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[
"Why is everyone surprised that Thaddeus was able to make a bomb?",
"What likely happens to Thaddeus after the story ends?",
"What is the significance of the Washington Monument flying into space at the end of the story?",
"What does the colonel seem to think about the bomb situation at the mental institution?",
"Which statement about the relationship between Thaddeus Funston and Miss Abercrombie is most true, based on the facts in the story?",
"What kind of person is Miss Abercrombie? Choose the best option",
"What do the jumbled clay strips represent?",
"Who is Miss Abercrombie",
"What are the necessary components for Thaddeus to cause an \"event\"?"
] |
[
[
"He needed the finger paints but Mr. Lieberman had taken those",
"Miss Abercrombie had taken away the other parts that would have made it work",
"It was only made of clay and nothing else",
"It was the wrong kind of clay to build an explosive device from"
],
[
"He uses the Washington Monument to travel to space",
"Various government agencies continue to study him to find out his secrets",
"He is locked in the Pentagon forever so he cannot create any more devices",
"He is sent back to the mental institution to continue his care"
],
[
"It shows that someone else has powers similar to Thaddeus",
"It shows the reader that it is certainly something about his gaze that causes these events",
"The government is able to confirm their suspicions that he is able to create different types of powerful reactions, not just bombs",
"It is a politically charged building which makes it a more severe issue to the men studying him"
],
[
"He wants to let Thaddeus create more things to study them",
"He is worried about the perception if others hear about what's happening",
"He wants to keep the story away from the newspapers so that others cannot learn Thaddeus' secrets",
"It figures that this is where this is happening, so he's frustrated for yet another bomb case"
],
[
"She encourages him to keep making progress over time as she supervises him in one area of his treatment",
"Thaddeus has long confided in Miss Abercrombie as his therapist and she is shocked that someone she trusted closely would cause so much damage",
"Miss Abercrombie has long considered Thaddeus a problem student of hers and is frustrated by his behavior",
"She tries to stifle his creative instincts and doesn't let him express himself the way he wants"
],
[
"Cautious and discouraging",
"Impatient but well-meaning",
"Encouraging and strict",
"Patient but sometimes easily shaken"
],
[
"Thaddeus' way of labeling his creation",
"Wires and circuitry from a bomb",
"The discarded clay from his process",
"Rivers on a globe of the Earth"
],
[
"An art teacher brought in to supervise activity time at the institution",
"A government agent keeping tabs on the people at the mental institution under the guise of a therapist",
"A therapist who specializes in hand- and joint-related activities",
"One of the therapists personally appointed to keep an eye on Thaddeus"
],
[
"An object and his stare",
"Clay and his stare",
"A physical object",
"His stare, at a particular time of day"
]
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"\"I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the\n hospital,\" she replied, \"and it's the same amount.\"\n\n\n Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with\n Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.\n\n\n She smiled at Funston.\n\n\n \"Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston,\" she said. \"These nice men have\n brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the\n one you made for me yesterday.\"\n\n\n A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the\n shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he\n walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp\n clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top\n atomic scientists watched in fascination.",
"Within fifteen minutes, the disaster-trained crews had detected heavy\n radiation emanating from the crater and there was a scurry of men and\n equipment back to a safe distance, a few hundred yards away.\n\n\n At 5:30 a.m., a plane landed at a nearby airfield and a platoon of\n Atomic Energy Commission experts, military intelligence men, four FBI\n agents and an Army full colonel disembarked.\n\n\n At 5:45 a.m. a cordon was thrown around both the hospital and the blast\n crater.\n\n\n In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily.\n\n\n \"It's impossible and unbelievable,\" Colonel Thomas Thurgood said for the\n fifteenth time, later that morning, as he looked around the group of\n experts gathered in the tent erected on the hill overlooking the crater.\n \"How can an atom bomb go off in a nut house?\"",
"Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the\n edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist\n on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with\n every beat.\n\n\n \"It's ridiculous,\" Thurgood roared. \"We'll all be the laughingstocks of\n the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You\n are all nuts. You're in the right place, but count me out.\"\n\n\n At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the\n broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists,\n strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered\n weariness.\n\n\n \"Miss Abercrombie,\" one of the physicists spoke up gently, \"you say that\n after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at\n Funston's work?\"",
"\"Are you crazy?\" he screamed. \"You want to get us all thrown into this\n filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they\n ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second,\n anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with\n the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid's modeling clay?\n\n\n \"They'd crucify us, that's what they'd do!\"\n\n\n At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's\n greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an\n officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small\n side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes\n later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and\n drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of\n the runway with propellers turning.",
"\"It apparently was a very small bomb, colonel,\" one of the haggard AEC\n men offered timidly. \"Not over three kilotons.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care if it was the size of a peanut,\" Thurgood screamed. \"How\n did it get here?\"\n\n\n A military intelligence agent spoke up. \"If we knew, sir, we wouldn't be\n standing around here. We don't know, but the fact remains that it WAS an\n atomic explosion.\"\n\n\n Thurgood turned wearily to the small, white-haired man at his side.\n\n\n \"Let's go over it once more, Dr. Crane. Are you sure you knew everything\n that was in that building?\" Thurgood swept his hand in the general\n direction of the blast crater.",
"In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling\n glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.\n\n\n \"I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel,\" the general\n said coldly, \"but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane\n asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit\n there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic\n devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them.\"\n\n\n The general paused.\n\n\n \"Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships\n out of sponge rubber?\" the general added bitingly.\n\n\n In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama\n of the Washington landscape. He stared hard.",
"\"And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?\" Miss Abercrombie asked.\n\n\n The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the\n patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to\n draw away from the woman.\n\n\n \"We mustn't be antisocial, Mr. Funston,\" Miss Abercrombie said lightly,\n but firmly. \"You've been coming along famously and you must remember to\n answer when someone talks to you. Now what are you making? It looks very\n complicated.\" She stared professionally at the maze of clay parts.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place.\n\n\n Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply.\n\n\n \"Atom bomb.\"\n\n\n A puzzled look crossed the therapist's face. \"Pardon me, Mr. Funston. I\n thought you said an 'atom bomb.'\"",
"The therapist nodded unhappily.\n\n\n \"And you say that, to the best of your knowledge,\" the physicist\n continued, \"there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay.\"\n\n\n \"I'm positive that's all there was in it,\" Miss Abercrombie cried.\n\n\n There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC\n man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They\n conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.\n\n\n \"That seems to settle it, colonel. We've got to give this Funston\n another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision.\"\n\n\n Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.",
"Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to\n secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard\n the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss\n Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into\n the night skies.\n\n\n The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in\n the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack\n miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and\n military men huddled around a small wooden table.\n\n\n There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of\n modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off\n Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary\n Miss Abercrombie.\n\n\n \"Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same\n kind of clay he used before?\"",
"Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a\n small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been\n the arts and crafts building.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed\n with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried\n through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the\n explosion.\n\n\n None had. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a\n welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight.\n\n\n The roar and flash of the explosion had lighted and rocked the\n surrounding countryside. Soon firemen and civil defense disaster units\n from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the\n still-smoking hole that marked the site of the vanished crafts building.",
"For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay\n and photographed it from every angle.\n\n\n Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down\n range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of\n stony-faced military policemen.\n\n\n \"I told you this whole thing was asinine,\" Thurgood snarled as the\n scientific teams trooped into the bunker.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open\n door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden\n cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.",
"\"Colonel, I've told you a dozen times,\" the hospital administrator said\n with exasperation, \"this was our manual therapy room. We gave our\n patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems,\n through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems\n that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints\n and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then\n Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman.\"\n\n\n \"All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was,\"\n Thurgood sighed. \"I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this\n morning blew it to hell and gone.\n\n\n \"And I've got to find out how it happened.\"\n\n\n Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little\n doctor.\n\n\n \"Where's that girl you said was in charge of this place?\"",
"A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit\n the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door\n slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.\nSix hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait\n jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon.\n Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the\n Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.\n\n\n In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were\n closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his\n baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted\n across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in\n a neatly-tied bundle.",
"At 3:01 a.m., Thaddeus Funston stirred in his sleep and awakened. He sat\n up in bed and looked around the dark ward. The quiet breathing and\n occasional snores of thirty other sleeping patients filled the room.\n Funston turned to the window and stared out across the black hills that\n sheltered the deserted crafts building.\n\n\n He gave a quick cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.\n\n\n The brilliance of a hundred suns glared in the night and threw stark\n shadows on the walls of the suddenly-illuminated ward.\n\n\n An instant later, the shattering roar and blast of the explosion struck\n the hospital buildings in a wave of force and the bursting crash of a\n thousand windows was lost in the fury of the explosion and the wild\n screams of the frightened and demented patients.\n\n\n It was over in an instant, and a stunned moment later, recessed ceiling\n lights began flashing on throughout the big institution.",
"\"We've already called for Miss Abercrombie and she's on her way here\n now,\" the doctor snapped.\nOutside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved\n around the perimeter of the crater, scintillators in hand, examining\n every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one\n time.\n\n\n A jeep raced down the road from the hospital and drew up in front of the\n tent. An armed MP helped Miss Abercrombie from the vehicle.\n\n\n She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down with a stunned\n expression.\n\n\n \"He did make an atom bomb,\" she cried.\n\n\n Colonel Thurgood, who had snapped from his chair at her words, leaped\n forward to catch her as she collapsed in a faint.\n\n\n At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff\n room of the hospital administration building.",
"His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay\n parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in\n front of him.\n\n\n Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the\n table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she\n glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston\n finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense\n silence.\n\n\n \"Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow.\" She\n looked at the men and nodded her head.\n\n\n The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of\n clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him\n from the shack.\n\n\n There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The\n experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere\n and cameras clicking.",
"At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit\n of clay and slapped it into place. With a furtive glance around him, he\n clapped the other half of the clay sphere over the filled hemisphere and\n then stood up. The patients lined up at the door, waiting for the walk\n back across the green hills to the main hospital. The attendants made a\n quick count and then unlocked the door. The group shuffled out into the\n warm, afternoon sunlight and the door closed behind them.\n\n\n Miss Abercrombie gazed around the cluttered room and picked up her chart\n book of patient progress. Moving slowly down the line of benches, she\n made short, precise notes on the day's work accomplished by each\n patient.\n\n\n At the clay table, she carefully lifted the top half of the clay ball\n and stared thoughtfully at the jumbled maze of clay strips laced through\n the lower hemisphere. She placed the lid back in place and jotted\n lengthily in her chart book.",
"\"Did,\" Funston murmured.\n\n\n Safely behind the patient's back, Miss Abercrombie smiled ever so\n slightly. \"Why that's very good, Mr. Funston. That shows real creative\n thought. I'm very pleased.\"\n\n\n She patted him on the shoulder and moved down the line of patients.\n\n\n A few minutes later, one of the attendants glanced at his watch, stood\n up and stretched.\n\n\n \"All right, fellows,\" he called out, \"time to go back. Put up your\n things.\"\n\n\n There was a rustle of paint boxes and papers being shuffled and chairs\n being moved back. A tall, blond patient with a flowing mustache, put one\n more dab of paint on his canvas and stood back to survey the meaningless\n smears. He sighed happily and laid down his palette.",
"Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction November 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nA FILBERT IS A NUT\nBY RICK RAPHAEL\nThat the gentleman in question was a nut was beyond question. He was an institutionalized\n psychotic. He was nutty enough to think he could make an atom bomb out of modeling clay!\nIllustrated by Freas\nMiss Abercrombie, the manual therapist patted the old man on the\n shoulder. \"You're doing just fine, Mr. Lieberman. Show it to me when you\n have finished.\"\n\n\n The oldster in the stained convalescent suit gave her a quick, shy smile\n and went back to his aimless smearing in the finger paints.",
"In the distance, a white cloud began billowing up from the base of the\n Washington Monument, and with an ear-shattering, glass-splintering roar,\n the great shaft rose majestically from its base and vanished into space\n on a tail of flame.\nTHE END"
],
[
"When she had completed her rounds, she slipped out of the smock, tucked\n the chart book under her arm and left the crafts building for the day.\n\n\n The late afternoon sun felt warm and comfortable as she walked the mile\n to the main administration building where her car was parked.\n\n\n As she drove out of the hospital grounds, Thaddeus Funston stood at the\n barred window of his locked ward and stared vacantly over the hills\n towards the craft shop. He stood there unmoving until a ward attendant\n came and took his arm an hour later to lead him off to the patients'\n mess hall.\nThe sun set, darkness fell over the stilled hospital grounds and the\n ward lights winked out at nine o'clock, leaving just a single light\n burning in each ward office. A quiet wind sighed over the still-warm\n hills.",
"Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to\n secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard\n the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss\n Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into\n the night skies.\n\n\n The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in\n the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack\n miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and\n military men huddled around a small wooden table.\n\n\n There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of\n modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off\n Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary\n Miss Abercrombie.\n\n\n \"Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same\n kind of clay he used before?\"",
"For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay\n and photographed it from every angle.\n\n\n Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down\n range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of\n stony-faced military policemen.\n\n\n \"I told you this whole thing was asinine,\" Thurgood snarled as the\n scientific teams trooped into the bunker.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open\n door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden\n cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.",
"A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit\n the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door\n slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.\nSix hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait\n jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon.\n Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the\n Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.\n\n\n In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were\n closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his\n baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted\n across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in\n a neatly-tied bundle.",
"\"Are you crazy?\" he screamed. \"You want to get us all thrown into this\n filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they\n ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second,\n anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with\n the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid's modeling clay?\n\n\n \"They'd crucify us, that's what they'd do!\"\n\n\n At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's\n greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an\n officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small\n side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes\n later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and\n drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of\n the runway with propellers turning.",
"His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay\n parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in\n front of him.\n\n\n Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the\n table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she\n glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston\n finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense\n silence.\n\n\n \"Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow.\" She\n looked at the men and nodded her head.\n\n\n The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of\n clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him\n from the shack.\n\n\n There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The\n experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere\n and cameras clicking.",
"Within fifteen minutes, the disaster-trained crews had detected heavy\n radiation emanating from the crater and there was a scurry of men and\n equipment back to a safe distance, a few hundred yards away.\n\n\n At 5:30 a.m., a plane landed at a nearby airfield and a platoon of\n Atomic Energy Commission experts, military intelligence men, four FBI\n agents and an Army full colonel disembarked.\n\n\n At 5:45 a.m. a cordon was thrown around both the hospital and the blast\n crater.\n\n\n In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily.\n\n\n \"It's impossible and unbelievable,\" Colonel Thomas Thurgood said for the\n fifteenth time, later that morning, as he looked around the group of\n experts gathered in the tent erected on the hill overlooking the crater.\n \"How can an atom bomb go off in a nut house?\"",
"Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a\n small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been\n the arts and crafts building.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed\n with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried\n through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the\n explosion.\n\n\n None had. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a\n welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight.\n\n\n The roar and flash of the explosion had lighted and rocked the\n surrounding countryside. Soon firemen and civil defense disaster units\n from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the\n still-smoking hole that marked the site of the vanished crafts building.",
"At 3:01 a.m., Thaddeus Funston stirred in his sleep and awakened. He sat\n up in bed and looked around the dark ward. The quiet breathing and\n occasional snores of thirty other sleeping patients filled the room.\n Funston turned to the window and stared out across the black hills that\n sheltered the deserted crafts building.\n\n\n He gave a quick cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.\n\n\n The brilliance of a hundred suns glared in the night and threw stark\n shadows on the walls of the suddenly-illuminated ward.\n\n\n An instant later, the shattering roar and blast of the explosion struck\n the hospital buildings in a wave of force and the bursting crash of a\n thousand windows was lost in the fury of the explosion and the wild\n screams of the frightened and demented patients.\n\n\n It was over in an instant, and a stunned moment later, recessed ceiling\n lights began flashing on throughout the big institution.",
"Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the\n edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist\n on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with\n every beat.\n\n\n \"It's ridiculous,\" Thurgood roared. \"We'll all be the laughingstocks of\n the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You\n are all nuts. You're in the right place, but count me out.\"\n\n\n At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the\n broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists,\n strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered\n weariness.\n\n\n \"Miss Abercrombie,\" one of the physicists spoke up gently, \"you say that\n after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at\n Funston's work?\"",
"In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling\n glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.\n\n\n \"I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel,\" the general\n said coldly, \"but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane\n asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit\n there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic\n devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them.\"\n\n\n The general paused.\n\n\n \"Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships\n out of sponge rubber?\" the general added bitingly.\n\n\n In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama\n of the Washington landscape. He stared hard.",
"\"And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?\" Miss Abercrombie asked.\n\n\n The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the\n patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to\n draw away from the woman.\n\n\n \"We mustn't be antisocial, Mr. Funston,\" Miss Abercrombie said lightly,\n but firmly. \"You've been coming along famously and you must remember to\n answer when someone talks to you. Now what are you making? It looks very\n complicated.\" She stared professionally at the maze of clay parts.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place.\n\n\n Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply.\n\n\n \"Atom bomb.\"\n\n\n A puzzled look crossed the therapist's face. \"Pardon me, Mr. Funston. I\n thought you said an 'atom bomb.'\"",
"\"Did,\" Funston murmured.\n\n\n Safely behind the patient's back, Miss Abercrombie smiled ever so\n slightly. \"Why that's very good, Mr. Funston. That shows real creative\n thought. I'm very pleased.\"\n\n\n She patted him on the shoulder and moved down the line of patients.\n\n\n A few minutes later, one of the attendants glanced at his watch, stood\n up and stretched.\n\n\n \"All right, fellows,\" he called out, \"time to go back. Put up your\n things.\"\n\n\n There was a rustle of paint boxes and papers being shuffled and chairs\n being moved back. A tall, blond patient with a flowing mustache, put one\n more dab of paint on his canvas and stood back to survey the meaningless\n smears. He sighed happily and laid down his palette.",
"The therapist nodded unhappily.\n\n\n \"And you say that, to the best of your knowledge,\" the physicist\n continued, \"there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay.\"\n\n\n \"I'm positive that's all there was in it,\" Miss Abercrombie cried.\n\n\n There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC\n man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They\n conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.\n\n\n \"That seems to settle it, colonel. We've got to give this Funston\n another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision.\"\n\n\n Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.",
"\"Colonel, I've told you a dozen times,\" the hospital administrator said\n with exasperation, \"this was our manual therapy room. We gave our\n patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems,\n through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems\n that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints\n and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then\n Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman.\"\n\n\n \"All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was,\"\n Thurgood sighed. \"I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this\n morning blew it to hell and gone.\n\n\n \"And I've got to find out how it happened.\"\n\n\n Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little\n doctor.\n\n\n \"Where's that girl you said was in charge of this place?\"",
"\"I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the\n hospital,\" she replied, \"and it's the same amount.\"\n\n\n Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with\n Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.\n\n\n She smiled at Funston.\n\n\n \"Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston,\" she said. \"These nice men have\n brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the\n one you made for me yesterday.\"\n\n\n A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the\n shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he\n walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp\n clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top\n atomic scientists watched in fascination.",
"At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit\n of clay and slapped it into place. With a furtive glance around him, he\n clapped the other half of the clay sphere over the filled hemisphere and\n then stood up. The patients lined up at the door, waiting for the walk\n back across the green hills to the main hospital. The attendants made a\n quick count and then unlocked the door. The group shuffled out into the\n warm, afternoon sunlight and the door closed behind them.\n\n\n Miss Abercrombie gazed around the cluttered room and picked up her chart\n book of patient progress. Moving slowly down the line of benches, she\n made short, precise notes on the day's work accomplished by each\n patient.\n\n\n At the clay table, she carefully lifted the top half of the clay ball\n and stared thoughtfully at the jumbled maze of clay strips laced through\n the lower hemisphere. She placed the lid back in place and jotted\n lengthily in her chart book.",
"In the distance, a white cloud began billowing up from the base of the\n Washington Monument, and with an ear-shattering, glass-splintering roar,\n the great shaft rose majestically from its base and vanished into space\n on a tail of flame.\nTHE END",
"\"It apparently was a very small bomb, colonel,\" one of the haggard AEC\n men offered timidly. \"Not over three kilotons.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care if it was the size of a peanut,\" Thurgood screamed. \"How\n did it get here?\"\n\n\n A military intelligence agent spoke up. \"If we knew, sir, we wouldn't be\n standing around here. We don't know, but the fact remains that it WAS an\n atomic explosion.\"\n\n\n Thurgood turned wearily to the small, white-haired man at his side.\n\n\n \"Let's go over it once more, Dr. Crane. Are you sure you knew everything\n that was in that building?\" Thurgood swept his hand in the general\n direction of the blast crater.",
"\"We've already called for Miss Abercrombie and she's on her way here\n now,\" the doctor snapped.\nOutside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved\n around the perimeter of the crater, scintillators in hand, examining\n every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one\n time.\n\n\n A jeep raced down the road from the hospital and drew up in front of the\n tent. An armed MP helped Miss Abercrombie from the vehicle.\n\n\n She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down with a stunned\n expression.\n\n\n \"He did make an atom bomb,\" she cried.\n\n\n Colonel Thurgood, who had snapped from his chair at her words, leaped\n forward to catch her as she collapsed in a faint.\n\n\n At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff\n room of the hospital administration building."
],
[
"In the distance, a white cloud began billowing up from the base of the\n Washington Monument, and with an ear-shattering, glass-splintering roar,\n the great shaft rose majestically from its base and vanished into space\n on a tail of flame.\nTHE END",
"In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling\n glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.\n\n\n \"I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel,\" the general\n said coldly, \"but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane\n asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit\n there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic\n devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them.\"\n\n\n The general paused.\n\n\n \"Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships\n out of sponge rubber?\" the general added bitingly.\n\n\n In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama\n of the Washington landscape. He stared hard.",
"A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit\n the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door\n slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.\nSix hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait\n jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon.\n Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the\n Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.\n\n\n In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were\n closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his\n baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted\n across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in\n a neatly-tied bundle.",
"For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay\n and photographed it from every angle.\n\n\n Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down\n range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of\n stony-faced military policemen.\n\n\n \"I told you this whole thing was asinine,\" Thurgood snarled as the\n scientific teams trooped into the bunker.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open\n door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden\n cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.",
"Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a\n small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been\n the arts and crafts building.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed\n with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried\n through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the\n explosion.\n\n\n None had. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a\n welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight.\n\n\n The roar and flash of the explosion had lighted and rocked the\n surrounding countryside. Soon firemen and civil defense disaster units\n from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the\n still-smoking hole that marked the site of the vanished crafts building.",
"Within fifteen minutes, the disaster-trained crews had detected heavy\n radiation emanating from the crater and there was a scurry of men and\n equipment back to a safe distance, a few hundred yards away.\n\n\n At 5:30 a.m., a plane landed at a nearby airfield and a platoon of\n Atomic Energy Commission experts, military intelligence men, four FBI\n agents and an Army full colonel disembarked.\n\n\n At 5:45 a.m. a cordon was thrown around both the hospital and the blast\n crater.\n\n\n In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily.\n\n\n \"It's impossible and unbelievable,\" Colonel Thomas Thurgood said for the\n fifteenth time, later that morning, as he looked around the group of\n experts gathered in the tent erected on the hill overlooking the crater.\n \"How can an atom bomb go off in a nut house?\"",
"\"Are you crazy?\" he screamed. \"You want to get us all thrown into this\n filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they\n ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second,\n anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with\n the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid's modeling clay?\n\n\n \"They'd crucify us, that's what they'd do!\"\n\n\n At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's\n greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an\n officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small\n side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes\n later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and\n drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of\n the runway with propellers turning.",
"Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to\n secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard\n the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss\n Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into\n the night skies.\n\n\n The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in\n the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack\n miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and\n military men huddled around a small wooden table.\n\n\n There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of\n modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off\n Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary\n Miss Abercrombie.\n\n\n \"Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same\n kind of clay he used before?\"",
"At 3:01 a.m., Thaddeus Funston stirred in his sleep and awakened. He sat\n up in bed and looked around the dark ward. The quiet breathing and\n occasional snores of thirty other sleeping patients filled the room.\n Funston turned to the window and stared out across the black hills that\n sheltered the deserted crafts building.\n\n\n He gave a quick cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.\n\n\n The brilliance of a hundred suns glared in the night and threw stark\n shadows on the walls of the suddenly-illuminated ward.\n\n\n An instant later, the shattering roar and blast of the explosion struck\n the hospital buildings in a wave of force and the bursting crash of a\n thousand windows was lost in the fury of the explosion and the wild\n screams of the frightened and demented patients.\n\n\n It was over in an instant, and a stunned moment later, recessed ceiling\n lights began flashing on throughout the big institution.",
"\"And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?\" Miss Abercrombie asked.\n\n\n The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the\n patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to\n draw away from the woman.\n\n\n \"We mustn't be antisocial, Mr. Funston,\" Miss Abercrombie said lightly,\n but firmly. \"You've been coming along famously and you must remember to\n answer when someone talks to you. Now what are you making? It looks very\n complicated.\" She stared professionally at the maze of clay parts.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place.\n\n\n Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply.\n\n\n \"Atom bomb.\"\n\n\n A puzzled look crossed the therapist's face. \"Pardon me, Mr. Funston. I\n thought you said an 'atom bomb.'\"",
"Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the\n edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist\n on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with\n every beat.\n\n\n \"It's ridiculous,\" Thurgood roared. \"We'll all be the laughingstocks of\n the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You\n are all nuts. You're in the right place, but count me out.\"\n\n\n At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the\n broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists,\n strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered\n weariness.\n\n\n \"Miss Abercrombie,\" one of the physicists spoke up gently, \"you say that\n after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at\n Funston's work?\"",
"\"I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the\n hospital,\" she replied, \"and it's the same amount.\"\n\n\n Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with\n Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.\n\n\n She smiled at Funston.\n\n\n \"Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston,\" she said. \"These nice men have\n brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the\n one you made for me yesterday.\"\n\n\n A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the\n shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he\n walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp\n clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top\n atomic scientists watched in fascination.",
"His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay\n parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in\n front of him.\n\n\n Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the\n table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she\n glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston\n finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense\n silence.\n\n\n \"Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow.\" She\n looked at the men and nodded her head.\n\n\n The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of\n clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him\n from the shack.\n\n\n There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The\n experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere\n and cameras clicking.",
"The therapist nodded unhappily.\n\n\n \"And you say that, to the best of your knowledge,\" the physicist\n continued, \"there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay.\"\n\n\n \"I'm positive that's all there was in it,\" Miss Abercrombie cried.\n\n\n There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC\n man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They\n conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.\n\n\n \"That seems to settle it, colonel. We've got to give this Funston\n another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision.\"\n\n\n Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.",
"\"We've already called for Miss Abercrombie and she's on her way here\n now,\" the doctor snapped.\nOutside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved\n around the perimeter of the crater, scintillators in hand, examining\n every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one\n time.\n\n\n A jeep raced down the road from the hospital and drew up in front of the\n tent. An armed MP helped Miss Abercrombie from the vehicle.\n\n\n She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down with a stunned\n expression.\n\n\n \"He did make an atom bomb,\" she cried.\n\n\n Colonel Thurgood, who had snapped from his chair at her words, leaped\n forward to catch her as she collapsed in a faint.\n\n\n At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff\n room of the hospital administration building.",
"\"Did,\" Funston murmured.\n\n\n Safely behind the patient's back, Miss Abercrombie smiled ever so\n slightly. \"Why that's very good, Mr. Funston. That shows real creative\n thought. I'm very pleased.\"\n\n\n She patted him on the shoulder and moved down the line of patients.\n\n\n A few minutes later, one of the attendants glanced at his watch, stood\n up and stretched.\n\n\n \"All right, fellows,\" he called out, \"time to go back. Put up your\n things.\"\n\n\n There was a rustle of paint boxes and papers being shuffled and chairs\n being moved back. A tall, blond patient with a flowing mustache, put one\n more dab of paint on his canvas and stood back to survey the meaningless\n smears. He sighed happily and laid down his palette.",
"At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit\n of clay and slapped it into place. With a furtive glance around him, he\n clapped the other half of the clay sphere over the filled hemisphere and\n then stood up. The patients lined up at the door, waiting for the walk\n back across the green hills to the main hospital. The attendants made a\n quick count and then unlocked the door. The group shuffled out into the\n warm, afternoon sunlight and the door closed behind them.\n\n\n Miss Abercrombie gazed around the cluttered room and picked up her chart\n book of patient progress. Moving slowly down the line of benches, she\n made short, precise notes on the day's work accomplished by each\n patient.\n\n\n At the clay table, she carefully lifted the top half of the clay ball\n and stared thoughtfully at the jumbled maze of clay strips laced through\n the lower hemisphere. She placed the lid back in place and jotted\n lengthily in her chart book.",
"When she had completed her rounds, she slipped out of the smock, tucked\n the chart book under her arm and left the crafts building for the day.\n\n\n The late afternoon sun felt warm and comfortable as she walked the mile\n to the main administration building where her car was parked.\n\n\n As she drove out of the hospital grounds, Thaddeus Funston stood at the\n barred window of his locked ward and stared vacantly over the hills\n towards the craft shop. He stood there unmoving until a ward attendant\n came and took his arm an hour later to lead him off to the patients'\n mess hall.\nThe sun set, darkness fell over the stilled hospital grounds and the\n ward lights winked out at nine o'clock, leaving just a single light\n burning in each ward office. A quiet wind sighed over the still-warm\n hills.",
"\"It apparently was a very small bomb, colonel,\" one of the haggard AEC\n men offered timidly. \"Not over three kilotons.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care if it was the size of a peanut,\" Thurgood screamed. \"How\n did it get here?\"\n\n\n A military intelligence agent spoke up. \"If we knew, sir, we wouldn't be\n standing around here. We don't know, but the fact remains that it WAS an\n atomic explosion.\"\n\n\n Thurgood turned wearily to the small, white-haired man at his side.\n\n\n \"Let's go over it once more, Dr. Crane. Are you sure you knew everything\n that was in that building?\" Thurgood swept his hand in the general\n direction of the blast crater.",
"\"Colonel, I've told you a dozen times,\" the hospital administrator said\n with exasperation, \"this was our manual therapy room. We gave our\n patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems,\n through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems\n that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints\n and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then\n Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman.\"\n\n\n \"All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was,\"\n Thurgood sighed. \"I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this\n morning blew it to hell and gone.\n\n\n \"And I've got to find out how it happened.\"\n\n\n Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little\n doctor.\n\n\n \"Where's that girl you said was in charge of this place?\""
],
[
"Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the\n edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist\n on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with\n every beat.\n\n\n \"It's ridiculous,\" Thurgood roared. \"We'll all be the laughingstocks of\n the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You\n are all nuts. You're in the right place, but count me out.\"\n\n\n At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the\n broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists,\n strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered\n weariness.\n\n\n \"Miss Abercrombie,\" one of the physicists spoke up gently, \"you say that\n after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at\n Funston's work?\"",
"Within fifteen minutes, the disaster-trained crews had detected heavy\n radiation emanating from the crater and there was a scurry of men and\n equipment back to a safe distance, a few hundred yards away.\n\n\n At 5:30 a.m., a plane landed at a nearby airfield and a platoon of\n Atomic Energy Commission experts, military intelligence men, four FBI\n agents and an Army full colonel disembarked.\n\n\n At 5:45 a.m. a cordon was thrown around both the hospital and the blast\n crater.\n\n\n In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily.\n\n\n \"It's impossible and unbelievable,\" Colonel Thomas Thurgood said for the\n fifteenth time, later that morning, as he looked around the group of\n experts gathered in the tent erected on the hill overlooking the crater.\n \"How can an atom bomb go off in a nut house?\"",
"\"Colonel, I've told you a dozen times,\" the hospital administrator said\n with exasperation, \"this was our manual therapy room. We gave our\n patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems,\n through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems\n that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints\n and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then\n Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman.\"\n\n\n \"All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was,\"\n Thurgood sighed. \"I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this\n morning blew it to hell and gone.\n\n\n \"And I've got to find out how it happened.\"\n\n\n Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little\n doctor.\n\n\n \"Where's that girl you said was in charge of this place?\"",
"The therapist nodded unhappily.\n\n\n \"And you say that, to the best of your knowledge,\" the physicist\n continued, \"there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay.\"\n\n\n \"I'm positive that's all there was in it,\" Miss Abercrombie cried.\n\n\n There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC\n man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They\n conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.\n\n\n \"That seems to settle it, colonel. We've got to give this Funston\n another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision.\"\n\n\n Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.",
"In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling\n glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.\n\n\n \"I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel,\" the general\n said coldly, \"but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane\n asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit\n there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic\n devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them.\"\n\n\n The general paused.\n\n\n \"Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships\n out of sponge rubber?\" the general added bitingly.\n\n\n In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama\n of the Washington landscape. He stared hard.",
"\"Are you crazy?\" he screamed. \"You want to get us all thrown into this\n filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they\n ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second,\n anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with\n the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid's modeling clay?\n\n\n \"They'd crucify us, that's what they'd do!\"\n\n\n At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's\n greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an\n officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small\n side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes\n later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and\n drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of\n the runway with propellers turning.",
"\"It apparently was a very small bomb, colonel,\" one of the haggard AEC\n men offered timidly. \"Not over three kilotons.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care if it was the size of a peanut,\" Thurgood screamed. \"How\n did it get here?\"\n\n\n A military intelligence agent spoke up. \"If we knew, sir, we wouldn't be\n standing around here. We don't know, but the fact remains that it WAS an\n atomic explosion.\"\n\n\n Thurgood turned wearily to the small, white-haired man at his side.\n\n\n \"Let's go over it once more, Dr. Crane. Are you sure you knew everything\n that was in that building?\" Thurgood swept his hand in the general\n direction of the blast crater.",
"A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit\n the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door\n slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.\nSix hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait\n jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon.\n Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the\n Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.\n\n\n In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were\n closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his\n baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted\n across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in\n a neatly-tied bundle.",
"\"And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?\" Miss Abercrombie asked.\n\n\n The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the\n patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to\n draw away from the woman.\n\n\n \"We mustn't be antisocial, Mr. Funston,\" Miss Abercrombie said lightly,\n but firmly. \"You've been coming along famously and you must remember to\n answer when someone talks to you. Now what are you making? It looks very\n complicated.\" She stared professionally at the maze of clay parts.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place.\n\n\n Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply.\n\n\n \"Atom bomb.\"\n\n\n A puzzled look crossed the therapist's face. \"Pardon me, Mr. Funston. I\n thought you said an 'atom bomb.'\"",
"At 3:01 a.m., Thaddeus Funston stirred in his sleep and awakened. He sat\n up in bed and looked around the dark ward. The quiet breathing and\n occasional snores of thirty other sleeping patients filled the room.\n Funston turned to the window and stared out across the black hills that\n sheltered the deserted crafts building.\n\n\n He gave a quick cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.\n\n\n The brilliance of a hundred suns glared in the night and threw stark\n shadows on the walls of the suddenly-illuminated ward.\n\n\n An instant later, the shattering roar and blast of the explosion struck\n the hospital buildings in a wave of force and the bursting crash of a\n thousand windows was lost in the fury of the explosion and the wild\n screams of the frightened and demented patients.\n\n\n It was over in an instant, and a stunned moment later, recessed ceiling\n lights began flashing on throughout the big institution.",
"Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to\n secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard\n the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss\n Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into\n the night skies.\n\n\n The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in\n the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack\n miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and\n military men huddled around a small wooden table.\n\n\n There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of\n modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off\n Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary\n Miss Abercrombie.\n\n\n \"Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same\n kind of clay he used before?\"",
"\"I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the\n hospital,\" she replied, \"and it's the same amount.\"\n\n\n Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with\n Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.\n\n\n She smiled at Funston.\n\n\n \"Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston,\" she said. \"These nice men have\n brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the\n one you made for me yesterday.\"\n\n\n A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the\n shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he\n walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp\n clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top\n atomic scientists watched in fascination.",
"\"Did,\" Funston murmured.\n\n\n Safely behind the patient's back, Miss Abercrombie smiled ever so\n slightly. \"Why that's very good, Mr. Funston. That shows real creative\n thought. I'm very pleased.\"\n\n\n She patted him on the shoulder and moved down the line of patients.\n\n\n A few minutes later, one of the attendants glanced at his watch, stood\n up and stretched.\n\n\n \"All right, fellows,\" he called out, \"time to go back. Put up your\n things.\"\n\n\n There was a rustle of paint boxes and papers being shuffled and chairs\n being moved back. A tall, blond patient with a flowing mustache, put one\n more dab of paint on his canvas and stood back to survey the meaningless\n smears. He sighed happily and laid down his palette.",
"\"We've already called for Miss Abercrombie and she's on her way here\n now,\" the doctor snapped.\nOutside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved\n around the perimeter of the crater, scintillators in hand, examining\n every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one\n time.\n\n\n A jeep raced down the road from the hospital and drew up in front of the\n tent. An armed MP helped Miss Abercrombie from the vehicle.\n\n\n She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down with a stunned\n expression.\n\n\n \"He did make an atom bomb,\" she cried.\n\n\n Colonel Thurgood, who had snapped from his chair at her words, leaped\n forward to catch her as she collapsed in a faint.\n\n\n At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff\n room of the hospital administration building.",
"Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a\n small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been\n the arts and crafts building.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed\n with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried\n through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the\n explosion.\n\n\n None had. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a\n welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight.\n\n\n The roar and flash of the explosion had lighted and rocked the\n surrounding countryside. Soon firemen and civil defense disaster units\n from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the\n still-smoking hole that marked the site of the vanished crafts building.",
"For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay\n and photographed it from every angle.\n\n\n Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down\n range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of\n stony-faced military policemen.\n\n\n \"I told you this whole thing was asinine,\" Thurgood snarled as the\n scientific teams trooped into the bunker.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open\n door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden\n cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.",
"His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay\n parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in\n front of him.\n\n\n Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the\n table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she\n glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston\n finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense\n silence.\n\n\n \"Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow.\" She\n looked at the men and nodded her head.\n\n\n The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of\n clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him\n from the shack.\n\n\n There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The\n experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere\n and cameras clicking.",
"When she had completed her rounds, she slipped out of the smock, tucked\n the chart book under her arm and left the crafts building for the day.\n\n\n The late afternoon sun felt warm and comfortable as she walked the mile\n to the main administration building where her car was parked.\n\n\n As she drove out of the hospital grounds, Thaddeus Funston stood at the\n barred window of his locked ward and stared vacantly over the hills\n towards the craft shop. He stood there unmoving until a ward attendant\n came and took his arm an hour later to lead him off to the patients'\n mess hall.\nThe sun set, darkness fell over the stilled hospital grounds and the\n ward lights winked out at nine o'clock, leaving just a single light\n burning in each ward office. A quiet wind sighed over the still-warm\n hills.",
"At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit\n of clay and slapped it into place. With a furtive glance around him, he\n clapped the other half of the clay sphere over the filled hemisphere and\n then stood up. The patients lined up at the door, waiting for the walk\n back across the green hills to the main hospital. The attendants made a\n quick count and then unlocked the door. The group shuffled out into the\n warm, afternoon sunlight and the door closed behind them.\n\n\n Miss Abercrombie gazed around the cluttered room and picked up her chart\n book of patient progress. Moving slowly down the line of benches, she\n made short, precise notes on the day's work accomplished by each\n patient.\n\n\n At the clay table, she carefully lifted the top half of the clay ball\n and stared thoughtfully at the jumbled maze of clay strips laced through\n the lower hemisphere. She placed the lid back in place and jotted\n lengthily in her chart book.",
"Miss Abercrombie smoothed her smock down over trim hips and surveyed the\n other patients working at the long tables in the hospital's arts and\n crafts shop. Two muscular and bored attendants in spotless whites,\n lounged beside the locked door and chatted idly about the Dodgers'\n prospects for the pennant.\n\n\n Through the barred windows of the workshop, rolling green hills were\n seen, their tree-studded flanks making a pleasant setting for the mental\n institution. The crafts building was a good mile away from the main\n buildings of the hospital and the hills blocked the view of the austere\n complex of buildings that housed the main wards.\n\n\n The therapist strolled down the line of tables, pausing to give a word\n of advice here, and a suggestion there.\n\n\n She stopped behind a frowning, intense patient, rapidly shaping blobs of\n clay into odd-sized strips and forms. As he finished each piece, he\n carefully placed it into a hollow shell hemisphere of clay."
],
[
"Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the\n edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist\n on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with\n every beat.\n\n\n \"It's ridiculous,\" Thurgood roared. \"We'll all be the laughingstocks of\n the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You\n are all nuts. You're in the right place, but count me out.\"\n\n\n At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the\n broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists,\n strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered\n weariness.\n\n\n \"Miss Abercrombie,\" one of the physicists spoke up gently, \"you say that\n after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at\n Funston's work?\"",
"\"And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?\" Miss Abercrombie asked.\n\n\n The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the\n patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to\n draw away from the woman.\n\n\n \"We mustn't be antisocial, Mr. Funston,\" Miss Abercrombie said lightly,\n but firmly. \"You've been coming along famously and you must remember to\n answer when someone talks to you. Now what are you making? It looks very\n complicated.\" She stared professionally at the maze of clay parts.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place.\n\n\n Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply.\n\n\n \"Atom bomb.\"\n\n\n A puzzled look crossed the therapist's face. \"Pardon me, Mr. Funston. I\n thought you said an 'atom bomb.'\"",
"\"I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the\n hospital,\" she replied, \"and it's the same amount.\"\n\n\n Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with\n Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.\n\n\n She smiled at Funston.\n\n\n \"Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston,\" she said. \"These nice men have\n brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the\n one you made for me yesterday.\"\n\n\n A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the\n shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he\n walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp\n clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top\n atomic scientists watched in fascination.",
"The therapist nodded unhappily.\n\n\n \"And you say that, to the best of your knowledge,\" the physicist\n continued, \"there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay.\"\n\n\n \"I'm positive that's all there was in it,\" Miss Abercrombie cried.\n\n\n There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC\n man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They\n conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.\n\n\n \"That seems to settle it, colonel. We've got to give this Funston\n another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision.\"\n\n\n Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.",
"\"Did,\" Funston murmured.\n\n\n Safely behind the patient's back, Miss Abercrombie smiled ever so\n slightly. \"Why that's very good, Mr. Funston. That shows real creative\n thought. I'm very pleased.\"\n\n\n She patted him on the shoulder and moved down the line of patients.\n\n\n A few minutes later, one of the attendants glanced at his watch, stood\n up and stretched.\n\n\n \"All right, fellows,\" he called out, \"time to go back. Put up your\n things.\"\n\n\n There was a rustle of paint boxes and papers being shuffled and chairs\n being moved back. A tall, blond patient with a flowing mustache, put one\n more dab of paint on his canvas and stood back to survey the meaningless\n smears. He sighed happily and laid down his palette.",
"His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay\n parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in\n front of him.\n\n\n Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the\n table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she\n glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston\n finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense\n silence.\n\n\n \"Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow.\" She\n looked at the men and nodded her head.\n\n\n The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of\n clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him\n from the shack.\n\n\n There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The\n experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere\n and cameras clicking.",
"For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay\n and photographed it from every angle.\n\n\n Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down\n range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of\n stony-faced military policemen.\n\n\n \"I told you this whole thing was asinine,\" Thurgood snarled as the\n scientific teams trooped into the bunker.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open\n door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden\n cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.",
"At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit\n of clay and slapped it into place. With a furtive glance around him, he\n clapped the other half of the clay sphere over the filled hemisphere and\n then stood up. The patients lined up at the door, waiting for the walk\n back across the green hills to the main hospital. The attendants made a\n quick count and then unlocked the door. The group shuffled out into the\n warm, afternoon sunlight and the door closed behind them.\n\n\n Miss Abercrombie gazed around the cluttered room and picked up her chart\n book of patient progress. Moving slowly down the line of benches, she\n made short, precise notes on the day's work accomplished by each\n patient.\n\n\n At the clay table, she carefully lifted the top half of the clay ball\n and stared thoughtfully at the jumbled maze of clay strips laced through\n the lower hemisphere. She placed the lid back in place and jotted\n lengthily in her chart book.",
"Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to\n secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard\n the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss\n Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into\n the night skies.\n\n\n The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in\n the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack\n miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and\n military men huddled around a small wooden table.\n\n\n There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of\n modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off\n Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary\n Miss Abercrombie.\n\n\n \"Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same\n kind of clay he used before?\"",
"In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling\n glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.\n\n\n \"I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel,\" the general\n said coldly, \"but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane\n asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit\n there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic\n devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them.\"\n\n\n The general paused.\n\n\n \"Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships\n out of sponge rubber?\" the general added bitingly.\n\n\n In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama\n of the Washington landscape. He stared hard.",
"Within fifteen minutes, the disaster-trained crews had detected heavy\n radiation emanating from the crater and there was a scurry of men and\n equipment back to a safe distance, a few hundred yards away.\n\n\n At 5:30 a.m., a plane landed at a nearby airfield and a platoon of\n Atomic Energy Commission experts, military intelligence men, four FBI\n agents and an Army full colonel disembarked.\n\n\n At 5:45 a.m. a cordon was thrown around both the hospital and the blast\n crater.\n\n\n In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily.\n\n\n \"It's impossible and unbelievable,\" Colonel Thomas Thurgood said for the\n fifteenth time, later that morning, as he looked around the group of\n experts gathered in the tent erected on the hill overlooking the crater.\n \"How can an atom bomb go off in a nut house?\"",
"\"Are you crazy?\" he screamed. \"You want to get us all thrown into this\n filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they\n ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second,\n anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with\n the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid's modeling clay?\n\n\n \"They'd crucify us, that's what they'd do!\"\n\n\n At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's\n greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an\n officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small\n side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes\n later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and\n drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of\n the runway with propellers turning.",
"A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit\n the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door\n slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.\nSix hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait\n jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon.\n Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the\n Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.\n\n\n In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were\n closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his\n baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted\n across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in\n a neatly-tied bundle.",
"At 3:01 a.m., Thaddeus Funston stirred in his sleep and awakened. He sat\n up in bed and looked around the dark ward. The quiet breathing and\n occasional snores of thirty other sleeping patients filled the room.\n Funston turned to the window and stared out across the black hills that\n sheltered the deserted crafts building.\n\n\n He gave a quick cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.\n\n\n The brilliance of a hundred suns glared in the night and threw stark\n shadows on the walls of the suddenly-illuminated ward.\n\n\n An instant later, the shattering roar and blast of the explosion struck\n the hospital buildings in a wave of force and the bursting crash of a\n thousand windows was lost in the fury of the explosion and the wild\n screams of the frightened and demented patients.\n\n\n It was over in an instant, and a stunned moment later, recessed ceiling\n lights began flashing on throughout the big institution.",
"\"We've already called for Miss Abercrombie and she's on her way here\n now,\" the doctor snapped.\nOutside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved\n around the perimeter of the crater, scintillators in hand, examining\n every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one\n time.\n\n\n A jeep raced down the road from the hospital and drew up in front of the\n tent. An armed MP helped Miss Abercrombie from the vehicle.\n\n\n She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down with a stunned\n expression.\n\n\n \"He did make an atom bomb,\" she cried.\n\n\n Colonel Thurgood, who had snapped from his chair at her words, leaped\n forward to catch her as she collapsed in a faint.\n\n\n At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff\n room of the hospital administration building.",
"Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a\n small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been\n the arts and crafts building.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed\n with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried\n through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the\n explosion.\n\n\n None had. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a\n welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight.\n\n\n The roar and flash of the explosion had lighted and rocked the\n surrounding countryside. Soon firemen and civil defense disaster units\n from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the\n still-smoking hole that marked the site of the vanished crafts building.",
"When she had completed her rounds, she slipped out of the smock, tucked\n the chart book under her arm and left the crafts building for the day.\n\n\n The late afternoon sun felt warm and comfortable as she walked the mile\n to the main administration building where her car was parked.\n\n\n As she drove out of the hospital grounds, Thaddeus Funston stood at the\n barred window of his locked ward and stared vacantly over the hills\n towards the craft shop. He stood there unmoving until a ward attendant\n came and took his arm an hour later to lead him off to the patients'\n mess hall.\nThe sun set, darkness fell over the stilled hospital grounds and the\n ward lights winked out at nine o'clock, leaving just a single light\n burning in each ward office. A quiet wind sighed over the still-warm\n hills.",
"Miss Abercrombie smoothed her smock down over trim hips and surveyed the\n other patients working at the long tables in the hospital's arts and\n crafts shop. Two muscular and bored attendants in spotless whites,\n lounged beside the locked door and chatted idly about the Dodgers'\n prospects for the pennant.\n\n\n Through the barred windows of the workshop, rolling green hills were\n seen, their tree-studded flanks making a pleasant setting for the mental\n institution. The crafts building was a good mile away from the main\n buildings of the hospital and the hills blocked the view of the austere\n complex of buildings that housed the main wards.\n\n\n The therapist strolled down the line of tables, pausing to give a word\n of advice here, and a suggestion there.\n\n\n She stopped behind a frowning, intense patient, rapidly shaping blobs of\n clay into odd-sized strips and forms. As he finished each piece, he\n carefully placed it into a hollow shell hemisphere of clay.",
"\"Colonel, I've told you a dozen times,\" the hospital administrator said\n with exasperation, \"this was our manual therapy room. We gave our\n patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems,\n through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems\n that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints\n and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then\n Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman.\"\n\n\n \"All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was,\"\n Thurgood sighed. \"I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this\n morning blew it to hell and gone.\n\n\n \"And I've got to find out how it happened.\"\n\n\n Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little\n doctor.\n\n\n \"Where's that girl you said was in charge of this place?\"",
"\"It apparently was a very small bomb, colonel,\" one of the haggard AEC\n men offered timidly. \"Not over three kilotons.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care if it was the size of a peanut,\" Thurgood screamed. \"How\n did it get here?\"\n\n\n A military intelligence agent spoke up. \"If we knew, sir, we wouldn't be\n standing around here. We don't know, but the fact remains that it WAS an\n atomic explosion.\"\n\n\n Thurgood turned wearily to the small, white-haired man at his side.\n\n\n \"Let's go over it once more, Dr. Crane. Are you sure you knew everything\n that was in that building?\" Thurgood swept his hand in the general\n direction of the blast crater."
],
[
"Miss Abercrombie smoothed her smock down over trim hips and surveyed the\n other patients working at the long tables in the hospital's arts and\n crafts shop. Two muscular and bored attendants in spotless whites,\n lounged beside the locked door and chatted idly about the Dodgers'\n prospects for the pennant.\n\n\n Through the barred windows of the workshop, rolling green hills were\n seen, their tree-studded flanks making a pleasant setting for the mental\n institution. The crafts building was a good mile away from the main\n buildings of the hospital and the hills blocked the view of the austere\n complex of buildings that housed the main wards.\n\n\n The therapist strolled down the line of tables, pausing to give a word\n of advice here, and a suggestion there.\n\n\n She stopped behind a frowning, intense patient, rapidly shaping blobs of\n clay into odd-sized strips and forms. As he finished each piece, he\n carefully placed it into a hollow shell hemisphere of clay.",
"\"Did,\" Funston murmured.\n\n\n Safely behind the patient's back, Miss Abercrombie smiled ever so\n slightly. \"Why that's very good, Mr. Funston. That shows real creative\n thought. I'm very pleased.\"\n\n\n She patted him on the shoulder and moved down the line of patients.\n\n\n A few minutes later, one of the attendants glanced at his watch, stood\n up and stretched.\n\n\n \"All right, fellows,\" he called out, \"time to go back. Put up your\n things.\"\n\n\n There was a rustle of paint boxes and papers being shuffled and chairs\n being moved back. A tall, blond patient with a flowing mustache, put one\n more dab of paint on his canvas and stood back to survey the meaningless\n smears. He sighed happily and laid down his palette.",
"\"And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?\" Miss Abercrombie asked.\n\n\n The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the\n patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to\n draw away from the woman.\n\n\n \"We mustn't be antisocial, Mr. Funston,\" Miss Abercrombie said lightly,\n but firmly. \"You've been coming along famously and you must remember to\n answer when someone talks to you. Now what are you making? It looks very\n complicated.\" She stared professionally at the maze of clay parts.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place.\n\n\n Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply.\n\n\n \"Atom bomb.\"\n\n\n A puzzled look crossed the therapist's face. \"Pardon me, Mr. Funston. I\n thought you said an 'atom bomb.'\"",
"The therapist nodded unhappily.\n\n\n \"And you say that, to the best of your knowledge,\" the physicist\n continued, \"there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay.\"\n\n\n \"I'm positive that's all there was in it,\" Miss Abercrombie cried.\n\n\n There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC\n man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They\n conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.\n\n\n \"That seems to settle it, colonel. We've got to give this Funston\n another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision.\"\n\n\n Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.",
"At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit\n of clay and slapped it into place. With a furtive glance around him, he\n clapped the other half of the clay sphere over the filled hemisphere and\n then stood up. The patients lined up at the door, waiting for the walk\n back across the green hills to the main hospital. The attendants made a\n quick count and then unlocked the door. The group shuffled out into the\n warm, afternoon sunlight and the door closed behind them.\n\n\n Miss Abercrombie gazed around the cluttered room and picked up her chart\n book of patient progress. Moving slowly down the line of benches, she\n made short, precise notes on the day's work accomplished by each\n patient.\n\n\n At the clay table, she carefully lifted the top half of the clay ball\n and stared thoughtfully at the jumbled maze of clay strips laced through\n the lower hemisphere. She placed the lid back in place and jotted\n lengthily in her chart book.",
"Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the\n edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist\n on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with\n every beat.\n\n\n \"It's ridiculous,\" Thurgood roared. \"We'll all be the laughingstocks of\n the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You\n are all nuts. You're in the right place, but count me out.\"\n\n\n At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the\n broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists,\n strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered\n weariness.\n\n\n \"Miss Abercrombie,\" one of the physicists spoke up gently, \"you say that\n after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at\n Funston's work?\"",
"Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to\n secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard\n the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss\n Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into\n the night skies.\n\n\n The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in\n the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack\n miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and\n military men huddled around a small wooden table.\n\n\n There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of\n modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off\n Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary\n Miss Abercrombie.\n\n\n \"Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same\n kind of clay he used before?\"",
"\"We've already called for Miss Abercrombie and she's on her way here\n now,\" the doctor snapped.\nOutside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved\n around the perimeter of the crater, scintillators in hand, examining\n every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one\n time.\n\n\n A jeep raced down the road from the hospital and drew up in front of the\n tent. An armed MP helped Miss Abercrombie from the vehicle.\n\n\n She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down with a stunned\n expression.\n\n\n \"He did make an atom bomb,\" she cried.\n\n\n Colonel Thurgood, who had snapped from his chair at her words, leaped\n forward to catch her as she collapsed in a faint.\n\n\n At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff\n room of the hospital administration building.",
"Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction November 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nA FILBERT IS A NUT\nBY RICK RAPHAEL\nThat the gentleman in question was a nut was beyond question. He was an institutionalized\n psychotic. He was nutty enough to think he could make an atom bomb out of modeling clay!\nIllustrated by Freas\nMiss Abercrombie, the manual therapist patted the old man on the\n shoulder. \"You're doing just fine, Mr. Lieberman. Show it to me when you\n have finished.\"\n\n\n The oldster in the stained convalescent suit gave her a quick, shy smile\n and went back to his aimless smearing in the finger paints.",
"\"I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the\n hospital,\" she replied, \"and it's the same amount.\"\n\n\n Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with\n Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.\n\n\n She smiled at Funston.\n\n\n \"Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston,\" she said. \"These nice men have\n brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the\n one you made for me yesterday.\"\n\n\n A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the\n shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he\n walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp\n clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top\n atomic scientists watched in fascination.",
"When she had completed her rounds, she slipped out of the smock, tucked\n the chart book under her arm and left the crafts building for the day.\n\n\n The late afternoon sun felt warm and comfortable as she walked the mile\n to the main administration building where her car was parked.\n\n\n As she drove out of the hospital grounds, Thaddeus Funston stood at the\n barred window of his locked ward and stared vacantly over the hills\n towards the craft shop. He stood there unmoving until a ward attendant\n came and took his arm an hour later to lead him off to the patients'\n mess hall.\nThe sun set, darkness fell over the stilled hospital grounds and the\n ward lights winked out at nine o'clock, leaving just a single light\n burning in each ward office. A quiet wind sighed over the still-warm\n hills.",
"His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay\n parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in\n front of him.\n\n\n Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the\n table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she\n glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston\n finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense\n silence.\n\n\n \"Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow.\" She\n looked at the men and nodded her head.\n\n\n The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of\n clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him\n from the shack.\n\n\n There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The\n experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere\n and cameras clicking.",
"For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay\n and photographed it from every angle.\n\n\n Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down\n range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of\n stony-faced military policemen.\n\n\n \"I told you this whole thing was asinine,\" Thurgood snarled as the\n scientific teams trooped into the bunker.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open\n door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden\n cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.",
"\"Colonel, I've told you a dozen times,\" the hospital administrator said\n with exasperation, \"this was our manual therapy room. We gave our\n patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems,\n through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems\n that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints\n and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then\n Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman.\"\n\n\n \"All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was,\"\n Thurgood sighed. \"I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this\n morning blew it to hell and gone.\n\n\n \"And I've got to find out how it happened.\"\n\n\n Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little\n doctor.\n\n\n \"Where's that girl you said was in charge of this place?\"",
"In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling\n glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.\n\n\n \"I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel,\" the general\n said coldly, \"but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane\n asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit\n there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic\n devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them.\"\n\n\n The general paused.\n\n\n \"Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships\n out of sponge rubber?\" the general added bitingly.\n\n\n In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama\n of the Washington landscape. He stared hard.",
"\"Are you crazy?\" he screamed. \"You want to get us all thrown into this\n filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they\n ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second,\n anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with\n the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid's modeling clay?\n\n\n \"They'd crucify us, that's what they'd do!\"\n\n\n At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's\n greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an\n officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small\n side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes\n later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and\n drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of\n the runway with propellers turning.",
"A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit\n the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door\n slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.\nSix hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait\n jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon.\n Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the\n Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.\n\n\n In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were\n closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his\n baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted\n across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in\n a neatly-tied bundle.",
"\"It apparently was a very small bomb, colonel,\" one of the haggard AEC\n men offered timidly. \"Not over three kilotons.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care if it was the size of a peanut,\" Thurgood screamed. \"How\n did it get here?\"\n\n\n A military intelligence agent spoke up. \"If we knew, sir, we wouldn't be\n standing around here. We don't know, but the fact remains that it WAS an\n atomic explosion.\"\n\n\n Thurgood turned wearily to the small, white-haired man at his side.\n\n\n \"Let's go over it once more, Dr. Crane. Are you sure you knew everything\n that was in that building?\" Thurgood swept his hand in the general\n direction of the blast crater.",
"Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a\n small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been\n the arts and crafts building.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed\n with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried\n through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the\n explosion.\n\n\n None had. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a\n welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight.\n\n\n The roar and flash of the explosion had lighted and rocked the\n surrounding countryside. Soon firemen and civil defense disaster units\n from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the\n still-smoking hole that marked the site of the vanished crafts building.",
"Within fifteen minutes, the disaster-trained crews had detected heavy\n radiation emanating from the crater and there was a scurry of men and\n equipment back to a safe distance, a few hundred yards away.\n\n\n At 5:30 a.m., a plane landed at a nearby airfield and a platoon of\n Atomic Energy Commission experts, military intelligence men, four FBI\n agents and an Army full colonel disembarked.\n\n\n At 5:45 a.m. a cordon was thrown around both the hospital and the blast\n crater.\n\n\n In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily.\n\n\n \"It's impossible and unbelievable,\" Colonel Thomas Thurgood said for the\n fifteenth time, later that morning, as he looked around the group of\n experts gathered in the tent erected on the hill overlooking the crater.\n \"How can an atom bomb go off in a nut house?\""
],
[
"At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit\n of clay and slapped it into place. With a furtive glance around him, he\n clapped the other half of the clay sphere over the filled hemisphere and\n then stood up. The patients lined up at the door, waiting for the walk\n back across the green hills to the main hospital. The attendants made a\n quick count and then unlocked the door. The group shuffled out into the\n warm, afternoon sunlight and the door closed behind them.\n\n\n Miss Abercrombie gazed around the cluttered room and picked up her chart\n book of patient progress. Moving slowly down the line of benches, she\n made short, precise notes on the day's work accomplished by each\n patient.\n\n\n At the clay table, she carefully lifted the top half of the clay ball\n and stared thoughtfully at the jumbled maze of clay strips laced through\n the lower hemisphere. She placed the lid back in place and jotted\n lengthily in her chart book.",
"His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay\n parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in\n front of him.\n\n\n Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the\n table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she\n glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston\n finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense\n silence.\n\n\n \"Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow.\" She\n looked at the men and nodded her head.\n\n\n The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of\n clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him\n from the shack.\n\n\n There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The\n experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere\n and cameras clicking.",
"\"And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?\" Miss Abercrombie asked.\n\n\n The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the\n patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to\n draw away from the woman.\n\n\n \"We mustn't be antisocial, Mr. Funston,\" Miss Abercrombie said lightly,\n but firmly. \"You've been coming along famously and you must remember to\n answer when someone talks to you. Now what are you making? It looks very\n complicated.\" She stared professionally at the maze of clay parts.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place.\n\n\n Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply.\n\n\n \"Atom bomb.\"\n\n\n A puzzled look crossed the therapist's face. \"Pardon me, Mr. Funston. I\n thought you said an 'atom bomb.'\"",
"Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to\n secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard\n the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss\n Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into\n the night skies.\n\n\n The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in\n the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack\n miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and\n military men huddled around a small wooden table.\n\n\n There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of\n modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off\n Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary\n Miss Abercrombie.\n\n\n \"Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same\n kind of clay he used before?\"",
"For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay\n and photographed it from every angle.\n\n\n Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down\n range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of\n stony-faced military policemen.\n\n\n \"I told you this whole thing was asinine,\" Thurgood snarled as the\n scientific teams trooped into the bunker.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open\n door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden\n cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.",
"Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the\n edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist\n on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with\n every beat.\n\n\n \"It's ridiculous,\" Thurgood roared. \"We'll all be the laughingstocks of\n the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You\n are all nuts. You're in the right place, but count me out.\"\n\n\n At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the\n broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists,\n strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered\n weariness.\n\n\n \"Miss Abercrombie,\" one of the physicists spoke up gently, \"you say that\n after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at\n Funston's work?\"",
"Miss Abercrombie smoothed her smock down over trim hips and surveyed the\n other patients working at the long tables in the hospital's arts and\n crafts shop. Two muscular and bored attendants in spotless whites,\n lounged beside the locked door and chatted idly about the Dodgers'\n prospects for the pennant.\n\n\n Through the barred windows of the workshop, rolling green hills were\n seen, their tree-studded flanks making a pleasant setting for the mental\n institution. The crafts building was a good mile away from the main\n buildings of the hospital and the hills blocked the view of the austere\n complex of buildings that housed the main wards.\n\n\n The therapist strolled down the line of tables, pausing to give a word\n of advice here, and a suggestion there.\n\n\n She stopped behind a frowning, intense patient, rapidly shaping blobs of\n clay into odd-sized strips and forms. As he finished each piece, he\n carefully placed it into a hollow shell hemisphere of clay.",
"\"I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the\n hospital,\" she replied, \"and it's the same amount.\"\n\n\n Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with\n Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.\n\n\n She smiled at Funston.\n\n\n \"Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston,\" she said. \"These nice men have\n brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the\n one you made for me yesterday.\"\n\n\n A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the\n shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he\n walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp\n clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top\n atomic scientists watched in fascination.",
"In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling\n glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.\n\n\n \"I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel,\" the general\n said coldly, \"but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane\n asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit\n there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic\n devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them.\"\n\n\n The general paused.\n\n\n \"Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships\n out of sponge rubber?\" the general added bitingly.\n\n\n In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama\n of the Washington landscape. He stared hard.",
"The therapist nodded unhappily.\n\n\n \"And you say that, to the best of your knowledge,\" the physicist\n continued, \"there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay.\"\n\n\n \"I'm positive that's all there was in it,\" Miss Abercrombie cried.\n\n\n There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC\n man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They\n conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.\n\n\n \"That seems to settle it, colonel. We've got to give this Funston\n another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision.\"\n\n\n Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.",
"\"Did,\" Funston murmured.\n\n\n Safely behind the patient's back, Miss Abercrombie smiled ever so\n slightly. \"Why that's very good, Mr. Funston. That shows real creative\n thought. I'm very pleased.\"\n\n\n She patted him on the shoulder and moved down the line of patients.\n\n\n A few minutes later, one of the attendants glanced at his watch, stood\n up and stretched.\n\n\n \"All right, fellows,\" he called out, \"time to go back. Put up your\n things.\"\n\n\n There was a rustle of paint boxes and papers being shuffled and chairs\n being moved back. A tall, blond patient with a flowing mustache, put one\n more dab of paint on his canvas and stood back to survey the meaningless\n smears. He sighed happily and laid down his palette.",
"A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit\n the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door\n slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.\nSix hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait\n jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon.\n Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the\n Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.\n\n\n In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were\n closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his\n baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted\n across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in\n a neatly-tied bundle.",
"\"Are you crazy?\" he screamed. \"You want to get us all thrown into this\n filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they\n ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second,\n anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with\n the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid's modeling clay?\n\n\n \"They'd crucify us, that's what they'd do!\"\n\n\n At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's\n greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an\n officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small\n side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes\n later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and\n drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of\n the runway with propellers turning.",
"\"Colonel, I've told you a dozen times,\" the hospital administrator said\n with exasperation, \"this was our manual therapy room. We gave our\n patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems,\n through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems\n that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints\n and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then\n Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman.\"\n\n\n \"All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was,\"\n Thurgood sighed. \"I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this\n morning blew it to hell and gone.\n\n\n \"And I've got to find out how it happened.\"\n\n\n Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little\n doctor.\n\n\n \"Where's that girl you said was in charge of this place?\"",
"Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a\n small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been\n the arts and crafts building.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed\n with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried\n through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the\n explosion.\n\n\n None had. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a\n welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight.\n\n\n The roar and flash of the explosion had lighted and rocked the\n surrounding countryside. Soon firemen and civil defense disaster units\n from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the\n still-smoking hole that marked the site of the vanished crafts building.",
"Within fifteen minutes, the disaster-trained crews had detected heavy\n radiation emanating from the crater and there was a scurry of men and\n equipment back to a safe distance, a few hundred yards away.\n\n\n At 5:30 a.m., a plane landed at a nearby airfield and a platoon of\n Atomic Energy Commission experts, military intelligence men, four FBI\n agents and an Army full colonel disembarked.\n\n\n At 5:45 a.m. a cordon was thrown around both the hospital and the blast\n crater.\n\n\n In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily.\n\n\n \"It's impossible and unbelievable,\" Colonel Thomas Thurgood said for the\n fifteenth time, later that morning, as he looked around the group of\n experts gathered in the tent erected on the hill overlooking the crater.\n \"How can an atom bomb go off in a nut house?\"",
"At 3:01 a.m., Thaddeus Funston stirred in his sleep and awakened. He sat\n up in bed and looked around the dark ward. The quiet breathing and\n occasional snores of thirty other sleeping patients filled the room.\n Funston turned to the window and stared out across the black hills that\n sheltered the deserted crafts building.\n\n\n He gave a quick cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.\n\n\n The brilliance of a hundred suns glared in the night and threw stark\n shadows on the walls of the suddenly-illuminated ward.\n\n\n An instant later, the shattering roar and blast of the explosion struck\n the hospital buildings in a wave of force and the bursting crash of a\n thousand windows was lost in the fury of the explosion and the wild\n screams of the frightened and demented patients.\n\n\n It was over in an instant, and a stunned moment later, recessed ceiling\n lights began flashing on throughout the big institution.",
"When she had completed her rounds, she slipped out of the smock, tucked\n the chart book under her arm and left the crafts building for the day.\n\n\n The late afternoon sun felt warm and comfortable as she walked the mile\n to the main administration building where her car was parked.\n\n\n As she drove out of the hospital grounds, Thaddeus Funston stood at the\n barred window of his locked ward and stared vacantly over the hills\n towards the craft shop. He stood there unmoving until a ward attendant\n came and took his arm an hour later to lead him off to the patients'\n mess hall.\nThe sun set, darkness fell over the stilled hospital grounds and the\n ward lights winked out at nine o'clock, leaving just a single light\n burning in each ward office. A quiet wind sighed over the still-warm\n hills.",
"Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction November 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nA FILBERT IS A NUT\nBY RICK RAPHAEL\nThat the gentleman in question was a nut was beyond question. He was an institutionalized\n psychotic. He was nutty enough to think he could make an atom bomb out of modeling clay!\nIllustrated by Freas\nMiss Abercrombie, the manual therapist patted the old man on the\n shoulder. \"You're doing just fine, Mr. Lieberman. Show it to me when you\n have finished.\"\n\n\n The oldster in the stained convalescent suit gave her a quick, shy smile\n and went back to his aimless smearing in the finger paints.",
"In the distance, a white cloud began billowing up from the base of the\n Washington Monument, and with an ear-shattering, glass-splintering roar,\n the great shaft rose majestically from its base and vanished into space\n on a tail of flame.\nTHE END"
],
[
"Miss Abercrombie smoothed her smock down over trim hips and surveyed the\n other patients working at the long tables in the hospital's arts and\n crafts shop. Two muscular and bored attendants in spotless whites,\n lounged beside the locked door and chatted idly about the Dodgers'\n prospects for the pennant.\n\n\n Through the barred windows of the workshop, rolling green hills were\n seen, their tree-studded flanks making a pleasant setting for the mental\n institution. The crafts building was a good mile away from the main\n buildings of the hospital and the hills blocked the view of the austere\n complex of buildings that housed the main wards.\n\n\n The therapist strolled down the line of tables, pausing to give a word\n of advice here, and a suggestion there.\n\n\n She stopped behind a frowning, intense patient, rapidly shaping blobs of\n clay into odd-sized strips and forms. As he finished each piece, he\n carefully placed it into a hollow shell hemisphere of clay.",
"\"Did,\" Funston murmured.\n\n\n Safely behind the patient's back, Miss Abercrombie smiled ever so\n slightly. \"Why that's very good, Mr. Funston. That shows real creative\n thought. I'm very pleased.\"\n\n\n She patted him on the shoulder and moved down the line of patients.\n\n\n A few minutes later, one of the attendants glanced at his watch, stood\n up and stretched.\n\n\n \"All right, fellows,\" he called out, \"time to go back. Put up your\n things.\"\n\n\n There was a rustle of paint boxes and papers being shuffled and chairs\n being moved back. A tall, blond patient with a flowing mustache, put one\n more dab of paint on his canvas and stood back to survey the meaningless\n smears. He sighed happily and laid down his palette.",
"At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit\n of clay and slapped it into place. With a furtive glance around him, he\n clapped the other half of the clay sphere over the filled hemisphere and\n then stood up. The patients lined up at the door, waiting for the walk\n back across the green hills to the main hospital. The attendants made a\n quick count and then unlocked the door. The group shuffled out into the\n warm, afternoon sunlight and the door closed behind them.\n\n\n Miss Abercrombie gazed around the cluttered room and picked up her chart\n book of patient progress. Moving slowly down the line of benches, she\n made short, precise notes on the day's work accomplished by each\n patient.\n\n\n At the clay table, she carefully lifted the top half of the clay ball\n and stared thoughtfully at the jumbled maze of clay strips laced through\n the lower hemisphere. She placed the lid back in place and jotted\n lengthily in her chart book.",
"\"And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?\" Miss Abercrombie asked.\n\n\n The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the\n patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to\n draw away from the woman.\n\n\n \"We mustn't be antisocial, Mr. Funston,\" Miss Abercrombie said lightly,\n but firmly. \"You've been coming along famously and you must remember to\n answer when someone talks to you. Now what are you making? It looks very\n complicated.\" She stared professionally at the maze of clay parts.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place.\n\n\n Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply.\n\n\n \"Atom bomb.\"\n\n\n A puzzled look crossed the therapist's face. \"Pardon me, Mr. Funston. I\n thought you said an 'atom bomb.'\"",
"Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the\n edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist\n on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with\n every beat.\n\n\n \"It's ridiculous,\" Thurgood roared. \"We'll all be the laughingstocks of\n the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You\n are all nuts. You're in the right place, but count me out.\"\n\n\n At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the\n broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists,\n strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered\n weariness.\n\n\n \"Miss Abercrombie,\" one of the physicists spoke up gently, \"you say that\n after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at\n Funston's work?\"",
"The therapist nodded unhappily.\n\n\n \"And you say that, to the best of your knowledge,\" the physicist\n continued, \"there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay.\"\n\n\n \"I'm positive that's all there was in it,\" Miss Abercrombie cried.\n\n\n There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC\n man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They\n conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.\n\n\n \"That seems to settle it, colonel. We've got to give this Funston\n another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision.\"\n\n\n Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.",
"Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to\n secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard\n the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss\n Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into\n the night skies.\n\n\n The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in\n the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack\n miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and\n military men huddled around a small wooden table.\n\n\n There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of\n modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off\n Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary\n Miss Abercrombie.\n\n\n \"Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same\n kind of clay he used before?\"",
"\"We've already called for Miss Abercrombie and she's on her way here\n now,\" the doctor snapped.\nOutside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved\n around the perimeter of the crater, scintillators in hand, examining\n every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one\n time.\n\n\n A jeep raced down the road from the hospital and drew up in front of the\n tent. An armed MP helped Miss Abercrombie from the vehicle.\n\n\n She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down with a stunned\n expression.\n\n\n \"He did make an atom bomb,\" she cried.\n\n\n Colonel Thurgood, who had snapped from his chair at her words, leaped\n forward to catch her as she collapsed in a faint.\n\n\n At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff\n room of the hospital administration building.",
"\"I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the\n hospital,\" she replied, \"and it's the same amount.\"\n\n\n Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with\n Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.\n\n\n She smiled at Funston.\n\n\n \"Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston,\" she said. \"These nice men have\n brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the\n one you made for me yesterday.\"\n\n\n A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the\n shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he\n walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp\n clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top\n atomic scientists watched in fascination.",
"His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay\n parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in\n front of him.\n\n\n Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the\n table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she\n glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston\n finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense\n silence.\n\n\n \"Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow.\" She\n looked at the men and nodded her head.\n\n\n The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of\n clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him\n from the shack.\n\n\n There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The\n experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere\n and cameras clicking.",
"Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction November 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nA FILBERT IS A NUT\nBY RICK RAPHAEL\nThat the gentleman in question was a nut was beyond question. He was an institutionalized\n psychotic. He was nutty enough to think he could make an atom bomb out of modeling clay!\nIllustrated by Freas\nMiss Abercrombie, the manual therapist patted the old man on the\n shoulder. \"You're doing just fine, Mr. Lieberman. Show it to me when you\n have finished.\"\n\n\n The oldster in the stained convalescent suit gave her a quick, shy smile\n and went back to his aimless smearing in the finger paints.",
"When she had completed her rounds, she slipped out of the smock, tucked\n the chart book under her arm and left the crafts building for the day.\n\n\n The late afternoon sun felt warm and comfortable as she walked the mile\n to the main administration building where her car was parked.\n\n\n As she drove out of the hospital grounds, Thaddeus Funston stood at the\n barred window of his locked ward and stared vacantly over the hills\n towards the craft shop. He stood there unmoving until a ward attendant\n came and took his arm an hour later to lead him off to the patients'\n mess hall.\nThe sun set, darkness fell over the stilled hospital grounds and the\n ward lights winked out at nine o'clock, leaving just a single light\n burning in each ward office. A quiet wind sighed over the still-warm\n hills.",
"\"Colonel, I've told you a dozen times,\" the hospital administrator said\n with exasperation, \"this was our manual therapy room. We gave our\n patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems,\n through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems\n that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints\n and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then\n Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman.\"\n\n\n \"All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was,\"\n Thurgood sighed. \"I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this\n morning blew it to hell and gone.\n\n\n \"And I've got to find out how it happened.\"\n\n\n Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little\n doctor.\n\n\n \"Where's that girl you said was in charge of this place?\"",
"For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay\n and photographed it from every angle.\n\n\n Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down\n range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of\n stony-faced military policemen.\n\n\n \"I told you this whole thing was asinine,\" Thurgood snarled as the\n scientific teams trooped into the bunker.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open\n door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden\n cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.",
"Within fifteen minutes, the disaster-trained crews had detected heavy\n radiation emanating from the crater and there was a scurry of men and\n equipment back to a safe distance, a few hundred yards away.\n\n\n At 5:30 a.m., a plane landed at a nearby airfield and a platoon of\n Atomic Energy Commission experts, military intelligence men, four FBI\n agents and an Army full colonel disembarked.\n\n\n At 5:45 a.m. a cordon was thrown around both the hospital and the blast\n crater.\n\n\n In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily.\n\n\n \"It's impossible and unbelievable,\" Colonel Thomas Thurgood said for the\n fifteenth time, later that morning, as he looked around the group of\n experts gathered in the tent erected on the hill overlooking the crater.\n \"How can an atom bomb go off in a nut house?\"",
"Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a\n small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been\n the arts and crafts building.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed\n with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried\n through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the\n explosion.\n\n\n None had. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a\n welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight.\n\n\n The roar and flash of the explosion had lighted and rocked the\n surrounding countryside. Soon firemen and civil defense disaster units\n from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the\n still-smoking hole that marked the site of the vanished crafts building.",
"\"It apparently was a very small bomb, colonel,\" one of the haggard AEC\n men offered timidly. \"Not over three kilotons.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care if it was the size of a peanut,\" Thurgood screamed. \"How\n did it get here?\"\n\n\n A military intelligence agent spoke up. \"If we knew, sir, we wouldn't be\n standing around here. We don't know, but the fact remains that it WAS an\n atomic explosion.\"\n\n\n Thurgood turned wearily to the small, white-haired man at his side.\n\n\n \"Let's go over it once more, Dr. Crane. Are you sure you knew everything\n that was in that building?\" Thurgood swept his hand in the general\n direction of the blast crater.",
"\"Are you crazy?\" he screamed. \"You want to get us all thrown into this\n filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they\n ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second,\n anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with\n the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid's modeling clay?\n\n\n \"They'd crucify us, that's what they'd do!\"\n\n\n At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's\n greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an\n officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small\n side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes\n later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and\n drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of\n the runway with propellers turning.",
"A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit\n the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door\n slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.\nSix hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait\n jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon.\n Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the\n Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.\n\n\n In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were\n closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his\n baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted\n across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in\n a neatly-tied bundle.",
"In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling\n glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.\n\n\n \"I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel,\" the general\n said coldly, \"but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane\n asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit\n there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic\n devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them.\"\n\n\n The general paused.\n\n\n \"Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships\n out of sponge rubber?\" the general added bitingly.\n\n\n In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama\n of the Washington landscape. He stared hard."
],
[
"Two military policemen and a brace of staff psychiatrists sworn to\n secrecy under the National Atomic Secrets Act, bundled Thaddeus aboard\n the plane. They plopped him into a seat directly in front of Miss\n Abercrombie and with a roar, the plane raced down the runway and into\n the night skies.\n\n\n The plane landed the next morning at the AEC's atomic testing grounds in\n the Nevada desert and two hours later, in a small hot, wooden shack\n miles up the barren desert wastelands, a cluster of scientists and\n military men huddled around a small wooden table.\n\n\n There was nothing on the table but a bowl of water and a great lump of\n modeling clay. While the psychiatrists were taking the strait jacket off\n Thaddeus in the staff car outside, Colonel Thurgood spoke to the weary\n Miss Abercrombie.\n\n\n \"Now you're positive this is just about the same amount and the same\n kind of clay he used before?\"",
"Within fifteen minutes, the disaster-trained crews had detected heavy\n radiation emanating from the crater and there was a scurry of men and\n equipment back to a safe distance, a few hundred yards away.\n\n\n At 5:30 a.m., a plane landed at a nearby airfield and a platoon of\n Atomic Energy Commission experts, military intelligence men, four FBI\n agents and an Army full colonel disembarked.\n\n\n At 5:45 a.m. a cordon was thrown around both the hospital and the blast\n crater.\n\n\n In Ward 4-C, Thaddeus Funston slept peacefully and happily.\n\n\n \"It's impossible and unbelievable,\" Colonel Thomas Thurgood said for the\n fifteenth time, later that morning, as he looked around the group of\n experts gathered in the tent erected on the hill overlooking the crater.\n \"How can an atom bomb go off in a nut house?\"",
"For two hours they studied and gently probed the mass of child's clay\n and photographed it from every angle.\n\n\n Then they left for the concrete observatory bunker, several miles down\n range where Thaddeus and the psychiatrists waited inside a ring of\n stony-faced military policemen.\n\n\n \"I told you this whole thing was asinine,\" Thurgood snarled as the\n scientific teams trooped into the bunker.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston stared out over the heads of the MPs through the open\n door, looking uprange over the heat-shimmering desert. He gave a sudden\n cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.",
"In the conference room, a red-faced, four-star general cast a chilling\n glance at the rumpled figure of Colonel Thurgood.\n\n\n \"I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel,\" the general\n said coldly, \"but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane\n asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit\n there and tell me that this poor soul has made not one, but two atomic\n devices out of modeling clay and then has detonated them.\"\n\n\n The general paused.\n\n\n \"Why don't you just tell me, colonel, that he can also make spaceships\n out of sponge rubber?\" the general added bitingly.\n\n\n In the next room, Thaddeus Funston stared out over the sweeping panorama\n of the Washington landscape. He stared hard.",
"\"Are you crazy?\" he screamed. \"You want to get us all thrown into this\n filbert factory? Do you know what the newspapers would do to us if they\n ever got wind of the fact, that for one, tiny fraction of a second,\n anyone of us here entertained the notion that a paranoidal idiot with\n the IQ of an ape could make an atomic bomb out of kid's modeling clay?\n\n\n \"They'd crucify us, that's what they'd do!\"\n\n\n At 8:30 that night, Thaddeus Funston, swathed in an Army officer's\n greatcoat that concealed the strait jacket binding him and with an\n officer's cap jammed far down over his face, was hustled out of a small\n side door of the hospital and into a waiting staff car. A few minutes\n later, the car pulled into the flying field at the nearby community and\n drove directly to the military transport plane that stood at the end of\n the runway with propellers turning.",
"At 3:01 a.m., Thaddeus Funston stirred in his sleep and awakened. He sat\n up in bed and looked around the dark ward. The quiet breathing and\n occasional snores of thirty other sleeping patients filled the room.\n Funston turned to the window and stared out across the black hills that\n sheltered the deserted crafts building.\n\n\n He gave a quick cry, shut his eyes and clapped his hands over his face.\n\n\n The brilliance of a hundred suns glared in the night and threw stark\n shadows on the walls of the suddenly-illuminated ward.\n\n\n An instant later, the shattering roar and blast of the explosion struck\n the hospital buildings in a wave of force and the bursting crash of a\n thousand windows was lost in the fury of the explosion and the wild\n screams of the frightened and demented patients.\n\n\n It was over in an instant, and a stunned moment later, recessed ceiling\n lights began flashing on throughout the big institution.",
"The therapist nodded unhappily.\n\n\n \"And you say that, to the best of your knowledge,\" the physicist\n continued, \"there was nothing inside the ball but other pieces of clay.\"\n\n\n \"I'm positive that's all there was in it,\" Miss Abercrombie cried.\n\n\n There was a renewed buzz of conversation at the table and the senior AEC\n man present got heads together with the senior intelligence man. They\n conferred briefly and then the intelligence officer spoke.\n\n\n \"That seems to settle it, colonel. We've got to give this Funston\n another chance to repeat his bomb. But this time under our supervision.\"\n\n\n Thurgood leaped to his feet, his face purpling.",
"A brilliance a hundred times brighter than the glaring Nevada sun lit\n the dim interior of the bunker and the pneumatically-operated door\n slammed shut just before the wave of the blast hit the structure.\nSix hours and a jet plane trip later, Thaddeus, once again in his strait\n jacket, sat between his armed escorts in a small room in the Pentagon.\n Through the window he could see the hurried bustle of traffic over the\n Potomac and beyond, the domed roof of the Capitol.\n\n\n In the conference room next door, the joint chiefs of staff were\n closeted with a gray-faced and bone-weary Colonel Thurgood and his\n baker's dozen of AEC brains. Scraps of the hot and scornful talk drifted\n across a half-opened transom into the room where Thaddeus Funston sat in\n a neatly-tied bundle.",
"Colonel Thurgood, looking more like a patient every minute, sat on the\n edge of his chair at the head of a long table and pounded with his fist\n on the wooden surface, making Miss Abercrombie's chart book bounce with\n every beat.\n\n\n \"It's ridiculous,\" Thurgood roared. \"We'll all be the laughingstocks of\n the world if this ever gets out. An atomic bomb made out of clay. You\n are all nuts. You're in the right place, but count me out.\"\n\n\n At his left, Miss Abercrombie cringed deeper into her chair at the\n broadside. Down both sides of the long table, psychiatrists, physicists,\n strategists and radiologists sat in various stages of nerve-shattered\n weariness.\n\n\n \"Miss Abercrombie,\" one of the physicists spoke up gently, \"you say that\n after the patients had departed the building, you looked again at\n Funston's work?\"",
"\"I brought it along from the same batch we had in the store room at the\n hospital,\" she replied, \"and it's the same amount.\"\n\n\n Thurgood signaled to the doctors and they entered the shack with\n Thaddeus Funston between them. The colonel nudged Miss Abercrombie.\n\n\n She smiled at Funston.\n\n\n \"Now isn't this nice, Mr. Funston,\" she said. \"These nice men have\n brought us way out here just to see you make another atom bomb like the\n one you made for me yesterday.\"\n\n\n A flicker of interest lightened Thaddeus' face. He looked around the\n shack and then spotted the clay on the table. Without hesitation, he\n walked to the table and sat down. His fingers began working the damp\n clay, making first the hollow, half-round shell while the nation's top\n atomic scientists watched in fascination.",
"\"And what are we making today, Mr. Funston?\" Miss Abercrombie asked.\n\n\n The flying fingers continued to whip out the bits of shaped clay as the\n patient ignored the question. He hunched closer to his table as if to\n draw away from the woman.\n\n\n \"We mustn't be antisocial, Mr. Funston,\" Miss Abercrombie said lightly,\n but firmly. \"You've been coming along famously and you must remember to\n answer when someone talks to you. Now what are you making? It looks very\n complicated.\" She stared professionally at the maze of clay parts.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston continued to mold the clay bits and put them in place.\n\n\n Without looking up from his bench he muttered a reply.\n\n\n \"Atom bomb.\"\n\n\n A puzzled look crossed the therapist's face. \"Pardon me, Mr. Funston. I\n thought you said an 'atom bomb.'\"",
"His busy fingers flew through the clay, shaping odd, flat bits and clay\n parts that were dropped almost aimlessly into the open hemisphere in\n front of him.\n\n\n Miss Abercrombie stood at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the\n table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she\n glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston\n finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense\n silence.\n\n\n \"Time to go back now, Mr. Funston. You can work some more tomorrow.\" She\n looked at the men and nodded her head.\n\n\n The two psychiatrists went to Thaddeus' side as he put the upper lid of\n clay carefully in place. Funston stood up and the doctors escorted him\n from the shack.\n\n\n There was a moment of hushed silence and then pandemonium burst. The\n experts converged on the clay ball, instruments blossoming from nowhere\n and cameras clicking.",
"Beyond the again-silent hills, a great pillar of smoke, topped by a\n small mushroom-shaped cloud, rose above the gaping hole that had been\n the arts and crafts building.\n\n\n Thaddeus Funston took his hands from his face and lay back in his bed\n with a small, secret smile on his lips. Attendants and nurses scurried\n through the hospital, seeing how many had been injured in the\n explosion.\n\n\n None had. The hills had absorbed most of the shock and apart from a\n welter of broken glass, the damage had been surprisingly slight.\n\n\n The roar and flash of the explosion had lighted and rocked the\n surrounding countryside. Soon firemen and civil defense disaster units\n from a half-dozen neighboring communities had gathered at the\n still-smoking hole that marked the site of the vanished crafts building.",
"\"Colonel, I've told you a dozen times,\" the hospital administrator said\n with exasperation, \"this was our manual therapy room. We gave our\n patients art work. It was a means of getting out of their systems,\n through the use of their hands, some of the frustrations and problems\n that led them to this hospital. They worked with oil and water paints\n and clay. If you can make an atomic bomb from vermillion pigments, then\n Madame Curie was a misguided scrubwoman.\"\n\n\n \"All I know is that you say this was a crafts building. O.K. So it was,\"\n Thurgood sighed. \"I also know that an atomic explosion at 3:02 this\n morning blew it to hell and gone.\n\n\n \"And I've got to find out how it happened.\"\n\n\n Thurgood slumped into a field chair and gazed tiredly up at the little\n doctor.\n\n\n \"Where's that girl you said was in charge of this place?\"",
"\"It apparently was a very small bomb, colonel,\" one of the haggard AEC\n men offered timidly. \"Not over three kilotons.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care if it was the size of a peanut,\" Thurgood screamed. \"How\n did it get here?\"\n\n\n A military intelligence agent spoke up. \"If we knew, sir, we wouldn't be\n standing around here. We don't know, but the fact remains that it WAS an\n atomic explosion.\"\n\n\n Thurgood turned wearily to the small, white-haired man at his side.\n\n\n \"Let's go over it once more, Dr. Crane. Are you sure you knew everything\n that was in that building?\" Thurgood swept his hand in the general\n direction of the blast crater.",
"At the clay table, Funston feverishly fabricated the last odd-shaped bit\n of clay and slapped it into place. With a furtive glance around him, he\n clapped the other half of the clay sphere over the filled hemisphere and\n then stood up. The patients lined up at the door, waiting for the walk\n back across the green hills to the main hospital. The attendants made a\n quick count and then unlocked the door. The group shuffled out into the\n warm, afternoon sunlight and the door closed behind them.\n\n\n Miss Abercrombie gazed around the cluttered room and picked up her chart\n book of patient progress. Moving slowly down the line of benches, she\n made short, precise notes on the day's work accomplished by each\n patient.\n\n\n At the clay table, she carefully lifted the top half of the clay ball\n and stared thoughtfully at the jumbled maze of clay strips laced through\n the lower hemisphere. She placed the lid back in place and jotted\n lengthily in her chart book.",
"When she had completed her rounds, she slipped out of the smock, tucked\n the chart book under her arm and left the crafts building for the day.\n\n\n The late afternoon sun felt warm and comfortable as she walked the mile\n to the main administration building where her car was parked.\n\n\n As she drove out of the hospital grounds, Thaddeus Funston stood at the\n barred window of his locked ward and stared vacantly over the hills\n towards the craft shop. He stood there unmoving until a ward attendant\n came and took his arm an hour later to lead him off to the patients'\n mess hall.\nThe sun set, darkness fell over the stilled hospital grounds and the\n ward lights winked out at nine o'clock, leaving just a single light\n burning in each ward office. A quiet wind sighed over the still-warm\n hills.",
"\"Did,\" Funston murmured.\n\n\n Safely behind the patient's back, Miss Abercrombie smiled ever so\n slightly. \"Why that's very good, Mr. Funston. That shows real creative\n thought. I'm very pleased.\"\n\n\n She patted him on the shoulder and moved down the line of patients.\n\n\n A few minutes later, one of the attendants glanced at his watch, stood\n up and stretched.\n\n\n \"All right, fellows,\" he called out, \"time to go back. Put up your\n things.\"\n\n\n There was a rustle of paint boxes and papers being shuffled and chairs\n being moved back. A tall, blond patient with a flowing mustache, put one\n more dab of paint on his canvas and stood back to survey the meaningless\n smears. He sighed happily and laid down his palette.",
"\"We've already called for Miss Abercrombie and she's on her way here\n now,\" the doctor snapped.\nOutside the tent, a small army of military men and AEC technicians moved\n around the perimeter of the crater, scintillators in hand, examining\n every tiny scrap that might have been a part of the building at one\n time.\n\n\n A jeep raced down the road from the hospital and drew up in front of the\n tent. An armed MP helped Miss Abercrombie from the vehicle.\n\n\n She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down with a stunned\n expression.\n\n\n \"He did make an atom bomb,\" she cried.\n\n\n Colonel Thurgood, who had snapped from his chair at her words, leaped\n forward to catch her as she collapsed in a faint.\n\n\n At 4:00 p.m., the argument was still raging in the long, narrow staff\n room of the hospital administration building.",
"In the distance, a white cloud began billowing up from the base of the\n Washington Monument, and with an ear-shattering, glass-splintering roar,\n the great shaft rose majestically from its base and vanished into space\n on a tail of flame.\nTHE END"
]
] |
train
|
24521
|
[
"Why does Malloy send James Nordon to the peace talks?",
"Why doesn't Malloy go to the peace talks himself?",
"How does Malloy feel about Miss Drayson?",
"Who are the Karna?",
"Does Earth want peace with Karn?",
"Why are the peace talks on Saarkkad V?",
"Who are the kind of men who are sent to Sararkkad IV?",
"Why doesn't Bertrand Malloy appear in public?",
"Why do the Karna demand the conference begin in three days?"
] |
[
[
"Nordon has trouble making decisions but will commit once the Karna present him with a choice that is not rigged in the Karna's favor.",
"Nordon is going to the peace talks to assist Braynek in case of a trap.",
"Nordon is the best negotiator Earth has to offer.",
"Nordon is a trained assassin. He will be ready to take out the ambassador from Karn if there is any funny business."
],
[
"Malloy is too sick to travel to the peace conference. He also hates aliens.",
"Malloy needs to stay on Saarkkad IV to keep the drug supply lines flowing.",
"Malloy is too far from Saarkkad V to get to the peace conference on time. He also hates aliens.",
"Malloy has a psychological disorder that prevents him from leaving the house. He also hates aliens."
],
[
"Malloy thinks Miss Drayson is a great secretary because she doesn't give away information.",
"Malloy is getting ready to fire Miss Drayson for not protecting confidential information.",
"Malloy suspects Miss Drayson may be a spy for Karn.",
"Malloy is secretly in love with Miss Drayson."
],
[
"The Karna are the second most powerful race in the galaxy. They are skilled negotiators.",
"The Karna are a race of warriors bent on destroying the Earth.",
"The Karna are a peaceful species trying to negotiate a surrender to Earth.",
"The Karna are a predator race who are trying to invade the Earth, to use humans as a food source."
],
[
"The Earth is ready for peace, as interstellar war is costly.",
"Earth needs to eliminate the Karna to protect the galaxy.",
"The Earth does not want peace with the planet Karn. The Karna are an evil race.",
"The Earth wants peace but doesn't trust the Karna to hold up their end of the bargain."
],
[
"Saarkkad V is not inhabited by intelligent life.",
"The Karna consider Saarkkad V to be neutral territory.",
"The inhabitants of Saarkkad V don't pose a danger to the Karna or to the humans.",
"Saarkkad V is halfway between Earth and Karn."
],
[
"Men who are hardened criminals.",
"Men who have mental illnesses.",
"Men who are physically challenged.",
"Men who are mentally challenged."
],
[
"Threats have been made against Malloy's life. He needs to stay out of sight.",
"Malloy is too frail to leave his apartment.",
"He holds a prestigious title. Prestigious men aren't seen in public.",
"He is agoraphobic."
],
[
"There is an immediate threat to the planet of Karn, and the Karna desperately need help from Earth.",
"The Karna are hoping to disrupt Earth's supply chain.",
"The Karna want to make Earth look bad in the eyes of the other planets.",
"The Karna are skilled negotiators and want to control the peace talks."
]
] |
[
1,
4,
1,
1,
1,
2,
2,
4,
4
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[
1,
1,
0,
1,
0,
0,
0,
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0
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[
[
"\"Nordon, I have a job for you. It's\n probably one of the most important\n jobs you'll ever have in your life. It\n can mean big things for you—promotion\n and prestige if you do it well.\"\n\n\n Nordon nodded slowly. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy explained the problem of\n the Karna peace talks.\n\n\n \"We need a man who can outthink\n them,\" Malloy finished, \"and judging\n from your record, I think you're that\n man. It involves risk, of course. If\n you make the wrong decisions, your\n name will be mud back on Earth. But\n I don't think there's much chance of\n that, really. Do you want to handle\n small-time operations all your life?\n Of course not.\n\n\n \"You'll be leaving within an hour\n for Saarkkad V.\"\n\n\n Nordon nodded again. \"Yes, sir;\n certainly. Am I to go alone?\"",
"He looked up at the ceiling again.\n \"What\ncan\nI do?\" he said softly.\nOn the second day after the arrival\n of the communique, Malloy\n made his decision. He flipped on his\n intercom and said: \"Miss Drayson,\n get hold of James Nordon and Kylen\n Braynek. I want to see them both immediately.\n Send Nordon in first, and\n tell Braynek to wait.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And keep the recorder on. You\n can file the tape later.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy knew the woman would\n listen in on the intercom anyway, and\n it was better to give her permission to\n do so.\n\n\n James Nordon was tall, broad-shouldered,\n and thirty-eight. His hair\n was graying at the temples, and his\n handsome face looked cool and efficient.\n\n\n Malloy waved him to a seat.",
"\"No,\" said Malloy, \"I'm sending\n an assistant with you—a man named\n Kylen Braynek. Ever heard of him?\"\n\n\n Nordon shook his head. \"Not that\n I recall, Mr. Malloy. Should I have?\"\n\n\n \"Not necessarily. He's a pretty\n shrewd operator, though. He knows a\n lot about interstellar law, and he's\n capable of spotting a trap a mile away.\n You'll be in charge, of course, but I\n want you to pay special attention to\n his advice.\"\n\n\n \"I will, sir,\" Nordon said gratefully.\n \"A man like that can be useful.\"",
"\"Naturally, they'll be trying to\n trick you every step of the way,\" Malloy\n went on. \"They're shrewd and\n underhanded; we'll simply have to\n be more shrewd and more underhanded.\n Nordon's job is to sit\n quietly and evaluate the data; yours\n will be to find the loopholes they're\n laying out for themselves and plug\n them. Don't antagonize them, but\n don't baby them, either. If you see\n anything underhanded going on, let\n Nordon know immediately.\"\n\n\n \"They won't get anything by me,\n Mr. Malloy.\"\nBy the time the ship from Earth\n got there, the peace conference had\n been going on for four days. Bertrand\n Malloy had full reports on the whole\n parley, as relayed to him through the\n ship that had taken Nordon and Braynek\n to Saarkkad V.",
"\"Right. Now, you go into the anteroom\n over there. I've prepared a summary\n of the situation, and you'll have\n to study it and get it into your head\n before the ship leaves. That isn't\n much time, but it's the Karna who are\n doing the pushing, not us.\"\n\n\n As soon as Nordon had left, Malloy\n said softly: \"Send in Braynek,\n Miss Drayson.\"\n\n\n Kylen Braynek was a smallish man\n with mouse-brown hair that lay flat\n against his skull, and hard, penetrating,\n dark eyes that were shadowed by\n heavy, protruding brows. Malloy asked\n him to sit down.\n\n\n Again Malloy went through the explanation\n of the peace conference.",
"But whoever won the armistice\n would find that some of the now-neutral\n races would come in on their\n side if war broke out again. If the\n Karna played their cards right, their\n side would be strong enough next\n time to win.\n\n\n So Earth had to get a delegation to\n meet with the Karna representatives\n within the three-day limit or lose what\n might be a vital point in the negotiations.\n\n\n And that was where Bertrand Malloy\n came in.\n\n\n He had been appointed Minister\n and Plenipotentiary Extraordinary to\n the Earth-Karn peace conference.",
"\"These two men are honestly doing\n their best to win at the peace conference,\n and they've got the Karna reeling.\n The Karna can see that we're not\n trying to stall; our men are actually\n working at trying to reach a decision.\n But what the Karna don't see is that\n those men, as a team, are unbeatable\n because, in this situation, they're psychologically\n incapable of losing.\"\n\n\n Again the Secretary of State nodded\n his approval, but there was still\n a question in his mind. \"Since you\n know all that, couldn't you have handled\n it yourself?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe, but I doubt it. They might\n have gotten around me someway by\n sneaking up on a blind spot. Nordon\n and Braynek have blind spots, but\n they're covered with armor. No, I'm\n glad I couldn't go; it's better this\n way.\"",
"Malloy nodded. \"I think so. The\n Karna put us in a dilemma, so I\n threw a dilemma right back at them.\"\n\n\n \"How do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Nordon had a mental block\n against making decisions. If he took\n a girl out on a date, he'd have trouble\n making up his mind whether to kiss\n her or not until she made up his mind\n for him, one way or the other. He's\n that kind of guy. Until he's presented\n with one, single, clear decision which\n admits of no alternatives, he can't\n move at all.",
"\"Paranoid,\" said Malloy. \"He\n thinks everyone is plotting against\n him. In this case, that's all to the good\n because the Karna\nare\nplotting against\n him. No matter what they put forth,\n Braynek is convinced that there's a\n trap in it somewhere, and he digs to\n find out what the trap is. Even if\n there isn't a trap, the Karna can't\n satisfy Braynek, because he's convinced\n that there\nhas\nto be—somewhere.\n As a result, all his advice to\n Nordon, and all his questioning on\n the wildest possibilities, just serves\n to keep Nordon from getting unconfused.",
"Secretary of State Blendwell stopped\n off at Saarkkad IV before going\n on to V to take charge of the conference.\n He was a tallish, lean man with\n a few strands of gray hair on the top\n of his otherwise bald scalp, and he\n wore a hearty, professional smile that\n didn't quite make it to his calculating\n eyes.\n\n\n He took Malloy's hand and shook\n it warmly. \"How are you, Mr. Ambassador?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, Mr. Secretary. How's everything\n on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Tense. They're waiting to see\n what is going to happen on Five. So\n am I, for that matter.\" His eyes were\n curious. \"You decided not to go\n yourself, eh?\"\n\n\n \"I thought it better not to. I sent a\n good team, instead. Would you like\n to see the reports?\"\n\n\n \"I certainly would.\"",
"And, Malloy knew, his own position\n was not unimportant in that war.\n He was not in the battle line, nor\n even in the major production line, but\n it was necessary to keep the drug supply\n lines flowing from Saarkkad, and\n that meant keeping on good terms\n with the Saarkkadic government.\n\n\n The Saarkkada themselves were humanoid\n in physical form—if one allowed\n the term to cover a wide range\n of differences—but their minds just\n didn't function along the same lines.\n\n\n For nine years, Bertrand Malloy\n had been Ambassador to Saarkkad,\n and for nine years, no Saarkkada had\n ever seen him. To have shown himself\n to one of them would have\n meant instant loss of prestige.",
"Malloy handed them to the secretary,\n and as he read, Malloy watched\n him. Blendwell was a political appointee—a\n good man, Malloy had to\n admit, but he didn't know all the\n ins and outs of the Diplomatic Corps.\n\n\n When Blendwell looked up from\n the reports at last, he said: \"Amazing!\n They've held off the Karna at\n every point! They've beaten them\n back! They've managed to cope with\n and outdo the finest team of negotiators\n the Karna could send.\"\n\n\n \"I thought they would,\" said Malloy,\n trying to appear modest.\n\n\n The secretary's eyes narrowed.\n \"I've heard of the work you've been\n doing here with ... ah ... sick men.\n Is this one of your ... ah ... successes?\"",
"She came in through the door,\n a rather handsome woman in her middle\n thirties, clutching a sheaf of\n papers in her right hand as though\n someone might at any instant snatch\n it from her before she could turn it\n over to Malloy.\n\n\n She laid them carefully on the\n desk. \"If anything else comes in, I'll\n let you know immediately, sir,\" she\n said. \"Will there be anything else?\"\n\n\n Malloy let her stand there while he\n picked up the communique. She wanted\n to know what his reaction was\n going to be; it didn't matter because\n no one would ever find out from her\n what he had done unless she was\n ordered to tell someone.\n\n\n He read the first paragraph, and his\n eyes widened involuntarily.\n\n\n \"Armistice,\" he said in a low\n whisper. \"There's a chance that the\n war may be over.\"",
"\"Yes, sir,\" said Miss Drayson in a\n hushed voice.\n\n\n Malloy read the whole thing\n through, fighting to keep his emotions\n in check. Miss Drayson stood\n there calmly, her face a mask; her\n emotions were a secret.\n\n\n Finally, Malloy looked up. \"I'll let\n you know as soon as I reach a decision,\n Miss Drayson. I think I hardly\n need say that no news of this is to\n leave this office.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy watched her go out the door\n without actually seeing her. The war\n was over—at least for a while. He\n looked down at the papers again.\n\n\n The Karna, slowly being beaten\n back on every front, were suing for\n peace. They wanted an armistice conference—immediately.",
"The Secretary of State raised an\n eyebrow. \"\nCouldn't\ngo, Mr. Ambassador?\"\n\n\n Malloy looked at him. \"Didn't you\n know? I wondered why you appointed\n me, in the first place. No, I\n couldn't go. The reason why I'm here,\n cooped up in this office, hiding from\n the Saarkkada the way a good Saarkkadic\n bigshot should, is because I\nlike\nit that way. I suffer from agoraphobia\n and xenophobia.",
"\"Mr. Malloy?\" said a careful voice.\n \"A special communication for you has\n been teletyped in from Earth. Shall I\n bring it in?\"\n\n\n \"Bring it in, Miss Drayson.\"\n\n\n Miss Drayson was a case in point.\n She was uncommunicative. She liked\n to gather in information, but she\n found it difficult to give it up once it\n was in her possession.\n\n\n Malloy had made her his private\n secretary. Nothing—but\nnothing\n—got\n out of Malloy's office without his\n direct order. It had taken Malloy a\n long time to get it into Miss Drayson's\n head that it was perfectly all\n right—even desirable—for her to\n keep secrets from everyone except\n Malloy.",
"To their way of thinking, an important\n official was aloof. The greater\n his importance, the greater must be\n his isolation. The Occeq of Saarkkad\n himself was never seen except by a\n handful of picked nobles, who, themselves,\n were never seen except by their\n underlings. It was a long, roundabout\n way of doing business, but it was the\n only way Saarkkad would do any\n business at all. To violate the rigid\n social setup of Saarkkad would mean\n the instant closing off of the supply\n of biochemical products that the\n Saarkkadic laboratories produced\n from native plants and animals—products\n that were vitally necessary\n to Earth's war, and which could be\n duplicated nowhere else in the\n known universe.\n\n\n It was Bertrand Malloy's job to\n keep the production output high and\n to keep the materiel flowing towards\n Earth and her allies and outposts.",
"Malloy sighed and pushed the dossiers\n away from him. No two men\n were alike, and yet there sometimes\n seemed to be an eternal sameness\n about all men. He considered himself\n an individual, for instance, but wasn't\n the basic similarity there, after all?\n\n\n He was—how old? He glanced at\n the Earth calendar dial that was automatically\n correlated with the Saarkkadic\n calendar just above it. Fifty-nine\n next week. Fifty-nine years old. And\n what did he have to show for it besides\n flabby muscles, sagging skin, a\n wrinkled face, and gray hair?\n\n\n Well, he had an excellent record in\n the Corps, if nothing else. One of the\n top men in his field. And he had his\n memories of Diane, dead these ten\n years, but still beautiful and alive in\n his recollections. And—he grinned\n softly to himself—he had Saarkkad.",
"The job would have been a snap\n cinch in the right circumstances; the\n Saarkkada weren't difficult to get\n along with. A staff of top-grade men\n could have handled them without\n half trying.\n\n\n But Malloy didn't have top-grade\n men. They couldn't be spared from\n work that required their total capacity.\n It's inefficient to waste a man on a\n job that he can do without half trying\n where there are more important jobs\n that will tax his full output.\n\n\n So Malloy was stuck with the culls.\n Not the worst ones, of course; there\n were places in the galaxy that were\n less important than Saarkkad to the\n war effort. Malloy knew that, no matter\n what was wrong with a man, as\n long as he had the mental ability to\n dress himself and get himself to\n work, useful work could be found for\n him.",
"Already, they had taken the offensive\n in the matter of the peace talks.\n They had sent a full delegation to\n Saarkkad V, the next planet out from\n the Saarkkad sun, a chilly world inhabited\n only by low-intelligence animals.\n The Karna considered this to be\n fully neutral territory, and Earth\n couldn't argue the point very well. In\n addition, they demanded that the conference\n begin in three days, Terrestrial\n time.\n\n\n The trouble was that interstellar\n communication beams travel a devil\n of a lot faster than ships. It would\n take more than a week for the Earth\n government to get a vessel to Saarkkad\n V. Earth had been caught unprepared\n for an armistice. They\n objected."
],
[
"The Secretary of State raised an\n eyebrow. \"\nCouldn't\ngo, Mr. Ambassador?\"\n\n\n Malloy looked at him. \"Didn't you\n know? I wondered why you appointed\n me, in the first place. No, I\n couldn't go. The reason why I'm here,\n cooped up in this office, hiding from\n the Saarkkada the way a good Saarkkadic\n bigshot should, is because I\nlike\nit that way. I suffer from agoraphobia\n and xenophobia.",
"But whoever won the armistice\n would find that some of the now-neutral\n races would come in on their\n side if war broke out again. If the\n Karna played their cards right, their\n side would be strong enough next\n time to win.\n\n\n So Earth had to get a delegation to\n meet with the Karna representatives\n within the three-day limit or lose what\n might be a vital point in the negotiations.\n\n\n And that was where Bertrand Malloy\n came in.\n\n\n He had been appointed Minister\n and Plenipotentiary Extraordinary to\n the Earth-Karn peace conference.",
"And, Malloy knew, his own position\n was not unimportant in that war.\n He was not in the battle line, nor\n even in the major production line, but\n it was necessary to keep the drug supply\n lines flowing from Saarkkad, and\n that meant keeping on good terms\n with the Saarkkadic government.\n\n\n The Saarkkada themselves were humanoid\n in physical form—if one allowed\n the term to cover a wide range\n of differences—but their minds just\n didn't function along the same lines.\n\n\n For nine years, Bertrand Malloy\n had been Ambassador to Saarkkad,\n and for nine years, no Saarkkada had\n ever seen him. To have shown himself\n to one of them would have\n meant instant loss of prestige.",
"Secretary of State Blendwell stopped\n off at Saarkkad IV before going\n on to V to take charge of the conference.\n He was a tallish, lean man with\n a few strands of gray hair on the top\n of his otherwise bald scalp, and he\n wore a hearty, professional smile that\n didn't quite make it to his calculating\n eyes.\n\n\n He took Malloy's hand and shook\n it warmly. \"How are you, Mr. Ambassador?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, Mr. Secretary. How's everything\n on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Tense. They're waiting to see\n what is going to happen on Five. So\n am I, for that matter.\" His eyes were\n curious. \"You decided not to go\n yourself, eh?\"\n\n\n \"I thought it better not to. I sent a\n good team, instead. Would you like\n to see the reports?\"\n\n\n \"I certainly would.\"",
"\"Naturally, they'll be trying to\n trick you every step of the way,\" Malloy\n went on. \"They're shrewd and\n underhanded; we'll simply have to\n be more shrewd and more underhanded.\n Nordon's job is to sit\n quietly and evaluate the data; yours\n will be to find the loopholes they're\n laying out for themselves and plug\n them. Don't antagonize them, but\n don't baby them, either. If you see\n anything underhanded going on, let\n Nordon know immediately.\"\n\n\n \"They won't get anything by me,\n Mr. Malloy.\"\nBy the time the ship from Earth\n got there, the peace conference had\n been going on for four days. Bertrand\n Malloy had full reports on the whole\n parley, as relayed to him through the\n ship that had taken Nordon and Braynek\n to Saarkkad V.",
"Malloy handed them to the secretary,\n and as he read, Malloy watched\n him. Blendwell was a political appointee—a\n good man, Malloy had to\n admit, but he didn't know all the\n ins and outs of the Diplomatic Corps.\n\n\n When Blendwell looked up from\n the reports at last, he said: \"Amazing!\n They've held off the Karna at\n every point! They've beaten them\n back! They've managed to cope with\n and outdo the finest team of negotiators\n the Karna could send.\"\n\n\n \"I thought they would,\" said Malloy,\n trying to appear modest.\n\n\n The secretary's eyes narrowed.\n \"I've heard of the work you've been\n doing here with ... ah ... sick men.\n Is this one of your ... ah ... successes?\"",
"\"Right. Now, you go into the anteroom\n over there. I've prepared a summary\n of the situation, and you'll have\n to study it and get it into your head\n before the ship leaves. That isn't\n much time, but it's the Karna who are\n doing the pushing, not us.\"\n\n\n As soon as Nordon had left, Malloy\n said softly: \"Send in Braynek,\n Miss Drayson.\"\n\n\n Kylen Braynek was a smallish man\n with mouse-brown hair that lay flat\n against his skull, and hard, penetrating,\n dark eyes that were shadowed by\n heavy, protruding brows. Malloy asked\n him to sit down.\n\n\n Again Malloy went through the explanation\n of the peace conference.",
"\"These two men are honestly doing\n their best to win at the peace conference,\n and they've got the Karna reeling.\n The Karna can see that we're not\n trying to stall; our men are actually\n working at trying to reach a decision.\n But what the Karna don't see is that\n those men, as a team, are unbeatable\n because, in this situation, they're psychologically\n incapable of losing.\"\n\n\n Again the Secretary of State nodded\n his approval, but there was still\n a question in his mind. \"Since you\n know all that, couldn't you have handled\n it yourself?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe, but I doubt it. They might\n have gotten around me someway by\n sneaking up on a blind spot. Nordon\n and Braynek have blind spots, but\n they're covered with armor. No, I'm\n glad I couldn't go; it's better this\n way.\"",
"\"Nordon, I have a job for you. It's\n probably one of the most important\n jobs you'll ever have in your life. It\n can mean big things for you—promotion\n and prestige if you do it well.\"\n\n\n Nordon nodded slowly. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy explained the problem of\n the Karna peace talks.\n\n\n \"We need a man who can outthink\n them,\" Malloy finished, \"and judging\n from your record, I think you're that\n man. It involves risk, of course. If\n you make the wrong decisions, your\n name will be mud back on Earth. But\n I don't think there's much chance of\n that, really. Do you want to handle\n small-time operations all your life?\n Of course not.\n\n\n \"You'll be leaving within an hour\n for Saarkkad V.\"\n\n\n Nordon nodded again. \"Yes, sir;\n certainly. Am I to go alone?\"",
"He looked up at the ceiling again.\n \"What\ncan\nI do?\" he said softly.\nOn the second day after the arrival\n of the communique, Malloy\n made his decision. He flipped on his\n intercom and said: \"Miss Drayson,\n get hold of James Nordon and Kylen\n Braynek. I want to see them both immediately.\n Send Nordon in first, and\n tell Braynek to wait.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And keep the recorder on. You\n can file the tape later.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy knew the woman would\n listen in on the intercom anyway, and\n it was better to give her permission to\n do so.\n\n\n James Nordon was tall, broad-shouldered,\n and thirty-eight. His hair\n was graying at the temples, and his\n handsome face looked cool and efficient.\n\n\n Malloy waved him to a seat.",
"To their way of thinking, an important\n official was aloof. The greater\n his importance, the greater must be\n his isolation. The Occeq of Saarkkad\n himself was never seen except by a\n handful of picked nobles, who, themselves,\n were never seen except by their\n underlings. It was a long, roundabout\n way of doing business, but it was the\n only way Saarkkad would do any\n business at all. To violate the rigid\n social setup of Saarkkad would mean\n the instant closing off of the supply\n of biochemical products that the\n Saarkkadic laboratories produced\n from native plants and animals—products\n that were vitally necessary\n to Earth's war, and which could be\n duplicated nowhere else in the\n known universe.\n\n\n It was Bertrand Malloy's job to\n keep the production output high and\n to keep the materiel flowing towards\n Earth and her allies and outposts.",
"\"Yes, sir,\" said Miss Drayson in a\n hushed voice.\n\n\n Malloy read the whole thing\n through, fighting to keep his emotions\n in check. Miss Drayson stood\n there calmly, her face a mask; her\n emotions were a secret.\n\n\n Finally, Malloy looked up. \"I'll let\n you know as soon as I reach a decision,\n Miss Drayson. I think I hardly\n need say that no news of this is to\n leave this office.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy watched her go out the door\n without actually seeing her. The war\n was over—at least for a while. He\n looked down at the papers again.\n\n\n The Karna, slowly being beaten\n back on every front, were suing for\n peace. They wanted an armistice conference—immediately.",
"She came in through the door,\n a rather handsome woman in her middle\n thirties, clutching a sheaf of\n papers in her right hand as though\n someone might at any instant snatch\n it from her before she could turn it\n over to Malloy.\n\n\n She laid them carefully on the\n desk. \"If anything else comes in, I'll\n let you know immediately, sir,\" she\n said. \"Will there be anything else?\"\n\n\n Malloy let her stand there while he\n picked up the communique. She wanted\n to know what his reaction was\n going to be; it didn't matter because\n no one would ever find out from her\n what he had done unless she was\n ordered to tell someone.\n\n\n He read the first paragraph, and his\n eyes widened involuntarily.\n\n\n \"Armistice,\" he said in a low\n whisper. \"There's a chance that the\n war may be over.\"",
"Malloy nodded. \"I think so. The\n Karna put us in a dilemma, so I\n threw a dilemma right back at them.\"\n\n\n \"How do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Nordon had a mental block\n against making decisions. If he took\n a girl out on a date, he'd have trouble\n making up his mind whether to kiss\n her or not until she made up his mind\n for him, one way or the other. He's\n that kind of guy. Until he's presented\n with one, single, clear decision which\n admits of no alternatives, he can't\n move at all.",
"\"Mr. Malloy?\" said a careful voice.\n \"A special communication for you has\n been teletyped in from Earth. Shall I\n bring it in?\"\n\n\n \"Bring it in, Miss Drayson.\"\n\n\n Miss Drayson was a case in point.\n She was uncommunicative. She liked\n to gather in information, but she\n found it difficult to give it up once it\n was in her possession.\n\n\n Malloy had made her his private\n secretary. Nothing—but\nnothing\n—got\n out of Malloy's office without his\n direct order. It had taken Malloy a\n long time to get it into Miss Drayson's\n head that it was perfectly all\n right—even desirable—for her to\n keep secrets from everyone except\n Malloy.",
"\"No,\" said Malloy, \"I'm sending\n an assistant with you—a man named\n Kylen Braynek. Ever heard of him?\"\n\n\n Nordon shook his head. \"Not that\n I recall, Mr. Malloy. Should I have?\"\n\n\n \"Not necessarily. He's a pretty\n shrewd operator, though. He knows a\n lot about interstellar law, and he's\n capable of spotting a trap a mile away.\n You'll be in charge, of course, but I\n want you to pay special attention to\n his advice.\"\n\n\n \"I will, sir,\" Nordon said gratefully.\n \"A man like that can be useful.\"",
"Malloy sighed and pushed the dossiers\n away from him. No two men\n were alike, and yet there sometimes\n seemed to be an eternal sameness\n about all men. He considered himself\n an individual, for instance, but wasn't\n the basic similarity there, after all?\n\n\n He was—how old? He glanced at\n the Earth calendar dial that was automatically\n correlated with the Saarkkadic\n calendar just above it. Fifty-nine\n next week. Fifty-nine years old. And\n what did he have to show for it besides\n flabby muscles, sagging skin, a\n wrinkled face, and gray hair?\n\n\n Well, he had an excellent record in\n the Corps, if nothing else. One of the\n top men in his field. And he had his\n memories of Diane, dead these ten\n years, but still beautiful and alive in\n his recollections. And—he grinned\n softly to himself—he had Saarkkad.",
"The job would have been a snap\n cinch in the right circumstances; the\n Saarkkada weren't difficult to get\n along with. A staff of top-grade men\n could have handled them without\n half trying.\n\n\n But Malloy didn't have top-grade\n men. They couldn't be spared from\n work that required their total capacity.\n It's inefficient to waste a man on a\n job that he can do without half trying\n where there are more important jobs\n that will tax his full output.\n\n\n So Malloy was stuck with the culls.\n Not the worst ones, of course; there\n were places in the galaxy that were\n less important than Saarkkad to the\n war effort. Malloy knew that, no matter\n what was wrong with a man, as\n long as he had the mental ability to\n dress himself and get himself to\n work, useful work could be found for\n him.",
"\"Paranoid,\" said Malloy. \"He\n thinks everyone is plotting against\n him. In this case, that's all to the good\n because the Karna\nare\nplotting against\n him. No matter what they put forth,\n Braynek is convinced that there's a\n trap in it somewhere, and he digs to\n find out what the trap is. Even if\n there isn't a trap, the Karna can't\n satisfy Braynek, because he's convinced\n that there\nhas\nto be—somewhere.\n As a result, all his advice to\n Nordon, and all his questioning on\n the wildest possibilities, just serves\n to keep Nordon from getting unconfused.",
"Already, they had taken the offensive\n in the matter of the peace talks.\n They had sent a full delegation to\n Saarkkad V, the next planet out from\n the Saarkkad sun, a chilly world inhabited\n only by low-intelligence animals.\n The Karna considered this to be\n fully neutral territory, and Earth\n couldn't argue the point very well. In\n addition, they demanded that the conference\n begin in three days, Terrestrial\n time.\n\n\n The trouble was that interstellar\n communication beams travel a devil\n of a lot faster than ships. It would\n take more than a week for the Earth\n government to get a vessel to Saarkkad\n V. Earth had been caught unprepared\n for an armistice. They\n objected."
],
[
"\"Yes, sir,\" said Miss Drayson in a\n hushed voice.\n\n\n Malloy read the whole thing\n through, fighting to keep his emotions\n in check. Miss Drayson stood\n there calmly, her face a mask; her\n emotions were a secret.\n\n\n Finally, Malloy looked up. \"I'll let\n you know as soon as I reach a decision,\n Miss Drayson. I think I hardly\n need say that no news of this is to\n leave this office.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy watched her go out the door\n without actually seeing her. The war\n was over—at least for a while. He\n looked down at the papers again.\n\n\n The Karna, slowly being beaten\n back on every front, were suing for\n peace. They wanted an armistice conference—immediately.",
"\"Mr. Malloy?\" said a careful voice.\n \"A special communication for you has\n been teletyped in from Earth. Shall I\n bring it in?\"\n\n\n \"Bring it in, Miss Drayson.\"\n\n\n Miss Drayson was a case in point.\n She was uncommunicative. She liked\n to gather in information, but she\n found it difficult to give it up once it\n was in her possession.\n\n\n Malloy had made her his private\n secretary. Nothing—but\nnothing\n—got\n out of Malloy's office without his\n direct order. It had taken Malloy a\n long time to get it into Miss Drayson's\n head that it was perfectly all\n right—even desirable—for her to\n keep secrets from everyone except\n Malloy.",
"She came in through the door,\n a rather handsome woman in her middle\n thirties, clutching a sheaf of\n papers in her right hand as though\n someone might at any instant snatch\n it from her before she could turn it\n over to Malloy.\n\n\n She laid them carefully on the\n desk. \"If anything else comes in, I'll\n let you know immediately, sir,\" she\n said. \"Will there be anything else?\"\n\n\n Malloy let her stand there while he\n picked up the communique. She wanted\n to know what his reaction was\n going to be; it didn't matter because\n no one would ever find out from her\n what he had done unless she was\n ordered to tell someone.\n\n\n He read the first paragraph, and his\n eyes widened involuntarily.\n\n\n \"Armistice,\" he said in a low\n whisper. \"There's a chance that the\n war may be over.\"",
"He looked up at the ceiling again.\n \"What\ncan\nI do?\" he said softly.\nOn the second day after the arrival\n of the communique, Malloy\n made his decision. He flipped on his\n intercom and said: \"Miss Drayson,\n get hold of James Nordon and Kylen\n Braynek. I want to see them both immediately.\n Send Nordon in first, and\n tell Braynek to wait.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And keep the recorder on. You\n can file the tape later.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy knew the woman would\n listen in on the intercom anyway, and\n it was better to give her permission to\n do so.\n\n\n James Nordon was tall, broad-shouldered,\n and thirty-eight. His hair\n was graying at the temples, and his\n handsome face looked cool and efficient.\n\n\n Malloy waved him to a seat.",
"Malloy sighed and pushed the dossiers\n away from him. No two men\n were alike, and yet there sometimes\n seemed to be an eternal sameness\n about all men. He considered himself\n an individual, for instance, but wasn't\n the basic similarity there, after all?\n\n\n He was—how old? He glanced at\n the Earth calendar dial that was automatically\n correlated with the Saarkkadic\n calendar just above it. Fifty-nine\n next week. Fifty-nine years old. And\n what did he have to show for it besides\n flabby muscles, sagging skin, a\n wrinkled face, and gray hair?\n\n\n Well, he had an excellent record in\n the Corps, if nothing else. One of the\n top men in his field. And he had his\n memories of Diane, dead these ten\n years, but still beautiful and alive in\n his recollections. And—he grinned\n softly to himself—he had Saarkkad.",
"Malloy nodded. \"I think so. The\n Karna put us in a dilemma, so I\n threw a dilemma right back at them.\"\n\n\n \"How do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Nordon had a mental block\n against making decisions. If he took\n a girl out on a date, he'd have trouble\n making up his mind whether to kiss\n her or not until she made up his mind\n for him, one way or the other. He's\n that kind of guy. Until he's presented\n with one, single, clear decision which\n admits of no alternatives, he can't\n move at all.",
"\"Right. Now, you go into the anteroom\n over there. I've prepared a summary\n of the situation, and you'll have\n to study it and get it into your head\n before the ship leaves. That isn't\n much time, but it's the Karna who are\n doing the pushing, not us.\"\n\n\n As soon as Nordon had left, Malloy\n said softly: \"Send in Braynek,\n Miss Drayson.\"\n\n\n Kylen Braynek was a smallish man\n with mouse-brown hair that lay flat\n against his skull, and hard, penetrating,\n dark eyes that were shadowed by\n heavy, protruding brows. Malloy asked\n him to sit down.\n\n\n Again Malloy went through the explanation\n of the peace conference.",
"Malloy handed them to the secretary,\n and as he read, Malloy watched\n him. Blendwell was a political appointee—a\n good man, Malloy had to\n admit, but he didn't know all the\n ins and outs of the Diplomatic Corps.\n\n\n When Blendwell looked up from\n the reports at last, he said: \"Amazing!\n They've held off the Karna at\n every point! They've beaten them\n back! They've managed to cope with\n and outdo the finest team of negotiators\n the Karna could send.\"\n\n\n \"I thought they would,\" said Malloy,\n trying to appear modest.\n\n\n The secretary's eyes narrowed.\n \"I've heard of the work you've been\n doing here with ... ah ... sick men.\n Is this one of your ... ah ... successes?\"",
"Take this first one, for instance.\n Malloy ran his finger down the columns\n of complex symbolism that\n showed the complete psychological\n analysis of the man. Psychopathic\n paranoia. The man wasn't technically\n insane; he could be as lucid as the next\n man most of the time. But he was\n morbidly suspicious that every man's\n hand was turned against him. He\n trusted no one, and was perpetually\n on his guard against imaginary plots\n and persecutions.\n\n\n Number two suffered from some\n sort of emotional block that left him\n continually on the horns of one dilemma\n or another. He was psychologically\n incapable of making a decision\n if he were faced with two or more\n possible alternatives of any major\n importance.\n\n\n Number three ...",
"And, Malloy knew, his own position\n was not unimportant in that war.\n He was not in the battle line, nor\n even in the major production line, but\n it was necessary to keep the drug supply\n lines flowing from Saarkkad, and\n that meant keeping on good terms\n with the Saarkkadic government.\n\n\n The Saarkkada themselves were humanoid\n in physical form—if one allowed\n the term to cover a wide range\n of differences—but their minds just\n didn't function along the same lines.\n\n\n For nine years, Bertrand Malloy\n had been Ambassador to Saarkkad,\n and for nine years, no Saarkkada had\n ever seen him. To have shown himself\n to one of them would have\n meant instant loss of prestige.",
"He glanced up at the ceiling, and\n mentally allowed his gaze to penetrate\n it to the blue sky beyond it.\n\n\n Out there was the terrible emptiness\n of interstellar space—a great, yawning,\n infinite chasm capable of swallowing\n men, ships, planets, suns, and\n whole galaxies without filling its insatiable\n void.\n\n\n Malloy closed his eyes. Somewhere\n out there, a war was raging. He\n didn't even like to think of that, but\n it was necessary to keep it in mind.\n Somewhere out there, the ships of\n Earth were ranged against the ships\n of the alien Karna in the most important\n war that Mankind had yet\n fought.",
"\"No,\" said Malloy, \"I'm sending\n an assistant with you—a man named\n Kylen Braynek. Ever heard of him?\"\n\n\n Nordon shook his head. \"Not that\n I recall, Mr. Malloy. Should I have?\"\n\n\n \"Not necessarily. He's a pretty\n shrewd operator, though. He knows a\n lot about interstellar law, and he's\n capable of spotting a trap a mile away.\n You'll be in charge, of course, but I\n want you to pay special attention to\n his advice.\"\n\n\n \"I will, sir,\" Nordon said gratefully.\n \"A man like that can be useful.\"",
"The Secretary of State raised an\n eyebrow. \"\nCouldn't\ngo, Mr. Ambassador?\"\n\n\n Malloy looked at him. \"Didn't you\n know? I wondered why you appointed\n me, in the first place. No, I\n couldn't go. The reason why I'm here,\n cooped up in this office, hiding from\n the Saarkkada the way a good Saarkkadic\n bigshot should, is because I\nlike\nit that way. I suffer from agoraphobia\n and xenophobia.",
"\"Paranoid,\" said Malloy. \"He\n thinks everyone is plotting against\n him. In this case, that's all to the good\n because the Karna\nare\nplotting against\n him. No matter what they put forth,\n Braynek is convinced that there's a\n trap in it somewhere, and he digs to\n find out what the trap is. Even if\n there isn't a trap, the Karna can't\n satisfy Braynek, because he's convinced\n that there\nhas\nto be—somewhere.\n As a result, all his advice to\n Nordon, and all his questioning on\n the wildest possibilities, just serves\n to keep Nordon from getting unconfused.",
"\"Naturally, they'll be trying to\n trick you every step of the way,\" Malloy\n went on. \"They're shrewd and\n underhanded; we'll simply have to\n be more shrewd and more underhanded.\n Nordon's job is to sit\n quietly and evaluate the data; yours\n will be to find the loopholes they're\n laying out for themselves and plug\n them. Don't antagonize them, but\n don't baby them, either. If you see\n anything underhanded going on, let\n Nordon know immediately.\"\n\n\n \"They won't get anything by me,\n Mr. Malloy.\"\nBy the time the ship from Earth\n got there, the peace conference had\n been going on for four days. Bertrand\n Malloy had full reports on the whole\n parley, as relayed to him through the\n ship that had taken Nordon and Braynek\n to Saarkkad V.",
"Secretary of State Blendwell stopped\n off at Saarkkad IV before going\n on to V to take charge of the conference.\n He was a tallish, lean man with\n a few strands of gray hair on the top\n of his otherwise bald scalp, and he\n wore a hearty, professional smile that\n didn't quite make it to his calculating\n eyes.\n\n\n He took Malloy's hand and shook\n it warmly. \"How are you, Mr. Ambassador?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, Mr. Secretary. How's everything\n on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Tense. They're waiting to see\n what is going to happen on Five. So\n am I, for that matter.\" His eyes were\n curious. \"You decided not to go\n yourself, eh?\"\n\n\n \"I thought it better not to. I sent a\n good team, instead. Would you like\n to see the reports?\"\n\n\n \"I certainly would.\"",
"To their way of thinking, an important\n official was aloof. The greater\n his importance, the greater must be\n his isolation. The Occeq of Saarkkad\n himself was never seen except by a\n handful of picked nobles, who, themselves,\n were never seen except by their\n underlings. It was a long, roundabout\n way of doing business, but it was the\n only way Saarkkad would do any\n business at all. To violate the rigid\n social setup of Saarkkad would mean\n the instant closing off of the supply\n of biochemical products that the\n Saarkkadic laboratories produced\n from native plants and animals—products\n that were vitally necessary\n to Earth's war, and which could be\n duplicated nowhere else in the\n known universe.\n\n\n It was Bertrand Malloy's job to\n keep the production output high and\n to keep the materiel flowing towards\n Earth and her allies and outposts.",
"Physical handicaps weren't at all\n difficult to deal with. A blind man can\n work very well in the total darkness\n of an infrared-film darkroom. Partial\n or total losses of limbs can be compensated\n for in one way or another.\n\n\n The mental disabilities were harder\n to deal with, but not totally impossible.\n On a world without liquor, a\n dipsomaniac could be channeled easily\n enough; and he'd better not try fermenting\n his own on Saarkkad unless\n he brought his own yeast—which\n was impossible, in view of the sterilization\n regulations.\n\n\n But Malloy didn't like to stop at\n merely thwarting mental quirks; he\n liked to find places where they were\nuseful\n.\nThe phone chimed. Malloy flipped\n it on with a practiced hand.\n\n\n \"Malloy here.\"",
"The job would have been a snap\n cinch in the right circumstances; the\n Saarkkada weren't difficult to get\n along with. A staff of top-grade men\n could have handled them without\n half trying.\n\n\n But Malloy didn't have top-grade\n men. They couldn't be spared from\n work that required their total capacity.\n It's inefficient to waste a man on a\n job that he can do without half trying\n where there are more important jobs\n that will tax his full output.\n\n\n So Malloy was stuck with the culls.\n Not the worst ones, of course; there\n were places in the galaxy that were\n less important than Saarkkad to the\n war effort. Malloy knew that, no matter\n what was wrong with a man, as\n long as he had the mental ability to\n dress himself and get himself to\n work, useful work could be found for\n him.",
"\"These two men are honestly doing\n their best to win at the peace conference,\n and they've got the Karna reeling.\n The Karna can see that we're not\n trying to stall; our men are actually\n working at trying to reach a decision.\n But what the Karna don't see is that\n those men, as a team, are unbeatable\n because, in this situation, they're psychologically\n incapable of losing.\"\n\n\n Again the Secretary of State nodded\n his approval, but there was still\n a question in his mind. \"Since you\n know all that, couldn't you have handled\n it yourself?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe, but I doubt it. They might\n have gotten around me someway by\n sneaking up on a blind spot. Nordon\n and Braynek have blind spots, but\n they're covered with armor. No, I'm\n glad I couldn't go; it's better this\n way.\""
],
[
"The Karna pointed out that the\n Saarkkad sun was just as far from\n Karn as it was from Earth, that it\n was only a few million miles from a\n planet which was allied with Earth,\n and that it was unfair for Earth to\n take so much time in preparing for an\n armistice. Why hadn't Earth been prepared?\n Did they intend to fight to the\n utter destruction of Karn?\n\n\n It wouldn't have been a problem at\n all if Earth and Karn had fostered the\n only two intelligent races in the galaxy.\n The sort of grandstanding the\n Karna were putting on had to be\n played to an audience. But there were\n other intelligent races throughout the\n galaxy, most of whom had remained\n as neutral as possible during the\n Earth-Karn war. They had no intention\n of sticking their figurative noses\n into a battle between the two most\n powerful races in the galaxy.",
"Earth was willing. Interstellar war\n is too costly to allow it to continue\n any longer than necessary, and this\n one had been going on for more than\n thirteen years now. Peace was necessary.\n But not peace at any price.\n\n\n The trouble was that the Karna had\n a reputation for losing wars and winning\n at the peace table. They were\n clever, persuasive talkers. They could\n twist a disadvantage to an advantage,\n and make their own strengths look\n like weaknesses. If they won the armistice,\n they'd be able to retrench and\n rearm, and the war would break out\n again within a few years.\n\n\n Now—at this point in time—they\n could be beaten. They could be forced\n to allow supervision of the production\n potential, forced to disarm, rendered\n impotent. But if the armistice went to\n their own advantage ...",
"\"These two men are honestly doing\n their best to win at the peace conference,\n and they've got the Karna reeling.\n The Karna can see that we're not\n trying to stall; our men are actually\n working at trying to reach a decision.\n But what the Karna don't see is that\n those men, as a team, are unbeatable\n because, in this situation, they're psychologically\n incapable of losing.\"\n\n\n Again the Secretary of State nodded\n his approval, but there was still\n a question in his mind. \"Since you\n know all that, couldn't you have handled\n it yourself?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe, but I doubt it. They might\n have gotten around me someway by\n sneaking up on a blind spot. Nordon\n and Braynek have blind spots, but\n they're covered with armor. No, I'm\n glad I couldn't go; it's better this\n way.\"",
"\"Paranoid,\" said Malloy. \"He\n thinks everyone is plotting against\n him. In this case, that's all to the good\n because the Karna\nare\nplotting against\n him. No matter what they put forth,\n Braynek is convinced that there's a\n trap in it somewhere, and he digs to\n find out what the trap is. Even if\n there isn't a trap, the Karna can't\n satisfy Braynek, because he's convinced\n that there\nhas\nto be—somewhere.\n As a result, all his advice to\n Nordon, and all his questioning on\n the wildest possibilities, just serves\n to keep Nordon from getting unconfused.",
"Malloy nodded. \"I think so. The\n Karna put us in a dilemma, so I\n threw a dilemma right back at them.\"\n\n\n \"How do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Nordon had a mental block\n against making decisions. If he took\n a girl out on a date, he'd have trouble\n making up his mind whether to kiss\n her or not until she made up his mind\n for him, one way or the other. He's\n that kind of guy. Until he's presented\n with one, single, clear decision which\n admits of no alternatives, he can't\n move at all.",
"But whoever won the armistice\n would find that some of the now-neutral\n races would come in on their\n side if war broke out again. If the\n Karna played their cards right, their\n side would be strong enough next\n time to win.\n\n\n So Earth had to get a delegation to\n meet with the Karna representatives\n within the three-day limit or lose what\n might be a vital point in the negotiations.\n\n\n And that was where Bertrand Malloy\n came in.\n\n\n He had been appointed Minister\n and Plenipotentiary Extraordinary to\n the Earth-Karn peace conference.",
"Already, they had taken the offensive\n in the matter of the peace talks.\n They had sent a full delegation to\n Saarkkad V, the next planet out from\n the Saarkkad sun, a chilly world inhabited\n only by low-intelligence animals.\n The Karna considered this to be\n fully neutral territory, and Earth\n couldn't argue the point very well. In\n addition, they demanded that the conference\n begin in three days, Terrestrial\n time.\n\n\n The trouble was that interstellar\n communication beams travel a devil\n of a lot faster than ships. It would\n take more than a week for the Earth\n government to get a vessel to Saarkkad\n V. Earth had been caught unprepared\n for an armistice. They\n objected.",
"\"Right. Now, you go into the anteroom\n over there. I've prepared a summary\n of the situation, and you'll have\n to study it and get it into your head\n before the ship leaves. That isn't\n much time, but it's the Karna who are\n doing the pushing, not us.\"\n\n\n As soon as Nordon had left, Malloy\n said softly: \"Send in Braynek,\n Miss Drayson.\"\n\n\n Kylen Braynek was a smallish man\n with mouse-brown hair that lay flat\n against his skull, and hard, penetrating,\n dark eyes that were shadowed by\n heavy, protruding brows. Malloy asked\n him to sit down.\n\n\n Again Malloy went through the explanation\n of the peace conference.",
"\"Yes, sir,\" said Miss Drayson in a\n hushed voice.\n\n\n Malloy read the whole thing\n through, fighting to keep his emotions\n in check. Miss Drayson stood\n there calmly, her face a mask; her\n emotions were a secret.\n\n\n Finally, Malloy looked up. \"I'll let\n you know as soon as I reach a decision,\n Miss Drayson. I think I hardly\n need say that no news of this is to\n leave this office.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy watched her go out the door\n without actually seeing her. The war\n was over—at least for a while. He\n looked down at the papers again.\n\n\n The Karna, slowly being beaten\n back on every front, were suing for\n peace. They wanted an armistice conference—immediately.",
"Malloy handed them to the secretary,\n and as he read, Malloy watched\n him. Blendwell was a political appointee—a\n good man, Malloy had to\n admit, but he didn't know all the\n ins and outs of the Diplomatic Corps.\n\n\n When Blendwell looked up from\n the reports at last, he said: \"Amazing!\n They've held off the Karna at\n every point! They've beaten them\n back! They've managed to cope with\n and outdo the finest team of negotiators\n the Karna could send.\"\n\n\n \"I thought they would,\" said Malloy,\n trying to appear modest.\n\n\n The secretary's eyes narrowed.\n \"I've heard of the work you've been\n doing here with ... ah ... sick men.\n Is this one of your ... ah ... successes?\"",
"\"As you can see, the Karna tried\n to give us several choices on each\n point, and they were all rigged. Until\n they backed down to a single point\n and proved that it\nwasn't\nrigged,\n Nordon couldn't possibly make up his\n mind. I drummed into him how important\n this was, and the more importance\n there is attached to his decisions,\n the more incapable he becomes\n of making them.\"\n\n\n The Secretary nodded slowly.\n \"What about Braynek?\"",
"He glanced up at the ceiling, and\n mentally allowed his gaze to penetrate\n it to the blue sky beyond it.\n\n\n Out there was the terrible emptiness\n of interstellar space—a great, yawning,\n infinite chasm capable of swallowing\n men, ships, planets, suns, and\n whole galaxies without filling its insatiable\n void.\n\n\n Malloy closed his eyes. Somewhere\n out there, a war was raging. He\n didn't even like to think of that, but\n it was necessary to keep it in mind.\n Somewhere out there, the ships of\n Earth were ranged against the ships\n of the alien Karna in the most important\n war that Mankind had yet\n fought.",
"\"Nordon, I have a job for you. It's\n probably one of the most important\n jobs you'll ever have in your life. It\n can mean big things for you—promotion\n and prestige if you do it well.\"\n\n\n Nordon nodded slowly. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy explained the problem of\n the Karna peace talks.\n\n\n \"We need a man who can outthink\n them,\" Malloy finished, \"and judging\n from your record, I think you're that\n man. It involves risk, of course. If\n you make the wrong decisions, your\n name will be mud back on Earth. But\n I don't think there's much chance of\n that, really. Do you want to handle\n small-time operations all your life?\n Of course not.\n\n\n \"You'll be leaving within an hour\n for Saarkkad V.\"\n\n\n Nordon nodded again. \"Yes, sir;\n certainly. Am I to go alone?\"",
"The job would have been a snap\n cinch in the right circumstances; the\n Saarkkada weren't difficult to get\n along with. A staff of top-grade men\n could have handled them without\n half trying.\n\n\n But Malloy didn't have top-grade\n men. They couldn't be spared from\n work that required their total capacity.\n It's inefficient to waste a man on a\n job that he can do without half trying\n where there are more important jobs\n that will tax his full output.\n\n\n So Malloy was stuck with the culls.\n Not the worst ones, of course; there\n were places in the galaxy that were\n less important than Saarkkad to the\n war effort. Malloy knew that, no matter\n what was wrong with a man, as\n long as he had the mental ability to\n dress himself and get himself to\n work, useful work could be found for\n him.",
"And, Malloy knew, his own position\n was not unimportant in that war.\n He was not in the battle line, nor\n even in the major production line, but\n it was necessary to keep the drug supply\n lines flowing from Saarkkad, and\n that meant keeping on good terms\n with the Saarkkadic government.\n\n\n The Saarkkada themselves were humanoid\n in physical form—if one allowed\n the term to cover a wide range\n of differences—but their minds just\n didn't function along the same lines.\n\n\n For nine years, Bertrand Malloy\n had been Ambassador to Saarkkad,\n and for nine years, no Saarkkada had\n ever seen him. To have shown himself\n to one of them would have\n meant instant loss of prestige.",
"\"No,\" said Malloy, \"I'm sending\n an assistant with you—a man named\n Kylen Braynek. Ever heard of him?\"\n\n\n Nordon shook his head. \"Not that\n I recall, Mr. Malloy. Should I have?\"\n\n\n \"Not necessarily. He's a pretty\n shrewd operator, though. He knows a\n lot about interstellar law, and he's\n capable of spotting a trap a mile away.\n You'll be in charge, of course, but I\n want you to pay special attention to\n his advice.\"\n\n\n \"I will, sir,\" Nordon said gratefully.\n \"A man like that can be useful.\"",
"Take this first one, for instance.\n Malloy ran his finger down the columns\n of complex symbolism that\n showed the complete psychological\n analysis of the man. Psychopathic\n paranoia. The man wasn't technically\n insane; he could be as lucid as the next\n man most of the time. But he was\n morbidly suspicious that every man's\n hand was turned against him. He\n trusted no one, and was perpetually\n on his guard against imaginary plots\n and persecutions.\n\n\n Number two suffered from some\n sort of emotional block that left him\n continually on the horns of one dilemma\n or another. He was psychologically\n incapable of making a decision\n if he were faced with two or more\n possible alternatives of any major\n importance.\n\n\n Number three ...",
"To their way of thinking, an important\n official was aloof. The greater\n his importance, the greater must be\n his isolation. The Occeq of Saarkkad\n himself was never seen except by a\n handful of picked nobles, who, themselves,\n were never seen except by their\n underlings. It was a long, roundabout\n way of doing business, but it was the\n only way Saarkkad would do any\n business at all. To violate the rigid\n social setup of Saarkkad would mean\n the instant closing off of the supply\n of biochemical products that the\n Saarkkadic laboratories produced\n from native plants and animals—products\n that were vitally necessary\n to Earth's war, and which could be\n duplicated nowhere else in the\n known universe.\n\n\n It was Bertrand Malloy's job to\n keep the production output high and\n to keep the materiel flowing towards\n Earth and her allies and outposts.",
"Malloy sighed and pushed the dossiers\n away from him. No two men\n were alike, and yet there sometimes\n seemed to be an eternal sameness\n about all men. He considered himself\n an individual, for instance, but wasn't\n the basic similarity there, after all?\n\n\n He was—how old? He glanced at\n the Earth calendar dial that was automatically\n correlated with the Saarkkadic\n calendar just above it. Fifty-nine\n next week. Fifty-nine years old. And\n what did he have to show for it besides\n flabby muscles, sagging skin, a\n wrinkled face, and gray hair?\n\n\n Well, he had an excellent record in\n the Corps, if nothing else. One of the\n top men in his field. And he had his\n memories of Diane, dead these ten\n years, but still beautiful and alive in\n his recollections. And—he grinned\n softly to himself—he had Saarkkad.",
"\"Naturally, they'll be trying to\n trick you every step of the way,\" Malloy\n went on. \"They're shrewd and\n underhanded; we'll simply have to\n be more shrewd and more underhanded.\n Nordon's job is to sit\n quietly and evaluate the data; yours\n will be to find the loopholes they're\n laying out for themselves and plug\n them. Don't antagonize them, but\n don't baby them, either. If you see\n anything underhanded going on, let\n Nordon know immediately.\"\n\n\n \"They won't get anything by me,\n Mr. Malloy.\"\nBy the time the ship from Earth\n got there, the peace conference had\n been going on for four days. Bertrand\n Malloy had full reports on the whole\n parley, as relayed to him through the\n ship that had taken Nordon and Braynek\n to Saarkkad V."
],
[
"Earth was willing. Interstellar war\n is too costly to allow it to continue\n any longer than necessary, and this\n one had been going on for more than\n thirteen years now. Peace was necessary.\n But not peace at any price.\n\n\n The trouble was that the Karna had\n a reputation for losing wars and winning\n at the peace table. They were\n clever, persuasive talkers. They could\n twist a disadvantage to an advantage,\n and make their own strengths look\n like weaknesses. If they won the armistice,\n they'd be able to retrench and\n rearm, and the war would break out\n again within a few years.\n\n\n Now—at this point in time—they\n could be beaten. They could be forced\n to allow supervision of the production\n potential, forced to disarm, rendered\n impotent. But if the armistice went to\n their own advantage ...",
"The Karna pointed out that the\n Saarkkad sun was just as far from\n Karn as it was from Earth, that it\n was only a few million miles from a\n planet which was allied with Earth,\n and that it was unfair for Earth to\n take so much time in preparing for an\n armistice. Why hadn't Earth been prepared?\n Did they intend to fight to the\n utter destruction of Karn?\n\n\n It wouldn't have been a problem at\n all if Earth and Karn had fostered the\n only two intelligent races in the galaxy.\n The sort of grandstanding the\n Karna were putting on had to be\n played to an audience. But there were\n other intelligent races throughout the\n galaxy, most of whom had remained\n as neutral as possible during the\n Earth-Karn war. They had no intention\n of sticking their figurative noses\n into a battle between the two most\n powerful races in the galaxy.",
"But whoever won the armistice\n would find that some of the now-neutral\n races would come in on their\n side if war broke out again. If the\n Karna played their cards right, their\n side would be strong enough next\n time to win.\n\n\n So Earth had to get a delegation to\n meet with the Karna representatives\n within the three-day limit or lose what\n might be a vital point in the negotiations.\n\n\n And that was where Bertrand Malloy\n came in.\n\n\n He had been appointed Minister\n and Plenipotentiary Extraordinary to\n the Earth-Karn peace conference.",
"Already, they had taken the offensive\n in the matter of the peace talks.\n They had sent a full delegation to\n Saarkkad V, the next planet out from\n the Saarkkad sun, a chilly world inhabited\n only by low-intelligence animals.\n The Karna considered this to be\n fully neutral territory, and Earth\n couldn't argue the point very well. In\n addition, they demanded that the conference\n begin in three days, Terrestrial\n time.\n\n\n The trouble was that interstellar\n communication beams travel a devil\n of a lot faster than ships. It would\n take more than a week for the Earth\n government to get a vessel to Saarkkad\n V. Earth had been caught unprepared\n for an armistice. They\n objected.",
"\"Right. Now, you go into the anteroom\n over there. I've prepared a summary\n of the situation, and you'll have\n to study it and get it into your head\n before the ship leaves. That isn't\n much time, but it's the Karna who are\n doing the pushing, not us.\"\n\n\n As soon as Nordon had left, Malloy\n said softly: \"Send in Braynek,\n Miss Drayson.\"\n\n\n Kylen Braynek was a smallish man\n with mouse-brown hair that lay flat\n against his skull, and hard, penetrating,\n dark eyes that were shadowed by\n heavy, protruding brows. Malloy asked\n him to sit down.\n\n\n Again Malloy went through the explanation\n of the peace conference.",
"\"Nordon, I have a job for you. It's\n probably one of the most important\n jobs you'll ever have in your life. It\n can mean big things for you—promotion\n and prestige if you do it well.\"\n\n\n Nordon nodded slowly. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy explained the problem of\n the Karna peace talks.\n\n\n \"We need a man who can outthink\n them,\" Malloy finished, \"and judging\n from your record, I think you're that\n man. It involves risk, of course. If\n you make the wrong decisions, your\n name will be mud back on Earth. But\n I don't think there's much chance of\n that, really. Do you want to handle\n small-time operations all your life?\n Of course not.\n\n\n \"You'll be leaving within an hour\n for Saarkkad V.\"\n\n\n Nordon nodded again. \"Yes, sir;\n certainly. Am I to go alone?\"",
"\"Yes, sir,\" said Miss Drayson in a\n hushed voice.\n\n\n Malloy read the whole thing\n through, fighting to keep his emotions\n in check. Miss Drayson stood\n there calmly, her face a mask; her\n emotions were a secret.\n\n\n Finally, Malloy looked up. \"I'll let\n you know as soon as I reach a decision,\n Miss Drayson. I think I hardly\n need say that no news of this is to\n leave this office.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy watched her go out the door\n without actually seeing her. The war\n was over—at least for a while. He\n looked down at the papers again.\n\n\n The Karna, slowly being beaten\n back on every front, were suing for\n peace. They wanted an armistice conference—immediately.",
"\"These two men are honestly doing\n their best to win at the peace conference,\n and they've got the Karna reeling.\n The Karna can see that we're not\n trying to stall; our men are actually\n working at trying to reach a decision.\n But what the Karna don't see is that\n those men, as a team, are unbeatable\n because, in this situation, they're psychologically\n incapable of losing.\"\n\n\n Again the Secretary of State nodded\n his approval, but there was still\n a question in his mind. \"Since you\n know all that, couldn't you have handled\n it yourself?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe, but I doubt it. They might\n have gotten around me someway by\n sneaking up on a blind spot. Nordon\n and Braynek have blind spots, but\n they're covered with armor. No, I'm\n glad I couldn't go; it's better this\n way.\"",
"\"Naturally, they'll be trying to\n trick you every step of the way,\" Malloy\n went on. \"They're shrewd and\n underhanded; we'll simply have to\n be more shrewd and more underhanded.\n Nordon's job is to sit\n quietly and evaluate the data; yours\n will be to find the loopholes they're\n laying out for themselves and plug\n them. Don't antagonize them, but\n don't baby them, either. If you see\n anything underhanded going on, let\n Nordon know immediately.\"\n\n\n \"They won't get anything by me,\n Mr. Malloy.\"\nBy the time the ship from Earth\n got there, the peace conference had\n been going on for four days. Bertrand\n Malloy had full reports on the whole\n parley, as relayed to him through the\n ship that had taken Nordon and Braynek\n to Saarkkad V.",
"He glanced up at the ceiling, and\n mentally allowed his gaze to penetrate\n it to the blue sky beyond it.\n\n\n Out there was the terrible emptiness\n of interstellar space—a great, yawning,\n infinite chasm capable of swallowing\n men, ships, planets, suns, and\n whole galaxies without filling its insatiable\n void.\n\n\n Malloy closed his eyes. Somewhere\n out there, a war was raging. He\n didn't even like to think of that, but\n it was necessary to keep it in mind.\n Somewhere out there, the ships of\n Earth were ranged against the ships\n of the alien Karna in the most important\n war that Mankind had yet\n fought.",
"\"Paranoid,\" said Malloy. \"He\n thinks everyone is plotting against\n him. In this case, that's all to the good\n because the Karna\nare\nplotting against\n him. No matter what they put forth,\n Braynek is convinced that there's a\n trap in it somewhere, and he digs to\n find out what the trap is. Even if\n there isn't a trap, the Karna can't\n satisfy Braynek, because he's convinced\n that there\nhas\nto be—somewhere.\n As a result, all his advice to\n Nordon, and all his questioning on\n the wildest possibilities, just serves\n to keep Nordon from getting unconfused.",
"Malloy handed them to the secretary,\n and as he read, Malloy watched\n him. Blendwell was a political appointee—a\n good man, Malloy had to\n admit, but he didn't know all the\n ins and outs of the Diplomatic Corps.\n\n\n When Blendwell looked up from\n the reports at last, he said: \"Amazing!\n They've held off the Karna at\n every point! They've beaten them\n back! They've managed to cope with\n and outdo the finest team of negotiators\n the Karna could send.\"\n\n\n \"I thought they would,\" said Malloy,\n trying to appear modest.\n\n\n The secretary's eyes narrowed.\n \"I've heard of the work you've been\n doing here with ... ah ... sick men.\n Is this one of your ... ah ... successes?\"",
"Malloy nodded. \"I think so. The\n Karna put us in a dilemma, so I\n threw a dilemma right back at them.\"\n\n\n \"How do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Nordon had a mental block\n against making decisions. If he took\n a girl out on a date, he'd have trouble\n making up his mind whether to kiss\n her or not until she made up his mind\n for him, one way or the other. He's\n that kind of guy. Until he's presented\n with one, single, clear decision which\n admits of no alternatives, he can't\n move at all.",
"\"Mr. Malloy?\" said a careful voice.\n \"A special communication for you has\n been teletyped in from Earth. Shall I\n bring it in?\"\n\n\n \"Bring it in, Miss Drayson.\"\n\n\n Miss Drayson was a case in point.\n She was uncommunicative. She liked\n to gather in information, but she\n found it difficult to give it up once it\n was in her possession.\n\n\n Malloy had made her his private\n secretary. Nothing—but\nnothing\n—got\n out of Malloy's office without his\n direct order. It had taken Malloy a\n long time to get it into Miss Drayson's\n head that it was perfectly all\n right—even desirable—for her to\n keep secrets from everyone except\n Malloy.",
"Secretary of State Blendwell stopped\n off at Saarkkad IV before going\n on to V to take charge of the conference.\n He was a tallish, lean man with\n a few strands of gray hair on the top\n of his otherwise bald scalp, and he\n wore a hearty, professional smile that\n didn't quite make it to his calculating\n eyes.\n\n\n He took Malloy's hand and shook\n it warmly. \"How are you, Mr. Ambassador?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, Mr. Secretary. How's everything\n on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Tense. They're waiting to see\n what is going to happen on Five. So\n am I, for that matter.\" His eyes were\n curious. \"You decided not to go\n yourself, eh?\"\n\n\n \"I thought it better not to. I sent a\n good team, instead. Would you like\n to see the reports?\"\n\n\n \"I certainly would.\"",
"\"As you can see, the Karna tried\n to give us several choices on each\n point, and they were all rigged. Until\n they backed down to a single point\n and proved that it\nwasn't\nrigged,\n Nordon couldn't possibly make up his\n mind. I drummed into him how important\n this was, and the more importance\n there is attached to his decisions,\n the more incapable he becomes\n of making them.\"\n\n\n The Secretary nodded slowly.\n \"What about Braynek?\"",
"She came in through the door,\n a rather handsome woman in her middle\n thirties, clutching a sheaf of\n papers in her right hand as though\n someone might at any instant snatch\n it from her before she could turn it\n over to Malloy.\n\n\n She laid them carefully on the\n desk. \"If anything else comes in, I'll\n let you know immediately, sir,\" she\n said. \"Will there be anything else?\"\n\n\n Malloy let her stand there while he\n picked up the communique. She wanted\n to know what his reaction was\n going to be; it didn't matter because\n no one would ever find out from her\n what he had done unless she was\n ordered to tell someone.\n\n\n He read the first paragraph, and his\n eyes widened involuntarily.\n\n\n \"Armistice,\" he said in a low\n whisper. \"There's a chance that the\n war may be over.\"",
"And, Malloy knew, his own position\n was not unimportant in that war.\n He was not in the battle line, nor\n even in the major production line, but\n it was necessary to keep the drug supply\n lines flowing from Saarkkad, and\n that meant keeping on good terms\n with the Saarkkadic government.\n\n\n The Saarkkada themselves were humanoid\n in physical form—if one allowed\n the term to cover a wide range\n of differences—but their minds just\n didn't function along the same lines.\n\n\n For nine years, Bertrand Malloy\n had been Ambassador to Saarkkad,\n and for nine years, no Saarkkada had\n ever seen him. To have shown himself\n to one of them would have\n meant instant loss of prestige.",
"\"No,\" said Malloy, \"I'm sending\n an assistant with you—a man named\n Kylen Braynek. Ever heard of him?\"\n\n\n Nordon shook his head. \"Not that\n I recall, Mr. Malloy. Should I have?\"\n\n\n \"Not necessarily. He's a pretty\n shrewd operator, though. He knows a\n lot about interstellar law, and he's\n capable of spotting a trap a mile away.\n You'll be in charge, of course, but I\n want you to pay special attention to\n his advice.\"\n\n\n \"I will, sir,\" Nordon said gratefully.\n \"A man like that can be useful.\"",
"To their way of thinking, an important\n official was aloof. The greater\n his importance, the greater must be\n his isolation. The Occeq of Saarkkad\n himself was never seen except by a\n handful of picked nobles, who, themselves,\n were never seen except by their\n underlings. It was a long, roundabout\n way of doing business, but it was the\n only way Saarkkad would do any\n business at all. To violate the rigid\n social setup of Saarkkad would mean\n the instant closing off of the supply\n of biochemical products that the\n Saarkkadic laboratories produced\n from native plants and animals—products\n that were vitally necessary\n to Earth's war, and which could be\n duplicated nowhere else in the\n known universe.\n\n\n It was Bertrand Malloy's job to\n keep the production output high and\n to keep the materiel flowing towards\n Earth and her allies and outposts."
],
[
"Already, they had taken the offensive\n in the matter of the peace talks.\n They had sent a full delegation to\n Saarkkad V, the next planet out from\n the Saarkkad sun, a chilly world inhabited\n only by low-intelligence animals.\n The Karna considered this to be\n fully neutral territory, and Earth\n couldn't argue the point very well. In\n addition, they demanded that the conference\n begin in three days, Terrestrial\n time.\n\n\n The trouble was that interstellar\n communication beams travel a devil\n of a lot faster than ships. It would\n take more than a week for the Earth\n government to get a vessel to Saarkkad\n V. Earth had been caught unprepared\n for an armistice. They\n objected.",
"\"Nordon, I have a job for you. It's\n probably one of the most important\n jobs you'll ever have in your life. It\n can mean big things for you—promotion\n and prestige if you do it well.\"\n\n\n Nordon nodded slowly. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy explained the problem of\n the Karna peace talks.\n\n\n \"We need a man who can outthink\n them,\" Malloy finished, \"and judging\n from your record, I think you're that\n man. It involves risk, of course. If\n you make the wrong decisions, your\n name will be mud back on Earth. But\n I don't think there's much chance of\n that, really. Do you want to handle\n small-time operations all your life?\n Of course not.\n\n\n \"You'll be leaving within an hour\n for Saarkkad V.\"\n\n\n Nordon nodded again. \"Yes, sir;\n certainly. Am I to go alone?\"",
"\"Naturally, they'll be trying to\n trick you every step of the way,\" Malloy\n went on. \"They're shrewd and\n underhanded; we'll simply have to\n be more shrewd and more underhanded.\n Nordon's job is to sit\n quietly and evaluate the data; yours\n will be to find the loopholes they're\n laying out for themselves and plug\n them. Don't antagonize them, but\n don't baby them, either. If you see\n anything underhanded going on, let\n Nordon know immediately.\"\n\n\n \"They won't get anything by me,\n Mr. Malloy.\"\nBy the time the ship from Earth\n got there, the peace conference had\n been going on for four days. Bertrand\n Malloy had full reports on the whole\n parley, as relayed to him through the\n ship that had taken Nordon and Braynek\n to Saarkkad V.",
"The Karna pointed out that the\n Saarkkad sun was just as far from\n Karn as it was from Earth, that it\n was only a few million miles from a\n planet which was allied with Earth,\n and that it was unfair for Earth to\n take so much time in preparing for an\n armistice. Why hadn't Earth been prepared?\n Did they intend to fight to the\n utter destruction of Karn?\n\n\n It wouldn't have been a problem at\n all if Earth and Karn had fostered the\n only two intelligent races in the galaxy.\n The sort of grandstanding the\n Karna were putting on had to be\n played to an audience. But there were\n other intelligent races throughout the\n galaxy, most of whom had remained\n as neutral as possible during the\n Earth-Karn war. They had no intention\n of sticking their figurative noses\n into a battle between the two most\n powerful races in the galaxy.",
"To their way of thinking, an important\n official was aloof. The greater\n his importance, the greater must be\n his isolation. The Occeq of Saarkkad\n himself was never seen except by a\n handful of picked nobles, who, themselves,\n were never seen except by their\n underlings. It was a long, roundabout\n way of doing business, but it was the\n only way Saarkkad would do any\n business at all. To violate the rigid\n social setup of Saarkkad would mean\n the instant closing off of the supply\n of biochemical products that the\n Saarkkadic laboratories produced\n from native plants and animals—products\n that were vitally necessary\n to Earth's war, and which could be\n duplicated nowhere else in the\n known universe.\n\n\n It was Bertrand Malloy's job to\n keep the production output high and\n to keep the materiel flowing towards\n Earth and her allies and outposts.",
"Secretary of State Blendwell stopped\n off at Saarkkad IV before going\n on to V to take charge of the conference.\n He was a tallish, lean man with\n a few strands of gray hair on the top\n of his otherwise bald scalp, and he\n wore a hearty, professional smile that\n didn't quite make it to his calculating\n eyes.\n\n\n He took Malloy's hand and shook\n it warmly. \"How are you, Mr. Ambassador?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, Mr. Secretary. How's everything\n on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Tense. They're waiting to see\n what is going to happen on Five. So\n am I, for that matter.\" His eyes were\n curious. \"You decided not to go\n yourself, eh?\"\n\n\n \"I thought it better not to. I sent a\n good team, instead. Would you like\n to see the reports?\"\n\n\n \"I certainly would.\"",
"And, Malloy knew, his own position\n was not unimportant in that war.\n He was not in the battle line, nor\n even in the major production line, but\n it was necessary to keep the drug supply\n lines flowing from Saarkkad, and\n that meant keeping on good terms\n with the Saarkkadic government.\n\n\n The Saarkkada themselves were humanoid\n in physical form—if one allowed\n the term to cover a wide range\n of differences—but their minds just\n didn't function along the same lines.\n\n\n For nine years, Bertrand Malloy\n had been Ambassador to Saarkkad,\n and for nine years, no Saarkkada had\n ever seen him. To have shown himself\n to one of them would have\n meant instant loss of prestige.",
"Earth was willing. Interstellar war\n is too costly to allow it to continue\n any longer than necessary, and this\n one had been going on for more than\n thirteen years now. Peace was necessary.\n But not peace at any price.\n\n\n The trouble was that the Karna had\n a reputation for losing wars and winning\n at the peace table. They were\n clever, persuasive talkers. They could\n twist a disadvantage to an advantage,\n and make their own strengths look\n like weaknesses. If they won the armistice,\n they'd be able to retrench and\n rearm, and the war would break out\n again within a few years.\n\n\n Now—at this point in time—they\n could be beaten. They could be forced\n to allow supervision of the production\n potential, forced to disarm, rendered\n impotent. But if the armistice went to\n their own advantage ...",
"The job would have been a snap\n cinch in the right circumstances; the\n Saarkkada weren't difficult to get\n along with. A staff of top-grade men\n could have handled them without\n half trying.\n\n\n But Malloy didn't have top-grade\n men. They couldn't be spared from\n work that required their total capacity.\n It's inefficient to waste a man on a\n job that he can do without half trying\n where there are more important jobs\n that will tax his full output.\n\n\n So Malloy was stuck with the culls.\n Not the worst ones, of course; there\n were places in the galaxy that were\n less important than Saarkkad to the\n war effort. Malloy knew that, no matter\n what was wrong with a man, as\n long as he had the mental ability to\n dress himself and get himself to\n work, useful work could be found for\n him.",
"\"Right. Now, you go into the anteroom\n over there. I've prepared a summary\n of the situation, and you'll have\n to study it and get it into your head\n before the ship leaves. That isn't\n much time, but it's the Karna who are\n doing the pushing, not us.\"\n\n\n As soon as Nordon had left, Malloy\n said softly: \"Send in Braynek,\n Miss Drayson.\"\n\n\n Kylen Braynek was a smallish man\n with mouse-brown hair that lay flat\n against his skull, and hard, penetrating,\n dark eyes that were shadowed by\n heavy, protruding brows. Malloy asked\n him to sit down.\n\n\n Again Malloy went through the explanation\n of the peace conference.",
"But whoever won the armistice\n would find that some of the now-neutral\n races would come in on their\n side if war broke out again. If the\n Karna played their cards right, their\n side would be strong enough next\n time to win.\n\n\n So Earth had to get a delegation to\n meet with the Karna representatives\n within the three-day limit or lose what\n might be a vital point in the negotiations.\n\n\n And that was where Bertrand Malloy\n came in.\n\n\n He had been appointed Minister\n and Plenipotentiary Extraordinary to\n the Earth-Karn peace conference.",
"\"These two men are honestly doing\n their best to win at the peace conference,\n and they've got the Karna reeling.\n The Karna can see that we're not\n trying to stall; our men are actually\n working at trying to reach a decision.\n But what the Karna don't see is that\n those men, as a team, are unbeatable\n because, in this situation, they're psychologically\n incapable of losing.\"\n\n\n Again the Secretary of State nodded\n his approval, but there was still\n a question in his mind. \"Since you\n know all that, couldn't you have handled\n it yourself?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe, but I doubt it. They might\n have gotten around me someway by\n sneaking up on a blind spot. Nordon\n and Braynek have blind spots, but\n they're covered with armor. No, I'm\n glad I couldn't go; it's better this\n way.\"",
"The Secretary of State raised an\n eyebrow. \"\nCouldn't\ngo, Mr. Ambassador?\"\n\n\n Malloy looked at him. \"Didn't you\n know? I wondered why you appointed\n me, in the first place. No, I\n couldn't go. The reason why I'm here,\n cooped up in this office, hiding from\n the Saarkkada the way a good Saarkkadic\n bigshot should, is because I\nlike\nit that way. I suffer from agoraphobia\n and xenophobia.",
"Malloy sighed and pushed the dossiers\n away from him. No two men\n were alike, and yet there sometimes\n seemed to be an eternal sameness\n about all men. He considered himself\n an individual, for instance, but wasn't\n the basic similarity there, after all?\n\n\n He was—how old? He glanced at\n the Earth calendar dial that was automatically\n correlated with the Saarkkadic\n calendar just above it. Fifty-nine\n next week. Fifty-nine years old. And\n what did he have to show for it besides\n flabby muscles, sagging skin, a\n wrinkled face, and gray hair?\n\n\n Well, he had an excellent record in\n the Corps, if nothing else. One of the\n top men in his field. And he had his\n memories of Diane, dead these ten\n years, but still beautiful and alive in\n his recollections. And—he grinned\n softly to himself—he had Saarkkad.",
"Physical handicaps weren't at all\n difficult to deal with. A blind man can\n work very well in the total darkness\n of an infrared-film darkroom. Partial\n or total losses of limbs can be compensated\n for in one way or another.\n\n\n The mental disabilities were harder\n to deal with, but not totally impossible.\n On a world without liquor, a\n dipsomaniac could be channeled easily\n enough; and he'd better not try fermenting\n his own on Saarkkad unless\n he brought his own yeast—which\n was impossible, in view of the sterilization\n regulations.\n\n\n But Malloy didn't like to stop at\n merely thwarting mental quirks; he\n liked to find places where they were\nuseful\n.\nThe phone chimed. Malloy flipped\n it on with a practiced hand.\n\n\n \"Malloy here.\"",
"\"Paranoid,\" said Malloy. \"He\n thinks everyone is plotting against\n him. In this case, that's all to the good\n because the Karna\nare\nplotting against\n him. No matter what they put forth,\n Braynek is convinced that there's a\n trap in it somewhere, and he digs to\n find out what the trap is. Even if\n there isn't a trap, the Karna can't\n satisfy Braynek, because he's convinced\n that there\nhas\nto be—somewhere.\n As a result, all his advice to\n Nordon, and all his questioning on\n the wildest possibilities, just serves\n to keep Nordon from getting unconfused.",
"He glanced up at the ceiling, and\n mentally allowed his gaze to penetrate\n it to the blue sky beyond it.\n\n\n Out there was the terrible emptiness\n of interstellar space—a great, yawning,\n infinite chasm capable of swallowing\n men, ships, planets, suns, and\n whole galaxies without filling its insatiable\n void.\n\n\n Malloy closed his eyes. Somewhere\n out there, a war was raging. He\n didn't even like to think of that, but\n it was necessary to keep it in mind.\n Somewhere out there, the ships of\n Earth were ranged against the ships\n of the alien Karna in the most important\n war that Mankind had yet\n fought.",
"\"Yes, sir,\" said Miss Drayson in a\n hushed voice.\n\n\n Malloy read the whole thing\n through, fighting to keep his emotions\n in check. Miss Drayson stood\n there calmly, her face a mask; her\n emotions were a secret.\n\n\n Finally, Malloy looked up. \"I'll let\n you know as soon as I reach a decision,\n Miss Drayson. I think I hardly\n need say that no news of this is to\n leave this office.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy watched her go out the door\n without actually seeing her. The war\n was over—at least for a while. He\n looked down at the papers again.\n\n\n The Karna, slowly being beaten\n back on every front, were suing for\n peace. They wanted an armistice conference—immediately.",
"\"No,\" said Malloy, \"I'm sending\n an assistant with you—a man named\n Kylen Braynek. Ever heard of him?\"\n\n\n Nordon shook his head. \"Not that\n I recall, Mr. Malloy. Should I have?\"\n\n\n \"Not necessarily. He's a pretty\n shrewd operator, though. He knows a\n lot about interstellar law, and he's\n capable of spotting a trap a mile away.\n You'll be in charge, of course, but I\n want you to pay special attention to\n his advice.\"\n\n\n \"I will, sir,\" Nordon said gratefully.\n \"A man like that can be useful.\"",
"Malloy handed them to the secretary,\n and as he read, Malloy watched\n him. Blendwell was a political appointee—a\n good man, Malloy had to\n admit, but he didn't know all the\n ins and outs of the Diplomatic Corps.\n\n\n When Blendwell looked up from\n the reports at last, he said: \"Amazing!\n They've held off the Karna at\n every point! They've beaten them\n back! They've managed to cope with\n and outdo the finest team of negotiators\n the Karna could send.\"\n\n\n \"I thought they would,\" said Malloy,\n trying to appear modest.\n\n\n The secretary's eyes narrowed.\n \"I've heard of the work you've been\n doing here with ... ah ... sick men.\n Is this one of your ... ah ... successes?\""
],
[
"The job would have been a snap\n cinch in the right circumstances; the\n Saarkkada weren't difficult to get\n along with. A staff of top-grade men\n could have handled them without\n half trying.\n\n\n But Malloy didn't have top-grade\n men. They couldn't be spared from\n work that required their total capacity.\n It's inefficient to waste a man on a\n job that he can do without half trying\n where there are more important jobs\n that will tax his full output.\n\n\n So Malloy was stuck with the culls.\n Not the worst ones, of course; there\n were places in the galaxy that were\n less important than Saarkkad to the\n war effort. Malloy knew that, no matter\n what was wrong with a man, as\n long as he had the mental ability to\n dress himself and get himself to\n work, useful work could be found for\n him.",
"Malloy sighed and pushed the dossiers\n away from him. No two men\n were alike, and yet there sometimes\n seemed to be an eternal sameness\n about all men. He considered himself\n an individual, for instance, but wasn't\n the basic similarity there, after all?\n\n\n He was—how old? He glanced at\n the Earth calendar dial that was automatically\n correlated with the Saarkkadic\n calendar just above it. Fifty-nine\n next week. Fifty-nine years old. And\n what did he have to show for it besides\n flabby muscles, sagging skin, a\n wrinkled face, and gray hair?\n\n\n Well, he had an excellent record in\n the Corps, if nothing else. One of the\n top men in his field. And he had his\n memories of Diane, dead these ten\n years, but still beautiful and alive in\n his recollections. And—he grinned\n softly to himself—he had Saarkkad.",
"\"Nordon, I have a job for you. It's\n probably one of the most important\n jobs you'll ever have in your life. It\n can mean big things for you—promotion\n and prestige if you do it well.\"\n\n\n Nordon nodded slowly. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy explained the problem of\n the Karna peace talks.\n\n\n \"We need a man who can outthink\n them,\" Malloy finished, \"and judging\n from your record, I think you're that\n man. It involves risk, of course. If\n you make the wrong decisions, your\n name will be mud back on Earth. But\n I don't think there's much chance of\n that, really. Do you want to handle\n small-time operations all your life?\n Of course not.\n\n\n \"You'll be leaving within an hour\n for Saarkkad V.\"\n\n\n Nordon nodded again. \"Yes, sir;\n certainly. Am I to go alone?\"",
"\"These two men are honestly doing\n their best to win at the peace conference,\n and they've got the Karna reeling.\n The Karna can see that we're not\n trying to stall; our men are actually\n working at trying to reach a decision.\n But what the Karna don't see is that\n those men, as a team, are unbeatable\n because, in this situation, they're psychologically\n incapable of losing.\"\n\n\n Again the Secretary of State nodded\n his approval, but there was still\n a question in his mind. \"Since you\n know all that, couldn't you have handled\n it yourself?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe, but I doubt it. They might\n have gotten around me someway by\n sneaking up on a blind spot. Nordon\n and Braynek have blind spots, but\n they're covered with armor. No, I'm\n glad I couldn't go; it's better this\n way.\"",
"To their way of thinking, an important\n official was aloof. The greater\n his importance, the greater must be\n his isolation. The Occeq of Saarkkad\n himself was never seen except by a\n handful of picked nobles, who, themselves,\n were never seen except by their\n underlings. It was a long, roundabout\n way of doing business, but it was the\n only way Saarkkad would do any\n business at all. To violate the rigid\n social setup of Saarkkad would mean\n the instant closing off of the supply\n of biochemical products that the\n Saarkkadic laboratories produced\n from native plants and animals—products\n that were vitally necessary\n to Earth's war, and which could be\n duplicated nowhere else in the\n known universe.\n\n\n It was Bertrand Malloy's job to\n keep the production output high and\n to keep the materiel flowing towards\n Earth and her allies and outposts.",
"And, Malloy knew, his own position\n was not unimportant in that war.\n He was not in the battle line, nor\n even in the major production line, but\n it was necessary to keep the drug supply\n lines flowing from Saarkkad, and\n that meant keeping on good terms\n with the Saarkkadic government.\n\n\n The Saarkkada themselves were humanoid\n in physical form—if one allowed\n the term to cover a wide range\n of differences—but their minds just\n didn't function along the same lines.\n\n\n For nine years, Bertrand Malloy\n had been Ambassador to Saarkkad,\n and for nine years, no Saarkkada had\n ever seen him. To have shown himself\n to one of them would have\n meant instant loss of prestige.",
"\"Right. Now, you go into the anteroom\n over there. I've prepared a summary\n of the situation, and you'll have\n to study it and get it into your head\n before the ship leaves. That isn't\n much time, but it's the Karna who are\n doing the pushing, not us.\"\n\n\n As soon as Nordon had left, Malloy\n said softly: \"Send in Braynek,\n Miss Drayson.\"\n\n\n Kylen Braynek was a smallish man\n with mouse-brown hair that lay flat\n against his skull, and hard, penetrating,\n dark eyes that were shadowed by\n heavy, protruding brows. Malloy asked\n him to sit down.\n\n\n Again Malloy went through the explanation\n of the peace conference.",
"Already, they had taken the offensive\n in the matter of the peace talks.\n They had sent a full delegation to\n Saarkkad V, the next planet out from\n the Saarkkad sun, a chilly world inhabited\n only by low-intelligence animals.\n The Karna considered this to be\n fully neutral territory, and Earth\n couldn't argue the point very well. In\n addition, they demanded that the conference\n begin in three days, Terrestrial\n time.\n\n\n The trouble was that interstellar\n communication beams travel a devil\n of a lot faster than ships. It would\n take more than a week for the Earth\n government to get a vessel to Saarkkad\n V. Earth had been caught unprepared\n for an armistice. They\n objected.",
"IN CASE OF FIRE\nBy RANDALL GARRETT\nThere are times when a broken tool is better\n than a sound one, or a twisted personality\n more useful than a whole one. For\n instance, a whole beer bottle isn't half\n the weapon that half a beer bottle is ...\nIllustrated by Martinez\nIn his\n office apartment,\n on the top floor of the\n Terran Embassy Building\n in Occeq City, Bertrand\n Malloy leafed\n casually through the dossiers of the\n four new men who had been assigned\n to him. They were typical of the kind\n of men who were sent to him, he\n thought. Which meant, as usual, that\n they were atypical. Every man in the\n Diplomatic Corps who developed a\n twitch or a quirk was shipped to\n Saarkkad IV to work under Bertrand\n Malloy, Permanent Terran Ambassador\n to His Utter Munificence, the\n Occeq of Saarkkad.",
"\"No,\" said Malloy, \"I'm sending\n an assistant with you—a man named\n Kylen Braynek. Ever heard of him?\"\n\n\n Nordon shook his head. \"Not that\n I recall, Mr. Malloy. Should I have?\"\n\n\n \"Not necessarily. He's a pretty\n shrewd operator, though. He knows a\n lot about interstellar law, and he's\n capable of spotting a trap a mile away.\n You'll be in charge, of course, but I\n want you to pay special attention to\n his advice.\"\n\n\n \"I will, sir,\" Nordon said gratefully.\n \"A man like that can be useful.\"",
"\"Naturally, they'll be trying to\n trick you every step of the way,\" Malloy\n went on. \"They're shrewd and\n underhanded; we'll simply have to\n be more shrewd and more underhanded.\n Nordon's job is to sit\n quietly and evaluate the data; yours\n will be to find the loopholes they're\n laying out for themselves and plug\n them. Don't antagonize them, but\n don't baby them, either. If you see\n anything underhanded going on, let\n Nordon know immediately.\"\n\n\n \"They won't get anything by me,\n Mr. Malloy.\"\nBy the time the ship from Earth\n got there, the peace conference had\n been going on for four days. Bertrand\n Malloy had full reports on the whole\n parley, as relayed to him through the\n ship that had taken Nordon and Braynek\n to Saarkkad V.",
"\"Paranoid,\" said Malloy. \"He\n thinks everyone is plotting against\n him. In this case, that's all to the good\n because the Karna\nare\nplotting against\n him. No matter what they put forth,\n Braynek is convinced that there's a\n trap in it somewhere, and he digs to\n find out what the trap is. Even if\n there isn't a trap, the Karna can't\n satisfy Braynek, because he's convinced\n that there\nhas\nto be—somewhere.\n As a result, all his advice to\n Nordon, and all his questioning on\n the wildest possibilities, just serves\n to keep Nordon from getting unconfused.",
"Physical handicaps weren't at all\n difficult to deal with. A blind man can\n work very well in the total darkness\n of an infrared-film darkroom. Partial\n or total losses of limbs can be compensated\n for in one way or another.\n\n\n The mental disabilities were harder\n to deal with, but not totally impossible.\n On a world without liquor, a\n dipsomaniac could be channeled easily\n enough; and he'd better not try fermenting\n his own on Saarkkad unless\n he brought his own yeast—which\n was impossible, in view of the sterilization\n regulations.\n\n\n But Malloy didn't like to stop at\n merely thwarting mental quirks; he\n liked to find places where they were\nuseful\n.\nThe phone chimed. Malloy flipped\n it on with a practiced hand.\n\n\n \"Malloy here.\"",
"Secretary of State Blendwell stopped\n off at Saarkkad IV before going\n on to V to take charge of the conference.\n He was a tallish, lean man with\n a few strands of gray hair on the top\n of his otherwise bald scalp, and he\n wore a hearty, professional smile that\n didn't quite make it to his calculating\n eyes.\n\n\n He took Malloy's hand and shook\n it warmly. \"How are you, Mr. Ambassador?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, Mr. Secretary. How's everything\n on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Tense. They're waiting to see\n what is going to happen on Five. So\n am I, for that matter.\" His eyes were\n curious. \"You decided not to go\n yourself, eh?\"\n\n\n \"I thought it better not to. I sent a\n good team, instead. Would you like\n to see the reports?\"\n\n\n \"I certainly would.\"",
"Take this first one, for instance.\n Malloy ran his finger down the columns\n of complex symbolism that\n showed the complete psychological\n analysis of the man. Psychopathic\n paranoia. The man wasn't technically\n insane; he could be as lucid as the next\n man most of the time. But he was\n morbidly suspicious that every man's\n hand was turned against him. He\n trusted no one, and was perpetually\n on his guard against imaginary plots\n and persecutions.\n\n\n Number two suffered from some\n sort of emotional block that left him\n continually on the horns of one dilemma\n or another. He was psychologically\n incapable of making a decision\n if he were faced with two or more\n possible alternatives of any major\n importance.\n\n\n Number three ...",
"Malloy handed them to the secretary,\n and as he read, Malloy watched\n him. Blendwell was a political appointee—a\n good man, Malloy had to\n admit, but he didn't know all the\n ins and outs of the Diplomatic Corps.\n\n\n When Blendwell looked up from\n the reports at last, he said: \"Amazing!\n They've held off the Karna at\n every point! They've beaten them\n back! They've managed to cope with\n and outdo the finest team of negotiators\n the Karna could send.\"\n\n\n \"I thought they would,\" said Malloy,\n trying to appear modest.\n\n\n The secretary's eyes narrowed.\n \"I've heard of the work you've been\n doing here with ... ah ... sick men.\n Is this one of your ... ah ... successes?\"",
"The Secretary of State raised an\n eyebrow. \"\nCouldn't\ngo, Mr. Ambassador?\"\n\n\n Malloy looked at him. \"Didn't you\n know? I wondered why you appointed\n me, in the first place. No, I\n couldn't go. The reason why I'm here,\n cooped up in this office, hiding from\n the Saarkkada the way a good Saarkkadic\n bigshot should, is because I\nlike\nit that way. I suffer from agoraphobia\n and xenophobia.",
"But whoever won the armistice\n would find that some of the now-neutral\n races would come in on their\n side if war broke out again. If the\n Karna played their cards right, their\n side would be strong enough next\n time to win.\n\n\n So Earth had to get a delegation to\n meet with the Karna representatives\n within the three-day limit or lose what\n might be a vital point in the negotiations.\n\n\n And that was where Bertrand Malloy\n came in.\n\n\n He had been appointed Minister\n and Plenipotentiary Extraordinary to\n the Earth-Karn peace conference.",
"He glanced up at the ceiling, and\n mentally allowed his gaze to penetrate\n it to the blue sky beyond it.\n\n\n Out there was the terrible emptiness\n of interstellar space—a great, yawning,\n infinite chasm capable of swallowing\n men, ships, planets, suns, and\n whole galaxies without filling its insatiable\n void.\n\n\n Malloy closed his eyes. Somewhere\n out there, a war was raging. He\n didn't even like to think of that, but\n it was necessary to keep it in mind.\n Somewhere out there, the ships of\n Earth were ranged against the ships\n of the alien Karna in the most important\n war that Mankind had yet\n fought.",
"The Karna pointed out that the\n Saarkkad sun was just as far from\n Karn as it was from Earth, that it\n was only a few million miles from a\n planet which was allied with Earth,\n and that it was unfair for Earth to\n take so much time in preparing for an\n armistice. Why hadn't Earth been prepared?\n Did they intend to fight to the\n utter destruction of Karn?\n\n\n It wouldn't have been a problem at\n all if Earth and Karn had fostered the\n only two intelligent races in the galaxy.\n The sort of grandstanding the\n Karna were putting on had to be\n played to an audience. But there were\n other intelligent races throughout the\n galaxy, most of whom had remained\n as neutral as possible during the\n Earth-Karn war. They had no intention\n of sticking their figurative noses\n into a battle between the two most\n powerful races in the galaxy."
],
[
"And, Malloy knew, his own position\n was not unimportant in that war.\n He was not in the battle line, nor\n even in the major production line, but\n it was necessary to keep the drug supply\n lines flowing from Saarkkad, and\n that meant keeping on good terms\n with the Saarkkadic government.\n\n\n The Saarkkada themselves were humanoid\n in physical form—if one allowed\n the term to cover a wide range\n of differences—but their minds just\n didn't function along the same lines.\n\n\n For nine years, Bertrand Malloy\n had been Ambassador to Saarkkad,\n and for nine years, no Saarkkada had\n ever seen him. To have shown himself\n to one of them would have\n meant instant loss of prestige.",
"To their way of thinking, an important\n official was aloof. The greater\n his importance, the greater must be\n his isolation. The Occeq of Saarkkad\n himself was never seen except by a\n handful of picked nobles, who, themselves,\n were never seen except by their\n underlings. It was a long, roundabout\n way of doing business, but it was the\n only way Saarkkad would do any\n business at all. To violate the rigid\n social setup of Saarkkad would mean\n the instant closing off of the supply\n of biochemical products that the\n Saarkkadic laboratories produced\n from native plants and animals—products\n that were vitally necessary\n to Earth's war, and which could be\n duplicated nowhere else in the\n known universe.\n\n\n It was Bertrand Malloy's job to\n keep the production output high and\n to keep the materiel flowing towards\n Earth and her allies and outposts.",
"The Secretary of State raised an\n eyebrow. \"\nCouldn't\ngo, Mr. Ambassador?\"\n\n\n Malloy looked at him. \"Didn't you\n know? I wondered why you appointed\n me, in the first place. No, I\n couldn't go. The reason why I'm here,\n cooped up in this office, hiding from\n the Saarkkada the way a good Saarkkadic\n bigshot should, is because I\nlike\nit that way. I suffer from agoraphobia\n and xenophobia.",
"Malloy handed them to the secretary,\n and as he read, Malloy watched\n him. Blendwell was a political appointee—a\n good man, Malloy had to\n admit, but he didn't know all the\n ins and outs of the Diplomatic Corps.\n\n\n When Blendwell looked up from\n the reports at last, he said: \"Amazing!\n They've held off the Karna at\n every point! They've beaten them\n back! They've managed to cope with\n and outdo the finest team of negotiators\n the Karna could send.\"\n\n\n \"I thought they would,\" said Malloy,\n trying to appear modest.\n\n\n The secretary's eyes narrowed.\n \"I've heard of the work you've been\n doing here with ... ah ... sick men.\n Is this one of your ... ah ... successes?\"",
"\"Mr. Malloy?\" said a careful voice.\n \"A special communication for you has\n been teletyped in from Earth. Shall I\n bring it in?\"\n\n\n \"Bring it in, Miss Drayson.\"\n\n\n Miss Drayson was a case in point.\n She was uncommunicative. She liked\n to gather in information, but she\n found it difficult to give it up once it\n was in her possession.\n\n\n Malloy had made her his private\n secretary. Nothing—but\nnothing\n—got\n out of Malloy's office without his\n direct order. It had taken Malloy a\n long time to get it into Miss Drayson's\n head that it was perfectly all\n right—even desirable—for her to\n keep secrets from everyone except\n Malloy.",
"But whoever won the armistice\n would find that some of the now-neutral\n races would come in on their\n side if war broke out again. If the\n Karna played their cards right, their\n side would be strong enough next\n time to win.\n\n\n So Earth had to get a delegation to\n meet with the Karna representatives\n within the three-day limit or lose what\n might be a vital point in the negotiations.\n\n\n And that was where Bertrand Malloy\n came in.\n\n\n He had been appointed Minister\n and Plenipotentiary Extraordinary to\n the Earth-Karn peace conference.",
"Malloy sighed and pushed the dossiers\n away from him. No two men\n were alike, and yet there sometimes\n seemed to be an eternal sameness\n about all men. He considered himself\n an individual, for instance, but wasn't\n the basic similarity there, after all?\n\n\n He was—how old? He glanced at\n the Earth calendar dial that was automatically\n correlated with the Saarkkadic\n calendar just above it. Fifty-nine\n next week. Fifty-nine years old. And\n what did he have to show for it besides\n flabby muscles, sagging skin, a\n wrinkled face, and gray hair?\n\n\n Well, he had an excellent record in\n the Corps, if nothing else. One of the\n top men in his field. And he had his\n memories of Diane, dead these ten\n years, but still beautiful and alive in\n his recollections. And—he grinned\n softly to himself—he had Saarkkad.",
"Malloy nodded. \"I think so. The\n Karna put us in a dilemma, so I\n threw a dilemma right back at them.\"\n\n\n \"How do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Nordon had a mental block\n against making decisions. If he took\n a girl out on a date, he'd have trouble\n making up his mind whether to kiss\n her or not until she made up his mind\n for him, one way or the other. He's\n that kind of guy. Until he's presented\n with one, single, clear decision which\n admits of no alternatives, he can't\n move at all.",
"He looked up at the ceiling again.\n \"What\ncan\nI do?\" he said softly.\nOn the second day after the arrival\n of the communique, Malloy\n made his decision. He flipped on his\n intercom and said: \"Miss Drayson,\n get hold of James Nordon and Kylen\n Braynek. I want to see them both immediately.\n Send Nordon in first, and\n tell Braynek to wait.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And keep the recorder on. You\n can file the tape later.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy knew the woman would\n listen in on the intercom anyway, and\n it was better to give her permission to\n do so.\n\n\n James Nordon was tall, broad-shouldered,\n and thirty-eight. His hair\n was graying at the temples, and his\n handsome face looked cool and efficient.\n\n\n Malloy waved him to a seat.",
"She came in through the door,\n a rather handsome woman in her middle\n thirties, clutching a sheaf of\n papers in her right hand as though\n someone might at any instant snatch\n it from her before she could turn it\n over to Malloy.\n\n\n She laid them carefully on the\n desk. \"If anything else comes in, I'll\n let you know immediately, sir,\" she\n said. \"Will there be anything else?\"\n\n\n Malloy let her stand there while he\n picked up the communique. She wanted\n to know what his reaction was\n going to be; it didn't matter because\n no one would ever find out from her\n what he had done unless she was\n ordered to tell someone.\n\n\n He read the first paragraph, and his\n eyes widened involuntarily.\n\n\n \"Armistice,\" he said in a low\n whisper. \"There's a chance that the\n war may be over.\"",
"Take this first one, for instance.\n Malloy ran his finger down the columns\n of complex symbolism that\n showed the complete psychological\n analysis of the man. Psychopathic\n paranoia. The man wasn't technically\n insane; he could be as lucid as the next\n man most of the time. But he was\n morbidly suspicious that every man's\n hand was turned against him. He\n trusted no one, and was perpetually\n on his guard against imaginary plots\n and persecutions.\n\n\n Number two suffered from some\n sort of emotional block that left him\n continually on the horns of one dilemma\n or another. He was psychologically\n incapable of making a decision\n if he were faced with two or more\n possible alternatives of any major\n importance.\n\n\n Number three ...",
"IN CASE OF FIRE\nBy RANDALL GARRETT\nThere are times when a broken tool is better\n than a sound one, or a twisted personality\n more useful than a whole one. For\n instance, a whole beer bottle isn't half\n the weapon that half a beer bottle is ...\nIllustrated by Martinez\nIn his\n office apartment,\n on the top floor of the\n Terran Embassy Building\n in Occeq City, Bertrand\n Malloy leafed\n casually through the dossiers of the\n four new men who had been assigned\n to him. They were typical of the kind\n of men who were sent to him, he\n thought. Which meant, as usual, that\n they were atypical. Every man in the\n Diplomatic Corps who developed a\n twitch or a quirk was shipped to\n Saarkkad IV to work under Bertrand\n Malloy, Permanent Terran Ambassador\n to His Utter Munificence, the\n Occeq of Saarkkad.",
"\"Yes, sir,\" said Miss Drayson in a\n hushed voice.\n\n\n Malloy read the whole thing\n through, fighting to keep his emotions\n in check. Miss Drayson stood\n there calmly, her face a mask; her\n emotions were a secret.\n\n\n Finally, Malloy looked up. \"I'll let\n you know as soon as I reach a decision,\n Miss Drayson. I think I hardly\n need say that no news of this is to\n leave this office.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy watched her go out the door\n without actually seeing her. The war\n was over—at least for a while. He\n looked down at the papers again.\n\n\n The Karna, slowly being beaten\n back on every front, were suing for\n peace. They wanted an armistice conference—immediately.",
"\"Naturally, they'll be trying to\n trick you every step of the way,\" Malloy\n went on. \"They're shrewd and\n underhanded; we'll simply have to\n be more shrewd and more underhanded.\n Nordon's job is to sit\n quietly and evaluate the data; yours\n will be to find the loopholes they're\n laying out for themselves and plug\n them. Don't antagonize them, but\n don't baby them, either. If you see\n anything underhanded going on, let\n Nordon know immediately.\"\n\n\n \"They won't get anything by me,\n Mr. Malloy.\"\nBy the time the ship from Earth\n got there, the peace conference had\n been going on for four days. Bertrand\n Malloy had full reports on the whole\n parley, as relayed to him through the\n ship that had taken Nordon and Braynek\n to Saarkkad V.",
"\"Paranoid,\" said Malloy. \"He\n thinks everyone is plotting against\n him. In this case, that's all to the good\n because the Karna\nare\nplotting against\n him. No matter what they put forth,\n Braynek is convinced that there's a\n trap in it somewhere, and he digs to\n find out what the trap is. Even if\n there isn't a trap, the Karna can't\n satisfy Braynek, because he's convinced\n that there\nhas\nto be—somewhere.\n As a result, all his advice to\n Nordon, and all his questioning on\n the wildest possibilities, just serves\n to keep Nordon from getting unconfused.",
"\"No,\" said Malloy, \"I'm sending\n an assistant with you—a man named\n Kylen Braynek. Ever heard of him?\"\n\n\n Nordon shook his head. \"Not that\n I recall, Mr. Malloy. Should I have?\"\n\n\n \"Not necessarily. He's a pretty\n shrewd operator, though. He knows a\n lot about interstellar law, and he's\n capable of spotting a trap a mile away.\n You'll be in charge, of course, but I\n want you to pay special attention to\n his advice.\"\n\n\n \"I will, sir,\" Nordon said gratefully.\n \"A man like that can be useful.\"",
"Secretary of State Blendwell stopped\n off at Saarkkad IV before going\n on to V to take charge of the conference.\n He was a tallish, lean man with\n a few strands of gray hair on the top\n of his otherwise bald scalp, and he\n wore a hearty, professional smile that\n didn't quite make it to his calculating\n eyes.\n\n\n He took Malloy's hand and shook\n it warmly. \"How are you, Mr. Ambassador?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, Mr. Secretary. How's everything\n on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Tense. They're waiting to see\n what is going to happen on Five. So\n am I, for that matter.\" His eyes were\n curious. \"You decided not to go\n yourself, eh?\"\n\n\n \"I thought it better not to. I sent a\n good team, instead. Would you like\n to see the reports?\"\n\n\n \"I certainly would.\"",
"\"Right. Now, you go into the anteroom\n over there. I've prepared a summary\n of the situation, and you'll have\n to study it and get it into your head\n before the ship leaves. That isn't\n much time, but it's the Karna who are\n doing the pushing, not us.\"\n\n\n As soon as Nordon had left, Malloy\n said softly: \"Send in Braynek,\n Miss Drayson.\"\n\n\n Kylen Braynek was a smallish man\n with mouse-brown hair that lay flat\n against his skull, and hard, penetrating,\n dark eyes that were shadowed by\n heavy, protruding brows. Malloy asked\n him to sit down.\n\n\n Again Malloy went through the explanation\n of the peace conference.",
"The job would have been a snap\n cinch in the right circumstances; the\n Saarkkada weren't difficult to get\n along with. A staff of top-grade men\n could have handled them without\n half trying.\n\n\n But Malloy didn't have top-grade\n men. They couldn't be spared from\n work that required their total capacity.\n It's inefficient to waste a man on a\n job that he can do without half trying\n where there are more important jobs\n that will tax his full output.\n\n\n So Malloy was stuck with the culls.\n Not the worst ones, of course; there\n were places in the galaxy that were\n less important than Saarkkad to the\n war effort. Malloy knew that, no matter\n what was wrong with a man, as\n long as he had the mental ability to\n dress himself and get himself to\n work, useful work could be found for\n him.",
"Physical handicaps weren't at all\n difficult to deal with. A blind man can\n work very well in the total darkness\n of an infrared-film darkroom. Partial\n or total losses of limbs can be compensated\n for in one way or another.\n\n\n The mental disabilities were harder\n to deal with, but not totally impossible.\n On a world without liquor, a\n dipsomaniac could be channeled easily\n enough; and he'd better not try fermenting\n his own on Saarkkad unless\n he brought his own yeast—which\n was impossible, in view of the sterilization\n regulations.\n\n\n But Malloy didn't like to stop at\n merely thwarting mental quirks; he\n liked to find places where they were\nuseful\n.\nThe phone chimed. Malloy flipped\n it on with a practiced hand.\n\n\n \"Malloy here.\""
],
[
"Already, they had taken the offensive\n in the matter of the peace talks.\n They had sent a full delegation to\n Saarkkad V, the next planet out from\n the Saarkkad sun, a chilly world inhabited\n only by low-intelligence animals.\n The Karna considered this to be\n fully neutral territory, and Earth\n couldn't argue the point very well. In\n addition, they demanded that the conference\n begin in three days, Terrestrial\n time.\n\n\n The trouble was that interstellar\n communication beams travel a devil\n of a lot faster than ships. It would\n take more than a week for the Earth\n government to get a vessel to Saarkkad\n V. Earth had been caught unprepared\n for an armistice. They\n objected.",
"\"Right. Now, you go into the anteroom\n over there. I've prepared a summary\n of the situation, and you'll have\n to study it and get it into your head\n before the ship leaves. That isn't\n much time, but it's the Karna who are\n doing the pushing, not us.\"\n\n\n As soon as Nordon had left, Malloy\n said softly: \"Send in Braynek,\n Miss Drayson.\"\n\n\n Kylen Braynek was a smallish man\n with mouse-brown hair that lay flat\n against his skull, and hard, penetrating,\n dark eyes that were shadowed by\n heavy, protruding brows. Malloy asked\n him to sit down.\n\n\n Again Malloy went through the explanation\n of the peace conference.",
"But whoever won the armistice\n would find that some of the now-neutral\n races would come in on their\n side if war broke out again. If the\n Karna played their cards right, their\n side would be strong enough next\n time to win.\n\n\n So Earth had to get a delegation to\n meet with the Karna representatives\n within the three-day limit or lose what\n might be a vital point in the negotiations.\n\n\n And that was where Bertrand Malloy\n came in.\n\n\n He had been appointed Minister\n and Plenipotentiary Extraordinary to\n the Earth-Karn peace conference.",
"\"These two men are honestly doing\n their best to win at the peace conference,\n and they've got the Karna reeling.\n The Karna can see that we're not\n trying to stall; our men are actually\n working at trying to reach a decision.\n But what the Karna don't see is that\n those men, as a team, are unbeatable\n because, in this situation, they're psychologically\n incapable of losing.\"\n\n\n Again the Secretary of State nodded\n his approval, but there was still\n a question in his mind. \"Since you\n know all that, couldn't you have handled\n it yourself?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe, but I doubt it. They might\n have gotten around me someway by\n sneaking up on a blind spot. Nordon\n and Braynek have blind spots, but\n they're covered with armor. No, I'm\n glad I couldn't go; it's better this\n way.\"",
"\"Yes, sir,\" said Miss Drayson in a\n hushed voice.\n\n\n Malloy read the whole thing\n through, fighting to keep his emotions\n in check. Miss Drayson stood\n there calmly, her face a mask; her\n emotions were a secret.\n\n\n Finally, Malloy looked up. \"I'll let\n you know as soon as I reach a decision,\n Miss Drayson. I think I hardly\n need say that no news of this is to\n leave this office.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy watched her go out the door\n without actually seeing her. The war\n was over—at least for a while. He\n looked down at the papers again.\n\n\n The Karna, slowly being beaten\n back on every front, were suing for\n peace. They wanted an armistice conference—immediately.",
"Earth was willing. Interstellar war\n is too costly to allow it to continue\n any longer than necessary, and this\n one had been going on for more than\n thirteen years now. Peace was necessary.\n But not peace at any price.\n\n\n The trouble was that the Karna had\n a reputation for losing wars and winning\n at the peace table. They were\n clever, persuasive talkers. They could\n twist a disadvantage to an advantage,\n and make their own strengths look\n like weaknesses. If they won the armistice,\n they'd be able to retrench and\n rearm, and the war would break out\n again within a few years.\n\n\n Now—at this point in time—they\n could be beaten. They could be forced\n to allow supervision of the production\n potential, forced to disarm, rendered\n impotent. But if the armistice went to\n their own advantage ...",
"The Karna pointed out that the\n Saarkkad sun was just as far from\n Karn as it was from Earth, that it\n was only a few million miles from a\n planet which was allied with Earth,\n and that it was unfair for Earth to\n take so much time in preparing for an\n armistice. Why hadn't Earth been prepared?\n Did they intend to fight to the\n utter destruction of Karn?\n\n\n It wouldn't have been a problem at\n all if Earth and Karn had fostered the\n only two intelligent races in the galaxy.\n The sort of grandstanding the\n Karna were putting on had to be\n played to an audience. But there were\n other intelligent races throughout the\n galaxy, most of whom had remained\n as neutral as possible during the\n Earth-Karn war. They had no intention\n of sticking their figurative noses\n into a battle between the two most\n powerful races in the galaxy.",
"\"Paranoid,\" said Malloy. \"He\n thinks everyone is plotting against\n him. In this case, that's all to the good\n because the Karna\nare\nplotting against\n him. No matter what they put forth,\n Braynek is convinced that there's a\n trap in it somewhere, and he digs to\n find out what the trap is. Even if\n there isn't a trap, the Karna can't\n satisfy Braynek, because he's convinced\n that there\nhas\nto be—somewhere.\n As a result, all his advice to\n Nordon, and all his questioning on\n the wildest possibilities, just serves\n to keep Nordon from getting unconfused.",
"Malloy nodded. \"I think so. The\n Karna put us in a dilemma, so I\n threw a dilemma right back at them.\"\n\n\n \"How do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Nordon had a mental block\n against making decisions. If he took\n a girl out on a date, he'd have trouble\n making up his mind whether to kiss\n her or not until she made up his mind\n for him, one way or the other. He's\n that kind of guy. Until he's presented\n with one, single, clear decision which\n admits of no alternatives, he can't\n move at all.",
"\"As you can see, the Karna tried\n to give us several choices on each\n point, and they were all rigged. Until\n they backed down to a single point\n and proved that it\nwasn't\nrigged,\n Nordon couldn't possibly make up his\n mind. I drummed into him how important\n this was, and the more importance\n there is attached to his decisions,\n the more incapable he becomes\n of making them.\"\n\n\n The Secretary nodded slowly.\n \"What about Braynek?\"",
"\"Nordon, I have a job for you. It's\n probably one of the most important\n jobs you'll ever have in your life. It\n can mean big things for you—promotion\n and prestige if you do it well.\"\n\n\n Nordon nodded slowly. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy explained the problem of\n the Karna peace talks.\n\n\n \"We need a man who can outthink\n them,\" Malloy finished, \"and judging\n from your record, I think you're that\n man. It involves risk, of course. If\n you make the wrong decisions, your\n name will be mud back on Earth. But\n I don't think there's much chance of\n that, really. Do you want to handle\n small-time operations all your life?\n Of course not.\n\n\n \"You'll be leaving within an hour\n for Saarkkad V.\"\n\n\n Nordon nodded again. \"Yes, sir;\n certainly. Am I to go alone?\"",
"\"Naturally, they'll be trying to\n trick you every step of the way,\" Malloy\n went on. \"They're shrewd and\n underhanded; we'll simply have to\n be more shrewd and more underhanded.\n Nordon's job is to sit\n quietly and evaluate the data; yours\n will be to find the loopholes they're\n laying out for themselves and plug\n them. Don't antagonize them, but\n don't baby them, either. If you see\n anything underhanded going on, let\n Nordon know immediately.\"\n\n\n \"They won't get anything by me,\n Mr. Malloy.\"\nBy the time the ship from Earth\n got there, the peace conference had\n been going on for four days. Bertrand\n Malloy had full reports on the whole\n parley, as relayed to him through the\n ship that had taken Nordon and Braynek\n to Saarkkad V.",
"Malloy handed them to the secretary,\n and as he read, Malloy watched\n him. Blendwell was a political appointee—a\n good man, Malloy had to\n admit, but he didn't know all the\n ins and outs of the Diplomatic Corps.\n\n\n When Blendwell looked up from\n the reports at last, he said: \"Amazing!\n They've held off the Karna at\n every point! They've beaten them\n back! They've managed to cope with\n and outdo the finest team of negotiators\n the Karna could send.\"\n\n\n \"I thought they would,\" said Malloy,\n trying to appear modest.\n\n\n The secretary's eyes narrowed.\n \"I've heard of the work you've been\n doing here with ... ah ... sick men.\n Is this one of your ... ah ... successes?\"",
"He looked up at the ceiling again.\n \"What\ncan\nI do?\" he said softly.\nOn the second day after the arrival\n of the communique, Malloy\n made his decision. He flipped on his\n intercom and said: \"Miss Drayson,\n get hold of James Nordon and Kylen\n Braynek. I want to see them both immediately.\n Send Nordon in first, and\n tell Braynek to wait.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And keep the recorder on. You\n can file the tape later.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Malloy knew the woman would\n listen in on the intercom anyway, and\n it was better to give her permission to\n do so.\n\n\n James Nordon was tall, broad-shouldered,\n and thirty-eight. His hair\n was graying at the temples, and his\n handsome face looked cool and efficient.\n\n\n Malloy waved him to a seat.",
"Secretary of State Blendwell stopped\n off at Saarkkad IV before going\n on to V to take charge of the conference.\n He was a tallish, lean man with\n a few strands of gray hair on the top\n of his otherwise bald scalp, and he\n wore a hearty, professional smile that\n didn't quite make it to his calculating\n eyes.\n\n\n He took Malloy's hand and shook\n it warmly. \"How are you, Mr. Ambassador?\"\n\n\n \"Fine, Mr. Secretary. How's everything\n on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Tense. They're waiting to see\n what is going to happen on Five. So\n am I, for that matter.\" His eyes were\n curious. \"You decided not to go\n yourself, eh?\"\n\n\n \"I thought it better not to. I sent a\n good team, instead. Would you like\n to see the reports?\"\n\n\n \"I certainly would.\"",
"To their way of thinking, an important\n official was aloof. The greater\n his importance, the greater must be\n his isolation. The Occeq of Saarkkad\n himself was never seen except by a\n handful of picked nobles, who, themselves,\n were never seen except by their\n underlings. It was a long, roundabout\n way of doing business, but it was the\n only way Saarkkad would do any\n business at all. To violate the rigid\n social setup of Saarkkad would mean\n the instant closing off of the supply\n of biochemical products that the\n Saarkkadic laboratories produced\n from native plants and animals—products\n that were vitally necessary\n to Earth's war, and which could be\n duplicated nowhere else in the\n known universe.\n\n\n It was Bertrand Malloy's job to\n keep the production output high and\n to keep the materiel flowing towards\n Earth and her allies and outposts.",
"\"No,\" said Malloy, \"I'm sending\n an assistant with you—a man named\n Kylen Braynek. Ever heard of him?\"\n\n\n Nordon shook his head. \"Not that\n I recall, Mr. Malloy. Should I have?\"\n\n\n \"Not necessarily. He's a pretty\n shrewd operator, though. He knows a\n lot about interstellar law, and he's\n capable of spotting a trap a mile away.\n You'll be in charge, of course, but I\n want you to pay special attention to\n his advice.\"\n\n\n \"I will, sir,\" Nordon said gratefully.\n \"A man like that can be useful.\"",
"And, Malloy knew, his own position\n was not unimportant in that war.\n He was not in the battle line, nor\n even in the major production line, but\n it was necessary to keep the drug supply\n lines flowing from Saarkkad, and\n that meant keeping on good terms\n with the Saarkkadic government.\n\n\n The Saarkkada themselves were humanoid\n in physical form—if one allowed\n the term to cover a wide range\n of differences—but their minds just\n didn't function along the same lines.\n\n\n For nine years, Bertrand Malloy\n had been Ambassador to Saarkkad,\n and for nine years, no Saarkkada had\n ever seen him. To have shown himself\n to one of them would have\n meant instant loss of prestige.",
"The Secretary of State raised an\n eyebrow. \"\nCouldn't\ngo, Mr. Ambassador?\"\n\n\n Malloy looked at him. \"Didn't you\n know? I wondered why you appointed\n me, in the first place. No, I\n couldn't go. The reason why I'm here,\n cooped up in this office, hiding from\n the Saarkkada the way a good Saarkkadic\n bigshot should, is because I\nlike\nit that way. I suffer from agoraphobia\n and xenophobia.",
"He glanced up at the ceiling, and\n mentally allowed his gaze to penetrate\n it to the blue sky beyond it.\n\n\n Out there was the terrible emptiness\n of interstellar space—a great, yawning,\n infinite chasm capable of swallowing\n men, ships, planets, suns, and\n whole galaxies without filling its insatiable\n void.\n\n\n Malloy closed his eyes. Somewhere\n out there, a war was raging. He\n didn't even like to think of that, but\n it was necessary to keep it in mind.\n Somewhere out there, the ships of\n Earth were ranged against the ships\n of the alien Karna in the most important\n war that Mankind had yet\n fought."
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[
"Which best describes the narrator's attitude towards his work?",
"Which of these is the best description of why the narrator strikes the spaceship?",
"What is Houlihan's relationship with the little people?",
"Which best describes Houlihan's perception of America?",
"Why did Houlihan consider his work to the advantage of humankind?",
"Which best describes the relationship between Keech and Houlihan?",
"Which of these is most true about why the little people are building what they are where they are?",
"Why of these is not a reason Houlihan agreed to help the little people?",
"Which best describes the role of history and faith in this story?"
] |
[
[
"He is frustrated that nobody ever recognizes his progress",
"He wishes he were in a different country interacting with his own people",
"He is proud to be contributing to broad scientific questions",
"He is disappointed he has to work inside a lab but enjoys research"
],
[
"He is convinced there's nothing there and his hand will pass right through",
"He wants to test what it's made out of to see if it would make a good model for his own project",
"He wants to show he means business and call to their attention",
"He is upset that the people ran away and wants to harm something they care about"
],
[
"He has some kind of historical relationship with them but it's not clear what",
"He has seen them once before and is suspicious of what they're taking from the area",
"He is a little person himself and is glad to finally find his own people",
"He believes in all fantastical creatures so he is an honorary member of their group"
],
[
"He is proud to have grown up there and work is a prestigious lab ",
"He is suspicious of anyone who is not Irish but is willing to put up with Americans",
"He hates the country but is willing to work for their government in secret",
"He is thankful to be on a team working towards scientific progress, wherever it is"
],
[
"He has furthered the goals of the little people, and not just the humans, making Earth a better place",
"He thought taking advantage of the little people's project to further his own goals was in line with human ideals",
"He thinks that sabatoging the little people will be better for the goals of humans",
"He thought human goals of scientific advancement could not be completed without his work"
],
[
"Keech doesn't prefer interacting with scientists but he knows he can trust Houlihan",
"Houlihan is resentful for being taken away from time in his own lab but feels indebted to Keech",
"They have a tenuously constructed relationship based on trust necessitated by the situation",
"There is a lot of mutual trust and respect between scientists"
],
[
"They were kicked out of their own home for trying to leave the planet and had to find a new place to set up shop",
"It was the only think they knew would help them gain access to knowledge necessary for the project",
"They wanted to work close enough to the lab to be able to steal supplies",
"They wanted to be far away from people who believed in them so that their plans would not be discovered"
],
[
"He saw it as an opportunity to clear his head about his own work",
"He figured their ship could act as a test case for his work",
"He felt a kinship with them because of his family's history",
"He figured he was the only one with knowledge to help them solve their problem"
],
[
"It is both family history and faith in the truth of the little people that lets Houlihan interact with them",
"It is with knowlege of family history and some faith that Houlihan is able to decieve the little people into trusting him",
"It is Houlihan's faith and belief in the existence of fantastical creatures that lets him see the little people",
"Houlihan has heard about the little people in reading up on family history and this is why he can see him"
]
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"I would halt work, pass the time\n of day, and then, in subtle fashion,\n send the intruder on his way. Keech\n and the little people just stood by\n and grinned all the while.\n\n\n At the end of sixteen days I had\n the entire problem all but whipped.\n It is not difficult to understand why.\n The working model and the fact\n that the small people with their\n quick eyes and clever fingers could\n spot all sorts of minute shortcomings\n was a great help. And I was\n hearing the old tongue and talking\n of the old things every day, and\n truly that went far to take the clutter\n out of my mind. I was no longer\n so lonely that I couldn't think properly.",
"\"And mine's Houlihan, as I've\n told you. Are you convinced now\n that I have no intention of doing\n you any injury?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Houlihan,\" said Keech,\n drawing a kind of peppered dignity\n up about himself, \"in such matters\n I am never fully convinced. After\n living for many centuries I am all\n too acutely aware of the perversity\n of human nature.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Well, as you will\n quickly see, all I want to do is\n talk.\" I nodded as I spoke, and sat\n down cross-legged upon the grass.\n\n\n \"Any Irishman wants to talk, Mr.\n Houlihan.\"\n\n\n \"And often that's\nall\nhe wants,\"\n I said. \"Sit down with me now, and\n stop staring as if I were a snake\n returned to the Island.\"",
"\"Come along now, people!\" said\n this crotchety one, looking straight\n at me. \"Stop starin' and get to\n work! You'll not be needin' to\n mind that man standin' there! You\n know he can't see nor hear us!\"\n\n\n Oh, it was good to hear the rich\n old tongue again. I smiled, and the\n foreman of the leprechauns—if\n that's what he was—saw me smile\n and became stiff and alert for a moment,\n as though suspecting that perhaps\n I actually could see him. Then\n he shrugged and turned away, clearly\n deeming such a thing impossible.\n\n\n I said, \"Just a minute, friend,\n and I'll beg your pardon. It so happens\n I\ncan\nsee you.\"\n\n\n He whirled to face me again,\n staring open-mouthed. Then he\n said, \"What? What's that, now?\"",
"And they cheered. And little tears\n crept into the corners of some of\n their turned-up eyes.\n\n\n We shook hands, all of us, and I\n left.\nI walked through the park, and\n back to the nuclear propulsion center.\n It was another cool, green morning\n with the leaves making only\n soft noises as the breezes came\n along. It smelled exactly like a\n wood I had known in Roscommon.\n\n\n And I lit my pipe and smoked it\n slowly and chuckled to myself at\n how I had gotten the best of the\n little people. Surely it was not every\n mortal who could accomplish that. I\n had given them the wrong equation,\n of course. They would never get\n their spaceship to work now, and\n later, if they tried to spy out the\n right information I would take special\n measures to prevent it, for I had\n the advantage of being able to see\n them.",
"Then I waited, but they didn't\n answer. The little people always\n had been shy. Yet without reaching\n a decision in so many words I knew\n suddenly that I\nhad\nto talk to them.\n I'd come to the glen to work out a\n knotty problem, and I was up\n against a blank wall. Simply because\n I was so lonely that my mind had\n become clogged.\n\n\n I knew that if I could just once\n hear the old tongue again, and talk\n about the old things, I might be able\n to think the problem through to a\n satisfactory conclusion.\n\n\n So I stepped back to the tiny\n spaceship, and this time I struck it\n a resounding blow with my fist.\n \"Hear me now, little people! If you\n don't show yourselves and come out\n and talk to me, I'll wreck this spaceship\n from stem to stern!\"\nI heard only the leaves rustling\n softly.",
"There was a leader, an older one\n with a crank face. He was beating\n the air with his arms and piping:\n \"Over here, now! All right, bring\n those electrical connections over\n here—and see you're not slow as\n treacle about it!\"\n\n\n There were perhaps fifty of the\n little people. I was more than startled\n by it, too. I had not seen little\n people in—oh, close to thirty years.\n I had seen them first as a boy of\n eight, and then, very briefly again,\n on my tenth birthday. And I had\n become convinced they could\nnever\nbe seen here in America. I had\n never seen them so busy, either.\n They were building something in\n the middle of the glade. It was long\n and shiny and upright and a little\n over five feet in height.",
"\"Do you understand? I'll give\n you until I count three to make an\n appearance! One!\"\n\n\n The glade remained deathly silent.\n\n\n \"Two!\"\n\n\n I thought I heard a stirring somewhere,\n as if a small, brittle twig had\n snapped in the underbrush.\n\n\n \"\nThree!\n\"\n\n\n And with that the little people\n suddenly appeared.\n\n\n The leader—he seemed more\n wizened and bent than before—approached\n me slowly and warily as I\n stood there. The others all followed\n at a safe distance. I smiled to reassure\n them and then waved my arm\n in a friendly gesture of greeting.\n\n\n \"Good morning,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Good morning,\" the foreman\n said with some caution. \"My name\n is Keech.\"",
"It was a most fascinating session.\n I had often wished for a true working\n model at the center, but no allowance\n had been inserted in the\n budget for it. Keech brought me\n paper and pencil and I talked with\n the aid of diagrams, as engineers\n are wont to do. Although the pencils\n were small and I had to hold\n them between thumb and forefinger,\n as you would a needle, I was\n able to make many sensible observations\n and even a few innovations.\n\n\n I came back again the next day—and\n every day for the following\n two weeks. It rained several times,\n but Keech and his people made a\n canopy of boughs and leaves and I\n was comfortable enough. Every once\n in a while someone from the town\n or the center itself would pass by,\n and stop to watch me. But of course\n they wouldn't see the leprechauns\n or anything the leprechauns had\n made, not being believers.",
"He shook his head and remained\n standing. \"Have your say, Mr.\n Houlihan. And afterward we'll appreciate\n it if you'll go away and\n leave us to our work.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now, your work,\" I said,\n and glanced at the spaceship.\n \"That's exactly what's got me curious.\"\n\n\n The others had edged in a bit\n now and were standing in a circle,\n intently staring at me. I took out my\n pipe. \"Why,\" I asked, \"would a\n group of little people be building a\n spaceship here in America—out in\n this lonely place?\"",
"\"A scientist, is it,\" said Keech.\n \"Well, now, that's very interesting.\"\n\n\n \"I'll make no apologies for it,\" I\n said.\n\n\n \"Oh, there's no need for apology,\"\n said Keech. \"Though in truth\n we prefer poets to scientists. But it\n has just now crossed my mind, Mr.\n Houlihan that you, being a scientist,\n might be of help to us.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Well, I might try starting at the\n beginning,\" he replied.\n\n\n \"You might,\" I said. \"A man\n usually does.\"\n\n\n Keech took out his own pipe—a\n clay dudeen—and looked hopeful.\n I gave him a pinch of tobacco from\n my pouch. \"Well, now,\" he said,\n \"first of all you're no doubt surprised\n to find us here in America.\"",
"\"I can see you,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Ohhh!\" he said and put his\n palms to his cheekbones. \"Saints be\n with us! He's a believer! Run everybody—run\n for your lives!\"\n\n\n And they all began running, in\n as many directions as there were\n little souls. They began to scurry\n behind the trees and bushes, and a\n sloping embankment nearby.\n\n\n \"No, wait!\" I said. \"Don't go\n away! I'll not be hurting you!\"\n\n\n They continued to scurry.\n\n\n I knew what it was they feared.\n \"I don't intend catching one of\n you!\" I said. \"Come back, you daft\n little creatures!\"",
"Now it was a place I came to\n when I had a problem to thrash out.\n That morning I had been trying to\n work out an equation to give the\n coefficient of discharge for the matter\n in combustion. You may call it\n gas, if you wish, for we treated it\n like gas at the center for convenience—as\n it came from the rocket\n tubes in our engine.\n\n\n Without this coefficient to give\n us control, we would have lacked a\n workable equation when we set\n about putting the first moon rocket\n around those extraordinary engines\n of ours, which were still in the undeveloped\n blueprint stage.",
"Perhaps you had better take my\n word for it that without this equation—correctly\n stated, mind you—mankind\n would be well advised not\n to make a first trip to the moon.\n And all this talk of coefficients and\n equations sits strangely, you might\n say, upon the tongue of a man\n named Kevin Francis Houlihan.\n But I am, after all, a scientist. If I\n had not been a specialist in my field\n I would hardly have found myself\n engaged in vital research at the\n center.\n\n\n Anyway, I heard these little\n noises in the park. They sounded\n like small working sounds, blending\n in eerily mysterious fashion with a\n chorus of small voices. I thought at\n first it might be children at play,\n but then at the time I was a bit\n absent-minded. I tiptoed to the edge\n of the trees, not wanting to deprive\n any small scalawags of their pleasure,\n and peered out between the\n branches. And what do you suppose\n I saw? Not children, but a\n group of little people, hard at work.",
"I nodded and looked grave and\n kneaded my chin for a moment softly.\n \"Well, now, Keech,\" I said\n finally, \"why should I help you?\"\n\n\n \"Ha!\" said Keech, grinning, but\n not with humor, \"the avarice of\n humans! I knew it! Well, Mr. Houlihan,\n I'll give you reason enough.\n The pot o' gold, Mr. Houlihan!\"\n\n\n \"The one at the end of the rainbow?\"\n\n\n \"It's not at the end of the rainbow.\n That's a grandmother's tale.\n Nor is it actually in an earthen\n crock. But there's gold, all right,\n enough to make you rich for the\n rest of your life. And I'll make you\n a proposition.\"\n\n\n \"Go ahead.\"",
"noises. It was in a park near the\n nuclear propulsion center—a cool,\n green spot, with the leaves all telling\n each other to hush, be quiet,\n and the soft breeze stirring them up\n again. I had known precisely such\n a secluded little green sanctuary just\n over the hill from Mr. Riordan's\n farm when I was a boy.",
"\"I am surprised from time to\n time to find myself here,\" I said.\n \"But continue.\"\n\n\n \"We had to come here,\" said\n Keech, \"to learn how to make a\n spaceship.\"\n\n\n \"A spaceship, now,\" I said, unconsciously\n adopting some of the\n old manner.\n\n\n \"Leprechauns are not really mechanically\n inclined,\" said Keech.\n \"Their major passions are music\n and laughter and mischief, as anyone\n knows.\"\n\n\n \"Myself included,\" I agreed.\n \"Then why do you need a spaceship?\"\n\n\n \"Well, if I may use an old expression,\n we've had a feelin' lately\n that we're not long for this world.\n Or let me put it this way. We feel\n the world isn't long for itself.\"",
"I walked over to the center of\n the glade where the curious shiny\n object was standing. It was as\n smooth as glass and shaped like a\n huge cigar. There were a pair of\n triangular fins down at the bottom,\n and stubby wings amidships. Of\n course it was a spaceship, or a\n miniature replica of one. I looked\n at it more closely. Everything seemed\n almost miraculously complete\n and workable.\n\n\n I shook my head in wonder, then\n stepped back from the spaceship\n and looked about the glade. I knew\n they were all hiding nearby, watching\n me apprehensively. I lifted my\n head to them.\n\n\n \"Listen to me now, little people!\"\n I called out. \"My name's\n Houlihan of the Roscommon Houlihans.\n I am descended from King\n Niall himself—or so at least my\n father used to say! Come on out\n now, and pass the time o' day!\"",
"On the sixteenth day I covered a\n piece of paper with tiny mathematical\n symbols and handed it to Keech.\n \"Here is your equation,\" I said. \"It\n will enable you to know your thrust\n at any given moment, under any\n circumstances, in or out of gravity,\n and under all conditions of friction\n and combustion.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Mr. Houlihan,\" said\n Keech. All his people had gathered\n in a loose circle, as though attending\n a rite. They were all looking at\n me quietly.\n\n\n \"Mr. Houlihan,\" said Keech,\n \"you will not be forgotten by the\n leprechauns. If we ever meet again,\n upon another world perchance,\n you'll find our friendship always\n eager and ready.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" I said.",
"\"It may be we never crossed your\n path. It may be you can only see us\n when you're thinkin' of us, and of\n course truly believin' in us. I don't\n know—'tis a thing of the mind, and\n not important at the moment.\n What's important is for us to get\n our first ship to workin' properly\n and then we'll be on our way.\"\n\n\n \"You're determined to go.\"\n\n\n \"Truly we are, Mr. Houlihan.\n Now—to business. Just during\n these last few minutes a certain matter\n has crossed my mind. That's\n why I'm wastin' all this time with\n you, sir. You say you are a scientist.\"\n\n\n \"A nuclear engineer.\"\n\n\n \"Well, then, it may be that you\n can help us—now that you know\n we're here.\"\n\n\n \"Help you?\"",
"I see I shall have to explain this,\n although I had hoped to get right\n along with my story. When you\n start from scratch, matter discharged\n from any orifice has a velocity directly\n proportional to the square\n root of the pressure-head driving it.\n But when you actually put things\n together, contractions or expansions\n in the gas, surface roughness\n and other factors make the velocity\n a bit smaller.\n\n\n At the terrible discharge speed\n of nuclear explosion—which is\n what the drive amounts to despite\n the fact that it is simply water in\n which nuclear salts have been previously\n dissolved—this small factor\n makes quite a difference. I had\n to figure everything into it—diameter\n of the nozzle, sharpness of the\n edge, the velocity of approach to the\n point of discharge, atomic weight\n and structure— Oh, there is so\n much of this that if you're not a\n nuclear engineer yourself it's certain\n to weary you."
],
[
"Keech stared back without much\n expression, and said, \"I've been\n wondering how you guessed it was\n a spaceship. I was surprised enough\n when you told me you could see us\n but not overwhelmingly so. I've run\n into believers before who could see\n the little people. It happens every\n so often, though not as frequently\n as it did a century ago. But knowing\n a spaceship at first glance! Well, I\n must confess that\ndoes\nastonish\n me.\"\n\n\n \"And why wouldn't I know a\n spaceship when I see one?\" I said.\n \"It just so happens I'm a doctor of\n science.\"\n\n\n \"A doctor of science, now,\" said\n Keech.\n\n\n \"Invited by the American government\n to work on the first moon\n rocket here at the nuclear propulsion\n center. Since it's no secret I\n can advise you of it.\"",
"Then I waited, but they didn't\n answer. The little people always\n had been shy. Yet without reaching\n a decision in so many words I knew\n suddenly that I\nhad\nto talk to them.\n I'd come to the glen to work out a\n knotty problem, and I was up\n against a blank wall. Simply because\n I was so lonely that my mind had\n become clogged.\n\n\n I knew that if I could just once\n hear the old tongue again, and talk\n about the old things, I might be able\n to think the problem through to a\n satisfactory conclusion.\n\n\n So I stepped back to the tiny\n spaceship, and this time I struck it\n a resounding blow with my fist.\n \"Hear me now, little people! If you\n don't show yourselves and come out\n and talk to me, I'll wreck this spaceship\n from stem to stern!\"\nI heard only the leaves rustling\n softly.",
"He shook his head and remained\n standing. \"Have your say, Mr.\n Houlihan. And afterward we'll appreciate\n it if you'll go away and\n leave us to our work.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now, your work,\" I said,\n and glanced at the spaceship.\n \"That's exactly what's got me curious.\"\n\n\n The others had edged in a bit\n now and were standing in a circle,\n intently staring at me. I took out my\n pipe. \"Why,\" I asked, \"would a\n group of little people be building a\n spaceship here in America—out in\n this lonely place?\"",
"\"We'll not be needin' gold where\n we're goin'. It's yours if you show\n us how to make our ship work.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now, that's quite an\n offer,\" I said. Keech had the goodness\n to be quiet while I sat and\n thought for a while. My pipe had\n gone out and I lit it again. I finally\n said, \"Let's have a look at your\n ship's drive and see what we can\n see.\"\n\n\n \"You accept the proposition\n then?\"\n\n\n \"Let's have a look,\" I said, and\n that was all.\n\n\n Well, we had a look, and then\n several looks, and before the morning\n was out we had half the spaceship\n apart, and were deep in argument\n about the whole project.",
"\"I am surprised from time to\n time to find myself here,\" I said.\n \"But continue.\"\n\n\n \"We had to come here,\" said\n Keech, \"to learn how to make a\n spaceship.\"\n\n\n \"A spaceship, now,\" I said, unconsciously\n adopting some of the\n old manner.\n\n\n \"Leprechauns are not really mechanically\n inclined,\" said Keech.\n \"Their major passions are music\n and laughter and mischief, as anyone\n knows.\"\n\n\n \"Myself included,\" I agreed.\n \"Then why do you need a spaceship?\"\n\n\n \"Well, if I may use an old expression,\n we've had a feelin' lately\n that we're not long for this world.\n Or let me put it this way. We feel\n the world isn't long for itself.\"",
"I scratched my cheek. \"How\n would a man unravel a statement\n such as that?\"\n\n\n \"It's very simple. With all the\n super weapons you mortals have\n developed, there's the distinct possibility\n you might be blowin' us all\n up in the process of destroying\n yourselves.\"\n\n\n \"There\nis\nthat possibility,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Well, then, as I say,\" said\n Keech, \"the little people have decided\n to leave the planet in a spaceship.\n Which we're buildin' here and\n now. We've spied upon you and\n learned how to do it. Well—almost\n how to do it. We haven't learned\n yet how to control the power—\"\n\n\n \"Hold on, now,\" I said. \"Leaving\n the planet, you say. And where\n would you be going?\"",
"\"It may be we never crossed your\n path. It may be you can only see us\n when you're thinkin' of us, and of\n course truly believin' in us. I don't\n know—'tis a thing of the mind, and\n not important at the moment.\n What's important is for us to get\n our first ship to workin' properly\n and then we'll be on our way.\"\n\n\n \"You're determined to go.\"\n\n\n \"Truly we are, Mr. Houlihan.\n Now—to business. Just during\n these last few minutes a certain matter\n has crossed my mind. That's\n why I'm wastin' all this time with\n you, sir. You say you are a scientist.\"\n\n\n \"A nuclear engineer.\"\n\n\n \"Well, then, it may be that you\n can help us—now that you know\n we're here.\"\n\n\n \"Help you?\"",
"I walked over to the center of\n the glade where the curious shiny\n object was standing. It was as\n smooth as glass and shaped like a\n huge cigar. There were a pair of\n triangular fins down at the bottom,\n and stubby wings amidships. Of\n course it was a spaceship, or a\n miniature replica of one. I looked\n at it more closely. Everything seemed\n almost miraculously complete\n and workable.\n\n\n I shook my head in wonder, then\n stepped back from the spaceship\n and looked about the glade. I knew\n they were all hiding nearby, watching\n me apprehensively. I lifted my\n head to them.\n\n\n \"Listen to me now, little people!\"\n I called out. \"My name's\n Houlihan of the Roscommon Houlihans.\n I am descended from King\n Niall himself—or so at least my\n father used to say! Come on out\n now, and pass the time o' day!\"",
"And they cheered. And little tears\n crept into the corners of some of\n their turned-up eyes.\n\n\n We shook hands, all of us, and I\n left.\nI walked through the park, and\n back to the nuclear propulsion center.\n It was another cool, green morning\n with the leaves making only\n soft noises as the breezes came\n along. It smelled exactly like a\n wood I had known in Roscommon.\n\n\n And I lit my pipe and smoked it\n slowly and chuckled to myself at\n how I had gotten the best of the\n little people. Surely it was not every\n mortal who could accomplish that. I\n had given them the wrong equation,\n of course. They would never get\n their spaceship to work now, and\n later, if they tried to spy out the\n right information I would take special\n measures to prevent it, for I had\n the advantage of being able to see\n them.",
"Indeed, I had done a piece of\n work greatly to my advantage, and\n also to the advantage of humankind,\n and when a man can do the first and\n include the second as a fortunate byproduct\n it is a most happy accident.\n\n\n For if I had shown the little people\n how to make a spaceship they\n would have left our world. And\n this world, as long as it lasts—what\n would it be in that event? I ask you\n now, wouldn't we be even\nmore\nlikely to blow ourselves to Kingdom\n Come without the little people here\n for us to believe in every now and\n then?\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nFantastic Universe\nSeptember 1955.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"On the sixteenth day I covered a\n piece of paper with tiny mathematical\n symbols and handed it to Keech.\n \"Here is your equation,\" I said. \"It\n will enable you to know your thrust\n at any given moment, under any\n circumstances, in or out of gravity,\n and under all conditions of friction\n and combustion.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Mr. Houlihan,\" said\n Keech. All his people had gathered\n in a loose circle, as though attending\n a rite. They were all looking at\n me quietly.\n\n\n \"Mr. Houlihan,\" said Keech,\n \"you will not be forgotten by the\n leprechauns. If we ever meet again,\n upon another world perchance,\n you'll find our friendship always\n eager and ready.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" I said.",
"\"The power control, Mr. Houlihan.\n As I understand it, 'tis necessary\n to know at any instant exactly\n how much thrust is bein' delivered\n through the little holes in back.\n And on paper it looks simple\n enough—the square of somethin' or\n other. I've got the figures jotted in\n a book when I need 'em. But when\n you get to doin' it it doesn't come\n out exactly as it does on paper.\"\n\n\n \"You're referring to the necessity\n for a coefficient of discharge.\"\n\n\n \"Whatever it might be named,\"\n said Keech, shrugging. \"'Tis the\n one thing we lack. I suppose eventually\n you people will be gettin'\n around to it. But meanwhile we\n need it right now, if we're to make\n our ship move.\"\n\n\n \"And you want me to help you\n with this?\"\n\n\n \"That is exactly what crossed my\n mind.\"",
"\"There's another committee\n working on that. 'Tis not our concern.\n I was inclined to suggest the\n constellation Orion, which sounds\n as though it has a good Irish name,\n but I was hooted down. Be that as it\n may, my own job was to go into\n your nuclear center, learn how to\n make the ship, and proceed with its\n construction. Naturally, we didn't\n understand all of your high-flyin'\n science, but some of our people are\n pretty clever at gettin' up replicas\n of things.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you've been spying\n on us at the center all this time? Do\n you know, we often had the feeling\n we were being watched, but we\n thought it was by the Russians.\n There's one thing which puzzles\n me, though. If you've been constantly\n around us—and I'm still\n able to see the little people—why\n did I never see you before?\"",
"I see I shall have to explain this,\n although I had hoped to get right\n along with my story. When you\n start from scratch, matter discharged\n from any orifice has a velocity directly\n proportional to the square\n root of the pressure-head driving it.\n But when you actually put things\n together, contractions or expansions\n in the gas, surface roughness\n and other factors make the velocity\n a bit smaller.\n\n\n At the terrible discharge speed\n of nuclear explosion—which is\n what the drive amounts to despite\n the fact that it is simply water in\n which nuclear salts have been previously\n dissolved—this small factor\n makes quite a difference. I had\n to figure everything into it—diameter\n of the nozzle, sharpness of the\n edge, the velocity of approach to the\n point of discharge, atomic weight\n and structure— Oh, there is so\n much of this that if you're not a\n nuclear engineer yourself it's certain\n to weary you.",
"As for our own rocket ship, it\n should be well on its way by next\n St. Patrick's Day. For I had indeed\n determined the true coefficient of\n discharge, which I never could have\n done so quickly without those sessions\n in the glade with Keech and\n his working model.\n\n\n It would go down in scientific\n literature now, I suppose, as Houlihan's\n Equation, and that was honor\n and glory enough for me. I could\n do without Keech's pot of gold,\n though it would have been pleasant\n to be truly rich for a change.\n\n\n There was no sense in cheating\n him out of the gold to boot, for\n leprechauns are most clever in matters\n of this sort and he would have\n had it back soon enough—or else\n made it a burden in some way.",
"Perhaps you had better take my\n word for it that without this equation—correctly\n stated, mind you—mankind\n would be well advised not\n to make a first trip to the moon.\n And all this talk of coefficients and\n equations sits strangely, you might\n say, upon the tongue of a man\n named Kevin Francis Houlihan.\n But I am, after all, a scientist. If I\n had not been a specialist in my field\n I would hardly have found myself\n engaged in vital research at the\n center.\n\n\n Anyway, I heard these little\n noises in the park. They sounded\n like small working sounds, blending\n in eerily mysterious fashion with a\n chorus of small voices. I thought at\n first it might be children at play,\n but then at the time I was a bit\n absent-minded. I tiptoed to the edge\n of the trees, not wanting to deprive\n any small scalawags of their pleasure,\n and peered out between the\n branches. And what do you suppose\n I saw? Not children, but a\n group of little people, hard at work.",
"I would halt work, pass the time\n of day, and then, in subtle fashion,\n send the intruder on his way. Keech\n and the little people just stood by\n and grinned all the while.\n\n\n At the end of sixteen days I had\n the entire problem all but whipped.\n It is not difficult to understand why.\n The working model and the fact\n that the small people with their\n quick eyes and clever fingers could\n spot all sorts of minute shortcomings\n was a great help. And I was\n hearing the old tongue and talking\n of the old things every day, and\n truly that went far to take the clutter\n out of my mind. I was no longer\n so lonely that I couldn't think properly.",
"There was a leader, an older one\n with a crank face. He was beating\n the air with his arms and piping:\n \"Over here, now! All right, bring\n those electrical connections over\n here—and see you're not slow as\n treacle about it!\"\n\n\n There were perhaps fifty of the\n little people. I was more than startled\n by it, too. I had not seen little\n people in—oh, close to thirty years.\n I had seen them first as a boy of\n eight, and then, very briefly again,\n on my tenth birthday. And I had\n become convinced they could\nnever\nbe seen here in America. I had\n never seen them so busy, either.\n They were building something in\n the middle of the glade. It was long\n and shiny and upright and a little\n over five feet in height.",
"Now it was a place I came to\n when I had a problem to thrash out.\n That morning I had been trying to\n work out an equation to give the\n coefficient of discharge for the matter\n in combustion. You may call it\n gas, if you wish, for we treated it\n like gas at the center for convenience—as\n it came from the rocket\n tubes in our engine.\n\n\n Without this coefficient to give\n us control, we would have lacked a\n workable equation when we set\n about putting the first moon rocket\n around those extraordinary engines\n of ours, which were still in the undeveloped\n blueprint stage.",
"Every writer must seek his own Flowery Kingdom in imagination's wide\n demesne, and if that search can begin and end on Earth his problem has\n been greatly simplified. In post-war Japan Walt Sheldon has found not only\n serenity, but complete freedom to write undisturbed about the things he\n treasures most. A one-time Air Force officer, he has turned to fantasy in\n his lighter moments, to bring us such brightly sparkling little gems as this.\nhoulihan's\n \nequation\nby ... Walt Sheldon\nThe tiny spaceship had been built for a journey to a star. But its\n small, mischievous pilots had a rendezvous with destiny—on Earth.\nI must\n admit that at first I\n wasn't sure I was hearing those"
],
[
"\"And mine's Houlihan, as I've\n told you. Are you convinced now\n that I have no intention of doing\n you any injury?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Houlihan,\" said Keech,\n drawing a kind of peppered dignity\n up about himself, \"in such matters\n I am never fully convinced. After\n living for many centuries I am all\n too acutely aware of the perversity\n of human nature.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Well, as you will\n quickly see, all I want to do is\n talk.\" I nodded as I spoke, and sat\n down cross-legged upon the grass.\n\n\n \"Any Irishman wants to talk, Mr.\n Houlihan.\"\n\n\n \"And often that's\nall\nhe wants,\"\n I said. \"Sit down with me now, and\n stop staring as if I were a snake\n returned to the Island.\"",
"\"And now, Mr. Houlihan,\" said\n Keech, \"I'll see that a quantity of\n gold is delivered to your rooms tonight,\n and so keep my part of the\n bargain.\"\n\n\n \"I'll not be needing the gold,\" I\n said.\n\n\n Keech's eyebrows popped upward.\n \"What's this now?\"\n\n\n \"I'll not be needing it,\" I repeated.\n \"I don't feel it would be\n right to take it for a service of this\n sort.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" said Keech in surprise,\n and in some awe, too, \"well, now,\n musha Lord help us! 'Tis the first\n time I ever heard such a speech\n from a mortal.\" He turned to his\n people. \"We'll have three cheers\n now, do you hear, for Mr. Houlihan—friend\n of the little people as\n long as he shall live!\"",
"Perhaps you had better take my\n word for it that without this equation—correctly\n stated, mind you—mankind\n would be well advised not\n to make a first trip to the moon.\n And all this talk of coefficients and\n equations sits strangely, you might\n say, upon the tongue of a man\n named Kevin Francis Houlihan.\n But I am, after all, a scientist. If I\n had not been a specialist in my field\n I would hardly have found myself\n engaged in vital research at the\n center.\n\n\n Anyway, I heard these little\n noises in the park. They sounded\n like small working sounds, blending\n in eerily mysterious fashion with a\n chorus of small voices. I thought at\n first it might be children at play,\n but then at the time I was a bit\n absent-minded. I tiptoed to the edge\n of the trees, not wanting to deprive\n any small scalawags of their pleasure,\n and peered out between the\n branches. And what do you suppose\n I saw? Not children, but a\n group of little people, hard at work.",
"I walked over to the center of\n the glade where the curious shiny\n object was standing. It was as\n smooth as glass and shaped like a\n huge cigar. There were a pair of\n triangular fins down at the bottom,\n and stubby wings amidships. Of\n course it was a spaceship, or a\n miniature replica of one. I looked\n at it more closely. Everything seemed\n almost miraculously complete\n and workable.\n\n\n I shook my head in wonder, then\n stepped back from the spaceship\n and looked about the glade. I knew\n they were all hiding nearby, watching\n me apprehensively. I lifted my\n head to them.\n\n\n \"Listen to me now, little people!\"\n I called out. \"My name's\n Houlihan of the Roscommon Houlihans.\n I am descended from King\n Niall himself—or so at least my\n father used to say! Come on out\n now, and pass the time o' day!\"",
"He shook his head and remained\n standing. \"Have your say, Mr.\n Houlihan. And afterward we'll appreciate\n it if you'll go away and\n leave us to our work.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now, your work,\" I said,\n and glanced at the spaceship.\n \"That's exactly what's got me curious.\"\n\n\n The others had edged in a bit\n now and were standing in a circle,\n intently staring at me. I took out my\n pipe. \"Why,\" I asked, \"would a\n group of little people be building a\n spaceship here in America—out in\n this lonely place?\"",
"Then I waited, but they didn't\n answer. The little people always\n had been shy. Yet without reaching\n a decision in so many words I knew\n suddenly that I\nhad\nto talk to them.\n I'd come to the glen to work out a\n knotty problem, and I was up\n against a blank wall. Simply because\n I was so lonely that my mind had\n become clogged.\n\n\n I knew that if I could just once\n hear the old tongue again, and talk\n about the old things, I might be able\n to think the problem through to a\n satisfactory conclusion.\n\n\n So I stepped back to the tiny\n spaceship, and this time I struck it\n a resounding blow with my fist.\n \"Hear me now, little people! If you\n don't show yourselves and come out\n and talk to me, I'll wreck this spaceship\n from stem to stern!\"\nI heard only the leaves rustling\n softly.",
"\"I can see you,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Ohhh!\" he said and put his\n palms to his cheekbones. \"Saints be\n with us! He's a believer! Run everybody—run\n for your lives!\"\n\n\n And they all began running, in\n as many directions as there were\n little souls. They began to scurry\n behind the trees and bushes, and a\n sloping embankment nearby.\n\n\n \"No, wait!\" I said. \"Don't go\n away! I'll not be hurting you!\"\n\n\n They continued to scurry.\n\n\n I knew what it was they feared.\n \"I don't intend catching one of\n you!\" I said. \"Come back, you daft\n little creatures!\"",
"\"It may be we never crossed your\n path. It may be you can only see us\n when you're thinkin' of us, and of\n course truly believin' in us. I don't\n know—'tis a thing of the mind, and\n not important at the moment.\n What's important is for us to get\n our first ship to workin' properly\n and then we'll be on our way.\"\n\n\n \"You're determined to go.\"\n\n\n \"Truly we are, Mr. Houlihan.\n Now—to business. Just during\n these last few minutes a certain matter\n has crossed my mind. That's\n why I'm wastin' all this time with\n you, sir. You say you are a scientist.\"\n\n\n \"A nuclear engineer.\"\n\n\n \"Well, then, it may be that you\n can help us—now that you know\n we're here.\"\n\n\n \"Help you?\"",
"\"A scientist, is it,\" said Keech.\n \"Well, now, that's very interesting.\"\n\n\n \"I'll make no apologies for it,\" I\n said.\n\n\n \"Oh, there's no need for apology,\"\n said Keech. \"Though in truth\n we prefer poets to scientists. But it\n has just now crossed my mind, Mr.\n Houlihan that you, being a scientist,\n might be of help to us.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Well, I might try starting at the\n beginning,\" he replied.\n\n\n \"You might,\" I said. \"A man\n usually does.\"\n\n\n Keech took out his own pipe—a\n clay dudeen—and looked hopeful.\n I gave him a pinch of tobacco from\n my pouch. \"Well, now,\" he said,\n \"first of all you're no doubt surprised\n to find us here in America.\"",
"\"Do you understand? I'll give\n you until I count three to make an\n appearance! One!\"\n\n\n The glade remained deathly silent.\n\n\n \"Two!\"\n\n\n I thought I heard a stirring somewhere,\n as if a small, brittle twig had\n snapped in the underbrush.\n\n\n \"\nThree!\n\"\n\n\n And with that the little people\n suddenly appeared.\n\n\n The leader—he seemed more\n wizened and bent than before—approached\n me slowly and warily as I\n stood there. The others all followed\n at a safe distance. I smiled to reassure\n them and then waved my arm\n in a friendly gesture of greeting.\n\n\n \"Good morning,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Good morning,\" the foreman\n said with some caution. \"My name\n is Keech.\"",
"I would halt work, pass the time\n of day, and then, in subtle fashion,\n send the intruder on his way. Keech\n and the little people just stood by\n and grinned all the while.\n\n\n At the end of sixteen days I had\n the entire problem all but whipped.\n It is not difficult to understand why.\n The working model and the fact\n that the small people with their\n quick eyes and clever fingers could\n spot all sorts of minute shortcomings\n was a great help. And I was\n hearing the old tongue and talking\n of the old things every day, and\n truly that went far to take the clutter\n out of my mind. I was no longer\n so lonely that I couldn't think properly.",
"There was a leader, an older one\n with a crank face. He was beating\n the air with his arms and piping:\n \"Over here, now! All right, bring\n those electrical connections over\n here—and see you're not slow as\n treacle about it!\"\n\n\n There were perhaps fifty of the\n little people. I was more than startled\n by it, too. I had not seen little\n people in—oh, close to thirty years.\n I had seen them first as a boy of\n eight, and then, very briefly again,\n on my tenth birthday. And I had\n become convinced they could\nnever\nbe seen here in America. I had\n never seen them so busy, either.\n They were building something in\n the middle of the glade. It was long\n and shiny and upright and a little\n over five feet in height.",
"\"There's another committee\n working on that. 'Tis not our concern.\n I was inclined to suggest the\n constellation Orion, which sounds\n as though it has a good Irish name,\n but I was hooted down. Be that as it\n may, my own job was to go into\n your nuclear center, learn how to\n make the ship, and proceed with its\n construction. Naturally, we didn't\n understand all of your high-flyin'\n science, but some of our people are\n pretty clever at gettin' up replicas\n of things.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you've been spying\n on us at the center all this time? Do\n you know, we often had the feeling\n we were being watched, but we\n thought it was by the Russians.\n There's one thing which puzzles\n me, though. If you've been constantly\n around us—and I'm still\n able to see the little people—why\n did I never see you before?\"",
"\"Come along now, people!\" said\n this crotchety one, looking straight\n at me. \"Stop starin' and get to\n work! You'll not be needin' to\n mind that man standin' there! You\n know he can't see nor hear us!\"\n\n\n Oh, it was good to hear the rich\n old tongue again. I smiled, and the\n foreman of the leprechauns—if\n that's what he was—saw me smile\n and became stiff and alert for a moment,\n as though suspecting that perhaps\n I actually could see him. Then\n he shrugged and turned away, clearly\n deeming such a thing impossible.\n\n\n I said, \"Just a minute, friend,\n and I'll beg your pardon. It so happens\n I\ncan\nsee you.\"\n\n\n He whirled to face me again,\n staring open-mouthed. Then he\n said, \"What? What's that, now?\"",
"On the sixteenth day I covered a\n piece of paper with tiny mathematical\n symbols and handed it to Keech.\n \"Here is your equation,\" I said. \"It\n will enable you to know your thrust\n at any given moment, under any\n circumstances, in or out of gravity,\n and under all conditions of friction\n and combustion.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Mr. Houlihan,\" said\n Keech. All his people had gathered\n in a loose circle, as though attending\n a rite. They were all looking at\n me quietly.\n\n\n \"Mr. Houlihan,\" said Keech,\n \"you will not be forgotten by the\n leprechauns. If we ever meet again,\n upon another world perchance,\n you'll find our friendship always\n eager and ready.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" I said.",
"I nodded and looked grave and\n kneaded my chin for a moment softly.\n \"Well, now, Keech,\" I said\n finally, \"why should I help you?\"\n\n\n \"Ha!\" said Keech, grinning, but\n not with humor, \"the avarice of\n humans! I knew it! Well, Mr. Houlihan,\n I'll give you reason enough.\n The pot o' gold, Mr. Houlihan!\"\n\n\n \"The one at the end of the rainbow?\"\n\n\n \"It's not at the end of the rainbow.\n That's a grandmother's tale.\n Nor is it actually in an earthen\n crock. But there's gold, all right,\n enough to make you rich for the\n rest of your life. And I'll make you\n a proposition.\"\n\n\n \"Go ahead.\"",
"And they cheered. And little tears\n crept into the corners of some of\n their turned-up eyes.\n\n\n We shook hands, all of us, and I\n left.\nI walked through the park, and\n back to the nuclear propulsion center.\n It was another cool, green morning\n with the leaves making only\n soft noises as the breezes came\n along. It smelled exactly like a\n wood I had known in Roscommon.\n\n\n And I lit my pipe and smoked it\n slowly and chuckled to myself at\n how I had gotten the best of the\n little people. Surely it was not every\n mortal who could accomplish that. I\n had given them the wrong equation,\n of course. They would never get\n their spaceship to work now, and\n later, if they tried to spy out the\n right information I would take special\n measures to prevent it, for I had\n the advantage of being able to see\n them.",
"As for our own rocket ship, it\n should be well on its way by next\n St. Patrick's Day. For I had indeed\n determined the true coefficient of\n discharge, which I never could have\n done so quickly without those sessions\n in the glade with Keech and\n his working model.\n\n\n It would go down in scientific\n literature now, I suppose, as Houlihan's\n Equation, and that was honor\n and glory enough for me. I could\n do without Keech's pot of gold,\n though it would have been pleasant\n to be truly rich for a change.\n\n\n There was no sense in cheating\n him out of the gold to boot, for\n leprechauns are most clever in matters\n of this sort and he would have\n had it back soon enough—or else\n made it a burden in some way.",
"Every writer must seek his own Flowery Kingdom in imagination's wide\n demesne, and if that search can begin and end on Earth his problem has\n been greatly simplified. In post-war Japan Walt Sheldon has found not only\n serenity, but complete freedom to write undisturbed about the things he\n treasures most. A one-time Air Force officer, he has turned to fantasy in\n his lighter moments, to bring us such brightly sparkling little gems as this.\nhoulihan's\n \nequation\nby ... Walt Sheldon\nThe tiny spaceship had been built for a journey to a star. But its\n small, mischievous pilots had a rendezvous with destiny—on Earth.\nI must\n admit that at first I\n wasn't sure I was hearing those",
"But the glade was silent, and they\n had all disappeared. They thought I\n wanted their crock of gold, of\n course. I'd be entitled to it if I could\n catch one and keep him. Or so the\n legends affirmed, though I've wondered\n often about the truth of them.\n But I was after no gold. I only wanted\n to hear the music of an Irish\n tongue. I was lonely here in America,\n even if I had latched on to a fine\n job of work for almost shamefully\n generous pay. You see, in a place as\n full of science as the nuclear propulsion\n center there is not much\n time for the old things. I very much\n wanted to talk to the little people."
],
[
"\"And mine's Houlihan, as I've\n told you. Are you convinced now\n that I have no intention of doing\n you any injury?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Houlihan,\" said Keech,\n drawing a kind of peppered dignity\n up about himself, \"in such matters\n I am never fully convinced. After\n living for many centuries I am all\n too acutely aware of the perversity\n of human nature.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Well, as you will\n quickly see, all I want to do is\n talk.\" I nodded as I spoke, and sat\n down cross-legged upon the grass.\n\n\n \"Any Irishman wants to talk, Mr.\n Houlihan.\"\n\n\n \"And often that's\nall\nhe wants,\"\n I said. \"Sit down with me now, and\n stop staring as if I were a snake\n returned to the Island.\"",
"\"A scientist, is it,\" said Keech.\n \"Well, now, that's very interesting.\"\n\n\n \"I'll make no apologies for it,\" I\n said.\n\n\n \"Oh, there's no need for apology,\"\n said Keech. \"Though in truth\n we prefer poets to scientists. But it\n has just now crossed my mind, Mr.\n Houlihan that you, being a scientist,\n might be of help to us.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Well, I might try starting at the\n beginning,\" he replied.\n\n\n \"You might,\" I said. \"A man\n usually does.\"\n\n\n Keech took out his own pipe—a\n clay dudeen—and looked hopeful.\n I gave him a pinch of tobacco from\n my pouch. \"Well, now,\" he said,\n \"first of all you're no doubt surprised\n to find us here in America.\"",
"He shook his head and remained\n standing. \"Have your say, Mr.\n Houlihan. And afterward we'll appreciate\n it if you'll go away and\n leave us to our work.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now, your work,\" I said,\n and glanced at the spaceship.\n \"That's exactly what's got me curious.\"\n\n\n The others had edged in a bit\n now and were standing in a circle,\n intently staring at me. I took out my\n pipe. \"Why,\" I asked, \"would a\n group of little people be building a\n spaceship here in America—out in\n this lonely place?\"",
"\"It may be we never crossed your\n path. It may be you can only see us\n when you're thinkin' of us, and of\n course truly believin' in us. I don't\n know—'tis a thing of the mind, and\n not important at the moment.\n What's important is for us to get\n our first ship to workin' properly\n and then we'll be on our way.\"\n\n\n \"You're determined to go.\"\n\n\n \"Truly we are, Mr. Houlihan.\n Now—to business. Just during\n these last few minutes a certain matter\n has crossed my mind. That's\n why I'm wastin' all this time with\n you, sir. You say you are a scientist.\"\n\n\n \"A nuclear engineer.\"\n\n\n \"Well, then, it may be that you\n can help us—now that you know\n we're here.\"\n\n\n \"Help you?\"",
"\"And now, Mr. Houlihan,\" said\n Keech, \"I'll see that a quantity of\n gold is delivered to your rooms tonight,\n and so keep my part of the\n bargain.\"\n\n\n \"I'll not be needing the gold,\" I\n said.\n\n\n Keech's eyebrows popped upward.\n \"What's this now?\"\n\n\n \"I'll not be needing it,\" I repeated.\n \"I don't feel it would be\n right to take it for a service of this\n sort.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" said Keech in surprise,\n and in some awe, too, \"well, now,\n musha Lord help us! 'Tis the first\n time I ever heard such a speech\n from a mortal.\" He turned to his\n people. \"We'll have three cheers\n now, do you hear, for Mr. Houlihan—friend\n of the little people as\n long as he shall live!\"",
"I nodded and looked grave and\n kneaded my chin for a moment softly.\n \"Well, now, Keech,\" I said\n finally, \"why should I help you?\"\n\n\n \"Ha!\" said Keech, grinning, but\n not with humor, \"the avarice of\n humans! I knew it! Well, Mr. Houlihan,\n I'll give you reason enough.\n The pot o' gold, Mr. Houlihan!\"\n\n\n \"The one at the end of the rainbow?\"\n\n\n \"It's not at the end of the rainbow.\n That's a grandmother's tale.\n Nor is it actually in an earthen\n crock. But there's gold, all right,\n enough to make you rich for the\n rest of your life. And I'll make you\n a proposition.\"\n\n\n \"Go ahead.\"",
"I walked over to the center of\n the glade where the curious shiny\n object was standing. It was as\n smooth as glass and shaped like a\n huge cigar. There were a pair of\n triangular fins down at the bottom,\n and stubby wings amidships. Of\n course it was a spaceship, or a\n miniature replica of one. I looked\n at it more closely. Everything seemed\n almost miraculously complete\n and workable.\n\n\n I shook my head in wonder, then\n stepped back from the spaceship\n and looked about the glade. I knew\n they were all hiding nearby, watching\n me apprehensively. I lifted my\n head to them.\n\n\n \"Listen to me now, little people!\"\n I called out. \"My name's\n Houlihan of the Roscommon Houlihans.\n I am descended from King\n Niall himself—or so at least my\n father used to say! Come on out\n now, and pass the time o' day!\"",
"Every writer must seek his own Flowery Kingdom in imagination's wide\n demesne, and if that search can begin and end on Earth his problem has\n been greatly simplified. In post-war Japan Walt Sheldon has found not only\n serenity, but complete freedom to write undisturbed about the things he\n treasures most. A one-time Air Force officer, he has turned to fantasy in\n his lighter moments, to bring us such brightly sparkling little gems as this.\nhoulihan's\n \nequation\nby ... Walt Sheldon\nThe tiny spaceship had been built for a journey to a star. But its\n small, mischievous pilots had a rendezvous with destiny—on Earth.\nI must\n admit that at first I\n wasn't sure I was hearing those",
"\"The power control, Mr. Houlihan.\n As I understand it, 'tis necessary\n to know at any instant exactly\n how much thrust is bein' delivered\n through the little holes in back.\n And on paper it looks simple\n enough—the square of somethin' or\n other. I've got the figures jotted in\n a book when I need 'em. But when\n you get to doin' it it doesn't come\n out exactly as it does on paper.\"\n\n\n \"You're referring to the necessity\n for a coefficient of discharge.\"\n\n\n \"Whatever it might be named,\"\n said Keech, shrugging. \"'Tis the\n one thing we lack. I suppose eventually\n you people will be gettin'\n around to it. But meanwhile we\n need it right now, if we're to make\n our ship move.\"\n\n\n \"And you want me to help you\n with this?\"\n\n\n \"That is exactly what crossed my\n mind.\"",
"Perhaps you had better take my\n word for it that without this equation—correctly\n stated, mind you—mankind\n would be well advised not\n to make a first trip to the moon.\n And all this talk of coefficients and\n equations sits strangely, you might\n say, upon the tongue of a man\n named Kevin Francis Houlihan.\n But I am, after all, a scientist. If I\n had not been a specialist in my field\n I would hardly have found myself\n engaged in vital research at the\n center.\n\n\n Anyway, I heard these little\n noises in the park. They sounded\n like small working sounds, blending\n in eerily mysterious fashion with a\n chorus of small voices. I thought at\n first it might be children at play,\n but then at the time I was a bit\n absent-minded. I tiptoed to the edge\n of the trees, not wanting to deprive\n any small scalawags of their pleasure,\n and peered out between the\n branches. And what do you suppose\n I saw? Not children, but a\n group of little people, hard at work.",
"On the sixteenth day I covered a\n piece of paper with tiny mathematical\n symbols and handed it to Keech.\n \"Here is your equation,\" I said. \"It\n will enable you to know your thrust\n at any given moment, under any\n circumstances, in or out of gravity,\n and under all conditions of friction\n and combustion.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Mr. Houlihan,\" said\n Keech. All his people had gathered\n in a loose circle, as though attending\n a rite. They were all looking at\n me quietly.\n\n\n \"Mr. Houlihan,\" said Keech,\n \"you will not be forgotten by the\n leprechauns. If we ever meet again,\n upon another world perchance,\n you'll find our friendship always\n eager and ready.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" I said.",
"There was a leader, an older one\n with a crank face. He was beating\n the air with his arms and piping:\n \"Over here, now! All right, bring\n those electrical connections over\n here—and see you're not slow as\n treacle about it!\"\n\n\n There were perhaps fifty of the\n little people. I was more than startled\n by it, too. I had not seen little\n people in—oh, close to thirty years.\n I had seen them first as a boy of\n eight, and then, very briefly again,\n on my tenth birthday. And I had\n become convinced they could\nnever\nbe seen here in America. I had\n never seen them so busy, either.\n They were building something in\n the middle of the glade. It was long\n and shiny and upright and a little\n over five feet in height.",
"And they cheered. And little tears\n crept into the corners of some of\n their turned-up eyes.\n\n\n We shook hands, all of us, and I\n left.\nI walked through the park, and\n back to the nuclear propulsion center.\n It was another cool, green morning\n with the leaves making only\n soft noises as the breezes came\n along. It smelled exactly like a\n wood I had known in Roscommon.\n\n\n And I lit my pipe and smoked it\n slowly and chuckled to myself at\n how I had gotten the best of the\n little people. Surely it was not every\n mortal who could accomplish that. I\n had given them the wrong equation,\n of course. They would never get\n their spaceship to work now, and\n later, if they tried to spy out the\n right information I would take special\n measures to prevent it, for I had\n the advantage of being able to see\n them.",
"\"Come along now, people!\" said\n this crotchety one, looking straight\n at me. \"Stop starin' and get to\n work! You'll not be needin' to\n mind that man standin' there! You\n know he can't see nor hear us!\"\n\n\n Oh, it was good to hear the rich\n old tongue again. I smiled, and the\n foreman of the leprechauns—if\n that's what he was—saw me smile\n and became stiff and alert for a moment,\n as though suspecting that perhaps\n I actually could see him. Then\n he shrugged and turned away, clearly\n deeming such a thing impossible.\n\n\n I said, \"Just a minute, friend,\n and I'll beg your pardon. It so happens\n I\ncan\nsee you.\"\n\n\n He whirled to face me again,\n staring open-mouthed. Then he\n said, \"What? What's that, now?\"",
"noises. It was in a park near the\n nuclear propulsion center—a cool,\n green spot, with the leaves all telling\n each other to hush, be quiet,\n and the soft breeze stirring them up\n again. I had known precisely such\n a secluded little green sanctuary just\n over the hill from Mr. Riordan's\n farm when I was a boy.",
"As for our own rocket ship, it\n should be well on its way by next\n St. Patrick's Day. For I had indeed\n determined the true coefficient of\n discharge, which I never could have\n done so quickly without those sessions\n in the glade with Keech and\n his working model.\n\n\n It would go down in scientific\n literature now, I suppose, as Houlihan's\n Equation, and that was honor\n and glory enough for me. I could\n do without Keech's pot of gold,\n though it would have been pleasant\n to be truly rich for a change.\n\n\n There was no sense in cheating\n him out of the gold to boot, for\n leprechauns are most clever in matters\n of this sort and he would have\n had it back soon enough—or else\n made it a burden in some way.",
"Keech stared back without much\n expression, and said, \"I've been\n wondering how you guessed it was\n a spaceship. I was surprised enough\n when you told me you could see us\n but not overwhelmingly so. I've run\n into believers before who could see\n the little people. It happens every\n so often, though not as frequently\n as it did a century ago. But knowing\n a spaceship at first glance! Well, I\n must confess that\ndoes\nastonish\n me.\"\n\n\n \"And why wouldn't I know a\n spaceship when I see one?\" I said.\n \"It just so happens I'm a doctor of\n science.\"\n\n\n \"A doctor of science, now,\" said\n Keech.\n\n\n \"Invited by the American government\n to work on the first moon\n rocket here at the nuclear propulsion\n center. Since it's no secret I\n can advise you of it.\"",
"\"I am surprised from time to\n time to find myself here,\" I said.\n \"But continue.\"\n\n\n \"We had to come here,\" said\n Keech, \"to learn how to make a\n spaceship.\"\n\n\n \"A spaceship, now,\" I said, unconsciously\n adopting some of the\n old manner.\n\n\n \"Leprechauns are not really mechanically\n inclined,\" said Keech.\n \"Their major passions are music\n and laughter and mischief, as anyone\n knows.\"\n\n\n \"Myself included,\" I agreed.\n \"Then why do you need a spaceship?\"\n\n\n \"Well, if I may use an old expression,\n we've had a feelin' lately\n that we're not long for this world.\n Or let me put it this way. We feel\n the world isn't long for itself.\"",
"But the glade was silent, and they\n had all disappeared. They thought I\n wanted their crock of gold, of\n course. I'd be entitled to it if I could\n catch one and keep him. Or so the\n legends affirmed, though I've wondered\n often about the truth of them.\n But I was after no gold. I only wanted\n to hear the music of an Irish\n tongue. I was lonely here in America,\n even if I had latched on to a fine\n job of work for almost shamefully\n generous pay. You see, in a place as\n full of science as the nuclear propulsion\n center there is not much\n time for the old things. I very much\n wanted to talk to the little people.",
"I would halt work, pass the time\n of day, and then, in subtle fashion,\n send the intruder on his way. Keech\n and the little people just stood by\n and grinned all the while.\n\n\n At the end of sixteen days I had\n the entire problem all but whipped.\n It is not difficult to understand why.\n The working model and the fact\n that the small people with their\n quick eyes and clever fingers could\n spot all sorts of minute shortcomings\n was a great help. And I was\n hearing the old tongue and talking\n of the old things every day, and\n truly that went far to take the clutter\n out of my mind. I was no longer\n so lonely that I couldn't think properly."
],
[
"\"It may be we never crossed your\n path. It may be you can only see us\n when you're thinkin' of us, and of\n course truly believin' in us. I don't\n know—'tis a thing of the mind, and\n not important at the moment.\n What's important is for us to get\n our first ship to workin' properly\n and then we'll be on our way.\"\n\n\n \"You're determined to go.\"\n\n\n \"Truly we are, Mr. Houlihan.\n Now—to business. Just during\n these last few minutes a certain matter\n has crossed my mind. That's\n why I'm wastin' all this time with\n you, sir. You say you are a scientist.\"\n\n\n \"A nuclear engineer.\"\n\n\n \"Well, then, it may be that you\n can help us—now that you know\n we're here.\"\n\n\n \"Help you?\"",
"Indeed, I had done a piece of\n work greatly to my advantage, and\n also to the advantage of humankind,\n and when a man can do the first and\n include the second as a fortunate byproduct\n it is a most happy accident.\n\n\n For if I had shown the little people\n how to make a spaceship they\n would have left our world. And\n this world, as long as it lasts—what\n would it be in that event? I ask you\n now, wouldn't we be even\nmore\nlikely to blow ourselves to Kingdom\n Come without the little people here\n for us to believe in every now and\n then?\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nFantastic Universe\nSeptember 1955.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"\"And mine's Houlihan, as I've\n told you. Are you convinced now\n that I have no intention of doing\n you any injury?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Houlihan,\" said Keech,\n drawing a kind of peppered dignity\n up about himself, \"in such matters\n I am never fully convinced. After\n living for many centuries I am all\n too acutely aware of the perversity\n of human nature.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Well, as you will\n quickly see, all I want to do is\n talk.\" I nodded as I spoke, and sat\n down cross-legged upon the grass.\n\n\n \"Any Irishman wants to talk, Mr.\n Houlihan.\"\n\n\n \"And often that's\nall\nhe wants,\"\n I said. \"Sit down with me now, and\n stop staring as if I were a snake\n returned to the Island.\"",
"He shook his head and remained\n standing. \"Have your say, Mr.\n Houlihan. And afterward we'll appreciate\n it if you'll go away and\n leave us to our work.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now, your work,\" I said,\n and glanced at the spaceship.\n \"That's exactly what's got me curious.\"\n\n\n The others had edged in a bit\n now and were standing in a circle,\n intently staring at me. I took out my\n pipe. \"Why,\" I asked, \"would a\n group of little people be building a\n spaceship here in America—out in\n this lonely place?\"",
"\"And now, Mr. Houlihan,\" said\n Keech, \"I'll see that a quantity of\n gold is delivered to your rooms tonight,\n and so keep my part of the\n bargain.\"\n\n\n \"I'll not be needing the gold,\" I\n said.\n\n\n Keech's eyebrows popped upward.\n \"What's this now?\"\n\n\n \"I'll not be needing it,\" I repeated.\n \"I don't feel it would be\n right to take it for a service of this\n sort.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" said Keech in surprise,\n and in some awe, too, \"well, now,\n musha Lord help us! 'Tis the first\n time I ever heard such a speech\n from a mortal.\" He turned to his\n people. \"We'll have three cheers\n now, do you hear, for Mr. Houlihan—friend\n of the little people as\n long as he shall live!\"",
"\"A scientist, is it,\" said Keech.\n \"Well, now, that's very interesting.\"\n\n\n \"I'll make no apologies for it,\" I\n said.\n\n\n \"Oh, there's no need for apology,\"\n said Keech. \"Though in truth\n we prefer poets to scientists. But it\n has just now crossed my mind, Mr.\n Houlihan that you, being a scientist,\n might be of help to us.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Well, I might try starting at the\n beginning,\" he replied.\n\n\n \"You might,\" I said. \"A man\n usually does.\"\n\n\n Keech took out his own pipe—a\n clay dudeen—and looked hopeful.\n I gave him a pinch of tobacco from\n my pouch. \"Well, now,\" he said,\n \"first of all you're no doubt surprised\n to find us here in America.\"",
"I nodded and looked grave and\n kneaded my chin for a moment softly.\n \"Well, now, Keech,\" I said\n finally, \"why should I help you?\"\n\n\n \"Ha!\" said Keech, grinning, but\n not with humor, \"the avarice of\n humans! I knew it! Well, Mr. Houlihan,\n I'll give you reason enough.\n The pot o' gold, Mr. Houlihan!\"\n\n\n \"The one at the end of the rainbow?\"\n\n\n \"It's not at the end of the rainbow.\n That's a grandmother's tale.\n Nor is it actually in an earthen\n crock. But there's gold, all right,\n enough to make you rich for the\n rest of your life. And I'll make you\n a proposition.\"\n\n\n \"Go ahead.\"",
"On the sixteenth day I covered a\n piece of paper with tiny mathematical\n symbols and handed it to Keech.\n \"Here is your equation,\" I said. \"It\n will enable you to know your thrust\n at any given moment, under any\n circumstances, in or out of gravity,\n and under all conditions of friction\n and combustion.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Mr. Houlihan,\" said\n Keech. All his people had gathered\n in a loose circle, as though attending\n a rite. They were all looking at\n me quietly.\n\n\n \"Mr. Houlihan,\" said Keech,\n \"you will not be forgotten by the\n leprechauns. If we ever meet again,\n upon another world perchance,\n you'll find our friendship always\n eager and ready.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" I said.",
"\"The power control, Mr. Houlihan.\n As I understand it, 'tis necessary\n to know at any instant exactly\n how much thrust is bein' delivered\n through the little holes in back.\n And on paper it looks simple\n enough—the square of somethin' or\n other. I've got the figures jotted in\n a book when I need 'em. But when\n you get to doin' it it doesn't come\n out exactly as it does on paper.\"\n\n\n \"You're referring to the necessity\n for a coefficient of discharge.\"\n\n\n \"Whatever it might be named,\"\n said Keech, shrugging. \"'Tis the\n one thing we lack. I suppose eventually\n you people will be gettin'\n around to it. But meanwhile we\n need it right now, if we're to make\n our ship move.\"\n\n\n \"And you want me to help you\n with this?\"\n\n\n \"That is exactly what crossed my\n mind.\"",
"Perhaps you had better take my\n word for it that without this equation—correctly\n stated, mind you—mankind\n would be well advised not\n to make a first trip to the moon.\n And all this talk of coefficients and\n equations sits strangely, you might\n say, upon the tongue of a man\n named Kevin Francis Houlihan.\n But I am, after all, a scientist. If I\n had not been a specialist in my field\n I would hardly have found myself\n engaged in vital research at the\n center.\n\n\n Anyway, I heard these little\n noises in the park. They sounded\n like small working sounds, blending\n in eerily mysterious fashion with a\n chorus of small voices. I thought at\n first it might be children at play,\n but then at the time I was a bit\n absent-minded. I tiptoed to the edge\n of the trees, not wanting to deprive\n any small scalawags of their pleasure,\n and peered out between the\n branches. And what do you suppose\n I saw? Not children, but a\n group of little people, hard at work.",
"As for our own rocket ship, it\n should be well on its way by next\n St. Patrick's Day. For I had indeed\n determined the true coefficient of\n discharge, which I never could have\n done so quickly without those sessions\n in the glade with Keech and\n his working model.\n\n\n It would go down in scientific\n literature now, I suppose, as Houlihan's\n Equation, and that was honor\n and glory enough for me. I could\n do without Keech's pot of gold,\n though it would have been pleasant\n to be truly rich for a change.\n\n\n There was no sense in cheating\n him out of the gold to boot, for\n leprechauns are most clever in matters\n of this sort and he would have\n had it back soon enough—or else\n made it a burden in some way.",
"And they cheered. And little tears\n crept into the corners of some of\n their turned-up eyes.\n\n\n We shook hands, all of us, and I\n left.\nI walked through the park, and\n back to the nuclear propulsion center.\n It was another cool, green morning\n with the leaves making only\n soft noises as the breezes came\n along. It smelled exactly like a\n wood I had known in Roscommon.\n\n\n And I lit my pipe and smoked it\n slowly and chuckled to myself at\n how I had gotten the best of the\n little people. Surely it was not every\n mortal who could accomplish that. I\n had given them the wrong equation,\n of course. They would never get\n their spaceship to work now, and\n later, if they tried to spy out the\n right information I would take special\n measures to prevent it, for I had\n the advantage of being able to see\n them.",
"I would halt work, pass the time\n of day, and then, in subtle fashion,\n send the intruder on his way. Keech\n and the little people just stood by\n and grinned all the while.\n\n\n At the end of sixteen days I had\n the entire problem all but whipped.\n It is not difficult to understand why.\n The working model and the fact\n that the small people with their\n quick eyes and clever fingers could\n spot all sorts of minute shortcomings\n was a great help. And I was\n hearing the old tongue and talking\n of the old things every day, and\n truly that went far to take the clutter\n out of my mind. I was no longer\n so lonely that I couldn't think properly.",
"Every writer must seek his own Flowery Kingdom in imagination's wide\n demesne, and if that search can begin and end on Earth his problem has\n been greatly simplified. In post-war Japan Walt Sheldon has found not only\n serenity, but complete freedom to write undisturbed about the things he\n treasures most. A one-time Air Force officer, he has turned to fantasy in\n his lighter moments, to bring us such brightly sparkling little gems as this.\nhoulihan's\n \nequation\nby ... Walt Sheldon\nThe tiny spaceship had been built for a journey to a star. But its\n small, mischievous pilots had a rendezvous with destiny—on Earth.\nI must\n admit that at first I\n wasn't sure I was hearing those",
"I walked over to the center of\n the glade where the curious shiny\n object was standing. It was as\n smooth as glass and shaped like a\n huge cigar. There were a pair of\n triangular fins down at the bottom,\n and stubby wings amidships. Of\n course it was a spaceship, or a\n miniature replica of one. I looked\n at it more closely. Everything seemed\n almost miraculously complete\n and workable.\n\n\n I shook my head in wonder, then\n stepped back from the spaceship\n and looked about the glade. I knew\n they were all hiding nearby, watching\n me apprehensively. I lifted my\n head to them.\n\n\n \"Listen to me now, little people!\"\n I called out. \"My name's\n Houlihan of the Roscommon Houlihans.\n I am descended from King\n Niall himself—or so at least my\n father used to say! Come on out\n now, and pass the time o' day!\"",
"Then I waited, but they didn't\n answer. The little people always\n had been shy. Yet without reaching\n a decision in so many words I knew\n suddenly that I\nhad\nto talk to them.\n I'd come to the glen to work out a\n knotty problem, and I was up\n against a blank wall. Simply because\n I was so lonely that my mind had\n become clogged.\n\n\n I knew that if I could just once\n hear the old tongue again, and talk\n about the old things, I might be able\n to think the problem through to a\n satisfactory conclusion.\n\n\n So I stepped back to the tiny\n spaceship, and this time I struck it\n a resounding blow with my fist.\n \"Hear me now, little people! If you\n don't show yourselves and come out\n and talk to me, I'll wreck this spaceship\n from stem to stern!\"\nI heard only the leaves rustling\n softly.",
"Now it was a place I came to\n when I had a problem to thrash out.\n That morning I had been trying to\n work out an equation to give the\n coefficient of discharge for the matter\n in combustion. You may call it\n gas, if you wish, for we treated it\n like gas at the center for convenience—as\n it came from the rocket\n tubes in our engine.\n\n\n Without this coefficient to give\n us control, we would have lacked a\n workable equation when we set\n about putting the first moon rocket\n around those extraordinary engines\n of ours, which were still in the undeveloped\n blueprint stage.",
"\"I am surprised from time to\n time to find myself here,\" I said.\n \"But continue.\"\n\n\n \"We had to come here,\" said\n Keech, \"to learn how to make a\n spaceship.\"\n\n\n \"A spaceship, now,\" I said, unconsciously\n adopting some of the\n old manner.\n\n\n \"Leprechauns are not really mechanically\n inclined,\" said Keech.\n \"Their major passions are music\n and laughter and mischief, as anyone\n knows.\"\n\n\n \"Myself included,\" I agreed.\n \"Then why do you need a spaceship?\"\n\n\n \"Well, if I may use an old expression,\n we've had a feelin' lately\n that we're not long for this world.\n Or let me put it this way. We feel\n the world isn't long for itself.\"",
"Keech stared back without much\n expression, and said, \"I've been\n wondering how you guessed it was\n a spaceship. I was surprised enough\n when you told me you could see us\n but not overwhelmingly so. I've run\n into believers before who could see\n the little people. It happens every\n so often, though not as frequently\n as it did a century ago. But knowing\n a spaceship at first glance! Well, I\n must confess that\ndoes\nastonish\n me.\"\n\n\n \"And why wouldn't I know a\n spaceship when I see one?\" I said.\n \"It just so happens I'm a doctor of\n science.\"\n\n\n \"A doctor of science, now,\" said\n Keech.\n\n\n \"Invited by the American government\n to work on the first moon\n rocket here at the nuclear propulsion\n center. Since it's no secret I\n can advise you of it.\"",
"\"We'll not be needin' gold where\n we're goin'. It's yours if you show\n us how to make our ship work.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now, that's quite an\n offer,\" I said. Keech had the goodness\n to be quiet while I sat and\n thought for a while. My pipe had\n gone out and I lit it again. I finally\n said, \"Let's have a look at your\n ship's drive and see what we can\n see.\"\n\n\n \"You accept the proposition\n then?\"\n\n\n \"Let's have a look,\" I said, and\n that was all.\n\n\n Well, we had a look, and then\n several looks, and before the morning\n was out we had half the spaceship\n apart, and were deep in argument\n about the whole project."
],
[
"\"And mine's Houlihan, as I've\n told you. Are you convinced now\n that I have no intention of doing\n you any injury?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Houlihan,\" said Keech,\n drawing a kind of peppered dignity\n up about himself, \"in such matters\n I am never fully convinced. After\n living for many centuries I am all\n too acutely aware of the perversity\n of human nature.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Well, as you will\n quickly see, all I want to do is\n talk.\" I nodded as I spoke, and sat\n down cross-legged upon the grass.\n\n\n \"Any Irishman wants to talk, Mr.\n Houlihan.\"\n\n\n \"And often that's\nall\nhe wants,\"\n I said. \"Sit down with me now, and\n stop staring as if I were a snake\n returned to the Island.\"",
"\"A scientist, is it,\" said Keech.\n \"Well, now, that's very interesting.\"\n\n\n \"I'll make no apologies for it,\" I\n said.\n\n\n \"Oh, there's no need for apology,\"\n said Keech. \"Though in truth\n we prefer poets to scientists. But it\n has just now crossed my mind, Mr.\n Houlihan that you, being a scientist,\n might be of help to us.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Well, I might try starting at the\n beginning,\" he replied.\n\n\n \"You might,\" I said. \"A man\n usually does.\"\n\n\n Keech took out his own pipe—a\n clay dudeen—and looked hopeful.\n I gave him a pinch of tobacco from\n my pouch. \"Well, now,\" he said,\n \"first of all you're no doubt surprised\n to find us here in America.\"",
"\"And now, Mr. Houlihan,\" said\n Keech, \"I'll see that a quantity of\n gold is delivered to your rooms tonight,\n and so keep my part of the\n bargain.\"\n\n\n \"I'll not be needing the gold,\" I\n said.\n\n\n Keech's eyebrows popped upward.\n \"What's this now?\"\n\n\n \"I'll not be needing it,\" I repeated.\n \"I don't feel it would be\n right to take it for a service of this\n sort.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" said Keech in surprise,\n and in some awe, too, \"well, now,\n musha Lord help us! 'Tis the first\n time I ever heard such a speech\n from a mortal.\" He turned to his\n people. \"We'll have three cheers\n now, do you hear, for Mr. Houlihan—friend\n of the little people as\n long as he shall live!\"",
"I nodded and looked grave and\n kneaded my chin for a moment softly.\n \"Well, now, Keech,\" I said\n finally, \"why should I help you?\"\n\n\n \"Ha!\" said Keech, grinning, but\n not with humor, \"the avarice of\n humans! I knew it! Well, Mr. Houlihan,\n I'll give you reason enough.\n The pot o' gold, Mr. Houlihan!\"\n\n\n \"The one at the end of the rainbow?\"\n\n\n \"It's not at the end of the rainbow.\n That's a grandmother's tale.\n Nor is it actually in an earthen\n crock. But there's gold, all right,\n enough to make you rich for the\n rest of your life. And I'll make you\n a proposition.\"\n\n\n \"Go ahead.\"",
"\"The power control, Mr. Houlihan.\n As I understand it, 'tis necessary\n to know at any instant exactly\n how much thrust is bein' delivered\n through the little holes in back.\n And on paper it looks simple\n enough—the square of somethin' or\n other. I've got the figures jotted in\n a book when I need 'em. But when\n you get to doin' it it doesn't come\n out exactly as it does on paper.\"\n\n\n \"You're referring to the necessity\n for a coefficient of discharge.\"\n\n\n \"Whatever it might be named,\"\n said Keech, shrugging. \"'Tis the\n one thing we lack. I suppose eventually\n you people will be gettin'\n around to it. But meanwhile we\n need it right now, if we're to make\n our ship move.\"\n\n\n \"And you want me to help you\n with this?\"\n\n\n \"That is exactly what crossed my\n mind.\"",
"\"It may be we never crossed your\n path. It may be you can only see us\n when you're thinkin' of us, and of\n course truly believin' in us. I don't\n know—'tis a thing of the mind, and\n not important at the moment.\n What's important is for us to get\n our first ship to workin' properly\n and then we'll be on our way.\"\n\n\n \"You're determined to go.\"\n\n\n \"Truly we are, Mr. Houlihan.\n Now—to business. Just during\n these last few minutes a certain matter\n has crossed my mind. That's\n why I'm wastin' all this time with\n you, sir. You say you are a scientist.\"\n\n\n \"A nuclear engineer.\"\n\n\n \"Well, then, it may be that you\n can help us—now that you know\n we're here.\"\n\n\n \"Help you?\"",
"On the sixteenth day I covered a\n piece of paper with tiny mathematical\n symbols and handed it to Keech.\n \"Here is your equation,\" I said. \"It\n will enable you to know your thrust\n at any given moment, under any\n circumstances, in or out of gravity,\n and under all conditions of friction\n and combustion.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Mr. Houlihan,\" said\n Keech. All his people had gathered\n in a loose circle, as though attending\n a rite. They were all looking at\n me quietly.\n\n\n \"Mr. Houlihan,\" said Keech,\n \"you will not be forgotten by the\n leprechauns. If we ever meet again,\n upon another world perchance,\n you'll find our friendship always\n eager and ready.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" I said.",
"Keech stared back without much\n expression, and said, \"I've been\n wondering how you guessed it was\n a spaceship. I was surprised enough\n when you told me you could see us\n but not overwhelmingly so. I've run\n into believers before who could see\n the little people. It happens every\n so often, though not as frequently\n as it did a century ago. But knowing\n a spaceship at first glance! Well, I\n must confess that\ndoes\nastonish\n me.\"\n\n\n \"And why wouldn't I know a\n spaceship when I see one?\" I said.\n \"It just so happens I'm a doctor of\n science.\"\n\n\n \"A doctor of science, now,\" said\n Keech.\n\n\n \"Invited by the American government\n to work on the first moon\n rocket here at the nuclear propulsion\n center. Since it's no secret I\n can advise you of it.\"",
"As for our own rocket ship, it\n should be well on its way by next\n St. Patrick's Day. For I had indeed\n determined the true coefficient of\n discharge, which I never could have\n done so quickly without those sessions\n in the glade with Keech and\n his working model.\n\n\n It would go down in scientific\n literature now, I suppose, as Houlihan's\n Equation, and that was honor\n and glory enough for me. I could\n do without Keech's pot of gold,\n though it would have been pleasant\n to be truly rich for a change.\n\n\n There was no sense in cheating\n him out of the gold to boot, for\n leprechauns are most clever in matters\n of this sort and he would have\n had it back soon enough—or else\n made it a burden in some way.",
"I would halt work, pass the time\n of day, and then, in subtle fashion,\n send the intruder on his way. Keech\n and the little people just stood by\n and grinned all the while.\n\n\n At the end of sixteen days I had\n the entire problem all but whipped.\n It is not difficult to understand why.\n The working model and the fact\n that the small people with their\n quick eyes and clever fingers could\n spot all sorts of minute shortcomings\n was a great help. And I was\n hearing the old tongue and talking\n of the old things every day, and\n truly that went far to take the clutter\n out of my mind. I was no longer\n so lonely that I couldn't think properly.",
"Perhaps you had better take my\n word for it that without this equation—correctly\n stated, mind you—mankind\n would be well advised not\n to make a first trip to the moon.\n And all this talk of coefficients and\n equations sits strangely, you might\n say, upon the tongue of a man\n named Kevin Francis Houlihan.\n But I am, after all, a scientist. If I\n had not been a specialist in my field\n I would hardly have found myself\n engaged in vital research at the\n center.\n\n\n Anyway, I heard these little\n noises in the park. They sounded\n like small working sounds, blending\n in eerily mysterious fashion with a\n chorus of small voices. I thought at\n first it might be children at play,\n but then at the time I was a bit\n absent-minded. I tiptoed to the edge\n of the trees, not wanting to deprive\n any small scalawags of their pleasure,\n and peered out between the\n branches. And what do you suppose\n I saw? Not children, but a\n group of little people, hard at work.",
"He shook his head and remained\n standing. \"Have your say, Mr.\n Houlihan. And afterward we'll appreciate\n it if you'll go away and\n leave us to our work.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now, your work,\" I said,\n and glanced at the spaceship.\n \"That's exactly what's got me curious.\"\n\n\n The others had edged in a bit\n now and were standing in a circle,\n intently staring at me. I took out my\n pipe. \"Why,\" I asked, \"would a\n group of little people be building a\n spaceship here in America—out in\n this lonely place?\"",
"\"Do you understand? I'll give\n you until I count three to make an\n appearance! One!\"\n\n\n The glade remained deathly silent.\n\n\n \"Two!\"\n\n\n I thought I heard a stirring somewhere,\n as if a small, brittle twig had\n snapped in the underbrush.\n\n\n \"\nThree!\n\"\n\n\n And with that the little people\n suddenly appeared.\n\n\n The leader—he seemed more\n wizened and bent than before—approached\n me slowly and warily as I\n stood there. The others all followed\n at a safe distance. I smiled to reassure\n them and then waved my arm\n in a friendly gesture of greeting.\n\n\n \"Good morning,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Good morning,\" the foreman\n said with some caution. \"My name\n is Keech.\"",
"It was a most fascinating session.\n I had often wished for a true working\n model at the center, but no allowance\n had been inserted in the\n budget for it. Keech brought me\n paper and pencil and I talked with\n the aid of diagrams, as engineers\n are wont to do. Although the pencils\n were small and I had to hold\n them between thumb and forefinger,\n as you would a needle, I was\n able to make many sensible observations\n and even a few innovations.\n\n\n I came back again the next day—and\n every day for the following\n two weeks. It rained several times,\n but Keech and his people made a\n canopy of boughs and leaves and I\n was comfortable enough. Every once\n in a while someone from the town\n or the center itself would pass by,\n and stop to watch me. But of course\n they wouldn't see the leprechauns\n or anything the leprechauns had\n made, not being believers.",
"I walked over to the center of\n the glade where the curious shiny\n object was standing. It was as\n smooth as glass and shaped like a\n huge cigar. There were a pair of\n triangular fins down at the bottom,\n and stubby wings amidships. Of\n course it was a spaceship, or a\n miniature replica of one. I looked\n at it more closely. Everything seemed\n almost miraculously complete\n and workable.\n\n\n I shook my head in wonder, then\n stepped back from the spaceship\n and looked about the glade. I knew\n they were all hiding nearby, watching\n me apprehensively. I lifted my\n head to them.\n\n\n \"Listen to me now, little people!\"\n I called out. \"My name's\n Houlihan of the Roscommon Houlihans.\n I am descended from King\n Niall himself—or so at least my\n father used to say! Come on out\n now, and pass the time o' day!\"",
"\"I am surprised from time to\n time to find myself here,\" I said.\n \"But continue.\"\n\n\n \"We had to come here,\" said\n Keech, \"to learn how to make a\n spaceship.\"\n\n\n \"A spaceship, now,\" I said, unconsciously\n adopting some of the\n old manner.\n\n\n \"Leprechauns are not really mechanically\n inclined,\" said Keech.\n \"Their major passions are music\n and laughter and mischief, as anyone\n knows.\"\n\n\n \"Myself included,\" I agreed.\n \"Then why do you need a spaceship?\"\n\n\n \"Well, if I may use an old expression,\n we've had a feelin' lately\n that we're not long for this world.\n Or let me put it this way. We feel\n the world isn't long for itself.\"",
"Every writer must seek his own Flowery Kingdom in imagination's wide\n demesne, and if that search can begin and end on Earth his problem has\n been greatly simplified. In post-war Japan Walt Sheldon has found not only\n serenity, but complete freedom to write undisturbed about the things he\n treasures most. A one-time Air Force officer, he has turned to fantasy in\n his lighter moments, to bring us such brightly sparkling little gems as this.\nhoulihan's\n \nequation\nby ... Walt Sheldon\nThe tiny spaceship had been built for a journey to a star. But its\n small, mischievous pilots had a rendezvous with destiny—on Earth.\nI must\n admit that at first I\n wasn't sure I was hearing those",
"I scratched my cheek. \"How\n would a man unravel a statement\n such as that?\"\n\n\n \"It's very simple. With all the\n super weapons you mortals have\n developed, there's the distinct possibility\n you might be blowin' us all\n up in the process of destroying\n yourselves.\"\n\n\n \"There\nis\nthat possibility,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Well, then, as I say,\" said\n Keech, \"the little people have decided\n to leave the planet in a spaceship.\n Which we're buildin' here and\n now. We've spied upon you and\n learned how to do it. Well—almost\n how to do it. We haven't learned\n yet how to control the power—\"\n\n\n \"Hold on, now,\" I said. \"Leaving\n the planet, you say. And where\n would you be going?\"",
"And they cheered. And little tears\n crept into the corners of some of\n their turned-up eyes.\n\n\n We shook hands, all of us, and I\n left.\nI walked through the park, and\n back to the nuclear propulsion center.\n It was another cool, green morning\n with the leaves making only\n soft noises as the breezes came\n along. It smelled exactly like a\n wood I had known in Roscommon.\n\n\n And I lit my pipe and smoked it\n slowly and chuckled to myself at\n how I had gotten the best of the\n little people. Surely it was not every\n mortal who could accomplish that. I\n had given them the wrong equation,\n of course. They would never get\n their spaceship to work now, and\n later, if they tried to spy out the\n right information I would take special\n measures to prevent it, for I had\n the advantage of being able to see\n them.",
"\"We'll not be needin' gold where\n we're goin'. It's yours if you show\n us how to make our ship work.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now, that's quite an\n offer,\" I said. Keech had the goodness\n to be quiet while I sat and\n thought for a while. My pipe had\n gone out and I lit it again. I finally\n said, \"Let's have a look at your\n ship's drive and see what we can\n see.\"\n\n\n \"You accept the proposition\n then?\"\n\n\n \"Let's have a look,\" I said, and\n that was all.\n\n\n Well, we had a look, and then\n several looks, and before the morning\n was out we had half the spaceship\n apart, and were deep in argument\n about the whole project."
],
[
"There was a leader, an older one\n with a crank face. He was beating\n the air with his arms and piping:\n \"Over here, now! All right, bring\n those electrical connections over\n here—and see you're not slow as\n treacle about it!\"\n\n\n There were perhaps fifty of the\n little people. I was more than startled\n by it, too. I had not seen little\n people in—oh, close to thirty years.\n I had seen them first as a boy of\n eight, and then, very briefly again,\n on my tenth birthday. And I had\n become convinced they could\nnever\nbe seen here in America. I had\n never seen them so busy, either.\n They were building something in\n the middle of the glade. It was long\n and shiny and upright and a little\n over five feet in height.",
"He shook his head and remained\n standing. \"Have your say, Mr.\n Houlihan. And afterward we'll appreciate\n it if you'll go away and\n leave us to our work.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now, your work,\" I said,\n and glanced at the spaceship.\n \"That's exactly what's got me curious.\"\n\n\n The others had edged in a bit\n now and were standing in a circle,\n intently staring at me. I took out my\n pipe. \"Why,\" I asked, \"would a\n group of little people be building a\n spaceship here in America—out in\n this lonely place?\"",
"Then I waited, but they didn't\n answer. The little people always\n had been shy. Yet without reaching\n a decision in so many words I knew\n suddenly that I\nhad\nto talk to them.\n I'd come to the glen to work out a\n knotty problem, and I was up\n against a blank wall. Simply because\n I was so lonely that my mind had\n become clogged.\n\n\n I knew that if I could just once\n hear the old tongue again, and talk\n about the old things, I might be able\n to think the problem through to a\n satisfactory conclusion.\n\n\n So I stepped back to the tiny\n spaceship, and this time I struck it\n a resounding blow with my fist.\n \"Hear me now, little people! If you\n don't show yourselves and come out\n and talk to me, I'll wreck this spaceship\n from stem to stern!\"\nI heard only the leaves rustling\n softly.",
"\"Do you understand? I'll give\n you until I count three to make an\n appearance! One!\"\n\n\n The glade remained deathly silent.\n\n\n \"Two!\"\n\n\n I thought I heard a stirring somewhere,\n as if a small, brittle twig had\n snapped in the underbrush.\n\n\n \"\nThree!\n\"\n\n\n And with that the little people\n suddenly appeared.\n\n\n The leader—he seemed more\n wizened and bent than before—approached\n me slowly and warily as I\n stood there. The others all followed\n at a safe distance. I smiled to reassure\n them and then waved my arm\n in a friendly gesture of greeting.\n\n\n \"Good morning,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Good morning,\" the foreman\n said with some caution. \"My name\n is Keech.\"",
"It was a most fascinating session.\n I had often wished for a true working\n model at the center, but no allowance\n had been inserted in the\n budget for it. Keech brought me\n paper and pencil and I talked with\n the aid of diagrams, as engineers\n are wont to do. Although the pencils\n were small and I had to hold\n them between thumb and forefinger,\n as you would a needle, I was\n able to make many sensible observations\n and even a few innovations.\n\n\n I came back again the next day—and\n every day for the following\n two weeks. It rained several times,\n but Keech and his people made a\n canopy of boughs and leaves and I\n was comfortable enough. Every once\n in a while someone from the town\n or the center itself would pass by,\n and stop to watch me. But of course\n they wouldn't see the leprechauns\n or anything the leprechauns had\n made, not being believers.",
"Perhaps you had better take my\n word for it that without this equation—correctly\n stated, mind you—mankind\n would be well advised not\n to make a first trip to the moon.\n And all this talk of coefficients and\n equations sits strangely, you might\n say, upon the tongue of a man\n named Kevin Francis Houlihan.\n But I am, after all, a scientist. If I\n had not been a specialist in my field\n I would hardly have found myself\n engaged in vital research at the\n center.\n\n\n Anyway, I heard these little\n noises in the park. They sounded\n like small working sounds, blending\n in eerily mysterious fashion with a\n chorus of small voices. I thought at\n first it might be children at play,\n but then at the time I was a bit\n absent-minded. I tiptoed to the edge\n of the trees, not wanting to deprive\n any small scalawags of their pleasure,\n and peered out between the\n branches. And what do you suppose\n I saw? Not children, but a\n group of little people, hard at work.",
"I would halt work, pass the time\n of day, and then, in subtle fashion,\n send the intruder on his way. Keech\n and the little people just stood by\n and grinned all the while.\n\n\n At the end of sixteen days I had\n the entire problem all but whipped.\n It is not difficult to understand why.\n The working model and the fact\n that the small people with their\n quick eyes and clever fingers could\n spot all sorts of minute shortcomings\n was a great help. And I was\n hearing the old tongue and talking\n of the old things every day, and\n truly that went far to take the clutter\n out of my mind. I was no longer\n so lonely that I couldn't think properly.",
"\"I can see you,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Ohhh!\" he said and put his\n palms to his cheekbones. \"Saints be\n with us! He's a believer! Run everybody—run\n for your lives!\"\n\n\n And they all began running, in\n as many directions as there were\n little souls. They began to scurry\n behind the trees and bushes, and a\n sloping embankment nearby.\n\n\n \"No, wait!\" I said. \"Don't go\n away! I'll not be hurting you!\"\n\n\n They continued to scurry.\n\n\n I knew what it was they feared.\n \"I don't intend catching one of\n you!\" I said. \"Come back, you daft\n little creatures!\"",
"I scratched my cheek. \"How\n would a man unravel a statement\n such as that?\"\n\n\n \"It's very simple. With all the\n super weapons you mortals have\n developed, there's the distinct possibility\n you might be blowin' us all\n up in the process of destroying\n yourselves.\"\n\n\n \"There\nis\nthat possibility,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Well, then, as I say,\" said\n Keech, \"the little people have decided\n to leave the planet in a spaceship.\n Which we're buildin' here and\n now. We've spied upon you and\n learned how to do it. Well—almost\n how to do it. We haven't learned\n yet how to control the power—\"\n\n\n \"Hold on, now,\" I said. \"Leaving\n the planet, you say. And where\n would you be going?\"",
"\"There's another committee\n working on that. 'Tis not our concern.\n I was inclined to suggest the\n constellation Orion, which sounds\n as though it has a good Irish name,\n but I was hooted down. Be that as it\n may, my own job was to go into\n your nuclear center, learn how to\n make the ship, and proceed with its\n construction. Naturally, we didn't\n understand all of your high-flyin'\n science, but some of our people are\n pretty clever at gettin' up replicas\n of things.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you've been spying\n on us at the center all this time? Do\n you know, we often had the feeling\n we were being watched, but we\n thought it was by the Russians.\n There's one thing which puzzles\n me, though. If you've been constantly\n around us—and I'm still\n able to see the little people—why\n did I never see you before?\"",
"Indeed, I had done a piece of\n work greatly to my advantage, and\n also to the advantage of humankind,\n and when a man can do the first and\n include the second as a fortunate byproduct\n it is a most happy accident.\n\n\n For if I had shown the little people\n how to make a spaceship they\n would have left our world. And\n this world, as long as it lasts—what\n would it be in that event? I ask you\n now, wouldn't we be even\nmore\nlikely to blow ourselves to Kingdom\n Come without the little people here\n for us to believe in every now and\n then?\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nFantastic Universe\nSeptember 1955.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"I walked over to the center of\n the glade where the curious shiny\n object was standing. It was as\n smooth as glass and shaped like a\n huge cigar. There were a pair of\n triangular fins down at the bottom,\n and stubby wings amidships. Of\n course it was a spaceship, or a\n miniature replica of one. I looked\n at it more closely. Everything seemed\n almost miraculously complete\n and workable.\n\n\n I shook my head in wonder, then\n stepped back from the spaceship\n and looked about the glade. I knew\n they were all hiding nearby, watching\n me apprehensively. I lifted my\n head to them.\n\n\n \"Listen to me now, little people!\"\n I called out. \"My name's\n Houlihan of the Roscommon Houlihans.\n I am descended from King\n Niall himself—or so at least my\n father used to say! Come on out\n now, and pass the time o' day!\"",
"\"I am surprised from time to\n time to find myself here,\" I said.\n \"But continue.\"\n\n\n \"We had to come here,\" said\n Keech, \"to learn how to make a\n spaceship.\"\n\n\n \"A spaceship, now,\" I said, unconsciously\n adopting some of the\n old manner.\n\n\n \"Leprechauns are not really mechanically\n inclined,\" said Keech.\n \"Their major passions are music\n and laughter and mischief, as anyone\n knows.\"\n\n\n \"Myself included,\" I agreed.\n \"Then why do you need a spaceship?\"\n\n\n \"Well, if I may use an old expression,\n we've had a feelin' lately\n that we're not long for this world.\n Or let me put it this way. We feel\n the world isn't long for itself.\"",
"And they cheered. And little tears\n crept into the corners of some of\n their turned-up eyes.\n\n\n We shook hands, all of us, and I\n left.\nI walked through the park, and\n back to the nuclear propulsion center.\n It was another cool, green morning\n with the leaves making only\n soft noises as the breezes came\n along. It smelled exactly like a\n wood I had known in Roscommon.\n\n\n And I lit my pipe and smoked it\n slowly and chuckled to myself at\n how I had gotten the best of the\n little people. Surely it was not every\n mortal who could accomplish that. I\n had given them the wrong equation,\n of course. They would never get\n their spaceship to work now, and\n later, if they tried to spy out the\n right information I would take special\n measures to prevent it, for I had\n the advantage of being able to see\n them.",
"\"Come along now, people!\" said\n this crotchety one, looking straight\n at me. \"Stop starin' and get to\n work! You'll not be needin' to\n mind that man standin' there! You\n know he can't see nor hear us!\"\n\n\n Oh, it was good to hear the rich\n old tongue again. I smiled, and the\n foreman of the leprechauns—if\n that's what he was—saw me smile\n and became stiff and alert for a moment,\n as though suspecting that perhaps\n I actually could see him. Then\n he shrugged and turned away, clearly\n deeming such a thing impossible.\n\n\n I said, \"Just a minute, friend,\n and I'll beg your pardon. It so happens\n I\ncan\nsee you.\"\n\n\n He whirled to face me again,\n staring open-mouthed. Then he\n said, \"What? What's that, now?\"",
"But the glade was silent, and they\n had all disappeared. They thought I\n wanted their crock of gold, of\n course. I'd be entitled to it if I could\n catch one and keep him. Or so the\n legends affirmed, though I've wondered\n often about the truth of them.\n But I was after no gold. I only wanted\n to hear the music of an Irish\n tongue. I was lonely here in America,\n even if I had latched on to a fine\n job of work for almost shamefully\n generous pay. You see, in a place as\n full of science as the nuclear propulsion\n center there is not much\n time for the old things. I very much\n wanted to talk to the little people.",
"\"It may be we never crossed your\n path. It may be you can only see us\n when you're thinkin' of us, and of\n course truly believin' in us. I don't\n know—'tis a thing of the mind, and\n not important at the moment.\n What's important is for us to get\n our first ship to workin' properly\n and then we'll be on our way.\"\n\n\n \"You're determined to go.\"\n\n\n \"Truly we are, Mr. Houlihan.\n Now—to business. Just during\n these last few minutes a certain matter\n has crossed my mind. That's\n why I'm wastin' all this time with\n you, sir. You say you are a scientist.\"\n\n\n \"A nuclear engineer.\"\n\n\n \"Well, then, it may be that you\n can help us—now that you know\n we're here.\"\n\n\n \"Help you?\"",
"\"And now, Mr. Houlihan,\" said\n Keech, \"I'll see that a quantity of\n gold is delivered to your rooms tonight,\n and so keep my part of the\n bargain.\"\n\n\n \"I'll not be needing the gold,\" I\n said.\n\n\n Keech's eyebrows popped upward.\n \"What's this now?\"\n\n\n \"I'll not be needing it,\" I repeated.\n \"I don't feel it would be\n right to take it for a service of this\n sort.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" said Keech in surprise,\n and in some awe, too, \"well, now,\n musha Lord help us! 'Tis the first\n time I ever heard such a speech\n from a mortal.\" He turned to his\n people. \"We'll have three cheers\n now, do you hear, for Mr. Houlihan—friend\n of the little people as\n long as he shall live!\"",
"\"A scientist, is it,\" said Keech.\n \"Well, now, that's very interesting.\"\n\n\n \"I'll make no apologies for it,\" I\n said.\n\n\n \"Oh, there's no need for apology,\"\n said Keech. \"Though in truth\n we prefer poets to scientists. But it\n has just now crossed my mind, Mr.\n Houlihan that you, being a scientist,\n might be of help to us.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Well, I might try starting at the\n beginning,\" he replied.\n\n\n \"You might,\" I said. \"A man\n usually does.\"\n\n\n Keech took out his own pipe—a\n clay dudeen—and looked hopeful.\n I gave him a pinch of tobacco from\n my pouch. \"Well, now,\" he said,\n \"first of all you're no doubt surprised\n to find us here in America.\"",
"\"And mine's Houlihan, as I've\n told you. Are you convinced now\n that I have no intention of doing\n you any injury?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Houlihan,\" said Keech,\n drawing a kind of peppered dignity\n up about himself, \"in such matters\n I am never fully convinced. After\n living for many centuries I am all\n too acutely aware of the perversity\n of human nature.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Well, as you will\n quickly see, all I want to do is\n talk.\" I nodded as I spoke, and sat\n down cross-legged upon the grass.\n\n\n \"Any Irishman wants to talk, Mr.\n Houlihan.\"\n\n\n \"And often that's\nall\nhe wants,\"\n I said. \"Sit down with me now, and\n stop staring as if I were a snake\n returned to the Island.\""
],
[
"\"And now, Mr. Houlihan,\" said\n Keech, \"I'll see that a quantity of\n gold is delivered to your rooms tonight,\n and so keep my part of the\n bargain.\"\n\n\n \"I'll not be needing the gold,\" I\n said.\n\n\n Keech's eyebrows popped upward.\n \"What's this now?\"\n\n\n \"I'll not be needing it,\" I repeated.\n \"I don't feel it would be\n right to take it for a service of this\n sort.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" said Keech in surprise,\n and in some awe, too, \"well, now,\n musha Lord help us! 'Tis the first\n time I ever heard such a speech\n from a mortal.\" He turned to his\n people. \"We'll have three cheers\n now, do you hear, for Mr. Houlihan—friend\n of the little people as\n long as he shall live!\"",
"\"And mine's Houlihan, as I've\n told you. Are you convinced now\n that I have no intention of doing\n you any injury?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Houlihan,\" said Keech,\n drawing a kind of peppered dignity\n up about himself, \"in such matters\n I am never fully convinced. After\n living for many centuries I am all\n too acutely aware of the perversity\n of human nature.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Well, as you will\n quickly see, all I want to do is\n talk.\" I nodded as I spoke, and sat\n down cross-legged upon the grass.\n\n\n \"Any Irishman wants to talk, Mr.\n Houlihan.\"\n\n\n \"And often that's\nall\nhe wants,\"\n I said. \"Sit down with me now, and\n stop staring as if I were a snake\n returned to the Island.\"",
"I nodded and looked grave and\n kneaded my chin for a moment softly.\n \"Well, now, Keech,\" I said\n finally, \"why should I help you?\"\n\n\n \"Ha!\" said Keech, grinning, but\n not with humor, \"the avarice of\n humans! I knew it! Well, Mr. Houlihan,\n I'll give you reason enough.\n The pot o' gold, Mr. Houlihan!\"\n\n\n \"The one at the end of the rainbow?\"\n\n\n \"It's not at the end of the rainbow.\n That's a grandmother's tale.\n Nor is it actually in an earthen\n crock. But there's gold, all right,\n enough to make you rich for the\n rest of your life. And I'll make you\n a proposition.\"\n\n\n \"Go ahead.\"",
"\"A scientist, is it,\" said Keech.\n \"Well, now, that's very interesting.\"\n\n\n \"I'll make no apologies for it,\" I\n said.\n\n\n \"Oh, there's no need for apology,\"\n said Keech. \"Though in truth\n we prefer poets to scientists. But it\n has just now crossed my mind, Mr.\n Houlihan that you, being a scientist,\n might be of help to us.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Well, I might try starting at the\n beginning,\" he replied.\n\n\n \"You might,\" I said. \"A man\n usually does.\"\n\n\n Keech took out his own pipe—a\n clay dudeen—and looked hopeful.\n I gave him a pinch of tobacco from\n my pouch. \"Well, now,\" he said,\n \"first of all you're no doubt surprised\n to find us here in America.\"",
"\"It may be we never crossed your\n path. It may be you can only see us\n when you're thinkin' of us, and of\n course truly believin' in us. I don't\n know—'tis a thing of the mind, and\n not important at the moment.\n What's important is for us to get\n our first ship to workin' properly\n and then we'll be on our way.\"\n\n\n \"You're determined to go.\"\n\n\n \"Truly we are, Mr. Houlihan.\n Now—to business. Just during\n these last few minutes a certain matter\n has crossed my mind. That's\n why I'm wastin' all this time with\n you, sir. You say you are a scientist.\"\n\n\n \"A nuclear engineer.\"\n\n\n \"Well, then, it may be that you\n can help us—now that you know\n we're here.\"\n\n\n \"Help you?\"",
"Perhaps you had better take my\n word for it that without this equation—correctly\n stated, mind you—mankind\n would be well advised not\n to make a first trip to the moon.\n And all this talk of coefficients and\n equations sits strangely, you might\n say, upon the tongue of a man\n named Kevin Francis Houlihan.\n But I am, after all, a scientist. If I\n had not been a specialist in my field\n I would hardly have found myself\n engaged in vital research at the\n center.\n\n\n Anyway, I heard these little\n noises in the park. They sounded\n like small working sounds, blending\n in eerily mysterious fashion with a\n chorus of small voices. I thought at\n first it might be children at play,\n but then at the time I was a bit\n absent-minded. I tiptoed to the edge\n of the trees, not wanting to deprive\n any small scalawags of their pleasure,\n and peered out between the\n branches. And what do you suppose\n I saw? Not children, but a\n group of little people, hard at work.",
"He shook his head and remained\n standing. \"Have your say, Mr.\n Houlihan. And afterward we'll appreciate\n it if you'll go away and\n leave us to our work.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now, your work,\" I said,\n and glanced at the spaceship.\n \"That's exactly what's got me curious.\"\n\n\n The others had edged in a bit\n now and were standing in a circle,\n intently staring at me. I took out my\n pipe. \"Why,\" I asked, \"would a\n group of little people be building a\n spaceship here in America—out in\n this lonely place?\"",
"Then I waited, but they didn't\n answer. The little people always\n had been shy. Yet without reaching\n a decision in so many words I knew\n suddenly that I\nhad\nto talk to them.\n I'd come to the glen to work out a\n knotty problem, and I was up\n against a blank wall. Simply because\n I was so lonely that my mind had\n become clogged.\n\n\n I knew that if I could just once\n hear the old tongue again, and talk\n about the old things, I might be able\n to think the problem through to a\n satisfactory conclusion.\n\n\n So I stepped back to the tiny\n spaceship, and this time I struck it\n a resounding blow with my fist.\n \"Hear me now, little people! If you\n don't show yourselves and come out\n and talk to me, I'll wreck this spaceship\n from stem to stern!\"\nI heard only the leaves rustling\n softly.",
"I walked over to the center of\n the glade where the curious shiny\n object was standing. It was as\n smooth as glass and shaped like a\n huge cigar. There were a pair of\n triangular fins down at the bottom,\n and stubby wings amidships. Of\n course it was a spaceship, or a\n miniature replica of one. I looked\n at it more closely. Everything seemed\n almost miraculously complete\n and workable.\n\n\n I shook my head in wonder, then\n stepped back from the spaceship\n and looked about the glade. I knew\n they were all hiding nearby, watching\n me apprehensively. I lifted my\n head to them.\n\n\n \"Listen to me now, little people!\"\n I called out. \"My name's\n Houlihan of the Roscommon Houlihans.\n I am descended from King\n Niall himself—or so at least my\n father used to say! Come on out\n now, and pass the time o' day!\"",
"I would halt work, pass the time\n of day, and then, in subtle fashion,\n send the intruder on his way. Keech\n and the little people just stood by\n and grinned all the while.\n\n\n At the end of sixteen days I had\n the entire problem all but whipped.\n It is not difficult to understand why.\n The working model and the fact\n that the small people with their\n quick eyes and clever fingers could\n spot all sorts of minute shortcomings\n was a great help. And I was\n hearing the old tongue and talking\n of the old things every day, and\n truly that went far to take the clutter\n out of my mind. I was no longer\n so lonely that I couldn't think properly.",
"\"I can see you,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Ohhh!\" he said and put his\n palms to his cheekbones. \"Saints be\n with us! He's a believer! Run everybody—run\n for your lives!\"\n\n\n And they all began running, in\n as many directions as there were\n little souls. They began to scurry\n behind the trees and bushes, and a\n sloping embankment nearby.\n\n\n \"No, wait!\" I said. \"Don't go\n away! I'll not be hurting you!\"\n\n\n They continued to scurry.\n\n\n I knew what it was they feared.\n \"I don't intend catching one of\n you!\" I said. \"Come back, you daft\n little creatures!\"",
"\"The power control, Mr. Houlihan.\n As I understand it, 'tis necessary\n to know at any instant exactly\n how much thrust is bein' delivered\n through the little holes in back.\n And on paper it looks simple\n enough—the square of somethin' or\n other. I've got the figures jotted in\n a book when I need 'em. But when\n you get to doin' it it doesn't come\n out exactly as it does on paper.\"\n\n\n \"You're referring to the necessity\n for a coefficient of discharge.\"\n\n\n \"Whatever it might be named,\"\n said Keech, shrugging. \"'Tis the\n one thing we lack. I suppose eventually\n you people will be gettin'\n around to it. But meanwhile we\n need it right now, if we're to make\n our ship move.\"\n\n\n \"And you want me to help you\n with this?\"\n\n\n \"That is exactly what crossed my\n mind.\"",
"As for our own rocket ship, it\n should be well on its way by next\n St. Patrick's Day. For I had indeed\n determined the true coefficient of\n discharge, which I never could have\n done so quickly without those sessions\n in the glade with Keech and\n his working model.\n\n\n It would go down in scientific\n literature now, I suppose, as Houlihan's\n Equation, and that was honor\n and glory enough for me. I could\n do without Keech's pot of gold,\n though it would have been pleasant\n to be truly rich for a change.\n\n\n There was no sense in cheating\n him out of the gold to boot, for\n leprechauns are most clever in matters\n of this sort and he would have\n had it back soon enough—or else\n made it a burden in some way.",
"\"Come along now, people!\" said\n this crotchety one, looking straight\n at me. \"Stop starin' and get to\n work! You'll not be needin' to\n mind that man standin' there! You\n know he can't see nor hear us!\"\n\n\n Oh, it was good to hear the rich\n old tongue again. I smiled, and the\n foreman of the leprechauns—if\n that's what he was—saw me smile\n and became stiff and alert for a moment,\n as though suspecting that perhaps\n I actually could see him. Then\n he shrugged and turned away, clearly\n deeming such a thing impossible.\n\n\n I said, \"Just a minute, friend,\n and I'll beg your pardon. It so happens\n I\ncan\nsee you.\"\n\n\n He whirled to face me again,\n staring open-mouthed. Then he\n said, \"What? What's that, now?\"",
"And they cheered. And little tears\n crept into the corners of some of\n their turned-up eyes.\n\n\n We shook hands, all of us, and I\n left.\nI walked through the park, and\n back to the nuclear propulsion center.\n It was another cool, green morning\n with the leaves making only\n soft noises as the breezes came\n along. It smelled exactly like a\n wood I had known in Roscommon.\n\n\n And I lit my pipe and smoked it\n slowly and chuckled to myself at\n how I had gotten the best of the\n little people. Surely it was not every\n mortal who could accomplish that. I\n had given them the wrong equation,\n of course. They would never get\n their spaceship to work now, and\n later, if they tried to spy out the\n right information I would take special\n measures to prevent it, for I had\n the advantage of being able to see\n them.",
"\"I am surprised from time to\n time to find myself here,\" I said.\n \"But continue.\"\n\n\n \"We had to come here,\" said\n Keech, \"to learn how to make a\n spaceship.\"\n\n\n \"A spaceship, now,\" I said, unconsciously\n adopting some of the\n old manner.\n\n\n \"Leprechauns are not really mechanically\n inclined,\" said Keech.\n \"Their major passions are music\n and laughter and mischief, as anyone\n knows.\"\n\n\n \"Myself included,\" I agreed.\n \"Then why do you need a spaceship?\"\n\n\n \"Well, if I may use an old expression,\n we've had a feelin' lately\n that we're not long for this world.\n Or let me put it this way. We feel\n the world isn't long for itself.\"",
"But the glade was silent, and they\n had all disappeared. They thought I\n wanted their crock of gold, of\n course. I'd be entitled to it if I could\n catch one and keep him. Or so the\n legends affirmed, though I've wondered\n often about the truth of them.\n But I was after no gold. I only wanted\n to hear the music of an Irish\n tongue. I was lonely here in America,\n even if I had latched on to a fine\n job of work for almost shamefully\n generous pay. You see, in a place as\n full of science as the nuclear propulsion\n center there is not much\n time for the old things. I very much\n wanted to talk to the little people.",
"\"There's another committee\n working on that. 'Tis not our concern.\n I was inclined to suggest the\n constellation Orion, which sounds\n as though it has a good Irish name,\n but I was hooted down. Be that as it\n may, my own job was to go into\n your nuclear center, learn how to\n make the ship, and proceed with its\n construction. Naturally, we didn't\n understand all of your high-flyin'\n science, but some of our people are\n pretty clever at gettin' up replicas\n of things.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you've been spying\n on us at the center all this time? Do\n you know, we often had the feeling\n we were being watched, but we\n thought it was by the Russians.\n There's one thing which puzzles\n me, though. If you've been constantly\n around us—and I'm still\n able to see the little people—why\n did I never see you before?\"",
"\"Do you understand? I'll give\n you until I count three to make an\n appearance! One!\"\n\n\n The glade remained deathly silent.\n\n\n \"Two!\"\n\n\n I thought I heard a stirring somewhere,\n as if a small, brittle twig had\n snapped in the underbrush.\n\n\n \"\nThree!\n\"\n\n\n And with that the little people\n suddenly appeared.\n\n\n The leader—he seemed more\n wizened and bent than before—approached\n me slowly and warily as I\n stood there. The others all followed\n at a safe distance. I smiled to reassure\n them and then waved my arm\n in a friendly gesture of greeting.\n\n\n \"Good morning,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Good morning,\" the foreman\n said with some caution. \"My name\n is Keech.\"",
"It was a most fascinating session.\n I had often wished for a true working\n model at the center, but no allowance\n had been inserted in the\n budget for it. Keech brought me\n paper and pencil and I talked with\n the aid of diagrams, as engineers\n are wont to do. Although the pencils\n were small and I had to hold\n them between thumb and forefinger,\n as you would a needle, I was\n able to make many sensible observations\n and even a few innovations.\n\n\n I came back again the next day—and\n every day for the following\n two weeks. It rained several times,\n but Keech and his people made a\n canopy of boughs and leaves and I\n was comfortable enough. Every once\n in a while someone from the town\n or the center itself would pass by,\n and stop to watch me. But of course\n they wouldn't see the leprechauns\n or anything the leprechauns had\n made, not being believers."
],
[
"\"And mine's Houlihan, as I've\n told you. Are you convinced now\n that I have no intention of doing\n you any injury?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Houlihan,\" said Keech,\n drawing a kind of peppered dignity\n up about himself, \"in such matters\n I am never fully convinced. After\n living for many centuries I am all\n too acutely aware of the perversity\n of human nature.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Well, as you will\n quickly see, all I want to do is\n talk.\" I nodded as I spoke, and sat\n down cross-legged upon the grass.\n\n\n \"Any Irishman wants to talk, Mr.\n Houlihan.\"\n\n\n \"And often that's\nall\nhe wants,\"\n I said. \"Sit down with me now, and\n stop staring as if I were a snake\n returned to the Island.\"",
"\"I can see you,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Ohhh!\" he said and put his\n palms to his cheekbones. \"Saints be\n with us! He's a believer! Run everybody—run\n for your lives!\"\n\n\n And they all began running, in\n as many directions as there were\n little souls. They began to scurry\n behind the trees and bushes, and a\n sloping embankment nearby.\n\n\n \"No, wait!\" I said. \"Don't go\n away! I'll not be hurting you!\"\n\n\n They continued to scurry.\n\n\n I knew what it was they feared.\n \"I don't intend catching one of\n you!\" I said. \"Come back, you daft\n little creatures!\"",
"\"A scientist, is it,\" said Keech.\n \"Well, now, that's very interesting.\"\n\n\n \"I'll make no apologies for it,\" I\n said.\n\n\n \"Oh, there's no need for apology,\"\n said Keech. \"Though in truth\n we prefer poets to scientists. But it\n has just now crossed my mind, Mr.\n Houlihan that you, being a scientist,\n might be of help to us.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"Well, I might try starting at the\n beginning,\" he replied.\n\n\n \"You might,\" I said. \"A man\n usually does.\"\n\n\n Keech took out his own pipe—a\n clay dudeen—and looked hopeful.\n I gave him a pinch of tobacco from\n my pouch. \"Well, now,\" he said,\n \"first of all you're no doubt surprised\n to find us here in America.\"",
"\"It may be we never crossed your\n path. It may be you can only see us\n when you're thinkin' of us, and of\n course truly believin' in us. I don't\n know—'tis a thing of the mind, and\n not important at the moment.\n What's important is for us to get\n our first ship to workin' properly\n and then we'll be on our way.\"\n\n\n \"You're determined to go.\"\n\n\n \"Truly we are, Mr. Houlihan.\n Now—to business. Just during\n these last few minutes a certain matter\n has crossed my mind. That's\n why I'm wastin' all this time with\n you, sir. You say you are a scientist.\"\n\n\n \"A nuclear engineer.\"\n\n\n \"Well, then, it may be that you\n can help us—now that you know\n we're here.\"\n\n\n \"Help you?\"",
"There was a leader, an older one\n with a crank face. He was beating\n the air with his arms and piping:\n \"Over here, now! All right, bring\n those electrical connections over\n here—and see you're not slow as\n treacle about it!\"\n\n\n There were perhaps fifty of the\n little people. I was more than startled\n by it, too. I had not seen little\n people in—oh, close to thirty years.\n I had seen them first as a boy of\n eight, and then, very briefly again,\n on my tenth birthday. And I had\n become convinced they could\nnever\nbe seen here in America. I had\n never seen them so busy, either.\n They were building something in\n the middle of the glade. It was long\n and shiny and upright and a little\n over five feet in height.",
"\"And now, Mr. Houlihan,\" said\n Keech, \"I'll see that a quantity of\n gold is delivered to your rooms tonight,\n and so keep my part of the\n bargain.\"\n\n\n \"I'll not be needing the gold,\" I\n said.\n\n\n Keech's eyebrows popped upward.\n \"What's this now?\"\n\n\n \"I'll not be needing it,\" I repeated.\n \"I don't feel it would be\n right to take it for a service of this\n sort.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" said Keech in surprise,\n and in some awe, too, \"well, now,\n musha Lord help us! 'Tis the first\n time I ever heard such a speech\n from a mortal.\" He turned to his\n people. \"We'll have three cheers\n now, do you hear, for Mr. Houlihan—friend\n of the little people as\n long as he shall live!\"",
"I walked over to the center of\n the glade where the curious shiny\n object was standing. It was as\n smooth as glass and shaped like a\n huge cigar. There were a pair of\n triangular fins down at the bottom,\n and stubby wings amidships. Of\n course it was a spaceship, or a\n miniature replica of one. I looked\n at it more closely. Everything seemed\n almost miraculously complete\n and workable.\n\n\n I shook my head in wonder, then\n stepped back from the spaceship\n and looked about the glade. I knew\n they were all hiding nearby, watching\n me apprehensively. I lifted my\n head to them.\n\n\n \"Listen to me now, little people!\"\n I called out. \"My name's\n Houlihan of the Roscommon Houlihans.\n I am descended from King\n Niall himself—or so at least my\n father used to say! Come on out\n now, and pass the time o' day!\"",
"I would halt work, pass the time\n of day, and then, in subtle fashion,\n send the intruder on his way. Keech\n and the little people just stood by\n and grinned all the while.\n\n\n At the end of sixteen days I had\n the entire problem all but whipped.\n It is not difficult to understand why.\n The working model and the fact\n that the small people with their\n quick eyes and clever fingers could\n spot all sorts of minute shortcomings\n was a great help. And I was\n hearing the old tongue and talking\n of the old things every day, and\n truly that went far to take the clutter\n out of my mind. I was no longer\n so lonely that I couldn't think properly.",
"\"Come along now, people!\" said\n this crotchety one, looking straight\n at me. \"Stop starin' and get to\n work! You'll not be needin' to\n mind that man standin' there! You\n know he can't see nor hear us!\"\n\n\n Oh, it was good to hear the rich\n old tongue again. I smiled, and the\n foreman of the leprechauns—if\n that's what he was—saw me smile\n and became stiff and alert for a moment,\n as though suspecting that perhaps\n I actually could see him. Then\n he shrugged and turned away, clearly\n deeming such a thing impossible.\n\n\n I said, \"Just a minute, friend,\n and I'll beg your pardon. It so happens\n I\ncan\nsee you.\"\n\n\n He whirled to face me again,\n staring open-mouthed. Then he\n said, \"What? What's that, now?\"",
"It was a most fascinating session.\n I had often wished for a true working\n model at the center, but no allowance\n had been inserted in the\n budget for it. Keech brought me\n paper and pencil and I talked with\n the aid of diagrams, as engineers\n are wont to do. Although the pencils\n were small and I had to hold\n them between thumb and forefinger,\n as you would a needle, I was\n able to make many sensible observations\n and even a few innovations.\n\n\n I came back again the next day—and\n every day for the following\n two weeks. It rained several times,\n but Keech and his people made a\n canopy of boughs and leaves and I\n was comfortable enough. Every once\n in a while someone from the town\n or the center itself would pass by,\n and stop to watch me. But of course\n they wouldn't see the leprechauns\n or anything the leprechauns had\n made, not being believers.",
"\"I am surprised from time to\n time to find myself here,\" I said.\n \"But continue.\"\n\n\n \"We had to come here,\" said\n Keech, \"to learn how to make a\n spaceship.\"\n\n\n \"A spaceship, now,\" I said, unconsciously\n adopting some of the\n old manner.\n\n\n \"Leprechauns are not really mechanically\n inclined,\" said Keech.\n \"Their major passions are music\n and laughter and mischief, as anyone\n knows.\"\n\n\n \"Myself included,\" I agreed.\n \"Then why do you need a spaceship?\"\n\n\n \"Well, if I may use an old expression,\n we've had a feelin' lately\n that we're not long for this world.\n Or let me put it this way. We feel\n the world isn't long for itself.\"",
"Then I waited, but they didn't\n answer. The little people always\n had been shy. Yet without reaching\n a decision in so many words I knew\n suddenly that I\nhad\nto talk to them.\n I'd come to the glen to work out a\n knotty problem, and I was up\n against a blank wall. Simply because\n I was so lonely that my mind had\n become clogged.\n\n\n I knew that if I could just once\n hear the old tongue again, and talk\n about the old things, I might be able\n to think the problem through to a\n satisfactory conclusion.\n\n\n So I stepped back to the tiny\n spaceship, and this time I struck it\n a resounding blow with my fist.\n \"Hear me now, little people! If you\n don't show yourselves and come out\n and talk to me, I'll wreck this spaceship\n from stem to stern!\"\nI heard only the leaves rustling\n softly.",
"And they cheered. And little tears\n crept into the corners of some of\n their turned-up eyes.\n\n\n We shook hands, all of us, and I\n left.\nI walked through the park, and\n back to the nuclear propulsion center.\n It was another cool, green morning\n with the leaves making only\n soft noises as the breezes came\n along. It smelled exactly like a\n wood I had known in Roscommon.\n\n\n And I lit my pipe and smoked it\n slowly and chuckled to myself at\n how I had gotten the best of the\n little people. Surely it was not every\n mortal who could accomplish that. I\n had given them the wrong equation,\n of course. They would never get\n their spaceship to work now, and\n later, if they tried to spy out the\n right information I would take special\n measures to prevent it, for I had\n the advantage of being able to see\n them.",
"Keech stared back without much\n expression, and said, \"I've been\n wondering how you guessed it was\n a spaceship. I was surprised enough\n when you told me you could see us\n but not overwhelmingly so. I've run\n into believers before who could see\n the little people. It happens every\n so often, though not as frequently\n as it did a century ago. But knowing\n a spaceship at first glance! Well, I\n must confess that\ndoes\nastonish\n me.\"\n\n\n \"And why wouldn't I know a\n spaceship when I see one?\" I said.\n \"It just so happens I'm a doctor of\n science.\"\n\n\n \"A doctor of science, now,\" said\n Keech.\n\n\n \"Invited by the American government\n to work on the first moon\n rocket here at the nuclear propulsion\n center. Since it's no secret I\n can advise you of it.\"",
"He shook his head and remained\n standing. \"Have your say, Mr.\n Houlihan. And afterward we'll appreciate\n it if you'll go away and\n leave us to our work.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now, your work,\" I said,\n and glanced at the spaceship.\n \"That's exactly what's got me curious.\"\n\n\n The others had edged in a bit\n now and were standing in a circle,\n intently staring at me. I took out my\n pipe. \"Why,\" I asked, \"would a\n group of little people be building a\n spaceship here in America—out in\n this lonely place?\"",
"I nodded and looked grave and\n kneaded my chin for a moment softly.\n \"Well, now, Keech,\" I said\n finally, \"why should I help you?\"\n\n\n \"Ha!\" said Keech, grinning, but\n not with humor, \"the avarice of\n humans! I knew it! Well, Mr. Houlihan,\n I'll give you reason enough.\n The pot o' gold, Mr. Houlihan!\"\n\n\n \"The one at the end of the rainbow?\"\n\n\n \"It's not at the end of the rainbow.\n That's a grandmother's tale.\n Nor is it actually in an earthen\n crock. But there's gold, all right,\n enough to make you rich for the\n rest of your life. And I'll make you\n a proposition.\"\n\n\n \"Go ahead.\"",
"Indeed, I had done a piece of\n work greatly to my advantage, and\n also to the advantage of humankind,\n and when a man can do the first and\n include the second as a fortunate byproduct\n it is a most happy accident.\n\n\n For if I had shown the little people\n how to make a spaceship they\n would have left our world. And\n this world, as long as it lasts—what\n would it be in that event? I ask you\n now, wouldn't we be even\nmore\nlikely to blow ourselves to Kingdom\n Come without the little people here\n for us to believe in every now and\n then?\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nFantastic Universe\nSeptember 1955.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"\"Do you understand? I'll give\n you until I count three to make an\n appearance! One!\"\n\n\n The glade remained deathly silent.\n\n\n \"Two!\"\n\n\n I thought I heard a stirring somewhere,\n as if a small, brittle twig had\n snapped in the underbrush.\n\n\n \"\nThree!\n\"\n\n\n And with that the little people\n suddenly appeared.\n\n\n The leader—he seemed more\n wizened and bent than before—approached\n me slowly and warily as I\n stood there. The others all followed\n at a safe distance. I smiled to reassure\n them and then waved my arm\n in a friendly gesture of greeting.\n\n\n \"Good morning,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Good morning,\" the foreman\n said with some caution. \"My name\n is Keech.\"",
"noises. It was in a park near the\n nuclear propulsion center—a cool,\n green spot, with the leaves all telling\n each other to hush, be quiet,\n and the soft breeze stirring them up\n again. I had known precisely such\n a secluded little green sanctuary just\n over the hill from Mr. Riordan's\n farm when I was a boy.",
"Perhaps you had better take my\n word for it that without this equation—correctly\n stated, mind you—mankind\n would be well advised not\n to make a first trip to the moon.\n And all this talk of coefficients and\n equations sits strangely, you might\n say, upon the tongue of a man\n named Kevin Francis Houlihan.\n But I am, after all, a scientist. If I\n had not been a specialist in my field\n I would hardly have found myself\n engaged in vital research at the\n center.\n\n\n Anyway, I heard these little\n noises in the park. They sounded\n like small working sounds, blending\n in eerily mysterious fashion with a\n chorus of small voices. I thought at\n first it might be children at play,\n but then at the time I was a bit\n absent-minded. I tiptoed to the edge\n of the trees, not wanting to deprive\n any small scalawags of their pleasure,\n and peered out between the\n branches. And what do you suppose\n I saw? Not children, but a\n group of little people, hard at work."
]
] |
train
|
60713
|
[
"What is a Nilly?",
"What happened to the passengers of the Weblor I?",
"How long will it take the Weblor II to make the round trip to the new colony and back?",
"When did the Nilly first strike?",
"What happened to Mrs. Failright?",
"What happened to Mr. Palugger?",
"How long did it take for the passengers to form a council?",
"How long did it take for the passengers to form a police force?",
"How many times has Critten been a Nilly?"
] |
[
[
"A Nilly is a trained operative used by colony transport ships to keep the colonists focused on a common enemy. ",
"A Nilly is a person who works on the crew on an interstellar ship.",
"A Nilly is a black ops agent.",
"A Nilly is a person, who is able to come back from the dead, but like Lazarus, not like a zombie."
],
[
"No one knows what happened. The frequency of the Weblor I was lost several months after take off.",
"The passengers started warring with each other and the crew.",
"Space pirates boarded the ship and shoved the passengers out of the airlock.",
"The Nilly's killed them in their sleep and ate them."
],
[
"24 months",
"42 months",
"30 months",
"36 months"
],
[
"One month after leaving Earth",
"Two weeks after leaving Earth",
"Two months after leaving Earth",
"Seven weeks after leaving Earth"
],
[
"She was startled.",
"She was raped.",
"She was attacked.",
"She was robbed."
],
[
"He was pushed out of the airlock.",
"He was beaten to death.",
"The man in the red mask shot him.",
"He died of his illness."
],
[
"One month",
"Two weeks",
"Two months",
"Ten days"
],
[
"94 days",
"79 days",
"31 days",
"52 days"
],
[
"8",
"5",
"7",
"6"
]
] |
[
1,
2,
1,
1,
1,
4,
3,
2,
3
] |
[
1,
0,
1,
1,
1,
1,
0,
0,
0
] |
[
[
"Critten sighed. \"And I'll have to be caught again.\"\nYes, we're anonymous, nameless, we Nillys, for that's what we call\n each other, and are a theme, with variations, in the endless stretches\n of deep space, objects of hatred and contempt, professional heels,\n dying once a trip when the time is ripe, antidote to boredom, and we'll\n ply our trade, our little tragedies, on a thousand ships bringing\n humanity to new worlds.",
"\"Sure,\" Critten said. \"You colonists got the easy life as passengers,\n just sitting around. I had to work my head off keeping records for you\n lazy bastards.\"\n\n\n The verdict was, of course, death.\n\n\n They executed Harrel Critten on the morning of the 270th day with\n blasts from six stunners supplied with full power. It was witnessed\n by a great crowd in the assembly hall. A detail from the ship's crew\n disposed of his body through a chute.\n\n\n It was all duly recorded in Keith Ellason's notebooks.\nDying is easy for a Nilly. Especially if it's arranged for beforehand,\n which it always is.\nThe\nWeblor II\nwas only one day out of orbit when Captain Branson sent\n for Ellason and introduced him to the executed man.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" Critten said, grinning from ear to ear.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nSure I'm a Nilly, and I've died seven times, always in the blackness\n of the outer reaches, and I'm not alone, although there aren't very\n many of us, never were.\nIt made sense. Interstellar was new and they wanted him on the ship\n because he was a trained observer. They wanted facts, not gibberish.\n But to ask a man to give up two years of his life—well, that was\n asking a lot. Two years in a sardine can. Still, it had an appeal Keith\n Ellason knew he couldn't deny, a newsman's joy of the clean beat, a\n planetary system far afield, a closeup view of the universe, history in\n the making.\n\n\n Interstellar Chief Rexroad knocked the dottle from his pipe in a tray,\n saying, \"Transworld Press is willing to let you have a leave of\n abscence, if you're interested.\"",
"\"I suppose that's problematical,\" Phipps said, \"but I think you will.\n Captain Branson and his fifty crewmen want to return as badly as you\n do.\" He grinned. \"You can write that novel you're always talking about\n on your return trip on the\nWeblor II\n.\"\nBeing a Nilly is important, probably as important as running the ship,\n and I think it is this thought that keeps us satisfied, willing to be\n what we are.\nThe\nWeblor II\nhad been built in space, as had its predecessor, the\nWeblor I\n, at a tremendous cost. Basically, it was an instrument\n which would open distant vistas to colonization, reducing the",
"The captain reported that his search had been equally fruitless.\n At another assembly the following day it was decided to make the\n inspection teams permanent, to await further moves on the part of Red\n Mask. The Quadrant Council held periodic meetings to set up a method of\n trial for him when he was caught. It was all recorded in the newsletter\n and by Keith Ellason.\nWe Nillys know about hate and about violence. We know too that where\n there is hate there is violence, and where there is violence there is\n death.\nDuring sleep time on the seventy-ninth day Barbara Stoneman, awakened\n by a strange sound, sat up in the bed of her compartment to find a\n man in a red mask in her room. Her cries brought neighbors into the\n corridor. The flight of the man was witnessed by many, and several men\n tried to stop him. But the intruder was light on his feet and fast. He\n escaped.\n\n\n The Quadrant Council confronted the captain, demanding weapons.",
"Ellason left, feeling uneasy. If he were Branson, he'd initiate an\n investigation, if nothing else than to prove the crew guiltless. Why\n couldn't Branson see the wisdom of setting an example for the colonists?\nAs a Nilly, I knew that space breeds hate. There is a seed of\n malevolence in every man. It sometimes blossoms out among the stars. On\n the\nWeblor II\nit was ready for ripening.\nRaymond Palugger was killed in the ship's hospital on the sixty-first\n day. Palugger, a Fourth Quadrant passenger, had complained of feeling\n ill, had been hospitalized with a diagnosis of ileus. He had put his\n money belt in the drawer of the small stand beside his bed. A man\n in a red mask was seen hurrying from the hospital area, and a staff\n investigation revealed that Palugger had died trying to prevent the\n theft of the belt.",
"And so, Ellason observed in his notebook, are wars created.\nSeen in space, stars are unmoving, silent, sterile bright eyes ever\n watchful and accusing. To men unused to it, such a sight numbs,\n compresses, stultifies. He introduces a countermeasure, proof he\n exists, which is any overt act, sometimes violent.\nOn the forty-fifth day June Failright, the young wife of one of the\n passenger meteorologists, ran screaming down one of the long corridors\n of the Third Quadrant. She told the captain she had been attacked in\n her compartment while her husband was in the ship's library. She was\n taken to one of the ship's doctors, who confirmed it.\n\n\n She said the culprit was a husky man wearing a red rubber mask, and\n though her description of what he had done did not appear in the story\n in the newsletter, it lost no time in penetrating every compartment of\n the ship.",
"\"What does he want that stuff for?\" Casey Stromberg, a passenger\n doctor, asked. \"I can see him taking my narcotics, my doctor's kit—but\n my dead wife's picture? That I don't understand.\"\n\n\n It was the same with others. \"The man's insane, Mr. Ellason. Positively\n insane.\" Many people said it.\n\n\n The council issued orders that all passengers from now on would be\n required to lock their compartments at all times. More guns were\n obtained from the captain. More policemen were appointed.\n\n\n Ellason was busy noting it all in his book. It became filled with\n jottings about innocent people being accidentally stunned when\n trigger-happy policemen thought their movements suspicious, about one\n man's suspicion of another and the ensuing search of compartments,\n people who saw Red Mask here, saw him there. Hardly a day went by\n without some new development.",
"Attendant to taking notes on this incident, Ellason noted a strange\n thing. Janssen lived in that part of the ship known as the First\n Quadrant, and those who lived in that quadrant—more than seven hundred\n men, women and children—felt that the thief must surely live in\n Quadrant Two or Four. Elias Cromley, who had the compartment next to\n Janssen's, sounded the consensus when he said, \"Surely a man wouldn't\n steal from his own quadrant, now would he, Mr. Ellason?\"",
"\"Oh, there'll be a trial, Mr. Ellason, but you don't think any jury'd\n let him live after all the things he's done, do you?\"\nRed Mask was stunned in Quadrant Four in a corridor by a policeman\n named Terryl Placer on the 201st day. The criminal was carried to the\n assembly room surrounded by guards, for he surely would have been\n mauled, if not killed, by angry colonists who crowded around. In the\n assembly hall his mask was whipped off. The crowd gasped. Nobody knew\n him.\n\n\n Ellason's first thought was that he must be a stowaway, but then he\n remembered the face, and Captain Branson, who came to have a look at\n him, unhappily admitted the man was a member of the crew. His name was\n Harrel Critten and he was a record keeper third class.\n\n\n \"Well, Critten,\" Branson roared at him, \"what have you got to say for\n yourself?\"",
"\"Oh, yes, Mr. Ellason, we're going to get him,\" said Tilbury, now chief\n of police, cracking his knuckles, his eyes glowing at the thought.\n \"We're bound to get him. We've got things worked out to the finest\n detail. He won't be able to get through our fingers now. Just let him\n make so much as a move.\"\n\n\n \"And what will you do when you get him?\"\n\n\n \"Kill him,\" Tilbury said, licking his lips, his eyes glowing more\n fiercely than ever.\n\n\n \"Without a trial?\"",
"\"Are you out of your minds?\" Branson exclaimed.\n\n\n Tom Tilbury, Fourth Quadrant leader, said, \"We want to set up a police\n force, Captain. We want stunners.\"\n\n\n \"There's no law against it,\" Branson said, \"but it's a rule of mine\n that no weapons are to be issued en route.\"\n\n\n \"If we had had a gun, we'd have got Red Mask,\" Tilbury said.\n\n\n \"And I might have a murder on my conscience.\"\n\n\n Tilbury said, \"We've also thought of that. Suppose you supply us with\n half-power stunners? That way we can stun but not kill.\"\n\n\n They got their guns. Now there were twenty-four policemen on duty in\n the corridors—eight on at a time. Ellason observed that for the first\n time the passengers seemed relaxed.",
"The Quadrant Council congratulated itself. The passengers were proud\n of themselves. A special congratulatory message from Captain Branson\n appeared one day in the Bulletin newsletter.\n\n\n The colonists settled down to living out the rest of the voyage until\n the landing on Antheon.\n\n\n But on the 170th day calamity struck. Red Mask appropriated one of the\n stunners, made his way down one whole corridor section in Quadrant Two,\n put occupants to sleep as he went, taking many articles of value and\n leaving disorder behind.\n\n\n Ellason interviewed as many victims as he could, noted it all in\n his book. The things taken were keepsakes, photographs and items of\n personal value. It seemed to be the work of a madman. If Red Mask\n wanted to make everyone furious, he certainly succeeded.",
"Let Red Mask move against armed men, they said.\n\n\n Yeah, let him see what happens now.\n\n\n Red Mask did.\nOn the 101st day he was seen in a corridor in Quadrant Four. Emil\n Pierce, policeman on duty, managed to squeeze off several shots at his\n retreating figure.\n\n\n Red Mask was seen again on the 120th day, on the 135th day, and the\n 157th day. He was seen, shot at, but not hit. He was also unable to\n commit any crime.\n\n\n We've got him on the run, the colonists said.\n\n\n He's afraid to do anything, now that we've got police protection, they\n said smugly.",
"Branson asked him to describe the man.\n\n\n \"Oh, he was about six feet tall, stocky build, and he wore a red rubber\n mask that covered his head completely.\"\n\n\n \"Didn't you think that was important?\" Branson asked in an outraged\n voice. \"A man wearing a red mask?\"\n\n\n Dievers shrugged. \"This is a spaceship. How would I know whether a red\n mask—or a blue or green one—does or doesn't belong on a spaceship?\"\n\n\n Although Dievers' account appeared in the newsletter, it was largely\n discounted.\n\n\n \"If it is true,\" Branson told Ellason, \"the theft must be the work of\n a psychotic. But I don't believe Jamieson Dievers. It may well be he's\n the psychotic.\" He snorted. \"Red rubber mask! I think I'll have Dievers\n put through psychiatry.\"",
"\"I figured as much,\" Ellason said. \"I've been doing a lot of thinking.\"\n\n\n \"You're perhaps a little too good as an observer,\" Branson said. \"Or\n maybe it was because you really weren't one of the colonists. But no\n matter, Critten did a good job. He was trained by an old friend of mine\n for this job, Gelthorpe Nill. Nill used to be in counter-espionage when\n there were wars.\"\n\n\n \"You were excellent,\" Ellason said.\n\n\n \"Can't say I enjoyed the role,\" said Critten, \"but I think it saved\n lives.\"\n\n\n \"Let me get this straight. Interstellar thought that it was idleness\n and boredom that caused the killings on the\nWeblor I\n, so they had you\n trained to be a scapegoat. Is that right?\"",
"\"Let me put it differently. Let me say that you will not understand why\n I say that until the journey ends.\" He smiled. \"Perhaps I shouldn't\n have mentioned it.\"\nEllason left the captain's quarters with an odd taste in his mouth. Now\n why had Branson said that? Why hadn't Rexroad or Phipps said something,\n if it was important?\n\n\n He made himself comfortable in his seven-foot-by-seven-foot cubicle,\n which is to say he dropped on his bed, found it more comfortable than\n he thought it would be, put his arms behind his head, stared at the\n ceiling. Metal walls, no windows, one floor vent, one ceiling vent,\n and a solitary ceiling molding tube-light. This would be his home for\n a year, just as there were homes like it for three thousand others,\n except that the family rooms would be larger. His quarters were near\n the front of the spike near the officers' quarters.",
"Janssen's case contained vegetable and flower seeds—thousands of\n them, according to the Captain's Bulletin, the ship's daily newsletter\n which went to all hands and passengers. In the Bulletin the captain\n appealed to the thief to return the case to Mr. Janssen. He said it\n was significant that all en route had passed stability tests, and that\n it was to the ship's discredit that someone with criminal tendencies\n should have been permitted aboard.",
"The colonists quieted. Benjamin Simpson, one of the older men, was\n elected president of the newly formed Quadrant Council. One man from\n each of the quadrants was named to serve under him. Each of these men\n in turn selected five others from his own group.\n\n\n Those assembled waited in the hall while each team of six inspected\n the compartments of the others. These compartments were then locked,\n everyone returned to his compartment, and the larger search was\n conducted. It took twenty hours.\n\n\n No mask was found. No mask, no case, no money, no man.",
"Critten nodded. \"When great numbers are being transported, they are apt\n to magnify each little event because so little happens. It was my job\n to see that they directed none of their venom against each other or the\n crew, only toward me.\"\n\n\n Branson smiled. \"It made the time pass quickly and interestingly for\n the passengers.\"\n\n\n \"To say nothing of me,\" Critten said.\n\n\n \"And you, Mr. Ellason, were along to observe it all,\" Captain Branson\n put in. \"Interstellar wanted an accurate picture of this. If it worked,\n they told me they'd use it on other trips to Antheon.\"\n\n\n Ellason nodded. \"No time for brooding, for differences of opinion on\n small matters. Just time to hate Mr. Critten. Unanimously.\"\n\n\n \"Probably,\" Critten said, \"you are wondering about the execution.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally.\""
],
[
"The\nWeblor I\nhad taken off on the first trip to Antheon five years\n before with a thousand families, reached the planet with less than five\n hundred surviving colonists. Upon the return to Earth a year later, the\n crew's report of suffering and chaos during the year's outgoing voyage\n was twisted, distorted and fragmentary. Ellason remembered it well. The\n decision of Interstellar was that the colonists started a revolution\n far out in space, that it was fanned by the ignorance of Captain\n Sessions in dealing with such matters.\n\n\n \"Space affects men in a peculiar way,\" Phipps said. \"We have conquered\n the problem of small groups in space—witness the discovery of\n Antheon, for example—but when there are large groups, control is more\n difficult.\"\n\n\n \"Sessions,\" Rexroad said, \"was a bully. The trouble started at about\n the halfway point. It ended with passengers engaging in open warfare\n with each other and the crew. Sessions was lucky to escape with his\n life.\"",
"Ellason left, feeling uneasy. If he were Branson, he'd initiate an\n investigation, if nothing else than to prove the crew guiltless. Why\n couldn't Branson see the wisdom of setting an example for the colonists?\nAs a Nilly, I knew that space breeds hate. There is a seed of\n malevolence in every man. It sometimes blossoms out among the stars. On\n the\nWeblor II\nit was ready for ripening.\nRaymond Palugger was killed in the ship's hospital on the sixty-first\n day. Palugger, a Fourth Quadrant passenger, had complained of feeling\n ill, had been hospitalized with a diagnosis of ileus. He had put his\n money belt in the drawer of the small stand beside his bed. A man\n in a red mask was seen hurrying from the hospital area, and a staff\n investigation revealed that Palugger had died trying to prevent the\n theft of the belt.",
"Captain Branson did not wait for the newsletter. Through the ship's\n speaker system, he reported that Palugger had a fortune in credits\n in the belt and had died of a severe beating. He said that since the\n incident occurred in the staff section of the ship, his crew would be\n forced to submit to a thorough inspection in an effort to find the\n mask, the seed case, the money and the man.\n\n\n \"I will not countenance such an act by a crewman,\" Branson said. \"If\n and when he is found, he will be severely dealt with. But he might not\n be a member of the crew. I am ordering an assembly of all passengers at\n nine tomorrow morning in the auditorium. I will speak to you all then.\"\nFaces were angry, tongues were sharp at the meeting, eyes suspicious\n and tempers short. Above it all was the overpowering presence of\n Captain Branson speaking to them.",
"\"Sure,\" Critten said. \"You colonists got the easy life as passengers,\n just sitting around. I had to work my head off keeping records for you\n lazy bastards.\"\n\n\n The verdict was, of course, death.\n\n\n They executed Harrel Critten on the morning of the 270th day with\n blasts from six stunners supplied with full power. It was witnessed\n by a great crowd in the assembly hall. A detail from the ship's crew\n disposed of his body through a chute.\n\n\n It was all duly recorded in Keith Ellason's notebooks.\nDying is easy for a Nilly. Especially if it's arranged for beforehand,\n which it always is.\nThe\nWeblor II\nwas only one day out of orbit when Captain Branson sent\n for Ellason and introduced him to the executed man.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" Critten said, grinning from ear to ear.",
"\"I figured as much,\" Ellason said. \"I've been doing a lot of thinking.\"\n\n\n \"You're perhaps a little too good as an observer,\" Branson said. \"Or\n maybe it was because you really weren't one of the colonists. But no\n matter, Critten did a good job. He was trained by an old friend of mine\n for this job, Gelthorpe Nill. Nill used to be in counter-espionage when\n there were wars.\"\n\n\n \"You were excellent,\" Ellason said.\n\n\n \"Can't say I enjoyed the role,\" said Critten, \"but I think it saved\n lives.\"\n\n\n \"Let me get this straight. Interstellar thought that it was idleness\n and boredom that caused the killings on the\nWeblor I\n, so they had you\n trained to be a scapegoat. Is that right?\"",
"The Quadrant Council congratulated itself. The passengers were proud\n of themselves. A special congratulatory message from Captain Branson\n appeared one day in the Bulletin newsletter.\n\n\n The colonists settled down to living out the rest of the voyage until\n the landing on Antheon.\n\n\n But on the 170th day calamity struck. Red Mask appropriated one of the\n stunners, made his way down one whole corridor section in Quadrant Two,\n put occupants to sleep as he went, taking many articles of value and\n leaving disorder behind.\n\n\n Ellason interviewed as many victims as he could, noted it all in\n his book. The things taken were keepsakes, photographs and items of\n personal value. It seemed to be the work of a madman. If Red Mask\n wanted to make everyone furious, he certainly succeeded.",
"\"I suppose that's problematical,\" Phipps said, \"but I think you will.\n Captain Branson and his fifty crewmen want to return as badly as you\n do.\" He grinned. \"You can write that novel you're always talking about\n on your return trip on the\nWeblor II\n.\"\nBeing a Nilly is important, probably as important as running the ship,\n and I think it is this thought that keeps us satisfied, willing to be\n what we are.\nThe\nWeblor II\nhad been built in space, as had its predecessor, the\nWeblor I\n, at a tremendous cost. Basically, it was an instrument\n which would open distant vistas to colonization, reducing the",
"Ellason had to smile at that. What did Captain Branson think of those\n colonists who killed each other on the\nWeblor I\n? They had passed\n stability tests too. This, then, was what happened when you took three\n thousand strangers and stuck them in a can for a year.\nWhen Ellason saw Branson about it, the captain said, \"Of course I\n realize it takes only a little thing like this to set things off. I\n know people get tired of seeing each other, playing the same tapes,\n looking at the stars from the observation dome, walking down the same\n corridors, reading the same books, eating the same meals, though God\n knows we try to vary it as much as we can. Space creates rough edges.\n But the point is, we know all this, and knowing it, we shouldn't let it\n happen. We've got to find that thief.\"\n\n\n \"What would he want seeds for? Have you thought of that?\"\n\n\n \"Of course. They'd have real value on Antheon.\"",
"\"It is not my desire to interfere in passenger affairs,\" he said.\n \"Insofar as the ship is concerned, it is my duty to make certain no\n crewman is guilty. This I am doing. But my crew is not and cannot be\n a police force for you. It is up to you people to police and protect\n yourselves.\"\n\n\n \"How can we protect ourselves without stunners?\" one colonist called\n out.\n\n\n \"Has Red Mask a gun?\" Branson retorted. \"It seems to me you have a\n better weapon than any gun.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"This ship is only so wide, so long and so deep. If every inch is\n searched, you'll find your man. He has to be somewhere aboard.\"",
"And so, Ellason observed in his notebook, are wars created.\nSeen in space, stars are unmoving, silent, sterile bright eyes ever\n watchful and accusing. To men unused to it, such a sight numbs,\n compresses, stultifies. He introduces a countermeasure, proof he\n exists, which is any overt act, sometimes violent.\nOn the forty-fifth day June Failright, the young wife of one of the\n passenger meteorologists, ran screaming down one of the long corridors\n of the Third Quadrant. She told the captain she had been attacked in\n her compartment while her husband was in the ship's library. She was\n taken to one of the ship's doctors, who confirmed it.\n\n\n She said the culprit was a husky man wearing a red rubber mask, and\n though her description of what he had done did not appear in the story\n in the newsletter, it lost no time in penetrating every compartment of\n the ship.",
"Critten nodded. \"When great numbers are being transported, they are apt\n to magnify each little event because so little happens. It was my job\n to see that they directed none of their venom against each other or the\n crew, only toward me.\"\n\n\n Branson smiled. \"It made the time pass quickly and interestingly for\n the passengers.\"\n\n\n \"To say nothing of me,\" Critten said.\n\n\n \"And you, Mr. Ellason, were along to observe it all,\" Captain Branson\n put in. \"Interstellar wanted an accurate picture of this. If it worked,\n they told me they'd use it on other trips to Antheon.\"\n\n\n Ellason nodded. \"No time for brooding, for differences of opinion on\n small matters. Just time to hate Mr. Critten. Unanimously.\"\n\n\n \"Probably,\" Critten said, \"you are wondering about the execution.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally.\"",
"\"Are you out of your minds?\" Branson exclaimed.\n\n\n Tom Tilbury, Fourth Quadrant leader, said, \"We want to set up a police\n force, Captain. We want stunners.\"\n\n\n \"There's no law against it,\" Branson said, \"but it's a rule of mine\n that no weapons are to be issued en route.\"\n\n\n \"If we had had a gun, we'd have got Red Mask,\" Tilbury said.\n\n\n \"And I might have a murder on my conscience.\"\n\n\n Tilbury said, \"We've also thought of that. Suppose you supply us with\n half-power stunners? That way we can stun but not kill.\"\n\n\n They got their guns. Now there were twenty-four policemen on duty in\n the corridors—eight on at a time. Ellason observed that for the first\n time the passengers seemed relaxed.",
"\"As I recall,\" Ellason said, \"there was something about stunners.\"\n\n\n Phipps rubbed his chin. \"No weapons were allowed on the ship, but you\n must remember the colonists were selected for their intelligence and\n resourcefulness. They utilized these attributes to set up weapon shops\n to arm themselves.\"\n\n\n \"The second trip is history,\" Rexroad said. \"And a puzzle.\"\nEllason nodded. \"The ship disappeared.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. We gave control to the colonists.\"\n\n\n \"Assuming no accident in space,\" Phipps said, \"it was a wrong decision.\n They probably took over the ship.\"\n\n\n \"And now,\" Ellason said, \"you're going to try again.\"",
"Critten sighed. \"And I'll have to be caught again.\"\nYes, we're anonymous, nameless, we Nillys, for that's what we call\n each other, and are a theme, with variations, in the endless stretches\n of deep space, objects of hatred and contempt, professional heels,\n dying once a trip when the time is ripe, antidote to boredom, and we'll\n ply our trade, our little tragedies, on a thousand ships bringing\n humanity to new worlds.",
"\"Oh, there'll be a trial, Mr. Ellason, but you don't think any jury'd\n let him live after all the things he's done, do you?\"\nRed Mask was stunned in Quadrant Four in a corridor by a policeman\n named Terryl Placer on the 201st day. The criminal was carried to the\n assembly room surrounded by guards, for he surely would have been\n mauled, if not killed, by angry colonists who crowded around. In the\n assembly hall his mask was whipped off. The crowd gasped. Nobody knew\n him.\n\n\n Ellason's first thought was that he must be a stowaway, but then he\n remembered the face, and Captain Branson, who came to have a look at\n him, unhappily admitted the man was a member of the crew. His name was\n Harrel Critten and he was a record keeper third class.\n\n\n \"Well, Critten,\" Branson roared at him, \"what have you got to say for\n yourself?\"",
"He knew Secretary Phipps from years of contacting, and now Phipps said,\n \"Personally, I don't want to see anybody else on the job. You've got a\n fine record in this sort of thing.\"\n\n\n Keith Ellason smiled, but just barely. \"You should have called me for\n the first trip.\"\n\n\n Phipps nodded. \"I wish we had had you on the\nWeblor I\n.\"\n\n\n \"Crewmen,\" Rexroad said, \"make poor reporters.\"",
"\"What does he want that stuff for?\" Casey Stromberg, a passenger\n doctor, asked. \"I can see him taking my narcotics, my doctor's kit—but\n my dead wife's picture? That I don't understand.\"\n\n\n It was the same with others. \"The man's insane, Mr. Ellason. Positively\n insane.\" Many people said it.\n\n\n The council issued orders that all passengers from now on would be\n required to lock their compartments at all times. More guns were\n obtained from the captain. More policemen were appointed.\n\n\n Ellason was busy noting it all in his book. It became filled with\n jottings about innocent people being accidentally stunned when\n trigger-happy policemen thought their movements suspicious, about one\n man's suspicion of another and the ensuing search of compartments,\n people who saw Red Mask here, saw him there. Hardly a day went by\n without some new development.",
"Branson asked him to describe the man.\n\n\n \"Oh, he was about six feet tall, stocky build, and he wore a red rubber\n mask that covered his head completely.\"\n\n\n \"Didn't you think that was important?\" Branson asked in an outraged\n voice. \"A man wearing a red mask?\"\n\n\n Dievers shrugged. \"This is a spaceship. How would I know whether a red\n mask—or a blue or green one—does or doesn't belong on a spaceship?\"\n\n\n Although Dievers' account appeared in the newsletter, it was largely\n discounted.\n\n\n \"If it is true,\" Branson told Ellason, \"the theft must be the work of\n a psychotic. But I don't believe Jamieson Dievers. It may well be he's\n the psychotic.\" He snorted. \"Red rubber mask! I think I'll have Dievers\n put through psychiatry.\"",
"\"Gentlemen,\" Branson said at last, as Ellason knew he would, \"I want\n to introduce Keith Ellason, whose presence Interstellar has impressed\n upon us. On loan from Transworld, he will have an observer status.\" He\n introduced him to the others. All of them seemed friendly; Ellason\n thought it was a good staff.\n\n\n Branson detained him after the others had gone. \"One thing, Mr.\n Ellason. To make it easier for you, I suggest you think of this journey\n strictly from the observer viewpoint. There will be no story for\n Transworld at the end.\"\n\n\n Ellason was startled. While he had considered the possibility, he had\n not dwelt on it. Now it loomed large in his mind. \"I don't understand,\n Captain Branson. It seems to me—\"",
"Rexroad said very gravely, \"We've got the finest captain in\n Interplanetary. Harvey Branson. No doubt you've heard of him. He's\n spent his life in our own system, and he's handpicking his own crew. We\n have also raised prerequisites for applicants. We don't think anything\n is going to happen, but if it does, we want to get an impersonal,\n unprejudiced view. That's where you come in. You do the observing, the\n reporting. We'll evaluate it on your return.\"\n\n\n \"If I return,\" said Ellason."
],
[
"The\nWeblor I\nhad taken off on the first trip to Antheon five years\n before with a thousand families, reached the planet with less than five\n hundred surviving colonists. Upon the return to Earth a year later, the\n crew's report of suffering and chaos during the year's outgoing voyage\n was twisted, distorted and fragmentary. Ellason remembered it well. The\n decision of Interstellar was that the colonists started a revolution\n far out in space, that it was fanned by the ignorance of Captain\n Sessions in dealing with such matters.\n\n\n \"Space affects men in a peculiar way,\" Phipps said. \"We have conquered\n the problem of small groups in space—witness the discovery of\n Antheon, for example—but when there are large groups, control is more\n difficult.\"\n\n\n \"Sessions,\" Rexroad said, \"was a bully. The trouble started at about\n the halfway point. It ended with passengers engaging in open warfare\n with each other and the crew. Sessions was lucky to escape with his\n life.\"",
"\"I suppose that's problematical,\" Phipps said, \"but I think you will.\n Captain Branson and his fifty crewmen want to return as badly as you\n do.\" He grinned. \"You can write that novel you're always talking about\n on your return trip on the\nWeblor II\n.\"\nBeing a Nilly is important, probably as important as running the ship,\n and I think it is this thought that keeps us satisfied, willing to be\n what we are.\nThe\nWeblor II\nhad been built in space, as had its predecessor, the\nWeblor I\n, at a tremendous cost. Basically, it was an instrument\n which would open distant vistas to colonization, reducing the",
"\"Sure,\" Critten said. \"You colonists got the easy life as passengers,\n just sitting around. I had to work my head off keeping records for you\n lazy bastards.\"\n\n\n The verdict was, of course, death.\n\n\n They executed Harrel Critten on the morning of the 270th day with\n blasts from six stunners supplied with full power. It was witnessed\n by a great crowd in the assembly hall. A detail from the ship's crew\n disposed of his body through a chute.\n\n\n It was all duly recorded in Keith Ellason's notebooks.\nDying is easy for a Nilly. Especially if it's arranged for beforehand,\n which it always is.\nThe\nWeblor II\nwas only one day out of orbit when Captain Branson sent\n for Ellason and introduced him to the executed man.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" Critten said, grinning from ear to ear.",
"Ellason had to smile at that. What did Captain Branson think of those\n colonists who killed each other on the\nWeblor I\n? They had passed\n stability tests too. This, then, was what happened when you took three\n thousand strangers and stuck them in a can for a year.\nWhen Ellason saw Branson about it, the captain said, \"Of course I\n realize it takes only a little thing like this to set things off. I\n know people get tired of seeing each other, playing the same tapes,\n looking at the stars from the observation dome, walking down the same\n corridors, reading the same books, eating the same meals, though God\n knows we try to vary it as much as we can. Space creates rough edges.\n But the point is, we know all this, and knowing it, we shouldn't let it\n happen. We've got to find that thief.\"\n\n\n \"What would he want seeds for? Have you thought of that?\"\n\n\n \"Of course. They'd have real value on Antheon.\"",
"\"As I recall,\" Ellason said, \"there was something about stunners.\"\n\n\n Phipps rubbed his chin. \"No weapons were allowed on the ship, but you\n must remember the colonists were selected for their intelligence and\n resourcefulness. They utilized these attributes to set up weapon shops\n to arm themselves.\"\n\n\n \"The second trip is history,\" Rexroad said. \"And a puzzle.\"\nEllason nodded. \"The ship disappeared.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. We gave control to the colonists.\"\n\n\n \"Assuming no accident in space,\" Phipps said, \"it was a wrong decision.\n They probably took over the ship.\"\n\n\n \"And now,\" Ellason said, \"you're going to try again.\"",
"Ellason left, feeling uneasy. If he were Branson, he'd initiate an\n investigation, if nothing else than to prove the crew guiltless. Why\n couldn't Branson see the wisdom of setting an example for the colonists?\nAs a Nilly, I knew that space breeds hate. There is a seed of\n malevolence in every man. It sometimes blossoms out among the stars. On\n the\nWeblor II\nit was ready for ripening.\nRaymond Palugger was killed in the ship's hospital on the sixty-first\n day. Palugger, a Fourth Quadrant passenger, had complained of feeling\n ill, had been hospitalized with a diagnosis of ileus. He had put his\n money belt in the drawer of the small stand beside his bed. A man\n in a red mask was seen hurrying from the hospital area, and a staff\n investigation revealed that Palugger had died trying to prevent the\n theft of the belt.",
"\"I figured as much,\" Ellason said. \"I've been doing a lot of thinking.\"\n\n\n \"You're perhaps a little too good as an observer,\" Branson said. \"Or\n maybe it was because you really weren't one of the colonists. But no\n matter, Critten did a good job. He was trained by an old friend of mine\n for this job, Gelthorpe Nill. Nill used to be in counter-espionage when\n there were wars.\"\n\n\n \"You were excellent,\" Ellason said.\n\n\n \"Can't say I enjoyed the role,\" said Critten, \"but I think it saved\n lives.\"\n\n\n \"Let me get this straight. Interstellar thought that it was idleness\n and boredom that caused the killings on the\nWeblor I\n, so they had you\n trained to be a scapegoat. Is that right?\"",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nSure I'm a Nilly, and I've died seven times, always in the blackness\n of the outer reaches, and I'm not alone, although there aren't very\n many of us, never were.\nIt made sense. Interstellar was new and they wanted him on the ship\n because he was a trained observer. They wanted facts, not gibberish.\n But to ask a man to give up two years of his life—well, that was\n asking a lot. Two years in a sardine can. Still, it had an appeal Keith\n Ellason knew he couldn't deny, a newsman's joy of the clean beat, a\n planetary system far afield, a closeup view of the universe, history in\n the making.\n\n\n Interstellar Chief Rexroad knocked the dottle from his pipe in a tray,\n saying, \"Transworld Press is willing to let you have a leave of\n abscence, if you're interested.\"",
"\"Let me put it differently. Let me say that you will not understand why\n I say that until the journey ends.\" He smiled. \"Perhaps I shouldn't\n have mentioned it.\"\nEllason left the captain's quarters with an odd taste in his mouth. Now\n why had Branson said that? Why hadn't Rexroad or Phipps said something,\n if it was important?\n\n\n He made himself comfortable in his seven-foot-by-seven-foot cubicle,\n which is to say he dropped on his bed, found it more comfortable than\n he thought it would be, put his arms behind his head, stared at the\n ceiling. Metal walls, no windows, one floor vent, one ceiling vent,\n and a solitary ceiling molding tube-light. This would be his home for\n a year, just as there were homes like it for three thousand others,\n except that the family rooms would be larger. His quarters were near\n the front of the spike near the officers' quarters.",
"He looked at his watch, picked up his notebook and made an entry. The\n ship right now would be slipping ever so slowly away from Earth. He got\n up. He'd have to go forward to the observation dome to see that. Last\n view of Earth for two years.\nThe penetration of space by large groups is the coming out from under\n the traditions of thousands of years, and as these planet-orginated\n rules fall away, the floundering group seeks a new control, for they\n are humanity adrift, rudderless, for whom the stars are no longer\n bearings but nonexistent things, and values are altered if they are not\n shown the way.\nThe theft of Carver Janssen's attache case occurred on the thirty-first\n day out. In Ellason's mind the incident, though insignificant from the\n standpoint of the ship as a whole, could very well be the cause of\n dissension later on. His notes covering it were therefore very thorough.",
"The Quadrant Council congratulated itself. The passengers were proud\n of themselves. A special congratulatory message from Captain Branson\n appeared one day in the Bulletin newsletter.\n\n\n The colonists settled down to living out the rest of the voyage until\n the landing on Antheon.\n\n\n But on the 170th day calamity struck. Red Mask appropriated one of the\n stunners, made his way down one whole corridor section in Quadrant Two,\n put occupants to sleep as he went, taking many articles of value and\n leaving disorder behind.\n\n\n Ellason interviewed as many victims as he could, noted it all in\n his book. The things taken were keepsakes, photographs and items of\n personal value. It seemed to be the work of a madman. If Red Mask\n wanted to make everyone furious, he certainly succeeded.",
"He knew Secretary Phipps from years of contacting, and now Phipps said,\n \"Personally, I don't want to see anybody else on the job. You've got a\n fine record in this sort of thing.\"\n\n\n Keith Ellason smiled, but just barely. \"You should have called me for\n the first trip.\"\n\n\n Phipps nodded. \"I wish we had had you on the\nWeblor I\n.\"\n\n\n \"Crewmen,\" Rexroad said, \"make poor reporters.\"",
"shoulder-to-shoulder pressure of a crowded solar system. A gigantic,\n hollow spike, the ship would never land anywhere, but would circle\n Antheon as it circled Earth, shuttling its cargo and passengers to the\n promised land, the new frontier. A space-borne metropolis, it would\n be the home for three thousand persons outward bound, only the crew\n on the return trip. It was equipped with every conceivable facility\n and comfort—dining rooms, assembly hall, individual and family\n compartments, recreation areas, swimming pool, library, theater.\n Nothing had been overlooked.",
"Ellason brightened. \"And by that time everybody was seeing Red Mask\n everywhere and the colonists organized against him.\"\n\n\n \"Gave them something to do,\" Branson said.\n\n\n \"Every time things got dull, I livened them up. I got a stunner and\n robbed along the corridor. That really stirred them. Lucky nobody got\n hurt during any of it, including that Stoneman woman. I was trying to\n rob her when she woke up.\"\nBranson cleared his throat. \"Ah, Ellason about that story. You\n understand you can't write it, don't you?\"\n\n\n Ellason said regretfully that he did understand.\n\n\n \"The colonists will never know the truth,\" Branson went on. \"There will\n be other ships outward bound.\"",
"Rexroad said very gravely, \"We've got the finest captain in\n Interplanetary. Harvey Branson. No doubt you've heard of him. He's\n spent his life in our own system, and he's handpicking his own crew. We\n have also raised prerequisites for applicants. We don't think anything\n is going to happen, but if it does, we want to get an impersonal,\n unprejudiced view. That's where you come in. You do the observing, the\n reporting. We'll evaluate it on your return.\"\n\n\n \"If I return,\" said Ellason.",
"He felt rather than heard the dull rumble. It was a sound he knew would\n be with him for two years—one year going and one year returning.",
"\"Are you out of your minds?\" Branson exclaimed.\n\n\n Tom Tilbury, Fourth Quadrant leader, said, \"We want to set up a police\n force, Captain. We want stunners.\"\n\n\n \"There's no law against it,\" Branson said, \"but it's a rule of mine\n that no weapons are to be issued en route.\"\n\n\n \"If we had had a gun, we'd have got Red Mask,\" Tilbury said.\n\n\n \"And I might have a murder on my conscience.\"\n\n\n Tilbury said, \"We've also thought of that. Suppose you supply us with\n half-power stunners? That way we can stun but not kill.\"\n\n\n They got their guns. Now there were twenty-four policemen on duty in\n the corridors—eight on at a time. Ellason observed that for the first\n time the passengers seemed relaxed.",
"\"Gentlemen,\" Branson said at last, as Ellason knew he would, \"I want\n to introduce Keith Ellason, whose presence Interstellar has impressed\n upon us. On loan from Transworld, he will have an observer status.\" He\n introduced him to the others. All of them seemed friendly; Ellason\n thought it was a good staff.\n\n\n Branson detained him after the others had gone. \"One thing, Mr.\n Ellason. To make it easier for you, I suggest you think of this journey\n strictly from the observer viewpoint. There will be no story for\n Transworld at the end.\"\n\n\n Ellason was startled. While he had considered the possibility, he had\n not dwelt on it. Now it loomed large in his mind. \"I don't understand,\n Captain Branson. It seems to me—\"",
"Critten sighed. \"And I'll have to be caught again.\"\nYes, we're anonymous, nameless, we Nillys, for that's what we call\n each other, and are a theme, with variations, in the endless stretches\n of deep space, objects of hatred and contempt, professional heels,\n dying once a trip when the time is ripe, antidote to boredom, and we'll\n ply our trade, our little tragedies, on a thousand ships bringing\n humanity to new worlds.",
"And so, Ellason observed in his notebook, are wars created.\nSeen in space, stars are unmoving, silent, sterile bright eyes ever\n watchful and accusing. To men unused to it, such a sight numbs,\n compresses, stultifies. He introduces a countermeasure, proof he\n exists, which is any overt act, sometimes violent.\nOn the forty-fifth day June Failright, the young wife of one of the\n passenger meteorologists, ran screaming down one of the long corridors\n of the Third Quadrant. She told the captain she had been attacked in\n her compartment while her husband was in the ship's library. She was\n taken to one of the ship's doctors, who confirmed it.\n\n\n She said the culprit was a husky man wearing a red rubber mask, and\n though her description of what he had done did not appear in the story\n in the newsletter, it lost no time in penetrating every compartment of\n the ship."
],
[
"The captain reported that his search had been equally fruitless.\n At another assembly the following day it was decided to make the\n inspection teams permanent, to await further moves on the part of Red\n Mask. The Quadrant Council held periodic meetings to set up a method of\n trial for him when he was caught. It was all recorded in the newsletter\n and by Keith Ellason.\nWe Nillys know about hate and about violence. We know too that where\n there is hate there is violence, and where there is violence there is\n death.\nDuring sleep time on the seventy-ninth day Barbara Stoneman, awakened\n by a strange sound, sat up in the bed of her compartment to find a\n man in a red mask in her room. Her cries brought neighbors into the\n corridor. The flight of the man was witnessed by many, and several men\n tried to stop him. But the intruder was light on his feet and fast. He\n escaped.\n\n\n The Quadrant Council confronted the captain, demanding weapons.",
"Critten sighed. \"And I'll have to be caught again.\"\nYes, we're anonymous, nameless, we Nillys, for that's what we call\n each other, and are a theme, with variations, in the endless stretches\n of deep space, objects of hatred and contempt, professional heels,\n dying once a trip when the time is ripe, antidote to boredom, and we'll\n ply our trade, our little tragedies, on a thousand ships bringing\n humanity to new worlds.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nSure I'm a Nilly, and I've died seven times, always in the blackness\n of the outer reaches, and I'm not alone, although there aren't very\n many of us, never were.\nIt made sense. Interstellar was new and they wanted him on the ship\n because he was a trained observer. They wanted facts, not gibberish.\n But to ask a man to give up two years of his life—well, that was\n asking a lot. Two years in a sardine can. Still, it had an appeal Keith\n Ellason knew he couldn't deny, a newsman's joy of the clean beat, a\n planetary system far afield, a closeup view of the universe, history in\n the making.\n\n\n Interstellar Chief Rexroad knocked the dottle from his pipe in a tray,\n saying, \"Transworld Press is willing to let you have a leave of\n abscence, if you're interested.\"",
"\"Sure,\" Critten said. \"You colonists got the easy life as passengers,\n just sitting around. I had to work my head off keeping records for you\n lazy bastards.\"\n\n\n The verdict was, of course, death.\n\n\n They executed Harrel Critten on the morning of the 270th day with\n blasts from six stunners supplied with full power. It was witnessed\n by a great crowd in the assembly hall. A detail from the ship's crew\n disposed of his body through a chute.\n\n\n It was all duly recorded in Keith Ellason's notebooks.\nDying is easy for a Nilly. Especially if it's arranged for beforehand,\n which it always is.\nThe\nWeblor II\nwas only one day out of orbit when Captain Branson sent\n for Ellason and introduced him to the executed man.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" Critten said, grinning from ear to ear.",
"Ellason left, feeling uneasy. If he were Branson, he'd initiate an\n investigation, if nothing else than to prove the crew guiltless. Why\n couldn't Branson see the wisdom of setting an example for the colonists?\nAs a Nilly, I knew that space breeds hate. There is a seed of\n malevolence in every man. It sometimes blossoms out among the stars. On\n the\nWeblor II\nit was ready for ripening.\nRaymond Palugger was killed in the ship's hospital on the sixty-first\n day. Palugger, a Fourth Quadrant passenger, had complained of feeling\n ill, had been hospitalized with a diagnosis of ileus. He had put his\n money belt in the drawer of the small stand beside his bed. A man\n in a red mask was seen hurrying from the hospital area, and a staff\n investigation revealed that Palugger had died trying to prevent the\n theft of the belt.",
"And so, Ellason observed in his notebook, are wars created.\nSeen in space, stars are unmoving, silent, sterile bright eyes ever\n watchful and accusing. To men unused to it, such a sight numbs,\n compresses, stultifies. He introduces a countermeasure, proof he\n exists, which is any overt act, sometimes violent.\nOn the forty-fifth day June Failright, the young wife of one of the\n passenger meteorologists, ran screaming down one of the long corridors\n of the Third Quadrant. She told the captain she had been attacked in\n her compartment while her husband was in the ship's library. She was\n taken to one of the ship's doctors, who confirmed it.\n\n\n She said the culprit was a husky man wearing a red rubber mask, and\n though her description of what he had done did not appear in the story\n in the newsletter, it lost no time in penetrating every compartment of\n the ship.",
"The Quadrant Council congratulated itself. The passengers were proud\n of themselves. A special congratulatory message from Captain Branson\n appeared one day in the Bulletin newsletter.\n\n\n The colonists settled down to living out the rest of the voyage until\n the landing on Antheon.\n\n\n But on the 170th day calamity struck. Red Mask appropriated one of the\n stunners, made his way down one whole corridor section in Quadrant Two,\n put occupants to sleep as he went, taking many articles of value and\n leaving disorder behind.\n\n\n Ellason interviewed as many victims as he could, noted it all in\n his book. The things taken were keepsakes, photographs and items of\n personal value. It seemed to be the work of a madman. If Red Mask\n wanted to make everyone furious, he certainly succeeded.",
"\"What does he want that stuff for?\" Casey Stromberg, a passenger\n doctor, asked. \"I can see him taking my narcotics, my doctor's kit—but\n my dead wife's picture? That I don't understand.\"\n\n\n It was the same with others. \"The man's insane, Mr. Ellason. Positively\n insane.\" Many people said it.\n\n\n The council issued orders that all passengers from now on would be\n required to lock their compartments at all times. More guns were\n obtained from the captain. More policemen were appointed.\n\n\n Ellason was busy noting it all in his book. It became filled with\n jottings about innocent people being accidentally stunned when\n trigger-happy policemen thought their movements suspicious, about one\n man's suspicion of another and the ensuing search of compartments,\n people who saw Red Mask here, saw him there. Hardly a day went by\n without some new development.",
"\"Are you out of your minds?\" Branson exclaimed.\n\n\n Tom Tilbury, Fourth Quadrant leader, said, \"We want to set up a police\n force, Captain. We want stunners.\"\n\n\n \"There's no law against it,\" Branson said, \"but it's a rule of mine\n that no weapons are to be issued en route.\"\n\n\n \"If we had had a gun, we'd have got Red Mask,\" Tilbury said.\n\n\n \"And I might have a murder on my conscience.\"\n\n\n Tilbury said, \"We've also thought of that. Suppose you supply us with\n half-power stunners? That way we can stun but not kill.\"\n\n\n They got their guns. Now there were twenty-four policemen on duty in\n the corridors—eight on at a time. Ellason observed that for the first\n time the passengers seemed relaxed.",
"\"I suppose that's problematical,\" Phipps said, \"but I think you will.\n Captain Branson and his fifty crewmen want to return as badly as you\n do.\" He grinned. \"You can write that novel you're always talking about\n on your return trip on the\nWeblor II\n.\"\nBeing a Nilly is important, probably as important as running the ship,\n and I think it is this thought that keeps us satisfied, willing to be\n what we are.\nThe\nWeblor II\nhad been built in space, as had its predecessor, the\nWeblor I\n, at a tremendous cost. Basically, it was an instrument\n which would open distant vistas to colonization, reducing the",
"Attendant to taking notes on this incident, Ellason noted a strange\n thing. Janssen lived in that part of the ship known as the First\n Quadrant, and those who lived in that quadrant—more than seven hundred\n men, women and children—felt that the thief must surely live in\n Quadrant Two or Four. Elias Cromley, who had the compartment next to\n Janssen's, sounded the consensus when he said, \"Surely a man wouldn't\n steal from his own quadrant, now would he, Mr. Ellason?\"",
"Let Red Mask move against armed men, they said.\n\n\n Yeah, let him see what happens now.\n\n\n Red Mask did.\nOn the 101st day he was seen in a corridor in Quadrant Four. Emil\n Pierce, policeman on duty, managed to squeeze off several shots at his\n retreating figure.\n\n\n Red Mask was seen again on the 120th day, on the 135th day, and the\n 157th day. He was seen, shot at, but not hit. He was also unable to\n commit any crime.\n\n\n We've got him on the run, the colonists said.\n\n\n He's afraid to do anything, now that we've got police protection, they\n said smugly.",
"\"Oh, there'll be a trial, Mr. Ellason, but you don't think any jury'd\n let him live after all the things he's done, do you?\"\nRed Mask was stunned in Quadrant Four in a corridor by a policeman\n named Terryl Placer on the 201st day. The criminal was carried to the\n assembly room surrounded by guards, for he surely would have been\n mauled, if not killed, by angry colonists who crowded around. In the\n assembly hall his mask was whipped off. The crowd gasped. Nobody knew\n him.\n\n\n Ellason's first thought was that he must be a stowaway, but then he\n remembered the face, and Captain Branson, who came to have a look at\n him, unhappily admitted the man was a member of the crew. His name was\n Harrel Critten and he was a record keeper third class.\n\n\n \"Well, Critten,\" Branson roared at him, \"what have you got to say for\n yourself?\"",
"\"Oh, yes, Mr. Ellason, we're going to get him,\" said Tilbury, now chief\n of police, cracking his knuckles, his eyes glowing at the thought.\n \"We're bound to get him. We've got things worked out to the finest\n detail. He won't be able to get through our fingers now. Just let him\n make so much as a move.\"\n\n\n \"And what will you do when you get him?\"\n\n\n \"Kill him,\" Tilbury said, licking his lips, his eyes glowing more\n fiercely than ever.\n\n\n \"Without a trial?\"",
"Janssen's case contained vegetable and flower seeds—thousands of\n them, according to the Captain's Bulletin, the ship's daily newsletter\n which went to all hands and passengers. In the Bulletin the captain\n appealed to the thief to return the case to Mr. Janssen. He said it\n was significant that all en route had passed stability tests, and that\n it was to the ship's discredit that someone with criminal tendencies\n should have been permitted aboard.",
"He felt rather than heard the dull rumble. It was a sound he knew would\n be with him for two years—one year going and one year returning.",
"\"I figured as much,\" Ellason said. \"I've been doing a lot of thinking.\"\n\n\n \"You're perhaps a little too good as an observer,\" Branson said. \"Or\n maybe it was because you really weren't one of the colonists. But no\n matter, Critten did a good job. He was trained by an old friend of mine\n for this job, Gelthorpe Nill. Nill used to be in counter-espionage when\n there were wars.\"\n\n\n \"You were excellent,\" Ellason said.\n\n\n \"Can't say I enjoyed the role,\" said Critten, \"but I think it saved\n lives.\"\n\n\n \"Let me get this straight. Interstellar thought that it was idleness\n and boredom that caused the killings on the\nWeblor I\n, so they had you\n trained to be a scapegoat. Is that right?\"",
"Branson asked him to describe the man.\n\n\n \"Oh, he was about six feet tall, stocky build, and he wore a red rubber\n mask that covered his head completely.\"\n\n\n \"Didn't you think that was important?\" Branson asked in an outraged\n voice. \"A man wearing a red mask?\"\n\n\n Dievers shrugged. \"This is a spaceship. How would I know whether a red\n mask—or a blue or green one—does or doesn't belong on a spaceship?\"\n\n\n Although Dievers' account appeared in the newsletter, it was largely\n discounted.\n\n\n \"If it is true,\" Branson told Ellason, \"the theft must be the work of\n a psychotic. But I don't believe Jamieson Dievers. It may well be he's\n the psychotic.\" He snorted. \"Red rubber mask! I think I'll have Dievers\n put through psychiatry.\"",
"Ellason brightened. \"And by that time everybody was seeing Red Mask\n everywhere and the colonists organized against him.\"\n\n\n \"Gave them something to do,\" Branson said.\n\n\n \"Every time things got dull, I livened them up. I got a stunner and\n robbed along the corridor. That really stirred them. Lucky nobody got\n hurt during any of it, including that Stoneman woman. I was trying to\n rob her when she woke up.\"\nBranson cleared his throat. \"Ah, Ellason about that story. You\n understand you can't write it, don't you?\"\n\n\n Ellason said regretfully that he did understand.\n\n\n \"The colonists will never know the truth,\" Branson went on. \"There will\n be other ships outward bound.\"",
"The colonists quieted. Benjamin Simpson, one of the older men, was\n elected president of the newly formed Quadrant Council. One man from\n each of the quadrants was named to serve under him. Each of these men\n in turn selected five others from his own group.\n\n\n Those assembled waited in the hall while each team of six inspected\n the compartments of the others. These compartments were then locked,\n everyone returned to his compartment, and the larger search was\n conducted. It took twenty hours.\n\n\n No mask was found. No mask, no case, no money, no man."
],
[
"And so, Ellason observed in his notebook, are wars created.\nSeen in space, stars are unmoving, silent, sterile bright eyes ever\n watchful and accusing. To men unused to it, such a sight numbs,\n compresses, stultifies. He introduces a countermeasure, proof he\n exists, which is any overt act, sometimes violent.\nOn the forty-fifth day June Failright, the young wife of one of the\n passenger meteorologists, ran screaming down one of the long corridors\n of the Third Quadrant. She told the captain she had been attacked in\n her compartment while her husband was in the ship's library. She was\n taken to one of the ship's doctors, who confirmed it.\n\n\n She said the culprit was a husky man wearing a red rubber mask, and\n though her description of what he had done did not appear in the story\n in the newsletter, it lost no time in penetrating every compartment of\n the ship.",
"\"We removed the charges before the guns were used.\"\n\n\n \"And Carver Janssen's case?\"\n\n\n \"He'll get it back when he's shuttled to Antheon. And all the other\n items will be returned. They're all tagged with their owner's names.\n Captain Branson will say they were found somewhere on the ship. You\n see, I was a liar.\"\n\n\n \"How about that assault on June Failright?\"\n\n\n Critten grinned again. \"She played right into our hands. She ran out\n into the hall claiming I'd attacked her, which I did not. She was\n certainly amazed when the ship's physicians agreed with her. Of course\n Captain Branson told them to do that.\"\n\n\n \"And the murder?\"\n\n\n \"Raymond Palugger died in the hospital all right, but he died from\n his illness on the operating table. We turned it into an advantage by\n making it look suspicious.\"",
"\"Oh, yes, Mr. Ellason, we're going to get him,\" said Tilbury, now chief\n of police, cracking his knuckles, his eyes glowing at the thought.\n \"We're bound to get him. We've got things worked out to the finest\n detail. He won't be able to get through our fingers now. Just let him\n make so much as a move.\"\n\n\n \"And what will you do when you get him?\"\n\n\n \"Kill him,\" Tilbury said, licking his lips, his eyes glowing more\n fiercely than ever.\n\n\n \"Without a trial?\"",
"Captain Branson did not wait for the newsletter. Through the ship's\n speaker system, he reported that Palugger had a fortune in credits\n in the belt and had died of a severe beating. He said that since the\n incident occurred in the staff section of the ship, his crew would be\n forced to submit to a thorough inspection in an effort to find the\n mask, the seed case, the money and the man.\n\n\n \"I will not countenance such an act by a crewman,\" Branson said. \"If\n and when he is found, he will be severely dealt with. But he might not\n be a member of the crew. I am ordering an assembly of all passengers at\n nine tomorrow morning in the auditorium. I will speak to you all then.\"\nFaces were angry, tongues were sharp at the meeting, eyes suspicious\n and tempers short. Above it all was the overpowering presence of\n Captain Branson speaking to them.",
"\"Oh, there'll be a trial, Mr. Ellason, but you don't think any jury'd\n let him live after all the things he's done, do you?\"\nRed Mask was stunned in Quadrant Four in a corridor by a policeman\n named Terryl Placer on the 201st day. The criminal was carried to the\n assembly room surrounded by guards, for he surely would have been\n mauled, if not killed, by angry colonists who crowded around. In the\n assembly hall his mask was whipped off. The crowd gasped. Nobody knew\n him.\n\n\n Ellason's first thought was that he must be a stowaway, but then he\n remembered the face, and Captain Branson, who came to have a look at\n him, unhappily admitted the man was a member of the crew. His name was\n Harrel Critten and he was a record keeper third class.\n\n\n \"Well, Critten,\" Branson roared at him, \"what have you got to say for\n yourself?\"",
"\"Go to hell,\" Critten said quietly. As if it were an afterthought, he\n spat at the captain.\n\n\n Branson looked as if he were going to kill the man himself right there\n and then.\n\n\n It was a long trial—from the 220th to the 241st day—and there didn't\n seem to be much doubt about the outcome, for Critten didn't help his\n own cause during any of it.\n\n\n Lemuel Tarper, who was appointed prosecutor, asked him, \"What did you\n do with the loot, Critten?\"\n\n\n Critten looked him square in the eye and said, \"I threw it out one of\n the escape chutes. Does that answer your question?\"\n\n\n \"Threw it away?\" Tarper and the crowd were incredulous.",
"\"What does he want that stuff for?\" Casey Stromberg, a passenger\n doctor, asked. \"I can see him taking my narcotics, my doctor's kit—but\n my dead wife's picture? That I don't understand.\"\n\n\n It was the same with others. \"The man's insane, Mr. Ellason. Positively\n insane.\" Many people said it.\n\n\n The council issued orders that all passengers from now on would be\n required to lock their compartments at all times. More guns were\n obtained from the captain. More policemen were appointed.\n\n\n Ellason was busy noting it all in his book. It became filled with\n jottings about innocent people being accidentally stunned when\n trigger-happy policemen thought their movements suspicious, about one\n man's suspicion of another and the ensuing search of compartments,\n people who saw Red Mask here, saw him there. Hardly a day went by\n without some new development.",
"Branson asked him to describe the man.\n\n\n \"Oh, he was about six feet tall, stocky build, and he wore a red rubber\n mask that covered his head completely.\"\n\n\n \"Didn't you think that was important?\" Branson asked in an outraged\n voice. \"A man wearing a red mask?\"\n\n\n Dievers shrugged. \"This is a spaceship. How would I know whether a red\n mask—or a blue or green one—does or doesn't belong on a spaceship?\"\n\n\n Although Dievers' account appeared in the newsletter, it was largely\n discounted.\n\n\n \"If it is true,\" Branson told Ellason, \"the theft must be the work of\n a psychotic. But I don't believe Jamieson Dievers. It may well be he's\n the psychotic.\" He snorted. \"Red rubber mask! I think I'll have Dievers\n put through psychiatry.\"",
"Ellason brightened. \"And by that time everybody was seeing Red Mask\n everywhere and the colonists organized against him.\"\n\n\n \"Gave them something to do,\" Branson said.\n\n\n \"Every time things got dull, I livened them up. I got a stunner and\n robbed along the corridor. That really stirred them. Lucky nobody got\n hurt during any of it, including that Stoneman woman. I was trying to\n rob her when she woke up.\"\nBranson cleared his throat. \"Ah, Ellason about that story. You\n understand you can't write it, don't you?\"\n\n\n Ellason said regretfully that he did understand.\n\n\n \"The colonists will never know the truth,\" Branson went on. \"There will\n be other ships outward bound.\"",
"The colonists quieted. Benjamin Simpson, one of the older men, was\n elected president of the newly formed Quadrant Council. One man from\n each of the quadrants was named to serve under him. Each of these men\n in turn selected five others from his own group.\n\n\n Those assembled waited in the hall while each team of six inspected\n the compartments of the others. These compartments were then locked,\n everyone returned to his compartment, and the larger search was\n conducted. It took twenty hours.\n\n\n No mask was found. No mask, no case, no money, no man.",
"Let Red Mask move against armed men, they said.\n\n\n Yeah, let him see what happens now.\n\n\n Red Mask did.\nOn the 101st day he was seen in a corridor in Quadrant Four. Emil\n Pierce, policeman on duty, managed to squeeze off several shots at his\n retreating figure.\n\n\n Red Mask was seen again on the 120th day, on the 135th day, and the\n 157th day. He was seen, shot at, but not hit. He was also unable to\n commit any crime.\n\n\n We've got him on the run, the colonists said.\n\n\n He's afraid to do anything, now that we've got police protection, they\n said smugly.",
"The Quadrant Council congratulated itself. The passengers were proud\n of themselves. A special congratulatory message from Captain Branson\n appeared one day in the Bulletin newsletter.\n\n\n The colonists settled down to living out the rest of the voyage until\n the landing on Antheon.\n\n\n But on the 170th day calamity struck. Red Mask appropriated one of the\n stunners, made his way down one whole corridor section in Quadrant Two,\n put occupants to sleep as he went, taking many articles of value and\n leaving disorder behind.\n\n\n Ellason interviewed as many victims as he could, noted it all in\n his book. The things taken were keepsakes, photographs and items of\n personal value. It seemed to be the work of a madman. If Red Mask\n wanted to make everyone furious, he certainly succeeded.",
"The captain reported that his search had been equally fruitless.\n At another assembly the following day it was decided to make the\n inspection teams permanent, to await further moves on the part of Red\n Mask. The Quadrant Council held periodic meetings to set up a method of\n trial for him when he was caught. It was all recorded in the newsletter\n and by Keith Ellason.\nWe Nillys know about hate and about violence. We know too that where\n there is hate there is violence, and where there is violence there is\n death.\nDuring sleep time on the seventy-ninth day Barbara Stoneman, awakened\n by a strange sound, sat up in the bed of her compartment to find a\n man in a red mask in her room. Her cries brought neighbors into the\n corridor. The flight of the man was witnessed by many, and several men\n tried to stop him. But the intruder was light on his feet and fast. He\n escaped.\n\n\n The Quadrant Council confronted the captain, demanding weapons.",
"Attendant to taking notes on this incident, Ellason noted a strange\n thing. Janssen lived in that part of the ship known as the First\n Quadrant, and those who lived in that quadrant—more than seven hundred\n men, women and children—felt that the thief must surely live in\n Quadrant Two or Four. Elias Cromley, who had the compartment next to\n Janssen's, sounded the consensus when he said, \"Surely a man wouldn't\n steal from his own quadrant, now would he, Mr. Ellason?\"",
"Critten nodded. \"When great numbers are being transported, they are apt\n to magnify each little event because so little happens. It was my job\n to see that they directed none of their venom against each other or the\n crew, only toward me.\"\n\n\n Branson smiled. \"It made the time pass quickly and interestingly for\n the passengers.\"\n\n\n \"To say nothing of me,\" Critten said.\n\n\n \"And you, Mr. Ellason, were along to observe it all,\" Captain Branson\n put in. \"Interstellar wanted an accurate picture of this. If it worked,\n they told me they'd use it on other trips to Antheon.\"\n\n\n Ellason nodded. \"No time for brooding, for differences of opinion on\n small matters. Just time to hate Mr. Critten. Unanimously.\"\n\n\n \"Probably,\" Critten said, \"you are wondering about the execution.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally.\"",
"Ellason sought out Carver Janssen. He was a middle-aged man with a\n tired face and sad eyes. He said, \"Now what am I going to Antheon\n for? I could only take along so much baggage and I threw out some\n comfort items to make room for the seeds. I'm a horticulturist, and\n Interstellar asked me to go along. But what use am I now? Where am\n I going to get seeds like those? Do you know how long it took me to\n collect them? They're not ordinary seeds, Mr. Ellason.\"\n\n\n There was an appeal from Janssen in the next day's newsletter\n describing the seeds, telling of their value, and requesting their\n return in the interests of the Antheon colony and of humanity.\n\n\n On the thirty-fourth day a witness turned up who said he had seen a\n man emerging from Janssen's compartment with the black case. \"I didn't\n think anything of it at the time,\" Jamieson Dievers said.",
"\"Sure,\" Critten said. \"You colonists got the easy life as passengers,\n just sitting around. I had to work my head off keeping records for you\n lazy bastards.\"\n\n\n The verdict was, of course, death.\n\n\n They executed Harrel Critten on the morning of the 270th day with\n blasts from six stunners supplied with full power. It was witnessed\n by a great crowd in the assembly hall. A detail from the ship's crew\n disposed of his body through a chute.\n\n\n It was all duly recorded in Keith Ellason's notebooks.\nDying is easy for a Nilly. Especially if it's arranged for beforehand,\n which it always is.\nThe\nWeblor II\nwas only one day out of orbit when Captain Branson sent\n for Ellason and introduced him to the executed man.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" Critten said, grinning from ear to ear.",
"\"Are you out of your minds?\" Branson exclaimed.\n\n\n Tom Tilbury, Fourth Quadrant leader, said, \"We want to set up a police\n force, Captain. We want stunners.\"\n\n\n \"There's no law against it,\" Branson said, \"but it's a rule of mine\n that no weapons are to be issued en route.\"\n\n\n \"If we had had a gun, we'd have got Red Mask,\" Tilbury said.\n\n\n \"And I might have a murder on my conscience.\"\n\n\n Tilbury said, \"We've also thought of that. Suppose you supply us with\n half-power stunners? That way we can stun but not kill.\"\n\n\n They got their guns. Now there were twenty-four policemen on duty in\n the corridors—eight on at a time. Ellason observed that for the first\n time the passengers seemed relaxed.",
"Janssen's case contained vegetable and flower seeds—thousands of\n them, according to the Captain's Bulletin, the ship's daily newsletter\n which went to all hands and passengers. In the Bulletin the captain\n appealed to the thief to return the case to Mr. Janssen. He said it\n was significant that all en route had passed stability tests, and that\n it was to the ship's discredit that someone with criminal tendencies\n should have been permitted aboard.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nSure I'm a Nilly, and I've died seven times, always in the blackness\n of the outer reaches, and I'm not alone, although there aren't very\n many of us, never were.\nIt made sense. Interstellar was new and they wanted him on the ship\n because he was a trained observer. They wanted facts, not gibberish.\n But to ask a man to give up two years of his life—well, that was\n asking a lot. Two years in a sardine can. Still, it had an appeal Keith\n Ellason knew he couldn't deny, a newsman's joy of the clean beat, a\n planetary system far afield, a closeup view of the universe, history in\n the making.\n\n\n Interstellar Chief Rexroad knocked the dottle from his pipe in a tray,\n saying, \"Transworld Press is willing to let you have a leave of\n abscence, if you're interested.\""
],
[
"Captain Branson did not wait for the newsletter. Through the ship's\n speaker system, he reported that Palugger had a fortune in credits\n in the belt and had died of a severe beating. He said that since the\n incident occurred in the staff section of the ship, his crew would be\n forced to submit to a thorough inspection in an effort to find the\n mask, the seed case, the money and the man.\n\n\n \"I will not countenance such an act by a crewman,\" Branson said. \"If\n and when he is found, he will be severely dealt with. But he might not\n be a member of the crew. I am ordering an assembly of all passengers at\n nine tomorrow morning in the auditorium. I will speak to you all then.\"\nFaces were angry, tongues were sharp at the meeting, eyes suspicious\n and tempers short. Above it all was the overpowering presence of\n Captain Branson speaking to them.",
"\"We removed the charges before the guns were used.\"\n\n\n \"And Carver Janssen's case?\"\n\n\n \"He'll get it back when he's shuttled to Antheon. And all the other\n items will be returned. They're all tagged with their owner's names.\n Captain Branson will say they were found somewhere on the ship. You\n see, I was a liar.\"\n\n\n \"How about that assault on June Failright?\"\n\n\n Critten grinned again. \"She played right into our hands. She ran out\n into the hall claiming I'd attacked her, which I did not. She was\n certainly amazed when the ship's physicians agreed with her. Of course\n Captain Branson told them to do that.\"\n\n\n \"And the murder?\"\n\n\n \"Raymond Palugger died in the hospital all right, but he died from\n his illness on the operating table. We turned it into an advantage by\n making it look suspicious.\"",
"\"Oh, yes, Mr. Ellason, we're going to get him,\" said Tilbury, now chief\n of police, cracking his knuckles, his eyes glowing at the thought.\n \"We're bound to get him. We've got things worked out to the finest\n detail. He won't be able to get through our fingers now. Just let him\n make so much as a move.\"\n\n\n \"And what will you do when you get him?\"\n\n\n \"Kill him,\" Tilbury said, licking his lips, his eyes glowing more\n fiercely than ever.\n\n\n \"Without a trial?\"",
"\"Oh, there'll be a trial, Mr. Ellason, but you don't think any jury'd\n let him live after all the things he's done, do you?\"\nRed Mask was stunned in Quadrant Four in a corridor by a policeman\n named Terryl Placer on the 201st day. The criminal was carried to the\n assembly room surrounded by guards, for he surely would have been\n mauled, if not killed, by angry colonists who crowded around. In the\n assembly hall his mask was whipped off. The crowd gasped. Nobody knew\n him.\n\n\n Ellason's first thought was that he must be a stowaway, but then he\n remembered the face, and Captain Branson, who came to have a look at\n him, unhappily admitted the man was a member of the crew. His name was\n Harrel Critten and he was a record keeper third class.\n\n\n \"Well, Critten,\" Branson roared at him, \"what have you got to say for\n yourself?\"",
"Branson asked him to describe the man.\n\n\n \"Oh, he was about six feet tall, stocky build, and he wore a red rubber\n mask that covered his head completely.\"\n\n\n \"Didn't you think that was important?\" Branson asked in an outraged\n voice. \"A man wearing a red mask?\"\n\n\n Dievers shrugged. \"This is a spaceship. How would I know whether a red\n mask—or a blue or green one—does or doesn't belong on a spaceship?\"\n\n\n Although Dievers' account appeared in the newsletter, it was largely\n discounted.\n\n\n \"If it is true,\" Branson told Ellason, \"the theft must be the work of\n a psychotic. But I don't believe Jamieson Dievers. It may well be he's\n the psychotic.\" He snorted. \"Red rubber mask! I think I'll have Dievers\n put through psychiatry.\"",
"\"What does he want that stuff for?\" Casey Stromberg, a passenger\n doctor, asked. \"I can see him taking my narcotics, my doctor's kit—but\n my dead wife's picture? That I don't understand.\"\n\n\n It was the same with others. \"The man's insane, Mr. Ellason. Positively\n insane.\" Many people said it.\n\n\n The council issued orders that all passengers from now on would be\n required to lock their compartments at all times. More guns were\n obtained from the captain. More policemen were appointed.\n\n\n Ellason was busy noting it all in his book. It became filled with\n jottings about innocent people being accidentally stunned when\n trigger-happy policemen thought their movements suspicious, about one\n man's suspicion of another and the ensuing search of compartments,\n people who saw Red Mask here, saw him there. Hardly a day went by\n without some new development.",
"Ellason left, feeling uneasy. If he were Branson, he'd initiate an\n investigation, if nothing else than to prove the crew guiltless. Why\n couldn't Branson see the wisdom of setting an example for the colonists?\nAs a Nilly, I knew that space breeds hate. There is a seed of\n malevolence in every man. It sometimes blossoms out among the stars. On\n the\nWeblor II\nit was ready for ripening.\nRaymond Palugger was killed in the ship's hospital on the sixty-first\n day. Palugger, a Fourth Quadrant passenger, had complained of feeling\n ill, had been hospitalized with a diagnosis of ileus. He had put his\n money belt in the drawer of the small stand beside his bed. A man\n in a red mask was seen hurrying from the hospital area, and a staff\n investigation revealed that Palugger had died trying to prevent the\n theft of the belt.",
"Ellason sought out Carver Janssen. He was a middle-aged man with a\n tired face and sad eyes. He said, \"Now what am I going to Antheon\n for? I could only take along so much baggage and I threw out some\n comfort items to make room for the seeds. I'm a horticulturist, and\n Interstellar asked me to go along. But what use am I now? Where am\n I going to get seeds like those? Do you know how long it took me to\n collect them? They're not ordinary seeds, Mr. Ellason.\"\n\n\n There was an appeal from Janssen in the next day's newsletter\n describing the seeds, telling of their value, and requesting their\n return in the interests of the Antheon colony and of humanity.\n\n\n On the thirty-fourth day a witness turned up who said he had seen a\n man emerging from Janssen's compartment with the black case. \"I didn't\n think anything of it at the time,\" Jamieson Dievers said.",
"\"Go to hell,\" Critten said quietly. As if it were an afterthought, he\n spat at the captain.\n\n\n Branson looked as if he were going to kill the man himself right there\n and then.\n\n\n It was a long trial—from the 220th to the 241st day—and there didn't\n seem to be much doubt about the outcome, for Critten didn't help his\n own cause during any of it.\n\n\n Lemuel Tarper, who was appointed prosecutor, asked him, \"What did you\n do with the loot, Critten?\"\n\n\n Critten looked him square in the eye and said, \"I threw it out one of\n the escape chutes. Does that answer your question?\"\n\n\n \"Threw it away?\" Tarper and the crowd were incredulous.",
"The Quadrant Council congratulated itself. The passengers were proud\n of themselves. A special congratulatory message from Captain Branson\n appeared one day in the Bulletin newsletter.\n\n\n The colonists settled down to living out the rest of the voyage until\n the landing on Antheon.\n\n\n But on the 170th day calamity struck. Red Mask appropriated one of the\n stunners, made his way down one whole corridor section in Quadrant Two,\n put occupants to sleep as he went, taking many articles of value and\n leaving disorder behind.\n\n\n Ellason interviewed as many victims as he could, noted it all in\n his book. The things taken were keepsakes, photographs and items of\n personal value. It seemed to be the work of a madman. If Red Mask\n wanted to make everyone furious, he certainly succeeded.",
"The colonists quieted. Benjamin Simpson, one of the older men, was\n elected president of the newly formed Quadrant Council. One man from\n each of the quadrants was named to serve under him. Each of these men\n in turn selected five others from his own group.\n\n\n Those assembled waited in the hall while each team of six inspected\n the compartments of the others. These compartments were then locked,\n everyone returned to his compartment, and the larger search was\n conducted. It took twenty hours.\n\n\n No mask was found. No mask, no case, no money, no man.",
"Janssen's case contained vegetable and flower seeds—thousands of\n them, according to the Captain's Bulletin, the ship's daily newsletter\n which went to all hands and passengers. In the Bulletin the captain\n appealed to the thief to return the case to Mr. Janssen. He said it\n was significant that all en route had passed stability tests, and that\n it was to the ship's discredit that someone with criminal tendencies\n should have been permitted aboard.",
"Let Red Mask move against armed men, they said.\n\n\n Yeah, let him see what happens now.\n\n\n Red Mask did.\nOn the 101st day he was seen in a corridor in Quadrant Four. Emil\n Pierce, policeman on duty, managed to squeeze off several shots at his\n retreating figure.\n\n\n Red Mask was seen again on the 120th day, on the 135th day, and the\n 157th day. He was seen, shot at, but not hit. He was also unable to\n commit any crime.\n\n\n We've got him on the run, the colonists said.\n\n\n He's afraid to do anything, now that we've got police protection, they\n said smugly.",
"Critten nodded. \"When great numbers are being transported, they are apt\n to magnify each little event because so little happens. It was my job\n to see that they directed none of their venom against each other or the\n crew, only toward me.\"\n\n\n Branson smiled. \"It made the time pass quickly and interestingly for\n the passengers.\"\n\n\n \"To say nothing of me,\" Critten said.\n\n\n \"And you, Mr. Ellason, were along to observe it all,\" Captain Branson\n put in. \"Interstellar wanted an accurate picture of this. If it worked,\n they told me they'd use it on other trips to Antheon.\"\n\n\n Ellason nodded. \"No time for brooding, for differences of opinion on\n small matters. Just time to hate Mr. Critten. Unanimously.\"\n\n\n \"Probably,\" Critten said, \"you are wondering about the execution.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally.\"",
"Attendant to taking notes on this incident, Ellason noted a strange\n thing. Janssen lived in that part of the ship known as the First\n Quadrant, and those who lived in that quadrant—more than seven hundred\n men, women and children—felt that the thief must surely live in\n Quadrant Two or Four. Elias Cromley, who had the compartment next to\n Janssen's, sounded the consensus when he said, \"Surely a man wouldn't\n steal from his own quadrant, now would he, Mr. Ellason?\"",
"And so, Ellason observed in his notebook, are wars created.\nSeen in space, stars are unmoving, silent, sterile bright eyes ever\n watchful and accusing. To men unused to it, such a sight numbs,\n compresses, stultifies. He introduces a countermeasure, proof he\n exists, which is any overt act, sometimes violent.\nOn the forty-fifth day June Failright, the young wife of one of the\n passenger meteorologists, ran screaming down one of the long corridors\n of the Third Quadrant. She told the captain she had been attacked in\n her compartment while her husband was in the ship's library. She was\n taken to one of the ship's doctors, who confirmed it.\n\n\n She said the culprit was a husky man wearing a red rubber mask, and\n though her description of what he had done did not appear in the story\n in the newsletter, it lost no time in penetrating every compartment of\n the ship.",
"\"It is not my desire to interfere in passenger affairs,\" he said.\n \"Insofar as the ship is concerned, it is my duty to make certain no\n crewman is guilty. This I am doing. But my crew is not and cannot be\n a police force for you. It is up to you people to police and protect\n yourselves.\"\n\n\n \"How can we protect ourselves without stunners?\" one colonist called\n out.\n\n\n \"Has Red Mask a gun?\" Branson retorted. \"It seems to me you have a\n better weapon than any gun.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"This ship is only so wide, so long and so deep. If every inch is\n searched, you'll find your man. He has to be somewhere aboard.\"",
"\"I figured as much,\" Ellason said. \"I've been doing a lot of thinking.\"\n\n\n \"You're perhaps a little too good as an observer,\" Branson said. \"Or\n maybe it was because you really weren't one of the colonists. But no\n matter, Critten did a good job. He was trained by an old friend of mine\n for this job, Gelthorpe Nill. Nill used to be in counter-espionage when\n there were wars.\"\n\n\n \"You were excellent,\" Ellason said.\n\n\n \"Can't say I enjoyed the role,\" said Critten, \"but I think it saved\n lives.\"\n\n\n \"Let me get this straight. Interstellar thought that it was idleness\n and boredom that caused the killings on the\nWeblor I\n, so they had you\n trained to be a scapegoat. Is that right?\"",
"He felt rather than heard the dull rumble. It was a sound he knew would\n be with him for two years—one year going and one year returning.",
"Ellason brightened. \"And by that time everybody was seeing Red Mask\n everywhere and the colonists organized against him.\"\n\n\n \"Gave them something to do,\" Branson said.\n\n\n \"Every time things got dull, I livened them up. I got a stunner and\n robbed along the corridor. That really stirred them. Lucky nobody got\n hurt during any of it, including that Stoneman woman. I was trying to\n rob her when she woke up.\"\nBranson cleared his throat. \"Ah, Ellason about that story. You\n understand you can't write it, don't you?\"\n\n\n Ellason said regretfully that he did understand.\n\n\n \"The colonists will never know the truth,\" Branson went on. \"There will\n be other ships outward bound.\""
],
[
"The Quadrant Council congratulated itself. The passengers were proud\n of themselves. A special congratulatory message from Captain Branson\n appeared one day in the Bulletin newsletter.\n\n\n The colonists settled down to living out the rest of the voyage until\n the landing on Antheon.\n\n\n But on the 170th day calamity struck. Red Mask appropriated one of the\n stunners, made his way down one whole corridor section in Quadrant Two,\n put occupants to sleep as he went, taking many articles of value and\n leaving disorder behind.\n\n\n Ellason interviewed as many victims as he could, noted it all in\n his book. The things taken were keepsakes, photographs and items of\n personal value. It seemed to be the work of a madman. If Red Mask\n wanted to make everyone furious, he certainly succeeded.",
"The colonists quieted. Benjamin Simpson, one of the older men, was\n elected president of the newly formed Quadrant Council. One man from\n each of the quadrants was named to serve under him. Each of these men\n in turn selected five others from his own group.\n\n\n Those assembled waited in the hall while each team of six inspected\n the compartments of the others. These compartments were then locked,\n everyone returned to his compartment, and the larger search was\n conducted. It took twenty hours.\n\n\n No mask was found. No mask, no case, no money, no man.",
"\"Are you out of your minds?\" Branson exclaimed.\n\n\n Tom Tilbury, Fourth Quadrant leader, said, \"We want to set up a police\n force, Captain. We want stunners.\"\n\n\n \"There's no law against it,\" Branson said, \"but it's a rule of mine\n that no weapons are to be issued en route.\"\n\n\n \"If we had had a gun, we'd have got Red Mask,\" Tilbury said.\n\n\n \"And I might have a murder on my conscience.\"\n\n\n Tilbury said, \"We've also thought of that. Suppose you supply us with\n half-power stunners? That way we can stun but not kill.\"\n\n\n They got their guns. Now there were twenty-four policemen on duty in\n the corridors—eight on at a time. Ellason observed that for the first\n time the passengers seemed relaxed.",
"\"What does he want that stuff for?\" Casey Stromberg, a passenger\n doctor, asked. \"I can see him taking my narcotics, my doctor's kit—but\n my dead wife's picture? That I don't understand.\"\n\n\n It was the same with others. \"The man's insane, Mr. Ellason. Positively\n insane.\" Many people said it.\n\n\n The council issued orders that all passengers from now on would be\n required to lock their compartments at all times. More guns were\n obtained from the captain. More policemen were appointed.\n\n\n Ellason was busy noting it all in his book. It became filled with\n jottings about innocent people being accidentally stunned when\n trigger-happy policemen thought their movements suspicious, about one\n man's suspicion of another and the ensuing search of compartments,\n people who saw Red Mask here, saw him there. Hardly a day went by\n without some new development.",
"Captain Branson did not wait for the newsletter. Through the ship's\n speaker system, he reported that Palugger had a fortune in credits\n in the belt and had died of a severe beating. He said that since the\n incident occurred in the staff section of the ship, his crew would be\n forced to submit to a thorough inspection in an effort to find the\n mask, the seed case, the money and the man.\n\n\n \"I will not countenance such an act by a crewman,\" Branson said. \"If\n and when he is found, he will be severely dealt with. But he might not\n be a member of the crew. I am ordering an assembly of all passengers at\n nine tomorrow morning in the auditorium. I will speak to you all then.\"\nFaces were angry, tongues were sharp at the meeting, eyes suspicious\n and tempers short. Above it all was the overpowering presence of\n Captain Branson speaking to them.",
"\"It is not my desire to interfere in passenger affairs,\" he said.\n \"Insofar as the ship is concerned, it is my duty to make certain no\n crewman is guilty. This I am doing. But my crew is not and cannot be\n a police force for you. It is up to you people to police and protect\n yourselves.\"\n\n\n \"How can we protect ourselves without stunners?\" one colonist called\n out.\n\n\n \"Has Red Mask a gun?\" Branson retorted. \"It seems to me you have a\n better weapon than any gun.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"This ship is only so wide, so long and so deep. If every inch is\n searched, you'll find your man. He has to be somewhere aboard.\"",
"The captain reported that his search had been equally fruitless.\n At another assembly the following day it was decided to make the\n inspection teams permanent, to await further moves on the part of Red\n Mask. The Quadrant Council held periodic meetings to set up a method of\n trial for him when he was caught. It was all recorded in the newsletter\n and by Keith Ellason.\nWe Nillys know about hate and about violence. We know too that where\n there is hate there is violence, and where there is violence there is\n death.\nDuring sleep time on the seventy-ninth day Barbara Stoneman, awakened\n by a strange sound, sat up in the bed of her compartment to find a\n man in a red mask in her room. Her cries brought neighbors into the\n corridor. The flight of the man was witnessed by many, and several men\n tried to stop him. But the intruder was light on his feet and fast. He\n escaped.\n\n\n The Quadrant Council confronted the captain, demanding weapons.",
"And so, Ellason observed in his notebook, are wars created.\nSeen in space, stars are unmoving, silent, sterile bright eyes ever\n watchful and accusing. To men unused to it, such a sight numbs,\n compresses, stultifies. He introduces a countermeasure, proof he\n exists, which is any overt act, sometimes violent.\nOn the forty-fifth day June Failright, the young wife of one of the\n passenger meteorologists, ran screaming down one of the long corridors\n of the Third Quadrant. She told the captain she had been attacked in\n her compartment while her husband was in the ship's library. She was\n taken to one of the ship's doctors, who confirmed it.\n\n\n She said the culprit was a husky man wearing a red rubber mask, and\n though her description of what he had done did not appear in the story\n in the newsletter, it lost no time in penetrating every compartment of\n the ship.",
"The\nWeblor I\nhad taken off on the first trip to Antheon five years\n before with a thousand families, reached the planet with less than five\n hundred surviving colonists. Upon the return to Earth a year later, the\n crew's report of suffering and chaos during the year's outgoing voyage\n was twisted, distorted and fragmentary. Ellason remembered it well. The\n decision of Interstellar was that the colonists started a revolution\n far out in space, that it was fanned by the ignorance of Captain\n Sessions in dealing with such matters.\n\n\n \"Space affects men in a peculiar way,\" Phipps said. \"We have conquered\n the problem of small groups in space—witness the discovery of\n Antheon, for example—but when there are large groups, control is more\n difficult.\"\n\n\n \"Sessions,\" Rexroad said, \"was a bully. The trouble started at about\n the halfway point. It ended with passengers engaging in open warfare\n with each other and the crew. Sessions was lucky to escape with his\n life.\"",
"Critten nodded. \"When great numbers are being transported, they are apt\n to magnify each little event because so little happens. It was my job\n to see that they directed none of their venom against each other or the\n crew, only toward me.\"\n\n\n Branson smiled. \"It made the time pass quickly and interestingly for\n the passengers.\"\n\n\n \"To say nothing of me,\" Critten said.\n\n\n \"And you, Mr. Ellason, were along to observe it all,\" Captain Branson\n put in. \"Interstellar wanted an accurate picture of this. If it worked,\n they told me they'd use it on other trips to Antheon.\"\n\n\n Ellason nodded. \"No time for brooding, for differences of opinion on\n small matters. Just time to hate Mr. Critten. Unanimously.\"\n\n\n \"Probably,\" Critten said, \"you are wondering about the execution.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally.\"",
"He looked at his watch, picked up his notebook and made an entry. The\n ship right now would be slipping ever so slowly away from Earth. He got\n up. He'd have to go forward to the observation dome to see that. Last\n view of Earth for two years.\nThe penetration of space by large groups is the coming out from under\n the traditions of thousands of years, and as these planet-orginated\n rules fall away, the floundering group seeks a new control, for they\n are humanity adrift, rudderless, for whom the stars are no longer\n bearings but nonexistent things, and values are altered if they are not\n shown the way.\nThe theft of Carver Janssen's attache case occurred on the thirty-first\n day out. In Ellason's mind the incident, though insignificant from the\n standpoint of the ship as a whole, could very well be the cause of\n dissension later on. His notes covering it were therefore very thorough.",
"\"Let me put it differently. Let me say that you will not understand why\n I say that until the journey ends.\" He smiled. \"Perhaps I shouldn't\n have mentioned it.\"\nEllason left the captain's quarters with an odd taste in his mouth. Now\n why had Branson said that? Why hadn't Rexroad or Phipps said something,\n if it was important?\n\n\n He made himself comfortable in his seven-foot-by-seven-foot cubicle,\n which is to say he dropped on his bed, found it more comfortable than\n he thought it would be, put his arms behind his head, stared at the\n ceiling. Metal walls, no windows, one floor vent, one ceiling vent,\n and a solitary ceiling molding tube-light. This would be his home for\n a year, just as there were homes like it for three thousand others,\n except that the family rooms would be larger. His quarters were near\n the front of the spike near the officers' quarters.",
"Ellason left, feeling uneasy. If he were Branson, he'd initiate an\n investigation, if nothing else than to prove the crew guiltless. Why\n couldn't Branson see the wisdom of setting an example for the colonists?\nAs a Nilly, I knew that space breeds hate. There is a seed of\n malevolence in every man. It sometimes blossoms out among the stars. On\n the\nWeblor II\nit was ready for ripening.\nRaymond Palugger was killed in the ship's hospital on the sixty-first\n day. Palugger, a Fourth Quadrant passenger, had complained of feeling\n ill, had been hospitalized with a diagnosis of ileus. He had put his\n money belt in the drawer of the small stand beside his bed. A man\n in a red mask was seen hurrying from the hospital area, and a staff\n investigation revealed that Palugger had died trying to prevent the\n theft of the belt.",
"\"Oh, there'll be a trial, Mr. Ellason, but you don't think any jury'd\n let him live after all the things he's done, do you?\"\nRed Mask was stunned in Quadrant Four in a corridor by a policeman\n named Terryl Placer on the 201st day. The criminal was carried to the\n assembly room surrounded by guards, for he surely would have been\n mauled, if not killed, by angry colonists who crowded around. In the\n assembly hall his mask was whipped off. The crowd gasped. Nobody knew\n him.\n\n\n Ellason's first thought was that he must be a stowaway, but then he\n remembered the face, and Captain Branson, who came to have a look at\n him, unhappily admitted the man was a member of the crew. His name was\n Harrel Critten and he was a record keeper third class.\n\n\n \"Well, Critten,\" Branson roared at him, \"what have you got to say for\n yourself?\"",
"The captain's briefing room was crowded, the air was heavy with the\n breathing of so many men, and the ventilators could not quite clear the\n air of tobacco smoke that drifted aimlessly here and there before it\n was caught and whisked away.\n\n\n In the tradition of newspaperman and observer, Keith Ellason tried\n to be as inconspicuous as possible, pressing against a bulkhead, but\n Captain Branson's eyes sought his several times as Branson listened\n to final reports from his engineers, record keepers, fuel men,\n computermen, and all the rest. He grunted his approval or disapproval,\n made a suggestion here, a restriction there. There was no doubt that\n Branson was in charge, yet there was a human quality about him that\n Ellason liked. The captain's was a lean face, well tanned, and his eyes\n were chunks of blue.",
"\"Go to hell,\" Critten said quietly. As if it were an afterthought, he\n spat at the captain.\n\n\n Branson looked as if he were going to kill the man himself right there\n and then.\n\n\n It was a long trial—from the 220th to the 241st day—and there didn't\n seem to be much doubt about the outcome, for Critten didn't help his\n own cause during any of it.\n\n\n Lemuel Tarper, who was appointed prosecutor, asked him, \"What did you\n do with the loot, Critten?\"\n\n\n Critten looked him square in the eye and said, \"I threw it out one of\n the escape chutes. Does that answer your question?\"\n\n\n \"Threw it away?\" Tarper and the crowd were incredulous.",
"Ellason was present when a delegation from the Third Quadrant called on\n Captain Branson, demanding action.\n\n\n Branson remained seated behind his desk, unperturbed, saying, \"I have\n no crewmen to spare for police duty.\"\n\n\n The delegation commenced speaking vehemently, to be quieted by\n Branson's raised hand.\n\n\n \"I sympathize,\" Branson said, \"but it is up to each quadrant to deal\n with its problems, whatever they may be. My job is to get us to\n Antheon.\"\n\n\n The group left in a surly mood.\n\n\n \"You wonder at my reluctance, Mr. Ellason,\" Captain Branson said. \"But\n suppose I assign the crew to patrol duties, the culprit isn't caught,\n and further incidents occur. What then? It soon becomes the crew's\n fault. And soon the colonists will begin thinking these things might be\n the crew's doing in the first place.\"",
"Attendant to taking notes on this incident, Ellason noted a strange\n thing. Janssen lived in that part of the ship known as the First\n Quadrant, and those who lived in that quadrant—more than seven hundred\n men, women and children—felt that the thief must surely live in\n Quadrant Two or Four. Elias Cromley, who had the compartment next to\n Janssen's, sounded the consensus when he said, \"Surely a man wouldn't\n steal from his own quadrant, now would he, Mr. Ellason?\"",
"\"As I recall,\" Ellason said, \"there was something about stunners.\"\n\n\n Phipps rubbed his chin. \"No weapons were allowed on the ship, but you\n must remember the colonists were selected for their intelligence and\n resourcefulness. They utilized these attributes to set up weapon shops\n to arm themselves.\"\n\n\n \"The second trip is history,\" Rexroad said. \"And a puzzle.\"\nEllason nodded. \"The ship disappeared.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. We gave control to the colonists.\"\n\n\n \"Assuming no accident in space,\" Phipps said, \"it was a wrong decision.\n They probably took over the ship.\"\n\n\n \"And now,\" Ellason said, \"you're going to try again.\"",
"\"Sure,\" Critten said. \"You colonists got the easy life as passengers,\n just sitting around. I had to work my head off keeping records for you\n lazy bastards.\"\n\n\n The verdict was, of course, death.\n\n\n They executed Harrel Critten on the morning of the 270th day with\n blasts from six stunners supplied with full power. It was witnessed\n by a great crowd in the assembly hall. A detail from the ship's crew\n disposed of his body through a chute.\n\n\n It was all duly recorded in Keith Ellason's notebooks.\nDying is easy for a Nilly. Especially if it's arranged for beforehand,\n which it always is.\nThe\nWeblor II\nwas only one day out of orbit when Captain Branson sent\n for Ellason and introduced him to the executed man.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" Critten said, grinning from ear to ear."
],
[
"\"Are you out of your minds?\" Branson exclaimed.\n\n\n Tom Tilbury, Fourth Quadrant leader, said, \"We want to set up a police\n force, Captain. We want stunners.\"\n\n\n \"There's no law against it,\" Branson said, \"but it's a rule of mine\n that no weapons are to be issued en route.\"\n\n\n \"If we had had a gun, we'd have got Red Mask,\" Tilbury said.\n\n\n \"And I might have a murder on my conscience.\"\n\n\n Tilbury said, \"We've also thought of that. Suppose you supply us with\n half-power stunners? That way we can stun but not kill.\"\n\n\n They got their guns. Now there were twenty-four policemen on duty in\n the corridors—eight on at a time. Ellason observed that for the first\n time the passengers seemed relaxed.",
"\"What does he want that stuff for?\" Casey Stromberg, a passenger\n doctor, asked. \"I can see him taking my narcotics, my doctor's kit—but\n my dead wife's picture? That I don't understand.\"\n\n\n It was the same with others. \"The man's insane, Mr. Ellason. Positively\n insane.\" Many people said it.\n\n\n The council issued orders that all passengers from now on would be\n required to lock their compartments at all times. More guns were\n obtained from the captain. More policemen were appointed.\n\n\n Ellason was busy noting it all in his book. It became filled with\n jottings about innocent people being accidentally stunned when\n trigger-happy policemen thought their movements suspicious, about one\n man's suspicion of another and the ensuing search of compartments,\n people who saw Red Mask here, saw him there. Hardly a day went by\n without some new development.",
"\"It is not my desire to interfere in passenger affairs,\" he said.\n \"Insofar as the ship is concerned, it is my duty to make certain no\n crewman is guilty. This I am doing. But my crew is not and cannot be\n a police force for you. It is up to you people to police and protect\n yourselves.\"\n\n\n \"How can we protect ourselves without stunners?\" one colonist called\n out.\n\n\n \"Has Red Mask a gun?\" Branson retorted. \"It seems to me you have a\n better weapon than any gun.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"This ship is only so wide, so long and so deep. If every inch is\n searched, you'll find your man. He has to be somewhere aboard.\"",
"The Quadrant Council congratulated itself. The passengers were proud\n of themselves. A special congratulatory message from Captain Branson\n appeared one day in the Bulletin newsletter.\n\n\n The colonists settled down to living out the rest of the voyage until\n the landing on Antheon.\n\n\n But on the 170th day calamity struck. Red Mask appropriated one of the\n stunners, made his way down one whole corridor section in Quadrant Two,\n put occupants to sleep as he went, taking many articles of value and\n leaving disorder behind.\n\n\n Ellason interviewed as many victims as he could, noted it all in\n his book. The things taken were keepsakes, photographs and items of\n personal value. It seemed to be the work of a madman. If Red Mask\n wanted to make everyone furious, he certainly succeeded.",
"Captain Branson did not wait for the newsletter. Through the ship's\n speaker system, he reported that Palugger had a fortune in credits\n in the belt and had died of a severe beating. He said that since the\n incident occurred in the staff section of the ship, his crew would be\n forced to submit to a thorough inspection in an effort to find the\n mask, the seed case, the money and the man.\n\n\n \"I will not countenance such an act by a crewman,\" Branson said. \"If\n and when he is found, he will be severely dealt with. But he might not\n be a member of the crew. I am ordering an assembly of all passengers at\n nine tomorrow morning in the auditorium. I will speak to you all then.\"\nFaces were angry, tongues were sharp at the meeting, eyes suspicious\n and tempers short. Above it all was the overpowering presence of\n Captain Branson speaking to them.",
"Let Red Mask move against armed men, they said.\n\n\n Yeah, let him see what happens now.\n\n\n Red Mask did.\nOn the 101st day he was seen in a corridor in Quadrant Four. Emil\n Pierce, policeman on duty, managed to squeeze off several shots at his\n retreating figure.\n\n\n Red Mask was seen again on the 120th day, on the 135th day, and the\n 157th day. He was seen, shot at, but not hit. He was also unable to\n commit any crime.\n\n\n We've got him on the run, the colonists said.\n\n\n He's afraid to do anything, now that we've got police protection, they\n said smugly.",
"Ellason was present when a delegation from the Third Quadrant called on\n Captain Branson, demanding action.\n\n\n Branson remained seated behind his desk, unperturbed, saying, \"I have\n no crewmen to spare for police duty.\"\n\n\n The delegation commenced speaking vehemently, to be quieted by\n Branson's raised hand.\n\n\n \"I sympathize,\" Branson said, \"but it is up to each quadrant to deal\n with its problems, whatever they may be. My job is to get us to\n Antheon.\"\n\n\n The group left in a surly mood.\n\n\n \"You wonder at my reluctance, Mr. Ellason,\" Captain Branson said. \"But\n suppose I assign the crew to patrol duties, the culprit isn't caught,\n and further incidents occur. What then? It soon becomes the crew's\n fault. And soon the colonists will begin thinking these things might be\n the crew's doing in the first place.\"",
"The colonists quieted. Benjamin Simpson, one of the older men, was\n elected president of the newly formed Quadrant Council. One man from\n each of the quadrants was named to serve under him. Each of these men\n in turn selected five others from his own group.\n\n\n Those assembled waited in the hall while each team of six inspected\n the compartments of the others. These compartments were then locked,\n everyone returned to his compartment, and the larger search was\n conducted. It took twenty hours.\n\n\n No mask was found. No mask, no case, no money, no man.",
"The captain reported that his search had been equally fruitless.\n At another assembly the following day it was decided to make the\n inspection teams permanent, to await further moves on the part of Red\n Mask. The Quadrant Council held periodic meetings to set up a method of\n trial for him when he was caught. It was all recorded in the newsletter\n and by Keith Ellason.\nWe Nillys know about hate and about violence. We know too that where\n there is hate there is violence, and where there is violence there is\n death.\nDuring sleep time on the seventy-ninth day Barbara Stoneman, awakened\n by a strange sound, sat up in the bed of her compartment to find a\n man in a red mask in her room. Her cries brought neighbors into the\n corridor. The flight of the man was witnessed by many, and several men\n tried to stop him. But the intruder was light on his feet and fast. He\n escaped.\n\n\n The Quadrant Council confronted the captain, demanding weapons.",
"And so, Ellason observed in his notebook, are wars created.\nSeen in space, stars are unmoving, silent, sterile bright eyes ever\n watchful and accusing. To men unused to it, such a sight numbs,\n compresses, stultifies. He introduces a countermeasure, proof he\n exists, which is any overt act, sometimes violent.\nOn the forty-fifth day June Failright, the young wife of one of the\n passenger meteorologists, ran screaming down one of the long corridors\n of the Third Quadrant. She told the captain she had been attacked in\n her compartment while her husband was in the ship's library. She was\n taken to one of the ship's doctors, who confirmed it.\n\n\n She said the culprit was a husky man wearing a red rubber mask, and\n though her description of what he had done did not appear in the story\n in the newsletter, it lost no time in penetrating every compartment of\n the ship.",
"\"Oh, there'll be a trial, Mr. Ellason, but you don't think any jury'd\n let him live after all the things he's done, do you?\"\nRed Mask was stunned in Quadrant Four in a corridor by a policeman\n named Terryl Placer on the 201st day. The criminal was carried to the\n assembly room surrounded by guards, for he surely would have been\n mauled, if not killed, by angry colonists who crowded around. In the\n assembly hall his mask was whipped off. The crowd gasped. Nobody knew\n him.\n\n\n Ellason's first thought was that he must be a stowaway, but then he\n remembered the face, and Captain Branson, who came to have a look at\n him, unhappily admitted the man was a member of the crew. His name was\n Harrel Critten and he was a record keeper third class.\n\n\n \"Well, Critten,\" Branson roared at him, \"what have you got to say for\n yourself?\"",
"Critten nodded. \"When great numbers are being transported, they are apt\n to magnify each little event because so little happens. It was my job\n to see that they directed none of their venom against each other or the\n crew, only toward me.\"\n\n\n Branson smiled. \"It made the time pass quickly and interestingly for\n the passengers.\"\n\n\n \"To say nothing of me,\" Critten said.\n\n\n \"And you, Mr. Ellason, were along to observe it all,\" Captain Branson\n put in. \"Interstellar wanted an accurate picture of this. If it worked,\n they told me they'd use it on other trips to Antheon.\"\n\n\n Ellason nodded. \"No time for brooding, for differences of opinion on\n small matters. Just time to hate Mr. Critten. Unanimously.\"\n\n\n \"Probably,\" Critten said, \"you are wondering about the execution.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally.\"",
"Ellason left, feeling uneasy. If he were Branson, he'd initiate an\n investigation, if nothing else than to prove the crew guiltless. Why\n couldn't Branson see the wisdom of setting an example for the colonists?\nAs a Nilly, I knew that space breeds hate. There is a seed of\n malevolence in every man. It sometimes blossoms out among the stars. On\n the\nWeblor II\nit was ready for ripening.\nRaymond Palugger was killed in the ship's hospital on the sixty-first\n day. Palugger, a Fourth Quadrant passenger, had complained of feeling\n ill, had been hospitalized with a diagnosis of ileus. He had put his\n money belt in the drawer of the small stand beside his bed. A man\n in a red mask was seen hurrying from the hospital area, and a staff\n investigation revealed that Palugger had died trying to prevent the\n theft of the belt.",
"He looked at his watch, picked up his notebook and made an entry. The\n ship right now would be slipping ever so slowly away from Earth. He got\n up. He'd have to go forward to the observation dome to see that. Last\n view of Earth for two years.\nThe penetration of space by large groups is the coming out from under\n the traditions of thousands of years, and as these planet-orginated\n rules fall away, the floundering group seeks a new control, for they\n are humanity adrift, rudderless, for whom the stars are no longer\n bearings but nonexistent things, and values are altered if they are not\n shown the way.\nThe theft of Carver Janssen's attache case occurred on the thirty-first\n day out. In Ellason's mind the incident, though insignificant from the\n standpoint of the ship as a whole, could very well be the cause of\n dissension later on. His notes covering it were therefore very thorough.",
"The\nWeblor I\nhad taken off on the first trip to Antheon five years\n before with a thousand families, reached the planet with less than five\n hundred surviving colonists. Upon the return to Earth a year later, the\n crew's report of suffering and chaos during the year's outgoing voyage\n was twisted, distorted and fragmentary. Ellason remembered it well. The\n decision of Interstellar was that the colonists started a revolution\n far out in space, that it was fanned by the ignorance of Captain\n Sessions in dealing with such matters.\n\n\n \"Space affects men in a peculiar way,\" Phipps said. \"We have conquered\n the problem of small groups in space—witness the discovery of\n Antheon, for example—but when there are large groups, control is more\n difficult.\"\n\n\n \"Sessions,\" Rexroad said, \"was a bully. The trouble started at about\n the halfway point. It ended with passengers engaging in open warfare\n with each other and the crew. Sessions was lucky to escape with his\n life.\"",
"Attendant to taking notes on this incident, Ellason noted a strange\n thing. Janssen lived in that part of the ship known as the First\n Quadrant, and those who lived in that quadrant—more than seven hundred\n men, women and children—felt that the thief must surely live in\n Quadrant Two or Four. Elias Cromley, who had the compartment next to\n Janssen's, sounded the consensus when he said, \"Surely a man wouldn't\n steal from his own quadrant, now would he, Mr. Ellason?\"",
"\"Go to hell,\" Critten said quietly. As if it were an afterthought, he\n spat at the captain.\n\n\n Branson looked as if he were going to kill the man himself right there\n and then.\n\n\n It was a long trial—from the 220th to the 241st day—and there didn't\n seem to be much doubt about the outcome, for Critten didn't help his\n own cause during any of it.\n\n\n Lemuel Tarper, who was appointed prosecutor, asked him, \"What did you\n do with the loot, Critten?\"\n\n\n Critten looked him square in the eye and said, \"I threw it out one of\n the escape chutes. Does that answer your question?\"\n\n\n \"Threw it away?\" Tarper and the crowd were incredulous.",
"Ellason had to smile at that. What did Captain Branson think of those\n colonists who killed each other on the\nWeblor I\n? They had passed\n stability tests too. This, then, was what happened when you took three\n thousand strangers and stuck them in a can for a year.\nWhen Ellason saw Branson about it, the captain said, \"Of course I\n realize it takes only a little thing like this to set things off. I\n know people get tired of seeing each other, playing the same tapes,\n looking at the stars from the observation dome, walking down the same\n corridors, reading the same books, eating the same meals, though God\n knows we try to vary it as much as we can. Space creates rough edges.\n But the point is, we know all this, and knowing it, we shouldn't let it\n happen. We've got to find that thief.\"\n\n\n \"What would he want seeds for? Have you thought of that?\"\n\n\n \"Of course. They'd have real value on Antheon.\"",
"Ellason brightened. \"And by that time everybody was seeing Red Mask\n everywhere and the colonists organized against him.\"\n\n\n \"Gave them something to do,\" Branson said.\n\n\n \"Every time things got dull, I livened them up. I got a stunner and\n robbed along the corridor. That really stirred them. Lucky nobody got\n hurt during any of it, including that Stoneman woman. I was trying to\n rob her when she woke up.\"\nBranson cleared his throat. \"Ah, Ellason about that story. You\n understand you can't write it, don't you?\"\n\n\n Ellason said regretfully that he did understand.\n\n\n \"The colonists will never know the truth,\" Branson went on. \"There will\n be other ships outward bound.\"",
"\"As I recall,\" Ellason said, \"there was something about stunners.\"\n\n\n Phipps rubbed his chin. \"No weapons were allowed on the ship, but you\n must remember the colonists were selected for their intelligence and\n resourcefulness. They utilized these attributes to set up weapon shops\n to arm themselves.\"\n\n\n \"The second trip is history,\" Rexroad said. \"And a puzzle.\"\nEllason nodded. \"The ship disappeared.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. We gave control to the colonists.\"\n\n\n \"Assuming no accident in space,\" Phipps said, \"it was a wrong decision.\n They probably took over the ship.\"\n\n\n \"And now,\" Ellason said, \"you're going to try again.\""
],
[
"Critten sighed. \"And I'll have to be caught again.\"\nYes, we're anonymous, nameless, we Nillys, for that's what we call\n each other, and are a theme, with variations, in the endless stretches\n of deep space, objects of hatred and contempt, professional heels,\n dying once a trip when the time is ripe, antidote to boredom, and we'll\n ply our trade, our little tragedies, on a thousand ships bringing\n humanity to new worlds.",
"\"Sure,\" Critten said. \"You colonists got the easy life as passengers,\n just sitting around. I had to work my head off keeping records for you\n lazy bastards.\"\n\n\n The verdict was, of course, death.\n\n\n They executed Harrel Critten on the morning of the 270th day with\n blasts from six stunners supplied with full power. It was witnessed\n by a great crowd in the assembly hall. A detail from the ship's crew\n disposed of his body through a chute.\n\n\n It was all duly recorded in Keith Ellason's notebooks.\nDying is easy for a Nilly. Especially if it's arranged for beforehand,\n which it always is.\nThe\nWeblor II\nwas only one day out of orbit when Captain Branson sent\n for Ellason and introduced him to the executed man.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" Critten said, grinning from ear to ear.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nSure I'm a Nilly, and I've died seven times, always in the blackness\n of the outer reaches, and I'm not alone, although there aren't very\n many of us, never were.\nIt made sense. Interstellar was new and they wanted him on the ship\n because he was a trained observer. They wanted facts, not gibberish.\n But to ask a man to give up two years of his life—well, that was\n asking a lot. Two years in a sardine can. Still, it had an appeal Keith\n Ellason knew he couldn't deny, a newsman's joy of the clean beat, a\n planetary system far afield, a closeup view of the universe, history in\n the making.\n\n\n Interstellar Chief Rexroad knocked the dottle from his pipe in a tray,\n saying, \"Transworld Press is willing to let you have a leave of\n abscence, if you're interested.\"",
"\"Oh, there'll be a trial, Mr. Ellason, but you don't think any jury'd\n let him live after all the things he's done, do you?\"\nRed Mask was stunned in Quadrant Four in a corridor by a policeman\n named Terryl Placer on the 201st day. The criminal was carried to the\n assembly room surrounded by guards, for he surely would have been\n mauled, if not killed, by angry colonists who crowded around. In the\n assembly hall his mask was whipped off. The crowd gasped. Nobody knew\n him.\n\n\n Ellason's first thought was that he must be a stowaway, but then he\n remembered the face, and Captain Branson, who came to have a look at\n him, unhappily admitted the man was a member of the crew. His name was\n Harrel Critten and he was a record keeper third class.\n\n\n \"Well, Critten,\" Branson roared at him, \"what have you got to say for\n yourself?\"",
"Critten nodded. \"When great numbers are being transported, they are apt\n to magnify each little event because so little happens. It was my job\n to see that they directed none of their venom against each other or the\n crew, only toward me.\"\n\n\n Branson smiled. \"It made the time pass quickly and interestingly for\n the passengers.\"\n\n\n \"To say nothing of me,\" Critten said.\n\n\n \"And you, Mr. Ellason, were along to observe it all,\" Captain Branson\n put in. \"Interstellar wanted an accurate picture of this. If it worked,\n they told me they'd use it on other trips to Antheon.\"\n\n\n Ellason nodded. \"No time for brooding, for differences of opinion on\n small matters. Just time to hate Mr. Critten. Unanimously.\"\n\n\n \"Probably,\" Critten said, \"you are wondering about the execution.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally.\"",
"The captain reported that his search had been equally fruitless.\n At another assembly the following day it was decided to make the\n inspection teams permanent, to await further moves on the part of Red\n Mask. The Quadrant Council held periodic meetings to set up a method of\n trial for him when he was caught. It was all recorded in the newsletter\n and by Keith Ellason.\nWe Nillys know about hate and about violence. We know too that where\n there is hate there is violence, and where there is violence there is\n death.\nDuring sleep time on the seventy-ninth day Barbara Stoneman, awakened\n by a strange sound, sat up in the bed of her compartment to find a\n man in a red mask in her room. Her cries brought neighbors into the\n corridor. The flight of the man was witnessed by many, and several men\n tried to stop him. But the intruder was light on his feet and fast. He\n escaped.\n\n\n The Quadrant Council confronted the captain, demanding weapons.",
"\"I suppose that's problematical,\" Phipps said, \"but I think you will.\n Captain Branson and his fifty crewmen want to return as badly as you\n do.\" He grinned. \"You can write that novel you're always talking about\n on your return trip on the\nWeblor II\n.\"\nBeing a Nilly is important, probably as important as running the ship,\n and I think it is this thought that keeps us satisfied, willing to be\n what we are.\nThe\nWeblor II\nhad been built in space, as had its predecessor, the\nWeblor I\n, at a tremendous cost. Basically, it was an instrument\n which would open distant vistas to colonization, reducing the",
"\"I figured as much,\" Ellason said. \"I've been doing a lot of thinking.\"\n\n\n \"You're perhaps a little too good as an observer,\" Branson said. \"Or\n maybe it was because you really weren't one of the colonists. But no\n matter, Critten did a good job. He was trained by an old friend of mine\n for this job, Gelthorpe Nill. Nill used to be in counter-espionage when\n there were wars.\"\n\n\n \"You were excellent,\" Ellason said.\n\n\n \"Can't say I enjoyed the role,\" said Critten, \"but I think it saved\n lives.\"\n\n\n \"Let me get this straight. Interstellar thought that it was idleness\n and boredom that caused the killings on the\nWeblor I\n, so they had you\n trained to be a scapegoat. Is that right?\"",
"Attendant to taking notes on this incident, Ellason noted a strange\n thing. Janssen lived in that part of the ship known as the First\n Quadrant, and those who lived in that quadrant—more than seven hundred\n men, women and children—felt that the thief must surely live in\n Quadrant Two or Four. Elias Cromley, who had the compartment next to\n Janssen's, sounded the consensus when he said, \"Surely a man wouldn't\n steal from his own quadrant, now would he, Mr. Ellason?\"",
"And so, Ellason observed in his notebook, are wars created.\nSeen in space, stars are unmoving, silent, sterile bright eyes ever\n watchful and accusing. To men unused to it, such a sight numbs,\n compresses, stultifies. He introduces a countermeasure, proof he\n exists, which is any overt act, sometimes violent.\nOn the forty-fifth day June Failright, the young wife of one of the\n passenger meteorologists, ran screaming down one of the long corridors\n of the Third Quadrant. She told the captain she had been attacked in\n her compartment while her husband was in the ship's library. She was\n taken to one of the ship's doctors, who confirmed it.\n\n\n She said the culprit was a husky man wearing a red rubber mask, and\n though her description of what he had done did not appear in the story\n in the newsletter, it lost no time in penetrating every compartment of\n the ship.",
"Ellason left, feeling uneasy. If he were Branson, he'd initiate an\n investigation, if nothing else than to prove the crew guiltless. Why\n couldn't Branson see the wisdom of setting an example for the colonists?\nAs a Nilly, I knew that space breeds hate. There is a seed of\n malevolence in every man. It sometimes blossoms out among the stars. On\n the\nWeblor II\nit was ready for ripening.\nRaymond Palugger was killed in the ship's hospital on the sixty-first\n day. Palugger, a Fourth Quadrant passenger, had complained of feeling\n ill, had been hospitalized with a diagnosis of ileus. He had put his\n money belt in the drawer of the small stand beside his bed. A man\n in a red mask was seen hurrying from the hospital area, and a staff\n investigation revealed that Palugger had died trying to prevent the\n theft of the belt.",
"Let Red Mask move against armed men, they said.\n\n\n Yeah, let him see what happens now.\n\n\n Red Mask did.\nOn the 101st day he was seen in a corridor in Quadrant Four. Emil\n Pierce, policeman on duty, managed to squeeze off several shots at his\n retreating figure.\n\n\n Red Mask was seen again on the 120th day, on the 135th day, and the\n 157th day. He was seen, shot at, but not hit. He was also unable to\n commit any crime.\n\n\n We've got him on the run, the colonists said.\n\n\n He's afraid to do anything, now that we've got police protection, they\n said smugly.",
"\"Go to hell,\" Critten said quietly. As if it were an afterthought, he\n spat at the captain.\n\n\n Branson looked as if he were going to kill the man himself right there\n and then.\n\n\n It was a long trial—from the 220th to the 241st day—and there didn't\n seem to be much doubt about the outcome, for Critten didn't help his\n own cause during any of it.\n\n\n Lemuel Tarper, who was appointed prosecutor, asked him, \"What did you\n do with the loot, Critten?\"\n\n\n Critten looked him square in the eye and said, \"I threw it out one of\n the escape chutes. Does that answer your question?\"\n\n\n \"Threw it away?\" Tarper and the crowd were incredulous.",
"\"What does he want that stuff for?\" Casey Stromberg, a passenger\n doctor, asked. \"I can see him taking my narcotics, my doctor's kit—but\n my dead wife's picture? That I don't understand.\"\n\n\n It was the same with others. \"The man's insane, Mr. Ellason. Positively\n insane.\" Many people said it.\n\n\n The council issued orders that all passengers from now on would be\n required to lock their compartments at all times. More guns were\n obtained from the captain. More policemen were appointed.\n\n\n Ellason was busy noting it all in his book. It became filled with\n jottings about innocent people being accidentally stunned when\n trigger-happy policemen thought their movements suspicious, about one\n man's suspicion of another and the ensuing search of compartments,\n people who saw Red Mask here, saw him there. Hardly a day went by\n without some new development.",
"\"Oh, yes, Mr. Ellason, we're going to get him,\" said Tilbury, now chief\n of police, cracking his knuckles, his eyes glowing at the thought.\n \"We're bound to get him. We've got things worked out to the finest\n detail. He won't be able to get through our fingers now. Just let him\n make so much as a move.\"\n\n\n \"And what will you do when you get him?\"\n\n\n \"Kill him,\" Tilbury said, licking his lips, his eyes glowing more\n fiercely than ever.\n\n\n \"Without a trial?\"",
"The Quadrant Council congratulated itself. The passengers were proud\n of themselves. A special congratulatory message from Captain Branson\n appeared one day in the Bulletin newsletter.\n\n\n The colonists settled down to living out the rest of the voyage until\n the landing on Antheon.\n\n\n But on the 170th day calamity struck. Red Mask appropriated one of the\n stunners, made his way down one whole corridor section in Quadrant Two,\n put occupants to sleep as he went, taking many articles of value and\n leaving disorder behind.\n\n\n Ellason interviewed as many victims as he could, noted it all in\n his book. The things taken were keepsakes, photographs and items of\n personal value. It seemed to be the work of a madman. If Red Mask\n wanted to make everyone furious, he certainly succeeded.",
"Branson asked him to describe the man.\n\n\n \"Oh, he was about six feet tall, stocky build, and he wore a red rubber\n mask that covered his head completely.\"\n\n\n \"Didn't you think that was important?\" Branson asked in an outraged\n voice. \"A man wearing a red mask?\"\n\n\n Dievers shrugged. \"This is a spaceship. How would I know whether a red\n mask—or a blue or green one—does or doesn't belong on a spaceship?\"\n\n\n Although Dievers' account appeared in the newsletter, it was largely\n discounted.\n\n\n \"If it is true,\" Branson told Ellason, \"the theft must be the work of\n a psychotic. But I don't believe Jamieson Dievers. It may well be he's\n the psychotic.\" He snorted. \"Red rubber mask! I think I'll have Dievers\n put through psychiatry.\"",
"Ellason brightened. \"And by that time everybody was seeing Red Mask\n everywhere and the colonists organized against him.\"\n\n\n \"Gave them something to do,\" Branson said.\n\n\n \"Every time things got dull, I livened them up. I got a stunner and\n robbed along the corridor. That really stirred them. Lucky nobody got\n hurt during any of it, including that Stoneman woman. I was trying to\n rob her when she woke up.\"\nBranson cleared his throat. \"Ah, Ellason about that story. You\n understand you can't write it, don't you?\"\n\n\n Ellason said regretfully that he did understand.\n\n\n \"The colonists will never know the truth,\" Branson went on. \"There will\n be other ships outward bound.\"",
"\"Are you out of your minds?\" Branson exclaimed.\n\n\n Tom Tilbury, Fourth Quadrant leader, said, \"We want to set up a police\n force, Captain. We want stunners.\"\n\n\n \"There's no law against it,\" Branson said, \"but it's a rule of mine\n that no weapons are to be issued en route.\"\n\n\n \"If we had had a gun, we'd have got Red Mask,\" Tilbury said.\n\n\n \"And I might have a murder on my conscience.\"\n\n\n Tilbury said, \"We've also thought of that. Suppose you supply us with\n half-power stunners? That way we can stun but not kill.\"\n\n\n They got their guns. Now there were twenty-four policemen on duty in\n the corridors—eight on at a time. Ellason observed that for the first\n time the passengers seemed relaxed.",
"\"Let me put it differently. Let me say that you will not understand why\n I say that until the journey ends.\" He smiled. \"Perhaps I shouldn't\n have mentioned it.\"\nEllason left the captain's quarters with an odd taste in his mouth. Now\n why had Branson said that? Why hadn't Rexroad or Phipps said something,\n if it was important?\n\n\n He made himself comfortable in his seven-foot-by-seven-foot cubicle,\n which is to say he dropped on his bed, found it more comfortable than\n he thought it would be, put his arms behind his head, stared at the\n ceiling. Metal walls, no windows, one floor vent, one ceiling vent,\n and a solitary ceiling molding tube-light. This would be his home for\n a year, just as there were homes like it for three thousand others,\n except that the family rooms would be larger. His quarters were near\n the front of the spike near the officers' quarters."
]
] |
train
|
26843
|
[
"Which term best describes the narrator's attitude toward writing up the first trip to Mars?",
"After they landed, how were the crewmen viewed by the general public?",
"What is the central theme of the story?",
"What is the Martians' orientation toward water?",
"Who is the 'dope' on Mars?",
"What does the last line indicate about modern society, in general?",
"What's ironic about the narrator's and Kroger's decision to sign on for the flight scheduled to Venus?"
] |
[
[
"ambivalent",
"apprehensive",
"resentful",
"downtrodden"
],
[
"with admiration",
"with curiosity",
"with fear",
"with disdain"
],
[
"Curiosity can cross dangerous boundaries, and lack of curiosity can blind one's self to those boundaries",
"Whatever we are addicted to will end up consuming us, if we allow it",
"Working together as a team is more advantageous than taking an individualistic approach",
"People, in general, are only interested in content if they find relevance or opportunity for personal gain"
],
[
"They fear it due to its ability to disintegrate their bodies",
"They utilize it to grow an army within their population",
"They desire it to fuel their underground Martian ecosystem",
"They are both curious and reluctant to understand its potential"
],
[
"Kroger, the biochemist",
"Jones, the co-pilot",
"The narrator",
"Desmond, the pilot"
],
[
"Humans in the modern age have been desensitized to crises",
"Creating a solution sometimes requires people to return to the source from which the problem originated",
"Quality is just as, if not more important, than quantity when it comes to armed forces",
"The preference for intrigue over information has the potential to destroy a society"
],
[
"The narrator is going to fabricate more events to make his story sound appealing to the general public",
"They have the least amount of technical experience compared to the other members of the Martian crew",
"They were permitted to attend due to their 'experience,' but their experience created a major crisis on Earth",
"The narrator's deadpan tone is not likely to convey the true excitement of the Venusian journey"
]
] |
[
2,
1,
1,
1,
3,
1,
3
] |
[
0,
1,
0,
0,
0,
1,
0
] |
[
[
"So I went on the first trip to\n Mars. And I kept a diary. This is\n it. And it is honest. Honest it is.\nOctober 1, 1960\nThey picked\n the launching\n date from the March, 1959, New\n York\nTimes\n, which stated that this\n was the most likely time for launching.\n Trip time is supposed to take\n 260 days (that's one way), so\n we're aimed toward where Mars\n will be (had\nbetter\nbe, or else).\n\n\n There are five of us on board. A\n pilot, co-pilot, navigator and biochemist.\n And, of course, me. I've\n met all but the pilot (he's very\n busy today), and they seem friendly\n enough.",
"THE DOPE\n\n on Mars\nBy JACK SHARKEY\nSomebody had to get the human\n angle on this trip ... but what\n was humane about sending me?\nIllustrated by WOOD\nMy\n agent was the one who\n got me the job of going\n along to write up the first\n trip to Mars. He was always getting\n me things like that—appearances\n on TV shows, or mentions in writers'\n magazines. If he didn't sell\n much of my stuff, at least he sold\nme\n.\n\n\n \"It'll be the biggest break a\n writer ever got,\" he told me, two\n days before blastoff. \"Oh, sure\n there'll be scientific reports on the\n trip, but the public doesn't want\n them; they want the\nhuman\nslant\n on things.\"\n\n\n \"But, Louie,\" I said weakly, \"I'll\n probably be locked up for the\n whole trip. If there are fights or accidents,\n they won't tell\nme\nabout\n them.\"",
"I asked Pat what the prize was\n and he told me to go to hell.\nJune 18, 1961\nMars has\n the whole screen\n filled. Looks like Death Valley. No\n sign of canals, but Pat says that's\n because of the dust storm down below.\n It's nice to have a \"down below\"\n again. We're going to land, so\n I have to go to my bunk. It's all\n foam rubber, nylon braid supports\n and magnesium tubing. Might as\n well be cement for all the good it\n did me at takeoff. Earth seems awfully\n far away.\nJune 19, 1961",
"Well, it's time for takeoff.\nThis time\n it wasn't so bad. I\n thought I was getting my space-legs,\n but Pat says there's less gravity on\n Mars, so escape velocity didn't\n have to be so fast, hence a smoother\n (relatively) trip on our shock-absorbing\n bunks.\n\n\n Lloyd wants to play chess again.\n I'll be careful not to win this time.\n However, if I don't win, maybe this\n time\nI'll\nbe the one to quit.\n\n\n Kroger is busy in his cramped\n lab space trying to classify the little\n moss he was able to gather, and\n Jones and Pat are up front watching\n the white specks revolve on that\n black velvet again.",
"I went to the galley for coffee\n and had a talk about moss with\n Kroger. He said there was a good\n chance of lichen on Mars, and I\n misunderstood and said, \"A good\n chance of liking\nwhat\non Mars?\"\n and Kroger finished his coffee and\n went up front.\n\n\n When I got back to my compartment,\n Lloyd had taken away the\n chessboard and all his buttons. He\n told me later he needed it to back\n up a star map.\n\n\n Pat slept mostly all day in his\n compartment, and Jones sat and\n watched the screen revolve. There\n wasn't much to do, so I wrote a\n poem, sort of.\n\nMary, Mary, quite contrary,\n \nHow does your garden grow?\n \nWith Martian rime, Venusian slime,\n \nAnd a radioactive hoe.",
"Jones got the rifles out of the\n stream (the Martians had probably\n thought they were beyond recovery\n there) and we found the jeep. It\n was nearly buried in sand, but we\n got it cleaned off and running, and\n got back to the ship quickly. First\n thing we did on arriving was to\n break out the stores and have a\n celebration feast just outside the\n door of the ship.\n\n\n It was pork again, and I got sick.\nJune 25, 1961\nWe're going back\n . Pat says\n that a week is all we were allowed\n to stay and that it's urgent to return\n and tell what we've learned\n about Mars (we know there are\n Martians, and they're made of\n sugar).\n\n\n \"Why,\" I said, \"can't we just tell\n it on the radio?\"",
"Also, I am one of the first five\n men in the history of the world to\n see the opposite side of the Moon,\n with a bluish blurred crescent beyond\n it that Pat said was the Earth.\n The back of the Moon isn't much\n different from the front. As to the\n space in front of the ship, well, it's\n all black with white dots in it, and\n none of the dots move, except in a\n circle that Pat says is a \"torque\"\n result from the gyroscopic spin\n we're in. Actually, he explained to\n me, the screen is supposed to keep\n the image of space locked into\n place no matter how much we spin.\n But there's some kind of a \"drag.\"\n I told him I hoped it didn't mean\n we'd land on Mars upside down. He\n just stared at me.",
"We're in a small cave that is just\n off a bigger cave where lots of tunnels\n come together. I can't remember\n which one we came in through,\n and neither can anyone else. Jones\n asked me what the hell I kept writing\n in the diary for, did I want to\n make it a gift to Martian archeologists?\n But I said where there's life\n there's hope, and now he won't talk\n to me. I congratulated Kroger on\n the lichen I'd seen, but he just said\n a short and unscientific word and\n went to sleep.\n\n\n There's a Martian guarding the\n entrance to our cave. I don't know\n what they intend to do with us.\n Feed us, I hope. So far, they've just\n left us here, and we're out of rations.",
"I showed it to Kroger. He says\n it may prove to be environmentally\n accurate, but that I should stick to\n prose.\nOctober 5, 1960\nLearned Jones'\n first name.\n He wrote something in the ship's\n log, and I saw his signature. His\n name is Fleance, like in \"Macbeth.\"\n He prefers to be called Jones. Pat\n uses his first name as a gag. Some\n fun.\n\n\n And only 255 days to go.\nApril 1, 1961\nI've skipped\n over the last 177\n days or so, because there's nothing\n much new. I brought some books\n with me on the trip, books that I'd\n always meant to read and never\n had the time. So now I know all\n about\nVanity Fair\n,\nPride and Prejudice\n,\nWar and Peace\n,\nGone with\n the Wind\n, and\nBabbitt\n.",
"Dwight Kroger, the biochemist,\n is rather old to take the \"rigors of\n the journey,\" as he puts it, but the\n government had a choice between\n sending a green scientist who could\n stand the trip or an accomplished\n man who would probably not survive,\n so they picked Kroger. We've\n blasted off, though, and he's still\n with us. He looks a damn sight better\n than I feel. He's kind of balding,\n and very iron-gray-haired and\n skinny, but his skin is tan as an Indian's,\n and right now he's telling\n jokes in the washroom with the co-pilot.\n\n\n Jones (that's the co-pilot; I\n didn't quite catch his first name) is\n scarlet-faced, barrel-chested and\n gives the general appearance of belonging\n under the spreading chestnut\n tree, not in a metal bullet flinging\n itself out into airless space.\n Come to think of it, who\ndoes\nbelong\n where we are?",
"Kroger is thrilled that he is\n learning something, maybe, about\n Martian reproductive processes.\n When he told Pat, Pat put it to a\n vote whether or not to jettison\n Kroger through the airlock. However,\n it was decided that responsibility\n was pretty well divided.\n Lloyd had gotten the crystals,\n Kroger had only studied them, and\n Jones had brought them aboard.\n\n\n So Kroger stays, but meanwhile\n the air is getting worse. Pat suggested\n Kroger put us all into a state\n of suspended animation till landing\n time, eight months away. Kroger\n said, \"How?\"\nJune 27, 1961\nAir is foul\n and I'm very\n thirsty. Kroger says that at least—when\n the Martians get bigger—they'll\n have to show themselves.\n Pat says what do we do\nthen\n? We\n can't afford the water we need to\n melt them down. Besides, the\n melted crystals might\nall\nturn into\n little Martians.",
"\"Nonsense,\" said Louie, sipping\n carefully at a paper cup of scalding\n coffee. \"It'll be just like the\n public going along vicariously.\n They'll\nidentify\nwith you.\"\n\n\n \"But, Louie,\" I said, wiping the\n dampness from my palms on the\n knees of my trousers as I sat there,\n \"how'll I go about it? A story? An\n article? A\nyou-are-there\ntype of report?\n What?\"\n\n\n Louie shrugged. \"So keep a\n diary. It'll be more intimate, like.\"\n\n\n \"But what if nothing happens?\"\n I insisted hopelessly.\n\n\n Louie smiled. \"So you fake it.\"\n\n\n I got up from the chair in his office\n and stepped to the door.\n \"That's dishonest,\" I pointed out.\n\n\n \"Creative is the word,\" Louie\n said.",
"The constant shower of sand\n near the cliff walls is annoying, but\n it's sandless (shower-wise) near\n the stream, so we're following the\n footprints along the bank. Also, the\n air's better down here. Still thin,\n but not so bad as on the surface.\n We're going without masks to save\n oxygen for the return trip (Jones\n assures me there'll\nbe\na return\n trip), and the air's only a little bit\n sandy, but handkerchiefs over nose\n and mouth solve this.\n\n\n We look like desperadoes, what\n with the rifles and covered faces. I\n said as much to Lloyd and he told\n me to shut up. Moss all over the\n cliff walls. Swell luck for Kroger.\nWe've found\n Kroger and Pat,\n with the help of the aliens. Or maybe\n I should call them the Martians.\n Either way, it's better than what\n Jones calls them.",
"They didn't take as long as I\n thought they would, except for\nVanity Fair\n. It must have been a\n riot when it first came out. I mean,\n all those sly digs at the aristocracy,\n with copious interpolations by Mr.\n Thackeray in case you didn't get\n it when he'd pulled a particularly\n good gag. Some fun.\n\n\n And only 78 days to go.\nJune 1, 1961\nOnly 17 days\n to go. I saw Mars\n on the screen today. It seems to be\n descending from overhead, but Pat\n says that that's the \"torque\" doing\n it. Actually, it's we who are coming\n in sideways.\n\n\n We've all grown beards, too. Pat\n said it was against regulations, but\n what the hell. We have a contest.\n Longest whiskers on landing gets a\n prize.",
"Meantime, we have to catch\n those Martians.\nJune 29, 1961\nWorse and worse\n . Lloyd\n caught one of the Martians in the\n firing chamber. We had to flood\n the chamber with acid to subdue\n the creature, which carbonized\n nicely. So now we have plenty of\n air and water again, but besides\n having another Martian still on\n the loose, we now don't have\n enough acid left in the fuel tanks\n to make a landing.\n\n\n Pat says at least our vector will\n carry us to Earth and we can die\n on our home planet, which is better\n than perishing in space.",
"The point is, bullets won't stop\n these things, and wherever a crystal\n falls, a new Martian springs up\n in a few weeks. It looks like the\n five of us have abetted an invasion\n from Mars.\n\n\n Needless to say, we're no longer\n heroes.\n\n\n I haven't heard from Pat or\n Lloyd for a week. Jones was picked\n up attacking a candy factory yesterday,\n and Kroger and I were allowed\n to sign on for the flight to\n Venus scheduled within the next\n few days—because of our experience.",
"It is not.\nJune 24, 1961, probably\nI'm hungry\n . So is everybody\n else. Right now I could eat a dinner\n raw, in a centrifuge, and keep it\n down. A Martian threw a stone at\n Jones today, and Jones threw one\n back at him and broke off a couple\n of scales. The Martian whistled\n furiously and went away. When the\n crowd thinned out, same as it did\n yesterday (must be some sort of\n sleeping cycle here), Kroger talked\n Lloyd into swimming across the\n river and getting the red scales.\n Lloyd started at the upstream part\n of the current, and was about a hundred\n yards below this underground\n island before he made the far side.\n Sure is a swift current.",
"Kroger says the Martians must\n be intelligent, otherwise they\n couldn't have guessed at the carbohydrates\n present in the bread after\n a lifelong diet of anthracite. Pat\n says let's jettison Kroger.\n\n\n This time the vote went against\n Kroger, but he got a last-minute reprieve\n by suggesting the crystals\n be pulverized and mixed with sulphuric\n acid. He says this'll produce\n carbon.\n\n\n I certainly hope so.\n\n\n So does Kroger.\nBrief reprieve\n for us. The\n acid-sugar combination not only\n produces carbon but water vapor,\n and the gauge has gone up a notch.\n That means that we have a quart\n of water in the tanks for drinking.\n However, the air's a bit better,\n and we voted to let Kroger stay inside\n the rocket.",
"Kroger tells me that the pilot's\n name is Patrick Desmond, but that\n I can call him Pat when I get to\n know him better. So far, he's still\n Captain Desmond to me. I haven't\n the vaguest idea what he looks like.\n He was already on board when I\n got here, with my typewriter and\n ream of paper, so we didn't meet.\n\n\n My compartment is small but\n clean. I mean clean now. It wasn't\n during blastoff. The inertial gravities\n didn't bother me so much as\n the gyroscopic spin they put on the\n ship so we have a sort of artificial\n gravity to hold us against the\n curved floor. It's that constant\n whirly feeling that gets me. I get\n sick on merry-go-rounds, too.",
"Guess I'll take a nap.\nJune 26, 1961\nHell's bells\n . Kroger says\n there are two baby Martians loose\n on board ship. Pat told him he\n was nuts, but there are certain\n signs he's right. Like the missing\n charcoal in the air-filtration-and-reclaiming\n (AFAR) system. And\n the water gauges are going down.\n But the clincher is those two sugar\n crystals Lloyd had grabbed up\n when we were in that zoo. They're\n gone.\n\n\n Pat has declared a state of emergency.\n Quick thinking, that's Pat.\n Lloyd, before he remembered and\n turned scarlet, suggested we radio\n Earth for instructions. We can't.\n\n\n Here we are, somewhere in a\n void headed for Earth, with enough\n air and water left for maybe three\n days—if the Martians don't take\n any more."
],
[
"\"Because,\" said Pat, \"if we tell\n them now, by the time we get back\n we'll be yesterday's news. This way\n we may be lucky and get a parade.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even money,\" said\n Kroger, whose mind wasn't always\n on science.\n\n\n \"But they'll ask why we didn't\n radio the info, sir,\" said Jones uneasily.\n\n\n \"The radio,\" said Pat, nodding to\n Lloyd, \"was unfortunately broken\n shortly after landing.\"\n\n\n Lloyd blinked, then nodded\n back and walked around the\n rocket. I heard a crunching sound\n and the shattering of glass, not unlike\n the noise made when one\n drives a rifle butt through a radio.",
"They didn't take as long as I\n thought they would, except for\nVanity Fair\n. It must have been a\n riot when it first came out. I mean,\n all those sly digs at the aristocracy,\n with copious interpolations by Mr.\n Thackeray in case you didn't get\n it when he'd pulled a particularly\n good gag. Some fun.\n\n\n And only 78 days to go.\nJune 1, 1961\nOnly 17 days\n to go. I saw Mars\n on the screen today. It seems to be\n descending from overhead, but Pat\n says that that's the \"torque\" doing\n it. Actually, it's we who are coming\n in sideways.\n\n\n We've all grown beards, too. Pat\n said it was against regulations, but\n what the hell. We have a contest.\n Longest whiskers on landing gets a\n prize.",
"Also, I am one of the first five\n men in the history of the world to\n see the opposite side of the Moon,\n with a bluish blurred crescent beyond\n it that Pat said was the Earth.\n The back of the Moon isn't much\n different from the front. As to the\n space in front of the ship, well, it's\n all black with white dots in it, and\n none of the dots move, except in a\n circle that Pat says is a \"torque\"\n result from the gyroscopic spin\n we're in. Actually, he explained to\n me, the screen is supposed to keep\n the image of space locked into\n place no matter how much we spin.\n But there's some kind of a \"drag.\"\n I told him I hoped it didn't mean\n we'd land on Mars upside down. He\n just stared at me.",
"Turned on my radio pack and\n got hold of Pat. Told him what happened,\n and he told Kroger. Kroger\n said I had been following a mirage,\n to step back a bit. I did, and I could\n see the ship again. Kroger said to\n try and walk toward where the ship\n seemed to be, even when it wasn't\n in view, and meantime they'd come\n out after me in the jeep, following\n my footprints.\n\n\n Started walking back, and the\n ship vanished again. It reappeared,\n disappeared, but I kept going. Finally\n saw the real ship, and Lloyd\n and Jones waving their arms at me.\n They were shouting through their\n masks, but I couldn't hear them.\n The air is too thin to carry sound\n well.",
"Jones (I still haven't learned his\n first name) has been up with the\n pilot all day. He passed my room\n on the way to the galley (the\n kitchen) for a cup of dark brown\n coffee (they like it thick) and told\n me that we were almost past the\n Moon. I asked to look, but he said\n not yet; the instrument panel is\n Top Secret. They'd have to cover\n it so I could look out the viewing\n screen, and they still need it for\n steering or something.\n\n\n I still haven't met the pilot.\nOctober 3, 1960\nWell, I've\n met the pilot. He is\n kind of squat, with a vulturish neck\n and close-set jet-black eyes that\n make him look rather mean, but he\n was pleasant enough, and said I\n could call him Pat. I still don't\n know Jones' first name, though Pat\n spoke to him, and it sounded like\n Flants. That can't be right.",
"Well, it's time for takeoff.\nThis time\n it wasn't so bad. I\n thought I was getting my space-legs,\n but Pat says there's less gravity on\n Mars, so escape velocity didn't\n have to be so fast, hence a smoother\n (relatively) trip on our shock-absorbing\n bunks.\n\n\n Lloyd wants to play chess again.\n I'll be careful not to win this time.\n However, if I don't win, maybe this\n time\nI'll\nbe the one to quit.\n\n\n Kroger is busy in his cramped\n lab space trying to classify the little\n moss he was able to gather, and\n Jones and Pat are up front watching\n the white specks revolve on that\n black velvet again.",
"Dwight Kroger, the biochemist,\n is rather old to take the \"rigors of\n the journey,\" as he puts it, but the\n government had a choice between\n sending a green scientist who could\n stand the trip or an accomplished\n man who would probably not survive,\n so they picked Kroger. We've\n blasted off, though, and he's still\n with us. He looks a damn sight better\n than I feel. He's kind of balding,\n and very iron-gray-haired and\n skinny, but his skin is tan as an Indian's,\n and right now he's telling\n jokes in the washroom with the co-pilot.\n\n\n Jones (that's the co-pilot; I\n didn't quite catch his first name) is\n scarlet-faced, barrel-chested and\n gives the general appearance of belonging\n under the spreading chestnut\n tree, not in a metal bullet flinging\n itself out into airless space.\n Come to think of it, who\ndoes\nbelong\n where we are?",
"The navigator's name is Lloyd\n Streeter, but I haven't seen his face\n yet. He has a little cubicle behind\n the pilot's compartment, with all\n kinds of maps and rulers and things.\n He keeps bent low over a welded-to-the-wall\n (they call it the bulkhead,\n for some reason or other)\n table, scratching away with a ballpoint\n pen on the maps, and now\n and then calling numbers over a\n microphone to the pilot. His hair\n is red and curly, and he looks as\n though he'd be tall if he ever gets\n to stand up. There are freckles on\n the backs of his hands, so I think\n he's probably got them on his face,\n too. So far, all he's said is, \"Scram,\n I'm busy.\"",
"I asked Pat what the prize was\n and he told me to go to hell.\nJune 18, 1961\nMars has\n the whole screen\n filled. Looks like Death Valley. No\n sign of canals, but Pat says that's\n because of the dust storm down below.\n It's nice to have a \"down below\"\n again. We're going to land, so\n I have to go to my bunk. It's all\n foam rubber, nylon braid supports\n and magnesium tubing. Might as\n well be cement for all the good it\n did me at takeoff. Earth seems awfully\n far away.\nJune 19, 1961",
"The constant shower of sand\n near the cliff walls is annoying, but\n it's sandless (shower-wise) near\n the stream, so we're following the\n footprints along the bank. Also, the\n air's better down here. Still thin,\n but not so bad as on the surface.\n We're going without masks to save\n oxygen for the return trip (Jones\n assures me there'll\nbe\na return\n trip), and the air's only a little bit\n sandy, but handkerchiefs over nose\n and mouth solve this.\n\n\n We look like desperadoes, what\n with the rifles and covered faces. I\n said as much to Lloyd and he told\n me to shut up. Moss all over the\n cliff walls. Swell luck for Kroger.\nWe've found\n Kroger and Pat,\n with the help of the aliens. Or maybe\n I should call them the Martians.\n Either way, it's better than what\n Jones calls them.",
"The point is, bullets won't stop\n these things, and wherever a crystal\n falls, a new Martian springs up\n in a few weeks. It looks like the\n five of us have abetted an invasion\n from Mars.\n\n\n Needless to say, we're no longer\n heroes.\n\n\n I haven't heard from Pat or\n Lloyd for a week. Jones was picked\n up attacking a candy factory yesterday,\n and Kroger and I were allowed\n to sign on for the flight to\n Venus scheduled within the next\n few days—because of our experience.",
"All at once, something gleamed\n in their hands, and they started\n shooting at me with their rifles.\n That's when I heard the noise behind\n me. I was too scared to turn\n around, but finally Jones and Lloyd\n came running over, and I got up\n enough nerve to look. There was\n nothing there, but on the sand,\n paralleling mine, were footprints.\n At least I think they were footprints.\n Twice as long as mine, and\n three times as wide, but kind of\n featureless because the sand's loose\n and dry. They doubled back on\n themselves, spaced considerably\n farther apart.\n\n\n \"What was it?\" I asked Lloyd\n when he got to me.\n\n\n \"Damned if I know,\" he said. \"It\n was red and scaly, and I think it\n had a tail. It was two heads taller\n than you.\" He shuddered. \"Ran off\n when we fired.\"\n\n\n \"Where,\" said Jones, \"are Pat and\n Kroger?\"",
"Jones got the rifles out of the\n stream (the Martians had probably\n thought they were beyond recovery\n there) and we found the jeep. It\n was nearly buried in sand, but we\n got it cleaned off and running, and\n got back to the ship quickly. First\n thing we did on arriving was to\n break out the stores and have a\n celebration feast just outside the\n door of the ship.\n\n\n It was pork again, and I got sick.\nJune 25, 1961\nWe're going back\n . Pat says\n that a week is all we were allowed\n to stay and that it's urgent to return\n and tell what we've learned\n about Mars (we know there are\n Martians, and they're made of\n sugar).\n\n\n \"Why,\" I said, \"can't we just tell\n it on the radio?\"",
"I showed it to Kroger. He says\n it may prove to be environmentally\n accurate, but that I should stick to\n prose.\nOctober 5, 1960\nLearned Jones'\n first name.\n He wrote something in the ship's\n log, and I saw his signature. His\n name is Fleance, like in \"Macbeth.\"\n He prefers to be called Jones. Pat\n uses his first name as a gag. Some\n fun.\n\n\n And only 255 days to go.\nApril 1, 1961\nI've skipped\n over the last 177\n days or so, because there's nothing\n much new. I brought some books\n with me on the trip, books that I'd\n always meant to read and never\n had the time. So now I know all\n about\nVanity Fair\n,\nPride and Prejudice\n,\nWar and Peace\n,\nGone with\n the Wind\n, and\nBabbitt\n.",
"I didn't know. I hadn't seen\n them, nor the jeep, on my trip back.\n So we followed the wheel tracks for\n a while, and they veered off from\n my trail and followed another, very\n much like the one that had been\n paralleling mine when Jones and\n Lloyd had taken a shot at the scaly\n thing.\n\n\n \"We'd better get them on the\n radio,\" said Jones, turning back\n toward the ship.\n\n\n There wasn't anything on the\n radio but static.\n\n\n Pat and Kroger haven't come\n back yet, either.\nJune 21, 1961\nWe're not\n alone here. More of\n the scaly things have come toward\n the camp, but a few rifle shots send\n them away. They hop like kangaroos\n when they're startled. Their\n attitudes aren't menacing, but their\n appearance is. And Jones says,\n \"Who knows what's 'menacing' in\n an alien?\"",
"Kroger is thrilled that he is\n learning something, maybe, about\n Martian reproductive processes.\n When he told Pat, Pat put it to a\n vote whether or not to jettison\n Kroger through the airlock. However,\n it was decided that responsibility\n was pretty well divided.\n Lloyd had gotten the crystals,\n Kroger had only studied them, and\n Jones had brought them aboard.\n\n\n So Kroger stays, but meanwhile\n the air is getting worse. Pat suggested\n Kroger put us all into a state\n of suspended animation till landing\n time, eight months away. Kroger\n said, \"How?\"\nJune 27, 1961\nAir is foul\n and I'm very\n thirsty. Kroger says that at least—when\n the Martians get bigger—they'll\n have to show themselves.\n Pat says what do we do\nthen\n? We\n can't afford the water we need to\n melt them down. Besides, the\n melted crystals might\nall\nturn into\n little Martians.",
"I went to the galley for coffee\n and had a talk about moss with\n Kroger. He said there was a good\n chance of lichen on Mars, and I\n misunderstood and said, \"A good\n chance of liking\nwhat\non Mars?\"\n and Kroger finished his coffee and\n went up front.\n\n\n When I got back to my compartment,\n Lloyd had taken away the\n chessboard and all his buttons. He\n told me later he needed it to back\n up a star map.\n\n\n Pat slept mostly all day in his\n compartment, and Jones sat and\n watched the screen revolve. There\n wasn't much to do, so I wrote a\n poem, sort of.\n\nMary, Mary, quite contrary,\n \nHow does your garden grow?\n \nWith Martian rime, Venusian slime,\n \nAnd a radioactive hoe.",
"I can't say I was too impressed\n with that 16 x 19 view of outer\n space. It's been done much better\n in the movies. There's just no awesomeness\n to it, no sense of depth or\n immensity. It's as impressive as a\n piece of velvet with salt sprinkled\n on it.\n\n\n Lloyd and I made a chessboard\n out of a carton. Right now we're using\n buttons for men. He's one of\n these fast players who don't stop\n and think out their moves. And so\n far I haven't won a game.\n\n\n It looks like a long trip.\nOctober 4, 1960\nI won\n a game. Lloyd mistook my\n queen-button for my bishop-button\n and left his king in jeopardy, and\n I checkmated him next move. He\n said chess was a waste of time\n and he had important work to do\n and he went away.",
"Kroger tells me that the pilot's\n name is Patrick Desmond, but that\n I can call him Pat when I get to\n know him better. So far, he's still\n Captain Desmond to me. I haven't\n the vaguest idea what he looks like.\n He was already on board when I\n got here, with my typewriter and\n ream of paper, so we didn't meet.\n\n\n My compartment is small but\n clean. I mean clean now. It wasn't\n during blastoff. The inertial gravities\n didn't bother me so much as\n the gyroscopic spin they put on the\n ship so we have a sort of artificial\n gravity to hold us against the\n curved floor. It's that constant\n whirly feeling that gets me. I get\n sick on merry-go-rounds, too.",
"Meantime, we have to catch\n those Martians.\nJune 29, 1961\nWorse and worse\n . Lloyd\n caught one of the Martians in the\n firing chamber. We had to flood\n the chamber with acid to subdue\n the creature, which carbonized\n nicely. So now we have plenty of\n air and water again, but besides\n having another Martian still on\n the loose, we now don't have\n enough acid left in the fuel tanks\n to make a landing.\n\n\n Pat says at least our vector will\n carry us to Earth and we can die\n on our home planet, which is better\n than perishing in space."
],
[
"\"Simple,\" he said, as though he\n were addressing me by name.\n \"They have a twofold reason to fear\n water. One: by complete solvency\n in that medium, they lose all energy\n and die. Two: even partial sprinkling\n alters the shape of the scales,\n and they are unable to use sunpower\n to form more sugar, and still die,\n if a bit slower.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said, taking it down verbatim.\n \"So now what do we do?\"\n\n\n \"We remove our boots,\" said\n Kroger, sitting on the ground and\n doing so, \"and then we cross this\n stream, fill the boots with water,\n and\nspray\nour way to freedom.\"\n\n\n \"Which tunnel do we take?\"\n asked Pat, his eyes aglow at the\n thought of escape.",
"They took away our rifles and\n brought us right to Kroger and Pat,\n without our even asking. Jones is\n mad at the way they got the rifles so\n easily. When we came upon them\n (a group of maybe ten, huddling\n behind a boulder in ambush), he\n fired, but the shots either bounced\n off their scales or stuck in their\n thick hides. Anyway, they took the\n rifles away and threw them into the\n stream, and picked us all up and\n took us into a hole in the cliff wall.\n The hole went on practically forever,\n but it didn't get dark. Kroger\n tells me that there are phosphorescent\n bacteria living in the mold on\n the walls. The air has a fresh-dug-grave\n smell, but it's richer in oxygen\n than even at the stream.",
"But he got the scales, walked\n very far upstream of us, and swam\n back with them. The stream sides\n are steep, like in a fjord, and we\n had to lift him out of the swirling\n cold water, with the scales gripped\n in his fist. Or what was left of the\n scales. They had melted down in\n the water and left his hand all\n sticky.\n\n\n Kroger took the gummy things,\n studied them in the uncertain light,\n then tasted them and grinned.",
"All at once, something gleamed\n in their hands, and they started\n shooting at me with their rifles.\n That's when I heard the noise behind\n me. I was too scared to turn\n around, but finally Jones and Lloyd\n came running over, and I got up\n enough nerve to look. There was\n nothing there, but on the sand,\n paralleling mine, were footprints.\n At least I think they were footprints.\n Twice as long as mine, and\n three times as wide, but kind of\n featureless because the sand's loose\n and dry. They doubled back on\n themselves, spaced considerably\n farther apart.\n\n\n \"What was it?\" I asked Lloyd\n when he got to me.\n\n\n \"Damned if I know,\" he said. \"It\n was red and scaly, and I think it\n had a tail. It was two heads taller\n than you.\" He shuddered. \"Ran off\n when we fired.\"\n\n\n \"Where,\" said Jones, \"are Pat and\n Kroger?\"",
"The point is, bullets won't stop\n these things, and wherever a crystal\n falls, a new Martian springs up\n in a few weeks. It looks like the\n five of us have abetted an invasion\n from Mars.\n\n\n Needless to say, we're no longer\n heroes.\n\n\n I haven't heard from Pat or\n Lloyd for a week. Jones was picked\n up attacking a candy factory yesterday,\n and Kroger and I were allowed\n to sign on for the flight to\n Venus scheduled within the next\n few days—because of our experience.",
"\"Because,\" said Pat, \"if we tell\n them now, by the time we get back\n we'll be yesterday's news. This way\n we may be lucky and get a parade.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even money,\" said\n Kroger, whose mind wasn't always\n on science.\n\n\n \"But they'll ask why we didn't\n radio the info, sir,\" said Jones uneasily.\n\n\n \"The radio,\" said Pat, nodding to\n Lloyd, \"was unfortunately broken\n shortly after landing.\"\n\n\n Lloyd blinked, then nodded\n back and walked around the\n rocket. I heard a crunching sound\n and the shattering of glass, not unlike\n the noise made when one\n drives a rifle butt through a radio.",
"\"Nonsense,\" said Louie, sipping\n carefully at a paper cup of scalding\n coffee. \"It'll be just like the\n public going along vicariously.\n They'll\nidentify\nwith you.\"\n\n\n \"But, Louie,\" I said, wiping the\n dampness from my palms on the\n knees of my trousers as I sat there,\n \"how'll I go about it? A story? An\n article? A\nyou-are-there\ntype of report?\n What?\"\n\n\n Louie shrugged. \"So keep a\n diary. It'll be more intimate, like.\"\n\n\n \"But what if nothing happens?\"\n I insisted hopelessly.\n\n\n Louie smiled. \"So you fake it.\"\n\n\n I got up from the chair in his office\n and stepped to the door.\n \"That's dishonest,\" I pointed out.\n\n\n \"Creative is the word,\" Louie\n said.",
"It is not.\nJune 24, 1961, probably\nI'm hungry\n . So is everybody\n else. Right now I could eat a dinner\n raw, in a centrifuge, and keep it\n down. A Martian threw a stone at\n Jones today, and Jones threw one\n back at him and broke off a couple\n of scales. The Martian whistled\n furiously and went away. When the\n crowd thinned out, same as it did\n yesterday (must be some sort of\n sleeping cycle here), Kroger talked\n Lloyd into swimming across the\n river and getting the red scales.\n Lloyd started at the upstream part\n of the current, and was about a hundred\n yards below this underground\n island before he made the far side.\n Sure is a swift current.",
"Pat said maybe we can swim to\n safety. Kroger told Pat he was\n crazy, that the little island we're on\n here underground is bordered by a\n fast river that goes into the planet.\n We'd end up drowned in some grotto\n in the heart of the planet, says\n Kroger.\n\n\n \"What the hell,\" says Pat, \"it's\n better than starving.\"",
"Dwight Kroger, the biochemist,\n is rather old to take the \"rigors of\n the journey,\" as he puts it, but the\n government had a choice between\n sending a green scientist who could\n stand the trip or an accomplished\n man who would probably not survive,\n so they picked Kroger. We've\n blasted off, though, and he's still\n with us. He looks a damn sight better\n than I feel. He's kind of balding,\n and very iron-gray-haired and\n skinny, but his skin is tan as an Indian's,\n and right now he's telling\n jokes in the washroom with the co-pilot.\n\n\n Jones (that's the co-pilot; I\n didn't quite catch his first name) is\n scarlet-faced, barrel-chested and\n gives the general appearance of belonging\n under the spreading chestnut\n tree, not in a metal bullet flinging\n itself out into airless space.\n Come to think of it, who\ndoes\nbelong\n where we are?",
"Kroger is thrilled that he is\n learning something, maybe, about\n Martian reproductive processes.\n When he told Pat, Pat put it to a\n vote whether or not to jettison\n Kroger through the airlock. However,\n it was decided that responsibility\n was pretty well divided.\n Lloyd had gotten the crystals,\n Kroger had only studied them, and\n Jones had brought them aboard.\n\n\n So Kroger stays, but meanwhile\n the air is getting worse. Pat suggested\n Kroger put us all into a state\n of suspended animation till landing\n time, eight months away. Kroger\n said, \"How?\"\nJune 27, 1961\nAir is foul\n and I'm very\n thirsty. Kroger says that at least—when\n the Martians get bigger—they'll\n have to show themselves.\n Pat says what do we do\nthen\n? We\n can't afford the water we need to\n melt them down. Besides, the\n melted crystals might\nall\nturn into\n little Martians.",
"Jones got the rifles out of the\n stream (the Martians had probably\n thought they were beyond recovery\n there) and we found the jeep. It\n was nearly buried in sand, but we\n got it cleaned off and running, and\n got back to the ship quickly. First\n thing we did on arriving was to\n break out the stores and have a\n celebration feast just outside the\n door of the ship.\n\n\n It was pork again, and I got sick.\nJune 25, 1961\nWe're going back\n . Pat says\n that a week is all we were allowed\n to stay and that it's urgent to return\n and tell what we've learned\n about Mars (we know there are\n Martians, and they're made of\n sugar).\n\n\n \"Why,\" I said, \"can't we just tell\n it on the radio?\"",
"Well, it's time for takeoff.\nThis time\n it wasn't so bad. I\n thought I was getting my space-legs,\n but Pat says there's less gravity on\n Mars, so escape velocity didn't\n have to be so fast, hence a smoother\n (relatively) trip on our shock-absorbing\n bunks.\n\n\n Lloyd wants to play chess again.\n I'll be careful not to win this time.\n However, if I don't win, maybe this\n time\nI'll\nbe the one to quit.\n\n\n Kroger is busy in his cramped\n lab space trying to classify the little\n moss he was able to gather, and\n Jones and Pat are up front watching\n the white specks revolve on that\n black velvet again.",
"I went to the galley for coffee\n and had a talk about moss with\n Kroger. He said there was a good\n chance of lichen on Mars, and I\n misunderstood and said, \"A good\n chance of liking\nwhat\non Mars?\"\n and Kroger finished his coffee and\n went up front.\n\n\n When I got back to my compartment,\n Lloyd had taken away the\n chessboard and all his buttons. He\n told me later he needed it to back\n up a star map.\n\n\n Pat slept mostly all day in his\n compartment, and Jones sat and\n watched the screen revolve. There\n wasn't much to do, so I wrote a\n poem, sort of.\n\nMary, Mary, quite contrary,\n \nHow does your garden grow?\n \nWith Martian rime, Venusian slime,\n \nAnd a radioactive hoe.",
"Kroger says the Martians must\n be intelligent, otherwise they\n couldn't have guessed at the carbohydrates\n present in the bread after\n a lifelong diet of anthracite. Pat\n says let's jettison Kroger.\n\n\n This time the vote went against\n Kroger, but he got a last-minute reprieve\n by suggesting the crystals\n be pulverized and mixed with sulphuric\n acid. He says this'll produce\n carbon.\n\n\n I certainly hope so.\n\n\n So does Kroger.\nBrief reprieve\n for us. The\n acid-sugar combination not only\n produces carbon but water vapor,\n and the gauge has gone up a notch.\n That means that we have a quart\n of water in the tanks for drinking.\n However, the air's a bit better,\n and we voted to let Kroger stay inside\n the rocket.",
"Guess I'll take a nap.\nJune 26, 1961\nHell's bells\n . Kroger says\n there are two baby Martians loose\n on board ship. Pat told him he\n was nuts, but there are certain\n signs he's right. Like the missing\n charcoal in the air-filtration-and-reclaiming\n (AFAR) system. And\n the water gauges are going down.\n But the clincher is those two sugar\n crystals Lloyd had grabbed up\n when we were in that zoo. They're\n gone.\n\n\n Pat has declared a state of emergency.\n Quick thinking, that's Pat.\n Lloyd, before he remembered and\n turned scarlet, suggested we radio\n Earth for instructions. We can't.\n\n\n Here we are, somewhere in a\n void headed for Earth, with enough\n air and water left for maybe three\n days—if the Martians don't take\n any more.",
"Kroger shrugged. \"We'll have to\n chance taking any that seem to\n slope upward. In any event, we can\n always follow it back and start\n again.\"\n\n\n \"I dunno,\" said Jones. \"Remember\n those\nteeth\nof theirs. They must\n be for biting something more substantial\n than moss, Kroger.\"\n\n\n \"We'll risk it,\" said Pat. \"It's better\n to go down fighting than to die\n of starvation.\"",
"Kroger tried talking to the guard\n once, but he (or it) made a whistling\n kind of sound and flashed a\n mouthful of teeth. Kroger says the\n teeth are in multiple rows, like a\n tiger shark's. I'd rather he hadn't\n told me.\nJune 23, 1961, I think\nWe're either\n in a docket or a\n zoo. I can't tell which. There's a\n rather square platform surrounded\n on all four sides by running water,\n maybe twenty feet across, and\n we're on it. Martians keep coming\n to the far edge of the water and\n looking at us and whistling at each\n other. A little Martian came near\n the edge of the water and a larger\n Martian whistled like crazy and\n dragged it away.\n\n\n \"Water must be dangerous to\n them,\" said Kroger.\n\n\n \"We shoulda brought water pistols,\"\n Jones muttered.",
"We all agreed to try it. Not that\n we thought it had a good chance of\n working, but none of us had a better\n idea.\nI guess\n you know the rest of\n the story, about how that destroyer\n spotted us and got us and\n my diary aboard, and towed the\n rocket to San Francisco. News of\n the \"captured Martian\" leaked out,\n and we all became nine-day wonders\n until the dismantling of the\n rocket.\n\n\n Kroger says he must have dissolved\n in the water, and wonders\n what\nthat\nwould do. There are\n about a thousand of those crystal-scales\n on a Martian.\n\n\n So last week we found out, when\n those red-scaled things began clambering\n out of the sea on every coastal\n region on Earth. Kroger tried\n to explain to me about salinity osmosis\n and hydrostatic pressure and\n crystalline life, but in no time at all\n he lost me.",
"The navigator's name is Lloyd\n Streeter, but I haven't seen his face\n yet. He has a little cubicle behind\n the pilot's compartment, with all\n kinds of maps and rulers and things.\n He keeps bent low over a welded-to-the-wall\n (they call it the bulkhead,\n for some reason or other)\n table, scratching away with a ballpoint\n pen on the maps, and now\n and then calling numbers over a\n microphone to the pilot. His hair\n is red and curly, and he looks as\n though he'd be tall if he ever gets\n to stand up. There are freckles on\n the backs of his hands, so I think\n he's probably got them on his face,\n too. So far, all he's said is, \"Scram,\n I'm busy.\""
],
[
"Kroger says the Martians must\n be intelligent, otherwise they\n couldn't have guessed at the carbohydrates\n present in the bread after\n a lifelong diet of anthracite. Pat\n says let's jettison Kroger.\n\n\n This time the vote went against\n Kroger, but he got a last-minute reprieve\n by suggesting the crystals\n be pulverized and mixed with sulphuric\n acid. He says this'll produce\n carbon.\n\n\n I certainly hope so.\n\n\n So does Kroger.\nBrief reprieve\n for us. The\n acid-sugar combination not only\n produces carbon but water vapor,\n and the gauge has gone up a notch.\n That means that we have a quart\n of water in the tanks for drinking.\n However, the air's a bit better,\n and we voted to let Kroger stay inside\n the rocket.",
"The constant shower of sand\n near the cliff walls is annoying, but\n it's sandless (shower-wise) near\n the stream, so we're following the\n footprints along the bank. Also, the\n air's better down here. Still thin,\n but not so bad as on the surface.\n We're going without masks to save\n oxygen for the return trip (Jones\n assures me there'll\nbe\na return\n trip), and the air's only a little bit\n sandy, but handkerchiefs over nose\n and mouth solve this.\n\n\n We look like desperadoes, what\n with the rifles and covered faces. I\n said as much to Lloyd and he told\n me to shut up. Moss all over the\n cliff walls. Swell luck for Kroger.\nWe've found\n Kroger and Pat,\n with the help of the aliens. Or maybe\n I should call them the Martians.\n Either way, it's better than what\n Jones calls them.",
"Kroger tried talking to the guard\n once, but he (or it) made a whistling\n kind of sound and flashed a\n mouthful of teeth. Kroger says the\n teeth are in multiple rows, like a\n tiger shark's. I'd rather he hadn't\n told me.\nJune 23, 1961, I think\nWe're either\n in a docket or a\n zoo. I can't tell which. There's a\n rather square platform surrounded\n on all four sides by running water,\n maybe twenty feet across, and\n we're on it. Martians keep coming\n to the far edge of the water and\n looking at us and whistling at each\n other. A little Martian came near\n the edge of the water and a larger\n Martian whistled like crazy and\n dragged it away.\n\n\n \"Water must be dangerous to\n them,\" said Kroger.\n\n\n \"We shoulda brought water pistols,\"\n Jones muttered.",
"The Martians are made of sugar.\nLater, same day\n . Kroger\n said that the Martian metabolism\n must be like Terran (Earth-type)\n metabolism, only with no pancreas\n to make insulin. They store their\n energy on the\noutside\nof their\n bodies, in the form of scales. He's\n watched them more closely and\n seen that they have long rubbery\n tubes for tongues, and that they\n now and then suck up water from\n the stream while they're watching\n us, being careful not to get their lips\n (all sugar, of course) wet. He\n guesses that their \"blood\" must be\n almost pure water, and that it\n washes away (from the inside, of\n course) the sugar they need for\n energy.",
"We're in a small cave that is just\n off a bigger cave where lots of tunnels\n come together. I can't remember\n which one we came in through,\n and neither can anyone else. Jones\n asked me what the hell I kept writing\n in the diary for, did I want to\n make it a gift to Martian archeologists?\n But I said where there's life\n there's hope, and now he won't talk\n to me. I congratulated Kroger on\n the lichen I'd seen, but he just said\n a short and unscientific word and\n went to sleep.\n\n\n There's a Martian guarding the\n entrance to our cave. I don't know\n what they intend to do with us.\n Feed us, I hope. So far, they've just\n left us here, and we're out of rations.",
"Kroger is thrilled that he is\n learning something, maybe, about\n Martian reproductive processes.\n When he told Pat, Pat put it to a\n vote whether or not to jettison\n Kroger through the airlock. However,\n it was decided that responsibility\n was pretty well divided.\n Lloyd had gotten the crystals,\n Kroger had only studied them, and\n Jones had brought them aboard.\n\n\n So Kroger stays, but meanwhile\n the air is getting worse. Pat suggested\n Kroger put us all into a state\n of suspended animation till landing\n time, eight months away. Kroger\n said, \"How?\"\nJune 27, 1961\nAir is foul\n and I'm very\n thirsty. Kroger says that at least—when\n the Martians get bigger—they'll\n have to show themselves.\n Pat says what do we do\nthen\n? We\n can't afford the water we need to\n melt them down. Besides, the\n melted crystals might\nall\nturn into\n little Martians.",
"We all agreed to try it. Not that\n we thought it had a good chance of\n working, but none of us had a better\n idea.\nI guess\n you know the rest of\n the story, about how that destroyer\n spotted us and got us and\n my diary aboard, and towed the\n rocket to San Francisco. News of\n the \"captured Martian\" leaked out,\n and we all became nine-day wonders\n until the dismantling of the\n rocket.\n\n\n Kroger says he must have dissolved\n in the water, and wonders\n what\nthat\nwould do. There are\n about a thousand of those crystal-scales\n on a Martian.\n\n\n So last week we found out, when\n those red-scaled things began clambering\n out of the sea on every coastal\n region on Earth. Kroger tried\n to explain to me about salinity osmosis\n and hydrostatic pressure and\n crystalline life, but in no time at all\n he lost me.",
"Jones says he'll go down spitting.\n\n\n Pat says why not dismantle interior\n of rocket to find out where\n they're holing up? Fine idea.\n\n\n How do you dismantle riveted\n metal plates?\nJune 28, 1961\nThe AFAR system\n is no more\n and the water gauges are still dropping.\n Kroger suggests baking bread,\n then slicing it, then toasting it till\n it turns to carbon, and we can use\n the carbon in the AFAR system.\n\n\n We'll have to try it, I guess.\nThe Martians\n ate the bread.\n Jones came forward to tell us the\n loaves were cooling, and when he\n got back they were gone. However,\n he did find a few of the red crystals\n on the galley deck (floor). They're\n good-sized crystals, too. Which\n means so are the Martians.",
"Meantime, we have to catch\n those Martians.\nJune 29, 1961\nWorse and worse\n . Lloyd\n caught one of the Martians in the\n firing chamber. We had to flood\n the chamber with acid to subdue\n the creature, which carbonized\n nicely. So now we have plenty of\n air and water again, but besides\n having another Martian still on\n the loose, we now don't have\n enough acid left in the fuel tanks\n to make a landing.\n\n\n Pat says at least our vector will\n carry us to Earth and we can die\n on our home planet, which is better\n than perishing in space.",
"Well, we're down.\n We have\n to wear gas masks with oxygen\n hook-ups. Kroger says the air is\n breathable, but thin, and it has too\n much dust in it to be any fun to\n inhale. He's all for going out and\n looking for lichen, but Pat says he's\n got to set up camp, then get instructions\n from Earth. So we just have\n to wait. The air is very cold, but the\n Sun is hot as hell when it hits you.\n The sky is a blinding pink, or maybe\n more of a pale fuchsia. Kroger\n says it's the dust. The sand underfoot\n is kind of rose-colored, and not\n really gritty. The particles are",
"The point is, bullets won't stop\n these things, and wherever a crystal\n falls, a new Martian springs up\n in a few weeks. It looks like the\n five of us have abetted an invasion\n from Mars.\n\n\n Needless to say, we're no longer\n heroes.\n\n\n I haven't heard from Pat or\n Lloyd for a week. Jones was picked\n up attacking a candy factory yesterday,\n and Kroger and I were allowed\n to sign on for the flight to\n Venus scheduled within the next\n few days—because of our experience.",
"The hell it is.\nJune 24, 1961, for sure\nThe Martians\n have coal\n mines.\nThat's\nwhat they use those\n teeth for. We passed through one\n and surprised a lot of them chewing\n gritty hunks of anthracite out\n of the walls. They came running at\n us, whistling with those tubelike\n tongues, and drooling dry coal dust,\n but Pat swung one of his boots in\n an arc that splashed all over the\n ground in front of them, and they\n turned tail (literally) and clattered\n off down another tunnel,\n sounding like a locomotive whistle\n gone berserk.\n\n\n We made the surface in another\n hour, back in the canal, and were\n lucky enough to find our own trail\n to follow toward the place above\n which the jeep still waited.",
"Guess I'll take a nap.\nJune 26, 1961\nHell's bells\n . Kroger says\n there are two baby Martians loose\n on board ship. Pat told him he\n was nuts, but there are certain\n signs he's right. Like the missing\n charcoal in the air-filtration-and-reclaiming\n (AFAR) system. And\n the water gauges are going down.\n But the clincher is those two sugar\n crystals Lloyd had grabbed up\n when we were in that zoo. They're\n gone.\n\n\n Pat has declared a state of emergency.\n Quick thinking, that's Pat.\n Lloyd, before he remembered and\n turned scarlet, suggested we radio\n Earth for instructions. We can't.\n\n\n Here we are, somewhere in a\n void headed for Earth, with enough\n air and water left for maybe three\n days—if the Martians don't take\n any more.",
"Jones got the rifles out of the\n stream (the Martians had probably\n thought they were beyond recovery\n there) and we found the jeep. It\n was nearly buried in sand, but we\n got it cleaned off and running, and\n got back to the ship quickly. First\n thing we did on arriving was to\n break out the stores and have a\n celebration feast just outside the\n door of the ship.\n\n\n It was pork again, and I got sick.\nJune 25, 1961\nWe're going back\n . Pat says\n that a week is all we were allowed\n to stay and that it's urgent to return\n and tell what we've learned\n about Mars (we know there are\n Martians, and they're made of\n sugar).\n\n\n \"Why,\" I said, \"can't we just tell\n it on the radio?\"",
"It is not.\nJune 24, 1961, probably\nI'm hungry\n . So is everybody\n else. Right now I could eat a dinner\n raw, in a centrifuge, and keep it\n down. A Martian threw a stone at\n Jones today, and Jones threw one\n back at him and broke off a couple\n of scales. The Martian whistled\n furiously and went away. When the\n crowd thinned out, same as it did\n yesterday (must be some sort of\n sleeping cycle here), Kroger talked\n Lloyd into swimming across the\n river and getting the red scales.\n Lloyd started at the upstream part\n of the current, and was about a hundred\n yards below this underground\n island before he made the far side.\n Sure is a swift current.",
"We're going to look for Kroger\n and Pat today. Jones says we'd better\n before another windstorm blows\n away the jeep tracks. Fortunately,\n the jeep has a leaky oil pan, so we\n always have the smears to follow,\n unless they get covered up, too.\n We're taking extra oxygen, shells,\n and rifles. Food, too, of course.\n And we're locking up the ship.\nIt's later\n , now. We found the\n jeep, but no Kroger or Pat. Lots of\n those big tracks nearby. We're taking\n the jeep to follow the aliens'\n tracks. There's some moss around\n here, on reddish brown rocks that\n stick up through the sand, just on\n the shady side, though. Kroger\n must be happy to have found his\n lichen.",
"I asked Pat what the prize was\n and he told me to go to hell.\nJune 18, 1961\nMars has\n the whole screen\n filled. Looks like Death Valley. No\n sign of canals, but Pat says that's\n because of the dust storm down below.\n It's nice to have a \"down below\"\n again. We're going to land, so\n I have to go to my bunk. It's all\n foam rubber, nylon braid supports\n and magnesium tubing. Might as\n well be cement for all the good it\n did me at takeoff. Earth seems awfully\n far away.\nJune 19, 1961",
"Going down was Jones' idea,\n not mine.\nJune 22, 1961\nWell, we're\n at the bottom, and\n there's water here, a shallow stream\n about thirty feet wide that runs\n along the center of the canal (we've\n decided we're in a canal). No sign\n of Pat or Kroger yet, but the sand\n here is hard-packed and damp, and\n there are normal-size footprints\n mingled with the alien ones, sharp\n and clear. The aliens seem to have\n six or seven toes. It varies from\n print to print. And they're barefoot,\n too, or else they have the damnedest-looking\n shoes in creation.",
"Turned on my radio pack and\n got hold of Pat. Told him what happened,\n and he told Kroger. Kroger\n said I had been following a mirage,\n to step back a bit. I did, and I could\n see the ship again. Kroger said to\n try and walk toward where the ship\n seemed to be, even when it wasn't\n in view, and meantime they'd come\n out after me in the jeep, following\n my footprints.\n\n\n Started walking back, and the\n ship vanished again. It reappeared,\n disappeared, but I kept going. Finally\n saw the real ship, and Lloyd\n and Jones waving their arms at me.\n They were shouting through their\n masks, but I couldn't hear them.\n The air is too thin to carry sound\n well.",
"The hell it is.\nMarch 3, 1962\nEarth in sight\n . The other\n Martian is still with us. He's where\n we can't get at him without blow-torches,\n but he can't get at the carbon\n in the AFAR system, either,\n which is a help. However, his tail\n is prehensile, and now and then it\n snakes out through an air duct and\n yanks food right off the table from\n under our noses."
],
[
"THE DOPE\n\n on Mars\nBy JACK SHARKEY\nSomebody had to get the human\n angle on this trip ... but what\n was humane about sending me?\nIllustrated by WOOD\nMy\n agent was the one who\n got me the job of going\n along to write up the first\n trip to Mars. He was always getting\n me things like that—appearances\n on TV shows, or mentions in writers'\n magazines. If he didn't sell\n much of my stuff, at least he sold\nme\n.\n\n\n \"It'll be the biggest break a\n writer ever got,\" he told me, two\n days before blastoff. \"Oh, sure\n there'll be scientific reports on the\n trip, but the public doesn't want\n them; they want the\nhuman\nslant\n on things.\"\n\n\n \"But, Louie,\" I said weakly, \"I'll\n probably be locked up for the\n whole trip. If there are fights or accidents,\n they won't tell\nme\nabout\n them.\"",
"The constant shower of sand\n near the cliff walls is annoying, but\n it's sandless (shower-wise) near\n the stream, so we're following the\n footprints along the bank. Also, the\n air's better down here. Still thin,\n but not so bad as on the surface.\n We're going without masks to save\n oxygen for the return trip (Jones\n assures me there'll\nbe\na return\n trip), and the air's only a little bit\n sandy, but handkerchiefs over nose\n and mouth solve this.\n\n\n We look like desperadoes, what\n with the rifles and covered faces. I\n said as much to Lloyd and he told\n me to shut up. Moss all over the\n cliff walls. Swell luck for Kroger.\nWe've found\n Kroger and Pat,\n with the help of the aliens. Or maybe\n I should call them the Martians.\n Either way, it's better than what\n Jones calls them.",
"Kroger says the Martians must\n be intelligent, otherwise they\n couldn't have guessed at the carbohydrates\n present in the bread after\n a lifelong diet of anthracite. Pat\n says let's jettison Kroger.\n\n\n This time the vote went against\n Kroger, but he got a last-minute reprieve\n by suggesting the crystals\n be pulverized and mixed with sulphuric\n acid. He says this'll produce\n carbon.\n\n\n I certainly hope so.\n\n\n So does Kroger.\nBrief reprieve\n for us. The\n acid-sugar combination not only\n produces carbon but water vapor,\n and the gauge has gone up a notch.\n That means that we have a quart\n of water in the tanks for drinking.\n However, the air's a bit better,\n and we voted to let Kroger stay inside\n the rocket.",
"We're in a small cave that is just\n off a bigger cave where lots of tunnels\n come together. I can't remember\n which one we came in through,\n and neither can anyone else. Jones\n asked me what the hell I kept writing\n in the diary for, did I want to\n make it a gift to Martian archeologists?\n But I said where there's life\n there's hope, and now he won't talk\n to me. I congratulated Kroger on\n the lichen I'd seen, but he just said\n a short and unscientific word and\n went to sleep.\n\n\n There's a Martian guarding the\n entrance to our cave. I don't know\n what they intend to do with us.\n Feed us, I hope. So far, they've just\n left us here, and we're out of rations.",
"I asked Pat what the prize was\n and he told me to go to hell.\nJune 18, 1961\nMars has\n the whole screen\n filled. Looks like Death Valley. No\n sign of canals, but Pat says that's\n because of the dust storm down below.\n It's nice to have a \"down below\"\n again. We're going to land, so\n I have to go to my bunk. It's all\n foam rubber, nylon braid supports\n and magnesium tubing. Might as\n well be cement for all the good it\n did me at takeoff. Earth seems awfully\n far away.\nJune 19, 1961",
"Well, it's time for takeoff.\nThis time\n it wasn't so bad. I\n thought I was getting my space-legs,\n but Pat says there's less gravity on\n Mars, so escape velocity didn't\n have to be so fast, hence a smoother\n (relatively) trip on our shock-absorbing\n bunks.\n\n\n Lloyd wants to play chess again.\n I'll be careful not to win this time.\n However, if I don't win, maybe this\n time\nI'll\nbe the one to quit.\n\n\n Kroger is busy in his cramped\n lab space trying to classify the little\n moss he was able to gather, and\n Jones and Pat are up front watching\n the white specks revolve on that\n black velvet again.",
"I went to the galley for coffee\n and had a talk about moss with\n Kroger. He said there was a good\n chance of lichen on Mars, and I\n misunderstood and said, \"A good\n chance of liking\nwhat\non Mars?\"\n and Kroger finished his coffee and\n went up front.\n\n\n When I got back to my compartment,\n Lloyd had taken away the\n chessboard and all his buttons. He\n told me later he needed it to back\n up a star map.\n\n\n Pat slept mostly all day in his\n compartment, and Jones sat and\n watched the screen revolve. There\n wasn't much to do, so I wrote a\n poem, sort of.\n\nMary, Mary, quite contrary,\n \nHow does your garden grow?\n \nWith Martian rime, Venusian slime,\n \nAnd a radioactive hoe.",
"The point is, bullets won't stop\n these things, and wherever a crystal\n falls, a new Martian springs up\n in a few weeks. It looks like the\n five of us have abetted an invasion\n from Mars.\n\n\n Needless to say, we're no longer\n heroes.\n\n\n I haven't heard from Pat or\n Lloyd for a week. Jones was picked\n up attacking a candy factory yesterday,\n and Kroger and I were allowed\n to sign on for the flight to\n Venus scheduled within the next\n few days—because of our experience.",
"Kroger is thrilled that he is\n learning something, maybe, about\n Martian reproductive processes.\n When he told Pat, Pat put it to a\n vote whether or not to jettison\n Kroger through the airlock. However,\n it was decided that responsibility\n was pretty well divided.\n Lloyd had gotten the crystals,\n Kroger had only studied them, and\n Jones had brought them aboard.\n\n\n So Kroger stays, but meanwhile\n the air is getting worse. Pat suggested\n Kroger put us all into a state\n of suspended animation till landing\n time, eight months away. Kroger\n said, \"How?\"\nJune 27, 1961\nAir is foul\n and I'm very\n thirsty. Kroger says that at least—when\n the Martians get bigger—they'll\n have to show themselves.\n Pat says what do we do\nthen\n? We\n can't afford the water we need to\n melt them down. Besides, the\n melted crystals might\nall\nturn into\n little Martians.",
"The hell it is.\nJune 24, 1961, for sure\nThe Martians\n have coal\n mines.\nThat's\nwhat they use those\n teeth for. We passed through one\n and surprised a lot of them chewing\n gritty hunks of anthracite out\n of the walls. They came running at\n us, whistling with those tubelike\n tongues, and drooling dry coal dust,\n but Pat swung one of his boots in\n an arc that splashed all over the\n ground in front of them, and they\n turned tail (literally) and clattered\n off down another tunnel,\n sounding like a locomotive whistle\n gone berserk.\n\n\n We made the surface in another\n hour, back in the canal, and were\n lucky enough to find our own trail\n to follow toward the place above\n which the jeep still waited.",
"Well, we're down.\n We have\n to wear gas masks with oxygen\n hook-ups. Kroger says the air is\n breathable, but thin, and it has too\n much dust in it to be any fun to\n inhale. He's all for going out and\n looking for lichen, but Pat says he's\n got to set up camp, then get instructions\n from Earth. So we just have\n to wait. The air is very cold, but the\n Sun is hot as hell when it hits you.\n The sky is a blinding pink, or maybe\n more of a pale fuchsia. Kroger\n says it's the dust. The sand underfoot\n is kind of rose-colored, and not\n really gritty. The particles are",
"Guess I'll take a nap.\nJune 26, 1961\nHell's bells\n . Kroger says\n there are two baby Martians loose\n on board ship. Pat told him he\n was nuts, but there are certain\n signs he's right. Like the missing\n charcoal in the air-filtration-and-reclaiming\n (AFAR) system. And\n the water gauges are going down.\n But the clincher is those two sugar\n crystals Lloyd had grabbed up\n when we were in that zoo. They're\n gone.\n\n\n Pat has declared a state of emergency.\n Quick thinking, that's Pat.\n Lloyd, before he remembered and\n turned scarlet, suggested we radio\n Earth for instructions. We can't.\n\n\n Here we are, somewhere in a\n void headed for Earth, with enough\n air and water left for maybe three\n days—if the Martians don't take\n any more.",
"Meantime, we have to catch\n those Martians.\nJune 29, 1961\nWorse and worse\n . Lloyd\n caught one of the Martians in the\n firing chamber. We had to flood\n the chamber with acid to subdue\n the creature, which carbonized\n nicely. So now we have plenty of\n air and water again, but besides\n having another Martian still on\n the loose, we now don't have\n enough acid left in the fuel tanks\n to make a landing.\n\n\n Pat says at least our vector will\n carry us to Earth and we can die\n on our home planet, which is better\n than perishing in space.",
"It is not.\nJune 24, 1961, probably\nI'm hungry\n . So is everybody\n else. Right now I could eat a dinner\n raw, in a centrifuge, and keep it\n down. A Martian threw a stone at\n Jones today, and Jones threw one\n back at him and broke off a couple\n of scales. The Martian whistled\n furiously and went away. When the\n crowd thinned out, same as it did\n yesterday (must be some sort of\n sleeping cycle here), Kroger talked\n Lloyd into swimming across the\n river and getting the red scales.\n Lloyd started at the upstream part\n of the current, and was about a hundred\n yards below this underground\n island before he made the far side.\n Sure is a swift current.",
"Also, I am one of the first five\n men in the history of the world to\n see the opposite side of the Moon,\n with a bluish blurred crescent beyond\n it that Pat said was the Earth.\n The back of the Moon isn't much\n different from the front. As to the\n space in front of the ship, well, it's\n all black with white dots in it, and\n none of the dots move, except in a\n circle that Pat says is a \"torque\"\n result from the gyroscopic spin\n we're in. Actually, he explained to\n me, the screen is supposed to keep\n the image of space locked into\n place no matter how much we spin.\n But there's some kind of a \"drag.\"\n I told him I hoped it didn't mean\n we'd land on Mars upside down. He\n just stared at me.",
"Jones got the rifles out of the\n stream (the Martians had probably\n thought they were beyond recovery\n there) and we found the jeep. It\n was nearly buried in sand, but we\n got it cleaned off and running, and\n got back to the ship quickly. First\n thing we did on arriving was to\n break out the stores and have a\n celebration feast just outside the\n door of the ship.\n\n\n It was pork again, and I got sick.\nJune 25, 1961\nWe're going back\n . Pat says\n that a week is all we were allowed\n to stay and that it's urgent to return\n and tell what we've learned\n about Mars (we know there are\n Martians, and they're made of\n sugar).\n\n\n \"Why,\" I said, \"can't we just tell\n it on the radio?\"",
"Kroger tried talking to the guard\n once, but he (or it) made a whistling\n kind of sound and flashed a\n mouthful of teeth. Kroger says the\n teeth are in multiple rows, like a\n tiger shark's. I'd rather he hadn't\n told me.\nJune 23, 1961, I think\nWe're either\n in a docket or a\n zoo. I can't tell which. There's a\n rather square platform surrounded\n on all four sides by running water,\n maybe twenty feet across, and\n we're on it. Martians keep coming\n to the far edge of the water and\n looking at us and whistling at each\n other. A little Martian came near\n the edge of the water and a larger\n Martian whistled like crazy and\n dragged it away.\n\n\n \"Water must be dangerous to\n them,\" said Kroger.\n\n\n \"We shoulda brought water pistols,\"\n Jones muttered.",
"So I went on the first trip to\n Mars. And I kept a diary. This is\n it. And it is honest. Honest it is.\nOctober 1, 1960\nThey picked\n the launching\n date from the March, 1959, New\n York\nTimes\n, which stated that this\n was the most likely time for launching.\n Trip time is supposed to take\n 260 days (that's one way), so\n we're aimed toward where Mars\n will be (had\nbetter\nbe, or else).\n\n\n There are five of us on board. A\n pilot, co-pilot, navigator and biochemist.\n And, of course, me. I've\n met all but the pilot (he's very\n busy today), and they seem friendly\n enough.",
"Dwight Kroger, the biochemist,\n is rather old to take the \"rigors of\n the journey,\" as he puts it, but the\n government had a choice between\n sending a green scientist who could\n stand the trip or an accomplished\n man who would probably not survive,\n so they picked Kroger. We've\n blasted off, though, and he's still\n with us. He looks a damn sight better\n than I feel. He's kind of balding,\n and very iron-gray-haired and\n skinny, but his skin is tan as an Indian's,\n and right now he's telling\n jokes in the washroom with the co-pilot.\n\n\n Jones (that's the co-pilot; I\n didn't quite catch his first name) is\n scarlet-faced, barrel-chested and\n gives the general appearance of belonging\n under the spreading chestnut\n tree, not in a metal bullet flinging\n itself out into airless space.\n Come to think of it, who\ndoes\nbelong\n where we are?",
"Jones says he'll go down spitting.\n\n\n Pat says why not dismantle interior\n of rocket to find out where\n they're holing up? Fine idea.\n\n\n How do you dismantle riveted\n metal plates?\nJune 28, 1961\nThe AFAR system\n is no more\n and the water gauges are still dropping.\n Kroger suggests baking bread,\n then slicing it, then toasting it till\n it turns to carbon, and we can use\n the carbon in the AFAR system.\n\n\n We'll have to try it, I guess.\nThe Martians\n ate the bread.\n Jones came forward to tell us the\n loaves were cooling, and when he\n got back they were gone. However,\n he did find a few of the red crystals\n on the galley deck (floor). They're\n good-sized crystals, too. Which\n means so are the Martians."
],
[
"Well, it's time for takeoff.\nThis time\n it wasn't so bad. I\n thought I was getting my space-legs,\n but Pat says there's less gravity on\n Mars, so escape velocity didn't\n have to be so fast, hence a smoother\n (relatively) trip on our shock-absorbing\n bunks.\n\n\n Lloyd wants to play chess again.\n I'll be careful not to win this time.\n However, if I don't win, maybe this\n time\nI'll\nbe the one to quit.\n\n\n Kroger is busy in his cramped\n lab space trying to classify the little\n moss he was able to gather, and\n Jones and Pat are up front watching\n the white specks revolve on that\n black velvet again.",
"I went to the galley for coffee\n and had a talk about moss with\n Kroger. He said there was a good\n chance of lichen on Mars, and I\n misunderstood and said, \"A good\n chance of liking\nwhat\non Mars?\"\n and Kroger finished his coffee and\n went up front.\n\n\n When I got back to my compartment,\n Lloyd had taken away the\n chessboard and all his buttons. He\n told me later he needed it to back\n up a star map.\n\n\n Pat slept mostly all day in his\n compartment, and Jones sat and\n watched the screen revolve. There\n wasn't much to do, so I wrote a\n poem, sort of.\n\nMary, Mary, quite contrary,\n \nHow does your garden grow?\n \nWith Martian rime, Venusian slime,\n \nAnd a radioactive hoe.",
"Dwight Kroger, the biochemist,\n is rather old to take the \"rigors of\n the journey,\" as he puts it, but the\n government had a choice between\n sending a green scientist who could\n stand the trip or an accomplished\n man who would probably not survive,\n so they picked Kroger. We've\n blasted off, though, and he's still\n with us. He looks a damn sight better\n than I feel. He's kind of balding,\n and very iron-gray-haired and\n skinny, but his skin is tan as an Indian's,\n and right now he's telling\n jokes in the washroom with the co-pilot.\n\n\n Jones (that's the co-pilot; I\n didn't quite catch his first name) is\n scarlet-faced, barrel-chested and\n gives the general appearance of belonging\n under the spreading chestnut\n tree, not in a metal bullet flinging\n itself out into airless space.\n Come to think of it, who\ndoes\nbelong\n where we are?",
"\"Simple,\" he said, as though he\n were addressing me by name.\n \"They have a twofold reason to fear\n water. One: by complete solvency\n in that medium, they lose all energy\n and die. Two: even partial sprinkling\n alters the shape of the scales,\n and they are unable to use sunpower\n to form more sugar, and still die,\n if a bit slower.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said, taking it down verbatim.\n \"So now what do we do?\"\n\n\n \"We remove our boots,\" said\n Kroger, sitting on the ground and\n doing so, \"and then we cross this\n stream, fill the boots with water,\n and\nspray\nour way to freedom.\"\n\n\n \"Which tunnel do we take?\"\n asked Pat, his eyes aglow at the\n thought of escape.",
"The point is, bullets won't stop\n these things, and wherever a crystal\n falls, a new Martian springs up\n in a few weeks. It looks like the\n five of us have abetted an invasion\n from Mars.\n\n\n Needless to say, we're no longer\n heroes.\n\n\n I haven't heard from Pat or\n Lloyd for a week. Jones was picked\n up attacking a candy factory yesterday,\n and Kroger and I were allowed\n to sign on for the flight to\n Venus scheduled within the next\n few days—because of our experience.",
"I showed it to Kroger. He says\n it may prove to be environmentally\n accurate, but that I should stick to\n prose.\nOctober 5, 1960\nLearned Jones'\n first name.\n He wrote something in the ship's\n log, and I saw his signature. His\n name is Fleance, like in \"Macbeth.\"\n He prefers to be called Jones. Pat\n uses his first name as a gag. Some\n fun.\n\n\n And only 255 days to go.\nApril 1, 1961\nI've skipped\n over the last 177\n days or so, because there's nothing\n much new. I brought some books\n with me on the trip, books that I'd\n always meant to read and never\n had the time. So now I know all\n about\nVanity Fair\n,\nPride and Prejudice\n,\nWar and Peace\n,\nGone with\n the Wind\n, and\nBabbitt\n.",
"But he got the scales, walked\n very far upstream of us, and swam\n back with them. The stream sides\n are steep, like in a fjord, and we\n had to lift him out of the swirling\n cold water, with the scales gripped\n in his fist. Or what was left of the\n scales. They had melted down in\n the water and left his hand all\n sticky.\n\n\n Kroger took the gummy things,\n studied them in the uncertain light,\n then tasted them and grinned.",
"We're in a small cave that is just\n off a bigger cave where lots of tunnels\n come together. I can't remember\n which one we came in through,\n and neither can anyone else. Jones\n asked me what the hell I kept writing\n in the diary for, did I want to\n make it a gift to Martian archeologists?\n But I said where there's life\n there's hope, and now he won't talk\n to me. I congratulated Kroger on\n the lichen I'd seen, but he just said\n a short and unscientific word and\n went to sleep.\n\n\n There's a Martian guarding the\n entrance to our cave. I don't know\n what they intend to do with us.\n Feed us, I hope. So far, they've just\n left us here, and we're out of rations.",
"It is not.\nJune 24, 1961, probably\nI'm hungry\n . So is everybody\n else. Right now I could eat a dinner\n raw, in a centrifuge, and keep it\n down. A Martian threw a stone at\n Jones today, and Jones threw one\n back at him and broke off a couple\n of scales. The Martian whistled\n furiously and went away. When the\n crowd thinned out, same as it did\n yesterday (must be some sort of\n sleeping cycle here), Kroger talked\n Lloyd into swimming across the\n river and getting the red scales.\n Lloyd started at the upstream part\n of the current, and was about a hundred\n yards below this underground\n island before he made the far side.\n Sure is a swift current.",
"I asked Pat what the prize was\n and he told me to go to hell.\nJune 18, 1961\nMars has\n the whole screen\n filled. Looks like Death Valley. No\n sign of canals, but Pat says that's\n because of the dust storm down below.\n It's nice to have a \"down below\"\n again. We're going to land, so\n I have to go to my bunk. It's all\n foam rubber, nylon braid supports\n and magnesium tubing. Might as\n well be cement for all the good it\n did me at takeoff. Earth seems awfully\n far away.\nJune 19, 1961",
"Kroger says the Martians must\n be intelligent, otherwise they\n couldn't have guessed at the carbohydrates\n present in the bread after\n a lifelong diet of anthracite. Pat\n says let's jettison Kroger.\n\n\n This time the vote went against\n Kroger, but he got a last-minute reprieve\n by suggesting the crystals\n be pulverized and mixed with sulphuric\n acid. He says this'll produce\n carbon.\n\n\n I certainly hope so.\n\n\n So does Kroger.\nBrief reprieve\n for us. The\n acid-sugar combination not only\n produces carbon but water vapor,\n and the gauge has gone up a notch.\n That means that we have a quart\n of water in the tanks for drinking.\n However, the air's a bit better,\n and we voted to let Kroger stay inside\n the rocket.",
"Kroger says watch out.\nWe\nare\n made of carbohydrates, too. I'd\n rather not have known.\nMarch 4, 1962\nEarth fills\n the screen in the\n control room. Pat says if we're\n lucky, he might be able to use the\n bit of fuel we have left to set us\n in a descending spiral into one of\n the oceans. The rocket is tighter\n than a submarine, he insists, and\n it will float till we're rescued, if\n the plates don't crack under the impact.",
"Pat said maybe we can swim to\n safety. Kroger told Pat he was\n crazy, that the little island we're on\n here underground is bordered by a\n fast river that goes into the planet.\n We'd end up drowned in some grotto\n in the heart of the planet, says\n Kroger.\n\n\n \"What the hell,\" says Pat, \"it's\n better than starving.\"",
"They didn't take as long as I\n thought they would, except for\nVanity Fair\n. It must have been a\n riot when it first came out. I mean,\n all those sly digs at the aristocracy,\n with copious interpolations by Mr.\n Thackeray in case you didn't get\n it when he'd pulled a particularly\n good gag. Some fun.\n\n\n And only 78 days to go.\nJune 1, 1961\nOnly 17 days\n to go. I saw Mars\n on the screen today. It seems to be\n descending from overhead, but Pat\n says that that's the \"torque\" doing\n it. Actually, it's we who are coming\n in sideways.\n\n\n We've all grown beards, too. Pat\n said it was against regulations, but\n what the hell. We have a contest.\n Longest whiskers on landing gets a\n prize.",
"Jones got the rifles out of the\n stream (the Martians had probably\n thought they were beyond recovery\n there) and we found the jeep. It\n was nearly buried in sand, but we\n got it cleaned off and running, and\n got back to the ship quickly. First\n thing we did on arriving was to\n break out the stores and have a\n celebration feast just outside the\n door of the ship.\n\n\n It was pork again, and I got sick.\nJune 25, 1961\nWe're going back\n . Pat says\n that a week is all we were allowed\n to stay and that it's urgent to return\n and tell what we've learned\n about Mars (we know there are\n Martians, and they're made of\n sugar).\n\n\n \"Why,\" I said, \"can't we just tell\n it on the radio?\"",
"They took away our rifles and\n brought us right to Kroger and Pat,\n without our even asking. Jones is\n mad at the way they got the rifles so\n easily. When we came upon them\n (a group of maybe ten, huddling\n behind a boulder in ambush), he\n fired, but the shots either bounced\n off their scales or stuck in their\n thick hides. Anyway, they took the\n rifles away and threw them into the\n stream, and picked us all up and\n took us into a hole in the cliff wall.\n The hole went on practically forever,\n but it didn't get dark. Kroger\n tells me that there are phosphorescent\n bacteria living in the mold on\n the walls. The air has a fresh-dug-grave\n smell, but it's richer in oxygen\n than even at the stream.",
"\"Because,\" said Pat, \"if we tell\n them now, by the time we get back\n we'll be yesterday's news. This way\n we may be lucky and get a parade.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even money,\" said\n Kroger, whose mind wasn't always\n on science.\n\n\n \"But they'll ask why we didn't\n radio the info, sir,\" said Jones uneasily.\n\n\n \"The radio,\" said Pat, nodding to\n Lloyd, \"was unfortunately broken\n shortly after landing.\"\n\n\n Lloyd blinked, then nodded\n back and walked around the\n rocket. I heard a crunching sound\n and the shattering of glass, not unlike\n the noise made when one\n drives a rifle butt through a radio.",
"\"Nonsense,\" said Louie, sipping\n carefully at a paper cup of scalding\n coffee. \"It'll be just like the\n public going along vicariously.\n They'll\nidentify\nwith you.\"\n\n\n \"But, Louie,\" I said, wiping the\n dampness from my palms on the\n knees of my trousers as I sat there,\n \"how'll I go about it? A story? An\n article? A\nyou-are-there\ntype of report?\n What?\"\n\n\n Louie shrugged. \"So keep a\n diary. It'll be more intimate, like.\"\n\n\n \"But what if nothing happens?\"\n I insisted hopelessly.\n\n\n Louie smiled. \"So you fake it.\"\n\n\n I got up from the chair in his office\n and stepped to the door.\n \"That's dishonest,\" I pointed out.\n\n\n \"Creative is the word,\" Louie\n said.",
"Kroger tried talking to the guard\n once, but he (or it) made a whistling\n kind of sound and flashed a\n mouthful of teeth. Kroger says the\n teeth are in multiple rows, like a\n tiger shark's. I'd rather he hadn't\n told me.\nJune 23, 1961, I think\nWe're either\n in a docket or a\n zoo. I can't tell which. There's a\n rather square platform surrounded\n on all four sides by running water,\n maybe twenty feet across, and\n we're on it. Martians keep coming\n to the far edge of the water and\n looking at us and whistling at each\n other. A little Martian came near\n the edge of the water and a larger\n Martian whistled like crazy and\n dragged it away.\n\n\n \"Water must be dangerous to\n them,\" said Kroger.\n\n\n \"We shoulda brought water pistols,\"\n Jones muttered.",
"Kroger shrugged. \"We'll have to\n chance taking any that seem to\n slope upward. In any event, we can\n always follow it back and start\n again.\"\n\n\n \"I dunno,\" said Jones. \"Remember\n those\nteeth\nof theirs. They must\n be for biting something more substantial\n than moss, Kroger.\"\n\n\n \"We'll risk it,\" said Pat. \"It's better\n to go down fighting than to die\n of starvation.\""
],
[
"Dwight Kroger, the biochemist,\n is rather old to take the \"rigors of\n the journey,\" as he puts it, but the\n government had a choice between\n sending a green scientist who could\n stand the trip or an accomplished\n man who would probably not survive,\n so they picked Kroger. We've\n blasted off, though, and he's still\n with us. He looks a damn sight better\n than I feel. He's kind of balding,\n and very iron-gray-haired and\n skinny, but his skin is tan as an Indian's,\n and right now he's telling\n jokes in the washroom with the co-pilot.\n\n\n Jones (that's the co-pilot; I\n didn't quite catch his first name) is\n scarlet-faced, barrel-chested and\n gives the general appearance of belonging\n under the spreading chestnut\n tree, not in a metal bullet flinging\n itself out into airless space.\n Come to think of it, who\ndoes\nbelong\n where we are?",
"The point is, bullets won't stop\n these things, and wherever a crystal\n falls, a new Martian springs up\n in a few weeks. It looks like the\n five of us have abetted an invasion\n from Mars.\n\n\n Needless to say, we're no longer\n heroes.\n\n\n I haven't heard from Pat or\n Lloyd for a week. Jones was picked\n up attacking a candy factory yesterday,\n and Kroger and I were allowed\n to sign on for the flight to\n Venus scheduled within the next\n few days—because of our experience.",
"Kroger says the Martians must\n be intelligent, otherwise they\n couldn't have guessed at the carbohydrates\n present in the bread after\n a lifelong diet of anthracite. Pat\n says let's jettison Kroger.\n\n\n This time the vote went against\n Kroger, but he got a last-minute reprieve\n by suggesting the crystals\n be pulverized and mixed with sulphuric\n acid. He says this'll produce\n carbon.\n\n\n I certainly hope so.\n\n\n So does Kroger.\nBrief reprieve\n for us. The\n acid-sugar combination not only\n produces carbon but water vapor,\n and the gauge has gone up a notch.\n That means that we have a quart\n of water in the tanks for drinking.\n However, the air's a bit better,\n and we voted to let Kroger stay inside\n the rocket.",
"Kroger is thrilled that he is\n learning something, maybe, about\n Martian reproductive processes.\n When he told Pat, Pat put it to a\n vote whether or not to jettison\n Kroger through the airlock. However,\n it was decided that responsibility\n was pretty well divided.\n Lloyd had gotten the crystals,\n Kroger had only studied them, and\n Jones had brought them aboard.\n\n\n So Kroger stays, but meanwhile\n the air is getting worse. Pat suggested\n Kroger put us all into a state\n of suspended animation till landing\n time, eight months away. Kroger\n said, \"How?\"\nJune 27, 1961\nAir is foul\n and I'm very\n thirsty. Kroger says that at least—when\n the Martians get bigger—they'll\n have to show themselves.\n Pat says what do we do\nthen\n? We\n can't afford the water we need to\n melt them down. Besides, the\n melted crystals might\nall\nturn into\n little Martians.",
"Kroger tells me that the pilot's\n name is Patrick Desmond, but that\n I can call him Pat when I get to\n know him better. So far, he's still\n Captain Desmond to me. I haven't\n the vaguest idea what he looks like.\n He was already on board when I\n got here, with my typewriter and\n ream of paper, so we didn't meet.\n\n\n My compartment is small but\n clean. I mean clean now. It wasn't\n during blastoff. The inertial gravities\n didn't bother me so much as\n the gyroscopic spin they put on the\n ship so we have a sort of artificial\n gravity to hold us against the\n curved floor. It's that constant\n whirly feeling that gets me. I get\n sick on merry-go-rounds, too.",
"Well, it's time for takeoff.\nThis time\n it wasn't so bad. I\n thought I was getting my space-legs,\n but Pat says there's less gravity on\n Mars, so escape velocity didn't\n have to be so fast, hence a smoother\n (relatively) trip on our shock-absorbing\n bunks.\n\n\n Lloyd wants to play chess again.\n I'll be careful not to win this time.\n However, if I don't win, maybe this\n time\nI'll\nbe the one to quit.\n\n\n Kroger is busy in his cramped\n lab space trying to classify the little\n moss he was able to gather, and\n Jones and Pat are up front watching\n the white specks revolve on that\n black velvet again.",
"I showed it to Kroger. He says\n it may prove to be environmentally\n accurate, but that I should stick to\n prose.\nOctober 5, 1960\nLearned Jones'\n first name.\n He wrote something in the ship's\n log, and I saw his signature. His\n name is Fleance, like in \"Macbeth.\"\n He prefers to be called Jones. Pat\n uses his first name as a gag. Some\n fun.\n\n\n And only 255 days to go.\nApril 1, 1961\nI've skipped\n over the last 177\n days or so, because there's nothing\n much new. I brought some books\n with me on the trip, books that I'd\n always meant to read and never\n had the time. So now I know all\n about\nVanity Fair\n,\nPride and Prejudice\n,\nWar and Peace\n,\nGone with\n the Wind\n, and\nBabbitt\n.",
"Guess I'll take a nap.\nJune 26, 1961\nHell's bells\n . Kroger says\n there are two baby Martians loose\n on board ship. Pat told him he\n was nuts, but there are certain\n signs he's right. Like the missing\n charcoal in the air-filtration-and-reclaiming\n (AFAR) system. And\n the water gauges are going down.\n But the clincher is those two sugar\n crystals Lloyd had grabbed up\n when we were in that zoo. They're\n gone.\n\n\n Pat has declared a state of emergency.\n Quick thinking, that's Pat.\n Lloyd, before he remembered and\n turned scarlet, suggested we radio\n Earth for instructions. We can't.\n\n\n Here we are, somewhere in a\n void headed for Earth, with enough\n air and water left for maybe three\n days—if the Martians don't take\n any more.",
"\"Because,\" said Pat, \"if we tell\n them now, by the time we get back\n we'll be yesterday's news. This way\n we may be lucky and get a parade.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even money,\" said\n Kroger, whose mind wasn't always\n on science.\n\n\n \"But they'll ask why we didn't\n radio the info, sir,\" said Jones uneasily.\n\n\n \"The radio,\" said Pat, nodding to\n Lloyd, \"was unfortunately broken\n shortly after landing.\"\n\n\n Lloyd blinked, then nodded\n back and walked around the\n rocket. I heard a crunching sound\n and the shattering of glass, not unlike\n the noise made when one\n drives a rifle butt through a radio.",
"Kroger says watch out.\nWe\nare\n made of carbohydrates, too. I'd\n rather not have known.\nMarch 4, 1962\nEarth fills\n the screen in the\n control room. Pat says if we're\n lucky, he might be able to use the\n bit of fuel we have left to set us\n in a descending spiral into one of\n the oceans. The rocket is tighter\n than a submarine, he insists, and\n it will float till we're rescued, if\n the plates don't crack under the impact.",
"I asked Pat what the prize was\n and he told me to go to hell.\nJune 18, 1961\nMars has\n the whole screen\n filled. Looks like Death Valley. No\n sign of canals, but Pat says that's\n because of the dust storm down below.\n It's nice to have a \"down below\"\n again. We're going to land, so\n I have to go to my bunk. It's all\n foam rubber, nylon braid supports\n and magnesium tubing. Might as\n well be cement for all the good it\n did me at takeoff. Earth seems awfully\n far away.\nJune 19, 1961",
"Pat said maybe we can swim to\n safety. Kroger told Pat he was\n crazy, that the little island we're on\n here underground is bordered by a\n fast river that goes into the planet.\n We'd end up drowned in some grotto\n in the heart of the planet, says\n Kroger.\n\n\n \"What the hell,\" says Pat, \"it's\n better than starving.\"",
"I went to the galley for coffee\n and had a talk about moss with\n Kroger. He said there was a good\n chance of lichen on Mars, and I\n misunderstood and said, \"A good\n chance of liking\nwhat\non Mars?\"\n and Kroger finished his coffee and\n went up front.\n\n\n When I got back to my compartment,\n Lloyd had taken away the\n chessboard and all his buttons. He\n told me later he needed it to back\n up a star map.\n\n\n Pat slept mostly all day in his\n compartment, and Jones sat and\n watched the screen revolve. There\n wasn't much to do, so I wrote a\n poem, sort of.\n\nMary, Mary, quite contrary,\n \nHow does your garden grow?\n \nWith Martian rime, Venusian slime,\n \nAnd a radioactive hoe.",
"The constant shower of sand\n near the cliff walls is annoying, but\n it's sandless (shower-wise) near\n the stream, so we're following the\n footprints along the bank. Also, the\n air's better down here. Still thin,\n but not so bad as on the surface.\n We're going without masks to save\n oxygen for the return trip (Jones\n assures me there'll\nbe\na return\n trip), and the air's only a little bit\n sandy, but handkerchiefs over nose\n and mouth solve this.\n\n\n We look like desperadoes, what\n with the rifles and covered faces. I\n said as much to Lloyd and he told\n me to shut up. Moss all over the\n cliff walls. Swell luck for Kroger.\nWe've found\n Kroger and Pat,\n with the help of the aliens. Or maybe\n I should call them the Martians.\n Either way, it's better than what\n Jones calls them.",
"Kroger says there's only enough\n fuel for a one-way trip. I don't care.\n I've always wanted to travel with\n the President.\n—JACK SHARKEY\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nGalaxy Magazine\nJune 1960.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"Kroger tried talking to the guard\n once, but he (or it) made a whistling\n kind of sound and flashed a\n mouthful of teeth. Kroger says the\n teeth are in multiple rows, like a\n tiger shark's. I'd rather he hadn't\n told me.\nJune 23, 1961, I think\nWe're either\n in a docket or a\n zoo. I can't tell which. There's a\n rather square platform surrounded\n on all four sides by running water,\n maybe twenty feet across, and\n we're on it. Martians keep coming\n to the far edge of the water and\n looking at us and whistling at each\n other. A little Martian came near\n the edge of the water and a larger\n Martian whistled like crazy and\n dragged it away.\n\n\n \"Water must be dangerous to\n them,\" said Kroger.\n\n\n \"We shoulda brought water pistols,\"\n Jones muttered.",
"Meantime, we have to catch\n those Martians.\nJune 29, 1961\nWorse and worse\n . Lloyd\n caught one of the Martians in the\n firing chamber. We had to flood\n the chamber with acid to subdue\n the creature, which carbonized\n nicely. So now we have plenty of\n air and water again, but besides\n having another Martian still on\n the loose, we now don't have\n enough acid left in the fuel tanks\n to make a landing.\n\n\n Pat says at least our vector will\n carry us to Earth and we can die\n on our home planet, which is better\n than perishing in space.",
"Kroger shrugged. \"We'll have to\n chance taking any that seem to\n slope upward. In any event, we can\n always follow it back and start\n again.\"\n\n\n \"I dunno,\" said Jones. \"Remember\n those\nteeth\nof theirs. They must\n be for biting something more substantial\n than moss, Kroger.\"\n\n\n \"We'll risk it,\" said Pat. \"It's better\n to go down fighting than to die\n of starvation.\"",
"Jones (I still haven't learned his\n first name) has been up with the\n pilot all day. He passed my room\n on the way to the galley (the\n kitchen) for a cup of dark brown\n coffee (they like it thick) and told\n me that we were almost past the\n Moon. I asked to look, but he said\n not yet; the instrument panel is\n Top Secret. They'd have to cover\n it so I could look out the viewing\n screen, and they still need it for\n steering or something.\n\n\n I still haven't met the pilot.\nOctober 3, 1960\nWell, I've\n met the pilot. He is\n kind of squat, with a vulturish neck\n and close-set jet-black eyes that\n make him look rather mean, but he\n was pleasant enough, and said I\n could call him Pat. I still don't\n know Jones' first name, though Pat\n spoke to him, and it sounded like\n Flants. That can't be right.",
"Also, I am one of the first five\n men in the history of the world to\n see the opposite side of the Moon,\n with a bluish blurred crescent beyond\n it that Pat said was the Earth.\n The back of the Moon isn't much\n different from the front. As to the\n space in front of the ship, well, it's\n all black with white dots in it, and\n none of the dots move, except in a\n circle that Pat says is a \"torque\"\n result from the gyroscopic spin\n we're in. Actually, he explained to\n me, the screen is supposed to keep\n the image of space locked into\n place no matter how much we spin.\n But there's some kind of a \"drag.\"\n I told him I hoped it didn't mean\n we'd land on Mars upside down. He\n just stared at me."
]
] |
valid
|
63041
|
[
"What is the Constellation’s main mission?",
"Why is Burnett compared to a machine?",
"Which of following statements is not a true statement about the differences between Rice and Burnett?",
"How does Lethla survive the vacuum of space?",
"Why doesn’t the Constellation have weapons?",
"Why are Lethla and Kriere compared to spiders?",
"What item on board the ship does Burnett use an improvised weapon?",
"How does Lethla die?",
"Which of the following is not a reason why Burnett kills Kriere?",
"What does the narrator imply will happen after the story ends?"
] |
[
[
"To engage in combat with the enemy",
"To collect the dead bodies of soldiers and preserve them for burial on Earth",
"To collect the dead bodies of soldiers so they can be reanimated using advanced technology",
"To salvage materials from wrecked warships"
],
[
"Because he has become numb to his emotions after witnessing so much death",
"Because he has always been detached from his emotions",
"Because he is renowned for his efficiency at his job",
"Because he is part cyborg"
],
[
"Rice is patriotic, while Burnett is treasonous",
"Rice is new to the job, while Burnett is experienced",
"Rice is young, while Burnett is old",
"Rice is idealistic, while Burnett is cynical"
],
[
"He is an alien who does not need air to survive the void",
"He is a mechanical robot that can function without air",
"He uses the blood-pumps to suck oxygen from nearby bodies",
"His suit supplies him with oxygen, and his transparent mask allows him to breathe it"
],
[
"It is not allowed to have weapons because it has a medical mission",
"It lost its weapons in a recent battle",
"It had its weapons stolen by Kriere",
"It is so far away from the war that having weapons is unnecessary"
],
[
"To show how insignificant they are to Burnett",
"To show that Burnett’s hatred of them is so intense that he dehumanizes them",
"Because they have created a trap to ensnare Burnett and Rice",
"Because they are an alien species with many limbs"
],
[
"The blood-pumps",
"The rockets",
"His surgical tools",
"The mechanical claw"
],
[
"Lethla shoots himself with his own gun",
"Rice and Burnett expel him into the vacuum of space",
"Burnett kills him with the mechanical claw",
"Rice beats him to death"
],
[
"He views Kriere as being responsible for the war",
"He needs more bodies to fill the ship’s morgue to fulfill his mission",
"Kriere is the enemy’s leader, so Burnett thinks that killing him will stop the war",
"He wants to kill Kriere before he gets aboard the ship because Lethla will be easier to take down by himself"
],
[
"Lethla and Kriere hijack the ship and make Rice and Burnett take it to Venus",
"Rice will save Burnett and return to Earth in triumph",
"Rice abandons Burnett in space because he is afraid of people finding out what Burnett has done",
"Burnett’s body will be the hundredth body aboard the ship, allowing Rice to return to Earth"
]
] |
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1,
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[
"Burnett laughed through his nose. Controls moved under his fingers like\n fluid; loved, caressed, tended by his familiar touching. Looking ahead,\n he squinted.\n\n\n \"There's your Ruler now, Lethla. Doing somersaults. Looks dead. A good\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"Cut power! We don't want to burn him!\"\nBurnett cut. Kriere's milky face floated dreamily into a visual-screen,\n eyes sealed, lips gaping, hands sagging, clutching emptily at the stars.\n\n\n \"We're about fifty miles from him, catching up.\" Burnett turned to\n Lethla with an intent scowl. Funny. This was the first and the last\n time anybody would ever board the\nConstellation\nalive. His stomach\n went flat, tautened with sudden weakening fear.",
"The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its\n slowness.\n\n\n It reached Kriere.\n\n\n Burnett inhaled a deep breath.\n\n\n The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm.\nLethla watched.\n\n\n He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: \"You\n know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the\nConstellation\n. I believe it.\"\nAnd the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all\n around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There\n was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the\n head, which was carefully preserved for identification.\n\n\n That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard.\n\n\n Burnett spun about and leaped.",
"\"To hell with it.\" Burnett winced, and fought to keep his eyes open.\n Something wet and sticky covered his chest. \"I said this was my last\n trip and I meant it. One way or the other, I'd have quit!\"\n\n\n \"This is the hard way—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. I dunno. Kind of nice to think of all those kids who'll never\n have to come aboard the\nConstellation\n, though, Rice.\" His voice\n trailed off. \"You watch the shelves fill up and you never know who'll\n be next. Who'd have thought, four days ago—\"\n\n\n Something happened to his tongue so it felt like hard ice blocking his\n mouth. He had a lot more words to say, but only time to get a few of\n them out:\n\n\n \"Rice?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got a full cargo, boy.\"",
"Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of\n stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the\nConstellation\n. Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about\n to be rescued.\n\n\n Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he\n was about to end a ten-years' war.\n\n\n There was only\none\nway of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be\n fast.\n\n\n Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as\n it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a\n good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered\n directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies\n from space.\n\n\n Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet,\n too.",
"Lethla nodded. His milk-blue eyes dilated. \"Very marvelously pared to\n an unbreakable thickness of one-thirtieth of an inch; worn only on the\n head. You have to look quickly to notice it, and, unfortunately, viewed\n as you saw it, outside the ship, floating in the void, not discernible\n at all.\"\n\n\n Prickles of sweat appeared on Rice's face. He swore at the Venusian and\n the Venusian laughed like some sort of stringed instrument, high and\n quick.\n\n\n Burnett laughed, too. Ironically. \"First time in years a man ever came\n aboard the Constellation alive. It's a welcome change.\"\n\n\n Lethla showed his needle-like teeth. \"I thought it might be. Where's\n your radio?\"\n\n\n \"Go find it!\" snapped Rice, hotly.",
"\"Precious is the word for you, brother!\" said Rice.\n\n\n \"Enough!\" Lethla moved his gun several inches.\n\n\n \"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be\n picked up—\nnow!\n\"\nRice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time\n in years. \"Sure,\" said Sam, smiling. \"We'll pick him up.\"\n\n\n \"No tricks,\" said Lethla.\n\n\n Burnett scowled and smiled together. \"No tricks. You'll have Kriere on\n board the\nConstellation\nin half an hour or I'm no coroner.\"\n\n\n \"Follow me up the ladder.\"\n\n\n Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. \"Come on.\"",
"\"Yeah? If there's a warship within our radio range, seven hundred\n thousand miles, we'll get it. Unfortunately, the tide of battle has\n swept out past Earth in a new war concerning Io. That's out, Rice.\"\n\n\n Rice stood about three inches below Sam Burnett's six-foot-one. Jaw\n hard and determined, he stared at Sam, a funny light in his eyes. His\n fingers twitched all by themselves at his sides. His mouth twisted,\n \"You're one hell of a patriot, Sam Burnett!\"\n\n\n Burnett reached out with one long finger, tapped it quietly on Rice's\n barrel-chest. \"Haul a cargo of corpses for three thousand nights and\n days and see how patriotic you feel. All those fine muscled lads\n bloated and crushed by space pressures and heat-blasts. Fine lads who\n start out smiling and get the smile burned off down to the bone—\"",
"Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade\n where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew,\n artery—heart.\n\n\n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and\n this would be the last trip.\n\n\n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n\n\n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there\n was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in\n the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the\n star-port.\"\n\n\n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly.\n Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back\n kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet\n sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first,\n why—",
"He kept thinking the one thing he couldn't forget.\nYou never catch up with the war.\nAll the color is ahead of you. The drive of orange rocket traces across\n stars, the whamming of steel-nosed bombs into elusive targets, the\n titanic explosions and breathless pursuits, the flags and the excited\n glory are always a million miles ahead.\n\n\n He bit his teeth together.\nYou never catch up with the war.\nYou come along when space has settled back, when the vacuum has stopped\n trembling from unleashed forces between worlds. You come along in the\n dark quiet of death to find the wreckage plunging with all the fury of\n its original acceleration in no particular direction. You can only see\n it; you don't hear anything in space but your own heart kicking your\n ribs.",
"Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them\n into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and\n shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one\n another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships,\n salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.\n\n\n Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred\n other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.\n\n\n Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots\n inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the\n husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved\n for action.\n\n\n This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!\n\n\n \"Sam!\"",
"Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what\n ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n\n\n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his\n body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms,\n wet thin lips.\n\n\n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n\n\n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n\n\n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies\n being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of\n hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it\n would all be over.",
"\"We saw your morgue ship an hour ago. It's a long, long way to Venus.\n We were running out of fuel, food, water. Radio was broken. Capture\n was certain. You were coming our way; we took the chance. We set a\n small time-bomb to destroy the life-rocket, and cast off, wearing our\n chrysali-helmets. It was the first time we had ever tried using them to\n trick anyone. We knew you wouldn't know we were alive until it was too\n late and we controlled your ship. We knew you picked up all bodies for\n brief exams, returning alien corpses to space later.\"\n\n\n Rice's voice was sullen. \"A set-up for you, huh? Traveling under the\n protection of the Purple Cross you can get your damned All-Mighty safe\n to Venus.\"\n\n\n Lethla bowed slightly. \"Who would suspect a Morgue Rocket of providing\n safe hiding for precious Venusian cargo?\"",
"Morgue Ship\nBy RAY BRADBURY\nThis was Burnett's last trip. Three more\n\n shelves to fill with space-slain warriors—and\n\n he would be among the living again.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe heard the star-port grind open, and the movement of the metal claws\n groping into space, and then the star-port closed.\n\n\n There was another dead man aboard the\nConstellation\n.",
"You see bodies, each in its own terrific orbit, given impetus by\n grinding collisions, tossed from mother ships and dancing head over\n feet forever and forever with no goal. Bits of flesh in ruptured space\n suits, mouths open for air that had never been there in a hundred\n billion centuries. And they kept dancing without music until you\n extended the retriever-claw and culled them into the air-lock.\n\n\n That was all the war-glory he got. Nothing but the stunned, shivering\n silence, the memory of rockets long gone, and the shelves filling up\n all too quickly with men who had once loved laughing.\n\n\n You wondered who all the men were; and who the next ones would be.\n After ten years you made yourself blind to them. You went around doing\n your job with mechanical hands.",
"He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and\n forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back\n full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke,\n who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a\n decent burial.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight.\" Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice\n from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight,\" Burnett repeated. \"Working on ninety-five,\n ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight\n surgery.\" Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded\n deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.\n\n\n Rice said:\n\n\n \"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day\n drunk!\"",
"Lethla's gun grip tightened. \"More talk of that nature, and only dead\n men there will be.\" He blinked. \"But first—we must rescue Kriere....\"\n\n\n \"Kriere!\" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw.\n\n\n Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes\n lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama.\n Lethla's voice came next:\n\n\n \"Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus\n at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these\n air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked\n unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the\n life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing\n their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the\n Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever.",
"\"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n \"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock\n is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the\n ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and\n coils. The radio.\n\n\n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his\n feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by\n the new bitterness in it.\n\n\n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n\n\n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk—\"\n\n\n Rice said it, slow:\n\n\n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead\n men belong here.\"",
"Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves.\n \"Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the\n Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the\n day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick\n of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling\n through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good\n green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine.\n\n\n \"As for Kriere—if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution\n is taken to protect that one.\"\n\n\n \"But Lethla! His body must mean something!\"\n\n\n \"And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a\n battle-cuiser to go against him?\"\n\n\n \"We'll radio for help?\"",
"Sam Burnett shook his long head, trying to think clearly. Pallid and\n quiet, three bodies lay on the cold transparent tables around him;\n machines stirred, revolved, hummed. He didn't see them. He didn't see\n anything but a red haze over his mind. It blotted out the far wall of\n the laboratory where the shelves went up and down, numbered in scarlet,\n keeping the bodies of soldiers from all further harm.\n\n\n Burnett didn't move. He stood there in his rumpled white surgical\n gown, staring at his fingers gloved in bone-white rubber; feeling all\n tight and wild inside himself. It went on for days. Moving the ship.\n Opening the star-port. Extending the retriever claw. Plucking some poor\n warrior's body out of the void.",
"Burnett said, \"Lethla?\" And then: \"Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That\n right?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in\n space, then Kriere's not far away from him!\"\n\n\n Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell.\n What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone\n else.\n\n\n Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. \"Snap out of it, Sam. Think!\n Kriere—The All-Mighty—in our territory. His right hand man dead. That\n means Kriere was in an accident, too!\""
],
[
"Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way,\n stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as\n delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly\n blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed\n close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a\n cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed\n completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n\n\n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n\n\n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and\n black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n\n\n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n\n\n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.",
"But even a machine breaks down....\n\"Sam!\" Rice turned swiftly as Burnett dragged himself up the ladder.\n Red and warm, Rice's face hovered over the body of a sprawled enemy\n official. \"Take a look at this!\"\n\n\n Burnett caught his breath. His eyes narrowed. There was something wrong\n with the body; his experienced glance knew that. He didn't know what it\n was.\n\n\n Maybe it was because the body looked a little\ntoo\ndead.",
"Sam Burnett shook his long head, trying to think clearly. Pallid and\n quiet, three bodies lay on the cold transparent tables around him;\n machines stirred, revolved, hummed. He didn't see them. He didn't see\n anything but a red haze over his mind. It blotted out the far wall of\n the laboratory where the shelves went up and down, numbered in scarlet,\n keeping the bodies of soldiers from all further harm.\n\n\n Burnett didn't move. He stood there in his rumpled white surgical\n gown, staring at his fingers gloved in bone-white rubber; feeling all\n tight and wild inside himself. It went on for days. Moving the ship.\n Opening the star-port. Extending the retriever claw. Plucking some poor\n warrior's body out of the void.",
"Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes.\n He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship,\n hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own\n heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n\n\n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't\n care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here—what's his name?\n Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine\n beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n\n\n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n\n\n Lethla was alive.",
"Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservative\n lab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigerator\n shelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap to\n life, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins.\n\n\n \"Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!\"\n\n\n Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing was\n worth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundred\n thousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with blood\n cooling in it.\nShaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamed\n up into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbed\n without making any noise on the rungs.",
"Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them\n into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and\n shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one\n another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships,\n salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.\n\n\n Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred\n other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.\n\n\n Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots\n inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the\n husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved\n for action.\n\n\n This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!\n\n\n \"Sam!\"",
"Burnett laughed through his nose. Controls moved under his fingers like\n fluid; loved, caressed, tended by his familiar touching. Looking ahead,\n he squinted.\n\n\n \"There's your Ruler now, Lethla. Doing somersaults. Looks dead. A good\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"Cut power! We don't want to burn him!\"\nBurnett cut. Kriere's milky face floated dreamily into a visual-screen,\n eyes sealed, lips gaping, hands sagging, clutching emptily at the stars.\n\n\n \"We're about fifty miles from him, catching up.\" Burnett turned to\n Lethla with an intent scowl. Funny. This was the first and the last\n time anybody would ever board the\nConstellation\nalive. His stomach\n went flat, tautened with sudden weakening fear.",
"He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream.\n He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the\n necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what\n language it would use if it had to.\n\n\n Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he\n knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a\n pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it\n like a dead cold star.\n\n\n Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From\n the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight,\n biting lines into his sharp face.\n\n\n Rice got it out, finally. \"How'd you do it?\" he demanded, bitterly.\n \"How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!\"",
"Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor.\n Rice grumbled and cursed after him.\n\n\n On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like\n a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never\n knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number\n ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.\n\n\n There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And\n what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he\n chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo\n wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you\n never knew who it would be.",
"A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head.\nYou\n never catch up with the war!\nBut what if the war catches up with you?\n\n\n What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship?\nLethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the\n chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick\n fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the\n halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off\n of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been\n inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen.\n\n\n He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. \"That's how I did it,\n Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Glassite!\" said Rice. \"A face-moulded mask of glassite!\"",
"The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its\n slowness.\n\n\n It reached Kriere.\n\n\n Burnett inhaled a deep breath.\n\n\n The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm.\nLethla watched.\n\n\n He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: \"You\n know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the\nConstellation\n. I believe it.\"\nAnd the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all\n around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There\n was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the\n head, which was carefully preserved for identification.\n\n\n That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard.\n\n\n Burnett spun about and leaped.",
"Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade\n where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew,\n artery—heart.\n\n\n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and\n this would be the last trip.\n\n\n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n\n\n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there\n was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in\n the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the\n star-port.\"\n\n\n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly.\n Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back\n kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet\n sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first,\n why—",
"Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of\n stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the\nConstellation\n. Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about\n to be rescued.\n\n\n Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he\n was about to end a ten-years' war.\n\n\n There was only\none\nway of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be\n fast.\n\n\n Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as\n it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a\n good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered\n directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies\n from space.\n\n\n Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet,\n too.",
"Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what\n ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n\n\n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his\n body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms,\n wet thin lips.\n\n\n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n\n\n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n\n\n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies\n being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of\n hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it\n would all be over.",
"He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and\n forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back\n full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke,\n who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a\n decent burial.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight.\" Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice\n from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight,\" Burnett repeated. \"Working on ninety-five,\n ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight\n surgery.\" Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded\n deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.\n\n\n Rice said:\n\n\n \"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day\n drunk!\"",
"Burnett said, \"Lethla?\" And then: \"Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That\n right?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in\n space, then Kriere's not far away from him!\"\n\n\n Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell.\n What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone\n else.\n\n\n Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. \"Snap out of it, Sam. Think!\n Kriere—The All-Mighty—in our territory. His right hand man dead. That\n means Kriere was in an accident, too!\"",
"\"Precious is the word for you, brother!\" said Rice.\n\n\n \"Enough!\" Lethla moved his gun several inches.\n\n\n \"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be\n picked up—\nnow!\n\"\nRice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time\n in years. \"Sure,\" said Sam, smiling. \"We'll pick him up.\"\n\n\n \"No tricks,\" said Lethla.\n\n\n Burnett scowled and smiled together. \"No tricks. You'll have Kriere on\n board the\nConstellation\nin half an hour or I'm no coroner.\"\n\n\n \"Follow me up the ladder.\"\n\n\n Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. \"Come on.\"",
"The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun.\n\n\n Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot\n ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back\n like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner.\n\n\n Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and\n screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the\n room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and\n started laughing.\n\n\n He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever\n claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut.\n\n\n Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's\n young face over him. Burnett groaned.\n\n\n Rice said, \"Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam.\"",
"If Kriere could be captured, that meant the end of the war, the end\n of shelves stacked with sleeping warriors, the end of this blind\n searching. Kriere, then, had to be taken aboard. After that—\n\n\n Kriere, the All-Mighty. At whose behest all space had quivered like\n a smitten gong for part of a century. Kriere, revolving in his neat,\n water-blue uniform, emblems shining gold, heat-gun tucked in glossy\n jet holster. With Kriere aboard, chances of overcoming him would be\n eliminated. Now: Rice and Burnett against Lethla. Lethla favored\n because of his gun.\n\n\n Kriere would make odds impossible.\n\n\n Something had to be done before Kriere came in.\n\n\n Lethla had to be yanked off guard. Shocked, bewildered,\n fooled—somehow. But—how?",
"He came out of the quick thoughts when he looped his long leg over\n the hole-rim, stepped up, faced Lethla in a cramped control room that\n was one glittering swirl of silver levers, audio-plates and visuals.\n Chronometers, clicking, told of the steady dropping toward the sun at a\n slow pace.\n\n\n Burnett set his teeth together, bone against bone. Help Kriere escape?\n See him safely to Venus, and then be freed? Sounded easy, wouldn't be\n hard. Venusians weren't blind with malice. Rice and he could come out\n alive; if they cooperated.\n\n\n But there were a lot of warriors sleeping on a lot of numbered shelves\n in the dim corridors of the long years. And their dead lips were\n stirring to life in Burnett's ears. Not so easily could they be ignored.\nYou may never catch up with the war again.\nThe last trip!"
],
[
"Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way,\n stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as\n delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly\n blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed\n close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a\n cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed\n completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n\n\n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n\n\n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and\n black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n\n\n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n\n\n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.",
"The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun.\n\n\n Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot\n ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back\n like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner.\n\n\n Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and\n screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the\n room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and\n started laughing.\n\n\n He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever\n claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut.\n\n\n Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's\n young face over him. Burnett groaned.\n\n\n Rice said, \"Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam.\"",
"Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes.\n He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship,\n hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own\n heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n\n\n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't\n care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here—what's his name?\n Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine\n beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n\n\n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n\n\n Lethla was alive.",
"\"Full enough for me, sir.\"\n\n\n \"But still not full. If we went back to Center Base without filling\n the shelves, it wouldn't be right. Look there—number ninety-eight is\n Lethla—number ninety-nine is Kriere. Three thousand days of rolling\n this rocket, and not once come back without a bunch of the kids who\n want to sleep easy on the good green earth. Not right to be going back\n any way—but—the way—we used to—\"\n\n\n His voice got all full of fog. As thick as the fists of a dozen\n warriors. Rice was going away from him. Rice was standing still, and\n Burnett was lying down, not moving, but somehow Rice was going away a\n million miles.\n\n\n \"Ain't I one hell of a patriot, Rice?\"\n\n\n Then everything got dark except Rice's face. And that was starting to\n dissolve.",
"Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them\n into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and\n shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one\n another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships,\n salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.\n\n\n Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred\n other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.\n\n\n Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots\n inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the\n husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved\n for action.\n\n\n This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!\n\n\n \"Sam!\"",
"He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream.\n He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the\n necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what\n language it would use if it had to.\n\n\n Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he\n knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a\n pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it\n like a dead cold star.\n\n\n Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From\n the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight,\n biting lines into his sharp face.\n\n\n Rice got it out, finally. \"How'd you do it?\" he demanded, bitterly.\n \"How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!\"",
"Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservative\n lab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigerator\n shelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap to\n life, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins.\n\n\n \"Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!\"\n\n\n Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing was\n worth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundred\n thousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with blood\n cooling in it.\nShaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamed\n up into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbed\n without making any noise on the rungs.",
"\"To hell with it.\" Burnett winced, and fought to keep his eyes open.\n Something wet and sticky covered his chest. \"I said this was my last\n trip and I meant it. One way or the other, I'd have quit!\"\n\n\n \"This is the hard way—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. I dunno. Kind of nice to think of all those kids who'll never\n have to come aboard the\nConstellation\n, though, Rice.\" His voice\n trailed off. \"You watch the shelves fill up and you never know who'll\n be next. Who'd have thought, four days ago—\"\n\n\n Something happened to his tongue so it felt like hard ice blocking his\n mouth. He had a lot more words to say, but only time to get a few of\n them out:\n\n\n \"Rice?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got a full cargo, boy.\"",
"Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor.\n Rice grumbled and cursed after him.\n\n\n On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like\n a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never\n knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number\n ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.\n\n\n There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And\n what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he\n chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo\n wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you\n never knew who it would be.",
"Burnett said, \"Lethla?\" And then: \"Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That\n right?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in\n space, then Kriere's not far away from him!\"\n\n\n Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell.\n What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone\n else.\n\n\n Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. \"Snap out of it, Sam. Think!\n Kriere—The All-Mighty—in our territory. His right hand man dead. That\n means Kriere was in an accident, too!\"",
"Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade\n where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew,\n artery—heart.\n\n\n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and\n this would be the last trip.\n\n\n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n\n\n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there\n was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in\n the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the\n star-port.\"\n\n\n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly.\n Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back\n kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet\n sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first,\n why—",
"\"Yeah? If there's a warship within our radio range, seven hundred\n thousand miles, we'll get it. Unfortunately, the tide of battle has\n swept out past Earth in a new war concerning Io. That's out, Rice.\"\n\n\n Rice stood about three inches below Sam Burnett's six-foot-one. Jaw\n hard and determined, he stared at Sam, a funny light in his eyes. His\n fingers twitched all by themselves at his sides. His mouth twisted,\n \"You're one hell of a patriot, Sam Burnett!\"\n\n\n Burnett reached out with one long finger, tapped it quietly on Rice's\n barrel-chest. \"Haul a cargo of corpses for three thousand nights and\n days and see how patriotic you feel. All those fine muscled lads\n bloated and crushed by space pressures and heat-blasts. Fine lads who\n start out smiling and get the smile burned off down to the bone—\"",
"He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and\n forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back\n full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke,\n who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a\n decent burial.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight.\" Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice\n from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight,\" Burnett repeated. \"Working on ninety-five,\n ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight\n surgery.\" Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded\n deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.\n\n\n Rice said:\n\n\n \"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day\n drunk!\"",
"\"Precious is the word for you, brother!\" said Rice.\n\n\n \"Enough!\" Lethla moved his gun several inches.\n\n\n \"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be\n picked up—\nnow!\n\"\nRice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time\n in years. \"Sure,\" said Sam, smiling. \"We'll pick him up.\"\n\n\n \"No tricks,\" said Lethla.\n\n\n Burnett scowled and smiled together. \"No tricks. You'll have Kriere on\n board the\nConstellation\nin half an hour or I'm no coroner.\"\n\n\n \"Follow me up the ladder.\"\n\n\n Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. \"Come on.\"",
"But even a machine breaks down....\n\"Sam!\" Rice turned swiftly as Burnett dragged himself up the ladder.\n Red and warm, Rice's face hovered over the body of a sprawled enemy\n official. \"Take a look at this!\"\n\n\n Burnett caught his breath. His eyes narrowed. There was something wrong\n with the body; his experienced glance knew that. He didn't know what it\n was.\n\n\n Maybe it was because the body looked a little\ntoo\ndead.",
"A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head.\nYou\n never catch up with the war!\nBut what if the war catches up with you?\n\n\n What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship?\nLethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the\n chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick\n fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the\n halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off\n of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been\n inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen.\n\n\n He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. \"That's how I did it,\n Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Glassite!\" said Rice. \"A face-moulded mask of glassite!\"",
"Ninety-eight: Lethla. Ninety-nine: Kriere.\n\n\n He could still see Rice standing over him for a long time, breathing\n out and in. Down under the tables the blood-pumps pulsed and pulsed,\n thick and slow. Rice looked down at Burnett and then at the empty shelf\n at the far end of the room, and then back at Burnett again.\n\n\n And then he said softly:\n\n\n \"\nOne hundred.\n\"",
"Lethla's gun grip tightened. \"More talk of that nature, and only dead\n men there will be.\" He blinked. \"But first—we must rescue Kriere....\"\n\n\n \"Kriere!\" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw.\n\n\n Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes\n lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama.\n Lethla's voice came next:\n\n\n \"Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus\n at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these\n air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked\n unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the\n life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing\n their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the\n Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever.",
"\"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n \"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock\n is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the\n ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and\n coils. The radio.\n\n\n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his\n feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by\n the new bitterness in it.\n\n\n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n\n\n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk—\"\n\n\n Rice said it, slow:\n\n\n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead\n men belong here.\"",
"Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves.\n \"Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the\n Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the\n day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick\n of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling\n through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good\n green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine.\n\n\n \"As for Kriere—if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution\n is taken to protect that one.\"\n\n\n \"But Lethla! His body must mean something!\"\n\n\n \"And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a\n battle-cuiser to go against him?\"\n\n\n \"We'll radio for help?\""
],
[
"Lethla's gun grip tightened. \"More talk of that nature, and only dead\n men there will be.\" He blinked. \"But first—we must rescue Kriere....\"\n\n\n \"Kriere!\" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw.\n\n\n Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes\n lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama.\n Lethla's voice came next:\n\n\n \"Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus\n at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these\n air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked\n unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the\n life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing\n their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the\n Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever.",
"Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way,\n stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as\n delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly\n blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed\n close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a\n cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed\n completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n\n\n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n\n\n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and\n black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n\n\n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n\n\n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.",
"Lethla nodded. His milk-blue eyes dilated. \"Very marvelously pared to\n an unbreakable thickness of one-thirtieth of an inch; worn only on the\n head. You have to look quickly to notice it, and, unfortunately, viewed\n as you saw it, outside the ship, floating in the void, not discernible\n at all.\"\n\n\n Prickles of sweat appeared on Rice's face. He swore at the Venusian and\n the Venusian laughed like some sort of stringed instrument, high and\n quick.\n\n\n Burnett laughed, too. Ironically. \"First time in years a man ever came\n aboard the Constellation alive. It's a welcome change.\"\n\n\n Lethla showed his needle-like teeth. \"I thought it might be. Where's\n your radio?\"\n\n\n \"Go find it!\" snapped Rice, hotly.",
"Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of\n stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the\nConstellation\n. Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about\n to be rescued.\n\n\n Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he\n was about to end a ten-years' war.\n\n\n There was only\none\nway of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be\n fast.\n\n\n Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as\n it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a\n good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered\n directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies\n from space.\n\n\n Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet,\n too.",
"The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its\n slowness.\n\n\n It reached Kriere.\n\n\n Burnett inhaled a deep breath.\n\n\n The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm.\nLethla watched.\n\n\n He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: \"You\n know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the\nConstellation\n. I believe it.\"\nAnd the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all\n around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There\n was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the\n head, which was carefully preserved for identification.\n\n\n That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard.\n\n\n Burnett spun about and leaped.",
"A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head.\nYou\n never catch up with the war!\nBut what if the war catches up with you?\n\n\n What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship?\nLethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the\n chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick\n fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the\n halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off\n of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been\n inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen.\n\n\n He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. \"That's how I did it,\n Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Glassite!\" said Rice. \"A face-moulded mask of glassite!\"",
"\"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n \"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock\n is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the\n ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and\n coils. The radio.\n\n\n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his\n feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by\n the new bitterness in it.\n\n\n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n\n\n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk—\"\n\n\n Rice said it, slow:\n\n\n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead\n men belong here.\"",
"Burnett laughed through his nose. Controls moved under his fingers like\n fluid; loved, caressed, tended by his familiar touching. Looking ahead,\n he squinted.\n\n\n \"There's your Ruler now, Lethla. Doing somersaults. Looks dead. A good\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"Cut power! We don't want to burn him!\"\nBurnett cut. Kriere's milky face floated dreamily into a visual-screen,\n eyes sealed, lips gaping, hands sagging, clutching emptily at the stars.\n\n\n \"We're about fifty miles from him, catching up.\" Burnett turned to\n Lethla with an intent scowl. Funny. This was the first and the last\n time anybody would ever board the\nConstellation\nalive. His stomach\n went flat, tautened with sudden weakening fear.",
"Burnett said, \"Lethla?\" And then: \"Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That\n right?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in\n space, then Kriere's not far away from him!\"\n\n\n Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell.\n What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone\n else.\n\n\n Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. \"Snap out of it, Sam. Think!\n Kriere—The All-Mighty—in our territory. His right hand man dead. That\n means Kriere was in an accident, too!\"",
"Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade\n where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew,\n artery—heart.\n\n\n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and\n this would be the last trip.\n\n\n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n\n\n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there\n was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in\n the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the\n star-port.\"\n\n\n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly.\n Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back\n kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet\n sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first,\n why—",
"He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream.\n He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the\n necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what\n language it would use if it had to.\n\n\n Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he\n knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a\n pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it\n like a dead cold star.\n\n\n Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From\n the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight,\n biting lines into his sharp face.\n\n\n Rice got it out, finally. \"How'd you do it?\" he demanded, bitterly.\n \"How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!\"",
"Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes.\n He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship,\n hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own\n heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n\n\n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't\n care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here—what's his name?\n Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine\n beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n\n\n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n\n\n Lethla was alive.",
"\"We saw your morgue ship an hour ago. It's a long, long way to Venus.\n We were running out of fuel, food, water. Radio was broken. Capture\n was certain. You were coming our way; we took the chance. We set a\n small time-bomb to destroy the life-rocket, and cast off, wearing our\n chrysali-helmets. It was the first time we had ever tried using them to\n trick anyone. We knew you wouldn't know we were alive until it was too\n late and we controlled your ship. We knew you picked up all bodies for\n brief exams, returning alien corpses to space later.\"\n\n\n Rice's voice was sullen. \"A set-up for you, huh? Traveling under the\n protection of the Purple Cross you can get your damned All-Mighty safe\n to Venus.\"\n\n\n Lethla bowed slightly. \"Who would suspect a Morgue Rocket of providing\n safe hiding for precious Venusian cargo?\"",
"If Kriere could be captured, that meant the end of the war, the end\n of shelves stacked with sleeping warriors, the end of this blind\n searching. Kriere, then, had to be taken aboard. After that—\n\n\n Kriere, the All-Mighty. At whose behest all space had quivered like\n a smitten gong for part of a century. Kriere, revolving in his neat,\n water-blue uniform, emblems shining gold, heat-gun tucked in glossy\n jet holster. With Kriere aboard, chances of overcoming him would be\n eliminated. Now: Rice and Burnett against Lethla. Lethla favored\n because of his gun.\n\n\n Kriere would make odds impossible.\n\n\n Something had to be done before Kriere came in.\n\n\n Lethla had to be yanked off guard. Shocked, bewildered,\n fooled—somehow. But—how?",
"Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves.\n \"Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the\n Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the\n day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick\n of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling\n through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good\n green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine.\n\n\n \"As for Kriere—if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution\n is taken to protect that one.\"\n\n\n \"But Lethla! His body must mean something!\"\n\n\n \"And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a\n battle-cuiser to go against him?\"\n\n\n \"We'll radio for help?\"",
"\"Precious is the word for you, brother!\" said Rice.\n\n\n \"Enough!\" Lethla moved his gun several inches.\n\n\n \"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be\n picked up—\nnow!\n\"\nRice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time\n in years. \"Sure,\" said Sam, smiling. \"We'll pick him up.\"\n\n\n \"No tricks,\" said Lethla.\n\n\n Burnett scowled and smiled together. \"No tricks. You'll have Kriere on\n board the\nConstellation\nin half an hour or I'm no coroner.\"\n\n\n \"Follow me up the ladder.\"\n\n\n Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. \"Come on.\"",
"Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor.\n Rice grumbled and cursed after him.\n\n\n On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like\n a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never\n knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number\n ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.\n\n\n There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And\n what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he\n chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo\n wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you\n never knew who it would be.",
"He came out of the quick thoughts when he looped his long leg over\n the hole-rim, stepped up, faced Lethla in a cramped control room that\n was one glittering swirl of silver levers, audio-plates and visuals.\n Chronometers, clicking, told of the steady dropping toward the sun at a\n slow pace.\n\n\n Burnett set his teeth together, bone against bone. Help Kriere escape?\n See him safely to Venus, and then be freed? Sounded easy, wouldn't be\n hard. Venusians weren't blind with malice. Rice and he could come out\n alive; if they cooperated.\n\n\n But there were a lot of warriors sleeping on a lot of numbered shelves\n in the dim corridors of the long years. And their dead lips were\n stirring to life in Burnett's ears. Not so easily could they be ignored.\nYou may never catch up with the war again.\nThe last trip!",
"Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what\n ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n\n\n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his\n body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms,\n wet thin lips.\n\n\n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n\n\n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n\n\n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies\n being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of\n hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it\n would all be over.",
"The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun.\n\n\n Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot\n ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back\n like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner.\n\n\n Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and\n screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the\n room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and\n started laughing.\n\n\n He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever\n claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut.\n\n\n Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's\n young face over him. Burnett groaned.\n\n\n Rice said, \"Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam.\""
],
[
"Burnett laughed through his nose. Controls moved under his fingers like\n fluid; loved, caressed, tended by his familiar touching. Looking ahead,\n he squinted.\n\n\n \"There's your Ruler now, Lethla. Doing somersaults. Looks dead. A good\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"Cut power! We don't want to burn him!\"\nBurnett cut. Kriere's milky face floated dreamily into a visual-screen,\n eyes sealed, lips gaping, hands sagging, clutching emptily at the stars.\n\n\n \"We're about fifty miles from him, catching up.\" Burnett turned to\n Lethla with an intent scowl. Funny. This was the first and the last\n time anybody would ever board the\nConstellation\nalive. His stomach\n went flat, tautened with sudden weakening fear.",
"Lethla nodded. His milk-blue eyes dilated. \"Very marvelously pared to\n an unbreakable thickness of one-thirtieth of an inch; worn only on the\n head. You have to look quickly to notice it, and, unfortunately, viewed\n as you saw it, outside the ship, floating in the void, not discernible\n at all.\"\n\n\n Prickles of sweat appeared on Rice's face. He swore at the Venusian and\n the Venusian laughed like some sort of stringed instrument, high and\n quick.\n\n\n Burnett laughed, too. Ironically. \"First time in years a man ever came\n aboard the Constellation alive. It's a welcome change.\"\n\n\n Lethla showed his needle-like teeth. \"I thought it might be. Where's\n your radio?\"\n\n\n \"Go find it!\" snapped Rice, hotly.",
"\"To hell with it.\" Burnett winced, and fought to keep his eyes open.\n Something wet and sticky covered his chest. \"I said this was my last\n trip and I meant it. One way or the other, I'd have quit!\"\n\n\n \"This is the hard way—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. I dunno. Kind of nice to think of all those kids who'll never\n have to come aboard the\nConstellation\n, though, Rice.\" His voice\n trailed off. \"You watch the shelves fill up and you never know who'll\n be next. Who'd have thought, four days ago—\"\n\n\n Something happened to his tongue so it felt like hard ice blocking his\n mouth. He had a lot more words to say, but only time to get a few of\n them out:\n\n\n \"Rice?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got a full cargo, boy.\"",
"The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its\n slowness.\n\n\n It reached Kriere.\n\n\n Burnett inhaled a deep breath.\n\n\n The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm.\nLethla watched.\n\n\n He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: \"You\n know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the\nConstellation\n. I believe it.\"\nAnd the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all\n around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There\n was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the\n head, which was carefully preserved for identification.\n\n\n That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard.\n\n\n Burnett spun about and leaped.",
"\"Precious is the word for you, brother!\" said Rice.\n\n\n \"Enough!\" Lethla moved his gun several inches.\n\n\n \"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be\n picked up—\nnow!\n\"\nRice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time\n in years. \"Sure,\" said Sam, smiling. \"We'll pick him up.\"\n\n\n \"No tricks,\" said Lethla.\n\n\n Burnett scowled and smiled together. \"No tricks. You'll have Kriere on\n board the\nConstellation\nin half an hour or I'm no coroner.\"\n\n\n \"Follow me up the ladder.\"\n\n\n Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. \"Come on.\"",
"Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of\n stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the\nConstellation\n. Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about\n to be rescued.\n\n\n Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he\n was about to end a ten-years' war.\n\n\n There was only\none\nway of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be\n fast.\n\n\n Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as\n it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a\n good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered\n directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies\n from space.\n\n\n Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet,\n too.",
"Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade\n where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew,\n artery—heart.\n\n\n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and\n this would be the last trip.\n\n\n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n\n\n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there\n was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in\n the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the\n star-port.\"\n\n\n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly.\n Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back\n kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet\n sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first,\n why—",
"\"Yeah? If there's a warship within our radio range, seven hundred\n thousand miles, we'll get it. Unfortunately, the tide of battle has\n swept out past Earth in a new war concerning Io. That's out, Rice.\"\n\n\n Rice stood about three inches below Sam Burnett's six-foot-one. Jaw\n hard and determined, he stared at Sam, a funny light in his eyes. His\n fingers twitched all by themselves at his sides. His mouth twisted,\n \"You're one hell of a patriot, Sam Burnett!\"\n\n\n Burnett reached out with one long finger, tapped it quietly on Rice's\n barrel-chest. \"Haul a cargo of corpses for three thousand nights and\n days and see how patriotic you feel. All those fine muscled lads\n bloated and crushed by space pressures and heat-blasts. Fine lads who\n start out smiling and get the smile burned off down to the bone—\"",
"Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves.\n \"Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the\n Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the\n day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick\n of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling\n through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good\n green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine.\n\n\n \"As for Kriere—if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution\n is taken to protect that one.\"\n\n\n \"But Lethla! His body must mean something!\"\n\n\n \"And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a\n battle-cuiser to go against him?\"\n\n\n \"We'll radio for help?\"",
"If Kriere could be captured, that meant the end of the war, the end\n of shelves stacked with sleeping warriors, the end of this blind\n searching. Kriere, then, had to be taken aboard. After that—\n\n\n Kriere, the All-Mighty. At whose behest all space had quivered like\n a smitten gong for part of a century. Kriere, revolving in his neat,\n water-blue uniform, emblems shining gold, heat-gun tucked in glossy\n jet holster. With Kriere aboard, chances of overcoming him would be\n eliminated. Now: Rice and Burnett against Lethla. Lethla favored\n because of his gun.\n\n\n Kriere would make odds impossible.\n\n\n Something had to be done before Kriere came in.\n\n\n Lethla had to be yanked off guard. Shocked, bewildered,\n fooled—somehow. But—how?",
"He kept thinking the one thing he couldn't forget.\nYou never catch up with the war.\nAll the color is ahead of you. The drive of orange rocket traces across\n stars, the whamming of steel-nosed bombs into elusive targets, the\n titanic explosions and breathless pursuits, the flags and the excited\n glory are always a million miles ahead.\n\n\n He bit his teeth together.\nYou never catch up with the war.\nYou come along when space has settled back, when the vacuum has stopped\n trembling from unleashed forces between worlds. You come along in the\n dark quiet of death to find the wreckage plunging with all the fury of\n its original acceleration in no particular direction. You can only see\n it; you don't hear anything in space but your own heart kicking your\n ribs.",
"Lethla's gun grip tightened. \"More talk of that nature, and only dead\n men there will be.\" He blinked. \"But first—we must rescue Kriere....\"\n\n\n \"Kriere!\" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw.\n\n\n Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes\n lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama.\n Lethla's voice came next:\n\n\n \"Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus\n at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these\n air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked\n unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the\n life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing\n their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the\n Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever.",
"\"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n \"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock\n is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the\n ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and\n coils. The radio.\n\n\n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his\n feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by\n the new bitterness in it.\n\n\n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n\n\n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk—\"\n\n\n Rice said it, slow:\n\n\n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead\n men belong here.\"",
"Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way,\n stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as\n delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly\n blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed\n close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a\n cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed\n completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n\n\n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n\n\n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and\n black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n\n\n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n\n\n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.",
"He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and\n forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back\n full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke,\n who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a\n decent burial.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight.\" Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice\n from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight,\" Burnett repeated. \"Working on ninety-five,\n ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight\n surgery.\" Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded\n deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.\n\n\n Rice said:\n\n\n \"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day\n drunk!\"",
"\"We saw your morgue ship an hour ago. It's a long, long way to Venus.\n We were running out of fuel, food, water. Radio was broken. Capture\n was certain. You were coming our way; we took the chance. We set a\n small time-bomb to destroy the life-rocket, and cast off, wearing our\n chrysali-helmets. It was the first time we had ever tried using them to\n trick anyone. We knew you wouldn't know we were alive until it was too\n late and we controlled your ship. We knew you picked up all bodies for\n brief exams, returning alien corpses to space later.\"\n\n\n Rice's voice was sullen. \"A set-up for you, huh? Traveling under the\n protection of the Purple Cross you can get your damned All-Mighty safe\n to Venus.\"\n\n\n Lethla bowed slightly. \"Who would suspect a Morgue Rocket of providing\n safe hiding for precious Venusian cargo?\"",
"You see bodies, each in its own terrific orbit, given impetus by\n grinding collisions, tossed from mother ships and dancing head over\n feet forever and forever with no goal. Bits of flesh in ruptured space\n suits, mouths open for air that had never been there in a hundred\n billion centuries. And they kept dancing without music until you\n extended the retriever-claw and culled them into the air-lock.\n\n\n That was all the war-glory he got. Nothing but the stunned, shivering\n silence, the memory of rockets long gone, and the shelves filling up\n all too quickly with men who had once loved laughing.\n\n\n You wondered who all the men were; and who the next ones would be.\n After ten years you made yourself blind to them. You went around doing\n your job with mechanical hands.",
"Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what\n ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n\n\n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his\n body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms,\n wet thin lips.\n\n\n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n\n\n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n\n\n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies\n being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of\n hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it\n would all be over.",
"Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them\n into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and\n shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one\n another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships,\n salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.\n\n\n Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred\n other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.\n\n\n Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots\n inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the\n husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved\n for action.\n\n\n This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!\n\n\n \"Sam!\"",
"Morgue Ship\nBy RAY BRADBURY\nThis was Burnett's last trip. Three more\n\n shelves to fill with space-slain warriors—and\n\n he would be among the living again.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe heard the star-port grind open, and the movement of the metal claws\n groping into space, and then the star-port closed.\n\n\n There was another dead man aboard the\nConstellation\n."
],
[
"Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of\n stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the\nConstellation\n. Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about\n to be rescued.\n\n\n Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he\n was about to end a ten-years' war.\n\n\n There was only\none\nway of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be\n fast.\n\n\n Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as\n it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a\n good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered\n directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies\n from space.\n\n\n Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet,\n too.",
"Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way,\n stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as\n delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly\n blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed\n close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a\n cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed\n completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n\n\n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n\n\n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and\n black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n\n\n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n\n\n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.",
"Burnett said, \"Lethla?\" And then: \"Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That\n right?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in\n space, then Kriere's not far away from him!\"\n\n\n Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell.\n What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone\n else.\n\n\n Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. \"Snap out of it, Sam. Think!\n Kriere—The All-Mighty—in our territory. His right hand man dead. That\n means Kriere was in an accident, too!\"",
"If Kriere could be captured, that meant the end of the war, the end\n of shelves stacked with sleeping warriors, the end of this blind\n searching. Kriere, then, had to be taken aboard. After that—\n\n\n Kriere, the All-Mighty. At whose behest all space had quivered like\n a smitten gong for part of a century. Kriere, revolving in his neat,\n water-blue uniform, emblems shining gold, heat-gun tucked in glossy\n jet holster. With Kriere aboard, chances of overcoming him would be\n eliminated. Now: Rice and Burnett against Lethla. Lethla favored\n because of his gun.\n\n\n Kriere would make odds impossible.\n\n\n Something had to be done before Kriere came in.\n\n\n Lethla had to be yanked off guard. Shocked, bewildered,\n fooled—somehow. But—how?",
"The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its\n slowness.\n\n\n It reached Kriere.\n\n\n Burnett inhaled a deep breath.\n\n\n The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm.\nLethla watched.\n\n\n He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: \"You\n know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the\nConstellation\n. I believe it.\"\nAnd the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all\n around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There\n was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the\n head, which was carefully preserved for identification.\n\n\n That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard.\n\n\n Burnett spun about and leaped.",
"Lethla's gun grip tightened. \"More talk of that nature, and only dead\n men there will be.\" He blinked. \"But first—we must rescue Kriere....\"\n\n\n \"Kriere!\" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw.\n\n\n Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes\n lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama.\n Lethla's voice came next:\n\n\n \"Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus\n at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these\n air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked\n unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the\n life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing\n their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the\n Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever.",
"Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what\n ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n\n\n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his\n body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms,\n wet thin lips.\n\n\n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n\n\n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n\n\n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies\n being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of\n hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it\n would all be over.",
"Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor.\n Rice grumbled and cursed after him.\n\n\n On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like\n a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never\n knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number\n ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.\n\n\n There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And\n what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he\n chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo\n wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you\n never knew who it would be.",
"\"Precious is the word for you, brother!\" said Rice.\n\n\n \"Enough!\" Lethla moved his gun several inches.\n\n\n \"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be\n picked up—\nnow!\n\"\nRice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time\n in years. \"Sure,\" said Sam, smiling. \"We'll pick him up.\"\n\n\n \"No tricks,\" said Lethla.\n\n\n Burnett scowled and smiled together. \"No tricks. You'll have Kriere on\n board the\nConstellation\nin half an hour or I'm no coroner.\"\n\n\n \"Follow me up the ladder.\"\n\n\n Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. \"Come on.\"",
"Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves.\n \"Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the\n Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the\n day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick\n of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling\n through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good\n green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine.\n\n\n \"As for Kriere—if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution\n is taken to protect that one.\"\n\n\n \"But Lethla! His body must mean something!\"\n\n\n \"And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a\n battle-cuiser to go against him?\"\n\n\n \"We'll radio for help?\"",
"Burnett laughed through his nose. Controls moved under his fingers like\n fluid; loved, caressed, tended by his familiar touching. Looking ahead,\n he squinted.\n\n\n \"There's your Ruler now, Lethla. Doing somersaults. Looks dead. A good\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"Cut power! We don't want to burn him!\"\nBurnett cut. Kriere's milky face floated dreamily into a visual-screen,\n eyes sealed, lips gaping, hands sagging, clutching emptily at the stars.\n\n\n \"We're about fifty miles from him, catching up.\" Burnett turned to\n Lethla with an intent scowl. Funny. This was the first and the last\n time anybody would ever board the\nConstellation\nalive. His stomach\n went flat, tautened with sudden weakening fear.",
"The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun.\n\n\n Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot\n ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back\n like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner.\n\n\n Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and\n screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the\n room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and\n started laughing.\n\n\n He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever\n claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut.\n\n\n Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's\n young face over him. Burnett groaned.\n\n\n Rice said, \"Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam.\"",
"A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head.\nYou\n never catch up with the war!\nBut what if the war catches up with you?\n\n\n What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship?\nLethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the\n chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick\n fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the\n halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off\n of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been\n inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen.\n\n\n He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. \"That's how I did it,\n Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Glassite!\" said Rice. \"A face-moulded mask of glassite!\"",
"He came out of the quick thoughts when he looped his long leg over\n the hole-rim, stepped up, faced Lethla in a cramped control room that\n was one glittering swirl of silver levers, audio-plates and visuals.\n Chronometers, clicking, told of the steady dropping toward the sun at a\n slow pace.\n\n\n Burnett set his teeth together, bone against bone. Help Kriere escape?\n See him safely to Venus, and then be freed? Sounded easy, wouldn't be\n hard. Venusians weren't blind with malice. Rice and he could come out\n alive; if they cooperated.\n\n\n But there were a lot of warriors sleeping on a lot of numbered shelves\n in the dim corridors of the long years. And their dead lips were\n stirring to life in Burnett's ears. Not so easily could they be ignored.\nYou may never catch up with the war again.\nThe last trip!",
"Lethla nodded. His milk-blue eyes dilated. \"Very marvelously pared to\n an unbreakable thickness of one-thirtieth of an inch; worn only on the\n head. You have to look quickly to notice it, and, unfortunately, viewed\n as you saw it, outside the ship, floating in the void, not discernible\n at all.\"\n\n\n Prickles of sweat appeared on Rice's face. He swore at the Venusian and\n the Venusian laughed like some sort of stringed instrument, high and\n quick.\n\n\n Burnett laughed, too. Ironically. \"First time in years a man ever came\n aboard the Constellation alive. It's a welcome change.\"\n\n\n Lethla showed his needle-like teeth. \"I thought it might be. Where's\n your radio?\"\n\n\n \"Go find it!\" snapped Rice, hotly.",
"Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade\n where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew,\n artery—heart.\n\n\n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and\n this would be the last trip.\n\n\n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n\n\n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there\n was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in\n the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the\n star-port.\"\n\n\n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly.\n Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back\n kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet\n sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first,\n why—",
"Ninety-eight: Lethla. Ninety-nine: Kriere.\n\n\n He could still see Rice standing over him for a long time, breathing\n out and in. Down under the tables the blood-pumps pulsed and pulsed,\n thick and slow. Rice looked down at Burnett and then at the empty shelf\n at the far end of the room, and then back at Burnett again.\n\n\n And then he said softly:\n\n\n \"\nOne hundred.\n\"",
"\"We saw your morgue ship an hour ago. It's a long, long way to Venus.\n We were running out of fuel, food, water. Radio was broken. Capture\n was certain. You were coming our way; we took the chance. We set a\n small time-bomb to destroy the life-rocket, and cast off, wearing our\n chrysali-helmets. It was the first time we had ever tried using them to\n trick anyone. We knew you wouldn't know we were alive until it was too\n late and we controlled your ship. We knew you picked up all bodies for\n brief exams, returning alien corpses to space later.\"\n\n\n Rice's voice was sullen. \"A set-up for you, huh? Traveling under the\n protection of the Purple Cross you can get your damned All-Mighty safe\n to Venus.\"\n\n\n Lethla bowed slightly. \"Who would suspect a Morgue Rocket of providing\n safe hiding for precious Venusian cargo?\"",
"He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream.\n He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the\n necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what\n language it would use if it had to.\n\n\n Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he\n knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a\n pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it\n like a dead cold star.\n\n\n Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From\n the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight,\n biting lines into his sharp face.\n\n\n Rice got it out, finally. \"How'd you do it?\" he demanded, bitterly.\n \"How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!\"",
"\"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n \"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock\n is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the\n ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and\n coils. The radio.\n\n\n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his\n feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by\n the new bitterness in it.\n\n\n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n\n\n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk—\"\n\n\n Rice said it, slow:\n\n\n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead\n men belong here.\""
],
[
"Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade\n where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew,\n artery—heart.\n\n\n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and\n this would be the last trip.\n\n\n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n\n\n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there\n was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in\n the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the\n star-port.\"\n\n\n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly.\n Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back\n kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet\n sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first,\n why—",
"Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes.\n He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship,\n hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own\n heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n\n\n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't\n care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here—what's his name?\n Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine\n beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n\n\n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n\n\n Lethla was alive.",
"Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way,\n stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as\n delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly\n blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed\n close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a\n cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed\n completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n\n\n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n\n\n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and\n black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n\n\n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n\n\n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.",
"Burnett laughed through his nose. Controls moved under his fingers like\n fluid; loved, caressed, tended by his familiar touching. Looking ahead,\n he squinted.\n\n\n \"There's your Ruler now, Lethla. Doing somersaults. Looks dead. A good\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"Cut power! We don't want to burn him!\"\nBurnett cut. Kriere's milky face floated dreamily into a visual-screen,\n eyes sealed, lips gaping, hands sagging, clutching emptily at the stars.\n\n\n \"We're about fifty miles from him, catching up.\" Burnett turned to\n Lethla with an intent scowl. Funny. This was the first and the last\n time anybody would ever board the\nConstellation\nalive. His stomach\n went flat, tautened with sudden weakening fear.",
"If Kriere could be captured, that meant the end of the war, the end\n of shelves stacked with sleeping warriors, the end of this blind\n searching. Kriere, then, had to be taken aboard. After that—\n\n\n Kriere, the All-Mighty. At whose behest all space had quivered like\n a smitten gong for part of a century. Kriere, revolving in his neat,\n water-blue uniform, emblems shining gold, heat-gun tucked in glossy\n jet holster. With Kriere aboard, chances of overcoming him would be\n eliminated. Now: Rice and Burnett against Lethla. Lethla favored\n because of his gun.\n\n\n Kriere would make odds impossible.\n\n\n Something had to be done before Kriere came in.\n\n\n Lethla had to be yanked off guard. Shocked, bewildered,\n fooled—somehow. But—how?",
"The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun.\n\n\n Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot\n ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back\n like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner.\n\n\n Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and\n screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the\n room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and\n started laughing.\n\n\n He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever\n claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut.\n\n\n Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's\n young face over him. Burnett groaned.\n\n\n Rice said, \"Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam.\"",
"The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its\n slowness.\n\n\n It reached Kriere.\n\n\n Burnett inhaled a deep breath.\n\n\n The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm.\nLethla watched.\n\n\n He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: \"You\n know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the\nConstellation\n. I believe it.\"\nAnd the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all\n around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There\n was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the\n head, which was carefully preserved for identification.\n\n\n That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard.\n\n\n Burnett spun about and leaped.",
"Lethla nodded. His milk-blue eyes dilated. \"Very marvelously pared to\n an unbreakable thickness of one-thirtieth of an inch; worn only on the\n head. You have to look quickly to notice it, and, unfortunately, viewed\n as you saw it, outside the ship, floating in the void, not discernible\n at all.\"\n\n\n Prickles of sweat appeared on Rice's face. He swore at the Venusian and\n the Venusian laughed like some sort of stringed instrument, high and\n quick.\n\n\n Burnett laughed, too. Ironically. \"First time in years a man ever came\n aboard the Constellation alive. It's a welcome change.\"\n\n\n Lethla showed his needle-like teeth. \"I thought it might be. Where's\n your radio?\"\n\n\n \"Go find it!\" snapped Rice, hotly.",
"Sam Burnett shook his long head, trying to think clearly. Pallid and\n quiet, three bodies lay on the cold transparent tables around him;\n machines stirred, revolved, hummed. He didn't see them. He didn't see\n anything but a red haze over his mind. It blotted out the far wall of\n the laboratory where the shelves went up and down, numbered in scarlet,\n keeping the bodies of soldiers from all further harm.\n\n\n Burnett didn't move. He stood there in his rumpled white surgical\n gown, staring at his fingers gloved in bone-white rubber; feeling all\n tight and wild inside himself. It went on for days. Moving the ship.\n Opening the star-port. Extending the retriever claw. Plucking some poor\n warrior's body out of the void.",
"\"To hell with it.\" Burnett winced, and fought to keep his eyes open.\n Something wet and sticky covered his chest. \"I said this was my last\n trip and I meant it. One way or the other, I'd have quit!\"\n\n\n \"This is the hard way—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. I dunno. Kind of nice to think of all those kids who'll never\n have to come aboard the\nConstellation\n, though, Rice.\" His voice\n trailed off. \"You watch the shelves fill up and you never know who'll\n be next. Who'd have thought, four days ago—\"\n\n\n Something happened to his tongue so it felt like hard ice blocking his\n mouth. He had a lot more words to say, but only time to get a few of\n them out:\n\n\n \"Rice?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got a full cargo, boy.\"",
"Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them\n into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and\n shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one\n another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships,\n salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.\n\n\n Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred\n other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.\n\n\n Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots\n inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the\n husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved\n for action.\n\n\n This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!\n\n\n \"Sam!\"",
"A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head.\nYou\n never catch up with the war!\nBut what if the war catches up with you?\n\n\n What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship?\nLethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the\n chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick\n fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the\n halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off\n of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been\n inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen.\n\n\n He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. \"That's how I did it,\n Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Glassite!\" said Rice. \"A face-moulded mask of glassite!\"",
"He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream.\n He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the\n necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what\n language it would use if it had to.\n\n\n Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he\n knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a\n pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it\n like a dead cold star.\n\n\n Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From\n the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight,\n biting lines into his sharp face.\n\n\n Rice got it out, finally. \"How'd you do it?\" he demanded, bitterly.\n \"How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!\"",
"Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor.\n Rice grumbled and cursed after him.\n\n\n On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like\n a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never\n knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number\n ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.\n\n\n There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And\n what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he\n chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo\n wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you\n never knew who it would be.",
"Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of\n stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the\nConstellation\n. Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about\n to be rescued.\n\n\n Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he\n was about to end a ten-years' war.\n\n\n There was only\none\nway of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be\n fast.\n\n\n Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as\n it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a\n good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered\n directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies\n from space.\n\n\n Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet,\n too.",
"Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what\n ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n\n\n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his\n body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms,\n wet thin lips.\n\n\n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n\n\n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n\n\n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies\n being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of\n hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it\n would all be over.",
"Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservative\n lab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigerator\n shelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap to\n life, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins.\n\n\n \"Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!\"\n\n\n Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing was\n worth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundred\n thousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with blood\n cooling in it.\nShaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamed\n up into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbed\n without making any noise on the rungs.",
"\"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n \"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock\n is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the\n ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and\n coils. The radio.\n\n\n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his\n feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by\n the new bitterness in it.\n\n\n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n\n\n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk—\"\n\n\n Rice said it, slow:\n\n\n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead\n men belong here.\"",
"\"Yeah? If there's a warship within our radio range, seven hundred\n thousand miles, we'll get it. Unfortunately, the tide of battle has\n swept out past Earth in a new war concerning Io. That's out, Rice.\"\n\n\n Rice stood about three inches below Sam Burnett's six-foot-one. Jaw\n hard and determined, he stared at Sam, a funny light in his eyes. His\n fingers twitched all by themselves at his sides. His mouth twisted,\n \"You're one hell of a patriot, Sam Burnett!\"\n\n\n Burnett reached out with one long finger, tapped it quietly on Rice's\n barrel-chest. \"Haul a cargo of corpses for three thousand nights and\n days and see how patriotic you feel. All those fine muscled lads\n bloated and crushed by space pressures and heat-blasts. Fine lads who\n start out smiling and get the smile burned off down to the bone—\"",
"Lethla's gun grip tightened. \"More talk of that nature, and only dead\n men there will be.\" He blinked. \"But first—we must rescue Kriere....\"\n\n\n \"Kriere!\" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw.\n\n\n Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes\n lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama.\n Lethla's voice came next:\n\n\n \"Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus\n at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these\n air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked\n unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the\n life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing\n their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the\n Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever."
],
[
"Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way,\n stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as\n delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly\n blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed\n close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a\n cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed\n completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n\n\n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n\n\n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and\n black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n\n\n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n\n\n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.",
"Burnett said, \"Lethla?\" And then: \"Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That\n right?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in\n space, then Kriere's not far away from him!\"\n\n\n Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell.\n What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone\n else.\n\n\n Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. \"Snap out of it, Sam. Think!\n Kriere—The All-Mighty—in our territory. His right hand man dead. That\n means Kriere was in an accident, too!\"",
"The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun.\n\n\n Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot\n ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back\n like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner.\n\n\n Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and\n screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the\n room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and\n started laughing.\n\n\n He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever\n claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut.\n\n\n Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's\n young face over him. Burnett groaned.\n\n\n Rice said, \"Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam.\"",
"Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade\n where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew,\n artery—heart.\n\n\n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and\n this would be the last trip.\n\n\n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n\n\n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there\n was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in\n the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the\n star-port.\"\n\n\n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly.\n Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back\n kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet\n sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first,\n why—",
"Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes.\n He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship,\n hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own\n heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n\n\n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't\n care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here—what's his name?\n Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine\n beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n\n\n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n\n\n Lethla was alive.",
"The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its\n slowness.\n\n\n It reached Kriere.\n\n\n Burnett inhaled a deep breath.\n\n\n The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm.\nLethla watched.\n\n\n He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: \"You\n know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the\nConstellation\n. I believe it.\"\nAnd the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all\n around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There\n was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the\n head, which was carefully preserved for identification.\n\n\n That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard.\n\n\n Burnett spun about and leaped.",
"Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor.\n Rice grumbled and cursed after him.\n\n\n On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like\n a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never\n knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number\n ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.\n\n\n There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And\n what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he\n chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo\n wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you\n never knew who it would be.",
"Lethla's gun grip tightened. \"More talk of that nature, and only dead\n men there will be.\" He blinked. \"But first—we must rescue Kriere....\"\n\n\n \"Kriere!\" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw.\n\n\n Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes\n lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama.\n Lethla's voice came next:\n\n\n \"Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus\n at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these\n air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked\n unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the\n life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing\n their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the\n Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever.",
"Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of\n stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the\nConstellation\n. Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about\n to be rescued.\n\n\n Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he\n was about to end a ten-years' war.\n\n\n There was only\none\nway of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be\n fast.\n\n\n Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as\n it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a\n good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered\n directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies\n from space.\n\n\n Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet,\n too.",
"A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head.\nYou\n never catch up with the war!\nBut what if the war catches up with you?\n\n\n What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship?\nLethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the\n chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick\n fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the\n halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off\n of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been\n inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen.\n\n\n He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. \"That's how I did it,\n Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Glassite!\" said Rice. \"A face-moulded mask of glassite!\"",
"Burnett laughed through his nose. Controls moved under his fingers like\n fluid; loved, caressed, tended by his familiar touching. Looking ahead,\n he squinted.\n\n\n \"There's your Ruler now, Lethla. Doing somersaults. Looks dead. A good\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"Cut power! We don't want to burn him!\"\nBurnett cut. Kriere's milky face floated dreamily into a visual-screen,\n eyes sealed, lips gaping, hands sagging, clutching emptily at the stars.\n\n\n \"We're about fifty miles from him, catching up.\" Burnett turned to\n Lethla with an intent scowl. Funny. This was the first and the last\n time anybody would ever board the\nConstellation\nalive. His stomach\n went flat, tautened with sudden weakening fear.",
"Ninety-eight: Lethla. Ninety-nine: Kriere.\n\n\n He could still see Rice standing over him for a long time, breathing\n out and in. Down under the tables the blood-pumps pulsed and pulsed,\n thick and slow. Rice looked down at Burnett and then at the empty shelf\n at the far end of the room, and then back at Burnett again.\n\n\n And then he said softly:\n\n\n \"\nOne hundred.\n\"",
"Lethla nodded. His milk-blue eyes dilated. \"Very marvelously pared to\n an unbreakable thickness of one-thirtieth of an inch; worn only on the\n head. You have to look quickly to notice it, and, unfortunately, viewed\n as you saw it, outside the ship, floating in the void, not discernible\n at all.\"\n\n\n Prickles of sweat appeared on Rice's face. He swore at the Venusian and\n the Venusian laughed like some sort of stringed instrument, high and\n quick.\n\n\n Burnett laughed, too. Ironically. \"First time in years a man ever came\n aboard the Constellation alive. It's a welcome change.\"\n\n\n Lethla showed his needle-like teeth. \"I thought it might be. Where's\n your radio?\"\n\n\n \"Go find it!\" snapped Rice, hotly.",
"\"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n \"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock\n is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the\n ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and\n coils. The radio.\n\n\n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his\n feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by\n the new bitterness in it.\n\n\n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n\n\n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk—\"\n\n\n Rice said it, slow:\n\n\n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead\n men belong here.\"",
"He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream.\n He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the\n necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what\n language it would use if it had to.\n\n\n Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he\n knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a\n pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it\n like a dead cold star.\n\n\n Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From\n the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight,\n biting lines into his sharp face.\n\n\n Rice got it out, finally. \"How'd you do it?\" he demanded, bitterly.\n \"How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!\"",
"If Kriere could be captured, that meant the end of the war, the end\n of shelves stacked with sleeping warriors, the end of this blind\n searching. Kriere, then, had to be taken aboard. After that—\n\n\n Kriere, the All-Mighty. At whose behest all space had quivered like\n a smitten gong for part of a century. Kriere, revolving in his neat,\n water-blue uniform, emblems shining gold, heat-gun tucked in glossy\n jet holster. With Kriere aboard, chances of overcoming him would be\n eliminated. Now: Rice and Burnett against Lethla. Lethla favored\n because of his gun.\n\n\n Kriere would make odds impossible.\n\n\n Something had to be done before Kriere came in.\n\n\n Lethla had to be yanked off guard. Shocked, bewildered,\n fooled—somehow. But—how?",
"Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what\n ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n\n\n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his\n body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms,\n wet thin lips.\n\n\n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n\n\n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n\n\n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies\n being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of\n hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it\n would all be over.",
"\"Precious is the word for you, brother!\" said Rice.\n\n\n \"Enough!\" Lethla moved his gun several inches.\n\n\n \"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be\n picked up—\nnow!\n\"\nRice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time\n in years. \"Sure,\" said Sam, smiling. \"We'll pick him up.\"\n\n\n \"No tricks,\" said Lethla.\n\n\n Burnett scowled and smiled together. \"No tricks. You'll have Kriere on\n board the\nConstellation\nin half an hour or I'm no coroner.\"\n\n\n \"Follow me up the ladder.\"\n\n\n Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. \"Come on.\"",
"Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves.\n \"Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the\n Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the\n day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick\n of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling\n through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good\n green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine.\n\n\n \"As for Kriere—if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution\n is taken to protect that one.\"\n\n\n \"But Lethla! His body must mean something!\"\n\n\n \"And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a\n battle-cuiser to go against him?\"\n\n\n \"We'll radio for help?\"",
"He came out of the quick thoughts when he looped his long leg over\n the hole-rim, stepped up, faced Lethla in a cramped control room that\n was one glittering swirl of silver levers, audio-plates and visuals.\n Chronometers, clicking, told of the steady dropping toward the sun at a\n slow pace.\n\n\n Burnett set his teeth together, bone against bone. Help Kriere escape?\n See him safely to Venus, and then be freed? Sounded easy, wouldn't be\n hard. Venusians weren't blind with malice. Rice and he could come out\n alive; if they cooperated.\n\n\n But there were a lot of warriors sleeping on a lot of numbered shelves\n in the dim corridors of the long years. And their dead lips were\n stirring to life in Burnett's ears. Not so easily could they be ignored.\nYou may never catch up with the war again.\nThe last trip!"
],
[
"Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what\n ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n\n\n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his\n body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms,\n wet thin lips.\n\n\n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n\n\n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n\n\n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies\n being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of\n hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it\n would all be over.",
"Burnett said, \"Lethla?\" And then: \"Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That\n right?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in\n space, then Kriere's not far away from him!\"\n\n\n Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell.\n What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone\n else.\n\n\n Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. \"Snap out of it, Sam. Think!\n Kriere—The All-Mighty—in our territory. His right hand man dead. That\n means Kriere was in an accident, too!\"",
"If Kriere could be captured, that meant the end of the war, the end\n of shelves stacked with sleeping warriors, the end of this blind\n searching. Kriere, then, had to be taken aboard. After that—\n\n\n Kriere, the All-Mighty. At whose behest all space had quivered like\n a smitten gong for part of a century. Kriere, revolving in his neat,\n water-blue uniform, emblems shining gold, heat-gun tucked in glossy\n jet holster. With Kriere aboard, chances of overcoming him would be\n eliminated. Now: Rice and Burnett against Lethla. Lethla favored\n because of his gun.\n\n\n Kriere would make odds impossible.\n\n\n Something had to be done before Kriere came in.\n\n\n Lethla had to be yanked off guard. Shocked, bewildered,\n fooled—somehow. But—how?",
"The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its\n slowness.\n\n\n It reached Kriere.\n\n\n Burnett inhaled a deep breath.\n\n\n The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm.\nLethla watched.\n\n\n He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: \"You\n know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the\nConstellation\n. I believe it.\"\nAnd the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all\n around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There\n was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the\n head, which was carefully preserved for identification.\n\n\n That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard.\n\n\n Burnett spun about and leaped.",
"Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor.\n Rice grumbled and cursed after him.\n\n\n On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like\n a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never\n knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number\n ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.\n\n\n There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And\n what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he\n chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo\n wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you\n never knew who it would be.",
"Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of\n stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the\nConstellation\n. Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about\n to be rescued.\n\n\n Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he\n was about to end a ten-years' war.\n\n\n There was only\none\nway of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be\n fast.\n\n\n Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as\n it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a\n good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered\n directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies\n from space.\n\n\n Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet,\n too.",
"Burnett laughed through his nose. Controls moved under his fingers like\n fluid; loved, caressed, tended by his familiar touching. Looking ahead,\n he squinted.\n\n\n \"There's your Ruler now, Lethla. Doing somersaults. Looks dead. A good\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"Cut power! We don't want to burn him!\"\nBurnett cut. Kriere's milky face floated dreamily into a visual-screen,\n eyes sealed, lips gaping, hands sagging, clutching emptily at the stars.\n\n\n \"We're about fifty miles from him, catching up.\" Burnett turned to\n Lethla with an intent scowl. Funny. This was the first and the last\n time anybody would ever board the\nConstellation\nalive. His stomach\n went flat, tautened with sudden weakening fear.",
"Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade\n where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew,\n artery—heart.\n\n\n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and\n this would be the last trip.\n\n\n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n\n\n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there\n was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in\n the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the\n star-port.\"\n\n\n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly.\n Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back\n kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet\n sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first,\n why—",
"Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way,\n stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as\n delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly\n blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed\n close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a\n cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed\n completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n\n\n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n\n\n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and\n black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n\n\n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n\n\n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.",
"Lethla's gun grip tightened. \"More talk of that nature, and only dead\n men there will be.\" He blinked. \"But first—we must rescue Kriere....\"\n\n\n \"Kriere!\" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw.\n\n\n Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes\n lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama.\n Lethla's voice came next:\n\n\n \"Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus\n at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these\n air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked\n unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the\n life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing\n their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the\n Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever.",
"Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes.\n He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship,\n hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own\n heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n\n\n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't\n care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here—what's his name?\n Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine\n beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n\n\n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n\n\n Lethla was alive.",
"\"Precious is the word for you, brother!\" said Rice.\n\n\n \"Enough!\" Lethla moved his gun several inches.\n\n\n \"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be\n picked up—\nnow!\n\"\nRice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time\n in years. \"Sure,\" said Sam, smiling. \"We'll pick him up.\"\n\n\n \"No tricks,\" said Lethla.\n\n\n Burnett scowled and smiled together. \"No tricks. You'll have Kriere on\n board the\nConstellation\nin half an hour or I'm no coroner.\"\n\n\n \"Follow me up the ladder.\"\n\n\n Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. \"Come on.\"",
"The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun.\n\n\n Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot\n ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back\n like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner.\n\n\n Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and\n screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the\n room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and\n started laughing.\n\n\n He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever\n claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut.\n\n\n Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's\n young face over him. Burnett groaned.\n\n\n Rice said, \"Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam.\"",
"Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them\n into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and\n shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one\n another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships,\n salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.\n\n\n Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred\n other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.\n\n\n Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots\n inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the\n husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved\n for action.\n\n\n This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!\n\n\n \"Sam!\"",
"He came out of the quick thoughts when he looped his long leg over\n the hole-rim, stepped up, faced Lethla in a cramped control room that\n was one glittering swirl of silver levers, audio-plates and visuals.\n Chronometers, clicking, told of the steady dropping toward the sun at a\n slow pace.\n\n\n Burnett set his teeth together, bone against bone. Help Kriere escape?\n See him safely to Venus, and then be freed? Sounded easy, wouldn't be\n hard. Venusians weren't blind with malice. Rice and he could come out\n alive; if they cooperated.\n\n\n But there were a lot of warriors sleeping on a lot of numbered shelves\n in the dim corridors of the long years. And their dead lips were\n stirring to life in Burnett's ears. Not so easily could they be ignored.\nYou may never catch up with the war again.\nThe last trip!",
"\"Full enough for me, sir.\"\n\n\n \"But still not full. If we went back to Center Base without filling\n the shelves, it wouldn't be right. Look there—number ninety-eight is\n Lethla—number ninety-nine is Kriere. Three thousand days of rolling\n this rocket, and not once come back without a bunch of the kids who\n want to sleep easy on the good green earth. Not right to be going back\n any way—but—the way—we used to—\"\n\n\n His voice got all full of fog. As thick as the fists of a dozen\n warriors. Rice was going away from him. Rice was standing still, and\n Burnett was lying down, not moving, but somehow Rice was going away a\n million miles.\n\n\n \"Ain't I one hell of a patriot, Rice?\"\n\n\n Then everything got dark except Rice's face. And that was starting to\n dissolve.",
"\"To hell with it.\" Burnett winced, and fought to keep his eyes open.\n Something wet and sticky covered his chest. \"I said this was my last\n trip and I meant it. One way or the other, I'd have quit!\"\n\n\n \"This is the hard way—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. I dunno. Kind of nice to think of all those kids who'll never\n have to come aboard the\nConstellation\n, though, Rice.\" His voice\n trailed off. \"You watch the shelves fill up and you never know who'll\n be next. Who'd have thought, four days ago—\"\n\n\n Something happened to his tongue so it felt like hard ice blocking his\n mouth. He had a lot more words to say, but only time to get a few of\n them out:\n\n\n \"Rice?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got a full cargo, boy.\"",
"\"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n \"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock\n is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the\n ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and\n coils. The radio.\n\n\n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his\n feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by\n the new bitterness in it.\n\n\n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n\n\n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk—\"\n\n\n Rice said it, slow:\n\n\n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead\n men belong here.\"",
"Ninety-eight: Lethla. Ninety-nine: Kriere.\n\n\n He could still see Rice standing over him for a long time, breathing\n out and in. Down under the tables the blood-pumps pulsed and pulsed,\n thick and slow. Rice looked down at Burnett and then at the empty shelf\n at the far end of the room, and then back at Burnett again.\n\n\n And then he said softly:\n\n\n \"\nOne hundred.\n\"",
"Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservative\n lab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigerator\n shelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap to\n life, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins.\n\n\n \"Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!\"\n\n\n Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing was\n worth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundred\n thousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with blood\n cooling in it.\nShaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamed\n up into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbed\n without making any noise on the rungs."
],
[
"The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun.\n\n\n Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot\n ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back\n like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner.\n\n\n Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and\n screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the\n room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and\n started laughing.\n\n\n He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever\n claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut.\n\n\n Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's\n young face over him. Burnett groaned.\n\n\n Rice said, \"Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam.\"",
"Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes.\n He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship,\n hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own\n heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n\n\n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't\n care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here—what's his name?\n Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine\n beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n\n\n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n\n\n Lethla was alive.",
"Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor.\n Rice grumbled and cursed after him.\n\n\n On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like\n a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never\n knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number\n ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.\n\n\n There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And\n what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he\n chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo\n wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you\n never knew who it would be.",
"Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservative\n lab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigerator\n shelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap to\n life, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins.\n\n\n \"Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!\"\n\n\n Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing was\n worth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundred\n thousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with blood\n cooling in it.\nShaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamed\n up into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbed\n without making any noise on the rungs.",
"\"To hell with it.\" Burnett winced, and fought to keep his eyes open.\n Something wet and sticky covered his chest. \"I said this was my last\n trip and I meant it. One way or the other, I'd have quit!\"\n\n\n \"This is the hard way—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. I dunno. Kind of nice to think of all those kids who'll never\n have to come aboard the\nConstellation\n, though, Rice.\" His voice\n trailed off. \"You watch the shelves fill up and you never know who'll\n be next. Who'd have thought, four days ago—\"\n\n\n Something happened to his tongue so it felt like hard ice blocking his\n mouth. He had a lot more words to say, but only time to get a few of\n them out:\n\n\n \"Rice?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got a full cargo, boy.\"",
"\"Full enough for me, sir.\"\n\n\n \"But still not full. If we went back to Center Base without filling\n the shelves, it wouldn't be right. Look there—number ninety-eight is\n Lethla—number ninety-nine is Kriere. Three thousand days of rolling\n this rocket, and not once come back without a bunch of the kids who\n want to sleep easy on the good green earth. Not right to be going back\n any way—but—the way—we used to—\"\n\n\n His voice got all full of fog. As thick as the fists of a dozen\n warriors. Rice was going away from him. Rice was standing still, and\n Burnett was lying down, not moving, but somehow Rice was going away a\n million miles.\n\n\n \"Ain't I one hell of a patriot, Rice?\"\n\n\n Then everything got dark except Rice's face. And that was starting to\n dissolve.",
"Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what\n ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n\n\n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his\n body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms,\n wet thin lips.\n\n\n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n\n\n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n\n\n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies\n being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of\n hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it\n would all be over.",
"Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade\n where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew,\n artery—heart.\n\n\n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and\n this would be the last trip.\n\n\n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n\n\n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there\n was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in\n the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the\n star-port.\"\n\n\n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly.\n Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back\n kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet\n sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first,\n why—",
"He kept thinking the one thing he couldn't forget.\nYou never catch up with the war.\nAll the color is ahead of you. The drive of orange rocket traces across\n stars, the whamming of steel-nosed bombs into elusive targets, the\n titanic explosions and breathless pursuits, the flags and the excited\n glory are always a million miles ahead.\n\n\n He bit his teeth together.\nYou never catch up with the war.\nYou come along when space has settled back, when the vacuum has stopped\n trembling from unleashed forces between worlds. You come along in the\n dark quiet of death to find the wreckage plunging with all the fury of\n its original acceleration in no particular direction. You can only see\n it; you don't hear anything in space but your own heart kicking your\n ribs.",
"Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them\n into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and\n shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one\n another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships,\n salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.\n\n\n Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred\n other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.\n\n\n Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots\n inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the\n husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved\n for action.\n\n\n This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!\n\n\n \"Sam!\"",
"Ninety-eight: Lethla. Ninety-nine: Kriere.\n\n\n He could still see Rice standing over him for a long time, breathing\n out and in. Down under the tables the blood-pumps pulsed and pulsed,\n thick and slow. Rice looked down at Burnett and then at the empty shelf\n at the far end of the room, and then back at Burnett again.\n\n\n And then he said softly:\n\n\n \"\nOne hundred.\n\"",
"He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream.\n He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the\n necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what\n language it would use if it had to.\n\n\n Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he\n knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a\n pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it\n like a dead cold star.\n\n\n Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From\n the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight,\n biting lines into his sharp face.\n\n\n Rice got it out, finally. \"How'd you do it?\" he demanded, bitterly.\n \"How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!\"",
"Lethla's gun grip tightened. \"More talk of that nature, and only dead\n men there will be.\" He blinked. \"But first—we must rescue Kriere....\"\n\n\n \"Kriere!\" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw.\n\n\n Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes\n lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama.\n Lethla's voice came next:\n\n\n \"Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus\n at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these\n air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked\n unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the\n life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing\n their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the\n Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever.",
"He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and\n forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back\n full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke,\n who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a\n decent burial.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight.\" Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice\n from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight,\" Burnett repeated. \"Working on ninety-five,\n ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight\n surgery.\" Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded\n deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.\n\n\n Rice said:\n\n\n \"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day\n drunk!\"",
"\"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n \"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock\n is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the\n ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and\n coils. The radio.\n\n\n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his\n feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by\n the new bitterness in it.\n\n\n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n\n\n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk—\"\n\n\n Rice said it, slow:\n\n\n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead\n men belong here.\"",
"You see bodies, each in its own terrific orbit, given impetus by\n grinding collisions, tossed from mother ships and dancing head over\n feet forever and forever with no goal. Bits of flesh in ruptured space\n suits, mouths open for air that had never been there in a hundred\n billion centuries. And they kept dancing without music until you\n extended the retriever-claw and culled them into the air-lock.\n\n\n That was all the war-glory he got. Nothing but the stunned, shivering\n silence, the memory of rockets long gone, and the shelves filling up\n all too quickly with men who had once loved laughing.\n\n\n You wondered who all the men were; and who the next ones would be.\n After ten years you made yourself blind to them. You went around doing\n your job with mechanical hands.",
"But even a machine breaks down....\n\"Sam!\" Rice turned swiftly as Burnett dragged himself up the ladder.\n Red and warm, Rice's face hovered over the body of a sprawled enemy\n official. \"Take a look at this!\"\n\n\n Burnett caught his breath. His eyes narrowed. There was something wrong\n with the body; his experienced glance knew that. He didn't know what it\n was.\n\n\n Maybe it was because the body looked a little\ntoo\ndead.",
"He came out of the quick thoughts when he looped his long leg over\n the hole-rim, stepped up, faced Lethla in a cramped control room that\n was one glittering swirl of silver levers, audio-plates and visuals.\n Chronometers, clicking, told of the steady dropping toward the sun at a\n slow pace.\n\n\n Burnett set his teeth together, bone against bone. Help Kriere escape?\n See him safely to Venus, and then be freed? Sounded easy, wouldn't be\n hard. Venusians weren't blind with malice. Rice and he could come out\n alive; if they cooperated.\n\n\n But there were a lot of warriors sleeping on a lot of numbered shelves\n in the dim corridors of the long years. And their dead lips were\n stirring to life in Burnett's ears. Not so easily could they be ignored.\nYou may never catch up with the war again.\nThe last trip!",
"\"We saw your morgue ship an hour ago. It's a long, long way to Venus.\n We were running out of fuel, food, water. Radio was broken. Capture\n was certain. You were coming our way; we took the chance. We set a\n small time-bomb to destroy the life-rocket, and cast off, wearing our\n chrysali-helmets. It was the first time we had ever tried using them to\n trick anyone. We knew you wouldn't know we were alive until it was too\n late and we controlled your ship. We knew you picked up all bodies for\n brief exams, returning alien corpses to space later.\"\n\n\n Rice's voice was sullen. \"A set-up for you, huh? Traveling under the\n protection of the Purple Cross you can get your damned All-Mighty safe\n to Venus.\"\n\n\n Lethla bowed slightly. \"Who would suspect a Morgue Rocket of providing\n safe hiding for precious Venusian cargo?\"",
"Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves.\n \"Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the\n Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the\n day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick\n of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling\n through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good\n green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine.\n\n\n \"As for Kriere—if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution\n is taken to protect that one.\"\n\n\n \"But Lethla! His body must mean something!\"\n\n\n \"And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a\n battle-cuiser to go against him?\"\n\n\n \"We'll radio for help?\""
]
] |
valid
|
63645
|
[
"What did Irgi find that could have helped his people if it weren't too late?",
"What caused the plague on earth?",
"Where did the spaceship land?",
"What did Nichols reminisce about?",
"How did Irgi feel after meeting the men?",
"What did Irgi do to the men in the lab?",
"Who inspired Irgi to work to help the people of earth?",
"What is the most likely reason Irgi was the last of his people?"
] |
[
[
"The mist and the globe of transparent metal",
"Only the mist",
"The mist and the blue light",
"The mist and the invisible beam"
],
[
"It was a microbe from space travel",
"It was a form of contagious cancer",
"It was caused by cosmic rays that reached earth",
"It was caused by radium"
],
[
"South of the rocks",
"North of the desert",
"East of the mountains",
"West of the city"
],
[
"Being with his family",
"Playing baseball",
"Breathing fresh air on earth",
"Shooting the monster with a sun blaster"
],
[
"Surprised at the way they looked",
"Confused about why they were there",
"Disappointed they could not speak to him through their minds",
"Happy they had a disease"
],
[
"Vivisected them with rays",
"Prepared them for the chamber",
"Burned them with fire",
"Cut them with sharp lancets"
],
[
"Mussdorf",
"Emerson",
"Nichols",
"Washington"
],
[
"They were killed in an invasion",
"They died from a disease caused by a microbe",
"They moved to another planet",
"They died from cancer"
]
] |
[
3,
2,
2,
2,
1,
2,
4,
4
] |
[
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1
] |
[
[
"Only Irgi, alone.\n\n\n He moved now along the ebony flooring, past the white marble walls hung\n with golden drapes that never withered or shed their aurate luster in\n the opalescent mists that bathed the city in shimmering whiteness. They\n hung low, those wispy tendrils of mist, clasping everything in their\n clinging shelter, destroying dust and germs. Irgi had discovered the\n mist many years ago, when it was too late to save his kind.\n\n\n He had flung a vast globe of transparent metal above this greatest of\n the cities of the Urg and filled it with the mist, and in it he had\n stored the treasures of his people. From Bar Nomala, from Faryl, and\n from the far-off jungle city of Kreed had he brought the riches of the\n Urg and set them up. Irgi enjoyed beauty, and he enjoyed work. It was\n the combination of both that kept him sane.",
"A picture quivered on the screen; grew nebulous, then cleared. Irgi\n found himself staring at a city far vaster than Urg. Grim white\n towers peaked high into the air, and broad, flat ramps circled them,\n interwoven like ribbons in the sunlight. On the tallest and largest\n buildings were great fields of metal painted a dull luster, where\n queerly wrought flying ships landed and took off.\n\n\n The scene changed suddenly. He looked into a hospital room and watched\n a pretty young woman smiling up at him. She too, had the growth\n disease. Now he beheld the mighty salt mines where naked men swung huge\n picks at the crusted crystals, sweating and dying under a strange sun.\n Even these remnants of humanity festered with the growth.",
"Toward a mighty bronze doorway he went, and as his body passed an\n invisible beam, the bronze portals slid apart, noiselessly, opening to\n reveal a vast circular chamber that hummed and throbbed, and was filled\n with a pale blue luminescence that glimmered upon metal rods and bars\n and ten tall cones of steelite.\n\n\n In the doorway, Irgi paused and ran his eyes about the chamber, sighing.\n\n\n This was his life work, this blue hum and throb. Those ten cones\n lifting their disced tips toward a circular roof bathed in, and drew\n their power from, a huge block of radiant white matter that hung\n suspended between the cones, in midair. All power did the cones and the\n block possess. There was nothing they could not do, if Irgi so willed.\n It was another discovery that came too late to save the Urg.",
"Irgi bent to wrap long arms about the queer beings, lifting them. His\n eyes were caught suddenly by the lumps protruding from their arms and\n legs, from face and chest. The growth disease! That was bad, but Irgi\n knew a way to cure it. Irgi knew a way to cure anything.\n\n\n He slid swiftly across the square and onto a flat, glittering ramp that\n stretched upward toward an arched doorway set like a jewel of light\n in a long, low building next to the vast, round Chamber of the Cones.\n He carried these creatures easily, without trouble. The ease of his\n passage gave him time to think.",
"The Last Monster\nBy GARDNER F. FOX\nIrgi was the last of his monster race, guardian of\n\n a dead planet, master of the secret of immortality.\n\n It was he whom the four men from Earth had to\n\n conquer to gain that secret—a tentacled\n\n monstrosity whom Earthly weapons could not touch.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIrgi was the last of his race. There was no one else, now; there had\n been no others for hundreds and hundreds of years. Irgi had lost count\n of time dwelling alone amid the marble halls of the eon-ancient city,\n but he knew that much. There were no others.",
"\"There, it is done,\" he whispered to himself. \"Now for another oval I\n can roam all Urg as I will, for the life spark in me has been cleansed\n and nourished.\"\n\n\n He touched the jeweled controls, shutting the power to a low murmur. He\n turned to the bronze doors, passed through and into the misty halls.\n\n\n \"I must speak,\" Irgi said as he moved along the corridor. \"I have not\n spoken for many weeks. I must exercise my voice, or lose it. That is\n the law of nature. It would atrophy, otherwise.\n\n\n \"Yes, I will use my voice tonight, and I will go out under the dome and\n look up at the stars and the other planets that swing near Urg, and I\n will talk to them and tell them how lonely Irgi is.\"",
"A tall, lean man in white looked out at him. His lips moved, and Irgi\n read their meaning. This man spoke to one named Emerson, commissioning\n him with a spaceship, reciting the need of radium, the dread of the\n plague. The thoughts of this Emerson were coming in clearer, as Irgi in\n sudden interest, flipped over different dials. The unspoken thoughts\n pouring into his brain through the screen continued. The words he did\n not understand, but the necessity for radium, and the danger of the\n growth disease he did. The pictures jumbled, grew chameleonesque—\n\n\n Irgi stared upward at a colossal figure graven in lucent white marble.\n He made out the letters chiseled into the base: GEORGE WASHINGTON. He\n wondered idly what this Washington had done, to merit such undying\n fame. He must have created a nation, or saved it. He wished there were\n Urgians alive to build a statue to\nhim\n.",
"And if he could not speak to them, they could speak to him, through\n their minds. Once unconscious, he could tap their memories with an\n electrigraph screen. That should be absorbing. It made Irgi happy,\n reflecting upon it, and Irgi had not known happiness for a long time.\n\n\n From the passage he hurried into a large white room, fitted with glass\n vials and ovules and glittering metal instruments, so many in number\n that the room seemed a jungle of metal. Down on flat, smooth tables\n Irgi dropped his burdens. With quick tendrils he adjusted straps to\n them, bound them securely. From a small, wheeled vehicle he took a\n metal rod and touched it to their foreheads. As it met the flesh, it\n hummed once faintly.",
"Irgi moved across the room. He pressed glittering jewels inset in a\n control panel on the wall, one after another, in proper sequence.\n\n\n The blue opalescence deepened, grew dark and vivid. The hum broadened\n into a hoarse roar. And standing out, startlingly white against the\n blue, was the queer block of shining metal, shimmering and pulsing.\n\n\n Irgi drew himself upwards, slowly turning, laving in the quivering\n bands of cobalt that sped outward from the cones. He preened his body\n in their patterns of color, watching it splash and spread over his\n chest and torso. Where it touched, a faint tingle lingered; then spread\n outwards, all over his huge form.\n\n\n Irgi was immortal, and the blue light made him so.",
"He rose suddenly, standing upright on his tentacles, swaying gently.\n Why, he had the power to make himself immortal! These creatures would\n gladly build statues to him! True, he could not create a nation—\nbut\n he could save it\n!\n\n\n Irgi unfastened clamps, and rolled the screen aside. He reached to a\n series of black knobs inset in the wall, and turned them carefully.\n Turning, he saw the figures of the four men stiffen to rigidity as a\n red aura drifted upward from the tabletop, passing through them as if\n they were mist, rising upwards to dissipate in the air near the ceiling.\n\n\n \"That will prepare their bodies for the Chamber of the Cones,\" he said.\n \"When they realize that I am their friend, they will gladly hear my\n counsels!\"",
"He turned and went along a hall that opened into a broad balcony which\n stood forth directly beneath a segment of the mighty dome. He stared\n upwards, craning all his eyes to see through the darkness pressing down\n upon him.\n\n\n \"Stars,\" he whispered, \"listen to me once again. I am lonely, stars,\n and the name and fame of Irgi means nothing to the walls of my city,\n nor to the Chamber of the Cones, nor even—at times—to Irgi himself.\"\n\n\n He paused and his eyes widened, staring upwards.\n\n\n \"By the Block,\" he said to the silence about him. \"There is something\n up there that is not a star, nor a planet, nor yet a meteor.\"",
"The thing dropped the Earthmen suddenly; its legs gathered beneath it\n and launched it full at Emerson. Caught off guard, the Earthman lifted\n his sun-blaster—felt it ripped from his fingers, knew a hard blackness\n thrashing down at him. He went backwards, sickened....\nIrgi stared at the things that lay on the white flagging. Queer beings\n they were, unlike anything Irgi had ever conceived. Only two legs, only\n two arms. And such weak little limbs! Why, an Urgian cat would make\n short work of them if an Urgian cat existed any more, and Irgi had\n never rated cats very highly.\n\n\n He looked at the spaceship, ran exploring feelers over it. He cast a\n glance back at the creatures again, and shook his head. Strange beings\n they might be, but they had mastered interplanetary travel. Well, he'd\n always maintained that life would be different on other worlds. Life\n here on Urg took different patterns.",
"Opening the laboratory door, Irgi passed out and closed it behind him.\nIt was the sweat of agony trickling down his forehead and over his eyes\n and cheeks that woke Emerson. He opened his eyes, then clamped them\n shut as his body writhed in pain.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord!\" he whimpered, bloodying his mouth where his teeth sank into\n his lips.\n\n\n In every fibre of his body sharp lancets cut and dug. In arms and legs\n and chest and belly they twisted and tore. Into the tissues beneath his\n skin, all along the muscles and the bone, the fiery torment played. He\n could not stand it; he could not—\n\n\n He flipped his head to right, to left; saw the others stretched out\n and strapped even as he. They were unconscious. What right had they to\n ignore this agony? Why didn't they share it with him? He opened his\n lips to shriek; then bit down again, hard.",
"\"It's short-circulated their nervous systems for a while, absorbed the\n electric charges all intelligent beings cast,\" Irgi said aloud, glad at\n this chance to exercise his voice. \"They won't be able to feel for some\n time. When the worst pain will have passed, they will recover. And now\n to examine their minds—\"\n\n\n He fitted metal clamps over their heads and screwed them tight. He\n wheeled forward a glassy screen; plugged in the cords that dangled from\n its frame to the metal clamps.\n\n\n \"I wonder if they've perfected this,\" Irgi mused. \"They must be aware\n that the brain gives off electrical waves. Perhaps they can chart\n those waves on graphs. But do they know that each curve and bend of\n those waves represents a picture? I can translate those waves into\n pictures—but can they?\"\n\n\n He slouched a little on his tentacles, squatting, gazing at the screen\n as he flipped over a lever.",
"The others crowded about him, looking out. Here the green was more\n vivid, intense. They could feel its surging power tingling on their\n skins. Beneath them, the jagged peak of the mountain almost grazed the\n hull. Spread out under their eyes was the panorama of a dead planet.\n\n\n Great rocks lay split and tumbled over one another in a black\n desolation. Sunlight glinting on their jagged edges, made harsh\n shadows. Far to the north a mountain range shrugged its snow-topped\n peaks to a sullen sky. To the south, beyond the rocks, lay a white\n waste of desert. To the west—\n\n\n \"A city,\" yelled Nichols, \"the place is inhabited. Thank God, thank\n God—\"\n\n\n Mussdorf erupted laughter.\n\n\n \"For what? How do we know what they're like? An inhabited planet\n doesn't mean men. We found that out—several times.\"",
"He had been glad to find these creatures. They were someone to\n converse with after centuries of loneliness. But as he approached them\n there in the square, calling out gladly to them, they could not hear\n him. His voice was pitched eight vibrations to the second. He wondered\n idly if that was beyond the hearing range of these two-legged things.\n He ought to check that, to be sure. Still, they had heard him on their\n ship. He had caught a confused, angry murmur on the radiation recorder.\n Perhaps the metal of the hull had in some manner made his voice audible\n to them, speeded up the vibrations to twelve or fifteen a second.\n\n\n Then there was the matter of the growth disease. He could eliminate\n that easily enough, in the Chamber of the Cones. But first they would\n have to be prepared. And the preparation—hurt. Well, better a few\n moments of agony than a death through a worse.",
"It was a spaceship.\nEmerson took his hands from the controls of the gigantic ship that\n hurtled through space, and wiped his sweaty palms on his thighs. His\n grey eyes bored like a steel awl downward at the mighty globe swinging\n in the void.\n\n\n \"The last planet in our course,\" he breathed. \"Maybe it has the radium!\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" whispered the man beside him, wetting his lips with his tongue.\n \"No use to think of failure. If it hasn't, we'll die ourselves, down\n there.\"\n\n\n Radium. And the Plague. It had come on Earth suddenly, had the Plague,\n back in the first days of space travel, after Quigg, the American\n research scientist at Cal Tech, discovered a way to lift a rocket ship\n off the Earth, and propel it to the Moon.",
"Now Emerson was breathing softly, \"Yes, it had better be there, or else\n we die.\"\n\n\n He ran quivering fingers over his forearm, felt the strange lumps that\n heralded cancer. Involuntarily, he shuddered.\n\n\n Steps clanged on the metal runway beneath them. Mussdorf pushed up\n through the trap and got to his feet. He was as big as Emerson, bulky\n where Emerson was lithe, granite where Emerson was chiseled steel. His\n hair was black, and his brows shaggy. A stubborn jaw shot out under\n thin, hard lips.\n\n\n \"There it is, Karl,\" said Nichols. \"Start hoping.\"\n\n\n Mussdorf scowled darkly, and spat.",
"\"We can hope,\" said Emerson sharply. \"Maybe they have some radium,\n stored so that our spectroscope couldn't pick it up.\"\n\n\n The mighty globe that hung over the city glimmered in the morning suns.\n Beneath it, the white towers and spires of the city reared in alien\n loveliness above graceful buildings and rounded roofs. A faint mist\n seemed to hang in the city streets.\n\n\n \"It's empty,\" said Nichols heavily. \"Deserted.\"\n\n\n \"Something's alive,\" protested Emerson. \"Something that spoke to us,\n that is controlling this green beam.\"\nA section of the globe slid back, and the spaceship moved through the\n opening. The globe slipped back and locked after it.",
"Within her gleaming walls, four men bent with hard faces over gleaming\n bands of color on a spectroscopic screen. With quivering fingers,\n Emerson twisted dials and switches.\n\n\n \"Hell!\" exploded Mussdorf. \"I might have known it. Not a trace.\"\n\n\n Emerson touched his forearm gently, and shuddered.\n\n\n Nichols bit his lips, and thought of Marge and the kids; Gunn licked\n his lips with a dry tongue and kept looking at Emerson.\n\n\n With one sweep of his brawny arm, Mussdorf sent the apparatus flying\n against the far wall to shatter in shards.\n\n\n No one said a word.\n\n\n Something whispered in the ship. They jerked their heads up, stood\n listening. The faint susurration swept all about them, questioning,\n curious. It came again, imperative; suddenly demanding."
],
[
"It meant death to travel in space, and only the stupendous fees paid to\n the young men who believed in a short life and a merry one, kept the\n ships plying between Mars and Earth and Venus. Lead kept out the cosmic\n rays, but lead would not stand the terrific speed required to lift a\n craft free of planetary gravity; and an inner coating of lead brought\n men into port raving with lead poisoning illusions.\n\n\n Cancer cases increased on Earth. It was learned that the virulent\n form of space cancer, as it was called, was in some peculiar manner,\n contagious to a certain extent. The alarm spread. Men who voyaged in\n space were segregated, but the damage had been done.\n\n\n The Plague spread, and ravaged the peoples of three planets.\n\n\n Hospitals were set up, and precious radium used for the fight. But the\n radium was hard to come by. There was just not enough for the job.",
"It was a spaceship.\nEmerson took his hands from the controls of the gigantic ship that\n hurtled through space, and wiped his sweaty palms on his thighs. His\n grey eyes bored like a steel awl downward at the mighty globe swinging\n in the void.\n\n\n \"The last planet in our course,\" he breathed. \"Maybe it has the radium!\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" whispered the man beside him, wetting his lips with his tongue.\n \"No use to think of failure. If it hasn't, we'll die ourselves, down\n there.\"\n\n\n Radium. And the Plague. It had come on Earth suddenly, had the Plague,\n back in the first days of space travel, after Quigg, the American\n research scientist at Cal Tech, discovered a way to lift a rocket ship\n off the Earth, and propel it to the Moon.",
"A picture quivered on the screen; grew nebulous, then cleared. Irgi\n found himself staring at a city far vaster than Urg. Grim white\n towers peaked high into the air, and broad, flat ramps circled them,\n interwoven like ribbons in the sunlight. On the tallest and largest\n buildings were great fields of metal painted a dull luster, where\n queerly wrought flying ships landed and took off.\n\n\n The scene changed suddenly. He looked into a hospital room and watched\n a pretty young woman smiling up at him. She too, had the growth\n disease. Now he beheld the mighty salt mines where naked men swung huge\n picks at the crusted crystals, sweating and dying under a strange sun.\n Even these remnants of humanity festered with the growth.",
"They had been slow, lumbering vessels, those first spaceships; not at\n all like the sleek craft that plied the voids today. But it had been a\n beginning. And no one had thought anything of it when Quigg, who had\n made the first flight through space, died of cancer.\n\n\n As the years passed to a decade, and the ships of Earth rode to Mars\n and Venus, it began to be apparent that a lifetime of space travel\n meant a hideous death. Scientists attributed it to the cosmic rays, for\n out in space there was no blanketing layer of atmosphere to protect\n the fleshy tissues of man from their piercing power. It had long been\n a theory that cosmic rays were related to the birth of new life in the\n cosmos; perhaps they were, said some, the direct cause of life. Thus by\n causing the unorderly growth of new cells that man called cancer, the\n cosmic rays were destroying the life they had created.",
"He had been glad to find these creatures. They were someone to\n converse with after centuries of loneliness. But as he approached them\n there in the square, calling out gladly to them, they could not hear\n him. His voice was pitched eight vibrations to the second. He wondered\n idly if that was beyond the hearing range of these two-legged things.\n He ought to check that, to be sure. Still, they had heard him on their\n ship. He had caught a confused, angry murmur on the radiation recorder.\n Perhaps the metal of the hull had in some manner made his voice audible\n to them, speeded up the vibrations to twelve or fifteen a second.\n\n\n Then there was the matter of the growth disease. He could eliminate\n that easily enough, in the Chamber of the Cones. But first they would\n have to be prepared. And the preparation—hurt. Well, better a few\n moments of agony than a death through a worse.",
"\"Try the atmospheric recorder,\" said Emerson. \"If the air's okay, I'd\n like to stretch my own legs.\"\n\n\n Nichols twisted chrome wheels, staring at a red line that wavered on a\n plastic screen, then straightened abruptly, rigid.\n\n\n \"Hey,\" yelled Nichols excitedly. \"It's pure. I mean actually pure. No\n germs. No dust. Just clean air!\"\n\n\n Emerson leaped to his side, staring, frowning.\n\n\n \"No germs. No dust. Why—that means there's no disease in this place!\n No disease.\"\n\n\n He began to laugh, then caught himself.\n\n\n \"No disease,\" he whispered, \"and every one of us is going to die of\n cancer.\"",
"Irgi bent to wrap long arms about the queer beings, lifting them. His\n eyes were caught suddenly by the lumps protruding from their arms and\n legs, from face and chest. The growth disease! That was bad, but Irgi\n knew a way to cure it. Irgi knew a way to cure anything.\n\n\n He slid swiftly across the square and onto a flat, glittering ramp that\n stretched upward toward an arched doorway set like a jewel of light\n in a long, low building next to the vast, round Chamber of the Cones.\n He carried these creatures easily, without trouble. The ease of his\n passage gave him time to think.",
"A ship was built, the fastest vessel ever made by man. It was designed\n for speed. It made the swiftest interplanetary craft seem a lumbering\n barge by comparison. And mankind gave it to Valentine Emerson to take\n it out among the stars to find the precious radium in sufficient\n quantities to halt the Plague.\n\n\n It had not been easy to find a crew. The three worlds knew the men\n were going to their doom. It would be a miracle if ever they reached\n a single planet, if they did not perish of space cancer before their\n first goal. Carson Nichols, whose wife and children were dying of the\n Plague, begged him for a chance. A murderer convicted to the Martian\n salt mines, Karl Mussdorf, grudgingly agreed to go along on the promise\n that he won a pardon if he ever came back. With Mussdorf went a little,\n wry-faced man named Tilford Gunn, who knew radio, cookery, and the fine\n art of pocket-picking. The two seemed inseparable.",
"A tall, lean man in white looked out at him. His lips moved, and Irgi\n read their meaning. This man spoke to one named Emerson, commissioning\n him with a spaceship, reciting the need of radium, the dread of the\n plague. The thoughts of this Emerson were coming in clearer, as Irgi in\n sudden interest, flipped over different dials. The unspoken thoughts\n pouring into his brain through the screen continued. The words he did\n not understand, but the necessity for radium, and the danger of the\n growth disease he did. The pictures jumbled, grew chameleonesque—\n\n\n Irgi stared upward at a colossal figure graven in lucent white marble.\n He made out the letters chiseled into the base: GEORGE WASHINGTON. He\n wondered idly what this Washington had done, to merit such undying\n fame. He must have created a nation, or saved it. He wished there were\n Urgians alive to build a statue to\nhim\n.",
"The thing dropped the Earthmen suddenly; its legs gathered beneath it\n and launched it full at Emerson. Caught off guard, the Earthman lifted\n his sun-blaster—felt it ripped from his fingers, knew a hard blackness\n thrashing down at him. He went backwards, sickened....\nIrgi stared at the things that lay on the white flagging. Queer beings\n they were, unlike anything Irgi had ever conceived. Only two legs, only\n two arms. And such weak little limbs! Why, an Urgian cat would make\n short work of them if an Urgian cat existed any more, and Irgi had\n never rated cats very highly.\n\n\n He looked at the spaceship, ran exploring feelers over it. He cast a\n glance back at the creatures again, and shook his head. Strange beings\n they might be, but they had mastered interplanetary travel. Well, he'd\n always maintained that life would be different on other worlds. Life\n here on Urg took different patterns.",
"Nichols screamed suddenly, his body aching.\n\n\n It woke the others. They too, bellowed and screamed and sobbed, and\n their arms and legs writhed like wild things in a trap.\n\n\n \"Got to get free,\" Emerson panted, straining against the wristbands.\n The hard muscles of his arms ridged with effort, but the straps held.\n He dropped back, sobbing.\n\n\n \"That fiend,\" yelled Mussdorf. \"That ten-eyed, octopus-legged,\n black-hearted spawn of a mismated monster did this to us. Damn him!\n Damn him! If I ever get loose I'll cut his heart out and make him eat\n it.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe—maybe he's vivisecting us,\" moaned Nichols. \"With rays or—or\n something—aagh! I can't stand it!\"",
"Only Irgi, alone.\n\n\n He moved now along the ebony flooring, past the white marble walls hung\n with golden drapes that never withered or shed their aurate luster in\n the opalescent mists that bathed the city in shimmering whiteness. They\n hung low, those wispy tendrils of mist, clasping everything in their\n clinging shelter, destroying dust and germs. Irgi had discovered the\n mist many years ago, when it was too late to save his kind.\n\n\n He had flung a vast globe of transparent metal above this greatest of\n the cities of the Urg and filled it with the mist, and in it he had\n stored the treasures of his people. From Bar Nomala, from Faryl, and\n from the far-off jungle city of Kreed had he brought the riches of the\n Urg and set them up. Irgi enjoyed beauty, and he enjoyed work. It was\n the combination of both that kept him sane.",
"The others crowded about him, looking out. Here the green was more\n vivid, intense. They could feel its surging power tingling on their\n skins. Beneath them, the jagged peak of the mountain almost grazed the\n hull. Spread out under their eyes was the panorama of a dead planet.\n\n\n Great rocks lay split and tumbled over one another in a black\n desolation. Sunlight glinting on their jagged edges, made harsh\n shadows. Far to the north a mountain range shrugged its snow-topped\n peaks to a sullen sky. To the south, beyond the rocks, lay a white\n waste of desert. To the west—\n\n\n \"A city,\" yelled Nichols, \"the place is inhabited. Thank God, thank\n God—\"\n\n\n Mussdorf erupted laughter.\n\n\n \"For what? How do we know what they're like? An inhabited planet\n doesn't mean men. We found that out—several times.\"",
"\"There, it is done,\" he whispered to himself. \"Now for another oval I\n can roam all Urg as I will, for the life spark in me has been cleansed\n and nourished.\"\n\n\n He touched the jeweled controls, shutting the power to a low murmur. He\n turned to the bronze doors, passed through and into the misty halls.\n\n\n \"I must speak,\" Irgi said as he moved along the corridor. \"I have not\n spoken for many weeks. I must exercise my voice, or lose it. That is\n the law of nature. It would atrophy, otherwise.\n\n\n \"Yes, I will use my voice tonight, and I will go out under the dome and\n look up at the stars and the other planets that swing near Urg, and I\n will talk to them and tell them how lonely Irgi is.\"",
"Opening the laboratory door, Irgi passed out and closed it behind him.\nIt was the sweat of agony trickling down his forehead and over his eyes\n and cheeks that woke Emerson. He opened his eyes, then clamped them\n shut as his body writhed in pain.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord!\" he whimpered, bloodying his mouth where his teeth sank into\n his lips.\n\n\n In every fibre of his body sharp lancets cut and dug. In arms and legs\n and chest and belly they twisted and tore. Into the tissues beneath his\n skin, all along the muscles and the bone, the fiery torment played. He\n could not stand it; he could not—\n\n\n He flipped his head to right, to left; saw the others stretched out\n and strapped even as he. They were unconscious. What right had they to\n ignore this agony? Why didn't they share it with him? He opened his\n lips to shriek; then bit down again, hard.",
"Now Emerson was breathing softly, \"Yes, it had better be there, or else\n we die.\"\n\n\n He ran quivering fingers over his forearm, felt the strange lumps that\n heralded cancer. Involuntarily, he shuddered.\n\n\n Steps clanged on the metal runway beneath them. Mussdorf pushed up\n through the trap and got to his feet. He was as big as Emerson, bulky\n where Emerson was lithe, granite where Emerson was chiseled steel. His\n hair was black, and his brows shaggy. A stubborn jaw shot out under\n thin, hard lips.\n\n\n \"There it is, Karl,\" said Nichols. \"Start hoping.\"\n\n\n Mussdorf scowled darkly, and spat.",
"\"Don't be a fool, Mussdorf,\" snapped Emerson savagely. \"It isn't your\n place to think, anyhow. That's mine. I'm commander of this force. What\n I say is an order.\"\n\n\n Mussdorf grinned dryly. Into his eyes came a glint of hot, sullen anger.\n\n\n \"You were our commander—out there, in space. We're on a planet now.\n Things are different. I want to learn the secret of those mists,\n Emerson. Something tells me I'd get a fortune for it, on Earth.\"\n\n\n Emerson squirmed helplessly, cursing him, saying, \"What's gotten into\n you?\"",
"\"Gawd,\" whispered Gunn. \"Wot is it, guv'nor?\"\n\n\n Emerson shook his head, frowning, suddenly glad that the others had\n heard it, too.\n\n\n \"Maybe somebody trying to speak to us,\" stated Nichols.\n\n\n The whispers grew louder and harsher. Angry.\n\n\n \"Take it easy,\" yelled Mussdorf savagely. \"We don't know what you're\n talking about. How can we answer you, you stupid lug?\"\n\n\n Gunn giggled hysterically, \"We can't even 'alf talk 'is bloomin'\n language.\"\n\n\n The rustle ceased. The silence hung eerily in the ship. The men looked\n at one another, curious; somehow, a little nervous.",
"Within her gleaming walls, four men bent with hard faces over gleaming\n bands of color on a spectroscopic screen. With quivering fingers,\n Emerson twisted dials and switches.\n\n\n \"Hell!\" exploded Mussdorf. \"I might have known it. Not a trace.\"\n\n\n Emerson touched his forearm gently, and shuddered.\n\n\n Nichols bit his lips, and thought of Marge and the kids; Gunn licked\n his lips with a dry tongue and kept looking at Emerson.\n\n\n With one sweep of his brawny arm, Mussdorf sent the apparatus flying\n against the far wall to shatter in shards.\n\n\n No one said a word.\n\n\n Something whispered in the ship. They jerked their heads up, stood\n listening. The faint susurration swept all about them, questioning,\n curious. It came again, imperative; suddenly demanding.",
"Mussdorf came up through the trap and passed out the sun-blasters. They\n buckled them around their waists while Mussdorf swung the bolts of the\n door. He threw it open, and clean air, and faint tendrils of whitish\n mist came swirling into the ship.\n\n\n Nichols took a deep breath and his boyish face split with a grin.\n\n\n \"I feel like a kid again on a Spring day back on Earth. You know, with\n a ball and a glove under your arm, with the sun beating down on you,\n swinging a bat and whistling. You felt good. You were young. Young! I\n feel like that now.\"\n\n\n They grinned and went through the door, dropping to the street.\n\n\n They turned."
],
[
"\"They have us now,\" grunted Mussdorf. He slid his fingers along the\n transparent window, pressing hard, the skin showing white as his\n knuckles lifted. He said swiftly, \"You guys can stay here if you want,\n but I'm getting myself a sun-blaster. Two of them. I'm not going to be\n caught short when the time for action comes.\"\n\n\n He swung through the trap and out of sight. They heard him running\n below; heard the slam of opened doors, the withdrawal of the guns. They\n could imagine him belting them about his waist.\n\n\n \"Bring us some,\" cried Emerson suddenly, and turned again to look out\n the window.\n\n\n The spaceship settled down on the white flagging of an immense square.\n The green beam was gone, suddenly. The uncanny silence of the place\n pressed in on them.\n\n\n \"Think it's safe to go out?\" asked Nichols.",
"Mussdorf dropped to the floor, lowered his shaggy head through the open\n trap, and bellowed. A hail from the depths of the ship answered him. A\n moment later, Gunn stood with the others: a little man with a wry smile\n twisting his features to a hard mask.\n\n\n \"Think she's got the stuff, skipper?\" he asked Emerson.\n\n\n \"The spectroscope'll tell us. Break it out.\"\n\n\n \"You bet.\"\n\n\n The ship rocked gently as Emerson set it down on a flat, rocky plain\n between two high, craggy mountains that rose abruptly from the tiny\n valley. It was just lighting as the faint rays of the suns that served\n this planet nosed their way above the peaks. Like a silver needle on a\n floor of black rock, the spacecraft bounced once, twice; then lay still.",
"It was a spaceship.\nEmerson took his hands from the controls of the gigantic ship that\n hurtled through space, and wiped his sweaty palms on his thighs. His\n grey eyes bored like a steel awl downward at the mighty globe swinging\n in the void.\n\n\n \"The last planet in our course,\" he breathed. \"Maybe it has the radium!\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" whispered the man beside him, wetting his lips with his tongue.\n \"No use to think of failure. If it hasn't, we'll die ourselves, down\n there.\"\n\n\n Radium. And the Plague. It had come on Earth suddenly, had the Plague,\n back in the first days of space travel, after Quigg, the American\n research scientist at Cal Tech, discovered a way to lift a rocket ship\n off the Earth, and propel it to the Moon.",
"Mussdorf came up through the trap and passed out the sun-blasters. They\n buckled them around their waists while Mussdorf swung the bolts of the\n door. He threw it open, and clean air, and faint tendrils of whitish\n mist came swirling into the ship.\n\n\n Nichols took a deep breath and his boyish face split with a grin.\n\n\n \"I feel like a kid again on a Spring day back on Earth. You know, with\n a ball and a glove under your arm, with the sun beating down on you,\n swinging a bat and whistling. You felt good. You were young. Young! I\n feel like that now.\"\n\n\n They grinned and went through the door, dropping to the street.\n\n\n They turned.",
"The others crowded about him, looking out. Here the green was more\n vivid, intense. They could feel its surging power tingling on their\n skins. Beneath them, the jagged peak of the mountain almost grazed the\n hull. Spread out under their eyes was the panorama of a dead planet.\n\n\n Great rocks lay split and tumbled over one another in a black\n desolation. Sunlight glinting on their jagged edges, made harsh\n shadows. Far to the north a mountain range shrugged its snow-topped\n peaks to a sullen sky. To the south, beyond the rocks, lay a white\n waste of desert. To the west—\n\n\n \"A city,\" yelled Nichols, \"the place is inhabited. Thank God, thank\n God—\"\n\n\n Mussdorf erupted laughter.\n\n\n \"For what? How do we know what they're like? An inhabited planet\n doesn't mean men. We found that out—several times.\"",
"The thing dropped the Earthmen suddenly; its legs gathered beneath it\n and launched it full at Emerson. Caught off guard, the Earthman lifted\n his sun-blaster—felt it ripped from his fingers, knew a hard blackness\n thrashing down at him. He went backwards, sickened....\nIrgi stared at the things that lay on the white flagging. Queer beings\n they were, unlike anything Irgi had ever conceived. Only two legs, only\n two arms. And such weak little limbs! Why, an Urgian cat would make\n short work of them if an Urgian cat existed any more, and Irgi had\n never rated cats very highly.\n\n\n He looked at the spaceship, ran exploring feelers over it. He cast a\n glance back at the creatures again, and shook his head. Strange beings\n they might be, but they had mastered interplanetary travel. Well, he'd\n always maintained that life would be different on other worlds. Life\n here on Urg took different patterns.",
"\"We can hope,\" said Emerson sharply. \"Maybe they have some radium,\n stored so that our spectroscope couldn't pick it up.\"\n\n\n The mighty globe that hung over the city glimmered in the morning suns.\n Beneath it, the white towers and spires of the city reared in alien\n loveliness above graceful buildings and rounded roofs. A faint mist\n seemed to hang in the city streets.\n\n\n \"It's empty,\" said Nichols heavily. \"Deserted.\"\n\n\n \"Something's alive,\" protested Emerson. \"Something that spoke to us,\n that is controlling this green beam.\"\nA section of the globe slid back, and the spaceship moved through the\n opening. The globe slipped back and locked after it.",
"Within her gleaming walls, four men bent with hard faces over gleaming\n bands of color on a spectroscopic screen. With quivering fingers,\n Emerson twisted dials and switches.\n\n\n \"Hell!\" exploded Mussdorf. \"I might have known it. Not a trace.\"\n\n\n Emerson touched his forearm gently, and shuddered.\n\n\n Nichols bit his lips, and thought of Marge and the kids; Gunn licked\n his lips with a dry tongue and kept looking at Emerson.\n\n\n With one sweep of his brawny arm, Mussdorf sent the apparatus flying\n against the far wall to shatter in shards.\n\n\n No one said a word.\n\n\n Something whispered in the ship. They jerked their heads up, stood\n listening. The faint susurration swept all about them, questioning,\n curious. It came again, imperative; suddenly demanding.",
"\"What a radio\nhe\nmust have,\" said Emerson softly. \"The metal of our\n hull is his loudspeaker. That's why we heard him in all directions.\"\n\n\n Mussdorf nodded, shaggy brows knotted.\n\n\n \"We'll see what his next move is,\" he muttered. \"If he gets too fresh,\n we'll try a sun-blaster out on him.\"\n\n\n The ship began to glow softly, flushing a soft, delicate green. The\n light bathed the interior, turning the men a ghastly hue. Gunn shivered\n and looked at Emerson, who went to the port window; stood staring out,\n gasping.\n\n\n \"Wot's happenin' now?\" choked Gunn.\n\n\n \"We're off the ground! Whatever it is, it's lifting us.\"",
"A ship was built, the fastest vessel ever made by man. It was designed\n for speed. It made the swiftest interplanetary craft seem a lumbering\n barge by comparison. And mankind gave it to Valentine Emerson to take\n it out among the stars to find the precious radium in sufficient\n quantities to halt the Plague.\n\n\n It had not been easy to find a crew. The three worlds knew the men\n were going to their doom. It would be a miracle if ever they reached\n a single planet, if they did not perish of space cancer before their\n first goal. Carson Nichols, whose wife and children were dying of the\n Plague, begged him for a chance. A murderer convicted to the Martian\n salt mines, Karl Mussdorf, grudgingly agreed to go along on the promise\n that he won a pardon if he ever came back. With Mussdorf went a little,\n wry-faced man named Tilford Gunn, who knew radio, cookery, and the fine\n art of pocket-picking. The two seemed inseparable.",
"\"A hell of a way to spend my last days,\" he growled. \"I'm dying on my\n feet, and I've got to be a martyr to a billion people who don't know\n I'm alive.\"\n\n\n \"You know a better way to die, of course,\" replied Emerson.\n\n\n \"You bet I do. There's a sweet little redhead in New Mars. She'd make\n dying a pleasure. In fact,\" he chuckled softly, \"that's just the way\n I'd let her kill me.\"\nEmerson snorted, glancing down at the controls. Beneath his steady\n fingers, the ship sideslipped into the gravity tug of the looming orb,\n shuddered a moment, then eased downward.\n\n\n \"Tell Gunn to come up,\" ordered Emerson. \"No need for him to be below.\"",
"\"Gawd,\" whispered Gunn. \"Wot is it, guv'nor?\"\n\n\n Emerson shook his head, frowning, suddenly glad that the others had\n heard it, too.\n\n\n \"Maybe somebody trying to speak to us,\" stated Nichols.\n\n\n The whispers grew louder and harsher. Angry.\n\n\n \"Take it easy,\" yelled Mussdorf savagely. \"We don't know what you're\n talking about. How can we answer you, you stupid lug?\"\n\n\n Gunn giggled hysterically, \"We can't even 'alf talk 'is bloomin'\n language.\"\n\n\n The rustle ceased. The silence hung eerily in the ship. The men looked\n at one another, curious; somehow, a little nervous.",
"A picture quivered on the screen; grew nebulous, then cleared. Irgi\n found himself staring at a city far vaster than Urg. Grim white\n towers peaked high into the air, and broad, flat ramps circled them,\n interwoven like ribbons in the sunlight. On the tallest and largest\n buildings were great fields of metal painted a dull luster, where\n queerly wrought flying ships landed and took off.\n\n\n The scene changed suddenly. He looked into a hospital room and watched\n a pretty young woman smiling up at him. She too, had the growth\n disease. Now he beheld the mighty salt mines where naked men swung huge\n picks at the crusted crystals, sweating and dying under a strange sun.\n Even these remnants of humanity festered with the growth.",
"Now Emerson was breathing softly, \"Yes, it had better be there, or else\n we die.\"\n\n\n He ran quivering fingers over his forearm, felt the strange lumps that\n heralded cancer. Involuntarily, he shuddered.\n\n\n Steps clanged on the metal runway beneath them. Mussdorf pushed up\n through the trap and got to his feet. He was as big as Emerson, bulky\n where Emerson was lithe, granite where Emerson was chiseled steel. His\n hair was black, and his brows shaggy. A stubborn jaw shot out under\n thin, hard lips.\n\n\n \"There it is, Karl,\" said Nichols. \"Start hoping.\"\n\n\n Mussdorf scowled darkly, and spat.",
"\"Don't be a fool, Mussdorf,\" snapped Emerson savagely. \"It isn't your\n place to think, anyhow. That's mine. I'm commander of this force. What\n I say is an order.\"\n\n\n Mussdorf grinned dryly. Into his eyes came a glint of hot, sullen anger.\n\n\n \"You were our commander—out there, in space. We're on a planet now.\n Things are different. I want to learn the secret of those mists,\n Emerson. Something tells me I'd get a fortune for it, on Earth.\"\n\n\n Emerson squirmed helplessly, cursing him, saying, \"What's gotten into\n you?\"",
"They had been slow, lumbering vessels, those first spaceships; not at\n all like the sleek craft that plied the voids today. But it had been a\n beginning. And no one had thought anything of it when Quigg, who had\n made the first flight through space, died of cancer.\n\n\n As the years passed to a decade, and the ships of Earth rode to Mars\n and Venus, it began to be apparent that a lifetime of space travel\n meant a hideous death. Scientists attributed it to the cosmic rays, for\n out in space there was no blanketing layer of atmosphere to protect\n the fleshy tissues of man from their piercing power. It had long been\n a theory that cosmic rays were related to the birth of new life in the\n cosmos; perhaps they were, said some, the direct cause of life. Thus by\n causing the unorderly growth of new cells that man called cancer, the\n cosmic rays were destroying the life they had created.",
"It meant death to travel in space, and only the stupendous fees paid to\n the young men who believed in a short life and a merry one, kept the\n ships plying between Mars and Earth and Venus. Lead kept out the cosmic\n rays, but lead would not stand the terrific speed required to lift a\n craft free of planetary gravity; and an inner coating of lead brought\n men into port raving with lead poisoning illusions.\n\n\n Cancer cases increased on Earth. It was learned that the virulent\n form of space cancer, as it was called, was in some peculiar manner,\n contagious to a certain extent. The alarm spread. Men who voyaged in\n space were segregated, but the damage had been done.\n\n\n The Plague spread, and ravaged the peoples of three planets.\n\n\n Hospitals were set up, and precious radium used for the fight. But the\n radium was hard to come by. There was just not enough for the job.",
"He had been glad to find these creatures. They were someone to\n converse with after centuries of loneliness. But as he approached them\n there in the square, calling out gladly to them, they could not hear\n him. His voice was pitched eight vibrations to the second. He wondered\n idly if that was beyond the hearing range of these two-legged things.\n He ought to check that, to be sure. Still, they had heard him on their\n ship. He had caught a confused, angry murmur on the radiation recorder.\n Perhaps the metal of the hull had in some manner made his voice audible\n to them, speeded up the vibrations to twelve or fifteen a second.\n\n\n Then there was the matter of the growth disease. He could eliminate\n that easily enough, in the Chamber of the Cones. But first they would\n have to be prepared. And the preparation—hurt. Well, better a few\n moments of agony than a death through a worse.",
"\"There, it is done,\" he whispered to himself. \"Now for another oval I\n can roam all Urg as I will, for the life spark in me has been cleansed\n and nourished.\"\n\n\n He touched the jeweled controls, shutting the power to a low murmur. He\n turned to the bronze doors, passed through and into the misty halls.\n\n\n \"I must speak,\" Irgi said as he moved along the corridor. \"I have not\n spoken for many weeks. I must exercise my voice, or lose it. That is\n the law of nature. It would atrophy, otherwise.\n\n\n \"Yes, I will use my voice tonight, and I will go out under the dome and\n look up at the stars and the other planets that swing near Urg, and I\n will talk to them and tell them how lonely Irgi is.\"",
"The thing twisted sideways with an eerie grace, dodging the amber beams\n of solar power that sizzled past its bulbous head. As it moved, its\n tentacled arms and legs slithered out with unthinkable rapidity, fell\n and wrapped around Mussdorf.\n\n\n The big Earthman was lifted high into the air, squeezed until his lungs\n nearly collapsed. He hung limp in a gigantic tentacle as Emerson ran\n to one side, trying for a shot without hitting Mussdorf. But the thing\n was diabolically clever. It held Mussdorf aloft, between itself and\n Emerson, while its other arms stabbed out at Gunn and Nichols, catching\n them up and shaking them as a terrier shakes a rat.\n\n\n \"Hold on,\" called Emerson, dodging and twisting, gun in hand, seeking a\n spot to fire at."
],
[
"\"Nothing new. Remember me, Karl Mussdorf? I'm a convict, I am. A salt\n mine convict. I'd have done anything to get out of that boiling hell. I\n volunteered to go with you for the radium. Me and Gunn. Nichols doesn't\n count. He came on account of his wife and kids. We were the only two\n who'd come. Convicts, both of us.\"",
"Mussdorf came up through the trap and passed out the sun-blasters. They\n buckled them around their waists while Mussdorf swung the bolts of the\n door. He threw it open, and clean air, and faint tendrils of whitish\n mist came swirling into the ship.\n\n\n Nichols took a deep breath and his boyish face split with a grin.\n\n\n \"I feel like a kid again on a Spring day back on Earth. You know, with\n a ball and a glove under your arm, with the sun beating down on you,\n swinging a bat and whistling. You felt good. You were young. Young! I\n feel like that now.\"\n\n\n They grinned and went through the door, dropping to the street.\n\n\n They turned.",
"Nichols screamed suddenly, his body aching.\n\n\n It woke the others. They too, bellowed and screamed and sobbed, and\n their arms and legs writhed like wild things in a trap.\n\n\n \"Got to get free,\" Emerson panted, straining against the wristbands.\n The hard muscles of his arms ridged with effort, but the straps held.\n He dropped back, sobbing.\n\n\n \"That fiend,\" yelled Mussdorf. \"That ten-eyed, octopus-legged,\n black-hearted spawn of a mismated monster did this to us. Damn him!\n Damn him! If I ever get loose I'll cut his heart out and make him eat\n it.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe—maybe he's vivisecting us,\" moaned Nichols. \"With rays or—or\n something—aagh! I can't stand it!\"",
"Now Emerson was breathing softly, \"Yes, it had better be there, or else\n we die.\"\n\n\n He ran quivering fingers over his forearm, felt the strange lumps that\n heralded cancer. Involuntarily, he shuddered.\n\n\n Steps clanged on the metal runway beneath them. Mussdorf pushed up\n through the trap and got to his feet. He was as big as Emerson, bulky\n where Emerson was lithe, granite where Emerson was chiseled steel. His\n hair was black, and his brows shaggy. A stubborn jaw shot out under\n thin, hard lips.\n\n\n \"There it is, Karl,\" said Nichols. \"Start hoping.\"\n\n\n Mussdorf scowled darkly, and spat.",
"\"Gawd,\" whispered Gunn. \"Wot is it, guv'nor?\"\n\n\n Emerson shook his head, frowning, suddenly glad that the others had\n heard it, too.\n\n\n \"Maybe somebody trying to speak to us,\" stated Nichols.\n\n\n The whispers grew louder and harsher. Angry.\n\n\n \"Take it easy,\" yelled Mussdorf savagely. \"We don't know what you're\n talking about. How can we answer you, you stupid lug?\"\n\n\n Gunn giggled hysterically, \"We can't even 'alf talk 'is bloomin'\n language.\"\n\n\n The rustle ceased. The silence hung eerily in the ship. The men looked\n at one another, curious; somehow, a little nervous.",
"He leaped from the table and stretched. He grinned into their faces.\n\n\n \"You know, it's funny—but I feel great. Huh, I must've sweated all the\n aches out of me. Here, Gunn—you first.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks, Karl. We're still pals, aren't we?\"\n\n\n When Gunn was free, Mussdorf came to stand over Emerson, looking down\n at him. His eyes narrowed suddenly. He grinned a little, twisting his\n lips.\n\n\n \"Maybe you fellows ought to stay tied up,\" he said. \"In case that—that\n thing comes back. He won't blame us all for the break we're making.\"\n\n\n \"Not on your life,\" said Emerson.\n\n\n But Mussdorf shook his head, and his lips tightened.\n\n\n \"No. No, I think it's better the way I say.\"",
"Within her gleaming walls, four men bent with hard faces over gleaming\n bands of color on a spectroscopic screen. With quivering fingers,\n Emerson twisted dials and switches.\n\n\n \"Hell!\" exploded Mussdorf. \"I might have known it. Not a trace.\"\n\n\n Emerson touched his forearm gently, and shuddered.\n\n\n Nichols bit his lips, and thought of Marge and the kids; Gunn licked\n his lips with a dry tongue and kept looking at Emerson.\n\n\n With one sweep of his brawny arm, Mussdorf sent the apparatus flying\n against the far wall to shatter in shards.\n\n\n No one said a word.\n\n\n Something whispered in the ship. They jerked their heads up, stood\n listening. The faint susurration swept all about them, questioning,\n curious. It came again, imperative; suddenly demanding.",
"\"There, it is done,\" he whispered to himself. \"Now for another oval I\n can roam all Urg as I will, for the life spark in me has been cleansed\n and nourished.\"\n\n\n He touched the jeweled controls, shutting the power to a low murmur. He\n turned to the bronze doors, passed through and into the misty halls.\n\n\n \"I must speak,\" Irgi said as he moved along the corridor. \"I have not\n spoken for many weeks. I must exercise my voice, or lose it. That is\n the law of nature. It would atrophy, otherwise.\n\n\n \"Yes, I will use my voice tonight, and I will go out under the dome and\n look up at the stars and the other planets that swing near Urg, and I\n will talk to them and tell them how lonely Irgi is.\"",
"\"They have us now,\" grunted Mussdorf. He slid his fingers along the\n transparent window, pressing hard, the skin showing white as his\n knuckles lifted. He said swiftly, \"You guys can stay here if you want,\n but I'm getting myself a sun-blaster. Two of them. I'm not going to be\n caught short when the time for action comes.\"\n\n\n He swung through the trap and out of sight. They heard him running\n below; heard the slam of opened doors, the withdrawal of the guns. They\n could imagine him belting them about his waist.\n\n\n \"Bring us some,\" cried Emerson suddenly, and turned again to look out\n the window.\n\n\n The spaceship settled down on the white flagging of an immense square.\n The green beam was gone, suddenly. The uncanny silence of the place\n pressed in on them.\n\n\n \"Think it's safe to go out?\" asked Nichols.",
"\"Try the atmospheric recorder,\" said Emerson. \"If the air's okay, I'd\n like to stretch my own legs.\"\n\n\n Nichols twisted chrome wheels, staring at a red line that wavered on a\n plastic screen, then straightened abruptly, rigid.\n\n\n \"Hey,\" yelled Nichols excitedly. \"It's pure. I mean actually pure. No\n germs. No dust. Just clean air!\"\n\n\n Emerson leaped to his side, staring, frowning.\n\n\n \"No germs. No dust. Why—that means there's no disease in this place!\n No disease.\"\n\n\n He began to laugh, then caught himself.\n\n\n \"No disease,\" he whispered, \"and every one of us is going to die of\n cancer.\"",
"\"A hell of a way to spend my last days,\" he growled. \"I'm dying on my\n feet, and I've got to be a martyr to a billion people who don't know\n I'm alive.\"\n\n\n \"You know a better way to die, of course,\" replied Emerson.\n\n\n \"You bet I do. There's a sweet little redhead in New Mars. She'd make\n dying a pleasure. In fact,\" he chuckled softly, \"that's just the way\n I'd let her kill me.\"\nEmerson snorted, glancing down at the controls. Beneath his steady\n fingers, the ship sideslipped into the gravity tug of the looming orb,\n shuddered a moment, then eased downward.\n\n\n \"Tell Gunn to come up,\" ordered Emerson. \"No need for him to be below.\"",
"He turned and went along a hall that opened into a broad balcony which\n stood forth directly beneath a segment of the mighty dome. He stared\n upwards, craning all his eyes to see through the darkness pressing down\n upon him.\n\n\n \"Stars,\" he whispered, \"listen to me once again. I am lonely, stars,\n and the name and fame of Irgi means nothing to the walls of my city,\n nor to the Chamber of the Cones, nor even—at times—to Irgi himself.\"\n\n\n He paused and his eyes widened, staring upwards.\n\n\n \"By the Block,\" he said to the silence about him. \"There is something\n up there that is not a star, nor a planet, nor yet a meteor.\"",
"\"Hang on, kid,\" gritted Emerson, fighting the straps. \"I think it's\n lessening. Yeah, yeah—it is. It doesn't hurt so much now.\"\n\n\n Mussdorf grunted astonishment.\n\n\n \"You're right. It is lessening. And—hey, one of my arm buckles is\n coming loose. It's torn a little. Maybe I can work it free.\"\n\n\n They turned their heads to watch, biting their lips, the sweat standing\n in colorless beads on their pale foreheads. Mussdorf's thick arm bulged\n its muscles as he wrenched and tugged, panting. A buckle swung outward,\n clanging against the tabletop as it ripped loose. Mussdorf held his arm\n aloft and laughed harsh triumph.\n\n\n \"I'll have you all loose in a second,\" he grunted, ripping straps from\n his body.",
"And if he could not speak to them, they could speak to him, through\n their minds. Once unconscious, he could tap their memories with an\n electrigraph screen. That should be absorbing. It made Irgi happy,\n reflecting upon it, and Irgi had not known happiness for a long time.\n\n\n From the passage he hurried into a large white room, fitted with glass\n vials and ovules and glittering metal instruments, so many in number\n that the room seemed a jungle of metal. Down on flat, smooth tables\n Irgi dropped his burdens. With quick tendrils he adjusted straps to\n them, bound them securely. From a small, wheeled vehicle he took a\n metal rod and touched it to their foreheads. As it met the flesh, it\n hummed once faintly.",
"Only Irgi, alone.\n\n\n He moved now along the ebony flooring, past the white marble walls hung\n with golden drapes that never withered or shed their aurate luster in\n the opalescent mists that bathed the city in shimmering whiteness. They\n hung low, those wispy tendrils of mist, clasping everything in their\n clinging shelter, destroying dust and germs. Irgi had discovered the\n mist many years ago, when it was too late to save his kind.\n\n\n He had flung a vast globe of transparent metal above this greatest of\n the cities of the Urg and filled it with the mist, and in it he had\n stored the treasures of his people. From Bar Nomala, from Faryl, and\n from the far-off jungle city of Kreed had he brought the riches of the\n Urg and set them up. Irgi enjoyed beauty, and he enjoyed work. It was\n the combination of both that kept him sane.",
"A ship was built, the fastest vessel ever made by man. It was designed\n for speed. It made the swiftest interplanetary craft seem a lumbering\n barge by comparison. And mankind gave it to Valentine Emerson to take\n it out among the stars to find the precious radium in sufficient\n quantities to halt the Plague.\n\n\n It had not been easy to find a crew. The three worlds knew the men\n were going to their doom. It would be a miracle if ever they reached\n a single planet, if they did not perish of space cancer before their\n first goal. Carson Nichols, whose wife and children were dying of the\n Plague, begged him for a chance. A murderer convicted to the Martian\n salt mines, Karl Mussdorf, grudgingly agreed to go along on the promise\n that he won a pardon if he ever came back. With Mussdorf went a little,\n wry-faced man named Tilford Gunn, who knew radio, cookery, and the fine\n art of pocket-picking. The two seemed inseparable.",
"The others crowded about him, looking out. Here the green was more\n vivid, intense. They could feel its surging power tingling on their\n skins. Beneath them, the jagged peak of the mountain almost grazed the\n hull. Spread out under their eyes was the panorama of a dead planet.\n\n\n Great rocks lay split and tumbled over one another in a black\n desolation. Sunlight glinting on their jagged edges, made harsh\n shadows. Far to the north a mountain range shrugged its snow-topped\n peaks to a sullen sky. To the south, beyond the rocks, lay a white\n waste of desert. To the west—\n\n\n \"A city,\" yelled Nichols, \"the place is inhabited. Thank God, thank\n God—\"\n\n\n Mussdorf erupted laughter.\n\n\n \"For what? How do we know what they're like? An inhabited planet\n doesn't mean men. We found that out—several times.\"",
"A tall, lean man in white looked out at him. His lips moved, and Irgi\n read their meaning. This man spoke to one named Emerson, commissioning\n him with a spaceship, reciting the need of radium, the dread of the\n plague. The thoughts of this Emerson were coming in clearer, as Irgi in\n sudden interest, flipped over different dials. The unspoken thoughts\n pouring into his brain through the screen continued. The words he did\n not understand, but the necessity for radium, and the danger of the\n growth disease he did. The pictures jumbled, grew chameleonesque—\n\n\n Irgi stared upward at a colossal figure graven in lucent white marble.\n He made out the letters chiseled into the base: GEORGE WASHINGTON. He\n wondered idly what this Washington had done, to merit such undying\n fame. He must have created a nation, or saved it. He wished there were\n Urgians alive to build a statue to\nhim\n.",
"Opening the laboratory door, Irgi passed out and closed it behind him.\nIt was the sweat of agony trickling down his forehead and over his eyes\n and cheeks that woke Emerson. He opened his eyes, then clamped them\n shut as his body writhed in pain.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord!\" he whimpered, bloodying his mouth where his teeth sank into\n his lips.\n\n\n In every fibre of his body sharp lancets cut and dug. In arms and legs\n and chest and belly they twisted and tore. Into the tissues beneath his\n skin, all along the muscles and the bone, the fiery torment played. He\n could not stand it; he could not—\n\n\n He flipped his head to right, to left; saw the others stretched out\n and strapped even as he. They were unconscious. What right had they to\n ignore this agony? Why didn't they share it with him? He opened his\n lips to shriek; then bit down again, hard.",
"Toward a mighty bronze doorway he went, and as his body passed an\n invisible beam, the bronze portals slid apart, noiselessly, opening to\n reveal a vast circular chamber that hummed and throbbed, and was filled\n with a pale blue luminescence that glimmered upon metal rods and bars\n and ten tall cones of steelite.\n\n\n In the doorway, Irgi paused and ran his eyes about the chamber, sighing.\n\n\n This was his life work, this blue hum and throb. Those ten cones\n lifting their disced tips toward a circular roof bathed in, and drew\n their power from, a huge block of radiant white matter that hung\n suspended between the cones, in midair. All power did the cones and the\n block possess. There was nothing they could not do, if Irgi so willed.\n It was another discovery that came too late to save the Urg."
],
[
"Irgi bent to wrap long arms about the queer beings, lifting them. His\n eyes were caught suddenly by the lumps protruding from their arms and\n legs, from face and chest. The growth disease! That was bad, but Irgi\n knew a way to cure it. Irgi knew a way to cure anything.\n\n\n He slid swiftly across the square and onto a flat, glittering ramp that\n stretched upward toward an arched doorway set like a jewel of light\n in a long, low building next to the vast, round Chamber of the Cones.\n He carried these creatures easily, without trouble. The ease of his\n passage gave him time to think.",
"And if he could not speak to them, they could speak to him, through\n their minds. Once unconscious, he could tap their memories with an\n electrigraph screen. That should be absorbing. It made Irgi happy,\n reflecting upon it, and Irgi had not known happiness for a long time.\n\n\n From the passage he hurried into a large white room, fitted with glass\n vials and ovules and glittering metal instruments, so many in number\n that the room seemed a jungle of metal. Down on flat, smooth tables\n Irgi dropped his burdens. With quick tendrils he adjusted straps to\n them, bound them securely. From a small, wheeled vehicle he took a\n metal rod and touched it to their foreheads. As it met the flesh, it\n hummed once faintly.",
"Only Irgi, alone.\n\n\n He moved now along the ebony flooring, past the white marble walls hung\n with golden drapes that never withered or shed their aurate luster in\n the opalescent mists that bathed the city in shimmering whiteness. They\n hung low, those wispy tendrils of mist, clasping everything in their\n clinging shelter, destroying dust and germs. Irgi had discovered the\n mist many years ago, when it was too late to save his kind.\n\n\n He had flung a vast globe of transparent metal above this greatest of\n the cities of the Urg and filled it with the mist, and in it he had\n stored the treasures of his people. From Bar Nomala, from Faryl, and\n from the far-off jungle city of Kreed had he brought the riches of the\n Urg and set them up. Irgi enjoyed beauty, and he enjoyed work. It was\n the combination of both that kept him sane.",
"\"There, it is done,\" he whispered to himself. \"Now for another oval I\n can roam all Urg as I will, for the life spark in me has been cleansed\n and nourished.\"\n\n\n He touched the jeweled controls, shutting the power to a low murmur. He\n turned to the bronze doors, passed through and into the misty halls.\n\n\n \"I must speak,\" Irgi said as he moved along the corridor. \"I have not\n spoken for many weeks. I must exercise my voice, or lose it. That is\n the law of nature. It would atrophy, otherwise.\n\n\n \"Yes, I will use my voice tonight, and I will go out under the dome and\n look up at the stars and the other planets that swing near Urg, and I\n will talk to them and tell them how lonely Irgi is.\"",
"The Last Monster\nBy GARDNER F. FOX\nIrgi was the last of his monster race, guardian of\n\n a dead planet, master of the secret of immortality.\n\n It was he whom the four men from Earth had to\n\n conquer to gain that secret—a tentacled\n\n monstrosity whom Earthly weapons could not touch.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIrgi was the last of his race. There was no one else, now; there had\n been no others for hundreds and hundreds of years. Irgi had lost count\n of time dwelling alone amid the marble halls of the eon-ancient city,\n but he knew that much. There were no others.",
"He rose suddenly, standing upright on his tentacles, swaying gently.\n Why, he had the power to make himself immortal! These creatures would\n gladly build statues to him! True, he could not create a nation—\nbut\n he could save it\n!\n\n\n Irgi unfastened clamps, and rolled the screen aside. He reached to a\n series of black knobs inset in the wall, and turned them carefully.\n Turning, he saw the figures of the four men stiffen to rigidity as a\n red aura drifted upward from the tabletop, passing through them as if\n they were mist, rising upwards to dissipate in the air near the ceiling.\n\n\n \"That will prepare their bodies for the Chamber of the Cones,\" he said.\n \"When they realize that I am their friend, they will gladly hear my\n counsels!\"",
"The thing dropped the Earthmen suddenly; its legs gathered beneath it\n and launched it full at Emerson. Caught off guard, the Earthman lifted\n his sun-blaster—felt it ripped from his fingers, knew a hard blackness\n thrashing down at him. He went backwards, sickened....\nIrgi stared at the things that lay on the white flagging. Queer beings\n they were, unlike anything Irgi had ever conceived. Only two legs, only\n two arms. And such weak little limbs! Why, an Urgian cat would make\n short work of them if an Urgian cat existed any more, and Irgi had\n never rated cats very highly.\n\n\n He looked at the spaceship, ran exploring feelers over it. He cast a\n glance back at the creatures again, and shook his head. Strange beings\n they might be, but they had mastered interplanetary travel. Well, he'd\n always maintained that life would be different on other worlds. Life\n here on Urg took different patterns.",
"A picture quivered on the screen; grew nebulous, then cleared. Irgi\n found himself staring at a city far vaster than Urg. Grim white\n towers peaked high into the air, and broad, flat ramps circled them,\n interwoven like ribbons in the sunlight. On the tallest and largest\n buildings were great fields of metal painted a dull luster, where\n queerly wrought flying ships landed and took off.\n\n\n The scene changed suddenly. He looked into a hospital room and watched\n a pretty young woman smiling up at him. She too, had the growth\n disease. Now he beheld the mighty salt mines where naked men swung huge\n picks at the crusted crystals, sweating and dying under a strange sun.\n Even these remnants of humanity festered with the growth.",
"He turned and went along a hall that opened into a broad balcony which\n stood forth directly beneath a segment of the mighty dome. He stared\n upwards, craning all his eyes to see through the darkness pressing down\n upon him.\n\n\n \"Stars,\" he whispered, \"listen to me once again. I am lonely, stars,\n and the name and fame of Irgi means nothing to the walls of my city,\n nor to the Chamber of the Cones, nor even—at times—to Irgi himself.\"\n\n\n He paused and his eyes widened, staring upwards.\n\n\n \"By the Block,\" he said to the silence about him. \"There is something\n up there that is not a star, nor a planet, nor yet a meteor.\"",
"Irgi moved across the room. He pressed glittering jewels inset in a\n control panel on the wall, one after another, in proper sequence.\n\n\n The blue opalescence deepened, grew dark and vivid. The hum broadened\n into a hoarse roar. And standing out, startlingly white against the\n blue, was the queer block of shining metal, shimmering and pulsing.\n\n\n Irgi drew himself upwards, slowly turning, laving in the quivering\n bands of cobalt that sped outward from the cones. He preened his body\n in their patterns of color, watching it splash and spread over his\n chest and torso. Where it touched, a faint tingle lingered; then spread\n outwards, all over his huge form.\n\n\n Irgi was immortal, and the blue light made him so.",
"Opening the laboratory door, Irgi passed out and closed it behind him.\nIt was the sweat of agony trickling down his forehead and over his eyes\n and cheeks that woke Emerson. He opened his eyes, then clamped them\n shut as his body writhed in pain.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord!\" he whimpered, bloodying his mouth where his teeth sank into\n his lips.\n\n\n In every fibre of his body sharp lancets cut and dug. In arms and legs\n and chest and belly they twisted and tore. Into the tissues beneath his\n skin, all along the muscles and the bone, the fiery torment played. He\n could not stand it; he could not—\n\n\n He flipped his head to right, to left; saw the others stretched out\n and strapped even as he. They were unconscious. What right had they to\n ignore this agony? Why didn't they share it with him? He opened his\n lips to shriek; then bit down again, hard.",
"A tall, lean man in white looked out at him. His lips moved, and Irgi\n read their meaning. This man spoke to one named Emerson, commissioning\n him with a spaceship, reciting the need of radium, the dread of the\n plague. The thoughts of this Emerson were coming in clearer, as Irgi in\n sudden interest, flipped over different dials. The unspoken thoughts\n pouring into his brain through the screen continued. The words he did\n not understand, but the necessity for radium, and the danger of the\n growth disease he did. The pictures jumbled, grew chameleonesque—\n\n\n Irgi stared upward at a colossal figure graven in lucent white marble.\n He made out the letters chiseled into the base: GEORGE WASHINGTON. He\n wondered idly what this Washington had done, to merit such undying\n fame. He must have created a nation, or saved it. He wished there were\n Urgians alive to build a statue to\nhim\n.",
"\"It's short-circulated their nervous systems for a while, absorbed the\n electric charges all intelligent beings cast,\" Irgi said aloud, glad at\n this chance to exercise his voice. \"They won't be able to feel for some\n time. When the worst pain will have passed, they will recover. And now\n to examine their minds—\"\n\n\n He fitted metal clamps over their heads and screwed them tight. He\n wheeled forward a glassy screen; plugged in the cords that dangled from\n its frame to the metal clamps.\n\n\n \"I wonder if they've perfected this,\" Irgi mused. \"They must be aware\n that the brain gives off electrical waves. Perhaps they can chart\n those waves on graphs. But do they know that each curve and bend of\n those waves represents a picture? I can translate those waves into\n pictures—but can they?\"\n\n\n He slouched a little on his tentacles, squatting, gazing at the screen\n as he flipped over a lever.",
"Toward a mighty bronze doorway he went, and as his body passed an\n invisible beam, the bronze portals slid apart, noiselessly, opening to\n reveal a vast circular chamber that hummed and throbbed, and was filled\n with a pale blue luminescence that glimmered upon metal rods and bars\n and ten tall cones of steelite.\n\n\n In the doorway, Irgi paused and ran his eyes about the chamber, sighing.\n\n\n This was his life work, this blue hum and throb. Those ten cones\n lifting their disced tips toward a circular roof bathed in, and drew\n their power from, a huge block of radiant white matter that hung\n suspended between the cones, in midair. All power did the cones and the\n block possess. There was nothing they could not do, if Irgi so willed.\n It was another discovery that came too late to save the Urg.",
"He leaped from the table and stretched. He grinned into their faces.\n\n\n \"You know, it's funny—but I feel great. Huh, I must've sweated all the\n aches out of me. Here, Gunn—you first.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks, Karl. We're still pals, aren't we?\"\n\n\n When Gunn was free, Mussdorf came to stand over Emerson, looking down\n at him. His eyes narrowed suddenly. He grinned a little, twisting his\n lips.\n\n\n \"Maybe you fellows ought to stay tied up,\" he said. \"In case that—that\n thing comes back. He won't blame us all for the break we're making.\"\n\n\n \"Not on your life,\" said Emerson.\n\n\n But Mussdorf shook his head, and his lips tightened.\n\n\n \"No. No, I think it's better the way I say.\"",
"Within her gleaming walls, four men bent with hard faces over gleaming\n bands of color on a spectroscopic screen. With quivering fingers,\n Emerson twisted dials and switches.\n\n\n \"Hell!\" exploded Mussdorf. \"I might have known it. Not a trace.\"\n\n\n Emerson touched his forearm gently, and shuddered.\n\n\n Nichols bit his lips, and thought of Marge and the kids; Gunn licked\n his lips with a dry tongue and kept looking at Emerson.\n\n\n With one sweep of his brawny arm, Mussdorf sent the apparatus flying\n against the far wall to shatter in shards.\n\n\n No one said a word.\n\n\n Something whispered in the ship. They jerked their heads up, stood\n listening. The faint susurration swept all about them, questioning,\n curious. It came again, imperative; suddenly demanding.",
"\"They have us now,\" grunted Mussdorf. He slid his fingers along the\n transparent window, pressing hard, the skin showing white as his\n knuckles lifted. He said swiftly, \"You guys can stay here if you want,\n but I'm getting myself a sun-blaster. Two of them. I'm not going to be\n caught short when the time for action comes.\"\n\n\n He swung through the trap and out of sight. They heard him running\n below; heard the slam of opened doors, the withdrawal of the guns. They\n could imagine him belting them about his waist.\n\n\n \"Bring us some,\" cried Emerson suddenly, and turned again to look out\n the window.\n\n\n The spaceship settled down on the white flagging of an immense square.\n The green beam was gone, suddenly. The uncanny silence of the place\n pressed in on them.\n\n\n \"Think it's safe to go out?\" asked Nichols.",
"He had been glad to find these creatures. They were someone to\n converse with after centuries of loneliness. But as he approached them\n there in the square, calling out gladly to them, they could not hear\n him. His voice was pitched eight vibrations to the second. He wondered\n idly if that was beyond the hearing range of these two-legged things.\n He ought to check that, to be sure. Still, they had heard him on their\n ship. He had caught a confused, angry murmur on the radiation recorder.\n Perhaps the metal of the hull had in some manner made his voice audible\n to them, speeded up the vibrations to twelve or fifteen a second.\n\n\n Then there was the matter of the growth disease. He could eliminate\n that easily enough, in the Chamber of the Cones. But first they would\n have to be prepared. And the preparation—hurt. Well, better a few\n moments of agony than a death through a worse.",
"Now Emerson was breathing softly, \"Yes, it had better be there, or else\n we die.\"\n\n\n He ran quivering fingers over his forearm, felt the strange lumps that\n heralded cancer. Involuntarily, he shuddered.\n\n\n Steps clanged on the metal runway beneath them. Mussdorf pushed up\n through the trap and got to his feet. He was as big as Emerson, bulky\n where Emerson was lithe, granite where Emerson was chiseled steel. His\n hair was black, and his brows shaggy. A stubborn jaw shot out under\n thin, hard lips.\n\n\n \"There it is, Karl,\" said Nichols. \"Start hoping.\"\n\n\n Mussdorf scowled darkly, and spat.",
"\"Gawd,\" whispered Gunn. \"Wot is it, guv'nor?\"\n\n\n Emerson shook his head, frowning, suddenly glad that the others had\n heard it, too.\n\n\n \"Maybe somebody trying to speak to us,\" stated Nichols.\n\n\n The whispers grew louder and harsher. Angry.\n\n\n \"Take it easy,\" yelled Mussdorf savagely. \"We don't know what you're\n talking about. How can we answer you, you stupid lug?\"\n\n\n Gunn giggled hysterically, \"We can't even 'alf talk 'is bloomin'\n language.\"\n\n\n The rustle ceased. The silence hung eerily in the ship. The men looked\n at one another, curious; somehow, a little nervous."
],
[
"Opening the laboratory door, Irgi passed out and closed it behind him.\nIt was the sweat of agony trickling down his forehead and over his eyes\n and cheeks that woke Emerson. He opened his eyes, then clamped them\n shut as his body writhed in pain.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord!\" he whimpered, bloodying his mouth where his teeth sank into\n his lips.\n\n\n In every fibre of his body sharp lancets cut and dug. In arms and legs\n and chest and belly they twisted and tore. Into the tissues beneath his\n skin, all along the muscles and the bone, the fiery torment played. He\n could not stand it; he could not—\n\n\n He flipped his head to right, to left; saw the others stretched out\n and strapped even as he. They were unconscious. What right had they to\n ignore this agony? Why didn't they share it with him? He opened his\n lips to shriek; then bit down again, hard.",
"And if he could not speak to them, they could speak to him, through\n their minds. Once unconscious, he could tap their memories with an\n electrigraph screen. That should be absorbing. It made Irgi happy,\n reflecting upon it, and Irgi had not known happiness for a long time.\n\n\n From the passage he hurried into a large white room, fitted with glass\n vials and ovules and glittering metal instruments, so many in number\n that the room seemed a jungle of metal. Down on flat, smooth tables\n Irgi dropped his burdens. With quick tendrils he adjusted straps to\n them, bound them securely. From a small, wheeled vehicle he took a\n metal rod and touched it to their foreheads. As it met the flesh, it\n hummed once faintly.",
"Irgi bent to wrap long arms about the queer beings, lifting them. His\n eyes were caught suddenly by the lumps protruding from their arms and\n legs, from face and chest. The growth disease! That was bad, but Irgi\n knew a way to cure it. Irgi knew a way to cure anything.\n\n\n He slid swiftly across the square and onto a flat, glittering ramp that\n stretched upward toward an arched doorway set like a jewel of light\n in a long, low building next to the vast, round Chamber of the Cones.\n He carried these creatures easily, without trouble. The ease of his\n passage gave him time to think.",
"Only Irgi, alone.\n\n\n He moved now along the ebony flooring, past the white marble walls hung\n with golden drapes that never withered or shed their aurate luster in\n the opalescent mists that bathed the city in shimmering whiteness. They\n hung low, those wispy tendrils of mist, clasping everything in their\n clinging shelter, destroying dust and germs. Irgi had discovered the\n mist many years ago, when it was too late to save his kind.\n\n\n He had flung a vast globe of transparent metal above this greatest of\n the cities of the Urg and filled it with the mist, and in it he had\n stored the treasures of his people. From Bar Nomala, from Faryl, and\n from the far-off jungle city of Kreed had he brought the riches of the\n Urg and set them up. Irgi enjoyed beauty, and he enjoyed work. It was\n the combination of both that kept him sane.",
"He rose suddenly, standing upright on his tentacles, swaying gently.\n Why, he had the power to make himself immortal! These creatures would\n gladly build statues to him! True, he could not create a nation—\nbut\n he could save it\n!\n\n\n Irgi unfastened clamps, and rolled the screen aside. He reached to a\n series of black knobs inset in the wall, and turned them carefully.\n Turning, he saw the figures of the four men stiffen to rigidity as a\n red aura drifted upward from the tabletop, passing through them as if\n they were mist, rising upwards to dissipate in the air near the ceiling.\n\n\n \"That will prepare their bodies for the Chamber of the Cones,\" he said.\n \"When they realize that I am their friend, they will gladly hear my\n counsels!\"",
"A picture quivered on the screen; grew nebulous, then cleared. Irgi\n found himself staring at a city far vaster than Urg. Grim white\n towers peaked high into the air, and broad, flat ramps circled them,\n interwoven like ribbons in the sunlight. On the tallest and largest\n buildings were great fields of metal painted a dull luster, where\n queerly wrought flying ships landed and took off.\n\n\n The scene changed suddenly. He looked into a hospital room and watched\n a pretty young woman smiling up at him. She too, had the growth\n disease. Now he beheld the mighty salt mines where naked men swung huge\n picks at the crusted crystals, sweating and dying under a strange sun.\n Even these remnants of humanity festered with the growth.",
"The Last Monster\nBy GARDNER F. FOX\nIrgi was the last of his monster race, guardian of\n\n a dead planet, master of the secret of immortality.\n\n It was he whom the four men from Earth had to\n\n conquer to gain that secret—a tentacled\n\n monstrosity whom Earthly weapons could not touch.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIrgi was the last of his race. There was no one else, now; there had\n been no others for hundreds and hundreds of years. Irgi had lost count\n of time dwelling alone amid the marble halls of the eon-ancient city,\n but he knew that much. There were no others.",
"Irgi moved across the room. He pressed glittering jewels inset in a\n control panel on the wall, one after another, in proper sequence.\n\n\n The blue opalescence deepened, grew dark and vivid. The hum broadened\n into a hoarse roar. And standing out, startlingly white against the\n blue, was the queer block of shining metal, shimmering and pulsing.\n\n\n Irgi drew himself upwards, slowly turning, laving in the quivering\n bands of cobalt that sped outward from the cones. He preened his body\n in their patterns of color, watching it splash and spread over his\n chest and torso. Where it touched, a faint tingle lingered; then spread\n outwards, all over his huge form.\n\n\n Irgi was immortal, and the blue light made him so.",
"\"It's short-circulated their nervous systems for a while, absorbed the\n electric charges all intelligent beings cast,\" Irgi said aloud, glad at\n this chance to exercise his voice. \"They won't be able to feel for some\n time. When the worst pain will have passed, they will recover. And now\n to examine their minds—\"\n\n\n He fitted metal clamps over their heads and screwed them tight. He\n wheeled forward a glassy screen; plugged in the cords that dangled from\n its frame to the metal clamps.\n\n\n \"I wonder if they've perfected this,\" Irgi mused. \"They must be aware\n that the brain gives off electrical waves. Perhaps they can chart\n those waves on graphs. But do they know that each curve and bend of\n those waves represents a picture? I can translate those waves into\n pictures—but can they?\"\n\n\n He slouched a little on his tentacles, squatting, gazing at the screen\n as he flipped over a lever.",
"\"There, it is done,\" he whispered to himself. \"Now for another oval I\n can roam all Urg as I will, for the life spark in me has been cleansed\n and nourished.\"\n\n\n He touched the jeweled controls, shutting the power to a low murmur. He\n turned to the bronze doors, passed through and into the misty halls.\n\n\n \"I must speak,\" Irgi said as he moved along the corridor. \"I have not\n spoken for many weeks. I must exercise my voice, or lose it. That is\n the law of nature. It would atrophy, otherwise.\n\n\n \"Yes, I will use my voice tonight, and I will go out under the dome and\n look up at the stars and the other planets that swing near Urg, and I\n will talk to them and tell them how lonely Irgi is.\"",
"A tall, lean man in white looked out at him. His lips moved, and Irgi\n read their meaning. This man spoke to one named Emerson, commissioning\n him with a spaceship, reciting the need of radium, the dread of the\n plague. The thoughts of this Emerson were coming in clearer, as Irgi in\n sudden interest, flipped over different dials. The unspoken thoughts\n pouring into his brain through the screen continued. The words he did\n not understand, but the necessity for radium, and the danger of the\n growth disease he did. The pictures jumbled, grew chameleonesque—\n\n\n Irgi stared upward at a colossal figure graven in lucent white marble.\n He made out the letters chiseled into the base: GEORGE WASHINGTON. He\n wondered idly what this Washington had done, to merit such undying\n fame. He must have created a nation, or saved it. He wished there were\n Urgians alive to build a statue to\nhim\n.",
"Toward a mighty bronze doorway he went, and as his body passed an\n invisible beam, the bronze portals slid apart, noiselessly, opening to\n reveal a vast circular chamber that hummed and throbbed, and was filled\n with a pale blue luminescence that glimmered upon metal rods and bars\n and ten tall cones of steelite.\n\n\n In the doorway, Irgi paused and ran his eyes about the chamber, sighing.\n\n\n This was his life work, this blue hum and throb. Those ten cones\n lifting their disced tips toward a circular roof bathed in, and drew\n their power from, a huge block of radiant white matter that hung\n suspended between the cones, in midair. All power did the cones and the\n block possess. There was nothing they could not do, if Irgi so willed.\n It was another discovery that came too late to save the Urg.",
"Nichols screamed suddenly, his body aching.\n\n\n It woke the others. They too, bellowed and screamed and sobbed, and\n their arms and legs writhed like wild things in a trap.\n\n\n \"Got to get free,\" Emerson panted, straining against the wristbands.\n The hard muscles of his arms ridged with effort, but the straps held.\n He dropped back, sobbing.\n\n\n \"That fiend,\" yelled Mussdorf. \"That ten-eyed, octopus-legged,\n black-hearted spawn of a mismated monster did this to us. Damn him!\n Damn him! If I ever get loose I'll cut his heart out and make him eat\n it.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe—maybe he's vivisecting us,\" moaned Nichols. \"With rays or—or\n something—aagh! I can't stand it!\"",
"The thing dropped the Earthmen suddenly; its legs gathered beneath it\n and launched it full at Emerson. Caught off guard, the Earthman lifted\n his sun-blaster—felt it ripped from his fingers, knew a hard blackness\n thrashing down at him. He went backwards, sickened....\nIrgi stared at the things that lay on the white flagging. Queer beings\n they were, unlike anything Irgi had ever conceived. Only two legs, only\n two arms. And such weak little limbs! Why, an Urgian cat would make\n short work of them if an Urgian cat existed any more, and Irgi had\n never rated cats very highly.\n\n\n He looked at the spaceship, ran exploring feelers over it. He cast a\n glance back at the creatures again, and shook his head. Strange beings\n they might be, but they had mastered interplanetary travel. Well, he'd\n always maintained that life would be different on other worlds. Life\n here on Urg took different patterns.",
"He leaped from the table and stretched. He grinned into their faces.\n\n\n \"You know, it's funny—but I feel great. Huh, I must've sweated all the\n aches out of me. Here, Gunn—you first.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks, Karl. We're still pals, aren't we?\"\n\n\n When Gunn was free, Mussdorf came to stand over Emerson, looking down\n at him. His eyes narrowed suddenly. He grinned a little, twisting his\n lips.\n\n\n \"Maybe you fellows ought to stay tied up,\" he said. \"In case that—that\n thing comes back. He won't blame us all for the break we're making.\"\n\n\n \"Not on your life,\" said Emerson.\n\n\n But Mussdorf shook his head, and his lips tightened.\n\n\n \"No. No, I think it's better the way I say.\"",
"Within her gleaming walls, four men bent with hard faces over gleaming\n bands of color on a spectroscopic screen. With quivering fingers,\n Emerson twisted dials and switches.\n\n\n \"Hell!\" exploded Mussdorf. \"I might have known it. Not a trace.\"\n\n\n Emerson touched his forearm gently, and shuddered.\n\n\n Nichols bit his lips, and thought of Marge and the kids; Gunn licked\n his lips with a dry tongue and kept looking at Emerson.\n\n\n With one sweep of his brawny arm, Mussdorf sent the apparatus flying\n against the far wall to shatter in shards.\n\n\n No one said a word.\n\n\n Something whispered in the ship. They jerked their heads up, stood\n listening. The faint susurration swept all about them, questioning,\n curious. It came again, imperative; suddenly demanding.",
"Now Emerson was breathing softly, \"Yes, it had better be there, or else\n we die.\"\n\n\n He ran quivering fingers over his forearm, felt the strange lumps that\n heralded cancer. Involuntarily, he shuddered.\n\n\n Steps clanged on the metal runway beneath them. Mussdorf pushed up\n through the trap and got to his feet. He was as big as Emerson, bulky\n where Emerson was lithe, granite where Emerson was chiseled steel. His\n hair was black, and his brows shaggy. A stubborn jaw shot out under\n thin, hard lips.\n\n\n \"There it is, Karl,\" said Nichols. \"Start hoping.\"\n\n\n Mussdorf scowled darkly, and spat.",
"He turned and went along a hall that opened into a broad balcony which\n stood forth directly beneath a segment of the mighty dome. He stared\n upwards, craning all his eyes to see through the darkness pressing down\n upon him.\n\n\n \"Stars,\" he whispered, \"listen to me once again. I am lonely, stars,\n and the name and fame of Irgi means nothing to the walls of my city,\n nor to the Chamber of the Cones, nor even—at times—to Irgi himself.\"\n\n\n He paused and his eyes widened, staring upwards.\n\n\n \"By the Block,\" he said to the silence about him. \"There is something\n up there that is not a star, nor a planet, nor yet a meteor.\"",
"He had been glad to find these creatures. They were someone to\n converse with after centuries of loneliness. But as he approached them\n there in the square, calling out gladly to them, they could not hear\n him. His voice was pitched eight vibrations to the second. He wondered\n idly if that was beyond the hearing range of these two-legged things.\n He ought to check that, to be sure. Still, they had heard him on their\n ship. He had caught a confused, angry murmur on the radiation recorder.\n Perhaps the metal of the hull had in some manner made his voice audible\n to them, speeded up the vibrations to twelve or fifteen a second.\n\n\n Then there was the matter of the growth disease. He could eliminate\n that easily enough, in the Chamber of the Cones. But first they would\n have to be prepared. And the preparation—hurt. Well, better a few\n moments of agony than a death through a worse.",
"\"Hang on, kid,\" gritted Emerson, fighting the straps. \"I think it's\n lessening. Yeah, yeah—it is. It doesn't hurt so much now.\"\n\n\n Mussdorf grunted astonishment.\n\n\n \"You're right. It is lessening. And—hey, one of my arm buckles is\n coming loose. It's torn a little. Maybe I can work it free.\"\n\n\n They turned their heads to watch, biting their lips, the sweat standing\n in colorless beads on their pale foreheads. Mussdorf's thick arm bulged\n its muscles as he wrenched and tugged, panting. A buckle swung outward,\n clanging against the tabletop as it ripped loose. Mussdorf held his arm\n aloft and laughed harsh triumph.\n\n\n \"I'll have you all loose in a second,\" he grunted, ripping straps from\n his body."
],
[
"Only Irgi, alone.\n\n\n He moved now along the ebony flooring, past the white marble walls hung\n with golden drapes that never withered or shed their aurate luster in\n the opalescent mists that bathed the city in shimmering whiteness. They\n hung low, those wispy tendrils of mist, clasping everything in their\n clinging shelter, destroying dust and germs. Irgi had discovered the\n mist many years ago, when it was too late to save his kind.\n\n\n He had flung a vast globe of transparent metal above this greatest of\n the cities of the Urg and filled it with the mist, and in it he had\n stored the treasures of his people. From Bar Nomala, from Faryl, and\n from the far-off jungle city of Kreed had he brought the riches of the\n Urg and set them up. Irgi enjoyed beauty, and he enjoyed work. It was\n the combination of both that kept him sane.",
"A picture quivered on the screen; grew nebulous, then cleared. Irgi\n found himself staring at a city far vaster than Urg. Grim white\n towers peaked high into the air, and broad, flat ramps circled them,\n interwoven like ribbons in the sunlight. On the tallest and largest\n buildings were great fields of metal painted a dull luster, where\n queerly wrought flying ships landed and took off.\n\n\n The scene changed suddenly. He looked into a hospital room and watched\n a pretty young woman smiling up at him. She too, had the growth\n disease. Now he beheld the mighty salt mines where naked men swung huge\n picks at the crusted crystals, sweating and dying under a strange sun.\n Even these remnants of humanity festered with the growth.",
"A tall, lean man in white looked out at him. His lips moved, and Irgi\n read their meaning. This man spoke to one named Emerson, commissioning\n him with a spaceship, reciting the need of radium, the dread of the\n plague. The thoughts of this Emerson were coming in clearer, as Irgi in\n sudden interest, flipped over different dials. The unspoken thoughts\n pouring into his brain through the screen continued. The words he did\n not understand, but the necessity for radium, and the danger of the\n growth disease he did. The pictures jumbled, grew chameleonesque—\n\n\n Irgi stared upward at a colossal figure graven in lucent white marble.\n He made out the letters chiseled into the base: GEORGE WASHINGTON. He\n wondered idly what this Washington had done, to merit such undying\n fame. He must have created a nation, or saved it. He wished there were\n Urgians alive to build a statue to\nhim\n.",
"The Last Monster\nBy GARDNER F. FOX\nIrgi was the last of his monster race, guardian of\n\n a dead planet, master of the secret of immortality.\n\n It was he whom the four men from Earth had to\n\n conquer to gain that secret—a tentacled\n\n monstrosity whom Earthly weapons could not touch.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIrgi was the last of his race. There was no one else, now; there had\n been no others for hundreds and hundreds of years. Irgi had lost count\n of time dwelling alone amid the marble halls of the eon-ancient city,\n but he knew that much. There were no others.",
"Irgi moved across the room. He pressed glittering jewels inset in a\n control panel on the wall, one after another, in proper sequence.\n\n\n The blue opalescence deepened, grew dark and vivid. The hum broadened\n into a hoarse roar. And standing out, startlingly white against the\n blue, was the queer block of shining metal, shimmering and pulsing.\n\n\n Irgi drew himself upwards, slowly turning, laving in the quivering\n bands of cobalt that sped outward from the cones. He preened his body\n in their patterns of color, watching it splash and spread over his\n chest and torso. Where it touched, a faint tingle lingered; then spread\n outwards, all over his huge form.\n\n\n Irgi was immortal, and the blue light made him so.",
"\"There, it is done,\" he whispered to himself. \"Now for another oval I\n can roam all Urg as I will, for the life spark in me has been cleansed\n and nourished.\"\n\n\n He touched the jeweled controls, shutting the power to a low murmur. He\n turned to the bronze doors, passed through and into the misty halls.\n\n\n \"I must speak,\" Irgi said as he moved along the corridor. \"I have not\n spoken for many weeks. I must exercise my voice, or lose it. That is\n the law of nature. It would atrophy, otherwise.\n\n\n \"Yes, I will use my voice tonight, and I will go out under the dome and\n look up at the stars and the other planets that swing near Urg, and I\n will talk to them and tell them how lonely Irgi is.\"",
"Irgi bent to wrap long arms about the queer beings, lifting them. His\n eyes were caught suddenly by the lumps protruding from their arms and\n legs, from face and chest. The growth disease! That was bad, but Irgi\n knew a way to cure it. Irgi knew a way to cure anything.\n\n\n He slid swiftly across the square and onto a flat, glittering ramp that\n stretched upward toward an arched doorway set like a jewel of light\n in a long, low building next to the vast, round Chamber of the Cones.\n He carried these creatures easily, without trouble. The ease of his\n passage gave him time to think.",
"And if he could not speak to them, they could speak to him, through\n their minds. Once unconscious, he could tap their memories with an\n electrigraph screen. That should be absorbing. It made Irgi happy,\n reflecting upon it, and Irgi had not known happiness for a long time.\n\n\n From the passage he hurried into a large white room, fitted with glass\n vials and ovules and glittering metal instruments, so many in number\n that the room seemed a jungle of metal. Down on flat, smooth tables\n Irgi dropped his burdens. With quick tendrils he adjusted straps to\n them, bound them securely. From a small, wheeled vehicle he took a\n metal rod and touched it to their foreheads. As it met the flesh, it\n hummed once faintly.",
"The thing dropped the Earthmen suddenly; its legs gathered beneath it\n and launched it full at Emerson. Caught off guard, the Earthman lifted\n his sun-blaster—felt it ripped from his fingers, knew a hard blackness\n thrashing down at him. He went backwards, sickened....\nIrgi stared at the things that lay on the white flagging. Queer beings\n they were, unlike anything Irgi had ever conceived. Only two legs, only\n two arms. And such weak little limbs! Why, an Urgian cat would make\n short work of them if an Urgian cat existed any more, and Irgi had\n never rated cats very highly.\n\n\n He looked at the spaceship, ran exploring feelers over it. He cast a\n glance back at the creatures again, and shook his head. Strange beings\n they might be, but they had mastered interplanetary travel. Well, he'd\n always maintained that life would be different on other worlds. Life\n here on Urg took different patterns.",
"He rose suddenly, standing upright on his tentacles, swaying gently.\n Why, he had the power to make himself immortal! These creatures would\n gladly build statues to him! True, he could not create a nation—\nbut\n he could save it\n!\n\n\n Irgi unfastened clamps, and rolled the screen aside. He reached to a\n series of black knobs inset in the wall, and turned them carefully.\n Turning, he saw the figures of the four men stiffen to rigidity as a\n red aura drifted upward from the tabletop, passing through them as if\n they were mist, rising upwards to dissipate in the air near the ceiling.\n\n\n \"That will prepare their bodies for the Chamber of the Cones,\" he said.\n \"When they realize that I am their friend, they will gladly hear my\n counsels!\"",
"Toward a mighty bronze doorway he went, and as his body passed an\n invisible beam, the bronze portals slid apart, noiselessly, opening to\n reveal a vast circular chamber that hummed and throbbed, and was filled\n with a pale blue luminescence that glimmered upon metal rods and bars\n and ten tall cones of steelite.\n\n\n In the doorway, Irgi paused and ran his eyes about the chamber, sighing.\n\n\n This was his life work, this blue hum and throb. Those ten cones\n lifting their disced tips toward a circular roof bathed in, and drew\n their power from, a huge block of radiant white matter that hung\n suspended between the cones, in midair. All power did the cones and the\n block possess. There was nothing they could not do, if Irgi so willed.\n It was another discovery that came too late to save the Urg.",
"He turned and went along a hall that opened into a broad balcony which\n stood forth directly beneath a segment of the mighty dome. He stared\n upwards, craning all his eyes to see through the darkness pressing down\n upon him.\n\n\n \"Stars,\" he whispered, \"listen to me once again. I am lonely, stars,\n and the name and fame of Irgi means nothing to the walls of my city,\n nor to the Chamber of the Cones, nor even—at times—to Irgi himself.\"\n\n\n He paused and his eyes widened, staring upwards.\n\n\n \"By the Block,\" he said to the silence about him. \"There is something\n up there that is not a star, nor a planet, nor yet a meteor.\"",
"\"It's short-circulated their nervous systems for a while, absorbed the\n electric charges all intelligent beings cast,\" Irgi said aloud, glad at\n this chance to exercise his voice. \"They won't be able to feel for some\n time. When the worst pain will have passed, they will recover. And now\n to examine their minds—\"\n\n\n He fitted metal clamps over their heads and screwed them tight. He\n wheeled forward a glassy screen; plugged in the cords that dangled from\n its frame to the metal clamps.\n\n\n \"I wonder if they've perfected this,\" Irgi mused. \"They must be aware\n that the brain gives off electrical waves. Perhaps they can chart\n those waves on graphs. But do they know that each curve and bend of\n those waves represents a picture? I can translate those waves into\n pictures—but can they?\"\n\n\n He slouched a little on his tentacles, squatting, gazing at the screen\n as he flipped over a lever.",
"Opening the laboratory door, Irgi passed out and closed it behind him.\nIt was the sweat of agony trickling down his forehead and over his eyes\n and cheeks that woke Emerson. He opened his eyes, then clamped them\n shut as his body writhed in pain.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord!\" he whimpered, bloodying his mouth where his teeth sank into\n his lips.\n\n\n In every fibre of his body sharp lancets cut and dug. In arms and legs\n and chest and belly they twisted and tore. Into the tissues beneath his\n skin, all along the muscles and the bone, the fiery torment played. He\n could not stand it; he could not—\n\n\n He flipped his head to right, to left; saw the others stretched out\n and strapped even as he. They were unconscious. What right had they to\n ignore this agony? Why didn't they share it with him? He opened his\n lips to shriek; then bit down again, hard.",
"The others crowded about him, looking out. Here the green was more\n vivid, intense. They could feel its surging power tingling on their\n skins. Beneath them, the jagged peak of the mountain almost grazed the\n hull. Spread out under their eyes was the panorama of a dead planet.\n\n\n Great rocks lay split and tumbled over one another in a black\n desolation. Sunlight glinting on their jagged edges, made harsh\n shadows. Far to the north a mountain range shrugged its snow-topped\n peaks to a sullen sky. To the south, beyond the rocks, lay a white\n waste of desert. To the west—\n\n\n \"A city,\" yelled Nichols, \"the place is inhabited. Thank God, thank\n God—\"\n\n\n Mussdorf erupted laughter.\n\n\n \"For what? How do we know what they're like? An inhabited planet\n doesn't mean men. We found that out—several times.\"",
"He had been glad to find these creatures. They were someone to\n converse with after centuries of loneliness. But as he approached them\n there in the square, calling out gladly to them, they could not hear\n him. His voice was pitched eight vibrations to the second. He wondered\n idly if that was beyond the hearing range of these two-legged things.\n He ought to check that, to be sure. Still, they had heard him on their\n ship. He had caught a confused, angry murmur on the radiation recorder.\n Perhaps the metal of the hull had in some manner made his voice audible\n to them, speeded up the vibrations to twelve or fifteen a second.\n\n\n Then there was the matter of the growth disease. He could eliminate\n that easily enough, in the Chamber of the Cones. But first they would\n have to be prepared. And the preparation—hurt. Well, better a few\n moments of agony than a death through a worse.",
"It was a spaceship.\nEmerson took his hands from the controls of the gigantic ship that\n hurtled through space, and wiped his sweaty palms on his thighs. His\n grey eyes bored like a steel awl downward at the mighty globe swinging\n in the void.\n\n\n \"The last planet in our course,\" he breathed. \"Maybe it has the radium!\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" whispered the man beside him, wetting his lips with his tongue.\n \"No use to think of failure. If it hasn't, we'll die ourselves, down\n there.\"\n\n\n Radium. And the Plague. It had come on Earth suddenly, had the Plague,\n back in the first days of space travel, after Quigg, the American\n research scientist at Cal Tech, discovered a way to lift a rocket ship\n off the Earth, and propel it to the Moon.",
"\"A hell of a way to spend my last days,\" he growled. \"I'm dying on my\n feet, and I've got to be a martyr to a billion people who don't know\n I'm alive.\"\n\n\n \"You know a better way to die, of course,\" replied Emerson.\n\n\n \"You bet I do. There's a sweet little redhead in New Mars. She'd make\n dying a pleasure. In fact,\" he chuckled softly, \"that's just the way\n I'd let her kill me.\"\nEmerson snorted, glancing down at the controls. Beneath his steady\n fingers, the ship sideslipped into the gravity tug of the looming orb,\n shuddered a moment, then eased downward.\n\n\n \"Tell Gunn to come up,\" ordered Emerson. \"No need for him to be below.\"",
"\"Don't be a fool, Mussdorf,\" snapped Emerson savagely. \"It isn't your\n place to think, anyhow. That's mine. I'm commander of this force. What\n I say is an order.\"\n\n\n Mussdorf grinned dryly. Into his eyes came a glint of hot, sullen anger.\n\n\n \"You were our commander—out there, in space. We're on a planet now.\n Things are different. I want to learn the secret of those mists,\n Emerson. Something tells me I'd get a fortune for it, on Earth.\"\n\n\n Emerson squirmed helplessly, cursing him, saying, \"What's gotten into\n you?\"",
"Within her gleaming walls, four men bent with hard faces over gleaming\n bands of color on a spectroscopic screen. With quivering fingers,\n Emerson twisted dials and switches.\n\n\n \"Hell!\" exploded Mussdorf. \"I might have known it. Not a trace.\"\n\n\n Emerson touched his forearm gently, and shuddered.\n\n\n Nichols bit his lips, and thought of Marge and the kids; Gunn licked\n his lips with a dry tongue and kept looking at Emerson.\n\n\n With one sweep of his brawny arm, Mussdorf sent the apparatus flying\n against the far wall to shatter in shards.\n\n\n No one said a word.\n\n\n Something whispered in the ship. They jerked their heads up, stood\n listening. The faint susurration swept all about them, questioning,\n curious. It came again, imperative; suddenly demanding."
],
[
"Only Irgi, alone.\n\n\n He moved now along the ebony flooring, past the white marble walls hung\n with golden drapes that never withered or shed their aurate luster in\n the opalescent mists that bathed the city in shimmering whiteness. They\n hung low, those wispy tendrils of mist, clasping everything in their\n clinging shelter, destroying dust and germs. Irgi had discovered the\n mist many years ago, when it was too late to save his kind.\n\n\n He had flung a vast globe of transparent metal above this greatest of\n the cities of the Urg and filled it with the mist, and in it he had\n stored the treasures of his people. From Bar Nomala, from Faryl, and\n from the far-off jungle city of Kreed had he brought the riches of the\n Urg and set them up. Irgi enjoyed beauty, and he enjoyed work. It was\n the combination of both that kept him sane.",
"The Last Monster\nBy GARDNER F. FOX\nIrgi was the last of his monster race, guardian of\n\n a dead planet, master of the secret of immortality.\n\n It was he whom the four men from Earth had to\n\n conquer to gain that secret—a tentacled\n\n monstrosity whom Earthly weapons could not touch.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIrgi was the last of his race. There was no one else, now; there had\n been no others for hundreds and hundreds of years. Irgi had lost count\n of time dwelling alone amid the marble halls of the eon-ancient city,\n but he knew that much. There were no others.",
"Irgi bent to wrap long arms about the queer beings, lifting them. His\n eyes were caught suddenly by the lumps protruding from their arms and\n legs, from face and chest. The growth disease! That was bad, but Irgi\n knew a way to cure it. Irgi knew a way to cure anything.\n\n\n He slid swiftly across the square and onto a flat, glittering ramp that\n stretched upward toward an arched doorway set like a jewel of light\n in a long, low building next to the vast, round Chamber of the Cones.\n He carried these creatures easily, without trouble. The ease of his\n passage gave him time to think.",
"A picture quivered on the screen; grew nebulous, then cleared. Irgi\n found himself staring at a city far vaster than Urg. Grim white\n towers peaked high into the air, and broad, flat ramps circled them,\n interwoven like ribbons in the sunlight. On the tallest and largest\n buildings were great fields of metal painted a dull luster, where\n queerly wrought flying ships landed and took off.\n\n\n The scene changed suddenly. He looked into a hospital room and watched\n a pretty young woman smiling up at him. She too, had the growth\n disease. Now he beheld the mighty salt mines where naked men swung huge\n picks at the crusted crystals, sweating and dying under a strange sun.\n Even these remnants of humanity festered with the growth.",
"\"There, it is done,\" he whispered to himself. \"Now for another oval I\n can roam all Urg as I will, for the life spark in me has been cleansed\n and nourished.\"\n\n\n He touched the jeweled controls, shutting the power to a low murmur. He\n turned to the bronze doors, passed through and into the misty halls.\n\n\n \"I must speak,\" Irgi said as he moved along the corridor. \"I have not\n spoken for many weeks. I must exercise my voice, or lose it. That is\n the law of nature. It would atrophy, otherwise.\n\n\n \"Yes, I will use my voice tonight, and I will go out under the dome and\n look up at the stars and the other planets that swing near Urg, and I\n will talk to them and tell them how lonely Irgi is.\"",
"Irgi moved across the room. He pressed glittering jewels inset in a\n control panel on the wall, one after another, in proper sequence.\n\n\n The blue opalescence deepened, grew dark and vivid. The hum broadened\n into a hoarse roar. And standing out, startlingly white against the\n blue, was the queer block of shining metal, shimmering and pulsing.\n\n\n Irgi drew himself upwards, slowly turning, laving in the quivering\n bands of cobalt that sped outward from the cones. He preened his body\n in their patterns of color, watching it splash and spread over his\n chest and torso. Where it touched, a faint tingle lingered; then spread\n outwards, all over his huge form.\n\n\n Irgi was immortal, and the blue light made him so.",
"A tall, lean man in white looked out at him. His lips moved, and Irgi\n read their meaning. This man spoke to one named Emerson, commissioning\n him with a spaceship, reciting the need of radium, the dread of the\n plague. The thoughts of this Emerson were coming in clearer, as Irgi in\n sudden interest, flipped over different dials. The unspoken thoughts\n pouring into his brain through the screen continued. The words he did\n not understand, but the necessity for radium, and the danger of the\n growth disease he did. The pictures jumbled, grew chameleonesque—\n\n\n Irgi stared upward at a colossal figure graven in lucent white marble.\n He made out the letters chiseled into the base: GEORGE WASHINGTON. He\n wondered idly what this Washington had done, to merit such undying\n fame. He must have created a nation, or saved it. He wished there were\n Urgians alive to build a statue to\nhim\n.",
"The thing dropped the Earthmen suddenly; its legs gathered beneath it\n and launched it full at Emerson. Caught off guard, the Earthman lifted\n his sun-blaster—felt it ripped from his fingers, knew a hard blackness\n thrashing down at him. He went backwards, sickened....\nIrgi stared at the things that lay on the white flagging. Queer beings\n they were, unlike anything Irgi had ever conceived. Only two legs, only\n two arms. And such weak little limbs! Why, an Urgian cat would make\n short work of them if an Urgian cat existed any more, and Irgi had\n never rated cats very highly.\n\n\n He looked at the spaceship, ran exploring feelers over it. He cast a\n glance back at the creatures again, and shook his head. Strange beings\n they might be, but they had mastered interplanetary travel. Well, he'd\n always maintained that life would be different on other worlds. Life\n here on Urg took different patterns.",
"Toward a mighty bronze doorway he went, and as his body passed an\n invisible beam, the bronze portals slid apart, noiselessly, opening to\n reveal a vast circular chamber that hummed and throbbed, and was filled\n with a pale blue luminescence that glimmered upon metal rods and bars\n and ten tall cones of steelite.\n\n\n In the doorway, Irgi paused and ran his eyes about the chamber, sighing.\n\n\n This was his life work, this blue hum and throb. Those ten cones\n lifting their disced tips toward a circular roof bathed in, and drew\n their power from, a huge block of radiant white matter that hung\n suspended between the cones, in midair. All power did the cones and the\n block possess. There was nothing they could not do, if Irgi so willed.\n It was another discovery that came too late to save the Urg.",
"And if he could not speak to them, they could speak to him, through\n their minds. Once unconscious, he could tap their memories with an\n electrigraph screen. That should be absorbing. It made Irgi happy,\n reflecting upon it, and Irgi had not known happiness for a long time.\n\n\n From the passage he hurried into a large white room, fitted with glass\n vials and ovules and glittering metal instruments, so many in number\n that the room seemed a jungle of metal. Down on flat, smooth tables\n Irgi dropped his burdens. With quick tendrils he adjusted straps to\n them, bound them securely. From a small, wheeled vehicle he took a\n metal rod and touched it to their foreheads. As it met the flesh, it\n hummed once faintly.",
"He turned and went along a hall that opened into a broad balcony which\n stood forth directly beneath a segment of the mighty dome. He stared\n upwards, craning all his eyes to see through the darkness pressing down\n upon him.\n\n\n \"Stars,\" he whispered, \"listen to me once again. I am lonely, stars,\n and the name and fame of Irgi means nothing to the walls of my city,\n nor to the Chamber of the Cones, nor even—at times—to Irgi himself.\"\n\n\n He paused and his eyes widened, staring upwards.\n\n\n \"By the Block,\" he said to the silence about him. \"There is something\n up there that is not a star, nor a planet, nor yet a meteor.\"",
"Opening the laboratory door, Irgi passed out and closed it behind him.\nIt was the sweat of agony trickling down his forehead and over his eyes\n and cheeks that woke Emerson. He opened his eyes, then clamped them\n shut as his body writhed in pain.\n\n\n \"Oh, Lord!\" he whimpered, bloodying his mouth where his teeth sank into\n his lips.\n\n\n In every fibre of his body sharp lancets cut and dug. In arms and legs\n and chest and belly they twisted and tore. Into the tissues beneath his\n skin, all along the muscles and the bone, the fiery torment played. He\n could not stand it; he could not—\n\n\n He flipped his head to right, to left; saw the others stretched out\n and strapped even as he. They were unconscious. What right had they to\n ignore this agony? Why didn't they share it with him? He opened his\n lips to shriek; then bit down again, hard.",
"He rose suddenly, standing upright on his tentacles, swaying gently.\n Why, he had the power to make himself immortal! These creatures would\n gladly build statues to him! True, he could not create a nation—\nbut\n he could save it\n!\n\n\n Irgi unfastened clamps, and rolled the screen aside. He reached to a\n series of black knobs inset in the wall, and turned them carefully.\n Turning, he saw the figures of the four men stiffen to rigidity as a\n red aura drifted upward from the tabletop, passing through them as if\n they were mist, rising upwards to dissipate in the air near the ceiling.\n\n\n \"That will prepare their bodies for the Chamber of the Cones,\" he said.\n \"When they realize that I am their friend, they will gladly hear my\n counsels!\"",
"\"It's short-circulated their nervous systems for a while, absorbed the\n electric charges all intelligent beings cast,\" Irgi said aloud, glad at\n this chance to exercise his voice. \"They won't be able to feel for some\n time. When the worst pain will have passed, they will recover. And now\n to examine their minds—\"\n\n\n He fitted metal clamps over their heads and screwed them tight. He\n wheeled forward a glassy screen; plugged in the cords that dangled from\n its frame to the metal clamps.\n\n\n \"I wonder if they've perfected this,\" Irgi mused. \"They must be aware\n that the brain gives off electrical waves. Perhaps they can chart\n those waves on graphs. But do they know that each curve and bend of\n those waves represents a picture? I can translate those waves into\n pictures—but can they?\"\n\n\n He slouched a little on his tentacles, squatting, gazing at the screen\n as he flipped over a lever.",
"The others crowded about him, looking out. Here the green was more\n vivid, intense. They could feel its surging power tingling on their\n skins. Beneath them, the jagged peak of the mountain almost grazed the\n hull. Spread out under their eyes was the panorama of a dead planet.\n\n\n Great rocks lay split and tumbled over one another in a black\n desolation. Sunlight glinting on their jagged edges, made harsh\n shadows. Far to the north a mountain range shrugged its snow-topped\n peaks to a sullen sky. To the south, beyond the rocks, lay a white\n waste of desert. To the west—\n\n\n \"A city,\" yelled Nichols, \"the place is inhabited. Thank God, thank\n God—\"\n\n\n Mussdorf erupted laughter.\n\n\n \"For what? How do we know what they're like? An inhabited planet\n doesn't mean men. We found that out—several times.\"",
"\"A hell of a way to spend my last days,\" he growled. \"I'm dying on my\n feet, and I've got to be a martyr to a billion people who don't know\n I'm alive.\"\n\n\n \"You know a better way to die, of course,\" replied Emerson.\n\n\n \"You bet I do. There's a sweet little redhead in New Mars. She'd make\n dying a pleasure. In fact,\" he chuckled softly, \"that's just the way\n I'd let her kill me.\"\nEmerson snorted, glancing down at the controls. Beneath his steady\n fingers, the ship sideslipped into the gravity tug of the looming orb,\n shuddered a moment, then eased downward.\n\n\n \"Tell Gunn to come up,\" ordered Emerson. \"No need for him to be below.\"",
"It was a spaceship.\nEmerson took his hands from the controls of the gigantic ship that\n hurtled through space, and wiped his sweaty palms on his thighs. His\n grey eyes bored like a steel awl downward at the mighty globe swinging\n in the void.\n\n\n \"The last planet in our course,\" he breathed. \"Maybe it has the radium!\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" whispered the man beside him, wetting his lips with his tongue.\n \"No use to think of failure. If it hasn't, we'll die ourselves, down\n there.\"\n\n\n Radium. And the Plague. It had come on Earth suddenly, had the Plague,\n back in the first days of space travel, after Quigg, the American\n research scientist at Cal Tech, discovered a way to lift a rocket ship\n off the Earth, and propel it to the Moon.",
"He had been glad to find these creatures. They were someone to\n converse with after centuries of loneliness. But as he approached them\n there in the square, calling out gladly to them, they could not hear\n him. His voice was pitched eight vibrations to the second. He wondered\n idly if that was beyond the hearing range of these two-legged things.\n He ought to check that, to be sure. Still, they had heard him on their\n ship. He had caught a confused, angry murmur on the radiation recorder.\n Perhaps the metal of the hull had in some manner made his voice audible\n to them, speeded up the vibrations to twelve or fifteen a second.\n\n\n Then there was the matter of the growth disease. He could eliminate\n that easily enough, in the Chamber of the Cones. But first they would\n have to be prepared. And the preparation—hurt. Well, better a few\n moments of agony than a death through a worse.",
"\"Try the atmospheric recorder,\" said Emerson. \"If the air's okay, I'd\n like to stretch my own legs.\"\n\n\n Nichols twisted chrome wheels, staring at a red line that wavered on a\n plastic screen, then straightened abruptly, rigid.\n\n\n \"Hey,\" yelled Nichols excitedly. \"It's pure. I mean actually pure. No\n germs. No dust. Just clean air!\"\n\n\n Emerson leaped to his side, staring, frowning.\n\n\n \"No germs. No dust. Why—that means there's no disease in this place!\n No disease.\"\n\n\n He began to laugh, then caught himself.\n\n\n \"No disease,\" he whispered, \"and every one of us is going to die of\n cancer.\"",
"It meant death to travel in space, and only the stupendous fees paid to\n the young men who believed in a short life and a merry one, kept the\n ships plying between Mars and Earth and Venus. Lead kept out the cosmic\n rays, but lead would not stand the terrific speed required to lift a\n craft free of planetary gravity; and an inner coating of lead brought\n men into port raving with lead poisoning illusions.\n\n\n Cancer cases increased on Earth. It was learned that the virulent\n form of space cancer, as it was called, was in some peculiar manner,\n contagious to a certain extent. The alarm spread. Men who voyaged in\n space were segregated, but the damage had been done.\n\n\n The Plague spread, and ravaged the peoples of three planets.\n\n\n Hospitals were set up, and precious radium used for the fight. But the\n radium was hard to come by. There was just not enough for the job."
]
] |
valid
|
63812
|
[
"Of the following options, which traits best describe Darling Toujours?",
"Of the following options, which traits best describe Grandma Perkins?",
"Of the following options, which traits best describe Johnny?",
"What is likely Grandma Perkins's primary motivation for interfering with the pirates?",
"Of the following options, which best describe Captain Homer Fogarty?",
"If the pirates hadn't tried to ambush the ship, what would've most likely happened to Grandma Perkins?",
"Which of the following is NOT a technological advancement that's a part of this story?",
"Of the following options, which is not an issue discussed within this fantasy world?",
"Of the following options, who might enjoy reading this story the most and why?"
] |
[
[
"Pretty and kind",
"Naive and lovely",
"Gorgeous and patient",
"Rude and beautiful"
],
[
"strong and hilarious",
"clever and dangerous",
"kind and reserved",
"curious and fragile"
],
[
"lucky and kind",
"oblivious and lucky",
"smart and kind",
"dumb and nice"
],
[
"She knew someone on the pirate ship and didn't want the Captain to kill him",
"She knew they were going to kidnap Darling Toujours and she didn't want them to",
"She was bored",
"She wanted to find a more fun way to get back to Earth"
],
[
"Dumb and kind",
"Handsome and brave",
"Brave and desperate",
"Rash and impatient"
],
[
"She would've convinced the pirates to pick her up once she got to Earth.",
"She would've reached Earth and might've tried to avoid the nursing home.",
"She would've contacted another transportation agency and altered her travel plans.",
"She would've found a way to escape the ship before reaching Earth."
],
[
"The ability to watch media with 3D capabilities",
"The ability to live on places other than Earth",
"The ability to transfer between spaceships",
"The ability to control spaceships with voice-command technologies"
],
[
"Classism",
"Evil Corporations",
"Racism",
"Crimes"
],
[
"A reader who loves adventure stories and intriguing characters",
"A video game player who loves playing space-themed games",
"A sci-fi nerd who loves rebellions",
"A sci-fi nerd who loves reading stories with unlikable protagonists"
]
] |
[
4,
1,
3,
3,
4,
2,
4,
3,
1
] |
[
0,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
0,
1
] |
[
[
"Darling Toujours drew back her hand to smack Carlton one in a very\n unlady-like manner when she suddenly realized that they were not alone.\n Her hand froze, poised elegantly in mid-air, as she turned to see a\n newcomer standing at the door.\nThe witness to the impending slap was a withered little lady, scarcely\n five feet tall, with silvered hair, eyes that twinkled like a March\n wind, and a friendly rash of wrinkles that gave her face the kindly,\n weathered appearance of an old stone idol. Her slight figure was lost\n in volumes of black cloth draped on her in a manner that had gone out\n of style at least fifty years before. The little woman coughed politely.\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon,\" she told them in a sweet, high little voice.\n \"I hope I didn't interrupt anything. If you would like to hit the\n gentleman, Miss Toujours, I'll be glad to come back later.\"",
"Darling Toujours opened her violet eyes wide in surprise. \"Why, I\n was ... I was ... I—\" The actress uttered a small, gulping sound as\n she recovered her poise. \"Why, I was just going to pat him on the cheek\n for being such a nice boy. You are a nice boy, aren't you, Carlton?\"\n She leaned forward to stroke him gently on the face. Carlton roared\n with laughter and the good Captain colored deeply.\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said the little old woman, \"I'm sorry. I didn't know that he was\n your son.\" Carlton choked suddenly and Darling suffered from a brief\n fit of hysteria.\n\n\n The Captain took command. \"Now, look here, Madam,\" he sputtered. \"What\n is it you want?\"",
"\"Why, hello, Miss Toujours. And Mr. Carlton too. I hope you'll forgive\n me for this afternoon. I've found out who you were, you see.\"\n\n\n \"Of course we forgive you, Mrs. Jerkins,\" Darling said throatily,\n baring her teeth like a feline.\n\n\n \"My name is Perkins,\" Grandma smiled.\n\n\n \"I hope you don't mind, Toujours, but you know, you remind me a great\n deal of my grandniece, Agatha. She was undoubtedly the most lovely\n child I've ever seen.\"\n\n\n \"Why, thank you, Mrs. Perkins,\" Darling purred, starting to preen just\n a bit. Anything could be forgiven someone who complimented her.",
"Grandma watched them as they finished up their food and then she moved\n from her little table over to one of the very comfortable sofas in the\n main lounge. In reality she wasn't supposed to be sitting there, but\n she hoped that she could get away with it. The divans were so much more\n comfortable than her hard, narrow bed that she felt like sitting there\n for a long time, by herself, just thinking.\n\n\n But her hopes met with disappointment. For shortly after she sat down,\n Darling Toujours and Carlton E. Carlton strolled over and sat down\n across from her, not recognizing her at first. Then Carlton spied her.\n\n\n \"Darling! There's that priceless little woman we met this afternoon.\"\n\n\n \"The little hag, you mean,\" Miss Toujours muttered under her breath,\n but loudly enough for Grandma Perkins to hear.",
"\"I must say that I think Miss Toujours has the prettiest mouth I've\n ever seen,\" boomed Captain Fogarty, his voice sounding something like\n a cross between a foghorn and a steam whistle. And he was not merely\n being gallant, for many a lonely night as he flew the darkness between\n Earth and the many planets, he had dreamed of caressing those lips.\n\n\n \"And I think you are definitely a man of discriminating taste,\" said\n Darling demurely, crossing her legs and arranging her dress to expose a\n little more of the Toujours charms to the Captain's eye.\n\n\n Carlton smiled casually at the exposed flesh. \"It's all very pretty,\n my dear,\" he said smugly. \"But we've seen it all before and in space\n you're supposed to act like a lady, if you can act that well.\"",
"The two of them were sitting in the finest lounge of the luxury space\n ship\nKismet\n, enjoying postprandial cocktails with Captain Homer\n Fogarty, the\nKismet's\nrotund commanding officer. The\nKismet\nwas\n blasting through space at close to the speed of light, bound from\n Callisto, one of Jupiter's moons, back to Earth. But none of the two\n hundred Earthbound passengers were conscious of the speed at all.\n\n\n Darling Toujours waved a long cigarette holder at the author. \"Don't\n pay any attention to him, Captain. You know how writers are—always\n putting words in other people's mouths, and not very good ones at that.\"",
"\"Of course, Agatha never was quite bright,\" Grandma said as she turned\n her head aside as if in sorrow. \"They were all set to put her in an\n institution when she ran off and married the lizard man in a carnival.\n I believe she's still appearing in the show as the bearded lady. A\n pity. She was so pretty, just like you.\"\n\n\n Darling Toujours muttered a few choice words under her breath.",
"\"Oh, I'm so glad to hear that,\" she said, but made no move whatsoever\n to leave. Captain Fogarty gave her his hardened stare of the type which\n withered most people where they stood. Mrs. Perkins just smiled sweetly\n at him.\n\n\n His rage getting out of hand, he finally blurted, \"And now, Mrs.\n Perkins, I think you'd better be getting back to your quarters. As you\n know, this is a private lounge for the\nfirst\nclass passengers.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Perkins continued to smile at him. \"Yes, I know. It's lovely,\n isn't it? I'll just go out this way.\" And before anyone could stop her,\n she had moved to the door to Darling Toujours' suite and had opened it,\n stepping inside.\n\n\n \"That's my room, not the door out,\" Darling said loudly.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"I can always get along with a man if he remembers who he is,\" said\n Darling Toujours, the raven-haired, creamy-skinned televideo actress\n whose smoke-and-flame eyes lit fires in hearts all over the solar\n system. She was credited with being the most beautiful woman alive and\n there were few who dared to contradict her when she mentioned it.\n\n\n \"And I can always get along with a woman if she remembers who\nI\nam,\"\n replied Carlton E. Carlton, the acid-tongued author whose biting novels\n had won him universal fame. He leaned his thin, bony body back into the\n comfort of an overstuffed chair and favored the actress with a wicked\n smile.",
"\"But we must all make the best of things as they come. That's what\n Omar, my husband, used to say.\" Grandma paused to wipe away a small\n tear that had gotten lodged in one of her eyes. \"That reminds me,\" she\n said finally, \"I've got a three dimensional picture of Omar right here.\n And pictures of all my children, my ten lovely children. I brought them\n with me specially tonight because I thought you might want to look at\n them. Now, where did I put them?\" Grandma opened her purse and began\n rummaging around in its voluminous confines.\n\n\n Darling and Carlton exchanged horrified glances and then rose silently\n and tip-toed out of the lounge.\n\n\n Grandma looked up from her search. \"Oh, my, they seem to have gone.\"",
"\"So I see,\" said Mrs. Perkins, staring at the opulent furnishings\n with avid pleasure. \"It's such a pretty thing, all done up with\n mother-of-pearl like that, isn't it? And what a pretty lace nightie\n lying on the bed.\" Mrs. Perkins picked up the sheer, gossamer garment\n to examine it. \"You do wear something under it, don't you?\"\n\n\n Darling screeched and darted for the door. She snatched the nightie\n away from Mrs. Perkins and rudely propelled the older woman out the\n door, closing it behind her. \"Captain, this woman must GO!\"",
"When he could recover his powers of speech, Lamps sputtered, \"I think\n you owe us a sort of an explanation, lady. If you know what I mean.\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. I know exactly what you mean. It's all quite simple. When I\n overheard that you intended to board the\nKismet\n, searching for only\n one person, I decided that one person had to be Darling Toujours. I\n guessed right off that she was the only one on board worth kidnapping\n and holding for ransom, so I simply let you believe that I was she and\n you took me. That's easy to understand, isn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Lady, I don't know what your game is, but it better be good. Now, just\n why did you do this to us?\" Lamps was restraining himself nobly.\n\n\n \"You never would have gotten inside the\nKismet\nwithout my assistance.\n And even if you had, you'd never have gotten back out alive.",
"GRANDMA PERKINS AND THE SPACE PIRATES\nBy JAMES McCONNELL\nRaven-haired, seductive Darling Toujours'\n \nsmoke-and-flame eyes kindled sparks in hearts\n \nall over the universe. But it took sweet old\n \nGrandma Perkins, of the pirate ship\nDirty\n\n Shame,\nto set the Jupiter moons on fire\n.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories March 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"\"That's better. And now, Miss Toujours, maybe you'd be more\n comfortable without that space suit on,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Oh, no, thank you. I feel much better with it on,\" a small voice said\n over the suit's loudspeaker system.\n\n\n Lamps grinned. \"Oh, come now, Miss Toujours. We ain't going to hurt\n you. I guarantee nobody will lay a finger to you.\"\n\n\n \"But I feel much—much safer, if you know what I mean,\" said the voice.\n\n\n \"Heck. With one of them things on, you can't eat, can't sleep,\n can't—Well, there's lots of things you can't do with one of them\n things on. Besides, we all want to take a little look at you, if you\n don't mind. Snake, you and Willie help the little lady out of her\n attire.\"",
"A little while later when Johnny looked into her room to see if she had\n gone, the cabin was empty and the heavy box was back in place in the\n top cabinet.\nThe food that evening was not the very best, Grandma Perkins thought to\n herself, but that was mostly due to her seat. By the time the waiter\n got around to her little cranny most of it was cold. But she didn't\n complain. She enjoyed watching the people with the more expensive\n cabins parade their clothes and their manners at the Captain's table.\n And, it must be admitted, she was more than a trifle envious of them.\n Her acquaintances of the afternoon, Miss Toujours and Mr. Carlton, were\n seated there, Miss Toujours having the place of honor to the Captain's\n right.",
"As the men approached her, Grandma sensed the game was up. \"Okay,\" she\n told them. \"I give up. I can make it by myself.\" She started to take\n the bulky covering off. She had gotten no more than the headpiece off\n when the truth dawned on her companions.\n\n\n \"Holy Smoke (or something like that),\" said one of the men.\n\n\n \"Nippin' Nebulae,\" said another.\n\n\n \"It ain't Darling Toujours at all!\" cried Lamps.\n\n\n \"It ain't even no woman!\" cried Snake.\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon,\" said Grandma, and quite nonchalantly shed the rest\n of the suit and sat down in a comfortable chair. \"I am Mrs. Matilda\n Perkins.\"",
"\"I was just leaving, Miss Toujours. I hope you and your son have a very\n happy voyage. Good day, Captain Fogarty,\" she called over her shoulder\n as she exited. Carlton E. Carlton's shrill laughter followed her down\n the companionway.\nMrs. Perkins had been lying in her berth reading for less than an hour\n when the knock sounded at her door. She would have preferred to sit up\n and read, but her cabin was so small that there was no room for any\n other furniture besides the bed.\n\n\n \"Come in,\" she called in a small voice.\n\n\n Johnny Weaver, steward for the cheaper cabins, poked his youthful,\n freckled face through the door. \"Howdy, Mrs. Perkins. I wondered if I\n could do anything for you? It's about ten minutes before we eat.\"",
"Opening the inner door to the airlock, she clanked into the little\n room. As the door shut behind her, she pressed the cycling button and\n evacuated the air from the lock.\n\n\n A minute or so later she heard poundings outside the airlock and quite\n calmly she reached out a mailed fist and turned a switch plainly\n marked:\nEMERGENCY LOCK\n\n DO NOT OPERATE IN FLIGHT\n\n\n The outer hatch opened almost immediately. The radio in Grandma's suit\n crackled with static. \"What are you doing here?\" demanded a voice over\n the suit radio.\n\n\n \"Pirates! I'm hiding from the pirates. They'll never find me here!\" she\n told them in a voice she hoped sounded full of panic.\n\n\n \"What's your name?\" asked the voice.\n\n\n \"Darling Toujours, famous television actress,\" she lied quite calmly.",
"\"Okay, Grandma, look. You really fixed us good. To begin with, we ain't\n really pirates. We used to operate this tub as a freighter between the\n Jupiter moons. But STAR got a monopoly on all space flights, including\n freight, and they just froze us out. We can't operate nowhere in the\n solar system, unless we get their permission. And they just ain't\n giving permission to nobody these days.\" Lamps flopped into one of the\n control seats and lit a cigarette.\n\n\n \"So, when us good, honest men couldn't find any work because of STAR,\n and we didn't want to give up working in space, we just ups and decides\n to become pirates. This was our first job, and we sure did need the\n money we could have gotten out of Darling Toujours' studios for ransom.\"",
"Snake Simpson was a wiry little man whose tough exterior in no way\n suggested a reptile, except, perhaps, for his eyes which sat too close\n to one another. \"You bet, Skipper. We're full fledged pirates now, just\n like old Captain Blackbrood.\"\n\n\n \"You mean Blackbeard, Snake,\" said Lamps.\n\n\n \"Sure. He used to sit around broodin' up trouble all the time.\"\n\n\n One of the other men piped up. \"And to think we get the pleasurable\n company of the sweetest doll in the whole solar system for free besides\n the money.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, women are no dern good—all of them,\" said Snake.\n\n\n \"Now, Snake, that's no way to talk in front of company. You just\n apologize to the lady,\" Lamps told him. Lamps was six inches taller and\n fifty pounds heavier than Snake. Snake apologized."
],
[
"Grandma Perkins sighed. \"It's such a small cabin I don't think anybody\n else would want it. But it's all that I could afford,\" she said,\n smoothing out the wrinkles in her dress with both hands.\n\n\n \"Anything else I can do for you, Grandma?\"\n\n\n \"No, thank you, Johnny. I think I can make it up the steps to the\n dining room by myself.\"",
"Grandma watched them as they finished up their food and then she moved\n from her little table over to one of the very comfortable sofas in the\n main lounge. In reality she wasn't supposed to be sitting there, but\n she hoped that she could get away with it. The divans were so much more\n comfortable than her hard, narrow bed that she felt like sitting there\n for a long time, by herself, just thinking.\n\n\n But her hopes met with disappointment. For shortly after she sat down,\n Darling Toujours and Carlton E. Carlton strolled over and sat down\n across from her, not recognizing her at first. Then Carlton spied her.\n\n\n \"Darling! There's that priceless little woman we met this afternoon.\"\n\n\n \"The little hag, you mean,\" Miss Toujours muttered under her breath,\n but loudly enough for Grandma Perkins to hear.",
"\"Why, hello, Miss Toujours. And Mr. Carlton too. I hope you'll forgive\n me for this afternoon. I've found out who you were, you see.\"\n\n\n \"Of course we forgive you, Mrs. Jerkins,\" Darling said throatily,\n baring her teeth like a feline.\n\n\n \"My name is Perkins,\" Grandma smiled.\n\n\n \"I hope you don't mind, Toujours, but you know, you remind me a great\n deal of my grandniece, Agatha. She was undoubtedly the most lovely\n child I've ever seen.\"\n\n\n \"Why, thank you, Mrs. Perkins,\" Darling purred, starting to preen just\n a bit. Anything could be forgiven someone who complimented her.",
"\"But we must all make the best of things as they come. That's what\n Omar, my husband, used to say.\" Grandma paused to wipe away a small\n tear that had gotten lodged in one of her eyes. \"That reminds me,\" she\n said finally, \"I've got a three dimensional picture of Omar right here.\n And pictures of all my children, my ten lovely children. I brought them\n with me specially tonight because I thought you might want to look at\n them. Now, where did I put them?\" Grandma opened her purse and began\n rummaging around in its voluminous confines.\n\n\n Darling and Carlton exchanged horrified glances and then rose silently\n and tip-toed out of the lounge.\n\n\n Grandma looked up from her search. \"Oh, my, they seem to have gone.\"",
"As the men approached her, Grandma sensed the game was up. \"Okay,\" she\n told them. \"I give up. I can make it by myself.\" She started to take\n the bulky covering off. She had gotten no more than the headpiece off\n when the truth dawned on her companions.\n\n\n \"Holy Smoke (or something like that),\" said one of the men.\n\n\n \"Nippin' Nebulae,\" said another.\n\n\n \"It ain't Darling Toujours at all!\" cried Lamps.\n\n\n \"It ain't even no woman!\" cried Snake.\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon,\" said Grandma, and quite nonchalantly shed the rest\n of the suit and sat down in a comfortable chair. \"I am Mrs. Matilda\n Perkins.\"",
"GRANDMA PERKINS AND THE SPACE PIRATES\nBy JAMES McCONNELL\nRaven-haired, seductive Darling Toujours'\n \nsmoke-and-flame eyes kindled sparks in hearts\n \nall over the universe. But it took sweet old\n \nGrandma Perkins, of the pirate ship\nDirty\n\n Shame,\nto set the Jupiter moons on fire\n.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories March 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"\"So I see,\" said Mrs. Perkins, staring at the opulent furnishings\n with avid pleasure. \"It's such a pretty thing, all done up with\n mother-of-pearl like that, isn't it? And what a pretty lace nightie\n lying on the bed.\" Mrs. Perkins picked up the sheer, gossamer garment\n to examine it. \"You do wear something under it, don't you?\"\n\n\n Darling screeched and darted for the door. She snatched the nightie\n away from Mrs. Perkins and rudely propelled the older woman out the\n door, closing it behind her. \"Captain, this woman must GO!\"",
"\"Captain Fogarty's men would have cut you to ribbons. So I opened the\n hatch to let you in, planted myself in the way, and you got out with\n me before they could muster their defenses. So, you see, I saved your\n lives.\"\n\n\n Grandma Perkins paused in her narrative and looked up at her audience,\n giving them a withered little smile. \"And if you want to know why,\n well ... I was bored on the\nKismet\n, and I thought how nice it would\n be to run away and join a gang of cutthroat pirates.\"\n\n\n \"She's batty,\" moaned Snake.\n\n\n \"She's lost her marbles,\" muttered another.\n\n\n \"Let's toss her overboard right now,\" said still another.",
"\"Well, you can pull that big box down from the top shelf there, if you\n don't mind. And, I wonder, would you mind calling me Grandma? All my\n children do it and I miss it so.\" She gave him a wrinkled smile that\n was at once wistful and petulant.\n\n\n Johnny laughed in an easy, infectious manner. \"Sure thing, Grandma.\"\n He stretched his long arms up to bring down the heavy bag and found\n himself wondering just how it had gotten up there in the first place.\n He didn't remember ever putting it there for her and Grandma Perkins\n was obviously too frail a woman to have handled such a heavy box by\n herself. He put it on the floor.\n\n\n As she stooped over and extracted a pair of low-heeled, black and\n battered shoes from the box, she asked him, \"Johnny, what was that\n paper I signed this afternoon?\"",
"\"There aren't many friends my age left around any more. So I'm being\n sent to Earth to a home full of dear, sweet old ladies my age, the\n money for which is being provided by my dear, sweet children—all ten\n of them.\" Grandma dabbed a bit of a handkerchief at her eyes. \"The\n rats,\" she muttered under her breath. When she saw her companion was\n smiling she dropped her pretense of crying.\n\n\n \"To be truthful, Johnny, they've grown old and stodgy, all of them.\n And I'm sure they think I've lost most of my marbles. Everything I did\n embarrassed them, so I guess it's for the best, but—\"\n\n\n Grandma Perkins never finished the sentence, for interrupting her came\n the horrendous clang of the\nKismet's\ngeneral alarm, and on its heels,\n charging through the main salon like a rhinoceros in heat, came Captain\n Fogarty.",
"A little while later when Johnny looked into her room to see if she had\n gone, the cabin was empty and the heavy box was back in place in the\n top cabinet.\nThe food that evening was not the very best, Grandma Perkins thought to\n herself, but that was mostly due to her seat. By the time the waiter\n got around to her little cranny most of it was cold. But she didn't\n complain. She enjoyed watching the people with the more expensive\n cabins parade their clothes and their manners at the Captain's table.\n And, it must be admitted, she was more than a trifle envious of them.\n Her acquaintances of the afternoon, Miss Toujours and Mr. Carlton, were\n seated there, Miss Toujours having the place of honor to the Captain's\n right.",
"\"Of course, Agatha never was quite bright,\" Grandma said as she turned\n her head aside as if in sorrow. \"They were all set to put her in an\n institution when she ran off and married the lizard man in a carnival.\n I believe she's still appearing in the show as the bearded lady. A\n pity. She was so pretty, just like you.\"\n\n\n Darling Toujours muttered a few choice words under her breath.",
"\"I figured as much,\" Lamps said dolefully. \"Lookit, Grandma, the best\n thing we can do is to put you off safely at the next place we stop.\n Unless we get you back in one piece the Space Patrol will be on our\n necks forever. So don't go getting any ideas about joining up with us.\"\n\n\n \"Well, the very least you could do for a poor old lady is to feed her,\"\n Grandma told him, her lower lip sticking out in a most petulant manner.\n \"They like to have starved me to death on that\nKismet\n.\"\n\n\n \"We ain't got much fancy in the line of grub....\" Lamps began.\n\n\n \"Just show me the way to the kitchen,\" said Grandma.",
"Johnny Weaver, who had been clearing one of the nearby tables, put down\n a stack of dirty dishes and came over to her. \"I'd like to see the\n pictures, Grandma.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that's very nice of you, Johnny, but—\" she said quickly.\n\n\n \"Really I would, Grandma. Where are they?\"\n\n\n \"I—\" She stopped and the devilment showed in her eyes. Her withered\n little face pursed itself into a smile. \"There aren't any pictures,\n Johnny. I don't carry any. I know their faces all so well I don't have\n to. But any time I want to get rid of somebody I just offer to show\n them pictures of my family. You'd be surprised how effective it is.\"\n\n\n Johnny laughed. \"Why are you going to Earth, anyway, Grandma?\"",
"Lamps O'Toole took the floor. \"Now, wait a minute. We can't do that,\"\n he said loudly. \"We got enough trouble as is. You know what would\n happen to us if the Space Patrol added murder to the list. They'd put\n the whole fleet in after us and track us and our families down to the\n last kid.\" Then he turned to the little old lady to explain.\n\n\n \"Look, lady—\"\n\n\n \"My name is Mrs. Matilda Perkins. You may call me Grandma.\"",
"The old woman sighed. \"It's a long story, Johnny, but you just sit down\n and I'll tell it to you.\"\n\n\n \"I can't sit down in the lounge, but I'll be glad to stand up and\n listen.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'll make it a short story. You see, Johnny, I'm an old woman.\n I'll be 152 this year. And ever since Omar, my husband, died a few\n years ago, I've lived from pillar to post. First with one child and\n then with another. They've all been married for decades now of course,\n with children and grandchildren of their own. And I guess that I just\n get in their way. There just isn't much left in life for a feeble old\n woman like me.\" She sniffled a moment or two as if to cry. Johnny,\n remembering the heavy box in her cabin that got moved up and down\n without his help, suppressed a smile on the word \"feeble.\"",
"Darling Toujours drew back her hand to smack Carlton one in a very\n unlady-like manner when she suddenly realized that they were not alone.\n Her hand froze, poised elegantly in mid-air, as she turned to see a\n newcomer standing at the door.\nThe witness to the impending slap was a withered little lady, scarcely\n five feet tall, with silvered hair, eyes that twinkled like a March\n wind, and a friendly rash of wrinkles that gave her face the kindly,\n weathered appearance of an old stone idol. Her slight figure was lost\n in volumes of black cloth draped on her in a manner that had gone out\n of style at least fifty years before. The little woman coughed politely.\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon,\" she told them in a sweet, high little voice.\n \"I hope I didn't interrupt anything. If you would like to hit the\n gentleman, Miss Toujours, I'll be glad to come back later.\"",
"\"Oh, I'm so glad to hear that,\" she said, but made no move whatsoever\n to leave. Captain Fogarty gave her his hardened stare of the type which\n withered most people where they stood. Mrs. Perkins just smiled sweetly\n at him.\n\n\n His rage getting out of hand, he finally blurted, \"And now, Mrs.\n Perkins, I think you'd better be getting back to your quarters. As you\n know, this is a private lounge for the\nfirst\nclass passengers.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Perkins continued to smile at him. \"Yes, I know. It's lovely,\n isn't it? I'll just go out this way.\" And before anyone could stop her,\n she had moved to the door to Darling Toujours' suite and had opened it,\n stepping inside.\n\n\n \"That's my room, not the door out,\" Darling said loudly.",
"\"PIRATES! PIRATES! We're being attacked by space pirates! You there!\"\n he shouted at Johnny. \"Man your station! And you, Madam, to your\n quarters at once! PIRATES!\" he shouted again and barged through the\n door again and bellowed down the hall to the main bridge.\n\n\n Johnny was off like a startled rabbit, but Grandma moved with serene\n calmness to the door. Maybe, she thought, we're going to have a little\n excitement after all.\n\n\n At the door to the steps leading to her downstairs cabin she paused to\n think.\n\n\n \"If I go down and hide, I'll miss all the fun. Of course, it's safer,\n and an old woman like me shouldn't be up and about when pirates are\n around, but—\" A delicious smile spread over her face as she took her\n scruples firmly in hand and turned to follow the bellowing Captain\n towards the bridge.\nII",
"\"I really wanted to see you, Captain,\" she told him, her battered old\n shoes bringing her fully into the room with little mincing steps. \"The\n Purser says I have to sign a contract of some kind with you, and I\n wanted to know how to write my name. I'm Mrs. Omar K. Perkins, but you\n see, I'm really Mrs. Matilda Perkins because my Omar died a few years\n ago. But I haven't signed my name very much since then and I'm not at\n all sure of which is legal.\" She put one bird-like little hand to\n her throat and clasped the cameo there almost as if it could give her\n support. She looked so small and so frail that Fogarty forgave her the\n intrusion.\n\n\n \"It really doesn't make much difference how you sign the thing, just so\n long as you sign it,\" he blustered. \"Just a mere formality anyway. You\n just sign it any way you like.\" He paused, hoping that she would leave\n now that she had her information."
],
[
"A little while later when Johnny looked into her room to see if she had\n gone, the cabin was empty and the heavy box was back in place in the\n top cabinet.\nThe food that evening was not the very best, Grandma Perkins thought to\n herself, but that was mostly due to her seat. By the time the waiter\n got around to her little cranny most of it was cold. But she didn't\n complain. She enjoyed watching the people with the more expensive\n cabins parade their clothes and their manners at the Captain's table.\n And, it must be admitted, she was more than a trifle envious of them.\n Her acquaintances of the afternoon, Miss Toujours and Mr. Carlton, were\n seated there, Miss Toujours having the place of honor to the Captain's\n right.",
"The old woman sighed. \"It's a long story, Johnny, but you just sit down\n and I'll tell it to you.\"\n\n\n \"I can't sit down in the lounge, but I'll be glad to stand up and\n listen.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'll make it a short story. You see, Johnny, I'm an old woman.\n I'll be 152 this year. And ever since Omar, my husband, died a few\n years ago, I've lived from pillar to post. First with one child and\n then with another. They've all been married for decades now of course,\n with children and grandchildren of their own. And I guess that I just\n get in their way. There just isn't much left in life for a feeble old\n woman like me.\" She sniffled a moment or two as if to cry. Johnny,\n remembering the heavy box in her cabin that got moved up and down\n without his help, suppressed a smile on the word \"feeble.\"",
"\"Well, you can pull that big box down from the top shelf there, if you\n don't mind. And, I wonder, would you mind calling me Grandma? All my\n children do it and I miss it so.\" She gave him a wrinkled smile that\n was at once wistful and petulant.\n\n\n Johnny laughed in an easy, infectious manner. \"Sure thing, Grandma.\"\n He stretched his long arms up to bring down the heavy bag and found\n himself wondering just how it had gotten up there in the first place.\n He didn't remember ever putting it there for her and Grandma Perkins\n was obviously too frail a woman to have handled such a heavy box by\n herself. He put it on the floor.\n\n\n As she stooped over and extracted a pair of low-heeled, black and\n battered shoes from the box, she asked him, \"Johnny, what was that\n paper I signed this afternoon?\"",
"Johnny Weaver, who had been clearing one of the nearby tables, put down\n a stack of dirty dishes and came over to her. \"I'd like to see the\n pictures, Grandma.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that's very nice of you, Johnny, but—\" she said quickly.\n\n\n \"Really I would, Grandma. Where are they?\"\n\n\n \"I—\" She stopped and the devilment showed in her eyes. Her withered\n little face pursed itself into a smile. \"There aren't any pictures,\n Johnny. I don't carry any. I know their faces all so well I don't have\n to. But any time I want to get rid of somebody I just offer to show\n them pictures of my family. You'd be surprised how effective it is.\"\n\n\n Johnny laughed. \"Why are you going to Earth, anyway, Grandma?\"",
"\"But we must all make the best of things as they come. That's what\n Omar, my husband, used to say.\" Grandma paused to wipe away a small\n tear that had gotten lodged in one of her eyes. \"That reminds me,\" she\n said finally, \"I've got a three dimensional picture of Omar right here.\n And pictures of all my children, my ten lovely children. I brought them\n with me specially tonight because I thought you might want to look at\n them. Now, where did I put them?\" Grandma opened her purse and began\n rummaging around in its voluminous confines.\n\n\n Darling and Carlton exchanged horrified glances and then rose silently\n and tip-toed out of the lounge.\n\n\n Grandma looked up from her search. \"Oh, my, they seem to have gone.\"",
"Grandma Perkins sighed. \"It's such a small cabin I don't think anybody\n else would want it. But it's all that I could afford,\" she said,\n smoothing out the wrinkles in her dress with both hands.\n\n\n \"Anything else I can do for you, Grandma?\"\n\n\n \"No, thank you, Johnny. I think I can make it up the steps to the\n dining room by myself.\"",
"\"There aren't many friends my age left around any more. So I'm being\n sent to Earth to a home full of dear, sweet old ladies my age, the\n money for which is being provided by my dear, sweet children—all ten\n of them.\" Grandma dabbed a bit of a handkerchief at her eyes. \"The\n rats,\" she muttered under her breath. When she saw her companion was\n smiling she dropped her pretense of crying.\n\n\n \"To be truthful, Johnny, they've grown old and stodgy, all of them.\n And I'm sure they think I've lost most of my marbles. Everything I did\n embarrassed them, so I guess it's for the best, but—\"\n\n\n Grandma Perkins never finished the sentence, for interrupting her came\n the horrendous clang of the\nKismet's\ngeneral alarm, and on its heels,\n charging through the main salon like a rhinoceros in heat, came Captain\n Fogarty.",
"Snake Simpson was a wiry little man whose tough exterior in no way\n suggested a reptile, except, perhaps, for his eyes which sat too close\n to one another. \"You bet, Skipper. We're full fledged pirates now, just\n like old Captain Blackbrood.\"\n\n\n \"You mean Blackbeard, Snake,\" said Lamps.\n\n\n \"Sure. He used to sit around broodin' up trouble all the time.\"\n\n\n One of the other men piped up. \"And to think we get the pleasurable\n company of the sweetest doll in the whole solar system for free besides\n the money.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, women are no dern good—all of them,\" said Snake.\n\n\n \"Now, Snake, that's no way to talk in front of company. You just\n apologize to the lady,\" Lamps told him. Lamps was six inches taller and\n fifty pounds heavier than Snake. Snake apologized.",
"\"PIRATES! PIRATES! We're being attacked by space pirates! You there!\"\n he shouted at Johnny. \"Man your station! And you, Madam, to your\n quarters at once! PIRATES!\" he shouted again and barged through the\n door again and bellowed down the hall to the main bridge.\n\n\n Johnny was off like a startled rabbit, but Grandma moved with serene\n calmness to the door. Maybe, she thought, we're going to have a little\n excitement after all.\n\n\n At the door to the steps leading to her downstairs cabin she paused to\n think.\n\n\n \"If I go down and hide, I'll miss all the fun. Of course, it's safer,\n and an old woman like me shouldn't be up and about when pirates are\n around, but—\" A delicious smile spread over her face as she took her\n scruples firmly in hand and turned to follow the bellowing Captain\n towards the bridge.\nII",
"\"I was just leaving, Miss Toujours. I hope you and your son have a very\n happy voyage. Good day, Captain Fogarty,\" she called over her shoulder\n as she exited. Carlton E. Carlton's shrill laughter followed her down\n the companionway.\nMrs. Perkins had been lying in her berth reading for less than an hour\n when the knock sounded at her door. She would have preferred to sit up\n and read, but her cabin was so small that there was no room for any\n other furniture besides the bed.\n\n\n \"Come in,\" she called in a small voice.\n\n\n Johnny Weaver, steward for the cheaper cabins, poked his youthful,\n freckled face through the door. \"Howdy, Mrs. Perkins. I wondered if I\n could do anything for you? It's about ten minutes before we eat.\"",
"\"That's better. And now, Miss Toujours, maybe you'd be more\n comfortable without that space suit on,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Oh, no, thank you. I feel much better with it on,\" a small voice said\n over the suit's loudspeaker system.\n\n\n Lamps grinned. \"Oh, come now, Miss Toujours. We ain't going to hurt\n you. I guarantee nobody will lay a finger to you.\"\n\n\n \"But I feel much—much safer, if you know what I mean,\" said the voice.\n\n\n \"Heck. With one of them things on, you can't eat, can't sleep,\n can't—Well, there's lots of things you can't do with one of them\n things on. Besides, we all want to take a little look at you, if you\n don't mind. Snake, you and Willie help the little lady out of her\n attire.\"",
"Johnny leaned back, relaxing against the door. \"Well, STAR—that's\n Stellar Transportation and Atomic Research, you know—is one of\n the thirteen monopolies in this part of the solar system. The \"Big\n Thirteen,\" we call them. STAR charters every space flight in this neck\n of the woods. Well, back in the old days, when space flights were\n scarce, it used to be that you'd pay for a ticket from Saturn to Earth,\n say, and you'd get to Mars and they'd stop for fuel. Maybe somebody\n on Mars would offer a lot of money for your cabin. So STAR would just\n bump you off, refund part of your money and leave you stranded there.\n In order to get the monopoly, they had to promise to stop all that. And\n the Solar Congress makes them sign contracts guaranteeing you that they\n won't put you off against your wishes. Of course, they don't dare do it\n anymore anyway, but that's the law.\"",
"\"Captain Fogarty's men would have cut you to ribbons. So I opened the\n hatch to let you in, planted myself in the way, and you got out with\n me before they could muster their defenses. So, you see, I saved your\n lives.\"\n\n\n Grandma Perkins paused in her narrative and looked up at her audience,\n giving them a withered little smile. \"And if you want to know why,\n well ... I was bored on the\nKismet\n, and I thought how nice it would\n be to run away and join a gang of cutthroat pirates.\"\n\n\n \"She's batty,\" moaned Snake.\n\n\n \"She's lost her marbles,\" muttered another.\n\n\n \"Let's toss her overboard right now,\" said still another.",
"\"That's the one, boys,\" said another voice. \"Let's go.\" Catching hold\n of Grandma's arm, they led her out into the emptiness of free space.\nHalf an hour later, after the pirate ship had blasted far enough away\n from the\nKismet\n, the men in the control room relaxed and began to\n take off their space suits. One of the men who Grandma soon learned was\n Lamps O'Toole, the nominal leader of the pirates, stretched his brawny\n body to ease the crinks out of it and then rubbed his hands together.\n Grandma noticed that he carried a week's beard on his face, as did most\n of the other men.\n\n\n \"Well, that was a good one, eh, Snake?\" said Lamps.",
"As the men approached her, Grandma sensed the game was up. \"Okay,\" she\n told them. \"I give up. I can make it by myself.\" She started to take\n the bulky covering off. She had gotten no more than the headpiece off\n when the truth dawned on her companions.\n\n\n \"Holy Smoke (or something like that),\" said one of the men.\n\n\n \"Nippin' Nebulae,\" said another.\n\n\n \"It ain't Darling Toujours at all!\" cried Lamps.\n\n\n \"It ain't even no woman!\" cried Snake.\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon,\" said Grandma, and quite nonchalantly shed the rest\n of the suit and sat down in a comfortable chair. \"I am Mrs. Matilda\n Perkins.\"",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"I can always get along with a man if he remembers who he is,\" said\n Darling Toujours, the raven-haired, creamy-skinned televideo actress\n whose smoke-and-flame eyes lit fires in hearts all over the solar\n system. She was credited with being the most beautiful woman alive and\n there were few who dared to contradict her when she mentioned it.\n\n\n \"And I can always get along with a woman if she remembers who\nI\nam,\"\n replied Carlton E. Carlton, the acid-tongued author whose biting novels\n had won him universal fame. He leaned his thin, bony body back into the\n comfort of an overstuffed chair and favored the actress with a wicked\n smile.",
"Darling Toujours opened her violet eyes wide in surprise. \"Why, I\n was ... I was ... I—\" The actress uttered a small, gulping sound as\n she recovered her poise. \"Why, I was just going to pat him on the cheek\n for being such a nice boy. You are a nice boy, aren't you, Carlton?\"\n She leaned forward to stroke him gently on the face. Carlton roared\n with laughter and the good Captain colored deeply.\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said the little old woman, \"I'm sorry. I didn't know that he was\n your son.\" Carlton choked suddenly and Darling suffered from a brief\n fit of hysteria.\n\n\n The Captain took command. \"Now, look here, Madam,\" he sputtered. \"What\n is it you want?\"",
"\"So I see,\" said Mrs. Perkins, staring at the opulent furnishings\n with avid pleasure. \"It's such a pretty thing, all done up with\n mother-of-pearl like that, isn't it? And what a pretty lace nightie\n lying on the bed.\" Mrs. Perkins picked up the sheer, gossamer garment\n to examine it. \"You do wear something under it, don't you?\"\n\n\n Darling screeched and darted for the door. She snatched the nightie\n away from Mrs. Perkins and rudely propelled the older woman out the\n door, closing it behind her. \"Captain, this woman must GO!\"",
"The two of them were sitting in the finest lounge of the luxury space\n ship\nKismet\n, enjoying postprandial cocktails with Captain Homer\n Fogarty, the\nKismet's\nrotund commanding officer. The\nKismet\nwas\n blasting through space at close to the speed of light, bound from\n Callisto, one of Jupiter's moons, back to Earth. But none of the two\n hundred Earthbound passengers were conscious of the speed at all.\n\n\n Darling Toujours waved a long cigarette holder at the author. \"Don't\n pay any attention to him, Captain. You know how writers are—always\n putting words in other people's mouths, and not very good ones at that.\"",
"\"I figured as much,\" Lamps said dolefully. \"Lookit, Grandma, the best\n thing we can do is to put you off safely at the next place we stop.\n Unless we get you back in one piece the Space Patrol will be on our\n necks forever. So don't go getting any ideas about joining up with us.\"\n\n\n \"Well, the very least you could do for a poor old lady is to feed her,\"\n Grandma told him, her lower lip sticking out in a most petulant manner.\n \"They like to have starved me to death on that\nKismet\n.\"\n\n\n \"We ain't got much fancy in the line of grub....\" Lamps began.\n\n\n \"Just show me the way to the kitchen,\" said Grandma."
],
[
"\"Captain Fogarty's men would have cut you to ribbons. So I opened the\n hatch to let you in, planted myself in the way, and you got out with\n me before they could muster their defenses. So, you see, I saved your\n lives.\"\n\n\n Grandma Perkins paused in her narrative and looked up at her audience,\n giving them a withered little smile. \"And if you want to know why,\n well ... I was bored on the\nKismet\n, and I thought how nice it would\n be to run away and join a gang of cutthroat pirates.\"\n\n\n \"She's batty,\" moaned Snake.\n\n\n \"She's lost her marbles,\" muttered another.\n\n\n \"Let's toss her overboard right now,\" said still another.",
"GRANDMA PERKINS AND THE SPACE PIRATES\nBy JAMES McCONNELL\nRaven-haired, seductive Darling Toujours'\n \nsmoke-and-flame eyes kindled sparks in hearts\n \nall over the universe. But it took sweet old\n \nGrandma Perkins, of the pirate ship\nDirty\n\n Shame,\nto set the Jupiter moons on fire\n.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories March 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"\"PIRATES! PIRATES! We're being attacked by space pirates! You there!\"\n he shouted at Johnny. \"Man your station! And you, Madam, to your\n quarters at once! PIRATES!\" he shouted again and barged through the\n door again and bellowed down the hall to the main bridge.\n\n\n Johnny was off like a startled rabbit, but Grandma moved with serene\n calmness to the door. Maybe, she thought, we're going to have a little\n excitement after all.\n\n\n At the door to the steps leading to her downstairs cabin she paused to\n think.\n\n\n \"If I go down and hide, I'll miss all the fun. Of course, it's safer,\n and an old woman like me shouldn't be up and about when pirates are\n around, but—\" A delicious smile spread over her face as she took her\n scruples firmly in hand and turned to follow the bellowing Captain\n towards the bridge.\nII",
"\"That's the one, boys,\" said another voice. \"Let's go.\" Catching hold\n of Grandma's arm, they led her out into the emptiness of free space.\nHalf an hour later, after the pirate ship had blasted far enough away\n from the\nKismet\n, the men in the control room relaxed and began to\n take off their space suits. One of the men who Grandma soon learned was\n Lamps O'Toole, the nominal leader of the pirates, stretched his brawny\n body to ease the crinks out of it and then rubbed his hands together.\n Grandma noticed that he carried a week's beard on his face, as did most\n of the other men.\n\n\n \"Well, that was a good one, eh, Snake?\" said Lamps.",
"Grandma watched them as they finished up their food and then she moved\n from her little table over to one of the very comfortable sofas in the\n main lounge. In reality she wasn't supposed to be sitting there, but\n she hoped that she could get away with it. The divans were so much more\n comfortable than her hard, narrow bed that she felt like sitting there\n for a long time, by herself, just thinking.\n\n\n But her hopes met with disappointment. For shortly after she sat down,\n Darling Toujours and Carlton E. Carlton strolled over and sat down\n across from her, not recognizing her at first. Then Carlton spied her.\n\n\n \"Darling! There's that priceless little woman we met this afternoon.\"\n\n\n \"The little hag, you mean,\" Miss Toujours muttered under her breath,\n but loudly enough for Grandma Perkins to hear.",
"\"There aren't many friends my age left around any more. So I'm being\n sent to Earth to a home full of dear, sweet old ladies my age, the\n money for which is being provided by my dear, sweet children—all ten\n of them.\" Grandma dabbed a bit of a handkerchief at her eyes. \"The\n rats,\" she muttered under her breath. When she saw her companion was\n smiling she dropped her pretense of crying.\n\n\n \"To be truthful, Johnny, they've grown old and stodgy, all of them.\n And I'm sure they think I've lost most of my marbles. Everything I did\n embarrassed them, so I guess it's for the best, but—\"\n\n\n Grandma Perkins never finished the sentence, for interrupting her came\n the horrendous clang of the\nKismet's\ngeneral alarm, and on its heels,\n charging through the main salon like a rhinoceros in heat, came Captain\n Fogarty.",
"\"We only want one of you. All the rest of you will be spared if you\n open up the hatches and don't try to make no trouble,\" came the voice\n over the radio.\n\n\n \"Tell them I'd rather all of us be killed than to let one dirty pirate\n on board my ship,\" the Captain shouted to the Communications Officer.\n\n\n \"Oh, my goodness. That doesn't sound very smart,\" Grandma said half\n aloud. And turning from the doorway, she crept back through the\n deserted passageway.\n\n\n The main passenger hatch was not too far from the bridge. Grandma found\n it with ease, and in less than three minutes she had zipped herself\n into one of the emergency-use space suits stowed away beside the port.\n She felt awfully awkward climbing into the monstrous steel and plastic\n contraption, and her small body didn't quite fit the proportions of the\n metallic covering. But once she had maneuvered herself into it, she\n felt quite at ease.",
"\"So I see,\" said Mrs. Perkins, staring at the opulent furnishings\n with avid pleasure. \"It's such a pretty thing, all done up with\n mother-of-pearl like that, isn't it? And what a pretty lace nightie\n lying on the bed.\" Mrs. Perkins picked up the sheer, gossamer garment\n to examine it. \"You do wear something under it, don't you?\"\n\n\n Darling screeched and darted for the door. She snatched the nightie\n away from Mrs. Perkins and rudely propelled the older woman out the\n door, closing it behind her. \"Captain, this woman must GO!\"",
"\"Why, hello, Miss Toujours. And Mr. Carlton too. I hope you'll forgive\n me for this afternoon. I've found out who you were, you see.\"\n\n\n \"Of course we forgive you, Mrs. Jerkins,\" Darling said throatily,\n baring her teeth like a feline.\n\n\n \"My name is Perkins,\" Grandma smiled.\n\n\n \"I hope you don't mind, Toujours, but you know, you remind me a great\n deal of my grandniece, Agatha. She was undoubtedly the most lovely\n child I've ever seen.\"\n\n\n \"Why, thank you, Mrs. Perkins,\" Darling purred, starting to preen just\n a bit. Anything could be forgiven someone who complimented her.",
"A little while later when Johnny looked into her room to see if she had\n gone, the cabin was empty and the heavy box was back in place in the\n top cabinet.\nThe food that evening was not the very best, Grandma Perkins thought to\n herself, but that was mostly due to her seat. By the time the waiter\n got around to her little cranny most of it was cold. But she didn't\n complain. She enjoyed watching the people with the more expensive\n cabins parade their clothes and their manners at the Captain's table.\n And, it must be admitted, she was more than a trifle envious of them.\n Her acquaintances of the afternoon, Miss Toujours and Mr. Carlton, were\n seated there, Miss Toujours having the place of honor to the Captain's\n right.",
"As the men approached her, Grandma sensed the game was up. \"Okay,\" she\n told them. \"I give up. I can make it by myself.\" She started to take\n the bulky covering off. She had gotten no more than the headpiece off\n when the truth dawned on her companions.\n\n\n \"Holy Smoke (or something like that),\" said one of the men.\n\n\n \"Nippin' Nebulae,\" said another.\n\n\n \"It ain't Darling Toujours at all!\" cried Lamps.\n\n\n \"It ain't even no woman!\" cried Snake.\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon,\" said Grandma, and quite nonchalantly shed the rest\n of the suit and sat down in a comfortable chair. \"I am Mrs. Matilda\n Perkins.\"",
"Grandma Perkins sighed. \"It's such a small cabin I don't think anybody\n else would want it. But it's all that I could afford,\" she said,\n smoothing out the wrinkles in her dress with both hands.\n\n\n \"Anything else I can do for you, Grandma?\"\n\n\n \"No, thank you, Johnny. I think I can make it up the steps to the\n dining room by myself.\"",
"\"Okay, Grandma, look. You really fixed us good. To begin with, we ain't\n really pirates. We used to operate this tub as a freighter between the\n Jupiter moons. But STAR got a monopoly on all space flights, including\n freight, and they just froze us out. We can't operate nowhere in the\n solar system, unless we get their permission. And they just ain't\n giving permission to nobody these days.\" Lamps flopped into one of the\n control seats and lit a cigarette.\n\n\n \"So, when us good, honest men couldn't find any work because of STAR,\n and we didn't want to give up working in space, we just ups and decides\n to become pirates. This was our first job, and we sure did need the\n money we could have gotten out of Darling Toujours' studios for ransom.\"",
"\"Oh, I'm so glad to hear that,\" she said, but made no move whatsoever\n to leave. Captain Fogarty gave her his hardened stare of the type which\n withered most people where they stood. Mrs. Perkins just smiled sweetly\n at him.\n\n\n His rage getting out of hand, he finally blurted, \"And now, Mrs.\n Perkins, I think you'd better be getting back to your quarters. As you\n know, this is a private lounge for the\nfirst\nclass passengers.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Perkins continued to smile at him. \"Yes, I know. It's lovely,\n isn't it? I'll just go out this way.\" And before anyone could stop her,\n she had moved to the door to Darling Toujours' suite and had opened it,\n stepping inside.\n\n\n \"That's my room, not the door out,\" Darling said loudly.",
"Johnny Weaver, who had been clearing one of the nearby tables, put down\n a stack of dirty dishes and came over to her. \"I'd like to see the\n pictures, Grandma.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that's very nice of you, Johnny, but—\" she said quickly.\n\n\n \"Really I would, Grandma. Where are they?\"\n\n\n \"I—\" She stopped and the devilment showed in her eyes. Her withered\n little face pursed itself into a smile. \"There aren't any pictures,\n Johnny. I don't carry any. I know their faces all so well I don't have\n to. But any time I want to get rid of somebody I just offer to show\n them pictures of my family. You'd be surprised how effective it is.\"\n\n\n Johnny laughed. \"Why are you going to Earth, anyway, Grandma?\"",
"Lamps sighed. \"Now, we got you instead, no chance of getting the ransom\n money, and to top it all off, we'll be wanted for piracy by the Space\n Patrol.\"\n\n\n \"Well, it doesn't seem to me that you're ever going to be good pirates\n at this rate,\" Grandma told him. \"You should have known better than to\n take a woman at her word.\"\n\n\n \"I don't suppose you got any rich relatives what would pay to get you\n back?\" suggested Snake hopefully.\n\n\n \"I haven't got any rich relatives period,\" she said pertly. Then she\n added, \"But my ten children might scrape up a little cash for you if\n you promised you wouldn't bring me back at all.\"",
"Captain Fogarty snorted. \"Fat lot of good he'll do us. Wait for him,\n eh? Well, we'll just blow that pirate out of the sky right now. Stand\n by the guns!\"\n\n\n \"The guns are useless,\" whined the Gunnery Officer. \"The atomics that\n run them won't operate at all. What will we do?\"\n\n\n \"Ahoy, STAR\nKismet\n. Open up your hatches when we arrive and let us\n in, or we won't spare a man of you,\" boomed the loudspeaker.\n\n\n \"Pirates going to board us. How nice,\" muttered Grandma to herself as\n she eavesdropped just outside the door to the bridge.\n\n\n \"They'll never get through the hatches alive. At least our small arms\n still work. We'll kill 'em all!\" cried Captain Fogarty.",
"\"I really wanted to see you, Captain,\" she told him, her battered old\n shoes bringing her fully into the room with little mincing steps. \"The\n Purser says I have to sign a contract of some kind with you, and I\n wanted to know how to write my name. I'm Mrs. Omar K. Perkins, but you\n see, I'm really Mrs. Matilda Perkins because my Omar died a few years\n ago. But I haven't signed my name very much since then and I'm not at\n all sure of which is legal.\" She put one bird-like little hand to\n her throat and clasped the cameo there almost as if it could give her\n support. She looked so small and so frail that Fogarty forgave her the\n intrusion.\n\n\n \"It really doesn't make much difference how you sign the thing, just so\n long as you sign it,\" he blustered. \"Just a mere formality anyway. You\n just sign it any way you like.\" He paused, hoping that she would leave\n now that she had her information.",
"\"I figured as much,\" Lamps said dolefully. \"Lookit, Grandma, the best\n thing we can do is to put you off safely at the next place we stop.\n Unless we get you back in one piece the Space Patrol will be on our\n necks forever. So don't go getting any ideas about joining up with us.\"\n\n\n \"Well, the very least you could do for a poor old lady is to feed her,\"\n Grandma told him, her lower lip sticking out in a most petulant manner.\n \"They like to have starved me to death on that\nKismet\n.\"\n\n\n \"We ain't got much fancy in the line of grub....\" Lamps began.\n\n\n \"Just show me the way to the kitchen,\" said Grandma.",
"Lamps O'Toole took the floor. \"Now, wait a minute. We can't do that,\"\n he said loudly. \"We got enough trouble as is. You know what would\n happen to us if the Space Patrol added murder to the list. They'd put\n the whole fleet in after us and track us and our families down to the\n last kid.\" Then he turned to the little old lady to explain.\n\n\n \"Look, lady—\"\n\n\n \"My name is Mrs. Matilda Perkins. You may call me Grandma.\""
],
[
"\"Captain Fogarty's men would have cut you to ribbons. So I opened the\n hatch to let you in, planted myself in the way, and you got out with\n me before they could muster their defenses. So, you see, I saved your\n lives.\"\n\n\n Grandma Perkins paused in her narrative and looked up at her audience,\n giving them a withered little smile. \"And if you want to know why,\n well ... I was bored on the\nKismet\n, and I thought how nice it would\n be to run away and join a gang of cutthroat pirates.\"\n\n\n \"She's batty,\" moaned Snake.\n\n\n \"She's lost her marbles,\" muttered another.\n\n\n \"Let's toss her overboard right now,\" said still another.",
"\"I really wanted to see you, Captain,\" she told him, her battered old\n shoes bringing her fully into the room with little mincing steps. \"The\n Purser says I have to sign a contract of some kind with you, and I\n wanted to know how to write my name. I'm Mrs. Omar K. Perkins, but you\n see, I'm really Mrs. Matilda Perkins because my Omar died a few years\n ago. But I haven't signed my name very much since then and I'm not at\n all sure of which is legal.\" She put one bird-like little hand to\n her throat and clasped the cameo there almost as if it could give her\n support. She looked so small and so frail that Fogarty forgave her the\n intrusion.\n\n\n \"It really doesn't make much difference how you sign the thing, just so\n long as you sign it,\" he blustered. \"Just a mere formality anyway. You\n just sign it any way you like.\" He paused, hoping that she would leave\n now that she had her information.",
"\"There aren't many friends my age left around any more. So I'm being\n sent to Earth to a home full of dear, sweet old ladies my age, the\n money for which is being provided by my dear, sweet children—all ten\n of them.\" Grandma dabbed a bit of a handkerchief at her eyes. \"The\n rats,\" she muttered under her breath. When she saw her companion was\n smiling she dropped her pretense of crying.\n\n\n \"To be truthful, Johnny, they've grown old and stodgy, all of them.\n And I'm sure they think I've lost most of my marbles. Everything I did\n embarrassed them, so I guess it's for the best, but—\"\n\n\n Grandma Perkins never finished the sentence, for interrupting her came\n the horrendous clang of the\nKismet's\ngeneral alarm, and on its heels,\n charging through the main salon like a rhinoceros in heat, came Captain\n Fogarty.",
"The two of them were sitting in the finest lounge of the luxury space\n ship\nKismet\n, enjoying postprandial cocktails with Captain Homer\n Fogarty, the\nKismet's\nrotund commanding officer. The\nKismet\nwas\n blasting through space at close to the speed of light, bound from\n Callisto, one of Jupiter's moons, back to Earth. But none of the two\n hundred Earthbound passengers were conscious of the speed at all.\n\n\n Darling Toujours waved a long cigarette holder at the author. \"Don't\n pay any attention to him, Captain. You know how writers are—always\n putting words in other people's mouths, and not very good ones at that.\"",
"Captain Fogarty snorted. \"Fat lot of good he'll do us. Wait for him,\n eh? Well, we'll just blow that pirate out of the sky right now. Stand\n by the guns!\"\n\n\n \"The guns are useless,\" whined the Gunnery Officer. \"The atomics that\n run them won't operate at all. What will we do?\"\n\n\n \"Ahoy, STAR\nKismet\n. Open up your hatches when we arrive and let us\n in, or we won't spare a man of you,\" boomed the loudspeaker.\n\n\n \"Pirates going to board us. How nice,\" muttered Grandma to herself as\n she eavesdropped just outside the door to the bridge.\n\n\n \"They'll never get through the hatches alive. At least our small arms\n still work. We'll kill 'em all!\" cried Captain Fogarty.",
"\"Oh, I'm so glad to hear that,\" she said, but made no move whatsoever\n to leave. Captain Fogarty gave her his hardened stare of the type which\n withered most people where they stood. Mrs. Perkins just smiled sweetly\n at him.\n\n\n His rage getting out of hand, he finally blurted, \"And now, Mrs.\n Perkins, I think you'd better be getting back to your quarters. As you\n know, this is a private lounge for the\nfirst\nclass passengers.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Perkins continued to smile at him. \"Yes, I know. It's lovely,\n isn't it? I'll just go out this way.\" And before anyone could stop her,\n she had moved to the door to Darling Toujours' suite and had opened it,\n stepping inside.\n\n\n \"That's my room, not the door out,\" Darling said loudly.",
"\"I must say that I think Miss Toujours has the prettiest mouth I've\n ever seen,\" boomed Captain Fogarty, his voice sounding something like\n a cross between a foghorn and a steam whistle. And he was not merely\n being gallant, for many a lonely night as he flew the darkness between\n Earth and the many planets, he had dreamed of caressing those lips.\n\n\n \"And I think you are definitely a man of discriminating taste,\" said\n Darling demurely, crossing her legs and arranging her dress to expose a\n little more of the Toujours charms to the Captain's eye.\n\n\n Carlton smiled casually at the exposed flesh. \"It's all very pretty,\n my dear,\" he said smugly. \"But we've seen it all before and in space\n you're supposed to act like a lady, if you can act that well.\"",
"\"I was just leaving, Miss Toujours. I hope you and your son have a very\n happy voyage. Good day, Captain Fogarty,\" she called over her shoulder\n as she exited. Carlton E. Carlton's shrill laughter followed her down\n the companionway.\nMrs. Perkins had been lying in her berth reading for less than an hour\n when the knock sounded at her door. She would have preferred to sit up\n and read, but her cabin was so small that there was no room for any\n other furniture besides the bed.\n\n\n \"Come in,\" she called in a small voice.\n\n\n Johnny Weaver, steward for the cheaper cabins, poked his youthful,\n freckled face through the door. \"Howdy, Mrs. Perkins. I wondered if I\n could do anything for you? It's about ten minutes before we eat.\"",
"Snake Simpson was a wiry little man whose tough exterior in no way\n suggested a reptile, except, perhaps, for his eyes which sat too close\n to one another. \"You bet, Skipper. We're full fledged pirates now, just\n like old Captain Blackbrood.\"\n\n\n \"You mean Blackbeard, Snake,\" said Lamps.\n\n\n \"Sure. He used to sit around broodin' up trouble all the time.\"\n\n\n One of the other men piped up. \"And to think we get the pleasurable\n company of the sweetest doll in the whole solar system for free besides\n the money.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, women are no dern good—all of them,\" said Snake.\n\n\n \"Now, Snake, that's no way to talk in front of company. You just\n apologize to the lady,\" Lamps told him. Lamps was six inches taller and\n fifty pounds heavier than Snake. Snake apologized.",
"Darling Toujours opened her violet eyes wide in surprise. \"Why, I\n was ... I was ... I—\" The actress uttered a small, gulping sound as\n she recovered her poise. \"Why, I was just going to pat him on the cheek\n for being such a nice boy. You are a nice boy, aren't you, Carlton?\"\n She leaned forward to stroke him gently on the face. Carlton roared\n with laughter and the good Captain colored deeply.\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said the little old woman, \"I'm sorry. I didn't know that he was\n your son.\" Carlton choked suddenly and Darling suffered from a brief\n fit of hysteria.\n\n\n The Captain took command. \"Now, look here, Madam,\" he sputtered. \"What\n is it you want?\"",
"The Starship\nKismet\nwas the pride and joy of Stellar Transportation\n and Atomic Research. It was outfitted with every known safety device\n and the control room was masterfully planned for maximum efficiency.\n But the astral architect who designed her never anticipated the\n situation facing her at the present. The\nKismet's\nbridge was a welter\n of confusion.\n\n\n The Senior Watch Officer was shouting at his assistant, the Navigator\n was cursing out the Pilot and the Gunnery Officer, whose job had been\n a sinecure until now, was bellowing at them all. Above the hubbub,\n suddenly, came the raucous voice of Captain Fogarty as he stalked onto\n the bridge.\n\n\n \"What in great space has happened to the motors? Why are we losing\n speed?\"\n\n\n The Senior Watch Officer saluted and shouted, \"Engine Room reports the\n engines have all stopped, Sir. Don't know why. We're operating the\n lights and vents on emergency power.\"",
"\"So I see,\" said Mrs. Perkins, staring at the opulent furnishings\n with avid pleasure. \"It's such a pretty thing, all done up with\n mother-of-pearl like that, isn't it? And what a pretty lace nightie\n lying on the bed.\" Mrs. Perkins picked up the sheer, gossamer garment\n to examine it. \"You do wear something under it, don't you?\"\n\n\n Darling screeched and darted for the door. She snatched the nightie\n away from Mrs. Perkins and rudely propelled the older woman out the\n door, closing it behind her. \"Captain, this woman must GO!\"",
"\"But we must all make the best of things as they come. That's what\n Omar, my husband, used to say.\" Grandma paused to wipe away a small\n tear that had gotten lodged in one of her eyes. \"That reminds me,\" she\n said finally, \"I've got a three dimensional picture of Omar right here.\n And pictures of all my children, my ten lovely children. I brought them\n with me specially tonight because I thought you might want to look at\n them. Now, where did I put them?\" Grandma opened her purse and began\n rummaging around in its voluminous confines.\n\n\n Darling and Carlton exchanged horrified glances and then rose silently\n and tip-toed out of the lounge.\n\n\n Grandma looked up from her search. \"Oh, my, they seem to have gone.\"",
"\"That's the one, boys,\" said another voice. \"Let's go.\" Catching hold\n of Grandma's arm, they led her out into the emptiness of free space.\nHalf an hour later, after the pirate ship had blasted far enough away\n from the\nKismet\n, the men in the control room relaxed and began to\n take off their space suits. One of the men who Grandma soon learned was\n Lamps O'Toole, the nominal leader of the pirates, stretched his brawny\n body to ease the crinks out of it and then rubbed his hands together.\n Grandma noticed that he carried a week's beard on his face, as did most\n of the other men.\n\n\n \"Well, that was a good one, eh, Snake?\" said Lamps.",
"A little while later when Johnny looked into her room to see if she had\n gone, the cabin was empty and the heavy box was back in place in the\n top cabinet.\nThe food that evening was not the very best, Grandma Perkins thought to\n herself, but that was mostly due to her seat. By the time the waiter\n got around to her little cranny most of it was cold. But she didn't\n complain. She enjoyed watching the people with the more expensive\n cabins parade their clothes and their manners at the Captain's table.\n And, it must be admitted, she was more than a trifle envious of them.\n Her acquaintances of the afternoon, Miss Toujours and Mr. Carlton, were\n seated there, Miss Toujours having the place of honor to the Captain's\n right.",
"\"We only want one of you. All the rest of you will be spared if you\n open up the hatches and don't try to make no trouble,\" came the voice\n over the radio.\n\n\n \"Tell them I'd rather all of us be killed than to let one dirty pirate\n on board my ship,\" the Captain shouted to the Communications Officer.\n\n\n \"Oh, my goodness. That doesn't sound very smart,\" Grandma said half\n aloud. And turning from the doorway, she crept back through the\n deserted passageway.\n\n\n The main passenger hatch was not too far from the bridge. Grandma found\n it with ease, and in less than three minutes she had zipped herself\n into one of the emergency-use space suits stowed away beside the port.\n She felt awfully awkward climbing into the monstrous steel and plastic\n contraption, and her small body didn't quite fit the proportions of the\n metallic covering. But once she had maneuvered herself into it, she\n felt quite at ease.",
"\"PIRATES! PIRATES! We're being attacked by space pirates! You there!\"\n he shouted at Johnny. \"Man your station! And you, Madam, to your\n quarters at once! PIRATES!\" he shouted again and barged through the\n door again and bellowed down the hall to the main bridge.\n\n\n Johnny was off like a startled rabbit, but Grandma moved with serene\n calmness to the door. Maybe, she thought, we're going to have a little\n excitement after all.\n\n\n At the door to the steps leading to her downstairs cabin she paused to\n think.\n\n\n \"If I go down and hide, I'll miss all the fun. Of course, it's safer,\n and an old woman like me shouldn't be up and about when pirates are\n around, but—\" A delicious smile spread over her face as she took her\n scruples firmly in hand and turned to follow the bellowing Captain\n towards the bridge.\nII",
"As the men approached her, Grandma sensed the game was up. \"Okay,\" she\n told them. \"I give up. I can make it by myself.\" She started to take\n the bulky covering off. She had gotten no more than the headpiece off\n when the truth dawned on her companions.\n\n\n \"Holy Smoke (or something like that),\" said one of the men.\n\n\n \"Nippin' Nebulae,\" said another.\n\n\n \"It ain't Darling Toujours at all!\" cried Lamps.\n\n\n \"It ain't even no woman!\" cried Snake.\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon,\" said Grandma, and quite nonchalantly shed the rest\n of the suit and sat down in a comfortable chair. \"I am Mrs. Matilda\n Perkins.\"",
"\"Why, hello, Miss Toujours. And Mr. Carlton too. I hope you'll forgive\n me for this afternoon. I've found out who you were, you see.\"\n\n\n \"Of course we forgive you, Mrs. Jerkins,\" Darling said throatily,\n baring her teeth like a feline.\n\n\n \"My name is Perkins,\" Grandma smiled.\n\n\n \"I hope you don't mind, Toujours, but you know, you remind me a great\n deal of my grandniece, Agatha. She was undoubtedly the most lovely\n child I've ever seen.\"\n\n\n \"Why, thank you, Mrs. Perkins,\" Darling purred, starting to preen just\n a bit. Anything could be forgiven someone who complimented her.",
"The old woman sighed. \"It's a long story, Johnny, but you just sit down\n and I'll tell it to you.\"\n\n\n \"I can't sit down in the lounge, but I'll be glad to stand up and\n listen.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'll make it a short story. You see, Johnny, I'm an old woman.\n I'll be 152 this year. And ever since Omar, my husband, died a few\n years ago, I've lived from pillar to post. First with one child and\n then with another. They've all been married for decades now of course,\n with children and grandchildren of their own. And I guess that I just\n get in their way. There just isn't much left in life for a feeble old\n woman like me.\" She sniffled a moment or two as if to cry. Johnny,\n remembering the heavy box in her cabin that got moved up and down\n without his help, suppressed a smile on the word \"feeble.\""
],
[
"\"Captain Fogarty's men would have cut you to ribbons. So I opened the\n hatch to let you in, planted myself in the way, and you got out with\n me before they could muster their defenses. So, you see, I saved your\n lives.\"\n\n\n Grandma Perkins paused in her narrative and looked up at her audience,\n giving them a withered little smile. \"And if you want to know why,\n well ... I was bored on the\nKismet\n, and I thought how nice it would\n be to run away and join a gang of cutthroat pirates.\"\n\n\n \"She's batty,\" moaned Snake.\n\n\n \"She's lost her marbles,\" muttered another.\n\n\n \"Let's toss her overboard right now,\" said still another.",
"\"PIRATES! PIRATES! We're being attacked by space pirates! You there!\"\n he shouted at Johnny. \"Man your station! And you, Madam, to your\n quarters at once! PIRATES!\" he shouted again and barged through the\n door again and bellowed down the hall to the main bridge.\n\n\n Johnny was off like a startled rabbit, but Grandma moved with serene\n calmness to the door. Maybe, she thought, we're going to have a little\n excitement after all.\n\n\n At the door to the steps leading to her downstairs cabin she paused to\n think.\n\n\n \"If I go down and hide, I'll miss all the fun. Of course, it's safer,\n and an old woman like me shouldn't be up and about when pirates are\n around, but—\" A delicious smile spread over her face as she took her\n scruples firmly in hand and turned to follow the bellowing Captain\n towards the bridge.\nII",
"\"We only want one of you. All the rest of you will be spared if you\n open up the hatches and don't try to make no trouble,\" came the voice\n over the radio.\n\n\n \"Tell them I'd rather all of us be killed than to let one dirty pirate\n on board my ship,\" the Captain shouted to the Communications Officer.\n\n\n \"Oh, my goodness. That doesn't sound very smart,\" Grandma said half\n aloud. And turning from the doorway, she crept back through the\n deserted passageway.\n\n\n The main passenger hatch was not too far from the bridge. Grandma found\n it with ease, and in less than three minutes she had zipped herself\n into one of the emergency-use space suits stowed away beside the port.\n She felt awfully awkward climbing into the monstrous steel and plastic\n contraption, and her small body didn't quite fit the proportions of the\n metallic covering. But once she had maneuvered herself into it, she\n felt quite at ease.",
"\"That's the one, boys,\" said another voice. \"Let's go.\" Catching hold\n of Grandma's arm, they led her out into the emptiness of free space.\nHalf an hour later, after the pirate ship had blasted far enough away\n from the\nKismet\n, the men in the control room relaxed and began to\n take off their space suits. One of the men who Grandma soon learned was\n Lamps O'Toole, the nominal leader of the pirates, stretched his brawny\n body to ease the crinks out of it and then rubbed his hands together.\n Grandma noticed that he carried a week's beard on his face, as did most\n of the other men.\n\n\n \"Well, that was a good one, eh, Snake?\" said Lamps.",
"Captain Fogarty snorted. \"Fat lot of good he'll do us. Wait for him,\n eh? Well, we'll just blow that pirate out of the sky right now. Stand\n by the guns!\"\n\n\n \"The guns are useless,\" whined the Gunnery Officer. \"The atomics that\n run them won't operate at all. What will we do?\"\n\n\n \"Ahoy, STAR\nKismet\n. Open up your hatches when we arrive and let us\n in, or we won't spare a man of you,\" boomed the loudspeaker.\n\n\n \"Pirates going to board us. How nice,\" muttered Grandma to herself as\n she eavesdropped just outside the door to the bridge.\n\n\n \"They'll never get through the hatches alive. At least our small arms\n still work. We'll kill 'em all!\" cried Captain Fogarty.",
"GRANDMA PERKINS AND THE SPACE PIRATES\nBy JAMES McCONNELL\nRaven-haired, seductive Darling Toujours'\n \nsmoke-and-flame eyes kindled sparks in hearts\n \nall over the universe. But it took sweet old\n \nGrandma Perkins, of the pirate ship\nDirty\n\n Shame,\nto set the Jupiter moons on fire\n.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories March 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"\"There aren't many friends my age left around any more. So I'm being\n sent to Earth to a home full of dear, sweet old ladies my age, the\n money for which is being provided by my dear, sweet children—all ten\n of them.\" Grandma dabbed a bit of a handkerchief at her eyes. \"The\n rats,\" she muttered under her breath. When she saw her companion was\n smiling she dropped her pretense of crying.\n\n\n \"To be truthful, Johnny, they've grown old and stodgy, all of them.\n And I'm sure they think I've lost most of my marbles. Everything I did\n embarrassed them, so I guess it's for the best, but—\"\n\n\n Grandma Perkins never finished the sentence, for interrupting her came\n the horrendous clang of the\nKismet's\ngeneral alarm, and on its heels,\n charging through the main salon like a rhinoceros in heat, came Captain\n Fogarty.",
"A little while later when Johnny looked into her room to see if she had\n gone, the cabin was empty and the heavy box was back in place in the\n top cabinet.\nThe food that evening was not the very best, Grandma Perkins thought to\n herself, but that was mostly due to her seat. By the time the waiter\n got around to her little cranny most of it was cold. But she didn't\n complain. She enjoyed watching the people with the more expensive\n cabins parade their clothes and their manners at the Captain's table.\n And, it must be admitted, she was more than a trifle envious of them.\n Her acquaintances of the afternoon, Miss Toujours and Mr. Carlton, were\n seated there, Miss Toujours having the place of honor to the Captain's\n right.",
"Grandma Perkins sighed. \"It's such a small cabin I don't think anybody\n else would want it. But it's all that I could afford,\" she said,\n smoothing out the wrinkles in her dress with both hands.\n\n\n \"Anything else I can do for you, Grandma?\"\n\n\n \"No, thank you, Johnny. I think I can make it up the steps to the\n dining room by myself.\"",
"As the men approached her, Grandma sensed the game was up. \"Okay,\" she\n told them. \"I give up. I can make it by myself.\" She started to take\n the bulky covering off. She had gotten no more than the headpiece off\n when the truth dawned on her companions.\n\n\n \"Holy Smoke (or something like that),\" said one of the men.\n\n\n \"Nippin' Nebulae,\" said another.\n\n\n \"It ain't Darling Toujours at all!\" cried Lamps.\n\n\n \"It ain't even no woman!\" cried Snake.\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon,\" said Grandma, and quite nonchalantly shed the rest\n of the suit and sat down in a comfortable chair. \"I am Mrs. Matilda\n Perkins.\"",
"Grandma watched them as they finished up their food and then she moved\n from her little table over to one of the very comfortable sofas in the\n main lounge. In reality she wasn't supposed to be sitting there, but\n she hoped that she could get away with it. The divans were so much more\n comfortable than her hard, narrow bed that she felt like sitting there\n for a long time, by herself, just thinking.\n\n\n But her hopes met with disappointment. For shortly after she sat down,\n Darling Toujours and Carlton E. Carlton strolled over and sat down\n across from her, not recognizing her at first. Then Carlton spied her.\n\n\n \"Darling! There's that priceless little woman we met this afternoon.\"\n\n\n \"The little hag, you mean,\" Miss Toujours muttered under her breath,\n but loudly enough for Grandma Perkins to hear.",
"\"Oh, I'm so glad to hear that,\" she said, but made no move whatsoever\n to leave. Captain Fogarty gave her his hardened stare of the type which\n withered most people where they stood. Mrs. Perkins just smiled sweetly\n at him.\n\n\n His rage getting out of hand, he finally blurted, \"And now, Mrs.\n Perkins, I think you'd better be getting back to your quarters. As you\n know, this is a private lounge for the\nfirst\nclass passengers.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Perkins continued to smile at him. \"Yes, I know. It's lovely,\n isn't it? I'll just go out this way.\" And before anyone could stop her,\n she had moved to the door to Darling Toujours' suite and had opened it,\n stepping inside.\n\n\n \"That's my room, not the door out,\" Darling said loudly.",
"Lamps sighed. \"Now, we got you instead, no chance of getting the ransom\n money, and to top it all off, we'll be wanted for piracy by the Space\n Patrol.\"\n\n\n \"Well, it doesn't seem to me that you're ever going to be good pirates\n at this rate,\" Grandma told him. \"You should have known better than to\n take a woman at her word.\"\n\n\n \"I don't suppose you got any rich relatives what would pay to get you\n back?\" suggested Snake hopefully.\n\n\n \"I haven't got any rich relatives period,\" she said pertly. Then she\n added, \"But my ten children might scrape up a little cash for you if\n you promised you wouldn't bring me back at all.\"",
"\"I figured as much,\" Lamps said dolefully. \"Lookit, Grandma, the best\n thing we can do is to put you off safely at the next place we stop.\n Unless we get you back in one piece the Space Patrol will be on our\n necks forever. So don't go getting any ideas about joining up with us.\"\n\n\n \"Well, the very least you could do for a poor old lady is to feed her,\"\n Grandma told him, her lower lip sticking out in a most petulant manner.\n \"They like to have starved me to death on that\nKismet\n.\"\n\n\n \"We ain't got much fancy in the line of grub....\" Lamps began.\n\n\n \"Just show me the way to the kitchen,\" said Grandma.",
"\"Okay, Grandma, look. You really fixed us good. To begin with, we ain't\n really pirates. We used to operate this tub as a freighter between the\n Jupiter moons. But STAR got a monopoly on all space flights, including\n freight, and they just froze us out. We can't operate nowhere in the\n solar system, unless we get their permission. And they just ain't\n giving permission to nobody these days.\" Lamps flopped into one of the\n control seats and lit a cigarette.\n\n\n \"So, when us good, honest men couldn't find any work because of STAR,\n and we didn't want to give up working in space, we just ups and decides\n to become pirates. This was our first job, and we sure did need the\n money we could have gotten out of Darling Toujours' studios for ransom.\"",
"\"I was just leaving, Miss Toujours. I hope you and your son have a very\n happy voyage. Good day, Captain Fogarty,\" she called over her shoulder\n as she exited. Carlton E. Carlton's shrill laughter followed her down\n the companionway.\nMrs. Perkins had been lying in her berth reading for less than an hour\n when the knock sounded at her door. She would have preferred to sit up\n and read, but her cabin was so small that there was no room for any\n other furniture besides the bed.\n\n\n \"Come in,\" she called in a small voice.\n\n\n Johnny Weaver, steward for the cheaper cabins, poked his youthful,\n freckled face through the door. \"Howdy, Mrs. Perkins. I wondered if I\n could do anything for you? It's about ten minutes before we eat.\"",
"Opening the inner door to the airlock, she clanked into the little\n room. As the door shut behind her, she pressed the cycling button and\n evacuated the air from the lock.\n\n\n A minute or so later she heard poundings outside the airlock and quite\n calmly she reached out a mailed fist and turned a switch plainly\n marked:\nEMERGENCY LOCK\n\n DO NOT OPERATE IN FLIGHT\n\n\n The outer hatch opened almost immediately. The radio in Grandma's suit\n crackled with static. \"What are you doing here?\" demanded a voice over\n the suit radio.\n\n\n \"Pirates! I'm hiding from the pirates. They'll never find me here!\" she\n told them in a voice she hoped sounded full of panic.\n\n\n \"What's your name?\" asked the voice.\n\n\n \"Darling Toujours, famous television actress,\" she lied quite calmly.",
"\"I really wanted to see you, Captain,\" she told him, her battered old\n shoes bringing her fully into the room with little mincing steps. \"The\n Purser says I have to sign a contract of some kind with you, and I\n wanted to know how to write my name. I'm Mrs. Omar K. Perkins, but you\n see, I'm really Mrs. Matilda Perkins because my Omar died a few years\n ago. But I haven't signed my name very much since then and I'm not at\n all sure of which is legal.\" She put one bird-like little hand to\n her throat and clasped the cameo there almost as if it could give her\n support. She looked so small and so frail that Fogarty forgave her the\n intrusion.\n\n\n \"It really doesn't make much difference how you sign the thing, just so\n long as you sign it,\" he blustered. \"Just a mere formality anyway. You\n just sign it any way you like.\" He paused, hoping that she would leave\n now that she had her information.",
"Lamps O'Toole took the floor. \"Now, wait a minute. We can't do that,\"\n he said loudly. \"We got enough trouble as is. You know what would\n happen to us if the Space Patrol added murder to the list. They'd put\n the whole fleet in after us and track us and our families down to the\n last kid.\" Then he turned to the little old lady to explain.\n\n\n \"Look, lady—\"\n\n\n \"My name is Mrs. Matilda Perkins. You may call me Grandma.\"",
"\"Why, hello, Miss Toujours. And Mr. Carlton too. I hope you'll forgive\n me for this afternoon. I've found out who you were, you see.\"\n\n\n \"Of course we forgive you, Mrs. Jerkins,\" Darling said throatily,\n baring her teeth like a feline.\n\n\n \"My name is Perkins,\" Grandma smiled.\n\n\n \"I hope you don't mind, Toujours, but you know, you remind me a great\n deal of my grandniece, Agatha. She was undoubtedly the most lovely\n child I've ever seen.\"\n\n\n \"Why, thank you, Mrs. Perkins,\" Darling purred, starting to preen just\n a bit. Anything could be forgiven someone who complimented her."
],
[
"As the men approached her, Grandma sensed the game was up. \"Okay,\" she\n told them. \"I give up. I can make it by myself.\" She started to take\n the bulky covering off. She had gotten no more than the headpiece off\n when the truth dawned on her companions.\n\n\n \"Holy Smoke (or something like that),\" said one of the men.\n\n\n \"Nippin' Nebulae,\" said another.\n\n\n \"It ain't Darling Toujours at all!\" cried Lamps.\n\n\n \"It ain't even no woman!\" cried Snake.\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon,\" said Grandma, and quite nonchalantly shed the rest\n of the suit and sat down in a comfortable chair. \"I am Mrs. Matilda\n Perkins.\"",
"\"That's better. And now, Miss Toujours, maybe you'd be more\n comfortable without that space suit on,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Oh, no, thank you. I feel much better with it on,\" a small voice said\n over the suit's loudspeaker system.\n\n\n Lamps grinned. \"Oh, come now, Miss Toujours. We ain't going to hurt\n you. I guarantee nobody will lay a finger to you.\"\n\n\n \"But I feel much—much safer, if you know what I mean,\" said the voice.\n\n\n \"Heck. With one of them things on, you can't eat, can't sleep,\n can't—Well, there's lots of things you can't do with one of them\n things on. Besides, we all want to take a little look at you, if you\n don't mind. Snake, you and Willie help the little lady out of her\n attire.\"",
"The two of them were sitting in the finest lounge of the luxury space\n ship\nKismet\n, enjoying postprandial cocktails with Captain Homer\n Fogarty, the\nKismet's\nrotund commanding officer. The\nKismet\nwas\n blasting through space at close to the speed of light, bound from\n Callisto, one of Jupiter's moons, back to Earth. But none of the two\n hundred Earthbound passengers were conscious of the speed at all.\n\n\n Darling Toujours waved a long cigarette holder at the author. \"Don't\n pay any attention to him, Captain. You know how writers are—always\n putting words in other people's mouths, and not very good ones at that.\"",
"The Starship\nKismet\nwas the pride and joy of Stellar Transportation\n and Atomic Research. It was outfitted with every known safety device\n and the control room was masterfully planned for maximum efficiency.\n But the astral architect who designed her never anticipated the\n situation facing her at the present. The\nKismet's\nbridge was a welter\n of confusion.\n\n\n The Senior Watch Officer was shouting at his assistant, the Navigator\n was cursing out the Pilot and the Gunnery Officer, whose job had been\n a sinecure until now, was bellowing at them all. Above the hubbub,\n suddenly, came the raucous voice of Captain Fogarty as he stalked onto\n the bridge.\n\n\n \"What in great space has happened to the motors? Why are we losing\n speed?\"\n\n\n The Senior Watch Officer saluted and shouted, \"Engine Room reports the\n engines have all stopped, Sir. Don't know why. We're operating the\n lights and vents on emergency power.\"",
"\"That's the one, boys,\" said another voice. \"Let's go.\" Catching hold\n of Grandma's arm, they led her out into the emptiness of free space.\nHalf an hour later, after the pirate ship had blasted far enough away\n from the\nKismet\n, the men in the control room relaxed and began to\n take off their space suits. One of the men who Grandma soon learned was\n Lamps O'Toole, the nominal leader of the pirates, stretched his brawny\n body to ease the crinks out of it and then rubbed his hands together.\n Grandma noticed that he carried a week's beard on his face, as did most\n of the other men.\n\n\n \"Well, that was a good one, eh, Snake?\" said Lamps.",
"Opening the inner door to the airlock, she clanked into the little\n room. As the door shut behind her, she pressed the cycling button and\n evacuated the air from the lock.\n\n\n A minute or so later she heard poundings outside the airlock and quite\n calmly she reached out a mailed fist and turned a switch plainly\n marked:\nEMERGENCY LOCK\n\n DO NOT OPERATE IN FLIGHT\n\n\n The outer hatch opened almost immediately. The radio in Grandma's suit\n crackled with static. \"What are you doing here?\" demanded a voice over\n the suit radio.\n\n\n \"Pirates! I'm hiding from the pirates. They'll never find me here!\" she\n told them in a voice she hoped sounded full of panic.\n\n\n \"What's your name?\" asked the voice.\n\n\n \"Darling Toujours, famous television actress,\" she lied quite calmly.",
"Captain Fogarty snorted. \"Fat lot of good he'll do us. Wait for him,\n eh? Well, we'll just blow that pirate out of the sky right now. Stand\n by the guns!\"\n\n\n \"The guns are useless,\" whined the Gunnery Officer. \"The atomics that\n run them won't operate at all. What will we do?\"\n\n\n \"Ahoy, STAR\nKismet\n. Open up your hatches when we arrive and let us\n in, or we won't spare a man of you,\" boomed the loudspeaker.\n\n\n \"Pirates going to board us. How nice,\" muttered Grandma to herself as\n she eavesdropped just outside the door to the bridge.\n\n\n \"They'll never get through the hatches alive. At least our small arms\n still work. We'll kill 'em all!\" cried Captain Fogarty.",
"\"But we must all make the best of things as they come. That's what\n Omar, my husband, used to say.\" Grandma paused to wipe away a small\n tear that had gotten lodged in one of her eyes. \"That reminds me,\" she\n said finally, \"I've got a three dimensional picture of Omar right here.\n And pictures of all my children, my ten lovely children. I brought them\n with me specially tonight because I thought you might want to look at\n them. Now, where did I put them?\" Grandma opened her purse and began\n rummaging around in its voluminous confines.\n\n\n Darling and Carlton exchanged horrified glances and then rose silently\n and tip-toed out of the lounge.\n\n\n Grandma looked up from her search. \"Oh, my, they seem to have gone.\"",
"\"We only want one of you. All the rest of you will be spared if you\n open up the hatches and don't try to make no trouble,\" came the voice\n over the radio.\n\n\n \"Tell them I'd rather all of us be killed than to let one dirty pirate\n on board my ship,\" the Captain shouted to the Communications Officer.\n\n\n \"Oh, my goodness. That doesn't sound very smart,\" Grandma said half\n aloud. And turning from the doorway, she crept back through the\n deserted passageway.\n\n\n The main passenger hatch was not too far from the bridge. Grandma found\n it with ease, and in less than three minutes she had zipped herself\n into one of the emergency-use space suits stowed away beside the port.\n She felt awfully awkward climbing into the monstrous steel and plastic\n contraption, and her small body didn't quite fit the proportions of the\n metallic covering. But once she had maneuvered herself into it, she\n felt quite at ease.",
"\"PIRATES! PIRATES! We're being attacked by space pirates! You there!\"\n he shouted at Johnny. \"Man your station! And you, Madam, to your\n quarters at once! PIRATES!\" he shouted again and barged through the\n door again and bellowed down the hall to the main bridge.\n\n\n Johnny was off like a startled rabbit, but Grandma moved with serene\n calmness to the door. Maybe, she thought, we're going to have a little\n excitement after all.\n\n\n At the door to the steps leading to her downstairs cabin she paused to\n think.\n\n\n \"If I go down and hide, I'll miss all the fun. Of course, it's safer,\n and an old woman like me shouldn't be up and about when pirates are\n around, but—\" A delicious smile spread over her face as she took her\n scruples firmly in hand and turned to follow the bellowing Captain\n towards the bridge.\nII",
"The old woman sighed. \"It's a long story, Johnny, but you just sit down\n and I'll tell it to you.\"\n\n\n \"I can't sit down in the lounge, but I'll be glad to stand up and\n listen.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'll make it a short story. You see, Johnny, I'm an old woman.\n I'll be 152 this year. And ever since Omar, my husband, died a few\n years ago, I've lived from pillar to post. First with one child and\n then with another. They've all been married for decades now of course,\n with children and grandchildren of their own. And I guess that I just\n get in their way. There just isn't much left in life for a feeble old\n woman like me.\" She sniffled a moment or two as if to cry. Johnny,\n remembering the heavy box in her cabin that got moved up and down\n without his help, suppressed a smile on the word \"feeble.\"",
"\"I must say that I think Miss Toujours has the prettiest mouth I've\n ever seen,\" boomed Captain Fogarty, his voice sounding something like\n a cross between a foghorn and a steam whistle. And he was not merely\n being gallant, for many a lonely night as he flew the darkness between\n Earth and the many planets, he had dreamed of caressing those lips.\n\n\n \"And I think you are definitely a man of discriminating taste,\" said\n Darling demurely, crossing her legs and arranging her dress to expose a\n little more of the Toujours charms to the Captain's eye.\n\n\n Carlton smiled casually at the exposed flesh. \"It's all very pretty,\n my dear,\" he said smugly. \"But we've seen it all before and in space\n you're supposed to act like a lady, if you can act that well.\"",
"The Communications Officer spoke up. \"The pirate ship reports that\n they're responsible, Sir. They say they've got a new device that will\n leave us without atomic power for as long as they like.\"\n\n\n As if to confirm this, over the loudspeaker came a voice. \"Ahoy, STAR\nKismet\n. Stand by for boarders. If you don't open up to us, we'll\n blast you off the map.\"\n\n\n \"Pirates! Attacking us! Incredible!\" cried the Captain. \"There are no\n pirates any more. What have we got a Space Patrol for? Where in blazes\n is the Space Patrol anyway?\"\n\n\n The Communications Officer gulped. \"Er, ah, we got in contact with\n Commodore Trumble. He says his ship can get here in ten hours anyway,\n and for us to wait for him.\"",
"\"There aren't many friends my age left around any more. So I'm being\n sent to Earth to a home full of dear, sweet old ladies my age, the\n money for which is being provided by my dear, sweet children—all ten\n of them.\" Grandma dabbed a bit of a handkerchief at her eyes. \"The\n rats,\" she muttered under her breath. When she saw her companion was\n smiling she dropped her pretense of crying.\n\n\n \"To be truthful, Johnny, they've grown old and stodgy, all of them.\n And I'm sure they think I've lost most of my marbles. Everything I did\n embarrassed them, so I guess it's for the best, but—\"\n\n\n Grandma Perkins never finished the sentence, for interrupting her came\n the horrendous clang of the\nKismet's\ngeneral alarm, and on its heels,\n charging through the main salon like a rhinoceros in heat, came Captain\n Fogarty.",
"\"So I see,\" said Mrs. Perkins, staring at the opulent furnishings\n with avid pleasure. \"It's such a pretty thing, all done up with\n mother-of-pearl like that, isn't it? And what a pretty lace nightie\n lying on the bed.\" Mrs. Perkins picked up the sheer, gossamer garment\n to examine it. \"You do wear something under it, don't you?\"\n\n\n Darling screeched and darted for the door. She snatched the nightie\n away from Mrs. Perkins and rudely propelled the older woman out the\n door, closing it behind her. \"Captain, this woman must GO!\"",
"\"Okay, Grandma, look. You really fixed us good. To begin with, we ain't\n really pirates. We used to operate this tub as a freighter between the\n Jupiter moons. But STAR got a monopoly on all space flights, including\n freight, and they just froze us out. We can't operate nowhere in the\n solar system, unless we get their permission. And they just ain't\n giving permission to nobody these days.\" Lamps flopped into one of the\n control seats and lit a cigarette.\n\n\n \"So, when us good, honest men couldn't find any work because of STAR,\n and we didn't want to give up working in space, we just ups and decides\n to become pirates. This was our first job, and we sure did need the\n money we could have gotten out of Darling Toujours' studios for ransom.\"",
"\"Do you mean not very good words or not very good mouths, my dear?\"\n Carlton asked. The solar system's most famous actress clamped her\n scarlet lips shut with rage. It would take someone like Carlton E.\n Carlton, she knew, to point out the one minor blemish in an otherwise\n perfect body—her slightly over-sized mouth.\n\n\n She began to wish that she had never left Callisto, that she had\n cancelled her passage on the\nKismet\nwhen she learned that Carlton\n was to be a fellow passenger. But her studio had wired her to return\n to Earth immediately to make a new series of three dimensional video\n films. And the\nKismet\nwas the only first class space ship flying to\n Earth for two weeks. So she had kept her ticket in spite of Carlton.",
"Johnny leaned back, relaxing against the door. \"Well, STAR—that's\n Stellar Transportation and Atomic Research, you know—is one of\n the thirteen monopolies in this part of the solar system. The \"Big\n Thirteen,\" we call them. STAR charters every space flight in this neck\n of the woods. Well, back in the old days, when space flights were\n scarce, it used to be that you'd pay for a ticket from Saturn to Earth,\n say, and you'd get to Mars and they'd stop for fuel. Maybe somebody\n on Mars would offer a lot of money for your cabin. So STAR would just\n bump you off, refund part of your money and leave you stranded there.\n In order to get the monopoly, they had to promise to stop all that. And\n the Solar Congress makes them sign contracts guaranteeing you that they\n won't put you off against your wishes. Of course, they don't dare do it\n anymore anyway, but that's the law.\"",
"Lamps O'Toole took the floor. \"Now, wait a minute. We can't do that,\"\n he said loudly. \"We got enough trouble as is. You know what would\n happen to us if the Space Patrol added murder to the list. They'd put\n the whole fleet in after us and track us and our families down to the\n last kid.\" Then he turned to the little old lady to explain.\n\n\n \"Look, lady—\"\n\n\n \"My name is Mrs. Matilda Perkins. You may call me Grandma.\"",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"I can always get along with a man if he remembers who he is,\" said\n Darling Toujours, the raven-haired, creamy-skinned televideo actress\n whose smoke-and-flame eyes lit fires in hearts all over the solar\n system. She was credited with being the most beautiful woman alive and\n there were few who dared to contradict her when she mentioned it.\n\n\n \"And I can always get along with a woman if she remembers who\nI\nam,\"\n replied Carlton E. Carlton, the acid-tongued author whose biting novels\n had won him universal fame. He leaned his thin, bony body back into the\n comfort of an overstuffed chair and favored the actress with a wicked\n smile."
],
[
"As the men approached her, Grandma sensed the game was up. \"Okay,\" she\n told them. \"I give up. I can make it by myself.\" She started to take\n the bulky covering off. She had gotten no more than the headpiece off\n when the truth dawned on her companions.\n\n\n \"Holy Smoke (or something like that),\" said one of the men.\n\n\n \"Nippin' Nebulae,\" said another.\n\n\n \"It ain't Darling Toujours at all!\" cried Lamps.\n\n\n \"It ain't even no woman!\" cried Snake.\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon,\" said Grandma, and quite nonchalantly shed the rest\n of the suit and sat down in a comfortable chair. \"I am Mrs. Matilda\n Perkins.\"",
"Johnny Weaver, who had been clearing one of the nearby tables, put down\n a stack of dirty dishes and came over to her. \"I'd like to see the\n pictures, Grandma.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that's very nice of you, Johnny, but—\" she said quickly.\n\n\n \"Really I would, Grandma. Where are they?\"\n\n\n \"I—\" She stopped and the devilment showed in her eyes. Her withered\n little face pursed itself into a smile. \"There aren't any pictures,\n Johnny. I don't carry any. I know their faces all so well I don't have\n to. But any time I want to get rid of somebody I just offer to show\n them pictures of my family. You'd be surprised how effective it is.\"\n\n\n Johnny laughed. \"Why are you going to Earth, anyway, Grandma?\"",
"The two of them were sitting in the finest lounge of the luxury space\n ship\nKismet\n, enjoying postprandial cocktails with Captain Homer\n Fogarty, the\nKismet's\nrotund commanding officer. The\nKismet\nwas\n blasting through space at close to the speed of light, bound from\n Callisto, one of Jupiter's moons, back to Earth. But none of the two\n hundred Earthbound passengers were conscious of the speed at all.\n\n\n Darling Toujours waved a long cigarette holder at the author. \"Don't\n pay any attention to him, Captain. You know how writers are—always\n putting words in other people's mouths, and not very good ones at that.\"",
"\"Do you mean not very good words or not very good mouths, my dear?\"\n Carlton asked. The solar system's most famous actress clamped her\n scarlet lips shut with rage. It would take someone like Carlton E.\n Carlton, she knew, to point out the one minor blemish in an otherwise\n perfect body—her slightly over-sized mouth.\n\n\n She began to wish that she had never left Callisto, that she had\n cancelled her passage on the\nKismet\nwhen she learned that Carlton\n was to be a fellow passenger. But her studio had wired her to return\n to Earth immediately to make a new series of three dimensional video\n films. And the\nKismet\nwas the only first class space ship flying to\n Earth for two weeks. So she had kept her ticket in spite of Carlton.",
"\"I must say that I think Miss Toujours has the prettiest mouth I've\n ever seen,\" boomed Captain Fogarty, his voice sounding something like\n a cross between a foghorn and a steam whistle. And he was not merely\n being gallant, for many a lonely night as he flew the darkness between\n Earth and the many planets, he had dreamed of caressing those lips.\n\n\n \"And I think you are definitely a man of discriminating taste,\" said\n Darling demurely, crossing her legs and arranging her dress to expose a\n little more of the Toujours charms to the Captain's eye.\n\n\n Carlton smiled casually at the exposed flesh. \"It's all very pretty,\n my dear,\" he said smugly. \"But we've seen it all before and in space\n you're supposed to act like a lady, if you can act that well.\"",
"\"But we must all make the best of things as they come. That's what\n Omar, my husband, used to say.\" Grandma paused to wipe away a small\n tear that had gotten lodged in one of her eyes. \"That reminds me,\" she\n said finally, \"I've got a three dimensional picture of Omar right here.\n And pictures of all my children, my ten lovely children. I brought them\n with me specially tonight because I thought you might want to look at\n them. Now, where did I put them?\" Grandma opened her purse and began\n rummaging around in its voluminous confines.\n\n\n Darling and Carlton exchanged horrified glances and then rose silently\n and tip-toed out of the lounge.\n\n\n Grandma looked up from her search. \"Oh, my, they seem to have gone.\"",
"\"There aren't many friends my age left around any more. So I'm being\n sent to Earth to a home full of dear, sweet old ladies my age, the\n money for which is being provided by my dear, sweet children—all ten\n of them.\" Grandma dabbed a bit of a handkerchief at her eyes. \"The\n rats,\" she muttered under her breath. When she saw her companion was\n smiling she dropped her pretense of crying.\n\n\n \"To be truthful, Johnny, they've grown old and stodgy, all of them.\n And I'm sure they think I've lost most of my marbles. Everything I did\n embarrassed them, so I guess it's for the best, but—\"\n\n\n Grandma Perkins never finished the sentence, for interrupting her came\n the horrendous clang of the\nKismet's\ngeneral alarm, and on its heels,\n charging through the main salon like a rhinoceros in heat, came Captain\n Fogarty.",
"\"So I see,\" said Mrs. Perkins, staring at the opulent furnishings\n with avid pleasure. \"It's such a pretty thing, all done up with\n mother-of-pearl like that, isn't it? And what a pretty lace nightie\n lying on the bed.\" Mrs. Perkins picked up the sheer, gossamer garment\n to examine it. \"You do wear something under it, don't you?\"\n\n\n Darling screeched and darted for the door. She snatched the nightie\n away from Mrs. Perkins and rudely propelled the older woman out the\n door, closing it behind her. \"Captain, this woman must GO!\"",
"Lamps O'Toole took the floor. \"Now, wait a minute. We can't do that,\"\n he said loudly. \"We got enough trouble as is. You know what would\n happen to us if the Space Patrol added murder to the list. They'd put\n the whole fleet in after us and track us and our families down to the\n last kid.\" Then he turned to the little old lady to explain.\n\n\n \"Look, lady—\"\n\n\n \"My name is Mrs. Matilda Perkins. You may call me Grandma.\"",
"\"That's better. And now, Miss Toujours, maybe you'd be more\n comfortable without that space suit on,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Oh, no, thank you. I feel much better with it on,\" a small voice said\n over the suit's loudspeaker system.\n\n\n Lamps grinned. \"Oh, come now, Miss Toujours. We ain't going to hurt\n you. I guarantee nobody will lay a finger to you.\"\n\n\n \"But I feel much—much safer, if you know what I mean,\" said the voice.\n\n\n \"Heck. With one of them things on, you can't eat, can't sleep,\n can't—Well, there's lots of things you can't do with one of them\n things on. Besides, we all want to take a little look at you, if you\n don't mind. Snake, you and Willie help the little lady out of her\n attire.\"",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"I can always get along with a man if he remembers who he is,\" said\n Darling Toujours, the raven-haired, creamy-skinned televideo actress\n whose smoke-and-flame eyes lit fires in hearts all over the solar\n system. She was credited with being the most beautiful woman alive and\n there were few who dared to contradict her when she mentioned it.\n\n\n \"And I can always get along with a woman if she remembers who\nI\nam,\"\n replied Carlton E. Carlton, the acid-tongued author whose biting novels\n had won him universal fame. He leaned his thin, bony body back into the\n comfort of an overstuffed chair and favored the actress with a wicked\n smile.",
"\"Of course, Agatha never was quite bright,\" Grandma said as she turned\n her head aside as if in sorrow. \"They were all set to put her in an\n institution when she ran off and married the lizard man in a carnival.\n I believe she's still appearing in the show as the bearded lady. A\n pity. She was so pretty, just like you.\"\n\n\n Darling Toujours muttered a few choice words under her breath.",
"The old woman sighed. \"It's a long story, Johnny, but you just sit down\n and I'll tell it to you.\"\n\n\n \"I can't sit down in the lounge, but I'll be glad to stand up and\n listen.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'll make it a short story. You see, Johnny, I'm an old woman.\n I'll be 152 this year. And ever since Omar, my husband, died a few\n years ago, I've lived from pillar to post. First with one child and\n then with another. They've all been married for decades now of course,\n with children and grandchildren of their own. And I guess that I just\n get in their way. There just isn't much left in life for a feeble old\n woman like me.\" She sniffled a moment or two as if to cry. Johnny,\n remembering the heavy box in her cabin that got moved up and down\n without his help, suppressed a smile on the word \"feeble.\"",
"Grandma watched them as they finished up their food and then she moved\n from her little table over to one of the very comfortable sofas in the\n main lounge. In reality she wasn't supposed to be sitting there, but\n she hoped that she could get away with it. The divans were so much more\n comfortable than her hard, narrow bed that she felt like sitting there\n for a long time, by herself, just thinking.\n\n\n But her hopes met with disappointment. For shortly after she sat down,\n Darling Toujours and Carlton E. Carlton strolled over and sat down\n across from her, not recognizing her at first. Then Carlton spied her.\n\n\n \"Darling! There's that priceless little woman we met this afternoon.\"\n\n\n \"The little hag, you mean,\" Miss Toujours muttered under her breath,\n but loudly enough for Grandma Perkins to hear.",
"\"Captain Fogarty's men would have cut you to ribbons. So I opened the\n hatch to let you in, planted myself in the way, and you got out with\n me before they could muster their defenses. So, you see, I saved your\n lives.\"\n\n\n Grandma Perkins paused in her narrative and looked up at her audience,\n giving them a withered little smile. \"And if you want to know why,\n well ... I was bored on the\nKismet\n, and I thought how nice it would\n be to run away and join a gang of cutthroat pirates.\"\n\n\n \"She's batty,\" moaned Snake.\n\n\n \"She's lost her marbles,\" muttered another.\n\n\n \"Let's toss her overboard right now,\" said still another.",
"\"Oh, that? Why that was just a contract for passage, Grandma. You\n guaranteed to pay them so much for the flight, which you've already\n done, and they guaranteed that you wouldn't be put off against your\n will until you reached your destination.\"\n\n\n \"But why do we have to have a contract?\"",
"Opening the inner door to the airlock, she clanked into the little\n room. As the door shut behind her, she pressed the cycling button and\n evacuated the air from the lock.\n\n\n A minute or so later she heard poundings outside the airlock and quite\n calmly she reached out a mailed fist and turned a switch plainly\n marked:\nEMERGENCY LOCK\n\n DO NOT OPERATE IN FLIGHT\n\n\n The outer hatch opened almost immediately. The radio in Grandma's suit\n crackled with static. \"What are you doing here?\" demanded a voice over\n the suit radio.\n\n\n \"Pirates! I'm hiding from the pirates. They'll never find me here!\" she\n told them in a voice she hoped sounded full of panic.\n\n\n \"What's your name?\" asked the voice.\n\n\n \"Darling Toujours, famous television actress,\" she lied quite calmly.",
"Johnny leaned back, relaxing against the door. \"Well, STAR—that's\n Stellar Transportation and Atomic Research, you know—is one of\n the thirteen monopolies in this part of the solar system. The \"Big\n Thirteen,\" we call them. STAR charters every space flight in this neck\n of the woods. Well, back in the old days, when space flights were\n scarce, it used to be that you'd pay for a ticket from Saturn to Earth,\n say, and you'd get to Mars and they'd stop for fuel. Maybe somebody\n on Mars would offer a lot of money for your cabin. So STAR would just\n bump you off, refund part of your money and leave you stranded there.\n In order to get the monopoly, they had to promise to stop all that. And\n the Solar Congress makes them sign contracts guaranteeing you that they\n won't put you off against your wishes. Of course, they don't dare do it\n anymore anyway, but that's the law.\"",
"Darling Toujours drew back her hand to smack Carlton one in a very\n unlady-like manner when she suddenly realized that they were not alone.\n Her hand froze, poised elegantly in mid-air, as she turned to see a\n newcomer standing at the door.\nThe witness to the impending slap was a withered little lady, scarcely\n five feet tall, with silvered hair, eyes that twinkled like a March\n wind, and a friendly rash of wrinkles that gave her face the kindly,\n weathered appearance of an old stone idol. Her slight figure was lost\n in volumes of black cloth draped on her in a manner that had gone out\n of style at least fifty years before. The little woman coughed politely.\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon,\" she told them in a sweet, high little voice.\n \"I hope I didn't interrupt anything. If you would like to hit the\n gentleman, Miss Toujours, I'll be glad to come back later.\"",
"\"That's the one, boys,\" said another voice. \"Let's go.\" Catching hold\n of Grandma's arm, they led her out into the emptiness of free space.\nHalf an hour later, after the pirate ship had blasted far enough away\n from the\nKismet\n, the men in the control room relaxed and began to\n take off their space suits. One of the men who Grandma soon learned was\n Lamps O'Toole, the nominal leader of the pirates, stretched his brawny\n body to ease the crinks out of it and then rubbed his hands together.\n Grandma noticed that he carried a week's beard on his face, as did most\n of the other men.\n\n\n \"Well, that was a good one, eh, Snake?\" said Lamps."
],
[
"The old woman sighed. \"It's a long story, Johnny, but you just sit down\n and I'll tell it to you.\"\n\n\n \"I can't sit down in the lounge, but I'll be glad to stand up and\n listen.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'll make it a short story. You see, Johnny, I'm an old woman.\n I'll be 152 this year. And ever since Omar, my husband, died a few\n years ago, I've lived from pillar to post. First with one child and\n then with another. They've all been married for decades now of course,\n with children and grandchildren of their own. And I guess that I just\n get in their way. There just isn't much left in life for a feeble old\n woman like me.\" She sniffled a moment or two as if to cry. Johnny,\n remembering the heavy box in her cabin that got moved up and down\n without his help, suppressed a smile on the word \"feeble.\"",
"\"But we must all make the best of things as they come. That's what\n Omar, my husband, used to say.\" Grandma paused to wipe away a small\n tear that had gotten lodged in one of her eyes. \"That reminds me,\" she\n said finally, \"I've got a three dimensional picture of Omar right here.\n And pictures of all my children, my ten lovely children. I brought them\n with me specially tonight because I thought you might want to look at\n them. Now, where did I put them?\" Grandma opened her purse and began\n rummaging around in its voluminous confines.\n\n\n Darling and Carlton exchanged horrified glances and then rose silently\n and tip-toed out of the lounge.\n\n\n Grandma looked up from her search. \"Oh, my, they seem to have gone.\"",
"As the men approached her, Grandma sensed the game was up. \"Okay,\" she\n told them. \"I give up. I can make it by myself.\" She started to take\n the bulky covering off. She had gotten no more than the headpiece off\n when the truth dawned on her companions.\n\n\n \"Holy Smoke (or something like that),\" said one of the men.\n\n\n \"Nippin' Nebulae,\" said another.\n\n\n \"It ain't Darling Toujours at all!\" cried Lamps.\n\n\n \"It ain't even no woman!\" cried Snake.\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon,\" said Grandma, and quite nonchalantly shed the rest\n of the suit and sat down in a comfortable chair. \"I am Mrs. Matilda\n Perkins.\"",
"\"So I see,\" said Mrs. Perkins, staring at the opulent furnishings\n with avid pleasure. \"It's such a pretty thing, all done up with\n mother-of-pearl like that, isn't it? And what a pretty lace nightie\n lying on the bed.\" Mrs. Perkins picked up the sheer, gossamer garment\n to examine it. \"You do wear something under it, don't you?\"\n\n\n Darling screeched and darted for the door. She snatched the nightie\n away from Mrs. Perkins and rudely propelled the older woman out the\n door, closing it behind her. \"Captain, this woman must GO!\"",
"\"Captain Fogarty's men would have cut you to ribbons. So I opened the\n hatch to let you in, planted myself in the way, and you got out with\n me before they could muster their defenses. So, you see, I saved your\n lives.\"\n\n\n Grandma Perkins paused in her narrative and looked up at her audience,\n giving them a withered little smile. \"And if you want to know why,\n well ... I was bored on the\nKismet\n, and I thought how nice it would\n be to run away and join a gang of cutthroat pirates.\"\n\n\n \"She's batty,\" moaned Snake.\n\n\n \"She's lost her marbles,\" muttered another.\n\n\n \"Let's toss her overboard right now,\" said still another.",
"Grandma Perkins sighed. \"It's such a small cabin I don't think anybody\n else would want it. But it's all that I could afford,\" she said,\n smoothing out the wrinkles in her dress with both hands.\n\n\n \"Anything else I can do for you, Grandma?\"\n\n\n \"No, thank you, Johnny. I think I can make it up the steps to the\n dining room by myself.\"",
"\"PIRATES! PIRATES! We're being attacked by space pirates! You there!\"\n he shouted at Johnny. \"Man your station! And you, Madam, to your\n quarters at once! PIRATES!\" he shouted again and barged through the\n door again and bellowed down the hall to the main bridge.\n\n\n Johnny was off like a startled rabbit, but Grandma moved with serene\n calmness to the door. Maybe, she thought, we're going to have a little\n excitement after all.\n\n\n At the door to the steps leading to her downstairs cabin she paused to\n think.\n\n\n \"If I go down and hide, I'll miss all the fun. Of course, it's safer,\n and an old woman like me shouldn't be up and about when pirates are\n around, but—\" A delicious smile spread over her face as she took her\n scruples firmly in hand and turned to follow the bellowing Captain\n towards the bridge.\nII",
"\"There aren't many friends my age left around any more. So I'm being\n sent to Earth to a home full of dear, sweet old ladies my age, the\n money for which is being provided by my dear, sweet children—all ten\n of them.\" Grandma dabbed a bit of a handkerchief at her eyes. \"The\n rats,\" she muttered under her breath. When she saw her companion was\n smiling she dropped her pretense of crying.\n\n\n \"To be truthful, Johnny, they've grown old and stodgy, all of them.\n And I'm sure they think I've lost most of my marbles. Everything I did\n embarrassed them, so I guess it's for the best, but—\"\n\n\n Grandma Perkins never finished the sentence, for interrupting her came\n the horrendous clang of the\nKismet's\ngeneral alarm, and on its heels,\n charging through the main salon like a rhinoceros in heat, came Captain\n Fogarty.",
"Grandma watched them as they finished up their food and then she moved\n from her little table over to one of the very comfortable sofas in the\n main lounge. In reality she wasn't supposed to be sitting there, but\n she hoped that she could get away with it. The divans were so much more\n comfortable than her hard, narrow bed that she felt like sitting there\n for a long time, by herself, just thinking.\n\n\n But her hopes met with disappointment. For shortly after she sat down,\n Darling Toujours and Carlton E. Carlton strolled over and sat down\n across from her, not recognizing her at first. Then Carlton spied her.\n\n\n \"Darling! There's that priceless little woman we met this afternoon.\"\n\n\n \"The little hag, you mean,\" Miss Toujours muttered under her breath,\n but loudly enough for Grandma Perkins to hear.",
"A little while later when Johnny looked into her room to see if she had\n gone, the cabin was empty and the heavy box was back in place in the\n top cabinet.\nThe food that evening was not the very best, Grandma Perkins thought to\n herself, but that was mostly due to her seat. By the time the waiter\n got around to her little cranny most of it was cold. But she didn't\n complain. She enjoyed watching the people with the more expensive\n cabins parade their clothes and their manners at the Captain's table.\n And, it must be admitted, she was more than a trifle envious of them.\n Her acquaintances of the afternoon, Miss Toujours and Mr. Carlton, were\n seated there, Miss Toujours having the place of honor to the Captain's\n right.",
"\"Why, hello, Miss Toujours. And Mr. Carlton too. I hope you'll forgive\n me for this afternoon. I've found out who you were, you see.\"\n\n\n \"Of course we forgive you, Mrs. Jerkins,\" Darling said throatily,\n baring her teeth like a feline.\n\n\n \"My name is Perkins,\" Grandma smiled.\n\n\n \"I hope you don't mind, Toujours, but you know, you remind me a great\n deal of my grandniece, Agatha. She was undoubtedly the most lovely\n child I've ever seen.\"\n\n\n \"Why, thank you, Mrs. Perkins,\" Darling purred, starting to preen just\n a bit. Anything could be forgiven someone who complimented her.",
"Darling Toujours drew back her hand to smack Carlton one in a very\n unlady-like manner when she suddenly realized that they were not alone.\n Her hand froze, poised elegantly in mid-air, as she turned to see a\n newcomer standing at the door.\nThe witness to the impending slap was a withered little lady, scarcely\n five feet tall, with silvered hair, eyes that twinkled like a March\n wind, and a friendly rash of wrinkles that gave her face the kindly,\n weathered appearance of an old stone idol. Her slight figure was lost\n in volumes of black cloth draped on her in a manner that had gone out\n of style at least fifty years before. The little woman coughed politely.\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon,\" she told them in a sweet, high little voice.\n \"I hope I didn't interrupt anything. If you would like to hit the\n gentleman, Miss Toujours, I'll be glad to come back later.\"",
"The two of them were sitting in the finest lounge of the luxury space\n ship\nKismet\n, enjoying postprandial cocktails with Captain Homer\n Fogarty, the\nKismet's\nrotund commanding officer. The\nKismet\nwas\n blasting through space at close to the speed of light, bound from\n Callisto, one of Jupiter's moons, back to Earth. But none of the two\n hundred Earthbound passengers were conscious of the speed at all.\n\n\n Darling Toujours waved a long cigarette holder at the author. \"Don't\n pay any attention to him, Captain. You know how writers are—always\n putting words in other people's mouths, and not very good ones at that.\"",
"\"We only want one of you. All the rest of you will be spared if you\n open up the hatches and don't try to make no trouble,\" came the voice\n over the radio.\n\n\n \"Tell them I'd rather all of us be killed than to let one dirty pirate\n on board my ship,\" the Captain shouted to the Communications Officer.\n\n\n \"Oh, my goodness. That doesn't sound very smart,\" Grandma said half\n aloud. And turning from the doorway, she crept back through the\n deserted passageway.\n\n\n The main passenger hatch was not too far from the bridge. Grandma found\n it with ease, and in less than three minutes she had zipped herself\n into one of the emergency-use space suits stowed away beside the port.\n She felt awfully awkward climbing into the monstrous steel and plastic\n contraption, and her small body didn't quite fit the proportions of the\n metallic covering. But once she had maneuvered herself into it, she\n felt quite at ease.",
"Johnny Weaver, who had been clearing one of the nearby tables, put down\n a stack of dirty dishes and came over to her. \"I'd like to see the\n pictures, Grandma.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that's very nice of you, Johnny, but—\" she said quickly.\n\n\n \"Really I would, Grandma. Where are they?\"\n\n\n \"I—\" She stopped and the devilment showed in her eyes. Her withered\n little face pursed itself into a smile. \"There aren't any pictures,\n Johnny. I don't carry any. I know their faces all so well I don't have\n to. But any time I want to get rid of somebody I just offer to show\n them pictures of my family. You'd be surprised how effective it is.\"\n\n\n Johnny laughed. \"Why are you going to Earth, anyway, Grandma?\"",
"\"Well, you can pull that big box down from the top shelf there, if you\n don't mind. And, I wonder, would you mind calling me Grandma? All my\n children do it and I miss it so.\" She gave him a wrinkled smile that\n was at once wistful and petulant.\n\n\n Johnny laughed in an easy, infectious manner. \"Sure thing, Grandma.\"\n He stretched his long arms up to bring down the heavy bag and found\n himself wondering just how it had gotten up there in the first place.\n He didn't remember ever putting it there for her and Grandma Perkins\n was obviously too frail a woman to have handled such a heavy box by\n herself. He put it on the floor.\n\n\n As she stooped over and extracted a pair of low-heeled, black and\n battered shoes from the box, she asked him, \"Johnny, what was that\n paper I signed this afternoon?\"",
"\"I must say that I think Miss Toujours has the prettiest mouth I've\n ever seen,\" boomed Captain Fogarty, his voice sounding something like\n a cross between a foghorn and a steam whistle. And he was not merely\n being gallant, for many a lonely night as he flew the darkness between\n Earth and the many planets, he had dreamed of caressing those lips.\n\n\n \"And I think you are definitely a man of discriminating taste,\" said\n Darling demurely, crossing her legs and arranging her dress to expose a\n little more of the Toujours charms to the Captain's eye.\n\n\n Carlton smiled casually at the exposed flesh. \"It's all very pretty,\n my dear,\" he said smugly. \"But we've seen it all before and in space\n you're supposed to act like a lady, if you can act that well.\"",
"\"I was just leaving, Miss Toujours. I hope you and your son have a very\n happy voyage. Good day, Captain Fogarty,\" she called over her shoulder\n as she exited. Carlton E. Carlton's shrill laughter followed her down\n the companionway.\nMrs. Perkins had been lying in her berth reading for less than an hour\n when the knock sounded at her door. She would have preferred to sit up\n and read, but her cabin was so small that there was no room for any\n other furniture besides the bed.\n\n\n \"Come in,\" she called in a small voice.\n\n\n Johnny Weaver, steward for the cheaper cabins, poked his youthful,\n freckled face through the door. \"Howdy, Mrs. Perkins. I wondered if I\n could do anything for you? It's about ten minutes before we eat.\"",
"\"That's better. And now, Miss Toujours, maybe you'd be more\n comfortable without that space suit on,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Oh, no, thank you. I feel much better with it on,\" a small voice said\n over the suit's loudspeaker system.\n\n\n Lamps grinned. \"Oh, come now, Miss Toujours. We ain't going to hurt\n you. I guarantee nobody will lay a finger to you.\"\n\n\n \"But I feel much—much safer, if you know what I mean,\" said the voice.\n\n\n \"Heck. With one of them things on, you can't eat, can't sleep,\n can't—Well, there's lots of things you can't do with one of them\n things on. Besides, we all want to take a little look at you, if you\n don't mind. Snake, you and Willie help the little lady out of her\n attire.\"",
"Opening the inner door to the airlock, she clanked into the little\n room. As the door shut behind her, she pressed the cycling button and\n evacuated the air from the lock.\n\n\n A minute or so later she heard poundings outside the airlock and quite\n calmly she reached out a mailed fist and turned a switch plainly\n marked:\nEMERGENCY LOCK\n\n DO NOT OPERATE IN FLIGHT\n\n\n The outer hatch opened almost immediately. The radio in Grandma's suit\n crackled with static. \"What are you doing here?\" demanded a voice over\n the suit radio.\n\n\n \"Pirates! I'm hiding from the pirates. They'll never find me here!\" she\n told them in a voice she hoped sounded full of panic.\n\n\n \"What's your name?\" asked the voice.\n\n\n \"Darling Toujours, famous television actress,\" she lied quite calmly."
]
] |
valid
|
51605
|
[
"How many years passed between moving to Wisconsin and her son becoming a Konv?",
"Why did the mother not go to space with Earl?",
"When did Earl go to space?",
"Why did Earl wish to be human?",
"Where did Earl go when he disappeared during college?",
"What was Mrs. Jamieson's biggest problem in the story?",
"Why did the woman not realize her cylinder no longer worked?",
"Why did the woman kill the man in the third cabin?",
"Why did Earl need to get used to being seen nude?"
] |
[
[
"2",
"5",
"7",
"6"
],
[
"She hated the agents",
"She loved her husband",
"She loved her son",
"She was afraid to go"
],
[
"At the end of high school",
"During his first year of university",
"After he finished college",
"When he was 14"
],
[
"He was born a Konv",
"He wasn't born human",
"He had no friends at university",
"He liked a girl"
],
[
"Stockholm",
"Wolf River",
"Siam ",
"Centaurus"
],
[
"She did not understand the Stinson Effect",
"She had to raise her son alone",
"She was just able to make ends meet",
"She had to hide her scar"
],
[
"She was against using the cylinder",
"She had not wanted to go to Centaurus",
"She had avoided using it as part of her disguise",
"She never learned how to use the cylinder"
],
[
"She thought he was there to kill Earl",
"She thought he was there to kill her",
"He said he was an agent",
"She found out he was an agent"
],
[
"He liked to swim in the river with his friends",
"He was taken by the Konv for surgery",
"When you travel with the cylinder you arrive nude",
"He shared a small house with his mom"
]
] |
[
3,
1,
2,
4,
3,
1,
3,
4,
3
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[
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[
"\"I'm not like most boys, mother. The Konvs saw to that. Sometimes I'm\n sorry. Back in high school I used to wish I was like the others. Do you\n remember Lorane Peters?\" His mother nodded. \"Well, when we were seniors\n last year she liked me quite a lot. She didn't say so, but I knew it.\n She would sit across the aisle from me, and sometimes when I saw how\n her hair fell over her face when she read, I wanted to lean over and\n whisper to her, 'Hey, Lorrie—' just as if I was human—'can I take you\n to the basketball game?'\"\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson turned to leave the room, but he stopped her. \"You\n understand what I'm saying, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I don't!\" she said sharply. \"You're old enough to face realities.\n You are a Konv. You always will be a Konv.\nHave you forgotten your own\n father?\n\"",
"Sometimes when she talked about her husband, Mrs. Jamieson wanted to\n stand up and scream at her son, \"Hate, hate! Hate! You must learn to\n hate!\" But she clenched her hands over her knitting, knowing that he\n would learn it faster if she avoided the word.\nThe winter passed, and the next summer, and two more summers.\n\n\n Earl was ready for college. They had successfully kept their secret.\n They had been vigilant in every detail. Earl referred to the \"damn\n Agents\" now with a curl of his lip. They had been successful in\n contacting other Konvs, and sometimes visited them at a remote\n rendezvous.\n\n\n \"When you have finished college,\" Mrs. Jamieson told her son, \"we will\n go to Centaurus.\"\n\n\n \"Why not now?\"",
"Her neighbors knew nothing of the money she had brought with her to\n Wisconsin. They didn't even know that she was not a native. She never\n spoke of it, except at first, when Earl was a boy of seven and they had\n just come there to live. Then she only said that she came from the\n East. She knew the names of eastern Wisconsin towns, and small facts\n about them; it lent an air of authenticity to her claim of being a\n native. Actually her previous residence was Bangkok, Siam, where the\n Agents had killed her husband.\n\n\n That was back in '07, on the eve of his departure for Alpha Centaurus;\n but she never spoke of this; and she was very careful not to move from\n place to place except by the conventional methods of travel.",
"Several times in the past seven years Mrs. Jamieson had seen other\n Konvs, and had been tempted to identify herself and say, \"Here I am.\n You are one of them; so am I. Come, and we'll talk. We'll talk about\n Stinson and Benjamin, who helped them all get away. And Doctor Straus.\n And my husband, E. Mason Jamieson, who never got away because those\n filthy, unspeakable Agents shot him in the back, there in that coffee\n shop in Bangkok, Siam.\"\nOnce, in the second year after her husband's death, an Agent came and\n stayed in one of her cabins.\n\n\n She learned that he was an Agent completely by accident. While cleaning\n the cabin one morning his badge fell out of a shirt pocket. She stood\n still, staring at the horror of it there on the floor, the shirt in\n her hands, all the loneliness returning in a black wave of hate and\n frustration.",
"Earl faced the window, looking out, then turned quickly back. \"What is\n it?\" he asked, desperately. \"What happened to me?\"\n\n\n \"Better put your trousers on,\" Mrs. Jamieson said. \"It's something very\n unusual and terrible to think of at first, but really wonderful.\"\n\n\n \"But what happened? What is this patch behind my ear?\"\n\n\n Suddenly his face paled and he stopped in the act of getting into his\n trousers. \"Guess I know now. They made me a Konv.\"\n\n\n \"Well, don't take on so. You'll get used to it.\"\n\n\n \"But they shouldn't have! They didn't even ask me!\"",
"\"You have asked many times,\" Mrs. Jamieson said, \"how your father\n died. Now I will tell you the truth. Your father was one of the great\n ones, along with Stinson and Benjamin and Dr. Straus. He helped plan\n the escape; but the Agents found him in Bangkok fifteen minutes before\n the group left. They shot him in the back, and the others had to go on\n without him. Now do you know why I killed the Agent in the third cabin?\n I had to. Your father was a great man, and I loved him.\"\n\n\n \"I don't blame you, mother,\" Earl said simply. \"But we are freaks.\n Everybody says, 'Konv' as if it is something dirty. They write it on\n the walls in rest rooms.\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do—because they don't understand! They are afraid of\n us. Wouldn't you be afraid of someone who could do the things we do, if\n you\ncouldn't\ndo them?\"",
"\"There will be no friends,\" he answered, \"not here. No Konvs will be at\n the university.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? Stinson selected only educated, intelligent people. When\n one dies the cylinder is taken and adjusted to a new thought\n pattern—usually a person from the same family. I would say it is very\n likely that Konvs will be found here.\"\nHe shook his head. \"No. They knew we were coming, and no one said a\n word about others being here. I'm afraid we are alone.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I think not,\" she said firmly. \"Anyway, the room will be\n comfortable.\"\n\n\n He shook his head again. \"Why can't I be in the house with you? There\n are two bedrooms.\"\n\n\n She said quickly, \"You can if you wish. I just thought you'd like being\n alone, at your age. Most boys do.\"",
"JAMIESON\nBy BILL DOEDE\n\n\n Illustrated by GRAY\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine December 1960.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nA Konv cylinder was the key to space—but\n \nthere was one power it could not match!\nThey lived in a small house beside the little Wolf river in Wisconsin.\n Once it had been a summer cottage owned by a rich man from Chicago.\n The rich man died. His heirs sold it. Now it was well insulated and\n Mrs. Jamieson and her son were very comfortable, even in the coldest\n winter. During the summer they rented a few row boats to vacationing\n fishermen, and she had built a few overnight cabins beside the road.\n They were able to make ends meet.",
"\"I remember when you were born,\" he said, and smiled in reminiscence.\n \"Your father was afraid you would be twins.\"\n\n\n Earl said, \"Why was my father killed?\"\n\n\n \"By mistake. Back in those days, like now, there were good Konvs and\n bad. One of those not selected by Stinson to join us was enraged, half\n crazy with envy. He killed two women there in Bangkok. The Agents\n thought Jamieson—I mean, your father—did it. Jamieson was the\n greatest man among us. It was he who first conceived the theory that\n there was a basic, underlying law in the operation of the cylinders.\n Even now, no one knows how the idea of love ties in with the Stinson\n Effect; but we do know that hate and greed as motivating forces can\n greatly minimize the cylinders' power. That is why the undesirables\n with cylinders have never reached Centaurus.\"\n\n\n Heavy steps sounded on the porch outside.",
"The second day after his disappearance she found a small item. A Konv\n had raided the Agent's office in Stockholm, killing three, and getting\n killed himself. Mrs. Jamieson dropped the paper immediately and went\n to Stockholm. She did not consider the risk. In Stockholm she found\n clothes and made discreet inquiries. The slain man had been a Finnish\n Konv, one of those left behind by Stinson as an undesirable. His wife\n had been killed by the Agents the week before. He had gone completely\n insane and made the raid singlehanded. Mrs. Jamieson read the account\n of crimes committed by the man and his wife, and determined to prevent\n Earl from making the mistake of taking on more than he could handle.\n\n\n When she arrived at her own home, Earl was in his room.\n\n\n \"Where have you been?\" she asked petulantly.\n\n\n \"Oh, here and there.\"\n\n\n \"I thought you were involved in that fight in Stockholm.\"",
"Also, she wore her hair long, almost to the shoulders. People said,\n \"There goes one of the old-fashioned ones. That hair-do was popular\n back in the sixties.\" They did not suspect that she did this only to\n cover the thin, pencil-line scar, evidence that a small cylinder lay\n under her skin behind the ear.\nFor Mrs. Jamieson was one of the Konvs.\n\n\n Her husband had been one of the small group who developed this tiny\n instrument. Not the inventor—\nhis\nname was Stinson, and the effects\n produced by it were known as the Stinson Effect. In appearance\n it resembled a small semi-conductor device. Analysis by the best\n scientific minds proved it to be a semi-conductor.\n\n\n Yet it held the power to move a body instantly from one point in space\n to any other point. Each unit was custom built, keyed to operate only\n by the thought pattern of the particular individual.",
"\"I didn't kill him. That's what seems so strange. And he didn't try to\n kill me. We didn't even fight. He didn't ask why I broke in without\n breaking the lock or even a window. He seemed to know. He did ask what\n I was doing there, and who I was. I told him, and ... he helped me get\n the names. He asked where I lived. 'None of your damn business,' I told\n him. Then he said he didn't blame me for not telling, that Konvs must\n fear Agents, and hate them. Then he said, 'Do you know why we kill\n Konvs? We kill them because there is no prison cell in the world that\n will hold a Konv. When they break the law, we have no choice. It is a\n terrible thing, but must be done. We don't want your secret; we only\n want law and order. There is room enough in the world for both of us.'\"\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson was furious. \"And you believed him?\"",
"That night she soundlessly lifted the screen from the window over his\n bed and shot him with a .22 rifle.\n\n\n She threw the weapon into the river. It helped very little. He was one\n Agent, only one out of all the thousands of Agents all over Earth;\n while her husband had been one of twenty-eight persons. She decided\n then that her efforts would be too ineffective. The odds were wrong.\n She would wait until her son, Earl, was grown.\n\n\n Together they would seek revenge. He did not have the cylinder—not\n yet. But he would. The Konvs took care of their own.\n\n\n Her husband had been one of the first, and they would not forget. One\n day the boy would disappear for a few hours. When he returned the small\n patch of gauze would be behind his ear. She would shield him until the\n opening healed. Then no one would ever know, because now they could do\n it without leaving the tell-tale scar. Then they would seek revenge.",
"Even before the summer was over, he matured. The childish antics of his\n friends began to bore him. \"Be careful, Earl,\" his mother would say.\n \"Remember who you are. Play with them sometimes, even if you don't like\n it. You have a long way to go before you will be ready.\"",
"She didn't know where the men were now, those who had killed her\n husband. They could be anywhere. Agents moved from post to post; in ten\n years they might be scattered all over Earth. In the killing of Konvs,\n some cylinders might even be taken by Agents—and used by them, for\n the power and freedom the cylinders gave must be coveted even by them.\n And they were in the best position to gain them. She was consumed by\n fear that one or more of the men on Earl's list might have acquired a\n cylinder and were now Konvs themselves.\nTwo weeks later she read a news item saying that Tom Palieu had been\n killed by a Konv. The assassin's identity was unknown, but agents were\n working on the case.\n\n\n She knew. She had found a gun in Earl's desk.\n\n\n She took the paper into Earl's room. \"Did you do this?\"",
"She turned her back and slammed the door. Earl stood very still for\n a long time in the room that was to have been happy for him. She was\n crying just beyond the wall.\n\n\n Earl did not use the room that first year. He slept in the second\n bedroom. He did not mention his frustrated desires to be normal, not\n after the first attempt, but he persisted in his efforts to be so. Use\n of the cylinder was out of the question for them now, anyway.\n\n\n In the spring Mrs. Jamieson caught a virus cold which resulted in a\n long convalescence. Earl moved into the new bedroom. At first she\n thought he moved in an effort to please her because of the illness, but\n she soon grew aware of her mistake.\n\n\n One day he disappeared.\nMrs. Jamieson was alarmed. Had the Agents found him? She watched the\n papers daily for some word of Konvs being killed.",
"It was a hot, mucky afternoon with storm clouds pushing out of the\n west. Mrs. Jamieson put on her swimming suit and wandered down to the\n river to cool herself.\nFor the remainder of that summer they worked together. They practiced\n at night mostly, taking longer and longer jumps, until Earl's\n confidence allowed him to reach any part of the Earth he chose. She\n knew the habits of Agents. She knew how to avoid them.\n\n\n They would select a spot sufficiently remote to insure detection, she\n would devise some prank to irritate the Agents; then they would quickly\n return to Wisconsin. The Agents would rush to the calculated spot, but\n would find only the bare footprints of a woman and a boy. They would\n swear and drive back to their offices to dig through files, searching\n for some clue to their identity.",
"\"Because when you get there they will need men who can contribute to\n the development of the planet. Stinson is a physicist, Benjamin a\n metallurgist, Straus a doctor. But Straus is an old man by this time. A\n young doctor will be needed. Study hard, Earl. Learn all you can. Even\n the great ones get sick.\"\n\n\n She did not mention her secret hope, that before they left Earth\n he would have fully avenged his father's death. He was clever and\n intelligent.\n\n\n He could kill many Agents.\n\n\n So she exhumed the money she had hidden more than ten years before.\n The house beside the Little Wolf river was sold. They found a modest\n bungalow within walking distance of the University's medical school.\n Mrs. Jamieson furnished it carefully but, oddly, rather lavishly.\n\n\n This was her husband's money she was spending now. It needed to last\n only a few years. Then they would leave Earth forever.",
"He turned away from her. \"It doesn't matter whether I did or not. They\n will suspect me. His name was on the list.\"\n\n\n \"They will,\" she agreed. \"It doesn't matter who the Konv is, now that\n an Agent has been killed. The one in Bangkok will tell them about you\n and the list of names, and it's all they need.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what else can he do?\" Earl asked. \"After all, he is an Agent.\n If one of them is killed, he will have to tell what he knows.\"\n\n\n \"You're defending him? Why?\" she cried. \"Tell me why!\"\n\n\n He removed her hand from his arm. Her nails were digging into his\n flesh. \"I don't know why. Mother, I'm sorry, but Agents are just people\n to me. I can't hate them the way you do.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson's face colored, then drained white.",
"Mrs. Jamieson held out her hand. \"Come here, son. It's time I told you\n about us.\"\nSo he sat across the kitchen table from her, and she told the whole\n history, beginning with Stinson sitting in the laboratory in New\n Jersey, holding in his hand a small cylinder moulded from silicon\n with controlled impurities. He had made it, looking for a better\n micro-circuit structure. He was holding this cylinder ... and it was a\n cold day outside ... and he was dreaming of a sunny Florida beach—\n\n\n And suddenly he was there, on the beach. He could not believe it at\n first. He felt the sand and water, and felt of himself; there was no\n mistake."
],
[
"\"Because when you get there they will need men who can contribute to\n the development of the planet. Stinson is a physicist, Benjamin a\n metallurgist, Straus a doctor. But Straus is an old man by this time. A\n young doctor will be needed. Study hard, Earl. Learn all you can. Even\n the great ones get sick.\"\n\n\n She did not mention her secret hope, that before they left Earth\n he would have fully avenged his father's death. He was clever and\n intelligent.\n\n\n He could kill many Agents.\n\n\n So she exhumed the money she had hidden more than ten years before.\n The house beside the Little Wolf river was sold. They found a modest\n bungalow within walking distance of the University's medical school.\n Mrs. Jamieson furnished it carefully but, oddly, rather lavishly.\n\n\n This was her husband's money she was spending now. It needed to last\n only a few years. Then they would leave Earth forever.",
"It was inevitable that they should identify Mrs. Jamieson as one of\n the offenders, since they had discovered, even before Stinson took his\n group to Centaurus, that individuals had thought patterns peculiar to\n themselves. These could be identified, if caught on their detectors,\n and even recorded for the files. But the files proved confusing, for\n they said that Mrs. Jamieson had gone to Centaurus with the others.\n\n\n Had she returned to Earth? The question did not trouble them long. They\n had more serious problems. Stinson had selected only the best of the\n Konvs when he left Earth, leaving all those with criminal tendencies\n behind. They could have followed if they chose—what could stop them?\n But it was more lucrative to stay. On Earth they could rob, loot, even\n murder—without fear of the law.\n\n\n Earl changed.",
"Her neighbors knew nothing of the money she had brought with her to\n Wisconsin. They didn't even know that she was not a native. She never\n spoke of it, except at first, when Earl was a boy of seven and they had\n just come there to live. Then she only said that she came from the\n East. She knew the names of eastern Wisconsin towns, and small facts\n about them; it lent an air of authenticity to her claim of being a\n native. Actually her previous residence was Bangkok, Siam, where the\n Agents had killed her husband.\n\n\n That was back in '07, on the eve of his departure for Alpha Centaurus;\n but she never spoke of this; and she was very careful not to move from\n place to place except by the conventional methods of travel.",
"Sometimes when she talked about her husband, Mrs. Jamieson wanted to\n stand up and scream at her son, \"Hate, hate! Hate! You must learn to\n hate!\" But she clenched her hands over her knitting, knowing that he\n would learn it faster if she avoided the word.\nThe winter passed, and the next summer, and two more summers.\n\n\n Earl was ready for college. They had successfully kept their secret.\n They had been vigilant in every detail. Earl referred to the \"damn\n Agents\" now with a curl of his lip. They had been successful in\n contacting other Konvs, and sometimes visited them at a remote\n rendezvous.\n\n\n \"When you have finished college,\" Mrs. Jamieson told her son, \"we will\n go to Centaurus.\"\n\n\n \"Why not now?\"",
"\"I remember when you were born,\" he said, and smiled in reminiscence.\n \"Your father was afraid you would be twins.\"\n\n\n Earl said, \"Why was my father killed?\"\n\n\n \"By mistake. Back in those days, like now, there were good Konvs and\n bad. One of those not selected by Stinson to join us was enraged, half\n crazy with envy. He killed two women there in Bangkok. The Agents\n thought Jamieson—I mean, your father—did it. Jamieson was the\n greatest man among us. It was he who first conceived the theory that\n there was a basic, underlying law in the operation of the cylinders.\n Even now, no one knows how the idea of love ties in with the Stinson\n Effect; but we do know that hate and greed as motivating forces can\n greatly minimize the cylinders' power. That is why the undesirables\n with cylinders have never reached Centaurus.\"\n\n\n Heavy steps sounded on the porch outside.",
"\"You have asked many times,\" Mrs. Jamieson said, \"how your father\n died. Now I will tell you the truth. Your father was one of the great\n ones, along with Stinson and Benjamin and Dr. Straus. He helped plan\n the escape; but the Agents found him in Bangkok fifteen minutes before\n the group left. They shot him in the back, and the others had to go on\n without him. Now do you know why I killed the Agent in the third cabin?\n I had to. Your father was a great man, and I loved him.\"\n\n\n \"I don't blame you, mother,\" Earl said simply. \"But we are freaks.\n Everybody says, 'Konv' as if it is something dirty. They write it on\n the walls in rest rooms.\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do—because they don't understand! They are afraid of\n us. Wouldn't you be afraid of someone who could do the things we do, if\n you\ncouldn't\ndo them?\"",
"She turned her back and slammed the door. Earl stood very still for\n a long time in the room that was to have been happy for him. She was\n crying just beyond the wall.\n\n\n Earl did not use the room that first year. He slept in the second\n bedroom. He did not mention his frustrated desires to be normal, not\n after the first attempt, but he persisted in his efforts to be so. Use\n of the cylinder was out of the question for them now, anyway.\n\n\n In the spring Mrs. Jamieson caught a virus cold which resulted in a\n long convalescence. Earl moved into the new bedroom. At first she\n thought he moved in an effort to please her because of the illness, but\n she soon grew aware of her mistake.\n\n\n One day he disappeared.\nMrs. Jamieson was alarmed. Had the Agents found him? She watched the\n papers daily for some word of Konvs being killed.",
"Later they would go to Alpha Centaurus, where a life free from Agents\n could be lived.\n\n\n It happened to Earl one hot summer day when he was fourteen. Mrs.\n Jamieson was working in her kitchen; Earl supposedly was swimming with\n his friends in the river. Suddenly he appeared before her, completely\n nude. At sight of his mother his face paled and he began to shake\n violently, so that she was forced to slap him to prevent hysteria. She\n looked behind his ear.\n\n\n It was there.\n\n\n \"Mom!\" he cried. \"Mom!\"",
"Suddenly, with a wide, furious sweep of her hand, she slapped his face.\n So much strength and rage was in her arm that the blow almost sent him\n spinning. They faced each other, she breathing hard from the exertion,\n Earl stunned immobile—not by the blow, but from the knowledge that she\n could hate so suddenly, viciously.\n\n\n She controlled herself. \"We must find a way to leave here,\" she said,\n calmly.\n\n\n \"They won't find us.\"",
"He turned away from her. \"It doesn't matter whether I did or not. They\n will suspect me. His name was on the list.\"\n\n\n \"They will,\" she agreed. \"It doesn't matter who the Konv is, now that\n an Agent has been killed. The one in Bangkok will tell them about you\n and the list of names, and it's all they need.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what else can he do?\" Earl asked. \"After all, he is an Agent.\n If one of them is killed, he will have to tell what he knows.\"\n\n\n \"You're defending him? Why?\" she cried. \"Tell me why!\"\n\n\n He removed her hand from his arm. Her nails were digging into his\n flesh. \"I don't know why. Mother, I'm sorry, but Agents are just people\n to me. I can't hate them the way you do.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson's face colored, then drained white.",
"\"Oh, yes they will,\" she said. \"Don't underestimate them. Agents are\n picked from the most intelligent people on Earth. It will be a small\n job for them. Don't forget they know who you are. Even if you hadn't\n been so stupid as to tell them, they'd know. They knew my pattern from\n the time your father was alive. They got yours when we were together\n years ago, teasing them. They linked your pattern with mine. They know\n that your father and I had a son. Your birth was recorded. The only\n difficult aspect of their job now is to find where you live, and it\n won't be impossible. They will drive their cars through every city on\n Earth with those new detectors, until they pick up your pattern or\n mine. I'm afraid it's time to leave Earth.\"\nEarl sat down suddenly, \"It's just as well. I thought maybe some day I\n might hate them too, or learn to like them. But I can do neither, so I\n am halfway between, and no man can live this way.\"",
"She did not answer him. Finally he said, \"It doesn't make sense to you,\n does it?\"\n\n\n \"No, it doesn't. This is not the time for such discussions, anyway. The\n Agents have their machines working at top speed, while we sit here and\n talk.\"\n\n\n Suddenly they were not alone.\n\n\n No sound was generated by the man's coming. One instant they were\n talking alone, the next he was here. Earl saw him first. He was a\n middle-aged man whose hair was completely white. He stood near the\n desk, easily, as if standing there were the most natural way to relax.\n He was entirely nude ... but it seemed natural and right.\n\n\n Then Mrs. Jamieson saw him.\n\n\n \"Benjamin!\" she cried. \"I knew someone would come.\"\n\n\n He smiled. \"This is your son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" she said. \"We are ready.\"",
"It was a hot, mucky afternoon with storm clouds pushing out of the\n west. Mrs. Jamieson put on her swimming suit and wandered down to the\n river to cool herself.\nFor the remainder of that summer they worked together. They practiced\n at night mostly, taking longer and longer jumps, until Earl's\n confidence allowed him to reach any part of the Earth he chose. She\n knew the habits of Agents. She knew how to avoid them.\n\n\n They would select a spot sufficiently remote to insure detection, she\n would devise some prank to irritate the Agents; then they would quickly\n return to Wisconsin. The Agents would rush to the calculated spot, but\n would find only the bare footprints of a woman and a boy. They would\n swear and drive back to their offices to dig through files, searching\n for some clue to their identity.",
"Earl faced the window, looking out, then turned quickly back. \"What is\n it?\" he asked, desperately. \"What happened to me?\"\n\n\n \"Better put your trousers on,\" Mrs. Jamieson said. \"It's something very\n unusual and terrible to think of at first, but really wonderful.\"\n\n\n \"But what happened? What is this patch behind my ear?\"\n\n\n Suddenly his face paled and he stopped in the act of getting into his\n trousers. \"Guess I know now. They made me a Konv.\"\n\n\n \"Well, don't take on so. You'll get used to it.\"\n\n\n \"But they shouldn't have! They didn't even ask me!\"",
"That night she soundlessly lifted the screen from the window over his\n bed and shot him with a .22 rifle.\n\n\n She threw the weapon into the river. It helped very little. He was one\n Agent, only one out of all the thousands of Agents all over Earth;\n while her husband had been one of twenty-eight persons. She decided\n then that her efforts would be too ineffective. The odds were wrong.\n She would wait until her son, Earl, was grown.\n\n\n Together they would seek revenge. He did not have the cylinder—not\n yet. But he would. The Konvs took care of their own.\n\n\n Her husband had been one of the first, and they would not forget. One\n day the boy would disappear for a few hours. When he returned the small\n patch of gauze would be behind his ear. She would shield him until the\n opening healed. Then no one would ever know, because now they could do\n it without leaving the tell-tale scar. Then they would seek revenge.",
"A room was built on the east side of the bungalow, with its own private\n entrance. This was Earl's room. Ostensibly the private entrance was for\n convenience due to the irregular hours of college students.\n\n\n It was also convenient for coming home late at night after Agent\n hunting.\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson was becoming obvious.\n\n\n Excitement brought color to her cheeks when she thought of Earl facing\n one of them—a lean, cunning jaguar facing a fat, lazy bear. It was her\n notion that federal Agents were evil creatures, tools of a decadent,\n bloodthirsty society, living off the fat of the land.\n\n\n She painted the room herself, in soft, pastel colors. When it was\n finished she showed Earl regally into the room, making a big joke of it.\n\n\n \"Here you can study and relax, and have those bull sessions students\n are always having,\" she said.",
"The arrested man disappeared from his jail cell, and the next morning\n the Agent was found strangled to death in his bed. This set off a\n campaign against Konvs. One base act led to another, until the original\n reason for noticing them at all was lost. Normal men no longer thought\n of them as human.\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson told how Stinson, knowing he had made too many cylinders\n and given them unwisely, left Earth for Alpha Centaurus.\n\n\n He went alone, not knowing if he could go so far, or what he would find\n when he arrived. But he did arrive, and it was what he had sought.\n\n\n He returned for the others. They gathered one night in a dirty,\n broken-down farmhouse in Missouri—and disappeared in a body, leaving\n the Agents standing helplessly on Earth, shaking their fists at the sky.",
"\"I'm not like most boys, mother. The Konvs saw to that. Sometimes I'm\n sorry. Back in high school I used to wish I was like the others. Do you\n remember Lorane Peters?\" His mother nodded. \"Well, when we were seniors\n last year she liked me quite a lot. She didn't say so, but I knew it.\n She would sit across the aisle from me, and sometimes when I saw how\n her hair fell over her face when she read, I wanted to lean over and\n whisper to her, 'Hey, Lorrie—' just as if I was human—'can I take you\n to the basketball game?'\"\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson turned to leave the room, but he stopped her. \"You\n understand what I'm saying, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I don't!\" she said sharply. \"You're old enough to face realities.\n You are a Konv. You always will be a Konv.\nHave you forgotten your own\n father?\n\"",
"She didn't know where the men were now, those who had killed her\n husband. They could be anywhere. Agents moved from post to post; in ten\n years they might be scattered all over Earth. In the killing of Konvs,\n some cylinders might even be taken by Agents—and used by them, for\n the power and freedom the cylinders gave must be coveted even by them.\n And they were in the best position to gain them. She was consumed by\n fear that one or more of the men on Earl's list might have acquired a\n cylinder and were now Konvs themselves.\nTwo weeks later she read a news item saying that Tom Palieu had been\n killed by a Konv. The assassin's identity was unknown, but agents were\n working on the case.\n\n\n She knew. She had found a gun in Earl's desk.\n\n\n She took the paper into Earl's room. \"Did you do this?\"",
"Even before the summer was over, he matured. The childish antics of his\n friends began to bore him. \"Be careful, Earl,\" his mother would say.\n \"Remember who you are. Play with them sometimes, even if you don't like\n it. You have a long way to go before you will be ready.\""
],
[
"\"Because when you get there they will need men who can contribute to\n the development of the planet. Stinson is a physicist, Benjamin a\n metallurgist, Straus a doctor. But Straus is an old man by this time. A\n young doctor will be needed. Study hard, Earl. Learn all you can. Even\n the great ones get sick.\"\n\n\n She did not mention her secret hope, that before they left Earth\n he would have fully avenged his father's death. He was clever and\n intelligent.\n\n\n He could kill many Agents.\n\n\n So she exhumed the money she had hidden more than ten years before.\n The house beside the Little Wolf river was sold. They found a modest\n bungalow within walking distance of the University's medical school.\n Mrs. Jamieson furnished it carefully but, oddly, rather lavishly.\n\n\n This was her husband's money she was spending now. It needed to last\n only a few years. Then they would leave Earth forever.",
"It was inevitable that they should identify Mrs. Jamieson as one of\n the offenders, since they had discovered, even before Stinson took his\n group to Centaurus, that individuals had thought patterns peculiar to\n themselves. These could be identified, if caught on their detectors,\n and even recorded for the files. But the files proved confusing, for\n they said that Mrs. Jamieson had gone to Centaurus with the others.\n\n\n Had she returned to Earth? The question did not trouble them long. They\n had more serious problems. Stinson had selected only the best of the\n Konvs when he left Earth, leaving all those with criminal tendencies\n behind. They could have followed if they chose—what could stop them?\n But it was more lucrative to stay. On Earth they could rob, loot, even\n murder—without fear of the law.\n\n\n Earl changed.",
"\"I remember when you were born,\" he said, and smiled in reminiscence.\n \"Your father was afraid you would be twins.\"\n\n\n Earl said, \"Why was my father killed?\"\n\n\n \"By mistake. Back in those days, like now, there were good Konvs and\n bad. One of those not selected by Stinson to join us was enraged, half\n crazy with envy. He killed two women there in Bangkok. The Agents\n thought Jamieson—I mean, your father—did it. Jamieson was the\n greatest man among us. It was he who first conceived the theory that\n there was a basic, underlying law in the operation of the cylinders.\n Even now, no one knows how the idea of love ties in with the Stinson\n Effect; but we do know that hate and greed as motivating forces can\n greatly minimize the cylinders' power. That is why the undesirables\n with cylinders have never reached Centaurus.\"\n\n\n Heavy steps sounded on the porch outside.",
"Later they would go to Alpha Centaurus, where a life free from Agents\n could be lived.\n\n\n It happened to Earl one hot summer day when he was fourteen. Mrs.\n Jamieson was working in her kitchen; Earl supposedly was swimming with\n his friends in the river. Suddenly he appeared before her, completely\n nude. At sight of his mother his face paled and he began to shake\n violently, so that she was forced to slap him to prevent hysteria. She\n looked behind his ear.\n\n\n It was there.\n\n\n \"Mom!\" he cried. \"Mom!\"",
"Sometimes when she talked about her husband, Mrs. Jamieson wanted to\n stand up and scream at her son, \"Hate, hate! Hate! You must learn to\n hate!\" But she clenched her hands over her knitting, knowing that he\n would learn it faster if she avoided the word.\nThe winter passed, and the next summer, and two more summers.\n\n\n Earl was ready for college. They had successfully kept their secret.\n They had been vigilant in every detail. Earl referred to the \"damn\n Agents\" now with a curl of his lip. They had been successful in\n contacting other Konvs, and sometimes visited them at a remote\n rendezvous.\n\n\n \"When you have finished college,\" Mrs. Jamieson told her son, \"we will\n go to Centaurus.\"\n\n\n \"Why not now?\"",
"Her neighbors knew nothing of the money she had brought with her to\n Wisconsin. They didn't even know that she was not a native. She never\n spoke of it, except at first, when Earl was a boy of seven and they had\n just come there to live. Then she only said that she came from the\n East. She knew the names of eastern Wisconsin towns, and small facts\n about them; it lent an air of authenticity to her claim of being a\n native. Actually her previous residence was Bangkok, Siam, where the\n Agents had killed her husband.\n\n\n That was back in '07, on the eve of his departure for Alpha Centaurus;\n but she never spoke of this; and she was very careful not to move from\n place to place except by the conventional methods of travel.",
"Earl faced the window, looking out, then turned quickly back. \"What is\n it?\" he asked, desperately. \"What happened to me?\"\n\n\n \"Better put your trousers on,\" Mrs. Jamieson said. \"It's something very\n unusual and terrible to think of at first, but really wonderful.\"\n\n\n \"But what happened? What is this patch behind my ear?\"\n\n\n Suddenly his face paled and he stopped in the act of getting into his\n trousers. \"Guess I know now. They made me a Konv.\"\n\n\n \"Well, don't take on so. You'll get used to it.\"\n\n\n \"But they shouldn't have! They didn't even ask me!\"",
"That night she soundlessly lifted the screen from the window over his\n bed and shot him with a .22 rifle.\n\n\n She threw the weapon into the river. It helped very little. He was one\n Agent, only one out of all the thousands of Agents all over Earth;\n while her husband had been one of twenty-eight persons. She decided\n then that her efforts would be too ineffective. The odds were wrong.\n She would wait until her son, Earl, was grown.\n\n\n Together they would seek revenge. He did not have the cylinder—not\n yet. But he would. The Konvs took care of their own.\n\n\n Her husband had been one of the first, and they would not forget. One\n day the boy would disappear for a few hours. When he returned the small\n patch of gauze would be behind his ear. She would shield him until the\n opening healed. Then no one would ever know, because now they could do\n it without leaving the tell-tale scar. Then they would seek revenge.",
"She turned her back and slammed the door. Earl stood very still for\n a long time in the room that was to have been happy for him. She was\n crying just beyond the wall.\n\n\n Earl did not use the room that first year. He slept in the second\n bedroom. He did not mention his frustrated desires to be normal, not\n after the first attempt, but he persisted in his efforts to be so. Use\n of the cylinder was out of the question for them now, anyway.\n\n\n In the spring Mrs. Jamieson caught a virus cold which resulted in a\n long convalescence. Earl moved into the new bedroom. At first she\n thought he moved in an effort to please her because of the illness, but\n she soon grew aware of her mistake.\n\n\n One day he disappeared.\nMrs. Jamieson was alarmed. Had the Agents found him? She watched the\n papers daily for some word of Konvs being killed.",
"A room was built on the east side of the bungalow, with its own private\n entrance. This was Earl's room. Ostensibly the private entrance was for\n convenience due to the irregular hours of college students.\n\n\n It was also convenient for coming home late at night after Agent\n hunting.\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson was becoming obvious.\n\n\n Excitement brought color to her cheeks when she thought of Earl facing\n one of them—a lean, cunning jaguar facing a fat, lazy bear. It was her\n notion that federal Agents were evil creatures, tools of a decadent,\n bloodthirsty society, living off the fat of the land.\n\n\n She painted the room herself, in soft, pastel colors. When it was\n finished she showed Earl regally into the room, making a big joke of it.\n\n\n \"Here you can study and relax, and have those bull sessions students\n are always having,\" she said.",
"It was a hot, mucky afternoon with storm clouds pushing out of the\n west. Mrs. Jamieson put on her swimming suit and wandered down to the\n river to cool herself.\nFor the remainder of that summer they worked together. They practiced\n at night mostly, taking longer and longer jumps, until Earl's\n confidence allowed him to reach any part of the Earth he chose. She\n knew the habits of Agents. She knew how to avoid them.\n\n\n They would select a spot sufficiently remote to insure detection, she\n would devise some prank to irritate the Agents; then they would quickly\n return to Wisconsin. The Agents would rush to the calculated spot, but\n would find only the bare footprints of a woman and a boy. They would\n swear and drive back to their offices to dig through files, searching\n for some clue to their identity.",
"\"Oh, yes they will,\" she said. \"Don't underestimate them. Agents are\n picked from the most intelligent people on Earth. It will be a small\n job for them. Don't forget they know who you are. Even if you hadn't\n been so stupid as to tell them, they'd know. They knew my pattern from\n the time your father was alive. They got yours when we were together\n years ago, teasing them. They linked your pattern with mine. They know\n that your father and I had a son. Your birth was recorded. The only\n difficult aspect of their job now is to find where you live, and it\n won't be impossible. They will drive their cars through every city on\n Earth with those new detectors, until they pick up your pattern or\n mine. I'm afraid it's time to leave Earth.\"\nEarl sat down suddenly, \"It's just as well. I thought maybe some day I\n might hate them too, or learn to like them. But I can do neither, so I\n am halfway between, and no man can live this way.\"",
"The arrested man disappeared from his jail cell, and the next morning\n the Agent was found strangled to death in his bed. This set off a\n campaign against Konvs. One base act led to another, until the original\n reason for noticing them at all was lost. Normal men no longer thought\n of them as human.\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson told how Stinson, knowing he had made too many cylinders\n and given them unwisely, left Earth for Alpha Centaurus.\n\n\n He went alone, not knowing if he could go so far, or what he would find\n when he arrived. But he did arrive, and it was what he had sought.\n\n\n He returned for the others. They gathered one night in a dirty,\n broken-down farmhouse in Missouri—and disappeared in a body, leaving\n the Agents standing helplessly on Earth, shaking their fists at the sky.",
"\"You have asked many times,\" Mrs. Jamieson said, \"how your father\n died. Now I will tell you the truth. Your father was one of the great\n ones, along with Stinson and Benjamin and Dr. Straus. He helped plan\n the escape; but the Agents found him in Bangkok fifteen minutes before\n the group left. They shot him in the back, and the others had to go on\n without him. Now do you know why I killed the Agent in the third cabin?\n I had to. Your father was a great man, and I loved him.\"\n\n\n \"I don't blame you, mother,\" Earl said simply. \"But we are freaks.\n Everybody says, 'Konv' as if it is something dirty. They write it on\n the walls in rest rooms.\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do—because they don't understand! They are afraid of\n us. Wouldn't you be afraid of someone who could do the things we do, if\n you\ncouldn't\ndo them?\"",
"She didn't know where the men were now, those who had killed her\n husband. They could be anywhere. Agents moved from post to post; in ten\n years they might be scattered all over Earth. In the killing of Konvs,\n some cylinders might even be taken by Agents—and used by them, for\n the power and freedom the cylinders gave must be coveted even by them.\n And they were in the best position to gain them. She was consumed by\n fear that one or more of the men on Earl's list might have acquired a\n cylinder and were now Konvs themselves.\nTwo weeks later she read a news item saying that Tom Palieu had been\n killed by a Konv. The assassin's identity was unknown, but agents were\n working on the case.\n\n\n She knew. She had found a gun in Earl's desk.\n\n\n She took the paper into Earl's room. \"Did you do this?\"",
"She did not answer him. Finally he said, \"It doesn't make sense to you,\n does it?\"\n\n\n \"No, it doesn't. This is not the time for such discussions, anyway. The\n Agents have their machines working at top speed, while we sit here and\n talk.\"\n\n\n Suddenly they were not alone.\n\n\n No sound was generated by the man's coming. One instant they were\n talking alone, the next he was here. Earl saw him first. He was a\n middle-aged man whose hair was completely white. He stood near the\n desk, easily, as if standing there were the most natural way to relax.\n He was entirely nude ... but it seemed natural and right.\n\n\n Then Mrs. Jamieson saw him.\n\n\n \"Benjamin!\" she cried. \"I knew someone would come.\"\n\n\n He smiled. \"This is your son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" she said. \"We are ready.\"",
"Suddenly, with a wide, furious sweep of her hand, she slapped his face.\n So much strength and rage was in her arm that the blow almost sent him\n spinning. They faced each other, she breathing hard from the exertion,\n Earl stunned immobile—not by the blow, but from the knowledge that she\n could hate so suddenly, viciously.\n\n\n She controlled herself. \"We must find a way to leave here,\" she said,\n calmly.\n\n\n \"They won't find us.\"",
"Just like that, it was over.\n\n\n That is, the first shock was over. Mrs. Jamieson watched Earl leave the\n house, walking slowly along the river, a boy with a man's problems.\n His friends called to him from the river, but he chose not to hear.\n He wanted to be alone. He needed to think, to feel the newness of the\n thing.\n\n\n Perhaps he would cross the river and enter the deep forest there. When\n the initial shock wore off he might experiment with his new power. He\n would not travel far, in these first attempts. Probably he would stay\n within walking distance of his clothes, because he still lacked the\n tricks others had learned.",
"\"I was swimming in the river, and a man came down to the river. His\n hair was all white, and his eyes looked like ... well, I never saw eyes\n like his before. He asked who was Earl Jamieson, and I said I was. Then\n he said, 'Come with me.' I went with him. I don't know why. It seemed\n the right thing. He took me to a car and there was another man in it,\n that looked like the first one only he was bigger. We went to a house,\n not far away and went inside. And that's all I can remember until I\n woke up. I was on a table, sort of. A high table. There was a light\n over it. It was all strange, and the two men stood there talking in\n some language I don't know.\"\n\n\n Earl ran his hand through his hair, shaking his head. \"I don't remember\n clearly, I guess. I was looking around the room and I remember thinking\n how scared I was, and how nice it would be to be here with you. And\n then I was here.\"",
"Even before the summer was over, he matured. The childish antics of his\n friends began to bore him. \"Be careful, Earl,\" his mother would say.\n \"Remember who you are. Play with them sometimes, even if you don't like\n it. You have a long way to go before you will be ready.\""
],
[
"Earl faced the window, looking out, then turned quickly back. \"What is\n it?\" he asked, desperately. \"What happened to me?\"\n\n\n \"Better put your trousers on,\" Mrs. Jamieson said. \"It's something very\n unusual and terrible to think of at first, but really wonderful.\"\n\n\n \"But what happened? What is this patch behind my ear?\"\n\n\n Suddenly his face paled and he stopped in the act of getting into his\n trousers. \"Guess I know now. They made me a Konv.\"\n\n\n \"Well, don't take on so. You'll get used to it.\"\n\n\n \"But they shouldn't have! They didn't even ask me!\"",
"\"I remember when you were born,\" he said, and smiled in reminiscence.\n \"Your father was afraid you would be twins.\"\n\n\n Earl said, \"Why was my father killed?\"\n\n\n \"By mistake. Back in those days, like now, there were good Konvs and\n bad. One of those not selected by Stinson to join us was enraged, half\n crazy with envy. He killed two women there in Bangkok. The Agents\n thought Jamieson—I mean, your father—did it. Jamieson was the\n greatest man among us. It was he who first conceived the theory that\n there was a basic, underlying law in the operation of the cylinders.\n Even now, no one knows how the idea of love ties in with the Stinson\n Effect; but we do know that hate and greed as motivating forces can\n greatly minimize the cylinders' power. That is why the undesirables\n with cylinders have never reached Centaurus.\"\n\n\n Heavy steps sounded on the porch outside.",
"Even before the summer was over, he matured. The childish antics of his\n friends began to bore him. \"Be careful, Earl,\" his mother would say.\n \"Remember who you are. Play with them sometimes, even if you don't like\n it. You have a long way to go before you will be ready.\"",
"Just like that, it was over.\n\n\n That is, the first shock was over. Mrs. Jamieson watched Earl leave the\n house, walking slowly along the river, a boy with a man's problems.\n His friends called to him from the river, but he chose not to hear.\n He wanted to be alone. He needed to think, to feel the newness of the\n thing.\n\n\n Perhaps he would cross the river and enter the deep forest there. When\n the initial shock wore off he might experiment with his new power. He\n would not travel far, in these first attempts. Probably he would stay\n within walking distance of his clothes, because he still lacked the\n tricks others had learned.",
"\"You have asked many times,\" Mrs. Jamieson said, \"how your father\n died. Now I will tell you the truth. Your father was one of the great\n ones, along with Stinson and Benjamin and Dr. Straus. He helped plan\n the escape; but the Agents found him in Bangkok fifteen minutes before\n the group left. They shot him in the back, and the others had to go on\n without him. Now do you know why I killed the Agent in the third cabin?\n I had to. Your father was a great man, and I loved him.\"\n\n\n \"I don't blame you, mother,\" Earl said simply. \"But we are freaks.\n Everybody says, 'Konv' as if it is something dirty. They write it on\n the walls in rest rooms.\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do—because they don't understand! They are afraid of\n us. Wouldn't you be afraid of someone who could do the things we do, if\n you\ncouldn't\ndo them?\"",
"Later they would go to Alpha Centaurus, where a life free from Agents\n could be lived.\n\n\n It happened to Earl one hot summer day when he was fourteen. Mrs.\n Jamieson was working in her kitchen; Earl supposedly was swimming with\n his friends in the river. Suddenly he appeared before her, completely\n nude. At sight of his mother his face paled and he began to shake\n violently, so that she was forced to slap him to prevent hysteria. She\n looked behind his ear.\n\n\n It was there.\n\n\n \"Mom!\" he cried. \"Mom!\"",
"\"Because when you get there they will need men who can contribute to\n the development of the planet. Stinson is a physicist, Benjamin a\n metallurgist, Straus a doctor. But Straus is an old man by this time. A\n young doctor will be needed. Study hard, Earl. Learn all you can. Even\n the great ones get sick.\"\n\n\n She did not mention her secret hope, that before they left Earth\n he would have fully avenged his father's death. He was clever and\n intelligent.\n\n\n He could kill many Agents.\n\n\n So she exhumed the money she had hidden more than ten years before.\n The house beside the Little Wolf river was sold. They found a modest\n bungalow within walking distance of the University's medical school.\n Mrs. Jamieson furnished it carefully but, oddly, rather lavishly.\n\n\n This was her husband's money she was spending now. It needed to last\n only a few years. Then they would leave Earth forever.",
"She did not answer him. Finally he said, \"It doesn't make sense to you,\n does it?\"\n\n\n \"No, it doesn't. This is not the time for such discussions, anyway. The\n Agents have their machines working at top speed, while we sit here and\n talk.\"\n\n\n Suddenly they were not alone.\n\n\n No sound was generated by the man's coming. One instant they were\n talking alone, the next he was here. Earl saw him first. He was a\n middle-aged man whose hair was completely white. He stood near the\n desk, easily, as if standing there were the most natural way to relax.\n He was entirely nude ... but it seemed natural and right.\n\n\n Then Mrs. Jamieson saw him.\n\n\n \"Benjamin!\" she cried. \"I knew someone would come.\"\n\n\n He smiled. \"This is your son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" she said. \"We are ready.\"",
"Suddenly, with a wide, furious sweep of her hand, she slapped his face.\n So much strength and rage was in her arm that the blow almost sent him\n spinning. They faced each other, she breathing hard from the exertion,\n Earl stunned immobile—not by the blow, but from the knowledge that she\n could hate so suddenly, viciously.\n\n\n She controlled herself. \"We must find a way to leave here,\" she said,\n calmly.\n\n\n \"They won't find us.\"",
"That night she soundlessly lifted the screen from the window over his\n bed and shot him with a .22 rifle.\n\n\n She threw the weapon into the river. It helped very little. He was one\n Agent, only one out of all the thousands of Agents all over Earth;\n while her husband had been one of twenty-eight persons. She decided\n then that her efforts would be too ineffective. The odds were wrong.\n She would wait until her son, Earl, was grown.\n\n\n Together they would seek revenge. He did not have the cylinder—not\n yet. But he would. The Konvs took care of their own.\n\n\n Her husband had been one of the first, and they would not forget. One\n day the boy would disappear for a few hours. When he returned the small\n patch of gauze would be behind his ear. She would shield him until the\n opening healed. Then no one would ever know, because now they could do\n it without leaving the tell-tale scar. Then they would seek revenge.",
"She turned her back and slammed the door. Earl stood very still for\n a long time in the room that was to have been happy for him. She was\n crying just beyond the wall.\n\n\n Earl did not use the room that first year. He slept in the second\n bedroom. He did not mention his frustrated desires to be normal, not\n after the first attempt, but he persisted in his efforts to be so. Use\n of the cylinder was out of the question for them now, anyway.\n\n\n In the spring Mrs. Jamieson caught a virus cold which resulted in a\n long convalescence. Earl moved into the new bedroom. At first she\n thought he moved in an effort to please her because of the illness, but\n she soon grew aware of her mistake.\n\n\n One day he disappeared.\nMrs. Jamieson was alarmed. Had the Agents found him? She watched the\n papers daily for some word of Konvs being killed.",
"A room was built on the east side of the bungalow, with its own private\n entrance. This was Earl's room. Ostensibly the private entrance was for\n convenience due to the irregular hours of college students.\n\n\n It was also convenient for coming home late at night after Agent\n hunting.\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson was becoming obvious.\n\n\n Excitement brought color to her cheeks when she thought of Earl facing\n one of them—a lean, cunning jaguar facing a fat, lazy bear. It was her\n notion that federal Agents were evil creatures, tools of a decadent,\n bloodthirsty society, living off the fat of the land.\n\n\n She painted the room herself, in soft, pastel colors. When it was\n finished she showed Earl regally into the room, making a big joke of it.\n\n\n \"Here you can study and relax, and have those bull sessions students\n are always having,\" she said.",
"\"I was swimming in the river, and a man came down to the river. His\n hair was all white, and his eyes looked like ... well, I never saw eyes\n like his before. He asked who was Earl Jamieson, and I said I was. Then\n he said, 'Come with me.' I went with him. I don't know why. It seemed\n the right thing. He took me to a car and there was another man in it,\n that looked like the first one only he was bigger. We went to a house,\n not far away and went inside. And that's all I can remember until I\n woke up. I was on a table, sort of. A high table. There was a light\n over it. It was all strange, and the two men stood there talking in\n some language I don't know.\"\n\n\n Earl ran his hand through his hair, shaking his head. \"I don't remember\n clearly, I guess. I was looking around the room and I remember thinking\n how scared I was, and how nice it would be to be here with you. And\n then I was here.\"",
"It was inevitable that they should identify Mrs. Jamieson as one of\n the offenders, since they had discovered, even before Stinson took his\n group to Centaurus, that individuals had thought patterns peculiar to\n themselves. These could be identified, if caught on their detectors,\n and even recorded for the files. But the files proved confusing, for\n they said that Mrs. Jamieson had gone to Centaurus with the others.\n\n\n Had she returned to Earth? The question did not trouble them long. They\n had more serious problems. Stinson had selected only the best of the\n Konvs when he left Earth, leaving all those with criminal tendencies\n behind. They could have followed if they chose—what could stop them?\n But it was more lucrative to stay. On Earth they could rob, loot, even\n murder—without fear of the law.\n\n\n Earl changed.",
"\"I wanted to learn the names of the men who killed Father.\" He said the\n word strangely. He was unaccustomed to it.\n\n\n \"Did you find them?\"\n\n\n He pointed to the paper on his desk. Mrs. Jamieson, trembling, picked\n it up and read the names. Seeing them there, written like any other\n names would be written, made her furious. How could they? How could the\n names of murderers look like ordinary names? When she thought them in\n her mind, they even sounded like ordinary names—and they shouldn't!\n She had always thought that those names, if she ever saw them, would\n be filthy, unholy scratches on paper, evil sounds, like the rustle of\n bedclothes to a jealous lover listening at a keyhole. \"Tom Palieu\"\n didn't sound evil; neither did \"Al Jonson.\" She was shaken by this more\n than she would permit Earl to see.\n\"Why did you want the names?\"",
"Sometimes when she talked about her husband, Mrs. Jamieson wanted to\n stand up and scream at her son, \"Hate, hate! Hate! You must learn to\n hate!\" But she clenched her hands over her knitting, knowing that he\n would learn it faster if she avoided the word.\nThe winter passed, and the next summer, and two more summers.\n\n\n Earl was ready for college. They had successfully kept their secret.\n They had been vigilant in every detail. Earl referred to the \"damn\n Agents\" now with a curl of his lip. They had been successful in\n contacting other Konvs, and sometimes visited them at a remote\n rendezvous.\n\n\n \"When you have finished college,\" Mrs. Jamieson told her son, \"we will\n go to Centaurus.\"\n\n\n \"Why not now?\"",
"\"Oh, yes they will,\" she said. \"Don't underestimate them. Agents are\n picked from the most intelligent people on Earth. It will be a small\n job for them. Don't forget they know who you are. Even if you hadn't\n been so stupid as to tell them, they'd know. They knew my pattern from\n the time your father was alive. They got yours when we were together\n years ago, teasing them. They linked your pattern with mine. They know\n that your father and I had a son. Your birth was recorded. The only\n difficult aspect of their job now is to find where you live, and it\n won't be impossible. They will drive their cars through every city on\n Earth with those new detectors, until they pick up your pattern or\n mine. I'm afraid it's time to leave Earth.\"\nEarl sat down suddenly, \"It's just as well. I thought maybe some day I\n might hate them too, or learn to like them. But I can do neither, so I\n am halfway between, and no man can live this way.\"",
"She didn't know where the men were now, those who had killed her\n husband. They could be anywhere. Agents moved from post to post; in ten\n years they might be scattered all over Earth. In the killing of Konvs,\n some cylinders might even be taken by Agents—and used by them, for\n the power and freedom the cylinders gave must be coveted even by them.\n And they were in the best position to gain them. She was consumed by\n fear that one or more of the men on Earl's list might have acquired a\n cylinder and were now Konvs themselves.\nTwo weeks later she read a news item saying that Tom Palieu had been\n killed by a Konv. The assassin's identity was unknown, but agents were\n working on the case.\n\n\n She knew. She had found a gun in Earl's desk.\n\n\n She took the paper into Earl's room. \"Did you do this?\"",
"\"I'm not like most boys, mother. The Konvs saw to that. Sometimes I'm\n sorry. Back in high school I used to wish I was like the others. Do you\n remember Lorane Peters?\" His mother nodded. \"Well, when we were seniors\n last year she liked me quite a lot. She didn't say so, but I knew it.\n She would sit across the aisle from me, and sometimes when I saw how\n her hair fell over her face when she read, I wanted to lean over and\n whisper to her, 'Hey, Lorrie—' just as if I was human—'can I take you\n to the basketball game?'\"\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson turned to leave the room, but he stopped her. \"You\n understand what I'm saying, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I don't!\" she said sharply. \"You're old enough to face realities.\n You are a Konv. You always will be a Konv.\nHave you forgotten your own\n father?\n\"",
"He turned away from her. \"It doesn't matter whether I did or not. They\n will suspect me. His name was on the list.\"\n\n\n \"They will,\" she agreed. \"It doesn't matter who the Konv is, now that\n an Agent has been killed. The one in Bangkok will tell them about you\n and the list of names, and it's all they need.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what else can he do?\" Earl asked. \"After all, he is an Agent.\n If one of them is killed, he will have to tell what he knows.\"\n\n\n \"You're defending him? Why?\" she cried. \"Tell me why!\"\n\n\n He removed her hand from his arm. Her nails were digging into his\n flesh. \"I don't know why. Mother, I'm sorry, but Agents are just people\n to me. I can't hate them the way you do.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson's face colored, then drained white."
],
[
"A room was built on the east side of the bungalow, with its own private\n entrance. This was Earl's room. Ostensibly the private entrance was for\n convenience due to the irregular hours of college students.\n\n\n It was also convenient for coming home late at night after Agent\n hunting.\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson was becoming obvious.\n\n\n Excitement brought color to her cheeks when she thought of Earl facing\n one of them—a lean, cunning jaguar facing a fat, lazy bear. It was her\n notion that federal Agents were evil creatures, tools of a decadent,\n bloodthirsty society, living off the fat of the land.\n\n\n She painted the room herself, in soft, pastel colors. When it was\n finished she showed Earl regally into the room, making a big joke of it.\n\n\n \"Here you can study and relax, and have those bull sessions students\n are always having,\" she said.",
"The second day after his disappearance she found a small item. A Konv\n had raided the Agent's office in Stockholm, killing three, and getting\n killed himself. Mrs. Jamieson dropped the paper immediately and went\n to Stockholm. She did not consider the risk. In Stockholm she found\n clothes and made discreet inquiries. The slain man had been a Finnish\n Konv, one of those left behind by Stinson as an undesirable. His wife\n had been killed by the Agents the week before. He had gone completely\n insane and made the raid singlehanded. Mrs. Jamieson read the account\n of crimes committed by the man and his wife, and determined to prevent\n Earl from making the mistake of taking on more than he could handle.\n\n\n When she arrived at her own home, Earl was in his room.\n\n\n \"Where have you been?\" she asked petulantly.\n\n\n \"Oh, here and there.\"\n\n\n \"I thought you were involved in that fight in Stockholm.\"",
"She turned her back and slammed the door. Earl stood very still for\n a long time in the room that was to have been happy for him. She was\n crying just beyond the wall.\n\n\n Earl did not use the room that first year. He slept in the second\n bedroom. He did not mention his frustrated desires to be normal, not\n after the first attempt, but he persisted in his efforts to be so. Use\n of the cylinder was out of the question for them now, anyway.\n\n\n In the spring Mrs. Jamieson caught a virus cold which resulted in a\n long convalescence. Earl moved into the new bedroom. At first she\n thought he moved in an effort to please her because of the illness, but\n she soon grew aware of her mistake.\n\n\n One day he disappeared.\nMrs. Jamieson was alarmed. Had the Agents found him? She watched the\n papers daily for some word of Konvs being killed.",
"Just like that, it was over.\n\n\n That is, the first shock was over. Mrs. Jamieson watched Earl leave the\n house, walking slowly along the river, a boy with a man's problems.\n His friends called to him from the river, but he chose not to hear.\n He wanted to be alone. He needed to think, to feel the newness of the\n thing.\n\n\n Perhaps he would cross the river and enter the deep forest there. When\n the initial shock wore off he might experiment with his new power. He\n would not travel far, in these first attempts. Probably he would stay\n within walking distance of his clothes, because he still lacked the\n tricks others had learned.",
"Even before the summer was over, he matured. The childish antics of his\n friends began to bore him. \"Be careful, Earl,\" his mother would say.\n \"Remember who you are. Play with them sometimes, even if you don't like\n it. You have a long way to go before you will be ready.\"",
"Her neighbors knew nothing of the money she had brought with her to\n Wisconsin. They didn't even know that she was not a native. She never\n spoke of it, except at first, when Earl was a boy of seven and they had\n just come there to live. Then she only said that she came from the\n East. She knew the names of eastern Wisconsin towns, and small facts\n about them; it lent an air of authenticity to her claim of being a\n native. Actually her previous residence was Bangkok, Siam, where the\n Agents had killed her husband.\n\n\n That was back in '07, on the eve of his departure for Alpha Centaurus;\n but she never spoke of this; and she was very careful not to move from\n place to place except by the conventional methods of travel.",
"\"Because when you get there they will need men who can contribute to\n the development of the planet. Stinson is a physicist, Benjamin a\n metallurgist, Straus a doctor. But Straus is an old man by this time. A\n young doctor will be needed. Study hard, Earl. Learn all you can. Even\n the great ones get sick.\"\n\n\n She did not mention her secret hope, that before they left Earth\n he would have fully avenged his father's death. He was clever and\n intelligent.\n\n\n He could kill many Agents.\n\n\n So she exhumed the money she had hidden more than ten years before.\n The house beside the Little Wolf river was sold. They found a modest\n bungalow within walking distance of the University's medical school.\n Mrs. Jamieson furnished it carefully but, oddly, rather lavishly.\n\n\n This was her husband's money she was spending now. It needed to last\n only a few years. Then they would leave Earth forever.",
"\"You have asked many times,\" Mrs. Jamieson said, \"how your father\n died. Now I will tell you the truth. Your father was one of the great\n ones, along with Stinson and Benjamin and Dr. Straus. He helped plan\n the escape; but the Agents found him in Bangkok fifteen minutes before\n the group left. They shot him in the back, and the others had to go on\n without him. Now do you know why I killed the Agent in the third cabin?\n I had to. Your father was a great man, and I loved him.\"\n\n\n \"I don't blame you, mother,\" Earl said simply. \"But we are freaks.\n Everybody says, 'Konv' as if it is something dirty. They write it on\n the walls in rest rooms.\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do—because they don't understand! They are afraid of\n us. Wouldn't you be afraid of someone who could do the things we do, if\n you\ncouldn't\ndo them?\"",
"Sometimes when she talked about her husband, Mrs. Jamieson wanted to\n stand up and scream at her son, \"Hate, hate! Hate! You must learn to\n hate!\" But she clenched her hands over her knitting, knowing that he\n would learn it faster if she avoided the word.\nThe winter passed, and the next summer, and two more summers.\n\n\n Earl was ready for college. They had successfully kept their secret.\n They had been vigilant in every detail. Earl referred to the \"damn\n Agents\" now with a curl of his lip. They had been successful in\n contacting other Konvs, and sometimes visited them at a remote\n rendezvous.\n\n\n \"When you have finished college,\" Mrs. Jamieson told her son, \"we will\n go to Centaurus.\"\n\n\n \"Why not now?\"",
"Later they would go to Alpha Centaurus, where a life free from Agents\n could be lived.\n\n\n It happened to Earl one hot summer day when he was fourteen. Mrs.\n Jamieson was working in her kitchen; Earl supposedly was swimming with\n his friends in the river. Suddenly he appeared before her, completely\n nude. At sight of his mother his face paled and he began to shake\n violently, so that she was forced to slap him to prevent hysteria. She\n looked behind his ear.\n\n\n It was there.\n\n\n \"Mom!\" he cried. \"Mom!\"",
"The arrested man disappeared from his jail cell, and the next morning\n the Agent was found strangled to death in his bed. This set off a\n campaign against Konvs. One base act led to another, until the original\n reason for noticing them at all was lost. Normal men no longer thought\n of them as human.\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson told how Stinson, knowing he had made too many cylinders\n and given them unwisely, left Earth for Alpha Centaurus.\n\n\n He went alone, not knowing if he could go so far, or what he would find\n when he arrived. But he did arrive, and it was what he had sought.\n\n\n He returned for the others. They gathered one night in a dirty,\n broken-down farmhouse in Missouri—and disappeared in a body, leaving\n the Agents standing helplessly on Earth, shaking their fists at the sky.",
"It was a hot, mucky afternoon with storm clouds pushing out of the\n west. Mrs. Jamieson put on her swimming suit and wandered down to the\n river to cool herself.\nFor the remainder of that summer they worked together. They practiced\n at night mostly, taking longer and longer jumps, until Earl's\n confidence allowed him to reach any part of the Earth he chose. She\n knew the habits of Agents. She knew how to avoid them.\n\n\n They would select a spot sufficiently remote to insure detection, she\n would devise some prank to irritate the Agents; then they would quickly\n return to Wisconsin. The Agents would rush to the calculated spot, but\n would find only the bare footprints of a woman and a boy. They would\n swear and drive back to their offices to dig through files, searching\n for some clue to their identity.",
"\"I remember when you were born,\" he said, and smiled in reminiscence.\n \"Your father was afraid you would be twins.\"\n\n\n Earl said, \"Why was my father killed?\"\n\n\n \"By mistake. Back in those days, like now, there were good Konvs and\n bad. One of those not selected by Stinson to join us was enraged, half\n crazy with envy. He killed two women there in Bangkok. The Agents\n thought Jamieson—I mean, your father—did it. Jamieson was the\n greatest man among us. It was he who first conceived the theory that\n there was a basic, underlying law in the operation of the cylinders.\n Even now, no one knows how the idea of love ties in with the Stinson\n Effect; but we do know that hate and greed as motivating forces can\n greatly minimize the cylinders' power. That is why the undesirables\n with cylinders have never reached Centaurus.\"\n\n\n Heavy steps sounded on the porch outside.",
"Suddenly, with a wide, furious sweep of her hand, she slapped his face.\n So much strength and rage was in her arm that the blow almost sent him\n spinning. They faced each other, she breathing hard from the exertion,\n Earl stunned immobile—not by the blow, but from the knowledge that she\n could hate so suddenly, viciously.\n\n\n She controlled herself. \"We must find a way to leave here,\" she said,\n calmly.\n\n\n \"They won't find us.\"",
"It was inevitable that they should identify Mrs. Jamieson as one of\n the offenders, since they had discovered, even before Stinson took his\n group to Centaurus, that individuals had thought patterns peculiar to\n themselves. These could be identified, if caught on their detectors,\n and even recorded for the files. But the files proved confusing, for\n they said that Mrs. Jamieson had gone to Centaurus with the others.\n\n\n Had she returned to Earth? The question did not trouble them long. They\n had more serious problems. Stinson had selected only the best of the\n Konvs when he left Earth, leaving all those with criminal tendencies\n behind. They could have followed if they chose—what could stop them?\n But it was more lucrative to stay. On Earth they could rob, loot, even\n murder—without fear of the law.\n\n\n Earl changed.",
"He turned away from her. \"It doesn't matter whether I did or not. They\n will suspect me. His name was on the list.\"\n\n\n \"They will,\" she agreed. \"It doesn't matter who the Konv is, now that\n an Agent has been killed. The one in Bangkok will tell them about you\n and the list of names, and it's all they need.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what else can he do?\" Earl asked. \"After all, he is an Agent.\n If one of them is killed, he will have to tell what he knows.\"\n\n\n \"You're defending him? Why?\" she cried. \"Tell me why!\"\n\n\n He removed her hand from his arm. Her nails were digging into his\n flesh. \"I don't know why. Mother, I'm sorry, but Agents are just people\n to me. I can't hate them the way you do.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson's face colored, then drained white.",
"During the long winter evenings, after they had watched their favorite\n video programs, they would sit by the fireplace. \"Tell me about the\n great ones,\" he would say, and she would repeat all the things she\n remembered about Stinson and Benjamin and Straus. She never tired of\n discussing them. She would tell about Benjamin's wife, Lisa, and try to\n describe the horror in Lisa's young mind when the news went out that\n E. Mason Jamieson had been killed. She wanted him to learn as much as\n possible about his father's death, knowing that soon the Agents would\n be after Earl. They were so clever, so persistent. She wanted him to be\n ready, not only in ways of avoiding their traps ... but ready with a\n heart full of hate.",
"\"I was swimming in the river, and a man came down to the river. His\n hair was all white, and his eyes looked like ... well, I never saw eyes\n like his before. He asked who was Earl Jamieson, and I said I was. Then\n he said, 'Come with me.' I went with him. I don't know why. It seemed\n the right thing. He took me to a car and there was another man in it,\n that looked like the first one only he was bigger. We went to a house,\n not far away and went inside. And that's all I can remember until I\n woke up. I was on a table, sort of. A high table. There was a light\n over it. It was all strange, and the two men stood there talking in\n some language I don't know.\"\n\n\n Earl ran his hand through his hair, shaking his head. \"I don't remember\n clearly, I guess. I was looking around the room and I remember thinking\n how scared I was, and how nice it would be to be here with you. And\n then I was here.\"",
"Earl faced the window, looking out, then turned quickly back. \"What is\n it?\" he asked, desperately. \"What happened to me?\"\n\n\n \"Better put your trousers on,\" Mrs. Jamieson said. \"It's something very\n unusual and terrible to think of at first, but really wonderful.\"\n\n\n \"But what happened? What is this patch behind my ear?\"\n\n\n Suddenly his face paled and he stopped in the act of getting into his\n trousers. \"Guess I know now. They made me a Konv.\"\n\n\n \"Well, don't take on so. You'll get used to it.\"\n\n\n \"But they shouldn't have! They didn't even ask me!\"",
"That night she soundlessly lifted the screen from the window over his\n bed and shot him with a .22 rifle.\n\n\n She threw the weapon into the river. It helped very little. He was one\n Agent, only one out of all the thousands of Agents all over Earth;\n while her husband had been one of twenty-eight persons. She decided\n then that her efforts would be too ineffective. The odds were wrong.\n She would wait until her son, Earl, was grown.\n\n\n Together they would seek revenge. He did not have the cylinder—not\n yet. But he would. The Konvs took care of their own.\n\n\n Her husband had been one of the first, and they would not forget. One\n day the boy would disappear for a few hours. When he returned the small\n patch of gauze would be behind his ear. She would shield him until the\n opening healed. Then no one would ever know, because now they could do\n it without leaving the tell-tale scar. Then they would seek revenge."
],
[
"He went to the window and looked out toward the river, where his\n friends were still swimming in the river, with great noise and delight.\n Apparently they did not miss him. Mrs. Jamieson handed him a pair of\n trousers. \"Here, get yourself dressed. Then we'll talk.\"\nHe started for his room, but she stopped him. \"No, do it right here.\n You may as well get used to it now.\"\n\n\n \"Get used to what?\"\n\n\n \"To people seeing you nude.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind. What happened just now?\"",
"A room was built on the east side of the bungalow, with its own private\n entrance. This was Earl's room. Ostensibly the private entrance was for\n convenience due to the irregular hours of college students.\n\n\n It was also convenient for coming home late at night after Agent\n hunting.\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson was becoming obvious.\n\n\n Excitement brought color to her cheeks when she thought of Earl facing\n one of them—a lean, cunning jaguar facing a fat, lazy bear. It was her\n notion that federal Agents were evil creatures, tools of a decadent,\n bloodthirsty society, living off the fat of the land.\n\n\n She painted the room herself, in soft, pastel colors. When it was\n finished she showed Earl regally into the room, making a big joke of it.\n\n\n \"Here you can study and relax, and have those bull sessions students\n are always having,\" she said.",
"JAMIESON\nBy BILL DOEDE\n\n\n Illustrated by GRAY\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine December 1960.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nA Konv cylinder was the key to space—but\n \nthere was one power it could not match!\nThey lived in a small house beside the little Wolf river in Wisconsin.\n Once it had been a summer cottage owned by a rich man from Chicago.\n The rich man died. His heirs sold it. Now it was well insulated and\n Mrs. Jamieson and her son were very comfortable, even in the coldest\n winter. During the summer they rented a few row boats to vacationing\n fishermen, and she had built a few overnight cabins beside the road.\n They were able to make ends meet.",
"Several times in the past seven years Mrs. Jamieson had seen other\n Konvs, and had been tempted to identify herself and say, \"Here I am.\n You are one of them; so am I. Come, and we'll talk. We'll talk about\n Stinson and Benjamin, who helped them all get away. And Doctor Straus.\n And my husband, E. Mason Jamieson, who never got away because those\n filthy, unspeakable Agents shot him in the back, there in that coffee\n shop in Bangkok, Siam.\"\nOnce, in the second year after her husband's death, an Agent came and\n stayed in one of her cabins.\n\n\n She learned that he was an Agent completely by accident. While cleaning\n the cabin one morning his badge fell out of a shirt pocket. She stood\n still, staring at the horror of it there on the floor, the shirt in\n her hands, all the loneliness returning in a black wave of hate and\n frustration.",
"Mrs. Jamieson held out her hand. \"Come here, son. It's time I told you\n about us.\"\nSo he sat across the kitchen table from her, and she told the whole\n history, beginning with Stinson sitting in the laboratory in New\n Jersey, holding in his hand a small cylinder moulded from silicon\n with controlled impurities. He had made it, looking for a better\n micro-circuit structure. He was holding this cylinder ... and it was a\n cold day outside ... and he was dreaming of a sunny Florida beach—\n\n\n And suddenly he was there, on the beach. He could not believe it at\n first. He felt the sand and water, and felt of himself; there was no\n mistake.",
"\"We'd better hurry,\" Mrs. Jamieson said.\n\n\n Benjamin held out his hands. They took them, to increase the power of\n the cylinders. As the Agents pounded on the door, Mrs. Jamieson flicked\n one thought of hatred at them, but of course they did not hear her.\n Benjamin's hands gripped tightly.\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson slowly opened her eyes....\n\n\n She no longer felt the hands.\nShe was still in the room!\nBenjamin and\n her son were gone. Her outstretched hands touched nothing.\n\n\n Her power was gone!\n\n\n The Agents stepped into the room over the broken door. She stared at\n them, then ran to Earl's desk, fumbling for the gun.\n\n\n The Agents' guns rattled.",
"\"You have asked many times,\" Mrs. Jamieson said, \"how your father\n died. Now I will tell you the truth. Your father was one of the great\n ones, along with Stinson and Benjamin and Dr. Straus. He helped plan\n the escape; but the Agents found him in Bangkok fifteen minutes before\n the group left. They shot him in the back, and the others had to go on\n without him. Now do you know why I killed the Agent in the third cabin?\n I had to. Your father was a great man, and I loved him.\"\n\n\n \"I don't blame you, mother,\" Earl said simply. \"But we are freaks.\n Everybody says, 'Konv' as if it is something dirty. They write it on\n the walls in rest rooms.\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do—because they don't understand! They are afraid of\n us. Wouldn't you be afraid of someone who could do the things we do, if\n you\ncouldn't\ndo them?\"",
"Sometimes when she talked about her husband, Mrs. Jamieson wanted to\n stand up and scream at her son, \"Hate, hate! Hate! You must learn to\n hate!\" But she clenched her hands over her knitting, knowing that he\n would learn it faster if she avoided the word.\nThe winter passed, and the next summer, and two more summers.\n\n\n Earl was ready for college. They had successfully kept their secret.\n They had been vigilant in every detail. Earl referred to the \"damn\n Agents\" now with a curl of his lip. They had been successful in\n contacting other Konvs, and sometimes visited them at a remote\n rendezvous.\n\n\n \"When you have finished college,\" Mrs. Jamieson told her son, \"we will\n go to Centaurus.\"\n\n\n \"Why not now?\"",
"It was a hot, mucky afternoon with storm clouds pushing out of the\n west. Mrs. Jamieson put on her swimming suit and wandered down to the\n river to cool herself.\nFor the remainder of that summer they worked together. They practiced\n at night mostly, taking longer and longer jumps, until Earl's\n confidence allowed him to reach any part of the Earth he chose. She\n knew the habits of Agents. She knew how to avoid them.\n\n\n They would select a spot sufficiently remote to insure detection, she\n would devise some prank to irritate the Agents; then they would quickly\n return to Wisconsin. The Agents would rush to the calculated spot, but\n would find only the bare footprints of a woman and a boy. They would\n swear and drive back to their offices to dig through files, searching\n for some clue to their identity.",
"He shook his head.\n\n\n She stood in the doorway and watched him leaning over his desk,\n attempting to write something on a sheet of paper. She was proud of his\n profile, tow-headed as a boy, handsome in a masculine way. He cracked\n his knuckles nervously.\n\n\n \"What did you do?\" she asked.\n\n\n Suddenly he flung the pencil down, jumped from his chair and paced the\n floor. \"I talked to an Agent last night,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Where?\"\n\n\n \"Bangkok.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson had to sit down. Finally she was able to ask, \"How did it\n happen?\"\n\n\n \"I broke into the office there to get at the records. He caught me.\"\n\n\n \"What were you looking for?\"",
"\"I didn't kill him. That's what seems so strange. And he didn't try to\n kill me. We didn't even fight. He didn't ask why I broke in without\n breaking the lock or even a window. He seemed to know. He did ask what\n I was doing there, and who I was. I told him, and ... he helped me get\n the names. He asked where I lived. 'None of your damn business,' I told\n him. Then he said he didn't blame me for not telling, that Konvs must\n fear Agents, and hate them. Then he said, 'Do you know why we kill\n Konvs? We kill them because there is no prison cell in the world that\n will hold a Konv. When they break the law, we have no choice. It is a\n terrible thing, but must be done. We don't want your secret; we only\n want law and order. There is room enough in the world for both of us.'\"\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson was furious. \"And you believed him?\"",
"Love, Benjamin said, the greatest of these is love. Or did someone\n else say that? Someone, somewhere, perhaps in another time, in some\n misty, forgotten chip of time long gone, in another frame of reference\n perhaps....\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson could not remember, before she died.",
"Just like that, it was over.\n\n\n That is, the first shock was over. Mrs. Jamieson watched Earl leave the\n house, walking slowly along the river, a boy with a man's problems.\n His friends called to him from the river, but he chose not to hear.\n He wanted to be alone. He needed to think, to feel the newness of the\n thing.\n\n\n Perhaps he would cross the river and enter the deep forest there. When\n the initial shock wore off he might experiment with his new power. He\n would not travel far, in these first attempts. Probably he would stay\n within walking distance of his clothes, because he still lacked the\n tricks others had learned.",
"It was inevitable that they should identify Mrs. Jamieson as one of\n the offenders, since they had discovered, even before Stinson took his\n group to Centaurus, that individuals had thought patterns peculiar to\n themselves. These could be identified, if caught on their detectors,\n and even recorded for the files. But the files proved confusing, for\n they said that Mrs. Jamieson had gone to Centaurus with the others.\n\n\n Had she returned to Earth? The question did not trouble them long. They\n had more serious problems. Stinson had selected only the best of the\n Konvs when he left Earth, leaving all those with criminal tendencies\n behind. They could have followed if they chose—what could stop them?\n But it was more lucrative to stay. On Earth they could rob, loot, even\n murder—without fear of the law.\n\n\n Earl changed.",
"The second day after his disappearance she found a small item. A Konv\n had raided the Agent's office in Stockholm, killing three, and getting\n killed himself. Mrs. Jamieson dropped the paper immediately and went\n to Stockholm. She did not consider the risk. In Stockholm she found\n clothes and made discreet inquiries. The slain man had been a Finnish\n Konv, one of those left behind by Stinson as an undesirable. His wife\n had been killed by the Agents the week before. He had gone completely\n insane and made the raid singlehanded. Mrs. Jamieson read the account\n of crimes committed by the man and his wife, and determined to prevent\n Earl from making the mistake of taking on more than he could handle.\n\n\n When she arrived at her own home, Earl was in his room.\n\n\n \"Where have you been?\" she asked petulantly.\n\n\n \"Oh, here and there.\"\n\n\n \"I thought you were involved in that fight in Stockholm.\"",
"\"I wanted to learn the names of the men who killed Father.\" He said the\n word strangely. He was unaccustomed to it.\n\n\n \"Did you find them?\"\n\n\n He pointed to the paper on his desk. Mrs. Jamieson, trembling, picked\n it up and read the names. Seeing them there, written like any other\n names would be written, made her furious. How could they? How could the\n names of murderers look like ordinary names? When she thought them in\n her mind, they even sounded like ordinary names—and they shouldn't!\n She had always thought that those names, if she ever saw them, would\n be filthy, unholy scratches on paper, evil sounds, like the rustle of\n bedclothes to a jealous lover listening at a keyhole. \"Tom Palieu\"\n didn't sound evil; neither did \"Al Jonson.\" She was shaken by this more\n than she would permit Earl to see.\n\"Why did you want the names?\"",
"She turned her back and slammed the door. Earl stood very still for\n a long time in the room that was to have been happy for him. She was\n crying just beyond the wall.\n\n\n Earl did not use the room that first year. He slept in the second\n bedroom. He did not mention his frustrated desires to be normal, not\n after the first attempt, but he persisted in his efforts to be so. Use\n of the cylinder was out of the question for them now, anyway.\n\n\n In the spring Mrs. Jamieson caught a virus cold which resulted in a\n long convalescence. Earl moved into the new bedroom. At first she\n thought he moved in an effort to please her because of the illness, but\n she soon grew aware of her mistake.\n\n\n One day he disappeared.\nMrs. Jamieson was alarmed. Had the Agents found him? She watched the\n papers daily for some word of Konvs being killed.",
"\"I don't know. I just know what he said—and that he let me go without\n trying to shoot me.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson stopped on her way out of the room and laid a hand on his\n arm. \"Your father would have been proud of you,\" she said. \"Soon you\n will learn the truth about the Agents.\"\n\n\n Beyond the closed door, out of sight of her son, Mrs. Jamieson gave\n rein to the excitement that ran through her. He had wanted the names!\n He didn't know why—not yet—but he would. \"He'll do it yet!\" she\n whispered to the flowered wallpaper. She didn't care that no one heard\n her.",
"\"I'm not like most boys, mother. The Konvs saw to that. Sometimes I'm\n sorry. Back in high school I used to wish I was like the others. Do you\n remember Lorane Peters?\" His mother nodded. \"Well, when we were seniors\n last year she liked me quite a lot. She didn't say so, but I knew it.\n She would sit across the aisle from me, and sometimes when I saw how\n her hair fell over her face when she read, I wanted to lean over and\n whisper to her, 'Hey, Lorrie—' just as if I was human—'can I take you\n to the basketball game?'\"\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson turned to leave the room, but he stopped her. \"You\n understand what I'm saying, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I don't!\" she said sharply. \"You're old enough to face realities.\n You are a Konv. You always will be a Konv.\nHave you forgotten your own\n father?\n\"",
"Also, she wore her hair long, almost to the shoulders. People said,\n \"There goes one of the old-fashioned ones. That hair-do was popular\n back in the sixties.\" They did not suspect that she did this only to\n cover the thin, pencil-line scar, evidence that a small cylinder lay\n under her skin behind the ear.\nFor Mrs. Jamieson was one of the Konvs.\n\n\n Her husband had been one of the small group who developed this tiny\n instrument. Not the inventor—\nhis\nname was Stinson, and the effects\n produced by it were known as the Stinson Effect. In appearance\n it resembled a small semi-conductor device. Analysis by the best\n scientific minds proved it to be a semi-conductor.\n\n\n Yet it held the power to move a body instantly from one point in space\n to any other point. Each unit was custom built, keyed to operate only\n by the thought pattern of the particular individual."
],
[
"She turned her back and slammed the door. Earl stood very still for\n a long time in the room that was to have been happy for him. She was\n crying just beyond the wall.\n\n\n Earl did not use the room that first year. He slept in the second\n bedroom. He did not mention his frustrated desires to be normal, not\n after the first attempt, but he persisted in his efforts to be so. Use\n of the cylinder was out of the question for them now, anyway.\n\n\n In the spring Mrs. Jamieson caught a virus cold which resulted in a\n long convalescence. Earl moved into the new bedroom. At first she\n thought he moved in an effort to please her because of the illness, but\n she soon grew aware of her mistake.\n\n\n One day he disappeared.\nMrs. Jamieson was alarmed. Had the Agents found him? She watched the\n papers daily for some word of Konvs being killed.",
"On the plane back to New Jersey he came to certain conclusions\n regarding the strange power of his device. He tried it again, secretly.\n Then he made more cylinders. He was the only man in the world who\n knew how to construct it, and he kept the secret, giving cylinders\n to selected people. He worked out the basic principle, calling it a\n kinetic ordinate of negative vortices, which was very undefinitive.\n\n\n It was a subject of wonder and much speculation, but no one took\n serious notice of them until one night a federal Agent arrested one man\n for indecency. It was a valid charge. One disadvantage of this method\n of travel was that, while a body could travel instantaneously to any\n chosen spot, it arrived without clothes.",
"\"We'd better hurry,\" Mrs. Jamieson said.\n\n\n Benjamin held out his hands. They took them, to increase the power of\n the cylinders. As the Agents pounded on the door, Mrs. Jamieson flicked\n one thought of hatred at them, but of course they did not hear her.\n Benjamin's hands gripped tightly.\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson slowly opened her eyes....\n\n\n She no longer felt the hands.\nShe was still in the room!\nBenjamin and\n her son were gone. Her outstretched hands touched nothing.\n\n\n Her power was gone!\n\n\n The Agents stepped into the room over the broken door. She stared at\n them, then ran to Earl's desk, fumbling for the gun.\n\n\n The Agents' guns rattled.",
"Also, she wore her hair long, almost to the shoulders. People said,\n \"There goes one of the old-fashioned ones. That hair-do was popular\n back in the sixties.\" They did not suspect that she did this only to\n cover the thin, pencil-line scar, evidence that a small cylinder lay\n under her skin behind the ear.\nFor Mrs. Jamieson was one of the Konvs.\n\n\n Her husband had been one of the small group who developed this tiny\n instrument. Not the inventor—\nhis\nname was Stinson, and the effects\n produced by it were known as the Stinson Effect. In appearance\n it resembled a small semi-conductor device. Analysis by the best\n scientific minds proved it to be a semi-conductor.\n\n\n Yet it held the power to move a body instantly from one point in space\n to any other point. Each unit was custom built, keyed to operate only\n by the thought pattern of the particular individual.",
"That night she soundlessly lifted the screen from the window over his\n bed and shot him with a .22 rifle.\n\n\n She threw the weapon into the river. It helped very little. He was one\n Agent, only one out of all the thousands of Agents all over Earth;\n while her husband had been one of twenty-eight persons. She decided\n then that her efforts would be too ineffective. The odds were wrong.\n She would wait until her son, Earl, was grown.\n\n\n Together they would seek revenge. He did not have the cylinder—not\n yet. But he would. The Konvs took care of their own.\n\n\n Her husband had been one of the first, and they would not forget. One\n day the boy would disappear for a few hours. When he returned the small\n patch of gauze would be behind his ear. She would shield him until the\n opening healed. Then no one would ever know, because now they could do\n it without leaving the tell-tale scar. Then they would seek revenge.",
"\"There will be no friends,\" he answered, \"not here. No Konvs will be at\n the university.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? Stinson selected only educated, intelligent people. When\n one dies the cylinder is taken and adjusted to a new thought\n pattern—usually a person from the same family. I would say it is very\n likely that Konvs will be found here.\"\nHe shook his head. \"No. They knew we were coming, and no one said a\n word about others being here. I'm afraid we are alone.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I think not,\" she said firmly. \"Anyway, the room will be\n comfortable.\"\n\n\n He shook his head again. \"Why can't I be in the house with you? There\n are two bedrooms.\"\n\n\n She said quickly, \"You can if you wish. I just thought you'd like being\n alone, at your age. Most boys do.\"",
"She didn't know where the men were now, those who had killed her\n husband. They could be anywhere. Agents moved from post to post; in ten\n years they might be scattered all over Earth. In the killing of Konvs,\n some cylinders might even be taken by Agents—and used by them, for\n the power and freedom the cylinders gave must be coveted even by them.\n And they were in the best position to gain them. She was consumed by\n fear that one or more of the men on Earl's list might have acquired a\n cylinder and were now Konvs themselves.\nTwo weeks later she read a news item saying that Tom Palieu had been\n killed by a Konv. The assassin's identity was unknown, but agents were\n working on the case.\n\n\n She knew. She had found a gun in Earl's desk.\n\n\n She took the paper into Earl's room. \"Did you do this?\"",
"Mrs. Jamieson held out her hand. \"Come here, son. It's time I told you\n about us.\"\nSo he sat across the kitchen table from her, and she told the whole\n history, beginning with Stinson sitting in the laboratory in New\n Jersey, holding in his hand a small cylinder moulded from silicon\n with controlled impurities. He had made it, looking for a better\n micro-circuit structure. He was holding this cylinder ... and it was a\n cold day outside ... and he was dreaming of a sunny Florida beach—\n\n\n And suddenly he was there, on the beach. He could not believe it at\n first. He felt the sand and water, and felt of himself; there was no\n mistake.",
"\"I remember when you were born,\" he said, and smiled in reminiscence.\n \"Your father was afraid you would be twins.\"\n\n\n Earl said, \"Why was my father killed?\"\n\n\n \"By mistake. Back in those days, like now, there were good Konvs and\n bad. One of those not selected by Stinson to join us was enraged, half\n crazy with envy. He killed two women there in Bangkok. The Agents\n thought Jamieson—I mean, your father—did it. Jamieson was the\n greatest man among us. It was he who first conceived the theory that\n there was a basic, underlying law in the operation of the cylinders.\n Even now, no one knows how the idea of love ties in with the Stinson\n Effect; but we do know that hate and greed as motivating forces can\n greatly minimize the cylinders' power. That is why the undesirables\n with cylinders have never reached Centaurus.\"\n\n\n Heavy steps sounded on the porch outside.",
"Her neighbors knew nothing of the money she had brought with her to\n Wisconsin. They didn't even know that she was not a native. She never\n spoke of it, except at first, when Earl was a boy of seven and they had\n just come there to live. Then she only said that she came from the\n East. She knew the names of eastern Wisconsin towns, and small facts\n about them; it lent an air of authenticity to her claim of being a\n native. Actually her previous residence was Bangkok, Siam, where the\n Agents had killed her husband.\n\n\n That was back in '07, on the eve of his departure for Alpha Centaurus;\n but she never spoke of this; and she was very careful not to move from\n place to place except by the conventional methods of travel.",
"Suddenly, with a wide, furious sweep of her hand, she slapped his face.\n So much strength and rage was in her arm that the blow almost sent him\n spinning. They faced each other, she breathing hard from the exertion,\n Earl stunned immobile—not by the blow, but from the knowledge that she\n could hate so suddenly, viciously.\n\n\n She controlled herself. \"We must find a way to leave here,\" she said,\n calmly.\n\n\n \"They won't find us.\"",
"She did not answer him. Finally he said, \"It doesn't make sense to you,\n does it?\"\n\n\n \"No, it doesn't. This is not the time for such discussions, anyway. The\n Agents have their machines working at top speed, while we sit here and\n talk.\"\n\n\n Suddenly they were not alone.\n\n\n No sound was generated by the man's coming. One instant they were\n talking alone, the next he was here. Earl saw him first. He was a\n middle-aged man whose hair was completely white. He stood near the\n desk, easily, as if standing there were the most natural way to relax.\n He was entirely nude ... but it seemed natural and right.\n\n\n Then Mrs. Jamieson saw him.\n\n\n \"Benjamin!\" she cried. \"I knew someone would come.\"\n\n\n He smiled. \"This is your son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" she said. \"We are ready.\"",
"It was a hot, mucky afternoon with storm clouds pushing out of the\n west. Mrs. Jamieson put on her swimming suit and wandered down to the\n river to cool herself.\nFor the remainder of that summer they worked together. They practiced\n at night mostly, taking longer and longer jumps, until Earl's\n confidence allowed him to reach any part of the Earth he chose. She\n knew the habits of Agents. She knew how to avoid them.\n\n\n They would select a spot sufficiently remote to insure detection, she\n would devise some prank to irritate the Agents; then they would quickly\n return to Wisconsin. The Agents would rush to the calculated spot, but\n would find only the bare footprints of a woman and a boy. They would\n swear and drive back to their offices to dig through files, searching\n for some clue to their identity.",
"The arrested man disappeared from his jail cell, and the next morning\n the Agent was found strangled to death in his bed. This set off a\n campaign against Konvs. One base act led to another, until the original\n reason for noticing them at all was lost. Normal men no longer thought\n of them as human.\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson told how Stinson, knowing he had made too many cylinders\n and given them unwisely, left Earth for Alpha Centaurus.\n\n\n He went alone, not knowing if he could go so far, or what he would find\n when he arrived. But he did arrive, and it was what he had sought.\n\n\n He returned for the others. They gathered one night in a dirty,\n broken-down farmhouse in Missouri—and disappeared in a body, leaving\n the Agents standing helplessly on Earth, shaking their fists at the sky.",
"He went to the window and looked out toward the river, where his\n friends were still swimming in the river, with great noise and delight.\n Apparently they did not miss him. Mrs. Jamieson handed him a pair of\n trousers. \"Here, get yourself dressed. Then we'll talk.\"\nHe started for his room, but she stopped him. \"No, do it right here.\n You may as well get used to it now.\"\n\n\n \"Get used to what?\"\n\n\n \"To people seeing you nude.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind. What happened just now?\"",
"\"I didn't kill him. That's what seems so strange. And he didn't try to\n kill me. We didn't even fight. He didn't ask why I broke in without\n breaking the lock or even a window. He seemed to know. He did ask what\n I was doing there, and who I was. I told him, and ... he helped me get\n the names. He asked where I lived. 'None of your damn business,' I told\n him. Then he said he didn't blame me for not telling, that Konvs must\n fear Agents, and hate them. Then he said, 'Do you know why we kill\n Konvs? We kill them because there is no prison cell in the world that\n will hold a Konv. When they break the law, we have no choice. It is a\n terrible thing, but must be done. We don't want your secret; we only\n want law and order. There is room enough in the world for both of us.'\"\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson was furious. \"And you believed him?\"",
"\"You have asked many times,\" Mrs. Jamieson said, \"how your father\n died. Now I will tell you the truth. Your father was one of the great\n ones, along with Stinson and Benjamin and Dr. Straus. He helped plan\n the escape; but the Agents found him in Bangkok fifteen minutes before\n the group left. They shot him in the back, and the others had to go on\n without him. Now do you know why I killed the Agent in the third cabin?\n I had to. Your father was a great man, and I loved him.\"\n\n\n \"I don't blame you, mother,\" Earl said simply. \"But we are freaks.\n Everybody says, 'Konv' as if it is something dirty. They write it on\n the walls in rest rooms.\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do—because they don't understand! They are afraid of\n us. Wouldn't you be afraid of someone who could do the things we do, if\n you\ncouldn't\ndo them?\"",
"Just like that, it was over.\n\n\n That is, the first shock was over. Mrs. Jamieson watched Earl leave the\n house, walking slowly along the river, a boy with a man's problems.\n His friends called to him from the river, but he chose not to hear.\n He wanted to be alone. He needed to think, to feel the newness of the\n thing.\n\n\n Perhaps he would cross the river and enter the deep forest there. When\n the initial shock wore off he might experiment with his new power. He\n would not travel far, in these first attempts. Probably he would stay\n within walking distance of his clothes, because he still lacked the\n tricks others had learned.",
"JAMIESON\nBy BILL DOEDE\n\n\n Illustrated by GRAY\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine December 1960.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nA Konv cylinder was the key to space—but\n \nthere was one power it could not match!\nThey lived in a small house beside the little Wolf river in Wisconsin.\n Once it had been a summer cottage owned by a rich man from Chicago.\n The rich man died. His heirs sold it. Now it was well insulated and\n Mrs. Jamieson and her son were very comfortable, even in the coldest\n winter. During the summer they rented a few row boats to vacationing\n fishermen, and she had built a few overnight cabins beside the road.\n They were able to make ends meet.",
"It was inevitable that they should identify Mrs. Jamieson as one of\n the offenders, since they had discovered, even before Stinson took his\n group to Centaurus, that individuals had thought patterns peculiar to\n themselves. These could be identified, if caught on their detectors,\n and even recorded for the files. But the files proved confusing, for\n they said that Mrs. Jamieson had gone to Centaurus with the others.\n\n\n Had she returned to Earth? The question did not trouble them long. They\n had more serious problems. Stinson had selected only the best of the\n Konvs when he left Earth, leaving all those with criminal tendencies\n behind. They could have followed if they chose—what could stop them?\n But it was more lucrative to stay. On Earth they could rob, loot, even\n murder—without fear of the law.\n\n\n Earl changed."
],
[
"\"You have asked many times,\" Mrs. Jamieson said, \"how your father\n died. Now I will tell you the truth. Your father was one of the great\n ones, along with Stinson and Benjamin and Dr. Straus. He helped plan\n the escape; but the Agents found him in Bangkok fifteen minutes before\n the group left. They shot him in the back, and the others had to go on\n without him. Now do you know why I killed the Agent in the third cabin?\n I had to. Your father was a great man, and I loved him.\"\n\n\n \"I don't blame you, mother,\" Earl said simply. \"But we are freaks.\n Everybody says, 'Konv' as if it is something dirty. They write it on\n the walls in rest rooms.\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do—because they don't understand! They are afraid of\n us. Wouldn't you be afraid of someone who could do the things we do, if\n you\ncouldn't\ndo them?\"",
"He started for the door, but she called him back. \"No, don't run away\n from it now. This is the time to face it. There are two sides to every\n story, you know. You hear only one side in school—their side. There is\n also\nour\nside.\"\n\n\n He turned back, a dawning comprehension showing in his eyes. \"That's\n right, you're one, too. That is why you killed that Agent in the third\n cabin.\"\n\n\n It was her turn to be surprised. \"You knew about that?\"\n\n\n \"I saw you. I wasn't sleeping. I was afraid to stay inside alone, so I\n followed you. I never told anyone.\"\n\n\n \"But you were only nine!\"\n\n\n \"They would have taken you away if I'd said anything.\"",
"\"I didn't kill him. That's what seems so strange. And he didn't try to\n kill me. We didn't even fight. He didn't ask why I broke in without\n breaking the lock or even a window. He seemed to know. He did ask what\n I was doing there, and who I was. I told him, and ... he helped me get\n the names. He asked where I lived. 'None of your damn business,' I told\n him. Then he said he didn't blame me for not telling, that Konvs must\n fear Agents, and hate them. Then he said, 'Do you know why we kill\n Konvs? We kill them because there is no prison cell in the world that\n will hold a Konv. When they break the law, we have no choice. It is a\n terrible thing, but must be done. We don't want your secret; we only\n want law and order. There is room enough in the world for both of us.'\"\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson was furious. \"And you believed him?\"",
"Several times in the past seven years Mrs. Jamieson had seen other\n Konvs, and had been tempted to identify herself and say, \"Here I am.\n You are one of them; so am I. Come, and we'll talk. We'll talk about\n Stinson and Benjamin, who helped them all get away. And Doctor Straus.\n And my husband, E. Mason Jamieson, who never got away because those\n filthy, unspeakable Agents shot him in the back, there in that coffee\n shop in Bangkok, Siam.\"\nOnce, in the second year after her husband's death, an Agent came and\n stayed in one of her cabins.\n\n\n She learned that he was an Agent completely by accident. While cleaning\n the cabin one morning his badge fell out of a shirt pocket. She stood\n still, staring at the horror of it there on the floor, the shirt in\n her hands, all the loneliness returning in a black wave of hate and\n frustration.",
"\"I wanted to learn the names of the men who killed Father.\" He said the\n word strangely. He was unaccustomed to it.\n\n\n \"Did you find them?\"\n\n\n He pointed to the paper on his desk. Mrs. Jamieson, trembling, picked\n it up and read the names. Seeing them there, written like any other\n names would be written, made her furious. How could they? How could the\n names of murderers look like ordinary names? When she thought them in\n her mind, they even sounded like ordinary names—and they shouldn't!\n She had always thought that those names, if she ever saw them, would\n be filthy, unholy scratches on paper, evil sounds, like the rustle of\n bedclothes to a jealous lover listening at a keyhole. \"Tom Palieu\"\n didn't sound evil; neither did \"Al Jonson.\" She was shaken by this more\n than she would permit Earl to see.\n\"Why did you want the names?\"",
"Suddenly, with a wide, furious sweep of her hand, she slapped his face.\n So much strength and rage was in her arm that the blow almost sent him\n spinning. They faced each other, she breathing hard from the exertion,\n Earl stunned immobile—not by the blow, but from the knowledge that she\n could hate so suddenly, viciously.\n\n\n She controlled herself. \"We must find a way to leave here,\" she said,\n calmly.\n\n\n \"They won't find us.\"",
"She didn't know where the men were now, those who had killed her\n husband. They could be anywhere. Agents moved from post to post; in ten\n years they might be scattered all over Earth. In the killing of Konvs,\n some cylinders might even be taken by Agents—and used by them, for\n the power and freedom the cylinders gave must be coveted even by them.\n And they were in the best position to gain them. She was consumed by\n fear that one or more of the men on Earl's list might have acquired a\n cylinder and were now Konvs themselves.\nTwo weeks later she read a news item saying that Tom Palieu had been\n killed by a Konv. The assassin's identity was unknown, but agents were\n working on the case.\n\n\n She knew. She had found a gun in Earl's desk.\n\n\n She took the paper into Earl's room. \"Did you do this?\"",
"The second day after his disappearance she found a small item. A Konv\n had raided the Agent's office in Stockholm, killing three, and getting\n killed himself. Mrs. Jamieson dropped the paper immediately and went\n to Stockholm. She did not consider the risk. In Stockholm she found\n clothes and made discreet inquiries. The slain man had been a Finnish\n Konv, one of those left behind by Stinson as an undesirable. His wife\n had been killed by the Agents the week before. He had gone completely\n insane and made the raid singlehanded. Mrs. Jamieson read the account\n of crimes committed by the man and his wife, and determined to prevent\n Earl from making the mistake of taking on more than he could handle.\n\n\n When she arrived at her own home, Earl was in his room.\n\n\n \"Where have you been?\" she asked petulantly.\n\n\n \"Oh, here and there.\"\n\n\n \"I thought you were involved in that fight in Stockholm.\"",
"A room was built on the east side of the bungalow, with its own private\n entrance. This was Earl's room. Ostensibly the private entrance was for\n convenience due to the irregular hours of college students.\n\n\n It was also convenient for coming home late at night after Agent\n hunting.\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson was becoming obvious.\n\n\n Excitement brought color to her cheeks when she thought of Earl facing\n one of them—a lean, cunning jaguar facing a fat, lazy bear. It was her\n notion that federal Agents were evil creatures, tools of a decadent,\n bloodthirsty society, living off the fat of the land.\n\n\n She painted the room herself, in soft, pastel colors. When it was\n finished she showed Earl regally into the room, making a big joke of it.\n\n\n \"Here you can study and relax, and have those bull sessions students\n are always having,\" she said.",
"\"Because when you get there they will need men who can contribute to\n the development of the planet. Stinson is a physicist, Benjamin a\n metallurgist, Straus a doctor. But Straus is an old man by this time. A\n young doctor will be needed. Study hard, Earl. Learn all you can. Even\n the great ones get sick.\"\n\n\n She did not mention her secret hope, that before they left Earth\n he would have fully avenged his father's death. He was clever and\n intelligent.\n\n\n He could kill many Agents.\n\n\n So she exhumed the money she had hidden more than ten years before.\n The house beside the Little Wolf river was sold. They found a modest\n bungalow within walking distance of the University's medical school.\n Mrs. Jamieson furnished it carefully but, oddly, rather lavishly.\n\n\n This was her husband's money she was spending now. It needed to last\n only a few years. Then they would leave Earth forever.",
"\"I remember when you were born,\" he said, and smiled in reminiscence.\n \"Your father was afraid you would be twins.\"\n\n\n Earl said, \"Why was my father killed?\"\n\n\n \"By mistake. Back in those days, like now, there were good Konvs and\n bad. One of those not selected by Stinson to join us was enraged, half\n crazy with envy. He killed two women there in Bangkok. The Agents\n thought Jamieson—I mean, your father—did it. Jamieson was the\n greatest man among us. It was he who first conceived the theory that\n there was a basic, underlying law in the operation of the cylinders.\n Even now, no one knows how the idea of love ties in with the Stinson\n Effect; but we do know that hate and greed as motivating forces can\n greatly minimize the cylinders' power. That is why the undesirables\n with cylinders have never reached Centaurus.\"\n\n\n Heavy steps sounded on the porch outside.",
"She turned her back and slammed the door. Earl stood very still for\n a long time in the room that was to have been happy for him. She was\n crying just beyond the wall.\n\n\n Earl did not use the room that first year. He slept in the second\n bedroom. He did not mention his frustrated desires to be normal, not\n after the first attempt, but he persisted in his efforts to be so. Use\n of the cylinder was out of the question for them now, anyway.\n\n\n In the spring Mrs. Jamieson caught a virus cold which resulted in a\n long convalescence. Earl moved into the new bedroom. At first she\n thought he moved in an effort to please her because of the illness, but\n she soon grew aware of her mistake.\n\n\n One day he disappeared.\nMrs. Jamieson was alarmed. Had the Agents found him? She watched the\n papers daily for some word of Konvs being killed.",
"Her neighbors knew nothing of the money she had brought with her to\n Wisconsin. They didn't even know that she was not a native. She never\n spoke of it, except at first, when Earl was a boy of seven and they had\n just come there to live. Then she only said that she came from the\n East. She knew the names of eastern Wisconsin towns, and small facts\n about them; it lent an air of authenticity to her claim of being a\n native. Actually her previous residence was Bangkok, Siam, where the\n Agents had killed her husband.\n\n\n That was back in '07, on the eve of his departure for Alpha Centaurus;\n but she never spoke of this; and she was very careful not to move from\n place to place except by the conventional methods of travel.",
"During the long winter evenings, after they had watched their favorite\n video programs, they would sit by the fireplace. \"Tell me about the\n great ones,\" he would say, and she would repeat all the things she\n remembered about Stinson and Benjamin and Straus. She never tired of\n discussing them. She would tell about Benjamin's wife, Lisa, and try to\n describe the horror in Lisa's young mind when the news went out that\n E. Mason Jamieson had been killed. She wanted him to learn as much as\n possible about his father's death, knowing that soon the Agents would\n be after Earl. They were so clever, so persistent. She wanted him to be\n ready, not only in ways of avoiding their traps ... but ready with a\n heart full of hate.",
"That night she soundlessly lifted the screen from the window over his\n bed and shot him with a .22 rifle.\n\n\n She threw the weapon into the river. It helped very little. He was one\n Agent, only one out of all the thousands of Agents all over Earth;\n while her husband had been one of twenty-eight persons. She decided\n then that her efforts would be too ineffective. The odds were wrong.\n She would wait until her son, Earl, was grown.\n\n\n Together they would seek revenge. He did not have the cylinder—not\n yet. But he would. The Konvs took care of their own.\n\n\n Her husband had been one of the first, and they would not forget. One\n day the boy would disappear for a few hours. When he returned the small\n patch of gauze would be behind his ear. She would shield him until the\n opening healed. Then no one would ever know, because now they could do\n it without leaving the tell-tale scar. Then they would seek revenge.",
"The arrested man disappeared from his jail cell, and the next morning\n the Agent was found strangled to death in his bed. This set off a\n campaign against Konvs. One base act led to another, until the original\n reason for noticing them at all was lost. Normal men no longer thought\n of them as human.\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson told how Stinson, knowing he had made too many cylinders\n and given them unwisely, left Earth for Alpha Centaurus.\n\n\n He went alone, not knowing if he could go so far, or what he would find\n when he arrived. But he did arrive, and it was what he had sought.\n\n\n He returned for the others. They gathered one night in a dirty,\n broken-down farmhouse in Missouri—and disappeared in a body, leaving\n the Agents standing helplessly on Earth, shaking their fists at the sky.",
"He shook his head.\n\n\n She stood in the doorway and watched him leaning over his desk,\n attempting to write something on a sheet of paper. She was proud of his\n profile, tow-headed as a boy, handsome in a masculine way. He cracked\n his knuckles nervously.\n\n\n \"What did you do?\" she asked.\n\n\n Suddenly he flung the pencil down, jumped from his chair and paced the\n floor. \"I talked to an Agent last night,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Where?\"\n\n\n \"Bangkok.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson had to sit down. Finally she was able to ask, \"How did it\n happen?\"\n\n\n \"I broke into the office there to get at the records. He caught me.\"\n\n\n \"What were you looking for?\"",
"\"We'd better hurry,\" Mrs. Jamieson said.\n\n\n Benjamin held out his hands. They took them, to increase the power of\n the cylinders. As the Agents pounded on the door, Mrs. Jamieson flicked\n one thought of hatred at them, but of course they did not hear her.\n Benjamin's hands gripped tightly.\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson slowly opened her eyes....\n\n\n She no longer felt the hands.\nShe was still in the room!\nBenjamin and\n her son were gone. Her outstretched hands touched nothing.\n\n\n Her power was gone!\n\n\n The Agents stepped into the room over the broken door. She stared at\n them, then ran to Earl's desk, fumbling for the gun.\n\n\n The Agents' guns rattled.",
"He turned away from her. \"It doesn't matter whether I did or not. They\n will suspect me. His name was on the list.\"\n\n\n \"They will,\" she agreed. \"It doesn't matter who the Konv is, now that\n an Agent has been killed. The one in Bangkok will tell them about you\n and the list of names, and it's all they need.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what else can he do?\" Earl asked. \"After all, he is an Agent.\n If one of them is killed, he will have to tell what he knows.\"\n\n\n \"You're defending him? Why?\" she cried. \"Tell me why!\"\n\n\n He removed her hand from his arm. Her nails were digging into his\n flesh. \"I don't know why. Mother, I'm sorry, but Agents are just people\n to me. I can't hate them the way you do.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson's face colored, then drained white.",
"\"There will be no friends,\" he answered, \"not here. No Konvs will be at\n the university.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? Stinson selected only educated, intelligent people. When\n one dies the cylinder is taken and adjusted to a new thought\n pattern—usually a person from the same family. I would say it is very\n likely that Konvs will be found here.\"\nHe shook his head. \"No. They knew we were coming, and no one said a\n word about others being here. I'm afraid we are alone.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I think not,\" she said firmly. \"Anyway, the room will be\n comfortable.\"\n\n\n He shook his head again. \"Why can't I be in the house with you? There\n are two bedrooms.\"\n\n\n She said quickly, \"You can if you wish. I just thought you'd like being\n alone, at your age. Most boys do.\""
],
[
"He went to the window and looked out toward the river, where his\n friends were still swimming in the river, with great noise and delight.\n Apparently they did not miss him. Mrs. Jamieson handed him a pair of\n trousers. \"Here, get yourself dressed. Then we'll talk.\"\nHe started for his room, but she stopped him. \"No, do it right here.\n You may as well get used to it now.\"\n\n\n \"Get used to what?\"\n\n\n \"To people seeing you nude.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind. What happened just now?\"",
"Just like that, it was over.\n\n\n That is, the first shock was over. Mrs. Jamieson watched Earl leave the\n house, walking slowly along the river, a boy with a man's problems.\n His friends called to him from the river, but he chose not to hear.\n He wanted to be alone. He needed to think, to feel the newness of the\n thing.\n\n\n Perhaps he would cross the river and enter the deep forest there. When\n the initial shock wore off he might experiment with his new power. He\n would not travel far, in these first attempts. Probably he would stay\n within walking distance of his clothes, because he still lacked the\n tricks others had learned.",
"A room was built on the east side of the bungalow, with its own private\n entrance. This was Earl's room. Ostensibly the private entrance was for\n convenience due to the irregular hours of college students.\n\n\n It was also convenient for coming home late at night after Agent\n hunting.\n\n\n Mrs. Jamieson was becoming obvious.\n\n\n Excitement brought color to her cheeks when she thought of Earl facing\n one of them—a lean, cunning jaguar facing a fat, lazy bear. It was her\n notion that federal Agents were evil creatures, tools of a decadent,\n bloodthirsty society, living off the fat of the land.\n\n\n She painted the room herself, in soft, pastel colors. When it was\n finished she showed Earl regally into the room, making a big joke of it.\n\n\n \"Here you can study and relax, and have those bull sessions students\n are always having,\" she said.",
"She did not answer him. Finally he said, \"It doesn't make sense to you,\n does it?\"\n\n\n \"No, it doesn't. This is not the time for such discussions, anyway. The\n Agents have their machines working at top speed, while we sit here and\n talk.\"\n\n\n Suddenly they were not alone.\n\n\n No sound was generated by the man's coming. One instant they were\n talking alone, the next he was here. Earl saw him first. He was a\n middle-aged man whose hair was completely white. He stood near the\n desk, easily, as if standing there were the most natural way to relax.\n He was entirely nude ... but it seemed natural and right.\n\n\n Then Mrs. Jamieson saw him.\n\n\n \"Benjamin!\" she cried. \"I knew someone would come.\"\n\n\n He smiled. \"This is your son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" she said. \"We are ready.\"",
"Earl faced the window, looking out, then turned quickly back. \"What is\n it?\" he asked, desperately. \"What happened to me?\"\n\n\n \"Better put your trousers on,\" Mrs. Jamieson said. \"It's something very\n unusual and terrible to think of at first, but really wonderful.\"\n\n\n \"But what happened? What is this patch behind my ear?\"\n\n\n Suddenly his face paled and he stopped in the act of getting into his\n trousers. \"Guess I know now. They made me a Konv.\"\n\n\n \"Well, don't take on so. You'll get used to it.\"\n\n\n \"But they shouldn't have! They didn't even ask me!\"",
"Later they would go to Alpha Centaurus, where a life free from Agents\n could be lived.\n\n\n It happened to Earl one hot summer day when he was fourteen. Mrs.\n Jamieson was working in her kitchen; Earl supposedly was swimming with\n his friends in the river. Suddenly he appeared before her, completely\n nude. At sight of his mother his face paled and he began to shake\n violently, so that she was forced to slap him to prevent hysteria. She\n looked behind his ear.\n\n\n It was there.\n\n\n \"Mom!\" he cried. \"Mom!\"",
"She turned her back and slammed the door. Earl stood very still for\n a long time in the room that was to have been happy for him. She was\n crying just beyond the wall.\n\n\n Earl did not use the room that first year. He slept in the second\n bedroom. He did not mention his frustrated desires to be normal, not\n after the first attempt, but he persisted in his efforts to be so. Use\n of the cylinder was out of the question for them now, anyway.\n\n\n In the spring Mrs. Jamieson caught a virus cold which resulted in a\n long convalescence. Earl moved into the new bedroom. At first she\n thought he moved in an effort to please her because of the illness, but\n she soon grew aware of her mistake.\n\n\n One day he disappeared.\nMrs. Jamieson was alarmed. Had the Agents found him? She watched the\n papers daily for some word of Konvs being killed.",
"Even before the summer was over, he matured. The childish antics of his\n friends began to bore him. \"Be careful, Earl,\" his mother would say.\n \"Remember who you are. Play with them sometimes, even if you don't like\n it. You have a long way to go before you will be ready.\"",
"\"You have asked many times,\" Mrs. Jamieson said, \"how your father\n died. Now I will tell you the truth. Your father was one of the great\n ones, along with Stinson and Benjamin and Dr. Straus. He helped plan\n the escape; but the Agents found him in Bangkok fifteen minutes before\n the group left. They shot him in the back, and the others had to go on\n without him. Now do you know why I killed the Agent in the third cabin?\n I had to. Your father was a great man, and I loved him.\"\n\n\n \"I don't blame you, mother,\" Earl said simply. \"But we are freaks.\n Everybody says, 'Konv' as if it is something dirty. They write it on\n the walls in rest rooms.\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do—because they don't understand! They are afraid of\n us. Wouldn't you be afraid of someone who could do the things we do, if\n you\ncouldn't\ndo them?\"",
"Suddenly, with a wide, furious sweep of her hand, she slapped his face.\n So much strength and rage was in her arm that the blow almost sent him\n spinning. They faced each other, she breathing hard from the exertion,\n Earl stunned immobile—not by the blow, but from the knowledge that she\n could hate so suddenly, viciously.\n\n\n She controlled herself. \"We must find a way to leave here,\" she said,\n calmly.\n\n\n \"They won't find us.\"",
"\"I wanted to learn the names of the men who killed Father.\" He said the\n word strangely. He was unaccustomed to it.\n\n\n \"Did you find them?\"\n\n\n He pointed to the paper on his desk. Mrs. Jamieson, trembling, picked\n it up and read the names. Seeing them there, written like any other\n names would be written, made her furious. How could they? How could the\n names of murderers look like ordinary names? When she thought them in\n her mind, they even sounded like ordinary names—and they shouldn't!\n She had always thought that those names, if she ever saw them, would\n be filthy, unholy scratches on paper, evil sounds, like the rustle of\n bedclothes to a jealous lover listening at a keyhole. \"Tom Palieu\"\n didn't sound evil; neither did \"Al Jonson.\" She was shaken by this more\n than she would permit Earl to see.\n\"Why did you want the names?\"",
"\"I remember when you were born,\" he said, and smiled in reminiscence.\n \"Your father was afraid you would be twins.\"\n\n\n Earl said, \"Why was my father killed?\"\n\n\n \"By mistake. Back in those days, like now, there were good Konvs and\n bad. One of those not selected by Stinson to join us was enraged, half\n crazy with envy. He killed two women there in Bangkok. The Agents\n thought Jamieson—I mean, your father—did it. Jamieson was the\n greatest man among us. It was he who first conceived the theory that\n there was a basic, underlying law in the operation of the cylinders.\n Even now, no one knows how the idea of love ties in with the Stinson\n Effect; but we do know that hate and greed as motivating forces can\n greatly minimize the cylinders' power. That is why the undesirables\n with cylinders have never reached Centaurus.\"\n\n\n Heavy steps sounded on the porch outside.",
"\"I was swimming in the river, and a man came down to the river. His\n hair was all white, and his eyes looked like ... well, I never saw eyes\n like his before. He asked who was Earl Jamieson, and I said I was. Then\n he said, 'Come with me.' I went with him. I don't know why. It seemed\n the right thing. He took me to a car and there was another man in it,\n that looked like the first one only he was bigger. We went to a house,\n not far away and went inside. And that's all I can remember until I\n woke up. I was on a table, sort of. A high table. There was a light\n over it. It was all strange, and the two men stood there talking in\n some language I don't know.\"\n\n\n Earl ran his hand through his hair, shaking his head. \"I don't remember\n clearly, I guess. I was looking around the room and I remember thinking\n how scared I was, and how nice it would be to be here with you. And\n then I was here.\"",
"\"Because when you get there they will need men who can contribute to\n the development of the planet. Stinson is a physicist, Benjamin a\n metallurgist, Straus a doctor. But Straus is an old man by this time. A\n young doctor will be needed. Study hard, Earl. Learn all you can. Even\n the great ones get sick.\"\n\n\n She did not mention her secret hope, that before they left Earth\n he would have fully avenged his father's death. He was clever and\n intelligent.\n\n\n He could kill many Agents.\n\n\n So she exhumed the money she had hidden more than ten years before.\n The house beside the Little Wolf river was sold. They found a modest\n bungalow within walking distance of the University's medical school.\n Mrs. Jamieson furnished it carefully but, oddly, rather lavishly.\n\n\n This was her husband's money she was spending now. It needed to last\n only a few years. Then they would leave Earth forever.",
"On the plane back to New Jersey he came to certain conclusions\n regarding the strange power of his device. He tried it again, secretly.\n Then he made more cylinders. He was the only man in the world who\n knew how to construct it, and he kept the secret, giving cylinders\n to selected people. He worked out the basic principle, calling it a\n kinetic ordinate of negative vortices, which was very undefinitive.\n\n\n It was a subject of wonder and much speculation, but no one took\n serious notice of them until one night a federal Agent arrested one man\n for indecency. It was a valid charge. One disadvantage of this method\n of travel was that, while a body could travel instantaneously to any\n chosen spot, it arrived without clothes.",
"It was a hot, mucky afternoon with storm clouds pushing out of the\n west. Mrs. Jamieson put on her swimming suit and wandered down to the\n river to cool herself.\nFor the remainder of that summer they worked together. They practiced\n at night mostly, taking longer and longer jumps, until Earl's\n confidence allowed him to reach any part of the Earth he chose. She\n knew the habits of Agents. She knew how to avoid them.\n\n\n They would select a spot sufficiently remote to insure detection, she\n would devise some prank to irritate the Agents; then they would quickly\n return to Wisconsin. The Agents would rush to the calculated spot, but\n would find only the bare footprints of a woman and a boy. They would\n swear and drive back to their offices to dig through files, searching\n for some clue to their identity.",
"During the long winter evenings, after they had watched their favorite\n video programs, they would sit by the fireplace. \"Tell me about the\n great ones,\" he would say, and she would repeat all the things she\n remembered about Stinson and Benjamin and Straus. She never tired of\n discussing them. She would tell about Benjamin's wife, Lisa, and try to\n describe the horror in Lisa's young mind when the news went out that\n E. Mason Jamieson had been killed. She wanted him to learn as much as\n possible about his father's death, knowing that soon the Agents would\n be after Earl. They were so clever, so persistent. She wanted him to be\n ready, not only in ways of avoiding their traps ... but ready with a\n heart full of hate.",
"That night she soundlessly lifted the screen from the window over his\n bed and shot him with a .22 rifle.\n\n\n She threw the weapon into the river. It helped very little. He was one\n Agent, only one out of all the thousands of Agents all over Earth;\n while her husband had been one of twenty-eight persons. She decided\n then that her efforts would be too ineffective. The odds were wrong.\n She would wait until her son, Earl, was grown.\n\n\n Together they would seek revenge. He did not have the cylinder—not\n yet. But he would. The Konvs took care of their own.\n\n\n Her husband had been one of the first, and they would not forget. One\n day the boy would disappear for a few hours. When he returned the small\n patch of gauze would be behind his ear. She would shield him until the\n opening healed. Then no one would ever know, because now they could do\n it without leaving the tell-tale scar. Then they would seek revenge.",
"It was inevitable that they should identify Mrs. Jamieson as one of\n the offenders, since they had discovered, even before Stinson took his\n group to Centaurus, that individuals had thought patterns peculiar to\n themselves. These could be identified, if caught on their detectors,\n and even recorded for the files. But the files proved confusing, for\n they said that Mrs. Jamieson had gone to Centaurus with the others.\n\n\n Had she returned to Earth? The question did not trouble them long. They\n had more serious problems. Stinson had selected only the best of the\n Konvs when he left Earth, leaving all those with criminal tendencies\n behind. They could have followed if they chose—what could stop them?\n But it was more lucrative to stay. On Earth they could rob, loot, even\n murder—without fear of the law.\n\n\n Earl changed.",
"The second day after his disappearance she found a small item. A Konv\n had raided the Agent's office in Stockholm, killing three, and getting\n killed himself. Mrs. Jamieson dropped the paper immediately and went\n to Stockholm. She did not consider the risk. In Stockholm she found\n clothes and made discreet inquiries. The slain man had been a Finnish\n Konv, one of those left behind by Stinson as an undesirable. His wife\n had been killed by the Agents the week before. He had gone completely\n insane and made the raid singlehanded. Mrs. Jamieson read the account\n of crimes committed by the man and his wife, and determined to prevent\n Earl from making the mistake of taking on more than he could handle.\n\n\n When she arrived at her own home, Earl was in his room.\n\n\n \"Where have you been?\" she asked petulantly.\n\n\n \"Oh, here and there.\"\n\n\n \"I thought you were involved in that fight in Stockholm.\""
]
] |
valid
|
51461
|
[
"Why couldn’t the search party find the family with traditional communications?",
"What is the Nest built inside of?",
"What do humans wear outside on the planet?",
"How many times did the son leave the Nest in the story?",
"What is the relationship like between Pa and his son?",
"What is the relationship like between Ma and Pa?",
"What is the Big Jerk?",
"What are the ways that the family sustains themselves?",
"What is the attitude of the search party?"
] |
[
[
"Signals are disrupted by the electromagnetic events of the dark star",
"The family couldn’t hear them because they were underground",
"The communication devices don’t work in the cold",
"There is no medium to carry signals"
],
[
"A train station",
"An office building",
"It stands alone like a tent",
"It’s not known"
],
[
"They can travel outside without any special gear",
"Winter clothes and simple clear helmets",
"They never travel outside, only in underground corridors",
"Sophisticated astronaut suits from Pa’s old work"
],
[
"Four",
"Two",
"One",
"Three"
],
[
"He encourages him to keep up their lifestyle in the Nest",
"He trusts him and tasks him with protecting the family too",
"He is not yet sure if his son is ready to care for the family",
"They are not as close as they might have been before the hardships of the planet freezing"
],
[
"They devotedly support each other",
"They hardly speak anymore due to the hardships of survival",
"They fight terribly at times",
"Pa is like a caregiver for Ma given her affliction"
],
[
"The event that changed the orbit of Earth to a new star",
"The time period before the Earth started orbiting the dark star",
"A term for the sun that Pa uses to entertain the kids",
"The process of the Earth and moon leaving the solar system"
],
[
"Drinking water from under the ice of a frozen lake",
"Eating the people that froze in the city",
"Sheltering next to a nuclear reactor",
"Breathing pure oxygen"
],
[
"They are surprised to find the family alive",
"They are elated to reunite with their family members",
"They are downtrodden because they haven’t found any survivors outside of their fortified city",
"They have found others very nearby the Nest and they were hopeful there were others like the family there"
]
] |
[
4,
4,
2,
2,
2,
4,
1,
4,
1
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[
1,
1,
0,
1,
1,
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[
"But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright\n light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice stopped and his eyes turned to\n the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped\n the handle of the hammer beside him.\nIn through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood\n there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something\n bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her\n shoulders—men's faces, white and staring.\n\n\n Well, my heart couldn't have been stopped for more than four or five\n beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa's\n homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too—and that the\n frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I noticed that\n the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.\n\n\n The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after\n that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion.",
"In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about\n things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked\n and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another\n bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started\n them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little\n drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen.\n\n\n Funny thing, though—I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on\n to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt\n pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady.\n Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but\n now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to\n be nice as anything to me.\n\n\n I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone\n and get our feelings straightened out.",
"Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was\n told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind\n of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail\n and the two of us go out.\nPa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not\n afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to\n him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a\n bit scared.\n\n\n You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa\n heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of\n the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we\n knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't\n be anything human or friendly.",
"Well, they'd found other colonies at Argonne and Brookhaven and way\n around the world at Harwell and Tanna Tuva. And now they'd been giving\n our city a look, not really expecting to find anything. But they had an\n instrument that noticed the faintest heat waves and it had told them\n there was something warm down here, so they'd landed to investigate.\n Of course we hadn't heard them land, since there was no air to carry\n the sound, and they'd had to investigate around quite a while before\n finding us. Their instruments had given them a wrong steer and they'd\n wasted some time in the building across the street.\nBy now, all five adults were talking like sixty. Pa was demonstrating\n to the men how he worked the fire and got rid of the ice in the chimney",
"They were simply people, you see. We hadn't been the only ones to\n survive; we'd just thought so, for natural enough reasons. These three\n people had survived, and quite a few others with them. And when we\n found out\nhow\nthey'd survived, Pa let out the biggest whoop of joy.\n\n\n They were from Los Alamos and they were getting their heat and power\n from atomic energy. Just using the uranium and plutonium intended\n for bombs, they had enough to go on for thousands of years. They had\n a regular little airtight city, with air-locks and all. They even\n generated electric light and grew plants and animals by it. (At this Pa\n let out a second whoop, waking Ma from her faint.)\n\n\n But if we were flabbergasted at them, they were double-flabbergasted at\n us.",
"The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking\n eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the\n Nest.\n\n\n I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very\n badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said\n and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.\n\n\n We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently.\n There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks.\n\n\n And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My\n skin tightened all over me.\n\n\n Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the\n place where he philosophizes.",
"And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going to Los Alamos,\n as if that were taken for granted, I could see that something of the\n same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden\n and Ma kept telling the young lady, \"But I wouldn't know how to act\n there and I haven't any clothes.\"\n\n\n The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then they got\n the idea. As Pa kept saying, \"It just doesn't seem right to let this\n fire go out.\"\nWell, the strangers are gone, but they're coming back. It hasn't been\n decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as\n what one of the strangers called a \"survival school.\" Or maybe we will\n join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the\n uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.",
"It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think\n of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously\n at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often\n carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa\n tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very\n old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen\n air all around then and you didn't really need one.\n\n\n He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the\n pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he'd spotted my frozen\n helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's\n always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut\n her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.",
"Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined\n in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside\n clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have\n plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food\n cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a\n little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and\n so on.\n\n\n Ma started moaning again, \"I've always known there was something\n outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something\n that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the\n Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after\n us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!\"",
"Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a\n lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a\n hankering to see them for myself.\n\n\n You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty\n thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.\n\n\n \"It's different, now that we know others are alive,\" he explains to me.\n \"Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that\n matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the\n human race going, so to speak. It scares a person.\"\n\n\n I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air\n boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering\n light.",
"One of the men kept saying, \"But it's impossible, I tell you. You\n can't maintain an air supply without hermetic sealing. It's simply\n impossible.\"\n\n\n That was after he had got his helmet off and was using our air.\n Meanwhile, the young lady kept looking around at us as if we were\n saints, and telling us we'd done something amazing, and suddenly she\n broke down and cried.\n\n\n They'd been scouting around for survivors, but they never expected to\n find any in a place like this. They had rocket ships at Los Alamos and\n plenty of chemical fuel. As for liquid oxygen, all you had to do was\n go out and shovel the air blanket at the top\nlevel\n. So after they'd\n got things going smoothly at Los Alamos, which had taken years, they'd\n decided to make some trips to likely places where there might be other\n survivors. No good trying long-distance radio signals, of course, since\n there was no atmosphere to carry them around the curve of the Earth.",
"Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so\n blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of\n air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the\n tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back\n into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course.\n But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last\n blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the\n heat—and came into the Nest.\nLet me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the\n four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly\n rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it\n touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've\n never seen the real walls or ceiling.",
"Pa showed them to me once in quick winks of his flashlight, when\n he still had a fair supply of batteries and could afford to waste\n a little light. They scared me pretty bad and made my heart pound,\n especially the young lady.\nNow, with Pa telling his story for the umpteenth time to take our minds\n off another scare, I got to thinking of the frozen folk again. All of a\n sudden I got an idea that scared me worse than anything yet. You see,\n I'd just remembered the face I'd thought I'd seen in the window. I'd\n forgotten about that on account of trying to hide it from the others.",
"His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it\n didn't wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind—or the\n fact that Pa took it seriously.\nIt's hard to hide your feelings about such a thing. When we got back in\n the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and\n told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination,\n but his words fell flat. He didn't convince Ma and Sis any more than\n he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the\n courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what\n I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old\n days, and how it all happened.",
"You see, Pa and some scientist friends of his had figured out part of\n what was going to happen—they'd known we'd get captured and our air\n would freeze—and they'd been working like mad to fix up a place with\n airtight walls and doors, and insulation against the cold, and big\n supplies of food and fuel and water and bottled air. But the place\n got smashed in the last earthquakes and all Pa's friends were killed\n then and in the Big Jerk. So he had to start over and throw the Nest\n together quick without any advantages, just using any stuff he could\n lay his hands on.\n\n\n I guess he's telling pretty much the truth when he says he didn't have\n any time to keep an eye on how other folks behaved, either then or\n in the Big Freeze that followed—followed very quick, you know, both\n because the dark star was pulling us away very fast and because Earth's\n rotation had been slowed in the tug-of-war, so that the nights were ten\n old nights long.",
"You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful\n young lady's face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the\n fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor\n just above the white blanket of frozen air. I'd never seen a live young\n lady before, except in the old magazines—Sis is just a kid and Ma is\n pretty sick and miserable—and it gave me such a start that I dropped\n the pail. Who wouldn't, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa\n and Ma and Sis and you?\nEven at that, I don't suppose I should have been surprised. We all\n see things now and then. Ma has some pretty bad ones, to judge from\n the way she bugs her eyes at nothing and just screams and screams and\n huddles back against the blankets hanging around the Nest. Pa says it\n is natural we should react like that sometimes.",
"He sometimes doesn't mind telling that story, and Sis and I sure like\n to listen to it, and he got my idea. So we were all settled around the\n fire in a wink, and Ma pushed up some cans to thaw for supper, and Pa\n began. Before he did, though, I noticed him casually get a hammer from\n the shelf and lay it down beside him.\n\n\n It was the same old story as always—I think I could recite the main\n thread of it in my sleep—though Pa always puts in a new detail or two\n and keeps improving it in spots.\n\n\n He told us how the Earth had been swinging around the Sun ever so\n steady and warm, and the people on it fixing to make money and wars and\n have a good time and get power and treat each other right or wrong,\n when without warning there comes charging out of space this dead star,\n this burned out sun, and upsets everything.",
"and all that. Ma had perked up wonderfully and was showing the young\n lady her cooking and sewing stuff, and even asking about how the women\n dressed at Los Alamos. The strangers marveled at everything and praised\n it to the skies. I could tell from the way they wrinkled their noses\n that they found the Nest a bit smelly, but they never mentioned that at\n all and just asked bushels of questions.",
"\"So I asked myself then,\" he said, \"what's the use of going on? What's\n the use of dragging it out for a few years? Why prolong a doomed\n existence of hard work and cold and loneliness? The human race is done.\n The Earth is done. Why not give up, I asked myself—and all of a sudden\n I got the answer.\"\n\n\n Again I heard the noise, louder this time, a kind of uncertain,\n shuffling tread, coming closer. I couldn't breathe.",
"Here and there a few icicles hang, water icicles from the first days\n of the cold, other icicles of frozen air that melted on the roofs and\n dripped and froze again. Sometimes one of those icicles will catch the\n light of a star and send it to you so brightly you think the star has\n swooped into the city. That was one of the things Pa had been thinking\n of when I told him about the light, but I had thought of it myself\n first and known it wasn't so.\n\n\n He touched his helmet to mine so we could talk easier and he asked me\n to point out the windows to him. But there wasn't any light moving\n around inside them now, or anywhere else. To my surprise, Pa didn't\n bawl me out and tell me I'd been seeing things. He looked all around\n quite a while after filling his pail, and just as we were going inside\n he whipped around without warning, as if to take some peeping thing\n off guard."
],
[
"Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so\n blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of\n air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the\n tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back\n into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course.\n But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last\n blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the\n heat—and came into the Nest.\nLet me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the\n four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly\n rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it\n touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've\n never seen the real walls or ceiling.",
"Pa handled the pail of air in a twist of cloth. Now that it was inside\n the Nest, you could really feel its coldness. It just seemed to suck\n the heat out of everything. Even the flames cringed away from it as Pa\n put it down close by the fire.\n\n\n Yet it's that glimmery white stuff in the pail that keeps us alive.\n It slowly melts and vanishes and refreshes the Nest and feeds the\n fire. The blankets keep it from escaping too fast. Pa'd like to seal\n the whole place, but he can't—building's too earthquake-twisted, and\n besides he has to leave the chimney open for smoke.",
"Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined\n in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside\n clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have\n plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food\n cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a\n little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and\n so on.\n\n\n Ma started moaning again, \"I've always known there was something\n outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something\n that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the\n Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after\n us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!\"",
"The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking\n eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the\n Nest.\n\n\n I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very\n badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said\n and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.\n\n\n We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently.\n There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks.\n\n\n And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My\n skin tightened all over me.\n\n\n Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the\n place where he philosophizes.",
"You see, Pa and some scientist friends of his had figured out part of\n what was going to happen—they'd known we'd get captured and our air\n would freeze—and they'd been working like mad to fix up a place with\n airtight walls and doors, and insulation against the cold, and big\n supplies of food and fuel and water and bottled air. But the place\n got smashed in the last earthquakes and all Pa's friends were killed\n then and in the Big Jerk. So he had to start over and throw the Nest\n together quick without any advantages, just using any stuff he could\n lay his hands on.\n\n\n I guess he's telling pretty much the truth when he says he didn't have\n any time to keep an eye on how other folks behaved, either then or\n in the Big Freeze that followed—followed very quick, you know, both\n because the dark star was pulling us away very fast and because Earth's\n rotation had been slowed in the tug-of-war, so that the nights were ten\n old nights long.",
"\"It's not going to be easy to leave the Nest,\" I said, wanting to cry,\n kind of. \"It's so small and there's just the four of us. I get scared\n at the idea of big places and a lot of strangers.\"\n\n\n He nodded and put another piece of coal on the fire. Then he looked at\n the little pile and grinned suddenly and put a couple of handfuls on,\n just as if it was one of our birthdays or Christmas.\n\n\n \"You'll quickly get over that feeling son,\" he said. \"The trouble with\n the world was that it kept getting smaller and smaller, till it ended\n with just the Nest. Now it'll be good to have a real huge world again,\n the way it was in the beginning.\"\n\n\n I guess he's right. You think the beautiful young lady will wait for me\n till I grow up? I'll be twenty in only ten years.",
"His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it\n didn't wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind—or the\n fact that Pa took it seriously.\nIt's hard to hide your feelings about such a thing. When we got back in\n the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and\n told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination,\n but his words fell flat. He didn't convince Ma and Sis any more than\n he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the\n courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what\n I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old\n days, and how it all happened.",
"In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about\n things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked\n and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another\n bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started\n them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little\n drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen.\n\n\n Funny thing, though—I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on\n to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt\n pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady.\n Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but\n now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to\n be nice as anything to me.\n\n\n I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone\n and get our feelings straightened out.",
"\"So right then and there,\" Pa went on, and now I could tell that he\n heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn't hear\n them, \"right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if\n we had all eternity ahead of us. I'd have children and teach them all\n I could. I'd get them to read books. I'd plan for the future, try to\n enlarge and seal the Nest. I'd do what I could to keep everything\n beautiful and growing. I'd keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the\n cold and the dark and the distant stars.\"",
"Against one of the blanket-walls is a big set of shelves, with tools\n and books and other stuff, and on top of it a whole row of clocks. Pa's\n very fussy about keeping them wound. He says we must never forget time,\n and without a sun or moon, that would be easy to do.\n\n\n The fourth wall has blankets all over except around the fireplace, in\n which there is a fire that must never go out. It keeps us from freezing\n and does a lot more besides. One of us must always watch it. Some of\n the clocks are alarm and we can use them to remind us. In the early\n days there was only Ma to take turns with Pa—I think of that when she\n gets difficult—but now there's me to help, and Sis too.",
"He wasn't just making up those ideas. Odd things happen in a world\n that's about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter\n would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff\n comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for\n heat—that's the liquid helium. And once, when I was little, a bolt of\n lightning—not even Pa could figure where it came from—hit the nearby\n steeple and crawled up and down it for weeks, until the glow finally\n died.\n\n\n \"Not like anything I ever saw,\" I told him.\n\n\n He stood for a moment frowning. Then, \"I'll go out with you, and you\n show it to me,\" he said.",
"It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think\n of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously\n at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often\n carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa\n tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very\n old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen\n air all around then and you didn't really need one.\n\n\n He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the\n pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he'd spotted my frozen\n helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's\n always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut\n her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.",
"and all that. Ma had perked up wonderfully and was showing the young\n lady her cooking and sewing stuff, and even asking about how the women\n dressed at Los Alamos. The strangers marveled at everything and praised\n it to the skies. I could tell from the way they wrinkled their noses\n that they found the Nest a bit smelly, but they never mentioned that at\n all and just asked bushels of questions.",
"Inside, he said to me, touching helmets, \"If you see something like\n that again, son, don't tell the others. Your Ma's sort of nervous these\n days and we owe her all the feeling of safety we can give her. Once—it\n was when your sister was born—I was ready to give up and die, but your\n Mother kept me trying. Another time she kept the fire going a whole\n week all by herself when I was sick. Nursed me and took care of the two\n of you, too.\"\n\"You know that game we sometimes play, sitting in a square in the Nest,\n tossing a ball around? Courage is like a ball, son. A person can hold\n it only so long, and then he's got to toss it to someone else. When\n it's tossed your way, you've got to catch it and hold it tight—and\n hope there'll be someone else to toss it to when you get tired of being\n brave.\"",
"When I'd recovered the pail and could look again at the opposite\n apartment, I got an idea of what Ma might be feeling at those times,\n for I saw it wasn't a young lady at all but simply a light—a tiny\n light that moved stealthily from window to window, just as if one\n of the cruel little stars had come down out of the airless sky to\n investigate why the Earth had gone away from the Sun, and maybe to hunt\n down something to torment or terrify, now that the Earth didn't have\n the Sun's protection.\n\n\n I tell you, the thought of it gave me the creeps. I just stood there\n shaking, and almost froze my feet and did frost my helmet so solid on\n the inside that I couldn't have seen the light even if it had come out\n of one of the windows to get me. Then I had the wit to go back inside.",
"You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful\n young lady's face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the\n fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor\n just above the white blanket of frozen air. I'd never seen a live young\n lady before, except in the old magazines—Sis is just a kid and Ma is\n pretty sick and miserable—and it gave me such a start that I dropped\n the pail. Who wouldn't, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa\n and Ma and Sis and you?\nEven at that, I don't suppose I should have been surprised. We all\n see things now and then. Ma has some pretty bad ones, to judge from\n the way she bugs her eyes at nothing and just screams and screams and\n huddles back against the blankets hanging around the Nest. Pa says it\n is natural we should react like that sometimes.",
"And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going to Los Alamos,\n as if that were taken for granted, I could see that something of the\n same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden\n and Ma kept telling the young lady, \"But I wouldn't know how to act\n there and I haven't any clothes.\"\n\n\n The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then they got\n the idea. As Pa kept saying, \"It just doesn't seem right to let this\n fire go out.\"\nWell, the strangers are gone, but they're coming back. It hasn't been\n decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as\n what one of the strangers called a \"survival school.\" Or maybe we will\n join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the\n uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.",
"Still, I've got an idea of some of the things that happened from the\n frozen folk I've seen, a few of them in other rooms in our building,\n others clustered around the furnaces in the basements where we go for\n coal.\n\n\n In one of the rooms, an old man sits stiff in a chair, with an arm and\n a leg in splints. In another, a man and woman are huddled together in\n a bed with heaps of covers over them. You can just see their heads\n peeking out, close together. And in another a beautiful young lady is\n sitting with a pile of wraps huddled around her, looking hopefully\n toward the door, as if waiting for someone who never came back with\n warmth and food. They're all still and stiff as statues, of course, but\n just like life.",
"Pa had everything on but his helmet. He knelt by the fireplace and\n reached in and shook the long metal rod that goes up the chimney and\n knocks off the ice that keeps trying to clog it. Once a week he goes up\n on the roof to check if it's working all right. That's our worst trip\n and Pa won't let me make it alone.\n\n\n \"Sis,\" Pa said quietly, \"come watch the fire. Keep an eye on the air,\n too. If it gets low or doesn't seem to be boiling fast enough, fetch\n another bucket from behind the blanket. But mind your hands. Use the\n cloth to pick up the bucket.\"",
"Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a\n lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a\n hankering to see them for myself.\n\n\n You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty\n thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.\n\n\n \"It's different, now that we know others are alive,\" he explains to me.\n \"Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that\n matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the\n human race going, so to speak. It scares a person.\"\n\n\n I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air\n boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering\n light."
],
[
"Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined\n in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside\n clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have\n plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food\n cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a\n little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and\n so on.\n\n\n Ma started moaning again, \"I've always known there was something\n outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something\n that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the\n Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after\n us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!\"",
"\"Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,\"\n Pa was saying. \"The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of\n miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might\n have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't\n matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture,\n like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you've seen\n pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel—or the fire's\n glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the\n last man as the first.\"\n\n\n And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the\n inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were\n burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.",
"Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so\n blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of\n air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the\n tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back\n into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course.\n But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last\n blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the\n heat—and came into the Nest.\nLet me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the\n four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly\n rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it\n touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've\n never seen the real walls or ceiling.",
"Besides that, there's a feeling that comes with it always being night,\ncold\nnight. Pa says there used to be some of that feeling even in the\n old days, but then every morning the Sun would come and chase it away.\n I have to take his word for that, not ever remembering the Sun as being\n anything more than a big star. You see, I hadn't been born when the\n dark star snatched us away from the Sun, and by now it's dragged us out\n beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto, Pa says, and taking us farther\n out all the time.\n\n\n I found myself wondering whether there mightn't be something on the\n dark star that wanted us, and if that was why it had captured the\n Earth. Just then we came to the end of the corridor and I followed Pa\n out on the balcony.",
"Well, they'd found other colonies at Argonne and Brookhaven and way\n around the world at Harwell and Tanna Tuva. And now they'd been giving\n our city a look, not really expecting to find anything. But they had an\n instrument that noticed the faintest heat waves and it had told them\n there was something warm down here, so they'd landed to investigate.\n Of course we hadn't heard them land, since there was no air to carry\n the sound, and they'd had to investigate around quite a while before\n finding us. Their instruments had given them a wrong steer and they'd\n wasted some time in the building across the street.\nBy now, all five adults were talking like sixty. Pa was demonstrating\n to the men how he worked the fire and got rid of the ice in the chimney",
"All of these gases in neat separate layers. Like a pussy caffay, Pa\n laughingly says, whatever that is.\nI was busting to tell them all about what I'd seen, and so as soon as\n I'd ducked out of my helmet and while I was still climbing out of my\n suit, I cut loose. Right away Ma got nervous and began making eyes at\n the entry-slit in the blankets and wringing her hands together—the\n hand where she'd lost three fingers from frostbite inside the good one,\n as usual. I could tell that Pa was annoyed at me scaring her and wanted\n to explain it all away quickly, yet could see I wasn't fooling.",
"One of the men kept saying, \"But it's impossible, I tell you. You\n can't maintain an air supply without hermetic sealing. It's simply\n impossible.\"\n\n\n That was after he had got his helmet off and was using our air.\n Meanwhile, the young lady kept looking around at us as if we were\n saints, and telling us we'd done something amazing, and suddenly she\n broke down and cried.\n\n\n They'd been scouting around for survivors, but they never expected to\n find any in a place like this. They had rocket ships at Los Alamos and\n plenty of chemical fuel. As for liquid oxygen, all you had to do was\n go out and shovel the air blanket at the top\nlevel\n. So after they'd\n got things going smoothly at Los Alamos, which had taken years, they'd\n decided to make some trips to likely places where there might be other\n survivors. No good trying long-distance radio signals, of course, since\n there was no atmosphere to carry them around the curve of the Earth.",
"Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a\n lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a\n hankering to see them for myself.\n\n\n You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty\n thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.\n\n\n \"It's different, now that we know others are alive,\" he explains to me.\n \"Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that\n matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the\n human race going, so to speak. It scares a person.\"\n\n\n I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air\n boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering\n light.",
"But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright\n light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice stopped and his eyes turned to\n the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped\n the handle of the hammer beside him.\nIn through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood\n there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something\n bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her\n shoulders—men's faces, white and staring.\n\n\n Well, my heart couldn't have been stopped for more than four or five\n beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa's\n homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too—and that the\n frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I noticed that\n the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.\n\n\n The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after\n that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion.",
"Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was\n told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind\n of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail\n and the two of us go out.\nPa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not\n afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to\n him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a\n bit scared.\n\n\n You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa\n heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of\n the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we\n knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't\n be anything human or friendly.",
"First to drop out was the carbon dioxide—when you're shoveling for\n water, you have to make sure you don't go too high and get any of that\n stuff mixed in, for it would put you to sleep, maybe for good, and make\n the fire go out. Next there's the nitrogen, which doesn't count one way\n or the other, though it's the biggest part of the blanket. On top of\n that and easy to get at, which is lucky for us, there's the oxygen that\n keeps us alive. Pa says we live better than kings ever did, breathing\n pure oxygen, but we're used to it and don't notice. Finally, at the\n very top, there's a slick of liquid helium, which is funny stuff.",
"In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about\n things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked\n and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another\n bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started\n them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little\n drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen.\n\n\n Funny thing, though—I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on\n to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt\n pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady.\n Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but\n now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to\n be nice as anything to me.\n\n\n I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone\n and get our feelings straightened out.",
"It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think\n of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously\n at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often\n carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa\n tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very\n old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen\n air all around then and you didn't really need one.\n\n\n He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the\n pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he'd spotted my frozen\n helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's\n always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut\n her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.",
"Pa says air is tiny molecules that fly away like a flash if there isn't\n something to stop them. We have to watch sharp not to let the air run\n low. Pa always keeps a big reserve supply of it in buckets behind\n the first blankets, along with extra coal and cans of food and other\n things, such as pails of snow to melt for water. We have to go way down\n to the bottom floor for that stuff, which is a mean trip, and get it\n through a door to outside.\n\n\n You see, when the Earth got cold, all the water in the air froze first\n and made a blanket ten feet thick or so everywhere, and then down on\n top of that dropped the crystals of frozen air, making another white\n blanket sixty or seventy feet thick maybe.\n\n\n Of course, all the parts of the air didn't freeze and snow down at the\n same time.",
"The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking\n eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the\n Nest.\n\n\n I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very\n badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said\n and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.\n\n\n We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently.\n There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks.\n\n\n And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My\n skin tightened all over me.\n\n\n Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the\n place where he philosophizes.",
"When I'd recovered the pail and could look again at the opposite\n apartment, I got an idea of what Ma might be feeling at those times,\n for I saw it wasn't a young lady at all but simply a light—a tiny\n light that moved stealthily from window to window, just as if one\n of the cruel little stars had come down out of the airless sky to\n investigate why the Earth had gone away from the Sun, and maybe to hunt\n down something to torment or terrify, now that the Earth didn't have\n the Sun's protection.\n\n\n I tell you, the thought of it gave me the creeps. I just stood there\n shaking, and almost froze my feet and did frost my helmet so solid on\n the inside that I couldn't have seen the light even if it had come out\n of one of the windows to get me. Then I had the wit to go back inside.",
"Against one of the blanket-walls is a big set of shelves, with tools\n and books and other stuff, and on top of it a whole row of clocks. Pa's\n very fussy about keeping them wound. He says we must never forget time,\n and without a sun or moon, that would be easy to do.\n\n\n The fourth wall has blankets all over except around the fireplace, in\n which there is a fire that must never go out. It keeps us from freezing\n and does a lot more besides. One of us must always watch it. Some of\n the clocks are alarm and we can use them to remind us. In the early\n days there was only Ma to take turns with Pa—I think of that when she\n gets difficult—but now there's me to help, and Sis too.",
"He wasn't just making up those ideas. Odd things happen in a world\n that's about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter\n would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff\n comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for\n heat—that's the liquid helium. And once, when I was little, a bolt of\n lightning—not even Pa could figure where it came from—hit the nearby\n steeple and crawled up and down it for weeks, until the glow finally\n died.\n\n\n \"Not like anything I ever saw,\" I told him.\n\n\n He stood for a moment frowning. Then, \"I'll go out with you, and you\n show it to me,\" he said.",
"You see, Pa and some scientist friends of his had figured out part of\n what was going to happen—they'd known we'd get captured and our air\n would freeze—and they'd been working like mad to fix up a place with\n airtight walls and doors, and insulation against the cold, and big\n supplies of food and fuel and water and bottled air. But the place\n got smashed in the last earthquakes and all Pa's friends were killed\n then and in the Big Jerk. So he had to start over and throw the Nest\n together quick without any advantages, just using any stuff he could\n lay his hands on.\n\n\n I guess he's telling pretty much the truth when he says he didn't have\n any time to keep an eye on how other folks behaved, either then or\n in the Big Freeze that followed—followed very quick, you know, both\n because the dark star was pulling us away very fast and because Earth's\n rotation had been slowed in the tug-of-war, so that the nights were ten\n old nights long.",
"Pa handled the pail of air in a twist of cloth. Now that it was inside\n the Nest, you could really feel its coldness. It just seemed to suck\n the heat out of everything. Even the flames cringed away from it as Pa\n put it down close by the fire.\n\n\n Yet it's that glimmery white stuff in the pail that keeps us alive.\n It slowly melts and vanishes and refreshes the Nest and feeds the\n fire. The blankets keep it from escaping too fast. Pa'd like to seal\n the whole place, but he can't—building's too earthquake-twisted, and\n besides he has to leave the chimney open for smoke."
],
[
"\"It's not going to be easy to leave the Nest,\" I said, wanting to cry,\n kind of. \"It's so small and there's just the four of us. I get scared\n at the idea of big places and a lot of strangers.\"\n\n\n He nodded and put another piece of coal on the fire. Then he looked at\n the little pile and grinned suddenly and put a couple of handfuls on,\n just as if it was one of our birthdays or Christmas.\n\n\n \"You'll quickly get over that feeling son,\" he said. \"The trouble with\n the world was that it kept getting smaller and smaller, till it ended\n with just the Nest. Now it'll be good to have a real huge world again,\n the way it was in the beginning.\"\n\n\n I guess he's right. You think the beautiful young lady will wait for me\n till I grow up? I'll be twenty in only ten years.",
"Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined\n in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside\n clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have\n plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food\n cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a\n little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and\n so on.\n\n\n Ma started moaning again, \"I've always known there was something\n outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something\n that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the\n Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after\n us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!\"",
"Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so\n blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of\n air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the\n tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back\n into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course.\n But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last\n blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the\n heat—and came into the Nest.\nLet me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the\n four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly\n rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it\n touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've\n never seen the real walls or ceiling.",
"\"So right then and there,\" Pa went on, and now I could tell that he\n heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn't hear\n them, \"right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if\n we had all eternity ahead of us. I'd have children and teach them all\n I could. I'd get them to read books. I'd plan for the future, try to\n enlarge and seal the Nest. I'd do what I could to keep everything\n beautiful and growing. I'd keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the\n cold and the dark and the distant stars.\"",
"In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about\n things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked\n and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another\n bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started\n them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little\n drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen.\n\n\n Funny thing, though—I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on\n to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt\n pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady.\n Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but\n now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to\n be nice as anything to me.\n\n\n I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone\n and get our feelings straightened out.",
"The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking\n eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the\n Nest.\n\n\n I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very\n badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said\n and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.\n\n\n We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently.\n There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks.\n\n\n And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My\n skin tightened all over me.\n\n\n Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the\n place where he philosophizes.",
"His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it\n didn't wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind—or the\n fact that Pa took it seriously.\nIt's hard to hide your feelings about such a thing. When we got back in\n the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and\n told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination,\n but his words fell flat. He didn't convince Ma and Sis any more than\n he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the\n courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what\n I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old\n days, and how it all happened.",
"Pa handled the pail of air in a twist of cloth. Now that it was inside\n the Nest, you could really feel its coldness. It just seemed to suck\n the heat out of everything. Even the flames cringed away from it as Pa\n put it down close by the fire.\n\n\n Yet it's that glimmery white stuff in the pail that keeps us alive.\n It slowly melts and vanishes and refreshes the Nest and feeds the\n fire. The blankets keep it from escaping too fast. Pa'd like to seal\n the whole place, but he can't—building's too earthquake-twisted, and\n besides he has to leave the chimney open for smoke.",
"Inside, he said to me, touching helmets, \"If you see something like\n that again, son, don't tell the others. Your Ma's sort of nervous these\n days and we owe her all the feeling of safety we can give her. Once—it\n was when your sister was born—I was ready to give up and die, but your\n Mother kept me trying. Another time she kept the fire going a whole\n week all by herself when I was sick. Nursed me and took care of the two\n of you, too.\"\n\"You know that game we sometimes play, sitting in a square in the Nest,\n tossing a ball around? Courage is like a ball, son. A person can hold\n it only so long, and then he's got to toss it to someone else. When\n it's tossed your way, you've got to catch it and hold it tight—and\n hope there'll be someone else to toss it to when you get tired of being\n brave.\"",
"And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going to Los Alamos,\n as if that were taken for granted, I could see that something of the\n same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden\n and Ma kept telling the young lady, \"But I wouldn't know how to act\n there and I haven't any clothes.\"\n\n\n The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then they got\n the idea. As Pa kept saying, \"It just doesn't seem right to let this\n fire go out.\"\nWell, the strangers are gone, but they're coming back. It hasn't been\n decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as\n what one of the strangers called a \"survival school.\" Or maybe we will\n join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the\n uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.",
"He wasn't just making up those ideas. Odd things happen in a world\n that's about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter\n would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff\n comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for\n heat—that's the liquid helium. And once, when I was little, a bolt of\n lightning—not even Pa could figure where it came from—hit the nearby\n steeple and crawled up and down it for weeks, until the glow finally\n died.\n\n\n \"Not like anything I ever saw,\" I told him.\n\n\n He stood for a moment frowning. Then, \"I'll go out with you, and you\n show it to me,\" he said.",
"You see, Pa and some scientist friends of his had figured out part of\n what was going to happen—they'd known we'd get captured and our air\n would freeze—and they'd been working like mad to fix up a place with\n airtight walls and doors, and insulation against the cold, and big\n supplies of food and fuel and water and bottled air. But the place\n got smashed in the last earthquakes and all Pa's friends were killed\n then and in the Big Jerk. So he had to start over and throw the Nest\n together quick without any advantages, just using any stuff he could\n lay his hands on.\n\n\n I guess he's telling pretty much the truth when he says he didn't have\n any time to keep an eye on how other folks behaved, either then or\n in the Big Freeze that followed—followed very quick, you know, both\n because the dark star was pulling us away very fast and because Earth's\n rotation had been slowed in the tug-of-war, so that the nights were ten\n old nights long.",
"When I'd recovered the pail and could look again at the opposite\n apartment, I got an idea of what Ma might be feeling at those times,\n for I saw it wasn't a young lady at all but simply a light—a tiny\n light that moved stealthily from window to window, just as if one\n of the cruel little stars had come down out of the airless sky to\n investigate why the Earth had gone away from the Sun, and maybe to hunt\n down something to torment or terrify, now that the Earth didn't have\n the Sun's protection.\n\n\n I tell you, the thought of it gave me the creeps. I just stood there\n shaking, and almost froze my feet and did frost my helmet so solid on\n the inside that I couldn't have seen the light even if it had come out\n of one of the windows to get me. Then I had the wit to go back inside.",
"It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think\n of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously\n at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often\n carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa\n tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very\n old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen\n air all around then and you didn't really need one.\n\n\n He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the\n pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he'd spotted my frozen\n helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's\n always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut\n her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.",
"and all that. Ma had perked up wonderfully and was showing the young\n lady her cooking and sewing stuff, and even asking about how the women\n dressed at Los Alamos. The strangers marveled at everything and praised\n it to the skies. I could tell from the way they wrinkled their noses\n that they found the Nest a bit smelly, but they never mentioned that at\n all and just asked bushels of questions.",
"Against one of the blanket-walls is a big set of shelves, with tools\n and books and other stuff, and on top of it a whole row of clocks. Pa's\n very fussy about keeping them wound. He says we must never forget time,\n and without a sun or moon, that would be easy to do.\n\n\n The fourth wall has blankets all over except around the fireplace, in\n which there is a fire that must never go out. It keeps us from freezing\n and does a lot more besides. One of us must always watch it. Some of\n the clocks are alarm and we can use them to remind us. In the early\n days there was only Ma to take turns with Pa—I think of that when she\n gets difficult—but now there's me to help, and Sis too.",
"Pa had everything on but his helmet. He knelt by the fireplace and\n reached in and shook the long metal rod that goes up the chimney and\n knocks off the ice that keeps trying to clog it. Once a week he goes up\n on the roof to check if it's working all right. That's our worst trip\n and Pa won't let me make it alone.\n\n\n \"Sis,\" Pa said quietly, \"come watch the fire. Keep an eye on the air,\n too. If it gets low or doesn't seem to be boiling fast enough, fetch\n another bucket from behind the blanket. But mind your hands. Use the\n cloth to pick up the bucket.\"",
"\"Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,\"\n Pa was saying. \"The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of\n miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might\n have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't\n matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture,\n like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you've seen\n pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel—or the fire's\n glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the\n last man as the first.\"\n\n\n And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the\n inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were\n burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.",
"Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was\n told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind\n of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail\n and the two of us go out.\nPa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not\n afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to\n him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a\n bit scared.\n\n\n You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa\n heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of\n the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we\n knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't\n be anything human or friendly.",
"Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a\n lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a\n hankering to see them for myself.\n\n\n You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty\n thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.\n\n\n \"It's different, now that we know others are alive,\" he explains to me.\n \"Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that\n matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the\n human race going, so to speak. It scares a person.\"\n\n\n I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air\n boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering\n light."
],
[
"It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think\n of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously\n at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often\n carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa\n tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very\n old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen\n air all around then and you didn't really need one.\n\n\n He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the\n pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he'd spotted my frozen\n helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's\n always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut\n her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.",
"\"So right then and there,\" Pa went on, and now I could tell that he\n heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn't hear\n them, \"right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if\n we had all eternity ahead of us. I'd have children and teach them all\n I could. I'd get them to read books. I'd plan for the future, try to\n enlarge and seal the Nest. I'd do what I could to keep everything\n beautiful and growing. I'd keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the\n cold and the dark and the distant stars.\"",
"His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it\n didn't wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind—or the\n fact that Pa took it seriously.\nIt's hard to hide your feelings about such a thing. When we got back in\n the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and\n told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination,\n but his words fell flat. He didn't convince Ma and Sis any more than\n he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the\n courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what\n I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old\n days, and how it all happened.",
"Pa had everything on but his helmet. He knelt by the fireplace and\n reached in and shook the long metal rod that goes up the chimney and\n knocks off the ice that keeps trying to clog it. Once a week he goes up\n on the roof to check if it's working all right. That's our worst trip\n and Pa won't let me make it alone.\n\n\n \"Sis,\" Pa said quietly, \"come watch the fire. Keep an eye on the air,\n too. If it gets low or doesn't seem to be boiling fast enough, fetch\n another bucket from behind the blanket. But mind your hands. Use the\n cloth to pick up the bucket.\"",
"He sometimes doesn't mind telling that story, and Sis and I sure like\n to listen to it, and he got my idea. So we were all settled around the\n fire in a wink, and Ma pushed up some cans to thaw for supper, and Pa\n began. Before he did, though, I noticed him casually get a hammer from\n the shelf and lay it down beside him.\n\n\n It was the same old story as always—I think I could recite the main\n thread of it in my sleep—though Pa always puts in a new detail or two\n and keeps improving it in spots.\n\n\n He told us how the Earth had been swinging around the Sun ever so\n steady and warm, and the people on it fixing to make money and wars and\n have a good time and get power and treat each other right or wrong,\n when without warning there comes charging out of space this dead star,\n this burned out sun, and upsets everything.",
"\"Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,\"\n Pa was saying. \"The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of\n miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might\n have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't\n matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture,\n like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you've seen\n pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel—or the fire's\n glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the\n last man as the first.\"\n\n\n And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the\n inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were\n burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.",
"Here and there a few icicles hang, water icicles from the first days\n of the cold, other icicles of frozen air that melted on the roofs and\n dripped and froze again. Sometimes one of those icicles will catch the\n light of a star and send it to you so brightly you think the star has\n swooped into the city. That was one of the things Pa had been thinking\n of when I told him about the light, but I had thought of it myself\n first and known it wasn't so.\n\n\n He touched his helmet to mine so we could talk easier and he asked me\n to point out the windows to him. But there wasn't any light moving\n around inside them now, or anywhere else. To my surprise, Pa didn't\n bawl me out and tell me I'd been seeing things. He looked all around\n quite a while after filling his pail, and just as we were going inside\n he whipped around without warning, as if to take some peeping thing\n off guard.",
"Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was\n told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind\n of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail\n and the two of us go out.\nPa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not\n afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to\n him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a\n bit scared.\n\n\n You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa\n heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of\n the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we\n knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't\n be anything human or friendly.",
"Inside, he said to me, touching helmets, \"If you see something like\n that again, son, don't tell the others. Your Ma's sort of nervous these\n days and we owe her all the feeling of safety we can give her. Once—it\n was when your sister was born—I was ready to give up and die, but your\n Mother kept me trying. Another time she kept the fire going a whole\n week all by herself when I was sick. Nursed me and took care of the two\n of you, too.\"\n\"You know that game we sometimes play, sitting in a square in the Nest,\n tossing a ball around? Courage is like a ball, son. A person can hold\n it only so long, and then he's got to toss it to someone else. When\n it's tossed your way, you've got to catch it and hold it tight—and\n hope there'll be someone else to toss it to when you get tired of being\n brave.\"",
"The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking\n eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the\n Nest.\n\n\n I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very\n badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said\n and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.\n\n\n We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently.\n There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks.\n\n\n And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My\n skin tightened all over me.\n\n\n Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the\n place where he philosophizes.",
"Against one of the blanket-walls is a big set of shelves, with tools\n and books and other stuff, and on top of it a whole row of clocks. Pa's\n very fussy about keeping them wound. He says we must never forget time,\n and without a sun or moon, that would be easy to do.\n\n\n The fourth wall has blankets all over except around the fireplace, in\n which there is a fire that must never go out. It keeps us from freezing\n and does a lot more besides. One of us must always watch it. Some of\n the clocks are alarm and we can use them to remind us. In the early\n days there was only Ma to take turns with Pa—I think of that when she\n gets difficult—but now there's me to help, and Sis too.",
"But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright\n light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice stopped and his eyes turned to\n the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped\n the handle of the hammer beside him.\nIn through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood\n there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something\n bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her\n shoulders—men's faces, white and staring.\n\n\n Well, my heart couldn't have been stopped for more than four or five\n beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa's\n homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too—and that the\n frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I noticed that\n the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.\n\n\n The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after\n that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion.",
"Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined\n in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside\n clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have\n plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food\n cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a\n little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and\n so on.\n\n\n Ma started moaning again, \"I've always known there was something\n outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something\n that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the\n Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after\n us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!\"",
"In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about\n things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked\n and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another\n bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started\n them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little\n drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen.\n\n\n Funny thing, though—I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on\n to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt\n pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady.\n Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but\n now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to\n be nice as anything to me.\n\n\n I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone\n and get our feelings straightened out.",
"He wasn't just making up those ideas. Odd things happen in a world\n that's about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter\n would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff\n comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for\n heat—that's the liquid helium. And once, when I was little, a bolt of\n lightning—not even Pa could figure where it came from—hit the nearby\n steeple and crawled up and down it for weeks, until the glow finally\n died.\n\n\n \"Not like anything I ever saw,\" I told him.\n\n\n He stood for a moment frowning. Then, \"I'll go out with you, and you\n show it to me,\" he said.",
"Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so\n blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of\n air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the\n tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back\n into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course.\n But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last\n blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the\n heat—and came into the Nest.\nLet me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the\n four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly\n rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it\n touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've\n never seen the real walls or ceiling.",
"Pa handled the pail of air in a twist of cloth. Now that it was inside\n the Nest, you could really feel its coldness. It just seemed to suck\n the heat out of everything. Even the flames cringed away from it as Pa\n put it down close by the fire.\n\n\n Yet it's that glimmery white stuff in the pail that keeps us alive.\n It slowly melts and vanishes and refreshes the Nest and feeds the\n fire. The blankets keep it from escaping too fast. Pa'd like to seal\n the whole place, but he can't—building's too earthquake-twisted, and\n besides he has to leave the chimney open for smoke.",
"Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a\n lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a\n hankering to see them for myself.\n\n\n You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty\n thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.\n\n\n \"It's different, now that we know others are alive,\" he explains to me.\n \"Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that\n matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the\n human race going, so to speak. It scares a person.\"\n\n\n I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air\n boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering\n light.",
"Pa showed them to me once in quick winks of his flashlight, when\n he still had a fair supply of batteries and could afford to waste\n a little light. They scared me pretty bad and made my heart pound,\n especially the young lady.\nNow, with Pa telling his story for the umpteenth time to take our minds\n off another scare, I got to thinking of the frozen folk again. All of a\n sudden I got an idea that scared me worse than anything yet. You see,\n I'd just remembered the face I'd thought I'd seen in the window. I'd\n forgotten about that on account of trying to hide it from the others.",
"Besides that, there's a feeling that comes with it always being night,\ncold\nnight. Pa says there used to be some of that feeling even in the\n old days, but then every morning the Sun would come and chase it away.\n I have to take his word for that, not ever remembering the Sun as being\n anything more than a big star. You see, I hadn't been born when the\n dark star snatched us away from the Sun, and by now it's dragged us out\n beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto, Pa says, and taking us farther\n out all the time.\n\n\n I found myself wondering whether there mightn't be something on the\n dark star that wanted us, and if that was why it had captured the\n Earth. Just then we came to the end of the corridor and I followed Pa\n out on the balcony."
],
[
"It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think\n of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously\n at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often\n carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa\n tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very\n old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen\n air all around then and you didn't really need one.\n\n\n He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the\n pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he'd spotted my frozen\n helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's\n always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut\n her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.",
"Pa had everything on but his helmet. He knelt by the fireplace and\n reached in and shook the long metal rod that goes up the chimney and\n knocks off the ice that keeps trying to clog it. Once a week he goes up\n on the roof to check if it's working all right. That's our worst trip\n and Pa won't let me make it alone.\n\n\n \"Sis,\" Pa said quietly, \"come watch the fire. Keep an eye on the air,\n too. If it gets low or doesn't seem to be boiling fast enough, fetch\n another bucket from behind the blanket. But mind your hands. Use the\n cloth to pick up the bucket.\"",
"His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it\n didn't wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind—or the\n fact that Pa took it seriously.\nIt's hard to hide your feelings about such a thing. When we got back in\n the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and\n told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination,\n but his words fell flat. He didn't convince Ma and Sis any more than\n he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the\n courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what\n I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old\n days, and how it all happened.",
"In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about\n things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked\n and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another\n bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started\n them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little\n drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen.\n\n\n Funny thing, though—I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on\n to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt\n pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady.\n Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but\n now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to\n be nice as anything to me.\n\n\n I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone\n and get our feelings straightened out.",
"Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined\n in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside\n clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have\n plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food\n cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a\n little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and\n so on.\n\n\n Ma started moaning again, \"I've always known there was something\n outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something\n that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the\n Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after\n us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!\"",
"Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was\n told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind\n of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail\n and the two of us go out.\nPa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not\n afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to\n him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a\n bit scared.\n\n\n You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa\n heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of\n the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we\n knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't\n be anything human or friendly.",
"\"So right then and there,\" Pa went on, and now I could tell that he\n heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn't hear\n them, \"right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if\n we had all eternity ahead of us. I'd have children and teach them all\n I could. I'd get them to read books. I'd plan for the future, try to\n enlarge and seal the Nest. I'd do what I could to keep everything\n beautiful and growing. I'd keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the\n cold and the dark and the distant stars.\"",
"and all that. Ma had perked up wonderfully and was showing the young\n lady her cooking and sewing stuff, and even asking about how the women\n dressed at Los Alamos. The strangers marveled at everything and praised\n it to the skies. I could tell from the way they wrinkled their noses\n that they found the Nest a bit smelly, but they never mentioned that at\n all and just asked bushels of questions.",
"He sometimes doesn't mind telling that story, and Sis and I sure like\n to listen to it, and he got my idea. So we were all settled around the\n fire in a wink, and Ma pushed up some cans to thaw for supper, and Pa\n began. Before he did, though, I noticed him casually get a hammer from\n the shelf and lay it down beside him.\n\n\n It was the same old story as always—I think I could recite the main\n thread of it in my sleep—though Pa always puts in a new detail or two\n and keeps improving it in spots.\n\n\n He told us how the Earth had been swinging around the Sun ever so\n steady and warm, and the people on it fixing to make money and wars and\n have a good time and get power and treat each other right or wrong,\n when without warning there comes charging out of space this dead star,\n this burned out sun, and upsets everything.",
"Against one of the blanket-walls is a big set of shelves, with tools\n and books and other stuff, and on top of it a whole row of clocks. Pa's\n very fussy about keeping them wound. He says we must never forget time,\n and without a sun or moon, that would be easy to do.\n\n\n The fourth wall has blankets all over except around the fireplace, in\n which there is a fire that must never go out. It keeps us from freezing\n and does a lot more besides. One of us must always watch it. Some of\n the clocks are alarm and we can use them to remind us. In the early\n days there was only Ma to take turns with Pa—I think of that when she\n gets difficult—but now there's me to help, and Sis too.",
"Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a\n lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a\n hankering to see them for myself.\n\n\n You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty\n thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.\n\n\n \"It's different, now that we know others are alive,\" he explains to me.\n \"Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that\n matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the\n human race going, so to speak. It scares a person.\"\n\n\n I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air\n boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering\n light.",
"But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright\n light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice stopped and his eyes turned to\n the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped\n the handle of the hammer beside him.\nIn through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood\n there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something\n bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her\n shoulders—men's faces, white and staring.\n\n\n Well, my heart couldn't have been stopped for more than four or five\n beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa's\n homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too—and that the\n frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I noticed that\n the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.\n\n\n The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after\n that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion.",
"Pa handled the pail of air in a twist of cloth. Now that it was inside\n the Nest, you could really feel its coldness. It just seemed to suck\n the heat out of everything. Even the flames cringed away from it as Pa\n put it down close by the fire.\n\n\n Yet it's that glimmery white stuff in the pail that keeps us alive.\n It slowly melts and vanishes and refreshes the Nest and feeds the\n fire. The blankets keep it from escaping too fast. Pa'd like to seal\n the whole place, but he can't—building's too earthquake-twisted, and\n besides he has to leave the chimney open for smoke.",
"\"Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,\"\n Pa was saying. \"The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of\n miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might\n have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't\n matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture,\n like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you've seen\n pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel—or the fire's\n glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the\n last man as the first.\"\n\n\n And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the\n inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were\n burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.",
"The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking\n eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the\n Nest.\n\n\n I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very\n badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said\n and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.\n\n\n We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently.\n There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks.\n\n\n And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My\n skin tightened all over me.\n\n\n Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the\n place where he philosophizes.",
"Here and there a few icicles hang, water icicles from the first days\n of the cold, other icicles of frozen air that melted on the roofs and\n dripped and froze again. Sometimes one of those icicles will catch the\n light of a star and send it to you so brightly you think the star has\n swooped into the city. That was one of the things Pa had been thinking\n of when I told him about the light, but I had thought of it myself\n first and known it wasn't so.\n\n\n He touched his helmet to mine so we could talk easier and he asked me\n to point out the windows to him. But there wasn't any light moving\n around inside them now, or anywhere else. To my surprise, Pa didn't\n bawl me out and tell me I'd been seeing things. He looked all around\n quite a while after filling his pail, and just as we were going inside\n he whipped around without warning, as if to take some peeping thing\n off guard.",
"Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so\n blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of\n air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the\n tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back\n into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course.\n But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last\n blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the\n heat—and came into the Nest.\nLet me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the\n four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly\n rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it\n touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've\n never seen the real walls or ceiling.",
"Inside, he said to me, touching helmets, \"If you see something like\n that again, son, don't tell the others. Your Ma's sort of nervous these\n days and we owe her all the feeling of safety we can give her. Once—it\n was when your sister was born—I was ready to give up and die, but your\n Mother kept me trying. Another time she kept the fire going a whole\n week all by herself when I was sick. Nursed me and took care of the two\n of you, too.\"\n\"You know that game we sometimes play, sitting in a square in the Nest,\n tossing a ball around? Courage is like a ball, son. A person can hold\n it only so long, and then he's got to toss it to someone else. When\n it's tossed your way, you've got to catch it and hold it tight—and\n hope there'll be someone else to toss it to when you get tired of being\n brave.\"",
"And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going to Los Alamos,\n as if that were taken for granted, I could see that something of the\n same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden\n and Ma kept telling the young lady, \"But I wouldn't know how to act\n there and I haven't any clothes.\"\n\n\n The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then they got\n the idea. As Pa kept saying, \"It just doesn't seem right to let this\n fire go out.\"\nWell, the strangers are gone, but they're coming back. It hasn't been\n decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as\n what one of the strangers called a \"survival school.\" Or maybe we will\n join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the\n uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.",
"You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful\n young lady's face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the\n fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor\n just above the white blanket of frozen air. I'd never seen a live young\n lady before, except in the old magazines—Sis is just a kid and Ma is\n pretty sick and miserable—and it gave me such a start that I dropped\n the pail. Who wouldn't, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa\n and Ma and Sis and you?\nEven at that, I don't suppose I should have been surprised. We all\n see things now and then. Ma has some pretty bad ones, to judge from\n the way she bugs her eyes at nothing and just screams and screams and\n huddles back against the blankets hanging around the Nest. Pa says it\n is natural we should react like that sometimes."
],
[
"The Big Jerk didn't last long. It was over as soon as the Earth\n was settled down in its new orbit around the dark star. But it was\n pretty terrible while it lasted. Pa says that all sorts of cliffs and\n buildings toppled, oceans slopped over, swamps and sandy deserts gave\n great sliding surges that buried nearby lands. Earth was almost jerked\n out of its atmosphere blanket and the air got so thin in spots that\n people keeled over and fainted—though of course, at the same time,\n they were getting knocked down by the Big Jerk and maybe their bones\n broke or skulls cracked.\n\n\n We've often asked Pa how people acted during that time, whether they\n were scared or brave or crazy or stunned, or all four, but he's sort of\n leery of the subject, and he was again tonight. He says he was mostly\n too busy to notice.",
"Most of the other planets were on the other side of the Sun and didn't\n get involved. The Sun and the newcomer fought over the Earth for a\n little while—pulling it this way and that, like two dogs growling\n over a bone, Pa described it this time—and then the newcomer won and\n carried us off. The Sun got a consolation prize, though. At the last\n minute he managed to hold on to the Moon.\n\n\n That was the time of the monster earthquakes and floods, twenty times\n worse than anything before. It was also the time of the Big Jerk, as Pa\n calls it, when all Earth got yanked suddenly, just as Pa has done to\n me once or twice, grabbing me by the collar to do it, when I've been\n sitting too far from the fire.\nYou see, the dark star was going through space faster than the Sun, and\n in the opposite direction, and it had to wrench the world considerably\n in order to take it away.",
"You see, Pa and some scientist friends of his had figured out part of\n what was going to happen—they'd known we'd get captured and our air\n would freeze—and they'd been working like mad to fix up a place with\n airtight walls and doors, and insulation against the cold, and big\n supplies of food and fuel and water and bottled air. But the place\n got smashed in the last earthquakes and all Pa's friends were killed\n then and in the Big Jerk. So he had to start over and throw the Nest\n together quick without any advantages, just using any stuff he could\n lay his hands on.\n\n\n I guess he's telling pretty much the truth when he says he didn't have\n any time to keep an eye on how other folks behaved, either then or\n in the Big Freeze that followed—followed very quick, you know, both\n because the dark star was pulling us away very fast and because Earth's\n rotation had been slowed in the tug-of-war, so that the nights were ten\n old nights long.",
"But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright\n light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice stopped and his eyes turned to\n the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped\n the handle of the hammer beside him.\nIn through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood\n there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something\n bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her\n shoulders—men's faces, white and staring.\n\n\n Well, my heart couldn't have been stopped for more than four or five\n beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa's\n homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too—and that the\n frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I noticed that\n the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.\n\n\n The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after\n that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion.",
"Pa showed them to me once in quick winks of his flashlight, when\n he still had a fair supply of batteries and could afford to waste\n a little light. They scared me pretty bad and made my heart pound,\n especially the young lady.\nNow, with Pa telling his story for the umpteenth time to take our minds\n off another scare, I got to thinking of the frozen folk again. All of a\n sudden I got an idea that scared me worse than anything yet. You see,\n I'd just remembered the face I'd thought I'd seen in the window. I'd\n forgotten about that on account of trying to hide it from the others.",
"When I'd recovered the pail and could look again at the opposite\n apartment, I got an idea of what Ma might be feeling at those times,\n for I saw it wasn't a young lady at all but simply a light—a tiny\n light that moved stealthily from window to window, just as if one\n of the cruel little stars had come down out of the airless sky to\n investigate why the Earth had gone away from the Sun, and maybe to hunt\n down something to torment or terrify, now that the Earth didn't have\n the Sun's protection.\n\n\n I tell you, the thought of it gave me the creeps. I just stood there\n shaking, and almost froze my feet and did frost my helmet so solid on\n the inside that I couldn't have seen the light even if it had come out\n of one of the windows to get me. Then I had the wit to go back inside.",
"The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking\n eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the\n Nest.\n\n\n I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very\n badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said\n and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.\n\n\n We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently.\n There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks.\n\n\n And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My\n skin tightened all over me.\n\n\n Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the\n place where he philosophizes.",
"His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it\n didn't wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind—or the\n fact that Pa took it seriously.\nIt's hard to hide your feelings about such a thing. When we got back in\n the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and\n told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination,\n but his words fell flat. He didn't convince Ma and Sis any more than\n he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the\n courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what\n I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old\n days, and how it all happened.",
"He wasn't just making up those ideas. Odd things happen in a world\n that's about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter\n would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff\n comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for\n heat—that's the liquid helium. And once, when I was little, a bolt of\n lightning—not even Pa could figure where it came from—hit the nearby\n steeple and crawled up and down it for weeks, until the glow finally\n died.\n\n\n \"Not like anything I ever saw,\" I told him.\n\n\n He stood for a moment frowning. Then, \"I'll go out with you, and you\n show it to me,\" he said.",
"He sometimes doesn't mind telling that story, and Sis and I sure like\n to listen to it, and he got my idea. So we were all settled around the\n fire in a wink, and Ma pushed up some cans to thaw for supper, and Pa\n began. Before he did, though, I noticed him casually get a hammer from\n the shelf and lay it down beside him.\n\n\n It was the same old story as always—I think I could recite the main\n thread of it in my sleep—though Pa always puts in a new detail or two\n and keeps improving it in spots.\n\n\n He told us how the Earth had been swinging around the Sun ever so\n steady and warm, and the people on it fixing to make money and wars and\n have a good time and get power and treat each other right or wrong,\n when without warning there comes charging out of space this dead star,\n this burned out sun, and upsets everything.",
"Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so\n blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of\n air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the\n tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back\n into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course.\n But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last\n blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the\n heat—and came into the Nest.\nLet me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the\n four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly\n rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it\n touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've\n never seen the real walls or ceiling.",
"You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful\n young lady's face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the\n fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor\n just above the white blanket of frozen air. I'd never seen a live young\n lady before, except in the old magazines—Sis is just a kid and Ma is\n pretty sick and miserable—and it gave me such a start that I dropped\n the pail. Who wouldn't, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa\n and Ma and Sis and you?\nEven at that, I don't suppose I should have been surprised. We all\n see things now and then. Ma has some pretty bad ones, to judge from\n the way she bugs her eyes at nothing and just screams and screams and\n huddles back against the blankets hanging around the Nest. Pa says it\n is natural we should react like that sometimes.",
"What, I asked myself, if the frozen folk were coming to life? What\n if they were like the liquid helium that got a new lease on life\n and started crawling toward the heat just when you thought its\n molecules ought to freeze solid forever? Or like the electricity that\n moves endlessly when it's just about as cold as that? What if the\n ever-growing cold, with the temperature creeping down the last few\n degrees to the last zero, had mysteriously wakened the frozen folk to\n life—not warm-blooded life, but something icy and horrible?\n\n\n That was a worse idea than the one about something coming down from the\n dark star to get us.\n\n\n Or maybe, I thought, both ideas might be true. Something coming down\n from the dark star and making the frozen folk move, using them to do\n its work. That would fit with both things I'd seen—the beautiful young\n lady and the moving, starlike light.",
"Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was\n told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind\n of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail\n and the two of us go out.\nPa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not\n afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to\n him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a\n bit scared.\n\n\n You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa\n heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of\n the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we\n knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't\n be anything human or friendly.",
"It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think\n of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously\n at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often\n carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa\n tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very\n old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen\n air all around then and you didn't really need one.\n\n\n He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the\n pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he'd spotted my frozen\n helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's\n always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut\n her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.",
"\"So I asked myself then,\" he said, \"what's the use of going on? What's\n the use of dragging it out for a few years? Why prolong a doomed\n existence of hard work and cold and loneliness? The human race is done.\n The Earth is done. Why not give up, I asked myself—and all of a sudden\n I got the answer.\"\n\n\n Again I heard the noise, louder this time, a kind of uncertain,\n shuffling tread, coming closer. I couldn't breathe.",
"In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about\n things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked\n and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another\n bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started\n them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little\n drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen.\n\n\n Funny thing, though—I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on\n to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt\n pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady.\n Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but\n now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to\n be nice as anything to me.\n\n\n I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone\n and get our feelings straightened out.",
"All of these gases in neat separate layers. Like a pussy caffay, Pa\n laughingly says, whatever that is.\nI was busting to tell them all about what I'd seen, and so as soon as\n I'd ducked out of my helmet and while I was still climbing out of my\n suit, I cut loose. Right away Ma got nervous and began making eyes at\n the entry-slit in the blankets and wringing her hands together—the\n hand where she'd lost three fingers from frostbite inside the good one,\n as usual. I could tell that Pa was annoyed at me scaring her and wanted\n to explain it all away quickly, yet could see I wasn't fooling.",
"\"And you watched this light for some time, son?\" he asked when I\n finished.\n\n\n I hadn't said anything about first thinking it was a young lady's face.\n Somehow that part embarrassed me.\n\n\n \"Long enough for it to pass five windows and go to the next floor.\"\n\n\n \"And it didn't look like stray electricity or crawling liquid or\n starlight focused by a growing crystal, or anything like that?\"",
"Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined\n in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside\n clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have\n plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food\n cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a\n little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and\n so on.\n\n\n Ma started moaning again, \"I've always known there was something\n outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something\n that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the\n Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after\n us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!\""
],
[
"It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think\n of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously\n at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often\n carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa\n tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very\n old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen\n air all around then and you didn't really need one.\n\n\n He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the\n pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he'd spotted my frozen\n helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's\n always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut\n her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.",
"Against one of the blanket-walls is a big set of shelves, with tools\n and books and other stuff, and on top of it a whole row of clocks. Pa's\n very fussy about keeping them wound. He says we must never forget time,\n and without a sun or moon, that would be easy to do.\n\n\n The fourth wall has blankets all over except around the fireplace, in\n which there is a fire that must never go out. It keeps us from freezing\n and does a lot more besides. One of us must always watch it. Some of\n the clocks are alarm and we can use them to remind us. In the early\n days there was only Ma to take turns with Pa—I think of that when she\n gets difficult—but now there's me to help, and Sis too.",
"Pa had everything on but his helmet. He knelt by the fireplace and\n reached in and shook the long metal rod that goes up the chimney and\n knocks off the ice that keeps trying to clog it. Once a week he goes up\n on the roof to check if it's working all right. That's our worst trip\n and Pa won't let me make it alone.\n\n\n \"Sis,\" Pa said quietly, \"come watch the fire. Keep an eye on the air,\n too. If it gets low or doesn't seem to be boiling fast enough, fetch\n another bucket from behind the blanket. But mind your hands. Use the\n cloth to pick up the bucket.\"",
"Pa handled the pail of air in a twist of cloth. Now that it was inside\n the Nest, you could really feel its coldness. It just seemed to suck\n the heat out of everything. Even the flames cringed away from it as Pa\n put it down close by the fire.\n\n\n Yet it's that glimmery white stuff in the pail that keeps us alive.\n It slowly melts and vanishes and refreshes the Nest and feeds the\n fire. The blankets keep it from escaping too fast. Pa'd like to seal\n the whole place, but he can't—building's too earthquake-twisted, and\n besides he has to leave the chimney open for smoke.",
"Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined\n in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside\n clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have\n plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food\n cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a\n little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and\n so on.\n\n\n Ma started moaning again, \"I've always known there was something\n outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something\n that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the\n Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after\n us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!\"",
"Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so\n blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of\n air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the\n tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back\n into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course.\n But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last\n blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the\n heat—and came into the Nest.\nLet me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the\n four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly\n rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it\n touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've\n never seen the real walls or ceiling.",
"Still, I've got an idea of some of the things that happened from the\n frozen folk I've seen, a few of them in other rooms in our building,\n others clustered around the furnaces in the basements where we go for\n coal.\n\n\n In one of the rooms, an old man sits stiff in a chair, with an arm and\n a leg in splints. In another, a man and woman are huddled together in\n a bed with heaps of covers over them. You can just see their heads\n peeking out, close together. And in another a beautiful young lady is\n sitting with a pile of wraps huddled around her, looking hopefully\n toward the door, as if waiting for someone who never came back with\n warmth and food. They're all still and stiff as statues, of course, but\n just like life.",
"\"So right then and there,\" Pa went on, and now I could tell that he\n heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn't hear\n them, \"right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if\n we had all eternity ahead of us. I'd have children and teach them all\n I could. I'd get them to read books. I'd plan for the future, try to\n enlarge and seal the Nest. I'd do what I could to keep everything\n beautiful and growing. I'd keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the\n cold and the dark and the distant stars.\"",
"He sometimes doesn't mind telling that story, and Sis and I sure like\n to listen to it, and he got my idea. So we were all settled around the\n fire in a wink, and Ma pushed up some cans to thaw for supper, and Pa\n began. Before he did, though, I noticed him casually get a hammer from\n the shelf and lay it down beside him.\n\n\n It was the same old story as always—I think I could recite the main\n thread of it in my sleep—though Pa always puts in a new detail or two\n and keeps improving it in spots.\n\n\n He told us how the Earth had been swinging around the Sun ever so\n steady and warm, and the people on it fixing to make money and wars and\n have a good time and get power and treat each other right or wrong,\n when without warning there comes charging out of space this dead star,\n this burned out sun, and upsets everything.",
"His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it\n didn't wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind—or the\n fact that Pa took it seriously.\nIt's hard to hide your feelings about such a thing. When we got back in\n the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and\n told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination,\n but his words fell flat. He didn't convince Ma and Sis any more than\n he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the\n courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what\n I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old\n days, and how it all happened.",
"Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a\n lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a\n hankering to see them for myself.\n\n\n You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty\n thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.\n\n\n \"It's different, now that we know others are alive,\" he explains to me.\n \"Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that\n matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the\n human race going, so to speak. It scares a person.\"\n\n\n I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air\n boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering\n light.",
"They were simply people, you see. We hadn't been the only ones to\n survive; we'd just thought so, for natural enough reasons. These three\n people had survived, and quite a few others with them. And when we\n found out\nhow\nthey'd survived, Pa let out the biggest whoop of joy.\n\n\n They were from Los Alamos and they were getting their heat and power\n from atomic energy. Just using the uranium and plutonium intended\n for bombs, they had enough to go on for thousands of years. They had\n a regular little airtight city, with air-locks and all. They even\n generated electric light and grew plants and animals by it. (At this Pa\n let out a second whoop, waking Ma from her faint.)\n\n\n But if we were flabbergasted at them, they were double-flabbergasted at\n us.",
"The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking\n eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the\n Nest.\n\n\n I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very\n badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said\n and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.\n\n\n We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently.\n There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks.\n\n\n And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My\n skin tightened all over me.\n\n\n Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the\n place where he philosophizes.",
"And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going to Los Alamos,\n as if that were taken for granted, I could see that something of the\n same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden\n and Ma kept telling the young lady, \"But I wouldn't know how to act\n there and I haven't any clothes.\"\n\n\n The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then they got\n the idea. As Pa kept saying, \"It just doesn't seem right to let this\n fire go out.\"\nWell, the strangers are gone, but they're coming back. It hasn't been\n decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as\n what one of the strangers called a \"survival school.\" Or maybe we will\n join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the\n uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.",
"In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about\n things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked\n and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another\n bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started\n them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little\n drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen.\n\n\n Funny thing, though—I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on\n to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt\n pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady.\n Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but\n now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to\n be nice as anything to me.\n\n\n I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone\n and get our feelings straightened out.",
"and all that. Ma had perked up wonderfully and was showing the young\n lady her cooking and sewing stuff, and even asking about how the women\n dressed at Los Alamos. The strangers marveled at everything and praised\n it to the skies. I could tell from the way they wrinkled their noses\n that they found the Nest a bit smelly, but they never mentioned that at\n all and just asked bushels of questions.",
"Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was\n told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind\n of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail\n and the two of us go out.\nPa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not\n afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to\n him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a\n bit scared.\n\n\n You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa\n heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of\n the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we\n knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't\n be anything human or friendly.",
"\"Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,\"\n Pa was saying. \"The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of\n miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might\n have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't\n matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture,\n like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you've seen\n pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel—or the fire's\n glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the\n last man as the first.\"\n\n\n And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the\n inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were\n burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.",
"Inside, he said to me, touching helmets, \"If you see something like\n that again, son, don't tell the others. Your Ma's sort of nervous these\n days and we owe her all the feeling of safety we can give her. Once—it\n was when your sister was born—I was ready to give up and die, but your\n Mother kept me trying. Another time she kept the fire going a whole\n week all by herself when I was sick. Nursed me and took care of the two\n of you, too.\"\n\"You know that game we sometimes play, sitting in a square in the Nest,\n tossing a ball around? Courage is like a ball, son. A person can hold\n it only so long, and then he's got to toss it to someone else. When\n it's tossed your way, you've got to catch it and hold it tight—and\n hope there'll be someone else to toss it to when you get tired of being\n brave.\"",
"\"It's not going to be easy to leave the Nest,\" I said, wanting to cry,\n kind of. \"It's so small and there's just the four of us. I get scared\n at the idea of big places and a lot of strangers.\"\n\n\n He nodded and put another piece of coal on the fire. Then he looked at\n the little pile and grinned suddenly and put a couple of handfuls on,\n just as if it was one of our birthdays or Christmas.\n\n\n \"You'll quickly get over that feeling son,\" he said. \"The trouble with\n the world was that it kept getting smaller and smaller, till it ended\n with just the Nest. Now it'll be good to have a real huge world again,\n the way it was in the beginning.\"\n\n\n I guess he's right. You think the beautiful young lady will wait for me\n till I grow up? I'll be twenty in only ten years."
],
[
"It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think\n of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously\n at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often\n carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa\n tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very\n old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen\n air all around then and you didn't really need one.\n\n\n He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the\n pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he'd spotted my frozen\n helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's\n always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut\n her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.",
"The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking\n eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the\n Nest.\n\n\n I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very\n badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said\n and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.\n\n\n We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently.\n There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks.\n\n\n And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My\n skin tightened all over me.\n\n\n Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the\n place where he philosophizes.",
"But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright\n light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice stopped and his eyes turned to\n the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped\n the handle of the hammer beside him.\nIn through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood\n there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something\n bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her\n shoulders—men's faces, white and staring.\n\n\n Well, my heart couldn't have been stopped for more than four or five\n beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa's\n homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too—and that the\n frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I noticed that\n the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.\n\n\n The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after\n that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion.",
"Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was\n told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind\n of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail\n and the two of us go out.\nPa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not\n afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to\n him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a\n bit scared.\n\n\n You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa\n heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of\n the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we\n knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't\n be anything human or friendly.",
"\"Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,\"\n Pa was saying. \"The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of\n miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might\n have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't\n matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture,\n like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you've seen\n pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel—or the fire's\n glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the\n last man as the first.\"\n\n\n And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the\n inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were\n burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.",
"Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined\n in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside\n clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have\n plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food\n cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a\n little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and\n so on.\n\n\n Ma started moaning again, \"I've always known there was something\n outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something\n that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the\n Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after\n us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!\"",
"You know, I find it hard to believe in the way those people felt,\n any more than I can believe in the swarming number of them. Imagine\n people getting ready for the horrible sort of war they were cooking up.\n Wanting it even, or at least wishing it were over so as to end their\n nervousness. As if all folks didn't have to hang together and pool\n every bit of warmth just to keep alive. And how can they have hoped to\n end danger, any more than we can hope to end the cold?",
"In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about\n things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked\n and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another\n bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started\n them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little\n drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen.\n\n\n Funny thing, though—I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on\n to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt\n pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady.\n Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but\n now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to\n be nice as anything to me.\n\n\n I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone\n and get our feelings straightened out.",
"Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a\n lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a\n hankering to see them for myself.\n\n\n You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty\n thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.\n\n\n \"It's different, now that we know others are alive,\" he explains to me.\n \"Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that\n matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the\n human race going, so to speak. It scares a person.\"\n\n\n I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air\n boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering\n light.",
"Pa showed them to me once in quick winks of his flashlight, when\n he still had a fair supply of batteries and could afford to waste\n a little light. They scared me pretty bad and made my heart pound,\n especially the young lady.\nNow, with Pa telling his story for the umpteenth time to take our minds\n off another scare, I got to thinking of the frozen folk again. All of a\n sudden I got an idea that scared me worse than anything yet. You see,\n I'd just remembered the face I'd thought I'd seen in the window. I'd\n forgotten about that on account of trying to hide it from the others.",
"\"So I asked myself then,\" he said, \"what's the use of going on? What's\n the use of dragging it out for a few years? Why prolong a doomed\n existence of hard work and cold and loneliness? The human race is done.\n The Earth is done. Why not give up, I asked myself—and all of a sudden\n I got the answer.\"\n\n\n Again I heard the noise, louder this time, a kind of uncertain,\n shuffling tread, coming closer. I couldn't breathe.",
"I could feel it, too. The old peace was gone. There was something\n lurking out there, watching, waiting, getting ready.",
"and all that. Ma had perked up wonderfully and was showing the young\n lady her cooking and sewing stuff, and even asking about how the women\n dressed at Los Alamos. The strangers marveled at everything and praised\n it to the skies. I could tell from the way they wrinkled their noses\n that they found the Nest a bit smelly, but they never mentioned that at\n all and just asked bushels of questions.",
"And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going to Los Alamos,\n as if that were taken for granted, I could see that something of the\n same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden\n and Ma kept telling the young lady, \"But I wouldn't know how to act\n there and I haven't any clothes.\"\n\n\n The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then they got\n the idea. As Pa kept saying, \"It just doesn't seem right to let this\n fire go out.\"\nWell, the strangers are gone, but they're coming back. It hasn't been\n decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as\n what one of the strangers called a \"survival school.\" Or maybe we will\n join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the\n uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.",
"\"So right then and there,\" Pa went on, and now I could tell that he\n heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn't hear\n them, \"right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if\n we had all eternity ahead of us. I'd have children and teach them all\n I could. I'd get them to read books. I'd plan for the future, try to\n enlarge and seal the Nest. I'd do what I could to keep everything\n beautiful and growing. I'd keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the\n cold and the dark and the distant stars.\"",
"His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it\n didn't wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind—or the\n fact that Pa took it seriously.\nIt's hard to hide your feelings about such a thing. When we got back in\n the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and\n told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination,\n but his words fell flat. He didn't convince Ma and Sis any more than\n he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the\n courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what\n I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old\n days, and how it all happened.",
"What, I asked myself, if the frozen folk were coming to life? What\n if they were like the liquid helium that got a new lease on life\n and started crawling toward the heat just when you thought its\n molecules ought to freeze solid forever? Or like the electricity that\n moves endlessly when it's just about as cold as that? What if the\n ever-growing cold, with the temperature creeping down the last few\n degrees to the last zero, had mysteriously wakened the frozen folk to\n life—not warm-blooded life, but something icy and horrible?\n\n\n That was a worse idea than the one about something coming down from the\n dark star to get us.\n\n\n Or maybe, I thought, both ideas might be true. Something coming down\n from the dark star and making the frozen folk move, using them to do\n its work. That would fit with both things I'd seen—the beautiful young\n lady and the moving, starlike light.",
"He wasn't just making up those ideas. Odd things happen in a world\n that's about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter\n would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff\n comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for\n heat—that's the liquid helium. And once, when I was little, a bolt of\n lightning—not even Pa could figure where it came from—hit the nearby\n steeple and crawled up and down it for weeks, until the glow finally\n died.\n\n\n \"Not like anything I ever saw,\" I told him.\n\n\n He stood for a moment frowning. Then, \"I'll go out with you, and you\n show it to me,\" he said.",
"Still, I've got an idea of some of the things that happened from the\n frozen folk I've seen, a few of them in other rooms in our building,\n others clustered around the furnaces in the basements where we go for\n coal.\n\n\n In one of the rooms, an old man sits stiff in a chair, with an arm and\n a leg in splints. In another, a man and woman are huddled together in\n a bed with heaps of covers over them. You can just see their heads\n peeking out, close together. And in another a beautiful young lady is\n sitting with a pile of wraps huddled around her, looking hopefully\n toward the door, as if waiting for someone who never came back with\n warmth and food. They're all still and stiff as statues, of course, but\n just like life.",
"When I'd recovered the pail and could look again at the opposite\n apartment, I got an idea of what Ma might be feeling at those times,\n for I saw it wasn't a young lady at all but simply a light—a tiny\n light that moved stealthily from window to window, just as if one\n of the cruel little stars had come down out of the airless sky to\n investigate why the Earth had gone away from the Sun, and maybe to hunt\n down something to torment or terrify, now that the Earth didn't have\n the Sun's protection.\n\n\n I tell you, the thought of it gave me the creeps. I just stood there\n shaking, and almost froze my feet and did frost my helmet so solid on\n the inside that I couldn't have seen the light even if it had come out\n of one of the windows to get me. Then I had the wit to go back inside."
]
] |
valid
|
20031
|
[
"What did the author outline as the importance of friendships to his father?",
"What is the relationship like between the brother and sister?",
"What was the relationship like between the father and son in the piece?",
"What were some of the privileges that Stein was able to offer his family in his life?",
"What does the author explain was his father’s opinions on status?",
"What are some of the things the author says can’t easily be valued?",
"What was the apparent status of the father that passed away?",
"What was the relationship like between the son and his mother?",
"What was a section of the federal budget that the author’s father felt strongly about supporting that his estate tax would then go to support after he died?",
"What personal feelings did the author have about the estate tax on his father’s estate?"
] |
[
[
"His friends were essential in his early career days, but he lost touch with most through raising his family",
"He didn’t keep many friends at the end of his life",
"He kept friends even from early school days throughout his life and they were very important to him even as he became busy through life",
"He did not value friendships, and often felt regretful later in life that he hadn’t"
],
[
"They are estranged",
"They seem to be in agreement about the things discussed in the piece",
"They don’t see each other’s opinions and do not get along well",
"They disagree on how to divide their father’s estate"
],
[
"The son thought his father made bad financial decisions",
"The son held great respect for his father and valued his legacy",
"They had become estranged through life",
"The son came to discover that his father had secrets in his finances upon his death"
],
[
"Untaxed inheritance",
"Buying them investment properties to pass on",
"Paying their expenses",
"Entry into politics due to his reputation"
],
[
"He was never able to reach status and he resented those with it",
"He sought to achieve status in life and pass on wealth",
"Status was less important to him than friendships",
"He respected status and the power that is brought to the holder"
],
[
"The antique car collection",
"The furniture in his home",
"The values that his children cherish",
"The various properties his father owned that are meaningful to the family"
],
[
"Locally-famous mayor",
"Agent in the CIA",
"Independent business person",
"Political figurehead"
],
[
"His mother needed to make decisions about the estate when his father passed and he was in disagreement about how they should be made",
"Their relationship seems to have been pleasant and he knows how much she meant to his father",
"His mother needed a lot of help when his father passed away and he was happy to be there for her",
"She passed away early in her son’s life"
],
[
"Schools",
"Hospitals",
"Defense",
"Infrastructure"
],
[
"He believed that people who invest in land like his father should be able to pass property on without tax",
"His parents lived cheaply and the author feels they deserve to have their savings passed on",
"His parents passed a lot of money on while they were alive, and he feels like he has received plenty and doesn’t need to worry about estate tax",
"He believes it is important that his father’s estate does go in part to the IRS to support the public services his father was a part of creating"
]
] |
[
3,
2,
2,
3,
3,
3,
4,
2,
3,
2
] |
[
0,
0,
1,
1,
0,
1,
1,
0,
0,
1
] |
[
[
"Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.",
"Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, \"Let's do it together. It'll take half as long.\" I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.",
"He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.",
"My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.",
"This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.",
"My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)",
"My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.",
"That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.",
"But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. \n\n The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.",
"My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. \n\n When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.",
"He appreciated his friends and did not differentiate between them on the basis of fame or position. He took the words of his longtime pal Murray Foss at the American Enterprise Institute, a think",
"He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that paid him handsomely.",
"My Father's Estate \n\n A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: \"I saw that your father had died,\" she wrote. \"He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?\" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. \n\n My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us.",
"was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him.",
"beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I",
"believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what",
"Even in his hospital bed, hearing my son's voice on the phone could make him smile through the fear and the pain. (\"He sounds so sweet when he calls me 'Grandpa,' \" my father said, beaming even with tubes in him.)",
"He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far.",
"on their merits to him, not on the basis of how much press or money the speaker had. He never once in my lifetime's recall said that any man or woman deserved special respect for riches--in fact, like Adam Smith, he",
"Once, about 25 years ago, when my boss treated me unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer hung in my mind as a last refuge forever. \n\n This reassurance--that somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well as in a nation, to paraphrase his idol, Adam Smith--has become part of me, and I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax payment due or a bad day on the market. Again, the IRS taxes it at zero."
],
[
"believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what",
"Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, \"Let's do it together. It'll take half as long.\" I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.",
"He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.",
"beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I",
"Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.",
"stand near them in his closet, I can still smell his smell of hair and skin and leather shoes, the closet smelling a lot like he smelled when he came home from work in 1954 carrying a newspaper that said there could",
"to and from my mother when they were courting in 1935 and 1936, still tied with light blue ribbon in what was my mother's lingerie drawer, talking about their love triumphing over the dangers of the Depression. I suppose",
"But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. \n\n The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.",
"My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)",
"My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.",
"Even in his hospital bed, hearing my son's voice on the phone could make him smile through the fear and the pain. (\"He sounds so sweet when he calls me 'Grandpa,' \" my father said, beaming even with tubes in him.)",
"He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that paid him handsomely.",
"He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far.",
"This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.",
"My Father's Estate \n\n A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: \"I saw that your father had died,\" she wrote. \"He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?\" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. \n\n My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us.",
"was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him.",
"He appreciated his friends and did not differentiate between them on the basis of fame or position. He took the words of his longtime pal Murray Foss at the American Enterprise Institute, a think",
"This good name cannot be taxed at all, at least not right now. My sister and I and our children will have it for as long as we keep it clean. It's priceless, incalculable in value. \n\n So, in answer to the query from the forward high-school classmate, \"Yes, my father did leave an immense estate, and yes, he did manage to beat the estate tax.\" The only problem is that I miss him every single minute, and I already had the best parts of the estate without his being gone, so the death part is pure loss.",
"That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.",
"My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed."
],
[
"Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.",
"He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.",
"Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, \"Let's do it together. It'll take half as long.\" I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.",
"This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.",
"My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.",
"My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)",
"That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.",
"My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.",
"believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what",
"My Father's Estate \n\n A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: \"I saw that your father had died,\" she wrote. \"He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?\" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. \n\n My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us.",
"Even in his hospital bed, hearing my son's voice on the phone could make him smile through the fear and the pain. (\"He sounds so sweet when he calls me 'Grandpa,' \" my father said, beaming even with tubes in him.)",
"But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. \n\n The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.",
"stand near them in his closet, I can still smell his smell of hair and skin and leather shoes, the closet smelling a lot like he smelled when he came home from work in 1954 carrying a newspaper that said there could",
"was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him.",
"beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I",
"My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. \n\n When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.",
"He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far.",
"This good name cannot be taxed at all, at least not right now. My sister and I and our children will have it for as long as we keep it clean. It's priceless, incalculable in value. \n\n So, in answer to the query from the forward high-school classmate, \"Yes, my father did leave an immense estate, and yes, he did manage to beat the estate tax.\" The only problem is that I miss him every single minute, and I already had the best parts of the estate without his being gone, so the death part is pure loss.",
"Once, about 25 years ago, when my boss treated me unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer hung in my mind as a last refuge forever. \n\n This reassurance--that somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well as in a nation, to paraphrase his idol, Adam Smith--has become part of me, and I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax payment due or a bad day on the market. Again, the IRS taxes it at zero.",
"He did indeed leave some money. By the standards we read about in the Wall Street Journal or Sports Illustrated , it was not worthy of much ink. In any event, because of the class-warfare-based death tax, the amount that will be left is vastly less than what he had saved. As an economist, my father was famous for defending taxes as a necessary evil. But even he was staggered, not long before his death, when he considered the taxes on his savings that would go to the Internal Revenue Service."
],
[
"My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)",
"My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.",
"My Father's Estate \n\n A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: \"I saw that your father had died,\" she wrote. \"He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?\" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. \n\n My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us.",
"But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. \n\n The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.",
"believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what",
"Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.",
"He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that paid him handsomely.",
"That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.",
"He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far.",
"My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.",
"This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.",
"My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. \n\n When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.",
"beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I",
"on their merits to him, not on the basis of how much press or money the speaker had. He never once in my lifetime's recall said that any man or woman deserved special respect for riches--in fact, like Adam Smith, he",
"He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.",
"Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, \"Let's do it together. It'll take half as long.\" I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.",
"was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him.",
"He did indeed leave some money. By the standards we read about in the Wall Street Journal or Sports Illustrated , it was not worthy of much ink. In any event, because of the class-warfare-based death tax, the amount that will be left is vastly less than what he had saved. As an economist, my father was famous for defending taxes as a necessary evil. But even he was staggered, not long before his death, when he considered the taxes on his savings that would go to the Internal Revenue Service.",
"This good name cannot be taxed at all, at least not right now. My sister and I and our children will have it for as long as we keep it clean. It's priceless, incalculable in value. \n\n So, in answer to the query from the forward high-school classmate, \"Yes, my father did leave an immense estate, and yes, he did manage to beat the estate tax.\" The only problem is that I miss him every single minute, and I already had the best parts of the estate without his being gone, so the death part is pure loss.",
"Once, about 25 years ago, when my boss treated me unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer hung in my mind as a last refuge forever. \n\n This reassurance--that somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well as in a nation, to paraphrase his idol, Adam Smith--has become part of me, and I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax payment due or a bad day on the market. Again, the IRS taxes it at zero."
],
[
"My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)",
"believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what",
"My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.",
"Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.",
"This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.",
"My Father's Estate \n\n A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: \"I saw that your father had died,\" she wrote. \"He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?\" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. \n\n My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us.",
"on their merits to him, not on the basis of how much press or money the speaker had. He never once in my lifetime's recall said that any man or woman deserved special respect for riches--in fact, like Adam Smith, he",
"But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. \n\n The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.",
"That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.",
"Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, \"Let's do it together. It'll take half as long.\" I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.",
"My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. \n\n When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.",
"My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.",
"was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him.",
"He appreciated his friends and did not differentiate between them on the basis of fame or position. He took the words of his longtime pal Murray Foss at the American Enterprise Institute, a think",
"He did indeed leave some money. By the standards we read about in the Wall Street Journal or Sports Illustrated , it was not worthy of much ink. In any event, because of the class-warfare-based death tax, the amount that will be left is vastly less than what he had saved. As an economist, my father was famous for defending taxes as a necessary evil. But even he was staggered, not long before his death, when he considered the taxes on his savings that would go to the Internal Revenue Service.",
"He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.",
"He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far.",
"He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that paid him handsomely.",
"Once, about 25 years ago, when my boss treated me unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer hung in my mind as a last refuge forever. \n\n This reassurance--that somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well as in a nation, to paraphrase his idol, Adam Smith--has become part of me, and I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax payment due or a bad day on the market. Again, the IRS taxes it at zero.",
"beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I"
],
[
"There are a few material, tangible items that an assessor will have to come in to appraise. There are my father's books, from his days at Williams College and the University of Chicago, many of them still neatly underlined and annotated in his handwriting, which did not change from 1931 until days before his death. Most of them are about economics, but some are poetry.",
"This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.",
"beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I",
"But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. \n\n The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.",
"He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far.",
"That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.",
"This good name cannot be taxed at all, at least not right now. My sister and I and our children will have it for as long as we keep it clean. It's priceless, incalculable in value. \n\n So, in answer to the query from the forward high-school classmate, \"Yes, my father did leave an immense estate, and yes, he did manage to beat the estate tax.\" The only problem is that I miss him every single minute, and I already had the best parts of the estate without his being gone, so the death part is pure loss.",
"My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)",
"believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what",
"My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.",
"tank where he hung his hat for many years, into account; and the words of Mrs. Wiggins, who ran the cafeteria at the AEI; and the thoughts of Alan Greenspan or the head of Goldman, Sachs; and valued them entirely",
"on their merits to him, not on the basis of how much press or money the speaker had. He never once in my lifetime's recall said that any man or woman deserved special respect for riches--in fact, like Adam Smith, he",
"was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him.",
"Once, about 25 years ago, when my boss treated me unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer hung in my mind as a last refuge forever. \n\n This reassurance--that somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well as in a nation, to paraphrase his idol, Adam Smith--has become part of me, and I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax payment due or a bad day on the market. Again, the IRS taxes it at zero.",
"My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.",
"He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.",
"My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. \n\n When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.",
"He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that paid him handsomely.",
"Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.",
"He appreciated his friends and did not differentiate between them on the basis of fame or position. He took the words of his longtime pal Murray Foss at the American Enterprise Institute, a think"
],
[
"My Father's Estate \n\n A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: \"I saw that your father had died,\" she wrote. \"He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?\" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. \n\n My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us.",
"My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.",
"He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.",
"That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.",
"But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. \n\n The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.",
"He did indeed leave some money. By the standards we read about in the Wall Street Journal or Sports Illustrated , it was not worthy of much ink. In any event, because of the class-warfare-based death tax, the amount that will be left is vastly less than what he had saved. As an economist, my father was famous for defending taxes as a necessary evil. But even he was staggered, not long before his death, when he considered the taxes on his savings that would go to the Internal Revenue Service.",
"believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what",
"Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.",
"This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.",
"My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.",
"My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)",
"This good name cannot be taxed at all, at least not right now. My sister and I and our children will have it for as long as we keep it clean. It's priceless, incalculable in value. \n\n So, in answer to the query from the forward high-school classmate, \"Yes, my father did leave an immense estate, and yes, he did manage to beat the estate tax.\" The only problem is that I miss him every single minute, and I already had the best parts of the estate without his being gone, so the death part is pure loss.",
"Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, \"Let's do it together. It'll take half as long.\" I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.",
"He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far.",
"My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. \n\n When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.",
"was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him.",
"on their merits to him, not on the basis of how much press or money the speaker had. He never once in my lifetime's recall said that any man or woman deserved special respect for riches--in fact, like Adam Smith, he",
"stand near them in his closet, I can still smell his smell of hair and skin and leather shoes, the closet smelling a lot like he smelled when he came home from work in 1954 carrying a newspaper that said there could",
"There are a few material, tangible items that an assessor will have to come in to appraise. There are my father's books, from his days at Williams College and the University of Chicago, many of them still neatly underlined and annotated in his handwriting, which did not change from 1931 until days before his death. Most of them are about economics, but some are poetry.",
"They never had live-in help. My father washed the dishes after my mother made the meatloaf. My father took the bus whenever he could. His only large expenditure in his and my mom's whole lives was to pay for schools for his children and grandchildren. He never bought bottled, imported water; he said whatever came out of the tap was good enough for him. They still used bargain-basement furniture from before the war for their bedroom furniture and their couch. I never once knew them to order the most expensive thing in a restaurant, and they always took the leftovers home. \n\n They made not one penny of it from stock options or golden parachutes. They made it all by depriving themselves in the name of thrift and prudence and preparing for the needs of posterity. To think that this abstemiousness and this display of virtue will primarily benefit the IRS is really just so galling I can hardly stand it. The only possible reason for it is to satisfy some urge of jealousy by people who were less self-disciplined."
],
[
"He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.",
"believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what",
"Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.",
"My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.",
"Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, \"Let's do it together. It'll take half as long.\" I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.",
"Even in his hospital bed, hearing my son's voice on the phone could make him smile through the fear and the pain. (\"He sounds so sweet when he calls me 'Grandpa,' \" my father said, beaming even with tubes in him.)",
"to and from my mother when they were courting in 1935 and 1936, still tied with light blue ribbon in what was my mother's lingerie drawer, talking about their love triumphing over the dangers of the Depression. I suppose",
"beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I",
"This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.",
"was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him.",
"My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.",
"My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)",
"stand near them in his closet, I can still smell his smell of hair and skin and leather shoes, the closet smelling a lot like he smelled when he came home from work in 1954 carrying a newspaper that said there could",
"But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. \n\n The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.",
"That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.",
"He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that paid him handsomely.",
"He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far.",
"tank where he hung his hat for many years, into account; and the words of Mrs. Wiggins, who ran the cafeteria at the AEI; and the thoughts of Alan Greenspan or the head of Goldman, Sachs; and valued them entirely",
"on their merits to him, not on the basis of how much press or money the speaker had. He never once in my lifetime's recall said that any man or woman deserved special respect for riches--in fact, like Adam Smith, he",
"He appreciated his friends and did not differentiate between them on the basis of fame or position. He took the words of his longtime pal Murray Foss at the American Enterprise Institute, a think"
],
[
"My Father's Estate \n\n A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: \"I saw that your father had died,\" she wrote. \"He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?\" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. \n\n My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us.",
"But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. \n\n The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.",
"He did indeed leave some money. By the standards we read about in the Wall Street Journal or Sports Illustrated , it was not worthy of much ink. In any event, because of the class-warfare-based death tax, the amount that will be left is vastly less than what he had saved. As an economist, my father was famous for defending taxes as a necessary evil. But even he was staggered, not long before his death, when he considered the taxes on his savings that would go to the Internal Revenue Service.",
"My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.",
"This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.",
"That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.",
"He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far.",
"My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)",
"Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.",
"This good name cannot be taxed at all, at least not right now. My sister and I and our children will have it for as long as we keep it clean. It's priceless, incalculable in value. \n\n So, in answer to the query from the forward high-school classmate, \"Yes, my father did leave an immense estate, and yes, he did manage to beat the estate tax.\" The only problem is that I miss him every single minute, and I already had the best parts of the estate without his being gone, so the death part is pure loss.",
"They never had live-in help. My father washed the dishes after my mother made the meatloaf. My father took the bus whenever he could. His only large expenditure in his and my mom's whole lives was to pay for schools for his children and grandchildren. He never bought bottled, imported water; he said whatever came out of the tap was good enough for him. They still used bargain-basement furniture from before the war for their bedroom furniture and their couch. I never once knew them to order the most expensive thing in a restaurant, and they always took the leftovers home. \n\n They made not one penny of it from stock options or golden parachutes. They made it all by depriving themselves in the name of thrift and prudence and preparing for the needs of posterity. To think that this abstemiousness and this display of virtue will primarily benefit the IRS is really just so galling I can hardly stand it. The only possible reason for it is to satisfy some urge of jealousy by people who were less self-disciplined.",
"He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.",
"My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.",
"The nest egg is going to be taxed at a federal rate of about 55 percent, after an initial exemption and then a transition amount taxed at around 40 percent (and all that after paying estate expenses). When I think about it, I want to cry. My father and mother lived frugally all their lives. They never had a luxury car. They never flew first-class unless it was on the expense account. They never in their whole lives went on an expensive vacation. When he last went into the hospital, my father was still wearing an old pair of gray wool slacks with a sewed-up hole in them from where my dog ripped them--15 years ago.",
"Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, \"Let's do it together. It'll take half as long.\" I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.",
"believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what",
"Once, about 25 years ago, when my boss treated me unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer hung in my mind as a last refuge forever. \n\n This reassurance--that somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well as in a nation, to paraphrase his idol, Adam Smith--has become part of me, and I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax payment due or a bad day on the market. Again, the IRS taxes it at zero.",
"My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. \n\n When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.",
"He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that paid him handsomely.",
"There are a few material, tangible items that an assessor will have to come in to appraise. There are my father's books, from his days at Williams College and the University of Chicago, many of them still neatly underlined and annotated in his handwriting, which did not change from 1931 until days before his death. Most of them are about economics, but some are poetry."
],
[
"My Father's Estate \n\n A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: \"I saw that your father had died,\" she wrote. \"He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?\" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. \n\n My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us.",
"But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. \n\n The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.",
"That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.",
"This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.",
"My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.",
"This good name cannot be taxed at all, at least not right now. My sister and I and our children will have it for as long as we keep it clean. It's priceless, incalculable in value. \n\n So, in answer to the query from the forward high-school classmate, \"Yes, my father did leave an immense estate, and yes, he did manage to beat the estate tax.\" The only problem is that I miss him every single minute, and I already had the best parts of the estate without his being gone, so the death part is pure loss.",
"He did indeed leave some money. By the standards we read about in the Wall Street Journal or Sports Illustrated , it was not worthy of much ink. In any event, because of the class-warfare-based death tax, the amount that will be left is vastly less than what he had saved. As an economist, my father was famous for defending taxes as a necessary evil. But even he was staggered, not long before his death, when he considered the taxes on his savings that would go to the Internal Revenue Service.",
"They never had live-in help. My father washed the dishes after my mother made the meatloaf. My father took the bus whenever he could. His only large expenditure in his and my mom's whole lives was to pay for schools for his children and grandchildren. He never bought bottled, imported water; he said whatever came out of the tap was good enough for him. They still used bargain-basement furniture from before the war for their bedroom furniture and their couch. I never once knew them to order the most expensive thing in a restaurant, and they always took the leftovers home. \n\n They made not one penny of it from stock options or golden parachutes. They made it all by depriving themselves in the name of thrift and prudence and preparing for the needs of posterity. To think that this abstemiousness and this display of virtue will primarily benefit the IRS is really just so galling I can hardly stand it. The only possible reason for it is to satisfy some urge of jealousy by people who were less self-disciplined.",
"My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.",
"My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)",
"The nest egg is going to be taxed at a federal rate of about 55 percent, after an initial exemption and then a transition amount taxed at around 40 percent (and all that after paying estate expenses). When I think about it, I want to cry. My father and mother lived frugally all their lives. They never had a luxury car. They never flew first-class unless it was on the expense account. They never in their whole lives went on an expensive vacation. When he last went into the hospital, my father was still wearing an old pair of gray wool slacks with a sewed-up hole in them from where my dog ripped them--15 years ago.",
"He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.",
"He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far.",
"Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.",
"Once, about 25 years ago, when my boss treated me unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer hung in my mind as a last refuge forever. \n\n This reassurance--that somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well as in a nation, to paraphrase his idol, Adam Smith--has become part of me, and I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax payment due or a bad day on the market. Again, the IRS taxes it at zero.",
"There are a few material, tangible items that an assessor will have to come in to appraise. There are my father's books, from his days at Williams College and the University of Chicago, many of them still neatly underlined and annotated in his handwriting, which did not change from 1931 until days before his death. Most of them are about economics, but some are poetry.",
"believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what",
"Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, \"Let's do it together. It'll take half as long.\" I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.",
"My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. \n\n When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.",
"He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that paid him handsomely."
]
] |
valid
|
22218
|
[
"What was Mr. Chambers' academic scandal centered around?",
"Why was there a crowd of people surrounding the drugstore?",
"Why did Mr. Chambers return early from his walk?",
"Why did Mr. Chambers become a recluse?",
"Why was Mr. Chambers horrified by the thought of places disappearing? ",
"Why did Mr. Chambers think that man might be losing control over physical reality?",
"Why was Mr. Chambers unable to see the apple tree by his window?",
"Why might Mr. Chambers think that the face from his vision from \"behind the curtain\" is evil?",
"Why was Mr. Chambers able to remain in his room after most of reality had disappeared?",
"What is implied when Mr. Chambers starts to feel a tingling sensation in his feet?"
] |
[
[
"A theory that suggested there were multiple other realities",
"Inappropriate conduct with a student",
"His unwillingness to participate in social activities",
"He theorized that matter was held together by the power of minds"
],
[
"Because the store was getting ready to close",
"They were trying to get medicine for the plague",
"They were discussing the news surrounding the war",
"They were discussing the disappearance of objects and places"
],
[
"He did not stop at the drug store to watch the news",
"One of the streets had completely disappeared ",
"He took a different turn than usual",
"He walked faster than normal to avoid the crowds"
],
[
"He did not like the advancements in technology",
"He simply did not like people",
"He was exiled after a controversial theory",
"He was afraid of the war and following plague"
],
[
"He realized that it might be related to his prior metaphysics theory",
"He realized that he might be losing his mind",
"He was worried for his neighbors who may had disappeared",
"He was worried he wouldn't be able to get his cigars anymore"
],
[
"It was an inevitable function of time passing",
"The nuclear experiments of the time were tearing apart the threads of reality ",
"The loss of life from war and plague left too few of minds to retain control",
"The constant bickering left a lack of harmony"
],
[
"The apple tree had be chopped down",
"There was a thick layer of fog outside",
"His eyesight was failing him",
"The current reality was starting to fade "
],
[
"He saw it as a representation of the people who hated him",
"It was too large in scale for him to comprehend",
"It revealed its' evil intentions to Mr. Chambers directly ",
"He felt that this new presence was trying to steal reality from humans"
],
[
"No one else knew he was there, allowing him to hide",
"He remained focused on the marine painting on the wall",
"He spent so much time in the room that it was ingrained in his psyche",
"He was spared because he foretold the coming of the beings from other dimensions"
],
[
"He is dying",
"He is being transported into another dimension",
"He is excited to meet the inter-dimensional beings.",
"He is starting to feel emotions once again"
]
] |
[
4,
4,
2,
3,
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3,
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[
"A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such\n outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was\n connected with his name ... at the time an academic scandal. He\n had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that\n volume to his classes. What that subject matter was, had long been\n forgotten, but whatever it was had been considered sufficiently\n revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the university.\n\n\n A silver moon shone over the chimney tops and a chill, impish\n October wind was rustling the dead leaves when Mr. Chambers\n started out at seven o'clock.\n\n\n It was a good night, he told himself, smelling the clean, crisp\n air of autumn and the faint pungence of distant wood smoke.",
"And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through\n him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes\n later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany\n bookcase that stood against the wall.\n\n\n There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the\n first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The\n second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book\n that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.\n\n\n Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach\n its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he\n remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had\n been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand\n either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent\n of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the\n school.",
"He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his\n front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with\n him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought\n his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr.\n Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a\n coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr.\n Chambers took his cigar. That was all.\n\n\n For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be\n left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it\n eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for\n it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual\n with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once\n had been a professor at State University.",
"Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,\n then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed\n merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...\n somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half\n whispered thought.\n\n\n A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the\n pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than\n he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but\n a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.",
"It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as\n merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began\n thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of\n happier days swept over him.",
"The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not\n deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living\n alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed\n existence had grown on him gradually.\n\n\n So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner\n of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out\n snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers\n pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.\n\n\n A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it\n was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers.\n\n\n \"... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ...\n thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt....\"",
"Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It\n showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far\n in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague\n outline of a larger vessel.\n\n\n There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the\n fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the\n Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly\n in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head.\n He had put it there because he liked it best.\n\n\n Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself\n succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an\n hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither\n define nor understand.",
"There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself.\n Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and\n demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of\n talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news\n broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the\n shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with\n the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.\nHe brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one\n central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues.\n Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of\n the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America,\n of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread\n into that nation's boundaries.\n\n\n Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South\n America. Billions, perhaps.",
"But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an\n abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them\n no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many\n years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not\n wish to talk.\n\n\n One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but\n then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.\n\n\n Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a\n thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his\n pocket.\n\n\n He started violently. It was only 7:30!\n\n\n For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in\n accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked\n audibly.\n\n\n But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he\n had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight.\n Now....",
"But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.",
"Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first\n time in twenty years.\n\n\n He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.\n\n\n The clock hadn't stopped.\n\n\n It wasn't there.\n\n\n There was a tingling sensation in his feet.",
"The wind whipped the muted words away and Mr. Chambers grumbled\n to himself. Another one of those fantastic radio dramas,\n probably. He remembered one from many years before, something\n about the Martians. And Harcourt! What did Harcourt have to do\n with it? He was one of the men who had ridiculed the book\n Mr. Chambers had written.\n\n\n But he pushed speculation away, sniffed the clean, crisp air again,\n looked at the familiar things that materialized out of the late\n autumn darkness as he walked along. For there was nothing ...\n absolutely nothing in the world ... that he would let upset him.\n That was a tenet he had laid down twenty years ago.\nThere was a crowd of men in front of the drugstore at the corner\n of Oak and Lincoln and they were talking excitedly. Mr. Chambers\n caught some excited words: \"It's happening everywhere.... What\n do you think it is.... The scientists can't explain....\"",
"For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his\n steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went\n back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant\n again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact\n grew slowly in his brain:\nThere wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant\n had disappeared!\nNow he understood why he had missed the store on the night\n before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.\n\n\n On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He\n slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way\n unsteadily to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable\n necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings\n be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?\n\n\n Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded\n life, knew nothing about?",
"He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.",
"And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own\n experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,\n seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled\n brain failed to find the answer.\n\n\n The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual\n setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood\n upon the mantel.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and\n looked out.\n\n\n Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the\n chimneys and trees against a silvered sky.\n\n\n But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was\n strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a\n house that suddenly had gone mad.",
"The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers\n slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the\n floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.\n\n\n There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there\n might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple\n tree that grew close against the house.\n\n\n But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with\n a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few\n shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch.",
"The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had\n looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.\nAnd now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but\n those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...\n they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house\n and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the\n street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself\n when he thought of how it should look.\n\n\n Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it\n too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too\n weary to think about the house.\n\n\n He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room\n he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked\n ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.",
"He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from\n that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had\n deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the\n world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic\n premeditation.\n\n\n On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the\n connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a\n sob forced its way to his lips.\n\n\n There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser\n had been there was greyish nothingness.\n\n\n Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door.\n Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no\n familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.\n\n\n Nothing....\n\n\n Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n \"So here I am,\" he said, half aloud.",
"On the stoop he stood for a moment, breathing hard. He glanced\n back over his shoulder and a queer feeling of inner numbness\n seemed to well over him. At that moment the gray nothingness\n appeared to thin ... the enveloping curtain fell away, and he\n saw....\n\n\n Vague and indistinct, yet cast in stereoscopic outline, a\n gigantic city was lined against the darkling sky. It was a city\n fantastic with cubed domes, spires, and aerial bridges and flying\n buttresses. Tunnel-like streets, flanked on either side by\n shining metallic ramps and runways, stretched endlessly to the\n vanishing point. Great shafts of multicolored light probed huge\n streamers and ellipses above the higher levels.\n\n\n And beyond, like a final backdrop, rose a titanic wall. It was\n from that wall ... from its crenelated parapets and battlements\n that Mr. Chambers felt the eyes peering at him.",
"had written that. And because of those words he had been\n called a heretic, had been compelled to resign his position at\n the university, had been forced into this hermit life."
],
[
"The wind whipped the muted words away and Mr. Chambers grumbled\n to himself. Another one of those fantastic radio dramas,\n probably. He remembered one from many years before, something\n about the Martians. And Harcourt! What did Harcourt have to do\n with it? He was one of the men who had ridiculed the book\n Mr. Chambers had written.\n\n\n But he pushed speculation away, sniffed the clean, crisp air again,\n looked at the familiar things that materialized out of the late\n autumn darkness as he walked along. For there was nothing ...\n absolutely nothing in the world ... that he would let upset him.\n That was a tenet he had laid down twenty years ago.\nThere was a crowd of men in front of the drugstore at the corner\n of Oak and Lincoln and they were talking excitedly. Mr. Chambers\n caught some excited words: \"It's happening everywhere.... What\n do you think it is.... The scientists can't explain....\"",
"He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his\n front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with\n him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought\n his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr.\n Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a\n coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr.\n Chambers took his cigar. That was all.\n\n\n For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be\n left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it\n eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for\n it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual\n with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once\n had been a professor at State University.",
"There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself.\n Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and\n demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of\n talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news\n broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the\n shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with\n the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.\nHe brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one\n central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues.\n Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of\n the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America,\n of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread\n into that nation's boundaries.\n\n\n Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South\n America. Billions, perhaps.",
"For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his\n steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went\n back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant\n again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact\n grew slowly in his brain:\nThere wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant\n had disappeared!\nNow he understood why he had missed the store on the night\n before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.\n\n\n On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He\n slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way\n unsteadily to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable\n necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings\n be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?\n\n\n Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded\n life, knew nothing about?",
"Could it be that he was going mad? He had heard whispers when he\n had passed, whispers the gossiping housewives had not intended\n him to hear. And he had heard the shouting of boys when he walked\n by. They thought him mad. Could he be really mad?\n\n\n But he knew he wasn't mad. He knew that he perhaps was the sanest\n of all men who walked the earth. For he, and he alone, had\n foreseen this very thing. And the others had scoffed at him for\n it.\n\n\n Somewhere else the children might be playing on a street. But it\n would be a different street. And the children undoubtedly would\n be different too.",
"But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.",
"The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not\n deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living\n alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed\n existence had grown on him gradually.\n\n\n So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner\n of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out\n snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers\n pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.\n\n\n A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it\n was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers.\n\n\n \"... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ...\n thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt....\"",
"Then again the terror descended on him, a black, unimagined thing\n and he tried to scream and couldn't. He opened his mouth and\n strained his vocal cords and filled his lungs to bursting with\n the urge to shriek ... but not a sound came from his lips.\nAll next day he was uneasy and as he left the house that evening,\n at precisely seven o'clock, he kept saying to himself: \"You must\n not forget tonight! You must remember to stop and get your\n cigar!\"\n\n\n The street light at the corner of Jefferson was still out and in\n front of 816 the cemented driveway was still boarded off.\n Everything was the same as the night before.\n\n\n And now, he told himself, the Red Star confectionery is in the\n next block. I must not forget tonight. To forget twice in a row\n would be just too much.\n\n\n He grasped that thought firmly in his mind, strode just a bit\n more rapidly down the street.",
"He walked unhurriedly, swinging his cane a bit less jauntily than\n twenty years ago. He tucked the muffler more securely under the\n rusty old topcoat and pulled his bowler hat more firmly on his\n head.\n\n\n He noticed that the street light at the corner of Maple and\n Jefferson was out and he grumbled a little to himself when he was\n forced to step off the walk to circle a boarded-off section of\n newly-laid concrete work before the driveway of 816.\n\n\n It seemed that he reached the corner of Lexington and Maple just\n a bit too quickly, but he told himself that this couldn't be. For\n he never did that. For twenty years, since the year following his\n expulsion from the university, he had lived by the clock.",
"But at the corner he stopped in consternation. Bewildered, he\n stared down the next block. There was no neon sign, no splash of\n friendly light upon the sidewalk to mark the little store tucked\n away in this residential section.\n\n\n He stared at the street marker and read the word slowly: GRANT. He\n read it again, unbelieving, for this shouldn't be Grant Street, but\n Marshall. He had walked two blocks and the confectionery was between\n Marshall and Grant. He hadn't come to Marshall yet ... and here was\n Grant.\n\n\n Or had he, absent-mindedly, come one block farther than he\n thought, passed the store as on the night before?",
"But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an\n abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them\n no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many\n years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not\n wish to talk.\n\n\n One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but\n then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.\n\n\n Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a\n thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his\n pocket.\n\n\n He started violently. It was only 7:30!\n\n\n For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in\n accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked\n audibly.\n\n\n But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he\n had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight.\n Now....",
"A tumultuous idea hammered at him. Men had died by the millions\n all over the world. Where there had been thousands of minds there\n now were one or two. A feeble force to hold the form of matter\n intact.\nThe plague had swept Europe and Asia almost clean of life, had\n blighted Africa, had reached South America ... might even have\n come to the United States. He remembered the whispers he had\n heard, the words of the men at the drugstore corner, the\n buildings disappearing. Something scientists could not explain.\n But those were merely scraps of information. He did not know the\n whole story ... he could not know. He never listened to the\n radio, never read a newspaper.\n\n\n But abruptly the whole thing fitted together in his brain like\n the missing piece of a puzzle into its slot. The significance of\n it all gripped him with damning clarity.",
"He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.",
"And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own\n experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,\n seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled\n brain failed to find the answer.\n\n\n The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual\n setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood\n upon the mantel.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and\n looked out.\n\n\n Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the\n chimneys and trees against a silvered sky.\n\n\n But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was\n strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a\n house that suddenly had gone mad.",
"And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through\n him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes\n later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany\n bookcase that stood against the wall.\n\n\n There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the\n first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The\n second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book\n that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.\n\n\n Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach\n its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he\n remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had\n been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand\n either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent\n of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the\n school.",
"It wasn't until then that he realized something else was wrong.\n He had no cigar. For the first time he had neglected to purchase\n his evening smoke.\n\n\n Shaken, muttering to himself, Mr. Chambers let himself in his\n house and locked the door behind him.\n\n\n He hung his hat and coat on the rack in the hall and walked\n slowly into the living room. Dropping into his favorite chair, he\n shook his head in bewilderment.\n\n\n Silence filled the room. A silence that was measured by the\n ticking of the old fashioned pendulum clock on the mantelpiece.",
"He moved forward rapidly. Visibility extended only a few feet and as\n he approached them the houses materialized like two dimensional\n pictures without perspective, like twisted cardboard soldiers lining\n up for review on a misty morning.\n\n\n Once he stopped and looked back and saw that the grayness had\n closed in behind him. The houses were wiped out, the sidewalk\n faded into nothing.\n\n\n He shouted, hoping to attract attention. But his voice frightened\n him. It seemed to ricochet up and into the higher levels of the\n sky, as if a giant door had been opened to a mighty room high\n above him.",
"On the stoop he stood for a moment, breathing hard. He glanced\n back over his shoulder and a queer feeling of inner numbness\n seemed to well over him. At that moment the gray nothingness\n appeared to thin ... the enveloping curtain fell away, and he\n saw....\n\n\n Vague and indistinct, yet cast in stereoscopic outline, a\n gigantic city was lined against the darkling sky. It was a city\n fantastic with cubed domes, spires, and aerial bridges and flying\n buttresses. Tunnel-like streets, flanked on either side by\n shining metallic ramps and runways, stretched endlessly to the\n vanishing point. Great shafts of multicolored light probed huge\n streamers and ellipses above the higher levels.\n\n\n And beyond, like a final backdrop, rose a titanic wall. It was\n from that wall ... from its crenelated parapets and battlements\n that Mr. Chambers felt the eyes peering at him.",
"His dreams that night were the same as on the night before. Again\n there was the islet in mid-ocean. Again he was alone upon it.\n Again the squirming hydrophinnae were eating his foothold piece\n by piece.\n\n\n He awoke, body drenched with perspiration. Vague light of early\n dawn filtered through the window. The clock on the bedside table\n showed 7:30. For a long time he lay there motionless.\n\n\n Again the fantastic happenings of the night before came back to\n haunt him and as he lay there, staring at the windows, he\n remembered them, one by one. But his mind, still fogged by sleep\n and astonishment, took the happenings in its stride, mulled over\n them, lost the keen edge of fantastic terror that lurked around\n them.",
"And so he knew that this was the year 1960 and that the wars in\n Europe and Asia had flamed to an end to be followed by a terrible\n plague, a plague that even now was sweeping through country after\n country like wild fire, decimating populations. A plague\n undoubtedly induced by hunger and privation and the miseries of\n war.\n\n\n But those things he put away as items far removed from his own\n small world. He disregarded them. He pretended he had never heard\n of them. Others might discuss and worry over them if they wished.\n To him they simply did not matter.\n\n\n But there were two things tonight that did matter. Two curious,\n incredible events. He had arrived home fifteen minutes early. He\n had forgotten his cigar."
],
[
"He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his\n front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with\n him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought\n his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr.\n Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a\n coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr.\n Chambers took his cigar. That was all.\n\n\n For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be\n left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it\n eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for\n it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual\n with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once\n had been a professor at State University.",
"But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an\n abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them\n no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many\n years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not\n wish to talk.\n\n\n One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but\n then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.\n\n\n Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a\n thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his\n pocket.\n\n\n He started violently. It was only 7:30!\n\n\n For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in\n accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked\n audibly.\n\n\n But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he\n had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight.\n Now....",
"Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,\n then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed\n merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...\n somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half\n whispered thought.\n\n\n A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the\n pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than\n he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but\n a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.",
"For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his\n steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went\n back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant\n again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact\n grew slowly in his brain:\nThere wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant\n had disappeared!\nNow he understood why he had missed the store on the night\n before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.\n\n\n On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He\n slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way\n unsteadily to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable\n necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings\n be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?\n\n\n Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded\n life, knew nothing about?",
"He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.",
"A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such\n outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was\n connected with his name ... at the time an academic scandal. He\n had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that\n volume to his classes. What that subject matter was, had long been\n forgotten, but whatever it was had been considered sufficiently\n revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the university.\n\n\n A silver moon shone over the chimney tops and a chill, impish\n October wind was rustling the dead leaves when Mr. Chambers\n started out at seven o'clock.\n\n\n It was a good night, he told himself, smelling the clean, crisp\n air of autumn and the faint pungence of distant wood smoke.",
"The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers\n slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the\n floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.\n\n\n There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there\n might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple\n tree that grew close against the house.\n\n\n But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with\n a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few\n shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch.",
"The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not\n deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living\n alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed\n existence had grown on him gradually.\n\n\n So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner\n of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out\n snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers\n pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.\n\n\n A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it\n was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers.\n\n\n \"... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ...\n thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt....\"",
"And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own\n experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,\n seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled\n brain failed to find the answer.\n\n\n The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual\n setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood\n upon the mantel.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and\n looked out.\n\n\n Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the\n chimneys and trees against a silvered sky.\n\n\n But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was\n strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a\n house that suddenly had gone mad.",
"And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through\n him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes\n later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany\n bookcase that stood against the wall.\n\n\n There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the\n first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The\n second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book\n that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.\n\n\n Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach\n its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he\n remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had\n been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand\n either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent\n of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the\n school.",
"Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first\n time in twenty years.\n\n\n He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.\n\n\n The clock hadn't stopped.\n\n\n It wasn't there.\n\n\n There was a tingling sensation in his feet.",
"But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.",
"Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It\n showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far\n in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague\n outline of a larger vessel.\n\n\n There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the\n fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the\n Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly\n in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head.\n He had put it there because he liked it best.\n\n\n Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself\n succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an\n hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither\n define nor understand.",
"It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as\n merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began\n thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of\n happier days swept over him.",
"The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had\n looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.\nAnd now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but\n those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...\n they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house\n and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the\n street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself\n when he thought of how it should look.\n\n\n Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it\n too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too\n weary to think about the house.\n\n\n He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room\n he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked\n ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.",
"The wind whipped the muted words away and Mr. Chambers grumbled\n to himself. Another one of those fantastic radio dramas,\n probably. He remembered one from many years before, something\n about the Martians. And Harcourt! What did Harcourt have to do\n with it? He was one of the men who had ridiculed the book\n Mr. Chambers had written.\n\n\n But he pushed speculation away, sniffed the clean, crisp air again,\n looked at the familiar things that materialized out of the late\n autumn darkness as he walked along. For there was nothing ...\n absolutely nothing in the world ... that he would let upset him.\n That was a tenet he had laid down twenty years ago.\nThere was a crowd of men in front of the drugstore at the corner\n of Oak and Lincoln and they were talking excitedly. Mr. Chambers\n caught some excited words: \"It's happening everywhere.... What\n do you think it is.... The scientists can't explain....\"",
"It wasn't until then that he realized something else was wrong.\n He had no cigar. For the first time he had neglected to purchase\n his evening smoke.\n\n\n Shaken, muttering to himself, Mr. Chambers let himself in his\n house and locked the door behind him.\n\n\n He hung his hat and coat on the rack in the hall and walked\n slowly into the living room. Dropping into his favorite chair, he\n shook his head in bewilderment.\n\n\n Silence filled the room. A silence that was measured by the\n ticking of the old fashioned pendulum clock on the mantelpiece.",
"He walked unhurriedly, swinging his cane a bit less jauntily than\n twenty years ago. He tucked the muffler more securely under the\n rusty old topcoat and pulled his bowler hat more firmly on his\n head.\n\n\n He noticed that the street light at the corner of Maple and\n Jefferson was out and he grumbled a little to himself when he was\n forced to step off the walk to circle a boarded-off section of\n newly-laid concrete work before the driveway of 816.\n\n\n It seemed that he reached the corner of Lexington and Maple just\n a bit too quickly, but he told himself that this couldn't be. For\n he never did that. For twenty years, since the year following his\n expulsion from the university, he had lived by the clock.",
"There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself.\n Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and\n demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of\n talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news\n broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the\n shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with\n the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.\nHe brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one\n central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues.\n Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of\n the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America,\n of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread\n into that nation's boundaries.\n\n\n Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South\n America. Billions, perhaps.",
"He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from\n that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had\n deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the\n world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic\n premeditation.\n\n\n On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the\n connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a\n sob forced its way to his lips.\n\n\n There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser\n had been there was greyish nothingness.\n\n\n Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door.\n Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no\n familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.\n\n\n Nothing....\n\n\n Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n \"So here I am,\" he said, half aloud."
],
[
"He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his\n front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with\n him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought\n his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr.\n Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a\n coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr.\n Chambers took his cigar. That was all.\n\n\n For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be\n left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it\n eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for\n it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual\n with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once\n had been a professor at State University.",
"But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.",
"Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,\n then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed\n merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...\n somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half\n whispered thought.\n\n\n A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the\n pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than\n he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but\n a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.",
"And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through\n him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes\n later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany\n bookcase that stood against the wall.\n\n\n There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the\n first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The\n second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book\n that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.\n\n\n Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach\n its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he\n remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had\n been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand\n either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent\n of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the\n school.",
"A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such\n outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was\n connected with his name ... at the time an academic scandal. He\n had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that\n volume to his classes. What that subject matter was, had long been\n forgotten, but whatever it was had been considered sufficiently\n revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the university.\n\n\n A silver moon shone over the chimney tops and a chill, impish\n October wind was rustling the dead leaves when Mr. Chambers\n started out at seven o'clock.\n\n\n It was a good night, he told himself, smelling the clean, crisp\n air of autumn and the faint pungence of distant wood smoke.",
"But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an\n abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them\n no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many\n years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not\n wish to talk.\n\n\n One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but\n then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.\n\n\n Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a\n thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his\n pocket.\n\n\n He started violently. It was only 7:30!\n\n\n For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in\n accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked\n audibly.\n\n\n But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he\n had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight.\n Now....",
"Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It\n showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far\n in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague\n outline of a larger vessel.\n\n\n There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the\n fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the\n Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly\n in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head.\n He had put it there because he liked it best.\n\n\n Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself\n succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an\n hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither\n define nor understand.",
"It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as\n merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began\n thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of\n happier days swept over him.",
"For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his\n steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went\n back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant\n again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact\n grew slowly in his brain:\nThere wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant\n had disappeared!\nNow he understood why he had missed the store on the night\n before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.\n\n\n On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He\n slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way\n unsteadily to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable\n necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings\n be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?\n\n\n Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded\n life, knew nothing about?",
"He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.",
"The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not\n deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living\n alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed\n existence had grown on him gradually.\n\n\n So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner\n of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out\n snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers\n pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.\n\n\n A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it\n was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers.\n\n\n \"... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ...\n thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt....\"",
"The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers\n slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the\n floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.\n\n\n There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there\n might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple\n tree that grew close against the house.\n\n\n But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with\n a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few\n shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch.",
"There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself.\n Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and\n demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of\n talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news\n broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the\n shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with\n the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.\nHe brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one\n central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues.\n Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of\n the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America,\n of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread\n into that nation's boundaries.\n\n\n Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South\n America. Billions, perhaps.",
"And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own\n experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,\n seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled\n brain failed to find the answer.\n\n\n The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual\n setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood\n upon the mantel.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and\n looked out.\n\n\n Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the\n chimneys and trees against a silvered sky.\n\n\n But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was\n strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a\n house that suddenly had gone mad.",
"Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first\n time in twenty years.\n\n\n He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.\n\n\n The clock hadn't stopped.\n\n\n It wasn't there.\n\n\n There was a tingling sensation in his feet.",
"Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was\n ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the\n room.\n\n\n The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away\n and with them went one corner of the room.\n\n\n And then the elephant ash tray.\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" said Mr. Chambers, \"I never did like that very well.\"\n\n\n Now as he sat there it didn't seem queer to be without the table\n or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal.\n Something one could expect to happen.\n\n\n Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back.\n\n\n But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not stand\n off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone,\n simply couldn't do it.",
"It wasn't until then that he realized something else was wrong.\n He had no cigar. For the first time he had neglected to purchase\n his evening smoke.\n\n\n Shaken, muttering to himself, Mr. Chambers let himself in his\n house and locked the door behind him.\n\n\n He hung his hat and coat on the rack in the hall and walked\n slowly into the living room. Dropping into his favorite chair, he\n shook his head in bewilderment.\n\n\n Silence filled the room. A silence that was measured by the\n ticking of the old fashioned pendulum clock on the mantelpiece.",
"The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had\n looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.\nAnd now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but\n those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...\n they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house\n and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the\n street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself\n when he thought of how it should look.\n\n\n Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it\n too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too\n weary to think about the house.\n\n\n He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room\n he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked\n ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.",
"He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from\n that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had\n deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the\n world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic\n premeditation.\n\n\n On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the\n connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a\n sob forced its way to his lips.\n\n\n There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser\n had been there was greyish nothingness.\n\n\n Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door.\n Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no\n familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.\n\n\n Nothing....\n\n\n Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n \"So here I am,\" he said, half aloud.",
"Mr. Chambers stared at the marine print and for a moment a little\n breath of reassurance returned to him.\nThey\ncouldn't take this\n away. The rest of the world might dissolve because there was\n insufficient power of thought to retain its outward form.\n\n\n But this room was his. He alone had furnished it. He alone, since\n he had first planned the house's building, had lived here.\n\n\n This room would stay. It must stay on ... it must....\n\n\n He rose from his chair and walked across the room to the book\n case, stood staring at the second shelf with its single volume.\n His eyes shifted to the top shelf and swift terror gripped him.\n\n\n For all the books weren't there. A lot of books weren't there!\n Only the most beloved, the most familiar ones."
],
[
"For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his\n steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went\n back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant\n again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact\n grew slowly in his brain:\nThere wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant\n had disappeared!\nNow he understood why he had missed the store on the night\n before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.\n\n\n On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He\n slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way\n unsteadily to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable\n necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings\n be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?\n\n\n Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded\n life, knew nothing about?",
"Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,\n then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed\n merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...\n somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half\n whispered thought.\n\n\n A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the\n pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than\n he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but\n a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.",
"Mr. Chambers stared at the marine print and for a moment a little\n breath of reassurance returned to him.\nThey\ncouldn't take this\n away. The rest of the world might dissolve because there was\n insufficient power of thought to retain its outward form.\n\n\n But this room was his. He alone had furnished it. He alone, since\n he had first planned the house's building, had lived here.\n\n\n This room would stay. It must stay on ... it must....\n\n\n He rose from his chair and walked across the room to the book\n case, stood staring at the second shelf with its single volume.\n His eyes shifted to the top shelf and swift terror gripped him.\n\n\n For all the books weren't there. A lot of books weren't there!\n Only the most beloved, the most familiar ones.",
"He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.",
"Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It\n showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far\n in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague\n outline of a larger vessel.\n\n\n There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the\n fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the\n Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly\n in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head.\n He had put it there because he liked it best.\n\n\n Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself\n succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an\n hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither\n define nor understand.",
"Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was\n ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the\n room.\n\n\n The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away\n and with them went one corner of the room.\n\n\n And then the elephant ash tray.\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" said Mr. Chambers, \"I never did like that very well.\"\n\n\n Now as he sat there it didn't seem queer to be without the table\n or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal.\n Something one could expect to happen.\n\n\n Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back.\n\n\n But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not stand\n off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone,\n simply couldn't do it.",
"He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from\n that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had\n deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the\n world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic\n premeditation.\n\n\n On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the\n connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a\n sob forced its way to his lips.\n\n\n There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser\n had been there was greyish nothingness.\n\n\n Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door.\n Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no\n familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.\n\n\n Nothing....\n\n\n Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n \"So here I am,\" he said, half aloud.",
"The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not\n deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living\n alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed\n existence had grown on him gradually.\n\n\n So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner\n of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out\n snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers\n pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.\n\n\n A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it\n was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers.\n\n\n \"... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ...\n thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt....\"",
"The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had\n looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.\nAnd now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but\n those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...\n they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house\n and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the\n street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself\n when he thought of how it should look.\n\n\n Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it\n too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too\n weary to think about the house.\n\n\n He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room\n he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked\n ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.",
"But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.",
"Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first\n time in twenty years.\n\n\n He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.\n\n\n The clock hadn't stopped.\n\n\n It wasn't there.\n\n\n There was a tingling sensation in his feet.",
"There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself.\n Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and\n demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of\n talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news\n broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the\n shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with\n the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.\nHe brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one\n central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues.\n Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of\n the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America,\n of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread\n into that nation's boundaries.\n\n\n Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South\n America. Billions, perhaps.",
"And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through\n him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes\n later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany\n bookcase that stood against the wall.\n\n\n There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the\n first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The\n second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book\n that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.\n\n\n Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach\n its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he\n remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had\n been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand\n either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent\n of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the\n school.",
"And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own\n experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,\n seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled\n brain failed to find the answer.\n\n\n The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual\n setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood\n upon the mantel.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and\n looked out.\n\n\n Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the\n chimneys and trees against a silvered sky.\n\n\n But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was\n strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a\n house that suddenly had gone mad.",
"It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as\n merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began\n thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of\n happier days swept over him.",
"On the stoop he stood for a moment, breathing hard. He glanced\n back over his shoulder and a queer feeling of inner numbness\n seemed to well over him. At that moment the gray nothingness\n appeared to thin ... the enveloping curtain fell away, and he\n saw....\n\n\n Vague and indistinct, yet cast in stereoscopic outline, a\n gigantic city was lined against the darkling sky. It was a city\n fantastic with cubed domes, spires, and aerial bridges and flying\n buttresses. Tunnel-like streets, flanked on either side by\n shining metallic ramps and runways, stretched endlessly to the\n vanishing point. Great shafts of multicolored light probed huge\n streamers and ellipses above the higher levels.\n\n\n And beyond, like a final backdrop, rose a titanic wall. It was\n from that wall ... from its crenelated parapets and battlements\n that Mr. Chambers felt the eyes peering at him.",
"There were not sufficient minds in existence to retain the\n material world in its mundane form. Some other power from another\n dimension was fighting to supersede man's control\nand take his\n universe into its own plane!\nAbruptly Mr. Chambers closed the book, shoved it back in the case\n and picked up his hat and coat.\n\n\n He had to know more. He had to find someone who could tell him.\n\n\n He moved through the hall to the door, emerged into the street.\n On the walk he looked skyward, trying to make out the sun. But\n there wasn't any sun ... only an all pervading grayness that\n shrouded everything ... not a gray fog, but a gray emptiness that\n seemed devoid of life, of any movement.\n\n\n The walk led to his gate and there it ended, but as he moved\n forward the sidewalk came into view and the house ahead loomed\n out of the gray, but a house with differences.",
"He stared at it in amazement, trying to determine what was wrong\n with it. He recalled how it had always stood, foursquare, a solid\n piece of mid-Victorian architecture.\n\n\n Then, before his eyes, the house righted itself again. Slowly it\n drew together, ironed out its queer angles, readjusted its\n dimensions, became once again the stodgy house he knew it had\n to be.\n\n\n With a sigh of relief, Mr. Chambers turned back into the hall.\n\n\n But before he closed the door, he looked again. The house was\n lop-sided ... as bad, perhaps worse than before!\n\n\n Gulping in fright, Mr. Chambers slammed the door shut, locked it\n and double bolted it. Then he went to his bedroom and took two\n sleeping powders.",
"But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an\n abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them\n no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many\n years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not\n wish to talk.\n\n\n One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but\n then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.\n\n\n Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a\n thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his\n pocket.\n\n\n He started violently. It was only 7:30!\n\n\n For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in\n accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked\n audibly.\n\n\n But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he\n had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight.\n Now....",
"He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his\n front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with\n him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought\n his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr.\n Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a\n coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr.\n Chambers took his cigar. That was all.\n\n\n For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be\n left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it\n eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for\n it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual\n with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once\n had been a professor at State University."
],
[
"Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was\n ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the\n room.\n\n\n The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away\n and with them went one corner of the room.\n\n\n And then the elephant ash tray.\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" said Mr. Chambers, \"I never did like that very well.\"\n\n\n Now as he sat there it didn't seem queer to be without the table\n or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal.\n Something one could expect to happen.\n\n\n Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back.\n\n\n But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not stand\n off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone,\n simply couldn't do it.",
"He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from\n that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had\n deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the\n world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic\n premeditation.\n\n\n On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the\n connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a\n sob forced its way to his lips.\n\n\n There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser\n had been there was greyish nothingness.\n\n\n Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door.\n Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no\n familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.\n\n\n Nothing....\n\n\n Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n \"So here I am,\" he said, half aloud.",
"Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It\n showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far\n in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague\n outline of a larger vessel.\n\n\n There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the\n fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the\n Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly\n in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head.\n He had put it there because he liked it best.\n\n\n Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself\n succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an\n hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither\n define nor understand.",
"For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his\n steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went\n back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant\n again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact\n grew slowly in his brain:\nThere wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant\n had disappeared!\nNow he understood why he had missed the store on the night\n before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.\n\n\n On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He\n slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way\n unsteadily to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable\n necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings\n be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?\n\n\n Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded\n life, knew nothing about?",
"There were not sufficient minds in existence to retain the\n material world in its mundane form. Some other power from another\n dimension was fighting to supersede man's control\nand take his\n universe into its own plane!\nAbruptly Mr. Chambers closed the book, shoved it back in the case\n and picked up his hat and coat.\n\n\n He had to know more. He had to find someone who could tell him.\n\n\n He moved through the hall to the door, emerged into the street.\n On the walk he looked skyward, trying to make out the sun. But\n there wasn't any sun ... only an all pervading grayness that\n shrouded everything ... not a gray fog, but a gray emptiness that\n seemed devoid of life, of any movement.\n\n\n The walk led to his gate and there it ended, but as he moved\n forward the sidewalk came into view and the house ahead loomed\n out of the gray, but a house with differences.",
"There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself.\n Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and\n demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of\n talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news\n broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the\n shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with\n the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.\nHe brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one\n central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues.\n Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of\n the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America,\n of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread\n into that nation's boundaries.\n\n\n Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South\n America. Billions, perhaps.",
"Mr. Chambers stared at the marine print and for a moment a little\n breath of reassurance returned to him.\nThey\ncouldn't take this\n away. The rest of the world might dissolve because there was\n insufficient power of thought to retain its outward form.\n\n\n But this room was his. He alone had furnished it. He alone, since\n he had first planned the house's building, had lived here.\n\n\n This room would stay. It must stay on ... it must....\n\n\n He rose from his chair and walked across the room to the book\n case, stood staring at the second shelf with its single volume.\n His eyes shifted to the top shelf and swift terror gripped him.\n\n\n For all the books weren't there. A lot of books weren't there!\n Only the most beloved, the most familiar ones.",
"The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had\n looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.\nAnd now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but\n those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...\n they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house\n and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the\n street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself\n when he thought of how it should look.\n\n\n Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it\n too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too\n weary to think about the house.\n\n\n He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room\n he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked\n ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.",
"But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.",
"Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first\n time in twenty years.\n\n\n He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.\n\n\n The clock hadn't stopped.\n\n\n It wasn't there.\n\n\n There was a tingling sensation in his feet.",
"Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,\n then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed\n merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...\n somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half\n whispered thought.\n\n\n A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the\n pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than\n he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but\n a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.",
"The wind whipped the muted words away and Mr. Chambers grumbled\n to himself. Another one of those fantastic radio dramas,\n probably. He remembered one from many years before, something\n about the Martians. And Harcourt! What did Harcourt have to do\n with it? He was one of the men who had ridiculed the book\n Mr. Chambers had written.\n\n\n But he pushed speculation away, sniffed the clean, crisp air again,\n looked at the familiar things that materialized out of the late\n autumn darkness as he walked along. For there was nothing ...\n absolutely nothing in the world ... that he would let upset him.\n That was a tenet he had laid down twenty years ago.\nThere was a crowd of men in front of the drugstore at the corner\n of Oak and Lincoln and they were talking excitedly. Mr. Chambers\n caught some excited words: \"It's happening everywhere.... What\n do you think it is.... The scientists can't explain....\"",
"And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through\n him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes\n later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany\n bookcase that stood against the wall.\n\n\n There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the\n first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The\n second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book\n that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.\n\n\n Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach\n its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he\n remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had\n been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand\n either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent\n of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the\n school.",
"Then his eyes focused on the paragraph, a paragraph written so\n long ago the very words seemed strange and unreal:\nMan himself, by the power of mass suggestion, holds the physical\n fate of this earth ... yes, even the universe. Billions of minds\n seeing trees as trees, houses as houses, streets as streets ...\n and not as something else. Minds that see things as they are and\n have kept things as they were.... Destroy those minds and the\n entire foundation of matter, robbed of its regenerative power,\n will crumple and slip away like a column of sand....\nHis eyes followed down the page:\nYet this would have nothing to do with matter itself ... but\n only with matter's form. For while the mind of man through long",
"He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.",
"The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not\n deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living\n alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed\n existence had grown on him gradually.\n\n\n So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner\n of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out\n snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers\n pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.\n\n\n A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it\n was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers.\n\n\n \"... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ...\n thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt....\"",
"But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an\n abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them\n no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many\n years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not\n wish to talk.\n\n\n One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but\n then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.\n\n\n Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a\n thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his\n pocket.\n\n\n He started violently. It was only 7:30!\n\n\n For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in\n accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked\n audibly.\n\n\n But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he\n had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight.\n Now....",
"It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as\n merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began\n thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of\n happier days swept over him.",
"On the stoop he stood for a moment, breathing hard. He glanced\n back over his shoulder and a queer feeling of inner numbness\n seemed to well over him. At that moment the gray nothingness\n appeared to thin ... the enveloping curtain fell away, and he\n saw....\n\n\n Vague and indistinct, yet cast in stereoscopic outline, a\n gigantic city was lined against the darkling sky. It was a city\n fantastic with cubed domes, spires, and aerial bridges and flying\n buttresses. Tunnel-like streets, flanked on either side by\n shining metallic ramps and runways, stretched endlessly to the\n vanishing point. Great shafts of multicolored light probed huge\n streamers and ellipses above the higher levels.\n\n\n And beyond, like a final backdrop, rose a titanic wall. It was\n from that wall ... from its crenelated parapets and battlements\n that Mr. Chambers felt the eyes peering at him.",
"And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own\n experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,\n seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled\n brain failed to find the answer.\n\n\n The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual\n setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood\n upon the mantel.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and\n looked out.\n\n\n Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the\n chimneys and trees against a silvered sky.\n\n\n But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was\n strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a\n house that suddenly had gone mad."
],
[
"The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers\n slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the\n floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.\n\n\n There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there\n might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple\n tree that grew close against the house.\n\n\n But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with\n a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few\n shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch.",
"The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had\n looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.\nAnd now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but\n those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...\n they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house\n and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the\n street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself\n when he thought of how it should look.\n\n\n Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it\n too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too\n weary to think about the house.\n\n\n He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room\n he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked\n ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.",
"Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It\n showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far\n in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague\n outline of a larger vessel.\n\n\n There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the\n fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the\n Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly\n in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head.\n He had put it there because he liked it best.\n\n\n Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself\n succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an\n hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither\n define nor understand.",
"Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,\n then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed\n merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...\n somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half\n whispered thought.\n\n\n A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the\n pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than\n he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but\n a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.",
"He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.",
"A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such\n outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was\n connected with his name ... at the time an academic scandal. He\n had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that\n volume to his classes. What that subject matter was, had long been\n forgotten, but whatever it was had been considered sufficiently\n revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the university.\n\n\n A silver moon shone over the chimney tops and a chill, impish\n October wind was rustling the dead leaves when Mr. Chambers\n started out at seven o'clock.\n\n\n It was a good night, he told himself, smelling the clean, crisp\n air of autumn and the faint pungence of distant wood smoke.",
"And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own\n experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,\n seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled\n brain failed to find the answer.\n\n\n The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual\n setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood\n upon the mantel.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and\n looked out.\n\n\n Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the\n chimneys and trees against a silvered sky.\n\n\n But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was\n strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a\n house that suddenly had gone mad.",
"Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was\n ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the\n room.\n\n\n The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away\n and with them went one corner of the room.\n\n\n And then the elephant ash tray.\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" said Mr. Chambers, \"I never did like that very well.\"\n\n\n Now as he sat there it didn't seem queer to be without the table\n or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal.\n Something one could expect to happen.\n\n\n Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back.\n\n\n But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not stand\n off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone,\n simply couldn't do it.",
"On the stoop he stood for a moment, breathing hard. He glanced\n back over his shoulder and a queer feeling of inner numbness\n seemed to well over him. At that moment the gray nothingness\n appeared to thin ... the enveloping curtain fell away, and he\n saw....\n\n\n Vague and indistinct, yet cast in stereoscopic outline, a\n gigantic city was lined against the darkling sky. It was a city\n fantastic with cubed domes, spires, and aerial bridges and flying\n buttresses. Tunnel-like streets, flanked on either side by\n shining metallic ramps and runways, stretched endlessly to the\n vanishing point. Great shafts of multicolored light probed huge\n streamers and ellipses above the higher levels.\n\n\n And beyond, like a final backdrop, rose a titanic wall. It was\n from that wall ... from its crenelated parapets and battlements\n that Mr. Chambers felt the eyes peering at him.",
"But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.",
"For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his\n steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went\n back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant\n again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact\n grew slowly in his brain:\nThere wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant\n had disappeared!\nNow he understood why he had missed the store on the night\n before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.\n\n\n On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He\n slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way\n unsteadily to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable\n necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings\n be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?\n\n\n Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded\n life, knew nothing about?",
"He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from\n that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had\n deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the\n world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic\n premeditation.\n\n\n On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the\n connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a\n sob forced its way to his lips.\n\n\n There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser\n had been there was greyish nothingness.\n\n\n Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door.\n Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no\n familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.\n\n\n Nothing....\n\n\n Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n \"So here I am,\" he said, half aloud.",
"He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his\n front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with\n him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought\n his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr.\n Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a\n coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr.\n Chambers took his cigar. That was all.\n\n\n For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be\n left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it\n eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for\n it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual\n with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once\n had been a professor at State University.",
"And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through\n him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes\n later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany\n bookcase that stood against the wall.\n\n\n There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the\n first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The\n second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book\n that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.\n\n\n Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach\n its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he\n remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had\n been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand\n either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent\n of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the\n school.",
"Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first\n time in twenty years.\n\n\n He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.\n\n\n The clock hadn't stopped.\n\n\n It wasn't there.\n\n\n There was a tingling sensation in his feet.",
"It wasn't until then that he realized something else was wrong.\n He had no cigar. For the first time he had neglected to purchase\n his evening smoke.\n\n\n Shaken, muttering to himself, Mr. Chambers let himself in his\n house and locked the door behind him.\n\n\n He hung his hat and coat on the rack in the hall and walked\n slowly into the living room. Dropping into his favorite chair, he\n shook his head in bewilderment.\n\n\n Silence filled the room. A silence that was measured by the\n ticking of the old fashioned pendulum clock on the mantelpiece.",
"It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as\n merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began\n thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of\n happier days swept over him.",
"The wind whipped the muted words away and Mr. Chambers grumbled\n to himself. Another one of those fantastic radio dramas,\n probably. He remembered one from many years before, something\n about the Martians. And Harcourt! What did Harcourt have to do\n with it? He was one of the men who had ridiculed the book\n Mr. Chambers had written.\n\n\n But he pushed speculation away, sniffed the clean, crisp air again,\n looked at the familiar things that materialized out of the late\n autumn darkness as he walked along. For there was nothing ...\n absolutely nothing in the world ... that he would let upset him.\n That was a tenet he had laid down twenty years ago.\nThere was a crowd of men in front of the drugstore at the corner\n of Oak and Lincoln and they were talking excitedly. Mr. Chambers\n caught some excited words: \"It's happening everywhere.... What\n do you think it is.... The scientists can't explain....\"",
"But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an\n abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them\n no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many\n years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not\n wish to talk.\n\n\n One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but\n then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.\n\n\n Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a\n thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his\n pocket.\n\n\n He started violently. It was only 7:30!\n\n\n For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in\n accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked\n audibly.\n\n\n But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he\n had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight.\n Now....",
"The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not\n deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living\n alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed\n existence had grown on him gradually.\n\n\n So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner\n of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out\n snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers\n pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.\n\n\n A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it\n was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers.\n\n\n \"... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ...\n thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt....\""
],
[
"Thousands of eyes glaring down with but a single purpose.\n\n\n And as he continued to look, something else seemed to take form\n above that wall. A design this time, that swirled and writhed in\n the ribbons of radiance and rapidly coalesced into strange\n geometric features, without definite line or detail. A colossal\n face, a face of indescribable power and evil, it was, staring\n down with malevolent composure.\nThen the city and the face slid out of focus; the vision faded\n like a darkened magic-lantern, and the grayness moved in again.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers pushed open the door of his house. But he did not\n lock it. There was no need of locks ... not any more.\n\n\n A few coals of fire still smouldered in the grate and going\n there, he stirred them up, raked away the ash, piled on more\n wood. The flames leaped merrily, dancing in the chimney's throat.",
"Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,\n then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed\n merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...\n somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half\n whispered thought.\n\n\n A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the\n pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than\n he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but\n a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.",
"Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It\n showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far\n in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague\n outline of a larger vessel.\n\n\n There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the\n fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the\n Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly\n in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head.\n He had put it there because he liked it best.\n\n\n Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself\n succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an\n hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither\n define nor understand.",
"On the stoop he stood for a moment, breathing hard. He glanced\n back over his shoulder and a queer feeling of inner numbness\n seemed to well over him. At that moment the gray nothingness\n appeared to thin ... the enveloping curtain fell away, and he\n saw....\n\n\n Vague and indistinct, yet cast in stereoscopic outline, a\n gigantic city was lined against the darkling sky. It was a city\n fantastic with cubed domes, spires, and aerial bridges and flying\n buttresses. Tunnel-like streets, flanked on either side by\n shining metallic ramps and runways, stretched endlessly to the\n vanishing point. Great shafts of multicolored light probed huge\n streamers and ellipses above the higher levels.\n\n\n And beyond, like a final backdrop, rose a titanic wall. It was\n from that wall ... from its crenelated parapets and battlements\n that Mr. Chambers felt the eyes peering at him.",
"He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.",
"And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through\n him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes\n later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany\n bookcase that stood against the wall.\n\n\n There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the\n first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The\n second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book\n that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.\n\n\n Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach\n its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he\n remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had\n been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand\n either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent\n of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the\n school.",
"The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers\n slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the\n floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.\n\n\n There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there\n might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple\n tree that grew close against the house.\n\n\n But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with\n a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few\n shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch.",
"The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had\n looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.\nAnd now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but\n those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...\n they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house\n and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the\n street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself\n when he thought of how it should look.\n\n\n Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it\n too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too\n weary to think about the house.\n\n\n He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room\n he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked\n ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.",
"And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own\n experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,\n seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled\n brain failed to find the answer.\n\n\n The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual\n setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood\n upon the mantel.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and\n looked out.\n\n\n Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the\n chimneys and trees against a silvered sky.\n\n\n But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was\n strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a\n house that suddenly had gone mad.",
"He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from\n that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had\n deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the\n world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic\n premeditation.\n\n\n On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the\n connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a\n sob forced its way to his lips.\n\n\n There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser\n had been there was greyish nothingness.\n\n\n Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door.\n Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no\n familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.\n\n\n Nothing....\n\n\n Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n \"So here I am,\" he said, half aloud.",
"He looked out the window into a blank world. His neighbors'\n houses already were gone. They had not lived with them as he had\n lived with this room. Their interests had been divided, thinly\n spread; their thoughts had not been concentrated as his upon an\n area four blocks by three, or a room fourteen by twelve.\nStaring through the window, he saw it again. The same vision he\n had looked upon before and yet different in an indescribable way.\n There was the city illumined in the sky. There were the\n elliptical towers and turrets, the cube-shaped domes and\n battlements. He could see with stereoscopic clarity the aerial\n bridges, the gleaming avenues sweeping on into infinitude. The\n vision was nearer this time, but the depth and proportion had\n changed ... as if he were viewing it from two concentric angles\n at the same time.\n\n\n And the face ... the face of magnitude ... of power of cosmic\n craft and evil....",
"But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.",
"Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first\n time in twenty years.\n\n\n He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.\n\n\n The clock hadn't stopped.\n\n\n It wasn't there.\n\n\n There was a tingling sensation in his feet.",
"He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his\n front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with\n him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought\n his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr.\n Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a\n coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr.\n Chambers took his cigar. That was all.\n\n\n For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be\n left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it\n eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for\n it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual\n with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once\n had been a professor at State University.",
"A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such\n outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was\n connected with his name ... at the time an academic scandal. He\n had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that\n volume to his classes. What that subject matter was, had long been\n forgotten, but whatever it was had been considered sufficiently\n revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the university.\n\n\n A silver moon shone over the chimney tops and a chill, impish\n October wind was rustling the dead leaves when Mr. Chambers\n started out at seven o'clock.\n\n\n It was a good night, he told himself, smelling the clean, crisp\n air of autumn and the faint pungence of distant wood smoke.",
"It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as\n merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began\n thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of\n happier days swept over him.",
"But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an\n abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them\n no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many\n years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not\n wish to talk.\n\n\n One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but\n then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.\n\n\n Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a\n thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his\n pocket.\n\n\n He started violently. It was only 7:30!\n\n\n For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in\n accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked\n audibly.\n\n\n But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he\n had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight.\n Now....",
"Mr. Chambers stared at the marine print and for a moment a little\n breath of reassurance returned to him.\nThey\ncouldn't take this\n away. The rest of the world might dissolve because there was\n insufficient power of thought to retain its outward form.\n\n\n But this room was his. He alone had furnished it. He alone, since\n he had first planned the house's building, had lived here.\n\n\n This room would stay. It must stay on ... it must....\n\n\n He rose from his chair and walked across the room to the book\n case, stood staring at the second shelf with its single volume.\n His eyes shifted to the top shelf and swift terror gripped him.\n\n\n For all the books weren't there. A lot of books weren't there!\n Only the most beloved, the most familiar ones.",
"Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was\n ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the\n room.\n\n\n The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away\n and with them went one corner of the room.\n\n\n And then the elephant ash tray.\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" said Mr. Chambers, \"I never did like that very well.\"\n\n\n Now as he sat there it didn't seem queer to be without the table\n or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal.\n Something one could expect to happen.\n\n\n Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back.\n\n\n But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not stand\n off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone,\n simply couldn't do it.",
"There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself.\n Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and\n demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of\n talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news\n broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the\n shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with\n the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.\nHe brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one\n central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues.\n Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of\n the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America,\n of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread\n into that nation's boundaries.\n\n\n Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South\n America. Billions, perhaps."
],
[
"Mr. Chambers stared at the marine print and for a moment a little\n breath of reassurance returned to him.\nThey\ncouldn't take this\n away. The rest of the world might dissolve because there was\n insufficient power of thought to retain its outward form.\n\n\n But this room was his. He alone had furnished it. He alone, since\n he had first planned the house's building, had lived here.\n\n\n This room would stay. It must stay on ... it must....\n\n\n He rose from his chair and walked across the room to the book\n case, stood staring at the second shelf with its single volume.\n His eyes shifted to the top shelf and swift terror gripped him.\n\n\n For all the books weren't there. A lot of books weren't there!\n Only the most beloved, the most familiar ones.",
"Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was\n ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the\n room.\n\n\n The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away\n and with them went one corner of the room.\n\n\n And then the elephant ash tray.\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" said Mr. Chambers, \"I never did like that very well.\"\n\n\n Now as he sat there it didn't seem queer to be without the table\n or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal.\n Something one could expect to happen.\n\n\n Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back.\n\n\n But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not stand\n off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone,\n simply couldn't do it.",
"Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,\n then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed\n merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...\n somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half\n whispered thought.\n\n\n A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the\n pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than\n he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but\n a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.",
"He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from\n that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had\n deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the\n world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic\n premeditation.\n\n\n On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the\n connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a\n sob forced its way to his lips.\n\n\n There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser\n had been there was greyish nothingness.\n\n\n Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door.\n Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no\n familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.\n\n\n Nothing....\n\n\n Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n \"So here I am,\" he said, half aloud.",
"For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his\n steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went\n back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant\n again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact\n grew slowly in his brain:\nThere wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant\n had disappeared!\nNow he understood why he had missed the store on the night\n before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.\n\n\n On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He\n slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way\n unsteadily to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable\n necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings\n be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?\n\n\n Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded\n life, knew nothing about?",
"Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first\n time in twenty years.\n\n\n He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.\n\n\n The clock hadn't stopped.\n\n\n It wasn't there.\n\n\n There was a tingling sensation in his feet.",
"He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.",
"But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.",
"So there he was. Embattled in the last corner of the world that\n was left to him.\n\n\n Perhaps there were other men like him, he thought. Men who stood\n at bay against the emptiness that marked the transition from one\n dimension to another. Men who had lived close to the things they\n loved, who had endowed those things with such substantial form by\n power of mind alone that they now stood out alone against the\n power of some greater mind.\n\n\n The street was gone. The rest of his house was gone. This room\n still retained its form.\n\n\n This room, he knew, would stay the longest. And when the rest of\n the room was gone, this corner with his favorite chair would\n remain. For this was the spot where he had lived for twenty\n years. The bedroom was for sleeping, the kitchen for eating. This\n room was for living. This was his last stand.\n\n\n These were the walls and floors and prints and lamps that had\n soaked up his will to make them walls and prints and lamps.",
"The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had\n looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.\nAnd now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but\n those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...\n they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house\n and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the\n street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself\n when he thought of how it should look.\n\n\n Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it\n too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too\n weary to think about the house.\n\n\n He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room\n he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked\n ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.",
"The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers\n slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the\n floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.\n\n\n There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there\n might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple\n tree that grew close against the house.\n\n\n But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with\n a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few\n shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch.",
"The same thing, at the same time, day after day. He had not\n deliberately set upon such a life of routine. A bachelor, living\n alone with sufficient money to supply his humble needs, the timed\n existence had grown on him gradually.\n\n\n So he turned on Lexington and back on Oak. The dog at the corner\n of Oak and Jefferson was waiting for him once again and came out\n snarling and growling, snapping at his heels. But Mr. Chambers\n pretended not to notice and the beast gave up the chase.\n\n\n A radio was blaring down the street and faint wisps of what it\n was blurting floated to Mr. Chambers.\n\n\n \"... still taking place ... Empire State building disappeared ...\n thin air ... famed scientist, Dr. Edmund Harcourt....\"",
"Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It\n showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far\n in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague\n outline of a larger vessel.\n\n\n There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the\n fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the\n Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly\n in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head.\n He had put it there because he liked it best.\n\n\n Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself\n succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an\n hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither\n define nor understand.",
"It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as\n merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began\n thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of\n happier days swept over him.",
"He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his\n front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with\n him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought\n his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr.\n Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a\n coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr.\n Chambers took his cigar. That was all.\n\n\n For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be\n left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it\n eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for\n it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual\n with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once\n had been a professor at State University.",
"There were not sufficient minds in existence to retain the\n material world in its mundane form. Some other power from another\n dimension was fighting to supersede man's control\nand take his\n universe into its own plane!\nAbruptly Mr. Chambers closed the book, shoved it back in the case\n and picked up his hat and coat.\n\n\n He had to know more. He had to find someone who could tell him.\n\n\n He moved through the hall to the door, emerged into the street.\n On the walk he looked skyward, trying to make out the sun. But\n there wasn't any sun ... only an all pervading grayness that\n shrouded everything ... not a gray fog, but a gray emptiness that\n seemed devoid of life, of any movement.\n\n\n The walk led to his gate and there it ended, but as he moved\n forward the sidewalk came into view and the house ahead loomed\n out of the gray, but a house with differences.",
"So the change already had started here! The unfamiliar books were\n gone and that fitted in the pattern ... for it would be the least\n familiar things that would go first.\n\n\n Wheeling, he stared across the room. Was it his imagination, or\n did the lamp on the table blur and begin to fade away?\n\n\n But as he stared at it, it became clear again, a solid,\n substantial thing.\n\n\n For a moment real fear reached out and touched him with chilly\n fingers. For he knew that this room no longer was proof against\n the thing that had happened out there on the street.\n\n\n Or had it really happened? Might not all this exist within his\n own mind? Might not the street be as it always was, with laughing\n children and barking dogs? Might not the Red Star confectionery\n still exist, splashing the street with the red of its neon sign?",
"Huddled in the chair, he frowned slowly. It was disquieting to\n have something like that happen. There must be something wrong.\n Had his long exile finally turned his mind ... perhaps just a\n very little ... enough to make him queer? Had he lost his sense\n of proportion, of perspective?\n\n\n No, he hadn't. Take this room, for example. After twenty years it\n had come to be as much a part of him as the clothes he wore.\n Every detail of the room was engraved in his mind with ...\n clarity; the old center leg table with its green covering and\n stained glass lamp; the mantelpiece with the dusty bric-a-brac;\n the pendulum clock that told the time of day as well as the day\n of the week and month; the elephant ash tray on the tabaret and,\n most important of all, the marine print.",
"And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through\n him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes\n later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany\n bookcase that stood against the wall.\n\n\n There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the\n first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The\n second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book\n that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.\n\n\n Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach\n its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he\n remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had\n been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand\n either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent\n of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the\n school.",
"Without removing his hat and coat, he sank exhausted in his\n favorite chair, closed his eyes then opened them again.\n\n\n He sighed with relief as he saw the room was unchanged.\n Everything in its accustomed place: the clock, the lamp, the\n elephant ash tray, the marine print on the wall.\n\n\n Everything was as it should be. The clock measured the silence\n with its measured ticking; it chimed abruptly and the vase sent\n up its usual sympathetic vibration.\n\n\n This was his room, he thought. Rooms acquire the personality of\n the person who lives in them, become a part of him. This was his\n world, his own private world, and as such it would be the last to\n go.\n\n\n But how long could he ... his brain ... maintain its existence?"
],
[
"Mr. Chambers started. The clock had stopped. Funny ... the first\n time in twenty years.\n\n\n He leaped from his chair and then sat down again.\n\n\n The clock hadn't stopped.\n\n\n It wasn't there.\n\n\n There was a tingling sensation in his feet.",
"Mr. Chambers shivered, reached to turn up the collar of his coat,\n then stopped as he realized the room must be warm. A fire blazed\n merrily in the grate. The cold he felt came from something ...\n somewhere else. The cold of fear and horror, the chill of a half\n whispered thought.\n\n\n A deathly silence had fallen, a silence still measured by the\n pendulum clock. And yet a silence that held a different tenor than\n he had ever sensed before. Not a homey, comfortable silence ... but\n a silence that hinted at emptiness and nothingness.",
"He went on until he came to the corner of Lexington. There, on\n the curb, he stopped and stared. The gray wall was thicker there\n but he did not realize how close it was until he glanced down at\n his feet and saw there was nothing, nothing at all beyond the\n curbstone. No dull gleam of wet asphalt, no sign of a street. It\n was as if all eternity ended here at the corner of Maple and\n Lexington.\n\n\n With a wild cry, Mr. Chambers turned and ran. Back down the\n street he raced, coat streaming after him in the wind, bowler hat\n bouncing on his head.\n\n\n Panting, he reached the gate and stumbled up the walk, thankful\n that it still was there.",
"On the stoop he stood for a moment, breathing hard. He glanced\n back over his shoulder and a queer feeling of inner numbness\n seemed to well over him. At that moment the gray nothingness\n appeared to thin ... the enveloping curtain fell away, and he\n saw....\n\n\n Vague and indistinct, yet cast in stereoscopic outline, a\n gigantic city was lined against the darkling sky. It was a city\n fantastic with cubed domes, spires, and aerial bridges and flying\n buttresses. Tunnel-like streets, flanked on either side by\n shining metallic ramps and runways, stretched endlessly to the\n vanishing point. Great shafts of multicolored light probed huge\n streamers and ellipses above the higher levels.\n\n\n And beyond, like a final backdrop, rose a titanic wall. It was\n from that wall ... from its crenelated parapets and battlements\n that Mr. Chambers felt the eyes peering at him.",
"And then, abruptly, something like an electric shock ran through\n him. Rigid, he sat there, limp inside at the thought. Minutes\n later he arose and almost ran across the room to the old mahogany\n bookcase that stood against the wall.\n\n\n There were many volumes in the case: his beloved classics on the\n first shelf, his many scientific works on the lower shelves. The\n second shelf contained but one book. And it was around this book\n that Mr. Chambers' entire life was centered.\n\n\n Twenty years ago he had written it and foolishly attempted to teach\n its philosophy to a class of undergraduates. The newspapers, he\n remembered, had made a great deal of it at the time. Tongues had\n been set to wagging. Narrow-minded townsfolk, failing to understand\n either his philosophy or his aim, but seeing in him another exponent\n of some anti-rational cult, had forced his expulsion from the\n school.",
"Mr. Chambers loved that picture. It had depth, he always said. It\n showed an old sailing ship in the foreground on a placid sea. Far\n in the distance, almost on the horizon line, was the vague\n outline of a larger vessel.\n\n\n There were other pictures, too. The forest scene above the\n fireplace, the old English prints in the corner where he sat, the\n Currier and Ives above the radio. But the ship print was directly\n in his line of vision. He could see it without turning his head.\n He had put it there because he liked it best.\n\n\n Further reverie became an effort as Mr. Chambers felt himself\n succumbing to weariness. He undressed and went to bed. For an\n hour he lay awake, assailed by vague fears he could neither\n define nor understand.",
"The light through the windows slowly grew brighter. Mr. Chambers\n slid out of bed, slowly crossed to the window, the cold of the\n floor biting into his bare feet. He forced himself to look out.\n\n\n There was nothing outside the window. No shadows. As if there\n might be a fog. But no fog, however, thick, could hide the apple\n tree that grew close against the house.\n\n\n But the tree was there ... shadowy, indistinct in the gray, with\n a few withered apples still clinging to its boughs, a few\n shriveled leaves reluctant to leave the parent branch.",
"But as Mr. Chambers neared them they fell into what seemed an\n abashed silence and watched him pass. He, on his part, gave them\n no sign of recognition. That was the way it had been for many\n years, ever since the people had become convinced that he did not\n wish to talk.\n\n\n One of the men half started forward as if to speak to him, but\n then stepped back and Mr. Chambers continued on his walk.\n\n\n Back at his own front door he stopped and as he had done a\n thousand times before drew forth the heavy gold watch from his\n pocket.\n\n\n He started violently. It was only 7:30!\n\n\n For long minutes he stood there staring at the watch in\n accusation. The timepiece hadn't stopped, for it still ticked\n audibly.\n\n\n But 15 minutes too soon! For twenty years, day in, day out, he\n had started out at seven and returned at a quarter of eight.\n Now....",
"But silence was no strange thing to Mr. Chambers. Once he had\n loved music ... the kind of music he could get by tuning in\n symphonic orchestras on the radio. But the radio stood silent in\n the corner, the cord out of its socket. Mr. Chambers had pulled\n it out many years before. To be precise, upon the night when the\n symphonic broadcast had been interrupted to give a news flash.\n\n\n He had stopped reading newspapers and magazines too, had exiled\n himself to a few city blocks. And as the years flowed by, that\n self exile had become a prison, an intangible, impassable wall\n bounded by four city blocks by three. Beyond them lay utter,\n unexplainable terror. Beyond them he never went.\n\n\n But recluse though he was, he could not on occasion escape from\n hearing things. Things the newsboy shouted on the streets, things\n the men talked about on the drugstore corner when they didn't see\n him coming.",
"And somehow those gruesome statistics seemed tied up with his own\n experience. Something, somewhere, some part of his earlier life,\n seemed to hold an explanation. But try as he would his befuddled\n brain failed to find the answer.\n\n\n The pendulum clock struck slowly, its every other chime as usual\n setting up a sympathetic vibration in the pewter vase that stood\n upon the mantel.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers got to his feet, strode to the door, opened it and\n looked out.\n\n\n Moonlight tesselated the street in black and silver, etching the\n chimneys and trees against a silvered sky.\n\n\n But the house directly across the street was not the same. It was\n strangely lop-sided, its dimensions out of proportion, like a\n house that suddenly had gone mad.",
"The tree was there now. But it hadn't been when he first had\n looked. Mr. Chambers was sure of that.\nAnd now he saw the faint outlines of his neighbor's house ... but\n those outlines were all wrong. They didn't jibe and fit together ...\n they were out of plumb. As if some giant hand had grasped the house\n and wrenched it out of true. Like the house he had seen across the\n street the night before, the house that had painfully righted itself\n when he thought of how it should look.\n\n\n Perhaps if he thought of how his neighbor's house should look, it\n too might right itself. But Mr. Chambers was very weary. Too\n weary to think about the house.\n\n\n He turned from the window and dressed slowly. In the living room\n he slumped into his chair, put his feet on the old cracked\n ottoman. For a long time he sat, trying to think.",
"For the first time in twenty years, Mr. Chambers retraced his\n steps. He walked back to Jefferson, then turned around and went\n back to Grant again and on to Lexington. Then back to Grant\n again, where he stood astounded while a single, incredible fact\n grew slowly in his brain:\nThere wasn't any confectionery! The block from Marshall to Grant\n had disappeared!\nNow he understood why he had missed the store on the night\n before, why he had arrived home fifteen minutes early.\n\n\n On legs that were dead things he stumbled back to his home. He\n slammed and locked the door behind him and made his way\n unsteadily to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n What was this? What did it mean? By what inconceivable\n necromancy could a paved street with houses, trees and buildings\n be spirited away and the space it had occupied be closed up?\n\n\n Was something happening in the world which he, in his secluded\n life, knew nothing about?",
"He could see it all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from\n that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had\n deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the\n world's mental power had been carefully planned with diabolic\n premeditation.\n\n\n On impulse he suddenly turned, crossed the room and opened the\n connecting door to the bedroom. He stopped on the threshold and a\n sob forced its way to his lips.\n\n\n There was no bedroom. Where his stolid four poster and dresser\n had been there was greyish nothingness.\n\n\n Like an automaton he turned again and paced to the hall door.\n Here, too, he found what he had expected. There was no hall, no\n familiar hat rack and umbrella stand.\n\n\n Nothing....\n\n\n Weakly Mr. Chambers moved back to his chair in the corner.\n\n\n \"So here I am,\" he said, half aloud.",
"Mr. Chambers turned his eyes back into the room. The clock was\n ticking slowly, steadily. The greyness was stealing into the\n room.\n\n\n The table and radio were the first to go. They simply faded away\n and with them went one corner of the room.\n\n\n And then the elephant ash tray.\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" said Mr. Chambers, \"I never did like that very well.\"\n\n\n Now as he sat there it didn't seem queer to be without the table\n or the radio. It was as if it were something quite normal.\n Something one could expect to happen.\n\n\n Perhaps, if he thought hard enough, he could bring them back.\n\n\n But, after all, what was the use? One man, alone, could not stand\n off the irresistible march of nothingness. One man, all alone,\n simply couldn't do it.",
"It was a simple book, really, dismissed by most authorities as\n merely the vagaries of an over-zealous mind.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers took it down now, opened its cover and began\n thumbing slowly through the pages. For a moment the memory of\n happier days swept over him.",
"He didn't walk fast. He took his time. He always returned to his\n front door at exactly 7:45. No one ever stopped to talk with\n him. Even the man at the Red Star confectionery, where he bought\n his cigar, remained silent while the purchase was being made. Mr.\n Chambers merely tapped on the glass top of the counter with a\n coin, the man reached in and brought forth the box, and Mr.\n Chambers took his cigar. That was all.\n\n\n For people long ago had gathered that Mr. Chambers desired to be\n left alone. The newer generation of townsfolk called it\n eccentricity. Certain uncouth persons had a different word for\n it. The oldsters remembered that this queer looking individual\n with his black silk muffler, rosewood cane and bowler hat once\n had been a professor at State University.",
"A professor of metaphysics, they seemed to recall, or some such\n outlandish subject. At any rate a furore of some sort was\n connected with his name ... at the time an academic scandal. He\n had written a book, and he had taught the subject matter of that\n volume to his classes. What that subject matter was, had long been\n forgotten, but whatever it was had been considered sufficiently\n revolutionary to cost Mr. Chambers his post at the university.\n\n\n A silver moon shone over the chimney tops and a chill, impish\n October wind was rustling the dead leaves when Mr. Chambers\n started out at seven o'clock.\n\n\n It was a good night, he told himself, smelling the clean, crisp\n air of autumn and the faint pungence of distant wood smoke.",
"The wind whipped the muted words away and Mr. Chambers grumbled\n to himself. Another one of those fantastic radio dramas,\n probably. He remembered one from many years before, something\n about the Martians. And Harcourt! What did Harcourt have to do\n with it? He was one of the men who had ridiculed the book\n Mr. Chambers had written.\n\n\n But he pushed speculation away, sniffed the clean, crisp air again,\n looked at the familiar things that materialized out of the late\n autumn darkness as he walked along. For there was nothing ...\n absolutely nothing in the world ... that he would let upset him.\n That was a tenet he had laid down twenty years ago.\nThere was a crowd of men in front of the drugstore at the corner\n of Oak and Lincoln and they were talking excitedly. Mr. Chambers\n caught some excited words: \"It's happening everywhere.... What\n do you think it is.... The scientists can't explain....\"",
"Thousands of eyes glaring down with but a single purpose.\n\n\n And as he continued to look, something else seemed to take form\n above that wall. A design this time, that swirled and writhed in\n the ribbons of radiance and rapidly coalesced into strange\n geometric features, without definite line or detail. A colossal\n face, a face of indescribable power and evil, it was, staring\n down with malevolent composure.\nThen the city and the face slid out of focus; the vision faded\n like a darkened magic-lantern, and the grayness moved in again.\n\n\n Mr. Chambers pushed open the door of his house. But he did not\n lock it. There was no need of locks ... not any more.\n\n\n A few coals of fire still smouldered in the grate and going\n there, he stirred them up, raked away the ash, piled on more\n wood. The flames leaped merrily, dancing in the chimney's throat.",
"There was something back of this, Mr. Chambers told himself.\n Something that reached far back into one corner of his brain and\n demanded recognition. Something tied up with the fragments of\n talk he had heard on the drugstore corner, bits of news\n broadcasts he had heard as he walked along the street, the\n shrieking of the newsboy calling his papers. Something to do with\n the happenings in the world from which he had excluded himself.\nHe brought them back to mind now and lingered over the one\n central theme of the talk he overheard: the wars and plagues.\n Hints of a Europe and Asia swept almost clean of human life, of\n the plague ravaging Africa, of its appearance in South America,\n of the frantic efforts of the United States to prevent its spread\n into that nation's boundaries.\n\n\n Millions of people were dead in Europe and Asia, Africa and South\n America. Billions, perhaps."
]
] |
valid
|
22524
|
[
"What is Manto and Palit's own language?",
"What other job does Miss Burton likely wish she had?",
"How does George feel about little girls?",
"Where did the lions come from at the end?",
"What is George's big fault?",
"Why does George like Carol more than other women?",
"Why is it hard for George to give autographs?",
"How old is Carolyn?",
"Why are Manto and Palit at the zoo?",
"Who accidentally saved humanity from Manto and Palit?"
] |
[
[
"Pig-Latin",
"Unknown",
"Spanish",
"English"
],
[
"Teacher",
"Agent",
"Actor",
"Zookeeper"
],
[
"He likes children.",
"He considers them friends.",
"He considers himself like them.",
"He thinks they're annoying."
],
[
"They escaped from the zoo.",
"There weren't really lions there at all.",
"Manto and Palit turned into lions to kill George.",
"Manto and Palit accidentally turned into lions."
],
[
"He is not useful.",
"He is not a good actor.",
"He does not like kids.",
"He drinks too much."
],
[
"She swoons at his movies.",
"She works for him.",
"He doesn't.",
"She stands up to him."
],
[
"He does not want to give autographs",
"He is a drunk.",
"It isn't hard for him to give autographs.",
"He shakes from a fever in Africa."
],
[
"Two",
"Two hundred",
"Twelve",
"We don't know"
],
[
"They are lost.",
"They are on a class trip.",
"They are observing the animals.",
"They are observing the girls."
],
[
"George",
"Miss Burton",
"All of three people in different ways",
"Carol"
]
] |
[
2,
3,
4,
4,
4,
4,
2,
2,
4,
3
] |
[
1,
1,
0,
1,
0,
0,
1,
1,
0,
0
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[
[
"Palit said firmly, \"Be careful,\n and I won't be fearful. That's all\n there is to it.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be careful. After all, I\n shouldn't want us to lose these\n children. They're so exactly the\n kind we need. Look how inquiring\n they are, how unafraid, how\n quick to adapt to any circumstances—\"\n\n\n Miss Burton's voice said,\n \"Good gracious, children, what\n language\n are\n you using? Greek?\"\n\n\n They had been speaking too\n loud, they had been overheard.\n Palit and Manto stared at each\n other, and giggled coyly. Then,\n after a second to think, Palit\n said, \"Onay, Issmay Urtonbay!\"\n\n\n \"What?\"",
"Manto said tolerantly, \"You're\n getting jittery, Palit. We've\n been away from home too long.\"\n\n\n \"I am not jittery in the least.\n But I believe in taking due care.\"\n\n\n \"What could possibly happen\n to us? If we were to announce\n to the children and the teacher,\n and to every one in this zoo, for\n that matter, exactly who and\n what we were, they wouldn't believe\n us. And even if they did,\n they wouldn't be able to act rapidly\n enough to harm us.\"\n\n\n \"You never can tell about such\n things. Wise—people—simply\n don't take unnecessary chances.\"\n\n\n \"I'll grant that you're my superior\n in such wisdom.\"",
"\"There should be happiness inside\n you at the thought of your\n doing a good deed. Not a drop,\n George, not a drop.\"\nThe two little girls drew apart\n from the others and began to\n whisper into each other's ears.\n The whispers were punctuated\n by giggles which made the entire\n childish conversation seem quite\n normal. But Palit was in no\n laughing mood. He said, in his\n own language, \"You're getting\n careless, Manto. You had no\n business imitating her expression.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Palit, but it was\n so suggestive. And I'm a very\n suggestible person.\"\n\n\n \"So am I. But I control myself.\"\n\n\n \"Still, if the temptation were\n great enough, I don't think you'd\n be able to resist either.\"\n\n\n \"The issues are important\n enough to make me resist.\"",
"\"Whatever you say, Manto. If\n you wish, we shall join the little\n ladies.\"\n\n\n \"We must have our story prepared\n first.\"\n\n\n Palit nodded, and the two men\n stepped under the shade of a\n tree whose long, drooping, leaf-covered\n branches formed a convenient\n screen. For a moment,\n the tree hid silence. Then there\n came from beneath the branches\n the chatter of girlish voices, and\n two little girls skipped merrily\n away. Miss Burton did not at\n first notice that now she had an\n additional two children in her\n charge.\n\n\n \"Do you think you will be able\n to keep your English straight?\"\n asked one of the new little girls.\n\n\n The other one smiled with\n amusement and at first did not\n answer. Then she began to skip\n around her companion and\n chant, \"I know a secret, I know\n a secret.\"",
"\"The chance of being discovered.\n Here we stumble on this\n place quite by accident. No one\n at home knows about it, no one\n so much as suspects that it exists.\n We must get back and report—and\n you do all sorts of silly\n things which may reveal what\n we are, and lead these people to\n suspect their danger.\"\nThis time, Manto's giggle was\n no longer mere camouflage, but\n expressed to a certain degree\n how he felt. \"They cannot possibly\n suspect. We have been all\n over the world, we have taken\n many forms and adapted ourselves\n to many customs, and no\n one has suspected. And even if\n danger really threatened, it\n would be easy to escape. I could\n take the form of the school\n teacher herself, of a policeman,\n of any one in authority. However,\n at present there is not the\n slightest shadow of danger. So,\n Palit, you had better stop being\n fearful.\"",
"\"Sorry. Come on, let's go.\"\nThe lecture hall resounded\n with giggles. And beneath the\n giggles was a steady undercurrent\n of whispers, of girlish confidences\n exchanged, of girlish\n hopes that would now be fulfilled.\n Miss Burton's class was\n not the only one which had come\n to hear the famous actor-hunter\n describe his brave exploits. There\n were at least five others like it,\n and by some mistake, a class of\n boys, who also whispered to each\n other, in manly superiority, and\n pretended to find amusement in\n the presence of so many of the\n fairer sex.\n\n\n In this atmosphere of giggles\n and whispers, Manto and Palit\n could exchange confidences without\n being noticed. Palit said savagely,\n \"Why did you tell her that\n I could act too?\"",
"\"You needn't be sarcastic,\n Manto, I\n know\n I'm superior.\n I\n realize what a godsend this\n planet is—you don't. It has the\n right gravity, a suitable atmosphere,\n the proper chemical composition—everything.\"\n\n\n \"Including a population that\n will be helpless before us.\"\n\n\n \"And you would take chances\n of losing all this.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly, Palit. What\n chances am I taking?\"",
"\"All right,\" conceded Palit,\n grudgingly.\nSo they stayed, and out of\n some twigs and leaves they\n shaped the necessary coins with\n which to buy peanuts, and popcorn,\n and ice cream, and other\n delicacies favored by the young.\n Manto wanted to win easy popularity\n by treating a few of the\n other children, but Palit put his\n girlish foot down. No use arousing\n suspicion. Even as it was—\n\n\n \"Gee, your father gives you an\n awful lot of spending money,\"\n said Frances enviously. \"Is he\n rich?\"\n\n\n \"We get as much as we want,\"\n replied Manto carelessly.\n\n\n \"Gosh, I wish I did.\"",
"\"That'll do,\" said Miss Burton\n firmly. \"Now, let's get along\n to the lion house. And please,\n children, do not make faces at\n the lions. How would you like to\n be in a cage and have people\n make faces at you? Always remember\n to be considerate to\n others.\"\n\n\n \"Even lions, Miss Burton?\"\n\n\n \"Even lions.\"\n\n\n \"But Mr. George shot lots of\n lions. Was he considerate of them\n too?\"\n\n\n \"There is no time for silly\n questions,\" said Miss Burton,\n with the same firmness. \"Come\n along.\"\n\n\n They all trouped after her,\n Palit and Manto bringing up the\n rear. Manto giggled, and whispered\n with amusement, \"That\n Pig-Latin business was quick\n thinking, Palit. But in fact, quite\n unnecessary. The things that you\n do to avoid being suspected!\"",
"Frances giggled. \"Oh, Miss\n Burton, do you think the polar\n bear would want to play catch?\"\n\n\n The two men who were looking\n on wore pleased smiles.\n \"Charming,\" said Manto. \"But\n somewhat unpredictable, despite\n all our experiences,\n muy amigo\n .\"\n\n\n \"No attempts at Spanish, Manto,\n not here. It calls attention to\n us. And you are not sure of the\n grammar anyway. You may find\n yourself saying things you do\n not intend.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry, Palit. It wasn't an attempt\n to show my skill, I assure\n you. It's that by now I have a\n tendency to confuse one language\n with another.\"\n\n\n \"I know. You were never a linguist.\n But about these interesting\n creatures—\"\n\n\n \"I suggest that they could\n stand investigation. It would be\n good to know how they think.\"",
"\"Still, I thought I saw your\n own face taking on a bit of her\n expression too.\"\n\n\n \"You are imagining things,\n Manto. Another thing, that mistake\n in starting to say you were\n two hundred years old—\"\n\n\n \"They would have thought it\n a joke. And I think I got out of\n that rather neatly.\"\n\n\n \"You like to skate on thin ice,\n don't you, Manto? Just as you\n did when you changed your\n height. You had no business\n shrinking right out in public like\n that.\"\n\n\n \"I did it skillfully. Not a\n single person noticed.\"\n\n\n \"\n I\n noticed.\"\n\n\n \"Don't quibble.\"\n\n\n \"I don't intend to. Some of\n these children have very sharp\n eyes. You'd be surprised at what\n they see.\"",
"\"Why, because it's the truth.\n You're a very good animal performer.\n You make a wonderful\n dragon, for instance. Go on,\n Palit, show her what a fine\n dragon you can—\"\n\n\n \"Stop it, you fool, before you\n cause trouble!\"\n\n\n \"Very well, Palit. Did I tempt\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Did you tempt me! You and\n your sense of humor!\"\n\n\n \"You and your lack of it! But\n let's not argue now, Palit. Here,\n I think, comes the lion-hunter.\n Let's scream, and be as properly\n excited as every one else is.\"\nMy God, he thought, how can\n they keep their voices so high\n so long? My eardrums hurt already.\n How do they stand a lifetime\n of it? Even an hour?",
"\"Perhaps you regard me, my\n friends, as a very lucky person.\n But when I recall some of the\n narrow escapes I have had, I\n don't agree with you. I remember\n once, when we were on the\n trail of a rogue elephant—\"\n\n\n He told the story of the rogue\n elephant, modestly granting a co-hero's\n role to his guide. Then\n another story illustrating the\n strange ways of lions. The elephant\n gun figured in still another\n tale, this time of a vicious\n rhinoceros. His audience was\n quiet now, breathless with interest,\n and he welcomed the respite\n from shrillness he had won\n for his ears.\n\n\n \"And now, my friends, it is\n time to say farewell.\" He actually\n looked sad and regretful.\n \"But it is my hope that I shall\n be able to see you again—\"",
"Facing him across the platform\n were two lions, tensed as\n if to leap. Where they had come\n from he didn't know, but there\n they were, eyes glaring, manes\n ruffled, more terrifying than any\n he had seen in Africa. There\n they were, with the threat of\n death and destruction in their\n fierce eyes, and here he was,\n terror and helplessness on his\n handsome, manly, and bloodless\n face, heart unfrozen now and\n pounding fiercely, knees melting,\n hands—\n\n\n Hands clutching an elephant\n gun. The thought was like a director's\n command. With calm efficiency,\n with all the precision of\n an actor playing a scene rehearsed\n a thousand times, the\n gun leaped to his shoulder, and\n now its own roar thundered out\n a challenge to the roaring of the\n wild beasts, shouted at them in\n its own accents of barking\n thunder.",
"Frances shrilled triumphantly,\n \"It isn't Greek, Miss Burton, it's\n Latin—Pig-Latin. She said,\n 'No, Miss Burton.'\"\n\n\n \"Good heavens, what is Pig-Latin?\"\n\n\n \"It's a kind of way of talking\n where you talk kind of backwards.\n Like, you don't say,\n Me\n ,\n you say,\n Emay\n .\"\n\n\n \"You don't say,\n Yes\n , you say\n Esyay\n ,\" added another little girl.\n\n\n \"You don't say,\n You\n , you say,\n Ouyay\n . You don't say—\"\n\n\n \"All right, all right, I get the\n idea.\"\n\n\n \"You don't say—\"",
"An assistant curator of some\n collection in the zoo, a flustered\n old woman, was introducing him.\n There were a few laudatory references\n to his great talents as an\n actor, and he managed to look\n properly modest as he listened.\n The remarks about his knowledge\n of wild and ferocious beasts\n were a little harder to take, but\n he took them. Then the old\n woman stepped back, and he was\n facing his fate alone.\n\n\n \"Children,\" he began. A pause,\n a bashful grin. \"Perhaps I\n should rather say, my friends.\n I'm not one to think of you as\n children. Some people think of\n me as a child myself, because I\n like to hunt, and have adventures.\n They think that such\n things are childish. But if they\n are, I'm glad to be a child. I'm\n glad to be one of you. Yes, I\n think I\n will\n call you my friends.",
"\"I'm Doris Palit. I went with\n Carolyn to the bathroom—\"\nMiss Burton made a sound of\n annoyance. Imagine losing\n two\n children and not noticing it right\n away. The other teacher must\n be frantic by now, and serve her\n right for being so careless.\n\n\n \"All right, you may stay with\n us until we find a policeman—\"\n She interrupted herself. \"Frances,\n what are you giggling at\n now?\"\n\n\n \"It's Carolyn. She's making\n faces just like you!\"\n\n\n \"Really, Carolyn, that isn't at\n all nice!\"\n\n\n Carolyn's face altered itself in\n a hurry, so as to lose any resemblance\n to Miss Burton's. \"I'm\n sorry, Miss Burton, I didn't\n really mean to do anything\n wrong.\"",
"\"—with hardly enough energy\n to let them dress you in that\n hunter's outfit and photograph\n you as if you were shooting\n lions.\"\n\n\n \"You're so unforgiving, Carol.\n You don't have much use for me,\n do you—consciously, that is?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, Curt, no. I don't\n have much use for useless people.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not entirely useless. I\n earn you that ten per cent—\"\n\n\n \"I'd gladly forego that to see\n you sober.\"\n\n\n \"But it's your contempt for me\n that drives me to drink. And\n when I think of having to face\n those dear little kiddies with\n nothing inside me—\"",
"\"Go ahead,\" whispered Carol.\n \"You've seen the script—go into\n your act. Tell them what a hero\n you are. You have the odds in\n your favor to start with.\"\n\n\n \"My lovely looks,\" he said,\n with some bitterness.\n\n\n \"Lovely is the word for you.\n But forget that. If you're good—you'll\n get a drink afterwards.\"\n\n\n \"Will it be one of those occasions\n when you love me?\"\n\n\n \"If the moon turns blue.\"\n\n\n He strode to the front of the\n platform, an elephant gun swinging\n easily at his side, an easy\n grin radiating from his confident,\n rugged face. The cheers\n rose to a shrill fortissimo, but\n the grin did not vanish. What a\n great actor he really was, he told\n himself, to be able to pretend he\n liked this.",
"\"I feel terrified. I don't know\n how I'm going to face those kids.\n If they were boys it wouldn't be\n so bad, but a bunch of little\n girls!\"\n\n\n \"They'll grow up to be your\n fans, if you're still alive five\n years from now. Meanwhile, into\n each life some rain must fall.\"\n\n\n \"You would talk of water,\n when you know how I feel.\""
],
[
"Miss Burton coughed modestly.\n \"Yes, children, I never told you,\n but I was once ambitious to be\n an actress too. I studied dramatics,\n and really, I was quite\n good at it. I was told that if I\n persevered I might actually be\n famous. Just think, your teacher\n might actually have been a famous\n actress! However, in my\n day, there were many coarse people\n on the stage, and the life of\n the theater was not attractive—but\n perhaps we'd better not\n speak of that. At any rate, I\n know the principles of the dramatic\n art very well.\"\n\"God knows what I'll have to\n go through,\" said Curt. \"And I\n don't see how I can take it\n sober.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see how they can take\n you drunk,\" replied Carol.\n\n\n \"Why go through with it at\n all? Why not call the whole thing\n quits?\"",
"\"Oh, Miss Burton, please don't\n make her go home with a policeman.\n If she's going to be an\n actress, I'll bet she'd love to see\n Curt George!\"\n\n\n \"Well, after the way she's behaved,\n I don't know whether I\n should let her. I really don't.\"\n\n\n \"Please, Miss Burton, it was\n an accident. I won't do it again.\"\n\n\n \"All right, if you're good, and\n cause no trouble. But we still\n have plenty of time before seeing\n Mr. George. It's only two now,\n and we're not supposed to go to\n the lecture hall until four.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Burton,\" called Barbara\n Willman, \"do you think he'd give\n us his autograph?\"",
"Miss Burton had an idea. \"I\n know what to do, children. If\n you can act animals—Mr. George\n has shown you what the hunter\n does; you show him what the\n lions do. Yes, Carolyn and Doris,\n you're going to be lions. You are\n waiting in your lairs, ready to\n pounce on the unwary hunter.\n Crouch now, behind that chair.\n Closer and closer he comes—you\n act it out, Mr. George, please,\n that's the way—ever closer, and\n now your muscles tighten for\n the spring, and you open\n your great, wide, red mouths\n in a great, great big roar—\"\n\n\n A deep and tremendous roar,\n as of thunder, crashed through\n the auditorium. A roar—and\n then, from the audience, an outburst\n of terrified screaming such\n as he had never heard. The\n bristles rose at the back of his\n neck, and his heart froze.",
"\"Well, I'd like to know how\n you were brought up, if you\n don't know that it's wrong to\n mimic people to their faces. A\n big girl like you, too. How old\n are you, Carolyn?\"\n\n\n Carolyn shrank, she hoped imperceptibly,\n by an inch. \"I'm\n two—\"\n\n\n An outburst of shrill laughter.\n \"She's two years old, she's\n two years old!\"\n\n\n \"I was going to say, I'm\n to\n welve\n . Almost, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"Eleven years old,\" said Miss\n Burton. \"Old enough to know\n better.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Miss Burton. And\n honest, Miss Burton, I didn't\n mean anything, but I'm studying\n to be an actress, and I imitate\n people, like the actors you\n see on television—\"",
"\"Fine. How about you, Carolyn?\n You and your little friend,\n Doris. Can she act too?\"\n\n\n Carolyn giggled. \"Oh, yes, she\n can act very well. I can act like\n people. She can act like animals.\"\n The laughing, girlish eyes evaded\n a dirty look from the little\n friend. \"She can act like\n any\n kind of animal.\"\n\n\n \"She's certainly a talented\n child. But she seems so shy!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no,\" said Carolyn. \"She\n likes to be coaxed.\"\n\n\n \"She shouldn't be like that.\n Perhaps, Carolyn, you and Doris\n can do something together. And\n perhaps, too, Mr. George will be\n pleased to see that your teacher\n also has talent.\"\n\n\n \"You, Miss Burton?\"",
"\"That'll do,\" said Miss Burton\n firmly. \"Now, let's get along\n to the lion house. And please,\n children, do not make faces at\n the lions. How would you like to\n be in a cage and have people\n make faces at you? Always remember\n to be considerate to\n others.\"\n\n\n \"Even lions, Miss Burton?\"\n\n\n \"Even lions.\"\n\n\n \"But Mr. George shot lots of\n lions. Was he considerate of them\n too?\"\n\n\n \"There is no time for silly\n questions,\" said Miss Burton,\n with the same firmness. \"Come\n along.\"\n\n\n They all trouped after her,\n Palit and Manto bringing up the\n rear. Manto giggled, and whispered\n with amusement, \"That\n Pig-Latin business was quick\n thinking, Palit. But in fact, quite\n unnecessary. The things that you\n do to avoid being suspected!\"",
"There was no better way to\n make herself inconspicuous. For\n some time, Miss Burton did not\n notice her.\nThe polar bears, the grizzlies,\n the penguins, the reptiles, all\n were left behind. At times the\n children scattered, but Miss Burton\n knew how to get them together\n again, and not one was\n lost.\n\n\n \"Here, children, is the building\n where the kangaroos live.\n Who knows where kangaroos\n come from?\"\n\n\n \"Australia!\" clanged the shrill\n chorus.\n\n\n \"That's right. And what other\n animals come from Australia?\"\n\n\n \"I know, Miss Burton!\" cried\n Frances, a dark-haired nine-year-old\n with a pair of glittering\n eyes that stared like a pair\n of critics from a small heart-shaped\n face. \"I've been here before.\n Wallabies and wombats!\"",
"\"Oh, Miss Burton,\" screamed\n Frances. \"Here's a girl who isn't\n in our class! She got lost from\n her own class!\"\n\"Really?\" Miss Burton seemed\n rather pleased at the idea that\n some other teacher had been so\n careless as to lose one of her\n charges. \"What's your name,\n child?\"\n\n\n \"I'm Carolyn.\"\n\n\n \"Carolyn what?\"\n\n\n \"Carolyn Manto. Please, Miss\n Burton, I had to go to the bathroom,\n and then when I came\n out—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, I know.\"\n\n\n A shrill cry came from another\n section of her class. \"Oh, Miss\n Burton, here's another one who's\n lost!\"\n\n\n The other little girl was\n pushed forward. \"Now, who are\n you\n ?\" Miss Burton asked.",
"Miss Burton collected her\n brood. \"Come together, children,\n I have something to say to you.\n Soon it will be time to go in and\n hear Mr. George. Now, if Mr.\n George is so kind as to entertain\n us, don't you think that it's only\n proper for us to entertain him?\"\n\n\n \"We could put on our class\n play!\" yelled Barbara.\n\n\n \"Barbara's a fine one to talk,\"\n said Frances. \"She doesn't even\n remember her lines.\"\n\n\n \"No, children, we mustn't do\n anything we can't do well. That\n wouldn't make a good impression.\n And besides, there is no\n time for a play. Perhaps Barbara\n will sing—\"\n\n\n \"I can sing a 'Thank You'\n song,\" interrupted Frances.\n\n\n \"That would be nice.\"\n\n\n \"I can recite,\" added another\n little girl.",
"\"Come, come, mustn't be shy.\n Your friend says that you act\n very nicely indeed. Can't want to\n go on the stage and still be shy.\n Now, do you know any movie\n scenes? Shirley Temple used to\n be a good little actress, I remember.\n Can you do any scenes that\n she does?\"\nThe silence was getting to be\n embarrassing. And Carol said he\n didn't amount to anything, he\n never did anything useful. Why,\n if thanks to his being here this\n afternoon, those kids lost the\n ambition to go on the stage, the\n whole human race would have\n cause to be grateful to him. To\n him, and to Miss Burton. She'd\n kill ambition in anybody.",
"What the devil do you do in a\n case like that? You grin, of\n course—but what do you say,\n without handing over your soul\n to the devil? Agree how nice it\n would be to have those sly little\n brats with faces magnified on\n every screen all over the country?\n Like hell you do.\n\n\n \"Now, what are we going to\n act, children?\"\n\n\n \"Please, Miss Burton,\" said\n Doris. \"I don't know how to act.\n I can't even imitate a puppy.\n Really I can't, Miss Burton—\"",
"That was the worst of all. He\n winced once, then bore up. You\n can get used even to torture, he\n told himself. An adult making a\n fool of herself is always more\n painful than a kid. And that\n affected elocutionist's voice gave\n him the horrors. But he thanked\n her too. His good deed for the\n day. Maybe Carol would have\n him now, he thought.\n\n\n A voice shrilled, \"Miss Burton?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, dear?\"\n\n\n \"Aren't you going to call on\n Carolyn to act?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, I was forgetting.\n Come up here, Carolyn, come up,\n Doris. Carolyn and Doris, Mr.\n George, are studying how to act.\n They act people\n and\n animals.\n Who knows? Some day they, too,\n may be in the movies, just as you\n are, Mr. George. Wouldn't that\n be nice, children?\"",
"Palit said firmly, \"Be careful,\n and I won't be fearful. That's all\n there is to it.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be careful. After all, I\n shouldn't want us to lose these\n children. They're so exactly the\n kind we need. Look how inquiring\n they are, how unafraid, how\n quick to adapt to any circumstances—\"\n\n\n Miss Burton's voice said,\n \"Good gracious, children, what\n language\n are\n you using? Greek?\"\n\n\n They had been speaking too\n loud, they had been overheard.\n Palit and Manto stared at each\n other, and giggled coyly. Then,\n after a second to think, Palit\n said, \"Onay, Issmay Urtonbay!\"\n\n\n \"What?\"",
"\"Whatever you say, Manto. If\n you wish, we shall join the little\n ladies.\"\n\n\n \"We must have our story prepared\n first.\"\n\n\n Palit nodded, and the two men\n stepped under the shade of a\n tree whose long, drooping, leaf-covered\n branches formed a convenient\n screen. For a moment,\n the tree hid silence. Then there\n came from beneath the branches\n the chatter of girlish voices, and\n two little girls skipped merrily\n away. Miss Burton did not at\n first notice that now she had an\n additional two children in her\n charge.\n\n\n \"Do you think you will be able\n to keep your English straight?\"\n asked one of the new little girls.\n\n\n The other one smiled with\n amusement and at first did not\n answer. Then she began to skip\n around her companion and\n chant, \"I know a secret, I know\n a secret.\"",
"\"Sorry. Come on, let's go.\"\nThe lecture hall resounded\n with giggles. And beneath the\n giggles was a steady undercurrent\n of whispers, of girlish confidences\n exchanged, of girlish\n hopes that would now be fulfilled.\n Miss Burton's class was\n not the only one which had come\n to hear the famous actor-hunter\n describe his brave exploits. There\n were at least five others like it,\n and by some mistake, a class of\n boys, who also whispered to each\n other, in manly superiority, and\n pretended to find amusement in\n the presence of so many of the\n fairer sex.\n\n\n In this atmosphere of giggles\n and whispers, Manto and Palit\n could exchange confidences without\n being noticed. Palit said savagely,\n \"Why did you tell her that\n I could act too?\"",
"\"Now, children, I've warned\n you about that. You mustn't\n annoy him. Mr. George is a famous\n movie actor, and his time\n is valuable. It's very kind of him\n to offer to speak to us, especially\n when so many grown-up people\n are anxious to hear him, but\n we mustn't take advantage of his\n kindness.\"\n\n\n \"But he likes children, Miss\n Burton! My big sister read in a\n movie magazine where it said\n he's just crazy about them.\"\n\n\n \"I know, but—he's not in good\n health, children. They say he got\n jungle fever in Africa, where he\n was shooting all those lions, and\n rhinoceroses, and elephants for\n his new picture. That's why you\n mustn't bother him too much.\"\n\n\n \"But he looks so big and\n strong, Miss Burton. It wouldn't\n hurt him to sign an autograph!\"",
"Screams of exultation, shrill\n as ever, small hands beating\n enthusiastically to indicate joy.\n Thank God that's over with, he\n thought. Now for those drinks—and\n he didn't mean drink,\n singular. Talk of being useful,\n he'd certainly been useful now.\n He'd made those kids happy.\n What more can any reasonable\n person want?\nBut it wasn't over with. Another\n old lady had stepped up on\n the platform.\n\n\n \"Mr. George,\" she said, in a\n strangely affected voice, like that\n of the first dramatic teacher he\n had ever had, the one who had\n almost ruined his acting career.\n \"Mr. George, I can't tell you\n how happy you have made us all,\n young and old. Hasn't Mr.\n George made us happy, children?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Miss Burton!\" came the\n shrill scream.",
"\"And we feel that it would be\n no more than fair to repay you\n in some small measure for the\n pleasure you have given us.\n First, a 'Thank You' song by\n Frances Heller—\"\n\n\n He hadn't expected this, and\n he repressed a groan. Mercifully,\n the first song was short.\n He grinned the thanks he didn't\n feel. To think that he could take\n this, while sober as a judge!\n What strength of character,\n what will-power!\n\n\n Next, Miss Burton introduced\n another kid, who recited. And\n then, Miss Burton stood upright\n and recited herself.",
"\"I'm Doris Palit. I went with\n Carolyn to the bathroom—\"\nMiss Burton made a sound of\n annoyance. Imagine losing\n two\n children and not noticing it right\n away. The other teacher must\n be frantic by now, and serve her\n right for being so careless.\n\n\n \"All right, you may stay with\n us until we find a policeman—\"\n She interrupted herself. \"Frances,\n what are you giggling at\n now?\"\n\n\n \"It's Carolyn. She's making\n faces just like you!\"\n\n\n \"Really, Carolyn, that isn't at\n all nice!\"\n\n\n Carolyn's face altered itself in\n a hurry, so as to lose any resemblance\n to Miss Burton's. \"I'm\n sorry, Miss Burton, I didn't\n really mean to do anything\n wrong.\"",
"Frances shrilled triumphantly,\n \"It isn't Greek, Miss Burton, it's\n Latin—Pig-Latin. She said,\n 'No, Miss Burton.'\"\n\n\n \"Good heavens, what is Pig-Latin?\"\n\n\n \"It's a kind of way of talking\n where you talk kind of backwards.\n Like, you don't say,\n Me\n ,\n you say,\n Emay\n .\"\n\n\n \"You don't say,\n Yes\n , you say\n Esyay\n ,\" added another little girl.\n\n\n \"You don't say,\n You\n , you say,\n Ouyay\n . You don't say—\"\n\n\n \"All right, all right, I get the\n idea.\"\n\n\n \"You don't say—\""
],
[
"\"There should be happiness inside\n you at the thought of your\n doing a good deed. Not a drop,\n George, not a drop.\"\nThe two little girls drew apart\n from the others and began to\n whisper into each other's ears.\n The whispers were punctuated\n by giggles which made the entire\n childish conversation seem quite\n normal. But Palit was in no\n laughing mood. He said, in his\n own language, \"You're getting\n careless, Manto. You had no\n business imitating her expression.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Palit, but it was\n so suggestive. And I'm a very\n suggestible person.\"\n\n\n \"So am I. But I control myself.\"\n\n\n \"Still, if the temptation were\n great enough, I don't think you'd\n be able to resist either.\"\n\n\n \"The issues are important\n enough to make me resist.\"",
"\"Fine. How about you, Carolyn?\n You and your little friend,\n Doris. Can she act too?\"\n\n\n Carolyn giggled. \"Oh, yes, she\n can act very well. I can act like\n people. She can act like animals.\"\n The laughing, girlish eyes evaded\n a dirty look from the little\n friend. \"She can act like\n any\n kind of animal.\"\n\n\n \"She's certainly a talented\n child. But she seems so shy!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no,\" said Carolyn. \"She\n likes to be coaxed.\"\n\n\n \"She shouldn't be like that.\n Perhaps, Carolyn, you and Doris\n can do something together. And\n perhaps, too, Mr. George will be\n pleased to see that your teacher\n also has talent.\"\n\n\n \"You, Miss Burton?\"",
"Screams of exultation, shrill\n as ever, small hands beating\n enthusiastically to indicate joy.\n Thank God that's over with, he\n thought. Now for those drinks—and\n he didn't mean drink,\n singular. Talk of being useful,\n he'd certainly been useful now.\n He'd made those kids happy.\n What more can any reasonable\n person want?\nBut it wasn't over with. Another\n old lady had stepped up on\n the platform.\n\n\n \"Mr. George,\" she said, in a\n strangely affected voice, like that\n of the first dramatic teacher he\n had ever had, the one who had\n almost ruined his acting career.\n \"Mr. George, I can't tell you\n how happy you have made us all,\n young and old. Hasn't Mr.\n George made us happy, children?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Miss Burton!\" came the\n shrill scream.",
"\"That'll do,\" said Miss Burton\n firmly. \"Now, let's get along\n to the lion house. And please,\n children, do not make faces at\n the lions. How would you like to\n be in a cage and have people\n make faces at you? Always remember\n to be considerate to\n others.\"\n\n\n \"Even lions, Miss Burton?\"\n\n\n \"Even lions.\"\n\n\n \"But Mr. George shot lots of\n lions. Was he considerate of them\n too?\"\n\n\n \"There is no time for silly\n questions,\" said Miss Burton,\n with the same firmness. \"Come\n along.\"\n\n\n They all trouped after her,\n Palit and Manto bringing up the\n rear. Manto giggled, and whispered\n with amusement, \"That\n Pig-Latin business was quick\n thinking, Palit. But in fact, quite\n unnecessary. The things that you\n do to avoid being suspected!\"",
"THE HUNTERS\nBY WILLIAM MORRISON\nILLUSTRATED BY VAN DONGEN\nTo all who didn't know him, Curt George was a\n mighty hunter and actor. But this time he was\n up against others who could really act, and\n whose business was the hunting of whole worlds.\n\n\n There were thirty or more of\n the little girls, their ages ranging\n apparently from nine to\n eleven, all of them chirping\n away like a flock of chicks as\n they followed the old mother hen\n past the line of cages. \"Now,\n now, girls,\" called Miss Burton\n cheerily. \"Don't scatter. I can't\n keep my eye on you if you get\n too far away from me. You,\n Hilda, give me that water pistol.\n No, don't fill it up first at that\n fountain. And Frances, stop\n bouncing your ball. You'll lose it\n through the bars, and a polar\n bear may get it and not want to\n give it back.\"",
"That was the worst of all. He\n winced once, then bore up. You\n can get used even to torture, he\n told himself. An adult making a\n fool of herself is always more\n painful than a kid. And that\n affected elocutionist's voice gave\n him the horrors. But he thanked\n her too. His good deed for the\n day. Maybe Carol would have\n him now, he thought.\n\n\n A voice shrilled, \"Miss Burton?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, dear?\"\n\n\n \"Aren't you going to call on\n Carolyn to act?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, I was forgetting.\n Come up here, Carolyn, come up,\n Doris. Carolyn and Doris, Mr.\n George, are studying how to act.\n They act people\n and\n animals.\n Who knows? Some day they, too,\n may be in the movies, just as you\n are, Mr. George. Wouldn't that\n be nice, children?\"",
"\"Now, children, I've warned\n you about that. You mustn't\n annoy him. Mr. George is a famous\n movie actor, and his time\n is valuable. It's very kind of him\n to offer to speak to us, especially\n when so many grown-up people\n are anxious to hear him, but\n we mustn't take advantage of his\n kindness.\"\n\n\n \"But he likes children, Miss\n Burton! My big sister read in a\n movie magazine where it said\n he's just crazy about them.\"\n\n\n \"I know, but—he's not in good\n health, children. They say he got\n jungle fever in Africa, where he\n was shooting all those lions, and\n rhinoceroses, and elephants for\n his new picture. That's why you\n mustn't bother him too much.\"\n\n\n \"But he looks so big and\n strong, Miss Burton. It wouldn't\n hurt him to sign an autograph!\"",
"Miss Burton had an idea. \"I\n know what to do, children. If\n you can act animals—Mr. George\n has shown you what the hunter\n does; you show him what the\n lions do. Yes, Carolyn and Doris,\n you're going to be lions. You are\n waiting in your lairs, ready to\n pounce on the unwary hunter.\n Crouch now, behind that chair.\n Closer and closer he comes—you\n act it out, Mr. George, please,\n that's the way—ever closer, and\n now your muscles tighten for\n the spring, and you open\n your great, wide, red mouths\n in a great, great big roar—\"\n\n\n A deep and tremendous roar,\n as of thunder, crashed through\n the auditorium. A roar—and\n then, from the audience, an outburst\n of terrified screaming such\n as he had never heard. The\n bristles rose at the back of his\n neck, and his heart froze.",
"\"Whatever you say, Manto. If\n you wish, we shall join the little\n ladies.\"\n\n\n \"We must have our story prepared\n first.\"\n\n\n Palit nodded, and the two men\n stepped under the shade of a\n tree whose long, drooping, leaf-covered\n branches formed a convenient\n screen. For a moment,\n the tree hid silence. Then there\n came from beneath the branches\n the chatter of girlish voices, and\n two little girls skipped merrily\n away. Miss Burton did not at\n first notice that now she had an\n additional two children in her\n charge.\n\n\n \"Do you think you will be able\n to keep your English straight?\"\n asked one of the new little girls.\n\n\n The other one smiled with\n amusement and at first did not\n answer. Then she began to skip\n around her companion and\n chant, \"I know a secret, I know\n a secret.\"",
"\"Oh, yes, it would,\" asserted\n one little girl. \"He shakes. When\n he has an attack of fever, his\n hand shakes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Africa is a dangerous\n continent, and one never knows\n how the dangers will strike one,\"\n said Miss Burton complacently.\n \"So we must all remember how\n bravely Mr. George is fighting\n his misfortune, and do our best\n not to tire him out.\"\nIn the bright light that flooded\n the afternoon breakfast table,\n Curt George's handsome, manly\n face wore an expression of distress.\n He groaned dismally, and\n muttered, \"What a head I've got,\n what a head. How do you expect\n me to face that gang of kids\n without a drink to pick me up?\"",
"Miss Burton collected her\n brood. \"Come together, children,\n I have something to say to you.\n Soon it will be time to go in and\n hear Mr. George. Now, if Mr.\n George is so kind as to entertain\n us, don't you think that it's only\n proper for us to entertain him?\"\n\n\n \"We could put on our class\n play!\" yelled Barbara.\n\n\n \"Barbara's a fine one to talk,\"\n said Frances. \"She doesn't even\n remember her lines.\"\n\n\n \"No, children, we mustn't do\n anything we can't do well. That\n wouldn't make a good impression.\n And besides, there is no\n time for a play. Perhaps Barbara\n will sing—\"\n\n\n \"I can sing a 'Thank You'\n song,\" interrupted Frances.\n\n\n \"That would be nice.\"\n\n\n \"I can recite,\" added another\n little girl.",
"\"Oh, Miss Burton, please don't\n make her go home with a policeman.\n If she's going to be an\n actress, I'll bet she'd love to see\n Curt George!\"\n\n\n \"Well, after the way she's behaved,\n I don't know whether I\n should let her. I really don't.\"\n\n\n \"Please, Miss Burton, it was\n an accident. I won't do it again.\"\n\n\n \"All right, if you're good, and\n cause no trouble. But we still\n have plenty of time before seeing\n Mr. George. It's only two now,\n and we're not supposed to go to\n the lecture hall until four.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Burton,\" called Barbara\n Willman, \"do you think he'd give\n us his autograph?\"",
"\"I feel terrified. I don't know\n how I'm going to face those kids.\n If they were boys it wouldn't be\n so bad, but a bunch of little\n girls!\"\n\n\n \"They'll grow up to be your\n fans, if you're still alive five\n years from now. Meanwhile, into\n each life some rain must fall.\"\n\n\n \"You would talk of water,\n when you know how I feel.\"",
"\"Very good, Frances.\"\n\n\n Frances smirked at the approbation.\n \"I've been to the zoo\n lots of times,\" she said to the\n girl next to her. \"My father\n takes me.\"\n\n\n \"I wish my father would take\n me too,\" replied the other little\n girl, with an air of wistfulness.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask him to?\"\n Before the other little girl could\n answer, Frances paused, cocked\n her head slightly, and demanded,\n \"Who are you? You aren't in our\n class.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in Miss Hassel's class.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Hassel? Who is she? Is\n she in our school?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" said the other\n little girl uncertainly. \"I go to\n P. S. 77—\"",
"\"—with hardly enough energy\n to let them dress you in that\n hunter's outfit and photograph\n you as if you were shooting\n lions.\"\n\n\n \"You're so unforgiving, Carol.\n You don't have much use for me,\n do you—consciously, that is?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, Curt, no. I don't\n have much use for useless people.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not entirely useless. I\n earn you that ten per cent—\"\n\n\n \"I'd gladly forego that to see\n you sober.\"\n\n\n \"But it's your contempt for me\n that drives me to drink. And\n when I think of having to face\n those dear little kiddies with\n nothing inside me—\"",
"\"The women who swoon at you\n will swoon at anybody. Besides,\n I don't consider that making nitwits\n swoon is a useful occupation\n for a real man.\"\n\n\n \"How can I be useful, Carol?\n No one ever taught me how.\"\n\n\n \"Some people manage without\n being taught.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose I could think how\n if I had a drink inside me.\"\n\n\n \"Then you'll have to do without\n thinking.\"\n\n\n He came into the room again,\n powerful, manly, determined-looking.\n There was an expression\n in his eye which indicated\n courage without end, a courage\n that would enable him to brave\n the wrath of man, beast, or devil.\n\n\n \"How do I look?\"\n\n\n \"Your noble self, of course. A\n poor woman's edition of Rudolph\n Valentino.\"",
"Palit said firmly, \"Be careful,\n and I won't be fearful. That's all\n there is to it.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be careful. After all, I\n shouldn't want us to lose these\n children. They're so exactly the\n kind we need. Look how inquiring\n they are, how unafraid, how\n quick to adapt to any circumstances—\"\n\n\n Miss Burton's voice said,\n \"Good gracious, children, what\n language\n are\n you using? Greek?\"\n\n\n They had been speaking too\n loud, they had been overheard.\n Palit and Manto stared at each\n other, and giggled coyly. Then,\n after a second to think, Palit\n said, \"Onay, Issmay Urtonbay!\"\n\n\n \"What?\"",
"\"Oh, Miss Burton,\" screamed\n Frances. \"Here's a girl who isn't\n in our class! She got lost from\n her own class!\"\n\"Really?\" Miss Burton seemed\n rather pleased at the idea that\n some other teacher had been so\n careless as to lose one of her\n charges. \"What's your name,\n child?\"\n\n\n \"I'm Carolyn.\"\n\n\n \"Carolyn what?\"\n\n\n \"Carolyn Manto. Please, Miss\n Burton, I had to go to the bathroom,\n and then when I came\n out—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, I know.\"\n\n\n A shrill cry came from another\n section of her class. \"Oh, Miss\n Burton, here's another one who's\n lost!\"\n\n\n The other little girl was\n pushed forward. \"Now, who are\n you\n ?\" Miss Burton asked.",
"\"Still, I thought I saw your\n own face taking on a bit of her\n expression too.\"\n\n\n \"You are imagining things,\n Manto. Another thing, that mistake\n in starting to say you were\n two hundred years old—\"\n\n\n \"They would have thought it\n a joke. And I think I got out of\n that rather neatly.\"\n\n\n \"You like to skate on thin ice,\n don't you, Manto? Just as you\n did when you changed your\n height. You had no business\n shrinking right out in public like\n that.\"\n\n\n \"I did it skillfully. Not a\n single person noticed.\"\n\n\n \"\n I\n noticed.\"\n\n\n \"Don't quibble.\"\n\n\n \"I don't intend to. Some of\n these children have very sharp\n eyes. You'd be surprised at what\n they see.\"",
"\"Well, I'd like to know how\n you were brought up, if you\n don't know that it's wrong to\n mimic people to their faces. A\n big girl like you, too. How old\n are you, Carolyn?\"\n\n\n Carolyn shrank, she hoped imperceptibly,\n by an inch. \"I'm\n two—\"\n\n\n An outburst of shrill laughter.\n \"She's two years old, she's\n two years old!\"\n\n\n \"I was going to say, I'm\n to\n welve\n . Almost, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"Eleven years old,\" said Miss\n Burton. \"Old enough to know\n better.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Miss Burton. And\n honest, Miss Burton, I didn't\n mean anything, but I'm studying\n to be an actress, and I imitate\n people, like the actors you\n see on television—\""
],
[
"Facing him across the platform\n were two lions, tensed as\n if to leap. Where they had come\n from he didn't know, but there\n they were, eyes glaring, manes\n ruffled, more terrifying than any\n he had seen in Africa. There\n they were, with the threat of\n death and destruction in their\n fierce eyes, and here he was,\n terror and helplessness on his\n handsome, manly, and bloodless\n face, heart unfrozen now and\n pounding fiercely, knees melting,\n hands—\n\n\n Hands clutching an elephant\n gun. The thought was like a director's\n command. With calm efficiency,\n with all the precision of\n an actor playing a scene rehearsed\n a thousand times, the\n gun leaped to his shoulder, and\n now its own roar thundered out\n a challenge to the roaring of the\n wild beasts, shouted at them in\n its own accents of barking\n thunder.",
"\"That'll do,\" said Miss Burton\n firmly. \"Now, let's get along\n to the lion house. And please,\n children, do not make faces at\n the lions. How would you like to\n be in a cage and have people\n make faces at you? Always remember\n to be considerate to\n others.\"\n\n\n \"Even lions, Miss Burton?\"\n\n\n \"Even lions.\"\n\n\n \"But Mr. George shot lots of\n lions. Was he considerate of them\n too?\"\n\n\n \"There is no time for silly\n questions,\" said Miss Burton,\n with the same firmness. \"Come\n along.\"\n\n\n They all trouped after her,\n Palit and Manto bringing up the\n rear. Manto giggled, and whispered\n with amusement, \"That\n Pig-Latin business was quick\n thinking, Palit. But in fact, quite\n unnecessary. The things that you\n do to avoid being suspected!\"",
"\"Why, because it's the truth.\n You're a very good animal performer.\n You make a wonderful\n dragon, for instance. Go on,\n Palit, show her what a fine\n dragon you can—\"\n\n\n \"Stop it, you fool, before you\n cause trouble!\"\n\n\n \"Very well, Palit. Did I tempt\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Did you tempt me! You and\n your sense of humor!\"\n\n\n \"You and your lack of it! But\n let's not argue now, Palit. Here,\n I think, comes the lion-hunter.\n Let's scream, and be as properly\n excited as every one else is.\"\nMy God, he thought, how can\n they keep their voices so high\n so long? My eardrums hurt already.\n How do they stand a lifetime\n of it? Even an hour?",
"Miss Burton had an idea. \"I\n know what to do, children. If\n you can act animals—Mr. George\n has shown you what the hunter\n does; you show him what the\n lions do. Yes, Carolyn and Doris,\n you're going to be lions. You are\n waiting in your lairs, ready to\n pounce on the unwary hunter.\n Crouch now, behind that chair.\n Closer and closer he comes—you\n act it out, Mr. George, please,\n that's the way—ever closer, and\n now your muscles tighten for\n the spring, and you open\n your great, wide, red mouths\n in a great, great big roar—\"\n\n\n A deep and tremendous roar,\n as of thunder, crashed through\n the auditorium. A roar—and\n then, from the audience, an outburst\n of terrified screaming such\n as he had never heard. The\n bristles rose at the back of his\n neck, and his heart froze.",
"\"Perhaps you regard me, my\n friends, as a very lucky person.\n But when I recall some of the\n narrow escapes I have had, I\n don't agree with you. I remember\n once, when we were on the\n trail of a rogue elephant—\"\n\n\n He told the story of the rogue\n elephant, modestly granting a co-hero's\n role to his guide. Then\n another story illustrating the\n strange ways of lions. The elephant\n gun figured in still another\n tale, this time of a vicious\n rhinoceros. His audience was\n quiet now, breathless with interest,\n and he welcomed the respite\n from shrillness he had won\n for his ears.\n\n\n \"And now, my friends, it is\n time to say farewell.\" He actually\n looked sad and regretful.\n \"But it is my hope that I shall\n be able to see you again—\"",
"There was no better way to\n make herself inconspicuous. For\n some time, Miss Burton did not\n notice her.\nThe polar bears, the grizzlies,\n the penguins, the reptiles, all\n were left behind. At times the\n children scattered, but Miss Burton\n knew how to get them together\n again, and not one was\n lost.\n\n\n \"Here, children, is the building\n where the kangaroos live.\n Who knows where kangaroos\n come from?\"\n\n\n \"Australia!\" clanged the shrill\n chorus.\n\n\n \"That's right. And what other\n animals come from Australia?\"\n\n\n \"I know, Miss Burton!\" cried\n Frances, a dark-haired nine-year-old\n with a pair of glittering\n eyes that stared like a pair\n of critics from a small heart-shaped\n face. \"I've been here before.\n Wallabies and wombats!\"",
"The shrill screaming continued\n long after the echoes of the gun's\n speech had died away. Across\n the platform from him were two\n great bodies, the bodies of lions,\n and yet curiously unlike the\n beasts in some ways, now that\n they were dead and dissolving as\n if corroded by some invisible\n acid.\n\n\n Carol's hand was on his arm,\n Carol's thin and breathless voice\n shook as she said, \"A drink—all\n the drinks you want.\"\n\n\n \"One will do. And you.\"\n\n\n \"And me. I guess you're kind\n of—kind of useful after all.\"\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis e-text was produced from\n Space Science Fiction\n February 1953.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright\n on this publication was renewed.",
"\"Drunks don't attract attention.\n They're too ordinary.\"\n\n\n \"But a drunken lion hunter—that's\n something special.\" He\n went into the next room and began\n to change. \"Carol,\" he\n called. \"Do you like me?\"\n\n\n \"At times.\"\n\n\n \"Would you say that you liked\n me very much?\"\n\n\n \"When you're sober. Rarely.\"\n\n\n \"Love me?\"\n\n\n \"Once in a blue moon.\"\n\n\n \"What would I have to do for\n you to want to marry me?\"\n\n\n \"Amount to something.\"\n\n\n \"I like that. Don't you think I\n amount to something now?\n Women swoon at the sight of my\n face on the screen, and come to\n life again at the sound of my\n voice.\"",
"Manto said tolerantly, \"You're\n getting jittery, Palit. We've\n been away from home too long.\"\n\n\n \"I am not jittery in the least.\n But I believe in taking due care.\"\n\n\n \"What could possibly happen\n to us? If we were to announce\n to the children and the teacher,\n and to every one in this zoo, for\n that matter, exactly who and\n what we were, they wouldn't believe\n us. And even if they did,\n they wouldn't be able to act rapidly\n enough to harm us.\"\n\n\n \"You never can tell about such\n things. Wise—people—simply\n don't take unnecessary chances.\"\n\n\n \"I'll grant that you're my superior\n in such wisdom.\"",
"THE HUNTERS\nBY WILLIAM MORRISON\nILLUSTRATED BY VAN DONGEN\nTo all who didn't know him, Curt George was a\n mighty hunter and actor. But this time he was\n up against others who could really act, and\n whose business was the hunting of whole worlds.\n\n\n There were thirty or more of\n the little girls, their ages ranging\n apparently from nine to\n eleven, all of them chirping\n away like a flock of chicks as\n they followed the old mother hen\n past the line of cages. \"Now,\n now, girls,\" called Miss Burton\n cheerily. \"Don't scatter. I can't\n keep my eye on you if you get\n too far away from me. You,\n Hilda, give me that water pistol.\n No, don't fill it up first at that\n fountain. And Frances, stop\n bouncing your ball. You'll lose it\n through the bars, and a polar\n bear may get it and not want to\n give it back.\"",
"\"—with hardly enough energy\n to let them dress you in that\n hunter's outfit and photograph\n you as if you were shooting\n lions.\"\n\n\n \"You're so unforgiving, Carol.\n You don't have much use for me,\n do you—consciously, that is?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, Curt, no. I don't\n have much use for useless people.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not entirely useless. I\n earn you that ten per cent—\"\n\n\n \"I'd gladly forego that to see\n you sober.\"\n\n\n \"But it's your contempt for me\n that drives me to drink. And\n when I think of having to face\n those dear little kiddies with\n nothing inside me—\"",
"An assistant curator of some\n collection in the zoo, a flustered\n old woman, was introducing him.\n There were a few laudatory references\n to his great talents as an\n actor, and he managed to look\n properly modest as he listened.\n The remarks about his knowledge\n of wild and ferocious beasts\n were a little harder to take, but\n he took them. Then the old\n woman stepped back, and he was\n facing his fate alone.\n\n\n \"Children,\" he began. A pause,\n a bashful grin. \"Perhaps I\n should rather say, my friends.\n I'm not one to think of you as\n children. Some people think of\n me as a child myself, because I\n like to hunt, and have adventures.\n They think that such\n things are childish. But if they\n are, I'm glad to be a child. I'm\n glad to be one of you. Yes, I\n think I\n will\n call you my friends.",
"\"Because people are depending\n on you. You always want to call\n quits whenever you run into\n something you don't like. You\n may as well call quits to your\n contract if that's the way you\n feel.\"\n\n\n \"And to your ten per cent,\n darling.\"\n\n\n \"You think I'd mind that. I\n work for my ten per cent, Curt,\n sweetheart. I work too damn\n hard for that ten per cent.\"\n\n\n \"You can marry me and take\n it easy. Honest, Carol, if you\n treated me better, if you showed\n me I meant something to you,\n I'd give up drinking.\"\n\n\n She made a face. \"Don't talk\n nonsense. Take your outfit, and\n let's get ready to go. Unless you\n want to change here, and walk\n around dressed as a lion hunter.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I've walked around\n dressed as worse. A drunk.\"",
"Frances giggled. \"Oh, Miss\n Burton, do you think the polar\n bear would want to play catch?\"\n\n\n The two men who were looking\n on wore pleased smiles.\n \"Charming,\" said Manto. \"But\n somewhat unpredictable, despite\n all our experiences,\n muy amigo\n .\"\n\n\n \"No attempts at Spanish, Manto,\n not here. It calls attention to\n us. And you are not sure of the\n grammar anyway. You may find\n yourself saying things you do\n not intend.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry, Palit. It wasn't an attempt\n to show my skill, I assure\n you. It's that by now I have a\n tendency to confuse one language\n with another.\"\n\n\n \"I know. You were never a linguist.\n But about these interesting\n creatures—\"\n\n\n \"I suggest that they could\n stand investigation. It would be\n good to know how they think.\"",
"\"Go ahead,\" whispered Carol.\n \"You've seen the script—go into\n your act. Tell them what a hero\n you are. You have the odds in\n your favor to start with.\"\n\n\n \"My lovely looks,\" he said,\n with some bitterness.\n\n\n \"Lovely is the word for you.\n But forget that. If you're good—you'll\n get a drink afterwards.\"\n\n\n \"Will it be one of those occasions\n when you love me?\"\n\n\n \"If the moon turns blue.\"\n\n\n He strode to the front of the\n platform, an elephant gun swinging\n easily at his side, an easy\n grin radiating from his confident,\n rugged face. The cheers\n rose to a shrill fortissimo, but\n the grin did not vanish. What a\n great actor he really was, he told\n himself, to be able to pretend he\n liked this.",
"\"Sorry. Come on, let's go.\"\nThe lecture hall resounded\n with giggles. And beneath the\n giggles was a steady undercurrent\n of whispers, of girlish confidences\n exchanged, of girlish\n hopes that would now be fulfilled.\n Miss Burton's class was\n not the only one which had come\n to hear the famous actor-hunter\n describe his brave exploits. There\n were at least five others like it,\n and by some mistake, a class of\n boys, who also whispered to each\n other, in manly superiority, and\n pretended to find amusement in\n the presence of so many of the\n fairer sex.\n\n\n In this atmosphere of giggles\n and whispers, Manto and Palit\n could exchange confidences without\n being noticed. Palit said savagely,\n \"Why did you tell her that\n I could act too?\"",
"\"Whatever you say, Manto. If\n you wish, we shall join the little\n ladies.\"\n\n\n \"We must have our story prepared\n first.\"\n\n\n Palit nodded, and the two men\n stepped under the shade of a\n tree whose long, drooping, leaf-covered\n branches formed a convenient\n screen. For a moment,\n the tree hid silence. Then there\n came from beneath the branches\n the chatter of girlish voices, and\n two little girls skipped merrily\n away. Miss Burton did not at\n first notice that now she had an\n additional two children in her\n charge.\n\n\n \"Do you think you will be able\n to keep your English straight?\"\n asked one of the new little girls.\n\n\n The other one smiled with\n amusement and at first did not\n answer. Then she began to skip\n around her companion and\n chant, \"I know a secret, I know\n a secret.\"",
"\"Now, children, I've warned\n you about that. You mustn't\n annoy him. Mr. George is a famous\n movie actor, and his time\n is valuable. It's very kind of him\n to offer to speak to us, especially\n when so many grown-up people\n are anxious to hear him, but\n we mustn't take advantage of his\n kindness.\"\n\n\n \"But he likes children, Miss\n Burton! My big sister read in a\n movie magazine where it said\n he's just crazy about them.\"\n\n\n \"I know, but—he's not in good\n health, children. They say he got\n jungle fever in Africa, where he\n was shooting all those lions, and\n rhinoceroses, and elephants for\n his new picture. That's why you\n mustn't bother him too much.\"\n\n\n \"But he looks so big and\n strong, Miss Burton. It wouldn't\n hurt him to sign an autograph!\"",
"Palit said firmly, \"Be careful,\n and I won't be fearful. That's all\n there is to it.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be careful. After all, I\n shouldn't want us to lose these\n children. They're so exactly the\n kind we need. Look how inquiring\n they are, how unafraid, how\n quick to adapt to any circumstances—\"\n\n\n Miss Burton's voice said,\n \"Good gracious, children, what\n language\n are\n you using? Greek?\"\n\n\n They had been speaking too\n loud, they had been overheard.\n Palit and Manto stared at each\n other, and giggled coyly. Then,\n after a second to think, Palit\n said, \"Onay, Issmay Urtonbay!\"\n\n\n \"What?\"",
"Screams of exultation, shrill\n as ever, small hands beating\n enthusiastically to indicate joy.\n Thank God that's over with, he\n thought. Now for those drinks—and\n he didn't mean drink,\n singular. Talk of being useful,\n he'd certainly been useful now.\n He'd made those kids happy.\n What more can any reasonable\n person want?\nBut it wasn't over with. Another\n old lady had stepped up on\n the platform.\n\n\n \"Mr. George,\" she said, in a\n strangely affected voice, like that\n of the first dramatic teacher he\n had ever had, the one who had\n almost ruined his acting career.\n \"Mr. George, I can't tell you\n how happy you have made us all,\n young and old. Hasn't Mr.\n George made us happy, children?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Miss Burton!\" came the\n shrill scream."
],
[
"\"That'll do,\" said Miss Burton\n firmly. \"Now, let's get along\n to the lion house. And please,\n children, do not make faces at\n the lions. How would you like to\n be in a cage and have people\n make faces at you? Always remember\n to be considerate to\n others.\"\n\n\n \"Even lions, Miss Burton?\"\n\n\n \"Even lions.\"\n\n\n \"But Mr. George shot lots of\n lions. Was he considerate of them\n too?\"\n\n\n \"There is no time for silly\n questions,\" said Miss Burton,\n with the same firmness. \"Come\n along.\"\n\n\n They all trouped after her,\n Palit and Manto bringing up the\n rear. Manto giggled, and whispered\n with amusement, \"That\n Pig-Latin business was quick\n thinking, Palit. But in fact, quite\n unnecessary. The things that you\n do to avoid being suspected!\"",
"\"Now, children, I've warned\n you about that. You mustn't\n annoy him. Mr. George is a famous\n movie actor, and his time\n is valuable. It's very kind of him\n to offer to speak to us, especially\n when so many grown-up people\n are anxious to hear him, but\n we mustn't take advantage of his\n kindness.\"\n\n\n \"But he likes children, Miss\n Burton! My big sister read in a\n movie magazine where it said\n he's just crazy about them.\"\n\n\n \"I know, but—he's not in good\n health, children. They say he got\n jungle fever in Africa, where he\n was shooting all those lions, and\n rhinoceroses, and elephants for\n his new picture. That's why you\n mustn't bother him too much.\"\n\n\n \"But he looks so big and\n strong, Miss Burton. It wouldn't\n hurt him to sign an autograph!\"",
"That was the worst of all. He\n winced once, then bore up. You\n can get used even to torture, he\n told himself. An adult making a\n fool of herself is always more\n painful than a kid. And that\n affected elocutionist's voice gave\n him the horrors. But he thanked\n her too. His good deed for the\n day. Maybe Carol would have\n him now, he thought.\n\n\n A voice shrilled, \"Miss Burton?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, dear?\"\n\n\n \"Aren't you going to call on\n Carolyn to act?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, I was forgetting.\n Come up here, Carolyn, come up,\n Doris. Carolyn and Doris, Mr.\n George, are studying how to act.\n They act people\n and\n animals.\n Who knows? Some day they, too,\n may be in the movies, just as you\n are, Mr. George. Wouldn't that\n be nice, children?\"",
"Miss Burton had an idea. \"I\n know what to do, children. If\n you can act animals—Mr. George\n has shown you what the hunter\n does; you show him what the\n lions do. Yes, Carolyn and Doris,\n you're going to be lions. You are\n waiting in your lairs, ready to\n pounce on the unwary hunter.\n Crouch now, behind that chair.\n Closer and closer he comes—you\n act it out, Mr. George, please,\n that's the way—ever closer, and\n now your muscles tighten for\n the spring, and you open\n your great, wide, red mouths\n in a great, great big roar—\"\n\n\n A deep and tremendous roar,\n as of thunder, crashed through\n the auditorium. A roar—and\n then, from the audience, an outburst\n of terrified screaming such\n as he had never heard. The\n bristles rose at the back of his\n neck, and his heart froze.",
"Screams of exultation, shrill\n as ever, small hands beating\n enthusiastically to indicate joy.\n Thank God that's over with, he\n thought. Now for those drinks—and\n he didn't mean drink,\n singular. Talk of being useful,\n he'd certainly been useful now.\n He'd made those kids happy.\n What more can any reasonable\n person want?\nBut it wasn't over with. Another\n old lady had stepped up on\n the platform.\n\n\n \"Mr. George,\" she said, in a\n strangely affected voice, like that\n of the first dramatic teacher he\n had ever had, the one who had\n almost ruined his acting career.\n \"Mr. George, I can't tell you\n how happy you have made us all,\n young and old. Hasn't Mr.\n George made us happy, children?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Miss Burton!\" came the\n shrill scream.",
"\"There should be happiness inside\n you at the thought of your\n doing a good deed. Not a drop,\n George, not a drop.\"\nThe two little girls drew apart\n from the others and began to\n whisper into each other's ears.\n The whispers were punctuated\n by giggles which made the entire\n childish conversation seem quite\n normal. But Palit was in no\n laughing mood. He said, in his\n own language, \"You're getting\n careless, Manto. You had no\n business imitating her expression.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Palit, but it was\n so suggestive. And I'm a very\n suggestible person.\"\n\n\n \"So am I. But I control myself.\"\n\n\n \"Still, if the temptation were\n great enough, I don't think you'd\n be able to resist either.\"\n\n\n \"The issues are important\n enough to make me resist.\"",
"\"Oh, yes, it would,\" asserted\n one little girl. \"He shakes. When\n he has an attack of fever, his\n hand shakes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Africa is a dangerous\n continent, and one never knows\n how the dangers will strike one,\"\n said Miss Burton complacently.\n \"So we must all remember how\n bravely Mr. George is fighting\n his misfortune, and do our best\n not to tire him out.\"\nIn the bright light that flooded\n the afternoon breakfast table,\n Curt George's handsome, manly\n face wore an expression of distress.\n He groaned dismally, and\n muttered, \"What a head I've got,\n what a head. How do you expect\n me to face that gang of kids\n without a drink to pick me up?\"",
"\"Oh, Miss Burton, please don't\n make her go home with a policeman.\n If she's going to be an\n actress, I'll bet she'd love to see\n Curt George!\"\n\n\n \"Well, after the way she's behaved,\n I don't know whether I\n should let her. I really don't.\"\n\n\n \"Please, Miss Burton, it was\n an accident. I won't do it again.\"\n\n\n \"All right, if you're good, and\n cause no trouble. But we still\n have plenty of time before seeing\n Mr. George. It's only two now,\n and we're not supposed to go to\n the lecture hall until four.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Burton,\" called Barbara\n Willman, \"do you think he'd give\n us his autograph?\"",
"\"—with hardly enough energy\n to let them dress you in that\n hunter's outfit and photograph\n you as if you were shooting\n lions.\"\n\n\n \"You're so unforgiving, Carol.\n You don't have much use for me,\n do you—consciously, that is?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, Curt, no. I don't\n have much use for useless people.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not entirely useless. I\n earn you that ten per cent—\"\n\n\n \"I'd gladly forego that to see\n you sober.\"\n\n\n \"But it's your contempt for me\n that drives me to drink. And\n when I think of having to face\n those dear little kiddies with\n nothing inside me—\"",
"\"The women who swoon at you\n will swoon at anybody. Besides,\n I don't consider that making nitwits\n swoon is a useful occupation\n for a real man.\"\n\n\n \"How can I be useful, Carol?\n No one ever taught me how.\"\n\n\n \"Some people manage without\n being taught.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose I could think how\n if I had a drink inside me.\"\n\n\n \"Then you'll have to do without\n thinking.\"\n\n\n He came into the room again,\n powerful, manly, determined-looking.\n There was an expression\n in his eye which indicated\n courage without end, a courage\n that would enable him to brave\n the wrath of man, beast, or devil.\n\n\n \"How do I look?\"\n\n\n \"Your noble self, of course. A\n poor woman's edition of Rudolph\n Valentino.\"",
"THE HUNTERS\nBY WILLIAM MORRISON\nILLUSTRATED BY VAN DONGEN\nTo all who didn't know him, Curt George was a\n mighty hunter and actor. But this time he was\n up against others who could really act, and\n whose business was the hunting of whole worlds.\n\n\n There were thirty or more of\n the little girls, their ages ranging\n apparently from nine to\n eleven, all of them chirping\n away like a flock of chicks as\n they followed the old mother hen\n past the line of cages. \"Now,\n now, girls,\" called Miss Burton\n cheerily. \"Don't scatter. I can't\n keep my eye on you if you get\n too far away from me. You,\n Hilda, give me that water pistol.\n No, don't fill it up first at that\n fountain. And Frances, stop\n bouncing your ball. You'll lose it\n through the bars, and a polar\n bear may get it and not want to\n give it back.\"",
"\"Because people are depending\n on you. You always want to call\n quits whenever you run into\n something you don't like. You\n may as well call quits to your\n contract if that's the way you\n feel.\"\n\n\n \"And to your ten per cent,\n darling.\"\n\n\n \"You think I'd mind that. I\n work for my ten per cent, Curt,\n sweetheart. I work too damn\n hard for that ten per cent.\"\n\n\n \"You can marry me and take\n it easy. Honest, Carol, if you\n treated me better, if you showed\n me I meant something to you,\n I'd give up drinking.\"\n\n\n She made a face. \"Don't talk\n nonsense. Take your outfit, and\n let's get ready to go. Unless you\n want to change here, and walk\n around dressed as a lion hunter.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I've walked around\n dressed as worse. A drunk.\"",
"\"Why, because it's the truth.\n You're a very good animal performer.\n You make a wonderful\n dragon, for instance. Go on,\n Palit, show her what a fine\n dragon you can—\"\n\n\n \"Stop it, you fool, before you\n cause trouble!\"\n\n\n \"Very well, Palit. Did I tempt\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Did you tempt me! You and\n your sense of humor!\"\n\n\n \"You and your lack of it! But\n let's not argue now, Palit. Here,\n I think, comes the lion-hunter.\n Let's scream, and be as properly\n excited as every one else is.\"\nMy God, he thought, how can\n they keep their voices so high\n so long? My eardrums hurt already.\n How do they stand a lifetime\n of it? Even an hour?",
"\"Fine. How about you, Carolyn?\n You and your little friend,\n Doris. Can she act too?\"\n\n\n Carolyn giggled. \"Oh, yes, she\n can act very well. I can act like\n people. She can act like animals.\"\n The laughing, girlish eyes evaded\n a dirty look from the little\n friend. \"She can act like\n any\n kind of animal.\"\n\n\n \"She's certainly a talented\n child. But she seems so shy!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no,\" said Carolyn. \"She\n likes to be coaxed.\"\n\n\n \"She shouldn't be like that.\n Perhaps, Carolyn, you and Doris\n can do something together. And\n perhaps, too, Mr. George will be\n pleased to see that your teacher\n also has talent.\"\n\n\n \"You, Miss Burton?\"",
"\"Drunks don't attract attention.\n They're too ordinary.\"\n\n\n \"But a drunken lion hunter—that's\n something special.\" He\n went into the next room and began\n to change. \"Carol,\" he\n called. \"Do you like me?\"\n\n\n \"At times.\"\n\n\n \"Would you say that you liked\n me very much?\"\n\n\n \"When you're sober. Rarely.\"\n\n\n \"Love me?\"\n\n\n \"Once in a blue moon.\"\n\n\n \"What would I have to do for\n you to want to marry me?\"\n\n\n \"Amount to something.\"\n\n\n \"I like that. Don't you think I\n amount to something now?\n Women swoon at the sight of my\n face on the screen, and come to\n life again at the sound of my\n voice.\"",
"\"Go ahead,\" whispered Carol.\n \"You've seen the script—go into\n your act. Tell them what a hero\n you are. You have the odds in\n your favor to start with.\"\n\n\n \"My lovely looks,\" he said,\n with some bitterness.\n\n\n \"Lovely is the word for you.\n But forget that. If you're good—you'll\n get a drink afterwards.\"\n\n\n \"Will it be one of those occasions\n when you love me?\"\n\n\n \"If the moon turns blue.\"\n\n\n He strode to the front of the\n platform, an elephant gun swinging\n easily at his side, an easy\n grin radiating from his confident,\n rugged face. The cheers\n rose to a shrill fortissimo, but\n the grin did not vanish. What a\n great actor he really was, he told\n himself, to be able to pretend he\n liked this.",
"\"Perhaps you regard me, my\n friends, as a very lucky person.\n But when I recall some of the\n narrow escapes I have had, I\n don't agree with you. I remember\n once, when we were on the\n trail of a rogue elephant—\"\n\n\n He told the story of the rogue\n elephant, modestly granting a co-hero's\n role to his guide. Then\n another story illustrating the\n strange ways of lions. The elephant\n gun figured in still another\n tale, this time of a vicious\n rhinoceros. His audience was\n quiet now, breathless with interest,\n and he welcomed the respite\n from shrillness he had won\n for his ears.\n\n\n \"And now, my friends, it is\n time to say farewell.\" He actually\n looked sad and regretful.\n \"But it is my hope that I shall\n be able to see you again—\"",
"\"Sorry. Come on, let's go.\"\nThe lecture hall resounded\n with giggles. And beneath the\n giggles was a steady undercurrent\n of whispers, of girlish confidences\n exchanged, of girlish\n hopes that would now be fulfilled.\n Miss Burton's class was\n not the only one which had come\n to hear the famous actor-hunter\n describe his brave exploits. There\n were at least five others like it,\n and by some mistake, a class of\n boys, who also whispered to each\n other, in manly superiority, and\n pretended to find amusement in\n the presence of so many of the\n fairer sex.\n\n\n In this atmosphere of giggles\n and whispers, Manto and Palit\n could exchange confidences without\n being noticed. Palit said savagely,\n \"Why did you tell her that\n I could act too?\"",
"Miss Burton collected her\n brood. \"Come together, children,\n I have something to say to you.\n Soon it will be time to go in and\n hear Mr. George. Now, if Mr.\n George is so kind as to entertain\n us, don't you think that it's only\n proper for us to entertain him?\"\n\n\n \"We could put on our class\n play!\" yelled Barbara.\n\n\n \"Barbara's a fine one to talk,\"\n said Frances. \"She doesn't even\n remember her lines.\"\n\n\n \"No, children, we mustn't do\n anything we can't do well. That\n wouldn't make a good impression.\n And besides, there is no\n time for a play. Perhaps Barbara\n will sing—\"\n\n\n \"I can sing a 'Thank You'\n song,\" interrupted Frances.\n\n\n \"That would be nice.\"\n\n\n \"I can recite,\" added another\n little girl.",
"Palit said firmly, \"Be careful,\n and I won't be fearful. That's all\n there is to it.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be careful. After all, I\n shouldn't want us to lose these\n children. They're so exactly the\n kind we need. Look how inquiring\n they are, how unafraid, how\n quick to adapt to any circumstances—\"\n\n\n Miss Burton's voice said,\n \"Good gracious, children, what\n language\n are\n you using? Greek?\"\n\n\n They had been speaking too\n loud, they had been overheard.\n Palit and Manto stared at each\n other, and giggled coyly. Then,\n after a second to think, Palit\n said, \"Onay, Issmay Urtonbay!\"\n\n\n \"What?\""
],
[
"\"Fine. How about you, Carolyn?\n You and your little friend,\n Doris. Can she act too?\"\n\n\n Carolyn giggled. \"Oh, yes, she\n can act very well. I can act like\n people. She can act like animals.\"\n The laughing, girlish eyes evaded\n a dirty look from the little\n friend. \"She can act like\n any\n kind of animal.\"\n\n\n \"She's certainly a talented\n child. But she seems so shy!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no,\" said Carolyn. \"She\n likes to be coaxed.\"\n\n\n \"She shouldn't be like that.\n Perhaps, Carolyn, you and Doris\n can do something together. And\n perhaps, too, Mr. George will be\n pleased to see that your teacher\n also has talent.\"\n\n\n \"You, Miss Burton?\"",
"That was the worst of all. He\n winced once, then bore up. You\n can get used even to torture, he\n told himself. An adult making a\n fool of herself is always more\n painful than a kid. And that\n affected elocutionist's voice gave\n him the horrors. But he thanked\n her too. His good deed for the\n day. Maybe Carol would have\n him now, he thought.\n\n\n A voice shrilled, \"Miss Burton?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, dear?\"\n\n\n \"Aren't you going to call on\n Carolyn to act?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, I was forgetting.\n Come up here, Carolyn, come up,\n Doris. Carolyn and Doris, Mr.\n George, are studying how to act.\n They act people\n and\n animals.\n Who knows? Some day they, too,\n may be in the movies, just as you\n are, Mr. George. Wouldn't that\n be nice, children?\"",
"\"The women who swoon at you\n will swoon at anybody. Besides,\n I don't consider that making nitwits\n swoon is a useful occupation\n for a real man.\"\n\n\n \"How can I be useful, Carol?\n No one ever taught me how.\"\n\n\n \"Some people manage without\n being taught.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose I could think how\n if I had a drink inside me.\"\n\n\n \"Then you'll have to do without\n thinking.\"\n\n\n He came into the room again,\n powerful, manly, determined-looking.\n There was an expression\n in his eye which indicated\n courage without end, a courage\n that would enable him to brave\n the wrath of man, beast, or devil.\n\n\n \"How do I look?\"\n\n\n \"Your noble self, of course. A\n poor woman's edition of Rudolph\n Valentino.\"",
"\"Drunks don't attract attention.\n They're too ordinary.\"\n\n\n \"But a drunken lion hunter—that's\n something special.\" He\n went into the next room and began\n to change. \"Carol,\" he\n called. \"Do you like me?\"\n\n\n \"At times.\"\n\n\n \"Would you say that you liked\n me very much?\"\n\n\n \"When you're sober. Rarely.\"\n\n\n \"Love me?\"\n\n\n \"Once in a blue moon.\"\n\n\n \"What would I have to do for\n you to want to marry me?\"\n\n\n \"Amount to something.\"\n\n\n \"I like that. Don't you think I\n amount to something now?\n Women swoon at the sight of my\n face on the screen, and come to\n life again at the sound of my\n voice.\"",
"\"Because people are depending\n on you. You always want to call\n quits whenever you run into\n something you don't like. You\n may as well call quits to your\n contract if that's the way you\n feel.\"\n\n\n \"And to your ten per cent,\n darling.\"\n\n\n \"You think I'd mind that. I\n work for my ten per cent, Curt,\n sweetheart. I work too damn\n hard for that ten per cent.\"\n\n\n \"You can marry me and take\n it easy. Honest, Carol, if you\n treated me better, if you showed\n me I meant something to you,\n I'd give up drinking.\"\n\n\n She made a face. \"Don't talk\n nonsense. Take your outfit, and\n let's get ready to go. Unless you\n want to change here, and walk\n around dressed as a lion hunter.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I've walked around\n dressed as worse. A drunk.\"",
"\"Go ahead,\" whispered Carol.\n \"You've seen the script—go into\n your act. Tell them what a hero\n you are. You have the odds in\n your favor to start with.\"\n\n\n \"My lovely looks,\" he said,\n with some bitterness.\n\n\n \"Lovely is the word for you.\n But forget that. If you're good—you'll\n get a drink afterwards.\"\n\n\n \"Will it be one of those occasions\n when you love me?\"\n\n\n \"If the moon turns blue.\"\n\n\n He strode to the front of the\n platform, an elephant gun swinging\n easily at his side, an easy\n grin radiating from his confident,\n rugged face. The cheers\n rose to a shrill fortissimo, but\n the grin did not vanish. What a\n great actor he really was, he told\n himself, to be able to pretend he\n liked this.",
"\"—with hardly enough energy\n to let them dress you in that\n hunter's outfit and photograph\n you as if you were shooting\n lions.\"\n\n\n \"You're so unforgiving, Carol.\n You don't have much use for me,\n do you—consciously, that is?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, Curt, no. I don't\n have much use for useless people.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not entirely useless. I\n earn you that ten per cent—\"\n\n\n \"I'd gladly forego that to see\n you sober.\"\n\n\n \"But it's your contempt for me\n that drives me to drink. And\n when I think of having to face\n those dear little kiddies with\n nothing inside me—\"",
"\"There should be happiness inside\n you at the thought of your\n doing a good deed. Not a drop,\n George, not a drop.\"\nThe two little girls drew apart\n from the others and began to\n whisper into each other's ears.\n The whispers were punctuated\n by giggles which made the entire\n childish conversation seem quite\n normal. But Palit was in no\n laughing mood. He said, in his\n own language, \"You're getting\n careless, Manto. You had no\n business imitating her expression.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Palit, but it was\n so suggestive. And I'm a very\n suggestible person.\"\n\n\n \"So am I. But I control myself.\"\n\n\n \"Still, if the temptation were\n great enough, I don't think you'd\n be able to resist either.\"\n\n\n \"The issues are important\n enough to make me resist.\"",
"\"You've had your drink,\" said\n Carol. She was slim, attractive,\n and efficient. At the moment she\n was being more efficient than attractive,\n and she could sense his\n resentment. \"That's all you get.\n Now, lay off, and try to be\n reasonably sober, for a change.\"\n\n\n \"But those kids! They'll squeal\n and giggle—\"\n\n\n \"They're about the only audience\n in the world that won't\n spot you as a drunk. God knows\n where I could find any one else\n who'd believe that your hand\n shakes because of fever.\"\n\n\n \"I know that you're looking\n out for my best interests, Carol.\n But one more drink wouldn't\n hurt me.\"\n\n\n She said wearily, but firmly, \"I\n don't argue with drunks, Curt. I\n just go ahead and protect them\n from themselves. No drinks.\"\n\n\n \"Afterwards?\"",
"\"Well, I'd like to know how\n you were brought up, if you\n don't know that it's wrong to\n mimic people to their faces. A\n big girl like you, too. How old\n are you, Carolyn?\"\n\n\n Carolyn shrank, she hoped imperceptibly,\n by an inch. \"I'm\n two—\"\n\n\n An outburst of shrill laughter.\n \"She's two years old, she's\n two years old!\"\n\n\n \"I was going to say, I'm\n to\n welve\n . Almost, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"Eleven years old,\" said Miss\n Burton. \"Old enough to know\n better.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Miss Burton. And\n honest, Miss Burton, I didn't\n mean anything, but I'm studying\n to be an actress, and I imitate\n people, like the actors you\n see on television—\"",
"Miss Burton had an idea. \"I\n know what to do, children. If\n you can act animals—Mr. George\n has shown you what the hunter\n does; you show him what the\n lions do. Yes, Carolyn and Doris,\n you're going to be lions. You are\n waiting in your lairs, ready to\n pounce on the unwary hunter.\n Crouch now, behind that chair.\n Closer and closer he comes—you\n act it out, Mr. George, please,\n that's the way—ever closer, and\n now your muscles tighten for\n the spring, and you open\n your great, wide, red mouths\n in a great, great big roar—\"\n\n\n A deep and tremendous roar,\n as of thunder, crashed through\n the auditorium. A roar—and\n then, from the audience, an outburst\n of terrified screaming such\n as he had never heard. The\n bristles rose at the back of his\n neck, and his heart froze.",
"\"That'll do,\" said Miss Burton\n firmly. \"Now, let's get along\n to the lion house. And please,\n children, do not make faces at\n the lions. How would you like to\n be in a cage and have people\n make faces at you? Always remember\n to be considerate to\n others.\"\n\n\n \"Even lions, Miss Burton?\"\n\n\n \"Even lions.\"\n\n\n \"But Mr. George shot lots of\n lions. Was he considerate of them\n too?\"\n\n\n \"There is no time for silly\n questions,\" said Miss Burton,\n with the same firmness. \"Come\n along.\"\n\n\n They all trouped after her,\n Palit and Manto bringing up the\n rear. Manto giggled, and whispered\n with amusement, \"That\n Pig-Latin business was quick\n thinking, Palit. But in fact, quite\n unnecessary. The things that you\n do to avoid being suspected!\"",
"\"Oh, Miss Burton, please don't\n make her go home with a policeman.\n If she's going to be an\n actress, I'll bet she'd love to see\n Curt George!\"\n\n\n \"Well, after the way she's behaved,\n I don't know whether I\n should let her. I really don't.\"\n\n\n \"Please, Miss Burton, it was\n an accident. I won't do it again.\"\n\n\n \"All right, if you're good, and\n cause no trouble. But we still\n have plenty of time before seeing\n Mr. George. It's only two now,\n and we're not supposed to go to\n the lecture hall until four.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Burton,\" called Barbara\n Willman, \"do you think he'd give\n us his autograph?\"",
"\"Now, children, I've warned\n you about that. You mustn't\n annoy him. Mr. George is a famous\n movie actor, and his time\n is valuable. It's very kind of him\n to offer to speak to us, especially\n when so many grown-up people\n are anxious to hear him, but\n we mustn't take advantage of his\n kindness.\"\n\n\n \"But he likes children, Miss\n Burton! My big sister read in a\n movie magazine where it said\n he's just crazy about them.\"\n\n\n \"I know, but—he's not in good\n health, children. They say he got\n jungle fever in Africa, where he\n was shooting all those lions, and\n rhinoceroses, and elephants for\n his new picture. That's why you\n mustn't bother him too much.\"\n\n\n \"But he looks so big and\n strong, Miss Burton. It wouldn't\n hurt him to sign an autograph!\"",
"\"I can't watch you the way a\n mother watches a child.\"\n\n\n The contemptuous reply sent\n his mind off on a new tack. \"You\n could if we were married.\"\n\n\n \"I've never believed in marrying\n weak characters to reform\n them.\"\n\n\n \"But if I proved to you that I\n could change—\"\n\n\n \"Prove it first, and I'll consider\n your proposal afterwards.\"\n\n\n \"You certainly are a cold-blooded\n creature, Carol. But I\n suppose that in your profession\n you have to be.\"\n\n\n \"Cold, suspicious, nasty—and\n reliable. It's inevitable when I\n must deal with such warm-hearted,\n trusting, and unreliable\n clients.\"\n\n\n He watched her move about\n the room, clearing away the\n dishes from his meager breakfast.\n \"What are you humming,\n Carol?\"",
"\"Come, come, mustn't be shy.\n Your friend says that you act\n very nicely indeed. Can't want to\n go on the stage and still be shy.\n Now, do you know any movie\n scenes? Shirley Temple used to\n be a good little actress, I remember.\n Can you do any scenes that\n she does?\"\nThe silence was getting to be\n embarrassing. And Carol said he\n didn't amount to anything, he\n never did anything useful. Why,\n if thanks to his being here this\n afternoon, those kids lost the\n ambition to go on the stage, the\n whole human race would have\n cause to be grateful to him. To\n him, and to Miss Burton. She'd\n kill ambition in anybody.",
"Screams of exultation, shrill\n as ever, small hands beating\n enthusiastically to indicate joy.\n Thank God that's over with, he\n thought. Now for those drinks—and\n he didn't mean drink,\n singular. Talk of being useful,\n he'd certainly been useful now.\n He'd made those kids happy.\n What more can any reasonable\n person want?\nBut it wasn't over with. Another\n old lady had stepped up on\n the platform.\n\n\n \"Mr. George,\" she said, in a\n strangely affected voice, like that\n of the first dramatic teacher he\n had ever had, the one who had\n almost ruined his acting career.\n \"Mr. George, I can't tell you\n how happy you have made us all,\n young and old. Hasn't Mr.\n George made us happy, children?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Miss Burton!\" came the\n shrill scream.",
"THE HUNTERS\nBY WILLIAM MORRISON\nILLUSTRATED BY VAN DONGEN\nTo all who didn't know him, Curt George was a\n mighty hunter and actor. But this time he was\n up against others who could really act, and\n whose business was the hunting of whole worlds.\n\n\n There were thirty or more of\n the little girls, their ages ranging\n apparently from nine to\n eleven, all of them chirping\n away like a flock of chicks as\n they followed the old mother hen\n past the line of cages. \"Now,\n now, girls,\" called Miss Burton\n cheerily. \"Don't scatter. I can't\n keep my eye on you if you get\n too far away from me. You,\n Hilda, give me that water pistol.\n No, don't fill it up first at that\n fountain. And Frances, stop\n bouncing your ball. You'll lose it\n through the bars, and a polar\n bear may get it and not want to\n give it back.\"",
"\"Oh, Miss Burton,\" screamed\n Frances. \"Here's a girl who isn't\n in our class! She got lost from\n her own class!\"\n\"Really?\" Miss Burton seemed\n rather pleased at the idea that\n some other teacher had been so\n careless as to lose one of her\n charges. \"What's your name,\n child?\"\n\n\n \"I'm Carolyn.\"\n\n\n \"Carolyn what?\"\n\n\n \"Carolyn Manto. Please, Miss\n Burton, I had to go to the bathroom,\n and then when I came\n out—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, I know.\"\n\n\n A shrill cry came from another\n section of her class. \"Oh, Miss\n Burton, here's another one who's\n lost!\"\n\n\n The other little girl was\n pushed forward. \"Now, who are\n you\n ?\" Miss Burton asked.",
"Miss Burton collected her\n brood. \"Come together, children,\n I have something to say to you.\n Soon it will be time to go in and\n hear Mr. George. Now, if Mr.\n George is so kind as to entertain\n us, don't you think that it's only\n proper for us to entertain him?\"\n\n\n \"We could put on our class\n play!\" yelled Barbara.\n\n\n \"Barbara's a fine one to talk,\"\n said Frances. \"She doesn't even\n remember her lines.\"\n\n\n \"No, children, we mustn't do\n anything we can't do well. That\n wouldn't make a good impression.\n And besides, there is no\n time for a play. Perhaps Barbara\n will sing—\"\n\n\n \"I can sing a 'Thank You'\n song,\" interrupted Frances.\n\n\n \"That would be nice.\"\n\n\n \"I can recite,\" added another\n little girl."
],
[
"\"Now, children, I've warned\n you about that. You mustn't\n annoy him. Mr. George is a famous\n movie actor, and his time\n is valuable. It's very kind of him\n to offer to speak to us, especially\n when so many grown-up people\n are anxious to hear him, but\n we mustn't take advantage of his\n kindness.\"\n\n\n \"But he likes children, Miss\n Burton! My big sister read in a\n movie magazine where it said\n he's just crazy about them.\"\n\n\n \"I know, but—he's not in good\n health, children. They say he got\n jungle fever in Africa, where he\n was shooting all those lions, and\n rhinoceroses, and elephants for\n his new picture. That's why you\n mustn't bother him too much.\"\n\n\n \"But he looks so big and\n strong, Miss Burton. It wouldn't\n hurt him to sign an autograph!\"",
"Screams of exultation, shrill\n as ever, small hands beating\n enthusiastically to indicate joy.\n Thank God that's over with, he\n thought. Now for those drinks—and\n he didn't mean drink,\n singular. Talk of being useful,\n he'd certainly been useful now.\n He'd made those kids happy.\n What more can any reasonable\n person want?\nBut it wasn't over with. Another\n old lady had stepped up on\n the platform.\n\n\n \"Mr. George,\" she said, in a\n strangely affected voice, like that\n of the first dramatic teacher he\n had ever had, the one who had\n almost ruined his acting career.\n \"Mr. George, I can't tell you\n how happy you have made us all,\n young and old. Hasn't Mr.\n George made us happy, children?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Miss Burton!\" came the\n shrill scream.",
"That was the worst of all. He\n winced once, then bore up. You\n can get used even to torture, he\n told himself. An adult making a\n fool of herself is always more\n painful than a kid. And that\n affected elocutionist's voice gave\n him the horrors. But he thanked\n her too. His good deed for the\n day. Maybe Carol would have\n him now, he thought.\n\n\n A voice shrilled, \"Miss Burton?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, dear?\"\n\n\n \"Aren't you going to call on\n Carolyn to act?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, I was forgetting.\n Come up here, Carolyn, come up,\n Doris. Carolyn and Doris, Mr.\n George, are studying how to act.\n They act people\n and\n animals.\n Who knows? Some day they, too,\n may be in the movies, just as you\n are, Mr. George. Wouldn't that\n be nice, children?\"",
"\"That'll do,\" said Miss Burton\n firmly. \"Now, let's get along\n to the lion house. And please,\n children, do not make faces at\n the lions. How would you like to\n be in a cage and have people\n make faces at you? Always remember\n to be considerate to\n others.\"\n\n\n \"Even lions, Miss Burton?\"\n\n\n \"Even lions.\"\n\n\n \"But Mr. George shot lots of\n lions. Was he considerate of them\n too?\"\n\n\n \"There is no time for silly\n questions,\" said Miss Burton,\n with the same firmness. \"Come\n along.\"\n\n\n They all trouped after her,\n Palit and Manto bringing up the\n rear. Manto giggled, and whispered\n with amusement, \"That\n Pig-Latin business was quick\n thinking, Palit. But in fact, quite\n unnecessary. The things that you\n do to avoid being suspected!\"",
"Miss Burton had an idea. \"I\n know what to do, children. If\n you can act animals—Mr. George\n has shown you what the hunter\n does; you show him what the\n lions do. Yes, Carolyn and Doris,\n you're going to be lions. You are\n waiting in your lairs, ready to\n pounce on the unwary hunter.\n Crouch now, behind that chair.\n Closer and closer he comes—you\n act it out, Mr. George, please,\n that's the way—ever closer, and\n now your muscles tighten for\n the spring, and you open\n your great, wide, red mouths\n in a great, great big roar—\"\n\n\n A deep and tremendous roar,\n as of thunder, crashed through\n the auditorium. A roar—and\n then, from the audience, an outburst\n of terrified screaming such\n as he had never heard. The\n bristles rose at the back of his\n neck, and his heart froze.",
"\"Oh, Miss Burton, please don't\n make her go home with a policeman.\n If she's going to be an\n actress, I'll bet she'd love to see\n Curt George!\"\n\n\n \"Well, after the way she's behaved,\n I don't know whether I\n should let her. I really don't.\"\n\n\n \"Please, Miss Burton, it was\n an accident. I won't do it again.\"\n\n\n \"All right, if you're good, and\n cause no trouble. But we still\n have plenty of time before seeing\n Mr. George. It's only two now,\n and we're not supposed to go to\n the lecture hall until four.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Burton,\" called Barbara\n Willman, \"do you think he'd give\n us his autograph?\"",
"\"—with hardly enough energy\n to let them dress you in that\n hunter's outfit and photograph\n you as if you were shooting\n lions.\"\n\n\n \"You're so unforgiving, Carol.\n You don't have much use for me,\n do you—consciously, that is?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, Curt, no. I don't\n have much use for useless people.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not entirely useless. I\n earn you that ten per cent—\"\n\n\n \"I'd gladly forego that to see\n you sober.\"\n\n\n \"But it's your contempt for me\n that drives me to drink. And\n when I think of having to face\n those dear little kiddies with\n nothing inside me—\"",
"\"Drunks don't attract attention.\n They're too ordinary.\"\n\n\n \"But a drunken lion hunter—that's\n something special.\" He\n went into the next room and began\n to change. \"Carol,\" he\n called. \"Do you like me?\"\n\n\n \"At times.\"\n\n\n \"Would you say that you liked\n me very much?\"\n\n\n \"When you're sober. Rarely.\"\n\n\n \"Love me?\"\n\n\n \"Once in a blue moon.\"\n\n\n \"What would I have to do for\n you to want to marry me?\"\n\n\n \"Amount to something.\"\n\n\n \"I like that. Don't you think I\n amount to something now?\n Women swoon at the sight of my\n face on the screen, and come to\n life again at the sound of my\n voice.\"",
"\"There should be happiness inside\n you at the thought of your\n doing a good deed. Not a drop,\n George, not a drop.\"\nThe two little girls drew apart\n from the others and began to\n whisper into each other's ears.\n The whispers were punctuated\n by giggles which made the entire\n childish conversation seem quite\n normal. But Palit was in no\n laughing mood. He said, in his\n own language, \"You're getting\n careless, Manto. You had no\n business imitating her expression.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Palit, but it was\n so suggestive. And I'm a very\n suggestible person.\"\n\n\n \"So am I. But I control myself.\"\n\n\n \"Still, if the temptation were\n great enough, I don't think you'd\n be able to resist either.\"\n\n\n \"The issues are important\n enough to make me resist.\"",
"\"Because people are depending\n on you. You always want to call\n quits whenever you run into\n something you don't like. You\n may as well call quits to your\n contract if that's the way you\n feel.\"\n\n\n \"And to your ten per cent,\n darling.\"\n\n\n \"You think I'd mind that. I\n work for my ten per cent, Curt,\n sweetheart. I work too damn\n hard for that ten per cent.\"\n\n\n \"You can marry me and take\n it easy. Honest, Carol, if you\n treated me better, if you showed\n me I meant something to you,\n I'd give up drinking.\"\n\n\n She made a face. \"Don't talk\n nonsense. Take your outfit, and\n let's get ready to go. Unless you\n want to change here, and walk\n around dressed as a lion hunter.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I've walked around\n dressed as worse. A drunk.\"",
"\"Perhaps you regard me, my\n friends, as a very lucky person.\n But when I recall some of the\n narrow escapes I have had, I\n don't agree with you. I remember\n once, when we were on the\n trail of a rogue elephant—\"\n\n\n He told the story of the rogue\n elephant, modestly granting a co-hero's\n role to his guide. Then\n another story illustrating the\n strange ways of lions. The elephant\n gun figured in still another\n tale, this time of a vicious\n rhinoceros. His audience was\n quiet now, breathless with interest,\n and he welcomed the respite\n from shrillness he had won\n for his ears.\n\n\n \"And now, my friends, it is\n time to say farewell.\" He actually\n looked sad and regretful.\n \"But it is my hope that I shall\n be able to see you again—\"",
"\"Why, because it's the truth.\n You're a very good animal performer.\n You make a wonderful\n dragon, for instance. Go on,\n Palit, show her what a fine\n dragon you can—\"\n\n\n \"Stop it, you fool, before you\n cause trouble!\"\n\n\n \"Very well, Palit. Did I tempt\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Did you tempt me! You and\n your sense of humor!\"\n\n\n \"You and your lack of it! But\n let's not argue now, Palit. Here,\n I think, comes the lion-hunter.\n Let's scream, and be as properly\n excited as every one else is.\"\nMy God, he thought, how can\n they keep their voices so high\n so long? My eardrums hurt already.\n How do they stand a lifetime\n of it? Even an hour?",
"THE HUNTERS\nBY WILLIAM MORRISON\nILLUSTRATED BY VAN DONGEN\nTo all who didn't know him, Curt George was a\n mighty hunter and actor. But this time he was\n up against others who could really act, and\n whose business was the hunting of whole worlds.\n\n\n There were thirty or more of\n the little girls, their ages ranging\n apparently from nine to\n eleven, all of them chirping\n away like a flock of chicks as\n they followed the old mother hen\n past the line of cages. \"Now,\n now, girls,\" called Miss Burton\n cheerily. \"Don't scatter. I can't\n keep my eye on you if you get\n too far away from me. You,\n Hilda, give me that water pistol.\n No, don't fill it up first at that\n fountain. And Frances, stop\n bouncing your ball. You'll lose it\n through the bars, and a polar\n bear may get it and not want to\n give it back.\"",
"An assistant curator of some\n collection in the zoo, a flustered\n old woman, was introducing him.\n There were a few laudatory references\n to his great talents as an\n actor, and he managed to look\n properly modest as he listened.\n The remarks about his knowledge\n of wild and ferocious beasts\n were a little harder to take, but\n he took them. Then the old\n woman stepped back, and he was\n facing his fate alone.\n\n\n \"Children,\" he began. A pause,\n a bashful grin. \"Perhaps I\n should rather say, my friends.\n I'm not one to think of you as\n children. Some people think of\n me as a child myself, because I\n like to hunt, and have adventures.\n They think that such\n things are childish. But if they\n are, I'm glad to be a child. I'm\n glad to be one of you. Yes, I\n think I\n will\n call you my friends.",
"\"Oh, yes, it would,\" asserted\n one little girl. \"He shakes. When\n he has an attack of fever, his\n hand shakes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Africa is a dangerous\n continent, and one never knows\n how the dangers will strike one,\"\n said Miss Burton complacently.\n \"So we must all remember how\n bravely Mr. George is fighting\n his misfortune, and do our best\n not to tire him out.\"\nIn the bright light that flooded\n the afternoon breakfast table,\n Curt George's handsome, manly\n face wore an expression of distress.\n He groaned dismally, and\n muttered, \"What a head I've got,\n what a head. How do you expect\n me to face that gang of kids\n without a drink to pick me up?\"",
"\"The women who swoon at you\n will swoon at anybody. Besides,\n I don't consider that making nitwits\n swoon is a useful occupation\n for a real man.\"\n\n\n \"How can I be useful, Carol?\n No one ever taught me how.\"\n\n\n \"Some people manage without\n being taught.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose I could think how\n if I had a drink inside me.\"\n\n\n \"Then you'll have to do without\n thinking.\"\n\n\n He came into the room again,\n powerful, manly, determined-looking.\n There was an expression\n in his eye which indicated\n courage without end, a courage\n that would enable him to brave\n the wrath of man, beast, or devil.\n\n\n \"How do I look?\"\n\n\n \"Your noble self, of course. A\n poor woman's edition of Rudolph\n Valentino.\"",
"\"I feel terrified. I don't know\n how I'm going to face those kids.\n If they were boys it wouldn't be\n so bad, but a bunch of little\n girls!\"\n\n\n \"They'll grow up to be your\n fans, if you're still alive five\n years from now. Meanwhile, into\n each life some rain must fall.\"\n\n\n \"You would talk of water,\n when you know how I feel.\"",
"\"Go ahead,\" whispered Carol.\n \"You've seen the script—go into\n your act. Tell them what a hero\n you are. You have the odds in\n your favor to start with.\"\n\n\n \"My lovely looks,\" he said,\n with some bitterness.\n\n\n \"Lovely is the word for you.\n But forget that. If you're good—you'll\n get a drink afterwards.\"\n\n\n \"Will it be one of those occasions\n when you love me?\"\n\n\n \"If the moon turns blue.\"\n\n\n He strode to the front of the\n platform, an elephant gun swinging\n easily at his side, an easy\n grin radiating from his confident,\n rugged face. The cheers\n rose to a shrill fortissimo, but\n the grin did not vanish. What a\n great actor he really was, he told\n himself, to be able to pretend he\n liked this.",
"\"Come, come, mustn't be shy.\n Your friend says that you act\n very nicely indeed. Can't want to\n go on the stage and still be shy.\n Now, do you know any movie\n scenes? Shirley Temple used to\n be a good little actress, I remember.\n Can you do any scenes that\n she does?\"\nThe silence was getting to be\n embarrassing. And Carol said he\n didn't amount to anything, he\n never did anything useful. Why,\n if thanks to his being here this\n afternoon, those kids lost the\n ambition to go on the stage, the\n whole human race would have\n cause to be grateful to him. To\n him, and to Miss Burton. She'd\n kill ambition in anybody.",
"Miss Burton coughed modestly.\n \"Yes, children, I never told you,\n but I was once ambitious to be\n an actress too. I studied dramatics,\n and really, I was quite\n good at it. I was told that if I\n persevered I might actually be\n famous. Just think, your teacher\n might actually have been a famous\n actress! However, in my\n day, there were many coarse people\n on the stage, and the life of\n the theater was not attractive—but\n perhaps we'd better not\n speak of that. At any rate, I\n know the principles of the dramatic\n art very well.\"\n\"God knows what I'll have to\n go through,\" said Curt. \"And I\n don't see how I can take it\n sober.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see how they can take\n you drunk,\" replied Carol.\n\n\n \"Why go through with it at\n all? Why not call the whole thing\n quits?\""
],
[
"\"Well, I'd like to know how\n you were brought up, if you\n don't know that it's wrong to\n mimic people to their faces. A\n big girl like you, too. How old\n are you, Carolyn?\"\n\n\n Carolyn shrank, she hoped imperceptibly,\n by an inch. \"I'm\n two—\"\n\n\n An outburst of shrill laughter.\n \"She's two years old, she's\n two years old!\"\n\n\n \"I was going to say, I'm\n to\n welve\n . Almost, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"Eleven years old,\" said Miss\n Burton. \"Old enough to know\n better.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Miss Burton. And\n honest, Miss Burton, I didn't\n mean anything, but I'm studying\n to be an actress, and I imitate\n people, like the actors you\n see on television—\"",
"\"Fine. How about you, Carolyn?\n You and your little friend,\n Doris. Can she act too?\"\n\n\n Carolyn giggled. \"Oh, yes, she\n can act very well. I can act like\n people. She can act like animals.\"\n The laughing, girlish eyes evaded\n a dirty look from the little\n friend. \"She can act like\n any\n kind of animal.\"\n\n\n \"She's certainly a talented\n child. But she seems so shy!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no,\" said Carolyn. \"She\n likes to be coaxed.\"\n\n\n \"She shouldn't be like that.\n Perhaps, Carolyn, you and Doris\n can do something together. And\n perhaps, too, Mr. George will be\n pleased to see that your teacher\n also has talent.\"\n\n\n \"You, Miss Burton?\"",
"\"You've had your drink,\" said\n Carol. She was slim, attractive,\n and efficient. At the moment she\n was being more efficient than attractive,\n and she could sense his\n resentment. \"That's all you get.\n Now, lay off, and try to be\n reasonably sober, for a change.\"\n\n\n \"But those kids! They'll squeal\n and giggle—\"\n\n\n \"They're about the only audience\n in the world that won't\n spot you as a drunk. God knows\n where I could find any one else\n who'd believe that your hand\n shakes because of fever.\"\n\n\n \"I know that you're looking\n out for my best interests, Carol.\n But one more drink wouldn't\n hurt me.\"\n\n\n She said wearily, but firmly, \"I\n don't argue with drunks, Curt. I\n just go ahead and protect them\n from themselves. No drinks.\"\n\n\n \"Afterwards?\"",
"That was the worst of all. He\n winced once, then bore up. You\n can get used even to torture, he\n told himself. An adult making a\n fool of herself is always more\n painful than a kid. And that\n affected elocutionist's voice gave\n him the horrors. But he thanked\n her too. His good deed for the\n day. Maybe Carol would have\n him now, he thought.\n\n\n A voice shrilled, \"Miss Burton?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, dear?\"\n\n\n \"Aren't you going to call on\n Carolyn to act?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, I was forgetting.\n Come up here, Carolyn, come up,\n Doris. Carolyn and Doris, Mr.\n George, are studying how to act.\n They act people\n and\n animals.\n Who knows? Some day they, too,\n may be in the movies, just as you\n are, Mr. George. Wouldn't that\n be nice, children?\"",
"\"I'm Doris Palit. I went with\n Carolyn to the bathroom—\"\nMiss Burton made a sound of\n annoyance. Imagine losing\n two\n children and not noticing it right\n away. The other teacher must\n be frantic by now, and serve her\n right for being so careless.\n\n\n \"All right, you may stay with\n us until we find a policeman—\"\n She interrupted herself. \"Frances,\n what are you giggling at\n now?\"\n\n\n \"It's Carolyn. She's making\n faces just like you!\"\n\n\n \"Really, Carolyn, that isn't at\n all nice!\"\n\n\n Carolyn's face altered itself in\n a hurry, so as to lose any resemblance\n to Miss Burton's. \"I'm\n sorry, Miss Burton, I didn't\n really mean to do anything\n wrong.\"",
"\"—with hardly enough energy\n to let them dress you in that\n hunter's outfit and photograph\n you as if you were shooting\n lions.\"\n\n\n \"You're so unforgiving, Carol.\n You don't have much use for me,\n do you—consciously, that is?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, Curt, no. I don't\n have much use for useless people.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not entirely useless. I\n earn you that ten per cent—\"\n\n\n \"I'd gladly forego that to see\n you sober.\"\n\n\n \"But it's your contempt for me\n that drives me to drink. And\n when I think of having to face\n those dear little kiddies with\n nothing inside me—\"",
"\"Because people are depending\n on you. You always want to call\n quits whenever you run into\n something you don't like. You\n may as well call quits to your\n contract if that's the way you\n feel.\"\n\n\n \"And to your ten per cent,\n darling.\"\n\n\n \"You think I'd mind that. I\n work for my ten per cent, Curt,\n sweetheart. I work too damn\n hard for that ten per cent.\"\n\n\n \"You can marry me and take\n it easy. Honest, Carol, if you\n treated me better, if you showed\n me I meant something to you,\n I'd give up drinking.\"\n\n\n She made a face. \"Don't talk\n nonsense. Take your outfit, and\n let's get ready to go. Unless you\n want to change here, and walk\n around dressed as a lion hunter.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I've walked around\n dressed as worse. A drunk.\"",
"\"Oh, Miss Burton,\" screamed\n Frances. \"Here's a girl who isn't\n in our class! She got lost from\n her own class!\"\n\"Really?\" Miss Burton seemed\n rather pleased at the idea that\n some other teacher had been so\n careless as to lose one of her\n charges. \"What's your name,\n child?\"\n\n\n \"I'm Carolyn.\"\n\n\n \"Carolyn what?\"\n\n\n \"Carolyn Manto. Please, Miss\n Burton, I had to go to the bathroom,\n and then when I came\n out—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, I know.\"\n\n\n A shrill cry came from another\n section of her class. \"Oh, Miss\n Burton, here's another one who's\n lost!\"\n\n\n The other little girl was\n pushed forward. \"Now, who are\n you\n ?\" Miss Burton asked.",
"\"Come, come, mustn't be shy.\n Your friend says that you act\n very nicely indeed. Can't want to\n go on the stage and still be shy.\n Now, do you know any movie\n scenes? Shirley Temple used to\n be a good little actress, I remember.\n Can you do any scenes that\n she does?\"\nThe silence was getting to be\n embarrassing. And Carol said he\n didn't amount to anything, he\n never did anything useful. Why,\n if thanks to his being here this\n afternoon, those kids lost the\n ambition to go on the stage, the\n whole human race would have\n cause to be grateful to him. To\n him, and to Miss Burton. She'd\n kill ambition in anybody.",
"\"Go ahead,\" whispered Carol.\n \"You've seen the script—go into\n your act. Tell them what a hero\n you are. You have the odds in\n your favor to start with.\"\n\n\n \"My lovely looks,\" he said,\n with some bitterness.\n\n\n \"Lovely is the word for you.\n But forget that. If you're good—you'll\n get a drink afterwards.\"\n\n\n \"Will it be one of those occasions\n when you love me?\"\n\n\n \"If the moon turns blue.\"\n\n\n He strode to the front of the\n platform, an elephant gun swinging\n easily at his side, an easy\n grin radiating from his confident,\n rugged face. The cheers\n rose to a shrill fortissimo, but\n the grin did not vanish. What a\n great actor he really was, he told\n himself, to be able to pretend he\n liked this.",
"\"Oh, Miss Burton, please don't\n make her go home with a policeman.\n If she's going to be an\n actress, I'll bet she'd love to see\n Curt George!\"\n\n\n \"Well, after the way she's behaved,\n I don't know whether I\n should let her. I really don't.\"\n\n\n \"Please, Miss Burton, it was\n an accident. I won't do it again.\"\n\n\n \"All right, if you're good, and\n cause no trouble. But we still\n have plenty of time before seeing\n Mr. George. It's only two now,\n and we're not supposed to go to\n the lecture hall until four.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Burton,\" called Barbara\n Willman, \"do you think he'd give\n us his autograph?\"",
"Miss Burton coughed modestly.\n \"Yes, children, I never told you,\n but I was once ambitious to be\n an actress too. I studied dramatics,\n and really, I was quite\n good at it. I was told that if I\n persevered I might actually be\n famous. Just think, your teacher\n might actually have been a famous\n actress! However, in my\n day, there were many coarse people\n on the stage, and the life of\n the theater was not attractive—but\n perhaps we'd better not\n speak of that. At any rate, I\n know the principles of the dramatic\n art very well.\"\n\"God knows what I'll have to\n go through,\" said Curt. \"And I\n don't see how I can take it\n sober.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see how they can take\n you drunk,\" replied Carol.\n\n\n \"Why go through with it at\n all? Why not call the whole thing\n quits?\"",
"\"I can't watch you the way a\n mother watches a child.\"\n\n\n The contemptuous reply sent\n his mind off on a new tack. \"You\n could if we were married.\"\n\n\n \"I've never believed in marrying\n weak characters to reform\n them.\"\n\n\n \"But if I proved to you that I\n could change—\"\n\n\n \"Prove it first, and I'll consider\n your proposal afterwards.\"\n\n\n \"You certainly are a cold-blooded\n creature, Carol. But I\n suppose that in your profession\n you have to be.\"\n\n\n \"Cold, suspicious, nasty—and\n reliable. It's inevitable when I\n must deal with such warm-hearted,\n trusting, and unreliable\n clients.\"\n\n\n He watched her move about\n the room, clearing away the\n dishes from his meager breakfast.\n \"What are you humming,\n Carol?\"",
"\"Still, I thought I saw your\n own face taking on a bit of her\n expression too.\"\n\n\n \"You are imagining things,\n Manto. Another thing, that mistake\n in starting to say you were\n two hundred years old—\"\n\n\n \"They would have thought it\n a joke. And I think I got out of\n that rather neatly.\"\n\n\n \"You like to skate on thin ice,\n don't you, Manto? Just as you\n did when you changed your\n height. You had no business\n shrinking right out in public like\n that.\"\n\n\n \"I did it skillfully. Not a\n single person noticed.\"\n\n\n \"\n I\n noticed.\"\n\n\n \"Don't quibble.\"\n\n\n \"I don't intend to. Some of\n these children have very sharp\n eyes. You'd be surprised at what\n they see.\"",
"\"The women who swoon at you\n will swoon at anybody. Besides,\n I don't consider that making nitwits\n swoon is a useful occupation\n for a real man.\"\n\n\n \"How can I be useful, Carol?\n No one ever taught me how.\"\n\n\n \"Some people manage without\n being taught.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose I could think how\n if I had a drink inside me.\"\n\n\n \"Then you'll have to do without\n thinking.\"\n\n\n He came into the room again,\n powerful, manly, determined-looking.\n There was an expression\n in his eye which indicated\n courage without end, a courage\n that would enable him to brave\n the wrath of man, beast, or devil.\n\n\n \"How do I look?\"\n\n\n \"Your noble self, of course. A\n poor woman's edition of Rudolph\n Valentino.\"",
"\"Drunks don't attract attention.\n They're too ordinary.\"\n\n\n \"But a drunken lion hunter—that's\n something special.\" He\n went into the next room and began\n to change. \"Carol,\" he\n called. \"Do you like me?\"\n\n\n \"At times.\"\n\n\n \"Would you say that you liked\n me very much?\"\n\n\n \"When you're sober. Rarely.\"\n\n\n \"Love me?\"\n\n\n \"Once in a blue moon.\"\n\n\n \"What would I have to do for\n you to want to marry me?\"\n\n\n \"Amount to something.\"\n\n\n \"I like that. Don't you think I\n amount to something now?\n Women swoon at the sight of my\n face on the screen, and come to\n life again at the sound of my\n voice.\"",
"\"Very good, Frances.\"\n\n\n Frances smirked at the approbation.\n \"I've been to the zoo\n lots of times,\" she said to the\n girl next to her. \"My father\n takes me.\"\n\n\n \"I wish my father would take\n me too,\" replied the other little\n girl, with an air of wistfulness.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask him to?\"\n Before the other little girl could\n answer, Frances paused, cocked\n her head slightly, and demanded,\n \"Who are you? You aren't in our\n class.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in Miss Hassel's class.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Hassel? Who is she? Is\n she in our school?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" said the other\n little girl uncertainly. \"I go to\n P. S. 77—\"",
"Screams of exultation, shrill\n as ever, small hands beating\n enthusiastically to indicate joy.\n Thank God that's over with, he\n thought. Now for those drinks—and\n he didn't mean drink,\n singular. Talk of being useful,\n he'd certainly been useful now.\n He'd made those kids happy.\n What more can any reasonable\n person want?\nBut it wasn't over with. Another\n old lady had stepped up on\n the platform.\n\n\n \"Mr. George,\" she said, in a\n strangely affected voice, like that\n of the first dramatic teacher he\n had ever had, the one who had\n almost ruined his acting career.\n \"Mr. George, I can't tell you\n how happy you have made us all,\n young and old. Hasn't Mr.\n George made us happy, children?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Miss Burton!\" came the\n shrill scream.",
"The shrill screaming continued\n long after the echoes of the gun's\n speech had died away. Across\n the platform from him were two\n great bodies, the bodies of lions,\n and yet curiously unlike the\n beasts in some ways, now that\n they were dead and dissolving as\n if corroded by some invisible\n acid.\n\n\n Carol's hand was on his arm,\n Carol's thin and breathless voice\n shook as she said, \"A drink—all\n the drinks you want.\"\n\n\n \"One will do. And you.\"\n\n\n \"And me. I guess you're kind\n of—kind of useful after all.\"\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis e-text was produced from\n Space Science Fiction\n February 1953.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright\n on this publication was renewed.",
"Miss Burton had an idea. \"I\n know what to do, children. If\n you can act animals—Mr. George\n has shown you what the hunter\n does; you show him what the\n lions do. Yes, Carolyn and Doris,\n you're going to be lions. You are\n waiting in your lairs, ready to\n pounce on the unwary hunter.\n Crouch now, behind that chair.\n Closer and closer he comes—you\n act it out, Mr. George, please,\n that's the way—ever closer, and\n now your muscles tighten for\n the spring, and you open\n your great, wide, red mouths\n in a great, great big roar—\"\n\n\n A deep and tremendous roar,\n as of thunder, crashed through\n the auditorium. A roar—and\n then, from the audience, an outburst\n of terrified screaming such\n as he had never heard. The\n bristles rose at the back of his\n neck, and his heart froze."
],
[
"Manto said tolerantly, \"You're\n getting jittery, Palit. We've\n been away from home too long.\"\n\n\n \"I am not jittery in the least.\n But I believe in taking due care.\"\n\n\n \"What could possibly happen\n to us? If we were to announce\n to the children and the teacher,\n and to every one in this zoo, for\n that matter, exactly who and\n what we were, they wouldn't believe\n us. And even if they did,\n they wouldn't be able to act rapidly\n enough to harm us.\"\n\n\n \"You never can tell about such\n things. Wise—people—simply\n don't take unnecessary chances.\"\n\n\n \"I'll grant that you're my superior\n in such wisdom.\"",
"\"That'll do,\" said Miss Burton\n firmly. \"Now, let's get along\n to the lion house. And please,\n children, do not make faces at\n the lions. How would you like to\n be in a cage and have people\n make faces at you? Always remember\n to be considerate to\n others.\"\n\n\n \"Even lions, Miss Burton?\"\n\n\n \"Even lions.\"\n\n\n \"But Mr. George shot lots of\n lions. Was he considerate of them\n too?\"\n\n\n \"There is no time for silly\n questions,\" said Miss Burton,\n with the same firmness. \"Come\n along.\"\n\n\n They all trouped after her,\n Palit and Manto bringing up the\n rear. Manto giggled, and whispered\n with amusement, \"That\n Pig-Latin business was quick\n thinking, Palit. But in fact, quite\n unnecessary. The things that you\n do to avoid being suspected!\"",
"\"Sorry. Come on, let's go.\"\nThe lecture hall resounded\n with giggles. And beneath the\n giggles was a steady undercurrent\n of whispers, of girlish confidences\n exchanged, of girlish\n hopes that would now be fulfilled.\n Miss Burton's class was\n not the only one which had come\n to hear the famous actor-hunter\n describe his brave exploits. There\n were at least five others like it,\n and by some mistake, a class of\n boys, who also whispered to each\n other, in manly superiority, and\n pretended to find amusement in\n the presence of so many of the\n fairer sex.\n\n\n In this atmosphere of giggles\n and whispers, Manto and Palit\n could exchange confidences without\n being noticed. Palit said savagely,\n \"Why did you tell her that\n I could act too?\"",
"\"There should be happiness inside\n you at the thought of your\n doing a good deed. Not a drop,\n George, not a drop.\"\nThe two little girls drew apart\n from the others and began to\n whisper into each other's ears.\n The whispers were punctuated\n by giggles which made the entire\n childish conversation seem quite\n normal. But Palit was in no\n laughing mood. He said, in his\n own language, \"You're getting\n careless, Manto. You had no\n business imitating her expression.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Palit, but it was\n so suggestive. And I'm a very\n suggestible person.\"\n\n\n \"So am I. But I control myself.\"\n\n\n \"Still, if the temptation were\n great enough, I don't think you'd\n be able to resist either.\"\n\n\n \"The issues are important\n enough to make me resist.\"",
"\"The chance of being discovered.\n Here we stumble on this\n place quite by accident. No one\n at home knows about it, no one\n so much as suspects that it exists.\n We must get back and report—and\n you do all sorts of silly\n things which may reveal what\n we are, and lead these people to\n suspect their danger.\"\nThis time, Manto's giggle was\n no longer mere camouflage, but\n expressed to a certain degree\n how he felt. \"They cannot possibly\n suspect. We have been all\n over the world, we have taken\n many forms and adapted ourselves\n to many customs, and no\n one has suspected. And even if\n danger really threatened, it\n would be easy to escape. I could\n take the form of the school\n teacher herself, of a policeman,\n of any one in authority. However,\n at present there is not the\n slightest shadow of danger. So,\n Palit, you had better stop being\n fearful.\"",
"Palit said firmly, \"Be careful,\n and I won't be fearful. That's all\n there is to it.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be careful. After all, I\n shouldn't want us to lose these\n children. They're so exactly the\n kind we need. Look how inquiring\n they are, how unafraid, how\n quick to adapt to any circumstances—\"\n\n\n Miss Burton's voice said,\n \"Good gracious, children, what\n language\n are\n you using? Greek?\"\n\n\n They had been speaking too\n loud, they had been overheard.\n Palit and Manto stared at each\n other, and giggled coyly. Then,\n after a second to think, Palit\n said, \"Onay, Issmay Urtonbay!\"\n\n\n \"What?\"",
"\"Whatever you say, Manto. If\n you wish, we shall join the little\n ladies.\"\n\n\n \"We must have our story prepared\n first.\"\n\n\n Palit nodded, and the two men\n stepped under the shade of a\n tree whose long, drooping, leaf-covered\n branches formed a convenient\n screen. For a moment,\n the tree hid silence. Then there\n came from beneath the branches\n the chatter of girlish voices, and\n two little girls skipped merrily\n away. Miss Burton did not at\n first notice that now she had an\n additional two children in her\n charge.\n\n\n \"Do you think you will be able\n to keep your English straight?\"\n asked one of the new little girls.\n\n\n The other one smiled with\n amusement and at first did not\n answer. Then she began to skip\n around her companion and\n chant, \"I know a secret, I know\n a secret.\"",
"\"Why, because it's the truth.\n You're a very good animal performer.\n You make a wonderful\n dragon, for instance. Go on,\n Palit, show her what a fine\n dragon you can—\"\n\n\n \"Stop it, you fool, before you\n cause trouble!\"\n\n\n \"Very well, Palit. Did I tempt\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Did you tempt me! You and\n your sense of humor!\"\n\n\n \"You and your lack of it! But\n let's not argue now, Palit. Here,\n I think, comes the lion-hunter.\n Let's scream, and be as properly\n excited as every one else is.\"\nMy God, he thought, how can\n they keep their voices so high\n so long? My eardrums hurt already.\n How do they stand a lifetime\n of it? Even an hour?",
"\"All right,\" conceded Palit,\n grudgingly.\nSo they stayed, and out of\n some twigs and leaves they\n shaped the necessary coins with\n which to buy peanuts, and popcorn,\n and ice cream, and other\n delicacies favored by the young.\n Manto wanted to win easy popularity\n by treating a few of the\n other children, but Palit put his\n girlish foot down. No use arousing\n suspicion. Even as it was—\n\n\n \"Gee, your father gives you an\n awful lot of spending money,\"\n said Frances enviously. \"Is he\n rich?\"\n\n\n \"We get as much as we want,\"\n replied Manto carelessly.\n\n\n \"Gosh, I wish I did.\"",
"\"You needn't be sarcastic,\n Manto, I\n know\n I'm superior.\n I\n realize what a godsend this\n planet is—you don't. It has the\n right gravity, a suitable atmosphere,\n the proper chemical composition—everything.\"\n\n\n \"Including a population that\n will be helpless before us.\"\n\n\n \"And you would take chances\n of losing all this.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly, Palit. What\n chances am I taking?\"",
"An assistant curator of some\n collection in the zoo, a flustered\n old woman, was introducing him.\n There were a few laudatory references\n to his great talents as an\n actor, and he managed to look\n properly modest as he listened.\n The remarks about his knowledge\n of wild and ferocious beasts\n were a little harder to take, but\n he took them. Then the old\n woman stepped back, and he was\n facing his fate alone.\n\n\n \"Children,\" he began. A pause,\n a bashful grin. \"Perhaps I\n should rather say, my friends.\n I'm not one to think of you as\n children. Some people think of\n me as a child myself, because I\n like to hunt, and have adventures.\n They think that such\n things are childish. But if they\n are, I'm glad to be a child. I'm\n glad to be one of you. Yes, I\n think I\n will\n call you my friends.",
"\"Perhaps you regard me, my\n friends, as a very lucky person.\n But when I recall some of the\n narrow escapes I have had, I\n don't agree with you. I remember\n once, when we were on the\n trail of a rogue elephant—\"\n\n\n He told the story of the rogue\n elephant, modestly granting a co-hero's\n role to his guide. Then\n another story illustrating the\n strange ways of lions. The elephant\n gun figured in still another\n tale, this time of a vicious\n rhinoceros. His audience was\n quiet now, breathless with interest,\n and he welcomed the respite\n from shrillness he had won\n for his ears.\n\n\n \"And now, my friends, it is\n time to say farewell.\" He actually\n looked sad and regretful.\n \"But it is my hope that I shall\n be able to see you again—\"",
"Facing him across the platform\n were two lions, tensed as\n if to leap. Where they had come\n from he didn't know, but there\n they were, eyes glaring, manes\n ruffled, more terrifying than any\n he had seen in Africa. There\n they were, with the threat of\n death and destruction in their\n fierce eyes, and here he was,\n terror and helplessness on his\n handsome, manly, and bloodless\n face, heart unfrozen now and\n pounding fiercely, knees melting,\n hands—\n\n\n Hands clutching an elephant\n gun. The thought was like a director's\n command. With calm efficiency,\n with all the precision of\n an actor playing a scene rehearsed\n a thousand times, the\n gun leaped to his shoulder, and\n now its own roar thundered out\n a challenge to the roaring of the\n wild beasts, shouted at them in\n its own accents of barking\n thunder.",
"Frances giggled. \"Oh, Miss\n Burton, do you think the polar\n bear would want to play catch?\"\n\n\n The two men who were looking\n on wore pleased smiles.\n \"Charming,\" said Manto. \"But\n somewhat unpredictable, despite\n all our experiences,\n muy amigo\n .\"\n\n\n \"No attempts at Spanish, Manto,\n not here. It calls attention to\n us. And you are not sure of the\n grammar anyway. You may find\n yourself saying things you do\n not intend.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry, Palit. It wasn't an attempt\n to show my skill, I assure\n you. It's that by now I have a\n tendency to confuse one language\n with another.\"\n\n\n \"I know. You were never a linguist.\n But about these interesting\n creatures—\"\n\n\n \"I suggest that they could\n stand investigation. It would be\n good to know how they think.\"",
"There was no better way to\n make herself inconspicuous. For\n some time, Miss Burton did not\n notice her.\nThe polar bears, the grizzlies,\n the penguins, the reptiles, all\n were left behind. At times the\n children scattered, but Miss Burton\n knew how to get them together\n again, and not one was\n lost.\n\n\n \"Here, children, is the building\n where the kangaroos live.\n Who knows where kangaroos\n come from?\"\n\n\n \"Australia!\" clanged the shrill\n chorus.\n\n\n \"That's right. And what other\n animals come from Australia?\"\n\n\n \"I know, Miss Burton!\" cried\n Frances, a dark-haired nine-year-old\n with a pair of glittering\n eyes that stared like a pair\n of critics from a small heart-shaped\n face. \"I've been here before.\n Wallabies and wombats!\"",
"\"Still, I thought I saw your\n own face taking on a bit of her\n expression too.\"\n\n\n \"You are imagining things,\n Manto. Another thing, that mistake\n in starting to say you were\n two hundred years old—\"\n\n\n \"They would have thought it\n a joke. And I think I got out of\n that rather neatly.\"\n\n\n \"You like to skate on thin ice,\n don't you, Manto? Just as you\n did when you changed your\n height. You had no business\n shrinking right out in public like\n that.\"\n\n\n \"I did it skillfully. Not a\n single person noticed.\"\n\n\n \"\n I\n noticed.\"\n\n\n \"Don't quibble.\"\n\n\n \"I don't intend to. Some of\n these children have very sharp\n eyes. You'd be surprised at what\n they see.\"",
"Miss Burton had an idea. \"I\n know what to do, children. If\n you can act animals—Mr. George\n has shown you what the hunter\n does; you show him what the\n lions do. Yes, Carolyn and Doris,\n you're going to be lions. You are\n waiting in your lairs, ready to\n pounce on the unwary hunter.\n Crouch now, behind that chair.\n Closer and closer he comes—you\n act it out, Mr. George, please,\n that's the way—ever closer, and\n now your muscles tighten for\n the spring, and you open\n your great, wide, red mouths\n in a great, great big roar—\"\n\n\n A deep and tremendous roar,\n as of thunder, crashed through\n the auditorium. A roar—and\n then, from the audience, an outburst\n of terrified screaming such\n as he had never heard. The\n bristles rose at the back of his\n neck, and his heart froze.",
"\"Drunks don't attract attention.\n They're too ordinary.\"\n\n\n \"But a drunken lion hunter—that's\n something special.\" He\n went into the next room and began\n to change. \"Carol,\" he\n called. \"Do you like me?\"\n\n\n \"At times.\"\n\n\n \"Would you say that you liked\n me very much?\"\n\n\n \"When you're sober. Rarely.\"\n\n\n \"Love me?\"\n\n\n \"Once in a blue moon.\"\n\n\n \"What would I have to do for\n you to want to marry me?\"\n\n\n \"Amount to something.\"\n\n\n \"I like that. Don't you think I\n amount to something now?\n Women swoon at the sight of my\n face on the screen, and come to\n life again at the sound of my\n voice.\"",
"\"—with hardly enough energy\n to let them dress you in that\n hunter's outfit and photograph\n you as if you were shooting\n lions.\"\n\n\n \"You're so unforgiving, Carol.\n You don't have much use for me,\n do you—consciously, that is?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, Curt, no. I don't\n have much use for useless people.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not entirely useless. I\n earn you that ten per cent—\"\n\n\n \"I'd gladly forego that to see\n you sober.\"\n\n\n \"But it's your contempt for me\n that drives me to drink. And\n when I think of having to face\n those dear little kiddies with\n nothing inside me—\"",
"\"Because people are depending\n on you. You always want to call\n quits whenever you run into\n something you don't like. You\n may as well call quits to your\n contract if that's the way you\n feel.\"\n\n\n \"And to your ten per cent,\n darling.\"\n\n\n \"You think I'd mind that. I\n work for my ten per cent, Curt,\n sweetheart. I work too damn\n hard for that ten per cent.\"\n\n\n \"You can marry me and take\n it easy. Honest, Carol, if you\n treated me better, if you showed\n me I meant something to you,\n I'd give up drinking.\"\n\n\n She made a face. \"Don't talk\n nonsense. Take your outfit, and\n let's get ready to go. Unless you\n want to change here, and walk\n around dressed as a lion hunter.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I've walked around\n dressed as worse. A drunk.\""
],
[
"\"The chance of being discovered.\n Here we stumble on this\n place quite by accident. No one\n at home knows about it, no one\n so much as suspects that it exists.\n We must get back and report—and\n you do all sorts of silly\n things which may reveal what\n we are, and lead these people to\n suspect their danger.\"\nThis time, Manto's giggle was\n no longer mere camouflage, but\n expressed to a certain degree\n how he felt. \"They cannot possibly\n suspect. We have been all\n over the world, we have taken\n many forms and adapted ourselves\n to many customs, and no\n one has suspected. And even if\n danger really threatened, it\n would be easy to escape. I could\n take the form of the school\n teacher herself, of a policeman,\n of any one in authority. However,\n at present there is not the\n slightest shadow of danger. So,\n Palit, you had better stop being\n fearful.\"",
"Manto said tolerantly, \"You're\n getting jittery, Palit. We've\n been away from home too long.\"\n\n\n \"I am not jittery in the least.\n But I believe in taking due care.\"\n\n\n \"What could possibly happen\n to us? If we were to announce\n to the children and the teacher,\n and to every one in this zoo, for\n that matter, exactly who and\n what we were, they wouldn't believe\n us. And even if they did,\n they wouldn't be able to act rapidly\n enough to harm us.\"\n\n\n \"You never can tell about such\n things. Wise—people—simply\n don't take unnecessary chances.\"\n\n\n \"I'll grant that you're my superior\n in such wisdom.\"",
"Palit said firmly, \"Be careful,\n and I won't be fearful. That's all\n there is to it.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be careful. After all, I\n shouldn't want us to lose these\n children. They're so exactly the\n kind we need. Look how inquiring\n they are, how unafraid, how\n quick to adapt to any circumstances—\"\n\n\n Miss Burton's voice said,\n \"Good gracious, children, what\n language\n are\n you using? Greek?\"\n\n\n They had been speaking too\n loud, they had been overheard.\n Palit and Manto stared at each\n other, and giggled coyly. Then,\n after a second to think, Palit\n said, \"Onay, Issmay Urtonbay!\"\n\n\n \"What?\"",
"\"Sorry. Come on, let's go.\"\nThe lecture hall resounded\n with giggles. And beneath the\n giggles was a steady undercurrent\n of whispers, of girlish confidences\n exchanged, of girlish\n hopes that would now be fulfilled.\n Miss Burton's class was\n not the only one which had come\n to hear the famous actor-hunter\n describe his brave exploits. There\n were at least five others like it,\n and by some mistake, a class of\n boys, who also whispered to each\n other, in manly superiority, and\n pretended to find amusement in\n the presence of so many of the\n fairer sex.\n\n\n In this atmosphere of giggles\n and whispers, Manto and Palit\n could exchange confidences without\n being noticed. Palit said savagely,\n \"Why did you tell her that\n I could act too?\"",
"\"You needn't be sarcastic,\n Manto, I\n know\n I'm superior.\n I\n realize what a godsend this\n planet is—you don't. It has the\n right gravity, a suitable atmosphere,\n the proper chemical composition—everything.\"\n\n\n \"Including a population that\n will be helpless before us.\"\n\n\n \"And you would take chances\n of losing all this.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly, Palit. What\n chances am I taking?\"",
"\"All right,\" conceded Palit,\n grudgingly.\nSo they stayed, and out of\n some twigs and leaves they\n shaped the necessary coins with\n which to buy peanuts, and popcorn,\n and ice cream, and other\n delicacies favored by the young.\n Manto wanted to win easy popularity\n by treating a few of the\n other children, but Palit put his\n girlish foot down. No use arousing\n suspicion. Even as it was—\n\n\n \"Gee, your father gives you an\n awful lot of spending money,\"\n said Frances enviously. \"Is he\n rich?\"\n\n\n \"We get as much as we want,\"\n replied Manto carelessly.\n\n\n \"Gosh, I wish I did.\"",
"\"There should be happiness inside\n you at the thought of your\n doing a good deed. Not a drop,\n George, not a drop.\"\nThe two little girls drew apart\n from the others and began to\n whisper into each other's ears.\n The whispers were punctuated\n by giggles which made the entire\n childish conversation seem quite\n normal. But Palit was in no\n laughing mood. He said, in his\n own language, \"You're getting\n careless, Manto. You had no\n business imitating her expression.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Palit, but it was\n so suggestive. And I'm a very\n suggestible person.\"\n\n\n \"So am I. But I control myself.\"\n\n\n \"Still, if the temptation were\n great enough, I don't think you'd\n be able to resist either.\"\n\n\n \"The issues are important\n enough to make me resist.\"",
"\"Whatever you say, Manto. If\n you wish, we shall join the little\n ladies.\"\n\n\n \"We must have our story prepared\n first.\"\n\n\n Palit nodded, and the two men\n stepped under the shade of a\n tree whose long, drooping, leaf-covered\n branches formed a convenient\n screen. For a moment,\n the tree hid silence. Then there\n came from beneath the branches\n the chatter of girlish voices, and\n two little girls skipped merrily\n away. Miss Burton did not at\n first notice that now she had an\n additional two children in her\n charge.\n\n\n \"Do you think you will be able\n to keep your English straight?\"\n asked one of the new little girls.\n\n\n The other one smiled with\n amusement and at first did not\n answer. Then she began to skip\n around her companion and\n chant, \"I know a secret, I know\n a secret.\"",
"\"That'll do,\" said Miss Burton\n firmly. \"Now, let's get along\n to the lion house. And please,\n children, do not make faces at\n the lions. How would you like to\n be in a cage and have people\n make faces at you? Always remember\n to be considerate to\n others.\"\n\n\n \"Even lions, Miss Burton?\"\n\n\n \"Even lions.\"\n\n\n \"But Mr. George shot lots of\n lions. Was he considerate of them\n too?\"\n\n\n \"There is no time for silly\n questions,\" said Miss Burton,\n with the same firmness. \"Come\n along.\"\n\n\n They all trouped after her,\n Palit and Manto bringing up the\n rear. Manto giggled, and whispered\n with amusement, \"That\n Pig-Latin business was quick\n thinking, Palit. But in fact, quite\n unnecessary. The things that you\n do to avoid being suspected!\"",
"\"Perhaps you regard me, my\n friends, as a very lucky person.\n But when I recall some of the\n narrow escapes I have had, I\n don't agree with you. I remember\n once, when we were on the\n trail of a rogue elephant—\"\n\n\n He told the story of the rogue\n elephant, modestly granting a co-hero's\n role to his guide. Then\n another story illustrating the\n strange ways of lions. The elephant\n gun figured in still another\n tale, this time of a vicious\n rhinoceros. His audience was\n quiet now, breathless with interest,\n and he welcomed the respite\n from shrillness he had won\n for his ears.\n\n\n \"And now, my friends, it is\n time to say farewell.\" He actually\n looked sad and regretful.\n \"But it is my hope that I shall\n be able to see you again—\"",
"\"Why, because it's the truth.\n You're a very good animal performer.\n You make a wonderful\n dragon, for instance. Go on,\n Palit, show her what a fine\n dragon you can—\"\n\n\n \"Stop it, you fool, before you\n cause trouble!\"\n\n\n \"Very well, Palit. Did I tempt\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Did you tempt me! You and\n your sense of humor!\"\n\n\n \"You and your lack of it! But\n let's not argue now, Palit. Here,\n I think, comes the lion-hunter.\n Let's scream, and be as properly\n excited as every one else is.\"\nMy God, he thought, how can\n they keep their voices so high\n so long? My eardrums hurt already.\n How do they stand a lifetime\n of it? Even an hour?",
"\"Still, I thought I saw your\n own face taking on a bit of her\n expression too.\"\n\n\n \"You are imagining things,\n Manto. Another thing, that mistake\n in starting to say you were\n two hundred years old—\"\n\n\n \"They would have thought it\n a joke. And I think I got out of\n that rather neatly.\"\n\n\n \"You like to skate on thin ice,\n don't you, Manto? Just as you\n did when you changed your\n height. You had no business\n shrinking right out in public like\n that.\"\n\n\n \"I did it skillfully. Not a\n single person noticed.\"\n\n\n \"\n I\n noticed.\"\n\n\n \"Don't quibble.\"\n\n\n \"I don't intend to. Some of\n these children have very sharp\n eyes. You'd be surprised at what\n they see.\"",
"Frances giggled. \"Oh, Miss\n Burton, do you think the polar\n bear would want to play catch?\"\n\n\n The two men who were looking\n on wore pleased smiles.\n \"Charming,\" said Manto. \"But\n somewhat unpredictable, despite\n all our experiences,\n muy amigo\n .\"\n\n\n \"No attempts at Spanish, Manto,\n not here. It calls attention to\n us. And you are not sure of the\n grammar anyway. You may find\n yourself saying things you do\n not intend.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry, Palit. It wasn't an attempt\n to show my skill, I assure\n you. It's that by now I have a\n tendency to confuse one language\n with another.\"\n\n\n \"I know. You were never a linguist.\n But about these interesting\n creatures—\"\n\n\n \"I suggest that they could\n stand investigation. It would be\n good to know how they think.\"",
"\"I'm Doris Palit. I went with\n Carolyn to the bathroom—\"\nMiss Burton made a sound of\n annoyance. Imagine losing\n two\n children and not noticing it right\n away. The other teacher must\n be frantic by now, and serve her\n right for being so careless.\n\n\n \"All right, you may stay with\n us until we find a policeman—\"\n She interrupted herself. \"Frances,\n what are you giggling at\n now?\"\n\n\n \"It's Carolyn. She's making\n faces just like you!\"\n\n\n \"Really, Carolyn, that isn't at\n all nice!\"\n\n\n Carolyn's face altered itself in\n a hurry, so as to lose any resemblance\n to Miss Burton's. \"I'm\n sorry, Miss Burton, I didn't\n really mean to do anything\n wrong.\"",
"Screams of exultation, shrill\n as ever, small hands beating\n enthusiastically to indicate joy.\n Thank God that's over with, he\n thought. Now for those drinks—and\n he didn't mean drink,\n singular. Talk of being useful,\n he'd certainly been useful now.\n He'd made those kids happy.\n What more can any reasonable\n person want?\nBut it wasn't over with. Another\n old lady had stepped up on\n the platform.\n\n\n \"Mr. George,\" she said, in a\n strangely affected voice, like that\n of the first dramatic teacher he\n had ever had, the one who had\n almost ruined his acting career.\n \"Mr. George, I can't tell you\n how happy you have made us all,\n young and old. Hasn't Mr.\n George made us happy, children?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Miss Burton!\" came the\n shrill scream.",
"\"Oh, Miss Burton,\" screamed\n Frances. \"Here's a girl who isn't\n in our class! She got lost from\n her own class!\"\n\"Really?\" Miss Burton seemed\n rather pleased at the idea that\n some other teacher had been so\n careless as to lose one of her\n charges. \"What's your name,\n child?\"\n\n\n \"I'm Carolyn.\"\n\n\n \"Carolyn what?\"\n\n\n \"Carolyn Manto. Please, Miss\n Burton, I had to go to the bathroom,\n and then when I came\n out—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, I know.\"\n\n\n A shrill cry came from another\n section of her class. \"Oh, Miss\n Burton, here's another one who's\n lost!\"\n\n\n The other little girl was\n pushed forward. \"Now, who are\n you\n ?\" Miss Burton asked.",
"Facing him across the platform\n were two lions, tensed as\n if to leap. Where they had come\n from he didn't know, but there\n they were, eyes glaring, manes\n ruffled, more terrifying than any\n he had seen in Africa. There\n they were, with the threat of\n death and destruction in their\n fierce eyes, and here he was,\n terror and helplessness on his\n handsome, manly, and bloodless\n face, heart unfrozen now and\n pounding fiercely, knees melting,\n hands—\n\n\n Hands clutching an elephant\n gun. The thought was like a director's\n command. With calm efficiency,\n with all the precision of\n an actor playing a scene rehearsed\n a thousand times, the\n gun leaped to his shoulder, and\n now its own roar thundered out\n a challenge to the roaring of the\n wild beasts, shouted at them in\n its own accents of barking\n thunder.",
"\"Go ahead,\" whispered Carol.\n \"You've seen the script—go into\n your act. Tell them what a hero\n you are. You have the odds in\n your favor to start with.\"\n\n\n \"My lovely looks,\" he said,\n with some bitterness.\n\n\n \"Lovely is the word for you.\n But forget that. If you're good—you'll\n get a drink afterwards.\"\n\n\n \"Will it be one of those occasions\n when you love me?\"\n\n\n \"If the moon turns blue.\"\n\n\n He strode to the front of the\n platform, an elephant gun swinging\n easily at his side, an easy\n grin radiating from his confident,\n rugged face. The cheers\n rose to a shrill fortissimo, but\n the grin did not vanish. What a\n great actor he really was, he told\n himself, to be able to pretend he\n liked this.",
"\"Oh, Miss Burton, please don't\n make her go home with a policeman.\n If she's going to be an\n actress, I'll bet she'd love to see\n Curt George!\"\n\n\n \"Well, after the way she's behaved,\n I don't know whether I\n should let her. I really don't.\"\n\n\n \"Please, Miss Burton, it was\n an accident. I won't do it again.\"\n\n\n \"All right, if you're good, and\n cause no trouble. But we still\n have plenty of time before seeing\n Mr. George. It's only two now,\n and we're not supposed to go to\n the lecture hall until four.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Burton,\" called Barbara\n Willman, \"do you think he'd give\n us his autograph?\"",
"Miss Burton had an idea. \"I\n know what to do, children. If\n you can act animals—Mr. George\n has shown you what the hunter\n does; you show him what the\n lions do. Yes, Carolyn and Doris,\n you're going to be lions. You are\n waiting in your lairs, ready to\n pounce on the unwary hunter.\n Crouch now, behind that chair.\n Closer and closer he comes—you\n act it out, Mr. George, please,\n that's the way—ever closer, and\n now your muscles tighten for\n the spring, and you open\n your great, wide, red mouths\n in a great, great big roar—\"\n\n\n A deep and tremendous roar,\n as of thunder, crashed through\n the auditorium. A roar—and\n then, from the audience, an outburst\n of terrified screaming such\n as he had never heard. The\n bristles rose at the back of his\n neck, and his heart froze."
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"Why were the creators of Bulb nervous about interviewing?",
"Why were the creators of Bulb optimistic about their interview?",
"What is a major benefit of having an office at Second Home?",
"What were the owners of Bulb able to learn from the Second Home community?",
"What is the main reason for the increase in popularity in co-working spaces?",
"What is the largest co-working model company mentioned in the article?",
"How does the community aspect of co-working space effect the productivity of workers?",
"What does the author claim has made humans want to interact in person more?",
"What does the author argue has happened to the relationship between work life and home life?",
"What does the author think to be the immediate next step in the advancing the co-working space?"
] |
[
[
"They were not sure they would be able to hire more people",
"They were not sure they would be accepted into a co-working space",
"They were not sure that they would be hired for the consultancy position",
"They were not sure they would secure the investments"
],
[
"They had plenty of applicants for the positions they were trying to fill ",
"They knew a few people at the co-working space from previous ventures",
"They were overqualified for the positions that they were interviewing for",
"The co-working space was notoriously easy to work for"
],
[
"Having on site apartments so that one does not have to commute to work",
"Having an office space completely to your own company ",
"It is an incredibly affordable work space for the price",
"Having access to a large network of businesses to collaborate with "
],
[
"How to increase revenue without increasing sales ",
"How to be good tenants ",
"How to treat their own employees",
"How to lease out work space to other people"
],
[
"Corporate offices downsizing their physical operations",
"Main offices becoming too expensive",
"Collaboration between companies becoming more commonplace ",
"A lack of real estate for individual offices "
],
[
"Apps for Good",
"Bulb",
"The Freelancers Union",
"WeWork"
],
[
"It has a negative impact because the workers have to pay more in overhead costs",
"It has a negative impact because the workers are more distracted",
"It has no impact",
"It has a positive impact because of the work-focused community aspect"
],
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"An increased use of digital socialization methods",
"An increase collective worry about loss of work",
"The popularity of the capitalist way of life",
"Having to spend much more time in office situations"
],
[
"Work and home have become more intertwined in recent years",
"There has been no change in the relationship between work and home life",
"Work life has become more important than home life in recent years ",
"Home life has become more important than work life in recent years"
],
[
"Adding lodging to the co-working spaces",
"Adding coffee shops to the co-working space",
"Building more co-working spaces in new cities",
"Decreasing the price of the co-working rentals"
]
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"New work order\nIn March 2015, it was time for Hayden Wood and Amit Gudka to move out of the kitchen. The pair had raised investment for their startup, Bulb, a renewable energy supplier, and they were looking for an office. \n\n A coworking space was the obvious choice: somewhere that would allow them to take on more desks as needed. (When I meet them a little over a year later, they were eight strong and hiring around one more each month.) \"We looked at a few different spaces,\" says Wood, who had previously spent 10 years in management consultancy for Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte) and Bain & Company. \"Second Home had been open a few months and we took the tour. We were nervous: were we going to get in?\"",
"Given that coworking, which after all grew out of hacker culture, is supposed to embody an attitude of resistance to conventional authority, WeWork is curiously corporate, certainly in its approach to communication. I am asked not to quote the community manager who shows me around. There isn't anyone who can speak on the record (or off it, for that matter) in the building. My queries have to be submitted in writing then edited down because there are too many of them. The answers come back, finally, appended: \"All attributable to Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe\".",
"It is odd, perhaps, to think of the renting of office space as a socially testing business, entailing pre-interview nerves. But acceptance into Second Home, for some, signifies hipness. Juliette Morgan, partner at Cushman & Wakefield, a property consultancy, who works out of Second Home, says: \"I used to joke that there was a cool alarm that went off when people came to look round – but then they let us in.\"",
"Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".",
"The single generation demographic bubble is of course the trouble with all this curation. Even while lip service is paid to ideas of innovation coming from unexpected places, from unlikely collisions and random connections, it is a very tough-minded curator who doesn't seek to be surrounded by people who are basically a bit like himself. With coworking spaces, as with the internet, there is the promise of connection and collaboration and a world of newness and surprise. And, as with the internet, there is a danger that you can easily end up talking either to people just like yourself.",
"The benches are orange, the floors yellow. (\"There is quite a lot of science behind the colours, to do with improving mood and productivity,\" says Morgan.) Flowers flop in elegant vases and masses of plants sit in pots on sills, desks and walls. A row of fruit trees is in blossom outside. The exposed concrete pillars look unfinished, with scribble and tags still visible. Sam Aldenton, Silva's co-founder, has sourced 600 mid-century modern chairs from all over Europe.\n\"It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money,\" says Morgan, \"but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business.\"",
"What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"",
"The interior ticks all the coworking style boxes: raw concrete; exposed ceilings revealing air conditioning ducts, pipes and silvered insulation; multicoloured upholstery; a kitchen with its own island bar offering free tea, coffee and craft beer; easy chairs and sofas; tables of varying heights and sizes; music; and some signifiers of fun, such as a table tennis table (but, unlike at WeWork's South Bank site, no arcade machines; nor, unlike at its Devonshire Square, any skateboards on the walls). \n\n In the toilet, cups for mouthwash urge you to 'stay fresh', which I am sure is meant jocularly but which arouses in me the same sort of mulish resentment I used to feel when I worked in advertising in my twenties and slogans in reception ordered me to \"reach for the stars\". (What makes you think I wouldn't, mate?).",
"Being a Second Home business gives you access to others that have also made the grade. \"We had a strong business plan, but there were other things we didn't have,\"says Wood. \"Someone at Second Home recommended our branding agency, Ragged Edge. Congregation Partners, who are here, have helped with recruiting; and we met Blue State Digital [a digital strategy agency that worked on Obama's election campaign, whose London office is based at Second Home] in the bar one Friday night and they offered us a workshop about how to market and launch. It's an extremely generous collaborative culture.\"\nOther kinds of business at Second Home include venture capitalists; the European headquarters of chore-outsourcing company TaskRabbit; and ASAP54, an app that scans online fashion and locates where to buy it. Silva and Aldenton curate events that help them to network and that offer a kind of intellectual support and ballast – so Amit Gudka, a fan of the South African theoretical physicist Neil Turok was able to hear him speak at Second Home and afterwards have dinner with him and Silva.",
"The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.",
"Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.",
"We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations; hacker spaces; industry- and sector-coworking spaces; more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace; and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. \n\n Coworking began because startups and freelancers, typically in tech and the creative industries, needed somewhere to work. But as more organisations outsource more of their operations – or as large corporates seek to reach those startups – the range of activities represented among coworkers has expanded to comprehend almost everything. KPMG’s tech startup advice arm is based at Interchange in Camden. Merck, Microsoft, American Express and GE all lease desks at WeWork, in addition to running their own offices.",
"As we have to rely more on ourselves and on our own resources at work, it's probably not surprising that we seek out the reassuring sight of other people doing the same. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri say in their 2012 book, Declaration, \"The centre of gravity of capitalist production no longer resides in the factory but has drifted outside its walls. Society has become a factory.\" \n\n Work has blurred into life, in part owing to the peculiar nature of our current relationship to technology. We do not conceive of machines, as we did in the past, as engines of oppression, exploiting workers; rather, we frame our devices as intimate and personal, interactive and fun, blurring the distinctions between work and play.",
"In what Armstrong calls \"a somewhat unconventional deal with Peabody\", the Trampery is about to start building Fish Island Village in Hackney Wick: a co-living space that will also include traditional social housing. This experiment is partly a response to the pricing out of London of artists and other creatives and partly an attempt \"to move beyond a single workspace to think about a neighbourhood\".",
"So what of those questions about style and scalability? As far as the former is concerned, coworking spaces do all look a little bit alike – but design has a long history of innovators and followers. Inevitably, everyone borrows the more directional visual cues, even to the point of pastiche. \n\n But they are not, in fact, all alike. They are surprising in their degree of difference. There are industrial-scale operators that lack the warmth and personal touches of the smaller providers (no one at WeWork is ever going to come out of the kitchen as you arrive, knowing your name and whom you're here to visit, which is what happens at the Trampery); but which also lack their preciousness about who is allowed to the party. And then there are the cool clubs that everyone in their right mind would want to join, but where few are chosen.",
"Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, coffee shop-workspace hybrid Timberyard is dematerialising the desk, providing mobile workers who need to sit down and check their emails with the most ad hoc of workspaces. Most of Timberyard's users don't pay for space, the usual coworking business model, but they do pay for the tea and coffee (\"award-winning\", co-founder Darren Elliott is keen to point out) and for the artisan-produced, wellness-focused food (super seeds with almond butter on toast, beetroot, avocado and hummus on toast, hibiscus cake). Unlike most coffee shops, Timberyard's branches in Seven Dials and Soho are designed to encourage customers to stay and work: there is fast Wi-Fi with plentiful power sockets, careful regulation of temperature, lots of natural light and attentive design. Many of the chairs have been rescued from skips and reupholstered; the tables are striped like Jim Lambie staircases; the disabled toilet looks like a shipping container.",
"When I arrive at the Second Home reception desk, a sign urges me to \"join us tonight at 3.30pm for meditation.\" Before that, there's the option to have lunch at the atrium restaurant, Jago, founded by a former head chef of Ottolenghi and the former general manager of Morito. Today, there are cauliflower fritters made with lentil flour (gluten-free), which you can eat while admiring the exuberant architecture of Spanish firm SelgasCano, which has transformed the former carpet warehouse near Brick Lane: a plexiglass bubble punched out of the front of the building, sweeping curved walls, a wide cantilevered staircase up to the pod-like offices on the first floor.",
"Wood and Gudka's first post-kitchen office was in Second Home's roaming area, where freelancers come and go. A desk costs £350 a month; they are sold several times over (a four-to-one ratio is thought to ensure the right level of occupancy without straining supply). The pair subsequently moved into a studio, then a larger office; they will take a bigger space upstairs when the refurbishment of three upper floors is completed. \"It doesn't feel like being a tenant,\" says Wood. \"The community team here has taught us a lot about how to interact with our own members.\"",
"At a purely economic level, it's easy to see why. As large corporates downsize their core operations, they no longer need vast offices. Iris Lapinski watched the process in action when her educational non-profit startup, Apps for Good, squatted in Royal Bank of Scotland’s offices in the City in late 2008. \"RBS was going through huge waves of redundancies. On our floor, it was three of us and 150 empty desks,\" she says, \"and then new people would come in and they'd get fired too. Eventually they'd fired so many people they closed down the building.\" Aware that \"tech companies were doing something funkier\", she moved Apps for Good into the Trampery, the first coworking space in Shoreditch.",
"Meanwhile, the current excitement over coworking may have less to do with a method of office organisation than with a handful of hugely successful connectors. When Iris Lapinski moved out of RBS, she chose the Trampery partly because \"Charles draws in interesting people. He's got links to corporates, government, policymakers.\" One of these connections turned out to be Bob Schukai, head of advanced product innovation at Thomson Reuters, which led directly to £300,000 of sponsorship revenue for Apps for Good. \"Charles is a great connector,\" Lapinsky says, \"and that is really what makes the Trampery so special. Most don't have the same flair.\"\nImages from top: WeWork Moorgate; Second Home; WeWork; The Trampery Old Street, Home of Publicis Drugstore; Timberyard; WeWork\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article."
],
[
"New work order\nIn March 2015, it was time for Hayden Wood and Amit Gudka to move out of the kitchen. The pair had raised investment for their startup, Bulb, a renewable energy supplier, and they were looking for an office. \n\n A coworking space was the obvious choice: somewhere that would allow them to take on more desks as needed. (When I meet them a little over a year later, they were eight strong and hiring around one more each month.) \"We looked at a few different spaces,\" says Wood, who had previously spent 10 years in management consultancy for Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte) and Bain & Company. \"Second Home had been open a few months and we took the tour. We were nervous: were we going to get in?\"",
"What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"",
"The benches are orange, the floors yellow. (\"There is quite a lot of science behind the colours, to do with improving mood and productivity,\" says Morgan.) Flowers flop in elegant vases and masses of plants sit in pots on sills, desks and walls. A row of fruit trees is in blossom outside. The exposed concrete pillars look unfinished, with scribble and tags still visible. Sam Aldenton, Silva's co-founder, has sourced 600 mid-century modern chairs from all over Europe.\n\"It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money,\" says Morgan, \"but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business.\"",
"Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".",
"It is odd, perhaps, to think of the renting of office space as a socially testing business, entailing pre-interview nerves. But acceptance into Second Home, for some, signifies hipness. Juliette Morgan, partner at Cushman & Wakefield, a property consultancy, who works out of Second Home, says: \"I used to joke that there was a cool alarm that went off when people came to look round – but then they let us in.\"",
"Being a Second Home business gives you access to others that have also made the grade. \"We had a strong business plan, but there were other things we didn't have,\"says Wood. \"Someone at Second Home recommended our branding agency, Ragged Edge. Congregation Partners, who are here, have helped with recruiting; and we met Blue State Digital [a digital strategy agency that worked on Obama's election campaign, whose London office is based at Second Home] in the bar one Friday night and they offered us a workshop about how to market and launch. It's an extremely generous collaborative culture.\"\nOther kinds of business at Second Home include venture capitalists; the European headquarters of chore-outsourcing company TaskRabbit; and ASAP54, an app that scans online fashion and locates where to buy it. Silva and Aldenton curate events that help them to network and that offer a kind of intellectual support and ballast – so Amit Gudka, a fan of the South African theoretical physicist Neil Turok was able to hear him speak at Second Home and afterwards have dinner with him and Silva.",
"The interior ticks all the coworking style boxes: raw concrete; exposed ceilings revealing air conditioning ducts, pipes and silvered insulation; multicoloured upholstery; a kitchen with its own island bar offering free tea, coffee and craft beer; easy chairs and sofas; tables of varying heights and sizes; music; and some signifiers of fun, such as a table tennis table (but, unlike at WeWork's South Bank site, no arcade machines; nor, unlike at its Devonshire Square, any skateboards on the walls). \n\n In the toilet, cups for mouthwash urge you to 'stay fresh', which I am sure is meant jocularly but which arouses in me the same sort of mulish resentment I used to feel when I worked in advertising in my twenties and slogans in reception ordered me to \"reach for the stars\". (What makes you think I wouldn't, mate?).",
"As we have to rely more on ourselves and on our own resources at work, it's probably not surprising that we seek out the reassuring sight of other people doing the same. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri say in their 2012 book, Declaration, \"The centre of gravity of capitalist production no longer resides in the factory but has drifted outside its walls. Society has become a factory.\" \n\n Work has blurred into life, in part owing to the peculiar nature of our current relationship to technology. We do not conceive of machines, as we did in the past, as engines of oppression, exploiting workers; rather, we frame our devices as intimate and personal, interactive and fun, blurring the distinctions between work and play.",
"Given that coworking, which after all grew out of hacker culture, is supposed to embody an attitude of resistance to conventional authority, WeWork is curiously corporate, certainly in its approach to communication. I am asked not to quote the community manager who shows me around. There isn't anyone who can speak on the record (or off it, for that matter) in the building. My queries have to be submitted in writing then edited down because there are too many of them. The answers come back, finally, appended: \"All attributable to Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe\".",
"We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations; hacker spaces; industry- and sector-coworking spaces; more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace; and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. \n\n Coworking began because startups and freelancers, typically in tech and the creative industries, needed somewhere to work. But as more organisations outsource more of their operations – or as large corporates seek to reach those startups – the range of activities represented among coworkers has expanded to comprehend almost everything. KPMG’s tech startup advice arm is based at Interchange in Camden. Merck, Microsoft, American Express and GE all lease desks at WeWork, in addition to running their own offices.",
"The single generation demographic bubble is of course the trouble with all this curation. Even while lip service is paid to ideas of innovation coming from unexpected places, from unlikely collisions and random connections, it is a very tough-minded curator who doesn't seek to be surrounded by people who are basically a bit like himself. With coworking spaces, as with the internet, there is the promise of connection and collaboration and a world of newness and surprise. And, as with the internet, there is a danger that you can easily end up talking either to people just like yourself.",
"Morgan's case may have been helped by her previous role as head of property for Tech City, the government initiative promoted by David Cameron's advisor Rohan Silva, who also happens to be the co-founder of Second Home. Wood admits that he and Gudka, who previously traded energy at Barclays for eight years, did know some people at Second Home already. \"When we looked on the website, some of the faces were familiar. And we hoped our business idea was quite good.\"",
"The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.",
"Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.",
"When I arrive at the Second Home reception desk, a sign urges me to \"join us tonight at 3.30pm for meditation.\" Before that, there's the option to have lunch at the atrium restaurant, Jago, founded by a former head chef of Ottolenghi and the former general manager of Morito. Today, there are cauliflower fritters made with lentil flour (gluten-free), which you can eat while admiring the exuberant architecture of Spanish firm SelgasCano, which has transformed the former carpet warehouse near Brick Lane: a plexiglass bubble punched out of the front of the building, sweeping curved walls, a wide cantilevered staircase up to the pod-like offices on the first floor.",
"In the last couple of months, Timberyard has renting out permanent desks in the basement of its Soho branch and now hosts three companies, one of eight people, one of 12 and one of 20. But Elliott says the shop upstairs will always be open to the street and the public. Typically, workers stay for a couple of hours, but they might be there for 20 minutes or all day. \"We believe this is the way people will work in the future,\" Elliott says, surveying a sea of laptops: \"portable, connected, independent and collaborative, sharing resources and seeking out inspiring spaces.\" Timberyard intends to become a way station for the digital nomad.",
"At a purely economic level, it's easy to see why. As large corporates downsize their core operations, they no longer need vast offices. Iris Lapinski watched the process in action when her educational non-profit startup, Apps for Good, squatted in Royal Bank of Scotland’s offices in the City in late 2008. \"RBS was going through huge waves of redundancies. On our floor, it was three of us and 150 empty desks,\" she says, \"and then new people would come in and they'd get fired too. Eventually they'd fired so many people they closed down the building.\" Aware that \"tech companies were doing something funkier\", she moved Apps for Good into the Trampery, the first coworking space in Shoreditch.",
"Meanwhile, the current excitement over coworking may have less to do with a method of office organisation than with a handful of hugely successful connectors. When Iris Lapinski moved out of RBS, she chose the Trampery partly because \"Charles draws in interesting people. He's got links to corporates, government, policymakers.\" One of these connections turned out to be Bob Schukai, head of advanced product innovation at Thomson Reuters, which led directly to £300,000 of sponsorship revenue for Apps for Good. \"Charles is a great connector,\" Lapinsky says, \"and that is really what makes the Trampery so special. Most don't have the same flair.\"\nImages from top: WeWork Moorgate; Second Home; WeWork; The Trampery Old Street, Home of Publicis Drugstore; Timberyard; WeWork\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"So what of those questions about style and scalability? As far as the former is concerned, coworking spaces do all look a little bit alike – but design has a long history of innovators and followers. Inevitably, everyone borrows the more directional visual cues, even to the point of pastiche. \n\n But they are not, in fact, all alike. They are surprising in their degree of difference. There are industrial-scale operators that lack the warmth and personal touches of the smaller providers (no one at WeWork is ever going to come out of the kitchen as you arrive, knowing your name and whom you're here to visit, which is what happens at the Trampery); but which also lack their preciousness about who is allowed to the party. And then there are the cool clubs that everyone in their right mind would want to join, but where few are chosen.",
"We tend not, for example, to view posting on Facebook as labour, even though there are perfectly good economic arguments why we should. The eight hours' work, eight hours' leisure, eight hours' rest fought for so fiercely in the 19th century has become meaningless in an era when we willingly, eagerly, spend 12 hours a day on a laptop. \n\n As work becomes increasingly unpredictable and permeable, in a way that reflects the internet itself, workspaces are imagined more as social landscapes. Increasingly, they are designed for serendipitous encounters, emotional expression, explorations of identity. Of course, you could take the cynical view that the imperative of productivity has now colonised every aspect of our lives, that our private relationships have become 'social capital', that even our intimate interactions have been turned into a kind of labour. Or you could say, as coworking enthusiasts tend to, that work has got a whole lot more fun."
],
[
"Being a Second Home business gives you access to others that have also made the grade. \"We had a strong business plan, but there were other things we didn't have,\"says Wood. \"Someone at Second Home recommended our branding agency, Ragged Edge. Congregation Partners, who are here, have helped with recruiting; and we met Blue State Digital [a digital strategy agency that worked on Obama's election campaign, whose London office is based at Second Home] in the bar one Friday night and they offered us a workshop about how to market and launch. It's an extremely generous collaborative culture.\"\nOther kinds of business at Second Home include venture capitalists; the European headquarters of chore-outsourcing company TaskRabbit; and ASAP54, an app that scans online fashion and locates where to buy it. Silva and Aldenton curate events that help them to network and that offer a kind of intellectual support and ballast – so Amit Gudka, a fan of the South African theoretical physicist Neil Turok was able to hear him speak at Second Home and afterwards have dinner with him and Silva.",
"It is odd, perhaps, to think of the renting of office space as a socially testing business, entailing pre-interview nerves. But acceptance into Second Home, for some, signifies hipness. Juliette Morgan, partner at Cushman & Wakefield, a property consultancy, who works out of Second Home, says: \"I used to joke that there was a cool alarm that went off when people came to look round – but then they let us in.\"",
"Wood and Gudka's first post-kitchen office was in Second Home's roaming area, where freelancers come and go. A desk costs £350 a month; they are sold several times over (a four-to-one ratio is thought to ensure the right level of occupancy without straining supply). The pair subsequently moved into a studio, then a larger office; they will take a bigger space upstairs when the refurbishment of three upper floors is completed. \"It doesn't feel like being a tenant,\" says Wood. \"The community team here has taught us a lot about how to interact with our own members.\"",
"When I arrive at the Second Home reception desk, a sign urges me to \"join us tonight at 3.30pm for meditation.\" Before that, there's the option to have lunch at the atrium restaurant, Jago, founded by a former head chef of Ottolenghi and the former general manager of Morito. Today, there are cauliflower fritters made with lentil flour (gluten-free), which you can eat while admiring the exuberant architecture of Spanish firm SelgasCano, which has transformed the former carpet warehouse near Brick Lane: a plexiglass bubble punched out of the front of the building, sweeping curved walls, a wide cantilevered staircase up to the pod-like offices on the first floor.",
"The benches are orange, the floors yellow. (\"There is quite a lot of science behind the colours, to do with improving mood and productivity,\" says Morgan.) Flowers flop in elegant vases and masses of plants sit in pots on sills, desks and walls. A row of fruit trees is in blossom outside. The exposed concrete pillars look unfinished, with scribble and tags still visible. Sam Aldenton, Silva's co-founder, has sourced 600 mid-century modern chairs from all over Europe.\n\"It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money,\" says Morgan, \"but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business.\"",
"Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.",
"The logical extension of the elision of work and home life is that the same organisations might end up providing both. WeWork is experimenting with micro apartments in two locations: in New York and at Crystal City, outside Washington DC. Second Home is also believed to have Roam, which began in Bali, intends to build a global co-living network, with its offer: \"Sign one lease. Live around the world.\" From its initial base in Ubud, it has expanded into Miami and recently Madrid; Buenos Aires and London are 'coming soon'. Roam isn't simply about a bed for the night: it sells itself partly on the quality of its coworking offer. In Bali, the office space is on the roof, under a palm thatch, with a swimming pool in the courtyard below.",
"New work order\nIn March 2015, it was time for Hayden Wood and Amit Gudka to move out of the kitchen. The pair had raised investment for their startup, Bulb, a renewable energy supplier, and they were looking for an office. \n\n A coworking space was the obvious choice: somewhere that would allow them to take on more desks as needed. (When I meet them a little over a year later, they were eight strong and hiring around one more each month.) \"We looked at a few different spaces,\" says Wood, who had previously spent 10 years in management consultancy for Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte) and Bain & Company. \"Second Home had been open a few months and we took the tour. We were nervous: were we going to get in?\"",
"Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".",
"In the last couple of months, Timberyard has renting out permanent desks in the basement of its Soho branch and now hosts three companies, one of eight people, one of 12 and one of 20. But Elliott says the shop upstairs will always be open to the street and the public. Typically, workers stay for a couple of hours, but they might be there for 20 minutes or all day. \"We believe this is the way people will work in the future,\" Elliott says, surveying a sea of laptops: \"portable, connected, independent and collaborative, sharing resources and seeking out inspiring spaces.\" Timberyard intends to become a way station for the digital nomad.",
"The interior ticks all the coworking style boxes: raw concrete; exposed ceilings revealing air conditioning ducts, pipes and silvered insulation; multicoloured upholstery; a kitchen with its own island bar offering free tea, coffee and craft beer; easy chairs and sofas; tables of varying heights and sizes; music; and some signifiers of fun, such as a table tennis table (but, unlike at WeWork's South Bank site, no arcade machines; nor, unlike at its Devonshire Square, any skateboards on the walls). \n\n In the toilet, cups for mouthwash urge you to 'stay fresh', which I am sure is meant jocularly but which arouses in me the same sort of mulish resentment I used to feel when I worked in advertising in my twenties and slogans in reception ordered me to \"reach for the stars\". (What makes you think I wouldn't, mate?).",
"We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations; hacker spaces; industry- and sector-coworking spaces; more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace; and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. \n\n Coworking began because startups and freelancers, typically in tech and the creative industries, needed somewhere to work. But as more organisations outsource more of their operations – or as large corporates seek to reach those startups – the range of activities represented among coworkers has expanded to comprehend almost everything. KPMG’s tech startup advice arm is based at Interchange in Camden. Merck, Microsoft, American Express and GE all lease desks at WeWork, in addition to running their own offices.",
"The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.",
"Morgan's case may have been helped by her previous role as head of property for Tech City, the government initiative promoted by David Cameron's advisor Rohan Silva, who also happens to be the co-founder of Second Home. Wood admits that he and Gudka, who previously traded energy at Barclays for eight years, did know some people at Second Home already. \"When we looked on the website, some of the faces were familiar. And we hoped our business idea was quite good.\"",
"Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, coffee shop-workspace hybrid Timberyard is dematerialising the desk, providing mobile workers who need to sit down and check their emails with the most ad hoc of workspaces. Most of Timberyard's users don't pay for space, the usual coworking business model, but they do pay for the tea and coffee (\"award-winning\", co-founder Darren Elliott is keen to point out) and for the artisan-produced, wellness-focused food (super seeds with almond butter on toast, beetroot, avocado and hummus on toast, hibiscus cake). Unlike most coffee shops, Timberyard's branches in Seven Dials and Soho are designed to encourage customers to stay and work: there is fast Wi-Fi with plentiful power sockets, careful regulation of temperature, lots of natural light and attentive design. Many of the chairs have been rescued from skips and reupholstered; the tables are striped like Jim Lambie staircases; the disabled toilet looks like a shipping container.",
"WeWork Moorgate is the second largest coworking space in the UK after WeWork Paddington, accommodating 3,000 people over eight floors. A permanent desk will cost you £425 a month, rising to £675 depending on its location in the building. A one-person office will set you back £725 to £825 a month, a four-person £2,600 to £3,100. The largest office here is for 40 people; in Paddington, one company has 230 desks.",
"At a purely economic level, it's easy to see why. As large corporates downsize their core operations, they no longer need vast offices. Iris Lapinski watched the process in action when her educational non-profit startup, Apps for Good, squatted in Royal Bank of Scotland’s offices in the City in late 2008. \"RBS was going through huge waves of redundancies. On our floor, it was three of us and 150 empty desks,\" she says, \"and then new people would come in and they'd get fired too. Eventually they'd fired so many people they closed down the building.\" Aware that \"tech companies were doing something funkier\", she moved Apps for Good into the Trampery, the first coworking space in Shoreditch.",
"What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"",
"Meanwhile, the current excitement over coworking may have less to do with a method of office organisation than with a handful of hugely successful connectors. When Iris Lapinski moved out of RBS, she chose the Trampery partly because \"Charles draws in interesting people. He's got links to corporates, government, policymakers.\" One of these connections turned out to be Bob Schukai, head of advanced product innovation at Thomson Reuters, which led directly to £300,000 of sponsorship revenue for Apps for Good. \"Charles is a great connector,\" Lapinsky says, \"and that is really what makes the Trampery so special. Most don't have the same flair.\"\nImages from top: WeWork Moorgate; Second Home; WeWork; The Trampery Old Street, Home of Publicis Drugstore; Timberyard; WeWork\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey founded WeWork in 2010 in New York to capitalise on this corporate downsizing phenomenon: leasing large spaces, often previous corporate offices, subdividing them, then selling them at a profit. WeWork typically rents its buildings (although it owns its latest London site in Paddington) then subleases the space – with, according to Fast Company, average gross margins of 60 per cent. \n\n The model has proved so successful that WeWork now has 103 locations in 29 cities worldwide. The company will open five new coworking spaces in London this year, bringing the total to 11, with Paddington large enough for 2,100 'members'. The company recently authorised the sale of up to $780m in new stock, giving it a $16bn valuation and making it, on paper, the sixth most valuable private startup in the world."
],
[
"Being a Second Home business gives you access to others that have also made the grade. \"We had a strong business plan, but there were other things we didn't have,\"says Wood. \"Someone at Second Home recommended our branding agency, Ragged Edge. Congregation Partners, who are here, have helped with recruiting; and we met Blue State Digital [a digital strategy agency that worked on Obama's election campaign, whose London office is based at Second Home] in the bar one Friday night and they offered us a workshop about how to market and launch. It's an extremely generous collaborative culture.\"\nOther kinds of business at Second Home include venture capitalists; the European headquarters of chore-outsourcing company TaskRabbit; and ASAP54, an app that scans online fashion and locates where to buy it. Silva and Aldenton curate events that help them to network and that offer a kind of intellectual support and ballast – so Amit Gudka, a fan of the South African theoretical physicist Neil Turok was able to hear him speak at Second Home and afterwards have dinner with him and Silva.",
"New work order\nIn March 2015, it was time for Hayden Wood and Amit Gudka to move out of the kitchen. The pair had raised investment for their startup, Bulb, a renewable energy supplier, and they were looking for an office. \n\n A coworking space was the obvious choice: somewhere that would allow them to take on more desks as needed. (When I meet them a little over a year later, they were eight strong and hiring around one more each month.) \"We looked at a few different spaces,\" says Wood, who had previously spent 10 years in management consultancy for Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte) and Bain & Company. \"Second Home had been open a few months and we took the tour. We were nervous: were we going to get in?\"",
"Wood and Gudka's first post-kitchen office was in Second Home's roaming area, where freelancers come and go. A desk costs £350 a month; they are sold several times over (a four-to-one ratio is thought to ensure the right level of occupancy without straining supply). The pair subsequently moved into a studio, then a larger office; they will take a bigger space upstairs when the refurbishment of three upper floors is completed. \"It doesn't feel like being a tenant,\" says Wood. \"The community team here has taught us a lot about how to interact with our own members.\"",
"When I arrive at the Second Home reception desk, a sign urges me to \"join us tonight at 3.30pm for meditation.\" Before that, there's the option to have lunch at the atrium restaurant, Jago, founded by a former head chef of Ottolenghi and the former general manager of Morito. Today, there are cauliflower fritters made with lentil flour (gluten-free), which you can eat while admiring the exuberant architecture of Spanish firm SelgasCano, which has transformed the former carpet warehouse near Brick Lane: a plexiglass bubble punched out of the front of the building, sweeping curved walls, a wide cantilevered staircase up to the pod-like offices on the first floor.",
"Morgan's case may have been helped by her previous role as head of property for Tech City, the government initiative promoted by David Cameron's advisor Rohan Silva, who also happens to be the co-founder of Second Home. Wood admits that he and Gudka, who previously traded energy at Barclays for eight years, did know some people at Second Home already. \"When we looked on the website, some of the faces were familiar. And we hoped our business idea was quite good.\"",
"The logical extension of the elision of work and home life is that the same organisations might end up providing both. WeWork is experimenting with micro apartments in two locations: in New York and at Crystal City, outside Washington DC. Second Home is also believed to have Roam, which began in Bali, intends to build a global co-living network, with its offer: \"Sign one lease. Live around the world.\" From its initial base in Ubud, it has expanded into Miami and recently Madrid; Buenos Aires and London are 'coming soon'. Roam isn't simply about a bed for the night: it sells itself partly on the quality of its coworking offer. In Bali, the office space is on the roof, under a palm thatch, with a swimming pool in the courtyard below.",
"It is odd, perhaps, to think of the renting of office space as a socially testing business, entailing pre-interview nerves. But acceptance into Second Home, for some, signifies hipness. Juliette Morgan, partner at Cushman & Wakefield, a property consultancy, who works out of Second Home, says: \"I used to joke that there was a cool alarm that went off when people came to look round – but then they let us in.\"",
"Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.",
"The benches are orange, the floors yellow. (\"There is quite a lot of science behind the colours, to do with improving mood and productivity,\" says Morgan.) Flowers flop in elegant vases and masses of plants sit in pots on sills, desks and walls. A row of fruit trees is in blossom outside. The exposed concrete pillars look unfinished, with scribble and tags still visible. Sam Aldenton, Silva's co-founder, has sourced 600 mid-century modern chairs from all over Europe.\n\"It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money,\" says Morgan, \"but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business.\"",
"We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations; hacker spaces; industry- and sector-coworking spaces; more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace; and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. \n\n Coworking began because startups and freelancers, typically in tech and the creative industries, needed somewhere to work. But as more organisations outsource more of their operations – or as large corporates seek to reach those startups – the range of activities represented among coworkers has expanded to comprehend almost everything. KPMG’s tech startup advice arm is based at Interchange in Camden. Merck, Microsoft, American Express and GE all lease desks at WeWork, in addition to running their own offices.",
"What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"",
"Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".",
"In what Armstrong calls \"a somewhat unconventional deal with Peabody\", the Trampery is about to start building Fish Island Village in Hackney Wick: a co-living space that will also include traditional social housing. This experiment is partly a response to the pricing out of London of artists and other creatives and partly an attempt \"to move beyond a single workspace to think about a neighbourhood\".",
"Given that coworking, which after all grew out of hacker culture, is supposed to embody an attitude of resistance to conventional authority, WeWork is curiously corporate, certainly in its approach to communication. I am asked not to quote the community manager who shows me around. There isn't anyone who can speak on the record (or off it, for that matter) in the building. My queries have to be submitted in writing then edited down because there are too many of them. The answers come back, finally, appended: \"All attributable to Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe\".",
"As we have to rely more on ourselves and on our own resources at work, it's probably not surprising that we seek out the reassuring sight of other people doing the same. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri say in their 2012 book, Declaration, \"The centre of gravity of capitalist production no longer resides in the factory but has drifted outside its walls. Society has become a factory.\" \n\n Work has blurred into life, in part owing to the peculiar nature of our current relationship to technology. We do not conceive of machines, as we did in the past, as engines of oppression, exploiting workers; rather, we frame our devices as intimate and personal, interactive and fun, blurring the distinctions between work and play.",
"In the last couple of months, Timberyard has renting out permanent desks in the basement of its Soho branch and now hosts three companies, one of eight people, one of 12 and one of 20. But Elliott says the shop upstairs will always be open to the street and the public. Typically, workers stay for a couple of hours, but they might be there for 20 minutes or all day. \"We believe this is the way people will work in the future,\" Elliott says, surveying a sea of laptops: \"portable, connected, independent and collaborative, sharing resources and seeking out inspiring spaces.\" Timberyard intends to become a way station for the digital nomad.",
"The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.",
"Meanwhile, the current excitement over coworking may have less to do with a method of office organisation than with a handful of hugely successful connectors. When Iris Lapinski moved out of RBS, she chose the Trampery partly because \"Charles draws in interesting people. He's got links to corporates, government, policymakers.\" One of these connections turned out to be Bob Schukai, head of advanced product innovation at Thomson Reuters, which led directly to £300,000 of sponsorship revenue for Apps for Good. \"Charles is a great connector,\" Lapinsky says, \"and that is really what makes the Trampery so special. Most don't have the same flair.\"\nImages from top: WeWork Moorgate; Second Home; WeWork; The Trampery Old Street, Home of Publicis Drugstore; Timberyard; WeWork\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"The single generation demographic bubble is of course the trouble with all this curation. Even while lip service is paid to ideas of innovation coming from unexpected places, from unlikely collisions and random connections, it is a very tough-minded curator who doesn't seek to be surrounded by people who are basically a bit like himself. With coworking spaces, as with the internet, there is the promise of connection and collaboration and a world of newness and surprise. And, as with the internet, there is a danger that you can easily end up talking either to people just like yourself.",
"Coworking organisations increasingly see a market in digital nomads: if you can work from a coffee shop in Seven Dials, why not a rooftop in Bali? It's not even necessary to have a string of spaces across the world to attract drop-ins from elsewhere:Coworking Visa andCoPass offer 'passports' that guarantee a certain amount of time in any of their participating spaces. \n\n The Trampery, the pioneering coworking organisation in London that attracted Iris Lapinski, is now moving into co-living. Founded by the sociologist-entrepreneur-musician-traveller-dandy Charles Armstrong, The Trampery currently has three spaces, at Old Street, near City Hall, and in Hackney Wick. Armstrong began with a cross-sector workspace but now specialises in fashion and retail at Old St, travel and tourism at London Bridge, and digital artists, fashion and design in Hackney, finding this a better way to create 'intentional communities' and secure corporate partnerships."
],
[
"The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.",
"The Freelancers' Union in the US claims that 30 per cent of the US working population is now freelance, and predicts a rise to 50 per cent by 2035. One in eight London workers are self-employed. But the unstoppable rise and rise of coworking isn't simply about corporate downsizing and the growth of the startup and the gig economy, significant though these are.",
"It seems likely that coworking spaces will follow a pattern set by festivals. They will proliferate, each developing its own distinctive vibe, projecting an array of differing identities while all answering a need for the increasingly autonomous workers of the future to hang out with other people.",
"At a purely economic level, it's easy to see why. As large corporates downsize their core operations, they no longer need vast offices. Iris Lapinski watched the process in action when her educational non-profit startup, Apps for Good, squatted in Royal Bank of Scotland’s offices in the City in late 2008. \"RBS was going through huge waves of redundancies. On our floor, it was three of us and 150 empty desks,\" she says, \"and then new people would come in and they'd get fired too. Eventually they'd fired so many people they closed down the building.\" Aware that \"tech companies were doing something funkier\", she moved Apps for Good into the Trampery, the first coworking space in Shoreditch.",
"What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"",
"Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.",
"The annual Global Coworking Survey, produced by Deskmag, anticipates that 10,000 new coworking spaces will open worldwide in 2016. In Europe, the estimated number of spaces (though it's hard to keep track) has risen from 3,400 in 2013 to around 7,800 in 2016. According to Cushman & Wakefield's Juliette Morgan, \"Twelve per cent of the uptake in the London market in the last year has been spaces like this. Everyone thinks it's going to continue.\"",
"Coworking organisations increasingly see a market in digital nomads: if you can work from a coffee shop in Seven Dials, why not a rooftop in Bali? It's not even necessary to have a string of spaces across the world to attract drop-ins from elsewhere:Coworking Visa andCoPass offer 'passports' that guarantee a certain amount of time in any of their participating spaces. \n\n The Trampery, the pioneering coworking organisation in London that attracted Iris Lapinski, is now moving into co-living. Founded by the sociologist-entrepreneur-musician-traveller-dandy Charles Armstrong, The Trampery currently has three spaces, at Old Street, near City Hall, and in Hackney Wick. Armstrong began with a cross-sector workspace but now specialises in fashion and retail at Old St, travel and tourism at London Bridge, and digital artists, fashion and design in Hackney, finding this a better way to create 'intentional communities' and secure corporate partnerships.",
"We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations; hacker spaces; industry- and sector-coworking spaces; more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace; and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. \n\n Coworking began because startups and freelancers, typically in tech and the creative industries, needed somewhere to work. But as more organisations outsource more of their operations – or as large corporates seek to reach those startups – the range of activities represented among coworkers has expanded to comprehend almost everything. KPMG’s tech startup advice arm is based at Interchange in Camden. Merck, Microsoft, American Express and GE all lease desks at WeWork, in addition to running their own offices.",
"Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".",
"Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey founded WeWork in 2010 in New York to capitalise on this corporate downsizing phenomenon: leasing large spaces, often previous corporate offices, subdividing them, then selling them at a profit. WeWork typically rents its buildings (although it owns its latest London site in Paddington) then subleases the space – with, according to Fast Company, average gross margins of 60 per cent. \n\n The model has proved so successful that WeWork now has 103 locations in 29 cities worldwide. The company will open five new coworking spaces in London this year, bringing the total to 11, with Paddington large enough for 2,100 'members'. The company recently authorised the sale of up to $780m in new stock, giving it a $16bn valuation and making it, on paper, the sixth most valuable private startup in the world.",
"We tend not, for example, to view posting on Facebook as labour, even though there are perfectly good economic arguments why we should. The eight hours' work, eight hours' leisure, eight hours' rest fought for so fiercely in the 19th century has become meaningless in an era when we willingly, eagerly, spend 12 hours a day on a laptop. \n\n As work becomes increasingly unpredictable and permeable, in a way that reflects the internet itself, workspaces are imagined more as social landscapes. Increasingly, they are designed for serendipitous encounters, emotional expression, explorations of identity. Of course, you could take the cynical view that the imperative of productivity has now colonised every aspect of our lives, that our private relationships have become 'social capital', that even our intimate interactions have been turned into a kind of labour. Or you could say, as coworking enthusiasts tend to, that work has got a whole lot more fun.",
"The benches are orange, the floors yellow. (\"There is quite a lot of science behind the colours, to do with improving mood and productivity,\" says Morgan.) Flowers flop in elegant vases and masses of plants sit in pots on sills, desks and walls. A row of fruit trees is in blossom outside. The exposed concrete pillars look unfinished, with scribble and tags still visible. Sam Aldenton, Silva's co-founder, has sourced 600 mid-century modern chairs from all over Europe.\n\"It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money,\" says Morgan, \"but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business.\"",
"In the last couple of months, Timberyard has renting out permanent desks in the basement of its Soho branch and now hosts three companies, one of eight people, one of 12 and one of 20. But Elliott says the shop upstairs will always be open to the street and the public. Typically, workers stay for a couple of hours, but they might be there for 20 minutes or all day. \"We believe this is the way people will work in the future,\" Elliott says, surveying a sea of laptops: \"portable, connected, independent and collaborative, sharing resources and seeking out inspiring spaces.\" Timberyard intends to become a way station for the digital nomad.",
"Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, coffee shop-workspace hybrid Timberyard is dematerialising the desk, providing mobile workers who need to sit down and check their emails with the most ad hoc of workspaces. Most of Timberyard's users don't pay for space, the usual coworking business model, but they do pay for the tea and coffee (\"award-winning\", co-founder Darren Elliott is keen to point out) and for the artisan-produced, wellness-focused food (super seeds with almond butter on toast, beetroot, avocado and hummus on toast, hibiscus cake). Unlike most coffee shops, Timberyard's branches in Seven Dials and Soho are designed to encourage customers to stay and work: there is fast Wi-Fi with plentiful power sockets, careful regulation of temperature, lots of natural light and attentive design. Many of the chairs have been rescued from skips and reupholstered; the tables are striped like Jim Lambie staircases; the disabled toilet looks like a shipping container.",
"It is odd, perhaps, to think of the renting of office space as a socially testing business, entailing pre-interview nerves. But acceptance into Second Home, for some, signifies hipness. Juliette Morgan, partner at Cushman & Wakefield, a property consultancy, who works out of Second Home, says: \"I used to joke that there was a cool alarm that went off when people came to look round – but then they let us in.\"",
"So what of those questions about style and scalability? As far as the former is concerned, coworking spaces do all look a little bit alike – but design has a long history of innovators and followers. Inevitably, everyone borrows the more directional visual cues, even to the point of pastiche. \n\n But they are not, in fact, all alike. They are surprising in their degree of difference. There are industrial-scale operators that lack the warmth and personal touches of the smaller providers (no one at WeWork is ever going to come out of the kitchen as you arrive, knowing your name and whom you're here to visit, which is what happens at the Trampery); but which also lack their preciousness about who is allowed to the party. And then there are the cool clubs that everyone in their right mind would want to join, but where few are chosen.",
"New work order\nIn March 2015, it was time for Hayden Wood and Amit Gudka to move out of the kitchen. The pair had raised investment for their startup, Bulb, a renewable energy supplier, and they were looking for an office. \n\n A coworking space was the obvious choice: somewhere that would allow them to take on more desks as needed. (When I meet them a little over a year later, they were eight strong and hiring around one more each month.) \"We looked at a few different spaces,\" says Wood, who had previously spent 10 years in management consultancy for Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte) and Bain & Company. \"Second Home had been open a few months and we took the tour. We were nervous: were we going to get in?\"",
"The single generation demographic bubble is of course the trouble with all this curation. Even while lip service is paid to ideas of innovation coming from unexpected places, from unlikely collisions and random connections, it is a very tough-minded curator who doesn't seek to be surrounded by people who are basically a bit like himself. With coworking spaces, as with the internet, there is the promise of connection and collaboration and a world of newness and surprise. And, as with the internet, there is a danger that you can easily end up talking either to people just like yourself.",
"This empire of office space has been derided as 'McCoworking'; but another way of looking at it might simply be that it's a sign of natural segmentation as the market matures. Many workspace providers set up because they wanted some office space themselves; they have no desire to be other than local, small-scale and collaborative. But others are starting to take on a role as akind of corporate parent. Canada's Coworking Ontario provides health insurance. WeWork is also reported to be looking at providing discounts on healthcare, payroll and shipping, replicating services that a corporate employer might once have provided."
],
[
"Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey founded WeWork in 2010 in New York to capitalise on this corporate downsizing phenomenon: leasing large spaces, often previous corporate offices, subdividing them, then selling them at a profit. WeWork typically rents its buildings (although it owns its latest London site in Paddington) then subleases the space – with, according to Fast Company, average gross margins of 60 per cent. \n\n The model has proved so successful that WeWork now has 103 locations in 29 cities worldwide. The company will open five new coworking spaces in London this year, bringing the total to 11, with Paddington large enough for 2,100 'members'. The company recently authorised the sale of up to $780m in new stock, giving it a $16bn valuation and making it, on paper, the sixth most valuable private startup in the world.",
"We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations; hacker spaces; industry- and sector-coworking spaces; more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace; and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. \n\n Coworking began because startups and freelancers, typically in tech and the creative industries, needed somewhere to work. But as more organisations outsource more of their operations – or as large corporates seek to reach those startups – the range of activities represented among coworkers has expanded to comprehend almost everything. KPMG’s tech startup advice arm is based at Interchange in Camden. Merck, Microsoft, American Express and GE all lease desks at WeWork, in addition to running their own offices.",
"This empire of office space has been derided as 'McCoworking'; but another way of looking at it might simply be that it's a sign of natural segmentation as the market matures. Many workspace providers set up because they wanted some office space themselves; they have no desire to be other than local, small-scale and collaborative. But others are starting to take on a role as akind of corporate parent. Canada's Coworking Ontario provides health insurance. WeWork is also reported to be looking at providing discounts on healthcare, payroll and shipping, replicating services that a corporate employer might once have provided.",
"The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.",
"Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".",
"What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"",
"WeWork Moorgate is the second largest coworking space in the UK after WeWork Paddington, accommodating 3,000 people over eight floors. A permanent desk will cost you £425 a month, rising to £675 depending on its location in the building. A one-person office will set you back £725 to £825 a month, a four-person £2,600 to £3,100. The largest office here is for 40 people; in Paddington, one company has 230 desks.",
"Meanwhile, the current excitement over coworking may have less to do with a method of office organisation than with a handful of hugely successful connectors. When Iris Lapinski moved out of RBS, she chose the Trampery partly because \"Charles draws in interesting people. He's got links to corporates, government, policymakers.\" One of these connections turned out to be Bob Schukai, head of advanced product innovation at Thomson Reuters, which led directly to £300,000 of sponsorship revenue for Apps for Good. \"Charles is a great connector,\" Lapinsky says, \"and that is really what makes the Trampery so special. Most don't have the same flair.\"\nImages from top: WeWork Moorgate; Second Home; WeWork; The Trampery Old Street, Home of Publicis Drugstore; Timberyard; WeWork\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"The logical extension of the elision of work and home life is that the same organisations might end up providing both. WeWork is experimenting with micro apartments in two locations: in New York and at Crystal City, outside Washington DC. Second Home is also believed to have Roam, which began in Bali, intends to build a global co-living network, with its offer: \"Sign one lease. Live around the world.\" From its initial base in Ubud, it has expanded into Miami and recently Madrid; Buenos Aires and London are 'coming soon'. Roam isn't simply about a bed for the night: it sells itself partly on the quality of its coworking offer. In Bali, the office space is on the roof, under a palm thatch, with a swimming pool in the courtyard below.",
"So what of those questions about style and scalability? As far as the former is concerned, coworking spaces do all look a little bit alike – but design has a long history of innovators and followers. Inevitably, everyone borrows the more directional visual cues, even to the point of pastiche. \n\n But they are not, in fact, all alike. They are surprising in their degree of difference. There are industrial-scale operators that lack the warmth and personal touches of the smaller providers (no one at WeWork is ever going to come out of the kitchen as you arrive, knowing your name and whom you're here to visit, which is what happens at the Trampery); but which also lack their preciousness about who is allowed to the party. And then there are the cool clubs that everyone in their right mind would want to join, but where few are chosen.",
"Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.",
"Coworking organisations increasingly see a market in digital nomads: if you can work from a coffee shop in Seven Dials, why not a rooftop in Bali? It's not even necessary to have a string of spaces across the world to attract drop-ins from elsewhere:Coworking Visa andCoPass offer 'passports' that guarantee a certain amount of time in any of their participating spaces. \n\n The Trampery, the pioneering coworking organisation in London that attracted Iris Lapinski, is now moving into co-living. Founded by the sociologist-entrepreneur-musician-traveller-dandy Charles Armstrong, The Trampery currently has three spaces, at Old Street, near City Hall, and in Hackney Wick. Armstrong began with a cross-sector workspace but now specialises in fashion and retail at Old St, travel and tourism at London Bridge, and digital artists, fashion and design in Hackney, finding this a better way to create 'intentional communities' and secure corporate partnerships.",
"At a purely economic level, it's easy to see why. As large corporates downsize their core operations, they no longer need vast offices. Iris Lapinski watched the process in action when her educational non-profit startup, Apps for Good, squatted in Royal Bank of Scotland’s offices in the City in late 2008. \"RBS was going through huge waves of redundancies. On our floor, it was three of us and 150 empty desks,\" she says, \"and then new people would come in and they'd get fired too. Eventually they'd fired so many people they closed down the building.\" Aware that \"tech companies were doing something funkier\", she moved Apps for Good into the Trampery, the first coworking space in Shoreditch.",
"It seems likely that coworking spaces will follow a pattern set by festivals. They will proliferate, each developing its own distinctive vibe, projecting an array of differing identities while all answering a need for the increasingly autonomous workers of the future to hang out with other people.",
"Given that coworking, which after all grew out of hacker culture, is supposed to embody an attitude of resistance to conventional authority, WeWork is curiously corporate, certainly in its approach to communication. I am asked not to quote the community manager who shows me around. There isn't anyone who can speak on the record (or off it, for that matter) in the building. My queries have to be submitted in writing then edited down because there are too many of them. The answers come back, finally, appended: \"All attributable to Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe\".",
"The benches are orange, the floors yellow. (\"There is quite a lot of science behind the colours, to do with improving mood and productivity,\" says Morgan.) Flowers flop in elegant vases and masses of plants sit in pots on sills, desks and walls. A row of fruit trees is in blossom outside. The exposed concrete pillars look unfinished, with scribble and tags still visible. Sam Aldenton, Silva's co-founder, has sourced 600 mid-century modern chairs from all over Europe.\n\"It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money,\" says Morgan, \"but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business.\"",
"The annual Global Coworking Survey, produced by Deskmag, anticipates that 10,000 new coworking spaces will open worldwide in 2016. In Europe, the estimated number of spaces (though it's hard to keep track) has risen from 3,400 in 2013 to around 7,800 in 2016. According to Cushman & Wakefield's Juliette Morgan, \"Twelve per cent of the uptake in the London market in the last year has been spaces like this. Everyone thinks it's going to continue.\"",
"In the last couple of months, Timberyard has renting out permanent desks in the basement of its Soho branch and now hosts three companies, one of eight people, one of 12 and one of 20. But Elliott says the shop upstairs will always be open to the street and the public. Typically, workers stay for a couple of hours, but they might be there for 20 minutes or all day. \"We believe this is the way people will work in the future,\" Elliott says, surveying a sea of laptops: \"portable, connected, independent and collaborative, sharing resources and seeking out inspiring spaces.\" Timberyard intends to become a way station for the digital nomad.",
"Being a Second Home business gives you access to others that have also made the grade. \"We had a strong business plan, but there were other things we didn't have,\"says Wood. \"Someone at Second Home recommended our branding agency, Ragged Edge. Congregation Partners, who are here, have helped with recruiting; and we met Blue State Digital [a digital strategy agency that worked on Obama's election campaign, whose London office is based at Second Home] in the bar one Friday night and they offered us a workshop about how to market and launch. It's an extremely generous collaborative culture.\"\nOther kinds of business at Second Home include venture capitalists; the European headquarters of chore-outsourcing company TaskRabbit; and ASAP54, an app that scans online fashion and locates where to buy it. Silva and Aldenton curate events that help them to network and that offer a kind of intellectual support and ballast – so Amit Gudka, a fan of the South African theoretical physicist Neil Turok was able to hear him speak at Second Home and afterwards have dinner with him and Silva.",
"The interior ticks all the coworking style boxes: raw concrete; exposed ceilings revealing air conditioning ducts, pipes and silvered insulation; multicoloured upholstery; a kitchen with its own island bar offering free tea, coffee and craft beer; easy chairs and sofas; tables of varying heights and sizes; music; and some signifiers of fun, such as a table tennis table (but, unlike at WeWork's South Bank site, no arcade machines; nor, unlike at its Devonshire Square, any skateboards on the walls). \n\n In the toilet, cups for mouthwash urge you to 'stay fresh', which I am sure is meant jocularly but which arouses in me the same sort of mulish resentment I used to feel when I worked in advertising in my twenties and slogans in reception ordered me to \"reach for the stars\". (What makes you think I wouldn't, mate?)."
],
[
"What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"",
"The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.",
"Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".",
"We tend not, for example, to view posting on Facebook as labour, even though there are perfectly good economic arguments why we should. The eight hours' work, eight hours' leisure, eight hours' rest fought for so fiercely in the 19th century has become meaningless in an era when we willingly, eagerly, spend 12 hours a day on a laptop. \n\n As work becomes increasingly unpredictable and permeable, in a way that reflects the internet itself, workspaces are imagined more as social landscapes. Increasingly, they are designed for serendipitous encounters, emotional expression, explorations of identity. Of course, you could take the cynical view that the imperative of productivity has now colonised every aspect of our lives, that our private relationships have become 'social capital', that even our intimate interactions have been turned into a kind of labour. Or you could say, as coworking enthusiasts tend to, that work has got a whole lot more fun.",
"It seems likely that coworking spaces will follow a pattern set by festivals. They will proliferate, each developing its own distinctive vibe, projecting an array of differing identities while all answering a need for the increasingly autonomous workers of the future to hang out with other people.",
"Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.",
"The benches are orange, the floors yellow. (\"There is quite a lot of science behind the colours, to do with improving mood and productivity,\" says Morgan.) Flowers flop in elegant vases and masses of plants sit in pots on sills, desks and walls. A row of fruit trees is in blossom outside. The exposed concrete pillars look unfinished, with scribble and tags still visible. Sam Aldenton, Silva's co-founder, has sourced 600 mid-century modern chairs from all over Europe.\n\"It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money,\" says Morgan, \"but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business.\"",
"We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations; hacker spaces; industry- and sector-coworking spaces; more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace; and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. \n\n Coworking began because startups and freelancers, typically in tech and the creative industries, needed somewhere to work. But as more organisations outsource more of their operations – or as large corporates seek to reach those startups – the range of activities represented among coworkers has expanded to comprehend almost everything. KPMG’s tech startup advice arm is based at Interchange in Camden. Merck, Microsoft, American Express and GE all lease desks at WeWork, in addition to running their own offices.",
"In the last couple of months, Timberyard has renting out permanent desks in the basement of its Soho branch and now hosts three companies, one of eight people, one of 12 and one of 20. But Elliott says the shop upstairs will always be open to the street and the public. Typically, workers stay for a couple of hours, but they might be there for 20 minutes or all day. \"We believe this is the way people will work in the future,\" Elliott says, surveying a sea of laptops: \"portable, connected, independent and collaborative, sharing resources and seeking out inspiring spaces.\" Timberyard intends to become a way station for the digital nomad.",
"Coworking organisations increasingly see a market in digital nomads: if you can work from a coffee shop in Seven Dials, why not a rooftop in Bali? It's not even necessary to have a string of spaces across the world to attract drop-ins from elsewhere:Coworking Visa andCoPass offer 'passports' that guarantee a certain amount of time in any of their participating spaces. \n\n The Trampery, the pioneering coworking organisation in London that attracted Iris Lapinski, is now moving into co-living. Founded by the sociologist-entrepreneur-musician-traveller-dandy Charles Armstrong, The Trampery currently has three spaces, at Old Street, near City Hall, and in Hackney Wick. Armstrong began with a cross-sector workspace but now specialises in fashion and retail at Old St, travel and tourism at London Bridge, and digital artists, fashion and design in Hackney, finding this a better way to create 'intentional communities' and secure corporate partnerships.",
"Given that coworking, which after all grew out of hacker culture, is supposed to embody an attitude of resistance to conventional authority, WeWork is curiously corporate, certainly in its approach to communication. I am asked not to quote the community manager who shows me around. There isn't anyone who can speak on the record (or off it, for that matter) in the building. My queries have to be submitted in writing then edited down because there are too many of them. The answers come back, finally, appended: \"All attributable to Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe\".",
"Wood and Gudka's first post-kitchen office was in Second Home's roaming area, where freelancers come and go. A desk costs £350 a month; they are sold several times over (a four-to-one ratio is thought to ensure the right level of occupancy without straining supply). The pair subsequently moved into a studio, then a larger office; they will take a bigger space upstairs when the refurbishment of three upper floors is completed. \"It doesn't feel like being a tenant,\" says Wood. \"The community team here has taught us a lot about how to interact with our own members.\"",
"As we have to rely more on ourselves and on our own resources at work, it's probably not surprising that we seek out the reassuring sight of other people doing the same. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri say in their 2012 book, Declaration, \"The centre of gravity of capitalist production no longer resides in the factory but has drifted outside its walls. Society has become a factory.\" \n\n Work has blurred into life, in part owing to the peculiar nature of our current relationship to technology. We do not conceive of machines, as we did in the past, as engines of oppression, exploiting workers; rather, we frame our devices as intimate and personal, interactive and fun, blurring the distinctions between work and play.",
"Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, coffee shop-workspace hybrid Timberyard is dematerialising the desk, providing mobile workers who need to sit down and check their emails with the most ad hoc of workspaces. Most of Timberyard's users don't pay for space, the usual coworking business model, but they do pay for the tea and coffee (\"award-winning\", co-founder Darren Elliott is keen to point out) and for the artisan-produced, wellness-focused food (super seeds with almond butter on toast, beetroot, avocado and hummus on toast, hibiscus cake). Unlike most coffee shops, Timberyard's branches in Seven Dials and Soho are designed to encourage customers to stay and work: there is fast Wi-Fi with plentiful power sockets, careful regulation of temperature, lots of natural light and attentive design. Many of the chairs have been rescued from skips and reupholstered; the tables are striped like Jim Lambie staircases; the disabled toilet looks like a shipping container.",
"The Freelancers' Union in the US claims that 30 per cent of the US working population is now freelance, and predicts a rise to 50 per cent by 2035. One in eight London workers are self-employed. But the unstoppable rise and rise of coworking isn't simply about corporate downsizing and the growth of the startup and the gig economy, significant though these are.",
"Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey founded WeWork in 2010 in New York to capitalise on this corporate downsizing phenomenon: leasing large spaces, often previous corporate offices, subdividing them, then selling them at a profit. WeWork typically rents its buildings (although it owns its latest London site in Paddington) then subleases the space – with, according to Fast Company, average gross margins of 60 per cent. \n\n The model has proved so successful that WeWork now has 103 locations in 29 cities worldwide. The company will open five new coworking spaces in London this year, bringing the total to 11, with Paddington large enough for 2,100 'members'. The company recently authorised the sale of up to $780m in new stock, giving it a $16bn valuation and making it, on paper, the sixth most valuable private startup in the world.",
"The single generation demographic bubble is of course the trouble with all this curation. Even while lip service is paid to ideas of innovation coming from unexpected places, from unlikely collisions and random connections, it is a very tough-minded curator who doesn't seek to be surrounded by people who are basically a bit like himself. With coworking spaces, as with the internet, there is the promise of connection and collaboration and a world of newness and surprise. And, as with the internet, there is a danger that you can easily end up talking either to people just like yourself.",
"It is odd, perhaps, to think of the renting of office space as a socially testing business, entailing pre-interview nerves. But acceptance into Second Home, for some, signifies hipness. Juliette Morgan, partner at Cushman & Wakefield, a property consultancy, who works out of Second Home, says: \"I used to joke that there was a cool alarm that went off when people came to look round – but then they let us in.\"",
"The interior ticks all the coworking style boxes: raw concrete; exposed ceilings revealing air conditioning ducts, pipes and silvered insulation; multicoloured upholstery; a kitchen with its own island bar offering free tea, coffee and craft beer; easy chairs and sofas; tables of varying heights and sizes; music; and some signifiers of fun, such as a table tennis table (but, unlike at WeWork's South Bank site, no arcade machines; nor, unlike at its Devonshire Square, any skateboards on the walls). \n\n In the toilet, cups for mouthwash urge you to 'stay fresh', which I am sure is meant jocularly but which arouses in me the same sort of mulish resentment I used to feel when I worked in advertising in my twenties and slogans in reception ordered me to \"reach for the stars\". (What makes you think I wouldn't, mate?).",
"So what of those questions about style and scalability? As far as the former is concerned, coworking spaces do all look a little bit alike – but design has a long history of innovators and followers. Inevitably, everyone borrows the more directional visual cues, even to the point of pastiche. \n\n But they are not, in fact, all alike. They are surprising in their degree of difference. There are industrial-scale operators that lack the warmth and personal touches of the smaller providers (no one at WeWork is ever going to come out of the kitchen as you arrive, knowing your name and whom you're here to visit, which is what happens at the Trampery); but which also lack their preciousness about who is allowed to the party. And then there are the cool clubs that everyone in their right mind would want to join, but where few are chosen."
],
[
"As we have to rely more on ourselves and on our own resources at work, it's probably not surprising that we seek out the reassuring sight of other people doing the same. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri say in their 2012 book, Declaration, \"The centre of gravity of capitalist production no longer resides in the factory but has drifted outside its walls. Society has become a factory.\" \n\n Work has blurred into life, in part owing to the peculiar nature of our current relationship to technology. We do not conceive of machines, as we did in the past, as engines of oppression, exploiting workers; rather, we frame our devices as intimate and personal, interactive and fun, blurring the distinctions between work and play.",
"We tend not, for example, to view posting on Facebook as labour, even though there are perfectly good economic arguments why we should. The eight hours' work, eight hours' leisure, eight hours' rest fought for so fiercely in the 19th century has become meaningless in an era when we willingly, eagerly, spend 12 hours a day on a laptop. \n\n As work becomes increasingly unpredictable and permeable, in a way that reflects the internet itself, workspaces are imagined more as social landscapes. Increasingly, they are designed for serendipitous encounters, emotional expression, explorations of identity. Of course, you could take the cynical view that the imperative of productivity has now colonised every aspect of our lives, that our private relationships have become 'social capital', that even our intimate interactions have been turned into a kind of labour. Or you could say, as coworking enthusiasts tend to, that work has got a whole lot more fun.",
"The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.",
"What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"",
"Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".",
"Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.",
"The single generation demographic bubble is of course the trouble with all this curation. Even while lip service is paid to ideas of innovation coming from unexpected places, from unlikely collisions and random connections, it is a very tough-minded curator who doesn't seek to be surrounded by people who are basically a bit like himself. With coworking spaces, as with the internet, there is the promise of connection and collaboration and a world of newness and surprise. And, as with the internet, there is a danger that you can easily end up talking either to people just like yourself.",
"We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations; hacker spaces; industry- and sector-coworking spaces; more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace; and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. \n\n Coworking began because startups and freelancers, typically in tech and the creative industries, needed somewhere to work. But as more organisations outsource more of their operations – or as large corporates seek to reach those startups – the range of activities represented among coworkers has expanded to comprehend almost everything. KPMG’s tech startup advice arm is based at Interchange in Camden. Merck, Microsoft, American Express and GE all lease desks at WeWork, in addition to running their own offices.",
"In the last couple of months, Timberyard has renting out permanent desks in the basement of its Soho branch and now hosts three companies, one of eight people, one of 12 and one of 20. But Elliott says the shop upstairs will always be open to the street and the public. Typically, workers stay for a couple of hours, but they might be there for 20 minutes or all day. \"We believe this is the way people will work in the future,\" Elliott says, surveying a sea of laptops: \"portable, connected, independent and collaborative, sharing resources and seeking out inspiring spaces.\" Timberyard intends to become a way station for the digital nomad.",
"Given that coworking, which after all grew out of hacker culture, is supposed to embody an attitude of resistance to conventional authority, WeWork is curiously corporate, certainly in its approach to communication. I am asked not to quote the community manager who shows me around. There isn't anyone who can speak on the record (or off it, for that matter) in the building. My queries have to be submitted in writing then edited down because there are too many of them. The answers come back, finally, appended: \"All attributable to Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe\".",
"It seems likely that coworking spaces will follow a pattern set by festivals. They will proliferate, each developing its own distinctive vibe, projecting an array of differing identities while all answering a need for the increasingly autonomous workers of the future to hang out with other people.",
"Being a Second Home business gives you access to others that have also made the grade. \"We had a strong business plan, but there were other things we didn't have,\"says Wood. \"Someone at Second Home recommended our branding agency, Ragged Edge. Congregation Partners, who are here, have helped with recruiting; and we met Blue State Digital [a digital strategy agency that worked on Obama's election campaign, whose London office is based at Second Home] in the bar one Friday night and they offered us a workshop about how to market and launch. It's an extremely generous collaborative culture.\"\nOther kinds of business at Second Home include venture capitalists; the European headquarters of chore-outsourcing company TaskRabbit; and ASAP54, an app that scans online fashion and locates where to buy it. Silva and Aldenton curate events that help them to network and that offer a kind of intellectual support and ballast – so Amit Gudka, a fan of the South African theoretical physicist Neil Turok was able to hear him speak at Second Home and afterwards have dinner with him and Silva.",
"Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, coffee shop-workspace hybrid Timberyard is dematerialising the desk, providing mobile workers who need to sit down and check their emails with the most ad hoc of workspaces. Most of Timberyard's users don't pay for space, the usual coworking business model, but they do pay for the tea and coffee (\"award-winning\", co-founder Darren Elliott is keen to point out) and for the artisan-produced, wellness-focused food (super seeds with almond butter on toast, beetroot, avocado and hummus on toast, hibiscus cake). Unlike most coffee shops, Timberyard's branches in Seven Dials and Soho are designed to encourage customers to stay and work: there is fast Wi-Fi with plentiful power sockets, careful regulation of temperature, lots of natural light and attentive design. Many of the chairs have been rescued from skips and reupholstered; the tables are striped like Jim Lambie staircases; the disabled toilet looks like a shipping container.",
"Coworking organisations increasingly see a market in digital nomads: if you can work from a coffee shop in Seven Dials, why not a rooftop in Bali? It's not even necessary to have a string of spaces across the world to attract drop-ins from elsewhere:Coworking Visa andCoPass offer 'passports' that guarantee a certain amount of time in any of their participating spaces. \n\n The Trampery, the pioneering coworking organisation in London that attracted Iris Lapinski, is now moving into co-living. Founded by the sociologist-entrepreneur-musician-traveller-dandy Charles Armstrong, The Trampery currently has three spaces, at Old Street, near City Hall, and in Hackney Wick. Armstrong began with a cross-sector workspace but now specialises in fashion and retail at Old St, travel and tourism at London Bridge, and digital artists, fashion and design in Hackney, finding this a better way to create 'intentional communities' and secure corporate partnerships.",
"The interior ticks all the coworking style boxes: raw concrete; exposed ceilings revealing air conditioning ducts, pipes and silvered insulation; multicoloured upholstery; a kitchen with its own island bar offering free tea, coffee and craft beer; easy chairs and sofas; tables of varying heights and sizes; music; and some signifiers of fun, such as a table tennis table (but, unlike at WeWork's South Bank site, no arcade machines; nor, unlike at its Devonshire Square, any skateboards on the walls). \n\n In the toilet, cups for mouthwash urge you to 'stay fresh', which I am sure is meant jocularly but which arouses in me the same sort of mulish resentment I used to feel when I worked in advertising in my twenties and slogans in reception ordered me to \"reach for the stars\". (What makes you think I wouldn't, mate?).",
"The logical extension of the elision of work and home life is that the same organisations might end up providing both. WeWork is experimenting with micro apartments in two locations: in New York and at Crystal City, outside Washington DC. Second Home is also believed to have Roam, which began in Bali, intends to build a global co-living network, with its offer: \"Sign one lease. Live around the world.\" From its initial base in Ubud, it has expanded into Miami and recently Madrid; Buenos Aires and London are 'coming soon'. Roam isn't simply about a bed for the night: it sells itself partly on the quality of its coworking offer. In Bali, the office space is on the roof, under a palm thatch, with a swimming pool in the courtyard below.",
"It is odd, perhaps, to think of the renting of office space as a socially testing business, entailing pre-interview nerves. But acceptance into Second Home, for some, signifies hipness. Juliette Morgan, partner at Cushman & Wakefield, a property consultancy, who works out of Second Home, says: \"I used to joke that there was a cool alarm that went off when people came to look round – but then they let us in.\"",
"At a purely economic level, it's easy to see why. As large corporates downsize their core operations, they no longer need vast offices. Iris Lapinski watched the process in action when her educational non-profit startup, Apps for Good, squatted in Royal Bank of Scotland’s offices in the City in late 2008. \"RBS was going through huge waves of redundancies. On our floor, it was three of us and 150 empty desks,\" she says, \"and then new people would come in and they'd get fired too. Eventually they'd fired so many people they closed down the building.\" Aware that \"tech companies were doing something funkier\", she moved Apps for Good into the Trampery, the first coworking space in Shoreditch.",
"The benches are orange, the floors yellow. (\"There is quite a lot of science behind the colours, to do with improving mood and productivity,\" says Morgan.) Flowers flop in elegant vases and masses of plants sit in pots on sills, desks and walls. A row of fruit trees is in blossom outside. The exposed concrete pillars look unfinished, with scribble and tags still visible. Sam Aldenton, Silva's co-founder, has sourced 600 mid-century modern chairs from all over Europe.\n\"It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money,\" says Morgan, \"but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business.\"",
"Meanwhile, the current excitement over coworking may have less to do with a method of office organisation than with a handful of hugely successful connectors. When Iris Lapinski moved out of RBS, she chose the Trampery partly because \"Charles draws in interesting people. He's got links to corporates, government, policymakers.\" One of these connections turned out to be Bob Schukai, head of advanced product innovation at Thomson Reuters, which led directly to £300,000 of sponsorship revenue for Apps for Good. \"Charles is a great connector,\" Lapinsky says, \"and that is really what makes the Trampery so special. Most don't have the same flair.\"\nImages from top: WeWork Moorgate; Second Home; WeWork; The Trampery Old Street, Home of Publicis Drugstore; Timberyard; WeWork\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article."
],
[
"As we have to rely more on ourselves and on our own resources at work, it's probably not surprising that we seek out the reassuring sight of other people doing the same. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri say in their 2012 book, Declaration, \"The centre of gravity of capitalist production no longer resides in the factory but has drifted outside its walls. Society has become a factory.\" \n\n Work has blurred into life, in part owing to the peculiar nature of our current relationship to technology. We do not conceive of machines, as we did in the past, as engines of oppression, exploiting workers; rather, we frame our devices as intimate and personal, interactive and fun, blurring the distinctions between work and play.",
"We tend not, for example, to view posting on Facebook as labour, even though there are perfectly good economic arguments why we should. The eight hours' work, eight hours' leisure, eight hours' rest fought for so fiercely in the 19th century has become meaningless in an era when we willingly, eagerly, spend 12 hours a day on a laptop. \n\n As work becomes increasingly unpredictable and permeable, in a way that reflects the internet itself, workspaces are imagined more as social landscapes. Increasingly, they are designed for serendipitous encounters, emotional expression, explorations of identity. Of course, you could take the cynical view that the imperative of productivity has now colonised every aspect of our lives, that our private relationships have become 'social capital', that even our intimate interactions have been turned into a kind of labour. Or you could say, as coworking enthusiasts tend to, that work has got a whole lot more fun.",
"The logical extension of the elision of work and home life is that the same organisations might end up providing both. WeWork is experimenting with micro apartments in two locations: in New York and at Crystal City, outside Washington DC. Second Home is also believed to have Roam, which began in Bali, intends to build a global co-living network, with its offer: \"Sign one lease. Live around the world.\" From its initial base in Ubud, it has expanded into Miami and recently Madrid; Buenos Aires and London are 'coming soon'. Roam isn't simply about a bed for the night: it sells itself partly on the quality of its coworking offer. In Bali, the office space is on the roof, under a palm thatch, with a swimming pool in the courtyard below.",
"Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.",
"What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"",
"Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".",
"The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.",
"We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations; hacker spaces; industry- and sector-coworking spaces; more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace; and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. \n\n Coworking began because startups and freelancers, typically in tech and the creative industries, needed somewhere to work. But as more organisations outsource more of their operations – or as large corporates seek to reach those startups – the range of activities represented among coworkers has expanded to comprehend almost everything. KPMG’s tech startup advice arm is based at Interchange in Camden. Merck, Microsoft, American Express and GE all lease desks at WeWork, in addition to running their own offices.",
"Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, coffee shop-workspace hybrid Timberyard is dematerialising the desk, providing mobile workers who need to sit down and check their emails with the most ad hoc of workspaces. Most of Timberyard's users don't pay for space, the usual coworking business model, but they do pay for the tea and coffee (\"award-winning\", co-founder Darren Elliott is keen to point out) and for the artisan-produced, wellness-focused food (super seeds with almond butter on toast, beetroot, avocado and hummus on toast, hibiscus cake). Unlike most coffee shops, Timberyard's branches in Seven Dials and Soho are designed to encourage customers to stay and work: there is fast Wi-Fi with plentiful power sockets, careful regulation of temperature, lots of natural light and attentive design. Many of the chairs have been rescued from skips and reupholstered; the tables are striped like Jim Lambie staircases; the disabled toilet looks like a shipping container.",
"In the last couple of months, Timberyard has renting out permanent desks in the basement of its Soho branch and now hosts three companies, one of eight people, one of 12 and one of 20. But Elliott says the shop upstairs will always be open to the street and the public. Typically, workers stay for a couple of hours, but they might be there for 20 minutes or all day. \"We believe this is the way people will work in the future,\" Elliott says, surveying a sea of laptops: \"portable, connected, independent and collaborative, sharing resources and seeking out inspiring spaces.\" Timberyard intends to become a way station for the digital nomad.",
"Given that coworking, which after all grew out of hacker culture, is supposed to embody an attitude of resistance to conventional authority, WeWork is curiously corporate, certainly in its approach to communication. I am asked not to quote the community manager who shows me around. There isn't anyone who can speak on the record (or off it, for that matter) in the building. My queries have to be submitted in writing then edited down because there are too many of them. The answers come back, finally, appended: \"All attributable to Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe\".",
"Coworking organisations increasingly see a market in digital nomads: if you can work from a coffee shop in Seven Dials, why not a rooftop in Bali? It's not even necessary to have a string of spaces across the world to attract drop-ins from elsewhere:Coworking Visa andCoPass offer 'passports' that guarantee a certain amount of time in any of their participating spaces. \n\n The Trampery, the pioneering coworking organisation in London that attracted Iris Lapinski, is now moving into co-living. Founded by the sociologist-entrepreneur-musician-traveller-dandy Charles Armstrong, The Trampery currently has three spaces, at Old Street, near City Hall, and in Hackney Wick. Armstrong began with a cross-sector workspace but now specialises in fashion and retail at Old St, travel and tourism at London Bridge, and digital artists, fashion and design in Hackney, finding this a better way to create 'intentional communities' and secure corporate partnerships.",
"Being a Second Home business gives you access to others that have also made the grade. \"We had a strong business plan, but there were other things we didn't have,\"says Wood. \"Someone at Second Home recommended our branding agency, Ragged Edge. Congregation Partners, who are here, have helped with recruiting; and we met Blue State Digital [a digital strategy agency that worked on Obama's election campaign, whose London office is based at Second Home] in the bar one Friday night and they offered us a workshop about how to market and launch. It's an extremely generous collaborative culture.\"\nOther kinds of business at Second Home include venture capitalists; the European headquarters of chore-outsourcing company TaskRabbit; and ASAP54, an app that scans online fashion and locates where to buy it. Silva and Aldenton curate events that help them to network and that offer a kind of intellectual support and ballast – so Amit Gudka, a fan of the South African theoretical physicist Neil Turok was able to hear him speak at Second Home and afterwards have dinner with him and Silva.",
"The single generation demographic bubble is of course the trouble with all this curation. Even while lip service is paid to ideas of innovation coming from unexpected places, from unlikely collisions and random connections, it is a very tough-minded curator who doesn't seek to be surrounded by people who are basically a bit like himself. With coworking spaces, as with the internet, there is the promise of connection and collaboration and a world of newness and surprise. And, as with the internet, there is a danger that you can easily end up talking either to people just like yourself.",
"The Freelancers' Union in the US claims that 30 per cent of the US working population is now freelance, and predicts a rise to 50 per cent by 2035. One in eight London workers are self-employed. But the unstoppable rise and rise of coworking isn't simply about corporate downsizing and the growth of the startup and the gig economy, significant though these are.",
"In what Armstrong calls \"a somewhat unconventional deal with Peabody\", the Trampery is about to start building Fish Island Village in Hackney Wick: a co-living space that will also include traditional social housing. This experiment is partly a response to the pricing out of London of artists and other creatives and partly an attempt \"to move beyond a single workspace to think about a neighbourhood\".",
"At a purely economic level, it's easy to see why. As large corporates downsize their core operations, they no longer need vast offices. Iris Lapinski watched the process in action when her educational non-profit startup, Apps for Good, squatted in Royal Bank of Scotland’s offices in the City in late 2008. \"RBS was going through huge waves of redundancies. On our floor, it was three of us and 150 empty desks,\" she says, \"and then new people would come in and they'd get fired too. Eventually they'd fired so many people they closed down the building.\" Aware that \"tech companies were doing something funkier\", she moved Apps for Good into the Trampery, the first coworking space in Shoreditch.",
"The interior ticks all the coworking style boxes: raw concrete; exposed ceilings revealing air conditioning ducts, pipes and silvered insulation; multicoloured upholstery; a kitchen with its own island bar offering free tea, coffee and craft beer; easy chairs and sofas; tables of varying heights and sizes; music; and some signifiers of fun, such as a table tennis table (but, unlike at WeWork's South Bank site, no arcade machines; nor, unlike at its Devonshire Square, any skateboards on the walls). \n\n In the toilet, cups for mouthwash urge you to 'stay fresh', which I am sure is meant jocularly but which arouses in me the same sort of mulish resentment I used to feel when I worked in advertising in my twenties and slogans in reception ordered me to \"reach for the stars\". (What makes you think I wouldn't, mate?).",
"It seems likely that coworking spaces will follow a pattern set by festivals. They will proliferate, each developing its own distinctive vibe, projecting an array of differing identities while all answering a need for the increasingly autonomous workers of the future to hang out with other people.",
"Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey founded WeWork in 2010 in New York to capitalise on this corporate downsizing phenomenon: leasing large spaces, often previous corporate offices, subdividing them, then selling them at a profit. WeWork typically rents its buildings (although it owns its latest London site in Paddington) then subleases the space – with, according to Fast Company, average gross margins of 60 per cent. \n\n The model has proved so successful that WeWork now has 103 locations in 29 cities worldwide. The company will open five new coworking spaces in London this year, bringing the total to 11, with Paddington large enough for 2,100 'members'. The company recently authorised the sale of up to $780m in new stock, giving it a $16bn valuation and making it, on paper, the sixth most valuable private startup in the world."
],
[
"It seems likely that coworking spaces will follow a pattern set by festivals. They will proliferate, each developing its own distinctive vibe, projecting an array of differing identities while all answering a need for the increasingly autonomous workers of the future to hang out with other people.",
"What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"",
"Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".",
"We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations; hacker spaces; industry- and sector-coworking spaces; more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace; and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. \n\n Coworking began because startups and freelancers, typically in tech and the creative industries, needed somewhere to work. But as more organisations outsource more of their operations – or as large corporates seek to reach those startups – the range of activities represented among coworkers has expanded to comprehend almost everything. KPMG’s tech startup advice arm is based at Interchange in Camden. Merck, Microsoft, American Express and GE all lease desks at WeWork, in addition to running their own offices.",
"Coworking organisations increasingly see a market in digital nomads: if you can work from a coffee shop in Seven Dials, why not a rooftop in Bali? It's not even necessary to have a string of spaces across the world to attract drop-ins from elsewhere:Coworking Visa andCoPass offer 'passports' that guarantee a certain amount of time in any of their participating spaces. \n\n The Trampery, the pioneering coworking organisation in London that attracted Iris Lapinski, is now moving into co-living. Founded by the sociologist-entrepreneur-musician-traveller-dandy Charles Armstrong, The Trampery currently has three spaces, at Old Street, near City Hall, and in Hackney Wick. Armstrong began with a cross-sector workspace but now specialises in fashion and retail at Old St, travel and tourism at London Bridge, and digital artists, fashion and design in Hackney, finding this a better way to create 'intentional communities' and secure corporate partnerships.",
"The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.",
"The logical extension of the elision of work and home life is that the same organisations might end up providing both. WeWork is experimenting with micro apartments in two locations: in New York and at Crystal City, outside Washington DC. Second Home is also believed to have Roam, which began in Bali, intends to build a global co-living network, with its offer: \"Sign one lease. Live around the world.\" From its initial base in Ubud, it has expanded into Miami and recently Madrid; Buenos Aires and London are 'coming soon'. Roam isn't simply about a bed for the night: it sells itself partly on the quality of its coworking offer. In Bali, the office space is on the roof, under a palm thatch, with a swimming pool in the courtyard below.",
"Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.",
"This empire of office space has been derided as 'McCoworking'; but another way of looking at it might simply be that it's a sign of natural segmentation as the market matures. Many workspace providers set up because they wanted some office space themselves; they have no desire to be other than local, small-scale and collaborative. But others are starting to take on a role as akind of corporate parent. Canada's Coworking Ontario provides health insurance. WeWork is also reported to be looking at providing discounts on healthcare, payroll and shipping, replicating services that a corporate employer might once have provided.",
"In the last couple of months, Timberyard has renting out permanent desks in the basement of its Soho branch and now hosts three companies, one of eight people, one of 12 and one of 20. But Elliott says the shop upstairs will always be open to the street and the public. Typically, workers stay for a couple of hours, but they might be there for 20 minutes or all day. \"We believe this is the way people will work in the future,\" Elliott says, surveying a sea of laptops: \"portable, connected, independent and collaborative, sharing resources and seeking out inspiring spaces.\" Timberyard intends to become a way station for the digital nomad.",
"So what of those questions about style and scalability? As far as the former is concerned, coworking spaces do all look a little bit alike – but design has a long history of innovators and followers. Inevitably, everyone borrows the more directional visual cues, even to the point of pastiche. \n\n But they are not, in fact, all alike. They are surprising in their degree of difference. There are industrial-scale operators that lack the warmth and personal touches of the smaller providers (no one at WeWork is ever going to come out of the kitchen as you arrive, knowing your name and whom you're here to visit, which is what happens at the Trampery); but which also lack their preciousness about who is allowed to the party. And then there are the cool clubs that everyone in their right mind would want to join, but where few are chosen.",
"The benches are orange, the floors yellow. (\"There is quite a lot of science behind the colours, to do with improving mood and productivity,\" says Morgan.) Flowers flop in elegant vases and masses of plants sit in pots on sills, desks and walls. A row of fruit trees is in blossom outside. The exposed concrete pillars look unfinished, with scribble and tags still visible. Sam Aldenton, Silva's co-founder, has sourced 600 mid-century modern chairs from all over Europe.\n\"It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money,\" says Morgan, \"but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business.\"",
"We tend not, for example, to view posting on Facebook as labour, even though there are perfectly good economic arguments why we should. The eight hours' work, eight hours' leisure, eight hours' rest fought for so fiercely in the 19th century has become meaningless in an era when we willingly, eagerly, spend 12 hours a day on a laptop. \n\n As work becomes increasingly unpredictable and permeable, in a way that reflects the internet itself, workspaces are imagined more as social landscapes. Increasingly, they are designed for serendipitous encounters, emotional expression, explorations of identity. Of course, you could take the cynical view that the imperative of productivity has now colonised every aspect of our lives, that our private relationships have become 'social capital', that even our intimate interactions have been turned into a kind of labour. Or you could say, as coworking enthusiasts tend to, that work has got a whole lot more fun.",
"Wood and Gudka's first post-kitchen office was in Second Home's roaming area, where freelancers come and go. A desk costs £350 a month; they are sold several times over (a four-to-one ratio is thought to ensure the right level of occupancy without straining supply). The pair subsequently moved into a studio, then a larger office; they will take a bigger space upstairs when the refurbishment of three upper floors is completed. \"It doesn't feel like being a tenant,\" says Wood. \"The community team here has taught us a lot about how to interact with our own members.\"",
"In what Armstrong calls \"a somewhat unconventional deal with Peabody\", the Trampery is about to start building Fish Island Village in Hackney Wick: a co-living space that will also include traditional social housing. This experiment is partly a response to the pricing out of London of artists and other creatives and partly an attempt \"to move beyond a single workspace to think about a neighbourhood\".",
"The interior ticks all the coworking style boxes: raw concrete; exposed ceilings revealing air conditioning ducts, pipes and silvered insulation; multicoloured upholstery; a kitchen with its own island bar offering free tea, coffee and craft beer; easy chairs and sofas; tables of varying heights and sizes; music; and some signifiers of fun, such as a table tennis table (but, unlike at WeWork's South Bank site, no arcade machines; nor, unlike at its Devonshire Square, any skateboards on the walls). \n\n In the toilet, cups for mouthwash urge you to 'stay fresh', which I am sure is meant jocularly but which arouses in me the same sort of mulish resentment I used to feel when I worked in advertising in my twenties and slogans in reception ordered me to \"reach for the stars\". (What makes you think I wouldn't, mate?).",
"The annual Global Coworking Survey, produced by Deskmag, anticipates that 10,000 new coworking spaces will open worldwide in 2016. In Europe, the estimated number of spaces (though it's hard to keep track) has risen from 3,400 in 2013 to around 7,800 in 2016. According to Cushman & Wakefield's Juliette Morgan, \"Twelve per cent of the uptake in the London market in the last year has been spaces like this. Everyone thinks it's going to continue.\"",
"Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey founded WeWork in 2010 in New York to capitalise on this corporate downsizing phenomenon: leasing large spaces, often previous corporate offices, subdividing them, then selling them at a profit. WeWork typically rents its buildings (although it owns its latest London site in Paddington) then subleases the space – with, according to Fast Company, average gross margins of 60 per cent. \n\n The model has proved so successful that WeWork now has 103 locations in 29 cities worldwide. The company will open five new coworking spaces in London this year, bringing the total to 11, with Paddington large enough for 2,100 'members'. The company recently authorised the sale of up to $780m in new stock, giving it a $16bn valuation and making it, on paper, the sixth most valuable private startup in the world.",
"Meanwhile, the current excitement over coworking may have less to do with a method of office organisation than with a handful of hugely successful connectors. When Iris Lapinski moved out of RBS, she chose the Trampery partly because \"Charles draws in interesting people. He's got links to corporates, government, policymakers.\" One of these connections turned out to be Bob Schukai, head of advanced product innovation at Thomson Reuters, which led directly to £300,000 of sponsorship revenue for Apps for Good. \"Charles is a great connector,\" Lapinsky says, \"and that is really what makes the Trampery so special. Most don't have the same flair.\"\nImages from top: WeWork Moorgate; Second Home; WeWork; The Trampery Old Street, Home of Publicis Drugstore; Timberyard; WeWork\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"Being a Second Home business gives you access to others that have also made the grade. \"We had a strong business plan, but there were other things we didn't have,\"says Wood. \"Someone at Second Home recommended our branding agency, Ragged Edge. Congregation Partners, who are here, have helped with recruiting; and we met Blue State Digital [a digital strategy agency that worked on Obama's election campaign, whose London office is based at Second Home] in the bar one Friday night and they offered us a workshop about how to market and launch. It's an extremely generous collaborative culture.\"\nOther kinds of business at Second Home include venture capitalists; the European headquarters of chore-outsourcing company TaskRabbit; and ASAP54, an app that scans online fashion and locates where to buy it. Silva and Aldenton curate events that help them to network and that offer a kind of intellectual support and ballast – so Amit Gudka, a fan of the South African theoretical physicist Neil Turok was able to hear him speak at Second Home and afterwards have dinner with him and Silva."
]
] |
test
|
63657
|
[
"What is an autogiro?",
"Why did Mart look for Leah Barrow's spaceship first?",
"Who won the war between Earth and Venus?",
"What Venusian traits were disguised by Tar Norn's dark-colored hairpiece and tinted spectacles?",
"Why did Tar Norn kidnap Leah Barrow?",
"Why does the author give us such a detailed description of the Venusian mind?",
"What evidence indicates that Leah Barrow was kidnapped?",
"Why did Tar Norn put his hostage in the engine of a rocket?",
"Was Leah Barrow in love with Mart Wells?",
"Mart Wells concludes that he was wrong in thinking that nothing mattered more to Director Barrow than his schedules. What does Mart think matters more than schedules to Dir. Barrow, and why?"
] |
[
[
"It appears to be a flying machine similar to a helicopter in function and flying principles.",
"It is a remote-controlled drone with a camera, specialized for operation on Callisto.",
"It is a hot-air balloon specialized for use on Callisto.",
"It is an expensive instrument that helps determine the orientation of a flying machine."
],
[
"Because she was Director Barrow's daughter, so having the facts about Leah to give to the Director was the first priority.",
"Because Leah was Mart's wife - of course he looked for her spaceship first!",
"Leah had recently arrived in her spacecruiser, bringing important information about the Venusians.",
"Because he was in love with her."
],
[
"No one won - the war continues, and the story describes just one of the attacks, some of them carried out by very small forces, in this long-running war.",
"Earth won, but tensions continue, with guerrillas and terrorists from Venus inflicting damage where they can.",
"Venus won and conquered the inner solar system, but Jovian colonists and recent refugees from Earth continue their resistance from Jupiter's moon Callisto.",
"Jupiter brokered a peace between Earth and Venus, and the treaty of 2280 stipulated that no one was considered to have won."
],
[
"Antennae that grew from the top of his smooth, white, hairless skull.",
"His flat face and flat, unconvoluted ears.",
"A smooth, hairless skull that was white and his six-fingered hands.",
"A smooth, hairless skull that was white and gray eyeballs."
],
[
"He landed on Callisto by accident and wanted to make sure he could leave without being apprehended.",
"Tar Norn was not so much a patriot as a pirate, and he needed income to operate his ship. Kidnapping Leah was a way to generate income from ransom money. It was just business, nothing personal.",
"Leah Barrow had visited Venus without Director Barrow's knowledge, and had fallen in love with Tar Norn. They wanted to be together.",
"He had a personal grudge against Director Barrow from their interactions during the Earth-Venus war."
],
[
"The author believes in eugenics and is writing in code about the races of men on Earth in the present time.",
"The inability of Venusians to comprehend machinery and engineering principles gives the reader a clue as to how the kidnapping plot will turn out.",
"Mart Wells reviews the mental strengths and weaknesses of Venusians to avoid falling into the trap of underestimating his enemy.",
"Mart Wells knows that because Venusians aren't much good with technology, Tar Norn will not think about the time zone differences between different parts of Callisto, so the threatened bomb will not go off as soon as threatened, and authorities will have extra time to find it."
],
[
"Leah Barrow's bed is mussed and there are traces of blood on the floor, leading to the door.",
"Leah Barrow is not in her room; her bed is unmade, but does not look slept in; and her pressure suit and her pajamas are gone",
"Leah Barrow is not in her room and the housekeeper saw her leave with a strange man with black hair and tinted glasses.",
"Leah Barrows did not answer her phone, and the towels in her room were dry, indicating she had left without her customary morning shower."
],
[
"As Venusians were too technologically illiterate to wire explosives to detonate at a scheduled time, the only way Norn could have a deadline for negotiating the fate of the hostage was to place her into the end of a space freighter scheduled to leave at a particular time that day.",
"He had limited time to stash his hostage before his presence would become known to authorities, and with everyone out searching the surroundings for his crashed ship, putting Leah in the easiest possible location, an open rocket engine bell, was the best choice.",
"This was a common Venusian guerilla warfare technique, because the threat of roasting a hostage in a rocket blast was gruesome enough to obtain cooperation from the families of the kidnapped.",
"Since Tar Norn, as a Venusian, was not very good with machines, he could not open any of the door interlock systems he encountered, so he could not keep her in a building on Callisto, where he had no allies."
],
[
"No. She loved Tar Norn, and intended to marry him.",
"Yes. It was love at first sight for both Leah and Mart.",
"No. She was completely indifferent to him.",
"No. She liked him as a friend, that was all."
],
[
"His daughter matters more to Barrow. He never really believes that Norn will succeed with his kidnapping plot.",
"Wells is wrong. In fact, nothing matters more to Barrow than schedules.",
"Justice matters more to Barrow. To protect the many people that Norn might kill by getting away, he refuses to let Norn go to save his daughter.",
"Revenge matters more to Barrow. To get revenge against Norn for past crimes, he is willing to let his own daughter die."
]
] |
[
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1
] |
[
0,
1,
1,
1,
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[
[
"\"Huh?\" The mechanic looked startled. \"You sure? No, there hasn't been a\n report. Wait, I'll radio Central Communications.\"\n\n\n He darted back into the building, and emerged a moment later. \"No\n report. They're going to send out the autogiro to look at it. Say,\n Mart, there are only two small spaceships on Callisto. Could it be—\"\n\n\n Mart was already running toward the corner from which he could see the\n landing field. He stopped so suddenly that the mechanic almost ran into\n him, and said, \"Whew! They're both there.\" Leah Barrow's trim little\n spacecruiser was safe in port. So was the Police one-seater scout—but\n that wasn't the one Mart had looked for first.\n\n\n From near the Administration Building a two-place autogiro was rising,\n silhouetted for a moment between the horns of the reddish crescent of\n big Jupiter just above the horizon.",
"He turned back to the papers and finished initialing them, grinning\n inwardly at being able to say that the Director would arrive in\n twenty-one minutes exactly. It wasn't everywhere that one could make\n so accurate a prediction about anyone's arrival time, but Barrow was\n something of a chronometer himself.\n\n\n He tossed the papers toward the back of the desk and threw the switch\n of the communicator on his desk, leaned forward slightly. \"Dispatcher\n Wells calling Police Autogiro.\"\n\n\n \"Autogiro, Captain Wayne,\" came the reply. \"Go ahead. Mart.\"\n\n\n \"I was the one who reported seeing the spaceship, Cap—if it was one.\n Found it? If not, I can—\"",
"Barrow said, \"Yes, he's telling the truth. But we have some time yet.\n Maybe the search—\"\nMart strode to the window and looked out so the others wouldn't see his\n face. Less than three-quarters of an hour to search all of Callisto\n within a radius of fifty miles!\nThrough the pane he saw figures in groups of three searching the\n streets and buildings of Comprotown. That part of the search wouldn't\n be difficult. But the hills and the caves, and with only two autogiros.\n If she was there, out of sight in one of the caves, where the cruising\n ships couldn't see her....\n\n\n Her father was right, but—The picture of Leah Barrow, smiling as he\n had last seen her, seemed to blur out the view from the window. Her\n impertinent little tilted nose, the soft tempting contours of her lips,\n the deep blueness of her eyes.",
"The carrier wave hummed again. \"Central Communications reporting. Most\n searchers in the town have reported in. No results. Those outside\n reaching points three miles out.\"\n\n\n The communicator faded. Mart clenched his fists against the futility\n of that search. Three miles! The strong Venusian, in the light gravity\n of Callisto, probably had eight or ten hours of darkness to carry his\n burden. He could easily have covered twenty to forty miles, in any\n direction. Possibly even more. And the chance of an autogiro—\n\n\n Obviously, Wayne had been thinking the same thing. \"He timed his\n arrival,\" he said bitterly. \"He gave us less than an hour. He'd\n certainly have put her outside walking range within that length of\n time. And with all the caves around, thousands of them, would he have\n put her where a giro could spot anything?\"",
"He whirled from the window and began pacing the floor, trying to\n think of something they could do that wasn't being done. Again at the\n communicator, Captain Wayne was barking questions.\n\n\n \"All available men and women are combing the town, sir,\" he reported,\n \"with orders to break down any doors that are locked, to stop at\n nothing.\"\n\n\n \"And outside, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"The two giros are our only real hope. But the men from the smelting\n plant are working afoot out of town. By nine-thirty they'll have\n covered a radius of about five miles.\"\n\n\n Corey returned, slamming the door viciously behind him. \"Maybe we\n could trick him, sir,\" he suggested. \"Pretend we'll give him a ship if\n he'll—\"",
"\"Thanks, Mart, but we've sighted it all right. We're now circling,\n looking for a spot to come down. It doesn't take much, but damned if we\n can perch on a ridge like a canary. Neither could that space-speedster\n down there.\n\n\n \"Wrecked? What's it look like?\"\n\n\n \"Ummm. Offhand one of the single-place jobs that Venusians bought from\n Earth before the war. Full armament, too.\"\n\n\n \"What? You sure, Cap? After the Earth-Venus twenty-two eighty treaty,\n we reclaimed and destroyed all the armed—\"",
"\"Yeah, I know,\" cut in the Captain's voice. \"All but a few that the\n Venusian renegades—the pirates—got off with before then. Well—we're\n going down. Corey's found a place not too far from it where he can set\n the giro down, or says he can.\"\n\n\n \"If that's a pirate ship, Cap, be careful!\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry. We're armed. And the ship's pretty smashed up. Probably\n at least kayoed whoever was in it. Well, keep your key open and I'll\n call you back. We're down.\"\n\n\n Mart found the shipment chart and began to check off tonnage. That much\n he wanted to get out of the way before—but something was gnawing at\n the back of his mind. It took him a moment to trace what it was. Of\n course. The workman who was waiting for the Director was wearing tinted\n glasses.",
"\"But I still don't see—\"\n\n\n \"The Ganymede jewel shipments, Mart. I'd say he was bound for Gany and\n his ship went blooie while he was scudding past Callisto. He got pulled\n down here and just barely made a landing he could walk away from. I'm\n afraid there'll be trouble.\"\n\n\n Mart whistled. \"Well, the Director's due now. He'll want a search\n organized and—Wait, here he is. Tell it over again, Cap, and you'll be\n reporting direct.... Listen to this, Director.\"\nThe tall slender figure of Director Barrow stood impassively beside\n Mart's desk and listened to a repetition of Wayne's report. Not a\n flicker of expression passed over his gaunt face.\n\n\n As Wayne finished, the Director asked, \"Is he armed? Anything taken\n from the ship's equipment, Captain?\"",
"Mart glanced at Barrow. The Director was sitting as immobile as a\n statue. His eyes were closed and every muscle of his thin face was\n tense. Probably he was trying not to look at the chronometer on the\n wall. It was nine-fifteen.\n\n\n The office door opened and three uniformed mechanics from the field\n stood in the doorway. The foremost of them saluted. \"This entire\n building has been searched twice except this office. I presume—\"\n\n\n Director Barrow opened his eyes and stood up. \"Don't presume anything.\n Search here, too.\"\n\n\n The men came in and began a detailed but fruitless search. Nobody spoke\n until they left.",
"The thought of ships reminded him of the freighters. \"Cap,\" he asked\n Wayne, \"the freighters been searched thoroughly?\"\n\n\n Wayne nodded. \"Rocket tubes and all. Even broke open the ore drums. I\n presume you'll want them to clear on schedule?\"\n\n\n Director Barrow nodded. \"The crews?\" he asked. \"In the search or\n standing by?\"\n\n\n \"Standing by for departure as usual, Director. A few men one way or the\n other—\"\n\n\n Barrow nodded, glancing at the chronometer. Mart knew what he was\n thinking. Less than half an hour now. And, unless the searchers by some\n miracle found Leah Barrow, it would all be over before the ten o'clock\n clearance of the first freighter. And the freighters hadn't missed a\n clearance in ten years.",
"As he walked across the field toward headquarters, Mart surveyed the\n familiar scene. Three squat freighters were up on the racks, their ugly\n black bottoms over the ash-filled blasting pits; four others were on\n dollies ready to be serviced.\n\n\n All seven were ready for their regular weekly Callisto-Jupe hop,\n ready to pick up more ore. And, as usual, they'd go out today to\n clear the field for the sleeker, faster, long-haul ships that would\n arrive from Earth tomorrow for the smelted metal. Mart glanced at his\n wrist-chronometer. Eight o'clock now; in an hour and a half,\nFreighter\n One\n, right on schedule, would start testing its rocket tubes for the\n ten o'clock hop. And an hour later,\nFreighter Two\nwould start to warm\n up for the eleven o'clock blasting-off. And then the others, every hour\n on the hour.",
"True, Comprotown held fewer than a thousand colonists, but it was the\n only inhabited spot on bleak Callisto, and its Director was practical\n czar of a world. Yes, the Director could well afford to look down his\n long nose at any uniform with fewer than six stars on its right sleeve.\n But Leah didn't feel that—\n\n\n Suddenly, straightening up as he fastened his weighted boot, he looked\n more intently out of the window. Something that flashed caught his eye\n out in the barren, warped hills. A gleam of metal where metal shouldn't\n have been. And it looked like a small spaceship.\n\n\n Mart hastily pulled on his other boot and ran down the stairs. A\n red-headed mechanic from the rocketport was coming out of the building\n across the way.\n\n\n Mart called out, \"Red! Something about a mile back in the hills looks\n like a spaceship. Has one been reported down?\"",
"With a sudden intake of breath that was almost a gasp, Mart whirled and\n ran to the communicator. The others looked at him, startled. Mart was\n yelling at the mike even before he got near enough to it to talk in a\n normal voice. \"Control! Emergency! Get\nJupe Freighter One\n!\nTell him\n not to test his tubes.\nNot to touch a lever!\"",
"Mart whirled around. Barrow turned slowly and with dignity.\n\n\n It was the tall man dressed in the uniform of a smelting plant worker\n who had spoken. But he wasn't dark-haired any more. Still seated, he\n was smiling at them sardonically as he fanned himself with a black wig\n he had just removed. The top of his head was as smooth as a billiard\n ball, and dead white. There was a line of demarcation where the dye he\n had applied to his face came to an end.\n\n\n He had removed the tinted glasses too, and the blank-surfaced\n gray eyeballs showed why they had been worn. Now that the simple\n disguise of wig and glasses was removed, Mart noted some of the other\n distinguishing features that marked the Venusian. The general flatness\n of the face and flat unconvoluted ears. The six-fingered hands that had\n probably been thrust into the pockets of the stolen uniform.",
"Tinted glasses on Callisto! It didn't make sense. The sun, half a\n billion miles away, gives only a twenty-fifth of the light that falls\n on Earth. Even when that light is augmented by Big Jupe, it isn't—Yes,\n it was the first time he'd seen tinted glasses in Comprotown.\n\n\n Curiously, he turned to glance at the seated workman. But the carrier\n wave of the desk communicator hummed and he forgot his visitor as\n Captain Wayne's voice boomed in.\n\n\n \"Dispatcher Wells. Captain Wayne calling Dispatcher—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, Cap. Go ahead.\"\n\n\n \"We've examined the spaceship. No one's in it, hurt or otherwise. It's\n a single seater. A pirate ship all right.\"\n\n\n \"You sure? How can you be certain?\"",
"He turned over the sheaf of papers and drew a little square on the\n blank reverse side of the bottom one. That was Comprotown. He made a\n dot an inch or two away. That was the point where Tar Norn's ship had\n wrecked itself in landing.\n\n\n He drew a line from the point to the square. That was Tar Norn coming\n in to the town. That would have been about ten hours ago.\n\n\n Then, from the information about Callisto and Comprotown that had\n been in the papers in Tar Norn's ship, the pirate had found the home\n of the director. He would have had no trouble finding Leah's room.\n Venusians could see in the dark and walk as silently as cats. He would\n undoubtedly have drugged Leah into unconsciousness, probably without\n awakening her, since there had been no sign of a struggle. He'd put her\n into the lightweight spacesuit.",
"A momentary surge of elation swept Mart. Tar Norn must have been\n bluffing! Then he remembered: a Venusian might murder his own family,\n but he would never swear to an untruth by the Eternal Varga. That one\n superstition, or religion, as they looked upon it, was binding beyond\n all else. And Tar Norn had sworn by that oath that Leah Barrows would\n die at nine-thirty unless—\n\n\n Mart looked at the chronometer. It was twenty-six minutes past nine. He\n caught a glimpse of Director Barrow's face. It looked like the face of\n a dead man. Barrow had obviously given up all hope and waited only for\n the four minutes to pass.\n\n\n The carrier wave hummed. All of them started, but the voice from the\n communicator merely reported, \"All Comprotown reports in. All negative.\n Giros report nothing. Foot parties five miles out. Reports negative.\"",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMart Wells shut off the alarm buzzer and jumped out of bed—much to his\n regret. He cussed and then grinned sheepishly as he brought up with a\n thud against the fortunately unbreakable glass of the window. A year\n on Callisto, and he could still forget that he weighed only thirty-six\n pounds and couldn't take a normal step without neutronium-weighted\n shoes.\n\n\n Regaining his balance, he yawned and looked out over the rough Callisto\n landscape beyond Comprotown. Then he yawned again and reached for his\n uniform.\n\n\n A year before, Comprotown—and his job as rocketport dispatcher—had\n been Romance with a capital R. Now, he thought gloomily, Romance with\n Leah with a capital L, and a fat lot of good that did him when Leah\n Barrow's father was Old Fish-face himself, Director of Comprotown.",
"Why? Undoubtedly it indicated that she would be outdoors. During the\n Callisto day, it would have been unnecessary. But an unconscious\n Earthwoman would freeze to death in the cold dark period of Callisto's\n eclipse behind Big Jupe.\n\n\n What then? The Venusian left, carrying her—\nThe Venusian had carried the drugged girl into the night.\nHe threw down the pencil and began to pace the room again. His muscles\n were tense from listening. How many minutes? He didn't want to know;\n dared not look.\n\n\n But Tar Norn must have planned it all before he left the wrecked ship.\n Otherwise he wouldn't have taken the timer and—",
"\"Looks intact, but he probably has sidearms. All the pirates carry\n them. One funny thing, Director. The timer robot has been removed from\n the control panel. What on Callisto would he want with a loose timer?\"\n\n\n \"Report back to headquarters immediately, Captain Wayne,\" Director\n Barrow ordered.\n\n\n The hum of the carrier wave died and Mart clicked off the set.\n Then, belatedly, he stood up and saluted. \"Anything I can do, sir?\n Everything's set for the freighters to clear as usual, so I'm more or\n less free—\"\n\n\n Barrow nodded. \"Very good, Wells. You may go to the field and direct a\n search of the freighters. The Venusian's first thought will be to get\n away, and he may already be stowed in one of—\"\n\n\n A dry voice interrupted from behind the Director's back. \"But the\n Venusian would not do anything so obvious, Director Barrow.\""
],
[
"Barrow said, \"Yes, he's telling the truth. But we have some time yet.\n Maybe the search—\"\nMart strode to the window and looked out so the others wouldn't see his\n face. Less than three-quarters of an hour to search all of Callisto\n within a radius of fifty miles!\nThrough the pane he saw figures in groups of three searching the\n streets and buildings of Comprotown. That part of the search wouldn't\n be difficult. But the hills and the caves, and with only two autogiros.\n If she was there, out of sight in one of the caves, where the cruising\n ships couldn't see her....\n\n\n Her father was right, but—The picture of Leah Barrow, smiling as he\n had last seen her, seemed to blur out the view from the window. Her\n impertinent little tilted nose, the soft tempting contours of her lips,\n the deep blueness of her eyes.",
"The thought of ships reminded him of the freighters. \"Cap,\" he asked\n Wayne, \"the freighters been searched thoroughly?\"\n\n\n Wayne nodded. \"Rocket tubes and all. Even broke open the ore drums. I\n presume you'll want them to clear on schedule?\"\n\n\n Director Barrow nodded. \"The crews?\" he asked. \"In the search or\n standing by?\"\n\n\n \"Standing by for departure as usual, Director. A few men one way or the\n other—\"\n\n\n Barrow nodded, glancing at the chronometer. Mart knew what he was\n thinking. Less than half an hour now. And, unless the searchers by some\n miracle found Leah Barrow, it would all be over before the ten o'clock\n clearance of the first freighter. And the freighters hadn't missed a\n clearance in ten years.",
"\"Huh?\" The mechanic looked startled. \"You sure? No, there hasn't been a\n report. Wait, I'll radio Central Communications.\"\n\n\n He darted back into the building, and emerged a moment later. \"No\n report. They're going to send out the autogiro to look at it. Say,\n Mart, there are only two small spaceships on Callisto. Could it be—\"\n\n\n Mart was already running toward the corner from which he could see the\n landing field. He stopped so suddenly that the mechanic almost ran into\n him, and said, \"Whew! They're both there.\" Leah Barrow's trim little\n spacecruiser was safe in port. So was the Police one-seater scout—but\n that wasn't the one Mart had looked for first.\n\n\n From near the Administration Building a two-place autogiro was rising,\n silhouetted for a moment between the horns of the reddish crescent of\n big Jupiter just above the horizon.",
"\"Captain,\" Barrow ordered, \"you will form a search party at once—every\n available man and means. We must search all of Callisto within—\" he\n made a rapid mental calculation \"—about fifty miles. You will be\n searching for my daughter.\"\n\n\n The captain stiffened. Before he could reply the carrier wave hummed\n and a feminine voice, that of an elderly woman, came over the\n communicator. \"Director Barrow? Leah isn't here. I looked in her room\n and her bed is disarranged as though she left suddenly. She always\n makes it herself as soon as she gets up.\"\n\n\n \"Anything to point to when she left, Mrs. Andrews?\"\n\n\n \"Not exactly, sir. The alarm was set for six and it was still buzzing.\n Her bed isn't very mussed; it looks like she got up again almost right\n after she retired. I don't understand.\"",
"Three minutes to go. Mart could see by the attitude of the others that\n they were bracing themselves for the sound of an explosion. All of them\n had liked, or loved, Leah Barrows. Mart had a momentary vision of her\n again, and remembered the electric thrill that had run through him when\n she had placed her hand on his arm, just a few days ago, and told him\n that she did care for him, well, a little anyway—\n\n\n But, if Tar Norn couldn't have rigged a time-bomb, how could he have\n arranged for Leah to die at nine-thirty?\n\n\n He saw again the corpse-like face of the Director. Yes, they had all\n been wrong in thinking that nothing mattered to Barrow more than the\n schedules—\nSchedules\n! There had been departure schedules among the\n papers in Tar Norn's ship. Could he have—",
"The pirate's smile faded. \"It will take half an hour to prepare the\n ship, Director Barrow. Better not stall too long.\"\n\n\n Mart said, his voice urgent. \"But, sir,\nLeah\n! What's one pirate\n compared to—\"\n\n\n Barrow's face was granite-like. \"He's killed hundreds of people. If we\n release him, he'll kill hundreds more. One life cannot weigh against\n that. Corey, take him away. Lock him up until the next ship leaves for\n Earth.\"\n\n\n Mart's fists were clenched, his fingernails biting into the palms. But\n he knew Barrow was right; that he couldn't possibly take any other\n course and be worthy of his post. One life couldn't weigh against the\n many lives that meeting the pirate's terms would mean. That was where\n Tar Norn had miscalculated. A Venusian didn't understand responsibility\n to society, nor any higher ideal than self-interest.",
"True, Comprotown held fewer than a thousand colonists, but it was the\n only inhabited spot on bleak Callisto, and its Director was practical\n czar of a world. Yes, the Director could well afford to look down his\n long nose at any uniform with fewer than six stars on its right sleeve.\n But Leah didn't feel that—\n\n\n Suddenly, straightening up as he fastened his weighted boot, he looked\n more intently out of the window. Something that flashed caught his eye\n out in the barren, warped hills. A gleam of metal where metal shouldn't\n have been. And it looked like a small spaceship.\n\n\n Mart hastily pulled on his other boot and ran down the stairs. A\n red-headed mechanic from the rocketport was coming out of the building\n across the way.\n\n\n Mart called out, \"Red! Something about a mile back in the hills looks\n like a spaceship. Has one been reported down?\"",
"\"Your daughter, Director,\" he continued. \"If you wish to see her again,\n you will give me a ship, your\nfastest\nship.\"\nThere was a moment of dead, utter silence. Then Director Barrow leaned\n over the desk and flicked the key of the communicator. \"Control? Get\n my—get Leah Barrow at once. Ring her room. If no answer there, get my\n housekeeper. This is Director Barrow.\"\n\n\n \"Your fastest ship,\" repeated the Venusian. \"Well stocked with\n supplies. Enough to take me to—to a place in the Asteroid belt. I\n shall be too late now to carry out my original plans on Ganymede.\"\n\n\n The office door opened and Captain Wayne came in, followed by Roger\n Corey. Their eyes widened as they saw the Venusian. Wayne's hand darted\n toward his holster, then relaxed as he saw Mart's blaster trained on\n the pirate.\n\n\n He faced Director Barrow and saluted.",
"He turned over the sheaf of papers and drew a little square on the\n blank reverse side of the bottom one. That was Comprotown. He made a\n dot an inch or two away. That was the point where Tar Norn's ship had\n wrecked itself in landing.\n\n\n He drew a line from the point to the square. That was Tar Norn coming\n in to the town. That would have been about ten hours ago.\n\n\n Then, from the information about Callisto and Comprotown that had\n been in the papers in Tar Norn's ship, the pirate had found the home\n of the director. He would have had no trouble finding Leah's room.\n Venusians could see in the dark and walk as silently as cats. He would\n undoubtedly have drugged Leah into unconsciousness, probably without\n awakening her, since there had been no sign of a struggle. He'd put her\n into the lightweight spacesuit.",
"\"But I still don't see—\"\n\n\n \"The Ganymede jewel shipments, Mart. I'd say he was bound for Gany and\n his ship went blooie while he was scudding past Callisto. He got pulled\n down here and just barely made a landing he could walk away from. I'm\n afraid there'll be trouble.\"\n\n\n Mart whistled. \"Well, the Director's due now. He'll want a search\n organized and—Wait, here he is. Tell it over again, Cap, and you'll be\n reporting direct.... Listen to this, Director.\"\nThe tall slender figure of Director Barrow stood impassively beside\n Mart's desk and listened to a repetition of Wayne's report. Not a\n flicker of expression passed over his gaunt face.\n\n\n As Wayne finished, the Director asked, \"Is he armed? Anything taken\n from the ship's equipment, Captain?\"",
"Barrow was looking straight ahead, and not a muscle of his face moved\n until he spoke. \"I'm afraid he isn't bluffing. No reason why he should\n be. Leah is gone and the timer is gone. And a pirate ship would have\n uranite.\"\n\n\n \"The ship?\" asked Tar Norn. \"It will take some time to fuel it and—\"\n\n\n Director Barrow's voice was positive. \"There will be no ship for you,\n Tar Norn.\"\n\n\n Roger Corey's voice cut in, jerkily. \"Let me work on him, sir. Me and\n Wayne. Maybe we can make him talk.\"\n\n\n Barrow shook his head. \"No use, Corey. Venusians don't mind pain as\n much as Earthmen. They almost like it. You could take him apart, and he\n wouldn't talk.\"",
"\"A Venusian wouldn't trust his own mother,\" Barrow snapped. \"He'd\n insist on taking off first and then radioing back where she is. And\n don't think he wouldn't check the fuel tanks.\"\n\n\n \"I wish you'd let me and Wayne work on him, anyway.\"\n\n\n Director Barrow didn't answer.\n\n\n Mart growled, \"If Leah dies, I'm going to take that filthy pirate and—\"\n\n\n Wayne's voice was bitter. \"Venusians can't help what they are. Blame\n the Earth council that sold them those ships. If they had used more\n sense, there wouldn't be a Venusian off Venus.\"\n\n\n Mart nodded. If the council hadn't pulled that boner twenty years\n before, there would be no trouble with the Venusians.",
"Mart glanced at Barrow. The Director was sitting as immobile as a\n statue. His eyes were closed and every muscle of his thin face was\n tense. Probably he was trying not to look at the chronometer on the\n wall. It was nine-fifteen.\n\n\n The office door opened and three uniformed mechanics from the field\n stood in the doorway. The foremost of them saluted. \"This entire\n building has been searched twice except this office. I presume—\"\n\n\n Director Barrow opened his eyes and stood up. \"Don't presume anything.\n Search here, too.\"\n\n\n The men came in and began a detailed but fruitless search. Nobody spoke\n until they left.",
"He turned back to the papers and finished initialing them, grinning\n inwardly at being able to say that the Director would arrive in\n twenty-one minutes exactly. It wasn't everywhere that one could make\n so accurate a prediction about anyone's arrival time, but Barrow was\n something of a chronometer himself.\n\n\n He tossed the papers toward the back of the desk and threw the switch\n of the communicator on his desk, leaned forward slightly. \"Dispatcher\n Wells calling Police Autogiro.\"\n\n\n \"Autogiro, Captain Wayne,\" came the reply. \"Go ahead. Mart.\"\n\n\n \"I was the one who reported seeing the spaceship, Cap—if it was one.\n Found it? If not, I can—\"",
"A momentary surge of elation swept Mart. Tar Norn must have been\n bluffing! Then he remembered: a Venusian might murder his own family,\n but he would never swear to an untruth by the Eternal Varga. That one\n superstition, or religion, as they looked upon it, was binding beyond\n all else. And Tar Norn had sworn by that oath that Leah Barrows would\n die at nine-thirty unless—\n\n\n Mart looked at the chronometer. It was twenty-six minutes past nine. He\n caught a glimpse of Director Barrow's face. It looked like the face of\n a dead man. Barrow had obviously given up all hope and waited only for\n the four minutes to pass.\n\n\n The carrier wave hummed. All of them started, but the voice from the\n communicator merely reported, \"All Comprotown reports in. All negative.\n Giros report nothing. Foot parties five miles out. Reports negative.\"",
"With a sudden intake of breath that was almost a gasp, Mart whirled and\n ran to the communicator. The others looked at him, startled. Mart was\n yelling at the mike even before he got near enough to it to talk in a\n normal voice. \"Control! Emergency! Get\nJupe Freighter One\n!\nTell him\n not to test his tubes.\nNot to touch a lever!\"",
"Would he have rigged the time-bomb first, or after he had kidnapped\n Leah? And how? The timer itself would not have provided the concussion\n to set off the uranite. He'd have needed a battery, a spark-coil, and—\nBut Venusians weren't mechanics.\nThey didn't understand machines, or electricity, or even simple\n clockworks, brilliant as their strange minds were in other ways.\n\n\n Tar Norn could have set the timer all right. For that matter, he could\n calculate an orbit and make settings for space flight. But he couldn't\n have made a time-bomb, even with the timer. He couldn't have rigged\n a circuit that would set off a cap! And, Mart realized suddenly, the\n timer itself would be an electrical—not a clockwork—gadget. Once\n disconnected from the now broken dynamo of the ship, Tar Norn couldn't\n have made it run at all!",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMart Wells shut off the alarm buzzer and jumped out of bed—much to his\n regret. He cussed and then grinned sheepishly as he brought up with a\n thud against the fortunately unbreakable glass of the window. A year\n on Callisto, and he could still forget that he weighed only thirty-six\n pounds and couldn't take a normal step without neutronium-weighted\n shoes.\n\n\n Regaining his balance, he yawned and looked out over the rough Callisto\n landscape beyond Comprotown. Then he yawned again and reached for his\n uniform.\n\n\n A year before, Comprotown—and his job as rocketport dispatcher—had\n been Romance with a capital R. Now, he thought gloomily, Romance with\n Leah with a capital L, and a fat lot of good that did him when Leah\n Barrow's father was Old Fish-face himself, Director of Comprotown.",
"Tar Norn tossed the wig and glasses to the floor as Corey took his arm.\n His pupil-less eyes seemed to glow with anger.\n\n\n \"You won't murder your own daughter, Director. This is a bluff. But\n mine isn't. She dies at nine-thirty unless you find her. I swear that\n by the\nEternal Varga\n.\"\n\n\n Mart cursed. Fists balled, he lunged toward the Venusian. Barrow put\n a hand on his arm. \"Don't, Wells. That's up to the Interplanetary\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"But he's\nnot\nbluffing,\" Mart raved. \"Leah will surely die at\n nine-thirty. That damned oath.\nVarga.\nIt's the only thing a Venusian\n is afraid of. He isn't—\" His voice broke.\n\n\n Corey started off with the Venusian.",
"\"Looks intact, but he probably has sidearms. All the pirates carry\n them. One funny thing, Director. The timer robot has been removed from\n the control panel. What on Callisto would he want with a loose timer?\"\n\n\n \"Report back to headquarters immediately, Captain Wayne,\" Director\n Barrow ordered.\n\n\n The hum of the carrier wave died and Mart clicked off the set.\n Then, belatedly, he stood up and saluted. \"Anything I can do, sir?\n Everything's set for the freighters to clear as usual, so I'm more or\n less free—\"\n\n\n Barrow nodded. \"Very good, Wells. You may go to the field and direct a\n search of the freighters. The Venusian's first thought will be to get\n away, and he may already be stowed in one of—\"\n\n\n A dry voice interrupted from behind the Director's back. \"But the\n Venusian would not do anything so obvious, Director Barrow.\""
],
[
"\"—before the Supreme Council on Earth,\" Mart finished. Then, glancing\n side-wise at Director Barrow and seeing him nod, he stepped forward\n warily. Venusians, he knew, were both fast and tricky. Watching every\n move, he completed the search. Tar Norn carried no weapons.\n\n\n Why, Mart wondered, had the pirate walked openly into headquarters and\n given himself up? Obviously, Tar Norn had something up his sleeve.\n But—\n\n\n Director Barrow spoke coldly, as Mart stepped back, still covering the\n Venusian with the blaster. \"Tar Norn, you speak of 'our discussion.'\n There is nothing to discuss. You will be sent to Earth.\"",
"Venusians were, compared to Earth standards, a strange combination of\n genius and idiocy. Brilliant mathematicians, they had no mechanical\n ingenuity whatever. Linguists who could speak any language fluently\n after hearing it a few hours, not one of them could create a child's\n wind-up toy. Knowing the laws of leverage, they constructed their\n buildings by manual labor alone. Able to operate any machine as long as\n it was in good working order, they couldn't as much as figure out how\n to repair a clogged fuel-line.\n\n\n Even the pirates based on some of the bigger Asteroids had to depend\n upon a few renegade Earthmen to keep their ships in running order. And\n if one went blah away from base, it was a gone ship as far as they\n were concerned. Probably the trouble that had forced Tar Norn down on\n Callisto had been a minor matter that any Earthman could have taken in\n his stride. But to Tar Norn it meant a new ship or nothing.",
"\"A Venusian wouldn't trust his own mother,\" Barrow snapped. \"He'd\n insist on taking off first and then radioing back where she is. And\n don't think he wouldn't check the fuel tanks.\"\n\n\n \"I wish you'd let me and Wayne work on him, anyway.\"\n\n\n Director Barrow didn't answer.\n\n\n Mart growled, \"If Leah dies, I'm going to take that filthy pirate and—\"\n\n\n Wayne's voice was bitter. \"Venusians can't help what they are. Blame\n the Earth council that sold them those ships. If they had used more\n sense, there wouldn't be a Venusian off Venus.\"\n\n\n Mart nodded. If the council hadn't pulled that boner twenty years\n before, there would be no trouble with the Venusians.",
"\"Thanks, Mart, but we've sighted it all right. We're now circling,\n looking for a spot to come down. It doesn't take much, but damned if we\n can perch on a ridge like a canary. Neither could that space-speedster\n down there.\n\n\n \"Wrecked? What's it look like?\"\n\n\n \"Ummm. Offhand one of the single-place jobs that Venusians bought from\n Earth before the war. Full armament, too.\"\n\n\n \"What? You sure, Cap? After the Earth-Venus twenty-two eighty treaty,\n we reclaimed and destroyed all the armed—\"",
"A momentary surge of elation swept Mart. Tar Norn must have been\n bluffing! Then he remembered: a Venusian might murder his own family,\n but he would never swear to an untruth by the Eternal Varga. That one\n superstition, or religion, as they looked upon it, was binding beyond\n all else. And Tar Norn had sworn by that oath that Leah Barrows would\n die at nine-thirty unless—\n\n\n Mart looked at the chronometer. It was twenty-six minutes past nine. He\n caught a glimpse of Director Barrow's face. It looked like the face of\n a dead man. Barrow had obviously given up all hope and waited only for\n the four minutes to pass.\n\n\n The carrier wave hummed. All of them started, but the voice from the\n communicator merely reported, \"All Comprotown reports in. All negative.\n Giros report nothing. Foot parties five miles out. Reports negative.\"",
"Tar Norn tossed the wig and glasses to the floor as Corey took his arm.\n His pupil-less eyes seemed to glow with anger.\n\n\n \"You won't murder your own daughter, Director. This is a bluff. But\n mine isn't. She dies at nine-thirty unless you find her. I swear that\n by the\nEternal Varga\n.\"\n\n\n Mart cursed. Fists balled, he lunged toward the Venusian. Barrow put\n a hand on his arm. \"Don't, Wells. That's up to the Interplanetary\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"But he's\nnot\nbluffing,\" Mart raved. \"Leah will surely die at\n nine-thirty. That damned oath.\nVarga.\nIt's the only thing a Venusian\n is afraid of. He isn't—\" His voice broke.\n\n\n Corey started off with the Venusian.",
"The pirate's smile faded. \"It will take half an hour to prepare the\n ship, Director Barrow. Better not stall too long.\"\n\n\n Mart said, his voice urgent. \"But, sir,\nLeah\n! What's one pirate\n compared to—\"\n\n\n Barrow's face was granite-like. \"He's killed hundreds of people. If we\n release him, he'll kill hundreds more. One life cannot weigh against\n that. Corey, take him away. Lock him up until the next ship leaves for\n Earth.\"\n\n\n Mart's fists were clenched, his fingernails biting into the palms. But\n he knew Barrow was right; that he couldn't possibly take any other\n course and be worthy of his post. One life couldn't weigh against the\n many lives that meeting the pirate's terms would mean. That was where\n Tar Norn had miscalculated. A Venusian didn't understand responsibility\n to society, nor any higher ideal than self-interest.",
"The pirate's face became vicious. \"I do not think so,\" he snapped.\n \"I have taken a hostage. It was quite dark—your tiny Callisto in\n eclipse of its huge primary—when I was forced down. But darkness means\n nothing to a Venusian. You Earthmen play a strange game with cardboard\n rectangles. To use its language, Director Barrow, I have an ace in the\n hole.\"\n\n\n Tar Norn sat down again and folded his six-fingered hands quite calmly.\n Light from the ceiling overhead seemed to cast a malignant glow on his\n dead-white scalp.",
"Barrow was looking straight ahead, and not a muscle of his face moved\n until he spoke. \"I'm afraid he isn't bluffing. No reason why he should\n be. Leah is gone and the timer is gone. And a pirate ship would have\n uranite.\"\n\n\n \"The ship?\" asked Tar Norn. \"It will take some time to fuel it and—\"\n\n\n Director Barrow's voice was positive. \"There will be no ship for you,\n Tar Norn.\"\n\n\n Roger Corey's voice cut in, jerkily. \"Let me work on him, sir. Me and\n Wayne. Maybe we can make him talk.\"\n\n\n Barrow shook his head. \"No use, Corey. Venusians don't mind pain as\n much as Earthmen. They almost like it. You could take him apart, and he\n wouldn't talk.\"",
"The Venusian glanced down at the wig and glasses. \"Standard equipment,\"\n he explained. \"I always carry them in my ship and they've come in handy\n before.\"\n\n\n He rose and bowed mockingly. \"My name is Tar Norn, and your supposition\n that I am a pirate is correct. But I assure you that my visit here is\n accidental and I have no designs on Comprotown.\"\n\n\n Tar Norn! The most vicious and notorious of the pirates, and the most\n ruthless killer of them all. Mart hastily jerked open the drawer of\n his desk and pulled out a hand-blaster. He started the formula: \"Under\n authority of the Interplanetary Council, I arrest you, to be held for\n trial—\"\n\n\n The sardonic smile did not fade from the pirate's thin lips. He rose\n and extended his arms upward. \"I am unarmed,\" he cut in. \"It will help\n our discussion if you will verify that.\"",
"Director Barrow's face was bleak. His voice sounded like the drip of\n water from melting ice. \"Clothing?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Her lightweight spacesuit is gone. Apparently she put it on over her\n sleeping pajamas, for they aren't here. Is there anything I can do,\n sir? I'm worried; she hasn't ever—\"\n\n\n \"That will be all, Mrs. Andrews,\" Barrow replied. \"I'll let you know if\n there is anything.\"\n\n\n He turned to Captain Wayne. \"Use this set, Captain. Get Communications\n to send out a general alarm and assembly. You can make all necessary\n arrangements right here.\"\n\n\n Wayne crossed to the communicator, and began to issue rapid\n instructions.\n\n\n \"Tell them to hurry,\" the Venusian cut in mockingly. \"They have until\n nine-thirty o'clock.\"",
"Mart whirled around. Barrow turned slowly and with dignity.\n\n\n It was the tall man dressed in the uniform of a smelting plant worker\n who had spoken. But he wasn't dark-haired any more. Still seated, he\n was smiling at them sardonically as he fanned himself with a black wig\n he had just removed. The top of his head was as smooth as a billiard\n ball, and dead white. There was a line of demarcation where the dye he\n had applied to his face came to an end.\n\n\n He had removed the tinted glasses too, and the blank-surfaced\n gray eyeballs showed why they had been worn. Now that the simple\n disguise of wig and glasses was removed, Mart noted some of the other\n distinguishing features that marked the Venusian. The general flatness\n of the face and flat unconvoluted ears. The six-fingered hands that had\n probably been thrust into the pockets of the stolen uniform.",
"Why? Undoubtedly it indicated that she would be outdoors. During the\n Callisto day, it would have been unnecessary. But an unconscious\n Earthwoman would freeze to death in the cold dark period of Callisto's\n eclipse behind Big Jupe.\n\n\n What then? The Venusian left, carrying her—\nThe Venusian had carried the drugged girl into the night.\nHe threw down the pencil and began to pace the room again. His muscles\n were tense from listening. How many minutes? He didn't want to know;\n dared not look.\n\n\n But Tar Norn must have planned it all before he left the wrecked ship.\n Otherwise he wouldn't have taken the timer and—",
"\"Your daughter, Director,\" he continued. \"If you wish to see her again,\n you will give me a ship, your\nfastest\nship.\"\nThere was a moment of dead, utter silence. Then Director Barrow leaned\n over the desk and flicked the key of the communicator. \"Control? Get\n my—get Leah Barrow at once. Ring her room. If no answer there, get my\n housekeeper. This is Director Barrow.\"\n\n\n \"Your fastest ship,\" repeated the Venusian. \"Well stocked with\n supplies. Enough to take me to—to a place in the Asteroid belt. I\n shall be too late now to carry out my original plans on Ganymede.\"\n\n\n The office door opened and Captain Wayne came in, followed by Roger\n Corey. Their eyes widened as they saw the Venusian. Wayne's hand darted\n toward his holster, then relaxed as he saw Mart's blaster trained on\n the pirate.\n\n\n He faced Director Barrow and saluted.",
"The chronometer said twenty minutes after nine now. Ten minutes to go,\n if the timer had been accurately set. But could it have been set wrong?\n Venusians were lousy mechanics. Maybe—\nMart became aware that he was holding his breath for the sound of a\n distant explosion. Yes, from whatever point Tar Norn could have hidden\n his hostage, the sound of a pound of uranite exploding would carry back\n to Comprotown.\n\n\n He sat down at his desk again. In front of him were the signed\n clearance papers for the freighters. In half an hour he'd take out the\n papers for the first freighter. But before that half hour was up—\n\n\n He twisted a pencil between his fingers, held himself rigid to keep\n from turning and looking at the chronometer again. It hadn't been over\n a minute since he sat down—why torture himself by looking again? But\n each minute now seemed both a flash and an eternity.",
"VENUSIAN INVADER\nBy LARRY STERNIG\nLeah Barrow would die. Tar Norn had sworn she\n\n would, unless he was set free. But freedom for\n\n the Venusian Pirate meant death for many, and\n\n it was Director Barrow's duty to hold him—even\n\n though it would cost his daughter's life.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"He turned over the sheaf of papers and drew a little square on the\n blank reverse side of the bottom one. That was Comprotown. He made a\n dot an inch or two away. That was the point where Tar Norn's ship had\n wrecked itself in landing.\n\n\n He drew a line from the point to the square. That was Tar Norn coming\n in to the town. That would have been about ten hours ago.\n\n\n Then, from the information about Callisto and Comprotown that had\n been in the papers in Tar Norn's ship, the pirate had found the home\n of the director. He would have had no trouble finding Leah's room.\n Venusians could see in the dark and walk as silently as cats. He would\n undoubtedly have drugged Leah into unconsciousness, probably without\n awakening her, since there had been no sign of a struggle. He'd put her\n into the lightweight spacesuit.",
"\"But I still don't see—\"\n\n\n \"The Ganymede jewel shipments, Mart. I'd say he was bound for Gany and\n his ship went blooie while he was scudding past Callisto. He got pulled\n down here and just barely made a landing he could walk away from. I'm\n afraid there'll be trouble.\"\n\n\n Mart whistled. \"Well, the Director's due now. He'll want a search\n organized and—Wait, here he is. Tell it over again, Cap, and you'll be\n reporting direct.... Listen to this, Director.\"\nThe tall slender figure of Director Barrow stood impassively beside\n Mart's desk and listened to a repetition of Wayne's report. Not a\n flicker of expression passed over his gaunt face.\n\n\n As Wayne finished, the Director asked, \"Is he armed? Anything taken\n from the ship's equipment, Captain?\"",
"Mart Wells glanced fearfully at the dial of the chronometer. It was\n eight-forty now. He turned and caught the Director's glance. \"\nThe\n timer!\n\" he said grimly. \"Captain Wayne said it was missing from the\n wrecked ship. He must have—\"\n\n\n The Venusian was grinning. \"Exactly. The timer. And a pound of uranite.\n That gives you fifty minutes to search Callisto. It would be wiser to\n spend the time getting a ship ready for me instead.\"\n\n\n The silence of the office was broken only by the low voice of Captain\n Wayne giving orders into the communicator. Abruptly he turned to his\n superior. His face was white.\n\n\n \"Search is on, sir. But if he isn't lying, there's a chance in a\n million. Less than an hour, and the area to be covered is—\"",
"\"Yeah, I know,\" cut in the Captain's voice. \"All but a few that the\n Venusian renegades—the pirates—got off with before then. Well—we're\n going down. Corey's found a place not too far from it where he can set\n the giro down, or says he can.\"\n\n\n \"If that's a pirate ship, Cap, be careful!\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry. We're armed. And the ship's pretty smashed up. Probably\n at least kayoed whoever was in it. Well, keep your key open and I'll\n call you back. We're down.\"\n\n\n Mart found the shipment chart and began to check off tonnage. That much\n he wanted to get out of the way before—but something was gnawing at\n the back of his mind. It took him a moment to trace what it was. Of\n course. The workman who was waiting for the Director was wearing tinted\n glasses."
],
[
"The Venusian glanced down at the wig and glasses. \"Standard equipment,\"\n he explained. \"I always carry them in my ship and they've come in handy\n before.\"\n\n\n He rose and bowed mockingly. \"My name is Tar Norn, and your supposition\n that I am a pirate is correct. But I assure you that my visit here is\n accidental and I have no designs on Comprotown.\"\n\n\n Tar Norn! The most vicious and notorious of the pirates, and the most\n ruthless killer of them all. Mart hastily jerked open the drawer of\n his desk and pulled out a hand-blaster. He started the formula: \"Under\n authority of the Interplanetary Council, I arrest you, to be held for\n trial—\"\n\n\n The sardonic smile did not fade from the pirate's thin lips. He rose\n and extended his arms upward. \"I am unarmed,\" he cut in. \"It will help\n our discussion if you will verify that.\"",
"Mart whirled around. Barrow turned slowly and with dignity.\n\n\n It was the tall man dressed in the uniform of a smelting plant worker\n who had spoken. But he wasn't dark-haired any more. Still seated, he\n was smiling at them sardonically as he fanned himself with a black wig\n he had just removed. The top of his head was as smooth as a billiard\n ball, and dead white. There was a line of demarcation where the dye he\n had applied to his face came to an end.\n\n\n He had removed the tinted glasses too, and the blank-surfaced\n gray eyeballs showed why they had been worn. Now that the simple\n disguise of wig and glasses was removed, Mart noted some of the other\n distinguishing features that marked the Venusian. The general flatness\n of the face and flat unconvoluted ears. The six-fingered hands that had\n probably been thrust into the pockets of the stolen uniform.",
"The pirate's face became vicious. \"I do not think so,\" he snapped.\n \"I have taken a hostage. It was quite dark—your tiny Callisto in\n eclipse of its huge primary—when I was forced down. But darkness means\n nothing to a Venusian. You Earthmen play a strange game with cardboard\n rectangles. To use its language, Director Barrow, I have an ace in the\n hole.\"\n\n\n Tar Norn sat down again and folded his six-fingered hands quite calmly.\n Light from the ceiling overhead seemed to cast a malignant glow on his\n dead-white scalp.",
"Tar Norn tossed the wig and glasses to the floor as Corey took his arm.\n His pupil-less eyes seemed to glow with anger.\n\n\n \"You won't murder your own daughter, Director. This is a bluff. But\n mine isn't. She dies at nine-thirty unless you find her. I swear that\n by the\nEternal Varga\n.\"\n\n\n Mart cursed. Fists balled, he lunged toward the Venusian. Barrow put\n a hand on his arm. \"Don't, Wells. That's up to the Interplanetary\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"But he's\nnot\nbluffing,\" Mart raved. \"Leah will surely die at\n nine-thirty. That damned oath.\nVarga.\nIt's the only thing a Venusian\n is afraid of. He isn't—\" His voice broke.\n\n\n Corey started off with the Venusian.",
"Why? Undoubtedly it indicated that she would be outdoors. During the\n Callisto day, it would have been unnecessary. But an unconscious\n Earthwoman would freeze to death in the cold dark period of Callisto's\n eclipse behind Big Jupe.\n\n\n What then? The Venusian left, carrying her—\nThe Venusian had carried the drugged girl into the night.\nHe threw down the pencil and began to pace the room again. His muscles\n were tense from listening. How many minutes? He didn't want to know;\n dared not look.\n\n\n But Tar Norn must have planned it all before he left the wrecked ship.\n Otherwise he wouldn't have taken the timer and—",
"He turned over the sheaf of papers and drew a little square on the\n blank reverse side of the bottom one. That was Comprotown. He made a\n dot an inch or two away. That was the point where Tar Norn's ship had\n wrecked itself in landing.\n\n\n He drew a line from the point to the square. That was Tar Norn coming\n in to the town. That would have been about ten hours ago.\n\n\n Then, from the information about Callisto and Comprotown that had\n been in the papers in Tar Norn's ship, the pirate had found the home\n of the director. He would have had no trouble finding Leah's room.\n Venusians could see in the dark and walk as silently as cats. He would\n undoubtedly have drugged Leah into unconsciousness, probably without\n awakening her, since there had been no sign of a struggle. He'd put her\n into the lightweight spacesuit.",
"\"—before the Supreme Council on Earth,\" Mart finished. Then, glancing\n side-wise at Director Barrow and seeing him nod, he stepped forward\n warily. Venusians, he knew, were both fast and tricky. Watching every\n move, he completed the search. Tar Norn carried no weapons.\n\n\n Why, Mart wondered, had the pirate walked openly into headquarters and\n given himself up? Obviously, Tar Norn had something up his sleeve.\n But—\n\n\n Director Barrow spoke coldly, as Mart stepped back, still covering the\n Venusian with the blaster. \"Tar Norn, you speak of 'our discussion.'\n There is nothing to discuss. You will be sent to Earth.\"",
"Barrow was looking straight ahead, and not a muscle of his face moved\n until he spoke. \"I'm afraid he isn't bluffing. No reason why he should\n be. Leah is gone and the timer is gone. And a pirate ship would have\n uranite.\"\n\n\n \"The ship?\" asked Tar Norn. \"It will take some time to fuel it and—\"\n\n\n Director Barrow's voice was positive. \"There will be no ship for you,\n Tar Norn.\"\n\n\n Roger Corey's voice cut in, jerkily. \"Let me work on him, sir. Me and\n Wayne. Maybe we can make him talk.\"\n\n\n Barrow shook his head. \"No use, Corey. Venusians don't mind pain as\n much as Earthmen. They almost like it. You could take him apart, and he\n wouldn't talk.\"",
"VENUSIAN INVADER\nBy LARRY STERNIG\nLeah Barrow would die. Tar Norn had sworn she\n\n would, unless he was set free. But freedom for\n\n the Venusian Pirate meant death for many, and\n\n it was Director Barrow's duty to hold him—even\n\n though it would cost his daughter's life.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"Venusians were, compared to Earth standards, a strange combination of\n genius and idiocy. Brilliant mathematicians, they had no mechanical\n ingenuity whatever. Linguists who could speak any language fluently\n after hearing it a few hours, not one of them could create a child's\n wind-up toy. Knowing the laws of leverage, they constructed their\n buildings by manual labor alone. Able to operate any machine as long as\n it was in good working order, they couldn't as much as figure out how\n to repair a clogged fuel-line.\n\n\n Even the pirates based on some of the bigger Asteroids had to depend\n upon a few renegade Earthmen to keep their ships in running order. And\n if one went blah away from base, it was a gone ship as far as they\n were concerned. Probably the trouble that had forced Tar Norn down on\n Callisto had been a minor matter that any Earthman could have taken in\n his stride. But to Tar Norn it meant a new ship or nothing.",
"A momentary surge of elation swept Mart. Tar Norn must have been\n bluffing! Then he remembered: a Venusian might murder his own family,\n but he would never swear to an untruth by the Eternal Varga. That one\n superstition, or religion, as they looked upon it, was binding beyond\n all else. And Tar Norn had sworn by that oath that Leah Barrows would\n die at nine-thirty unless—\n\n\n Mart looked at the chronometer. It was twenty-six minutes past nine. He\n caught a glimpse of Director Barrow's face. It looked like the face of\n a dead man. Barrow had obviously given up all hope and waited only for\n the four minutes to pass.\n\n\n The carrier wave hummed. All of them started, but the voice from the\n communicator merely reported, \"All Comprotown reports in. All negative.\n Giros report nothing. Foot parties five miles out. Reports negative.\"",
"\"Yeah, I know,\" cut in the Captain's voice. \"All but a few that the\n Venusian renegades—the pirates—got off with before then. Well—we're\n going down. Corey's found a place not too far from it where he can set\n the giro down, or says he can.\"\n\n\n \"If that's a pirate ship, Cap, be careful!\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry. We're armed. And the ship's pretty smashed up. Probably\n at least kayoed whoever was in it. Well, keep your key open and I'll\n call you back. We're down.\"\n\n\n Mart found the shipment chart and began to check off tonnage. That much\n he wanted to get out of the way before—but something was gnawing at\n the back of his mind. It took him a moment to trace what it was. Of\n course. The workman who was waiting for the Director was wearing tinted\n glasses.",
"Tinted glasses on Callisto! It didn't make sense. The sun, half a\n billion miles away, gives only a twenty-fifth of the light that falls\n on Earth. Even when that light is augmented by Big Jupe, it isn't—Yes,\n it was the first time he'd seen tinted glasses in Comprotown.\n\n\n Curiously, he turned to glance at the seated workman. But the carrier\n wave of the desk communicator hummed and he forgot his visitor as\n Captain Wayne's voice boomed in.\n\n\n \"Dispatcher Wells. Captain Wayne calling Dispatcher—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, Cap. Go ahead.\"\n\n\n \"We've examined the spaceship. No one's in it, hurt or otherwise. It's\n a single seater. A pirate ship all right.\"\n\n\n \"You sure? How can you be certain?\"",
"Would he have rigged the time-bomb first, or after he had kidnapped\n Leah? And how? The timer itself would not have provided the concussion\n to set off the uranite. He'd have needed a battery, a spark-coil, and—\nBut Venusians weren't mechanics.\nThey didn't understand machines, or electricity, or even simple\n clockworks, brilliant as their strange minds were in other ways.\n\n\n Tar Norn could have set the timer all right. For that matter, he could\n calculate an orbit and make settings for space flight. But he couldn't\n have made a time-bomb, even with the timer. He couldn't have rigged\n a circuit that would set off a cap! And, Mart realized suddenly, the\n timer itself would be an electrical—not a clockwork—gadget. Once\n disconnected from the now broken dynamo of the ship, Tar Norn couldn't\n have made it run at all!",
"Director Barrow's face was bleak. His voice sounded like the drip of\n water from melting ice. \"Clothing?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Her lightweight spacesuit is gone. Apparently she put it on over her\n sleeping pajamas, for they aren't here. Is there anything I can do,\n sir? I'm worried; she hasn't ever—\"\n\n\n \"That will be all, Mrs. Andrews,\" Barrow replied. \"I'll let you know if\n there is anything.\"\n\n\n He turned to Captain Wayne. \"Use this set, Captain. Get Communications\n to send out a general alarm and assembly. You can make all necessary\n arrangements right here.\"\n\n\n Wayne crossed to the communicator, and began to issue rapid\n instructions.\n\n\n \"Tell them to hurry,\" the Venusian cut in mockingly. \"They have until\n nine-thirty o'clock.\"",
"\"A Venusian wouldn't trust his own mother,\" Barrow snapped. \"He'd\n insist on taking off first and then radioing back where she is. And\n don't think he wouldn't check the fuel tanks.\"\n\n\n \"I wish you'd let me and Wayne work on him, anyway.\"\n\n\n Director Barrow didn't answer.\n\n\n Mart growled, \"If Leah dies, I'm going to take that filthy pirate and—\"\n\n\n Wayne's voice was bitter. \"Venusians can't help what they are. Blame\n the Earth council that sold them those ships. If they had used more\n sense, there wouldn't be a Venusian off Venus.\"\n\n\n Mart nodded. If the council hadn't pulled that boner twenty years\n before, there would be no trouble with the Venusians.",
"The pirate's smile faded. \"It will take half an hour to prepare the\n ship, Director Barrow. Better not stall too long.\"\n\n\n Mart said, his voice urgent. \"But, sir,\nLeah\n! What's one pirate\n compared to—\"\n\n\n Barrow's face was granite-like. \"He's killed hundreds of people. If we\n release him, he'll kill hundreds more. One life cannot weigh against\n that. Corey, take him away. Lock him up until the next ship leaves for\n Earth.\"\n\n\n Mart's fists were clenched, his fingernails biting into the palms. But\n he knew Barrow was right; that he couldn't possibly take any other\n course and be worthy of his post. One life couldn't weigh against the\n many lives that meeting the pirate's terms would mean. That was where\n Tar Norn had miscalculated. A Venusian didn't understand responsibility\n to society, nor any higher ideal than self-interest.",
"The chronometer said twenty minutes after nine now. Ten minutes to go,\n if the timer had been accurately set. But could it have been set wrong?\n Venusians were lousy mechanics. Maybe—\nMart became aware that he was holding his breath for the sound of a\n distant explosion. Yes, from whatever point Tar Norn could have hidden\n his hostage, the sound of a pound of uranite exploding would carry back\n to Comprotown.\n\n\n He sat down at his desk again. In front of him were the signed\n clearance papers for the freighters. In half an hour he'd take out the\n papers for the first freighter. But before that half hour was up—\n\n\n He twisted a pencil between his fingers, held himself rigid to keep\n from turning and looking at the chronometer again. It hadn't been over\n a minute since he sat down—why torture himself by looking again? But\n each minute now seemed both a flash and an eternity.",
"Barrow said, \"Yes, he's telling the truth. But we have some time yet.\n Maybe the search—\"\nMart strode to the window and looked out so the others wouldn't see his\n face. Less than three-quarters of an hour to search all of Callisto\n within a radius of fifty miles!\nThrough the pane he saw figures in groups of three searching the\n streets and buildings of Comprotown. That part of the search wouldn't\n be difficult. But the hills and the caves, and with only two autogiros.\n If she was there, out of sight in one of the caves, where the cruising\n ships couldn't see her....\n\n\n Her father was right, but—The picture of Leah Barrow, smiling as he\n had last seen her, seemed to blur out the view from the window. Her\n impertinent little tilted nose, the soft tempting contours of her lips,\n the deep blueness of her eyes.",
"\"Looks intact, but he probably has sidearms. All the pirates carry\n them. One funny thing, Director. The timer robot has been removed from\n the control panel. What on Callisto would he want with a loose timer?\"\n\n\n \"Report back to headquarters immediately, Captain Wayne,\" Director\n Barrow ordered.\n\n\n The hum of the carrier wave died and Mart clicked off the set.\n Then, belatedly, he stood up and saluted. \"Anything I can do, sir?\n Everything's set for the freighters to clear as usual, so I'm more or\n less free—\"\n\n\n Barrow nodded. \"Very good, Wells. You may go to the field and direct a\n search of the freighters. The Venusian's first thought will be to get\n away, and he may already be stowed in one of—\"\n\n\n A dry voice interrupted from behind the Director's back. \"But the\n Venusian would not do anything so obvious, Director Barrow.\""
],
[
"He turned over the sheaf of papers and drew a little square on the\n blank reverse side of the bottom one. That was Comprotown. He made a\n dot an inch or two away. That was the point where Tar Norn's ship had\n wrecked itself in landing.\n\n\n He drew a line from the point to the square. That was Tar Norn coming\n in to the town. That would have been about ten hours ago.\n\n\n Then, from the information about Callisto and Comprotown that had\n been in the papers in Tar Norn's ship, the pirate had found the home\n of the director. He would have had no trouble finding Leah's room.\n Venusians could see in the dark and walk as silently as cats. He would\n undoubtedly have drugged Leah into unconsciousness, probably without\n awakening her, since there had been no sign of a struggle. He'd put her\n into the lightweight spacesuit.",
"Tar Norn tossed the wig and glasses to the floor as Corey took his arm.\n His pupil-less eyes seemed to glow with anger.\n\n\n \"You won't murder your own daughter, Director. This is a bluff. But\n mine isn't. She dies at nine-thirty unless you find her. I swear that\n by the\nEternal Varga\n.\"\n\n\n Mart cursed. Fists balled, he lunged toward the Venusian. Barrow put\n a hand on his arm. \"Don't, Wells. That's up to the Interplanetary\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"But he's\nnot\nbluffing,\" Mart raved. \"Leah will surely die at\n nine-thirty. That damned oath.\nVarga.\nIt's the only thing a Venusian\n is afraid of. He isn't—\" His voice broke.\n\n\n Corey started off with the Venusian.",
"Barrow was looking straight ahead, and not a muscle of his face moved\n until he spoke. \"I'm afraid he isn't bluffing. No reason why he should\n be. Leah is gone and the timer is gone. And a pirate ship would have\n uranite.\"\n\n\n \"The ship?\" asked Tar Norn. \"It will take some time to fuel it and—\"\n\n\n Director Barrow's voice was positive. \"There will be no ship for you,\n Tar Norn.\"\n\n\n Roger Corey's voice cut in, jerkily. \"Let me work on him, sir. Me and\n Wayne. Maybe we can make him talk.\"\n\n\n Barrow shook his head. \"No use, Corey. Venusians don't mind pain as\n much as Earthmen. They almost like it. You could take him apart, and he\n wouldn't talk.\"",
"The pirate's smile faded. \"It will take half an hour to prepare the\n ship, Director Barrow. Better not stall too long.\"\n\n\n Mart said, his voice urgent. \"But, sir,\nLeah\n! What's one pirate\n compared to—\"\n\n\n Barrow's face was granite-like. \"He's killed hundreds of people. If we\n release him, he'll kill hundreds more. One life cannot weigh against\n that. Corey, take him away. Lock him up until the next ship leaves for\n Earth.\"\n\n\n Mart's fists were clenched, his fingernails biting into the palms. But\n he knew Barrow was right; that he couldn't possibly take any other\n course and be worthy of his post. One life couldn't weigh against the\n many lives that meeting the pirate's terms would mean. That was where\n Tar Norn had miscalculated. A Venusian didn't understand responsibility\n to society, nor any higher ideal than self-interest.",
"Three minutes to go. Mart could see by the attitude of the others that\n they were bracing themselves for the sound of an explosion. All of them\n had liked, or loved, Leah Barrows. Mart had a momentary vision of her\n again, and remembered the electric thrill that had run through him when\n she had placed her hand on his arm, just a few days ago, and told him\n that she did care for him, well, a little anyway—\n\n\n But, if Tar Norn couldn't have rigged a time-bomb, how could he have\n arranged for Leah to die at nine-thirty?\n\n\n He saw again the corpse-like face of the Director. Yes, they had all\n been wrong in thinking that nothing mattered to Barrow more than the\n schedules—\nSchedules\n! There had been departure schedules among the\n papers in Tar Norn's ship. Could he have—",
"The pirate's face became vicious. \"I do not think so,\" he snapped.\n \"I have taken a hostage. It was quite dark—your tiny Callisto in\n eclipse of its huge primary—when I was forced down. But darkness means\n nothing to a Venusian. You Earthmen play a strange game with cardboard\n rectangles. To use its language, Director Barrow, I have an ace in the\n hole.\"\n\n\n Tar Norn sat down again and folded his six-fingered hands quite calmly.\n Light from the ceiling overhead seemed to cast a malignant glow on his\n dead-white scalp.",
"A momentary surge of elation swept Mart. Tar Norn must have been\n bluffing! Then he remembered: a Venusian might murder his own family,\n but he would never swear to an untruth by the Eternal Varga. That one\n superstition, or religion, as they looked upon it, was binding beyond\n all else. And Tar Norn had sworn by that oath that Leah Barrows would\n die at nine-thirty unless—\n\n\n Mart looked at the chronometer. It was twenty-six minutes past nine. He\n caught a glimpse of Director Barrow's face. It looked like the face of\n a dead man. Barrow had obviously given up all hope and waited only for\n the four minutes to pass.\n\n\n The carrier wave hummed. All of them started, but the voice from the\n communicator merely reported, \"All Comprotown reports in. All negative.\n Giros report nothing. Foot parties five miles out. Reports negative.\"",
"Barrow said, \"Yes, he's telling the truth. But we have some time yet.\n Maybe the search—\"\nMart strode to the window and looked out so the others wouldn't see his\n face. Less than three-quarters of an hour to search all of Callisto\n within a radius of fifty miles!\nThrough the pane he saw figures in groups of three searching the\n streets and buildings of Comprotown. That part of the search wouldn't\n be difficult. But the hills and the caves, and with only two autogiros.\n If she was there, out of sight in one of the caves, where the cruising\n ships couldn't see her....\n\n\n Her father was right, but—The picture of Leah Barrow, smiling as he\n had last seen her, seemed to blur out the view from the window. Her\n impertinent little tilted nose, the soft tempting contours of her lips,\n the deep blueness of her eyes.",
"VENUSIAN INVADER\nBy LARRY STERNIG\nLeah Barrow would die. Tar Norn had sworn she\n\n would, unless he was set free. But freedom for\n\n the Venusian Pirate meant death for many, and\n\n it was Director Barrow's duty to hold him—even\n\n though it would cost his daughter's life.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"Would he have rigged the time-bomb first, or after he had kidnapped\n Leah? And how? The timer itself would not have provided the concussion\n to set off the uranite. He'd have needed a battery, a spark-coil, and—\nBut Venusians weren't mechanics.\nThey didn't understand machines, or electricity, or even simple\n clockworks, brilliant as their strange minds were in other ways.\n\n\n Tar Norn could have set the timer all right. For that matter, he could\n calculate an orbit and make settings for space flight. But he couldn't\n have made a time-bomb, even with the timer. He couldn't have rigged\n a circuit that would set off a cap! And, Mart realized suddenly, the\n timer itself would be an electrical—not a clockwork—gadget. Once\n disconnected from the now broken dynamo of the ship, Tar Norn couldn't\n have made it run at all!",
"Why? Undoubtedly it indicated that she would be outdoors. During the\n Callisto day, it would have been unnecessary. But an unconscious\n Earthwoman would freeze to death in the cold dark period of Callisto's\n eclipse behind Big Jupe.\n\n\n What then? The Venusian left, carrying her—\nThe Venusian had carried the drugged girl into the night.\nHe threw down the pencil and began to pace the room again. His muscles\n were tense from listening. How many minutes? He didn't want to know;\n dared not look.\n\n\n But Tar Norn must have planned it all before he left the wrecked ship.\n Otherwise he wouldn't have taken the timer and—",
"\"Captain,\" Barrow ordered, \"you will form a search party at once—every\n available man and means. We must search all of Callisto within—\" he\n made a rapid mental calculation \"—about fifty miles. You will be\n searching for my daughter.\"\n\n\n The captain stiffened. Before he could reply the carrier wave hummed\n and a feminine voice, that of an elderly woman, came over the\n communicator. \"Director Barrow? Leah isn't here. I looked in her room\n and her bed is disarranged as though she left suddenly. She always\n makes it herself as soon as she gets up.\"\n\n\n \"Anything to point to when she left, Mrs. Andrews?\"\n\n\n \"Not exactly, sir. The alarm was set for six and it was still buzzing.\n Her bed isn't very mussed; it looks like she got up again almost right\n after she retired. I don't understand.\"",
"The thought of ships reminded him of the freighters. \"Cap,\" he asked\n Wayne, \"the freighters been searched thoroughly?\"\n\n\n Wayne nodded. \"Rocket tubes and all. Even broke open the ore drums. I\n presume you'll want them to clear on schedule?\"\n\n\n Director Barrow nodded. \"The crews?\" he asked. \"In the search or\n standing by?\"\n\n\n \"Standing by for departure as usual, Director. A few men one way or the\n other—\"\n\n\n Barrow nodded, glancing at the chronometer. Mart knew what he was\n thinking. Less than half an hour now. And, unless the searchers by some\n miracle found Leah Barrow, it would all be over before the ten o'clock\n clearance of the first freighter. And the freighters hadn't missed a\n clearance in ten years.",
"\"Your daughter, Director,\" he continued. \"If you wish to see her again,\n you will give me a ship, your\nfastest\nship.\"\nThere was a moment of dead, utter silence. Then Director Barrow leaned\n over the desk and flicked the key of the communicator. \"Control? Get\n my—get Leah Barrow at once. Ring her room. If no answer there, get my\n housekeeper. This is Director Barrow.\"\n\n\n \"Your fastest ship,\" repeated the Venusian. \"Well stocked with\n supplies. Enough to take me to—to a place in the Asteroid belt. I\n shall be too late now to carry out my original plans on Ganymede.\"\n\n\n The office door opened and Captain Wayne came in, followed by Roger\n Corey. Their eyes widened as they saw the Venusian. Wayne's hand darted\n toward his holster, then relaxed as he saw Mart's blaster trained on\n the pirate.\n\n\n He faced Director Barrow and saluted.",
"\"—before the Supreme Council on Earth,\" Mart finished. Then, glancing\n side-wise at Director Barrow and seeing him nod, he stepped forward\n warily. Venusians, he knew, were both fast and tricky. Watching every\n move, he completed the search. Tar Norn carried no weapons.\n\n\n Why, Mart wondered, had the pirate walked openly into headquarters and\n given himself up? Obviously, Tar Norn had something up his sleeve.\n But—\n\n\n Director Barrow spoke coldly, as Mart stepped back, still covering the\n Venusian with the blaster. \"Tar Norn, you speak of 'our discussion.'\n There is nothing to discuss. You will be sent to Earth.\"",
"The Venusian glanced down at the wig and glasses. \"Standard equipment,\"\n he explained. \"I always carry them in my ship and they've come in handy\n before.\"\n\n\n He rose and bowed mockingly. \"My name is Tar Norn, and your supposition\n that I am a pirate is correct. But I assure you that my visit here is\n accidental and I have no designs on Comprotown.\"\n\n\n Tar Norn! The most vicious and notorious of the pirates, and the most\n ruthless killer of them all. Mart hastily jerked open the drawer of\n his desk and pulled out a hand-blaster. He started the formula: \"Under\n authority of the Interplanetary Council, I arrest you, to be held for\n trial—\"\n\n\n The sardonic smile did not fade from the pirate's thin lips. He rose\n and extended his arms upward. \"I am unarmed,\" he cut in. \"It will help\n our discussion if you will verify that.\"",
"\"A Venusian wouldn't trust his own mother,\" Barrow snapped. \"He'd\n insist on taking off first and then radioing back where she is. And\n don't think he wouldn't check the fuel tanks.\"\n\n\n \"I wish you'd let me and Wayne work on him, anyway.\"\n\n\n Director Barrow didn't answer.\n\n\n Mart growled, \"If Leah dies, I'm going to take that filthy pirate and—\"\n\n\n Wayne's voice was bitter. \"Venusians can't help what they are. Blame\n the Earth council that sold them those ships. If they had used more\n sense, there wouldn't be a Venusian off Venus.\"\n\n\n Mart nodded. If the council hadn't pulled that boner twenty years\n before, there would be no trouble with the Venusians.",
"Director Barrow's face was bleak. His voice sounded like the drip of\n water from melting ice. \"Clothing?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Her lightweight spacesuit is gone. Apparently she put it on over her\n sleeping pajamas, for they aren't here. Is there anything I can do,\n sir? I'm worried; she hasn't ever—\"\n\n\n \"That will be all, Mrs. Andrews,\" Barrow replied. \"I'll let you know if\n there is anything.\"\n\n\n He turned to Captain Wayne. \"Use this set, Captain. Get Communications\n to send out a general alarm and assembly. You can make all necessary\n arrangements right here.\"\n\n\n Wayne crossed to the communicator, and began to issue rapid\n instructions.\n\n\n \"Tell them to hurry,\" the Venusian cut in mockingly. \"They have until\n nine-thirty o'clock.\"",
"He whirled from the window and began pacing the floor, trying to\n think of something they could do that wasn't being done. Again at the\n communicator, Captain Wayne was barking questions.\n\n\n \"All available men and women are combing the town, sir,\" he reported,\n \"with orders to break down any doors that are locked, to stop at\n nothing.\"\n\n\n \"And outside, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"The two giros are our only real hope. But the men from the smelting\n plant are working afoot out of town. By nine-thirty they'll have\n covered a radius of about five miles.\"\n\n\n Corey returned, slamming the door viciously behind him. \"Maybe we\n could trick him, sir,\" he suggested. \"Pretend we'll give him a ship if\n he'll—\"",
"Mart glanced at Barrow. The Director was sitting as immobile as a\n statue. His eyes were closed and every muscle of his thin face was\n tense. Probably he was trying not to look at the chronometer on the\n wall. It was nine-fifteen.\n\n\n The office door opened and three uniformed mechanics from the field\n stood in the doorway. The foremost of them saluted. \"This entire\n building has been searched twice except this office. I presume—\"\n\n\n Director Barrow opened his eyes and stood up. \"Don't presume anything.\n Search here, too.\"\n\n\n The men came in and began a detailed but fruitless search. Nobody spoke\n until they left."
],
[
"Venusians were, compared to Earth standards, a strange combination of\n genius and idiocy. Brilliant mathematicians, they had no mechanical\n ingenuity whatever. Linguists who could speak any language fluently\n after hearing it a few hours, not one of them could create a child's\n wind-up toy. Knowing the laws of leverage, they constructed their\n buildings by manual labor alone. Able to operate any machine as long as\n it was in good working order, they couldn't as much as figure out how\n to repair a clogged fuel-line.\n\n\n Even the pirates based on some of the bigger Asteroids had to depend\n upon a few renegade Earthmen to keep their ships in running order. And\n if one went blah away from base, it was a gone ship as far as they\n were concerned. Probably the trouble that had forced Tar Norn down on\n Callisto had been a minor matter that any Earthman could have taken in\n his stride. But to Tar Norn it meant a new ship or nothing.",
"Why? Undoubtedly it indicated that she would be outdoors. During the\n Callisto day, it would have been unnecessary. But an unconscious\n Earthwoman would freeze to death in the cold dark period of Callisto's\n eclipse behind Big Jupe.\n\n\n What then? The Venusian left, carrying her—\nThe Venusian had carried the drugged girl into the night.\nHe threw down the pencil and began to pace the room again. His muscles\n were tense from listening. How many minutes? He didn't want to know;\n dared not look.\n\n\n But Tar Norn must have planned it all before he left the wrecked ship.\n Otherwise he wouldn't have taken the timer and—",
"\"A Venusian wouldn't trust his own mother,\" Barrow snapped. \"He'd\n insist on taking off first and then radioing back where she is. And\n don't think he wouldn't check the fuel tanks.\"\n\n\n \"I wish you'd let me and Wayne work on him, anyway.\"\n\n\n Director Barrow didn't answer.\n\n\n Mart growled, \"If Leah dies, I'm going to take that filthy pirate and—\"\n\n\n Wayne's voice was bitter. \"Venusians can't help what they are. Blame\n the Earth council that sold them those ships. If they had used more\n sense, there wouldn't be a Venusian off Venus.\"\n\n\n Mart nodded. If the council hadn't pulled that boner twenty years\n before, there would be no trouble with the Venusians.",
"Mart whirled around. Barrow turned slowly and with dignity.\n\n\n It was the tall man dressed in the uniform of a smelting plant worker\n who had spoken. But he wasn't dark-haired any more. Still seated, he\n was smiling at them sardonically as he fanned himself with a black wig\n he had just removed. The top of his head was as smooth as a billiard\n ball, and dead white. There was a line of demarcation where the dye he\n had applied to his face came to an end.\n\n\n He had removed the tinted glasses too, and the blank-surfaced\n gray eyeballs showed why they had been worn. Now that the simple\n disguise of wig and glasses was removed, Mart noted some of the other\n distinguishing features that marked the Venusian. The general flatness\n of the face and flat unconvoluted ears. The six-fingered hands that had\n probably been thrust into the pockets of the stolen uniform.",
"The Venusian glanced down at the wig and glasses. \"Standard equipment,\"\n he explained. \"I always carry them in my ship and they've come in handy\n before.\"\n\n\n He rose and bowed mockingly. \"My name is Tar Norn, and your supposition\n that I am a pirate is correct. But I assure you that my visit here is\n accidental and I have no designs on Comprotown.\"\n\n\n Tar Norn! The most vicious and notorious of the pirates, and the most\n ruthless killer of them all. Mart hastily jerked open the drawer of\n his desk and pulled out a hand-blaster. He started the formula: \"Under\n authority of the Interplanetary Council, I arrest you, to be held for\n trial—\"\n\n\n The sardonic smile did not fade from the pirate's thin lips. He rose\n and extended his arms upward. \"I am unarmed,\" he cut in. \"It will help\n our discussion if you will verify that.\"",
"Barrow was looking straight ahead, and not a muscle of his face moved\n until he spoke. \"I'm afraid he isn't bluffing. No reason why he should\n be. Leah is gone and the timer is gone. And a pirate ship would have\n uranite.\"\n\n\n \"The ship?\" asked Tar Norn. \"It will take some time to fuel it and—\"\n\n\n Director Barrow's voice was positive. \"There will be no ship for you,\n Tar Norn.\"\n\n\n Roger Corey's voice cut in, jerkily. \"Let me work on him, sir. Me and\n Wayne. Maybe we can make him talk.\"\n\n\n Barrow shook his head. \"No use, Corey. Venusians don't mind pain as\n much as Earthmen. They almost like it. You could take him apart, and he\n wouldn't talk.\"",
"\"—before the Supreme Council on Earth,\" Mart finished. Then, glancing\n side-wise at Director Barrow and seeing him nod, he stepped forward\n warily. Venusians, he knew, were both fast and tricky. Watching every\n move, he completed the search. Tar Norn carried no weapons.\n\n\n Why, Mart wondered, had the pirate walked openly into headquarters and\n given himself up? Obviously, Tar Norn had something up his sleeve.\n But—\n\n\n Director Barrow spoke coldly, as Mart stepped back, still covering the\n Venusian with the blaster. \"Tar Norn, you speak of 'our discussion.'\n There is nothing to discuss. You will be sent to Earth.\"",
"A momentary surge of elation swept Mart. Tar Norn must have been\n bluffing! Then he remembered: a Venusian might murder his own family,\n but he would never swear to an untruth by the Eternal Varga. That one\n superstition, or religion, as they looked upon it, was binding beyond\n all else. And Tar Norn had sworn by that oath that Leah Barrows would\n die at nine-thirty unless—\n\n\n Mart looked at the chronometer. It was twenty-six minutes past nine. He\n caught a glimpse of Director Barrow's face. It looked like the face of\n a dead man. Barrow had obviously given up all hope and waited only for\n the four minutes to pass.\n\n\n The carrier wave hummed. All of them started, but the voice from the\n communicator merely reported, \"All Comprotown reports in. All negative.\n Giros report nothing. Foot parties five miles out. Reports negative.\"",
"The pirate's face became vicious. \"I do not think so,\" he snapped.\n \"I have taken a hostage. It was quite dark—your tiny Callisto in\n eclipse of its huge primary—when I was forced down. But darkness means\n nothing to a Venusian. You Earthmen play a strange game with cardboard\n rectangles. To use its language, Director Barrow, I have an ace in the\n hole.\"\n\n\n Tar Norn sat down again and folded his six-fingered hands quite calmly.\n Light from the ceiling overhead seemed to cast a malignant glow on his\n dead-white scalp.",
"He turned over the sheaf of papers and drew a little square on the\n blank reverse side of the bottom one. That was Comprotown. He made a\n dot an inch or two away. That was the point where Tar Norn's ship had\n wrecked itself in landing.\n\n\n He drew a line from the point to the square. That was Tar Norn coming\n in to the town. That would have been about ten hours ago.\n\n\n Then, from the information about Callisto and Comprotown that had\n been in the papers in Tar Norn's ship, the pirate had found the home\n of the director. He would have had no trouble finding Leah's room.\n Venusians could see in the dark and walk as silently as cats. He would\n undoubtedly have drugged Leah into unconsciousness, probably without\n awakening her, since there had been no sign of a struggle. He'd put her\n into the lightweight spacesuit.",
"Director Barrow's face was bleak. His voice sounded like the drip of\n water from melting ice. \"Clothing?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Her lightweight spacesuit is gone. Apparently she put it on over her\n sleeping pajamas, for they aren't here. Is there anything I can do,\n sir? I'm worried; she hasn't ever—\"\n\n\n \"That will be all, Mrs. Andrews,\" Barrow replied. \"I'll let you know if\n there is anything.\"\n\n\n He turned to Captain Wayne. \"Use this set, Captain. Get Communications\n to send out a general alarm and assembly. You can make all necessary\n arrangements right here.\"\n\n\n Wayne crossed to the communicator, and began to issue rapid\n instructions.\n\n\n \"Tell them to hurry,\" the Venusian cut in mockingly. \"They have until\n nine-thirty o'clock.\"",
"VENUSIAN INVADER\nBy LARRY STERNIG\nLeah Barrow would die. Tar Norn had sworn she\n\n would, unless he was set free. But freedom for\n\n the Venusian Pirate meant death for many, and\n\n it was Director Barrow's duty to hold him—even\n\n though it would cost his daughter's life.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"\"Aside from the fact that it would have no business around here if it\n wasn't, the papers are a give-away. There's a whole sheaf of them.\n Reports on the Ganymede jewel shipments mostly. And a full set of data\n on our own little world, Mart. If there's a Venusian around, he sure\n knows his way.\"\n\n\n \"Dope on Callisto? What kind?\"\n\n\n \"A detailed map of Comprotown, showing every building. A full schedule\n of freighter hops both ways to Jupe and Earth. Details of shipments.\n That sort of thing.\"\n\n\n \"Holy stars! But why should a pirate be interested in ore?\"\n\n\n \"Don't imagine he is. Or in Comprotown, either. I'd say from the\n papers, it was precautionary information. We don't keep our operations\n a secret here. He could have picked it up from any magazine article\n describing Comprotown in detail.",
"The chronometer said twenty minutes after nine now. Ten minutes to go,\n if the timer had been accurately set. But could it have been set wrong?\n Venusians were lousy mechanics. Maybe—\nMart became aware that he was holding his breath for the sound of a\n distant explosion. Yes, from whatever point Tar Norn could have hidden\n his hostage, the sound of a pound of uranite exploding would carry back\n to Comprotown.\n\n\n He sat down at his desk again. In front of him were the signed\n clearance papers for the freighters. In half an hour he'd take out the\n papers for the first freighter. But before that half hour was up—\n\n\n He twisted a pencil between his fingers, held himself rigid to keep\n from turning and looking at the chronometer again. It hadn't been over\n a minute since he sat down—why torture himself by looking again? But\n each minute now seemed both a flash and an eternity.",
"\"Your daughter, Director,\" he continued. \"If you wish to see her again,\n you will give me a ship, your\nfastest\nship.\"\nThere was a moment of dead, utter silence. Then Director Barrow leaned\n over the desk and flicked the key of the communicator. \"Control? Get\n my—get Leah Barrow at once. Ring her room. If no answer there, get my\n housekeeper. This is Director Barrow.\"\n\n\n \"Your fastest ship,\" repeated the Venusian. \"Well stocked with\n supplies. Enough to take me to—to a place in the Asteroid belt. I\n shall be too late now to carry out my original plans on Ganymede.\"\n\n\n The office door opened and Captain Wayne came in, followed by Roger\n Corey. Their eyes widened as they saw the Venusian. Wayne's hand darted\n toward his holster, then relaxed as he saw Mart's blaster trained on\n the pirate.\n\n\n He faced Director Barrow and saluted.",
"Tar Norn tossed the wig and glasses to the floor as Corey took his arm.\n His pupil-less eyes seemed to glow with anger.\n\n\n \"You won't murder your own daughter, Director. This is a bluff. But\n mine isn't. She dies at nine-thirty unless you find her. I swear that\n by the\nEternal Varga\n.\"\n\n\n Mart cursed. Fists balled, he lunged toward the Venusian. Barrow put\n a hand on his arm. \"Don't, Wells. That's up to the Interplanetary\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"But he's\nnot\nbluffing,\" Mart raved. \"Leah will surely die at\n nine-thirty. That damned oath.\nVarga.\nIt's the only thing a Venusian\n is afraid of. He isn't—\" His voice broke.\n\n\n Corey started off with the Venusian.",
"\"Yeah, I know,\" cut in the Captain's voice. \"All but a few that the\n Venusian renegades—the pirates—got off with before then. Well—we're\n going down. Corey's found a place not too far from it where he can set\n the giro down, or says he can.\"\n\n\n \"If that's a pirate ship, Cap, be careful!\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry. We're armed. And the ship's pretty smashed up. Probably\n at least kayoed whoever was in it. Well, keep your key open and I'll\n call you back. We're down.\"\n\n\n Mart found the shipment chart and began to check off tonnage. That much\n he wanted to get out of the way before—but something was gnawing at\n the back of his mind. It took him a moment to trace what it was. Of\n course. The workman who was waiting for the Director was wearing tinted\n glasses.",
"\"Looks intact, but he probably has sidearms. All the pirates carry\n them. One funny thing, Director. The timer robot has been removed from\n the control panel. What on Callisto would he want with a loose timer?\"\n\n\n \"Report back to headquarters immediately, Captain Wayne,\" Director\n Barrow ordered.\n\n\n The hum of the carrier wave died and Mart clicked off the set.\n Then, belatedly, he stood up and saluted. \"Anything I can do, sir?\n Everything's set for the freighters to clear as usual, so I'm more or\n less free—\"\n\n\n Barrow nodded. \"Very good, Wells. You may go to the field and direct a\n search of the freighters. The Venusian's first thought will be to get\n away, and he may already be stowed in one of—\"\n\n\n A dry voice interrupted from behind the Director's back. \"But the\n Venusian would not do anything so obvious, Director Barrow.\"",
"\"But I still don't see—\"\n\n\n \"The Ganymede jewel shipments, Mart. I'd say he was bound for Gany and\n his ship went blooie while he was scudding past Callisto. He got pulled\n down here and just barely made a landing he could walk away from. I'm\n afraid there'll be trouble.\"\n\n\n Mart whistled. \"Well, the Director's due now. He'll want a search\n organized and—Wait, here he is. Tell it over again, Cap, and you'll be\n reporting direct.... Listen to this, Director.\"\nThe tall slender figure of Director Barrow stood impassively beside\n Mart's desk and listened to a repetition of Wayne's report. Not a\n flicker of expression passed over his gaunt face.\n\n\n As Wayne finished, the Director asked, \"Is he armed? Anything taken\n from the ship's equipment, Captain?\"",
"Mart Wells glanced fearfully at the dial of the chronometer. It was\n eight-forty now. He turned and caught the Director's glance. \"\nThe\n timer!\n\" he said grimly. \"Captain Wayne said it was missing from the\n wrecked ship. He must have—\"\n\n\n The Venusian was grinning. \"Exactly. The timer. And a pound of uranite.\n That gives you fifty minutes to search Callisto. It would be wiser to\n spend the time getting a ship ready for me instead.\"\n\n\n The silence of the office was broken only by the low voice of Captain\n Wayne giving orders into the communicator. Abruptly he turned to his\n superior. His face was white.\n\n\n \"Search is on, sir. But if he isn't lying, there's a chance in a\n million. Less than an hour, and the area to be covered is—\""
],
[
"\"Captain,\" Barrow ordered, \"you will form a search party at once—every\n available man and means. We must search all of Callisto within—\" he\n made a rapid mental calculation \"—about fifty miles. You will be\n searching for my daughter.\"\n\n\n The captain stiffened. Before he could reply the carrier wave hummed\n and a feminine voice, that of an elderly woman, came over the\n communicator. \"Director Barrow? Leah isn't here. I looked in her room\n and her bed is disarranged as though she left suddenly. She always\n makes it herself as soon as she gets up.\"\n\n\n \"Anything to point to when she left, Mrs. Andrews?\"\n\n\n \"Not exactly, sir. The alarm was set for six and it was still buzzing.\n Her bed isn't very mussed; it looks like she got up again almost right\n after she retired. I don't understand.\"",
"Barrow said, \"Yes, he's telling the truth. But we have some time yet.\n Maybe the search—\"\nMart strode to the window and looked out so the others wouldn't see his\n face. Less than three-quarters of an hour to search all of Callisto\n within a radius of fifty miles!\nThrough the pane he saw figures in groups of three searching the\n streets and buildings of Comprotown. That part of the search wouldn't\n be difficult. But the hills and the caves, and with only two autogiros.\n If she was there, out of sight in one of the caves, where the cruising\n ships couldn't see her....\n\n\n Her father was right, but—The picture of Leah Barrow, smiling as he\n had last seen her, seemed to blur out the view from the window. Her\n impertinent little tilted nose, the soft tempting contours of her lips,\n the deep blueness of her eyes.",
"The thought of ships reminded him of the freighters. \"Cap,\" he asked\n Wayne, \"the freighters been searched thoroughly?\"\n\n\n Wayne nodded. \"Rocket tubes and all. Even broke open the ore drums. I\n presume you'll want them to clear on schedule?\"\n\n\n Director Barrow nodded. \"The crews?\" he asked. \"In the search or\n standing by?\"\n\n\n \"Standing by for departure as usual, Director. A few men one way or the\n other—\"\n\n\n Barrow nodded, glancing at the chronometer. Mart knew what he was\n thinking. Less than half an hour now. And, unless the searchers by some\n miracle found Leah Barrow, it would all be over before the ten o'clock\n clearance of the first freighter. And the freighters hadn't missed a\n clearance in ten years.",
"He turned over the sheaf of papers and drew a little square on the\n blank reverse side of the bottom one. That was Comprotown. He made a\n dot an inch or two away. That was the point where Tar Norn's ship had\n wrecked itself in landing.\n\n\n He drew a line from the point to the square. That was Tar Norn coming\n in to the town. That would have been about ten hours ago.\n\n\n Then, from the information about Callisto and Comprotown that had\n been in the papers in Tar Norn's ship, the pirate had found the home\n of the director. He would have had no trouble finding Leah's room.\n Venusians could see in the dark and walk as silently as cats. He would\n undoubtedly have drugged Leah into unconsciousness, probably without\n awakening her, since there had been no sign of a struggle. He'd put her\n into the lightweight spacesuit.",
"Director Barrow's face was bleak. His voice sounded like the drip of\n water from melting ice. \"Clothing?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Her lightweight spacesuit is gone. Apparently she put it on over her\n sleeping pajamas, for they aren't here. Is there anything I can do,\n sir? I'm worried; she hasn't ever—\"\n\n\n \"That will be all, Mrs. Andrews,\" Barrow replied. \"I'll let you know if\n there is anything.\"\n\n\n He turned to Captain Wayne. \"Use this set, Captain. Get Communications\n to send out a general alarm and assembly. You can make all necessary\n arrangements right here.\"\n\n\n Wayne crossed to the communicator, and began to issue rapid\n instructions.\n\n\n \"Tell them to hurry,\" the Venusian cut in mockingly. \"They have until\n nine-thirty o'clock.\"",
"Three minutes to go. Mart could see by the attitude of the others that\n they were bracing themselves for the sound of an explosion. All of them\n had liked, or loved, Leah Barrows. Mart had a momentary vision of her\n again, and remembered the electric thrill that had run through him when\n she had placed her hand on his arm, just a few days ago, and told him\n that she did care for him, well, a little anyway—\n\n\n But, if Tar Norn couldn't have rigged a time-bomb, how could he have\n arranged for Leah to die at nine-thirty?\n\n\n He saw again the corpse-like face of the Director. Yes, they had all\n been wrong in thinking that nothing mattered to Barrow more than the\n schedules—\nSchedules\n! There had been departure schedules among the\n papers in Tar Norn's ship. Could he have—",
"Barrow was looking straight ahead, and not a muscle of his face moved\n until he spoke. \"I'm afraid he isn't bluffing. No reason why he should\n be. Leah is gone and the timer is gone. And a pirate ship would have\n uranite.\"\n\n\n \"The ship?\" asked Tar Norn. \"It will take some time to fuel it and—\"\n\n\n Director Barrow's voice was positive. \"There will be no ship for you,\n Tar Norn.\"\n\n\n Roger Corey's voice cut in, jerkily. \"Let me work on him, sir. Me and\n Wayne. Maybe we can make him talk.\"\n\n\n Barrow shook his head. \"No use, Corey. Venusians don't mind pain as\n much as Earthmen. They almost like it. You could take him apart, and he\n wouldn't talk.\"",
"\"Your daughter, Director,\" he continued. \"If you wish to see her again,\n you will give me a ship, your\nfastest\nship.\"\nThere was a moment of dead, utter silence. Then Director Barrow leaned\n over the desk and flicked the key of the communicator. \"Control? Get\n my—get Leah Barrow at once. Ring her room. If no answer there, get my\n housekeeper. This is Director Barrow.\"\n\n\n \"Your fastest ship,\" repeated the Venusian. \"Well stocked with\n supplies. Enough to take me to—to a place in the Asteroid belt. I\n shall be too late now to carry out my original plans on Ganymede.\"\n\n\n The office door opened and Captain Wayne came in, followed by Roger\n Corey. Their eyes widened as they saw the Venusian. Wayne's hand darted\n toward his holster, then relaxed as he saw Mart's blaster trained on\n the pirate.\n\n\n He faced Director Barrow and saluted.",
"Tar Norn tossed the wig and glasses to the floor as Corey took his arm.\n His pupil-less eyes seemed to glow with anger.\n\n\n \"You won't murder your own daughter, Director. This is a bluff. But\n mine isn't. She dies at nine-thirty unless you find her. I swear that\n by the\nEternal Varga\n.\"\n\n\n Mart cursed. Fists balled, he lunged toward the Venusian. Barrow put\n a hand on his arm. \"Don't, Wells. That's up to the Interplanetary\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"But he's\nnot\nbluffing,\" Mart raved. \"Leah will surely die at\n nine-thirty. That damned oath.\nVarga.\nIt's the only thing a Venusian\n is afraid of. He isn't—\" His voice broke.\n\n\n Corey started off with the Venusian.",
"The pirate's smile faded. \"It will take half an hour to prepare the\n ship, Director Barrow. Better not stall too long.\"\n\n\n Mart said, his voice urgent. \"But, sir,\nLeah\n! What's one pirate\n compared to—\"\n\n\n Barrow's face was granite-like. \"He's killed hundreds of people. If we\n release him, he'll kill hundreds more. One life cannot weigh against\n that. Corey, take him away. Lock him up until the next ship leaves for\n Earth.\"\n\n\n Mart's fists were clenched, his fingernails biting into the palms. But\n he knew Barrow was right; that he couldn't possibly take any other\n course and be worthy of his post. One life couldn't weigh against the\n many lives that meeting the pirate's terms would mean. That was where\n Tar Norn had miscalculated. A Venusian didn't understand responsibility\n to society, nor any higher ideal than self-interest.",
"Mart glanced at Barrow. The Director was sitting as immobile as a\n statue. His eyes were closed and every muscle of his thin face was\n tense. Probably he was trying not to look at the chronometer on the\n wall. It was nine-fifteen.\n\n\n The office door opened and three uniformed mechanics from the field\n stood in the doorway. The foremost of them saluted. \"This entire\n building has been searched twice except this office. I presume—\"\n\n\n Director Barrow opened his eyes and stood up. \"Don't presume anything.\n Search here, too.\"\n\n\n The men came in and began a detailed but fruitless search. Nobody spoke\n until they left.",
"A momentary surge of elation swept Mart. Tar Norn must have been\n bluffing! Then he remembered: a Venusian might murder his own family,\n but he would never swear to an untruth by the Eternal Varga. That one\n superstition, or religion, as they looked upon it, was binding beyond\n all else. And Tar Norn had sworn by that oath that Leah Barrows would\n die at nine-thirty unless—\n\n\n Mart looked at the chronometer. It was twenty-six minutes past nine. He\n caught a glimpse of Director Barrow's face. It looked like the face of\n a dead man. Barrow had obviously given up all hope and waited only for\n the four minutes to pass.\n\n\n The carrier wave hummed. All of them started, but the voice from the\n communicator merely reported, \"All Comprotown reports in. All negative.\n Giros report nothing. Foot parties five miles out. Reports negative.\"",
"\"Huh?\" The mechanic looked startled. \"You sure? No, there hasn't been a\n report. Wait, I'll radio Central Communications.\"\n\n\n He darted back into the building, and emerged a moment later. \"No\n report. They're going to send out the autogiro to look at it. Say,\n Mart, there are only two small spaceships on Callisto. Could it be—\"\n\n\n Mart was already running toward the corner from which he could see the\n landing field. He stopped so suddenly that the mechanic almost ran into\n him, and said, \"Whew! They're both there.\" Leah Barrow's trim little\n spacecruiser was safe in port. So was the Police one-seater scout—but\n that wasn't the one Mart had looked for first.\n\n\n From near the Administration Building a two-place autogiro was rising,\n silhouetted for a moment between the horns of the reddish crescent of\n big Jupiter just above the horizon.",
"He whirled from the window and began pacing the floor, trying to\n think of something they could do that wasn't being done. Again at the\n communicator, Captain Wayne was barking questions.\n\n\n \"All available men and women are combing the town, sir,\" he reported,\n \"with orders to break down any doors that are locked, to stop at\n nothing.\"\n\n\n \"And outside, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"The two giros are our only real hope. But the men from the smelting\n plant are working afoot out of town. By nine-thirty they'll have\n covered a radius of about five miles.\"\n\n\n Corey returned, slamming the door viciously behind him. \"Maybe we\n could trick him, sir,\" he suggested. \"Pretend we'll give him a ship if\n he'll—\"",
"Why? Undoubtedly it indicated that she would be outdoors. During the\n Callisto day, it would have been unnecessary. But an unconscious\n Earthwoman would freeze to death in the cold dark period of Callisto's\n eclipse behind Big Jupe.\n\n\n What then? The Venusian left, carrying her—\nThe Venusian had carried the drugged girl into the night.\nHe threw down the pencil and began to pace the room again. His muscles\n were tense from listening. How many minutes? He didn't want to know;\n dared not look.\n\n\n But Tar Norn must have planned it all before he left the wrecked ship.\n Otherwise he wouldn't have taken the timer and—",
"Would he have rigged the time-bomb first, or after he had kidnapped\n Leah? And how? The timer itself would not have provided the concussion\n to set off the uranite. He'd have needed a battery, a spark-coil, and—\nBut Venusians weren't mechanics.\nThey didn't understand machines, or electricity, or even simple\n clockworks, brilliant as their strange minds were in other ways.\n\n\n Tar Norn could have set the timer all right. For that matter, he could\n calculate an orbit and make settings for space flight. But he couldn't\n have made a time-bomb, even with the timer. He couldn't have rigged\n a circuit that would set off a cap! And, Mart realized suddenly, the\n timer itself would be an electrical—not a clockwork—gadget. Once\n disconnected from the now broken dynamo of the ship, Tar Norn couldn't\n have made it run at all!",
"VENUSIAN INVADER\nBy LARRY STERNIG\nLeah Barrow would die. Tar Norn had sworn she\n\n would, unless he was set free. But freedom for\n\n the Venusian Pirate meant death for many, and\n\n it was Director Barrow's duty to hold him—even\n\n though it would cost his daughter's life.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"\"A Venusian wouldn't trust his own mother,\" Barrow snapped. \"He'd\n insist on taking off first and then radioing back where she is. And\n don't think he wouldn't check the fuel tanks.\"\n\n\n \"I wish you'd let me and Wayne work on him, anyway.\"\n\n\n Director Barrow didn't answer.\n\n\n Mart growled, \"If Leah dies, I'm going to take that filthy pirate and—\"\n\n\n Wayne's voice was bitter. \"Venusians can't help what they are. Blame\n the Earth council that sold them those ships. If they had used more\n sense, there wouldn't be a Venusian off Venus.\"\n\n\n Mart nodded. If the council hadn't pulled that boner twenty years\n before, there would be no trouble with the Venusians.",
"The pirate's face became vicious. \"I do not think so,\" he snapped.\n \"I have taken a hostage. It was quite dark—your tiny Callisto in\n eclipse of its huge primary—when I was forced down. But darkness means\n nothing to a Venusian. You Earthmen play a strange game with cardboard\n rectangles. To use its language, Director Barrow, I have an ace in the\n hole.\"\n\n\n Tar Norn sat down again and folded his six-fingered hands quite calmly.\n Light from the ceiling overhead seemed to cast a malignant glow on his\n dead-white scalp.",
"At his desk in the Administration Building, Mart picked up the familiar\n sheaf of clearance papers waiting for his attention, and glanced\n through them. Initialing them was mere routine; they'd never cleared a\n minute early or a minute late since he'd been there. Director Barrow\n saw to that.\n\n\n The door opened. Mart put down the papers and glanced up.\nOne of the workmen from the smelting plant, a tall black-haired fellow\n wearing tinted glasses, stood looking into the office. Mart didn't\n remember ever seeing him before—but with several hundred workmen, you\n couldn't remember all of them.\n\n\n \"Director Barrow in?\"\n\n\n Mart glanced up at the wall clock before he answered. \"He'll be here in\n twenty-one minutes. Sit down and wait if you're off duty.\""
],
[
"The pirate's face became vicious. \"I do not think so,\" he snapped.\n \"I have taken a hostage. It was quite dark—your tiny Callisto in\n eclipse of its huge primary—when I was forced down. But darkness means\n nothing to a Venusian. You Earthmen play a strange game with cardboard\n rectangles. To use its language, Director Barrow, I have an ace in the\n hole.\"\n\n\n Tar Norn sat down again and folded his six-fingered hands quite calmly.\n Light from the ceiling overhead seemed to cast a malignant glow on his\n dead-white scalp.",
"Barrow was looking straight ahead, and not a muscle of his face moved\n until he spoke. \"I'm afraid he isn't bluffing. No reason why he should\n be. Leah is gone and the timer is gone. And a pirate ship would have\n uranite.\"\n\n\n \"The ship?\" asked Tar Norn. \"It will take some time to fuel it and—\"\n\n\n Director Barrow's voice was positive. \"There will be no ship for you,\n Tar Norn.\"\n\n\n Roger Corey's voice cut in, jerkily. \"Let me work on him, sir. Me and\n Wayne. Maybe we can make him talk.\"\n\n\n Barrow shook his head. \"No use, Corey. Venusians don't mind pain as\n much as Earthmen. They almost like it. You could take him apart, and he\n wouldn't talk.\"",
"The pirate's smile faded. \"It will take half an hour to prepare the\n ship, Director Barrow. Better not stall too long.\"\n\n\n Mart said, his voice urgent. \"But, sir,\nLeah\n! What's one pirate\n compared to—\"\n\n\n Barrow's face was granite-like. \"He's killed hundreds of people. If we\n release him, he'll kill hundreds more. One life cannot weigh against\n that. Corey, take him away. Lock him up until the next ship leaves for\n Earth.\"\n\n\n Mart's fists were clenched, his fingernails biting into the palms. But\n he knew Barrow was right; that he couldn't possibly take any other\n course and be worthy of his post. One life couldn't weigh against the\n many lives that meeting the pirate's terms would mean. That was where\n Tar Norn had miscalculated. A Venusian didn't understand responsibility\n to society, nor any higher ideal than self-interest.",
"Tar Norn tossed the wig and glasses to the floor as Corey took his arm.\n His pupil-less eyes seemed to glow with anger.\n\n\n \"You won't murder your own daughter, Director. This is a bluff. But\n mine isn't. She dies at nine-thirty unless you find her. I swear that\n by the\nEternal Varga\n.\"\n\n\n Mart cursed. Fists balled, he lunged toward the Venusian. Barrow put\n a hand on his arm. \"Don't, Wells. That's up to the Interplanetary\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"But he's\nnot\nbluffing,\" Mart raved. \"Leah will surely die at\n nine-thirty. That damned oath.\nVarga.\nIt's the only thing a Venusian\n is afraid of. He isn't—\" His voice broke.\n\n\n Corey started off with the Venusian.",
"Would he have rigged the time-bomb first, or after he had kidnapped\n Leah? And how? The timer itself would not have provided the concussion\n to set off the uranite. He'd have needed a battery, a spark-coil, and—\nBut Venusians weren't mechanics.\nThey didn't understand machines, or electricity, or even simple\n clockworks, brilliant as their strange minds were in other ways.\n\n\n Tar Norn could have set the timer all right. For that matter, he could\n calculate an orbit and make settings for space flight. But he couldn't\n have made a time-bomb, even with the timer. He couldn't have rigged\n a circuit that would set off a cap! And, Mart realized suddenly, the\n timer itself would be an electrical—not a clockwork—gadget. Once\n disconnected from the now broken dynamo of the ship, Tar Norn couldn't\n have made it run at all!",
"The chronometer said twenty minutes after nine now. Ten minutes to go,\n if the timer had been accurately set. But could it have been set wrong?\n Venusians were lousy mechanics. Maybe—\nMart became aware that he was holding his breath for the sound of a\n distant explosion. Yes, from whatever point Tar Norn could have hidden\n his hostage, the sound of a pound of uranite exploding would carry back\n to Comprotown.\n\n\n He sat down at his desk again. In front of him were the signed\n clearance papers for the freighters. In half an hour he'd take out the\n papers for the first freighter. But before that half hour was up—\n\n\n He twisted a pencil between his fingers, held himself rigid to keep\n from turning and looking at the chronometer again. It hadn't been over\n a minute since he sat down—why torture himself by looking again? But\n each minute now seemed both a flash and an eternity.",
"He turned over the sheaf of papers and drew a little square on the\n blank reverse side of the bottom one. That was Comprotown. He made a\n dot an inch or two away. That was the point where Tar Norn's ship had\n wrecked itself in landing.\n\n\n He drew a line from the point to the square. That was Tar Norn coming\n in to the town. That would have been about ten hours ago.\n\n\n Then, from the information about Callisto and Comprotown that had\n been in the papers in Tar Norn's ship, the pirate had found the home\n of the director. He would have had no trouble finding Leah's room.\n Venusians could see in the dark and walk as silently as cats. He would\n undoubtedly have drugged Leah into unconsciousness, probably without\n awakening her, since there had been no sign of a struggle. He'd put her\n into the lightweight spacesuit.",
"Why? Undoubtedly it indicated that she would be outdoors. During the\n Callisto day, it would have been unnecessary. But an unconscious\n Earthwoman would freeze to death in the cold dark period of Callisto's\n eclipse behind Big Jupe.\n\n\n What then? The Venusian left, carrying her—\nThe Venusian had carried the drugged girl into the night.\nHe threw down the pencil and began to pace the room again. His muscles\n were tense from listening. How many minutes? He didn't want to know;\n dared not look.\n\n\n But Tar Norn must have planned it all before he left the wrecked ship.\n Otherwise he wouldn't have taken the timer and—",
"Three minutes to go. Mart could see by the attitude of the others that\n they were bracing themselves for the sound of an explosion. All of them\n had liked, or loved, Leah Barrows. Mart had a momentary vision of her\n again, and remembered the electric thrill that had run through him when\n she had placed her hand on his arm, just a few days ago, and told him\n that she did care for him, well, a little anyway—\n\n\n But, if Tar Norn couldn't have rigged a time-bomb, how could he have\n arranged for Leah to die at nine-thirty?\n\n\n He saw again the corpse-like face of the Director. Yes, they had all\n been wrong in thinking that nothing mattered to Barrow more than the\n schedules—\nSchedules\n! There had been departure schedules among the\n papers in Tar Norn's ship. Could he have—",
"A momentary surge of elation swept Mart. Tar Norn must have been\n bluffing! Then he remembered: a Venusian might murder his own family,\n but he would never swear to an untruth by the Eternal Varga. That one\n superstition, or religion, as they looked upon it, was binding beyond\n all else. And Tar Norn had sworn by that oath that Leah Barrows would\n die at nine-thirty unless—\n\n\n Mart looked at the chronometer. It was twenty-six minutes past nine. He\n caught a glimpse of Director Barrow's face. It looked like the face of\n a dead man. Barrow had obviously given up all hope and waited only for\n the four minutes to pass.\n\n\n The carrier wave hummed. All of them started, but the voice from the\n communicator merely reported, \"All Comprotown reports in. All negative.\n Giros report nothing. Foot parties five miles out. Reports negative.\"",
"\"—before the Supreme Council on Earth,\" Mart finished. Then, glancing\n side-wise at Director Barrow and seeing him nod, he stepped forward\n warily. Venusians, he knew, were both fast and tricky. Watching every\n move, he completed the search. Tar Norn carried no weapons.\n\n\n Why, Mart wondered, had the pirate walked openly into headquarters and\n given himself up? Obviously, Tar Norn had something up his sleeve.\n But—\n\n\n Director Barrow spoke coldly, as Mart stepped back, still covering the\n Venusian with the blaster. \"Tar Norn, you speak of 'our discussion.'\n There is nothing to discuss. You will be sent to Earth.\"",
"The Venusian glanced down at the wig and glasses. \"Standard equipment,\"\n he explained. \"I always carry them in my ship and they've come in handy\n before.\"\n\n\n He rose and bowed mockingly. \"My name is Tar Norn, and your supposition\n that I am a pirate is correct. But I assure you that my visit here is\n accidental and I have no designs on Comprotown.\"\n\n\n Tar Norn! The most vicious and notorious of the pirates, and the most\n ruthless killer of them all. Mart hastily jerked open the drawer of\n his desk and pulled out a hand-blaster. He started the formula: \"Under\n authority of the Interplanetary Council, I arrest you, to be held for\n trial—\"\n\n\n The sardonic smile did not fade from the pirate's thin lips. He rose\n and extended his arms upward. \"I am unarmed,\" he cut in. \"It will help\n our discussion if you will verify that.\"",
"He whirled from the window and began pacing the floor, trying to\n think of something they could do that wasn't being done. Again at the\n communicator, Captain Wayne was barking questions.\n\n\n \"All available men and women are combing the town, sir,\" he reported,\n \"with orders to break down any doors that are locked, to stop at\n nothing.\"\n\n\n \"And outside, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"The two giros are our only real hope. But the men from the smelting\n plant are working afoot out of town. By nine-thirty they'll have\n covered a radius of about five miles.\"\n\n\n Corey returned, slamming the door viciously behind him. \"Maybe we\n could trick him, sir,\" he suggested. \"Pretend we'll give him a ship if\n he'll—\"",
"Venusians were, compared to Earth standards, a strange combination of\n genius and idiocy. Brilliant mathematicians, they had no mechanical\n ingenuity whatever. Linguists who could speak any language fluently\n after hearing it a few hours, not one of them could create a child's\n wind-up toy. Knowing the laws of leverage, they constructed their\n buildings by manual labor alone. Able to operate any machine as long as\n it was in good working order, they couldn't as much as figure out how\n to repair a clogged fuel-line.\n\n\n Even the pirates based on some of the bigger Asteroids had to depend\n upon a few renegade Earthmen to keep their ships in running order. And\n if one went blah away from base, it was a gone ship as far as they\n were concerned. Probably the trouble that had forced Tar Norn down on\n Callisto had been a minor matter that any Earthman could have taken in\n his stride. But to Tar Norn it meant a new ship or nothing.",
"The thought of ships reminded him of the freighters. \"Cap,\" he asked\n Wayne, \"the freighters been searched thoroughly?\"\n\n\n Wayne nodded. \"Rocket tubes and all. Even broke open the ore drums. I\n presume you'll want them to clear on schedule?\"\n\n\n Director Barrow nodded. \"The crews?\" he asked. \"In the search or\n standing by?\"\n\n\n \"Standing by for departure as usual, Director. A few men one way or the\n other—\"\n\n\n Barrow nodded, glancing at the chronometer. Mart knew what he was\n thinking. Less than half an hour now. And, unless the searchers by some\n miracle found Leah Barrow, it would all be over before the ten o'clock\n clearance of the first freighter. And the freighters hadn't missed a\n clearance in ten years.",
"VENUSIAN INVADER\nBy LARRY STERNIG\nLeah Barrow would die. Tar Norn had sworn she\n\n would, unless he was set free. But freedom for\n\n the Venusian Pirate meant death for many, and\n\n it was Director Barrow's duty to hold him—even\n\n though it would cost his daughter's life.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"\"Looks intact, but he probably has sidearms. All the pirates carry\n them. One funny thing, Director. The timer robot has been removed from\n the control panel. What on Callisto would he want with a loose timer?\"\n\n\n \"Report back to headquarters immediately, Captain Wayne,\" Director\n Barrow ordered.\n\n\n The hum of the carrier wave died and Mart clicked off the set.\n Then, belatedly, he stood up and saluted. \"Anything I can do, sir?\n Everything's set for the freighters to clear as usual, so I'm more or\n less free—\"\n\n\n Barrow nodded. \"Very good, Wells. You may go to the field and direct a\n search of the freighters. The Venusian's first thought will be to get\n away, and he may already be stowed in one of—\"\n\n\n A dry voice interrupted from behind the Director's back. \"But the\n Venusian would not do anything so obvious, Director Barrow.\"",
"\"Your daughter, Director,\" he continued. \"If you wish to see her again,\n you will give me a ship, your\nfastest\nship.\"\nThere was a moment of dead, utter silence. Then Director Barrow leaned\n over the desk and flicked the key of the communicator. \"Control? Get\n my—get Leah Barrow at once. Ring her room. If no answer there, get my\n housekeeper. This is Director Barrow.\"\n\n\n \"Your fastest ship,\" repeated the Venusian. \"Well stocked with\n supplies. Enough to take me to—to a place in the Asteroid belt. I\n shall be too late now to carry out my original plans on Ganymede.\"\n\n\n The office door opened and Captain Wayne came in, followed by Roger\n Corey. Their eyes widened as they saw the Venusian. Wayne's hand darted\n toward his holster, then relaxed as he saw Mart's blaster trained on\n the pirate.\n\n\n He faced Director Barrow and saluted.",
"Director Barrow's face was bleak. His voice sounded like the drip of\n water from melting ice. \"Clothing?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Her lightweight spacesuit is gone. Apparently she put it on over her\n sleeping pajamas, for they aren't here. Is there anything I can do,\n sir? I'm worried; she hasn't ever—\"\n\n\n \"That will be all, Mrs. Andrews,\" Barrow replied. \"I'll let you know if\n there is anything.\"\n\n\n He turned to Captain Wayne. \"Use this set, Captain. Get Communications\n to send out a general alarm and assembly. You can make all necessary\n arrangements right here.\"\n\n\n Wayne crossed to the communicator, and began to issue rapid\n instructions.\n\n\n \"Tell them to hurry,\" the Venusian cut in mockingly. \"They have until\n nine-thirty o'clock.\"",
"\"But I still don't see—\"\n\n\n \"The Ganymede jewel shipments, Mart. I'd say he was bound for Gany and\n his ship went blooie while he was scudding past Callisto. He got pulled\n down here and just barely made a landing he could walk away from. I'm\n afraid there'll be trouble.\"\n\n\n Mart whistled. \"Well, the Director's due now. He'll want a search\n organized and—Wait, here he is. Tell it over again, Cap, and you'll be\n reporting direct.... Listen to this, Director.\"\nThe tall slender figure of Director Barrow stood impassively beside\n Mart's desk and listened to a repetition of Wayne's report. Not a\n flicker of expression passed over his gaunt face.\n\n\n As Wayne finished, the Director asked, \"Is he armed? Anything taken\n from the ship's equipment, Captain?\""
],
[
"Barrow said, \"Yes, he's telling the truth. But we have some time yet.\n Maybe the search—\"\nMart strode to the window and looked out so the others wouldn't see his\n face. Less than three-quarters of an hour to search all of Callisto\n within a radius of fifty miles!\nThrough the pane he saw figures in groups of three searching the\n streets and buildings of Comprotown. That part of the search wouldn't\n be difficult. But the hills and the caves, and with only two autogiros.\n If she was there, out of sight in one of the caves, where the cruising\n ships couldn't see her....\n\n\n Her father was right, but—The picture of Leah Barrow, smiling as he\n had last seen her, seemed to blur out the view from the window. Her\n impertinent little tilted nose, the soft tempting contours of her lips,\n the deep blueness of her eyes.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMart Wells shut off the alarm buzzer and jumped out of bed—much to his\n regret. He cussed and then grinned sheepishly as he brought up with a\n thud against the fortunately unbreakable glass of the window. A year\n on Callisto, and he could still forget that he weighed only thirty-six\n pounds and couldn't take a normal step without neutronium-weighted\n shoes.\n\n\n Regaining his balance, he yawned and looked out over the rough Callisto\n landscape beyond Comprotown. Then he yawned again and reached for his\n uniform.\n\n\n A year before, Comprotown—and his job as rocketport dispatcher—had\n been Romance with a capital R. Now, he thought gloomily, Romance with\n Leah with a capital L, and a fat lot of good that did him when Leah\n Barrow's father was Old Fish-face himself, Director of Comprotown.",
"Three minutes to go. Mart could see by the attitude of the others that\n they were bracing themselves for the sound of an explosion. All of them\n had liked, or loved, Leah Barrows. Mart had a momentary vision of her\n again, and remembered the electric thrill that had run through him when\n she had placed her hand on his arm, just a few days ago, and told him\n that she did care for him, well, a little anyway—\n\n\n But, if Tar Norn couldn't have rigged a time-bomb, how could he have\n arranged for Leah to die at nine-thirty?\n\n\n He saw again the corpse-like face of the Director. Yes, they had all\n been wrong in thinking that nothing mattered to Barrow more than the\n schedules—\nSchedules\n! There had been departure schedules among the\n papers in Tar Norn's ship. Could he have—",
"The thought of ships reminded him of the freighters. \"Cap,\" he asked\n Wayne, \"the freighters been searched thoroughly?\"\n\n\n Wayne nodded. \"Rocket tubes and all. Even broke open the ore drums. I\n presume you'll want them to clear on schedule?\"\n\n\n Director Barrow nodded. \"The crews?\" he asked. \"In the search or\n standing by?\"\n\n\n \"Standing by for departure as usual, Director. A few men one way or the\n other—\"\n\n\n Barrow nodded, glancing at the chronometer. Mart knew what he was\n thinking. Less than half an hour now. And, unless the searchers by some\n miracle found Leah Barrow, it would all be over before the ten o'clock\n clearance of the first freighter. And the freighters hadn't missed a\n clearance in ten years.",
"A momentary surge of elation swept Mart. Tar Norn must have been\n bluffing! Then he remembered: a Venusian might murder his own family,\n but he would never swear to an untruth by the Eternal Varga. That one\n superstition, or religion, as they looked upon it, was binding beyond\n all else. And Tar Norn had sworn by that oath that Leah Barrows would\n die at nine-thirty unless—\n\n\n Mart looked at the chronometer. It was twenty-six minutes past nine. He\n caught a glimpse of Director Barrow's face. It looked like the face of\n a dead man. Barrow had obviously given up all hope and waited only for\n the four minutes to pass.\n\n\n The carrier wave hummed. All of them started, but the voice from the\n communicator merely reported, \"All Comprotown reports in. All negative.\n Giros report nothing. Foot parties five miles out. Reports negative.\"",
"The pirate's smile faded. \"It will take half an hour to prepare the\n ship, Director Barrow. Better not stall too long.\"\n\n\n Mart said, his voice urgent. \"But, sir,\nLeah\n! What's one pirate\n compared to—\"\n\n\n Barrow's face was granite-like. \"He's killed hundreds of people. If we\n release him, he'll kill hundreds more. One life cannot weigh against\n that. Corey, take him away. Lock him up until the next ship leaves for\n Earth.\"\n\n\n Mart's fists were clenched, his fingernails biting into the palms. But\n he knew Barrow was right; that he couldn't possibly take any other\n course and be worthy of his post. One life couldn't weigh against the\n many lives that meeting the pirate's terms would mean. That was where\n Tar Norn had miscalculated. A Venusian didn't understand responsibility\n to society, nor any higher ideal than self-interest.",
"\"Captain,\" Barrow ordered, \"you will form a search party at once—every\n available man and means. We must search all of Callisto within—\" he\n made a rapid mental calculation \"—about fifty miles. You will be\n searching for my daughter.\"\n\n\n The captain stiffened. Before he could reply the carrier wave hummed\n and a feminine voice, that of an elderly woman, came over the\n communicator. \"Director Barrow? Leah isn't here. I looked in her room\n and her bed is disarranged as though she left suddenly. She always\n makes it herself as soon as she gets up.\"\n\n\n \"Anything to point to when she left, Mrs. Andrews?\"\n\n\n \"Not exactly, sir. The alarm was set for six and it was still buzzing.\n Her bed isn't very mussed; it looks like she got up again almost right\n after she retired. I don't understand.\"",
"Tar Norn tossed the wig and glasses to the floor as Corey took his arm.\n His pupil-less eyes seemed to glow with anger.\n\n\n \"You won't murder your own daughter, Director. This is a bluff. But\n mine isn't. She dies at nine-thirty unless you find her. I swear that\n by the\nEternal Varga\n.\"\n\n\n Mart cursed. Fists balled, he lunged toward the Venusian. Barrow put\n a hand on his arm. \"Don't, Wells. That's up to the Interplanetary\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"But he's\nnot\nbluffing,\" Mart raved. \"Leah will surely die at\n nine-thirty. That damned oath.\nVarga.\nIt's the only thing a Venusian\n is afraid of. He isn't—\" His voice broke.\n\n\n Corey started off with the Venusian.",
"Mart glanced at Barrow. The Director was sitting as immobile as a\n statue. His eyes were closed and every muscle of his thin face was\n tense. Probably he was trying not to look at the chronometer on the\n wall. It was nine-fifteen.\n\n\n The office door opened and three uniformed mechanics from the field\n stood in the doorway. The foremost of them saluted. \"This entire\n building has been searched twice except this office. I presume—\"\n\n\n Director Barrow opened his eyes and stood up. \"Don't presume anything.\n Search here, too.\"\n\n\n The men came in and began a detailed but fruitless search. Nobody spoke\n until they left.",
"Barrow was looking straight ahead, and not a muscle of his face moved\n until he spoke. \"I'm afraid he isn't bluffing. No reason why he should\n be. Leah is gone and the timer is gone. And a pirate ship would have\n uranite.\"\n\n\n \"The ship?\" asked Tar Norn. \"It will take some time to fuel it and—\"\n\n\n Director Barrow's voice was positive. \"There will be no ship for you,\n Tar Norn.\"\n\n\n Roger Corey's voice cut in, jerkily. \"Let me work on him, sir. Me and\n Wayne. Maybe we can make him talk.\"\n\n\n Barrow shook his head. \"No use, Corey. Venusians don't mind pain as\n much as Earthmen. They almost like it. You could take him apart, and he\n wouldn't talk.\"",
"\"A Venusian wouldn't trust his own mother,\" Barrow snapped. \"He'd\n insist on taking off first and then radioing back where she is. And\n don't think he wouldn't check the fuel tanks.\"\n\n\n \"I wish you'd let me and Wayne work on him, anyway.\"\n\n\n Director Barrow didn't answer.\n\n\n Mart growled, \"If Leah dies, I'm going to take that filthy pirate and—\"\n\n\n Wayne's voice was bitter. \"Venusians can't help what they are. Blame\n the Earth council that sold them those ships. If they had used more\n sense, there wouldn't be a Venusian off Venus.\"\n\n\n Mart nodded. If the council hadn't pulled that boner twenty years\n before, there would be no trouble with the Venusians.",
"He turned over the sheaf of papers and drew a little square on the\n blank reverse side of the bottom one. That was Comprotown. He made a\n dot an inch or two away. That was the point where Tar Norn's ship had\n wrecked itself in landing.\n\n\n He drew a line from the point to the square. That was Tar Norn coming\n in to the town. That would have been about ten hours ago.\n\n\n Then, from the information about Callisto and Comprotown that had\n been in the papers in Tar Norn's ship, the pirate had found the home\n of the director. He would have had no trouble finding Leah's room.\n Venusians could see in the dark and walk as silently as cats. He would\n undoubtedly have drugged Leah into unconsciousness, probably without\n awakening her, since there had been no sign of a struggle. He'd put her\n into the lightweight spacesuit.",
"\"Your daughter, Director,\" he continued. \"If you wish to see her again,\n you will give me a ship, your\nfastest\nship.\"\nThere was a moment of dead, utter silence. Then Director Barrow leaned\n over the desk and flicked the key of the communicator. \"Control? Get\n my—get Leah Barrow at once. Ring her room. If no answer there, get my\n housekeeper. This is Director Barrow.\"\n\n\n \"Your fastest ship,\" repeated the Venusian. \"Well stocked with\n supplies. Enough to take me to—to a place in the Asteroid belt. I\n shall be too late now to carry out my original plans on Ganymede.\"\n\n\n The office door opened and Captain Wayne came in, followed by Roger\n Corey. Their eyes widened as they saw the Venusian. Wayne's hand darted\n toward his holster, then relaxed as he saw Mart's blaster trained on\n the pirate.\n\n\n He faced Director Barrow and saluted.",
"At his desk in the Administration Building, Mart picked up the familiar\n sheaf of clearance papers waiting for his attention, and glanced\n through them. Initialing them was mere routine; they'd never cleared a\n minute early or a minute late since he'd been there. Director Barrow\n saw to that.\n\n\n The door opened. Mart put down the papers and glanced up.\nOne of the workmen from the smelting plant, a tall black-haired fellow\n wearing tinted glasses, stood looking into the office. Mart didn't\n remember ever seeing him before—but with several hundred workmen, you\n couldn't remember all of them.\n\n\n \"Director Barrow in?\"\n\n\n Mart glanced up at the wall clock before he answered. \"He'll be here in\n twenty-one minutes. Sit down and wait if you're off duty.\"",
"True, Comprotown held fewer than a thousand colonists, but it was the\n only inhabited spot on bleak Callisto, and its Director was practical\n czar of a world. Yes, the Director could well afford to look down his\n long nose at any uniform with fewer than six stars on its right sleeve.\n But Leah didn't feel that—\n\n\n Suddenly, straightening up as he fastened his weighted boot, he looked\n more intently out of the window. Something that flashed caught his eye\n out in the barren, warped hills. A gleam of metal where metal shouldn't\n have been. And it looked like a small spaceship.\n\n\n Mart hastily pulled on his other boot and ran down the stairs. A\n red-headed mechanic from the rocketport was coming out of the building\n across the way.\n\n\n Mart called out, \"Red! Something about a mile back in the hills looks\n like a spaceship. Has one been reported down?\"",
"\"Huh?\" The mechanic looked startled. \"You sure? No, there hasn't been a\n report. Wait, I'll radio Central Communications.\"\n\n\n He darted back into the building, and emerged a moment later. \"No\n report. They're going to send out the autogiro to look at it. Say,\n Mart, there are only two small spaceships on Callisto. Could it be—\"\n\n\n Mart was already running toward the corner from which he could see the\n landing field. He stopped so suddenly that the mechanic almost ran into\n him, and said, \"Whew! They're both there.\" Leah Barrow's trim little\n spacecruiser was safe in port. So was the Police one-seater scout—but\n that wasn't the one Mart had looked for first.\n\n\n From near the Administration Building a two-place autogiro was rising,\n silhouetted for a moment between the horns of the reddish crescent of\n big Jupiter just above the horizon.",
"Mart whirled around. Barrow turned slowly and with dignity.\n\n\n It was the tall man dressed in the uniform of a smelting plant worker\n who had spoken. But he wasn't dark-haired any more. Still seated, he\n was smiling at them sardonically as he fanned himself with a black wig\n he had just removed. The top of his head was as smooth as a billiard\n ball, and dead white. There was a line of demarcation where the dye he\n had applied to his face came to an end.\n\n\n He had removed the tinted glasses too, and the blank-surfaced\n gray eyeballs showed why they had been worn. Now that the simple\n disguise of wig and glasses was removed, Mart noted some of the other\n distinguishing features that marked the Venusian. The general flatness\n of the face and flat unconvoluted ears. The six-fingered hands that had\n probably been thrust into the pockets of the stolen uniform.",
"He turned back to the papers and finished initialing them, grinning\n inwardly at being able to say that the Director would arrive in\n twenty-one minutes exactly. It wasn't everywhere that one could make\n so accurate a prediction about anyone's arrival time, but Barrow was\n something of a chronometer himself.\n\n\n He tossed the papers toward the back of the desk and threw the switch\n of the communicator on his desk, leaned forward slightly. \"Dispatcher\n Wells calling Police Autogiro.\"\n\n\n \"Autogiro, Captain Wayne,\" came the reply. \"Go ahead. Mart.\"\n\n\n \"I was the one who reported seeing the spaceship, Cap—if it was one.\n Found it? If not, I can—\"",
"VENUSIAN INVADER\nBy LARRY STERNIG\nLeah Barrow would die. Tar Norn had sworn she\n\n would, unless he was set free. But freedom for\n\n the Venusian Pirate meant death for many, and\n\n it was Director Barrow's duty to hold him—even\n\n though it would cost his daughter's life.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"\"But I still don't see—\"\n\n\n \"The Ganymede jewel shipments, Mart. I'd say he was bound for Gany and\n his ship went blooie while he was scudding past Callisto. He got pulled\n down here and just barely made a landing he could walk away from. I'm\n afraid there'll be trouble.\"\n\n\n Mart whistled. \"Well, the Director's due now. He'll want a search\n organized and—Wait, here he is. Tell it over again, Cap, and you'll be\n reporting direct.... Listen to this, Director.\"\nThe tall slender figure of Director Barrow stood impassively beside\n Mart's desk and listened to a repetition of Wayne's report. Not a\n flicker of expression passed over his gaunt face.\n\n\n As Wayne finished, the Director asked, \"Is he armed? Anything taken\n from the ship's equipment, Captain?\""
],
[
"Three minutes to go. Mart could see by the attitude of the others that\n they were bracing themselves for the sound of an explosion. All of them\n had liked, or loved, Leah Barrows. Mart had a momentary vision of her\n again, and remembered the electric thrill that had run through him when\n she had placed her hand on his arm, just a few days ago, and told him\n that she did care for him, well, a little anyway—\n\n\n But, if Tar Norn couldn't have rigged a time-bomb, how could he have\n arranged for Leah to die at nine-thirty?\n\n\n He saw again the corpse-like face of the Director. Yes, they had all\n been wrong in thinking that nothing mattered to Barrow more than the\n schedules—\nSchedules\n! There had been departure schedules among the\n papers in Tar Norn's ship. Could he have—",
"Mart glanced at Barrow. The Director was sitting as immobile as a\n statue. His eyes were closed and every muscle of his thin face was\n tense. Probably he was trying not to look at the chronometer on the\n wall. It was nine-fifteen.\n\n\n The office door opened and three uniformed mechanics from the field\n stood in the doorway. The foremost of them saluted. \"This entire\n building has been searched twice except this office. I presume—\"\n\n\n Director Barrow opened his eyes and stood up. \"Don't presume anything.\n Search here, too.\"\n\n\n The men came in and began a detailed but fruitless search. Nobody spoke\n until they left.",
"The thought of ships reminded him of the freighters. \"Cap,\" he asked\n Wayne, \"the freighters been searched thoroughly?\"\n\n\n Wayne nodded. \"Rocket tubes and all. Even broke open the ore drums. I\n presume you'll want them to clear on schedule?\"\n\n\n Director Barrow nodded. \"The crews?\" he asked. \"In the search or\n standing by?\"\n\n\n \"Standing by for departure as usual, Director. A few men one way or the\n other—\"\n\n\n Barrow nodded, glancing at the chronometer. Mart knew what he was\n thinking. Less than half an hour now. And, unless the searchers by some\n miracle found Leah Barrow, it would all be over before the ten o'clock\n clearance of the first freighter. And the freighters hadn't missed a\n clearance in ten years.",
"The pirate's smile faded. \"It will take half an hour to prepare the\n ship, Director Barrow. Better not stall too long.\"\n\n\n Mart said, his voice urgent. \"But, sir,\nLeah\n! What's one pirate\n compared to—\"\n\n\n Barrow's face was granite-like. \"He's killed hundreds of people. If we\n release him, he'll kill hundreds more. One life cannot weigh against\n that. Corey, take him away. Lock him up until the next ship leaves for\n Earth.\"\n\n\n Mart's fists were clenched, his fingernails biting into the palms. But\n he knew Barrow was right; that he couldn't possibly take any other\n course and be worthy of his post. One life couldn't weigh against the\n many lives that meeting the pirate's terms would mean. That was where\n Tar Norn had miscalculated. A Venusian didn't understand responsibility\n to society, nor any higher ideal than self-interest.",
"At his desk in the Administration Building, Mart picked up the familiar\n sheaf of clearance papers waiting for his attention, and glanced\n through them. Initialing them was mere routine; they'd never cleared a\n minute early or a minute late since he'd been there. Director Barrow\n saw to that.\n\n\n The door opened. Mart put down the papers and glanced up.\nOne of the workmen from the smelting plant, a tall black-haired fellow\n wearing tinted glasses, stood looking into the office. Mart didn't\n remember ever seeing him before—but with several hundred workmen, you\n couldn't remember all of them.\n\n\n \"Director Barrow in?\"\n\n\n Mart glanced up at the wall clock before he answered. \"He'll be here in\n twenty-one minutes. Sit down and wait if you're off duty.\"",
"Tar Norn tossed the wig and glasses to the floor as Corey took his arm.\n His pupil-less eyes seemed to glow with anger.\n\n\n \"You won't murder your own daughter, Director. This is a bluff. But\n mine isn't. She dies at nine-thirty unless you find her. I swear that\n by the\nEternal Varga\n.\"\n\n\n Mart cursed. Fists balled, he lunged toward the Venusian. Barrow put\n a hand on his arm. \"Don't, Wells. That's up to the Interplanetary\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"But he's\nnot\nbluffing,\" Mart raved. \"Leah will surely die at\n nine-thirty. That damned oath.\nVarga.\nIt's the only thing a Venusian\n is afraid of. He isn't—\" His voice broke.\n\n\n Corey started off with the Venusian.",
"He turned back to the papers and finished initialing them, grinning\n inwardly at being able to say that the Director would arrive in\n twenty-one minutes exactly. It wasn't everywhere that one could make\n so accurate a prediction about anyone's arrival time, but Barrow was\n something of a chronometer himself.\n\n\n He tossed the papers toward the back of the desk and threw the switch\n of the communicator on his desk, leaned forward slightly. \"Dispatcher\n Wells calling Police Autogiro.\"\n\n\n \"Autogiro, Captain Wayne,\" came the reply. \"Go ahead. Mart.\"\n\n\n \"I was the one who reported seeing the spaceship, Cap—if it was one.\n Found it? If not, I can—\"",
"\"But I still don't see—\"\n\n\n \"The Ganymede jewel shipments, Mart. I'd say he was bound for Gany and\n his ship went blooie while he was scudding past Callisto. He got pulled\n down here and just barely made a landing he could walk away from. I'm\n afraid there'll be trouble.\"\n\n\n Mart whistled. \"Well, the Director's due now. He'll want a search\n organized and—Wait, here he is. Tell it over again, Cap, and you'll be\n reporting direct.... Listen to this, Director.\"\nThe tall slender figure of Director Barrow stood impassively beside\n Mart's desk and listened to a repetition of Wayne's report. Not a\n flicker of expression passed over his gaunt face.\n\n\n As Wayne finished, the Director asked, \"Is he armed? Anything taken\n from the ship's equipment, Captain?\"",
"A momentary surge of elation swept Mart. Tar Norn must have been\n bluffing! Then he remembered: a Venusian might murder his own family,\n but he would never swear to an untruth by the Eternal Varga. That one\n superstition, or religion, as they looked upon it, was binding beyond\n all else. And Tar Norn had sworn by that oath that Leah Barrows would\n die at nine-thirty unless—\n\n\n Mart looked at the chronometer. It was twenty-six minutes past nine. He\n caught a glimpse of Director Barrow's face. It looked like the face of\n a dead man. Barrow had obviously given up all hope and waited only for\n the four minutes to pass.\n\n\n The carrier wave hummed. All of them started, but the voice from the\n communicator merely reported, \"All Comprotown reports in. All negative.\n Giros report nothing. Foot parties five miles out. Reports negative.\"",
"Barrow was looking straight ahead, and not a muscle of his face moved\n until he spoke. \"I'm afraid he isn't bluffing. No reason why he should\n be. Leah is gone and the timer is gone. And a pirate ship would have\n uranite.\"\n\n\n \"The ship?\" asked Tar Norn. \"It will take some time to fuel it and—\"\n\n\n Director Barrow's voice was positive. \"There will be no ship for you,\n Tar Norn.\"\n\n\n Roger Corey's voice cut in, jerkily. \"Let me work on him, sir. Me and\n Wayne. Maybe we can make him talk.\"\n\n\n Barrow shook his head. \"No use, Corey. Venusians don't mind pain as\n much as Earthmen. They almost like it. You could take him apart, and he\n wouldn't talk.\"",
"\"Looks intact, but he probably has sidearms. All the pirates carry\n them. One funny thing, Director. The timer robot has been removed from\n the control panel. What on Callisto would he want with a loose timer?\"\n\n\n \"Report back to headquarters immediately, Captain Wayne,\" Director\n Barrow ordered.\n\n\n The hum of the carrier wave died and Mart clicked off the set.\n Then, belatedly, he stood up and saluted. \"Anything I can do, sir?\n Everything's set for the freighters to clear as usual, so I'm more or\n less free—\"\n\n\n Barrow nodded. \"Very good, Wells. You may go to the field and direct a\n search of the freighters. The Venusian's first thought will be to get\n away, and he may already be stowed in one of—\"\n\n\n A dry voice interrupted from behind the Director's back. \"But the\n Venusian would not do anything so obvious, Director Barrow.\"",
"The pirate's face became vicious. \"I do not think so,\" he snapped.\n \"I have taken a hostage. It was quite dark—your tiny Callisto in\n eclipse of its huge primary—when I was forced down. But darkness means\n nothing to a Venusian. You Earthmen play a strange game with cardboard\n rectangles. To use its language, Director Barrow, I have an ace in the\n hole.\"\n\n\n Tar Norn sat down again and folded his six-fingered hands quite calmly.\n Light from the ceiling overhead seemed to cast a malignant glow on his\n dead-white scalp.",
"Director Barrow's face was bleak. His voice sounded like the drip of\n water from melting ice. \"Clothing?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Her lightweight spacesuit is gone. Apparently she put it on over her\n sleeping pajamas, for they aren't here. Is there anything I can do,\n sir? I'm worried; she hasn't ever—\"\n\n\n \"That will be all, Mrs. Andrews,\" Barrow replied. \"I'll let you know if\n there is anything.\"\n\n\n He turned to Captain Wayne. \"Use this set, Captain. Get Communications\n to send out a general alarm and assembly. You can make all necessary\n arrangements right here.\"\n\n\n Wayne crossed to the communicator, and began to issue rapid\n instructions.\n\n\n \"Tell them to hurry,\" the Venusian cut in mockingly. \"They have until\n nine-thirty o'clock.\"",
"Barrow said, \"Yes, he's telling the truth. But we have some time yet.\n Maybe the search—\"\nMart strode to the window and looked out so the others wouldn't see his\n face. Less than three-quarters of an hour to search all of Callisto\n within a radius of fifty miles!\nThrough the pane he saw figures in groups of three searching the\n streets and buildings of Comprotown. That part of the search wouldn't\n be difficult. But the hills and the caves, and with only two autogiros.\n If she was there, out of sight in one of the caves, where the cruising\n ships couldn't see her....\n\n\n Her father was right, but—The picture of Leah Barrow, smiling as he\n had last seen her, seemed to blur out the view from the window. Her\n impertinent little tilted nose, the soft tempting contours of her lips,\n the deep blueness of her eyes.",
"\"Your daughter, Director,\" he continued. \"If you wish to see her again,\n you will give me a ship, your\nfastest\nship.\"\nThere was a moment of dead, utter silence. Then Director Barrow leaned\n over the desk and flicked the key of the communicator. \"Control? Get\n my—get Leah Barrow at once. Ring her room. If no answer there, get my\n housekeeper. This is Director Barrow.\"\n\n\n \"Your fastest ship,\" repeated the Venusian. \"Well stocked with\n supplies. Enough to take me to—to a place in the Asteroid belt. I\n shall be too late now to carry out my original plans on Ganymede.\"\n\n\n The office door opened and Captain Wayne came in, followed by Roger\n Corey. Their eyes widened as they saw the Venusian. Wayne's hand darted\n toward his holster, then relaxed as he saw Mart's blaster trained on\n the pirate.\n\n\n He faced Director Barrow and saluted.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMart Wells shut off the alarm buzzer and jumped out of bed—much to his\n regret. He cussed and then grinned sheepishly as he brought up with a\n thud against the fortunately unbreakable glass of the window. A year\n on Callisto, and he could still forget that he weighed only thirty-six\n pounds and couldn't take a normal step without neutronium-weighted\n shoes.\n\n\n Regaining his balance, he yawned and looked out over the rough Callisto\n landscape beyond Comprotown. Then he yawned again and reached for his\n uniform.\n\n\n A year before, Comprotown—and his job as rocketport dispatcher—had\n been Romance with a capital R. Now, he thought gloomily, Romance with\n Leah with a capital L, and a fat lot of good that did him when Leah\n Barrow's father was Old Fish-face himself, Director of Comprotown.",
"As he walked across the field toward headquarters, Mart surveyed the\n familiar scene. Three squat freighters were up on the racks, their ugly\n black bottoms over the ash-filled blasting pits; four others were on\n dollies ready to be serviced.\n\n\n All seven were ready for their regular weekly Callisto-Jupe hop,\n ready to pick up more ore. And, as usual, they'd go out today to\n clear the field for the sleeker, faster, long-haul ships that would\n arrive from Earth tomorrow for the smelted metal. Mart glanced at his\n wrist-chronometer. Eight o'clock now; in an hour and a half,\nFreighter\n One\n, right on schedule, would start testing its rocket tubes for the\n ten o'clock hop. And an hour later,\nFreighter Two\nwould start to warm\n up for the eleven o'clock blasting-off. And then the others, every hour\n on the hour.",
"\"—before the Supreme Council on Earth,\" Mart finished. Then, glancing\n side-wise at Director Barrow and seeing him nod, he stepped forward\n warily. Venusians, he knew, were both fast and tricky. Watching every\n move, he completed the search. Tar Norn carried no weapons.\n\n\n Why, Mart wondered, had the pirate walked openly into headquarters and\n given himself up? Obviously, Tar Norn had something up his sleeve.\n But—\n\n\n Director Barrow spoke coldly, as Mart stepped back, still covering the\n Venusian with the blaster. \"Tar Norn, you speak of 'our discussion.'\n There is nothing to discuss. You will be sent to Earth.\"",
"\"A Venusian wouldn't trust his own mother,\" Barrow snapped. \"He'd\n insist on taking off first and then radioing back where she is. And\n don't think he wouldn't check the fuel tanks.\"\n\n\n \"I wish you'd let me and Wayne work on him, anyway.\"\n\n\n Director Barrow didn't answer.\n\n\n Mart growled, \"If Leah dies, I'm going to take that filthy pirate and—\"\n\n\n Wayne's voice was bitter. \"Venusians can't help what they are. Blame\n the Earth council that sold them those ships. If they had used more\n sense, there wouldn't be a Venusian off Venus.\"\n\n\n Mart nodded. If the council hadn't pulled that boner twenty years\n before, there would be no trouble with the Venusians.",
"Mart whirled around. Barrow turned slowly and with dignity.\n\n\n It was the tall man dressed in the uniform of a smelting plant worker\n who had spoken. But he wasn't dark-haired any more. Still seated, he\n was smiling at them sardonically as he fanned himself with a black wig\n he had just removed. The top of his head was as smooth as a billiard\n ball, and dead white. There was a line of demarcation where the dye he\n had applied to his face came to an end.\n\n\n He had removed the tinted glasses too, and the blank-surfaced\n gray eyeballs showed why they had been worn. Now that the simple\n disguise of wig and glasses was removed, Mart noted some of the other\n distinguishing features that marked the Venusian. The general flatness\n of the face and flat unconvoluted ears. The six-fingered hands that had\n probably been thrust into the pockets of the stolen uniform."
]
] |
test
|
20013
|
[
"Which conclusion about the TP is probably correct?",
"How does the TP indicate legal insight but perhaps not authorship by a lawyer?",
"What is the JCOC?",
"What is the best indicator of multiple authors of the TP?",
"What evidence seems to exculpate Lewinsky from sole authorship of the text?",
"Why was James Moody unlikely to have prepared the TP?",
"What information appears to clear Clinton of a role in writing the TP?",
"Why would the author of the TP not wish to name the Newsweek reporter?",
"Why did Linda Tripp fire Behre?",
"Why did Julie Steele claim to change her story?"
] |
[
[
"It was co-authored by multiple people.",
"It was written by \"lawyers connected to the case.\"",
"It was written solely by Linda Tripp.",
"It was engineered by Monica Lewinsky."
],
[
"The suggestion of fabricating evidence.",
"The conflation of \"affidavit\" with \"deposition\".",
"The author's desire to leave out any mention of Isikoff.",
"The reference to \"the oval\" rather than \"the oval office.\""
],
[
"A Pentagon course.",
"The code word for Linda Tripp's job.",
"The office where Monica Lewinsky worked.",
"An acronym for Linda Tripp's legal team."
],
[
"The repetition of key words and phrases throughout the text.",
"Specific details are not consistent, such as the use of \"affidavit\" vs. \"deposition.\"",
"The fact that multiple people had a motive for the creation of the TP.",
"A shift in the voice of the writer(s) as well as point of view."
],
[
"Her mood at the time of its writing along with her perceived mental faculties.",
"She made a foolish attempt to engineer a \"foot accident\" for Linda Tripp.",
"Her attorney, William Ginsburg, denied her involvement.",
"She is not a lawyer, despite having legal knowledge."
],
[
"His conservative values were in conflict with the White House.",
"Willey fabricated her entire account of her relationship with Clinton.",
"The document appeared to be crafted based upon a lawyer's advice and written instructions.",
"He was loyal to Behre and did not wish to implicate him."
],
[
"There is no clear reason why he would want to change Linda Tripp's testimony. ",
"Clinton did not like to use proxies to handle his crises.",
"He never dictated any calls for himself, preferring to channel such discussions through lawyers.",
"The time of his encounter with Willey is inconsistent with his deposition testimony."
],
[
"The Newsweek reporter knew the true author of the TP and would immediately expose them.",
"This revelation would hamper the assertion of obstruction of justice by damaging the author's credibility.",
"If the author was Tripp because she wanted to keep her association with Isikoff a secret.",
"If the author revealed themselves, then it would become more difficult to take down the president."
],
[
"He had asked her to give her evidence to Clinton's attorney.",
"He was too close with White House staffer Bruce Lindsey.",
"For bad representation during her testimony about Travelgate and Vince Foster's death.",
"For authoring the Talking Points."
],
[
"To protect herself from further scrutiny.",
"Clinton pressured her to do so.",
"Her friend Kathleen Willey had told her to.",
"She caved to pressure from White House attorneys."
]
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"Note 1 \n\n Here are seven good guesses about the authorship of the TP:",
"Note 9 \n\n At this juncture, it seems another author takes over. Note the \"the oval\" is now referred to as the \"oval office.\" Also, this sentence essentially repeats the advice already given: \"You did not see her go in or see her come out.\" The TP's tenor and tone shift from legalistic to colloquial. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 10 \n\n The author is obviously on the side he or she thinks Tripp would do well to be on. As subsequent sentences make clear, that side is the administration's--as distinct from Jones'. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 11",
"The writer means \"affidavit,\" since the stated point of this exercise is to enable Tripp to avoid being deposed in person. This is not a mistake that a practicing lawyer would make, though it could be a mistake made in dictation. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 19 \n\n The remainder of the document is cast in the first rather than the second person. And, in this paragraph--though not in the following ones--the tone becomes more chatty. This might suggest that Tripp herself is writing the TP in her own words. However, if Tripp were creating a bogus document for purposes of entrapment, it would not seem in her interest to recast second-person paragraphs from earlier in the document in such a way that they are potentially confusing. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 20",
"When Tripp testified before Congress about Travelgate and Vince Foster's death, the White House helped her retain lawyer Kirby Behre. She fired Behre three days before she gave the TP to Starr, when, she says, Behre asked her to hand the tapes over to Bennett. Behre has the knowledge and the motive (he's loyal to the White House) to have written the TP. \n\n The writer is familiar with what Behre has been telling Tripp and calls him by his first name, which might suggest Tripp (or perhaps Lewinsky, who has been discussing Tripp's legal strategy with her) is the author. However, New York Observer columnist Philip Weiss says presidential adviser and troubleshooter Lindsey also commonly refers to everyone but the president by a first name. However, Behre denies having talked with Lindsey. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 12",
"The TP advises Tripp on crafting an affidavit that would recant statements she had made to Newsweek 's Isikoff. Tripp told Isikoff last summer that she had bumped into Kathleen Willey after she left the Oval Office Nov. 29, 1993, and that Willey had looked flushed, lipstickless, and happy. Three days before Tripp received the TP, Willey gave sworn testimony in the Paula Jones case that the president had fondled her breasts and placed her hand on his crotch. Tripp had been scheduled to be deposed in the Jones case in December, but the deposition was postponed. \n\n \n\n Whodunit? There are seven theories about the authorship of the TP. The leading suspects: Lewinsky, Tripp, her ex-lawyer Kirby Behre, Clinton, Bruce Lindsey (the president's closest aide), the Right-Wing Conspiracy, and a collaboration among several of the above. Click here for a summary of the major theories.",
"her retain Behre. She fired him three days before the TP surfaced, when he asked her to hand the tapes over to Bennett. Behre has the knowledge and the motive (he's loyal to the White House) to write the TP.",
"7) A Combo of the Above. While there is no credible scenario in which the people mentioned above could have concocted the TP on their own, several of the suspects could have worked in concert. For instance, it is plausible Tripp and Lewinsky collaborated on the TP with insight from a trained lawyer (Clinton, Lindsey, Behre). As our annotation of the text shows, the TP appears to be the handiwork of multiple authors. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 2 \n\n One scenario has the president dictating points over the phone to Lewinsky, with whom he spent much time talking. A lawyer by training, Clinton has a clear interest in changing Tripp's testimony. But the author of the TP seems unfamiliar with Clinton's actual testimony in the Paula Jones case, in which he said Willey's visit occurred before her husband's suicide. This contradiction might exculpate Clinton.",
"Aside from this sentence, there is no specific hint that Tripp penned the TP to entrap Lewinsky. However, Tripp had a motive: She wanted to take down the president after Bennett, his lawyer, denounced her. One scenario has Tripp--with the assistance of lawyers involved in the Jones case or otherwise committed to conservative causes--prodding the gullible Lewinsky to write the TP so she, Tripp, would have clear evidence of attempted obstruction of justice. Another has Tripp drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the whole thing--herself. A senior administration official has suggested that a draft of the TP lives on Tripp's hard drive. The defect with these theories: Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 7",
"3) The Right-Wing Conspiracy. An elaboration of the Tripp theory. Without any specific evidence, proponents of this theory posit that Tripp drafted the TP with the assistance of lawyers involved in the Jones case or otherwise committed to conservative causes.",
"The parenthetical phrasing is emblematic of the tight construction of the first half of the TP. Some theorists have pointed to it as evidence that a lawyer drafted--or at least advised on the drafting of--the document. Fabricating evidence would, of course, be a highly unethical activity for a lawyer, but if, as some administration advocates maintain, the TP is all true, assistance in its drafting would not be unethical. However, as noted later, the TP makes legal errors, and the smooth phrasing could as easily be that of a PR person, journalist, or nonpracticing lawyer. Nonetheless, it casts doubt on the theory that Lewinsky was the lone author. Tripp told Newsweek she suspected immediately that the TP was too deftly crafted to have originated with Lewinsky. Lewinsky's former lawyer Ginsburg never denied his client's involvement in the document's preparation (his theory is that it was a collaborative effort). \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 5",
"Note 22 \n\n No effort is made to fill in the blanks. This suggests Tripp is not attempting to construct a first draft in her own words following the earlier instructions. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 23 \n\n In the Washington Post version of the TP--given here--a second-person version of this sentence does not appear in the first section of the document. In ABC's version of the document, it appears in both places. Both the Post and ABC claim to have copies of the original TP. In itself, the discrepancy has no apparent significance, although it has been pointed to by theorists who contend that the TP was leaked through more than one source. \n\n Back to story.",
"And it seems possible that a White House staffer wrote a chunk of the TP. Immediately following the TP's release, reporters fingered Lindsey as the leading suspect. Many speculate that he wipes up after the president's bimbo eruptions; he was also the administration's point man on the Jones case. Lindsey also had reason to believe he could change Tripp's testimony. Last summer, Tripp contacted Lindsey to discuss the Willey affair (she told Newsweek that because Willey didn't seem upset at the time, she didn't think Willey had been sexually harassed). Tripp and Lindsey spoke at least two more times, according to the New York Times . However, there is no evidence that Lewinsky and Lindsey knew each other or ever communicated. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 4",
"This apparent reference to Lewinsky is the only substantive addition to the second part of the document. It seems unlikely that Lewinsky would refer to herself as a \"big liar\" who was \"stalking\" the president. However, Lewinsky had recently given sworn testimony in the Jones case that flatly contradicted her lengthy taped conversations with Tripp, in which she had talked about her affair with Clinton. So it is possible that she decided it was better to label herself a liar in this context than to face perjury charges. The word \"huge,\" which appears here, is used by Tripp three times in the transcript of her taped conversations with Lewinsky reported in Newsweek . This point is made by Skip Fox and Jack Gillis, two academics at the University of Southwestern Louisiana whose analysis of the TP may be found here. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 21 \n\n Narcissistic phrasing that allegedly sounds very much like Lewinsky. \n\n Back to story.",
"Pointillism \n\n Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's obstruction of justice case against President Clinton is likely to turn on his identification of the author of the so-called \"Talking Points.\" Like Shakespeare's works and the Bible, the TP, a three-page document, has inspired numerous schools of thought that disagree on the meaning of seemingly banal phrases and discern the handiwork of different authors. As a service to scholars in the burgeoning field of TP Studies--as well as to the general public--here is a Talmudic exegesis, a Reader's Guide to the TP .",
"On its face, the suggestion seems highly unlikely: that Willey, who had gone in seeking a job from the president, would leave the Oval Office and stop to muss herself, hoping to run into someone who could later confirm a false allegation of sexual advances by Clinton. However, by this time, Steele had changed her story, saying Willey had asked her to lie about exactly when Willey had confided in her and also about the details of the alleged sexual encounter. The suggestion in the TP would be consistent with the amended Steele statements. The TP also says Willey's blouse was untucked--a point that has been cited as evidence Willey was lying, since an untucked blouse would probably have been noticed by the other people waiting in the reception area outside the Oval Office. However, Tripp is quoted in Newsweek as observing only that Willey was \"disheveled. Her face was red and her lipstick was off.\" So the added detail in the TP may have been intended to further discredit Willey. \n\n Back to story.",
"Background: Only one person claims to have firsthand knowledge of the TP's origins: Linda Tripp. Tripp told Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff that Monica Lewinsky had given her the TP on Jan. 14, 1998, while driving Tripp home from work. That night, Tripp handed the document over to Starr's office. The following day, wearing an FBI-supplied wire, she met Lewinsky at the Pentagon City, Va., Ritz-Carlton. FBI agents interrupted their conversation and took Lewinsky to a room in the hotel for questioning.",
"2) Tripp, the Manipulative Bitch. Gunning to bring down the president after Bennett denounced her, Tripp entrapped Lewinsky. One scenario has her prodding the gullible young woman to write the TP so she, Tripp, could get physical evidence of obstruction of justice. Another has her drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the entire thing--herself. A senior White House official has even suggested a draft of the TP lives on the hard drive of Tripp's computer. The theory's defects: a) Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? b) While the tapes expose Tripp as a horrible friend and a vicious schemer, we have no evidence that she is capable of conceiving of such a complicated machination.",
"1) Lewinsky, the Lone Gunman. Panic-stricken by Tripp's threat that she would expose Lewinsky's affair with Clinton if asked about it in a deposition, Lewinsky mustered all her intellectual resources to cobble together the TP. Lewinsky's former lawyer, William Ginsburg, never denied his client's involvement in the document's preparation. Strikes against this theory: a) Lewinsky doesn't have enough knowledge of the law. b) Apparently, she is not the sharpest tool in the shed. Tripp has said she immediately suspected the TP was too deftly crafted to have originated with Lewinsky. c) Lewinsky was too panic-stricken to have acted this rationally. Before Christmas, for example, the tapes record her suggesting that Tripp have a \"foot accident\" and be hospitalized during the time her deposition was scheduled to take place.",
"The TP appears to have been composed in three parts, each in a different voice. The first section, in which Tripp receives legal-sounding advice, is smoothly and efficiently written. The document then shifts from the substance of the affidavit to the strategy behind it, with special reference to Tripp's relationship with the president's lawyer Robert Bennett. The final portion recasts the original section in the first person. It also includes a chatty paragraph discrediting allegations about Lewinsky's alleged affair with Clinton. \n\n Exegesis: This is the widely circulated version of the TP. For annotations, click on the hot-linked phrases. \n\n Points to Make in an Affidavit \n\n Your first few paragraphs should be about yourself--what you do now, what you did at the White House, and for how many years you were there as a career person and as a political appointee.",
"most unlikely that the TP was prepared by Moody or a right-wing cabal."
],
[
"The parenthetical phrasing is emblematic of the tight construction of the first half of the TP. Some theorists have pointed to it as evidence that a lawyer drafted--or at least advised on the drafting of--the document. Fabricating evidence would, of course, be a highly unethical activity for a lawyer, but if, as some administration advocates maintain, the TP is all true, assistance in its drafting would not be unethical. However, as noted later, the TP makes legal errors, and the smooth phrasing could as easily be that of a PR person, journalist, or nonpracticing lawyer. Nonetheless, it casts doubt on the theory that Lewinsky was the lone author. Tripp told Newsweek she suspected immediately that the TP was too deftly crafted to have originated with Lewinsky. Lewinsky's former lawyer Ginsburg never denied his client's involvement in the document's preparation (his theory is that it was a collaborative effort). \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 5",
"When Tripp testified before Congress about Travelgate and Vince Foster's death, the White House helped her retain lawyer Kirby Behre. She fired Behre three days before she gave the TP to Starr, when, she says, Behre asked her to hand the tapes over to Bennett. Behre has the knowledge and the motive (he's loyal to the White House) to have written the TP. \n\n The writer is familiar with what Behre has been telling Tripp and calls him by his first name, which might suggest Tripp (or perhaps Lewinsky, who has been discussing Tripp's legal strategy with her) is the author. However, New York Observer columnist Philip Weiss says presidential adviser and troubleshooter Lindsey also commonly refers to everyone but the president by a first name. However, Behre denies having talked with Lindsey. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 12",
"The writer means \"affidavit,\" since the stated point of this exercise is to enable Tripp to avoid being deposed in person. This is not a mistake that a practicing lawyer would make, though it could be a mistake made in dictation. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 19 \n\n The remainder of the document is cast in the first rather than the second person. And, in this paragraph--though not in the following ones--the tone becomes more chatty. This might suggest that Tripp herself is writing the TP in her own words. However, if Tripp were creating a bogus document for purposes of entrapment, it would not seem in her interest to recast second-person paragraphs from earlier in the document in such a way that they are potentially confusing. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 20",
"Note 9 \n\n At this juncture, it seems another author takes over. Note the \"the oval\" is now referred to as the \"oval office.\" Also, this sentence essentially repeats the advice already given: \"You did not see her go in or see her come out.\" The TP's tenor and tone shift from legalistic to colloquial. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 10 \n\n The author is obviously on the side he or she thinks Tripp would do well to be on. As subsequent sentences make clear, that side is the administration's--as distinct from Jones'. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 11",
"Note 1 \n\n Here are seven good guesses about the authorship of the TP:",
"The TP appears to have been composed in three parts, each in a different voice. The first section, in which Tripp receives legal-sounding advice, is smoothly and efficiently written. The document then shifts from the substance of the affidavit to the strategy behind it, with special reference to Tripp's relationship with the president's lawyer Robert Bennett. The final portion recasts the original section in the first person. It also includes a chatty paragraph discrediting allegations about Lewinsky's alleged affair with Clinton. \n\n Exegesis: This is the widely circulated version of the TP. For annotations, click on the hot-linked phrases. \n\n Points to Make in an Affidavit \n\n Your first few paragraphs should be about yourself--what you do now, what you did at the White House, and for how many years you were there as a career person and as a political appointee.",
"Aside from this sentence, there is no specific hint that Tripp penned the TP to entrap Lewinsky. However, Tripp had a motive: She wanted to take down the president after Bennett, his lawyer, denounced her. One scenario has Tripp--with the assistance of lawyers involved in the Jones case or otherwise committed to conservative causes--prodding the gullible Lewinsky to write the TP so she, Tripp, would have clear evidence of attempted obstruction of justice. Another has Tripp drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the whole thing--herself. A senior administration official has suggested that a draft of the TP lives on Tripp's hard drive. The defect with these theories: Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 7",
"Pointillism \n\n Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's obstruction of justice case against President Clinton is likely to turn on his identification of the author of the so-called \"Talking Points.\" Like Shakespeare's works and the Bible, the TP, a three-page document, has inspired numerous schools of thought that disagree on the meaning of seemingly banal phrases and discern the handiwork of different authors. As a service to scholars in the burgeoning field of TP Studies--as well as to the general public--here is a Talmudic exegesis, a Reader's Guide to the TP .",
"7) A Combo of the Above. While there is no credible scenario in which the people mentioned above could have concocted the TP on their own, several of the suspects could have worked in concert. For instance, it is plausible Tripp and Lewinsky collaborated on the TP with insight from a trained lawyer (Clinton, Lindsey, Behre). As our annotation of the text shows, the TP appears to be the handiwork of multiple authors. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 2 \n\n One scenario has the president dictating points over the phone to Lewinsky, with whom he spent much time talking. A lawyer by training, Clinton has a clear interest in changing Tripp's testimony. But the author of the TP seems unfamiliar with Clinton's actual testimony in the Paula Jones case, in which he said Willey's visit occurred before her husband's suicide. This contradiction might exculpate Clinton.",
"repetitive, and error-ridden to have been written out by a lawyer worth his salt (though it might be notes based on a lawyer's advice). In addition, lawyers know better than to give a witness written instructions about the preparation of false",
"The TP advises Tripp on crafting an affidavit that would recant statements she had made to Newsweek 's Isikoff. Tripp told Isikoff last summer that she had bumped into Kathleen Willey after she left the Oval Office Nov. 29, 1993, and that Willey had looked flushed, lipstickless, and happy. Three days before Tripp received the TP, Willey gave sworn testimony in the Paula Jones case that the president had fondled her breasts and placed her hand on his crotch. Tripp had been scheduled to be deposed in the Jones case in December, but the deposition was postponed. \n\n \n\n Whodunit? There are seven theories about the authorship of the TP. The leading suspects: Lewinsky, Tripp, her ex-lawyer Kirby Behre, Clinton, Bruce Lindsey (the president's closest aide), the Right-Wing Conspiracy, and a collaboration among several of the above. Click here for a summary of the major theories.",
"3) The Right-Wing Conspiracy. An elaboration of the Tripp theory. Without any specific evidence, proponents of this theory posit that Tripp drafted the TP with the assistance of lawyers involved in the Jones case or otherwise committed to conservative causes.",
"1) Lewinsky, the Lone Gunman. Panic-stricken by Tripp's threat that she would expose Lewinsky's affair with Clinton if asked about it in a deposition, Lewinsky mustered all her intellectual resources to cobble together the TP. Lewinsky's former lawyer, William Ginsburg, never denied his client's involvement in the document's preparation. Strikes against this theory: a) Lewinsky doesn't have enough knowledge of the law. b) Apparently, she is not the sharpest tool in the shed. Tripp has said she immediately suspected the TP was too deftly crafted to have originated with Lewinsky. c) Lewinsky was too panic-stricken to have acted this rationally. Before Christmas, for example, the tapes record her suggesting that Tripp have a \"foot accident\" and be hospitalized during the time her deposition was scheduled to take place.",
"testimony. Note, however, that, as one observer argues, if the TP is entirely true (Willey did muss her own clothes, etc.), assisting in its preparation would not be unethical or tantamount to subornation of perjury--though it would then be",
"Note 22 \n\n No effort is made to fill in the blanks. This suggests Tripp is not attempting to construct a first draft in her own words following the earlier instructions. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 23 \n\n In the Washington Post version of the TP--given here--a second-person version of this sentence does not appear in the first section of the document. In ABC's version of the document, it appears in both places. Both the Post and ABC claim to have copies of the original TP. In itself, the discrepancy has no apparent significance, although it has been pointed to by theorists who contend that the TP was leaked through more than one source. \n\n Back to story.",
"And it seems possible that a White House staffer wrote a chunk of the TP. Immediately following the TP's release, reporters fingered Lindsey as the leading suspect. Many speculate that he wipes up after the president's bimbo eruptions; he was also the administration's point man on the Jones case. Lindsey also had reason to believe he could change Tripp's testimony. Last summer, Tripp contacted Lindsey to discuss the Willey affair (she told Newsweek that because Willey didn't seem upset at the time, she didn't think Willey had been sexually harassed). Tripp and Lindsey spoke at least two more times, according to the New York Times . However, there is no evidence that Lewinsky and Lindsey knew each other or ever communicated. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 4",
"This apparent reference to Lewinsky is the only substantive addition to the second part of the document. It seems unlikely that Lewinsky would refer to herself as a \"big liar\" who was \"stalking\" the president. However, Lewinsky had recently given sworn testimony in the Jones case that flatly contradicted her lengthy taped conversations with Tripp, in which she had talked about her affair with Clinton. So it is possible that she decided it was better to label herself a liar in this context than to face perjury charges. The word \"huge,\" which appears here, is used by Tripp three times in the transcript of her taped conversations with Lewinsky reported in Newsweek . This point is made by Skip Fox and Jack Gillis, two academics at the University of Southwestern Louisiana whose analysis of the TP may be found here. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 21 \n\n Narcissistic phrasing that allegedly sounds very much like Lewinsky. \n\n Back to story.",
"her retain Behre. She fired him three days before the TP surfaced, when he asked her to hand the tapes over to Bennett. Behre has the knowledge and the motive (he's loyal to the White House) to write the TP.",
"Note 16 \n\n This is the acronym for the Joint Civilian Orientation Course, a program Tripp ran at the Pentagon. Lewinsky, as well as Tripp, would be familiar with the acronym, as would people in the White House who knew where Tripp had been placed following her transfer. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 17 \n\n Presumably, only someone with legal training--though not necessarily a practicing lawyer--would know that an affidavit could substitute for a deposition. However, this is not good lawyerly advice. It is unlikely that Jones' lawyers would have accepted an affidavit in lieu of a deposition from someone who had changed her story. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 18",
"(Some implicate Behre's replacement, James Moody. It seems unlikely, however, that Moody, a conservative stalwart, would have helped Tripp prepare talking points apparently so favorable to the president.) And while the document presents legal-sounding advice, it's too rambling,"
],
[
"You are not sure you've been clear about whose side you're on. (Kirby has been saying you should look neutral; better for credibility but you aren't neutral. Neutral makes you look like you're on the other team since you are a political appointee) \n\n It's important to you that they think you're a team player, after all, you are a political appointee. You believe that they think you're on the other side because you wouldn't meet with them. \n\n You want to meet with Bennett. You are upset about the comment he made, but you'll take the high road and do what's in your best interest. \n\n December 18th, you were in a better position to attend an all day or half-day deposition, but now you are into JCOC mode. Your livelihood is dependent on the success of this program. Therefore, you want to provide an affidavit laying out all of the facts in lieu of a deposition.",
"Note 16 \n\n This is the acronym for the Joint Civilian Orientation Course, a program Tripp ran at the Pentagon. Lewinsky, as well as Tripp, would be familiar with the acronym, as would people in the White House who knew where Tripp had been placed following her transfer. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 17 \n\n Presumably, only someone with legal training--though not necessarily a practicing lawyer--would know that an affidavit could substitute for a deposition. However, this is not good lawyerly advice. It is unlikely that Jones' lawyers would have accepted an affidavit in lieu of a deposition from someone who had changed her story. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 18",
"Note 9 \n\n At this juncture, it seems another author takes over. Note the \"the oval\" is now referred to as the \"oval office.\" Also, this sentence essentially repeats the advice already given: \"You did not see her go in or see her come out.\" The TP's tenor and tone shift from legalistic to colloquial. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 10 \n\n The author is obviously on the side he or she thinks Tripp would do well to be on. As subsequent sentences make clear, that side is the administration's--as distinct from Jones'. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 11",
"Pointillism \n\n Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's obstruction of justice case against President Clinton is likely to turn on his identification of the author of the so-called \"Talking Points.\" Like Shakespeare's works and the Bible, the TP, a three-page document, has inspired numerous schools of thought that disagree on the meaning of seemingly banal phrases and discern the handiwork of different authors. As a service to scholars in the burgeoning field of TP Studies--as well as to the general public--here is a Talmudic exegesis, a Reader's Guide to the TP .",
"I did not see her go in or see her come out. \n\n Talk about when I became out of touch with her and maybe why. \n\n The next time I heard of her was when a Newsweek reporter showed up in my office saying she was naming me as a someone who would corroborate that she was sexually harassed by the President. I spoke with her that evening, etc., and she relayed to me a sequence of events that was very dissimilar from what I remembered happening. As a result of my conversation with her and subsequent reports that showed she had tried to enlist the help of someone else in her lie that the President sexually harassed her, I now do not believe that what she claimed happened really happened. I now find it completely plausible that she herself smeared her lipstick, untucked her blouse, etc. \n\n I never saw her go into the oval office, or come out of the oval office. \n\n I have never observed the President behave inappropriately with anybody.",
"Note 22 \n\n No effort is made to fill in the blanks. This suggests Tripp is not attempting to construct a first draft in her own words following the earlier instructions. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 23 \n\n In the Washington Post version of the TP--given here--a second-person version of this sentence does not appear in the first section of the document. In ABC's version of the document, it appears in both places. Both the Post and ABC claim to have copies of the original TP. In itself, the discrepancy has no apparent significance, although it has been pointed to by theorists who contend that the TP was leaked through more than one source. \n\n Back to story.",
"But it does not necessarily clear aide Lindsey or others close to the president. After all, the president's sealed, private testimony contradicts his lawyer Bennett's public pronouncements that the encounter with Willey took place after her husband's suicide. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 3 \n\n According to Howard Kurtz's book Spin Cycle , this characterization of the Oval Office is common only among White House staffers.",
"(Some implicate Behre's replacement, James Moody. It seems unlikely, however, that Moody, a conservative stalwart, would have helped Tripp prepare talking points apparently so favorable to the president.) And while the document presents legal-sounding advice, it's too rambling,",
"You want Bennett's people to see your affidavit before it's signed. \n\n Your deposition should include enough information to satisfy their questioning. \n\n By the way, remember how I said there was someone else that I knew about. Well, she turned out to be a huge liar. I found out she left the WH because she was stalking the P or something like that. Well, at least that gets me out of another scandal I know about. \n\n The first few paragraphs should be about me--what I do now, what I did at the White House and for how many years I was there as a career person and as a political appointee. \n\n Kathleen and I were friends. At around the time of her husband's death, she came to me after she allegedly came out of the oval office and looked _____, I don't recall her exact words, but she claimed at the time ______ and was very happy.",
"The writer means \"affidavit,\" since the stated point of this exercise is to enable Tripp to avoid being deposed in person. This is not a mistake that a practicing lawyer would make, though it could be a mistake made in dictation. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 19 \n\n The remainder of the document is cast in the first rather than the second person. And, in this paragraph--though not in the following ones--the tone becomes more chatty. This might suggest that Tripp herself is writing the TP in her own words. However, if Tripp were creating a bogus document for purposes of entrapment, it would not seem in her interest to recast second-person paragraphs from earlier in the document in such a way that they are potentially confusing. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 20",
"The next you heard of her was when a Newsweek reporter (I wouldn't name him specifically) showed up in your office saying she was naming you as someone who would corroborate that she was sexually harassed. You spoke with her that evening, etc., and she relayed to you a sequence of events that was very dissimilar from what you remembered happening. As a result of your conversation with her and subsequent reports that showed that she had tried to enlist the help of someone else in her lie that the President sexually harassed her, you now do not believe that what she claimed happened really happened. You now find it completely plausible that she herself smeared her lipstick, untucked her blouse, etc. \n\n You never saw her go into the oval office, or come out of the oval office.",
"3) The Right-Wing Conspiracy. An elaboration of the Tripp theory. Without any specific evidence, proponents of this theory posit that Tripp drafted the TP with the assistance of lawyers involved in the Jones case or otherwise committed to conservative causes.",
"This is clumsily phrased: The identity of the \"other side\" is ambiguous. It sounds more like loose drafting by a PR person than it does the work of a practicing lawyer. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 13 \n\n The New York Times and others, quoting \"lawyers connected to the case,\" report Lindsey had earlier advised Tripp to seek Bennett's help, advice Tripp eschewed. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 14 \n\n Bennett was quoted as saying that \"Linda Tripp is not to be believed\" in the Willey controversy. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 15 \n\n The date when Tripp was originally scheduled to be deposed by Jones' lawyers. \n\n Back to story.",
"\"Someone else\" apparently refers to Julie Steele, a friend of Willey's. Steele initially told Newsweek that Willey had confided the details of the incident with Clinton to her shortly after it happened. Later, Steele changed her story, saying Willey had told her that the president had \"made a pass\" at her only weeks after the alleged incident and that she had lied at Willey's behest. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 8",
"This apparent reference to Lewinsky is the only substantive addition to the second part of the document. It seems unlikely that Lewinsky would refer to herself as a \"big liar\" who was \"stalking\" the president. However, Lewinsky had recently given sworn testimony in the Jones case that flatly contradicted her lengthy taped conversations with Tripp, in which she had talked about her affair with Clinton. So it is possible that she decided it was better to label herself a liar in this context than to face perjury charges. The word \"huge,\" which appears here, is used by Tripp three times in the transcript of her taped conversations with Lewinsky reported in Newsweek . This point is made by Skip Fox and Jack Gillis, two academics at the University of Southwestern Louisiana whose analysis of the TP may be found here. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 21 \n\n Narcissistic phrasing that allegedly sounds very much like Lewinsky. \n\n Back to story.",
"Note 1 \n\n Here are seven good guesses about the authorship of the TP:",
"7) A Combo of the Above. While there is no credible scenario in which the people mentioned above could have concocted the TP on their own, several of the suspects could have worked in concert. For instance, it is plausible Tripp and Lewinsky collaborated on the TP with insight from a trained lawyer (Clinton, Lindsey, Behre). As our annotation of the text shows, the TP appears to be the handiwork of multiple authors. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 2 \n\n One scenario has the president dictating points over the phone to Lewinsky, with whom he spent much time talking. A lawyer by training, Clinton has a clear interest in changing Tripp's testimony. But the author of the TP seems unfamiliar with Clinton's actual testimony in the Paula Jones case, in which he said Willey's visit occurred before her husband's suicide. This contradiction might exculpate Clinton.",
"repetitive, and error-ridden to have been written out by a lawyer worth his salt (though it might be notes based on a lawyer's advice). In addition, lawyers know better than to give a witness written instructions about the preparation of false",
"On its face, the suggestion seems highly unlikely: that Willey, who had gone in seeking a job from the president, would leave the Oval Office and stop to muss herself, hoping to run into someone who could later confirm a false allegation of sexual advances by Clinton. However, by this time, Steele had changed her story, saying Willey had asked her to lie about exactly when Willey had confided in her and also about the details of the alleged sexual encounter. The suggestion in the TP would be consistent with the amended Steele statements. The TP also says Willey's blouse was untucked--a point that has been cited as evidence Willey was lying, since an untucked blouse would probably have been noticed by the other people waiting in the reception area outside the Oval Office. However, Tripp is quoted in Newsweek as observing only that Willey was \"disheveled. Her face was red and her lipstick was off.\" So the added detail in the TP may have been intended to further discredit Willey. \n\n Back to story.",
"The TP advises Tripp on crafting an affidavit that would recant statements she had made to Newsweek 's Isikoff. Tripp told Isikoff last summer that she had bumped into Kathleen Willey after she left the Oval Office Nov. 29, 1993, and that Willey had looked flushed, lipstickless, and happy. Three days before Tripp received the TP, Willey gave sworn testimony in the Paula Jones case that the president had fondled her breasts and placed her hand on his crotch. Tripp had been scheduled to be deposed in the Jones case in December, but the deposition was postponed. \n\n \n\n Whodunit? There are seven theories about the authorship of the TP. The leading suspects: Lewinsky, Tripp, her ex-lawyer Kirby Behre, Clinton, Bruce Lindsey (the president's closest aide), the Right-Wing Conspiracy, and a collaboration among several of the above. Click here for a summary of the major theories."
],
[
"Note 1 \n\n Here are seven good guesses about the authorship of the TP:",
"7) A Combo of the Above. While there is no credible scenario in which the people mentioned above could have concocted the TP on their own, several of the suspects could have worked in concert. For instance, it is plausible Tripp and Lewinsky collaborated on the TP with insight from a trained lawyer (Clinton, Lindsey, Behre). As our annotation of the text shows, the TP appears to be the handiwork of multiple authors. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 2 \n\n One scenario has the president dictating points over the phone to Lewinsky, with whom he spent much time talking. A lawyer by training, Clinton has a clear interest in changing Tripp's testimony. But the author of the TP seems unfamiliar with Clinton's actual testimony in the Paula Jones case, in which he said Willey's visit occurred before her husband's suicide. This contradiction might exculpate Clinton.",
"When Tripp testified before Congress about Travelgate and Vince Foster's death, the White House helped her retain lawyer Kirby Behre. She fired Behre three days before she gave the TP to Starr, when, she says, Behre asked her to hand the tapes over to Bennett. Behre has the knowledge and the motive (he's loyal to the White House) to have written the TP. \n\n The writer is familiar with what Behre has been telling Tripp and calls him by his first name, which might suggest Tripp (or perhaps Lewinsky, who has been discussing Tripp's legal strategy with her) is the author. However, New York Observer columnist Philip Weiss says presidential adviser and troubleshooter Lindsey also commonly refers to everyone but the president by a first name. However, Behre denies having talked with Lindsey. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 12",
"Pointillism \n\n Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's obstruction of justice case against President Clinton is likely to turn on his identification of the author of the so-called \"Talking Points.\" Like Shakespeare's works and the Bible, the TP, a three-page document, has inspired numerous schools of thought that disagree on the meaning of seemingly banal phrases and discern the handiwork of different authors. As a service to scholars in the burgeoning field of TP Studies--as well as to the general public--here is a Talmudic exegesis, a Reader's Guide to the TP .",
"The parenthetical phrasing is emblematic of the tight construction of the first half of the TP. Some theorists have pointed to it as evidence that a lawyer drafted--or at least advised on the drafting of--the document. Fabricating evidence would, of course, be a highly unethical activity for a lawyer, but if, as some administration advocates maintain, the TP is all true, assistance in its drafting would not be unethical. However, as noted later, the TP makes legal errors, and the smooth phrasing could as easily be that of a PR person, journalist, or nonpracticing lawyer. Nonetheless, it casts doubt on the theory that Lewinsky was the lone author. Tripp told Newsweek she suspected immediately that the TP was too deftly crafted to have originated with Lewinsky. Lewinsky's former lawyer Ginsburg never denied his client's involvement in the document's preparation (his theory is that it was a collaborative effort). \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 5",
"The TP advises Tripp on crafting an affidavit that would recant statements she had made to Newsweek 's Isikoff. Tripp told Isikoff last summer that she had bumped into Kathleen Willey after she left the Oval Office Nov. 29, 1993, and that Willey had looked flushed, lipstickless, and happy. Three days before Tripp received the TP, Willey gave sworn testimony in the Paula Jones case that the president had fondled her breasts and placed her hand on his crotch. Tripp had been scheduled to be deposed in the Jones case in December, but the deposition was postponed. \n\n \n\n Whodunit? There are seven theories about the authorship of the TP. The leading suspects: Lewinsky, Tripp, her ex-lawyer Kirby Behre, Clinton, Bruce Lindsey (the president's closest aide), the Right-Wing Conspiracy, and a collaboration among several of the above. Click here for a summary of the major theories.",
"Note 9 \n\n At this juncture, it seems another author takes over. Note the \"the oval\" is now referred to as the \"oval office.\" Also, this sentence essentially repeats the advice already given: \"You did not see her go in or see her come out.\" The TP's tenor and tone shift from legalistic to colloquial. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 10 \n\n The author is obviously on the side he or she thinks Tripp would do well to be on. As subsequent sentences make clear, that side is the administration's--as distinct from Jones'. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 11",
"And it seems possible that a White House staffer wrote a chunk of the TP. Immediately following the TP's release, reporters fingered Lindsey as the leading suspect. Many speculate that he wipes up after the president's bimbo eruptions; he was also the administration's point man on the Jones case. Lindsey also had reason to believe he could change Tripp's testimony. Last summer, Tripp contacted Lindsey to discuss the Willey affair (she told Newsweek that because Willey didn't seem upset at the time, she didn't think Willey had been sexually harassed). Tripp and Lindsey spoke at least two more times, according to the New York Times . However, there is no evidence that Lewinsky and Lindsey knew each other or ever communicated. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 4",
"Note 22 \n\n No effort is made to fill in the blanks. This suggests Tripp is not attempting to construct a first draft in her own words following the earlier instructions. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 23 \n\n In the Washington Post version of the TP--given here--a second-person version of this sentence does not appear in the first section of the document. In ABC's version of the document, it appears in both places. Both the Post and ABC claim to have copies of the original TP. In itself, the discrepancy has no apparent significance, although it has been pointed to by theorists who contend that the TP was leaked through more than one source. \n\n Back to story.",
"3) The Right-Wing Conspiracy. An elaboration of the Tripp theory. Without any specific evidence, proponents of this theory posit that Tripp drafted the TP with the assistance of lawyers involved in the Jones case or otherwise committed to conservative causes.",
"her retain Behre. She fired him three days before the TP surfaced, when he asked her to hand the tapes over to Bennett. Behre has the knowledge and the motive (he's loyal to the White House) to write the TP.",
"The writer means \"affidavit,\" since the stated point of this exercise is to enable Tripp to avoid being deposed in person. This is not a mistake that a practicing lawyer would make, though it could be a mistake made in dictation. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 19 \n\n The remainder of the document is cast in the first rather than the second person. And, in this paragraph--though not in the following ones--the tone becomes more chatty. This might suggest that Tripp herself is writing the TP in her own words. However, if Tripp were creating a bogus document for purposes of entrapment, it would not seem in her interest to recast second-person paragraphs from earlier in the document in such a way that they are potentially confusing. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 20",
"Aside from this sentence, there is no specific hint that Tripp penned the TP to entrap Lewinsky. However, Tripp had a motive: She wanted to take down the president after Bennett, his lawyer, denounced her. One scenario has Tripp--with the assistance of lawyers involved in the Jones case or otherwise committed to conservative causes--prodding the gullible Lewinsky to write the TP so she, Tripp, would have clear evidence of attempted obstruction of justice. Another has Tripp drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the whole thing--herself. A senior administration official has suggested that a draft of the TP lives on Tripp's hard drive. The defect with these theories: Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 7",
"This apparent reference to Lewinsky is the only substantive addition to the second part of the document. It seems unlikely that Lewinsky would refer to herself as a \"big liar\" who was \"stalking\" the president. However, Lewinsky had recently given sworn testimony in the Jones case that flatly contradicted her lengthy taped conversations with Tripp, in which she had talked about her affair with Clinton. So it is possible that she decided it was better to label herself a liar in this context than to face perjury charges. The word \"huge,\" which appears here, is used by Tripp three times in the transcript of her taped conversations with Lewinsky reported in Newsweek . This point is made by Skip Fox and Jack Gillis, two academics at the University of Southwestern Louisiana whose analysis of the TP may be found here. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 21 \n\n Narcissistic phrasing that allegedly sounds very much like Lewinsky. \n\n Back to story.",
"1) Lewinsky, the Lone Gunman. Panic-stricken by Tripp's threat that she would expose Lewinsky's affair with Clinton if asked about it in a deposition, Lewinsky mustered all her intellectual resources to cobble together the TP. Lewinsky's former lawyer, William Ginsburg, never denied his client's involvement in the document's preparation. Strikes against this theory: a) Lewinsky doesn't have enough knowledge of the law. b) Apparently, she is not the sharpest tool in the shed. Tripp has said she immediately suspected the TP was too deftly crafted to have originated with Lewinsky. c) Lewinsky was too panic-stricken to have acted this rationally. Before Christmas, for example, the tapes record her suggesting that Tripp have a \"foot accident\" and be hospitalized during the time her deposition was scheduled to take place.",
"2) Tripp, the Manipulative Bitch. Gunning to bring down the president after Bennett denounced her, Tripp entrapped Lewinsky. One scenario has her prodding the gullible young woman to write the TP so she, Tripp, could get physical evidence of obstruction of justice. Another has her drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the entire thing--herself. A senior White House official has even suggested a draft of the TP lives on the hard drive of Tripp's computer. The theory's defects: a) Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? b) While the tapes expose Tripp as a horrible friend and a vicious schemer, we have no evidence that she is capable of conceiving of such a complicated machination.",
"The TP appears to have been composed in three parts, each in a different voice. The first section, in which Tripp receives legal-sounding advice, is smoothly and efficiently written. The document then shifts from the substance of the affidavit to the strategy behind it, with special reference to Tripp's relationship with the president's lawyer Robert Bennett. The final portion recasts the original section in the first person. It also includes a chatty paragraph discrediting allegations about Lewinsky's alleged affair with Clinton. \n\n Exegesis: This is the widely circulated version of the TP. For annotations, click on the hot-linked phrases. \n\n Points to Make in an Affidavit \n\n Your first few paragraphs should be about yourself--what you do now, what you did at the White House, and for how many years you were there as a career person and as a political appointee.",
"Background: Only one person claims to have firsthand knowledge of the TP's origins: Linda Tripp. Tripp told Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff that Monica Lewinsky had given her the TP on Jan. 14, 1998, while driving Tripp home from work. That night, Tripp handed the document over to Starr's office. The following day, wearing an FBI-supplied wire, she met Lewinsky at the Pentagon City, Va., Ritz-Carlton. FBI agents interrupted their conversation and took Lewinsky to a room in the hotel for questioning.",
"testimony. Note, however, that, as one observer argues, if the TP is entirely true (Willey did muss her own clothes, etc.), assisting in its preparation would not be unethical or tantamount to subornation of perjury--though it would then be",
"On its face, the suggestion seems highly unlikely: that Willey, who had gone in seeking a job from the president, would leave the Oval Office and stop to muss herself, hoping to run into someone who could later confirm a false allegation of sexual advances by Clinton. However, by this time, Steele had changed her story, saying Willey had asked her to lie about exactly when Willey had confided in her and also about the details of the alleged sexual encounter. The suggestion in the TP would be consistent with the amended Steele statements. The TP also says Willey's blouse was untucked--a point that has been cited as evidence Willey was lying, since an untucked blouse would probably have been noticed by the other people waiting in the reception area outside the Oval Office. However, Tripp is quoted in Newsweek as observing only that Willey was \"disheveled. Her face was red and her lipstick was off.\" So the added detail in the TP may have been intended to further discredit Willey. \n\n Back to story."
],
[
"The parenthetical phrasing is emblematic of the tight construction of the first half of the TP. Some theorists have pointed to it as evidence that a lawyer drafted--or at least advised on the drafting of--the document. Fabricating evidence would, of course, be a highly unethical activity for a lawyer, but if, as some administration advocates maintain, the TP is all true, assistance in its drafting would not be unethical. However, as noted later, the TP makes legal errors, and the smooth phrasing could as easily be that of a PR person, journalist, or nonpracticing lawyer. Nonetheless, it casts doubt on the theory that Lewinsky was the lone author. Tripp told Newsweek she suspected immediately that the TP was too deftly crafted to have originated with Lewinsky. Lewinsky's former lawyer Ginsburg never denied his client's involvement in the document's preparation (his theory is that it was a collaborative effort). \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 5",
"Aside from this sentence, there is no specific hint that Tripp penned the TP to entrap Lewinsky. However, Tripp had a motive: She wanted to take down the president after Bennett, his lawyer, denounced her. One scenario has Tripp--with the assistance of lawyers involved in the Jones case or otherwise committed to conservative causes--prodding the gullible Lewinsky to write the TP so she, Tripp, would have clear evidence of attempted obstruction of justice. Another has Tripp drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the whole thing--herself. A senior administration official has suggested that a draft of the TP lives on Tripp's hard drive. The defect with these theories: Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 7",
"This apparent reference to Lewinsky is the only substantive addition to the second part of the document. It seems unlikely that Lewinsky would refer to herself as a \"big liar\" who was \"stalking\" the president. However, Lewinsky had recently given sworn testimony in the Jones case that flatly contradicted her lengthy taped conversations with Tripp, in which she had talked about her affair with Clinton. So it is possible that she decided it was better to label herself a liar in this context than to face perjury charges. The word \"huge,\" which appears here, is used by Tripp three times in the transcript of her taped conversations with Lewinsky reported in Newsweek . This point is made by Skip Fox and Jack Gillis, two academics at the University of Southwestern Louisiana whose analysis of the TP may be found here. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 21 \n\n Narcissistic phrasing that allegedly sounds very much like Lewinsky. \n\n Back to story.",
"7) A Combo of the Above. While there is no credible scenario in which the people mentioned above could have concocted the TP on their own, several of the suspects could have worked in concert. For instance, it is plausible Tripp and Lewinsky collaborated on the TP with insight from a trained lawyer (Clinton, Lindsey, Behre). As our annotation of the text shows, the TP appears to be the handiwork of multiple authors. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 2 \n\n One scenario has the president dictating points over the phone to Lewinsky, with whom he spent much time talking. A lawyer by training, Clinton has a clear interest in changing Tripp's testimony. But the author of the TP seems unfamiliar with Clinton's actual testimony in the Paula Jones case, in which he said Willey's visit occurred before her husband's suicide. This contradiction might exculpate Clinton.",
"The TP advises Tripp on crafting an affidavit that would recant statements she had made to Newsweek 's Isikoff. Tripp told Isikoff last summer that she had bumped into Kathleen Willey after she left the Oval Office Nov. 29, 1993, and that Willey had looked flushed, lipstickless, and happy. Three days before Tripp received the TP, Willey gave sworn testimony in the Paula Jones case that the president had fondled her breasts and placed her hand on his crotch. Tripp had been scheduled to be deposed in the Jones case in December, but the deposition was postponed. \n\n \n\n Whodunit? There are seven theories about the authorship of the TP. The leading suspects: Lewinsky, Tripp, her ex-lawyer Kirby Behre, Clinton, Bruce Lindsey (the president's closest aide), the Right-Wing Conspiracy, and a collaboration among several of the above. Click here for a summary of the major theories.",
"2) Tripp, the Manipulative Bitch. Gunning to bring down the president after Bennett denounced her, Tripp entrapped Lewinsky. One scenario has her prodding the gullible young woman to write the TP so she, Tripp, could get physical evidence of obstruction of justice. Another has her drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the entire thing--herself. A senior White House official has even suggested a draft of the TP lives on the hard drive of Tripp's computer. The theory's defects: a) Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? b) While the tapes expose Tripp as a horrible friend and a vicious schemer, we have no evidence that she is capable of conceiving of such a complicated machination.",
"And it seems possible that a White House staffer wrote a chunk of the TP. Immediately following the TP's release, reporters fingered Lindsey as the leading suspect. Many speculate that he wipes up after the president's bimbo eruptions; he was also the administration's point man on the Jones case. Lindsey also had reason to believe he could change Tripp's testimony. Last summer, Tripp contacted Lindsey to discuss the Willey affair (she told Newsweek that because Willey didn't seem upset at the time, she didn't think Willey had been sexually harassed). Tripp and Lindsey spoke at least two more times, according to the New York Times . However, there is no evidence that Lewinsky and Lindsey knew each other or ever communicated. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 4",
"1) Lewinsky, the Lone Gunman. Panic-stricken by Tripp's threat that she would expose Lewinsky's affair with Clinton if asked about it in a deposition, Lewinsky mustered all her intellectual resources to cobble together the TP. Lewinsky's former lawyer, William Ginsburg, never denied his client's involvement in the document's preparation. Strikes against this theory: a) Lewinsky doesn't have enough knowledge of the law. b) Apparently, she is not the sharpest tool in the shed. Tripp has said she immediately suspected the TP was too deftly crafted to have originated with Lewinsky. c) Lewinsky was too panic-stricken to have acted this rationally. Before Christmas, for example, the tapes record her suggesting that Tripp have a \"foot accident\" and be hospitalized during the time her deposition was scheduled to take place.",
"When Tripp testified before Congress about Travelgate and Vince Foster's death, the White House helped her retain lawyer Kirby Behre. She fired Behre three days before she gave the TP to Starr, when, she says, Behre asked her to hand the tapes over to Bennett. Behre has the knowledge and the motive (he's loyal to the White House) to have written the TP. \n\n The writer is familiar with what Behre has been telling Tripp and calls him by his first name, which might suggest Tripp (or perhaps Lewinsky, who has been discussing Tripp's legal strategy with her) is the author. However, New York Observer columnist Philip Weiss says presidential adviser and troubleshooter Lindsey also commonly refers to everyone but the president by a first name. However, Behre denies having talked with Lindsey. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 12",
"Note 9 \n\n At this juncture, it seems another author takes over. Note the \"the oval\" is now referred to as the \"oval office.\" Also, this sentence essentially repeats the advice already given: \"You did not see her go in or see her come out.\" The TP's tenor and tone shift from legalistic to colloquial. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 10 \n\n The author is obviously on the side he or she thinks Tripp would do well to be on. As subsequent sentences make clear, that side is the administration's--as distinct from Jones'. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 11",
"Pointillism \n\n Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's obstruction of justice case against President Clinton is likely to turn on his identification of the author of the so-called \"Talking Points.\" Like Shakespeare's works and the Bible, the TP, a three-page document, has inspired numerous schools of thought that disagree on the meaning of seemingly banal phrases and discern the handiwork of different authors. As a service to scholars in the burgeoning field of TP Studies--as well as to the general public--here is a Talmudic exegesis, a Reader's Guide to the TP .",
"The TP appears to have been composed in three parts, each in a different voice. The first section, in which Tripp receives legal-sounding advice, is smoothly and efficiently written. The document then shifts from the substance of the affidavit to the strategy behind it, with special reference to Tripp's relationship with the president's lawyer Robert Bennett. The final portion recasts the original section in the first person. It also includes a chatty paragraph discrediting allegations about Lewinsky's alleged affair with Clinton. \n\n Exegesis: This is the widely circulated version of the TP. For annotations, click on the hot-linked phrases. \n\n Points to Make in an Affidavit \n\n Your first few paragraphs should be about yourself--what you do now, what you did at the White House, and for how many years you were there as a career person and as a political appointee.",
"5) Clinton, the Dictator. A lawyer by training, Clinton spent much time on the phone with Lewinsky. He could have dictated points during his calls, and he has a clear interest in changing Tripp's testimony. But in crises such as this one, Clinton has historically turned to proxies for his dirty work. Moreover the TP is wrong about what Clinton said in his Jones deposition about when his meeting with Willey took place.",
"Note 16 \n\n This is the acronym for the Joint Civilian Orientation Course, a program Tripp ran at the Pentagon. Lewinsky, as well as Tripp, would be familiar with the acronym, as would people in the White House who knew where Tripp had been placed following her transfer. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 17 \n\n Presumably, only someone with legal training--though not necessarily a practicing lawyer--would know that an affidavit could substitute for a deposition. However, this is not good lawyerly advice. It is unlikely that Jones' lawyers would have accepted an affidavit in lieu of a deposition from someone who had changed her story. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 18",
"Background: Only one person claims to have firsthand knowledge of the TP's origins: Linda Tripp. Tripp told Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff that Monica Lewinsky had given her the TP on Jan. 14, 1998, while driving Tripp home from work. That night, Tripp handed the document over to Starr's office. The following day, wearing an FBI-supplied wire, she met Lewinsky at the Pentagon City, Va., Ritz-Carlton. FBI agents interrupted their conversation and took Lewinsky to a room in the hotel for questioning.",
"The writer means \"affidavit,\" since the stated point of this exercise is to enable Tripp to avoid being deposed in person. This is not a mistake that a practicing lawyer would make, though it could be a mistake made in dictation. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 19 \n\n The remainder of the document is cast in the first rather than the second person. And, in this paragraph--though not in the following ones--the tone becomes more chatty. This might suggest that Tripp herself is writing the TP in her own words. However, if Tripp were creating a bogus document for purposes of entrapment, it would not seem in her interest to recast second-person paragraphs from earlier in the document in such a way that they are potentially confusing. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 20",
"Why doesn't the author want to mention Isikoff, the reporter in question? Only Tripp had a clear interest in not seeming unduly familiar with him. For months, she had been meeting clandestinely with Isikoff, discussing her conversations with Lewinsky. Tripp had hoped to remain anonymous in Isikoff's story. There's no good reason why Lindsey should have inserted this detail.",
"On its face, the suggestion seems highly unlikely: that Willey, who had gone in seeking a job from the president, would leave the Oval Office and stop to muss herself, hoping to run into someone who could later confirm a false allegation of sexual advances by Clinton. However, by this time, Steele had changed her story, saying Willey had asked her to lie about exactly when Willey had confided in her and also about the details of the alleged sexual encounter. The suggestion in the TP would be consistent with the amended Steele statements. The TP also says Willey's blouse was untucked--a point that has been cited as evidence Willey was lying, since an untucked blouse would probably have been noticed by the other people waiting in the reception area outside the Oval Office. However, Tripp is quoted in Newsweek as observing only that Willey was \"disheveled. Her face was red and her lipstick was off.\" So the added detail in the TP may have been intended to further discredit Willey. \n\n Back to story.",
"\"Someone else\" apparently refers to Julie Steele, a friend of Willey's. Steele initially told Newsweek that Willey had confided the details of the incident with Clinton to her shortly after it happened. Later, Steele changed her story, saying Willey had told her that the president had \"made a pass\" at her only weeks after the alleged incident and that she had lied at Willey's behest. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 8",
"6) Lindsey, the Fixer. Immediately following the TP's release, reporters fingered the president's confidant as a suspect. He was the administration's point man on the Jones case and has been known to wipe up after Clinton's bimbo eruptions. And he had reason to believe he could change or blunt the impact of Tripp's testimony. In August, Tripp told Newsweek she doubted Clinton's advances to Willey constituted sexual harassment, as Willey--despite her later protestations--had not seemed upset at the time. Tripp also contacted Lindsey last summer to discuss the Willey affair. Tripp and Lindsey spoke on at least two more occasions, according to the New York Times . However, there is no evidence that Lewinsky and Lindsey knew each other or ever communicated."
],
[
"most unlikely that the TP was prepared by Moody or a right-wing cabal.",
"(Some implicate Behre's replacement, James Moody. It seems unlikely, however, that Moody, a conservative stalwart, would have helped Tripp prepare talking points apparently so favorable to the president.) And while the document presents legal-sounding advice, it's too rambling,",
"1) Lewinsky, the Lone Gunman. Panic-stricken by Tripp's threat that she would expose Lewinsky's affair with Clinton if asked about it in a deposition, Lewinsky mustered all her intellectual resources to cobble together the TP. Lewinsky's former lawyer, William Ginsburg, never denied his client's involvement in the document's preparation. Strikes against this theory: a) Lewinsky doesn't have enough knowledge of the law. b) Apparently, she is not the sharpest tool in the shed. Tripp has said she immediately suspected the TP was too deftly crafted to have originated with Lewinsky. c) Lewinsky was too panic-stricken to have acted this rationally. Before Christmas, for example, the tapes record her suggesting that Tripp have a \"foot accident\" and be hospitalized during the time her deposition was scheduled to take place.",
"Aside from this sentence, there is no specific hint that Tripp penned the TP to entrap Lewinsky. However, Tripp had a motive: She wanted to take down the president after Bennett, his lawyer, denounced her. One scenario has Tripp--with the assistance of lawyers involved in the Jones case or otherwise committed to conservative causes--prodding the gullible Lewinsky to write the TP so she, Tripp, would have clear evidence of attempted obstruction of justice. Another has Tripp drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the whole thing--herself. A senior administration official has suggested that a draft of the TP lives on Tripp's hard drive. The defect with these theories: Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 7",
"When Tripp testified before Congress about Travelgate and Vince Foster's death, the White House helped her retain lawyer Kirby Behre. She fired Behre three days before she gave the TP to Starr, when, she says, Behre asked her to hand the tapes over to Bennett. Behre has the knowledge and the motive (he's loyal to the White House) to have written the TP. \n\n The writer is familiar with what Behre has been telling Tripp and calls him by his first name, which might suggest Tripp (or perhaps Lewinsky, who has been discussing Tripp's legal strategy with her) is the author. However, New York Observer columnist Philip Weiss says presidential adviser and troubleshooter Lindsey also commonly refers to everyone but the president by a first name. However, Behre denies having talked with Lindsey. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 12",
"Note 1 \n\n Here are seven good guesses about the authorship of the TP:",
"her retain Behre. She fired him three days before the TP surfaced, when he asked her to hand the tapes over to Bennett. Behre has the knowledge and the motive (he's loyal to the White House) to write the TP.",
"The parenthetical phrasing is emblematic of the tight construction of the first half of the TP. Some theorists have pointed to it as evidence that a lawyer drafted--or at least advised on the drafting of--the document. Fabricating evidence would, of course, be a highly unethical activity for a lawyer, but if, as some administration advocates maintain, the TP is all true, assistance in its drafting would not be unethical. However, as noted later, the TP makes legal errors, and the smooth phrasing could as easily be that of a PR person, journalist, or nonpracticing lawyer. Nonetheless, it casts doubt on the theory that Lewinsky was the lone author. Tripp told Newsweek she suspected immediately that the TP was too deftly crafted to have originated with Lewinsky. Lewinsky's former lawyer Ginsburg never denied his client's involvement in the document's preparation (his theory is that it was a collaborative effort). \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 5",
"7) A Combo of the Above. While there is no credible scenario in which the people mentioned above could have concocted the TP on their own, several of the suspects could have worked in concert. For instance, it is plausible Tripp and Lewinsky collaborated on the TP with insight from a trained lawyer (Clinton, Lindsey, Behre). As our annotation of the text shows, the TP appears to be the handiwork of multiple authors. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 2 \n\n One scenario has the president dictating points over the phone to Lewinsky, with whom he spent much time talking. A lawyer by training, Clinton has a clear interest in changing Tripp's testimony. But the author of the TP seems unfamiliar with Clinton's actual testimony in the Paula Jones case, in which he said Willey's visit occurred before her husband's suicide. This contradiction might exculpate Clinton.",
"The TP advises Tripp on crafting an affidavit that would recant statements she had made to Newsweek 's Isikoff. Tripp told Isikoff last summer that she had bumped into Kathleen Willey after she left the Oval Office Nov. 29, 1993, and that Willey had looked flushed, lipstickless, and happy. Three days before Tripp received the TP, Willey gave sworn testimony in the Paula Jones case that the president had fondled her breasts and placed her hand on his crotch. Tripp had been scheduled to be deposed in the Jones case in December, but the deposition was postponed. \n\n \n\n Whodunit? There are seven theories about the authorship of the TP. The leading suspects: Lewinsky, Tripp, her ex-lawyer Kirby Behre, Clinton, Bruce Lindsey (the president's closest aide), the Right-Wing Conspiracy, and a collaboration among several of the above. Click here for a summary of the major theories.",
"And it seems possible that a White House staffer wrote a chunk of the TP. Immediately following the TP's release, reporters fingered Lindsey as the leading suspect. Many speculate that he wipes up after the president's bimbo eruptions; he was also the administration's point man on the Jones case. Lindsey also had reason to believe he could change Tripp's testimony. Last summer, Tripp contacted Lindsey to discuss the Willey affair (she told Newsweek that because Willey didn't seem upset at the time, she didn't think Willey had been sexually harassed). Tripp and Lindsey spoke at least two more times, according to the New York Times . However, there is no evidence that Lewinsky and Lindsey knew each other or ever communicated. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 4",
"The writer means \"affidavit,\" since the stated point of this exercise is to enable Tripp to avoid being deposed in person. This is not a mistake that a practicing lawyer would make, though it could be a mistake made in dictation. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 19 \n\n The remainder of the document is cast in the first rather than the second person. And, in this paragraph--though not in the following ones--the tone becomes more chatty. This might suggest that Tripp herself is writing the TP in her own words. However, if Tripp were creating a bogus document for purposes of entrapment, it would not seem in her interest to recast second-person paragraphs from earlier in the document in such a way that they are potentially confusing. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 20",
"On its face, the suggestion seems highly unlikely: that Willey, who had gone in seeking a job from the president, would leave the Oval Office and stop to muss herself, hoping to run into someone who could later confirm a false allegation of sexual advances by Clinton. However, by this time, Steele had changed her story, saying Willey had asked her to lie about exactly when Willey had confided in her and also about the details of the alleged sexual encounter. The suggestion in the TP would be consistent with the amended Steele statements. The TP also says Willey's blouse was untucked--a point that has been cited as evidence Willey was lying, since an untucked blouse would probably have been noticed by the other people waiting in the reception area outside the Oval Office. However, Tripp is quoted in Newsweek as observing only that Willey was \"disheveled. Her face was red and her lipstick was off.\" So the added detail in the TP may have been intended to further discredit Willey. \n\n Back to story.",
"3) The Right-Wing Conspiracy. An elaboration of the Tripp theory. Without any specific evidence, proponents of this theory posit that Tripp drafted the TP with the assistance of lawyers involved in the Jones case or otherwise committed to conservative causes.",
"Note 9 \n\n At this juncture, it seems another author takes over. Note the \"the oval\" is now referred to as the \"oval office.\" Also, this sentence essentially repeats the advice already given: \"You did not see her go in or see her come out.\" The TP's tenor and tone shift from legalistic to colloquial. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 10 \n\n The author is obviously on the side he or she thinks Tripp would do well to be on. As subsequent sentences make clear, that side is the administration's--as distinct from Jones'. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 11",
"Note 22 \n\n No effort is made to fill in the blanks. This suggests Tripp is not attempting to construct a first draft in her own words following the earlier instructions. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 23 \n\n In the Washington Post version of the TP--given here--a second-person version of this sentence does not appear in the first section of the document. In ABC's version of the document, it appears in both places. Both the Post and ABC claim to have copies of the original TP. In itself, the discrepancy has no apparent significance, although it has been pointed to by theorists who contend that the TP was leaked through more than one source. \n\n Back to story.",
"testimony. Note, however, that, as one observer argues, if the TP is entirely true (Willey did muss her own clothes, etc.), assisting in its preparation would not be unethical or tantamount to subornation of perjury--though it would then be",
"2) Tripp, the Manipulative Bitch. Gunning to bring down the president after Bennett denounced her, Tripp entrapped Lewinsky. One scenario has her prodding the gullible young woman to write the TP so she, Tripp, could get physical evidence of obstruction of justice. Another has her drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the entire thing--herself. A senior White House official has even suggested a draft of the TP lives on the hard drive of Tripp's computer. The theory's defects: a) Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? b) While the tapes expose Tripp as a horrible friend and a vicious schemer, we have no evidence that she is capable of conceiving of such a complicated machination.",
"Background: Only one person claims to have firsthand knowledge of the TP's origins: Linda Tripp. Tripp told Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff that Monica Lewinsky had given her the TP on Jan. 14, 1998, while driving Tripp home from work. That night, Tripp handed the document over to Starr's office. The following day, wearing an FBI-supplied wire, she met Lewinsky at the Pentagon City, Va., Ritz-Carlton. FBI agents interrupted their conversation and took Lewinsky to a room in the hotel for questioning.",
"This apparent reference to Lewinsky is the only substantive addition to the second part of the document. It seems unlikely that Lewinsky would refer to herself as a \"big liar\" who was \"stalking\" the president. However, Lewinsky had recently given sworn testimony in the Jones case that flatly contradicted her lengthy taped conversations with Tripp, in which she had talked about her affair with Clinton. So it is possible that she decided it was better to label herself a liar in this context than to face perjury charges. The word \"huge,\" which appears here, is used by Tripp three times in the transcript of her taped conversations with Lewinsky reported in Newsweek . This point is made by Skip Fox and Jack Gillis, two academics at the University of Southwestern Louisiana whose analysis of the TP may be found here. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 21 \n\n Narcissistic phrasing that allegedly sounds very much like Lewinsky. \n\n Back to story."
],
[
"And it seems possible that a White House staffer wrote a chunk of the TP. Immediately following the TP's release, reporters fingered Lindsey as the leading suspect. Many speculate that he wipes up after the president's bimbo eruptions; he was also the administration's point man on the Jones case. Lindsey also had reason to believe he could change Tripp's testimony. Last summer, Tripp contacted Lindsey to discuss the Willey affair (she told Newsweek that because Willey didn't seem upset at the time, she didn't think Willey had been sexually harassed). Tripp and Lindsey spoke at least two more times, according to the New York Times . However, there is no evidence that Lewinsky and Lindsey knew each other or ever communicated. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 4",
"Aside from this sentence, there is no specific hint that Tripp penned the TP to entrap Lewinsky. However, Tripp had a motive: She wanted to take down the president after Bennett, his lawyer, denounced her. One scenario has Tripp--with the assistance of lawyers involved in the Jones case or otherwise committed to conservative causes--prodding the gullible Lewinsky to write the TP so she, Tripp, would have clear evidence of attempted obstruction of justice. Another has Tripp drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the whole thing--herself. A senior administration official has suggested that a draft of the TP lives on Tripp's hard drive. The defect with these theories: Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 7",
"7) A Combo of the Above. While there is no credible scenario in which the people mentioned above could have concocted the TP on their own, several of the suspects could have worked in concert. For instance, it is plausible Tripp and Lewinsky collaborated on the TP with insight from a trained lawyer (Clinton, Lindsey, Behre). As our annotation of the text shows, the TP appears to be the handiwork of multiple authors. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 2 \n\n One scenario has the president dictating points over the phone to Lewinsky, with whom he spent much time talking. A lawyer by training, Clinton has a clear interest in changing Tripp's testimony. But the author of the TP seems unfamiliar with Clinton's actual testimony in the Paula Jones case, in which he said Willey's visit occurred before her husband's suicide. This contradiction might exculpate Clinton.",
"When Tripp testified before Congress about Travelgate and Vince Foster's death, the White House helped her retain lawyer Kirby Behre. She fired Behre three days before she gave the TP to Starr, when, she says, Behre asked her to hand the tapes over to Bennett. Behre has the knowledge and the motive (he's loyal to the White House) to have written the TP. \n\n The writer is familiar with what Behre has been telling Tripp and calls him by his first name, which might suggest Tripp (or perhaps Lewinsky, who has been discussing Tripp's legal strategy with her) is the author. However, New York Observer columnist Philip Weiss says presidential adviser and troubleshooter Lindsey also commonly refers to everyone but the president by a first name. However, Behre denies having talked with Lindsey. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 12",
"The TP advises Tripp on crafting an affidavit that would recant statements she had made to Newsweek 's Isikoff. Tripp told Isikoff last summer that she had bumped into Kathleen Willey after she left the Oval Office Nov. 29, 1993, and that Willey had looked flushed, lipstickless, and happy. Three days before Tripp received the TP, Willey gave sworn testimony in the Paula Jones case that the president had fondled her breasts and placed her hand on his crotch. Tripp had been scheduled to be deposed in the Jones case in December, but the deposition was postponed. \n\n \n\n Whodunit? There are seven theories about the authorship of the TP. The leading suspects: Lewinsky, Tripp, her ex-lawyer Kirby Behre, Clinton, Bruce Lindsey (the president's closest aide), the Right-Wing Conspiracy, and a collaboration among several of the above. Click here for a summary of the major theories.",
"1) Lewinsky, the Lone Gunman. Panic-stricken by Tripp's threat that she would expose Lewinsky's affair with Clinton if asked about it in a deposition, Lewinsky mustered all her intellectual resources to cobble together the TP. Lewinsky's former lawyer, William Ginsburg, never denied his client's involvement in the document's preparation. Strikes against this theory: a) Lewinsky doesn't have enough knowledge of the law. b) Apparently, she is not the sharpest tool in the shed. Tripp has said she immediately suspected the TP was too deftly crafted to have originated with Lewinsky. c) Lewinsky was too panic-stricken to have acted this rationally. Before Christmas, for example, the tapes record her suggesting that Tripp have a \"foot accident\" and be hospitalized during the time her deposition was scheduled to take place.",
"The TP appears to have been composed in three parts, each in a different voice. The first section, in which Tripp receives legal-sounding advice, is smoothly and efficiently written. The document then shifts from the substance of the affidavit to the strategy behind it, with special reference to Tripp's relationship with the president's lawyer Robert Bennett. The final portion recasts the original section in the first person. It also includes a chatty paragraph discrediting allegations about Lewinsky's alleged affair with Clinton. \n\n Exegesis: This is the widely circulated version of the TP. For annotations, click on the hot-linked phrases. \n\n Points to Make in an Affidavit \n\n Your first few paragraphs should be about yourself--what you do now, what you did at the White House, and for how many years you were there as a career person and as a political appointee.",
"5) Clinton, the Dictator. A lawyer by training, Clinton spent much time on the phone with Lewinsky. He could have dictated points during his calls, and he has a clear interest in changing Tripp's testimony. But in crises such as this one, Clinton has historically turned to proxies for his dirty work. Moreover the TP is wrong about what Clinton said in his Jones deposition about when his meeting with Willey took place.",
"The parenthetical phrasing is emblematic of the tight construction of the first half of the TP. Some theorists have pointed to it as evidence that a lawyer drafted--or at least advised on the drafting of--the document. Fabricating evidence would, of course, be a highly unethical activity for a lawyer, but if, as some administration advocates maintain, the TP is all true, assistance in its drafting would not be unethical. However, as noted later, the TP makes legal errors, and the smooth phrasing could as easily be that of a PR person, journalist, or nonpracticing lawyer. Nonetheless, it casts doubt on the theory that Lewinsky was the lone author. Tripp told Newsweek she suspected immediately that the TP was too deftly crafted to have originated with Lewinsky. Lewinsky's former lawyer Ginsburg never denied his client's involvement in the document's preparation (his theory is that it was a collaborative effort). \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 5",
"Pointillism \n\n Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's obstruction of justice case against President Clinton is likely to turn on his identification of the author of the so-called \"Talking Points.\" Like Shakespeare's works and the Bible, the TP, a three-page document, has inspired numerous schools of thought that disagree on the meaning of seemingly banal phrases and discern the handiwork of different authors. As a service to scholars in the burgeoning field of TP Studies--as well as to the general public--here is a Talmudic exegesis, a Reader's Guide to the TP .",
"Note 9 \n\n At this juncture, it seems another author takes over. Note the \"the oval\" is now referred to as the \"oval office.\" Also, this sentence essentially repeats the advice already given: \"You did not see her go in or see her come out.\" The TP's tenor and tone shift from legalistic to colloquial. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 10 \n\n The author is obviously on the side he or she thinks Tripp would do well to be on. As subsequent sentences make clear, that side is the administration's--as distinct from Jones'. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 11",
"This apparent reference to Lewinsky is the only substantive addition to the second part of the document. It seems unlikely that Lewinsky would refer to herself as a \"big liar\" who was \"stalking\" the president. However, Lewinsky had recently given sworn testimony in the Jones case that flatly contradicted her lengthy taped conversations with Tripp, in which she had talked about her affair with Clinton. So it is possible that she decided it was better to label herself a liar in this context than to face perjury charges. The word \"huge,\" which appears here, is used by Tripp three times in the transcript of her taped conversations with Lewinsky reported in Newsweek . This point is made by Skip Fox and Jack Gillis, two academics at the University of Southwestern Louisiana whose analysis of the TP may be found here. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 21 \n\n Narcissistic phrasing that allegedly sounds very much like Lewinsky. \n\n Back to story.",
"2) Tripp, the Manipulative Bitch. Gunning to bring down the president after Bennett denounced her, Tripp entrapped Lewinsky. One scenario has her prodding the gullible young woman to write the TP so she, Tripp, could get physical evidence of obstruction of justice. Another has her drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the entire thing--herself. A senior White House official has even suggested a draft of the TP lives on the hard drive of Tripp's computer. The theory's defects: a) Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? b) While the tapes expose Tripp as a horrible friend and a vicious schemer, we have no evidence that she is capable of conceiving of such a complicated machination.",
"Background: Only one person claims to have firsthand knowledge of the TP's origins: Linda Tripp. Tripp told Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff that Monica Lewinsky had given her the TP on Jan. 14, 1998, while driving Tripp home from work. That night, Tripp handed the document over to Starr's office. The following day, wearing an FBI-supplied wire, she met Lewinsky at the Pentagon City, Va., Ritz-Carlton. FBI agents interrupted their conversation and took Lewinsky to a room in the hotel for questioning.",
"On its face, the suggestion seems highly unlikely: that Willey, who had gone in seeking a job from the president, would leave the Oval Office and stop to muss herself, hoping to run into someone who could later confirm a false allegation of sexual advances by Clinton. However, by this time, Steele had changed her story, saying Willey had asked her to lie about exactly when Willey had confided in her and also about the details of the alleged sexual encounter. The suggestion in the TP would be consistent with the amended Steele statements. The TP also says Willey's blouse was untucked--a point that has been cited as evidence Willey was lying, since an untucked blouse would probably have been noticed by the other people waiting in the reception area outside the Oval Office. However, Tripp is quoted in Newsweek as observing only that Willey was \"disheveled. Her face was red and her lipstick was off.\" So the added detail in the TP may have been intended to further discredit Willey. \n\n Back to story.",
"3) The Right-Wing Conspiracy. An elaboration of the Tripp theory. Without any specific evidence, proponents of this theory posit that Tripp drafted the TP with the assistance of lawyers involved in the Jones case or otherwise committed to conservative causes.",
"The writer means \"affidavit,\" since the stated point of this exercise is to enable Tripp to avoid being deposed in person. This is not a mistake that a practicing lawyer would make, though it could be a mistake made in dictation. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 19 \n\n The remainder of the document is cast in the first rather than the second person. And, in this paragraph--though not in the following ones--the tone becomes more chatty. This might suggest that Tripp herself is writing the TP in her own words. However, if Tripp were creating a bogus document for purposes of entrapment, it would not seem in her interest to recast second-person paragraphs from earlier in the document in such a way that they are potentially confusing. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 20",
"6) Lindsey, the Fixer. Immediately following the TP's release, reporters fingered the president's confidant as a suspect. He was the administration's point man on the Jones case and has been known to wipe up after Clinton's bimbo eruptions. And he had reason to believe he could change or blunt the impact of Tripp's testimony. In August, Tripp told Newsweek she doubted Clinton's advances to Willey constituted sexual harassment, as Willey--despite her later protestations--had not seemed upset at the time. Tripp also contacted Lindsey last summer to discuss the Willey affair. Tripp and Lindsey spoke on at least two more occasions, according to the New York Times . However, there is no evidence that Lewinsky and Lindsey knew each other or ever communicated.",
"her retain Behre. She fired him three days before the TP surfaced, when he asked her to hand the tapes over to Bennett. Behre has the knowledge and the motive (he's loyal to the White House) to write the TP.",
"Note 22 \n\n No effort is made to fill in the blanks. This suggests Tripp is not attempting to construct a first draft in her own words following the earlier instructions. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 23 \n\n In the Washington Post version of the TP--given here--a second-person version of this sentence does not appear in the first section of the document. In ABC's version of the document, it appears in both places. Both the Post and ABC claim to have copies of the original TP. In itself, the discrepancy has no apparent significance, although it has been pointed to by theorists who contend that the TP was leaked through more than one source. \n\n Back to story."
],
[
"Why doesn't the author want to mention Isikoff, the reporter in question? Only Tripp had a clear interest in not seeming unduly familiar with him. For months, she had been meeting clandestinely with Isikoff, discussing her conversations with Lewinsky. Tripp had hoped to remain anonymous in Isikoff's story. There's no good reason why Lindsey should have inserted this detail.",
"The TP advises Tripp on crafting an affidavit that would recant statements she had made to Newsweek 's Isikoff. Tripp told Isikoff last summer that she had bumped into Kathleen Willey after she left the Oval Office Nov. 29, 1993, and that Willey had looked flushed, lipstickless, and happy. Three days before Tripp received the TP, Willey gave sworn testimony in the Paula Jones case that the president had fondled her breasts and placed her hand on his crotch. Tripp had been scheduled to be deposed in the Jones case in December, but the deposition was postponed. \n\n \n\n Whodunit? There are seven theories about the authorship of the TP. The leading suspects: Lewinsky, Tripp, her ex-lawyer Kirby Behre, Clinton, Bruce Lindsey (the president's closest aide), the Right-Wing Conspiracy, and a collaboration among several of the above. Click here for a summary of the major theories.",
"The next you heard of her was when a Newsweek reporter (I wouldn't name him specifically) showed up in your office saying she was naming you as someone who would corroborate that she was sexually harassed. You spoke with her that evening, etc., and she relayed to you a sequence of events that was very dissimilar from what you remembered happening. As a result of your conversation with her and subsequent reports that showed that she had tried to enlist the help of someone else in her lie that the President sexually harassed her, you now do not believe that what she claimed happened really happened. You now find it completely plausible that she herself smeared her lipstick, untucked her blouse, etc. \n\n You never saw her go into the oval office, or come out of the oval office.",
"And it seems possible that a White House staffer wrote a chunk of the TP. Immediately following the TP's release, reporters fingered Lindsey as the leading suspect. Many speculate that he wipes up after the president's bimbo eruptions; he was also the administration's point man on the Jones case. Lindsey also had reason to believe he could change Tripp's testimony. Last summer, Tripp contacted Lindsey to discuss the Willey affair (she told Newsweek that because Willey didn't seem upset at the time, she didn't think Willey had been sexually harassed). Tripp and Lindsey spoke at least two more times, according to the New York Times . However, there is no evidence that Lewinsky and Lindsey knew each other or ever communicated. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 4",
"When Tripp testified before Congress about Travelgate and Vince Foster's death, the White House helped her retain lawyer Kirby Behre. She fired Behre three days before she gave the TP to Starr, when, she says, Behre asked her to hand the tapes over to Bennett. Behre has the knowledge and the motive (he's loyal to the White House) to have written the TP. \n\n The writer is familiar with what Behre has been telling Tripp and calls him by his first name, which might suggest Tripp (or perhaps Lewinsky, who has been discussing Tripp's legal strategy with her) is the author. However, New York Observer columnist Philip Weiss says presidential adviser and troubleshooter Lindsey also commonly refers to everyone but the president by a first name. However, Behre denies having talked with Lindsey. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 12",
"Note 9 \n\n At this juncture, it seems another author takes over. Note the \"the oval\" is now referred to as the \"oval office.\" Also, this sentence essentially repeats the advice already given: \"You did not see her go in or see her come out.\" The TP's tenor and tone shift from legalistic to colloquial. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 10 \n\n The author is obviously on the side he or she thinks Tripp would do well to be on. As subsequent sentences make clear, that side is the administration's--as distinct from Jones'. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 11",
"6) Lindsey, the Fixer. Immediately following the TP's release, reporters fingered the president's confidant as a suspect. He was the administration's point man on the Jones case and has been known to wipe up after Clinton's bimbo eruptions. And he had reason to believe he could change or blunt the impact of Tripp's testimony. In August, Tripp told Newsweek she doubted Clinton's advances to Willey constituted sexual harassment, as Willey--despite her later protestations--had not seemed upset at the time. Tripp also contacted Lindsey last summer to discuss the Willey affair. Tripp and Lindsey spoke on at least two more occasions, according to the New York Times . However, there is no evidence that Lewinsky and Lindsey knew each other or ever communicated.",
"\"Someone else\" apparently refers to Julie Steele, a friend of Willey's. Steele initially told Newsweek that Willey had confided the details of the incident with Clinton to her shortly after it happened. Later, Steele changed her story, saying Willey had told her that the president had \"made a pass\" at her only weeks after the alleged incident and that she had lied at Willey's behest. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 8",
"her retain Behre. She fired him three days before the TP surfaced, when he asked her to hand the tapes over to Bennett. Behre has the knowledge and the motive (he's loyal to the White House) to write the TP.",
"On its face, the suggestion seems highly unlikely: that Willey, who had gone in seeking a job from the president, would leave the Oval Office and stop to muss herself, hoping to run into someone who could later confirm a false allegation of sexual advances by Clinton. However, by this time, Steele had changed her story, saying Willey had asked her to lie about exactly when Willey had confided in her and also about the details of the alleged sexual encounter. The suggestion in the TP would be consistent with the amended Steele statements. The TP also says Willey's blouse was untucked--a point that has been cited as evidence Willey was lying, since an untucked blouse would probably have been noticed by the other people waiting in the reception area outside the Oval Office. However, Tripp is quoted in Newsweek as observing only that Willey was \"disheveled. Her face was red and her lipstick was off.\" So the added detail in the TP may have been intended to further discredit Willey. \n\n Back to story.",
"This apparent reference to Lewinsky is the only substantive addition to the second part of the document. It seems unlikely that Lewinsky would refer to herself as a \"big liar\" who was \"stalking\" the president. However, Lewinsky had recently given sworn testimony in the Jones case that flatly contradicted her lengthy taped conversations with Tripp, in which she had talked about her affair with Clinton. So it is possible that she decided it was better to label herself a liar in this context than to face perjury charges. The word \"huge,\" which appears here, is used by Tripp three times in the transcript of her taped conversations with Lewinsky reported in Newsweek . This point is made by Skip Fox and Jack Gillis, two academics at the University of Southwestern Louisiana whose analysis of the TP may be found here. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 21 \n\n Narcissistic phrasing that allegedly sounds very much like Lewinsky. \n\n Back to story.",
"Note 22 \n\n No effort is made to fill in the blanks. This suggests Tripp is not attempting to construct a first draft in her own words following the earlier instructions. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 23 \n\n In the Washington Post version of the TP--given here--a second-person version of this sentence does not appear in the first section of the document. In ABC's version of the document, it appears in both places. Both the Post and ABC claim to have copies of the original TP. In itself, the discrepancy has no apparent significance, although it has been pointed to by theorists who contend that the TP was leaked through more than one source. \n\n Back to story.",
"Background: Only one person claims to have firsthand knowledge of the TP's origins: Linda Tripp. Tripp told Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff that Monica Lewinsky had given her the TP on Jan. 14, 1998, while driving Tripp home from work. That night, Tripp handed the document over to Starr's office. The following day, wearing an FBI-supplied wire, she met Lewinsky at the Pentagon City, Va., Ritz-Carlton. FBI agents interrupted their conversation and took Lewinsky to a room in the hotel for questioning.",
"The parenthetical phrasing is emblematic of the tight construction of the first half of the TP. Some theorists have pointed to it as evidence that a lawyer drafted--or at least advised on the drafting of--the document. Fabricating evidence would, of course, be a highly unethical activity for a lawyer, but if, as some administration advocates maintain, the TP is all true, assistance in its drafting would not be unethical. However, as noted later, the TP makes legal errors, and the smooth phrasing could as easily be that of a PR person, journalist, or nonpracticing lawyer. Nonetheless, it casts doubt on the theory that Lewinsky was the lone author. Tripp told Newsweek she suspected immediately that the TP was too deftly crafted to have originated with Lewinsky. Lewinsky's former lawyer Ginsburg never denied his client's involvement in the document's preparation (his theory is that it was a collaborative effort). \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 5",
"The writer means \"affidavit,\" since the stated point of this exercise is to enable Tripp to avoid being deposed in person. This is not a mistake that a practicing lawyer would make, though it could be a mistake made in dictation. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 19 \n\n The remainder of the document is cast in the first rather than the second person. And, in this paragraph--though not in the following ones--the tone becomes more chatty. This might suggest that Tripp herself is writing the TP in her own words. However, if Tripp were creating a bogus document for purposes of entrapment, it would not seem in her interest to recast second-person paragraphs from earlier in the document in such a way that they are potentially confusing. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 20",
"I did not see her go in or see her come out. \n\n Talk about when I became out of touch with her and maybe why. \n\n The next time I heard of her was when a Newsweek reporter showed up in my office saying she was naming me as a someone who would corroborate that she was sexually harassed by the President. I spoke with her that evening, etc., and she relayed to me a sequence of events that was very dissimilar from what I remembered happening. As a result of my conversation with her and subsequent reports that showed she had tried to enlist the help of someone else in her lie that the President sexually harassed her, I now do not believe that what she claimed happened really happened. I now find it completely plausible that she herself smeared her lipstick, untucked her blouse, etc. \n\n I never saw her go into the oval office, or come out of the oval office. \n\n I have never observed the President behave inappropriately with anybody.",
"Note 1 \n\n Here are seven good guesses about the authorship of the TP:",
"7) A Combo of the Above. While there is no credible scenario in which the people mentioned above could have concocted the TP on their own, several of the suspects could have worked in concert. For instance, it is plausible Tripp and Lewinsky collaborated on the TP with insight from a trained lawyer (Clinton, Lindsey, Behre). As our annotation of the text shows, the TP appears to be the handiwork of multiple authors. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 2 \n\n One scenario has the president dictating points over the phone to Lewinsky, with whom he spent much time talking. A lawyer by training, Clinton has a clear interest in changing Tripp's testimony. But the author of the TP seems unfamiliar with Clinton's actual testimony in the Paula Jones case, in which he said Willey's visit occurred before her husband's suicide. This contradiction might exculpate Clinton.",
"Aside from this sentence, there is no specific hint that Tripp penned the TP to entrap Lewinsky. However, Tripp had a motive: She wanted to take down the president after Bennett, his lawyer, denounced her. One scenario has Tripp--with the assistance of lawyers involved in the Jones case or otherwise committed to conservative causes--prodding the gullible Lewinsky to write the TP so she, Tripp, would have clear evidence of attempted obstruction of justice. Another has Tripp drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the whole thing--herself. A senior administration official has suggested that a draft of the TP lives on Tripp's hard drive. The defect with these theories: Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 7",
"1) Lewinsky, the Lone Gunman. Panic-stricken by Tripp's threat that she would expose Lewinsky's affair with Clinton if asked about it in a deposition, Lewinsky mustered all her intellectual resources to cobble together the TP. Lewinsky's former lawyer, William Ginsburg, never denied his client's involvement in the document's preparation. Strikes against this theory: a) Lewinsky doesn't have enough knowledge of the law. b) Apparently, she is not the sharpest tool in the shed. Tripp has said she immediately suspected the TP was too deftly crafted to have originated with Lewinsky. c) Lewinsky was too panic-stricken to have acted this rationally. Before Christmas, for example, the tapes record her suggesting that Tripp have a \"foot accident\" and be hospitalized during the time her deposition was scheduled to take place."
],
[
"her retain Behre. She fired him three days before the TP surfaced, when he asked her to hand the tapes over to Bennett. Behre has the knowledge and the motive (he's loyal to the White House) to write the TP.",
"When Tripp testified before Congress about Travelgate and Vince Foster's death, the White House helped her retain lawyer Kirby Behre. She fired Behre three days before she gave the TP to Starr, when, she says, Behre asked her to hand the tapes over to Bennett. Behre has the knowledge and the motive (he's loyal to the White House) to have written the TP. \n\n The writer is familiar with what Behre has been telling Tripp and calls him by his first name, which might suggest Tripp (or perhaps Lewinsky, who has been discussing Tripp's legal strategy with her) is the author. However, New York Observer columnist Philip Weiss says presidential adviser and troubleshooter Lindsey also commonly refers to everyone but the president by a first name. However, Behre denies having talked with Lindsey. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 12",
"(Some implicate Behre's replacement, James Moody. It seems unlikely, however, that Moody, a conservative stalwart, would have helped Tripp prepare talking points apparently so favorable to the president.) And while the document presents legal-sounding advice, it's too rambling,",
"4) Behre, the White House Mole. When Tripp testified before Congress about Travelgate and Foster's death, the White House helped",
"Why doesn't the author want to mention Isikoff, the reporter in question? Only Tripp had a clear interest in not seeming unduly familiar with him. For months, she had been meeting clandestinely with Isikoff, discussing her conversations with Lewinsky. Tripp had hoped to remain anonymous in Isikoff's story. There's no good reason why Lindsey should have inserted this detail.",
"Background: Only one person claims to have firsthand knowledge of the TP's origins: Linda Tripp. Tripp told Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff that Monica Lewinsky had given her the TP on Jan. 14, 1998, while driving Tripp home from work. That night, Tripp handed the document over to Starr's office. The following day, wearing an FBI-supplied wire, she met Lewinsky at the Pentagon City, Va., Ritz-Carlton. FBI agents interrupted their conversation and took Lewinsky to a room in the hotel for questioning.",
"The TP advises Tripp on crafting an affidavit that would recant statements she had made to Newsweek 's Isikoff. Tripp told Isikoff last summer that she had bumped into Kathleen Willey after she left the Oval Office Nov. 29, 1993, and that Willey had looked flushed, lipstickless, and happy. Three days before Tripp received the TP, Willey gave sworn testimony in the Paula Jones case that the president had fondled her breasts and placed her hand on his crotch. Tripp had been scheduled to be deposed in the Jones case in December, but the deposition was postponed. \n\n \n\n Whodunit? There are seven theories about the authorship of the TP. The leading suspects: Lewinsky, Tripp, her ex-lawyer Kirby Behre, Clinton, Bruce Lindsey (the president's closest aide), the Right-Wing Conspiracy, and a collaboration among several of the above. Click here for a summary of the major theories.",
"This is clumsily phrased: The identity of the \"other side\" is ambiguous. It sounds more like loose drafting by a PR person than it does the work of a practicing lawyer. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 13 \n\n The New York Times and others, quoting \"lawyers connected to the case,\" report Lindsey had earlier advised Tripp to seek Bennett's help, advice Tripp eschewed. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 14 \n\n Bennett was quoted as saying that \"Linda Tripp is not to be believed\" in the Willey controversy. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 15 \n\n The date when Tripp was originally scheduled to be deposed by Jones' lawyers. \n\n Back to story.",
"Note 9 \n\n At this juncture, it seems another author takes over. Note the \"the oval\" is now referred to as the \"oval office.\" Also, this sentence essentially repeats the advice already given: \"You did not see her go in or see her come out.\" The TP's tenor and tone shift from legalistic to colloquial. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 10 \n\n The author is obviously on the side he or she thinks Tripp would do well to be on. As subsequent sentences make clear, that side is the administration's--as distinct from Jones'. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 11",
"On its face, the suggestion seems highly unlikely: that Willey, who had gone in seeking a job from the president, would leave the Oval Office and stop to muss herself, hoping to run into someone who could later confirm a false allegation of sexual advances by Clinton. However, by this time, Steele had changed her story, saying Willey had asked her to lie about exactly when Willey had confided in her and also about the details of the alleged sexual encounter. The suggestion in the TP would be consistent with the amended Steele statements. The TP also says Willey's blouse was untucked--a point that has been cited as evidence Willey was lying, since an untucked blouse would probably have been noticed by the other people waiting in the reception area outside the Oval Office. However, Tripp is quoted in Newsweek as observing only that Willey was \"disheveled. Her face was red and her lipstick was off.\" So the added detail in the TP may have been intended to further discredit Willey. \n\n Back to story.",
"6) Lindsey, the Fixer. Immediately following the TP's release, reporters fingered the president's confidant as a suspect. He was the administration's point man on the Jones case and has been known to wipe up after Clinton's bimbo eruptions. And he had reason to believe he could change or blunt the impact of Tripp's testimony. In August, Tripp told Newsweek she doubted Clinton's advances to Willey constituted sexual harassment, as Willey--despite her later protestations--had not seemed upset at the time. Tripp also contacted Lindsey last summer to discuss the Willey affair. Tripp and Lindsey spoke on at least two more occasions, according to the New York Times . However, there is no evidence that Lewinsky and Lindsey knew each other or ever communicated.",
"Aside from this sentence, there is no specific hint that Tripp penned the TP to entrap Lewinsky. However, Tripp had a motive: She wanted to take down the president after Bennett, his lawyer, denounced her. One scenario has Tripp--with the assistance of lawyers involved in the Jones case or otherwise committed to conservative causes--prodding the gullible Lewinsky to write the TP so she, Tripp, would have clear evidence of attempted obstruction of justice. Another has Tripp drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the whole thing--herself. A senior administration official has suggested that a draft of the TP lives on Tripp's hard drive. The defect with these theories: Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 7",
"Note 16 \n\n This is the acronym for the Joint Civilian Orientation Course, a program Tripp ran at the Pentagon. Lewinsky, as well as Tripp, would be familiar with the acronym, as would people in the White House who knew where Tripp had been placed following her transfer. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 17 \n\n Presumably, only someone with legal training--though not necessarily a practicing lawyer--would know that an affidavit could substitute for a deposition. However, this is not good lawyerly advice. It is unlikely that Jones' lawyers would have accepted an affidavit in lieu of a deposition from someone who had changed her story. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 18",
"2) Tripp, the Manipulative Bitch. Gunning to bring down the president after Bennett denounced her, Tripp entrapped Lewinsky. One scenario has her prodding the gullible young woman to write the TP so she, Tripp, could get physical evidence of obstruction of justice. Another has her drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the entire thing--herself. A senior White House official has even suggested a draft of the TP lives on the hard drive of Tripp's computer. The theory's defects: a) Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? b) While the tapes expose Tripp as a horrible friend and a vicious schemer, we have no evidence that she is capable of conceiving of such a complicated machination.",
"And it seems possible that a White House staffer wrote a chunk of the TP. Immediately following the TP's release, reporters fingered Lindsey as the leading suspect. Many speculate that he wipes up after the president's bimbo eruptions; he was also the administration's point man on the Jones case. Lindsey also had reason to believe he could change Tripp's testimony. Last summer, Tripp contacted Lindsey to discuss the Willey affair (she told Newsweek that because Willey didn't seem upset at the time, she didn't think Willey had been sexually harassed). Tripp and Lindsey spoke at least two more times, according to the New York Times . However, there is no evidence that Lewinsky and Lindsey knew each other or ever communicated. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 4",
"7) A Combo of the Above. While there is no credible scenario in which the people mentioned above could have concocted the TP on their own, several of the suspects could have worked in concert. For instance, it is plausible Tripp and Lewinsky collaborated on the TP with insight from a trained lawyer (Clinton, Lindsey, Behre). As our annotation of the text shows, the TP appears to be the handiwork of multiple authors. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 2 \n\n One scenario has the president dictating points over the phone to Lewinsky, with whom he spent much time talking. A lawyer by training, Clinton has a clear interest in changing Tripp's testimony. But the author of the TP seems unfamiliar with Clinton's actual testimony in the Paula Jones case, in which he said Willey's visit occurred before her husband's suicide. This contradiction might exculpate Clinton.",
"\"Someone else\" apparently refers to Julie Steele, a friend of Willey's. Steele initially told Newsweek that Willey had confided the details of the incident with Clinton to her shortly after it happened. Later, Steele changed her story, saying Willey had told her that the president had \"made a pass\" at her only weeks after the alleged incident and that she had lied at Willey's behest. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 8",
"I did not see her go in or see her come out. \n\n Talk about when I became out of touch with her and maybe why. \n\n The next time I heard of her was when a Newsweek reporter showed up in my office saying she was naming me as a someone who would corroborate that she was sexually harassed by the President. I spoke with her that evening, etc., and she relayed to me a sequence of events that was very dissimilar from what I remembered happening. As a result of my conversation with her and subsequent reports that showed she had tried to enlist the help of someone else in her lie that the President sexually harassed her, I now do not believe that what she claimed happened really happened. I now find it completely plausible that she herself smeared her lipstick, untucked her blouse, etc. \n\n I never saw her go into the oval office, or come out of the oval office. \n\n I have never observed the President behave inappropriately with anybody.",
"1) Lewinsky, the Lone Gunman. Panic-stricken by Tripp's threat that she would expose Lewinsky's affair with Clinton if asked about it in a deposition, Lewinsky mustered all her intellectual resources to cobble together the TP. Lewinsky's former lawyer, William Ginsburg, never denied his client's involvement in the document's preparation. Strikes against this theory: a) Lewinsky doesn't have enough knowledge of the law. b) Apparently, she is not the sharpest tool in the shed. Tripp has said she immediately suspected the TP was too deftly crafted to have originated with Lewinsky. c) Lewinsky was too panic-stricken to have acted this rationally. Before Christmas, for example, the tapes record her suggesting that Tripp have a \"foot accident\" and be hospitalized during the time her deposition was scheduled to take place.",
"The TP appears to have been composed in three parts, each in a different voice. The first section, in which Tripp receives legal-sounding advice, is smoothly and efficiently written. The document then shifts from the substance of the affidavit to the strategy behind it, with special reference to Tripp's relationship with the president's lawyer Robert Bennett. The final portion recasts the original section in the first person. It also includes a chatty paragraph discrediting allegations about Lewinsky's alleged affair with Clinton. \n\n Exegesis: This is the widely circulated version of the TP. For annotations, click on the hot-linked phrases. \n\n Points to Make in an Affidavit \n\n Your first few paragraphs should be about yourself--what you do now, what you did at the White House, and for how many years you were there as a career person and as a political appointee."
],
[
"\"Someone else\" apparently refers to Julie Steele, a friend of Willey's. Steele initially told Newsweek that Willey had confided the details of the incident with Clinton to her shortly after it happened. Later, Steele changed her story, saying Willey had told her that the president had \"made a pass\" at her only weeks after the alleged incident and that she had lied at Willey's behest. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 8",
"On its face, the suggestion seems highly unlikely: that Willey, who had gone in seeking a job from the president, would leave the Oval Office and stop to muss herself, hoping to run into someone who could later confirm a false allegation of sexual advances by Clinton. However, by this time, Steele had changed her story, saying Willey had asked her to lie about exactly when Willey had confided in her and also about the details of the alleged sexual encounter. The suggestion in the TP would be consistent with the amended Steele statements. The TP also says Willey's blouse was untucked--a point that has been cited as evidence Willey was lying, since an untucked blouse would probably have been noticed by the other people waiting in the reception area outside the Oval Office. However, Tripp is quoted in Newsweek as observing only that Willey was \"disheveled. Her face was red and her lipstick was off.\" So the added detail in the TP may have been intended to further discredit Willey. \n\n Back to story.",
"The next you heard of her was when a Newsweek reporter (I wouldn't name him specifically) showed up in your office saying she was naming you as someone who would corroborate that she was sexually harassed. You spoke with her that evening, etc., and she relayed to you a sequence of events that was very dissimilar from what you remembered happening. As a result of your conversation with her and subsequent reports that showed that she had tried to enlist the help of someone else in her lie that the President sexually harassed her, you now do not believe that what she claimed happened really happened. You now find it completely plausible that she herself smeared her lipstick, untucked her blouse, etc. \n\n You never saw her go into the oval office, or come out of the oval office.",
"I did not see her go in or see her come out. \n\n Talk about when I became out of touch with her and maybe why. \n\n The next time I heard of her was when a Newsweek reporter showed up in my office saying she was naming me as a someone who would corroborate that she was sexually harassed by the President. I spoke with her that evening, etc., and she relayed to me a sequence of events that was very dissimilar from what I remembered happening. As a result of my conversation with her and subsequent reports that showed she had tried to enlist the help of someone else in her lie that the President sexually harassed her, I now do not believe that what she claimed happened really happened. I now find it completely plausible that she herself smeared her lipstick, untucked her blouse, etc. \n\n I never saw her go into the oval office, or come out of the oval office. \n\n I have never observed the President behave inappropriately with anybody.",
"The writer means \"affidavit,\" since the stated point of this exercise is to enable Tripp to avoid being deposed in person. This is not a mistake that a practicing lawyer would make, though it could be a mistake made in dictation. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 19 \n\n The remainder of the document is cast in the first rather than the second person. And, in this paragraph--though not in the following ones--the tone becomes more chatty. This might suggest that Tripp herself is writing the TP in her own words. However, if Tripp were creating a bogus document for purposes of entrapment, it would not seem in her interest to recast second-person paragraphs from earlier in the document in such a way that they are potentially confusing. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 20",
"This apparent reference to Lewinsky is the only substantive addition to the second part of the document. It seems unlikely that Lewinsky would refer to herself as a \"big liar\" who was \"stalking\" the president. However, Lewinsky had recently given sworn testimony in the Jones case that flatly contradicted her lengthy taped conversations with Tripp, in which she had talked about her affair with Clinton. So it is possible that she decided it was better to label herself a liar in this context than to face perjury charges. The word \"huge,\" which appears here, is used by Tripp three times in the transcript of her taped conversations with Lewinsky reported in Newsweek . This point is made by Skip Fox and Jack Gillis, two academics at the University of Southwestern Louisiana whose analysis of the TP may be found here. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 21 \n\n Narcissistic phrasing that allegedly sounds very much like Lewinsky. \n\n Back to story.",
"Note 16 \n\n This is the acronym for the Joint Civilian Orientation Course, a program Tripp ran at the Pentagon. Lewinsky, as well as Tripp, would be familiar with the acronym, as would people in the White House who knew where Tripp had been placed following her transfer. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 17 \n\n Presumably, only someone with legal training--though not necessarily a practicing lawyer--would know that an affidavit could substitute for a deposition. However, this is not good lawyerly advice. It is unlikely that Jones' lawyers would have accepted an affidavit in lieu of a deposition from someone who had changed her story. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 18",
"Note 9 \n\n At this juncture, it seems another author takes over. Note the \"the oval\" is now referred to as the \"oval office.\" Also, this sentence essentially repeats the advice already given: \"You did not see her go in or see her come out.\" The TP's tenor and tone shift from legalistic to colloquial. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 10 \n\n The author is obviously on the side he or she thinks Tripp would do well to be on. As subsequent sentences make clear, that side is the administration's--as distinct from Jones'. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 11",
"You and Kathleen were friends. At around the time of her husband's death (The President has claimed it was after her husband died. Do you really want to contradict him?), she came to you after she allegedly came out of the oval and looked (however she looked), you don't recall her exact words, but she claimed at the time (whatever she claimed) and was very happy. \n\n You did not see her go in or see her come out. \n\n Talk about when you became out of touch with her and maybe why.",
"5) Clinton, the Dictator. A lawyer by training, Clinton spent much time on the phone with Lewinsky. He could have dictated points during his calls, and he has a clear interest in changing Tripp's testimony. But in crises such as this one, Clinton has historically turned to proxies for his dirty work. Moreover the TP is wrong about what Clinton said in his Jones deposition about when his meeting with Willey took place.",
"Why doesn't the author want to mention Isikoff, the reporter in question? Only Tripp had a clear interest in not seeming unduly familiar with him. For months, she had been meeting clandestinely with Isikoff, discussing her conversations with Lewinsky. Tripp had hoped to remain anonymous in Isikoff's story. There's no good reason why Lindsey should have inserted this detail.",
"This is clumsily phrased: The identity of the \"other side\" is ambiguous. It sounds more like loose drafting by a PR person than it does the work of a practicing lawyer. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 13 \n\n The New York Times and others, quoting \"lawyers connected to the case,\" report Lindsey had earlier advised Tripp to seek Bennett's help, advice Tripp eschewed. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 14 \n\n Bennett was quoted as saying that \"Linda Tripp is not to be believed\" in the Willey controversy. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 15 \n\n The date when Tripp was originally scheduled to be deposed by Jones' lawyers. \n\n Back to story.",
"But it does not necessarily clear aide Lindsey or others close to the president. After all, the president's sealed, private testimony contradicts his lawyer Bennett's public pronouncements that the encounter with Willey took place after her husband's suicide. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 3 \n\n According to Howard Kurtz's book Spin Cycle , this characterization of the Oval Office is common only among White House staffers.",
"7) A Combo of the Above. While there is no credible scenario in which the people mentioned above could have concocted the TP on their own, several of the suspects could have worked in concert. For instance, it is plausible Tripp and Lewinsky collaborated on the TP with insight from a trained lawyer (Clinton, Lindsey, Behre). As our annotation of the text shows, the TP appears to be the handiwork of multiple authors. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 2 \n\n One scenario has the president dictating points over the phone to Lewinsky, with whom he spent much time talking. A lawyer by training, Clinton has a clear interest in changing Tripp's testimony. But the author of the TP seems unfamiliar with Clinton's actual testimony in the Paula Jones case, in which he said Willey's visit occurred before her husband's suicide. This contradiction might exculpate Clinton.",
"You want Bennett's people to see your affidavit before it's signed. \n\n Your deposition should include enough information to satisfy their questioning. \n\n By the way, remember how I said there was someone else that I knew about. Well, she turned out to be a huge liar. I found out she left the WH because she was stalking the P or something like that. Well, at least that gets me out of another scandal I know about. \n\n The first few paragraphs should be about me--what I do now, what I did at the White House and for how many years I was there as a career person and as a political appointee. \n\n Kathleen and I were friends. At around the time of her husband's death, she came to me after she allegedly came out of the oval office and looked _____, I don't recall her exact words, but she claimed at the time ______ and was very happy.",
"Note 22 \n\n No effort is made to fill in the blanks. This suggests Tripp is not attempting to construct a first draft in her own words following the earlier instructions. \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 23 \n\n In the Washington Post version of the TP--given here--a second-person version of this sentence does not appear in the first section of the document. In ABC's version of the document, it appears in both places. Both the Post and ABC claim to have copies of the original TP. In itself, the discrepancy has no apparent significance, although it has been pointed to by theorists who contend that the TP was leaked through more than one source. \n\n Back to story.",
"testimony. Note, however, that, as one observer argues, if the TP is entirely true (Willey did muss her own clothes, etc.), assisting in its preparation would not be unethical or tantamount to subornation of perjury--though it would then be",
"2) Tripp, the Manipulative Bitch. Gunning to bring down the president after Bennett denounced her, Tripp entrapped Lewinsky. One scenario has her prodding the gullible young woman to write the TP so she, Tripp, could get physical evidence of obstruction of justice. Another has her drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the entire thing--herself. A senior White House official has even suggested a draft of the TP lives on the hard drive of Tripp's computer. The theory's defects: a) Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? b) While the tapes expose Tripp as a horrible friend and a vicious schemer, we have no evidence that she is capable of conceiving of such a complicated machination.",
"Aside from this sentence, there is no specific hint that Tripp penned the TP to entrap Lewinsky. However, Tripp had a motive: She wanted to take down the president after Bennett, his lawyer, denounced her. One scenario has Tripp--with the assistance of lawyers involved in the Jones case or otherwise committed to conservative causes--prodding the gullible Lewinsky to write the TP so she, Tripp, would have clear evidence of attempted obstruction of justice. Another has Tripp drafting a chunk of the TP--or even the whole thing--herself. A senior administration official has suggested that a draft of the TP lives on Tripp's hard drive. The defect with these theories: Why would Tripp risk getting caught fabricating evidence when she has mountains of damning tapes and e-mail? \n\n Back to story. \n\n Note 7",
"The TP advises Tripp on crafting an affidavit that would recant statements she had made to Newsweek 's Isikoff. Tripp told Isikoff last summer that she had bumped into Kathleen Willey after she left the Oval Office Nov. 29, 1993, and that Willey had looked flushed, lipstickless, and happy. Three days before Tripp received the TP, Willey gave sworn testimony in the Paula Jones case that the president had fondled her breasts and placed her hand on his crotch. Tripp had been scheduled to be deposed in the Jones case in December, but the deposition was postponed. \n\n \n\n Whodunit? There are seven theories about the authorship of the TP. The leading suspects: Lewinsky, Tripp, her ex-lawyer Kirby Behre, Clinton, Bruce Lindsey (the president's closest aide), the Right-Wing Conspiracy, and a collaboration among several of the above. Click here for a summary of the major theories."
]
] |
test
|
20003
|
[
"The author claims that the two publications changed identities because",
"What does the author mean by \"when the papers traded places, they exchanged virtues as well as vices?\"",
"It is thought that The Times often takes on too many risks, and",
"The alternative to reading a publication like The Times who is known for taking risks is",
"The author implies that one of The Post's downfalls is that",
"The author says that The Times typically overlooks anything going on in The Post, ",
"Some improvements that The Post have made to the publication include",
"According to the author, what is the biggest move that The Post has made in recent years?",
"What is the turnover rate for the executive editor of The Times?"
] |
[
[
"The Washington Post became too \"newsie,\" and The New York Times became too informal and daring.",
"The two publications basically assimilated into one.",
"The two publications started to cancel one another out.",
"The Washington Post became too informal and daring, and The New York Times became too \"newsie.\""
],
[
"When the two publications took on attributes of one another, they were both completely lost in the process.",
"The Times took on The Post's boring deliverables, and the Post took on the Times' cheeky delivery.",
"When the two publications took on attributes of one another, they took on both the good and bad.",
"The Times took on The Post's cheeky delivery, and the Post took on The Times' boring deliverables."
],
[
"those risks usually pay off for the publication.",
"those risks never pay off for the publication.",
"the reader comes out on the losing end because of it.",
"those risks can sometimes get out of control."
],
[
"to read tabloids to get exciting news.",
"to read something bland like The Post.",
"to read something that is of the highest quality like The Post.",
"to leave print behind and move on to blogs."
],
[
"its need to be the best has resulted in a lack of quality.",
"it is too concerned with keeping up with the changing times and not as concerned with quality journalism.",
"it is too set in its ways, thus becoming stale at times.",
"it is too concerned with being a competitor to The Times that it has lost its sense of self."
],
[
"but it should be looking to The Post as a guide for what true journalism is.",
"but it should look at The Post so that it can understand what longevity on the market and reader loyalty can do for a publication.",
"and it should continue to do just as it has been and ignoring anything going on at The Post.",
"but it could benefit from some of the things The Post offers that it does not."
],
[
"taking away from its consumer electronics section",
"improved suburbian coverage added more to its business page, and added to its travel and sports section.",
"taking much more publishing risks.",
"removed the science and history sections altogether."
],
[
"Appointing Seve Coll as its managing editor.",
"Changing its format.",
"Its biggest move has been to stand completely still.",
"Letting The Times influence how it structures itself."
],
[
"They go into the job knowing that once their purpose has been served, then they will be asked to leave.",
"They tend only to leave once they retire, so they can take their time to do what they want to with their vision for the publication.",
"They know that they will be let go at the same time as the executive editor of The Post.",
"They know that their time there will be short-lived, so they have to make their mark quickly."
]
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[
[
"The Changelings \n\n When did the Washington Post swap identities with the New York Times ? One day, it seemed, the Post rollicked readers with its cheeky personality and the next suffocated them with the sort of overcast official news that made the Times famous. Meanwhile, the Times sloughed its Old Gray Lady persona for the daredevilry that was the Post franchise. \n\n The switch dawned on me one morning 10 years ago as I found myself flipping through the Post because I had to, not because I wanted to--and reading the Times for the joy of it, not because it was the newspaper of record. I know this sounds like the beginning of an encomium for the Times at the expense of the Post , but it's not. When the papers traded places, they exchanged virtues as well as vices .",
"apologized for it. That same year, the paper digested Kitty Kelley's spuriously sourced Nancy Reagan biography on Page 1. In a transparent lunge for a Pulitzer Prize in early 1996, the Times published a seven-part series alleging that the",
"In its pursuit of holy shit, the Times routinely spins out of control. In 1991, it published the name of the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of rape--for no particular reason--and then",
"On the vice side of the exchange, the Times ... takes a lot of risks. It's now the primary exponent of what Post ie Bob Woodward famously called the \"holy shit\" story--pieces so astonishing that you scream spontaneous profanities when you read them. The downside of holy shit stories is that they can turn out to be wholly bullshit, as Woodward learned in 1981, when a reporter under his editorial watch, Janet Cooke, got caught making up a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict.",
"Other traded virtues: The Times prints in color, the Post doesn't (yet). The Times sports an aggressive and handsome design. The recent Post redesign aches like a bad face lift. Times Editorial Page Editor Howell Raines writes barrelhouse editorials demanding action--such as the resignation of Janet Reno--that stir substance and fanfaronade. The Post editorial and op-ed pages are so evenhanded that if Scotty Reston were resurrected, his soft gas would appear there, alongside that of Jim Hoagland. And the Times seasons its reporting with opinion, while the once liberal-and-proud-of-it Post prides itself on cool neutrality (some would count this as a swapped vice and not a swapped virtue). On the news side, Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. boasts he's so bias-free that he doesn't vote.",
"downsizing of the American workforce was creating \"millions of casualties.\" Actually, job creation was booming. Later that year, the paper spread its legs for the theory that TWA Flight 800 was downed by foul play, based on the discovery of",
"The question of how the audacious paper turned stodgy floats over the Post newsroom like a thought balloon. The easy answer: Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee departed in 1991 after 26 years at the top. This theory singles out current Executive Editor Downie for abuse, but complacency took root as early as 1981, when the Post 's cross-town competitor, the Washington Star , folded, allowing the fat beast to diddle all it wanted without paying a price. When Donald Graham took over as publisher, he picked Downie as the editor who would help steer the paper away from the Georgetown elites and toward the masses, away from national competition and straight at the suburban dailies. You're reading the paper they wanted to make.",
"Don Graham's biggest handicap is that he's the publisher who came after Katharine, and he's fearful that he'll blow her legacy. Downie's is that he came after Bradlee, and he's afraid he'll blow his. Who remembers the guys who canoed after Lewis and Clark? No wonder they operate the paper as if the frontier has closed behind them. In that context, Graham's conservatism makes business sense. His paper claims the highest reader penetration in the nation and is immensely profitable. Warren Buffett, a major stockholder in the company, whispers into his ear that he's a business genius. Why disturb the money-making machine? \n\n The last time the paper took an editorial risk was in 1986, when it barred no expense in relaunching the Washington Post",
"Post ies, on the other hand, obsess on the Times . Last month at the Post 's annual \"Pugwash\" editorial retreat, outgoing Managing Editor Robert Kaiser began his speech with the preposterous boast that the Post , with a staff half the size of the Times ', \"does more for its readers, day in and day out.\" Kaiser obviously lusts for the Old Times as he repeatedly calls for \"authoritative journalism\" and higher journalistic \"standards,\" and petitions Post ies to be more intellectual and creative. \"Authoritative, creative journalism that meets the highest standards must have intellectual content,\" Kaiser says at speech's end as he road-wrecks his themes. Somebody get this editor an editor!",
"Just this spring, two reckless Times stories slid off the road. Gina Kolata prematurely announced a cancer cure (while shopping a book proposal on the subject) and Rick Bragg botched a simple story about police corruption in small-town Alabama. Bragg, a writerish reporter who would be at home in Style, earned in the June 9 Times . The jailed sheriff spent 27 months behind bars, not 27 years, as Bragg originally reported. Bragg also got the age of the crusading newspaper editor wrong, misstated the paper's circulation, and mistakenly described the method by which the sheriff defrauded the government (the sheriff cashed checks improperly made out to him; he did not cash checks made out to the government). \n\n Horrible! Just horrible! But consider the alternative. Who wants to read a porcelain white newspaper that has flushed all its holy shit? Whose reporters drive Volvos to work?",
"has lost its verve. Sometimes a loss of verve is not a bad thing. Compare the Times and Post coverage of the China satellite story. In the Times , Jeff Gerth implies that illegal campaign donations from China + the extravagant",
"The boldest Post stroke in recent years came this spring when Downie dethroned Kaiser as managing editor and appointed Steve Coll, a 39-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning whiz, who most recently served as Sunday magazine editor/publisher. Coll's vision for the Post , also laid out in a Pugwash speech, sounds like a description of the New New York Times : \"[T]he future of the Post depends mightily on our ability to excel at enterprise journalism--on our ability to think more creatively, to tear the skin off of our subjects more often, to write better, to go deeper, to be more alive, to make more of a difference to readers.\" Good luck, Steve, you'll need it.",
"Perhaps the Times derives its edge from its succession politics. Whereas Ben Bradlee served as Post editor-for-life, the Times places an informal term limit on its executive editor job, and this turnover has helped to reinvigorate the paper: Times executive editors know they must make their mark in haste, before their tenure is over. A.M. Rosenthal reinvented the paper during his tenure from 1977 to 1986, stealing from Clay Felker's playbook to explode the Times into a many sectioned national paper. His successor, Max Frankel, brought vivid writing to the paper from 1986 to 1994, making sure that one story made it to Page 1 every day just because it was fun to read. Joseph Lelyveld, who took over from Frankel, has stayed their courses.",
"In the traded virtue category: The Times takes a lot of risks. It has turned its back on the five boroughs to become a national newspaper, even purchasing the Boston Globe , while the Post has burrowed deeper locally. Its columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich dish the sort of sauce Nicholas von Hoffman and the young Richard Cohen once served at the Post . It continues to innovate, with new sections like Monday's \"Business Day\" (a k a \"The Information Industries\") and Saturday's \"Arts and Ideas,\" while the Post hasn't contributed anything significant to the template since the \"Style\" section in 1969. Its Sunday magazine is the best general interest publication in the world. The Post 's isn't.",
"Wanted on China\"). The Post 's version is probably closer to the facts, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I've enjoyed the Times ' sensationalist coverage more.",
"Of course the Post doesn't tiptoe all the time. Woodward's 1996 campaign finance pieces struck a chord that still rings, and I predict a similar impact for Barton Gellman's two-part series last week about how the United States and China nearly went to war in 1996 (click here and here). At its best, the Post can still swarm a breaking news story like Flytrap. But at its worst, it sits on hot news. In 1992, the paper delayed its exposé of masher Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., until after the election, thereby assuring his return to the Senate. In 1994, it spiked Michael Isikoff's Paula Jones reporting, so he left for Newsweek , where he has led the Flytrap story.",
"Magazine as a prestige Sunday magazine on the scale of the New York Times Magazine . But the Magazine never got to compete with the Magazine : It was bushwhacked by a black talk-radio demagogue who unfairly labeled the debut issue racist and targeted the paper with demonstrations and a boycott. Its momentum shattered, the extravagantly funded Washington Post Magazine limped along for a couple of years until the Post abandoned its grand financial and editorial ambitions and downscaled it. \n\n Various sections of the Post have improved since then--it has invested heavily in zoned suburban coverage, expanded its business page, improved the quality of its travel section, extended the heft of its sports coverage, experimented with an advertorial insert about consumer electronics, and added a monthly midbrow science/history section (\"Horizon\")--but it's taken no publishing risks.",
"The Post isn't powered by Volvo--yet. But in adopting Old New York Times values of cautiousness and fairness and dullness, in striving to become the new Newspaper of Record, the Post",
"Timesmen don't pay much attention to the Post , except to periodically raid the paper--as if it were a minor league team--for some of its better players. ( Post defectors include Celestine Bohlen, Gwen Ifill, Julia Preston, Michael Specter, Patrick Tyler, Patti Cohen, and David Richards--who defected back. Few careers, outside of E.J. Dionne's, have been made by going the other way.) But it should pay closer attention. It desperately needs something like the Style section, where it can run imprudent stories that readers are dying to read but have yet to acquire the Heft and Importance of a New York Times News Story. Then again, if the Times were to embrace the virtue of a Style section (or is that a vice?), would its news sections lose their current virtue of attitude?",
"Still, the discovery would seem to knock from contention the theory that mechanical failure caused the airplane to explode on July 17, killing all 230 aboard .\" (Emphasis added.) Eventually, the Times and the investigators abandoned the PETN/bomb theory for"
],
[
"Other traded virtues: The Times prints in color, the Post doesn't (yet). The Times sports an aggressive and handsome design. The recent Post redesign aches like a bad face lift. Times Editorial Page Editor Howell Raines writes barrelhouse editorials demanding action--such as the resignation of Janet Reno--that stir substance and fanfaronade. The Post editorial and op-ed pages are so evenhanded that if Scotty Reston were resurrected, his soft gas would appear there, alongside that of Jim Hoagland. And the Times seasons its reporting with opinion, while the once liberal-and-proud-of-it Post prides itself on cool neutrality (some would count this as a swapped vice and not a swapped virtue). On the news side, Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. boasts he's so bias-free that he doesn't vote.",
"The Changelings \n\n When did the Washington Post swap identities with the New York Times ? One day, it seemed, the Post rollicked readers with its cheeky personality and the next suffocated them with the sort of overcast official news that made the Times famous. Meanwhile, the Times sloughed its Old Gray Lady persona for the daredevilry that was the Post franchise. \n\n The switch dawned on me one morning 10 years ago as I found myself flipping through the Post because I had to, not because I wanted to--and reading the Times for the joy of it, not because it was the newspaper of record. I know this sounds like the beginning of an encomium for the Times at the expense of the Post , but it's not. When the papers traded places, they exchanged virtues as well as vices .",
"In the traded virtue category: The Times takes a lot of risks. It has turned its back on the five boroughs to become a national newspaper, even purchasing the Boston Globe , while the Post has burrowed deeper locally. Its columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich dish the sort of sauce Nicholas von Hoffman and the young Richard Cohen once served at the Post . It continues to innovate, with new sections like Monday's \"Business Day\" (a k a \"The Information Industries\") and Saturday's \"Arts and Ideas,\" while the Post hasn't contributed anything significant to the template since the \"Style\" section in 1969. Its Sunday magazine is the best general interest publication in the world. The Post 's isn't.",
"On the vice side of the exchange, the Times ... takes a lot of risks. It's now the primary exponent of what Post ie Bob Woodward famously called the \"holy shit\" story--pieces so astonishing that you scream spontaneous profanities when you read them. The downside of holy shit stories is that they can turn out to be wholly bullshit, as Woodward learned in 1981, when a reporter under his editorial watch, Janet Cooke, got caught making up a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict.",
"Timesmen don't pay much attention to the Post , except to periodically raid the paper--as if it were a minor league team--for some of its better players. ( Post defectors include Celestine Bohlen, Gwen Ifill, Julia Preston, Michael Specter, Patrick Tyler, Patti Cohen, and David Richards--who defected back. Few careers, outside of E.J. Dionne's, have been made by going the other way.) But it should pay closer attention. It desperately needs something like the Style section, where it can run imprudent stories that readers are dying to read but have yet to acquire the Heft and Importance of a New York Times News Story. Then again, if the Times were to embrace the virtue of a Style section (or is that a vice?), would its news sections lose their current virtue of attitude?",
"Perhaps the Times derives its edge from its succession politics. Whereas Ben Bradlee served as Post editor-for-life, the Times places an informal term limit on its executive editor job, and this turnover has helped to reinvigorate the paper: Times executive editors know they must make their mark in haste, before their tenure is over. A.M. Rosenthal reinvented the paper during his tenure from 1977 to 1986, stealing from Clay Felker's playbook to explode the Times into a many sectioned national paper. His successor, Max Frankel, brought vivid writing to the paper from 1986 to 1994, making sure that one story made it to Page 1 every day just because it was fun to read. Joseph Lelyveld, who took over from Frankel, has stayed their courses.",
"The question of how the audacious paper turned stodgy floats over the Post newsroom like a thought balloon. The easy answer: Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee departed in 1991 after 26 years at the top. This theory singles out current Executive Editor Downie for abuse, but complacency took root as early as 1981, when the Post 's cross-town competitor, the Washington Star , folded, allowing the fat beast to diddle all it wanted without paying a price. When Donald Graham took over as publisher, he picked Downie as the editor who would help steer the paper away from the Georgetown elites and toward the masses, away from national competition and straight at the suburban dailies. You're reading the paper they wanted to make.",
"Post ies, on the other hand, obsess on the Times . Last month at the Post 's annual \"Pugwash\" editorial retreat, outgoing Managing Editor Robert Kaiser began his speech with the preposterous boast that the Post , with a staff half the size of the Times ', \"does more for its readers, day in and day out.\" Kaiser obviously lusts for the Old Times as he repeatedly calls for \"authoritative journalism\" and higher journalistic \"standards,\" and petitions Post ies to be more intellectual and creative. \"Authoritative, creative journalism that meets the highest standards must have intellectual content,\" Kaiser says at speech's end as he road-wrecks his themes. Somebody get this editor an editor!",
"downsizing of the American workforce was creating \"millions of casualties.\" Actually, job creation was booming. Later that year, the paper spread its legs for the theory that TWA Flight 800 was downed by foul play, based on the discovery of",
"has lost its verve. Sometimes a loss of verve is not a bad thing. Compare the Times and Post coverage of the China satellite story. In the Times , Jeff Gerth implies that illegal campaign donations from China + the extravagant",
"Just this spring, two reckless Times stories slid off the road. Gina Kolata prematurely announced a cancer cure (while shopping a book proposal on the subject) and Rick Bragg botched a simple story about police corruption in small-town Alabama. Bragg, a writerish reporter who would be at home in Style, earned in the June 9 Times . The jailed sheriff spent 27 months behind bars, not 27 years, as Bragg originally reported. Bragg also got the age of the crusading newspaper editor wrong, misstated the paper's circulation, and mistakenly described the method by which the sheriff defrauded the government (the sheriff cashed checks improperly made out to him; he did not cash checks made out to the government). \n\n Horrible! Just horrible! But consider the alternative. Who wants to read a porcelain white newspaper that has flushed all its holy shit? Whose reporters drive Volvos to work?",
"apologized for it. That same year, the paper digested Kitty Kelley's spuriously sourced Nancy Reagan biography on Page 1. In a transparent lunge for a Pulitzer Prize in early 1996, the Times published a seven-part series alleging that the",
"In its pursuit of holy shit, the Times routinely spins out of control. In 1991, it published the name of the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of rape--for no particular reason--and then",
"Meanwhile, the 56-year-old Downie is now seven years into the job. If he were a Times man, they'd be farming him out to write a column right about now. Instead, he's ensconced like the pope.",
"Of course the Post doesn't tiptoe all the time. Woodward's 1996 campaign finance pieces struck a chord that still rings, and I predict a similar impact for Barton Gellman's two-part series last week about how the United States and China nearly went to war in 1996 (click here and here). At its best, the Post can still swarm a breaking news story like Flytrap. But at its worst, it sits on hot news. In 1992, the paper delayed its exposé of masher Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., until after the election, thereby assuring his return to the Senate. In 1994, it spiked Michael Isikoff's Paula Jones reporting, so he left for Newsweek , where he has led the Flytrap story.",
"Don Graham's biggest handicap is that he's the publisher who came after Katharine, and he's fearful that he'll blow her legacy. Downie's is that he came after Bradlee, and he's afraid he'll blow his. Who remembers the guys who canoed after Lewis and Clark? No wonder they operate the paper as if the frontier has closed behind them. In that context, Graham's conservatism makes business sense. His paper claims the highest reader penetration in the nation and is immensely profitable. Warren Buffett, a major stockholder in the company, whispers into his ear that he's a business genius. Why disturb the money-making machine? \n\n The last time the paper took an editorial risk was in 1986, when it barred no expense in relaunching the Washington Post",
"The boldest Post stroke in recent years came this spring when Downie dethroned Kaiser as managing editor and appointed Steve Coll, a 39-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning whiz, who most recently served as Sunday magazine editor/publisher. Coll's vision for the Post , also laid out in a Pugwash speech, sounds like a description of the New New York Times : \"[T]he future of the Post depends mightily on our ability to excel at enterprise journalism--on our ability to think more creatively, to tear the skin off of our subjects more often, to write better, to go deeper, to be more alive, to make more of a difference to readers.\" Good luck, Steve, you'll need it.",
"Wanted on China\"). The Post 's version is probably closer to the facts, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I've enjoyed the Times ' sensationalist coverage more.",
"The Post isn't powered by Volvo--yet. But in adopting Old New York Times values of cautiousness and fairness and dullness, in striving to become the new Newspaper of Record, the Post",
"Magazine as a prestige Sunday magazine on the scale of the New York Times Magazine . But the Magazine never got to compete with the Magazine : It was bushwhacked by a black talk-radio demagogue who unfairly labeled the debut issue racist and targeted the paper with demonstrations and a boycott. Its momentum shattered, the extravagantly funded Washington Post Magazine limped along for a couple of years until the Post abandoned its grand financial and editorial ambitions and downscaled it. \n\n Various sections of the Post have improved since then--it has invested heavily in zoned suburban coverage, expanded its business page, improved the quality of its travel section, extended the heft of its sports coverage, experimented with an advertorial insert about consumer electronics, and added a monthly midbrow science/history section (\"Horizon\")--but it's taken no publishing risks."
],
[
"On the vice side of the exchange, the Times ... takes a lot of risks. It's now the primary exponent of what Post ie Bob Woodward famously called the \"holy shit\" story--pieces so astonishing that you scream spontaneous profanities when you read them. The downside of holy shit stories is that they can turn out to be wholly bullshit, as Woodward learned in 1981, when a reporter under his editorial watch, Janet Cooke, got caught making up a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict.",
"In the traded virtue category: The Times takes a lot of risks. It has turned its back on the five boroughs to become a national newspaper, even purchasing the Boston Globe , while the Post has burrowed deeper locally. Its columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich dish the sort of sauce Nicholas von Hoffman and the young Richard Cohen once served at the Post . It continues to innovate, with new sections like Monday's \"Business Day\" (a k a \"The Information Industries\") and Saturday's \"Arts and Ideas,\" while the Post hasn't contributed anything significant to the template since the \"Style\" section in 1969. Its Sunday magazine is the best general interest publication in the world. The Post 's isn't.",
"In its pursuit of holy shit, the Times routinely spins out of control. In 1991, it published the name of the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of rape--for no particular reason--and then",
"Perhaps the Times derives its edge from its succession politics. Whereas Ben Bradlee served as Post editor-for-life, the Times places an informal term limit on its executive editor job, and this turnover has helped to reinvigorate the paper: Times executive editors know they must make their mark in haste, before their tenure is over. A.M. Rosenthal reinvented the paper during his tenure from 1977 to 1986, stealing from Clay Felker's playbook to explode the Times into a many sectioned national paper. His successor, Max Frankel, brought vivid writing to the paper from 1986 to 1994, making sure that one story made it to Page 1 every day just because it was fun to read. Joseph Lelyveld, who took over from Frankel, has stayed their courses.",
"Timesmen don't pay much attention to the Post , except to periodically raid the paper--as if it were a minor league team--for some of its better players. ( Post defectors include Celestine Bohlen, Gwen Ifill, Julia Preston, Michael Specter, Patrick Tyler, Patti Cohen, and David Richards--who defected back. Few careers, outside of E.J. Dionne's, have been made by going the other way.) But it should pay closer attention. It desperately needs something like the Style section, where it can run imprudent stories that readers are dying to read but have yet to acquire the Heft and Importance of a New York Times News Story. Then again, if the Times were to embrace the virtue of a Style section (or is that a vice?), would its news sections lose their current virtue of attitude?",
"Post ies, on the other hand, obsess on the Times . Last month at the Post 's annual \"Pugwash\" editorial retreat, outgoing Managing Editor Robert Kaiser began his speech with the preposterous boast that the Post , with a staff half the size of the Times ', \"does more for its readers, day in and day out.\" Kaiser obviously lusts for the Old Times as he repeatedly calls for \"authoritative journalism\" and higher journalistic \"standards,\" and petitions Post ies to be more intellectual and creative. \"Authoritative, creative journalism that meets the highest standards must have intellectual content,\" Kaiser says at speech's end as he road-wrecks his themes. Somebody get this editor an editor!",
"Just this spring, two reckless Times stories slid off the road. Gina Kolata prematurely announced a cancer cure (while shopping a book proposal on the subject) and Rick Bragg botched a simple story about police corruption in small-town Alabama. Bragg, a writerish reporter who would be at home in Style, earned in the June 9 Times . The jailed sheriff spent 27 months behind bars, not 27 years, as Bragg originally reported. Bragg also got the age of the crusading newspaper editor wrong, misstated the paper's circulation, and mistakenly described the method by which the sheriff defrauded the government (the sheriff cashed checks improperly made out to him; he did not cash checks made out to the government). \n\n Horrible! Just horrible! But consider the alternative. Who wants to read a porcelain white newspaper that has flushed all its holy shit? Whose reporters drive Volvos to work?",
"has lost its verve. Sometimes a loss of verve is not a bad thing. Compare the Times and Post coverage of the China satellite story. In the Times , Jeff Gerth implies that illegal campaign donations from China + the extravagant",
"Don Graham's biggest handicap is that he's the publisher who came after Katharine, and he's fearful that he'll blow her legacy. Downie's is that he came after Bradlee, and he's afraid he'll blow his. Who remembers the guys who canoed after Lewis and Clark? No wonder they operate the paper as if the frontier has closed behind them. In that context, Graham's conservatism makes business sense. His paper claims the highest reader penetration in the nation and is immensely profitable. Warren Buffett, a major stockholder in the company, whispers into his ear that he's a business genius. Why disturb the money-making machine? \n\n The last time the paper took an editorial risk was in 1986, when it barred no expense in relaunching the Washington Post",
"Other traded virtues: The Times prints in color, the Post doesn't (yet). The Times sports an aggressive and handsome design. The recent Post redesign aches like a bad face lift. Times Editorial Page Editor Howell Raines writes barrelhouse editorials demanding action--such as the resignation of Janet Reno--that stir substance and fanfaronade. The Post editorial and op-ed pages are so evenhanded that if Scotty Reston were resurrected, his soft gas would appear there, alongside that of Jim Hoagland. And the Times seasons its reporting with opinion, while the once liberal-and-proud-of-it Post prides itself on cool neutrality (some would count this as a swapped vice and not a swapped virtue). On the news side, Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. boasts he's so bias-free that he doesn't vote.",
"The Post isn't powered by Volvo--yet. But in adopting Old New York Times values of cautiousness and fairness and dullness, in striving to become the new Newspaper of Record, the Post",
"Wanted on China\"). The Post 's version is probably closer to the facts, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I've enjoyed the Times ' sensationalist coverage more.",
"Meanwhile, the 56-year-old Downie is now seven years into the job. If he were a Times man, they'd be farming him out to write a column right about now. Instead, he's ensconced like the pope.",
"The boldest Post stroke in recent years came this spring when Downie dethroned Kaiser as managing editor and appointed Steve Coll, a 39-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning whiz, who most recently served as Sunday magazine editor/publisher. Coll's vision for the Post , also laid out in a Pugwash speech, sounds like a description of the New New York Times : \"[T]he future of the Post depends mightily on our ability to excel at enterprise journalism--on our ability to think more creatively, to tear the skin off of our subjects more often, to write better, to go deeper, to be more alive, to make more of a difference to readers.\" Good luck, Steve, you'll need it.",
"The question of how the audacious paper turned stodgy floats over the Post newsroom like a thought balloon. The easy answer: Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee departed in 1991 after 26 years at the top. This theory singles out current Executive Editor Downie for abuse, but complacency took root as early as 1981, when the Post 's cross-town competitor, the Washington Star , folded, allowing the fat beast to diddle all it wanted without paying a price. When Donald Graham took over as publisher, he picked Downie as the editor who would help steer the paper away from the Georgetown elites and toward the masses, away from national competition and straight at the suburban dailies. You're reading the paper they wanted to make.",
"The Changelings \n\n When did the Washington Post swap identities with the New York Times ? One day, it seemed, the Post rollicked readers with its cheeky personality and the next suffocated them with the sort of overcast official news that made the Times famous. Meanwhile, the Times sloughed its Old Gray Lady persona for the daredevilry that was the Post franchise. \n\n The switch dawned on me one morning 10 years ago as I found myself flipping through the Post because I had to, not because I wanted to--and reading the Times for the joy of it, not because it was the newspaper of record. I know this sounds like the beginning of an encomium for the Times at the expense of the Post , but it's not. When the papers traded places, they exchanged virtues as well as vices .",
"Magazine as a prestige Sunday magazine on the scale of the New York Times Magazine . But the Magazine never got to compete with the Magazine : It was bushwhacked by a black talk-radio demagogue who unfairly labeled the debut issue racist and targeted the paper with demonstrations and a boycott. Its momentum shattered, the extravagantly funded Washington Post Magazine limped along for a couple of years until the Post abandoned its grand financial and editorial ambitions and downscaled it. \n\n Various sections of the Post have improved since then--it has invested heavily in zoned suburban coverage, expanded its business page, improved the quality of its travel section, extended the heft of its sports coverage, experimented with an advertorial insert about consumer electronics, and added a monthly midbrow science/history section (\"Horizon\")--but it's taken no publishing risks.",
"apologized for it. That same year, the paper digested Kitty Kelley's spuriously sourced Nancy Reagan biography on Page 1. In a transparent lunge for a Pulitzer Prize in early 1996, the Times published a seven-part series alleging that the",
"Of course the Post doesn't tiptoe all the time. Woodward's 1996 campaign finance pieces struck a chord that still rings, and I predict a similar impact for Barton Gellman's two-part series last week about how the United States and China nearly went to war in 1996 (click here and here). At its best, the Post can still swarm a breaking news story like Flytrap. But at its worst, it sits on hot news. In 1992, the paper delayed its exposé of masher Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., until after the election, thereby assuring his return to the Senate. In 1994, it spiked Michael Isikoff's Paula Jones reporting, so he left for Newsweek , where he has led the Flytrap story.",
"downsizing of the American workforce was creating \"millions of casualties.\" Actually, job creation was booming. Later that year, the paper spread its legs for the theory that TWA Flight 800 was downed by foul play, based on the discovery of"
],
[
"On the vice side of the exchange, the Times ... takes a lot of risks. It's now the primary exponent of what Post ie Bob Woodward famously called the \"holy shit\" story--pieces so astonishing that you scream spontaneous profanities when you read them. The downside of holy shit stories is that they can turn out to be wholly bullshit, as Woodward learned in 1981, when a reporter under his editorial watch, Janet Cooke, got caught making up a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict.",
"In the traded virtue category: The Times takes a lot of risks. It has turned its back on the five boroughs to become a national newspaper, even purchasing the Boston Globe , while the Post has burrowed deeper locally. Its columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich dish the sort of sauce Nicholas von Hoffman and the young Richard Cohen once served at the Post . It continues to innovate, with new sections like Monday's \"Business Day\" (a k a \"The Information Industries\") and Saturday's \"Arts and Ideas,\" while the Post hasn't contributed anything significant to the template since the \"Style\" section in 1969. Its Sunday magazine is the best general interest publication in the world. The Post 's isn't.",
"Just this spring, two reckless Times stories slid off the road. Gina Kolata prematurely announced a cancer cure (while shopping a book proposal on the subject) and Rick Bragg botched a simple story about police corruption in small-town Alabama. Bragg, a writerish reporter who would be at home in Style, earned in the June 9 Times . The jailed sheriff spent 27 months behind bars, not 27 years, as Bragg originally reported. Bragg also got the age of the crusading newspaper editor wrong, misstated the paper's circulation, and mistakenly described the method by which the sheriff defrauded the government (the sheriff cashed checks improperly made out to him; he did not cash checks made out to the government). \n\n Horrible! Just horrible! But consider the alternative. Who wants to read a porcelain white newspaper that has flushed all its holy shit? Whose reporters drive Volvos to work?",
"In its pursuit of holy shit, the Times routinely spins out of control. In 1991, it published the name of the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of rape--for no particular reason--and then",
"Don Graham's biggest handicap is that he's the publisher who came after Katharine, and he's fearful that he'll blow her legacy. Downie's is that he came after Bradlee, and he's afraid he'll blow his. Who remembers the guys who canoed after Lewis and Clark? No wonder they operate the paper as if the frontier has closed behind them. In that context, Graham's conservatism makes business sense. His paper claims the highest reader penetration in the nation and is immensely profitable. Warren Buffett, a major stockholder in the company, whispers into his ear that he's a business genius. Why disturb the money-making machine? \n\n The last time the paper took an editorial risk was in 1986, when it barred no expense in relaunching the Washington Post",
"Perhaps the Times derives its edge from its succession politics. Whereas Ben Bradlee served as Post editor-for-life, the Times places an informal term limit on its executive editor job, and this turnover has helped to reinvigorate the paper: Times executive editors know they must make their mark in haste, before their tenure is over. A.M. Rosenthal reinvented the paper during his tenure from 1977 to 1986, stealing from Clay Felker's playbook to explode the Times into a many sectioned national paper. His successor, Max Frankel, brought vivid writing to the paper from 1986 to 1994, making sure that one story made it to Page 1 every day just because it was fun to read. Joseph Lelyveld, who took over from Frankel, has stayed their courses.",
"Timesmen don't pay much attention to the Post , except to periodically raid the paper--as if it were a minor league team--for some of its better players. ( Post defectors include Celestine Bohlen, Gwen Ifill, Julia Preston, Michael Specter, Patrick Tyler, Patti Cohen, and David Richards--who defected back. Few careers, outside of E.J. Dionne's, have been made by going the other way.) But it should pay closer attention. It desperately needs something like the Style section, where it can run imprudent stories that readers are dying to read but have yet to acquire the Heft and Importance of a New York Times News Story. Then again, if the Times were to embrace the virtue of a Style section (or is that a vice?), would its news sections lose their current virtue of attitude?",
"Post ies, on the other hand, obsess on the Times . Last month at the Post 's annual \"Pugwash\" editorial retreat, outgoing Managing Editor Robert Kaiser began his speech with the preposterous boast that the Post , with a staff half the size of the Times ', \"does more for its readers, day in and day out.\" Kaiser obviously lusts for the Old Times as he repeatedly calls for \"authoritative journalism\" and higher journalistic \"standards,\" and petitions Post ies to be more intellectual and creative. \"Authoritative, creative journalism that meets the highest standards must have intellectual content,\" Kaiser says at speech's end as he road-wrecks his themes. Somebody get this editor an editor!",
"The Changelings \n\n When did the Washington Post swap identities with the New York Times ? One day, it seemed, the Post rollicked readers with its cheeky personality and the next suffocated them with the sort of overcast official news that made the Times famous. Meanwhile, the Times sloughed its Old Gray Lady persona for the daredevilry that was the Post franchise. \n\n The switch dawned on me one morning 10 years ago as I found myself flipping through the Post because I had to, not because I wanted to--and reading the Times for the joy of it, not because it was the newspaper of record. I know this sounds like the beginning of an encomium for the Times at the expense of the Post , but it's not. When the papers traded places, they exchanged virtues as well as vices .",
"Other traded virtues: The Times prints in color, the Post doesn't (yet). The Times sports an aggressive and handsome design. The recent Post redesign aches like a bad face lift. Times Editorial Page Editor Howell Raines writes barrelhouse editorials demanding action--such as the resignation of Janet Reno--that stir substance and fanfaronade. The Post editorial and op-ed pages are so evenhanded that if Scotty Reston were resurrected, his soft gas would appear there, alongside that of Jim Hoagland. And the Times seasons its reporting with opinion, while the once liberal-and-proud-of-it Post prides itself on cool neutrality (some would count this as a swapped vice and not a swapped virtue). On the news side, Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. boasts he's so bias-free that he doesn't vote.",
"The boldest Post stroke in recent years came this spring when Downie dethroned Kaiser as managing editor and appointed Steve Coll, a 39-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning whiz, who most recently served as Sunday magazine editor/publisher. Coll's vision for the Post , also laid out in a Pugwash speech, sounds like a description of the New New York Times : \"[T]he future of the Post depends mightily on our ability to excel at enterprise journalism--on our ability to think more creatively, to tear the skin off of our subjects more often, to write better, to go deeper, to be more alive, to make more of a difference to readers.\" Good luck, Steve, you'll need it.",
"The question of how the audacious paper turned stodgy floats over the Post newsroom like a thought balloon. The easy answer: Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee departed in 1991 after 26 years at the top. This theory singles out current Executive Editor Downie for abuse, but complacency took root as early as 1981, when the Post 's cross-town competitor, the Washington Star , folded, allowing the fat beast to diddle all it wanted without paying a price. When Donald Graham took over as publisher, he picked Downie as the editor who would help steer the paper away from the Georgetown elites and toward the masses, away from national competition and straight at the suburban dailies. You're reading the paper they wanted to make.",
"Magazine as a prestige Sunday magazine on the scale of the New York Times Magazine . But the Magazine never got to compete with the Magazine : It was bushwhacked by a black talk-radio demagogue who unfairly labeled the debut issue racist and targeted the paper with demonstrations and a boycott. Its momentum shattered, the extravagantly funded Washington Post Magazine limped along for a couple of years until the Post abandoned its grand financial and editorial ambitions and downscaled it. \n\n Various sections of the Post have improved since then--it has invested heavily in zoned suburban coverage, expanded its business page, improved the quality of its travel section, extended the heft of its sports coverage, experimented with an advertorial insert about consumer electronics, and added a monthly midbrow science/history section (\"Horizon\")--but it's taken no publishing risks.",
"has lost its verve. Sometimes a loss of verve is not a bad thing. Compare the Times and Post coverage of the China satellite story. In the Times , Jeff Gerth implies that illegal campaign donations from China + the extravagant",
"The Post isn't powered by Volvo--yet. But in adopting Old New York Times values of cautiousness and fairness and dullness, in striving to become the new Newspaper of Record, the Post",
"Wanted on China\"). The Post 's version is probably closer to the facts, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I've enjoyed the Times ' sensationalist coverage more.",
"apologized for it. That same year, the paper digested Kitty Kelley's spuriously sourced Nancy Reagan biography on Page 1. In a transparent lunge for a Pulitzer Prize in early 1996, the Times published a seven-part series alleging that the",
"Meanwhile, the 56-year-old Downie is now seven years into the job. If he were a Times man, they'd be farming him out to write a column right about now. Instead, he's ensconced like the pope.",
"Of course the Post doesn't tiptoe all the time. Woodward's 1996 campaign finance pieces struck a chord that still rings, and I predict a similar impact for Barton Gellman's two-part series last week about how the United States and China nearly went to war in 1996 (click here and here). At its best, the Post can still swarm a breaking news story like Flytrap. But at its worst, it sits on hot news. In 1992, the paper delayed its exposé of masher Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., until after the election, thereby assuring his return to the Senate. In 1994, it spiked Michael Isikoff's Paula Jones reporting, so he left for Newsweek , where he has led the Flytrap story.",
"downsizing of the American workforce was creating \"millions of casualties.\" Actually, job creation was booming. Later that year, the paper spread its legs for the theory that TWA Flight 800 was downed by foul play, based on the discovery of"
],
[
"The question of how the audacious paper turned stodgy floats over the Post newsroom like a thought balloon. The easy answer: Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee departed in 1991 after 26 years at the top. This theory singles out current Executive Editor Downie for abuse, but complacency took root as early as 1981, when the Post 's cross-town competitor, the Washington Star , folded, allowing the fat beast to diddle all it wanted without paying a price. When Donald Graham took over as publisher, he picked Downie as the editor who would help steer the paper away from the Georgetown elites and toward the masses, away from national competition and straight at the suburban dailies. You're reading the paper they wanted to make.",
"Post ies, on the other hand, obsess on the Times . Last month at the Post 's annual \"Pugwash\" editorial retreat, outgoing Managing Editor Robert Kaiser began his speech with the preposterous boast that the Post , with a staff half the size of the Times ', \"does more for its readers, day in and day out.\" Kaiser obviously lusts for the Old Times as he repeatedly calls for \"authoritative journalism\" and higher journalistic \"standards,\" and petitions Post ies to be more intellectual and creative. \"Authoritative, creative journalism that meets the highest standards must have intellectual content,\" Kaiser says at speech's end as he road-wrecks his themes. Somebody get this editor an editor!",
"Other traded virtues: The Times prints in color, the Post doesn't (yet). The Times sports an aggressive and handsome design. The recent Post redesign aches like a bad face lift. Times Editorial Page Editor Howell Raines writes barrelhouse editorials demanding action--such as the resignation of Janet Reno--that stir substance and fanfaronade. The Post editorial and op-ed pages are so evenhanded that if Scotty Reston were resurrected, his soft gas would appear there, alongside that of Jim Hoagland. And the Times seasons its reporting with opinion, while the once liberal-and-proud-of-it Post prides itself on cool neutrality (some would count this as a swapped vice and not a swapped virtue). On the news side, Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. boasts he's so bias-free that he doesn't vote.",
"The boldest Post stroke in recent years came this spring when Downie dethroned Kaiser as managing editor and appointed Steve Coll, a 39-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning whiz, who most recently served as Sunday magazine editor/publisher. Coll's vision for the Post , also laid out in a Pugwash speech, sounds like a description of the New New York Times : \"[T]he future of the Post depends mightily on our ability to excel at enterprise journalism--on our ability to think more creatively, to tear the skin off of our subjects more often, to write better, to go deeper, to be more alive, to make more of a difference to readers.\" Good luck, Steve, you'll need it.",
"Don Graham's biggest handicap is that he's the publisher who came after Katharine, and he's fearful that he'll blow her legacy. Downie's is that he came after Bradlee, and he's afraid he'll blow his. Who remembers the guys who canoed after Lewis and Clark? No wonder they operate the paper as if the frontier has closed behind them. In that context, Graham's conservatism makes business sense. His paper claims the highest reader penetration in the nation and is immensely profitable. Warren Buffett, a major stockholder in the company, whispers into his ear that he's a business genius. Why disturb the money-making machine? \n\n The last time the paper took an editorial risk was in 1986, when it barred no expense in relaunching the Washington Post",
"In the traded virtue category: The Times takes a lot of risks. It has turned its back on the five boroughs to become a national newspaper, even purchasing the Boston Globe , while the Post has burrowed deeper locally. Its columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich dish the sort of sauce Nicholas von Hoffman and the young Richard Cohen once served at the Post . It continues to innovate, with new sections like Monday's \"Business Day\" (a k a \"The Information Industries\") and Saturday's \"Arts and Ideas,\" while the Post hasn't contributed anything significant to the template since the \"Style\" section in 1969. Its Sunday magazine is the best general interest publication in the world. The Post 's isn't.",
"Perhaps the Times derives its edge from its succession politics. Whereas Ben Bradlee served as Post editor-for-life, the Times places an informal term limit on its executive editor job, and this turnover has helped to reinvigorate the paper: Times executive editors know they must make their mark in haste, before their tenure is over. A.M. Rosenthal reinvented the paper during his tenure from 1977 to 1986, stealing from Clay Felker's playbook to explode the Times into a many sectioned national paper. His successor, Max Frankel, brought vivid writing to the paper from 1986 to 1994, making sure that one story made it to Page 1 every day just because it was fun to read. Joseph Lelyveld, who took over from Frankel, has stayed their courses.",
"Of course the Post doesn't tiptoe all the time. Woodward's 1996 campaign finance pieces struck a chord that still rings, and I predict a similar impact for Barton Gellman's two-part series last week about how the United States and China nearly went to war in 1996 (click here and here). At its best, the Post can still swarm a breaking news story like Flytrap. But at its worst, it sits on hot news. In 1992, the paper delayed its exposé of masher Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., until after the election, thereby assuring his return to the Senate. In 1994, it spiked Michael Isikoff's Paula Jones reporting, so he left for Newsweek , where he has led the Flytrap story.",
"has lost its verve. Sometimes a loss of verve is not a bad thing. Compare the Times and Post coverage of the China satellite story. In the Times , Jeff Gerth implies that illegal campaign donations from China + the extravagant",
"On the vice side of the exchange, the Times ... takes a lot of risks. It's now the primary exponent of what Post ie Bob Woodward famously called the \"holy shit\" story--pieces so astonishing that you scream spontaneous profanities when you read them. The downside of holy shit stories is that they can turn out to be wholly bullshit, as Woodward learned in 1981, when a reporter under his editorial watch, Janet Cooke, got caught making up a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict.",
"The Post isn't powered by Volvo--yet. But in adopting Old New York Times values of cautiousness and fairness and dullness, in striving to become the new Newspaper of Record, the Post",
"The Changelings \n\n When did the Washington Post swap identities with the New York Times ? One day, it seemed, the Post rollicked readers with its cheeky personality and the next suffocated them with the sort of overcast official news that made the Times famous. Meanwhile, the Times sloughed its Old Gray Lady persona for the daredevilry that was the Post franchise. \n\n The switch dawned on me one morning 10 years ago as I found myself flipping through the Post because I had to, not because I wanted to--and reading the Times for the joy of it, not because it was the newspaper of record. I know this sounds like the beginning of an encomium for the Times at the expense of the Post , but it's not. When the papers traded places, they exchanged virtues as well as vices .",
"Timesmen don't pay much attention to the Post , except to periodically raid the paper--as if it were a minor league team--for some of its better players. ( Post defectors include Celestine Bohlen, Gwen Ifill, Julia Preston, Michael Specter, Patrick Tyler, Patti Cohen, and David Richards--who defected back. Few careers, outside of E.J. Dionne's, have been made by going the other way.) But it should pay closer attention. It desperately needs something like the Style section, where it can run imprudent stories that readers are dying to read but have yet to acquire the Heft and Importance of a New York Times News Story. Then again, if the Times were to embrace the virtue of a Style section (or is that a vice?), would its news sections lose their current virtue of attitude?",
"Just this spring, two reckless Times stories slid off the road. Gina Kolata prematurely announced a cancer cure (while shopping a book proposal on the subject) and Rick Bragg botched a simple story about police corruption in small-town Alabama. Bragg, a writerish reporter who would be at home in Style, earned in the June 9 Times . The jailed sheriff spent 27 months behind bars, not 27 years, as Bragg originally reported. Bragg also got the age of the crusading newspaper editor wrong, misstated the paper's circulation, and mistakenly described the method by which the sheriff defrauded the government (the sheriff cashed checks improperly made out to him; he did not cash checks made out to the government). \n\n Horrible! Just horrible! But consider the alternative. Who wants to read a porcelain white newspaper that has flushed all its holy shit? Whose reporters drive Volvos to work?",
"Magazine as a prestige Sunday magazine on the scale of the New York Times Magazine . But the Magazine never got to compete with the Magazine : It was bushwhacked by a black talk-radio demagogue who unfairly labeled the debut issue racist and targeted the paper with demonstrations and a boycott. Its momentum shattered, the extravagantly funded Washington Post Magazine limped along for a couple of years until the Post abandoned its grand financial and editorial ambitions and downscaled it. \n\n Various sections of the Post have improved since then--it has invested heavily in zoned suburban coverage, expanded its business page, improved the quality of its travel section, extended the heft of its sports coverage, experimented with an advertorial insert about consumer electronics, and added a monthly midbrow science/history section (\"Horizon\")--but it's taken no publishing risks.",
"Meanwhile, the 56-year-old Downie is now seven years into the job. If he were a Times man, they'd be farming him out to write a column right about now. Instead, he's ensconced like the pope.",
"downsizing of the American workforce was creating \"millions of casualties.\" Actually, job creation was booming. Later that year, the paper spread its legs for the theory that TWA Flight 800 was downed by foul play, based on the discovery of",
"Wanted on China\"). The Post 's version is probably closer to the facts, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I've enjoyed the Times ' sensationalist coverage more.",
"apologized for it. That same year, the paper digested Kitty Kelley's spuriously sourced Nancy Reagan biography on Page 1. In a transparent lunge for a Pulitzer Prize in early 1996, the Times published a seven-part series alleging that the",
"In its pursuit of holy shit, the Times routinely spins out of control. In 1991, it published the name of the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of rape--for no particular reason--and then"
],
[
"Post ies, on the other hand, obsess on the Times . Last month at the Post 's annual \"Pugwash\" editorial retreat, outgoing Managing Editor Robert Kaiser began his speech with the preposterous boast that the Post , with a staff half the size of the Times ', \"does more for its readers, day in and day out.\" Kaiser obviously lusts for the Old Times as he repeatedly calls for \"authoritative journalism\" and higher journalistic \"standards,\" and petitions Post ies to be more intellectual and creative. \"Authoritative, creative journalism that meets the highest standards must have intellectual content,\" Kaiser says at speech's end as he road-wrecks his themes. Somebody get this editor an editor!",
"Timesmen don't pay much attention to the Post , except to periodically raid the paper--as if it were a minor league team--for some of its better players. ( Post defectors include Celestine Bohlen, Gwen Ifill, Julia Preston, Michael Specter, Patrick Tyler, Patti Cohen, and David Richards--who defected back. Few careers, outside of E.J. Dionne's, have been made by going the other way.) But it should pay closer attention. It desperately needs something like the Style section, where it can run imprudent stories that readers are dying to read but have yet to acquire the Heft and Importance of a New York Times News Story. Then again, if the Times were to embrace the virtue of a Style section (or is that a vice?), would its news sections lose their current virtue of attitude?",
"Perhaps the Times derives its edge from its succession politics. Whereas Ben Bradlee served as Post editor-for-life, the Times places an informal term limit on its executive editor job, and this turnover has helped to reinvigorate the paper: Times executive editors know they must make their mark in haste, before their tenure is over. A.M. Rosenthal reinvented the paper during his tenure from 1977 to 1986, stealing from Clay Felker's playbook to explode the Times into a many sectioned national paper. His successor, Max Frankel, brought vivid writing to the paper from 1986 to 1994, making sure that one story made it to Page 1 every day just because it was fun to read. Joseph Lelyveld, who took over from Frankel, has stayed their courses.",
"Other traded virtues: The Times prints in color, the Post doesn't (yet). The Times sports an aggressive and handsome design. The recent Post redesign aches like a bad face lift. Times Editorial Page Editor Howell Raines writes barrelhouse editorials demanding action--such as the resignation of Janet Reno--that stir substance and fanfaronade. The Post editorial and op-ed pages are so evenhanded that if Scotty Reston were resurrected, his soft gas would appear there, alongside that of Jim Hoagland. And the Times seasons its reporting with opinion, while the once liberal-and-proud-of-it Post prides itself on cool neutrality (some would count this as a swapped vice and not a swapped virtue). On the news side, Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. boasts he's so bias-free that he doesn't vote.",
"The Changelings \n\n When did the Washington Post swap identities with the New York Times ? One day, it seemed, the Post rollicked readers with its cheeky personality and the next suffocated them with the sort of overcast official news that made the Times famous. Meanwhile, the Times sloughed its Old Gray Lady persona for the daredevilry that was the Post franchise. \n\n The switch dawned on me one morning 10 years ago as I found myself flipping through the Post because I had to, not because I wanted to--and reading the Times for the joy of it, not because it was the newspaper of record. I know this sounds like the beginning of an encomium for the Times at the expense of the Post , but it's not. When the papers traded places, they exchanged virtues as well as vices .",
"In the traded virtue category: The Times takes a lot of risks. It has turned its back on the five boroughs to become a national newspaper, even purchasing the Boston Globe , while the Post has burrowed deeper locally. Its columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich dish the sort of sauce Nicholas von Hoffman and the young Richard Cohen once served at the Post . It continues to innovate, with new sections like Monday's \"Business Day\" (a k a \"The Information Industries\") and Saturday's \"Arts and Ideas,\" while the Post hasn't contributed anything significant to the template since the \"Style\" section in 1969. Its Sunday magazine is the best general interest publication in the world. The Post 's isn't.",
"Of course the Post doesn't tiptoe all the time. Woodward's 1996 campaign finance pieces struck a chord that still rings, and I predict a similar impact for Barton Gellman's two-part series last week about how the United States and China nearly went to war in 1996 (click here and here). At its best, the Post can still swarm a breaking news story like Flytrap. But at its worst, it sits on hot news. In 1992, the paper delayed its exposé of masher Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., until after the election, thereby assuring his return to the Senate. In 1994, it spiked Michael Isikoff's Paula Jones reporting, so he left for Newsweek , where he has led the Flytrap story.",
"On the vice side of the exchange, the Times ... takes a lot of risks. It's now the primary exponent of what Post ie Bob Woodward famously called the \"holy shit\" story--pieces so astonishing that you scream spontaneous profanities when you read them. The downside of holy shit stories is that they can turn out to be wholly bullshit, as Woodward learned in 1981, when a reporter under his editorial watch, Janet Cooke, got caught making up a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict.",
"Wanted on China\"). The Post 's version is probably closer to the facts, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I've enjoyed the Times ' sensationalist coverage more.",
"The boldest Post stroke in recent years came this spring when Downie dethroned Kaiser as managing editor and appointed Steve Coll, a 39-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning whiz, who most recently served as Sunday magazine editor/publisher. Coll's vision for the Post , also laid out in a Pugwash speech, sounds like a description of the New New York Times : \"[T]he future of the Post depends mightily on our ability to excel at enterprise journalism--on our ability to think more creatively, to tear the skin off of our subjects more often, to write better, to go deeper, to be more alive, to make more of a difference to readers.\" Good luck, Steve, you'll need it.",
"has lost its verve. Sometimes a loss of verve is not a bad thing. Compare the Times and Post coverage of the China satellite story. In the Times , Jeff Gerth implies that illegal campaign donations from China + the extravagant",
"The question of how the audacious paper turned stodgy floats over the Post newsroom like a thought balloon. The easy answer: Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee departed in 1991 after 26 years at the top. This theory singles out current Executive Editor Downie for abuse, but complacency took root as early as 1981, when the Post 's cross-town competitor, the Washington Star , folded, allowing the fat beast to diddle all it wanted without paying a price. When Donald Graham took over as publisher, he picked Downie as the editor who would help steer the paper away from the Georgetown elites and toward the masses, away from national competition and straight at the suburban dailies. You're reading the paper they wanted to make.",
"Just this spring, two reckless Times stories slid off the road. Gina Kolata prematurely announced a cancer cure (while shopping a book proposal on the subject) and Rick Bragg botched a simple story about police corruption in small-town Alabama. Bragg, a writerish reporter who would be at home in Style, earned in the June 9 Times . The jailed sheriff spent 27 months behind bars, not 27 years, as Bragg originally reported. Bragg also got the age of the crusading newspaper editor wrong, misstated the paper's circulation, and mistakenly described the method by which the sheriff defrauded the government (the sheriff cashed checks improperly made out to him; he did not cash checks made out to the government). \n\n Horrible! Just horrible! But consider the alternative. Who wants to read a porcelain white newspaper that has flushed all its holy shit? Whose reporters drive Volvos to work?",
"In its pursuit of holy shit, the Times routinely spins out of control. In 1991, it published the name of the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of rape--for no particular reason--and then",
"Don Graham's biggest handicap is that he's the publisher who came after Katharine, and he's fearful that he'll blow her legacy. Downie's is that he came after Bradlee, and he's afraid he'll blow his. Who remembers the guys who canoed after Lewis and Clark? No wonder they operate the paper as if the frontier has closed behind them. In that context, Graham's conservatism makes business sense. His paper claims the highest reader penetration in the nation and is immensely profitable. Warren Buffett, a major stockholder in the company, whispers into his ear that he's a business genius. Why disturb the money-making machine? \n\n The last time the paper took an editorial risk was in 1986, when it barred no expense in relaunching the Washington Post",
"The Post isn't powered by Volvo--yet. But in adopting Old New York Times values of cautiousness and fairness and dullness, in striving to become the new Newspaper of Record, the Post",
"Magazine as a prestige Sunday magazine on the scale of the New York Times Magazine . But the Magazine never got to compete with the Magazine : It was bushwhacked by a black talk-radio demagogue who unfairly labeled the debut issue racist and targeted the paper with demonstrations and a boycott. Its momentum shattered, the extravagantly funded Washington Post Magazine limped along for a couple of years until the Post abandoned its grand financial and editorial ambitions and downscaled it. \n\n Various sections of the Post have improved since then--it has invested heavily in zoned suburban coverage, expanded its business page, improved the quality of its travel section, extended the heft of its sports coverage, experimented with an advertorial insert about consumer electronics, and added a monthly midbrow science/history section (\"Horizon\")--but it's taken no publishing risks.",
"apologized for it. That same year, the paper digested Kitty Kelley's spuriously sourced Nancy Reagan biography on Page 1. In a transparent lunge for a Pulitzer Prize in early 1996, the Times published a seven-part series alleging that the",
"Meanwhile, the 56-year-old Downie is now seven years into the job. If he were a Times man, they'd be farming him out to write a column right about now. Instead, he's ensconced like the pope.",
"downsizing of the American workforce was creating \"millions of casualties.\" Actually, job creation was booming. Later that year, the paper spread its legs for the theory that TWA Flight 800 was downed by foul play, based on the discovery of"
],
[
"In the traded virtue category: The Times takes a lot of risks. It has turned its back on the five boroughs to become a national newspaper, even purchasing the Boston Globe , while the Post has burrowed deeper locally. Its columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich dish the sort of sauce Nicholas von Hoffman and the young Richard Cohen once served at the Post . It continues to innovate, with new sections like Monday's \"Business Day\" (a k a \"The Information Industries\") and Saturday's \"Arts and Ideas,\" while the Post hasn't contributed anything significant to the template since the \"Style\" section in 1969. Its Sunday magazine is the best general interest publication in the world. The Post 's isn't.",
"Perhaps the Times derives its edge from its succession politics. Whereas Ben Bradlee served as Post editor-for-life, the Times places an informal term limit on its executive editor job, and this turnover has helped to reinvigorate the paper: Times executive editors know they must make their mark in haste, before their tenure is over. A.M. Rosenthal reinvented the paper during his tenure from 1977 to 1986, stealing from Clay Felker's playbook to explode the Times into a many sectioned national paper. His successor, Max Frankel, brought vivid writing to the paper from 1986 to 1994, making sure that one story made it to Page 1 every day just because it was fun to read. Joseph Lelyveld, who took over from Frankel, has stayed their courses.",
"Other traded virtues: The Times prints in color, the Post doesn't (yet). The Times sports an aggressive and handsome design. The recent Post redesign aches like a bad face lift. Times Editorial Page Editor Howell Raines writes barrelhouse editorials demanding action--such as the resignation of Janet Reno--that stir substance and fanfaronade. The Post editorial and op-ed pages are so evenhanded that if Scotty Reston were resurrected, his soft gas would appear there, alongside that of Jim Hoagland. And the Times seasons its reporting with opinion, while the once liberal-and-proud-of-it Post prides itself on cool neutrality (some would count this as a swapped vice and not a swapped virtue). On the news side, Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. boasts he's so bias-free that he doesn't vote.",
"The question of how the audacious paper turned stodgy floats over the Post newsroom like a thought balloon. The easy answer: Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee departed in 1991 after 26 years at the top. This theory singles out current Executive Editor Downie for abuse, but complacency took root as early as 1981, when the Post 's cross-town competitor, the Washington Star , folded, allowing the fat beast to diddle all it wanted without paying a price. When Donald Graham took over as publisher, he picked Downie as the editor who would help steer the paper away from the Georgetown elites and toward the masses, away from national competition and straight at the suburban dailies. You're reading the paper they wanted to make.",
"The boldest Post stroke in recent years came this spring when Downie dethroned Kaiser as managing editor and appointed Steve Coll, a 39-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning whiz, who most recently served as Sunday magazine editor/publisher. Coll's vision for the Post , also laid out in a Pugwash speech, sounds like a description of the New New York Times : \"[T]he future of the Post depends mightily on our ability to excel at enterprise journalism--on our ability to think more creatively, to tear the skin off of our subjects more often, to write better, to go deeper, to be more alive, to make more of a difference to readers.\" Good luck, Steve, you'll need it.",
"Magazine as a prestige Sunday magazine on the scale of the New York Times Magazine . But the Magazine never got to compete with the Magazine : It was bushwhacked by a black talk-radio demagogue who unfairly labeled the debut issue racist and targeted the paper with demonstrations and a boycott. Its momentum shattered, the extravagantly funded Washington Post Magazine limped along for a couple of years until the Post abandoned its grand financial and editorial ambitions and downscaled it. \n\n Various sections of the Post have improved since then--it has invested heavily in zoned suburban coverage, expanded its business page, improved the quality of its travel section, extended the heft of its sports coverage, experimented with an advertorial insert about consumer electronics, and added a monthly midbrow science/history section (\"Horizon\")--but it's taken no publishing risks.",
"Of course the Post doesn't tiptoe all the time. Woodward's 1996 campaign finance pieces struck a chord that still rings, and I predict a similar impact for Barton Gellman's two-part series last week about how the United States and China nearly went to war in 1996 (click here and here). At its best, the Post can still swarm a breaking news story like Flytrap. But at its worst, it sits on hot news. In 1992, the paper delayed its exposé of masher Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., until after the election, thereby assuring his return to the Senate. In 1994, it spiked Michael Isikoff's Paula Jones reporting, so he left for Newsweek , where he has led the Flytrap story.",
"The Changelings \n\n When did the Washington Post swap identities with the New York Times ? One day, it seemed, the Post rollicked readers with its cheeky personality and the next suffocated them with the sort of overcast official news that made the Times famous. Meanwhile, the Times sloughed its Old Gray Lady persona for the daredevilry that was the Post franchise. \n\n The switch dawned on me one morning 10 years ago as I found myself flipping through the Post because I had to, not because I wanted to--and reading the Times for the joy of it, not because it was the newspaper of record. I know this sounds like the beginning of an encomium for the Times at the expense of the Post , but it's not. When the papers traded places, they exchanged virtues as well as vices .",
"Timesmen don't pay much attention to the Post , except to periodically raid the paper--as if it were a minor league team--for some of its better players. ( Post defectors include Celestine Bohlen, Gwen Ifill, Julia Preston, Michael Specter, Patrick Tyler, Patti Cohen, and David Richards--who defected back. Few careers, outside of E.J. Dionne's, have been made by going the other way.) But it should pay closer attention. It desperately needs something like the Style section, where it can run imprudent stories that readers are dying to read but have yet to acquire the Heft and Importance of a New York Times News Story. Then again, if the Times were to embrace the virtue of a Style section (or is that a vice?), would its news sections lose their current virtue of attitude?",
"The Post isn't powered by Volvo--yet. But in adopting Old New York Times values of cautiousness and fairness and dullness, in striving to become the new Newspaper of Record, the Post",
"has lost its verve. Sometimes a loss of verve is not a bad thing. Compare the Times and Post coverage of the China satellite story. In the Times , Jeff Gerth implies that illegal campaign donations from China + the extravagant",
"Don Graham's biggest handicap is that he's the publisher who came after Katharine, and he's fearful that he'll blow her legacy. Downie's is that he came after Bradlee, and he's afraid he'll blow his. Who remembers the guys who canoed after Lewis and Clark? No wonder they operate the paper as if the frontier has closed behind them. In that context, Graham's conservatism makes business sense. His paper claims the highest reader penetration in the nation and is immensely profitable. Warren Buffett, a major stockholder in the company, whispers into his ear that he's a business genius. Why disturb the money-making machine? \n\n The last time the paper took an editorial risk was in 1986, when it barred no expense in relaunching the Washington Post",
"On the vice side of the exchange, the Times ... takes a lot of risks. It's now the primary exponent of what Post ie Bob Woodward famously called the \"holy shit\" story--pieces so astonishing that you scream spontaneous profanities when you read them. The downside of holy shit stories is that they can turn out to be wholly bullshit, as Woodward learned in 1981, when a reporter under his editorial watch, Janet Cooke, got caught making up a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict.",
"Post ies, on the other hand, obsess on the Times . Last month at the Post 's annual \"Pugwash\" editorial retreat, outgoing Managing Editor Robert Kaiser began his speech with the preposterous boast that the Post , with a staff half the size of the Times ', \"does more for its readers, day in and day out.\" Kaiser obviously lusts for the Old Times as he repeatedly calls for \"authoritative journalism\" and higher journalistic \"standards,\" and petitions Post ies to be more intellectual and creative. \"Authoritative, creative journalism that meets the highest standards must have intellectual content,\" Kaiser says at speech's end as he road-wrecks his themes. Somebody get this editor an editor!",
"Wanted on China\"). The Post 's version is probably closer to the facts, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I've enjoyed the Times ' sensationalist coverage more.",
"apologized for it. That same year, the paper digested Kitty Kelley's spuriously sourced Nancy Reagan biography on Page 1. In a transparent lunge for a Pulitzer Prize in early 1996, the Times published a seven-part series alleging that the",
"Just this spring, two reckless Times stories slid off the road. Gina Kolata prematurely announced a cancer cure (while shopping a book proposal on the subject) and Rick Bragg botched a simple story about police corruption in small-town Alabama. Bragg, a writerish reporter who would be at home in Style, earned in the June 9 Times . The jailed sheriff spent 27 months behind bars, not 27 years, as Bragg originally reported. Bragg also got the age of the crusading newspaper editor wrong, misstated the paper's circulation, and mistakenly described the method by which the sheriff defrauded the government (the sheriff cashed checks improperly made out to him; he did not cash checks made out to the government). \n\n Horrible! Just horrible! But consider the alternative. Who wants to read a porcelain white newspaper that has flushed all its holy shit? Whose reporters drive Volvos to work?",
"downsizing of the American workforce was creating \"millions of casualties.\" Actually, job creation was booming. Later that year, the paper spread its legs for the theory that TWA Flight 800 was downed by foul play, based on the discovery of",
"In its pursuit of holy shit, the Times routinely spins out of control. In 1991, it published the name of the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of rape--for no particular reason--and then",
"Meanwhile, the 56-year-old Downie is now seven years into the job. If he were a Times man, they'd be farming him out to write a column right about now. Instead, he's ensconced like the pope."
],
[
"The boldest Post stroke in recent years came this spring when Downie dethroned Kaiser as managing editor and appointed Steve Coll, a 39-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning whiz, who most recently served as Sunday magazine editor/publisher. Coll's vision for the Post , also laid out in a Pugwash speech, sounds like a description of the New New York Times : \"[T]he future of the Post depends mightily on our ability to excel at enterprise journalism--on our ability to think more creatively, to tear the skin off of our subjects more often, to write better, to go deeper, to be more alive, to make more of a difference to readers.\" Good luck, Steve, you'll need it.",
"In the traded virtue category: The Times takes a lot of risks. It has turned its back on the five boroughs to become a national newspaper, even purchasing the Boston Globe , while the Post has burrowed deeper locally. Its columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich dish the sort of sauce Nicholas von Hoffman and the young Richard Cohen once served at the Post . It continues to innovate, with new sections like Monday's \"Business Day\" (a k a \"The Information Industries\") and Saturday's \"Arts and Ideas,\" while the Post hasn't contributed anything significant to the template since the \"Style\" section in 1969. Its Sunday magazine is the best general interest publication in the world. The Post 's isn't.",
"Don Graham's biggest handicap is that he's the publisher who came after Katharine, and he's fearful that he'll blow her legacy. Downie's is that he came after Bradlee, and he's afraid he'll blow his. Who remembers the guys who canoed after Lewis and Clark? No wonder they operate the paper as if the frontier has closed behind them. In that context, Graham's conservatism makes business sense. His paper claims the highest reader penetration in the nation and is immensely profitable. Warren Buffett, a major stockholder in the company, whispers into his ear that he's a business genius. Why disturb the money-making machine? \n\n The last time the paper took an editorial risk was in 1986, when it barred no expense in relaunching the Washington Post",
"Of course the Post doesn't tiptoe all the time. Woodward's 1996 campaign finance pieces struck a chord that still rings, and I predict a similar impact for Barton Gellman's two-part series last week about how the United States and China nearly went to war in 1996 (click here and here). At its best, the Post can still swarm a breaking news story like Flytrap. But at its worst, it sits on hot news. In 1992, the paper delayed its exposé of masher Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., until after the election, thereby assuring his return to the Senate. In 1994, it spiked Michael Isikoff's Paula Jones reporting, so he left for Newsweek , where he has led the Flytrap story.",
"Perhaps the Times derives its edge from its succession politics. Whereas Ben Bradlee served as Post editor-for-life, the Times places an informal term limit on its executive editor job, and this turnover has helped to reinvigorate the paper: Times executive editors know they must make their mark in haste, before their tenure is over. A.M. Rosenthal reinvented the paper during his tenure from 1977 to 1986, stealing from Clay Felker's playbook to explode the Times into a many sectioned national paper. His successor, Max Frankel, brought vivid writing to the paper from 1986 to 1994, making sure that one story made it to Page 1 every day just because it was fun to read. Joseph Lelyveld, who took over from Frankel, has stayed their courses.",
"The question of how the audacious paper turned stodgy floats over the Post newsroom like a thought balloon. The easy answer: Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee departed in 1991 after 26 years at the top. This theory singles out current Executive Editor Downie for abuse, but complacency took root as early as 1981, when the Post 's cross-town competitor, the Washington Star , folded, allowing the fat beast to diddle all it wanted without paying a price. When Donald Graham took over as publisher, he picked Downie as the editor who would help steer the paper away from the Georgetown elites and toward the masses, away from national competition and straight at the suburban dailies. You're reading the paper they wanted to make.",
"Post ies, on the other hand, obsess on the Times . Last month at the Post 's annual \"Pugwash\" editorial retreat, outgoing Managing Editor Robert Kaiser began his speech with the preposterous boast that the Post , with a staff half the size of the Times ', \"does more for its readers, day in and day out.\" Kaiser obviously lusts for the Old Times as he repeatedly calls for \"authoritative journalism\" and higher journalistic \"standards,\" and petitions Post ies to be more intellectual and creative. \"Authoritative, creative journalism that meets the highest standards must have intellectual content,\" Kaiser says at speech's end as he road-wrecks his themes. Somebody get this editor an editor!",
"The Changelings \n\n When did the Washington Post swap identities with the New York Times ? One day, it seemed, the Post rollicked readers with its cheeky personality and the next suffocated them with the sort of overcast official news that made the Times famous. Meanwhile, the Times sloughed its Old Gray Lady persona for the daredevilry that was the Post franchise. \n\n The switch dawned on me one morning 10 years ago as I found myself flipping through the Post because I had to, not because I wanted to--and reading the Times for the joy of it, not because it was the newspaper of record. I know this sounds like the beginning of an encomium for the Times at the expense of the Post , but it's not. When the papers traded places, they exchanged virtues as well as vices .",
"The Post isn't powered by Volvo--yet. But in adopting Old New York Times values of cautiousness and fairness and dullness, in striving to become the new Newspaper of Record, the Post",
"Other traded virtues: The Times prints in color, the Post doesn't (yet). The Times sports an aggressive and handsome design. The recent Post redesign aches like a bad face lift. Times Editorial Page Editor Howell Raines writes barrelhouse editorials demanding action--such as the resignation of Janet Reno--that stir substance and fanfaronade. The Post editorial and op-ed pages are so evenhanded that if Scotty Reston were resurrected, his soft gas would appear there, alongside that of Jim Hoagland. And the Times seasons its reporting with opinion, while the once liberal-and-proud-of-it Post prides itself on cool neutrality (some would count this as a swapped vice and not a swapped virtue). On the news side, Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. boasts he's so bias-free that he doesn't vote.",
"has lost its verve. Sometimes a loss of verve is not a bad thing. Compare the Times and Post coverage of the China satellite story. In the Times , Jeff Gerth implies that illegal campaign donations from China + the extravagant",
"Timesmen don't pay much attention to the Post , except to periodically raid the paper--as if it were a minor league team--for some of its better players. ( Post defectors include Celestine Bohlen, Gwen Ifill, Julia Preston, Michael Specter, Patrick Tyler, Patti Cohen, and David Richards--who defected back. Few careers, outside of E.J. Dionne's, have been made by going the other way.) But it should pay closer attention. It desperately needs something like the Style section, where it can run imprudent stories that readers are dying to read but have yet to acquire the Heft and Importance of a New York Times News Story. Then again, if the Times were to embrace the virtue of a Style section (or is that a vice?), would its news sections lose their current virtue of attitude?",
"On the vice side of the exchange, the Times ... takes a lot of risks. It's now the primary exponent of what Post ie Bob Woodward famously called the \"holy shit\" story--pieces so astonishing that you scream spontaneous profanities when you read them. The downside of holy shit stories is that they can turn out to be wholly bullshit, as Woodward learned in 1981, when a reporter under his editorial watch, Janet Cooke, got caught making up a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict.",
"Magazine as a prestige Sunday magazine on the scale of the New York Times Magazine . But the Magazine never got to compete with the Magazine : It was bushwhacked by a black talk-radio demagogue who unfairly labeled the debut issue racist and targeted the paper with demonstrations and a boycott. Its momentum shattered, the extravagantly funded Washington Post Magazine limped along for a couple of years until the Post abandoned its grand financial and editorial ambitions and downscaled it. \n\n Various sections of the Post have improved since then--it has invested heavily in zoned suburban coverage, expanded its business page, improved the quality of its travel section, extended the heft of its sports coverage, experimented with an advertorial insert about consumer electronics, and added a monthly midbrow science/history section (\"Horizon\")--but it's taken no publishing risks.",
"Wanted on China\"). The Post 's version is probably closer to the facts, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I've enjoyed the Times ' sensationalist coverage more.",
"Meanwhile, the 56-year-old Downie is now seven years into the job. If he were a Times man, they'd be farming him out to write a column right about now. Instead, he's ensconced like the pope.",
"apologized for it. That same year, the paper digested Kitty Kelley's spuriously sourced Nancy Reagan biography on Page 1. In a transparent lunge for a Pulitzer Prize in early 1996, the Times published a seven-part series alleging that the",
"Just this spring, two reckless Times stories slid off the road. Gina Kolata prematurely announced a cancer cure (while shopping a book proposal on the subject) and Rick Bragg botched a simple story about police corruption in small-town Alabama. Bragg, a writerish reporter who would be at home in Style, earned in the June 9 Times . The jailed sheriff spent 27 months behind bars, not 27 years, as Bragg originally reported. Bragg also got the age of the crusading newspaper editor wrong, misstated the paper's circulation, and mistakenly described the method by which the sheriff defrauded the government (the sheriff cashed checks improperly made out to him; he did not cash checks made out to the government). \n\n Horrible! Just horrible! But consider the alternative. Who wants to read a porcelain white newspaper that has flushed all its holy shit? Whose reporters drive Volvos to work?",
"In its pursuit of holy shit, the Times routinely spins out of control. In 1991, it published the name of the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of rape--for no particular reason--and then",
"downsizing of the American workforce was creating \"millions of casualties.\" Actually, job creation was booming. Later that year, the paper spread its legs for the theory that TWA Flight 800 was downed by foul play, based on the discovery of"
],
[
"Perhaps the Times derives its edge from its succession politics. Whereas Ben Bradlee served as Post editor-for-life, the Times places an informal term limit on its executive editor job, and this turnover has helped to reinvigorate the paper: Times executive editors know they must make their mark in haste, before their tenure is over. A.M. Rosenthal reinvented the paper during his tenure from 1977 to 1986, stealing from Clay Felker's playbook to explode the Times into a many sectioned national paper. His successor, Max Frankel, brought vivid writing to the paper from 1986 to 1994, making sure that one story made it to Page 1 every day just because it was fun to read. Joseph Lelyveld, who took over from Frankel, has stayed their courses.",
"The question of how the audacious paper turned stodgy floats over the Post newsroom like a thought balloon. The easy answer: Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee departed in 1991 after 26 years at the top. This theory singles out current Executive Editor Downie for abuse, but complacency took root as early as 1981, when the Post 's cross-town competitor, the Washington Star , folded, allowing the fat beast to diddle all it wanted without paying a price. When Donald Graham took over as publisher, he picked Downie as the editor who would help steer the paper away from the Georgetown elites and toward the masses, away from national competition and straight at the suburban dailies. You're reading the paper they wanted to make.",
"Meanwhile, the 56-year-old Downie is now seven years into the job. If he were a Times man, they'd be farming him out to write a column right about now. Instead, he's ensconced like the pope.",
"Post ies, on the other hand, obsess on the Times . Last month at the Post 's annual \"Pugwash\" editorial retreat, outgoing Managing Editor Robert Kaiser began his speech with the preposterous boast that the Post , with a staff half the size of the Times ', \"does more for its readers, day in and day out.\" Kaiser obviously lusts for the Old Times as he repeatedly calls for \"authoritative journalism\" and higher journalistic \"standards,\" and petitions Post ies to be more intellectual and creative. \"Authoritative, creative journalism that meets the highest standards must have intellectual content,\" Kaiser says at speech's end as he road-wrecks his themes. Somebody get this editor an editor!",
"On the vice side of the exchange, the Times ... takes a lot of risks. It's now the primary exponent of what Post ie Bob Woodward famously called the \"holy shit\" story--pieces so astonishing that you scream spontaneous profanities when you read them. The downside of holy shit stories is that they can turn out to be wholly bullshit, as Woodward learned in 1981, when a reporter under his editorial watch, Janet Cooke, got caught making up a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict.",
"The boldest Post stroke in recent years came this spring when Downie dethroned Kaiser as managing editor and appointed Steve Coll, a 39-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning whiz, who most recently served as Sunday magazine editor/publisher. Coll's vision for the Post , also laid out in a Pugwash speech, sounds like a description of the New New York Times : \"[T]he future of the Post depends mightily on our ability to excel at enterprise journalism--on our ability to think more creatively, to tear the skin off of our subjects more often, to write better, to go deeper, to be more alive, to make more of a difference to readers.\" Good luck, Steve, you'll need it.",
"Other traded virtues: The Times prints in color, the Post doesn't (yet). The Times sports an aggressive and handsome design. The recent Post redesign aches like a bad face lift. Times Editorial Page Editor Howell Raines writes barrelhouse editorials demanding action--such as the resignation of Janet Reno--that stir substance and fanfaronade. The Post editorial and op-ed pages are so evenhanded that if Scotty Reston were resurrected, his soft gas would appear there, alongside that of Jim Hoagland. And the Times seasons its reporting with opinion, while the once liberal-and-proud-of-it Post prides itself on cool neutrality (some would count this as a swapped vice and not a swapped virtue). On the news side, Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. boasts he's so bias-free that he doesn't vote.",
"In its pursuit of holy shit, the Times routinely spins out of control. In 1991, it published the name of the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of rape--for no particular reason--and then",
"The Changelings \n\n When did the Washington Post swap identities with the New York Times ? One day, it seemed, the Post rollicked readers with its cheeky personality and the next suffocated them with the sort of overcast official news that made the Times famous. Meanwhile, the Times sloughed its Old Gray Lady persona for the daredevilry that was the Post franchise. \n\n The switch dawned on me one morning 10 years ago as I found myself flipping through the Post because I had to, not because I wanted to--and reading the Times for the joy of it, not because it was the newspaper of record. I know this sounds like the beginning of an encomium for the Times at the expense of the Post , but it's not. When the papers traded places, they exchanged virtues as well as vices .",
"Don Graham's biggest handicap is that he's the publisher who came after Katharine, and he's fearful that he'll blow her legacy. Downie's is that he came after Bradlee, and he's afraid he'll blow his. Who remembers the guys who canoed after Lewis and Clark? No wonder they operate the paper as if the frontier has closed behind them. In that context, Graham's conservatism makes business sense. His paper claims the highest reader penetration in the nation and is immensely profitable. Warren Buffett, a major stockholder in the company, whispers into his ear that he's a business genius. Why disturb the money-making machine? \n\n The last time the paper took an editorial risk was in 1986, when it barred no expense in relaunching the Washington Post",
"Timesmen don't pay much attention to the Post , except to periodically raid the paper--as if it were a minor league team--for some of its better players. ( Post defectors include Celestine Bohlen, Gwen Ifill, Julia Preston, Michael Specter, Patrick Tyler, Patti Cohen, and David Richards--who defected back. Few careers, outside of E.J. Dionne's, have been made by going the other way.) But it should pay closer attention. It desperately needs something like the Style section, where it can run imprudent stories that readers are dying to read but have yet to acquire the Heft and Importance of a New York Times News Story. Then again, if the Times were to embrace the virtue of a Style section (or is that a vice?), would its news sections lose their current virtue of attitude?",
"In the traded virtue category: The Times takes a lot of risks. It has turned its back on the five boroughs to become a national newspaper, even purchasing the Boston Globe , while the Post has burrowed deeper locally. Its columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich dish the sort of sauce Nicholas von Hoffman and the young Richard Cohen once served at the Post . It continues to innovate, with new sections like Monday's \"Business Day\" (a k a \"The Information Industries\") and Saturday's \"Arts and Ideas,\" while the Post hasn't contributed anything significant to the template since the \"Style\" section in 1969. Its Sunday magazine is the best general interest publication in the world. The Post 's isn't.",
"Just this spring, two reckless Times stories slid off the road. Gina Kolata prematurely announced a cancer cure (while shopping a book proposal on the subject) and Rick Bragg botched a simple story about police corruption in small-town Alabama. Bragg, a writerish reporter who would be at home in Style, earned in the June 9 Times . The jailed sheriff spent 27 months behind bars, not 27 years, as Bragg originally reported. Bragg also got the age of the crusading newspaper editor wrong, misstated the paper's circulation, and mistakenly described the method by which the sheriff defrauded the government (the sheriff cashed checks improperly made out to him; he did not cash checks made out to the government). \n\n Horrible! Just horrible! But consider the alternative. Who wants to read a porcelain white newspaper that has flushed all its holy shit? Whose reporters drive Volvos to work?",
"has lost its verve. Sometimes a loss of verve is not a bad thing. Compare the Times and Post coverage of the China satellite story. In the Times , Jeff Gerth implies that illegal campaign donations from China + the extravagant",
"downsizing of the American workforce was creating \"millions of casualties.\" Actually, job creation was booming. Later that year, the paper spread its legs for the theory that TWA Flight 800 was downed by foul play, based on the discovery of",
"apologized for it. That same year, the paper digested Kitty Kelley's spuriously sourced Nancy Reagan biography on Page 1. In a transparent lunge for a Pulitzer Prize in early 1996, the Times published a seven-part series alleging that the",
"Of course the Post doesn't tiptoe all the time. Woodward's 1996 campaign finance pieces struck a chord that still rings, and I predict a similar impact for Barton Gellman's two-part series last week about how the United States and China nearly went to war in 1996 (click here and here). At its best, the Post can still swarm a breaking news story like Flytrap. But at its worst, it sits on hot news. In 1992, the paper delayed its exposé of masher Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., until after the election, thereby assuring his return to the Senate. In 1994, it spiked Michael Isikoff's Paula Jones reporting, so he left for Newsweek , where he has led the Flytrap story.",
"The Post isn't powered by Volvo--yet. But in adopting Old New York Times values of cautiousness and fairness and dullness, in striving to become the new Newspaper of Record, the Post",
"Wanted on China\"). The Post 's version is probably closer to the facts, but I'd be lying if I didn't say that I've enjoyed the Times ' sensationalist coverage more.",
"Magazine as a prestige Sunday magazine on the scale of the New York Times Magazine . But the Magazine never got to compete with the Magazine : It was bushwhacked by a black talk-radio demagogue who unfairly labeled the debut issue racist and targeted the paper with demonstrations and a boycott. Its momentum shattered, the extravagantly funded Washington Post Magazine limped along for a couple of years until the Post abandoned its grand financial and editorial ambitions and downscaled it. \n\n Various sections of the Post have improved since then--it has invested heavily in zoned suburban coverage, expanded its business page, improved the quality of its travel section, extended the heft of its sports coverage, experimented with an advertorial insert about consumer electronics, and added a monthly midbrow science/history section (\"Horizon\")--but it's taken no publishing risks."
]
] |
test
|
50923
|
[
"What traits best describe Campbell?",
"How would you describe Tomboldo?",
"What is the goal of the Captain and Campbell?",
"Based on the passage, what is the relationship like between Vauna and the Captain?",
"How do the two men first meet the group of people?",
"If the two hadn't helped during the attack, what would've happened?",
"Why should we have respect for the Captain?",
"What is NOT an element of the culture of the people of the planet?",
"If the story were to continue, what would probably happen?"
] |
[
[
"Kind and quiet",
"Funny and quick",
"Handsome and tall",
"Studious and dutiful"
],
[
"Kind and respected",
"Childish and rude",
"Respected and humorous",
"Generous and Lighthearted"
],
[
"To contact the monsters on the planet",
"To make an alliance with the people on the planet",
"To explore the entirety of the planet they landed on",
"To learn about a specific part of the planet"
],
[
"Vauna falls in love with the Captain",
"The Captain has feelings for Vauna",
"Vauna and the Captain are lovers but Gravgak is trying to interfere",
"Vauna has feelings for the Captain but the Captain has feelings for Gravgak"
],
[
"They defend them from attackers at a distance and then fly closer",
"They land their ship nearby and walk to meet them, then they were able to help when the attackers came",
"They get out of their ship and run over to defend them from attackers",
"They defend them from attackers and then the people come to meet them"
],
[
"The group of people would've actually been much better off",
"Vauna would've been abducted",
"The group of people probably would've been much worse off",
"The two men would've been attacked anyway "
],
[
"He doesn't mind getting his hands dirty to defend those in need",
"He knows a lot about planets (and does his research) so he can be culturally competent prior to landing",
"He cares for others",
"His charisma makes him naturally likeable"
],
[
"There is specialization within the group",
"There is gender equality",
"They have an organized leadership hierarchy",
"The group knows the geography of the area well to use that information to their advantage"
],
[
"the Captain and Campbell would likely leave the group and fly home as soon as possible",
"Gravgak would certainly murder the Captain",
"the Captain and Campbell would probably travel with the group for a while",
"Vauna would certainly be proposed to by the Captain"
]
] |
[
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1
] |
[
0,
0,
1,
1,
1,
0,
0,
0,
1
] |
[
[
"We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance\n from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred\n not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly\n vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it\n proved to be some sort of vegetable—a vine of glacier proportions—or\n a river of some silvery, creamy substance—we would move in upon it\n gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n \"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of\n split-hairs.\n\n\n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n\n\n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn\n eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare\n young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!",
"He was none of these—and at the very first moment of viewing him I\n felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance—but had\n my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race\n a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had\n somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By\n what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be\n able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n\n\n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n\n\n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know\n what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or\n murderous.\n\n\n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my\n word for it, he's a friend.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"",
"\"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n\n\n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two,\n Order of Duties upon Landing: A—\"\n\n\n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Yes sir.\"\n\n\n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from\n under its belly?\"\n\n\n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n\n\n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n\n\n \"No sir.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"",
"He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with\n any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain\n Linden? Or are you warning\nyourself\n?\"\n\n\n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred\n vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her—yes, she must have\n haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her\n features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the\n party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the\n attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and\n figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's\n question. \"Myself.\"",
"I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for\n a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as\n innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged\n with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers—how can we warn them? Oh-oh!\n Too late. Look!\"\n\n\n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads\n of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors—fifty or more\n of them—with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide\n semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n3.\n\n\n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends.\n They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird\n clubs with a threat of death.\n\n\n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we\n were about to witness a massacre.",
"\"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\nserpent\n river\n.\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not\n knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\nI\nmade an eel-like motion\n with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain,\n the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked\n around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent\n figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and\n green diamond markings—Gravgak.\n\n\n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n\n\n \"I get well,\" I said.\n\n\n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"",
"\"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow\n penetrate my dream.\n\n\n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices\n of this new, strange language.\n\n\n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n\n\n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n\n\n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n\n\n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n\n\n \"One of them.\"\n\n\n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember—\"",
"\"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after\n you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve\n the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of\n Campbell came through insistently.\n\n\n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n \"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Section Four?\"\n\n\n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put\n me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No\n agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed\n as binding—\"\n\n\n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"",
"In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna.\n The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella\n people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of\n their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning\n about the world into which he has been born.\n\n\n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together.\n Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire\n about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to\n converse in simple words. And Vauna and I—yes. If I could only avoid\n blacking out.\n\n\n I wanted to see her.",
"Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with\n restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir.\n Any orders, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks—thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though\n coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an\n exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n\n\n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all,\n his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his\n words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he\n required in his coffee.",
"Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits.\n Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n (our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I\n had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim\n his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually\n physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the\n part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"—and the wide ears that\n stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of\n selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I\n could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n\n\n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n\n\n \"What do you see?\" I asked.",
"\"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got\n into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party\n had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our\n direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make\n out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately,\n he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n\n\n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding\n places in the ground. But a few—the brave ones, perhaps, or the\n officials of his group—came with him.\n\n\n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n\n\n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I\n said. Together we descended from the ship.",
"We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first.\n We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be\n one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively.\n We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still\n retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And\n in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket\n arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n\n\n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the\n cream-and-red cloak.",
"Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still\n at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused\n a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it—and then blacked\n out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the\n handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him—apparently all by\n accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into\n my head.\n\n\n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n4.\n\n\n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the\n weeks that I lay unconscious.\n\n\n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n\n\n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to\n land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"",
"By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were\n invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we\n would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of\n Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose—to\n understand the Serpent River—would be forwarded greatly if we could\n learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the\n river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and\n to map its course—these facts were only a part of the information we\n sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this\n planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends\n they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when\n future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE)\n for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.",
"We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and\n weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They\n were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n\n\n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n\n\n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n\n\n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n\n\n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n\n\n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones\n suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you\n ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren\n scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The\n attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life.\n It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept\n right on singing.",
"So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space\n ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars.\n The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of\n Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n\n\n I regained my health gradually.\n\n\n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella\n words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you\n more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My\n father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are\n still weak.\"\n\n\n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust\n myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By\n night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep.\n Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.",
"We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from\n this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course\n for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn\n path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the\n horizon.\nWhat was it?\n\"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers.\n Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good\n Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first\n expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important\n pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned)\n had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts\n of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this\n planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n (2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land,\n continuously, endlessly.",
"Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n \"Tomboldo.\"\n\n\n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then,\n as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each\n breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of\n them. One was Gravgak.\n\n\n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did\n not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n\n\n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were\n painted with green and black diamond designs.",
"\"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise,\n the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will\n walk soon.\"\n\n\n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars\n and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the\n ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make\n myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of\n forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying\n to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell\n each other.\""
],
[
"Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was\n safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees\n that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we\n knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent.\n Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests\n of Tomboldo.\n\n\n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to\n hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored\n the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with\n agitated jabbering:\n\n\n \"Wollo—yeeta—vo—vandartch—vandartch! Grr—see—o—see—o—see—o!\"\n\n\n \"See—o—see—o—see—o,\" one of the others echoed.",
"\"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise,\n the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will\n walk soon.\"\n\n\n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars\n and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the\n ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make\n myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of\n forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying\n to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell\n each other.\"",
"Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n \"Tomboldo.\"\n\n\n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then,\n as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each\n breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of\n them. One was Gravgak.\n\n\n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did\n not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n\n\n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were\n painted with green and black diamond designs.",
"\"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at\n the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we\n will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n\n\n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n\n\n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend—\"\n he pointed to me—\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him\n here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through\n the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget\n this kindness. When we ascend the\nKao-Wagwattl\n, the ever moving\nrope of life\n, these friends shall come with us. On the back of\n the Kao-Wagwattl\nthey shall ride with us across the land\n.\"",
"But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious\n casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first\n blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of\n the party hovered over him.\n\n\n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me\n with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us\n stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages,\n and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to\n consciousness.",
"I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come\n equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing\n medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a\n large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear,\n dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n\n\n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own\n neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was\n not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it\n was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I\n liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to\n place the gift around his neck.\n\n\n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.",
"We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first.\n We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be\n one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively.\n We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still\n retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And\n in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket\n arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n\n\n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the\n cream-and-red cloak.",
"And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me\n through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me,\n faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some\n corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to\n go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless\n dreams.\n\n\n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing\n before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a\n hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook\n the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his\n flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and\n played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n\n\n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n\n\n \"You have had a long sleep.\"",
"Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their\n clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party\n it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet\n the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as\n a\nwarning\n! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these\n strange devils will throw fire at you.\n\n\n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders,\n thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip,\n zip—BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the\n rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four\n warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were\n flattened—and those who were able, ran.\n\n\n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to\n pick up their clubs.",
"Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits.\n Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n (our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I\n had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim\n his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually\n physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the\n part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"—and the wide ears that\n stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of\n selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I\n could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n\n\n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n\n\n \"What do you see?\" I asked.",
"It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The\n enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a\n wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see—o—see—o\"\n we were all safe.\n\n\n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment\n jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than\n a yowling siren.\n\n\n \"See—o—see—o—see—o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand.\n They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n \"\nSee—o—see—o!\n\"\n\n\n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees\n came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They\n bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.",
"By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were\n invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we\n would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of\n Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose—to\n understand the Serpent River—would be forwarded greatly if we could\n learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the\n river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and\n to map its course—these facts were only a part of the information we\n sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this\n planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends\n they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when\n future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE)\n for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.",
"Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still\n at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused\n a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it—and then blacked\n out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the\n handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him—apparently all by\n accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into\n my head.\n\n\n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n4.\n\n\n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the\n weeks that I lay unconscious.\n\n\n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n\n\n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to\n land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"",
"From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic\n moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master—or her\n lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n\n\n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n \"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n\n\n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called\n them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a\n jealous lover—or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard\n was a potential traitor?)\n\n\n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been\n called back.\n\n\n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway\n he stood scowling.",
"The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\".\n They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our\n ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently\n come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied\n them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a\n hike.\n\n\n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might\n guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold,\n cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the\n cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in\n the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this\n was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a\n circular mantle.",
"So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space\n ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars.\n The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of\n Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n\n\n I regained my health gradually.\n\n\n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella\n words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you\n more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My\n father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are\n still weak.\"\n\n\n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust\n myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By\n night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep.\n Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.",
"Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No\n deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies\n gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the\n nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed.\n Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the\n air.\n\n\n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing\n sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n\n\n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came\n forward, rushing defiantly.",
"He was none of these—and at the very first moment of viewing him I\n felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance—but had\n my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race\n a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had\n somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By\n what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be\n able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n\n\n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n\n\n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know\n what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or\n murderous.\n\n\n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my\n word for it, he's a friend.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"",
"They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the\n crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees\n themselves were moving.\n\n\n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n\n\n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He\n gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n\n\n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of\n the moving trees.\n\n\n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n\n\n \"Yes. The females—I'm speaking hypothetically—but they\nmust\nbe\n females—are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows.\n I wonder why?\"\n\n\n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n\n\n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.",
"We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance\n from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred\n not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly\n vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it\n proved to be some sort of vegetable—a vine of glacier proportions—or\n a river of some silvery, creamy substance—we would move in upon it\n gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n \"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of\n split-hairs.\n\n\n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n\n\n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn\n eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare\n young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!"
],
[
"I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for\n a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as\n innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged\n with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers—how can we warn them? Oh-oh!\n Too late. Look!\"\n\n\n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads\n of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors—fifty or more\n of them—with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide\n semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n3.\n\n\n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends.\n They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird\n clubs with a threat of death.\n\n\n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we\n were about to witness a massacre.",
"\"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n\n\n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two,\n Order of Duties upon Landing: A—\"\n\n\n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Yes sir.\"\n\n\n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from\n under its belly?\"\n\n\n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n\n\n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n\n\n \"No sir.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"",
"He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with\n any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain\n Linden? Or are you warning\nyourself\n?\"\n\n\n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred\n vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her—yes, she must have\n haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her\n features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the\n party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the\n attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and\n figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's\n question. \"Myself.\"",
"We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance\n from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred\n not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly\n vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it\n proved to be some sort of vegetable—a vine of glacier proportions—or\n a river of some silvery, creamy substance—we would move in upon it\n gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n \"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of\n split-hairs.\n\n\n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n\n\n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn\n eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare\n young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!",
"\"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow\n penetrate my dream.\n\n\n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices\n of this new, strange language.\n\n\n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n\n\n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n\n\n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n\n\n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n\n\n \"One of them.\"\n\n\n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember—\"",
"\"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got\n into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party\n had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our\n direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make\n out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately,\n he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n\n\n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding\n places in the ground. But a few—the brave ones, perhaps, or the\n officials of his group—came with him.\n\n\n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n\n\n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I\n said. Together we descended from the ship.",
"\"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after\n you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve\n the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of\n Campbell came through insistently.\n\n\n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n \"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Section Four?\"\n\n\n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put\n me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No\n agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed\n as binding—\"\n\n\n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"",
"\"Captain—\nJim\n! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n\n\n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had\n the same impulse as Campbell—to do something—anything! Yet here we\n sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n \"friends\" in danger.\n\n\n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't\n duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and\n packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n\n\n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n\n\n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\ncould\ndrop his\n dignity under excitement—his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he\n wanted any sort of split-second order.",
"He was none of these—and at the very first moment of viewing him I\n felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance—but had\n my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race\n a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had\n somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By\n what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be\n able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n\n\n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n\n\n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know\n what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or\n murderous.\n\n\n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my\n word for it, he's a friend.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"",
"We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and\n weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They\n were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n\n\n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n\n\n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n\n\n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n\n\n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n\n\n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones\n suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you\n ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren\n scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The\n attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life.\n It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept\n right on singing.",
"\"I hope so,\" I said. \"Campbell and I came to learn about the\nserpent\n river\n.\" I resorted to my own language for the last two words, not\n knowing the Benzendella equivalent.\nI\nmade an eel-like motion\n with my arm. But they didn't understand. And before I could explain,\n the footsteps of other Benzendellas approached, and presently I looked\n around to see that quite an audience had gathered. The most prominent\n figure of the new group was the big muscular guard of the black and\n green diamond markings—Gravgak.\n\n\n \"You get well?\" Gravgak said to me. His eyes drilled me closely.\n\n\n \"I get well,\" I said.\n\n\n \"The blow on the head,\" he said, \"was not meant.\"",
"By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were\n invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we\n would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of\n Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose—to\n understand the Serpent River—would be forwarded greatly if we could\n learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the\n river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and\n to map its course—these facts were only a part of the information we\n sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this\n planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends\n they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when\n future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE)\n for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.",
"We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first.\n We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be\n one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively.\n We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still\n retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And\n in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket\n arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n\n\n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the\n cream-and-red cloak.",
"Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No\n deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies\n gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the\n nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed.\n Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the\n air.\n\n\n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing\n sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n\n\n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came\n forward, rushing defiantly.",
"Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still\n at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused\n a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it—and then blacked\n out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the\n handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him—apparently all by\n accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into\n my head.\n\n\n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n4.\n\n\n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the\n weeks that I lay unconscious.\n\n\n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n\n\n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to\n land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"",
"Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against\n the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces.\n Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down\n any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n \"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n \"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very\n smooth—handsome—attractive.\"\n\n\n Then the siren went off.\n\n\n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be\n waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in\n close.",
"It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The\n enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a\n wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see—o—see—o\"\n we were all safe.\n\n\n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment\n jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than\n a yowling siren.\n\n\n \"See—o—see—o—see—o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand.\n They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n \"\nSee—o—see—o!\n\"\n\n\n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees\n came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They\n bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.",
"Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with\n restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir.\n Any orders, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks—thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though\n coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an\n exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n\n\n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all,\n his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his\n words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he\n required in his coffee.",
"\"Are you complaining?\"\n\n\n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we\n were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their\n meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing\n that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making\n a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in\n calm, graceful gestures.\n\n\n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are\n moving in on them.\"\n\n\n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you\n ever see moving trees?\"\n\n\n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under\n cover. Look!\"",
"The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\".\n They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our\n ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently\n come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied\n them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a\n hike.\n\n\n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might\n guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold,\n cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the\n cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in\n the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this\n was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a\n circular mantle."
],
[
"He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with\n any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain\n Linden? Or are you warning\nyourself\n?\"\n\n\n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred\n vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her—yes, she must have\n haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her\n features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the\n party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the\n attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and\n figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's\n question. \"Myself.\"",
"From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic\n moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master—or her\n lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n\n\n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n \"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n\n\n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called\n them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a\n jealous lover—or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard\n was a potential traitor?)\n\n\n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been\n called back.\n\n\n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway\n he stood scowling.",
"I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant\n to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes\n told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes\n flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and\n started off. \"Get well!\"\n\n\n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway\n he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n\n\n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I\n will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n\n\n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n\n\n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her\n father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.",
"In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna.\n The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella\n people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of\n their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning\n about the world into which he has been born.\n\n\n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together.\n Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire\n about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to\n converse in simple words. And Vauna and I—yes. If I could only avoid\n blacking out.\n\n\n I wanted to see her.",
"And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me\n through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me,\n faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some\n corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to\n go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless\n dreams.\n\n\n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing\n before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a\n hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook\n the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his\n flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and\n played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n\n\n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n\n\n \"You have had a long sleep.\"",
"Suddenly he came to life. Lying there on his back, with the club still\n at his fingertips, he swung up on one elbow. The swift motion caused\n a cry of joy from the crowd. I heard a little of it—and then blacked\n out. For as the muscular Gravgak moved, his fingers closed over the\n handle of the club. It whizzed upward with him—apparently all by\n accident. The stone that dangled from the end of the club crashed into\n my head.\n\n\n I went into instant darkness. Darkness, and a long, long silence.\n4.\n\n\n Vauna, the beautiful daughter of Tomboldo, came into my life during the\n weeks that I lay unconscious.\n\n\n I must have talked aloud much during those feverish hours of darkness.\n\n\n \"Campbell!\" I would call out of a nightmare. \"Campbell, we're about to\n land. Is everything set? Check the instruments again, Campbell.\"",
"\"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after\n you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve\n the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of\n Campbell came through insistently.\n\n\n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n \"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Section Four?\"\n\n\n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put\n me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No\n agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed\n as binding—\"\n\n\n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\"",
"\"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow\n penetrate my dream.\n\n\n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices\n of this new, strange language.\n\n\n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n\n\n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n\n\n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n\n\n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n\n\n \"One of them.\"\n\n\n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember—\"",
"So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space\n ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars.\n The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of\n Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n\n\n I regained my health gradually.\n\n\n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella\n words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you\n more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My\n father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are\n still weak.\"\n\n\n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust\n myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By\n night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep.\n Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.",
"He was none of these—and at the very first moment of viewing him I\n felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance—but had\n my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race\n a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had\n somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By\n what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be\n able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n\n\n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n\n\n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know\n what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or\n murderous.\n\n\n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my\n word for it, he's a friend.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"",
"We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first.\n We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be\n one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively.\n We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still\n retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And\n in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket\n arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n\n\n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the\n cream-and-red cloak.",
"Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against\n the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces.\n Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down\n any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n \"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n \"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very\n smooth—handsome—attractive.\"\n\n\n Then the siren went off.\n\n\n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be\n waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in\n close.",
"The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\".\n They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our\n ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently\n come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied\n them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a\n hike.\n\n\n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might\n guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold,\n cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the\n cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in\n the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this\n was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a\n circular mantle.",
"\"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise,\n the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will\n walk soon.\"\n\n\n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars\n and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the\n ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make\n myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of\n forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying\n to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell\n each other.\"",
"Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was\n safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees\n that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we\n knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent.\n Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests\n of Tomboldo.\n\n\n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to\n hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored\n the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with\n agitated jabbering:\n\n\n \"Wollo—yeeta—vo—vandartch—vandartch! Grr—see—o—see—o—see—o!\"\n\n\n \"See—o—see—o—see—o,\" one of the others echoed.",
"Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with\n restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir.\n Any orders, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks—thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though\n coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an\n exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n\n\n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all,\n his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his\n words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he\n required in his coffee.",
"Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits.\n Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n (our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I\n had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim\n his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually\n physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the\n part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"—and the wide ears that\n stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of\n selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I\n could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n\n\n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n\n\n \"What do you see?\" I asked.",
"We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and\n weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They\n were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n\n\n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n\n\n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n\n\n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n\n\n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n\n\n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones\n suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you\n ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren\n scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The\n attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life.\n It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept\n right on singing.",
"\"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n\n\n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two,\n Order of Duties upon Landing: A—\"\n\n\n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Yes sir.\"\n\n\n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from\n under its belly?\"\n\n\n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n\n\n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n\n\n \"No sir.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"",
"\"Captain—\nJim\n! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n\n\n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had\n the same impulse as Campbell—to do something—anything! Yet here we\n sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n \"friends\" in danger.\n\n\n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't\n duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and\n packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n\n\n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n\n\n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\ncould\ndrop his\n dignity under excitement—his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he\n wanted any sort of split-second order."
],
[
"We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first.\n We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be\n one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively.\n We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still\n retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And\n in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket\n arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n\n\n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the\n cream-and-red cloak.",
"Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against\n the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces.\n Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down\n any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n \"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n \"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very\n smooth—handsome—attractive.\"\n\n\n Then the siren went off.\n\n\n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be\n waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in\n close.",
"Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No\n deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies\n gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the\n nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed.\n Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the\n air.\n\n\n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing\n sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n\n\n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came\n forward, rushing defiantly.",
"\"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n\n\n \"We're going to go\nout\n—?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n\n\n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n\n\n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n\n\n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs\n of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground\n city—though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n\n\n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.",
"I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for\n a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as\n innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged\n with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers—how can we warn them? Oh-oh!\n Too late. Look!\"\n\n\n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads\n of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors—fifty or more\n of them—with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide\n semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n3.\n\n\n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends.\n They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird\n clubs with a threat of death.\n\n\n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we\n were about to witness a massacre.",
"The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\".\n They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our\n ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently\n come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied\n them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a\n hike.\n\n\n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might\n guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold,\n cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the\n cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in\n the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this\n was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a\n circular mantle.",
"He was none of these—and at the very first moment of viewing him I\n felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance—but had\n my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race\n a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had\n somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By\n what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be\n able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n\n\n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n\n\n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know\n what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or\n murderous.\n\n\n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my\n word for it, he's a friend.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"",
"\"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at\n the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we\n will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n\n\n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n\n\n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend—\"\n he pointed to me—\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him\n here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through\n the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget\n this kindness. When we ascend the\nKao-Wagwattl\n, the ever moving\nrope of life\n, these friends shall come with us. On the back of\n the Kao-Wagwattl\nthey shall ride with us across the land\n.\"",
"They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the\n crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees\n themselves were moving.\n\n\n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n\n\n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He\n gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n\n\n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of\n the moving trees.\n\n\n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n\n\n \"Yes. The females—I'm speaking hypothetically—but they\nmust\nbe\n females—are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows.\n I wonder why?\"\n\n\n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n\n\n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.",
"I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come\n equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing\n medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a\n large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear,\n dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n\n\n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own\n neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was\n not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it\n was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I\n liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to\n place the gift around his neck.\n\n\n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.",
"It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The\n enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a\n wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see—o—see—o\"\n we were all safe.\n\n\n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment\n jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than\n a yowling siren.\n\n\n \"See—o—see—o—see—o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand.\n They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n \"\nSee—o—see—o!\n\"\n\n\n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees\n came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They\n bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.",
"Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n \"Tomboldo.\"\n\n\n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then,\n as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each\n breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of\n them. One was Gravgak.\n\n\n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did\n not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n\n\n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were\n painted with green and black diamond designs.",
"We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and\n weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They\n were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n\n\n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n\n\n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n\n\n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n\n\n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n\n\n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones\n suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you\n ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren\n scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The\n attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life.\n It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept\n right on singing.",
"I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant\n to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes\n told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes\n flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and\n started off. \"Get well!\"\n\n\n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway\n he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n\n\n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I\n will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n\n\n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n\n\n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her\n father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.",
"But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious\n casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first\n blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of\n the party hovered over him.\n\n\n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me\n with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us\n stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages,\n and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to\n consciousness.",
"\"Are you complaining?\"\n\n\n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we\n were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their\n meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing\n that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making\n a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in\n calm, graceful gestures.\n\n\n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are\n moving in on them.\"\n\n\n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you\n ever see moving trees?\"\n\n\n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under\n cover. Look!\"",
"By motions and words we didn't understand, we inferred that we were\n invited to accompany the party back home, inside the hill, where we\n would be safe. I nodded to Campbell. \"It's our chance to be guests of\n Tomboldo.\" Nothing could have pleased us more. For our big purpose—to\n understand the Serpent River—would be forwarded greatly if we could\n learn, through the people, what its meanings were. To analyze the\n river's substance, estimate its rate, its weight, its temperature, and\n to map its course—these facts were only a part of the information we\n sought. The fuller story would be to learn how the inhabitants of this\n planet regarded it: whether they loved or shunned it, and what legends\n they may have woven around it. All this knowledge would be useful when\n future expeditions of men from the Earth followed us (through EGGWE)\n for an extension of peaceful trade relationships.",
"\"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got\n into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party\n had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our\n direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make\n out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately,\n he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n\n\n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding\n places in the ground. But a few—the brave ones, perhaps, or the\n officials of his group—came with him.\n\n\n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n\n\n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I\n said. Together we descended from the ship.",
"Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was\n safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees\n that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we\n knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent.\n Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests\n of Tomboldo.\n\n\n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to\n hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored\n the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with\n agitated jabbering:\n\n\n \"Wollo—yeeta—vo—vandartch—vandartch! Grr—see—o—see—o—see—o!\"\n\n\n \"See—o—see—o—see—o,\" one of the others echoed.",
"\"Captain—\nJim\n! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n\n\n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had\n the same impulse as Campbell—to do something—anything! Yet here we\n sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n \"friends\" in danger.\n\n\n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't\n duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and\n packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n\n\n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n\n\n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\ncould\ndrop his\n dignity under excitement—his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he\n wanted any sort of split-second order."
],
[
"Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No\n deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies\n gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the\n nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed.\n Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the\n air.\n\n\n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing\n sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n\n\n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came\n forward, rushing defiantly.",
"\"Captain—\nJim\n! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n\n\n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had\n the same impulse as Campbell—to do something—anything! Yet here we\n sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n \"friends\" in danger.\n\n\n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't\n duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and\n packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n\n\n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n\n\n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\ncould\ndrop his\n dignity under excitement—his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he\n wanted any sort of split-second order.",
"But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious\n casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first\n blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of\n the party hovered over him.\n\n\n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me\n with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us\n stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages,\n and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to\n consciousness.",
"It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The\n enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a\n wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see—o—see—o\"\n we were all safe.\n\n\n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment\n jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than\n a yowling siren.\n\n\n \"See—o—see—o—see—o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand.\n They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n \"\nSee—o—see—o!\n\"\n\n\n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees\n came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They\n bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.",
"Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their\n clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party\n it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet\n the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as\n a\nwarning\n! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these\n strange devils will throw fire at you.\n\n\n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders,\n thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip,\n zip—BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the\n rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four\n warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were\n flattened—and those who were able, ran.\n\n\n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to\n pick up their clubs.",
"Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was\n safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees\n that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we\n knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent.\n Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests\n of Tomboldo.\n\n\n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to\n hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored\n the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with\n agitated jabbering:\n\n\n \"Wollo—yeeta—vo—vandartch—vandartch! Grr—see—o—see—o—see—o!\"\n\n\n \"See—o—see—o—see—o,\" one of the others echoed.",
"I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for\n a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as\n innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged\n with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers—how can we warn them? Oh-oh!\n Too late. Look!\"\n\n\n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads\n of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors—fifty or more\n of them—with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide\n semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n3.\n\n\n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends.\n They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird\n clubs with a threat of death.\n\n\n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we\n were about to witness a massacre.",
"We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and\n weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They\n were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n\n\n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n\n\n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n\n\n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n\n\n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n\n\n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones\n suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you\n ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren\n scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The\n attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life.\n It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept\n right on singing.",
"From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic\n moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master—or her\n lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n\n\n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n \"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n\n\n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called\n them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a\n jealous lover—or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard\n was a potential traitor?)\n\n\n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been\n called back.\n\n\n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway\n he stood scowling.",
"I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant\n to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes\n told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes\n flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and\n started off. \"Get well!\"\n\n\n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway\n he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n\n\n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I\n will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n\n\n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n\n\n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her\n father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.",
"We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first.\n We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be\n one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively.\n We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still\n retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And\n in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket\n arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n\n\n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the\n cream-and-red cloak.",
"\"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at\n the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we\n will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n\n\n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n\n\n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend—\"\n he pointed to me—\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him\n here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through\n the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget\n this kindness. When we ascend the\nKao-Wagwattl\n, the ever moving\nrope of life\n, these friends shall come with us. On the back of\n the Kao-Wagwattl\nthey shall ride with us across the land\n.\"",
"They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the\n crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees\n themselves were moving.\n\n\n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n\n\n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He\n gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n\n\n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of\n the moving trees.\n\n\n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n\n\n \"Yes. The females—I'm speaking hypothetically—but they\nmust\nbe\n females—are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows.\n I wonder why?\"\n\n\n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n\n\n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.",
"He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with\n any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain\n Linden? Or are you warning\nyourself\n?\"\n\n\n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred\n vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her—yes, she must have\n haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her\n features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the\n party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the\n attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and\n figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's\n question. \"Myself.\"",
"\"Ready for that hike, Campbell? Give me my equipment coat.\" I got\n into it. I looked back to the telescope. The tall man of the party\n had behaved with exceptional calmness. He had turned to stare in our\n direction from the instant the siren sounded. He could no doubt make\n out the lines of our silvery ship in the shadows. Slowly, deliberately,\n he marched over the hilltop toward us.\n\n\n Most of his party now scampered back to the safety of their hiding\n places in the ground. But a few—the brave ones, perhaps, or the\n officials of his group—came with him.\n\n\n \"He needs a stronger guard than that,\" Campbell grumbled.\n\n\n Sixteen was still wailing. \"Set it for ten minutes and come on,\" I\n said. Together we descended from the ship.",
"In the hours that followed, I came to know the soft footsteps of Vauna.\n The caverns in which she and her father and all these Benzendella\n people lived were pleasantly warm and fragrant. My misty impressions of\n their life about me were like the first impressions of a child learning\n about the world into which he has been born.\n\n\n Sometimes I would hear Vauna and her attendant Omosla talking together.\n Often when Campbell would stop in this part of the cavern to inquire\n about me, Omosla would drop in also. She and Campbell were learning to\n converse in simple words. And Vauna and I—yes. If I could only avoid\n blacking out.\n\n\n I wanted to see her.",
"\"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n\n\n \"We're going to go\nout\n—?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n\n\n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n\n\n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n\n\n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs\n of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground\n city—though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n\n\n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.",
"The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\".\n They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our\n ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently\n come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied\n them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a\n hike.\n\n\n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might\n guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold,\n cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the\n cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in\n the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this\n was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a\n circular mantle.",
"Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits.\n Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n (our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I\n had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim\n his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually\n physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the\n part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"—and the wide ears that\n stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of\n selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I\n could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n\n\n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n\n\n \"What do you see?\" I asked.",
"Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n \"Tomboldo.\"\n\n\n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then,\n as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each\n breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of\n them. One was Gravgak.\n\n\n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did\n not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n\n\n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were\n painted with green and black diamond designs."
],
[
"We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first.\n We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be\n one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively.\n We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still\n retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And\n in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket\n arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n\n\n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the\n cream-and-red cloak.",
"\"Captain—\nJim\n! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n\n\n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had\n the same impulse as Campbell—to do something—anything! Yet here we\n sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n \"friends\" in danger.\n\n\n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't\n duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and\n packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n\n\n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n\n\n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\ncould\ndrop his\n dignity under excitement—his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he\n wanted any sort of split-second order.",
"Split answered me with an enthusiastic, \"By gollies, sir!\" Then, with\n restraint, \"It's precisely what I expected from the photographs, sir.\n Any orders, sir?\"\n\n\n \"Relax, Split! That's the order. Relax!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks—thanks, Cap!\" That was his effort to sound informal, though\n coming from him it was strained. His training had given him an\n exaggerated notion of the importance of dignity and discipline.\n\n\n He was naturally so conscientious it was painful. And to top it all,\n his scientific habit of thought made him want to stop and weigh his\n words even when speaking of casual things such as how much sugar he\n required in his coffee.",
"Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits.\n Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n (our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I\n had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim\n his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually\n physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the\n part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"—and the wide ears that\n stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of\n selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I\n could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n\n\n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n\n\n \"What do you see?\" I asked.",
"But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious\n casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first\n blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of\n the party hovered over him.\n\n\n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me\n with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us\n stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages,\n and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to\n consciousness.",
"\"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise,\n the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will\n walk soon.\"\n\n\n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars\n and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the\n ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make\n myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of\n forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying\n to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell\n each other.\"",
"\"Here Campbell, take a look at the 'rope'.\"\n\n\n \"Before I finish the reports, sir? If I recall our Code, Section Two,\n Order of Duties upon Landing: A—\"\n\n\n \"Forget the Code. Take a look at the rope while the sun's on it.... See\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Yes sir.\"\n\n\n \"Can you see it's moving? See the little clouds of dust coming up from\n under its belly?\"\n\n\n \"Yes sir. An excellent view, Captain Linden.\"\n\n\n \"What do you think of it, Split? Ever see a sight like that before?\"\n\n\n \"No sir.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what about it? Any comments?\"",
"Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against\n the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces.\n Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down\n any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n \"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n \"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very\n smooth—handsome—attractive.\"\n\n\n Then the siren went off.\n\n\n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be\n waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in\n close.",
"He was none of these—and at the very first moment of viewing him I\n felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance—but had\n my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race\n a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had\n somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By\n what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be\n able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n\n\n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n\n\n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know\n what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or\n murderous.\n\n\n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my\n word for it, he's a friend.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"",
"He picked it up. \"D, no agent shall enter into a marriage contract with\n any native.... H-m-m. You're not trying to warn me, are you, Captain\n Linden? Or are you warning\nyourself\n?\"\n\n\n At that moment my eyes opened a little. Swimming before my blurred\n vision was the face of Vauna. I did remember her—yes, she must have\n haunted my dreams, for now my eyes burned in an effort to define her\n features more clearly. This was indeed Vauna, who had been one of the\n party of twelve, and had walked beside her father in the face of the\n attack. Deep within my subconscious the image of her beautiful face and\n figure had lingered. I murmured a single word of answer to Campbell's\n question. \"Myself.\"",
"We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance\n from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred\n not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly\n vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it\n proved to be some sort of vegetable—a vine of glacier proportions—or\n a river of some silvery, creamy substance—we would move in upon it\n gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n \"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of\n split-hairs.\n\n\n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n\n\n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn\n eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare\n young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!",
"Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their\n clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party\n it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet\n the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as\n a\nwarning\n! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these\n strange devils will throw fire at you.\n\n\n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders,\n thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip,\n zip—BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the\n rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four\n warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were\n flattened—and those who were able, ran.\n\n\n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to\n pick up their clubs.",
"\"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at\n the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we\n will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n\n\n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n\n\n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend—\"\n he pointed to me—\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him\n here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through\n the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget\n this kindness. When we ascend the\nKao-Wagwattl\n, the ever moving\nrope of life\n, these friends shall come with us. On the back of\n the Kao-Wagwattl\nthey shall ride with us across the land\n.\"",
"Split and I tried to imitate his breathy accents as we repeated aloud,\n \"Tomboldo.\"\n\n\n We pointed to ourselves, in turn, and spoke our own names. And then,\n as the names of the others were pronounced, we tried to memorize each\n breathy sound that was uttered. I was able to remember four or five of\n them. One was Gravgak.\n\n\n Gravgak's piercing eyes caused me to notice him. Suspicious eyes? I did\n not know these people's expressions well enough to be sure.\n\n\n Gravgak was a guard, tall and muscular, whose arms and legs were\n painted with green and black diamond designs.",
"We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and\n weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They\n were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n\n\n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n\n\n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n\n\n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n\n\n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n\n\n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones\n suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you\n ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren\n scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The\n attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life.\n It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept\n right on singing.",
"The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\".\n They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our\n ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently\n come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied\n them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a\n hike.\n\n\n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might\n guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold,\n cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the\n cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in\n the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this\n was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a\n circular mantle.",
"\"Are you complaining?\"\n\n\n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we\n were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their\n meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing\n that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making\n a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in\n calm, graceful gestures.\n\n\n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are\n moving in on them.\"\n\n\n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you\n ever see moving trees?\"\n\n\n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under\n cover. Look!\"",
"I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for\n a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as\n innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged\n with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers—how can we warn them? Oh-oh!\n Too late. Look!\"\n\n\n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads\n of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors—fifty or more\n of them—with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide\n semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n3.\n\n\n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends.\n They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird\n clubs with a threat of death.\n\n\n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we\n were about to witness a massacre.",
"\"S-s-sh!\" The low hush of Split Campbell's voice would somehow\n penetrate my dream.\n\n\n The voices about me were soft. My dreams echoed the soft female voices\n of this new, strange language.\n\n\n \"Campbell, are you there?... Have you forgotten the Code, Campbell?\"\n\n\n \"Quiet, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Who is it that's swabbing my face? I can't see.\"\n\n\n \"It's Vauna. She's smiling at you, Captain. Can't you see her?\"\n\n\n \"Is this the pretty one we saw through the telescope?\"\n\n\n \"One of them.\"\n\n\n \"And what of the other? There were two together. I remember—\"",
"I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man!\n Across millions of miles of space—a man, like the men of the Earth.\n\n\n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms\n within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the\n living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of\n our Earth.\n\n\n A man!\n\n\n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n\n\n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n\n\n He might have been entirely naked."
],
[
"I forgot about the moving trees, then, and took over the telescope.\n Mobile trees were not new to me. I had seen similar vegetation on other\n planets—\"sponge-trees\"—which possessed a sort of muscular quality. If\n these were similar, they were no doubt feeding along the surface of the\n slope below the rocky plateau. The people in the clearing beyond paid\n no attention to them.\n\n\n I studied the crowd of people. Only the leader wore the brilliant garb.\n The others were more scantily clothed. All were handsome of build. The\n lemon-tinted sunlight glanced off the muscular shoulders of the males\n and the soft curves of the females.\n\n\n \"Those furry elbow ornaments on the females,\" I said to Split,\n \"they're for protection. The caves they live in must be narrow, so\n they pad their elbows.\"\n\n\n \"Why don't they pad their shoulders? They don't have anything on their\n shoulders.\"",
"\"I cannot say definitely. The exact scientific classification of the\n object I am observing would call for more detailed scrutiny—\"\n\n\n \"You're seeing some sort of object?\"\n\n\n \"Yes sir.\"\n\n\n \"What sort of object?\"\n\n\n \"A living creature, sir—upright, wearing clothes—\"\n\n\n \"A\nman\n?\"\n\n\n \"To all appearances, sir—\"\n\n\n \"You bounder, give me that telescope!\"\n2.\n\n\n If you have explored the weird life of many a planet, as I have, you\n can appreciate the deep sense of excitement that comes over me when,\n looking out at a new world for the first time, I see a man-like animal.\n\n\n Walking upright!\n\n\n Wearing adornments in the nature of clothing!",
"I gazed, and my lungs filled with the breath of wonderment. A man!\n Across millions of miles of space—a man, like the men of the Earth.\n\n\n Six times before in my life of exploration I had gazed at new realms\n within the approachable parts of our universe, but never before had the\n living creatures borne such wonderful resemblance to the human life of\n our Earth.\n\n\n A man!\n\n\n He might have been creeping on all fours.\n\n\n He might have been skulking like a lesser animal.\n\n\n He might have been entirely naked.",
"They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the\n crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees\n themselves were moving.\n\n\n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n\n\n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He\n gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n\n\n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of\n the moving trees.\n\n\n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n\n\n \"Yes. The females—I'm speaking hypothetically—but they\nmust\nbe\n females—are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows.\n I wonder why?\"\n\n\n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n\n\n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.",
"\"Are you complaining?\"\n\n\n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we\n were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their\n meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing\n that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making\n a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in\n calm, graceful gestures.\n\n\n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are\n moving in on them.\"\n\n\n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you\n ever see moving trees?\"\n\n\n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under\n cover. Look!\"",
"So often my eyes would refuse to open. A thousand nightmares. Space\n ships shooting through meteor swarms. Stars like eyes. Eyes like stars.\n The eyes of Vauna, the daughter of Tomboldo. The sensitive stroke of\n Vauna's fingers, brushing my forehead, pressing my hand.\n\n\n I regained my health gradually.\n\n\n \"Are you quite awake?\" Vauna would ask me in her musical Benzendella\n words. \"You speak better today. Your friend Campbell has brought you\n more recordings of our language, so you can learn to speak more. My\n father is eager to talk with you. But you must sleep more. You are\n still weak.\"\n\n\n It gave me a weird sensation to awaken in the night, trying to adjust\n myself to my surroundings. The Benzendellas were sleep-singers. By\n night they murmured mysterious little songs through their sleep.\n Strange harmonies whispered through the caves.",
"Split and I stood together, close enough to exchange comments against\n the siren's wail. Fine looking people, we observed. Smooth faces.\n Like the features of Earth men. These creatures could walk down\n any main street back home. With a bit of makeup they would pass.\n \"Notice, Captain, they have strange looking eyes.\" \"Very smooth.\"\n \"It's because they have no eyebrows ... no eye lashes.\" \"Very\n smooth—handsome—attractive.\"\n\n\n Then the siren went off.\n\n\n The leader stood before me, apparently unafraid. He seemed to be\n waiting for me to explain my presence. His group of twelve gathered in\n close.",
"He was none of these—and at the very first moment of viewing him I\n felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance—but had\n my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race\n a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had\n somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By\n what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be\n able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n\n\n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n\n\n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know\n what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or\n murderous.\n\n\n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my\n word for it, he's a friend.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\"",
"We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and\n weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They\n were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n\n\n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n\n\n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n\n\n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n\n\n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n\n\n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones\n suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you\n ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren\n scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The\n attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life.\n It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept\n right on singing.",
"The late evening sunshine gave us a clear view of our two \"friends\".\n They were fully a mile away. Split was certain they had not seen our\n ship, and to this conclusion I was in agreement. They had apparently\n come up out of the barren rock hillside to view the sunset. I studied\n them through the telescope while Split checked over equipment for a\n hike.\n\n\n The man's walk was unhurried. He moved thoughtfully, one might\n guess. His bare chest and legs showed him to be statuesque in mold,\n cleanly muscled, fine of bone. His skin was almost the color of the\n cream-colored robe which flowed from his back, whipping lightly in\n the breeze. He wore a brilliant red sash about his middle, and this\n was matched by a red headdress that came down over his shoulders as a\n circular mantle.",
"We could see it at several points among the low foothills. Even from\n this distance we could guess that it had been moving along its course\n for centuries. Moving like a sluggish snake. It followed a deep-worn\n path between the nearer hills and the high jagged mountains on the\n horizon.\nWhat was it?\n\"Split\" Campbell and I had been sent here to learn the answers.\n Our sponsor was the well known \"EGGWE\" (the Earth-Galaxy Good\n Will Expeditions.) We were under the EGGWE Code. We were the first\n expedition to this planet, but we had come equipped with two important\n pieces of advance information. The Keynes-Roy roving cameras (unmanned)\n had brought back to the Earth choice items of fact about various parts\n of the universe. From these photos we knew (1) that man lived on this\n planet, a humanoid closely resembling the humans of the Earth; and\n (2) that a vast cylindrical \"rope\" crawled the surface of this land,\n continuously, endlessly.",
"Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits.\n Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n (our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I\n had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim\n his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually\n physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the\n part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"—and the wide ears that\n stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of\n selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I\n could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n\n\n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n\n\n \"What do you see?\" I asked.",
"The girl stood several yards distant, watching him. This was some\n sort of ritual, no doubt. He was not concerned with her, but with the\n setting sun. Its rays were almost horizontal, knifing through a break\n in the distant mountain skyline. He went through some routine motions,\n his moving arms highlighted by the lemon-colored light of evening.\n\n\n The girl approached him. Two other persons appeared from somewhere back\n of her.... Three.... Four.... Five....\n\n\n \"Where do they come from?\" Split had paused in the act of checking\n equipment to take his turn at the telescope. If he had not done so, I\n might not have made a discovery. The landscape was\nmoving\n.\n\n\n The long shadows that I had not noticed through the telescope were a\n prominent part of the picture I saw through the ship's window when I\n looked out across the scene with the naked eye. The shadows were moving.",
"Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their\n clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party\n it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet\n the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as\n a\nwarning\n! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these\n strange devils will throw fire at you.\n\n\n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders,\n thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip,\n zip—BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the\n rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four\n warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were\n flattened—and those who were able, ran.\n\n\n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to\n pick up their clubs.",
"\"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at\n the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we\n will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n\n\n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n\n\n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend—\"\n he pointed to me—\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him\n here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through\n the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget\n this kindness. When we ascend the\nKao-Wagwattl\n, the ever moving\nrope of life\n, these friends shall come with us. On the back of\n the Kao-Wagwattl\nthey shall ride with us across the land\n.\"",
"And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me\n through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me,\n faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some\n corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to\n go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless\n dreams.\n\n\n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing\n before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a\n hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook\n the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his\n flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and\n played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n\n\n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n\n\n \"You have had a long sleep.\"",
"Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was\n safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees\n that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we\n knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent.\n Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests\n of Tomboldo.\n\n\n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to\n hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored\n the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with\n agitated jabbering:\n\n\n \"Wollo—yeeta—vo—vandartch—vandartch! Grr—see—o—see—o—see—o!\"\n\n\n \"See—o—see—o—see—o,\" one of the others echoed.",
"\"Captain—\nJim\n! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n\n\n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had\n the same impulse as Campbell—to do something—anything! Yet here we\n sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n \"friends\" in danger.\n\n\n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't\n duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and\n packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n\n\n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n\n\n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\ncould\ndrop his\n dignity under excitement—his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he\n wanted any sort of split-second order.",
"I had met such situations with ease before. \"EGGWE\" explorers come\n equipped. I held out a gift toward the leader. It was a singing\n medallion attached to a chain. It was disc-shaped, patterned after a\n large silver coin. It made music at the touch of a button. In clear,\n dainty bell tones it rang out its one tune, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n\n\n As it played I held it up for inspection. I placed it around my own\n neck, then offered it to the leader. I thought he was smiling. He was\n not overwhelmed by the \"magic\" of this gadget. He saw it for what it\n was, a token of friendship. There was a keenness about him that I\n liked. Yes, he was smiling. He bent his head forward and allowed me to\n place the gift around his neck.\n\n\n \"Tomboldo,\" he said, pointing to himself.",
"\"Omosla is here too. She's Vauna's attendant. We're all looking after\n you, Captain Linden. Did you know I performed an operation to relieve\n the pressure on your brain? You must get well, Captain.\" The words of\n Campbell came through insistently.\n\n\n After a silence that may have lasted for hours or days, I said,\n \"Campbell, you haven't forgot the EGGWE Code?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Section Four?\"\n\n\n \"Section Four,\" he repeated in a low voice, as if to pacify me and put\n me to sleep. \"Conduct of EGGWE agents toward native inhabitants: A, No\n agent shall enter into any diplomatic agreement that shall be construed\n as binding—\"\n\n\n I interrupted. \"Clause D?\""
],
[
"It began to make sense. They wanted us to repeat the siren noises. The\n enemy had threatened their lives. There could very well have been a\n wholesale slaughter. But as long as we could make the \"see—o—see—o\"\n we were all safe.\n\n\n Split and I exchanged glances. He touched his hand to the equipment\n jacket, to remind me we were armed with something more miraculous than\n a yowling siren.\n\n\n \"See—o—see—o—see—o!\" Others of Tomboldo's party echoed the demand.\n They must have seen the sponge-trees again moving toward our path.\n \"\nSee—o—see—o!\n\"\n\n\n Our peaceful march turned into a spasm of terror. The sponge-trees\n came rushing up the slope, as if borne by a sudden gust of wind. They\n bounced over our path, and the war party spilled out of them.",
"\"I am well again. See, I can almost walk.\" But as I started to rise,\n the wave of blackness warned me, and I restrained my ambition. \"I will\n walk soon.\"\n\n\n \"We will have much to talk about. Your friend has pointed to the stars\n and told me a strange story of your coming. We have walked around the\n ship. He has told me how it rides through the sky. I can hardly make\n myself believe.\" Tomboldo's eyes cast upward under the strong ridge of\n forehead where the eyebrows should have been. He was evidently trying\n to visualize the flight of a space ship. \"We will have much to tell\n each other.\"",
"And if I stirred restlessly, the footsteps of Vauna might come to me\n through the darkness. In her sleeping garments she would come to me,\n faintly visible in the pink light that filtered through from some\n corridor. She would whisper melodious Benzendella words and tell me to\n go back to sleep, and I would drift into the darkness of my endless\n dreams.\n\n\n The day came when I awakened to see both Vauna and her father standing\n before me. Stern old Tomboldo, with his chalk-smooth face and not a\n hint of an eyebrow or eyelash, rapped his hand against my ribs, shook\n the fiber bed lightly, and smiled. From a pocket concealed in his\n flowing cape, he drew forth the musical watch, touched the button, and\n played, \"Trail of Stars.\"\n\n\n \"I have learned to talk,\" I said.\n\n\n \"You have had a long sleep.\"",
"Shouting. A wild swinging of clubs. And no cat-and-mouse tricks. No\n deliberate circling and closing in. An outright attack. Naked bodies\n gleaming in the semi-darkness. Arms swinging weapons, choosing the\n nearest victims. The luminous rocks on the ends of the clubs flashed.\n Shouting, screeching, hurling their clubs. The whizzing fury filled the\n air.\n\n\n I hurled a capsule bomb. It struck at the base of a bouncing\n sponge-tree, and blew the thing to bits.\n\n\n The attackers ran back into a huddle, screaming. Then they came\n forward, rushing defiantly.",
"Tomboldo depended upon the guard Gravgak to make sure that the way was\n safe. Gravgak was supposed to keep an eye on the line of floating trees\n that had taken flight down the hillside. Danger still lurked there, we\n knew. And now the siren that had frightened off the attack was silent.\n Our ship, locked against invaders, could be forgotten. We were guests\n of Tomboldo.\n\n\n Gravgak was our guard, but he didn't work at it. He was too anxious to\n hear all the talk. In the excitement of our meeting, everyone ignored\n the growing darkness, the lurking dangers. Gravgak confronted us with\n agitated jabbering:\n\n\n \"Wollo—yeeta—vo—vandartch—vandartch! Grr—see—o—see—o—see—o!\"\n\n\n \"See—o—see—o—see—o,\" one of the others echoed.",
"\"While we are together,\" old Tomboldo said quietly, looking around at\n the assemblage, \"I must tell you the decision of the council. Soon we\n will move back to the other part of the world.\"\n\n\n There were low murmurs of approval through the chamber.\n\n\n \"We will wait a few days,\" Tomboldo went on, \"until our new friend—\"\n he pointed to me—\"is well enough to travel. We would never leave him\n here to the mercy of the savage ones. He and his helper came through\n the sky in time to save us from being destroyed. We must never forget\n this kindness. When we ascend the\nKao-Wagwattl\n, the ever moving\nrope of life\n, these friends shall come with us. On the back of\n the Kao-Wagwattl\nthey shall ride with us across the land\n.\"",
"I looked at him. Everyone was looking at him, and I knew this was meant\n to be an occasion of apology. But the light of fire in Vauna's eyes\n told me that she did not believe. He saw her look, and his own eyes\n flashed darts of defiance. With an abrupt word to me, he wheeled and\n started off. \"Get well!\"\n\n\n The crowd of men and women made way for him. But in the arched doorway\n he turned. \"Vauna. I am ready to speak to you alone.\"\n\n\n She started. I reached and barely touched her hand. She stopped. \"I\n will talk with you later, Gravgak.\"\n\n\n \"Now!\" he shouted. \"Alone.\"\n\n\n He stalked off. A moment later Vauna, after exchanging a word with her\n father, excused herself from the crowd and followed Gravgak.",
"\"Captain—\nJim\n! You're not going to let this happen!\"\n\n\n Our sympathies had gone to the first groups, the peaceable ones. I had\n the same impulse as Campbell—to do something—anything! Yet here we\n sat in our ship, more than half a mile from our thirty-five or forty\n \"friends\" in danger.\n\n\n Our friends were panicked. But they didn't take flight. They didn't\n duck for the holes in the rocky hilltop. Instead, they rallied and\n packed themselves around their tall leader. They stood, a defiant wall.\n\n\n \"Can we shoot a ray, Jim?\"\n\n\n I didn't answer. Later I would recall that Split\ncould\ndrop his\n dignity under excitement—his \"Captain Linden\" and \"sir.\" Just now he\n wanted any sort of split-second order.",
"We took into our nostrils the tangy air, breathing fiercely, at first.\n We slogged along over the rock surface feeling our weight to be\n one-and-a-third times normal. We glanced down the slope apprehensively.\n We didn't want any footraces. The trees, however, were still\n retreating. Our siren would sing on for another eight minutes. And\n in case of further danger, we were equipped with the standard pocket\n arsenal of special purpose capsule bombs.\n\n\n Soon we came face to face with the tall, stately old leader in the\n cream-and-red cloak.",
"From the way those in the room looked, I knew this must be a dramatic\n moment. It was as if she had acknowledged Gravgak as her master—or her\n lover. He had called for her. She had followed.\n\n\n But her old father was still the master. He stepped toward the door.\n \"Vauna!... Gravgak!... Come back.\"\n\n\n (I will always wonder what might have happened if he hadn't called\n them! Was my distrust of Gravgak justified? Had I become merely a\n jealous lover—or was I right in my hunch that the tall muscular guard\n was a potential traitor?)\n\n\n Vauna reappeared at once. I believe she was glad that she had been\n called back.\n\n\n Gravgak came sullenly. At the edge of the crowd in the arched doorway\n he stood scowling.",
"I saw, then. The whole line of advancing vegetation was camouflage for\n a sneak attack. And all those natives sitting around in meeting were as\n innocent as a flock of sitting ducks. Split Campbell's voice was edged\n with alarm. \"Captain! Those worshippers—how can we warn them? Oh-oh!\n Too late. Look!\"\n\n\n All at once the advancing sponge-trees were tossed back over the heads\n of the savage band concealed within. They were warriors—fifty or more\n of them—with painted naked bodies. They dashed forward in a wide\n semicircle, swinging crude weapons, bent on slaughter.\n3.\n\n\n They were waving short clubs or whips with stones tied to the ends.\n They charged up the slope, about sixty yards, swinging their weird\n clubs with a threat of death.\n\n\n Wild disorder suddenly struck the audience. Campbell and I believed we\n were about to witness a massacre.",
"They were tree shadows. They were moving toward the clearing where the\n crowd gathered. And the reason for their movement was that the trees\n themselves were moving.\n\n\n \"Notice anything?\" I asked Split.\n\n\n \"The crowd is growing. We've certainly landed on top of a city.\" He\n gazed. \"They're coming from underground.\"\n\n\n Looking through the telescope, obviously he didn't catch the view of\n the moving trees.\n\n\n \"Notice anything else unusual?\" I persisted.\n\n\n \"Yes. The females—I'm speaking hypothetically—but they\nmust\nbe\n females—are all wearing puffy white fur ornaments around their elbows.\n I wonder why?\"\n\n\n \"You haven't noticed the trees?\"\n\n\n \"The females are quite attractive,\" said Split.",
"We saw the naked warriors run out in a wide circle. They spun and\n weaved, they twirled their deadly clubs, they danced grotesquely. They\n were closing in. Closer and closer. It was all their party.\n\n\n \"Jim, can we shoot?\"\n\n\n \"Hit number sixteen, Campbell.\"\n\n\n Split touched the number sixteen signal.\n\n\n The ship's siren wailed out over the land.\n\n\n You could tell when the sound struck them. The circle of savage ones\n suddenly fell apart. The dancing broke into the wildest contortions you\n ever saw. As if they'd been spanked by a wave of electricity. The siren\n scream must have sounded like an animal cry from an unknown world. The\n attackers ran for the sponge-trees. The rootless jungle came to life.\n It jerked and jumped spasmodically down the slope. And our siren kept\n right on singing.",
"\"Good. Don't. Just get ready.\"\n\n\n \"We're going to go\nout\n—?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" I said. \"Orders.\"\n\n\n \"And meet both of them?\" Split was at the telescope.\n\n\n \"Both?\" I took the instrument from him. Both! \"Well!\"\n\n\n \"They seem to be coming out of the ground,\" Split said. \"I see no signs\n of habitation, but apparently we've landed on top of an underground\n city—though I hasten to add that this is only an hypothesis.\"\n\n\n \"One's a male and the other's a female,\" I said.\n\n\n \"Another hypothesis,\" said Split.",
"We had intentionally landed at what we guessed would be a safe distance\n from the rope. If it were a living thing, like a serpent, we preferred\n not to disturb it. If it gave off heat or poisonous gases or deadly\n vibrations, we meant to keep our distance. If, on the other hand, it\n proved to be some sort of vegetable—a vine of glacier proportions—or\n a river of some silvery, creamy substance—we would move in upon it\n gradually, gathering facts as we progressed. I could depend upon\n \"Split\" to record all observable phenomena with the accuracy of\n split-hairs.\n\n\n Split was working at the reports like a drudge at this very moment.\n\n\n I looked up from the telescope, expecting him to be waiting his turn\n eagerly. I misguessed. He didn't even glance up from his books. Rare\n young Campbell! Always a man of duty, never a man of impulse!",
"But the operation was not a complete success. We had suffered a serious\n casualty. The guard Gravgak. He had rushed out too far, and the first\n blast of fire and rock had knocked him down. Now Tomboldo and others of\n the party hovered over him.\n\n\n His eyes opened a little. I thought he was staring at me, drilling me\n with suspicion. I worked over him with medicines. The crowd around us\n stood back in an attitude of awe as Split and I applied ready bandages,\n and held a stimulant to his nostrils that made him breath back to\n consciousness.",
"\"Are you complaining?\"\n\n\n We became fascinated in watching, from the seclusion of our ship. If we\n were to walk out, or make any sounds, we might have interrupted their\n meeting. Here they were in their native ritual of sunset, not knowing\n that people from another world watched. The tall leader must be making\n a speech. They sat around him in little huddles. He moved his arms in\n calm, graceful gestures.\n\n\n \"They'd better break it up!\" Split said suddenly. \"The jungles are\n moving in on them.\"\n\n\n \"They're spellbound,\" I said. \"They're used to sponge-trees. Didn't you\n ever see moving trees?\"\n\n\n Split said sharply, \"Those trees are marching! They're an army under\n cover. Look!\"",
"Our muscular guard, Gravgak was too bold. He had picked up one of their\n clubs and he ran toward their advance, and to all of Tomboldo's party\n it must have appeared that he was bravely rushing to his death. Yet\n the gesture of the club he swung so wildly could have been intended as\n a\nwarning\n! It could have meant, Run back, you fools, or these\n strange devils will throw fire at you.\n\n\n I threw fire. And so did my lieutenant. He didn't wait for orders,\n thank goodness. He knew it was their lives or ours. Zip, zip,\n zip—BLANG-BLANG-BLANG! The bursts of fire at their feet ripped the\n rocks. The spray caught them and knocked them back. Three or four\n warriors in the fore ranks were torn up in the blasts. Others were\n flattened—and those who were able, ran.\n\n\n They ran, not waiting for the cover of sponge-trees. Not bothering to\n pick up their clubs.",
"Needless to say, I had kidded him unmercifully over these traits.\n Across the millions of miles of space that we had recently traveled\n (our first voyage together) I had amused myself at his expense. I\n had sworn that he would find, in time, that he couldn't even trim\n his fingernails without calipers, or comb his hair without actually\n physically splitting the hairs that cropped up in the middle of the\n part. That was when I had nicknamed him \"Split\"—and the wide ears that\n stuck out from his stubble-cut blond hair had glowed with the pink of\n selfconsciousness. Plainly, he liked the kidding. But if I thought I\n could rescue him from the weight of dignity and duty, I was mistaken.\n\n\n Now he had turned the telescope for a view far to the right. He paused.\n\n\n \"What do you see?\" I asked.",
"He was none of these—and at the very first moment of viewing him I\n felt a kinship toward him. Oh, he was primitive in appearance—but had\n my ancestors not been the same? Was this not a mirror of my own race\n a million years or so ago? I sensed that my own stream of life had\n somehow crossed with his in ages gone by. How? Who can ever know? By\n what faded charts of the movements through the sky will man ever be\n able to retrace relationships of forms of life among planets?\n\n\n \"Get ready to go out and meet him, Campbell,\" I said. \"He's a friend.\"\n\n\n Split Campbell gave me a look as if to say, Sir, you don't even know\n what sort of animal he is, actually, much less whether he's friendly or\n murderous.\n\n\n \"There are some things I can sense on first sight, Campbell. Take my\n word for it, he's a friend.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't say anything, sir.\""
]
] |
test
|
51241
|
[
"Who is Molly?",
"What was unique about Roddie's appearance according to Ida?",
"Why did Roddie initially decide he should kill Ida?",
"Why does Molly begin singing a kindergarten song to Roddie?",
"Why doesn't Roddie know what a boat is?",
"What event causes Roddie to finally come to accept he is actually Man?",
"Why was Roddie happy when he finally saw Ida after surfacing from his secret hideout?",
"Why do the Invaders attack the city?",
"Why does Roddie pursue Ida on the suspension cable?",
"Why did Ida join the Invaders?"
] |
[
[
"Roddie's android mother.",
"An android nurse.",
"A nurse also responsible for commanding the android soldiers.",
"Roddie's human nurse."
],
[
"He wore a diaper.",
"His uncut, blond hair looked like it had been recently burned.",
"His hands were filthy.",
"His footprints were extremely large."
],
[
"In order to ingratiate himself with the android soldiers.",
"She had discovered his secret hideout.",
"To help rid his city of the Invader horde.",
"To demonstrate his worthiness to join the Invaders."
],
[
"She is attempting to distract him from the Invaders destroying the city outside.",
"She is trying to help him learn his ABCs.",
"She is trying to sing him to sleep.",
"She is having a mechanical malfunction."
],
[
"The androids had re-programmed his memories to forget everything prior to their saving his life.",
"The year is 2349, and boats are a relic from the distant past.",
"He had been raised by androids and has never left the city.",
"He has never left the apartment where Molly takes care of him."
],
[
"He and Ida spend the night together in a tower atop the Golden Gate Bridge.",
"He crawls along the bridge and feels his mortal body aching as he latches onto the sharp wire.",
"Ida makes fun of him for wearing a diaper.",
"He feels bad for Ida and decides not to kill her."
],
[
"He liked the doeskin dress she wore.",
"He found her attractive.",
"He was drawn in by her bright, dark, wary eyes, which she hid from him when they met each other's gaze.",
"He realized they shared a similar physique, and therefore she would be easier to kill than an android."
],
[
"They want to take over the city from the androids to make it their home.",
"The city used to be their home, and they rely on frequent attacks to gather essential supplies.",
"They are trying to capture and imprison Roddie.",
"They are trying to eliminate the android species."
],
[
"He hopes she will tire and fall of the bridge to her death.",
"He wants to learn more about the Invaders and their purpose in the city.",
"He is attracted to her, and he wants to spend more time with her.",
"He realizes allowing her to go free would send the wrong message to the android soldiers."
],
[
"She was eager to take back the city and help her people resettle there.",
"She hoped to meet a man wearing a diaper.",
"She wanted to attend to those injured in the raids.",
"There was a lack of men in her community, so she wanted to go somewhere where there were more."
]
] |
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[
0,
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[
"\"I'm\nnot\na little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and\n I've never even\nseen\nan Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n\n\n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder.\n She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n\n\n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—\" she chanted.\n\n\n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had\n helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the\n kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n\n\n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n\n\n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.",
"Soon there would be nothing left of the\nPrivate Property Keep Out\nthat, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to\n them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves\n would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed\n servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n\n\n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He\n might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And\n Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with\n Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n\n\n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as\n the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might\n accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first\n aid was useful to them.",
"There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight\n extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands\n touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an\n angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n\n\n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n\n\n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular\n seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n\n\n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n\n\n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped\n out a bayonet.\n\n\n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\nMolly stepped in front of him.",
"But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was,\n though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger,\n thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his\n friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were\n things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring\n eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n\n\n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite\n complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light\n on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off,\n an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and\n rustle as they scampered.",
"\"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her\n knitting needles into his eyes.\n\n\n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft\n spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\nRoddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the\n patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.",
"\"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these\n androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n\n\n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find\n him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the\n manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n\"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n\n\n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see\n me soon enough.\"\n\n\n But she'd see\nhim\n, Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n\n\n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.",
"But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the\n supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as\n Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would\n satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he\n might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this\n enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect\n him.",
"It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had\n cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a\n mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\nHe was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up\n along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n\n\n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n \"Looking for a good time?\"\n\n\n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many\n things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done.\n Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come\n to attention and report!\"",
"But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry\n out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all\n obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against\n everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even\nhim\nout\n when he was aflame....\n\n\n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling.\n He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the\n street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n\n\n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but\n saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could\n have entered through the iron cover?\n\n\n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.",
"He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the\n cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks;\n what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he\n peered was fire-proof.\n\n\n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke\n in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while\n the soldiers went out to fight.\n\n\n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt\n almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in\n that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers\n don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The soldiers don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The\n soldiers don't—\"",
"He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a\n full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he\n looked too long.\n\n\n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of\n fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst\n into sudden laughter.\n\n\n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big,\n strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and\n carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable\n character I have ever known!\"\n\n\n He'd passed inspection, then—so far. He expelled his withheld breath,\n and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"",
"He went on with his questioning. \"Why are\nyou\nhere? I mean, sure, the\n others are after tools and things, but what's\nyour\npurpose?\"\n\n\n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n \"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no\n weapon.\"\n\n\n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of\n words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored\n and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the\n boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was\n being silly?\"\n\n\n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"",
"Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he\n had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting\n a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had\n grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose.\n Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed\n an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained\n spinach or squash.\n\n\n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat\n baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you\n happen to know where to find it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n \"I've been here before.\"\n\n\n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"",
"She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her\n teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the\n courage.\"\n\n\n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face,\n but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He\n compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought\n for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n\n\n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't\n possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I\n feel in the morning.\"\n\n\n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n\n\n And by morning he knew he was a Man.",
"She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet\n somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said\n nothing.\n\n\n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and\n kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the\n city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack\n friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\nScornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was\n Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n\n\n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so\n much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men\nalways\ncall it\n logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness,\n affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is\n for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"",
"Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n\n\n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first\n up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old\n thing?\"\n\n\n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The\n ladder's right behind me.\"\n\n\n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from\n street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously\n fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n\n\n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her\n shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet\n that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n\n\n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that\n would make things easy when the time came.",
"\"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n\n\n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She\n was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can\n with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the\n rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her\n strength.\n\n\n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed\n plainly that he'd given himself away.",
"He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of\n his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder\n at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for\n this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\nHe'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to\n look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of\n concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the\n unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked\n girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n\n\n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads\n made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n\n\n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n\n\n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.",
"It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body\n heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\nQuickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready\n for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the\n darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over\n that curving surface for identifying features.\n\n\n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly\n seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage\n kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an\n unexpected voice.\n\n\n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think\n you are?\"\n\n\n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to\n fumble for it. \"Who do you think\nyou\nare?\"",
"\"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't\n say odd.\"\nWhen they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's\n assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if\n she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of\n what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an\n Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n\n\n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n\n\n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do\n any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most\n direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and\n she began to talk.\n\n\n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless\n to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had\n been."
],
[
"\"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't\n say odd.\"\nWhen they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's\n assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if\n she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of\n what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an\n Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n\n\n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n\n\n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do\n any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most\n direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and\n she began to talk.\n\n\n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless\n to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had\n been.",
"Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie\n turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to\n his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n\n\n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from\n his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've\n had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n\n\n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to\n deny his own humiliating needs.\n\n\n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care\n of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"",
"In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and\n concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over\n the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they\n could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n\n\n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and\n clung to Roddie's arm.\n\n\n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n\n\n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back\n below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a\n soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n\"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n\n\n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned\n and walked away.",
"But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would\n admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at\n every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only\n his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\nShe had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her\n and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced\n by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in\n sight.\n\n\n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier\n had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left\n the city, were not built to do so. But\nhe\nwas here; with luck, he\n could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n\n\n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"",
"She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet\n somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said\n nothing.\n\n\n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and\n kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the\n city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack\n friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\nScornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was\n Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n\n\n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so\n much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men\nalways\ncall it\n logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness,\n affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is\n for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"",
"They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within\n the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and\n slept for several hours.\nRoddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip.\n Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings\n they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n\n\n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount\n Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy\n white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons\n on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding,\n tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.",
"But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the\n supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as\n Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would\n satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he\n might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this\n enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect\n him.",
"He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a\n full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he\n looked too long.\n\n\n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of\n fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst\n into sudden laughter.\n\n\n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big,\n strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and\n carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable\n character I have ever known!\"\n\n\n He'd passed inspection, then—so far. He expelled his withheld breath,\n and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"",
"\"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls\nare\nthere in this raiding\n party?\"\n\n\n His first Invader—and he had dropped his weapon!\n\n\n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused\n suddenly. This girl—whatever\nthat\nwas—seemed to think him one of\n her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn\n delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he\n killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n\n\n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would\nI\nknow how many girls there\n are?\"\n\n\n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl\n said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either.\n Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"",
"Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n\n\n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her\n face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n\n\n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and,\n weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends.\n Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n\n\n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will\n come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n\n\n \"But—but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so\n senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your\n friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the\n city is ours, not theirs!\"",
"He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of\n his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder\n at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for\n this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\nHe'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to\n look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of\n concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the\n unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked\n girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n\n\n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads\n made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n\n\n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n\n\n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.",
"She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her\n teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the\n courage.\"\n\n\n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face,\n but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He\n compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought\n for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n\n\n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't\n possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I\n feel in the morning.\"\n\n\n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n\n\n And by morning he knew he was a Man.",
"Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they\n were unbearably wearing.\nIn the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted\n his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this\n fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble,\n the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His\n cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the\n diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from\n a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood\n irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more\n familiar bedlam.",
"Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n\n\n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first\n up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old\n thing?\"\n\n\n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The\n ladder's right behind me.\"\n\n\n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from\n street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously\n fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n\n\n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her\n shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet\n that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n\n\n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that\n would make things easy when the time came.",
"It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had\n cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a\n mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\nHe was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up\n along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n\n\n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n \"Looking for a good time?\"\n\n\n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many\n things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done.\n Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come\n to attention and report!\"",
"\"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you\n belong!\"\n\n\n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I\n belong here!\"\n\n\n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n\n\n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and\n out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they\n thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n\n\n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable\n anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling\n support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was\n trapped.\n\n\n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly\n would, to finish the job....",
"\"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her\n knitting needles into his eyes.\n\n\n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft\n spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\nRoddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the\n patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.",
"But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of\n gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small\n portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed\n to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its\n color.\n\n\n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no\n interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes,\n Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n\n\n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which\n Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins\n of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable\n over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was\n the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on\n the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need\n to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.",
"There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened\n wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n\n\n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted.\n Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar\n non-mechanical construction.\n\n\n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling\n as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling\n body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n\n\n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog\n thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last\n hundred feet to sanctuary.",
"Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he\n had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting\n a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had\n grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose.\n Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed\n an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained\n spinach or squash.\n\n\n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat\n baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you\n happen to know where to find it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n \"I've been here before.\"\n\n\n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\""
],
[
"But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the\n supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as\n Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would\n satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he\n might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this\n enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect\n him.",
"She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her\n teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the\n courage.\"\n\n\n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face,\n but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He\n compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought\n for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n\n\n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't\n possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I\n feel in the morning.\"\n\n\n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n\n\n And by morning he knew he was a Man.",
"She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet\n somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said\n nothing.\n\n\n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and\n kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the\n city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack\n friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\nScornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was\n Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n\n\n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so\n much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men\nalways\ncall it\n logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness,\n affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is\n for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"",
"Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie\n turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to\n his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n\n\n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from\n his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've\n had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n\n\n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to\n deny his own humiliating needs.\n\n\n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care\n of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"",
"But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of\n gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small\n portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed\n to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its\n color.\n\n\n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no\n interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes,\n Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n\n\n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which\n Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins\n of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable\n over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was\n the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on\n the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need\n to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.",
"Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n\n\n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her\n face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n\n\n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and,\n weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends.\n Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n\n\n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will\n come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n\n\n \"But—but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so\n senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your\n friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the\n city is ours, not theirs!\"",
"\"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't\n say odd.\"\nWhen they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's\n assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if\n she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of\n what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an\n Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n\n\n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n\n\n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do\n any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most\n direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and\n she began to talk.\n\n\n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless\n to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had\n been.",
"\"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you\n belong!\"\n\n\n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I\n belong here!\"\n\n\n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n\n\n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and\n out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they\n thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n\n\n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable\n anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling\n support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was\n trapped.\n\n\n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly\n would, to finish the job....",
"\"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many\n casualties....\n\n\n \"But why do you—we—keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the\n soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and\n they\ncan't\nleave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll\n be plenty of young men.\"\n\n\n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever\n tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep\n us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our\n tools and things?\"\n\n\n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance.\n But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too\n close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder\n every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.",
"He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of\n his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder\n at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for\n this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\nHe'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to\n look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of\n concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the\n unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked\n girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n\n\n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads\n made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n\n\n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n\n\n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.",
"But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would\n admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at\n every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only\n his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\nShe had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her\n and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced\n by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in\n sight.\n\n\n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier\n had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left\n the city, were not built to do so. But\nhe\nwas here; with luck, he\n could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n\n\n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"",
"But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she\n dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved\n steel surface.\n\n\n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the\n ever-steepening catenary until—because there were no guard-ropes or\n handgrips—she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n\n\n Except it wouldn't be\nhis\nsolution. Her death wouldn't prove him to\n his friends.\n\n\n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog\n that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along\n the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve\n steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n\n\n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when\n he'd followed.",
"Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they\n were unbearably wearing.\nIn the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted\n his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this\n fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble,\n the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His\n cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the\n diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from\n a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood\n irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more\n familiar bedlam.",
"\"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls\nare\nthere in this raiding\n party?\"\n\n\n His first Invader—and he had dropped his weapon!\n\n\n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused\n suddenly. This girl—whatever\nthat\nwas—seemed to think him one of\n her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn\n delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he\n killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n\n\n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would\nI\nknow how many girls there\n are?\"\n\n\n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl\n said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either.\n Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"",
"\"It\ncan't\nbe,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those\n who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to\n me. Each of\nus\nhas a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be\n aimless. Each of\nus\nhelps preserve the city; you only try to rob and\n end it by destroying it.\nMy\npeople must be the true Men, because\n they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to\n let you escape.\"\n\n\n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n\n\n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in\n cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two?\n Don't—don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"",
"\"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the\n Gate, I guess—you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll\n think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it\n over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n\n\n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even\n her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there\nwere\na way over the bridge....\n\n\n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I—I don't want to be\n alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n\n\n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed\n her—\nif\nnothing happened when she saw him.",
"In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and\n concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over\n the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they\n could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n\n\n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and\n clung to Roddie's arm.\n\n\n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n\n\n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back\n below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a\n soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n\"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n\n\n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned\n and walked away.",
"\"I'm\nnot\na little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and\n I've never even\nseen\nan Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n\n\n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder.\n She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n\n\n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—\" she chanted.\n\n\n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had\n helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the\n kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n\n\n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n\n\n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.",
"There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened\n wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n\n\n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted.\n Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar\n non-mechanical construction.\n\n\n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling\n as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling\n body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n\n\n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog\n thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last\n hundred feet to sanctuary.",
"He went on with his questioning. \"Why are\nyou\nhere? I mean, sure, the\n others are after tools and things, but what's\nyour\npurpose?\"\n\n\n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n \"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no\n weapon.\"\n\n\n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of\n words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored\n and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the\n boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was\n being silly?\"\n\n\n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\""
],
[
"\"I'm\nnot\na little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and\n I've never even\nseen\nan Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n\n\n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder.\n She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n\n\n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—\" she chanted.\n\n\n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had\n helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the\n kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n\n\n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n\n\n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.",
"\"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her\n knitting needles into his eyes.\n\n\n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft\n spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\nRoddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the\n patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.",
"He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the\n cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks;\n what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he\n peered was fire-proof.\n\n\n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke\n in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while\n the soldiers went out to fight.\n\n\n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt\n almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in\n that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers\n don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The soldiers don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The\n soldiers don't—\"",
"But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the\n supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as\n Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would\n satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he\n might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this\n enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect\n him.",
"It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had\n cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a\n mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\nHe was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up\n along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n\n\n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n \"Looking for a good time?\"\n\n\n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many\n things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done.\n Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come\n to attention and report!\"",
"Soon there would be nothing left of the\nPrivate Property Keep Out\nthat, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to\n them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves\n would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed\n servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n\n\n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He\n might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And\n Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with\n Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n\n\n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as\n the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might\n accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first\n aid was useful to them.",
"Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie\n turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to\n his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n\n\n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from\n his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've\n had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n\n\n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to\n deny his own humiliating needs.\n\n\n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care\n of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"",
"She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet\n somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said\n nothing.\n\n\n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and\n kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the\n city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack\n friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\nScornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was\n Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n\n\n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so\n much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men\nalways\ncall it\n logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness,\n affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is\n for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"",
"Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he\n had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting\n a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had\n grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose.\n Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed\n an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained\n spinach or squash.\n\n\n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat\n baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you\n happen to know where to find it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n \"I've been here before.\"\n\n\n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"",
"Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they\n were unbearably wearing.\nIn the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted\n his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this\n fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble,\n the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His\n cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the\n diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from\n a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood\n irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more\n familiar bedlam.",
"There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight\n extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands\n touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an\n angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n\n\n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n\n\n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular\n seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n\n\n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n\n\n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped\n out a bayonet.\n\n\n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\nMolly stepped in front of him.",
"He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when\n heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on\n the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n\n\n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new\n idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled\n with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out\n the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n\n\n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense\n firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide\n foam.",
"\"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these\n androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n\n\n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find\n him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the\n manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n\"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n\n\n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see\n me soon enough.\"\n\n\n But she'd see\nhim\n, Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n\n\n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.",
"She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her\n teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the\n courage.\"\n\n\n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face,\n but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He\n compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought\n for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n\n\n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't\n possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I\n feel in the morning.\"\n\n\n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n\n\n And by morning he knew he was a Man.",
"But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was,\n though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger,\n thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his\n friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were\n things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring\n eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n\n\n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite\n complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light\n on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off,\n an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and\n rustle as they scampered.",
"Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n\n\n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first\n up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old\n thing?\"\n\n\n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The\n ladder's right behind me.\"\n\n\n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from\n street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously\n fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n\n\n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her\n shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet\n that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n\n\n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that\n would make things easy when the time came.",
"It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body\n heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\nQuickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready\n for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the\n darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over\n that curving surface for identifying features.\n\n\n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly\n seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage\n kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an\n unexpected voice.\n\n\n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think\n you are?\"\n\n\n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to\n fumble for it. \"Who do you think\nyou\nare?\"",
"\"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't\n say odd.\"\nWhen they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's\n assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if\n she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of\n what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an\n Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n\n\n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n\n\n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do\n any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most\n direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and\n she began to talk.\n\n\n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless\n to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had\n been.",
"But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would\n admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at\n every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only\n his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\nShe had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her\n and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced\n by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in\n sight.\n\n\n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier\n had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left\n the city, were not built to do so. But\nhe\nwas here; with luck, he\n could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n\n\n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"",
"But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of\n gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small\n portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed\n to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its\n color.\n\n\n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no\n interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes,\n Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n\n\n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which\n Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins\n of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable\n over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was\n the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on\n the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need\n to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge."
],
[
"Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight\n with fear of discovery.\n\n\n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper\n was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then.\n They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't\n it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't\n have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and\n rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n\n\n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the\n dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n\n\n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man\n when I came back?\"",
"It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had\n cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a\n mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\nHe was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up\n along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n\n\n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n \"Looking for a good time?\"\n\n\n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many\n things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done.\n Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come\n to attention and report!\"",
"But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would\n admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at\n every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only\n his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\nShe had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her\n and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced\n by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in\n sight.\n\n\n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier\n had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left\n the city, were not built to do so. But\nhe\nwas here; with luck, he\n could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n\n\n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"",
"Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they\n were unbearably wearing.\nIn the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted\n his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this\n fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble,\n the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His\n cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the\n diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from\n a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood\n irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more\n familiar bedlam.",
"\"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls\nare\nthere in this raiding\n party?\"\n\n\n His first Invader—and he had dropped his weapon!\n\n\n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused\n suddenly. This girl—whatever\nthat\nwas—seemed to think him one of\n her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn\n delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he\n killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n\n\n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would\nI\nknow how many girls there\n are?\"\n\n\n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl\n said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either.\n Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"",
"He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the\n cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks;\n what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he\n peered was fire-proof.\n\n\n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke\n in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while\n the soldiers went out to fight.\n\n\n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt\n almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in\n that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers\n don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The soldiers don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The\n soldiers don't—\"",
"\"I'm\nnot\na little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and\n I've never even\nseen\nan Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n\n\n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder.\n She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n\n\n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—\" she chanted.\n\n\n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had\n helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the\n kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n\n\n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n\n\n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.",
"\"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't\n say odd.\"\nWhen they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's\n assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if\n she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of\n what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an\n Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n\n\n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n\n\n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do\n any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most\n direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and\n she began to talk.\n\n\n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless\n to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had\n been.",
"He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when\n heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on\n the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n\n\n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new\n idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled\n with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out\n the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n\n\n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense\n firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide\n foam.",
"Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie\n turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to\n his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n\n\n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from\n his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've\n had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n\n\n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to\n deny his own humiliating needs.\n\n\n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care\n of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"",
"Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he\n had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting\n a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had\n grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose.\n Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed\n an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained\n spinach or squash.\n\n\n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat\n baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you\n happen to know where to find it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n \"I've been here before.\"\n\n\n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"",
"\"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her\n knitting needles into his eyes.\n\n\n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft\n spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\nRoddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the\n patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.",
"They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within\n the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and\n slept for several hours.\nRoddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip.\n Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings\n they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n\n\n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount\n Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy\n white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons\n on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding,\n tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.",
"Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n\n\n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her\n face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n\n\n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and,\n weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends.\n Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n\n\n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will\n come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n\n\n \"But—but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so\n senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your\n friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the\n city is ours, not theirs!\"",
"It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body\n heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\nQuickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready\n for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the\n darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over\n that curving surface for identifying features.\n\n\n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly\n seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage\n kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an\n unexpected voice.\n\n\n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think\n you are?\"\n\n\n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to\n fumble for it. \"Who do you think\nyou\nare?\"",
"But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the\n supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as\n Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would\n satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he\n might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this\n enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect\n him.",
"But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of\n gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small\n portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed\n to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its\n color.\n\n\n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no\n interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes,\n Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n\n\n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which\n Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins\n of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable\n over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was\n the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on\n the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need\n to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.",
"The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as\n an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even\n in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the\n One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n\n\n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now\n walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of\n how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock\n itself a difference to be hidden.\n\n\n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A\n weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was\n the levering key that opened its door.\nEverything\nwas wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of\n course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to\n move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for\n ventilation.",
"He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of\n his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder\n at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for\n this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\nHe'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to\n look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of\n concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the\n unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked\n girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n\n\n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads\n made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n\n\n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n\n\n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.",
"Soon there would be nothing left of the\nPrivate Property Keep Out\nthat, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to\n them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves\n would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed\n servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n\n\n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He\n might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And\n Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with\n Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n\n\n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as\n the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might\n accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first\n aid was useful to them."
],
[
"She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her\n teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the\n courage.\"\n\n\n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face,\n but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He\n compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought\n for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n\n\n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't\n possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I\n feel in the morning.\"\n\n\n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n\n\n And by morning he knew he was a Man.",
"Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n\n\n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her\n face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n\n\n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and,\n weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends.\n Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n\n\n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will\n come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n\n\n \"But—but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so\n senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your\n friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the\n city is ours, not theirs!\"",
"\"It\ncan't\nbe,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those\n who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to\n me. Each of\nus\nhas a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be\n aimless. Each of\nus\nhelps preserve the city; you only try to rob and\n end it by destroying it.\nMy\npeople must be the true Men, because\n they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to\n let you escape.\"\n\n\n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n\n\n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in\n cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two?\n Don't—don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"",
"He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when\n heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on\n the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n\n\n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new\n idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled\n with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out\n the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n\n\n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense\n firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide\n foam.",
"The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as\n an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even\n in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the\n One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n\n\n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now\n walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of\n how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock\n itself a difference to be hidden.\n\n\n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A\n weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was\n the levering key that opened its door.\nEverything\nwas wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of\n course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to\n move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for\n ventilation.",
"There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened\n wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n\n\n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted.\n Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar\n non-mechanical construction.\n\n\n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling\n as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling\n body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n\n\n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog\n thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last\n hundred feet to sanctuary.",
"Soon there would be nothing left of the\nPrivate Property Keep Out\nthat, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to\n them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves\n would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed\n servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n\n\n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He\n might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And\n Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with\n Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n\n\n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as\n the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might\n accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first\n aid was useful to them.",
"She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet\n somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said\n nothing.\n\n\n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and\n kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the\n city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack\n friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\nScornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was\n Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n\n\n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so\n much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men\nalways\ncall it\n logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness,\n affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is\n for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"",
"Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they\n were unbearably wearing.\nIn the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted\n his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this\n fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble,\n the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His\n cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the\n diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from\n a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood\n irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more\n familiar bedlam.",
"It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had\n cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a\n mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\nHe was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up\n along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n\n\n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n \"Looking for a good time?\"\n\n\n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many\n things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done.\n Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come\n to attention and report!\"",
"But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would\n admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at\n every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only\n his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\nShe had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her\n and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced\n by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in\n sight.\n\n\n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier\n had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left\n the city, were not built to do so. But\nhe\nwas here; with luck, he\n could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n\n\n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"",
"\"I'm\nnot\na little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and\n I've never even\nseen\nan Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n\n\n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder.\n She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n\n\n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—\" she chanted.\n\n\n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had\n helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the\n kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n\n\n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n\n\n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.",
"Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie\n turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to\n his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n\n\n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from\n his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've\n had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n\n\n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to\n deny his own humiliating needs.\n\n\n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care\n of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"",
"\"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these\n androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n\n\n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find\n him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the\n manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n\"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n\n\n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see\n me soon enough.\"\n\n\n But she'd see\nhim\n, Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n\n\n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.",
"It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body\n heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\nQuickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready\n for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the\n darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over\n that curving surface for identifying features.\n\n\n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly\n seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage\n kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an\n unexpected voice.\n\n\n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think\n you are?\"\n\n\n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to\n fumble for it. \"Who do you think\nyou\nare?\"",
"It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off\n the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached\n at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught\n and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another\n harmlessly.\nMeanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another\n casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the\n time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie\n swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces\n of the other to make a whole one.\n\n\n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was\n new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the\n soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed\n him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders\n repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.",
"\"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her\n knitting needles into his eyes.\n\n\n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft\n spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\nRoddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the\n patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.",
"In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and\n concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over\n the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they\n could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n\n\n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and\n clung to Roddie's arm.\n\n\n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n\n\n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back\n below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a\n soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n\"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n\n\n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned\n and walked away.",
"Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight\n with fear of discovery.\n\n\n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper\n was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then.\n They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't\n it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't\n have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and\n rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n\n\n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the\n dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n\n\n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man\n when I came back?\"",
"\"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you\n belong!\"\n\n\n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I\n belong here!\"\n\n\n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n\n\n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and\n out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they\n thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n\n\n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable\n anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling\n support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was\n trapped.\n\n\n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly\n would, to finish the job...."
],
[
"Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie\n turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to\n his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n\n\n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from\n his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've\n had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n\n\n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to\n deny his own humiliating needs.\n\n\n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care\n of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"",
"She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her\n teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the\n courage.\"\n\n\n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face,\n but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He\n compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought\n for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n\n\n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't\n possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I\n feel in the morning.\"\n\n\n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n\n\n And by morning he knew he was a Man.",
"\"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't\n say odd.\"\nWhen they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's\n assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if\n she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of\n what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an\n Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n\n\n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n\n\n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do\n any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most\n direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and\n she began to talk.\n\n\n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless\n to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had\n been.",
"In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and\n concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over\n the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they\n could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n\n\n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and\n clung to Roddie's arm.\n\n\n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n\n\n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back\n below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a\n soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n\"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n\n\n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned\n and walked away.",
"He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of\n his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder\n at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for\n this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\nHe'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to\n look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of\n concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the\n unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked\n girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n\n\n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads\n made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n\n\n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n\n\n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.",
"There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened\n wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n\n\n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted.\n Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar\n non-mechanical construction.\n\n\n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling\n as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling\n body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n\n\n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog\n thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last\n hundred feet to sanctuary.",
"But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would\n admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at\n every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only\n his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\nShe had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her\n and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced\n by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in\n sight.\n\n\n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier\n had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left\n the city, were not built to do so. But\nhe\nwas here; with luck, he\n could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n\n\n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"",
"They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within\n the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and\n slept for several hours.\nRoddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip.\n Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings\n they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n\n\n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount\n Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy\n white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons\n on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding,\n tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.",
"She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet\n somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said\n nothing.\n\n\n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and\n kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the\n city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack\n friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\nScornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was\n Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n\n\n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so\n much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men\nalways\ncall it\n logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness,\n affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is\n for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"",
"\"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you\n belong!\"\n\n\n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I\n belong here!\"\n\n\n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n\n\n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and\n out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they\n thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n\n\n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable\n anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling\n support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was\n trapped.\n\n\n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly\n would, to finish the job....",
"Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n\n\n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her\n face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n\n\n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and,\n weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends.\n Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n\n\n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will\n come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n\n\n \"But—but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so\n senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your\n friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the\n city is ours, not theirs!\"",
"But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the\n supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as\n Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would\n satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he\n might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this\n enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect\n him.",
"Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he\n had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting\n a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had\n grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose.\n Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed\n an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained\n spinach or squash.\n\n\n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat\n baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you\n happen to know where to find it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n \"I've been here before.\"\n\n\n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"",
"\"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these\n androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n\n\n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find\n him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the\n manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n\"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n\n\n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see\n me soon enough.\"\n\n\n But she'd see\nhim\n, Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n\n\n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.",
"But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of\n gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small\n portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed\n to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its\n color.\n\n\n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no\n interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes,\n Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n\n\n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which\n Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins\n of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable\n over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was\n the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on\n the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need\n to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.",
"Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they\n were unbearably wearing.\nIn the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted\n his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this\n fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble,\n the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His\n cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the\n diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from\n a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood\n irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more\n familiar bedlam.",
"It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body\n heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\nQuickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready\n for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the\n darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over\n that curving surface for identifying features.\n\n\n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly\n seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage\n kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an\n unexpected voice.\n\n\n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think\n you are?\"\n\n\n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to\n fumble for it. \"Who do you think\nyou\nare?\"",
"But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she\n dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved\n steel surface.\n\n\n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the\n ever-steepening catenary until—because there were no guard-ropes or\n handgrips—she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n\n\n Except it wouldn't be\nhis\nsolution. Her death wouldn't prove him to\n his friends.\n\n\n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog\n that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along\n the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve\n steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n\n\n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when\n he'd followed.",
"The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as\n an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even\n in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the\n One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n\n\n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now\n walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of\n how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock\n itself a difference to be hidden.\n\n\n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A\n weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was\n the levering key that opened its door.\nEverything\nwas wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of\n course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to\n move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for\n ventilation.",
"Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight\n with fear of discovery.\n\n\n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper\n was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then.\n They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't\n it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't\n have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and\n rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n\n\n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the\n dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n\n\n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man\n when I came back?\""
],
[
"\"It\ncan't\nbe,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those\n who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to\n me. Each of\nus\nhas a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be\n aimless. Each of\nus\nhelps preserve the city; you only try to rob and\n end it by destroying it.\nMy\npeople must be the true Men, because\n they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to\n let you escape.\"\n\n\n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n\n\n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in\n cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two?\n Don't—don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"",
"\"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many\n casualties....\n\n\n \"But why do you—we—keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the\n soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and\n they\ncan't\nleave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll\n be plenty of young men.\"\n\n\n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever\n tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep\n us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our\n tools and things?\"\n\n\n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance.\n But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too\n close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder\n every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.",
"He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the\n cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks;\n what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he\n peered was fire-proof.\n\n\n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke\n in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while\n the soldiers went out to fight.\n\n\n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt\n almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in\n that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers\n don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The soldiers don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The\n soldiers don't—\"",
"Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n\n\n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her\n face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n\n\n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and,\n weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends.\n Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n\n\n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will\n come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n\n\n \"But—but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so\n senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your\n friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the\n city is ours, not theirs!\"",
"Soon there would be nothing left of the\nPrivate Property Keep Out\nthat, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to\n them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves\n would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed\n servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n\n\n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He\n might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And\n Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with\n Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n\n\n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as\n the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might\n accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first\n aid was useful to them.",
"\"I'm\nnot\na little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and\n I've never even\nseen\nan Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n\n\n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder.\n She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n\n\n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—\" she chanted.\n\n\n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had\n helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the\n kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n\n\n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n\n\n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.",
"But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of\n gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small\n portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed\n to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its\n color.\n\n\n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no\n interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes,\n Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n\n\n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which\n Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins\n of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable\n over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was\n the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on\n the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need\n to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.",
"\"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't\n say odd.\"\nWhen they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's\n assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if\n she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of\n what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an\n Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n\n\n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n\n\n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do\n any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most\n direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and\n she began to talk.\n\n\n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless\n to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had\n been.",
"\"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls\nare\nthere in this raiding\n party?\"\n\n\n His first Invader—and he had dropped his weapon!\n\n\n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused\n suddenly. This girl—whatever\nthat\nwas—seemed to think him one of\n her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn\n delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he\n killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n\n\n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would\nI\nknow how many girls there\n are?\"\n\n\n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl\n said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either.\n Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"",
"She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet\n somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said\n nothing.\n\n\n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and\n kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the\n city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack\n friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\nScornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was\n Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n\n\n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so\n much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men\nalways\ncall it\n logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness,\n affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is\n for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"",
"It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off\n the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached\n at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught\n and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another\n harmlessly.\nMeanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another\n casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the\n time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie\n swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces\n of the other to make a whole one.\n\n\n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was\n new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the\n soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed\n him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders\n repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.",
"He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of\n his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder\n at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for\n this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\nHe'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to\n look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of\n concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the\n unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked\n girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n\n\n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads\n made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n\n\n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n\n\n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.",
"But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would\n admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at\n every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only\n his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\nShe had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her\n and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced\n by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in\n sight.\n\n\n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier\n had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left\n the city, were not built to do so. But\nhe\nwas here; with luck, he\n could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n\n\n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"",
"But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry\n out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all\n obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against\n everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even\nhim\nout\n when he was aflame....\n\n\n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling.\n He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the\n street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n\n\n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but\n saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could\n have entered through the iron cover?\n\n\n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.",
"Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he\n had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting\n a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had\n grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose.\n Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed\n an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained\n spinach or squash.\n\n\n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat\n baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you\n happen to know where to find it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n \"I've been here before.\"\n\n\n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"",
"He went on with his questioning. \"Why are\nyou\nhere? I mean, sure, the\n others are after tools and things, but what's\nyour\npurpose?\"\n\n\n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n \"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no\n weapon.\"\n\n\n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of\n words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored\n and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the\n boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was\n being silly?\"\n\n\n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"",
"It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had\n cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a\n mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\nHe was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up\n along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n\n\n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n \"Looking for a good time?\"\n\n\n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many\n things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done.\n Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come\n to attention and report!\"",
"There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight\n extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands\n touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an\n angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n\n\n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n\n\n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular\n seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n\n\n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n\n\n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped\n out a bayonet.\n\n\n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\nMolly stepped in front of him.",
"In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and\n concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over\n the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they\n could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n\n\n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and\n clung to Roddie's arm.\n\n\n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n\n\n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back\n below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a\n soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n\"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n\n\n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned\n and walked away.",
"Bridge Crossing\nBY DAVE DRYFOOS\n\n\n Illustrated by HARRISON\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe knew the city was organized for his\n\n individual defense, for it had been that\n\n way since he was born. But who was his enemy?\nIn 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was\n known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known\n as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.\n\n\n But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it.\n Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning."
],
[
"But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she\n dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved\n steel surface.\n\n\n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the\n ever-steepening catenary until—because there were no guard-ropes or\n handgrips—she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n\n\n Except it wouldn't be\nhis\nsolution. Her death wouldn't prove him to\n his friends.\n\n\n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog\n that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along\n the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve\n steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n\n\n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when\n he'd followed.",
"But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would\n admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at\n every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only\n his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\nShe had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her\n and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced\n by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in\n sight.\n\n\n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier\n had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left\n the city, were not built to do so. But\nhe\nwas here; with luck, he\n could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n\n\n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"",
"\"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you\n belong!\"\n\n\n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I\n belong here!\"\n\n\n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n\n\n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and\n out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they\n thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n\n\n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable\n anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling\n support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was\n trapped.\n\n\n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly\n would, to finish the job....",
"There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened\n wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n\n\n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted.\n Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar\n non-mechanical construction.\n\n\n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling\n as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling\n body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n\n\n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog\n thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last\n hundred feet to sanctuary.",
"He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of\n his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder\n at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for\n this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\nHe'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to\n look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of\n concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the\n unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked\n girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n\n\n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads\n made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n\n\n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n\n\n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.",
"Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie\n turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to\n his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n\n\n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from\n his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've\n had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n\n\n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to\n deny his own humiliating needs.\n\n\n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care\n of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"",
"But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the\n supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as\n Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would\n satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he\n might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this\n enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect\n him.",
"But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of\n gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small\n portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed\n to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its\n color.\n\n\n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no\n interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes,\n Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n\n\n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which\n Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins\n of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable\n over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was\n the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on\n the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need\n to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.",
"She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet\n somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said\n nothing.\n\n\n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and\n kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the\n city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack\n friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\nScornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was\n Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n\n\n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so\n much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men\nalways\ncall it\n logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness,\n affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is\n for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"",
"She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her\n teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the\n courage.\"\n\n\n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face,\n but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He\n compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought\n for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n\n\n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't\n possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I\n feel in the morning.\"\n\n\n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n\n\n And by morning he knew he was a Man.",
"\"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the\n Gate, I guess—you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll\n think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it\n over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n\n\n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even\n her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there\nwere\na way over the bridge....\n\n\n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I—I don't want to be\n alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n\n\n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed\n her—\nif\nnothing happened when she saw him.",
"Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n\n\n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her\n face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n\n\n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and,\n weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends.\n Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n\n\n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will\n come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n\n\n \"But—but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so\n senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your\n friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the\n city is ours, not theirs!\"",
"They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within\n the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and\n slept for several hours.\nRoddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip.\n Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings\n they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n\n\n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount\n Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy\n white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons\n on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding,\n tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.",
"\"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't\n say odd.\"\nWhen they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's\n assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if\n she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of\n what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an\n Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n\n\n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n\n\n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do\n any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most\n direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and\n she began to talk.\n\n\n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless\n to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had\n been.",
"Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they\n were unbearably wearing.\nIn the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted\n his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this\n fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble,\n the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His\n cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the\n diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from\n a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood\n irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more\n familiar bedlam.",
"In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and\n concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over\n the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they\n could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n\n\n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and\n clung to Roddie's arm.\n\n\n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n\n\n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back\n below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a\n soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n\"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n\n\n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned\n and walked away.",
"\"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many\n casualties....\n\n\n \"But why do you—we—keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the\n soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and\n they\ncan't\nleave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll\n be plenty of young men.\"\n\n\n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever\n tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep\n us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our\n tools and things?\"\n\n\n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance.\n But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too\n close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder\n every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.",
"Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he\n had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting\n a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had\n grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose.\n Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed\n an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained\n spinach or squash.\n\n\n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat\n baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you\n happen to know where to find it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n \"I've been here before.\"\n\n\n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"",
"Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n\n\n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first\n up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old\n thing?\"\n\n\n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The\n ladder's right behind me.\"\n\n\n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from\n street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously\n fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n\n\n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her\n shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet\n that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n\n\n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that\n would make things easy when the time came.",
"He went on with his questioning. \"Why are\nyou\nhere? I mean, sure, the\n others are after tools and things, but what's\nyour\npurpose?\"\n\n\n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n \"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no\n weapon.\"\n\n\n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of\n words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored\n and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the\n boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was\n being silly?\"\n\n\n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\""
],
[
"\"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't\n say odd.\"\nWhen they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's\n assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if\n she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of\n what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an\n Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n\n\n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n\n\n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do\n any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most\n direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and\n she began to talk.\n\n\n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless\n to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had\n been.",
"He went on with his questioning. \"Why are\nyou\nhere? I mean, sure, the\n others are after tools and things, but what's\nyour\npurpose?\"\n\n\n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n \"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no\n weapon.\"\n\n\n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of\n words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored\n and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the\n boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was\n being silly?\"\n\n\n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"",
"\"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls\nare\nthere in this raiding\n party?\"\n\n\n His first Invader—and he had dropped his weapon!\n\n\n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused\n suddenly. This girl—whatever\nthat\nwas—seemed to think him one of\n her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn\n delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he\n killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n\n\n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would\nI\nknow how many girls there\n are?\"\n\n\n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl\n said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either.\n Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"",
"\"It\ncan't\nbe,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those\n who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to\n me. Each of\nus\nhas a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be\n aimless. Each of\nus\nhelps preserve the city; you only try to rob and\n end it by destroying it.\nMy\npeople must be the true Men, because\n they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to\n let you escape.\"\n\n\n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n\n\n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in\n cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two?\n Don't—don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"",
"\"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many\n casualties....\n\n\n \"But why do you—we—keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the\n soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and\n they\ncan't\nleave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll\n be plenty of young men.\"\n\n\n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever\n tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep\n us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our\n tools and things?\"\n\n\n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance.\n But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too\n close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder\n every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.",
"But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the\n supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as\n Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would\n satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he\n might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this\n enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect\n him.",
"He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of\n his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder\n at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for\n this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\nHe'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to\n look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of\n concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the\n unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked\n girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n\n\n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads\n made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n\n\n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n\n\n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.",
"She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet\n somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said\n nothing.\n\n\n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and\n kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the\n city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack\n friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\nScornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was\n Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n\n\n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so\n much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men\nalways\ncall it\n logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness,\n affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is\n for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"",
"\"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you\n belong!\"\n\n\n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I\n belong here!\"\n\n\n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n\n\n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and\n out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they\n thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n\n\n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable\n anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling\n support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was\n trapped.\n\n\n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly\n would, to finish the job....",
"But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of\n gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small\n portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed\n to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its\n color.\n\n\n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no\n interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes,\n Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n\n\n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which\n Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins\n of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable\n over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was\n the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on\n the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need\n to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.",
"Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n\n\n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her\n face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n\n\n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and,\n weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends.\n Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n\n\n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will\n come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n\n\n \"But—but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so\n senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your\n friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the\n city is ours, not theirs!\"",
"She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her\n teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the\n courage.\"\n\n\n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face,\n but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He\n compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought\n for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n\n\n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't\n possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I\n feel in the morning.\"\n\n\n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n\n\n And by morning he knew he was a Man.",
"Soon there would be nothing left of the\nPrivate Property Keep Out\nthat, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to\n them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves\n would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed\n servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n\n\n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He\n might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And\n Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with\n Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n\n\n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as\n the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might\n accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first\n aid was useful to them.",
"\"I'm\nnot\na little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and\n I've never even\nseen\nan Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n\n\n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder.\n She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n\n\n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—\" she chanted.\n\n\n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had\n helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the\n kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n\n\n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n\n\n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.",
"He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the\n cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks;\n what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he\n peered was fire-proof.\n\n\n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke\n in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while\n the soldiers went out to fight.\n\n\n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt\n almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in\n that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers\n don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The soldiers don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The\n soldiers don't—\"",
"\"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the\n Gate, I guess—you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll\n think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it\n over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n\n\n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even\n her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there\nwere\na way over the bridge....\n\n\n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I—I don't want to be\n alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n\n\n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed\n her—\nif\nnothing happened when she saw him.",
"Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie\n turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to\n his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n\n\n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from\n his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've\n had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n\n\n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to\n deny his own humiliating needs.\n\n\n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care\n of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"",
"But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would\n admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at\n every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only\n his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\nShe had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her\n and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced\n by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in\n sight.\n\n\n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier\n had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left\n the city, were not built to do so. But\nhe\nwas here; with luck, he\n could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n\n\n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"",
"There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened\n wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n\n\n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted.\n Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar\n non-mechanical construction.\n\n\n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling\n as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling\n body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n\n\n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog\n thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last\n hundred feet to sanctuary.",
"Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he\n had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting\n a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had\n grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose.\n Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed\n an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained\n spinach or squash.\n\n\n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat\n baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you\n happen to know where to find it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n \"I've been here before.\"\n\n\n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\""
]
] |
test
|
20052
|
[
"Why did Bill Clinton keep the deformed orange?",
"Why could Clinton's campaign aircraft suitably be called Long Dong Silver or Monkey Business?",
"Why did Clinton's aide contact Cristy Zercher in 1994?",
"Why does \"The Star\" call Bill Clinton Leonardo DiCaprio's mentor?",
"How did DiCaprio get a black eye?",
"How are Jerry Springer and Bill Clinton similar, according to \"The Star\"? ",
"Why does \"The Star\" suggest celebrities like Frank Gifford should start using trains for transportation?",
"Why were Leonardo DiCaprio and Naomi Campbell in Europe together?",
"Why was Mike McGrath allegedly locked in a pantry?",
"Why did Clinton want to keep the story of his friends' divorce a secret?"
] |
[
[
"He thought it was unique looking and wanted to share it with Cristy Zercher.",
"It reminded him of a sexual organ.",
"It was an odd habit of his to keep strange-looking fruits for two weeks.",
"He said, \"It's one of my favorite things.\""
],
[
"Because the story was featured in \"The Star\", a famous tabloid known for crafting humorous monikers.",
"The plane was a locus of his sexual exploits.",
"Because the name \"Longhorn One\" was not available.",
"Clinton had an unusual sense of humor, and the nicknames would have been appropriate."
],
[
"Bruce Lindsey threatened her with losing her job as an executive assistant if she revealed details of the affair.",
"Bruce Lindsey wanted to arrange a meeting between Zercher and Clinton.",
"He wanted to encourage her to spin her encounters with Clinton as welcome.",
"He wanted to remind her that her friend had told him her relationship with Clinton was entirely consensual."
],
[
"They have had affairs with many of the same women over the years.",
"Bill Clinton is Leonardo DiCaprio's senior, and DiCaprio looks up to him as a role model.",
"Neither men are ashamed or embarrassed about their exploits.",
"They share similar philosophies regarding their prolific sex lives. "
],
[
"He was beaten up outside a hotel bar by Elizabeth Berkley's boyfriend.",
"He hit his face on a bathroom door.",
"He and his friend got into a fight with some drunk bar patrons in New York.",
"He was beaten up at a hotel bar in New York."
],
[
"They are both desperate in their attempts to begin sexual exploits with women.",
"They both prefer to enlist the help of employees in initiating their affairs.",
"Both are very famous men who use their fame to get what they want.",
"They both use dumb pick-up lines."
],
[
"Trains are a more romantic setting to engage in sexual activities.",
"Using trains will help them stay faithful to their wives.",
"Tabloids like the \"Globe\" do not use trains, and therefore would not film future sexual encounters.",
"So they can participate in their affairs in the privacy of a cabin."
],
[
"DiCaprio wanted to hide the fact that he was simultaneously dating an 18-year old Cuban model.",
"They wanted to swim naked together in a hotel swimming pool.",
"He wanted to hide his affair with Campbell from his girlfriend.",
"They were traveling together as friends."
],
[
"There was a very important meeting happening in the Oval Office, for which McGrath did not have the proper security clearance.",
"Debra Schiff had recently appeared in tabloids and didn't want to have further exposure.",
"Debra Schiff put him there so she could sleep with Clinton in private.",
"He locked himself in there, not wishing to witness any \"humiliating\" behavior."
],
[
"His friend had been having sex with farm animals.",
"He wanted to help his friend navigate a very messy divorce.",
"He realized the President of the United States should not be associated with such people.",
"He did not wish to bring them humiliation by revealing their divorce to the press."
]
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[
"Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world.",
"On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\"",
"But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\"",
"This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist.",
"No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer.",
"The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\"",
"DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even",
"him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After",
"This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off.",
"In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role",
"All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\"",
"The Pickup Artists \n\n Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n 1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n 2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n 3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n 4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford.",
"scandal--about the Saturday that Schiff locked him in the pantry off the Oval Office and reportedly said, \"We don't want to be disturbed for 20 minutes.\" He said he heard Schiff go into the study, where the president was. Twenty",
"Schiff has also appeared recently in the tabs. The Star has an account from Clinton's former chief White House steward Mike McGrath--who has testified before the grand jury investigating the current White House",
"model and who, at only 23, has a good chance of surpassing the president's accomplishments. According to the Globe , after he sorrowfully bid adieu at the airport to his latest love, singer Alanis Morissette, he began chatting up",
"Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"",
"There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar.",
"minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told",
"one hour. The women named included aides, wives of major supporters, executives, reporters, beauty queens, barflies, and even a judge.\"",
"she left, Nelvis told McGrath, he went into the study, where he found towels smeared with lipstick on the floor."
],
[
"This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist.",
"Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world.",
"On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\"",
"The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\"",
"But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\"",
"No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer.",
"This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off.",
"DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even",
"him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After",
"In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role",
"The Pickup Artists \n\n Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n 1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n 2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n 3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n 4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford.",
"All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\"",
"Schiff has also appeared recently in the tabs. The Star has an account from Clinton's former chief White House steward Mike McGrath--who has testified before the grand jury investigating the current White House",
"Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"",
"one hour. The women named included aides, wives of major supporters, executives, reporters, beauty queens, barflies, and even a judge.\"",
"scandal--about the Saturday that Schiff locked him in the pantry off the Oval Office and reportedly said, \"We don't want to be disturbed for 20 minutes.\" He said he heard Schiff go into the study, where the president was. Twenty",
"minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told",
"a blonde waiting to get on the same plane. He has been on a \"date-a-day spree\" for almost a year, friends tell the publication. Though DiCaprio has gone out with a string of models and actresses, including Liv Tyler, Claire",
"model and who, at only 23, has a good chance of surpassing the president's accomplishments. According to the Globe , after he sorrowfully bid adieu at the airport to his latest love, singer Alanis Morissette, he began chatting up",
"There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar."
],
[
"This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off.",
"But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\"",
"On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\"",
"No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer.",
"This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist.",
"Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world.",
"him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After",
"Schiff has also appeared recently in the tabs. The Star has an account from Clinton's former chief White House steward Mike McGrath--who has testified before the grand jury investigating the current White House",
"DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even",
"minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told",
"The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\"",
"In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role",
"The Pickup Artists \n\n Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n 1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n 2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n 3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n 4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford.",
"one hour. The women named included aides, wives of major supporters, executives, reporters, beauty queens, barflies, and even a judge.\"",
"Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"",
"All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\"",
"scandal--about the Saturday that Schiff locked him in the pantry off the Oval Office and reportedly said, \"We don't want to be disturbed for 20 minutes.\" He said he heard Schiff go into the study, where the president was. Twenty",
"There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar.",
"model and who, at only 23, has a good chance of surpassing the president's accomplishments. According to the Globe , after he sorrowfully bid adieu at the airport to his latest love, singer Alanis Morissette, he began chatting up",
"a blonde waiting to get on the same plane. He has been on a \"date-a-day spree\" for almost a year, friends tell the publication. Though DiCaprio has gone out with a string of models and actresses, including Liv Tyler, Claire"
],
[
"DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even",
"In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role",
"All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\"",
"The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\"",
"There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar.",
"This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist.",
"No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer.",
"The Pickup Artists \n\n Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n 1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n 2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n 3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n 4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford.",
"a blonde waiting to get on the same plane. He has been on a \"date-a-day spree\" for almost a year, friends tell the publication. Though DiCaprio has gone out with a string of models and actresses, including Liv Tyler, Claire",
"On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\"",
"Schiff has also appeared recently in the tabs. The Star has an account from Clinton's former chief White House steward Mike McGrath--who has testified before the grand jury investigating the current White House",
"But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\"",
"Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world.",
"him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After",
"Danes, Juliette Lewis, and Kate Moss, a friend says he is no snob and that a woman doesn't have to be famous to merit his advances. \"Leo's motto is, 'So many girls, so little time.' \" In this, too,",
"This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off.",
"model and who, at only 23, has a good chance of surpassing the president's accomplishments. According to the Globe , after he sorrowfully bid adieu at the airport to his latest love, singer Alanis Morissette, he began chatting up",
"Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"",
"minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told",
"scandal--about the Saturday that Schiff locked him in the pantry off the Oval Office and reportedly said, \"We don't want to be disturbed for 20 minutes.\" He said he heard Schiff go into the study, where the president was. Twenty"
],
[
"There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar.",
"The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\"",
"All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\"",
"DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even",
"a blonde waiting to get on the same plane. He has been on a \"date-a-day spree\" for almost a year, friends tell the publication. Though DiCaprio has gone out with a string of models and actresses, including Liv Tyler, Claire",
"In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role",
"The Pickup Artists \n\n Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n 1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n 2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n 3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n 4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford.",
"Danes, Juliette Lewis, and Kate Moss, a friend says he is no snob and that a woman doesn't have to be famous to merit his advances. \"Leo's motto is, 'So many girls, so little time.' \" In this, too,",
"But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\"",
"Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world.",
"Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"",
"him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After",
"minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told",
"No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer.",
"This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist.",
"she left, Nelvis told McGrath, he went into the study, where he found towels smeared with lipstick on the floor.",
"On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\"",
"scandal--about the Saturday that Schiff locked him in the pantry off the Oval Office and reportedly said, \"We don't want to be disturbed for 20 minutes.\" He said he heard Schiff go into the study, where the president was. Twenty",
"This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off.",
"model and who, at only 23, has a good chance of surpassing the president's accomplishments. According to the Globe , after he sorrowfully bid adieu at the airport to his latest love, singer Alanis Morissette, he began chatting up"
],
[
"No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer.",
"This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist.",
"DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even",
"On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\"",
"All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\"",
"In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role",
"But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\"",
"The Pickup Artists \n\n Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n 1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n 2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n 3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n 4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford.",
"Schiff has also appeared recently in the tabs. The Star has an account from Clinton's former chief White House steward Mike McGrath--who has testified before the grand jury investigating the current White House",
"The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\"",
"This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off.",
"Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world.",
"him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After",
"Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"",
"There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar.",
"model and who, at only 23, has a good chance of surpassing the president's accomplishments. According to the Globe , after he sorrowfully bid adieu at the airport to his latest love, singer Alanis Morissette, he began chatting up",
"minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told",
"a blonde waiting to get on the same plane. He has been on a \"date-a-day spree\" for almost a year, friends tell the publication. Though DiCaprio has gone out with a string of models and actresses, including Liv Tyler, Claire",
"Danes, Juliette Lewis, and Kate Moss, a friend says he is no snob and that a woman doesn't have to be famous to merit his advances. \"Leo's motto is, 'So many girls, so little time.' \" In this, too,",
"scandal--about the Saturday that Schiff locked him in the pantry off the Oval Office and reportedly said, \"We don't want to be disturbed for 20 minutes.\" He said he heard Schiff go into the study, where the president was. Twenty"
],
[
"Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"",
"This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist.",
"The Pickup Artists \n\n Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n 1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n 2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n 3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n 4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford.",
"No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer.",
"All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\"",
"The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\"",
"DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even",
"There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar.",
"model and who, at only 23, has a good chance of surpassing the president's accomplishments. According to the Globe , after he sorrowfully bid adieu at the airport to his latest love, singer Alanis Morissette, he began chatting up",
"Schiff has also appeared recently in the tabs. The Star has an account from Clinton's former chief White House steward Mike McGrath--who has testified before the grand jury investigating the current White House",
"On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\"",
"In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role",
"a blonde waiting to get on the same plane. He has been on a \"date-a-day spree\" for almost a year, friends tell the publication. Though DiCaprio has gone out with a string of models and actresses, including Liv Tyler, Claire",
"This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off.",
"But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\"",
"Danes, Juliette Lewis, and Kate Moss, a friend says he is no snob and that a woman doesn't have to be famous to merit his advances. \"Leo's motto is, 'So many girls, so little time.' \" In this, too,",
"minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told",
"Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world.",
"one hour. The women named included aides, wives of major supporters, executives, reporters, beauty queens, barflies, and even a judge.\"",
"him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After"
],
[
"The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\"",
"There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar.",
"a blonde waiting to get on the same plane. He has been on a \"date-a-day spree\" for almost a year, friends tell the publication. Though DiCaprio has gone out with a string of models and actresses, including Liv Tyler, Claire",
"In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role",
"All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\"",
"Danes, Juliette Lewis, and Kate Moss, a friend says he is no snob and that a woman doesn't have to be famous to merit his advances. \"Leo's motto is, 'So many girls, so little time.' \" In this, too,",
"DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even",
"The Pickup Artists \n\n Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n 1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n 2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n 3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n 4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford.",
"model and who, at only 23, has a good chance of surpassing the president's accomplishments. According to the Globe , after he sorrowfully bid adieu at the airport to his latest love, singer Alanis Morissette, he began chatting up",
"This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist.",
"But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\"",
"No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer.",
"Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"",
"him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After",
"On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\"",
"Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world.",
"This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off.",
"she left, Nelvis told McGrath, he went into the study, where he found towels smeared with lipstick on the floor.",
"minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told",
"Schiff has also appeared recently in the tabs. The Star has an account from Clinton's former chief White House steward Mike McGrath--who has testified before the grand jury investigating the current White House"
],
[
"scandal--about the Saturday that Schiff locked him in the pantry off the Oval Office and reportedly said, \"We don't want to be disturbed for 20 minutes.\" He said he heard Schiff go into the study, where the president was. Twenty",
"minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told",
"she left, Nelvis told McGrath, he went into the study, where he found towels smeared with lipstick on the floor.",
"Schiff has also appeared recently in the tabs. The Star has an account from Clinton's former chief White House steward Mike McGrath--who has testified before the grand jury investigating the current White House",
"On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\"",
"Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world.",
"There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar.",
"But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\"",
"This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off.",
"him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After",
"This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist.",
"No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer.",
"Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"",
"The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\"",
"All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\"",
"DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even",
"In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role",
"model and who, at only 23, has a good chance of surpassing the president's accomplishments. According to the Globe , after he sorrowfully bid adieu at the airport to his latest love, singer Alanis Morissette, he began chatting up",
"one hour. The women named included aides, wives of major supporters, executives, reporters, beauty queens, barflies, and even a judge.\"",
"Danes, Juliette Lewis, and Kate Moss, a friend says he is no snob and that a woman doesn't have to be famous to merit his advances. \"Leo's motto is, 'So many girls, so little time.' \" In this, too,"
],
[
"On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\"",
"But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\"",
"This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off.",
"No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer.",
"Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world.",
"DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even",
"This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist.",
"All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\"",
"In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role",
"him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After",
"The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\"",
"Schiff has also appeared recently in the tabs. The Star has an account from Clinton's former chief White House steward Mike McGrath--who has testified before the grand jury investigating the current White House",
"Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"",
"There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar.",
"scandal--about the Saturday that Schiff locked him in the pantry off the Oval Office and reportedly said, \"We don't want to be disturbed for 20 minutes.\" He said he heard Schiff go into the study, where the president was. Twenty",
"minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told",
"The Pickup Artists \n\n Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n 1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n 2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n 3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n 4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford.",
"model and who, at only 23, has a good chance of surpassing the president's accomplishments. According to the Globe , after he sorrowfully bid adieu at the airport to his latest love, singer Alanis Morissette, he began chatting up",
"one hour. The women named included aides, wives of major supporters, executives, reporters, beauty queens, barflies, and even a judge.\"",
"Danes, Juliette Lewis, and Kate Moss, a friend says he is no snob and that a woman doesn't have to be famous to merit his advances. \"Leo's motto is, 'So many girls, so little time.' \" In this, too,"
]
] |
test
|
49838
|
[
"Why didn't Kevin fit in with his family?",
"What does Kevin identify as being one of the hardest things about being non-telepathic in a family full of telepaths?",
"What accounts for the different modes of transportation taken by each family member to commute to their jobs?",
"How did Kevin keep busy apart from occasionally fixing one of the household servomechanisms, and why was this unsatisfactory?",
"Why couldn't Kevin pursue a career as an astronaut?",
"What changes did the emergence of psi abilities bring to the residents of Earth?",
"Kevin returns from a walk to find out that the rest of the family is in a tizzy. Why are they upset, and why was Kevin unaware of the news?",
"What does Kevin's mother do to help prepare for war with the aliens?",
"How does Kevin fare at learning first aid?",
"How do Kevin's fortunes change during the war and afterward?"
] |
[
[
"Kevin had psychological problems. He was so filled with anger from having been abused by his uncle that no one in the family wanted to be around him.",
"Because they all had psi powers of one kind or another, and he had never shown any such talents.",
"Kevin's family was highly educated, and Kevin didn't even know how to read.",
"Kevin's family was very industrious, and Kevin was positively lazy."
],
[
"He couldn't operate any of the machines in his own home because they were all psi-control models.",
"The ability to hide your own thoughts from others is linked to the ability to detect others' thoughts, and since Kevin lacked the latter, he also lacked the former.",
"He couldn't pursue a career as an astronaut because only psi-talented people were accepted for that.",
"When he was young, he was constantly teased by by his elementary school classmates, as their psi-powers started to manifest themselves, and he had none."
],
[
"The family members that work close to the house take the bus because teleportation does put a strain on the body, so they don't do it unnecessarily.",
"Because the alternate dimension through which people pass when they teleport can get quite crowded, only one person per family is permitted to travel by that method. That was the dad. Everyone else walked to work.",
"They have different levels of psi ability. In the family, only the dad had the talent of teleportation. The rest had to take the bus.",
"Sylvia could do her job remotely with a computer, but the rest of them rode the bus to work."
],
[
"Kevin's mother took him to the Psycho hospital each day for therapy and adult care, since he could not be trusted to take care of himself. He hated being treated ike a child.",
"He read a lot of books. However, they were all more than a hundred years old, because no one wrote books anymore.",
"He did the investing for the family because he could do it without being affected by everyone else's emotions. However, he found it boring.",
"He prepared dinner for the family every night without the aid of the robocook, but he hated chopping vegetables and figuring out who liked what."
],
[
"Because all the nearby planets had been explored and found to be uninhabitable, and the first missions to more distant places had left when he was too young to join up and had not returned yet.",
"Because the space agency had replaced radio communication with telepathic communication. It was cheaper and more reliable, but since Kevin lacked psi abilities, he did not qualify as an astronaut.",
"Because education these days depended so much on knowledge imparted quickly and telepathically, Kevin could not get the education he needed to apply.",
"Because his scores on the space agency entrance exams were too low."
],
[
"Expensive medical diagnostics were eliminated because doctors could just probe the minds of their patients and figure out the true problem.",
"It eliminated war and crime but it also caused people to want to simply connect with each other and not the natural world.",
"It eliminated income inequality because everyone telepathically had access to the same information and education, so no one was worth more than anyone else.",
"Telepathy made bargaining useless - you always knew what the other guy's bottom line was when you started, so why haggle?"
],
[
"Because there is news that the fleet that was sent to explore outside the solar system discovered planets peopled by hostile beings which may or may not be planning to attack Earth. Kevin is unaware because he doesn't receive telepathic news transmissions.",
"The dad has been asked to step down from his job because of Kevin - the whole family is suspect and may all lose their jobs. Kevin didn't know because he didn't ask.",
"Danny is getting married. Kevin didn't know this because Danny never discussed it with him, and the rest of the family communicated about it telepathcally.",
"The space exploration fleet has returned from outside the solar system with hostile alien ships hot on their tails, which Kevin is unaware of because he was reading a book in the garden."
],
[
"She telepathically recruits all the local women to start winding bandages and growing victory gardens even though no one likes to garden anymore, to save foodstuffs for the space soldiers.",
"She analyzes the medical care system and realizes it will be insufficient, so she recruits Kevin and his sister to learn basic first aid.",
"The government orders her to convert the Psycho Center to a hospital for the wounded that are expected, so she carries out the directions.",
"Although she had always been a strong woman, she feels anxious and frightened about the war with the space aliens. She believes they may have psi weapons that will wipe ou the psi-sensitive population."
],
[
"The adulation he receives simply for being strong enough to maneuver large patients goes to his head, and his cocky attitude turns off the other psi-sensitive volunteers.",
"Kevin isn't very successful at learning first aid, just like he has never succeeded at anything else, but he does meet a girl he likes, Lucy, and she seems to like him.",
"Being a telepath confers no advantage in the practice of battlefield first aid, and he finds that he likes it and he is receiving some admiration from those around him for the first time.",
"He is utterly insensitive to the patients' needs, because he can't sense them. His bedside manner is terrible, even though his technical work is satisfactory."
],
[
"Kevin does his best at his patriotic duty, even though it is just non-psi grunt work. He works so hard that he shunts Lucy aside and loses his best chance for a good marriage.",
"As Kevin practices his talent for healing, other talents spring into being, as if they just needed to be triggered. By the end of the war, he has the full spectrum of talents expected of a normal citizen.",
"Kevin has a psi talent after all - instant healing. He becomes famous, but it goes to his head. He becomes arrogant and starts doing drugs, and at the end, he is shunted aside, nolonger useful.",
"Kevin has a psi talent after all - instant healing. This is a huge help in the war and earns him medals. At the end of the war, however, his services are no longer needed, and he is back to being an obscure citizen with an unneeded psi talent.."
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[
"\"Well, that's perfectly natural—\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother\n caught her eye.\n\n\n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we\n can't figure out.\"\n\n\n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been\n tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport\n or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or\n prepossess. He can't—\"\n\n\n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to\n keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my\n family thought of me, I knew—as an animal, and not a very lovable one,\n either.",
"\"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\"\n she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself,\n Sylvia—poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n\n\n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted\n out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable.\n Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n\n\n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress.\n Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\"\n A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family—that is, not\n officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more\n than they could help having thumbnails.\n\n\n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can\n adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"",
"Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n\n\n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to\n poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the\n nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they\n lost their tempers could I get—or so I believed—their true attitude\n toward me.\n\n\n How else could I tell?\n\n\n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out\n on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had\n it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"",
"However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns\n than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they\n broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings\n than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\nOn that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I\n got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me.\n They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me\n so calm.\n\n\n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate\n concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n\n\n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim\n shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.",
"I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to\n be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his\n mental grip.\n\n\n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody\n would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight\n faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n\n\n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily\n have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of\n exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a\n kid. Not that he looked his age—he was big and blond, like Danny and\n Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n\n\n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of\n yourself—picking on poor Kev.\"",
"Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage\n me. As Danny had said, she\nknew\nbut she didn't really\nunderstand\n.\n Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\nBreakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their\n various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared—he was\n a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the\n continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take\n the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a\n psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist.\n Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a\n promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on\n pianos.",
"\"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test\n for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\nI smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who\n really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim.\n I know you're trying to be kind, but—\"\n\n\n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it.\n Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim\n scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his\n extracurricular prognostications too far.\"",
"\"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my\n youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n\n\n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I\n must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n\n\n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what\n was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n\n\n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could\n answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she\n called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food\n floating ahead of him.\n\n\n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my\n sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"",
"However, when the actual bombs—or their alien equivalent—struck near\n our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started\n carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into\n a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene—I had\n never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter\n of fact—and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the\n way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his\n talent for prognostication.\n\n\n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\"\n she said, \"\nyou\ncertainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in\n the\nyou\n.",
"She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her\n place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass\n bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over\n her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere\n primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n\n\n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n\n\n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you\n not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of\n interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A\n robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She\n turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"",
"Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there\n were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents\n would have none of them—partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of\n their own community standing.\n\n\n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always\n said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take\n care of the house.\"",
"I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people\n liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature.\n Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at\n home in those woodland—or, rather, pseudo-woodland—surroundings,\n able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could\n with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more\n sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any\n household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody\n noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness\n as well as extrasensory imbecility.",
"About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were\n out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't\n want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me\n and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they\n were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest\n Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\nI didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of\n attracted to me—I could see that—they could hardly go out with me\n without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have\n done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.",
"\"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father\n reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe\n telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It\n was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n \"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n\n\n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n \"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n\n\n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level,\n because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n\"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched\n in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way\n upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I\n must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts,\n please.\"",
"\"It\nis\nan ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me\n catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better\n that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n\n\n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched\n talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers\n usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without\n one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n\n\n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The\n aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation—even\n the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern\n was entirely different from ours—and the war was on.",
"I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever\n worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers\n aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but\n I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman\n abilities—normal human abilities, rather.\n\n\n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so\n strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n\n\n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My\n name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.",
"And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a\n techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough,\n those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke\n down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement\n robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a\n constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of\n a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine\n could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of\n my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway,\n they would just do it all over again when they got home.",
"I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the\n back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n\n\n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him—\nstop\nhim! He's\n hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n\n\n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it,\n Sylvia.\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"That's right—I'm just a poor atavism with no control over\n myself a-tall.\"\n\n\n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned\n woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her\n the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to\n probe anyone without permission.\"",
"Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times\n and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the\n time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly\n be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a\n machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\nNow that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever\n got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic.\n Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents\n these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted\n into it—which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the",
"Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I\n had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in\n which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival\n to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more\n talented race.\n\"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as\n lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties\n and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them.\n It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll\n be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of\n absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid\n techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little\n surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even\n better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's\n pain.\"\n\n\n I looked at her."
],
[
"\"Well, that's perfectly natural—\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother\n caught her eye.\n\n\n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we\n can't figure out.\"\n\n\n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been\n tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport\n or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or\n prepossess. He can't—\"\n\n\n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to\n keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my\n family thought of me, I knew—as an animal, and not a very lovable one,\n either.",
"I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to\n be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his\n mental grip.\n\n\n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody\n would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight\n faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n\n\n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily\n have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of\n exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a\n kid. Not that he looked his age—he was big and blond, like Danny and\n Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n\n\n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of\n yourself—picking on poor Kev.\"",
"However, when the actual bombs—or their alien equivalent—struck near\n our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started\n carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into\n a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene—I had\n never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter\n of fact—and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the\n way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his\n talent for prognostication.\n\n\n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\"\n she said, \"\nyou\ncertainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in\n the\nyou\n.",
"\"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\"\n she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself,\n Sylvia—poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n\n\n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted\n out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable.\n Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n\n\n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress.\n Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\"\n A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family—that is, not\n officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more\n than they could help having thumbnails.\n\n\n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can\n adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"",
"\"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father\n reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe\n telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It\n was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n \"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n\n\n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n \"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n\n\n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level,\n because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n\"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched\n in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way\n upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I\n must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts,\n please.\"",
"Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage\n me. As Danny had said, she\nknew\nbut she didn't really\nunderstand\n.\n Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\nBreakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their\n various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared—he was\n a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the\n continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take\n the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a\n psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist.\n Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a\n promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on\n pianos.",
"However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns\n than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they\n broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings\n than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\nOn that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I\n got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me.\n They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me\n so calm.\n\n\n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate\n concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n\n\n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim\n shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.",
"Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there\n were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents\n would have none of them—partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of\n their own community standing.\n\n\n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always\n said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take\n care of the house.\"",
"I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever\n worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers\n aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but\n I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman\n abilities—normal human abilities, rather.\n\n\n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so\n strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n\n\n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My\n name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.",
"\"It\nis\nan ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me\n catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better\n that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n\n\n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched\n talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers\n usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without\n one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n\n\n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The\n aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation—even\n the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern\n was entirely different from ours—and the war was on.",
"\"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test\n for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\nI smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who\n really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim.\n I know you're trying to be kind, but—\"\n\n\n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it.\n Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim\n scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his\n extracurricular prognostications too far.\"",
"Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n\n\n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to\n poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the\n nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they\n lost their tempers could I get—or so I believed—their true attitude\n toward me.\n\n\n How else could I tell?\n\n\n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out\n on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had\n it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"",
"About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were\n out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't\n want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me\n and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they\n were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest\n Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\nI didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of\n attracted to me—I could see that—they could hardly go out with me\n without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have\n done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.",
"\"I—I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with\n apprehension.\n\n\n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can\n tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to\n say. But right now—\" I clapped her arm—\"there's a job to be done.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have\n time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were\n waiting for me.\n\n\n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough\n sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to\n show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit\n thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those\n powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.",
"I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the\n back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n\n\n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him—\nstop\nhim! He's\n hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n\n\n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it,\n Sylvia.\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"That's right—I'm just a poor atavism with no control over\n myself a-tall.\"\n\n\n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned\n woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her\n the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to\n probe anyone without permission.\"",
"I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people\n couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running\n around—not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior\n wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent\n in me. Tim must be right, I thought—I must have some undreamed-of\n power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was\n that power?\n\n\n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be,\n explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none\n productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself.\n As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably\n nothing more than what I seemed to be—a simple psi-negative. Yet, from\n time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my\n knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent\n psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?",
"So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to\n take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and\n couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was\n telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even\n if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got\n nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can\n get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a\n hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound\n tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n\n\n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting,\n which would classify me as a telesensitive—artistic ability being\n considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power—but I couldn't\n even do anything like that.",
"Jack of No Trades\nBy EVELYN E. SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by CAVAT\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright\n\n on this publication was renewed.]\nI was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd\n psee otherwise psomeday!\nI walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of\n fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n\n\n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled\n through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"",
"Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I\n had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in\n which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival\n to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more\n talented race.\n\"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as\n lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties\n and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them.\n It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll\n be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of\n absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid\n techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little\n surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even\n better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's\n pain.\"\n\n\n I looked at her.",
"I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people\n liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature.\n Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at\n home in those woodland—or, rather, pseudo-woodland—surroundings,\n able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could\n with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more\n sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any\n household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody\n noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness\n as well as extrasensory imbecility."
],
[
"Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage\n me. As Danny had said, she\nknew\nbut she didn't really\nunderstand\n.\n Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\nBreakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their\n various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared—he was\n a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the\n continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take\n the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a\n psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist.\n Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a\n promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on\n pianos.",
"Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times\n and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the\n time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly\n be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a\n machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\nNow that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever\n got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic.\n Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents\n these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted\n into it—which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the",
"\"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my\n youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n\n\n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I\n must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n\n\n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what\n was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n\n\n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could\n answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she\n called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food\n floating ahead of him.\n\n\n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my\n sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"",
"\"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father\n reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe\n telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It\n was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n \"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n\n\n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n \"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n\n\n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level,\n because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n\"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched\n in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way\n upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I\n must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts,\n please.\"",
"However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns\n than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they\n broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings\n than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\nOn that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I\n got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me.\n They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me\n so calm.\n\n\n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate\n concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n\n\n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim\n shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.",
"\"Well, that's perfectly natural—\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother\n caught her eye.\n\n\n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we\n can't figure out.\"\n\n\n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been\n tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport\n or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or\n prepossess. He can't—\"\n\n\n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to\n keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my\n family thought of me, I knew—as an animal, and not a very lovable one,\n either.",
"And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a\n techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough,\n those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke\n down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement\n robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a\n constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of\n a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine\n could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of\n my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway,\n they would just do it all over again when they got home.",
"Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n\n\n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to\n poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the\n nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they\n lost their tempers could I get—or so I believed—their true attitude\n toward me.\n\n\n How else could I tell?\n\n\n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out\n on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had\n it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"",
"I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people\n liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature.\n Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at\n home in those woodland—or, rather, pseudo-woodland—surroundings,\n able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could\n with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more\n sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any\n household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody\n noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness\n as well as extrasensory imbecility.",
"\"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\"\n she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself,\n Sylvia—poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n\n\n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted\n out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable.\n Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n\n\n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress.\n Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\"\n A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family—that is, not\n officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more\n than they could help having thumbnails.\n\n\n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can\n adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"",
"I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to\n be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his\n mental grip.\n\n\n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody\n would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight\n faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n\n\n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily\n have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of\n exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a\n kid. Not that he looked his age—he was big and blond, like Danny and\n Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n\n\n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of\n yourself—picking on poor Kev.\"",
"She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her\n place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass\n bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over\n her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere\n primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n\n\n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n\n\n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you\n not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of\n interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A\n robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She\n turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"",
"About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were\n out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't\n want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me\n and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they\n were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest\n Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\nI didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of\n attracted to me—I could see that—they could hardly go out with me\n without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have\n done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.",
"He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I\n was frightened, too—too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do\n anything but stare witlessly at him.\n\n\n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing\n astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n\n\n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they\n were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in\n the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and\n shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole\n thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have\n imagined all those horrors.",
"Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there\n were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents\n would have none of them—partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of\n their own community standing.\n\n\n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always\n said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take\n care of the house.\"",
"However, when the actual bombs—or their alien equivalent—struck near\n our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started\n carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into\n a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene—I had\n never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter\n of fact—and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the\n way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his\n talent for prognostication.\n\n\n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\"\n she said, \"\nyou\ncertainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in\n the\nyou\n.",
"\"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father\n suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at\n the cure-all?\"",
"I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the\n back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n\n\n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him—\nstop\nhim! He's\n hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n\n\n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it,\n Sylvia.\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"That's right—I'm just a poor atavism with no control over\n myself a-tall.\"\n\n\n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned\n woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her\n the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to\n probe anyone without permission.\"",
"Jack of No Trades\nBy EVELYN E. SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by CAVAT\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright\n\n on this publication was renewed.]\nI was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd\n psee otherwise psomeday!\nI walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of\n fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n\n\n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled\n through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"",
"She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on—now's your\n chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\nGritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had\n pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the\n right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's\n eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed\n face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as\n if some super-psi had plucked them from me."
],
[
"And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a\n techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough,\n those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke\n down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement\n robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a\n constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of\n a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine\n could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of\n my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway,\n they would just do it all over again when they got home.",
"She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her\n place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass\n bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over\n her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere\n primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n\n\n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n\n\n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you\n not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of\n interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A\n robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She\n turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"",
"However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns\n than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they\n broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings\n than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\nOn that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I\n got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me.\n They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me\n so calm.\n\n\n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate\n concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n\n\n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim\n shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.",
"Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times\n and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the\n time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly\n be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a\n machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\nNow that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever\n got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic.\n Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents\n these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted\n into it—which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the",
"Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there\n were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents\n would have none of them—partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of\n their own community standing.\n\n\n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always\n said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take\n care of the house.\"",
"\"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\"\n she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself,\n Sylvia—poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n\n\n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted\n out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable.\n Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n\n\n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress.\n Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\"\n A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family—that is, not\n officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more\n than they could help having thumbnails.\n\n\n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can\n adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"",
"Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n\n\n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to\n poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the\n nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they\n lost their tempers could I get—or so I believed—their true attitude\n toward me.\n\n\n How else could I tell?\n\n\n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out\n on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had\n it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"",
"\"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my\n youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n\n\n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I\n must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n\n\n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what\n was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n\n\n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could\n answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she\n called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food\n floating ahead of him.\n\n\n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my\n sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"",
"Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I\n had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in\n which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival\n to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more\n talented race.\n\"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as\n lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties\n and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them.\n It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll\n be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of\n absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid\n techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little\n surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even\n better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's\n pain.\"\n\n\n I looked at her.",
"I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know\n that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently\n disfigured. In a sense, they were—well, my children; I felt a warm\n glow of affection toward them.\n\n\n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the\n hospital soon leaked out—during all those years of peace, the\n government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets—and\n people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\nThe government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might\n attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on\n Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The\n human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And\n it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than\n they wanted to risk me.",
"However, when the actual bombs—or their alien equivalent—struck near\n our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started\n carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into\n a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene—I had\n never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter\n of fact—and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the\n way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his\n talent for prognostication.\n\n\n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\"\n she said, \"\nyou\ncertainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in\n the\nyou\n.",
"Plenty of people did come to see me officially—the President,\n generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other\n obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I\n began to love everybody.\n\n\n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\"\n Lucy asked me one day.\n\n\n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n\n\n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that.\n Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n\n\n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are\n you jealous, Lucy?\"\n\n\n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to\n an end, you know, and—\"",
"\"Well, that's perfectly natural—\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother\n caught her eye.\n\n\n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we\n can't figure out.\"\n\n\n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been\n tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport\n or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or\n prepossess. He can't—\"\n\n\n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to\n keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my\n family thought of me, I knew—as an animal, and not a very lovable one,\n either.",
"I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people\n liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature.\n Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at\n home in those woodland—or, rather, pseudo-woodland—surroundings,\n able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could\n with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more\n sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any\n household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody\n noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness\n as well as extrasensory imbecility.",
"I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the\n back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n\n\n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him—\nstop\nhim! He's\n hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n\n\n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it,\n Sylvia.\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"That's right—I'm just a poor atavism with no control over\n myself a-tall.\"\n\n\n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned\n woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her\n the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to\n probe anyone without permission.\"",
"I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to\n be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his\n mental grip.\n\n\n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody\n would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight\n faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n\n\n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily\n have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of\n exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a\n kid. Not that he looked his age—he was big and blond, like Danny and\n Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n\n\n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of\n yourself—picking on poor Kev.\"",
"About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were\n out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't\n want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me\n and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they\n were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest\n Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\nI didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of\n attracted to me—I could see that—they could hardly go out with me\n without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have\n done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.",
"Jack of No Trades\nBy EVELYN E. SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by CAVAT\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright\n\n on this publication was renewed.]\nI was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd\n psee otherwise psomeday!\nI walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of\n fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n\n\n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled\n through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"",
"Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage\n me. As Danny had said, she\nknew\nbut she didn't really\nunderstand\n.\n Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\nBreakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their\n various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared—he was\n a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the\n continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take\n the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a\n psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist.\n Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a\n promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on\n pianos.",
"\"It\nis\nan ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me\n catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better\n that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n\n\n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched\n talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers\n usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without\n one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n\n\n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The\n aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation—even\n the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern\n was entirely different from ours—and the war was on."
],
[
"\"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test\n for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\nI smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who\n really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim.\n I know you're trying to be kind, but—\"\n\n\n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it.\n Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim\n scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his\n extracurricular prognostications too far.\"",
"Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything\n useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found\n a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers\n geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the\n time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just\n barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres\n drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive\n had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the\n stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.",
"\"Well, that's perfectly natural—\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother\n caught her eye.\n\n\n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we\n can't figure out.\"\n\n\n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been\n tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport\n or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or\n prepossess. He can't—\"\n\n\n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to\n keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my\n family thought of me, I knew—as an animal, and not a very lovable one,\n either.",
"\"It\nis\nan ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me\n catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better\n that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n\n\n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched\n talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers\n usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without\n one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n\n\n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The\n aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation—even\n the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern\n was entirely different from ours—and the war was on.",
"\"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\"\n she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself,\n Sylvia—poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n\n\n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted\n out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable.\n Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n\n\n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress.\n Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\"\n A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family—that is, not\n officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more\n than they could help having thumbnails.\n\n\n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can\n adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"",
"However, when the actual bombs—or their alien equivalent—struck near\n our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started\n carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into\n a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene—I had\n never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter\n of fact—and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the\n way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his\n talent for prognostication.\n\n\n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\"\n she said, \"\nyou\ncertainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in\n the\nyou\n.",
"Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there\n were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents\n would have none of them—partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of\n their own community standing.\n\n\n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always\n said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take\n care of the house.\"",
"Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I\n had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in\n which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival\n to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more\n talented race.\n\"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as\n lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties\n and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them.\n It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll\n be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of\n absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid\n techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little\n surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even\n better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's\n pain.\"\n\n\n I looked at her.",
"I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever\n worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers\n aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but\n I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman\n abilities—normal human abilities, rather.\n\n\n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so\n strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n\n\n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My\n name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.",
"Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n\n\n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to\n poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the\n nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they\n lost their tempers could I get—or so I believed—their true attitude\n toward me.\n\n\n How else could I tell?\n\n\n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out\n on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had\n it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"",
"\"I—I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with\n apprehension.\n\n\n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can\n tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to\n say. But right now—\" I clapped her arm—\"there's a job to be done.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have\n time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were\n waiting for me.\n\n\n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough\n sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to\n show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit\n thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those\n powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.",
"However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns\n than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they\n broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings\n than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\nOn that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I\n got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me.\n They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me\n so calm.\n\n\n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate\n concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n\n\n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim\n shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.",
"She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her\n place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass\n bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over\n her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere\n primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n\n\n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n\n\n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you\n not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of\n interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A\n robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She\n turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"",
"Jack of No Trades\nBy EVELYN E. SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by CAVAT\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright\n\n on this publication was renewed.]\nI was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd\n psee otherwise psomeday!\nI walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of\n fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n\n\n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled\n through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"",
"I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to\n be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his\n mental grip.\n\n\n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody\n would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight\n faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n\n\n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily\n have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of\n exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a\n kid. Not that he looked his age—he was big and blond, like Danny and\n Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n\n\n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of\n yourself—picking on poor Kev.\"",
"Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage\n me. As Danny had said, she\nknew\nbut she didn't really\nunderstand\n.\n Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\nBreakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their\n various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared—he was\n a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the\n continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take\n the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a\n psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist.\n Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a\n promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on\n pianos.",
"About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were\n out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't\n want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me\n and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they\n were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest\n Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\nI didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of\n attracted to me—I could see that—they could hardly go out with me\n without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have\n done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.",
"Plenty of people did come to see me officially—the President,\n generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other\n obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I\n began to love everybody.\n\n\n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\"\n Lucy asked me one day.\n\n\n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n\n\n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that.\n Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n\n\n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are\n you jealous, Lucy?\"\n\n\n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to\n an end, you know, and—\"",
"And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a\n techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough,\n those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke\n down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement\n robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a\n constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of\n a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine\n could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of\n my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway,\n they would just do it all over again when they got home.",
"Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times\n and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the\n time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly\n be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a\n machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\nNow that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever\n got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic.\n Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents\n these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted\n into it—which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the"
],
[
"population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't,\n like me—psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no\n physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg\n grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if\n you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.",
"Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything\n useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found\n a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers\n geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the\n time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just\n barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres\n drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive\n had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the\n stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.",
"I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people\n couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running\n around—not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior\n wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent\n in me. Tim must be right, I thought—I must have some undreamed-of\n power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was\n that power?\n\n\n For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be,\n explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none\n productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself.\n As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably\n nothing more than what I seemed to be—a simple psi-negative. Yet, from\n time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my\n knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent\n psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?",
"\"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace,\n but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n\n\n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but\n we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military\n techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back\n with reinforcements—if such were its intention—in less than six\n months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though\n we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the\n aliens' armament.\n\n\n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would\n be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits\n of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths\n to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the\n outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the\n first place.",
"I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago—before people\n started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with\n radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous\n monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been\n latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I\n don't know why I say\nwe\n—in 1960 or so, I might have been considered\n superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.",
"However, when the actual bombs—or their alien equivalent—struck near\n our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started\n carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into\n a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene—I had\n never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter\n of fact—and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the\n way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his\n talent for prognostication.\n\n\n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\"\n she said, \"\nyou\ncertainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in\n the\nyou\n.",
"Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage\n me. As Danny had said, she\nknew\nbut she didn't really\nunderstand\n.\n Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\nBreakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their\n various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared—he was\n a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the\n continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take\n the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a\n psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist.\n Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a\n promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on\n pianos.",
"About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were\n out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't\n want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me\n and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they\n were saying to one another when I hove into sight. \"There's that oldest\n Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective.\"\nI didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of\n attracted to me—I could see that—they could hardly go out with me\n without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have\n done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.",
"Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there\n were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents\n would have none of them—partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of\n their own community standing.\n\n\n \"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in,\" my father always\n said. \"I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take\n care of the house.\"",
"\"It\nis\nan ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me\n catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better\n that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n\n\n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched\n talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers\n usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without\n one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n\n\n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The\n aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation—even\n the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern\n was entirely different from ours—and the war was on.",
"So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to\n take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and\n couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was\n telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even\n if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got\n nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can\n get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a\n hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound\n tapes, but they also bored me after a while.\n\n\n I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting,\n which would classify me as a telesensitive—artistic ability being\n considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power—but I couldn't\n even do anything like that.",
"Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I\n had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in\n which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival\n to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more\n talented race.\n\"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as\n lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties\n and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them.\n It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll\n be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of\n absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid\n techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little\n surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even\n better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's\n pain.\"\n\n\n I looked at her.",
"I felt ... well, good.\n\"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power,\" my\n mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she\n was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to\n make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once.\n \"The ability to heal\nis\nrecorded in history, only we never paid much\n attention to it.\"\n\n\n \"Recorded?\" I asked, a little jealously.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" she smiled. \"Remember the King's Evil?\"\n\n\n I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I\n had read. \"Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch\n of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I\n guess.\"",
"I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know\n that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently\n disfigured. In a sense, they were—well, my children; I felt a warm\n glow of affection toward them.\n\n\n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the\n hospital soon leaked out—during all those years of peace, the\n government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets—and\n people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\nThe government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might\n attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on\n Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The\n human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And\n it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than\n they wanted to risk me.",
"Jack of No Trades\nBy EVELYN E. SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by CAVAT\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright\n\n on this publication was renewed.]\nI was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd\n psee otherwise psomeday!\nI walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of\n fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n\n\n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled\n through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\"",
"I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever\n worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers\n aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but\n I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman\n abilities—normal human abilities, rather.\n\n\n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so\n strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n\n\n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My\n name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.",
"\"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n \"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n\n\n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my\n enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep\n their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n \"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship\n says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and\n left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a\n pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial\n ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n\n\n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"",
"I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people\n liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature.\n Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at\n home in those woodland—or, rather, pseudo-woodland—surroundings,\n able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could\n with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more\n sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any\n household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody\n noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness\n as well as extrasensory imbecility.",
"\"Well, that's perfectly natural—\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother\n caught her eye.\n\n\n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we\n can't figure out.\"\n\n\n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been\n tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport\n or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or\n prepossess. He can't—\"\n\n\n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to\n keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my\n family thought of me, I knew—as an animal, and not a very lovable one,\n either.",
"Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times\n and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the\n time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly\n be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a\n machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\nNow that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever\n got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic.\n Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents\n these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted\n into it—which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the"
],
[
"However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns\n than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they\n broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings\n than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\nOn that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I\n got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me.\n They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me\n so calm.\n\n\n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate\n concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n\n\n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim\n shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.",
"\"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my\n youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n\n\n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I\n must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n\n\n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what\n was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n\n\n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could\n answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she\n called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food\n floating ahead of him.\n\n\n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my\n sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"",
"Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n\n\n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to\n poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the\n nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they\n lost their tempers could I get—or so I believed—their true attitude\n toward me.\n\n\n How else could I tell?\n\n\n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out\n on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had\n it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"",
"\"Well, that's perfectly natural—\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother\n caught her eye.\n\n\n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we\n can't figure out.\"\n\n\n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been\n tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport\n or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or\n prepossess. He can't—\"\n\n\n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to\n keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my\n family thought of me, I knew—as an animal, and not a very lovable one,\n either.",
"However, when the actual bombs—or their alien equivalent—struck near\n our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started\n carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into\n a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene—I had\n never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter\n of fact—and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the\n way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his\n talent for prognostication.\n\n\n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\"\n she said, \"\nyou\ncertainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in\n the\nyou\n.",
"I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to\n be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his\n mental grip.\n\n\n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody\n would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight\n faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n\n\n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily\n have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of\n exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a\n kid. Not that he looked his age—he was big and blond, like Danny and\n Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n\n\n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of\n yourself—picking on poor Kev.\"",
"\"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father\n reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe\n telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It\n was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n \"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n\n\n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n \"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n\n\n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level,\n because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n\"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched\n in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way\n upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I\n must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts,\n please.\"",
"\"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\"\n she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself,\n Sylvia—poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n\n\n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted\n out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable.\n Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n\n\n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress.\n Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\"\n A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family—that is, not\n officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more\n than they could help having thumbnails.\n\n\n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can\n adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"",
"She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her\n place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass\n bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over\n her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere\n primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n\n\n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n\n\n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you\n not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of\n interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A\n robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She\n turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"",
"Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage\n me. As Danny had said, she\nknew\nbut she didn't really\nunderstand\n.\n Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\nBreakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their\n various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared—he was\n a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the\n continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take\n the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a\n psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist.\n Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a\n promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on\n pianos.",
"\"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test\n for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\nI smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who\n really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim.\n I know you're trying to be kind, but—\"\n\n\n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it.\n Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim\n scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his\n extracurricular prognostications too far.\"",
"\"It\nis\nan ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me\n catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better\n that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n\n\n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched\n talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers\n usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without\n one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n\n\n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The\n aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation—even\n the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern\n was entirely different from ours—and the war was on.",
"He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I\n was frightened, too—too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do\n anything but stare witlessly at him.\n\n\n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing\n astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n\n\n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they\n were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in\n the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and\n shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole\n thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have\n imagined all those horrors.",
"I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the\n back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.\n\n\n Sylvia's face turned even whiter. \"Father, stop him—\nstop\nhim! He's\n hating again! I can't stand it!\"\n\n\n Father looked at me, then at her. \"I don't think he can help it,\n Sylvia.\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"That's right—I'm just a poor atavism with no control over\n myself a-tall.\"\n\n\n Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned\n woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her\n the complete details, even though I quickly protested, \"It's illegal to\n probe anyone without permission.\"",
"Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I\n had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in\n which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival\n to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more\n talented race.\n\"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as\n lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties\n and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them.\n It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll\n be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of\n absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid\n techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little\n surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even\n better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's\n pain.\"\n\n\n I looked at her.",
"Plenty of people did come to see me officially—the President,\n generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other\n obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I\n began to love everybody.\n\n\n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\"\n Lucy asked me one day.\n\n\n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n\n\n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that.\n Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n\n\n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are\n you jealous, Lucy?\"\n\n\n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to\n an end, you know, and—\"",
"I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people\n liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature.\n Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at\n home in those woodland—or, rather, pseudo-woodland—surroundings,\n able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could\n with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more\n sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any\n household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody\n noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness\n as well as extrasensory imbecility.",
"\"I—I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with\n apprehension.\n\n\n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can\n tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to\n say. But right now—\" I clapped her arm—\"there's a job to be done.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have\n time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were\n waiting for me.\n\n\n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough\n sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to\n show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit\n thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those\n powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.",
"Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times\n and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the\n time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly\n be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a\n machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\nNow that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever\n got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic.\n Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents\n these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted\n into it—which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the",
"Jack of No Trades\nBy EVELYN E. SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by CAVAT\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright\n\n on this publication was renewed.]\nI was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe they'd\n psee otherwise psomeday!\nI walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of\n fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.\n\n\n \"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!\" my middle brother's voice came muffled\n through the folds. \"If you can't help, at least don't hinder!\""
],
[
"\"It\nis\nan ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me\n catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better\n that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n\n\n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched\n talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers\n usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without\n one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n\n\n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The\n aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation—even\n the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern\n was entirely different from ours—and the war was on.",
"Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I\n had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in\n which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival\n to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more\n talented race.\n\"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as\n lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties\n and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them.\n It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll\n be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of\n absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid\n techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little\n surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even\n better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's\n pain.\"\n\n\n I looked at her.",
"However, when the actual bombs—or their alien equivalent—struck near\n our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started\n carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into\n a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene—I had\n never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter\n of fact—and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the\n way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his\n talent for prognostication.\n\n\n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\"\n she said, \"\nyou\ncertainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in\n the\nyou\n.",
"\"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace,\n but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n\n\n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but\n we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military\n techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back\n with reinforcements—if such were its intention—in less than six\n months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though\n we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the\n aliens' armament.\n\n\n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would\n be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits\n of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths\n to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the\n outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the\n first place.",
"Plenty of people did come to see me officially—the President,\n generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other\n obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I\n began to love everybody.\n\n\n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\"\n Lucy asked me one day.\n\n\n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n\n\n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that.\n Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n\n\n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are\n you jealous, Lucy?\"\n\n\n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to\n an end, you know, and—\"",
"She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on—now's your\n chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\nGritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had\n pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the\n right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's\n eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed\n face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as\n if some super-psi had plucked them from me.",
"\"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already,\" Father\n reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe\n telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It\n was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.\n \"But I think you'll find she understands.\"\n\n\n \"She knows, all right,\" Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,\n \"but I'm not sure she always understands.\"\n\n\n I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level,\n because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.\n\"There are tensions in this room,\" my sister announced as she slouched\n in, not quite awake yet, \"and hatred. I could feel them all the way\n upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I\n must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts,\n please.\"",
"Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. \"He's been to it dozens of times\n and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the\n time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly\n be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a\n machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them.\"\nNow that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever\n got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic.\n Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents\n these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted\n into it—which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the",
"\"I—I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with\n apprehension.\n\n\n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can\n tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to\n say. But right now—\" I clapped her arm—\"there's a job to be done.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have\n time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were\n waiting for me.\n\n\n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough\n sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to\n show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit\n thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those\n powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.",
"\"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\"\n she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself,\n Sylvia—poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n\n\n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted\n out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable.\n Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n\n\n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress.\n Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\"\n A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family—that is, not\n officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more\n than they could help having thumbnails.\n\n\n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can\n adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"",
"It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you\n mean—\"\n\n\n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to\n them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to\n have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n\n\n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed\n that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness,\n were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being\n light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off\n and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the\n equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from\n the Centaurians again.",
"Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n\n\n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to\n poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the\n nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they\n lost their tempers could I get—or so I believed—their true attitude\n toward me.\n\n\n How else could I tell?\n\n\n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out\n on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had\n it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"",
"She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her\n place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass\n bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over\n her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere\n primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n\n\n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n\n\n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you\n not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of\n interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A\n robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She\n turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"",
"\"Well, that's perfectly natural—\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother\n caught her eye.\n\n\n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we\n can't figure out.\"\n\n\n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been\n tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport\n or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or\n prepossess. He can't—\"\n\n\n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to\n keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my\n family thought of me, I knew—as an animal, and not a very lovable one,\n either.",
"\"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my\n youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n\n\n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I\n must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n\n\n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what\n was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n\n\n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could\n answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she\n called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food\n floating ahead of him.\n\n\n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my\n sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"",
"Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage\n me. As Danny had said, she\nknew\nbut she didn't really\nunderstand\n.\n Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.\nBreakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their\n various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared—he was\n a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the\n continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take\n the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a\n psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist.\n Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a\n promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on\n pianos.",
"However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns\n than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they\n broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings\n than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\nOn that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I\n got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me.\n They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me\n so calm.\n\n\n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate\n concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n\n\n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim\n shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.",
"\"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri,\" Danny said excitedly.\n \"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!\"\n\n\n This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my\n enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep\n their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.\n \"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-uh.\" Danny shook his head. \"And hostile. The crew of the starship\n says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and\n left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a\n pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial\n ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going.\"\n\n\n \"But if they're hostile,\" I said thoughtfully, \"it might mean war.\"",
"I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever\n worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers\n aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but\n I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman\n abilities—normal human abilities, rather.\n\n\n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so\n strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n\n\n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My\n name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.",
"\"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test\n for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\nI smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who\n really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim.\n I know you're trying to be kind, but—\"\n\n\n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it.\n Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim\n scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his\n extracurricular prognostications too far.\""
],
[
"I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever\n worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers\n aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but\n I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman\n abilities—normal human abilities, rather.\n\n\n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so\n strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n\n\n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My\n name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.",
"\"I—I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with\n apprehension.\n\n\n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can\n tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to\n say. But right now—\" I clapped her arm—\"there's a job to be done.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have\n time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were\n waiting for me.\n\n\n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough\n sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to\n show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit\n thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those\n powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.",
"She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. \"Go on—now's your\n chance to show you're of some use in this world.\"\nGritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had\n pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the\n right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's\n eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed\n face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as\n if some super-psi had plucked them from me.",
"However, when the actual bombs—or their alien equivalent—struck near\n our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started\n carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into\n a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene—I had\n never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter\n of fact—and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the\n way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his\n talent for prognostication.\n\n\n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\"\n she said, \"\nyou\ncertainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in\n the\nyou\n.",
"\"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test\n for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\nI smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who\n really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim.\n I know you're trying to be kind, but—\"\n\n\n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it.\n Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim\n scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his\n extracurricular prognostications too far.\"",
"Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n\n\n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to\n poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the\n nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they\n lost their tempers could I get—or so I believed—their true attitude\n toward me.\n\n\n How else could I tell?\n\n\n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out\n on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had\n it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"",
"The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like\n that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I\n wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking\n so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping\n wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not\n even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.\n\n\n Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I\n could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my\n patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound,\n no wound at all—just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole\n again. Not even a scar.\n\n\n \"Wha—wha happened?\" he asked. \"It doesn't hurt any more!\"",
"However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns\n than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they\n broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings\n than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\nOn that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I\n got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me.\n They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me\n so calm.\n\n\n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate\n concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n\n\n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim\n shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.",
"\"Well, that's perfectly natural—\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother\n caught her eye.\n\n\n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we\n can't figure out.\"\n\n\n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been\n tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport\n or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or\n prepossess. He can't—\"\n\n\n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to\n keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my\n family thought of me, I knew—as an animal, and not a very lovable one,\n either.",
"Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I\n had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in\n which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival\n to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more\n talented race.\n\"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as\n lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties\n and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them.\n It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll\n be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of\n absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid\n techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little\n surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even\n better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's\n pain.\"\n\n\n I looked at her.",
"She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her\n place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass\n bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over\n her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere\n primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n\n\n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n\n\n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you\n not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of\n interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A\n robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She\n turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"",
"I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to\n be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his\n mental grip.\n\n\n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody\n would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight\n faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n\n\n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily\n have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of\n exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a\n kid. Not that he looked his age—he was big and blond, like Danny and\n Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n\n\n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of\n yourself—picking on poor Kev.\"",
"\"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\"\n she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself,\n Sylvia—poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n\n\n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted\n out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable.\n Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n\n\n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress.\n Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\"\n A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family—that is, not\n officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more\n than they could help having thumbnails.\n\n\n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can\n adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"",
"He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I\n was frightened, too—too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do\n anything but stare witlessly at him.\n\n\n \"Touch some of the others, quick!\" my mother commanded, pushing\n astounded attendants away from stretchers.\n\n\n I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they\n were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in\n the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and\n shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole\n thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have\n imagined all those horrors.",
"But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them\n almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it.\n There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in\n seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it\n would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n\n\n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and\n I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son—\" and she said\n the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it—\"the\n greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And\n Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.",
"\"It\nis\nan ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me\n catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better\n that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n\n\n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched\n talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers\n usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without\n one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n\n\n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The\n aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation—even\n the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern\n was entirely different from ours—and the war was on.",
"She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's\n probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n\n\n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other\n deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of\n them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive,\n and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and\n effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital\n just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the\n world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise\n the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I\n wouldn't be able to do even that.\n\n\n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but\n Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm\n your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n\n\n I looked at her. \"You are?\"",
"\"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy,\" my father\n suggested hopefully. \"Maybe you should make an appointment for him at\n the cure-all?\"",
"Plenty of people did come to see me officially—the President,\n generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other\n obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I\n began to love everybody.\n\n\n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\"\n Lucy asked me one day.\n\n\n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n\n\n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that.\n Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n\n\n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are\n you jealous, Lucy?\"\n\n\n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to\n an end, you know, and—\"",
"\"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my\n youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n\n\n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I\n must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n\n\n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what\n was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n\n\n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could\n answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she\n called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food\n floating ahead of him.\n\n\n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my\n sense of ominousness is connected with him.\""
],
[
"Plenty of people did come to see me officially—the President,\n generals, all kinds of big wheels, bringing citations, medals and other\n obsolete honors they'd revived primarily for me. It was wonderful. I\n began to love everybody.\n\n\n \"Don't you think you're putting too much of yourself into this, Kev?\"\n Lucy asked me one day.\n\n\n I gave her an incredulous glance. \"You mean I shouldn't help people?\"\n\n\n \"Of course you should help them. I didn't mean anything like that.\n Just ... well, you're getting too bound up in your work.\"\n\n\n \"Why shouldn't I be?\" Then the truth, as I thought, dawned on me. \"Are\n you jealous, Lucy?\"\n\n\n She lowered her eyes. \"Not only that, but the war's bound to come to\n an end, you know, and—\"",
"\"It\nis\nan ill wind,\" she agreed, smiling wryly, \"but don't let me\n catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better\n that there should be no war and you should remain useless?\"\n\n\n I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched\n talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers\n usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without\n one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.\n\n\n My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The\n aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation—even\n the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern\n was entirely different from ours—and the war was on.",
"However, when the actual bombs—or their alien equivalent—struck near\n our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started\n carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into\n a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene—I had\n never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter\n of fact—and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the\n way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his\n talent for prognostication.\n\n\n \"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin,\"\n she said, \"\nyou\ncertainly can.\" And there was no kindness at all in\n the\nyou\n.",
"\"I—I hope you want me,\" she went on, coyness now mixing with\n apprehension.\n\n\n I gave her shoulder a squeeze. \"I do want you, Lucy. More than I can\n tell you now. After all this is over, there's something more I want to\n say. But right now—\" I clapped her arm—\"there's a job to be done.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Kevin,\" she said, glaring at me for some reason I didn't have\n time to investigate or interpret at the moment. My patients were\n waiting for me.\n\n\n They gave me everything else I could possibly need, except enough\n sleep, and I myself didn't want that. I wanted to heal. I wanted to\n show my fellow human beings that, though I couldn't receive or transmit\n thoughts or foretell the future or move things with my mind, all those\n powers were useless without life, and that was what I could give.",
"Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.\n\n\n Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to\n poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the\n nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they\n lost their tempers could I get—or so I believed—their true attitude\n toward me.\n\n\n How else could I tell?\n\n\n \"Sorry, fella,\" Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out\n on the table. \"Wrinkles,\" he grumbled to himself. \"Wrinkles. And I had\n it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious.\"",
"I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever\n worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers\n aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but\n I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman\n abilities—normal human abilities, rather.\n\n\n \"Gee, Mr. Faraday,\" one of the other students breathed, \"you're so\n strong. And without 'kinesis or anything.\"\n\n\n I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. \"My\n name's not Mr. Faraday,\" I said. \"It's Kevin.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Lucy,\" she giggled.",
"However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns\n than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they\n broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings\n than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.\nOn that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I\n got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me.\n They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me\n so calm.\n\n\n \"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate\n concerns, Kev?\" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.\n\n\n \"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?\" Tim\n shot back at her. \"He probably doesn't even know what's happened.\"\n\n\n \"Well, what did happen?\" I asked, trying not to snap.",
"Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I\n had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in\n which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival\n to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more\n talented race.\n\"It isn't so much our defense that worries me,\" my mother muttered, \"as\n lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties\n and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them.\n It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll\n be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of\n absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid\n techniques. And you too, Kevin,\" she added, obviously a little\n surprised herself at what she was saying. \"Probably you'd be even\n better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's\n pain.\"\n\n\n I looked at her.",
"\"Well, that's perfectly natural—\" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother\n caught her eye.\n\n\n \"I didn't mean that,\" Tim said. \"I still say Kev's got something we\n can't figure out.\"\n\n\n \"You've been saying that for years,\" Danny protested, \"and he's been\n tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport\n or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or\n prepossess. He can't—\"\n\n\n \"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me,\" I interrupted, trying to\n keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my\n family thought of me, I knew—as an animal, and not a very lovable one,\n either.",
"I took pride in my work. It was good to stop pain and ugliness, to know\n that, if it weren't for me, these people would be dead or permanently\n disfigured. In a sense, they were—well, my children; I felt a warm\n glow of affection toward them.\n\n\n They felt the same way toward me. I knew because the secret of the\n hospital soon leaked out—during all those years of peace, the\n government had lost whatever facility it had for keeping secrets—and\n people used to come in droves, hoping for a glimpse of me.\nThe government pointed out that such crowds outside the building might\n attract the enemy's attention. I was the most important individual on\n Earth, they told my followers, and my safety couldn't be risked. The\n human race at this stage was pretty docile. The crowds went away. And\n it was right that they should; I didn't want to be risked any more than\n they wanted to risk me.",
"\"No,\" Tim said, \"he's just got something we haven't developed a test\n for. It'll come out some day, you'll see.\" He smiled at me.\nI smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who\n really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. \"It won't work, Tim.\n I know you're trying to be kind, but—\"\n\n\n \"He's not saying it just to be kind,\" my mother put in. \"He means it.\n Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin,\" she added with grim\n scrupulousness. \"Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his\n extracurricular prognostications too far.\"",
"She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her\n place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass\n bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over\n her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere\n primitive, I couldn't help laughing.\n\n\n \"Danny, you fumbler!\" she screamed.\n\n\n Danny erupted from the kitchen. \"How many times have I asked all of you\n not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of\n interfering busybodies getting in the way.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why you have to set the table at all,\" she retorted. \"A\n robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could.\" She\n turned quickly toward me. \"Oh, I am sorry, Kevin.\"",
"\"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household,\" my\n youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.\n\n\n \"You always do, Timothy,\" my mother said, unfolding her napkin. \"And I\n must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast.\"\n\n\n He reached for his juice. \"Guess this is a doomed household. And what\n was all that emotional uproar about?\"\n\n\n \"The usual,\" Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could\n answer. She slid warily into her chair. \"Hey, Dan, I'm here!\" she\n called. \"If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, all right.\" Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food\n floating ahead of him.\n\n\n \"The usual? Trouble with Kev?\" Tim looked at me narrowly. \"Somehow my\n sense of ominousness is connected with him.\"",
"\"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,\"\n she said tartly, \"and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself,\n Sylvia—poor Kevin isn't responsible.\"\n\n\n She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted\n out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable.\n Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.\n\n\n Mother's lips tightened. \"Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress.\n Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?\"\n A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family—that is, not\n officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more\n than they could help having thumbnails.\n\n\n \"No use,\" I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. \"Who can\n adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?\"",
"I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to\n be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his\n mental grip.\n\n\n \"I could help,\" I yelled as soon as I got my head free, \"if anybody\n would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight\n faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis.\"\n\n\n Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily\n have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of\n exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a\n kid. Not that he looked his age—he was big and blond, like Danny and\n Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.\n\n\n \"Boys, boys!\" he reproved us. \"Danny, you ought to be ashamed of\n yourself—picking on poor Kev.\"",
"She nodded. \"Certain people must have had the healing power and that's\n probably why they originally got to be the rulers.\"\n\n\n In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other\n deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of\n them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive,\n and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and\n effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital\n just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the\n world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise\n the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I\n wouldn't be able to do even that.\n\n\n When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but\n Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. \"I'm\n your assistant, Kev,\" she said shyly.\n\n\n I looked at her. \"You are?\"",
"It was the first part of her sentence that interested me. \"Why, do you\n mean—\"\n\n\n And just then a fresh batch of casualties arrived and I had to tend to\n them. For the next few days, I was so busy, I didn't get the chance to\n have the long talk with Lucy I'd wanted....\n\n\n Then, after only four months, the war suddenly stopped. It seemed\n that the aliens' weapons, despite their undeniable mysteriousness,\n were not equal to ours. And they had the added disadvantage of being\n light-years away from home base. So the remnant of their fleet took off\n and blew itself up just outside of Mars, which we understood to be the\n equivalent of unconditional surrender. And it was; we never heard from\n the Centaurians again.",
"But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them\n almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it.\n There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in\n seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it\n would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.\n\n\n \"Timothy was right,\" my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, \"and\n I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son—\" and she said\n the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it—\"the\n greatest gift of all, that of healing.\" She looked at me proudly. And\n Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.",
"Peace once more. I had a little mopping up to do at the hospital; then\n I collected my possessions and went back home after a dignitary—only\n the Vice President this time—had thanked me on behalf of a grateful\n country. I wasn't needed any more.",
"\"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace,\n but we'll have to prepare for war just in case.\"\n\n\n There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but\n we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military\n techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back\n with reinforcements—if such were its intention—in less than six\n months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though\n we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the\n aliens' armament.\n\n\n They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would\n be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits\n of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths\n to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the\n outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the\n first place."
]
] |
test
|
50571
|
[
"How does Alen end up as the head servant to the Duke and Duchess?",
"Almost as soon as Alan arrives on the planet, in the area, what happens to him that \"adds insult to injury.\"",
"How does Alen end up on that planet?",
"What hope did Alen luck on to as the story opens?",
"Why are the people on this planet so afraid of the two \"visitors?\"",
"How do the people on this planet determine if someone is a demon?",
"What happens to Alen if the Dutchess decides that she doesn't want him around anymore?",
"Why is Alen afraid for the Dutchess to speak during breakfast as the men are discussing the \"visitors?\"",
"Why does Alan hate the perfume that the Dutchess wears?",
"Out of all of his wife's children, how many of them are Alen's?"
] |
[
[
"He inherited the job when his father died. It is a position passed on through the generations.",
"His wife spends too much money, so he had to get a better job in order to be able to support her spending habits in addition to her multiple children by different men.",
"The Dutches is attracted to him, and basically wants to use him as her \"pleasure servant.\"",
"He applied and was most qualified for the job."
],
[
"He makes enemies with the Dutchess's dog, thus making his life more difficult.",
"He is forced into slavery.",
"He plans his escape.",
"He meets and marries his wife."
],
[
"He went to visit and never felt the need to return to Earth.",
"He is sent as a spy from Earth.",
"He was sent to fulfill an arrangement between his family and his wife's family.",
"He crash-landed."
],
[
"He lucked on to find out about the downed spaceship, now he has hope he can once again return home.",
"He lucked on to some free time to spend with his wife, and his wife is his only hope for happiness.",
"He lucked onto not being bitten by the dog because the dog bites him regularly, and he started to that day, as well, but was stopped.",
"He lucked on to his position with the Duke and Duchess, and that gave him hope for a secure future."
],
[
"They are simply afraid of the unknown surrounding the visitors.",
"They are not afraid of them at all. In fact, they are excited that they are there because they believe they will fulfill the prophecy. ",
"They are afraid they carry disease.",
"They are afraid of an ancient prophecy that says someone will claim to be there for one reason, and then destroy them."
],
[
"They hold them for two years, and if they don't change into demon form in that time, then they are not demons.",
"They torture them until the demon shows itself.",
"They keep them under distant surveillance to see if they reveal themselves in private.",
"They put them through a battery of psychological exams, and those exams will identify whether or not they are demons."
],
[
"He will be put back into the slave pool.",
"He will be put to death under the guise that he was trying to have an affair with the Dutchess.",
"He will lose his job, and he will become homeless.",
"His wife and family will pay the price by losing their lives."
],
[
"He is afraid she will change the subject, and on Wednesdays, the woman gets to chose the topic.",
"He is afraid she will change the subject, and at breakfast, the woman gets to chose the topic.",
"He is afraid that she is going to disclose that he is plan to escape, as he confided in her the previous night.",
"He is afraid that she is going to reveal their affair."
],
[
"She wears too much of it, and it mixes with her body odor.",
"She only wears it when she wants to have sex with him, so he associates it with how bad he feels when he is forced to cheat on his wife.",
"It reminds him of his wife.",
"His mother wore the same scent."
],
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"0",
"3",
"2",
"1"
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[
"The Duke sat at the other end of the table. He ignored the by-play,\n just as he ignored the so-called secret passage inside the walls of the\n castle, which Green used to get to the Duchess's apartments. Custom\n demanded this, just as custom demanded that he should play the outraged\n husband if she got tired of Green or angry at him and accused him\n publicly of amorous advances. This was enough to make Green jittery,\n but he had more than the Duke to consider. There was Alzo.",
"Hope came to him a month after he'd been made foreman of the kitchen\n slaves of the Duke of Tropat. It came to him as he was standing behind\n the Duchess during a meal and directing those who were waiting upon her.\n\n\n It was the Duchess Zuni who had not so subtly maneuvered him from the\n labor pens to his coveted, if dangerous, position. Why dangerous?\n Because she was very jealous and possessive, and the slightest hint of\n lack of attention from him could mean he'd lose his life or one limb\n or another. The knowledge of what had happened to his two predecessors\n kept him extremely sensitive to her every gesture, her every wish.",
"Presto, changeo! He was. And he'd put in six months in a quarry and a\n year as a dock worker. Then the Duchess had chanced to see him on the\n streets as she rode by, and he'd been transferred to the castle.",
"a wheelwright. When she was five years old they had died in a plague.\n She had been transferred to the Pens and raised by her aunt. When she\n was fifteen her beauty had attracted the Duke and he had installed\n her in the palace. There she gave birth to his two sons, now ten and\n eleven, who would soon be taken away from her and raised in the Duke's\n household as free and petted servants.",
"Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.",
"That fateful morning he was standing behind her as she sat at one end\n of the long breakfast table. In one hand he held his foreman's wand,\n a little white baton topped by a large red ball. With it he gestured\n at the slaves who served food, who poured wine and beer, who fanned\n away the flies, who carried in the household god and sat it on the god\n chair, who played something like music. Now and then he bent over the\n Duchess Zuni's long black hair and whispered phrases from this or that\n love poem, praising her beauty, her supposed unattainability, and his\n burning, if seemingly hopeless, passion for her. Zuni would smile, or\n repeat the formula of thanks—the short one—or else giggle at his\n funny accent.",
"Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.",
"The Duke had married the present Duchess several years after his\n liaison with Amra began and her jealousy had forced him to get rid of\n Amra. Back to the Pens she had gone; perhaps the Duke had not been\n too sad to see her go, for living with her was like living with a\n hurricane, and he liked peace and quiet too well.\n\n\n Then, in accordance with the custom, she had been recommended by the\n Duke to a visiting prince; the prince had overstayed his leave from\n his native country because he hated to part with her, and the Duke had\n wanted to give her as a present. But here he'd overstepped his legal\n authority. Slaves had certain rights. A woman who had borne a citizen a\n child could not be shipped away or sold unless she gave her permission.\n Amra didn't choose to go, so the sorrowing prince had gone home, though\n not without leaving a memento of his visit behind him.",
"The Duke rose, and everybody followed his example. Jugkaxtr chanted the\n formula of dismissal, then sat down to finish gnawing on the bone. The\n others filed out. Green walked in front of Zuni in order to warn her\n of any obstacles in her path and to take the brunt of any attempted\n assassination. As he did so he was seized by the ankle and tripped\n headlong. He did not fall hard because he was a quick man, in spite\n of his six-foot-two and hundred ninety pounds. But he rose red-faced\n because of the loud laughter and from repressed anger at Alzo, who had\n again repeated his trick of grabbing Green's leg and upsetting him.\n He wanted to grab a spear from a nearby guard and spit Alzo. But that\n would be the end of Green. And whereas up to now there had been many",
"Green hailed a passing rickshaw and seated himself comfortably in it.\n As assistant majordomo he had plenty of money. Moreover, the Duke and\n Duchess would have been outraged if he had lowered their prestige by\n walking through the city's streets. His vehicle made good time, too,\n because everybody recognized his livery: the scarlet and white tricorn\n hat and the white sleeveless shirt with the Duke's heraldic arms on its\n chest—red and green concentric circles pierced by a black arrow.\n\n\n The street led always downward, for the city had been built on the\n foothills of the mountains. It wandered here and there and gave Green\n plenty of time to think.",
"Alzo was the Duchess's watchdog, a mastiff-like monster with shaggy\n red-gold hair. The dog hated Green with a vindictiveness that Green\n could only account for by supposing that the animal knew, perhaps from\n his body-odor, that he was not a native of this planet. Alzo rumbled\n a warning deep in his chest every time Green bent over the Duchess or\n made a too-sudden movement. Occasionally he rose to his four feet and\n nuzzled the man's leg. When that happened Green could not keep from\n breaking out into a sweat, for the dog had twice bitten him, playfully,\n so to speak, and severely lacerated his calf. As if that weren't bad\n enough, Green had to worry that the natives might notice that his scars\n healed abnormally fast, almost overnight. He'd been forced to wear\n bandages on his legs long after the new skin had come in.",
"But how...? He didn't think that stowing away would work. There was\n always a careful search for slaves who might try just that very plan.\n He looked at Miran, the short, fat, big-stomached, hook-nosed, one-eyed\n fellow with many chins and a large gold ring in his nose. The fellow\n was shrewd, shrewd, and he would not want to offend the Duchess by\n helping her official gigolo escape. Not, that is, unless Green could\n offer him something that was so valuable that he couldn't afford not to\n take the risk. Miran boasted that he was a hard-headed businessman, but\n it was Green's observation that there was always a large soft spot in\n that supposedly impenetrable cranium: the Fissure of Cupiditas.\n2",
"So he grinned sheepishly and again preceded the Duchess, while the\n others followed her out. When they reached the bottom of the broad\n stone staircase that led to the upper floors of the castle, Zuni told\n Green that he was to go to the marketplace and buy tomorrow's food. As\n for her, she was going back to bed and sleep until noon.\n\n\n Inwardly Green groaned. How long could he keep up this pace? He was\n expected to stay up half the night with her, then attend to his\n official duties during the day. She slept enough to be refreshed by\n the time he visited her, but he never had a chance for any real rest.\n Even when he had his free hours in the afternoon he had to go to his\n house in the pens, and there he had to stay awake and attend to all\n his familial duties. And Amra, his slave-wife, and her six children\n demanded much from him. They were even more tyrannical than the\n Duchess, if that were possible.",
"He got down out of the rickshaw, told the boy to wait, said, \"Hello,\n honey,\" and kissed her. He was glad she was a slave, because she didn't\n wear a nose-ring. When he kissed the Duchess he was always annoyed\n by hers. She refused to take it off when with him because that would\n put her on his level, and he mustn't ever forget he was a slave. It\n was perfectly moral for her to take a bondsman as a lover but not a\n freeman, and she was nothing if not moral.",
"How long, O Lord, how long? The situation was intolerable; even if he'd\n not heard of the spaceship he would have plotted to escape. Better a\n quick death while trying to get away than a slow, torturous one by\n exhaustion.\n\n\n He bowed good-by to the Duke and Duchess, then followed the violet\n turban and yellow robes of Miran through the courtyard, through the\n thick stone walls, over the bridge of the broad moat, and into the\n narrow winding streets of the city of Quotz. Here the merchant-captain\n got into his silver-and-jewel-decorated rickshaw. The two long-legged\n men between its shafts, sailors and clansmen from Miran's vessel, the\nBird of Fortune\n, began running through the crowd. The people made way\n for them, as two other sailors preceded them calling out Miran's name\n and cracking whips in the air.",
"She looked so beautiful, he thought. And stank so terribly. At least\n she had at first. Now she looked less beautiful because he knew how\n stupid she was, and didn't stink quite so badly because his nostrils\n had become somewhat adjusted. They'd had to.\n\n\n \"I intend to be back in Estorya by the time of the festival,\" said\n Miran. \"I've never seen the Eye of the Sun burn demons before. It's a\n giant lens, you know. There will be just time enough to make a voyage\n there and get back before the rainy season. I expect to make even\n greater profits than the last time, because I've established some\n highly placed contacts. O gods, I do not boast but merely praise your\n favor to your humble worshiper, Miran the Merchant of the Clan of\n Effenycan!\"\n\n\n \"Please bring me some more of this perfume,\" said the Duchess, \"and I\n just love the diamond necklace you gave me.\"",
"Amra's return kiss was passionate, part of which was the vigor of\n asperity. \"You're not fooling me,\" she said. \"You meant to ride right\n by. Kiss the children! What's the matter, are you getting tired of me?\n You told me you only accepted the Duchess's offer because it meant\n advancement, and you were afraid that if you turned her down she'd\n find an excuse to kill you. Well, I believed you—half-believed you,\n anyway. But I won't if you try sneaking by without seeing me. What's\n the matter? Are you a man or not? Are you afraid to face a woman? Don't\n shake your head. You're a liar! Don't forget to kiss Grizquetr; you",
"Green, after looking to make certain that nobody from the castle was\n around to see him, ran until he was even with the rickshaw. Miran\n halted it and asked what he wanted.\n\n\n \"Your pardon, Your Richness, but may a humble slave speak and not be\n reprimanded?\"\n\n\n \"I presume it is no idle thought you have in mind,\" said Miran, looking\n Green over his one eye narrow in its fat-folds.\n\n\n \"It has to do with money.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, despite your foreign accent you speak with a pleasing voice; you\n are the golden trumpet of Mennirox, my patron god. Speak!\"\n\n\n \"First Your Richness must swear by Mennirox that you will under no\n circumstances divulge my proposal.\"\n\n\n \"There is wealth in this? For me?\"\n\n\n \"There is.\"",
"From beneath the table rose the babble of the priest, Jugkaxtr,\n as he blessed everyone in the house, down to the latest-born pup,\n and the fleas living thereoff, and cursed all those who were\n possessed by even the tiniest demon. The Duke, growing impatient at\n the noise, kicked under the table. Jugkaxtr yelped and presently\n crawled out. He sat down and began gnawing the meat from a bone,\n a well-done-thou-good-and-faithful-servant expression on his fat\n features. Green also felt like kicking him, just as he often felt\n like kicking every single human being on this planet. It was hard to\n remember that he must exercise compassion and understanding for them,\n and that his own remote ancestors had once been just as nauseatingly\n superstitious, cruel and bloody.",
"This is an original novel—not a reprint—published\n by Ballantine\n Books, Inc.\nTo Nan Gerding\nDANGER! THRILLS! ADVENTURE!\n\n\n Alan Green was not exactly a hero. In fact he liked peace just as\n well as the next man. Not that he was really afraid of that crazy,\n hot-blooded hound-dog Alzo, or even of the hound's gorgeous owner, the\n Duchess Zuni—who was also hot-blooded (to say nothing of the Duke).\n After all, these things were understood on this backward, violent\n planet, and a man could manage, provided he was alert twenty-four hours\n a day.\n\n\n And as a matter of fact, Alan was only normally apprehensive of his\n Junoesque, tempestuous (but altogether lovable) wife Amra. Delightful,\n demanding Amra—and her five uproarious kids. The trouble was, he was\n tired. And homesick."
],
[
"So when he heard of two other downed spacemen, he hitched a ride with\n a piratical merchant-captain on a windroller destined to carry him to\n the spaceship and thence to the peaceful green hills of Earth. But\n he had reckoned without the vagaries of the windroller, pirates, the\n \"traveling islands,\" the rascally Captain, and various flora and fauna\n peculiar to this planet—all of which, it now seemed, regarded Alan\n with unnerving malevolence.",
"And worst of all, Amra was determined that he should be a hero. Amra\n won.\n1\nFor two years Alan Green had lived without hope. From the day the\n spaceship had crashed on this unknown planet he had resigned himself\n to the destiny created for him by accident and mathematics. Chances\n against another ship landing within the next hundred years were a\n million to one. Therefore it would do no good to sit around waiting\n for rescue. Much as he loathed the idea, he must live the rest of his\n life here, and he must squeeze as much blood as he could out of this\n planet-sized turnip. There wasn't much to squeeze. In fact, it seemed\n to him that he was the one losing the blood. Shortly after he'd been\n cast away he'd been made a slave.\n\n\n Now, suddenly, he had hope.",
"Alzo was the Duchess's watchdog, a mastiff-like monster with shaggy\n red-gold hair. The dog hated Green with a vindictiveness that Green\n could only account for by supposing that the animal knew, perhaps from\n his body-odor, that he was not a native of this planet. Alzo rumbled\n a warning deep in his chest every time Green bent over the Duchess or\n made a too-sudden movement. Occasionally he rose to his four feet and\n nuzzled the man's leg. When that happened Green could not keep from\n breaking out into a sweat, for the dog had twice bitten him, playfully,\n so to speak, and severely lacerated his calf. As if that weren't bad\n enough, Green had to worry that the natives might notice that his scars\n healed abnormally fast, almost overnight. He'd been forced to wear\n bandages on his legs long after the new skin had come in.",
"This is an original novel—not a reprint—published\n by Ballantine\n Books, Inc.\nTo Nan Gerding\nDANGER! THRILLS! ADVENTURE!\n\n\n Alan Green was not exactly a hero. In fact he liked peace just as\n well as the next man. Not that he was really afraid of that crazy,\n hot-blooded hound-dog Alzo, or even of the hound's gorgeous owner, the\n Duchess Zuni—who was also hot-blooded (to say nothing of the Duke).\n After all, these things were understood on this backward, violent\n planet, and a man could manage, provided he was alert twenty-four hours\n a day.\n\n\n And as a matter of fact, Alan was only normally apprehensive of his\n Junoesque, tempestuous (but altogether lovable) wife Amra. Delightful,\n demanding Amra—and her five uproarious kids. The trouble was, he was\n tired. And homesick.",
"Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.",
"How long, O Lord, how long? The situation was intolerable; even if he'd\n not heard of the spaceship he would have plotted to escape. Better a\n quick death while trying to get away than a slow, torturous one by\n exhaustion.\n\n\n He bowed good-by to the Duke and Duchess, then followed the violet\n turban and yellow robes of Miran through the courtyard, through the\n thick stone walls, over the bridge of the broad moat, and into the\n narrow winding streets of the city of Quotz. Here the merchant-captain\n got into his silver-and-jewel-decorated rickshaw. The two long-legged\n men between its shafts, sailors and clansmen from Miran's vessel, the\nBird of Fortune\n, began running through the crowd. The people made way\n for them, as two other sailors preceded them calling out Miran's name\n and cracking whips in the air.",
"The trouble was, he thought, that if the two imprisoned men at Estorya\n were to die before he got to them he'd still be lost. He had no idea\n of how to pilot or navigate a spaceship. He'd been a passenger on a\n freighter when it had unaccountably blown up, and he'd been forced to\n leave the dying vessel in one of those automatic castaway emergency\n shells. The capsule had got him down to the surface of this planet and\n was, as far as he knew, still up in the hills where he'd left it. After\n wandering for a week and almost starving to death he'd been picked up\n by some peasants. They had turned him in to the soldiers of a nearby\n garrison, thinking he must be a runaway slave on whom they'd collect",
"From beneath the table rose the babble of the priest, Jugkaxtr,\n as he blessed everyone in the house, down to the latest-born pup,\n and the fleas living thereoff, and cursed all those who were\n possessed by even the tiniest demon. The Duke, growing impatient at\n the noise, kicked under the table. Jugkaxtr yelped and presently\n crawled out. He sat down and began gnawing the meat from a bone,\n a well-done-thou-good-and-faithful-servant expression on his fat\n features. Green also felt like kicking him, just as he often felt\n like kicking every single human being on this planet. It was hard to\n remember that he must exercise compassion and understanding for them,\n and that his own remote ancestors had once been just as nauseatingly\n superstitious, cruel and bloody.",
"For the thousandth time Green wondered at this strange planet where\n the only large animals were men, dogs, grass cats, a small deer and\n a very small equine. In fact, there was a paucity of any variety of\n animal life, except for the surprisingly large number of birds. It was\n this scarcity of horses and oxen, he supposed, that helped perpetuate\n slavery. Man and dog had to provide most of the labor.\n\n\n No doubt there was an explanation for all this, but it must be buried\n so deep in this people's forgotten history that one would never know.\n Green, always curious, wished that he had time and means to explore.\n But he didn't. He might as well resign himself to keeping a whole skin\n and to getting out of this mess as fast as he could.\n\n\n There was enough to do merely to make his way through the narrow and\n crowded streets. He had to display his baton often to clear a path,\n though when he approached the harbor area he had less trouble because\n the streets were much wider.",
"Here great wagons drawn by gangs of slaves carried huge loads to or\n from the ships. The thoroughfares had to be broad, else the people\n would have been crushed between wagon and house. Here also were the\n so-called Pens, where the dock-slaves lived. Once the area had actually\n been an enclosure where men and women were locked up for the night. But\n the walls had been torn down and new houses built in the old Duke's\n time. The closest Earthly parallel Green could think of for these\n edifices was a housing project. Small cottages, all exactly alike, set\n in military columns.\n\n\n For a moment he considered stopping off to see Amra, then decided\n against it. She'd get him tied up in an argument or something, and\n he'd spend too much time trying to soothe her, time that should be\n spent at the marketplace. He hated scenes, whereas Amra was a born\n self-dramatist who reveled in them, almost wallowed, one might say.",
"Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.",
"There was a lengthy conversation which did not hold Green's attention.\n He was too busy trying to think of a plan whereby he could get\n to Estorya and to the demons' iron vessel, which was obviously a\n spaceship. This was his only chance. Soon the rainy season would start\n and there would be no vessels leaving for at least three months.\n\n\n He could, of course, just walk away and hope to get to Estorya on foot.\n Thousands of miles through countless perils, and he had only a general\n idea of where the city was ... no, Miran was his only hope.",
"\"ALAN, YOU BIG BLOND NO-GOOD HUNK OF MAN, STOP!\"",
"The Duke rose, and everybody followed his example. Jugkaxtr chanted the\n formula of dismissal, then sat down to finish gnawing on the bone. The\n others filed out. Green walked in front of Zuni in order to warn her\n of any obstacles in her path and to take the brunt of any attempted\n assassination. As he did so he was seized by the ankle and tripped\n headlong. He did not fall hard because he was a quick man, in spite\n of his six-foot-two and hundred ninety pounds. But he rose red-faced\n because of the loud laughter and from repressed anger at Alzo, who had\n again repeated his trick of grabbing Green's leg and upsetting him.\n He wanted to grab a spear from a nearby guard and spit Alzo. But that\n would be the end of Green. And whereas up to now there had been many",
"Green hailed a passing rickshaw and seated himself comfortably in it.\n As assistant majordomo he had plenty of money. Moreover, the Duke and\n Duchess would have been outraged if he had lowered their prestige by\n walking through the city's streets. His vehicle made good time, too,\n because everybody recognized his livery: the scarlet and white tricorn\n hat and the white sleeveless shirt with the Duke's heraldic arms on its\n chest—red and green concentric circles pierced by a black arrow.\n\n\n The street led always downward, for the city had been built on the\n foothills of the mountains. It wandered here and there and gave Green\n plenty of time to think.",
"Green, after looking to make certain that nobody from the castle was\n around to see him, ran until he was even with the rickshaw. Miran\n halted it and asked what he wanted.\n\n\n \"Your pardon, Your Richness, but may a humble slave speak and not be\n reprimanded?\"\n\n\n \"I presume it is no idle thought you have in mind,\" said Miran, looking\n Green over his one eye narrow in its fat-folds.\n\n\n \"It has to do with money.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, despite your foreign accent you speak with a pleasing voice; you\n are the golden trumpet of Mennirox, my patron god. Speak!\"\n\n\n \"First Your Richness must swear by Mennirox that you will under no\n circumstances divulge my proposal.\"\n\n\n \"There is wealth in this? For me?\"\n\n\n \"There is.\"",
"times when he would not particularly have cared if he left this planet\n via the death route, he could not now make a false move. Not when\n escape was so near!",
"The streets were alive with the short, dark, stocky natives and the\n taller, lighter-complexioned slaves. The former wore their turbans of\n various colors, indicating their status and trade. The latter wore\n their three-cornered hats. Occasionally a priest in his high conical\n hat, hexagonal spectacles and goatee rode by. Wagons and rickshaws\n drawn by men or by big, powerful dogs went by. Merchants stood at the\n fronts of their shops and hawked their wares in loud voices. They sold\n cloth, grixtr nut, parchment, knives, swords, helmets, drugs, books—on\n magic, on religion, on travel—spices, perfumes, ink, rugs, highly\n sugared drinks, wine, beer, tonic, paintings, everything that went to\n make up their civilization. Butchers stood before open shops where\n dressed fowl, deer and dogs hung. Dealers in birds pointed out the\n virtues of their many-colored and multi-songed pets.",
"Miran glanced at his clansmen, standing there patiently, apparently\n oblivious of what was going on. He had power of life and death over\n them, but he didn't trust them. He said, \"Perhaps it would be better if\n I thought about this before making such a drastic oath. Could you meet\n me tonight at the Hour of the Wineglass at the House of Equality? And\n could you perhaps give me a slight hint of what you have in mind?\"\n\n\n \"The answer to both is yes. My proposal has to do with the dried fish\n that you carry as cargo to the Estoryans. There is another thing, too,\n but I may not even hint at it until I have your oath.\"\n\n\n \"Very well then. At the agreed hour. Fish, eh? I must be off. Time is\n money, you know. Get going boys, full sails.\"",
"There was a big difference between reading about such people and\n actually living among them. A history or a romantic novel could\n describe how unwashed and diseased and formula-bound primitives were,\n but only the too-too substantial stench and filth could make your gorge\n rise.\n\n\n Even as he stood there Zuni's powerful perfume rose and clung in heavy\n festoons about him and slithered down his nostrils. It was a rare and\n expensive perfume, brought back by Miran from his voyages and given to\n her as a token of the merchant's esteem. Used in small quantities it\n would have been quite effective to express feminine daintiness and to\n hint at delicate passion. But no, Zuni poured it like water over her,\n hoping to cover up the stale odor left by\nnot\ntaking a bath more than\n once a month."
],
[
"So when he heard of two other downed spacemen, he hitched a ride with\n a piratical merchant-captain on a windroller destined to carry him to\n the spaceship and thence to the peaceful green hills of Earth. But\n he had reckoned without the vagaries of the windroller, pirates, the\n \"traveling islands,\" the rascally Captain, and various flora and fauna\n peculiar to this planet—all of which, it now seemed, regarded Alan\n with unnerving malevolence.",
"And worst of all, Amra was determined that he should be a hero. Amra\n won.\n1\nFor two years Alan Green had lived without hope. From the day the\n spaceship had crashed on this unknown planet he had resigned himself\n to the destiny created for him by accident and mathematics. Chances\n against another ship landing within the next hundred years were a\n million to one. Therefore it would do no good to sit around waiting\n for rescue. Much as he loathed the idea, he must live the rest of his\n life here, and he must squeeze as much blood as he could out of this\n planet-sized turnip. There wasn't much to squeeze. In fact, it seemed\n to him that he was the one losing the blood. Shortly after he'd been\n cast away he'd been made a slave.\n\n\n Now, suddenly, he had hope.",
"This is an original novel—not a reprint—published\n by Ballantine\n Books, Inc.\nTo Nan Gerding\nDANGER! THRILLS! ADVENTURE!\n\n\n Alan Green was not exactly a hero. In fact he liked peace just as\n well as the next man. Not that he was really afraid of that crazy,\n hot-blooded hound-dog Alzo, or even of the hound's gorgeous owner, the\n Duchess Zuni—who was also hot-blooded (to say nothing of the Duke).\n After all, these things were understood on this backward, violent\n planet, and a man could manage, provided he was alert twenty-four hours\n a day.\n\n\n And as a matter of fact, Alan was only normally apprehensive of his\n Junoesque, tempestuous (but altogether lovable) wife Amra. Delightful,\n demanding Amra—and her five uproarious kids. The trouble was, he was\n tired. And homesick.",
"The trouble was, he thought, that if the two imprisoned men at Estorya\n were to die before he got to them he'd still be lost. He had no idea\n of how to pilot or navigate a spaceship. He'd been a passenger on a\n freighter when it had unaccountably blown up, and he'd been forced to\n leave the dying vessel in one of those automatic castaway emergency\n shells. The capsule had got him down to the surface of this planet and\n was, as far as he knew, still up in the hills where he'd left it. After\n wandering for a week and almost starving to death he'd been picked up\n by some peasants. They had turned him in to the soldiers of a nearby\n garrison, thinking he must be a runaway slave on whom they'd collect",
"Alzo was the Duchess's watchdog, a mastiff-like monster with shaggy\n red-gold hair. The dog hated Green with a vindictiveness that Green\n could only account for by supposing that the animal knew, perhaps from\n his body-odor, that he was not a native of this planet. Alzo rumbled\n a warning deep in his chest every time Green bent over the Duchess or\n made a too-sudden movement. Occasionally he rose to his four feet and\n nuzzled the man's leg. When that happened Green could not keep from\n breaking out into a sweat, for the dog had twice bitten him, playfully,\n so to speak, and severely lacerated his calf. As if that weren't bad\n enough, Green had to worry that the natives might notice that his scars\n healed abnormally fast, almost overnight. He'd been forced to wear\n bandages on his legs long after the new skin had come in.",
"How long, O Lord, how long? The situation was intolerable; even if he'd\n not heard of the spaceship he would have plotted to escape. Better a\n quick death while trying to get away than a slow, torturous one by\n exhaustion.\n\n\n He bowed good-by to the Duke and Duchess, then followed the violet\n turban and yellow robes of Miran through the courtyard, through the\n thick stone walls, over the bridge of the broad moat, and into the\n narrow winding streets of the city of Quotz. Here the merchant-captain\n got into his silver-and-jewel-decorated rickshaw. The two long-legged\n men between its shafts, sailors and clansmen from Miran's vessel, the\nBird of Fortune\n, began running through the crowd. The people made way\n for them, as two other sailors preceded them calling out Miran's name\n and cracking whips in the air.",
"There was a lengthy conversation which did not hold Green's attention.\n He was too busy trying to think of a plan whereby he could get\n to Estorya and to the demons' iron vessel, which was obviously a\n spaceship. This was his only chance. Soon the rainy season would start\n and there would be no vessels leaving for at least three months.\n\n\n He could, of course, just walk away and hope to get to Estorya on foot.\n Thousands of miles through countless perils, and he had only a general\n idea of where the city was ... no, Miran was his only hope.",
"Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.",
"Here great wagons drawn by gangs of slaves carried huge loads to or\n from the ships. The thoroughfares had to be broad, else the people\n would have been crushed between wagon and house. Here also were the\n so-called Pens, where the dock-slaves lived. Once the area had actually\n been an enclosure where men and women were locked up for the night. But\n the walls had been torn down and new houses built in the old Duke's\n time. The closest Earthly parallel Green could think of for these\n edifices was a housing project. Small cottages, all exactly alike, set\n in military columns.\n\n\n For a moment he considered stopping off to see Amra, then decided\n against it. She'd get him tied up in an argument or something, and\n he'd spend too much time trying to soothe her, time that should be\n spent at the marketplace. He hated scenes, whereas Amra was a born\n self-dramatist who reveled in them, almost wallowed, one might say.",
"times when he would not particularly have cared if he left this planet\n via the death route, he could not now make a false move. Not when\n escape was so near!",
"But how...? He didn't think that stowing away would work. There was\n always a careful search for slaves who might try just that very plan.\n He looked at Miran, the short, fat, big-stomached, hook-nosed, one-eyed\n fellow with many chins and a large gold ring in his nose. The fellow\n was shrewd, shrewd, and he would not want to offend the Duchess by\n helping her official gigolo escape. Not, that is, unless Green could\n offer him something that was so valuable that he couldn't afford not to\n take the risk. Miran boasted that he was a hard-headed businessman, but\n it was Green's observation that there was always a large soft spot in\n that supposedly impenetrable cranium: the Fissure of Cupiditas.\n2",
"\"Men? Demons, rather! Can men fly in an iron ship through the air?\n These two claimed to have come from the stars, and you know what that\n means. Remember Oixrotl's prophecy:\nA demon will come, claiming\n to be an angel\n. No doubt about these two! Just to show you their\n subtlety, they claim to be neither demon nor angels, but men! Now,\n there's devilish clever thinking. Confusing to anybody but the most\n clear-headed. I'm glad the King of Estorya wasn't taken in.\"\n\n\n Eagerly Zuni leaned forward, her large brown eyes bright, and her\n red-painted mouth open and wet. \"Oh, has he burned them already? What a\n shame! I should think he'd at least torture them for a while.\"",
"From beneath the table rose the babble of the priest, Jugkaxtr,\n as he blessed everyone in the house, down to the latest-born pup,\n and the fleas living thereoff, and cursed all those who were\n possessed by even the tiniest demon. The Duke, growing impatient at\n the noise, kicked under the table. Jugkaxtr yelped and presently\n crawled out. He sat down and began gnawing the meat from a bone,\n a well-done-thou-good-and-faithful-servant expression on his fat\n features. Green also felt like kicking him, just as he often felt\n like kicking every single human being on this planet. It was hard to\n remember that he must exercise compassion and understanding for them,\n and that his own remote ancestors had once been just as nauseatingly\n superstitious, cruel and bloody.",
"Reluctantly Green told his rickshaw boy to turn around. The boy,\n grinning, did so. Like everybody else along the harbor front he knew\n Amra and was familiar with her relations with Green. She held their\n one-year-old daughter in her arms, cradled against her magnificent\n bosom. Behind her stood her other five children, her two sons by the\n Duke, her daughter by a visiting prince, her son by the captain of a\n Northerner ship, her daughter by a temple sculptor. Her rise and fall\n and slow rise again was told in the children around her; the tableau\n embodied an outline of the structure of the planet's society.\n3\nHer mother had been a Northerner slave; her father, a native freeman,",
"Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.",
"For the thousandth time Green wondered at this strange planet where\n the only large animals were men, dogs, grass cats, a small deer and\n a very small equine. In fact, there was a paucity of any variety of\n animal life, except for the surprisingly large number of birds. It was\n this scarcity of horses and oxen, he supposed, that helped perpetuate\n slavery. Man and dog had to provide most of the labor.\n\n\n No doubt there was an explanation for all this, but it must be buried\n so deep in this people's forgotten history that one would never know.\n Green, always curious, wished that he had time and means to explore.\n But he didn't. He might as well resign himself to keeping a whole skin\n and to getting out of this mess as fast as he could.\n\n\n There was enough to do merely to make his way through the narrow and\n crowded streets. He had to display his baton often to clear a path,\n though when he approached the harbor area he had less trouble because\n the streets were much wider.",
"There was more to her than beauty. She radiated a something that struck\n every male at first sight; to Green she sometimes seemed to be a\n violent physical event, perhaps even a principle of Nature herself.\n\n\n There were times when Green felt proud because she had picked him as\n her mate, chosen him when he was a newly imported slave who could say\n only a few words in the highly irregular agglutinative tongue. But\n there were times when he felt that she was too much for him, and those\n times had been getting too frequent lately. Besides, he felt a pang\n whenever he saw their child, because he loved it and dreaded the moment\n when he would have to leave it. As for deserting Amra, he wasn't sure\n how that would make him feel. Undeniably, she did affect him, but then\n so did a blow in the teeth or wine in the blood.",
"Miran glanced at his clansmen, standing there patiently, apparently\n oblivious of what was going on. He had power of life and death over\n them, but he didn't trust them. He said, \"Perhaps it would be better if\n I thought about this before making such a drastic oath. Could you meet\n me tonight at the Hour of the Wineglass at the House of Equality? And\n could you perhaps give me a slight hint of what you have in mind?\"\n\n\n \"The answer to both is yes. My proposal has to do with the dried fish\n that you carry as cargo to the Estoryans. There is another thing, too,\n but I may not even hint at it until I have your oath.\"\n\n\n \"Very well then. At the agreed hour. Fish, eh? I must be off. Time is\n money, you know. Get going boys, full sails.\"",
"Green, after looking to make certain that nobody from the castle was\n around to see him, ran until he was even with the rickshaw. Miran\n halted it and asked what he wanted.\n\n\n \"Your pardon, Your Richness, but may a humble slave speak and not be\n reprimanded?\"\n\n\n \"I presume it is no idle thought you have in mind,\" said Miran, looking\n Green over his one eye narrow in its fat-folds.\n\n\n \"It has to do with money.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, despite your foreign accent you speak with a pleasing voice; you\n are the golden trumpet of Mennirox, my patron god. Speak!\"\n\n\n \"First Your Richness must swear by Mennirox that you will under no\n circumstances divulge my proposal.\"\n\n\n \"There is wealth in this? For me?\"\n\n\n \"There is.\"",
"Hope came to him a month after he'd been made foreman of the kitchen\n slaves of the Duke of Tropat. It came to him as he was standing behind\n the Duchess during a meal and directing those who were waiting upon her.\n\n\n It was the Duchess Zuni who had not so subtly maneuvered him from the\n labor pens to his coveted, if dangerous, position. Why dangerous?\n Because she was very jealous and possessive, and the slightest hint of\n lack of attention from him could mean he'd lose his life or one limb\n or another. The knowledge of what had happened to his two predecessors\n kept him extremely sensitive to her every gesture, her every wish."
],
[
"And worst of all, Amra was determined that he should be a hero. Amra\n won.\n1\nFor two years Alan Green had lived without hope. From the day the\n spaceship had crashed on this unknown planet he had resigned himself\n to the destiny created for him by accident and mathematics. Chances\n against another ship landing within the next hundred years were a\n million to one. Therefore it would do no good to sit around waiting\n for rescue. Much as he loathed the idea, he must live the rest of his\n life here, and he must squeeze as much blood as he could out of this\n planet-sized turnip. There wasn't much to squeeze. In fact, it seemed\n to him that he was the one losing the blood. Shortly after he'd been\n cast away he'd been made a slave.\n\n\n Now, suddenly, he had hope.",
"Hope came to him a month after he'd been made foreman of the kitchen\n slaves of the Duke of Tropat. It came to him as he was standing behind\n the Duchess during a meal and directing those who were waiting upon her.\n\n\n It was the Duchess Zuni who had not so subtly maneuvered him from the\n labor pens to his coveted, if dangerous, position. Why dangerous?\n Because she was very jealous and possessive, and the slightest hint of\n lack of attention from him could mean he'd lose his life or one limb\n or another. The knowledge of what had happened to his two predecessors\n kept him extremely sensitive to her every gesture, her every wish.",
"The trouble was, he thought, that if the two imprisoned men at Estorya\n were to die before he got to them he'd still be lost. He had no idea\n of how to pilot or navigate a spaceship. He'd been a passenger on a\n freighter when it had unaccountably blown up, and he'd been forced to\n leave the dying vessel in one of those automatic castaway emergency\n shells. The capsule had got him down to the surface of this planet and\n was, as far as he knew, still up in the hills where he'd left it. After\n wandering for a week and almost starving to death he'd been picked up\n by some peasants. They had turned him in to the soldiers of a nearby\n garrison, thinking he must be a runaway slave on whom they'd collect",
"This is an original novel—not a reprint—published\n by Ballantine\n Books, Inc.\nTo Nan Gerding\nDANGER! THRILLS! ADVENTURE!\n\n\n Alan Green was not exactly a hero. In fact he liked peace just as\n well as the next man. Not that he was really afraid of that crazy,\n hot-blooded hound-dog Alzo, or even of the hound's gorgeous owner, the\n Duchess Zuni—who was also hot-blooded (to say nothing of the Duke).\n After all, these things were understood on this backward, violent\n planet, and a man could manage, provided he was alert twenty-four hours\n a day.\n\n\n And as a matter of fact, Alan was only normally apprehensive of his\n Junoesque, tempestuous (but altogether lovable) wife Amra. Delightful,\n demanding Amra—and her five uproarious kids. The trouble was, he was\n tired. And homesick.",
"There was a lengthy conversation which did not hold Green's attention.\n He was too busy trying to think of a plan whereby he could get\n to Estorya and to the demons' iron vessel, which was obviously a\n spaceship. This was his only chance. Soon the rainy season would start\n and there would be no vessels leaving for at least three months.\n\n\n He could, of course, just walk away and hope to get to Estorya on foot.\n Thousands of miles through countless perils, and he had only a general\n idea of where the city was ... no, Miran was his only hope.",
"Miran glanced at his clansmen, standing there patiently, apparently\n oblivious of what was going on. He had power of life and death over\n them, but he didn't trust them. He said, \"Perhaps it would be better if\n I thought about this before making such a drastic oath. Could you meet\n me tonight at the Hour of the Wineglass at the House of Equality? And\n could you perhaps give me a slight hint of what you have in mind?\"\n\n\n \"The answer to both is yes. My proposal has to do with the dried fish\n that you carry as cargo to the Estoryans. There is another thing, too,\n but I may not even hint at it until I have your oath.\"\n\n\n \"Very well then. At the agreed hour. Fish, eh? I must be off. Time is\n money, you know. Get going boys, full sails.\"",
"Green, after looking to make certain that nobody from the castle was\n around to see him, ran until he was even with the rickshaw. Miran\n halted it and asked what he wanted.\n\n\n \"Your pardon, Your Richness, but may a humble slave speak and not be\n reprimanded?\"\n\n\n \"I presume it is no idle thought you have in mind,\" said Miran, looking\n Green over his one eye narrow in its fat-folds.\n\n\n \"It has to do with money.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, despite your foreign accent you speak with a pleasing voice; you\n are the golden trumpet of Mennirox, my patron god. Speak!\"\n\n\n \"First Your Richness must swear by Mennirox that you will under no\n circumstances divulge my proposal.\"\n\n\n \"There is wealth in this? For me?\"\n\n\n \"There is.\"",
"Alzo was the Duchess's watchdog, a mastiff-like monster with shaggy\n red-gold hair. The dog hated Green with a vindictiveness that Green\n could only account for by supposing that the animal knew, perhaps from\n his body-odor, that he was not a native of this planet. Alzo rumbled\n a warning deep in his chest every time Green bent over the Duchess or\n made a too-sudden movement. Occasionally he rose to his four feet and\n nuzzled the man's leg. When that happened Green could not keep from\n breaking out into a sweat, for the dog had twice bitten him, playfully,\n so to speak, and severely lacerated his calf. As if that weren't bad\n enough, Green had to worry that the natives might notice that his scars\n healed abnormally fast, almost overnight. He'd been forced to wear\n bandages on his legs long after the new skin had come in.",
"Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.",
"How long, O Lord, how long? The situation was intolerable; even if he'd\n not heard of the spaceship he would have plotted to escape. Better a\n quick death while trying to get away than a slow, torturous one by\n exhaustion.\n\n\n He bowed good-by to the Duke and Duchess, then followed the violet\n turban and yellow robes of Miran through the courtyard, through the\n thick stone walls, over the bridge of the broad moat, and into the\n narrow winding streets of the city of Quotz. Here the merchant-captain\n got into his silver-and-jewel-decorated rickshaw. The two long-legged\n men between its shafts, sailors and clansmen from Miran's vessel, the\nBird of Fortune\n, began running through the crowd. The people made way\n for them, as two other sailors preceded them calling out Miran's name\n and cracking whips in the air.",
"But how...? He didn't think that stowing away would work. There was\n always a careful search for slaves who might try just that very plan.\n He looked at Miran, the short, fat, big-stomached, hook-nosed, one-eyed\n fellow with many chins and a large gold ring in his nose. The fellow\n was shrewd, shrewd, and he would not want to offend the Duchess by\n helping her official gigolo escape. Not, that is, unless Green could\n offer him something that was so valuable that he couldn't afford not to\n take the risk. Miran boasted that he was a hard-headed businessman, but\n it was Green's observation that there was always a large soft spot in\n that supposedly impenetrable cranium: the Fissure of Cupiditas.\n2",
"Miran cleared his throat, adjusted his violet turban and yellow robes,\n pulled gently at the large gold ring that hung from his nose and said,\n \"It took me a month to get back from Estorya, and that is very good\n time indeed, but then I am noted for my good luck, though I prefer to\n call it skill plus the favor given by the gods to the truly devout.\n I do not boast, O gods, but merely give you tribute because you have\n smiled upon my ventures and have found pleasing the scent of my many\n sacrifices in your nostrils!\"",
"Green hailed a passing rickshaw and seated himself comfortably in it.\n As assistant majordomo he had plenty of money. Moreover, the Duke and\n Duchess would have been outraged if he had lowered their prestige by\n walking through the city's streets. His vehicle made good time, too,\n because everybody recognized his livery: the scarlet and white tricorn\n hat and the white sleeveless shirt with the Duke's heraldic arms on its\n chest—red and green concentric circles pierced by a black arrow.\n\n\n The street led always downward, for the city had been built on the\n foothills of the mountains. It wandered here and there and gave Green\n plenty of time to think.",
"Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.",
"So when he heard of two other downed spacemen, he hitched a ride with\n a piratical merchant-captain on a windroller destined to carry him to\n the spaceship and thence to the peaceful green hills of Earth. But\n he had reckoned without the vagaries of the windroller, pirates, the\n \"traveling islands,\" the rascally Captain, and various flora and fauna\n peculiar to this planet—all of which, it now seemed, regarded Alan\n with unnerving malevolence.",
"Miran wiped his face and said, \"Of course, I wasn't able to find\n out much, because we merchants are regarded with deep suspicion and\n scarcely dare to move outside the harbor or the marketplace. The\n Estoryans worship a female deity—ridiculous, isn't it?—and eat fish.\n They hate us Tropatians because we worship Zaxropatr, Male of Males,\n and because they must depend on us to bring them fish. But they aren't\n close-mouthed. They babble on and on to us, especially when one has\n given them wine for nothing.\"\n\n\n Green finally released his breath in a sigh of relief. How glad he\n was that he had never told these people his true origin! So far as\n they knew he was merely one of the many slaves who came from a distant\n country in the North.",
"The Duke sat at the other end of the table. He ignored the by-play,\n just as he ignored the so-called secret passage inside the walls of the\n castle, which Green used to get to the Duchess's apartments. Custom\n demanded this, just as custom demanded that he should play the outraged\n husband if she got tired of Green or angry at him and accused him\n publicly of amorous advances. This was enough to make Green jittery,\n but he had more than the Duke to consider. There was Alzo.",
"That fateful morning he was standing behind her as she sat at one end\n of the long breakfast table. In one hand he held his foreman's wand,\n a little white baton topped by a large red ball. With it he gestured\n at the slaves who served food, who poured wine and beer, who fanned\n away the flies, who carried in the household god and sat it on the god\n chair, who played something like music. Now and then he bent over the\n Duchess Zuni's long black hair and whispered phrases from this or that\n love poem, praising her beauty, her supposed unattainability, and his\n burning, if seemingly hopeless, passion for her. Zuni would smile, or\n repeat the formula of thanks—the short one—or else giggle at his\n funny accent.",
"times when he would not particularly have cared if he left this planet\n via the death route, he could not now make a false move. Not when\n escape was so near!",
"The Duke rose, and everybody followed his example. Jugkaxtr chanted the\n formula of dismissal, then sat down to finish gnawing on the bone. The\n others filed out. Green walked in front of Zuni in order to warn her\n of any obstacles in her path and to take the brunt of any attempted\n assassination. As he did so he was seized by the ankle and tripped\n headlong. He did not fall hard because he was a quick man, in spite\n of his six-foot-two and hundred ninety pounds. But he rose red-faced\n because of the loud laughter and from repressed anger at Alzo, who had\n again repeated his trick of grabbing Green's leg and upsetting him.\n He wanted to grab a spear from a nearby guard and spit Alzo. But that\n would be the end of Green. And whereas up to now there had been many"
],
[
"Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.",
"Alzo was the Duchess's watchdog, a mastiff-like monster with shaggy\n red-gold hair. The dog hated Green with a vindictiveness that Green\n could only account for by supposing that the animal knew, perhaps from\n his body-odor, that he was not a native of this planet. Alzo rumbled\n a warning deep in his chest every time Green bent over the Duchess or\n made a too-sudden movement. Occasionally he rose to his four feet and\n nuzzled the man's leg. When that happened Green could not keep from\n breaking out into a sweat, for the dog had twice bitten him, playfully,\n so to speak, and severely lacerated his calf. As if that weren't bad\n enough, Green had to worry that the natives might notice that his scars\n healed abnormally fast, almost overnight. He'd been forced to wear\n bandages on his legs long after the new skin had come in.",
"\"Men? Demons, rather! Can men fly in an iron ship through the air?\n These two claimed to have come from the stars, and you know what that\n means. Remember Oixrotl's prophecy:\nA demon will come, claiming\n to be an angel\n. No doubt about these two! Just to show you their\n subtlety, they claim to be neither demon nor angels, but men! Now,\n there's devilish clever thinking. Confusing to anybody but the most\n clear-headed. I'm glad the King of Estorya wasn't taken in.\"\n\n\n Eagerly Zuni leaned forward, her large brown eyes bright, and her\n red-painted mouth open and wet. \"Oh, has he burned them already? What a\n shame! I should think he'd at least torture them for a while.\"",
"This is an original novel—not a reprint—published\n by Ballantine\n Books, Inc.\nTo Nan Gerding\nDANGER! THRILLS! ADVENTURE!\n\n\n Alan Green was not exactly a hero. In fact he liked peace just as\n well as the next man. Not that he was really afraid of that crazy,\n hot-blooded hound-dog Alzo, or even of the hound's gorgeous owner, the\n Duchess Zuni—who was also hot-blooded (to say nothing of the Duke).\n After all, these things were understood on this backward, violent\n planet, and a man could manage, provided he was alert twenty-four hours\n a day.\n\n\n And as a matter of fact, Alan was only normally apprehensive of his\n Junoesque, tempestuous (but altogether lovable) wife Amra. Delightful,\n demanding Amra—and her five uproarious kids. The trouble was, he was\n tired. And homesick.",
"From beneath the table rose the babble of the priest, Jugkaxtr,\n as he blessed everyone in the house, down to the latest-born pup,\n and the fleas living thereoff, and cursed all those who were\n possessed by even the tiniest demon. The Duke, growing impatient at\n the noise, kicked under the table. Jugkaxtr yelped and presently\n crawled out. He sat down and began gnawing the meat from a bone,\n a well-done-thou-good-and-faithful-servant expression on his fat\n features. Green also felt like kicking him, just as he often felt\n like kicking every single human being on this planet. It was hard to\n remember that he must exercise compassion and understanding for them,\n and that his own remote ancestors had once been just as nauseatingly\n superstitious, cruel and bloody.",
"So when he heard of two other downed spacemen, he hitched a ride with\n a piratical merchant-captain on a windroller destined to carry him to\n the spaceship and thence to the peaceful green hills of Earth. But\n he had reckoned without the vagaries of the windroller, pirates, the\n \"traveling islands,\" the rascally Captain, and various flora and fauna\n peculiar to this planet—all of which, it now seemed, regarded Alan\n with unnerving malevolence.",
"And worst of all, Amra was determined that he should be a hero. Amra\n won.\n1\nFor two years Alan Green had lived without hope. From the day the\n spaceship had crashed on this unknown planet he had resigned himself\n to the destiny created for him by accident and mathematics. Chances\n against another ship landing within the next hundred years were a\n million to one. Therefore it would do no good to sit around waiting\n for rescue. Much as he loathed the idea, he must live the rest of his\n life here, and he must squeeze as much blood as he could out of this\n planet-sized turnip. There wasn't much to squeeze. In fact, it seemed\n to him that he was the one losing the blood. Shortly after he'd been\n cast away he'd been made a slave.\n\n\n Now, suddenly, he had hope.",
"The trouble was, he thought, that if the two imprisoned men at Estorya\n were to die before he got to them he'd still be lost. He had no idea\n of how to pilot or navigate a spaceship. He'd been a passenger on a\n freighter when it had unaccountably blown up, and he'd been forced to\n leave the dying vessel in one of those automatic castaway emergency\n shells. The capsule had got him down to the surface of this planet and\n was, as far as he knew, still up in the hills where he'd left it. After\n wandering for a week and almost starving to death he'd been picked up\n by some peasants. They had turned him in to the soldiers of a nearby\n garrison, thinking he must be a runaway slave on whom they'd collect",
"How long, O Lord, how long? The situation was intolerable; even if he'd\n not heard of the spaceship he would have plotted to escape. Better a\n quick death while trying to get away than a slow, torturous one by\n exhaustion.\n\n\n He bowed good-by to the Duke and Duchess, then followed the violet\n turban and yellow robes of Miran through the courtyard, through the\n thick stone walls, over the bridge of the broad moat, and into the\n narrow winding streets of the city of Quotz. Here the merchant-captain\n got into his silver-and-jewel-decorated rickshaw. The two long-legged\n men between its shafts, sailors and clansmen from Miran's vessel, the\nBird of Fortune\n, began running through the crowd. The people made way\n for them, as two other sailors preceded them calling out Miran's name\n and cracking whips in the air.",
"Miran, the merchant-captain, said, \"Your pardon, gracious lady, but the\n King of Estorya has done no such thing. The Estoryan law demands that\n all suspected demons should be kept in prison for two years. Everybody\n knows that a devil can't keep his human disguise more than two years.\n At the end of that time he reverts to his natural flesh and form, a\n hideous sight to behold, blasphemous, repulsive, soul-shaking.\"\n\n\n Miran rolled his one good eye so that only the white showed and made\n the sign to ward off evil, the index finger held rigidly out from a\n clenched fist. Jugkaxtr, the household priest, dived under the table,\n where he crouched praying, secure in the knowledge that demons couldn't\n touch him while he knelt beneath the thrice-blessed wood. The Duke\n swallowed a whole glass of wine, apparently to calm his nerves, and\n belched.",
"\"These two demons were very tall, like your slave Green, here,\" said\n Miran, \"and they could not speak a word of Estoryan. Or at least they\n claimed they couldn't. When King Raussmig's soldiers tried to capture\n them they brought from the folds of their strange clothes two pistols\n that only had to be pointed to send silent and awesome and sure death.\n Everywhere men dropped dead. Panic overtook many, but there were brave\n soldiers who kept on charging, and eventually the magical instruments\n became exhausted. The demons were overpowered and put into the Tower\n of Grass Cats from which no man or demon has yet escaped. And there\n they will be until the Festival of the Sun's Eye. Then they will be\n burnt....\"",
"Reluctantly Green told his rickshaw boy to turn around. The boy,\n grinning, did so. Like everybody else along the harbor front he knew\n Amra and was familiar with her relations with Green. She held their\n one-year-old daughter in her arms, cradled against her magnificent\n bosom. Behind her stood her other five children, her two sons by the\n Duke, her daughter by a visiting prince, her son by the captain of a\n Northerner ship, her daughter by a temple sculptor. Her rise and fall\n and slow rise again was told in the children around her; the tableau\n embodied an outline of the structure of the planet's society.\n3\nHer mother had been a Northerner slave; her father, a native freeman,",
"For the thousandth time Green wondered at this strange planet where\n the only large animals were men, dogs, grass cats, a small deer and\n a very small equine. In fact, there was a paucity of any variety of\n animal life, except for the surprisingly large number of birds. It was\n this scarcity of horses and oxen, he supposed, that helped perpetuate\n slavery. Man and dog had to provide most of the labor.\n\n\n No doubt there was an explanation for all this, but it must be buried\n so deep in this people's forgotten history that one would never know.\n Green, always curious, wished that he had time and means to explore.\n But he didn't. He might as well resign himself to keeping a whole skin\n and to getting out of this mess as fast as he could.\n\n\n There was enough to do merely to make his way through the narrow and\n crowded streets. He had to display his baton often to clear a path,\n though when he approached the harbor area he had less trouble because\n the streets were much wider.",
"Here great wagons drawn by gangs of slaves carried huge loads to or\n from the ships. The thoroughfares had to be broad, else the people\n would have been crushed between wagon and house. Here also were the\n so-called Pens, where the dock-slaves lived. Once the area had actually\n been an enclosure where men and women were locked up for the night. But\n the walls had been torn down and new houses built in the old Duke's\n time. The closest Earthly parallel Green could think of for these\n edifices was a housing project. Small cottages, all exactly alike, set\n in military columns.\n\n\n For a moment he considered stopping off to see Amra, then decided\n against it. She'd get him tied up in an argument or something, and\n he'd spend too much time trying to soothe her, time that should be\n spent at the marketplace. He hated scenes, whereas Amra was a born\n self-dramatist who reveled in them, almost wallowed, one might say.",
"Miran wiped his face and said, \"Of course, I wasn't able to find\n out much, because we merchants are regarded with deep suspicion and\n scarcely dare to move outside the harbor or the marketplace. The\n Estoryans worship a female deity—ridiculous, isn't it?—and eat fish.\n They hate us Tropatians because we worship Zaxropatr, Male of Males,\n and because they must depend on us to bring them fish. But they aren't\n close-mouthed. They babble on and on to us, especially when one has\n given them wine for nothing.\"\n\n\n Green finally released his breath in a sigh of relief. How glad he\n was that he had never told these people his true origin! So far as\n they knew he was merely one of the many slaves who came from a distant\n country in the North.",
"Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.",
"There was a lengthy conversation which did not hold Green's attention.\n He was too busy trying to think of a plan whereby he could get\n to Estorya and to the demons' iron vessel, which was obviously a\n spaceship. This was his only chance. Soon the rainy season would start\n and there would be no vessels leaving for at least three months.\n\n\n He could, of course, just walk away and hope to get to Estorya on foot.\n Thousands of miles through countless perils, and he had only a general\n idea of where the city was ... no, Miran was his only hope.",
"The Duke rose, and everybody followed his example. Jugkaxtr chanted the\n formula of dismissal, then sat down to finish gnawing on the bone. The\n others filed out. Green walked in front of Zuni in order to warn her\n of any obstacles in her path and to take the brunt of any attempted\n assassination. As he did so he was seized by the ankle and tripped\n headlong. He did not fall hard because he was a quick man, in spite\n of his six-foot-two and hundred ninety pounds. But he rose red-faced\n because of the loud laughter and from repressed anger at Alzo, who had\n again repeated his trick of grabbing Green's leg and upsetting him.\n He wanted to grab a spear from a nearby guard and spit Alzo. But that\n would be the end of Green. And whereas up to now there had been many",
"Hope came to him a month after he'd been made foreman of the kitchen\n slaves of the Duke of Tropat. It came to him as he was standing behind\n the Duchess during a meal and directing those who were waiting upon her.\n\n\n It was the Duchess Zuni who had not so subtly maneuvered him from the\n labor pens to his coveted, if dangerous, position. Why dangerous?\n Because she was very jealous and possessive, and the slightest hint of\n lack of attention from him could mean he'd lose his life or one limb\n or another. The knowledge of what had happened to his two predecessors\n kept him extremely sensitive to her every gesture, her every wish.",
"The streets were alive with the short, dark, stocky natives and the\n taller, lighter-complexioned slaves. The former wore their turbans of\n various colors, indicating their status and trade. The latter wore\n their three-cornered hats. Occasionally a priest in his high conical\n hat, hexagonal spectacles and goatee rode by. Wagons and rickshaws\n drawn by men or by big, powerful dogs went by. Merchants stood at the\n fronts of their shops and hawked their wares in loud voices. They sold\n cloth, grixtr nut, parchment, knives, swords, helmets, drugs, books—on\n magic, on religion, on travel—spices, perfumes, ink, rugs, highly\n sugared drinks, wine, beer, tonic, paintings, everything that went to\n make up their civilization. Butchers stood before open shops where\n dressed fowl, deer and dogs hung. Dealers in birds pointed out the\n virtues of their many-colored and multi-songed pets."
],
[
"\"Men? Demons, rather! Can men fly in an iron ship through the air?\n These two claimed to have come from the stars, and you know what that\n means. Remember Oixrotl's prophecy:\nA demon will come, claiming\n to be an angel\n. No doubt about these two! Just to show you their\n subtlety, they claim to be neither demon nor angels, but men! Now,\n there's devilish clever thinking. Confusing to anybody but the most\n clear-headed. I'm glad the King of Estorya wasn't taken in.\"\n\n\n Eagerly Zuni leaned forward, her large brown eyes bright, and her\n red-painted mouth open and wet. \"Oh, has he burned them already? What a\n shame! I should think he'd at least torture them for a while.\"",
"Miran, the merchant-captain, said, \"Your pardon, gracious lady, but the\n King of Estorya has done no such thing. The Estoryan law demands that\n all suspected demons should be kept in prison for two years. Everybody\n knows that a devil can't keep his human disguise more than two years.\n At the end of that time he reverts to his natural flesh and form, a\n hideous sight to behold, blasphemous, repulsive, soul-shaking.\"\n\n\n Miran rolled his one good eye so that only the white showed and made\n the sign to ward off evil, the index finger held rigidly out from a\n clenched fist. Jugkaxtr, the household priest, dived under the table,\n where he crouched praying, secure in the knowledge that demons couldn't\n touch him while he knelt beneath the thrice-blessed wood. The Duke\n swallowed a whole glass of wine, apparently to calm his nerves, and\n belched.",
"From beneath the table rose the babble of the priest, Jugkaxtr,\n as he blessed everyone in the house, down to the latest-born pup,\n and the fleas living thereoff, and cursed all those who were\n possessed by even the tiniest demon. The Duke, growing impatient at\n the noise, kicked under the table. Jugkaxtr yelped and presently\n crawled out. He sat down and began gnawing the meat from a bone,\n a well-done-thou-good-and-faithful-servant expression on his fat\n features. Green also felt like kicking him, just as he often felt\n like kicking every single human being on this planet. It was hard to\n remember that he must exercise compassion and understanding for them,\n and that his own remote ancestors had once been just as nauseatingly\n superstitious, cruel and bloody.",
"\"These two demons were very tall, like your slave Green, here,\" said\n Miran, \"and they could not speak a word of Estoryan. Or at least they\n claimed they couldn't. When King Raussmig's soldiers tried to capture\n them they brought from the folds of their strange clothes two pistols\n that only had to be pointed to send silent and awesome and sure death.\n Everywhere men dropped dead. Panic overtook many, but there were brave\n soldiers who kept on charging, and eventually the magical instruments\n became exhausted. The demons were overpowered and put into the Tower\n of Grass Cats from which no man or demon has yet escaped. And there\n they will be until the Festival of the Sun's Eye. Then they will be\n burnt....\"",
"Alzo was the Duchess's watchdog, a mastiff-like monster with shaggy\n red-gold hair. The dog hated Green with a vindictiveness that Green\n could only account for by supposing that the animal knew, perhaps from\n his body-odor, that he was not a native of this planet. Alzo rumbled\n a warning deep in his chest every time Green bent over the Duchess or\n made a too-sudden movement. Occasionally he rose to his four feet and\n nuzzled the man's leg. When that happened Green could not keep from\n breaking out into a sweat, for the dog had twice bitten him, playfully,\n so to speak, and severely lacerated his calf. As if that weren't bad\n enough, Green had to worry that the natives might notice that his scars\n healed abnormally fast, almost overnight. He'd been forced to wear\n bandages on his legs long after the new skin had come in.",
"There was a lengthy conversation which did not hold Green's attention.\n He was too busy trying to think of a plan whereby he could get\n to Estorya and to the demons' iron vessel, which was obviously a\n spaceship. This was his only chance. Soon the rainy season would start\n and there would be no vessels leaving for at least three months.\n\n\n He could, of course, just walk away and hope to get to Estorya on foot.\n Thousands of miles through countless perils, and he had only a general\n idea of where the city was ... no, Miran was his only hope.",
"Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.",
"She looked so beautiful, he thought. And stank so terribly. At least\n she had at first. Now she looked less beautiful because he knew how\n stupid she was, and didn't stink quite so badly because his nostrils\n had become somewhat adjusted. They'd had to.\n\n\n \"I intend to be back in Estorya by the time of the festival,\" said\n Miran. \"I've never seen the Eye of the Sun burn demons before. It's a\n giant lens, you know. There will be just time enough to make a voyage\n there and get back before the rainy season. I expect to make even\n greater profits than the last time, because I've established some\n highly placed contacts. O gods, I do not boast but merely praise your\n favor to your humble worshiper, Miran the Merchant of the Clan of\n Effenycan!\"\n\n\n \"Please bring me some more of this perfume,\" said the Duchess, \"and I\n just love the diamond necklace you gave me.\"",
"How long, O Lord, how long? The situation was intolerable; even if he'd\n not heard of the spaceship he would have plotted to escape. Better a\n quick death while trying to get away than a slow, torturous one by\n exhaustion.\n\n\n He bowed good-by to the Duke and Duchess, then followed the violet\n turban and yellow robes of Miran through the courtyard, through the\n thick stone walls, over the bridge of the broad moat, and into the\n narrow winding streets of the city of Quotz. Here the merchant-captain\n got into his silver-and-jewel-decorated rickshaw. The two long-legged\n men between its shafts, sailors and clansmen from Miran's vessel, the\nBird of Fortune\n, began running through the crowd. The people made way\n for them, as two other sailors preceded them calling out Miran's name\n and cracking whips in the air.",
"Miran wiped his face and said, \"Of course, I wasn't able to find\n out much, because we merchants are regarded with deep suspicion and\n scarcely dare to move outside the harbor or the marketplace. The\n Estoryans worship a female deity—ridiculous, isn't it?—and eat fish.\n They hate us Tropatians because we worship Zaxropatr, Male of Males,\n and because they must depend on us to bring them fish. But they aren't\n close-mouthed. They babble on and on to us, especially when one has\n given them wine for nothing.\"\n\n\n Green finally released his breath in a sigh of relief. How glad he\n was that he had never told these people his true origin! So far as\n they knew he was merely one of the many slaves who came from a distant\n country in the North.",
"The streets were alive with the short, dark, stocky natives and the\n taller, lighter-complexioned slaves. The former wore their turbans of\n various colors, indicating their status and trade. The latter wore\n their three-cornered hats. Occasionally a priest in his high conical\n hat, hexagonal spectacles and goatee rode by. Wagons and rickshaws\n drawn by men or by big, powerful dogs went by. Merchants stood at the\n fronts of their shops and hawked their wares in loud voices. They sold\n cloth, grixtr nut, parchment, knives, swords, helmets, drugs, books—on\n magic, on religion, on travel—spices, perfumes, ink, rugs, highly\n sugared drinks, wine, beer, tonic, paintings, everything that went to\n make up their civilization. Butchers stood before open shops where\n dressed fowl, deer and dogs hung. Dealers in birds pointed out the\n virtues of their many-colored and multi-songed pets.",
"Reluctantly Green told his rickshaw boy to turn around. The boy,\n grinning, did so. Like everybody else along the harbor front he knew\n Amra and was familiar with her relations with Green. She held their\n one-year-old daughter in her arms, cradled against her magnificent\n bosom. Behind her stood her other five children, her two sons by the\n Duke, her daughter by a visiting prince, her son by the captain of a\n Northerner ship, her daughter by a temple sculptor. Her rise and fall\n and slow rise again was told in the children around her; the tableau\n embodied an outline of the structure of the planet's society.\n3\nHer mother had been a Northerner slave; her father, a native freeman,",
"And worst of all, Amra was determined that he should be a hero. Amra\n won.\n1\nFor two years Alan Green had lived without hope. From the day the\n spaceship had crashed on this unknown planet he had resigned himself\n to the destiny created for him by accident and mathematics. Chances\n against another ship landing within the next hundred years were a\n million to one. Therefore it would do no good to sit around waiting\n for rescue. Much as he loathed the idea, he must live the rest of his\n life here, and he must squeeze as much blood as he could out of this\n planet-sized turnip. There wasn't much to squeeze. In fact, it seemed\n to him that he was the one losing the blood. Shortly after he'd been\n cast away he'd been made a slave.\n\n\n Now, suddenly, he had hope.",
"This is an original novel—not a reprint—published\n by Ballantine\n Books, Inc.\nTo Nan Gerding\nDANGER! THRILLS! ADVENTURE!\n\n\n Alan Green was not exactly a hero. In fact he liked peace just as\n well as the next man. Not that he was really afraid of that crazy,\n hot-blooded hound-dog Alzo, or even of the hound's gorgeous owner, the\n Duchess Zuni—who was also hot-blooded (to say nothing of the Duke).\n After all, these things were understood on this backward, violent\n planet, and a man could manage, provided he was alert twenty-four hours\n a day.\n\n\n And as a matter of fact, Alan was only normally apprehensive of his\n Junoesque, tempestuous (but altogether lovable) wife Amra. Delightful,\n demanding Amra—and her five uproarious kids. The trouble was, he was\n tired. And homesick.",
"Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.",
"The Duke rose, and everybody followed his example. Jugkaxtr chanted the\n formula of dismissal, then sat down to finish gnawing on the bone. The\n others filed out. Green walked in front of Zuni in order to warn her\n of any obstacles in her path and to take the brunt of any attempted\n assassination. As he did so he was seized by the ankle and tripped\n headlong. He did not fall hard because he was a quick man, in spite\n of his six-foot-two and hundred ninety pounds. But he rose red-faced\n because of the loud laughter and from repressed anger at Alzo, who had\n again repeated his trick of grabbing Green's leg and upsetting him.\n He wanted to grab a spear from a nearby guard and spit Alzo. But that\n would be the end of Green. And whereas up to now there had been many",
"For the thousandth time Green wondered at this strange planet where\n the only large animals were men, dogs, grass cats, a small deer and\n a very small equine. In fact, there was a paucity of any variety of\n animal life, except for the surprisingly large number of birds. It was\n this scarcity of horses and oxen, he supposed, that helped perpetuate\n slavery. Man and dog had to provide most of the labor.\n\n\n No doubt there was an explanation for all this, but it must be buried\n so deep in this people's forgotten history that one would never know.\n Green, always curious, wished that he had time and means to explore.\n But he didn't. He might as well resign himself to keeping a whole skin\n and to getting out of this mess as fast as he could.\n\n\n There was enough to do merely to make his way through the narrow and\n crowded streets. He had to display his baton often to clear a path,\n though when he approached the harbor area he had less trouble because\n the streets were much wider.",
"The trouble was, he thought, that if the two imprisoned men at Estorya\n were to die before he got to them he'd still be lost. He had no idea\n of how to pilot or navigate a spaceship. He'd been a passenger on a\n freighter when it had unaccountably blown up, and he'd been forced to\n leave the dying vessel in one of those automatic castaway emergency\n shells. The capsule had got him down to the surface of this planet and\n was, as far as he knew, still up in the hills where he'd left it. After\n wandering for a week and almost starving to death he'd been picked up\n by some peasants. They had turned him in to the soldiers of a nearby\n garrison, thinking he must be a runaway slave on whom they'd collect",
"Green, after looking to make certain that nobody from the castle was\n around to see him, ran until he was even with the rickshaw. Miran\n halted it and asked what he wanted.\n\n\n \"Your pardon, Your Richness, but may a humble slave speak and not be\n reprimanded?\"\n\n\n \"I presume it is no idle thought you have in mind,\" said Miran, looking\n Green over his one eye narrow in its fat-folds.\n\n\n \"It has to do with money.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, despite your foreign accent you speak with a pleasing voice; you\n are the golden trumpet of Mennirox, my patron god. Speak!\"\n\n\n \"First Your Richness must swear by Mennirox that you will under no\n circumstances divulge my proposal.\"\n\n\n \"There is wealth in this? For me?\"\n\n\n \"There is.\"",
"That fateful morning he was standing behind her as she sat at one end\n of the long breakfast table. In one hand he held his foreman's wand,\n a little white baton topped by a large red ball. With it he gestured\n at the slaves who served food, who poured wine and beer, who fanned\n away the flies, who carried in the household god and sat it on the god\n chair, who played something like music. Now and then he bent over the\n Duchess Zuni's long black hair and whispered phrases from this or that\n love poem, praising her beauty, her supposed unattainability, and his\n burning, if seemingly hopeless, passion for her. Zuni would smile, or\n repeat the formula of thanks—the short one—or else giggle at his\n funny accent."
],
[
"The Duke sat at the other end of the table. He ignored the by-play,\n just as he ignored the so-called secret passage inside the walls of the\n castle, which Green used to get to the Duchess's apartments. Custom\n demanded this, just as custom demanded that he should play the outraged\n husband if she got tired of Green or angry at him and accused him\n publicly of amorous advances. This was enough to make Green jittery,\n but he had more than the Duke to consider. There was Alzo.",
"Alzo was the Duchess's watchdog, a mastiff-like monster with shaggy\n red-gold hair. The dog hated Green with a vindictiveness that Green\n could only account for by supposing that the animal knew, perhaps from\n his body-odor, that he was not a native of this planet. Alzo rumbled\n a warning deep in his chest every time Green bent over the Duchess or\n made a too-sudden movement. Occasionally he rose to his four feet and\n nuzzled the man's leg. When that happened Green could not keep from\n breaking out into a sweat, for the dog had twice bitten him, playfully,\n so to speak, and severely lacerated his calf. As if that weren't bad\n enough, Green had to worry that the natives might notice that his scars\n healed abnormally fast, almost overnight. He'd been forced to wear\n bandages on his legs long after the new skin had come in.",
"Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.",
"Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.",
"Hope came to him a month after he'd been made foreman of the kitchen\n slaves of the Duke of Tropat. It came to him as he was standing behind\n the Duchess during a meal and directing those who were waiting upon her.\n\n\n It was the Duchess Zuni who had not so subtly maneuvered him from the\n labor pens to his coveted, if dangerous, position. Why dangerous?\n Because she was very jealous and possessive, and the slightest hint of\n lack of attention from him could mean he'd lose his life or one limb\n or another. The knowledge of what had happened to his two predecessors\n kept him extremely sensitive to her every gesture, her every wish.",
"That fateful morning he was standing behind her as she sat at one end\n of the long breakfast table. In one hand he held his foreman's wand,\n a little white baton topped by a large red ball. With it he gestured\n at the slaves who served food, who poured wine and beer, who fanned\n away the flies, who carried in the household god and sat it on the god\n chair, who played something like music. Now and then he bent over the\n Duchess Zuni's long black hair and whispered phrases from this or that\n love poem, praising her beauty, her supposed unattainability, and his\n burning, if seemingly hopeless, passion for her. Zuni would smile, or\n repeat the formula of thanks—the short one—or else giggle at his\n funny accent.",
"The Duke rose, and everybody followed his example. Jugkaxtr chanted the\n formula of dismissal, then sat down to finish gnawing on the bone. The\n others filed out. Green walked in front of Zuni in order to warn her\n of any obstacles in her path and to take the brunt of any attempted\n assassination. As he did so he was seized by the ankle and tripped\n headlong. He did not fall hard because he was a quick man, in spite\n of his six-foot-two and hundred ninety pounds. But he rose red-faced\n because of the loud laughter and from repressed anger at Alzo, who had\n again repeated his trick of grabbing Green's leg and upsetting him.\n He wanted to grab a spear from a nearby guard and spit Alzo. But that\n would be the end of Green. And whereas up to now there had been many",
"Presto, changeo! He was. And he'd put in six months in a quarry and a\n year as a dock worker. Then the Duchess had chanced to see him on the\n streets as she rode by, and he'd been transferred to the castle.",
"She looked so beautiful, he thought. And stank so terribly. At least\n she had at first. Now she looked less beautiful because he knew how\n stupid she was, and didn't stink quite so badly because his nostrils\n had become somewhat adjusted. They'd had to.\n\n\n \"I intend to be back in Estorya by the time of the festival,\" said\n Miran. \"I've never seen the Eye of the Sun burn demons before. It's a\n giant lens, you know. There will be just time enough to make a voyage\n there and get back before the rainy season. I expect to make even\n greater profits than the last time, because I've established some\n highly placed contacts. O gods, I do not boast but merely praise your\n favor to your humble worshiper, Miran the Merchant of the Clan of\n Effenycan!\"\n\n\n \"Please bring me some more of this perfume,\" said the Duchess, \"and I\n just love the diamond necklace you gave me.\"",
"So he grinned sheepishly and again preceded the Duchess, while the\n others followed her out. When they reached the bottom of the broad\n stone staircase that led to the upper floors of the castle, Zuni told\n Green that he was to go to the marketplace and buy tomorrow's food. As\n for her, she was going back to bed and sleep until noon.\n\n\n Inwardly Green groaned. How long could he keep up this pace? He was\n expected to stay up half the night with her, then attend to his\n official duties during the day. She slept enough to be refreshed by\n the time he visited her, but he never had a chance for any real rest.\n Even when he had his free hours in the afternoon he had to go to his\n house in the pens, and there he had to stay awake and attend to all\n his familial duties. And Amra, his slave-wife, and her six children\n demanded much from him. They were even more tyrannical than the\n Duchess, if that were possible.",
"a wheelwright. When she was five years old they had died in a plague.\n She had been transferred to the Pens and raised by her aunt. When she\n was fifteen her beauty had attracted the Duke and he had installed\n her in the palace. There she gave birth to his two sons, now ten and\n eleven, who would soon be taken away from her and raised in the Duke's\n household as free and petted servants.",
"Amra's return kiss was passionate, part of which was the vigor of\n asperity. \"You're not fooling me,\" she said. \"You meant to ride right\n by. Kiss the children! What's the matter, are you getting tired of me?\n You told me you only accepted the Duchess's offer because it meant\n advancement, and you were afraid that if you turned her down she'd\n find an excuse to kill you. Well, I believed you—half-believed you,\n anyway. But I won't if you try sneaking by without seeing me. What's\n the matter? Are you a man or not? Are you afraid to face a woman? Don't\n shake your head. You're a liar! Don't forget to kiss Grizquetr; you",
"The Duke had married the present Duchess several years after his\n liaison with Amra began and her jealousy had forced him to get rid of\n Amra. Back to the Pens she had gone; perhaps the Duke had not been\n too sad to see her go, for living with her was like living with a\n hurricane, and he liked peace and quiet too well.\n\n\n Then, in accordance with the custom, she had been recommended by the\n Duke to a visiting prince; the prince had overstayed his leave from\n his native country because he hated to part with her, and the Duke had\n wanted to give her as a present. But here he'd overstepped his legal\n authority. Slaves had certain rights. A woman who had borne a citizen a\n child could not be shipped away or sold unless she gave her permission.\n Amra didn't choose to go, so the sorrowing prince had gone home, though\n not without leaving a memento of his visit behind him.",
"But how...? He didn't think that stowing away would work. There was\n always a careful search for slaves who might try just that very plan.\n He looked at Miran, the short, fat, big-stomached, hook-nosed, one-eyed\n fellow with many chins and a large gold ring in his nose. The fellow\n was shrewd, shrewd, and he would not want to offend the Duchess by\n helping her official gigolo escape. Not, that is, unless Green could\n offer him something that was so valuable that he couldn't afford not to\n take the risk. Miran boasted that he was a hard-headed businessman, but\n it was Green's observation that there was always a large soft spot in\n that supposedly impenetrable cranium: the Fissure of Cupiditas.\n2",
"He got down out of the rickshaw, told the boy to wait, said, \"Hello,\n honey,\" and kissed her. He was glad she was a slave, because she didn't\n wear a nose-ring. When he kissed the Duchess he was always annoyed\n by hers. She refused to take it off when with him because that would\n put her on his level, and he mustn't ever forget he was a slave. It\n was perfectly moral for her to take a bondsman as a lover but not a\n freeman, and she was nothing if not moral.",
"Miran, the merchant-captain, said, \"Your pardon, gracious lady, but the\n King of Estorya has done no such thing. The Estoryan law demands that\n all suspected demons should be kept in prison for two years. Everybody\n knows that a devil can't keep his human disguise more than two years.\n At the end of that time he reverts to his natural flesh and form, a\n hideous sight to behold, blasphemous, repulsive, soul-shaking.\"\n\n\n Miran rolled his one good eye so that only the white showed and made\n the sign to ward off evil, the index finger held rigidly out from a\n clenched fist. Jugkaxtr, the household priest, dived under the table,\n where he crouched praying, secure in the knowledge that demons couldn't\n touch him while he knelt beneath the thrice-blessed wood. The Duke\n swallowed a whole glass of wine, apparently to calm his nerves, and\n belched.",
"This is an original novel—not a reprint—published\n by Ballantine\n Books, Inc.\nTo Nan Gerding\nDANGER! THRILLS! ADVENTURE!\n\n\n Alan Green was not exactly a hero. In fact he liked peace just as\n well as the next man. Not that he was really afraid of that crazy,\n hot-blooded hound-dog Alzo, or even of the hound's gorgeous owner, the\n Duchess Zuni—who was also hot-blooded (to say nothing of the Duke).\n After all, these things were understood on this backward, violent\n planet, and a man could manage, provided he was alert twenty-four hours\n a day.\n\n\n And as a matter of fact, Alan was only normally apprehensive of his\n Junoesque, tempestuous (but altogether lovable) wife Amra. Delightful,\n demanding Amra—and her five uproarious kids. The trouble was, he was\n tired. And homesick.",
"Here great wagons drawn by gangs of slaves carried huge loads to or\n from the ships. The thoroughfares had to be broad, else the people\n would have been crushed between wagon and house. Here also were the\n so-called Pens, where the dock-slaves lived. Once the area had actually\n been an enclosure where men and women were locked up for the night. But\n the walls had been torn down and new houses built in the old Duke's\n time. The closest Earthly parallel Green could think of for these\n edifices was a housing project. Small cottages, all exactly alike, set\n in military columns.\n\n\n For a moment he considered stopping off to see Amra, then decided\n against it. She'd get him tied up in an argument or something, and\n he'd spend too much time trying to soothe her, time that should be\n spent at the marketplace. He hated scenes, whereas Amra was a born\n self-dramatist who reveled in them, almost wallowed, one might say.",
"Green, after looking to make certain that nobody from the castle was\n around to see him, ran until he was even with the rickshaw. Miran\n halted it and asked what he wanted.\n\n\n \"Your pardon, Your Richness, but may a humble slave speak and not be\n reprimanded?\"\n\n\n \"I presume it is no idle thought you have in mind,\" said Miran, looking\n Green over his one eye narrow in its fat-folds.\n\n\n \"It has to do with money.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, despite your foreign accent you speak with a pleasing voice; you\n are the golden trumpet of Mennirox, my patron god. Speak!\"\n\n\n \"First Your Richness must swear by Mennirox that you will under no\n circumstances divulge my proposal.\"\n\n\n \"There is wealth in this? For me?\"\n\n\n \"There is.\"",
"Green hailed a passing rickshaw and seated himself comfortably in it.\n As assistant majordomo he had plenty of money. Moreover, the Duke and\n Duchess would have been outraged if he had lowered their prestige by\n walking through the city's streets. His vehicle made good time, too,\n because everybody recognized his livery: the scarlet and white tricorn\n hat and the white sleeveless shirt with the Duke's heraldic arms on its\n chest—red and green concentric circles pierced by a black arrow.\n\n\n The street led always downward, for the city had been built on the\n foothills of the mountains. It wandered here and there and gave Green\n plenty of time to think."
],
[
"The Duke sat at the other end of the table. He ignored the by-play,\n just as he ignored the so-called secret passage inside the walls of the\n castle, which Green used to get to the Duchess's apartments. Custom\n demanded this, just as custom demanded that he should play the outraged\n husband if she got tired of Green or angry at him and accused him\n publicly of amorous advances. This was enough to make Green jittery,\n but he had more than the Duke to consider. There was Alzo.",
"Green lowered his eyelids to conceal the expression of disgust which he\n felt must be shining from them. At the same time, he saw Zuni's shoe\n tapping impatiently. Inwardly he groaned, because he knew she would\n divert the conversation to something more interesting to her, to her\n clothes and the state of her stomach and/or complexion. And there would\n be nothing that anybody could do about it, because the custom was that\n the woman of the house regulated the subject of talk during breakfast.\n If only this had been lunch or dinner! Then the men would theoretically\n have had uncontested control.",
"That fateful morning he was standing behind her as she sat at one end\n of the long breakfast table. In one hand he held his foreman's wand,\n a little white baton topped by a large red ball. With it he gestured\n at the slaves who served food, who poured wine and beer, who fanned\n away the flies, who carried in the household god and sat it on the god\n chair, who played something like music. Now and then he bent over the\n Duchess Zuni's long black hair and whispered phrases from this or that\n love poem, praising her beauty, her supposed unattainability, and his\n burning, if seemingly hopeless, passion for her. Zuni would smile, or\n repeat the formula of thanks—the short one—or else giggle at his\n funny accent.",
"Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.",
"Alzo was the Duchess's watchdog, a mastiff-like monster with shaggy\n red-gold hair. The dog hated Green with a vindictiveness that Green\n could only account for by supposing that the animal knew, perhaps from\n his body-odor, that he was not a native of this planet. Alzo rumbled\n a warning deep in his chest every time Green bent over the Duchess or\n made a too-sudden movement. Occasionally he rose to his four feet and\n nuzzled the man's leg. When that happened Green could not keep from\n breaking out into a sweat, for the dog had twice bitten him, playfully,\n so to speak, and severely lacerated his calf. As if that weren't bad\n enough, Green had to worry that the natives might notice that his scars\n healed abnormally fast, almost overnight. He'd been forced to wear\n bandages on his legs long after the new skin had come in.",
"Amra's return kiss was passionate, part of which was the vigor of\n asperity. \"You're not fooling me,\" she said. \"You meant to ride right\n by. Kiss the children! What's the matter, are you getting tired of me?\n You told me you only accepted the Duchess's offer because it meant\n advancement, and you were afraid that if you turned her down she'd\n find an excuse to kill you. Well, I believed you—half-believed you,\n anyway. But I won't if you try sneaking by without seeing me. What's\n the matter? Are you a man or not? Are you afraid to face a woman? Don't\n shake your head. You're a liar! Don't forget to kiss Grizquetr; you",
"The Duke rose, and everybody followed his example. Jugkaxtr chanted the\n formula of dismissal, then sat down to finish gnawing on the bone. The\n others filed out. Green walked in front of Zuni in order to warn her\n of any obstacles in her path and to take the brunt of any attempted\n assassination. As he did so he was seized by the ankle and tripped\n headlong. He did not fall hard because he was a quick man, in spite\n of his six-foot-two and hundred ninety pounds. But he rose red-faced\n because of the loud laughter and from repressed anger at Alzo, who had\n again repeated his trick of grabbing Green's leg and upsetting him.\n He wanted to grab a spear from a nearby guard and spit Alzo. But that\n would be the end of Green. And whereas up to now there had been many",
"So he grinned sheepishly and again preceded the Duchess, while the\n others followed her out. When they reached the bottom of the broad\n stone staircase that led to the upper floors of the castle, Zuni told\n Green that he was to go to the marketplace and buy tomorrow's food. As\n for her, she was going back to bed and sleep until noon.\n\n\n Inwardly Green groaned. How long could he keep up this pace? He was\n expected to stay up half the night with her, then attend to his\n official duties during the day. She slept enough to be refreshed by\n the time he visited her, but he never had a chance for any real rest.\n Even when he had his free hours in the afternoon he had to go to his\n house in the pens, and there he had to stay awake and attend to all\n his familial duties. And Amra, his slave-wife, and her six children\n demanded much from him. They were even more tyrannical than the\n Duchess, if that were possible.",
"Hope came to him a month after he'd been made foreman of the kitchen\n slaves of the Duke of Tropat. It came to him as he was standing behind\n the Duchess during a meal and directing those who were waiting upon her.\n\n\n It was the Duchess Zuni who had not so subtly maneuvered him from the\n labor pens to his coveted, if dangerous, position. Why dangerous?\n Because she was very jealous and possessive, and the slightest hint of\n lack of attention from him could mean he'd lose his life or one limb\n or another. The knowledge of what had happened to his two predecessors\n kept him extremely sensitive to her every gesture, her every wish.",
"Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.",
"Miran, the merchant-captain, said, \"Your pardon, gracious lady, but the\n King of Estorya has done no such thing. The Estoryan law demands that\n all suspected demons should be kept in prison for two years. Everybody\n knows that a devil can't keep his human disguise more than two years.\n At the end of that time he reverts to his natural flesh and form, a\n hideous sight to behold, blasphemous, repulsive, soul-shaking.\"\n\n\n Miran rolled his one good eye so that only the white showed and made\n the sign to ward off evil, the index finger held rigidly out from a\n clenched fist. Jugkaxtr, the household priest, dived under the table,\n where he crouched praying, secure in the knowledge that demons couldn't\n touch him while he knelt beneath the thrice-blessed wood. The Duke\n swallowed a whole glass of wine, apparently to calm his nerves, and\n belched.",
"He got down out of the rickshaw, told the boy to wait, said, \"Hello,\n honey,\" and kissed her. He was glad she was a slave, because she didn't\n wear a nose-ring. When he kissed the Duchess he was always annoyed\n by hers. She refused to take it off when with him because that would\n put her on his level, and he mustn't ever forget he was a slave. It\n was perfectly moral for her to take a bondsman as a lover but not a\n freeman, and she was nothing if not moral.",
"Green, after looking to make certain that nobody from the castle was\n around to see him, ran until he was even with the rickshaw. Miran\n halted it and asked what he wanted.\n\n\n \"Your pardon, Your Richness, but may a humble slave speak and not be\n reprimanded?\"\n\n\n \"I presume it is no idle thought you have in mind,\" said Miran, looking\n Green over his one eye narrow in its fat-folds.\n\n\n \"It has to do with money.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, despite your foreign accent you speak with a pleasing voice; you\n are the golden trumpet of Mennirox, my patron god. Speak!\"\n\n\n \"First Your Richness must swear by Mennirox that you will under no\n circumstances divulge my proposal.\"\n\n\n \"There is wealth in this? For me?\"\n\n\n \"There is.\"",
"From beneath the table rose the babble of the priest, Jugkaxtr,\n as he blessed everyone in the house, down to the latest-born pup,\n and the fleas living thereoff, and cursed all those who were\n possessed by even the tiniest demon. The Duke, growing impatient at\n the noise, kicked under the table. Jugkaxtr yelped and presently\n crawled out. He sat down and began gnawing the meat from a bone,\n a well-done-thou-good-and-faithful-servant expression on his fat\n features. Green also felt like kicking him, just as he often felt\n like kicking every single human being on this planet. It was hard to\n remember that he must exercise compassion and understanding for them,\n and that his own remote ancestors had once been just as nauseatingly\n superstitious, cruel and bloody.",
"\"Men? Demons, rather! Can men fly in an iron ship through the air?\n These two claimed to have come from the stars, and you know what that\n means. Remember Oixrotl's prophecy:\nA demon will come, claiming\n to be an angel\n. No doubt about these two! Just to show you their\n subtlety, they claim to be neither demon nor angels, but men! Now,\n there's devilish clever thinking. Confusing to anybody but the most\n clear-headed. I'm glad the King of Estorya wasn't taken in.\"\n\n\n Eagerly Zuni leaned forward, her large brown eyes bright, and her\n red-painted mouth open and wet. \"Oh, has he burned them already? What a\n shame! I should think he'd at least torture them for a while.\"",
"\"These two demons were very tall, like your slave Green, here,\" said\n Miran, \"and they could not speak a word of Estoryan. Or at least they\n claimed they couldn't. When King Raussmig's soldiers tried to capture\n them they brought from the folds of their strange clothes two pistols\n that only had to be pointed to send silent and awesome and sure death.\n Everywhere men dropped dead. Panic overtook many, but there were brave\n soldiers who kept on charging, and eventually the magical instruments\n became exhausted. The demons were overpowered and put into the Tower\n of Grass Cats from which no man or demon has yet escaped. And there\n they will be until the Festival of the Sun's Eye. Then they will be\n burnt....\"",
"a wheelwright. When she was five years old they had died in a plague.\n She had been transferred to the Pens and raised by her aunt. When she\n was fifteen her beauty had attracted the Duke and he had installed\n her in the palace. There she gave birth to his two sons, now ten and\n eleven, who would soon be taken away from her and raised in the Duke's\n household as free and petted servants.",
"Miran glanced at his clansmen, standing there patiently, apparently\n oblivious of what was going on. He had power of life and death over\n them, but he didn't trust them. He said, \"Perhaps it would be better if\n I thought about this before making such a drastic oath. Could you meet\n me tonight at the Hour of the Wineglass at the House of Equality? And\n could you perhaps give me a slight hint of what you have in mind?\"\n\n\n \"The answer to both is yes. My proposal has to do with the dried fish\n that you carry as cargo to the Estoryans. There is another thing, too,\n but I may not even hint at it until I have your oath.\"\n\n\n \"Very well then. At the agreed hour. Fish, eh? I must be off. Time is\n money, you know. Get going boys, full sails.\"",
"This is an original novel—not a reprint—published\n by Ballantine\n Books, Inc.\nTo Nan Gerding\nDANGER! THRILLS! ADVENTURE!\n\n\n Alan Green was not exactly a hero. In fact he liked peace just as\n well as the next man. Not that he was really afraid of that crazy,\n hot-blooded hound-dog Alzo, or even of the hound's gorgeous owner, the\n Duchess Zuni—who was also hot-blooded (to say nothing of the Duke).\n After all, these things were understood on this backward, violent\n planet, and a man could manage, provided he was alert twenty-four hours\n a day.\n\n\n And as a matter of fact, Alan was only normally apprehensive of his\n Junoesque, tempestuous (but altogether lovable) wife Amra. Delightful,\n demanding Amra—and her five uproarious kids. The trouble was, he was\n tired. And homesick.",
"How long, O Lord, how long? The situation was intolerable; even if he'd\n not heard of the spaceship he would have plotted to escape. Better a\n quick death while trying to get away than a slow, torturous one by\n exhaustion.\n\n\n He bowed good-by to the Duke and Duchess, then followed the violet\n turban and yellow robes of Miran through the courtyard, through the\n thick stone walls, over the bridge of the broad moat, and into the\n narrow winding streets of the city of Quotz. Here the merchant-captain\n got into his silver-and-jewel-decorated rickshaw. The two long-legged\n men between its shafts, sailors and clansmen from Miran's vessel, the\nBird of Fortune\n, began running through the crowd. The people made way\n for them, as two other sailors preceded them calling out Miran's name\n and cracking whips in the air."
],
[
"She looked so beautiful, he thought. And stank so terribly. At least\n she had at first. Now she looked less beautiful because he knew how\n stupid she was, and didn't stink quite so badly because his nostrils\n had become somewhat adjusted. They'd had to.\n\n\n \"I intend to be back in Estorya by the time of the festival,\" said\n Miran. \"I've never seen the Eye of the Sun burn demons before. It's a\n giant lens, you know. There will be just time enough to make a voyage\n there and get back before the rainy season. I expect to make even\n greater profits than the last time, because I've established some\n highly placed contacts. O gods, I do not boast but merely praise your\n favor to your humble worshiper, Miran the Merchant of the Clan of\n Effenycan!\"\n\n\n \"Please bring me some more of this perfume,\" said the Duchess, \"and I\n just love the diamond necklace you gave me.\"",
"Alzo was the Duchess's watchdog, a mastiff-like monster with shaggy\n red-gold hair. The dog hated Green with a vindictiveness that Green\n could only account for by supposing that the animal knew, perhaps from\n his body-odor, that he was not a native of this planet. Alzo rumbled\n a warning deep in his chest every time Green bent over the Duchess or\n made a too-sudden movement. Occasionally he rose to his four feet and\n nuzzled the man's leg. When that happened Green could not keep from\n breaking out into a sweat, for the dog had twice bitten him, playfully,\n so to speak, and severely lacerated his calf. As if that weren't bad\n enough, Green had to worry that the natives might notice that his scars\n healed abnormally fast, almost overnight. He'd been forced to wear\n bandages on his legs long after the new skin had come in.",
"The Duke sat at the other end of the table. He ignored the by-play,\n just as he ignored the so-called secret passage inside the walls of the\n castle, which Green used to get to the Duchess's apartments. Custom\n demanded this, just as custom demanded that he should play the outraged\n husband if she got tired of Green or angry at him and accused him\n publicly of amorous advances. This was enough to make Green jittery,\n but he had more than the Duke to consider. There was Alzo.",
"There was a big difference between reading about such people and\n actually living among them. A history or a romantic novel could\n describe how unwashed and diseased and formula-bound primitives were,\n but only the too-too substantial stench and filth could make your gorge\n rise.\n\n\n Even as he stood there Zuni's powerful perfume rose and clung in heavy\n festoons about him and slithered down his nostrils. It was a rare and\n expensive perfume, brought back by Miran from his voyages and given to\n her as a token of the merchant's esteem. Used in small quantities it\n would have been quite effective to express feminine daintiness and to\n hint at delicate passion. But no, Zuni poured it like water over her,\n hoping to cover up the stale odor left by\nnot\ntaking a bath more than\n once a month.",
"Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.",
"Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.",
"He got down out of the rickshaw, told the boy to wait, said, \"Hello,\n honey,\" and kissed her. He was glad she was a slave, because she didn't\n wear a nose-ring. When he kissed the Duchess he was always annoyed\n by hers. She refused to take it off when with him because that would\n put her on his level, and he mustn't ever forget he was a slave. It\n was perfectly moral for her to take a bondsman as a lover but not a\n freeman, and she was nothing if not moral.",
"That fateful morning he was standing behind her as she sat at one end\n of the long breakfast table. In one hand he held his foreman's wand,\n a little white baton topped by a large red ball. With it he gestured\n at the slaves who served food, who poured wine and beer, who fanned\n away the flies, who carried in the household god and sat it on the god\n chair, who played something like music. Now and then he bent over the\n Duchess Zuni's long black hair and whispered phrases from this or that\n love poem, praising her beauty, her supposed unattainability, and his\n burning, if seemingly hopeless, passion for her. Zuni would smile, or\n repeat the formula of thanks—the short one—or else giggle at his\n funny accent.",
"Amra's return kiss was passionate, part of which was the vigor of\n asperity. \"You're not fooling me,\" she said. \"You meant to ride right\n by. Kiss the children! What's the matter, are you getting tired of me?\n You told me you only accepted the Duchess's offer because it meant\n advancement, and you were afraid that if you turned her down she'd\n find an excuse to kill you. Well, I believed you—half-believed you,\n anyway. But I won't if you try sneaking by without seeing me. What's\n the matter? Are you a man or not? Are you afraid to face a woman? Don't\n shake your head. You're a liar! Don't forget to kiss Grizquetr; you",
"So he grinned sheepishly and again preceded the Duchess, while the\n others followed her out. When they reached the bottom of the broad\n stone staircase that led to the upper floors of the castle, Zuni told\n Green that he was to go to the marketplace and buy tomorrow's food. As\n for her, she was going back to bed and sleep until noon.\n\n\n Inwardly Green groaned. How long could he keep up this pace? He was\n expected to stay up half the night with her, then attend to his\n official duties during the day. She slept enough to be refreshed by\n the time he visited her, but he never had a chance for any real rest.\n Even when he had his free hours in the afternoon he had to go to his\n house in the pens, and there he had to stay awake and attend to all\n his familial duties. And Amra, his slave-wife, and her six children\n demanded much from him. They were even more tyrannical than the\n Duchess, if that were possible.",
"\"ALAN, YOU BIG BLOND NO-GOOD HUNK OF MAN, STOP!\"",
"From beneath the table rose the babble of the priest, Jugkaxtr,\n as he blessed everyone in the house, down to the latest-born pup,\n and the fleas living thereoff, and cursed all those who were\n possessed by even the tiniest demon. The Duke, growing impatient at\n the noise, kicked under the table. Jugkaxtr yelped and presently\n crawled out. He sat down and began gnawing the meat from a bone,\n a well-done-thou-good-and-faithful-servant expression on his fat\n features. Green also felt like kicking him, just as he often felt\n like kicking every single human being on this planet. It was hard to\n remember that he must exercise compassion and understanding for them,\n and that his own remote ancestors had once been just as nauseatingly\n superstitious, cruel and bloody.",
"Green lowered his eyelids to conceal the expression of disgust which he\n felt must be shining from them. At the same time, he saw Zuni's shoe\n tapping impatiently. Inwardly he groaned, because he knew she would\n divert the conversation to something more interesting to her, to her\n clothes and the state of her stomach and/or complexion. And there would\n be nothing that anybody could do about it, because the custom was that\n the woman of the house regulated the subject of talk during breakfast.\n If only this had been lunch or dinner! Then the men would theoretically\n have had uncontested control.",
"Green hailed a passing rickshaw and seated himself comfortably in it.\n As assistant majordomo he had plenty of money. Moreover, the Duke and\n Duchess would have been outraged if he had lowered their prestige by\n walking through the city's streets. His vehicle made good time, too,\n because everybody recognized his livery: the scarlet and white tricorn\n hat and the white sleeveless shirt with the Duke's heraldic arms on its\n chest—red and green concentric circles pierced by a black arrow.\n\n\n The street led always downward, for the city had been built on the\n foothills of the mountains. It wandered here and there and gave Green\n plenty of time to think.",
"Here great wagons drawn by gangs of slaves carried huge loads to or\n from the ships. The thoroughfares had to be broad, else the people\n would have been crushed between wagon and house. Here also were the\n so-called Pens, where the dock-slaves lived. Once the area had actually\n been an enclosure where men and women were locked up for the night. But\n the walls had been torn down and new houses built in the old Duke's\n time. The closest Earthly parallel Green could think of for these\n edifices was a housing project. Small cottages, all exactly alike, set\n in military columns.\n\n\n For a moment he considered stopping off to see Amra, then decided\n against it. She'd get him tied up in an argument or something, and\n he'd spend too much time trying to soothe her, time that should be\n spent at the marketplace. He hated scenes, whereas Amra was a born\n self-dramatist who reveled in them, almost wallowed, one might say.",
"Hope came to him a month after he'd been made foreman of the kitchen\n slaves of the Duke of Tropat. It came to him as he was standing behind\n the Duchess during a meal and directing those who were waiting upon her.\n\n\n It was the Duchess Zuni who had not so subtly maneuvered him from the\n labor pens to his coveted, if dangerous, position. Why dangerous?\n Because she was very jealous and possessive, and the slightest hint of\n lack of attention from him could mean he'd lose his life or one limb\n or another. The knowledge of what had happened to his two predecessors\n kept him extremely sensitive to her every gesture, her every wish.",
"Miran, the merchant-captain, said, \"Your pardon, gracious lady, but the\n King of Estorya has done no such thing. The Estoryan law demands that\n all suspected demons should be kept in prison for two years. Everybody\n knows that a devil can't keep his human disguise more than two years.\n At the end of that time he reverts to his natural flesh and form, a\n hideous sight to behold, blasphemous, repulsive, soul-shaking.\"\n\n\n Miran rolled his one good eye so that only the white showed and made\n the sign to ward off evil, the index finger held rigidly out from a\n clenched fist. Jugkaxtr, the household priest, dived under the table,\n where he crouched praying, secure in the knowledge that demons couldn't\n touch him while he knelt beneath the thrice-blessed wood. The Duke\n swallowed a whole glass of wine, apparently to calm his nerves, and\n belched.",
"This is an original novel—not a reprint—published\n by Ballantine\n Books, Inc.\nTo Nan Gerding\nDANGER! THRILLS! ADVENTURE!\n\n\n Alan Green was not exactly a hero. In fact he liked peace just as\n well as the next man. Not that he was really afraid of that crazy,\n hot-blooded hound-dog Alzo, or even of the hound's gorgeous owner, the\n Duchess Zuni—who was also hot-blooded (to say nothing of the Duke).\n After all, these things were understood on this backward, violent\n planet, and a man could manage, provided he was alert twenty-four hours\n a day.\n\n\n And as a matter of fact, Alan was only normally apprehensive of his\n Junoesque, tempestuous (but altogether lovable) wife Amra. Delightful,\n demanding Amra—and her five uproarious kids. The trouble was, he was\n tired. And homesick.",
"The Duke had married the present Duchess several years after his\n liaison with Amra began and her jealousy had forced him to get rid of\n Amra. Back to the Pens she had gone; perhaps the Duke had not been\n too sad to see her go, for living with her was like living with a\n hurricane, and he liked peace and quiet too well.\n\n\n Then, in accordance with the custom, she had been recommended by the\n Duke to a visiting prince; the prince had overstayed his leave from\n his native country because he hated to part with her, and the Duke had\n wanted to give her as a present. But here he'd overstepped his legal\n authority. Slaves had certain rights. A woman who had borne a citizen a\n child could not be shipped away or sold unless she gave her permission.\n Amra didn't choose to go, so the sorrowing prince had gone home, though\n not without leaving a memento of his visit behind him.",
"The Duke rose, and everybody followed his example. Jugkaxtr chanted the\n formula of dismissal, then sat down to finish gnawing on the bone. The\n others filed out. Green walked in front of Zuni in order to warn her\n of any obstacles in her path and to take the brunt of any attempted\n assassination. As he did so he was seized by the ankle and tripped\n headlong. He did not fall hard because he was a quick man, in spite\n of his six-foot-two and hundred ninety pounds. But he rose red-faced\n because of the loud laughter and from repressed anger at Alzo, who had\n again repeated his trick of grabbing Green's leg and upsetting him.\n He wanted to grab a spear from a nearby guard and spit Alzo. But that\n would be the end of Green. And whereas up to now there had been many"
],
[
"Reluctantly Green told his rickshaw boy to turn around. The boy,\n grinning, did so. Like everybody else along the harbor front he knew\n Amra and was familiar with her relations with Green. She held their\n one-year-old daughter in her arms, cradled against her magnificent\n bosom. Behind her stood her other five children, her two sons by the\n Duke, her daughter by a visiting prince, her son by the captain of a\n Northerner ship, her daughter by a temple sculptor. Her rise and fall\n and slow rise again was told in the children around her; the tableau\n embodied an outline of the structure of the planet's society.\n3\nHer mother had been a Northerner slave; her father, a native freeman,",
"\"What was a ship doing in your cellar?\" he said, and he whooped with\n laughter. \"By all the gods, Amra, I know it's been two days since I've\n seen you, but don't try to crowd forty-eight hours' conversation into\n ten minutes, especially your kind of conversation. And quit scolding me\n in front of the children. You know it's bad for them. They might pick\n up your attitude of contempt for the head of the house.\"\n\n\n \"I? Contempt? Why, I worship the ground you walk on! I tell them\n continually what a fine man you are, though it's rather hard to\n convince them when you do show up and they see the truth. Still....\"",
"Amra's return kiss was passionate, part of which was the vigor of\n asperity. \"You're not fooling me,\" she said. \"You meant to ride right\n by. Kiss the children! What's the matter, are you getting tired of me?\n You told me you only accepted the Duchess's offer because it meant\n advancement, and you were afraid that if you turned her down she'd\n find an excuse to kill you. Well, I believed you—half-believed you,\n anyway. But I won't if you try sneaking by without seeing me. What's\n the matter? Are you a man or not? Are you afraid to face a woman? Don't\n shake your head. You're a liar! Don't forget to kiss Grizquetr; you",
"The Duke sat at the other end of the table. He ignored the by-play,\n just as he ignored the so-called secret passage inside the walls of the\n castle, which Green used to get to the Duchess's apartments. Custom\n demanded this, just as custom demanded that he should play the outraged\n husband if she got tired of Green or angry at him and accused him\n publicly of amorous advances. This was enough to make Green jittery,\n but he had more than the Duke to consider. There was Alzo.",
"a wheelwright. When she was five years old they had died in a plague.\n She had been transferred to the Pens and raised by her aunt. When she\n was fifteen her beauty had attracted the Duke and he had installed\n her in the palace. There she gave birth to his two sons, now ten and\n eleven, who would soon be taken away from her and raised in the Duke's\n household as free and petted servants.",
"This is an original novel—not a reprint—published\n by Ballantine\n Books, Inc.\nTo Nan Gerding\nDANGER! THRILLS! ADVENTURE!\n\n\n Alan Green was not exactly a hero. In fact he liked peace just as\n well as the next man. Not that he was really afraid of that crazy,\n hot-blooded hound-dog Alzo, or even of the hound's gorgeous owner, the\n Duchess Zuni—who was also hot-blooded (to say nothing of the Duke).\n After all, these things were understood on this backward, violent\n planet, and a man could manage, provided he was alert twenty-four hours\n a day.\n\n\n And as a matter of fact, Alan was only normally apprehensive of his\n Junoesque, tempestuous (but altogether lovable) wife Amra. Delightful,\n demanding Amra—and her five uproarious kids. The trouble was, he was\n tired. And homesick.",
"So he grinned sheepishly and again preceded the Duchess, while the\n others followed her out. When they reached the bottom of the broad\n stone staircase that led to the upper floors of the castle, Zuni told\n Green that he was to go to the marketplace and buy tomorrow's food. As\n for her, she was going back to bed and sleep until noon.\n\n\n Inwardly Green groaned. How long could he keep up this pace? He was\n expected to stay up half the night with her, then attend to his\n official duties during the day. She slept enough to be refreshed by\n the time he visited her, but he never had a chance for any real rest.\n Even when he had his free hours in the afternoon he had to go to his\n house in the pens, and there he had to stay awake and attend to all\n his familial duties. And Amra, his slave-wife, and her six children\n demanded much from him. They were even more tyrannical than the\n Duchess, if that were possible.",
"Alzo was the Duchess's watchdog, a mastiff-like monster with shaggy\n red-gold hair. The dog hated Green with a vindictiveness that Green\n could only account for by supposing that the animal knew, perhaps from\n his body-odor, that he was not a native of this planet. Alzo rumbled\n a warning deep in his chest every time Green bent over the Duchess or\n made a too-sudden movement. Occasionally he rose to his four feet and\n nuzzled the man's leg. When that happened Green could not keep from\n breaking out into a sweat, for the dog had twice bitten him, playfully,\n so to speak, and severely lacerated his calf. As if that weren't bad\n enough, Green had to worry that the natives might notice that his scars\n healed abnormally fast, almost overnight. He'd been forced to wear\n bandages on his legs long after the new skin had come in.",
"There was more to her than beauty. She radiated a something that struck\n every male at first sight; to Green she sometimes seemed to be a\n violent physical event, perhaps even a principle of Nature herself.\n\n\n There were times when Green felt proud because she had picked him as\n her mate, chosen him when he was a newly imported slave who could say\n only a few words in the highly irregular agglutinative tongue. But\n there were times when he felt that she was too much for him, and those\n times had been getting too frequent lately. Besides, he felt a pang\n whenever he saw their child, because he loved it and dreaded the moment\n when he would have to leave it. As for deserting Amra, he wasn't sure\n how that would make him feel. Undeniably, she did affect him, but then\n so did a blow in the teeth or wine in the blood.",
"The Duke rose, and everybody followed his example. Jugkaxtr chanted the\n formula of dismissal, then sat down to finish gnawing on the bone. The\n others filed out. Green walked in front of Zuni in order to warn her\n of any obstacles in her path and to take the brunt of any attempted\n assassination. As he did so he was seized by the ankle and tripped\n headlong. He did not fall hard because he was a quick man, in spite\n of his six-foot-two and hundred ninety pounds. But he rose red-faced\n because of the loud laughter and from repressed anger at Alzo, who had\n again repeated his trick of grabbing Green's leg and upsetting him.\n He wanted to grab a spear from a nearby guard and spit Alzo. But that\n would be the end of Green. And whereas up to now there had been many",
"know he's an affectionate boy and worships you, and it's absurd to\n say that in your country grown men don't kiss boys that old. You're\n not in your country—what a strange, frigid, loveless race must live\n there—and even if you were you might overlook their customs to show\n some tenderness to the boy. Come on back to our house and I'll bring up\n some of that wonderful Chalousma wine that came in the other day out of\n the cellar——\"",
"Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.",
"\"ALAN, YOU BIG BLOND NO-GOOD HUNK OF MAN, STOP!\"",
"That fateful morning he was standing behind her as she sat at one end\n of the long breakfast table. In one hand he held his foreman's wand,\n a little white baton topped by a large red ball. With it he gestured\n at the slaves who served food, who poured wine and beer, who fanned\n away the flies, who carried in the household god and sat it on the god\n chair, who played something like music. Now and then he bent over the\n Duchess Zuni's long black hair and whispered phrases from this or that\n love poem, praising her beauty, her supposed unattainability, and his\n burning, if seemingly hopeless, passion for her. Zuni would smile, or\n repeat the formula of thanks—the short one—or else giggle at his\n funny accent.",
"He got down out of the rickshaw, told the boy to wait, said, \"Hello,\n honey,\" and kissed her. He was glad she was a slave, because she didn't\n wear a nose-ring. When he kissed the Duchess he was always annoyed\n by hers. She refused to take it off when with him because that would\n put her on his level, and he mustn't ever forget he was a slave. It\n was perfectly moral for her to take a bondsman as a lover but not a\n freeman, and she was nothing if not moral.",
"The Duke had married the present Duchess several years after his\n liaison with Amra began and her jealousy had forced him to get rid of\n Amra. Back to the Pens she had gone; perhaps the Duke had not been\n too sad to see her go, for living with her was like living with a\n hurricane, and he liked peace and quiet too well.\n\n\n Then, in accordance with the custom, she had been recommended by the\n Duke to a visiting prince; the prince had overstayed his leave from\n his native country because he hated to part with her, and the Duke had\n wanted to give her as a present. But here he'd overstepped his legal\n authority. Slaves had certain rights. A woman who had borne a citizen a\n child could not be shipped away or sold unless she gave her permission.\n Amra didn't choose to go, so the sorrowing prince had gone home, though\n not without leaving a memento of his visit behind him.",
"Miran wiped his face and said, \"Of course, I wasn't able to find\n out much, because we merchants are regarded with deep suspicion and\n scarcely dare to move outside the harbor or the marketplace. The\n Estoryans worship a female deity—ridiculous, isn't it?—and eat fish.\n They hate us Tropatians because we worship Zaxropatr, Male of Males,\n and because they must depend on us to bring them fish. But they aren't\n close-mouthed. They babble on and on to us, especially when one has\n given them wine for nothing.\"\n\n\n Green finally released his breath in a sigh of relief. How glad he\n was that he had never told these people his true origin! So far as\n they knew he was merely one of the many slaves who came from a distant\n country in the North.",
"Miran glanced at his clansmen, standing there patiently, apparently\n oblivious of what was going on. He had power of life and death over\n them, but he didn't trust them. He said, \"Perhaps it would be better if\n I thought about this before making such a drastic oath. Could you meet\n me tonight at the Hour of the Wineglass at the House of Equality? And\n could you perhaps give me a slight hint of what you have in mind?\"\n\n\n \"The answer to both is yes. My proposal has to do with the dried fish\n that you carry as cargo to the Estoryans. There is another thing, too,\n but I may not even hint at it until I have your oath.\"\n\n\n \"Very well then. At the agreed hour. Fish, eh? I must be off. Time is\n money, you know. Get going boys, full sails.\"",
"She looked so beautiful, he thought. And stank so terribly. At least\n she had at first. Now she looked less beautiful because he knew how\n stupid she was, and didn't stink quite so badly because his nostrils\n had become somewhat adjusted. They'd had to.\n\n\n \"I intend to be back in Estorya by the time of the festival,\" said\n Miran. \"I've never seen the Eye of the Sun burn demons before. It's a\n giant lens, you know. There will be just time enough to make a voyage\n there and get back before the rainy season. I expect to make even\n greater profits than the last time, because I've established some\n highly placed contacts. O gods, I do not boast but merely praise your\n favor to your humble worshiper, Miran the Merchant of the Clan of\n Effenycan!\"\n\n\n \"Please bring me some more of this perfume,\" said the Duchess, \"and I\n just love the diamond necklace you gave me.\"",
"Miran, the merchant-captain, said, \"Your pardon, gracious lady, but the\n King of Estorya has done no such thing. The Estoryan law demands that\n all suspected demons should be kept in prison for two years. Everybody\n knows that a devil can't keep his human disguise more than two years.\n At the end of that time he reverts to his natural flesh and form, a\n hideous sight to behold, blasphemous, repulsive, soul-shaking.\"\n\n\n Miran rolled his one good eye so that only the white showed and made\n the sign to ward off evil, the index finger held rigidly out from a\n clenched fist. Jugkaxtr, the household priest, dived under the table,\n where he crouched praying, secure in the knowledge that demons couldn't\n touch him while he knelt beneath the thrice-blessed wood. The Duke\n swallowed a whole glass of wine, apparently to calm his nerves, and\n belched."
]
] |
test
|
25644
|
[
"Why do the people on Mars have to take pills?",
"Clayton's very first reaction to Parks was:",
"Clayton realized he didn't like Mars...",
"Why did Clayton enter Sharks alone?",
"Why did the First Officer call to speak with the airlock duty crew member?",
"Clayton failed to think through what part of his escape plan?",
"What happened when Clayton boarded the STS-52?",
"What did Parks do that pushed Clayton over the edge?",
"When Clayton fought with Parks, he..."
] |
[
[
"To survive in low pressure",
"To be able to breathe",
"To prevent them from getting sick",
"To stay warm in the cold"
],
[
"envy that he was able to buy whiskey.",
"curiosity about his oxygen tube.",
"annoyance that he let cold air in through both doors.",
"fascination with his Luna story."
],
[
"when he met with the parole board.",
"when he arrived.",
"when he was working in the mines.",
"when he committed robbery."
],
[
"Clayton didn't want Parks to know the true ingredients of Martian Gin.",
"Sharks is wary of strangers.",
"Clayton didn't want Parks to know the true cost of Martian Gin.",
"Parks was too drunk."
],
[
"For him to explain how Clayton got aboard the ship.",
"For him to show Clayton around the ship.",
"For him to take Clayton to sick bay.",
"For him to take Clayton to the kitchen."
],
[
"How he would be able to decapacitate the engineers.",
"How to keep the STS-52 from catching him.",
"How he would be able to steer and maneuver the lifeboat.",
"How we would be able to run away once he landed on Earth."
],
[
"He was caught and put in the hold.",
"He went to sick bay.",
"He took Parkinson's place in the kitchen.",
"He passed out behind some crates."
],
[
"Got them both kicked out of the Recreation Building",
"Talked about his life in Indiana",
"Told Clayton he's stupid for not going home",
"Kept playing the \"Green Hills of Earth\" on the jukebox"
],
[
"thought he had just knocked him out.",
"left him at his place to sleep it off.",
"left him to die.",
"put clothes on him to keep him warm."
]
] |
[
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1
] |
[
0,
1,
0,
1,
0,
1,
0,
1,
1
] |
[
[
"“Not much. We only keep it\n at six pounds in the ships.\n Half helium and half oxygen.\n Only thing that bothers me is\n the oxy here. Or rather, the\n oxy that\nisn’t\nhere.” He took\n a deep breath through his\n nose tube to emphasize his\n point.\n\n\n Clayton clamped his teeth\n together, making the muscles\n at the side of his jaw stand\n out.\n\n\n Parks didn’t notice. “You\n guys have to take those pills,\n don’t you?”\n\n\n “Yeah.”",
"“Mankind is inherently an\n adaptable animal. If we are to\n colonize the planets of the\n Solar System, we must meet\n the conditions on those planets\n as best we can.\n\n\n “Financially, it is impracticable\n to change an entire\n planet from its original condition\n to one which will support\n human life as it exists on\n Terra.\n\n\n “But man, since he is adaptable,\n can change himself—modify\n his structure slightly—so\n that he can live on these\n planets with only a minimum\n of change in the environment.”\nSo they made you live outside\n and like it. So you froze\n and you choked and you suffered.\n\n\n Clayton hated Mars. He\n hated the thin air and the\n cold. More than anything, he\n hated the cold.\n\n\n Ron Clayton wanted to go\n home.",
"Outside the Rehabilitation\n Service Building, Clayton\n could feel the tears running\n down the inside of his face\n mask. He’d asked again and\n again—God only knew how\n many times—in the past fifteen\n years. Always the same\n answer. No.\n\n\n When he’d heard that this\n new administrator was a\n woman, he’d hoped she might\n be easier to convince. She\n wasn’t. If anything, she was\n harder than the others.\n\n\n The heat-sucking frigidity\n of the thin Martian air whispered\n around him in a feeble\n breeze. He shivered a little\n and began walking toward the\n recreation center.\n\n\n There was a high, thin\n piping in the sky above him\n which quickly became a\n scream in the thin air.\n\n\n He turned for a moment to\n watch the ship land, squinting\n his eyes to see the number on\n the hull.",
"A voice next to him said:\n “I’ll have a whiskey.”\nThe voice sounded as if the\n man had a bad cold, and Clayton\n turned slowly to look at\n him. After all the sterilization\n they went through before they\n left Earth, nobody on Mars\n ever had a cold, so there was\n only one thing that would\n make a man’s voice sound\n like that.\n\n\n Clayton was right. The fellow\n had an oxygen tube\n clamped firmly over his nose.\n He was wearing the uniform\n of the Space Transport Service.\n\n\n “Just get in on the ship?”\n Clayton asked conversationally.\n\n\n The man nodded and grinned.\n “Yeah. Four hours before\n we take off again.” He poured\n down the whiskey. “Sure cold\n out.”\n\n\n Clayton agreed. “It’s always\n cold.” He watched enviously\n as the spaceman ordered\n another whiskey.",
"Fifty-two. Space Transport\n Ship Fifty-two.\n\n\n Probably bringing another\n load of poor suckers to freeze\n to death on Mars.\n\n\n That was the thing he hated\n about Mars—the cold. The\n everlasting damned cold! And\n the oxidation pills; take one\n every three hours or smother\n in the poor, thin air.\n\n\n The government could have\n put up domes; it could have\n put in building-to-building\n tunnels, at least. It could have\n done a hell of a lot of things\n to make Mars a decent place\n for human beings.\n\n\n But no—the government\n had other ideas. A bunch of\n bigshot scientific characters\n had come up with the idea\n nearly twenty-three years before.\n Clayton could remember\n the words on the sheet he had\n been given when he was sentenced.",
"At the bar, he ordered a\n beer and used it to wash down\n another oxidation tablet. It\n wasn’t good beer; it didn’t\n even deserve the name. The\n atmospheric pressure was so\n low as to boil all the carbon\n dioxide out of it, so the brewers\n never put it back in after\n fermentation.\n\n\n He was sorry for what he\n had done—really and truly\n sorry. If they’d only give him\n one more chance, he’d make\n good. Just one more chance.\n He’d work things out.\n\n\n He’d promised himself that\n both times they’d put him up\n before, but things had been\n different then. He hadn’t really\n been given another chance,\n what with parole boards and\n all.\n\n\n Clayton closed his eyes and\n finished the beer. He ordered\n another.",
"To escape from Mars, all Clayton had to do was the impossible. Break out of\n a crack-proof exile camp—get onto a ship that couldn’t be\n boarded—smash through an impenetrable wall of steel. Perhaps he could do\n all these things, but he discovered that Mars did evil things to men; that he\n wasn’t even Clayton any more. He was only—\nThe Man Who Hated Mars\nBy RANDALL GARRETT\n“I want\n you to put me in prison!” the big, hairy man said in\n a trembling voice.\n\n\n He was addressing his request\n to a thin woman sitting\n behind a desk that seemed\n much too big for her. The\n plaque on the desk said:\nLT. PHOEBE HARRIS\n\n TERRAN REHABILITATION SERVICE",
"No, by God! He wouldn’t\n go back to that frozen mud-ball!\n He’d stay on Earth,\n where it was warm and comfortable\n and a man could live\n where he was meant to live.\n Where there was plenty of\n air to breathe and plenty of\n water to drink. Where the\n beer tasted like beer and not\n like slop. Earth. Good green\n hills, the like of which exists\n nowhere else.\n\n\n Slowly, over the days, he\n evolved a plan. He watched\n and waited and checked each\n little detail to make sure nothing\n would go wrong. It\ncouldn’t\ngo wrong. He didn’t want\n to die, and he didn’t want to\n go back to Mars.",
"The iciness didn’t seem to\n go away immediately. It was\n like the mine. Little old Mars\n was cold clear down to her\n core—or at least down as far\n as they’d drilled. The walls\n were frozen and seemed to\n radiate a chill that pulled the\n heat right out of your blood.\n\n\n Somebody was playing\nGreen Hills\nagain, damn them.\n Evidently all of his own selections\n had run out earlier than\n he’d thought they would.\n\n\n Hell! There was nothing to\n do here. He might as well go\n home.\n\n\n “Gimme another beer,\n Mac.”\n\n\n He’d go home as soon as he\n finished this one.\n\n\n He stood there with his eyes\n closed, listening to the music\n and hating Mars.",
"“Fifteen years. Fifteen\n long, long years.”\n\n\n “Did you—uh—I mean—”\n Parks looked suddenly confused.\n\n\n Clayton glanced quickly to\n make sure the bartender was\n out of earshot. Then he grinned.\n “You mean am I a convict?\n Nah. I came here because\n I wanted to. But—” He\n lowered his voice. “—we don’t\n talk about it around here. You\n know.” He gestured with one\n hand—a gesture that took in\n everyone else in the room.\n\n\n Parks glanced around\n quickly, moving only his eyes.\n “Yeah. I see,” he said softly.\n\n\n “This your first trip?” asked\n Clayton.\n\n\n “First one to Mars. Been on\n the Luna run a long time.”\n\n\n “Low pressure bother you\n much?”",
"“Yep, I’m from Indiana.\n Southern part, down around\n Bloomington,” Parks said.\n “Gimme the jug. Not Bloomington,\n Illinois—Bloomington,\n Indiana. We really got\n green hills down there.” He\n drank, and handed the bottle\n back to Clayton. “Pers-nally,\n I don’t see why anybody’d\n stay on Mars. Here y’are,\n practic’ly on the equator in\n the middle of the summer, and\n it’s colder than hell. Brrr!\n\n\n “Now if you was smart,\n you’d go home, where it’s\n warm. Mars wasn’t built for\n people to live on, anyhow. I\n don’t see how you stand it.”\n\n\n That was when Clayton\n decided he really hated Parks.\n\n\n And when Parks said:\n “Why be dumb, friend? Whyn’t\n you go home?” Clayton\n kicked him in the stomach,\n hard.",
"“I had to take them once.\n Got stranded on Luna. The cat\n I was in broke down eighty\n some miles from Aristarchus\n Base and I had to walk back—with\n my oxy low. Well, I\n figured—”\nClayton listened to Parks’\n story with a great show of attention,\n but he had heard it\n before. This “lost on the\n moon” stuff and its variations\n had been going the rounds for\n forty years. Every once in a\n while, it actually did happen\n to someone; just often enough\n to keep the story going.\n\n\n This guy did have a couple\n of new twists, but not enough\n to make the story worthwhile.\n\n\n “Boy,” Clayton said when\n Parks had finished, “you were\n lucky to come out of that\n alive!”\n\n\n Parks nodded, well pleased\n with himself, and bought another\n round of drinks.",
"“Indiana? That’s nice. Real\n nice.”\n\n\n “Yeah. You talk about\n green hills, we got green hills\n in Indiana. What time is it?”\n\n\n Clayton told him.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise! Ol’ spaship\n takes off in an hour. Ought\n to have one more drink first.”\n\n\n Clayton realized he didn’t\n like Parks. But maybe he’d\n buy a bottle.\n\n\n Sharkie Johnson worked in\n Fuels Section, and he made a\n nice little sideline of stealing\n alcohol, cutting it, and selling\n it. He thought it was real\n funny to call it Martian Gin.\n\n\n Clayton said: “Let’s go over\n to Sharkie’s. Sharkie will sell\n us a bottle.”",
"The Recreation Building\n was just ahead; at least it\n would be warm inside. He\n pushed in through the outer\n and inner doors, and he heard\n the burst of music from the\n jukebox. His stomach tightened\n up into a hard cramp.\n\n\n They were playing Heinlein’s\nGreen Hills of Earth\n.\n\n\n There was almost no other\n sound in the room, although\n it was full of people. There\n were plenty of colonists who\n claimed to like Mars, but even\n they were silent when that\n song was played.\n\n\n Clayton wanted to go over\n and smash the machine—make\n it stop reminding him.\n He clenched his teeth and his\n fists and his eyes and cursed\n mentally.\nGod, how I hate\n Mars!\nWhen the hauntingly nostalgic\n last chorus faded away,\n he walked over to the machine\n and fed it full of enough coins\n to keep it going on something\n else until he left.",
"Evidently, he didn’t realize\n that fifteen years of Martian\n gravity had so weakened his\n muscles that he could hardly\n walk under the pull of a full\n Earth gee.\n\n\n As it was, he could only\n crawl about a hundred yards\n from the wrecked lifeship before\n he collapsed.\n\n\n Well, I hope this clears up\n everything.\n\n\n I hope you’re not getting\n the snow storms up there like\n we’ve been getting them.\n\n\n John B. Remley\n\n Captain, CBI\nTHE END\nTranscriber’s Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Stories\nSeptember 1956.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"The medic in the sick bay\n fired two shots from a hypo-gun\n into both arms, but Clayton\n ignored the slight sting.\n\n\n “Where am I?”\n\n\n “Real original. Here, take\n these.” He handed Clayton a\n couple of capsules, and gave\n him a glass of water to wash\n them down with.\n\n\n When the water hit his\n stomach, there was an immediate\n reaction.\n\n\n “Oh, Christ!” the medic\n said. “Get a mop, somebody.\n Here, bud; heave into this.”\n He put a basin on the table\n in front of Clayton.",
"She had thought he was\n going to jump her.\nLittle rat!\nhe thought,\nsomebody ought\n to slap her down!\nHe watched her check\n through the heavy dossier in\n front of her. Finally, she looked\n up at him again.\n\n\n “Clayton, your last conviction\n was for strong-arm robbery.\n You were given a choice\n between prison on Earth and\n freedom here on Mars. You\n picked Mars.”\n\n\n He nodded slowly. He’d\n been broke and hungry at the\n time. A sneaky little rat\n named Johnson had bilked\n Clayton out of his fair share\n of the Corey payroll job, and\n Clayton had been forced to\n get the money somehow. He\n hadn’t mussed the guy up\n much; besides, it was the\n sucker’s own fault. If he hadn’t\n tried to yell—\n\n\n Lieutenant Harris went on:\n “I’m afraid you can’t back\n down now.”",
"“Well, that’s all, Cartwright.\n You can report to\n Kissman in the kitchen.”\n\n\n The First pressed a button\n on his desk and spoke into the\n intercom. “Who was on duty\n at the airlock when the crew\n came aboard last night? Send\n him up. I want to talk to him.”\n\n\n Then the quartermaster officer\n led Clayton out the door\n and took him to the kitchen.\n\n\n The ship’s driver tubes\n were pushing it along at a\n steady five hundred centimeters\n per second squared acceleration,\n pushing her steadily\n closer to Earth with a little\n more than half a gravity of\n drive.\nThere wasn’t much for\n Clayton to do, really. He helped\n to select the foods that\n went into the automatics, and\n he cleaned them out after each\n meal was cooked. Once every\n day, he had to partially dismantle\n them for a really thorough\n going-over.",
"Clayton looked down at his\n clothes in wonder. “I don’t\n know.”\n\n\n “You\ndon’t know\n? That’s a\n hell of an answer.”\n\n\n “Well, I was drunk,” Clayton\n said defensively. “A man\n doesn’t know what he’s doing\n when he’s drunk.” He frowned\n in concentration. He knew\n he’d have to think up some\n story.\n\n\n “I kind of remember we\n made a bet. I bet him I could\n get on the ship. Sure—I remember,\n now. That’s what\n happened; I bet him I could\n get on the ship and we traded\n clothes.”\n\n\n “Where is he now?”\n\n\n “At my place, sleeping it\n off, I guess.”\n\n\n “Without his oxy-mask?”\n\n\n “Oh, I gave him my oxidation\n pills for the mask.”",
"And all the time, he was\n thinking.\n\n\n Parkinson must be dead;\n he knew that. That meant the\n Chamber. And even if he wasn’t,\n they’d send Clayton back\n to Mars. Luckily, there was no\n way for either planet to communicate\n with the ship; it was\n hard enough to keep a beam\n trained on a planet without\n trying to hit such a comparatively\n small thing as a ship.\n\n\n But they would know about\n it on Earth by now. They\n would pick him up the instant\n the ship landed. And the best\n he could hope for was a return\n to Mars."
],
[
"Parks was nodding vaguely.\n Clayton looked up at the clock\n above the bar and realized\n that they had been talking for\n better than an hour. Parks\n was buying another round.\n\n\n Parks was a hell of a nice\n fellow.\n\n\n There was, Clayton found,\n only one trouble with Parks.\n He got to talking so loud that\n the bartender refused to serve\n either one of them any more.\nThe bartender said Clayton\n was getting loud, too, but it\n was just because he had to\n talk loud to make Parks hear\n him.\n\n\n Clayton helped Parks put\n his mask and parka on and\n they walked out into the cold\n night.\n\n\n Parks began to sing\nGreen\n Hills\n. About halfway through,\n he stopped and turned to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “I’m from Indiana.”\n\n\n Clayton had already spotted\n him as an American by his\n accent.",
"Clayton couldn’t afford\n whiskey. He probably could\n have by this time, if the mines\n had made him a foreman, like\n they should have.\n\n\n Maybe he could talk the\n spaceman out of a couple of\n drinks.\n\n\n “My name’s Clayton. Ron\n Clayton.”\n\n\n The spaceman took the offered\n hand. “Mine’s Parkinson,\n but everybody calls me\n Parks.”\n\n\n “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I\n buy you a beer?”\n\n\n Parks shook his head. “No,\n thanks. I started on whiskey.\n Here, let me buy you one.”\n\n\n “Well—thanks. Don’t mind\n if I do.”\n\n\n They drank them in silence,\n and Parks ordered two more.\n\n\n “Been here long?” Parks\n asked.",
"Parks was a steward, too.\n A cook’s helper. That was\n good. If he’d been a jetman or\n something like that, the crew\n might wonder why he wasn’t\n on duty at takeoff. But a steward\n was different.\n\n\n Clayton sat for several minutes,\n looking through the\n booklet and drinking from the\n bottle. He emptied it just before\n the warning sirens keened\n through the thin air.\n\n\n Clayton got up and went\n outside toward the ship.\n\n\n “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake\n up!”\n\n\n Somebody was slapping his\n cheeks. Clayton opened his\n eyes and looked at the blurred\n face over his own.\n\n\n From a distance, another\n voice said: “Who is it?”\n\n\n The blurred face said: “I\n don’t know. He was asleep\n behind these cases. I think\n he’s drunk.”",
"“And that, that—” Clayton\n said as Parks doubled over.\n\n\n He said it again as he kicked\n him in the head. And in\n the ribs. Parks was gasping\n as he writhed on the ground,\n but he soon lay still.\n\n\n Then Clayton saw why.\n Parks’ nose tube had come off\n when Clayton’s foot struck\n his head.\n\n\n Parks was breathing heavily,\n but he wasn’t getting any\n oxygen.\n\n\n That was when the Big\n Idea hit Ron Clayton. With a\n nosepiece on like that, you\n couldn’t tell who a man was.\n He took another drink from\n the jug and then began to\n take Parks’ clothes off.",
"“Okay,” said Parks. “We’ll\n get a bottle. That’s what we\n need: a bottle.”\n\n\n It was quite a walk to the\n Shark’s place. It was so cold\n that even Parks was beginning\n to sober up a little. He\n was laughing like hell when\n Clayton started to sing.\n\n“We’re going over to the Shark’s\n \nTo buy a jug of gin for Parks!\n \nHi ho, hi ho, hi ho!”\n \n\n One thing about a few\n drinks; you didn’t get so cold.\n You didn’t feel it too much,\n anyway.\nThe Shark still had his light\n on when they arrived. Clayton\n whispered to Parks: “I’ll go\n in. He knows me. He wouldn’t\n sell it if you were around. You\n got eight credits?”",
"“Yep, I’m from Indiana.\n Southern part, down around\n Bloomington,” Parks said.\n “Gimme the jug. Not Bloomington,\n Illinois—Bloomington,\n Indiana. We really got\n green hills down there.” He\n drank, and handed the bottle\n back to Clayton. “Pers-nally,\n I don’t see why anybody’d\n stay on Mars. Here y’are,\n practic’ly on the equator in\n the middle of the summer, and\n it’s colder than hell. Brrr!\n\n\n “Now if you was smart,\n you’d go home, where it’s\n warm. Mars wasn’t built for\n people to live on, anyhow. I\n don’t see how you stand it.”\n\n\n That was when Clayton\n decided he really hated Parks.\n\n\n And when Parks said:\n “Why be dumb, friend? Whyn’t\n you go home?” Clayton\n kicked him in the stomach,\n hard.",
"“Something like that happened\n to me a couple of years\n ago,” Clayton began. “I’m\n supervisor on the third shift\n in the mines at Xanthe, but\n at the time, I was only a foreman.\n One day, a couple of\n guys went to a branch tunnel\n to—”\n\n\n It was a very good story.\n Clayton had made it up himself,\n so he knew that Parks\n had never heard it before. It\n was gory in just the right\n places, with a nice effect at\n the end.\n\n\n “—so I had to hold up the\n rocks with my back while the\n rescue crew pulled the others\n out of the tunnel by crawling\n between my legs. Finally, they\n got some steel beams down\n there to take the load off, and\n I could let go. I was in the\n hospital for a week,” he finished.",
"“Indiana? That’s nice. Real\n nice.”\n\n\n “Yeah. You talk about\n green hills, we got green hills\n in Indiana. What time is it?”\n\n\n Clayton told him.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise! Ol’ spaship\n takes off in an hour. Ought\n to have one more drink first.”\n\n\n Clayton realized he didn’t\n like Parks. But maybe he’d\n buy a bottle.\n\n\n Sharkie Johnson worked in\n Fuels Section, and he made a\n nice little sideline of stealing\n alcohol, cutting it, and selling\n it. He thought it was real\n funny to call it Martian Gin.\n\n\n Clayton said: “Let’s go over\n to Sharkie’s. Sharkie will sell\n us a bottle.”",
"“Sure. I got the bottle.\n Want a drink?”\n\n\n Parks took the bottle, opened\n it, and took a good belt out\n of it.\n\n\n “Hooh!” he breathed.\n “Pretty smooth.”\n\n\n As Clayton drank, Parks\n said: “Hey! I better get back\n to the field! I know! We can\n go to the men’s room and\n finish the bottle before the\n ship takes off! Isn’t that a\n good idea? It’s warm there.”\n\n\n They started back down the\n street toward the spacefield.",
"The uniform fit Clayton\n fine, and so did the nose mask.\n He dumped his own clothing\n on top of Parks’ nearly nude\n body, adjusted the little oxygen\n tank so that the gas would\n flow properly through the\n mask, took the first deep\n breath of good air he’d had\n in fifteen years, and walked\n toward the spacefield.\nHe went into the men’s\n room at the Port Building,\n took a drink, and felt in the\n pockets of the uniform for\n Parks’ identification. He\n found it and opened the booklet.\n It read:\nPARKINSON, HERBERT J.\n\n Steward 2nd Class, STS\n\n\n Above it was a photo, and a\n set of fingerprints.\n\n\n Clayton grinned. They’d\n never know it wasn’t Parks\n getting on the ship.",
"The First shook his head.\n “That sounds like the kind of\n trick Parkinson would pull, all\n right. I’ll have to write it up\n and turn you both in to the\n authorities when we hit\n Earth.” He eyed Clayton.\n “What’s your name?”\n\n\n “Cartwright. Sam Cartwright,”\n Clayton said without\n batting an eye.\n\n\n “Volunteer or convicted\n colonist?”\n\n\n “Volunteer.”\n\n\n The First looked at him for\n a long moment, disbelief in\n his eyes.",
"And all the time, he was\n thinking.\n\n\n Parkinson must be dead;\n he knew that. That meant the\n Chamber. And even if he wasn’t,\n they’d send Clayton back\n to Mars. Luckily, there was no\n way for either planet to communicate\n with the ship; it was\n hard enough to keep a beam\n trained on a planet without\n trying to hit such a comparatively\n small thing as a ship.\n\n\n But they would know about\n it on Earth by now. They\n would pick him up the instant\n the ship landed. And the best\n he could hope for was a return\n to Mars.",
"“Sure I got eight credits.\n Just a minute, and I’ll give\n you eight credits.” He fished\n around for a minute inside his\n parka, and pulled out his\n notecase. His gloved fingers\n were a little clumsy, but he\n managed to get out a five and\n three ones and hand them to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “You wait out here,” Clayton\n said.\n\n\n He went in through the\n outer door and knocked on the\n inner one. He should have\n asked for ten credits. Sharkie\n only charged five, and that\n would leave him three for\n himself. But he could have got\n ten—maybe more.\n\n\n When he came out with the\n bottle, Parks was sitting on\n a rock, shivering.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise!” he said. “It’s\n cold out here. Let’s get to\n someplace where it’s warm.”",
"“Fifteen years. Fifteen\n long, long years.”\n\n\n “Did you—uh—I mean—”\n Parks looked suddenly confused.\n\n\n Clayton glanced quickly to\n make sure the bartender was\n out of earshot. Then he grinned.\n “You mean am I a convict?\n Nah. I came here because\n I wanted to. But—” He\n lowered his voice. “—we don’t\n talk about it around here. You\n know.” He gestured with one\n hand—a gesture that took in\n everyone else in the room.\n\n\n Parks glanced around\n quickly, moving only his eyes.\n “Yeah. I see,” he said softly.\n\n\n “This your first trip?” asked\n Clayton.\n\n\n “First one to Mars. Been on\n the Luna run a long time.”\n\n\n “Low pressure bother you\n much?”",
"He tapped his glass on the\n bar, and the barman came\n over with another beer. Clayton\n looked at it, then up at\n the barman. “Put a head on\n it.”\n\n\n The bartender looked at\n him sourly. “I’ve got some\n soapsuds here, Clayton, and\n one of these days I’m gonna\n put some in your beer if you\n keep pulling that gag.”\n\n\n That was the trouble with\n some guys. No sense of humor.\n\n\n Somebody came in the door\n and then somebody else came\n in behind him, so that both\n inner and outer doors were\n open for an instant. A blast\n of icy breeze struck Clayton’s\n back, and he shivered. He\n started to say something, then\n changed his mind; the doors\n were already closed again,\n and besides, one of the guys\n was bigger than he was.",
"Clayton wasn’t drunk—he\n was sick. His head felt like\n hell. Where the devil was he?\n\n\n “Get up, bud. Come on, get\n up!”\n\n\n Clayton pulled himself up\n by holding to the man’s arm.\n The effort made him dizzy\n and nauseated.\n\n\n The other man said: “Take\n him down to sick bay, Casey.\n Get some thiamin into him.”\n\n\n Clayton didn’t struggle as\n they led him down to the sick\n bay. He was trying to clear\n his head. Where was he? He\n must have been pretty drunk\n last night.\n\n\n He remembered meeting\n Parks. And getting thrown\n out by the bartender. Then\n what?\n\n\n Oh, yeah. He’d gone to the\n Shark’s for a bottle. From\n there on, it was mostly gone.\n He remembered a fight or\n something, but that was all\n that registered.",
"“I had to take them once.\n Got stranded on Luna. The cat\n I was in broke down eighty\n some miles from Aristarchus\n Base and I had to walk back—with\n my oxy low. Well, I\n figured—”\nClayton listened to Parks’\n story with a great show of attention,\n but he had heard it\n before. This “lost on the\n moon” stuff and its variations\n had been going the rounds for\n forty years. Every once in a\n while, it actually did happen\n to someone; just often enough\n to keep the story going.\n\n\n This guy did have a couple\n of new twists, but not enough\n to make the story worthwhile.\n\n\n “Boy,” Clayton said when\n Parks had finished, “you were\n lucky to come out of that\n alive!”\n\n\n Parks nodded, well pleased\n with himself, and bought another\n round of drinks.",
"Outside the Rehabilitation\n Service Building, Clayton\n could feel the tears running\n down the inside of his face\n mask. He’d asked again and\n again—God only knew how\n many times—in the past fifteen\n years. Always the same\n answer. No.\n\n\n When he’d heard that this\n new administrator was a\n woman, he’d hoped she might\n be easier to convince. She\n wasn’t. If anything, she was\n harder than the others.\n\n\n The heat-sucking frigidity\n of the thin Martian air whispered\n around him in a feeble\n breeze. He shivered a little\n and began walking toward the\n recreation center.\n\n\n There was a high, thin\n piping in the sky above him\n which quickly became a\n scream in the thin air.\n\n\n He turned for a moment to\n watch the ship land, squinting\n his eyes to see the number on\n the hull.",
"It took them the better part\n of an hour to get Clayton\n awake enough to realize what\n was going on and where he\n was. Even then, he was\n plenty groggy.\nIt was the First Officer of\n the STS-52 who finally got the\n story straight. As soon as\n Clayton was in condition, the\n medic and the quartermaster\n officer who had found him\n took him up to the First Officer’s\n compartment.\n\n\n “I was checking through\n the stores this morning when\n I found this man. He was\n asleep, dead drunk, behind the\n crates.”\n\n\n “He was drunk, all right,”\n supplied the medic. “I found\n this in his pocket.” He flipped\n a booklet to the First Officer.\n\n\n The First was a young man,\n not older than twenty-eight\n with tough-looking gray eyes.\n He looked over the booklet.\n\n\n “Where did you get Parkinson’s\n ID booklet? And his uniform?”",
"Lieutenant Harris glanced\n at the man before her for only\n a moment before she returned\n her eyes to the dossier on the\n desk; but long enough to verify\n the impression his voice\n had given. Ron Clayton was a\n big, ugly, cowardly, dangerous\n man.\n\n\n He said: “Well? Dammit,\n say something!”\n\n\n The lieutenant raised her\n eyes again. “Just be patient\n until I’ve read this.” Her voice\n and eyes were expressionless,\n but her hand moved beneath\n the desk.\nThe frightful carnage would go down in the bloody history of space.\n\n\n Clayton froze.\nShe’s yellow!\nhe thought. She’s turned on\n the trackers! He could see the\n pale greenish glow of their\n little eyes watching him all\n around the room. If he made\n any fast move, they would cut\n him down with a stun beam\n before he could get two feet."
],
[
"To escape from Mars, all Clayton had to do was the impossible. Break out of\n a crack-proof exile camp—get onto a ship that couldn’t be\n boarded—smash through an impenetrable wall of steel. Perhaps he could do\n all these things, but he discovered that Mars did evil things to men; that he\n wasn’t even Clayton any more. He was only—\nThe Man Who Hated Mars\nBy RANDALL GARRETT\n“I want\n you to put me in prison!” the big, hairy man said in\n a trembling voice.\n\n\n He was addressing his request\n to a thin woman sitting\n behind a desk that seemed\n much too big for her. The\n plaque on the desk said:\nLT. PHOEBE HARRIS\n\n TERRAN REHABILITATION SERVICE",
"“Mankind is inherently an\n adaptable animal. If we are to\n colonize the planets of the\n Solar System, we must meet\n the conditions on those planets\n as best we can.\n\n\n “Financially, it is impracticable\n to change an entire\n planet from its original condition\n to one which will support\n human life as it exists on\n Terra.\n\n\n “But man, since he is adaptable,\n can change himself—modify\n his structure slightly—so\n that he can live on these\n planets with only a minimum\n of change in the environment.”\nSo they made you live outside\n and like it. So you froze\n and you choked and you suffered.\n\n\n Clayton hated Mars. He\n hated the thin air and the\n cold. More than anything, he\n hated the cold.\n\n\n Ron Clayton wanted to go\n home.",
"“Yep, I’m from Indiana.\n Southern part, down around\n Bloomington,” Parks said.\n “Gimme the jug. Not Bloomington,\n Illinois—Bloomington,\n Indiana. We really got\n green hills down there.” He\n drank, and handed the bottle\n back to Clayton. “Pers-nally,\n I don’t see why anybody’d\n stay on Mars. Here y’are,\n practic’ly on the equator in\n the middle of the summer, and\n it’s colder than hell. Brrr!\n\n\n “Now if you was smart,\n you’d go home, where it’s\n warm. Mars wasn’t built for\n people to live on, anyhow. I\n don’t see how you stand it.”\n\n\n That was when Clayton\n decided he really hated Parks.\n\n\n And when Parks said:\n “Why be dumb, friend? Whyn’t\n you go home?” Clayton\n kicked him in the stomach,\n hard.",
"The iciness didn’t seem to\n go away immediately. It was\n like the mine. Little old Mars\n was cold clear down to her\n core—or at least down as far\n as they’d drilled. The walls\n were frozen and seemed to\n radiate a chill that pulled the\n heat right out of your blood.\n\n\n Somebody was playing\nGreen Hills\nagain, damn them.\n Evidently all of his own selections\n had run out earlier than\n he’d thought they would.\n\n\n Hell! There was nothing to\n do here. He might as well go\n home.\n\n\n “Gimme another beer,\n Mac.”\n\n\n He’d go home as soon as he\n finished this one.\n\n\n He stood there with his eyes\n closed, listening to the music\n and hating Mars.",
"The Recreation Building\n was just ahead; at least it\n would be warm inside. He\n pushed in through the outer\n and inner doors, and he heard\n the burst of music from the\n jukebox. His stomach tightened\n up into a hard cramp.\n\n\n They were playing Heinlein’s\nGreen Hills of Earth\n.\n\n\n There was almost no other\n sound in the room, although\n it was full of people. There\n were plenty of colonists who\n claimed to like Mars, but even\n they were silent when that\n song was played.\n\n\n Clayton wanted to go over\n and smash the machine—make\n it stop reminding him.\n He clenched his teeth and his\n fists and his eyes and cursed\n mentally.\nGod, how I hate\n Mars!\nWhen the hauntingly nostalgic\n last chorus faded away,\n he walked over to the machine\n and fed it full of enough coins\n to keep it going on something\n else until he left.",
"“Indiana? That’s nice. Real\n nice.”\n\n\n “Yeah. You talk about\n green hills, we got green hills\n in Indiana. What time is it?”\n\n\n Clayton told him.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise! Ol’ spaship\n takes off in an hour. Ought\n to have one more drink first.”\n\n\n Clayton realized he didn’t\n like Parks. But maybe he’d\n buy a bottle.\n\n\n Sharkie Johnson worked in\n Fuels Section, and he made a\n nice little sideline of stealing\n alcohol, cutting it, and selling\n it. He thought it was real\n funny to call it Martian Gin.\n\n\n Clayton said: “Let’s go over\n to Sharkie’s. Sharkie will sell\n us a bottle.”",
"She had thought he was\n going to jump her.\nLittle rat!\nhe thought,\nsomebody ought\n to slap her down!\nHe watched her check\n through the heavy dossier in\n front of her. Finally, she looked\n up at him again.\n\n\n “Clayton, your last conviction\n was for strong-arm robbery.\n You were given a choice\n between prison on Earth and\n freedom here on Mars. You\n picked Mars.”\n\n\n He nodded slowly. He’d\n been broke and hungry at the\n time. A sneaky little rat\n named Johnson had bilked\n Clayton out of his fair share\n of the Corey payroll job, and\n Clayton had been forced to\n get the money somehow. He\n hadn’t mussed the guy up\n much; besides, it was the\n sucker’s own fault. If he hadn’t\n tried to yell—\n\n\n Lieutenant Harris went on:\n “I’m afraid you can’t back\n down now.”",
"Outside the Rehabilitation\n Service Building, Clayton\n could feel the tears running\n down the inside of his face\n mask. He’d asked again and\n again—God only knew how\n many times—in the past fifteen\n years. Always the same\n answer. No.\n\n\n When he’d heard that this\n new administrator was a\n woman, he’d hoped she might\n be easier to convince. She\n wasn’t. If anything, she was\n harder than the others.\n\n\n The heat-sucking frigidity\n of the thin Martian air whispered\n around him in a feeble\n breeze. He shivered a little\n and began walking toward the\n recreation center.\n\n\n There was a high, thin\n piping in the sky above him\n which quickly became a\n scream in the thin air.\n\n\n He turned for a moment to\n watch the ship land, squinting\n his eyes to see the number on\n the hull.",
"And all the time, he was\n thinking.\n\n\n Parkinson must be dead;\n he knew that. That meant the\n Chamber. And even if he wasn’t,\n they’d send Clayton back\n to Mars. Luckily, there was no\n way for either planet to communicate\n with the ship; it was\n hard enough to keep a beam\n trained on a planet without\n trying to hit such a comparatively\n small thing as a ship.\n\n\n But they would know about\n it on Earth by now. They\n would pick him up the instant\n the ship landed. And the best\n he could hope for was a return\n to Mars.",
"Clayton couldn’t afford\n whiskey. He probably could\n have by this time, if the mines\n had made him a foreman, like\n they should have.\n\n\n Maybe he could talk the\n spaceman out of a couple of\n drinks.\n\n\n “My name’s Clayton. Ron\n Clayton.”\n\n\n The spaceman took the offered\n hand. “Mine’s Parkinson,\n but everybody calls me\n Parks.”\n\n\n “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I\n buy you a beer?”\n\n\n Parks shook his head. “No,\n thanks. I started on whiskey.\n Here, let me buy you one.”\n\n\n “Well—thanks. Don’t mind\n if I do.”\n\n\n They drank them in silence,\n and Parks ordered two more.\n\n\n “Been here long?” Parks\n asked.",
"“Fifteen years. Fifteen\n long, long years.”\n\n\n “Did you—uh—I mean—”\n Parks looked suddenly confused.\n\n\n Clayton glanced quickly to\n make sure the bartender was\n out of earshot. Then he grinned.\n “You mean am I a convict?\n Nah. I came here because\n I wanted to. But—” He\n lowered his voice. “—we don’t\n talk about it around here. You\n know.” He gestured with one\n hand—a gesture that took in\n everyone else in the room.\n\n\n Parks glanced around\n quickly, moving only his eyes.\n “Yeah. I see,” he said softly.\n\n\n “This your first trip?” asked\n Clayton.\n\n\n “First one to Mars. Been on\n the Luna run a long time.”\n\n\n “Low pressure bother you\n much?”",
"No, by God! He wouldn’t\n go back to that frozen mud-ball!\n He’d stay on Earth,\n where it was warm and comfortable\n and a man could live\n where he was meant to live.\n Where there was plenty of\n air to breathe and plenty of\n water to drink. Where the\n beer tasted like beer and not\n like slop. Earth. Good green\n hills, the like of which exists\n nowhere else.\n\n\n Slowly, over the days, he\n evolved a plan. He watched\n and waited and checked each\n little detail to make sure nothing\n would go wrong. It\ncouldn’t\ngo wrong. He didn’t want\n to die, and he didn’t want to\n go back to Mars.",
"It didn’t matter. Volunteer\n or convict, there was no place\n Clayton could go. From the\n officer’s viewpoint, he was as\n safely imprisoned in the\n spaceship as he would be on\n Mars or a prison on Earth.\nThe First wrote in the log\n book, and then said: “Well,\n we’re one man short in the\n kitchen. You wanted to take\n Parkinson’s place; brother,\n you’ve got it—without pay.”\n He paused for a moment.\n\n\n “You know, of course,” he\n said judiciously, “that you’ll\n be shipped back to Mars immediately.\n And you’ll have to\n work out your passage both\n ways—it will be deducted\n from your pay.”\n\n\n Clayton nodded. “I know.”\n\n\n “I don’t know what else\n will happen. If there’s a conviction,\n you may lose your\n volunteer status on Mars. And\n there may be fines taken out\n of your pay, too.",
"Fifty-two. Space Transport\n Ship Fifty-two.\n\n\n Probably bringing another\n load of poor suckers to freeze\n to death on Mars.\n\n\n That was the thing he hated\n about Mars—the cold. The\n everlasting damned cold! And\n the oxidation pills; take one\n every three hours or smother\n in the poor, thin air.\n\n\n The government could have\n put up domes; it could have\n put in building-to-building\n tunnels, at least. It could have\n done a hell of a lot of things\n to make Mars a decent place\n for human beings.\n\n\n But no—the government\n had other ideas. A bunch of\n bigshot scientific characters\n had come up with the idea\n nearly twenty-three years before.\n Clayton could remember\n the words on the sheet he had\n been given when he was sentenced.",
"A voice next to him said:\n “I’ll have a whiskey.”\nThe voice sounded as if the\n man had a bad cold, and Clayton\n turned slowly to look at\n him. After all the sterilization\n they went through before they\n left Earth, nobody on Mars\n ever had a cold, so there was\n only one thing that would\n make a man’s voice sound\n like that.\n\n\n Clayton was right. The fellow\n had an oxygen tube\n clamped firmly over his nose.\n He was wearing the uniform\n of the Space Transport Service.\n\n\n “Just get in on the ship?”\n Clayton asked conversationally.\n\n\n The man nodded and grinned.\n “Yeah. Four hours before\n we take off again.” He poured\n down the whiskey. “Sure cold\n out.”\n\n\n Clayton agreed. “It’s always\n cold.” He watched enviously\n as the spaceman ordered\n another whiskey.",
"“\nShut up!\n” the woman\n snapped harshly. “I’m getting\n sick of it! I personally think\n you should have been locked\n up—permanently. I think this\n idea of forced colonization is\n going to breed trouble for\n Earth someday, but it is about\n the only way you can get anybody\n to colonize this frozen\n hunk of mud.\n\n\n “Just keep it in mind that\n I don’t like it any better than\n you do—\nand I didn’t strong-arm\n anybody to deserve the\n assignment!\nNow get out of\n here!”\n\n\n She moved a hand threateningly\n toward the manual controls\n of the stun beam.\n\n\n Clayton retreated fast. The\n trackers ignored anyone walking\n away from the desk; they\n were set only to spot threatening\n movements toward it.",
"At the bar, he ordered a\n beer and used it to wash down\n another oxidation tablet. It\n wasn’t good beer; it didn’t\n even deserve the name. The\n atmospheric pressure was so\n low as to boil all the carbon\n dioxide out of it, so the brewers\n never put it back in after\n fermentation.\n\n\n He was sorry for what he\n had done—really and truly\n sorry. If they’d only give him\n one more chance, he’d make\n good. Just one more chance.\n He’d work things out.\n\n\n He’d promised himself that\n both times they’d put him up\n before, but things had been\n different then. He hadn’t really\n been given another chance,\n what with parole boards and\n all.\n\n\n Clayton closed his eyes and\n finished the beer. He ordered\n another.",
"“I had to take them once.\n Got stranded on Luna. The cat\n I was in broke down eighty\n some miles from Aristarchus\n Base and I had to walk back—with\n my oxy low. Well, I\n figured—”\nClayton listened to Parks’\n story with a great show of attention,\n but he had heard it\n before. This “lost on the\n moon” stuff and its variations\n had been going the rounds for\n forty years. Every once in a\n while, it actually did happen\n to someone; just often enough\n to keep the story going.\n\n\n This guy did have a couple\n of new twists, but not enough\n to make the story worthwhile.\n\n\n “Boy,” Clayton said when\n Parks had finished, “you were\n lucky to come out of that\n alive!”\n\n\n Parks nodded, well pleased\n with himself, and bought another\n round of drinks.",
"The ship was eight hours\n out from Earth and still decelerating\n when Clayton pulled\n his getaway.\nIt was surprisingly easy.\n He was supposed to be asleep\n when he sneaked down to the\n drive compartment with the\n knife. He pushed open the\n door, looked in, and grinned\n like an ape.\n\n\n The Engineer and the two\n jetmen were out cold from the\n chloral hydrate in the coffee\n from the kitchen.\n\n\n Moving rapidly, he went to\n the spares locker and began\n methodically to smash every\n replacement part for the\n drivers. Then he took three\n of the signal bombs from the\n emergency kit, set them for\n five minutes, and placed them\n around the driver circuits.\n\n\n He looked at the three sleeping\n men. What if they woke\n up before the bombs went off?\n He didn’t want to kill them\n though. He wanted them to\n know what had happened and\n who had done it.",
"“Not much. We only keep it\n at six pounds in the ships.\n Half helium and half oxygen.\n Only thing that bothers me is\n the oxy here. Or rather, the\n oxy that\nisn’t\nhere.” He took\n a deep breath through his\n nose tube to emphasize his\n point.\n\n\n Clayton clamped his teeth\n together, making the muscles\n at the side of his jaw stand\n out.\n\n\n Parks didn’t notice. “You\n guys have to take those pills,\n don’t you?”\n\n\n “Yeah.”"
],
[
"“Okay,” said Parks. “We’ll\n get a bottle. That’s what we\n need: a bottle.”\n\n\n It was quite a walk to the\n Shark’s place. It was so cold\n that even Parks was beginning\n to sober up a little. He\n was laughing like hell when\n Clayton started to sing.\n\n“We’re going over to the Shark’s\n \nTo buy a jug of gin for Parks!\n \nHi ho, hi ho, hi ho!”\n \n\n One thing about a few\n drinks; you didn’t get so cold.\n You didn’t feel it too much,\n anyway.\nThe Shark still had his light\n on when they arrived. Clayton\n whispered to Parks: “I’ll go\n in. He knows me. He wouldn’t\n sell it if you were around. You\n got eight credits?”",
"“Sure I got eight credits.\n Just a minute, and I’ll give\n you eight credits.” He fished\n around for a minute inside his\n parka, and pulled out his\n notecase. His gloved fingers\n were a little clumsy, but he\n managed to get out a five and\n three ones and hand them to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “You wait out here,” Clayton\n said.\n\n\n He went in through the\n outer door and knocked on the\n inner one. He should have\n asked for ten credits. Sharkie\n only charged five, and that\n would leave him three for\n himself. But he could have got\n ten—maybe more.\n\n\n When he came out with the\n bottle, Parks was sitting on\n a rock, shivering.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise!” he said. “It’s\n cold out here. Let’s get to\n someplace where it’s warm.”",
"“And that, that—” Clayton\n said as Parks doubled over.\n\n\n He said it again as he kicked\n him in the head. And in\n the ribs. Parks was gasping\n as he writhed on the ground,\n but he soon lay still.\n\n\n Then Clayton saw why.\n Parks’ nose tube had come off\n when Clayton’s foot struck\n his head.\n\n\n Parks was breathing heavily,\n but he wasn’t getting any\n oxygen.\n\n\n That was when the Big\n Idea hit Ron Clayton. With a\n nosepiece on like that, you\n couldn’t tell who a man was.\n He took another drink from\n the jug and then began to\n take Parks’ clothes off.",
"Clayton couldn’t afford\n whiskey. He probably could\n have by this time, if the mines\n had made him a foreman, like\n they should have.\n\n\n Maybe he could talk the\n spaceman out of a couple of\n drinks.\n\n\n “My name’s Clayton. Ron\n Clayton.”\n\n\n The spaceman took the offered\n hand. “Mine’s Parkinson,\n but everybody calls me\n Parks.”\n\n\n “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I\n buy you a beer?”\n\n\n Parks shook his head. “No,\n thanks. I started on whiskey.\n Here, let me buy you one.”\n\n\n “Well—thanks. Don’t mind\n if I do.”\n\n\n They drank them in silence,\n and Parks ordered two more.\n\n\n “Been here long?” Parks\n asked.",
"Clayton looked down at his\n clothes in wonder. “I don’t\n know.”\n\n\n “You\ndon’t know\n? That’s a\n hell of an answer.”\n\n\n “Well, I was drunk,” Clayton\n said defensively. “A man\n doesn’t know what he’s doing\n when he’s drunk.” He frowned\n in concentration. He knew\n he’d have to think up some\n story.\n\n\n “I kind of remember we\n made a bet. I bet him I could\n get on the ship. Sure—I remember,\n now. That’s what\n happened; I bet him I could\n get on the ship and we traded\n clothes.”\n\n\n “Where is he now?”\n\n\n “At my place, sleeping it\n off, I guess.”\n\n\n “Without his oxy-mask?”\n\n\n “Oh, I gave him my oxidation\n pills for the mask.”",
"He tapped his glass on the\n bar, and the barman came\n over with another beer. Clayton\n looked at it, then up at\n the barman. “Put a head on\n it.”\n\n\n The bartender looked at\n him sourly. “I’ve got some\n soapsuds here, Clayton, and\n one of these days I’m gonna\n put some in your beer if you\n keep pulling that gag.”\n\n\n That was the trouble with\n some guys. No sense of humor.\n\n\n Somebody came in the door\n and then somebody else came\n in behind him, so that both\n inner and outer doors were\n open for an instant. A blast\n of icy breeze struck Clayton’s\n back, and he shivered. He\n started to say something, then\n changed his mind; the doors\n were already closed again,\n and besides, one of the guys\n was bigger than he was.",
"“Indiana? That’s nice. Real\n nice.”\n\n\n “Yeah. You talk about\n green hills, we got green hills\n in Indiana. What time is it?”\n\n\n Clayton told him.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise! Ol’ spaship\n takes off in an hour. Ought\n to have one more drink first.”\n\n\n Clayton realized he didn’t\n like Parks. But maybe he’d\n buy a bottle.\n\n\n Sharkie Johnson worked in\n Fuels Section, and he made a\n nice little sideline of stealing\n alcohol, cutting it, and selling\n it. He thought it was real\n funny to call it Martian Gin.\n\n\n Clayton said: “Let’s go over\n to Sharkie’s. Sharkie will sell\n us a bottle.”",
"Parks was a steward, too.\n A cook’s helper. That was\n good. If he’d been a jetman or\n something like that, the crew\n might wonder why he wasn’t\n on duty at takeoff. But a steward\n was different.\n\n\n Clayton sat for several minutes,\n looking through the\n booklet and drinking from the\n bottle. He emptied it just before\n the warning sirens keened\n through the thin air.\n\n\n Clayton got up and went\n outside toward the ship.\n\n\n “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake\n up!”\n\n\n Somebody was slapping his\n cheeks. Clayton opened his\n eyes and looked at the blurred\n face over his own.\n\n\n From a distance, another\n voice said: “Who is it?”\n\n\n The blurred face said: “I\n don’t know. He was asleep\n behind these cases. I think\n he’s drunk.”",
"Clayton wasn’t drunk—he\n was sick. His head felt like\n hell. Where the devil was he?\n\n\n “Get up, bud. Come on, get\n up!”\n\n\n Clayton pulled himself up\n by holding to the man’s arm.\n The effort made him dizzy\n and nauseated.\n\n\n The other man said: “Take\n him down to sick bay, Casey.\n Get some thiamin into him.”\n\n\n Clayton didn’t struggle as\n they led him down to the sick\n bay. He was trying to clear\n his head. Where was he? He\n must have been pretty drunk\n last night.\n\n\n He remembered meeting\n Parks. And getting thrown\n out by the bartender. Then\n what?\n\n\n Oh, yeah. He’d gone to the\n Shark’s for a bottle. From\n there on, it was mostly gone.\n He remembered a fight or\n something, but that was all\n that registered.",
"The uniform fit Clayton\n fine, and so did the nose mask.\n He dumped his own clothing\n on top of Parks’ nearly nude\n body, adjusted the little oxygen\n tank so that the gas would\n flow properly through the\n mask, took the first deep\n breath of good air he’d had\n in fifteen years, and walked\n toward the spacefield.\nHe went into the men’s\n room at the Port Building,\n took a drink, and felt in the\n pockets of the uniform for\n Parks’ identification. He\n found it and opened the booklet.\n It read:\nPARKINSON, HERBERT J.\n\n Steward 2nd Class, STS\n\n\n Above it was a photo, and a\n set of fingerprints.\n\n\n Clayton grinned. They’d\n never know it wasn’t Parks\n getting on the ship.",
"Parks was nodding vaguely.\n Clayton looked up at the clock\n above the bar and realized\n that they had been talking for\n better than an hour. Parks\n was buying another round.\n\n\n Parks was a hell of a nice\n fellow.\n\n\n There was, Clayton found,\n only one trouble with Parks.\n He got to talking so loud that\n the bartender refused to serve\n either one of them any more.\nThe bartender said Clayton\n was getting loud, too, but it\n was just because he had to\n talk loud to make Parks hear\n him.\n\n\n Clayton helped Parks put\n his mask and parka on and\n they walked out into the cold\n night.\n\n\n Parks began to sing\nGreen\n Hills\n. About halfway through,\n he stopped and turned to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “I’m from Indiana.”\n\n\n Clayton had already spotted\n him as an American by his\n accent.",
"“Sure. I got the bottle.\n Want a drink?”\n\n\n Parks took the bottle, opened\n it, and took a good belt out\n of it.\n\n\n “Hooh!” he breathed.\n “Pretty smooth.”\n\n\n As Clayton drank, Parks\n said: “Hey! I better get back\n to the field! I know! We can\n go to the men’s room and\n finish the bottle before the\n ship takes off! Isn’t that a\n good idea? It’s warm there.”\n\n\n They started back down the\n street toward the spacefield.",
"The ship was eight hours\n out from Earth and still decelerating\n when Clayton pulled\n his getaway.\nIt was surprisingly easy.\n He was supposed to be asleep\n when he sneaked down to the\n drive compartment with the\n knife. He pushed open the\n door, looked in, and grinned\n like an ape.\n\n\n The Engineer and the two\n jetmen were out cold from the\n chloral hydrate in the coffee\n from the kitchen.\n\n\n Moving rapidly, he went to\n the spares locker and began\n methodically to smash every\n replacement part for the\n drivers. Then he took three\n of the signal bombs from the\n emergency kit, set them for\n five minutes, and placed them\n around the driver circuits.\n\n\n He looked at the three sleeping\n men. What if they woke\n up before the bombs went off?\n He didn’t want to kill them\n though. He wanted them to\n know what had happened and\n who had done it.",
"And all the time, he was\n thinking.\n\n\n Parkinson must be dead;\n he knew that. That meant the\n Chamber. And even if he wasn’t,\n they’d send Clayton back\n to Mars. Luckily, there was no\n way for either planet to communicate\n with the ship; it was\n hard enough to keep a beam\n trained on a planet without\n trying to hit such a comparatively\n small thing as a ship.\n\n\n But they would know about\n it on Earth by now. They\n would pick him up the instant\n the ship landed. And the best\n he could hope for was a return\n to Mars.",
"Landing the lifeship would\n be the only difficult part of\n the maneuver, but they were\n designed to be handled by beginners.\n Full instructions\n were printed on the simplified\n control board.\nClayton studied them for\n a while, then set the alarm to\n waken him in seven hours and\n dozed off to sleep.\n\n\n He dreamed of Indiana. It\n was full of nice, green hills\n and leafy woods, and Parkinson\n was inviting him over to\n his mother’s house for chicken\n and whiskey. And all for free.\n\n\n Beneath the dream was the\n calm assurance that they\n would never catch him and\n send him back. When the\n STS-52 failed to show up,\n they would think he had been\n lost with it. They would never\n look for him.",
"The medic in the sick bay\n fired two shots from a hypo-gun\n into both arms, but Clayton\n ignored the slight sting.\n\n\n “Where am I?”\n\n\n “Real original. Here, take\n these.” He handed Clayton a\n couple of capsules, and gave\n him a glass of water to wash\n them down with.\n\n\n When the water hit his\n stomach, there was an immediate\n reaction.\n\n\n “Oh, Christ!” the medic\n said. “Get a mop, somebody.\n Here, bud; heave into this.”\n He put a basin on the table\n in front of Clayton.",
"The First shook his head.\n “That sounds like the kind of\n trick Parkinson would pull, all\n right. I’ll have to write it up\n and turn you both in to the\n authorities when we hit\n Earth.” He eyed Clayton.\n “What’s your name?”\n\n\n “Cartwright. Sam Cartwright,”\n Clayton said without\n batting an eye.\n\n\n “Volunteer or convicted\n colonist?”\n\n\n “Volunteer.”\n\n\n The First looked at him for\n a long moment, disbelief in\n his eyes.",
"Outside the Rehabilitation\n Service Building, Clayton\n could feel the tears running\n down the inside of his face\n mask. He’d asked again and\n again—God only knew how\n many times—in the past fifteen\n years. Always the same\n answer. No.\n\n\n When he’d heard that this\n new administrator was a\n woman, he’d hoped she might\n be easier to convince. She\n wasn’t. If anything, she was\n harder than the others.\n\n\n The heat-sucking frigidity\n of the thin Martian air whispered\n around him in a feeble\n breeze. He shivered a little\n and began walking toward the\n recreation center.\n\n\n There was a high, thin\n piping in the sky above him\n which quickly became a\n scream in the thin air.\n\n\n He turned for a moment to\n watch the ship land, squinting\n his eyes to see the number on\n the hull.",
"“I had to take them once.\n Got stranded on Luna. The cat\n I was in broke down eighty\n some miles from Aristarchus\n Base and I had to walk back—with\n my oxy low. Well, I\n figured—”\nClayton listened to Parks’\n story with a great show of attention,\n but he had heard it\n before. This “lost on the\n moon” stuff and its variations\n had been going the rounds for\n forty years. Every once in a\n while, it actually did happen\n to someone; just often enough\n to keep the story going.\n\n\n This guy did have a couple\n of new twists, but not enough\n to make the story worthwhile.\n\n\n “Boy,” Clayton said when\n Parks had finished, “you were\n lucky to come out of that\n alive!”\n\n\n Parks nodded, well pleased\n with himself, and bought another\n round of drinks.",
"He’d worked in the mines\n for fifteen years. It wasn’t\n that he minded work really,\n but the foreman had it in for\n him. Always giving him a bad\n time; always picking out the\n lousy jobs for him.\n\n\n Like the time he’d crawled\n into a side-boring in Tunnel\n 12 for a nap during lunch and\n the foreman had caught him.\n When he promised never to\n do it again if the foreman\n wouldn’t put it on report, the\n guy said, “Yeah. Sure. Hate\n to hurt a guy’s record.”\n\n\n Then he’d put Clayton on\n report anyway. Strictly a rat.\n\n\n Not that Clayton ran any\n chance of being fired; they\n never fired anybody. But\n they’d fined him a day’s pay.\n A whole day’s pay."
],
[
"“Well, that’s all, Cartwright.\n You can report to\n Kissman in the kitchen.”\n\n\n The First pressed a button\n on his desk and spoke into the\n intercom. “Who was on duty\n at the airlock when the crew\n came aboard last night? Send\n him up. I want to talk to him.”\n\n\n Then the quartermaster officer\n led Clayton out the door\n and took him to the kitchen.\n\n\n The ship’s driver tubes\n were pushing it along at a\n steady five hundred centimeters\n per second squared acceleration,\n pushing her steadily\n closer to Earth with a little\n more than half a gravity of\n drive.\nThere wasn’t much for\n Clayton to do, really. He helped\n to select the foods that\n went into the automatics, and\n he cleaned them out after each\n meal was cooked. Once every\n day, he had to partially dismantle\n them for a really thorough\n going-over.",
"Parks was a steward, too.\n A cook’s helper. That was\n good. If he’d been a jetman or\n something like that, the crew\n might wonder why he wasn’t\n on duty at takeoff. But a steward\n was different.\n\n\n Clayton sat for several minutes,\n looking through the\n booklet and drinking from the\n bottle. He emptied it just before\n the warning sirens keened\n through the thin air.\n\n\n Clayton got up and went\n outside toward the ship.\n\n\n “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake\n up!”\n\n\n Somebody was slapping his\n cheeks. Clayton opened his\n eyes and looked at the blurred\n face over his own.\n\n\n From a distance, another\n voice said: “Who is it?”\n\n\n The blurred face said: “I\n don’t know. He was asleep\n behind these cases. I think\n he’s drunk.”",
"It took them the better part\n of an hour to get Clayton\n awake enough to realize what\n was going on and where he\n was. Even then, he was\n plenty groggy.\nIt was the First Officer of\n the STS-52 who finally got the\n story straight. As soon as\n Clayton was in condition, the\n medic and the quartermaster\n officer who had found him\n took him up to the First Officer’s\n compartment.\n\n\n “I was checking through\n the stores this morning when\n I found this man. He was\n asleep, dead drunk, behind the\n crates.”\n\n\n “He was drunk, all right,”\n supplied the medic. “I found\n this in his pocket.” He flipped\n a booklet to the First Officer.\n\n\n The First was a young man,\n not older than twenty-eight\n with tough-looking gray eyes.\n He looked over the booklet.\n\n\n “Where did you get Parkinson’s\n ID booklet? And his uniform?”",
"It didn’t matter. Volunteer\n or convict, there was no place\n Clayton could go. From the\n officer’s viewpoint, he was as\n safely imprisoned in the\n spaceship as he would be on\n Mars or a prison on Earth.\nThe First wrote in the log\n book, and then said: “Well,\n we’re one man short in the\n kitchen. You wanted to take\n Parkinson’s place; brother,\n you’ve got it—without pay.”\n He paused for a moment.\n\n\n “You know, of course,” he\n said judiciously, “that you’ll\n be shipped back to Mars immediately.\n And you’ll have to\n work out your passage both\n ways—it will be deducted\n from your pay.”\n\n\n Clayton nodded. “I know.”\n\n\n “I don’t know what else\n will happen. If there’s a conviction,\n you may lose your\n volunteer status on Mars. And\n there may be fines taken out\n of your pay, too.",
"“Not much. We only keep it\n at six pounds in the ships.\n Half helium and half oxygen.\n Only thing that bothers me is\n the oxy here. Or rather, the\n oxy that\nisn’t\nhere.” He took\n a deep breath through his\n nose tube to emphasize his\n point.\n\n\n Clayton clamped his teeth\n together, making the muscles\n at the side of his jaw stand\n out.\n\n\n Parks didn’t notice. “You\n guys have to take those pills,\n don’t you?”\n\n\n “Yeah.”",
"The First shook his head.\n “That sounds like the kind of\n trick Parkinson would pull, all\n right. I’ll have to write it up\n and turn you both in to the\n authorities when we hit\n Earth.” He eyed Clayton.\n “What’s your name?”\n\n\n “Cartwright. Sam Cartwright,”\n Clayton said without\n batting an eye.\n\n\n “Volunteer or convicted\n colonist?”\n\n\n “Volunteer.”\n\n\n The First looked at him for\n a long moment, disbelief in\n his eyes.",
"He grinned. There was a\n way. He simply had to drag\n them outside and jam the door\n lock. He took the key from the\n Engineer, inserted it, turned\n it, and snapped off the head,\n leaving the body of the key\n still in the lock. Nobody would\n unjam it in the next four minutes.\n\n\n Then he began to run up\n the stairwell toward the good\n lifeboat.\n\n\n He was panting and out of\n breath when he arrived, but\n no one had stopped him. No\n one had even seen him.\n\n\n He clambered into the lifeboat,\n made everything ready,\n and waited.\n\n\n The signal bombs were not\n heavy charges; their main\n purposes was to make a flare\n bright enough to be seen for\n thousands of miles in space.\n Fluorine and magnesium\n made plenty of light—and\n heat.",
"“\nShut up!\n” the woman\n snapped harshly. “I’m getting\n sick of it! I personally think\n you should have been locked\n up—permanently. I think this\n idea of forced colonization is\n going to breed trouble for\n Earth someday, but it is about\n the only way you can get anybody\n to colonize this frozen\n hunk of mud.\n\n\n “Just keep it in mind that\n I don’t like it any better than\n you do—\nand I didn’t strong-arm\n anybody to deserve the\n assignment!\nNow get out of\n here!”\n\n\n She moved a hand threateningly\n toward the manual controls\n of the stun beam.\n\n\n Clayton retreated fast. The\n trackers ignored anyone walking\n away from the desk; they\n were set only to spot threatening\n movements toward it.",
"The uniform fit Clayton\n fine, and so did the nose mask.\n He dumped his own clothing\n on top of Parks’ nearly nude\n body, adjusted the little oxygen\n tank so that the gas would\n flow properly through the\n mask, took the first deep\n breath of good air he’d had\n in fifteen years, and walked\n toward the spacefield.\nHe went into the men’s\n room at the Port Building,\n took a drink, and felt in the\n pockets of the uniform for\n Parks’ identification. He\n found it and opened the booklet.\n It read:\nPARKINSON, HERBERT J.\n\n Steward 2nd Class, STS\n\n\n Above it was a photo, and a\n set of fingerprints.\n\n\n Clayton grinned. They’d\n never know it wasn’t Parks\n getting on the ship.",
"The ship was eight hours\n out from Earth and still decelerating\n when Clayton pulled\n his getaway.\nIt was surprisingly easy.\n He was supposed to be asleep\n when he sneaked down to the\n drive compartment with the\n knife. He pushed open the\n door, looked in, and grinned\n like an ape.\n\n\n The Engineer and the two\n jetmen were out cold from the\n chloral hydrate in the coffee\n from the kitchen.\n\n\n Moving rapidly, he went to\n the spares locker and began\n methodically to smash every\n replacement part for the\n drivers. Then he took three\n of the signal bombs from the\n emergency kit, set them for\n five minutes, and placed them\n around the driver circuits.\n\n\n He looked at the three sleeping\n men. What if they woke\n up before the bombs went off?\n He didn’t want to kill them\n though. He wanted them to\n know what had happened and\n who had done it.",
"Outside the Rehabilitation\n Service Building, Clayton\n could feel the tears running\n down the inside of his face\n mask. He’d asked again and\n again—God only knew how\n many times—in the past fifteen\n years. Always the same\n answer. No.\n\n\n When he’d heard that this\n new administrator was a\n woman, he’d hoped she might\n be easier to convince. She\n wasn’t. If anything, she was\n harder than the others.\n\n\n The heat-sucking frigidity\n of the thin Martian air whispered\n around him in a feeble\n breeze. He shivered a little\n and began walking toward the\n recreation center.\n\n\n There was a high, thin\n piping in the sky above him\n which quickly became a\n scream in the thin air.\n\n\n He turned for a moment to\n watch the ship land, squinting\n his eyes to see the number on\n the hull.",
"A voice next to him said:\n “I’ll have a whiskey.”\nThe voice sounded as if the\n man had a bad cold, and Clayton\n turned slowly to look at\n him. After all the sterilization\n they went through before they\n left Earth, nobody on Mars\n ever had a cold, so there was\n only one thing that would\n make a man’s voice sound\n like that.\n\n\n Clayton was right. The fellow\n had an oxygen tube\n clamped firmly over his nose.\n He was wearing the uniform\n of the Space Transport Service.\n\n\n “Just get in on the ship?”\n Clayton asked conversationally.\n\n\n The man nodded and grinned.\n “Yeah. Four hours before\n we take off again.” He poured\n down the whiskey. “Sure cold\n out.”\n\n\n Clayton agreed. “It’s always\n cold.” He watched enviously\n as the spaceman ordered\n another whiskey.",
"Lieutenant Harris glanced\n at the man before her for only\n a moment before she returned\n her eyes to the dossier on the\n desk; but long enough to verify\n the impression his voice\n had given. Ron Clayton was a\n big, ugly, cowardly, dangerous\n man.\n\n\n He said: “Well? Dammit,\n say something!”\n\n\n The lieutenant raised her\n eyes again. “Just be patient\n until I’ve read this.” Her voice\n and eyes were expressionless,\n but her hand moved beneath\n the desk.\nThe frightful carnage would go down in the bloody history of space.\n\n\n Clayton froze.\nShe’s yellow!\nhe thought. She’s turned on\n the trackers! He could see the\n pale greenish glow of their\n little eyes watching him all\n around the room. If he made\n any fast move, they would cut\n him down with a stun beam\n before he could get two feet.",
"Nobody on the ship liked\n him; they couldn’t appreciate\n his position. He hadn’t done\n anything to them, but they\n just didn’t like him. He didn’t\n know why; he’d\ntried\nto get\n along with them. Well, if they\n didn’t like him, the hell with\n them.\n\n\n If things worked out the\n way he figured, they’d be\n damned sorry.\n\n\n He was very clever about\n the whole plan. When turn-over\n came, he pretended to\n get violently spacesick. That\n gave him an opportunity to\n steal a bottle of chloral hydrate\n from the medic’s locker.\n\n\n And, while he worked in the\n kitchen, he spent a great deal\n of time sharpening a big carving\n knife.\n\n\n Once, during his off time,\n he managed to disable one of\n the ship’s two lifeboats. He\n was saving the other for himself.",
"“Indiana? That’s nice. Real\n nice.”\n\n\n “Yeah. You talk about\n green hills, we got green hills\n in Indiana. What time is it?”\n\n\n Clayton told him.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise! Ol’ spaship\n takes off in an hour. Ought\n to have one more drink first.”\n\n\n Clayton realized he didn’t\n like Parks. But maybe he’d\n buy a bottle.\n\n\n Sharkie Johnson worked in\n Fuels Section, and he made a\n nice little sideline of stealing\n alcohol, cutting it, and selling\n it. He thought it was real\n funny to call it Martian Gin.\n\n\n Clayton said: “Let’s go over\n to Sharkie’s. Sharkie will sell\n us a bottle.”",
"Fifty-two. Space Transport\n Ship Fifty-two.\n\n\n Probably bringing another\n load of poor suckers to freeze\n to death on Mars.\n\n\n That was the thing he hated\n about Mars—the cold. The\n everlasting damned cold! And\n the oxidation pills; take one\n every three hours or smother\n in the poor, thin air.\n\n\n The government could have\n put up domes; it could have\n put in building-to-building\n tunnels, at least. It could have\n done a hell of a lot of things\n to make Mars a decent place\n for human beings.\n\n\n But no—the government\n had other ideas. A bunch of\n bigshot scientific characters\n had come up with the idea\n nearly twenty-three years before.\n Clayton could remember\n the words on the sheet he had\n been given when he was sentenced.",
"Clayton looked down at his\n clothes in wonder. “I don’t\n know.”\n\n\n “You\ndon’t know\n? That’s a\n hell of an answer.”\n\n\n “Well, I was drunk,” Clayton\n said defensively. “A man\n doesn’t know what he’s doing\n when he’s drunk.” He frowned\n in concentration. He knew\n he’d have to think up some\n story.\n\n\n “I kind of remember we\n made a bet. I bet him I could\n get on the ship. Sure—I remember,\n now. That’s what\n happened; I bet him I could\n get on the ship and we traded\n clothes.”\n\n\n “Where is he now?”\n\n\n “At my place, sleeping it\n off, I guess.”\n\n\n “Without his oxy-mask?”\n\n\n “Oh, I gave him my oxidation\n pills for the mask.”",
"When the alarm rang,\n Earth was a mottled globe\n looming hugely beneath the\n ship. Clayton watched the\n dials on the board, and began\n to follow the instructions on\n the landing sheet.\n\n\n He wasn’t too good at it.\n The accelerometer climbed\n higher and higher, and he felt\n as though he could hardly\n move his hands to the proper\n switches.\n\n\n He was less than fifteen\n feet off the ground when his\n hand slipped. The ship, out of\n control, shifted, spun, and\n toppled over on its side,\n smashing a great hole in the\n cabin.\n\n\n Clayton shook his head and\n tried to stand up in the wreckage.\n He got to his hands and\n knees, dizzy but unhurt, and\n took a deep breath of the fresh\n air that was blowing in\n through the hole in the cabin.\n\n\n It felt just like home.\nBureau of Criminal Investigation\n\n Regional Headquarters",
"At the bar, he ordered a\n beer and used it to wash down\n another oxidation tablet. It\n wasn’t good beer; it didn’t\n even deserve the name. The\n atmospheric pressure was so\n low as to boil all the carbon\n dioxide out of it, so the brewers\n never put it back in after\n fermentation.\n\n\n He was sorry for what he\n had done—really and truly\n sorry. If they’d only give him\n one more chance, he’d make\n good. Just one more chance.\n He’d work things out.\n\n\n He’d promised himself that\n both times they’d put him up\n before, but things had been\n different then. He hadn’t really\n been given another chance,\n what with parole boards and\n all.\n\n\n Clayton closed his eyes and\n finished the beer. He ordered\n another.",
"“Mankind is inherently an\n adaptable animal. If we are to\n colonize the planets of the\n Solar System, we must meet\n the conditions on those planets\n as best we can.\n\n\n “Financially, it is impracticable\n to change an entire\n planet from its original condition\n to one which will support\n human life as it exists on\n Terra.\n\n\n “But man, since he is adaptable,\n can change himself—modify\n his structure slightly—so\n that he can live on these\n planets with only a minimum\n of change in the environment.”\nSo they made you live outside\n and like it. So you froze\n and you choked and you suffered.\n\n\n Clayton hated Mars. He\n hated the thin air and the\n cold. More than anything, he\n hated the cold.\n\n\n Ron Clayton wanted to go\n home."
],
[
"And all the time, he was\n thinking.\n\n\n Parkinson must be dead;\n he knew that. That meant the\n Chamber. And even if he wasn’t,\n they’d send Clayton back\n to Mars. Luckily, there was no\n way for either planet to communicate\n with the ship; it was\n hard enough to keep a beam\n trained on a planet without\n trying to hit such a comparatively\n small thing as a ship.\n\n\n But they would know about\n it on Earth by now. They\n would pick him up the instant\n the ship landed. And the best\n he could hope for was a return\n to Mars.",
"Landing the lifeship would\n be the only difficult part of\n the maneuver, but they were\n designed to be handled by beginners.\n Full instructions\n were printed on the simplified\n control board.\nClayton studied them for\n a while, then set the alarm to\n waken him in seven hours and\n dozed off to sleep.\n\n\n He dreamed of Indiana. It\n was full of nice, green hills\n and leafy woods, and Parkinson\n was inviting him over to\n his mother’s house for chicken\n and whiskey. And all for free.\n\n\n Beneath the dream was the\n calm assurance that they\n would never catch him and\n send him back. When the\n STS-52 failed to show up,\n they would think he had been\n lost with it. They would never\n look for him.",
"“And that, that—” Clayton\n said as Parks doubled over.\n\n\n He said it again as he kicked\n him in the head. And in\n the ribs. Parks was gasping\n as he writhed on the ground,\n but he soon lay still.\n\n\n Then Clayton saw why.\n Parks’ nose tube had come off\n when Clayton’s foot struck\n his head.\n\n\n Parks was breathing heavily,\n but he wasn’t getting any\n oxygen.\n\n\n That was when the Big\n Idea hit Ron Clayton. With a\n nosepiece on like that, you\n couldn’t tell who a man was.\n He took another drink from\n the jug and then began to\n take Parks’ clothes off.",
"Clayton looked down at his\n clothes in wonder. “I don’t\n know.”\n\n\n “You\ndon’t know\n? That’s a\n hell of an answer.”\n\n\n “Well, I was drunk,” Clayton\n said defensively. “A man\n doesn’t know what he’s doing\n when he’s drunk.” He frowned\n in concentration. He knew\n he’d have to think up some\n story.\n\n\n “I kind of remember we\n made a bet. I bet him I could\n get on the ship. Sure—I remember,\n now. That’s what\n happened; I bet him I could\n get on the ship and we traded\n clothes.”\n\n\n “Where is he now?”\n\n\n “At my place, sleeping it\n off, I guess.”\n\n\n “Without his oxy-mask?”\n\n\n “Oh, I gave him my oxidation\n pills for the mask.”",
"The ship was eight hours\n out from Earth and still decelerating\n when Clayton pulled\n his getaway.\nIt was surprisingly easy.\n He was supposed to be asleep\n when he sneaked down to the\n drive compartment with the\n knife. He pushed open the\n door, looked in, and grinned\n like an ape.\n\n\n The Engineer and the two\n jetmen were out cold from the\n chloral hydrate in the coffee\n from the kitchen.\n\n\n Moving rapidly, he went to\n the spares locker and began\n methodically to smash every\n replacement part for the\n drivers. Then he took three\n of the signal bombs from the\n emergency kit, set them for\n five minutes, and placed them\n around the driver circuits.\n\n\n He looked at the three sleeping\n men. What if they woke\n up before the bombs went off?\n He didn’t want to kill them\n though. He wanted them to\n know what had happened and\n who had done it.",
"Parks was a steward, too.\n A cook’s helper. That was\n good. If he’d been a jetman or\n something like that, the crew\n might wonder why he wasn’t\n on duty at takeoff. But a steward\n was different.\n\n\n Clayton sat for several minutes,\n looking through the\n booklet and drinking from the\n bottle. He emptied it just before\n the warning sirens keened\n through the thin air.\n\n\n Clayton got up and went\n outside toward the ship.\n\n\n “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake\n up!”\n\n\n Somebody was slapping his\n cheeks. Clayton opened his\n eyes and looked at the blurred\n face over his own.\n\n\n From a distance, another\n voice said: “Who is it?”\n\n\n The blurred face said: “I\n don’t know. He was asleep\n behind these cases. I think\n he’s drunk.”",
"To escape from Mars, all Clayton had to do was the impossible. Break out of\n a crack-proof exile camp—get onto a ship that couldn’t be\n boarded—smash through an impenetrable wall of steel. Perhaps he could do\n all these things, but he discovered that Mars did evil things to men; that he\n wasn’t even Clayton any more. He was only—\nThe Man Who Hated Mars\nBy RANDALL GARRETT\n“I want\n you to put me in prison!” the big, hairy man said in\n a trembling voice.\n\n\n He was addressing his request\n to a thin woman sitting\n behind a desk that seemed\n much too big for her. The\n plaque on the desk said:\nLT. PHOEBE HARRIS\n\n TERRAN REHABILITATION SERVICE",
"“But it isn’t fair! The most\n I’d have got on that frame-up\n would’ve been ten years. I’ve\n been here fifteen already!”\n\n\n “I’m sorry, Clayton. It can’t\n be done. You’re here. Period.\n Forget about trying to get\n back. Earth doesn’t want\n you.” Her voice sounded\n choppy, as though she were\n trying to keep it calm.\n\n\n Clayton broke into a whining\n rage. “You can’t do that!\n It isn’t fair! I never did anything\n to you! I’ll go talk to the\n Governor! He’ll listen to reason!\n You’ll see! I’ll—”",
"He grinned. There was a\n way. He simply had to drag\n them outside and jam the door\n lock. He took the key from the\n Engineer, inserted it, turned\n it, and snapped off the head,\n leaving the body of the key\n still in the lock. Nobody would\n unjam it in the next four minutes.\n\n\n Then he began to run up\n the stairwell toward the good\n lifeboat.\n\n\n He was panting and out of\n breath when he arrived, but\n no one had stopped him. No\n one had even seen him.\n\n\n He clambered into the lifeboat,\n made everything ready,\n and waited.\n\n\n The signal bombs were not\n heavy charges; their main\n purposes was to make a flare\n bright enough to be seen for\n thousands of miles in space.\n Fluorine and magnesium\n made plenty of light—and\n heat.",
"It didn’t matter. Volunteer\n or convict, there was no place\n Clayton could go. From the\n officer’s viewpoint, he was as\n safely imprisoned in the\n spaceship as he would be on\n Mars or a prison on Earth.\nThe First wrote in the log\n book, and then said: “Well,\n we’re one man short in the\n kitchen. You wanted to take\n Parkinson’s place; brother,\n you’ve got it—without pay.”\n He paused for a moment.\n\n\n “You know, of course,” he\n said judiciously, “that you’ll\n be shipped back to Mars immediately.\n And you’ll have to\n work out your passage both\n ways—it will be deducted\n from your pay.”\n\n\n Clayton nodded. “I know.”\n\n\n “I don’t know what else\n will happen. If there’s a conviction,\n you may lose your\n volunteer status on Mars. And\n there may be fines taken out\n of your pay, too.",
"Clayton couldn’t afford\n whiskey. He probably could\n have by this time, if the mines\n had made him a foreman, like\n they should have.\n\n\n Maybe he could talk the\n spaceman out of a couple of\n drinks.\n\n\n “My name’s Clayton. Ron\n Clayton.”\n\n\n The spaceman took the offered\n hand. “Mine’s Parkinson,\n but everybody calls me\n Parks.”\n\n\n “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I\n buy you a beer?”\n\n\n Parks shook his head. “No,\n thanks. I started on whiskey.\n Here, let me buy you one.”\n\n\n “Well—thanks. Don’t mind\n if I do.”\n\n\n They drank them in silence,\n and Parks ordered two more.\n\n\n “Been here long?” Parks\n asked.",
"The uniform fit Clayton\n fine, and so did the nose mask.\n He dumped his own clothing\n on top of Parks’ nearly nude\n body, adjusted the little oxygen\n tank so that the gas would\n flow properly through the\n mask, took the first deep\n breath of good air he’d had\n in fifteen years, and walked\n toward the spacefield.\nHe went into the men’s\n room at the Port Building,\n took a drink, and felt in the\n pockets of the uniform for\n Parks’ identification. He\n found it and opened the booklet.\n It read:\nPARKINSON, HERBERT J.\n\n Steward 2nd Class, STS\n\n\n Above it was a photo, and a\n set of fingerprints.\n\n\n Clayton grinned. They’d\n never know it wasn’t Parks\n getting on the ship.",
"She had thought he was\n going to jump her.\nLittle rat!\nhe thought,\nsomebody ought\n to slap her down!\nHe watched her check\n through the heavy dossier in\n front of her. Finally, she looked\n up at him again.\n\n\n “Clayton, your last conviction\n was for strong-arm robbery.\n You were given a choice\n between prison on Earth and\n freedom here on Mars. You\n picked Mars.”\n\n\n He nodded slowly. He’d\n been broke and hungry at the\n time. A sneaky little rat\n named Johnson had bilked\n Clayton out of his fair share\n of the Corey payroll job, and\n Clayton had been forced to\n get the money somehow. He\n hadn’t mussed the guy up\n much; besides, it was the\n sucker’s own fault. If he hadn’t\n tried to yell—\n\n\n Lieutenant Harris went on:\n “I’m afraid you can’t back\n down now.”",
"When the alarm rang,\n Earth was a mottled globe\n looming hugely beneath the\n ship. Clayton watched the\n dials on the board, and began\n to follow the instructions on\n the landing sheet.\n\n\n He wasn’t too good at it.\n The accelerometer climbed\n higher and higher, and he felt\n as though he could hardly\n move his hands to the proper\n switches.\n\n\n He was less than fifteen\n feet off the ground when his\n hand slipped. The ship, out of\n control, shifted, spun, and\n toppled over on its side,\n smashing a great hole in the\n cabin.\n\n\n Clayton shook his head and\n tried to stand up in the wreckage.\n He got to his hands and\n knees, dizzy but unhurt, and\n took a deep breath of the fresh\n air that was blowing in\n through the hole in the cabin.\n\n\n It felt just like home.\nBureau of Criminal Investigation\n\n Regional Headquarters",
"The medic in the sick bay\n fired two shots from a hypo-gun\n into both arms, but Clayton\n ignored the slight sting.\n\n\n “Where am I?”\n\n\n “Real original. Here, take\n these.” He handed Clayton a\n couple of capsules, and gave\n him a glass of water to wash\n them down with.\n\n\n When the water hit his\n stomach, there was an immediate\n reaction.\n\n\n “Oh, Christ!” the medic\n said. “Get a mop, somebody.\n Here, bud; heave into this.”\n He put a basin on the table\n in front of Clayton.",
"The First shook his head.\n “That sounds like the kind of\n trick Parkinson would pull, all\n right. I’ll have to write it up\n and turn you both in to the\n authorities when we hit\n Earth.” He eyed Clayton.\n “What’s your name?”\n\n\n “Cartwright. Sam Cartwright,”\n Clayton said without\n batting an eye.\n\n\n “Volunteer or convicted\n colonist?”\n\n\n “Volunteer.”\n\n\n The First looked at him for\n a long moment, disbelief in\n his eyes.",
"Clayton wasn’t drunk—he\n was sick. His head felt like\n hell. Where the devil was he?\n\n\n “Get up, bud. Come on, get\n up!”\n\n\n Clayton pulled himself up\n by holding to the man’s arm.\n The effort made him dizzy\n and nauseated.\n\n\n The other man said: “Take\n him down to sick bay, Casey.\n Get some thiamin into him.”\n\n\n Clayton didn’t struggle as\n they led him down to the sick\n bay. He was trying to clear\n his head. Where was he? He\n must have been pretty drunk\n last night.\n\n\n He remembered meeting\n Parks. And getting thrown\n out by the bartender. Then\n what?\n\n\n Oh, yeah. He’d gone to the\n Shark’s for a bottle. From\n there on, it was mostly gone.\n He remembered a fight or\n something, but that was all\n that registered.",
"He’d worked in the mines\n for fifteen years. It wasn’t\n that he minded work really,\n but the foreman had it in for\n him. Always giving him a bad\n time; always picking out the\n lousy jobs for him.\n\n\n Like the time he’d crawled\n into a side-boring in Tunnel\n 12 for a nap during lunch and\n the foreman had caught him.\n When he promised never to\n do it again if the foreman\n wouldn’t put it on report, the\n guy said, “Yeah. Sure. Hate\n to hurt a guy’s record.”\n\n\n Then he’d put Clayton on\n report anyway. Strictly a rat.\n\n\n Not that Clayton ran any\n chance of being fired; they\n never fired anybody. But\n they’d fined him a day’s pay.\n A whole day’s pay.",
"“Something like that happened\n to me a couple of years\n ago,” Clayton began. “I’m\n supervisor on the third shift\n in the mines at Xanthe, but\n at the time, I was only a foreman.\n One day, a couple of\n guys went to a branch tunnel\n to—”\n\n\n It was a very good story.\n Clayton had made it up himself,\n so he knew that Parks\n had never heard it before. It\n was gory in just the right\n places, with a nice effect at\n the end.\n\n\n “—so I had to hold up the\n rocks with my back while the\n rescue crew pulled the others\n out of the tunnel by crawling\n between my legs. Finally, they\n got some steel beams down\n there to take the load off, and\n I could let go. I was in the\n hospital for a week,” he finished.",
"At the bar, he ordered a\n beer and used it to wash down\n another oxidation tablet. It\n wasn’t good beer; it didn’t\n even deserve the name. The\n atmospheric pressure was so\n low as to boil all the carbon\n dioxide out of it, so the brewers\n never put it back in after\n fermentation.\n\n\n He was sorry for what he\n had done—really and truly\n sorry. If they’d only give him\n one more chance, he’d make\n good. Just one more chance.\n He’d work things out.\n\n\n He’d promised himself that\n both times they’d put him up\n before, but things had been\n different then. He hadn’t really\n been given another chance,\n what with parole boards and\n all.\n\n\n Clayton closed his eyes and\n finished the beer. He ordered\n another."
],
[
"Landing the lifeship would\n be the only difficult part of\n the maneuver, but they were\n designed to be handled by beginners.\n Full instructions\n were printed on the simplified\n control board.\nClayton studied them for\n a while, then set the alarm to\n waken him in seven hours and\n dozed off to sleep.\n\n\n He dreamed of Indiana. It\n was full of nice, green hills\n and leafy woods, and Parkinson\n was inviting him over to\n his mother’s house for chicken\n and whiskey. And all for free.\n\n\n Beneath the dream was the\n calm assurance that they\n would never catch him and\n send him back. When the\n STS-52 failed to show up,\n they would think he had been\n lost with it. They would never\n look for him.",
"It took them the better part\n of an hour to get Clayton\n awake enough to realize what\n was going on and where he\n was. Even then, he was\n plenty groggy.\nIt was the First Officer of\n the STS-52 who finally got the\n story straight. As soon as\n Clayton was in condition, the\n medic and the quartermaster\n officer who had found him\n took him up to the First Officer’s\n compartment.\n\n\n “I was checking through\n the stores this morning when\n I found this man. He was\n asleep, dead drunk, behind the\n crates.”\n\n\n “He was drunk, all right,”\n supplied the medic. “I found\n this in his pocket.” He flipped\n a booklet to the First Officer.\n\n\n The First was a young man,\n not older than twenty-eight\n with tough-looking gray eyes.\n He looked over the booklet.\n\n\n “Where did you get Parkinson’s\n ID booklet? And his uniform?”",
"The uniform fit Clayton\n fine, and so did the nose mask.\n He dumped his own clothing\n on top of Parks’ nearly nude\n body, adjusted the little oxygen\n tank so that the gas would\n flow properly through the\n mask, took the first deep\n breath of good air he’d had\n in fifteen years, and walked\n toward the spacefield.\nHe went into the men’s\n room at the Port Building,\n took a drink, and felt in the\n pockets of the uniform for\n Parks’ identification. He\n found it and opened the booklet.\n It read:\nPARKINSON, HERBERT J.\n\n Steward 2nd Class, STS\n\n\n Above it was a photo, and a\n set of fingerprints.\n\n\n Clayton grinned. They’d\n never know it wasn’t Parks\n getting on the ship.",
"Cheyenne, Wyoming\n\n 20 January 2102\nTo: Space Transport Service\n\n Subject: Lifeship 2, STS-52\n\n Attention Mr. P. D. Latimer\n\n\n Dear Paul,\n\n\n I have on hand the copies\n of your reports on the rescue\n of the men on the disabled\n STS-52. It is fortunate that\n the Lunar radar stations could\n compute their orbit.\n\n\n The detailed official report\n will follow, but briefly, this is\n what happened:\n\n\n The lifeship landed—or,\n rather, crashed—several miles\n west of Cheyenne, as you\n know, but it was impossible\n to find the man who was piloting\n it until yesterday because\n of the weather.\n\n\n He has been identified as\n Ronald Watkins Clayton, exiled\n to Mars fifteen years ago.",
"Quite suddenly, there was\n no gravity. He had felt nothing,\n but he knew that the\n bombs had exploded. He\n punched the LAUNCH switch\n on the control board of the\n lifeboat, and the little ship\n leaped out from the side of the\n greater one.\n\n\n Then he turned on the\n drive, set it at half a gee, and\n watched the STS-52 drop behind\n him. It was no longer\n decelerating, so it would miss\n Earth and drift on into space.\n On the other hand, the lifeship\n would come down very\n neatly within a few hundred\n miles of the spaceport in\n Utah, the destination of the\n STS-52.",
"Parks was a steward, too.\n A cook’s helper. That was\n good. If he’d been a jetman or\n something like that, the crew\n might wonder why he wasn’t\n on duty at takeoff. But a steward\n was different.\n\n\n Clayton sat for several minutes,\n looking through the\n booklet and drinking from the\n bottle. He emptied it just before\n the warning sirens keened\n through the thin air.\n\n\n Clayton got up and went\n outside toward the ship.\n\n\n “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake\n up!”\n\n\n Somebody was slapping his\n cheeks. Clayton opened his\n eyes and looked at the blurred\n face over his own.\n\n\n From a distance, another\n voice said: “Who is it?”\n\n\n The blurred face said: “I\n don’t know. He was asleep\n behind these cases. I think\n he’s drunk.”",
"Fifty-two. Space Transport\n Ship Fifty-two.\n\n\n Probably bringing another\n load of poor suckers to freeze\n to death on Mars.\n\n\n That was the thing he hated\n about Mars—the cold. The\n everlasting damned cold! And\n the oxidation pills; take one\n every three hours or smother\n in the poor, thin air.\n\n\n The government could have\n put up domes; it could have\n put in building-to-building\n tunnels, at least. It could have\n done a hell of a lot of things\n to make Mars a decent place\n for human beings.\n\n\n But no—the government\n had other ideas. A bunch of\n bigshot scientific characters\n had come up with the idea\n nearly twenty-three years before.\n Clayton could remember\n the words on the sheet he had\n been given when he was sentenced.",
"“Well, that’s all, Cartwright.\n You can report to\n Kissman in the kitchen.”\n\n\n The First pressed a button\n on his desk and spoke into the\n intercom. “Who was on duty\n at the airlock when the crew\n came aboard last night? Send\n him up. I want to talk to him.”\n\n\n Then the quartermaster officer\n led Clayton out the door\n and took him to the kitchen.\n\n\n The ship’s driver tubes\n were pushing it along at a\n steady five hundred centimeters\n per second squared acceleration,\n pushing her steadily\n closer to Earth with a little\n more than half a gravity of\n drive.\nThere wasn’t much for\n Clayton to do, really. He helped\n to select the foods that\n went into the automatics, and\n he cleaned them out after each\n meal was cooked. Once every\n day, he had to partially dismantle\n them for a really thorough\n going-over.",
"Clayton looked down at his\n clothes in wonder. “I don’t\n know.”\n\n\n “You\ndon’t know\n? That’s a\n hell of an answer.”\n\n\n “Well, I was drunk,” Clayton\n said defensively. “A man\n doesn’t know what he’s doing\n when he’s drunk.” He frowned\n in concentration. He knew\n he’d have to think up some\n story.\n\n\n “I kind of remember we\n made a bet. I bet him I could\n get on the ship. Sure—I remember,\n now. That’s what\n happened; I bet him I could\n get on the ship and we traded\n clothes.”\n\n\n “Where is he now?”\n\n\n “At my place, sleeping it\n off, I guess.”\n\n\n “Without his oxy-mask?”\n\n\n “Oh, I gave him my oxidation\n pills for the mask.”",
"The ship was eight hours\n out from Earth and still decelerating\n when Clayton pulled\n his getaway.\nIt was surprisingly easy.\n He was supposed to be asleep\n when he sneaked down to the\n drive compartment with the\n knife. He pushed open the\n door, looked in, and grinned\n like an ape.\n\n\n The Engineer and the two\n jetmen were out cold from the\n chloral hydrate in the coffee\n from the kitchen.\n\n\n Moving rapidly, he went to\n the spares locker and began\n methodically to smash every\n replacement part for the\n drivers. Then he took three\n of the signal bombs from the\n emergency kit, set them for\n five minutes, and placed them\n around the driver circuits.\n\n\n He looked at the three sleeping\n men. What if they woke\n up before the bombs went off?\n He didn’t want to kill them\n though. He wanted them to\n know what had happened and\n who had done it.",
"Outside the Rehabilitation\n Service Building, Clayton\n could feel the tears running\n down the inside of his face\n mask. He’d asked again and\n again—God only knew how\n many times—in the past fifteen\n years. Always the same\n answer. No.\n\n\n When he’d heard that this\n new administrator was a\n woman, he’d hoped she might\n be easier to convince. She\n wasn’t. If anything, she was\n harder than the others.\n\n\n The heat-sucking frigidity\n of the thin Martian air whispered\n around him in a feeble\n breeze. He shivered a little\n and began walking toward the\n recreation center.\n\n\n There was a high, thin\n piping in the sky above him\n which quickly became a\n scream in the thin air.\n\n\n He turned for a moment to\n watch the ship land, squinting\n his eyes to see the number on\n the hull.",
"The medic in the sick bay\n fired two shots from a hypo-gun\n into both arms, but Clayton\n ignored the slight sting.\n\n\n “Where am I?”\n\n\n “Real original. Here, take\n these.” He handed Clayton a\n couple of capsules, and gave\n him a glass of water to wash\n them down with.\n\n\n When the water hit his\n stomach, there was an immediate\n reaction.\n\n\n “Oh, Christ!” the medic\n said. “Get a mop, somebody.\n Here, bud; heave into this.”\n He put a basin on the table\n in front of Clayton.",
"Clayton couldn’t afford\n whiskey. He probably could\n have by this time, if the mines\n had made him a foreman, like\n they should have.\n\n\n Maybe he could talk the\n spaceman out of a couple of\n drinks.\n\n\n “My name’s Clayton. Ron\n Clayton.”\n\n\n The spaceman took the offered\n hand. “Mine’s Parkinson,\n but everybody calls me\n Parks.”\n\n\n “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I\n buy you a beer?”\n\n\n Parks shook his head. “No,\n thanks. I started on whiskey.\n Here, let me buy you one.”\n\n\n “Well—thanks. Don’t mind\n if I do.”\n\n\n They drank them in silence,\n and Parks ordered two more.\n\n\n “Been here long?” Parks\n asked.",
"The First shook his head.\n “That sounds like the kind of\n trick Parkinson would pull, all\n right. I’ll have to write it up\n and turn you both in to the\n authorities when we hit\n Earth.” He eyed Clayton.\n “What’s your name?”\n\n\n “Cartwright. Sam Cartwright,”\n Clayton said without\n batting an eye.\n\n\n “Volunteer or convicted\n colonist?”\n\n\n “Volunteer.”\n\n\n The First looked at him for\n a long moment, disbelief in\n his eyes.",
"It didn’t matter. Volunteer\n or convict, there was no place\n Clayton could go. From the\n officer’s viewpoint, he was as\n safely imprisoned in the\n spaceship as he would be on\n Mars or a prison on Earth.\nThe First wrote in the log\n book, and then said: “Well,\n we’re one man short in the\n kitchen. You wanted to take\n Parkinson’s place; brother,\n you’ve got it—without pay.”\n He paused for a moment.\n\n\n “You know, of course,” he\n said judiciously, “that you’ll\n be shipped back to Mars immediately.\n And you’ll have to\n work out your passage both\n ways—it will be deducted\n from your pay.”\n\n\n Clayton nodded. “I know.”\n\n\n “I don’t know what else\n will happen. If there’s a conviction,\n you may lose your\n volunteer status on Mars. And\n there may be fines taken out\n of your pay, too.",
"And all the time, he was\n thinking.\n\n\n Parkinson must be dead;\n he knew that. That meant the\n Chamber. And even if he wasn’t,\n they’d send Clayton back\n to Mars. Luckily, there was no\n way for either planet to communicate\n with the ship; it was\n hard enough to keep a beam\n trained on a planet without\n trying to hit such a comparatively\n small thing as a ship.\n\n\n But they would know about\n it on Earth by now. They\n would pick him up the instant\n the ship landed. And the best\n he could hope for was a return\n to Mars.",
"“I had to take them once.\n Got stranded on Luna. The cat\n I was in broke down eighty\n some miles from Aristarchus\n Base and I had to walk back—with\n my oxy low. Well, I\n figured—”\nClayton listened to Parks’\n story with a great show of attention,\n but he had heard it\n before. This “lost on the\n moon” stuff and its variations\n had been going the rounds for\n forty years. Every once in a\n while, it actually did happen\n to someone; just often enough\n to keep the story going.\n\n\n This guy did have a couple\n of new twists, but not enough\n to make the story worthwhile.\n\n\n “Boy,” Clayton said when\n Parks had finished, “you were\n lucky to come out of that\n alive!”\n\n\n Parks nodded, well pleased\n with himself, and bought another\n round of drinks.",
"“\nShut up!\n” the woman\n snapped harshly. “I’m getting\n sick of it! I personally think\n you should have been locked\n up—permanently. I think this\n idea of forced colonization is\n going to breed trouble for\n Earth someday, but it is about\n the only way you can get anybody\n to colonize this frozen\n hunk of mud.\n\n\n “Just keep it in mind that\n I don’t like it any better than\n you do—\nand I didn’t strong-arm\n anybody to deserve the\n assignment!\nNow get out of\n here!”\n\n\n She moved a hand threateningly\n toward the manual controls\n of the stun beam.\n\n\n Clayton retreated fast. The\n trackers ignored anyone walking\n away from the desk; they\n were set only to spot threatening\n movements toward it.",
"At the bar, he ordered a\n beer and used it to wash down\n another oxidation tablet. It\n wasn’t good beer; it didn’t\n even deserve the name. The\n atmospheric pressure was so\n low as to boil all the carbon\n dioxide out of it, so the brewers\n never put it back in after\n fermentation.\n\n\n He was sorry for what he\n had done—really and truly\n sorry. If they’d only give him\n one more chance, he’d make\n good. Just one more chance.\n He’d work things out.\n\n\n He’d promised himself that\n both times they’d put him up\n before, but things had been\n different then. He hadn’t really\n been given another chance,\n what with parole boards and\n all.\n\n\n Clayton closed his eyes and\n finished the beer. He ordered\n another.",
"“Sure. I got the bottle.\n Want a drink?”\n\n\n Parks took the bottle, opened\n it, and took a good belt out\n of it.\n\n\n “Hooh!” he breathed.\n “Pretty smooth.”\n\n\n As Clayton drank, Parks\n said: “Hey! I better get back\n to the field! I know! We can\n go to the men’s room and\n finish the bottle before the\n ship takes off! Isn’t that a\n good idea? It’s warm there.”\n\n\n They started back down the\n street toward the spacefield."
],
[
"Parks was nodding vaguely.\n Clayton looked up at the clock\n above the bar and realized\n that they had been talking for\n better than an hour. Parks\n was buying another round.\n\n\n Parks was a hell of a nice\n fellow.\n\n\n There was, Clayton found,\n only one trouble with Parks.\n He got to talking so loud that\n the bartender refused to serve\n either one of them any more.\nThe bartender said Clayton\n was getting loud, too, but it\n was just because he had to\n talk loud to make Parks hear\n him.\n\n\n Clayton helped Parks put\n his mask and parka on and\n they walked out into the cold\n night.\n\n\n Parks began to sing\nGreen\n Hills\n. About halfway through,\n he stopped and turned to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “I’m from Indiana.”\n\n\n Clayton had already spotted\n him as an American by his\n accent.",
"“And that, that—” Clayton\n said as Parks doubled over.\n\n\n He said it again as he kicked\n him in the head. And in\n the ribs. Parks was gasping\n as he writhed on the ground,\n but he soon lay still.\n\n\n Then Clayton saw why.\n Parks’ nose tube had come off\n when Clayton’s foot struck\n his head.\n\n\n Parks was breathing heavily,\n but he wasn’t getting any\n oxygen.\n\n\n That was when the Big\n Idea hit Ron Clayton. With a\n nosepiece on like that, you\n couldn’t tell who a man was.\n He took another drink from\n the jug and then began to\n take Parks’ clothes off.",
"Parks was a steward, too.\n A cook’s helper. That was\n good. If he’d been a jetman or\n something like that, the crew\n might wonder why he wasn’t\n on duty at takeoff. But a steward\n was different.\n\n\n Clayton sat for several minutes,\n looking through the\n booklet and drinking from the\n bottle. He emptied it just before\n the warning sirens keened\n through the thin air.\n\n\n Clayton got up and went\n outside toward the ship.\n\n\n “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake\n up!”\n\n\n Somebody was slapping his\n cheeks. Clayton opened his\n eyes and looked at the blurred\n face over his own.\n\n\n From a distance, another\n voice said: “Who is it?”\n\n\n The blurred face said: “I\n don’t know. He was asleep\n behind these cases. I think\n he’s drunk.”",
"Clayton couldn’t afford\n whiskey. He probably could\n have by this time, if the mines\n had made him a foreman, like\n they should have.\n\n\n Maybe he could talk the\n spaceman out of a couple of\n drinks.\n\n\n “My name’s Clayton. Ron\n Clayton.”\n\n\n The spaceman took the offered\n hand. “Mine’s Parkinson,\n but everybody calls me\n Parks.”\n\n\n “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I\n buy you a beer?”\n\n\n Parks shook his head. “No,\n thanks. I started on whiskey.\n Here, let me buy you one.”\n\n\n “Well—thanks. Don’t mind\n if I do.”\n\n\n They drank them in silence,\n and Parks ordered two more.\n\n\n “Been here long?” Parks\n asked.",
"“Yep, I’m from Indiana.\n Southern part, down around\n Bloomington,” Parks said.\n “Gimme the jug. Not Bloomington,\n Illinois—Bloomington,\n Indiana. We really got\n green hills down there.” He\n drank, and handed the bottle\n back to Clayton. “Pers-nally,\n I don’t see why anybody’d\n stay on Mars. Here y’are,\n practic’ly on the equator in\n the middle of the summer, and\n it’s colder than hell. Brrr!\n\n\n “Now if you was smart,\n you’d go home, where it’s\n warm. Mars wasn’t built for\n people to live on, anyhow. I\n don’t see how you stand it.”\n\n\n That was when Clayton\n decided he really hated Parks.\n\n\n And when Parks said:\n “Why be dumb, friend? Whyn’t\n you go home?” Clayton\n kicked him in the stomach,\n hard.",
"“Okay,” said Parks. “We’ll\n get a bottle. That’s what we\n need: a bottle.”\n\n\n It was quite a walk to the\n Shark’s place. It was so cold\n that even Parks was beginning\n to sober up a little. He\n was laughing like hell when\n Clayton started to sing.\n\n“We’re going over to the Shark’s\n \nTo buy a jug of gin for Parks!\n \nHi ho, hi ho, hi ho!”\n \n\n One thing about a few\n drinks; you didn’t get so cold.\n You didn’t feel it too much,\n anyway.\nThe Shark still had his light\n on when they arrived. Clayton\n whispered to Parks: “I’ll go\n in. He knows me. He wouldn’t\n sell it if you were around. You\n got eight credits?”",
"And all the time, he was\n thinking.\n\n\n Parkinson must be dead;\n he knew that. That meant the\n Chamber. And even if he wasn’t,\n they’d send Clayton back\n to Mars. Luckily, there was no\n way for either planet to communicate\n with the ship; it was\n hard enough to keep a beam\n trained on a planet without\n trying to hit such a comparatively\n small thing as a ship.\n\n\n But they would know about\n it on Earth by now. They\n would pick him up the instant\n the ship landed. And the best\n he could hope for was a return\n to Mars.",
"“Something like that happened\n to me a couple of years\n ago,” Clayton began. “I’m\n supervisor on the third shift\n in the mines at Xanthe, but\n at the time, I was only a foreman.\n One day, a couple of\n guys went to a branch tunnel\n to—”\n\n\n It was a very good story.\n Clayton had made it up himself,\n so he knew that Parks\n had never heard it before. It\n was gory in just the right\n places, with a nice effect at\n the end.\n\n\n “—so I had to hold up the\n rocks with my back while the\n rescue crew pulled the others\n out of the tunnel by crawling\n between my legs. Finally, they\n got some steel beams down\n there to take the load off, and\n I could let go. I was in the\n hospital for a week,” he finished.",
"He’d worked in the mines\n for fifteen years. It wasn’t\n that he minded work really,\n but the foreman had it in for\n him. Always giving him a bad\n time; always picking out the\n lousy jobs for him.\n\n\n Like the time he’d crawled\n into a side-boring in Tunnel\n 12 for a nap during lunch and\n the foreman had caught him.\n When he promised never to\n do it again if the foreman\n wouldn’t put it on report, the\n guy said, “Yeah. Sure. Hate\n to hurt a guy’s record.”\n\n\n Then he’d put Clayton on\n report anyway. Strictly a rat.\n\n\n Not that Clayton ran any\n chance of being fired; they\n never fired anybody. But\n they’d fined him a day’s pay.\n A whole day’s pay.",
"“Indiana? That’s nice. Real\n nice.”\n\n\n “Yeah. You talk about\n green hills, we got green hills\n in Indiana. What time is it?”\n\n\n Clayton told him.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise! Ol’ spaship\n takes off in an hour. Ought\n to have one more drink first.”\n\n\n Clayton realized he didn’t\n like Parks. But maybe he’d\n buy a bottle.\n\n\n Sharkie Johnson worked in\n Fuels Section, and he made a\n nice little sideline of stealing\n alcohol, cutting it, and selling\n it. He thought it was real\n funny to call it Martian Gin.\n\n\n Clayton said: “Let’s go over\n to Sharkie’s. Sharkie will sell\n us a bottle.”",
"“Sure. I got the bottle.\n Want a drink?”\n\n\n Parks took the bottle, opened\n it, and took a good belt out\n of it.\n\n\n “Hooh!” he breathed.\n “Pretty smooth.”\n\n\n As Clayton drank, Parks\n said: “Hey! I better get back\n to the field! I know! We can\n go to the men’s room and\n finish the bottle before the\n ship takes off! Isn’t that a\n good idea? It’s warm there.”\n\n\n They started back down the\n street toward the spacefield.",
"The uniform fit Clayton\n fine, and so did the nose mask.\n He dumped his own clothing\n on top of Parks’ nearly nude\n body, adjusted the little oxygen\n tank so that the gas would\n flow properly through the\n mask, took the first deep\n breath of good air he’d had\n in fifteen years, and walked\n toward the spacefield.\nHe went into the men’s\n room at the Port Building,\n took a drink, and felt in the\n pockets of the uniform for\n Parks’ identification. He\n found it and opened the booklet.\n It read:\nPARKINSON, HERBERT J.\n\n Steward 2nd Class, STS\n\n\n Above it was a photo, and a\n set of fingerprints.\n\n\n Clayton grinned. They’d\n never know it wasn’t Parks\n getting on the ship.",
"She had thought he was\n going to jump her.\nLittle rat!\nhe thought,\nsomebody ought\n to slap her down!\nHe watched her check\n through the heavy dossier in\n front of her. Finally, she looked\n up at him again.\n\n\n “Clayton, your last conviction\n was for strong-arm robbery.\n You were given a choice\n between prison on Earth and\n freedom here on Mars. You\n picked Mars.”\n\n\n He nodded slowly. He’d\n been broke and hungry at the\n time. A sneaky little rat\n named Johnson had bilked\n Clayton out of his fair share\n of the Corey payroll job, and\n Clayton had been forced to\n get the money somehow. He\n hadn’t mussed the guy up\n much; besides, it was the\n sucker’s own fault. If he hadn’t\n tried to yell—\n\n\n Lieutenant Harris went on:\n “I’m afraid you can’t back\n down now.”",
"“Sure I got eight credits.\n Just a minute, and I’ll give\n you eight credits.” He fished\n around for a minute inside his\n parka, and pulled out his\n notecase. His gloved fingers\n were a little clumsy, but he\n managed to get out a five and\n three ones and hand them to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “You wait out here,” Clayton\n said.\n\n\n He went in through the\n outer door and knocked on the\n inner one. He should have\n asked for ten credits. Sharkie\n only charged five, and that\n would leave him three for\n himself. But he could have got\n ten—maybe more.\n\n\n When he came out with the\n bottle, Parks was sitting on\n a rock, shivering.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise!” he said. “It’s\n cold out here. Let’s get to\n someplace where it’s warm.”",
"It took them the better part\n of an hour to get Clayton\n awake enough to realize what\n was going on and where he\n was. Even then, he was\n plenty groggy.\nIt was the First Officer of\n the STS-52 who finally got the\n story straight. As soon as\n Clayton was in condition, the\n medic and the quartermaster\n officer who had found him\n took him up to the First Officer’s\n compartment.\n\n\n “I was checking through\n the stores this morning when\n I found this man. He was\n asleep, dead drunk, behind the\n crates.”\n\n\n “He was drunk, all right,”\n supplied the medic. “I found\n this in his pocket.” He flipped\n a booklet to the First Officer.\n\n\n The First was a young man,\n not older than twenty-eight\n with tough-looking gray eyes.\n He looked over the booklet.\n\n\n “Where did you get Parkinson’s\n ID booklet? And his uniform?”",
"“But it isn’t fair! The most\n I’d have got on that frame-up\n would’ve been ten years. I’ve\n been here fifteen already!”\n\n\n “I’m sorry, Clayton. It can’t\n be done. You’re here. Period.\n Forget about trying to get\n back. Earth doesn’t want\n you.” Her voice sounded\n choppy, as though she were\n trying to keep it calm.\n\n\n Clayton broke into a whining\n rage. “You can’t do that!\n It isn’t fair! I never did anything\n to you! I’ll go talk to the\n Governor! He’ll listen to reason!\n You’ll see! I’ll—”",
"The First shook his head.\n “That sounds like the kind of\n trick Parkinson would pull, all\n right. I’ll have to write it up\n and turn you both in to the\n authorities when we hit\n Earth.” He eyed Clayton.\n “What’s your name?”\n\n\n “Cartwright. Sam Cartwright,”\n Clayton said without\n batting an eye.\n\n\n “Volunteer or convicted\n colonist?”\n\n\n “Volunteer.”\n\n\n The First looked at him for\n a long moment, disbelief in\n his eyes.",
"“Fifteen years. Fifteen\n long, long years.”\n\n\n “Did you—uh—I mean—”\n Parks looked suddenly confused.\n\n\n Clayton glanced quickly to\n make sure the bartender was\n out of earshot. Then he grinned.\n “You mean am I a convict?\n Nah. I came here because\n I wanted to. But—” He\n lowered his voice. “—we don’t\n talk about it around here. You\n know.” He gestured with one\n hand—a gesture that took in\n everyone else in the room.\n\n\n Parks glanced around\n quickly, moving only his eyes.\n “Yeah. I see,” he said softly.\n\n\n “This your first trip?” asked\n Clayton.\n\n\n “First one to Mars. Been on\n the Luna run a long time.”\n\n\n “Low pressure bother you\n much?”",
"“I had to take them once.\n Got stranded on Luna. The cat\n I was in broke down eighty\n some miles from Aristarchus\n Base and I had to walk back—with\n my oxy low. Well, I\n figured—”\nClayton listened to Parks’\n story with a great show of attention,\n but he had heard it\n before. This “lost on the\n moon” stuff and its variations\n had been going the rounds for\n forty years. Every once in a\n while, it actually did happen\n to someone; just often enough\n to keep the story going.\n\n\n This guy did have a couple\n of new twists, but not enough\n to make the story worthwhile.\n\n\n “Boy,” Clayton said when\n Parks had finished, “you were\n lucky to come out of that\n alive!”\n\n\n Parks nodded, well pleased\n with himself, and bought another\n round of drinks.",
"Clayton wasn’t drunk—he\n was sick. His head felt like\n hell. Where the devil was he?\n\n\n “Get up, bud. Come on, get\n up!”\n\n\n Clayton pulled himself up\n by holding to the man’s arm.\n The effort made him dizzy\n and nauseated.\n\n\n The other man said: “Take\n him down to sick bay, Casey.\n Get some thiamin into him.”\n\n\n Clayton didn’t struggle as\n they led him down to the sick\n bay. He was trying to clear\n his head. Where was he? He\n must have been pretty drunk\n last night.\n\n\n He remembered meeting\n Parks. And getting thrown\n out by the bartender. Then\n what?\n\n\n Oh, yeah. He’d gone to the\n Shark’s for a bottle. From\n there on, it was mostly gone.\n He remembered a fight or\n something, but that was all\n that registered."
],
[
"Parks was nodding vaguely.\n Clayton looked up at the clock\n above the bar and realized\n that they had been talking for\n better than an hour. Parks\n was buying another round.\n\n\n Parks was a hell of a nice\n fellow.\n\n\n There was, Clayton found,\n only one trouble with Parks.\n He got to talking so loud that\n the bartender refused to serve\n either one of them any more.\nThe bartender said Clayton\n was getting loud, too, but it\n was just because he had to\n talk loud to make Parks hear\n him.\n\n\n Clayton helped Parks put\n his mask and parka on and\n they walked out into the cold\n night.\n\n\n Parks began to sing\nGreen\n Hills\n. About halfway through,\n he stopped and turned to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “I’m from Indiana.”\n\n\n Clayton had already spotted\n him as an American by his\n accent.",
"“And that, that—” Clayton\n said as Parks doubled over.\n\n\n He said it again as he kicked\n him in the head. And in\n the ribs. Parks was gasping\n as he writhed on the ground,\n but he soon lay still.\n\n\n Then Clayton saw why.\n Parks’ nose tube had come off\n when Clayton’s foot struck\n his head.\n\n\n Parks was breathing heavily,\n but he wasn’t getting any\n oxygen.\n\n\n That was when the Big\n Idea hit Ron Clayton. With a\n nosepiece on like that, you\n couldn’t tell who a man was.\n He took another drink from\n the jug and then began to\n take Parks’ clothes off.",
"Clayton couldn’t afford\n whiskey. He probably could\n have by this time, if the mines\n had made him a foreman, like\n they should have.\n\n\n Maybe he could talk the\n spaceman out of a couple of\n drinks.\n\n\n “My name’s Clayton. Ron\n Clayton.”\n\n\n The spaceman took the offered\n hand. “Mine’s Parkinson,\n but everybody calls me\n Parks.”\n\n\n “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I\n buy you a beer?”\n\n\n Parks shook his head. “No,\n thanks. I started on whiskey.\n Here, let me buy you one.”\n\n\n “Well—thanks. Don’t mind\n if I do.”\n\n\n They drank them in silence,\n and Parks ordered two more.\n\n\n “Been here long?” Parks\n asked.",
"Parks was a steward, too.\n A cook’s helper. That was\n good. If he’d been a jetman or\n something like that, the crew\n might wonder why he wasn’t\n on duty at takeoff. But a steward\n was different.\n\n\n Clayton sat for several minutes,\n looking through the\n booklet and drinking from the\n bottle. He emptied it just before\n the warning sirens keened\n through the thin air.\n\n\n Clayton got up and went\n outside toward the ship.\n\n\n “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake\n up!”\n\n\n Somebody was slapping his\n cheeks. Clayton opened his\n eyes and looked at the blurred\n face over his own.\n\n\n From a distance, another\n voice said: “Who is it?”\n\n\n The blurred face said: “I\n don’t know. He was asleep\n behind these cases. I think\n he’s drunk.”",
"“Okay,” said Parks. “We’ll\n get a bottle. That’s what we\n need: a bottle.”\n\n\n It was quite a walk to the\n Shark’s place. It was so cold\n that even Parks was beginning\n to sober up a little. He\n was laughing like hell when\n Clayton started to sing.\n\n“We’re going over to the Shark’s\n \nTo buy a jug of gin for Parks!\n \nHi ho, hi ho, hi ho!”\n \n\n One thing about a few\n drinks; you didn’t get so cold.\n You didn’t feel it too much,\n anyway.\nThe Shark still had his light\n on when they arrived. Clayton\n whispered to Parks: “I’ll go\n in. He knows me. He wouldn’t\n sell it if you were around. You\n got eight credits?”",
"“Yep, I’m from Indiana.\n Southern part, down around\n Bloomington,” Parks said.\n “Gimme the jug. Not Bloomington,\n Illinois—Bloomington,\n Indiana. We really got\n green hills down there.” He\n drank, and handed the bottle\n back to Clayton. “Pers-nally,\n I don’t see why anybody’d\n stay on Mars. Here y’are,\n practic’ly on the equator in\n the middle of the summer, and\n it’s colder than hell. Brrr!\n\n\n “Now if you was smart,\n you’d go home, where it’s\n warm. Mars wasn’t built for\n people to live on, anyhow. I\n don’t see how you stand it.”\n\n\n That was when Clayton\n decided he really hated Parks.\n\n\n And when Parks said:\n “Why be dumb, friend? Whyn’t\n you go home?” Clayton\n kicked him in the stomach,\n hard.",
"“Sure. I got the bottle.\n Want a drink?”\n\n\n Parks took the bottle, opened\n it, and took a good belt out\n of it.\n\n\n “Hooh!” he breathed.\n “Pretty smooth.”\n\n\n As Clayton drank, Parks\n said: “Hey! I better get back\n to the field! I know! We can\n go to the men’s room and\n finish the bottle before the\n ship takes off! Isn’t that a\n good idea? It’s warm there.”\n\n\n They started back down the\n street toward the spacefield.",
"“Something like that happened\n to me a couple of years\n ago,” Clayton began. “I’m\n supervisor on the third shift\n in the mines at Xanthe, but\n at the time, I was only a foreman.\n One day, a couple of\n guys went to a branch tunnel\n to—”\n\n\n It was a very good story.\n Clayton had made it up himself,\n so he knew that Parks\n had never heard it before. It\n was gory in just the right\n places, with a nice effect at\n the end.\n\n\n “—so I had to hold up the\n rocks with my back while the\n rescue crew pulled the others\n out of the tunnel by crawling\n between my legs. Finally, they\n got some steel beams down\n there to take the load off, and\n I could let go. I was in the\n hospital for a week,” he finished.",
"And all the time, he was\n thinking.\n\n\n Parkinson must be dead;\n he knew that. That meant the\n Chamber. And even if he wasn’t,\n they’d send Clayton back\n to Mars. Luckily, there was no\n way for either planet to communicate\n with the ship; it was\n hard enough to keep a beam\n trained on a planet without\n trying to hit such a comparatively\n small thing as a ship.\n\n\n But they would know about\n it on Earth by now. They\n would pick him up the instant\n the ship landed. And the best\n he could hope for was a return\n to Mars.",
"Clayton wasn’t drunk—he\n was sick. His head felt like\n hell. Where the devil was he?\n\n\n “Get up, bud. Come on, get\n up!”\n\n\n Clayton pulled himself up\n by holding to the man’s arm.\n The effort made him dizzy\n and nauseated.\n\n\n The other man said: “Take\n him down to sick bay, Casey.\n Get some thiamin into him.”\n\n\n Clayton didn’t struggle as\n they led him down to the sick\n bay. He was trying to clear\n his head. Where was he? He\n must have been pretty drunk\n last night.\n\n\n He remembered meeting\n Parks. And getting thrown\n out by the bartender. Then\n what?\n\n\n Oh, yeah. He’d gone to the\n Shark’s for a bottle. From\n there on, it was mostly gone.\n He remembered a fight or\n something, but that was all\n that registered.",
"The uniform fit Clayton\n fine, and so did the nose mask.\n He dumped his own clothing\n on top of Parks’ nearly nude\n body, adjusted the little oxygen\n tank so that the gas would\n flow properly through the\n mask, took the first deep\n breath of good air he’d had\n in fifteen years, and walked\n toward the spacefield.\nHe went into the men’s\n room at the Port Building,\n took a drink, and felt in the\n pockets of the uniform for\n Parks’ identification. He\n found it and opened the booklet.\n It read:\nPARKINSON, HERBERT J.\n\n Steward 2nd Class, STS\n\n\n Above it was a photo, and a\n set of fingerprints.\n\n\n Clayton grinned. They’d\n never know it wasn’t Parks\n getting on the ship.",
"“Sure I got eight credits.\n Just a minute, and I’ll give\n you eight credits.” He fished\n around for a minute inside his\n parka, and pulled out his\n notecase. His gloved fingers\n were a little clumsy, but he\n managed to get out a five and\n three ones and hand them to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “You wait out here,” Clayton\n said.\n\n\n He went in through the\n outer door and knocked on the\n inner one. He should have\n asked for ten credits. Sharkie\n only charged five, and that\n would leave him three for\n himself. But he could have got\n ten—maybe more.\n\n\n When he came out with the\n bottle, Parks was sitting on\n a rock, shivering.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise!” he said. “It’s\n cold out here. Let’s get to\n someplace where it’s warm.”",
"He tapped his glass on the\n bar, and the barman came\n over with another beer. Clayton\n looked at it, then up at\n the barman. “Put a head on\n it.”\n\n\n The bartender looked at\n him sourly. “I’ve got some\n soapsuds here, Clayton, and\n one of these days I’m gonna\n put some in your beer if you\n keep pulling that gag.”\n\n\n That was the trouble with\n some guys. No sense of humor.\n\n\n Somebody came in the door\n and then somebody else came\n in behind him, so that both\n inner and outer doors were\n open for an instant. A blast\n of icy breeze struck Clayton’s\n back, and he shivered. He\n started to say something, then\n changed his mind; the doors\n were already closed again,\n and besides, one of the guys\n was bigger than he was.",
"It took them the better part\n of an hour to get Clayton\n awake enough to realize what\n was going on and where he\n was. Even then, he was\n plenty groggy.\nIt was the First Officer of\n the STS-52 who finally got the\n story straight. As soon as\n Clayton was in condition, the\n medic and the quartermaster\n officer who had found him\n took him up to the First Officer’s\n compartment.\n\n\n “I was checking through\n the stores this morning when\n I found this man. He was\n asleep, dead drunk, behind the\n crates.”\n\n\n “He was drunk, all right,”\n supplied the medic. “I found\n this in his pocket.” He flipped\n a booklet to the First Officer.\n\n\n The First was a young man,\n not older than twenty-eight\n with tough-looking gray eyes.\n He looked over the booklet.\n\n\n “Where did you get Parkinson’s\n ID booklet? And his uniform?”",
"“Indiana? That’s nice. Real\n nice.”\n\n\n “Yeah. You talk about\n green hills, we got green hills\n in Indiana. What time is it?”\n\n\n Clayton told him.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise! Ol’ spaship\n takes off in an hour. Ought\n to have one more drink first.”\n\n\n Clayton realized he didn’t\n like Parks. But maybe he’d\n buy a bottle.\n\n\n Sharkie Johnson worked in\n Fuels Section, and he made a\n nice little sideline of stealing\n alcohol, cutting it, and selling\n it. He thought it was real\n funny to call it Martian Gin.\n\n\n Clayton said: “Let’s go over\n to Sharkie’s. Sharkie will sell\n us a bottle.”",
"The First shook his head.\n “That sounds like the kind of\n trick Parkinson would pull, all\n right. I’ll have to write it up\n and turn you both in to the\n authorities when we hit\n Earth.” He eyed Clayton.\n “What’s your name?”\n\n\n “Cartwright. Sam Cartwright,”\n Clayton said without\n batting an eye.\n\n\n “Volunteer or convicted\n colonist?”\n\n\n “Volunteer.”\n\n\n The First looked at him for\n a long moment, disbelief in\n his eyes.",
"“I had to take them once.\n Got stranded on Luna. The cat\n I was in broke down eighty\n some miles from Aristarchus\n Base and I had to walk back—with\n my oxy low. Well, I\n figured—”\nClayton listened to Parks’\n story with a great show of attention,\n but he had heard it\n before. This “lost on the\n moon” stuff and its variations\n had been going the rounds for\n forty years. Every once in a\n while, it actually did happen\n to someone; just often enough\n to keep the story going.\n\n\n This guy did have a couple\n of new twists, but not enough\n to make the story worthwhile.\n\n\n “Boy,” Clayton said when\n Parks had finished, “you were\n lucky to come out of that\n alive!”\n\n\n Parks nodded, well pleased\n with himself, and bought another\n round of drinks.",
"Clayton looked down at his\n clothes in wonder. “I don’t\n know.”\n\n\n “You\ndon’t know\n? That’s a\n hell of an answer.”\n\n\n “Well, I was drunk,” Clayton\n said defensively. “A man\n doesn’t know what he’s doing\n when he’s drunk.” He frowned\n in concentration. He knew\n he’d have to think up some\n story.\n\n\n “I kind of remember we\n made a bet. I bet him I could\n get on the ship. Sure—I remember,\n now. That’s what\n happened; I bet him I could\n get on the ship and we traded\n clothes.”\n\n\n “Where is he now?”\n\n\n “At my place, sleeping it\n off, I guess.”\n\n\n “Without his oxy-mask?”\n\n\n “Oh, I gave him my oxidation\n pills for the mask.”",
"The medic in the sick bay\n fired two shots from a hypo-gun\n into both arms, but Clayton\n ignored the slight sting.\n\n\n “Where am I?”\n\n\n “Real original. Here, take\n these.” He handed Clayton a\n couple of capsules, and gave\n him a glass of water to wash\n them down with.\n\n\n When the water hit his\n stomach, there was an immediate\n reaction.\n\n\n “Oh, Christ!” the medic\n said. “Get a mop, somebody.\n Here, bud; heave into this.”\n He put a basin on the table\n in front of Clayton.",
"He’d worked in the mines\n for fifteen years. It wasn’t\n that he minded work really,\n but the foreman had it in for\n him. Always giving him a bad\n time; always picking out the\n lousy jobs for him.\n\n\n Like the time he’d crawled\n into a side-boring in Tunnel\n 12 for a nap during lunch and\n the foreman had caught him.\n When he promised never to\n do it again if the foreman\n wouldn’t put it on report, the\n guy said, “Yeah. Sure. Hate\n to hurt a guy’s record.”\n\n\n Then he’d put Clayton on\n report anyway. Strictly a rat.\n\n\n Not that Clayton ran any\n chance of being fired; they\n never fired anybody. But\n they’d fined him a day’s pay.\n A whole day’s pay."
]
] |
test
|
24949
|
[
"How did Gibson and Xavier discover Farrell had crashed?",
"From where did the Alphardians originate?",
"Who was Xavier and what was his significance to the crew of Marco Four?",
"Why does Stryker feel justified in ordering Farrell to conduct reconnaissance of Alphard Six prior to landing?",
"Who are the Hymenops and what is their role in the story?",
"How does the crew first realize the inhabitants of Alphard Six are not Hymenops?",
"How did Farrell crash?",
"Why did Stryker believe the Alphardians would be easily reclaimed?",
"Why doesn't Gibson believe the inhabitants of Alphard Six are migrant Terrans?",
"Why did Stryker disallow Gibson from venturing to the surface of Alphard Six?"
] |
[
[
"Following the crash, the Alphardians flew to the Marco Four in a small boat used for emergency missions. The crew of the Marco Four thought this boat was a torpedo, but it turned out to just be the Alphardians offering their assistance.",
"Gibson and Stryker had been monitoring Xavier and Farrell as they made their way to Alphard Six in separate ships, so they knew immediately when they both crashed.",
"After devising a transceiver to tap into the frequency modulation of the Alphardians, they were able to understand their speech as the old Terran language and thereby learned about Farrell's crash.",
"Since Xavier had been following Farrell in a separate ship, he witnessed the electrical blast that disabled Farrell's ship and led to his eventual capture."
],
[
"They originally populated a Terran colony until they were hypnotized and essentially kidnapped as a control group for the Hymenops' human experimentations.",
"Originally Terran settlers on Sirius, the Alphardians travelled for a thousand years to reach Alphard Six, where they established a new colony and developed their own language.",
"The Alphardians were actually Terran colonists who had traveled a thousand years to reach Alphard Five, where they were captured by the Hymenops and brainwashed to do their bidding.",
"The Alphardians had left Earth thousands of years prior for the express purpose of reaching Alphard Six, where they hoped to establish a new Terran colony."
],
[
"Xavier was the ship's mechanic, whose vast knowledge of Hymenop history contributed to the positive identification of the mysterious ship on Alphard Six.",
"Xavier was a mechanic who possessed a calm, quiet disposition and contributed his knowledge and expertise in a variety of ways during the mission.",
"Xavier was a humanoid who understood the language of the Alphardians, and therefore his presence was essential when he was sent with Farrell to investigate Alphard Six.",
"Xavier was a robot with an encyclopedic knowledge of Terran history who assisted the crew in a number of research and exploratory capacities during their mission."
],
[
"Alphard Six is an unreclaimed planet, and therefore the crew of the Marco Four knows nothing about its atmosphere, inhabitants, or environment. They must be wary of potential threats.",
"A torpedo-like shape explodes near their ship, which Stryker believes might have destroyed them if they'd ventured any nearer.",
"Stryker lives and breathes the Reclamations Handbook; he doesn't believe in listening to the expertise of his crewmembers.",
"Stryker is the captain of the Marco Four, and therefore he is responsible for giving orders to his crew based on decisions he believes are necessary."
],
[
"The Hymenops are an ancient alien species that build large beehive-like structures on the planets they invade and colonize. They use these structures to conduct their human experiments.",
"Also called Bees, the Hymenops are natives of Alphard Five and headquarter the operations of their human experimentations there.",
"The Hymenops are an alien species that resemble bees. The hypnotized Terrans worship them as gods and revert to a childlike state when they are not in their presence.",
"The Hymenops are a hostile, bee-like species that use their power of hypnosis to conduct experiments upon Terrans."
],
[
"There are no beehive-like structures on Alphard Six, and the Hymenops prefer to use a different kind of weapon than the shape the crew believes was a torpedo.",
"The Hymenops were not native to Alphard Six; rather, they made their home on Alphard Five so that they could use it as a base to observe their human experiments.",
"When Farrell wakes up after his crash, he recognizes the white-smocked man that attends to him as an old Terran.",
"When Xavier uses his magnoscanner to investigate the planet's surface, he discovers the existence of an old Terran spacecraft."
],
[
"His helihopper was shot down by the torpedo they had earlier avoided when Stryker ordered Farrell to circle back and conduct the reconnaissance spiral.",
"As he was flying towards the planet's surface, Farrell inadvertently intercepted an electromagnetic wave the Alphardians used to transmit their frequency modulations.",
"Xavier accidentally ran into his helihopper because their communications were scrambled by the interception from the Alphardians' transceiver.",
"Because they were largely a thing of the past, Farrell had forgotten about the existence of power lines, which the Alphardians used for their electricity, and he ran into one. This downed his helihopper."
],
[
"Since the Hymenops wanted to observe them as a Terran control group, they were largely left unaltered by the Hymenops' hypnoses and therefore more susceptible to the reclamation process.",
"The Hymenops' hypnotism had left the Alphardians' minds open and suggestible.",
"Due to his devout study of the Reclamations Handbook, Stryker was confident he could implement the guidelines on Terrans in any configuration and be successful.",
"The fact that they used the old language and dated technology indicated to Stryker that they were a simple-minded people and therefore likely more amenable to reclamation."
],
[
"It was physically impossible for Terrans to survive a thousand-year journey from Earth to Alphard Six.",
"He is suspicious of the hypnotic spell cast upon Terran groups by the Hymenops and worries that the inhabitants are another one of their hallucinations.",
"Throughout all of their Reclamations missions, they had not discovered a single unreclaimed Terran colony that had progressed to traveling in space.",
"He believes they are aliens from a system the crew of the Macro Four has yet to discover, beyond the old sphere of Terran exploration."
],
[
"He was tired of him theorizing as to the hallucinatory nature of the things they had so far witnessed in the sky and on the surface of Alphard Six.",
"Gibson needed to fix the computer that controlled the Macro Four's ability to conduct a Transfer jump quickly in case something went wrong.",
"He wanted him to stay on the Macro Four in order to keep Xavier company by practicing dead languages and playing chess.",
"Since Gibson had attended to the previous mission, Stryker wanted him to stay on the Macro Four while Farrell and Xavier took helihoppers to the planet's surface."
]
] |
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[
[
"Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n\n\n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n\n\n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n\n\n \"\nFriendly?\nThat torpedo—\"",
"Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n\n\n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better—they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the\nMarco\nwould be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.",
"He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n\n\n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n\n\n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n\n\n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the\nMarco Four\ndown. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n\n\n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"",
"When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The\nMarco Four\n, Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n\n\n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n\n\n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\nStryker looked dubious.\n \"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"",
"\"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n\n\n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n\n\n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"",
"\"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n \"It's high time I took my turn—and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n\n\n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the\nMarco\n Four\n.\n\n\n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the\nLament for Old Terra\nwith\n your accordion.\"\n\n\n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n\n\n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"",
"They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n\n\n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n \"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n\n\n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"",
"Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n\n\n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down—\"",
"Suppose, he thought—and derided\n himself for thinking it—one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures\ndid\nsucceed?\n\n\n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n\n\n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"",
"Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk—\n\n\n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get\nhere\n?\"\n\n\n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.",
"Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name\nare\nthey?\"\n\"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all—we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n\n\n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"",
"Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\nGibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"",
"Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\nBut uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n\n\n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs—what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?",
"Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n\n\n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n \"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n\n\n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear—and\n as inflectionless—as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the\nMarco Four\n.\"",
"He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n\n\n The\nMarco Four\n, ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\nFarrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.",
"\"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added\nas usual\n. \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n\n\n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the\nMarco Four\nout of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.",
"\"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end—\"\n\n\n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib—the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since—how\n long, Xav?\"\n\n\n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n \"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"",
"\"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n\n\n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n \"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n\n\n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where\ndid\nthey come from?\"",
"Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n\n\n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.",
"\"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not—\"\n\n\n \"\nAny problem posed by one\n group of human beings\n,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \"\ncan be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity\n.\"\n\n\n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\nHe waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued."
],
[
"\"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n\n\n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n \"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n\n\n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where\ndid\nthey come from?\"",
"\"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n \"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n\n\n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here—they\n still don't know where\n they really are—by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"",
"Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n\n\n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n\n\n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n\n\n \"\nFriendly?\nThat torpedo—\"",
"\"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n \"then there's only one choice remaining—they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n\n\n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture—they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"",
"\"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship\ncouldn't\nhave made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary—the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated—\"\n\n\n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n \"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"",
"\"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven:\nNo planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper—\n\"\n\n\n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you\nsleep\nwith that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world—it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n\n\n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.",
"\"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n \"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n\n\n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n\n\n Gibson disagreed.",
"\"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n\n\n \"And I think\nyou\nlive for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born—neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"",
"\"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n\n\n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n\n\n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us\nhow\n,\n we're ready to move.\"",
"One of those old ventures\nhad\nsucceeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before—for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n\n\n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.",
"Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\nGibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"",
"He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n\n\n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n\n\n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n\n\n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the\nMarco Four\ndown. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n\n\n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"",
"\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\nCONTROL GROUP\nBy ROGER DEE\nThe\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the\nMarco Four\ndown at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had—as\n was usual and proper—no voice\n in the matter.",
"\"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end—\"\n\n\n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib—the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since—how\n long, Xav?\"\n\n\n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n \"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"",
"Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n\n\n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n \"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n\n\n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear—and\n as inflectionless—as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the\nMarco Four\n.\"",
"\"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n \"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars—our records are\n complete from that time.\"",
"Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name\nare\nthey?\"\n\"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all—we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n\n\n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"",
"\"But the ship wasn't here in\n 3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n\n\n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"",
"\"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n \"It's high time I took my turn—and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n\n\n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the\nMarco\n Four\n.\n\n\n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the\nLament for Old Terra\nwith\n your accordion.\"\n\n\n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n\n\n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"",
"\"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n \"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n\n\n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'—we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\""
],
[
"\"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n \"It's high time I took my turn—and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n\n\n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the\nMarco\n Four\n.\n\n\n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the\nLament for Old Terra\nwith\n your accordion.\"\n\n\n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n\n\n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"",
"Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n\n\n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n \"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n\n\n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear—and\n as inflectionless—as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the\nMarco Four\n.\"",
"He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n\n\n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n\n\n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n\n\n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the\nMarco Four\ndown. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n\n\n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"",
"When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The\nMarco Four\n, Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n\n\n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n\n\n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\nStryker looked dubious.\n \"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"",
"Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n\n\n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better—they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the\nMarco\nwould be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.",
"He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n\n\n The\nMarco Four\n, ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\nFarrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.",
"They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n\n\n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n \"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n\n\n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"",
"Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n\n\n He reached the\nMarco Four\nwith the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.",
"\"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n\n\n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n\n\n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"",
"Suppose, he thought—and derided\n himself for thinking it—one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures\ndid\nsucceed?\n\n\n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n\n\n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"",
"Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n\n\n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n\n\n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n\n\n \"\nFriendly?\nThat torpedo—\"",
"\"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added\nas usual\n. \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n\n\n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the\nMarco Four\nout of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.",
"Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\nBut uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n\n\n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs—what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?",
"\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\nCONTROL GROUP\nBy ROGER DEE\nThe\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the\nMarco Four\ndown at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had—as\n was usual and proper—no voice\n in the matter.",
"Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name\nare\nthey?\"\n\"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all—we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n\n\n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"",
"Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\nGibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"",
"\"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end—\"\n\n\n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib—the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since—how\n long, Xav?\"\n\n\n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n \"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"",
"\"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven:\nNo planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper—\n\"\n\n\n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you\nsleep\nwith that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world—it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n\n\n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.",
"\"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n\n\n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.",
"Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n\n\n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable."
],
[
"\"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven:\nNo planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper—\n\"\n\n\n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you\nsleep\nwith that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world—it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n\n\n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.",
"When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The\nMarco Four\n, Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n\n\n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n\n\n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\nStryker looked dubious.\n \"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"",
"\"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n \"It's high time I took my turn—and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n\n\n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the\nMarco\n Four\n.\n\n\n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the\nLament for Old Terra\nwith\n your accordion.\"\n\n\n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n\n\n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"",
"Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n\n\n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n \"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n\n\n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear—and\n as inflectionless—as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the\nMarco Four\n.\"",
"Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n\n\n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years—the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors—would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.",
"\"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n\n\n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.",
"He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n\n\n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n\n\n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n\n\n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the\nMarco Four\ndown. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n\n\n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"",
"Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n\"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"",
"Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name\nare\nthey?\"\n\"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all—we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n\n\n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"",
"\"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n \"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n\n\n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n\n\n Gibson disagreed.",
"\"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n\n\n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n\n\n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us\nhow\n,\n we're ready to move.\"",
"\"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not—\"\n\n\n \"\nAny problem posed by one\n group of human beings\n,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \"\ncan be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity\n.\"\n\n\n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\nHe waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.",
"Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n\n\n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better—they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the\nMarco\nwould be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.",
"\"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship\ncouldn't\nhave made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary—the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated—\"\n\n\n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n \"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"",
"Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\nBut uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n\n\n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs—what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?",
"Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n\n\n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n\n\n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n\n\n \"\nFriendly?\nThat torpedo—\"",
"\"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n\n\n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n\n\n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"",
"They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n\n\n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n \"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n\n\n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"",
"Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk—\n\n\n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get\nhere\n?\"\n\n\n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.",
"He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n\n\n The\nMarco Four\n, ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\nFarrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid."
],
[
"\"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n \"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n\n\n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here—they\n still don't know where\n they really are—by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"",
"\"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n\n\n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n \"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n\n\n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where\ndid\nthey come from?\"",
"One of those old ventures\nhad\nsucceeded, he thought, and was\n awed by the daring of that thousand-year\n odyssey. The realization\n left him more alarmed than\n before—for what technical marvels\n might not an isolated group\n of such dogged specialists have\n developed during a millennium\n of application?\n\n\n Such a weapon as had brought\n down the helihopper and scouter\n was patently beyond reach of his\n own latter-day technology. Perhaps,\n he thought, its possession\n explained the presence of these\n people here in the first stronghold\n of the Hymenops; perhaps\n they had even fought and defeated\n the Bees on their own invaded\n ground.",
"Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n\n\n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n\n\n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"",
"\"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n\n\n \"And I think\nyou\nlive for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born—neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"",
"Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name\nare\nthey?\"\n\"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all—we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n\n\n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"",
"\"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n\n\n Stryker was not reassured.\n\n\n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n\n\n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"",
"\"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n \"then there's only one choice remaining—they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n\n\n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture—they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"",
"Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\nBut uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n\n\n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs—what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?",
"\"But the ship wasn't here in\n 3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n\n\n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"",
"\"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment—the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point—and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n\n\n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.",
"\"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not—\"\n\n\n \"\nAny problem posed by one\n group of human beings\n,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \"\ncan be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity\n.\"\n\n\n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\nHe waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.",
"\"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n \"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n\n\n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'—we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"",
"\"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000—Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember—and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"",
"Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n\n\n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down—\"",
"\"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n \"It's high time I took my turn—and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n\n\n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the\nMarco\n Four\n.\n\n\n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the\nLament for Old Terra\nwith\n your accordion.\"\n\n\n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n\n\n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"",
"The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n\n\n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n\n\n \"A\ncreche\n,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.",
"They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n\n\n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n \"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n\n\n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"",
"\"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship\ncouldn't\nhave made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary—the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated—\"\n\n\n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n \"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"",
"\"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven:\nNo planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper—\n\"\n\n\n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you\nsleep\nwith that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world—it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n\n\n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand."
],
[
"\"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n\n\n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n \"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n\n\n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where\ndid\nthey come from?\"",
"\"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n \"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n\n\n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here—they\n still don't know where\n they really are—by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"",
"Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name\nare\nthey?\"\n\"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all—we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n\n\n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"",
"\"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n\n\n Stryker was not reassured.\n\n\n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n\n\n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"",
"\"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven:\nNo planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper—\n\"\n\n\n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you\nsleep\nwith that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world—it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n\n\n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.",
"\"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n \"then there's only one choice remaining—they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n\n\n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture—they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"",
"Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\nBut uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n\n\n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs—what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?",
"\"But the ship wasn't here in\n 3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n\n\n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"",
"\"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not—\"\n\n\n \"\nAny problem posed by one\n group of human beings\n,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \"\ncan be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity\n.\"\n\n\n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\nHe waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.",
"\"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n\n\n \"And I think\nyou\nlive for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born—neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"",
"\"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship\ncouldn't\nhave made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary—the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated—\"\n\n\n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n \"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"",
"They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n\n\n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n \"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n\n\n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"",
"\"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n \"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n\n\n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n\n\n Gibson disagreed.",
"\"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n\n\n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n\n\n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"",
"\"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end—\"\n\n\n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib—the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since—how\n long, Xav?\"\n\n\n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n \"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"",
"\"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment—the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point—and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n\n\n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.",
"Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n\n\n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n\n\n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"",
"\"Any problem posed by one group of\n human beings can be resolved by any\n other group.\" That's what the Handbook\n said. But did that include primitive\n humans? Or the Bees? Or a ...\nCONTROL GROUP\nBy ROGER DEE\nThe\n cool green disk of Alphard\n Six on the screen was\n infinitely welcome after the arid\n desolation and stinking swamplands\n of the inner planets, an\n airy jewel of a world that might\n have been designed specifically\n for the hard-earned month of\n rest ahead. Navigator Farrell,\n youngest and certainly most impulsive\n of the three-man Terran\n Reclamations crew, would have\n set the\nMarco Four\ndown at\n once but for the greater caution\n of Stryker, nominally captain of\n the group, and of Gibson, engineer,\n and linguist. Xavier, the\n ship's little mechanical, had—as\n was usual and proper—no voice\n in the matter.",
"Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n\n\n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n \"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n\n\n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear—and\n as inflectionless—as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the\nMarco Four\n.\"",
"Suppose, he thought—and derided\n himself for thinking it—one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures\ndid\nsucceed?\n\n\n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n\n\n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\""
],
[
"Farrell was on the point of\n demanding acidly to know how\n one went about communicating\n by means of a fluctuating electric\n field when the unexpected\n cessation of forest diverted his\n attention. The helihopper scudded\n over a cultivated area\n of considerable extent, fields\n stretching below in a vague random\n checkerboard of lighter and\n darker earth, an undefined cluster\n of buildings at their center.\n There was a central bonfire that\n burned like a wild red eye\n against the lower gloom, and in\n its plunging ruddy glow he made\n out an urgent scurrying of shadowy\n figures.\n\n\n \"I'm passing over a hamlet,\"\n Farrell reported. \"The one nearest\n the city, I think. There's\n something odd going on\n down—\"",
"He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n\n\n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n\n\n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n\n\n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the\nMarco Four\ndown. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n\n\n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"",
"He followed his white-smocked\n guide through a power room\n where great crude generators\n whirred ponderously, pouring\n out gross electric current into\n arm-thick cables. They were\n nearing the bow of the ship\n when they passed by another\n open port and Farrell, glancing\n out over the lowered rampway,\n saw that his fears for Stryker\n and Gibson had been well\n grounded.\n\n\n The\nMarco Four\n, ports open,\n lay grounded outside.\nFarrell could not have said,\n later, whether his next move\n was planned or reflexive. The\n whole desperate issue seemed to\n hang suspended for a breathless\n moment upon a hair-fine edge of\n decision, and in that instant he\n made his bid.",
"Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n\n\n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n\n\n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n\n\n \"\nFriendly?\nThat torpedo—\"",
"Farrell sat up, groaning,\n when full consciousness made his\n position clear. He had been shot\n down by God knew what sort of\n devastating unorthodox weapon\n and was a prisoner in the\n grounded ship.\n\n\n At his rising, a white-smocked\n fat man with anachronistic spectacles\n and close-cropped gray\n hair came into the room, moving\n with the professional assurance\n of a medic. The man stopped\n short at Farrell's stare and\n spoke; his words were utterly\n unintelligible, but his gesture\n was unmistakable.",
"Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n\n\n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better—they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the\nMarco\nwould be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.",
"Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n\"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"",
"Without pausing in his stride\n he sprang out and through the\n port and down the steep plane\n of the ramp. The rough stone\n pavement of the square drummed\n underfoot; sore muscles\n tore at him, and weakness was\n like a weight about his neck. He\n expected momentarily to be\n blasted out of existence.\n\n\n He reached the\nMarco Four\nwith the startled shouts of his\n guide ringing unintelligibly in\n his ears. The port yawned; he\n plunged inside and stabbed at\n controls without waiting to seat\n himself. The ports swung shut.\n The ship darted up under his\n manipulation and arrowed into\n space with an acceleration that\n sprung his knees and made his\n vision swim blackly.",
"Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk—\n\n\n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get\nhere\n?\"\n\n\n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him.",
"\"Then we can eliminate this\n one now,\" Farrell said flatly. \"It\n entails a thousand-year voyage,\n which is an impossibility for any\n gross reaction drive; the application\n of suspended animation\n or longevity or a successive-generation\n program, and a final\n penetration of Hymenop-occupied\n space to set up a colony under\n the very antennae of the\n Bees. Longevity wasn't developed\n until around the year 3000—Lee\n here was one of the first to\n profit by it, if you remember—and\n suspended animation is still\n to come. So there's one theory\n you can forget.\"",
"\"It wasn't a torpedo at all,\"\n Stryker put in. Understanding\n of the error under which Farrell\n had labored erased his\n earlier irritation, and he chuckled\n commiseratingly. \"They had\n one small boat left for emergency\n missions, and sent it up to\n contact us in the fear that we\n might overlook their settlement\n and move on. The boat was\n atomic powered, and our shield\n screens set off its engines.\"\n\n\n Farrell dropped into a chair at\n the chart table, limp with reaction.\n He was suddenly exhausted,\n and his head ached dully.\n\n\n \"We cracked the communications\n problem early last night,\"\n Gibson said. \"These people use\n an ancient system of electromagnetic\n wave propagation called\n frequency modulation, and once\n Lee and I rigged up a suitable\n transceiver the rest was simple.\n Both Xav and I recognized the\n old language; the natives reported\n your accident, and we came\n down at once.\"",
"Farrell threw up his hands in\n disgust. \"Next you'll say this is\n an ancient Terran expedition\n that actually succeeded! There's\n only one way to answer the\n questions we've raised, and\n that's to go down and see for\n ourselves. Ready, Xav?\"\nBut uncertainty nagged uneasily\n at him when Farrell found\n himself alone in the helihopper\n with the forest flowing beneath\n like a leafy river and Xavier's\n scouter disappearing bulletlike\n into the dusk ahead.\n\n\n We never found a colony so\n advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose\n this is a Hymenop experiment\n that really paid off? The\n Bees did some weird and wonderful\n things with human\n guinea pigs—what if they've\n created the ultimate booby trap\n here, and primed it with conditioned\n myrmidons in our own\n form?",
"\"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n\n\n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.",
"When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The\nMarco Four\n, Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n\n\n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n\n\n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\nStryker looked dubious.\n \"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"",
"Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\nGibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"",
"The fat medic turned and\n said something urgent in his\n unintelligible tongue. Farrell,\n dazed by the enormity of what\n had happened, followed without\n protest into an intersecting way\n that led through a bewildering\n succession of storage rooms and\n hydroponics gardens, through a\n small gymnasium fitted with\n physical training equipment in\n graduated sizes and finally into\n a soundproofed place that could\n have been nothing but a nursery.\n\n\n The implication behind its\n presence stopped Farrell short.\n\n\n \"A\ncreche\n,\" he said, stunned.\n He had a wild vision of endless\n generations of children growing\n up in this dim and stuffy room,\n to be taught from their first\n toddling steps the functions they\n must fulfill before the venture\n of which they were a part could\n be consummated.",
"Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n\n\n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n \"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n\n\n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear—and\n as inflectionless—as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the\nMarco Four\n.\"",
"Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name\nare\nthey?\"\n\"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all—we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n\n\n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"",
"Catastrophe struck so suddenly\n that he was caught completely\n unprepared. The helihopper's\n flimsy carriage bucked and\n crumpled. There was a blinding\n flare of electric discharge, a\n pungent stink of ozone and a\n stunning shock that flung him\n headlong into darkness.\nHe awoke slowly with a brutal\n headache and a conviction of\n nightmare heightened by the\n outlandish tone of his surroundings.\n He lay on a narrow bed in\n a whitely antiseptic infirmary,\n an oblong metal cell cluttered\n with a grimly utilitarian array\n of tables and lockers and chests.\n The lighting was harsh and\n overbright and the air hung\n thick with pungent unfamiliar\n chemical odors. From somewhere,\n far off yet at the same\n time as near as the bulkhead\n above him, came the unceasing\n drone of machinery.",
"Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n\n\n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n\n\n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\""
],
[
"\"But I saw them,\" Stryker\n said. \"I fought them for the better\n part of the century they were\n here, and I learned there's no\n predicting nor understanding\n them. We never knew why they\n came nor why they gave up and\n left. How can we know whether\n they'd leave a rear-guard or\n booby trap here?\"\n\n\n He put a paternal hand on\n Farrell's shoulder, understanding\n the younger man's eagerness\n and knowing that their close-knit\n team would have been the\n more poorly balanced without it.",
"He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n\n\n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n\n\n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n\n\n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the\nMarco Four\ndown. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n\n\n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"",
"\"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven:\nNo planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper—\n\"\n\n\n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you\nsleep\nwith that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world—it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n\n\n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.",
"Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n\n\n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better—they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the\nMarco\nwould be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.",
"\"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n \"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n\n\n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n\n\n Gibson disagreed.",
"When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The\nMarco Four\n, Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n\n\n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n\n\n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\nStryker looked dubious.\n \"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"",
"\"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n \"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n\n\n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here—they\n still don't know where\n they really are—by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"",
"Stryker, grinning, brought\n Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled\n invitingly. \"An unusually\n fortunate ending to a Hymenop\n experiment,\" he said. \"These\n people progressed normally because\n they've been let alone. Reorienting\n them will be a simple\n matter; they'll be properly spoiled\n colonists within another generation.\"\n\n\n Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.\n\n\n \"But I don't see why the Bees\n should go to such trouble to deceive\n these people. Why did they\n sit back and let them grow as\n they pleased, Gib? It doesn't\n make sense!\"",
"\"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship\ncouldn't\nhave made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary—the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated—\"\n\n\n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n \"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"",
"\"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n \"It's high time I took my turn—and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n\n\n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the\nMarco\n Four\n.\n\n\n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the\nLament for Old Terra\nwith\n your accordion.\"\n\n\n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n\n\n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"",
"\"The obvious premise is that\n a Terran ship must have been\n built by Terrans. Question: Was\n it flown here, or built here?\"\n\n\n \"It couldn't have been built\n here,\" Stryker said. \"Alphard\n Six was surveyed just before the\n Bees took over in 3025, and there\n was nothing of the sort here\n then. It couldn't have been built\n during the two and a quarter\n centuries since; it's obviously\n much older than that. It was\n flown here.\"\n\n\n \"We progress,\" Farrell said\n dryly. \"Now if you'll tell us\nhow\n,\n we're ready to move.\"",
"Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n\n\n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n\n\n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n\n\n \"\nFriendly?\nThat torpedo—\"",
"Stryker's caution was justified\n on the instant. The speeding\n streamlined shape that had flashed\n up unobserved from below\n swerved sharply and exploded in\n a cataclysmic blaze of atomic\n fire that rocked the ship wildly\n and flung the three men to the\n floor in a jangling roar of\n alarms.\n\"So the Handbook tacticians\n knew what they were about,\"\n Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately\n he adopted the smug\n tone best calculated to sting Farrell\n out of his first self-reproach,\n and grinned when the navigator\n bristled defensively. \"Some of\n their enjoinders seem a little\n stuffy and obvious at times, but\n they're eminently sensible.\"",
"Stryker looked at Farrell. \"All\n right, Arthur?\"\n\n\n \"Good enough,\" Farrell said.\n And to Xavier, who had not\n moved from his post at the magnoscanner:\n \"How does it look,\n Xav? Have you pinned down\n their base yet?\"\n\n\n The mechanical answered him\n in a voice as smooth and clear—and\n as inflectionless—as a 'cello\n note. \"The planet seems uninhabited\n except for a large island\n some three hundred miles in\n diameter. There are twenty-seven\n small agrarian hamlets surrounded\n by cultivated fields.\n There is one city of perhaps a\n thousand buildings with a central\n square. In the square rests\n a grounded spaceship of approximately\n ten times the bulk\n of the\nMarco Four\n.\"",
"Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name\nare\nthey?\"\n\"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all—we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n\n\n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"",
"Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n\n\n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years—the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors—would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.",
"\"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not—\"\n\n\n \"\nAny problem posed by one\n group of human beings\n,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \"\ncan be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity\n.\"\n\n\n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\nHe waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.",
"\"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment—the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point—and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n\n\n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.",
"They crowded about the vision\n screen, jostling Xavier's jointed\n gray shape in their interest. The\n central city lay in minutest detail\n before them, the battered\n hulk of the grounded ship glinting\n rustily in the late afternoon\n sunlight. Streets radiated away\n from the square in orderly succession,\n the whole so clearly\n depicted that they could see the\n throngs of people surging up\n and down, tiny foreshortened\n faces turned toward the sky.\n\n\n \"At least they're human,\"\n Farrell said. Relief replaced in\n some measure his earlier uneasiness.\n \"Which means that they're\n Terran, and can be dealt with\n according to Reclamations routine.\n Is that hulk spaceworthy,\n Xav?\"\n\n\n Xavier's mellow drone assumed\n the convention vibrato that\n indicated stark puzzlement. \"Its\n breached hull makes the ship incapable\n of flight. Apparently it\n is used only to supply power to\n the outlying hamlets.\"",
"\"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end—\"\n\n\n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib—the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since—how\n long, Xav?\"\n\n\n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n \"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\""
],
[
"\"They really came from Terra?\n They lived through a thousand\n years of flight?\"\n\n\n \"The ship left Terra for\n Sirius in 2171,\" Gibson said.\n \"But not with these people\n aboard, or their ancestors. That\n expedition perished after less\n than a light-year when its\n hydroponics system failed. The\n Hymenops found the ship derelict\n when they invaded us, and\n brought it to Alphard Six in\n what was probably their first experiment\n with human subjects.\n The ship's log shows clearly\n what happened to the original\n complement. The rest is deducible\n from the situation here.\"\n\n\n Farrell put his hands to his\n temples and groaned. \"The crash\n must have scrambled my wits.\n Gib, where\ndid\nthey come from?\"",
"\"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n \"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n\n\n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here—they\n still don't know where\n they really are—by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"",
"\"If they're neither Hymenops\n nor resurgent colonists,\" he said,\n \"then there's only one choice remaining—they're\n aliens from a\n system we haven't reached yet,\n beyond the old sphere of Terran\n exploration. We always assumed\n that we'd find other races out\n here someday, and that they'd\n be as different from us in form\n and motivation as the Hymenops.\n Why not now?\"\n\n\n Gibson said seriously, \"Not\n probable, Lee. The same objection\n that rules out the Bees applies\n to any trans-Alphardian\n culture—they'd have to be beyond\n the atomic fission stage,\n else they'd never have attempted\n interstellar flight. The Ringwave\n with its Zero Interval Transfer\n principle and instantaneous communications\n applications is the\n only answer to long-range travel,\n and if they'd had that they\n wouldn't have bothered with\n atomics.\"",
"Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\nGibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"",
"\"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n\n\n \"And I think\nyou\nlive for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born—neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"",
"\"But it does, for once,\" Gibson\n said. \"The Bees set up this\n colony as a control unit to study\n the species they were invading,\n and they had to give their\n specimens a normal—if obsolete—background\n in order to determine\n their capabilities. The fact\n that their experiment didn't tell\n them what they wanted to know\n may have had a direct bearing\n on their decision to pull out.\"\n\n\n Farrell shook his head. \"It's\n a reverse application, isn't it of\n the old saw about Terrans being\n incapable of understanding an\n alien culture?\"",
"\"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not—\"\n\n\n \"\nAny problem posed by one\n group of human beings\n,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \"\ncan be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity\n.\"\n\n\n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\nHe waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.",
"\"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship\ncouldn't\nhave made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary—the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated—\"\n\n\n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n \"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"",
"\"There were three empty\n domes on Five, which is a desert\n planet,\" Farrell pointed out.\n \"Why didn't they settle Six? It's\n a more habitable world.\"\n\n\n Gibson shrugged. \"I know the\n Bees always erected domes on\n every planet they colonized, Arthur,\n but precedent is a fallible\n tool. And it's even more firmly\n established that there's no possibility\n of our rationalizing the\n motivations of a culture as alien\n as the Hymenops'—we've been\n over that argument a hundred\n times on other reclaimed\n worlds.\"",
"\"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven:\nNo planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper—\n\"\n\n\n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you\nsleep\nwith that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world—it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n\n\n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.",
"Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name\nare\nthey?\"\n\"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all—we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n\n\n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"",
"\"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end—\"\n\n\n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib—the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since—how\n long, Xav?\"\n\n\n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n \"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"",
"\"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n \"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n\n\n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n\n\n Gibson disagreed.",
"\"But the ship wasn't here in\n 3000,\" Gibson said, \"and it is\n now. Therefore it must have arrived\n at some time during the\n two hundred years of Hymenop\n occupation and evacuation.\"\n\n\n Farrell, tangled in contradictions,\n swore bitterly. \"But\n why should the Bees let them\n through? The three domes on\n Five are over two hundred years\n old, which means that the Bees\n were here before the ship came.\n Why didn't they blast it or enslave\n its crew?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't touched on all the\n possibilities,\" Gibson reminded\n him. \"We haven't even established\n yet that these people were\n never under Hymenop control.\n Precedent won't hold always, and\n there's no predicting nor evaluating\n the motives of an alien\n race. We never understood the\n Hymenops because there's no\n common ground of logic between\n us. Why try to interpret their\n intentions now?\"",
"Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n\n\n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n\n\n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n\n\n \"\nFriendly?\nThat torpedo—\"",
"\"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n\n\n Stryker was not reassured.\n\n\n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n\n\n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"",
"\"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added\nas usual\n. \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n\n\n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the\nMarco Four\nout of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.",
"\"I think the ship was built on\n Terra during the Twenty-second\n Century,\" Gibson said calmly.\n \"The atomic wars during that\n period destroyed practically all\n historical records along with the\n technology of the time, but I've\n read well-authenticated reports\n of atomic-driven ships leaving\n Terra before then for the nearer\n stars. The human race climbed\n out of its pit again during the\n Twenty-third Century and developed\n the technology that gave\n us the Ringwave. Certainly no\n atomic-powered ships were built\n after the wars—our records are\n complete from that time.\"",
"When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The\nMarco Four\n, Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n\n\n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n\n\n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\nStryker looked dubious.\n \"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"",
"Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk—\n\n\n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get\nhere\n?\"\n\n\n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him."
],
[
"Stryker turned on him almost\n angrily. \"If they're not Hymenops\n or humans or aliens, then\n what in God's name\nare\nthey?\"\n\"Aye, there's the rub,\" Farrell\n said, quoting a passage\n whose aptness had somehow seen\n it through a dozen reorganizations\n of insular tongue and a\n final translation to universal\n Terran. \"If they're none of those\n three, we've only one conclusion\n left. There's no one down there\n at all—we're victims of the first\n joint hallucination in psychiatric\n history.\"\n\n\n Stryker threw up his hands in\n surrender. \"We can't identify\n them by theorizing, and that\n brings us down to the business\n of first-hand investigation.\n Who's going to bell the cat this\n time?\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to go,\" Gibson said\n at once. \"The ZIT computer can\n wait.\"",
"\"You two did the field work\n on the last location,\" he said.\n \"It's high time I took my turn—and\n God knows I'd go mad if\n I had to stay inship and listen\n to Lee memorizing his Handbook\n subsections or to Gib practicing\n dead languages with Xavier.\"\n\n\n Stryker laughed for the first\n time since the explosion that\n had so nearly wrecked the\nMarco\n Four\n.\n\n\n \"Good enough. Though it\n wouldn't be more diverting to\n listen for hours to you improvising\n enharmonic variations on\n the\nLament for Old Terra\nwith\n your accordion.\"\n\n\n Gibson, characteristically, had\n a refinement to offer.\n\n\n \"They'll be alerted down there\n for a reconnaissance sally,\" he\n said. \"Why not let Xavier take\n the scouter down for overt diversion,\n and drop Arthur off in\n the helihopper for a low-level\n check?\"",
"When Farrell refused to be\n baited Stryker turned to Gibson,\n who was busily assessing the\n damage done to the ship's more\n fragile equipment, and to Xavier,\n who searched the planet's\n surface with the ship's magnoscanner.\n The\nMarco Four\n, Ringwave\n generators humming gently,\n hung at the moment just\n inside the orbit of Alphard Six's\n single dun-colored moon.\n\n\n Gibson put down a test meter\n with an air of finality.\n\n\n \"Nothing damaged but the\n Zero Interval Transfer computer.\n I can realign that in a couple\n of hours, but it'll have to be\n done before we hit Transfer\n again.\"\nStryker looked dubious.\n \"What if the issue is forced before\n the ZIT unit is repaired?\n Suppose they come up after us?\"",
"\"Arthur's right,\" Stryker said\n reluctantly. \"An atomic-powered\n ship\ncouldn't\nhave made such a\n trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant\n project couldn't have\n lasted through forty generations,\n speculative fiction to the\n contrary—the later generations\n would have been too far removed\n in ideology and intent from\n their ancestors. They'd have\n adapted to shipboard life as the\n norm. They'd have atrophied\n physically, perhaps even have\n mutated—\"\n\n\n \"And they'd never have\n fought past the Bees during the\n Hymenop invasion and occupation,\"\n Farrell finished triumphantly.\n \"The Bees had better\n detection equipment than we\n had. They'd have picked this\n ship up long before it reached\n Alphard Six.\"",
"He was so weak with strain\n and with the success of his coup\n that he all but fainted when\n Stryker, his scanty hair tousled\n and his fat face comical with bewilderment,\n stumbled out of his\n sleeping cubicle and bellowed at\n him.\n\n\n \"What the hell are you doing,\n Arthur? Take us down!\"\n\n\n Farrell gaped at him, speechless.\n\n\n Stryker lumbered past him\n and took the controls, spiraling\n the\nMarco Four\ndown. Men\n swarmed outside the ports when\n the Reclamations craft settled\n gently to the square again. Gibson\n and Xavier reached the ship\n first; Gibson came inside quickly,\n leaving the mechanical outside\n making patient explanations\n to an excited group of Alphardians.\n\n\n Gibson put a reassuring hand\n on Farrell's arm. \"It's all right,\n Arthur. There's no trouble.\"",
"\"Reconnaissance spiral first,\n Arthur,\" Stryker said firmly. He\n chuckled at Farrell's instant\n scowl, his little eyes twinkling\n and his naked paunch quaking\n over the belt of his shipboard\n shorts. \"Chapter One, Subsection\n Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven:\nNo planetfall on an unreclaimed\n world shall be deemed\n safe without proper—\n\"\n\n\n Farrell, as Stryker had expected,\n interrupted with characteristic\n impatience. \"Do you\nsleep\nwith that damned Reclamations\n Handbook, Lee? Alphard Six\n isn't an unreclaimed world—it\n was never colonized before the\n Hymenop invasion back in 3025,\n so why should it be inhabited\n now?\"\n\n\n Gibson, who for four hours\n had not looked up from his interminable\n chess game with\n Xavier, paused with a beleaguered\n knight in one blunt brown\n hand.",
"\"No point in taking chances,\"\n Gibson said in his neutral baritone.\n He shrugged thick bare\n shoulders, his humorless black-browed\n face unmoved, when\n Farrell included him in his\n scowl. \"We're two hundred twenty-six\n light-years from Sol, at\n the old limits of Terran expansion,\n and there's no knowing\n what we may turn up here. Alphard's\n was one of the first systems\n the Bees took over. It must\n have been one of the last to be\n abandoned when they pulled back\n to 70 Ophiuchi.\"\n\n\n \"And I think\nyou\nlive for the\n day,\" Farrell said acidly, \"when\n we'll stumble across a functioning\n dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.\n Damn it, Gib, the Bees\n pulled out a hundred years ago,\n before you and I were born—neither\n of us ever saw a Hymenop,\n and never will!\"",
"\"Logic or not-logic,\" Gibson\n said. \"If it's a Terran artifact,\n we can discover the reason for\n its presence. If not—\"\n\n\n \"\nAny problem posed by one\n group of human beings\n,\" Stryker\n quoted his Handbook, \"\ncan be\n resolved by any other group, regardless\n of ideology or conditioning,\n because the basic\n perceptive abilities of both must\n be the same through identical\n heredity\n.\"\n\n\n \"If it's an imitation, and this\n is another Hymenop experiment\n in condition ecology, then we're\n stumped to begin with,\" Gibson\n finished. \"Because we're not\n equipped to evaluate the psychology\n of alien motivation. We've\n got to determine first which case\n applies here.\"\nHe waited for Farrell's expected\n irony, and when the\n navigator forestalled him by remaining\n grimly quiet, continued.",
"Stryker vetoed his offer as\n promptly. \"No, the ZIT comes\n first. We may have to run for it,\n and we can't set up a Transfer\n jump without the computer. It's\n got to be me or Arthur.\"\n\n\n Farrell felt the familiar chill\n of uneasiness that inevitably\n preceded this moment of decision.\n He was not lacking in courage,\n else the circumstances under\n which he had worked for the\n past ten years—the sometimes\n perilous, sometimes downright\n charnel conditions left by the\n fleeing Hymenop conquerors—would\n have broken him long\n ago. But that same hard experience\n had honed rather than\n blunted the edge of his imagination,\n and the prospect of a close-quarters\n stalking of an unknown\n and patently hostile force was\n anything but attractive.",
"Suppose, he thought—and derided\n himself for thinking it—one\n of those suicidal old interstellar\n ventures\ndid\nsucceed?\n\n\n Xavier's voice, a mellow\n drone from the helihopper's\n Ringwave-powered visicom, cut\n sharply into his musing. \"The\n ship has discovered the scouter\n and is training an electronic\n beam upon it. My instruments\n record an electromagnetic vibration\n pattern of low power but\n rapidly varying frequency. The\n operation seems pointless.\"\n\n\n Stryker's voice followed, querulous\n with worry: \"I'd better\n pull Xav back. It may be something\n lethal.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" Gibson's baritone advised.\n Surprisingly, there was\n excitement in the engineer's\n voice. \"I think they're trying to\n communicate with us.\"",
"\"We've touched at every inhabited\n world in this sector, Lee,\n and not one surviving colony has\n developed space travel on its\n own. The Hymenops had a hundred\n years to condition their human\n slaves to ignorance of\n everything beyond their immediate\n environment—the motives\n behind that conditioning usually\n escape us, but that's beside the\n point—and they did a thorough\n job of it. The colonists have had\n no more than a century of freedom\n since the Bees pulled out,\n and four generations simply\n isn't enough time for any subjugated\n culture to climb from\n slavery to interstellar flight.\"\n\n\n Stryker made a padding turn\n about the control room, tugging\n unhappily at the scanty fringe\n of hair the years had left him.",
"\"From one of the first peripheral\n colonies conquered by the\n Bees,\" Gibson said patiently.\n \"The Hymenops were long-range\n planners, remember, and masters\n of hypnotic conditioning. They\n stocked the ship with a captive\n crew of Terrans conditioned to\n believe themselves descendants\n of the original crew, and\n grounded it here in disabled\n condition. They left for Alphard\n Five then, to watch developments.\n\n\n \"Succeeding generations of\n colonists grew up accepting the\n fact that their ship had missed\n Sirius and made planetfall here—they\n still don't know where\n they really are—by luck. They\n never knew about the Hymenops,\n and they've struggled along\n with an inadequate technology in\n the hope that a later expedition\n would find them. They found the\n truth hard to take, but they're\n eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran\n assimilation.\"",
"Farrell followed him dumbly\n out of the infirmary and down\n a bare corridor whose metal\n floor rang coldly underfoot. An\n open port near the corridor's end\n relieved the blankness of wall\n and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian\n sunlight; Farrell slowed\n to look out, wondering how\n long he had lain unconscious,\n and felt panic knife at him\n when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,\n port open and undefended,\n on the square outside.\n\n\n The mechanical had been as\n easily taken as himself, then.\n Stryker and Gibson, for all their\n professional caution, would fare\n no better—they could not have\n overlooked the capture of Farrell\n and Xavier, and when they\n tried as a matter of course to\n rescue them the\nMarco\nwould be\n struck down in turn by the same\n weapon.",
"\"But this was never an unreclaimed\n world,\" Farrell said\n with the faint malice of one too\n recently caught in the wrong.\n \"Alphard Six was surveyed and\n seeded with Terran bacteria\n around the year 3000, but the\n Bees invaded before we could\n colonize. And that means we'll\n have to rule out any resurgent\n colonial group down there, because\n Six never had a colony in\n the beginning.\"\n\n\n \"The Bees have been gone for\n over a hundred years,\" Stryker\n said. \"Colonists might have migrated\n from another Terran-occupied\n planet.\"\n\n\n Gibson disagreed.",
"\"They're not alien,\" Gibson\n said positively. \"Their architecture\n is Terran, and so is their\n ship. The ship is incredibly\n primitive, though; those batteries\n of tubes at either end—\"\n\n\n \"Are thrust reaction jets,\"\n Stryker finished in an awed\n voice. \"Primitive isn't the word,\n Gib—the thing is prehistoric!\n Rocket propulsion hasn't been\n used in spacecraft since—how\n long, Xav?\"\n\n\n Xavier supplied the information\n with mechanical infallibility.\n \"Since the year 2100 when\n the Ringwave propulsion-communication\n principle was discovered.\n That principle has served\n men since.\"",
"\"I doubt that they can. Any\n installation crudely enough\n equipped to trust in guided missiles\n is hardly likely to have developed\n efficient space craft.\"\n\n\n Stryker was not reassured.\n\n\n \"That torpedo of theirs was\n deadly enough,\" he said. \"And\n its nature reflects the nature of\n the people who made it. Any race\n vicious enough to use atomic\n charges is too dangerous to\n trifle with.\" Worry made comical\n creases in his fat, good-humored\n face. \"We'll have to find\n out who they are and why\n they're here, you know.\"\n\n\n \"They can't be Hymenops,\"\n Gibson said promptly. \"First,\n because the Bees pinned their\n faith on Ringwave energy fields,\n as we did, rather than on missiles.\n Second, because there's no\n dome on Six.\"",
"Farrell shook his head at the\n inference. \"I've read any number\n of fanciful romances on the\n theme, Gib, but it won't stand\n up in practice. No shipboard society\n could last through a thousand-year\n space voyage. It's a\n physical and psychological impossibility.\n There's got to be\n some other explanation.\"\nGibson shrugged. \"We can\n only eliminate the least likely\n alternatives and accept the simplest\n one remaining.\"",
"Farrell said dumbly, \"I don't\n understand. They didn't shoot\n you and Xav down too?\"\n\n\n It was Gibson's turn to stare.\n\n\n \"No one shot you down! These\n people are primitive enough to\n use metallic power lines to\n carry electricity to their hamlets,\n an anachronism you forgot\n last night. You piloted the helihopper\n into one of those lines,\n and the crash put you out for\n the rest of the night and most\n of today. These Alphardians are\n friendly, so desperately happy to\n be found again that it's really\n pathetic.\"\n\n\n \"\nFriendly?\nThat torpedo—\"",
"\"Gib's right,\" he said. He\n nearly added\nas usual\n. \"We're on\n rest leave at the moment, yes,\n but our mission is still to find\n Terran colonies enslaved and\n abandoned by the Bees, not to\n risk our necks and a valuable\n Reorientations ship by landing\n blind on an unobserved planet.\n We're too close already. Cut in\n your shields and find a reconnaissance\n spiral, will you?\"\n\n\n Grumbling, Farrell punched\n coordinates on the Ringwave\n board that lifted the\nMarco Four\nout of her descent and restored\n the bluish enveloping haze of\n her repellors.",
"Farrell stared in blank disbelief\n at the anomalous craft on\n the screen. Primitive, as Stryker\n had said, was not the word\n for it: clumsily ovoid, studded\n with torpedo domes and turrets\n and bristling at either end with\n propulsion tubes, it lay at the\n center of its square like a rusted\n relic of a past largely destroyed\n and all but forgotten. What a\n magnificent disregard its builders\n must have had, he thought,\n for their lives and the genetic\n purity of their posterity! The\n sullen atomic fires banked in\n that oxidizing hulk—\n\n\n Stryker said plaintively, \"If\n you're right, Gib, then we're\n more in the dark than ever. How\n could a Terran-built ship eleven\n hundred years old get\nhere\n?\"\n\n\n Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's\n contemplation of alternatives,\n seemed hardly to hear\n him."
]
] |
train
|
63477
|
[
"How did Trillium end up as a stow-away on the ship?",
"How had the fusion control points been adjusted?",
"Had Trillium known the outcome of her stowing away, would she have likely still stowed away?",
"What were the hiding places selected by Trillium while stowing away?",
"Why were the Venus women transfixed by the Earthmen?",
"What caused Trillium to be found in her hiding place the final time?",
"Why is it in the best interest for an Earthman to never lay eyes on a Venus dame?",
"Why did Callahan think Trillium was Berta when he first spotted her?",
"How did Trillium sneak her way onto the ship?",
"What were Callahan and O'Rielly awarded for assisting the revolution?"
] |
[
[
"She had been kidnapped by the men under the official command of the President of Earth. ",
"She had fallen for the Earthmen and had chosen to run away with them.",
"She chose to show away so that the Venus women could bring their cause to the attention of Earth's President. ",
"She had accidentally boarded the ship while looking for the shower. "
],
[
"The control had reset itself in flight. ",
"It had been moved by a scurrying three-tailed mouse of Venus",
"Trillium had adjusted it when she got too heated.",
"They were not correctly inspected and locked before blast-off."
],
[
"Yes, because she was able to accomplish her mission. ",
"Yes, because she had already shown that she was selfish and lonely. ",
"No, because she was jeopardizing being condemned to a Uranus moon.",
"No, because she wasn't able to prove her point and was sent back to Venus. "
],
[
"In the shower and behind the burner",
"By the lockers and behind the burner",
"Behind the burner and under the bunk",
"In the shower and under the bunk"
],
[
"They felt abandoned by their own men who had obsessions with war and little time for them.",
"The Earthmen were much more attractive and had real facial hair. ",
"The women of Venus liked to break the rules. ",
"Venus was solely occupied by women, leaving them no other option. "
],
[
"The Earthmen couldn't stop staring at the bunk where she was because of their lust. ",
"His Excellency saw her hiding under the bunk and recognized her immediately. ",
"O'Rielly and Callahan had turned her in to the Old Woman in hopes of a reward. ",
"A loud thump from under the bunk that caught the attention of the Old Woman. "
],
[
"Because the Venus dames were thought to be only goofy tale set loose by some old space bum. ",
"Because they would be so infatuated by the dame even knowing she would be their damnation. ",
"Because they would be condemned to a Uranus moon for even looking at them. ",
"Because of their dangerous nature."
],
[
"Because Berta was Trillium's Grandmamma and she resembled her from a hundred and twenty-five years ago. ",
"Because she introduced herself as so and led him to believe that was who she was. ",
"Because all the Venus women have the same enchanting appearance. ",
"Because only Berta was able to enter the ship. "
],
[
"She disguised herself as a boy hustling bags through the ship. ",
"She had an enchanted Earthman help her onto the ship. ",
"She had sneaked on while no one was looking and went straight to the burner. ",
"She disguised herself as a boy who was serving food in the quarters. "
],
[
"They were allowed to visit with the women of Venus",
"They were allotted five minutes leisure before returning to their stations. ",
"They were punished, rather than rewarded, and programmed to be hung, shot and thrown to the crows for breakfast. ",
"Nothing, but they were spared from being condemned to a Uranus moon."
]
] |
[
3,
3,
1,
4,
1,
4,
2,
1,
1,
2
] |
[
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
0,
0,
0
] |
[
[
"O'Rielly stood looking thoughtfully at lovely, womanly, exquisite\n Trillium. Just like that, O'Rielly felt as sparkling of mind as a\n spiral nebula. \"My locker!\" he crowed with inspiration and yanked open\n the doors under his bunk. He glimpsed a black ditty bag, also the cap\n and coverall uniform of a baggage boy.\n\n\n \"I threw them in there before you came on duty before blast-off,\"\n Trillium explained. \"I knew the burner room would be warm.\"\n\n\n Trillium—with her shape—passing as a boy hustling bags through this\n ship. O'Rielly chortled as he tucked her under his bunk. \"Now don't you\n worry about another thing!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm not,\" she assured him happily. \"Everything is going just the\n way Grandmamma knew it would!\"",
"\"Oh, I'm Trillium,\" she assured Callahan sweetly. \"But Grandmamma's\n name is Berta and people say I'm just like she was a hundred and\n twenty-five years ago.\"\n\"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like his brain had been taken apart and\n was being slapped together again. \"O'Rielly! Awp, you angel-faced\n pirate, couldn't you hide her somewheres better than that? Shut up,\n you don't have to explain to me, but God help the whole universe if we\n don't flimflam the Old Woman!\" With which ominous remark, rendered in\n a zesty devil-may-care manner, however, Callahan threw himself into\n O'Rielly's shower.",
"\"Trillium,\" O'Rielly pleaded in loving anguish, \"why do you have to\n keep coming out of hiding just when nobody's going to find you?\"\n\n\n Her eyes merely became deep pools in which O'Rielly would have gladly\n drowned himself if he could.\n\"There are rewards,\" the Old Woman said with the deadly coldness of\n outer space, \"for Earthmen found in a Venus woman's company, and for\n her leaving her planet.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" His Excellency's ear beards were standing straight out\n sideways. \"I'll handle this!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind His Excellency,\" the Old Woman snapped, \"that I represent\n Earth and her dominion of space gained by right of original flight!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind the Captain,\" His Excellency declared fit to be heard\n back to his planet, \"that I am the Personal Ambassador of the President\n of Venus and this thing can mean war!\"",
"\"No more so than those of the Ambassadorial Suite.\"\nSeeming to grind her teeth, the Old O Woman turned abruptly to leave\n O'Rielly's watch room. Was all O'Rielly could do to keep from busting\n out laughing for joy.\n\n\n Old Woman had been flimflammed for fair! Dear Trillium was saved! And\n betwixt O'Rielly's grand brain and Callahan's great experience she'd be\n happy forever.\n\n\n A fine loud \"thump,\" however, was now heard. Old Woman whirled back and\n yanked open the doors under O'Rielly's bunk.\n\n\n \"Of all the sappy hiding places!\" Callahan yelped, in surprise of\n course.\n\n\n \"Trillium?\" His Excellency bellowed as if stung by one of the\n sabre-tailed hornets of his native planet. \"Trillium!\"",
"\"Impossible!\" Grandpapa President's ear beards stood near straight up\n as he roared, \"You couldn't have stolen away by yourself! Trillium,\n tell the truth!\"\n\n\n \"Very well. Grandmamma told me how.\"\n\"Obviously Trillium's poor little brain has been drugged,\" His\n Excellency Dimdooly declared. \"Grandmamma Berta wouldn't know the first\n thing about such things!\"\n\n\n \"Impossible!\" Grandpapa President agreed. \"I've been married to her\n for a hundred and twenty-four and a half years and she's the finest\n rattle-brain I ever knew!\"\n\n\n \"She learned,\" Trillium stated emphatically, \"a hundred and twenty-five\n years ago.\"\n\n\n \"Hundred twenty-five,\" Grandpapa president growled like a boiling\n volcano. \"The year some Earthman.... Never did catch the devil....\n Berta? Impossible!\"",
"\"You—I mean, that Earth guy a hundred twenty-five years ago,\" O'Rielly\n said in sudden thought. \"If Venus dames wanted to be loved so bad, why\n did Trillium's Grandmamma let him go?\"\n\n\n \"Venus guys wasn't so busy playing war all the time,\" Callahan mumbled,\n like to himself, \"they'd of found out the answer centuries ago. Yep,\n guess our boy was the only guy on Earth or Venus to find out and live.\n Dames bossing both planets now, though, his old secret won't be one\n much longer. Venus dames could of let it out centuries ago themselves\n but didn't, just to spite Earth probably. Later, was part of organizing\n to take over Venus, I guess.\"\n\n\n O'Rielly still had memories of the way he had felt about Trillium\n before her revolution. \"All right, Callahan, why did 'our boy' leave\n Grandmamma?\"",
"\"Of all the loony apprentices I ever had to answer the Old Woman for!\n Awp, lemme out where I can think of something to save me own neck at\n least!\"\n\n\n Was all O'Rielly could do to keep from rolling on the deck with glee.\n Old Callahan had been flimflammed for fair! The dear little stowaway\n was saved! And O'Rielly would now think of grand ways to save her\n lovely neck and his own forever.\n\n\n O'Rielly's shower door, however, opened abruptly. O'Rielly had not\n opened it. O'Rielly, however, suffered a cruel stab of dismay. Surely\n his dear stowaway had been listening through the door. Why didn't she\n have brains enough to stay hid until Callahan was gone!\n\n\n At sight of her, of course, Callahan's eyes near popped from his old\n head. \"Berta!\"",
"Wasn't too bad a fib. The more O'Rielly thought of Trillium, the more\n ideas he got of doing things he'd never dreamt of before in his life.\n Yes, ma'am!\n\n\n \"Wasting your time talking nonsense!\" Old Woman's look was fit to\n freeze O'Rielly's brain, then she gave Callahan the look. \"I sent you\n down here to find the answer to that fusion control slippage!\"",
"\"Mr. President's office. He is in personal command of our glorious war\n efforts.\"\n\n\n Old Woman sighed through her teeth. \"Venus woman aboard this ship.\n Stowaway. Rattle that around your belfries.\"\n\n\n The flunkies' faces went slack with shock, then were replaced by a\n blizzard of scrambled faces and torrents of incoherent voices.\n\n\n Finally on the Earth panel appeared the famous classic features. \"The\n facts, if you please, Captain Hatwoody.\"\n\n\n The Venus panel finally held steady on universally notorious features,\n that were as fierce as an eagle's, in a fancy war helmet. \"Trillium! My\n own granddaughter? Impossible! Dimdooly,\" Mr. President roared at his\n Excellency, \"what's this nonsense?\"\n\n\n \"Some loud creature is interfering,\" Madame President snapped with\n annoyance.",
"Madame President's shapely finger now rested full on the button that\n could launch the fleets of war rockets that had been pre-aimed for a\n thousand years. \"I'm afraid your Ambassador is unwelcome now,\" Madame\n President stated coolly. \"Your granddaughter's actions have every mark\n of an invasion tactic by your government.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, her actions?\" Grandpapa President's finger now lay\n poised on the button that had been waiting a thousand years to blow\n Earth out of the universe. \"My grandchild was kidnapped by men under\n your official command! Weren't you, Trillium dear?\"\n\n\n \"No. One of us stowing away was the only way we Venus women could bring\n our cause to the attention of Earth's President. If Earth will only\n stop buying from Venus, you won't have any money to squander on your\n wars any longer no matter what happens to we revolutionaries!\"",
"\"Dimmy,\" Trillium was saying firmly to His Excellency, \"you have beat\n around the bush with me long enough. Now say it!\"\nDimdooly—the mighty, the lordly, who had sneered at the sight of mere\n Earthmen kowtowing to a mere woman—swelled up fit to blow his gaskets,\n then all the gas went out of him. His ear beards, however, still had\n enough zip left to flutter like butterflies. \"Yes, Trillium dear. I\n love only you. Please marry me at your earliest convenience.\"\n\n\n \"Well, Grandmamma,\" Trillium said with a highly self-satisfied air, \"it\n works. And just like you said, Earthmen meant nothing once I knew we\n Venus women had our own men in our power.\"\n\n\n \"Those crewmen there,\" Grandmamma President said, \"seem to be proof\n enough that we Venus women no longer radiate any threat to Earth's\n tranquility.\"",
"\"Blasted fools still have the circuits crossed,\" Mr. President swore.\n \"Some silly female cackling now!\"\n\n\n The parties in the panels saw each other now. Each one's left hand on a\n desk moved toward a big red button marked, ROCKETS.\n\n\n \"So,\" Mr. President said evenly. \"Another violation by your Earthmen.\"\n\n\n \"By your granddaughter, at least,\" Madame President replied coolly.\n\n\n \"An innocent child,\" Mr. President snapped, \"obviously kidnapped by\n those two idiotic Earthmen there!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no, Grandpapa,\" Trillium said swiftly; \"I stole away all by\n myself, and Mr. O'Rielly and Callahan have been very helpful.\"",
"Well, ma'am, O'Rielly searched every cranny where even a three-tailed\n mouse of Venus could have stowed away. His first flight, and O'Rielly\n saw himself washed out, busted to sweeper on the blast-off stands of\n some God-forsaken satellite. He staggered back into his watch room. And\n his brain was suddenly taken apart and slapped together again. Felt\n that way.\n\n\n She was sitting on his bunk. No three-tailed mouse. No Old Woman\n either. Oh, she was a female human, though, this creature at which\n O'Rielly stood gaping. Yes, ma'am!",
"\"I was in your burner room.\" Her voice matched the rest of her, a blend\n of loveliness unlike anything outside a guy's most secret dreams. \"I\n couldn't stand the heat any longer and I couldn't open that big door.\n So I moved one of your controls a tiny bit. All the noise in there,\n naturally you couldn't hear me walk out while your back was turned\n resetting the control.\"\nO'Rielly suddenly felt like turning her over his knee and whaling her\n until she couldn't sit for a year. This, mind you, he felt in an age\n where no Earth guy for a thousand years had dared raise so much as a\n breath against woman's supremacy in all matters. That male character\n trait, however, did not seem to be the overpowering reason why\n O'Rielly, instead of laying violent hands upon this one's person, heard\n himself saying in sympathetic outrage, \"A shame you had to go to all\n that bother to get out here!\"",
"\"Higher than a swacked skunk's tail again,\" Callahan muttered, then\n snapped back over his shoulder, \"Use your shower!\"\n\n\n O'Rielly stood considering his shower door. Somehow he doubted that\n Burner Chief Terrence Callahan's mood, or Captain Millicent Hatwoody's,\n would be improved by knowledge of she who was in O'Rielly's shower now.\n Not that the dear stowaway was less than charming. Quite the contrary.\n Oh, very quite!\n\n\n \"You rockhead!\" Only Callahan back from the burner. \"Didn't I tell you\n to shower the stink off yourself? Old Woman's taking a Venus bigwig\n on tour the ship. Old Woman catches you like you been rassling skunks\n she'll peel both our hides off. Not to mention what she'll do anyway\n about your fusion control!\"",
"\"Yes! War in which people will actually die!\" As His Excellency paled\n at that grisly remark, the Old Woman spoke through her teeth at\n O'Rielly, Callahan and Trillium. \"All right, come along!\"\n\n\n O'Rielly joined the death march gladly. He felt the way Callahan\n looked: ready to wrap his arms around Trillium's brave loveliness and\n protect it to his last breath of life.\n\n\n Old Woman led the way to her office. Jabbed some buttons on her desk.\n Panels on opposite walls lit up.\n\n\n \"Presidents of Earth and Venus, please,\" the Old Woman stated evenly.\n \"Interplanetary emergency.\"\n\n\n Highly groomed flunkies appeared on the panels and were impersonally\n pleasant.\n\n\n \"Madame President's office. She is in a Cabinet meeting.\"",
"\"Now you just listen to me, Trillium!\" Grandpapa President was all\n Venus manhood laying down the law. \"That's the way things have been on\n Venus for ten thousand years and all the women in the universe can't\n change it!\"\n\n\n \"I have been in constant contact with my Cabinet during these\n conversations,\" Madame President said crisply. \"Earth is terminating\n all trade agreements with Venus as of this instant.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Grandpapa's beards near pulled his ears off. \"It's not legal!\n You can't get away with this!\"\n\n\n \"Take your finger off that trigger, boy!\" a heavenly voice similar to\n Trillium's advised from the Venus panel.\n\n\n Whereupon Grandpapa glared to one side. \"Berta! What are you doing\n here? I am deciding matters of the gravest interplanetary nature!\"",
"\"Oh?\" Callahan bristled up like a bad name had been bandied about.\n \"Seen them ditty bags Venus bigwigs have, ain't you? Some big enough to\n stuff a cow in. Notice how nobody ever dares question a bigwig's bags,\n even through customs? Just run 'em through the big Geiger that tells\n whether there's any fusionable junk inside. Well, our boy got himself\n one of them bags, stuffed himself inside and joined a bigwig's pile of\n 'em.\n\n\n \"Didn't pull it whilst on the Venus port during a layover either, when\n a crew check would of turned him up missing. Pulled it on vacation.\n Started on the Earth end. Made himself a pair of beards to paste on his\n ears of course. Wove Jupiter wiggle worms in to keep the beards moving.\n Wasn't like the real thing, but good enough to flimflam Venus guys.\"",
"Never in his right mind would any crewman dare fail to come stiffly\n erect the instant the Old Woman appeared. Behind her stood a colorfully\n robed specimen of Venus man. Handsome as the devil himself. Fit to snap\n lesser men in two with his highly bejeweled hands. Fuzzy beards trailed\n from his ears and kept twitching lazily as he sneered at the spectacle\n of two men meekly acknowledging the superiority of a woman.\n\n\n She was fit to put frost on a hydrogen burner. \"Mr. Callahan, I asked\n you a question, did I not?\"\n\n\n \"Believe you did, ma'am,\" Callahan responded cheerfully. \"And the\n answer is, ma'am, that Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly and me was\n discussing—ah—matrimony, ma'am. Mr. Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly\n here is considering it, ma'am.\"",
"\"You're so kind. But I'm afraid I became rather sticky and smelly in\n there.\"\n\n\n \"They ought to cool the air in there with perfume! I'll drop a\n suggestion in the Old Woman's box first chance I get.\"\n\n\n \"You're so thoughtful. And do you have bathing facilities?\"\n\n\n \"That door right there. Oh, let me open it for you!\"\n\n\n \"You're so sweet.\" Her big dark eyes glowed with such pure innocence\n that O'Rielly could have torn down the universe and rebuilt it just for\n her.\n\n\n Yes, ma'am, O'Rielly was floating on a pink cloud with heavenly music\n in his head. Never felt so fine before. Except on the Venus layover\n when he'd been roped into a dice game with a bunch of Venus lads who\n had a jug to cheer one's parting with one's money."
],
[
"At the first flash of red on the bank of meters Apprentice Burnerman\n O'Rielly had slammed the safety helmet on his head; he was already\n throwing open the lock to the burner room. The hot, throbbing rumble\n whipped around him and near crushed his breath away. Power! Power of\n the universe trapped here and ready to destroy its captors given one\n chance! Swiftly O'Rielly unlocked the controls and reset them. The\n throbbing rumble changed tone.\n\n\n Old Callahan's voice crackled now through the helmet's ear contact.\n \"Well, Mr. O'Rielly?\"\n\n\n \"Fusion control two points low, sir.\"\n\n\n O'Rielly wondered had Callahan passed out, was so long before the old\n Burner Chief demanded hoarsely, \"Didn't you lock them controls before\n blast-off?\"",
"A bell suddenly clanged fit to wake the dead while the overhead lights\n flashed wildly. Only the watch room door. Only Callahan here now. Old\n buzzard had a drooped nose like a pick, chin like a shovel.\n\n\n When he talked he was like digging a hole in front of himself. \"Well,\n what about that control?\"\n\n\n \"What control?\"\n\n\n \"Your fusion control that got itself two points low!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that little thing.\"\n\n\n Callahan said something through his teeth, then studied O'Rielly\n sharply. \"Hey, you been wetting your whistle on that Venus vino again?\n Lemme smell your breath! Bah. Loaded yourself full of chlorophyll\n again probably. All right, stand aside whilst I see your burner.\"\n\n\n \"Charmed to, Burner Chief Callahan, sir,\" O'Rielly said while bowing\n gracefully.",
"\"If every control hadn't been locked in correct setting,\" O'Rielly\n answered from his own angry bewilderment, \"the error would have\n registered before blast-off—wouldn't it, sir?\"\n\n\n \"So a control reset itself in flight, hey?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know yet, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Well, Mr. O'Rielly, you better know before we orbit Earth!\"",
"The icy knot in O'Rielly's stomach jerked tighter. A dozen burners on\n this ship; why did something crazy have to happen to O'Rielly's? In a\n hundred years, so the instructors—brisk females all—had told O'Rielly\n in pre-flight school, no control had ever been known to slip. But one\n had moved here. Not enough to cause serious trouble this far out from\n Earth. On blast-down, though, with one jet below peak, the uneven\n thrust could throw the ship, crash it, the whole lovely thing and all\n aboard gone in a churning cloud.",
"Wasn't too bad a fib. The more O'Rielly thought of Trillium, the more\n ideas he got of doing things he'd never dreamt of before in his life.\n Yes, ma'am!\n\n\n \"Wasting your time talking nonsense!\" Old Woman's look was fit to\n freeze O'Rielly's brain, then she gave Callahan the look. \"I sent you\n down here to find the answer to that fusion control slippage!\"",
"Sweat pouring off him, O'Rielly prowled around his burner. Design of\n the thing had been bossed by dames of course; what on Earth wasn't any\n more? Anyway, nobody could get to a burner except through its watch\n room. Anyone entered or left there, a bell clanged, lights flashed\n and a meter registered beside the Burnerman's bunk and on the Burner\n Chief's console up in the flight room full of beautifully efficient\n officers. Ever since Venus blast-off O'Rielly had been in Four's watch\n room. Nobody had passed through. O'Rielly knew it. Callahan knew it.\n By now the Old Woman herself, Captain Millicent Hatwoody, had probably\n inquired what was in charge of Burner Four.",
"\"I was in your burner room.\" Her voice matched the rest of her, a blend\n of loveliness unlike anything outside a guy's most secret dreams. \"I\n couldn't stand the heat any longer and I couldn't open that big door.\n So I moved one of your controls a tiny bit. All the noise in there,\n naturally you couldn't hear me walk out while your back was turned\n resetting the control.\"\nO'Rielly suddenly felt like turning her over his knee and whaling her\n until she couldn't sit for a year. This, mind you, he felt in an age\n where no Earth guy for a thousand years had dared raise so much as a\n breath against woman's supremacy in all matters. That male character\n trait, however, did not seem to be the overpowering reason why\n O'Rielly, instead of laying violent hands upon this one's person, heard\n himself saying in sympathetic outrage, \"A shame you had to go to all\n that bother to get out here!\"",
"The shower units were equipped so no Burnerman need be more than two\n steps from his responsibility. To keep the Old Woman from possibly\n blowing her gaskets completely, O'Rielly simply stepped in, shut the\n door, flipped a switch and tingled as he was electronically cleansed\n of person and clothes. By time he finished, the Old Woman and His\n Excellency were already coming out of the burner room, dripping with\n sweat.\n\n\n Old Woman opened the shower with her customary commanding air. \"You\n first, Your Excellency.\"\n\n\n \"My dear Captain,\" His Excellency replied like a smoothly drawn dagger,\n \"always the lesser gender enjoys precedence.\"\n\n\n No Earth dame ever admitted any guy was even equal to any female. Old\n Woman, a prime symbol of her gender's superiority, whipped a razor edge\n onto her own words. \"Facilities of the Captain's quarters are more\n satisfactory.\"",
"With suddenly enlivened interest O'Rielly looked at Callahan. \"Hey, how\n come you know so much?\"\n\n\n \"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like waking from a trance; even groaned\n to himself, something that sounded like, \"Blabbering like I'd had\n a nip myself—or one of them dillies was radiating nearby.\" Then\n Callahan glared fit to drill holes in O'Rielly's head. \"Look! I was\n a full Burnerman before you was born. Been flying the spaces hundred\n twenty-five years now. Had more chances to hear more—just hear more,\n you hear! Only tried to clear your mind about Venus dames so you could\n put your brain on your control mess. So now put it! If you ain't high\n on vino and ain't been made nuts by a Venus dame, what answer do we\n feed the Old Woman?\"\n\n\n \"Search me,\" Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly responded cheerfully.",
"\"Oh?\" Callahan bristled up like a bad name had been bandied about.\n \"Seen them ditty bags Venus bigwigs have, ain't you? Some big enough to\n stuff a cow in. Notice how nobody ever dares question a bigwig's bags,\n even through customs? Just run 'em through the big Geiger that tells\n whether there's any fusionable junk inside. Well, our boy got himself\n one of them bags, stuffed himself inside and joined a bigwig's pile of\n 'em.\n\n\n \"Didn't pull it whilst on the Venus port during a layover either, when\n a crew check would of turned him up missing. Pulled it on vacation.\n Started on the Earth end. Made himself a pair of beards to paste on his\n ears of course. Wove Jupiter wiggle worms in to keep the beards moving.\n Wasn't like the real thing, but good enough to flimflam Venus guys.\"",
"\"Burner Chief Callahan, sir,\" O'Rielly responded courteously, \"I have\n been thinking.\"\n\n\n \"With what? Never mind, just keep on trying whilst I have a shower for\n myself here.\" Wherewith Callahan reached hand for O'Rielly's shower\n door.\n\n\n \"Venus dames,\" O'Rielly said dreamily, \"don't boss anything, do they?\"\n\n\n Callahan yelped like he'd been bit in the pants by a big Jupiter ant.\n \"O'Rielly! You trying to get both of us condemned to a Uranus moon?\"\n Callahan also shot a wild look to the intercom switch. It was in OFF\n position; the flight room full of fancy gold-lace petticoats could not\n have overheard from here. Nevertheless Callahan's eyes rolled like the\n devil was behind him with the fork ready. \"O'Rielly, open your big ears\n whilst for your own good and mine I speak of certain matters.",
"O'Rielly stood looking thoughtfully at lovely, womanly, exquisite\n Trillium. Just like that, O'Rielly felt as sparkling of mind as a\n spiral nebula. \"My locker!\" he crowed with inspiration and yanked open\n the doors under his bunk. He glimpsed a black ditty bag, also the cap\n and coverall uniform of a baggage boy.\n\n\n \"I threw them in there before you came on duty before blast-off,\"\n Trillium explained. \"I knew the burner room would be warm.\"\n\n\n Trillium—with her shape—passing as a boy hustling bags through this\n ship. O'Rielly chortled as he tucked her under his bunk. \"Now don't you\n worry about another thing!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm not,\" she assured him happily. \"Everything is going just the\n way Grandmamma knew it would!\"",
"\"Now, now, Burner Chief Callahan, sir,\" O'Rielly responded with an airy\n laugh. \"No Earth guy for a hundred twenty-five years been near one and\n lived to tell it, has he?\"\n\n\n \"So the whispers run,\" Callahan murmured with a queer flame dancing\n into his eyes. \"So the old whispers still run.\"\n\n\n \"Never a name, though. Never how it was done.\" O'Rielly snorted.\n \"Probably just a goofy tale set loose by some old space bum.\"",
"Never in his right mind would any crewman dare fail to come stiffly\n erect the instant the Old Woman appeared. Behind her stood a colorfully\n robed specimen of Venus man. Handsome as the devil himself. Fit to snap\n lesser men in two with his highly bejeweled hands. Fuzzy beards trailed\n from his ears and kept twitching lazily as he sneered at the spectacle\n of two men meekly acknowledging the superiority of a woman.\n\n\n She was fit to put frost on a hydrogen burner. \"Mr. Callahan, I asked\n you a question, did I not?\"\n\n\n \"Believe you did, ma'am,\" Callahan responded cheerfully. \"And the\n answer is, ma'am, that Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly and me was\n discussing—ah—matrimony, ma'am. Mr. Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly\n here is considering it, ma'am.\"",
"\"Blasted fools still have the circuits crossed,\" Mr. President swore.\n \"Some silly female cackling now!\"\n\n\n The parties in the panels saw each other now. Each one's left hand on a\n desk moved toward a big red button marked, ROCKETS.\n\n\n \"So,\" Mr. President said evenly. \"Another violation by your Earthmen.\"\n\n\n \"By your granddaughter, at least,\" Madame President replied coolly.\n\n\n \"An innocent child,\" Mr. President snapped, \"obviously kidnapped by\n those two idiotic Earthmen there!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no, Grandpapa,\" Trillium said swiftly; \"I stole away all by\n myself, and Mr. O'Rielly and Callahan have been very helpful.\"",
"Well, ma'am, O'Rielly searched every cranny where even a three-tailed\n mouse of Venus could have stowed away. His first flight, and O'Rielly\n saw himself washed out, busted to sweeper on the blast-off stands of\n some God-forsaken satellite. He staggered back into his watch room. And\n his brain was suddenly taken apart and slapped together again. Felt\n that way.\n\n\n She was sitting on his bunk. No three-tailed mouse. No Old Woman\n either. Oh, she was a female human, though, this creature at which\n O'Rielly stood gaping. Yes, ma'am!",
"\"Higher than a swacked skunk's tail again,\" Callahan muttered, then\n snapped back over his shoulder, \"Use your shower!\"\n\n\n O'Rielly stood considering his shower door. Somehow he doubted that\n Burner Chief Terrence Callahan's mood, or Captain Millicent Hatwoody's,\n would be improved by knowledge of she who was in O'Rielly's shower now.\n Not that the dear stowaway was less than charming. Quite the contrary.\n Oh, very quite!\n\n\n \"You rockhead!\" Only Callahan back from the burner. \"Didn't I tell you\n to shower the stink off yourself? Old Woman's taking a Venus bigwig\n on tour the ship. Old Woman catches you like you been rassling skunks\n she'll peel both our hides off. Not to mention what she'll do anyway\n about your fusion control!\"",
"The Madame Presidents switched to a private circuit, Trillium dragged\n Dimdooly off somewhere and the Old Woman eyed O'Rielly and Callahan.\n Especially she eyed Callahan, like running chilled drills through his\n old conniving brain. \"I award the pair of you five minutes leisure\n before returning to your stations.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" O'Rielly muttered, once he and Callahan were safely beyond\n earshot, \"could have been rewarded worse, I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"What you expect for being flimflammed by a foreign dame, the rings of\n Saturn? Lucky we ain't programmed to be hung, shot and thrown to the\n crows for breakfast.\" Callahan's old pick-and-shovel face wore a little\n grin like the cat that nobody could prove ate the canary.",
"\"Mr. President's office. He is in personal command of our glorious war\n efforts.\"\n\n\n Old Woman sighed through her teeth. \"Venus woman aboard this ship.\n Stowaway. Rattle that around your belfries.\"\n\n\n The flunkies' faces went slack with shock, then were replaced by a\n blizzard of scrambled faces and torrents of incoherent voices.\n\n\n Finally on the Earth panel appeared the famous classic features. \"The\n facts, if you please, Captain Hatwoody.\"\n\n\n The Venus panel finally held steady on universally notorious features,\n that were as fierce as an eagle's, in a fancy war helmet. \"Trillium! My\n own granddaughter? Impossible! Dimdooly,\" Mr. President roared at his\n Excellency, \"what's this nonsense?\"\n\n\n \"Some loud creature is interfering,\" Madame President snapped with\n annoyance.",
"\"No more so than those of the Ambassadorial Suite.\"\nSeeming to grind her teeth, the Old O Woman turned abruptly to leave\n O'Rielly's watch room. Was all O'Rielly could do to keep from busting\n out laughing for joy.\n\n\n Old Woman had been flimflammed for fair! Dear Trillium was saved! And\n betwixt O'Rielly's grand brain and Callahan's great experience she'd be\n happy forever.\n\n\n A fine loud \"thump,\" however, was now heard. Old Woman whirled back and\n yanked open the doors under O'Rielly's bunk.\n\n\n \"Of all the sappy hiding places!\" Callahan yelped, in surprise of\n course.\n\n\n \"Trillium?\" His Excellency bellowed as if stung by one of the\n sabre-tailed hornets of his native planet. \"Trillium!\""
],
[
"O'Rielly stood looking thoughtfully at lovely, womanly, exquisite\n Trillium. Just like that, O'Rielly felt as sparkling of mind as a\n spiral nebula. \"My locker!\" he crowed with inspiration and yanked open\n the doors under his bunk. He glimpsed a black ditty bag, also the cap\n and coverall uniform of a baggage boy.\n\n\n \"I threw them in there before you came on duty before blast-off,\"\n Trillium explained. \"I knew the burner room would be warm.\"\n\n\n Trillium—with her shape—passing as a boy hustling bags through this\n ship. O'Rielly chortled as he tucked her under his bunk. \"Now don't you\n worry about another thing!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm not,\" she assured him happily. \"Everything is going just the\n way Grandmamma knew it would!\"",
"\"Oh, I'm Trillium,\" she assured Callahan sweetly. \"But Grandmamma's\n name is Berta and people say I'm just like she was a hundred and\n twenty-five years ago.\"\n\"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like his brain had been taken apart and\n was being slapped together again. \"O'Rielly! Awp, you angel-faced\n pirate, couldn't you hide her somewheres better than that? Shut up,\n you don't have to explain to me, but God help the whole universe if we\n don't flimflam the Old Woman!\" With which ominous remark, rendered in\n a zesty devil-may-care manner, however, Callahan threw himself into\n O'Rielly's shower.",
"\"No more so than those of the Ambassadorial Suite.\"\nSeeming to grind her teeth, the Old O Woman turned abruptly to leave\n O'Rielly's watch room. Was all O'Rielly could do to keep from busting\n out laughing for joy.\n\n\n Old Woman had been flimflammed for fair! Dear Trillium was saved! And\n betwixt O'Rielly's grand brain and Callahan's great experience she'd be\n happy forever.\n\n\n A fine loud \"thump,\" however, was now heard. Old Woman whirled back and\n yanked open the doors under O'Rielly's bunk.\n\n\n \"Of all the sappy hiding places!\" Callahan yelped, in surprise of\n course.\n\n\n \"Trillium?\" His Excellency bellowed as if stung by one of the\n sabre-tailed hornets of his native planet. \"Trillium!\"",
"\"Impossible!\" Grandpapa President's ear beards stood near straight up\n as he roared, \"You couldn't have stolen away by yourself! Trillium,\n tell the truth!\"\n\n\n \"Very well. Grandmamma told me how.\"\n\"Obviously Trillium's poor little brain has been drugged,\" His\n Excellency Dimdooly declared. \"Grandmamma Berta wouldn't know the first\n thing about such things!\"\n\n\n \"Impossible!\" Grandpapa President agreed. \"I've been married to her\n for a hundred and twenty-four and a half years and she's the finest\n rattle-brain I ever knew!\"\n\n\n \"She learned,\" Trillium stated emphatically, \"a hundred and twenty-five\n years ago.\"\n\n\n \"Hundred twenty-five,\" Grandpapa president growled like a boiling\n volcano. \"The year some Earthman.... Never did catch the devil....\n Berta? Impossible!\"",
"\"Trillium,\" O'Rielly pleaded in loving anguish, \"why do you have to\n keep coming out of hiding just when nobody's going to find you?\"\n\n\n Her eyes merely became deep pools in which O'Rielly would have gladly\n drowned himself if he could.\n\"There are rewards,\" the Old Woman said with the deadly coldness of\n outer space, \"for Earthmen found in a Venus woman's company, and for\n her leaving her planet.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" His Excellency's ear beards were standing straight out\n sideways. \"I'll handle this!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind His Excellency,\" the Old Woman snapped, \"that I represent\n Earth and her dominion of space gained by right of original flight!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind the Captain,\" His Excellency declared fit to be heard\n back to his planet, \"that I am the Personal Ambassador of the President\n of Venus and this thing can mean war!\"",
"Wasn't too bad a fib. The more O'Rielly thought of Trillium, the more\n ideas he got of doing things he'd never dreamt of before in his life.\n Yes, ma'am!\n\n\n \"Wasting your time talking nonsense!\" Old Woman's look was fit to\n freeze O'Rielly's brain, then she gave Callahan the look. \"I sent you\n down here to find the answer to that fusion control slippage!\"",
"\"You—I mean, that Earth guy a hundred twenty-five years ago,\" O'Rielly\n said in sudden thought. \"If Venus dames wanted to be loved so bad, why\n did Trillium's Grandmamma let him go?\"\n\n\n \"Venus guys wasn't so busy playing war all the time,\" Callahan mumbled,\n like to himself, \"they'd of found out the answer centuries ago. Yep,\n guess our boy was the only guy on Earth or Venus to find out and live.\n Dames bossing both planets now, though, his old secret won't be one\n much longer. Venus dames could of let it out centuries ago themselves\n but didn't, just to spite Earth probably. Later, was part of organizing\n to take over Venus, I guess.\"\n\n\n O'Rielly still had memories of the way he had felt about Trillium\n before her revolution. \"All right, Callahan, why did 'our boy' leave\n Grandmamma?\"",
"\"Of all the loony apprentices I ever had to answer the Old Woman for!\n Awp, lemme out where I can think of something to save me own neck at\n least!\"\n\n\n Was all O'Rielly could do to keep from rolling on the deck with glee.\n Old Callahan had been flimflammed for fair! The dear little stowaway\n was saved! And O'Rielly would now think of grand ways to save her\n lovely neck and his own forever.\n\n\n O'Rielly's shower door, however, opened abruptly. O'Rielly had not\n opened it. O'Rielly, however, suffered a cruel stab of dismay. Surely\n his dear stowaway had been listening through the door. Why didn't she\n have brains enough to stay hid until Callahan was gone!\n\n\n At sight of her, of course, Callahan's eyes near popped from his old\n head. \"Berta!\"",
"\"Dimmy,\" Trillium was saying firmly to His Excellency, \"you have beat\n around the bush with me long enough. Now say it!\"\nDimdooly—the mighty, the lordly, who had sneered at the sight of mere\n Earthmen kowtowing to a mere woman—swelled up fit to blow his gaskets,\n then all the gas went out of him. His ear beards, however, still had\n enough zip left to flutter like butterflies. \"Yes, Trillium dear. I\n love only you. Please marry me at your earliest convenience.\"\n\n\n \"Well, Grandmamma,\" Trillium said with a highly self-satisfied air, \"it\n works. And just like you said, Earthmen meant nothing once I knew we\n Venus women had our own men in our power.\"\n\n\n \"Those crewmen there,\" Grandmamma President said, \"seem to be proof\n enough that we Venus women no longer radiate any threat to Earth's\n tranquility.\"",
"\"Blasted fools still have the circuits crossed,\" Mr. President swore.\n \"Some silly female cackling now!\"\n\n\n The parties in the panels saw each other now. Each one's left hand on a\n desk moved toward a big red button marked, ROCKETS.\n\n\n \"So,\" Mr. President said evenly. \"Another violation by your Earthmen.\"\n\n\n \"By your granddaughter, at least,\" Madame President replied coolly.\n\n\n \"An innocent child,\" Mr. President snapped, \"obviously kidnapped by\n those two idiotic Earthmen there!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no, Grandpapa,\" Trillium said swiftly; \"I stole away all by\n myself, and Mr. O'Rielly and Callahan have been very helpful.\"",
"Madame President's shapely finger now rested full on the button that\n could launch the fleets of war rockets that had been pre-aimed for a\n thousand years. \"I'm afraid your Ambassador is unwelcome now,\" Madame\n President stated coolly. \"Your granddaughter's actions have every mark\n of an invasion tactic by your government.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, her actions?\" Grandpapa President's finger now lay\n poised on the button that had been waiting a thousand years to blow\n Earth out of the universe. \"My grandchild was kidnapped by men under\n your official command! Weren't you, Trillium dear?\"\n\n\n \"No. One of us stowing away was the only way we Venus women could bring\n our cause to the attention of Earth's President. If Earth will only\n stop buying from Venus, you won't have any money to squander on your\n wars any longer no matter what happens to we revolutionaries!\"",
"\"I was in your burner room.\" Her voice matched the rest of her, a blend\n of loveliness unlike anything outside a guy's most secret dreams. \"I\n couldn't stand the heat any longer and I couldn't open that big door.\n So I moved one of your controls a tiny bit. All the noise in there,\n naturally you couldn't hear me walk out while your back was turned\n resetting the control.\"\nO'Rielly suddenly felt like turning her over his knee and whaling her\n until she couldn't sit for a year. This, mind you, he felt in an age\n where no Earth guy for a thousand years had dared raise so much as a\n breath against woman's supremacy in all matters. That male character\n trait, however, did not seem to be the overpowering reason why\n O'Rielly, instead of laying violent hands upon this one's person, heard\n himself saying in sympathetic outrage, \"A shame you had to go to all\n that bother to get out here!\"",
"\"Were.\" Features more beautifully mature than Trillium's crowded onto\n the panel too. \"From now on I'm doing the deciding.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense! You're only my wife!\"\n\n\n \"And new President of Venus, elected by unanimous vote of all women.\"\n\n\n \"Impossible! The men run Venus! Nobody's turning this planet into\n another Earth where a man can't even sneeze unless some woman says so!\"\n\n\n \"Take him away, girls,\" Berta ordered coolly, whereupon her spouse was\n yanked from view.\n\n\n His bellows, however, could be heard yet. \"Unhand me, you fool\n creatures! Guards! Guards!\"\n\n\n \"Save your breath,\" Berta advised him. \"And while you're in the cooler,\n enjoy this latest batch of surrender communiques. We women are in\n control everywhere now.\"",
"\"Yes! War in which people will actually die!\" As His Excellency paled\n at that grisly remark, the Old Woman spoke through her teeth at\n O'Rielly, Callahan and Trillium. \"All right, come along!\"\n\n\n O'Rielly joined the death march gladly. He felt the way Callahan\n looked: ready to wrap his arms around Trillium's brave loveliness and\n protect it to his last breath of life.\n\n\n Old Woman led the way to her office. Jabbed some buttons on her desk.\n Panels on opposite walls lit up.\n\n\n \"Presidents of Earth and Venus, please,\" the Old Woman stated evenly.\n \"Interplanetary emergency.\"\n\n\n Highly groomed flunkies appeared on the panels and were impersonally\n pleasant.\n\n\n \"Madame President's office. She is in a Cabinet meeting.\"",
"\"Mr. President's office. He is in personal command of our glorious war\n efforts.\"\n\n\n Old Woman sighed through her teeth. \"Venus woman aboard this ship.\n Stowaway. Rattle that around your belfries.\"\n\n\n The flunkies' faces went slack with shock, then were replaced by a\n blizzard of scrambled faces and torrents of incoherent voices.\n\n\n Finally on the Earth panel appeared the famous classic features. \"The\n facts, if you please, Captain Hatwoody.\"\n\n\n The Venus panel finally held steady on universally notorious features,\n that were as fierce as an eagle's, in a fancy war helmet. \"Trillium! My\n own granddaughter? Impossible! Dimdooly,\" Mr. President roared at his\n Excellency, \"what's this nonsense?\"\n\n\n \"Some loud creature is interfering,\" Madame President snapped with\n annoyance.",
"The Madame Presidents switched to a private circuit, Trillium dragged\n Dimdooly off somewhere and the Old Woman eyed O'Rielly and Callahan.\n Especially she eyed Callahan, like running chilled drills through his\n old conniving brain. \"I award the pair of you five minutes leisure\n before returning to your stations.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" O'Rielly muttered, once he and Callahan were safely beyond\n earshot, \"could have been rewarded worse, I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"What you expect for being flimflammed by a foreign dame, the rings of\n Saturn? Lucky we ain't programmed to be hung, shot and thrown to the\n crows for breakfast.\" Callahan's old pick-and-shovel face wore a little\n grin like the cat that nobody could prove ate the canary.",
"Well, ma'am, O'Rielly searched every cranny where even a three-tailed\n mouse of Venus could have stowed away. His first flight, and O'Rielly\n saw himself washed out, busted to sweeper on the blast-off stands of\n some God-forsaken satellite. He staggered back into his watch room. And\n his brain was suddenly taken apart and slapped together again. Felt\n that way.\n\n\n She was sitting on his bunk. No three-tailed mouse. No Old Woman\n either. Oh, she was a female human, though, this creature at which\n O'Rielly stood gaping. Yes, ma'am!",
"With suddenly enlivened interest O'Rielly looked at Callahan. \"Hey, how\n come you know so much?\"\n\n\n \"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like waking from a trance; even groaned\n to himself, something that sounded like, \"Blabbering like I'd had\n a nip myself—or one of them dillies was radiating nearby.\" Then\n Callahan glared fit to drill holes in O'Rielly's head. \"Look! I was\n a full Burnerman before you was born. Been flying the spaces hundred\n twenty-five years now. Had more chances to hear more—just hear more,\n you hear! Only tried to clear your mind about Venus dames so you could\n put your brain on your control mess. So now put it! If you ain't high\n on vino and ain't been made nuts by a Venus dame, what answer do we\n feed the Old Woman?\"\n\n\n \"Search me,\" Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly responded cheerfully.",
"\"You're so kind. But I'm afraid I became rather sticky and smelly in\n there.\"\n\n\n \"They ought to cool the air in there with perfume! I'll drop a\n suggestion in the Old Woman's box first chance I get.\"\n\n\n \"You're so thoughtful. And do you have bathing facilities?\"\n\n\n \"That door right there. Oh, let me open it for you!\"\n\n\n \"You're so sweet.\" Her big dark eyes glowed with such pure innocence\n that O'Rielly could have torn down the universe and rebuilt it just for\n her.\n\n\n Yes, ma'am, O'Rielly was floating on a pink cloud with heavenly music\n in his head. Never felt so fine before. Except on the Venus layover\n when he'd been roped into a dice game with a bunch of Venus lads who\n had a jug to cheer one's parting with one's money.",
"Never in his right mind would any crewman dare fail to come stiffly\n erect the instant the Old Woman appeared. Behind her stood a colorfully\n robed specimen of Venus man. Handsome as the devil himself. Fit to snap\n lesser men in two with his highly bejeweled hands. Fuzzy beards trailed\n from his ears and kept twitching lazily as he sneered at the spectacle\n of two men meekly acknowledging the superiority of a woman.\n\n\n She was fit to put frost on a hydrogen burner. \"Mr. Callahan, I asked\n you a question, did I not?\"\n\n\n \"Believe you did, ma'am,\" Callahan responded cheerfully. \"And the\n answer is, ma'am, that Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly and me was\n discussing—ah—matrimony, ma'am. Mr. Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly\n here is considering it, ma'am.\""
],
[
"\"Oh, I'm Trillium,\" she assured Callahan sweetly. \"But Grandmamma's\n name is Berta and people say I'm just like she was a hundred and\n twenty-five years ago.\"\n\"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like his brain had been taken apart and\n was being slapped together again. \"O'Rielly! Awp, you angel-faced\n pirate, couldn't you hide her somewheres better than that? Shut up,\n you don't have to explain to me, but God help the whole universe if we\n don't flimflam the Old Woman!\" With which ominous remark, rendered in\n a zesty devil-may-care manner, however, Callahan threw himself into\n O'Rielly's shower.",
"O'Rielly stood looking thoughtfully at lovely, womanly, exquisite\n Trillium. Just like that, O'Rielly felt as sparkling of mind as a\n spiral nebula. \"My locker!\" he crowed with inspiration and yanked open\n the doors under his bunk. He glimpsed a black ditty bag, also the cap\n and coverall uniform of a baggage boy.\n\n\n \"I threw them in there before you came on duty before blast-off,\"\n Trillium explained. \"I knew the burner room would be warm.\"\n\n\n Trillium—with her shape—passing as a boy hustling bags through this\n ship. O'Rielly chortled as he tucked her under his bunk. \"Now don't you\n worry about another thing!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm not,\" she assured him happily. \"Everything is going just the\n way Grandmamma knew it would!\"",
"\"No more so than those of the Ambassadorial Suite.\"\nSeeming to grind her teeth, the Old O Woman turned abruptly to leave\n O'Rielly's watch room. Was all O'Rielly could do to keep from busting\n out laughing for joy.\n\n\n Old Woman had been flimflammed for fair! Dear Trillium was saved! And\n betwixt O'Rielly's grand brain and Callahan's great experience she'd be\n happy forever.\n\n\n A fine loud \"thump,\" however, was now heard. Old Woman whirled back and\n yanked open the doors under O'Rielly's bunk.\n\n\n \"Of all the sappy hiding places!\" Callahan yelped, in surprise of\n course.\n\n\n \"Trillium?\" His Excellency bellowed as if stung by one of the\n sabre-tailed hornets of his native planet. \"Trillium!\"",
"\"Trillium,\" O'Rielly pleaded in loving anguish, \"why do you have to\n keep coming out of hiding just when nobody's going to find you?\"\n\n\n Her eyes merely became deep pools in which O'Rielly would have gladly\n drowned himself if he could.\n\"There are rewards,\" the Old Woman said with the deadly coldness of\n outer space, \"for Earthmen found in a Venus woman's company, and for\n her leaving her planet.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" His Excellency's ear beards were standing straight out\n sideways. \"I'll handle this!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind His Excellency,\" the Old Woman snapped, \"that I represent\n Earth and her dominion of space gained by right of original flight!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind the Captain,\" His Excellency declared fit to be heard\n back to his planet, \"that I am the Personal Ambassador of the President\n of Venus and this thing can mean war!\"",
"\"Impossible!\" Grandpapa President's ear beards stood near straight up\n as he roared, \"You couldn't have stolen away by yourself! Trillium,\n tell the truth!\"\n\n\n \"Very well. Grandmamma told me how.\"\n\"Obviously Trillium's poor little brain has been drugged,\" His\n Excellency Dimdooly declared. \"Grandmamma Berta wouldn't know the first\n thing about such things!\"\n\n\n \"Impossible!\" Grandpapa President agreed. \"I've been married to her\n for a hundred and twenty-four and a half years and she's the finest\n rattle-brain I ever knew!\"\n\n\n \"She learned,\" Trillium stated emphatically, \"a hundred and twenty-five\n years ago.\"\n\n\n \"Hundred twenty-five,\" Grandpapa president growled like a boiling\n volcano. \"The year some Earthman.... Never did catch the devil....\n Berta? Impossible!\"",
"Wasn't too bad a fib. The more O'Rielly thought of Trillium, the more\n ideas he got of doing things he'd never dreamt of before in his life.\n Yes, ma'am!\n\n\n \"Wasting your time talking nonsense!\" Old Woman's look was fit to\n freeze O'Rielly's brain, then she gave Callahan the look. \"I sent you\n down here to find the answer to that fusion control slippage!\"",
"\"Of all the loony apprentices I ever had to answer the Old Woman for!\n Awp, lemme out where I can think of something to save me own neck at\n least!\"\n\n\n Was all O'Rielly could do to keep from rolling on the deck with glee.\n Old Callahan had been flimflammed for fair! The dear little stowaway\n was saved! And O'Rielly would now think of grand ways to save her\n lovely neck and his own forever.\n\n\n O'Rielly's shower door, however, opened abruptly. O'Rielly had not\n opened it. O'Rielly, however, suffered a cruel stab of dismay. Surely\n his dear stowaway had been listening through the door. Why didn't she\n have brains enough to stay hid until Callahan was gone!\n\n\n At sight of her, of course, Callahan's eyes near popped from his old\n head. \"Berta!\"",
"\"You—I mean, that Earth guy a hundred twenty-five years ago,\" O'Rielly\n said in sudden thought. \"If Venus dames wanted to be loved so bad, why\n did Trillium's Grandmamma let him go?\"\n\n\n \"Venus guys wasn't so busy playing war all the time,\" Callahan mumbled,\n like to himself, \"they'd of found out the answer centuries ago. Yep,\n guess our boy was the only guy on Earth or Venus to find out and live.\n Dames bossing both planets now, though, his old secret won't be one\n much longer. Venus dames could of let it out centuries ago themselves\n but didn't, just to spite Earth probably. Later, was part of organizing\n to take over Venus, I guess.\"\n\n\n O'Rielly still had memories of the way he had felt about Trillium\n before her revolution. \"All right, Callahan, why did 'our boy' leave\n Grandmamma?\"",
"\"Oh?\" Callahan bristled up like a bad name had been bandied about.\n \"Seen them ditty bags Venus bigwigs have, ain't you? Some big enough to\n stuff a cow in. Notice how nobody ever dares question a bigwig's bags,\n even through customs? Just run 'em through the big Geiger that tells\n whether there's any fusionable junk inside. Well, our boy got himself\n one of them bags, stuffed himself inside and joined a bigwig's pile of\n 'em.\n\n\n \"Didn't pull it whilst on the Venus port during a layover either, when\n a crew check would of turned him up missing. Pulled it on vacation.\n Started on the Earth end. Made himself a pair of beards to paste on his\n ears of course. Wove Jupiter wiggle worms in to keep the beards moving.\n Wasn't like the real thing, but good enough to flimflam Venus guys.\"",
"\"Blasted fools still have the circuits crossed,\" Mr. President swore.\n \"Some silly female cackling now!\"\n\n\n The parties in the panels saw each other now. Each one's left hand on a\n desk moved toward a big red button marked, ROCKETS.\n\n\n \"So,\" Mr. President said evenly. \"Another violation by your Earthmen.\"\n\n\n \"By your granddaughter, at least,\" Madame President replied coolly.\n\n\n \"An innocent child,\" Mr. President snapped, \"obviously kidnapped by\n those two idiotic Earthmen there!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no, Grandpapa,\" Trillium said swiftly; \"I stole away all by\n myself, and Mr. O'Rielly and Callahan have been very helpful.\"",
"\"Mr. President's office. He is in personal command of our glorious war\n efforts.\"\n\n\n Old Woman sighed through her teeth. \"Venus woman aboard this ship.\n Stowaway. Rattle that around your belfries.\"\n\n\n The flunkies' faces went slack with shock, then were replaced by a\n blizzard of scrambled faces and torrents of incoherent voices.\n\n\n Finally on the Earth panel appeared the famous classic features. \"The\n facts, if you please, Captain Hatwoody.\"\n\n\n The Venus panel finally held steady on universally notorious features,\n that were as fierce as an eagle's, in a fancy war helmet. \"Trillium! My\n own granddaughter? Impossible! Dimdooly,\" Mr. President roared at his\n Excellency, \"what's this nonsense?\"\n\n\n \"Some loud creature is interfering,\" Madame President snapped with\n annoyance.",
"The Madame Presidents switched to a private circuit, Trillium dragged\n Dimdooly off somewhere and the Old Woman eyed O'Rielly and Callahan.\n Especially she eyed Callahan, like running chilled drills through his\n old conniving brain. \"I award the pair of you five minutes leisure\n before returning to your stations.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" O'Rielly muttered, once he and Callahan were safely beyond\n earshot, \"could have been rewarded worse, I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"What you expect for being flimflammed by a foreign dame, the rings of\n Saturn? Lucky we ain't programmed to be hung, shot and thrown to the\n crows for breakfast.\" Callahan's old pick-and-shovel face wore a little\n grin like the cat that nobody could prove ate the canary.",
"\"Higher than a swacked skunk's tail again,\" Callahan muttered, then\n snapped back over his shoulder, \"Use your shower!\"\n\n\n O'Rielly stood considering his shower door. Somehow he doubted that\n Burner Chief Terrence Callahan's mood, or Captain Millicent Hatwoody's,\n would be improved by knowledge of she who was in O'Rielly's shower now.\n Not that the dear stowaway was less than charming. Quite the contrary.\n Oh, very quite!\n\n\n \"You rockhead!\" Only Callahan back from the burner. \"Didn't I tell you\n to shower the stink off yourself? Old Woman's taking a Venus bigwig\n on tour the ship. Old Woman catches you like you been rassling skunks\n she'll peel both our hides off. Not to mention what she'll do anyway\n about your fusion control!\"",
"\"You're so kind. But I'm afraid I became rather sticky and smelly in\n there.\"\n\n\n \"They ought to cool the air in there with perfume! I'll drop a\n suggestion in the Old Woman's box first chance I get.\"\n\n\n \"You're so thoughtful. And do you have bathing facilities?\"\n\n\n \"That door right there. Oh, let me open it for you!\"\n\n\n \"You're so sweet.\" Her big dark eyes glowed with such pure innocence\n that O'Rielly could have torn down the universe and rebuilt it just for\n her.\n\n\n Yes, ma'am, O'Rielly was floating on a pink cloud with heavenly music\n in his head. Never felt so fine before. Except on the Venus layover\n when he'd been roped into a dice game with a bunch of Venus lads who\n had a jug to cheer one's parting with one's money.",
"\"Dimmy,\" Trillium was saying firmly to His Excellency, \"you have beat\n around the bush with me long enough. Now say it!\"\nDimdooly—the mighty, the lordly, who had sneered at the sight of mere\n Earthmen kowtowing to a mere woman—swelled up fit to blow his gaskets,\n then all the gas went out of him. His ear beards, however, still had\n enough zip left to flutter like butterflies. \"Yes, Trillium dear. I\n love only you. Please marry me at your earliest convenience.\"\n\n\n \"Well, Grandmamma,\" Trillium said with a highly self-satisfied air, \"it\n works. And just like you said, Earthmen meant nothing once I knew we\n Venus women had our own men in our power.\"\n\n\n \"Those crewmen there,\" Grandmamma President said, \"seem to be proof\n enough that we Venus women no longer radiate any threat to Earth's\n tranquility.\"",
"Well, ma'am, O'Rielly searched every cranny where even a three-tailed\n mouse of Venus could have stowed away. His first flight, and O'Rielly\n saw himself washed out, busted to sweeper on the blast-off stands of\n some God-forsaken satellite. He staggered back into his watch room. And\n his brain was suddenly taken apart and slapped together again. Felt\n that way.\n\n\n She was sitting on his bunk. No three-tailed mouse. No Old Woman\n either. Oh, she was a female human, though, this creature at which\n O'Rielly stood gaping. Yes, ma'am!",
"The shower units were equipped so no Burnerman need be more than two\n steps from his responsibility. To keep the Old Woman from possibly\n blowing her gaskets completely, O'Rielly simply stepped in, shut the\n door, flipped a switch and tingled as he was electronically cleansed\n of person and clothes. By time he finished, the Old Woman and His\n Excellency were already coming out of the burner room, dripping with\n sweat.\n\n\n Old Woman opened the shower with her customary commanding air. \"You\n first, Your Excellency.\"\n\n\n \"My dear Captain,\" His Excellency replied like a smoothly drawn dagger,\n \"always the lesser gender enjoys precedence.\"\n\n\n No Earth dame ever admitted any guy was even equal to any female. Old\n Woman, a prime symbol of her gender's superiority, whipped a razor edge\n onto her own words. \"Facilities of the Captain's quarters are more\n satisfactory.\"",
"O'Rielly's shower opened and Callahan, glowing like a young bucko,\n bounced onto the bunk. \"Well, did you hide her good this time? No,\n don't tell me! I want to be surprised if the Old Woman ever finds her.\"\n\n\n \"If what old woman finds whom?\" a voice like thin ice crackling wanted\n to know.\n\n\n The watch room's door had opened. Wouldn't think the Old Woman was a\n day over seventy-five, let alone near two hundred. Cut of her uniform\n probably lent a helping hand or three to the young snap of her figure.\n Frosty blue of fancy hair-do, she was, though, and icy of eye as she\n looked at O'Rielly and Callahan still lolling on the bunk.\n\n\n Her voice was an iceberg exploding. \"At attention!\"",
"Sweat pouring off him, O'Rielly prowled around his burner. Design of\n the thing had been bossed by dames of course; what on Earth wasn't any\n more? Anyway, nobody could get to a burner except through its watch\n room. Anyone entered or left there, a bell clanged, lights flashed\n and a meter registered beside the Burnerman's bunk and on the Burner\n Chief's console up in the flight room full of beautifully efficient\n officers. Ever since Venus blast-off O'Rielly had been in Four's watch\n room. Nobody had passed through. O'Rielly knew it. Callahan knew it.\n By now the Old Woman herself, Captain Millicent Hatwoody, had probably\n inquired what was in charge of Burner Four.",
"\"I was in your burner room.\" Her voice matched the rest of her, a blend\n of loveliness unlike anything outside a guy's most secret dreams. \"I\n couldn't stand the heat any longer and I couldn't open that big door.\n So I moved one of your controls a tiny bit. All the noise in there,\n naturally you couldn't hear me walk out while your back was turned\n resetting the control.\"\nO'Rielly suddenly felt like turning her over his knee and whaling her\n until she couldn't sit for a year. This, mind you, he felt in an age\n where no Earth guy for a thousand years had dared raise so much as a\n breath against woman's supremacy in all matters. That male character\n trait, however, did not seem to be the overpowering reason why\n O'Rielly, instead of laying violent hands upon this one's person, heard\n himself saying in sympathetic outrage, \"A shame you had to go to all\n that bother to get out here!\""
],
[
"\"Thousand years ago, it was, the first flight reached Venus. Guys\n got one look at them dames. Had to bring some home or bust. So then\n everybody on Earth got a look, mostly by TV only of course. That did\n it. Every guy on Earth began blowing his fuse over them dames. Give up\n the shirt off his back, last buck in the bank, his own Earth dame or\n family—everything.",
"\"No Venus dames allowed within fifty miles of their port. Earth guys\n stay inside the high-voltage fence. Any dame caught trying to leave\n Venus thrown to the tigers for supper. Same for any Earth guy caught\n around a Venus dame. In return, Earth could buy practically everything\n at bargain basement prices.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I was shown the history films in pre-flight,\" O'Rielly said, still\n dreamily. \"But not a peek of any Venus dame.\"\n\n\n \"Pray heaven you'll never lay eyes on one nor have one get within ten\n foot of you! Even though you'd know she'd be your damnation wouldn't\n make a whit difference—you'd still act sappier than thirty-seven\n angels flying on vino.\" Callahan suddenly stared at O'Rielly. \"Holy\n hollering saints!\"",
"\"Revolutionaries? Such claptrap! And what's wrong with my wars? People\n have to have something to keep their minds off their troubles! Nobody\n around here gets hurt. Oh, maybe a few scratches here and there. But\n nobody on Venus dies from the things any more.\"\n\n\n \"But Venus men are so excited all the time about going to war they\n haven't time for us women. That's why we always radiated such a fatal\n attraction for Earthmen. We want to be loved! We want our own men home\n doing useful work!\"\n\n\n \"Well, they do come home and do useful work! Couple weeks every ten\n months. Proven to be a highly efficient arrangement.\"\n\n\n \"More boys to run off to your old wars and more girls to stay home and\n be lonely!\"",
"\"Well, that's when Earth dames took over like armies of wild cats\n with knots in their tails. Before the guys who'd brought the Venus\n dames to Earth could say anything they was taken apart too small to\n pick up with a blotter. Earth dames wound up by flying the Venus ones\n back where they come from and serving notice if one ever set foot on\n Earth again there wouldn't be enough left of Venus to find with an\n electron microscope.\n\"Venus boys rared up and served notice that if Earth ever got any funny\n notions, right away there wouldn't be enough Earth left to hide in an\n atom's eyebrow. Touchy as hornets on a hot griddle, them Venus guys.\n Crazier than bed bugs about war. Could smell a loose dollar a million\n light years away too. Finagled around until they finally cooked up a\n deal.",
"\"You—I mean, that Earth guy a hundred twenty-five years ago,\" O'Rielly\n said in sudden thought. \"If Venus dames wanted to be loved so bad, why\n did Trillium's Grandmamma let him go?\"\n\n\n \"Venus guys wasn't so busy playing war all the time,\" Callahan mumbled,\n like to himself, \"they'd of found out the answer centuries ago. Yep,\n guess our boy was the only guy on Earth or Venus to find out and live.\n Dames bossing both planets now, though, his old secret won't be one\n much longer. Venus dames could of let it out centuries ago themselves\n but didn't, just to spite Earth probably. Later, was part of organizing\n to take over Venus, I guess.\"\n\n\n O'Rielly still had memories of the way he had felt about Trillium\n before her revolution. \"All right, Callahan, why did 'our boy' leave\n Grandmamma?\"",
"\"Dimmy,\" Trillium was saying firmly to His Excellency, \"you have beat\n around the bush with me long enough. Now say it!\"\nDimdooly—the mighty, the lordly, who had sneered at the sight of mere\n Earthmen kowtowing to a mere woman—swelled up fit to blow his gaskets,\n then all the gas went out of him. His ear beards, however, still had\n enough zip left to flutter like butterflies. \"Yes, Trillium dear. I\n love only you. Please marry me at your earliest convenience.\"\n\n\n \"Well, Grandmamma,\" Trillium said with a highly self-satisfied air, \"it\n works. And just like you said, Earthmen meant nothing once I knew we\n Venus women had our own men in our power.\"\n\n\n \"Those crewmen there,\" Grandmamma President said, \"seem to be proof\n enough that we Venus women no longer radiate any threat to Earth's\n tranquility.\"",
"\"Trillium,\" O'Rielly pleaded in loving anguish, \"why do you have to\n keep coming out of hiding just when nobody's going to find you?\"\n\n\n Her eyes merely became deep pools in which O'Rielly would have gladly\n drowned himself if he could.\n\"There are rewards,\" the Old Woman said with the deadly coldness of\n outer space, \"for Earthmen found in a Venus woman's company, and for\n her leaving her planet.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" His Excellency's ear beards were standing straight out\n sideways. \"I'll handle this!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind His Excellency,\" the Old Woman snapped, \"that I represent\n Earth and her dominion of space gained by right of original flight!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind the Captain,\" His Excellency declared fit to be heard\n back to his planet, \"that I am the Personal Ambassador of the President\n of Venus and this thing can mean war!\"",
"\"Yes, ma'am,\" Callahan sighed like he hadn't heard a word O'Rielly\n said, \"you could sweet-talk 'em, kiss 'em and hold 'em tighter'n\n Billy-be-damned. And that's all.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not sure,\" O'Rielly said, \"what you mean by, 'that's all.'\"\n\n\n \"Anybody ever seen anybody but a Venus guy come built with ear beards?\n Course not.\"\n\n\n \"But I thought our boy was wearing the best fakes ever.\"\n\n\n \"Ain't nothing can match the natural growed-on variety, no, ma'am.\n Venus guy kisses a Venus dame, his beards grabs her roundst the ears.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Tickles 'em, boy, tickles 'em!\"",
"\"Stay at attention!\" Old Woman sniffed the air near Callahan's face,\n then in O'Rielly's vicinity. \"Smothered it with chlorophyll probably,\"\n she muttered through her teeth, \"if it is that vino.\" Something\n horrible as a plague flickered in her eyes, then the old ice was there\n again. \"Apprentice Burnerman, don't you know what your shower is for?\n Then use it! Mr. Callahan, remain at attention while I inspect this\n burner!\" She tendered a cool glance at the Venus bigwig. \"Care to join\n me, Your Excellency?\"\n\n\n \"May as well.\" His Excellency glanced at O'Rielly and Callahan much as\n he might at a couple of worms. Could bet your last old sox no female\n ever told any Venus man what to do.",
"With suddenly enlivened interest O'Rielly looked at Callahan. \"Hey, how\n come you know so much?\"\n\n\n \"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like waking from a trance; even groaned\n to himself, something that sounded like, \"Blabbering like I'd had\n a nip myself—or one of them dillies was radiating nearby.\" Then\n Callahan glared fit to drill holes in O'Rielly's head. \"Look! I was\n a full Burnerman before you was born. Been flying the spaces hundred\n twenty-five years now. Had more chances to hear more—just hear more,\n you hear! Only tried to clear your mind about Venus dames so you could\n put your brain on your control mess. So now put it! If you ain't high\n on vino and ain't been made nuts by a Venus dame, what answer do we\n feed the Old Woman?\"\n\n\n \"Search me,\" Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly responded cheerfully.",
"Never in his right mind would any crewman dare fail to come stiffly\n erect the instant the Old Woman appeared. Behind her stood a colorfully\n robed specimen of Venus man. Handsome as the devil himself. Fit to snap\n lesser men in two with his highly bejeweled hands. Fuzzy beards trailed\n from his ears and kept twitching lazily as he sneered at the spectacle\n of two men meekly acknowledging the superiority of a woman.\n\n\n She was fit to put frost on a hydrogen burner. \"Mr. Callahan, I asked\n you a question, did I not?\"\n\n\n \"Believe you did, ma'am,\" Callahan responded cheerfully. \"And the\n answer is, ma'am, that Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly and me was\n discussing—ah—matrimony, ma'am. Mr. Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly\n here is considering it, ma'am.\"",
"Yes, ma'am, O'Rielly sure felt like proof of something all of a sudden.\n Worse than the hangover from that crap game with Venus vino. He looked\n away from Trillium and took a look at Callahan. Old guy looked away\n from Grandmamma President like he was packing the second biggest\n headache in history.\n\n\n \"Hmmmm, yes,\" Madame President of Earth observed. \"Reactions agree\n perfectly with the psychoanalytical research project we have been\n conducting on the subject of the Venus female influence. Madame\n President of Venus, congratulations on your victory!\n\n\n \"Long may the superior sex reign on Venus too! We shall be delighted to\n receive an Ambassadoress to discuss a new trade treaty at your earliest\n convenience.\"",
"\"Burner Chief Callahan, sir,\" O'Rielly responded courteously, \"I have\n been thinking.\"\n\n\n \"With what? Never mind, just keep on trying whilst I have a shower for\n myself here.\" Wherewith Callahan reached hand for O'Rielly's shower\n door.\n\n\n \"Venus dames,\" O'Rielly said dreamily, \"don't boss anything, do they?\"\n\n\n Callahan yelped like he'd been bit in the pants by a big Jupiter ant.\n \"O'Rielly! You trying to get both of us condemned to a Uranus moon?\"\n Callahan also shot a wild look to the intercom switch. It was in OFF\n position; the flight room full of fancy gold-lace petticoats could not\n have overheard from here. Nevertheless Callahan's eyes rolled like the\n devil was behind him with the fork ready. \"O'Rielly, open your big ears\n whilst for your own good and mine I speak of certain matters.",
"\"Mr. President's office. He is in personal command of our glorious war\n efforts.\"\n\n\n Old Woman sighed through her teeth. \"Venus woman aboard this ship.\n Stowaway. Rattle that around your belfries.\"\n\n\n The flunkies' faces went slack with shock, then were replaced by a\n blizzard of scrambled faces and torrents of incoherent voices.\n\n\n Finally on the Earth panel appeared the famous classic features. \"The\n facts, if you please, Captain Hatwoody.\"\n\n\n The Venus panel finally held steady on universally notorious features,\n that were as fierce as an eagle's, in a fancy war helmet. \"Trillium! My\n own granddaughter? Impossible! Dimdooly,\" Mr. President roared at his\n Excellency, \"what's this nonsense?\"\n\n\n \"Some loud creature is interfering,\" Madame President snapped with\n annoyance.",
"\"Were.\" Features more beautifully mature than Trillium's crowded onto\n the panel too. \"From now on I'm doing the deciding.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense! You're only my wife!\"\n\n\n \"And new President of Venus, elected by unanimous vote of all women.\"\n\n\n \"Impossible! The men run Venus! Nobody's turning this planet into\n another Earth where a man can't even sneeze unless some woman says so!\"\n\n\n \"Take him away, girls,\" Berta ordered coolly, whereupon her spouse was\n yanked from view.\n\n\n His bellows, however, could be heard yet. \"Unhand me, you fool\n creatures! Guards! Guards!\"\n\n\n \"Save your breath,\" Berta advised him. \"And while you're in the cooler,\n enjoy this latest batch of surrender communiques. We women are in\n control everywhere now.\"",
"\"Now you just listen to me, Trillium!\" Grandpapa President was all\n Venus manhood laying down the law. \"That's the way things have been on\n Venus for ten thousand years and all the women in the universe can't\n change it!\"\n\n\n \"I have been in constant contact with my Cabinet during these\n conversations,\" Madame President said crisply. \"Earth is terminating\n all trade agreements with Venus as of this instant.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Grandpapa's beards near pulled his ears off. \"It's not legal!\n You can't get away with this!\"\n\n\n \"Take your finger off that trigger, boy!\" a heavenly voice similar to\n Trillium's advised from the Venus panel.\n\n\n Whereupon Grandpapa glared to one side. \"Berta! What are you doing\n here? I am deciding matters of the gravest interplanetary nature!\"",
"IMAGE OF SPLENDOR\nBy LU KELLA\nFrom Venus to Earth, and all the way between,\n \nit was a hell of a world for men ... and\n \nApprentice Burnerman O'Rielly particularly.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe intercom roared fit to blow O'Rielly back to Venus. \"Burner Four!\"\n\n\n \"On my way, sir!\"",
"\"You're so kind. But I'm afraid I became rather sticky and smelly in\n there.\"\n\n\n \"They ought to cool the air in there with perfume! I'll drop a\n suggestion in the Old Woman's box first chance I get.\"\n\n\n \"You're so thoughtful. And do you have bathing facilities?\"\n\n\n \"That door right there. Oh, let me open it for you!\"\n\n\n \"You're so sweet.\" Her big dark eyes glowed with such pure innocence\n that O'Rielly could have torn down the universe and rebuilt it just for\n her.\n\n\n Yes, ma'am, O'Rielly was floating on a pink cloud with heavenly music\n in his head. Never felt so fine before. Except on the Venus layover\n when he'd been roped into a dice game with a bunch of Venus lads who\n had a jug to cheer one's parting with one's money.",
"Well, ma'am, O'Rielly searched every cranny where even a three-tailed\n mouse of Venus could have stowed away. His first flight, and O'Rielly\n saw himself washed out, busted to sweeper on the blast-off stands of\n some God-forsaken satellite. He staggered back into his watch room. And\n his brain was suddenly taken apart and slapped together again. Felt\n that way.\n\n\n She was sitting on his bunk. No three-tailed mouse. No Old Woman\n either. Oh, she was a female human, though, this creature at which\n O'Rielly stood gaping. Yes, ma'am!",
"Madame President's shapely finger now rested full on the button that\n could launch the fleets of war rockets that had been pre-aimed for a\n thousand years. \"I'm afraid your Ambassador is unwelcome now,\" Madame\n President stated coolly. \"Your granddaughter's actions have every mark\n of an invasion tactic by your government.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, her actions?\" Grandpapa President's finger now lay\n poised on the button that had been waiting a thousand years to blow\n Earth out of the universe. \"My grandchild was kidnapped by men under\n your official command! Weren't you, Trillium dear?\"\n\n\n \"No. One of us stowing away was the only way we Venus women could bring\n our cause to the attention of Earth's President. If Earth will only\n stop buying from Venus, you won't have any money to squander on your\n wars any longer no matter what happens to we revolutionaries!\""
],
[
"\"No more so than those of the Ambassadorial Suite.\"\nSeeming to grind her teeth, the Old O Woman turned abruptly to leave\n O'Rielly's watch room. Was all O'Rielly could do to keep from busting\n out laughing for joy.\n\n\n Old Woman had been flimflammed for fair! Dear Trillium was saved! And\n betwixt O'Rielly's grand brain and Callahan's great experience she'd be\n happy forever.\n\n\n A fine loud \"thump,\" however, was now heard. Old Woman whirled back and\n yanked open the doors under O'Rielly's bunk.\n\n\n \"Of all the sappy hiding places!\" Callahan yelped, in surprise of\n course.\n\n\n \"Trillium?\" His Excellency bellowed as if stung by one of the\n sabre-tailed hornets of his native planet. \"Trillium!\"",
"\"Oh, I'm Trillium,\" she assured Callahan sweetly. \"But Grandmamma's\n name is Berta and people say I'm just like she was a hundred and\n twenty-five years ago.\"\n\"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like his brain had been taken apart and\n was being slapped together again. \"O'Rielly! Awp, you angel-faced\n pirate, couldn't you hide her somewheres better than that? Shut up,\n you don't have to explain to me, but God help the whole universe if we\n don't flimflam the Old Woman!\" With which ominous remark, rendered in\n a zesty devil-may-care manner, however, Callahan threw himself into\n O'Rielly's shower.",
"\"Trillium,\" O'Rielly pleaded in loving anguish, \"why do you have to\n keep coming out of hiding just when nobody's going to find you?\"\n\n\n Her eyes merely became deep pools in which O'Rielly would have gladly\n drowned himself if he could.\n\"There are rewards,\" the Old Woman said with the deadly coldness of\n outer space, \"for Earthmen found in a Venus woman's company, and for\n her leaving her planet.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" His Excellency's ear beards were standing straight out\n sideways. \"I'll handle this!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind His Excellency,\" the Old Woman snapped, \"that I represent\n Earth and her dominion of space gained by right of original flight!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind the Captain,\" His Excellency declared fit to be heard\n back to his planet, \"that I am the Personal Ambassador of the President\n of Venus and this thing can mean war!\"",
"O'Rielly stood looking thoughtfully at lovely, womanly, exquisite\n Trillium. Just like that, O'Rielly felt as sparkling of mind as a\n spiral nebula. \"My locker!\" he crowed with inspiration and yanked open\n the doors under his bunk. He glimpsed a black ditty bag, also the cap\n and coverall uniform of a baggage boy.\n\n\n \"I threw them in there before you came on duty before blast-off,\"\n Trillium explained. \"I knew the burner room would be warm.\"\n\n\n Trillium—with her shape—passing as a boy hustling bags through this\n ship. O'Rielly chortled as he tucked her under his bunk. \"Now don't you\n worry about another thing!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm not,\" she assured him happily. \"Everything is going just the\n way Grandmamma knew it would!\"",
"Wasn't too bad a fib. The more O'Rielly thought of Trillium, the more\n ideas he got of doing things he'd never dreamt of before in his life.\n Yes, ma'am!\n\n\n \"Wasting your time talking nonsense!\" Old Woman's look was fit to\n freeze O'Rielly's brain, then she gave Callahan the look. \"I sent you\n down here to find the answer to that fusion control slippage!\"",
"\"Of all the loony apprentices I ever had to answer the Old Woman for!\n Awp, lemme out where I can think of something to save me own neck at\n least!\"\n\n\n Was all O'Rielly could do to keep from rolling on the deck with glee.\n Old Callahan had been flimflammed for fair! The dear little stowaway\n was saved! And O'Rielly would now think of grand ways to save her\n lovely neck and his own forever.\n\n\n O'Rielly's shower door, however, opened abruptly. O'Rielly had not\n opened it. O'Rielly, however, suffered a cruel stab of dismay. Surely\n his dear stowaway had been listening through the door. Why didn't she\n have brains enough to stay hid until Callahan was gone!\n\n\n At sight of her, of course, Callahan's eyes near popped from his old\n head. \"Berta!\"",
"\"You—I mean, that Earth guy a hundred twenty-five years ago,\" O'Rielly\n said in sudden thought. \"If Venus dames wanted to be loved so bad, why\n did Trillium's Grandmamma let him go?\"\n\n\n \"Venus guys wasn't so busy playing war all the time,\" Callahan mumbled,\n like to himself, \"they'd of found out the answer centuries ago. Yep,\n guess our boy was the only guy on Earth or Venus to find out and live.\n Dames bossing both planets now, though, his old secret won't be one\n much longer. Venus dames could of let it out centuries ago themselves\n but didn't, just to spite Earth probably. Later, was part of organizing\n to take over Venus, I guess.\"\n\n\n O'Rielly still had memories of the way he had felt about Trillium\n before her revolution. \"All right, Callahan, why did 'our boy' leave\n Grandmamma?\"",
"\"Impossible!\" Grandpapa President's ear beards stood near straight up\n as he roared, \"You couldn't have stolen away by yourself! Trillium,\n tell the truth!\"\n\n\n \"Very well. Grandmamma told me how.\"\n\"Obviously Trillium's poor little brain has been drugged,\" His\n Excellency Dimdooly declared. \"Grandmamma Berta wouldn't know the first\n thing about such things!\"\n\n\n \"Impossible!\" Grandpapa President agreed. \"I've been married to her\n for a hundred and twenty-four and a half years and she's the finest\n rattle-brain I ever knew!\"\n\n\n \"She learned,\" Trillium stated emphatically, \"a hundred and twenty-five\n years ago.\"\n\n\n \"Hundred twenty-five,\" Grandpapa president growled like a boiling\n volcano. \"The year some Earthman.... Never did catch the devil....\n Berta? Impossible!\"",
"\"I was in your burner room.\" Her voice matched the rest of her, a blend\n of loveliness unlike anything outside a guy's most secret dreams. \"I\n couldn't stand the heat any longer and I couldn't open that big door.\n So I moved one of your controls a tiny bit. All the noise in there,\n naturally you couldn't hear me walk out while your back was turned\n resetting the control.\"\nO'Rielly suddenly felt like turning her over his knee and whaling her\n until she couldn't sit for a year. This, mind you, he felt in an age\n where no Earth guy for a thousand years had dared raise so much as a\n breath against woman's supremacy in all matters. That male character\n trait, however, did not seem to be the overpowering reason why\n O'Rielly, instead of laying violent hands upon this one's person, heard\n himself saying in sympathetic outrage, \"A shame you had to go to all\n that bother to get out here!\"",
"O'Rielly's shower opened and Callahan, glowing like a young bucko,\n bounced onto the bunk. \"Well, did you hide her good this time? No,\n don't tell me! I want to be surprised if the Old Woman ever finds her.\"\n\n\n \"If what old woman finds whom?\" a voice like thin ice crackling wanted\n to know.\n\n\n The watch room's door had opened. Wouldn't think the Old Woman was a\n day over seventy-five, let alone near two hundred. Cut of her uniform\n probably lent a helping hand or three to the young snap of her figure.\n Frosty blue of fancy hair-do, she was, though, and icy of eye as she\n looked at O'Rielly and Callahan still lolling on the bunk.\n\n\n Her voice was an iceberg exploding. \"At attention!\"",
"\"Blasted fools still have the circuits crossed,\" Mr. President swore.\n \"Some silly female cackling now!\"\n\n\n The parties in the panels saw each other now. Each one's left hand on a\n desk moved toward a big red button marked, ROCKETS.\n\n\n \"So,\" Mr. President said evenly. \"Another violation by your Earthmen.\"\n\n\n \"By your granddaughter, at least,\" Madame President replied coolly.\n\n\n \"An innocent child,\" Mr. President snapped, \"obviously kidnapped by\n those two idiotic Earthmen there!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no, Grandpapa,\" Trillium said swiftly; \"I stole away all by\n myself, and Mr. O'Rielly and Callahan have been very helpful.\"",
"\"Yes! War in which people will actually die!\" As His Excellency paled\n at that grisly remark, the Old Woman spoke through her teeth at\n O'Rielly, Callahan and Trillium. \"All right, come along!\"\n\n\n O'Rielly joined the death march gladly. He felt the way Callahan\n looked: ready to wrap his arms around Trillium's brave loveliness and\n protect it to his last breath of life.\n\n\n Old Woman led the way to her office. Jabbed some buttons on her desk.\n Panels on opposite walls lit up.\n\n\n \"Presidents of Earth and Venus, please,\" the Old Woman stated evenly.\n \"Interplanetary emergency.\"\n\n\n Highly groomed flunkies appeared on the panels and were impersonally\n pleasant.\n\n\n \"Madame President's office. She is in a Cabinet meeting.\"",
"\"Dimmy,\" Trillium was saying firmly to His Excellency, \"you have beat\n around the bush with me long enough. Now say it!\"\nDimdooly—the mighty, the lordly, who had sneered at the sight of mere\n Earthmen kowtowing to a mere woman—swelled up fit to blow his gaskets,\n then all the gas went out of him. His ear beards, however, still had\n enough zip left to flutter like butterflies. \"Yes, Trillium dear. I\n love only you. Please marry me at your earliest convenience.\"\n\n\n \"Well, Grandmamma,\" Trillium said with a highly self-satisfied air, \"it\n works. And just like you said, Earthmen meant nothing once I knew we\n Venus women had our own men in our power.\"\n\n\n \"Those crewmen there,\" Grandmamma President said, \"seem to be proof\n enough that we Venus women no longer radiate any threat to Earth's\n tranquility.\"",
"The Madame Presidents switched to a private circuit, Trillium dragged\n Dimdooly off somewhere and the Old Woman eyed O'Rielly and Callahan.\n Especially she eyed Callahan, like running chilled drills through his\n old conniving brain. \"I award the pair of you five minutes leisure\n before returning to your stations.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" O'Rielly muttered, once he and Callahan were safely beyond\n earshot, \"could have been rewarded worse, I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"What you expect for being flimflammed by a foreign dame, the rings of\n Saturn? Lucky we ain't programmed to be hung, shot and thrown to the\n crows for breakfast.\" Callahan's old pick-and-shovel face wore a little\n grin like the cat that nobody could prove ate the canary.",
"Well, ma'am, O'Rielly searched every cranny where even a three-tailed\n mouse of Venus could have stowed away. His first flight, and O'Rielly\n saw himself washed out, busted to sweeper on the blast-off stands of\n some God-forsaken satellite. He staggered back into his watch room. And\n his brain was suddenly taken apart and slapped together again. Felt\n that way.\n\n\n She was sitting on his bunk. No three-tailed mouse. No Old Woman\n either. Oh, she was a female human, though, this creature at which\n O'Rielly stood gaping. Yes, ma'am!",
"Sweat pouring off him, O'Rielly prowled around his burner. Design of\n the thing had been bossed by dames of course; what on Earth wasn't any\n more? Anyway, nobody could get to a burner except through its watch\n room. Anyone entered or left there, a bell clanged, lights flashed\n and a meter registered beside the Burnerman's bunk and on the Burner\n Chief's console up in the flight room full of beautifully efficient\n officers. Ever since Venus blast-off O'Rielly had been in Four's watch\n room. Nobody had passed through. O'Rielly knew it. Callahan knew it.\n By now the Old Woman herself, Captain Millicent Hatwoody, had probably\n inquired what was in charge of Burner Four.",
"\"Mr. President's office. He is in personal command of our glorious war\n efforts.\"\n\n\n Old Woman sighed through her teeth. \"Venus woman aboard this ship.\n Stowaway. Rattle that around your belfries.\"\n\n\n The flunkies' faces went slack with shock, then were replaced by a\n blizzard of scrambled faces and torrents of incoherent voices.\n\n\n Finally on the Earth panel appeared the famous classic features. \"The\n facts, if you please, Captain Hatwoody.\"\n\n\n The Venus panel finally held steady on universally notorious features,\n that were as fierce as an eagle's, in a fancy war helmet. \"Trillium! My\n own granddaughter? Impossible! Dimdooly,\" Mr. President roared at his\n Excellency, \"what's this nonsense?\"\n\n\n \"Some loud creature is interfering,\" Madame President snapped with\n annoyance.",
"\"Now you just listen to me, Trillium!\" Grandpapa President was all\n Venus manhood laying down the law. \"That's the way things have been on\n Venus for ten thousand years and all the women in the universe can't\n change it!\"\n\n\n \"I have been in constant contact with my Cabinet during these\n conversations,\" Madame President said crisply. \"Earth is terminating\n all trade agreements with Venus as of this instant.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Grandpapa's beards near pulled his ears off. \"It's not legal!\n You can't get away with this!\"\n\n\n \"Take your finger off that trigger, boy!\" a heavenly voice similar to\n Trillium's advised from the Venus panel.\n\n\n Whereupon Grandpapa glared to one side. \"Berta! What are you doing\n here? I am deciding matters of the gravest interplanetary nature!\"",
"\"Were.\" Features more beautifully mature than Trillium's crowded onto\n the panel too. \"From now on I'm doing the deciding.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense! You're only my wife!\"\n\n\n \"And new President of Venus, elected by unanimous vote of all women.\"\n\n\n \"Impossible! The men run Venus! Nobody's turning this planet into\n another Earth where a man can't even sneeze unless some woman says so!\"\n\n\n \"Take him away, girls,\" Berta ordered coolly, whereupon her spouse was\n yanked from view.\n\n\n His bellows, however, could be heard yet. \"Unhand me, you fool\n creatures! Guards! Guards!\"\n\n\n \"Save your breath,\" Berta advised him. \"And while you're in the cooler,\n enjoy this latest batch of surrender communiques. We women are in\n control everywhere now.\"",
"With suddenly enlivened interest O'Rielly looked at Callahan. \"Hey, how\n come you know so much?\"\n\n\n \"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like waking from a trance; even groaned\n to himself, something that sounded like, \"Blabbering like I'd had\n a nip myself—or one of them dillies was radiating nearby.\" Then\n Callahan glared fit to drill holes in O'Rielly's head. \"Look! I was\n a full Burnerman before you was born. Been flying the spaces hundred\n twenty-five years now. Had more chances to hear more—just hear more,\n you hear! Only tried to clear your mind about Venus dames so you could\n put your brain on your control mess. So now put it! If you ain't high\n on vino and ain't been made nuts by a Venus dame, what answer do we\n feed the Old Woman?\"\n\n\n \"Search me,\" Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly responded cheerfully."
],
[
"\"No Venus dames allowed within fifty miles of their port. Earth guys\n stay inside the high-voltage fence. Any dame caught trying to leave\n Venus thrown to the tigers for supper. Same for any Earth guy caught\n around a Venus dame. In return, Earth could buy practically everything\n at bargain basement prices.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I was shown the history films in pre-flight,\" O'Rielly said, still\n dreamily. \"But not a peek of any Venus dame.\"\n\n\n \"Pray heaven you'll never lay eyes on one nor have one get within ten\n foot of you! Even though you'd know she'd be your damnation wouldn't\n make a whit difference—you'd still act sappier than thirty-seven\n angels flying on vino.\" Callahan suddenly stared at O'Rielly. \"Holy\n hollering saints!\"",
"\"Thousand years ago, it was, the first flight reached Venus. Guys\n got one look at them dames. Had to bring some home or bust. So then\n everybody on Earth got a look, mostly by TV only of course. That did\n it. Every guy on Earth began blowing his fuse over them dames. Give up\n the shirt off his back, last buck in the bank, his own Earth dame or\n family—everything.",
"\"Well, that's when Earth dames took over like armies of wild cats\n with knots in their tails. Before the guys who'd brought the Venus\n dames to Earth could say anything they was taken apart too small to\n pick up with a blotter. Earth dames wound up by flying the Venus ones\n back where they come from and serving notice if one ever set foot on\n Earth again there wouldn't be enough left of Venus to find with an\n electron microscope.\n\"Venus boys rared up and served notice that if Earth ever got any funny\n notions, right away there wouldn't be enough Earth left to hide in an\n atom's eyebrow. Touchy as hornets on a hot griddle, them Venus guys.\n Crazier than bed bugs about war. Could smell a loose dollar a million\n light years away too. Finagled around until they finally cooked up a\n deal.",
"\"Trillium,\" O'Rielly pleaded in loving anguish, \"why do you have to\n keep coming out of hiding just when nobody's going to find you?\"\n\n\n Her eyes merely became deep pools in which O'Rielly would have gladly\n drowned himself if he could.\n\"There are rewards,\" the Old Woman said with the deadly coldness of\n outer space, \"for Earthmen found in a Venus woman's company, and for\n her leaving her planet.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" His Excellency's ear beards were standing straight out\n sideways. \"I'll handle this!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind His Excellency,\" the Old Woman snapped, \"that I represent\n Earth and her dominion of space gained by right of original flight!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind the Captain,\" His Excellency declared fit to be heard\n back to his planet, \"that I am the Personal Ambassador of the President\n of Venus and this thing can mean war!\"",
"\"Revolutionaries? Such claptrap! And what's wrong with my wars? People\n have to have something to keep their minds off their troubles! Nobody\n around here gets hurt. Oh, maybe a few scratches here and there. But\n nobody on Venus dies from the things any more.\"\n\n\n \"But Venus men are so excited all the time about going to war they\n haven't time for us women. That's why we always radiated such a fatal\n attraction for Earthmen. We want to be loved! We want our own men home\n doing useful work!\"\n\n\n \"Well, they do come home and do useful work! Couple weeks every ten\n months. Proven to be a highly efficient arrangement.\"\n\n\n \"More boys to run off to your old wars and more girls to stay home and\n be lonely!\"",
"\"You—I mean, that Earth guy a hundred twenty-five years ago,\" O'Rielly\n said in sudden thought. \"If Venus dames wanted to be loved so bad, why\n did Trillium's Grandmamma let him go?\"\n\n\n \"Venus guys wasn't so busy playing war all the time,\" Callahan mumbled,\n like to himself, \"they'd of found out the answer centuries ago. Yep,\n guess our boy was the only guy on Earth or Venus to find out and live.\n Dames bossing both planets now, though, his old secret won't be one\n much longer. Venus dames could of let it out centuries ago themselves\n but didn't, just to spite Earth probably. Later, was part of organizing\n to take over Venus, I guess.\"\n\n\n O'Rielly still had memories of the way he had felt about Trillium\n before her revolution. \"All right, Callahan, why did 'our boy' leave\n Grandmamma?\"",
"\"Dimmy,\" Trillium was saying firmly to His Excellency, \"you have beat\n around the bush with me long enough. Now say it!\"\nDimdooly—the mighty, the lordly, who had sneered at the sight of mere\n Earthmen kowtowing to a mere woman—swelled up fit to blow his gaskets,\n then all the gas went out of him. His ear beards, however, still had\n enough zip left to flutter like butterflies. \"Yes, Trillium dear. I\n love only you. Please marry me at your earliest convenience.\"\n\n\n \"Well, Grandmamma,\" Trillium said with a highly self-satisfied air, \"it\n works. And just like you said, Earthmen meant nothing once I knew we\n Venus women had our own men in our power.\"\n\n\n \"Those crewmen there,\" Grandmamma President said, \"seem to be proof\n enough that we Venus women no longer radiate any threat to Earth's\n tranquility.\"",
"\"Burner Chief Callahan, sir,\" O'Rielly responded courteously, \"I have\n been thinking.\"\n\n\n \"With what? Never mind, just keep on trying whilst I have a shower for\n myself here.\" Wherewith Callahan reached hand for O'Rielly's shower\n door.\n\n\n \"Venus dames,\" O'Rielly said dreamily, \"don't boss anything, do they?\"\n\n\n Callahan yelped like he'd been bit in the pants by a big Jupiter ant.\n \"O'Rielly! You trying to get both of us condemned to a Uranus moon?\"\n Callahan also shot a wild look to the intercom switch. It was in OFF\n position; the flight room full of fancy gold-lace petticoats could not\n have overheard from here. Nevertheless Callahan's eyes rolled like the\n devil was behind him with the fork ready. \"O'Rielly, open your big ears\n whilst for your own good and mine I speak of certain matters.",
"Never in his right mind would any crewman dare fail to come stiffly\n erect the instant the Old Woman appeared. Behind her stood a colorfully\n robed specimen of Venus man. Handsome as the devil himself. Fit to snap\n lesser men in two with his highly bejeweled hands. Fuzzy beards trailed\n from his ears and kept twitching lazily as he sneered at the spectacle\n of two men meekly acknowledging the superiority of a woman.\n\n\n She was fit to put frost on a hydrogen burner. \"Mr. Callahan, I asked\n you a question, did I not?\"\n\n\n \"Believe you did, ma'am,\" Callahan responded cheerfully. \"And the\n answer is, ma'am, that Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly and me was\n discussing—ah—matrimony, ma'am. Mr. Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly\n here is considering it, ma'am.\"",
"\"You're so kind. But I'm afraid I became rather sticky and smelly in\n there.\"\n\n\n \"They ought to cool the air in there with perfume! I'll drop a\n suggestion in the Old Woman's box first chance I get.\"\n\n\n \"You're so thoughtful. And do you have bathing facilities?\"\n\n\n \"That door right there. Oh, let me open it for you!\"\n\n\n \"You're so sweet.\" Her big dark eyes glowed with such pure innocence\n that O'Rielly could have torn down the universe and rebuilt it just for\n her.\n\n\n Yes, ma'am, O'Rielly was floating on a pink cloud with heavenly music\n in his head. Never felt so fine before. Except on the Venus layover\n when he'd been roped into a dice game with a bunch of Venus lads who\n had a jug to cheer one's parting with one's money.",
"\"Yes, ma'am,\" Callahan sighed like he hadn't heard a word O'Rielly\n said, \"you could sweet-talk 'em, kiss 'em and hold 'em tighter'n\n Billy-be-damned. And that's all.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not sure,\" O'Rielly said, \"what you mean by, 'that's all.'\"\n\n\n \"Anybody ever seen anybody but a Venus guy come built with ear beards?\n Course not.\"\n\n\n \"But I thought our boy was wearing the best fakes ever.\"\n\n\n \"Ain't nothing can match the natural growed-on variety, no, ma'am.\n Venus guy kisses a Venus dame, his beards grabs her roundst the ears.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Tickles 'em, boy, tickles 'em!\"",
"\"Now you just listen to me, Trillium!\" Grandpapa President was all\n Venus manhood laying down the law. \"That's the way things have been on\n Venus for ten thousand years and all the women in the universe can't\n change it!\"\n\n\n \"I have been in constant contact with my Cabinet during these\n conversations,\" Madame President said crisply. \"Earth is terminating\n all trade agreements with Venus as of this instant.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Grandpapa's beards near pulled his ears off. \"It's not legal!\n You can't get away with this!\"\n\n\n \"Take your finger off that trigger, boy!\" a heavenly voice similar to\n Trillium's advised from the Venus panel.\n\n\n Whereupon Grandpapa glared to one side. \"Berta! What are you doing\n here? I am deciding matters of the gravest interplanetary nature!\"",
"With suddenly enlivened interest O'Rielly looked at Callahan. \"Hey, how\n come you know so much?\"\n\n\n \"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like waking from a trance; even groaned\n to himself, something that sounded like, \"Blabbering like I'd had\n a nip myself—or one of them dillies was radiating nearby.\" Then\n Callahan glared fit to drill holes in O'Rielly's head. \"Look! I was\n a full Burnerman before you was born. Been flying the spaces hundred\n twenty-five years now. Had more chances to hear more—just hear more,\n you hear! Only tried to clear your mind about Venus dames so you could\n put your brain on your control mess. So now put it! If you ain't high\n on vino and ain't been made nuts by a Venus dame, what answer do we\n feed the Old Woman?\"\n\n\n \"Search me,\" Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly responded cheerfully.",
"Yes, ma'am, O'Rielly sure felt like proof of something all of a sudden.\n Worse than the hangover from that crap game with Venus vino. He looked\n away from Trillium and took a look at Callahan. Old guy looked away\n from Grandmamma President like he was packing the second biggest\n headache in history.\n\n\n \"Hmmmm, yes,\" Madame President of Earth observed. \"Reactions agree\n perfectly with the psychoanalytical research project we have been\n conducting on the subject of the Venus female influence. Madame\n President of Venus, congratulations on your victory!\n\n\n \"Long may the superior sex reign on Venus too! We shall be delighted to\n receive an Ambassadoress to discuss a new trade treaty at your earliest\n convenience.\"",
"\"Stay at attention!\" Old Woman sniffed the air near Callahan's face,\n then in O'Rielly's vicinity. \"Smothered it with chlorophyll probably,\"\n she muttered through her teeth, \"if it is that vino.\" Something\n horrible as a plague flickered in her eyes, then the old ice was there\n again. \"Apprentice Burnerman, don't you know what your shower is for?\n Then use it! Mr. Callahan, remain at attention while I inspect this\n burner!\" She tendered a cool glance at the Venus bigwig. \"Care to join\n me, Your Excellency?\"\n\n\n \"May as well.\" His Excellency glanced at O'Rielly and Callahan much as\n he might at a couple of worms. Could bet your last old sox no female\n ever told any Venus man what to do.",
"\"Oh?\" Callahan bristled up like a bad name had been bandied about.\n \"Seen them ditty bags Venus bigwigs have, ain't you? Some big enough to\n stuff a cow in. Notice how nobody ever dares question a bigwig's bags,\n even through customs? Just run 'em through the big Geiger that tells\n whether there's any fusionable junk inside. Well, our boy got himself\n one of them bags, stuffed himself inside and joined a bigwig's pile of\n 'em.\n\n\n \"Didn't pull it whilst on the Venus port during a layover either, when\n a crew check would of turned him up missing. Pulled it on vacation.\n Started on the Earth end. Made himself a pair of beards to paste on his\n ears of course. Wove Jupiter wiggle worms in to keep the beards moving.\n Wasn't like the real thing, but good enough to flimflam Venus guys.\"",
"Madame President's shapely finger now rested full on the button that\n could launch the fleets of war rockets that had been pre-aimed for a\n thousand years. \"I'm afraid your Ambassador is unwelcome now,\" Madame\n President stated coolly. \"Your granddaughter's actions have every mark\n of an invasion tactic by your government.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, her actions?\" Grandpapa President's finger now lay\n poised on the button that had been waiting a thousand years to blow\n Earth out of the universe. \"My grandchild was kidnapped by men under\n your official command! Weren't you, Trillium dear?\"\n\n\n \"No. One of us stowing away was the only way we Venus women could bring\n our cause to the attention of Earth's President. If Earth will only\n stop buying from Venus, you won't have any money to squander on your\n wars any longer no matter what happens to we revolutionaries!\"",
"\"Mr. President's office. He is in personal command of our glorious war\n efforts.\"\n\n\n Old Woman sighed through her teeth. \"Venus woman aboard this ship.\n Stowaway. Rattle that around your belfries.\"\n\n\n The flunkies' faces went slack with shock, then were replaced by a\n blizzard of scrambled faces and torrents of incoherent voices.\n\n\n Finally on the Earth panel appeared the famous classic features. \"The\n facts, if you please, Captain Hatwoody.\"\n\n\n The Venus panel finally held steady on universally notorious features,\n that were as fierce as an eagle's, in a fancy war helmet. \"Trillium! My\n own granddaughter? Impossible! Dimdooly,\" Mr. President roared at his\n Excellency, \"what's this nonsense?\"\n\n\n \"Some loud creature is interfering,\" Madame President snapped with\n annoyance.",
"\"I was in your burner room.\" Her voice matched the rest of her, a blend\n of loveliness unlike anything outside a guy's most secret dreams. \"I\n couldn't stand the heat any longer and I couldn't open that big door.\n So I moved one of your controls a tiny bit. All the noise in there,\n naturally you couldn't hear me walk out while your back was turned\n resetting the control.\"\nO'Rielly suddenly felt like turning her over his knee and whaling her\n until she couldn't sit for a year. This, mind you, he felt in an age\n where no Earth guy for a thousand years had dared raise so much as a\n breath against woman's supremacy in all matters. That male character\n trait, however, did not seem to be the overpowering reason why\n O'Rielly, instead of laying violent hands upon this one's person, heard\n himself saying in sympathetic outrage, \"A shame you had to go to all\n that bother to get out here!\"",
"IMAGE OF SPLENDOR\nBy LU KELLA\nFrom Venus to Earth, and all the way between,\n \nit was a hell of a world for men ... and\n \nApprentice Burnerman O'Rielly particularly.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe intercom roared fit to blow O'Rielly back to Venus. \"Burner Four!\"\n\n\n \"On my way, sir!\""
],
[
"\"Oh, I'm Trillium,\" she assured Callahan sweetly. \"But Grandmamma's\n name is Berta and people say I'm just like she was a hundred and\n twenty-five years ago.\"\n\"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like his brain had been taken apart and\n was being slapped together again. \"O'Rielly! Awp, you angel-faced\n pirate, couldn't you hide her somewheres better than that? Shut up,\n you don't have to explain to me, but God help the whole universe if we\n don't flimflam the Old Woman!\" With which ominous remark, rendered in\n a zesty devil-may-care manner, however, Callahan threw himself into\n O'Rielly's shower.",
"\"Of all the loony apprentices I ever had to answer the Old Woman for!\n Awp, lemme out where I can think of something to save me own neck at\n least!\"\n\n\n Was all O'Rielly could do to keep from rolling on the deck with glee.\n Old Callahan had been flimflammed for fair! The dear little stowaway\n was saved! And O'Rielly would now think of grand ways to save her\n lovely neck and his own forever.\n\n\n O'Rielly's shower door, however, opened abruptly. O'Rielly had not\n opened it. O'Rielly, however, suffered a cruel stab of dismay. Surely\n his dear stowaway had been listening through the door. Why didn't she\n have brains enough to stay hid until Callahan was gone!\n\n\n At sight of her, of course, Callahan's eyes near popped from his old\n head. \"Berta!\"",
"Wasn't too bad a fib. The more O'Rielly thought of Trillium, the more\n ideas he got of doing things he'd never dreamt of before in his life.\n Yes, ma'am!\n\n\n \"Wasting your time talking nonsense!\" Old Woman's look was fit to\n freeze O'Rielly's brain, then she gave Callahan the look. \"I sent you\n down here to find the answer to that fusion control slippage!\"",
"\"No more so than those of the Ambassadorial Suite.\"\nSeeming to grind her teeth, the Old O Woman turned abruptly to leave\n O'Rielly's watch room. Was all O'Rielly could do to keep from busting\n out laughing for joy.\n\n\n Old Woman had been flimflammed for fair! Dear Trillium was saved! And\n betwixt O'Rielly's grand brain and Callahan's great experience she'd be\n happy forever.\n\n\n A fine loud \"thump,\" however, was now heard. Old Woman whirled back and\n yanked open the doors under O'Rielly's bunk.\n\n\n \"Of all the sappy hiding places!\" Callahan yelped, in surprise of\n course.\n\n\n \"Trillium?\" His Excellency bellowed as if stung by one of the\n sabre-tailed hornets of his native planet. \"Trillium!\"",
"O'Rielly stood looking thoughtfully at lovely, womanly, exquisite\n Trillium. Just like that, O'Rielly felt as sparkling of mind as a\n spiral nebula. \"My locker!\" he crowed with inspiration and yanked open\n the doors under his bunk. He glimpsed a black ditty bag, also the cap\n and coverall uniform of a baggage boy.\n\n\n \"I threw them in there before you came on duty before blast-off,\"\n Trillium explained. \"I knew the burner room would be warm.\"\n\n\n Trillium—with her shape—passing as a boy hustling bags through this\n ship. O'Rielly chortled as he tucked her under his bunk. \"Now don't you\n worry about another thing!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm not,\" she assured him happily. \"Everything is going just the\n way Grandmamma knew it would!\"",
"\"You—I mean, that Earth guy a hundred twenty-five years ago,\" O'Rielly\n said in sudden thought. \"If Venus dames wanted to be loved so bad, why\n did Trillium's Grandmamma let him go?\"\n\n\n \"Venus guys wasn't so busy playing war all the time,\" Callahan mumbled,\n like to himself, \"they'd of found out the answer centuries ago. Yep,\n guess our boy was the only guy on Earth or Venus to find out and live.\n Dames bossing both planets now, though, his old secret won't be one\n much longer. Venus dames could of let it out centuries ago themselves\n but didn't, just to spite Earth probably. Later, was part of organizing\n to take over Venus, I guess.\"\n\n\n O'Rielly still had memories of the way he had felt about Trillium\n before her revolution. \"All right, Callahan, why did 'our boy' leave\n Grandmamma?\"",
"With suddenly enlivened interest O'Rielly looked at Callahan. \"Hey, how\n come you know so much?\"\n\n\n \"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like waking from a trance; even groaned\n to himself, something that sounded like, \"Blabbering like I'd had\n a nip myself—or one of them dillies was radiating nearby.\" Then\n Callahan glared fit to drill holes in O'Rielly's head. \"Look! I was\n a full Burnerman before you was born. Been flying the spaces hundred\n twenty-five years now. Had more chances to hear more—just hear more,\n you hear! Only tried to clear your mind about Venus dames so you could\n put your brain on your control mess. So now put it! If you ain't high\n on vino and ain't been made nuts by a Venus dame, what answer do we\n feed the Old Woman?\"\n\n\n \"Search me,\" Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly responded cheerfully.",
"\"Oh, you'll have the best answer you ever heard of before long, ma'am!\"\n Callahan assured her heartily. \"The subject of nonsense—I mean,\n women—merely chanced to arise whilst we was scientifically analyzing\n the control phenomenon, ma'am. Naturally I offered this innocent young\n Burnerman the benefit of me long years of experience. Why,\" Callahan\n said with a jaunty laugh, \"dames mean nothing to me. Indeed 'twouldn't\n bother me none if there wasn't one of the things left in the world!\n Present company excepted, of course,\" Callahan hastened to say with a\n courtly bow.",
"O'Rielly's shower opened and Callahan, glowing like a young bucko,\n bounced onto the bunk. \"Well, did you hide her good this time? No,\n don't tell me! I want to be surprised if the Old Woman ever finds her.\"\n\n\n \"If what old woman finds whom?\" a voice like thin ice crackling wanted\n to know.\n\n\n The watch room's door had opened. Wouldn't think the Old Woman was a\n day over seventy-five, let alone near two hundred. Cut of her uniform\n probably lent a helping hand or three to the young snap of her figure.\n Frosty blue of fancy hair-do, she was, though, and icy of eye as she\n looked at O'Rielly and Callahan still lolling on the bunk.\n\n\n Her voice was an iceberg exploding. \"At attention!\"",
"The Madame Presidents switched to a private circuit, Trillium dragged\n Dimdooly off somewhere and the Old Woman eyed O'Rielly and Callahan.\n Especially she eyed Callahan, like running chilled drills through his\n old conniving brain. \"I award the pair of you five minutes leisure\n before returning to your stations.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" O'Rielly muttered, once he and Callahan were safely beyond\n earshot, \"could have been rewarded worse, I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"What you expect for being flimflammed by a foreign dame, the rings of\n Saturn? Lucky we ain't programmed to be hung, shot and thrown to the\n crows for breakfast.\" Callahan's old pick-and-shovel face wore a little\n grin like the cat that nobody could prove ate the canary.",
"\"Impossible!\" Grandpapa President's ear beards stood near straight up\n as he roared, \"You couldn't have stolen away by yourself! Trillium,\n tell the truth!\"\n\n\n \"Very well. Grandmamma told me how.\"\n\"Obviously Trillium's poor little brain has been drugged,\" His\n Excellency Dimdooly declared. \"Grandmamma Berta wouldn't know the first\n thing about such things!\"\n\n\n \"Impossible!\" Grandpapa President agreed. \"I've been married to her\n for a hundred and twenty-four and a half years and she's the finest\n rattle-brain I ever knew!\"\n\n\n \"She learned,\" Trillium stated emphatically, \"a hundred and twenty-five\n years ago.\"\n\n\n \"Hundred twenty-five,\" Grandpapa president growled like a boiling\n volcano. \"The year some Earthman.... Never did catch the devil....\n Berta? Impossible!\"",
"Sweat pouring off him, O'Rielly prowled around his burner. Design of\n the thing had been bossed by dames of course; what on Earth wasn't any\n more? Anyway, nobody could get to a burner except through its watch\n room. Anyone entered or left there, a bell clanged, lights flashed\n and a meter registered beside the Burnerman's bunk and on the Burner\n Chief's console up in the flight room full of beautifully efficient\n officers. Ever since Venus blast-off O'Rielly had been in Four's watch\n room. Nobody had passed through. O'Rielly knew it. Callahan knew it.\n By now the Old Woman herself, Captain Millicent Hatwoody, had probably\n inquired what was in charge of Burner Four.",
"Never in his right mind would any crewman dare fail to come stiffly\n erect the instant the Old Woman appeared. Behind her stood a colorfully\n robed specimen of Venus man. Handsome as the devil himself. Fit to snap\n lesser men in two with his highly bejeweled hands. Fuzzy beards trailed\n from his ears and kept twitching lazily as he sneered at the spectacle\n of two men meekly acknowledging the superiority of a woman.\n\n\n She was fit to put frost on a hydrogen burner. \"Mr. Callahan, I asked\n you a question, did I not?\"\n\n\n \"Believe you did, ma'am,\" Callahan responded cheerfully. \"And the\n answer is, ma'am, that Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly and me was\n discussing—ah—matrimony, ma'am. Mr. Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly\n here is considering it, ma'am.\"",
"\"Trillium,\" O'Rielly pleaded in loving anguish, \"why do you have to\n keep coming out of hiding just when nobody's going to find you?\"\n\n\n Her eyes merely became deep pools in which O'Rielly would have gladly\n drowned himself if he could.\n\"There are rewards,\" the Old Woman said with the deadly coldness of\n outer space, \"for Earthmen found in a Venus woman's company, and for\n her leaving her planet.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" His Excellency's ear beards were standing straight out\n sideways. \"I'll handle this!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind His Excellency,\" the Old Woman snapped, \"that I represent\n Earth and her dominion of space gained by right of original flight!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind the Captain,\" His Excellency declared fit to be heard\n back to his planet, \"that I am the Personal Ambassador of the President\n of Venus and this thing can mean war!\"",
"Well, ma'am, O'Rielly searched every cranny where even a three-tailed\n mouse of Venus could have stowed away. His first flight, and O'Rielly\n saw himself washed out, busted to sweeper on the blast-off stands of\n some God-forsaken satellite. He staggered back into his watch room. And\n his brain was suddenly taken apart and slapped together again. Felt\n that way.\n\n\n She was sitting on his bunk. No three-tailed mouse. No Old Woman\n either. Oh, she was a female human, though, this creature at which\n O'Rielly stood gaping. Yes, ma'am!",
"\"Stay at attention!\" Old Woman sniffed the air near Callahan's face,\n then in O'Rielly's vicinity. \"Smothered it with chlorophyll probably,\"\n she muttered through her teeth, \"if it is that vino.\" Something\n horrible as a plague flickered in her eyes, then the old ice was there\n again. \"Apprentice Burnerman, don't you know what your shower is for?\n Then use it! Mr. Callahan, remain at attention while I inspect this\n burner!\" She tendered a cool glance at the Venus bigwig. \"Care to join\n me, Your Excellency?\"\n\n\n \"May as well.\" His Excellency glanced at O'Rielly and Callahan much as\n he might at a couple of worms. Could bet your last old sox no female\n ever told any Venus man what to do.",
"Yes, ma'am, O'Rielly sure felt like proof of something all of a sudden.\n Worse than the hangover from that crap game with Venus vino. He looked\n away from Trillium and took a look at Callahan. Old guy looked away\n from Grandmamma President like he was packing the second biggest\n headache in history.\n\n\n \"Hmmmm, yes,\" Madame President of Earth observed. \"Reactions agree\n perfectly with the psychoanalytical research project we have been\n conducting on the subject of the Venus female influence. Madame\n President of Venus, congratulations on your victory!\n\n\n \"Long may the superior sex reign on Venus too! We shall be delighted to\n receive an Ambassadoress to discuss a new trade treaty at your earliest\n convenience.\"",
"\"I was in your burner room.\" Her voice matched the rest of her, a blend\n of loveliness unlike anything outside a guy's most secret dreams. \"I\n couldn't stand the heat any longer and I couldn't open that big door.\n So I moved one of your controls a tiny bit. All the noise in there,\n naturally you couldn't hear me walk out while your back was turned\n resetting the control.\"\nO'Rielly suddenly felt like turning her over his knee and whaling her\n until she couldn't sit for a year. This, mind you, he felt in an age\n where no Earth guy for a thousand years had dared raise so much as a\n breath against woman's supremacy in all matters. That male character\n trait, however, did not seem to be the overpowering reason why\n O'Rielly, instead of laying violent hands upon this one's person, heard\n himself saying in sympathetic outrage, \"A shame you had to go to all\n that bother to get out here!\"",
"\"Blasted fools still have the circuits crossed,\" Mr. President swore.\n \"Some silly female cackling now!\"\n\n\n The parties in the panels saw each other now. Each one's left hand on a\n desk moved toward a big red button marked, ROCKETS.\n\n\n \"So,\" Mr. President said evenly. \"Another violation by your Earthmen.\"\n\n\n \"By your granddaughter, at least,\" Madame President replied coolly.\n\n\n \"An innocent child,\" Mr. President snapped, \"obviously kidnapped by\n those two idiotic Earthmen there!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no, Grandpapa,\" Trillium said swiftly; \"I stole away all by\n myself, and Mr. O'Rielly and Callahan have been very helpful.\"",
"\"Now, now, Burner Chief Callahan, sir,\" O'Rielly responded with an airy\n laugh. \"No Earth guy for a hundred twenty-five years been near one and\n lived to tell it, has he?\"\n\n\n \"So the whispers run,\" Callahan murmured with a queer flame dancing\n into his eyes. \"So the old whispers still run.\"\n\n\n \"Never a name, though. Never how it was done.\" O'Rielly snorted.\n \"Probably just a goofy tale set loose by some old space bum.\""
],
[
"O'Rielly stood looking thoughtfully at lovely, womanly, exquisite\n Trillium. Just like that, O'Rielly felt as sparkling of mind as a\n spiral nebula. \"My locker!\" he crowed with inspiration and yanked open\n the doors under his bunk. He glimpsed a black ditty bag, also the cap\n and coverall uniform of a baggage boy.\n\n\n \"I threw them in there before you came on duty before blast-off,\"\n Trillium explained. \"I knew the burner room would be warm.\"\n\n\n Trillium—with her shape—passing as a boy hustling bags through this\n ship. O'Rielly chortled as he tucked her under his bunk. \"Now don't you\n worry about another thing!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm not,\" she assured him happily. \"Everything is going just the\n way Grandmamma knew it would!\"",
"\"Oh, I'm Trillium,\" she assured Callahan sweetly. \"But Grandmamma's\n name is Berta and people say I'm just like she was a hundred and\n twenty-five years ago.\"\n\"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like his brain had been taken apart and\n was being slapped together again. \"O'Rielly! Awp, you angel-faced\n pirate, couldn't you hide her somewheres better than that? Shut up,\n you don't have to explain to me, but God help the whole universe if we\n don't flimflam the Old Woman!\" With which ominous remark, rendered in\n a zesty devil-may-care manner, however, Callahan threw himself into\n O'Rielly's shower.",
"\"No more so than those of the Ambassadorial Suite.\"\nSeeming to grind her teeth, the Old O Woman turned abruptly to leave\n O'Rielly's watch room. Was all O'Rielly could do to keep from busting\n out laughing for joy.\n\n\n Old Woman had been flimflammed for fair! Dear Trillium was saved! And\n betwixt O'Rielly's grand brain and Callahan's great experience she'd be\n happy forever.\n\n\n A fine loud \"thump,\" however, was now heard. Old Woman whirled back and\n yanked open the doors under O'Rielly's bunk.\n\n\n \"Of all the sappy hiding places!\" Callahan yelped, in surprise of\n course.\n\n\n \"Trillium?\" His Excellency bellowed as if stung by one of the\n sabre-tailed hornets of his native planet. \"Trillium!\"",
"\"Impossible!\" Grandpapa President's ear beards stood near straight up\n as he roared, \"You couldn't have stolen away by yourself! Trillium,\n tell the truth!\"\n\n\n \"Very well. Grandmamma told me how.\"\n\"Obviously Trillium's poor little brain has been drugged,\" His\n Excellency Dimdooly declared. \"Grandmamma Berta wouldn't know the first\n thing about such things!\"\n\n\n \"Impossible!\" Grandpapa President agreed. \"I've been married to her\n for a hundred and twenty-four and a half years and she's the finest\n rattle-brain I ever knew!\"\n\n\n \"She learned,\" Trillium stated emphatically, \"a hundred and twenty-five\n years ago.\"\n\n\n \"Hundred twenty-five,\" Grandpapa president growled like a boiling\n volcano. \"The year some Earthman.... Never did catch the devil....\n Berta? Impossible!\"",
"\"Trillium,\" O'Rielly pleaded in loving anguish, \"why do you have to\n keep coming out of hiding just when nobody's going to find you?\"\n\n\n Her eyes merely became deep pools in which O'Rielly would have gladly\n drowned himself if he could.\n\"There are rewards,\" the Old Woman said with the deadly coldness of\n outer space, \"for Earthmen found in a Venus woman's company, and for\n her leaving her planet.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" His Excellency's ear beards were standing straight out\n sideways. \"I'll handle this!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind His Excellency,\" the Old Woman snapped, \"that I represent\n Earth and her dominion of space gained by right of original flight!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind the Captain,\" His Excellency declared fit to be heard\n back to his planet, \"that I am the Personal Ambassador of the President\n of Venus and this thing can mean war!\"",
"Wasn't too bad a fib. The more O'Rielly thought of Trillium, the more\n ideas he got of doing things he'd never dreamt of before in his life.\n Yes, ma'am!\n\n\n \"Wasting your time talking nonsense!\" Old Woman's look was fit to\n freeze O'Rielly's brain, then she gave Callahan the look. \"I sent you\n down here to find the answer to that fusion control slippage!\"",
"\"Of all the loony apprentices I ever had to answer the Old Woman for!\n Awp, lemme out where I can think of something to save me own neck at\n least!\"\n\n\n Was all O'Rielly could do to keep from rolling on the deck with glee.\n Old Callahan had been flimflammed for fair! The dear little stowaway\n was saved! And O'Rielly would now think of grand ways to save her\n lovely neck and his own forever.\n\n\n O'Rielly's shower door, however, opened abruptly. O'Rielly had not\n opened it. O'Rielly, however, suffered a cruel stab of dismay. Surely\n his dear stowaway had been listening through the door. Why didn't she\n have brains enough to stay hid until Callahan was gone!\n\n\n At sight of her, of course, Callahan's eyes near popped from his old\n head. \"Berta!\"",
"\"Mr. President's office. He is in personal command of our glorious war\n efforts.\"\n\n\n Old Woman sighed through her teeth. \"Venus woman aboard this ship.\n Stowaway. Rattle that around your belfries.\"\n\n\n The flunkies' faces went slack with shock, then were replaced by a\n blizzard of scrambled faces and torrents of incoherent voices.\n\n\n Finally on the Earth panel appeared the famous classic features. \"The\n facts, if you please, Captain Hatwoody.\"\n\n\n The Venus panel finally held steady on universally notorious features,\n that were as fierce as an eagle's, in a fancy war helmet. \"Trillium! My\n own granddaughter? Impossible! Dimdooly,\" Mr. President roared at his\n Excellency, \"what's this nonsense?\"\n\n\n \"Some loud creature is interfering,\" Madame President snapped with\n annoyance.",
"\"I was in your burner room.\" Her voice matched the rest of her, a blend\n of loveliness unlike anything outside a guy's most secret dreams. \"I\n couldn't stand the heat any longer and I couldn't open that big door.\n So I moved one of your controls a tiny bit. All the noise in there,\n naturally you couldn't hear me walk out while your back was turned\n resetting the control.\"\nO'Rielly suddenly felt like turning her over his knee and whaling her\n until she couldn't sit for a year. This, mind you, he felt in an age\n where no Earth guy for a thousand years had dared raise so much as a\n breath against woman's supremacy in all matters. That male character\n trait, however, did not seem to be the overpowering reason why\n O'Rielly, instead of laying violent hands upon this one's person, heard\n himself saying in sympathetic outrage, \"A shame you had to go to all\n that bother to get out here!\"",
"\"Dimmy,\" Trillium was saying firmly to His Excellency, \"you have beat\n around the bush with me long enough. Now say it!\"\nDimdooly—the mighty, the lordly, who had sneered at the sight of mere\n Earthmen kowtowing to a mere woman—swelled up fit to blow his gaskets,\n then all the gas went out of him. His ear beards, however, still had\n enough zip left to flutter like butterflies. \"Yes, Trillium dear. I\n love only you. Please marry me at your earliest convenience.\"\n\n\n \"Well, Grandmamma,\" Trillium said with a highly self-satisfied air, \"it\n works. And just like you said, Earthmen meant nothing once I knew we\n Venus women had our own men in our power.\"\n\n\n \"Those crewmen there,\" Grandmamma President said, \"seem to be proof\n enough that we Venus women no longer radiate any threat to Earth's\n tranquility.\"",
"\"Blasted fools still have the circuits crossed,\" Mr. President swore.\n \"Some silly female cackling now!\"\n\n\n The parties in the panels saw each other now. Each one's left hand on a\n desk moved toward a big red button marked, ROCKETS.\n\n\n \"So,\" Mr. President said evenly. \"Another violation by your Earthmen.\"\n\n\n \"By your granddaughter, at least,\" Madame President replied coolly.\n\n\n \"An innocent child,\" Mr. President snapped, \"obviously kidnapped by\n those two idiotic Earthmen there!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no, Grandpapa,\" Trillium said swiftly; \"I stole away all by\n myself, and Mr. O'Rielly and Callahan have been very helpful.\"",
"\"Oh?\" Callahan bristled up like a bad name had been bandied about.\n \"Seen them ditty bags Venus bigwigs have, ain't you? Some big enough to\n stuff a cow in. Notice how nobody ever dares question a bigwig's bags,\n even through customs? Just run 'em through the big Geiger that tells\n whether there's any fusionable junk inside. Well, our boy got himself\n one of them bags, stuffed himself inside and joined a bigwig's pile of\n 'em.\n\n\n \"Didn't pull it whilst on the Venus port during a layover either, when\n a crew check would of turned him up missing. Pulled it on vacation.\n Started on the Earth end. Made himself a pair of beards to paste on his\n ears of course. Wove Jupiter wiggle worms in to keep the beards moving.\n Wasn't like the real thing, but good enough to flimflam Venus guys.\"",
"\"You—I mean, that Earth guy a hundred twenty-five years ago,\" O'Rielly\n said in sudden thought. \"If Venus dames wanted to be loved so bad, why\n did Trillium's Grandmamma let him go?\"\n\n\n \"Venus guys wasn't so busy playing war all the time,\" Callahan mumbled,\n like to himself, \"they'd of found out the answer centuries ago. Yep,\n guess our boy was the only guy on Earth or Venus to find out and live.\n Dames bossing both planets now, though, his old secret won't be one\n much longer. Venus dames could of let it out centuries ago themselves\n but didn't, just to spite Earth probably. Later, was part of organizing\n to take over Venus, I guess.\"\n\n\n O'Rielly still had memories of the way he had felt about Trillium\n before her revolution. \"All right, Callahan, why did 'our boy' leave\n Grandmamma?\"",
"\"Yes! War in which people will actually die!\" As His Excellency paled\n at that grisly remark, the Old Woman spoke through her teeth at\n O'Rielly, Callahan and Trillium. \"All right, come along!\"\n\n\n O'Rielly joined the death march gladly. He felt the way Callahan\n looked: ready to wrap his arms around Trillium's brave loveliness and\n protect it to his last breath of life.\n\n\n Old Woman led the way to her office. Jabbed some buttons on her desk.\n Panels on opposite walls lit up.\n\n\n \"Presidents of Earth and Venus, please,\" the Old Woman stated evenly.\n \"Interplanetary emergency.\"\n\n\n Highly groomed flunkies appeared on the panels and were impersonally\n pleasant.\n\n\n \"Madame President's office. She is in a Cabinet meeting.\"",
"The Madame Presidents switched to a private circuit, Trillium dragged\n Dimdooly off somewhere and the Old Woman eyed O'Rielly and Callahan.\n Especially she eyed Callahan, like running chilled drills through his\n old conniving brain. \"I award the pair of you five minutes leisure\n before returning to your stations.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" O'Rielly muttered, once he and Callahan were safely beyond\n earshot, \"could have been rewarded worse, I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"What you expect for being flimflammed by a foreign dame, the rings of\n Saturn? Lucky we ain't programmed to be hung, shot and thrown to the\n crows for breakfast.\" Callahan's old pick-and-shovel face wore a little\n grin like the cat that nobody could prove ate the canary.",
"Madame President's shapely finger now rested full on the button that\n could launch the fleets of war rockets that had been pre-aimed for a\n thousand years. \"I'm afraid your Ambassador is unwelcome now,\" Madame\n President stated coolly. \"Your granddaughter's actions have every mark\n of an invasion tactic by your government.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, her actions?\" Grandpapa President's finger now lay\n poised on the button that had been waiting a thousand years to blow\n Earth out of the universe. \"My grandchild was kidnapped by men under\n your official command! Weren't you, Trillium dear?\"\n\n\n \"No. One of us stowing away was the only way we Venus women could bring\n our cause to the attention of Earth's President. If Earth will only\n stop buying from Venus, you won't have any money to squander on your\n wars any longer no matter what happens to we revolutionaries!\"",
"Well, ma'am, O'Rielly searched every cranny where even a three-tailed\n mouse of Venus could have stowed away. His first flight, and O'Rielly\n saw himself washed out, busted to sweeper on the blast-off stands of\n some God-forsaken satellite. He staggered back into his watch room. And\n his brain was suddenly taken apart and slapped together again. Felt\n that way.\n\n\n She was sitting on his bunk. No three-tailed mouse. No Old Woman\n either. Oh, she was a female human, though, this creature at which\n O'Rielly stood gaping. Yes, ma'am!",
"Never in his right mind would any crewman dare fail to come stiffly\n erect the instant the Old Woman appeared. Behind her stood a colorfully\n robed specimen of Venus man. Handsome as the devil himself. Fit to snap\n lesser men in two with his highly bejeweled hands. Fuzzy beards trailed\n from his ears and kept twitching lazily as he sneered at the spectacle\n of two men meekly acknowledging the superiority of a woman.\n\n\n She was fit to put frost on a hydrogen burner. \"Mr. Callahan, I asked\n you a question, did I not?\"\n\n\n \"Believe you did, ma'am,\" Callahan responded cheerfully. \"And the\n answer is, ma'am, that Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly and me was\n discussing—ah—matrimony, ma'am. Mr. Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly\n here is considering it, ma'am.\"",
"Sweat pouring off him, O'Rielly prowled around his burner. Design of\n the thing had been bossed by dames of course; what on Earth wasn't any\n more? Anyway, nobody could get to a burner except through its watch\n room. Anyone entered or left there, a bell clanged, lights flashed\n and a meter registered beside the Burnerman's bunk and on the Burner\n Chief's console up in the flight room full of beautifully efficient\n officers. Ever since Venus blast-off O'Rielly had been in Four's watch\n room. Nobody had passed through. O'Rielly knew it. Callahan knew it.\n By now the Old Woman herself, Captain Millicent Hatwoody, had probably\n inquired what was in charge of Burner Four.",
"\"Higher than a swacked skunk's tail again,\" Callahan muttered, then\n snapped back over his shoulder, \"Use your shower!\"\n\n\n O'Rielly stood considering his shower door. Somehow he doubted that\n Burner Chief Terrence Callahan's mood, or Captain Millicent Hatwoody's,\n would be improved by knowledge of she who was in O'Rielly's shower now.\n Not that the dear stowaway was less than charming. Quite the contrary.\n Oh, very quite!\n\n\n \"You rockhead!\" Only Callahan back from the burner. \"Didn't I tell you\n to shower the stink off yourself? Old Woman's taking a Venus bigwig\n on tour the ship. Old Woman catches you like you been rassling skunks\n she'll peel both our hides off. Not to mention what she'll do anyway\n about your fusion control!\""
],
[
"\"Thank you for cancelling the old trade agreements at the psychological\n moment,\" Grandmamma President said cordially. \"What with the\n communications mixup, we managed to have the scenes on these panels\n broadcast throughout all Venus. When the rug went out from under the\n top man, the tide really turned in our favor. Now, Trillium, you take\n over Dimmy's credentials.\"\n\n\n \"The Ambassadorial Suite, too,\" Madame President of Earth said\n graciously. \"Anything else now, Berta?\"\n\n\n \"I should like,\" Grandmamma President Berta said charmingly, \"that\n Mr. O'Rielly and Mr. Callahan be suitably rewarded for assisting our\n revolution better than they knew.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Madame President of Earth was delighted to oblige. \"No\n doubt Captain Hatwoody knows what reward would satisfy their needs\n best.\"",
"\"Oh, I'm Trillium,\" she assured Callahan sweetly. \"But Grandmamma's\n name is Berta and people say I'm just like she was a hundred and\n twenty-five years ago.\"\n\"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like his brain had been taken apart and\n was being slapped together again. \"O'Rielly! Awp, you angel-faced\n pirate, couldn't you hide her somewheres better than that? Shut up,\n you don't have to explain to me, but God help the whole universe if we\n don't flimflam the Old Woman!\" With which ominous remark, rendered in\n a zesty devil-may-care manner, however, Callahan threw himself into\n O'Rielly's shower.",
"The Madame Presidents switched to a private circuit, Trillium dragged\n Dimdooly off somewhere and the Old Woman eyed O'Rielly and Callahan.\n Especially she eyed Callahan, like running chilled drills through his\n old conniving brain. \"I award the pair of you five minutes leisure\n before returning to your stations.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" O'Rielly muttered, once he and Callahan were safely beyond\n earshot, \"could have been rewarded worse, I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"What you expect for being flimflammed by a foreign dame, the rings of\n Saturn? Lucky we ain't programmed to be hung, shot and thrown to the\n crows for breakfast.\" Callahan's old pick-and-shovel face wore a little\n grin like the cat that nobody could prove ate the canary.",
"\"Of all the loony apprentices I ever had to answer the Old Woman for!\n Awp, lemme out where I can think of something to save me own neck at\n least!\"\n\n\n Was all O'Rielly could do to keep from rolling on the deck with glee.\n Old Callahan had been flimflammed for fair! The dear little stowaway\n was saved! And O'Rielly would now think of grand ways to save her\n lovely neck and his own forever.\n\n\n O'Rielly's shower door, however, opened abruptly. O'Rielly had not\n opened it. O'Rielly, however, suffered a cruel stab of dismay. Surely\n his dear stowaway had been listening through the door. Why didn't she\n have brains enough to stay hid until Callahan was gone!\n\n\n At sight of her, of course, Callahan's eyes near popped from his old\n head. \"Berta!\"",
"O'Rielly's shower opened and Callahan, glowing like a young bucko,\n bounced onto the bunk. \"Well, did you hide her good this time? No,\n don't tell me! I want to be surprised if the Old Woman ever finds her.\"\n\n\n \"If what old woman finds whom?\" a voice like thin ice crackling wanted\n to know.\n\n\n The watch room's door had opened. Wouldn't think the Old Woman was a\n day over seventy-five, let alone near two hundred. Cut of her uniform\n probably lent a helping hand or three to the young snap of her figure.\n Frosty blue of fancy hair-do, she was, though, and icy of eye as she\n looked at O'Rielly and Callahan still lolling on the bunk.\n\n\n Her voice was an iceberg exploding. \"At attention!\"",
"\"No more so than those of the Ambassadorial Suite.\"\nSeeming to grind her teeth, the Old O Woman turned abruptly to leave\n O'Rielly's watch room. Was all O'Rielly could do to keep from busting\n out laughing for joy.\n\n\n Old Woman had been flimflammed for fair! Dear Trillium was saved! And\n betwixt O'Rielly's grand brain and Callahan's great experience she'd be\n happy forever.\n\n\n A fine loud \"thump,\" however, was now heard. Old Woman whirled back and\n yanked open the doors under O'Rielly's bunk.\n\n\n \"Of all the sappy hiding places!\" Callahan yelped, in surprise of\n course.\n\n\n \"Trillium?\" His Excellency bellowed as if stung by one of the\n sabre-tailed hornets of his native planet. \"Trillium!\"",
"Wasn't too bad a fib. The more O'Rielly thought of Trillium, the more\n ideas he got of doing things he'd never dreamt of before in his life.\n Yes, ma'am!\n\n\n \"Wasting your time talking nonsense!\" Old Woman's look was fit to\n freeze O'Rielly's brain, then she gave Callahan the look. \"I sent you\n down here to find the answer to that fusion control slippage!\"",
"With suddenly enlivened interest O'Rielly looked at Callahan. \"Hey, how\n come you know so much?\"\n\n\n \"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like waking from a trance; even groaned\n to himself, something that sounded like, \"Blabbering like I'd had\n a nip myself—or one of them dillies was radiating nearby.\" Then\n Callahan glared fit to drill holes in O'Rielly's head. \"Look! I was\n a full Burnerman before you was born. Been flying the spaces hundred\n twenty-five years now. Had more chances to hear more—just hear more,\n you hear! Only tried to clear your mind about Venus dames so you could\n put your brain on your control mess. So now put it! If you ain't high\n on vino and ain't been made nuts by a Venus dame, what answer do we\n feed the Old Woman?\"\n\n\n \"Search me,\" Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly responded cheerfully.",
"\"You—I mean, that Earth guy a hundred twenty-five years ago,\" O'Rielly\n said in sudden thought. \"If Venus dames wanted to be loved so bad, why\n did Trillium's Grandmamma let him go?\"\n\n\n \"Venus guys wasn't so busy playing war all the time,\" Callahan mumbled,\n like to himself, \"they'd of found out the answer centuries ago. Yep,\n guess our boy was the only guy on Earth or Venus to find out and live.\n Dames bossing both planets now, though, his old secret won't be one\n much longer. Venus dames could of let it out centuries ago themselves\n but didn't, just to spite Earth probably. Later, was part of organizing\n to take over Venus, I guess.\"\n\n\n O'Rielly still had memories of the way he had felt about Trillium\n before her revolution. \"All right, Callahan, why did 'our boy' leave\n Grandmamma?\"",
"\"Now, now, Burner Chief Callahan, sir,\" O'Rielly responded with an airy\n laugh. \"No Earth guy for a hundred twenty-five years been near one and\n lived to tell it, has he?\"\n\n\n \"So the whispers run,\" Callahan murmured with a queer flame dancing\n into his eyes. \"So the old whispers still run.\"\n\n\n \"Never a name, though. Never how it was done.\" O'Rielly snorted.\n \"Probably just a goofy tale set loose by some old space bum.\"",
"Sweat pouring off him, O'Rielly prowled around his burner. Design of\n the thing had been bossed by dames of course; what on Earth wasn't any\n more? Anyway, nobody could get to a burner except through its watch\n room. Anyone entered or left there, a bell clanged, lights flashed\n and a meter registered beside the Burnerman's bunk and on the Burner\n Chief's console up in the flight room full of beautifully efficient\n officers. Ever since Venus blast-off O'Rielly had been in Four's watch\n room. Nobody had passed through. O'Rielly knew it. Callahan knew it.\n By now the Old Woman herself, Captain Millicent Hatwoody, had probably\n inquired what was in charge of Burner Four.",
"A bell suddenly clanged fit to wake the dead while the overhead lights\n flashed wildly. Only the watch room door. Only Callahan here now. Old\n buzzard had a drooped nose like a pick, chin like a shovel.\n\n\n When he talked he was like digging a hole in front of himself. \"Well,\n what about that control?\"\n\n\n \"What control?\"\n\n\n \"Your fusion control that got itself two points low!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that little thing.\"\n\n\n Callahan said something through his teeth, then studied O'Rielly\n sharply. \"Hey, you been wetting your whistle on that Venus vino again?\n Lemme smell your breath! Bah. Loaded yourself full of chlorophyll\n again probably. All right, stand aside whilst I see your burner.\"\n\n\n \"Charmed to, Burner Chief Callahan, sir,\" O'Rielly said while bowing\n gracefully.",
"Yes, ma'am, O'Rielly sure felt like proof of something all of a sudden.\n Worse than the hangover from that crap game with Venus vino. He looked\n away from Trillium and took a look at Callahan. Old guy looked away\n from Grandmamma President like he was packing the second biggest\n headache in history.\n\n\n \"Hmmmm, yes,\" Madame President of Earth observed. \"Reactions agree\n perfectly with the psychoanalytical research project we have been\n conducting on the subject of the Venus female influence. Madame\n President of Venus, congratulations on your victory!\n\n\n \"Long may the superior sex reign on Venus too! We shall be delighted to\n receive an Ambassadoress to discuss a new trade treaty at your earliest\n convenience.\"",
"\"Yes! War in which people will actually die!\" As His Excellency paled\n at that grisly remark, the Old Woman spoke through her teeth at\n O'Rielly, Callahan and Trillium. \"All right, come along!\"\n\n\n O'Rielly joined the death march gladly. He felt the way Callahan\n looked: ready to wrap his arms around Trillium's brave loveliness and\n protect it to his last breath of life.\n\n\n Old Woman led the way to her office. Jabbed some buttons on her desk.\n Panels on opposite walls lit up.\n\n\n \"Presidents of Earth and Venus, please,\" the Old Woman stated evenly.\n \"Interplanetary emergency.\"\n\n\n Highly groomed flunkies appeared on the panels and were impersonally\n pleasant.\n\n\n \"Madame President's office. She is in a Cabinet meeting.\"",
"\"Blasted fools still have the circuits crossed,\" Mr. President swore.\n \"Some silly female cackling now!\"\n\n\n The parties in the panels saw each other now. Each one's left hand on a\n desk moved toward a big red button marked, ROCKETS.\n\n\n \"So,\" Mr. President said evenly. \"Another violation by your Earthmen.\"\n\n\n \"By your granddaughter, at least,\" Madame President replied coolly.\n\n\n \"An innocent child,\" Mr. President snapped, \"obviously kidnapped by\n those two idiotic Earthmen there!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no, Grandpapa,\" Trillium said swiftly; \"I stole away all by\n myself, and Mr. O'Rielly and Callahan have been very helpful.\"",
"\"Burner Chief Callahan, sir,\" O'Rielly responded courteously, \"I have\n been thinking.\"\n\n\n \"With what? Never mind, just keep on trying whilst I have a shower for\n myself here.\" Wherewith Callahan reached hand for O'Rielly's shower\n door.\n\n\n \"Venus dames,\" O'Rielly said dreamily, \"don't boss anything, do they?\"\n\n\n Callahan yelped like he'd been bit in the pants by a big Jupiter ant.\n \"O'Rielly! You trying to get both of us condemned to a Uranus moon?\"\n Callahan also shot a wild look to the intercom switch. It was in OFF\n position; the flight room full of fancy gold-lace petticoats could not\n have overheard from here. Nevertheless Callahan's eyes rolled like the\n devil was behind him with the fork ready. \"O'Rielly, open your big ears\n whilst for your own good and mine I speak of certain matters.",
"Never in his right mind would any crewman dare fail to come stiffly\n erect the instant the Old Woman appeared. Behind her stood a colorfully\n robed specimen of Venus man. Handsome as the devil himself. Fit to snap\n lesser men in two with his highly bejeweled hands. Fuzzy beards trailed\n from his ears and kept twitching lazily as he sneered at the spectacle\n of two men meekly acknowledging the superiority of a woman.\n\n\n She was fit to put frost on a hydrogen burner. \"Mr. Callahan, I asked\n you a question, did I not?\"\n\n\n \"Believe you did, ma'am,\" Callahan responded cheerfully. \"And the\n answer is, ma'am, that Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly and me was\n discussing—ah—matrimony, ma'am. Mr. Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly\n here is considering it, ma'am.\"",
"\"Oh, you'll have the best answer you ever heard of before long, ma'am!\"\n Callahan assured her heartily. \"The subject of nonsense—I mean,\n women—merely chanced to arise whilst we was scientifically analyzing\n the control phenomenon, ma'am. Naturally I offered this innocent young\n Burnerman the benefit of me long years of experience. Why,\" Callahan\n said with a jaunty laugh, \"dames mean nothing to me. Indeed 'twouldn't\n bother me none if there wasn't one of the things left in the world!\n Present company excepted, of course,\" Callahan hastened to say with a\n courtly bow.",
"\"Stay at attention!\" Old Woman sniffed the air near Callahan's face,\n then in O'Rielly's vicinity. \"Smothered it with chlorophyll probably,\"\n she muttered through her teeth, \"if it is that vino.\" Something\n horrible as a plague flickered in her eyes, then the old ice was there\n again. \"Apprentice Burnerman, don't you know what your shower is for?\n Then use it! Mr. Callahan, remain at attention while I inspect this\n burner!\" She tendered a cool glance at the Venus bigwig. \"Care to join\n me, Your Excellency?\"\n\n\n \"May as well.\" His Excellency glanced at O'Rielly and Callahan much as\n he might at a couple of worms. Could bet your last old sox no female\n ever told any Venus man what to do.",
"At the first flash of red on the bank of meters Apprentice Burnerman\n O'Rielly had slammed the safety helmet on his head; he was already\n throwing open the lock to the burner room. The hot, throbbing rumble\n whipped around him and near crushed his breath away. Power! Power of\n the universe trapped here and ready to destroy its captors given one\n chance! Swiftly O'Rielly unlocked the controls and reset them. The\n throbbing rumble changed tone.\n\n\n Old Callahan's voice crackled now through the helmet's ear contact.\n \"Well, Mr. O'Rielly?\"\n\n\n \"Fusion control two points low, sir.\"\n\n\n O'Rielly wondered had Callahan passed out, was so long before the old\n Burner Chief demanded hoarsely, \"Didn't you lock them controls before\n blast-off?\""
]
] |
train
|
63640
|
[
"What are two kinds of goods Casey Ritter deals with throughout the story? \n\n",
"What is the significance of the title, “Jupiter’s Joke?”",
"Who is the Old Man Casey refers to in the first paragraph? ",
"Who is Pard Hoskins and what is his relationship to Casey Ritter?",
"Why does Casey feels regret about choosing prison over the court’s option to be sent into Jupiter’s Great Red Spot to study its inhabitants?",
"What is the best explanation of Pard Hoskins’ relationship to Akroida?",
"What convinces Casey Ritter to help the government by throwing himself into Jupiter’s Great Red Spot?",
"There is one central object that saves Casey Ritter and Pard Hoskins from the wrath of Jupiter’s scorpion race. What is it and what does it do?\n\n",
"What is the name of the kid from Jupiter who helps both Pard and Casey?",
"What is the connection between Attaboy’s name and the perfume Pard teaches Casey to make? \n\n"
] |
[
[
"Strychnine and Space suits",
"Jupiter crystals and Mars emeralds \n\n",
"Kooleen Crystals and Kooleen Emeralds ",
"Killicut Emeralds and Kooleen Crystals "
],
[
"The joke is that the scorpion-like inhabitants of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot are actually planning an attack, and that they sent Pard to Casey in order to trick the humans into giving them one of their own.",
"The joke is that Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is actually made of harmless gas, which means that Casey can fly into it without worrying about protection. \n\n",
"The joke is that Casey Ritter is being tricked by the scorpion like inhabitants of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, and that they plan to steal Casey’s emeralds and hold him for ransom.",
"The joke is that Casey’s court hearing sentences him to flying into Jupiter’s red spot to face the supposedly deadly, scorpion-like people who live there. In actuality, the scorpion people aren’t as dangerous as thought, which could be a good deal for Casey to take. "
],
[
"The S.S. Customs Court Judge",
"God ",
"Pard Hoskins\n\n",
"The Experimentalist Doctor"
],
[
"Pard Hoskins is a daredevil like Casey Ritter. Casey met Pard during a Pluto related operation, and now the two have met again in jail. Pard has been to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot before, and so he teaches Casey how to trick its inhabitants into giving him emeralds. ",
"Pard Hoskins is a smuggler/grifter like Casey Ritter. Casey met Pard during a gambling related operation, and now the two have met again in jail. Pard has been to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot before, and so he invites Casey to help him break out of jail so that they can go sell emeralds on Jupiter together. ",
"Pard Hoskins is a smuggler/grifter like Casey Ritter. Casey met Pard during a real estate related operation, and now the two have met again in jail. Pard has been to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot before, and so he teaches Casey how to deal with its inhabitants and navigate safely. \n\n",
"Pard Hoskins is a smuggler/grifter like Casey Ritter. Casey met Pard during the Kooleen crystal operation, and now the two have met again in jail. Pard has been to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot before, and so he teaches Casey how to make sure it’s strange inhabitants don’t fall in love with him, as this could ruin the mission. \n\n"
],
[
"Terrified that being sent to Jupiter will kill him, Casey opts for a jail sell. When he’s told that Jupiter is filled with insect-like beings who share his enthusiasm for a reckless lifestyle, and that the mission could actually make him rich, Casey fears that he’s lost his dare devil edge.\n\n",
"Terrified that being sent to Jupiter will take too much energy on his part, Casey opts for a jail sell instead. When he’s told that Jupiter is filled with friendly life forms who love emerald and crystal as much as he does, and that the mission could actually prove his innocence, Casey fears that he’s lost his dare devil edge. \n\n",
"Casey is terrorized by his fellow prisoner, Pard Hoskins, which makes him regret not taking the chance to fly head first into Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. A true dare devil would have taken the challenge, after all. ",
"Terrified that being sent to Jupiter will kill him, Casey opts for a jail sell. When he’s told that Jupiter is not as dangerous as once thought, and that the mission could actually make him rich, Casey fears that he’s lost his daredevil edge."
],
[
"Pard Hoskins sold Jupiter’s queen scorpion, Akroida, a Halcyon Diamond. Before he was put in prison, he planned to bring her Killicut Emeralds. However, their business relationship became complicated when Hoskins accidentally wore yellow in front of Akroida—a deeply offensive color to Jupiter’s scorpion race.\n\n",
"Pard Hoskins sold Jupiter’s queen scorpion, Akroida, Kooleen crystals. Before he was put in prison, he planned to bring her a Halcyon Diamond. However, their business relationship became complicated when Hoskins accidentally wore purple in front of Akroida—a color which deeply offends Jupiter’s scorpion race.",
"Pard Hoskins sold Jupiter’s queen scorpion, Akroida, a Halcyon Diamond. Before he was put in prison, he planned to bring her Casey Ritter as human tribute. However, their business relationship became complicated when Hoskins accidentally wore purple and green in front of Akroida—a color which deeply offends Jupiter’s scorpion race.",
"Pard Hoskins sold Jupiter’s queen scorpion, Akroida, a Halcyon Diamond. Before he was put in prison, he planned to bring her lettuce and arsenic, her favorite foods. However, their business relationship became complicated when Hoskins accidentally wore green in front of Akroida—a color which deeply offends Jupiter’s scorpion race.\n\n"
],
[
"Pard Hoskins tells him that Jupiter’s scorpion race is rich with emeralds, which makes Casey realize how easy it would be to caper the emeralds and collect the compensation the S.S. Court’s offered him for completing the mission. \n\n",
"Pats Hoskins tells him that Jupiter’s scorpion race isn’t as harmful as previously thought, which makes Casey realize how easy it would be to earn the compensation the S.S. Court’s offered him if he completed the mission. \n\n",
"Casey wants to earn back his honor as a dare devil by successfully tricking Jupiter’s scorpion race into selling him emeralds.",
"Casey wants to learn more about Jupiter’s scorpion race."
],
[
"A potion that causes the scorpions to go insane. ",
"A yellow space suit. The scorpion race considers yellow is a sign of serious respect. ",
"A yellow space suit. The scorpion race considers yellow a sign of romantic love. ",
"A perfume that makes the scorpions fall in love with whoever wears it. "
],
[
"Attaboy",
"Yeller ",
"Thattaboy",
"Scorp Kid "
],
[
"Pard calls the scorpion kid “Attaboy.” Of course, “Attaboy” is a contraction for “that a boy,” but because Attaboy is affected by Pard’s love perfume, he accepts the name as a kind of blessing. ",
"Attaboy is the name of the person who taught Pard to make the perfume in the first place. ",
"Casey calls the scorpion kid “Attaboy” the first time he visits . Of course, “Attaboy” is a contraction for “that a boy,” but because Attaboy is affected by Casey’s love perfume, he accepts the name as a kind of blessing from his “best friend” Casey. \n\n",
"Attaboy gave himself that name after being inspired by Pard’s love perfume.\n\n"
]
] |
[
4,
4,
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3,
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1,
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1,
1
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[
0,
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[
[
"I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. \"I'm Casey\n Ritter. What's your label, chum?\"\n\n\n \"Attaboy,\" he ticked coyly.\n\n\n \"Attaboy?\" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain\n nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. \"Who named\n you that?\"\n\n\n He simpered. \"My dear friend, Pard Hoskins.\"\n\n\n I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for\n Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. \"How come you aren't\n mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?\"\n\n\n He hung his silly head. \"I fear I am colorblind,\" he confessed sadly.",
"In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was\n put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that\n there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just\n right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air\n as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but\n what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?\n\n\n Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the\n airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on\n my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully\n endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the\n little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.",
"\"Who from?\" Attaboy cringed lower and blushed a purple all-over blush.\n \"Dear lady, it is from an interspace trader who possesses some truly\n remarkable jewels,\" he confessed coyly.\n\n\n Akroida toyed with the Halcyon Diamond and ignored the bait. \"His\n name?\" she demanded. And when he told her, with a bad stutter in\n his code, she reared up higher on her skinny elbow and glared in my\n direction. \"Casey Ritter? Never heard of him. Where's he from?\"\n\n\n Well, after all, she wasn't blind. He had to confess. \"I—uh—the\n stones were so amazing, Royal Akroida, that I didn't pay much attention\n to the—uh—trader. He does seem to resemble an—ah—earthman.\" He\n ducked his head and fearfully waited.",
"When I finally wore them down and got to my little cell, I looked\n around it with a feeling of real coziness. I even patted the walls\n chummily and snapped a salute at the guard. It makes me grind my molars\n now to think of it. The way that bunch of stuffed shirts in the S.S.C.\n made a gold-barred chimpanzee out of me has broken my spirit and\n turned me into an honest trader. Me, Casey Ritter, slickest slicker in\n the Solar System, led like a precious infant right where I'd flatly\n refused to go! In plain English, I underestimated the enemy. Feeling\n safe and secure in the grip of the good old Iron College, I relaxed.\n\n\n At this strategic point, the enemy planted a stoolie on me. Not in my\n cell block. They were too smart for that. But we met at recreation, and\n his mug seemed familiar, like a wisp of smoke where no smoke has got a\n right to be; and after awhile I braced him.",
"\"These—\" he had proclaimed with a disdainful flourish, like a placer\n miner pointing to a batch of fool's gold—\"These jewels are as nothing,\n Ritter, compared with the value of the secret you are to buy with\n them. And be assured that if you're man enough to effect the trade—\"\n He paused, his long nose twitching cynically—\"IF you succeed, your\n reward will be triple what you could get for them in any market. Added\n to which, IF you succeed, you will be a free man.\"\n\n\n That twitch of the nose riled me no little. \"I ain't failed yet!\" I\n snarled at him. \"Just you wait till I do, feller!\" I slipped the string\n of emeralds back into its little safe. \"Instead of sniping at me, why\n don't you get that brain busy and set our rendezvous?\"",
"Sure, the crystals are deadly, but I was smuggling them legitimately,\n in a manner of speaking, for this doctor to experiment with. He wasn't\n going to sell them for dope. But—and this was the 'but' that was\n likely to deprive the System of my activities—even experimenting with\n them was illegal even if it needed to be done; also, I had promised not\n to rat on him before taking the job.\n\n\n Well, Casey Ritter may be a lot of things we won't mention, but he\n doesn't rat on his clients. So there I was, closeted with the ten\n members of the S.S. Customs Court, getting set to hear the gavel\n fall and the head man intone the sentence that would take me out of\n circulation for a long, long time. And instead, blast me, if they\n didn't foul me with this trip to good old Jupiter.",
"That night I turned on my hard prison cot until my bones were so much\n jelly, trying to figure that steal. The next morning I got up burning\n with this fever for information, only to find that Pard had got himself\n put in solitary for mugging a guard, and that really put the heat on\n me. I chewed my fingernails down to the quick by the time he got out a\n week later.\nBy that time he really had me hooked. I'd of sworn he was leveling\n with me. But he wouldn't tell me how he'd worked the steal. Instead,\n he opened up on the trade he'd booked for the string. He said, \"When I\n chisel me way outa this squirrel cage, I'm gonna hit fer good old Jupe\n and sell 'em to Akroida. She's nuts about jools. What that old girl\n won't give me fer 'em—\" He whistled appreciatively, thinking about it.",
"The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties\n had taken my voice again. \"How big?\" I whispered.\n\n\n He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. \"About the size of a man, I\n believe.\"\n\n\n I raised my shrinking head. \"Take me to jail!\" I said firmly, and\n collapsed onto my chair.\n\n\n A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. \"So this is\n the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!\" he sneered.\n \"Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!\"\n\n\n I shuddered. \"You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw\n the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!\"",
"JUPITER'S JOKE\nBy A. L. HALEY\nCasey Ritter, the guy who never turned\n \ndown a dare, breathed a prayer to the gods\n \nof idiots and spacemen, and headed in toward\n \nthe great red spot of terrible Jupiter.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my\n nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and\n along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had\n already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out\n alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it\n was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so\n that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.\n\n\n But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group\n of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked\n up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard\n Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.\n So did I.",
"The senior judge rapped ferociously, and I skidded to a halt. Our\n little story teller patiently cleared his skinny throat again.\n \"I assure you it is no fairy tale. We possess well-authenticated\n photographs of these inhabitants, and if you are prepared to visit them\n and in some way worm from them the secret of their anti-gravity field,\n the government stands ready to issue you a full pardon as well as a\n substantial monetary reward. Your talents, Mr. Ritter, seem, shall we\n say, eminently suited to the task.\"\nHe beamed at me. I looked around. They were all beaming. At me!\n Suddenly I smelled a rat as big as an elephant. That whole Kooleen\n caper: Had it been just a trap to lead me straight to this? I hadn't\n been able to figure how they'd cracked my setup....",
"He shrugged, but his little black-currant eyes began to sparkle with\n real passion, the high voltage kind that only a woman in a million, or\n a million in a bank, can kindle in a guy. \"Buddy,\" he said reverently,\n \"I'd start more than that just to get me mitts on them stones again!\n Why, you ain't never seen jools till you've seen them! Big as hen's\n eggs, an even dozen of 'em; and flawless, I'm a-shoutin', not a flaw!\"\n His eyes watered at the memory, yearning like a hound-dog's over a\n fresh scent.",
"Akroida rose up sort of languidly on an elbow that was all stripped\n bone and sharp as a needle. She pulled an eyeball out about a yard and\n scanned Attaboy and the box. He closed in to the couch all hunched\n over, ducked his head humbly half-a-dozen times, and pushed the box\n over beside her. Akroida eased her eyeball back, opened the box and\n sniffed, and then turned to Attaboy with a full-blown Satanic grin. I\n could hear her question reverberate away over where I was.\n\n\n \"Who from?\" asked Akroida.\n\n\n That conversation was telegraphed to me blow by blow by the actions of\n those hopper-scorps. I didn't need their particular brand of Morse Code\n at all.",
"\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\"",
"For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,\n while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would\n make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a\n letter to the S.S.C.\n\n\n The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,\n friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter\n that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the\n caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made\n and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to\n shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with\n those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.",
"\"Brains!\" he snorted. \"Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than\n people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you\n just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone.\n Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's\n fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite\n you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce,\n so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that\n almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!\"\n He sighed regretfully. \"But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda\n persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here\n cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer\n them emeralds.\"",
"I couldn't believe it. Those emeralds were in the inner shrine of the\n super-sacred, super-secret temple of the cavern-dwelling tribe of\n Killicuts on Mars—the real aborigines. Bleachies, we call them, sort\n of contemptuously; but those Bleachies are a rough lot when they're\n mad, and if Pard had really got near those emeralds, he should be\n nothing but a heap of cleaned bones by now. Either he was the world's\n champion liar or its bravest son, and either way I took my hat off to\n him.\n\n\n \"How'd you make the getaway?\" I asked, taking him at his word.\n\n\n He looked loftily past me. \"Sorry. Gotta keep that a secret. Likewise\n where I cached 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Cached what?\"\n\n\n \"The rocks, stupe.\"",
"My actions didn't bother him a bit. \"Jewels, did you say?\" he tapped\n out thoughtfully, just like an ordinary business man, and I managed to\n tap out yes. He drifted closer; close enough to get a whiff....\nA shudder of ecstasy stiffened him. His head and eyes rolled with it,\n and he wafted closer still. Right there I began to harbor a premonition\n that there might be such a thing as being too popular in Scorpdom, but\n I thrust this sneak-thief idea back into limbo.\n\n\n Taking advantage of his condition, I boldly tapped out, \"How's about\n taking me on a guided tour through this red spinach patch to Akroida,\n old pal?\" Or words to that effect.\n\n\n He lolled his hideous cranium practically on my shoulder. \"Anything!\n Just anything you desire, my dearest friend.\"",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThose methane and ammonia planets, take it from me, they're the\n dead-end of creation, and why the Old Man ever thought them up I'll\n never know. I never thought I'd mess around any of them, but things\n can sure happen. A man can get himself backed into a corner in this\n little old solar system. It just ain't big enough for a gent of scope\n and talent; and the day the Solar System Customs caught me red-handed\n smuggling Kooleen crystals in from Mars, I knew I was in that corner,\n and sewed up tight.",
"With that we got down to business and fixed a meeting point out on\n Jupiter's farthest moon; then they took me in to the edge of Jupiter's\n ice-cloud and turned me loose in a peanut of a space boat with old Jupe\n looming ahead bigger than all outdoors and the Red Spot dead ahead. I\n patted my pretty enameled suit, which was a study in paris green and\n passionate purple.\n\n\n I patted the three hundred pounds of arsenic crystals for Akroida and\n anyone else I might have to bribe. I anxiously examined my suit's air\n and water containers and the heating unit that would keep them in\n their proper state. I had already gone over the space boat. Yeah, I\n was as nervous as a cat with new kittens. Feeling again for my little\n bottle of horrid stench, I breathed a prayer to the god of idiots and\n spacemen, and headed in. The big ship was long gone, and I felt like a\n mighty small and naked microbe diving into the Pacific Ocean."
],
[
"JUPITER'S JOKE\nBy A. L. HALEY\nCasey Ritter, the guy who never turned\n \ndown a dare, breathed a prayer to the gods\n \nof idiots and spacemen, and headed in toward\n \nthe great red spot of terrible Jupiter.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"\"Jupiter!\" I goggled at him. \"Akroida! Who's she?\"\n\n\n He looked at me as if I hadn't yet got out from under the rock where he\n was sure I'd been born. \"Don't you know nothin', butterhead?\"\n\n\n From him I took it. I even waited patiently till the master spoke\n again. The memory still makes me fry.\n\n\n \"Akroida,\" he explained in his own sweet time, \"is the queen-scorp\n of them idiotic scorpions that lives on Jupiter. I sold her the\n Halcyon Diamond that disappeared from the World Museum five years ago,\n remember?\" He winked broadly. \"It come from Mars in the first place,\n you know. Mars! What a place fer jools! Damn desert's lousy with 'em,\n if it wasn't so much trouble to dig 'em out—\" He went off into a dream\n about the rocks on Mars but I jerked him back.",
"With that we got down to business and fixed a meeting point out on\n Jupiter's farthest moon; then they took me in to the edge of Jupiter's\n ice-cloud and turned me loose in a peanut of a space boat with old Jupe\n looming ahead bigger than all outdoors and the Red Spot dead ahead. I\n patted my pretty enameled suit, which was a study in paris green and\n passionate purple.\n\n\n I patted the three hundred pounds of arsenic crystals for Akroida and\n anyone else I might have to bribe. I anxiously examined my suit's air\n and water containers and the heating unit that would keep them in\n their proper state. I had already gone over the space boat. Yeah, I\n was as nervous as a cat with new kittens. Feeling again for my little\n bottle of horrid stench, I breathed a prayer to the god of idiots and\n spacemen, and headed in. The big ship was long gone, and I felt like a\n mighty small and naked microbe diving into the Pacific Ocean.",
"Then he winked at me. \"But then I got off in a corner and cooked up\n some perfume that drives them nuts the other way; sorta frantic with\n ecstasy, like the book says. Didn't have a chance to try it on Akroida,\n though. She wouldn't give me another audience. It's in the stuff they\n cleaned outa me room: a poiple bottle with a bright green stopper.\"\n\n\n He ruminated a few minutes. \"Tell you what, chump. Make them shell out\n with a green an' poiple spacesuit—them's the real Jupiter colors—an'\n put just a touch o' that there perfume on the outside of it. Akroida'll\n do anything fer you if she just gets a whiff. Just anything! But\n remember, don't use but a drop. It's real powerful.\"\nII",
"\"You've no doubt heard tales of the strange population of Jupiter,\"\n he said. \"Every spaceman has, I am sure. Insect-like creatures who\n manifestly migrated there from some other system and who inhabit\n the Red Spot of the planet, floating in some kind of artificial\n anti-gravity field in the gaseous portion of the atmosphere—\"\n\n\n I snorted. \"Aw, hell, judge, that's just one of those screwy fairy\n tales! How could any—\"",
"I didn't get it at first. I'd argued with 'em, but inside I'd been all\n set for the sentence, and even sort of reconciled to it. I could even\n hear the words in my mind. But they didn't match what the judge was\n saying. I stood there gaping like a beached fish while I sorted it out.\n Then I croaked, \"Jupiter! What for? Are you running outa space in stir?\n Want to choke me to death in chlorine instead?\" Being civil to the\n court didn't seem important just then. Jupiter was worse than the pen,\n a lot worse. Jupiter was a death sentence.\n\n\n The senior judge rapped sharply with his gavel. He frowned me down and\n then nodded at the judge on his right. This bird, a little old hank of\n dried-up straw, joined his fingertips carefully, cleared his scrawny\n throat, and told me what for.",
"Pard was right again. These critters had brains. And my S.S.C.\n persecutor was right, too. That anti-grav secret was worth more than\n any string of rocks in the system, including the Killicut Emeralds.\n\n\n Then I swallowed hard. Attaboy was leading me straight across to a\n window. Closing my helmet, my fingers fumbled badly. My brain was\n fumbling, too. \"Zero hour, chump!\" it told me, and I shuddered. Picking\n up the first hundred pounds of the arsenic, I wobbled over to the\n airlock.\nIII\n\n\n That palace was like nothing on earth. Naturally, you'll say, it's\n on Jupiter. But I mean it was even queerer than that. It was like no\n building on any planet at all. And, in fact, it wasn't on a planet; it\n was floating up there only two hundred miles in from the raw edge of\n space.",
"The senior judge rapped ferociously, and I skidded to a halt. Our\n little story teller patiently cleared his skinny throat again.\n \"I assure you it is no fairy tale. We possess well-authenticated\n photographs of these inhabitants, and if you are prepared to visit them\n and in some way worm from them the secret of their anti-gravity field,\n the government stands ready to issue you a full pardon as well as a\n substantial monetary reward. Your talents, Mr. Ritter, seem, shall we\n say, eminently suited to the task.\"\nHe beamed at me. I looked around. They were all beaming. At me!\n Suddenly I smelled a rat as big as an elephant. That whole Kooleen\n caper: Had it been just a trap to lead me straight to this? I hadn't\n been able to figure how they'd cracked my setup....",
"The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties\n had taken my voice again. \"How big?\" I whispered.\n\n\n He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. \"About the size of a man, I\n believe.\"\n\n\n I raised my shrinking head. \"Take me to jail!\" I said firmly, and\n collapsed onto my chair.\n\n\n A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. \"So this is\n the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!\" he sneered.\n \"Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!\"\n\n\n I shuddered. \"You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw\n the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!\"",
"For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,\n while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would\n make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a\n letter to the S.S.C.\n\n\n The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,\n friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter\n that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the\n caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made\n and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to\n shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with\n those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.",
"I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my\n nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and\n along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had\n already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out\n alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it\n was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so\n that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.\n\n\n But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group\n of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked\n up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard\n Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.\n So did I.",
"Sure, the crystals are deadly, but I was smuggling them legitimately,\n in a manner of speaking, for this doctor to experiment with. He wasn't\n going to sell them for dope. But—and this was the 'but' that was\n likely to deprive the System of my activities—even experimenting with\n them was illegal even if it needed to be done; also, I had promised not\n to rat on him before taking the job.\n\n\n Well, Casey Ritter may be a lot of things we won't mention, but he\n doesn't rat on his clients. So there I was, closeted with the ten\n members of the S.S. Customs Court, getting set to hear the gavel\n fall and the head man intone the sentence that would take me out of\n circulation for a long, long time. And instead, blast me, if they\n didn't foul me with this trip to good old Jupiter.",
"\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\"",
"That famous Red Spot was that big, too. It kept expanding until the\n whole universe was a fierce, raw luminous red. Out beyond it at first\n there had been fringes of snow-white frozen ammonia, but now it was all\n dyed redder than Mars. Then I took the plunge right into it. Surprise!\n The stuff was plants! Plants as big as meadows, bright red, floating\n around in those clouds of frozen ammonia like seaweed! Then I noticed\n that the ammonia around them wasn't frozen any more and peeked at the\n outside thermometer I couldn't believe it. It was above zero. Then I\n forgot about the temperature because it dawned on me that I was lost. I\n couldn't see a thing but drifting ammonia fog and those tangles of red\n floating plants like little islands all around. Cutting down the motor,\n I eased along.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThose methane and ammonia planets, take it from me, they're the\n dead-end of creation, and why the Old Man ever thought them up I'll\n never know. I never thought I'd mess around any of them, but things\n can sure happen. A man can get himself backed into a corner in this\n little old solar system. It just ain't big enough for a gent of scope\n and talent; and the day the Solar System Customs caught me red-handed\n smuggling Kooleen crystals in from Mars, I knew I was in that corner,\n and sewed up tight.",
"Real powerful, said the man. What an understatement! But the day I was\n set adrift in that sea of frozen ammonia clouds mixed with nice cozy\n methane gas I sure prayed for it to be powerful, and I clutched that\n tiny bottle like that boy Aladdin clutching his little old lamp.\n\n\n I'd had a lot of cooperation getting that far. An Earth patrol had\n slipped down onto the Red Desert of Mars and picked up the Killicut\n Emeralds from where Pard Hoskins had cached them; and safe out in space\n again, we had pored over that string of green headlights practically\n slobbering. But the Big Sneer of the S.S.C., the fellow that had got\n me into this caper, was right there to take the joy out of it all and\n to remind me that this was public service, strictly.",
"That night I turned on my hard prison cot until my bones were so much\n jelly, trying to figure that steal. The next morning I got up burning\n with this fever for information, only to find that Pard had got himself\n put in solitary for mugging a guard, and that really put the heat on\n me. I chewed my fingernails down to the quick by the time he got out a\n week later.\nBy that time he really had me hooked. I'd of sworn he was leveling\n with me. But he wouldn't tell me how he'd worked the steal. Instead,\n he opened up on the trade he'd booked for the string. He said, \"When I\n chisel me way outa this squirrel cage, I'm gonna hit fer good old Jupe\n and sell 'em to Akroida. She's nuts about jools. What that old girl\n won't give me fer 'em—\" He whistled appreciatively, thinking about it.",
"\"Brains!\" he snorted. \"Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than\n people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you\n just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone.\n Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's\n fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite\n you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce,\n so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that\n almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!\"\n He sighed regretfully. \"But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda\n persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here\n cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer\n them emeralds.\"",
"A sort of jerking quiver ran through Akroida. She reared up even\n higher. Her mean Roman nose twitched. \"An earthman? Like Pard Hoskins?\"\n\n\n Attaboy shrank smaller and smaller. He could only nod dumbly.\n\n\n The storm broke, all right. That old dame let out a scream like a\n maddened stallion and began to thrash around and flail her couch with\n that dragon's tail of hers.",
"My actions didn't bother him a bit. \"Jewels, did you say?\" he tapped\n out thoughtfully, just like an ordinary business man, and I managed to\n tap out yes. He drifted closer; close enough to get a whiff....\nA shudder of ecstasy stiffened him. His head and eyes rolled with it,\n and he wafted closer still. Right there I began to harbor a premonition\n that there might be such a thing as being too popular in Scorpdom, but\n I thrust this sneak-thief idea back into limbo.\n\n\n Taking advantage of his condition, I boldly tapped out, \"How's about\n taking me on a guided tour through this red spinach patch to Akroida,\n old pal?\" Or words to that effect.\n\n\n He lolled his hideous cranium practically on my shoulder. \"Anything!\n Just anything you desire, my dearest friend.\""
],
[
"I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. \"I'm Casey\n Ritter. What's your label, chum?\"\n\n\n \"Attaboy,\" he ticked coyly.\n\n\n \"Attaboy?\" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain\n nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. \"Who named\n you that?\"\n\n\n He simpered. \"My dear friend, Pard Hoskins.\"\n\n\n I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for\n Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. \"How come you aren't\n mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?\"\n\n\n He hung his silly head. \"I fear I am colorblind,\" he confessed sadly.",
"When I finally wore them down and got to my little cell, I looked\n around it with a feeling of real coziness. I even patted the walls\n chummily and snapped a salute at the guard. It makes me grind my molars\n now to think of it. The way that bunch of stuffed shirts in the S.S.C.\n made a gold-barred chimpanzee out of me has broken my spirit and\n turned me into an honest trader. Me, Casey Ritter, slickest slicker in\n the Solar System, led like a precious infant right where I'd flatly\n refused to go! In plain English, I underestimated the enemy. Feeling\n safe and secure in the grip of the good old Iron College, I relaxed.\n\n\n At this strategic point, the enemy planted a stoolie on me. Not in my\n cell block. They were too smart for that. But we met at recreation, and\n his mug seemed familiar, like a wisp of smoke where no smoke has got a\n right to be; and after awhile I braced him.",
"I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my\n nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and\n along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had\n already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out\n alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it\n was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so\n that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.\n\n\n But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group\n of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked\n up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard\n Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.\n So did I.",
"The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties\n had taken my voice again. \"How big?\" I whispered.\n\n\n He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. \"About the size of a man, I\n believe.\"\n\n\n I raised my shrinking head. \"Take me to jail!\" I said firmly, and\n collapsed onto my chair.\n\n\n A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. \"So this is\n the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!\" he sneered.\n \"Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!\"\n\n\n I shuddered. \"You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw\n the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!\"",
"JUPITER'S JOKE\nBy A. L. HALEY\nCasey Ritter, the guy who never turned\n \ndown a dare, breathed a prayer to the gods\n \nof idiots and spacemen, and headed in toward\n \nthe great red spot of terrible Jupiter.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was\n put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that\n there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just\n right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air\n as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but\n what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?\n\n\n Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the\n airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on\n my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully\n endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the\n little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.",
"Akroida rose up sort of languidly on an elbow that was all stripped\n bone and sharp as a needle. She pulled an eyeball out about a yard and\n scanned Attaboy and the box. He closed in to the couch all hunched\n over, ducked his head humbly half-a-dozen times, and pushed the box\n over beside her. Akroida eased her eyeball back, opened the box and\n sniffed, and then turned to Attaboy with a full-blown Satanic grin. I\n could hear her question reverberate away over where I was.\n\n\n \"Who from?\" asked Akroida.\n\n\n That conversation was telegraphed to me blow by blow by the actions of\n those hopper-scorps. I didn't need their particular brand of Morse Code\n at all.",
"\"Who from?\" Attaboy cringed lower and blushed a purple all-over blush.\n \"Dear lady, it is from an interspace trader who possesses some truly\n remarkable jewels,\" he confessed coyly.\n\n\n Akroida toyed with the Halcyon Diamond and ignored the bait. \"His\n name?\" she demanded. And when he told her, with a bad stutter in\n his code, she reared up higher on her skinny elbow and glared in my\n direction. \"Casey Ritter? Never heard of him. Where's he from?\"\n\n\n Well, after all, she wasn't blind. He had to confess. \"I—uh—the\n stones were so amazing, Royal Akroida, that I didn't pay much attention\n to the—uh—trader. He does seem to resemble an—ah—earthman.\" He\n ducked his head and fearfully waited.",
"The senior judge rapped ferociously, and I skidded to a halt. Our\n little story teller patiently cleared his skinny throat again.\n \"I assure you it is no fairy tale. We possess well-authenticated\n photographs of these inhabitants, and if you are prepared to visit them\n and in some way worm from them the secret of their anti-gravity field,\n the government stands ready to issue you a full pardon as well as a\n substantial monetary reward. Your talents, Mr. Ritter, seem, shall we\n say, eminently suited to the task.\"\nHe beamed at me. I looked around. They were all beaming. At me!\n Suddenly I smelled a rat as big as an elephant. That whole Kooleen\n caper: Had it been just a trap to lead me straight to this? I hadn't\n been able to figure how they'd cracked my setup....",
"He shrugged, but his little black-currant eyes began to sparkle with\n real passion, the high voltage kind that only a woman in a million, or\n a million in a bank, can kindle in a guy. \"Buddy,\" he said reverently,\n \"I'd start more than that just to get me mitts on them stones again!\n Why, you ain't never seen jools till you've seen them! Big as hen's\n eggs, an even dozen of 'em; and flawless, I'm a-shoutin', not a flaw!\"\n His eyes watered at the memory, yearning like a hound-dog's over a\n fresh scent.",
"For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,\n while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would\n make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a\n letter to the S.S.C.\n\n\n The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,\n friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter\n that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the\n caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made\n and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to\n shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with\n those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.",
"That night I turned on my hard prison cot until my bones were so much\n jelly, trying to figure that steal. The next morning I got up burning\n with this fever for information, only to find that Pard had got himself\n put in solitary for mugging a guard, and that really put the heat on\n me. I chewed my fingernails down to the quick by the time he got out a\n week later.\nBy that time he really had me hooked. I'd of sworn he was leveling\n with me. But he wouldn't tell me how he'd worked the steal. Instead,\n he opened up on the trade he'd booked for the string. He said, \"When I\n chisel me way outa this squirrel cage, I'm gonna hit fer good old Jupe\n and sell 'em to Akroida. She's nuts about jools. What that old girl\n won't give me fer 'em—\" He whistled appreciatively, thinking about it.",
"Right there I forgave him for pulling that eye on me. He was the guide\n I needed, the one who had got Pard out alive. I almost hugged him.\n \"Lead off, old pal,\" I sang out, and then had to tap it. \"I'll follow\n in my boat.\"\n\n\n Well, I'd met the first of the brood and was still alive. Not only\n alive but loved and cherished, thanks to Pard's inventiveness and to\n a kindly fate which had sent Pard's old pal my way. A great man, Pard\n Hoskins. How had he made friends with the brute in the first place?\n\n\n Being once more inside my spaceboat, I raised my helmet, which was like\n one of those head-pieces they used to put on suits of armor instead of\n the usual plastic bubble. And it was rigged out with phony antennae and\n mandibles and other embellishments calculated to interest my hosts.\n Whether it interested them or not, it was plenty uncomfortable for me.",
"I couldn't believe it. Those emeralds were in the inner shrine of the\n super-sacred, super-secret temple of the cavern-dwelling tribe of\n Killicuts on Mars—the real aborigines. Bleachies, we call them, sort\n of contemptuously; but those Bleachies are a rough lot when they're\n mad, and if Pard had really got near those emeralds, he should be\n nothing but a heap of cleaned bones by now. Either he was the world's\n champion liar or its bravest son, and either way I took my hat off to\n him.\n\n\n \"How'd you make the getaway?\" I asked, taking him at his word.\n\n\n He looked loftily past me. \"Sorry. Gotta keep that a secret. Likewise\n where I cached 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Cached what?\"\n\n\n \"The rocks, stupe.\"",
"With that we got down to business and fixed a meeting point out on\n Jupiter's farthest moon; then they took me in to the edge of Jupiter's\n ice-cloud and turned me loose in a peanut of a space boat with old Jupe\n looming ahead bigger than all outdoors and the Red Spot dead ahead. I\n patted my pretty enameled suit, which was a study in paris green and\n passionate purple.\n\n\n I patted the three hundred pounds of arsenic crystals for Akroida and\n anyone else I might have to bribe. I anxiously examined my suit's air\n and water containers and the heating unit that would keep them in\n their proper state. I had already gone over the space boat. Yeah, I\n was as nervous as a cat with new kittens. Feeling again for my little\n bottle of horrid stench, I breathed a prayer to the god of idiots and\n spacemen, and headed in. The big ship was long gone, and I felt like a\n mighty small and naked microbe diving into the Pacific Ocean.",
"Real powerful, said the man. What an understatement! But the day I was\n set adrift in that sea of frozen ammonia clouds mixed with nice cozy\n methane gas I sure prayed for it to be powerful, and I clutched that\n tiny bottle like that boy Aladdin clutching his little old lamp.\n\n\n I'd had a lot of cooperation getting that far. An Earth patrol had\n slipped down onto the Red Desert of Mars and picked up the Killicut\n Emeralds from where Pard Hoskins had cached them; and safe out in space\n again, we had pored over that string of green headlights practically\n slobbering. But the Big Sneer of the S.S.C., the fellow that had got\n me into this caper, was right there to take the joy out of it all and\n to remind me that this was public service, strictly.",
"Sure, the crystals are deadly, but I was smuggling them legitimately,\n in a manner of speaking, for this doctor to experiment with. He wasn't\n going to sell them for dope. But—and this was the 'but' that was\n likely to deprive the System of my activities—even experimenting with\n them was illegal even if it needed to be done; also, I had promised not\n to rat on him before taking the job.\n\n\n Well, Casey Ritter may be a lot of things we won't mention, but he\n doesn't rat on his clients. So there I was, closeted with the ten\n members of the S.S. Customs Court, getting set to hear the gavel\n fall and the head man intone the sentence that would take me out of\n circulation for a long, long time. And instead, blast me, if they\n didn't foul me with this trip to good old Jupiter.",
"\"Brains!\" he snorted. \"Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than\n people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you\n just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone.\n Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's\n fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite\n you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce,\n so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that\n almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!\"\n He sighed regretfully. \"But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda\n persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here\n cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer\n them emeralds.\"",
"\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\"",
"\"These—\" he had proclaimed with a disdainful flourish, like a placer\n miner pointing to a batch of fool's gold—\"These jewels are as nothing,\n Ritter, compared with the value of the secret you are to buy with\n them. And be assured that if you're man enough to effect the trade—\"\n He paused, his long nose twitching cynically—\"IF you succeed, your\n reward will be triple what you could get for them in any market. Added\n to which, IF you succeed, you will be a free man.\"\n\n\n That twitch of the nose riled me no little. \"I ain't failed yet!\" I\n snarled at him. \"Just you wait till I do, feller!\" I slipped the string\n of emeralds back into its little safe. \"Instead of sniping at me, why\n don't you get that brain busy and set our rendezvous?\""
],
[
"I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. \"I'm Casey\n Ritter. What's your label, chum?\"\n\n\n \"Attaboy,\" he ticked coyly.\n\n\n \"Attaboy?\" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain\n nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. \"Who named\n you that?\"\n\n\n He simpered. \"My dear friend, Pard Hoskins.\"\n\n\n I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for\n Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. \"How come you aren't\n mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?\"\n\n\n He hung his silly head. \"I fear I am colorblind,\" he confessed sadly.",
"I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my\n nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and\n along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had\n already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out\n alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it\n was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so\n that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.\n\n\n But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group\n of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked\n up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard\n Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.\n So did I.",
"I was right. I'd met the shrimp before when I was wound up in an\n asteroid real estate racket. Pard Hoskins was his alias, and he had the\n tag of being a real slick operator. We swapped yarns for about a week\n when we met, and then I asked him what's his rap this trip.\n\n\n \"Oh, a pretty good jolt if they can keep hold of me,\" he says. \"I just\n made a pass at the Killicut Emeralds, that's all, and got nabbed.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\" I moaned. \"What were you trying to do, start a feud between\n us and Mars?\"",
"Right there I forgave him for pulling that eye on me. He was the guide\n I needed, the one who had got Pard out alive. I almost hugged him.\n \"Lead off, old pal,\" I sang out, and then had to tap it. \"I'll follow\n in my boat.\"\n\n\n Well, I'd met the first of the brood and was still alive. Not only\n alive but loved and cherished, thanks to Pard's inventiveness and to\n a kindly fate which had sent Pard's old pal my way. A great man, Pard\n Hoskins. How had he made friends with the brute in the first place?\n\n\n Being once more inside my spaceboat, I raised my helmet, which was like\n one of those head-pieces they used to put on suits of armor instead of\n the usual plastic bubble. And it was rigged out with phony antennae and\n mandibles and other embellishments calculated to interest my hosts.\n Whether it interested them or not, it was plenty uncomfortable for me.",
"JUPITER'S JOKE\nBy A. L. HALEY\nCasey Ritter, the guy who never turned\n \ndown a dare, breathed a prayer to the gods\n \nof idiots and spacemen, and headed in toward\n \nthe great red spot of terrible Jupiter.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"When I finally wore them down and got to my little cell, I looked\n around it with a feeling of real coziness. I even patted the walls\n chummily and snapped a salute at the guard. It makes me grind my molars\n now to think of it. The way that bunch of stuffed shirts in the S.S.C.\n made a gold-barred chimpanzee out of me has broken my spirit and\n turned me into an honest trader. Me, Casey Ritter, slickest slicker in\n the Solar System, led like a precious infant right where I'd flatly\n refused to go! In plain English, I underestimated the enemy. Feeling\n safe and secure in the grip of the good old Iron College, I relaxed.\n\n\n At this strategic point, the enemy planted a stoolie on me. Not in my\n cell block. They were too smart for that. But we met at recreation, and\n his mug seemed familiar, like a wisp of smoke where no smoke has got a\n right to be; and after awhile I braced him.",
"\"Who from?\" Attaboy cringed lower and blushed a purple all-over blush.\n \"Dear lady, it is from an interspace trader who possesses some truly\n remarkable jewels,\" he confessed coyly.\n\n\n Akroida toyed with the Halcyon Diamond and ignored the bait. \"His\n name?\" she demanded. And when he told her, with a bad stutter in\n his code, she reared up higher on her skinny elbow and glared in my\n direction. \"Casey Ritter? Never heard of him. Where's he from?\"\n\n\n Well, after all, she wasn't blind. He had to confess. \"I—uh—the\n stones were so amazing, Royal Akroida, that I didn't pay much attention\n to the—uh—trader. He does seem to resemble an—ah—earthman.\" He\n ducked his head and fearfully waited.",
"In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was\n put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that\n there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just\n right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air\n as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but\n what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?\n\n\n Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the\n airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on\n my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully\n endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the\n little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.",
"Meanwhile the hopper-scorp reached the ship. Hastily I squirted some of\n my Scorpion-Come-Hither lure on the chest of my spacesuit, opened the\n lock, and popped out, brave as could be. Face to face with that thing,\n though, I nearly lost my grip on the handle. In fact, I'd have fainted\n dead away right there if Pard Hoskins hadn't been there already and\n lived. If that little shrimp could do it, I could, too.",
"The senior judge rapped ferociously, and I skidded to a halt. Our\n little story teller patiently cleared his skinny throat again.\n \"I assure you it is no fairy tale. We possess well-authenticated\n photographs of these inhabitants, and if you are prepared to visit them\n and in some way worm from them the secret of their anti-gravity field,\n the government stands ready to issue you a full pardon as well as a\n substantial monetary reward. Your talents, Mr. Ritter, seem, shall we\n say, eminently suited to the task.\"\nHe beamed at me. I looked around. They were all beaming. At me!\n Suddenly I smelled a rat as big as an elephant. That whole Kooleen\n caper: Had it been just a trap to lead me straight to this? I hadn't\n been able to figure how they'd cracked my setup....",
"A sort of jerking quiver ran through Akroida. She reared up even\n higher. Her mean Roman nose twitched. \"An earthman? Like Pard Hoskins?\"\n\n\n Attaboy shrank smaller and smaller. He could only nod dumbly.\n\n\n The storm broke, all right. That old dame let out a scream like a\n maddened stallion and began to thrash around and flail her couch with\n that dragon's tail of hers.",
"The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties\n had taken my voice again. \"How big?\" I whispered.\n\n\n He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. \"About the size of a man, I\n believe.\"\n\n\n I raised my shrinking head. \"Take me to jail!\" I said firmly, and\n collapsed onto my chair.\n\n\n A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. \"So this is\n the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!\" he sneered.\n \"Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!\"\n\n\n I shuddered. \"You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw\n the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!\"",
"That night I turned on my hard prison cot until my bones were so much\n jelly, trying to figure that steal. The next morning I got up burning\n with this fever for information, only to find that Pard had got himself\n put in solitary for mugging a guard, and that really put the heat on\n me. I chewed my fingernails down to the quick by the time he got out a\n week later.\nBy that time he really had me hooked. I'd of sworn he was leveling\n with me. But he wouldn't tell me how he'd worked the steal. Instead,\n he opened up on the trade he'd booked for the string. He said, \"When I\n chisel me way outa this squirrel cage, I'm gonna hit fer good old Jupe\n and sell 'em to Akroida. She's nuts about jools. What that old girl\n won't give me fer 'em—\" He whistled appreciatively, thinking about it.",
"For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,\n while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would\n make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a\n letter to the S.S.C.\n\n\n The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,\n friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter\n that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the\n caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made\n and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to\n shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with\n those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.",
"Akroida rose up sort of languidly on an elbow that was all stripped\n bone and sharp as a needle. She pulled an eyeball out about a yard and\n scanned Attaboy and the box. He closed in to the couch all hunched\n over, ducked his head humbly half-a-dozen times, and pushed the box\n over beside her. Akroida eased her eyeball back, opened the box and\n sniffed, and then turned to Attaboy with a full-blown Satanic grin. I\n could hear her question reverberate away over where I was.\n\n\n \"Who from?\" asked Akroida.\n\n\n That conversation was telegraphed to me blow by blow by the actions of\n those hopper-scorps. I didn't need their particular brand of Morse Code\n at all.",
"I braced up and tapped out the greeting Pard had taught me. My\n fiendish-looking opponent tapped right back, inquiring why the hell\n I was back so soon when I knew that Akroida was all set to carve me\n into steaks for just any meal. But the tone was friendly and even\n intimate—or rather, the taps were. There was even a rather warm\n expression discernible in the thing's eyes, so I took heart and decided\n to ignore the ferocious features surrounding those eyes. After all, the\n poor sinner's map was made of shell, and he wasn't responsible for its\n expression.\n\n\n I tapped back very politely that he must be mistaking me for someone\n else. \"I've never been here before, and so I've never met the charming\n lady,\" I informed him. \"However, I have something very special in the\n way of jewels—not with me, naturally—and the rumor is that she might\n be interested.\"",
"I couldn't believe it. Those emeralds were in the inner shrine of the\n super-sacred, super-secret temple of the cavern-dwelling tribe of\n Killicuts on Mars—the real aborigines. Bleachies, we call them, sort\n of contemptuously; but those Bleachies are a rough lot when they're\n mad, and if Pard had really got near those emeralds, he should be\n nothing but a heap of cleaned bones by now. Either he was the world's\n champion liar or its bravest son, and either way I took my hat off to\n him.\n\n\n \"How'd you make the getaway?\" I asked, taking him at his word.\n\n\n He looked loftily past me. \"Sorry. Gotta keep that a secret. Likewise\n where I cached 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Cached what?\"\n\n\n \"The rocks, stupe.\"",
"\"These—\" he had proclaimed with a disdainful flourish, like a placer\n miner pointing to a batch of fool's gold—\"These jewels are as nothing,\n Ritter, compared with the value of the secret you are to buy with\n them. And be assured that if you're man enough to effect the trade—\"\n He paused, his long nose twitching cynically—\"IF you succeed, your\n reward will be triple what you could get for them in any market. Added\n to which, IF you succeed, you will be a free man.\"\n\n\n That twitch of the nose riled me no little. \"I ain't failed yet!\" I\n snarled at him. \"Just you wait till I do, feller!\" I slipped the string\n of emeralds back into its little safe. \"Instead of sniping at me, why\n don't you get that brain busy and set our rendezvous?\"",
"\"Brains!\" he snorted. \"Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than\n people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you\n just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone.\n Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's\n fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite\n you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce,\n so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that\n almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!\"\n He sighed regretfully. \"But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda\n persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here\n cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer\n them emeralds.\"",
"\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\""
],
[
"I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my\n nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and\n along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had\n already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out\n alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it\n was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so\n that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.\n\n\n But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group\n of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked\n up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard\n Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.\n So did I.",
"Sure, the crystals are deadly, but I was smuggling them legitimately,\n in a manner of speaking, for this doctor to experiment with. He wasn't\n going to sell them for dope. But—and this was the 'but' that was\n likely to deprive the System of my activities—even experimenting with\n them was illegal even if it needed to be done; also, I had promised not\n to rat on him before taking the job.\n\n\n Well, Casey Ritter may be a lot of things we won't mention, but he\n doesn't rat on his clients. So there I was, closeted with the ten\n members of the S.S. Customs Court, getting set to hear the gavel\n fall and the head man intone the sentence that would take me out of\n circulation for a long, long time. And instead, blast me, if they\n didn't foul me with this trip to good old Jupiter.",
"I didn't get it at first. I'd argued with 'em, but inside I'd been all\n set for the sentence, and even sort of reconciled to it. I could even\n hear the words in my mind. But they didn't match what the judge was\n saying. I stood there gaping like a beached fish while I sorted it out.\n Then I croaked, \"Jupiter! What for? Are you running outa space in stir?\n Want to choke me to death in chlorine instead?\" Being civil to the\n court didn't seem important just then. Jupiter was worse than the pen,\n a lot worse. Jupiter was a death sentence.\n\n\n The senior judge rapped sharply with his gavel. He frowned me down and\n then nodded at the judge on his right. This bird, a little old hank of\n dried-up straw, joined his fingertips carefully, cleared his scrawny\n throat, and told me what for.",
"The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties\n had taken my voice again. \"How big?\" I whispered.\n\n\n He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. \"About the size of a man, I\n believe.\"\n\n\n I raised my shrinking head. \"Take me to jail!\" I said firmly, and\n collapsed onto my chair.\n\n\n A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. \"So this is\n the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!\" he sneered.\n \"Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!\"\n\n\n I shuddered. \"You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw\n the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!\"",
"JUPITER'S JOKE\nBy A. L. HALEY\nCasey Ritter, the guy who never turned\n \ndown a dare, breathed a prayer to the gods\n \nof idiots and spacemen, and headed in toward\n \nthe great red spot of terrible Jupiter.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"With that we got down to business and fixed a meeting point out on\n Jupiter's farthest moon; then they took me in to the edge of Jupiter's\n ice-cloud and turned me loose in a peanut of a space boat with old Jupe\n looming ahead bigger than all outdoors and the Red Spot dead ahead. I\n patted my pretty enameled suit, which was a study in paris green and\n passionate purple.\n\n\n I patted the three hundred pounds of arsenic crystals for Akroida and\n anyone else I might have to bribe. I anxiously examined my suit's air\n and water containers and the heating unit that would keep them in\n their proper state. I had already gone over the space boat. Yeah, I\n was as nervous as a cat with new kittens. Feeling again for my little\n bottle of horrid stench, I breathed a prayer to the god of idiots and\n spacemen, and headed in. The big ship was long gone, and I felt like a\n mighty small and naked microbe diving into the Pacific Ocean.",
"\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\"",
"\"You've no doubt heard tales of the strange population of Jupiter,\"\n he said. \"Every spaceman has, I am sure. Insect-like creatures who\n manifestly migrated there from some other system and who inhabit\n the Red Spot of the planet, floating in some kind of artificial\n anti-gravity field in the gaseous portion of the atmosphere—\"\n\n\n I snorted. \"Aw, hell, judge, that's just one of those screwy fairy\n tales! How could any—\"",
"In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was\n put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that\n there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just\n right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air\n as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but\n what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?\n\n\n Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the\n airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on\n my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully\n endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the\n little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.",
"When I finally wore them down and got to my little cell, I looked\n around it with a feeling of real coziness. I even patted the walls\n chummily and snapped a salute at the guard. It makes me grind my molars\n now to think of it. The way that bunch of stuffed shirts in the S.S.C.\n made a gold-barred chimpanzee out of me has broken my spirit and\n turned me into an honest trader. Me, Casey Ritter, slickest slicker in\n the Solar System, led like a precious infant right where I'd flatly\n refused to go! In plain English, I underestimated the enemy. Feeling\n safe and secure in the grip of the good old Iron College, I relaxed.\n\n\n At this strategic point, the enemy planted a stoolie on me. Not in my\n cell block. They were too smart for that. But we met at recreation, and\n his mug seemed familiar, like a wisp of smoke where no smoke has got a\n right to be; and after awhile I braced him.",
"That famous Red Spot was that big, too. It kept expanding until the\n whole universe was a fierce, raw luminous red. Out beyond it at first\n there had been fringes of snow-white frozen ammonia, but now it was all\n dyed redder than Mars. Then I took the plunge right into it. Surprise!\n The stuff was plants! Plants as big as meadows, bright red, floating\n around in those clouds of frozen ammonia like seaweed! Then I noticed\n that the ammonia around them wasn't frozen any more and peeked at the\n outside thermometer I couldn't believe it. It was above zero. Then I\n forgot about the temperature because it dawned on me that I was lost. I\n couldn't see a thing but drifting ammonia fog and those tangles of red\n floating plants like little islands all around. Cutting down the motor,\n I eased along.",
"At the thought my larynx froze up tight. This was worse than I'd\n thought. Government men trapping me and then beaming at me. And a full\n pardon. And a reward. Oh, no! I told myself, it wasn't possible. Not\n when I already had more counts against me than a cur has fleas. Not\n unless it was a straight suicide mission!\n\n\n I feebly massaged my throat. \"Pictures?\" I whispered. \"Show me 'em.\"\n Crude, but it was all I could squeeze out.\n\n\n I squeezed out more when I saw those pictures, though. Those\n inhabitants were charming, just charming if you like scorpions. Well,\n a cross between a scorpion and a grasshopper, to be accurate. Floating\n among that red stuff, they showed up a kind of sickly purple turning to\n gangrene around the edges.",
"\"Brains!\" he snorted. \"Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than\n people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you\n just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone.\n Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's\n fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite\n you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce,\n so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that\n almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!\"\n He sighed regretfully. \"But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda\n persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here\n cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer\n them emeralds.\"",
"The senior judge rapped ferociously, and I skidded to a halt. Our\n little story teller patiently cleared his skinny throat again.\n \"I assure you it is no fairy tale. We possess well-authenticated\n photographs of these inhabitants, and if you are prepared to visit them\n and in some way worm from them the secret of their anti-gravity field,\n the government stands ready to issue you a full pardon as well as a\n substantial monetary reward. Your talents, Mr. Ritter, seem, shall we\n say, eminently suited to the task.\"\nHe beamed at me. I looked around. They were all beaming. At me!\n Suddenly I smelled a rat as big as an elephant. That whole Kooleen\n caper: Had it been just a trap to lead me straight to this? I hadn't\n been able to figure how they'd cracked my setup....",
"Then he winked at me. \"But then I got off in a corner and cooked up\n some perfume that drives them nuts the other way; sorta frantic with\n ecstasy, like the book says. Didn't have a chance to try it on Akroida,\n though. She wouldn't give me another audience. It's in the stuff they\n cleaned outa me room: a poiple bottle with a bright green stopper.\"\n\n\n He ruminated a few minutes. \"Tell you what, chump. Make them shell out\n with a green an' poiple spacesuit—them's the real Jupiter colors—an'\n put just a touch o' that there perfume on the outside of it. Akroida'll\n do anything fer you if she just gets a whiff. Just anything! But\n remember, don't use but a drop. It's real powerful.\"\nII",
"Pard was right again. These critters had brains. And my S.S.C.\n persecutor was right, too. That anti-grav secret was worth more than\n any string of rocks in the system, including the Killicut Emeralds.\n\n\n Then I swallowed hard. Attaboy was leading me straight across to a\n window. Closing my helmet, my fingers fumbled badly. My brain was\n fumbling, too. \"Zero hour, chump!\" it told me, and I shuddered. Picking\n up the first hundred pounds of the arsenic, I wobbled over to the\n airlock.\nIII\n\n\n That palace was like nothing on earth. Naturally, you'll say, it's\n on Jupiter. But I mean it was even queerer than that. It was like no\n building on any planet at all. And, in fact, it wasn't on a planet; it\n was floating up there only two hundred miles in from the raw edge of\n space.",
"I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. \"I'm Casey\n Ritter. What's your label, chum?\"\n\n\n \"Attaboy,\" he ticked coyly.\n\n\n \"Attaboy?\" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain\n nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. \"Who named\n you that?\"\n\n\n He simpered. \"My dear friend, Pard Hoskins.\"\n\n\n I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for\n Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. \"How come you aren't\n mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?\"\n\n\n He hung his silly head. \"I fear I am colorblind,\" he confessed sadly.",
"For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,\n while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would\n make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a\n letter to the S.S.C.\n\n\n The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,\n friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter\n that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the\n caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made\n and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to\n shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with\n those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.",
"Real powerful, said the man. What an understatement! But the day I was\n set adrift in that sea of frozen ammonia clouds mixed with nice cozy\n methane gas I sure prayed for it to be powerful, and I clutched that\n tiny bottle like that boy Aladdin clutching his little old lamp.\n\n\n I'd had a lot of cooperation getting that far. An Earth patrol had\n slipped down onto the Red Desert of Mars and picked up the Killicut\n Emeralds from where Pard Hoskins had cached them; and safe out in space\n again, we had pored over that string of green headlights practically\n slobbering. But the Big Sneer of the S.S.C., the fellow that had got\n me into this caper, was right there to take the joy out of it all and\n to remind me that this was public service, strictly.",
"\"Jupiter!\" I goggled at him. \"Akroida! Who's she?\"\n\n\n He looked at me as if I hadn't yet got out from under the rock where he\n was sure I'd been born. \"Don't you know nothin', butterhead?\"\n\n\n From him I took it. I even waited patiently till the master spoke\n again. The memory still makes me fry.\n\n\n \"Akroida,\" he explained in his own sweet time, \"is the queen-scorp\n of them idiotic scorpions that lives on Jupiter. I sold her the\n Halcyon Diamond that disappeared from the World Museum five years ago,\n remember?\" He winked broadly. \"It come from Mars in the first place,\n you know. Mars! What a place fer jools! Damn desert's lousy with 'em,\n if it wasn't so much trouble to dig 'em out—\" He went off into a dream\n about the rocks on Mars but I jerked him back."
],
[
"A sort of jerking quiver ran through Akroida. She reared up even\n higher. Her mean Roman nose twitched. \"An earthman? Like Pard Hoskins?\"\n\n\n Attaboy shrank smaller and smaller. He could only nod dumbly.\n\n\n The storm broke, all right. That old dame let out a scream like a\n maddened stallion and began to thrash around and flail her couch with\n that dragon's tail of hers.",
"For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,\n while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would\n make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a\n letter to the S.S.C.\n\n\n The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,\n friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter\n that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the\n caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made\n and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to\n shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with\n those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.",
"Akroida rose up sort of languidly on an elbow that was all stripped\n bone and sharp as a needle. She pulled an eyeball out about a yard and\n scanned Attaboy and the box. He closed in to the couch all hunched\n over, ducked his head humbly half-a-dozen times, and pushed the box\n over beside her. Akroida eased her eyeball back, opened the box and\n sniffed, and then turned to Attaboy with a full-blown Satanic grin. I\n could hear her question reverberate away over where I was.\n\n\n \"Who from?\" asked Akroida.\n\n\n That conversation was telegraphed to me blow by blow by the actions of\n those hopper-scorps. I didn't need their particular brand of Morse Code\n at all.",
"Right there I forgave him for pulling that eye on me. He was the guide\n I needed, the one who had got Pard out alive. I almost hugged him.\n \"Lead off, old pal,\" I sang out, and then had to tap it. \"I'll follow\n in my boat.\"\n\n\n Well, I'd met the first of the brood and was still alive. Not only\n alive but loved and cherished, thanks to Pard's inventiveness and to\n a kindly fate which had sent Pard's old pal my way. A great man, Pard\n Hoskins. How had he made friends with the brute in the first place?\n\n\n Being once more inside my spaceboat, I raised my helmet, which was like\n one of those head-pieces they used to put on suits of armor instead of\n the usual plastic bubble. And it was rigged out with phony antennae and\n mandibles and other embellishments calculated to interest my hosts.\n Whether it interested them or not, it was plenty uncomfortable for me.",
"I braced up and tapped out the greeting Pard had taught me. My\n fiendish-looking opponent tapped right back, inquiring why the hell\n I was back so soon when I knew that Akroida was all set to carve me\n into steaks for just any meal. But the tone was friendly and even\n intimate—or rather, the taps were. There was even a rather warm\n expression discernible in the thing's eyes, so I took heart and decided\n to ignore the ferocious features surrounding those eyes. After all, the\n poor sinner's map was made of shell, and he wasn't responsible for its\n expression.\n\n\n I tapped back very politely that he must be mistaking me for someone\n else. \"I've never been here before, and so I've never met the charming\n lady,\" I informed him. \"However, I have something very special in the\n way of jewels—not with me, naturally—and the rumor is that she might\n be interested.\"",
"I was right. I'd met the shrimp before when I was wound up in an\n asteroid real estate racket. Pard Hoskins was his alias, and he had the\n tag of being a real slick operator. We swapped yarns for about a week\n when we met, and then I asked him what's his rap this trip.\n\n\n \"Oh, a pretty good jolt if they can keep hold of me,\" he says. \"I just\n made a pass at the Killicut Emeralds, that's all, and got nabbed.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\" I moaned. \"What were you trying to do, start a feud between\n us and Mars?\"",
"Our little Akroida was a pure and peculiarly violent purple—not a\n green edge anywhere. She was even more purple than my fancy enameled\n space suit, and she was big enough to comfortably fill most of that\n twenty-foot couch. To my shrinking eyes right then she looked as big as\n a ten-ton cannon and twice as mean and dangerous. She was idly nipping\n here and there as though she was just itching to take a hunk out of\n somebody, and the way the servants were edging away out around her, I\n could see they didn't want to get in range. I didn't blame them a bit.\n Under the vicious sag of her Roman nose, her mandibles kept grinding,\n shaking the jewels that were hung all over her repulsive carcass, and\n making the Halcyon Diamond on her chest blaze like a bonfire.\n\n\n Attaboy dumped me onto a floating cushion where I lay clutching and\n shuddering away from her and from the void all around me, and went\n across to her alone with the arsenic.",
"My actions didn't bother him a bit. \"Jewels, did you say?\" he tapped\n out thoughtfully, just like an ordinary business man, and I managed to\n tap out yes. He drifted closer; close enough to get a whiff....\nA shudder of ecstasy stiffened him. His head and eyes rolled with it,\n and he wafted closer still. Right there I began to harbor a premonition\n that there might be such a thing as being too popular in Scorpdom, but\n I thrust this sneak-thief idea back into limbo.\n\n\n Taking advantage of his condition, I boldly tapped out, \"How's about\n taking me on a guided tour through this red spinach patch to Akroida,\n old pal?\" Or words to that effect.\n\n\n He lolled his hideous cranium practically on my shoulder. \"Anything!\n Just anything you desire, my dearest friend.\"",
"I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. \"I'm Casey\n Ritter. What's your label, chum?\"\n\n\n \"Attaboy,\" he ticked coyly.\n\n\n \"Attaboy?\" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain\n nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. \"Who named\n you that?\"\n\n\n He simpered. \"My dear friend, Pard Hoskins.\"\n\n\n I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for\n Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. \"How come you aren't\n mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?\"\n\n\n He hung his silly head. \"I fear I am colorblind,\" he confessed sadly.",
"\"Jupiter!\" I goggled at him. \"Akroida! Who's she?\"\n\n\n He looked at me as if I hadn't yet got out from under the rock where he\n was sure I'd been born. \"Don't you know nothin', butterhead?\"\n\n\n From him I took it. I even waited patiently till the master spoke\n again. The memory still makes me fry.\n\n\n \"Akroida,\" he explained in his own sweet time, \"is the queen-scorp\n of them idiotic scorpions that lives on Jupiter. I sold her the\n Halcyon Diamond that disappeared from the World Museum five years ago,\n remember?\" He winked broadly. \"It come from Mars in the first place,\n you know. Mars! What a place fer jools! Damn desert's lousy with 'em,\n if it wasn't so much trouble to dig 'em out—\" He went off into a dream\n about the rocks on Mars but I jerked him back.",
"That night I turned on my hard prison cot until my bones were so much\n jelly, trying to figure that steal. The next morning I got up burning\n with this fever for information, only to find that Pard had got himself\n put in solitary for mugging a guard, and that really put the heat on\n me. I chewed my fingernails down to the quick by the time he got out a\n week later.\nBy that time he really had me hooked. I'd of sworn he was leveling\n with me. But he wouldn't tell me how he'd worked the steal. Instead,\n he opened up on the trade he'd booked for the string. He said, \"When I\n chisel me way outa this squirrel cage, I'm gonna hit fer good old Jupe\n and sell 'em to Akroida. She's nuts about jools. What that old girl\n won't give me fer 'em—\" He whistled appreciatively, thinking about it.",
"We finally came to the central hall of the palace, and at the sight\n of all that space dropping away, I clutched at his shell and nearly\n dropped the arsenic. But he didn't have any brakes I could grab, so he\n just flew out into mid-air in a room that could have swallowed a city\n block, skyscrapers and all. It was like a mammoth red cavern, and it\n glowed like the inside of a red light.\n\n\n No wonder those scorpions like green and purple. What a relief from all\n that red!\n\n\n A patch in the middle of the hall became a floating platform holding up\n a divan twenty feet square covered with stuff as green as new spring\n grass, and in the center of this reclined Akroida. It had to be. Who\n else could look like that? No one, believe me, boys and girls, no one!",
"\"Brains!\" he snorted. \"Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than\n people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you\n just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone.\n Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's\n fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite\n you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce,\n so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that\n almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!\"\n He sighed regretfully. \"But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda\n persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here\n cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer\n them emeralds.\"",
"Then he winked at me. \"But then I got off in a corner and cooked up\n some perfume that drives them nuts the other way; sorta frantic with\n ecstasy, like the book says. Didn't have a chance to try it on Akroida,\n though. She wouldn't give me another audience. It's in the stuff they\n cleaned outa me room: a poiple bottle with a bright green stopper.\"\n\n\n He ruminated a few minutes. \"Tell you what, chump. Make them shell out\n with a green an' poiple spacesuit—them's the real Jupiter colors—an'\n put just a touch o' that there perfume on the outside of it. Akroida'll\n do anything fer you if she just gets a whiff. Just anything! But\n remember, don't use but a drop. It's real powerful.\"\nII",
"\"Who from?\" Attaboy cringed lower and blushed a purple all-over blush.\n \"Dear lady, it is from an interspace trader who possesses some truly\n remarkable jewels,\" he confessed coyly.\n\n\n Akroida toyed with the Halcyon Diamond and ignored the bait. \"His\n name?\" she demanded. And when he told her, with a bad stutter in\n his code, she reared up higher on her skinny elbow and glared in my\n direction. \"Casey Ritter? Never heard of him. Where's he from?\"\n\n\n Well, after all, she wasn't blind. He had to confess. \"I—uh—the\n stones were so amazing, Royal Akroida, that I didn't pay much attention\n to the—uh—trader. He does seem to resemble an—ah—earthman.\" He\n ducked his head and fearfully waited.",
"\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\"",
"Meanwhile the hopper-scorp reached the ship. Hastily I squirted some of\n my Scorpion-Come-Hither lure on the chest of my spacesuit, opened the\n lock, and popped out, brave as could be. Face to face with that thing,\n though, I nearly lost my grip on the handle. In fact, I'd have fainted\n dead away right there if Pard Hoskins hadn't been there already and\n lived. If that little shrimp could do it, I could, too.",
"The senior judge rapped ferociously, and I skidded to a halt. Our\n little story teller patiently cleared his skinny throat again.\n \"I assure you it is no fairy tale. We possess well-authenticated\n photographs of these inhabitants, and if you are prepared to visit them\n and in some way worm from them the secret of their anti-gravity field,\n the government stands ready to issue you a full pardon as well as a\n substantial monetary reward. Your talents, Mr. Ritter, seem, shall we\n say, eminently suited to the task.\"\nHe beamed at me. I looked around. They were all beaming. At me!\n Suddenly I smelled a rat as big as an elephant. That whole Kooleen\n caper: Had it been just a trap to lead me straight to this? I hadn't\n been able to figure how they'd cracked my setup....",
"I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my\n nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and\n along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had\n already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out\n alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it\n was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so\n that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.\n\n\n But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group\n of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked\n up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard\n Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.\n So did I.",
"I couldn't believe it. Those emeralds were in the inner shrine of the\n super-sacred, super-secret temple of the cavern-dwelling tribe of\n Killicuts on Mars—the real aborigines. Bleachies, we call them, sort\n of contemptuously; but those Bleachies are a rough lot when they're\n mad, and if Pard had really got near those emeralds, he should be\n nothing but a heap of cleaned bones by now. Either he was the world's\n champion liar or its bravest son, and either way I took my hat off to\n him.\n\n\n \"How'd you make the getaway?\" I asked, taking him at his word.\n\n\n He looked loftily past me. \"Sorry. Gotta keep that a secret. Likewise\n where I cached 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Cached what?\"\n\n\n \"The rocks, stupe.\""
],
[
"JUPITER'S JOKE\nBy A. L. HALEY\nCasey Ritter, the guy who never turned\n \ndown a dare, breathed a prayer to the gods\n \nof idiots and spacemen, and headed in toward\n \nthe great red spot of terrible Jupiter.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my\n nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and\n along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had\n already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out\n alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it\n was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so\n that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.\n\n\n But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group\n of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked\n up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard\n Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.\n So did I.",
"Sure, the crystals are deadly, but I was smuggling them legitimately,\n in a manner of speaking, for this doctor to experiment with. He wasn't\n going to sell them for dope. But—and this was the 'but' that was\n likely to deprive the System of my activities—even experimenting with\n them was illegal even if it needed to be done; also, I had promised not\n to rat on him before taking the job.\n\n\n Well, Casey Ritter may be a lot of things we won't mention, but he\n doesn't rat on his clients. So there I was, closeted with the ten\n members of the S.S. Customs Court, getting set to hear the gavel\n fall and the head man intone the sentence that would take me out of\n circulation for a long, long time. And instead, blast me, if they\n didn't foul me with this trip to good old Jupiter.",
"With that we got down to business and fixed a meeting point out on\n Jupiter's farthest moon; then they took me in to the edge of Jupiter's\n ice-cloud and turned me loose in a peanut of a space boat with old Jupe\n looming ahead bigger than all outdoors and the Red Spot dead ahead. I\n patted my pretty enameled suit, which was a study in paris green and\n passionate purple.\n\n\n I patted the three hundred pounds of arsenic crystals for Akroida and\n anyone else I might have to bribe. I anxiously examined my suit's air\n and water containers and the heating unit that would keep them in\n their proper state. I had already gone over the space boat. Yeah, I\n was as nervous as a cat with new kittens. Feeling again for my little\n bottle of horrid stench, I breathed a prayer to the god of idiots and\n spacemen, and headed in. The big ship was long gone, and I felt like a\n mighty small and naked microbe diving into the Pacific Ocean.",
"In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was\n put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that\n there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just\n right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air\n as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but\n what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?\n\n\n Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the\n airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on\n my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully\n endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the\n little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.",
"The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties\n had taken my voice again. \"How big?\" I whispered.\n\n\n He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. \"About the size of a man, I\n believe.\"\n\n\n I raised my shrinking head. \"Take me to jail!\" I said firmly, and\n collapsed onto my chair.\n\n\n A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. \"So this is\n the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!\" he sneered.\n \"Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!\"\n\n\n I shuddered. \"You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw\n the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!\"",
"When I finally wore them down and got to my little cell, I looked\n around it with a feeling of real coziness. I even patted the walls\n chummily and snapped a salute at the guard. It makes me grind my molars\n now to think of it. The way that bunch of stuffed shirts in the S.S.C.\n made a gold-barred chimpanzee out of me has broken my spirit and\n turned me into an honest trader. Me, Casey Ritter, slickest slicker in\n the Solar System, led like a precious infant right where I'd flatly\n refused to go! In plain English, I underestimated the enemy. Feeling\n safe and secure in the grip of the good old Iron College, I relaxed.\n\n\n At this strategic point, the enemy planted a stoolie on me. Not in my\n cell block. They were too smart for that. But we met at recreation, and\n his mug seemed familiar, like a wisp of smoke where no smoke has got a\n right to be; and after awhile I braced him.",
"The senior judge rapped ferociously, and I skidded to a halt. Our\n little story teller patiently cleared his skinny throat again.\n \"I assure you it is no fairy tale. We possess well-authenticated\n photographs of these inhabitants, and if you are prepared to visit them\n and in some way worm from them the secret of their anti-gravity field,\n the government stands ready to issue you a full pardon as well as a\n substantial monetary reward. Your talents, Mr. Ritter, seem, shall we\n say, eminently suited to the task.\"\nHe beamed at me. I looked around. They were all beaming. At me!\n Suddenly I smelled a rat as big as an elephant. That whole Kooleen\n caper: Had it been just a trap to lead me straight to this? I hadn't\n been able to figure how they'd cracked my setup....",
"\"You've no doubt heard tales of the strange population of Jupiter,\"\n he said. \"Every spaceman has, I am sure. Insect-like creatures who\n manifestly migrated there from some other system and who inhabit\n the Red Spot of the planet, floating in some kind of artificial\n anti-gravity field in the gaseous portion of the atmosphere—\"\n\n\n I snorted. \"Aw, hell, judge, that's just one of those screwy fairy\n tales! How could any—\"",
"Then he winked at me. \"But then I got off in a corner and cooked up\n some perfume that drives them nuts the other way; sorta frantic with\n ecstasy, like the book says. Didn't have a chance to try it on Akroida,\n though. She wouldn't give me another audience. It's in the stuff they\n cleaned outa me room: a poiple bottle with a bright green stopper.\"\n\n\n He ruminated a few minutes. \"Tell you what, chump. Make them shell out\n with a green an' poiple spacesuit—them's the real Jupiter colors—an'\n put just a touch o' that there perfume on the outside of it. Akroida'll\n do anything fer you if she just gets a whiff. Just anything! But\n remember, don't use but a drop. It's real powerful.\"\nII",
"Pard was right again. These critters had brains. And my S.S.C.\n persecutor was right, too. That anti-grav secret was worth more than\n any string of rocks in the system, including the Killicut Emeralds.\n\n\n Then I swallowed hard. Attaboy was leading me straight across to a\n window. Closing my helmet, my fingers fumbled badly. My brain was\n fumbling, too. \"Zero hour, chump!\" it told me, and I shuddered. Picking\n up the first hundred pounds of the arsenic, I wobbled over to the\n airlock.\nIII\n\n\n That palace was like nothing on earth. Naturally, you'll say, it's\n on Jupiter. But I mean it was even queerer than that. It was like no\n building on any planet at all. And, in fact, it wasn't on a planet; it\n was floating up there only two hundred miles in from the raw edge of\n space.",
"That famous Red Spot was that big, too. It kept expanding until the\n whole universe was a fierce, raw luminous red. Out beyond it at first\n there had been fringes of snow-white frozen ammonia, but now it was all\n dyed redder than Mars. Then I took the plunge right into it. Surprise!\n The stuff was plants! Plants as big as meadows, bright red, floating\n around in those clouds of frozen ammonia like seaweed! Then I noticed\n that the ammonia around them wasn't frozen any more and peeked at the\n outside thermometer I couldn't believe it. It was above zero. Then I\n forgot about the temperature because it dawned on me that I was lost. I\n couldn't see a thing but drifting ammonia fog and those tangles of red\n floating plants like little islands all around. Cutting down the motor,\n I eased along.",
"I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. \"I'm Casey\n Ritter. What's your label, chum?\"\n\n\n \"Attaboy,\" he ticked coyly.\n\n\n \"Attaboy?\" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain\n nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. \"Who named\n you that?\"\n\n\n He simpered. \"My dear friend, Pard Hoskins.\"\n\n\n I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for\n Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. \"How come you aren't\n mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?\"\n\n\n He hung his silly head. \"I fear I am colorblind,\" he confessed sadly.",
"\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\"",
"At the thought my larynx froze up tight. This was worse than I'd\n thought. Government men trapping me and then beaming at me. And a full\n pardon. And a reward. Oh, no! I told myself, it wasn't possible. Not\n when I already had more counts against me than a cur has fleas. Not\n unless it was a straight suicide mission!\n\n\n I feebly massaged my throat. \"Pictures?\" I whispered. \"Show me 'em.\"\n Crude, but it was all I could squeeze out.\n\n\n I squeezed out more when I saw those pictures, though. Those\n inhabitants were charming, just charming if you like scorpions. Well,\n a cross between a scorpion and a grasshopper, to be accurate. Floating\n among that red stuff, they showed up a kind of sickly purple turning to\n gangrene around the edges.",
"I didn't get it at first. I'd argued with 'em, but inside I'd been all\n set for the sentence, and even sort of reconciled to it. I could even\n hear the words in my mind. But they didn't match what the judge was\n saying. I stood there gaping like a beached fish while I sorted it out.\n Then I croaked, \"Jupiter! What for? Are you running outa space in stir?\n Want to choke me to death in chlorine instead?\" Being civil to the\n court didn't seem important just then. Jupiter was worse than the pen,\n a lot worse. Jupiter was a death sentence.\n\n\n The senior judge rapped sharply with his gavel. He frowned me down and\n then nodded at the judge on his right. This bird, a little old hank of\n dried-up straw, joined his fingertips carefully, cleared his scrawny\n throat, and told me what for.",
"For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,\n while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would\n make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a\n letter to the S.S.C.\n\n\n The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,\n friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter\n that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the\n caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made\n and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to\n shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with\n those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.",
"\"Who from?\" Attaboy cringed lower and blushed a purple all-over blush.\n \"Dear lady, it is from an interspace trader who possesses some truly\n remarkable jewels,\" he confessed coyly.\n\n\n Akroida toyed with the Halcyon Diamond and ignored the bait. \"His\n name?\" she demanded. And when he told her, with a bad stutter in\n his code, she reared up higher on her skinny elbow and glared in my\n direction. \"Casey Ritter? Never heard of him. Where's he from?\"\n\n\n Well, after all, she wasn't blind. He had to confess. \"I—uh—the\n stones were so amazing, Royal Akroida, that I didn't pay much attention\n to the—uh—trader. He does seem to resemble an—ah—earthman.\" He\n ducked his head and fearfully waited.",
"Real powerful, said the man. What an understatement! But the day I was\n set adrift in that sea of frozen ammonia clouds mixed with nice cozy\n methane gas I sure prayed for it to be powerful, and I clutched that\n tiny bottle like that boy Aladdin clutching his little old lamp.\n\n\n I'd had a lot of cooperation getting that far. An Earth patrol had\n slipped down onto the Red Desert of Mars and picked up the Killicut\n Emeralds from where Pard Hoskins had cached them; and safe out in space\n again, we had pored over that string of green headlights practically\n slobbering. But the Big Sneer of the S.S.C., the fellow that had got\n me into this caper, was right there to take the joy out of it all and\n to remind me that this was public service, strictly.",
"\"Jupiter!\" I goggled at him. \"Akroida! Who's she?\"\n\n\n He looked at me as if I hadn't yet got out from under the rock where he\n was sure I'd been born. \"Don't you know nothin', butterhead?\"\n\n\n From him I took it. I even waited patiently till the master spoke\n again. The memory still makes me fry.\n\n\n \"Akroida,\" he explained in his own sweet time, \"is the queen-scorp\n of them idiotic scorpions that lives on Jupiter. I sold her the\n Halcyon Diamond that disappeared from the World Museum five years ago,\n remember?\" He winked broadly. \"It come from Mars in the first place,\n you know. Mars! What a place fer jools! Damn desert's lousy with 'em,\n if it wasn't so much trouble to dig 'em out—\" He went off into a dream\n about the rocks on Mars but I jerked him back."
],
[
"In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was\n put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that\n there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just\n right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air\n as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but\n what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?\n\n\n Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the\n airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on\n my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully\n endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the\n little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.",
"JUPITER'S JOKE\nBy A. L. HALEY\nCasey Ritter, the guy who never turned\n \ndown a dare, breathed a prayer to the gods\n \nof idiots and spacemen, and headed in toward\n \nthe great red spot of terrible Jupiter.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"Meanwhile the hopper-scorp reached the ship. Hastily I squirted some of\n my Scorpion-Come-Hither lure on the chest of my spacesuit, opened the\n lock, and popped out, brave as could be. Face to face with that thing,\n though, I nearly lost my grip on the handle. In fact, I'd have fainted\n dead away right there if Pard Hoskins hadn't been there already and\n lived. If that little shrimp could do it, I could, too.",
"I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my\n nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and\n along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had\n already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out\n alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it\n was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so\n that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.\n\n\n But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group\n of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked\n up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard\n Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.\n So did I.",
"Right there I forgave him for pulling that eye on me. He was the guide\n I needed, the one who had got Pard out alive. I almost hugged him.\n \"Lead off, old pal,\" I sang out, and then had to tap it. \"I'll follow\n in my boat.\"\n\n\n Well, I'd met the first of the brood and was still alive. Not only\n alive but loved and cherished, thanks to Pard's inventiveness and to\n a kindly fate which had sent Pard's old pal my way. A great man, Pard\n Hoskins. How had he made friends with the brute in the first place?\n\n\n Being once more inside my spaceboat, I raised my helmet, which was like\n one of those head-pieces they used to put on suits of armor instead of\n the usual plastic bubble. And it was rigged out with phony antennae and\n mandibles and other embellishments calculated to interest my hosts.\n Whether it interested them or not, it was plenty uncomfortable for me.",
"Pard was right again. These critters had brains. And my S.S.C.\n persecutor was right, too. That anti-grav secret was worth more than\n any string of rocks in the system, including the Killicut Emeralds.\n\n\n Then I swallowed hard. Attaboy was leading me straight across to a\n window. Closing my helmet, my fingers fumbled badly. My brain was\n fumbling, too. \"Zero hour, chump!\" it told me, and I shuddered. Picking\n up the first hundred pounds of the arsenic, I wobbled over to the\n airlock.\nIII\n\n\n That palace was like nothing on earth. Naturally, you'll say, it's\n on Jupiter. But I mean it was even queerer than that. It was like no\n building on any planet at all. And, in fact, it wasn't on a planet; it\n was floating up there only two hundred miles in from the raw edge of\n space.",
"With that we got down to business and fixed a meeting point out on\n Jupiter's farthest moon; then they took me in to the edge of Jupiter's\n ice-cloud and turned me loose in a peanut of a space boat with old Jupe\n looming ahead bigger than all outdoors and the Red Spot dead ahead. I\n patted my pretty enameled suit, which was a study in paris green and\n passionate purple.\n\n\n I patted the three hundred pounds of arsenic crystals for Akroida and\n anyone else I might have to bribe. I anxiously examined my suit's air\n and water containers and the heating unit that would keep them in\n their proper state. I had already gone over the space boat. Yeah, I\n was as nervous as a cat with new kittens. Feeling again for my little\n bottle of horrid stench, I breathed a prayer to the god of idiots and\n spacemen, and headed in. The big ship was long gone, and I felt like a\n mighty small and naked microbe diving into the Pacific Ocean.",
"For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,\n while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would\n make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a\n letter to the S.S.C.\n\n\n The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,\n friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter\n that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the\n caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made\n and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to\n shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with\n those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.",
"I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. \"I'm Casey\n Ritter. What's your label, chum?\"\n\n\n \"Attaboy,\" he ticked coyly.\n\n\n \"Attaboy?\" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain\n nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. \"Who named\n you that?\"\n\n\n He simpered. \"My dear friend, Pard Hoskins.\"\n\n\n I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for\n Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. \"How come you aren't\n mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?\"\n\n\n He hung his silly head. \"I fear I am colorblind,\" he confessed sadly.",
"The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties\n had taken my voice again. \"How big?\" I whispered.\n\n\n He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. \"About the size of a man, I\n believe.\"\n\n\n I raised my shrinking head. \"Take me to jail!\" I said firmly, and\n collapsed onto my chair.\n\n\n A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. \"So this is\n the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!\" he sneered.\n \"Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!\"\n\n\n I shuddered. \"You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw\n the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!\"",
"\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\"",
"Peeking out the porthole I saw that my guide was fidgeting and looking\n over his shoulder at my ship, so I eased in the controls and edge after\n him. To my surprise a vapor shot out of a box that I had taken for a\n natural lump on his back, and he darted away from me. I opened the\n throttle and tore after him among the immense red blobs that were now\n beginning to be patterned with dozens of green-and-purple scorpions,\n all busy filling huge baskets with buds and tendrils, no doubt.\n\n\n Other scorpions oared and floated about in twos and threes in a free\n and peaceable manner that almost made me forget that I was scared to\n death of them, and they stared at my boat with only a mild interest\n that would have taught manners to most of my fellow citizens of Earth.",
"Then he winked at me. \"But then I got off in a corner and cooked up\n some perfume that drives them nuts the other way; sorta frantic with\n ecstasy, like the book says. Didn't have a chance to try it on Akroida,\n though. She wouldn't give me another audience. It's in the stuff they\n cleaned outa me room: a poiple bottle with a bright green stopper.\"\n\n\n He ruminated a few minutes. \"Tell you what, chump. Make them shell out\n with a green an' poiple spacesuit—them's the real Jupiter colors—an'\n put just a touch o' that there perfume on the outside of it. Akroida'll\n do anything fer you if she just gets a whiff. Just anything! But\n remember, don't use but a drop. It's real powerful.\"\nII",
"\"Jupiter!\" I goggled at him. \"Akroida! Who's she?\"\n\n\n He looked at me as if I hadn't yet got out from under the rock where he\n was sure I'd been born. \"Don't you know nothin', butterhead?\"\n\n\n From him I took it. I even waited patiently till the master spoke\n again. The memory still makes me fry.\n\n\n \"Akroida,\" he explained in his own sweet time, \"is the queen-scorp\n of them idiotic scorpions that lives on Jupiter. I sold her the\n Halcyon Diamond that disappeared from the World Museum five years ago,\n remember?\" He winked broadly. \"It come from Mars in the first place,\n you know. Mars! What a place fer jools! Damn desert's lousy with 'em,\n if it wasn't so much trouble to dig 'em out—\" He went off into a dream\n about the rocks on Mars but I jerked him back.",
"A sort of jerking quiver ran through Akroida. She reared up even\n higher. Her mean Roman nose twitched. \"An earthman? Like Pard Hoskins?\"\n\n\n Attaboy shrank smaller and smaller. He could only nod dumbly.\n\n\n The storm broke, all right. That old dame let out a scream like a\n maddened stallion and began to thrash around and flail her couch with\n that dragon's tail of hers.",
"We finally came to the central hall of the palace, and at the sight\n of all that space dropping away, I clutched at his shell and nearly\n dropped the arsenic. But he didn't have any brakes I could grab, so he\n just flew out into mid-air in a room that could have swallowed a city\n block, skyscrapers and all. It was like a mammoth red cavern, and it\n glowed like the inside of a red light.\n\n\n No wonder those scorpions like green and purple. What a relief from all\n that red!\n\n\n A patch in the middle of the hall became a floating platform holding up\n a divan twenty feet square covered with stuff as green as new spring\n grass, and in the center of this reclined Akroida. It had to be. Who\n else could look like that? No one, believe me, boys and girls, no one!",
"\"Brains!\" he snorted. \"Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than\n people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you\n just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone.\n Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's\n fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite\n you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce,\n so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that\n almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!\"\n He sighed regretfully. \"But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda\n persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here\n cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer\n them emeralds.\"",
"Sure, the crystals are deadly, but I was smuggling them legitimately,\n in a manner of speaking, for this doctor to experiment with. He wasn't\n going to sell them for dope. But—and this was the 'but' that was\n likely to deprive the System of my activities—even experimenting with\n them was illegal even if it needed to be done; also, I had promised not\n to rat on him before taking the job.\n\n\n Well, Casey Ritter may be a lot of things we won't mention, but he\n doesn't rat on his clients. So there I was, closeted with the ten\n members of the S.S. Customs Court, getting set to hear the gavel\n fall and the head man intone the sentence that would take me out of\n circulation for a long, long time. And instead, blast me, if they\n didn't foul me with this trip to good old Jupiter.",
"The senior judge rapped ferociously, and I skidded to a halt. Our\n little story teller patiently cleared his skinny throat again.\n \"I assure you it is no fairy tale. We possess well-authenticated\n photographs of these inhabitants, and if you are prepared to visit them\n and in some way worm from them the secret of their anti-gravity field,\n the government stands ready to issue you a full pardon as well as a\n substantial monetary reward. Your talents, Mr. Ritter, seem, shall we\n say, eminently suited to the task.\"\nHe beamed at me. I looked around. They were all beaming. At me!\n Suddenly I smelled a rat as big as an elephant. That whole Kooleen\n caper: Had it been just a trap to lead me straight to this? I hadn't\n been able to figure how they'd cracked my setup....",
"At the thought my larynx froze up tight. This was worse than I'd\n thought. Government men trapping me and then beaming at me. And a full\n pardon. And a reward. Oh, no! I told myself, it wasn't possible. Not\n when I already had more counts against me than a cur has fleas. Not\n unless it was a straight suicide mission!\n\n\n I feebly massaged my throat. \"Pictures?\" I whispered. \"Show me 'em.\"\n Crude, but it was all I could squeeze out.\n\n\n I squeezed out more when I saw those pictures, though. Those\n inhabitants were charming, just charming if you like scorpions. Well,\n a cross between a scorpion and a grasshopper, to be accurate. Floating\n among that red stuff, they showed up a kind of sickly purple turning to\n gangrene around the edges."
],
[
"JUPITER'S JOKE\nBy A. L. HALEY\nCasey Ritter, the guy who never turned\n \ndown a dare, breathed a prayer to the gods\n \nof idiots and spacemen, and headed in toward\n \nthe great red spot of terrible Jupiter.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"With that we got down to business and fixed a meeting point out on\n Jupiter's farthest moon; then they took me in to the edge of Jupiter's\n ice-cloud and turned me loose in a peanut of a space boat with old Jupe\n looming ahead bigger than all outdoors and the Red Spot dead ahead. I\n patted my pretty enameled suit, which was a study in paris green and\n passionate purple.\n\n\n I patted the three hundred pounds of arsenic crystals for Akroida and\n anyone else I might have to bribe. I anxiously examined my suit's air\n and water containers and the heating unit that would keep them in\n their proper state. I had already gone over the space boat. Yeah, I\n was as nervous as a cat with new kittens. Feeling again for my little\n bottle of horrid stench, I breathed a prayer to the god of idiots and\n spacemen, and headed in. The big ship was long gone, and I felt like a\n mighty small and naked microbe diving into the Pacific Ocean.",
"Pard was right again. These critters had brains. And my S.S.C.\n persecutor was right, too. That anti-grav secret was worth more than\n any string of rocks in the system, including the Killicut Emeralds.\n\n\n Then I swallowed hard. Attaboy was leading me straight across to a\n window. Closing my helmet, my fingers fumbled badly. My brain was\n fumbling, too. \"Zero hour, chump!\" it told me, and I shuddered. Picking\n up the first hundred pounds of the arsenic, I wobbled over to the\n airlock.\nIII\n\n\n That palace was like nothing on earth. Naturally, you'll say, it's\n on Jupiter. But I mean it was even queerer than that. It was like no\n building on any planet at all. And, in fact, it wasn't on a planet; it\n was floating up there only two hundred miles in from the raw edge of\n space.",
"I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my\n nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and\n along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had\n already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out\n alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it\n was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so\n that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.\n\n\n But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group\n of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked\n up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard\n Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.\n So did I.",
"\"Jupiter!\" I goggled at him. \"Akroida! Who's she?\"\n\n\n He looked at me as if I hadn't yet got out from under the rock where he\n was sure I'd been born. \"Don't you know nothin', butterhead?\"\n\n\n From him I took it. I even waited patiently till the master spoke\n again. The memory still makes me fry.\n\n\n \"Akroida,\" he explained in his own sweet time, \"is the queen-scorp\n of them idiotic scorpions that lives on Jupiter. I sold her the\n Halcyon Diamond that disappeared from the World Museum five years ago,\n remember?\" He winked broadly. \"It come from Mars in the first place,\n you know. Mars! What a place fer jools! Damn desert's lousy with 'em,\n if it wasn't so much trouble to dig 'em out—\" He went off into a dream\n about the rocks on Mars but I jerked him back.",
"I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. \"I'm Casey\n Ritter. What's your label, chum?\"\n\n\n \"Attaboy,\" he ticked coyly.\n\n\n \"Attaboy?\" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain\n nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. \"Who named\n you that?\"\n\n\n He simpered. \"My dear friend, Pard Hoskins.\"\n\n\n I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for\n Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. \"How come you aren't\n mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?\"\n\n\n He hung his silly head. \"I fear I am colorblind,\" he confessed sadly.",
"For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,\n while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would\n make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a\n letter to the S.S.C.\n\n\n The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,\n friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter\n that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the\n caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made\n and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to\n shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with\n those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.",
"In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was\n put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that\n there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just\n right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air\n as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but\n what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?\n\n\n Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the\n airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on\n my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully\n endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the\n little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.",
"Then he winked at me. \"But then I got off in a corner and cooked up\n some perfume that drives them nuts the other way; sorta frantic with\n ecstasy, like the book says. Didn't have a chance to try it on Akroida,\n though. She wouldn't give me another audience. It's in the stuff they\n cleaned outa me room: a poiple bottle with a bright green stopper.\"\n\n\n He ruminated a few minutes. \"Tell you what, chump. Make them shell out\n with a green an' poiple spacesuit—them's the real Jupiter colors—an'\n put just a touch o' that there perfume on the outside of it. Akroida'll\n do anything fer you if she just gets a whiff. Just anything! But\n remember, don't use but a drop. It's real powerful.\"\nII",
"\"Who from?\" Attaboy cringed lower and blushed a purple all-over blush.\n \"Dear lady, it is from an interspace trader who possesses some truly\n remarkable jewels,\" he confessed coyly.\n\n\n Akroida toyed with the Halcyon Diamond and ignored the bait. \"His\n name?\" she demanded. And when he told her, with a bad stutter in\n his code, she reared up higher on her skinny elbow and glared in my\n direction. \"Casey Ritter? Never heard of him. Where's he from?\"\n\n\n Well, after all, she wasn't blind. He had to confess. \"I—uh—the\n stones were so amazing, Royal Akroida, that I didn't pay much attention\n to the—uh—trader. He does seem to resemble an—ah—earthman.\" He\n ducked his head and fearfully waited.",
"Right there I forgave him for pulling that eye on me. He was the guide\n I needed, the one who had got Pard out alive. I almost hugged him.\n \"Lead off, old pal,\" I sang out, and then had to tap it. \"I'll follow\n in my boat.\"\n\n\n Well, I'd met the first of the brood and was still alive. Not only\n alive but loved and cherished, thanks to Pard's inventiveness and to\n a kindly fate which had sent Pard's old pal my way. A great man, Pard\n Hoskins. How had he made friends with the brute in the first place?\n\n\n Being once more inside my spaceboat, I raised my helmet, which was like\n one of those head-pieces they used to put on suits of armor instead of\n the usual plastic bubble. And it was rigged out with phony antennae and\n mandibles and other embellishments calculated to interest my hosts.\n Whether it interested them or not, it was plenty uncomfortable for me.",
"The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties\n had taken my voice again. \"How big?\" I whispered.\n\n\n He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. \"About the size of a man, I\n believe.\"\n\n\n I raised my shrinking head. \"Take me to jail!\" I said firmly, and\n collapsed onto my chair.\n\n\n A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. \"So this is\n the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!\" he sneered.\n \"Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!\"\n\n\n I shuddered. \"You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw\n the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!\"",
"Sure, the crystals are deadly, but I was smuggling them legitimately,\n in a manner of speaking, for this doctor to experiment with. He wasn't\n going to sell them for dope. But—and this was the 'but' that was\n likely to deprive the System of my activities—even experimenting with\n them was illegal even if it needed to be done; also, I had promised not\n to rat on him before taking the job.\n\n\n Well, Casey Ritter may be a lot of things we won't mention, but he\n doesn't rat on his clients. So there I was, closeted with the ten\n members of the S.S. Customs Court, getting set to hear the gavel\n fall and the head man intone the sentence that would take me out of\n circulation for a long, long time. And instead, blast me, if they\n didn't foul me with this trip to good old Jupiter.",
"\"You've no doubt heard tales of the strange population of Jupiter,\"\n he said. \"Every spaceman has, I am sure. Insect-like creatures who\n manifestly migrated there from some other system and who inhabit\n the Red Spot of the planet, floating in some kind of artificial\n anti-gravity field in the gaseous portion of the atmosphere—\"\n\n\n I snorted. \"Aw, hell, judge, that's just one of those screwy fairy\n tales! How could any—\"",
"\"Brains!\" he snorted. \"Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than\n people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you\n just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone.\n Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's\n fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite\n you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce,\n so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that\n almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!\"\n He sighed regretfully. \"But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda\n persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here\n cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer\n them emeralds.\"",
"Real powerful, said the man. What an understatement! But the day I was\n set adrift in that sea of frozen ammonia clouds mixed with nice cozy\n methane gas I sure prayed for it to be powerful, and I clutched that\n tiny bottle like that boy Aladdin clutching his little old lamp.\n\n\n I'd had a lot of cooperation getting that far. An Earth patrol had\n slipped down onto the Red Desert of Mars and picked up the Killicut\n Emeralds from where Pard Hoskins had cached them; and safe out in space\n again, we had pored over that string of green headlights practically\n slobbering. But the Big Sneer of the S.S.C., the fellow that had got\n me into this caper, was right there to take the joy out of it all and\n to remind me that this was public service, strictly.",
"I was right. I'd met the shrimp before when I was wound up in an\n asteroid real estate racket. Pard Hoskins was his alias, and he had the\n tag of being a real slick operator. We swapped yarns for about a week\n when we met, and then I asked him what's his rap this trip.\n\n\n \"Oh, a pretty good jolt if they can keep hold of me,\" he says. \"I just\n made a pass at the Killicut Emeralds, that's all, and got nabbed.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\" I moaned. \"What were you trying to do, start a feud between\n us and Mars?\"",
"Our little Akroida was a pure and peculiarly violent purple—not a\n green edge anywhere. She was even more purple than my fancy enameled\n space suit, and she was big enough to comfortably fill most of that\n twenty-foot couch. To my shrinking eyes right then she looked as big as\n a ten-ton cannon and twice as mean and dangerous. She was idly nipping\n here and there as though she was just itching to take a hunk out of\n somebody, and the way the servants were edging away out around her, I\n could see they didn't want to get in range. I didn't blame them a bit.\n Under the vicious sag of her Roman nose, her mandibles kept grinding,\n shaking the jewels that were hung all over her repulsive carcass, and\n making the Halcyon Diamond on her chest blaze like a bonfire.\n\n\n Attaboy dumped me onto a floating cushion where I lay clutching and\n shuddering away from her and from the void all around me, and went\n across to her alone with the arsenic.",
"\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\"",
"When I finally wore them down and got to my little cell, I looked\n around it with a feeling of real coziness. I even patted the walls\n chummily and snapped a salute at the guard. It makes me grind my molars\n now to think of it. The way that bunch of stuffed shirts in the S.S.C.\n made a gold-barred chimpanzee out of me has broken my spirit and\n turned me into an honest trader. Me, Casey Ritter, slickest slicker in\n the Solar System, led like a precious infant right where I'd flatly\n refused to go! In plain English, I underestimated the enemy. Feeling\n safe and secure in the grip of the good old Iron College, I relaxed.\n\n\n At this strategic point, the enemy planted a stoolie on me. Not in my\n cell block. They were too smart for that. But we met at recreation, and\n his mug seemed familiar, like a wisp of smoke where no smoke has got a\n right to be; and after awhile I braced him."
],
[
"I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. \"I'm Casey\n Ritter. What's your label, chum?\"\n\n\n \"Attaboy,\" he ticked coyly.\n\n\n \"Attaboy?\" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain\n nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. \"Who named\n you that?\"\n\n\n He simpered. \"My dear friend, Pard Hoskins.\"\n\n\n I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for\n Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. \"How come you aren't\n mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?\"\n\n\n He hung his silly head. \"I fear I am colorblind,\" he confessed sadly.",
"Akroida rose up sort of languidly on an elbow that was all stripped\n bone and sharp as a needle. She pulled an eyeball out about a yard and\n scanned Attaboy and the box. He closed in to the couch all hunched\n over, ducked his head humbly half-a-dozen times, and pushed the box\n over beside her. Akroida eased her eyeball back, opened the box and\n sniffed, and then turned to Attaboy with a full-blown Satanic grin. I\n could hear her question reverberate away over where I was.\n\n\n \"Who from?\" asked Akroida.\n\n\n That conversation was telegraphed to me blow by blow by the actions of\n those hopper-scorps. I didn't need their particular brand of Morse Code\n at all.",
"\"Who from?\" Attaboy cringed lower and blushed a purple all-over blush.\n \"Dear lady, it is from an interspace trader who possesses some truly\n remarkable jewels,\" he confessed coyly.\n\n\n Akroida toyed with the Halcyon Diamond and ignored the bait. \"His\n name?\" she demanded. And when he told her, with a bad stutter in\n his code, she reared up higher on her skinny elbow and glared in my\n direction. \"Casey Ritter? Never heard of him. Where's he from?\"\n\n\n Well, after all, she wasn't blind. He had to confess. \"I—uh—the\n stones were so amazing, Royal Akroida, that I didn't pay much attention\n to the—uh—trader. He does seem to resemble an—ah—earthman.\" He\n ducked his head and fearfully waited.",
"In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was\n put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that\n there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just\n right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air\n as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but\n what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?\n\n\n Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the\n airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on\n my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully\n endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the\n little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.",
"Then he winked at me. \"But then I got off in a corner and cooked up\n some perfume that drives them nuts the other way; sorta frantic with\n ecstasy, like the book says. Didn't have a chance to try it on Akroida,\n though. She wouldn't give me another audience. It's in the stuff they\n cleaned outa me room: a poiple bottle with a bright green stopper.\"\n\n\n He ruminated a few minutes. \"Tell you what, chump. Make them shell out\n with a green an' poiple spacesuit—them's the real Jupiter colors—an'\n put just a touch o' that there perfume on the outside of it. Akroida'll\n do anything fer you if she just gets a whiff. Just anything! But\n remember, don't use but a drop. It's real powerful.\"\nII",
"That night I turned on my hard prison cot until my bones were so much\n jelly, trying to figure that steal. The next morning I got up burning\n with this fever for information, only to find that Pard had got himself\n put in solitary for mugging a guard, and that really put the heat on\n me. I chewed my fingernails down to the quick by the time he got out a\n week later.\nBy that time he really had me hooked. I'd of sworn he was leveling\n with me. But he wouldn't tell me how he'd worked the steal. Instead,\n he opened up on the trade he'd booked for the string. He said, \"When I\n chisel me way outa this squirrel cage, I'm gonna hit fer good old Jupe\n and sell 'em to Akroida. She's nuts about jools. What that old girl\n won't give me fer 'em—\" He whistled appreciatively, thinking about it.",
"A sort of jerking quiver ran through Akroida. She reared up even\n higher. Her mean Roman nose twitched. \"An earthman? Like Pard Hoskins?\"\n\n\n Attaboy shrank smaller and smaller. He could only nod dumbly.\n\n\n The storm broke, all right. That old dame let out a scream like a\n maddened stallion and began to thrash around and flail her couch with\n that dragon's tail of hers.",
"My actions didn't bother him a bit. \"Jewels, did you say?\" he tapped\n out thoughtfully, just like an ordinary business man, and I managed to\n tap out yes. He drifted closer; close enough to get a whiff....\nA shudder of ecstasy stiffened him. His head and eyes rolled with it,\n and he wafted closer still. Right there I began to harbor a premonition\n that there might be such a thing as being too popular in Scorpdom, but\n I thrust this sneak-thief idea back into limbo.\n\n\n Taking advantage of his condition, I boldly tapped out, \"How's about\n taking me on a guided tour through this red spinach patch to Akroida,\n old pal?\" Or words to that effect.\n\n\n He lolled his hideous cranium practically on my shoulder. \"Anything!\n Just anything you desire, my dearest friend.\"",
"Right there I forgave him for pulling that eye on me. He was the guide\n I needed, the one who had got Pard out alive. I almost hugged him.\n \"Lead off, old pal,\" I sang out, and then had to tap it. \"I'll follow\n in my boat.\"\n\n\n Well, I'd met the first of the brood and was still alive. Not only\n alive but loved and cherished, thanks to Pard's inventiveness and to\n a kindly fate which had sent Pard's old pal my way. A great man, Pard\n Hoskins. How had he made friends with the brute in the first place?\n\n\n Being once more inside my spaceboat, I raised my helmet, which was like\n one of those head-pieces they used to put on suits of armor instead of\n the usual plastic bubble. And it was rigged out with phony antennae and\n mandibles and other embellishments calculated to interest my hosts.\n Whether it interested them or not, it was plenty uncomfortable for me.",
"Our little Akroida was a pure and peculiarly violent purple—not a\n green edge anywhere. She was even more purple than my fancy enameled\n space suit, and she was big enough to comfortably fill most of that\n twenty-foot couch. To my shrinking eyes right then she looked as big as\n a ten-ton cannon and twice as mean and dangerous. She was idly nipping\n here and there as though she was just itching to take a hunk out of\n somebody, and the way the servants were edging away out around her, I\n could see they didn't want to get in range. I didn't blame them a bit.\n Under the vicious sag of her Roman nose, her mandibles kept grinding,\n shaking the jewels that were hung all over her repulsive carcass, and\n making the Halcyon Diamond on her chest blaze like a bonfire.\n\n\n Attaboy dumped me onto a floating cushion where I lay clutching and\n shuddering away from her and from the void all around me, and went\n across to her alone with the arsenic.",
"Meanwhile the hopper-scorp reached the ship. Hastily I squirted some of\n my Scorpion-Come-Hither lure on the chest of my spacesuit, opened the\n lock, and popped out, brave as could be. Face to face with that thing,\n though, I nearly lost my grip on the handle. In fact, I'd have fainted\n dead away right there if Pard Hoskins hadn't been there already and\n lived. If that little shrimp could do it, I could, too.",
"For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,\n while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would\n make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a\n letter to the S.S.C.\n\n\n The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,\n friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter\n that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the\n caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made\n and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to\n shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with\n those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.",
"I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my\n nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and\n along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had\n already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out\n alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it\n was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so\n that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.\n\n\n But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group\n of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked\n up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard\n Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.\n So did I.",
"\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\"",
"I braced up and tapped out the greeting Pard had taught me. My\n fiendish-looking opponent tapped right back, inquiring why the hell\n I was back so soon when I knew that Akroida was all set to carve me\n into steaks for just any meal. But the tone was friendly and even\n intimate—or rather, the taps were. There was even a rather warm\n expression discernible in the thing's eyes, so I took heart and decided\n to ignore the ferocious features surrounding those eyes. After all, the\n poor sinner's map was made of shell, and he wasn't responsible for its\n expression.\n\n\n I tapped back very politely that he must be mistaking me for someone\n else. \"I've never been here before, and so I've never met the charming\n lady,\" I informed him. \"However, I have something very special in the\n way of jewels—not with me, naturally—and the rumor is that she might\n be interested.\"",
"Pard was right again. These critters had brains. And my S.S.C.\n persecutor was right, too. That anti-grav secret was worth more than\n any string of rocks in the system, including the Killicut Emeralds.\n\n\n Then I swallowed hard. Attaboy was leading me straight across to a\n window. Closing my helmet, my fingers fumbled badly. My brain was\n fumbling, too. \"Zero hour, chump!\" it told me, and I shuddered. Picking\n up the first hundred pounds of the arsenic, I wobbled over to the\n airlock.\nIII\n\n\n That palace was like nothing on earth. Naturally, you'll say, it's\n on Jupiter. But I mean it was even queerer than that. It was like no\n building on any planet at all. And, in fact, it wasn't on a planet; it\n was floating up there only two hundred miles in from the raw edge of\n space.",
"With that we got down to business and fixed a meeting point out on\n Jupiter's farthest moon; then they took me in to the edge of Jupiter's\n ice-cloud and turned me loose in a peanut of a space boat with old Jupe\n looming ahead bigger than all outdoors and the Red Spot dead ahead. I\n patted my pretty enameled suit, which was a study in paris green and\n passionate purple.\n\n\n I patted the three hundred pounds of arsenic crystals for Akroida and\n anyone else I might have to bribe. I anxiously examined my suit's air\n and water containers and the heating unit that would keep them in\n their proper state. I had already gone over the space boat. Yeah, I\n was as nervous as a cat with new kittens. Feeling again for my little\n bottle of horrid stench, I breathed a prayer to the god of idiots and\n spacemen, and headed in. The big ship was long gone, and I felt like a\n mighty small and naked microbe diving into the Pacific Ocean.",
"Real powerful, said the man. What an understatement! But the day I was\n set adrift in that sea of frozen ammonia clouds mixed with nice cozy\n methane gas I sure prayed for it to be powerful, and I clutched that\n tiny bottle like that boy Aladdin clutching his little old lamp.\n\n\n I'd had a lot of cooperation getting that far. An Earth patrol had\n slipped down onto the Red Desert of Mars and picked up the Killicut\n Emeralds from where Pard Hoskins had cached them; and safe out in space\n again, we had pored over that string of green headlights practically\n slobbering. But the Big Sneer of the S.S.C., the fellow that had got\n me into this caper, was right there to take the joy out of it all and\n to remind me that this was public service, strictly.",
"He shrugged, but his little black-currant eyes began to sparkle with\n real passion, the high voltage kind that only a woman in a million, or\n a million in a bank, can kindle in a guy. \"Buddy,\" he said reverently,\n \"I'd start more than that just to get me mitts on them stones again!\n Why, you ain't never seen jools till you've seen them! Big as hen's\n eggs, an even dozen of 'em; and flawless, I'm a-shoutin', not a flaw!\"\n His eyes watered at the memory, yearning like a hound-dog's over a\n fresh scent.",
"When I finally wore them down and got to my little cell, I looked\n around it with a feeling of real coziness. I even patted the walls\n chummily and snapped a salute at the guard. It makes me grind my molars\n now to think of it. The way that bunch of stuffed shirts in the S.S.C.\n made a gold-barred chimpanzee out of me has broken my spirit and\n turned me into an honest trader. Me, Casey Ritter, slickest slicker in\n the Solar System, led like a precious infant right where I'd flatly\n refused to go! In plain English, I underestimated the enemy. Feeling\n safe and secure in the grip of the good old Iron College, I relaxed.\n\n\n At this strategic point, the enemy planted a stoolie on me. Not in my\n cell block. They were too smart for that. But we met at recreation, and\n his mug seemed familiar, like a wisp of smoke where no smoke has got a\n right to be; and after awhile I braced him."
]
] |
train
|
61242
|
[
"What was the problem with the tubes of calking compound that the crew was trying to use?",
"What was the issue with having Pinov on the communication system?",
"What happened to cause panic during the communicaton between Freedom 19 and the Cape?",
"How long would it take for the needed replacements to be delivered to Freedom 19?",
"Why did Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler return with a fifty-five gallon drum of calking compound rather than the needed cup?",
"What was the problem with having the fifty-five gallon barrell in the dome?",
"What caused the explosion that resulted in the loss of air on Freedom 19?",
"Why was the general said to have been upset by the quake?",
"Why did Major Winship likely refuse to call for help when they could not communicate with Pinov?"
] |
[
[
"They were hardening too fast when connected with air",
"They took too long to harden and dry",
"They were expired and unusable",
"They were too small to fill what they needed"
],
[
"He rarely paid attention well enough to handle the communications. ",
"He didn't speak English",
"He didn't know how to work the system properly.",
"He always selected the wrong communcations channel"
],
[
"They lost connection due to the leak.",
"The speaker became unplugged.",
"There was another underground atomic device fired.",
"The organic air reconditioner was destroyed."
],
[
"three hours",
"90 seconds",
"ten days",
"three weeks"
],
[
"The steel drum offered the extra, needed weight.",
"They could only obtain the 55-gallon drums",
"They needed the full fifty-five gallons for repairs",
"They needed the drum for a chair."
],
[
"It would be impossible to get out once it was inside the dome.",
"It took up too much room in an already crowded area.",
"It had a terribly overpowering smell.",
"It weighed too much to be supported by the dome."
],
[
"The room became too hot from overcrowding",
"The calking mixture leaked onto the air tank.",
"The compound mixture became too hot because of the lack of the air reconditioner",
"The compound mixture was mixed too quickly."
],
[
"Because his people had misfigured so bad.",
"Because his work was being destroyed.",
"Because the communications were left unanswered.",
"Because he was scared of the damage to the dome."
],
[
"He was stubborn.",
"He wanted to handle the situation by protocol. ",
"He wanted to be responsible for saving the day.",
"He was afraid of the consequences."
]
] |
[
1,
2,
2,
3,
2,
2,
2,
1,
1
] |
[
0,
0,
1,
0,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1
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[
[
"Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler returned with the calking compound. It\n occupied the rear section of the land car. Lt. Chandler sat atop it. It\n was a fifty-five gallon drum.\n\n\n The airlock to Freedom 19 was open. \"What is\nthat\n?\" asked Major\n Winship, squinting out into the glaring sunlight.\n\n\n \"That,\" said Capt. Lawler, \"is the calking compound.\"\n\n\n \"You're kidding,\" said Capt. Wilkins.\n\n\n \"I am not kidding.\"\n\n\n Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler came inside. Capt. Wilkins mounted a bunk.\n\n\n \"Why didn't you just borrow a cupful?\" Major Winship said sarcastically.",
"\"No!\" Major Winship snapped.\nWith the drum of calking compound inside, both Capt. Lawler and Lt.\n Chandler retreated to the bunks. Capt. Wilkins maneuvered the mixing\n attachment. \"I feel crowded,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Cozy's the word.\"\n\n\n \"Watch it! Watch it! You almost hit me in the face plate with that!\"\n\n\n \"Sorry.\"\n\n\n At length the mixer was in operation in the drum.\n\n\n \"Works perfectly,\" said Capt. Wilkins proudly.\n\n\n \"Now what, Skip? The instructions aren't in English.\"\n\n\n \"You're supposed to dump the bucket of stuff in. Then clean the area\n thoroughly around the leak.\"\n\n\n \"With what?\" asked Major Winship.\n\n\n \"Sandpaper, I guess.\"",
"\"Let's see. Squeeze the tube until the diaphragm at the nozzle\n ruptures. Extrude paste into seam. Allow to harden one hour before\n service.\"\n\n\n Major Winship said dryly, \"Never mind. I notice it hardens on contact\n with air.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins lay back on the bunk and stared upward. He said, \"Now\n that makes a weird kind of sense, doesn't it?\"\n\n\n \"How do they possibly think—?\"\n\n\n \"Gentlemen! It doesn't make any difference,\" Lt. Chandler said. \"Some\n air must already have leaked into this one. It's hard as a rock. A\n gorilla couldn't extrude it.\"\n\n\n \"How're the other ones?\" asked Major Winship.\n\n\n Lt. Chandler turned and made a quick examination. \"Oh, they're all\n hard, too.\"",
"Major Winship moved quickly to cut out the emergency air supply which\n had cut in automatically with the pressure drop. \"You guys wait. It's\n on your right side, midway up. I'll try to sheet it.\"\n\n\n He moved for the plastic sheeting.\n\n\n \"We've lost about three feet of calk out here,\" Capt. Lawler said. \"I\n can see more ripping loose. You're losing pressure fast at this rate.\"\n\n\n Major Winship pressed the sheeting over the leak. \"How's that?\"\n\n\n \"Not yet.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think I've got enough pressure left to hold it, now. It's\n sprung a little, and I can't get it to conform over the rivet heads.\"\n\n\n There was a splatter of static.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" Major Winship said, \"they should have made these things more\n flexible.\"",
"\"I want a cigarette in the worst way,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"So do I, Larry. Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. Unless\n something else goes wrong.\"\n\n\n \"As long as they'll loan us the calking compound,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"Yeah, yeah,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"Let's eat.\"\n\n\n \"You got any concentrate? I'm empty.\"\n\n\n \"I'll load you,\" Capt. Wilkins volunteered wearily.\n\n\n It was an awkward operation that took several minutes. Capt. Wilkins\n cursed twice during the operation. \"I'd hate to live in this thing for\n any period.\"\n\n\n \"I think these suits are one thing we've got over the Russians,\" Major\n Winship said. \"I don't see how they can manipulate those bulky pieces\n of junk around.\"",
"\"Well,\nfind\nit.\"\n\n\n Lt. Chandler began moving boxes. \"I saw it—\"\n\n\n \"Skip, help look.\"\n\n\n Capt. Lawler got down from the bunk and Major Winship mounted. \"We\n haven't got all day.\"\n\n\n A few minutes later, Lt. Chandler issued the triumphant cry. \"Here it\n is! Dozen tubes. Squeeze tubes. It's the new stuff.\"\n\n\n Major Winship got down and Capt. Wilkins got up.\n\n\n \"Marker showed it over here,\" Major Winship said, inching over to the\n wall. He traced the leak with a metallic finger.\n\n\n \"How does this stuff work?\" Capt. Lawler asked.\n\n\n They huddled over the instruction sheet.",
"\"You've got it stuck between the bunk post.\"\n\n\n \"I\nknow\nthat.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think this is the way to do it,\" Major Winship said. \"Let's\n back the drum out.\"\n\n\n Reluctantly, they backed the drum out and deposited it. With the aid of\n Capt. Lawler, Lt. Chandler got the table unstuck. They passed it over\n to Major Winship, who handed it out to Capt. Wilkins. Captain Wilkins\n carried it around the drum of calking compound and set it down. It\n rested uneasily on the uneven surface.\n\n\n \"Now, let's go,\" said Major Winship.\n\n\n Eventually, they accomplished the moving. They wedged the drum between\n the main air-supply tank and the transmitter. They were all perspiring.\n \"It's not the weight, it's the mass,\" said Capt. Wilkins brightly.",
"\"Well, anyway,\" Lt. Chandler continued, \"he told us just to mix up the\n whole fifty-five gallon drum. There's a little bucket of stuff that\n goes in, and it's measured just right. We can throw away what we don't\n need.\"\n\n\n \"Somehow, that sounds like him,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"He had five or six of them.\"\n\n\n \"Jesus!\" said Capt. Wilkins. \"That must be\nthree thousand pounds\nof\n calking compound. Those people are insane.\"\n\n\n \"The question is,\" Capt. Lawler said, \"'How are we going to mix it?'\n It's supposed to be mixed thoroughly.\"\n\n\n They thought over the problem for a while.\n\n\n \"That will be a man-sized job,\" Major Winship said.",
"\"Just leave us alone, thank you,\" Major Winship said and cut off the\n communication.\n\n\n \"What'd they say?\" Capt. Wilkins asked.\n\n\n \"Larry, General Finogenov said he was very embarrassed by this.\"\n\n\n \"That's nice,\" Lt. Chandler said.\n\n\n \"I'll be damned surprised,\" Major Winship said, \"if they got any\n seismic data out of that shot.... Well, to hell with them, let's get\n this leak fixed. Skip, can you get the calking compound?\"\n\n\n \"Larry, where's the inventory?\"\n\n\n \"Les has got it.\"\n\n\n Lt. Chandler got down from the bunk and Capt. Wilkins mounted.\n\n\n \"Larry,\" Major Winship said, \"why don't you get Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Okay.\"",
"They began to get the static for the first time. It crackled and\n snapped in their speakers. They made sounds of disapproval at each\n other. For a minute or two, static blanked out the communications\n completely. It then abated to something in excess of normal.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Lt. Chandler commented, \"even though we didn't build this thing\n to withstand a moonquake, it seems to have stood up all right.\"\n\n\n \"I guess I was just—\" Major Winship began. \"Oh, hell! We're losing\n pressure. Where's the markers?\"\n\n\n \"By the lug cabinet.\"\n\n\n \"Got 'em,\" Major Winship said a moment later.\n\n\n He peeled back a marker and let it fall. Air currents whisked it away\n and plastered it against a riveted seam of the dome. It pulsed as\n though it were breathing and then it ruptured.",
"\"With sandpaper?\" Major Winship said, emptying the bucket of fluid into\n the drum. \"We don't have any sandpaper.\"\n\n\n \"It's been a long day,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"Mix it thoroughly,\" Lt. Chandler mused. \"I guess that means let it mix\n for about ten minutes or so. Then you apply it. It sets for service in\n just a little bit, Finogenov said. An hour or so, maybe.\"\n\n\n \"I hope this doesn't set on exposure to air.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Capt. Lawler said. \"It sets by some kind of chemical action.\n General Finogenov wasn't sure of the English name for it. Some kind of\n plastic.\"\n\n\n \"Let's come back to how we're going to clean around the leak,\" Major\n Winship said.",
"They were still separated, two on one side of the airlock, two on the\n other.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try to look,\" Capt. Wilkins said. \"Let me go.\" He\n lumbered directly away from the dome for a distance of about fifteen\n feet, then turned and positioned himself, some five feet behind the\n table, on a line of sight with the airlock.\n\n\n \"I can see it,\" he said. \"It's getting redder. It's ... it's ...\n melting, yes. Melting down at the bottom a little. Now it's falling\n over to one side and laying on the air tank. The air tank is getting\n red, too. I'm afraid ... it's weakening it.... Redder. Oh, oh.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" said Capt. Lawler.",
"Capt. Wilkins got down from the bunk and Capt. Lawler ascended.\n\n\n \"Got the inventory sheet, Les?\"\n\n\n \"Right here.\"\n\n\n Squeezed in front of the massive transmitter, Capt. Wilkins had\n energized the circuits. There was a puzzled look on his face. He leaned\n his helmet against the speaker and then shook his head sadly. \"We can't\n hear anything without any air.\"\n\n\n Major Winship looked at the microphone. \"Well, I'll just report and—\"\n He started to pick up the microphone and reconsidered. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \"That's right, isn't it.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins flicked off the transmitter. \"Some days you don't mine at\n all,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Les, have you found it?\"\n\n\n \"It's around here somewhere. Supposed to be back here.\"",
"\"Let's see, Charlie. Maybe not too bad,\" said Capt. Wilkins. \"If I took\n the compressor motor, we could make up a shaft and ... let's see ... if\n we could....\"\nIt took the better part of an hour to rig up the electric mixer.\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins was profusely congratulated.\n\n\n \"Now,\" Major Winship said, \"we can either bring the drum inside or take\n the mixer out there.\"\n\n\n \"We're going to have to bring the drum in,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"Well,\" said Capt. Lawler, \"that will make it nice and cozy.\"\n\n\n It took the four of them to roll the drum inside, rocking it back and\n forth through the airlock. At that time, it was apparent the table was\n interposing itself.\n\n\n Lt. Chandler tried to dismantle the table. \"Damn these suits,\" he said.",
"Major Winship made a strangling motion and reached for his throat. One\n arm tangled a cable and jerked the speaker jack loose. Major Winship\n could no longer hear the alarmed expressions from the Cape. The effort\n was not entirely subvocal, since he emitted a little gasping cry in\n involuntary realism.\n\n\n This, in the course of some 90 seconds, was transmitted to Earth.\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins's lips were desperately forming the word \"Leak?\"\n\n\n Air, Major Winship said silently.\n\n\n Leak?\n\n\n Bottle! Bottle! Bottle! It was a frog-like, unvocal expletive.\nComprehension dawned. Capt. Wilkins nodded and started to turn away.\n Major Winship caught his arm and nodded his head toward the loose jack.\n\n\n Oh.",
"\"Say, I—\" interrupted Capt. Wilkins. There was a trace of concern\n in his voice. \"This is a hell of a time for this to occur to\n me. I just wasn't thinking, before.\nYou don't suppose it's a\n room-temperature-curing epoxy resin, do you?\n\"\n\n\n \"Larry,\" said Major Winship, \"I wouldn't know a room-temperature-curing\n epoxy resin from—\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" exclaimed Capt. Wilkins. \"The mixer's stopped.\" He bent forward\n and touched the drum. He jerked back. \"Ye Gods! that's hot! And it's\n harder than a rock! It\nis\nan epoxy! Let's get out of here.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\"\n\n\n \"Out! Out!\"",
"\"Watch out! There.\nThere!\n\" Capt. Wilkins leaped from his position.\n He was still floating toward the ground when there was an incredibly\n bright flare from inside the dome, and a great, silent tongue of flame\n lashed through the airlock and rolled across the lunar surface. The\n table was sent tumbling. The flame was gone almost instantly.\n\"There went the air,\" Capt. Lawler commented.\n\n\n \"We got T-Trouble,\" said Lt. Chandler.",
"\"Who was supposed to check?\" demanded Capt. Wilkins in exasperation.\n\n\n \"The only way you can check is to extrude it,\" Lt. Chandler said, \"and\n if it does extrude, you've ruined it.\"\n\n\n \"That's that,\" Major Winship said. \"There's nothing for it but to yell\n help.\"\nII\n\n\n Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler took the land car to Base Gagarin. The\n Soviet base was situated some ten miles toward sunset at the bottom of\n a natural fold in the surface. The route was moderately direct to the\n tip of the gently rolling ridge. At that point, the best pathway angled\n left and made an S-shaped descent to the basin. It was a one-way trip\n of approximately thirty exhausting minutes.\n\n\n Major Winship, with his deficient reefer, remained behind. Capt.\n Wilkins stayed for company.",
"\"You told me,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\nAfter a moment, Major Winship said bitterly, \"To hell with the Russian\n engineer.\"\n\n\n \"If you've got all that power....\"\n\n\n \"That's the thing. That's the thing that gripes me, know what I mean?\n It's just insane to send up a heavy wooden desk. That's showing off.\n Like a little kid.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they don't make aluminum desks.\"\n\n\n \"They've—got—aluminum. Half of everything on the whole planet is\n aluminum. You know they're just showing off.\"\n\n\n \"Let me wire you up,\" Capt. Wilkins said. \"We ought to report.\"\n\n\n \"That's going to take awhile.\"\n\n\n \"It's something to do while we wait.\"",
"\"It can wait until later. Send it by mail for all I care. Vacuum has\n destroyed our organic air reconditioner. We have approximately three\n weeks of emergency air. However, Base Gagarin reports no damage, so\n that, in the event we exhaust our air, we will be able to obtain the\n necessary replacement.\"\n\n\n The wait of a little better than three seconds for the response gave\n the conversation a tone of deliberation.\n\n\n A new voice came on. \"We tried to contact you earlier, Major. We will\n be able to deliver replacements in about ten days.\"\n\n\n \"I will forward a coded report on the occurrence,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"Let us hear from you again in ... about three hours. Is the leak\n repaired?\"\n\n\n \"The leak has not yet been repaired. Over and out.\"\n\n\n He nodded to Capt. Wilkins and leaned back."
],
[
"Major Winship attempted unsuccessfully to communicate with Base\n Gagarin. \"Will you please request the general to keep us informed on\n the progress of the countdown?\"\n\n\n \"Is Pinov,\" came the reply. \"Help?\"\n\n\n \"\nNyet\n,\" said Major Winship, exhausting his Russian. \"Count down.\n Progress. When—boom?\"\n\n\n \"Is Pinov,\" came the reply.\n\n\n \"Boom! Boom!\" said Major Winship in exasperation.\n\n\n \"Boom!\" said Pinov happily.\n\n\n \"When?\"\n\n\n \"Boom—boom!\" said Pinov.\n\n\n \"Oh, nuts.\" Major Winship cut out the circuit. \"They've got Pinov on\n emergency watch this morning,\" he explained to the other Americans.\n \"The one that doesn't speak English.\"",
"\"Hey, Les, how's it look?\" Capt. Wilkins asked.\n\n\n \"Okay from this side. Charlie, you still okay?\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Major Winship said. \"We told them this might happen,\" he added\n bitterly.\n\n\n There was a wait during which everyone seemed to be holding their\n breath.\n\n\n \"I guess it's over,\" said Major Winship, getting to his feet. \"Wait a\n bit more, there may be an after-shock.\" He switched once again to the\n emergency channel.\n\n\n \"Is Pinov,\" came the supremely relaxed voice. \"Help?\"\n\n\n Major Winship whinnied in disgust. \"\nNyet!\n\" he snarled. To the other\n Americans: \"Our comrades seem unconcerned.\"\n\n\n \"Tough.\"",
"\"I guess we ought to.\" Major Winship came down from the bunk and\n sat with his back toward the transmitter. Capt. Wilkins slewed the\n equipment around until the emergency jacks were accessible. He\n unearthed the appropriate cable and began unscrewing the exterior\n plate to the small transmitter-receiver set on Major Winship's back.\n Eventually, trailing wires, Major Winship was coupled into the network.\n \"Okay?\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Major Winship gestured.\n\n\n They roused Earth.\n\n\n \"This is Major Charles Winship, Commanding Officer, Freedom 19, the\n American moonbase.\"\n\n\n At this point, Major Winship observed for the first time that he was\n now on emergency air. He started to ask Capt. Wilkins to change his\n air bottle, but then he realized his communications were cut off. He\n reached over and rapped Capt. Wilkins' helmet.\n\n\n \"This is the Cape. Come in, Major Winship.\"",
"A small infinity seemed to pass very slowly.\n\n\n Major Winship shifted restlessly. \"My reefer's gone on the fritz.\"\n Perspiration was trickling down his face.\n\n\n \"Let's all go in,\" said the fourth American, Capt. Lawler. \"It's\n probably over by now.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try again,\" Major Winship said and switched to the emergency\n channel. \"Base Gagarin? Base Gagarin?\"\n\n\n \"Is Pinov. Help?\"\n\n\n \"\nNyet.\n\"\n\n\n \"Pinov's still there,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"Tell him, 'Help',\" said Capt. Wilkins, \"so he'll get somebody we can\n talk to.\"\n\n\n \"I'll see them all in hell, first,\" Major Winship said.",
"\"Just leave us alone, thank you,\" Major Winship said and cut off the\n communication.\n\n\n \"What'd they say?\" Capt. Wilkins asked.\n\n\n \"Larry, General Finogenov said he was very embarrassed by this.\"\n\n\n \"That's nice,\" Lt. Chandler said.\n\n\n \"I'll be damned surprised,\" Major Winship said, \"if they got any\n seismic data out of that shot.... Well, to hell with them, let's get\n this leak fixed. Skip, can you get the calking compound?\"\n\n\n \"Larry, where's the inventory?\"\n\n\n \"Les has got it.\"\n\n\n Lt. Chandler got down from the bunk and Capt. Wilkins mounted.\n\n\n \"Larry,\" Major Winship said, \"why don't you get Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Okay.\"",
"Major Winship made a strangling motion and reached for his throat. One\n arm tangled a cable and jerked the speaker jack loose. Major Winship\n could no longer hear the alarmed expressions from the Cape. The effort\n was not entirely subvocal, since he emitted a little gasping cry in\n involuntary realism.\n\n\n This, in the course of some 90 seconds, was transmitted to Earth.\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins's lips were desperately forming the word \"Leak?\"\n\n\n Air, Major Winship said silently.\n\n\n Leak?\n\n\n Bottle! Bottle! Bottle! It was a frog-like, unvocal expletive.\nComprehension dawned. Capt. Wilkins nodded and started to turn away.\n Major Winship caught his arm and nodded his head toward the loose jack.\n\n\n Oh.",
"Methodically, Capt. Wilkins set about disconnecting the major from the\n transmitter.\n\n\n \"Wow!\" said Major Winship when he was once more in communication. \"For\n a moment there, I thought....\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Capt. Wilkins asked with interest.\n\n\n \"I could see myself asking them to ask the Russians to ask Finogenov\n to get on the emergency channel to ask you to charge the air bottle.\n I never felt so ... idiotic is not quite strong enough ... there for a\n minute in my whole life. I didn't know how much emergency air was left,\n and I thought, my God, I'll never live this down. All the hams in the\n world listening, while I try to explain the situation. I could see the\n nickname being entered in my files: aka. The Airless Idiot. I tell you,\n that was rough.\"\nIII",
"\"He's done it deliberately,\" said Capt. Wilkins, the eldest of the four\n Americans. \"How are we going to know when it's over?\"\n\n\n No one bothered to respond. They sat for a while in silence while the\n shadows evaporated. One by one they clicked on their cooling systems.\n\n\n Ultimately, Lt. Chandler said, \"This is a little ridiculous. I'm going\n to switch over to their channel. Rap if you want me.\" He sat transfixed\n for several minutes. \"Ah, it's all Russian. Jabbering away. I can't\n tell a thing that's going on.\"\n\n\n In the airless void of the moon, the blast itself would be silent. A\n moth's wing of dust would, perhaps, rise and settle beyond the horizon:\n no more.\n\n\n \"Static?\"\n\n\n \"Nope.\"\n\n\n \"We'll get static on these things.\"",
"\"It can wait until later. Send it by mail for all I care. Vacuum has\n destroyed our organic air reconditioner. We have approximately three\n weeks of emergency air. However, Base Gagarin reports no damage, so\n that, in the event we exhaust our air, we will be able to obtain the\n necessary replacement.\"\n\n\n The wait of a little better than three seconds for the response gave\n the conversation a tone of deliberation.\n\n\n A new voice came on. \"We tried to contact you earlier, Major. We will\n be able to deliver replacements in about ten days.\"\n\n\n \"I will forward a coded report on the occurrence,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"Let us hear from you again in ... about three hours. Is the leak\n repaired?\"\n\n\n \"The leak has not yet been repaired. Over and out.\"\n\n\n He nodded to Capt. Wilkins and leaned back.",
"\"You told me,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\nAfter a moment, Major Winship said bitterly, \"To hell with the Russian\n engineer.\"\n\n\n \"If you've got all that power....\"\n\n\n \"That's the thing. That's the thing that gripes me, know what I mean?\n It's just insane to send up a heavy wooden desk. That's showing off.\n Like a little kid.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they don't make aluminum desks.\"\n\n\n \"They've—got—aluminum. Half of everything on the whole planet is\n aluminum. You know they're just showing off.\"\n\n\n \"Let me wire you up,\" Capt. Wilkins said. \"We ought to report.\"\n\n\n \"That's going to take awhile.\"\n\n\n \"It's something to do while we wait.\"",
"They began to get the static for the first time. It crackled and\n snapped in their speakers. They made sounds of disapproval at each\n other. For a minute or two, static blanked out the communications\n completely. It then abated to something in excess of normal.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Lt. Chandler commented, \"even though we didn't build this thing\n to withstand a moonquake, it seems to have stood up all right.\"\n\n\n \"I guess I was just—\" Major Winship began. \"Oh, hell! We're losing\n pressure. Where's the markers?\"\n\n\n \"By the lug cabinet.\"\n\n\n \"Got 'em,\" Major Winship said a moment later.\n\n\n He peeled back a marker and let it fall. Air currents whisked it away\n and plastered it against a riveted seam of the dome. It pulsed as\n though it were breathing and then it ruptured.",
"\"Just a moment.\"\n\n\n \"Is everything all right?\"\n\n\n Major Winship was squirming nervously, obviously perturbed.\n\n\n \"A-Okay,\" he said. \"Just a moment.\"\n\n\n \"What's wrong?\" came the worried question. In the background, he heard\n someone say, \"I think there's something wrong.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins peered intently. Major Winship contorted his face in a\n savage grimace.\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins raised his eyebrows in alarm. They were face to face\n through their helmets, close together. Each face appeared monstrously\n large to the other.",
"Capt. Wilkins got down from the bunk and Capt. Lawler ascended.\n\n\n \"Got the inventory sheet, Les?\"\n\n\n \"Right here.\"\n\n\n Squeezed in front of the massive transmitter, Capt. Wilkins had\n energized the circuits. There was a puzzled look on his face. He leaned\n his helmet against the speaker and then shook his head sadly. \"We can't\n hear anything without any air.\"\n\n\n Major Winship looked at the microphone. \"Well, I'll just report and—\"\n He started to pick up the microphone and reconsidered. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \"That's right, isn't it.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins flicked off the transmitter. \"Some days you don't mine at\n all,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Les, have you found it?\"\n\n\n \"It's around here somewhere. Supposed to be back here.\"",
"\"Who was supposed to check?\" demanded Capt. Wilkins in exasperation.\n\n\n \"The only way you can check is to extrude it,\" Lt. Chandler said, \"and\n if it does extrude, you've ruined it.\"\n\n\n \"That's that,\" Major Winship said. \"There's nothing for it but to yell\n help.\"\nII\n\n\n Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler took the land car to Base Gagarin. The\n Soviet base was situated some ten miles toward sunset at the bottom of\n a natural fold in the surface. The route was moderately direct to the\n tip of the gently rolling ridge. At that point, the best pathway angled\n left and made an S-shaped descent to the basin. It was a one-way trip\n of approximately thirty exhausting minutes.\n\n\n Major Winship, with his deficient reefer, remained behind. Capt.\n Wilkins stayed for company.",
"\"Major Winship! Hello! Hello, hello, hello. You A Okay?\"\n\n\n \"This is Major Winship.\"\n\n\n \"Oh! Excellent, very good. Any damage, Major?\"\n\n\n \"Little leak. You?\"\n\n\n \"Came through without damage.\" General Finogenov paused a moment. When\n no comment was forthcoming, he continued: \"Perhaps we built a bit more\n strongly, Major.\"\n\n\n \"You did this deliberately,\" Major Winship said testily.\n\n\n \"No, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. Major Winship, please believe me. I very\n much regret this. Very much so. I am very distressed. Depressed. After\n repeatedly assuring you there was no danger of a quake—and then to\n have something like this happen. Oh, this is very embarrassing to me.\n Is there anything at all we can do?\"",
"Major Winship moved quickly to cut out the emergency air supply which\n had cut in automatically with the pressure drop. \"You guys wait. It's\n on your right side, midway up. I'll try to sheet it.\"\n\n\n He moved for the plastic sheeting.\n\n\n \"We've lost about three feet of calk out here,\" Capt. Lawler said. \"I\n can see more ripping loose. You're losing pressure fast at this rate.\"\n\n\n Major Winship pressed the sheeting over the leak. \"How's that?\"\n\n\n \"Not yet.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think I've got enough pressure left to hold it, now. It's\n sprung a little, and I can't get it to conform over the rivet heads.\"\n\n\n There was a splatter of static.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" Major Winship said, \"they should have made these things more\n flexible.\"",
"\"It's this way,\" Lt. Chandler said. \"They didn't have anything but\n 55-gallon drums of it.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, my,\" said Capt. Wilkins. \"I suppose it's a steel drum. Those\n things must weigh....\"\n\n\n \"Actually, I think you guys have got the general wrong,\" Capt. Lawler\n said. \"He was out, himself, to greet us. I think he was really quite\n upset by the quake. Probably because his people had misfigured so bad.\"\n\n\n \"He's too damned suspicious,\" Major Winship said. \"You know and I know\n why they set that blast off. I tried to tell him. Hell. He looks at me\n like an emasculated owl and wants to know our ulterior motive in trying\n to prevent a purely scientific experiment, the results of which will be\n published in the technical press for the good of everybody. I'll bet!\"",
"\"Still coming out.\"\n\n\n \"Best I can do.\" Major Winship stepped back. The sheet began slowly\n to slide downward, then it fell away completely and lay limply on the\n floor.\n\n\n \"Come on in,\" he said dryly.\nWith the four of them inside, it was somewhat cramped. Most of the\n five hundred square feet was filled with equipment. Electrical cables\n trailed loosely along the walls and were festooned from the ceiling,\n radiating from the connections to the outside solar cells. The living\n space was more restricted than in a submarine, with the bunks jutting\n out from the walls about six feet from the floor.\n\n\n Lt. Chandler mounted one of the bunks to give them more room. \"Well,\"\n he said wryly, \"it doesn't smell as bad now.\"\n\n\n \"Oops,\" said Major Winship. \"Just a second. They're coming in.\" He\n switched over to the emergency channel. It was General Finogenov.",
"\"Finogenov had a\nclay\nsamovar sent up. Lemon and nutmeg, too. Real,\n by God, fresh lemons for the tea, the last time I was there. His own\n office is about ten by ten. Think of that. One hundred square feet. And\n a wooden desk. A\nwooden\ndesk. And a chair. A wooden chair. Everything\n big and heavy. Everything. Weight, hell. Fifty pounds more or less—\"\n\n\n \"They've got the power-plants for it.\"\n\n\n \"Do you think he did that deliberately?\" Major Winship asked. \"I think\n he's trying to force us off. I think he hoped for the quake. Gagarin's\n built to take it, I'll say that. Looks like it, anyhow. You don't\n suppose they planned this all along? Even if they didn't, they sure got\n the jump on us again, didn't they? I told you what he told me?\"",
"Capt. Wilkins tapped his helmet and gestured for him to swivel around.\n The turn was uncomfortably tight and complicated by the restraining\n cables. Capt. Wilkins began replacement of the air bottle.\n\n\n \"These protests have proved well founded,\" Major Winship continued.\n \"Immediately following the detonation, Freedom 19 was called on to\n withstand a moderately severe shifting of the Lunar surface. No\n personnel were injured and there was no equipment damage.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins tapped his shoulder to indicate the new air bottle was\n being inserted. Another tap indicated it was seated. Major Winship\n flicked the appropriate chest button and nodded in appreciation.\n\n\n \"However,\" he continued, \"we did experience a minor leak in the dome,\n which is presently being repaired.\"\n\n\n \"The Soviet Union,\" came the reply, \"has reported the disturbance and\n has tendered their official apology. You want it?\""
],
[
"\"I guess we ought to.\" Major Winship came down from the bunk and\n sat with his back toward the transmitter. Capt. Wilkins slewed the\n equipment around until the emergency jacks were accessible. He\n unearthed the appropriate cable and began unscrewing the exterior\n plate to the small transmitter-receiver set on Major Winship's back.\n Eventually, trailing wires, Major Winship was coupled into the network.\n \"Okay?\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Major Winship gestured.\n\n\n They roused Earth.\n\n\n \"This is Major Charles Winship, Commanding Officer, Freedom 19, the\n American moonbase.\"\n\n\n At this point, Major Winship observed for the first time that he was\n now on emergency air. He started to ask Capt. Wilkins to change his\n air bottle, but then he realized his communications were cut off. He\n reached over and rapped Capt. Wilkins' helmet.\n\n\n \"This is the Cape. Come in, Major Winship.\"",
"Major Winship made a strangling motion and reached for his throat. One\n arm tangled a cable and jerked the speaker jack loose. Major Winship\n could no longer hear the alarmed expressions from the Cape. The effort\n was not entirely subvocal, since he emitted a little gasping cry in\n involuntary realism.\n\n\n This, in the course of some 90 seconds, was transmitted to Earth.\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins's lips were desperately forming the word \"Leak?\"\n\n\n Air, Major Winship said silently.\n\n\n Leak?\n\n\n Bottle! Bottle! Bottle! It was a frog-like, unvocal expletive.\nComprehension dawned. Capt. Wilkins nodded and started to turn away.\n Major Winship caught his arm and nodded his head toward the loose jack.\n\n\n Oh.",
"Capt. Wilkins nodded and smiled. He reached across and plugged the\n speaker in again.\n\n\n \"... Freedom 19! Hello, Freedom 19! Come in!\"\n\n\n \"We're here,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"All right? Are you all right?\"\n\n\n \"We're all right. A-Okay.\" Major Winship, mindful of the extent of his\n potential audience, took a deep breath. \"Earlier this morning, the\n Soviet Union fired an underground atomic device for the\nostensible\npurpose of investigating the composition of the lunar mass by means of\n seismic analysis of the resultant shock waves. This was done in spite\n of American warnings that such a disturbance might release accumulated\n stresses in the long undisturbed satellite, and was done in the face of\n vigorous American protests.\"",
"Capt. Wilkins tapped his helmet and gestured for him to swivel around.\n The turn was uncomfortably tight and complicated by the restraining\n cables. Capt. Wilkins began replacement of the air bottle.\n\n\n \"These protests have proved well founded,\" Major Winship continued.\n \"Immediately following the detonation, Freedom 19 was called on to\n withstand a moderately severe shifting of the Lunar surface. No\n personnel were injured and there was no equipment damage.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins tapped his shoulder to indicate the new air bottle was\n being inserted. Another tap indicated it was seated. Major Winship\n flicked the appropriate chest button and nodded in appreciation.\n\n\n \"However,\" he continued, \"we did experience a minor leak in the dome,\n which is presently being repaired.\"\n\n\n \"The Soviet Union,\" came the reply, \"has reported the disturbance and\n has tendered their official apology. You want it?\"",
"Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler returned with the calking compound. It\n occupied the rear section of the land car. Lt. Chandler sat atop it. It\n was a fifty-five gallon drum.\n\n\n The airlock to Freedom 19 was open. \"What is\nthat\n?\" asked Major\n Winship, squinting out into the glaring sunlight.\n\n\n \"That,\" said Capt. Lawler, \"is the calking compound.\"\n\n\n \"You're kidding,\" said Capt. Wilkins.\n\n\n \"I am not kidding.\"\n\n\n Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler came inside. Capt. Wilkins mounted a bunk.\n\n\n \"Why didn't you just borrow a cupful?\" Major Winship said sarcastically.",
"\"Just leave us alone, thank you,\" Major Winship said and cut off the\n communication.\n\n\n \"What'd they say?\" Capt. Wilkins asked.\n\n\n \"Larry, General Finogenov said he was very embarrassed by this.\"\n\n\n \"That's nice,\" Lt. Chandler said.\n\n\n \"I'll be damned surprised,\" Major Winship said, \"if they got any\n seismic data out of that shot.... Well, to hell with them, let's get\n this leak fixed. Skip, can you get the calking compound?\"\n\n\n \"Larry, where's the inventory?\"\n\n\n \"Les has got it.\"\n\n\n Lt. Chandler got down from the bunk and Capt. Wilkins mounted.\n\n\n \"Larry,\" Major Winship said, \"why don't you get Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Okay.\"",
"They began to get the static for the first time. It crackled and\n snapped in their speakers. They made sounds of disapproval at each\n other. For a minute or two, static blanked out the communications\n completely. It then abated to something in excess of normal.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Lt. Chandler commented, \"even though we didn't build this thing\n to withstand a moonquake, it seems to have stood up all right.\"\n\n\n \"I guess I was just—\" Major Winship began. \"Oh, hell! We're losing\n pressure. Where's the markers?\"\n\n\n \"By the lug cabinet.\"\n\n\n \"Got 'em,\" Major Winship said a moment later.\n\n\n He peeled back a marker and let it fall. Air currents whisked it away\n and plastered it against a riveted seam of the dome. It pulsed as\n though it were breathing and then it ruptured.",
"Major Winship attempted unsuccessfully to communicate with Base\n Gagarin. \"Will you please request the general to keep us informed on\n the progress of the countdown?\"\n\n\n \"Is Pinov,\" came the reply. \"Help?\"\n\n\n \"\nNyet\n,\" said Major Winship, exhausting his Russian. \"Count down.\n Progress. When—boom?\"\n\n\n \"Is Pinov,\" came the reply.\n\n\n \"Boom! Boom!\" said Major Winship in exasperation.\n\n\n \"Boom!\" said Pinov happily.\n\n\n \"When?\"\n\n\n \"Boom—boom!\" said Pinov.\n\n\n \"Oh, nuts.\" Major Winship cut out the circuit. \"They've got Pinov on\n emergency watch this morning,\" he explained to the other Americans.\n \"The one that doesn't speak English.\"",
"\"He's done it deliberately,\" said Capt. Wilkins, the eldest of the four\n Americans. \"How are we going to know when it's over?\"\n\n\n No one bothered to respond. They sat for a while in silence while the\n shadows evaporated. One by one they clicked on their cooling systems.\n\n\n Ultimately, Lt. Chandler said, \"This is a little ridiculous. I'm going\n to switch over to their channel. Rap if you want me.\" He sat transfixed\n for several minutes. \"Ah, it's all Russian. Jabbering away. I can't\n tell a thing that's going on.\"\n\n\n In the airless void of the moon, the blast itself would be silent. A\n moth's wing of dust would, perhaps, rise and settle beyond the horizon:\n no more.\n\n\n \"Static?\"\n\n\n \"Nope.\"\n\n\n \"We'll get static on these things.\"",
"Methodically, Capt. Wilkins set about disconnecting the major from the\n transmitter.\n\n\n \"Wow!\" said Major Winship when he was once more in communication. \"For\n a moment there, I thought....\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Capt. Wilkins asked with interest.\n\n\n \"I could see myself asking them to ask the Russians to ask Finogenov\n to get on the emergency channel to ask you to charge the air bottle.\n I never felt so ... idiotic is not quite strong enough ... there for a\n minute in my whole life. I didn't know how much emergency air was left,\n and I thought, my God, I'll never live this down. All the hams in the\n world listening, while I try to explain the situation. I could see the\n nickname being entered in my files: aka. The Airless Idiot. I tell you,\n that was rough.\"\nIII",
"They were still separated, two on one side of the airlock, two on the\n other.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try to look,\" Capt. Wilkins said. \"Let me go.\" He\n lumbered directly away from the dome for a distance of about fifteen\n feet, then turned and positioned himself, some five feet behind the\n table, on a line of sight with the airlock.\n\n\n \"I can see it,\" he said. \"It's getting redder. It's ... it's ...\n melting, yes. Melting down at the bottom a little. Now it's falling\n over to one side and laying on the air tank. The air tank is getting\n red, too. I'm afraid ... it's weakening it.... Redder. Oh, oh.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" said Capt. Lawler.",
"Major Winship moved quickly to cut out the emergency air supply which\n had cut in automatically with the pressure drop. \"You guys wait. It's\n on your right side, midway up. I'll try to sheet it.\"\n\n\n He moved for the plastic sheeting.\n\n\n \"We've lost about three feet of calk out here,\" Capt. Lawler said. \"I\n can see more ripping loose. You're losing pressure fast at this rate.\"\n\n\n Major Winship pressed the sheeting over the leak. \"How's that?\"\n\n\n \"Not yet.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think I've got enough pressure left to hold it, now. It's\n sprung a little, and I can't get it to conform over the rivet heads.\"\n\n\n There was a splatter of static.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" Major Winship said, \"they should have made these things more\n flexible.\"",
"Major Winship, Lt. Chandler, and Capt. Lawler, recognizing the sense of\n urgency, simultaneously glanced at the drum. It was glowing cherry red.\n\n\n \"Let's go!\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n He and the Major reached the airlock at the same time and became\n temporarily engaged with each other. Movement was somewhat ungainly\n in the space suits under the best of conditions, and now, with the\n necessity for speed, was doubly so. The other two crashed into them\n from behind, and they spewed forth from the dome in a tangle of arms\n and legs.\n\n\n At the table, they separated, two going to the left, two to the right.\n The table remained untouched.\n\n\n When they halted, Capt. Wilkins said, \"Get to one side, it may go off\n like shrapnel.\" They obeyed.\n\n\n \"What—what—what?\" Capt. Lawler stuttered.",
"A small infinity seemed to pass very slowly.\n\n\n Major Winship shifted restlessly. \"My reefer's gone on the fritz.\"\n Perspiration was trickling down his face.\n\n\n \"Let's all go in,\" said the fourth American, Capt. Lawler. \"It's\n probably over by now.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try again,\" Major Winship said and switched to the emergency\n channel. \"Base Gagarin? Base Gagarin?\"\n\n\n \"Is Pinov. Help?\"\n\n\n \"\nNyet.\n\"\n\n\n \"Pinov's still there,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"Tell him, 'Help',\" said Capt. Wilkins, \"so he'll get somebody we can\n talk to.\"\n\n\n \"I'll see them all in hell, first,\" Major Winship said.",
"\"Just a moment.\"\n\n\n \"Is everything all right?\"\n\n\n Major Winship was squirming nervously, obviously perturbed.\n\n\n \"A-Okay,\" he said. \"Just a moment.\"\n\n\n \"What's wrong?\" came the worried question. In the background, he heard\n someone say, \"I think there's something wrong.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins peered intently. Major Winship contorted his face in a\n savage grimace.\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins raised his eyebrows in alarm. They were face to face\n through their helmets, close together. Each face appeared monstrously\n large to the other.",
"\"Watch out! There.\nThere!\n\" Capt. Wilkins leaped from his position.\n He was still floating toward the ground when there was an incredibly\n bright flare from inside the dome, and a great, silent tongue of flame\n lashed through the airlock and rolled across the lunar surface. The\n table was sent tumbling. The flame was gone almost instantly.\n\"There went the air,\" Capt. Lawler commented.\n\n\n \"We got T-Trouble,\" said Lt. Chandler.",
"\"It can wait until later. Send it by mail for all I care. Vacuum has\n destroyed our organic air reconditioner. We have approximately three\n weeks of emergency air. However, Base Gagarin reports no damage, so\n that, in the event we exhaust our air, we will be able to obtain the\n necessary replacement.\"\n\n\n The wait of a little better than three seconds for the response gave\n the conversation a tone of deliberation.\n\n\n A new voice came on. \"We tried to contact you earlier, Major. We will\n be able to deliver replacements in about ten days.\"\n\n\n \"I will forward a coded report on the occurrence,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"Let us hear from you again in ... about three hours. Is the leak\n repaired?\"\n\n\n \"The leak has not yet been repaired. Over and out.\"\n\n\n He nodded to Capt. Wilkins and leaned back.",
"Capt. Wilkins got down from the bunk and Capt. Lawler ascended.\n\n\n \"Got the inventory sheet, Les?\"\n\n\n \"Right here.\"\n\n\n Squeezed in front of the massive transmitter, Capt. Wilkins had\n energized the circuits. There was a puzzled look on his face. He leaned\n his helmet against the speaker and then shook his head sadly. \"We can't\n hear anything without any air.\"\n\n\n Major Winship looked at the microphone. \"Well, I'll just report and—\"\n He started to pick up the microphone and reconsidered. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \"That's right, isn't it.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins flicked off the transmitter. \"Some days you don't mine at\n all,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Les, have you found it?\"\n\n\n \"It's around here somewhere. Supposed to be back here.\"",
"\"Hey, Les, how's it look?\" Capt. Wilkins asked.\n\n\n \"Okay from this side. Charlie, you still okay?\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Major Winship said. \"We told them this might happen,\" he added\n bitterly.\n\n\n There was a wait during which everyone seemed to be holding their\n breath.\n\n\n \"I guess it's over,\" said Major Winship, getting to his feet. \"Wait a\n bit more, there may be an after-shock.\" He switched once again to the\n emergency channel.\n\n\n \"Is Pinov,\" came the supremely relaxed voice. \"Help?\"\n\n\n Major Winship whinnied in disgust. \"\nNyet!\n\" he snarled. To the other\n Americans: \"Our comrades seem unconcerned.\"\n\n\n \"Tough.\"",
"\"You told me,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\nAfter a moment, Major Winship said bitterly, \"To hell with the Russian\n engineer.\"\n\n\n \"If you've got all that power....\"\n\n\n \"That's the thing. That's the thing that gripes me, know what I mean?\n It's just insane to send up a heavy wooden desk. That's showing off.\n Like a little kid.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they don't make aluminum desks.\"\n\n\n \"They've—got—aluminum. Half of everything on the whole planet is\n aluminum. You know they're just showing off.\"\n\n\n \"Let me wire you up,\" Capt. Wilkins said. \"We ought to report.\"\n\n\n \"That's going to take awhile.\"\n\n\n \"It's something to do while we wait.\""
],
[
"\"It can wait until later. Send it by mail for all I care. Vacuum has\n destroyed our organic air reconditioner. We have approximately three\n weeks of emergency air. However, Base Gagarin reports no damage, so\n that, in the event we exhaust our air, we will be able to obtain the\n necessary replacement.\"\n\n\n The wait of a little better than three seconds for the response gave\n the conversation a tone of deliberation.\n\n\n A new voice came on. \"We tried to contact you earlier, Major. We will\n be able to deliver replacements in about ten days.\"\n\n\n \"I will forward a coded report on the occurrence,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"Let us hear from you again in ... about three hours. Is the leak\n repaired?\"\n\n\n \"The leak has not yet been repaired. Over and out.\"\n\n\n He nodded to Capt. Wilkins and leaned back.",
"Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler returned with the calking compound. It\n occupied the rear section of the land car. Lt. Chandler sat atop it. It\n was a fifty-five gallon drum.\n\n\n The airlock to Freedom 19 was open. \"What is\nthat\n?\" asked Major\n Winship, squinting out into the glaring sunlight.\n\n\n \"That,\" said Capt. Lawler, \"is the calking compound.\"\n\n\n \"You're kidding,\" said Capt. Wilkins.\n\n\n \"I am not kidding.\"\n\n\n Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler came inside. Capt. Wilkins mounted a bunk.\n\n\n \"Why didn't you just borrow a cupful?\" Major Winship said sarcastically.",
"\"I want a cigarette in the worst way,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"So do I, Larry. Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. Unless\n something else goes wrong.\"\n\n\n \"As long as they'll loan us the calking compound,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"Yeah, yeah,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"Let's eat.\"\n\n\n \"You got any concentrate? I'm empty.\"\n\n\n \"I'll load you,\" Capt. Wilkins volunteered wearily.\n\n\n It was an awkward operation that took several minutes. Capt. Wilkins\n cursed twice during the operation. \"I'd hate to live in this thing for\n any period.\"\n\n\n \"I think these suits are one thing we've got over the Russians,\" Major\n Winship said. \"I don't see how they can manipulate those bulky pieces\n of junk around.\"",
"\"I guess we ought to.\" Major Winship came down from the bunk and\n sat with his back toward the transmitter. Capt. Wilkins slewed the\n equipment around until the emergency jacks were accessible. He\n unearthed the appropriate cable and began unscrewing the exterior\n plate to the small transmitter-receiver set on Major Winship's back.\n Eventually, trailing wires, Major Winship was coupled into the network.\n \"Okay?\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Major Winship gestured.\n\n\n They roused Earth.\n\n\n \"This is Major Charles Winship, Commanding Officer, Freedom 19, the\n American moonbase.\"\n\n\n At this point, Major Winship observed for the first time that he was\n now on emergency air. He started to ask Capt. Wilkins to change his\n air bottle, but then he realized his communications were cut off. He\n reached over and rapped Capt. Wilkins' helmet.\n\n\n \"This is the Cape. Come in, Major Winship.\"",
"Capt. Wilkins tapped his helmet and gestured for him to swivel around.\n The turn was uncomfortably tight and complicated by the restraining\n cables. Capt. Wilkins began replacement of the air bottle.\n\n\n \"These protests have proved well founded,\" Major Winship continued.\n \"Immediately following the detonation, Freedom 19 was called on to\n withstand a moderately severe shifting of the Lunar surface. No\n personnel were injured and there was no equipment damage.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins tapped his shoulder to indicate the new air bottle was\n being inserted. Another tap indicated it was seated. Major Winship\n flicked the appropriate chest button and nodded in appreciation.\n\n\n \"However,\" he continued, \"we did experience a minor leak in the dome,\n which is presently being repaired.\"\n\n\n \"The Soviet Union,\" came the reply, \"has reported the disturbance and\n has tendered their official apology. You want it?\"",
"Major Winship moved quickly to cut out the emergency air supply which\n had cut in automatically with the pressure drop. \"You guys wait. It's\n on your right side, midway up. I'll try to sheet it.\"\n\n\n He moved for the plastic sheeting.\n\n\n \"We've lost about three feet of calk out here,\" Capt. Lawler said. \"I\n can see more ripping loose. You're losing pressure fast at this rate.\"\n\n\n Major Winship pressed the sheeting over the leak. \"How's that?\"\n\n\n \"Not yet.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think I've got enough pressure left to hold it, now. It's\n sprung a little, and I can't get it to conform over the rivet heads.\"\n\n\n There was a splatter of static.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" Major Winship said, \"they should have made these things more\n flexible.\"",
"\"Who was supposed to check?\" demanded Capt. Wilkins in exasperation.\n\n\n \"The only way you can check is to extrude it,\" Lt. Chandler said, \"and\n if it does extrude, you've ruined it.\"\n\n\n \"That's that,\" Major Winship said. \"There's nothing for it but to yell\n help.\"\nII\n\n\n Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler took the land car to Base Gagarin. The\n Soviet base was situated some ten miles toward sunset at the bottom of\n a natural fold in the surface. The route was moderately direct to the\n tip of the gently rolling ridge. At that point, the best pathway angled\n left and made an S-shaped descent to the basin. It was a one-way trip\n of approximately thirty exhausting minutes.\n\n\n Major Winship, with his deficient reefer, remained behind. Capt.\n Wilkins stayed for company.",
"A small infinity seemed to pass very slowly.\n\n\n Major Winship shifted restlessly. \"My reefer's gone on the fritz.\"\n Perspiration was trickling down his face.\n\n\n \"Let's all go in,\" said the fourth American, Capt. Lawler. \"It's\n probably over by now.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try again,\" Major Winship said and switched to the emergency\n channel. \"Base Gagarin? Base Gagarin?\"\n\n\n \"Is Pinov. Help?\"\n\n\n \"\nNyet.\n\"\n\n\n \"Pinov's still there,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"Tell him, 'Help',\" said Capt. Wilkins, \"so he'll get somebody we can\n talk to.\"\n\n\n \"I'll see them all in hell, first,\" Major Winship said.",
"\"Still coming out.\"\n\n\n \"Best I can do.\" Major Winship stepped back. The sheet began slowly\n to slide downward, then it fell away completely and lay limply on the\n floor.\n\n\n \"Come on in,\" he said dryly.\nWith the four of them inside, it was somewhat cramped. Most of the\n five hundred square feet was filled with equipment. Electrical cables\n trailed loosely along the walls and were festooned from the ceiling,\n radiating from the connections to the outside solar cells. The living\n space was more restricted than in a submarine, with the bunks jutting\n out from the walls about six feet from the floor.\n\n\n Lt. Chandler mounted one of the bunks to give them more room. \"Well,\"\n he said wryly, \"it doesn't smell as bad now.\"\n\n\n \"Oops,\" said Major Winship. \"Just a second. They're coming in.\" He\n switched over to the emergency channel. It was General Finogenov.",
"Major Winship, Lt. Chandler, and Capt. Lawler, recognizing the sense of\n urgency, simultaneously glanced at the drum. It was glowing cherry red.\n\n\n \"Let's go!\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n He and the Major reached the airlock at the same time and became\n temporarily engaged with each other. Movement was somewhat ungainly\n in the space suits under the best of conditions, and now, with the\n necessity for speed, was doubly so. The other two crashed into them\n from behind, and they spewed forth from the dome in a tangle of arms\n and legs.\n\n\n At the table, they separated, two going to the left, two to the right.\n The table remained untouched.\n\n\n When they halted, Capt. Wilkins said, \"Get to one side, it may go off\n like shrapnel.\" They obeyed.\n\n\n \"What—what—what?\" Capt. Lawler stuttered.",
"Capt. Wilkins got down from the bunk and Capt. Lawler ascended.\n\n\n \"Got the inventory sheet, Les?\"\n\n\n \"Right here.\"\n\n\n Squeezed in front of the massive transmitter, Capt. Wilkins had\n energized the circuits. There was a puzzled look on his face. He leaned\n his helmet against the speaker and then shook his head sadly. \"We can't\n hear anything without any air.\"\n\n\n Major Winship looked at the microphone. \"Well, I'll just report and—\"\n He started to pick up the microphone and reconsidered. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \"That's right, isn't it.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins flicked off the transmitter. \"Some days you don't mine at\n all,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Les, have you found it?\"\n\n\n \"It's around here somewhere. Supposed to be back here.\"",
"\"Just leave us alone, thank you,\" Major Winship said and cut off the\n communication.\n\n\n \"What'd they say?\" Capt. Wilkins asked.\n\n\n \"Larry, General Finogenov said he was very embarrassed by this.\"\n\n\n \"That's nice,\" Lt. Chandler said.\n\n\n \"I'll be damned surprised,\" Major Winship said, \"if they got any\n seismic data out of that shot.... Well, to hell with them, let's get\n this leak fixed. Skip, can you get the calking compound?\"\n\n\n \"Larry, where's the inventory?\"\n\n\n \"Les has got it.\"\n\n\n Lt. Chandler got down from the bunk and Capt. Wilkins mounted.\n\n\n \"Larry,\" Major Winship said, \"why don't you get Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Okay.\"",
"\"Let's see, Charlie. Maybe not too bad,\" said Capt. Wilkins. \"If I took\n the compressor motor, we could make up a shaft and ... let's see ... if\n we could....\"\nIt took the better part of an hour to rig up the electric mixer.\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins was profusely congratulated.\n\n\n \"Now,\" Major Winship said, \"we can either bring the drum inside or take\n the mixer out there.\"\n\n\n \"We're going to have to bring the drum in,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"Well,\" said Capt. Lawler, \"that will make it nice and cozy.\"\n\n\n It took the four of them to roll the drum inside, rocking it back and\n forth through the airlock. At that time, it was apparent the table was\n interposing itself.\n\n\n Lt. Chandler tried to dismantle the table. \"Damn these suits,\" he said.",
"Capt. Wilkins nodded and smiled. He reached across and plugged the\n speaker in again.\n\n\n \"... Freedom 19! Hello, Freedom 19! Come in!\"\n\n\n \"We're here,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"All right? Are you all right?\"\n\n\n \"We're all right. A-Okay.\" Major Winship, mindful of the extent of his\n potential audience, took a deep breath. \"Earlier this morning, the\n Soviet Union fired an underground atomic device for the\nostensible\npurpose of investigating the composition of the lunar mass by means of\n seismic analysis of the resultant shock waves. This was done in spite\n of American warnings that such a disturbance might release accumulated\n stresses in the long undisturbed satellite, and was done in the face of\n vigorous American protests.\"",
"\"You told me,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\nAfter a moment, Major Winship said bitterly, \"To hell with the Russian\n engineer.\"\n\n\n \"If you've got all that power....\"\n\n\n \"That's the thing. That's the thing that gripes me, know what I mean?\n It's just insane to send up a heavy wooden desk. That's showing off.\n Like a little kid.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they don't make aluminum desks.\"\n\n\n \"They've—got—aluminum. Half of everything on the whole planet is\n aluminum. You know they're just showing off.\"\n\n\n \"Let me wire you up,\" Capt. Wilkins said. \"We ought to report.\"\n\n\n \"That's going to take awhile.\"\n\n\n \"It's something to do while we wait.\"",
"\"You've got it stuck between the bunk post.\"\n\n\n \"I\nknow\nthat.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think this is the way to do it,\" Major Winship said. \"Let's\n back the drum out.\"\n\n\n Reluctantly, they backed the drum out and deposited it. With the aid of\n Capt. Lawler, Lt. Chandler got the table unstuck. They passed it over\n to Major Winship, who handed it out to Capt. Wilkins. Captain Wilkins\n carried it around the drum of calking compound and set it down. It\n rested uneasily on the uneven surface.\n\n\n \"Now, let's go,\" said Major Winship.\n\n\n Eventually, they accomplished the moving. They wedged the drum between\n the main air-supply tank and the transmitter. They were all perspiring.\n \"It's not the weight, it's the mass,\" said Capt. Wilkins brightly.",
"\"He's done it deliberately,\" said Capt. Wilkins, the eldest of the four\n Americans. \"How are we going to know when it's over?\"\n\n\n No one bothered to respond. They sat for a while in silence while the\n shadows evaporated. One by one they clicked on their cooling systems.\n\n\n Ultimately, Lt. Chandler said, \"This is a little ridiculous. I'm going\n to switch over to their channel. Rap if you want me.\" He sat transfixed\n for several minutes. \"Ah, it's all Russian. Jabbering away. I can't\n tell a thing that's going on.\"\n\n\n In the airless void of the moon, the blast itself would be silent. A\n moth's wing of dust would, perhaps, rise and settle beyond the horizon:\n no more.\n\n\n \"Static?\"\n\n\n \"Nope.\"\n\n\n \"We'll get static on these things.\"",
"Major Winship made a strangling motion and reached for his throat. One\n arm tangled a cable and jerked the speaker jack loose. Major Winship\n could no longer hear the alarmed expressions from the Cape. The effort\n was not entirely subvocal, since he emitted a little gasping cry in\n involuntary realism.\n\n\n This, in the course of some 90 seconds, was transmitted to Earth.\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins's lips were desperately forming the word \"Leak?\"\n\n\n Air, Major Winship said silently.\n\n\n Leak?\n\n\n Bottle! Bottle! Bottle! It was a frog-like, unvocal expletive.\nComprehension dawned. Capt. Wilkins nodded and started to turn away.\n Major Winship caught his arm and nodded his head toward the loose jack.\n\n\n Oh.",
"They were still separated, two on one side of the airlock, two on the\n other.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try to look,\" Capt. Wilkins said. \"Let me go.\" He\n lumbered directly away from the dome for a distance of about fifteen\n feet, then turned and positioned himself, some five feet behind the\n table, on a line of sight with the airlock.\n\n\n \"I can see it,\" he said. \"It's getting redder. It's ... it's ...\n melting, yes. Melting down at the bottom a little. Now it's falling\n over to one side and laying on the air tank. The air tank is getting\n red, too. I'm afraid ... it's weakening it.... Redder. Oh, oh.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" said Capt. Lawler.",
"\"No!\" Major Winship snapped.\nWith the drum of calking compound inside, both Capt. Lawler and Lt.\n Chandler retreated to the bunks. Capt. Wilkins maneuvered the mixing\n attachment. \"I feel crowded,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Cozy's the word.\"\n\n\n \"Watch it! Watch it! You almost hit me in the face plate with that!\"\n\n\n \"Sorry.\"\n\n\n At length the mixer was in operation in the drum.\n\n\n \"Works perfectly,\" said Capt. Wilkins proudly.\n\n\n \"Now what, Skip? The instructions aren't in English.\"\n\n\n \"You're supposed to dump the bucket of stuff in. Then clean the area\n thoroughly around the leak.\"\n\n\n \"With what?\" asked Major Winship.\n\n\n \"Sandpaper, I guess.\""
],
[
"Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler returned with the calking compound. It\n occupied the rear section of the land car. Lt. Chandler sat atop it. It\n was a fifty-five gallon drum.\n\n\n The airlock to Freedom 19 was open. \"What is\nthat\n?\" asked Major\n Winship, squinting out into the glaring sunlight.\n\n\n \"That,\" said Capt. Lawler, \"is the calking compound.\"\n\n\n \"You're kidding,\" said Capt. Wilkins.\n\n\n \"I am not kidding.\"\n\n\n Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler came inside. Capt. Wilkins mounted a bunk.\n\n\n \"Why didn't you just borrow a cupful?\" Major Winship said sarcastically.",
"\"Well, anyway,\" Lt. Chandler continued, \"he told us just to mix up the\n whole fifty-five gallon drum. There's a little bucket of stuff that\n goes in, and it's measured just right. We can throw away what we don't\n need.\"\n\n\n \"Somehow, that sounds like him,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"He had five or six of them.\"\n\n\n \"Jesus!\" said Capt. Wilkins. \"That must be\nthree thousand pounds\nof\n calking compound. Those people are insane.\"\n\n\n \"The question is,\" Capt. Lawler said, \"'How are we going to mix it?'\n It's supposed to be mixed thoroughly.\"\n\n\n They thought over the problem for a while.\n\n\n \"That will be a man-sized job,\" Major Winship said.",
"\"No!\" Major Winship snapped.\nWith the drum of calking compound inside, both Capt. Lawler and Lt.\n Chandler retreated to the bunks. Capt. Wilkins maneuvered the mixing\n attachment. \"I feel crowded,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Cozy's the word.\"\n\n\n \"Watch it! Watch it! You almost hit me in the face plate with that!\"\n\n\n \"Sorry.\"\n\n\n At length the mixer was in operation in the drum.\n\n\n \"Works perfectly,\" said Capt. Wilkins proudly.\n\n\n \"Now what, Skip? The instructions aren't in English.\"\n\n\n \"You're supposed to dump the bucket of stuff in. Then clean the area\n thoroughly around the leak.\"\n\n\n \"With what?\" asked Major Winship.\n\n\n \"Sandpaper, I guess.\"",
"\"It's this way,\" Lt. Chandler said. \"They didn't have anything but\n 55-gallon drums of it.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, my,\" said Capt. Wilkins. \"I suppose it's a steel drum. Those\n things must weigh....\"\n\n\n \"Actually, I think you guys have got the general wrong,\" Capt. Lawler\n said. \"He was out, himself, to greet us. I think he was really quite\n upset by the quake. Probably because his people had misfigured so bad.\"\n\n\n \"He's too damned suspicious,\" Major Winship said. \"You know and I know\n why they set that blast off. I tried to tell him. Hell. He looks at me\n like an emasculated owl and wants to know our ulterior motive in trying\n to prevent a purely scientific experiment, the results of which will be\n published in the technical press for the good of everybody. I'll bet!\"",
"\"About this drum,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"Well, like I said, it's this way,\" Lt. Chandler resumed. \"I told him\n we needed about a pint. Maybe a quart. But this stuff you have to mix\n up. He only had these drums. There's two parts to it, and you have to\n combine them in just the right proportion. He told me to take a little\n scale—\"\n\n\n \"A little scale?\" asked Capt. Wilkins, rolling his eyes at the dome.\n\n\n \"That's what I told him. We don't have any little scale.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Captain Lawler, \"and he looked at us with that mute,\n surprised look, like everybody, everywhere has dozens of little\n scales.\"",
"\"You've got it stuck between the bunk post.\"\n\n\n \"I\nknow\nthat.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think this is the way to do it,\" Major Winship said. \"Let's\n back the drum out.\"\n\n\n Reluctantly, they backed the drum out and deposited it. With the aid of\n Capt. Lawler, Lt. Chandler got the table unstuck. They passed it over\n to Major Winship, who handed it out to Capt. Wilkins. Captain Wilkins\n carried it around the drum of calking compound and set it down. It\n rested uneasily on the uneven surface.\n\n\n \"Now, let's go,\" said Major Winship.\n\n\n Eventually, they accomplished the moving. They wedged the drum between\n the main air-supply tank and the transmitter. They were all perspiring.\n \"It's not the weight, it's the mass,\" said Capt. Wilkins brightly.",
"\"Just leave us alone, thank you,\" Major Winship said and cut off the\n communication.\n\n\n \"What'd they say?\" Capt. Wilkins asked.\n\n\n \"Larry, General Finogenov said he was very embarrassed by this.\"\n\n\n \"That's nice,\" Lt. Chandler said.\n\n\n \"I'll be damned surprised,\" Major Winship said, \"if they got any\n seismic data out of that shot.... Well, to hell with them, let's get\n this leak fixed. Skip, can you get the calking compound?\"\n\n\n \"Larry, where's the inventory?\"\n\n\n \"Les has got it.\"\n\n\n Lt. Chandler got down from the bunk and Capt. Wilkins mounted.\n\n\n \"Larry,\" Major Winship said, \"why don't you get Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Okay.\"",
"\"Let's see, Charlie. Maybe not too bad,\" said Capt. Wilkins. \"If I took\n the compressor motor, we could make up a shaft and ... let's see ... if\n we could....\"\nIt took the better part of an hour to rig up the electric mixer.\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins was profusely congratulated.\n\n\n \"Now,\" Major Winship said, \"we can either bring the drum inside or take\n the mixer out there.\"\n\n\n \"We're going to have to bring the drum in,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"Well,\" said Capt. Lawler, \"that will make it nice and cozy.\"\n\n\n It took the four of them to roll the drum inside, rocking it back and\n forth through the airlock. At that time, it was apparent the table was\n interposing itself.\n\n\n Lt. Chandler tried to dismantle the table. \"Damn these suits,\" he said.",
"\"With sandpaper?\" Major Winship said, emptying the bucket of fluid into\n the drum. \"We don't have any sandpaper.\"\n\n\n \"It's been a long day,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"Mix it thoroughly,\" Lt. Chandler mused. \"I guess that means let it mix\n for about ten minutes or so. Then you apply it. It sets for service in\n just a little bit, Finogenov said. An hour or so, maybe.\"\n\n\n \"I hope this doesn't set on exposure to air.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Capt. Lawler said. \"It sets by some kind of chemical action.\n General Finogenov wasn't sure of the English name for it. Some kind of\n plastic.\"\n\n\n \"Let's come back to how we're going to clean around the leak,\" Major\n Winship said.",
"Five minutes later, the perspiration was rivers across his face. \"This\n is it,\" he said. \"I'm going in.\"\n\n\n \"Let's all—\"\n\n\n \"No. I've got to cool off.\"\n\n\n \"Hell, Charlie, I feel stupid sitting out here,\" Capt. Lawler said.\n \"The shot probably went off an hour ago.\"\n\n\n \"The static level hasn't gone up much, if at all.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" Lt. Chandler said, \"it's buried too deep.\"",
"\"I want a cigarette in the worst way,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"So do I, Larry. Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. Unless\n something else goes wrong.\"\n\n\n \"As long as they'll loan us the calking compound,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"Yeah, yeah,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"Let's eat.\"\n\n\n \"You got any concentrate? I'm empty.\"\n\n\n \"I'll load you,\" Capt. Wilkins volunteered wearily.\n\n\n It was an awkward operation that took several minutes. Capt. Wilkins\n cursed twice during the operation. \"I'd hate to live in this thing for\n any period.\"\n\n\n \"I think these suits are one thing we've got over the Russians,\" Major\n Winship said. \"I don't see how they can manipulate those bulky pieces\n of junk around.\"",
"\"Well,\nfind\nit.\"\n\n\n Lt. Chandler began moving boxes. \"I saw it—\"\n\n\n \"Skip, help look.\"\n\n\n Capt. Lawler got down from the bunk and Major Winship mounted. \"We\n haven't got all day.\"\n\n\n A few minutes later, Lt. Chandler issued the triumphant cry. \"Here it\n is! Dozen tubes. Squeeze tubes. It's the new stuff.\"\n\n\n Major Winship got down and Capt. Wilkins got up.\n\n\n \"Marker showed it over here,\" Major Winship said, inching over to the\n wall. He traced the leak with a metallic finger.\n\n\n \"How does this stuff work?\" Capt. Lawler asked.\n\n\n They huddled over the instruction sheet.",
"Major Winship, Lt. Chandler, and Capt. Lawler, recognizing the sense of\n urgency, simultaneously glanced at the drum. It was glowing cherry red.\n\n\n \"Let's go!\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n He and the Major reached the airlock at the same time and became\n temporarily engaged with each other. Movement was somewhat ungainly\n in the space suits under the best of conditions, and now, with the\n necessity for speed, was doubly so. The other two crashed into them\n from behind, and they spewed forth from the dome in a tangle of arms\n and legs.\n\n\n At the table, they separated, two going to the left, two to the right.\n The table remained untouched.\n\n\n When they halted, Capt. Wilkins said, \"Get to one side, it may go off\n like shrapnel.\" They obeyed.\n\n\n \"What—what—what?\" Capt. Lawler stuttered.",
"\"Who was supposed to check?\" demanded Capt. Wilkins in exasperation.\n\n\n \"The only way you can check is to extrude it,\" Lt. Chandler said, \"and\n if it does extrude, you've ruined it.\"\n\n\n \"That's that,\" Major Winship said. \"There's nothing for it but to yell\n help.\"\nII\n\n\n Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler took the land car to Base Gagarin. The\n Soviet base was situated some ten miles toward sunset at the bottom of\n a natural fold in the surface. The route was moderately direct to the\n tip of the gently rolling ridge. At that point, the best pathway angled\n left and made an S-shaped descent to the basin. It was a one-way trip\n of approximately thirty exhausting minutes.\n\n\n Major Winship, with his deficient reefer, remained behind. Capt.\n Wilkins stayed for company.",
"Major Winship moved quickly to cut out the emergency air supply which\n had cut in automatically with the pressure drop. \"You guys wait. It's\n on your right side, midway up. I'll try to sheet it.\"\n\n\n He moved for the plastic sheeting.\n\n\n \"We've lost about three feet of calk out here,\" Capt. Lawler said. \"I\n can see more ripping loose. You're losing pressure fast at this rate.\"\n\n\n Major Winship pressed the sheeting over the leak. \"How's that?\"\n\n\n \"Not yet.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think I've got enough pressure left to hold it, now. It's\n sprung a little, and I can't get it to conform over the rivet heads.\"\n\n\n There was a splatter of static.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" Major Winship said, \"they should have made these things more\n flexible.\"",
"Capt. Wilkins got down from the bunk and Capt. Lawler ascended.\n\n\n \"Got the inventory sheet, Les?\"\n\n\n \"Right here.\"\n\n\n Squeezed in front of the massive transmitter, Capt. Wilkins had\n energized the circuits. There was a puzzled look on his face. He leaned\n his helmet against the speaker and then shook his head sadly. \"We can't\n hear anything without any air.\"\n\n\n Major Winship looked at the microphone. \"Well, I'll just report and—\"\n He started to pick up the microphone and reconsidered. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \"That's right, isn't it.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins flicked off the transmitter. \"Some days you don't mine at\n all,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Les, have you found it?\"\n\n\n \"It's around here somewhere. Supposed to be back here.\"",
"\"The hell it isn't the weight,\" said Lt. Chandler. \"That's heavy.\"\n\n\n \"With my reefer out,\" said Major Winship, \"I'm the one it's rough on.\"\n He shook perspiration out of his eyes. \"They should figure a way to get\n a mop in here, or a towel, or a sponge, or something. I'll bet you've\n forgotten how much sweat stings in the eyes.\"\n\n\n \"It's the salt.\"\n\n\n \"Speaking of salt. I wish I had some salt tablets,\" Major Winship said.\n \"I've never sweat so much since basic.\"\n\n\n \"Want to bet Finogenov hasn't got a bushel of them?\"",
"They were still separated, two on one side of the airlock, two on the\n other.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try to look,\" Capt. Wilkins said. \"Let me go.\" He\n lumbered directly away from the dome for a distance of about fifteen\n feet, then turned and positioned himself, some five feet behind the\n table, on a line of sight with the airlock.\n\n\n \"I can see it,\" he said. \"It's getting redder. It's ... it's ...\n melting, yes. Melting down at the bottom a little. Now it's falling\n over to one side and laying on the air tank. The air tank is getting\n red, too. I'm afraid ... it's weakening it.... Redder. Oh, oh.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" said Capt. Lawler.",
"\"Say, I—\" interrupted Capt. Wilkins. There was a trace of concern\n in his voice. \"This is a hell of a time for this to occur to\n me. I just wasn't thinking, before.\nYou don't suppose it's a\n room-temperature-curing epoxy resin, do you?\n\"\n\n\n \"Larry,\" said Major Winship, \"I wouldn't know a room-temperature-curing\n epoxy resin from—\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" exclaimed Capt. Wilkins. \"The mixer's stopped.\" He bent forward\n and touched the drum. He jerked back. \"Ye Gods! that's hot! And it's\n harder than a rock! It\nis\nan epoxy! Let's get out of here.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\"\n\n\n \"Out! Out!\"",
"\"You told me,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\nAfter a moment, Major Winship said bitterly, \"To hell with the Russian\n engineer.\"\n\n\n \"If you've got all that power....\"\n\n\n \"That's the thing. That's the thing that gripes me, know what I mean?\n It's just insane to send up a heavy wooden desk. That's showing off.\n Like a little kid.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they don't make aluminum desks.\"\n\n\n \"They've—got—aluminum. Half of everything on the whole planet is\n aluminum. You know they're just showing off.\"\n\n\n \"Let me wire you up,\" Capt. Wilkins said. \"We ought to report.\"\n\n\n \"That's going to take awhile.\"\n\n\n \"It's something to do while we wait.\""
],
[
"Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler returned with the calking compound. It\n occupied the rear section of the land car. Lt. Chandler sat atop it. It\n was a fifty-five gallon drum.\n\n\n The airlock to Freedom 19 was open. \"What is\nthat\n?\" asked Major\n Winship, squinting out into the glaring sunlight.\n\n\n \"That,\" said Capt. Lawler, \"is the calking compound.\"\n\n\n \"You're kidding,\" said Capt. Wilkins.\n\n\n \"I am not kidding.\"\n\n\n Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler came inside. Capt. Wilkins mounted a bunk.\n\n\n \"Why didn't you just borrow a cupful?\" Major Winship said sarcastically.",
"\"Well, anyway,\" Lt. Chandler continued, \"he told us just to mix up the\n whole fifty-five gallon drum. There's a little bucket of stuff that\n goes in, and it's measured just right. We can throw away what we don't\n need.\"\n\n\n \"Somehow, that sounds like him,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"He had five or six of them.\"\n\n\n \"Jesus!\" said Capt. Wilkins. \"That must be\nthree thousand pounds\nof\n calking compound. Those people are insane.\"\n\n\n \"The question is,\" Capt. Lawler said, \"'How are we going to mix it?'\n It's supposed to be mixed thoroughly.\"\n\n\n They thought over the problem for a while.\n\n\n \"That will be a man-sized job,\" Major Winship said.",
"\"It's this way,\" Lt. Chandler said. \"They didn't have anything but\n 55-gallon drums of it.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, my,\" said Capt. Wilkins. \"I suppose it's a steel drum. Those\n things must weigh....\"\n\n\n \"Actually, I think you guys have got the general wrong,\" Capt. Lawler\n said. \"He was out, himself, to greet us. I think he was really quite\n upset by the quake. Probably because his people had misfigured so bad.\"\n\n\n \"He's too damned suspicious,\" Major Winship said. \"You know and I know\n why they set that blast off. I tried to tell him. Hell. He looks at me\n like an emasculated owl and wants to know our ulterior motive in trying\n to prevent a purely scientific experiment, the results of which will be\n published in the technical press for the good of everybody. I'll bet!\"",
"\"Let's see, Charlie. Maybe not too bad,\" said Capt. Wilkins. \"If I took\n the compressor motor, we could make up a shaft and ... let's see ... if\n we could....\"\nIt took the better part of an hour to rig up the electric mixer.\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins was profusely congratulated.\n\n\n \"Now,\" Major Winship said, \"we can either bring the drum inside or take\n the mixer out there.\"\n\n\n \"We're going to have to bring the drum in,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"Well,\" said Capt. Lawler, \"that will make it nice and cozy.\"\n\n\n It took the four of them to roll the drum inside, rocking it back and\n forth through the airlock. At that time, it was apparent the table was\n interposing itself.\n\n\n Lt. Chandler tried to dismantle the table. \"Damn these suits,\" he said.",
"They were still separated, two on one side of the airlock, two on the\n other.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try to look,\" Capt. Wilkins said. \"Let me go.\" He\n lumbered directly away from the dome for a distance of about fifteen\n feet, then turned and positioned himself, some five feet behind the\n table, on a line of sight with the airlock.\n\n\n \"I can see it,\" he said. \"It's getting redder. It's ... it's ...\n melting, yes. Melting down at the bottom a little. Now it's falling\n over to one side and laying on the air tank. The air tank is getting\n red, too. I'm afraid ... it's weakening it.... Redder. Oh, oh.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" said Capt. Lawler.",
"\"About this drum,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"Well, like I said, it's this way,\" Lt. Chandler resumed. \"I told him\n we needed about a pint. Maybe a quart. But this stuff you have to mix\n up. He only had these drums. There's two parts to it, and you have to\n combine them in just the right proportion. He told me to take a little\n scale—\"\n\n\n \"A little scale?\" asked Capt. Wilkins, rolling his eyes at the dome.\n\n\n \"That's what I told him. We don't have any little scale.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Captain Lawler, \"and he looked at us with that mute,\n surprised look, like everybody, everywhere has dozens of little\n scales.\"",
"\"Maybe so,\" Major Winship said. \"But we can't have the dome fall down\n around all our ears.\" He stood. \"Whew! You guys stay put.\"\nHe crossed with the floating moon-motion to the airlock and entered,\n closing the door behind him. The darkness slowly filled with air, and\n the temperature inside the suit declined steadily. At the proper moment\n of pressure, the inner lock slid open and Major Winship stepped into\n the illuminated central area. His foot was lifted for the second step\n when the floor beneath him rose and fell gently, pitching him forward,\n off balance. He stumbled against the table and ended up seated beside\n the radio equipment. The ground moved again.\n\n\n \"Charlie! Charlie!\"\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Major Winship answered. \"Okay! Okay!\"\n\n\n \"It's—\"\n\n\n There was additional surface movement. The movement ceased.",
"They ate.\n\n\n \"Really horrible stuff.\"\n\n\n \"Nutritious.\"\n\n\n After the meal, Major Winship said reflectively, \"Now I'd like a cup of\n hot tea. I'm cooled off.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins raised eyebrows. \"What brought this on?\"\n\n\n \"I was just thinking.... They really got it made, Larry. They've got\n better than three thousand square feet in the main dome and better than\n twelve hundred square feet in each of the two little ones. And there's\n only seven of them right now. That's living.\"\n\n\n \"They've been here six years longer, after all.\"",
"\"You've got it stuck between the bunk post.\"\n\n\n \"I\nknow\nthat.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think this is the way to do it,\" Major Winship said. \"Let's\n back the drum out.\"\n\n\n Reluctantly, they backed the drum out and deposited it. With the aid of\n Capt. Lawler, Lt. Chandler got the table unstuck. They passed it over\n to Major Winship, who handed it out to Capt. Wilkins. Captain Wilkins\n carried it around the drum of calking compound and set it down. It\n rested uneasily on the uneven surface.\n\n\n \"Now, let's go,\" said Major Winship.\n\n\n Eventually, they accomplished the moving. They wedged the drum between\n the main air-supply tank and the transmitter. They were all perspiring.\n \"It's not the weight, it's the mass,\" said Capt. Wilkins brightly.",
"\"Watch out! There.\nThere!\n\" Capt. Wilkins leaped from his position.\n He was still floating toward the ground when there was an incredibly\n bright flare from inside the dome, and a great, silent tongue of flame\n lashed through the airlock and rolled across the lunar surface. The\n table was sent tumbling. The flame was gone almost instantly.\n\"There went the air,\" Capt. Lawler commented.\n\n\n \"We got T-Trouble,\" said Lt. Chandler.",
"Major Winship, Lt. Chandler, and Capt. Lawler, recognizing the sense of\n urgency, simultaneously glanced at the drum. It was glowing cherry red.\n\n\n \"Let's go!\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n He and the Major reached the airlock at the same time and became\n temporarily engaged with each other. Movement was somewhat ungainly\n in the space suits under the best of conditions, and now, with the\n necessity for speed, was doubly so. The other two crashed into them\n from behind, and they spewed forth from the dome in a tangle of arms\n and legs.\n\n\n At the table, they separated, two going to the left, two to the right.\n The table remained untouched.\n\n\n When they halted, Capt. Wilkins said, \"Get to one side, it may go off\n like shrapnel.\" They obeyed.\n\n\n \"What—what—what?\" Capt. Lawler stuttered.",
"They began to get the static for the first time. It crackled and\n snapped in their speakers. They made sounds of disapproval at each\n other. For a minute or two, static blanked out the communications\n completely. It then abated to something in excess of normal.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Lt. Chandler commented, \"even though we didn't build this thing\n to withstand a moonquake, it seems to have stood up all right.\"\n\n\n \"I guess I was just—\" Major Winship began. \"Oh, hell! We're losing\n pressure. Where's the markers?\"\n\n\n \"By the lug cabinet.\"\n\n\n \"Got 'em,\" Major Winship said a moment later.\n\n\n He peeled back a marker and let it fall. Air currents whisked it away\n and plastered it against a riveted seam of the dome. It pulsed as\n though it were breathing and then it ruptured.",
"\"No!\" Major Winship snapped.\nWith the drum of calking compound inside, both Capt. Lawler and Lt.\n Chandler retreated to the bunks. Capt. Wilkins maneuvered the mixing\n attachment. \"I feel crowded,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Cozy's the word.\"\n\n\n \"Watch it! Watch it! You almost hit me in the face plate with that!\"\n\n\n \"Sorry.\"\n\n\n At length the mixer was in operation in the drum.\n\n\n \"Works perfectly,\" said Capt. Wilkins proudly.\n\n\n \"Now what, Skip? The instructions aren't in English.\"\n\n\n \"You're supposed to dump the bucket of stuff in. Then clean the area\n thoroughly around the leak.\"\n\n\n \"With what?\" asked Major Winship.\n\n\n \"Sandpaper, I guess.\"",
"Major Winship moved quickly to cut out the emergency air supply which\n had cut in automatically with the pressure drop. \"You guys wait. It's\n on your right side, midway up. I'll try to sheet it.\"\n\n\n He moved for the plastic sheeting.\n\n\n \"We've lost about three feet of calk out here,\" Capt. Lawler said. \"I\n can see more ripping loose. You're losing pressure fast at this rate.\"\n\n\n Major Winship pressed the sheeting over the leak. \"How's that?\"\n\n\n \"Not yet.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think I've got enough pressure left to hold it, now. It's\n sprung a little, and I can't get it to conform over the rivet heads.\"\n\n\n There was a splatter of static.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" Major Winship said, \"they should have made these things more\n flexible.\"",
"\"Still coming out.\"\n\n\n \"Best I can do.\" Major Winship stepped back. The sheet began slowly\n to slide downward, then it fell away completely and lay limply on the\n floor.\n\n\n \"Come on in,\" he said dryly.\nWith the four of them inside, it was somewhat cramped. Most of the\n five hundred square feet was filled with equipment. Electrical cables\n trailed loosely along the walls and were festooned from the ceiling,\n radiating from the connections to the outside solar cells. The living\n space was more restricted than in a submarine, with the bunks jutting\n out from the walls about six feet from the floor.\n\n\n Lt. Chandler mounted one of the bunks to give them more room. \"Well,\"\n he said wryly, \"it doesn't smell as bad now.\"\n\n\n \"Oops,\" said Major Winship. \"Just a second. They're coming in.\" He\n switched over to the emergency channel. It was General Finogenov.",
"Capt. Wilkins tapped his helmet and gestured for him to swivel around.\n The turn was uncomfortably tight and complicated by the restraining\n cables. Capt. Wilkins began replacement of the air bottle.\n\n\n \"These protests have proved well founded,\" Major Winship continued.\n \"Immediately following the detonation, Freedom 19 was called on to\n withstand a moderately severe shifting of the Lunar surface. No\n personnel were injured and there was no equipment damage.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins tapped his shoulder to indicate the new air bottle was\n being inserted. Another tap indicated it was seated. Major Winship\n flicked the appropriate chest button and nodded in appreciation.\n\n\n \"However,\" he continued, \"we did experience a minor leak in the dome,\n which is presently being repaired.\"\n\n\n \"The Soviet Union,\" came the reply, \"has reported the disturbance and\n has tendered their official apology. You want it?\"",
"\"Let's see. Squeeze the tube until the diaphragm at the nozzle\n ruptures. Extrude paste into seam. Allow to harden one hour before\n service.\"\n\n\n Major Winship said dryly, \"Never mind. I notice it hardens on contact\n with air.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins lay back on the bunk and stared upward. He said, \"Now\n that makes a weird kind of sense, doesn't it?\"\n\n\n \"How do they possibly think—?\"\n\n\n \"Gentlemen! It doesn't make any difference,\" Lt. Chandler said. \"Some\n air must already have leaked into this one. It's hard as a rock. A\n gorilla couldn't extrude it.\"\n\n\n \"How're the other ones?\" asked Major Winship.\n\n\n Lt. Chandler turned and made a quick examination. \"Oh, they're all\n hard, too.\"",
"\"I want a cigarette in the worst way,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"So do I, Larry. Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. Unless\n something else goes wrong.\"\n\n\n \"As long as they'll loan us the calking compound,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"Yeah, yeah,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"Let's eat.\"\n\n\n \"You got any concentrate? I'm empty.\"\n\n\n \"I'll load you,\" Capt. Wilkins volunteered wearily.\n\n\n It was an awkward operation that took several minutes. Capt. Wilkins\n cursed twice during the operation. \"I'd hate to live in this thing for\n any period.\"\n\n\n \"I think these suits are one thing we've got over the Russians,\" Major\n Winship said. \"I don't see how they can manipulate those bulky pieces\n of junk around.\"",
"Capt. Wilkins got down from the bunk and Capt. Lawler ascended.\n\n\n \"Got the inventory sheet, Les?\"\n\n\n \"Right here.\"\n\n\n Squeezed in front of the massive transmitter, Capt. Wilkins had\n energized the circuits. There was a puzzled look on his face. He leaned\n his helmet against the speaker and then shook his head sadly. \"We can't\n hear anything without any air.\"\n\n\n Major Winship looked at the microphone. \"Well, I'll just report and—\"\n He started to pick up the microphone and reconsidered. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \"That's right, isn't it.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins flicked off the transmitter. \"Some days you don't mine at\n all,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Les, have you found it?\"\n\n\n \"It's around here somewhere. Supposed to be back here.\"",
"\"You told me,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\nAfter a moment, Major Winship said bitterly, \"To hell with the Russian\n engineer.\"\n\n\n \"If you've got all that power....\"\n\n\n \"That's the thing. That's the thing that gripes me, know what I mean?\n It's just insane to send up a heavy wooden desk. That's showing off.\n Like a little kid.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they don't make aluminum desks.\"\n\n\n \"They've—got—aluminum. Half of everything on the whole planet is\n aluminum. You know they're just showing off.\"\n\n\n \"Let me wire you up,\" Capt. Wilkins said. \"We ought to report.\"\n\n\n \"That's going to take awhile.\"\n\n\n \"It's something to do while we wait.\""
],
[
"\"Watch out! There.\nThere!\n\" Capt. Wilkins leaped from his position.\n He was still floating toward the ground when there was an incredibly\n bright flare from inside the dome, and a great, silent tongue of flame\n lashed through the airlock and rolled across the lunar surface. The\n table was sent tumbling. The flame was gone almost instantly.\n\"There went the air,\" Capt. Lawler commented.\n\n\n \"We got T-Trouble,\" said Lt. Chandler.",
"Major Winship moved quickly to cut out the emergency air supply which\n had cut in automatically with the pressure drop. \"You guys wait. It's\n on your right side, midway up. I'll try to sheet it.\"\n\n\n He moved for the plastic sheeting.\n\n\n \"We've lost about three feet of calk out here,\" Capt. Lawler said. \"I\n can see more ripping loose. You're losing pressure fast at this rate.\"\n\n\n Major Winship pressed the sheeting over the leak. \"How's that?\"\n\n\n \"Not yet.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think I've got enough pressure left to hold it, now. It's\n sprung a little, and I can't get it to conform over the rivet heads.\"\n\n\n There was a splatter of static.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" Major Winship said, \"they should have made these things more\n flexible.\"",
"They were still separated, two on one side of the airlock, two on the\n other.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try to look,\" Capt. Wilkins said. \"Let me go.\" He\n lumbered directly away from the dome for a distance of about fifteen\n feet, then turned and positioned himself, some five feet behind the\n table, on a line of sight with the airlock.\n\n\n \"I can see it,\" he said. \"It's getting redder. It's ... it's ...\n melting, yes. Melting down at the bottom a little. Now it's falling\n over to one side and laying on the air tank. The air tank is getting\n red, too. I'm afraid ... it's weakening it.... Redder. Oh, oh.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" said Capt. Lawler.",
"Capt. Wilkins tapped his helmet and gestured for him to swivel around.\n The turn was uncomfortably tight and complicated by the restraining\n cables. Capt. Wilkins began replacement of the air bottle.\n\n\n \"These protests have proved well founded,\" Major Winship continued.\n \"Immediately following the detonation, Freedom 19 was called on to\n withstand a moderately severe shifting of the Lunar surface. No\n personnel were injured and there was no equipment damage.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins tapped his shoulder to indicate the new air bottle was\n being inserted. Another tap indicated it was seated. Major Winship\n flicked the appropriate chest button and nodded in appreciation.\n\n\n \"However,\" he continued, \"we did experience a minor leak in the dome,\n which is presently being repaired.\"\n\n\n \"The Soviet Union,\" came the reply, \"has reported the disturbance and\n has tendered their official apology. You want it?\"",
"Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler returned with the calking compound. It\n occupied the rear section of the land car. Lt. Chandler sat atop it. It\n was a fifty-five gallon drum.\n\n\n The airlock to Freedom 19 was open. \"What is\nthat\n?\" asked Major\n Winship, squinting out into the glaring sunlight.\n\n\n \"That,\" said Capt. Lawler, \"is the calking compound.\"\n\n\n \"You're kidding,\" said Capt. Wilkins.\n\n\n \"I am not kidding.\"\n\n\n Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler came inside. Capt. Wilkins mounted a bunk.\n\n\n \"Why didn't you just borrow a cupful?\" Major Winship said sarcastically.",
"They began to get the static for the first time. It crackled and\n snapped in their speakers. They made sounds of disapproval at each\n other. For a minute or two, static blanked out the communications\n completely. It then abated to something in excess of normal.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Lt. Chandler commented, \"even though we didn't build this thing\n to withstand a moonquake, it seems to have stood up all right.\"\n\n\n \"I guess I was just—\" Major Winship began. \"Oh, hell! We're losing\n pressure. Where's the markers?\"\n\n\n \"By the lug cabinet.\"\n\n\n \"Got 'em,\" Major Winship said a moment later.\n\n\n He peeled back a marker and let it fall. Air currents whisked it away\n and plastered it against a riveted seam of the dome. It pulsed as\n though it were breathing and then it ruptured.",
"Major Winship made a strangling motion and reached for his throat. One\n arm tangled a cable and jerked the speaker jack loose. Major Winship\n could no longer hear the alarmed expressions from the Cape. The effort\n was not entirely subvocal, since he emitted a little gasping cry in\n involuntary realism.\n\n\n This, in the course of some 90 seconds, was transmitted to Earth.\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins's lips were desperately forming the word \"Leak?\"\n\n\n Air, Major Winship said silently.\n\n\n Leak?\n\n\n Bottle! Bottle! Bottle! It was a frog-like, unvocal expletive.\nComprehension dawned. Capt. Wilkins nodded and started to turn away.\n Major Winship caught his arm and nodded his head toward the loose jack.\n\n\n Oh.",
"Major Winship, Lt. Chandler, and Capt. Lawler, recognizing the sense of\n urgency, simultaneously glanced at the drum. It was glowing cherry red.\n\n\n \"Let's go!\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n He and the Major reached the airlock at the same time and became\n temporarily engaged with each other. Movement was somewhat ungainly\n in the space suits under the best of conditions, and now, with the\n necessity for speed, was doubly so. The other two crashed into them\n from behind, and they spewed forth from the dome in a tangle of arms\n and legs.\n\n\n At the table, they separated, two going to the left, two to the right.\n The table remained untouched.\n\n\n When they halted, Capt. Wilkins said, \"Get to one side, it may go off\n like shrapnel.\" They obeyed.\n\n\n \"What—what—what?\" Capt. Lawler stuttered.",
"\"I guess we ought to.\" Major Winship came down from the bunk and\n sat with his back toward the transmitter. Capt. Wilkins slewed the\n equipment around until the emergency jacks were accessible. He\n unearthed the appropriate cable and began unscrewing the exterior\n plate to the small transmitter-receiver set on Major Winship's back.\n Eventually, trailing wires, Major Winship was coupled into the network.\n \"Okay?\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Major Winship gestured.\n\n\n They roused Earth.\n\n\n \"This is Major Charles Winship, Commanding Officer, Freedom 19, the\n American moonbase.\"\n\n\n At this point, Major Winship observed for the first time that he was\n now on emergency air. He started to ask Capt. Wilkins to change his\n air bottle, but then he realized his communications were cut off. He\n reached over and rapped Capt. Wilkins' helmet.\n\n\n \"This is the Cape. Come in, Major Winship.\"",
"Capt. Wilkins nodded and smiled. He reached across and plugged the\n speaker in again.\n\n\n \"... Freedom 19! Hello, Freedom 19! Come in!\"\n\n\n \"We're here,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"All right? Are you all right?\"\n\n\n \"We're all right. A-Okay.\" Major Winship, mindful of the extent of his\n potential audience, took a deep breath. \"Earlier this morning, the\n Soviet Union fired an underground atomic device for the\nostensible\npurpose of investigating the composition of the lunar mass by means of\n seismic analysis of the resultant shock waves. This was done in spite\n of American warnings that such a disturbance might release accumulated\n stresses in the long undisturbed satellite, and was done in the face of\n vigorous American protests.\"",
"Capt. Wilkins got down from the bunk and Capt. Lawler ascended.\n\n\n \"Got the inventory sheet, Les?\"\n\n\n \"Right here.\"\n\n\n Squeezed in front of the massive transmitter, Capt. Wilkins had\n energized the circuits. There was a puzzled look on his face. He leaned\n his helmet against the speaker and then shook his head sadly. \"We can't\n hear anything without any air.\"\n\n\n Major Winship looked at the microphone. \"Well, I'll just report and—\"\n He started to pick up the microphone and reconsidered. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \"That's right, isn't it.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins flicked off the transmitter. \"Some days you don't mine at\n all,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Les, have you found it?\"\n\n\n \"It's around here somewhere. Supposed to be back here.\"",
"\"He's done it deliberately,\" said Capt. Wilkins, the eldest of the four\n Americans. \"How are we going to know when it's over?\"\n\n\n No one bothered to respond. They sat for a while in silence while the\n shadows evaporated. One by one they clicked on their cooling systems.\n\n\n Ultimately, Lt. Chandler said, \"This is a little ridiculous. I'm going\n to switch over to their channel. Rap if you want me.\" He sat transfixed\n for several minutes. \"Ah, it's all Russian. Jabbering away. I can't\n tell a thing that's going on.\"\n\n\n In the airless void of the moon, the blast itself would be silent. A\n moth's wing of dust would, perhaps, rise and settle beyond the horizon:\n no more.\n\n\n \"Static?\"\n\n\n \"Nope.\"\n\n\n \"We'll get static on these things.\"",
"\"It can wait until later. Send it by mail for all I care. Vacuum has\n destroyed our organic air reconditioner. We have approximately three\n weeks of emergency air. However, Base Gagarin reports no damage, so\n that, in the event we exhaust our air, we will be able to obtain the\n necessary replacement.\"\n\n\n The wait of a little better than three seconds for the response gave\n the conversation a tone of deliberation.\n\n\n A new voice came on. \"We tried to contact you earlier, Major. We will\n be able to deliver replacements in about ten days.\"\n\n\n \"I will forward a coded report on the occurrence,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"Let us hear from you again in ... about three hours. Is the leak\n repaired?\"\n\n\n \"The leak has not yet been repaired. Over and out.\"\n\n\n He nodded to Capt. Wilkins and leaned back.",
"\"Maybe so,\" Major Winship said. \"But we can't have the dome fall down\n around all our ears.\" He stood. \"Whew! You guys stay put.\"\nHe crossed with the floating moon-motion to the airlock and entered,\n closing the door behind him. The darkness slowly filled with air, and\n the temperature inside the suit declined steadily. At the proper moment\n of pressure, the inner lock slid open and Major Winship stepped into\n the illuminated central area. His foot was lifted for the second step\n when the floor beneath him rose and fell gently, pitching him forward,\n off balance. He stumbled against the table and ended up seated beside\n the radio equipment. The ground moved again.\n\n\n \"Charlie! Charlie!\"\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Major Winship answered. \"Okay! Okay!\"\n\n\n \"It's—\"\n\n\n There was additional surface movement. The movement ceased.",
"\"I want a cigarette in the worst way,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"So do I, Larry. Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. Unless\n something else goes wrong.\"\n\n\n \"As long as they'll loan us the calking compound,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"Yeah, yeah,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"Let's eat.\"\n\n\n \"You got any concentrate? I'm empty.\"\n\n\n \"I'll load you,\" Capt. Wilkins volunteered wearily.\n\n\n It was an awkward operation that took several minutes. Capt. Wilkins\n cursed twice during the operation. \"I'd hate to live in this thing for\n any period.\"\n\n\n \"I think these suits are one thing we've got over the Russians,\" Major\n Winship said. \"I don't see how they can manipulate those bulky pieces\n of junk around.\"",
"\"Who was supposed to check?\" demanded Capt. Wilkins in exasperation.\n\n\n \"The only way you can check is to extrude it,\" Lt. Chandler said, \"and\n if it does extrude, you've ruined it.\"\n\n\n \"That's that,\" Major Winship said. \"There's nothing for it but to yell\n help.\"\nII\n\n\n Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler took the land car to Base Gagarin. The\n Soviet base was situated some ten miles toward sunset at the bottom of\n a natural fold in the surface. The route was moderately direct to the\n tip of the gently rolling ridge. At that point, the best pathway angled\n left and made an S-shaped descent to the basin. It was a one-way trip\n of approximately thirty exhausting minutes.\n\n\n Major Winship, with his deficient reefer, remained behind. Capt.\n Wilkins stayed for company.",
"Methodically, Capt. Wilkins set about disconnecting the major from the\n transmitter.\n\n\n \"Wow!\" said Major Winship when he was once more in communication. \"For\n a moment there, I thought....\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Capt. Wilkins asked with interest.\n\n\n \"I could see myself asking them to ask the Russians to ask Finogenov\n to get on the emergency channel to ask you to charge the air bottle.\n I never felt so ... idiotic is not quite strong enough ... there for a\n minute in my whole life. I didn't know how much emergency air was left,\n and I thought, my God, I'll never live this down. All the hams in the\n world listening, while I try to explain the situation. I could see the\n nickname being entered in my files: aka. The Airless Idiot. I tell you,\n that was rough.\"\nIII",
"\"Just leave us alone, thank you,\" Major Winship said and cut off the\n communication.\n\n\n \"What'd they say?\" Capt. Wilkins asked.\n\n\n \"Larry, General Finogenov said he was very embarrassed by this.\"\n\n\n \"That's nice,\" Lt. Chandler said.\n\n\n \"I'll be damned surprised,\" Major Winship said, \"if they got any\n seismic data out of that shot.... Well, to hell with them, let's get\n this leak fixed. Skip, can you get the calking compound?\"\n\n\n \"Larry, where's the inventory?\"\n\n\n \"Les has got it.\"\n\n\n Lt. Chandler got down from the bunk and Capt. Wilkins mounted.\n\n\n \"Larry,\" Major Winship said, \"why don't you get Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Okay.\"",
"\"Still coming out.\"\n\n\n \"Best I can do.\" Major Winship stepped back. The sheet began slowly\n to slide downward, then it fell away completely and lay limply on the\n floor.\n\n\n \"Come on in,\" he said dryly.\nWith the four of them inside, it was somewhat cramped. Most of the\n five hundred square feet was filled with equipment. Electrical cables\n trailed loosely along the walls and were festooned from the ceiling,\n radiating from the connections to the outside solar cells. The living\n space was more restricted than in a submarine, with the bunks jutting\n out from the walls about six feet from the floor.\n\n\n Lt. Chandler mounted one of the bunks to give them more room. \"Well,\"\n he said wryly, \"it doesn't smell as bad now.\"\n\n\n \"Oops,\" said Major Winship. \"Just a second. They're coming in.\" He\n switched over to the emergency channel. It was General Finogenov.",
"\"Let's see, Charlie. Maybe not too bad,\" said Capt. Wilkins. \"If I took\n the compressor motor, we could make up a shaft and ... let's see ... if\n we could....\"\nIt took the better part of an hour to rig up the electric mixer.\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins was profusely congratulated.\n\n\n \"Now,\" Major Winship said, \"we can either bring the drum inside or take\n the mixer out there.\"\n\n\n \"We're going to have to bring the drum in,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"Well,\" said Capt. Lawler, \"that will make it nice and cozy.\"\n\n\n It took the four of them to roll the drum inside, rocking it back and\n forth through the airlock. At that time, it was apparent the table was\n interposing itself.\n\n\n Lt. Chandler tried to dismantle the table. \"Damn these suits,\" he said."
],
[
"\"It's this way,\" Lt. Chandler said. \"They didn't have anything but\n 55-gallon drums of it.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, my,\" said Capt. Wilkins. \"I suppose it's a steel drum. Those\n things must weigh....\"\n\n\n \"Actually, I think you guys have got the general wrong,\" Capt. Lawler\n said. \"He was out, himself, to greet us. I think he was really quite\n upset by the quake. Probably because his people had misfigured so bad.\"\n\n\n \"He's too damned suspicious,\" Major Winship said. \"You know and I know\n why they set that blast off. I tried to tell him. Hell. He looks at me\n like an emasculated owl and wants to know our ulterior motive in trying\n to prevent a purely scientific experiment, the results of which will be\n published in the technical press for the good of everybody. I'll bet!\"",
"\"Major Winship! Hello! Hello, hello, hello. You A Okay?\"\n\n\n \"This is Major Winship.\"\n\n\n \"Oh! Excellent, very good. Any damage, Major?\"\n\n\n \"Little leak. You?\"\n\n\n \"Came through without damage.\" General Finogenov paused a moment. When\n no comment was forthcoming, he continued: \"Perhaps we built a bit more\n strongly, Major.\"\n\n\n \"You did this deliberately,\" Major Winship said testily.\n\n\n \"No, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. Major Winship, please believe me. I very\n much regret this. Very much so. I am very distressed. Depressed. After\n repeatedly assuring you there was no danger of a quake—and then to\n have something like this happen. Oh, this is very embarrassing to me.\n Is there anything at all we can do?\"",
"\"Hey, Les, how's it look?\" Capt. Wilkins asked.\n\n\n \"Okay from this side. Charlie, you still okay?\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Major Winship said. \"We told them this might happen,\" he added\n bitterly.\n\n\n There was a wait during which everyone seemed to be holding their\n breath.\n\n\n \"I guess it's over,\" said Major Winship, getting to his feet. \"Wait a\n bit more, there may be an after-shock.\" He switched once again to the\n emergency channel.\n\n\n \"Is Pinov,\" came the supremely relaxed voice. \"Help?\"\n\n\n Major Winship whinnied in disgust. \"\nNyet!\n\" he snarled. To the other\n Americans: \"Our comrades seem unconcerned.\"\n\n\n \"Tough.\"",
"\"Maybe so,\" Major Winship said. \"But we can't have the dome fall down\n around all our ears.\" He stood. \"Whew! You guys stay put.\"\nHe crossed with the floating moon-motion to the airlock and entered,\n closing the door behind him. The darkness slowly filled with air, and\n the temperature inside the suit declined steadily. At the proper moment\n of pressure, the inner lock slid open and Major Winship stepped into\n the illuminated central area. His foot was lifted for the second step\n when the floor beneath him rose and fell gently, pitching him forward,\n off balance. He stumbled against the table and ended up seated beside\n the radio equipment. The ground moved again.\n\n\n \"Charlie! Charlie!\"\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Major Winship answered. \"Okay! Okay!\"\n\n\n \"It's—\"\n\n\n There was additional surface movement. The movement ceased.",
"\"Just leave us alone, thank you,\" Major Winship said and cut off the\n communication.\n\n\n \"What'd they say?\" Capt. Wilkins asked.\n\n\n \"Larry, General Finogenov said he was very embarrassed by this.\"\n\n\n \"That's nice,\" Lt. Chandler said.\n\n\n \"I'll be damned surprised,\" Major Winship said, \"if they got any\n seismic data out of that shot.... Well, to hell with them, let's get\n this leak fixed. Skip, can you get the calking compound?\"\n\n\n \"Larry, where's the inventory?\"\n\n\n \"Les has got it.\"\n\n\n Lt. Chandler got down from the bunk and Capt. Wilkins mounted.\n\n\n \"Larry,\" Major Winship said, \"why don't you get Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Okay.\"",
"\"Finogenov had a\nclay\nsamovar sent up. Lemon and nutmeg, too. Real,\n by God, fresh lemons for the tea, the last time I was there. His own\n office is about ten by ten. Think of that. One hundred square feet. And\n a wooden desk. A\nwooden\ndesk. And a chair. A wooden chair. Everything\n big and heavy. Everything. Weight, hell. Fifty pounds more or less—\"\n\n\n \"They've got the power-plants for it.\"\n\n\n \"Do you think he did that deliberately?\" Major Winship asked. \"I think\n he's trying to force us off. I think he hoped for the quake. Gagarin's\n built to take it, I'll say that. Looks like it, anyhow. You don't\n suppose they planned this all along? Even if they didn't, they sure got\n the jump on us again, didn't they? I told you what he told me?\"",
"They began to get the static for the first time. It crackled and\n snapped in their speakers. They made sounds of disapproval at each\n other. For a minute or two, static blanked out the communications\n completely. It then abated to something in excess of normal.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Lt. Chandler commented, \"even though we didn't build this thing\n to withstand a moonquake, it seems to have stood up all right.\"\n\n\n \"I guess I was just—\" Major Winship began. \"Oh, hell! We're losing\n pressure. Where's the markers?\"\n\n\n \"By the lug cabinet.\"\n\n\n \"Got 'em,\" Major Winship said a moment later.\n\n\n He peeled back a marker and let it fall. Air currents whisked it away\n and plastered it against a riveted seam of the dome. It pulsed as\n though it were breathing and then it ruptured.",
"\"Just a moment.\"\n\n\n \"Is everything all right?\"\n\n\n Major Winship was squirming nervously, obviously perturbed.\n\n\n \"A-Okay,\" he said. \"Just a moment.\"\n\n\n \"What's wrong?\" came the worried question. In the background, he heard\n someone say, \"I think there's something wrong.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins peered intently. Major Winship contorted his face in a\n savage grimace.\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins raised his eyebrows in alarm. They were face to face\n through their helmets, close together. Each face appeared monstrously\n large to the other.",
"Five minutes later, the perspiration was rivers across his face. \"This\n is it,\" he said. \"I'm going in.\"\n\n\n \"Let's all—\"\n\n\n \"No. I've got to cool off.\"\n\n\n \"Hell, Charlie, I feel stupid sitting out here,\" Capt. Lawler said.\n \"The shot probably went off an hour ago.\"\n\n\n \"The static level hasn't gone up much, if at all.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" Lt. Chandler said, \"it's buried too deep.\"",
"\"You told me,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\nAfter a moment, Major Winship said bitterly, \"To hell with the Russian\n engineer.\"\n\n\n \"If you've got all that power....\"\n\n\n \"That's the thing. That's the thing that gripes me, know what I mean?\n It's just insane to send up a heavy wooden desk. That's showing off.\n Like a little kid.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they don't make aluminum desks.\"\n\n\n \"They've—got—aluminum. Half of everything on the whole planet is\n aluminum. You know they're just showing off.\"\n\n\n \"Let me wire you up,\" Capt. Wilkins said. \"We ought to report.\"\n\n\n \"That's going to take awhile.\"\n\n\n \"It's something to do while we wait.\"",
"\"He's done it deliberately,\" said Capt. Wilkins, the eldest of the four\n Americans. \"How are we going to know when it's over?\"\n\n\n No one bothered to respond. They sat for a while in silence while the\n shadows evaporated. One by one they clicked on their cooling systems.\n\n\n Ultimately, Lt. Chandler said, \"This is a little ridiculous. I'm going\n to switch over to their channel. Rap if you want me.\" He sat transfixed\n for several minutes. \"Ah, it's all Russian. Jabbering away. I can't\n tell a thing that's going on.\"\n\n\n In the airless void of the moon, the blast itself would be silent. A\n moth's wing of dust would, perhaps, rise and settle beyond the horizon:\n no more.\n\n\n \"Static?\"\n\n\n \"Nope.\"\n\n\n \"We'll get static on these things.\"",
"Capt. Wilkins tapped his helmet and gestured for him to swivel around.\n The turn was uncomfortably tight and complicated by the restraining\n cables. Capt. Wilkins began replacement of the air bottle.\n\n\n \"These protests have proved well founded,\" Major Winship continued.\n \"Immediately following the detonation, Freedom 19 was called on to\n withstand a moderately severe shifting of the Lunar surface. No\n personnel were injured and there was no equipment damage.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins tapped his shoulder to indicate the new air bottle was\n being inserted. Another tap indicated it was seated. Major Winship\n flicked the appropriate chest button and nodded in appreciation.\n\n\n \"However,\" he continued, \"we did experience a minor leak in the dome,\n which is presently being repaired.\"\n\n\n \"The Soviet Union,\" came the reply, \"has reported the disturbance and\n has tendered their official apology. You want it?\"",
"Capt. Wilkins nodded and smiled. He reached across and plugged the\n speaker in again.\n\n\n \"... Freedom 19! Hello, Freedom 19! Come in!\"\n\n\n \"We're here,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"All right? Are you all right?\"\n\n\n \"We're all right. A-Okay.\" Major Winship, mindful of the extent of his\n potential audience, took a deep breath. \"Earlier this morning, the\n Soviet Union fired an underground atomic device for the\nostensible\npurpose of investigating the composition of the lunar mass by means of\n seismic analysis of the resultant shock waves. This was done in spite\n of American warnings that such a disturbance might release accumulated\n stresses in the long undisturbed satellite, and was done in the face of\n vigorous American protests.\"",
"\"You've got it stuck between the bunk post.\"\n\n\n \"I\nknow\nthat.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think this is the way to do it,\" Major Winship said. \"Let's\n back the drum out.\"\n\n\n Reluctantly, they backed the drum out and deposited it. With the aid of\n Capt. Lawler, Lt. Chandler got the table unstuck. They passed it over\n to Major Winship, who handed it out to Capt. Wilkins. Captain Wilkins\n carried it around the drum of calking compound and set it down. It\n rested uneasily on the uneven surface.\n\n\n \"Now, let's go,\" said Major Winship.\n\n\n Eventually, they accomplished the moving. They wedged the drum between\n the main air-supply tank and the transmitter. They were all perspiring.\n \"It's not the weight, it's the mass,\" said Capt. Wilkins brightly.",
"Major Winship attempted unsuccessfully to communicate with Base\n Gagarin. \"Will you please request the general to keep us informed on\n the progress of the countdown?\"\n\n\n \"Is Pinov,\" came the reply. \"Help?\"\n\n\n \"\nNyet\n,\" said Major Winship, exhausting his Russian. \"Count down.\n Progress. When—boom?\"\n\n\n \"Is Pinov,\" came the reply.\n\n\n \"Boom! Boom!\" said Major Winship in exasperation.\n\n\n \"Boom!\" said Pinov happily.\n\n\n \"When?\"\n\n\n \"Boom—boom!\" said Pinov.\n\n\n \"Oh, nuts.\" Major Winship cut out the circuit. \"They've got Pinov on\n emergency watch this morning,\" he explained to the other Americans.\n \"The one that doesn't speak English.\"",
"They were still separated, two on one side of the airlock, two on the\n other.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try to look,\" Capt. Wilkins said. \"Let me go.\" He\n lumbered directly away from the dome for a distance of about fifteen\n feet, then turned and positioned himself, some five feet behind the\n table, on a line of sight with the airlock.\n\n\n \"I can see it,\" he said. \"It's getting redder. It's ... it's ...\n melting, yes. Melting down at the bottom a little. Now it's falling\n over to one side and laying on the air tank. The air tank is getting\n red, too. I'm afraid ... it's weakening it.... Redder. Oh, oh.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" said Capt. Lawler.",
"Major Winship, Lt. Chandler, and Capt. Lawler, recognizing the sense of\n urgency, simultaneously glanced at the drum. It was glowing cherry red.\n\n\n \"Let's go!\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n He and the Major reached the airlock at the same time and became\n temporarily engaged with each other. Movement was somewhat ungainly\n in the space suits under the best of conditions, and now, with the\n necessity for speed, was doubly so. The other two crashed into them\n from behind, and they spewed forth from the dome in a tangle of arms\n and legs.\n\n\n At the table, they separated, two going to the left, two to the right.\n The table remained untouched.\n\n\n When they halted, Capt. Wilkins said, \"Get to one side, it may go off\n like shrapnel.\" They obeyed.\n\n\n \"What—what—what?\" Capt. Lawler stuttered.",
"\"Well, anyway,\" Lt. Chandler continued, \"he told us just to mix up the\n whole fifty-five gallon drum. There's a little bucket of stuff that\n goes in, and it's measured just right. We can throw away what we don't\n need.\"\n\n\n \"Somehow, that sounds like him,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"He had five or six of them.\"\n\n\n \"Jesus!\" said Capt. Wilkins. \"That must be\nthree thousand pounds\nof\n calking compound. Those people are insane.\"\n\n\n \"The question is,\" Capt. Lawler said, \"'How are we going to mix it?'\n It's supposed to be mixed thoroughly.\"\n\n\n They thought over the problem for a while.\n\n\n \"That will be a man-sized job,\" Major Winship said.",
"The Winning of the Moon\nBY KRIS NEVILLE\nThe enemy was friendly enough.\n\n Trouble was—their friendship\n\n was as dangerous as their hate!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nGeneral Finogenov notified Major Winship that the underground blast was\n scheduled for the following morning.\n\n\n Major Winship, after receiving the message, discussed precautions with\n the three other Americans.\n\n\n Next morning, before the sunlight exploded, the four of them donned\n their space suits and went and sat outside the dome, waiting. The sun\n rose with its bright, silent clap of radiance. Black pools of shadows\n lay in harsh contrast, their edges drawn with geometric precision.",
"\"The hell it isn't the weight,\" said Lt. Chandler. \"That's heavy.\"\n\n\n \"With my reefer out,\" said Major Winship, \"I'm the one it's rough on.\"\n He shook perspiration out of his eyes. \"They should figure a way to get\n a mop in here, or a towel, or a sponge, or something. I'll bet you've\n forgotten how much sweat stings in the eyes.\"\n\n\n \"It's the salt.\"\n\n\n \"Speaking of salt. I wish I had some salt tablets,\" Major Winship said.\n \"I've never sweat so much since basic.\"\n\n\n \"Want to bet Finogenov hasn't got a bushel of them?\""
],
[
"Major Winship attempted unsuccessfully to communicate with Base\n Gagarin. \"Will you please request the general to keep us informed on\n the progress of the countdown?\"\n\n\n \"Is Pinov,\" came the reply. \"Help?\"\n\n\n \"\nNyet\n,\" said Major Winship, exhausting his Russian. \"Count down.\n Progress. When—boom?\"\n\n\n \"Is Pinov,\" came the reply.\n\n\n \"Boom! Boom!\" said Major Winship in exasperation.\n\n\n \"Boom!\" said Pinov happily.\n\n\n \"When?\"\n\n\n \"Boom—boom!\" said Pinov.\n\n\n \"Oh, nuts.\" Major Winship cut out the circuit. \"They've got Pinov on\n emergency watch this morning,\" he explained to the other Americans.\n \"The one that doesn't speak English.\"",
"A small infinity seemed to pass very slowly.\n\n\n Major Winship shifted restlessly. \"My reefer's gone on the fritz.\"\n Perspiration was trickling down his face.\n\n\n \"Let's all go in,\" said the fourth American, Capt. Lawler. \"It's\n probably over by now.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try again,\" Major Winship said and switched to the emergency\n channel. \"Base Gagarin? Base Gagarin?\"\n\n\n \"Is Pinov. Help?\"\n\n\n \"\nNyet.\n\"\n\n\n \"Pinov's still there,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"Tell him, 'Help',\" said Capt. Wilkins, \"so he'll get somebody we can\n talk to.\"\n\n\n \"I'll see them all in hell, first,\" Major Winship said.",
"Major Winship made a strangling motion and reached for his throat. One\n arm tangled a cable and jerked the speaker jack loose. Major Winship\n could no longer hear the alarmed expressions from the Cape. The effort\n was not entirely subvocal, since he emitted a little gasping cry in\n involuntary realism.\n\n\n This, in the course of some 90 seconds, was transmitted to Earth.\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins's lips were desperately forming the word \"Leak?\"\n\n\n Air, Major Winship said silently.\n\n\n Leak?\n\n\n Bottle! Bottle! Bottle! It was a frog-like, unvocal expletive.\nComprehension dawned. Capt. Wilkins nodded and started to turn away.\n Major Winship caught his arm and nodded his head toward the loose jack.\n\n\n Oh.",
"\"Just leave us alone, thank you,\" Major Winship said and cut off the\n communication.\n\n\n \"What'd they say?\" Capt. Wilkins asked.\n\n\n \"Larry, General Finogenov said he was very embarrassed by this.\"\n\n\n \"That's nice,\" Lt. Chandler said.\n\n\n \"I'll be damned surprised,\" Major Winship said, \"if they got any\n seismic data out of that shot.... Well, to hell with them, let's get\n this leak fixed. Skip, can you get the calking compound?\"\n\n\n \"Larry, where's the inventory?\"\n\n\n \"Les has got it.\"\n\n\n Lt. Chandler got down from the bunk and Capt. Wilkins mounted.\n\n\n \"Larry,\" Major Winship said, \"why don't you get Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Okay.\"",
"\"Major Winship! Hello! Hello, hello, hello. You A Okay?\"\n\n\n \"This is Major Winship.\"\n\n\n \"Oh! Excellent, very good. Any damage, Major?\"\n\n\n \"Little leak. You?\"\n\n\n \"Came through without damage.\" General Finogenov paused a moment. When\n no comment was forthcoming, he continued: \"Perhaps we built a bit more\n strongly, Major.\"\n\n\n \"You did this deliberately,\" Major Winship said testily.\n\n\n \"No, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. Major Winship, please believe me. I very\n much regret this. Very much so. I am very distressed. Depressed. After\n repeatedly assuring you there was no danger of a quake—and then to\n have something like this happen. Oh, this is very embarrassing to me.\n Is there anything at all we can do?\"",
"\"Hey, Les, how's it look?\" Capt. Wilkins asked.\n\n\n \"Okay from this side. Charlie, you still okay?\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Major Winship said. \"We told them this might happen,\" he added\n bitterly.\n\n\n There was a wait during which everyone seemed to be holding their\n breath.\n\n\n \"I guess it's over,\" said Major Winship, getting to his feet. \"Wait a\n bit more, there may be an after-shock.\" He switched once again to the\n emergency channel.\n\n\n \"Is Pinov,\" came the supremely relaxed voice. \"Help?\"\n\n\n Major Winship whinnied in disgust. \"\nNyet!\n\" he snarled. To the other\n Americans: \"Our comrades seem unconcerned.\"\n\n\n \"Tough.\"",
"\"I guess we ought to.\" Major Winship came down from the bunk and\n sat with his back toward the transmitter. Capt. Wilkins slewed the\n equipment around until the emergency jacks were accessible. He\n unearthed the appropriate cable and began unscrewing the exterior\n plate to the small transmitter-receiver set on Major Winship's back.\n Eventually, trailing wires, Major Winship was coupled into the network.\n \"Okay?\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Major Winship gestured.\n\n\n They roused Earth.\n\n\n \"This is Major Charles Winship, Commanding Officer, Freedom 19, the\n American moonbase.\"\n\n\n At this point, Major Winship observed for the first time that he was\n now on emergency air. He started to ask Capt. Wilkins to change his\n air bottle, but then he realized his communications were cut off. He\n reached over and rapped Capt. Wilkins' helmet.\n\n\n \"This is the Cape. Come in, Major Winship.\"",
"\"Just a moment.\"\n\n\n \"Is everything all right?\"\n\n\n Major Winship was squirming nervously, obviously perturbed.\n\n\n \"A-Okay,\" he said. \"Just a moment.\"\n\n\n \"What's wrong?\" came the worried question. In the background, he heard\n someone say, \"I think there's something wrong.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins peered intently. Major Winship contorted his face in a\n savage grimace.\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins raised his eyebrows in alarm. They were face to face\n through their helmets, close together. Each face appeared monstrously\n large to the other.",
"Major Winship moved quickly to cut out the emergency air supply which\n had cut in automatically with the pressure drop. \"You guys wait. It's\n on your right side, midway up. I'll try to sheet it.\"\n\n\n He moved for the plastic sheeting.\n\n\n \"We've lost about three feet of calk out here,\" Capt. Lawler said. \"I\n can see more ripping loose. You're losing pressure fast at this rate.\"\n\n\n Major Winship pressed the sheeting over the leak. \"How's that?\"\n\n\n \"Not yet.\"\n\n\n \"I don't think I've got enough pressure left to hold it, now. It's\n sprung a little, and I can't get it to conform over the rivet heads.\"\n\n\n There was a splatter of static.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" Major Winship said, \"they should have made these things more\n flexible.\"",
"\"You told me,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\nAfter a moment, Major Winship said bitterly, \"To hell with the Russian\n engineer.\"\n\n\n \"If you've got all that power....\"\n\n\n \"That's the thing. That's the thing that gripes me, know what I mean?\n It's just insane to send up a heavy wooden desk. That's showing off.\n Like a little kid.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they don't make aluminum desks.\"\n\n\n \"They've—got—aluminum. Half of everything on the whole planet is\n aluminum. You know they're just showing off.\"\n\n\n \"Let me wire you up,\" Capt. Wilkins said. \"We ought to report.\"\n\n\n \"That's going to take awhile.\"\n\n\n \"It's something to do while we wait.\"",
"\"Who was supposed to check?\" demanded Capt. Wilkins in exasperation.\n\n\n \"The only way you can check is to extrude it,\" Lt. Chandler said, \"and\n if it does extrude, you've ruined it.\"\n\n\n \"That's that,\" Major Winship said. \"There's nothing for it but to yell\n help.\"\nII\n\n\n Capt. Lawler and Lt. Chandler took the land car to Base Gagarin. The\n Soviet base was situated some ten miles toward sunset at the bottom of\n a natural fold in the surface. The route was moderately direct to the\n tip of the gently rolling ridge. At that point, the best pathway angled\n left and made an S-shaped descent to the basin. It was a one-way trip\n of approximately thirty exhausting minutes.\n\n\n Major Winship, with his deficient reefer, remained behind. Capt.\n Wilkins stayed for company.",
"Major Winship, Lt. Chandler, and Capt. Lawler, recognizing the sense of\n urgency, simultaneously glanced at the drum. It was glowing cherry red.\n\n\n \"Let's go!\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n He and the Major reached the airlock at the same time and became\n temporarily engaged with each other. Movement was somewhat ungainly\n in the space suits under the best of conditions, and now, with the\n necessity for speed, was doubly so. The other two crashed into them\n from behind, and they spewed forth from the dome in a tangle of arms\n and legs.\n\n\n At the table, they separated, two going to the left, two to the right.\n The table remained untouched.\n\n\n When they halted, Capt. Wilkins said, \"Get to one side, it may go off\n like shrapnel.\" They obeyed.\n\n\n \"What—what—what?\" Capt. Lawler stuttered.",
"\"It can wait until later. Send it by mail for all I care. Vacuum has\n destroyed our organic air reconditioner. We have approximately three\n weeks of emergency air. However, Base Gagarin reports no damage, so\n that, in the event we exhaust our air, we will be able to obtain the\n necessary replacement.\"\n\n\n The wait of a little better than three seconds for the response gave\n the conversation a tone of deliberation.\n\n\n A new voice came on. \"We tried to contact you earlier, Major. We will\n be able to deliver replacements in about ten days.\"\n\n\n \"I will forward a coded report on the occurrence,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"Let us hear from you again in ... about three hours. Is the leak\n repaired?\"\n\n\n \"The leak has not yet been repaired. Over and out.\"\n\n\n He nodded to Capt. Wilkins and leaned back.",
"Methodically, Capt. Wilkins set about disconnecting the major from the\n transmitter.\n\n\n \"Wow!\" said Major Winship when he was once more in communication. \"For\n a moment there, I thought....\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Capt. Wilkins asked with interest.\n\n\n \"I could see myself asking them to ask the Russians to ask Finogenov\n to get on the emergency channel to ask you to charge the air bottle.\n I never felt so ... idiotic is not quite strong enough ... there for a\n minute in my whole life. I didn't know how much emergency air was left,\n and I thought, my God, I'll never live this down. All the hams in the\n world listening, while I try to explain the situation. I could see the\n nickname being entered in my files: aka. The Airless Idiot. I tell you,\n that was rough.\"\nIII",
"\"Maybe so,\" Major Winship said. \"But we can't have the dome fall down\n around all our ears.\" He stood. \"Whew! You guys stay put.\"\nHe crossed with the floating moon-motion to the airlock and entered,\n closing the door behind him. The darkness slowly filled with air, and\n the temperature inside the suit declined steadily. At the proper moment\n of pressure, the inner lock slid open and Major Winship stepped into\n the illuminated central area. His foot was lifted for the second step\n when the floor beneath him rose and fell gently, pitching him forward,\n off balance. He stumbled against the table and ended up seated beside\n the radio equipment. The ground moved again.\n\n\n \"Charlie! Charlie!\"\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Major Winship answered. \"Okay! Okay!\"\n\n\n \"It's—\"\n\n\n There was additional surface movement. The movement ceased.",
"Capt. Wilkins got down from the bunk and Capt. Lawler ascended.\n\n\n \"Got the inventory sheet, Les?\"\n\n\n \"Right here.\"\n\n\n Squeezed in front of the massive transmitter, Capt. Wilkins had\n energized the circuits. There was a puzzled look on his face. He leaned\n his helmet against the speaker and then shook his head sadly. \"We can't\n hear anything without any air.\"\n\n\n Major Winship looked at the microphone. \"Well, I'll just report and—\"\n He started to pick up the microphone and reconsidered. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \"That's right, isn't it.\"\n\n\n Capt. Wilkins flicked off the transmitter. \"Some days you don't mine at\n all,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Les, have you found it?\"\n\n\n \"It's around here somewhere. Supposed to be back here.\"",
"Capt. Wilkins nodded and smiled. He reached across and plugged the\n speaker in again.\n\n\n \"... Freedom 19! Hello, Freedom 19! Come in!\"\n\n\n \"We're here,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"All right? Are you all right?\"\n\n\n \"We're all right. A-Okay.\" Major Winship, mindful of the extent of his\n potential audience, took a deep breath. \"Earlier this morning, the\n Soviet Union fired an underground atomic device for the\nostensible\npurpose of investigating the composition of the lunar mass by means of\n seismic analysis of the resultant shock waves. This was done in spite\n of American warnings that such a disturbance might release accumulated\n stresses in the long undisturbed satellite, and was done in the face of\n vigorous American protests.\"",
"\"No!\" Major Winship snapped.\nWith the drum of calking compound inside, both Capt. Lawler and Lt.\n Chandler retreated to the bunks. Capt. Wilkins maneuvered the mixing\n attachment. \"I feel crowded,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Cozy's the word.\"\n\n\n \"Watch it! Watch it! You almost hit me in the face plate with that!\"\n\n\n \"Sorry.\"\n\n\n At length the mixer was in operation in the drum.\n\n\n \"Works perfectly,\" said Capt. Wilkins proudly.\n\n\n \"Now what, Skip? The instructions aren't in English.\"\n\n\n \"You're supposed to dump the bucket of stuff in. Then clean the area\n thoroughly around the leak.\"\n\n\n \"With what?\" asked Major Winship.\n\n\n \"Sandpaper, I guess.\"",
"\"I want a cigarette in the worst way,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"So do I, Larry. Shouldn't be more than a couple of hours. Unless\n something else goes wrong.\"\n\n\n \"As long as they'll loan us the calking compound,\" Capt. Wilkins said.\n\n\n \"Yeah, yeah,\" Major Winship said.\n\n\n \"Let's eat.\"\n\n\n \"You got any concentrate? I'm empty.\"\n\n\n \"I'll load you,\" Capt. Wilkins volunteered wearily.\n\n\n It was an awkward operation that took several minutes. Capt. Wilkins\n cursed twice during the operation. \"I'd hate to live in this thing for\n any period.\"\n\n\n \"I think these suits are one thing we've got over the Russians,\" Major\n Winship said. \"I don't see how they can manipulate those bulky pieces\n of junk around.\"",
"\"He's done it deliberately,\" said Capt. Wilkins, the eldest of the four\n Americans. \"How are we going to know when it's over?\"\n\n\n No one bothered to respond. They sat for a while in silence while the\n shadows evaporated. One by one they clicked on their cooling systems.\n\n\n Ultimately, Lt. Chandler said, \"This is a little ridiculous. I'm going\n to switch over to their channel. Rap if you want me.\" He sat transfixed\n for several minutes. \"Ah, it's all Russian. Jabbering away. I can't\n tell a thing that's going on.\"\n\n\n In the airless void of the moon, the blast itself would be silent. A\n moth's wing of dust would, perhaps, rise and settle beyond the horizon:\n no more.\n\n\n \"Static?\"\n\n\n \"Nope.\"\n\n\n \"We'll get static on these things.\""
]
] |
train
|
63097
|
[
"Who ordered that the narrator to Dondromogon? \n",
"What is the significance of the narrator’s height? \n",
"The purpose for the narrator losing his memory is. . . \n",
"Who first tells the narrator about his destiny? \n",
"What is the significance of the narrator’s thumb print?\n",
"Who is Sporr and what is his authority in calling the narrator Yandro? \n",
"What is the meaning of Dondromogon’s two extreme hemispheres? \n",
"How do people live on Dondromogon? What is an example of a repercussion its people suffer as a result of its extreme temperatures? \n",
"Who is Yandro and what is his relationship to Dandromogon? \n",
"What is the meaning of the garments given to the narrator? \n"
] |
[
[
"The Voice\n",
"Old Sporr \n",
"The Book",
"The Masters of the Worlds\n"
],
[
"It shows he is liar. \n",
"It shows he is not from Dondromogon\n",
"It shows he is the Conquering Stranger \n",
"It shows he is not from Earth \n"
],
[
"Earth is not something a Dondromogon leader should remember. \n",
"So he can be birthed on a clean slate as the new Dondromogon leader. \n",
"So that the Dondromogons will be suspicious of him\n",
"To better assimilate to Dondromogon culture.\n"
],
[
"Doriza \n",
"The Masters of the Worlds\n",
"The Voice \n",
"Old Sporr\n"
],
[
"It is proof that he is Yandro \n",
"It is proof that he is from Earth \n",
"It is proof that he is a Newcomer \n",
"It is proof that he is a Master of Worlds \n"
],
[
"He is a mystic in touch with faith, in charge of the materialization of gods.\n",
"He is a mystic in touch with the spiritual realm, in charge of prophecies. \n",
"He is a mystic in touch with the material space, in charge of prophecies. \n",
"He is a mystic in touch with what is Good, in charge of the rational realm. \n"
],
[
"It causes its people to develop two vastly different cultures, creating social tension.\n",
"It causes its people to search for prophets, martyrs, and heroes, symbolizing the schizophrenia of the planet’s inhabitants. \n",
"It causes its people to live underground, giving the story its setting. \n",
"It causes its inhabitant groups to fight over what amount of the planet is habitable, the two extremes symbolizing the split between peoples. \n"
],
[
"They have to battle the extreme heat and extreme cold. Because of these intense temperatures people suffer, wars often start out of general agitation. \n",
"The live deep in the ground. They can only survive above ground for a short period, so they have to find what they need and quickly bring it back underground. \n",
"The live deep in the ground. They have to find all necessities for life, such as food, deep within the mines they dug to survive. \n",
"They live in a great temple, exactly on the twilight line between the light and dark side of their planet. They have to find all necessities for life inside. \n"
],
[
"Yandro is the Conquering Stranger. He is prophesied to conquer Dondromogon. \n",
"Yandro is the Conquering Stranger. He is prophesied to lead the planet Dondromogon. \n",
"Yandro is the Conquering Stranger. He killed and conquered the brute Barak.\n",
"Yandro is the New Prophet. He is said to tell of the destruction of the Newcomers.\n"
],
[
"It shows the reader that Yandro is preparing to fight Barak. \n",
"It shows the reader that the narrator is going to play the part of Yandro, but not believe in it. \n",
"It shows the reader that the narrator is becoming Yandro. \n",
"It shows the reader that all Dondromogon prophecies are true. \n"
]
] |
[
4,
2,
2,
3,
1,
2,
4,
3,
2,
3
] |
[
0,
1,
0,
0,
0,
1,
0,
1,
0,
1
] |
[
[
"\"I serve Yandro,\" she vowed tremulously. \"Now and forever—and happy\n that I was fated to live when he returned for the rescue of all\n Dondromogon.\"\n\n\n \"Please get up,\" I bade her, trying not to sound as embarrassed as I\n felt. \"Come with me. There is still much that I do not understand.\"\n\n\n \"I am Yandro's orderly and helper,\" she said. Rising, she ranged\n herself at my left hand. \"Will Yandro come this way? He will be awaited\n in the audience hall.\"\n\n\n It seemed to me then that the corridors were vast and mixed as a\n labyrinth, but Doriza guided me without the slightest hesitation past\n one tangled crossway after another. My questions she answered with a\n mixture of awe and brightness.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMy senses came to me slowly and somehow shyly, as if not sure of their\n way or welcome. I felt first—pressure on my brow and chest, as if I\n lay face downward; then the tug and buffet of a strong, probing wind,\n insistent but not cold, upon my naked skin. Closing my hands, I felt\n them dig into coarse dirt. I turned my face downwind and opened my\n eyes. There was little to see, so thick was the dust cloud around me.\n Words formed themselves on my thick tongue, words that must have been\n spoken by so many reviving unfortunates through the ages:\n\n\n \"Where am I?\"\n\n\n And at once there was an answer:\n\n\n \"\nYou lie upon the world Dondromogon.\n\"",
"\"War is fought between the two strips of habitable ground. War,\n unceasing, bitter, with no quarter asked, given or expected.\n Dondromogon was found and settled long ago, by adventurers from afar.\n Now come invaders, to reap the benefits of discovery and toil.\" A\n pause. \"You find that thought unpleasant? You wish to right that\n wrong?\"\n\n\n \"Anyone would wish that,\" I replied. \"But how—\"\n\n\n \"You are going to ask how you were brought here. That is the mystery\n of the\nMasters\n.\" The voice became grand. \"Suffice it that you were\n needed, and that the time was ripe. There is a proper time, like a\n proper place, for each thing and each happening. Now, go to your\n destiny.\"\n\n\n I rose on my knees, shielding my face from the buffeting wind by\n lifting a forearm. Somewhere through the murky clouds showed a dim\n blocky silhouette, a building of sorts.",
"\"Barak!\" I repeated. \"I—I—\" And I paused. When I had to learn my own\n name, how could it be that I sensed memory of another's name?\n\n\n \"Barak was a brute—mighty, but a brute.\" Thus Gederr continued.\n \"Weapons in his hands were the instruments of fate. His hands alone\n caused fear and ruin. But it pleased our fortune-bringing stars to\n encompass his destruction.\" He grinned, and licked his full lips. \"Now,\n even as they are without their battle-leader, so we have ours.\"\n\n\n \"You honor me,\" I told him. \"Yet I still know little. It seems that I\n am expected to aid and lead and save the people of this world called\n Dondromogon. But I must know them before I can help.\"",
"\"Enemies?\" I repeated.\n\n\n \"The Newcomers,\" supplemented Doriza. \"They have taken the \"Other Side\"\n of Dondromogon, and would take our side as well. We defend ourselves\n at the poles. Now,\" and her voice rang joyously, \"you will lead us to\n defeat and crush them utterly!\"\n\n\n \"Not naked like this,\" I said, and laughed. I must have sounded\n foolish, but it had its effect.\n\n\n \"Follow me, deign to follow me,\" Sporr said. \"Your clothing, your\n quarters, your destiny, all await you.\"\n\n\n We went out by the door at the rear, and Sporr respectfully gestured me\n upon a metal-plated platform. Standing beside me, he tinkered with a\n lever. We dropped smoothly away into a dark corridor, past level after\n level of light and sound.",
"\"Destined—leadership—\" I began to repeat, and fell silent. I had\n need to think. The voice was telling me that I had been snatched from\n worlds away, for a specified purpose here on whatever windswept planet\n Dondromogon might be. \"Birth and beginning—destined leadership—\"\n Fantastic! And yet, for all I could say to the contrary, unvarnishedly\n true.\n\n\n \"Dondromogon?\" I mumbled. \"The name is strange to me.\"",
"I knew the language of that answer, but where it came from—above,\n beneath, or indeed within me—I could not say. I lifted a hand, and\n knuckled dust from my eyes.\n\n\n \"How did I get here?\" I demanded of the speaker.\n\n\n \"It was ordered—by the Masters of the Worlds—that you should be\n brought from your own home planet, called Earth in the System of the\n star called Sun. Do you remember Earth?\"\n\n\n And I did not know whether I remembered or not. Vague matters stirred\n deep in me, but I could not for certain say they were memories. I asked\n yet again:\n\n\n \"Who am I?\"\n\n\n The voice had a note of triumph. \"You do not know that. It is as well,\n for this will be a birth and beginning of your destined leadership on\n Dondromogon.\"",
"\"What proof have I?\" I demanded. \"On this world of yours—Dondromogon,\n isn't it called?—I'm no more than an hour old. Accident or shock\n has taken my memory. Let me have a medical examination. A scientist\n probably can tell what happened to put me in such a condition.\"\n\n\n \"I am a scientist,\" offered Doriza, and came forward. Her eyes met\n mine, suddenly flickered and lowered. \"His gaze,\" she muttered.\n\n\n The officer at the table was touching a button. An attendant appeared,\n received an order, and vanished again. In a few moments two other\n men came—one a heavily armed officer of rank, the other an elderly,\n bearded fellow in a voluminous robe that enfolded him in most dignified\n manner.\n\n\n This latter man opened wide his clear old eyes at sight of me.",
"\"It is necessary that we live like this,\" she explained. \"The hot air\n of Dondromogon's sunlit face is ever rising, and the cold air from\n the dark side comes rushing under to fill the vacuum. Naturally, our\n strip of twilight country is never free of winds too high and fierce to\n fight. No crops can grow outside, no domestic animals flourish. We must\n pen ourselves away from the sky and soil, with stout walls and heavy\n sunken parapets. Our deep mines afford every element for necessities of\n life.\"\nI looked at my garments, and hers. There were various kinds of fabric,\n which I now saw plainly to be synthetic. \"The other side, where those\n you call the Newcomers dwell and fight,\" I reminded. \"Is it also\n windswept? Why can two people not join forces and face toil and nature\n together? They should fight, not each other, but the elements.\"",
"Sporr was waiting in the room where I had eaten. His eyes widened at\n sight of me, something like a grin of triumph flashed through his\n beard. Then he bowed, supple and humble, his palms together.\n\n\n \"It is indeed Yandro, our great chief,\" he mumbled. Then he turned and\n crossed the room. A sort of mouthpiece sprouted from the wall.\n\n\n \"I announce,\" he intoned into it. \"I announce, I, Sporr, the reader and\n fore-teller of wisdom. Yandro is with us, he awaits his partners and\n friends. Let them meet him in the audience hall.\"\n\n\n Facing me again, he motioned most respectfully toward the door to the\n hall. I moved to open it, and he followed, muttering.\n\n\n Outside stood Doriza. Her blue eyes met mine, and her lips moved to\n frame a word. Then, suddenly, she was on her knee, catching my hand and\n kissing it.",
"What had seized me? That was my first wonder. On this strange world\n called Dondromogon, what manner of intelligent life bade defiance to\n heat and cold and storm, and built these stout structures, and now laid\n hands—were they hands indeed?—upon me? I swung around, setting my\n back to a solid wall.\n\n\n My first glance showed me that my companions were creatures like\n myself—two-legged, fair-skinned men, shorter and slighter than I, but\n clad in metal-faced garments and wearing weapons in their girdles. I\n saw that each bore a swordlike device with a curved guard, set in a\n narrow sheath as long as my arm. Each also had a shorter weapon, with\n a curved stock to fit the palm of the hand, borne snugly in a holster.\n With such arms I had a faint sense of familiarity.",
"\"The tenth part of the wonders which concern mighty Yandro have not\n been told,\" intoned Sporr, ducking his bearded head in a bow, but\n fixing me with his wise old eyes.\n\n\n One of the group, called Council by Doriza, now moved a pace forward.\n He was the greedy-faced man, short but plump, and very conscious of\n the dignified folds of his purple robe. One carefully-tended hand\n brushed back his ginger-brown hair, then toyed with a little moustache.\n\n\n \"I am Gederr, senior of this Council,\" he purred. \"If Yandro permits, I\n will speak simply. Our hopes have been raised by Yandro's return—the\n return presaged of old by those who could see the future, and more\n recently by the death in battle of the Newcomer champion, called Barak.\"",
"\"They lie,\" I broke in, very conscious of my naked helplessness before\n her regard. \"They wanted to kill me and be rewarded for a false story\n of vigilance. I only defended myself.\"\n\n\n \"Get him on his feet,\" the young woman said, and the two guards\n obeyed. Then her eyes studied me again. \"Gods! What a mountain of a\n man!\" she exclaimed. \"Can you walk, stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Barely, with these bonds.\"\n\n\n \"Then manage to do so.\" She flung off her cloak and draped it over my\n nakedness. \"Walk along beside me. No tricks, and I promise you fair\n hearing.\"",
"We passed through another door, and I found myself in an office. A man\n in richly-embossed armor platings sat there. He had a fringe of pale\n beard, and his eyes were bluer than the gentlewoman Doriza's.\n\n\n She made a gesture of salute, hand at shoulder height, and reported the\n matter. He nodded for her to fall back to a corner.\n\n\n \"Stranger,\" he said to me, \"can you think of no better tale to tell\n than you now offer?\"\n\n\n \"I tell the truth,\" was my reply, not very gracious.\n\n\n \"You will have to prove that,\" he admonished me.",
"Gederr turned his eyes upon the woman with the red hair, and gestured\n to her \"Tell him, Elonie.\" Then he faced me. \"Have we Yandro's\n permission to sit?\"\n\n\n \"By all means,\" I granted, a little impatiently, and sat down myself.\n The others followed suit—the Council on their range of chairs, Doriza\n on a bench near me, Sporr somewhere behind. The woman called Elonie\n remained upon her sandalled feet, great eyes the color of deep green\n water fixed upon me.",
"Sporr had produced something else, a little vial of dark pigment. He\n carefully anointed one of my thumbs, and pressed it to the page. All\n three gazed.\n\n\n \"The same,\" said Doriza.\n\n\n And they were all on their knees before me.\n\n\n \"Forgive me, great Yandro,\" said the officer thickly. \"I did not know.\"\n\n\n \"Get up,\" I bade them. \"I want to hear why I was first bound, and now\n worshipped.\"\nII\n\n\n They rose, but stood off respectfully. The officer spoke first. \"I am\n Rohbar, field commander of this defense position,\" he said with crisp\n respect. \"Sporr is a mystic doctor, full of godly wisdom. Doriza,\n a junior officer and chief of the guard. And you—how could you\n know?—are sent by the First Comers to save us from our enemies.\"",
"\"It is a world the size of your native one,\" came words of information.\n \"Around a star it spins, light-years away from the world of your\n birth. One face of Dondromogon ever looks to the light and heat,\n wherefore its metals run in glowing seas. The other face is ever away\n in cold darkness, with its air freezing into solid chunks. But because\n Dondromogon wavers on its axis, there are two lunes of its surface\n which from time to time shift from night to day. These are habitable.\"\n\n\n My eyes were tight shut against the dust, but they saw in imagination\n such a planet—one-half incandescent, one-half pitchy black. From pole\n to pole on opposite sides ran the two twilight zones, widest at the\n equators like the outer rind of two slices of melon. Of course, such\n areas, between the hot and cold hemispheres, would be buffeted by\n mighty gales ... the voice was to be heard again:",
"\"As it is, he may remember that the Conquering Stranger is foretold\n to come with no memory of anything,\" supplied the officer. \"Score one\n against you, Sporr. You should have been able to instruct me, not I\n you.\"\n\n\n The attendant reentered, with a big book in his hands. It looked\n old and well-thumbed, with dim gold traceries on its binding. Sporr\n snatched it, and turned to a brightly colored picture. He looked once,\n his beard gaped, and he dropped to his knees.\n\n\n \"Happy, happy the day,\" he jabbered, \"that I was spared to see our\n great champion come among us in the flesh, as was foretold of ancient\n time by the First Comers!\"\n\n\n Doriza and the officer crossed to his side, snatching the book. Their\n bright heads bent above it. Doriza was first to speak. \"It is very\n like,\" she half-stammered.",
"Doriza had no answer that time, but Sporr spoke up behind us: \"Great\n Yandro is wise as well as powerful. But the Newcomers do not want to\n help, not even to conquer. They want to obliterate us. There is nothing\n to do—not for lifetimes—but to fight them back at the two poles.\"\n\n\n We came to a main corridor. It had a line of armed guards, but no\n pedestrians or vehicles, though I thought I caught a murmur of far-off\n traffic. Doriza paused before a great portal, closed by a curtainlike\n sheet of dull metal. She spoke into a mouthpiece:\n\n\n \"Doriza, gentlewoman of the guard, conducts Yandro, the Conquering\n Stranger, to greet his lieutenants!\"\n\n\n I have said that the portal was closed by a curtainlike metal sheet;\n and like a curtain it lifted, letting us through into the auditorium.",
"We went through the door by which she had entered, into a corridor\n beyond. It was lighted by small, brilliant bulbs at regular intervals.\n Beyond, it gave into several passages. She chose one of them and\n conducted me along. \"You are surely not of us,\" she commented. \"Men I\n have seen who are heavier than you, but none taller. Whence came you?\"\n\n\n I remembered the strange voice that had instructed me. \"I am from a\n far world,\" I replied. \"It is called—yes, Earth. Beyond that, I know\n nothing. Memory left me.\"\n\n\n \"The story is a strange one,\" she commented. \"And your name?\"\n\n\n \"I do not know that, either. Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"Doriza—a gentlewoman of the guard. My inspection tour brought me by\n chance to where you fought my outposts. But it is not for you to ask\n questions. Enter here.\""
],
[
"A woman this time, not of great height, and robust but not heavy. She\n was dressed for vigorous action in dark slacks with buskins to make\n them snug around ankles and calves, a jerkin of stout material that was\n faced with metal armor plates and left bare her round, strong arms. A\n gold-worked fillet bound her tawny hair back from a rosy, bold-featured\n face—a nose that was positively regal, a mouth short and firm but not\n hard, and blue eyes that just now burned and questioned. She wore a\n holstered pistol, and a cross-belt supported several instruments of a\n kind I could not remember seeing before. A crimson cloak gave color and\n dignity to her costume, and plainly she was someone of position, for\n both the men stiffened to attention.\n\n\n \"A spy,\" one ventured. \"He pushed in, claimed he was no enemy, then\n tried to attack—\"",
"The close-fitting costume was rich and dark, with bright colors only\n for edgings and minor accessories. I myself—and it was as if I saw my\n body for the first time—towered rather bluffly, with great breadth\n of chest and shoulder, and legs robust enough to carry such bulk. The\n face was square but haggard, as if from some toil or pain which was now\n wiped from my recollection. That nose had been even bigger than it was\n now, but a fracture had shortened it somewhat. The eyes were deep set\n and dark and moody—small wonder!—the chin heavy, the mouth made grim\n by a scar at one corner. Black, shaggy hair hung down like brackets.\n All told, I looked like a proper person for physical labor, or even\n fierce fighting—but surely no inspirational leader or savior of a\n distressed people.\n\n\n I took the military cloak which Doriza had lent me and slung it over my\n shoulders. Turning, I clanked out on my metal-soled shoes.",
"\"They lie,\" I broke in, very conscious of my naked helplessness before\n her regard. \"They wanted to kill me and be rewarded for a false story\n of vigilance. I only defended myself.\"\n\n\n \"Get him on his feet,\" the young woman said, and the two guards\n obeyed. Then her eyes studied me again. \"Gods! What a mountain of a\n man!\" she exclaimed. \"Can you walk, stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Barely, with these bonds.\"\n\n\n \"Then manage to do so.\" She flung off her cloak and draped it over my\n nakedness. \"Walk along beside me. No tricks, and I promise you fair\n hearing.\"",
"\"The stranger of the prophecy!\" he cried, in a voice that made us all\n jump.\nThe officer rose from behind the table. \"Are you totally mad, Sporr?\n You mystic doctors are too apt to become fuddled—\"\n\n\n \"But it is, it is!\" The graybeard flourished a thin hand at me. \"Look\n at him, you of little faith! Your mind dwells so much on material\n strength that you lose touch with the spiritual—\"\n\n\n He broke off, and wheeled on the attendant who had led him in. \"To my\n study,\" he commanded. \"On the shelf behind my desk, bring the great\n gold-bound book that is third from the right.\" Then he turned back,\n and bowed toward me. \"Surely you are Yandro, the Conquering Stranger,\"\n he said, intoning as if in formal prayer. \"Pardon these short-sighted\n ones—deign to save us from our enemies—\"",
"We went through the door by which she had entered, into a corridor\n beyond. It was lighted by small, brilliant bulbs at regular intervals.\n Beyond, it gave into several passages. She chose one of them and\n conducted me along. \"You are surely not of us,\" she commented. \"Men I\n have seen who are heavier than you, but none taller. Whence came you?\"\n\n\n I remembered the strange voice that had instructed me. \"I am from a\n far world,\" I replied. \"It is called—yes, Earth. Beyond that, I know\n nothing. Memory left me.\"\n\n\n \"The story is a strange one,\" she commented. \"And your name?\"\n\n\n \"I do not know that, either. Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"Doriza—a gentlewoman of the guard. My inspection tour brought me by\n chance to where you fought my outposts. But it is not for you to ask\n questions. Enter here.\"",
"Sporr was waiting in the room where I had eaten. His eyes widened at\n sight of me, something like a grin of triumph flashed through his\n beard. Then he bowed, supple and humble, his palms together.\n\n\n \"It is indeed Yandro, our great chief,\" he mumbled. Then he turned and\n crossed the room. A sort of mouthpiece sprouted from the wall.\n\n\n \"I announce,\" he intoned into it. \"I announce, I, Sporr, the reader and\n fore-teller of wisdom. Yandro is with us, he awaits his partners and\n friends. Let them meet him in the audience hall.\"\n\n\n Facing me again, he motioned most respectfully toward the door to the\n hall. I moved to open it, and he followed, muttering.\n\n\n Outside stood Doriza. Her blue eyes met mine, and her lips moved to\n frame a word. Then, suddenly, she was on her knee, catching my hand and\n kissing it.",
"\"Enemies?\" I repeated.\n\n\n \"The Newcomers,\" supplemented Doriza. \"They have taken the \"Other Side\"\n of Dondromogon, and would take our side as well. We defend ourselves\n at the poles. Now,\" and her voice rang joyously, \"you will lead us to\n defeat and crush them utterly!\"\n\n\n \"Not naked like this,\" I said, and laughed. I must have sounded\n foolish, but it had its effect.\n\n\n \"Follow me, deign to follow me,\" Sporr said. \"Your clothing, your\n quarters, your destiny, all await you.\"\n\n\n We went out by the door at the rear, and Sporr respectfully gestured me\n upon a metal-plated platform. Standing beside me, he tinkered with a\n lever. We dropped smoothly away into a dark corridor, past level after\n level of light and sound.",
"We passed through another door, and I found myself in an office. A man\n in richly-embossed armor platings sat there. He had a fringe of pale\n beard, and his eyes were bluer than the gentlewoman Doriza's.\n\n\n She made a gesture of salute, hand at shoulder height, and reported the\n matter. He nodded for her to fall back to a corner.\n\n\n \"Stranger,\" he said to me, \"can you think of no better tale to tell\n than you now offer?\"\n\n\n \"I tell the truth,\" was my reply, not very gracious.\n\n\n \"You will have to prove that,\" he admonished me.",
"\"Who are you, and where are you from?\" said one of the two, a\n broad-faced middle-aged fellow. \"Don't lie any more than you can help.\"\n\n\n I felt a stirring of the hair on my neck, but kept my voice mild and\n level: \"Why should I lie? Especially as I don't know who I am, or where\n I'm from, or anything that has happened longer ago than just a moment.\n I woke up out there in the dust storm, and I managed to come here for\n shelter.\"\n\n\n \"He's a Newcomer spy,\" quoth the other. \"Let's put him under arrest.\"\n\n\n \"And leave this gate unguarded?\" demanded the other. \"Sound the\n signal,\" and he jerked his head toward a system of levers and gauges on\n the wall beside the door-jamb.",
"Sporr had produced something else, a little vial of dark pigment. He\n carefully anointed one of my thumbs, and pressed it to the page. All\n three gazed.\n\n\n \"The same,\" said Doriza.\n\n\n And they were all on their knees before me.\n\n\n \"Forgive me, great Yandro,\" said the officer thickly. \"I did not know.\"\n\n\n \"Get up,\" I bade them. \"I want to hear why I was first bound, and now\n worshipped.\"\nII\n\n\n They rose, but stood off respectfully. The officer spoke first. \"I am\n Rohbar, field commander of this defense position,\" he said with crisp\n respect. \"Sporr is a mystic doctor, full of godly wisdom. Doriza,\n a junior officer and chief of the guard. And you—how could you\n know?—are sent by the First Comers to save us from our enemies.\"",
"\"As it is, he may remember that the Conquering Stranger is foretold\n to come with no memory of anything,\" supplied the officer. \"Score one\n against you, Sporr. You should have been able to instruct me, not I\n you.\"\n\n\n The attendant reentered, with a big book in his hands. It looked\n old and well-thumbed, with dim gold traceries on its binding. Sporr\n snatched it, and turned to a brightly colored picture. He looked once,\n his beard gaped, and he dropped to his knees.\n\n\n \"Happy, happy the day,\" he jabbered, \"that I was spared to see our\n great champion come among us in the flesh, as was foretold of ancient\n time by the First Comers!\"\n\n\n Doriza and the officer crossed to his side, snatching the book. Their\n bright heads bent above it. Doriza was first to speak. \"It is very\n like,\" she half-stammered.",
"Doriza shook her head. \"That happens to be my cloak. I gave it to him\n because he was naked, and not for any treasonable masquerade. But the\n thumb-print—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, the thumb-print,\" I repeated wearily. \"By all means, study my\n thumbs, if you'll first take these bonds off of me.\"\n\n\n \"Bonds,\" mumbled old Sporr. He got creakily up from his knees and\n bustled to me. From under his robe he produced a pouch, and took out a\n pencil-sized rod. Gingerly opening the red mantle, he touched my tether\n in several places with the glowing end of the rod. The coils dropped\n away from my grateful body and limbs. I thrust out my hands.\n\n\n \"Thumb-prints?\" I offered.",
"The girl Doriza spoke to the officer: \"If Sporr speaks truth, and he\n generally does, you have committed a blasphemy.\"\n\n\n The other made a little grimace. \"This may be Yandro, though I'm a\n plain soldier and follow the classics very little. The First Comers are\n souls to worship, not to study. If indeed he is Yandro,\" and he was\n most respectful, \"he will appreciate, like a good military mind, my\n caution against possible impostors.\"\n\n\n \"Who might Yandro be?\" I demanded, very uncomfortable in my bonds and\n loose draperies.\n\n\n Old Sporr almost crowed. \"You see? If he was a true imposter, he would\n come equipped with all plausible knowledge. As it is—\"",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMy senses came to me slowly and somehow shyly, as if not sure of their\n way or welcome. I felt first—pressure on my brow and chest, as if I\n lay face downward; then the tug and buffet of a strong, probing wind,\n insistent but not cold, upon my naked skin. Closing my hands, I felt\n them dig into coarse dirt. I turned my face downwind and opened my\n eyes. There was little to see, so thick was the dust cloud around me.\n Words formed themselves on my thick tongue, words that must have been\n spoken by so many reviving unfortunates through the ages:\n\n\n \"Where am I?\"\n\n\n And at once there was an answer:\n\n\n \"\nYou lie upon the world Dondromogon.\n\"",
"The officer faced me, with a sort of baffled respect.\n\n\n \"I still say you will understand my caution,\" he addressed me, with\n real respect and shyness this time. \"If you are Yandro himself, you can\n prove it. The prophecy even sketches a thumb-print—\" And he held the\n book toward me.\n\n\n It contained a full-page likeness, in color, of myself wrapped in a\n scarlet robe. Under this was considerable printed description, and to\n one side a thumb-print, or a drawing of one, in black.\n\n\n \"Behold,\" Doriza was saying, \"matters which even expert identification\n men take into thought. The ears in the picture are like the ears of the\n real man—\"\n\n\n \"That could be plastic surgery,\" rejoined the officer. \"Such things are\n artfully done by the Newcomers, and the red mantle he wears more easily\n assumed.\"",
"\"Let me out of this,\" I growled, and kicked at the man with my still\n unbound foot. He snapped a half-hitch on my ankle, and threw me\n heavily. Triumphant laughter came from both adversaries. Then:\n\n\n \"What's this?\"\nThe challenge was clear, rich, authoritative. Someone else had come,\n from a rearward door into the stone-walled vestibule where the\n encounter was taking place.",
"Gederr turned his eyes upon the woman with the red hair, and gestured\n to her \"Tell him, Elonie.\" Then he faced me. \"Have we Yandro's\n permission to sit?\"\n\n\n \"By all means,\" I granted, a little impatiently, and sat down myself.\n The others followed suit—the Council on their range of chairs, Doriza\n on a bench near me, Sporr somewhere behind. The woman called Elonie\n remained upon her sandalled feet, great eyes the color of deep green\n water fixed upon me.",
"That spacious chamber had rows of benches, with galleries above, that\n might have seated a thousand. However, only a dozen or so were present,\n on metal chairs ranged across the stage upon which we entered. They\n were all men but two, and wore robes of black, plum-purple or red. At\n sight of me, they rose together, most respectfully. They looked at me,\n and I looked at them.\n\n\n My first thought was, that if these were people of authority and trust\n in the nation I seemed destined to save, my work was cut out for me.",
"\"Our cities are below ground,\" he quavered. \"Whipped by winds above,\n we must scrabble in the depths for life's necessities—chemicals to\n transmute into food, to weave into clothing, to weld into tools and\n weapons—\"\n\n\n The mention of food brought to me the thought that I was hungry. I said\n as much, even as our elevator platform came to the lowest level and\n stopped.\n\n\n \"I have arranged for that,\" Sporr began, then fell silent, fingers\n combing his beard in embarrassment.\n\n\n \"Arranged food for me?\" I prompted sharply. \"As if you know I had come?\n What—\"\n\n\n \"Pardon, great Yandro,\" babbled Sporr. \"I was saying that I arranged\n food, as always, for whatever guest should come. Please follow.\"",
"Doriza had no answer that time, but Sporr spoke up behind us: \"Great\n Yandro is wise as well as powerful. But the Newcomers do not want to\n help, not even to conquer. They want to obliterate us. There is nothing\n to do—not for lifetimes—but to fight them back at the two poles.\"\n\n\n We came to a main corridor. It had a line of armed guards, but no\n pedestrians or vehicles, though I thought I caught a murmur of far-off\n traffic. Doriza paused before a great portal, closed by a curtainlike\n sheet of dull metal. She spoke into a mouthpiece:\n\n\n \"Doriza, gentlewoman of the guard, conducts Yandro, the Conquering\n Stranger, to greet his lieutenants!\"\n\n\n I have said that the portal was closed by a curtainlike metal sheet;\n and like a curtain it lifted, letting us through into the auditorium."
],
[
"\"As it is, he may remember that the Conquering Stranger is foretold\n to come with no memory of anything,\" supplied the officer. \"Score one\n against you, Sporr. You should have been able to instruct me, not I\n you.\"\n\n\n The attendant reentered, with a big book in his hands. It looked\n old and well-thumbed, with dim gold traceries on its binding. Sporr\n snatched it, and turned to a brightly colored picture. He looked once,\n his beard gaped, and he dropped to his knees.\n\n\n \"Happy, happy the day,\" he jabbered, \"that I was spared to see our\n great champion come among us in the flesh, as was foretold of ancient\n time by the First Comers!\"\n\n\n Doriza and the officer crossed to his side, snatching the book. Their\n bright heads bent above it. Doriza was first to speak. \"It is very\n like,\" she half-stammered.",
"\"Who are you, and where are you from?\" said one of the two, a\n broad-faced middle-aged fellow. \"Don't lie any more than you can help.\"\n\n\n I felt a stirring of the hair on my neck, but kept my voice mild and\n level: \"Why should I lie? Especially as I don't know who I am, or where\n I'm from, or anything that has happened longer ago than just a moment.\n I woke up out there in the dust storm, and I managed to come here for\n shelter.\"\n\n\n \"He's a Newcomer spy,\" quoth the other. \"Let's put him under arrest.\"\n\n\n \"And leave this gate unguarded?\" demanded the other. \"Sound the\n signal,\" and he jerked his head toward a system of levers and gauges on\n the wall beside the door-jamb.",
"My mind flew back to the two scrubby, venial guardsmen who had first\n welcomed me; to stuffy Rohbar, the commander; to Sporr, spry and clever\n enough, but somehow unwholesome; Doriza—no, she was not like these\n others, who may have lived too long in their earth-buried shelters. And\n Doriza now spoke to the gathering:\n\n\n \"Yandro, folk of the Council! He deigns to give you audience.\"\n\n\n \"\nYandro!\n\"\n\n\n They all spoke the name in chorus, and bowed toward me.\n\n\n Silence then, a silence which evidently I must break. I broke it:\n \"Friends, I am among you with no more memory or knowledge than an\n infant. I hear wonderful things, of which I seem to be the center. Are\n they true?\"",
"I knew the language of that answer, but where it came from—above,\n beneath, or indeed within me—I could not say. I lifted a hand, and\n knuckled dust from my eyes.\n\n\n \"How did I get here?\" I demanded of the speaker.\n\n\n \"It was ordered—by the Masters of the Worlds—that you should be\n brought from your own home planet, called Earth in the System of the\n star called Sun. Do you remember Earth?\"\n\n\n And I did not know whether I remembered or not. Vague matters stirred\n deep in me, but I could not for certain say they were memories. I asked\n yet again:\n\n\n \"Who am I?\"\n\n\n The voice had a note of triumph. \"You do not know that. It is as well,\n for this will be a birth and beginning of your destined leadership on\n Dondromogon.\"",
"\"What proof have I?\" I demanded. \"On this world of yours—Dondromogon,\n isn't it called?—I'm no more than an hour old. Accident or shock\n has taken my memory. Let me have a medical examination. A scientist\n probably can tell what happened to put me in such a condition.\"\n\n\n \"I am a scientist,\" offered Doriza, and came forward. Her eyes met\n mine, suddenly flickered and lowered. \"His gaze,\" she muttered.\n\n\n The officer at the table was touching a button. An attendant appeared,\n received an order, and vanished again. In a few moments two other\n men came—one a heavily armed officer of rank, the other an elderly,\n bearded fellow in a voluminous robe that enfolded him in most dignified\n manner.\n\n\n This latter man opened wide his clear old eyes at sight of me.",
"\"War is fought between the two strips of habitable ground. War,\n unceasing, bitter, with no quarter asked, given or expected.\n Dondromogon was found and settled long ago, by adventurers from afar.\n Now come invaders, to reap the benefits of discovery and toil.\" A\n pause. \"You find that thought unpleasant? You wish to right that\n wrong?\"\n\n\n \"Anyone would wish that,\" I replied. \"But how—\"\n\n\n \"You are going to ask how you were brought here. That is the mystery\n of the\nMasters\n.\" The voice became grand. \"Suffice it that you were\n needed, and that the time was ripe. There is a proper time, like a\n proper place, for each thing and each happening. Now, go to your\n destiny.\"\n\n\n I rose on my knees, shielding my face from the buffeting wind by\n lifting a forearm. Somewhere through the murky clouds showed a dim\n blocky silhouette, a building of sorts.",
"The girl Doriza spoke to the officer: \"If Sporr speaks truth, and he\n generally does, you have committed a blasphemy.\"\n\n\n The other made a little grimace. \"This may be Yandro, though I'm a\n plain soldier and follow the classics very little. The First Comers are\n souls to worship, not to study. If indeed he is Yandro,\" and he was\n most respectful, \"he will appreciate, like a good military mind, my\n caution against possible impostors.\"\n\n\n \"Who might Yandro be?\" I demanded, very uncomfortable in my bonds and\n loose draperies.\n\n\n Old Sporr almost crowed. \"You see? If he was a true imposter, he would\n come equipped with all plausible knowledge. As it is—\"",
"The close-fitting costume was rich and dark, with bright colors only\n for edgings and minor accessories. I myself—and it was as if I saw my\n body for the first time—towered rather bluffly, with great breadth\n of chest and shoulder, and legs robust enough to carry such bulk. The\n face was square but haggard, as if from some toil or pain which was now\n wiped from my recollection. That nose had been even bigger than it was\n now, but a fracture had shortened it somewhat. The eyes were deep set\n and dark and moody—small wonder!—the chin heavy, the mouth made grim\n by a scar at one corner. Black, shaggy hair hung down like brackets.\n All told, I looked like a proper person for physical labor, or even\n fierce fighting—but surely no inspirational leader or savior of a\n distressed people.\n\n\n I took the military cloak which Doriza had lent me and slung it over my\n shoulders. Turning, I clanked out on my metal-soled shoes.",
"We went through the door by which she had entered, into a corridor\n beyond. It was lighted by small, brilliant bulbs at regular intervals.\n Beyond, it gave into several passages. She chose one of them and\n conducted me along. \"You are surely not of us,\" she commented. \"Men I\n have seen who are heavier than you, but none taller. Whence came you?\"\n\n\n I remembered the strange voice that had instructed me. \"I am from a\n far world,\" I replied. \"It is called—yes, Earth. Beyond that, I know\n nothing. Memory left me.\"\n\n\n \"The story is a strange one,\" she commented. \"And your name?\"\n\n\n \"I do not know that, either. Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"Doriza—a gentlewoman of the guard. My inspection tour brought me by\n chance to where you fought my outposts. But it is not for you to ask\n questions. Enter here.\"",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMy senses came to me slowly and somehow shyly, as if not sure of their\n way or welcome. I felt first—pressure on my brow and chest, as if I\n lay face downward; then the tug and buffet of a strong, probing wind,\n insistent but not cold, upon my naked skin. Closing my hands, I felt\n them dig into coarse dirt. I turned my face downwind and opened my\n eyes. There was little to see, so thick was the dust cloud around me.\n Words formed themselves on my thick tongue, words that must have been\n spoken by so many reviving unfortunates through the ages:\n\n\n \"Where am I?\"\n\n\n And at once there was an answer:\n\n\n \"\nYou lie upon the world Dondromogon.\n\"",
"Sporr had produced something else, a little vial of dark pigment. He\n carefully anointed one of my thumbs, and pressed it to the page. All\n three gazed.\n\n\n \"The same,\" said Doriza.\n\n\n And they were all on their knees before me.\n\n\n \"Forgive me, great Yandro,\" said the officer thickly. \"I did not know.\"\n\n\n \"Get up,\" I bade them. \"I want to hear why I was first bound, and now\n worshipped.\"\nII\n\n\n They rose, but stood off respectfully. The officer spoke first. \"I am\n Rohbar, field commander of this defense position,\" he said with crisp\n respect. \"Sporr is a mystic doctor, full of godly wisdom. Doriza,\n a junior officer and chief of the guard. And you—how could you\n know?—are sent by the First Comers to save us from our enemies.\"",
"\"Enemies?\" I repeated.\n\n\n \"The Newcomers,\" supplemented Doriza. \"They have taken the \"Other Side\"\n of Dondromogon, and would take our side as well. We defend ourselves\n at the poles. Now,\" and her voice rang joyously, \"you will lead us to\n defeat and crush them utterly!\"\n\n\n \"Not naked like this,\" I said, and laughed. I must have sounded\n foolish, but it had its effect.\n\n\n \"Follow me, deign to follow me,\" Sporr said. \"Your clothing, your\n quarters, your destiny, all await you.\"\n\n\n We went out by the door at the rear, and Sporr respectfully gestured me\n upon a metal-plated platform. Standing beside me, he tinkered with a\n lever. We dropped smoothly away into a dark corridor, past level after\n level of light and sound.",
"The voice spoke no more. I had not the time to wonder about it. I got\n to my feet, bent double to keep from being blown over, and staggered\n toward the promised haven.\n\n\n I reached it, groped along until I found a door. There was no latch,\n handle or entry button, and I pounded heavily on the massive panels.\n The door opened from within, and I was blown inside, to fall sprawling.\nI struck my forehead upon a floor of stone or concrete, and so was\n half-stunned, but still I could distinguish something like the sound\n of agitated voices. Then I felt myself grasped, by both shoulders,\n and drawn roughly erect. The touch restored my senses, and I wrenched\n myself violently free.",
"\"The stranger of the prophecy!\" he cried, in a voice that made us all\n jump.\nThe officer rose from behind the table. \"Are you totally mad, Sporr?\n You mystic doctors are too apt to become fuddled—\"\n\n\n \"But it is, it is!\" The graybeard flourished a thin hand at me. \"Look\n at him, you of little faith! Your mind dwells so much on material\n strength that you lose touch with the spiritual—\"\n\n\n He broke off, and wheeled on the attendant who had led him in. \"To my\n study,\" he commanded. \"On the shelf behind my desk, bring the great\n gold-bound book that is third from the right.\" Then he turned back,\n and bowed toward me. \"Surely you are Yandro, the Conquering Stranger,\"\n he said, intoning as if in formal prayer. \"Pardon these short-sighted\n ones—deign to save us from our enemies—\"",
"\"Barak!\" I repeated. \"I—I—\" And I paused. When I had to learn my own\n name, how could it be that I sensed memory of another's name?\n\n\n \"Barak was a brute—mighty, but a brute.\" Thus Gederr continued.\n \"Weapons in his hands were the instruments of fate. His hands alone\n caused fear and ruin. But it pleased our fortune-bringing stars to\n encompass his destruction.\" He grinned, and licked his full lips. \"Now,\n even as they are without their battle-leader, so we have ours.\"\n\n\n \"You honor me,\" I told him. \"Yet I still know little. It seems that I\n am expected to aid and lead and save the people of this world called\n Dondromogon. But I must know them before I can help.\"",
"We entered a new small chamber, where a table was set with dishes of\n porcelain-like plastic. Sporr held a chair for me, and waited on me\n with the utmost gingerly respect. The food was a pungent and filling\n jelly, a little bundle of transparent leaves or scraps like cellophane\n and tasting of spice, and a tumbler of pink juice. I felt refreshed and\n satisfied, and thanked Sporr, who led me on to the next room.\n\n\n \"Behold!\" he said, with a dramatic gesture. \"Your garments, even as\n they have been preserved against your coming!\"\n\n\n It was a sleeping chamber, with a cot made fast to the wall, a metal\n locker or cupboard, with a glass door through which showed the garments\n of which Sporr spoke.\n\n\n The door closed softly behind me—I was left alone.",
"Doriza shook her head. \"That happens to be my cloak. I gave it to him\n because he was naked, and not for any treasonable masquerade. But the\n thumb-print—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, the thumb-print,\" I repeated wearily. \"By all means, study my\n thumbs, if you'll first take these bonds off of me.\"\n\n\n \"Bonds,\" mumbled old Sporr. He got creakily up from his knees and\n bustled to me. From under his robe he produced a pouch, and took out a\n pencil-sized rod. Gingerly opening the red mantle, he touched my tether\n in several places with the glowing end of the rod. The coils dropped\n away from my grateful body and limbs. I thrust out my hands.\n\n\n \"Thumb-prints?\" I offered.",
"Sporr was waiting in the room where I had eaten. His eyes widened at\n sight of me, something like a grin of triumph flashed through his\n beard. Then he bowed, supple and humble, his palms together.\n\n\n \"It is indeed Yandro, our great chief,\" he mumbled. Then he turned and\n crossed the room. A sort of mouthpiece sprouted from the wall.\n\n\n \"I announce,\" he intoned into it. \"I announce, I, Sporr, the reader and\n fore-teller of wisdom. Yandro is with us, he awaits his partners and\n friends. Let them meet him in the audience hall.\"\n\n\n Facing me again, he motioned most respectfully toward the door to the\n hall. I moved to open it, and he followed, muttering.\n\n\n Outside stood Doriza. Her blue eyes met mine, and her lips moved to\n frame a word. Then, suddenly, she was on her knee, catching my hand and\n kissing it.",
"Doriza had no answer that time, but Sporr spoke up behind us: \"Great\n Yandro is wise as well as powerful. But the Newcomers do not want to\n help, not even to conquer. They want to obliterate us. There is nothing\n to do—not for lifetimes—but to fight them back at the two poles.\"\n\n\n We came to a main corridor. It had a line of armed guards, but no\n pedestrians or vehicles, though I thought I caught a murmur of far-off\n traffic. Doriza paused before a great portal, closed by a curtainlike\n sheet of dull metal. She spoke into a mouthpiece:\n\n\n \"Doriza, gentlewoman of the guard, conducts Yandro, the Conquering\n Stranger, to greet his lieutenants!\"\n\n\n I have said that the portal was closed by a curtainlike metal sheet;\n and like a curtain it lifted, letting us through into the auditorium.",
"\"They lie,\" I broke in, very conscious of my naked helplessness before\n her regard. \"They wanted to kill me and be rewarded for a false story\n of vigilance. I only defended myself.\"\n\n\n \"Get him on his feet,\" the young woman said, and the two guards\n obeyed. Then her eyes studied me again. \"Gods! What a mountain of a\n man!\" she exclaimed. \"Can you walk, stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Barely, with these bonds.\"\n\n\n \"Then manage to do so.\" She flung off her cloak and draped it over my\n nakedness. \"Walk along beside me. No tricks, and I promise you fair\n hearing.\""
],
[
"\"The stranger of the prophecy!\" he cried, in a voice that made us all\n jump.\nThe officer rose from behind the table. \"Are you totally mad, Sporr?\n You mystic doctors are too apt to become fuddled—\"\n\n\n \"But it is, it is!\" The graybeard flourished a thin hand at me. \"Look\n at him, you of little faith! Your mind dwells so much on material\n strength that you lose touch with the spiritual—\"\n\n\n He broke off, and wheeled on the attendant who had led him in. \"To my\n study,\" he commanded. \"On the shelf behind my desk, bring the great\n gold-bound book that is third from the right.\" Then he turned back,\n and bowed toward me. \"Surely you are Yandro, the Conquering Stranger,\"\n he said, intoning as if in formal prayer. \"Pardon these short-sighted\n ones—deign to save us from our enemies—\"",
"\"As it is, he may remember that the Conquering Stranger is foretold\n to come with no memory of anything,\" supplied the officer. \"Score one\n against you, Sporr. You should have been able to instruct me, not I\n you.\"\n\n\n The attendant reentered, with a big book in his hands. It looked\n old and well-thumbed, with dim gold traceries on its binding. Sporr\n snatched it, and turned to a brightly colored picture. He looked once,\n his beard gaped, and he dropped to his knees.\n\n\n \"Happy, happy the day,\" he jabbered, \"that I was spared to see our\n great champion come among us in the flesh, as was foretold of ancient\n time by the First Comers!\"\n\n\n Doriza and the officer crossed to his side, snatching the book. Their\n bright heads bent above it. Doriza was first to speak. \"It is very\n like,\" she half-stammered.",
"Sporr was waiting in the room where I had eaten. His eyes widened at\n sight of me, something like a grin of triumph flashed through his\n beard. Then he bowed, supple and humble, his palms together.\n\n\n \"It is indeed Yandro, our great chief,\" he mumbled. Then he turned and\n crossed the room. A sort of mouthpiece sprouted from the wall.\n\n\n \"I announce,\" he intoned into it. \"I announce, I, Sporr, the reader and\n fore-teller of wisdom. Yandro is with us, he awaits his partners and\n friends. Let them meet him in the audience hall.\"\n\n\n Facing me again, he motioned most respectfully toward the door to the\n hall. I moved to open it, and he followed, muttering.\n\n\n Outside stood Doriza. Her blue eyes met mine, and her lips moved to\n frame a word. Then, suddenly, she was on her knee, catching my hand and\n kissing it.",
"Sporr had produced something else, a little vial of dark pigment. He\n carefully anointed one of my thumbs, and pressed it to the page. All\n three gazed.\n\n\n \"The same,\" said Doriza.\n\n\n And they were all on their knees before me.\n\n\n \"Forgive me, great Yandro,\" said the officer thickly. \"I did not know.\"\n\n\n \"Get up,\" I bade them. \"I want to hear why I was first bound, and now\n worshipped.\"\nII\n\n\n They rose, but stood off respectfully. The officer spoke first. \"I am\n Rohbar, field commander of this defense position,\" he said with crisp\n respect. \"Sporr is a mystic doctor, full of godly wisdom. Doriza,\n a junior officer and chief of the guard. And you—how could you\n know?—are sent by the First Comers to save us from our enemies.\"",
"The girl Doriza spoke to the officer: \"If Sporr speaks truth, and he\n generally does, you have committed a blasphemy.\"\n\n\n The other made a little grimace. \"This may be Yandro, though I'm a\n plain soldier and follow the classics very little. The First Comers are\n souls to worship, not to study. If indeed he is Yandro,\" and he was\n most respectful, \"he will appreciate, like a good military mind, my\n caution against possible impostors.\"\n\n\n \"Who might Yandro be?\" I demanded, very uncomfortable in my bonds and\n loose draperies.\n\n\n Old Sporr almost crowed. \"You see? If he was a true imposter, he would\n come equipped with all plausible knowledge. As it is—\"",
"\"The tenth part of the wonders which concern mighty Yandro have not\n been told,\" intoned Sporr, ducking his bearded head in a bow, but\n fixing me with his wise old eyes.\n\n\n One of the group, called Council by Doriza, now moved a pace forward.\n He was the greedy-faced man, short but plump, and very conscious of\n the dignified folds of his purple robe. One carefully-tended hand\n brushed back his ginger-brown hair, then toyed with a little moustache.\n\n\n \"I am Gederr, senior of this Council,\" he purred. \"If Yandro permits, I\n will speak simply. Our hopes have been raised by Yandro's return—the\n return presaged of old by those who could see the future, and more\n recently by the death in battle of the Newcomer champion, called Barak.\"",
"We passed through another door, and I found myself in an office. A man\n in richly-embossed armor platings sat there. He had a fringe of pale\n beard, and his eyes were bluer than the gentlewoman Doriza's.\n\n\n She made a gesture of salute, hand at shoulder height, and reported the\n matter. He nodded for her to fall back to a corner.\n\n\n \"Stranger,\" he said to me, \"can you think of no better tale to tell\n than you now offer?\"\n\n\n \"I tell the truth,\" was my reply, not very gracious.\n\n\n \"You will have to prove that,\" he admonished me.",
"\"War is fought between the two strips of habitable ground. War,\n unceasing, bitter, with no quarter asked, given or expected.\n Dondromogon was found and settled long ago, by adventurers from afar.\n Now come invaders, to reap the benefits of discovery and toil.\" A\n pause. \"You find that thought unpleasant? You wish to right that\n wrong?\"\n\n\n \"Anyone would wish that,\" I replied. \"But how—\"\n\n\n \"You are going to ask how you were brought here. That is the mystery\n of the\nMasters\n.\" The voice became grand. \"Suffice it that you were\n needed, and that the time was ripe. There is a proper time, like a\n proper place, for each thing and each happening. Now, go to your\n destiny.\"\n\n\n I rose on my knees, shielding my face from the buffeting wind by\n lifting a forearm. Somewhere through the murky clouds showed a dim\n blocky silhouette, a building of sorts.",
"\"Destined—leadership—\" I began to repeat, and fell silent. I had\n need to think. The voice was telling me that I had been snatched from\n worlds away, for a specified purpose here on whatever windswept planet\n Dondromogon might be. \"Birth and beginning—destined leadership—\"\n Fantastic! And yet, for all I could say to the contrary, unvarnishedly\n true.\n\n\n \"Dondromogon?\" I mumbled. \"The name is strange to me.\"",
"I knew the language of that answer, but where it came from—above,\n beneath, or indeed within me—I could not say. I lifted a hand, and\n knuckled dust from my eyes.\n\n\n \"How did I get here?\" I demanded of the speaker.\n\n\n \"It was ordered—by the Masters of the Worlds—that you should be\n brought from your own home planet, called Earth in the System of the\n star called Sun. Do you remember Earth?\"\n\n\n And I did not know whether I remembered or not. Vague matters stirred\n deep in me, but I could not for certain say they were memories. I asked\n yet again:\n\n\n \"Who am I?\"\n\n\n The voice had a note of triumph. \"You do not know that. It is as well,\n for this will be a birth and beginning of your destined leadership on\n Dondromogon.\"",
"\"Barak!\" I repeated. \"I—I—\" And I paused. When I had to learn my own\n name, how could it be that I sensed memory of another's name?\n\n\n \"Barak was a brute—mighty, but a brute.\" Thus Gederr continued.\n \"Weapons in his hands were the instruments of fate. His hands alone\n caused fear and ruin. But it pleased our fortune-bringing stars to\n encompass his destruction.\" He grinned, and licked his full lips. \"Now,\n even as they are without their battle-leader, so we have ours.\"\n\n\n \"You honor me,\" I told him. \"Yet I still know little. It seems that I\n am expected to aid and lead and save the people of this world called\n Dondromogon. But I must know them before I can help.\"",
"Gederr turned his eyes upon the woman with the red hair, and gestured\n to her \"Tell him, Elonie.\" Then he faced me. \"Have we Yandro's\n permission to sit?\"\n\n\n \"By all means,\" I granted, a little impatiently, and sat down myself.\n The others followed suit—the Council on their range of chairs, Doriza\n on a bench near me, Sporr somewhere behind. The woman called Elonie\n remained upon her sandalled feet, great eyes the color of deep green\n water fixed upon me.",
"\"They lie,\" I broke in, very conscious of my naked helplessness before\n her regard. \"They wanted to kill me and be rewarded for a false story\n of vigilance. I only defended myself.\"\n\n\n \"Get him on his feet,\" the young woman said, and the two guards\n obeyed. Then her eyes studied me again. \"Gods! What a mountain of a\n man!\" she exclaimed. \"Can you walk, stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Barely, with these bonds.\"\n\n\n \"Then manage to do so.\" She flung off her cloak and draped it over my\n nakedness. \"Walk along beside me. No tricks, and I promise you fair\n hearing.\"",
"\"Who are you, and where are you from?\" said one of the two, a\n broad-faced middle-aged fellow. \"Don't lie any more than you can help.\"\n\n\n I felt a stirring of the hair on my neck, but kept my voice mild and\n level: \"Why should I lie? Especially as I don't know who I am, or where\n I'm from, or anything that has happened longer ago than just a moment.\n I woke up out there in the dust storm, and I managed to come here for\n shelter.\"\n\n\n \"He's a Newcomer spy,\" quoth the other. \"Let's put him under arrest.\"\n\n\n \"And leave this gate unguarded?\" demanded the other. \"Sound the\n signal,\" and he jerked his head toward a system of levers and gauges on\n the wall beside the door-jamb.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMy senses came to me slowly and somehow shyly, as if not sure of their\n way or welcome. I felt first—pressure on my brow and chest, as if I\n lay face downward; then the tug and buffet of a strong, probing wind,\n insistent but not cold, upon my naked skin. Closing my hands, I felt\n them dig into coarse dirt. I turned my face downwind and opened my\n eyes. There was little to see, so thick was the dust cloud around me.\n Words formed themselves on my thick tongue, words that must have been\n spoken by so many reviving unfortunates through the ages:\n\n\n \"Where am I?\"\n\n\n And at once there was an answer:\n\n\n \"\nYou lie upon the world Dondromogon.\n\"",
"\"I serve Yandro,\" she vowed tremulously. \"Now and forever—and happy\n that I was fated to live when he returned for the rescue of all\n Dondromogon.\"\n\n\n \"Please get up,\" I bade her, trying not to sound as embarrassed as I\n felt. \"Come with me. There is still much that I do not understand.\"\n\n\n \"I am Yandro's orderly and helper,\" she said. Rising, she ranged\n herself at my left hand. \"Will Yandro come this way? He will be awaited\n in the audience hall.\"\n\n\n It seemed to me then that the corridors were vast and mixed as a\n labyrinth, but Doriza guided me without the slightest hesitation past\n one tangled crossway after another. My questions she answered with a\n mixture of awe and brightness.",
"That spacious chamber had rows of benches, with galleries above, that\n might have seated a thousand. However, only a dozen or so were present,\n on metal chairs ranged across the stage upon which we entered. They\n were all men but two, and wore robes of black, plum-purple or red. At\n sight of me, they rose together, most respectfully. They looked at me,\n and I looked at them.\n\n\n My first thought was, that if these were people of authority and trust\n in the nation I seemed destined to save, my work was cut out for me.",
"My mind flew back to the two scrubby, venial guardsmen who had first\n welcomed me; to stuffy Rohbar, the commander; to Sporr, spry and clever\n enough, but somehow unwholesome; Doriza—no, she was not like these\n others, who may have lived too long in their earth-buried shelters. And\n Doriza now spoke to the gathering:\n\n\n \"Yandro, folk of the Council! He deigns to give you audience.\"\n\n\n \"\nYandro!\n\"\n\n\n They all spoke the name in chorus, and bowed toward me.\n\n\n Silence then, a silence which evidently I must break. I broke it:\n \"Friends, I am among you with no more memory or knowledge than an\n infant. I hear wonderful things, of which I seem to be the center. Are\n they true?\"",
"The officer faced me, with a sort of baffled respect.\n\n\n \"I still say you will understand my caution,\" he addressed me, with\n real respect and shyness this time. \"If you are Yandro himself, you can\n prove it. The prophecy even sketches a thumb-print—\" And he held the\n book toward me.\n\n\n It contained a full-page likeness, in color, of myself wrapped in a\n scarlet robe. Under this was considerable printed description, and to\n one side a thumb-print, or a drawing of one, in black.\n\n\n \"Behold,\" Doriza was saying, \"matters which even expert identification\n men take into thought. The ears in the picture are like the ears of the\n real man—\"\n\n\n \"That could be plastic surgery,\" rejoined the officer. \"Such things are\n artfully done by the Newcomers, and the red mantle he wears more easily\n assumed.\"",
"Doriza had no answer that time, but Sporr spoke up behind us: \"Great\n Yandro is wise as well as powerful. But the Newcomers do not want to\n help, not even to conquer. They want to obliterate us. There is nothing\n to do—not for lifetimes—but to fight them back at the two poles.\"\n\n\n We came to a main corridor. It had a line of armed guards, but no\n pedestrians or vehicles, though I thought I caught a murmur of far-off\n traffic. Doriza paused before a great portal, closed by a curtainlike\n sheet of dull metal. She spoke into a mouthpiece:\n\n\n \"Doriza, gentlewoman of the guard, conducts Yandro, the Conquering\n Stranger, to greet his lieutenants!\"\n\n\n I have said that the portal was closed by a curtainlike metal sheet;\n and like a curtain it lifted, letting us through into the auditorium."
],
[
"Doriza shook her head. \"That happens to be my cloak. I gave it to him\n because he was naked, and not for any treasonable masquerade. But the\n thumb-print—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, the thumb-print,\" I repeated wearily. \"By all means, study my\n thumbs, if you'll first take these bonds off of me.\"\n\n\n \"Bonds,\" mumbled old Sporr. He got creakily up from his knees and\n bustled to me. From under his robe he produced a pouch, and took out a\n pencil-sized rod. Gingerly opening the red mantle, he touched my tether\n in several places with the glowing end of the rod. The coils dropped\n away from my grateful body and limbs. I thrust out my hands.\n\n\n \"Thumb-prints?\" I offered.",
"The officer faced me, with a sort of baffled respect.\n\n\n \"I still say you will understand my caution,\" he addressed me, with\n real respect and shyness this time. \"If you are Yandro himself, you can\n prove it. The prophecy even sketches a thumb-print—\" And he held the\n book toward me.\n\n\n It contained a full-page likeness, in color, of myself wrapped in a\n scarlet robe. Under this was considerable printed description, and to\n one side a thumb-print, or a drawing of one, in black.\n\n\n \"Behold,\" Doriza was saying, \"matters which even expert identification\n men take into thought. The ears in the picture are like the ears of the\n real man—\"\n\n\n \"That could be plastic surgery,\" rejoined the officer. \"Such things are\n artfully done by the Newcomers, and the red mantle he wears more easily\n assumed.\"",
"Sporr had produced something else, a little vial of dark pigment. He\n carefully anointed one of my thumbs, and pressed it to the page. All\n three gazed.\n\n\n \"The same,\" said Doriza.\n\n\n And they were all on their knees before me.\n\n\n \"Forgive me, great Yandro,\" said the officer thickly. \"I did not know.\"\n\n\n \"Get up,\" I bade them. \"I want to hear why I was first bound, and now\n worshipped.\"\nII\n\n\n They rose, but stood off respectfully. The officer spoke first. \"I am\n Rohbar, field commander of this defense position,\" he said with crisp\n respect. \"Sporr is a mystic doctor, full of godly wisdom. Doriza,\n a junior officer and chief of the guard. And you—how could you\n know?—are sent by the First Comers to save us from our enemies.\"",
"\"As it is, he may remember that the Conquering Stranger is foretold\n to come with no memory of anything,\" supplied the officer. \"Score one\n against you, Sporr. You should have been able to instruct me, not I\n you.\"\n\n\n The attendant reentered, with a big book in his hands. It looked\n old and well-thumbed, with dim gold traceries on its binding. Sporr\n snatched it, and turned to a brightly colored picture. He looked once,\n his beard gaped, and he dropped to his knees.\n\n\n \"Happy, happy the day,\" he jabbered, \"that I was spared to see our\n great champion come among us in the flesh, as was foretold of ancient\n time by the First Comers!\"\n\n\n Doriza and the officer crossed to his side, snatching the book. Their\n bright heads bent above it. Doriza was first to speak. \"It is very\n like,\" she half-stammered.",
"\"The stranger of the prophecy!\" he cried, in a voice that made us all\n jump.\nThe officer rose from behind the table. \"Are you totally mad, Sporr?\n You mystic doctors are too apt to become fuddled—\"\n\n\n \"But it is, it is!\" The graybeard flourished a thin hand at me. \"Look\n at him, you of little faith! Your mind dwells so much on material\n strength that you lose touch with the spiritual—\"\n\n\n He broke off, and wheeled on the attendant who had led him in. \"To my\n study,\" he commanded. \"On the shelf behind my desk, bring the great\n gold-bound book that is third from the right.\" Then he turned back,\n and bowed toward me. \"Surely you are Yandro, the Conquering Stranger,\"\n he said, intoning as if in formal prayer. \"Pardon these short-sighted\n ones—deign to save us from our enemies—\"",
"We passed through another door, and I found myself in an office. A man\n in richly-embossed armor platings sat there. He had a fringe of pale\n beard, and his eyes were bluer than the gentlewoman Doriza's.\n\n\n She made a gesture of salute, hand at shoulder height, and reported the\n matter. He nodded for her to fall back to a corner.\n\n\n \"Stranger,\" he said to me, \"can you think of no better tale to tell\n than you now offer?\"\n\n\n \"I tell the truth,\" was my reply, not very gracious.\n\n\n \"You will have to prove that,\" he admonished me.",
"\"Who are you, and where are you from?\" said one of the two, a\n broad-faced middle-aged fellow. \"Don't lie any more than you can help.\"\n\n\n I felt a stirring of the hair on my neck, but kept my voice mild and\n level: \"Why should I lie? Especially as I don't know who I am, or where\n I'm from, or anything that has happened longer ago than just a moment.\n I woke up out there in the dust storm, and I managed to come here for\n shelter.\"\n\n\n \"He's a Newcomer spy,\" quoth the other. \"Let's put him under arrest.\"\n\n\n \"And leave this gate unguarded?\" demanded the other. \"Sound the\n signal,\" and he jerked his head toward a system of levers and gauges on\n the wall beside the door-jamb.",
"Sporr was waiting in the room where I had eaten. His eyes widened at\n sight of me, something like a grin of triumph flashed through his\n beard. Then he bowed, supple and humble, his palms together.\n\n\n \"It is indeed Yandro, our great chief,\" he mumbled. Then he turned and\n crossed the room. A sort of mouthpiece sprouted from the wall.\n\n\n \"I announce,\" he intoned into it. \"I announce, I, Sporr, the reader and\n fore-teller of wisdom. Yandro is with us, he awaits his partners and\n friends. Let them meet him in the audience hall.\"\n\n\n Facing me again, he motioned most respectfully toward the door to the\n hall. I moved to open it, and he followed, muttering.\n\n\n Outside stood Doriza. Her blue eyes met mine, and her lips moved to\n frame a word. Then, suddenly, she was on her knee, catching my hand and\n kissing it.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMy senses came to me slowly and somehow shyly, as if not sure of their\n way or welcome. I felt first—pressure on my brow and chest, as if I\n lay face downward; then the tug and buffet of a strong, probing wind,\n insistent but not cold, upon my naked skin. Closing my hands, I felt\n them dig into coarse dirt. I turned my face downwind and opened my\n eyes. There was little to see, so thick was the dust cloud around me.\n Words formed themselves on my thick tongue, words that must have been\n spoken by so many reviving unfortunates through the ages:\n\n\n \"Where am I?\"\n\n\n And at once there was an answer:\n\n\n \"\nYou lie upon the world Dondromogon.\n\"",
"\"I think there'll be a reward,\" was the rejoinder, and the second man's\n hand stole to the sword-weapon. With a whispering rasp it cleared from\n its scabbard. \"If he's dead, we get pay for both warning and capture—\"\n\n\n His thumb touched a button at the pommel of the hilt. The dull blade\n suddenly glowed like heated iron, and from it crackled and pulsed\n little rainbow rays.\n\n\n There was no time to think or plan or ponder. I moved in, with a\n knowing speed that surprised me as much as the two guards. Catching the\n fellow's weapon wrist, I clamped it firmly and bent it back and around.\n He whimpered and swore, and his glowing sword dropped. Its radiant\n blade almost fell on my naked foot. Before the clang of its fall was\n through echoing, I had caught it up, and set the point within inches of\n its owner's unprotected face.",
"\"What proof have I?\" I demanded. \"On this world of yours—Dondromogon,\n isn't it called?—I'm no more than an hour old. Accident or shock\n has taken my memory. Let me have a medical examination. A scientist\n probably can tell what happened to put me in such a condition.\"\n\n\n \"I am a scientist,\" offered Doriza, and came forward. Her eyes met\n mine, suddenly flickered and lowered. \"His gaze,\" she muttered.\n\n\n The officer at the table was touching a button. An attendant appeared,\n received an order, and vanished again. In a few moments two other\n men came—one a heavily armed officer of rank, the other an elderly,\n bearded fellow in a voluminous robe that enfolded him in most dignified\n manner.\n\n\n This latter man opened wide his clear old eyes at sight of me.",
"The voice spoke no more. I had not the time to wonder about it. I got\n to my feet, bent double to keep from being blown over, and staggered\n toward the promised haven.\n\n\n I reached it, groped along until I found a door. There was no latch,\n handle or entry button, and I pounded heavily on the massive panels.\n The door opened from within, and I was blown inside, to fall sprawling.\nI struck my forehead upon a floor of stone or concrete, and so was\n half-stunned, but still I could distinguish something like the sound\n of agitated voices. Then I felt myself grasped, by both shoulders,\n and drawn roughly erect. The touch restored my senses, and I wrenched\n myself violently free.",
"the neck, a belt-bag, and a handsome sword, with clips to fasten them\n in place. These things, too, I donned, and closed the glass door.\nThe light struck it at such an angle as to make it serve for a\n full-length mirror. With some curiosity I gazed at my image.",
"We went through the door by which she had entered, into a corridor\n beyond. It was lighted by small, brilliant bulbs at regular intervals.\n Beyond, it gave into several passages. She chose one of them and\n conducted me along. \"You are surely not of us,\" she commented. \"Men I\n have seen who are heavier than you, but none taller. Whence came you?\"\n\n\n I remembered the strange voice that had instructed me. \"I am from a\n far world,\" I replied. \"It is called—yes, Earth. Beyond that, I know\n nothing. Memory left me.\"\n\n\n \"The story is a strange one,\" she commented. \"And your name?\"\n\n\n \"I do not know that, either. Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"Doriza—a gentlewoman of the guard. My inspection tour brought me by\n chance to where you fought my outposts. But it is not for you to ask\n questions. Enter here.\"",
"The girl Doriza spoke to the officer: \"If Sporr speaks truth, and he\n generally does, you have committed a blasphemy.\"\n\n\n The other made a little grimace. \"This may be Yandro, though I'm a\n plain soldier and follow the classics very little. The First Comers are\n souls to worship, not to study. If indeed he is Yandro,\" and he was\n most respectful, \"he will appreciate, like a good military mind, my\n caution against possible impostors.\"\n\n\n \"Who might Yandro be?\" I demanded, very uncomfortable in my bonds and\n loose draperies.\n\n\n Old Sporr almost crowed. \"You see? If he was a true imposter, he would\n come equipped with all plausible knowledge. As it is—\"",
"We entered a new small chamber, where a table was set with dishes of\n porcelain-like plastic. Sporr held a chair for me, and waited on me\n with the utmost gingerly respect. The food was a pungent and filling\n jelly, a little bundle of transparent leaves or scraps like cellophane\n and tasting of spice, and a tumbler of pink juice. I felt refreshed and\n satisfied, and thanked Sporr, who led me on to the next room.\n\n\n \"Behold!\" he said, with a dramatic gesture. \"Your garments, even as\n they have been preserved against your coming!\"\n\n\n It was a sleeping chamber, with a cot made fast to the wall, a metal\n locker or cupboard, with a glass door through which showed the garments\n of which Sporr spoke.\n\n\n The door closed softly behind me—I was left alone.",
"Gederr turned his eyes upon the woman with the red hair, and gestured\n to her \"Tell him, Elonie.\" Then he faced me. \"Have we Yandro's\n permission to sit?\"\n\n\n \"By all means,\" I granted, a little impatiently, and sat down myself.\n The others followed suit—the Council on their range of chairs, Doriza\n on a bench near me, Sporr somewhere behind. The woman called Elonie\n remained upon her sandalled feet, great eyes the color of deep green\n water fixed upon me.",
"\"Let me out of this,\" I growled, and kicked at the man with my still\n unbound foot. He snapped a half-hitch on my ankle, and threw me\n heavily. Triumphant laughter came from both adversaries. Then:\n\n\n \"What's this?\"\nThe challenge was clear, rich, authoritative. Someone else had come,\n from a rearward door into the stone-walled vestibule where the\n encounter was taking place.",
"\"They lie,\" I broke in, very conscious of my naked helplessness before\n her regard. \"They wanted to kill me and be rewarded for a false story\n of vigilance. I only defended myself.\"\n\n\n \"Get him on his feet,\" the young woman said, and the two guards\n obeyed. Then her eyes studied me again. \"Gods! What a mountain of a\n man!\" she exclaimed. \"Can you walk, stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Barely, with these bonds.\"\n\n\n \"Then manage to do so.\" She flung off her cloak and draped it over my\n nakedness. \"Walk along beside me. No tricks, and I promise you fair\n hearing.\"",
"The close-fitting costume was rich and dark, with bright colors only\n for edgings and minor accessories. I myself—and it was as if I saw my\n body for the first time—towered rather bluffly, with great breadth\n of chest and shoulder, and legs robust enough to carry such bulk. The\n face was square but haggard, as if from some toil or pain which was now\n wiped from my recollection. That nose had been even bigger than it was\n now, but a fracture had shortened it somewhat. The eyes were deep set\n and dark and moody—small wonder!—the chin heavy, the mouth made grim\n by a scar at one corner. Black, shaggy hair hung down like brackets.\n All told, I looked like a proper person for physical labor, or even\n fierce fighting—but surely no inspirational leader or savior of a\n distressed people.\n\n\n I took the military cloak which Doriza had lent me and slung it over my\n shoulders. Turning, I clanked out on my metal-soled shoes."
],
[
"The girl Doriza spoke to the officer: \"If Sporr speaks truth, and he\n generally does, you have committed a blasphemy.\"\n\n\n The other made a little grimace. \"This may be Yandro, though I'm a\n plain soldier and follow the classics very little. The First Comers are\n souls to worship, not to study. If indeed he is Yandro,\" and he was\n most respectful, \"he will appreciate, like a good military mind, my\n caution against possible impostors.\"\n\n\n \"Who might Yandro be?\" I demanded, very uncomfortable in my bonds and\n loose draperies.\n\n\n Old Sporr almost crowed. \"You see? If he was a true imposter, he would\n come equipped with all plausible knowledge. As it is—\"",
"Sporr was waiting in the room where I had eaten. His eyes widened at\n sight of me, something like a grin of triumph flashed through his\n beard. Then he bowed, supple and humble, his palms together.\n\n\n \"It is indeed Yandro, our great chief,\" he mumbled. Then he turned and\n crossed the room. A sort of mouthpiece sprouted from the wall.\n\n\n \"I announce,\" he intoned into it. \"I announce, I, Sporr, the reader and\n fore-teller of wisdom. Yandro is with us, he awaits his partners and\n friends. Let them meet him in the audience hall.\"\n\n\n Facing me again, he motioned most respectfully toward the door to the\n hall. I moved to open it, and he followed, muttering.\n\n\n Outside stood Doriza. Her blue eyes met mine, and her lips moved to\n frame a word. Then, suddenly, she was on her knee, catching my hand and\n kissing it.",
"\"The stranger of the prophecy!\" he cried, in a voice that made us all\n jump.\nThe officer rose from behind the table. \"Are you totally mad, Sporr?\n You mystic doctors are too apt to become fuddled—\"\n\n\n \"But it is, it is!\" The graybeard flourished a thin hand at me. \"Look\n at him, you of little faith! Your mind dwells so much on material\n strength that you lose touch with the spiritual—\"\n\n\n He broke off, and wheeled on the attendant who had led him in. \"To my\n study,\" he commanded. \"On the shelf behind my desk, bring the great\n gold-bound book that is third from the right.\" Then he turned back,\n and bowed toward me. \"Surely you are Yandro, the Conquering Stranger,\"\n he said, intoning as if in formal prayer. \"Pardon these short-sighted\n ones—deign to save us from our enemies—\"",
"Sporr had produced something else, a little vial of dark pigment. He\n carefully anointed one of my thumbs, and pressed it to the page. All\n three gazed.\n\n\n \"The same,\" said Doriza.\n\n\n And they were all on their knees before me.\n\n\n \"Forgive me, great Yandro,\" said the officer thickly. \"I did not know.\"\n\n\n \"Get up,\" I bade them. \"I want to hear why I was first bound, and now\n worshipped.\"\nII\n\n\n They rose, but stood off respectfully. The officer spoke first. \"I am\n Rohbar, field commander of this defense position,\" he said with crisp\n respect. \"Sporr is a mystic doctor, full of godly wisdom. Doriza,\n a junior officer and chief of the guard. And you—how could you\n know?—are sent by the First Comers to save us from our enemies.\"",
"\"The tenth part of the wonders which concern mighty Yandro have not\n been told,\" intoned Sporr, ducking his bearded head in a bow, but\n fixing me with his wise old eyes.\n\n\n One of the group, called Council by Doriza, now moved a pace forward.\n He was the greedy-faced man, short but plump, and very conscious of\n the dignified folds of his purple robe. One carefully-tended hand\n brushed back his ginger-brown hair, then toyed with a little moustache.\n\n\n \"I am Gederr, senior of this Council,\" he purred. \"If Yandro permits, I\n will speak simply. Our hopes have been raised by Yandro's return—the\n return presaged of old by those who could see the future, and more\n recently by the death in battle of the Newcomer champion, called Barak.\"",
"Doriza had no answer that time, but Sporr spoke up behind us: \"Great\n Yandro is wise as well as powerful. But the Newcomers do not want to\n help, not even to conquer. They want to obliterate us. There is nothing\n to do—not for lifetimes—but to fight them back at the two poles.\"\n\n\n We came to a main corridor. It had a line of armed guards, but no\n pedestrians or vehicles, though I thought I caught a murmur of far-off\n traffic. Doriza paused before a great portal, closed by a curtainlike\n sheet of dull metal. She spoke into a mouthpiece:\n\n\n \"Doriza, gentlewoman of the guard, conducts Yandro, the Conquering\n Stranger, to greet his lieutenants!\"\n\n\n I have said that the portal was closed by a curtainlike metal sheet;\n and like a curtain it lifted, letting us through into the auditorium.",
"Gederr turned his eyes upon the woman with the red hair, and gestured\n to her \"Tell him, Elonie.\" Then he faced me. \"Have we Yandro's\n permission to sit?\"\n\n\n \"By all means,\" I granted, a little impatiently, and sat down myself.\n The others followed suit—the Council on their range of chairs, Doriza\n on a bench near me, Sporr somewhere behind. The woman called Elonie\n remained upon her sandalled feet, great eyes the color of deep green\n water fixed upon me.",
"My mind flew back to the two scrubby, venial guardsmen who had first\n welcomed me; to stuffy Rohbar, the commander; to Sporr, spry and clever\n enough, but somehow unwholesome; Doriza—no, she was not like these\n others, who may have lived too long in their earth-buried shelters. And\n Doriza now spoke to the gathering:\n\n\n \"Yandro, folk of the Council! He deigns to give you audience.\"\n\n\n \"\nYandro!\n\"\n\n\n They all spoke the name in chorus, and bowed toward me.\n\n\n Silence then, a silence which evidently I must break. I broke it:\n \"Friends, I am among you with no more memory or knowledge than an\n infant. I hear wonderful things, of which I seem to be the center. Are\n they true?\"",
"\"Our cities are below ground,\" he quavered. \"Whipped by winds above,\n we must scrabble in the depths for life's necessities—chemicals to\n transmute into food, to weave into clothing, to weld into tools and\n weapons—\"\n\n\n The mention of food brought to me the thought that I was hungry. I said\n as much, even as our elevator platform came to the lowest level and\n stopped.\n\n\n \"I have arranged for that,\" Sporr began, then fell silent, fingers\n combing his beard in embarrassment.\n\n\n \"Arranged food for me?\" I prompted sharply. \"As if you know I had come?\n What—\"\n\n\n \"Pardon, great Yandro,\" babbled Sporr. \"I was saying that I arranged\n food, as always, for whatever guest should come. Please follow.\"",
"\"As it is, he may remember that the Conquering Stranger is foretold\n to come with no memory of anything,\" supplied the officer. \"Score one\n against you, Sporr. You should have been able to instruct me, not I\n you.\"\n\n\n The attendant reentered, with a big book in his hands. It looked\n old and well-thumbed, with dim gold traceries on its binding. Sporr\n snatched it, and turned to a brightly colored picture. He looked once,\n his beard gaped, and he dropped to his knees.\n\n\n \"Happy, happy the day,\" he jabbered, \"that I was spared to see our\n great champion come among us in the flesh, as was foretold of ancient\n time by the First Comers!\"\n\n\n Doriza and the officer crossed to his side, snatching the book. Their\n bright heads bent above it. Doriza was first to speak. \"It is very\n like,\" she half-stammered.",
"The officer faced me, with a sort of baffled respect.\n\n\n \"I still say you will understand my caution,\" he addressed me, with\n real respect and shyness this time. \"If you are Yandro himself, you can\n prove it. The prophecy even sketches a thumb-print—\" And he held the\n book toward me.\n\n\n It contained a full-page likeness, in color, of myself wrapped in a\n scarlet robe. Under this was considerable printed description, and to\n one side a thumb-print, or a drawing of one, in black.\n\n\n \"Behold,\" Doriza was saying, \"matters which even expert identification\n men take into thought. The ears in the picture are like the ears of the\n real man—\"\n\n\n \"That could be plastic surgery,\" rejoined the officer. \"Such things are\n artfully done by the Newcomers, and the red mantle he wears more easily\n assumed.\"",
"\"I serve Yandro,\" she vowed tremulously. \"Now and forever—and happy\n that I was fated to live when he returned for the rescue of all\n Dondromogon.\"\n\n\n \"Please get up,\" I bade her, trying not to sound as embarrassed as I\n felt. \"Come with me. There is still much that I do not understand.\"\n\n\n \"I am Yandro's orderly and helper,\" she said. Rising, she ranged\n herself at my left hand. \"Will Yandro come this way? He will be awaited\n in the audience hall.\"\n\n\n It seemed to me then that the corridors were vast and mixed as a\n labyrinth, but Doriza guided me without the slightest hesitation past\n one tangled crossway after another. My questions she answered with a\n mixture of awe and brightness.",
"Doriza shook her head. \"That happens to be my cloak. I gave it to him\n because he was naked, and not for any treasonable masquerade. But the\n thumb-print—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, the thumb-print,\" I repeated wearily. \"By all means, study my\n thumbs, if you'll first take these bonds off of me.\"\n\n\n \"Bonds,\" mumbled old Sporr. He got creakily up from his knees and\n bustled to me. From under his robe he produced a pouch, and took out a\n pencil-sized rod. Gingerly opening the red mantle, he touched my tether\n in several places with the glowing end of the rod. The coils dropped\n away from my grateful body and limbs. I thrust out my hands.\n\n\n \"Thumb-prints?\" I offered.",
"\"Enemies?\" I repeated.\n\n\n \"The Newcomers,\" supplemented Doriza. \"They have taken the \"Other Side\"\n of Dondromogon, and would take our side as well. We defend ourselves\n at the poles. Now,\" and her voice rang joyously, \"you will lead us to\n defeat and crush them utterly!\"\n\n\n \"Not naked like this,\" I said, and laughed. I must have sounded\n foolish, but it had its effect.\n\n\n \"Follow me, deign to follow me,\" Sporr said. \"Your clothing, your\n quarters, your destiny, all await you.\"\n\n\n We went out by the door at the rear, and Sporr respectfully gestured me\n upon a metal-plated platform. Standing beside me, he tinkered with a\n lever. We dropped smoothly away into a dark corridor, past level after\n level of light and sound.",
"We passed through another door, and I found myself in an office. A man\n in richly-embossed armor platings sat there. He had a fringe of pale\n beard, and his eyes were bluer than the gentlewoman Doriza's.\n\n\n She made a gesture of salute, hand at shoulder height, and reported the\n matter. He nodded for her to fall back to a corner.\n\n\n \"Stranger,\" he said to me, \"can you think of no better tale to tell\n than you now offer?\"\n\n\n \"I tell the truth,\" was my reply, not very gracious.\n\n\n \"You will have to prove that,\" he admonished me.",
"\"Who are you, and where are you from?\" said one of the two, a\n broad-faced middle-aged fellow. \"Don't lie any more than you can help.\"\n\n\n I felt a stirring of the hair on my neck, but kept my voice mild and\n level: \"Why should I lie? Especially as I don't know who I am, or where\n I'm from, or anything that has happened longer ago than just a moment.\n I woke up out there in the dust storm, and I managed to come here for\n shelter.\"\n\n\n \"He's a Newcomer spy,\" quoth the other. \"Let's put him under arrest.\"\n\n\n \"And leave this gate unguarded?\" demanded the other. \"Sound the\n signal,\" and he jerked his head toward a system of levers and gauges on\n the wall beside the door-jamb.",
"We went through the door by which she had entered, into a corridor\n beyond. It was lighted by small, brilliant bulbs at regular intervals.\n Beyond, it gave into several passages. She chose one of them and\n conducted me along. \"You are surely not of us,\" she commented. \"Men I\n have seen who are heavier than you, but none taller. Whence came you?\"\n\n\n I remembered the strange voice that had instructed me. \"I am from a\n far world,\" I replied. \"It is called—yes, Earth. Beyond that, I know\n nothing. Memory left me.\"\n\n\n \"The story is a strange one,\" she commented. \"And your name?\"\n\n\n \"I do not know that, either. Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"Doriza—a gentlewoman of the guard. My inspection tour brought me by\n chance to where you fought my outposts. But it is not for you to ask\n questions. Enter here.\"",
"Warrior of Two Worlds\nBy MANLY WADE WELLMAN\nHe was the man of two planets, drawn through\n\n the blackness of space to save a nation from\n\n ruthless invaders. He was Yandro, the\n\n Stranger of the Prophecy—and he found that\n\n he was destined to fight both sides.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"We entered a new small chamber, where a table was set with dishes of\n porcelain-like plastic. Sporr held a chair for me, and waited on me\n with the utmost gingerly respect. The food was a pungent and filling\n jelly, a little bundle of transparent leaves or scraps like cellophane\n and tasting of spice, and a tumbler of pink juice. I felt refreshed and\n satisfied, and thanked Sporr, who led me on to the next room.\n\n\n \"Behold!\" he said, with a dramatic gesture. \"Your garments, even as\n they have been preserved against your coming!\"\n\n\n It was a sleeping chamber, with a cot made fast to the wall, a metal\n locker or cupboard, with a glass door through which showed the garments\n of which Sporr spoke.\n\n\n The door closed softly behind me—I was left alone.",
"\"What proof have I?\" I demanded. \"On this world of yours—Dondromogon,\n isn't it called?—I'm no more than an hour old. Accident or shock\n has taken my memory. Let me have a medical examination. A scientist\n probably can tell what happened to put me in such a condition.\"\n\n\n \"I am a scientist,\" offered Doriza, and came forward. Her eyes met\n mine, suddenly flickered and lowered. \"His gaze,\" she muttered.\n\n\n The officer at the table was touching a button. An attendant appeared,\n received an order, and vanished again. In a few moments two other\n men came—one a heavily armed officer of rank, the other an elderly,\n bearded fellow in a voluminous robe that enfolded him in most dignified\n manner.\n\n\n This latter man opened wide his clear old eyes at sight of me."
],
[
"\"It is a world the size of your native one,\" came words of information.\n \"Around a star it spins, light-years away from the world of your\n birth. One face of Dondromogon ever looks to the light and heat,\n wherefore its metals run in glowing seas. The other face is ever away\n in cold darkness, with its air freezing into solid chunks. But because\n Dondromogon wavers on its axis, there are two lunes of its surface\n which from time to time shift from night to day. These are habitable.\"\n\n\n My eyes were tight shut against the dust, but they saw in imagination\n such a planet—one-half incandescent, one-half pitchy black. From pole\n to pole on opposite sides ran the two twilight zones, widest at the\n equators like the outer rind of two slices of melon. Of course, such\n areas, between the hot and cold hemispheres, would be buffeted by\n mighty gales ... the voice was to be heard again:",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMy senses came to me slowly and somehow shyly, as if not sure of their\n way or welcome. I felt first—pressure on my brow and chest, as if I\n lay face downward; then the tug and buffet of a strong, probing wind,\n insistent but not cold, upon my naked skin. Closing my hands, I felt\n them dig into coarse dirt. I turned my face downwind and opened my\n eyes. There was little to see, so thick was the dust cloud around me.\n Words formed themselves on my thick tongue, words that must have been\n spoken by so many reviving unfortunates through the ages:\n\n\n \"Where am I?\"\n\n\n And at once there was an answer:\n\n\n \"\nYou lie upon the world Dondromogon.\n\"",
"\"It is necessary that we live like this,\" she explained. \"The hot air\n of Dondromogon's sunlit face is ever rising, and the cold air from\n the dark side comes rushing under to fill the vacuum. Naturally, our\n strip of twilight country is never free of winds too high and fierce to\n fight. No crops can grow outside, no domestic animals flourish. We must\n pen ourselves away from the sky and soil, with stout walls and heavy\n sunken parapets. Our deep mines afford every element for necessities of\n life.\"\nI looked at my garments, and hers. There were various kinds of fabric,\n which I now saw plainly to be synthetic. \"The other side, where those\n you call the Newcomers dwell and fight,\" I reminded. \"Is it also\n windswept? Why can two people not join forces and face toil and nature\n together? They should fight, not each other, but the elements.\"",
"\"War is fought between the two strips of habitable ground. War,\n unceasing, bitter, with no quarter asked, given or expected.\n Dondromogon was found and settled long ago, by adventurers from afar.\n Now come invaders, to reap the benefits of discovery and toil.\" A\n pause. \"You find that thought unpleasant? You wish to right that\n wrong?\"\n\n\n \"Anyone would wish that,\" I replied. \"But how—\"\n\n\n \"You are going to ask how you were brought here. That is the mystery\n of the\nMasters\n.\" The voice became grand. \"Suffice it that you were\n needed, and that the time was ripe. There is a proper time, like a\n proper place, for each thing and each happening. Now, go to your\n destiny.\"\n\n\n I rose on my knees, shielding my face from the buffeting wind by\n lifting a forearm. Somewhere through the murky clouds showed a dim\n blocky silhouette, a building of sorts.",
"\"Barak!\" I repeated. \"I—I—\" And I paused. When I had to learn my own\n name, how could it be that I sensed memory of another's name?\n\n\n \"Barak was a brute—mighty, but a brute.\" Thus Gederr continued.\n \"Weapons in his hands were the instruments of fate. His hands alone\n caused fear and ruin. But it pleased our fortune-bringing stars to\n encompass his destruction.\" He grinned, and licked his full lips. \"Now,\n even as they are without their battle-leader, so we have ours.\"\n\n\n \"You honor me,\" I told him. \"Yet I still know little. It seems that I\n am expected to aid and lead and save the people of this world called\n Dondromogon. But I must know them before I can help.\"",
"\"I serve Yandro,\" she vowed tremulously. \"Now and forever—and happy\n that I was fated to live when he returned for the rescue of all\n Dondromogon.\"\n\n\n \"Please get up,\" I bade her, trying not to sound as embarrassed as I\n felt. \"Come with me. There is still much that I do not understand.\"\n\n\n \"I am Yandro's orderly and helper,\" she said. Rising, she ranged\n herself at my left hand. \"Will Yandro come this way? He will be awaited\n in the audience hall.\"\n\n\n It seemed to me then that the corridors were vast and mixed as a\n labyrinth, but Doriza guided me without the slightest hesitation past\n one tangled crossway after another. My questions she answered with a\n mixture of awe and brightness.",
"\"Enemies?\" I repeated.\n\n\n \"The Newcomers,\" supplemented Doriza. \"They have taken the \"Other Side\"\n of Dondromogon, and would take our side as well. We defend ourselves\n at the poles. Now,\" and her voice rang joyously, \"you will lead us to\n defeat and crush them utterly!\"\n\n\n \"Not naked like this,\" I said, and laughed. I must have sounded\n foolish, but it had its effect.\n\n\n \"Follow me, deign to follow me,\" Sporr said. \"Your clothing, your\n quarters, your destiny, all await you.\"\n\n\n We went out by the door at the rear, and Sporr respectfully gestured me\n upon a metal-plated platform. Standing beside me, he tinkered with a\n lever. We dropped smoothly away into a dark corridor, past level after\n level of light and sound.",
"What had seized me? That was my first wonder. On this strange world\n called Dondromogon, what manner of intelligent life bade defiance to\n heat and cold and storm, and built these stout structures, and now laid\n hands—were they hands indeed?—upon me? I swung around, setting my\n back to a solid wall.\n\n\n My first glance showed me that my companions were creatures like\n myself—two-legged, fair-skinned men, shorter and slighter than I, but\n clad in metal-faced garments and wearing weapons in their girdles. I\n saw that each bore a swordlike device with a curved guard, set in a\n narrow sheath as long as my arm. Each also had a shorter weapon, with\n a curved stock to fit the palm of the hand, borne snugly in a holster.\n With such arms I had a faint sense of familiarity.",
"\"Destined—leadership—\" I began to repeat, and fell silent. I had\n need to think. The voice was telling me that I had been snatched from\n worlds away, for a specified purpose here on whatever windswept planet\n Dondromogon might be. \"Birth and beginning—destined leadership—\"\n Fantastic! And yet, for all I could say to the contrary, unvarnishedly\n true.\n\n\n \"Dondromogon?\" I mumbled. \"The name is strange to me.\"",
"I knew the language of that answer, but where it came from—above,\n beneath, or indeed within me—I could not say. I lifted a hand, and\n knuckled dust from my eyes.\n\n\n \"How did I get here?\" I demanded of the speaker.\n\n\n \"It was ordered—by the Masters of the Worlds—that you should be\n brought from your own home planet, called Earth in the System of the\n star called Sun. Do you remember Earth?\"\n\n\n And I did not know whether I remembered or not. Vague matters stirred\n deep in me, but I could not for certain say they were memories. I asked\n yet again:\n\n\n \"Who am I?\"\n\n\n The voice had a note of triumph. \"You do not know that. It is as well,\n for this will be a birth and beginning of your destined leadership on\n Dondromogon.\"",
"\"What proof have I?\" I demanded. \"On this world of yours—Dondromogon,\n isn't it called?—I'm no more than an hour old. Accident or shock\n has taken my memory. Let me have a medical examination. A scientist\n probably can tell what happened to put me in such a condition.\"\n\n\n \"I am a scientist,\" offered Doriza, and came forward. Her eyes met\n mine, suddenly flickered and lowered. \"His gaze,\" she muttered.\n\n\n The officer at the table was touching a button. An attendant appeared,\n received an order, and vanished again. In a few moments two other\n men came—one a heavily armed officer of rank, the other an elderly,\n bearded fellow in a voluminous robe that enfolded him in most dignified\n manner.\n\n\n This latter man opened wide his clear old eyes at sight of me.",
"Doriza had no answer that time, but Sporr spoke up behind us: \"Great\n Yandro is wise as well as powerful. But the Newcomers do not want to\n help, not even to conquer. They want to obliterate us. There is nothing\n to do—not for lifetimes—but to fight them back at the two poles.\"\n\n\n We came to a main corridor. It had a line of armed guards, but no\n pedestrians or vehicles, though I thought I caught a murmur of far-off\n traffic. Doriza paused before a great portal, closed by a curtainlike\n sheet of dull metal. She spoke into a mouthpiece:\n\n\n \"Doriza, gentlewoman of the guard, conducts Yandro, the Conquering\n Stranger, to greet his lieutenants!\"\n\n\n I have said that the portal was closed by a curtainlike metal sheet;\n and like a curtain it lifted, letting us through into the auditorium.",
"Sporr was waiting in the room where I had eaten. His eyes widened at\n sight of me, something like a grin of triumph flashed through his\n beard. Then he bowed, supple and humble, his palms together.\n\n\n \"It is indeed Yandro, our great chief,\" he mumbled. Then he turned and\n crossed the room. A sort of mouthpiece sprouted from the wall.\n\n\n \"I announce,\" he intoned into it. \"I announce, I, Sporr, the reader and\n fore-teller of wisdom. Yandro is with us, he awaits his partners and\n friends. Let them meet him in the audience hall.\"\n\n\n Facing me again, he motioned most respectfully toward the door to the\n hall. I moved to open it, and he followed, muttering.\n\n\n Outside stood Doriza. Her blue eyes met mine, and her lips moved to\n frame a word. Then, suddenly, she was on her knee, catching my hand and\n kissing it.",
"\"The tenth part of the wonders which concern mighty Yandro have not\n been told,\" intoned Sporr, ducking his bearded head in a bow, but\n fixing me with his wise old eyes.\n\n\n One of the group, called Council by Doriza, now moved a pace forward.\n He was the greedy-faced man, short but plump, and very conscious of\n the dignified folds of his purple robe. One carefully-tended hand\n brushed back his ginger-brown hair, then toyed with a little moustache.\n\n\n \"I am Gederr, senior of this Council,\" he purred. \"If Yandro permits, I\n will speak simply. Our hopes have been raised by Yandro's return—the\n return presaged of old by those who could see the future, and more\n recently by the death in battle of the Newcomer champion, called Barak.\"",
"\"As it is, he may remember that the Conquering Stranger is foretold\n to come with no memory of anything,\" supplied the officer. \"Score one\n against you, Sporr. You should have been able to instruct me, not I\n you.\"\n\n\n The attendant reentered, with a big book in his hands. It looked\n old and well-thumbed, with dim gold traceries on its binding. Sporr\n snatched it, and turned to a brightly colored picture. He looked once,\n his beard gaped, and he dropped to his knees.\n\n\n \"Happy, happy the day,\" he jabbered, \"that I was spared to see our\n great champion come among us in the flesh, as was foretold of ancient\n time by the First Comers!\"\n\n\n Doriza and the officer crossed to his side, snatching the book. Their\n bright heads bent above it. Doriza was first to speak. \"It is very\n like,\" she half-stammered.",
"Sporr had produced something else, a little vial of dark pigment. He\n carefully anointed one of my thumbs, and pressed it to the page. All\n three gazed.\n\n\n \"The same,\" said Doriza.\n\n\n And they were all on their knees before me.\n\n\n \"Forgive me, great Yandro,\" said the officer thickly. \"I did not know.\"\n\n\n \"Get up,\" I bade them. \"I want to hear why I was first bound, and now\n worshipped.\"\nII\n\n\n They rose, but stood off respectfully. The officer spoke first. \"I am\n Rohbar, field commander of this defense position,\" he said with crisp\n respect. \"Sporr is a mystic doctor, full of godly wisdom. Doriza,\n a junior officer and chief of the guard. And you—how could you\n know?—are sent by the First Comers to save us from our enemies.\"",
"We passed through another door, and I found myself in an office. A man\n in richly-embossed armor platings sat there. He had a fringe of pale\n beard, and his eyes were bluer than the gentlewoman Doriza's.\n\n\n She made a gesture of salute, hand at shoulder height, and reported the\n matter. He nodded for her to fall back to a corner.\n\n\n \"Stranger,\" he said to me, \"can you think of no better tale to tell\n than you now offer?\"\n\n\n \"I tell the truth,\" was my reply, not very gracious.\n\n\n \"You will have to prove that,\" he admonished me.",
"The girl Doriza spoke to the officer: \"If Sporr speaks truth, and he\n generally does, you have committed a blasphemy.\"\n\n\n The other made a little grimace. \"This may be Yandro, though I'm a\n plain soldier and follow the classics very little. The First Comers are\n souls to worship, not to study. If indeed he is Yandro,\" and he was\n most respectful, \"he will appreciate, like a good military mind, my\n caution against possible impostors.\"\n\n\n \"Who might Yandro be?\" I demanded, very uncomfortable in my bonds and\n loose draperies.\n\n\n Old Sporr almost crowed. \"You see? If he was a true imposter, he would\n come equipped with all plausible knowledge. As it is—\"",
"My mind flew back to the two scrubby, venial guardsmen who had first\n welcomed me; to stuffy Rohbar, the commander; to Sporr, spry and clever\n enough, but somehow unwholesome; Doriza—no, she was not like these\n others, who may have lived too long in their earth-buried shelters. And\n Doriza now spoke to the gathering:\n\n\n \"Yandro, folk of the Council! He deigns to give you audience.\"\n\n\n \"\nYandro!\n\"\n\n\n They all spoke the name in chorus, and bowed toward me.\n\n\n Silence then, a silence which evidently I must break. I broke it:\n \"Friends, I am among you with no more memory or knowledge than an\n infant. I hear wonderful things, of which I seem to be the center. Are\n they true?\"",
"We went through the door by which she had entered, into a corridor\n beyond. It was lighted by small, brilliant bulbs at regular intervals.\n Beyond, it gave into several passages. She chose one of them and\n conducted me along. \"You are surely not of us,\" she commented. \"Men I\n have seen who are heavier than you, but none taller. Whence came you?\"\n\n\n I remembered the strange voice that had instructed me. \"I am from a\n far world,\" I replied. \"It is called—yes, Earth. Beyond that, I know\n nothing. Memory left me.\"\n\n\n \"The story is a strange one,\" she commented. \"And your name?\"\n\n\n \"I do not know that, either. Who are you?\"\n\n\n \"Doriza—a gentlewoman of the guard. My inspection tour brought me by\n chance to where you fought my outposts. But it is not for you to ask\n questions. Enter here.\""
],
[
"\"It is necessary that we live like this,\" she explained. \"The hot air\n of Dondromogon's sunlit face is ever rising, and the cold air from\n the dark side comes rushing under to fill the vacuum. Naturally, our\n strip of twilight country is never free of winds too high and fierce to\n fight. No crops can grow outside, no domestic animals flourish. We must\n pen ourselves away from the sky and soil, with stout walls and heavy\n sunken parapets. Our deep mines afford every element for necessities of\n life.\"\nI looked at my garments, and hers. There were various kinds of fabric,\n which I now saw plainly to be synthetic. \"The other side, where those\n you call the Newcomers dwell and fight,\" I reminded. \"Is it also\n windswept? Why can two people not join forces and face toil and nature\n together? They should fight, not each other, but the elements.\"",
"\"It is a world the size of your native one,\" came words of information.\n \"Around a star it spins, light-years away from the world of your\n birth. One face of Dondromogon ever looks to the light and heat,\n wherefore its metals run in glowing seas. The other face is ever away\n in cold darkness, with its air freezing into solid chunks. But because\n Dondromogon wavers on its axis, there are two lunes of its surface\n which from time to time shift from night to day. These are habitable.\"\n\n\n My eyes were tight shut against the dust, but they saw in imagination\n such a planet—one-half incandescent, one-half pitchy black. From pole\n to pole on opposite sides ran the two twilight zones, widest at the\n equators like the outer rind of two slices of melon. Of course, such\n areas, between the hot and cold hemispheres, would be buffeted by\n mighty gales ... the voice was to be heard again:",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMy senses came to me slowly and somehow shyly, as if not sure of their\n way or welcome. I felt first—pressure on my brow and chest, as if I\n lay face downward; then the tug and buffet of a strong, probing wind,\n insistent but not cold, upon my naked skin. Closing my hands, I felt\n them dig into coarse dirt. I turned my face downwind and opened my\n eyes. There was little to see, so thick was the dust cloud around me.\n Words formed themselves on my thick tongue, words that must have been\n spoken by so many reviving unfortunates through the ages:\n\n\n \"Where am I?\"\n\n\n And at once there was an answer:\n\n\n \"\nYou lie upon the world Dondromogon.\n\"",
"\"War is fought between the two strips of habitable ground. War,\n unceasing, bitter, with no quarter asked, given or expected.\n Dondromogon was found and settled long ago, by adventurers from afar.\n Now come invaders, to reap the benefits of discovery and toil.\" A\n pause. \"You find that thought unpleasant? You wish to right that\n wrong?\"\n\n\n \"Anyone would wish that,\" I replied. \"But how—\"\n\n\n \"You are going to ask how you were brought here. That is the mystery\n of the\nMasters\n.\" The voice became grand. \"Suffice it that you were\n needed, and that the time was ripe. There is a proper time, like a\n proper place, for each thing and each happening. Now, go to your\n destiny.\"\n\n\n I rose on my knees, shielding my face from the buffeting wind by\n lifting a forearm. Somewhere through the murky clouds showed a dim\n blocky silhouette, a building of sorts.",
"What had seized me? That was my first wonder. On this strange world\n called Dondromogon, what manner of intelligent life bade defiance to\n heat and cold and storm, and built these stout structures, and now laid\n hands—were they hands indeed?—upon me? I swung around, setting my\n back to a solid wall.\n\n\n My first glance showed me that my companions were creatures like\n myself—two-legged, fair-skinned men, shorter and slighter than I, but\n clad in metal-faced garments and wearing weapons in their girdles. I\n saw that each bore a swordlike device with a curved guard, set in a\n narrow sheath as long as my arm. Each also had a shorter weapon, with\n a curved stock to fit the palm of the hand, borne snugly in a holster.\n With such arms I had a faint sense of familiarity.",
"\"Barak!\" I repeated. \"I—I—\" And I paused. When I had to learn my own\n name, how could it be that I sensed memory of another's name?\n\n\n \"Barak was a brute—mighty, but a brute.\" Thus Gederr continued.\n \"Weapons in his hands were the instruments of fate. His hands alone\n caused fear and ruin. But it pleased our fortune-bringing stars to\n encompass his destruction.\" He grinned, and licked his full lips. \"Now,\n even as they are without their battle-leader, so we have ours.\"\n\n\n \"You honor me,\" I told him. \"Yet I still know little. It seems that I\n am expected to aid and lead and save the people of this world called\n Dondromogon. But I must know them before I can help.\"",
"\"Enemies?\" I repeated.\n\n\n \"The Newcomers,\" supplemented Doriza. \"They have taken the \"Other Side\"\n of Dondromogon, and would take our side as well. We defend ourselves\n at the poles. Now,\" and her voice rang joyously, \"you will lead us to\n defeat and crush them utterly!\"\n\n\n \"Not naked like this,\" I said, and laughed. I must have sounded\n foolish, but it had its effect.\n\n\n \"Follow me, deign to follow me,\" Sporr said. \"Your clothing, your\n quarters, your destiny, all await you.\"\n\n\n We went out by the door at the rear, and Sporr respectfully gestured me\n upon a metal-plated platform. Standing beside me, he tinkered with a\n lever. We dropped smoothly away into a dark corridor, past level after\n level of light and sound.",
"\"I serve Yandro,\" she vowed tremulously. \"Now and forever—and happy\n that I was fated to live when he returned for the rescue of all\n Dondromogon.\"\n\n\n \"Please get up,\" I bade her, trying not to sound as embarrassed as I\n felt. \"Come with me. There is still much that I do not understand.\"\n\n\n \"I am Yandro's orderly and helper,\" she said. Rising, she ranged\n herself at my left hand. \"Will Yandro come this way? He will be awaited\n in the audience hall.\"\n\n\n It seemed to me then that the corridors were vast and mixed as a\n labyrinth, but Doriza guided me without the slightest hesitation past\n one tangled crossway after another. My questions she answered with a\n mixture of awe and brightness.",
"I knew the language of that answer, but where it came from—above,\n beneath, or indeed within me—I could not say. I lifted a hand, and\n knuckled dust from my eyes.\n\n\n \"How did I get here?\" I demanded of the speaker.\n\n\n \"It was ordered—by the Masters of the Worlds—that you should be\n brought from your own home planet, called Earth in the System of the\n star called Sun. Do you remember Earth?\"\n\n\n And I did not know whether I remembered or not. Vague matters stirred\n deep in me, but I could not for certain say they were memories. I asked\n yet again:\n\n\n \"Who am I?\"\n\n\n The voice had a note of triumph. \"You do not know that. It is as well,\n for this will be a birth and beginning of your destined leadership on\n Dondromogon.\"",
"\"Destined—leadership—\" I began to repeat, and fell silent. I had\n need to think. The voice was telling me that I had been snatched from\n worlds away, for a specified purpose here on whatever windswept planet\n Dondromogon might be. \"Birth and beginning—destined leadership—\"\n Fantastic! And yet, for all I could say to the contrary, unvarnishedly\n true.\n\n\n \"Dondromogon?\" I mumbled. \"The name is strange to me.\"",
"\"What proof have I?\" I demanded. \"On this world of yours—Dondromogon,\n isn't it called?—I'm no more than an hour old. Accident or shock\n has taken my memory. Let me have a medical examination. A scientist\n probably can tell what happened to put me in such a condition.\"\n\n\n \"I am a scientist,\" offered Doriza, and came forward. Her eyes met\n mine, suddenly flickered and lowered. \"His gaze,\" she muttered.\n\n\n The officer at the table was touching a button. An attendant appeared,\n received an order, and vanished again. In a few moments two other\n men came—one a heavily armed officer of rank, the other an elderly,\n bearded fellow in a voluminous robe that enfolded him in most dignified\n manner.\n\n\n This latter man opened wide his clear old eyes at sight of me.",
"Sporr was waiting in the room where I had eaten. His eyes widened at\n sight of me, something like a grin of triumph flashed through his\n beard. Then he bowed, supple and humble, his palms together.\n\n\n \"It is indeed Yandro, our great chief,\" he mumbled. Then he turned and\n crossed the room. A sort of mouthpiece sprouted from the wall.\n\n\n \"I announce,\" he intoned into it. \"I announce, I, Sporr, the reader and\n fore-teller of wisdom. Yandro is with us, he awaits his partners and\n friends. Let them meet him in the audience hall.\"\n\n\n Facing me again, he motioned most respectfully toward the door to the\n hall. I moved to open it, and he followed, muttering.\n\n\n Outside stood Doriza. Her blue eyes met mine, and her lips moved to\n frame a word. Then, suddenly, she was on her knee, catching my hand and\n kissing it.",
"Doriza had no answer that time, but Sporr spoke up behind us: \"Great\n Yandro is wise as well as powerful. But the Newcomers do not want to\n help, not even to conquer. They want to obliterate us. There is nothing\n to do—not for lifetimes—but to fight them back at the two poles.\"\n\n\n We came to a main corridor. It had a line of armed guards, but no\n pedestrians or vehicles, though I thought I caught a murmur of far-off\n traffic. Doriza paused before a great portal, closed by a curtainlike\n sheet of dull metal. She spoke into a mouthpiece:\n\n\n \"Doriza, gentlewoman of the guard, conducts Yandro, the Conquering\n Stranger, to greet his lieutenants!\"\n\n\n I have said that the portal was closed by a curtainlike metal sheet;\n and like a curtain it lifted, letting us through into the auditorium.",
"\"Our cities are below ground,\" he quavered. \"Whipped by winds above,\n we must scrabble in the depths for life's necessities—chemicals to\n transmute into food, to weave into clothing, to weld into tools and\n weapons—\"\n\n\n The mention of food brought to me the thought that I was hungry. I said\n as much, even as our elevator platform came to the lowest level and\n stopped.\n\n\n \"I have arranged for that,\" Sporr began, then fell silent, fingers\n combing his beard in embarrassment.\n\n\n \"Arranged food for me?\" I prompted sharply. \"As if you know I had come?\n What—\"\n\n\n \"Pardon, great Yandro,\" babbled Sporr. \"I was saying that I arranged\n food, as always, for whatever guest should come. Please follow.\"",
"\"As it is, he may remember that the Conquering Stranger is foretold\n to come with no memory of anything,\" supplied the officer. \"Score one\n against you, Sporr. You should have been able to instruct me, not I\n you.\"\n\n\n The attendant reentered, with a big book in his hands. It looked\n old and well-thumbed, with dim gold traceries on its binding. Sporr\n snatched it, and turned to a brightly colored picture. He looked once,\n his beard gaped, and he dropped to his knees.\n\n\n \"Happy, happy the day,\" he jabbered, \"that I was spared to see our\n great champion come among us in the flesh, as was foretold of ancient\n time by the First Comers!\"\n\n\n Doriza and the officer crossed to his side, snatching the book. Their\n bright heads bent above it. Doriza was first to speak. \"It is very\n like,\" she half-stammered.",
"\"The tenth part of the wonders which concern mighty Yandro have not\n been told,\" intoned Sporr, ducking his bearded head in a bow, but\n fixing me with his wise old eyes.\n\n\n One of the group, called Council by Doriza, now moved a pace forward.\n He was the greedy-faced man, short but plump, and very conscious of\n the dignified folds of his purple robe. One carefully-tended hand\n brushed back his ginger-brown hair, then toyed with a little moustache.\n\n\n \"I am Gederr, senior of this Council,\" he purred. \"If Yandro permits, I\n will speak simply. Our hopes have been raised by Yandro's return—the\n return presaged of old by those who could see the future, and more\n recently by the death in battle of the Newcomer champion, called Barak.\"",
"\"They lie,\" I broke in, very conscious of my naked helplessness before\n her regard. \"They wanted to kill me and be rewarded for a false story\n of vigilance. I only defended myself.\"\n\n\n \"Get him on his feet,\" the young woman said, and the two guards\n obeyed. Then her eyes studied me again. \"Gods! What a mountain of a\n man!\" she exclaimed. \"Can you walk, stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Barely, with these bonds.\"\n\n\n \"Then manage to do so.\" She flung off her cloak and draped it over my\n nakedness. \"Walk along beside me. No tricks, and I promise you fair\n hearing.\"",
"My mind flew back to the two scrubby, venial guardsmen who had first\n welcomed me; to stuffy Rohbar, the commander; to Sporr, spry and clever\n enough, but somehow unwholesome; Doriza—no, she was not like these\n others, who may have lived too long in their earth-buried shelters. And\n Doriza now spoke to the gathering:\n\n\n \"Yandro, folk of the Council! He deigns to give you audience.\"\n\n\n \"\nYandro!\n\"\n\n\n They all spoke the name in chorus, and bowed toward me.\n\n\n Silence then, a silence which evidently I must break. I broke it:\n \"Friends, I am among you with no more memory or knowledge than an\n infant. I hear wonderful things, of which I seem to be the center. Are\n they true?\"",
"Sporr had produced something else, a little vial of dark pigment. He\n carefully anointed one of my thumbs, and pressed it to the page. All\n three gazed.\n\n\n \"The same,\" said Doriza.\n\n\n And they were all on their knees before me.\n\n\n \"Forgive me, great Yandro,\" said the officer thickly. \"I did not know.\"\n\n\n \"Get up,\" I bade them. \"I want to hear why I was first bound, and now\n worshipped.\"\nII\n\n\n They rose, but stood off respectfully. The officer spoke first. \"I am\n Rohbar, field commander of this defense position,\" he said with crisp\n respect. \"Sporr is a mystic doctor, full of godly wisdom. Doriza,\n a junior officer and chief of the guard. And you—how could you\n know?—are sent by the First Comers to save us from our enemies.\"",
"Gederr turned his eyes upon the woman with the red hair, and gestured\n to her \"Tell him, Elonie.\" Then he faced me. \"Have we Yandro's\n permission to sit?\"\n\n\n \"By all means,\" I granted, a little impatiently, and sat down myself.\n The others followed suit—the Council on their range of chairs, Doriza\n on a bench near me, Sporr somewhere behind. The woman called Elonie\n remained upon her sandalled feet, great eyes the color of deep green\n water fixed upon me."
],
[
"\"I serve Yandro,\" she vowed tremulously. \"Now and forever—and happy\n that I was fated to live when he returned for the rescue of all\n Dondromogon.\"\n\n\n \"Please get up,\" I bade her, trying not to sound as embarrassed as I\n felt. \"Come with me. There is still much that I do not understand.\"\n\n\n \"I am Yandro's orderly and helper,\" she said. Rising, she ranged\n herself at my left hand. \"Will Yandro come this way? He will be awaited\n in the audience hall.\"\n\n\n It seemed to me then that the corridors were vast and mixed as a\n labyrinth, but Doriza guided me without the slightest hesitation past\n one tangled crossway after another. My questions she answered with a\n mixture of awe and brightness.",
"\"The tenth part of the wonders which concern mighty Yandro have not\n been told,\" intoned Sporr, ducking his bearded head in a bow, but\n fixing me with his wise old eyes.\n\n\n One of the group, called Council by Doriza, now moved a pace forward.\n He was the greedy-faced man, short but plump, and very conscious of\n the dignified folds of his purple robe. One carefully-tended hand\n brushed back his ginger-brown hair, then toyed with a little moustache.\n\n\n \"I am Gederr, senior of this Council,\" he purred. \"If Yandro permits, I\n will speak simply. Our hopes have been raised by Yandro's return—the\n return presaged of old by those who could see the future, and more\n recently by the death in battle of the Newcomer champion, called Barak.\"",
"The girl Doriza spoke to the officer: \"If Sporr speaks truth, and he\n generally does, you have committed a blasphemy.\"\n\n\n The other made a little grimace. \"This may be Yandro, though I'm a\n plain soldier and follow the classics very little. The First Comers are\n souls to worship, not to study. If indeed he is Yandro,\" and he was\n most respectful, \"he will appreciate, like a good military mind, my\n caution against possible impostors.\"\n\n\n \"Who might Yandro be?\" I demanded, very uncomfortable in my bonds and\n loose draperies.\n\n\n Old Sporr almost crowed. \"You see? If he was a true imposter, he would\n come equipped with all plausible knowledge. As it is—\"",
"Sporr was waiting in the room where I had eaten. His eyes widened at\n sight of me, something like a grin of triumph flashed through his\n beard. Then he bowed, supple and humble, his palms together.\n\n\n \"It is indeed Yandro, our great chief,\" he mumbled. Then he turned and\n crossed the room. A sort of mouthpiece sprouted from the wall.\n\n\n \"I announce,\" he intoned into it. \"I announce, I, Sporr, the reader and\n fore-teller of wisdom. Yandro is with us, he awaits his partners and\n friends. Let them meet him in the audience hall.\"\n\n\n Facing me again, he motioned most respectfully toward the door to the\n hall. I moved to open it, and he followed, muttering.\n\n\n Outside stood Doriza. Her blue eyes met mine, and her lips moved to\n frame a word. Then, suddenly, she was on her knee, catching my hand and\n kissing it.",
"The officer faced me, with a sort of baffled respect.\n\n\n \"I still say you will understand my caution,\" he addressed me, with\n real respect and shyness this time. \"If you are Yandro himself, you can\n prove it. The prophecy even sketches a thumb-print—\" And he held the\n book toward me.\n\n\n It contained a full-page likeness, in color, of myself wrapped in a\n scarlet robe. Under this was considerable printed description, and to\n one side a thumb-print, or a drawing of one, in black.\n\n\n \"Behold,\" Doriza was saying, \"matters which even expert identification\n men take into thought. The ears in the picture are like the ears of the\n real man—\"\n\n\n \"That could be plastic surgery,\" rejoined the officer. \"Such things are\n artfully done by the Newcomers, and the red mantle he wears more easily\n assumed.\"",
"Sporr had produced something else, a little vial of dark pigment. He\n carefully anointed one of my thumbs, and pressed it to the page. All\n three gazed.\n\n\n \"The same,\" said Doriza.\n\n\n And they were all on their knees before me.\n\n\n \"Forgive me, great Yandro,\" said the officer thickly. \"I did not know.\"\n\n\n \"Get up,\" I bade them. \"I want to hear why I was first bound, and now\n worshipped.\"\nII\n\n\n They rose, but stood off respectfully. The officer spoke first. \"I am\n Rohbar, field commander of this defense position,\" he said with crisp\n respect. \"Sporr is a mystic doctor, full of godly wisdom. Doriza,\n a junior officer and chief of the guard. And you—how could you\n know?—are sent by the First Comers to save us from our enemies.\"",
"\"The stranger of the prophecy!\" he cried, in a voice that made us all\n jump.\nThe officer rose from behind the table. \"Are you totally mad, Sporr?\n You mystic doctors are too apt to become fuddled—\"\n\n\n \"But it is, it is!\" The graybeard flourished a thin hand at me. \"Look\n at him, you of little faith! Your mind dwells so much on material\n strength that you lose touch with the spiritual—\"\n\n\n He broke off, and wheeled on the attendant who had led him in. \"To my\n study,\" he commanded. \"On the shelf behind my desk, bring the great\n gold-bound book that is third from the right.\" Then he turned back,\n and bowed toward me. \"Surely you are Yandro, the Conquering Stranger,\"\n he said, intoning as if in formal prayer. \"Pardon these short-sighted\n ones—deign to save us from our enemies—\"",
"Doriza had no answer that time, but Sporr spoke up behind us: \"Great\n Yandro is wise as well as powerful. But the Newcomers do not want to\n help, not even to conquer. They want to obliterate us. There is nothing\n to do—not for lifetimes—but to fight them back at the two poles.\"\n\n\n We came to a main corridor. It had a line of armed guards, but no\n pedestrians or vehicles, though I thought I caught a murmur of far-off\n traffic. Doriza paused before a great portal, closed by a curtainlike\n sheet of dull metal. She spoke into a mouthpiece:\n\n\n \"Doriza, gentlewoman of the guard, conducts Yandro, the Conquering\n Stranger, to greet his lieutenants!\"\n\n\n I have said that the portal was closed by a curtainlike metal sheet;\n and like a curtain it lifted, letting us through into the auditorium.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMy senses came to me slowly and somehow shyly, as if not sure of their\n way or welcome. I felt first—pressure on my brow and chest, as if I\n lay face downward; then the tug and buffet of a strong, probing wind,\n insistent but not cold, upon my naked skin. Closing my hands, I felt\n them dig into coarse dirt. I turned my face downwind and opened my\n eyes. There was little to see, so thick was the dust cloud around me.\n Words formed themselves on my thick tongue, words that must have been\n spoken by so many reviving unfortunates through the ages:\n\n\n \"Where am I?\"\n\n\n And at once there was an answer:\n\n\n \"\nYou lie upon the world Dondromogon.\n\"",
"Warrior of Two Worlds\nBy MANLY WADE WELLMAN\nHe was the man of two planets, drawn through\n\n the blackness of space to save a nation from\n\n ruthless invaders. He was Yandro, the\n\n Stranger of the Prophecy—and he found that\n\n he was destined to fight both sides.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"\"Barak!\" I repeated. \"I—I—\" And I paused. When I had to learn my own\n name, how could it be that I sensed memory of another's name?\n\n\n \"Barak was a brute—mighty, but a brute.\" Thus Gederr continued.\n \"Weapons in his hands were the instruments of fate. His hands alone\n caused fear and ruin. But it pleased our fortune-bringing stars to\n encompass his destruction.\" He grinned, and licked his full lips. \"Now,\n even as they are without their battle-leader, so we have ours.\"\n\n\n \"You honor me,\" I told him. \"Yet I still know little. It seems that I\n am expected to aid and lead and save the people of this world called\n Dondromogon. But I must know them before I can help.\"",
"My mind flew back to the two scrubby, venial guardsmen who had first\n welcomed me; to stuffy Rohbar, the commander; to Sporr, spry and clever\n enough, but somehow unwholesome; Doriza—no, she was not like these\n others, who may have lived too long in their earth-buried shelters. And\n Doriza now spoke to the gathering:\n\n\n \"Yandro, folk of the Council! He deigns to give you audience.\"\n\n\n \"\nYandro!\n\"\n\n\n They all spoke the name in chorus, and bowed toward me.\n\n\n Silence then, a silence which evidently I must break. I broke it:\n \"Friends, I am among you with no more memory or knowledge than an\n infant. I hear wonderful things, of which I seem to be the center. Are\n they true?\"",
"Gederr turned his eyes upon the woman with the red hair, and gestured\n to her \"Tell him, Elonie.\" Then he faced me. \"Have we Yandro's\n permission to sit?\"\n\n\n \"By all means,\" I granted, a little impatiently, and sat down myself.\n The others followed suit—the Council on their range of chairs, Doriza\n on a bench near me, Sporr somewhere behind. The woman called Elonie\n remained upon her sandalled feet, great eyes the color of deep green\n water fixed upon me.",
"\"War is fought between the two strips of habitable ground. War,\n unceasing, bitter, with no quarter asked, given or expected.\n Dondromogon was found and settled long ago, by adventurers from afar.\n Now come invaders, to reap the benefits of discovery and toil.\" A\n pause. \"You find that thought unpleasant? You wish to right that\n wrong?\"\n\n\n \"Anyone would wish that,\" I replied. \"But how—\"\n\n\n \"You are going to ask how you were brought here. That is the mystery\n of the\nMasters\n.\" The voice became grand. \"Suffice it that you were\n needed, and that the time was ripe. There is a proper time, like a\n proper place, for each thing and each happening. Now, go to your\n destiny.\"\n\n\n I rose on my knees, shielding my face from the buffeting wind by\n lifting a forearm. Somewhere through the murky clouds showed a dim\n blocky silhouette, a building of sorts.",
"\"Destined—leadership—\" I began to repeat, and fell silent. I had\n need to think. The voice was telling me that I had been snatched from\n worlds away, for a specified purpose here on whatever windswept planet\n Dondromogon might be. \"Birth and beginning—destined leadership—\"\n Fantastic! And yet, for all I could say to the contrary, unvarnishedly\n true.\n\n\n \"Dondromogon?\" I mumbled. \"The name is strange to me.\"",
"\"Our cities are below ground,\" he quavered. \"Whipped by winds above,\n we must scrabble in the depths for life's necessities—chemicals to\n transmute into food, to weave into clothing, to weld into tools and\n weapons—\"\n\n\n The mention of food brought to me the thought that I was hungry. I said\n as much, even as our elevator platform came to the lowest level and\n stopped.\n\n\n \"I have arranged for that,\" Sporr began, then fell silent, fingers\n combing his beard in embarrassment.\n\n\n \"Arranged food for me?\" I prompted sharply. \"As if you know I had come?\n What—\"\n\n\n \"Pardon, great Yandro,\" babbled Sporr. \"I was saying that I arranged\n food, as always, for whatever guest should come. Please follow.\"",
"\"It is necessary that we live like this,\" she explained. \"The hot air\n of Dondromogon's sunlit face is ever rising, and the cold air from\n the dark side comes rushing under to fill the vacuum. Naturally, our\n strip of twilight country is never free of winds too high and fierce to\n fight. No crops can grow outside, no domestic animals flourish. We must\n pen ourselves away from the sky and soil, with stout walls and heavy\n sunken parapets. Our deep mines afford every element for necessities of\n life.\"\nI looked at my garments, and hers. There were various kinds of fabric,\n which I now saw plainly to be synthetic. \"The other side, where those\n you call the Newcomers dwell and fight,\" I reminded. \"Is it also\n windswept? Why can two people not join forces and face toil and nature\n together? They should fight, not each other, but the elements.\"",
"What had seized me? That was my first wonder. On this strange world\n called Dondromogon, what manner of intelligent life bade defiance to\n heat and cold and storm, and built these stout structures, and now laid\n hands—were they hands indeed?—upon me? I swung around, setting my\n back to a solid wall.\n\n\n My first glance showed me that my companions were creatures like\n myself—two-legged, fair-skinned men, shorter and slighter than I, but\n clad in metal-faced garments and wearing weapons in their girdles. I\n saw that each bore a swordlike device with a curved guard, set in a\n narrow sheath as long as my arm. Each also had a shorter weapon, with\n a curved stock to fit the palm of the hand, borne snugly in a holster.\n With such arms I had a faint sense of familiarity.",
"\"Enemies?\" I repeated.\n\n\n \"The Newcomers,\" supplemented Doriza. \"They have taken the \"Other Side\"\n of Dondromogon, and would take our side as well. We defend ourselves\n at the poles. Now,\" and her voice rang joyously, \"you will lead us to\n defeat and crush them utterly!\"\n\n\n \"Not naked like this,\" I said, and laughed. I must have sounded\n foolish, but it had its effect.\n\n\n \"Follow me, deign to follow me,\" Sporr said. \"Your clothing, your\n quarters, your destiny, all await you.\"\n\n\n We went out by the door at the rear, and Sporr respectfully gestured me\n upon a metal-plated platform. Standing beside me, he tinkered with a\n lever. We dropped smoothly away into a dark corridor, past level after\n level of light and sound.",
"I knew the language of that answer, but where it came from—above,\n beneath, or indeed within me—I could not say. I lifted a hand, and\n knuckled dust from my eyes.\n\n\n \"How did I get here?\" I demanded of the speaker.\n\n\n \"It was ordered—by the Masters of the Worlds—that you should be\n brought from your own home planet, called Earth in the System of the\n star called Sun. Do you remember Earth?\"\n\n\n And I did not know whether I remembered or not. Vague matters stirred\n deep in me, but I could not for certain say they were memories. I asked\n yet again:\n\n\n \"Who am I?\"\n\n\n The voice had a note of triumph. \"You do not know that. It is as well,\n for this will be a birth and beginning of your destined leadership on\n Dondromogon.\""
],
[
"Knowing that it was expected of me, I went to the locker and opened\n the door. The garments inside were old, I could see, but well kept and\n serviceable. I studied their type, and my hands, if not my mind, seemed\n familiar with them.",
"There was a kiltlike item, belted at the waist and falling to\n mid-thigh. A resilient band at the top, with a series of belt-holes,\n made it adaptable to my own body or to any other. Then came an upper\n garment, a long strip of soft, close-woven fabric that spiralled\n around the torso from hip to armpit, the end looping over the left\n shoulder and giving full play to the arms. A gold-worked fillet bound\n the brows and swept back my longish hair, knotting at the nape of the\n neck. The only fitted articles were a pair of shoes, metal-soled and\n soft-uppered, that went on well enough and ran cross-garters up to\n below the knee, like buskins. The case also held a platinum chain for",
"The close-fitting costume was rich and dark, with bright colors only\n for edgings and minor accessories. I myself—and it was as if I saw my\n body for the first time—towered rather bluffly, with great breadth\n of chest and shoulder, and legs robust enough to carry such bulk. The\n face was square but haggard, as if from some toil or pain which was now\n wiped from my recollection. That nose had been even bigger than it was\n now, but a fracture had shortened it somewhat. The eyes were deep set\n and dark and moody—small wonder!—the chin heavy, the mouth made grim\n by a scar at one corner. Black, shaggy hair hung down like brackets.\n All told, I looked like a proper person for physical labor, or even\n fierce fighting—but surely no inspirational leader or savior of a\n distressed people.\n\n\n I took the military cloak which Doriza had lent me and slung it over my\n shoulders. Turning, I clanked out on my metal-soled shoes.",
"We entered a new small chamber, where a table was set with dishes of\n porcelain-like plastic. Sporr held a chair for me, and waited on me\n with the utmost gingerly respect. The food was a pungent and filling\n jelly, a little bundle of transparent leaves or scraps like cellophane\n and tasting of spice, and a tumbler of pink juice. I felt refreshed and\n satisfied, and thanked Sporr, who led me on to the next room.\n\n\n \"Behold!\" he said, with a dramatic gesture. \"Your garments, even as\n they have been preserved against your coming!\"\n\n\n It was a sleeping chamber, with a cot made fast to the wall, a metal\n locker or cupboard, with a glass door through which showed the garments\n of which Sporr spoke.\n\n\n The door closed softly behind me—I was left alone.",
"\"Enemies?\" I repeated.\n\n\n \"The Newcomers,\" supplemented Doriza. \"They have taken the \"Other Side\"\n of Dondromogon, and would take our side as well. We defend ourselves\n at the poles. Now,\" and her voice rang joyously, \"you will lead us to\n defeat and crush them utterly!\"\n\n\n \"Not naked like this,\" I said, and laughed. I must have sounded\n foolish, but it had its effect.\n\n\n \"Follow me, deign to follow me,\" Sporr said. \"Your clothing, your\n quarters, your destiny, all await you.\"\n\n\n We went out by the door at the rear, and Sporr respectfully gestured me\n upon a metal-plated platform. Standing beside me, he tinkered with a\n lever. We dropped smoothly away into a dark corridor, past level after\n level of light and sound.",
"Doriza shook her head. \"That happens to be my cloak. I gave it to him\n because he was naked, and not for any treasonable masquerade. But the\n thumb-print—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, the thumb-print,\" I repeated wearily. \"By all means, study my\n thumbs, if you'll first take these bonds off of me.\"\n\n\n \"Bonds,\" mumbled old Sporr. He got creakily up from his knees and\n bustled to me. From under his robe he produced a pouch, and took out a\n pencil-sized rod. Gingerly opening the red mantle, he touched my tether\n in several places with the glowing end of the rod. The coils dropped\n away from my grateful body and limbs. I thrust out my hands.\n\n\n \"Thumb-prints?\" I offered.",
"the neck, a belt-bag, and a handsome sword, with clips to fasten them\n in place. These things, too, I donned, and closed the glass door.\nThe light struck it at such an angle as to make it serve for a\n full-length mirror. With some curiosity I gazed at my image.",
"The girl Doriza spoke to the officer: \"If Sporr speaks truth, and he\n generally does, you have committed a blasphemy.\"\n\n\n The other made a little grimace. \"This may be Yandro, though I'm a\n plain soldier and follow the classics very little. The First Comers are\n souls to worship, not to study. If indeed he is Yandro,\" and he was\n most respectful, \"he will appreciate, like a good military mind, my\n caution against possible impostors.\"\n\n\n \"Who might Yandro be?\" I demanded, very uncomfortable in my bonds and\n loose draperies.\n\n\n Old Sporr almost crowed. \"You see? If he was a true imposter, he would\n come equipped with all plausible knowledge. As it is—\"",
"A woman this time, not of great height, and robust but not heavy. She\n was dressed for vigorous action in dark slacks with buskins to make\n them snug around ankles and calves, a jerkin of stout material that was\n faced with metal armor plates and left bare her round, strong arms. A\n gold-worked fillet bound her tawny hair back from a rosy, bold-featured\n face—a nose that was positively regal, a mouth short and firm but not\n hard, and blue eyes that just now burned and questioned. She wore a\n holstered pistol, and a cross-belt supported several instruments of a\n kind I could not remember seeing before. A crimson cloak gave color and\n dignity to her costume, and plainly she was someone of position, for\n both the men stiffened to attention.\n\n\n \"A spy,\" one ventured. \"He pushed in, claimed he was no enemy, then\n tried to attack—\"",
"\"It is necessary that we live like this,\" she explained. \"The hot air\n of Dondromogon's sunlit face is ever rising, and the cold air from\n the dark side comes rushing under to fill the vacuum. Naturally, our\n strip of twilight country is never free of winds too high and fierce to\n fight. No crops can grow outside, no domestic animals flourish. We must\n pen ourselves away from the sky and soil, with stout walls and heavy\n sunken parapets. Our deep mines afford every element for necessities of\n life.\"\nI looked at my garments, and hers. There were various kinds of fabric,\n which I now saw plainly to be synthetic. \"The other side, where those\n you call the Newcomers dwell and fight,\" I reminded. \"Is it also\n windswept? Why can two people not join forces and face toil and nature\n together? They should fight, not each other, but the elements.\"",
"The officer faced me, with a sort of baffled respect.\n\n\n \"I still say you will understand my caution,\" he addressed me, with\n real respect and shyness this time. \"If you are Yandro himself, you can\n prove it. The prophecy even sketches a thumb-print—\" And he held the\n book toward me.\n\n\n It contained a full-page likeness, in color, of myself wrapped in a\n scarlet robe. Under this was considerable printed description, and to\n one side a thumb-print, or a drawing of one, in black.\n\n\n \"Behold,\" Doriza was saying, \"matters which even expert identification\n men take into thought. The ears in the picture are like the ears of the\n real man—\"\n\n\n \"That could be plastic surgery,\" rejoined the officer. \"Such things are\n artfully done by the Newcomers, and the red mantle he wears more easily\n assumed.\"",
"\"They lie,\" I broke in, very conscious of my naked helplessness before\n her regard. \"They wanted to kill me and be rewarded for a false story\n of vigilance. I only defended myself.\"\n\n\n \"Get him on his feet,\" the young woman said, and the two guards\n obeyed. Then her eyes studied me again. \"Gods! What a mountain of a\n man!\" she exclaimed. \"Can you walk, stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Barely, with these bonds.\"\n\n\n \"Then manage to do so.\" She flung off her cloak and draped it over my\n nakedness. \"Walk along beside me. No tricks, and I promise you fair\n hearing.\"",
"We passed through another door, and I found myself in an office. A man\n in richly-embossed armor platings sat there. He had a fringe of pale\n beard, and his eyes were bluer than the gentlewoman Doriza's.\n\n\n She made a gesture of salute, hand at shoulder height, and reported the\n matter. He nodded for her to fall back to a corner.\n\n\n \"Stranger,\" he said to me, \"can you think of no better tale to tell\n than you now offer?\"\n\n\n \"I tell the truth,\" was my reply, not very gracious.\n\n\n \"You will have to prove that,\" he admonished me.",
"\"As it is, he may remember that the Conquering Stranger is foretold\n to come with no memory of anything,\" supplied the officer. \"Score one\n against you, Sporr. You should have been able to instruct me, not I\n you.\"\n\n\n The attendant reentered, with a big book in his hands. It looked\n old and well-thumbed, with dim gold traceries on its binding. Sporr\n snatched it, and turned to a brightly colored picture. He looked once,\n his beard gaped, and he dropped to his knees.\n\n\n \"Happy, happy the day,\" he jabbered, \"that I was spared to see our\n great champion come among us in the flesh, as was foretold of ancient\n time by the First Comers!\"\n\n\n Doriza and the officer crossed to his side, snatching the book. Their\n bright heads bent above it. Doriza was first to speak. \"It is very\n like,\" she half-stammered.",
"That spacious chamber had rows of benches, with galleries above, that\n might have seated a thousand. However, only a dozen or so were present,\n on metal chairs ranged across the stage upon which we entered. They\n were all men but two, and wore robes of black, plum-purple or red. At\n sight of me, they rose together, most respectfully. They looked at me,\n and I looked at them.\n\n\n My first thought was, that if these were people of authority and trust\n in the nation I seemed destined to save, my work was cut out for me.",
"Sporr was waiting in the room where I had eaten. His eyes widened at\n sight of me, something like a grin of triumph flashed through his\n beard. Then he bowed, supple and humble, his palms together.\n\n\n \"It is indeed Yandro, our great chief,\" he mumbled. Then he turned and\n crossed the room. A sort of mouthpiece sprouted from the wall.\n\n\n \"I announce,\" he intoned into it. \"I announce, I, Sporr, the reader and\n fore-teller of wisdom. Yandro is with us, he awaits his partners and\n friends. Let them meet him in the audience hall.\"\n\n\n Facing me again, he motioned most respectfully toward the door to the\n hall. I moved to open it, and he followed, muttering.\n\n\n Outside stood Doriza. Her blue eyes met mine, and her lips moved to\n frame a word. Then, suddenly, she was on her knee, catching my hand and\n kissing it.",
"\"The stranger of the prophecy!\" he cried, in a voice that made us all\n jump.\nThe officer rose from behind the table. \"Are you totally mad, Sporr?\n You mystic doctors are too apt to become fuddled—\"\n\n\n \"But it is, it is!\" The graybeard flourished a thin hand at me. \"Look\n at him, you of little faith! Your mind dwells so much on material\n strength that you lose touch with the spiritual—\"\n\n\n He broke off, and wheeled on the attendant who had led him in. \"To my\n study,\" he commanded. \"On the shelf behind my desk, bring the great\n gold-bound book that is third from the right.\" Then he turned back,\n and bowed toward me. \"Surely you are Yandro, the Conquering Stranger,\"\n he said, intoning as if in formal prayer. \"Pardon these short-sighted\n ones—deign to save us from our enemies—\"",
"Not that they really seemed stupid—none had the look, or the\n subsequent action, of stupidity. But they were not pleasant. Their\n dozen pairs of eyes fixed me with some steadiness, but with no\n frankness anywhere. One man had a round, greedy-seeming face. Another\n was too narrow and cunning to look it. Of the women, one was nearly\n as tall as I and nobly proportioned, with hair of a red that would be\n inspiring were it not so blatantly dyed. The other was a little wisp of\n a brunette, with teeth too big for her scarlet mouth and bright eyes\n like some sort of a rodent. They all wore jewelry. Too much jewelry.",
"Gederr turned his eyes upon the woman with the red hair, and gestured\n to her \"Tell him, Elonie.\" Then he faced me. \"Have we Yandro's\n permission to sit?\"\n\n\n \"By all means,\" I granted, a little impatiently, and sat down myself.\n The others followed suit—the Council on their range of chairs, Doriza\n on a bench near me, Sporr somewhere behind. The woman called Elonie\n remained upon her sandalled feet, great eyes the color of deep green\n water fixed upon me.",
"Sporr had produced something else, a little vial of dark pigment. He\n carefully anointed one of my thumbs, and pressed it to the page. All\n three gazed.\n\n\n \"The same,\" said Doriza.\n\n\n And they were all on their knees before me.\n\n\n \"Forgive me, great Yandro,\" said the officer thickly. \"I did not know.\"\n\n\n \"Get up,\" I bade them. \"I want to hear why I was first bound, and now\n worshipped.\"\nII\n\n\n They rose, but stood off respectfully. The officer spoke first. \"I am\n Rohbar, field commander of this defense position,\" he said with crisp\n respect. \"Sporr is a mystic doctor, full of godly wisdom. Doriza,\n a junior officer and chief of the guard. And you—how could you\n know?—are sent by the First Comers to save us from our enemies.\""
]
] |
train
|
51330
|
[
"What is implied by having an \"absentee-wife look\"?",
"What motif runs through the story? Coincidences",
"What is the meaning of the title?",
"Who is the nucleus?",
"How might the card game had gone differently if Mr. Graham was not present?",
"Why are Danny and the deli owner aghast?",
"Why does Mrs. Graham leave such specific instructions for Mr. Graham?",
"What does McGill offer as a hypothesis for the odd events occurring within the story?"
] |
[
[
"It is hypermasculine",
"It is sophisticated",
"It is disheveled",
"It is malodorous"
],
[
"Antisocial behavior",
"Unfounded rage",
"Coincidence",
"Incorrect hypotheses"
],
[
"When Mr. and Mrs. Graham are apart, a major imbalance persists",
"McGill is manipulating Alec as part of a social experiment",
"Alec is at the center of all the coincidental behavior",
"Alec possesses supernatural abilities that will eventually destroy him"
],
[
"Alec",
"Mrs. Graham",
"A character never mentioned by name",
"McGill"
],
[
"Nat would have never hosted a card game in the late afternoon",
"Nat would have continued to win with straights and other rare hands",
"Nat would have lost all of his hands instead of won all of them",
"Nat would have a more random pattern of losing and winning hands"
],
[
"Alec drops his belongings from a tall height without breaking them",
"Alec breaks the top of a glass bottle and continues to drink the contents",
"Nat continues to win significant poker hands in the deli",
"Alec has the nerve to try and steal items from the deli"
],
[
"Mr. Graham cannot hear, but he is able to read",
"Mrs. Graham has the power to control Mr. Graham, but only in close proximity",
"Mrs. Graham strives to avoid more chaos than what Mr. Graham already attracts",
"Mr. Graham is physically unable to do things for himself"
],
[
"He believes that some form of life is causing the events",
"He believes that they events are merely coincidental",
"He believes that Alec has somehow defied principles of randomness and design",
"He believes that Alec is playing a deceitful trick in order to come up with an idea for his novel"
]
] |
[
3,
3,
3,
1,
4,
1,
3,
3
] |
[
0,
0,
0,
1,
0,
0,
1,
1
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[
[
"suddenly turned into a monstrosity of order!\nWhen I got home from the office, I was not so much tired as beaten\n down, but the effect is similar. I let myself into the apartment, which\n had an absentee-wife look, and took a cold shower. The present downtown\n temperature, according to the radio, was eighty-seven degrees, but\n according to my Greenwich Village thermometer, it was ninety-six. I got\n dressed and went into the living room, and wished ardently that my\n wife Molly were here to tell me why the whole place looked so woebegone.\n\n\n What do they do, I asked myself, that I have left undone? I've vacuumed\n the carpet, I've dusted and I've straightened the cushions.... Ah! The\n ashtrays. I emptied them, washed them and put them back, but still the\n place looked wife-deserted.",
"I went into our little kitchen to make a drink and reread the\n directions Molly had left, telling me how to get along by myself until\n she got back from her mother's in Oyster Bay, a matter of ten days.\n How to make coffee, how to open a can, whom to call if I took sick and\n such. My wife used to be a trained nurse and she is quite convinced\n that I cannot take a breath without her. She is right, but not for the\n reasons she supposes.\n\n\n I opened the refrigerator to get some ice and saw another notice: \"When\n you take out the Milk or Butter, Put it Right Back. And Close the Door,\n too.\"",
"It was, and I had the feeling the place was quieter—a background noise\n had stopped. It dawned on me that I no longer heard the faint hum of\n the air-conditioner over the door, and as I started to say so, I made\n a gesture toward it. My hand collided with Molly's when she tapped her\n cigarette over the ashtray, and the cigarette landed in the neighboring\n vichyssoise.\n\n\n \"Hey! What's the idea?\" snarled the sour-looking man.\n\n\n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" I said. \"It was an accident. I—\"\n\n\n \"Throwing cigarettes at people!\" the fat lady said.",
"\"All right, now, Mrs. Mac-Philip!\" one of them said. \"Leave go of my\n umbrella and we'll say no more about it!\"\n\n\n \"And so now it's Missus Mac-Philip, is it?\" said her adversary.\n\n\n The third, a younger one with her back turned to us, her umbrella also\n caught in the tangle, pulled at it in a tentative way, at which the\n other two glared at her. She turned her head away and tried to let go,\n but the handle was caught in her glove. She looked up and I saw it was\n Molly. My nurse-wife.\n\n\n \"Oh, Alec!\" she said, and managed to detach herself. \"Are you all\n right?\" Was\nI\nall right!\n\n\n \"Molly! What are you doing here?\"",
"Damn the heat, damn the pencil, damn Madison Avenue and advertising.\n My drink was gone and I went back to the kitchen and read Molly's\n notes again to see if they would be like a letter from her. I noticed\n one that I had missed, pinned to the door of the dumbwaiter: \"Garbage\n picked up at 6:30 AM so the idea is to Put it Here the Night Before. I\n love you.\" What can you do when the girl loves you?\n\n\n I made another drink and went and stared out of the living room window\n at the roof opposite. The Sun was out again and a man with a stick was\n exercising his flock of pigeons. They wheeled in a circle, hoping to be\n allowed to perch, but were not allowed to.",
"\"All right, smart guy!\" they shouted in unison, and barged ahead,\n only to collide. They backed off and threw simultaneous punches\n which met in mid-air. Then began one of the most remarkable bouts\n ever witnessed—a fight in which fist hit fist but never anything\n else, until both champions backed away undefeated, muttering identical\n excuses and threats.\nDanny appeared at that moment. His face was dripping. \"You all right,\n Mr. Graham?\" he asked. \"I don't know what's going on around here, but\n ever since I came on this afternoon, things are going crazy. Bartley!\"\n he shouted—he could succeed as a hog-caller. \"Bring those dames over\n here!\"\n\n\n Three women in a confused wrangle, with their half-open umbrellas\n intertwined, were brought across the street, which meant climbing over\n fenders. Bartley, a fine young patrolman, seemed self-conscious; the\n ladies seemed not to be.",
"The other bartender gave him a fresh shaker, but the same thing\n happened, and I saw no more because the customers sitting at the bar\n crowded around in front of him, offering advice. Our waiter came back,\n baffled, saying he'd have the drinks in a moment, and went to the\n kitchen. When he returned, he had madame's vichyssoise and some rolls,\n which he put down, and then went to the bar, where the audience had\n grown larger.\n\n\n Molly lit a cigarette and said, \"I suppose this is all part of it,\n Alec. Incidentally, it seems to be getting warmer in here.\"",
"When I picked up the receiver, the line sounded dead and I thought,\nmore\ntrouble. Then I heard a man cough and I said hello. McGill's\n voice said, \"Alec? You must have picked up the receiver just as we were\n connected. That's a damn funny coincidence.\"\n\n\n \"Not in the least,\" I said. \"Come on over here. I've got something for\n you to work on.\"\n\n\n \"Well, as a matter of fact, I was calling up to ask you and Molly—\"\n\n\n \"Molly's away for the week. Can you get over here quick? It's urgent.\"\n\n\n \"At once,\" he said, and hung up.",
"There was a faint bang and the thing disintegrated. It knocked him on\n his back, but he got right up and I realized he was not hurt. At the\n moment of the explosion—if so feeble a thing can be called one—I\n felt something sting my face and, on touching it, found blood on my\n hand. I mopped at it with my handkerchief but, though slight, the\n bleeding would not stop, so I went into a drugstore and bought some\n pink adhesive which I put on the tiny cut. When I got to the studio, I\n found that I had missed the story conference.\n\n\n During the day, by actual count, I heard the phrase \"I'm just\n spitballing\" eight times, and another Madison Avenue favorite,\n \"The whole ball of wax,\" twelve times. However, my story had been\n accepted without change because nobody had noticed my absence from the\n conference room. There you have what is known as the Advertising World,\n the Advertising game or the advertising racket, depending upon which\n rung of the ladder you have achieved.",
"\"If you want your umbrella, Mrs. Graham,\" Danny said, \"it's at the\n station house. What there's left of it, that is.\"\n\n\n Molly thanked him and there was a short pause, during which I felt\n the speculative regard of the lieutenant. I pulled out a packet of\n cigarettes, which I had opened, as always, by tearing off the top. I\n happened to have it upside down and all the cigarettes fell out. Before\n I could move my foot to obliterate what they had spelled out on the\n sidewalk, the two cops saw it. The lieutenant gave me a hard look, but\n said nothing. I quickly kicked the insulting cigarettes into the gutter.",
"\"But for Pete's sake, Molly says the calls were going on for a long\n time! I phoned you only a short time ago and it must have taken her\n nearly two hours to get here from Oyster Bay.\"\n\n\n \"Then you must have done it twice and the vibrations in the\n floor—something like that—just happened to cause the right induction\n impulses. Yes, I know how you feel,\" he said, seeing my expression.\n \"It's beginning to bear down.\"\n\n\n Molly was through telephoning and suggested going out for dinner. I was\n so pleased to see her that I'd forgotten all about being hungry.\n\n\n \"I'm in no mood to cook,\" she said. \"Let's get away from all this.\"\n\n\n McGill raised an eyebrow. \"If all this, as you call it, will let us.\"\n\n\n In the lobby, we ran into Nat, looking smug in a journalistic way.",
"While I waited, I thought I might try getting down a few paragraphs of\n my novel—perhaps something would come now. It did, but as I came to a\n point where I was about to put down the word \"agurgling,\" I decided it\n was too reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, and stopped at the letter\n \"R.\" Then I saw that I had unaccountably hit all four keys one step to\n the side of the correct ones, and tore out the page, with my face red.\n\n\n This was absolutely not my day.\n\"Well,\" McGill said, \"nothing you've told me is impossible or\n supernatural. Just very, very improbable. In fact, the odds against\n that poker game alone would lead me to suspect Nat, well as I know him.\n It's all those other things....\"\n\n\n He got up and walked over to the window and looked at the hot twilight\n while I waited. Then he turned around; he had a look of concern.",
"\"I was so worried, and when I saw all this, I didn't know what to\n think.\" She pointed to the stalled cars. \"Are you really all right?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm all right. But why....\"\n\n\n \"The Oyster Bay operator said someone kept dialing and dialing Mother's\n number and there wasn't anyone on the line, so then she had it traced\n and it came from our phone here. I kept calling up, but I only got a\n busy signal. Oh, dear, are you\nsure\nyou're all right?\"\n\n\n I put my arm around her and glanced at McGill. He had an inward look.\n Then I caught Danny's eye. It had a thoughtful, almost suspicious cast\n to it.\n\n\n \"Trouble does seem to follow you, Mr. Graham,\" was all he said.",
"When we got to the restaurant, it was crowded but cool—although it\n didn't stay cool for long. We sat down at a side table near the door\n and ordered Tom Collinses as we looked at the menu. Sitting at the\n next table were a fat lady, wearing a very long, brilliant green\n evening gown, and a dried-up sour-looking man in a tux. When the waiter\n returned, they preempted him and began ordering dinner fussily: cold\n cuts for the man, and vichyssoise, lobster salad and strawberry parfait\n for the fat lady.",
"The sight of this threw another driver into a skid, and when he and\n the taxi had stopped sliding around, they were face to face, arranged\n crosswise to the street. This gave them exactly no room to move either\n forward or backward, for the car had its back to a hydrant and the taxi\n to a lamp.\n\n\n Although rather narrow, this is a two-way street, and in no time at\n all, traffic was stacked up from both directions as far as the avenues.\n Everyone was honking his horn.\n\n\n Danny was furious—more so when he tried to put through a call to his\n station house from the box opposite.\n\n\n It was out of order.\nUpstairs, the wind was blowing into the apartment and I closed the\n windows, mainly to shut out the tumult and the shouting. Nat had\n brightened up considerably.",
"\"I really didn't mean to,\" I began again, getting up. There must have\n been a hole in the edge of their tablecloth which one of my cuff\n buttons caught in, because as I stepped out from between the closely\n set tables, I pulled everything—tablecloth, silver, water glasses,\n ashtrays and the vichyssoise-à-la-nicotine—onto the floor.\n\n\n The fat lady surged from the banquette and slapped me meatily. The man\n licked his thumb and danced as boxers are popularly supposed to do. The\n owner of the place, a man with thick black eyebrows, hustled toward us\n with a determined manner. I tried to explain what had happened, but I\n was outshouted, and the owner frowned darkly.",
"\"Not quite. It has a center. Alec is the center.\"\nMolly looked at me with a curious expression for a moment. \"Do you\nfeel\nall right, darling?\" she asked me. I nodded brightly. \"You'll\n think this silly of me,\" she went on to McGill, \"but why isn't it\n something like an overactive poltergeist?\"\n\n\n \"Pure concept,\" he said. \"No genuine evidence.\"\n\n\n \"Magnetism?\"",
"We put on our hats and went down to the street. From either end, we\n could hear wrecking trucks towing away the stalled cars. There were,\n by this time, a number of harassed cops directing the maneuver and we\n heard one of them say to Danny, \"I don't know what the hell's going\n on around here. Every goddam car's got something the matter with it.\n They can't none of them back out for one reason or another. Never seen\n anything like it.\"\n\n\n Near us, two pedestrians were doing a curious little two-step as they\n tried to pass one another; as soon as one of them moved aside to let\n the other pass, the other would move to the same side. They both had\n embarrassed grins on their faces, but before long their grins were\n replaced by looks of suspicion and then determination.",
"Intimidated, I took my drink into the living room and sat down in\n front of the typewriter. As I stared at the novel that was to liberate\n me from Madison Avenue, I noticed a mistake and picked up a pencil.\n When I put it down, it rolled off the desk, and with my eyes on the\n manuscript, I groped under the chair for it. Then I looked down. The\n pencil was standing on its end.\nThere, I thought to myself, is that one chance in a million we hear\n about, and picked up the pencil. I turned back to my novel and drank\n some of the highball in hopes of inspiration and surcease from the\n muggy heat, but nothing came. I went back and read the whole chapter\n to try to get a forward momentum, but came to a dead stop at the last\n sentence.",
"\"I'll stay for one more drink and then I'm due at the office,\" he said.\n \"You know, I think this would make an item for the paper.\" He grinned\n and nodded toward the pandemonium.\n\n\n When he was gone, I noticed it was getting dark and turned on the desk\n lamp. Then I saw the curtains. They were all tied in knots, except\n one. That was tied in three knots.\n\n\n All\nright\n, I told myself, it was the wind. But I felt the time had\n come for me to get expert advice, so I went to the phone to call\n McGill. McGill is an assistant professor of mathematics at a university\n uptown and lives near us. He is highly imaginative, but we believe he\n knows everything."
],
[
"\"Do you mean,\" I asked in some confusion, \"that some form of life is\n controlling the coins and—the other things?\"\nHe shook his head. \"No. All I mean is that improbable things usually\n have improbable explanations. When I see a natural law being broken,\n I don't say to myself, 'Here's a miracle.' I revise my version of the\n book of rules. Something—I don't know what—is going on, and it seems\n to involve probability, and it seems to center around you. Were you\n still in that building when the elevators stuck? Or near it?\"\n\n\n \"I guess I must have been. It happened just after I left.\"\n\n\n \"Hm. You're the center, all right. But why?\"\n\n\n \"Center of what?\" I asked. \"I feel as though I were the center of an\n electrical storm. Something has it in for me!\"",
"At the delicatessen on the corner, the man gave me three bottles in\n what must have been a wet bag, because as he handed them to me over the\n top of the cold-meat display, the bottom gave and they fell onto the\n tile floor. None of them broke, although the fall must have been from\n at least five feet. Nat was too wound up in his thoughts to notice and\n I was getting used to miracles. We left the proprietor with his mouth\n open and met Danny, the cop, looking in at the door, also with his\n mouth open.\nOn the sidewalk, a man walking in front of Nat stooped suddenly to tie\n his shoe and Nat, to avoid bumping him, stepped off the curb and a taxi\n swerved to avoid Nat. The street was still wet and the taxi skidded,",
"The subway gave a repeat performance going home, and as I got to the\n apartment house we live in, the cop on the afternoon beat was standing\n there talking to the doorman.\n\n\n He said, \"Hello, Mr. Graham. I guess you must have just have missed it\n at your office building.\" I looked blank and he explained, \"We just\n heard it a little while ago: all six elevators in your building jammed\n at the same time. Sounds crazy. I guess you just missed it.\"\n\n\n Anything can happen in advertising, I thought. \"That's right, Danny, I\n just missed it,\" I said, and went on in.\n\n\n Psychiatry tells us that some people are accident-prone; I, on the\n other hand, seemed recently to be coincidence-prone, fluke-happy, and\n except for the alarm clock, I'd had no control over what had been going\n on.",
"\"I should say it was made of the motions. There's a similar idea about\n the atom. Another thing that's like a crystal is that it appears to\n be forming around a nucleus not of its own material—the way a speck\n of sand thrown into a supersaturated solution becomes the nucleus of\n crystallization.\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like the pearl in an oyster,\" Molly said, and gave me an\n impertinent look.\n\n\n \"Why,\" I asked McGill, \"did you say the coins couldn't have the same\n date? I mean apart from the off chance I got them that way.\"\n\n\n \"Because I don't think this thing got going before today and\n everything that's happened can all be described as improbable motions\n here and now. The dates were already there, and to change them would\n require retroactive action, reversing time. That's out, in my book.\n That telephone now—\"",
"While I waited, I thought I might try getting down a few paragraphs of\n my novel—perhaps something would come now. It did, but as I came to a\n point where I was about to put down the word \"agurgling,\" I decided it\n was too reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, and stopped at the letter\n \"R.\" Then I saw that I had unaccountably hit all four keys one step to\n the side of the correct ones, and tore out the page, with my face red.\n\n\n This was absolutely not my day.\n\"Well,\" McGill said, \"nothing you've told me is impossible or\n supernatural. Just very, very improbable. In fact, the odds against\n that poker game alone would lead me to suspect Nat, well as I know him.\n It's all those other things....\"\n\n\n He got up and walked over to the window and looked at the hot twilight\n while I waited. Then he turned around; he had a look of concern.",
"When I picked up the receiver, the line sounded dead and I thought,\nmore\ntrouble. Then I heard a man cough and I said hello. McGill's\n voice said, \"Alec? You must have picked up the receiver just as we were\n connected. That's a damn funny coincidence.\"\n\n\n \"Not in the least,\" I said. \"Come on over here. I've got something for\n you to work on.\"\n\n\n \"Well, as a matter of fact, I was calling up to ask you and Molly—\"\n\n\n \"Molly's away for the week. Can you get over here quick? It's urgent.\"\n\n\n \"At once,\" he said, and hung up.",
"\"All right, smart guy!\" they shouted in unison, and barged ahead,\n only to collide. They backed off and threw simultaneous punches\n which met in mid-air. Then began one of the most remarkable bouts\n ever witnessed—a fight in which fist hit fist but never anything\n else, until both champions backed away undefeated, muttering identical\n excuses and threats.\nDanny appeared at that moment. His face was dripping. \"You all right,\n Mr. Graham?\" he asked. \"I don't know what's going on around here, but\n ever since I came on this afternoon, things are going crazy. Bartley!\"\n he shouted—he could succeed as a hog-caller. \"Bring those dames over\n here!\"\n\n\n Three women in a confused wrangle, with their half-open umbrellas\n intertwined, were brought across the street, which meant climbing over\n fenders. Bartley, a fine young patrolman, seemed self-conscious; the\n ladies seemed not to be.",
"\"Never seen anything to equal it,\" he said. \"Wouldn't have believed\n it. Those guys\ndidn't\nbelieve it. Every round normal, nothing\n unusual about the hands—three of a kind, a low straight, that sort\n of thing and one guy got queens over tens, until it gets to be\nmy\ndeal. Brother! Straight flush to the king—every time! And each time,\n somebody else has four aces....\"\n\n\n He started to sweat again, so I got up to fix him another drink. There\n was one quart of club soda left, but when I tried to open it, the top\n broke and glass chips got into the bottle.\n\n\n \"I'll have to go down for more soda,\" I said.\n\n\n \"I'll come, too. I need air.\"",
"\"I'll stay for one more drink and then I'm due at the office,\" he said.\n \"You know, I think this would make an item for the paper.\" He grinned\n and nodded toward the pandemonium.\n\n\n When he was gone, I noticed it was getting dark and turned on the desk\n lamp. Then I saw the curtains. They were all tied in knots, except\n one. That was tied in three knots.\n\n\n All\nright\n, I told myself, it was the wind. But I felt the time had\n come for me to get expert advice, so I went to the phone to call\n McGill. McGill is an assistant professor of mathematics at a university\n uptown and lives near us. He is highly imaginative, but we believe he\n knows everything.",
"\"Alec, you're a reasonable guy, so I don't think you'll take offense at\n what I'm going to say. What you have told me is so impossibly unlikely,\n and the odds against it so astronomical, that I must take the view that\n you're either stringing me or you're subject to a delusion.\" I started\n to get up and expostulate, but he motioned me back. \"I know, but don't\n you see that that is far more likely than....\" He stopped and shook\n his head. Then he brightened. \"I have an idea. Maybe we can have a\n demonstration.\"\n\n\n He thought for a tense minute and snapped his fingers. \"Have you any\n change on you?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes,\" I said. \"Quite a bit.\" I reached into my pocket. There\n must have been nearly two dollars in silver and pennies. \"Do you think\n they'll each have the same date, perhaps?\"",
"It was, and I had the feeling the place was quieter—a background noise\n had stopped. It dawned on me that I no longer heard the faint hum of\n the air-conditioner over the door, and as I started to say so, I made\n a gesture toward it. My hand collided with Molly's when she tapped her\n cigarette over the ashtray, and the cigarette landed in the neighboring\n vichyssoise.\n\n\n \"Hey! What's the idea?\" snarled the sour-looking man.\n\n\n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" I said. \"It was an accident. I—\"\n\n\n \"Throwing cigarettes at people!\" the fat lady said.",
"\"Well,\" I said, \"what more do you want?\"\n\n\n \"Great Scott,\" he said, and sat down. \"I suppose you know that\n there are two great apparently opposite principles governing the\n Universe—random and design. The sands on the beach are an example\n of random distribution and life is an example of design. The motions\n of the particles of a gas are what we call random, but there are so\n many of them, we treat them statistically and derive the Second Law of\n Thermodynamics—quite reliable. It isn't theoretically hard-and-fast;\n it's just a matter of extreme probability. Now life, on the other\n hand, seems not to depend on probability at all; actually, it goes\n against it. Or you might say it is certainly not an accidental\n manifestation.\"",
"Pigeons fly as a rule in formation and turn simultaneously, so that\n their wings all catch the sunlight at the same time. I was thinking\n about this decorative fact when I saw that as they were making a turn,\n they seemed to bunch up together. By some curious chance, they all\n wanted the same place in the sky to turn in, and several collided and\n fell.\n\n\n The man was as surprised as I and went to one of the dazed birds and\n picked it up. He stood there shaking his head from side to side,\n stroking its feathers.\n\n\n My speculations about this peculiar aerial traffic accident were\n interrupted by loud voices in the hallway. Since our building is\n usually very well behaved, I was astonished to hear what sounded like\n an incipient free-for-all, and among the angry voices I recognized that\n of my neighbor, Nat, a very quiet guy who works on a newspaper and has\n never, to my knowledge, given wild parties, particularly in the late\n afternoon.",
"McGill grinned. \"Don't be superstitious. And especially don't be\n anthropomorphic.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if it's the opposite of random, it's got to be a form of life.\"\n\n\n \"On what basis? All we know for certain is that random motions are\n being rearranged. A crystal, for example, is not life, but it's a\n non-random arrangement of particles.... I wonder.\" He had a faraway,\n frowning look.\n\n\n I was beginning to feel hungry and the drinks had worn off.\n\n\n \"Let's go out and eat,\" I said, \"There's not a damn thing in the\n kitchen and I'm not allowed to cook. Only eggs and coffee.\"",
"\"Did you accumulate all that change today?\"\n\n\n \"No. During the week.\"\n\n\n He shook his head. \"In that case, no. Discounting the fact that you\n could have prearranged it, if my dim provisional theory is right, that\n would be\nactually\nimpossible. It would involve time-reversal. I'll\n tell you about it later. No, just throw down the change. Let's see if\n they all come up heads.\"\n\n\n I moved away from the carpet and tossed the handful of coins onto the\n floor. They clattered and bounced—and bounced together—and stacked\n themselves into a neat pile.\n\n\n I looked at McGill. His eyes were narrowed. Without a word, he took a\n handful of coins from his own pocket and threw them.\n\n\n These coins didn't stack. They just fell into an exactly straight line,\n the adjacent ones touching.",
"The sight of this threw another driver into a skid, and when he and\n the taxi had stopped sliding around, they were face to face, arranged\n crosswise to the street. This gave them exactly no room to move either\n forward or backward, for the car had its back to a hydrant and the taxi\n to a lamp.\n\n\n Although rather narrow, this is a two-way street, and in no time at\n all, traffic was stacked up from both directions as far as the avenues.\n Everyone was honking his horn.\n\n\n Danny was furious—more so when he tried to put through a call to his\n station house from the box opposite.\n\n\n It was out of order.\nUpstairs, the wind was blowing into the apartment and I closed the\n windows, mainly to shut out the tumult and the shouting. Nat had\n brightened up considerably.",
"There was a faint bang and the thing disintegrated. It knocked him on\n his back, but he got right up and I realized he was not hurt. At the\n moment of the explosion—if so feeble a thing can be called one—I\n felt something sting my face and, on touching it, found blood on my\n hand. I mopped at it with my handkerchief but, though slight, the\n bleeding would not stop, so I went into a drugstore and bought some\n pink adhesive which I put on the tiny cut. When I got to the studio, I\n found that I had missed the story conference.\n\n\n During the day, by actual count, I heard the phrase \"I'm just\n spitballing\" eight times, and another Madison Avenue favorite,\n \"The whole ball of wax,\" twelve times. However, my story had been\n accepted without change because nobody had noticed my absence from the\n conference room. There you have what is known as the Advertising World,\n the Advertising game or the advertising racket, depending upon which\n rung of the ladder you have achieved.",
"The other bartender gave him a fresh shaker, but the same thing\n happened, and I saw no more because the customers sitting at the bar\n crowded around in front of him, offering advice. Our waiter came back,\n baffled, saying he'd have the drinks in a moment, and went to the\n kitchen. When he returned, he had madame's vichyssoise and some rolls,\n which he put down, and then went to the bar, where the audience had\n grown larger.\n\n\n Molly lit a cigarette and said, \"I suppose this is all part of it,\n Alec. Incidentally, it seems to be getting warmer in here.\"",
"When we got upstairs, I turned to McGill. \"Explain to Molly,\" I said.\n \"And incidentally to me. I'm not properly briefed yet.\"\n\n\n He did so, and when he got to the summing up, I had the feeling she was\n a jump ahead of him.\n\n\n \"In other words, you think it's something organic?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" McGill said, \"I'm trying to think of anything else it might be.\n I'm not doing so well,\" he confessed.\n\n\n \"But so far as I can see,\" Molly answered, \"it's mere probability, and\n without any over-all pattern.\"",
"Damn the heat, damn the pencil, damn Madison Avenue and advertising.\n My drink was gone and I went back to the kitchen and read Molly's\n notes again to see if they would be like a letter from her. I noticed\n one that I had missed, pinned to the door of the dumbwaiter: \"Garbage\n picked up at 6:30 AM so the idea is to Put it Here the Night Before. I\n love you.\" What can you do when the girl loves you?\n\n\n I made another drink and went and stared out of the living room window\n at the roof opposite. The Sun was out again and a man with a stick was\n exercising his flock of pigeons. They wheeled in a circle, hoping to be\n allowed to perch, but were not allowed to."
],
[
"Damn the heat, damn the pencil, damn Madison Avenue and advertising.\n My drink was gone and I went back to the kitchen and read Molly's\n notes again to see if they would be like a letter from her. I noticed\n one that I had missed, pinned to the door of the dumbwaiter: \"Garbage\n picked up at 6:30 AM so the idea is to Put it Here the Night Before. I\n love you.\" What can you do when the girl loves you?\n\n\n I made another drink and went and stared out of the living room window\n at the roof opposite. The Sun was out again and a man with a stick was\n exercising his flock of pigeons. They wheeled in a circle, hoping to be\n allowed to perch, but were not allowed to.",
"\"All right, smart guy!\" they shouted in unison, and barged ahead,\n only to collide. They backed off and threw simultaneous punches\n which met in mid-air. Then began one of the most remarkable bouts\n ever witnessed—a fight in which fist hit fist but never anything\n else, until both champions backed away undefeated, muttering identical\n excuses and threats.\nDanny appeared at that moment. His face was dripping. \"You all right,\n Mr. Graham?\" he asked. \"I don't know what's going on around here, but\n ever since I came on this afternoon, things are going crazy. Bartley!\"\n he shouted—he could succeed as a hog-caller. \"Bring those dames over\n here!\"\n\n\n Three women in a confused wrangle, with their half-open umbrellas\n intertwined, were brought across the street, which meant climbing over\n fenders. Bartley, a fine young patrolman, seemed self-conscious; the\n ladies seemed not to be.",
"There was a faint bang and the thing disintegrated. It knocked him on\n his back, but he got right up and I realized he was not hurt. At the\n moment of the explosion—if so feeble a thing can be called one—I\n felt something sting my face and, on touching it, found blood on my\n hand. I mopped at it with my handkerchief but, though slight, the\n bleeding would not stop, so I went into a drugstore and bought some\n pink adhesive which I put on the tiny cut. When I got to the studio, I\n found that I had missed the story conference.\n\n\n During the day, by actual count, I heard the phrase \"I'm just\n spitballing\" eight times, and another Madison Avenue favorite,\n \"The whole ball of wax,\" twelve times. However, my story had been\n accepted without change because nobody had noticed my absence from the\n conference room. There you have what is known as the Advertising World,\n the Advertising game or the advertising racket, depending upon which\n rung of the ladder you have achieved.",
"\"Do you mean,\" I asked in some confusion, \"that some form of life is\n controlling the coins and—the other things?\"\nHe shook his head. \"No. All I mean is that improbable things usually\n have improbable explanations. When I see a natural law being broken,\n I don't say to myself, 'Here's a miracle.' I revise my version of the\n book of rules. Something—I don't know what—is going on, and it seems\n to involve probability, and it seems to center around you. Were you\n still in that building when the elevators stuck? Or near it?\"\n\n\n \"I guess I must have been. It happened just after I left.\"\n\n\n \"Hm. You're the center, all right. But why?\"\n\n\n \"Center of what?\" I asked. \"I feel as though I were the center of an\n electrical storm. Something has it in for me!\"",
"It was, and I had the feeling the place was quieter—a background noise\n had stopped. It dawned on me that I no longer heard the faint hum of\n the air-conditioner over the door, and as I started to say so, I made\n a gesture toward it. My hand collided with Molly's when she tapped her\n cigarette over the ashtray, and the cigarette landed in the neighboring\n vichyssoise.\n\n\n \"Hey! What's the idea?\" snarled the sour-looking man.\n\n\n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" I said. \"It was an accident. I—\"\n\n\n \"Throwing cigarettes at people!\" the fat lady said.",
"suddenly turned into a monstrosity of order!\nWhen I got home from the office, I was not so much tired as beaten\n down, but the effect is similar. I let myself into the apartment, which\n had an absentee-wife look, and took a cold shower. The present downtown\n temperature, according to the radio, was eighty-seven degrees, but\n according to my Greenwich Village thermometer, it was ninety-six. I got\n dressed and went into the living room, and wished ardently that my\n wife Molly were here to tell me why the whole place looked so woebegone.\n\n\n What do they do, I asked myself, that I have left undone? I've vacuumed\n the carpet, I've dusted and I've straightened the cushions.... Ah! The\n ashtrays. I emptied them, washed them and put them back, but still the\n place looked wife-deserted.",
"Pigeons fly as a rule in formation and turn simultaneously, so that\n their wings all catch the sunlight at the same time. I was thinking\n about this decorative fact when I saw that as they were making a turn,\n they seemed to bunch up together. By some curious chance, they all\n wanted the same place in the sky to turn in, and several collided and\n fell.\n\n\n The man was as surprised as I and went to one of the dazed birds and\n picked it up. He stood there shaking his head from side to side,\n stroking its feathers.\n\n\n My speculations about this peculiar aerial traffic accident were\n interrupted by loud voices in the hallway. Since our building is\n usually very well behaved, I was astonished to hear what sounded like\n an incipient free-for-all, and among the angry voices I recognized that\n of my neighbor, Nat, a very quiet guy who works on a newspaper and has\n never, to my knowledge, given wild parties, particularly in the late\n afternoon.",
"\"I really didn't mean to,\" I began again, getting up. There must have\n been a hole in the edge of their tablecloth which one of my cuff\n buttons caught in, because as I stepped out from between the closely\n set tables, I pulled everything—tablecloth, silver, water glasses,\n ashtrays and the vichyssoise-à-la-nicotine—onto the floor.\n\n\n The fat lady surged from the banquette and slapped me meatily. The man\n licked his thumb and danced as boxers are popularly supposed to do. The\n owner of the place, a man with thick black eyebrows, hustled toward us\n with a determined manner. I tried to explain what had happened, but I\n was outshouted, and the owner frowned darkly.",
"\"If you want your umbrella, Mrs. Graham,\" Danny said, \"it's at the\n station house. What there's left of it, that is.\"\n\n\n Molly thanked him and there was a short pause, during which I felt\n the speculative regard of the lieutenant. I pulled out a packet of\n cigarettes, which I had opened, as always, by tearing off the top. I\n happened to have it upside down and all the cigarettes fell out. Before\n I could move my foot to obliterate what they had spelled out on the\n sidewalk, the two cops saw it. The lieutenant gave me a hard look, but\n said nothing. I quickly kicked the insulting cigarettes into the gutter.",
"I went into our little kitchen to make a drink and reread the\n directions Molly had left, telling me how to get along by myself until\n she got back from her mother's in Oyster Bay, a matter of ten days.\n How to make coffee, how to open a can, whom to call if I took sick and\n such. My wife used to be a trained nurse and she is quite convinced\n that I cannot take a breath without her. She is right, but not for the\n reasons she supposes.\n\n\n I opened the refrigerator to get some ice and saw another notice: \"When\n you take out the Milk or Butter, Put it Right Back. And Close the Door,\n too.\"",
"At the delicatessen on the corner, the man gave me three bottles in\n what must have been a wet bag, because as he handed them to me over the\n top of the cold-meat display, the bottom gave and they fell onto the\n tile floor. None of them broke, although the fall must have been from\n at least five feet. Nat was too wound up in his thoughts to notice and\n I was getting used to miracles. We left the proprietor with his mouth\n open and met Danny, the cop, looking in at the door, also with his\n mouth open.\nOn the sidewalk, a man walking in front of Nat stooped suddenly to tie\n his shoe and Nat, to avoid bumping him, stepped off the curb and a taxi\n swerved to avoid Nat. The street was still wet and the taxi skidded,",
"\"I'll stay for one more drink and then I'm due at the office,\" he said.\n \"You know, I think this would make an item for the paper.\" He grinned\n and nodded toward the pandemonium.\n\n\n When he was gone, I noticed it was getting dark and turned on the desk\n lamp. Then I saw the curtains. They were all tied in knots, except\n one. That was tied in three knots.\n\n\n All\nright\n, I told myself, it was the wind. But I felt the time had\n come for me to get expert advice, so I went to the phone to call\n McGill. McGill is an assistant professor of mathematics at a university\n uptown and lives near us. He is highly imaginative, but we believe he\n knows everything.",
"If possible, it was raining still harder. I opened my newspaper over\n my hat and ran for the subway: three blocks. Whizzing traffic held\n me up at each crossing and I was soaked when I reached the platform,\n just in time to miss the local. After an abnormal delay, I got one\n which exactly missed the express at Fourteenth Street. The same thing\n happened at both ends of the crosstown shuttle, but I found the rain\n had stopped when I got out at Fifty-first and Lexington.\nAs I walked across to Madison Avenue, I passed a big excavation where\n they were getting ready to put up a new office building. There was the\n usual crowd of buffs watching the digging machines and, in particular,\n a man with a pneumatic drill who was breaking up some hard-packed clay.",
"\"Not quite. It has a center. Alec is the center.\"\nMolly looked at me with a curious expression for a moment. \"Do you\nfeel\nall right, darling?\" she asked me. I nodded brightly. \"You'll\n think this silly of me,\" she went on to McGill, \"but why isn't it\n something like an overactive poltergeist?\"\n\n\n \"Pure concept,\" he said. \"No genuine evidence.\"\n\n\n \"Magnetism?\"",
"While I waited, I thought I might try getting down a few paragraphs of\n my novel—perhaps something would come now. It did, but as I came to a\n point where I was about to put down the word \"agurgling,\" I decided it\n was too reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, and stopped at the letter\n \"R.\" Then I saw that I had unaccountably hit all four keys one step to\n the side of the correct ones, and tore out the page, with my face red.\n\n\n This was absolutely not my day.\n\"Well,\" McGill said, \"nothing you've told me is impossible or\n supernatural. Just very, very improbable. In fact, the odds against\n that poker game alone would lead me to suspect Nat, well as I know him.\n It's all those other things....\"\n\n\n He got up and walked over to the window and looked at the hot twilight\n while I waited. Then he turned around; he had a look of concern.",
"The sight of this threw another driver into a skid, and when he and\n the taxi had stopped sliding around, they were face to face, arranged\n crosswise to the street. This gave them exactly no room to move either\n forward or backward, for the car had its back to a hydrant and the taxi\n to a lamp.\n\n\n Although rather narrow, this is a two-way street, and in no time at\n all, traffic was stacked up from both directions as far as the avenues.\n Everyone was honking his horn.\n\n\n Danny was furious—more so when he tried to put through a call to his\n station house from the box opposite.\n\n\n It was out of order.\nUpstairs, the wind was blowing into the apartment and I closed the\n windows, mainly to shut out the tumult and the shouting. Nat had\n brightened up considerably.",
"\"All right, now, Mrs. Mac-Philip!\" one of them said. \"Leave go of my\n umbrella and we'll say no more about it!\"\n\n\n \"And so now it's Missus Mac-Philip, is it?\" said her adversary.\n\n\n The third, a younger one with her back turned to us, her umbrella also\n caught in the tangle, pulled at it in a tentative way, at which the\n other two glared at her. She turned her head away and tried to let go,\n but the handle was caught in her glove. She looked up and I saw it was\n Molly. My nurse-wife.\n\n\n \"Oh, Alec!\" she said, and managed to detach herself. \"Are you all\n right?\" Was\nI\nall right!\n\n\n \"Molly! What are you doing here?\"",
"Intimidated, I took my drink into the living room and sat down in\n front of the typewriter. As I stared at the novel that was to liberate\n me from Madison Avenue, I noticed a mistake and picked up a pencil.\n When I put it down, it rolled off the desk, and with my eyes on the\n manuscript, I groped under the chair for it. Then I looked down. The\n pencil was standing on its end.\nThere, I thought to myself, is that one chance in a million we hear\n about, and picked up the pencil. I turned back to my novel and drank\n some of the highball in hopes of inspiration and surcease from the\n muggy heat, but nothing came. I went back and read the whole chapter\n to try to get a forward momentum, but came to a dead stop at the last\n sentence.",
"We put on our hats and went down to the street. From either end, we\n could hear wrecking trucks towing away the stalled cars. There were,\n by this time, a number of harassed cops directing the maneuver and we\n heard one of them say to Danny, \"I don't know what the hell's going\n on around here. Every goddam car's got something the matter with it.\n They can't none of them back out for one reason or another. Never seen\n anything like it.\"\n\n\n Near us, two pedestrians were doing a curious little two-step as they\n tried to pass one another; as soon as one of them moved aside to let\n the other pass, the other would move to the same side. They both had\n embarrassed grins on their faces, but before long their grins were\n replaced by looks of suspicion and then determination.",
"The other bartender gave him a fresh shaker, but the same thing\n happened, and I saw no more because the customers sitting at the bar\n crowded around in front of him, offering advice. Our waiter came back,\n baffled, saying he'd have the drinks in a moment, and went to the\n kitchen. When he returned, he had madame's vichyssoise and some rolls,\n which he put down, and then went to the bar, where the audience had\n grown larger.\n\n\n Molly lit a cigarette and said, \"I suppose this is all part of it,\n Alec. Incidentally, it seems to be getting warmer in here.\""
],
[
"I am a Nucleus\nBy STEPHEN BARR\n\n\n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction February 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nNo doubt whatever about it, I had the Indian\n\n sign on me ... my comfortably untidy world had",
"\"Only an analogy,\" said McGill. \"A crystal resembles life in that it\n has a definite shape and exhibits growth, but that's all. I'll agree\n this—thing—has no discernible shape and motion\nis\ninvolved, but\n plants don't move and amebas have no shape. Then a crystal feeds, but\n it does not convert what it feeds on; it merely rearranges it into a\n non-random pattern. In this case, it's rearranging random motions and\n it has a nucleus and it seems to be growing—at least in what you might\n call improbability.\"\n\n\n Molly frowned. \"Then what\nis\nit? What's it made of?\"",
"\"Not quite. It has a center. Alec is the center.\"\nMolly looked at me with a curious expression for a moment. \"Do you\nfeel\nall right, darling?\" she asked me. I nodded brightly. \"You'll\n think this silly of me,\" she went on to McGill, \"but why isn't it\n something like an overactive poltergeist?\"\n\n\n \"Pure concept,\" he said. \"No genuine evidence.\"\n\n\n \"Magnetism?\"",
"\"I should say it was made of the motions. There's a similar idea about\n the atom. Another thing that's like a crystal is that it appears to\n be forming around a nucleus not of its own material—the way a speck\n of sand thrown into a supersaturated solution becomes the nucleus of\n crystallization.\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like the pearl in an oyster,\" Molly said, and gave me an\n impertinent look.\n\n\n \"Why,\" I asked McGill, \"did you say the coins couldn't have the same\n date? I mean apart from the off chance I got them that way.\"\n\n\n \"Because I don't think this thing got going before today and\n everything that's happened can all be described as improbable motions\n here and now. The dates were already there, and to change them would\n require retroactive action, reversing time. That's out, in my book.\n That telephone now—\"",
"\"All right, smart guy!\" they shouted in unison, and barged ahead,\n only to collide. They backed off and threw simultaneous punches\n which met in mid-air. Then began one of the most remarkable bouts\n ever witnessed—a fight in which fist hit fist but never anything\n else, until both champions backed away undefeated, muttering identical\n excuses and threats.\nDanny appeared at that moment. His face was dripping. \"You all right,\n Mr. Graham?\" he asked. \"I don't know what's going on around here, but\n ever since I came on this afternoon, things are going crazy. Bartley!\"\n he shouted—he could succeed as a hog-caller. \"Bring those dames over\n here!\"\n\n\n Three women in a confused wrangle, with their half-open umbrellas\n intertwined, were brought across the street, which meant climbing over\n fenders. Bartley, a fine young patrolman, seemed self-conscious; the\n ladies seemed not to be.",
"\"All right, now, Mrs. Mac-Philip!\" one of them said. \"Leave go of my\n umbrella and we'll say no more about it!\"\n\n\n \"And so now it's Missus Mac-Philip, is it?\" said her adversary.\n\n\n The third, a younger one with her back turned to us, her umbrella also\n caught in the tangle, pulled at it in a tentative way, at which the\n other two glared at her. She turned her head away and tried to let go,\n but the handle was caught in her glove. She looked up and I saw it was\n Molly. My nurse-wife.\n\n\n \"Oh, Alec!\" she said, and managed to detach herself. \"Are you all\n right?\" Was\nI\nall right!\n\n\n \"Molly! What are you doing here?\"",
"When we got upstairs, I turned to McGill. \"Explain to Molly,\" I said.\n \"And incidentally to me. I'm not properly briefed yet.\"\n\n\n He did so, and when he got to the summing up, I had the feeling she was\n a jump ahead of him.\n\n\n \"In other words, you think it's something organic?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" McGill said, \"I'm trying to think of anything else it might be.\n I'm not doing so well,\" he confessed.\n\n\n \"But so far as I can see,\" Molly answered, \"it's mere probability, and\n without any over-all pattern.\"",
"It was, and I had the feeling the place was quieter—a background noise\n had stopped. It dawned on me that I no longer heard the faint hum of\n the air-conditioner over the door, and as I started to say so, I made\n a gesture toward it. My hand collided with Molly's when she tapped her\n cigarette over the ashtray, and the cigarette landed in the neighboring\n vichyssoise.\n\n\n \"Hey! What's the idea?\" snarled the sour-looking man.\n\n\n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" I said. \"It was an accident. I—\"\n\n\n \"Throwing cigarettes at people!\" the fat lady said.",
"I went into our little kitchen to make a drink and reread the\n directions Molly had left, telling me how to get along by myself until\n she got back from her mother's in Oyster Bay, a matter of ten days.\n How to make coffee, how to open a can, whom to call if I took sick and\n such. My wife used to be a trained nurse and she is quite convinced\n that I cannot take a breath without her. She is right, but not for the\n reasons she supposes.\n\n\n I opened the refrigerator to get some ice and saw another notice: \"When\n you take out the Milk or Butter, Put it Right Back. And Close the Door,\n too.\"",
"\"Well,\" I said, \"what more do you want?\"\n\n\n \"Great Scott,\" he said, and sat down. \"I suppose you know that\n there are two great apparently opposite principles governing the\n Universe—random and design. The sands on the beach are an example\n of random distribution and life is an example of design. The motions\n of the particles of a gas are what we call random, but there are so\n many of them, we treat them statistically and derive the Second Law of\n Thermodynamics—quite reliable. It isn't theoretically hard-and-fast;\n it's just a matter of extreme probability. Now life, on the other\n hand, seems not to depend on probability at all; actually, it goes\n against it. Or you might say it is certainly not an accidental\n manifestation.\"",
"Pigeons fly as a rule in formation and turn simultaneously, so that\n their wings all catch the sunlight at the same time. I was thinking\n about this decorative fact when I saw that as they were making a turn,\n they seemed to bunch up together. By some curious chance, they all\n wanted the same place in the sky to turn in, and several collided and\n fell.\n\n\n The man was as surprised as I and went to one of the dazed birds and\n picked it up. He stood there shaking his head from side to side,\n stroking its feathers.\n\n\n My speculations about this peculiar aerial traffic accident were\n interrupted by loud voices in the hallway. Since our building is\n usually very well behaved, I was astonished to hear what sounded like\n an incipient free-for-all, and among the angry voices I recognized that\n of my neighbor, Nat, a very quiet guy who works on a newspaper and has\n never, to my knowledge, given wild parties, particularly in the late\n afternoon.",
"\"Do you mean,\" I asked in some confusion, \"that some form of life is\n controlling the coins and—the other things?\"\nHe shook his head. \"No. All I mean is that improbable things usually\n have improbable explanations. When I see a natural law being broken,\n I don't say to myself, 'Here's a miracle.' I revise my version of the\n book of rules. Something—I don't know what—is going on, and it seems\n to involve probability, and it seems to center around you. Were you\n still in that building when the elevators stuck? Or near it?\"\n\n\n \"I guess I must have been. It happened just after I left.\"\n\n\n \"Hm. You're the center, all right. But why?\"\n\n\n \"Center of what?\" I asked. \"I feel as though I were the center of an\n electrical storm. Something has it in for me!\"",
"McGill grinned. \"Don't be superstitious. And especially don't be\n anthropomorphic.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if it's the opposite of random, it's got to be a form of life.\"\n\n\n \"On what basis? All we know for certain is that random motions are\n being rearranged. A crystal, for example, is not life, but it's a\n non-random arrangement of particles.... I wonder.\" He had a faraway,\n frowning look.\n\n\n I was beginning to feel hungry and the drinks had worn off.\n\n\n \"Let's go out and eat,\" I said, \"There's not a damn thing in the\n kitchen and I'm not allowed to cook. Only eggs and coffee.\"",
"While I looked, a big lump of it fell away, and for an instant I was\n able to see something that looked like a chunk of dirty glass, the size\n of an old-fashioned hatbox. It glittered brilliantly in the sunlight,\n and then his chattering drill hit it.",
"There was a faint bang and the thing disintegrated. It knocked him on\n his back, but he got right up and I realized he was not hurt. At the\n moment of the explosion—if so feeble a thing can be called one—I\n felt something sting my face and, on touching it, found blood on my\n hand. I mopped at it with my handkerchief but, though slight, the\n bleeding would not stop, so I went into a drugstore and bought some\n pink adhesive which I put on the tiny cut. When I got to the studio, I\n found that I had missed the story conference.\n\n\n During the day, by actual count, I heard the phrase \"I'm just\n spitballing\" eight times, and another Madison Avenue favorite,\n \"The whole ball of wax,\" twelve times. However, my story had been\n accepted without change because nobody had noticed my absence from the\n conference room. There you have what is known as the Advertising World,\n the Advertising game or the advertising racket, depending upon which\n rung of the ladder you have achieved.",
"While I waited, I thought I might try getting down a few paragraphs of\n my novel—perhaps something would come now. It did, but as I came to a\n point where I was about to put down the word \"agurgling,\" I decided it\n was too reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, and stopped at the letter\n \"R.\" Then I saw that I had unaccountably hit all four keys one step to\n the side of the correct ones, and tore out the page, with my face red.\n\n\n This was absolutely not my day.\n\"Well,\" McGill said, \"nothing you've told me is impossible or\n supernatural. Just very, very improbable. In fact, the odds against\n that poker game alone would lead me to suspect Nat, well as I know him.\n It's all those other things....\"\n\n\n He got up and walked over to the window and looked at the hot twilight\n while I waited. Then he turned around; he had a look of concern.",
"\"But for Pete's sake, Molly says the calls were going on for a long\n time! I phoned you only a short time ago and it must have taken her\n nearly two hours to get here from Oyster Bay.\"\n\n\n \"Then you must have done it twice and the vibrations in the\n floor—something like that—just happened to cause the right induction\n impulses. Yes, I know how you feel,\" he said, seeing my expression.\n \"It's beginning to bear down.\"\n\n\n Molly was through telephoning and suggested going out for dinner. I was\n so pleased to see her that I'd forgotten all about being hungry.\n\n\n \"I'm in no mood to cook,\" she said. \"Let's get away from all this.\"\n\n\n McGill raised an eyebrow. \"If all this, as you call it, will let us.\"\n\n\n In the lobby, we ran into Nat, looking smug in a journalistic way.",
"The other bartender gave him a fresh shaker, but the same thing\n happened, and I saw no more because the customers sitting at the bar\n crowded around in front of him, offering advice. Our waiter came back,\n baffled, saying he'd have the drinks in a moment, and went to the\n kitchen. When he returned, he had madame's vichyssoise and some rolls,\n which he put down, and then went to the bar, where the audience had\n grown larger.\n\n\n Molly lit a cigarette and said, \"I suppose this is all part of it,\n Alec. Incidentally, it seems to be getting warmer in here.\"",
"At the delicatessen on the corner, the man gave me three bottles in\n what must have been a wet bag, because as he handed them to me over the\n top of the cold-meat display, the bottom gave and they fell onto the\n tile floor. None of them broke, although the fall must have been from\n at least five feet. Nat was too wound up in his thoughts to notice and\n I was getting used to miracles. We left the proprietor with his mouth\n open and met Danny, the cop, looking in at the door, also with his\n mouth open.\nOn the sidewalk, a man walking in front of Nat stooped suddenly to tie\n his shoe and Nat, to avoid bumping him, stepped off the curb and a taxi\n swerved to avoid Nat. The street was still wet and the taxi skidded,",
"Damn the heat, damn the pencil, damn Madison Avenue and advertising.\n My drink was gone and I went back to the kitchen and read Molly's\n notes again to see if they would be like a letter from her. I noticed\n one that I had missed, pinned to the door of the dumbwaiter: \"Garbage\n picked up at 6:30 AM so the idea is to Put it Here the Night Before. I\n love you.\" What can you do when the girl loves you?\n\n\n I made another drink and went and stared out of the living room window\n at the roof opposite. The Sun was out again and a man with a stick was\n exercising his flock of pigeons. They wheeled in a circle, hoping to be\n allowed to perch, but were not allowed to."
],
[
"\"You can't say a thing like that to me!\" I heard him shout. \"I tell you\n I got that deck this afternoon and they weren't opened till we started\n to play!\"\n\n\n Several other loud voices started at the same time.\n\n\n \"Nobody gets five straight-flushes in a row!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, and only when you were dealer!\"\n\n\n The tone of the argument was beginning to get ugly, and I opened the\n door to offer Nat help if he needed it. There were four men confronting\n him, evidently torn between the desire to make an angry exit and the\n impulse to stay and beat him up. His face was furiously red and he\n looked stunned.\n\n\n \"Here!\" he said, holding out a deck of cards, \"For Pete's sake, look at\n 'em yourselves if you think they're marked!\"",
"\"Never seen anything to equal it,\" he said. \"Wouldn't have believed\n it. Those guys\ndidn't\nbelieve it. Every round normal, nothing\n unusual about the hands—three of a kind, a low straight, that sort\n of thing and one guy got queens over tens, until it gets to be\nmy\ndeal. Brother! Straight flush to the king—every time! And each time,\n somebody else has four aces....\"\n\n\n He started to sweat again, so I got up to fix him another drink. There\n was one quart of club soda left, but when I tried to open it, the top\n broke and glass chips got into the bottle.\n\n\n \"I'll have to go down for more soda,\" I said.\n\n\n \"I'll come, too. I need air.\"",
"The nearest man struck them up from his hand. \"Okay, Houdini! So\n they're not marked! All I know is five straight....\"\n\n\n His voice trailed away. He and the others stared at the scattered cards\n on the floor. About half were face down, as might be expected, and the\n rest face up—all red.\nSomeone must have rung, because at that moment the elevator arrived and\n the four men, with half frightened, incredulous looks, and in silence,\n got in and were taken down. My friend stood looking at the neatly\n arranged cards.\n\n\n \"Judas!\" he said, and started to pick them up. \"Will you look at that!\n My God, what a session....\"\n\n\n I helped him and said to come in for a drink and tell me all about it,\n but I had an idea what I would hear.\n\n\n After a while, he calmed down, but he still seemed dazed.",
"\"If you want your umbrella, Mrs. Graham,\" Danny said, \"it's at the\n station house. What there's left of it, that is.\"\n\n\n Molly thanked him and there was a short pause, during which I felt\n the speculative regard of the lieutenant. I pulled out a packet of\n cigarettes, which I had opened, as always, by tearing off the top. I\n happened to have it upside down and all the cigarettes fell out. Before\n I could move my foot to obliterate what they had spelled out on the\n sidewalk, the two cops saw it. The lieutenant gave me a hard look, but\n said nothing. I quickly kicked the insulting cigarettes into the gutter.",
"\"All right, smart guy!\" they shouted in unison, and barged ahead,\n only to collide. They backed off and threw simultaneous punches\n which met in mid-air. Then began one of the most remarkable bouts\n ever witnessed—a fight in which fist hit fist but never anything\n else, until both champions backed away undefeated, muttering identical\n excuses and threats.\nDanny appeared at that moment. His face was dripping. \"You all right,\n Mr. Graham?\" he asked. \"I don't know what's going on around here, but\n ever since I came on this afternoon, things are going crazy. Bartley!\"\n he shouted—he could succeed as a hog-caller. \"Bring those dames over\n here!\"\n\n\n Three women in a confused wrangle, with their half-open umbrellas\n intertwined, were brought across the street, which meant climbing over\n fenders. Bartley, a fine young patrolman, seemed self-conscious; the\n ladies seemed not to be.",
"\"I was so worried, and when I saw all this, I didn't know what to\n think.\" She pointed to the stalled cars. \"Are you really all right?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm all right. But why....\"\n\n\n \"The Oyster Bay operator said someone kept dialing and dialing Mother's\n number and there wasn't anyone on the line, so then she had it traced\n and it came from our phone here. I kept calling up, but I only got a\n busy signal. Oh, dear, are you\nsure\nyou're all right?\"\n\n\n I put my arm around her and glanced at McGill. He had an inward look.\n Then I caught Danny's eye. It had a thoughtful, almost suspicious cast\n to it.\n\n\n \"Trouble does seem to follow you, Mr. Graham,\" was all he said.",
"While I waited, I thought I might try getting down a few paragraphs of\n my novel—perhaps something would come now. It did, but as I came to a\n point where I was about to put down the word \"agurgling,\" I decided it\n was too reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, and stopped at the letter\n \"R.\" Then I saw that I had unaccountably hit all four keys one step to\n the side of the correct ones, and tore out the page, with my face red.\n\n\n This was absolutely not my day.\n\"Well,\" McGill said, \"nothing you've told me is impossible or\n supernatural. Just very, very improbable. In fact, the odds against\n that poker game alone would lead me to suspect Nat, well as I know him.\n It's all those other things....\"\n\n\n He got up and walked over to the window and looked at the hot twilight\n while I waited. Then he turned around; he had a look of concern.",
"When we got upstairs, I turned to McGill. \"Explain to Molly,\" I said.\n \"And incidentally to me. I'm not properly briefed yet.\"\n\n\n He did so, and when he got to the summing up, I had the feeling she was\n a jump ahead of him.\n\n\n \"In other words, you think it's something organic?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" McGill said, \"I'm trying to think of anything else it might be.\n I'm not doing so well,\" he confessed.\n\n\n \"But so far as I can see,\" Molly answered, \"it's mere probability, and\n without any over-all pattern.\"",
"It was, and I had the feeling the place was quieter—a background noise\n had stopped. It dawned on me that I no longer heard the faint hum of\n the air-conditioner over the door, and as I started to say so, I made\n a gesture toward it. My hand collided with Molly's when she tapped her\n cigarette over the ashtray, and the cigarette landed in the neighboring\n vichyssoise.\n\n\n \"Hey! What's the idea?\" snarled the sour-looking man.\n\n\n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" I said. \"It was an accident. I—\"\n\n\n \"Throwing cigarettes at people!\" the fat lady said.",
"\"I'll stay for one more drink and then I'm due at the office,\" he said.\n \"You know, I think this would make an item for the paper.\" He grinned\n and nodded toward the pandemonium.\n\n\n When he was gone, I noticed it was getting dark and turned on the desk\n lamp. Then I saw the curtains. They were all tied in knots, except\n one. That was tied in three knots.\n\n\n All\nright\n, I told myself, it was the wind. But I felt the time had\n come for me to get expert advice, so I went to the phone to call\n McGill. McGill is an assistant professor of mathematics at a university\n uptown and lives near us. He is highly imaginative, but we believe he\n knows everything.",
"There was a faint bang and the thing disintegrated. It knocked him on\n his back, but he got right up and I realized he was not hurt. At the\n moment of the explosion—if so feeble a thing can be called one—I\n felt something sting my face and, on touching it, found blood on my\n hand. I mopped at it with my handkerchief but, though slight, the\n bleeding would not stop, so I went into a drugstore and bought some\n pink adhesive which I put on the tiny cut. When I got to the studio, I\n found that I had missed the story conference.\n\n\n During the day, by actual count, I heard the phrase \"I'm just\n spitballing\" eight times, and another Madison Avenue favorite,\n \"The whole ball of wax,\" twelve times. However, my story had been\n accepted without change because nobody had noticed my absence from the\n conference room. There you have what is known as the Advertising World,\n the Advertising game or the advertising racket, depending upon which\n rung of the ladder you have achieved.",
"The subway gave a repeat performance going home, and as I got to the\n apartment house we live in, the cop on the afternoon beat was standing\n there talking to the doorman.\n\n\n He said, \"Hello, Mr. Graham. I guess you must have just have missed it\n at your office building.\" I looked blank and he explained, \"We just\n heard it a little while ago: all six elevators in your building jammed\n at the same time. Sounds crazy. I guess you just missed it.\"\n\n\n Anything can happen in advertising, I thought. \"That's right, Danny, I\n just missed it,\" I said, and went on in.\n\n\n Psychiatry tells us that some people are accident-prone; I, on the\n other hand, seemed recently to be coincidence-prone, fluke-happy, and\n except for the alarm clock, I'd had no control over what had been going\n on.",
"The sight of this threw another driver into a skid, and when he and\n the taxi had stopped sliding around, they were face to face, arranged\n crosswise to the street. This gave them exactly no room to move either\n forward or backward, for the car had its back to a hydrant and the taxi\n to a lamp.\n\n\n Although rather narrow, this is a two-way street, and in no time at\n all, traffic was stacked up from both directions as far as the avenues.\n Everyone was honking his horn.\n\n\n Danny was furious—more so when he tried to put through a call to his\n station house from the box opposite.\n\n\n It was out of order.\nUpstairs, the wind was blowing into the apartment and I closed the\n windows, mainly to shut out the tumult and the shouting. Nat had\n brightened up considerably.",
"\"All right, now, Mrs. Mac-Philip!\" one of them said. \"Leave go of my\n umbrella and we'll say no more about it!\"\n\n\n \"And so now it's Missus Mac-Philip, is it?\" said her adversary.\n\n\n The third, a younger one with her back turned to us, her umbrella also\n caught in the tangle, pulled at it in a tentative way, at which the\n other two glared at her. She turned her head away and tried to let go,\n but the handle was caught in her glove. She looked up and I saw it was\n Molly. My nurse-wife.\n\n\n \"Oh, Alec!\" she said, and managed to detach herself. \"Are you all\n right?\" Was\nI\nall right!\n\n\n \"Molly! What are you doing here?\"",
"When I picked up the receiver, the line sounded dead and I thought,\nmore\ntrouble. Then I heard a man cough and I said hello. McGill's\n voice said, \"Alec? You must have picked up the receiver just as we were\n connected. That's a damn funny coincidence.\"\n\n\n \"Not in the least,\" I said. \"Come on over here. I've got something for\n you to work on.\"\n\n\n \"Well, as a matter of fact, I was calling up to ask you and Molly—\"\n\n\n \"Molly's away for the week. Can you get over here quick? It's urgent.\"\n\n\n \"At once,\" he said, and hung up.",
"\"Do you mean,\" I asked in some confusion, \"that some form of life is\n controlling the coins and—the other things?\"\nHe shook his head. \"No. All I mean is that improbable things usually\n have improbable explanations. When I see a natural law being broken,\n I don't say to myself, 'Here's a miracle.' I revise my version of the\n book of rules. Something—I don't know what—is going on, and it seems\n to involve probability, and it seems to center around you. Were you\n still in that building when the elevators stuck? Or near it?\"\n\n\n \"I guess I must have been. It happened just after I left.\"\n\n\n \"Hm. You're the center, all right. But why?\"\n\n\n \"Center of what?\" I asked. \"I feel as though I were the center of an\n electrical storm. Something has it in for me!\"",
"The other bartender gave him a fresh shaker, but the same thing\n happened, and I saw no more because the customers sitting at the bar\n crowded around in front of him, offering advice. Our waiter came back,\n baffled, saying he'd have the drinks in a moment, and went to the\n kitchen. When he returned, he had madame's vichyssoise and some rolls,\n which he put down, and then went to the bar, where the audience had\n grown larger.\n\n\n Molly lit a cigarette and said, \"I suppose this is all part of it,\n Alec. Incidentally, it seems to be getting warmer in here.\"",
"McGill grinned. \"Don't be superstitious. And especially don't be\n anthropomorphic.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if it's the opposite of random, it's got to be a form of life.\"\n\n\n \"On what basis? All we know for certain is that random motions are\n being rearranged. A crystal, for example, is not life, but it's a\n non-random arrangement of particles.... I wonder.\" He had a faraway,\n frowning look.\n\n\n I was beginning to feel hungry and the drinks had worn off.\n\n\n \"Let's go out and eat,\" I said, \"There's not a damn thing in the\n kitchen and I'm not allowed to cook. Only eggs and coffee.\"",
"Damn the heat, damn the pencil, damn Madison Avenue and advertising.\n My drink was gone and I went back to the kitchen and read Molly's\n notes again to see if they would be like a letter from her. I noticed\n one that I had missed, pinned to the door of the dumbwaiter: \"Garbage\n picked up at 6:30 AM so the idea is to Put it Here the Night Before. I\n love you.\" What can you do when the girl loves you?\n\n\n I made another drink and went and stared out of the living room window\n at the roof opposite. The Sun was out again and a man with a stick was\n exercising his flock of pigeons. They wheeled in a circle, hoping to be\n allowed to perch, but were not allowed to.",
"\"Not quite. It has a center. Alec is the center.\"\nMolly looked at me with a curious expression for a moment. \"Do you\nfeel\nall right, darling?\" she asked me. I nodded brightly. \"You'll\n think this silly of me,\" she went on to McGill, \"but why isn't it\n something like an overactive poltergeist?\"\n\n\n \"Pure concept,\" he said. \"No genuine evidence.\"\n\n\n \"Magnetism?\""
],
[
"The sight of this threw another driver into a skid, and when he and\n the taxi had stopped sliding around, they were face to face, arranged\n crosswise to the street. This gave them exactly no room to move either\n forward or backward, for the car had its back to a hydrant and the taxi\n to a lamp.\n\n\n Although rather narrow, this is a two-way street, and in no time at\n all, traffic was stacked up from both directions as far as the avenues.\n Everyone was honking his horn.\n\n\n Danny was furious—more so when he tried to put through a call to his\n station house from the box opposite.\n\n\n It was out of order.\nUpstairs, the wind was blowing into the apartment and I closed the\n windows, mainly to shut out the tumult and the shouting. Nat had\n brightened up considerably.",
"At the delicatessen on the corner, the man gave me three bottles in\n what must have been a wet bag, because as he handed them to me over the\n top of the cold-meat display, the bottom gave and they fell onto the\n tile floor. None of them broke, although the fall must have been from\n at least five feet. Nat was too wound up in his thoughts to notice and\n I was getting used to miracles. We left the proprietor with his mouth\n open and met Danny, the cop, looking in at the door, also with his\n mouth open.\nOn the sidewalk, a man walking in front of Nat stooped suddenly to tie\n his shoe and Nat, to avoid bumping him, stepped off the curb and a taxi\n swerved to avoid Nat. The street was still wet and the taxi skidded,",
"\"I've been put on the story—who could be better?—I live here. So far,\n I don't quite get what's been happening. I've been talking to Danny,\n but he didn't say much. I got the feeling he thinks you're involved in\n some mystical, Hibernian way. Hello, McGill, what's with you?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a theory,\" said Molly. \"Come and eat with us and he'll tell\n you all about it.\"\n\n\n Since we decided on an air-conditioned restaurant nearby on Sixth\n Avenue, we walked. The jam of cars didn't seem to be any less than\n before and we saw Danny again. He was talking to a police lieutenant,\n and when he caught sight of us, he said something that made the\n lieutenant look at us with interest. Particularly at me.",
"\"If you want your umbrella, Mrs. Graham,\" Danny said, \"it's at the\n station house. What there's left of it, that is.\"\n\n\n Molly thanked him and there was a short pause, during which I felt\n the speculative regard of the lieutenant. I pulled out a packet of\n cigarettes, which I had opened, as always, by tearing off the top. I\n happened to have it upside down and all the cigarettes fell out. Before\n I could move my foot to obliterate what they had spelled out on the\n sidewalk, the two cops saw it. The lieutenant gave me a hard look, but\n said nothing. I quickly kicked the insulting cigarettes into the gutter.",
"\"All right, smart guy!\" they shouted in unison, and barged ahead,\n only to collide. They backed off and threw simultaneous punches\n which met in mid-air. Then began one of the most remarkable bouts\n ever witnessed—a fight in which fist hit fist but never anything\n else, until both champions backed away undefeated, muttering identical\n excuses and threats.\nDanny appeared at that moment. His face was dripping. \"You all right,\n Mr. Graham?\" he asked. \"I don't know what's going on around here, but\n ever since I came on this afternoon, things are going crazy. Bartley!\"\n he shouted—he could succeed as a hog-caller. \"Bring those dames over\n here!\"\n\n\n Three women in a confused wrangle, with their half-open umbrellas\n intertwined, were brought across the street, which meant climbing over\n fenders. Bartley, a fine young patrolman, seemed self-conscious; the\n ladies seemed not to be.",
"We put on our hats and went down to the street. From either end, we\n could hear wrecking trucks towing away the stalled cars. There were,\n by this time, a number of harassed cops directing the maneuver and we\n heard one of them say to Danny, \"I don't know what the hell's going\n on around here. Every goddam car's got something the matter with it.\n They can't none of them back out for one reason or another. Never seen\n anything like it.\"\n\n\n Near us, two pedestrians were doing a curious little two-step as they\n tried to pass one another; as soon as one of them moved aside to let\n the other pass, the other would move to the same side. They both had\n embarrassed grins on their faces, but before long their grins were\n replaced by looks of suspicion and then determination.",
"\"I was so worried, and when I saw all this, I didn't know what to\n think.\" She pointed to the stalled cars. \"Are you really all right?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm all right. But why....\"\n\n\n \"The Oyster Bay operator said someone kept dialing and dialing Mother's\n number and there wasn't anyone on the line, so then she had it traced\n and it came from our phone here. I kept calling up, but I only got a\n busy signal. Oh, dear, are you\nsure\nyou're all right?\"\n\n\n I put my arm around her and glanced at McGill. He had an inward look.\n Then I caught Danny's eye. It had a thoughtful, almost suspicious cast\n to it.\n\n\n \"Trouble does seem to follow you, Mr. Graham,\" was all he said.",
"It was, and I had the feeling the place was quieter—a background noise\n had stopped. It dawned on me that I no longer heard the faint hum of\n the air-conditioner over the door, and as I started to say so, I made\n a gesture toward it. My hand collided with Molly's when she tapped her\n cigarette over the ashtray, and the cigarette landed in the neighboring\n vichyssoise.\n\n\n \"Hey! What's the idea?\" snarled the sour-looking man.\n\n\n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" I said. \"It was an accident. I—\"\n\n\n \"Throwing cigarettes at people!\" the fat lady said.",
"\"I really didn't mean to,\" I began again, getting up. There must have\n been a hole in the edge of their tablecloth which one of my cuff\n buttons caught in, because as I stepped out from between the closely\n set tables, I pulled everything—tablecloth, silver, water glasses,\n ashtrays and the vichyssoise-à-la-nicotine—onto the floor.\n\n\n The fat lady surged from the banquette and slapped me meatily. The man\n licked his thumb and danced as boxers are popularly supposed to do. The\n owner of the place, a man with thick black eyebrows, hustled toward us\n with a determined manner. I tried to explain what had happened, but I\n was outshouted, and the owner frowned darkly.",
"The other bartender gave him a fresh shaker, but the same thing\n happened, and I saw no more because the customers sitting at the bar\n crowded around in front of him, offering advice. Our waiter came back,\n baffled, saying he'd have the drinks in a moment, and went to the\n kitchen. When he returned, he had madame's vichyssoise and some rolls,\n which he put down, and then went to the bar, where the audience had\n grown larger.\n\n\n Molly lit a cigarette and said, \"I suppose this is all part of it,\n Alec. Incidentally, it seems to be getting warmer in here.\"",
"There was a faint bang and the thing disintegrated. It knocked him on\n his back, but he got right up and I realized he was not hurt. At the\n moment of the explosion—if so feeble a thing can be called one—I\n felt something sting my face and, on touching it, found blood on my\n hand. I mopped at it with my handkerchief but, though slight, the\n bleeding would not stop, so I went into a drugstore and bought some\n pink adhesive which I put on the tiny cut. When I got to the studio, I\n found that I had missed the story conference.\n\n\n During the day, by actual count, I heard the phrase \"I'm just\n spitballing\" eight times, and another Madison Avenue favorite,\n \"The whole ball of wax,\" twelve times. However, my story had been\n accepted without change because nobody had noticed my absence from the\n conference room. There you have what is known as the Advertising World,\n the Advertising game or the advertising racket, depending upon which\n rung of the ladder you have achieved.",
"suddenly turned into a monstrosity of order!\nWhen I got home from the office, I was not so much tired as beaten\n down, but the effect is similar. I let myself into the apartment, which\n had an absentee-wife look, and took a cold shower. The present downtown\n temperature, according to the radio, was eighty-seven degrees, but\n according to my Greenwich Village thermometer, it was ninety-six. I got\n dressed and went into the living room, and wished ardently that my\n wife Molly were here to tell me why the whole place looked so woebegone.\n\n\n What do they do, I asked myself, that I have left undone? I've vacuumed\n the carpet, I've dusted and I've straightened the cushions.... Ah! The\n ashtrays. I emptied them, washed them and put them back, but still the\n place looked wife-deserted.",
"The subway gave a repeat performance going home, and as I got to the\n apartment house we live in, the cop on the afternoon beat was standing\n there talking to the doorman.\n\n\n He said, \"Hello, Mr. Graham. I guess you must have just have missed it\n at your office building.\" I looked blank and he explained, \"We just\n heard it a little while ago: all six elevators in your building jammed\n at the same time. Sounds crazy. I guess you just missed it.\"\n\n\n Anything can happen in advertising, I thought. \"That's right, Danny, I\n just missed it,\" I said, and went on in.\n\n\n Psychiatry tells us that some people are accident-prone; I, on the\n other hand, seemed recently to be coincidence-prone, fluke-happy, and\n except for the alarm clock, I'd had no control over what had been going\n on.",
"While I looked, a big lump of it fell away, and for an instant I was\n able to see something that looked like a chunk of dirty glass, the size\n of an old-fashioned hatbox. It glittered brilliantly in the sunlight,\n and then his chattering drill hit it.",
"Pigeons fly as a rule in formation and turn simultaneously, so that\n their wings all catch the sunlight at the same time. I was thinking\n about this decorative fact when I saw that as they were making a turn,\n they seemed to bunch up together. By some curious chance, they all\n wanted the same place in the sky to turn in, and several collided and\n fell.\n\n\n The man was as surprised as I and went to one of the dazed birds and\n picked it up. He stood there shaking his head from side to side,\n stroking its feathers.\n\n\n My speculations about this peculiar aerial traffic accident were\n interrupted by loud voices in the hallway. Since our building is\n usually very well behaved, I was astonished to hear what sounded like\n an incipient free-for-all, and among the angry voices I recognized that\n of my neighbor, Nat, a very quiet guy who works on a newspaper and has\n never, to my knowledge, given wild parties, particularly in the late\n afternoon.",
"Intimidated, I took my drink into the living room and sat down in\n front of the typewriter. As I stared at the novel that was to liberate\n me from Madison Avenue, I noticed a mistake and picked up a pencil.\n When I put it down, it rolled off the desk, and with my eyes on the\n manuscript, I groped under the chair for it. Then I looked down. The\n pencil was standing on its end.\nThere, I thought to myself, is that one chance in a million we hear\n about, and picked up the pencil. I turned back to my novel and drank\n some of the highball in hopes of inspiration and surcease from the\n muggy heat, but nothing came. I went back and read the whole chapter\n to try to get a forward momentum, but came to a dead stop at the last\n sentence.",
"\"Never seen anything to equal it,\" he said. \"Wouldn't have believed\n it. Those guys\ndidn't\nbelieve it. Every round normal, nothing\n unusual about the hands—three of a kind, a low straight, that sort\n of thing and one guy got queens over tens, until it gets to be\nmy\ndeal. Brother! Straight flush to the king—every time! And each time,\n somebody else has four aces....\"\n\n\n He started to sweat again, so I got up to fix him another drink. There\n was one quart of club soda left, but when I tried to open it, the top\n broke and glass chips got into the bottle.\n\n\n \"I'll have to go down for more soda,\" I said.\n\n\n \"I'll come, too. I need air.\"",
"When we got to the restaurant, it was crowded but cool—although it\n didn't stay cool for long. We sat down at a side table near the door\n and ordered Tom Collinses as we looked at the menu. Sitting at the\n next table were a fat lady, wearing a very long, brilliant green\n evening gown, and a dried-up sour-looking man in a tux. When the waiter\n returned, they preempted him and began ordering dinner fussily: cold\n cuts for the man, and vichyssoise, lobster salad and strawberry parfait\n for the fat lady.",
"Damn the heat, damn the pencil, damn Madison Avenue and advertising.\n My drink was gone and I went back to the kitchen and read Molly's\n notes again to see if they would be like a letter from her. I noticed\n one that I had missed, pinned to the door of the dumbwaiter: \"Garbage\n picked up at 6:30 AM so the idea is to Put it Here the Night Before. I\n love you.\" What can you do when the girl loves you?\n\n\n I made another drink and went and stared out of the living room window\n at the roof opposite. The Sun was out again and a man with a stick was\n exercising his flock of pigeons. They wheeled in a circle, hoping to be\n allowed to perch, but were not allowed to.",
"The nearest man struck them up from his hand. \"Okay, Houdini! So\n they're not marked! All I know is five straight....\"\n\n\n His voice trailed away. He and the others stared at the scattered cards\n on the floor. About half were face down, as might be expected, and the\n rest face up—all red.\nSomeone must have rung, because at that moment the elevator arrived and\n the four men, with half frightened, incredulous looks, and in silence,\n got in and were taken down. My friend stood looking at the neatly\n arranged cards.\n\n\n \"Judas!\" he said, and started to pick them up. \"Will you look at that!\n My God, what a session....\"\n\n\n I helped him and said to come in for a drink and tell me all about it,\n but I had an idea what I would hear.\n\n\n After a while, he calmed down, but he still seemed dazed."
],
[
"I went into our little kitchen to make a drink and reread the\n directions Molly had left, telling me how to get along by myself until\n she got back from her mother's in Oyster Bay, a matter of ten days.\n How to make coffee, how to open a can, whom to call if I took sick and\n such. My wife used to be a trained nurse and she is quite convinced\n that I cannot take a breath without her. She is right, but not for the\n reasons she supposes.\n\n\n I opened the refrigerator to get some ice and saw another notice: \"When\n you take out the Milk or Butter, Put it Right Back. And Close the Door,\n too.\"",
"\"If you want your umbrella, Mrs. Graham,\" Danny said, \"it's at the\n station house. What there's left of it, that is.\"\n\n\n Molly thanked him and there was a short pause, during which I felt\n the speculative regard of the lieutenant. I pulled out a packet of\n cigarettes, which I had opened, as always, by tearing off the top. I\n happened to have it upside down and all the cigarettes fell out. Before\n I could move my foot to obliterate what they had spelled out on the\n sidewalk, the two cops saw it. The lieutenant gave me a hard look, but\n said nothing. I quickly kicked the insulting cigarettes into the gutter.",
"\"I was so worried, and when I saw all this, I didn't know what to\n think.\" She pointed to the stalled cars. \"Are you really all right?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm all right. But why....\"\n\n\n \"The Oyster Bay operator said someone kept dialing and dialing Mother's\n number and there wasn't anyone on the line, so then she had it traced\n and it came from our phone here. I kept calling up, but I only got a\n busy signal. Oh, dear, are you\nsure\nyou're all right?\"\n\n\n I put my arm around her and glanced at McGill. He had an inward look.\n Then I caught Danny's eye. It had a thoughtful, almost suspicious cast\n to it.\n\n\n \"Trouble does seem to follow you, Mr. Graham,\" was all he said.",
"Damn the heat, damn the pencil, damn Madison Avenue and advertising.\n My drink was gone and I went back to the kitchen and read Molly's\n notes again to see if they would be like a letter from her. I noticed\n one that I had missed, pinned to the door of the dumbwaiter: \"Garbage\n picked up at 6:30 AM so the idea is to Put it Here the Night Before. I\n love you.\" What can you do when the girl loves you?\n\n\n I made another drink and went and stared out of the living room window\n at the roof opposite. The Sun was out again and a man with a stick was\n exercising his flock of pigeons. They wheeled in a circle, hoping to be\n allowed to perch, but were not allowed to.",
"suddenly turned into a monstrosity of order!\nWhen I got home from the office, I was not so much tired as beaten\n down, but the effect is similar. I let myself into the apartment, which\n had an absentee-wife look, and took a cold shower. The present downtown\n temperature, according to the radio, was eighty-seven degrees, but\n according to my Greenwich Village thermometer, it was ninety-six. I got\n dressed and went into the living room, and wished ardently that my\n wife Molly were here to tell me why the whole place looked so woebegone.\n\n\n What do they do, I asked myself, that I have left undone? I've vacuumed\n the carpet, I've dusted and I've straightened the cushions.... Ah! The\n ashtrays. I emptied them, washed them and put them back, but still the\n place looked wife-deserted.",
"When I picked up the receiver, the line sounded dead and I thought,\nmore\ntrouble. Then I heard a man cough and I said hello. McGill's\n voice said, \"Alec? You must have picked up the receiver just as we were\n connected. That's a damn funny coincidence.\"\n\n\n \"Not in the least,\" I said. \"Come on over here. I've got something for\n you to work on.\"\n\n\n \"Well, as a matter of fact, I was calling up to ask you and Molly—\"\n\n\n \"Molly's away for the week. Can you get over here quick? It's urgent.\"\n\n\n \"At once,\" he said, and hung up.",
"\"All right, smart guy!\" they shouted in unison, and barged ahead,\n only to collide. They backed off and threw simultaneous punches\n which met in mid-air. Then began one of the most remarkable bouts\n ever witnessed—a fight in which fist hit fist but never anything\n else, until both champions backed away undefeated, muttering identical\n excuses and threats.\nDanny appeared at that moment. His face was dripping. \"You all right,\n Mr. Graham?\" he asked. \"I don't know what's going on around here, but\n ever since I came on this afternoon, things are going crazy. Bartley!\"\n he shouted—he could succeed as a hog-caller. \"Bring those dames over\n here!\"\n\n\n Three women in a confused wrangle, with their half-open umbrellas\n intertwined, were brought across the street, which meant climbing over\n fenders. Bartley, a fine young patrolman, seemed self-conscious; the\n ladies seemed not to be.",
"\"All right, now, Mrs. Mac-Philip!\" one of them said. \"Leave go of my\n umbrella and we'll say no more about it!\"\n\n\n \"And so now it's Missus Mac-Philip, is it?\" said her adversary.\n\n\n The third, a younger one with her back turned to us, her umbrella also\n caught in the tangle, pulled at it in a tentative way, at which the\n other two glared at her. She turned her head away and tried to let go,\n but the handle was caught in her glove. She looked up and I saw it was\n Molly. My nurse-wife.\n\n\n \"Oh, Alec!\" she said, and managed to detach herself. \"Are you all\n right?\" Was\nI\nall right!\n\n\n \"Molly! What are you doing here?\"",
"While I waited, I thought I might try getting down a few paragraphs of\n my novel—perhaps something would come now. It did, but as I came to a\n point where I was about to put down the word \"agurgling,\" I decided it\n was too reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, and stopped at the letter\n \"R.\" Then I saw that I had unaccountably hit all four keys one step to\n the side of the correct ones, and tore out the page, with my face red.\n\n\n This was absolutely not my day.\n\"Well,\" McGill said, \"nothing you've told me is impossible or\n supernatural. Just very, very improbable. In fact, the odds against\n that poker game alone would lead me to suspect Nat, well as I know him.\n It's all those other things....\"\n\n\n He got up and walked over to the window and looked at the hot twilight\n while I waited. Then he turned around; he had a look of concern.",
"McGill grinned. \"Don't be superstitious. And especially don't be\n anthropomorphic.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if it's the opposite of random, it's got to be a form of life.\"\n\n\n \"On what basis? All we know for certain is that random motions are\n being rearranged. A crystal, for example, is not life, but it's a\n non-random arrangement of particles.... I wonder.\" He had a faraway,\n frowning look.\n\n\n I was beginning to feel hungry and the drinks had worn off.\n\n\n \"Let's go out and eat,\" I said, \"There's not a damn thing in the\n kitchen and I'm not allowed to cook. Only eggs and coffee.\"",
"When we got upstairs, I turned to McGill. \"Explain to Molly,\" I said.\n \"And incidentally to me. I'm not properly briefed yet.\"\n\n\n He did so, and when he got to the summing up, I had the feeling she was\n a jump ahead of him.\n\n\n \"In other words, you think it's something organic?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" McGill said, \"I'm trying to think of anything else it might be.\n I'm not doing so well,\" he confessed.\n\n\n \"But so far as I can see,\" Molly answered, \"it's mere probability, and\n without any over-all pattern.\"",
"It was, and I had the feeling the place was quieter—a background noise\n had stopped. It dawned on me that I no longer heard the faint hum of\n the air-conditioner over the door, and as I started to say so, I made\n a gesture toward it. My hand collided with Molly's when she tapped her\n cigarette over the ashtray, and the cigarette landed in the neighboring\n vichyssoise.\n\n\n \"Hey! What's the idea?\" snarled the sour-looking man.\n\n\n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" I said. \"It was an accident. I—\"\n\n\n \"Throwing cigarettes at people!\" the fat lady said.",
"\"I'll stay for one more drink and then I'm due at the office,\" he said.\n \"You know, I think this would make an item for the paper.\" He grinned\n and nodded toward the pandemonium.\n\n\n When he was gone, I noticed it was getting dark and turned on the desk\n lamp. Then I saw the curtains. They were all tied in knots, except\n one. That was tied in three knots.\n\n\n All\nright\n, I told myself, it was the wind. But I felt the time had\n come for me to get expert advice, so I went to the phone to call\n McGill. McGill is an assistant professor of mathematics at a university\n uptown and lives near us. He is highly imaginative, but we believe he\n knows everything.",
"When we got to the restaurant, it was crowded but cool—although it\n didn't stay cool for long. We sat down at a side table near the door\n and ordered Tom Collinses as we looked at the menu. Sitting at the\n next table were a fat lady, wearing a very long, brilliant green\n evening gown, and a dried-up sour-looking man in a tux. When the waiter\n returned, they preempted him and began ordering dinner fussily: cold\n cuts for the man, and vichyssoise, lobster salad and strawberry parfait\n for the fat lady.",
"Intimidated, I took my drink into the living room and sat down in\n front of the typewriter. As I stared at the novel that was to liberate\n me from Madison Avenue, I noticed a mistake and picked up a pencil.\n When I put it down, it rolled off the desk, and with my eyes on the\n manuscript, I groped under the chair for it. Then I looked down. The\n pencil was standing on its end.\nThere, I thought to myself, is that one chance in a million we hear\n about, and picked up the pencil. I turned back to my novel and drank\n some of the highball in hopes of inspiration and surcease from the\n muggy heat, but nothing came. I went back and read the whole chapter\n to try to get a forward momentum, but came to a dead stop at the last\n sentence.",
"The other bartender gave him a fresh shaker, but the same thing\n happened, and I saw no more because the customers sitting at the bar\n crowded around in front of him, offering advice. Our waiter came back,\n baffled, saying he'd have the drinks in a moment, and went to the\n kitchen. When he returned, he had madame's vichyssoise and some rolls,\n which he put down, and then went to the bar, where the audience had\n grown larger.\n\n\n Molly lit a cigarette and said, \"I suppose this is all part of it,\n Alec. Incidentally, it seems to be getting warmer in here.\"",
"\"But for Pete's sake, Molly says the calls were going on for a long\n time! I phoned you only a short time ago and it must have taken her\n nearly two hours to get here from Oyster Bay.\"\n\n\n \"Then you must have done it twice and the vibrations in the\n floor—something like that—just happened to cause the right induction\n impulses. Yes, I know how you feel,\" he said, seeing my expression.\n \"It's beginning to bear down.\"\n\n\n Molly was through telephoning and suggested going out for dinner. I was\n so pleased to see her that I'd forgotten all about being hungry.\n\n\n \"I'm in no mood to cook,\" she said. \"Let's get away from all this.\"\n\n\n McGill raised an eyebrow. \"If all this, as you call it, will let us.\"\n\n\n In the lobby, we ran into Nat, looking smug in a journalistic way.",
"We put on our hats and went down to the street. From either end, we\n could hear wrecking trucks towing away the stalled cars. There were,\n by this time, a number of harassed cops directing the maneuver and we\n heard one of them say to Danny, \"I don't know what the hell's going\n on around here. Every goddam car's got something the matter with it.\n They can't none of them back out for one reason or another. Never seen\n anything like it.\"\n\n\n Near us, two pedestrians were doing a curious little two-step as they\n tried to pass one another; as soon as one of them moved aside to let\n the other pass, the other would move to the same side. They both had\n embarrassed grins on their faces, but before long their grins were\n replaced by looks of suspicion and then determination.",
"At the delicatessen on the corner, the man gave me three bottles in\n what must have been a wet bag, because as he handed them to me over the\n top of the cold-meat display, the bottom gave and they fell onto the\n tile floor. None of them broke, although the fall must have been from\n at least five feet. Nat was too wound up in his thoughts to notice and\n I was getting used to miracles. We left the proprietor with his mouth\n open and met Danny, the cop, looking in at the door, also with his\n mouth open.\nOn the sidewalk, a man walking in front of Nat stooped suddenly to tie\n his shoe and Nat, to avoid bumping him, stepped off the curb and a taxi\n swerved to avoid Nat. The street was still wet and the taxi skidded,",
"\"Well,\" I said, \"what more do you want?\"\n\n\n \"Great Scott,\" he said, and sat down. \"I suppose you know that\n there are two great apparently opposite principles governing the\n Universe—random and design. The sands on the beach are an example\n of random distribution and life is an example of design. The motions\n of the particles of a gas are what we call random, but there are so\n many of them, we treat them statistically and derive the Second Law of\n Thermodynamics—quite reliable. It isn't theoretically hard-and-fast;\n it's just a matter of extreme probability. Now life, on the other\n hand, seems not to depend on probability at all; actually, it goes\n against it. Or you might say it is certainly not an accidental\n manifestation.\""
],
[
"When we got upstairs, I turned to McGill. \"Explain to Molly,\" I said.\n \"And incidentally to me. I'm not properly briefed yet.\"\n\n\n He did so, and when he got to the summing up, I had the feeling she was\n a jump ahead of him.\n\n\n \"In other words, you think it's something organic?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" McGill said, \"I'm trying to think of anything else it might be.\n I'm not doing so well,\" he confessed.\n\n\n \"But so far as I can see,\" Molly answered, \"it's mere probability, and\n without any over-all pattern.\"",
"While I waited, I thought I might try getting down a few paragraphs of\n my novel—perhaps something would come now. It did, but as I came to a\n point where I was about to put down the word \"agurgling,\" I decided it\n was too reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan, and stopped at the letter\n \"R.\" Then I saw that I had unaccountably hit all four keys one step to\n the side of the correct ones, and tore out the page, with my face red.\n\n\n This was absolutely not my day.\n\"Well,\" McGill said, \"nothing you've told me is impossible or\n supernatural. Just very, very improbable. In fact, the odds against\n that poker game alone would lead me to suspect Nat, well as I know him.\n It's all those other things....\"\n\n\n He got up and walked over to the window and looked at the hot twilight\n while I waited. Then he turned around; he had a look of concern.",
"\"Not quite. It has a center. Alec is the center.\"\nMolly looked at me with a curious expression for a moment. \"Do you\nfeel\nall right, darling?\" she asked me. I nodded brightly. \"You'll\n think this silly of me,\" she went on to McGill, \"but why isn't it\n something like an overactive poltergeist?\"\n\n\n \"Pure concept,\" he said. \"No genuine evidence.\"\n\n\n \"Magnetism?\"",
"McGill grinned. \"Don't be superstitious. And especially don't be\n anthropomorphic.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if it's the opposite of random, it's got to be a form of life.\"\n\n\n \"On what basis? All we know for certain is that random motions are\n being rearranged. A crystal, for example, is not life, but it's a\n non-random arrangement of particles.... I wonder.\" He had a faraway,\n frowning look.\n\n\n I was beginning to feel hungry and the drinks had worn off.\n\n\n \"Let's go out and eat,\" I said, \"There's not a damn thing in the\n kitchen and I'm not allowed to cook. Only eggs and coffee.\"",
"When I picked up the receiver, the line sounded dead and I thought,\nmore\ntrouble. Then I heard a man cough and I said hello. McGill's\n voice said, \"Alec? You must have picked up the receiver just as we were\n connected. That's a damn funny coincidence.\"\n\n\n \"Not in the least,\" I said. \"Come on over here. I've got something for\n you to work on.\"\n\n\n \"Well, as a matter of fact, I was calling up to ask you and Molly—\"\n\n\n \"Molly's away for the week. Can you get over here quick? It's urgent.\"\n\n\n \"At once,\" he said, and hung up.",
"\"I've been put on the story—who could be better?—I live here. So far,\n I don't quite get what's been happening. I've been talking to Danny,\n but he didn't say much. I got the feeling he thinks you're involved in\n some mystical, Hibernian way. Hello, McGill, what's with you?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a theory,\" said Molly. \"Come and eat with us and he'll tell\n you all about it.\"\n\n\n Since we decided on an air-conditioned restaurant nearby on Sixth\n Avenue, we walked. The jam of cars didn't seem to be any less than\n before and we saw Danny again. He was talking to a police lieutenant,\n and when he caught sight of us, he said something that made the\n lieutenant look at us with interest. Particularly at me.",
"\"Do you mean,\" I asked in some confusion, \"that some form of life is\n controlling the coins and—the other things?\"\nHe shook his head. \"No. All I mean is that improbable things usually\n have improbable explanations. When I see a natural law being broken,\n I don't say to myself, 'Here's a miracle.' I revise my version of the\n book of rules. Something—I don't know what—is going on, and it seems\n to involve probability, and it seems to center around you. Were you\n still in that building when the elevators stuck? Or near it?\"\n\n\n \"I guess I must have been. It happened just after I left.\"\n\n\n \"Hm. You're the center, all right. But why?\"\n\n\n \"Center of what?\" I asked. \"I feel as though I were the center of an\n electrical storm. Something has it in for me!\"",
"\"I'll stay for one more drink and then I'm due at the office,\" he said.\n \"You know, I think this would make an item for the paper.\" He grinned\n and nodded toward the pandemonium.\n\n\n When he was gone, I noticed it was getting dark and turned on the desk\n lamp. Then I saw the curtains. They were all tied in knots, except\n one. That was tied in three knots.\n\n\n All\nright\n, I told myself, it was the wind. But I felt the time had\n come for me to get expert advice, so I went to the phone to call\n McGill. McGill is an assistant professor of mathematics at a university\n uptown and lives near us. He is highly imaginative, but we believe he\n knows everything.",
"\"I was so worried, and when I saw all this, I didn't know what to\n think.\" She pointed to the stalled cars. \"Are you really all right?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I'm all right. But why....\"\n\n\n \"The Oyster Bay operator said someone kept dialing and dialing Mother's\n number and there wasn't anyone on the line, so then she had it traced\n and it came from our phone here. I kept calling up, but I only got a\n busy signal. Oh, dear, are you\nsure\nyou're all right?\"\n\n\n I put my arm around her and glanced at McGill. He had an inward look.\n Then I caught Danny's eye. It had a thoughtful, almost suspicious cast\n to it.\n\n\n \"Trouble does seem to follow you, Mr. Graham,\" was all he said.",
"\"But for Pete's sake, Molly says the calls were going on for a long\n time! I phoned you only a short time ago and it must have taken her\n nearly two hours to get here from Oyster Bay.\"\n\n\n \"Then you must have done it twice and the vibrations in the\n floor—something like that—just happened to cause the right induction\n impulses. Yes, I know how you feel,\" he said, seeing my expression.\n \"It's beginning to bear down.\"\n\n\n Molly was through telephoning and suggested going out for dinner. I was\n so pleased to see her that I'd forgotten all about being hungry.\n\n\n \"I'm in no mood to cook,\" she said. \"Let's get away from all this.\"\n\n\n McGill raised an eyebrow. \"If all this, as you call it, will let us.\"\n\n\n In the lobby, we ran into Nat, looking smug in a journalistic way.",
"\"Only an analogy,\" said McGill. \"A crystal resembles life in that it\n has a definite shape and exhibits growth, but that's all. I'll agree\n this—thing—has no discernible shape and motion\nis\ninvolved, but\n plants don't move and amebas have no shape. Then a crystal feeds, but\n it does not convert what it feeds on; it merely rearranges it into a\n non-random pattern. In this case, it's rearranging random motions and\n it has a nucleus and it seems to be growing—at least in what you might\n call improbability.\"\n\n\n Molly frowned. \"Then what\nis\nit? What's it made of?\"",
"\"I should say it was made of the motions. There's a similar idea about\n the atom. Another thing that's like a crystal is that it appears to\n be forming around a nucleus not of its own material—the way a speck\n of sand thrown into a supersaturated solution becomes the nucleus of\n crystallization.\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like the pearl in an oyster,\" Molly said, and gave me an\n impertinent look.\n\n\n \"Why,\" I asked McGill, \"did you say the coins couldn't have the same\n date? I mean apart from the off chance I got them that way.\"\n\n\n \"Because I don't think this thing got going before today and\n everything that's happened can all be described as improbable motions\n here and now. The dates were already there, and to change them would\n require retroactive action, reversing time. That's out, in my book.\n That telephone now—\"",
"The other bartender gave him a fresh shaker, but the same thing\n happened, and I saw no more because the customers sitting at the bar\n crowded around in front of him, offering advice. Our waiter came back,\n baffled, saying he'd have the drinks in a moment, and went to the\n kitchen. When he returned, he had madame's vichyssoise and some rolls,\n which he put down, and then went to the bar, where the audience had\n grown larger.\n\n\n Molly lit a cigarette and said, \"I suppose this is all part of it,\n Alec. Incidentally, it seems to be getting warmer in here.\"",
"\"Never seen anything to equal it,\" he said. \"Wouldn't have believed\n it. Those guys\ndidn't\nbelieve it. Every round normal, nothing\n unusual about the hands—three of a kind, a low straight, that sort\n of thing and one guy got queens over tens, until it gets to be\nmy\ndeal. Brother! Straight flush to the king—every time! And each time,\n somebody else has four aces....\"\n\n\n He started to sweat again, so I got up to fix him another drink. There\n was one quart of club soda left, but when I tried to open it, the top\n broke and glass chips got into the bottle.\n\n\n \"I'll have to go down for more soda,\" I said.\n\n\n \"I'll come, too. I need air.\"",
"\"Did you accumulate all that change today?\"\n\n\n \"No. During the week.\"\n\n\n He shook his head. \"In that case, no. Discounting the fact that you\n could have prearranged it, if my dim provisional theory is right, that\n would be\nactually\nimpossible. It would involve time-reversal. I'll\n tell you about it later. No, just throw down the change. Let's see if\n they all come up heads.\"\n\n\n I moved away from the carpet and tossed the handful of coins onto the\n floor. They clattered and bounced—and bounced together—and stacked\n themselves into a neat pile.\n\n\n I looked at McGill. His eyes were narrowed. Without a word, he took a\n handful of coins from his own pocket and threw them.\n\n\n These coins didn't stack. They just fell into an exactly straight line,\n the adjacent ones touching.",
"It was, and I had the feeling the place was quieter—a background noise\n had stopped. It dawned on me that I no longer heard the faint hum of\n the air-conditioner over the door, and as I started to say so, I made\n a gesture toward it. My hand collided with Molly's when she tapped her\n cigarette over the ashtray, and the cigarette landed in the neighboring\n vichyssoise.\n\n\n \"Hey! What's the idea?\" snarled the sour-looking man.\n\n\n \"I'm terribly sorry,\" I said. \"It was an accident. I—\"\n\n\n \"Throwing cigarettes at people!\" the fat lady said.",
"The subway gave a repeat performance going home, and as I got to the\n apartment house we live in, the cop on the afternoon beat was standing\n there talking to the doorman.\n\n\n He said, \"Hello, Mr. Graham. I guess you must have just have missed it\n at your office building.\" I looked blank and he explained, \"We just\n heard it a little while ago: all six elevators in your building jammed\n at the same time. Sounds crazy. I guess you just missed it.\"\n\n\n Anything can happen in advertising, I thought. \"That's right, Danny, I\n just missed it,\" I said, and went on in.\n\n\n Psychiatry tells us that some people are accident-prone; I, on the\n other hand, seemed recently to be coincidence-prone, fluke-happy, and\n except for the alarm clock, I'd had no control over what had been going\n on.",
"\"All right, smart guy!\" they shouted in unison, and barged ahead,\n only to collide. They backed off and threw simultaneous punches\n which met in mid-air. Then began one of the most remarkable bouts\n ever witnessed—a fight in which fist hit fist but never anything\n else, until both champions backed away undefeated, muttering identical\n excuses and threats.\nDanny appeared at that moment. His face was dripping. \"You all right,\n Mr. Graham?\" he asked. \"I don't know what's going on around here, but\n ever since I came on this afternoon, things are going crazy. Bartley!\"\n he shouted—he could succeed as a hog-caller. \"Bring those dames over\n here!\"\n\n\n Three women in a confused wrangle, with their half-open umbrellas\n intertwined, were brought across the street, which meant climbing over\n fenders. Bartley, a fine young patrolman, seemed self-conscious; the\n ladies seemed not to be.",
"We put on our hats and went down to the street. From either end, we\n could hear wrecking trucks towing away the stalled cars. There were,\n by this time, a number of harassed cops directing the maneuver and we\n heard one of them say to Danny, \"I don't know what the hell's going\n on around here. Every goddam car's got something the matter with it.\n They can't none of them back out for one reason or another. Never seen\n anything like it.\"\n\n\n Near us, two pedestrians were doing a curious little two-step as they\n tried to pass one another; as soon as one of them moved aside to let\n the other pass, the other would move to the same side. They both had\n embarrassed grins on their faces, but before long their grins were\n replaced by looks of suspicion and then determination.",
"\"Alec, you're a reasonable guy, so I don't think you'll take offense at\n what I'm going to say. What you have told me is so impossibly unlikely,\n and the odds against it so astronomical, that I must take the view that\n you're either stringing me or you're subject to a delusion.\" I started\n to get up and expostulate, but he motioned me back. \"I know, but don't\n you see that that is far more likely than....\" He stopped and shook\n his head. Then he brightened. \"I have an idea. Maybe we can have a\n demonstration.\"\n\n\n He thought for a tense minute and snapped his fingers. \"Have you any\n change on you?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes,\" I said. \"Quite a bit.\" I reached into my pocket. There\n must have been nearly two dollars in silver and pennies. \"Do you think\n they'll each have the same date, perhaps?\""
]
] |
train
|
51046
|
[
"Who was talking to Jerome in the very beginning of the passage?",
"Why is there no feeling of acceleration in the elevator in the future?",
"Why was Jerome stopped by the police while running?",
"What can be determined about the language used in the futuristic civilization that Jerome visits?",
"Why was futuristic Jerome so sure that past Jerome would invite him inside?",
"Why is the air inside the machine not stale on the return trip like it had been on the prior trip?",
"What was surprising to Jerome about the papers that were retrieved with the generator?",
"Why is Jerome in search of the museum in the futuristic civilization?",
"Why did Jerome not stop when he was being shouted at when leaving the futuristic civilization?"
] |
[
[
"Jerome, from 30 years in the past",
"Jerome, from 10 years in the past",
"Jerome, from 10 years in the future",
"Jerome, from 30 years in the future"
],
[
"The force is too fast to be felt. ",
"The elevator doesn't actually move, only the scenery does. ",
"It's moving slower in opposition to the gravity. ",
"The false gravity used in the interstellar civilization."
],
[
"He had been stealing",
"The cop had just saw the futuristic version of him.",
"There are laws again st exerting yourself in heat",
"He was presenting him with a yellow sticker. "
],
[
"They are lazy, based on the slurring and laws against physical exertion. ",
"They are all drunks, based on the slurring.",
"They are all moving at a snail pace, based on the slurring and relaxed tempers. ",
"They are all in a hurry, based on the slurring. "
],
[
"Because he himself had done so already. ",
"Because he can see into the future. ",
"Because he knows that his decisions have been altered by the machine. ",
"Because he can hear the inner thoughts of his mind"
],
[
"Because the generator is working and clearing the air. ",
"Because there is a clearer air flow now with the retrieval of the generator. ",
"Because no one is smoking inside the machine. ",
"Because there is only one Jerome smoking inside the machine. "
],
[
"They were all in his own handwriting.",
"They were copies of what he already had at home.",
"They were exact duplicates for what the futuristic Jerome had brought when he visited. ",
"They were forged. "
],
[
"That's where the guard who has information on the generator is located.",
"That's where the generator is held.",
"That's where the information for the real inventor is located.",
"That's where the guard who has information on the real inventory of the generator is located. "
],
[
"He was unsure what they wanted and didn't want to wait and find out.",
"He knew they had caught on to his actions. ",
"He was fearing being held there for theft. ",
"He knew they were going to switch the generator with another"
]
] |
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4,
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1
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[
"So let's begin when you get up in half an hour and come out with me.\n You'll take a closer look at the machine, then. Yes, it'll be pretty\n obvious it must be a time machine. You'll sense that, too. You've seen\n it, just a small little cage with two seats, a luggage compartment, and\n a few buttons on a dash. You'll be puzzling over what I'll tell you,\n and you'll be getting used to the idea that you are the man who makes\n atomic power practical. Jerome Boell, just a plain engineer, the man\n who put atomic power in every home. You won't exactly believe it, but\n you'll want to go along.\nI'll be tired of talking by then, and in a hurry to get going. So I",
"He beams at that. \"Of course.\" The gate is swung to behind you, but\n obviously he isn't locking it. In fact, there doesn't seem to be a\n lock. \"Must be a new part. You go down that corridor, up one flight\n of stairs and left. Finest display in all the known worlds. We've got\n the original of the first thirteen models. Professor Jonas was using\n them to check his latest theory of how they work. Too bad he could\n not explain the principle, either. Someone will, some day, though.\n Lord, the genius of that twentieth century inventor! It's quite a\n hobby with me, sir. I've read everything I could get on the period.\n Oh—congratulations on your pronunciation. Sounds just like some of our\n oldest tapes.\"",
"Here, have one of these. You'll get to like them in a couple more\n years. And you can look at the revenue stamp date, if you still doubt\n my story. You'll believe it eventually, though, so it doesn't matter.\n\n\n Right now, you're shocked. It's a real wrench when a man meets himself\n for the first time. Some kind of telepathy seems to work between two\n of the same people. You\nsense\nthings. So I'll simply go ahead talking\n for half an hour or so, until you get over it. After that you'll come\n along with me. You know, I could try to change things around by telling\n what happened to me; but he—I—told me what I was going to do, so I\n might as well do the same. I probably couldn't help telling you the\n same thing in the same words, even if I tried—and I don't intend to\n try. I've gotten past that stage in worrying about all this.",
"\"Nice,\" the guard says over your shoulder. \"It finally wore out one of\n the cathogrids and we had to replace that, but otherwise it's exactly\n as the great inventor made it. And it still operates as well as ever.\n Like to have me tell you about it?\"\n\n\n \"Not particularly,\" you begin, and then realize bad manners might be\n conspicuous here. While you're searching for an answer, the guard pulls\n something out of his pocket and stares at it.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine. The mayor of Altasecarba—Centaurian, you know—is\n arriving, but I'll be back in about ten minutes. He wants to examine\n some of the weapons for a monograph on Centaurian primitives compared\n to nineteenth century man. You'll pardon me?\"",
"You act as if you're dreaming, though you can't believe it's a dream.\n You nod at me and I move out into the main corridor. A second later,\n you see me going by, mixed into a crowd that is loafing along toward\n a restaurant, or something like it, that is just opening. I'm asking\n questions of a man, who points, and I turn and move off.",
"I'd told you that, too, but you've forgotten. \"As near as I can guess,\n it's about 2150. He told me, just as I'm telling you, that it's an\n interstellar civilization.\"\n\n\n You take another cigaret from me, and follow me. I've got a small\n flashlight and we grope through a pile of rubbish, out into a corridor.\n This is a sub-sub-sub-basement. We have to walk up a flight of stairs,\n and there is an elevator waiting, fortunately with the door open.\n\n\n \"What about the time machine?\" you ask.",
"But some men aren't sane; thus it isn't always so!\nNo, you're wrong. I'm not your father's ghost, even if I do look a bit\n like him. But it's a longish story, and you might as well let me in.\n You will, you know, so why quibble about it? At least, you always\n have ... or do ... or will. I don't know, verbs get all mixed up. We\n don't have the right attitude toward tenses for a situation like this.\n\n\n Anyhow, you'll let me in. I did, so you will.",
"You get away from him, finally, after some polite thanks. The building\n seems deserted and you wander up the stairs. There's a room on your\n right filled with something that proclaims itself the first truly\n plastic diamond former, and you go up to it. As you come near, it\n goes through a crazy wiggle inside, stops turning out a continual row\n of what seem to be bearings, and slips something the size of a penny\n toward you.\n\n\n \"Souvenir,\" it announces in a well-modulated voice. \"This is a typical\n gem of the twentieth century, properly cut to 58 facets, known\n technically as a Jaegger diamond, and approximately twenty carats\n in size. You can have it made into a ring on the third floor during\n morning hours for one-tenth credit. If you have more than one child,\n press the red button for the number of stones you desire.\"",
"One day you come across an old poem—something about some folks\n calling it evolution and others calling it God. You go out, make a few\n provisions for the future, and come back to climb into the time machine\n that's waiting in the building you had put around it. Then you'll be\n knocking on your own door, thirty years back—or right now, from your\n view—and telling your younger self all these things I'm telling you.\n\n\n But now....\n\n\n Well, the drinks are finished. You're woozy enough to go along with me\n without protest, and I want to find out just why those people up there\n came looking for you and shouting, before the time machine left.\n\n\n Let's go.",
"You put it in your pocket, gulping a little, and get back to the\n corridor. You turn left and go past a big room in which models of\n spaceships—from the original thing that looks like a V-2, and is\n labeled first Lunar rocket, to a ten-foot globe, complete with\n miniature manikins—are sailing about in some kind of orbits. Then\n there is one labeled\nWep:nz\n, filled with everything from a crossbow\n to a tiny rod four inches long and half the thickness of a pencil,\n marked\nFynal Hand Arm\n. Beyond is the end of the corridor, and a big\n place that bears a sign,\nMad:lz *v Atamic Pau:r Sorsez\n.\nBy that time, you're almost convinced. And you've been doing a lot of\n thinking about what you can do. The story I'm telling has been sinking\n in, but you aren't completely willing to accept it.",
"\"Since nobody ever stole it, it's safe.\"\nWe get in the elevator, and I say \"first\" to it. It gives out a\n coughing noise and the basement openings begin to click by us. There's\n no feeling of acceleration—some kind of false gravity they use in the\n future. Then the door opens, and the elevator says \"first\" back at us.\n\n\n It's obviously a service elevator and we're in a dim corridor, with\n nobody around. I grab your hand and shake it. \"You go that way. Don't\n worry about getting lost; you never did, so you can't. Find the museum,\n grab the motor, and get out. And good luck to you.\"",
"Something goes over your head and drops on the sidewalk just in front\n of your feet, with a sudden ringing sound. You don't wait to find out\n about that, either. Somebody reaches out a hand to catch you and you\n dart past.\nThe street is pretty clear now and you jolt along, with your arms\n seeming to come out of the sockets, and that atomic generator getting\n heavier at every step.\n\n\n Out of nowhere, something in a blue uniform about six feet tall and\n on the beefy side appears—and the badge hasn't changed much. The cop\n catches your arm and you know you're not going to get away, so you stop.\n\n\n \"You can't exert yourself that hard in this heat, fellow,\" the cop\n says. \"There are laws against that, without a yellow sticker. Here, let\n me grab you a taxi.\"\nReaction sets in a bit and your knees begin to buckle, but you shake\n your head and come up for air.",
"Thanks. You think you're crazy, of course, but you'll find out you\n aren't. It's just that things are a bit confused. And don't look at the\n machine out there too long—until you get used to it, you'll find it's\n hard on the eyes, trying to follow where the vanes go. You'll get used\n to it, of course, but it will take about thirty years.\n\n\n You're wondering whether to give me a drink, as I remember it. Why not?\n And naturally, since we have the same tastes, you can make the same for\n me as you're having. Of course we have the same tastes—we're the same\n person. I'm you thirty years from now, or you're me. I remember just\n how you feel; I felt the same way when he—that is, of course, I or\n we—came back to tell me about it, thirty years ago.",
"... and it comes out here\nBy LESTER DEL REY\n\n\n Illustrated by DON SIBLEY\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction February 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThere is one fact no sane man can quarrel\n\n with ... everything has a beginning and an end.",
"You start looking for other doors or corridors, but you know this is\n right. The signs along the halls are the same as they were.\nThen there's a sort of cough and something dilates in the wall. It\n forms a perfect door and the elevator stands there waiting. You get in,\n gulping out something about going all the way down, and then wonder how\n a machine geared for voice operation can make anything of that. What\n the deuce would that lowest basement be called? But the elevator has\n closed and is moving downward in a hurry. It coughs again and you're at\n the original level. You get out—and realize you don't have a light.\n\n\n You'll never know what you stumbled over, but, somehow, you move back\n in the direction of the time machine, bumping against boxes, staggering\n here and there, and trying to find the right place by sheer feel. Then\n a shred of dim light appears; it's the weak light in the time machine.\n\n\n You've located it.",
"What's more, he speaks pretty clearly. Everyone says things in a sort\n of drawl, with softer vowels and slurred consonants, but it's rather\n pleasant.\n\n\n \"Help you, sir? Oh, of course. You must be playing in 'Atoms and\n Axioms.' The museum's closed, but I'll be glad to let you study\n whatever you need for realism in your role. Nice show. I saw it twice.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" you mutter, wondering what kind of civilization can produce\n guards as polite as that. \"I—I'm told I should investigate your\n display of atomic generators.\"",
"Anyhow, you sit there, watching nothing all around you, and no time,\n apparently, though there is a time effect back in the luggage space.\n You look at your watch and it's still running. That means you either\n carry a small time field with you, or you are catching a small\n increment of time from the main field. I don't know, and you won't\n think about that then, either.\nI'm smoking, and so are you, and the air in the machine is getting a\n bit stale. You suddenly realize that everything in the machine is wide\n open, yet you haven't seen any effects of air loss.\n\n\n \"Where are we getting our air?\" you ask. \"Or why don't we lose it?\"",
"That way, it isn't so bad. And you begin to see why I decided I might\n like to stay in the future. But all the same, the organized cooperation\n here doesn't look too good. The guard can get the same and be there\n before you.\n\n\n And he is. He stands just inside the door of the building as you reach\n it. The stranger lifts an eyebrow and goes off at once when you nod\n at him, not waiting for thanks. And the guard comes up, holding some\n dinkus in his hand, about the size of a big folding camera and not too\n dissimilar in other ways. He snaps it open and you get set to duck.\n\n\n \"You forgot the prints, monograph, and patent applications,\" he says.\n \"They go with the generator—we don't like to have them separated. A\n good thing I knew the production office of 'Atoms and Axioms' was in\n this building. Just let us know when you're finished with the model and\n we'll pick it up.\"",
"You can't feel any motion, of course. You try to reach a hand out\n through the field into the nothing around you and your hand goes out,\n all right, but nothing happens. Where the screen ends, your hand just\n turns over and pokes back at you. Doesn't hurt, and when you pull your\n arm back, you're still sound and uninjured. But it looks frightening\n and you don't try it again.\n\n\n Then it comes to you slowly that you're actually traveling in time.\n You turn to me, getting used to the idea. \"So this is the fourth\n dimension?\" you ask.\n\n\n Then you feel silly, because you'll remember that I said you'd ask\n that. Well, I asked it after I was told, then I came back and told it\n to you, and I still can't help answering when you speak.",
"Well, you won't be able to change the time cycle by doing anything I\n haven't told you, but a working model such as that is a handy thing.\n You lift it; it only weighs about fifty pounds! Naturally, it can be\n carried.\n\n\n You expect a warning bell, but nothing happens. As a matter of fact,\n if you'd stop drinking so much of that scotch and staring at the time\n machine out there now, you'd hear what I'm saying and know what will\n happen to you. But of course, just as I did, you're going to miss a\n lot of what I say from now on, and have to find out for yourself. But\n maybe some of it helps. I've tried to remember how much I remembered,\n after he told me, but I can't be sure. So I'll keep on talking. I\n probably can't help it, anyhow. Pre-set, you might say."
],
[
"You can't feel any motion, of course. You try to reach a hand out\n through the field into the nothing around you and your hand goes out,\n all right, but nothing happens. Where the screen ends, your hand just\n turns over and pokes back at you. Doesn't hurt, and when you pull your\n arm back, you're still sound and uninjured. But it looks frightening\n and you don't try it again.\n\n\n Then it comes to you slowly that you're actually traveling in time.\n You turn to me, getting used to the idea. \"So this is the fourth\n dimension?\" you ask.\n\n\n Then you feel silly, because you'll remember that I said you'd ask\n that. Well, I asked it after I was told, then I came back and told it\n to you, and I still can't help answering when you speak.",
"\"No place for it to go,\" I explain. There isn't. Out there is neither\n time nor space, apparently. How could the air leak out? You still feel\n gravity, but I can't explain that, either. Maybe the machine has a\n gravity field built in, or maybe the time that makes your watch run is\n responsible for gravity. In spite of Einstein, you have always had the\n idea that time is an effect of gravity, and I sort of agree, still.\n\n\n Then the machine stops—at least, the field around us cuts off. You\n feel a dankish sort of air replace the stale air, and you breathe\n easier, though we're in complete darkness, except for the weak light in\n the machine, which always burns, and a few feet of rough dirty cement\n floor around. You take another cigaret from me and you get out of the\n machine, just as I do.",
"\"Since nobody ever stole it, it's safe.\"\nWe get in the elevator, and I say \"first\" to it. It gives out a\n coughing noise and the basement openings begin to click by us. There's\n no feeling of acceleration—some kind of false gravity they use in the\n future. Then the door opens, and the elevator says \"first\" back at us.\n\n\n It's obviously a service elevator and we're in a dim corridor, with\n nobody around. I grab your hand and shake it. \"You go that way. Don't\n worry about getting lost; you never did, so you can't. Find the museum,\n grab the motor, and get out. And good luck to you.\"",
"Anyhow, you sit there, watching nothing all around you, and no time,\n apparently, though there is a time effect back in the luggage space.\n You look at your watch and it's still running. That means you either\n carry a small time field with you, or you are catching a small\n increment of time from the main field. I don't know, and you won't\n think about that then, either.\nI'm smoking, and so are you, and the air in the machine is getting a\n bit stale. You suddenly realize that everything in the machine is wide\n open, yet you haven't seen any effects of air loss.\n\n\n \"Where are we getting our air?\" you ask. \"Or why don't we lose it?\"",
"cut off your questions, and get you inside. I snap on a green button,\n and everything seems to cut off around us. You can see a sort of\n foggy nothing surrounding the cockpit; it is probably the field that\n prevents passage through time from affecting us. The luggage section\n isn't protected, though.\nYou start to say something, but by then I'm pressing a black button,\n and everything outside will disappear. You look for your house, but\n it isn't there. There is exactly nothing there—in fact, there is no\nthere\n. You are completely outside of time and space, as best you can\n guess how things are.",
"You put the atomic generator in the luggage space, throw the papers\n down beside it, and climb into the cockpit, sweating and mumbling. You\n reach forward toward the green button and hesitate. There's a red one\n beside it and you finally decide on that.\n\n\n Suddenly, there's a confused yell from the direction of the elevator\n and a beam of light strikes against your eyes, with a shout punctuating\n it. Your finger touches the red button.\n\n\n You'll never know what the shouting was about—whether they finally\n doped out the fact that they'd been robbed, or whether they were trying\n to help you. You don't care which it is. The field springs up around\n you and the next button you touch—the one on the board that hasn't\n been used so far—sends you off into nothingness. There is no beam of\n light, you can't hear a thing, and you're safe.",
"You start looking for other doors or corridors, but you know this is\n right. The signs along the halls are the same as they were.\nThen there's a sort of cough and something dilates in the wall. It\n forms a perfect door and the elevator stands there waiting. You get in,\n gulping out something about going all the way down, and then wonder how\n a machine geared for voice operation can make anything of that. What\n the deuce would that lowest basement be called? But the elevator has\n closed and is moving downward in a hurry. It coughs again and you're at\n the original level. You get out—and realize you don't have a light.\n\n\n You'll never know what you stumbled over, but, somehow, you move back\n in the direction of the time machine, bumping against boxes, staggering\n here and there, and trying to find the right place by sheer feel. Then\n a shred of dim light appears; it's the weak light in the time machine.\n\n\n You've located it.",
"\"Not exactly,\" I try to explain. \"Maybe it's no dimension—or it might\n be the fifth; if you're going to skip over the so-called fourth without\n traveling along it, you'd need a fifth. Don't ask me. I didn't invent\n the machine and I don't understand it.\"\n\n\n \"But....\"",
"You pardon him pretty eagerly and he wanders off happily. You go up\n to the head of the line, to that Rinks Dynapattuh, or whatever it\n transliterates to. That's small and you can carry it. But the darned\n thing is absolutely fixed. You can't see any bolts, but you can't budge\n it, either.\nYou work down the line. It'd be foolish to take the early model if you\n can get one with built-in magnetic current terminals—Ehrenhaft or\n some other principle?—and nuclear binding-force energy terminals. But\n they're all held down by the same whatchamaycallem effect.\n\n\n And, finally, you're right back beside the original first model. It's\n probably bolted down, too, but you try it tentatively and you find it\n moves. There's a little sign under it, indicating you shouldn't touch\n it, since the gravostatic plate is being renewed.",
"It isn't much of a trip back. You sit there smoking and letting your\n nerves settle back to normal. You notice a third set of buttons, with\n some pencil marks over them—\"Press these to return to yourself 30\n years\"—and you begin waiting for the air to get stale. It doesn't\n because there is only one of you this time.\n\n\n Instead, everything flashes off and you're sitting in the machine in\n your own back yard.",
"He beams at that. \"Of course.\" The gate is swung to behind you, but\n obviously he isn't locking it. In fact, there doesn't seem to be a\n lock. \"Must be a new part. You go down that corridor, up one flight\n of stairs and left. Finest display in all the known worlds. We've got\n the original of the first thirteen models. Professor Jonas was using\n them to check his latest theory of how they work. Too bad he could\n not explain the principle, either. Someone will, some day, though.\n Lord, the genius of that twentieth century inventor! It's quite a\n hobby with me, sir. I've read everything I could get on the period.\n Oh—congratulations on your pronunciation. Sounds just like some of our\n oldest tapes.\"",
"So let's begin when you get up in half an hour and come out with me.\n You'll take a closer look at the machine, then. Yes, it'll be pretty\n obvious it must be a time machine. You'll sense that, too. You've seen\n it, just a small little cage with two seats, a luggage compartment, and\n a few buttons on a dash. You'll be puzzling over what I'll tell you,\n and you'll be getting used to the idea that you are the man who makes\n atomic power practical. Jerome Boell, just a plain engineer, the man\n who put atomic power in every home. You won't exactly believe it, but\n you'll want to go along.\nI'll be tired of talking by then, and in a hurry to get going. So I",
"That way, it isn't so bad. And you begin to see why I decided I might\n like to stay in the future. But all the same, the organized cooperation\n here doesn't look too good. The guard can get the same and be there\n before you.\n\n\n And he is. He stands just inside the door of the building as you reach\n it. The stranger lifts an eyebrow and goes off at once when you nod\n at him, not waiting for thanks. And the guard comes up, holding some\n dinkus in his hand, about the size of a big folding camera and not too\n dissimilar in other ways. He snaps it open and you get set to duck.\n\n\n \"You forgot the prints, monograph, and patent applications,\" he says.\n \"They go with the generator—we don't like to have them separated. A\n good thing I knew the production office of 'Atoms and Axioms' was in\n this building. Just let us know when you're finished with the model and\n we'll pick it up.\"",
"I'd told you that, too, but you've forgotten. \"As near as I can guess,\n it's about 2150. He told me, just as I'm telling you, that it's an\n interstellar civilization.\"\n\n\n You take another cigaret from me, and follow me. I've got a small\n flashlight and we grope through a pile of rubbish, out into a corridor.\n This is a sub-sub-sub-basement. We have to walk up a flight of stairs,\n and there is an elevator waiting, fortunately with the door open.\n\n\n \"What about the time machine?\" you ask.",
"Well, you stagger down the corridor, looking out for the guard, but all\n seems clear. Then you hear his voice from the weapons room. You bend\n down and try to scurry past, but you know you're in full view. Nothing\n happens, though.\n\n\n You stumble down the stairs, feeling all the futuristic rays in the\n world on your back, and still nothing happens. Ahead of you, the gate\n is closed. You reach it and it opens obligingly by itself. You breathe\n a quick sigh of relief and start out onto the street.\n\n\n Then there's a yell behind you. You don't wait. You put one leg in\n front of the other and you begin racing down the walk, ducking past\n people, who stare at you with expressions you haven't time to see.\n There's another yell behind you.",
"And with the controls set at 120 volts, 60 cycles and 15 amperes, you\n get just that. You don't need the power company any more. And you\n feel a little happier when you realize that the luggage space wasn't\n insulated from time effects by a field, so the motor has moved backward\n in time, somehow, and is back to its original youth—minus the\n replaced wires the guard mentioned—which probably wore out because of\n the makeshift job you've just done.\n\n\n But you begin getting more of a jolt when you find that the papers are\n all in your own writing, that your name is down as the inventor, and\n that the date of the patent application is 1951.",
"Something goes over your head and drops on the sidewalk just in front\n of your feet, with a sudden ringing sound. You don't wait to find out\n about that, either. Somebody reaches out a hand to catch you and you\n dart past.\nThe street is pretty clear now and you jolt along, with your arms\n seeming to come out of the sockets, and that atomic generator getting\n heavier at every step.\n\n\n Out of nowhere, something in a blue uniform about six feet tall and\n on the beefy side appears—and the badge hasn't changed much. The cop\n catches your arm and you know you're not going to get away, so you stop.\n\n\n \"You can't exert yourself that hard in this heat, fellow,\" the cop\n says. \"There are laws against that, without a yellow sticker. Here, let\n me grab you a taxi.\"\nReaction sets in a bit and your knees begin to buckle, but you shake\n your head and come up for air.",
"You get away from him, finally, after some polite thanks. The building\n seems deserted and you wander up the stairs. There's a room on your\n right filled with something that proclaims itself the first truly\n plastic diamond former, and you go up to it. As you come near, it\n goes through a crazy wiggle inside, stops turning out a continual row\n of what seem to be bearings, and slips something the size of a penny\n toward you.\n\n\n \"Souvenir,\" it announces in a well-modulated voice. \"This is a typical\n gem of the twentieth century, properly cut to 58 facets, known\n technically as a Jaegger diamond, and approximately twenty carats\n in size. You can have it made into a ring on the third floor during\n morning hours for one-tenth credit. If you have more than one child,\n press the red button for the number of stones you desire.\"",
"You swallow several sets of tonsils you had removed years before, and\n take the bundle of papers he hands you out of the little case. He pumps\n you for some more information, which you give him at random. It seems\n to satisfy your amiable guard friend. He finally smiles in satisfaction\n and heads back to the museum.\n\n\n You still don't believe it, but you pick up the atomic generator and\n the information sheets, and you head down toward the service elevator.\n There is no button on it. In fact, there's no door there.",
"You put it in your pocket, gulping a little, and get back to the\n corridor. You turn left and go past a big room in which models of\n spaceships—from the original thing that looks like a V-2, and is\n labeled first Lunar rocket, to a ten-foot globe, complete with\n miniature manikins—are sailing about in some kind of orbits. Then\n there is one labeled\nWep:nz\n, filled with everything from a crossbow\n to a tiny rod four inches long and half the thickness of a pencil,\n marked\nFynal Hand Arm\n. Beyond is the end of the corridor, and a big\n place that bears a sign,\nMad:lz *v Atamic Pau:r Sorsez\n.\nBy that time, you're almost convinced. And you've been doing a lot of\n thinking about what you can do. The story I'm telling has been sinking\n in, but you aren't completely willing to accept it."
],
[
"Something goes over your head and drops on the sidewalk just in front\n of your feet, with a sudden ringing sound. You don't wait to find out\n about that, either. Somebody reaches out a hand to catch you and you\n dart past.\nThe street is pretty clear now and you jolt along, with your arms\n seeming to come out of the sockets, and that atomic generator getting\n heavier at every step.\n\n\n Out of nowhere, something in a blue uniform about six feet tall and\n on the beefy side appears—and the badge hasn't changed much. The cop\n catches your arm and you know you're not going to get away, so you stop.\n\n\n \"You can't exert yourself that hard in this heat, fellow,\" the cop\n says. \"There are laws against that, without a yellow sticker. Here, let\n me grab you a taxi.\"\nReaction sets in a bit and your knees begin to buckle, but you shake\n your head and come up for air.",
"\"I—I left my money home,\" you begin.\n\n\n The cop nods. \"Oh, that explains it. Fine, I won't have to give you\n an appearance schedule. But you should have come to me.\" He reaches\n out and taps a pedestrian lightly on the shoulder. \"Sir, an emergency\n request. Would you help this gentleman?\"\nThe pedestrian grins, looks at his watch, and nods. \"How far?\"\n\n\n You did notice the name of the building from which you came and you\n mutter it. The stranger nods again, reaches out and picks up the other\n side of the generator, blowing a little whistle the cop hands him.\n Pedestrians begin to move aside, and you and the stranger jog down the\n street at a trot, with a nice clear path, while the cop stands beaming\n at you both.",
"Well, you stagger down the corridor, looking out for the guard, but all\n seems clear. Then you hear his voice from the weapons room. You bend\n down and try to scurry past, but you know you're in full view. Nothing\n happens, though.\n\n\n You stumble down the stairs, feeling all the futuristic rays in the\n world on your back, and still nothing happens. Ahead of you, the gate\n is closed. You reach it and it opens obligingly by itself. You breathe\n a quick sigh of relief and start out onto the street.\n\n\n Then there's a yell behind you. You don't wait. You put one leg in\n front of the other and you begin racing down the walk, ducking past\n people, who stare at you with expressions you haven't time to see.\n There's another yell behind you.",
"That way, it isn't so bad. And you begin to see why I decided I might\n like to stay in the future. But all the same, the organized cooperation\n here doesn't look too good. The guard can get the same and be there\n before you.\n\n\n And he is. He stands just inside the door of the building as you reach\n it. The stranger lifts an eyebrow and goes off at once when you nod\n at him, not waiting for thanks. And the guard comes up, holding some\n dinkus in his hand, about the size of a big folding camera and not too\n dissimilar in other ways. He snaps it open and you get set to duck.\n\n\n \"You forgot the prints, monograph, and patent applications,\" he says.\n \"They go with the generator—we don't like to have them separated. A\n good thing I knew the production office of 'Atoms and Axioms' was in\n this building. Just let us know when you're finished with the model and\n we'll pick it up.\"",
"\"Nice,\" the guard says over your shoulder. \"It finally wore out one of\n the cathogrids and we had to replace that, but otherwise it's exactly\n as the great inventor made it. And it still operates as well as ever.\n Like to have me tell you about it?\"\n\n\n \"Not particularly,\" you begin, and then realize bad manners might be\n conspicuous here. While you're searching for an answer, the guard pulls\n something out of his pocket and stares at it.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine. The mayor of Altasecarba—Centaurian, you know—is\n arriving, but I'll be back in about ten minutes. He wants to examine\n some of the weapons for a monograph on Centaurian primitives compared\n to nineteenth century man. You'll pardon me?\"",
"He beams at that. \"Of course.\" The gate is swung to behind you, but\n obviously he isn't locking it. In fact, there doesn't seem to be a\n lock. \"Must be a new part. You go down that corridor, up one flight\n of stairs and left. Finest display in all the known worlds. We've got\n the original of the first thirteen models. Professor Jonas was using\n them to check his latest theory of how they work. Too bad he could\n not explain the principle, either. Someone will, some day, though.\n Lord, the genius of that twentieth century inventor! It's quite a\n hobby with me, sir. I've read everything I could get on the period.\n Oh—congratulations on your pronunciation. Sounds just like some of our\n oldest tapes.\"",
"\"Since nobody ever stole it, it's safe.\"\nWe get in the elevator, and I say \"first\" to it. It gives out a\n coughing noise and the basement openings begin to click by us. There's\n no feeling of acceleration—some kind of false gravity they use in the\n future. Then the door opens, and the elevator says \"first\" back at us.\n\n\n It's obviously a service elevator and we're in a dim corridor, with\n nobody around. I grab your hand and shake it. \"You go that way. Don't\n worry about getting lost; you never did, so you can't. Find the museum,\n grab the motor, and get out. And good luck to you.\"",
"So let's begin when you get up in half an hour and come out with me.\n You'll take a closer look at the machine, then. Yes, it'll be pretty\n obvious it must be a time machine. You'll sense that, too. You've seen\n it, just a small little cage with two seats, a luggage compartment, and\n a few buttons on a dash. You'll be puzzling over what I'll tell you,\n and you'll be getting used to the idea that you are the man who makes\n atomic power practical. Jerome Boell, just a plain engineer, the man\n who put atomic power in every home. You won't exactly believe it, but\n you'll want to go along.\nI'll be tired of talking by then, and in a hurry to get going. So I",
"I'd told you that, too, but you've forgotten. \"As near as I can guess,\n it's about 2150. He told me, just as I'm telling you, that it's an\n interstellar civilization.\"\n\n\n You take another cigaret from me, and follow me. I've got a small\n flashlight and we grope through a pile of rubbish, out into a corridor.\n This is a sub-sub-sub-basement. We have to walk up a flight of stairs,\n and there is an elevator waiting, fortunately with the door open.\n\n\n \"What about the time machine?\" you ask.",
"You act as if you're dreaming, though you can't believe it's a dream.\n You nod at me and I move out into the main corridor. A second later,\n you see me going by, mixed into a crowd that is loafing along toward\n a restaurant, or something like it, that is just opening. I'm asking\n questions of a man, who points, and I turn and move off.",
"You put the atomic generator in the luggage space, throw the papers\n down beside it, and climb into the cockpit, sweating and mumbling. You\n reach forward toward the green button and hesitate. There's a red one\n beside it and you finally decide on that.\n\n\n Suddenly, there's a confused yell from the direction of the elevator\n and a beam of light strikes against your eyes, with a shout punctuating\n it. Your finger touches the red button.\n\n\n You'll never know what the shouting was about—whether they finally\n doped out the fact that they'd been robbed, or whether they were trying\n to help you. You don't care which it is. The field springs up around\n you and the next button you touch—the one on the board that hasn't\n been used so far—sends you off into nothingness. There is no beam of\n light, you can't hear a thing, and you're safe.",
"You get away from him, finally, after some polite thanks. The building\n seems deserted and you wander up the stairs. There's a room on your\n right filled with something that proclaims itself the first truly\n plastic diamond former, and you go up to it. As you come near, it\n goes through a crazy wiggle inside, stops turning out a continual row\n of what seem to be bearings, and slips something the size of a penny\n toward you.\n\n\n \"Souvenir,\" it announces in a well-modulated voice. \"This is a typical\n gem of the twentieth century, properly cut to 58 facets, known\n technically as a Jaegger diamond, and approximately twenty carats\n in size. You can have it made into a ring on the third floor during\n morning hours for one-tenth credit. If you have more than one child,\n press the red button for the number of stones you desire.\"",
"You put it in your pocket, gulping a little, and get back to the\n corridor. You turn left and go past a big room in which models of\n spaceships—from the original thing that looks like a V-2, and is\n labeled first Lunar rocket, to a ten-foot globe, complete with\n miniature manikins—are sailing about in some kind of orbits. Then\n there is one labeled\nWep:nz\n, filled with everything from a crossbow\n to a tiny rod four inches long and half the thickness of a pencil,\n marked\nFynal Hand Arm\n. Beyond is the end of the corridor, and a big\n place that bears a sign,\nMad:lz *v Atamic Pau:r Sorsez\n.\nBy that time, you're almost convinced. And you've been doing a lot of\n thinking about what you can do. The story I'm telling has been sinking\n in, but you aren't completely willing to accept it.",
"\"No place for it to go,\" I explain. There isn't. Out there is neither\n time nor space, apparently. How could the air leak out? You still feel\n gravity, but I can't explain that, either. Maybe the machine has a\n gravity field built in, or maybe the time that makes your watch run is\n responsible for gravity. In spite of Einstein, you have always had the\n idea that time is an effect of gravity, and I sort of agree, still.\n\n\n Then the machine stops—at least, the field around us cuts off. You\n feel a dankish sort of air replace the stale air, and you breathe\n easier, though we're in complete darkness, except for the weak light in\n the machine, which always burns, and a few feet of rough dirty cement\n floor around. You take another cigaret from me and you get out of the\n machine, just as I do.",
"Here, have one of these. You'll get to like them in a couple more\n years. And you can look at the revenue stamp date, if you still doubt\n my story. You'll believe it eventually, though, so it doesn't matter.\n\n\n Right now, you're shocked. It's a real wrench when a man meets himself\n for the first time. Some kind of telepathy seems to work between two\n of the same people. You\nsense\nthings. So I'll simply go ahead talking\n for half an hour or so, until you get over it. After that you'll come\n along with me. You know, I could try to change things around by telling\n what happened to me; but he—I—told me what I was going to do, so I\n might as well do the same. I probably couldn't help telling you the\n same thing in the same words, even if I tried—and I don't intend to\n try. I've gotten past that stage in worrying about all this.",
"You start looking for other doors or corridors, but you know this is\n right. The signs along the halls are the same as they were.\nThen there's a sort of cough and something dilates in the wall. It\n forms a perfect door and the elevator stands there waiting. You get in,\n gulping out something about going all the way down, and then wonder how\n a machine geared for voice operation can make anything of that. What\n the deuce would that lowest basement be called? But the elevator has\n closed and is moving downward in a hurry. It coughs again and you're at\n the original level. You get out—and realize you don't have a light.\n\n\n You'll never know what you stumbled over, but, somehow, you move back\n in the direction of the time machine, bumping against boxes, staggering\n here and there, and trying to find the right place by sheer feel. Then\n a shred of dim light appears; it's the weak light in the time machine.\n\n\n You've located it.",
"And with the controls set at 120 volts, 60 cycles and 15 amperes, you\n get just that. You don't need the power company any more. And you\n feel a little happier when you realize that the luggage space wasn't\n insulated from time effects by a field, so the motor has moved backward\n in time, somehow, and is back to its original youth—minus the\n replaced wires the guard mentioned—which probably wore out because of\n the makeshift job you've just done.\n\n\n But you begin getting more of a jolt when you find that the papers are\n all in your own writing, that your name is down as the inventor, and\n that the date of the patent application is 1951.",
"Anyhow, you sit there, watching nothing all around you, and no time,\n apparently, though there is a time effect back in the luggage space.\n You look at your watch and it's still running. That means you either\n carry a small time field with you, or you are catching a small\n increment of time from the main field. I don't know, and you won't\n think about that then, either.\nI'm smoking, and so are you, and the air in the machine is getting a\n bit stale. You suddenly realize that everything in the machine is wide\n open, yet you haven't seen any effects of air loss.\n\n\n \"Where are we getting our air?\" you ask. \"Or why don't we lose it?\"",
"I let it go, and so do you. If you don't, it's a good way of going\n crazy. You'll see later why I couldn't have invented the machine. Of\n course, there may have been a start for all this once. There may have\n been a time when you did invent the machine—the atomic motor first,\n then the time-machine. And when you closed the loop by going back and\n saving yourself the trouble, it got all tangled up. I figured out once\n that such a universe would need some seven or eight time and space\n dimensions. It's simpler just to figure that this is the way time got\n bent back on itself. Maybe there is no machine, and it's just easier\n for us to imagine it. When you spend thirty years thinking about it, as\n I did—and you will—you get further and further from an answer.",
"Well, you won't be able to change the time cycle by doing anything I\n haven't told you, but a working model such as that is a handy thing.\n You lift it; it only weighs about fifty pounds! Naturally, it can be\n carried.\n\n\n You expect a warning bell, but nothing happens. As a matter of fact,\n if you'd stop drinking so much of that scotch and staring at the time\n machine out there now, you'd hear what I'm saying and know what will\n happen to you. But of course, just as I did, you're going to miss a\n lot of what I say from now on, and have to find out for yourself. But\n maybe some of it helps. I've tried to remember how much I remembered,\n after he told me, but I can't be sure. So I'll keep on talking. I\n probably can't help it, anyhow. Pre-set, you might say."
],
[
"I'd told you that, too, but you've forgotten. \"As near as I can guess,\n it's about 2150. He told me, just as I'm telling you, that it's an\n interstellar civilization.\"\n\n\n You take another cigaret from me, and follow me. I've got a small\n flashlight and we grope through a pile of rubbish, out into a corridor.\n This is a sub-sub-sub-basement. We have to walk up a flight of stairs,\n and there is an elevator waiting, fortunately with the door open.\n\n\n \"What about the time machine?\" you ask.",
"You come out of the side corridor and go down a hall, away from the\n restaurant. There are quiet little signs along the hall. You look at\n them, realizing for the first time that things have changed.\nSteij:neri, Faunten, Z:rgat Dispenseri.\nThe signs are very quiet and\n dignified. Some of them can be decoded to stationery shops, fountains,\n and the like. What a zergot is, you don't know. You stop at a sign\n that announces:\nTrav:l Biwrou—F:rst-Clas Twrz—Marz, Viin*s, and\n x: Trouj:n Planets. Spej:l reits tu aol s*nz wixin 60 lyt iirz!\nBut\n there is only a single picture of a dull-looking metal sphere, with\n passengers moving up a ramp, and the office is closed. You begin to get\n the hang of the spelling they use, though.",
"What's more, he speaks pretty clearly. Everyone says things in a sort\n of drawl, with softer vowels and slurred consonants, but it's rather\n pleasant.\n\n\n \"Help you, sir? Oh, of course. You must be playing in 'Atoms and\n Axioms.' The museum's closed, but I'll be glad to let you study\n whatever you need for realism in your role. Nice show. I saw it twice.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" you mutter, wondering what kind of civilization can produce\n guards as polite as that. \"I—I'm told I should investigate your\n display of atomic generators.\"",
"Now there are people around you, but nobody pays much attention to you.\n Why should they? You wouldn't care if you saw a man in a leopard-skin\n suit; you'd figure it was some part in a play and let it go. Well,\n people don't change much.\n\n\n You get up your courage and go up to a boy selling something that might\n be papers on tapes.\n\n\n \"Where can I find the Museum of Science?\"\n\n\n \"Downayer rien turn lefa the sign. Stoo bloss,\" he tells you. Around\n you, you hear some pretty normal English, but there are others using\n stuff as garbled as his. The educated and uneducated? I don't know.",
"He beams at that. \"Of course.\" The gate is swung to behind you, but\n obviously he isn't locking it. In fact, there doesn't seem to be a\n lock. \"Must be a new part. You go down that corridor, up one flight\n of stairs and left. Finest display in all the known worlds. We've got\n the original of the first thirteen models. Professor Jonas was using\n them to check his latest theory of how they work. Too bad he could\n not explain the principle, either. Someone will, some day, though.\n Lord, the genius of that twentieth century inventor! It's quite a\n hobby with me, sir. I've read everything I could get on the period.\n Oh—congratulations on your pronunciation. Sounds just like some of our\n oldest tapes.\"",
"So let's begin when you get up in half an hour and come out with me.\n You'll take a closer look at the machine, then. Yes, it'll be pretty\n obvious it must be a time machine. You'll sense that, too. You've seen\n it, just a small little cage with two seats, a luggage compartment, and\n a few buttons on a dash. You'll be puzzling over what I'll tell you,\n and you'll be getting used to the idea that you are the man who makes\n atomic power practical. Jerome Boell, just a plain engineer, the man\n who put atomic power in every home. You won't exactly believe it, but\n you'll want to go along.\nI'll be tired of talking by then, and in a hurry to get going. So I",
"That way, it isn't so bad. And you begin to see why I decided I might\n like to stay in the future. But all the same, the organized cooperation\n here doesn't look too good. The guard can get the same and be there\n before you.\n\n\n And he is. He stands just inside the door of the building as you reach\n it. The stranger lifts an eyebrow and goes off at once when you nod\n at him, not waiting for thanks. And the guard comes up, holding some\n dinkus in his hand, about the size of a big folding camera and not too\n dissimilar in other ways. He snaps it open and you get set to duck.\n\n\n \"You forgot the prints, monograph, and patent applications,\" he says.\n \"They go with the generator—we don't like to have them separated. A\n good thing I knew the production office of 'Atoms and Axioms' was in\n this building. Just let us know when you're finished with the model and\n we'll pick it up.\"",
"\"Since nobody ever stole it, it's safe.\"\nWe get in the elevator, and I say \"first\" to it. It gives out a\n coughing noise and the basement openings begin to click by us. There's\n no feeling of acceleration—some kind of false gravity they use in the\n future. Then the door opens, and the elevator says \"first\" back at us.\n\n\n It's obviously a service elevator and we're in a dim corridor, with\n nobody around. I grab your hand and shake it. \"You go that way. Don't\n worry about getting lost; you never did, so you can't. Find the museum,\n grab the motor, and get out. And good luck to you.\"",
"I've got a bundle of clothes and I start changing. It's a sort\n of simple, short-limbed, one-piece affair I put on, but it feels\n comfortable.\n\n\n \"I'm staying here,\" I tell you. \"This is like the things they wear in\n this century, as near as I can remember it, and I should be able to\n pass fairly well. I've had all my fortune—the one you make on that\n atomic generator—invested in such a way I can get it on using some\n identification I've got with me, so I'll do all right. I know they\n still use some kind of money, you'll see evidence of that. And it's a\n pretty easygoing civilization, from what I could see. We'll go up and\n I'll leave you. I like the looks of things here, so I won't be coming\n back with you.\"\n\n\n You nod, remembering I've told you about it. \"What century is this,\n anyway?\"",
"You get away from him, finally, after some polite thanks. The building\n seems deserted and you wander up the stairs. There's a room on your\n right filled with something that proclaims itself the first truly\n plastic diamond former, and you go up to it. As you come near, it\n goes through a crazy wiggle inside, stops turning out a continual row\n of what seem to be bearings, and slips something the size of a penny\n toward you.\n\n\n \"Souvenir,\" it announces in a well-modulated voice. \"This is a typical\n gem of the twentieth century, properly cut to 58 facets, known\n technically as a Jaegger diamond, and approximately twenty carats\n in size. You can have it made into a ring on the third floor during\n morning hours for one-tenth credit. If you have more than one child,\n press the red button for the number of stones you desire.\"",
"\"Nice,\" the guard says over your shoulder. \"It finally wore out one of\n the cathogrids and we had to replace that, but otherwise it's exactly\n as the great inventor made it. And it still operates as well as ever.\n Like to have me tell you about it?\"\n\n\n \"Not particularly,\" you begin, and then realize bad manners might be\n conspicuous here. While you're searching for an answer, the guard pulls\n something out of his pocket and stares at it.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine. The mayor of Altasecarba—Centaurian, you know—is\n arriving, but I'll be back in about ten minutes. He wants to examine\n some of the weapons for a monograph on Centaurian primitives compared\n to nineteenth century man. You'll pardon me?\"",
"You go right until you find a big sign built into the rubbery surface\n of the walk:\nMiuzi:m *v Syens\n. There's an arrow pointing and you turn\n left. Ahead of you, two blocks on, you can see a pink building, with\n faint aqua trimming, bigger than most of the others. They are building\n lower than they used to, apparently. Twenty floors up seems about the\n maximum. You head for it, and find the sidewalk is marked with the\n information that it is the museum.\nYou go up the steps, but you see that it seems to be closed. You\n hesitate for a moment, then. You're beginning to think the whole affair\n is complete nonsense, and you should get back to the time machine and\n go home. But then a guard comes to the gate. Except for the short legs\n in his suit and the friendly grin on his face, he looks like any other\n guard.",
"Here, have one of these. You'll get to like them in a couple more\n years. And you can look at the revenue stamp date, if you still doubt\n my story. You'll believe it eventually, though, so it doesn't matter.\n\n\n Right now, you're shocked. It's a real wrench when a man meets himself\n for the first time. Some kind of telepathy seems to work between two\n of the same people. You\nsense\nthings. So I'll simply go ahead talking\n for half an hour or so, until you get over it. After that you'll come\n along with me. You know, I could try to change things around by telling\n what happened to me; but he—I—told me what I was going to do, so I\n might as well do the same. I probably couldn't help telling you the\n same thing in the same words, even if I tried—and I don't intend to\n try. I've gotten past that stage in worrying about all this.",
"You can't feel any motion, of course. You try to reach a hand out\n through the field into the nothing around you and your hand goes out,\n all right, but nothing happens. Where the screen ends, your hand just\n turns over and pokes back at you. Doesn't hurt, and when you pull your\n arm back, you're still sound and uninjured. But it looks frightening\n and you don't try it again.\n\n\n Then it comes to you slowly that you're actually traveling in time.\n You turn to me, getting used to the idea. \"So this is the fourth\n dimension?\" you ask.\n\n\n Then you feel silly, because you'll remember that I said you'd ask\n that. Well, I asked it after I was told, then I came back and told it\n to you, and I still can't help answering when you speak.",
"\"No place for it to go,\" I explain. There isn't. Out there is neither\n time nor space, apparently. How could the air leak out? You still feel\n gravity, but I can't explain that, either. Maybe the machine has a\n gravity field built in, or maybe the time that makes your watch run is\n responsible for gravity. In spite of Einstein, you have always had the\n idea that time is an effect of gravity, and I sort of agree, still.\n\n\n Then the machine stops—at least, the field around us cuts off. You\n feel a dankish sort of air replace the stale air, and you breathe\n easier, though we're in complete darkness, except for the weak light in\n the machine, which always burns, and a few feet of rough dirty cement\n floor around. You take another cigaret from me and you get out of the\n machine, just as I do.",
"Thanks. You think you're crazy, of course, but you'll find out you\n aren't. It's just that things are a bit confused. And don't look at the\n machine out there too long—until you get used to it, you'll find it's\n hard on the eyes, trying to follow where the vanes go. You'll get used\n to it, of course, but it will take about thirty years.\n\n\n You're wondering whether to give me a drink, as I remember it. Why not?\n And naturally, since we have the same tastes, you can make the same for\n me as you're having. Of course we have the same tastes—we're the same\n person. I'm you thirty years from now, or you're me. I remember just\n how you feel; I felt the same way when he—that is, of course, I or\n we—came back to tell me about it, thirty years ago.",
"You notice that the models are all mounted on tables and that they're a\n lot smaller than you thought. They seem to be in chronological order,\n and the latest one, marked\n2147—Rincs Dyn*pat:\n, is about the size\n of a desk telephone. The earlier ones are larger, of course, clumsier,\n but with variations, probably depending on the power output. A big sign\n on the ceiling gives a lot of dope on atomic generators, explaining\n that this is the first invention which leaped full blown into basically\n final form.\n\n\n You study it, but it mentions casually the inventor, without giving\n his name. Either they don't know it, or they take it for granted that\n everyone does, which seems more probable. They call attention to the\n fact that they have the original model of the first atomic generator\n built, complete with design drawings, original manuscript on operation,\n and full patent application.",
"cut off your questions, and get you inside. I snap on a green button,\n and everything seems to cut off around us. You can see a sort of\n foggy nothing surrounding the cockpit; it is probably the field that\n prevents passage through time from affecting us. The luggage section\n isn't protected, though.\nYou start to say something, but by then I'm pressing a black button,\n and everything outside will disappear. You look for your house, but\n it isn't there. There is exactly nothing there—in fact, there is no\nthere\n. You are completely outside of time and space, as best you can\n guess how things are.",
"Anyhow, you sit there, watching nothing all around you, and no time,\n apparently, though there is a time effect back in the luggage space.\n You look at your watch and it's still running. That means you either\n carry a small time field with you, or you are catching a small\n increment of time from the main field. I don't know, and you won't\n think about that then, either.\nI'm smoking, and so are you, and the air in the machine is getting a\n bit stale. You suddenly realize that everything in the machine is wide\n open, yet you haven't seen any effects of air loss.\n\n\n \"Where are we getting our air?\" you ask. \"Or why don't we lose it?\"",
"You pardon him pretty eagerly and he wanders off happily. You go up\n to the head of the line, to that Rinks Dynapattuh, or whatever it\n transliterates to. That's small and you can carry it. But the darned\n thing is absolutely fixed. You can't see any bolts, but you can't budge\n it, either.\nYou work down the line. It'd be foolish to take the early model if you\n can get one with built-in magnetic current terminals—Ehrenhaft or\n some other principle?—and nuclear binding-force energy terminals. But\n they're all held down by the same whatchamaycallem effect.\n\n\n And, finally, you're right back beside the original first model. It's\n probably bolted down, too, but you try it tentatively and you find it\n moves. There's a little sign under it, indicating you shouldn't touch\n it, since the gravostatic plate is being renewed."
],
[
"So let's begin when you get up in half an hour and come out with me.\n You'll take a closer look at the machine, then. Yes, it'll be pretty\n obvious it must be a time machine. You'll sense that, too. You've seen\n it, just a small little cage with two seats, a luggage compartment, and\n a few buttons on a dash. You'll be puzzling over what I'll tell you,\n and you'll be getting used to the idea that you are the man who makes\n atomic power practical. Jerome Boell, just a plain engineer, the man\n who put atomic power in every home. You won't exactly believe it, but\n you'll want to go along.\nI'll be tired of talking by then, and in a hurry to get going. So I",
"Here, have one of these. You'll get to like them in a couple more\n years. And you can look at the revenue stamp date, if you still doubt\n my story. You'll believe it eventually, though, so it doesn't matter.\n\n\n Right now, you're shocked. It's a real wrench when a man meets himself\n for the first time. Some kind of telepathy seems to work between two\n of the same people. You\nsense\nthings. So I'll simply go ahead talking\n for half an hour or so, until you get over it. After that you'll come\n along with me. You know, I could try to change things around by telling\n what happened to me; but he—I—told me what I was going to do, so I\n might as well do the same. I probably couldn't help telling you the\n same thing in the same words, even if I tried—and I don't intend to\n try. I've gotten past that stage in worrying about all this.",
"Thanks. You think you're crazy, of course, but you'll find out you\n aren't. It's just that things are a bit confused. And don't look at the\n machine out there too long—until you get used to it, you'll find it's\n hard on the eyes, trying to follow where the vanes go. You'll get used\n to it, of course, but it will take about thirty years.\n\n\n You're wondering whether to give me a drink, as I remember it. Why not?\n And naturally, since we have the same tastes, you can make the same for\n me as you're having. Of course we have the same tastes—we're the same\n person. I'm you thirty years from now, or you're me. I remember just\n how you feel; I felt the same way when he—that is, of course, I or\n we—came back to tell me about it, thirty years ago.",
"He beams at that. \"Of course.\" The gate is swung to behind you, but\n obviously he isn't locking it. In fact, there doesn't seem to be a\n lock. \"Must be a new part. You go down that corridor, up one flight\n of stairs and left. Finest display in all the known worlds. We've got\n the original of the first thirteen models. Professor Jonas was using\n them to check his latest theory of how they work. Too bad he could\n not explain the principle, either. Someone will, some day, though.\n Lord, the genius of that twentieth century inventor! It's quite a\n hobby with me, sir. I've read everything I could get on the period.\n Oh—congratulations on your pronunciation. Sounds just like some of our\n oldest tapes.\"",
"But some men aren't sane; thus it isn't always so!\nNo, you're wrong. I'm not your father's ghost, even if I do look a bit\n like him. But it's a longish story, and you might as well let me in.\n You will, you know, so why quibble about it? At least, you always\n have ... or do ... or will. I don't know, verbs get all mixed up. We\n don't have the right attitude toward tenses for a situation like this.\n\n\n Anyhow, you'll let me in. I did, so you will.",
"One day you come across an old poem—something about some folks\n calling it evolution and others calling it God. You go out, make a few\n provisions for the future, and come back to climb into the time machine\n that's waiting in the building you had put around it. Then you'll be\n knocking on your own door, thirty years back—or right now, from your\n view—and telling your younger self all these things I'm telling you.\n\n\n But now....\n\n\n Well, the drinks are finished. You're woozy enough to go along with me\n without protest, and I want to find out just why those people up there\n came looking for you and shouting, before the time machine left.\n\n\n Let's go.",
"That way, it isn't so bad. And you begin to see why I decided I might\n like to stay in the future. But all the same, the organized cooperation\n here doesn't look too good. The guard can get the same and be there\n before you.\n\n\n And he is. He stands just inside the door of the building as you reach\n it. The stranger lifts an eyebrow and goes off at once when you nod\n at him, not waiting for thanks. And the guard comes up, holding some\n dinkus in his hand, about the size of a big folding camera and not too\n dissimilar in other ways. He snaps it open and you get set to duck.\n\n\n \"You forgot the prints, monograph, and patent applications,\" he says.\n \"They go with the generator—we don't like to have them separated. A\n good thing I knew the production office of 'Atoms and Axioms' was in\n this building. Just let us know when you're finished with the model and\n we'll pick it up.\"",
"\"Since nobody ever stole it, it's safe.\"\nWe get in the elevator, and I say \"first\" to it. It gives out a\n coughing noise and the basement openings begin to click by us. There's\n no feeling of acceleration—some kind of false gravity they use in the\n future. Then the door opens, and the elevator says \"first\" back at us.\n\n\n It's obviously a service elevator and we're in a dim corridor, with\n nobody around. I grab your hand and shake it. \"You go that way. Don't\n worry about getting lost; you never did, so you can't. Find the museum,\n grab the motor, and get out. And good luck to you.\"",
"I'd told you that, too, but you've forgotten. \"As near as I can guess,\n it's about 2150. He told me, just as I'm telling you, that it's an\n interstellar civilization.\"\n\n\n You take another cigaret from me, and follow me. I've got a small\n flashlight and we grope through a pile of rubbish, out into a corridor.\n This is a sub-sub-sub-basement. We have to walk up a flight of stairs,\n and there is an elevator waiting, fortunately with the door open.\n\n\n \"What about the time machine?\" you ask.",
"You start looking for other doors or corridors, but you know this is\n right. The signs along the halls are the same as they were.\nThen there's a sort of cough and something dilates in the wall. It\n forms a perfect door and the elevator stands there waiting. You get in,\n gulping out something about going all the way down, and then wonder how\n a machine geared for voice operation can make anything of that. What\n the deuce would that lowest basement be called? But the elevator has\n closed and is moving downward in a hurry. It coughs again and you're at\n the original level. You get out—and realize you don't have a light.\n\n\n You'll never know what you stumbled over, but, somehow, you move back\n in the direction of the time machine, bumping against boxes, staggering\n here and there, and trying to find the right place by sheer feel. Then\n a shred of dim light appears; it's the weak light in the time machine.\n\n\n You've located it.",
"You'll figure out the cycle in more details later. You get into the\n machine in front of your house, go to the future in the sub-basement,\n land in your back yard, and then hop back thirty years to pick up\n yourself, landing in front of your house. Just that. But right then,\n you don't care. You jump out and start pulling out that atomic\n generator and taking it inside.\nIt isn't hard to disassemble, but you don't learn a thing; just some\n plates of metal, some spiral coils, and a few odds and ends—all\n things that can be made easily enough, all obviously of common metals.\n But when you put it together again, about an hour later, you notice\n something.\n\n\n Everything in it is brand-new and there's one set of copper wires\n missing! It won't work. You put some #12 house wire in, exactly like\n the set on the other side, drop in some iron filings, and try it again.",
"And with the controls set at 120 volts, 60 cycles and 15 amperes, you\n get just that. You don't need the power company any more. And you\n feel a little happier when you realize that the luggage space wasn't\n insulated from time effects by a field, so the motor has moved backward\n in time, somehow, and is back to its original youth—minus the\n replaced wires the guard mentioned—which probably wore out because of\n the makeshift job you've just done.\n\n\n But you begin getting more of a jolt when you find that the papers are\n all in your own writing, that your name is down as the inventor, and\n that the date of the patent application is 1951.",
"Well, you won't be able to change the time cycle by doing anything I\n haven't told you, but a working model such as that is a handy thing.\n You lift it; it only weighs about fifty pounds! Naturally, it can be\n carried.\n\n\n You expect a warning bell, but nothing happens. As a matter of fact,\n if you'd stop drinking so much of that scotch and staring at the time\n machine out there now, you'd hear what I'm saying and know what will\n happen to you. But of course, just as I did, you're going to miss a\n lot of what I say from now on, and have to find out for yourself. But\n maybe some of it helps. I've tried to remember how much I remembered,\n after he told me, but I can't be sure. So I'll keep on talking. I\n probably can't help it, anyhow. Pre-set, you might say.",
"I let it go, and so do you. If you don't, it's a good way of going\n crazy. You'll see later why I couldn't have invented the machine. Of\n course, there may have been a start for all this once. There may have\n been a time when you did invent the machine—the atomic motor first,\n then the time-machine. And when you closed the loop by going back and\n saving yourself the trouble, it got all tangled up. I figured out once\n that such a universe would need some seven or eight time and space\n dimensions. It's simpler just to figure that this is the way time got\n bent back on itself. Maybe there is no machine, and it's just easier\n for us to imagine it. When you spend thirty years thinking about it, as\n I did—and you will—you get further and further from an answer.",
"You put it in your pocket, gulping a little, and get back to the\n corridor. You turn left and go past a big room in which models of\n spaceships—from the original thing that looks like a V-2, and is\n labeled first Lunar rocket, to a ten-foot globe, complete with\n miniature manikins—are sailing about in some kind of orbits. Then\n there is one labeled\nWep:nz\n, filled with everything from a crossbow\n to a tiny rod four inches long and half the thickness of a pencil,\n marked\nFynal Hand Arm\n. Beyond is the end of the corridor, and a big\n place that bears a sign,\nMad:lz *v Atamic Pau:r Sorsez\n.\nBy that time, you're almost convinced. And you've been doing a lot of\n thinking about what you can do. The story I'm telling has been sinking\n in, but you aren't completely willing to accept it.",
"It isn't much of a trip back. You sit there smoking and letting your\n nerves settle back to normal. You notice a third set of buttons, with\n some pencil marks over them—\"Press these to return to yourself 30\n years\"—and you begin waiting for the air to get stale. It doesn't\n because there is only one of you this time.\n\n\n Instead, everything flashes off and you're sitting in the machine in\n your own back yard.",
"cut off your questions, and get you inside. I snap on a green button,\n and everything seems to cut off around us. You can see a sort of\n foggy nothing surrounding the cockpit; it is probably the field that\n prevents passage through time from affecting us. The luggage section\n isn't protected, though.\nYou start to say something, but by then I'm pressing a black button,\n and everything outside will disappear. You look for your house, but\n it isn't there. There is exactly nothing there—in fact, there is no\nthere\n. You are completely outside of time and space, as best you can\n guess how things are.",
"\"Nice,\" the guard says over your shoulder. \"It finally wore out one of\n the cathogrids and we had to replace that, but otherwise it's exactly\n as the great inventor made it. And it still operates as well as ever.\n Like to have me tell you about it?\"\n\n\n \"Not particularly,\" you begin, and then realize bad manners might be\n conspicuous here. While you're searching for an answer, the guard pulls\n something out of his pocket and stares at it.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine. The mayor of Altasecarba—Centaurian, you know—is\n arriving, but I'll be back in about ten minutes. He wants to examine\n some of the weapons for a monograph on Centaurian primitives compared\n to nineteenth century man. You'll pardon me?\"",
"You go right until you find a big sign built into the rubbery surface\n of the walk:\nMiuzi:m *v Syens\n. There's an arrow pointing and you turn\n left. Ahead of you, two blocks on, you can see a pink building, with\n faint aqua trimming, bigger than most of the others. They are building\n lower than they used to, apparently. Twenty floors up seems about the\n maximum. You head for it, and find the sidewalk is marked with the\n information that it is the museum.\nYou go up the steps, but you see that it seems to be closed. You\n hesitate for a moment, then. You're beginning to think the whole affair\n is complete nonsense, and you should get back to the time machine and\n go home. But then a guard comes to the gate. Except for the short legs\n in his suit and the friendly grin on his face, he looks like any other\n guard.",
"I've got a bundle of clothes and I start changing. It's a sort\n of simple, short-limbed, one-piece affair I put on, but it feels\n comfortable.\n\n\n \"I'm staying here,\" I tell you. \"This is like the things they wear in\n this century, as near as I can remember it, and I should be able to\n pass fairly well. I've had all my fortune—the one you make on that\n atomic generator—invested in such a way I can get it on using some\n identification I've got with me, so I'll do all right. I know they\n still use some kind of money, you'll see evidence of that. And it's a\n pretty easygoing civilization, from what I could see. We'll go up and\n I'll leave you. I like the looks of things here, so I won't be coming\n back with you.\"\n\n\n You nod, remembering I've told you about it. \"What century is this,\n anyway?\""
],
[
"Anyhow, you sit there, watching nothing all around you, and no time,\n apparently, though there is a time effect back in the luggage space.\n You look at your watch and it's still running. That means you either\n carry a small time field with you, or you are catching a small\n increment of time from the main field. I don't know, and you won't\n think about that then, either.\nI'm smoking, and so are you, and the air in the machine is getting a\n bit stale. You suddenly realize that everything in the machine is wide\n open, yet you haven't seen any effects of air loss.\n\n\n \"Where are we getting our air?\" you ask. \"Or why don't we lose it?\"",
"It isn't much of a trip back. You sit there smoking and letting your\n nerves settle back to normal. You notice a third set of buttons, with\n some pencil marks over them—\"Press these to return to yourself 30\n years\"—and you begin waiting for the air to get stale. It doesn't\n because there is only one of you this time.\n\n\n Instead, everything flashes off and you're sitting in the machine in\n your own back yard.",
"\"No place for it to go,\" I explain. There isn't. Out there is neither\n time nor space, apparently. How could the air leak out? You still feel\n gravity, but I can't explain that, either. Maybe the machine has a\n gravity field built in, or maybe the time that makes your watch run is\n responsible for gravity. In spite of Einstein, you have always had the\n idea that time is an effect of gravity, and I sort of agree, still.\n\n\n Then the machine stops—at least, the field around us cuts off. You\n feel a dankish sort of air replace the stale air, and you breathe\n easier, though we're in complete darkness, except for the weak light in\n the machine, which always burns, and a few feet of rough dirty cement\n floor around. You take another cigaret from me and you get out of the\n machine, just as I do.",
"You start looking for other doors or corridors, but you know this is\n right. The signs along the halls are the same as they were.\nThen there's a sort of cough and something dilates in the wall. It\n forms a perfect door and the elevator stands there waiting. You get in,\n gulping out something about going all the way down, and then wonder how\n a machine geared for voice operation can make anything of that. What\n the deuce would that lowest basement be called? But the elevator has\n closed and is moving downward in a hurry. It coughs again and you're at\n the original level. You get out—and realize you don't have a light.\n\n\n You'll never know what you stumbled over, but, somehow, you move back\n in the direction of the time machine, bumping against boxes, staggering\n here and there, and trying to find the right place by sheer feel. Then\n a shred of dim light appears; it's the weak light in the time machine.\n\n\n You've located it.",
"He beams at that. \"Of course.\" The gate is swung to behind you, but\n obviously he isn't locking it. In fact, there doesn't seem to be a\n lock. \"Must be a new part. You go down that corridor, up one flight\n of stairs and left. Finest display in all the known worlds. We've got\n the original of the first thirteen models. Professor Jonas was using\n them to check his latest theory of how they work. Too bad he could\n not explain the principle, either. Someone will, some day, though.\n Lord, the genius of that twentieth century inventor! It's quite a\n hobby with me, sir. I've read everything I could get on the period.\n Oh—congratulations on your pronunciation. Sounds just like some of our\n oldest tapes.\"",
"So let's begin when you get up in half an hour and come out with me.\n You'll take a closer look at the machine, then. Yes, it'll be pretty\n obvious it must be a time machine. You'll sense that, too. You've seen\n it, just a small little cage with two seats, a luggage compartment, and\n a few buttons on a dash. You'll be puzzling over what I'll tell you,\n and you'll be getting used to the idea that you are the man who makes\n atomic power practical. Jerome Boell, just a plain engineer, the man\n who put atomic power in every home. You won't exactly believe it, but\n you'll want to go along.\nI'll be tired of talking by then, and in a hurry to get going. So I",
"And with the controls set at 120 volts, 60 cycles and 15 amperes, you\n get just that. You don't need the power company any more. And you\n feel a little happier when you realize that the luggage space wasn't\n insulated from time effects by a field, so the motor has moved backward\n in time, somehow, and is back to its original youth—minus the\n replaced wires the guard mentioned—which probably wore out because of\n the makeshift job you've just done.\n\n\n But you begin getting more of a jolt when you find that the papers are\n all in your own writing, that your name is down as the inventor, and\n that the date of the patent application is 1951.",
"\"Nice,\" the guard says over your shoulder. \"It finally wore out one of\n the cathogrids and we had to replace that, but otherwise it's exactly\n as the great inventor made it. And it still operates as well as ever.\n Like to have me tell you about it?\"\n\n\n \"Not particularly,\" you begin, and then realize bad manners might be\n conspicuous here. While you're searching for an answer, the guard pulls\n something out of his pocket and stares at it.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine. The mayor of Altasecarba—Centaurian, you know—is\n arriving, but I'll be back in about ten minutes. He wants to examine\n some of the weapons for a monograph on Centaurian primitives compared\n to nineteenth century man. You'll pardon me?\"",
"You can't feel any motion, of course. You try to reach a hand out\n through the field into the nothing around you and your hand goes out,\n all right, but nothing happens. Where the screen ends, your hand just\n turns over and pokes back at you. Doesn't hurt, and when you pull your\n arm back, you're still sound and uninjured. But it looks frightening\n and you don't try it again.\n\n\n Then it comes to you slowly that you're actually traveling in time.\n You turn to me, getting used to the idea. \"So this is the fourth\n dimension?\" you ask.\n\n\n Then you feel silly, because you'll remember that I said you'd ask\n that. Well, I asked it after I was told, then I came back and told it\n to you, and I still can't help answering when you speak.",
"cut off your questions, and get you inside. I snap on a green button,\n and everything seems to cut off around us. You can see a sort of\n foggy nothing surrounding the cockpit; it is probably the field that\n prevents passage through time from affecting us. The luggage section\n isn't protected, though.\nYou start to say something, but by then I'm pressing a black button,\n and everything outside will disappear. You look for your house, but\n it isn't there. There is exactly nothing there—in fact, there is no\nthere\n. You are completely outside of time and space, as best you can\n guess how things are.",
"Thanks. You think you're crazy, of course, but you'll find out you\n aren't. It's just that things are a bit confused. And don't look at the\n machine out there too long—until you get used to it, you'll find it's\n hard on the eyes, trying to follow where the vanes go. You'll get used\n to it, of course, but it will take about thirty years.\n\n\n You're wondering whether to give me a drink, as I remember it. Why not?\n And naturally, since we have the same tastes, you can make the same for\n me as you're having. Of course we have the same tastes—we're the same\n person. I'm you thirty years from now, or you're me. I remember just\n how you feel; I felt the same way when he—that is, of course, I or\n we—came back to tell me about it, thirty years ago.",
"I let it go, and so do you. If you don't, it's a good way of going\n crazy. You'll see later why I couldn't have invented the machine. Of\n course, there may have been a start for all this once. There may have\n been a time when you did invent the machine—the atomic motor first,\n then the time-machine. And when you closed the loop by going back and\n saving yourself the trouble, it got all tangled up. I figured out once\n that such a universe would need some seven or eight time and space\n dimensions. It's simpler just to figure that this is the way time got\n bent back on itself. Maybe there is no machine, and it's just easier\n for us to imagine it. When you spend thirty years thinking about it, as\n I did—and you will—you get further and further from an answer.",
"You put it in your pocket, gulping a little, and get back to the\n corridor. You turn left and go past a big room in which models of\n spaceships—from the original thing that looks like a V-2, and is\n labeled first Lunar rocket, to a ten-foot globe, complete with\n miniature manikins—are sailing about in some kind of orbits. Then\n there is one labeled\nWep:nz\n, filled with everything from a crossbow\n to a tiny rod four inches long and half the thickness of a pencil,\n marked\nFynal Hand Arm\n. Beyond is the end of the corridor, and a big\n place that bears a sign,\nMad:lz *v Atamic Pau:r Sorsez\n.\nBy that time, you're almost convinced. And you've been doing a lot of\n thinking about what you can do. The story I'm telling has been sinking\n in, but you aren't completely willing to accept it.",
"\"Since nobody ever stole it, it's safe.\"\nWe get in the elevator, and I say \"first\" to it. It gives out a\n coughing noise and the basement openings begin to click by us. There's\n no feeling of acceleration—some kind of false gravity they use in the\n future. Then the door opens, and the elevator says \"first\" back at us.\n\n\n It's obviously a service elevator and we're in a dim corridor, with\n nobody around. I grab your hand and shake it. \"You go that way. Don't\n worry about getting lost; you never did, so you can't. Find the museum,\n grab the motor, and get out. And good luck to you.\"",
"You put the atomic generator in the luggage space, throw the papers\n down beside it, and climb into the cockpit, sweating and mumbling. You\n reach forward toward the green button and hesitate. There's a red one\n beside it and you finally decide on that.\n\n\n Suddenly, there's a confused yell from the direction of the elevator\n and a beam of light strikes against your eyes, with a shout punctuating\n it. Your finger touches the red button.\n\n\n You'll never know what the shouting was about—whether they finally\n doped out the fact that they'd been robbed, or whether they were trying\n to help you. You don't care which it is. The field springs up around\n you and the next button you touch—the one on the board that hasn't\n been used so far—sends you off into nothingness. There is no beam of\n light, you can't hear a thing, and you're safe.",
"I'd told you that, too, but you've forgotten. \"As near as I can guess,\n it's about 2150. He told me, just as I'm telling you, that it's an\n interstellar civilization.\"\n\n\n You take another cigaret from me, and follow me. I've got a small\n flashlight and we grope through a pile of rubbish, out into a corridor.\n This is a sub-sub-sub-basement. We have to walk up a flight of stairs,\n and there is an elevator waiting, fortunately with the door open.\n\n\n \"What about the time machine?\" you ask.",
"Well, you won't be able to change the time cycle by doing anything I\n haven't told you, but a working model such as that is a handy thing.\n You lift it; it only weighs about fifty pounds! Naturally, it can be\n carried.\n\n\n You expect a warning bell, but nothing happens. As a matter of fact,\n if you'd stop drinking so much of that scotch and staring at the time\n machine out there now, you'd hear what I'm saying and know what will\n happen to you. But of course, just as I did, you're going to miss a\n lot of what I say from now on, and have to find out for yourself. But\n maybe some of it helps. I've tried to remember how much I remembered,\n after he told me, but I can't be sure. So I'll keep on talking. I\n probably can't help it, anyhow. Pre-set, you might say.",
"You'll figure out the cycle in more details later. You get into the\n machine in front of your house, go to the future in the sub-basement,\n land in your back yard, and then hop back thirty years to pick up\n yourself, landing in front of your house. Just that. But right then,\n you don't care. You jump out and start pulling out that atomic\n generator and taking it inside.\nIt isn't hard to disassemble, but you don't learn a thing; just some\n plates of metal, some spiral coils, and a few odds and ends—all\n things that can be made easily enough, all obviously of common metals.\n But when you put it together again, about an hour later, you notice\n something.\n\n\n Everything in it is brand-new and there's one set of copper wires\n missing! It won't work. You put some #12 house wire in, exactly like\n the set on the other side, drop in some iron filings, and try it again.",
"You go right until you find a big sign built into the rubbery surface\n of the walk:\nMiuzi:m *v Syens\n. There's an arrow pointing and you turn\n left. Ahead of you, two blocks on, you can see a pink building, with\n faint aqua trimming, bigger than most of the others. They are building\n lower than they used to, apparently. Twenty floors up seems about the\n maximum. You head for it, and find the sidewalk is marked with the\n information that it is the museum.\nYou go up the steps, but you see that it seems to be closed. You\n hesitate for a moment, then. You're beginning to think the whole affair\n is complete nonsense, and you should get back to the time machine and\n go home. But then a guard comes to the gate. Except for the short legs\n in his suit and the friendly grin on his face, he looks like any other\n guard.",
"You get away from him, finally, after some polite thanks. The building\n seems deserted and you wander up the stairs. There's a room on your\n right filled with something that proclaims itself the first truly\n plastic diamond former, and you go up to it. As you come near, it\n goes through a crazy wiggle inside, stops turning out a continual row\n of what seem to be bearings, and slips something the size of a penny\n toward you.\n\n\n \"Souvenir,\" it announces in a well-modulated voice. \"This is a typical\n gem of the twentieth century, properly cut to 58 facets, known\n technically as a Jaegger diamond, and approximately twenty carats\n in size. You can have it made into a ring on the third floor during\n morning hours for one-tenth credit. If you have more than one child,\n press the red button for the number of stones you desire.\""
],
[
"You swallow several sets of tonsils you had removed years before, and\n take the bundle of papers he hands you out of the little case. He pumps\n you for some more information, which you give him at random. It seems\n to satisfy your amiable guard friend. He finally smiles in satisfaction\n and heads back to the museum.\n\n\n You still don't believe it, but you pick up the atomic generator and\n the information sheets, and you head down toward the service elevator.\n There is no button on it. In fact, there's no door there.",
"You notice that the models are all mounted on tables and that they're a\n lot smaller than you thought. They seem to be in chronological order,\n and the latest one, marked\n2147—Rincs Dyn*pat:\n, is about the size\n of a desk telephone. The earlier ones are larger, of course, clumsier,\n but with variations, probably depending on the power output. A big sign\n on the ceiling gives a lot of dope on atomic generators, explaining\n that this is the first invention which leaped full blown into basically\n final form.\n\n\n You study it, but it mentions casually the inventor, without giving\n his name. Either they don't know it, or they take it for granted that\n everyone does, which seems more probable. They call attention to the\n fact that they have the original model of the first atomic generator\n built, complete with design drawings, original manuscript on operation,\n and full patent application.",
"That way, it isn't so bad. And you begin to see why I decided I might\n like to stay in the future. But all the same, the organized cooperation\n here doesn't look too good. The guard can get the same and be there\n before you.\n\n\n And he is. He stands just inside the door of the building as you reach\n it. The stranger lifts an eyebrow and goes off at once when you nod\n at him, not waiting for thanks. And the guard comes up, holding some\n dinkus in his hand, about the size of a big folding camera and not too\n dissimilar in other ways. He snaps it open and you get set to duck.\n\n\n \"You forgot the prints, monograph, and patent applications,\" he says.\n \"They go with the generator—we don't like to have them separated. A\n good thing I knew the production office of 'Atoms and Axioms' was in\n this building. Just let us know when you're finished with the model and\n we'll pick it up.\"",
"He beams at that. \"Of course.\" The gate is swung to behind you, but\n obviously he isn't locking it. In fact, there doesn't seem to be a\n lock. \"Must be a new part. You go down that corridor, up one flight\n of stairs and left. Finest display in all the known worlds. We've got\n the original of the first thirteen models. Professor Jonas was using\n them to check his latest theory of how they work. Too bad he could\n not explain the principle, either. Someone will, some day, though.\n Lord, the genius of that twentieth century inventor! It's quite a\n hobby with me, sir. I've read everything I could get on the period.\n Oh—congratulations on your pronunciation. Sounds just like some of our\n oldest tapes.\"",
"You put the atomic generator in the luggage space, throw the papers\n down beside it, and climb into the cockpit, sweating and mumbling. You\n reach forward toward the green button and hesitate. There's a red one\n beside it and you finally decide on that.\n\n\n Suddenly, there's a confused yell from the direction of the elevator\n and a beam of light strikes against your eyes, with a shout punctuating\n it. Your finger touches the red button.\n\n\n You'll never know what the shouting was about—whether they finally\n doped out the fact that they'd been robbed, or whether they were trying\n to help you. You don't care which it is. The field springs up around\n you and the next button you touch—the one on the board that hasn't\n been used so far—sends you off into nothingness. There is no beam of\n light, you can't hear a thing, and you're safe.",
"\"Nice,\" the guard says over your shoulder. \"It finally wore out one of\n the cathogrids and we had to replace that, but otherwise it's exactly\n as the great inventor made it. And it still operates as well as ever.\n Like to have me tell you about it?\"\n\n\n \"Not particularly,\" you begin, and then realize bad manners might be\n conspicuous here. While you're searching for an answer, the guard pulls\n something out of his pocket and stares at it.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine. The mayor of Altasecarba—Centaurian, you know—is\n arriving, but I'll be back in about ten minutes. He wants to examine\n some of the weapons for a monograph on Centaurian primitives compared\n to nineteenth century man. You'll pardon me?\"",
"And with the controls set at 120 volts, 60 cycles and 15 amperes, you\n get just that. You don't need the power company any more. And you\n feel a little happier when you realize that the luggage space wasn't\n insulated from time effects by a field, so the motor has moved backward\n in time, somehow, and is back to its original youth—minus the\n replaced wires the guard mentioned—which probably wore out because of\n the makeshift job you've just done.\n\n\n But you begin getting more of a jolt when you find that the papers are\n all in your own writing, that your name is down as the inventor, and\n that the date of the patent application is 1951.",
"What's more, he speaks pretty clearly. Everyone says things in a sort\n of drawl, with softer vowels and slurred consonants, but it's rather\n pleasant.\n\n\n \"Help you, sir? Oh, of course. You must be playing in 'Atoms and\n Axioms.' The museum's closed, but I'll be glad to let you study\n whatever you need for realism in your role. Nice show. I saw it twice.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" you mutter, wondering what kind of civilization can produce\n guards as polite as that. \"I—I'm told I should investigate your\n display of atomic generators.\"",
"They state that it has all major refinements, operating on any fuel,\n producing electricity at any desired voltage up to five million, any\n chosen cyclic rate from direct current to one thousand megacycles,\n and any amperage up to one thousand, its maximum power output being\n fifty kilowatts, limited by the current-carrying capacity of the\n outputs. They also mention that the operating principle is still being\n investigated, and that only such refinements as better alloys and the\n addition of magnetric and nucleatric current outlets have been added\n since the original.\n\n\n So you go to the end and look over the thing. It's simply a square box\n with a huge plug on each side, and a set of vernier controls on top,\n plus a little hole marked, in old-style spelling,\nDrop BBs or wire\n here\n. Apparently that's the way it's fueled. It's about one foot on\n each side.",
"You put it in your pocket, gulping a little, and get back to the\n corridor. You turn left and go past a big room in which models of\n spaceships—from the original thing that looks like a V-2, and is\n labeled first Lunar rocket, to a ten-foot globe, complete with\n miniature manikins—are sailing about in some kind of orbits. Then\n there is one labeled\nWep:nz\n, filled with everything from a crossbow\n to a tiny rod four inches long and half the thickness of a pencil,\n marked\nFynal Hand Arm\n. Beyond is the end of the corridor, and a big\n place that bears a sign,\nMad:lz *v Atamic Pau:r Sorsez\n.\nBy that time, you're almost convinced. And you've been doing a lot of\n thinking about what you can do. The story I'm telling has been sinking\n in, but you aren't completely willing to accept it.",
"You get away from him, finally, after some polite thanks. The building\n seems deserted and you wander up the stairs. There's a room on your\n right filled with something that proclaims itself the first truly\n plastic diamond former, and you go up to it. As you come near, it\n goes through a crazy wiggle inside, stops turning out a continual row\n of what seem to be bearings, and slips something the size of a penny\n toward you.\n\n\n \"Souvenir,\" it announces in a well-modulated voice. \"This is a typical\n gem of the twentieth century, properly cut to 58 facets, known\n technically as a Jaegger diamond, and approximately twenty carats\n in size. You can have it made into a ring on the third floor during\n morning hours for one-tenth credit. If you have more than one child,\n press the red button for the number of stones you desire.\"",
"You start looking for other doors or corridors, but you know this is\n right. The signs along the halls are the same as they were.\nThen there's a sort of cough and something dilates in the wall. It\n forms a perfect door and the elevator stands there waiting. You get in,\n gulping out something about going all the way down, and then wonder how\n a machine geared for voice operation can make anything of that. What\n the deuce would that lowest basement be called? But the elevator has\n closed and is moving downward in a hurry. It coughs again and you're at\n the original level. You get out—and realize you don't have a light.\n\n\n You'll never know what you stumbled over, but, somehow, you move back\n in the direction of the time machine, bumping against boxes, staggering\n here and there, and trying to find the right place by sheer feel. Then\n a shred of dim light appears; it's the weak light in the time machine.\n\n\n You've located it.",
"I'd told you that, too, but you've forgotten. \"As near as I can guess,\n it's about 2150. He told me, just as I'm telling you, that it's an\n interstellar civilization.\"\n\n\n You take another cigaret from me, and follow me. I've got a small\n flashlight and we grope through a pile of rubbish, out into a corridor.\n This is a sub-sub-sub-basement. We have to walk up a flight of stairs,\n and there is an elevator waiting, fortunately with the door open.\n\n\n \"What about the time machine?\" you ask.",
"Here, have one of these. You'll get to like them in a couple more\n years. And you can look at the revenue stamp date, if you still doubt\n my story. You'll believe it eventually, though, so it doesn't matter.\n\n\n Right now, you're shocked. It's a real wrench when a man meets himself\n for the first time. Some kind of telepathy seems to work between two\n of the same people. You\nsense\nthings. So I'll simply go ahead talking\n for half an hour or so, until you get over it. After that you'll come\n along with me. You know, I could try to change things around by telling\n what happened to me; but he—I—told me what I was going to do, so I\n might as well do the same. I probably couldn't help telling you the\n same thing in the same words, even if I tried—and I don't intend to\n try. I've gotten past that stage in worrying about all this.",
"\"Since nobody ever stole it, it's safe.\"\nWe get in the elevator, and I say \"first\" to it. It gives out a\n coughing noise and the basement openings begin to click by us. There's\n no feeling of acceleration—some kind of false gravity they use in the\n future. Then the door opens, and the elevator says \"first\" back at us.\n\n\n It's obviously a service elevator and we're in a dim corridor, with\n nobody around. I grab your hand and shake it. \"You go that way. Don't\n worry about getting lost; you never did, so you can't. Find the museum,\n grab the motor, and get out. And good luck to you.\"",
"So let's begin when you get up in half an hour and come out with me.\n You'll take a closer look at the machine, then. Yes, it'll be pretty\n obvious it must be a time machine. You'll sense that, too. You've seen\n it, just a small little cage with two seats, a luggage compartment, and\n a few buttons on a dash. You'll be puzzling over what I'll tell you,\n and you'll be getting used to the idea that you are the man who makes\n atomic power practical. Jerome Boell, just a plain engineer, the man\n who put atomic power in every home. You won't exactly believe it, but\n you'll want to go along.\nI'll be tired of talking by then, and in a hurry to get going. So I",
"You'll figure out the cycle in more details later. You get into the\n machine in front of your house, go to the future in the sub-basement,\n land in your back yard, and then hop back thirty years to pick up\n yourself, landing in front of your house. Just that. But right then,\n you don't care. You jump out and start pulling out that atomic\n generator and taking it inside.\nIt isn't hard to disassemble, but you don't learn a thing; just some\n plates of metal, some spiral coils, and a few odds and ends—all\n things that can be made easily enough, all obviously of common metals.\n But when you put it together again, about an hour later, you notice\n something.\n\n\n Everything in it is brand-new and there's one set of copper wires\n missing! It won't work. You put some #12 house wire in, exactly like\n the set on the other side, drop in some iron filings, and try it again.",
"Anyhow, you sit there, watching nothing all around you, and no time,\n apparently, though there is a time effect back in the luggage space.\n You look at your watch and it's still running. That means you either\n carry a small time field with you, or you are catching a small\n increment of time from the main field. I don't know, and you won't\n think about that then, either.\nI'm smoking, and so are you, and the air in the machine is getting a\n bit stale. You suddenly realize that everything in the machine is wide\n open, yet you haven't seen any effects of air loss.\n\n\n \"Where are we getting our air?\" you ask. \"Or why don't we lose it?\"",
"\"I—I left my money home,\" you begin.\n\n\n The cop nods. \"Oh, that explains it. Fine, I won't have to give you\n an appearance schedule. But you should have come to me.\" He reaches\n out and taps a pedestrian lightly on the shoulder. \"Sir, an emergency\n request. Would you help this gentleman?\"\nThe pedestrian grins, looks at his watch, and nods. \"How far?\"\n\n\n You did notice the name of the building from which you came and you\n mutter it. The stranger nods again, reaches out and picks up the other\n side of the generator, blowing a little whistle the cop hands him.\n Pedestrians begin to move aside, and you and the stranger jog down the\n street at a trot, with a nice clear path, while the cop stands beaming\n at you both.",
"\"No place for it to go,\" I explain. There isn't. Out there is neither\n time nor space, apparently. How could the air leak out? You still feel\n gravity, but I can't explain that, either. Maybe the machine has a\n gravity field built in, or maybe the time that makes your watch run is\n responsible for gravity. In spite of Einstein, you have always had the\n idea that time is an effect of gravity, and I sort of agree, still.\n\n\n Then the machine stops—at least, the field around us cuts off. You\n feel a dankish sort of air replace the stale air, and you breathe\n easier, though we're in complete darkness, except for the weak light in\n the machine, which always burns, and a few feet of rough dirty cement\n floor around. You take another cigaret from me and you get out of the\n machine, just as I do."
],
[
"You go right until you find a big sign built into the rubbery surface\n of the walk:\nMiuzi:m *v Syens\n. There's an arrow pointing and you turn\n left. Ahead of you, two blocks on, you can see a pink building, with\n faint aqua trimming, bigger than most of the others. They are building\n lower than they used to, apparently. Twenty floors up seems about the\n maximum. You head for it, and find the sidewalk is marked with the\n information that it is the museum.\nYou go up the steps, but you see that it seems to be closed. You\n hesitate for a moment, then. You're beginning to think the whole affair\n is complete nonsense, and you should get back to the time machine and\n go home. But then a guard comes to the gate. Except for the short legs\n in his suit and the friendly grin on his face, he looks like any other\n guard.",
"\"Since nobody ever stole it, it's safe.\"\nWe get in the elevator, and I say \"first\" to it. It gives out a\n coughing noise and the basement openings begin to click by us. There's\n no feeling of acceleration—some kind of false gravity they use in the\n future. Then the door opens, and the elevator says \"first\" back at us.\n\n\n It's obviously a service elevator and we're in a dim corridor, with\n nobody around. I grab your hand and shake it. \"You go that way. Don't\n worry about getting lost; you never did, so you can't. Find the museum,\n grab the motor, and get out. And good luck to you.\"",
"He beams at that. \"Of course.\" The gate is swung to behind you, but\n obviously he isn't locking it. In fact, there doesn't seem to be a\n lock. \"Must be a new part. You go down that corridor, up one flight\n of stairs and left. Finest display in all the known worlds. We've got\n the original of the first thirteen models. Professor Jonas was using\n them to check his latest theory of how they work. Too bad he could\n not explain the principle, either. Someone will, some day, though.\n Lord, the genius of that twentieth century inventor! It's quite a\n hobby with me, sir. I've read everything I could get on the period.\n Oh—congratulations on your pronunciation. Sounds just like some of our\n oldest tapes.\"",
"\"Nice,\" the guard says over your shoulder. \"It finally wore out one of\n the cathogrids and we had to replace that, but otherwise it's exactly\n as the great inventor made it. And it still operates as well as ever.\n Like to have me tell you about it?\"\n\n\n \"Not particularly,\" you begin, and then realize bad manners might be\n conspicuous here. While you're searching for an answer, the guard pulls\n something out of his pocket and stares at it.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine. The mayor of Altasecarba—Centaurian, you know—is\n arriving, but I'll be back in about ten minutes. He wants to examine\n some of the weapons for a monograph on Centaurian primitives compared\n to nineteenth century man. You'll pardon me?\"",
"I'd told you that, too, but you've forgotten. \"As near as I can guess,\n it's about 2150. He told me, just as I'm telling you, that it's an\n interstellar civilization.\"\n\n\n You take another cigaret from me, and follow me. I've got a small\n flashlight and we grope through a pile of rubbish, out into a corridor.\n This is a sub-sub-sub-basement. We have to walk up a flight of stairs,\n and there is an elevator waiting, fortunately with the door open.\n\n\n \"What about the time machine?\" you ask.",
"That way, it isn't so bad. And you begin to see why I decided I might\n like to stay in the future. But all the same, the organized cooperation\n here doesn't look too good. The guard can get the same and be there\n before you.\n\n\n And he is. He stands just inside the door of the building as you reach\n it. The stranger lifts an eyebrow and goes off at once when you nod\n at him, not waiting for thanks. And the guard comes up, holding some\n dinkus in his hand, about the size of a big folding camera and not too\n dissimilar in other ways. He snaps it open and you get set to duck.\n\n\n \"You forgot the prints, monograph, and patent applications,\" he says.\n \"They go with the generator—we don't like to have them separated. A\n good thing I knew the production office of 'Atoms and Axioms' was in\n this building. Just let us know when you're finished with the model and\n we'll pick it up.\"",
"You get away from him, finally, after some polite thanks. The building\n seems deserted and you wander up the stairs. There's a room on your\n right filled with something that proclaims itself the first truly\n plastic diamond former, and you go up to it. As you come near, it\n goes through a crazy wiggle inside, stops turning out a continual row\n of what seem to be bearings, and slips something the size of a penny\n toward you.\n\n\n \"Souvenir,\" it announces in a well-modulated voice. \"This is a typical\n gem of the twentieth century, properly cut to 58 facets, known\n technically as a Jaegger diamond, and approximately twenty carats\n in size. You can have it made into a ring on the third floor during\n morning hours for one-tenth credit. If you have more than one child,\n press the red button for the number of stones you desire.\"",
"What's more, he speaks pretty clearly. Everyone says things in a sort\n of drawl, with softer vowels and slurred consonants, but it's rather\n pleasant.\n\n\n \"Help you, sir? Oh, of course. You must be playing in 'Atoms and\n Axioms.' The museum's closed, but I'll be glad to let you study\n whatever you need for realism in your role. Nice show. I saw it twice.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" you mutter, wondering what kind of civilization can produce\n guards as polite as that. \"I—I'm told I should investigate your\n display of atomic generators.\"",
"So let's begin when you get up in half an hour and come out with me.\n You'll take a closer look at the machine, then. Yes, it'll be pretty\n obvious it must be a time machine. You'll sense that, too. You've seen\n it, just a small little cage with two seats, a luggage compartment, and\n a few buttons on a dash. You'll be puzzling over what I'll tell you,\n and you'll be getting used to the idea that you are the man who makes\n atomic power practical. Jerome Boell, just a plain engineer, the man\n who put atomic power in every home. You won't exactly believe it, but\n you'll want to go along.\nI'll be tired of talking by then, and in a hurry to get going. So I",
"You notice that the models are all mounted on tables and that they're a\n lot smaller than you thought. They seem to be in chronological order,\n and the latest one, marked\n2147—Rincs Dyn*pat:\n, is about the size\n of a desk telephone. The earlier ones are larger, of course, clumsier,\n but with variations, probably depending on the power output. A big sign\n on the ceiling gives a lot of dope on atomic generators, explaining\n that this is the first invention which leaped full blown into basically\n final form.\n\n\n You study it, but it mentions casually the inventor, without giving\n his name. Either they don't know it, or they take it for granted that\n everyone does, which seems more probable. They call attention to the\n fact that they have the original model of the first atomic generator\n built, complete with design drawings, original manuscript on operation,\n and full patent application.",
"You put it in your pocket, gulping a little, and get back to the\n corridor. You turn left and go past a big room in which models of\n spaceships—from the original thing that looks like a V-2, and is\n labeled first Lunar rocket, to a ten-foot globe, complete with\n miniature manikins—are sailing about in some kind of orbits. Then\n there is one labeled\nWep:nz\n, filled with everything from a crossbow\n to a tiny rod four inches long and half the thickness of a pencil,\n marked\nFynal Hand Arm\n. Beyond is the end of the corridor, and a big\n place that bears a sign,\nMad:lz *v Atamic Pau:r Sorsez\n.\nBy that time, you're almost convinced. And you've been doing a lot of\n thinking about what you can do. The story I'm telling has been sinking\n in, but you aren't completely willing to accept it.",
"You start looking for other doors or corridors, but you know this is\n right. The signs along the halls are the same as they were.\nThen there's a sort of cough and something dilates in the wall. It\n forms a perfect door and the elevator stands there waiting. You get in,\n gulping out something about going all the way down, and then wonder how\n a machine geared for voice operation can make anything of that. What\n the deuce would that lowest basement be called? But the elevator has\n closed and is moving downward in a hurry. It coughs again and you're at\n the original level. You get out—and realize you don't have a light.\n\n\n You'll never know what you stumbled over, but, somehow, you move back\n in the direction of the time machine, bumping against boxes, staggering\n here and there, and trying to find the right place by sheer feel. Then\n a shred of dim light appears; it's the weak light in the time machine.\n\n\n You've located it.",
"You swallow several sets of tonsils you had removed years before, and\n take the bundle of papers he hands you out of the little case. He pumps\n you for some more information, which you give him at random. It seems\n to satisfy your amiable guard friend. He finally smiles in satisfaction\n and heads back to the museum.\n\n\n You still don't believe it, but you pick up the atomic generator and\n the information sheets, and you head down toward the service elevator.\n There is no button on it. In fact, there's no door there.",
"Well, you stagger down the corridor, looking out for the guard, but all\n seems clear. Then you hear his voice from the weapons room. You bend\n down and try to scurry past, but you know you're in full view. Nothing\n happens, though.\n\n\n You stumble down the stairs, feeling all the futuristic rays in the\n world on your back, and still nothing happens. Ahead of you, the gate\n is closed. You reach it and it opens obligingly by itself. You breathe\n a quick sigh of relief and start out onto the street.\n\n\n Then there's a yell behind you. You don't wait. You put one leg in\n front of the other and you begin racing down the walk, ducking past\n people, who stare at you with expressions you haven't time to see.\n There's another yell behind you.",
"You pardon him pretty eagerly and he wanders off happily. You go up\n to the head of the line, to that Rinks Dynapattuh, or whatever it\n transliterates to. That's small and you can carry it. But the darned\n thing is absolutely fixed. You can't see any bolts, but you can't budge\n it, either.\nYou work down the line. It'd be foolish to take the early model if you\n can get one with built-in magnetic current terminals—Ehrenhaft or\n some other principle?—and nuclear binding-force energy terminals. But\n they're all held down by the same whatchamaycallem effect.\n\n\n And, finally, you're right back beside the original first model. It's\n probably bolted down, too, but you try it tentatively and you find it\n moves. There's a little sign under it, indicating you shouldn't touch\n it, since the gravostatic plate is being renewed.",
"I've got a bundle of clothes and I start changing. It's a sort\n of simple, short-limbed, one-piece affair I put on, but it feels\n comfortable.\n\n\n \"I'm staying here,\" I tell you. \"This is like the things they wear in\n this century, as near as I can remember it, and I should be able to\n pass fairly well. I've had all my fortune—the one you make on that\n atomic generator—invested in such a way I can get it on using some\n identification I've got with me, so I'll do all right. I know they\n still use some kind of money, you'll see evidence of that. And it's a\n pretty easygoing civilization, from what I could see. We'll go up and\n I'll leave you. I like the looks of things here, so I won't be coming\n back with you.\"\n\n\n You nod, remembering I've told you about it. \"What century is this,\n anyway?\"",
"You come out of the side corridor and go down a hall, away from the\n restaurant. There are quiet little signs along the hall. You look at\n them, realizing for the first time that things have changed.\nSteij:neri, Faunten, Z:rgat Dispenseri.\nThe signs are very quiet and\n dignified. Some of them can be decoded to stationery shops, fountains,\n and the like. What a zergot is, you don't know. You stop at a sign\n that announces:\nTrav:l Biwrou—F:rst-Clas Twrz—Marz, Viin*s, and\n x: Trouj:n Planets. Spej:l reits tu aol s*nz wixin 60 lyt iirz!\nBut\n there is only a single picture of a dull-looking metal sphere, with\n passengers moving up a ramp, and the office is closed. You begin to get\n the hang of the spelling they use, though.",
"\"No place for it to go,\" I explain. There isn't. Out there is neither\n time nor space, apparently. How could the air leak out? You still feel\n gravity, but I can't explain that, either. Maybe the machine has a\n gravity field built in, or maybe the time that makes your watch run is\n responsible for gravity. In spite of Einstein, you have always had the\n idea that time is an effect of gravity, and I sort of agree, still.\n\n\n Then the machine stops—at least, the field around us cuts off. You\n feel a dankish sort of air replace the stale air, and you breathe\n easier, though we're in complete darkness, except for the weak light in\n the machine, which always burns, and a few feet of rough dirty cement\n floor around. You take another cigaret from me and you get out of the\n machine, just as I do.",
"One day you come across an old poem—something about some folks\n calling it evolution and others calling it God. You go out, make a few\n provisions for the future, and come back to climb into the time machine\n that's waiting in the building you had put around it. Then you'll be\n knocking on your own door, thirty years back—or right now, from your\n view—and telling your younger self all these things I'm telling you.\n\n\n But now....\n\n\n Well, the drinks are finished. You're woozy enough to go along with me\n without protest, and I want to find out just why those people up there\n came looking for you and shouting, before the time machine left.\n\n\n Let's go.",
"You'll figure out the cycle in more details later. You get into the\n machine in front of your house, go to the future in the sub-basement,\n land in your back yard, and then hop back thirty years to pick up\n yourself, landing in front of your house. Just that. But right then,\n you don't care. You jump out and start pulling out that atomic\n generator and taking it inside.\nIt isn't hard to disassemble, but you don't learn a thing; just some\n plates of metal, some spiral coils, and a few odds and ends—all\n things that can be made easily enough, all obviously of common metals.\n But when you put it together again, about an hour later, you notice\n something.\n\n\n Everything in it is brand-new and there's one set of copper wires\n missing! It won't work. You put some #12 house wire in, exactly like\n the set on the other side, drop in some iron filings, and try it again."
],
[
"I'd told you that, too, but you've forgotten. \"As near as I can guess,\n it's about 2150. He told me, just as I'm telling you, that it's an\n interstellar civilization.\"\n\n\n You take another cigaret from me, and follow me. I've got a small\n flashlight and we grope through a pile of rubbish, out into a corridor.\n This is a sub-sub-sub-basement. We have to walk up a flight of stairs,\n and there is an elevator waiting, fortunately with the door open.\n\n\n \"What about the time machine?\" you ask.",
"So let's begin when you get up in half an hour and come out with me.\n You'll take a closer look at the machine, then. Yes, it'll be pretty\n obvious it must be a time machine. You'll sense that, too. You've seen\n it, just a small little cage with two seats, a luggage compartment, and\n a few buttons on a dash. You'll be puzzling over what I'll tell you,\n and you'll be getting used to the idea that you are the man who makes\n atomic power practical. Jerome Boell, just a plain engineer, the man\n who put atomic power in every home. You won't exactly believe it, but\n you'll want to go along.\nI'll be tired of talking by then, and in a hurry to get going. So I",
"Well, you stagger down the corridor, looking out for the guard, but all\n seems clear. Then you hear his voice from the weapons room. You bend\n down and try to scurry past, but you know you're in full view. Nothing\n happens, though.\n\n\n You stumble down the stairs, feeling all the futuristic rays in the\n world on your back, and still nothing happens. Ahead of you, the gate\n is closed. You reach it and it opens obligingly by itself. You breathe\n a quick sigh of relief and start out onto the street.\n\n\n Then there's a yell behind you. You don't wait. You put one leg in\n front of the other and you begin racing down the walk, ducking past\n people, who stare at you with expressions you haven't time to see.\n There's another yell behind you.",
"\"Since nobody ever stole it, it's safe.\"\nWe get in the elevator, and I say \"first\" to it. It gives out a\n coughing noise and the basement openings begin to click by us. There's\n no feeling of acceleration—some kind of false gravity they use in the\n future. Then the door opens, and the elevator says \"first\" back at us.\n\n\n It's obviously a service elevator and we're in a dim corridor, with\n nobody around. I grab your hand and shake it. \"You go that way. Don't\n worry about getting lost; you never did, so you can't. Find the museum,\n grab the motor, and get out. And good luck to you.\"",
"He beams at that. \"Of course.\" The gate is swung to behind you, but\n obviously he isn't locking it. In fact, there doesn't seem to be a\n lock. \"Must be a new part. You go down that corridor, up one flight\n of stairs and left. Finest display in all the known worlds. We've got\n the original of the first thirteen models. Professor Jonas was using\n them to check his latest theory of how they work. Too bad he could\n not explain the principle, either. Someone will, some day, though.\n Lord, the genius of that twentieth century inventor! It's quite a\n hobby with me, sir. I've read everything I could get on the period.\n Oh—congratulations on your pronunciation. Sounds just like some of our\n oldest tapes.\"",
"That way, it isn't so bad. And you begin to see why I decided I might\n like to stay in the future. But all the same, the organized cooperation\n here doesn't look too good. The guard can get the same and be there\n before you.\n\n\n And he is. He stands just inside the door of the building as you reach\n it. The stranger lifts an eyebrow and goes off at once when you nod\n at him, not waiting for thanks. And the guard comes up, holding some\n dinkus in his hand, about the size of a big folding camera and not too\n dissimilar in other ways. He snaps it open and you get set to duck.\n\n\n \"You forgot the prints, monograph, and patent applications,\" he says.\n \"They go with the generator—we don't like to have them separated. A\n good thing I knew the production office of 'Atoms and Axioms' was in\n this building. Just let us know when you're finished with the model and\n we'll pick it up.\"",
"\"Nice,\" the guard says over your shoulder. \"It finally wore out one of\n the cathogrids and we had to replace that, but otherwise it's exactly\n as the great inventor made it. And it still operates as well as ever.\n Like to have me tell you about it?\"\n\n\n \"Not particularly,\" you begin, and then realize bad manners might be\n conspicuous here. While you're searching for an answer, the guard pulls\n something out of his pocket and stares at it.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine. The mayor of Altasecarba—Centaurian, you know—is\n arriving, but I'll be back in about ten minutes. He wants to examine\n some of the weapons for a monograph on Centaurian primitives compared\n to nineteenth century man. You'll pardon me?\"",
"You put it in your pocket, gulping a little, and get back to the\n corridor. You turn left and go past a big room in which models of\n spaceships—from the original thing that looks like a V-2, and is\n labeled first Lunar rocket, to a ten-foot globe, complete with\n miniature manikins—are sailing about in some kind of orbits. Then\n there is one labeled\nWep:nz\n, filled with everything from a crossbow\n to a tiny rod four inches long and half the thickness of a pencil,\n marked\nFynal Hand Arm\n. Beyond is the end of the corridor, and a big\n place that bears a sign,\nMad:lz *v Atamic Pau:r Sorsez\n.\nBy that time, you're almost convinced. And you've been doing a lot of\n thinking about what you can do. The story I'm telling has been sinking\n in, but you aren't completely willing to accept it.",
"Something goes over your head and drops on the sidewalk just in front\n of your feet, with a sudden ringing sound. You don't wait to find out\n about that, either. Somebody reaches out a hand to catch you and you\n dart past.\nThe street is pretty clear now and you jolt along, with your arms\n seeming to come out of the sockets, and that atomic generator getting\n heavier at every step.\n\n\n Out of nowhere, something in a blue uniform about six feet tall and\n on the beefy side appears—and the badge hasn't changed much. The cop\n catches your arm and you know you're not going to get away, so you stop.\n\n\n \"You can't exert yourself that hard in this heat, fellow,\" the cop\n says. \"There are laws against that, without a yellow sticker. Here, let\n me grab you a taxi.\"\nReaction sets in a bit and your knees begin to buckle, but you shake\n your head and come up for air.",
"I've got a bundle of clothes and I start changing. It's a sort\n of simple, short-limbed, one-piece affair I put on, but it feels\n comfortable.\n\n\n \"I'm staying here,\" I tell you. \"This is like the things they wear in\n this century, as near as I can remember it, and I should be able to\n pass fairly well. I've had all my fortune—the one you make on that\n atomic generator—invested in such a way I can get it on using some\n identification I've got with me, so I'll do all right. I know they\n still use some kind of money, you'll see evidence of that. And it's a\n pretty easygoing civilization, from what I could see. We'll go up and\n I'll leave you. I like the looks of things here, so I won't be coming\n back with you.\"\n\n\n You nod, remembering I've told you about it. \"What century is this,\n anyway?\"",
"You get away from him, finally, after some polite thanks. The building\n seems deserted and you wander up the stairs. There's a room on your\n right filled with something that proclaims itself the first truly\n plastic diamond former, and you go up to it. As you come near, it\n goes through a crazy wiggle inside, stops turning out a continual row\n of what seem to be bearings, and slips something the size of a penny\n toward you.\n\n\n \"Souvenir,\" it announces in a well-modulated voice. \"This is a typical\n gem of the twentieth century, properly cut to 58 facets, known\n technically as a Jaegger diamond, and approximately twenty carats\n in size. You can have it made into a ring on the third floor during\n morning hours for one-tenth credit. If you have more than one child,\n press the red button for the number of stones you desire.\"",
"\"No place for it to go,\" I explain. There isn't. Out there is neither\n time nor space, apparently. How could the air leak out? You still feel\n gravity, but I can't explain that, either. Maybe the machine has a\n gravity field built in, or maybe the time that makes your watch run is\n responsible for gravity. In spite of Einstein, you have always had the\n idea that time is an effect of gravity, and I sort of agree, still.\n\n\n Then the machine stops—at least, the field around us cuts off. You\n feel a dankish sort of air replace the stale air, and you breathe\n easier, though we're in complete darkness, except for the weak light in\n the machine, which always burns, and a few feet of rough dirty cement\n floor around. You take another cigaret from me and you get out of the\n machine, just as I do.",
"You put the atomic generator in the luggage space, throw the papers\n down beside it, and climb into the cockpit, sweating and mumbling. You\n reach forward toward the green button and hesitate. There's a red one\n beside it and you finally decide on that.\n\n\n Suddenly, there's a confused yell from the direction of the elevator\n and a beam of light strikes against your eyes, with a shout punctuating\n it. Your finger touches the red button.\n\n\n You'll never know what the shouting was about—whether they finally\n doped out the fact that they'd been robbed, or whether they were trying\n to help you. You don't care which it is. The field springs up around\n you and the next button you touch—the one on the board that hasn't\n been used so far—sends you off into nothingness. There is no beam of\n light, you can't hear a thing, and you're safe.",
"You can't feel any motion, of course. You try to reach a hand out\n through the field into the nothing around you and your hand goes out,\n all right, but nothing happens. Where the screen ends, your hand just\n turns over and pokes back at you. Doesn't hurt, and when you pull your\n arm back, you're still sound and uninjured. But it looks frightening\n and you don't try it again.\n\n\n Then it comes to you slowly that you're actually traveling in time.\n You turn to me, getting used to the idea. \"So this is the fourth\n dimension?\" you ask.\n\n\n Then you feel silly, because you'll remember that I said you'd ask\n that. Well, I asked it after I was told, then I came back and told it\n to you, and I still can't help answering when you speak.",
"What's more, he speaks pretty clearly. Everyone says things in a sort\n of drawl, with softer vowels and slurred consonants, but it's rather\n pleasant.\n\n\n \"Help you, sir? Oh, of course. You must be playing in 'Atoms and\n Axioms.' The museum's closed, but I'll be glad to let you study\n whatever you need for realism in your role. Nice show. I saw it twice.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" you mutter, wondering what kind of civilization can produce\n guards as polite as that. \"I—I'm told I should investigate your\n display of atomic generators.\"",
"One day you come across an old poem—something about some folks\n calling it evolution and others calling it God. You go out, make a few\n provisions for the future, and come back to climb into the time machine\n that's waiting in the building you had put around it. Then you'll be\n knocking on your own door, thirty years back—or right now, from your\n view—and telling your younger self all these things I'm telling you.\n\n\n But now....\n\n\n Well, the drinks are finished. You're woozy enough to go along with me\n without protest, and I want to find out just why those people up there\n came looking for you and shouting, before the time machine left.\n\n\n Let's go.",
"You start looking for other doors or corridors, but you know this is\n right. The signs along the halls are the same as they were.\nThen there's a sort of cough and something dilates in the wall. It\n forms a perfect door and the elevator stands there waiting. You get in,\n gulping out something about going all the way down, and then wonder how\n a machine geared for voice operation can make anything of that. What\n the deuce would that lowest basement be called? But the elevator has\n closed and is moving downward in a hurry. It coughs again and you're at\n the original level. You get out—and realize you don't have a light.\n\n\n You'll never know what you stumbled over, but, somehow, you move back\n in the direction of the time machine, bumping against boxes, staggering\n here and there, and trying to find the right place by sheer feel. Then\n a shred of dim light appears; it's the weak light in the time machine.\n\n\n You've located it.",
"Well, you won't be able to change the time cycle by doing anything I\n haven't told you, but a working model such as that is a handy thing.\n You lift it; it only weighs about fifty pounds! Naturally, it can be\n carried.\n\n\n You expect a warning bell, but nothing happens. As a matter of fact,\n if you'd stop drinking so much of that scotch and staring at the time\n machine out there now, you'd hear what I'm saying and know what will\n happen to you. But of course, just as I did, you're going to miss a\n lot of what I say from now on, and have to find out for yourself. But\n maybe some of it helps. I've tried to remember how much I remembered,\n after he told me, but I can't be sure. So I'll keep on talking. I\n probably can't help it, anyhow. Pre-set, you might say.",
"I let it go, and so do you. If you don't, it's a good way of going\n crazy. You'll see later why I couldn't have invented the machine. Of\n course, there may have been a start for all this once. There may have\n been a time when you did invent the machine—the atomic motor first,\n then the time-machine. And when you closed the loop by going back and\n saving yourself the trouble, it got all tangled up. I figured out once\n that such a universe would need some seven or eight time and space\n dimensions. It's simpler just to figure that this is the way time got\n bent back on itself. Maybe there is no machine, and it's just easier\n for us to imagine it. When you spend thirty years thinking about it, as\n I did—and you will—you get further and further from an answer.",
"You pardon him pretty eagerly and he wanders off happily. You go up\n to the head of the line, to that Rinks Dynapattuh, or whatever it\n transliterates to. That's small and you can carry it. But the darned\n thing is absolutely fixed. You can't see any bolts, but you can't budge\n it, either.\nYou work down the line. It'd be foolish to take the early model if you\n can get one with built-in magnetic current terminals—Ehrenhaft or\n some other principle?—and nuclear binding-force energy terminals. But\n they're all held down by the same whatchamaycallem effect.\n\n\n And, finally, you're right back beside the original first model. It's\n probably bolted down, too, but you try it tentatively and you find it\n moves. There's a little sign under it, indicating you shouldn't touch\n it, since the gravostatic plate is being renewed."
]
] |
train
|
51053
|
[
"What isn't something that the aliens control?",
"What can the captives do?",
"Why are there three women and one man in the home?",
"How is Rog treated differently than the others?",
"Why did Opal let Rog go back to Earth?",
"What didn't Roger learn when he returned to Earth?",
"Why had Roger been trained by Opal?",
"What will probably happen next?"
] |
[
[
"how the captives feel about being there",
"what the captives eat",
"the captives' desires",
"where the captives live"
],
[
"control their ability to have children",
"escape back to their homes when they desire",
"fight the alien commands",
"create things they think about"
],
[
"the other captives had killed themselves before this ",
"they wanted extra women to make more babies",
"it's the correct number they want for their social experiment",
"they were the only people the aliens had been able to bring back alive"
],
[
"he's the only one that can get what he thinks about",
"he's the only one that trains with Opal",
"they all dislike him because he's responsible for their situation",
"he's the one that makes all of the decisions in the house"
],
[
"so he would fall out of love with his wife",
"so he could try to escape and fail",
"because the aliens weren't good at capturing other men",
"as a reward for his hard work"
],
[
"that the aliens couldn't capture other men",
"that he had been in a car accident",
"that his wife had found someone new",
"that he could stay if he used his new powers"
],
[
"because Opal wanted to further his experiment",
"because Opal needed help building a new gateway",
"because Opal was looking for someone to take his place",
"because Opal was unable to bring other men back"
],
[
"Roger will find a way to escape",
"Roger will probably take Cass back with him",
"Roger will go back empty handed",
"Roger will bring his wife back with him"
]
] |
[
1,
4,
4,
2,
3,
4,
4,
2
] |
[
0,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1
] |
[
[
"\"Don't flatter yourself,\" she replied angrily. She sat up, pushed\n back her hair, got to her feet a trifle awkwardly because of the\n tight-fitting tubular gown. \"If I could do anything about it....\"\n\n\n \"But you can't,\" he told her. \"They're too clever.\"\n\n\n \"Is this crop rotation or did you send for me?\" she asked cynically.\n \"If you did, I wish you hadn't. You haven't asked about your son.\"\n\n\n \"I don't even want to think about him,\" said Tennant. \"Let's get\n on with it.\" He could sense the restless stirring of the woman\n within Dana, just as he could feel the stirring toward her within\n himself—desire that both of them loathed because it was implanted\n within them by their captors.",
"\"\nHuman!\n\" Dana was outraged. \"Do you call it human to—\"\n\n\n \"Hold on,\" he said. \"They pass through their gateway to Earth at\n considerable danger and, probably, expense of some kind. Some of them\n don't come back. They kill those of us who put up a fight. Those who\n don't—or can't—they bring back with them. Live or dead, we're just\n laboratory specimens.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" Eudalia conceded doubtfully. Then her eyes blazed. \"But the\n things they do—stuffing people, mounting their heads, keeping them on\n display in their—their whatever they live in. You call that human,\n Rog?\"",
"The captor Tennant called\nOpal\ncame in through a far corner of\n the ceiling. He—if it was a he—was not large, although this,\n Tennant knew, meant nothing; Opal might extend thousands of yards in\n some unseen direction. He had no regular shape and much of him was\n iridescent and shot with constantly changing colors. Hence the name\n Opal.\n\n\n Communication was telepathic. Tennant could have yodeled or yelled\n or sung\nMississippi Mud\nand Opal would have shown no reaction. Yet\n Tennant suspected that the captors could hear somewhere along the\n auditory scale, just as perhaps they could smell, although not in any\n human sense.\nYou will approach without use of your appendages.\nThe command was as clear as if it had been spoken aloud. Tennant took a\n deep breath. He thought of the space beside Opal. It took about three\n seconds and he was there, having spanned a distance of some ninety\n feet. He was getting good at it.",
"\"And it's not yours,\" insisted Eudalia. \"Don't let them make you think\n it is.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try not to,\" he said and stopped, realizing the family party was\n over. He had felt the inner tug of command, said good-by to the women\n and returned to his smaller compound within its own barrier dome.\n\n\n Then came the invisible aura of strain in the air, the shimmering\n illusion of heat that was not heat, that was prelude to his\n teleportation ... if that were the word. It was neither pleasant nor\n unpleasant; it\nwas\n, that was all.\n\n\n He called it the training hall, not because it looked like a training\n hall but because that was its function. It didn't actually look like\n anything save some half-nourished dream a surrealist might have\n discarded as too nightmarish for belief.",
"He realized, shocked and scared, that his thoughts of escape had\n slipped past his mental censor, and he waited apprehensively for Opal\n to strike. Nothing happened and he warily relaxed. Opal wasn't tapping\n his thoughts. Because he felt sure of his captive ... or because he\n couldn't on Earth?\n\n\n It was like being let out of a cage. Tennant grinned at the bookcase;\n the ebony-and-ivory elephants that Agatha had never liked were gone,\n but he'd get them back or another pair. The credenza had been replaced\n by a huge and ugly television console. That, he resolved, would go down\n in the cellar rumpus room, where its bleached modernity wouldn't clash\n with the casual antiquity of the living room.",
"Tennant knew now why he was the only male human the captors had been\n able to take alive. Apparently, thanks to the rain-slick road, he had\n run the sedan into a tree at the foot of the hill beyond the river. He\n had been sitting there, unconscious, ripe fruit on their doorstep. They\n had simply picked him up.\n\n\n Otherwise, apparently, men were next to impossible for them to capture.\n All they could do was kill them and bring back their heads and hides\n as trophies. With women it was different—perhaps the captors' weapons,\n whatever they were, worked more efficiently on females. A difference in\n body chemistry or psychology, perhaps.\n\n\n More than once, during his long training with Opal, Tennant had sent\n questing thoughts toward his captor, asking why they didn't simply set\n up the gateway in some town or city and take as many humans as they\n wanted.",
"\"You thought those up while we ate,\" he said. It annoyed him to be\n copied, though he did not know why. She laughed at him silently, tossed\n her auburn hair back from her face and went out of the roofless house,\n holding the gold dress casually over her bare arm.\n\n\n Eudalia took him to the nursery. He was irritated now in another,\n angrier way. The infants, protected by cellophane-like coverlets, were\n asleep.\n\n\n \"They never cry,\" the thin woman told him. \"But they grow—God, how\n they grow!\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Tennant, fighting down his anger. He kissed her, held\n her close, although neither of them felt desire at the moment. Their\n captors had seen to that; it wasn't Eudalia's turn. Tennant said, \"I\n wish I could do something about this. I hate seeing Dana so bitter and\n Olga so scared. It isn't their fault.\"",
"Agatha would complain, naturally, but his being back would make up for\n any amount of furniture shifting. He imagined her standing close to\n him, her lovely face lifted to be kissed, and his heart lurched like an\n adolescent's. This hunger was real, not implanted. Everything would be\n real ... his love for her, the food he ate, the things he touched, his\n house, his life....\nYour wife and a man are approaching the house.\nThe thought message from Opal crumbled his illusion of freedom. He sank\n down in a chair, trying to refuse to listen to the rest of the command:\nYou are to bring the man through the gateway with you. We want another\n live male.\nTennant shook his head, stiff and defiant in his chair. The punishment,\n when it came, was more humiliating than a slap across a dog's snout.\n Opal had been too interested in the next lab specimen to bother about\n his thoughts—that was why he had been free to think of escape.",
"\"We may be in the eleventh for all I know,\" he told her. \"But I'll\n settle for the fourth—a fourth dimension in space, if that makes\n scientific sense, because we don't seem to have moved in time. I wasn't\n sure of that, though, till we got the radio.\"\n\n\n \"Why haven't they brought more of us through?\" Eudalia asked, tamping\n out ashes in a tray that might have been silver.\n\n\n \"I'm not sure,\" he said thoughtfully. \"I think it's hard for them. They\n have a hell of a time bringing anyone through alive, and lately they\n haven't brought anyone through—not alive.\"\n\n\n \"Why do they do it—the other way, I mean?\" asked Dana.\n\n\n Tennant shrugged. \"I don't know. I've been thinking about it. I suppose\n it's because they're pretty human.\"",
"Tennant's meat looked like steak, it felt like steak, but, lacking the\n aroma of steak, it was almost tasteless. This was so with all of their\n foods, with their cigarettes, with everything in their prison—or their\n cage. Their captors were utterly without a human conception of smell,\n living, apparently, in a world without odor at all.\n\n\n Dana said suddenly, \"I named the boy Tom, after somebody I hate almost\n as much as I hate you.\"\n\n\n Eudalia laid down her fork with a clatter and regarded Dana\n disapprovingly. \"Why take it out on Rog?\" she asked bluntly. \"He didn't\n ask to come here any more than we did. He's got a wife back home. Maybe\n you want him to fall in love with you? Maybe you're jealous because\n he doesn't? Well, maybe he can't! And maybe it wouldn't work, the way\n things are arranged here.\"",
"They walked toward the house.\nIt didn't look like a prison—or a cage. Within the dome of the\n barrier, it looked more like a well-kept if bizarre little country\n estate. There was clipped lawn, a scattering of trees, even a clear\n little brook that chattered unending annoyance at the small stones\n which impeded its flow.\n\n\n But the lawn was not of grass—it was of a bright green substance that\n might have been cellophane but wasn't, and it sprouted from a fabric\n that might have been canvas but was something else. The trees looked\n like trees, only their trunks were bark all the way through—except\n that it was not bark. The brook was practically water, but the small\n stones over which it flowed were of no earthly mineral.",
"\"Thanks, Eudalia,\" said Tennant. \"I think I can defend myself. But\n she's right, Dana. We're as helpless as—laboratory animals. They have\n the means to make us do whatever they want.\"\n\n\n \"Rog,\" said Dana, looking suddenly scared, \"I'm sorry I snapped at you.\n I know it's not your fault. I'm—\nchanging\n.\"\n\n\n He shook his head. \"No, Dana, you're not changing. You're adapting. We\n all are. We seem to be in a universe of different properties as well as\n different dimensions. We're adjusting. I can do a thing or two myself\n that seem absolutely impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Are we really in the fourth dimension?\" Dana asked. Of the three of\n them, she alone had more than a high-school education.",
"They entered the house, which had no roof, continued to move beneath a\n sky that glowed with light which did not come from a sun or moon. It\n might have been a well-kept if bizarre little country estate, but it\n wasn't. It was a prison, a cage.\n\n\n The other two women were sitting in the heptagonal central hall.\n Eudalia, who had borne twin girls recently, was lying back, newly thin\n and dark of skin and hair, smoking a scentless cigarette. A tall woman,\n thirtyish, she wore a sort of shimmering green strapless evening gown.\n Tennant wondered how she maintained it in place, for despite her recent\n double motherhood, she was almost flat of bosom. He asked her how she\n was feeling.\n\n\n \"Okay, I guess,\" she said. \"The way they manage it, there's nothing\n to it.\" She had a flat, potentially raucous voice. Eudalia had been\n a female foreman in a garment-cutting shop before being captured and\n brought through.",
"Surprisingly there had been a definite fear reaction. As nearly as he\n could understand, it had been like asking an African pygmy, armed with\n a blowgun, to set up shop in the midst of a herd of wild elephants. It\n simply wasn't feasible—and furthermore he derived an impression of the\n tenuosity as well as the immovability of the gateway itself.\n\n\n They could be hurt, even killed by humans in a three-dimensional world.\n How? Tennant did not know. Perhaps as a man can cut finger or even\n throat on the edge of a near-two-dimensional piece of paper. It took\n valor for them to hunt men in the world of men. In that fact lay a key\n to their character—if such utterly alien creatures could be said to\n have character.",
"Dog does trick, he thought.\nHe went through the entire routine at Opal's bidding. When at last\n he was allowed to relax, he wondered, not for the first time, if he\n weren't mastering some of the alleged Guru arts. At once he felt\n probing investigation. Opal, like the rest of the captors, was as\n curious as a cat—or a human being.\nTennant sat against a wall, drenched with sweat. There would be endless\n repetition before his workout was done. On Earth, dogs were said to be\n intellectually two-dimensional creatures. He wondered if they felt this\n helpless futility when their masters taught them to heel, to point, to\n retrieve.",
"Tennant closed his eyes, willed himself to the front window. Now that\n he had mastered teleportation, it was incredible how much easier it was\n in his own world. He had covered the two miles from the gateway to the\n house in a mere seven jumps, the distance to the window in an instant.\n But there was no pleasure in it, only a confirmation of his captor's\n power over him.\n\n\n He was not free of them. He understood all too well what they wanted\n him to do; he was to play the Judas goat ... or rather the Judas ram,\n leading another victim to the fourth-dimensional pen.\n\n\n Grim, he watched the swoop of headlights in the driveway and returned\n to the coffee table, lit a fresh cigarette.",
"Some days later, the training routine was broken. He felt a sudden stir\n of near-sick excitement as he received the thought:\nNow you are ready. We are going through at last.\nOpal was nervous, so much so that he revealed more than he intended.\n Or perhaps that was his intent; Tennant could never be sure. They were\n going through to Tennant's own dimension. He wondered briefly just what\n his role was to be.\n\n\n He had little time to speculate before Opal seemed to envelop him.\n There was the blurring wrench of forced teleportation and they were in\n another room, a room which ended in a huge irregular passage that might\n have been the interior of a giant concertina—or an old-fashioned kodak.\n\n\n He stood before a kidney-shaped object over whose jagged surface\n colors played constantly. From Opal's thoughts it appeared to be some\n sort of ultradimensional television set, but to Tennant it was as\n incomprehensible as an oil painting to an animal.",
"As in all of this strange universe, excepting the dome-cages in\n which the captives were held, the training hall followed no rules of\n three-dimensional space. One wall looked normal for perhaps a third of\n its length, then it simply wasn't for a bit. It came back farther on\n at an impossible angle. Yet, walking along it, touching it, it felt\n perfectly smooth and continuously straight.\n\n\n The opposite wall resembled a diagonal cross-section of an asymmetrical\n dumbbell—that was the closest Tennant could come to it in words. And\n it, too, felt straight. The floor looked like crystal smashed by some\n cosmic impact, yet it had reason. He\nknew\nthis even though no reason\n was apparent to his three-dimensional vision. The ceiling, where he\n could see it, was beyond description.",
"\"Were you ever in a big-game hunter's trophy room?\" Tennant asked\n quietly. \"Or in a Museum of Natural History? A zoo? A naturalist's lab?\n Or even, maybe, photographed as a baby on a bear-skin rug?\"\n\n\n \"I was,\" said Olga. \"But that's not the same thing.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" he agreed. \"In the one instance,\nwe're\nthe hunters,\n the breeders, the trophy collectors. In the other\"—he shrugged—\"we're\n the trophies.\"\nThere was a long silence. They finished eating and then Dana stood up\n and said, \"I'm going out on the lawn for a while.\" She unzipped her\n golden gown, stepped out of it to reveal a pair of tartan shorts that\n matched his, and a narrow halter.",
"Opal was annoyed that Tennant could make nothing of it. Then came the\n thought:\nWhat cover must your body have not to be conspicuous?\nTennant wondered, cynically, what would happen if he were to demand\n a costume of mediaeval motley, complete with Pied Piper's flute. He\n received quick reproof that made his head ring as from a blow.\n\n\n He asked Opal where and when they were going, was informed that\n he would soon emerge on Earth where he had left it. That told him\n everything but the date and season. Opal, like the rest of the captors,\n seemed to have no understanding of time in a human sense."
],
[
"\"You thought those up while we ate,\" he said. It annoyed him to be\n copied, though he did not know why. She laughed at him silently, tossed\n her auburn hair back from her face and went out of the roofless house,\n holding the gold dress casually over her bare arm.\n\n\n Eudalia took him to the nursery. He was irritated now in another,\n angrier way. The infants, protected by cellophane-like coverlets, were\n asleep.\n\n\n \"They never cry,\" the thin woman told him. \"But they grow—God, how\n they grow!\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Tennant, fighting down his anger. He kissed her, held\n her close, although neither of them felt desire at the moment. Their\n captors had seen to that; it wasn't Eudalia's turn. Tennant said, \"I\n wish I could do something about this. I hate seeing Dana so bitter and\n Olga so scared. It isn't their fault.\"",
"They entered the house, which had no roof, continued to move beneath a\n sky that glowed with light which did not come from a sun or moon. It\n might have been a well-kept if bizarre little country estate, but it\n wasn't. It was a prison, a cage.\n\n\n The other two women were sitting in the heptagonal central hall.\n Eudalia, who had borne twin girls recently, was lying back, newly thin\n and dark of skin and hair, smoking a scentless cigarette. A tall woman,\n thirtyish, she wore a sort of shimmering green strapless evening gown.\n Tennant wondered how she maintained it in place, for despite her recent\n double motherhood, she was almost flat of bosom. He asked her how she\n was feeling.\n\n\n \"Okay, I guess,\" she said. \"The way they manage it, there's nothing\n to it.\" She had a flat, potentially raucous voice. Eudalia had been\n a female foreman in a garment-cutting shop before being captured and\n brought through.",
"Tennant knew now why he was the only male human the captors had been\n able to take alive. Apparently, thanks to the rain-slick road, he had\n run the sedan into a tree at the foot of the hill beyond the river. He\n had been sitting there, unconscious, ripe fruit on their doorstep. They\n had simply picked him up.\n\n\n Otherwise, apparently, men were next to impossible for them to capture.\n All they could do was kill them and bring back their heads and hides\n as trophies. With women it was different—perhaps the captors' weapons,\n whatever they were, worked more efficiently on females. A difference in\n body chemistry or psychology, perhaps.\n\n\n More than once, during his long training with Opal, Tennant had sent\n questing thoughts toward his captor, asking why they didn't simply set\n up the gateway in some town or city and take as many humans as they\n wanted.",
"\"Good,\" he said. \"Glad to hear it.\" He felt oddly embarrassed. He\n turned to Olga, broad, blonde and curiously vital, who sat perfectly\n still, regarding him over the pregnant swell of her dirndl-clad waist.\n Olga had been a waitress in a mining town hash-house near Scranton.\n\n\n Tennant wanted to put an encouraging hand on her shoulder, to say\n something that might cheer her up, for she was by far the youngest of\n the three female captives, barely nineteen. But with the eyes of the\n other two, especially Dana, upon him, he could not.\n\n\n \"I guess I wasn't cut out to be a Turk,\" he said. \"I don't feel at ease\n in a harem, even when it's supposedly my own.\"\n\n\n \"You're not doing so badly,\" Dana replied acidly.",
"Dog does trick, he thought.\nHe went through the entire routine at Opal's bidding. When at last\n he was allowed to relax, he wondered, not for the first time, if he\n weren't mastering some of the alleged Guru arts. At once he felt\n probing investigation. Opal, like the rest of the captors, was as\n curious as a cat—or a human being.\nTennant sat against a wall, drenched with sweat. There would be endless\n repetition before his workout was done. On Earth, dogs were said to be\n intellectually two-dimensional creatures. He wondered if they felt this\n helpless futility when their masters taught them to heel, to point, to\n retrieve.",
"The captor Tennant called\nOpal\ncame in through a far corner of\n the ceiling. He—if it was a he—was not large, although this,\n Tennant knew, meant nothing; Opal might extend thousands of yards in\n some unseen direction. He had no regular shape and much of him was\n iridescent and shot with constantly changing colors. Hence the name\n Opal.\n\n\n Communication was telepathic. Tennant could have yodeled or yelled\n or sung\nMississippi Mud\nand Opal would have shown no reaction. Yet\n Tennant suspected that the captors could hear somewhere along the\n auditory scale, just as perhaps they could smell, although not in any\n human sense.\nYou will approach without use of your appendages.\nThe command was as clear as if it had been spoken aloud. Tennant took a\n deep breath. He thought of the space beside Opal. It took about three\n seconds and he was there, having spanned a distance of some ninety\n feet. He was getting good at it.",
"\"Don't flatter yourself,\" she replied angrily. She sat up, pushed\n back her hair, got to her feet a trifle awkwardly because of the\n tight-fitting tubular gown. \"If I could do anything about it....\"\n\n\n \"But you can't,\" he told her. \"They're too clever.\"\n\n\n \"Is this crop rotation or did you send for me?\" she asked cynically.\n \"If you did, I wish you hadn't. You haven't asked about your son.\"\n\n\n \"I don't even want to think about him,\" said Tennant. \"Let's get\n on with it.\" He could sense the restless stirring of the woman\n within Dana, just as he could feel the stirring toward her within\n himself—desire that both of them loathed because it was implanted\n within them by their captors.",
"He shrugged, returned to the feeling of comfort that came from being\n back here, about to see Agatha again, hold her close in no more than a\n few minutes. And stay, his mind began to add eagerly, but he pushed the\n thought down where Opal could not detect it.\n\n\n He took another deep, lung-filling drag on his cigarette, looked around\n the room that was so important a part of his life. The three women back\n there would be in a ghastly spot. He felt like a heel for wanting to\n leave them there, then knew that he would try somehow to get them out.\n Not, of course, anything that would endanger his remaining with Agatha;\n the only way his captors would get him back would be as a taxidermist's\n specimen.",
"She opened her eyes at his approach and regarded him with nothing like\n favor. Involuntarily he glanced down at the tartan shorts that were his\n only garment to make sure that they were on properly. They were. He had\n thought them up in a moment of utter boredom and they were extremely\n comfortable. However, the near-Buchanan tartan did not crease or even\n wrinkle when he moved. Their captors had no idea of how a woven design\n should behave.\n\n\n \"Waiting for me?\" Tennant asked the girl.\n\n\n She said, \"I'd rather be dead. Maybe I am. Maybe we're all dead and\n this is Hell.\"\n\n\n He stood over her and looked down until she turned away her reddening\n face. He said, \"So it's going to be you again, Dana. You'll be the\n first to come back for a second run.\"",
"He realized, shocked and scared, that his thoughts of escape had\n slipped past his mental censor, and he waited apprehensively for Opal\n to strike. Nothing happened and he warily relaxed. Opal wasn't tapping\n his thoughts. Because he felt sure of his captive ... or because he\n couldn't on Earth?\n\n\n It was like being let out of a cage. Tennant grinned at the bookcase;\n the ebony-and-ivory elephants that Agatha had never liked were gone,\n but he'd get them back or another pair. The credenza had been replaced\n by a huge and ugly television console. That, he resolved, would go down\n in the cellar rumpus room, where its bleached modernity wouldn't clash\n with the casual antiquity of the living room.",
"Tennant's meat looked like steak, it felt like steak, but, lacking the\n aroma of steak, it was almost tasteless. This was so with all of their\n foods, with their cigarettes, with everything in their prison—or their\n cage. Their captors were utterly without a human conception of smell,\n living, apparently, in a world without odor at all.\n\n\n Dana said suddenly, \"I named the boy Tom, after somebody I hate almost\n as much as I hate you.\"\n\n\n Eudalia laid down her fork with a clatter and regarded Dana\n disapprovingly. \"Why take it out on Rog?\" she asked bluntly. \"He didn't\n ask to come here any more than we did. He's got a wife back home. Maybe\n you want him to fall in love with you? Maybe you're jealous because\n he doesn't? Well, maybe he can't! And maybe it wouldn't work, the way\n things are arranged here.\"",
"Tennant closed his eyes, willed himself to the front window. Now that\n he had mastered teleportation, it was incredible how much easier it was\n in his own world. He had covered the two miles from the gateway to the\n house in a mere seven jumps, the distance to the window in an instant.\n But there was no pleasure in it, only a confirmation of his captor's\n power over him.\n\n\n He was not free of them. He understood all too well what they wanted\n him to do; he was to play the Judas goat ... or rather the Judas ram,\n leading another victim to the fourth-dimensional pen.\n\n\n Grim, he watched the swoop of headlights in the driveway and returned\n to the coffee table, lit a fresh cigarette.",
"As in all of this strange universe, excepting the dome-cages in\n which the captives were held, the training hall followed no rules of\n three-dimensional space. One wall looked normal for perhaps a third of\n its length, then it simply wasn't for a bit. It came back farther on\n at an impossible angle. Yet, walking along it, touching it, it felt\n perfectly smooth and continuously straight.\n\n\n The opposite wall resembled a diagonal cross-section of an asymmetrical\n dumbbell—that was the closest Tennant could come to it in words. And\n it, too, felt straight. The floor looked like crystal smashed by some\n cosmic impact, yet it had reason. He\nknew\nthis even though no reason\n was apparent to his three-dimensional vision. The ceiling, where he\n could see it, was beyond description.",
"They walked toward the house.\nIt didn't look like a prison—or a cage. Within the dome of the\n barrier, it looked more like a well-kept if bizarre little country\n estate. There was clipped lawn, a scattering of trees, even a clear\n little brook that chattered unending annoyance at the small stones\n which impeded its flow.\n\n\n But the lawn was not of grass—it was of a bright green substance that\n might have been cellophane but wasn't, and it sprouted from a fabric\n that might have been canvas but was something else. The trees looked\n like trees, only their trunks were bark all the way through—except\n that it was not bark. The brook was practically water, but the small\n stones over which it flowed were of no earthly mineral.",
"\"Lay off—he can't help it,\" said Eudalia unexpectedly. \"He doesn't\n like it any better than we do.\"\n\n\n \"But he doesn't have to—have them,\" objected Olga. She had a trace of\n Polish accent that was not unpleasant. In fact, Tennant thought, only\n her laughter was unpleasant, a shrill, uncontrolled burst of staccato\n sound that jarred him to his heels. Olga had not laughed of late,\n however. She was too frightened.\n\"Let's get the meal ordered,\" said Dana and they were all silent,\n thinking of what they wanted to eat but would not enjoy when it came.\n Tennant finished with his order, then got busy with his surprise.",
"Opal was annoyed that Tennant could make nothing of it. Then came the\n thought:\nWhat cover must your body have not to be conspicuous?\nTennant wondered, cynically, what would happen if he were to demand\n a costume of mediaeval motley, complete with Pied Piper's flute. He\n received quick reproof that made his head ring as from a blow.\n\n\n He asked Opal where and when they were going, was informed that\n he would soon emerge on Earth where he had left it. That told him\n everything but the date and season. Opal, like the rest of the captors,\n seemed to have no understanding of time in a human sense.",
"Surprisingly there had been a definite fear reaction. As nearly as he\n could understand, it had been like asking an African pygmy, armed with\n a blowgun, to set up shop in the midst of a herd of wild elephants. It\n simply wasn't feasible—and furthermore he derived an impression of the\n tenuosity as well as the immovability of the gateway itself.\n\n\n They could be hurt, even killed by humans in a three-dimensional world.\n How? Tennant did not know. Perhaps as a man can cut finger or even\n throat on the edge of a near-two-dimensional piece of paper. It took\n valor for them to hunt men in the world of men. In that fact lay a key\n to their character—if such utterly alien creatures could be said to\n have character.",
"Agatha would complain, naturally, but his being back would make up for\n any amount of furniture shifting. He imagined her standing close to\n him, her lovely face lifted to be kissed, and his heart lurched like an\n adolescent's. This hunger was real, not implanted. Everything would be\n real ... his love for her, the food he ate, the things he touched, his\n house, his life....\nYour wife and a man are approaching the house.\nThe thought message from Opal crumbled his illusion of freedom. He sank\n down in a chair, trying to refuse to listen to the rest of the command:\nYou are to bring the man through the gateway with you. We want another\n live male.\nTennant shook his head, stiff and defiant in his chair. The punishment,\n when it came, was more humiliating than a slap across a dog's snout.\n Opal had been too interested in the next lab specimen to bother about\n his thoughts—that was why he had been free to think of escape.",
"\"Were you ever in a big-game hunter's trophy room?\" Tennant asked\n quietly. \"Or in a Museum of Natural History? A zoo? A naturalist's lab?\n Or even, maybe, photographed as a baby on a bear-skin rug?\"\n\n\n \"I was,\" said Olga. \"But that's not the same thing.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" he agreed. \"In the one instance,\nwe're\nthe hunters,\n the breeders, the trophy collectors. In the other\"—he shrugged—\"we're\n the trophies.\"\nThere was a long silence. They finished eating and then Dana stood up\n and said, \"I'm going out on the lawn for a while.\" She unzipped her\n golden gown, stepped out of it to reveal a pair of tartan shorts that\n matched his, and a narrow halter.",
"\"Decent of you,\" said Tennant. He got up, crossed to the cabinet that\n served as a bar. It was fully equipped—with more expensive liquor, he\n noticed, than he had ever been able to afford. He poured a drink of\n brandy, waited for the others to fill their glasses.\nAgatha looked at him over the rim of hers. \"Tell us, Rog. We have a\n right to know. I do, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"One question first,\" he said. \"What about those killings? Have there\n been any lately?\"\n\n\n \"Not for over a year,\" Cass told him. \"They never did get the devil who\n skinned those bodies and removed the heads.\"\n\n\n So, Tennant thought, they hadn't used the gateway. Not since they had\n brought the four of them through, not since they had begun to train him\n for his Judas ram duties.\n\n\n Agatha was asking him if he had been abroad."
],
[
"They entered the house, which had no roof, continued to move beneath a\n sky that glowed with light which did not come from a sun or moon. It\n might have been a well-kept if bizarre little country estate, but it\n wasn't. It was a prison, a cage.\n\n\n The other two women were sitting in the heptagonal central hall.\n Eudalia, who had borne twin girls recently, was lying back, newly thin\n and dark of skin and hair, smoking a scentless cigarette. A tall woman,\n thirtyish, she wore a sort of shimmering green strapless evening gown.\n Tennant wondered how she maintained it in place, for despite her recent\n double motherhood, she was almost flat of bosom. He asked her how she\n was feeling.\n\n\n \"Okay, I guess,\" she said. \"The way they manage it, there's nothing\n to it.\" She had a flat, potentially raucous voice. Eudalia had been\n a female foreman in a garment-cutting shop before being captured and\n brought through.",
"She shook her head and fright made twin stoplights of the rouge on her\n cheeks as she shut the door behind him. He went into the living room,\n directly to the long silver cigarette box on the coffee table. It was\n proof of homecoming to fill his lungs with smoke he could\nsmell\n. He\n took another drag, saw the maid still in the doorway, staring.\n\n\n \"There's no need for fright,\" he told her. \"I believe I still own this\n house.\" Then, \"When do you expect Mrs. Tennant?\"\n\n\n \"She just called. She's on her way home from the club.\"\n\n\n Still looking frightened, she departed for the rear of the house.\n Tennant stared after her puzzledly until the kitchen door swung shut\n behind her. The club? What club?",
"He shrugged, returned to the feeling of comfort that came from being\n back here, about to see Agatha again, hold her close in no more than a\n few minutes. And stay, his mind began to add eagerly, but he pushed the\n thought down where Opal could not detect it.\n\n\n He took another deep, lung-filling drag on his cigarette, looked around\n the room that was so important a part of his life. The three women back\n there would be in a ghastly spot. He felt like a heel for wanting to\n leave them there, then knew that he would try somehow to get them out.\n Not, of course, anything that would endanger his remaining with Agatha;\n the only way his captors would get him back would be as a taxidermist's\n specimen.",
"\"Good,\" he said. \"Glad to hear it.\" He felt oddly embarrassed. He\n turned to Olga, broad, blonde and curiously vital, who sat perfectly\n still, regarding him over the pregnant swell of her dirndl-clad waist.\n Olga had been a waitress in a mining town hash-house near Scranton.\n\n\n Tennant wanted to put an encouraging hand on her shoulder, to say\n something that might cheer her up, for she was by far the youngest of\n the three female captives, barely nineteen. But with the eyes of the\n other two, especially Dana, upon him, he could not.\n\n\n \"I guess I wasn't cut out to be a Turk,\" he said. \"I don't feel at ease\n in a harem, even when it's supposedly my own.\"\n\n\n \"You're not doing so badly,\" Dana replied acidly.",
"\"Lay off—he can't help it,\" said Eudalia unexpectedly. \"He doesn't\n like it any better than we do.\"\n\n\n \"But he doesn't have to—have them,\" objected Olga. She had a trace of\n Polish accent that was not unpleasant. In fact, Tennant thought, only\n her laughter was unpleasant, a shrill, uncontrolled burst of staccato\n sound that jarred him to his heels. Olga had not laughed of late,\n however. She was too frightened.\n\"Let's get the meal ordered,\" said Dana and they were all silent,\n thinking of what they wanted to eat but would not enjoy when it came.\n Tennant finished with his order, then got busy with his surprise.",
"\"You thought those up while we ate,\" he said. It annoyed him to be\n copied, though he did not know why. She laughed at him silently, tossed\n her auburn hair back from her face and went out of the roofless house,\n holding the gold dress casually over her bare arm.\n\n\n Eudalia took him to the nursery. He was irritated now in another,\n angrier way. The infants, protected by cellophane-like coverlets, were\n asleep.\n\n\n \"They never cry,\" the thin woman told him. \"But they grow—God, how\n they grow!\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Tennant, fighting down his anger. He kissed her, held\n her close, although neither of them felt desire at the moment. Their\n captors had seen to that; it wasn't Eudalia's turn. Tennant said, \"I\n wish I could do something about this. I hate seeing Dana so bitter and\n Olga so scared. It isn't their fault.\"",
"Tennant watched the girls as a sweet-voiced crooner began to ply\n an unfamiliar love lyric to a melody whose similarity to a thousand\n predecessors doomed it to instant success.\n\n\n Olga sat up straight, her pale blue eyes round with utter disbelief.\n She looked at the radio, at Tennant, at the other two women, then back\n at the machine. She murmured something in Polish that was inaudible,\n but her expression showed that it must have been wistful.\n\n\n Eudalia grinned at Tennant and, rising, did a sort of tap dance to the\n music, then whirled back into her chair, green dress ashimmer, and sank\n into it just to listen.\n\n\n Dana stood almost in the center of the room, carmine-tipped fingers\n clasped beneath the swell of her breasts. She might have been listening\n to Brahms or Debussy. Her eyes glowed with the salty brilliance of\n emotion and she was almost beautiful.",
"The front door was flung open and his diaphragm tightened at the\n remembered sound of Agatha's throaty laugh ... and tightened further\n when it was followed by a deeper rumbling laugh. Sudden fear made the\n cigarette shake in his fingers.\n\n\n \"... Don't be such a stuffed-shirt, darling.\" Agatha's mocking\n sweetness rang alarm-gongs in Tennant's memory. \"Charley wasn't making\n a grab for\nme\n. He'd had one too many and only wanted a little fun.\n Really, darling, you seem to think that a girl....\"\n\n\n Her voice faded out as she saw Tennant standing there. She was wearing\n a white strapless gown, had a blue-red-and-gold Mandarin jacket slung\n hussar-fashion over her left shoulder. She looked even sleeker, better\n groomed, more assured than his memory of her.",
"It arrived before the meal, materializing against one of the seven\n walls of the roofless chamber. It was a large cabinet on slender\n straight legs that resembled dark polished wood. Tennant went to it,\n opened a hingeless door and pushed a knob on the inner surface. At once\n the air was hideous with the acerate harmony of a singing commercial....\n\n... so go soak your head,\nbe it gold, brown or red,\nin Any-tone Shampoo!\n\n A disc jockey's buoyant tones cut in quickly as the final\nooooo\nfaded. \"This is Grady Martin, your old night-owl, coming to you with\n your requests over Station WZZX, Manhattan. Here's a wire from Theresa\n McManus and the girls in the family entrance of Conaghan's Bar and\n Grill on West....\"",
"had a lease that could be broken—\nRoger Tennant, crossing the lawn, could see two of the three wings\n of the house, which radiated spoke-like from its heptagonal central\n portion. The wing on the left was white, with slim square pillars,\n reminiscent of scores of movie sets of the Deep South. That on the\n right was sundeck solar-house living-machine modern, something like a\n montage of shoeboxes. The wing hidden by the rest of the house was, he\n knew, spired, gabled and multicolored, like an ancient building in\n pre-Hitler Cracow.\nDana was lying under a tree near the door, stretched out on a sort\n of deck chair with her eyes closed. She wore a golden gown, long and\n close-fitting and slit up the leg like the gown of a Chinese woman.\n Above it her comely face was sullen beneath its sleek cocoon of auburn\n hair.",
"JUDAS RAM\nBY SAM MERWIN, Jr.\n\n\n Illustrated by JAMES VINCENT\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction December 1950.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe house was furnished with all\n\n luxuries, including women. If it only",
"\"Roger,\" repeated Tennant viciously. He felt sick with disgust. Maybe\n he should have expected a triangle, but somehow he hadn't. And here\n it was, with all of them going through their paces like a trio of\n tent-show actors. He said, \"For God's sake, sit down.\"\n\n\n Agatha did so hesitantly. Her huge dark eyes, invariably clear\n and limpid no matter how much she had drunk, flickered toward him\n furtively. She said defensively, \"I had detectives looking for you for\n six months. Where have you been, Rog? Smashing up the car like that\n and—disappearing! I've been out of my mind.\"",
"Waiting, Tennant tried not to think of his wife, of the fact that he\n hadn't seen her in—was it more than a year and a half on Earth? He\n could have controlled his heartbeat with one of his new powers, but\n that might have made Opal suspicious. He should be somewhat excited.\n He allowed himself to be, though he obscured the reasons. He was going\n to see his wife again ... and maybe he could trick his way into not\n returning.\nThe maid who opened the door for him was new, although her eyes were\n old. But she recognized him and stood aside to let him enter. There\n must, he thought, still be pictures of him around. He wondered how\n Agatha could afford a servant.\n\n\n \"Is Mrs. Tennant in?\" he asked.",
"Agatha would complain, naturally, but his being back would make up for\n any amount of furniture shifting. He imagined her standing close to\n him, her lovely face lifted to be kissed, and his heart lurched like an\n adolescent's. This hunger was real, not implanted. Everything would be\n real ... his love for her, the food he ate, the things he touched, his\n house, his life....\nYour wife and a man are approaching the house.\nThe thought message from Opal crumbled his illusion of freedom. He sank\n down in a chair, trying to refuse to listen to the rest of the command:\nYou are to bring the man through the gateway with you. We want another\n live male.\nTennant shook his head, stiff and defiant in his chair. The punishment,\n when it came, was more humiliating than a slap across a dog's snout.\n Opal had been too interested in the next lab specimen to bother about\n his thoughts—that was why he had been free to think of escape.",
"\"And it's not yours,\" insisted Eudalia. \"Don't let them make you think\n it is.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try not to,\" he said and stopped, realizing the family party was\n over. He had felt the inner tug of command, said good-by to the women\n and returned to his smaller compound within its own barrier dome.\n\n\n Then came the invisible aura of strain in the air, the shimmering\n illusion of heat that was not heat, that was prelude to his\n teleportation ... if that were the word. It was neither pleasant nor\n unpleasant; it\nwas\n, that was all.\n\n\n He called it the training hall, not because it looked like a training\n hall but because that was its function. It didn't actually look like\n anything save some half-nourished dream a surrealist might have\n discarded as too nightmarish for belief.",
"\"Decent of you,\" said Tennant. He got up, crossed to the cabinet that\n served as a bar. It was fully equipped—with more expensive liquor, he\n noticed, than he had ever been able to afford. He poured a drink of\n brandy, waited for the others to fill their glasses.\nAgatha looked at him over the rim of hers. \"Tell us, Rog. We have a\n right to know. I do, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"One question first,\" he said. \"What about those killings? Have there\n been any lately?\"\n\n\n \"Not for over a year,\" Cass told him. \"They never did get the devil who\n skinned those bodies and removed the heads.\"\n\n\n So, Tennant thought, they hadn't used the gateway. Not since they had\n brought the four of them through, not since they had begun to train him\n for his Judas ram duties.\n\n\n Agatha was asking him if he had been abroad.",
"He realized, shocked and scared, that his thoughts of escape had\n slipped past his mental censor, and he waited apprehensively for Opal\n to strike. Nothing happened and he warily relaxed. Opal wasn't tapping\n his thoughts. Because he felt sure of his captive ... or because he\n couldn't on Earth?\n\n\n It was like being let out of a cage. Tennant grinned at the bookcase;\n the ebony-and-ivory elephants that Agatha had never liked were gone,\n but he'd get them back or another pair. The credenza had been replaced\n by a huge and ugly television console. That, he resolved, would go down\n in the cellar rumpus room, where its bleached modernity wouldn't clash\n with the casual antiquity of the living room.",
"Tennant knew now why he was the only male human the captors had been\n able to take alive. Apparently, thanks to the rain-slick road, he had\n run the sedan into a tree at the foot of the hill beyond the river. He\n had been sitting there, unconscious, ripe fruit on their doorstep. They\n had simply picked him up.\n\n\n Otherwise, apparently, men were next to impossible for them to capture.\n All they could do was kill them and bring back their heads and hides\n as trophies. With women it was different—perhaps the captors' weapons,\n whatever they were, worked more efficiently on females. A difference in\n body chemistry or psychology, perhaps.\n\n\n More than once, during his long training with Opal, Tennant had sent\n questing thoughts toward his captor, asking why they didn't simply set\n up the gateway in some town or city and take as many humans as they\n wanted.",
"\"We may be in the eleventh for all I know,\" he told her. \"But I'll\n settle for the fourth—a fourth dimension in space, if that makes\n scientific sense, because we don't seem to have moved in time. I wasn't\n sure of that, though, till we got the radio.\"\n\n\n \"Why haven't they brought more of us through?\" Eudalia asked, tamping\n out ashes in a tray that might have been silver.\n\n\n \"I'm not sure,\" he said thoughtfully. \"I think it's hard for them. They\n have a hell of a time bringing anyone through alive, and lately they\n haven't brought anyone through—not alive.\"\n\n\n \"Why do they do it—the other way, I mean?\" asked Dana.\n\n\n Tennant shrugged. \"I don't know. I've been thinking about it. I suppose\n it's because they're pretty human.\"",
"\"Were you ever in a big-game hunter's trophy room?\" Tennant asked\n quietly. \"Or in a Museum of Natural History? A zoo? A naturalist's lab?\n Or even, maybe, photographed as a baby on a bear-skin rug?\"\n\n\n \"I was,\" said Olga. \"But that's not the same thing.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" he agreed. \"In the one instance,\nwe're\nthe hunters,\n the breeders, the trophy collectors. In the other\"—he shrugged—\"we're\n the trophies.\"\nThere was a long silence. They finished eating and then Dana stood up\n and said, \"I'm going out on the lawn for a while.\" She unzipped her\n golden gown, stepped out of it to reveal a pair of tartan shorts that\n matched his, and a narrow halter."
],
[
"Tennant's meat looked like steak, it felt like steak, but, lacking the\n aroma of steak, it was almost tasteless. This was so with all of their\n foods, with their cigarettes, with everything in their prison—or their\n cage. Their captors were utterly without a human conception of smell,\n living, apparently, in a world without odor at all.\n\n\n Dana said suddenly, \"I named the boy Tom, after somebody I hate almost\n as much as I hate you.\"\n\n\n Eudalia laid down her fork with a clatter and regarded Dana\n disapprovingly. \"Why take it out on Rog?\" she asked bluntly. \"He didn't\n ask to come here any more than we did. He's got a wife back home. Maybe\n you want him to fall in love with you? Maybe you're jealous because\n he doesn't? Well, maybe he can't! And maybe it wouldn't work, the way\n things are arranged here.\"",
"They entered the house, which had no roof, continued to move beneath a\n sky that glowed with light which did not come from a sun or moon. It\n might have been a well-kept if bizarre little country estate, but it\n wasn't. It was a prison, a cage.\n\n\n The other two women were sitting in the heptagonal central hall.\n Eudalia, who had borne twin girls recently, was lying back, newly thin\n and dark of skin and hair, smoking a scentless cigarette. A tall woman,\n thirtyish, she wore a sort of shimmering green strapless evening gown.\n Tennant wondered how she maintained it in place, for despite her recent\n double motherhood, she was almost flat of bosom. He asked her how she\n was feeling.\n\n\n \"Okay, I guess,\" she said. \"The way they manage it, there's nothing\n to it.\" She had a flat, potentially raucous voice. Eudalia had been\n a female foreman in a garment-cutting shop before being captured and\n brought through.",
"\"Decent of you,\" said Tennant. He got up, crossed to the cabinet that\n served as a bar. It was fully equipped—with more expensive liquor, he\n noticed, than he had ever been able to afford. He poured a drink of\n brandy, waited for the others to fill their glasses.\nAgatha looked at him over the rim of hers. \"Tell us, Rog. We have a\n right to know. I do, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"One question first,\" he said. \"What about those killings? Have there\n been any lately?\"\n\n\n \"Not for over a year,\" Cass told him. \"They never did get the devil who\n skinned those bodies and removed the heads.\"\n\n\n So, Tennant thought, they hadn't used the gateway. Not since they had\n brought the four of them through, not since they had begun to train him\n for his Judas ram duties.\n\n\n Agatha was asking him if he had been abroad.",
"\"Were you ever in a big-game hunter's trophy room?\" Tennant asked\n quietly. \"Or in a Museum of Natural History? A zoo? A naturalist's lab?\n Or even, maybe, photographed as a baby on a bear-skin rug?\"\n\n\n \"I was,\" said Olga. \"But that's not the same thing.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" he agreed. \"In the one instance,\nwe're\nthe hunters,\n the breeders, the trophy collectors. In the other\"—he shrugged—\"we're\n the trophies.\"\nThere was a long silence. They finished eating and then Dana stood up\n and said, \"I'm going out on the lawn for a while.\" She unzipped her\n golden gown, stepped out of it to reveal a pair of tartan shorts that\n matched his, and a narrow halter.",
"Dog does trick, he thought.\nHe went through the entire routine at Opal's bidding. When at last\n he was allowed to relax, he wondered, not for the first time, if he\n weren't mastering some of the alleged Guru arts. At once he felt\n probing investigation. Opal, like the rest of the captors, was as\n curious as a cat—or a human being.\nTennant sat against a wall, drenched with sweat. There would be endless\n repetition before his workout was done. On Earth, dogs were said to be\n intellectually two-dimensional creatures. He wondered if they felt this\n helpless futility when their masters taught them to heel, to point, to\n retrieve.",
"\"\nHuman!\n\" Dana was outraged. \"Do you call it human to—\"\n\n\n \"Hold on,\" he said. \"They pass through their gateway to Earth at\n considerable danger and, probably, expense of some kind. Some of them\n don't come back. They kill those of us who put up a fight. Those who\n don't—or can't—they bring back with them. Live or dead, we're just\n laboratory specimens.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" Eudalia conceded doubtfully. Then her eyes blazed. \"But the\n things they do—stuffing people, mounting their heads, keeping them on\n display in their—their whatever they live in. You call that human,\n Rog?\"",
"\"Roger,\" repeated Tennant viciously. He felt sick with disgust. Maybe\n he should have expected a triangle, but somehow he hadn't. And here\n it was, with all of them going through their paces like a trio of\n tent-show actors. He said, \"For God's sake, sit down.\"\n\n\n Agatha did so hesitantly. Her huge dark eyes, invariably clear\n and limpid no matter how much she had drunk, flickered toward him\n furtively. She said defensively, \"I had detectives looking for you for\n six months. Where have you been, Rog? Smashing up the car like that\n and—disappearing! I've been out of my mind.\"",
"\"And it's not yours,\" insisted Eudalia. \"Don't let them make you think\n it is.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try not to,\" he said and stopped, realizing the family party was\n over. He had felt the inner tug of command, said good-by to the women\n and returned to his smaller compound within its own barrier dome.\n\n\n Then came the invisible aura of strain in the air, the shimmering\n illusion of heat that was not heat, that was prelude to his\n teleportation ... if that were the word. It was neither pleasant nor\n unpleasant; it\nwas\n, that was all.\n\n\n He called it the training hall, not because it looked like a training\n hall but because that was its function. It didn't actually look like\n anything save some half-nourished dream a surrealist might have\n discarded as too nightmarish for belief.",
"Tennant knew now why he was the only male human the captors had been\n able to take alive. Apparently, thanks to the rain-slick road, he had\n run the sedan into a tree at the foot of the hill beyond the river. He\n had been sitting there, unconscious, ripe fruit on their doorstep. They\n had simply picked him up.\n\n\n Otherwise, apparently, men were next to impossible for them to capture.\n All they could do was kill them and bring back their heads and hides\n as trophies. With women it was different—perhaps the captors' weapons,\n whatever they were, worked more efficiently on females. A difference in\n body chemistry or psychology, perhaps.\n\n\n More than once, during his long training with Opal, Tennant had sent\n questing thoughts toward his captor, asking why they didn't simply set\n up the gateway in some town or city and take as many humans as they\n wanted.",
"\"\nRog!\n\" she cried softly when the music stopped. \"A radio and WZZX! Is\n it—are they—real?\"\n\n\n \"As real as you or I,\" he told her. \"It took quite a bit of doing,\n getting them to put a set together. And I wasn't sure that radio would\n get through. TV doesn't seem to. Somehow it brings things closer....\"\n\n\n Olga got up quite suddenly, went to the machine and, after frowning at\n it for a moment, tuned in another station from which a Polish-speaking\n announcer was followed by polka music. She leaned against the wall,\n resting one smooth forearm on the top of the machine. Her eyes closed\n and she swayed a little in time to the polka beat.\nTennant caught Dana looking at him and there was near approval in her\n expression—approval that faded quickly as soon as she caught his gaze\n upon her. The food arrived then and they sat down at the round table to\n eat it.",
"\"You thought those up while we ate,\" he said. It annoyed him to be\n copied, though he did not know why. She laughed at him silently, tossed\n her auburn hair back from her face and went out of the roofless house,\n holding the gold dress casually over her bare arm.\n\n\n Eudalia took him to the nursery. He was irritated now in another,\n angrier way. The infants, protected by cellophane-like coverlets, were\n asleep.\n\n\n \"They never cry,\" the thin woman told him. \"But they grow—God, how\n they grow!\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Tennant, fighting down his anger. He kissed her, held\n her close, although neither of them felt desire at the moment. Their\n captors had seen to that; it wasn't Eudalia's turn. Tennant said, \"I\n wish I could do something about this. I hate seeing Dana so bitter and\n Olga so scared. It isn't their fault.\"",
"He shrugged, returned to the feeling of comfort that came from being\n back here, about to see Agatha again, hold her close in no more than a\n few minutes. And stay, his mind began to add eagerly, but he pushed the\n thought down where Opal could not detect it.\n\n\n He took another deep, lung-filling drag on his cigarette, looked around\n the room that was so important a part of his life. The three women back\n there would be in a ghastly spot. He felt like a heel for wanting to\n leave them there, then knew that he would try somehow to get them out.\n Not, of course, anything that would endanger his remaining with Agatha;\n the only way his captors would get him back would be as a taxidermist's\n specimen.",
"\"Thanks, Eudalia,\" said Tennant. \"I think I can defend myself. But\n she's right, Dana. We're as helpless as—laboratory animals. They have\n the means to make us do whatever they want.\"\n\n\n \"Rog,\" said Dana, looking suddenly scared, \"I'm sorry I snapped at you.\n I know it's not your fault. I'm—\nchanging\n.\"\n\n\n He shook his head. \"No, Dana, you're not changing. You're adapting. We\n all are. We seem to be in a universe of different properties as well as\n different dimensions. We're adjusting. I can do a thing or two myself\n that seem absolutely impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Are we really in the fourth dimension?\" Dana asked. Of the three of\n them, she alone had more than a high-school education.",
"She opened her eyes at his approach and regarded him with nothing like\n favor. Involuntarily he glanced down at the tartan shorts that were his\n only garment to make sure that they were on properly. They were. He had\n thought them up in a moment of utter boredom and they were extremely\n comfortable. However, the near-Buchanan tartan did not crease or even\n wrinkle when he moved. Their captors had no idea of how a woven design\n should behave.\n\n\n \"Waiting for me?\" Tennant asked the girl.\n\n\n She said, \"I'd rather be dead. Maybe I am. Maybe we're all dead and\n this is Hell.\"\n\n\n He stood over her and looked down until she turned away her reddening\n face. He said, \"So it's going to be you again, Dana. You'll be the\n first to come back for a second run.\"",
"Surprisingly there had been a definite fear reaction. As nearly as he\n could understand, it had been like asking an African pygmy, armed with\n a blowgun, to set up shop in the midst of a herd of wild elephants. It\n simply wasn't feasible—and furthermore he derived an impression of the\n tenuosity as well as the immovability of the gateway itself.\n\n\n They could be hurt, even killed by humans in a three-dimensional world.\n How? Tennant did not know. Perhaps as a man can cut finger or even\n throat on the edge of a near-two-dimensional piece of paper. It took\n valor for them to hunt men in the world of men. In that fact lay a key\n to their character—if such utterly alien creatures could be said to\n have character.",
"\"Don't flatter yourself,\" she replied angrily. She sat up, pushed\n back her hair, got to her feet a trifle awkwardly because of the\n tight-fitting tubular gown. \"If I could do anything about it....\"\n\n\n \"But you can't,\" he told her. \"They're too clever.\"\n\n\n \"Is this crop rotation or did you send for me?\" she asked cynically.\n \"If you did, I wish you hadn't. You haven't asked about your son.\"\n\n\n \"I don't even want to think about him,\" said Tennant. \"Let's get\n on with it.\" He could sense the restless stirring of the woman\n within Dana, just as he could feel the stirring toward her within\n himself—desire that both of them loathed because it was implanted\n within them by their captors.",
"\"Good,\" he said. \"Glad to hear it.\" He felt oddly embarrassed. He\n turned to Olga, broad, blonde and curiously vital, who sat perfectly\n still, regarding him over the pregnant swell of her dirndl-clad waist.\n Olga had been a waitress in a mining town hash-house near Scranton.\n\n\n Tennant wanted to put an encouraging hand on her shoulder, to say\n something that might cheer her up, for she was by far the youngest of\n the three female captives, barely nineteen. But with the eyes of the\n other two, especially Dana, upon him, he could not.\n\n\n \"I guess I wasn't cut out to be a Turk,\" he said. \"I don't feel at ease\n in a harem, even when it's supposedly my own.\"\n\n\n \"You're not doing so badly,\" Dana replied acidly.",
"\"Lay off—he can't help it,\" said Eudalia unexpectedly. \"He doesn't\n like it any better than we do.\"\n\n\n \"But he doesn't have to—have them,\" objected Olga. She had a trace of\n Polish accent that was not unpleasant. In fact, Tennant thought, only\n her laughter was unpleasant, a shrill, uncontrolled burst of staccato\n sound that jarred him to his heels. Olga had not laughed of late,\n however. She was too frightened.\n\"Let's get the meal ordered,\" said Dana and they were all silent,\n thinking of what they wanted to eat but would not enjoy when it came.\n Tennant finished with his order, then got busy with his surprise.",
"\"I'm no stuffed-shirt and you know it.\" Cass' tone was peevish. \"But\n your idea of fun, Agatha, is pretty damn....\"\n\n\n It was his turn to freeze. Unbelieving, Tennant studied his successor.\n Cass Gordon—the\nman\n, the ex-halfback whose bulk was beginning to get\n out of hand, but whose inherent aggressive grace had not yet deserted\n him. The\nman\n, that was all—unless one threw in the little black\n mustache and the smooth salesman's manner.\n\n\n \"You know, Cass,\" Tennant said quietly, \"I never for a moment dreamed\n it would be you.\"\n\n\n \"\nRoger!\n\" Agatha found her voice. \"You're\nalive\n!\"",
"had a lease that could be broken—\nRoger Tennant, crossing the lawn, could see two of the three wings\n of the house, which radiated spoke-like from its heptagonal central\n portion. The wing on the left was white, with slim square pillars,\n reminiscent of scores of movie sets of the Deep South. That on the\n right was sundeck solar-house living-machine modern, something like a\n montage of shoeboxes. The wing hidden by the rest of the house was, he\n knew, spired, gabled and multicolored, like an ancient building in\n pre-Hitler Cracow.\nDana was lying under a tree near the door, stretched out on a sort\n of deck chair with her eyes closed. She wore a golden gown, long and\n close-fitting and slit up the leg like the gown of a Chinese woman.\n Above it her comely face was sullen beneath its sleek cocoon of auburn\n hair."
],
[
"He shrugged, returned to the feeling of comfort that came from being\n back here, about to see Agatha again, hold her close in no more than a\n few minutes. And stay, his mind began to add eagerly, but he pushed the\n thought down where Opal could not detect it.\n\n\n He took another deep, lung-filling drag on his cigarette, looked around\n the room that was so important a part of his life. The three women back\n there would be in a ghastly spot. He felt like a heel for wanting to\n leave them there, then knew that he would try somehow to get them out.\n Not, of course, anything that would endanger his remaining with Agatha;\n the only way his captors would get him back would be as a taxidermist's\n specimen.",
"Opal was annoyed that Tennant could make nothing of it. Then came the\n thought:\nWhat cover must your body have not to be conspicuous?\nTennant wondered, cynically, what would happen if he were to demand\n a costume of mediaeval motley, complete with Pied Piper's flute. He\n received quick reproof that made his head ring as from a blow.\n\n\n He asked Opal where and when they were going, was informed that\n he would soon emerge on Earth where he had left it. That told him\n everything but the date and season. Opal, like the rest of the captors,\n seemed to have no understanding of time in a human sense.",
"He realized, shocked and scared, that his thoughts of escape had\n slipped past his mental censor, and he waited apprehensively for Opal\n to strike. Nothing happened and he warily relaxed. Opal wasn't tapping\n his thoughts. Because he felt sure of his captive ... or because he\n couldn't on Earth?\n\n\n It was like being let out of a cage. Tennant grinned at the bookcase;\n the ebony-and-ivory elephants that Agatha had never liked were gone,\n but he'd get them back or another pair. The credenza had been replaced\n by a huge and ugly television console. That, he resolved, would go down\n in the cellar rumpus room, where its bleached modernity wouldn't clash\n with the casual antiquity of the living room.",
"Waiting, Tennant tried not to think of his wife, of the fact that he\n hadn't seen her in—was it more than a year and a half on Earth? He\n could have controlled his heartbeat with one of his new powers, but\n that might have made Opal suspicious. He should be somewhat excited.\n He allowed himself to be, though he obscured the reasons. He was going\n to see his wife again ... and maybe he could trick his way into not\n returning.\nThe maid who opened the door for him was new, although her eyes were\n old. But she recognized him and stood aside to let him enter. There\n must, he thought, still be pictures of him around. He wondered how\n Agatha could afford a servant.\n\n\n \"Is Mrs. Tennant in?\" he asked.",
"The captor Tennant called\nOpal\ncame in through a far corner of\n the ceiling. He—if it was a he—was not large, although this,\n Tennant knew, meant nothing; Opal might extend thousands of yards in\n some unseen direction. He had no regular shape and much of him was\n iridescent and shot with constantly changing colors. Hence the name\n Opal.\n\n\n Communication was telepathic. Tennant could have yodeled or yelled\n or sung\nMississippi Mud\nand Opal would have shown no reaction. Yet\n Tennant suspected that the captors could hear somewhere along the\n auditory scale, just as perhaps they could smell, although not in any\n human sense.\nYou will approach without use of your appendages.\nThe command was as clear as if it had been spoken aloud. Tennant took a\n deep breath. He thought of the space beside Opal. It took about three\n seconds and he was there, having spanned a distance of some ninety\n feet. He was getting good at it.",
"Agatha would complain, naturally, but his being back would make up for\n any amount of furniture shifting. He imagined her standing close to\n him, her lovely face lifted to be kissed, and his heart lurched like an\n adolescent's. This hunger was real, not implanted. Everything would be\n real ... his love for her, the food he ate, the things he touched, his\n house, his life....\nYour wife and a man are approaching the house.\nThe thought message from Opal crumbled his illusion of freedom. He sank\n down in a chair, trying to refuse to listen to the rest of the command:\nYou are to bring the man through the gateway with you. We want another\n live male.\nTennant shook his head, stiff and defiant in his chair. The punishment,\n when it came, was more humiliating than a slap across a dog's snout.\n Opal had been too interested in the next lab specimen to bother about\n his thoughts—that was why he had been free to think of escape.",
"Tennant knew now why he was the only male human the captors had been\n able to take alive. Apparently, thanks to the rain-slick road, he had\n run the sedan into a tree at the foot of the hill beyond the river. He\n had been sitting there, unconscious, ripe fruit on their doorstep. They\n had simply picked him up.\n\n\n Otherwise, apparently, men were next to impossible for them to capture.\n All they could do was kill them and bring back their heads and hides\n as trophies. With women it was different—perhaps the captors' weapons,\n whatever they were, worked more efficiently on females. A difference in\n body chemistry or psychology, perhaps.\n\n\n More than once, during his long training with Opal, Tennant had sent\n questing thoughts toward his captor, asking why they didn't simply set\n up the gateway in some town or city and take as many humans as they\n wanted.",
"\"\nHuman!\n\" Dana was outraged. \"Do you call it human to—\"\n\n\n \"Hold on,\" he said. \"They pass through their gateway to Earth at\n considerable danger and, probably, expense of some kind. Some of them\n don't come back. They kill those of us who put up a fight. Those who\n don't—or can't—they bring back with them. Live or dead, we're just\n laboratory specimens.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" Eudalia conceded doubtfully. Then her eyes blazed. \"But the\n things they do—stuffing people, mounting their heads, keeping them on\n display in their—their whatever they live in. You call that human,\n Rog?\"",
"Some days later, the training routine was broken. He felt a sudden stir\n of near-sick excitement as he received the thought:\nNow you are ready. We are going through at last.\nOpal was nervous, so much so that he revealed more than he intended.\n Or perhaps that was his intent; Tennant could never be sure. They were\n going through to Tennant's own dimension. He wondered briefly just what\n his role was to be.\n\n\n He had little time to speculate before Opal seemed to envelop him.\n There was the blurring wrench of forced teleportation and they were in\n another room, a room which ended in a huge irregular passage that might\n have been the interior of a giant concertina—or an old-fashioned kodak.\n\n\n He stood before a kidney-shaped object over whose jagged surface\n colors played constantly. From Opal's thoughts it appeared to be some\n sort of ultradimensional television set, but to Tennant it was as\n incomprehensible as an oil painting to an animal.",
"Dog does trick, he thought.\nHe went through the entire routine at Opal's bidding. When at last\n he was allowed to relax, he wondered, not for the first time, if he\n weren't mastering some of the alleged Guru arts. At once he felt\n probing investigation. Opal, like the rest of the captors, was as\n curious as a cat—or a human being.\nTennant sat against a wall, drenched with sweat. There would be endless\n repetition before his workout was done. On Earth, dogs were said to be\n intellectually two-dimensional creatures. He wondered if they felt this\n helpless futility when their masters taught them to heel, to point, to\n retrieve.",
"\"Don't flatter yourself,\" she replied angrily. She sat up, pushed\n back her hair, got to her feet a trifle awkwardly because of the\n tight-fitting tubular gown. \"If I could do anything about it....\"\n\n\n \"But you can't,\" he told her. \"They're too clever.\"\n\n\n \"Is this crop rotation or did you send for me?\" she asked cynically.\n \"If you did, I wish you hadn't. You haven't asked about your son.\"\n\n\n \"I don't even want to think about him,\" said Tennant. \"Let's get\n on with it.\" He could sense the restless stirring of the woman\n within Dana, just as he could feel the stirring toward her within\n himself—desire that both of them loathed because it was implanted\n within them by their captors.",
"\"We may be in the eleventh for all I know,\" he told her. \"But I'll\n settle for the fourth—a fourth dimension in space, if that makes\n scientific sense, because we don't seem to have moved in time. I wasn't\n sure of that, though, till we got the radio.\"\n\n\n \"Why haven't they brought more of us through?\" Eudalia asked, tamping\n out ashes in a tray that might have been silver.\n\n\n \"I'm not sure,\" he said thoughtfully. \"I think it's hard for them. They\n have a hell of a time bringing anyone through alive, and lately they\n haven't brought anyone through—not alive.\"\n\n\n \"Why do they do it—the other way, I mean?\" asked Dana.\n\n\n Tennant shrugged. \"I don't know. I've been thinking about it. I suppose\n it's because they're pretty human.\"",
"Tennant's meat looked like steak, it felt like steak, but, lacking the\n aroma of steak, it was almost tasteless. This was so with all of their\n foods, with their cigarettes, with everything in their prison—or their\n cage. Their captors were utterly without a human conception of smell,\n living, apparently, in a world without odor at all.\n\n\n Dana said suddenly, \"I named the boy Tom, after somebody I hate almost\n as much as I hate you.\"\n\n\n Eudalia laid down her fork with a clatter and regarded Dana\n disapprovingly. \"Why take it out on Rog?\" she asked bluntly. \"He didn't\n ask to come here any more than we did. He's got a wife back home. Maybe\n you want him to fall in love with you? Maybe you're jealous because\n he doesn't? Well, maybe he can't! And maybe it wouldn't work, the way\n things are arranged here.\"",
"\"You thought those up while we ate,\" he said. It annoyed him to be\n copied, though he did not know why. She laughed at him silently, tossed\n her auburn hair back from her face and went out of the roofless house,\n holding the gold dress casually over her bare arm.\n\n\n Eudalia took him to the nursery. He was irritated now in another,\n angrier way. The infants, protected by cellophane-like coverlets, were\n asleep.\n\n\n \"They never cry,\" the thin woman told him. \"But they grow—God, how\n they grow!\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Tennant, fighting down his anger. He kissed her, held\n her close, although neither of them felt desire at the moment. Their\n captors had seen to that; it wasn't Eudalia's turn. Tennant said, \"I\n wish I could do something about this. I hate seeing Dana so bitter and\n Olga so scared. It isn't their fault.\"",
"\"And it's not yours,\" insisted Eudalia. \"Don't let them make you think\n it is.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try not to,\" he said and stopped, realizing the family party was\n over. He had felt the inner tug of command, said good-by to the women\n and returned to his smaller compound within its own barrier dome.\n\n\n Then came the invisible aura of strain in the air, the shimmering\n illusion of heat that was not heat, that was prelude to his\n teleportation ... if that were the word. It was neither pleasant nor\n unpleasant; it\nwas\n, that was all.\n\n\n He called it the training hall, not because it looked like a training\n hall but because that was its function. It didn't actually look like\n anything save some half-nourished dream a surrealist might have\n discarded as too nightmarish for belief.",
"\"Thanks, Eudalia,\" said Tennant. \"I think I can defend myself. But\n she's right, Dana. We're as helpless as—laboratory animals. They have\n the means to make us do whatever they want.\"\n\n\n \"Rog,\" said Dana, looking suddenly scared, \"I'm sorry I snapped at you.\n I know it's not your fault. I'm—\nchanging\n.\"\n\n\n He shook his head. \"No, Dana, you're not changing. You're adapting. We\n all are. We seem to be in a universe of different properties as well as\n different dimensions. We're adjusting. I can do a thing or two myself\n that seem absolutely impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Are we really in the fourth dimension?\" Dana asked. Of the three of\n them, she alone had more than a high-school education.",
"had a lease that could be broken—\nRoger Tennant, crossing the lawn, could see two of the three wings\n of the house, which radiated spoke-like from its heptagonal central\n portion. The wing on the left was white, with slim square pillars,\n reminiscent of scores of movie sets of the Deep South. That on the\n right was sundeck solar-house living-machine modern, something like a\n montage of shoeboxes. The wing hidden by the rest of the house was, he\n knew, spired, gabled and multicolored, like an ancient building in\n pre-Hitler Cracow.\nDana was lying under a tree near the door, stretched out on a sort\n of deck chair with her eyes closed. She wore a golden gown, long and\n close-fitting and slit up the leg like the gown of a Chinese woman.\n Above it her comely face was sullen beneath its sleek cocoon of auburn\n hair.",
"\"Were you ever in a big-game hunter's trophy room?\" Tennant asked\n quietly. \"Or in a Museum of Natural History? A zoo? A naturalist's lab?\n Or even, maybe, photographed as a baby on a bear-skin rug?\"\n\n\n \"I was,\" said Olga. \"But that's not the same thing.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" he agreed. \"In the one instance,\nwe're\nthe hunters,\n the breeders, the trophy collectors. In the other\"—he shrugged—\"we're\n the trophies.\"\nThere was a long silence. They finished eating and then Dana stood up\n and said, \"I'm going out on the lawn for a while.\" She unzipped her\n golden gown, stepped out of it to reveal a pair of tartan shorts that\n matched his, and a narrow halter.",
"\"In a way,\" he replied unemotionally. \"Sorry if I've worried you,\n Agatha, but my life has been rather—indefinite, since I—left.\"\n\n\n He was standing no more than four inches from this woman he had desired\n desperately for six years, and he no longer wanted her. He was acutely\n conscious of her perfume. It wrapped them both like an exotic blanket,\n and it repelled him. He studied the firm clear flesh of her cheek and\n chin, the arch of nostril, the carmine fullness of lower lip, the\n swell of bosom above low-cut gown. And he no longer wanted any of it or\n of her. Cass Gordon—\n\n\n It didn't have to be anybody at all. For it to be Cass Gordon was\n revolting.\n\n\n \"Rog,\" she said and her voice trembled, \"what are we going to do? What\n do you\nwant\nto do?\"",
"Tennant closed his eyes, willed himself to the front window. Now that\n he had mastered teleportation, it was incredible how much easier it was\n in his own world. He had covered the two miles from the gateway to the\n house in a mere seven jumps, the distance to the window in an instant.\n But there was no pleasure in it, only a confirmation of his captor's\n power over him.\n\n\n He was not free of them. He understood all too well what they wanted\n him to do; he was to play the Judas goat ... or rather the Judas ram,\n leading another victim to the fourth-dimensional pen.\n\n\n Grim, he watched the swoop of headlights in the driveway and returned\n to the coffee table, lit a fresh cigarette."
],
[
"Opal was annoyed that Tennant could make nothing of it. Then came the\n thought:\nWhat cover must your body have not to be conspicuous?\nTennant wondered, cynically, what would happen if he were to demand\n a costume of mediaeval motley, complete with Pied Piper's flute. He\n received quick reproof that made his head ring as from a blow.\n\n\n He asked Opal where and when they were going, was informed that\n he would soon emerge on Earth where he had left it. That told him\n everything but the date and season. Opal, like the rest of the captors,\n seemed to have no understanding of time in a human sense.",
"He realized, shocked and scared, that his thoughts of escape had\n slipped past his mental censor, and he waited apprehensively for Opal\n to strike. Nothing happened and he warily relaxed. Opal wasn't tapping\n his thoughts. Because he felt sure of his captive ... or because he\n couldn't on Earth?\n\n\n It was like being let out of a cage. Tennant grinned at the bookcase;\n the ebony-and-ivory elephants that Agatha had never liked were gone,\n but he'd get them back or another pair. The credenza had been replaced\n by a huge and ugly television console. That, he resolved, would go down\n in the cellar rumpus room, where its bleached modernity wouldn't clash\n with the casual antiquity of the living room.",
"\"Roger,\" repeated Tennant viciously. He felt sick with disgust. Maybe\n he should have expected a triangle, but somehow he hadn't. And here\n it was, with all of them going through their paces like a trio of\n tent-show actors. He said, \"For God's sake, sit down.\"\n\n\n Agatha did so hesitantly. Her huge dark eyes, invariably clear\n and limpid no matter how much she had drunk, flickered toward him\n furtively. She said defensively, \"I had detectives looking for you for\n six months. Where have you been, Rog? Smashing up the car like that\n and—disappearing! I've been out of my mind.\"",
"He shrugged, returned to the feeling of comfort that came from being\n back here, about to see Agatha again, hold her close in no more than a\n few minutes. And stay, his mind began to add eagerly, but he pushed the\n thought down where Opal could not detect it.\n\n\n He took another deep, lung-filling drag on his cigarette, looked around\n the room that was so important a part of his life. The three women back\n there would be in a ghastly spot. He felt like a heel for wanting to\n leave them there, then knew that he would try somehow to get them out.\n Not, of course, anything that would endanger his remaining with Agatha;\n the only way his captors would get him back would be as a taxidermist's\n specimen.",
"Waiting, Tennant tried not to think of his wife, of the fact that he\n hadn't seen her in—was it more than a year and a half on Earth? He\n could have controlled his heartbeat with one of his new powers, but\n that might have made Opal suspicious. He should be somewhat excited.\n He allowed himself to be, though he obscured the reasons. He was going\n to see his wife again ... and maybe he could trick his way into not\n returning.\nThe maid who opened the door for him was new, although her eyes were\n old. But she recognized him and stood aside to let him enter. There\n must, he thought, still be pictures of him around. He wondered how\n Agatha could afford a servant.\n\n\n \"Is Mrs. Tennant in?\" he asked.",
"\"And it's not yours,\" insisted Eudalia. \"Don't let them make you think\n it is.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try not to,\" he said and stopped, realizing the family party was\n over. He had felt the inner tug of command, said good-by to the women\n and returned to his smaller compound within its own barrier dome.\n\n\n Then came the invisible aura of strain in the air, the shimmering\n illusion of heat that was not heat, that was prelude to his\n teleportation ... if that were the word. It was neither pleasant nor\n unpleasant; it\nwas\n, that was all.\n\n\n He called it the training hall, not because it looked like a training\n hall but because that was its function. It didn't actually look like\n anything save some half-nourished dream a surrealist might have\n discarded as too nightmarish for belief.",
"Tennant's meat looked like steak, it felt like steak, but, lacking the\n aroma of steak, it was almost tasteless. This was so with all of their\n foods, with their cigarettes, with everything in their prison—or their\n cage. Their captors were utterly without a human conception of smell,\n living, apparently, in a world without odor at all.\n\n\n Dana said suddenly, \"I named the boy Tom, after somebody I hate almost\n as much as I hate you.\"\n\n\n Eudalia laid down her fork with a clatter and regarded Dana\n disapprovingly. \"Why take it out on Rog?\" she asked bluntly. \"He didn't\n ask to come here any more than we did. He's got a wife back home. Maybe\n you want him to fall in love with you? Maybe you're jealous because\n he doesn't? Well, maybe he can't! And maybe it wouldn't work, the way\n things are arranged here.\"",
"\"We may be in the eleventh for all I know,\" he told her. \"But I'll\n settle for the fourth—a fourth dimension in space, if that makes\n scientific sense, because we don't seem to have moved in time. I wasn't\n sure of that, though, till we got the radio.\"\n\n\n \"Why haven't they brought more of us through?\" Eudalia asked, tamping\n out ashes in a tray that might have been silver.\n\n\n \"I'm not sure,\" he said thoughtfully. \"I think it's hard for them. They\n have a hell of a time bringing anyone through alive, and lately they\n haven't brought anyone through—not alive.\"\n\n\n \"Why do they do it—the other way, I mean?\" asked Dana.\n\n\n Tennant shrugged. \"I don't know. I've been thinking about it. I suppose\n it's because they're pretty human.\"",
"\"\nHuman!\n\" Dana was outraged. \"Do you call it human to—\"\n\n\n \"Hold on,\" he said. \"They pass through their gateway to Earth at\n considerable danger and, probably, expense of some kind. Some of them\n don't come back. They kill those of us who put up a fight. Those who\n don't—or can't—they bring back with them. Live or dead, we're just\n laboratory specimens.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" Eudalia conceded doubtfully. Then her eyes blazed. \"But the\n things they do—stuffing people, mounting their heads, keeping them on\n display in their—their whatever they live in. You call that human,\n Rog?\"",
"Dog does trick, he thought.\nHe went through the entire routine at Opal's bidding. When at last\n he was allowed to relax, he wondered, not for the first time, if he\n weren't mastering some of the alleged Guru arts. At once he felt\n probing investigation. Opal, like the rest of the captors, was as\n curious as a cat—or a human being.\nTennant sat against a wall, drenched with sweat. There would be endless\n repetition before his workout was done. On Earth, dogs were said to be\n intellectually two-dimensional creatures. He wondered if they felt this\n helpless futility when their masters taught them to heel, to point, to\n retrieve.",
"\"Decent of you,\" said Tennant. He got up, crossed to the cabinet that\n served as a bar. It was fully equipped—with more expensive liquor, he\n noticed, than he had ever been able to afford. He poured a drink of\n brandy, waited for the others to fill their glasses.\nAgatha looked at him over the rim of hers. \"Tell us, Rog. We have a\n right to know. I do, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"One question first,\" he said. \"What about those killings? Have there\n been any lately?\"\n\n\n \"Not for over a year,\" Cass told him. \"They never did get the devil who\n skinned those bodies and removed the heads.\"\n\n\n So, Tennant thought, they hadn't used the gateway. Not since they had\n brought the four of them through, not since they had begun to train him\n for his Judas ram duties.\n\n\n Agatha was asking him if he had been abroad.",
"\"In a way,\" he replied unemotionally. \"Sorry if I've worried you,\n Agatha, but my life has been rather—indefinite, since I—left.\"\n\n\n He was standing no more than four inches from this woman he had desired\n desperately for six years, and he no longer wanted her. He was acutely\n conscious of her perfume. It wrapped them both like an exotic blanket,\n and it repelled him. He studied the firm clear flesh of her cheek and\n chin, the arch of nostril, the carmine fullness of lower lip, the\n swell of bosom above low-cut gown. And he no longer wanted any of it or\n of her. Cass Gordon—\n\n\n It didn't have to be anybody at all. For it to be Cass Gordon was\n revolting.\n\n\n \"Rog,\" she said and her voice trembled, \"what are we going to do? What\n do you\nwant\nto do?\"",
"\"Don't flatter yourself,\" she replied angrily. She sat up, pushed\n back her hair, got to her feet a trifle awkwardly because of the\n tight-fitting tubular gown. \"If I could do anything about it....\"\n\n\n \"But you can't,\" he told her. \"They're too clever.\"\n\n\n \"Is this crop rotation or did you send for me?\" she asked cynically.\n \"If you did, I wish you hadn't. You haven't asked about your son.\"\n\n\n \"I don't even want to think about him,\" said Tennant. \"Let's get\n on with it.\" He could sense the restless stirring of the woman\n within Dana, just as he could feel the stirring toward her within\n himself—desire that both of them loathed because it was implanted\n within them by their captors.",
"Tennant closed his eyes, willed himself to the front window. Now that\n he had mastered teleportation, it was incredible how much easier it was\n in his own world. He had covered the two miles from the gateway to the\n house in a mere seven jumps, the distance to the window in an instant.\n But there was no pleasure in it, only a confirmation of his captor's\n power over him.\n\n\n He was not free of them. He understood all too well what they wanted\n him to do; he was to play the Judas goat ... or rather the Judas ram,\n leading another victim to the fourth-dimensional pen.\n\n\n Grim, he watched the swoop of headlights in the driveway and returned\n to the coffee table, lit a fresh cigarette.",
"Some days later, the training routine was broken. He felt a sudden stir\n of near-sick excitement as he received the thought:\nNow you are ready. We are going through at last.\nOpal was nervous, so much so that he revealed more than he intended.\n Or perhaps that was his intent; Tennant could never be sure. They were\n going through to Tennant's own dimension. He wondered briefly just what\n his role was to be.\n\n\n He had little time to speculate before Opal seemed to envelop him.\n There was the blurring wrench of forced teleportation and they were in\n another room, a room which ended in a huge irregular passage that might\n have been the interior of a giant concertina—or an old-fashioned kodak.\n\n\n He stood before a kidney-shaped object over whose jagged surface\n colors played constantly. From Opal's thoughts it appeared to be some\n sort of ultradimensional television set, but to Tennant it was as\n incomprehensible as an oil painting to an animal.",
"As in all of this strange universe, excepting the dome-cages in\n which the captives were held, the training hall followed no rules of\n three-dimensional space. One wall looked normal for perhaps a third of\n its length, then it simply wasn't for a bit. It came back farther on\n at an impossible angle. Yet, walking along it, touching it, it felt\n perfectly smooth and continuously straight.\n\n\n The opposite wall resembled a diagonal cross-section of an asymmetrical\n dumbbell—that was the closest Tennant could come to it in words. And\n it, too, felt straight. The floor looked like crystal smashed by some\n cosmic impact, yet it had reason. He\nknew\nthis even though no reason\n was apparent to his three-dimensional vision. The ceiling, where he\n could see it, was beyond description.",
"The captor Tennant called\nOpal\ncame in through a far corner of\n the ceiling. He—if it was a he—was not large, although this,\n Tennant knew, meant nothing; Opal might extend thousands of yards in\n some unseen direction. He had no regular shape and much of him was\n iridescent and shot with constantly changing colors. Hence the name\n Opal.\n\n\n Communication was telepathic. Tennant could have yodeled or yelled\n or sung\nMississippi Mud\nand Opal would have shown no reaction. Yet\n Tennant suspected that the captors could hear somewhere along the\n auditory scale, just as perhaps they could smell, although not in any\n human sense.\nYou will approach without use of your appendages.\nThe command was as clear as if it had been spoken aloud. Tennant took a\n deep breath. He thought of the space beside Opal. It took about three\n seconds and he was there, having spanned a distance of some ninety\n feet. He was getting good at it.",
"\"You thought those up while we ate,\" he said. It annoyed him to be\n copied, though he did not know why. She laughed at him silently, tossed\n her auburn hair back from her face and went out of the roofless house,\n holding the gold dress casually over her bare arm.\n\n\n Eudalia took him to the nursery. He was irritated now in another,\n angrier way. The infants, protected by cellophane-like coverlets, were\n asleep.\n\n\n \"They never cry,\" the thin woman told him. \"But they grow—God, how\n they grow!\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Tennant, fighting down his anger. He kissed her, held\n her close, although neither of them felt desire at the moment. Their\n captors had seen to that; it wasn't Eudalia's turn. Tennant said, \"I\n wish I could do something about this. I hate seeing Dana so bitter and\n Olga so scared. It isn't their fault.\"",
"\"Thanks, Eudalia,\" said Tennant. \"I think I can defend myself. But\n she's right, Dana. We're as helpless as—laboratory animals. They have\n the means to make us do whatever they want.\"\n\n\n \"Rog,\" said Dana, looking suddenly scared, \"I'm sorry I snapped at you.\n I know it's not your fault. I'm—\nchanging\n.\"\n\n\n He shook his head. \"No, Dana, you're not changing. You're adapting. We\n all are. We seem to be in a universe of different properties as well as\n different dimensions. We're adjusting. I can do a thing or two myself\n that seem absolutely impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Are we really in the fourth dimension?\" Dana asked. Of the three of\n them, she alone had more than a high-school education.",
"They entered the house, which had no roof, continued to move beneath a\n sky that glowed with light which did not come from a sun or moon. It\n might have been a well-kept if bizarre little country estate, but it\n wasn't. It was a prison, a cage.\n\n\n The other two women were sitting in the heptagonal central hall.\n Eudalia, who had borne twin girls recently, was lying back, newly thin\n and dark of skin and hair, smoking a scentless cigarette. A tall woman,\n thirtyish, she wore a sort of shimmering green strapless evening gown.\n Tennant wondered how she maintained it in place, for despite her recent\n double motherhood, she was almost flat of bosom. He asked her how she\n was feeling.\n\n\n \"Okay, I guess,\" she said. \"The way they manage it, there's nothing\n to it.\" She had a flat, potentially raucous voice. Eudalia had been\n a female foreman in a garment-cutting shop before being captured and\n brought through."
],
[
"Some days later, the training routine was broken. He felt a sudden stir\n of near-sick excitement as he received the thought:\nNow you are ready. We are going through at last.\nOpal was nervous, so much so that he revealed more than he intended.\n Or perhaps that was his intent; Tennant could never be sure. They were\n going through to Tennant's own dimension. He wondered briefly just what\n his role was to be.\n\n\n He had little time to speculate before Opal seemed to envelop him.\n There was the blurring wrench of forced teleportation and they were in\n another room, a room which ended in a huge irregular passage that might\n have been the interior of a giant concertina—or an old-fashioned kodak.\n\n\n He stood before a kidney-shaped object over whose jagged surface\n colors played constantly. From Opal's thoughts it appeared to be some\n sort of ultradimensional television set, but to Tennant it was as\n incomprehensible as an oil painting to an animal.",
"He shrugged, returned to the feeling of comfort that came from being\n back here, about to see Agatha again, hold her close in no more than a\n few minutes. And stay, his mind began to add eagerly, but he pushed the\n thought down where Opal could not detect it.\n\n\n He took another deep, lung-filling drag on his cigarette, looked around\n the room that was so important a part of his life. The three women back\n there would be in a ghastly spot. He felt like a heel for wanting to\n leave them there, then knew that he would try somehow to get them out.\n Not, of course, anything that would endanger his remaining with Agatha;\n the only way his captors would get him back would be as a taxidermist's\n specimen.",
"Dog does trick, he thought.\nHe went through the entire routine at Opal's bidding. When at last\n he was allowed to relax, he wondered, not for the first time, if he\n weren't mastering some of the alleged Guru arts. At once he felt\n probing investigation. Opal, like the rest of the captors, was as\n curious as a cat—or a human being.\nTennant sat against a wall, drenched with sweat. There would be endless\n repetition before his workout was done. On Earth, dogs were said to be\n intellectually two-dimensional creatures. He wondered if they felt this\n helpless futility when their masters taught them to heel, to point, to\n retrieve.",
"Opal was annoyed that Tennant could make nothing of it. Then came the\n thought:\nWhat cover must your body have not to be conspicuous?\nTennant wondered, cynically, what would happen if he were to demand\n a costume of mediaeval motley, complete with Pied Piper's flute. He\n received quick reproof that made his head ring as from a blow.\n\n\n He asked Opal where and when they were going, was informed that\n he would soon emerge on Earth where he had left it. That told him\n everything but the date and season. Opal, like the rest of the captors,\n seemed to have no understanding of time in a human sense.",
"Tennant knew now why he was the only male human the captors had been\n able to take alive. Apparently, thanks to the rain-slick road, he had\n run the sedan into a tree at the foot of the hill beyond the river. He\n had been sitting there, unconscious, ripe fruit on their doorstep. They\n had simply picked him up.\n\n\n Otherwise, apparently, men were next to impossible for them to capture.\n All they could do was kill them and bring back their heads and hides\n as trophies. With women it was different—perhaps the captors' weapons,\n whatever they were, worked more efficiently on females. A difference in\n body chemistry or psychology, perhaps.\n\n\n More than once, during his long training with Opal, Tennant had sent\n questing thoughts toward his captor, asking why they didn't simply set\n up the gateway in some town or city and take as many humans as they\n wanted.",
"He realized, shocked and scared, that his thoughts of escape had\n slipped past his mental censor, and he waited apprehensively for Opal\n to strike. Nothing happened and he warily relaxed. Opal wasn't tapping\n his thoughts. Because he felt sure of his captive ... or because he\n couldn't on Earth?\n\n\n It was like being let out of a cage. Tennant grinned at the bookcase;\n the ebony-and-ivory elephants that Agatha had never liked were gone,\n but he'd get them back or another pair. The credenza had been replaced\n by a huge and ugly television console. That, he resolved, would go down\n in the cellar rumpus room, where its bleached modernity wouldn't clash\n with the casual antiquity of the living room.",
"The captor Tennant called\nOpal\ncame in through a far corner of\n the ceiling. He—if it was a he—was not large, although this,\n Tennant knew, meant nothing; Opal might extend thousands of yards in\n some unseen direction. He had no regular shape and much of him was\n iridescent and shot with constantly changing colors. Hence the name\n Opal.\n\n\n Communication was telepathic. Tennant could have yodeled or yelled\n or sung\nMississippi Mud\nand Opal would have shown no reaction. Yet\n Tennant suspected that the captors could hear somewhere along the\n auditory scale, just as perhaps they could smell, although not in any\n human sense.\nYou will approach without use of your appendages.\nThe command was as clear as if it had been spoken aloud. Tennant took a\n deep breath. He thought of the space beside Opal. It took about three\n seconds and he was there, having spanned a distance of some ninety\n feet. He was getting good at it.",
"Waiting, Tennant tried not to think of his wife, of the fact that he\n hadn't seen her in—was it more than a year and a half on Earth? He\n could have controlled his heartbeat with one of his new powers, but\n that might have made Opal suspicious. He should be somewhat excited.\n He allowed himself to be, though he obscured the reasons. He was going\n to see his wife again ... and maybe he could trick his way into not\n returning.\nThe maid who opened the door for him was new, although her eyes were\n old. But she recognized him and stood aside to let him enter. There\n must, he thought, still be pictures of him around. He wondered how\n Agatha could afford a servant.\n\n\n \"Is Mrs. Tennant in?\" he asked.",
"\"Roger,\" repeated Tennant viciously. He felt sick with disgust. Maybe\n he should have expected a triangle, but somehow he hadn't. And here\n it was, with all of them going through their paces like a trio of\n tent-show actors. He said, \"For God's sake, sit down.\"\n\n\n Agatha did so hesitantly. Her huge dark eyes, invariably clear\n and limpid no matter how much she had drunk, flickered toward him\n furtively. She said defensively, \"I had detectives looking for you for\n six months. Where have you been, Rog? Smashing up the car like that\n and—disappearing! I've been out of my mind.\"",
"\"And it's not yours,\" insisted Eudalia. \"Don't let them make you think\n it is.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try not to,\" he said and stopped, realizing the family party was\n over. He had felt the inner tug of command, said good-by to the women\n and returned to his smaller compound within its own barrier dome.\n\n\n Then came the invisible aura of strain in the air, the shimmering\n illusion of heat that was not heat, that was prelude to his\n teleportation ... if that were the word. It was neither pleasant nor\n unpleasant; it\nwas\n, that was all.\n\n\n He called it the training hall, not because it looked like a training\n hall but because that was its function. It didn't actually look like\n anything save some half-nourished dream a surrealist might have\n discarded as too nightmarish for belief.",
"Agatha would complain, naturally, but his being back would make up for\n any amount of furniture shifting. He imagined her standing close to\n him, her lovely face lifted to be kissed, and his heart lurched like an\n adolescent's. This hunger was real, not implanted. Everything would be\n real ... his love for her, the food he ate, the things he touched, his\n house, his life....\nYour wife and a man are approaching the house.\nThe thought message from Opal crumbled his illusion of freedom. He sank\n down in a chair, trying to refuse to listen to the rest of the command:\nYou are to bring the man through the gateway with you. We want another\n live male.\nTennant shook his head, stiff and defiant in his chair. The punishment,\n when it came, was more humiliating than a slap across a dog's snout.\n Opal had been too interested in the next lab specimen to bother about\n his thoughts—that was why he had been free to think of escape.",
"\"Don't flatter yourself,\" she replied angrily. She sat up, pushed\n back her hair, got to her feet a trifle awkwardly because of the\n tight-fitting tubular gown. \"If I could do anything about it....\"\n\n\n \"But you can't,\" he told her. \"They're too clever.\"\n\n\n \"Is this crop rotation or did you send for me?\" she asked cynically.\n \"If you did, I wish you hadn't. You haven't asked about your son.\"\n\n\n \"I don't even want to think about him,\" said Tennant. \"Let's get\n on with it.\" He could sense the restless stirring of the woman\n within Dana, just as he could feel the stirring toward her within\n himself—desire that both of them loathed because it was implanted\n within them by their captors.",
"had a lease that could be broken—\nRoger Tennant, crossing the lawn, could see two of the three wings\n of the house, which radiated spoke-like from its heptagonal central\n portion. The wing on the left was white, with slim square pillars,\n reminiscent of scores of movie sets of the Deep South. That on the\n right was sundeck solar-house living-machine modern, something like a\n montage of shoeboxes. The wing hidden by the rest of the house was, he\n knew, spired, gabled and multicolored, like an ancient building in\n pre-Hitler Cracow.\nDana was lying under a tree near the door, stretched out on a sort\n of deck chair with her eyes closed. She wore a golden gown, long and\n close-fitting and slit up the leg like the gown of a Chinese woman.\n Above it her comely face was sullen beneath its sleek cocoon of auburn\n hair.",
"\"Decent of you,\" said Tennant. He got up, crossed to the cabinet that\n served as a bar. It was fully equipped—with more expensive liquor, he\n noticed, than he had ever been able to afford. He poured a drink of\n brandy, waited for the others to fill their glasses.\nAgatha looked at him over the rim of hers. \"Tell us, Rog. We have a\n right to know. I do, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"One question first,\" he said. \"What about those killings? Have there\n been any lately?\"\n\n\n \"Not for over a year,\" Cass told him. \"They never did get the devil who\n skinned those bodies and removed the heads.\"\n\n\n So, Tennant thought, they hadn't used the gateway. Not since they had\n brought the four of them through, not since they had begun to train him\n for his Judas ram duties.\n\n\n Agatha was asking him if he had been abroad.",
"They entered the house, which had no roof, continued to move beneath a\n sky that glowed with light which did not come from a sun or moon. It\n might have been a well-kept if bizarre little country estate, but it\n wasn't. It was a prison, a cage.\n\n\n The other two women were sitting in the heptagonal central hall.\n Eudalia, who had borne twin girls recently, was lying back, newly thin\n and dark of skin and hair, smoking a scentless cigarette. A tall woman,\n thirtyish, she wore a sort of shimmering green strapless evening gown.\n Tennant wondered how she maintained it in place, for despite her recent\n double motherhood, she was almost flat of bosom. He asked her how she\n was feeling.\n\n\n \"Okay, I guess,\" she said. \"The way they manage it, there's nothing\n to it.\" She had a flat, potentially raucous voice. Eudalia had been\n a female foreman in a garment-cutting shop before being captured and\n brought through.",
"\"Were you ever in a big-game hunter's trophy room?\" Tennant asked\n quietly. \"Or in a Museum of Natural History? A zoo? A naturalist's lab?\n Or even, maybe, photographed as a baby on a bear-skin rug?\"\n\n\n \"I was,\" said Olga. \"But that's not the same thing.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" he agreed. \"In the one instance,\nwe're\nthe hunters,\n the breeders, the trophy collectors. In the other\"—he shrugged—\"we're\n the trophies.\"\nThere was a long silence. They finished eating and then Dana stood up\n and said, \"I'm going out on the lawn for a while.\" She unzipped her\n golden gown, stepped out of it to reveal a pair of tartan shorts that\n matched his, and a narrow halter.",
"\"You thought those up while we ate,\" he said. It annoyed him to be\n copied, though he did not know why. She laughed at him silently, tossed\n her auburn hair back from her face and went out of the roofless house,\n holding the gold dress casually over her bare arm.\n\n\n Eudalia took him to the nursery. He was irritated now in another,\n angrier way. The infants, protected by cellophane-like coverlets, were\n asleep.\n\n\n \"They never cry,\" the thin woman told him. \"But they grow—God, how\n they grow!\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Tennant, fighting down his anger. He kissed her, held\n her close, although neither of them felt desire at the moment. Their\n captors had seen to that; it wasn't Eudalia's turn. Tennant said, \"I\n wish I could do something about this. I hate seeing Dana so bitter and\n Olga so scared. It isn't their fault.\"",
"Tennant's meat looked like steak, it felt like steak, but, lacking the\n aroma of steak, it was almost tasteless. This was so with all of their\n foods, with their cigarettes, with everything in their prison—or their\n cage. Their captors were utterly without a human conception of smell,\n living, apparently, in a world without odor at all.\n\n\n Dana said suddenly, \"I named the boy Tom, after somebody I hate almost\n as much as I hate you.\"\n\n\n Eudalia laid down her fork with a clatter and regarded Dana\n disapprovingly. \"Why take it out on Rog?\" she asked bluntly. \"He didn't\n ask to come here any more than we did. He's got a wife back home. Maybe\n you want him to fall in love with you? Maybe you're jealous because\n he doesn't? Well, maybe he can't! And maybe it wouldn't work, the way\n things are arranged here.\"",
"As in all of this strange universe, excepting the dome-cages in\n which the captives were held, the training hall followed no rules of\n three-dimensional space. One wall looked normal for perhaps a third of\n its length, then it simply wasn't for a bit. It came back farther on\n at an impossible angle. Yet, walking along it, touching it, it felt\n perfectly smooth and continuously straight.\n\n\n The opposite wall resembled a diagonal cross-section of an asymmetrical\n dumbbell—that was the closest Tennant could come to it in words. And\n it, too, felt straight. The floor looked like crystal smashed by some\n cosmic impact, yet it had reason. He\nknew\nthis even though no reason\n was apparent to his three-dimensional vision. The ceiling, where he\n could see it, was beyond description.",
"\"I'm no stuffed-shirt and you know it.\" Cass' tone was peevish. \"But\n your idea of fun, Agatha, is pretty damn....\"\n\n\n It was his turn to freeze. Unbelieving, Tennant studied his successor.\n Cass Gordon—the\nman\n, the ex-halfback whose bulk was beginning to get\n out of hand, but whose inherent aggressive grace had not yet deserted\n him. The\nman\n, that was all—unless one threw in the little black\n mustache and the smooth salesman's manner.\n\n\n \"You know, Cass,\" Tennant said quietly, \"I never for a moment dreamed\n it would be you.\"\n\n\n \"\nRoger!\n\" Agatha found her voice. \"You're\nalive\n!\""
],
[
"He shrugged, returned to the feeling of comfort that came from being\n back here, about to see Agatha again, hold her close in no more than a\n few minutes. And stay, his mind began to add eagerly, but he pushed the\n thought down where Opal could not detect it.\n\n\n He took another deep, lung-filling drag on his cigarette, looked around\n the room that was so important a part of his life. The three women back\n there would be in a ghastly spot. He felt like a heel for wanting to\n leave them there, then knew that he would try somehow to get them out.\n Not, of course, anything that would endanger his remaining with Agatha;\n the only way his captors would get him back would be as a taxidermist's\n specimen.",
"\"You thought those up while we ate,\" he said. It annoyed him to be\n copied, though he did not know why. She laughed at him silently, tossed\n her auburn hair back from her face and went out of the roofless house,\n holding the gold dress casually over her bare arm.\n\n\n Eudalia took him to the nursery. He was irritated now in another,\n angrier way. The infants, protected by cellophane-like coverlets, were\n asleep.\n\n\n \"They never cry,\" the thin woman told him. \"But they grow—God, how\n they grow!\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Tennant, fighting down his anger. He kissed her, held\n her close, although neither of them felt desire at the moment. Their\n captors had seen to that; it wasn't Eudalia's turn. Tennant said, \"I\n wish I could do something about this. I hate seeing Dana so bitter and\n Olga so scared. It isn't their fault.\"",
"He lit a cigarette, inhaled. \"Relax. I'm not planning revenge. After\n this evening, I plan to vanish for good. Of course, Agatha, that\n offers you a minor nuisance. You will have to wait six years to marry\n Cass—seven years if the maid who let me in tonight talks. That's the\n law, isn't it, Cass? You probably had it all figured out.\"\n\n\n \"You bastard,\" said Cass. \"You dirty bastard! You know what a wait like\n that could do to us.\"",
"\"Tristan and Isolde,\" said Tennant, grinning almost happily. \"Well,\n I've had my little say. Now I'm off again. Cass, would you give me a\n lift? I have a conveyance of sorts a couple of miles down the road.\"\nHe needed no telepathic powers to read the thoughts around him then. He\n heard Agatha's quick intake of breath, saw the split-second look she\n exchanged with Cass. He turned away, knowing that she was imploring her\n lover to do something,\nanything\n, as long as it was safe.\n\n\n Deliberately, Tennant poured himself a second drink. This might be\n easier and pleasanter than he had expected. They deserved some of the\n suffering he had had and there was a chance that they might get it.",
"\"Lay off—he can't help it,\" said Eudalia unexpectedly. \"He doesn't\n like it any better than we do.\"\n\n\n \"But he doesn't have to—have them,\" objected Olga. She had a trace of\n Polish accent that was not unpleasant. In fact, Tennant thought, only\n her laughter was unpleasant, a shrill, uncontrolled burst of staccato\n sound that jarred him to his heels. Olga had not laughed of late,\n however. She was too frightened.\n\"Let's get the meal ordered,\" said Dana and they were all silent,\n thinking of what they wanted to eat but would not enjoy when it came.\n Tennant finished with his order, then got busy with his surprise.",
"She opened her eyes at his approach and regarded him with nothing like\n favor. Involuntarily he glanced down at the tartan shorts that were his\n only garment to make sure that they were on properly. They were. He had\n thought them up in a moment of utter boredom and they were extremely\n comfortable. However, the near-Buchanan tartan did not crease or even\n wrinkle when he moved. Their captors had no idea of how a woven design\n should behave.\n\n\n \"Waiting for me?\" Tennant asked the girl.\n\n\n She said, \"I'd rather be dead. Maybe I am. Maybe we're all dead and\n this is Hell.\"\n\n\n He stood over her and looked down until she turned away her reddening\n face. He said, \"So it's going to be you again, Dana. You'll be the\n first to come back for a second run.\"",
"\"Don't flatter yourself,\" she replied angrily. She sat up, pushed\n back her hair, got to her feet a trifle awkwardly because of the\n tight-fitting tubular gown. \"If I could do anything about it....\"\n\n\n \"But you can't,\" he told her. \"They're too clever.\"\n\n\n \"Is this crop rotation or did you send for me?\" she asked cynically.\n \"If you did, I wish you hadn't. You haven't asked about your son.\"\n\n\n \"I don't even want to think about him,\" said Tennant. \"Let's get\n on with it.\" He could sense the restless stirring of the woman\n within Dana, just as he could feel the stirring toward her within\n himself—desire that both of them loathed because it was implanted\n within them by their captors.",
"The front door was flung open and his diaphragm tightened at the\n remembered sound of Agatha's throaty laugh ... and tightened further\n when it was followed by a deeper rumbling laugh. Sudden fear made the\n cigarette shake in his fingers.\n\n\n \"... Don't be such a stuffed-shirt, darling.\" Agatha's mocking\n sweetness rang alarm-gongs in Tennant's memory. \"Charley wasn't making\n a grab for\nme\n. He'd had one too many and only wanted a little fun.\n Really, darling, you seem to think that a girl....\"\n\n\n Her voice faded out as she saw Tennant standing there. She was wearing\n a white strapless gown, had a blue-red-and-gold Mandarin jacket slung\n hussar-fashion over her left shoulder. She looked even sleeker, better\n groomed, more assured than his memory of her.",
"Take her back? He smiled ironically; she wouldn't know what that meant.\n It would serve her right, but maybe there was another way.\n\n\n \"I don't know about you,\" he said, \"but I suspect we're in the same\n boat. I also have other interests.\"\n\n\n \"You louse!\" said Cass Gordon, arching rib cage and nostrils. \"If you\n try to make trouble for Agatha, I can promise....\"\n\n\n \"\nWhat\ncan you promise?\" demanded Tennant. When Gordon's onset\n subsided in mumbles, he added, \"Actually, I don't think I'm capable of\n making more than a fraction of the trouble for either of you that you\n both are qualified to make for yourselves.\"",
"They entered the house, which had no roof, continued to move beneath a\n sky that glowed with light which did not come from a sun or moon. It\n might have been a well-kept if bizarre little country estate, but it\n wasn't. It was a prison, a cage.\n\n\n The other two women were sitting in the heptagonal central hall.\n Eudalia, who had borne twin girls recently, was lying back, newly thin\n and dark of skin and hair, smoking a scentless cigarette. A tall woman,\n thirtyish, she wore a sort of shimmering green strapless evening gown.\n Tennant wondered how she maintained it in place, for despite her recent\n double motherhood, she was almost flat of bosom. He asked her how she\n was feeling.\n\n\n \"Okay, I guess,\" she said. \"The way they manage it, there's nothing\n to it.\" She had a flat, potentially raucous voice. Eudalia had been\n a female foreman in a garment-cutting shop before being captured and\n brought through.",
"\"Roger,\" repeated Tennant viciously. He felt sick with disgust. Maybe\n he should have expected a triangle, but somehow he hadn't. And here\n it was, with all of them going through their paces like a trio of\n tent-show actors. He said, \"For God's sake, sit down.\"\n\n\n Agatha did so hesitantly. Her huge dark eyes, invariably clear\n and limpid no matter how much she had drunk, flickered toward him\n furtively. She said defensively, \"I had detectives looking for you for\n six months. Where have you been, Rog? Smashing up the car like that\n and—disappearing! I've been out of my mind.\"",
"Tennant closed his eyes, willed himself to the front window. Now that\n he had mastered teleportation, it was incredible how much easier it was\n in his own world. He had covered the two miles from the gateway to the\n house in a mere seven jumps, the distance to the window in an instant.\n But there was no pleasure in it, only a confirmation of his captor's\n power over him.\n\n\n He was not free of them. He understood all too well what they wanted\n him to do; he was to play the Judas goat ... or rather the Judas ram,\n leading another victim to the fourth-dimensional pen.\n\n\n Grim, he watched the swoop of headlights in the driveway and returned\n to the coffee table, lit a fresh cigarette.",
"\"In a way,\" he replied unemotionally. \"Sorry if I've worried you,\n Agatha, but my life has been rather—indefinite, since I—left.\"\n\n\n He was standing no more than four inches from this woman he had desired\n desperately for six years, and he no longer wanted her. He was acutely\n conscious of her perfume. It wrapped them both like an exotic blanket,\n and it repelled him. He studied the firm clear flesh of her cheek and\n chin, the arch of nostril, the carmine fullness of lower lip, the\n swell of bosom above low-cut gown. And he no longer wanted any of it or\n of her. Cass Gordon—\n\n\n It didn't have to be anybody at all. For it to be Cass Gordon was\n revolting.\n\n\n \"Rog,\" she said and her voice trembled, \"what are we going to do? What\n do you\nwant\nto do?\"",
"\"Were you ever in a big-game hunter's trophy room?\" Tennant asked\n quietly. \"Or in a Museum of Natural History? A zoo? A naturalist's lab?\n Or even, maybe, photographed as a baby on a bear-skin rug?\"\n\n\n \"I was,\" said Olga. \"But that's not the same thing.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" he agreed. \"In the one instance,\nwe're\nthe hunters,\n the breeders, the trophy collectors. In the other\"—he shrugged—\"we're\n the trophies.\"\nThere was a long silence. They finished eating and then Dana stood up\n and said, \"I'm going out on the lawn for a while.\" She unzipped her\n golden gown, stepped out of it to reveal a pair of tartan shorts that\n matched his, and a narrow halter.",
"\"Good,\" he said. \"Glad to hear it.\" He felt oddly embarrassed. He\n turned to Olga, broad, blonde and curiously vital, who sat perfectly\n still, regarding him over the pregnant swell of her dirndl-clad waist.\n Olga had been a waitress in a mining town hash-house near Scranton.\n\n\n Tennant wanted to put an encouraging hand on her shoulder, to say\n something that might cheer her up, for she was by far the youngest of\n the three female captives, barely nineteen. But with the eyes of the\n other two, especially Dana, upon him, he could not.\n\n\n \"I guess I wasn't cut out to be a Turk,\" he said. \"I don't feel at ease\n in a harem, even when it's supposedly my own.\"\n\n\n \"You're not doing so badly,\" Dana replied acidly.",
"He realized, shocked and scared, that his thoughts of escape had\n slipped past his mental censor, and he waited apprehensively for Opal\n to strike. Nothing happened and he warily relaxed. Opal wasn't tapping\n his thoughts. Because he felt sure of his captive ... or because he\n couldn't on Earth?\n\n\n It was like being let out of a cage. Tennant grinned at the bookcase;\n the ebony-and-ivory elephants that Agatha had never liked were gone,\n but he'd get them back or another pair. The credenza had been replaced\n by a huge and ugly television console. That, he resolved, would go down\n in the cellar rumpus room, where its bleached modernity wouldn't clash\n with the casual antiquity of the living room.",
"Agatha would complain, naturally, but his being back would make up for\n any amount of furniture shifting. He imagined her standing close to\n him, her lovely face lifted to be kissed, and his heart lurched like an\n adolescent's. This hunger was real, not implanted. Everything would be\n real ... his love for her, the food he ate, the things he touched, his\n house, his life....\nYour wife and a man are approaching the house.\nThe thought message from Opal crumbled his illusion of freedom. He sank\n down in a chair, trying to refuse to listen to the rest of the command:\nYou are to bring the man through the gateway with you. We want another\n live male.\nTennant shook his head, stiff and defiant in his chair. The punishment,\n when it came, was more humiliating than a slap across a dog's snout.\n Opal had been too interested in the next lab specimen to bother about\n his thoughts—that was why he had been free to think of escape.",
"\"We may be in the eleventh for all I know,\" he told her. \"But I'll\n settle for the fourth—a fourth dimension in space, if that makes\n scientific sense, because we don't seem to have moved in time. I wasn't\n sure of that, though, till we got the radio.\"\n\n\n \"Why haven't they brought more of us through?\" Eudalia asked, tamping\n out ashes in a tray that might have been silver.\n\n\n \"I'm not sure,\" he said thoughtfully. \"I think it's hard for them. They\n have a hell of a time bringing anyone through alive, and lately they\n haven't brought anyone through—not alive.\"\n\n\n \"Why do they do it—the other way, I mean?\" asked Dana.\n\n\n Tennant shrugged. \"I don't know. I've been thinking about it. I suppose\n it's because they're pretty human.\"",
"She shook her head and fright made twin stoplights of the rouge on her\n cheeks as she shut the door behind him. He went into the living room,\n directly to the long silver cigarette box on the coffee table. It was\n proof of homecoming to fill his lungs with smoke he could\nsmell\n. He\n took another drag, saw the maid still in the doorway, staring.\n\n\n \"There's no need for fright,\" he told her. \"I believe I still own this\n house.\" Then, \"When do you expect Mrs. Tennant?\"\n\n\n \"She just called. She's on her way home from the club.\"\n\n\n Still looking frightened, she departed for the rear of the house.\n Tennant stared after her puzzledly until the kitchen door swung shut\n behind her. The club? What club?",
"\"Decent of you,\" said Tennant. He got up, crossed to the cabinet that\n served as a bar. It was fully equipped—with more expensive liquor, he\n noticed, than he had ever been able to afford. He poured a drink of\n brandy, waited for the others to fill their glasses.\nAgatha looked at him over the rim of hers. \"Tell us, Rog. We have a\n right to know. I do, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"One question first,\" he said. \"What about those killings? Have there\n been any lately?\"\n\n\n \"Not for over a year,\" Cass told him. \"They never did get the devil who\n skinned those bodies and removed the heads.\"\n\n\n So, Tennant thought, they hadn't used the gateway. Not since they had\n brought the four of them through, not since they had begun to train him\n for his Judas ram duties.\n\n\n Agatha was asking him if he had been abroad."
]
] |
train
|
51344
|
[
"What kind of relationship does the third mate have with his wife?",
"What is the relationship between the priest and the captain, in terms of their jobs?",
"What would have happened had the captain not married Wanda?",
"Why does everyone seem interested in Jane?",
"What is the first mate trying to express when he says \"You all want me ta die uv old age\"?",
"What does Harry think about his wife's request to talk to the priest?",
"How does Nestir feel about someone having killed her own child?"
] |
[
[
"He is extremely obsessed with her and has no intent of letting her change husbands",
"He is torn between his relationship with her and his relationship with Wanda, but wants to be loyal",
"He doesn't feel strongly and is mostly using her as a pawn to trade for the wife he really wants",
"He wants what is best for her, and is dedicated to supporting her in everything she asks for"
],
[
"The priest is held in higher esteem and has the nicest living arrangements",
"The captain is in charge of the ship, but he allows the priest to make cultural decisions",
"The priest is very bitter at the captain's control and is always very cautious around him",
"They don't respect each other, but thankfully do not need to interact much as they oversee separate operations"
],
[
"Jane would have been upset with Harry for ruining her plan",
"The priest would have been happy that Wanda remained unmarried",
"The priest would not have been able to eventually end up with Jane",
"Wanda would have had to marry Harry instead"
],
[
"The crew is always interested in what Harry has, and he is married to her",
"There is not enough information to say for certain",
"She is known as the most attractive woman on the ship",
"She is the best at doing her duty, so she is sought after as a wife"
],
[
"He's grumbling because he hates his job and knows he doesn't want to do it forever",
"Only the most important members of the society die of old age and he does not want that responsibility",
"If he dies of old age, that means he will not be rewarded when he passes ",
"If he dies of old age, that means he'll be around without a lot of his friends, and he doesn't want that"
],
[
"Harry thinks it's a great idea for his wife to become the priest's wife, because then he'll have an in with the officials",
"Harry is very upset because he doesn't want to trade his wife for anyone, no matter what",
"Harry runs with it so that he can get what he wants in the Changing of the Wives",
"Harry is indifferent, but doesn't think the priest would want to marry her anyway"
],
[
"He is disappointed by how it occured, but unbothered by the act in general",
"He is more worried about the intent behind the act than the act itself",
"As a religious leader, he is baffled that anyone would want to do that",
"He is personally indifferent, but legally has to reprimand the woman for such an act"
]
] |
[
3,
1,
3,
2,
3,
3,
2
] |
[
0,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
0
] |
[
[
"\"Oh, not at all,\" the third mate's wife said. \"I did it to make him\n stop crying.\"\n\n\n \"Well, in that case, I see no reason why he shouldn't get his Reward.\"\n\n\n \"I certainly hope so,\" the third mate said. \"Jane worries about it all\n the time.\"\n\n\n \"I do not,\" Jane contradicted.\n\n\n \"Now, honey, you know you do so.\"\n\n\n At that moment, he lost interest in his wife and leaned across the\n table toward the captain, \"Well?\" he asked.\n\n\n The captain rolled the wine over his tongue. \"You were right, of\n course.\"\n\n\n The third mate turned triumphantly to the first mate. \"There, I told\n you so.\"",
"\"Say. Harry. Do you suppose your wife would...?\"\nHarry crossed to the second mate and put a hand on his shoulder.\n \"Sorry, old fellow. She's got it in her head to take Nestir.\" He\n shrugged. \"I don't exactly approve, of course, but ... I'm sure if he\n doesn't want her, she'd be glad to hear your offer.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, that's all right,\" John said. \"Don't really matter. Say. By the\n way. Have I told you what I intend to do to the captain? I've got it\n all thought out. You know that saber I picked up on Queglat? Well....\"\n\n\n \"Look. How about telling me another time?\"\n\n\n \"Uh, Sure. If you say so. Uh?\"\n\n\n \"I'm kind of expecting Wanda.\"",
"When the third mate saw that his opinion on the wine was not\n immediately to be justified, he settled back in his chair with a little\n sigh of disapproval.\n\n\n \"Well, what do you\nthink\nyour decision will be, Father?\" the steward\n asked.\n\n\n Nestir picked up his knife and fork and cut off a piece of meat.\n \"Hummmm,\" he said. \"It's hard to say. The whole issue involves, as a\n core point, the principle of\ncasta cum mae stotiti\n.\"\n\n\n The first mate nodded sagely.\n\n\n \"The intent, of course, could actually be—ah—\nsub mailloux\n; and in\n that event, naturally, the decision would be even more difficult. I\n wish I could talk to higher authority about it; but of course I haven't\n the time. I'll have to decide something.\"\n\"He had a very pretty wife,\" the third mate said.",
"\"She's too young for you, dear,\" Jane said to her husband.\n\n\n \"Oh, I don't know,\" the steward said. \"Sometimes they're the best, I\n hear.\"\nIII\n\n\n The third mate, whose name was Harry, stood before the mirror combing\n his hair. He had been combing his hair for the last fifteen minutes.\n\n\n \"I suppose the crew is celebrating?\" his wife said.\n\n\n \"I suppose.\"\n\n\n She stood up and walked over to the dresser. Absently she began to\n finger the articles on it.\n\n\n \"You really shouldn't have told them about little Glenn tonight.\"\n\n\n \"Pish-tush.\"\n\n\n \"No, Harry. I mean it. Helen looked at me strangely all through dinner.\n She has three children, you know.\"\n\n\n \"You're imagining things.\"",
"\"You don't need to worry about\nyour\nCasting Off, Captain. You can\n leave that to me. I assure you, I have in mind a most ingenious\n method.\"\nThe captain was not visibly cheered; he was still brooding about the\n sad absence of a sense of duty on the part of Nestir. \"I will welcome\n it,\" he said, \"at the proper time, sir. And I certainly hope—\" His\n eyes swept the table. \"I\ncertainly\nhope to be Cast Off by an officer.\n It would be very humiliating, y'know, to have a crew member do it.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, very,\" said the steward.\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" the second mate's wife said, \"whether you better count\n on my husband or not. I have my own plans for him.\"\n\n\n \"This problem of Carstar interests me,\" the third mate said. \"Did I\n ever tell you about my wife? She strangled our second baby.\"",
"\"After all, one must have done some duty,\" the captain said.\n\n\n \"He wants you to sign it so he can take her in the Changing of the\n Wives,\" Jane said.\n\n\n Nestir fidgeted uncomfortably. \"Well, I'll look at her record,\" he\n said.\n\n\n \"It's an idea,\" the second mate said. \"Otherwise, we'll be short one\n woman.\"\n\n\n \"There wouldn't be one short if\nhe\nhad brought a wife,\" the first\n mate's wife said, looking squarely at the captain.\n\n\n \"Now, Martha. I place duty above pleasure. You're just angry, y'know,\n because you have to stay with your husband.\"",
"\"Oh? Good morning, Captain. I didn't know you were here.\" Then, to the\n priest: \"I'll come back later, Father.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense,\" said the captain. \"Come in.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I had hoped to see the Father for a minute on ... private\n business.\"\n\n\n \"I have to be toddling along,\" said the captain.\n\n\n \"But Captain! I haven't finished telling you about....\"\n\n\n \"I'll just go down and get a cup of coffee,\" the captain said.\n\n\n \"I'll call you when I'm through,\" said Harry.\n\n\n The captain left the room.\n\n\n \"It's about Wanda, Father,\" said the third mate.\n\n\n The priest studied the table top. He rearranged some papers. \"Ah, yes.\n The young girl.\"",
"\"Oh?\"\n\n\n The second mate took out a cigarette and lit it. \"Can't blow the ship\n up, you know. Look like hell on the record. Hope the captain don't find\n out about it, though. He'll figure the man was neglecting his duty.\"\n\n\n He blew a smoke ring.\n\n\n \"Might even bar him from the Festival.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Harry, \"the captain's funny that way.\"\n\n\n The second mate blew another smoke ring.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Harry said.\n\n\n \"Uh. Harry? Are you really going to take that Wanda girl?\"\n\n\n \"If Nestir lets me.\"",
"\"Yes,\" said the second mate's wife. \"I remember that. I read about it\n in the newspapers.\"\n\n\n \"But it was a case of obvious\nintent\n,\" continued Nestir, \"and\n therefore constituted a clear out attempt to avoid his duty by\n hastening to his Reward.\"\n\n\n Upon hearing the word duty, the captain brightened.\n\n\n \"That,\" he said to Nestir, \"my dear Father, is the cardinal point of\n the whole game, y'know.\" He scratched the back of his left hand. \"Duty.\n And I must say, I think you're being quite short-sighted about the\n Casting Off date. After all, it's not only a question of\nhow\nwe go,\n but also a question of leaving only after having done our duty. And\n that's equally important.\"\n\n\n \"The Synod of Cathau—\" Nestir began.",
"The first mate shrugged. \"I never do say nothin' right,\" he said. \"I\n hain't got no luck. I've spent more years un all ya, carpenterin' up a\n duty log that's better un even th' captain's. An' hit's Martha an' me\n that gotta wait an' help th' next crew. Lord above knows how long time\n hit'll be afore we uns'll got ta have a Festival.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, really, now. Now. Duty, duty,\" the captain reprimanded him mildly.\n\n\n \"Duty! Duty! Duty! You all ur in a conspiracy. You all want me ta die\n uv old age.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense,\" said the steward. \"We don't want anything of the sort.\n After all, someone has to orient the new crew.\"",
"\"Husband,\" Wanda said simply. She closed the door behind her and stood\n staring at him.\n\n\n \"Madam,\" he said, \"I hope you will have the kindness not to refer to me\n by that indecent appelation a second time.\"\n\n\n \"Gee. You say the cutest things. I'm awful glad you had to marry me,\n huh.\"\n\n\n The captain stood up, adjusted his coat and his shoulders, and walked\n across the room to the dressing table. He opened the left-hand drawer,\n removed a bottle, poured himself half a water-glass full and drank it\n off.\n\n\n \"Ah,\" he said.\n\n\n He returned to the bed and sat down.\n\n\n \"Can'tcha even say hello ta little ol' me, huh?\" she asked.",
"\"Yes, very.\" Nestir agreed. \"But as I was saying, if it could be\n proven that the culstem fell due to no negligence on his part, either\n consciously or subconsciously, then the obvious conclusion would be\n that no stigma would be attached.\" He speared his meat and chewed it\n thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"But it wasn't at all bloody,\" the wife of the second mate said. \"I\n scarcely think he felt it at all. It happened too fast.\"\n\n\n Nestir swallowed the mouthful of food and washed it down with a gulp of\n wine.\n\n\n \"The problem, my dear Helen,\" he said, \"is one of intent. To raise\n the issue of concomitant agonies is to confuse the whole matter. For\n instance. Take Wilson, in my home state of Koltah. Certainly\nhe\ndied\n as miserable a death as anyone could desire.\"",
"\"All right, so I am. But it's true. And if Carstar hadn't been killed,\n there would have been two short.\" She shot a wicked glance at Nestir.\n \"Why don't you and him share a woman—\"\n\n\n \"Martha!\"\n\n\n \"Although the Prophet knows what woman in her right mind would consent\n to....\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" said Nestir hesitantly.\n\n\n \"Listen,\" the third mate said, \"the second's right. If you don't sign\n it, someone will have to do without a woman.\"\n\n\n Nestir blushed. \"I'll look it over very carefully, but you must realize\n that the priestcraft....\"\n\n\n \"Actually, in a way, it would be her duty to, you see. Think of it like\n that: as her way to do her duty.\"",
"\"You'll spoil the flavor, shaking it that way,\" the third mate\n cautioned. He was particularly fond of that year.\n\n\n The captain twisted the bottle savagely, and the cork came free with a\n little pop. He removed the cork from between his teeth, placed it very\n carefully beside his fork, and poured himself a full glass of the wine.\n\n\n \"Very probably,\" he said sadly.\n\n\n \"I don't think hit'll do hit,\" the first mate said. \"He hain't shook\n hard enough to matter.\"\n\n\n The captain picked up the glass, brought it toward his lips—then,\n suddenly having thought of something, he put it back down and turned to\n Nestir.\n\n\n \"I say. Have you decided on this Carstar thing yet, Father?\"\n\n\n The little priest looked up. He laid his knife across the rim of his\n plate. \"It has ramifications,\" he said.",
"\"Well, the point I want to make is this: I just wanted to tell you\n that I know what a Festival should be, and the captain and I will do\n everything in our power to make our Casting Off as wonderful as any\n anywhere.\n\n\n \"And I want to tell you that if you'll come to me with your\n suggestions, I'll do all I can to see that we do this thing just the\n way you want it done. I want you to be proud of this Casting Off\n Festival, so you can look back on it and say, uh, uh—this day was the\n real high point of your whole life!\"\n\n\n Everyone but Joanne Marie's husband cheered. He sat glumly muttering to\n himself.\n\n\n Nestir bobbed his shiny head at them and beamed his cherubic smile. And\n noticed that there was a little blonde, one of the crewmen's wives, in\n the front row that had very cute ankles.",
"\"Plague take it, Father! Really, now, I must say. The Synod of Cathau!\n Certainly you've misinterpreted that. Anticipation can be a joy,\n y'know: almost equal to the very Reward. Anticipation should spur man\n in duty. It's all noble and self sacrificing.\" He scratched the back of\n his right hand.\n\n\n The second mate had been trying to get a word in edgewise for several\n minutes; he finally succeeded by utilizing the temporary silence\n following the captain's outburst.",
"\"\nAd dulce verboten.\n\"\n\n\n \"Uh?\"\n\n\n \"That is to say, in order for a woman to join in the ritual of the\n Changing of the Wives, she must, ahem, be married.\"\n\n\n \"I never thought of that,\" said the third mate disconsolately.\n\n\n \"I think that can be arranged, however,\" said Nestir. \"If you go by the\n mess hall on your way out, please tell the captain we can continue our\n discussion at his pleasure.\"\nIV\n\n\n \"Sit down, Captain,\" said Nestir, when the captain entered. \"No. Over\n there, in the comfortable chair. There. Are you comfortable, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Of course I am.\"\n\n\n \"Good. I have a question to ask you, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"I say?\"",
"\"He was a very annoying child,\" his wife said.\n\n\n \"He probably wouldn't have lived, anyway,\" the third mate said. \"Puny\n baby.\"\n\n\n \"That,\" said Nestir, \"is not at all like the Carstar case. Not at all.\n Yours is a question of\nsaliex y cuminzund\n.\"\n\n\n The first mate nodded.\n\n\n \"It seems to me that the whole thing would depend on the intent of the\n strangler.\"\n\n\n \"Captain,\" the steward said, \"you really must let me give you some of\n that salve.\"\n\n\n \"That's very kind of you, but I....\"\n\n\n \"No bother at all,\" the steward said.\n\n\n \"As I see it,\" Nestir said, \"if the intent was the natural maternal\n instinct of the mother to release her child from its duty, then....\"",
"\"But she\ndoes\nhave three children.\"\n\n\n \"I mean about her looking at you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh.\"\n\n\n Harry fiddled with his tie without speaking.\n\n\n \"I mean, as much as to say: 'Well, I raised all of mine.'\"\n\n\n \"But honey, about little Glenn. That was an accident, almost. You\n didn't really mean to choke him that hard.\"\n\n\n \"But still ... it ... I mean, there was Helen, looking at me like I\n wasn't doing my duty. You know.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said. \"That's nonsense, Jane. Sheer nonsense. You know what\n the priest said.\"\n\n\n He polished one of his brass buttons with the sleeve of his coat.\n\n\n \"Harry?\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"",
"\"I don't know, yet. He's thinking about it. That's why I want to see\n you. He's going to check your record. And Wanda?\"\n\n\n \"Them stars shore are purty.\"\n\n\n \"Wanda, listen to me.\"\n\n\n \"I'm a-listenin', Haireee.\"\n\n\n \"You're simply going to have to stop carrying that doll around with you\n if you want to be an adult.\"\nIn Nestir's cabin the next morning, the captain and the priest held a\n conference.\n\n\n \"No, Captain. I'm afraid I can't agree to that,\" Nestir said.\n\n\n The captain said, \"Oh, don't be unreasonable, Father. After all, this\n is a ship, y'know. And I am, after all, the captain.\""
],
[
"\"Oh? Good morning, Captain. I didn't know you were here.\" Then, to the\n priest: \"I'll come back later, Father.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense,\" said the captain. \"Come in.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I had hoped to see the Father for a minute on ... private\n business.\"\n\n\n \"I have to be toddling along,\" said the captain.\n\n\n \"But Captain! I haven't finished telling you about....\"\n\n\n \"I'll just go down and get a cup of coffee,\" the captain said.\n\n\n \"I'll call you when I'm through,\" said Harry.\n\n\n The captain left the room.\n\n\n \"It's about Wanda, Father,\" said the third mate.\n\n\n The priest studied the table top. He rearranged some papers. \"Ah, yes.\n The young girl.\"",
"\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Now, as I was saying, Captain, when the methods used in....\"\n\n\n \"If you'll excuse me, Father, I really should return to duty,\" said the\n crewman.\n\n\n \"Quite all right, my son. Close the door after you.\"\n\n\n \"I must say, fellow, your sense of duty is commendable.\"\n\n\n \"Well, uh, thank you, sir. And thank you, Father, for your time.\"\n\n\n \"Quite all right, my son. That's what I'm here for. Come in as often as\n you like.\"\n\n\n The crewman closed the door after him.\nHe had been gone only a moment, scarcely time for Nestir to get\n properly launched on his account, when Harry, the third mate, knocked\n on the door and was admitted.",
"\"Now, dear,\" said Joanne Marie, \"the captain can hear ya, if you're\n gonna talk so loud.\"\n\n\n \"I hope he does; I jest hope he does. He's th' one that's a-keepin' us\n all from our Reward, an' I jest hope he does heyar me, so he'll know\n I'm a-gittin' mighty tyird uv waitin'.\"\n\n\n \"You tell 'im!\" someone said from two rows behind him.\nThe captain, in the officer's section, sat very straight and tall. He\n was studiously ignoring the crew. This confined his field of vision to\n the left half of the recreation area. While the priest stood before the\n speaker's rostrum waiting for silence, the captain reached back with\n great dignity and scratched his right shoulder blade.",
"\"I don't know, yet. He's thinking about it. That's why I want to see\n you. He's going to check your record. And Wanda?\"\n\n\n \"Them stars shore are purty.\"\n\n\n \"Wanda, listen to me.\"\n\n\n \"I'm a-listenin', Haireee.\"\n\n\n \"You're simply going to have to stop carrying that doll around with you\n if you want to be an adult.\"\nIn Nestir's cabin the next morning, the captain and the priest held a\n conference.\n\n\n \"No, Captain. I'm afraid I can't agree to that,\" Nestir said.\n\n\n The captain said, \"Oh, don't be unreasonable, Father. After all, this\n is a ship, y'know. And I am, after all, the captain.\"",
"Nestir, the priest, was dressed out in the full ceremonial costume\n of office. His high, strapless boots glistened with polish. His fez\n perched jauntily on his shiny, shaven head. The baldness was symbolic\n of diligent mental application to abstruse points of doctrine.\nCotian\n exentiati pablum re overum est\n: \"Grass grows not in the middle of\n a busy thoroughfare.\" The baldness was the result of the diligent\n application of an effective depilatory. His blood-red cloak had been\n freshly cleaned for the occasion, and it rustled around him in silky\n sibilants.\n\n\n \"Men,\" he said. And then, more loudly, \"Men!\"\n\n\n The hiss and sputter of conversation guttered away.\n\n\n \"Men,\" he said.\n\n\n \"The other evening,\" he said, \"—Gelday it was, to be exact—one of the\n crew came to me with a complaint.\"",
"\"Yes,\" said the second mate's wife. \"I remember that. I read about it\n in the newspapers.\"\n\n\n \"But it was a case of obvious\nintent\n,\" continued Nestir, \"and\n therefore constituted a clear out attempt to avoid his duty by\n hastening to his Reward.\"\n\n\n Upon hearing the word duty, the captain brightened.\n\n\n \"That,\" he said to Nestir, \"my dear Father, is the cardinal point of\n the whole game, y'know.\" He scratched the back of his left hand. \"Duty.\n And I must say, I think you're being quite short-sighted about the\n Casting Off date. After all, it's not only a question of\nhow\nwe go,\n but also a question of leaving only after having done our duty. And\n that's equally important.\"\n\n\n \"The Synod of Cathau—\" Nestir began.",
"\"But because he came to me and said, 'Father, I am weary of sailing,'\n I went to the captain, and I said, 'Captain, the men are weary of\n sailing.'\n\n\n \"And then the captain said: 'All right, Father,' he said, 'I will set\n the day for the Festival of the Casting Off!'\"\nThe little fellow was pleased by the rustle of approval from the\n audience. \"God damn, hit's about time!\" Joanne Marie's husband said.\n\n\n Nestir cleared his throat again.\n\n\n \"Hummm. Uh. And the day is not very far distant,\" said Nestir.\n\n\n \"I knowed there was a catch to hit,\" Joanne Marie's husband said.",
"\"You'll spoil the flavor, shaking it that way,\" the third mate\n cautioned. He was particularly fond of that year.\n\n\n The captain twisted the bottle savagely, and the cork came free with a\n little pop. He removed the cork from between his teeth, placed it very\n carefully beside his fork, and poured himself a full glass of the wine.\n\n\n \"Very probably,\" he said sadly.\n\n\n \"I don't think hit'll do hit,\" the first mate said. \"He hain't shook\n hard enough to matter.\"\n\n\n The captain picked up the glass, brought it toward his lips—then,\n suddenly having thought of something, he put it back down and turned to\n Nestir.\n\n\n \"I say. Have you decided on this Carstar thing yet, Father?\"\n\n\n The little priest looked up. He laid his knife across the rim of his\n plate. \"It has ramifications,\" he said.",
"\"Father?\" said the crewman who had just entered.\n\n\n \"Yes, my son. In one moment. Now, Captain. As I have been explaining:\n The arena method has advantages. In Koltah we always used it. But\n here—due to the—ah—exigencies of deep space—I feel convinced that\n a departure from normal procedure is warranted. It is not without\n precedent. Such things were fairly common,\nin astoli tavoro\n, up\n until centralization, three hundred years before Allth. Indeed, in my\n home city—Koltah—in the year of the seventh plague, a most unusual\n expedient was adopted. It seems....\"\n\n\n \"You're perfectly correct, of course,\" the captain said.\n\n\n \"That's just what I wanted to see you about, Father,\" the crewman said.\n \"Now, in my city state of Ni, for the Festivals, we....\"\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" said the captain softly.",
"\"Plague take it, Father! Really, now, I must say. The Synod of Cathau!\n Certainly you've misinterpreted that. Anticipation can be a joy,\n y'know: almost equal to the very Reward. Anticipation should spur man\n in duty. It's all noble and self sacrificing.\" He scratched the back of\n his right hand.\n\n\n The second mate had been trying to get a word in edgewise for several\n minutes; he finally succeeded by utilizing the temporary silence\n following the captain's outburst.",
"The captain rubbed his nose.\n\n\n \"\nCalex i pundendem hoy\n, my children. 'Secrecy makes for a long life,'\n as it says in the\nJarcon\n.\" Nestir tugged behind him at his cloak.\n\n\n \"I want you all to remember that little story. I want you all to take\n it away from here with you and think about it, tonight, in the privacy\n of your cabins.\n\n\n \"And like the three wise Vergios who went to the Prophet, one of the\n crewmen came to me. He came to me, and he said: 'Father, I am weary of\n sailing.'\n\n\n \"Yes, he said, 'I am weary of sailing.'\n\n\n \"Now, don't you think I don't know that. Every one of you—every\n blessed one of you—is weary of sailing. I know that as well as I know\n my own name, yes.",
"\"I don't believe you have.\"\n\n\n \"Then I will tell you. Came about this way. I was given command of\n fifty-three thousand Barains. Savage devils. Uncivilized, but fine\n fighters. I was to march them ninety-seven miles across the desert\n that....\"\n\n\n \"Captain! I fear I must be very severe with you. I will be forced to\n announce in the mess hall this evening that you have refused to do\n your duty when it was plainly and properly called to your attention.\"\n\n\n \"Very well, Father,\" the captain said after several minutes. \"I will do\n it.\"",
"The first mate shrugged. \"I never do say nothin' right,\" he said. \"I\n hain't got no luck. I've spent more years un all ya, carpenterin' up a\n duty log that's better un even th' captain's. An' hit's Martha an' me\n that gotta wait an' help th' next crew. Lord above knows how long time\n hit'll be afore we uns'll got ta have a Festival.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, really, now. Now. Duty, duty,\" the captain reprimanded him mildly.\n\n\n \"Duty! Duty! Duty! You all ur in a conspiracy. You all want me ta die\n uv old age.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense,\" said the steward. \"We don't want anything of the sort.\n After all, someone has to orient the new crew.\"",
"When the third mate saw that his opinion on the wine was not\n immediately to be justified, he settled back in his chair with a little\n sigh of disapproval.\n\n\n \"Well, what do you\nthink\nyour decision will be, Father?\" the steward\n asked.\n\n\n Nestir picked up his knife and fork and cut off a piece of meat.\n \"Hummmm,\" he said. \"It's hard to say. The whole issue involves, as a\n core point, the principle of\ncasta cum mae stotiti\n.\"\n\n\n The first mate nodded sagely.\n\n\n \"The intent, of course, could actually be—ah—\nsub mailloux\n; and in\n that event, naturally, the decision would be even more difficult. I\n wish I could talk to higher authority about it; but of course I haven't\n the time. I'll have to decide something.\"\n\"He had a very pretty wife,\" the third mate said.",
"\"Oh, not at all,\" the third mate's wife said. \"I did it to make him\n stop crying.\"\n\n\n \"Well, in that case, I see no reason why he shouldn't get his Reward.\"\n\n\n \"I certainly hope so,\" the third mate said. \"Jane worries about it all\n the time.\"\n\n\n \"I do not,\" Jane contradicted.\n\n\n \"Now, honey, you know you do so.\"\n\n\n At that moment, he lost interest in his wife and leaned across the\n table toward the captain, \"Well?\" he asked.\n\n\n The captain rolled the wine over his tongue. \"You were right, of\n course.\"\n\n\n The third mate turned triumphantly to the first mate. \"There, I told\n you so.\"",
"He was trembling slightly.\nThat morning was to be the time of the captain's wedding. He had\n insisted that it be done in privacy. For the ceremony, he refused to\n make the slightest change in his everyday uniform; nor would he consent\n to Nestir's suggestion that he carry a nosegay of hydroponic flowers.\n He had intended, after the ceremony, to go about his duty as if nothing\n out of the ordinary had happened; but after it was done with, the vast\n indignity of it came home to him even more poignantly than he had\n imagined it would.\n\n\n Without a word, he left the priest's stateroom and walked slowly,\n ponderously, with great dignity, to his own.\n\n\n It was a very fine stateroom. The finest, but for Nestir's, in the\n whole ship. The velvet and gold drapes (his single esthetic joy) were\n scented with exotic perfume. The carpet was an inch and a half thick.",
"Nestir rubbed his bald head. \"Sir,\" he said by way of preamble, \"I know\n you have the greatest sensibility in questions of duty.\"\n\n\n \"That's quite so, y'know. I pride myself upon it, if I do say so.\"\n\n\n \"Exactly.\nArgot y calpex.\nNo sacrifice is too great.\"\n\n\n \"True; true.\"\n\n\n \"Well, then, say the first day of Wenslaus, that would be—ah, a\n Zentahday—I may depend upon you to wed Wanda Miller, the bosun's\n daughter, yes?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" said the captain.\n\n\n \"Come now, sir. I realize she is the daughter of a crewman, but—\"\n\n\n \"Father,\" said the captain, \"did I ever tell you about the time I led\n an expeditionary force against Zelthalta?\"",
"\"I don't care a smidgen,\" he said, \"if en they ayre.\"\n\n\n \"Please,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Joanne Marie,\" he said, \"you know that when I aims ta do somethin',\n I'm jest natcher'lly bound to do hit. An' iffen I aims ta talk....\"\n\n\n \"Here comes the priest. Now, be still.\"\n\n\n The man looked up. \"So he do; an' I'll tell ya, hit shore is time he's\n a-gittin' hyere. I ain't got no all night fer ta sit.\"\n\n\n The crewman to his left bent over and whispered, \"I'll bet he's gonna\n tell us it's gonna be another postponement.\"\n\n\n \"Iffen he does, I'm jest a-gonna stand up an' yell right out that I\n ain't gonna stand fer hit no longer.\"",
"\"Oh?\"\n\n\n The second mate took out a cigarette and lit it. \"Can't blow the ship\n up, you know. Look like hell on the record. Hope the captain don't find\n out about it, though. He'll figure the man was neglecting his duty.\"\n\n\n He blew a smoke ring.\n\n\n \"Might even bar him from the Festival.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Harry, \"the captain's funny that way.\"\n\n\n The second mate blew another smoke ring.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Harry said.\n\n\n \"Uh. Harry? Are you really going to take that Wanda girl?\"\n\n\n \"If Nestir lets me.\"",
"\"Well, the point I want to make is this: I just wanted to tell you\n that I know what a Festival should be, and the captain and I will do\n everything in our power to make our Casting Off as wonderful as any\n anywhere.\n\n\n \"And I want to tell you that if you'll come to me with your\n suggestions, I'll do all I can to see that we do this thing just the\n way you want it done. I want you to be proud of this Casting Off\n Festival, so you can look back on it and say, uh, uh—this day was the\n real high point of your whole life!\"\n\n\n Everyone but Joanne Marie's husband cheered. He sat glumly muttering to\n himself.\n\n\n Nestir bobbed his shiny head at them and beamed his cherubic smile. And\n noticed that there was a little blonde, one of the crewmen's wives, in\n the front row that had very cute ankles."
],
[
"\"Husband,\" Wanda said simply. She closed the door behind her and stood\n staring at him.\n\n\n \"Madam,\" he said, \"I hope you will have the kindness not to refer to me\n by that indecent appelation a second time.\"\n\n\n \"Gee. You say the cutest things. I'm awful glad you had to marry me,\n huh.\"\n\n\n The captain stood up, adjusted his coat and his shoulders, and walked\n across the room to the dressing table. He opened the left-hand drawer,\n removed a bottle, poured himself half a water-glass full and drank it\n off.\n\n\n \"Ah,\" he said.\n\n\n He returned to the bed and sat down.\n\n\n \"Can'tcha even say hello ta little ol' me, huh?\" she asked.",
"\"Oh? Good morning, Captain. I didn't know you were here.\" Then, to the\n priest: \"I'll come back later, Father.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense,\" said the captain. \"Come in.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I had hoped to see the Father for a minute on ... private\n business.\"\n\n\n \"I have to be toddling along,\" said the captain.\n\n\n \"But Captain! I haven't finished telling you about....\"\n\n\n \"I'll just go down and get a cup of coffee,\" the captain said.\n\n\n \"I'll call you when I'm through,\" said Harry.\n\n\n The captain left the room.\n\n\n \"It's about Wanda, Father,\" said the third mate.\n\n\n The priest studied the table top. He rearranged some papers. \"Ah, yes.\n The young girl.\"",
"\"Oh?\"\n\n\n The second mate took out a cigarette and lit it. \"Can't blow the ship\n up, you know. Look like hell on the record. Hope the captain don't find\n out about it, though. He'll figure the man was neglecting his duty.\"\n\n\n He blew a smoke ring.\n\n\n \"Might even bar him from the Festival.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Harry, \"the captain's funny that way.\"\n\n\n The second mate blew another smoke ring.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Harry said.\n\n\n \"Uh. Harry? Are you really going to take that Wanda girl?\"\n\n\n \"If Nestir lets me.\"",
"\"Say. Harry. Do you suppose your wife would...?\"\nHarry crossed to the second mate and put a hand on his shoulder.\n \"Sorry, old fellow. She's got it in her head to take Nestir.\" He\n shrugged. \"I don't exactly approve, of course, but ... I'm sure if he\n doesn't want her, she'd be glad to hear your offer.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, that's all right,\" John said. \"Don't really matter. Say. By the\n way. Have I told you what I intend to do to the captain? I've got it\n all thought out. You know that saber I picked up on Queglat? Well....\"\n\n\n \"Look. How about telling me another time?\"\n\n\n \"Uh, Sure. If you say so. Uh?\"\n\n\n \"I'm kind of expecting Wanda.\"",
"Nestir rubbed his bald head. \"Sir,\" he said by way of preamble, \"I know\n you have the greatest sensibility in questions of duty.\"\n\n\n \"That's quite so, y'know. I pride myself upon it, if I do say so.\"\n\n\n \"Exactly.\nArgot y calpex.\nNo sacrifice is too great.\"\n\n\n \"True; true.\"\n\n\n \"Well, then, say the first day of Wenslaus, that would be—ah, a\n Zentahday—I may depend upon you to wed Wanda Miller, the bosun's\n daughter, yes?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" said the captain.\n\n\n \"Come now, sir. I realize she is the daughter of a crewman, but—\"\n\n\n \"Father,\" said the captain, \"did I ever tell you about the time I led\n an expeditionary force against Zelthalta?\"",
"\"I don't know, yet. He's thinking about it. That's why I want to see\n you. He's going to check your record. And Wanda?\"\n\n\n \"Them stars shore are purty.\"\n\n\n \"Wanda, listen to me.\"\n\n\n \"I'm a-listenin', Haireee.\"\n\n\n \"You're simply going to have to stop carrying that doll around with you\n if you want to be an adult.\"\nIn Nestir's cabin the next morning, the captain and the priest held a\n conference.\n\n\n \"No, Captain. I'm afraid I can't agree to that,\" Nestir said.\n\n\n The captain said, \"Oh, don't be unreasonable, Father. After all, this\n is a ship, y'know. And I am, after all, the captain.\"",
"\"After all, one must have done some duty,\" the captain said.\n\n\n \"He wants you to sign it so he can take her in the Changing of the\n Wives,\" Jane said.\n\n\n Nestir fidgeted uncomfortably. \"Well, I'll look at her record,\" he\n said.\n\n\n \"It's an idea,\" the second mate said. \"Otherwise, we'll be short one\n woman.\"\n\n\n \"There wouldn't be one short if\nhe\nhad brought a wife,\" the first\n mate's wife said, looking squarely at the captain.\n\n\n \"Now, Martha. I place duty above pleasure. You're just angry, y'know,\n because you have to stay with your husband.\"",
"\"Oh, not at all,\" the third mate's wife said. \"I did it to make him\n stop crying.\"\n\n\n \"Well, in that case, I see no reason why he shouldn't get his Reward.\"\n\n\n \"I certainly hope so,\" the third mate said. \"Jane worries about it all\n the time.\"\n\n\n \"I do not,\" Jane contradicted.\n\n\n \"Now, honey, you know you do so.\"\n\n\n At that moment, he lost interest in his wife and leaned across the\n table toward the captain, \"Well?\" he asked.\n\n\n The captain rolled the wine over his tongue. \"You were right, of\n course.\"\n\n\n The third mate turned triumphantly to the first mate. \"There, I told\n you so.\"",
"\"Well, the point I want to make is this: I just wanted to tell you\n that I know what a Festival should be, and the captain and I will do\n everything in our power to make our Casting Off as wonderful as any\n anywhere.\n\n\n \"And I want to tell you that if you'll come to me with your\n suggestions, I'll do all I can to see that we do this thing just the\n way you want it done. I want you to be proud of this Casting Off\n Festival, so you can look back on it and say, uh, uh—this day was the\n real high point of your whole life!\"\n\n\n Everyone but Joanne Marie's husband cheered. He sat glumly muttering to\n himself.\n\n\n Nestir bobbed his shiny head at them and beamed his cherubic smile. And\n noticed that there was a little blonde, one of the crewmen's wives, in\n the front row that had very cute ankles.",
"\"Oh, I don't know.\" She looked down at her legs, raised them up from\n the floor and held them out in front of her. \"I think I'd kind of like\n Nestir. With his funny bald head. I hope he asks me.\"\n\n\n \"I'll mention it to him.\"\n\n\n \"Would you really, Harry? That would be sweet.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, honey.\" He looked down at his watch.\n\n\n \"Harry? Are you going to meet Wanda in the control room?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-huh.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so. Well, remember this, dear: It isn't the day of the\n Changing of the Wives yet. Don't forget.\"\n\n\n \"Honey! You don't think for a minute that....\"",
"He was trembling slightly.\nThat morning was to be the time of the captain's wedding. He had\n insisted that it be done in privacy. For the ceremony, he refused to\n make the slightest change in his everyday uniform; nor would he consent\n to Nestir's suggestion that he carry a nosegay of hydroponic flowers.\n He had intended, after the ceremony, to go about his duty as if nothing\n out of the ordinary had happened; but after it was done with, the vast\n indignity of it came home to him even more poignantly than he had\n imagined it would.\n\n\n Without a word, he left the priest's stateroom and walked slowly,\n ponderously, with great dignity, to his own.\n\n\n It was a very fine stateroom. The finest, but for Nestir's, in the\n whole ship. The velvet and gold drapes (his single esthetic joy) were\n scented with exotic perfume. The carpet was an inch and a half thick.",
"\"Well, I mean, it's not only about Wanda,\" said Harry. \"You see, my\n wife, Jane, that is....\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" said the priest. He took his pen out of the holder.\n\n\n \"I think, with the proper ... ah ... you know. What I mean is, I think\n she might look with favor on you in the Changing of the Wives, if I\n said a few well chosen words in your behalf.\"\n\n\n \"That is very flattering, my son.\" He returned the pen to the holder.\n \"Such bounty, as it says in the\nJarcon\n, is\ncull tensio\n.\"\n\n\n \"And with your permission, Father....\"\n\n\n \"Ah....\"\n\n\n \"She's a very pretty woman.\"\n\n\n \"Ah.... Quite so.\"",
"\"You don't need to worry about\nyour\nCasting Off, Captain. You can\n leave that to me. I assure you, I have in mind a most ingenious\n method.\"\nThe captain was not visibly cheered; he was still brooding about the\n sad absence of a sense of duty on the part of Nestir. \"I will welcome\n it,\" he said, \"at the proper time, sir. And I certainly hope—\" His\n eyes swept the table. \"I\ncertainly\nhope to be Cast Off by an officer.\n It would be very humiliating, y'know, to have a crew member do it.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, very,\" said the steward.\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" the second mate's wife said, \"whether you better count\n on my husband or not. I have my own plans for him.\"\n\n\n \"This problem of Carstar interests me,\" the third mate said. \"Did I\n ever tell you about my wife? She strangled our second baby.\"",
"\"Yes,\" said the second mate's wife. \"I remember that. I read about it\n in the newspapers.\"\n\n\n \"But it was a case of obvious\nintent\n,\" continued Nestir, \"and\n therefore constituted a clear out attempt to avoid his duty by\n hastening to his Reward.\"\n\n\n Upon hearing the word duty, the captain brightened.\n\n\n \"That,\" he said to Nestir, \"my dear Father, is the cardinal point of\n the whole game, y'know.\" He scratched the back of his left hand. \"Duty.\n And I must say, I think you're being quite short-sighted about the\n Casting Off date. After all, it's not only a question of\nhow\nwe go,\n but also a question of leaving only after having done our duty. And\n that's equally important.\"\n\n\n \"The Synod of Cathau—\" Nestir began.",
"\"Now, dear,\" said Joanne Marie, \"the captain can hear ya, if you're\n gonna talk so loud.\"\n\n\n \"I hope he does; I jest hope he does. He's th' one that's a-keepin' us\n all from our Reward, an' I jest hope he does heyar me, so he'll know\n I'm a-gittin' mighty tyird uv waitin'.\"\n\n\n \"You tell 'im!\" someone said from two rows behind him.\nThe captain, in the officer's section, sat very straight and tall. He\n was studiously ignoring the crew. This confined his field of vision to\n the left half of the recreation area. While the priest stood before the\n speaker's rostrum waiting for silence, the captain reached back with\n great dignity and scratched his right shoulder blade.",
"\"But because he came to me and said, 'Father, I am weary of sailing,'\n I went to the captain, and I said, 'Captain, the men are weary of\n sailing.'\n\n\n \"And then the captain said: 'All right, Father,' he said, 'I will set\n the day for the Festival of the Casting Off!'\"\nThe little fellow was pleased by the rustle of approval from the\n audience. \"God damn, hit's about time!\" Joanne Marie's husband said.\n\n\n Nestir cleared his throat again.\n\n\n \"Hummm. Uh. And the day is not very far distant,\" said Nestir.\n\n\n \"I knowed there was a catch to hit,\" Joanne Marie's husband said.",
"\"He was a very annoying child,\" his wife said.\n\n\n \"He probably wouldn't have lived, anyway,\" the third mate said. \"Puny\n baby.\"\n\n\n \"That,\" said Nestir, \"is not at all like the Carstar case. Not at all.\n Yours is a question of\nsaliex y cuminzund\n.\"\n\n\n The first mate nodded.\n\n\n \"It seems to me that the whole thing would depend on the intent of the\n strangler.\"\n\n\n \"Captain,\" the steward said, \"you really must let me give you some of\n that salve.\"\n\n\n \"That's very kind of you, but I....\"\n\n\n \"No bother at all,\" the steward said.\n\n\n \"As I see it,\" Nestir said, \"if the intent was the natural maternal\n instinct of the mother to release her child from its duty, then....\"",
"\"You'll spoil the flavor, shaking it that way,\" the third mate\n cautioned. He was particularly fond of that year.\n\n\n The captain twisted the bottle savagely, and the cork came free with a\n little pop. He removed the cork from between his teeth, placed it very\n carefully beside his fork, and poured himself a full glass of the wine.\n\n\n \"Very probably,\" he said sadly.\n\n\n \"I don't think hit'll do hit,\" the first mate said. \"He hain't shook\n hard enough to matter.\"\n\n\n The captain picked up the glass, brought it toward his lips—then,\n suddenly having thought of something, he put it back down and turned to\n Nestir.\n\n\n \"I say. Have you decided on this Carstar thing yet, Father?\"\n\n\n The little priest looked up. He laid his knife across the rim of his\n plate. \"It has ramifications,\" he said.",
"\"Oh. Sure. I should have known you weren't here early for nothing. In\n that case, I better be shoving off. Luck.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. See you at breakfast.\"\n\n\n \"Right-o.\"\n\n\n After the second mate left, Harry walked over to the control panel.\n The jet lights were dead. He picked up the intercom and switched over\n the engine call bell. \"'Lo,\" he said into the microphone. \"This is\n the bridge.... Oh, hi, Barney. Harry.... Have you got a sober control\n technician down there yet...? Fine. We'll start the jets again. If the\n captain comes in now—well, you know how he is.... Okay, thanks. Night.\"\n\n\n He replaced the microphone. He reached over and threw the forward\n firing lever. The jet lights came on and the ship began to brake\n acceleration again.",
"The first mate shrugged. \"I never do say nothin' right,\" he said. \"I\n hain't got no luck. I've spent more years un all ya, carpenterin' up a\n duty log that's better un even th' captain's. An' hit's Martha an' me\n that gotta wait an' help th' next crew. Lord above knows how long time\n hit'll be afore we uns'll got ta have a Festival.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, really, now. Now. Duty, duty,\" the captain reprimanded him mildly.\n\n\n \"Duty! Duty! Duty! You all ur in a conspiracy. You all want me ta die\n uv old age.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense,\" said the steward. \"We don't want anything of the sort.\n After all, someone has to orient the new crew.\""
],
[
"\"Well, I mean, it's not only about Wanda,\" said Harry. \"You see, my\n wife, Jane, that is....\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" said the priest. He took his pen out of the holder.\n\n\n \"I think, with the proper ... ah ... you know. What I mean is, I think\n she might look with favor on you in the Changing of the Wives, if I\n said a few well chosen words in your behalf.\"\n\n\n \"That is very flattering, my son.\" He returned the pen to the holder.\n \"Such bounty, as it says in the\nJarcon\n, is\ncull tensio\n.\"\n\n\n \"And with your permission, Father....\"\n\n\n \"Ah....\"\n\n\n \"She's a very pretty woman.\"\n\n\n \"Ah.... Quite so.\"",
"\"I don't think all that is necessary just to go on duty.\"\n\n\n \"Probably not.\"\n\n\n She walked to the bed and sat down. \"Harry?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, dear?\"\n\n\n \"Don't you really think she's awful young?\"\n\n\n \"Huh-uh.\"\n\n\n \"I mean, why don't you pick someone else? Like Mary? She's awful sweet.\n I'll bet she'd be better.\"\n\n\n \"Probably.\"\n\n\n \"She's a lot of fun.\"\n\n\n He brushed at his hair again. \"Who do you want, Jane?\"",
"\"She's too young for you, dear,\" Jane said to her husband.\n\n\n \"Oh, I don't know,\" the steward said. \"Sometimes they're the best, I\n hear.\"\nIII\n\n\n The third mate, whose name was Harry, stood before the mirror combing\n his hair. He had been combing his hair for the last fifteen minutes.\n\n\n \"I suppose the crew is celebrating?\" his wife said.\n\n\n \"I suppose.\"\n\n\n She stood up and walked over to the dresser. Absently she began to\n finger the articles on it.\n\n\n \"You really shouldn't have told them about little Glenn tonight.\"\n\n\n \"Pish-tush.\"\n\n\n \"No, Harry. I mean it. Helen looked at me strangely all through dinner.\n She has three children, you know.\"\n\n\n \"You're imagining things.\"",
"\"Oh, not at all,\" the third mate's wife said. \"I did it to make him\n stop crying.\"\n\n\n \"Well, in that case, I see no reason why he shouldn't get his Reward.\"\n\n\n \"I certainly hope so,\" the third mate said. \"Jane worries about it all\n the time.\"\n\n\n \"I do not,\" Jane contradicted.\n\n\n \"Now, honey, you know you do so.\"\n\n\n At that moment, he lost interest in his wife and leaned across the\n table toward the captain, \"Well?\" he asked.\n\n\n The captain rolled the wine over his tongue. \"You were right, of\n course.\"\n\n\n The third mate turned triumphantly to the first mate. \"There, I told\n you so.\"",
"\"Well, the point I want to make is this: I just wanted to tell you\n that I know what a Festival should be, and the captain and I will do\n everything in our power to make our Casting Off as wonderful as any\n anywhere.\n\n\n \"And I want to tell you that if you'll come to me with your\n suggestions, I'll do all I can to see that we do this thing just the\n way you want it done. I want you to be proud of this Casting Off\n Festival, so you can look back on it and say, uh, uh—this day was the\n real high point of your whole life!\"\n\n\n Everyone but Joanne Marie's husband cheered. He sat glumly muttering to\n himself.\n\n\n Nestir bobbed his shiny head at them and beamed his cherubic smile. And\n noticed that there was a little blonde, one of the crewmen's wives, in\n the front row that had very cute ankles.",
"\"But she\ndoes\nhave three children.\"\n\n\n \"I mean about her looking at you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh.\"\n\n\n Harry fiddled with his tie without speaking.\n\n\n \"I mean, as much as to say: 'Well, I raised all of mine.'\"\n\n\n \"But honey, about little Glenn. That was an accident, almost. You\n didn't really mean to choke him that hard.\"\n\n\n \"But still ... it ... I mean, there was Helen, looking at me like I\n wasn't doing my duty. You know.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said. \"That's nonsense, Jane. Sheer nonsense. You know what\n the priest said.\"\n\n\n He polished one of his brass buttons with the sleeve of his coat.\n\n\n \"Harry?\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"",
"\"After all, one must have done some duty,\" the captain said.\n\n\n \"He wants you to sign it so he can take her in the Changing of the\n Wives,\" Jane said.\n\n\n Nestir fidgeted uncomfortably. \"Well, I'll look at her record,\" he\n said.\n\n\n \"It's an idea,\" the second mate said. \"Otherwise, we'll be short one\n woman.\"\n\n\n \"There wouldn't be one short if\nhe\nhad brought a wife,\" the first\n mate's wife said, looking squarely at the captain.\n\n\n \"Now, Martha. I place duty above pleasure. You're just angry, y'know,\n because you have to stay with your husband.\"",
"\"Say. Harry. Do you suppose your wife would...?\"\nHarry crossed to the second mate and put a hand on his shoulder.\n \"Sorry, old fellow. She's got it in her head to take Nestir.\" He\n shrugged. \"I don't exactly approve, of course, but ... I'm sure if he\n doesn't want her, she'd be glad to hear your offer.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, that's all right,\" John said. \"Don't really matter. Say. By the\n way. Have I told you what I intend to do to the captain? I've got it\n all thought out. You know that saber I picked up on Queglat? Well....\"\n\n\n \"Look. How about telling me another time?\"\n\n\n \"Uh, Sure. If you say so. Uh?\"\n\n\n \"I'm kind of expecting Wanda.\"",
"\"Hello,\" he said. \"Madam, sit down. I intend to give you an instructive\n lecture in the natural order of....\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\"\n\n\n \"Ah,\" he said. \"Quite true, of course.\"\n\n\n She walked over to the chair and sat down. \"I don't like them,\" she\n said. \"Them cloth things over there.\"\n\n\n \"Those, Madam,\" he said, \"are priceless drapes I had imported from the\n province of San Xalthan. They have a long, strange history.\n\n\n \"About three thousand years ago, a family by the name of Soong was\n forced to flee from the city of Xan because the eldest son of the\n family had become involved in a conspiracy against the illustrious King\n Fod. As the Soong family was traveling....\"\n\n\n \"I don't like 'em anyway,\" said Wanda.",
"\"Oh, I don't know.\" She looked down at her legs, raised them up from\n the floor and held them out in front of her. \"I think I'd kind of like\n Nestir. With his funny bald head. I hope he asks me.\"\n\n\n \"I'll mention it to him.\"\n\n\n \"Would you really, Harry? That would be sweet.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, honey.\" He looked down at his watch.\n\n\n \"Harry? Are you going to meet Wanda in the control room?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-huh.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so. Well, remember this, dear: It isn't the day of the\n Changing of the Wives yet. Don't forget.\"\n\n\n \"Honey! You don't think for a minute that....\"",
"\"Well, about Wanda. I really shouldn't mention this. But Father, if we\nare\nshort one woman....\"\n\n\n \"Hummmm.\"\n\n\n \"I mean, the girls might think a man gets rusty.\"\n\n\n \"I see what you mean.\" Nestir blinked his eyes. \"It wouldn't be fair,\n all things considered.\"\n\n\n He stood up.\n\n\n \"I may tell you, my son, that, in thinking this matter over last night,\n I decided that Wanda—ah—Miller, yes, has had sufficient duty to merit\n participation in the Festival.\"\n\n\n \"Justice is a priestly virtue,\" Harry said.\n\n\n \"And you really think your wife would...?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, Father.\"\n\n\n \"Well, ahem. But....\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Father?\"",
"\"Oh? Good morning, Captain. I didn't know you were here.\" Then, to the\n priest: \"I'll come back later, Father.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense,\" said the captain. \"Come in.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I had hoped to see the Father for a minute on ... private\n business.\"\n\n\n \"I have to be toddling along,\" said the captain.\n\n\n \"But Captain! I haven't finished telling you about....\"\n\n\n \"I'll just go down and get a cup of coffee,\" the captain said.\n\n\n \"I'll call you when I'm through,\" said Harry.\n\n\n The captain left the room.\n\n\n \"It's about Wanda, Father,\" said the third mate.\n\n\n The priest studied the table top. He rearranged some papers. \"Ah, yes.\n The young girl.\"",
"\"But because he came to me and said, 'Father, I am weary of sailing,'\n I went to the captain, and I said, 'Captain, the men are weary of\n sailing.'\n\n\n \"And then the captain said: 'All right, Father,' he said, 'I will set\n the day for the Festival of the Casting Off!'\"\nThe little fellow was pleased by the rustle of approval from the\n audience. \"God damn, hit's about time!\" Joanne Marie's husband said.\n\n\n Nestir cleared his throat again.\n\n\n \"Hummm. Uh. And the day is not very far distant,\" said Nestir.\n\n\n \"I knowed there was a catch to hit,\" Joanne Marie's husband said.",
"\"Oh?\"\n\n\n The second mate took out a cigarette and lit it. \"Can't blow the ship\n up, you know. Look like hell on the record. Hope the captain don't find\n out about it, though. He'll figure the man was neglecting his duty.\"\n\n\n He blew a smoke ring.\n\n\n \"Might even bar him from the Festival.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Harry, \"the captain's funny that way.\"\n\n\n The second mate blew another smoke ring.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Harry said.\n\n\n \"Uh. Harry? Are you really going to take that Wanda girl?\"\n\n\n \"If Nestir lets me.\"",
"\"Yes, very.\" Nestir agreed. \"But as I was saying, if it could be\n proven that the culstem fell due to no negligence on his part, either\n consciously or subconsciously, then the obvious conclusion would be\n that no stigma would be attached.\" He speared his meat and chewed it\n thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"But it wasn't at all bloody,\" the wife of the second mate said. \"I\n scarcely think he felt it at all. It happened too fast.\"\n\n\n Nestir swallowed the mouthful of food and washed it down with a gulp of\n wine.\n\n\n \"The problem, my dear Helen,\" he said, \"is one of intent. To raise\n the issue of concomitant agonies is to confuse the whole matter. For\n instance. Take Wilson, in my home state of Koltah. Certainly\nhe\ndied\n as miserable a death as anyone could desire.\"",
"\"I don't care a smidgen,\" he said, \"if en they ayre.\"\n\n\n \"Please,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Joanne Marie,\" he said, \"you know that when I aims ta do somethin',\n I'm jest natcher'lly bound to do hit. An' iffen I aims ta talk....\"\n\n\n \"Here comes the priest. Now, be still.\"\n\n\n The man looked up. \"So he do; an' I'll tell ya, hit shore is time he's\n a-gittin' hyere. I ain't got no all night fer ta sit.\"\n\n\n The crewman to his left bent over and whispered, \"I'll bet he's gonna\n tell us it's gonna be another postponement.\"\n\n\n \"Iffen he does, I'm jest a-gonna stand up an' yell right out that I\n ain't gonna stand fer hit no longer.\"",
"Having done that, he switched on the space viewer. The steady buzz of\n the equipment warming sounded in his ears. Wanda would be sure to want\n to look at the stars. She was simple minded.\n\n\n \"Hello.\"\n\n\n He swiveled around. \"Oh, hello, Wanda, honey.\"\n\n\n \"Hello, Haireee. Are you glad little ol' me could come, huh?\"\n\n\n \"Sure am.\"\n\n\n \"Me, too. Can I look at the—oh. It's already on.\"\n\n\n \"Uh-huh. Look. Wanda.\"\n\n\n \"Hum?\"\n\n\n \"I talked to Nestir today.\"\n\n\n \"Goody. What did he say, huh? I can be an adult and get to play in the\n Festival, can I?\"",
"\"Madam,\" said the captain, \"kindly bring me that.\"\n\n\n \"This?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. Thank you.\"\n\n\n He took the doll from her. He got up again, walked to the chest of\n drawers, searched around for a penknife. Finally he located it under a\n stack of socks.",
"\"I don't know, yet. He's thinking about it. That's why I want to see\n you. He's going to check your record. And Wanda?\"\n\n\n \"Them stars shore are purty.\"\n\n\n \"Wanda, listen to me.\"\n\n\n \"I'm a-listenin', Haireee.\"\n\n\n \"You're simply going to have to stop carrying that doll around with you\n if you want to be an adult.\"\nIn Nestir's cabin the next morning, the captain and the priest held a\n conference.\n\n\n \"No, Captain. I'm afraid I can't agree to that,\" Nestir said.\n\n\n The captain said, \"Oh, don't be unreasonable, Father. After all, this\n is a ship, y'know. And I am, after all, the captain.\"",
"\"Now, dear,\" said Joanne Marie, \"the captain can hear ya, if you're\n gonna talk so loud.\"\n\n\n \"I hope he does; I jest hope he does. He's th' one that's a-keepin' us\n all from our Reward, an' I jest hope he does heyar me, so he'll know\n I'm a-gittin' mighty tyird uv waitin'.\"\n\n\n \"You tell 'im!\" someone said from two rows behind him.\nThe captain, in the officer's section, sat very straight and tall. He\n was studiously ignoring the crew. This confined his field of vision to\n the left half of the recreation area. While the priest stood before the\n speaker's rostrum waiting for silence, the captain reached back with\n great dignity and scratched his right shoulder blade."
],
[
"The first mate shrugged. \"I never do say nothin' right,\" he said. \"I\n hain't got no luck. I've spent more years un all ya, carpenterin' up a\n duty log that's better un even th' captain's. An' hit's Martha an' me\n that gotta wait an' help th' next crew. Lord above knows how long time\n hit'll be afore we uns'll got ta have a Festival.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, really, now. Now. Duty, duty,\" the captain reprimanded him mildly.\n\n\n \"Duty! Duty! Duty! You all ur in a conspiracy. You all want me ta die\n uv old age.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense,\" said the steward. \"We don't want anything of the sort.\n After all, someone has to orient the new crew.\"",
"\"Plague take it, Father! Really, now, I must say. The Synod of Cathau!\n Certainly you've misinterpreted that. Anticipation can be a joy,\n y'know: almost equal to the very Reward. Anticipation should spur man\n in duty. It's all noble and self sacrificing.\" He scratched the back of\n his right hand.\n\n\n The second mate had been trying to get a word in edgewise for several\n minutes; he finally succeeded by utilizing the temporary silence\n following the captain's outburst.",
"\"Oh, not at all,\" the third mate's wife said. \"I did it to make him\n stop crying.\"\n\n\n \"Well, in that case, I see no reason why he shouldn't get his Reward.\"\n\n\n \"I certainly hope so,\" the third mate said. \"Jane worries about it all\n the time.\"\n\n\n \"I do not,\" Jane contradicted.\n\n\n \"Now, honey, you know you do so.\"\n\n\n At that moment, he lost interest in his wife and leaned across the\n table toward the captain, \"Well?\" he asked.\n\n\n The captain rolled the wine over his tongue. \"You were right, of\n course.\"\n\n\n The third mate turned triumphantly to the first mate. \"There, I told\n you so.\"",
"\"Yes,\" said the second mate's wife. \"I remember that. I read about it\n in the newspapers.\"\n\n\n \"But it was a case of obvious\nintent\n,\" continued Nestir, \"and\n therefore constituted a clear out attempt to avoid his duty by\n hastening to his Reward.\"\n\n\n Upon hearing the word duty, the captain brightened.\n\n\n \"That,\" he said to Nestir, \"my dear Father, is the cardinal point of\n the whole game, y'know.\" He scratched the back of his left hand. \"Duty.\n And I must say, I think you're being quite short-sighted about the\n Casting Off date. After all, it's not only a question of\nhow\nwe go,\n but also a question of leaving only after having done our duty. And\n that's equally important.\"\n\n\n \"The Synod of Cathau—\" Nestir began.",
"\"You'll spoil the flavor, shaking it that way,\" the third mate\n cautioned. He was particularly fond of that year.\n\n\n The captain twisted the bottle savagely, and the cork came free with a\n little pop. He removed the cork from between his teeth, placed it very\n carefully beside his fork, and poured himself a full glass of the wine.\n\n\n \"Very probably,\" he said sadly.\n\n\n \"I don't think hit'll do hit,\" the first mate said. \"He hain't shook\n hard enough to matter.\"\n\n\n The captain picked up the glass, brought it toward his lips—then,\n suddenly having thought of something, he put it back down and turned to\n Nestir.\n\n\n \"I say. Have you decided on this Carstar thing yet, Father?\"\n\n\n The little priest looked up. He laid his knife across the rim of his\n plate. \"It has ramifications,\" he said.",
"\"Say. Harry. Do you suppose your wife would...?\"\nHarry crossed to the second mate and put a hand on his shoulder.\n \"Sorry, old fellow. She's got it in her head to take Nestir.\" He\n shrugged. \"I don't exactly approve, of course, but ... I'm sure if he\n doesn't want her, she'd be glad to hear your offer.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, that's all right,\" John said. \"Don't really matter. Say. By the\n way. Have I told you what I intend to do to the captain? I've got it\n all thought out. You know that saber I picked up on Queglat? Well....\"\n\n\n \"Look. How about telling me another time?\"\n\n\n \"Uh, Sure. If you say so. Uh?\"\n\n\n \"I'm kind of expecting Wanda.\"",
"\"Yes, very.\" Nestir agreed. \"But as I was saying, if it could be\n proven that the culstem fell due to no negligence on his part, either\n consciously or subconsciously, then the obvious conclusion would be\n that no stigma would be attached.\" He speared his meat and chewed it\n thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"But it wasn't at all bloody,\" the wife of the second mate said. \"I\n scarcely think he felt it at all. It happened too fast.\"\n\n\n Nestir swallowed the mouthful of food and washed it down with a gulp of\n wine.\n\n\n \"The problem, my dear Helen,\" he said, \"is one of intent. To raise\n the issue of concomitant agonies is to confuse the whole matter. For\n instance. Take Wilson, in my home state of Koltah. Certainly\nhe\ndied\n as miserable a death as anyone could desire.\"",
"\"Now, dear,\" said Joanne Marie, \"the captain can hear ya, if you're\n gonna talk so loud.\"\n\n\n \"I hope he does; I jest hope he does. He's th' one that's a-keepin' us\n all from our Reward, an' I jest hope he does heyar me, so he'll know\n I'm a-gittin' mighty tyird uv waitin'.\"\n\n\n \"You tell 'im!\" someone said from two rows behind him.\nThe captain, in the officer's section, sat very straight and tall. He\n was studiously ignoring the crew. This confined his field of vision to\n the left half of the recreation area. While the priest stood before the\n speaker's rostrum waiting for silence, the captain reached back with\n great dignity and scratched his right shoulder blade.",
"\"But because he came to me and said, 'Father, I am weary of sailing,'\n I went to the captain, and I said, 'Captain, the men are weary of\n sailing.'\n\n\n \"And then the captain said: 'All right, Father,' he said, 'I will set\n the day for the Festival of the Casting Off!'\"\nThe little fellow was pleased by the rustle of approval from the\n audience. \"God damn, hit's about time!\" Joanne Marie's husband said.\n\n\n Nestir cleared his throat again.\n\n\n \"Hummm. Uh. And the day is not very far distant,\" said Nestir.\n\n\n \"I knowed there was a catch to hit,\" Joanne Marie's husband said.",
"\"I don't care a smidgen,\" he said, \"if en they ayre.\"\n\n\n \"Please,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Joanne Marie,\" he said, \"you know that when I aims ta do somethin',\n I'm jest natcher'lly bound to do hit. An' iffen I aims ta talk....\"\n\n\n \"Here comes the priest. Now, be still.\"\n\n\n The man looked up. \"So he do; an' I'll tell ya, hit shore is time he's\n a-gittin' hyere. I ain't got no all night fer ta sit.\"\n\n\n The crewman to his left bent over and whispered, \"I'll bet he's gonna\n tell us it's gonna be another postponement.\"\n\n\n \"Iffen he does, I'm jest a-gonna stand up an' yell right out that I\n ain't gonna stand fer hit no longer.\"",
"\"She's too young for you, dear,\" Jane said to her husband.\n\n\n \"Oh, I don't know,\" the steward said. \"Sometimes they're the best, I\n hear.\"\nIII\n\n\n The third mate, whose name was Harry, stood before the mirror combing\n his hair. He had been combing his hair for the last fifteen minutes.\n\n\n \"I suppose the crew is celebrating?\" his wife said.\n\n\n \"I suppose.\"\n\n\n She stood up and walked over to the dresser. Absently she began to\n finger the articles on it.\n\n\n \"You really shouldn't have told them about little Glenn tonight.\"\n\n\n \"Pish-tush.\"\n\n\n \"No, Harry. I mean it. Helen looked at me strangely all through dinner.\n She has three children, you know.\"\n\n\n \"You're imagining things.\"",
"When the third mate saw that his opinion on the wine was not\n immediately to be justified, he settled back in his chair with a little\n sigh of disapproval.\n\n\n \"Well, what do you\nthink\nyour decision will be, Father?\" the steward\n asked.\n\n\n Nestir picked up his knife and fork and cut off a piece of meat.\n \"Hummmm,\" he said. \"It's hard to say. The whole issue involves, as a\n core point, the principle of\ncasta cum mae stotiti\n.\"\n\n\n The first mate nodded sagely.\n\n\n \"The intent, of course, could actually be—ah—\nsub mailloux\n; and in\n that event, naturally, the decision would be even more difficult. I\n wish I could talk to higher authority about it; but of course I haven't\n the time. I'll have to decide something.\"\n\"He had a very pretty wife,\" the third mate said.",
"\"He was a very annoying child,\" his wife said.\n\n\n \"He probably wouldn't have lived, anyway,\" the third mate said. \"Puny\n baby.\"\n\n\n \"That,\" said Nestir, \"is not at all like the Carstar case. Not at all.\n Yours is a question of\nsaliex y cuminzund\n.\"\n\n\n The first mate nodded.\n\n\n \"It seems to me that the whole thing would depend on the intent of the\n strangler.\"\n\n\n \"Captain,\" the steward said, \"you really must let me give you some of\n that salve.\"\n\n\n \"That's very kind of you, but I....\"\n\n\n \"No bother at all,\" the steward said.\n\n\n \"As I see it,\" Nestir said, \"if the intent was the natural maternal\n instinct of the mother to release her child from its duty, then....\"",
"The captain rubbed his nose.\n\n\n \"\nCalex i pundendem hoy\n, my children. 'Secrecy makes for a long life,'\n as it says in the\nJarcon\n.\" Nestir tugged behind him at his cloak.\n\n\n \"I want you all to remember that little story. I want you all to take\n it away from here with you and think about it, tonight, in the privacy\n of your cabins.\n\n\n \"And like the three wise Vergios who went to the Prophet, one of the\n crewmen came to me. He came to me, and he said: 'Father, I am weary of\n sailing.'\n\n\n \"Yes, he said, 'I am weary of sailing.'\n\n\n \"Now, don't you think I don't know that. Every one of you—every\n blessed one of you—is weary of sailing. I know that as well as I know\n my own name, yes.",
"\"After all, one must have done some duty,\" the captain said.\n\n\n \"He wants you to sign it so he can take her in the Changing of the\n Wives,\" Jane said.\n\n\n Nestir fidgeted uncomfortably. \"Well, I'll look at her record,\" he\n said.\n\n\n \"It's an idea,\" the second mate said. \"Otherwise, we'll be short one\n woman.\"\n\n\n \"There wouldn't be one short if\nhe\nhad brought a wife,\" the first\n mate's wife said, looking squarely at the captain.\n\n\n \"Now, Martha. I place duty above pleasure. You're just angry, y'know,\n because you have to stay with your husband.\"",
"\"Oh?\"\n\n\n The second mate took out a cigarette and lit it. \"Can't blow the ship\n up, you know. Look like hell on the record. Hope the captain don't find\n out about it, though. He'll figure the man was neglecting his duty.\"\n\n\n He blew a smoke ring.\n\n\n \"Might even bar him from the Festival.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Harry, \"the captain's funny that way.\"\n\n\n The second mate blew another smoke ring.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Harry said.\n\n\n \"Uh. Harry? Are you really going to take that Wanda girl?\"\n\n\n \"If Nestir lets me.\"",
"\"You don't need to worry about\nyour\nCasting Off, Captain. You can\n leave that to me. I assure you, I have in mind a most ingenious\n method.\"\nThe captain was not visibly cheered; he was still brooding about the\n sad absence of a sense of duty on the part of Nestir. \"I will welcome\n it,\" he said, \"at the proper time, sir. And I certainly hope—\" His\n eyes swept the table. \"I\ncertainly\nhope to be Cast Off by an officer.\n It would be very humiliating, y'know, to have a crew member do it.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, very,\" said the steward.\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" the second mate's wife said, \"whether you better count\n on my husband or not. I have my own plans for him.\"\n\n\n \"This problem of Carstar interests me,\" the third mate said. \"Did I\n ever tell you about my wife? She strangled our second baby.\"",
"\"Oh? Good morning, Captain. I didn't know you were here.\" Then, to the\n priest: \"I'll come back later, Father.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense,\" said the captain. \"Come in.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I had hoped to see the Father for a minute on ... private\n business.\"\n\n\n \"I have to be toddling along,\" said the captain.\n\n\n \"But Captain! I haven't finished telling you about....\"\n\n\n \"I'll just go down and get a cup of coffee,\" the captain said.\n\n\n \"I'll call you when I'm through,\" said Harry.\n\n\n The captain left the room.\n\n\n \"It's about Wanda, Father,\" said the third mate.\n\n\n The priest studied the table top. He rearranged some papers. \"Ah, yes.\n The young girl.\"",
"\"I don't know, yet. He's thinking about it. That's why I want to see\n you. He's going to check your record. And Wanda?\"\n\n\n \"Them stars shore are purty.\"\n\n\n \"Wanda, listen to me.\"\n\n\n \"I'm a-listenin', Haireee.\"\n\n\n \"You're simply going to have to stop carrying that doll around with you\n if you want to be an adult.\"\nIn Nestir's cabin the next morning, the captain and the priest held a\n conference.\n\n\n \"No, Captain. I'm afraid I can't agree to that,\" Nestir said.\n\n\n The captain said, \"Oh, don't be unreasonable, Father. After all, this\n is a ship, y'know. And I am, after all, the captain.\"",
"\"Well, the point I want to make is this: I just wanted to tell you\n that I know what a Festival should be, and the captain and I will do\n everything in our power to make our Casting Off as wonderful as any\n anywhere.\n\n\n \"And I want to tell you that if you'll come to me with your\n suggestions, I'll do all I can to see that we do this thing just the\n way you want it done. I want you to be proud of this Casting Off\n Festival, so you can look back on it and say, uh, uh—this day was the\n real high point of your whole life!\"\n\n\n Everyone but Joanne Marie's husband cheered. He sat glumly muttering to\n himself.\n\n\n Nestir bobbed his shiny head at them and beamed his cherubic smile. And\n noticed that there was a little blonde, one of the crewmen's wives, in\n the front row that had very cute ankles."
],
[
"\"Well, I mean, it's not only about Wanda,\" said Harry. \"You see, my\n wife, Jane, that is....\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" said the priest. He took his pen out of the holder.\n\n\n \"I think, with the proper ... ah ... you know. What I mean is, I think\n she might look with favor on you in the Changing of the Wives, if I\n said a few well chosen words in your behalf.\"\n\n\n \"That is very flattering, my son.\" He returned the pen to the holder.\n \"Such bounty, as it says in the\nJarcon\n, is\ncull tensio\n.\"\n\n\n \"And with your permission, Father....\"\n\n\n \"Ah....\"\n\n\n \"She's a very pretty woman.\"\n\n\n \"Ah.... Quite so.\"",
"\"Oh? Good morning, Captain. I didn't know you were here.\" Then, to the\n priest: \"I'll come back later, Father.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense,\" said the captain. \"Come in.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I had hoped to see the Father for a minute on ... private\n business.\"\n\n\n \"I have to be toddling along,\" said the captain.\n\n\n \"But Captain! I haven't finished telling you about....\"\n\n\n \"I'll just go down and get a cup of coffee,\" the captain said.\n\n\n \"I'll call you when I'm through,\" said Harry.\n\n\n The captain left the room.\n\n\n \"It's about Wanda, Father,\" said the third mate.\n\n\n The priest studied the table top. He rearranged some papers. \"Ah, yes.\n The young girl.\"",
"\"Well, about Wanda. I really shouldn't mention this. But Father, if we\nare\nshort one woman....\"\n\n\n \"Hummmm.\"\n\n\n \"I mean, the girls might think a man gets rusty.\"\n\n\n \"I see what you mean.\" Nestir blinked his eyes. \"It wouldn't be fair,\n all things considered.\"\n\n\n He stood up.\n\n\n \"I may tell you, my son, that, in thinking this matter over last night,\n I decided that Wanda—ah—Miller, yes, has had sufficient duty to merit\n participation in the Festival.\"\n\n\n \"Justice is a priestly virtue,\" Harry said.\n\n\n \"And you really think your wife would...?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, Father.\"\n\n\n \"Well, ahem. But....\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Father?\"",
"\"But she\ndoes\nhave three children.\"\n\n\n \"I mean about her looking at you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh.\"\n\n\n Harry fiddled with his tie without speaking.\n\n\n \"I mean, as much as to say: 'Well, I raised all of mine.'\"\n\n\n \"But honey, about little Glenn. That was an accident, almost. You\n didn't really mean to choke him that hard.\"\n\n\n \"But still ... it ... I mean, there was Helen, looking at me like I\n wasn't doing my duty. You know.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said. \"That's nonsense, Jane. Sheer nonsense. You know what\n the priest said.\"\n\n\n He polished one of his brass buttons with the sleeve of his coat.\n\n\n \"Harry?\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"",
"\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Now, as I was saying, Captain, when the methods used in....\"\n\n\n \"If you'll excuse me, Father, I really should return to duty,\" said the\n crewman.\n\n\n \"Quite all right, my son. Close the door after you.\"\n\n\n \"I must say, fellow, your sense of duty is commendable.\"\n\n\n \"Well, uh, thank you, sir. And thank you, Father, for your time.\"\n\n\n \"Quite all right, my son. That's what I'm here for. Come in as often as\n you like.\"\n\n\n The crewman closed the door after him.\nHe had been gone only a moment, scarcely time for Nestir to get\n properly launched on his account, when Harry, the third mate, knocked\n on the door and was admitted.",
"\"I don't think all that is necessary just to go on duty.\"\n\n\n \"Probably not.\"\n\n\n She walked to the bed and sat down. \"Harry?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, dear?\"\n\n\n \"Don't you really think she's awful young?\"\n\n\n \"Huh-uh.\"\n\n\n \"I mean, why don't you pick someone else? Like Mary? She's awful sweet.\n I'll bet she'd be better.\"\n\n\n \"Probably.\"\n\n\n \"She's a lot of fun.\"\n\n\n He brushed at his hair again. \"Who do you want, Jane?\"",
"\"Say. Harry. Do you suppose your wife would...?\"\nHarry crossed to the second mate and put a hand on his shoulder.\n \"Sorry, old fellow. She's got it in her head to take Nestir.\" He\n shrugged. \"I don't exactly approve, of course, but ... I'm sure if he\n doesn't want her, she'd be glad to hear your offer.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, that's all right,\" John said. \"Don't really matter. Say. By the\n way. Have I told you what I intend to do to the captain? I've got it\n all thought out. You know that saber I picked up on Queglat? Well....\"\n\n\n \"Look. How about telling me another time?\"\n\n\n \"Uh, Sure. If you say so. Uh?\"\n\n\n \"I'm kind of expecting Wanda.\"",
"\"Oh, I don't know.\" She looked down at her legs, raised them up from\n the floor and held them out in front of her. \"I think I'd kind of like\n Nestir. With his funny bald head. I hope he asks me.\"\n\n\n \"I'll mention it to him.\"\n\n\n \"Would you really, Harry? That would be sweet.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, honey.\" He looked down at his watch.\n\n\n \"Harry? Are you going to meet Wanda in the control room?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-huh.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so. Well, remember this, dear: It isn't the day of the\n Changing of the Wives yet. Don't forget.\"\n\n\n \"Honey! You don't think for a minute that....\"",
"\"Yes,\" said the second mate's wife. \"I remember that. I read about it\n in the newspapers.\"\n\n\n \"But it was a case of obvious\nintent\n,\" continued Nestir, \"and\n therefore constituted a clear out attempt to avoid his duty by\n hastening to his Reward.\"\n\n\n Upon hearing the word duty, the captain brightened.\n\n\n \"That,\" he said to Nestir, \"my dear Father, is the cardinal point of\n the whole game, y'know.\" He scratched the back of his left hand. \"Duty.\n And I must say, I think you're being quite short-sighted about the\n Casting Off date. After all, it's not only a question of\nhow\nwe go,\n but also a question of leaving only after having done our duty. And\n that's equally important.\"\n\n\n \"The Synod of Cathau—\" Nestir began.",
"\"I don't know, yet. He's thinking about it. That's why I want to see\n you. He's going to check your record. And Wanda?\"\n\n\n \"Them stars shore are purty.\"\n\n\n \"Wanda, listen to me.\"\n\n\n \"I'm a-listenin', Haireee.\"\n\n\n \"You're simply going to have to stop carrying that doll around with you\n if you want to be an adult.\"\nIn Nestir's cabin the next morning, the captain and the priest held a\n conference.\n\n\n \"No, Captain. I'm afraid I can't agree to that,\" Nestir said.\n\n\n The captain said, \"Oh, don't be unreasonable, Father. After all, this\n is a ship, y'know. And I am, after all, the captain.\"",
"\"Oh?\"\n\n\n The second mate took out a cigarette and lit it. \"Can't blow the ship\n up, you know. Look like hell on the record. Hope the captain don't find\n out about it, though. He'll figure the man was neglecting his duty.\"\n\n\n He blew a smoke ring.\n\n\n \"Might even bar him from the Festival.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Harry, \"the captain's funny that way.\"\n\n\n The second mate blew another smoke ring.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Harry said.\n\n\n \"Uh. Harry? Are you really going to take that Wanda girl?\"\n\n\n \"If Nestir lets me.\"",
"Nestir, the priest, was dressed out in the full ceremonial costume\n of office. His high, strapless boots glistened with polish. His fez\n perched jauntily on his shiny, shaven head. The baldness was symbolic\n of diligent mental application to abstruse points of doctrine.\nCotian\n exentiati pablum re overum est\n: \"Grass grows not in the middle of\n a busy thoroughfare.\" The baldness was the result of the diligent\n application of an effective depilatory. His blood-red cloak had been\n freshly cleaned for the occasion, and it rustled around him in silky\n sibilants.\n\n\n \"Men,\" he said. And then, more loudly, \"Men!\"\n\n\n The hiss and sputter of conversation guttered away.\n\n\n \"Men,\" he said.\n\n\n \"The other evening,\" he said, \"—Gelday it was, to be exact—one of the\n crew came to me with a complaint.\"",
"\"But because he came to me and said, 'Father, I am weary of sailing,'\n I went to the captain, and I said, 'Captain, the men are weary of\n sailing.'\n\n\n \"And then the captain said: 'All right, Father,' he said, 'I will set\n the day for the Festival of the Casting Off!'\"\nThe little fellow was pleased by the rustle of approval from the\n audience. \"God damn, hit's about time!\" Joanne Marie's husband said.\n\n\n Nestir cleared his throat again.\n\n\n \"Hummm. Uh. And the day is not very far distant,\" said Nestir.\n\n\n \"I knowed there was a catch to hit,\" Joanne Marie's husband said.",
"\"I don't care a smidgen,\" he said, \"if en they ayre.\"\n\n\n \"Please,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Joanne Marie,\" he said, \"you know that when I aims ta do somethin',\n I'm jest natcher'lly bound to do hit. An' iffen I aims ta talk....\"\n\n\n \"Here comes the priest. Now, be still.\"\n\n\n The man looked up. \"So he do; an' I'll tell ya, hit shore is time he's\n a-gittin' hyere. I ain't got no all night fer ta sit.\"\n\n\n The crewman to his left bent over and whispered, \"I'll bet he's gonna\n tell us it's gonna be another postponement.\"\n\n\n \"Iffen he does, I'm jest a-gonna stand up an' yell right out that I\n ain't gonna stand fer hit no longer.\"",
"\"Now, dear,\" said Joanne Marie, \"the captain can hear ya, if you're\n gonna talk so loud.\"\n\n\n \"I hope he does; I jest hope he does. He's th' one that's a-keepin' us\n all from our Reward, an' I jest hope he does heyar me, so he'll know\n I'm a-gittin' mighty tyird uv waitin'.\"\n\n\n \"You tell 'im!\" someone said from two rows behind him.\nThe captain, in the officer's section, sat very straight and tall. He\n was studiously ignoring the crew. This confined his field of vision to\n the left half of the recreation area. While the priest stood before the\n speaker's rostrum waiting for silence, the captain reached back with\n great dignity and scratched his right shoulder blade.",
"When the third mate saw that his opinion on the wine was not\n immediately to be justified, he settled back in his chair with a little\n sigh of disapproval.\n\n\n \"Well, what do you\nthink\nyour decision will be, Father?\" the steward\n asked.\n\n\n Nestir picked up his knife and fork and cut off a piece of meat.\n \"Hummmm,\" he said. \"It's hard to say. The whole issue involves, as a\n core point, the principle of\ncasta cum mae stotiti\n.\"\n\n\n The first mate nodded sagely.\n\n\n \"The intent, of course, could actually be—ah—\nsub mailloux\n; and in\n that event, naturally, the decision would be even more difficult. I\n wish I could talk to higher authority about it; but of course I haven't\n the time. I'll have to decide something.\"\n\"He had a very pretty wife,\" the third mate said.",
"\"Husband,\" Wanda said simply. She closed the door behind her and stood\n staring at him.\n\n\n \"Madam,\" he said, \"I hope you will have the kindness not to refer to me\n by that indecent appelation a second time.\"\n\n\n \"Gee. You say the cutest things. I'm awful glad you had to marry me,\n huh.\"\n\n\n The captain stood up, adjusted his coat and his shoulders, and walked\n across the room to the dressing table. He opened the left-hand drawer,\n removed a bottle, poured himself half a water-glass full and drank it\n off.\n\n\n \"Ah,\" he said.\n\n\n He returned to the bed and sat down.\n\n\n \"Can'tcha even say hello ta little ol' me, huh?\" she asked.",
"\"Yes, very.\" Nestir agreed. \"But as I was saying, if it could be\n proven that the culstem fell due to no negligence on his part, either\n consciously or subconsciously, then the obvious conclusion would be\n that no stigma would be attached.\" He speared his meat and chewed it\n thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"But it wasn't at all bloody,\" the wife of the second mate said. \"I\n scarcely think he felt it at all. It happened too fast.\"\n\n\n Nestir swallowed the mouthful of food and washed it down with a gulp of\n wine.\n\n\n \"The problem, my dear Helen,\" he said, \"is one of intent. To raise\n the issue of concomitant agonies is to confuse the whole matter. For\n instance. Take Wilson, in my home state of Koltah. Certainly\nhe\ndied\n as miserable a death as anyone could desire.\"",
"\"Plague take it, Father! Really, now, I must say. The Synod of Cathau!\n Certainly you've misinterpreted that. Anticipation can be a joy,\n y'know: almost equal to the very Reward. Anticipation should spur man\n in duty. It's all noble and self sacrificing.\" He scratched the back of\n his right hand.\n\n\n The second mate had been trying to get a word in edgewise for several\n minutes; he finally succeeded by utilizing the temporary silence\n following the captain's outburst.",
"\"Well, the point I want to make is this: I just wanted to tell you\n that I know what a Festival should be, and the captain and I will do\n everything in our power to make our Casting Off as wonderful as any\n anywhere.\n\n\n \"And I want to tell you that if you'll come to me with your\n suggestions, I'll do all I can to see that we do this thing just the\n way you want it done. I want you to be proud of this Casting Off\n Festival, so you can look back on it and say, uh, uh—this day was the\n real high point of your whole life!\"\n\n\n Everyone but Joanne Marie's husband cheered. He sat glumly muttering to\n himself.\n\n\n Nestir bobbed his shiny head at them and beamed his cherubic smile. And\n noticed that there was a little blonde, one of the crewmen's wives, in\n the front row that had very cute ankles."
],
[
"\"Yes, very.\" Nestir agreed. \"But as I was saying, if it could be\n proven that the culstem fell due to no negligence on his part, either\n consciously or subconsciously, then the obvious conclusion would be\n that no stigma would be attached.\" He speared his meat and chewed it\n thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"But it wasn't at all bloody,\" the wife of the second mate said. \"I\n scarcely think he felt it at all. It happened too fast.\"\n\n\n Nestir swallowed the mouthful of food and washed it down with a gulp of\n wine.\n\n\n \"The problem, my dear Helen,\" he said, \"is one of intent. To raise\n the issue of concomitant agonies is to confuse the whole matter. For\n instance. Take Wilson, in my home state of Koltah. Certainly\nhe\ndied\n as miserable a death as anyone could desire.\"",
"\"He was a very annoying child,\" his wife said.\n\n\n \"He probably wouldn't have lived, anyway,\" the third mate said. \"Puny\n baby.\"\n\n\n \"That,\" said Nestir, \"is not at all like the Carstar case. Not at all.\n Yours is a question of\nsaliex y cuminzund\n.\"\n\n\n The first mate nodded.\n\n\n \"It seems to me that the whole thing would depend on the intent of the\n strangler.\"\n\n\n \"Captain,\" the steward said, \"you really must let me give you some of\n that salve.\"\n\n\n \"That's very kind of you, but I....\"\n\n\n \"No bother at all,\" the steward said.\n\n\n \"As I see it,\" Nestir said, \"if the intent was the natural maternal\n instinct of the mother to release her child from its duty, then....\"",
"Nestir, the priest, was dressed out in the full ceremonial costume\n of office. His high, strapless boots glistened with polish. His fez\n perched jauntily on his shiny, shaven head. The baldness was symbolic\n of diligent mental application to abstruse points of doctrine.\nCotian\n exentiati pablum re overum est\n: \"Grass grows not in the middle of\n a busy thoroughfare.\" The baldness was the result of the diligent\n application of an effective depilatory. His blood-red cloak had been\n freshly cleaned for the occasion, and it rustled around him in silky\n sibilants.\n\n\n \"Men,\" he said. And then, more loudly, \"Men!\"\n\n\n The hiss and sputter of conversation guttered away.\n\n\n \"Men,\" he said.\n\n\n \"The other evening,\" he said, \"—Gelday it was, to be exact—one of the\n crew came to me with a complaint.\"",
"\"All right, so I am. But it's true. And if Carstar hadn't been killed,\n there would have been two short.\" She shot a wicked glance at Nestir.\n \"Why don't you and him share a woman—\"\n\n\n \"Martha!\"\n\n\n \"Although the Prophet knows what woman in her right mind would consent\n to....\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" said Nestir hesitantly.\n\n\n \"Listen,\" the third mate said, \"the second's right. If you don't sign\n it, someone will have to do without a woman.\"\n\n\n Nestir blushed. \"I'll look it over very carefully, but you must realize\n that the priestcraft....\"\n\n\n \"Actually, in a way, it would be her duty to, you see. Think of it like\n that: as her way to do her duty.\"",
"\"But because he came to me and said, 'Father, I am weary of sailing,'\n I went to the captain, and I said, 'Captain, the men are weary of\n sailing.'\n\n\n \"And then the captain said: 'All right, Father,' he said, 'I will set\n the day for the Festival of the Casting Off!'\"\nThe little fellow was pleased by the rustle of approval from the\n audience. \"God damn, hit's about time!\" Joanne Marie's husband said.\n\n\n Nestir cleared his throat again.\n\n\n \"Hummm. Uh. And the day is not very far distant,\" said Nestir.\n\n\n \"I knowed there was a catch to hit,\" Joanne Marie's husband said.",
"\"I don't know, yet. He's thinking about it. That's why I want to see\n you. He's going to check your record. And Wanda?\"\n\n\n \"Them stars shore are purty.\"\n\n\n \"Wanda, listen to me.\"\n\n\n \"I'm a-listenin', Haireee.\"\n\n\n \"You're simply going to have to stop carrying that doll around with you\n if you want to be an adult.\"\nIn Nestir's cabin the next morning, the captain and the priest held a\n conference.\n\n\n \"No, Captain. I'm afraid I can't agree to that,\" Nestir said.\n\n\n The captain said, \"Oh, don't be unreasonable, Father. After all, this\n is a ship, y'know. And I am, after all, the captain.\"",
"\"But she\ndoes\nhave three children.\"\n\n\n \"I mean about her looking at you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh.\"\n\n\n Harry fiddled with his tie without speaking.\n\n\n \"I mean, as much as to say: 'Well, I raised all of mine.'\"\n\n\n \"But honey, about little Glenn. That was an accident, almost. You\n didn't really mean to choke him that hard.\"\n\n\n \"But still ... it ... I mean, there was Helen, looking at me like I\n wasn't doing my duty. You know.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said. \"That's nonsense, Jane. Sheer nonsense. You know what\n the priest said.\"\n\n\n He polished one of his brass buttons with the sleeve of his coat.\n\n\n \"Harry?\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"",
"\"Yes,\" said the second mate's wife. \"I remember that. I read about it\n in the newspapers.\"\n\n\n \"But it was a case of obvious\nintent\n,\" continued Nestir, \"and\n therefore constituted a clear out attempt to avoid his duty by\n hastening to his Reward.\"\n\n\n Upon hearing the word duty, the captain brightened.\n\n\n \"That,\" he said to Nestir, \"my dear Father, is the cardinal point of\n the whole game, y'know.\" He scratched the back of his left hand. \"Duty.\n And I must say, I think you're being quite short-sighted about the\n Casting Off date. After all, it's not only a question of\nhow\nwe go,\n but also a question of leaving only after having done our duty. And\n that's equally important.\"\n\n\n \"The Synod of Cathau—\" Nestir began.",
"\"Oh?\"\n\n\n The second mate took out a cigarette and lit it. \"Can't blow the ship\n up, you know. Look like hell on the record. Hope the captain don't find\n out about it, though. He'll figure the man was neglecting his duty.\"\n\n\n He blew a smoke ring.\n\n\n \"Might even bar him from the Festival.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Harry, \"the captain's funny that way.\"\n\n\n The second mate blew another smoke ring.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Harry said.\n\n\n \"Uh. Harry? Are you really going to take that Wanda girl?\"\n\n\n \"If Nestir lets me.\"",
"\"Say. Harry. Do you suppose your wife would...?\"\nHarry crossed to the second mate and put a hand on his shoulder.\n \"Sorry, old fellow. She's got it in her head to take Nestir.\" He\n shrugged. \"I don't exactly approve, of course, but ... I'm sure if he\n doesn't want her, she'd be glad to hear your offer.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, that's all right,\" John said. \"Don't really matter. Say. By the\n way. Have I told you what I intend to do to the captain? I've got it\n all thought out. You know that saber I picked up on Queglat? Well....\"\n\n\n \"Look. How about telling me another time?\"\n\n\n \"Uh, Sure. If you say so. Uh?\"\n\n\n \"I'm kind of expecting Wanda.\"",
"\"Well, the point I want to make is this: I just wanted to tell you\n that I know what a Festival should be, and the captain and I will do\n everything in our power to make our Casting Off as wonderful as any\n anywhere.\n\n\n \"And I want to tell you that if you'll come to me with your\n suggestions, I'll do all I can to see that we do this thing just the\n way you want it done. I want you to be proud of this Casting Off\n Festival, so you can look back on it and say, uh, uh—this day was the\n real high point of your whole life!\"\n\n\n Everyone but Joanne Marie's husband cheered. He sat glumly muttering to\n himself.\n\n\n Nestir bobbed his shiny head at them and beamed his cherubic smile. And\n noticed that there was a little blonde, one of the crewmen's wives, in\n the front row that had very cute ankles.",
"\"Well, I'll be damned,\" Joanne Marie's husband said loudly.\n\n\n Nestir cleared his throat. \"It was about the Casting Off. That's why\n I called you all together today.\" He stared away, at a point over the\n head and to the rear of the audience.\n\n\n \"It puts me in mind of the parable of the six Vergios.\"\n\n\n Joanne Marie's husband sighed deeply.\n\n\n \"Three, you will recall, were wise. When Prophet was at Meizque, they\n came to him and said, 'Prophet, we are afflicted. We have great sores\n upon our bodies.' The Prophet looked at them and did see that it\nwas\ntrue. Then he blessed them and took out His knife and lay open their\n sores. For which the three wise Vergios were passing grateful. And\n within the last week, they were dead of infection. But three were\n foolish and hid their sores; and these three did live.\"",
"When the third mate saw that his opinion on the wine was not\n immediately to be justified, he settled back in his chair with a little\n sigh of disapproval.\n\n\n \"Well, what do you\nthink\nyour decision will be, Father?\" the steward\n asked.\n\n\n Nestir picked up his knife and fork and cut off a piece of meat.\n \"Hummmm,\" he said. \"It's hard to say. The whole issue involves, as a\n core point, the principle of\ncasta cum mae stotiti\n.\"\n\n\n The first mate nodded sagely.\n\n\n \"The intent, of course, could actually be—ah—\nsub mailloux\n; and in\n that event, naturally, the decision would be even more difficult. I\n wish I could talk to higher authority about it; but of course I haven't\n the time. I'll have to decide something.\"\n\"He had a very pretty wife,\" the third mate said.",
"\"Oh, I don't know.\" She looked down at her legs, raised them up from\n the floor and held them out in front of her. \"I think I'd kind of like\n Nestir. With his funny bald head. I hope he asks me.\"\n\n\n \"I'll mention it to him.\"\n\n\n \"Would you really, Harry? That would be sweet.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, honey.\" He looked down at his watch.\n\n\n \"Harry? Are you going to meet Wanda in the control room?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-huh.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so. Well, remember this, dear: It isn't the day of the\n Changing of the Wives yet. Don't forget.\"\n\n\n \"Honey! You don't think for a minute that....\"",
"Nestir rubbed his bald head. \"Sir,\" he said by way of preamble, \"I know\n you have the greatest sensibility in questions of duty.\"\n\n\n \"That's quite so, y'know. I pride myself upon it, if I do say so.\"\n\n\n \"Exactly.\nArgot y calpex.\nNo sacrifice is too great.\"\n\n\n \"True; true.\"\n\n\n \"Well, then, say the first day of Wenslaus, that would be—ah, a\n Zentahday—I may depend upon you to wed Wanda Miller, the bosun's\n daughter, yes?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" said the captain.\n\n\n \"Come now, sir. I realize she is the daughter of a crewman, but—\"\n\n\n \"Father,\" said the captain, \"did I ever tell you about the time I led\n an expeditionary force against Zelthalta?\"",
"\"Well, about Wanda. I really shouldn't mention this. But Father, if we\nare\nshort one woman....\"\n\n\n \"Hummmm.\"\n\n\n \"I mean, the girls might think a man gets rusty.\"\n\n\n \"I see what you mean.\" Nestir blinked his eyes. \"It wouldn't be fair,\n all things considered.\"\n\n\n He stood up.\n\n\n \"I may tell you, my son, that, in thinking this matter over last night,\n I decided that Wanda—ah—Miller, yes, has had sufficient duty to merit\n participation in the Festival.\"\n\n\n \"Justice is a priestly virtue,\" Harry said.\n\n\n \"And you really think your wife would...?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, Father.\"\n\n\n \"Well, ahem. But....\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Father?\"",
"While they were still cheering and stomping and otherwise expressing\n their enthusiasm and approval, Nestir walked off the speaker's platform\n and into the officer's corridor. He wiped his forehead indecorously on\n the hem of his cloak and felt quite relieved that the announcement was\n over with and the public speaking done.\nII\n\n\n Dinner that evening was a gala occasion aboard the ship. The steward\n ordered the holiday feast prepared in celebration of Nestir's\n announcement. And, for the officers, he broke out of the special cellar\n the last case allotment for Crew One of the delicate Colta Barauche\n ('94). He ordered the messman to put a bottle of it to the right of\n each plate.\n\n\n The captain came down from his stateroom after the meal had begun. He\n nodded curtly to the officers when he entered the mess hall, walked\n directly to his place at the head of the table, sat down and morosely\n began to work the cork out of his wine bottle with his teeth.",
"\"Quite right,\" said the captain. \"You ought to be proud.\"\nThe first mate slammed his napkin in the middle of his food and stalked\n out of the mess hall.\n\n\n \"Quite touchy today,\" Nestir observed.\n\n\n \"By the way,\" the third mate said. \"Wanda gave me a petition to give to\n you, Father.\"\n\n\n \"Wanda?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. She's sixteen, now.\"\n\n\n \"Wanda who?\" the steward asked.\n\n\n \"Wanda Miller, the bosun's daughter.\"\n\n\n \"I know her,\" Helen said.\n\n\n \"She's the oldest child on the ship, and she wants you to sign her\n adult petition so she can be in the Festival, Father.\"\n\n\n \"She's so young....\"\n\n\n \"Sixteen, Father.\"",
"The captain rubbed his nose.\n\n\n \"\nCalex i pundendem hoy\n, my children. 'Secrecy makes for a long life,'\n as it says in the\nJarcon\n.\" Nestir tugged behind him at his cloak.\n\n\n \"I want you all to remember that little story. I want you all to take\n it away from here with you and think about it, tonight, in the privacy\n of your cabins.\n\n\n \"And like the three wise Vergios who went to the Prophet, one of the\n crewmen came to me. He came to me, and he said: 'Father, I am weary of\n sailing.'\n\n\n \"Yes, he said, 'I am weary of sailing.'\n\n\n \"Now, don't you think I don't know that. Every one of you—every\n blessed one of you—is weary of sailing. I know that as well as I know\n my own name, yes.",
"Having done that, he switched on the space viewer. The steady buzz of\n the equipment warming sounded in his ears. Wanda would be sure to want\n to look at the stars. She was simple minded.\n\n\n \"Hello.\"\n\n\n He swiveled around. \"Oh, hello, Wanda, honey.\"\n\n\n \"Hello, Haireee. Are you glad little ol' me could come, huh?\"\n\n\n \"Sure am.\"\n\n\n \"Me, too. Can I look at the—oh. It's already on.\"\n\n\n \"Uh-huh. Look. Wanda.\"\n\n\n \"Hum?\"\n\n\n \"I talked to Nestir today.\"\n\n\n \"Goody. What did he say, huh? I can be an adult and get to play in the\n Festival, can I?\""
]
] |
train
|
23592
|
[
"How is Mary feeling at the beginning of the story?",
"How is Phil feeling at the beginning of the story?",
"Why does Mary ask Phil to go to the rocket as soon as they can see it?",
"What do you think life is like for Mary and Phil after the events of the story?",
"What prompted the general to take Phil off of the mission?",
"Which of these is a reason that Mary would have wanted Sammy to replace Phil?",
"What were the unanswered questions that the men had after the weather briefing?",
"How long was Mary standing outside?",
"What is the most salient part of the final scene the reflects on the initial conversation?",
"What would have happened if Phil had gone on the mission?"
] |
[
[
"She is desperate for Phil not to leave.",
"She is angry at Phil for not taking her seriously.",
"She is frustrated with Phil for not letting Sammy replace him.",
"She is depressed because she thinks she is going to lose Phil forever."
],
[
"He is nervous about the mission but hopeful that it will be a success and he could return home.",
"He is uncertain if he is the right person to go on this mission.",
"He is upset by the way Mary stifles his hopes.",
"He is too excited about fulfilling his dream that he ignores everything else going on around him."
],
[
"She was not allowed to stay there, as a civilian, so she had to leave.",
"She did not want him to be late for his very important mission.",
"She needed to drop them off so she could leave.",
"She did not want to prolong the painful goodbye."
],
[
"Mary is thankful that Phil did not leave, and their lives continue as normal.",
"They become closer friends with Sammy who is thankful to have gone on the mission.",
"Phil closes himself off, resenting Mary for forcing his hand.",
"Mary helps Phil find another mission closer to home."
],
[
"Phil was too torn about his disagreement with his wife to be in the right headspace.",
"Phil had expressed concerns about the safety of the mission compared to the unmanned missions.",
"Phil's hands were shaking, so he could not safely operate the controls.",
"Phil was too nervous and was not thinking straight."
],
[
"She knows that Sammy is more careful, and would have a greater chance at mission success.",
"She thought she could protect herself if someone else went.",
"She thought that Sammy was more qualified.",
"She thought but his lack of family showed his dedication to his job."
],
[
"They did not know how the public would react to the event.",
"They did not know how well they could predict weather so far away.",
"They were not sure if Phil could go on the mission.",
"There is still level uncertainty in the success of the mission."
],
[
"She had gone home but came back for the launch.",
"For almost half a day.",
"For a couple hours as Phil went through pre-boarding procedure.",
"A full 24 hours."
],
[
"Mary promising she would only stay with him if he did not go",
"Phil knowing he wouldn't be the same if he did not go on the mission",
"The fact that their love was stronger than Phil's independent goals",
"Phil decided not to go on the mission in the end"
],
[
"Mary would have forgiven him for following his dreams and they would work together to continue their relationship.",
"His anger would've caused him to make a mistake that would have ended in his death.",
"He would have been ecstatic to finally have lived his dream, and gone on to live his life.",
"He would still have been disappointed after fulfilling his dream because of how things ended with Mary."
]
] |
[
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3,
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[
"\"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three\n years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing\n would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it\n hard.\" He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of\n her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He\n released her and stood up.\n\n\n \"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?\"",
"She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his\n cheeks. \"Thank, God,\" she said. \"It doesn't matter, darling. The only\n thing that matters is you didn't go.\"\n\n\n \"You're right, Mary,\" he said. His voice was low—so low she could\n hardly hear him. \"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now.\" He stood with\n his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked\n toward the car.\nTHE END",
"\"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week,\" Phil said, and smiled.\n They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,\n and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He\n turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a\n cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the\n windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished\n surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until\n the eye lost the tip against the stars.\n\n\n \"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I've never seen her before,\" she said. \"Hadn't you better go?\" Her\n voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.\n \"Please go now, Phil,\" she said.",
"His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not\n theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too\n far. She said, \"You look fine, Phil. You look just right.\" She managed a\n smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash\n tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.\n\n\n He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her\n face until she was looking into his eyes. \"You're the most beautiful\n girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did,\" she said, finishing the\n ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat\n beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped\n smiling.",
"\"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might\n mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your\n life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our\n success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension\n wrong with you. Want to tell me?\"\nOutside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of\n the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;\n and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they\n had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt\n that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond\n the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.\n Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of\n wire. But her eyes were on the ship.",
"\"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the\n wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was\n possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.\n It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous\n dream!\"\n\n\n He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.\n \"Mary, listen to me,\" he said. \"It isn't a dream. It's real. There's\n nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no\n man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.\n If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky\n again. I'd be through.\"\n\n\n She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in\n her eyes.",
"He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,\n her head buried against his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Good-by, darling,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Wish me luck, Mary?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Yes, good luck, Phil,\" she said. He opened the car door and got out.\n The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell\n of the rocket waiting silently for flight.\n\n\n \"Mary, I—\" he began, and then turned and strode toward the\n administration building without looking back.\nInside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The\n tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that\n Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle\n stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to\n him and took his hand.",
"And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the\n administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed\n into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,\n alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the\n rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the\n ground and then disappeared through a small port.\n\n\n Mary waved to him. \"Good-by,\" she said to herself, but the words stuck\n tight in her throat.",
"The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the\n fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,\n from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar\n that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned\n rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.\nFor a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the\n heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to\n herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.\n\n\n \"Phil! Oh, Phil.\" She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and\n over.\n\n\n \"They wouldn't let me go, Mary,\" he said finally. \"The general would not\n let me go.\"",
"The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There\n were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly\n connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in\n front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the\n last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had\n gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.\n He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.\n\n\n The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.\n\n\n \"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway\n to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours\n until—\"",
"\"Let's go, if you're still going,\" she finally said.\nThey drove through the streets of the small town with its small\n bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was\n a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It\n existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off\n zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the\n ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed\n ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,\n if such was its destiny.",
"\"Yes, I'll come to say good-by.\" She paused and dropped her eyes. \"Phil,\n if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't\n be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my\n life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I\n love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not\n the noble sort of wife.\"\n\n\n She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee\n table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the\n lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching\n her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.\n\n\n \"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary,\" Phil said. His\n voice was dry and low. \"I didn't know you felt this way about it.\"",
"\"Honey, look at me,\" he said. \"It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it\n isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they\n wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five\n un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch.\"\n\n\n She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her\n wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.\n\n\n \"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a\n wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!\" She was holding his\n arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.",
"Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then\n the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same\n unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and\n handshakes. They were ready now.\n\n\n \"Phil,\" the general said, and took him aside.\n\n\n \"Sir?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you\n better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the\n psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,\n Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir. There's nothing wrong,\" Phil said, but his voice didn't carry\n conviction. He reached for a cigarette.",
"\"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking\n at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man\n again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first\n adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,\n colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had\n it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little.\"",
"Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science\n Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nBREAKAWAY\nBY STANLEY GIMBLE\nIllustrated by Freas\nShe surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting\n what she wanted.\nPhil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his\n long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious\n and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines\n around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his\n wife.\n\n\n \"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?\"",
"\"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all\n set, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess,\" Phil said.\n\n\n \"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by\n the radar.\"\n\n\n As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his\n hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy\n waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say\n something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come\n later.\n\n\n \"Mr. Secretary,\" the general said, \"this is Colonel Conover. He'll be\n the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the\n Secretary of Defense.\"\n\n\n \"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you,\" Phil said.",
"Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led\n across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they\n could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the\n take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching\n out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the\n guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and\n then saluted. \"Good luck, colonel,\" he said, and shook Phil's hand."
],
[
"His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not\n theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too\n far. She said, \"You look fine, Phil. You look just right.\" She managed a\n smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash\n tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.\n\n\n He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her\n face until she was looking into his eyes. \"You're the most beautiful\n girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did,\" she said, finishing the\n ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat\n beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped\n smiling.",
"Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then\n the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same\n unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and\n handshakes. They were ready now.\n\n\n \"Phil,\" the general said, and took him aside.\n\n\n \"Sir?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you\n better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the\n psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,\n Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir. There's nothing wrong,\" Phil said, but his voice didn't carry\n conviction. He reached for a cigarette.",
"\"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might\n mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your\n life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our\n success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension\n wrong with you. Want to tell me?\"\nOutside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of\n the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;\n and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they\n had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt\n that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond\n the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.\n Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of\n wire. But her eyes were on the ship.",
"\"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week,\" Phil said, and smiled.\n They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,\n and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He\n turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a\n cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the\n windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished\n surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until\n the eye lost the tip against the stars.\n\n\n \"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I've never seen her before,\" she said. \"Hadn't you better go?\" Her\n voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.\n \"Please go now, Phil,\" she said.",
"\"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all\n set, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess,\" Phil said.\n\n\n \"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by\n the radar.\"\n\n\n As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his\n hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy\n waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say\n something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come\n later.\n\n\n \"Mr. Secretary,\" the general said, \"this is Colonel Conover. He'll be\n the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the\n Secretary of Defense.\"\n\n\n \"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you,\" Phil said.",
"He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,\n her head buried against his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Good-by, darling,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Wish me luck, Mary?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Yes, good luck, Phil,\" she said. He opened the car door and got out.\n The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell\n of the rocket waiting silently for flight.\n\n\n \"Mary, I—\" he began, and then turned and strode toward the\n administration building without looking back.\nInside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The\n tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that\n Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle\n stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to\n him and took his hand.",
"The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There\n were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly\n connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in\n front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the\n last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had\n gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.\n He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.\n\n\n The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.\n\n\n \"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway\n to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours\n until—\"",
"The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the\n fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,\n from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar\n that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned\n rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.\nFor a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the\n heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to\n herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.\n\n\n \"Phil! Oh, Phil.\" She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and\n over.\n\n\n \"They wouldn't let me go, Mary,\" he said finally. \"The general would not\n let me go.\"",
"Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led\n across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they\n could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the\n take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching\n out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the\n guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and\n then saluted. \"Good luck, colonel,\" he said, and shook Phil's hand.",
"\"Honey, look at me,\" he said. \"It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it\n isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they\n wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five\n un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch.\"\n\n\n She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her\n wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.\n\n\n \"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a\n wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!\" She was holding his\n arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.",
"She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his\n cheeks. \"Thank, God,\" she said. \"It doesn't matter, darling. The only\n thing that matters is you didn't go.\"\n\n\n \"You're right, Mary,\" he said. His voice was low—so low she could\n hardly hear him. \"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now.\" He stood with\n his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked\n toward the car.\nTHE END",
"\"Let's go, if you're still going,\" she finally said.\nThey drove through the streets of the small town with its small\n bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was\n a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It\n existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off\n zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the\n ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed\n ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,\n if such was its destiny.",
"\"Yes, I'll come to say good-by.\" She paused and dropped her eyes. \"Phil,\n if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't\n be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my\n life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I\n love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not\n the noble sort of wife.\"\n\n\n She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee\n table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the\n lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching\n her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.\n\n\n \"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary,\" Phil said. His\n voice was dry and low. \"I didn't know you felt this way about it.\"",
"\"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three\n years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing\n would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it\n hard.\" He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of\n her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He\n released her and stood up.\n\n\n \"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?\"",
"\"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking\n at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man\n again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first\n adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,\n colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had\n it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little.\"",
"\"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the\n wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was\n possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.\n It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous\n dream!\"\n\n\n He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.\n \"Mary, listen to me,\" he said. \"It isn't a dream. It's real. There's\n nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no\n man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.\n If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky\n again. I'd be through.\"\n\n\n She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in\n her eyes.",
"Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science\n Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nBREAKAWAY\nBY STANLEY GIMBLE\nIllustrated by Freas\nShe surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting\n what she wanted.\nPhil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his\n long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious\n and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines\n around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his\n wife.\n\n\n \"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?\"",
"And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the\n administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed\n into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,\n alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the\n rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the\n ground and then disappeared through a small port.\n\n\n Mary waved to him. \"Good-by,\" she said to herself, but the words stuck\n tight in her throat."
],
[
"\"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week,\" Phil said, and smiled.\n They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,\n and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He\n turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a\n cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the\n windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished\n surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until\n the eye lost the tip against the stars.\n\n\n \"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I've never seen her before,\" she said. \"Hadn't you better go?\" Her\n voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.\n \"Please go now, Phil,\" she said.",
"\"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might\n mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your\n life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our\n success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension\n wrong with you. Want to tell me?\"\nOutside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of\n the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;\n and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they\n had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt\n that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond\n the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.\n Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of\n wire. But her eyes were on the ship.",
"\"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three\n years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing\n would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it\n hard.\" He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of\n her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He\n released her and stood up.\n\n\n \"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?\"",
"The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There\n were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly\n connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in\n front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the\n last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had\n gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.\n He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.\n\n\n The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.\n\n\n \"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway\n to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours\n until—\"",
"He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,\n her head buried against his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Good-by, darling,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Wish me luck, Mary?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Yes, good luck, Phil,\" she said. He opened the car door and got out.\n The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell\n of the rocket waiting silently for flight.\n\n\n \"Mary, I—\" he began, and then turned and strode toward the\n administration building without looking back.\nInside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The\n tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that\n Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle\n stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to\n him and took his hand.",
"The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the\n fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,\n from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar\n that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned\n rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.\nFor a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the\n heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to\n herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.\n\n\n \"Phil! Oh, Phil.\" She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and\n over.\n\n\n \"They wouldn't let me go, Mary,\" he said finally. \"The general would not\n let me go.\"",
"\"Yes, I'll come to say good-by.\" She paused and dropped her eyes. \"Phil,\n if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't\n be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my\n life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I\n love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not\n the noble sort of wife.\"\n\n\n She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee\n table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the\n lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching\n her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.\n\n\n \"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary,\" Phil said. His\n voice was dry and low. \"I didn't know you felt this way about it.\"",
"\"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the\n wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was\n possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.\n It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous\n dream!\"\n\n\n He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.\n \"Mary, listen to me,\" he said. \"It isn't a dream. It's real. There's\n nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no\n man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.\n If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky\n again. I'd be through.\"\n\n\n She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in\n her eyes.",
"Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then\n the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same\n unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and\n handshakes. They were ready now.\n\n\n \"Phil,\" the general said, and took him aside.\n\n\n \"Sir?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you\n better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the\n psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,\n Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir. There's nothing wrong,\" Phil said, but his voice didn't carry\n conviction. He reached for a cigarette.",
"And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the\n administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed\n into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,\n alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the\n rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the\n ground and then disappeared through a small port.\n\n\n Mary waved to him. \"Good-by,\" she said to herself, but the words stuck\n tight in her throat.",
"\"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all\n set, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess,\" Phil said.\n\n\n \"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by\n the radar.\"\n\n\n As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his\n hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy\n waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say\n something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come\n later.\n\n\n \"Mr. Secretary,\" the general said, \"this is Colonel Conover. He'll be\n the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the\n Secretary of Defense.\"\n\n\n \"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you,\" Phil said.",
"\"Honey, look at me,\" he said. \"It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it\n isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they\n wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five\n un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch.\"\n\n\n She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her\n wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.\n\n\n \"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a\n wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!\" She was holding his\n arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.",
"\"Let's go, if you're still going,\" she finally said.\nThey drove through the streets of the small town with its small\n bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was\n a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It\n existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off\n zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the\n ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed\n ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,\n if such was its destiny.",
"Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led\n across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they\n could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the\n take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching\n out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the\n guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and\n then saluted. \"Good luck, colonel,\" he said, and shook Phil's hand.",
"\"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking\n at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man\n again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first\n adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,\n colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had\n it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little.\"",
"His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not\n theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too\n far. She said, \"You look fine, Phil. You look just right.\" She managed a\n smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash\n tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.\n\n\n He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her\n face until she was looking into his eyes. \"You're the most beautiful\n girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did,\" she said, finishing the\n ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat\n beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped\n smiling.",
"She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his\n cheeks. \"Thank, God,\" she said. \"It doesn't matter, darling. The only\n thing that matters is you didn't go.\"\n\n\n \"You're right, Mary,\" he said. His voice was low—so low she could\n hardly hear him. \"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now.\" He stood with\n his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked\n toward the car.\nTHE END",
"Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science\n Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nBREAKAWAY\nBY STANLEY GIMBLE\nIllustrated by Freas\nShe surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting\n what she wanted.\nPhil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his\n long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious\n and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines\n around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his\n wife.\n\n\n \"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?\""
],
[
"She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his\n cheeks. \"Thank, God,\" she said. \"It doesn't matter, darling. The only\n thing that matters is you didn't go.\"\n\n\n \"You're right, Mary,\" he said. His voice was low—so low she could\n hardly hear him. \"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now.\" He stood with\n his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked\n toward the car.\nTHE END",
"His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not\n theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too\n far. She said, \"You look fine, Phil. You look just right.\" She managed a\n smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash\n tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.\n\n\n He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her\n face until she was looking into his eyes. \"You're the most beautiful\n girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did,\" she said, finishing the\n ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat\n beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped\n smiling.",
"\"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might\n mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your\n life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our\n success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension\n wrong with you. Want to tell me?\"\nOutside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of\n the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;\n and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they\n had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt\n that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond\n the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.\n Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of\n wire. But her eyes were on the ship.",
"\"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week,\" Phil said, and smiled.\n They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,\n and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He\n turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a\n cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the\n windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished\n surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until\n the eye lost the tip against the stars.\n\n\n \"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I've never seen her before,\" she said. \"Hadn't you better go?\" Her\n voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.\n \"Please go now, Phil,\" she said.",
"\"Yes, I'll come to say good-by.\" She paused and dropped her eyes. \"Phil,\n if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't\n be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my\n life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I\n love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not\n the noble sort of wife.\"\n\n\n She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee\n table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the\n lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching\n her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.\n\n\n \"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary,\" Phil said. His\n voice was dry and low. \"I didn't know you felt this way about it.\"",
"He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,\n her head buried against his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Good-by, darling,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Wish me luck, Mary?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Yes, good luck, Phil,\" she said. He opened the car door and got out.\n The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell\n of the rocket waiting silently for flight.\n\n\n \"Mary, I—\" he began, and then turned and strode toward the\n administration building without looking back.\nInside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The\n tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that\n Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle\n stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to\n him and took his hand.",
"\"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three\n years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing\n would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it\n hard.\" He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of\n her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He\n released her and stood up.\n\n\n \"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?\"",
"Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then\n the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same\n unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and\n handshakes. They were ready now.\n\n\n \"Phil,\" the general said, and took him aside.\n\n\n \"Sir?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you\n better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the\n psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,\n Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir. There's nothing wrong,\" Phil said, but his voice didn't carry\n conviction. He reached for a cigarette.",
"The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the\n fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,\n from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar\n that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned\n rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.\nFor a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the\n heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to\n herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.\n\n\n \"Phil! Oh, Phil.\" She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and\n over.\n\n\n \"They wouldn't let me go, Mary,\" he said finally. \"The general would not\n let me go.\"",
"\"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the\n wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was\n possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.\n It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous\n dream!\"\n\n\n He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.\n \"Mary, listen to me,\" he said. \"It isn't a dream. It's real. There's\n nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no\n man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.\n If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky\n again. I'd be through.\"\n\n\n She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in\n her eyes.",
"The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There\n were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly\n connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in\n front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the\n last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had\n gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.\n He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.\n\n\n The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.\n\n\n \"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway\n to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours\n until—\"",
"\"Let's go, if you're still going,\" she finally said.\nThey drove through the streets of the small town with its small\n bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was\n a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It\n existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off\n zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the\n ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed\n ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,\n if such was its destiny.",
"\"Honey, look at me,\" he said. \"It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it\n isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they\n wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five\n un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch.\"\n\n\n She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her\n wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.\n\n\n \"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a\n wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!\" She was holding his\n arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.",
"\"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all\n set, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess,\" Phil said.\n\n\n \"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by\n the radar.\"\n\n\n As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his\n hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy\n waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say\n something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come\n later.\n\n\n \"Mr. Secretary,\" the general said, \"this is Colonel Conover. He'll be\n the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the\n Secretary of Defense.\"\n\n\n \"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you,\" Phil said.",
"And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the\n administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed\n into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,\n alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the\n rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the\n ground and then disappeared through a small port.\n\n\n Mary waved to him. \"Good-by,\" she said to herself, but the words stuck\n tight in her throat.",
"Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science\n Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nBREAKAWAY\nBY STANLEY GIMBLE\nIllustrated by Freas\nShe surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting\n what she wanted.\nPhil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his\n long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious\n and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines\n around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his\n wife.\n\n\n \"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?\"",
"Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led\n across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they\n could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the\n take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching\n out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the\n guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and\n then saluted. \"Good luck, colonel,\" he said, and shook Phil's hand.",
"\"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking\n at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man\n again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first\n adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,\n colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had\n it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little.\""
],
[
"Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then\n the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same\n unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and\n handshakes. They were ready now.\n\n\n \"Phil,\" the general said, and took him aside.\n\n\n \"Sir?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you\n better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the\n psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,\n Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir. There's nothing wrong,\" Phil said, but his voice didn't carry\n conviction. He reached for a cigarette.",
"The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There\n were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly\n connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in\n front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the\n last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had\n gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.\n He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.\n\n\n The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.\n\n\n \"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway\n to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours\n until—\"",
"\"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all\n set, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess,\" Phil said.\n\n\n \"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by\n the radar.\"\n\n\n As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his\n hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy\n waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say\n something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come\n later.\n\n\n \"Mr. Secretary,\" the general said, \"this is Colonel Conover. He'll be\n the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the\n Secretary of Defense.\"\n\n\n \"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you,\" Phil said.",
"Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led\n across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they\n could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the\n take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching\n out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the\n guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and\n then saluted. \"Good luck, colonel,\" he said, and shook Phil's hand.",
"The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the\n fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,\n from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar\n that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned\n rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.\nFor a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the\n heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to\n herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.\n\n\n \"Phil! Oh, Phil.\" She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and\n over.\n\n\n \"They wouldn't let me go, Mary,\" he said finally. \"The general would not\n let me go.\"",
"\"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might\n mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your\n life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our\n success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension\n wrong with you. Want to tell me?\"\nOutside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of\n the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;\n and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they\n had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt\n that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond\n the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.\n Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of\n wire. But her eyes were on the ship.",
"\"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week,\" Phil said, and smiled.\n They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,\n and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He\n turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a\n cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the\n windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished\n surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until\n the eye lost the tip against the stars.\n\n\n \"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I've never seen her before,\" she said. \"Hadn't you better go?\" Her\n voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.\n \"Please go now, Phil,\" she said.",
"He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,\n her head buried against his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Good-by, darling,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Wish me luck, Mary?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Yes, good luck, Phil,\" she said. He opened the car door and got out.\n The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell\n of the rocket waiting silently for flight.\n\n\n \"Mary, I—\" he began, and then turned and strode toward the\n administration building without looking back.\nInside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The\n tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that\n Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle\n stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to\n him and took his hand.",
"\"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three\n years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing\n would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it\n hard.\" He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of\n her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He\n released her and stood up.\n\n\n \"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?\"",
"\"Yes, I'll come to say good-by.\" She paused and dropped her eyes. \"Phil,\n if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't\n be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my\n life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I\n love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not\n the noble sort of wife.\"\n\n\n She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee\n table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the\n lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching\n her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.\n\n\n \"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary,\" Phil said. His\n voice was dry and low. \"I didn't know you felt this way about it.\"",
"His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not\n theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too\n far. She said, \"You look fine, Phil. You look just right.\" She managed a\n smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash\n tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.\n\n\n He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her\n face until she was looking into his eyes. \"You're the most beautiful\n girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did,\" she said, finishing the\n ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat\n beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped\n smiling.",
"\"Honey, look at me,\" he said. \"It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it\n isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they\n wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five\n un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch.\"\n\n\n She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her\n wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.\n\n\n \"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a\n wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!\" She was holding his\n arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.",
"\"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking\n at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man\n again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first\n adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,\n colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had\n it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little.\"",
"\"Let's go, if you're still going,\" she finally said.\nThey drove through the streets of the small town with its small\n bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was\n a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It\n existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off\n zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the\n ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed\n ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,\n if such was its destiny.",
"And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the\n administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed\n into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,\n alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the\n rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the\n ground and then disappeared through a small port.\n\n\n Mary waved to him. \"Good-by,\" she said to herself, but the words stuck\n tight in her throat.",
"She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his\n cheeks. \"Thank, God,\" she said. \"It doesn't matter, darling. The only\n thing that matters is you didn't go.\"\n\n\n \"You're right, Mary,\" he said. His voice was low—so low she could\n hardly hear him. \"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now.\" He stood with\n his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked\n toward the car.\nTHE END",
"\"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the\n wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was\n possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.\n It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous\n dream!\"\n\n\n He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.\n \"Mary, listen to me,\" he said. \"It isn't a dream. It's real. There's\n nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no\n man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.\n If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky\n again. I'd be through.\"\n\n\n She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in\n her eyes.",
"Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science\n Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nBREAKAWAY\nBY STANLEY GIMBLE\nIllustrated by Freas\nShe surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting\n what she wanted.\nPhil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his\n long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious\n and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines\n around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his\n wife.\n\n\n \"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?\""
],
[
"\"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might\n mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your\n life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our\n success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension\n wrong with you. Want to tell me?\"\nOutside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of\n the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;\n and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they\n had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt\n that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond\n the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.\n Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of\n wire. But her eyes were on the ship.",
"\"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week,\" Phil said, and smiled.\n They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,\n and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He\n turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a\n cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the\n windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished\n surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until\n the eye lost the tip against the stars.\n\n\n \"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I've never seen her before,\" she said. \"Hadn't you better go?\" Her\n voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.\n \"Please go now, Phil,\" she said.",
"He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,\n her head buried against his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Good-by, darling,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Wish me luck, Mary?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Yes, good luck, Phil,\" she said. He opened the car door and got out.\n The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell\n of the rocket waiting silently for flight.\n\n\n \"Mary, I—\" he began, and then turned and strode toward the\n administration building without looking back.\nInside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The\n tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that\n Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle\n stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to\n him and took his hand.",
"His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not\n theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too\n far. She said, \"You look fine, Phil. You look just right.\" She managed a\n smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash\n tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.\n\n\n He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her\n face until she was looking into his eyes. \"You're the most beautiful\n girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did,\" she said, finishing the\n ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat\n beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped\n smiling.",
"\"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three\n years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing\n would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it\n hard.\" He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of\n her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He\n released her and stood up.\n\n\n \"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?\"",
"She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his\n cheeks. \"Thank, God,\" she said. \"It doesn't matter, darling. The only\n thing that matters is you didn't go.\"\n\n\n \"You're right, Mary,\" he said. His voice was low—so low she could\n hardly hear him. \"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now.\" He stood with\n his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked\n toward the car.\nTHE END",
"\"Honey, look at me,\" he said. \"It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it\n isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they\n wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five\n un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch.\"\n\n\n She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her\n wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.\n\n\n \"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a\n wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!\" She was holding his\n arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.",
"The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the\n fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,\n from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar\n that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned\n rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.\nFor a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the\n heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to\n herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.\n\n\n \"Phil! Oh, Phil.\" She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and\n over.\n\n\n \"They wouldn't let me go, Mary,\" he said finally. \"The general would not\n let me go.\"",
"\"Yes, I'll come to say good-by.\" She paused and dropped her eyes. \"Phil,\n if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't\n be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my\n life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I\n love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not\n the noble sort of wife.\"\n\n\n She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee\n table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the\n lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching\n her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.\n\n\n \"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary,\" Phil said. His\n voice was dry and low. \"I didn't know you felt this way about it.\"",
"The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There\n were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly\n connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in\n front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the\n last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had\n gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.\n He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.\n\n\n The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.\n\n\n \"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway\n to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours\n until—\"",
"\"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all\n set, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess,\" Phil said.\n\n\n \"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by\n the radar.\"\n\n\n As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his\n hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy\n waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say\n something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come\n later.\n\n\n \"Mr. Secretary,\" the general said, \"this is Colonel Conover. He'll be\n the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the\n Secretary of Defense.\"\n\n\n \"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you,\" Phil said.",
"Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then\n the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same\n unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and\n handshakes. They were ready now.\n\n\n \"Phil,\" the general said, and took him aside.\n\n\n \"Sir?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you\n better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the\n psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,\n Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir. There's nothing wrong,\" Phil said, but his voice didn't carry\n conviction. He reached for a cigarette.",
"\"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the\n wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was\n possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.\n It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous\n dream!\"\n\n\n He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.\n \"Mary, listen to me,\" he said. \"It isn't a dream. It's real. There's\n nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no\n man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.\n If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky\n again. I'd be through.\"\n\n\n She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in\n her eyes.",
"And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the\n administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed\n into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,\n alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the\n rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the\n ground and then disappeared through a small port.\n\n\n Mary waved to him. \"Good-by,\" she said to herself, but the words stuck\n tight in her throat.",
"\"Let's go, if you're still going,\" she finally said.\nThey drove through the streets of the small town with its small\n bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was\n a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It\n existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off\n zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the\n ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed\n ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,\n if such was its destiny.",
"Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science\n Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nBREAKAWAY\nBY STANLEY GIMBLE\nIllustrated by Freas\nShe surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting\n what she wanted.\nPhil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his\n long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious\n and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines\n around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his\n wife.\n\n\n \"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?\"",
"Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led\n across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they\n could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the\n take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching\n out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the\n guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and\n then saluted. \"Good luck, colonel,\" he said, and shook Phil's hand.",
"\"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking\n at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man\n again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first\n adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,\n colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had\n it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little.\""
],
[
"Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then\n the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same\n unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and\n handshakes. They were ready now.\n\n\n \"Phil,\" the general said, and took him aside.\n\n\n \"Sir?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you\n better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the\n psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,\n Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir. There's nothing wrong,\" Phil said, but his voice didn't carry\n conviction. He reached for a cigarette.",
"The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There\n were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly\n connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in\n front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the\n last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had\n gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.\n He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.\n\n\n The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.\n\n\n \"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway\n to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours\n until—\"",
"And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the\n administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed\n into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,\n alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the\n rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the\n ground and then disappeared through a small port.\n\n\n Mary waved to him. \"Good-by,\" she said to herself, but the words stuck\n tight in her throat.",
"\"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking\n at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man\n again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first\n adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,\n colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had\n it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little.\"",
"\"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might\n mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your\n life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our\n success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension\n wrong with you. Want to tell me?\"\nOutside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of\n the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;\n and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they\n had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt\n that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond\n the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.\n Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of\n wire. But her eyes were on the ship.",
"\"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all\n set, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess,\" Phil said.\n\n\n \"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by\n the radar.\"\n\n\n As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his\n hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy\n waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say\n something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come\n later.\n\n\n \"Mr. Secretary,\" the general said, \"this is Colonel Conover. He'll be\n the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the\n Secretary of Defense.\"\n\n\n \"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you,\" Phil said.",
"\"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three\n years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing\n would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it\n hard.\" He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of\n her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He\n released her and stood up.\n\n\n \"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?\"",
"The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the\n fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,\n from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar\n that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned\n rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.\nFor a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the\n heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to\n herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.\n\n\n \"Phil! Oh, Phil.\" She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and\n over.\n\n\n \"They wouldn't let me go, Mary,\" he said finally. \"The general would not\n let me go.\"",
"\"Let's go, if you're still going,\" she finally said.\nThey drove through the streets of the small town with its small\n bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was\n a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It\n existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off\n zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the\n ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed\n ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,\n if such was its destiny.",
"\"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week,\" Phil said, and smiled.\n They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,\n and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He\n turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a\n cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the\n windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished\n surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until\n the eye lost the tip against the stars.\n\n\n \"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I've never seen her before,\" she said. \"Hadn't you better go?\" Her\n voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.\n \"Please go now, Phil,\" she said.",
"He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,\n her head buried against his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Good-by, darling,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Wish me luck, Mary?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Yes, good luck, Phil,\" she said. He opened the car door and got out.\n The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell\n of the rocket waiting silently for flight.\n\n\n \"Mary, I—\" he began, and then turned and strode toward the\n administration building without looking back.\nInside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The\n tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that\n Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle\n stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to\n him and took his hand.",
"Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led\n across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they\n could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the\n take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching\n out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the\n guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and\n then saluted. \"Good luck, colonel,\" he said, and shook Phil's hand.",
"She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his\n cheeks. \"Thank, God,\" she said. \"It doesn't matter, darling. The only\n thing that matters is you didn't go.\"\n\n\n \"You're right, Mary,\" he said. His voice was low—so low she could\n hardly hear him. \"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now.\" He stood with\n his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked\n toward the car.\nTHE END",
"\"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the\n wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was\n possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.\n It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous\n dream!\"\n\n\n He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.\n \"Mary, listen to me,\" he said. \"It isn't a dream. It's real. There's\n nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no\n man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.\n If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky\n again. I'd be through.\"\n\n\n She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in\n her eyes.",
"His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not\n theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too\n far. She said, \"You look fine, Phil. You look just right.\" She managed a\n smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash\n tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.\n\n\n He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her\n face until she was looking into his eyes. \"You're the most beautiful\n girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did,\" she said, finishing the\n ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat\n beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped\n smiling.",
"\"Honey, look at me,\" he said. \"It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it\n isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they\n wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five\n un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch.\"\n\n\n She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her\n wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.\n\n\n \"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a\n wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!\" She was holding his\n arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.",
"\"Yes, I'll come to say good-by.\" She paused and dropped her eyes. \"Phil,\n if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't\n be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my\n life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I\n love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not\n the noble sort of wife.\"\n\n\n She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee\n table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the\n lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching\n her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.\n\n\n \"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary,\" Phil said. His\n voice was dry and low. \"I didn't know you felt this way about it.\"",
"Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science\n Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nBREAKAWAY\nBY STANLEY GIMBLE\nIllustrated by Freas\nShe surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting\n what she wanted.\nPhil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his\n long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious\n and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines\n around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his\n wife.\n\n\n \"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?\""
],
[
"\"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three\n years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing\n would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it\n hard.\" He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of\n her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He\n released her and stood up.\n\n\n \"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?\"",
"She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his\n cheeks. \"Thank, God,\" she said. \"It doesn't matter, darling. The only\n thing that matters is you didn't go.\"\n\n\n \"You're right, Mary,\" he said. His voice was low—so low she could\n hardly hear him. \"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now.\" He stood with\n his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked\n toward the car.\nTHE END",
"And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the\n administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed\n into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,\n alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the\n rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the\n ground and then disappeared through a small port.\n\n\n Mary waved to him. \"Good-by,\" she said to herself, but the words stuck\n tight in her throat.",
"\"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week,\" Phil said, and smiled.\n They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,\n and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He\n turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a\n cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the\n windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished\n surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until\n the eye lost the tip against the stars.\n\n\n \"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I've never seen her before,\" she said. \"Hadn't you better go?\" Her\n voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.\n \"Please go now, Phil,\" she said.",
"\"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might\n mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your\n life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our\n success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension\n wrong with you. Want to tell me?\"\nOutside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of\n the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;\n and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they\n had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt\n that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond\n the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.\n Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of\n wire. But her eyes were on the ship.",
"The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There\n were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly\n connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in\n front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the\n last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had\n gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.\n He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.\n\n\n The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.\n\n\n \"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway\n to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours\n until—\"",
"The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the\n fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,\n from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar\n that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned\n rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.\nFor a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the\n heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to\n herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.\n\n\n \"Phil! Oh, Phil.\" She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and\n over.\n\n\n \"They wouldn't let me go, Mary,\" he said finally. \"The general would not\n let me go.\"",
"\"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the\n wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was\n possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.\n It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous\n dream!\"\n\n\n He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.\n \"Mary, listen to me,\" he said. \"It isn't a dream. It's real. There's\n nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no\n man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.\n If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky\n again. I'd be through.\"\n\n\n She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in\n her eyes.",
"He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,\n her head buried against his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Good-by, darling,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Wish me luck, Mary?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Yes, good luck, Phil,\" she said. He opened the car door and got out.\n The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell\n of the rocket waiting silently for flight.\n\n\n \"Mary, I—\" he began, and then turned and strode toward the\n administration building without looking back.\nInside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The\n tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that\n Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle\n stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to\n him and took his hand.",
"\"Let's go, if you're still going,\" she finally said.\nThey drove through the streets of the small town with its small\n bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was\n a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It\n existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off\n zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the\n ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed\n ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,\n if such was its destiny.",
"His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not\n theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too\n far. She said, \"You look fine, Phil. You look just right.\" She managed a\n smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash\n tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.\n\n\n He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her\n face until she was looking into his eyes. \"You're the most beautiful\n girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did,\" she said, finishing the\n ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat\n beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped\n smiling.",
"\"Yes, I'll come to say good-by.\" She paused and dropped her eyes. \"Phil,\n if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't\n be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my\n life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I\n love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not\n the noble sort of wife.\"\n\n\n She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee\n table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the\n lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching\n her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.\n\n\n \"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary,\" Phil said. His\n voice was dry and low. \"I didn't know you felt this way about it.\"",
"Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then\n the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same\n unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and\n handshakes. They were ready now.\n\n\n \"Phil,\" the general said, and took him aside.\n\n\n \"Sir?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you\n better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the\n psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,\n Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir. There's nothing wrong,\" Phil said, but his voice didn't carry\n conviction. He reached for a cigarette.",
"Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led\n across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they\n could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the\n take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching\n out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the\n guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and\n then saluted. \"Good luck, colonel,\" he said, and shook Phil's hand.",
"\"Honey, look at me,\" he said. \"It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it\n isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they\n wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five\n un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch.\"\n\n\n She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her\n wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.\n\n\n \"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a\n wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!\" She was holding his\n arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.",
"\"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking\n at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man\n again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first\n adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,\n colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had\n it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little.\"",
"Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science\n Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nBREAKAWAY\nBY STANLEY GIMBLE\nIllustrated by Freas\nShe surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting\n what she wanted.\nPhil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his\n long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious\n and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines\n around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his\n wife.\n\n\n \"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?\"",
"\"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all\n set, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess,\" Phil said.\n\n\n \"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by\n the radar.\"\n\n\n As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his\n hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy\n waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say\n something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come\n later.\n\n\n \"Mr. Secretary,\" the general said, \"this is Colonel Conover. He'll be\n the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the\n Secretary of Defense.\"\n\n\n \"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you,\" Phil said."
],
[
"She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his\n cheeks. \"Thank, God,\" she said. \"It doesn't matter, darling. The only\n thing that matters is you didn't go.\"\n\n\n \"You're right, Mary,\" he said. His voice was low—so low she could\n hardly hear him. \"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now.\" He stood with\n his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked\n toward the car.\nTHE END",
"His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not\n theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too\n far. She said, \"You look fine, Phil. You look just right.\" She managed a\n smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash\n tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.\n\n\n He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her\n face until she was looking into his eyes. \"You're the most beautiful\n girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did,\" she said, finishing the\n ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat\n beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped\n smiling.",
"\"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking\n at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man\n again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first\n adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,\n colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had\n it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little.\"",
"\"Let's go, if you're still going,\" she finally said.\nThey drove through the streets of the small town with its small\n bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was\n a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It\n existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off\n zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the\n ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed\n ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,\n if such was its destiny.",
"He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,\n her head buried against his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Good-by, darling,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Wish me luck, Mary?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Yes, good luck, Phil,\" she said. He opened the car door and got out.\n The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell\n of the rocket waiting silently for flight.\n\n\n \"Mary, I—\" he began, and then turned and strode toward the\n administration building without looking back.\nInside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The\n tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that\n Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle\n stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to\n him and took his hand.",
"Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then\n the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same\n unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and\n handshakes. They were ready now.\n\n\n \"Phil,\" the general said, and took him aside.\n\n\n \"Sir?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you\n better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the\n psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,\n Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir. There's nothing wrong,\" Phil said, but his voice didn't carry\n conviction. He reached for a cigarette.",
"\"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week,\" Phil said, and smiled.\n They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,\n and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He\n turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a\n cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the\n windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished\n surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until\n the eye lost the tip against the stars.\n\n\n \"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I've never seen her before,\" she said. \"Hadn't you better go?\" Her\n voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.\n \"Please go now, Phil,\" she said.",
"\"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three\n years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing\n would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it\n hard.\" He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of\n her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He\n released her and stood up.\n\n\n \"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?\"",
"\"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all\n set, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess,\" Phil said.\n\n\n \"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by\n the radar.\"\n\n\n As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his\n hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy\n waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say\n something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come\n later.\n\n\n \"Mr. Secretary,\" the general said, \"this is Colonel Conover. He'll be\n the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the\n Secretary of Defense.\"\n\n\n \"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you,\" Phil said.",
"\"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might\n mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your\n life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our\n success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension\n wrong with you. Want to tell me?\"\nOutside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of\n the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;\n and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they\n had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt\n that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond\n the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.\n Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of\n wire. But her eyes were on the ship.",
"Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led\n across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they\n could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the\n take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching\n out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the\n guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and\n then saluted. \"Good luck, colonel,\" he said, and shook Phil's hand.",
"The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the\n fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,\n from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar\n that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned\n rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.\nFor a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the\n heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to\n herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.\n\n\n \"Phil! Oh, Phil.\" She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and\n over.\n\n\n \"They wouldn't let me go, Mary,\" he said finally. \"The general would not\n let me go.\"",
"\"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the\n wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was\n possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.\n It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous\n dream!\"\n\n\n He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.\n \"Mary, listen to me,\" he said. \"It isn't a dream. It's real. There's\n nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no\n man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.\n If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky\n again. I'd be through.\"\n\n\n She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in\n her eyes.",
"The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There\n were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly\n connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in\n front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the\n last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had\n gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.\n He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.\n\n\n The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.\n\n\n \"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway\n to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours\n until—\"",
"And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the\n administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed\n into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,\n alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the\n rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the\n ground and then disappeared through a small port.\n\n\n Mary waved to him. \"Good-by,\" she said to herself, but the words stuck\n tight in her throat.",
"\"Yes, I'll come to say good-by.\" She paused and dropped her eyes. \"Phil,\n if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't\n be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my\n life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I\n love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not\n the noble sort of wife.\"\n\n\n She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee\n table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the\n lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching\n her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.\n\n\n \"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary,\" Phil said. His\n voice was dry and low. \"I didn't know you felt this way about it.\"",
"\"Honey, look at me,\" he said. \"It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it\n isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they\n wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five\n un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch.\"\n\n\n She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her\n wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.\n\n\n \"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a\n wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!\" She was holding his\n arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.",
"Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science\n Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nBREAKAWAY\nBY STANLEY GIMBLE\nIllustrated by Freas\nShe surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting\n what she wanted.\nPhil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his\n long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious\n and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines\n around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his\n wife.\n\n\n \"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?\""
],
[
"Phil asked a few questions about weather and solar conditions. And then\n the session was done. They rose and looked at each other, the same\n unanswered questions on each man's face. There were forced smiles and\n handshakes. They were ready now.\n\n\n \"Phil,\" the general said, and took him aside.\n\n\n \"Sir?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, you're ... you feel all right, don't you, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. I feel fine. Why?\"\n\n\n \"Phil, I've spent nearly every day with you for three years. I know you\n better than I know myself in many ways. And I've studied the\n psychologist's reports on you carefully. Maybe it's just nervousness,\n Phil, but I think there's something wrong. Is there?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir. There's nothing wrong,\" Phil said, but his voice didn't carry\n conviction. He reached for a cigarette.",
"\"Phil, if there is anything—anything at all—you know what it might\n mean. You've got to be in the best mental and physical condition of your\n life tonight. You know better than any man here what that means to our\n success. I think there is something more than just natural apprehension\n wrong with you. Want to tell me?\"\nOutside, the take-off zone crawled with men and machines at the base of\n the rocket. For ten hours, the final check-outs had been in progress;\n and now the men were checking again, on their own time. The thing they\n had worked toward for six years was ready to happen, and each one felt\n that he was sending just a little bit of himself into the sky. Beyond\n the ring of lights and moving men, on the edge of the field, Mary stood.\n Her hands moved slowly over the top of the fence, twisting the barbs of\n wire. But her eyes were on the ship.",
"The small group at the base of the ship turned and walked back to the\n fence. And for an eternity the great ship stood alone, waiting. Then,\n from deep inside, a rumble came, increasing in volume to a gigantic roar\n that shook the earth and tore at the ears. Slowly, the first manned\n rocket to the Moon lifted up and up to the sky.\nFor a long time after the rocket had become a tiny speck of light in the\n heavens, she stood holding her face in her hands and crying softly to\n herself. And then she felt the touch of a hand on her arm. She turned.\n\n\n \"Phil! Oh, Phil.\" She held tightly to him and repeated his name over and\n over.\n\n\n \"They wouldn't let me go, Mary,\" he said finally. \"The general would not\n let me go.\"",
"\"Hello, Phil. We were beginning to think you weren't coming. You all\n set, son?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir, I'm all set, I guess,\" Phil said.\n\n\n \"I'd like you to meet the Secretary of Defense, Phil. He's over here by\n the radar.\"\n\n\n As they crossed the room, familiar faces smiled, and each man shook his\n hand or touched his arm. He saw Sammy, alone, by the coffee urn. Sammy\n waved to him, but he didn't smile. Phil wanted to talk to him, to say\n something; but there was nothing to be said now. Sammy's turn would come\n later.\n\n\n \"Mr. Secretary,\" the general said, \"this is Colonel Conover. He'll be\n the first man in history to see the other side of the Moon. Colonel—the\n Secretary of Defense.\"\n\n\n \"How do you do, sir. I'm very proud to meet you,\" Phil said.",
"The general took Phil's arm and they walked to the briefing room. There\n were chairs set up for the scientists and Air Force officers directly\n connected with the take-off. They were seated now in a semicircle in\n front of a huge chart of the solar system. Phil took his seat, and the\n last minute briefing began. It was a routine he knew by heart. He had\n gone over and over it a thousand times, and he only half listened now.\n He kept thinking of Mary outside, alone by the fence.\n\n\n The voice of the briefing officer was a dull hum in his ears.\n\n\n \"... And orbit at 18,000-mph. You will then accelerate for the breakaway\n to 24,900-mph for five minutes and then free-coast for 116 hours\n until—\"",
"\"Thanks, sergeant. I'll be seeing you next week,\" Phil said, and smiled.\n They drove between the rows of wooden buildings that lined the field,\n and he parked near the low barbed fence ringing the take-off zone. He\n turned off the ignition, and sat quietly for a moment before lighting a\n cigarette. Then he looked at his wife. She was staring through the\n windshield at the rocket two hundred yards away. Its smooth polished\n surface gleamed in the spotlight glare, and it sloped up and up until\n the eye lost the tip against the stars.\n\n\n \"She's beautiful, Mary. You've never seen her before, have you?\"\n\n\n \"No, I've never seen her before,\" she said. \"Hadn't you better go?\" Her\n voice was strained and she held her hands closed tightly in her lap.\n \"Please go now, Phil,\" she said.",
"\"Yes, I'll come to say good-by.\" She paused and dropped her eyes. \"Phil,\n if you go, I won't be here when you get back—if you get back. I won't\n be here because I won't be the wife of a space pilot for the rest of my\n life. It isn't the kind of life I bargained for. No matter how much I\n love you, I just couldn't take that, Phil. I'm sorry. I guess I'm not\n the noble sort of wife.\"\n\n\n She finished and took another cigarette from the pack on the coffee\n table and put it to her lips. Her hand was trembling as she touched the\n lighter to the end of the cigarette and drew deeply. Phil stood watching\n her, the excitement completely gone from his eyes.\n\n\n \"I wish you had told me this a long time ago, Mary,\" Phil said. His\n voice was dry and low. \"I didn't know you felt this way about it.\"",
"She looked at him. His face was drawn tight, and there were tears on his\n cheeks. \"Thank, God,\" she said. \"It doesn't matter, darling. The only\n thing that matters is you didn't go.\"\n\n\n \"You're right, Mary,\" he said. His voice was low—so low she could\n hardly hear him. \"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now.\" He stood with\n his hands at his sides, watching her. And then turned away and walked\n toward the car.\nTHE END",
"\"Honey, look at me,\" he said. \"It isn't going to be bad. Honestly it\n isn't. We know exactly how it will be. If anything could go wrong, they\n wouldn't be sending me; you know that. I told you that we've sent five\n un-manned ships up and everyone came back without a hitch.\"\n\n\n She turned, facing him. There were tears starting in the corners of her\n wide, brown eyes, and she brushed them away with her hand.\n\n\n \"Phil, don't go. Please don't. They can send Sammy. Sammy doesn't have a\n wife. Can't he go? They'd understand, Phil. Please!\" She was holding his\n arms tightly with her hands, and the color had drained from her cheeks.",
"He leaned toward her and touched her cheek. Then she was in his arms,\n her head buried against his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Good-by, darling,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Wish me luck, Mary?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Yes, good luck, Phil,\" she said. He opened the car door and got out.\n The noise of men and machines scurrying around the ship broke the spell\n of the rocket waiting silently for flight.\n\n\n \"Mary, I—\" he began, and then turned and strode toward the\n administration building without looking back.\nInside the building it was like a locker room before the big game. The\n tension stood alone, and each man had the same happy, excited look that\n Phil had worn earlier. When he came into the room, the noise and bustle\n stopped. They turned as one man toward him, and General Small came up to\n him and took his hand.",
"\"Mary, you know I can't back out now. How could I? It's been three\n years. You know how much I've wanted to be the first man to go. Nothing\n would ever be right with me again if I didn't go. Please don't make it\n hard.\" He stopped talking and held her to him and stroked the back of\n her head. He could feel her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. He\n released her and stood up.\n\n\n \"I've got to get started, Mary. Will you come to the field with me?\"",
"\"Let's go, if you're still going,\" she finally said.\nThey drove through the streets of the small town with its small\n bungalows, each alike. There were no trees and very little grass. It was\n a new town, a government built town, and it had no personality yet. It\n existed only because of the huge ship standing poised in the take-off\n zone five miles away in the desert. Its future as a town rested with the\n ship, and the town seemed to feel the uncertainty of its future, seemed\n ready to stop existing as a town and to give itself back to the desert,\n if such was its destiny.",
"Phil turned the car off the highway onto the rutted dirt road that led\n across the sand to the field where the ship waited. In the distance they\n could see the beams of the searchlights as they played across the\n take-off zone and swept along the top of the high wire fence stretching\n out of sight to right and left. At the gate they were stopped by the\n guard. He read Phil's pass, shined his flashlight in their faces, and\n then saluted. \"Good luck, colonel,\" he said, and shook Phil's hand.",
"His wife was sitting stiffly on the flowered couch that was still not\n theirs completely. In her fingers she held a cigarette burned down too\n far. She said, \"You look fine, Phil. You look just right.\" She managed a\n smile. Then she leaned forward and crushed the cigarette in the ash\n tray on the maple coffee table and took another from the pack.\n\n\n He came to her and touched his hands to her soft blond hair, raising her\n face until she was looking into his eyes. \"You're the most beautiful\n girl I know. Did I ever tell you that?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I think so. Yes, I'm sure you did,\" she said, finishing the\n ritual; but her voice broke, and she turned her head away. Phil sat\n beside her and put his arm around her small shoulders. He had stopped\n smiling.",
"\"On the contrary, colonel. I'm very proud to meet you. I've been looking\n at that ship out there and wondering. I almost wish I were a young man\n again. I'd like to be going. It's a thrilling thought—man's first\n adventure into the universe. You're lighting a new dawn of history,\n colonel. It's a privilege few men have ever had; and those who have had\n it didn't realize it at the time. Good luck, and God be with you.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir. I'm aware of all you say. It frightens me a little.\"",
"\"Yes, you did. I told you how I felt. I told you I could never be the\n wife of a space pilot. But I don't think I ever really believed it was\n possible—not until this morning when you said tonight was the take-off.\n It's so stupid to jeopardize everything we've got for a ridiculous\n dream!\"\n\n\n He sat down on the edge of the couch and took her hands between his.\n \"Mary, listen to me,\" he said. \"It isn't a dream. It's real. There's\n nothing means anything more to me than you do—you know that. But no\n man ever had the chance to do what I'm going to do tonight—no man ever.\n If I backed out now for any reason, I'd never be able to look at the sky\n again. I'd be through.\"\n\n\n She looked at him without seeing him, and there was nothing at all in\n her eyes.",
"And then they were ready. A small group of excited men came out from the\n administration building and moved forward. The check-out crews climbed\n into their machines and drove back outside the take-off zone. And,\n alone, one man climbed the steel ladder up the side of the\n rocket—ninety feet into the air. At the top he waved to the men on the\n ground and then disappeared through a small port.\n\n\n Mary waved to him. \"Good-by,\" she said to herself, but the words stuck\n tight in her throat.",
"Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science\n Fiction December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nBREAKAWAY\nBY STANLEY GIMBLE\nIllustrated by Freas\nShe surely got her wish ... but there was some question about getting\n what she wanted.\nPhil Conover pulled the zipper of his flight suit up the front of his\n long, thin body and came into the living room. His face, usually serious\n and quietly handsome, had an alive, excited look. And the faint lines\n around his dark, deep-set eyes were accentuated when he smiled at his\n wife.\n\n\n \"All set, honey. How do I look in my monkey suit?\""
]
] |
train
|
24958
|
[
"Why is the Earth worse than the aliens imagine?",
"Why does Ethaniel think the humans look defenseless?",
"What is the aliens' mission?",
"Why are Bal and Ethaniel so cold?",
"How do Bal and Ethaniel feel about the humans?",
"Why do Bal and Ethaniel think they have to make time to save Earth?",
"Why doesn't the Earth shoot the spaceship out of the sky?",
"Why do the aliens believe they have succeeded in saving Earth?"
] |
[
[
"The Earth has missiles and is close to space travel.",
"The humans are rough and desperate.",
"A meteor shower could be interpreted as an enemy attack by the humans' clumsy instruments.",
"The humans don't like aliens."
],
[
"Without space travel, the humans seem defenseless against an alien attack.",
"Without wings, the humans look small and defenseless.",
"Without wings, the humans look like children.",
"Without space weapon technology, the humans seem defenseless against an alien attack."
],
[
"Bal and Ethaniel are on a mission to Earth to set up an interstellar trade route.",
"Bal and Ethaniel are on a mission to Willafours.",
"Bal and Ethaniel only have one week to save the Earth, but that is their mission.",
"Bal and Ethaniel are on a mission to steal the big bomb from the humans."
],
[
"People are mistaking them for the types of angles seen in Renaissance paintings. It is likely they are wearing little or no clothing.",
"They are cold because the clothing synthesizer on their spaceship was not equipped with the materials needed to make cold-weather gear.",
"They are cold because the planet they come from has a much warmer climate, and they were not prepared for cold weather.",
"Bal and Ethaniel are cold because it is winter where they have landed on Earth."
],
[
"Bal and Ethaniel think humans are very similar beings to themselves. ",
"Bal and Ethaniel think humans are crude, rough, and desperate. ",
"Bal and Ethaniel think humans are not very intelligent and superstitious.",
"Bal and Ethaniel are scared of the humans because humans seem to be trigger-happy."
],
[
"No one else knows Earth and its big bomb problem exisits. It will be quite a long time before anyone passes out this way again. By then, it will be too late for the Earth.",
"If Bal and Ethaniel don't make time to save the Earth from the big bomb, the shockwave may also destroy their spacecraft.",
"If Bal and Ethaniel don't make time to save the Earth from the big bomb, the shockwave may also destroy Willafours.",
"Not saving the humans would be like letting their own people die."
],
[
"The Earth does not have weapons that are capable of going as high as the spaceship. Nor are their weapons capable of penetrating the spaceship's hull.",
"Bal and Ethaniel are using the spaceship to broadcast a message of peace in all the languages of the world.",
"The combination of the Christmas holiday, aliens that look like angels, and what looks to be the star of Bethlehem, has convinced the people of Earth that Bal and Ethaniel are friends and not foes.",
"The spaceship is lit up as brightly as a star. The light is bright enough to convince the humans that firing upon it would be futile."
],
[
"The humans did come to a formal agreement before the aliens left them.",
"The humans realized they were not alone in the universe. They dropped all their petty differences to defend themselves against an alien invasion.",
"The humans painted many pictures of the aliens to commemorate the historic event of first contact, a sign they will hold to the agreement made.",
"The humans were kneeling before the aliens in deference, a sign that they will hold to the agreement made."
]
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[
"\"You ought to know. You're\n running this one.\" Bal looked\n down at the planet. Clouds were\n beginning to form at the twilight\n edge. \"I hate to go down\n and leave the ship up here with\n no one in it.\"\n\n\n \"They can't touch it. No matter\n how they develop in the next\n hundred years they still won't be\n able to get in or damage it in\n any way.\"\n\n\n \"It's myself I'm thinking\n about. Down there, alone.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be with you. On the other\n side of the Earth.\"\n\n\n \"That's not very close. I'd like\n it better if there were someone\n in the ship to bring it down in a\n hurry if things get rough. They\n don't think much of each other.\n I don't imagine they'll like aliens\n any better.\"",
"They went much closer to\n Earth, not intending to commit\n themselves. For a day they circled\n the planet, avoiding radar\n detection, which for them was\n not difficult, testing, and sampling.\n Finally Ethaniel looked up\n from the monitor screen. \"Any\n conclusions?\"\n\n\n \"What's there to think? It's\n worse than I imagined.\"\n\n\n \"In what way?\"\n\n\n \"Well, we knew they had the\n big bomb. Atmospheric analysis\n showed that as far away as we\n were.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"We also knew they could deliver\n the big bomb, presumably\n by some sort of aircraft.\"\n\n\n \"That was almost a certainty.\n They'd have no use for the big\n bomb without aircraft.\"",
"\"Sure, I knew it before we\n started,\" said Bal. \"It's happened\n before. We take the trouble to\n find out what a people are like\n and when we can't help them we\n feel bad. It's going to be that\n way again.\" He rose and stretched.\n \"Well, give me an hour to\n think of some way of going at\n it.\"\nIt was longer than that before\n they met again. In the meantime\n the ship moved much closer to\n Earth. They no longer needed instruments\n to see it. The planet\n revolved outside the visionports.\n The southern plains were green,\n coursed with rivers; the oceans\n were blue; and much of the\n northern hemisphere was glistening\n white. Ragged clouds covered\n the pole, and a dirty pall\n spread over the mid-regions of\n the north.\n\n\n \"I haven't thought of anything\n brilliant,\" said Ethaniel.",
"\"What's worse is that I now\n find they also have missiles,\n range one thousand miles and\n upward. They either have or are\n near a primitive form of space\n travel.\"\n\n\n \"Bad,\" said Ethaniel. \"Sitting\n there, wondering when it's going\n to hit them. Nervousness could\n set it off.\"\n\n\n \"It could, and the missiles\n make it worse,\" said Bal. \"What\n did you find out at your end?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing worthwhile. I was\n looking at the people while you\n were investigating their weapons.\"\n\n\n \"You must think something.\"",
"\"You know what I'm in favor\n of,\" said the second.\n\n\n \"I can guess,\" said Ethaniel,\n who had spoken first. \"The place\n is a complete mess. They've never\n done anything except fight\n each other—and invent better\n weapons.\"\n\n\n \"It's not what they've done,\"\n said Bal, the second alien. \"It's\n what they're going to do, with\n that big bomb.\"\n\n\n \"The more reason for stopping,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"The big\n bomb can destroy them. Without\n our help they may do just that.\"\n\n\n \"I may remind you that in two\n months twenty-nine days we're\n due in Willafours,\" said Bal.\n \"Without looking at the charts\n I can tell you we still have more\n than a hundred light-years to\n go.\"\n\n\n \"A week,\" said Ethaniel. \"We\n can spare a week and still get\n there on time.\"",
"And the ship circled on,\n bright, shining, seeming to be a\n little piece clipped from the center\n of a star and brought near\n Earth to illuminate it. Never, or\n seldom, had Earth seen anything\n like it.\n\n\n In five days the two small landing\n craft that had left it arched\n up from Earth and joined the\n orbit of the large ship. The two\n small craft slid inside the large\n one and doors closed behind\n them. In a short time the aliens\n met again.\n\n\n \"We did it,\" said Bal exultantly\n as he came in. \"I don't know\n how we did it and I thought we\n were going to fail but at the last\n minute they came through.\"\n\n\n Ethaniel smiled. \"I'm tired,\"\n he said, rustling.",
"\"A week?\" said Bal. \"To settle\n their problems? They've had two\n world wars in one generation\n and that the third and final one\n is coming up you can't help feeling\n in everything they do.\"\n\n\n \"It won't take much,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"The wrong diplomatic\n move, or a trigger-happy soldier\n could set it off. And it wouldn't\n have to be deliberate. A meteor\n shower could pass over and their\n clumsy instruments could interpret\n it as an all-out enemy\n attack.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad,\" said Bal. \"We'll\n just have to forget there ever\n was such a planet as Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Could you? Forget so many\n people?\"\n\n\n \"I'm doing it,\" said Bal. \"Just\n give them a little time and they\n won't be here to remind me that\n I have a conscience.\"",
"\"All right,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"You take one side and I the\n other. We'll tell them bluntly\n what they'll have to do if they're\n going to survive, how they can\n keep their planet in one piece so\n they can live on it.\"\n\n\n \"That'll go over big. Advice is\n always popular.\"\n\n\n \"Can't help it. That's all we\n have time for.\"\n\n\n \"Special instructions?\"\n\n\n \"None. We leave the ship here\n and go down in separate landing\n craft. You can talk with me any\n time you want to through our\n communications, but don't unless\n you have to.\"\n\n\n \"They can't intercept the\n beams we use.\"\n\n\n \"They can't, and even if they\n did they wouldn't know what to\n do with our language. I want\n them to think that we don't\nneed\nto talk things over.\"",
"\"It's not we who need help, but\n the people of Earth,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"See you in five days.\" With\n that he entered a small landing\n craft, which left a faintly luminescent\n trail as it plunged toward\n Earth. As soon as it was\n safe to do so, Bal left in another\n craft, heading for the other side\n of the planet.\nAnd the spaceship circled\n Earth, unmanned, blazing and\n pulsing with light. No star in the\n winter skies of the planet below\n could equal it in brilliancy. Once\n a man-made satellite came near\n but it was dim and was lost sight\n of by the people below. During\n the day the ship was visible as\n a bright spot of light. At evening\n it seemed to burn through\n the sunset colors.",
"\"They may be unfriendly,\"\n Ethaniel acknowledged. Now he\n switched a monitor screen until\n he looked at the slope of a mountain.\n It was snowing and men\n were cutting small green trees in\n the snow. \"I've thought of a\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"If it saves my neck I'm for\n it.\"\n\n\n \"I don't guarantee anything,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"This is what I\n was thinking of: instead of hiding\n the ship against the sun\n where there's little chance it will\n be seen, we'll make sure that\n they do see it. Let's take it\n around to the night side of the\n planet and light it up.\"\n\n\n \"Say, pretty good,\" said Bal.",
"SECOND LANDING\nBy FLOYD WALLACE\nA gentle fancy for the Christmas Season—an\n oft-told tale with a wistful twistful of Something\n that left the Earth with a wing and a prayer.\nEarth\n was so far away that\n it wasn't visible. Even the\n sun was only a twinkle. But this\n vast distance did not mean that\n isolation could endure forever.\n Instruments within the ship intercepted\n radio broadcasts and,\n within the hour, early TV signals.\n Machines compiled dictionaries\n and grammars and began\n translating the major languages.\n The history of the planet was\n tabulated as facts became available.\n\n\n The course of the ship changed\n slightly; it was not much out of\n the way to swing nearer Earth.\n For days the two within the ship\n listened and watched with little\n comment. They had to decide\n soon.\n\n\n \"We've got to make or break,\"\n said the first alien.",
"\"They can't imagine that we'd\n light up an unmanned ship,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"Even if the thought\n should occur to them they'll have\n no way of checking it. Also, they\n won't be eager to harm us with\n our ship shining down on them.\"\n\n\n \"That's thinking,\" said Bal,\n moving to the controls. \"I'll move\n the ship over where they can see\n it best and then I'll light it up.\n I'll really light it up.\"\n\n\n \"Don't spare power.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that.\n They'll see it. Everybody on\n Earth will see it.\" Later, with the\n ship in position, glowing against\n the darkness of space, pulsating\n with light, Bal said: \"You know,\n I feel better about this. We may\n pull it off. Lighting the ship may\n be just the help we need.\"",
"\"Nor I,\" said Bal. \"We're going\n to have to go down there\n cold. And it will be cold.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. It's their winter.\"\n\n\n \"I did have an idea,\" said Bal.\n \"What about going down as supernatural\n beings?\"\n\n\n \"Hardly,\" said Ethaniel. \"A\n hundred years ago it might have\n worked. Today they have satellites.\n They are not primitives.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you're right,\" said\n Bal. \"I did think we ought to\n take advantage of our physical\n differences.\"\n\n\n \"If we could I'd be all for it.\n But these people are rough and\n desperate. They wouldn't be\n fooled by anything that crude.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you're calling it,\" said\n Bal.",
"\"I wish I knew what to think.\n There's so little time,\" Ethaniel\n said. \"Language isn't the difficulty.\n Our machines translate\n their languages easily and I've\n taken a cram course in two or\n three of them. But that's not\n enough, looking at a few plays,\n listening to advertisements, music,\n and news bulletins. I should\n go down and live among them,\n read books, talk to scholars, work\n with them, play.\"\n\n\n \"You could do that and you'd\n really get to know them. But\n that takes time—and we don't\n have it.\"\n\n\n \"I realize that.\"\n\n\n \"A flat yes or no,\" said Bal.\n\n\n \"No. We can't help them,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"There is nothing we\n can do for them—but we have to\n try.\"",
"\"My memory isn't convenient,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"I ask you\n to look at them.\"\nBal rustled, flicking the screen\n intently. \"Very much like ourselves,\"\n he said at last. \"A bit\n shorter perhaps, and most certainly\n incomplete. Except for the\n one thing they lack, and that's\n quite odd, they seem exactly like\n us. Is that what you wanted me\n to say?\"\n\n\n \"It is. The fact that they are\n an incomplete version of ourselves\n touches me. They actually\n seem defenseless, though I suppose\n they're not.\"\n\n\n \"Tough,\" said Bal. \"Nothing\n we can do about it.\"\n\n\n \"There is. We can give them\n a week.\"\n\n\n \"In a week we can't negate\n their entire history. We can't\n begin to undo the effect of the\n big bomb.\"",
"\"You can't tell,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"We can look things over.\"\n\n\n \"And then what? How much\n authority do we have?\"\n\n\n \"Very little,\" conceded Ethaniel.\n \"Two minor officials on the\n way to Willafours—and we run\n directly into a problem no one\n knew existed.\"\n\n\n \"And when we get to Willafours\n we'll be busy. It will be a\n long time before anyone comes\n this way again.\"\n\n\n \"A very long time. There's\n nothing in this region of space\n our people want,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"And how long can Earth last?\n Ten years? Even ten months?\n The tension is building by the\n hour.\"\n\n\n \"What can I say?\" said Bal.\n \"I suppose we can stop and look\n them over. We're not committing\n ourselves by looking.\"",
"\"I get it. Makes us seem better\n than we are. They think we know\n exactly what we're doing even\n though we don't.\"\n\n\n \"If we're lucky they'll think\n that.\"\nBal looked out of the port at\n the planet below. \"It's going to\n be cold where I'm going. You too.\n Sure we don't want to change\n our plans and land in the southern\n hemisphere? It's summer\n there.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid not. The great\n powers are in the north. They\n are the ones we have to reach to\n do the job.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, but I was thinking of\n that holiday you mentioned.\n We'll be running straight into it.\n That won't help us any.\"\n\n\n \"I know, they don't like their\n holidays interrupted. It can't be\n helped. We can't wait until it's\n over.\"",
"\"Me too, but mostly I'm cold,\"\n said Bal, shivering. \"Snow.\n Nothing but snow wherever I\n went. Miserable climate. And yet\n you had me go out walking after\n that first day.\"\n\n\n \"From my own experience it\n seemed to be a good idea,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"If I went out walking\n one day I noticed that the next\n day the officials were much more\n cooperative. If it worked for me\n I thought it might help you.\"\n\n\n \"It did. I don't know why, but\n it did,\" said Bal. \"Anyway, this\n agreement they made isn't the\n best but I think it will keep them\n from destroying themselves.\"\n\n\n \"It's as much as we can expect,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"They may\n have small wars after this, but\n never the big one. In fifty or a\n hundred years we can come back\n and see how much they've\n learned.\"",
"\"But you don't know what an\n angel is?\"\n\n\n \"No. I didn't have time to find\n out. Some creature of their folklore\n I suppose. You know, except\n for our wings they're very much\n like ourselves. Their legends are\n bound to resemble ours.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Bal. \"Anyway,\n peace on Earth.\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Science Fiction Stories\nJanuary\n 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"\"I'm aware of that,\" said Bal.\n \"Fill me in on that holiday, anything\n I ought to know. Probably\n religious in origin. That so?\"\n\n\n \"It was religious a long time\n ago,\" said Ethaniel. \"I didn't\n learn anything exact from radio\n and TV. Now it seems to be\n chiefly a time for eating, office\n parties, and selling merchandise.\"\n\n\n \"I see. It has become a business\n holiday.\"\n\n\n \"That's a good description. I\n didn't get as much of it as I\n ought to have. I was busy studying\n the people, and they're hard\n to pin down.\"\n\n\n \"I see. I was thinking there\n might be some way we could tie\n ourselves in with this holiday.\n Make it work for us.\"\n\n\n \"If there is I haven't thought\n of it.\""
],
[
"\"My memory isn't convenient,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"I ask you\n to look at them.\"\nBal rustled, flicking the screen\n intently. \"Very much like ourselves,\"\n he said at last. \"A bit\n shorter perhaps, and most certainly\n incomplete. Except for the\n one thing they lack, and that's\n quite odd, they seem exactly like\n us. Is that what you wanted me\n to say?\"\n\n\n \"It is. The fact that they are\n an incomplete version of ourselves\n touches me. They actually\n seem defenseless, though I suppose\n they're not.\"\n\n\n \"Tough,\" said Bal. \"Nothing\n we can do about it.\"\n\n\n \"There is. We can give them\n a week.\"\n\n\n \"In a week we can't negate\n their entire history. We can't\n begin to undo the effect of the\n big bomb.\"",
"\"Nor I,\" said Bal. \"We're going\n to have to go down there\n cold. And it will be cold.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. It's their winter.\"\n\n\n \"I did have an idea,\" said Bal.\n \"What about going down as supernatural\n beings?\"\n\n\n \"Hardly,\" said Ethaniel. \"A\n hundred years ago it might have\n worked. Today they have satellites.\n They are not primitives.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you're right,\" said\n Bal. \"I did think we ought to\n take advantage of our physical\n differences.\"\n\n\n \"If we could I'd be all for it.\n But these people are rough and\n desperate. They wouldn't be\n fooled by anything that crude.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you're calling it,\" said\n Bal.",
"\"You can't tell,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"We can look things over.\"\n\n\n \"And then what? How much\n authority do we have?\"\n\n\n \"Very little,\" conceded Ethaniel.\n \"Two minor officials on the\n way to Willafours—and we run\n directly into a problem no one\n knew existed.\"\n\n\n \"And when we get to Willafours\n we'll be busy. It will be a\n long time before anyone comes\n this way again.\"\n\n\n \"A very long time. There's\n nothing in this region of space\n our people want,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"And how long can Earth last?\n Ten years? Even ten months?\n The tension is building by the\n hour.\"\n\n\n \"What can I say?\" said Bal.\n \"I suppose we can stop and look\n them over. We're not committing\n ourselves by looking.\"",
"\"What's worse is that I now\n find they also have missiles,\n range one thousand miles and\n upward. They either have or are\n near a primitive form of space\n travel.\"\n\n\n \"Bad,\" said Ethaniel. \"Sitting\n there, wondering when it's going\n to hit them. Nervousness could\n set it off.\"\n\n\n \"It could, and the missiles\n make it worse,\" said Bal. \"What\n did you find out at your end?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing worthwhile. I was\n looking at the people while you\n were investigating their weapons.\"\n\n\n \"You must think something.\"",
"\"They may be unfriendly,\"\n Ethaniel acknowledged. Now he\n switched a monitor screen until\n he looked at the slope of a mountain.\n It was snowing and men\n were cutting small green trees in\n the snow. \"I've thought of a\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"If it saves my neck I'm for\n it.\"\n\n\n \"I don't guarantee anything,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"This is what I\n was thinking of: instead of hiding\n the ship against the sun\n where there's little chance it will\n be seen, we'll make sure that\n they do see it. Let's take it\n around to the night side of the\n planet and light it up.\"\n\n\n \"Say, pretty good,\" said Bal.",
"\"They can't imagine that we'd\n light up an unmanned ship,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"Even if the thought\n should occur to them they'll have\n no way of checking it. Also, they\n won't be eager to harm us with\n our ship shining down on them.\"\n\n\n \"That's thinking,\" said Bal,\n moving to the controls. \"I'll move\n the ship over where they can see\n it best and then I'll light it up.\n I'll really light it up.\"\n\n\n \"Don't spare power.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that.\n They'll see it. Everybody on\n Earth will see it.\" Later, with the\n ship in position, glowing against\n the darkness of space, pulsating\n with light, Bal said: \"You know,\n I feel better about this. We may\n pull it off. Lighting the ship may\n be just the help we need.\"",
"\"Sure, I knew it before we\n started,\" said Bal. \"It's happened\n before. We take the trouble to\n find out what a people are like\n and when we can't help them we\n feel bad. It's going to be that\n way again.\" He rose and stretched.\n \"Well, give me an hour to\n think of some way of going at\n it.\"\nIt was longer than that before\n they met again. In the meantime\n the ship moved much closer to\n Earth. They no longer needed instruments\n to see it. The planet\n revolved outside the visionports.\n The southern plains were green,\n coursed with rivers; the oceans\n were blue; and much of the\n northern hemisphere was glistening\n white. Ragged clouds covered\n the pole, and a dirty pall\n spread over the mid-regions of\n the north.\n\n\n \"I haven't thought of anything\n brilliant,\" said Ethaniel.",
"\"It's not we who need help, but\n the people of Earth,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"See you in five days.\" With\n that he entered a small landing\n craft, which left a faintly luminescent\n trail as it plunged toward\n Earth. As soon as it was\n safe to do so, Bal left in another\n craft, heading for the other side\n of the planet.\nAnd the spaceship circled\n Earth, unmanned, blazing and\n pulsing with light. No star in the\n winter skies of the planet below\n could equal it in brilliancy. Once\n a man-made satellite came near\n but it was dim and was lost sight\n of by the people below. During\n the day the ship was visible as\n a bright spot of light. At evening\n it seemed to burn through\n the sunset colors.",
"\"All right,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"You take one side and I the\n other. We'll tell them bluntly\n what they'll have to do if they're\n going to survive, how they can\n keep their planet in one piece so\n they can live on it.\"\n\n\n \"That'll go over big. Advice is\n always popular.\"\n\n\n \"Can't help it. That's all we\n have time for.\"\n\n\n \"Special instructions?\"\n\n\n \"None. We leave the ship here\n and go down in separate landing\n craft. You can talk with me any\n time you want to through our\n communications, but don't unless\n you have to.\"\n\n\n \"They can't intercept the\n beams we use.\"\n\n\n \"They can't, and even if they\n did they wouldn't know what to\n do with our language. I want\n them to think that we don't\nneed\nto talk things over.\"",
"\"I wish I knew what to think.\n There's so little time,\" Ethaniel\n said. \"Language isn't the difficulty.\n Our machines translate\n their languages easily and I've\n taken a cram course in two or\n three of them. But that's not\n enough, looking at a few plays,\n listening to advertisements, music,\n and news bulletins. I should\n go down and live among them,\n read books, talk to scholars, work\n with them, play.\"\n\n\n \"You could do that and you'd\n really get to know them. But\n that takes time—and we don't\n have it.\"\n\n\n \"I realize that.\"\n\n\n \"A flat yes or no,\" said Bal.\n\n\n \"No. We can't help them,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"There is nothing we\n can do for them—but we have to\n try.\"",
"\"You know what I'm in favor\n of,\" said the second.\n\n\n \"I can guess,\" said Ethaniel,\n who had spoken first. \"The place\n is a complete mess. They've never\n done anything except fight\n each other—and invent better\n weapons.\"\n\n\n \"It's not what they've done,\"\n said Bal, the second alien. \"It's\n what they're going to do, with\n that big bomb.\"\n\n\n \"The more reason for stopping,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"The big\n bomb can destroy them. Without\n our help they may do just that.\"\n\n\n \"I may remind you that in two\n months twenty-nine days we're\n due in Willafours,\" said Bal.\n \"Without looking at the charts\n I can tell you we still have more\n than a hundred light-years to\n go.\"\n\n\n \"A week,\" said Ethaniel. \"We\n can spare a week and still get\n there on time.\"",
"They went much closer to\n Earth, not intending to commit\n themselves. For a day they circled\n the planet, avoiding radar\n detection, which for them was\n not difficult, testing, and sampling.\n Finally Ethaniel looked up\n from the monitor screen. \"Any\n conclusions?\"\n\n\n \"What's there to think? It's\n worse than I imagined.\"\n\n\n \"In what way?\"\n\n\n \"Well, we knew they had the\n big bomb. Atmospheric analysis\n showed that as far away as we\n were.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"We also knew they could deliver\n the big bomb, presumably\n by some sort of aircraft.\"\n\n\n \"That was almost a certainty.\n They'd have no use for the big\n bomb without aircraft.\"",
"And the ship circled on,\n bright, shining, seeming to be a\n little piece clipped from the center\n of a star and brought near\n Earth to illuminate it. Never, or\n seldom, had Earth seen anything\n like it.\n\n\n In five days the two small landing\n craft that had left it arched\n up from Earth and joined the\n orbit of the large ship. The two\n small craft slid inside the large\n one and doors closed behind\n them. In a short time the aliens\n met again.\n\n\n \"We did it,\" said Bal exultantly\n as he came in. \"I don't know\n how we did it and I thought we\n were going to fail but at the last\n minute they came through.\"\n\n\n Ethaniel smiled. \"I'm tired,\"\n he said, rustling.",
"\"You ought to know. You're\n running this one.\" Bal looked\n down at the planet. Clouds were\n beginning to form at the twilight\n edge. \"I hate to go down\n and leave the ship up here with\n no one in it.\"\n\n\n \"They can't touch it. No matter\n how they develop in the next\n hundred years they still won't be\n able to get in or damage it in\n any way.\"\n\n\n \"It's myself I'm thinking\n about. Down there, alone.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be with you. On the other\n side of the Earth.\"\n\n\n \"That's not very close. I'd like\n it better if there were someone\n in the ship to bring it down in a\n hurry if things get rough. They\n don't think much of each other.\n I don't imagine they'll like aliens\n any better.\"",
"\"I'm not sure I want to,\" said\n Bal. \"Say, what's an angel?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"When I went out walking\n people stopped to look. Some\n knelt in the snow and called me\n an angel.\"\n\n\n \"Something like that happened\n to me,\" said Ethaniel.\n\n\n \"I didn't get it but I didn't let\n it upset me,\" said Bal. \"I smiled\n at them and went about my business.\"\n He shivered again. \"It was\n always cold. I walked out, but\n sometimes I flew back. I hope\n that was all right.\"\n\n\n In the cabin Bal spread his\n great wings. Renaissance painters\n had never seen his like but\n knew exactly how he looked. In\n their paintings they had pictured\n him innumerable times.\n\n\n \"I don't think it hurt us that\n you flew,\" said Ethaniel. \"I did\n so myself occasionally.\"",
"\"A week?\" said Bal. \"To settle\n their problems? They've had two\n world wars in one generation\n and that the third and final one\n is coming up you can't help feeling\n in everything they do.\"\n\n\n \"It won't take much,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"The wrong diplomatic\n move, or a trigger-happy soldier\n could set it off. And it wouldn't\n have to be deliberate. A meteor\n shower could pass over and their\n clumsy instruments could interpret\n it as an all-out enemy\n attack.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad,\" said Bal. \"We'll\n just have to forget there ever\n was such a planet as Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Could you? Forget so many\n people?\"\n\n\n \"I'm doing it,\" said Bal. \"Just\n give them a little time and they\n won't be here to remind me that\n I have a conscience.\"",
"\"Me too, but mostly I'm cold,\"\n said Bal, shivering. \"Snow.\n Nothing but snow wherever I\n went. Miserable climate. And yet\n you had me go out walking after\n that first day.\"\n\n\n \"From my own experience it\n seemed to be a good idea,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"If I went out walking\n one day I noticed that the next\n day the officials were much more\n cooperative. If it worked for me\n I thought it might help you.\"\n\n\n \"It did. I don't know why, but\n it did,\" said Bal. \"Anyway, this\n agreement they made isn't the\n best but I think it will keep them\n from destroying themselves.\"\n\n\n \"It's as much as we can expect,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"They may\n have small wars after this, but\n never the big one. In fifty or a\n hundred years we can come back\n and see how much they've\n learned.\"",
"\"I'm aware of that,\" said Bal.\n \"Fill me in on that holiday, anything\n I ought to know. Probably\n religious in origin. That so?\"\n\n\n \"It was religious a long time\n ago,\" said Ethaniel. \"I didn't\n learn anything exact from radio\n and TV. Now it seems to be\n chiefly a time for eating, office\n parties, and selling merchandise.\"\n\n\n \"I see. It has become a business\n holiday.\"\n\n\n \"That's a good description. I\n didn't get as much of it as I\n ought to have. I was busy studying\n the people, and they're hard\n to pin down.\"\n\n\n \"I see. I was thinking there\n might be some way we could tie\n ourselves in with this holiday.\n Make it work for us.\"\n\n\n \"If there is I haven't thought\n of it.\"",
"\"I get it. Makes us seem better\n than we are. They think we know\n exactly what we're doing even\n though we don't.\"\n\n\n \"If we're lucky they'll think\n that.\"\nBal looked out of the port at\n the planet below. \"It's going to\n be cold where I'm going. You too.\n Sure we don't want to change\n our plans and land in the southern\n hemisphere? It's summer\n there.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid not. The great\n powers are in the north. They\n are the ones we have to reach to\n do the job.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, but I was thinking of\n that holiday you mentioned.\n We'll be running straight into it.\n That won't help us any.\"\n\n\n \"I know, they don't like their\n holidays interrupted. It can't be\n helped. We can't wait until it's\n over.\"",
"SECOND LANDING\nBy FLOYD WALLACE\nA gentle fancy for the Christmas Season—an\n oft-told tale with a wistful twistful of Something\n that left the Earth with a wing and a prayer.\nEarth\n was so far away that\n it wasn't visible. Even the\n sun was only a twinkle. But this\n vast distance did not mean that\n isolation could endure forever.\n Instruments within the ship intercepted\n radio broadcasts and,\n within the hour, early TV signals.\n Machines compiled dictionaries\n and grammars and began\n translating the major languages.\n The history of the planet was\n tabulated as facts became available.\n\n\n The course of the ship changed\n slightly; it was not much out of\n the way to swing nearer Earth.\n For days the two within the ship\n listened and watched with little\n comment. They had to decide\n soon.\n\n\n \"We've got to make or break,\"\n said the first alien."
],
[
"And the ship circled on,\n bright, shining, seeming to be a\n little piece clipped from the center\n of a star and brought near\n Earth to illuminate it. Never, or\n seldom, had Earth seen anything\n like it.\n\n\n In five days the two small landing\n craft that had left it arched\n up from Earth and joined the\n orbit of the large ship. The two\n small craft slid inside the large\n one and doors closed behind\n them. In a short time the aliens\n met again.\n\n\n \"We did it,\" said Bal exultantly\n as he came in. \"I don't know\n how we did it and I thought we\n were going to fail but at the last\n minute they came through.\"\n\n\n Ethaniel smiled. \"I'm tired,\"\n he said, rustling.",
"\"All right,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"You take one side and I the\n other. We'll tell them bluntly\n what they'll have to do if they're\n going to survive, how they can\n keep their planet in one piece so\n they can live on it.\"\n\n\n \"That'll go over big. Advice is\n always popular.\"\n\n\n \"Can't help it. That's all we\n have time for.\"\n\n\n \"Special instructions?\"\n\n\n \"None. We leave the ship here\n and go down in separate landing\n craft. You can talk with me any\n time you want to through our\n communications, but don't unless\n you have to.\"\n\n\n \"They can't intercept the\n beams we use.\"\n\n\n \"They can't, and even if they\n did they wouldn't know what to\n do with our language. I want\n them to think that we don't\nneed\nto talk things over.\"",
"\"You ought to know. You're\n running this one.\" Bal looked\n down at the planet. Clouds were\n beginning to form at the twilight\n edge. \"I hate to go down\n and leave the ship up here with\n no one in it.\"\n\n\n \"They can't touch it. No matter\n how they develop in the next\n hundred years they still won't be\n able to get in or damage it in\n any way.\"\n\n\n \"It's myself I'm thinking\n about. Down there, alone.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be with you. On the other\n side of the Earth.\"\n\n\n \"That's not very close. I'd like\n it better if there were someone\n in the ship to bring it down in a\n hurry if things get rough. They\n don't think much of each other.\n I don't imagine they'll like aliens\n any better.\"",
"\"It's not we who need help, but\n the people of Earth,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"See you in five days.\" With\n that he entered a small landing\n craft, which left a faintly luminescent\n trail as it plunged toward\n Earth. As soon as it was\n safe to do so, Bal left in another\n craft, heading for the other side\n of the planet.\nAnd the spaceship circled\n Earth, unmanned, blazing and\n pulsing with light. No star in the\n winter skies of the planet below\n could equal it in brilliancy. Once\n a man-made satellite came near\n but it was dim and was lost sight\n of by the people below. During\n the day the ship was visible as\n a bright spot of light. At evening\n it seemed to burn through\n the sunset colors.",
"\"You know what I'm in favor\n of,\" said the second.\n\n\n \"I can guess,\" said Ethaniel,\n who had spoken first. \"The place\n is a complete mess. They've never\n done anything except fight\n each other—and invent better\n weapons.\"\n\n\n \"It's not what they've done,\"\n said Bal, the second alien. \"It's\n what they're going to do, with\n that big bomb.\"\n\n\n \"The more reason for stopping,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"The big\n bomb can destroy them. Without\n our help they may do just that.\"\n\n\n \"I may remind you that in two\n months twenty-nine days we're\n due in Willafours,\" said Bal.\n \"Without looking at the charts\n I can tell you we still have more\n than a hundred light-years to\n go.\"\n\n\n \"A week,\" said Ethaniel. \"We\n can spare a week and still get\n there on time.\"",
"\"You can't tell,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"We can look things over.\"\n\n\n \"And then what? How much\n authority do we have?\"\n\n\n \"Very little,\" conceded Ethaniel.\n \"Two minor officials on the\n way to Willafours—and we run\n directly into a problem no one\n knew existed.\"\n\n\n \"And when we get to Willafours\n we'll be busy. It will be a\n long time before anyone comes\n this way again.\"\n\n\n \"A very long time. There's\n nothing in this region of space\n our people want,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"And how long can Earth last?\n Ten years? Even ten months?\n The tension is building by the\n hour.\"\n\n\n \"What can I say?\" said Bal.\n \"I suppose we can stop and look\n them over. We're not committing\n ourselves by looking.\"",
"They went much closer to\n Earth, not intending to commit\n themselves. For a day they circled\n the planet, avoiding radar\n detection, which for them was\n not difficult, testing, and sampling.\n Finally Ethaniel looked up\n from the monitor screen. \"Any\n conclusions?\"\n\n\n \"What's there to think? It's\n worse than I imagined.\"\n\n\n \"In what way?\"\n\n\n \"Well, we knew they had the\n big bomb. Atmospheric analysis\n showed that as far away as we\n were.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"We also knew they could deliver\n the big bomb, presumably\n by some sort of aircraft.\"\n\n\n \"That was almost a certainty.\n They'd have no use for the big\n bomb without aircraft.\"",
"\"I get it. Makes us seem better\n than we are. They think we know\n exactly what we're doing even\n though we don't.\"\n\n\n \"If we're lucky they'll think\n that.\"\nBal looked out of the port at\n the planet below. \"It's going to\n be cold where I'm going. You too.\n Sure we don't want to change\n our plans and land in the southern\n hemisphere? It's summer\n there.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid not. The great\n powers are in the north. They\n are the ones we have to reach to\n do the job.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, but I was thinking of\n that holiday you mentioned.\n We'll be running straight into it.\n That won't help us any.\"\n\n\n \"I know, they don't like their\n holidays interrupted. It can't be\n helped. We can't wait until it's\n over.\"",
"\"They can't imagine that we'd\n light up an unmanned ship,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"Even if the thought\n should occur to them they'll have\n no way of checking it. Also, they\n won't be eager to harm us with\n our ship shining down on them.\"\n\n\n \"That's thinking,\" said Bal,\n moving to the controls. \"I'll move\n the ship over where they can see\n it best and then I'll light it up.\n I'll really light it up.\"\n\n\n \"Don't spare power.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that.\n They'll see it. Everybody on\n Earth will see it.\" Later, with the\n ship in position, glowing against\n the darkness of space, pulsating\n with light, Bal said: \"You know,\n I feel better about this. We may\n pull it off. Lighting the ship may\n be just the help we need.\"",
"\"They may be unfriendly,\"\n Ethaniel acknowledged. Now he\n switched a monitor screen until\n he looked at the slope of a mountain.\n It was snowing and men\n were cutting small green trees in\n the snow. \"I've thought of a\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"If it saves my neck I'm for\n it.\"\n\n\n \"I don't guarantee anything,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"This is what I\n was thinking of: instead of hiding\n the ship against the sun\n where there's little chance it will\n be seen, we'll make sure that\n they do see it. Let's take it\n around to the night side of the\n planet and light it up.\"\n\n\n \"Say, pretty good,\" said Bal.",
"\"I wish I knew what to think.\n There's so little time,\" Ethaniel\n said. \"Language isn't the difficulty.\n Our machines translate\n their languages easily and I've\n taken a cram course in two or\n three of them. But that's not\n enough, looking at a few plays,\n listening to advertisements, music,\n and news bulletins. I should\n go down and live among them,\n read books, talk to scholars, work\n with them, play.\"\n\n\n \"You could do that and you'd\n really get to know them. But\n that takes time—and we don't\n have it.\"\n\n\n \"I realize that.\"\n\n\n \"A flat yes or no,\" said Bal.\n\n\n \"No. We can't help them,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"There is nothing we\n can do for them—but we have to\n try.\"",
"\"Sure, I knew it before we\n started,\" said Bal. \"It's happened\n before. We take the trouble to\n find out what a people are like\n and when we can't help them we\n feel bad. It's going to be that\n way again.\" He rose and stretched.\n \"Well, give me an hour to\n think of some way of going at\n it.\"\nIt was longer than that before\n they met again. In the meantime\n the ship moved much closer to\n Earth. They no longer needed instruments\n to see it. The planet\n revolved outside the visionports.\n The southern plains were green,\n coursed with rivers; the oceans\n were blue; and much of the\n northern hemisphere was glistening\n white. Ragged clouds covered\n the pole, and a dirty pall\n spread over the mid-regions of\n the north.\n\n\n \"I haven't thought of anything\n brilliant,\" said Ethaniel.",
"\"Nor I,\" said Bal. \"We're going\n to have to go down there\n cold. And it will be cold.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. It's their winter.\"\n\n\n \"I did have an idea,\" said Bal.\n \"What about going down as supernatural\n beings?\"\n\n\n \"Hardly,\" said Ethaniel. \"A\n hundred years ago it might have\n worked. Today they have satellites.\n They are not primitives.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you're right,\" said\n Bal. \"I did think we ought to\n take advantage of our physical\n differences.\"\n\n\n \"If we could I'd be all for it.\n But these people are rough and\n desperate. They wouldn't be\n fooled by anything that crude.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you're calling it,\" said\n Bal.",
"\"What's worse is that I now\n find they also have missiles,\n range one thousand miles and\n upward. They either have or are\n near a primitive form of space\n travel.\"\n\n\n \"Bad,\" said Ethaniel. \"Sitting\n there, wondering when it's going\n to hit them. Nervousness could\n set it off.\"\n\n\n \"It could, and the missiles\n make it worse,\" said Bal. \"What\n did you find out at your end?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing worthwhile. I was\n looking at the people while you\n were investigating their weapons.\"\n\n\n \"You must think something.\"",
"\"My memory isn't convenient,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"I ask you\n to look at them.\"\nBal rustled, flicking the screen\n intently. \"Very much like ourselves,\"\n he said at last. \"A bit\n shorter perhaps, and most certainly\n incomplete. Except for the\n one thing they lack, and that's\n quite odd, they seem exactly like\n us. Is that what you wanted me\n to say?\"\n\n\n \"It is. The fact that they are\n an incomplete version of ourselves\n touches me. They actually\n seem defenseless, though I suppose\n they're not.\"\n\n\n \"Tough,\" said Bal. \"Nothing\n we can do about it.\"\n\n\n \"There is. We can give them\n a week.\"\n\n\n \"In a week we can't negate\n their entire history. We can't\n begin to undo the effect of the\n big bomb.\"",
"SECOND LANDING\nBy FLOYD WALLACE\nA gentle fancy for the Christmas Season—an\n oft-told tale with a wistful twistful of Something\n that left the Earth with a wing and a prayer.\nEarth\n was so far away that\n it wasn't visible. Even the\n sun was only a twinkle. But this\n vast distance did not mean that\n isolation could endure forever.\n Instruments within the ship intercepted\n radio broadcasts and,\n within the hour, early TV signals.\n Machines compiled dictionaries\n and grammars and began\n translating the major languages.\n The history of the planet was\n tabulated as facts became available.\n\n\n The course of the ship changed\n slightly; it was not much out of\n the way to swing nearer Earth.\n For days the two within the ship\n listened and watched with little\n comment. They had to decide\n soon.\n\n\n \"We've got to make or break,\"\n said the first alien.",
"\"A week?\" said Bal. \"To settle\n their problems? They've had two\n world wars in one generation\n and that the third and final one\n is coming up you can't help feeling\n in everything they do.\"\n\n\n \"It won't take much,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"The wrong diplomatic\n move, or a trigger-happy soldier\n could set it off. And it wouldn't\n have to be deliberate. A meteor\n shower could pass over and their\n clumsy instruments could interpret\n it as an all-out enemy\n attack.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad,\" said Bal. \"We'll\n just have to forget there ever\n was such a planet as Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Could you? Forget so many\n people?\"\n\n\n \"I'm doing it,\" said Bal. \"Just\n give them a little time and they\n won't be here to remind me that\n I have a conscience.\"",
"\"Me too, but mostly I'm cold,\"\n said Bal, shivering. \"Snow.\n Nothing but snow wherever I\n went. Miserable climate. And yet\n you had me go out walking after\n that first day.\"\n\n\n \"From my own experience it\n seemed to be a good idea,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"If I went out walking\n one day I noticed that the next\n day the officials were much more\n cooperative. If it worked for me\n I thought it might help you.\"\n\n\n \"It did. I don't know why, but\n it did,\" said Bal. \"Anyway, this\n agreement they made isn't the\n best but I think it will keep them\n from destroying themselves.\"\n\n\n \"It's as much as we can expect,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"They may\n have small wars after this, but\n never the big one. In fifty or a\n hundred years we can come back\n and see how much they've\n learned.\"",
"\"But you don't know what an\n angel is?\"\n\n\n \"No. I didn't have time to find\n out. Some creature of their folklore\n I suppose. You know, except\n for our wings they're very much\n like ourselves. Their legends are\n bound to resemble ours.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Bal. \"Anyway,\n peace on Earth.\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Science Fiction Stories\nJanuary\n 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"\"I'm aware of that,\" said Bal.\n \"Fill me in on that holiday, anything\n I ought to know. Probably\n religious in origin. That so?\"\n\n\n \"It was religious a long time\n ago,\" said Ethaniel. \"I didn't\n learn anything exact from radio\n and TV. Now it seems to be\n chiefly a time for eating, office\n parties, and selling merchandise.\"\n\n\n \"I see. It has become a business\n holiday.\"\n\n\n \"That's a good description. I\n didn't get as much of it as I\n ought to have. I was busy studying\n the people, and they're hard\n to pin down.\"\n\n\n \"I see. I was thinking there\n might be some way we could tie\n ourselves in with this holiday.\n Make it work for us.\"\n\n\n \"If there is I haven't thought\n of it.\""
],
[
"\"Nor I,\" said Bal. \"We're going\n to have to go down there\n cold. And it will be cold.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. It's their winter.\"\n\n\n \"I did have an idea,\" said Bal.\n \"What about going down as supernatural\n beings?\"\n\n\n \"Hardly,\" said Ethaniel. \"A\n hundred years ago it might have\n worked. Today they have satellites.\n They are not primitives.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you're right,\" said\n Bal. \"I did think we ought to\n take advantage of our physical\n differences.\"\n\n\n \"If we could I'd be all for it.\n But these people are rough and\n desperate. They wouldn't be\n fooled by anything that crude.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you're calling it,\" said\n Bal.",
"\"Me too, but mostly I'm cold,\"\n said Bal, shivering. \"Snow.\n Nothing but snow wherever I\n went. Miserable climate. And yet\n you had me go out walking after\n that first day.\"\n\n\n \"From my own experience it\n seemed to be a good idea,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"If I went out walking\n one day I noticed that the next\n day the officials were much more\n cooperative. If it worked for me\n I thought it might help you.\"\n\n\n \"It did. I don't know why, but\n it did,\" said Bal. \"Anyway, this\n agreement they made isn't the\n best but I think it will keep them\n from destroying themselves.\"\n\n\n \"It's as much as we can expect,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"They may\n have small wars after this, but\n never the big one. In fifty or a\n hundred years we can come back\n and see how much they've\n learned.\"",
"\"I'm not sure I want to,\" said\n Bal. \"Say, what's an angel?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"When I went out walking\n people stopped to look. Some\n knelt in the snow and called me\n an angel.\"\n\n\n \"Something like that happened\n to me,\" said Ethaniel.\n\n\n \"I didn't get it but I didn't let\n it upset me,\" said Bal. \"I smiled\n at them and went about my business.\"\n He shivered again. \"It was\n always cold. I walked out, but\n sometimes I flew back. I hope\n that was all right.\"\n\n\n In the cabin Bal spread his\n great wings. Renaissance painters\n had never seen his like but\n knew exactly how he looked. In\n their paintings they had pictured\n him innumerable times.\n\n\n \"I don't think it hurt us that\n you flew,\" said Ethaniel. \"I did\n so myself occasionally.\"",
"\"They may be unfriendly,\"\n Ethaniel acknowledged. Now he\n switched a monitor screen until\n he looked at the slope of a mountain.\n It was snowing and men\n were cutting small green trees in\n the snow. \"I've thought of a\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"If it saves my neck I'm for\n it.\"\n\n\n \"I don't guarantee anything,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"This is what I\n was thinking of: instead of hiding\n the ship against the sun\n where there's little chance it will\n be seen, we'll make sure that\n they do see it. Let's take it\n around to the night side of the\n planet and light it up.\"\n\n\n \"Say, pretty good,\" said Bal.",
"\"My memory isn't convenient,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"I ask you\n to look at them.\"\nBal rustled, flicking the screen\n intently. \"Very much like ourselves,\"\n he said at last. \"A bit\n shorter perhaps, and most certainly\n incomplete. Except for the\n one thing they lack, and that's\n quite odd, they seem exactly like\n us. Is that what you wanted me\n to say?\"\n\n\n \"It is. The fact that they are\n an incomplete version of ourselves\n touches me. They actually\n seem defenseless, though I suppose\n they're not.\"\n\n\n \"Tough,\" said Bal. \"Nothing\n we can do about it.\"\n\n\n \"There is. We can give them\n a week.\"\n\n\n \"In a week we can't negate\n their entire history. We can't\n begin to undo the effect of the\n big bomb.\"",
"\"Sure, I knew it before we\n started,\" said Bal. \"It's happened\n before. We take the trouble to\n find out what a people are like\n and when we can't help them we\n feel bad. It's going to be that\n way again.\" He rose and stretched.\n \"Well, give me an hour to\n think of some way of going at\n it.\"\nIt was longer than that before\n they met again. In the meantime\n the ship moved much closer to\n Earth. They no longer needed instruments\n to see it. The planet\n revolved outside the visionports.\n The southern plains were green,\n coursed with rivers; the oceans\n were blue; and much of the\n northern hemisphere was glistening\n white. Ragged clouds covered\n the pole, and a dirty pall\n spread over the mid-regions of\n the north.\n\n\n \"I haven't thought of anything\n brilliant,\" said Ethaniel.",
"\"What's worse is that I now\n find they also have missiles,\n range one thousand miles and\n upward. They either have or are\n near a primitive form of space\n travel.\"\n\n\n \"Bad,\" said Ethaniel. \"Sitting\n there, wondering when it's going\n to hit them. Nervousness could\n set it off.\"\n\n\n \"It could, and the missiles\n make it worse,\" said Bal. \"What\n did you find out at your end?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing worthwhile. I was\n looking at the people while you\n were investigating their weapons.\"\n\n\n \"You must think something.\"",
"\"You can't tell,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"We can look things over.\"\n\n\n \"And then what? How much\n authority do we have?\"\n\n\n \"Very little,\" conceded Ethaniel.\n \"Two minor officials on the\n way to Willafours—and we run\n directly into a problem no one\n knew existed.\"\n\n\n \"And when we get to Willafours\n we'll be busy. It will be a\n long time before anyone comes\n this way again.\"\n\n\n \"A very long time. There's\n nothing in this region of space\n our people want,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"And how long can Earth last?\n Ten years? Even ten months?\n The tension is building by the\n hour.\"\n\n\n \"What can I say?\" said Bal.\n \"I suppose we can stop and look\n them over. We're not committing\n ourselves by looking.\"",
"\"I wish I knew what to think.\n There's so little time,\" Ethaniel\n said. \"Language isn't the difficulty.\n Our machines translate\n their languages easily and I've\n taken a cram course in two or\n three of them. But that's not\n enough, looking at a few plays,\n listening to advertisements, music,\n and news bulletins. I should\n go down and live among them,\n read books, talk to scholars, work\n with them, play.\"\n\n\n \"You could do that and you'd\n really get to know them. But\n that takes time—and we don't\n have it.\"\n\n\n \"I realize that.\"\n\n\n \"A flat yes or no,\" said Bal.\n\n\n \"No. We can't help them,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"There is nothing we\n can do for them—but we have to\n try.\"",
"\"I get it. Makes us seem better\n than we are. They think we know\n exactly what we're doing even\n though we don't.\"\n\n\n \"If we're lucky they'll think\n that.\"\nBal looked out of the port at\n the planet below. \"It's going to\n be cold where I'm going. You too.\n Sure we don't want to change\n our plans and land in the southern\n hemisphere? It's summer\n there.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid not. The great\n powers are in the north. They\n are the ones we have to reach to\n do the job.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, but I was thinking of\n that holiday you mentioned.\n We'll be running straight into it.\n That won't help us any.\"\n\n\n \"I know, they don't like their\n holidays interrupted. It can't be\n helped. We can't wait until it's\n over.\"",
"\"I'm aware of that,\" said Bal.\n \"Fill me in on that holiday, anything\n I ought to know. Probably\n religious in origin. That so?\"\n\n\n \"It was religious a long time\n ago,\" said Ethaniel. \"I didn't\n learn anything exact from radio\n and TV. Now it seems to be\n chiefly a time for eating, office\n parties, and selling merchandise.\"\n\n\n \"I see. It has become a business\n holiday.\"\n\n\n \"That's a good description. I\n didn't get as much of it as I\n ought to have. I was busy studying\n the people, and they're hard\n to pin down.\"\n\n\n \"I see. I was thinking there\n might be some way we could tie\n ourselves in with this holiday.\n Make it work for us.\"\n\n\n \"If there is I haven't thought\n of it.\"",
"\"They can't imagine that we'd\n light up an unmanned ship,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"Even if the thought\n should occur to them they'll have\n no way of checking it. Also, they\n won't be eager to harm us with\n our ship shining down on them.\"\n\n\n \"That's thinking,\" said Bal,\n moving to the controls. \"I'll move\n the ship over where they can see\n it best and then I'll light it up.\n I'll really light it up.\"\n\n\n \"Don't spare power.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that.\n They'll see it. Everybody on\n Earth will see it.\" Later, with the\n ship in position, glowing against\n the darkness of space, pulsating\n with light, Bal said: \"You know,\n I feel better about this. We may\n pull it off. Lighting the ship may\n be just the help we need.\"",
"\"A week?\" said Bal. \"To settle\n their problems? They've had two\n world wars in one generation\n and that the third and final one\n is coming up you can't help feeling\n in everything they do.\"\n\n\n \"It won't take much,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"The wrong diplomatic\n move, or a trigger-happy soldier\n could set it off. And it wouldn't\n have to be deliberate. A meteor\n shower could pass over and their\n clumsy instruments could interpret\n it as an all-out enemy\n attack.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad,\" said Bal. \"We'll\n just have to forget there ever\n was such a planet as Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Could you? Forget so many\n people?\"\n\n\n \"I'm doing it,\" said Bal. \"Just\n give them a little time and they\n won't be here to remind me that\n I have a conscience.\"",
"\"You ought to know. You're\n running this one.\" Bal looked\n down at the planet. Clouds were\n beginning to form at the twilight\n edge. \"I hate to go down\n and leave the ship up here with\n no one in it.\"\n\n\n \"They can't touch it. No matter\n how they develop in the next\n hundred years they still won't be\n able to get in or damage it in\n any way.\"\n\n\n \"It's myself I'm thinking\n about. Down there, alone.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be with you. On the other\n side of the Earth.\"\n\n\n \"That's not very close. I'd like\n it better if there were someone\n in the ship to bring it down in a\n hurry if things get rough. They\n don't think much of each other.\n I don't imagine they'll like aliens\n any better.\"",
"\"You know what I'm in favor\n of,\" said the second.\n\n\n \"I can guess,\" said Ethaniel,\n who had spoken first. \"The place\n is a complete mess. They've never\n done anything except fight\n each other—and invent better\n weapons.\"\n\n\n \"It's not what they've done,\"\n said Bal, the second alien. \"It's\n what they're going to do, with\n that big bomb.\"\n\n\n \"The more reason for stopping,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"The big\n bomb can destroy them. Without\n our help they may do just that.\"\n\n\n \"I may remind you that in two\n months twenty-nine days we're\n due in Willafours,\" said Bal.\n \"Without looking at the charts\n I can tell you we still have more\n than a hundred light-years to\n go.\"\n\n\n \"A week,\" said Ethaniel. \"We\n can spare a week and still get\n there on time.\"",
"And the ship circled on,\n bright, shining, seeming to be a\n little piece clipped from the center\n of a star and brought near\n Earth to illuminate it. Never, or\n seldom, had Earth seen anything\n like it.\n\n\n In five days the two small landing\n craft that had left it arched\n up from Earth and joined the\n orbit of the large ship. The two\n small craft slid inside the large\n one and doors closed behind\n them. In a short time the aliens\n met again.\n\n\n \"We did it,\" said Bal exultantly\n as he came in. \"I don't know\n how we did it and I thought we\n were going to fail but at the last\n minute they came through.\"\n\n\n Ethaniel smiled. \"I'm tired,\"\n he said, rustling.",
"\"It's not we who need help, but\n the people of Earth,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"See you in five days.\" With\n that he entered a small landing\n craft, which left a faintly luminescent\n trail as it plunged toward\n Earth. As soon as it was\n safe to do so, Bal left in another\n craft, heading for the other side\n of the planet.\nAnd the spaceship circled\n Earth, unmanned, blazing and\n pulsing with light. No star in the\n winter skies of the planet below\n could equal it in brilliancy. Once\n a man-made satellite came near\n but it was dim and was lost sight\n of by the people below. During\n the day the ship was visible as\n a bright spot of light. At evening\n it seemed to burn through\n the sunset colors.",
"\"All right,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"You take one side and I the\n other. We'll tell them bluntly\n what they'll have to do if they're\n going to survive, how they can\n keep their planet in one piece so\n they can live on it.\"\n\n\n \"That'll go over big. Advice is\n always popular.\"\n\n\n \"Can't help it. That's all we\n have time for.\"\n\n\n \"Special instructions?\"\n\n\n \"None. We leave the ship here\n and go down in separate landing\n craft. You can talk with me any\n time you want to through our\n communications, but don't unless\n you have to.\"\n\n\n \"They can't intercept the\n beams we use.\"\n\n\n \"They can't, and even if they\n did they wouldn't know what to\n do with our language. I want\n them to think that we don't\nneed\nto talk things over.\"",
"\"But you don't know what an\n angel is?\"\n\n\n \"No. I didn't have time to find\n out. Some creature of their folklore\n I suppose. You know, except\n for our wings they're very much\n like ourselves. Their legends are\n bound to resemble ours.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Bal. \"Anyway,\n peace on Earth.\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Science Fiction Stories\nJanuary\n 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"They went much closer to\n Earth, not intending to commit\n themselves. For a day they circled\n the planet, avoiding radar\n detection, which for them was\n not difficult, testing, and sampling.\n Finally Ethaniel looked up\n from the monitor screen. \"Any\n conclusions?\"\n\n\n \"What's there to think? It's\n worse than I imagined.\"\n\n\n \"In what way?\"\n\n\n \"Well, we knew they had the\n big bomb. Atmospheric analysis\n showed that as far away as we\n were.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"We also knew they could deliver\n the big bomb, presumably\n by some sort of aircraft.\"\n\n\n \"That was almost a certainty.\n They'd have no use for the big\n bomb without aircraft.\""
],
[
"\"Nor I,\" said Bal. \"We're going\n to have to go down there\n cold. And it will be cold.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. It's their winter.\"\n\n\n \"I did have an idea,\" said Bal.\n \"What about going down as supernatural\n beings?\"\n\n\n \"Hardly,\" said Ethaniel. \"A\n hundred years ago it might have\n worked. Today they have satellites.\n They are not primitives.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you're right,\" said\n Bal. \"I did think we ought to\n take advantage of our physical\n differences.\"\n\n\n \"If we could I'd be all for it.\n But these people are rough and\n desperate. They wouldn't be\n fooled by anything that crude.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you're calling it,\" said\n Bal.",
"\"Sure, I knew it before we\n started,\" said Bal. \"It's happened\n before. We take the trouble to\n find out what a people are like\n and when we can't help them we\n feel bad. It's going to be that\n way again.\" He rose and stretched.\n \"Well, give me an hour to\n think of some way of going at\n it.\"\nIt was longer than that before\n they met again. In the meantime\n the ship moved much closer to\n Earth. They no longer needed instruments\n to see it. The planet\n revolved outside the visionports.\n The southern plains were green,\n coursed with rivers; the oceans\n were blue; and much of the\n northern hemisphere was glistening\n white. Ragged clouds covered\n the pole, and a dirty pall\n spread over the mid-regions of\n the north.\n\n\n \"I haven't thought of anything\n brilliant,\" said Ethaniel.",
"\"My memory isn't convenient,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"I ask you\n to look at them.\"\nBal rustled, flicking the screen\n intently. \"Very much like ourselves,\"\n he said at last. \"A bit\n shorter perhaps, and most certainly\n incomplete. Except for the\n one thing they lack, and that's\n quite odd, they seem exactly like\n us. Is that what you wanted me\n to say?\"\n\n\n \"It is. The fact that they are\n an incomplete version of ourselves\n touches me. They actually\n seem defenseless, though I suppose\n they're not.\"\n\n\n \"Tough,\" said Bal. \"Nothing\n we can do about it.\"\n\n\n \"There is. We can give them\n a week.\"\n\n\n \"In a week we can't negate\n their entire history. We can't\n begin to undo the effect of the\n big bomb.\"",
"\"You can't tell,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"We can look things over.\"\n\n\n \"And then what? How much\n authority do we have?\"\n\n\n \"Very little,\" conceded Ethaniel.\n \"Two minor officials on the\n way to Willafours—and we run\n directly into a problem no one\n knew existed.\"\n\n\n \"And when we get to Willafours\n we'll be busy. It will be a\n long time before anyone comes\n this way again.\"\n\n\n \"A very long time. There's\n nothing in this region of space\n our people want,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"And how long can Earth last?\n Ten years? Even ten months?\n The tension is building by the\n hour.\"\n\n\n \"What can I say?\" said Bal.\n \"I suppose we can stop and look\n them over. We're not committing\n ourselves by looking.\"",
"\"I wish I knew what to think.\n There's so little time,\" Ethaniel\n said. \"Language isn't the difficulty.\n Our machines translate\n their languages easily and I've\n taken a cram course in two or\n three of them. But that's not\n enough, looking at a few plays,\n listening to advertisements, music,\n and news bulletins. I should\n go down and live among them,\n read books, talk to scholars, work\n with them, play.\"\n\n\n \"You could do that and you'd\n really get to know them. But\n that takes time—and we don't\n have it.\"\n\n\n \"I realize that.\"\n\n\n \"A flat yes or no,\" said Bal.\n\n\n \"No. We can't help them,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"There is nothing we\n can do for them—but we have to\n try.\"",
"\"What's worse is that I now\n find they also have missiles,\n range one thousand miles and\n upward. They either have or are\n near a primitive form of space\n travel.\"\n\n\n \"Bad,\" said Ethaniel. \"Sitting\n there, wondering when it's going\n to hit them. Nervousness could\n set it off.\"\n\n\n \"It could, and the missiles\n make it worse,\" said Bal. \"What\n did you find out at your end?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing worthwhile. I was\n looking at the people while you\n were investigating their weapons.\"\n\n\n \"You must think something.\"",
"\"They may be unfriendly,\"\n Ethaniel acknowledged. Now he\n switched a monitor screen until\n he looked at the slope of a mountain.\n It was snowing and men\n were cutting small green trees in\n the snow. \"I've thought of a\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"If it saves my neck I'm for\n it.\"\n\n\n \"I don't guarantee anything,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"This is what I\n was thinking of: instead of hiding\n the ship against the sun\n where there's little chance it will\n be seen, we'll make sure that\n they do see it. Let's take it\n around to the night side of the\n planet and light it up.\"\n\n\n \"Say, pretty good,\" said Bal.",
"\"Me too, but mostly I'm cold,\"\n said Bal, shivering. \"Snow.\n Nothing but snow wherever I\n went. Miserable climate. And yet\n you had me go out walking after\n that first day.\"\n\n\n \"From my own experience it\n seemed to be a good idea,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"If I went out walking\n one day I noticed that the next\n day the officials were much more\n cooperative. If it worked for me\n I thought it might help you.\"\n\n\n \"It did. I don't know why, but\n it did,\" said Bal. \"Anyway, this\n agreement they made isn't the\n best but I think it will keep them\n from destroying themselves.\"\n\n\n \"It's as much as we can expect,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"They may\n have small wars after this, but\n never the big one. In fifty or a\n hundred years we can come back\n and see how much they've\n learned.\"",
"\"They can't imagine that we'd\n light up an unmanned ship,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"Even if the thought\n should occur to them they'll have\n no way of checking it. Also, they\n won't be eager to harm us with\n our ship shining down on them.\"\n\n\n \"That's thinking,\" said Bal,\n moving to the controls. \"I'll move\n the ship over where they can see\n it best and then I'll light it up.\n I'll really light it up.\"\n\n\n \"Don't spare power.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that.\n They'll see it. Everybody on\n Earth will see it.\" Later, with the\n ship in position, glowing against\n the darkness of space, pulsating\n with light, Bal said: \"You know,\n I feel better about this. We may\n pull it off. Lighting the ship may\n be just the help we need.\"",
"\"I'm not sure I want to,\" said\n Bal. \"Say, what's an angel?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"When I went out walking\n people stopped to look. Some\n knelt in the snow and called me\n an angel.\"\n\n\n \"Something like that happened\n to me,\" said Ethaniel.\n\n\n \"I didn't get it but I didn't let\n it upset me,\" said Bal. \"I smiled\n at them and went about my business.\"\n He shivered again. \"It was\n always cold. I walked out, but\n sometimes I flew back. I hope\n that was all right.\"\n\n\n In the cabin Bal spread his\n great wings. Renaissance painters\n had never seen his like but\n knew exactly how he looked. In\n their paintings they had pictured\n him innumerable times.\n\n\n \"I don't think it hurt us that\n you flew,\" said Ethaniel. \"I did\n so myself occasionally.\"",
"\"You ought to know. You're\n running this one.\" Bal looked\n down at the planet. Clouds were\n beginning to form at the twilight\n edge. \"I hate to go down\n and leave the ship up here with\n no one in it.\"\n\n\n \"They can't touch it. No matter\n how they develop in the next\n hundred years they still won't be\n able to get in or damage it in\n any way.\"\n\n\n \"It's myself I'm thinking\n about. Down there, alone.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be with you. On the other\n side of the Earth.\"\n\n\n \"That's not very close. I'd like\n it better if there were someone\n in the ship to bring it down in a\n hurry if things get rough. They\n don't think much of each other.\n I don't imagine they'll like aliens\n any better.\"",
"\"You know what I'm in favor\n of,\" said the second.\n\n\n \"I can guess,\" said Ethaniel,\n who had spoken first. \"The place\n is a complete mess. They've never\n done anything except fight\n each other—and invent better\n weapons.\"\n\n\n \"It's not what they've done,\"\n said Bal, the second alien. \"It's\n what they're going to do, with\n that big bomb.\"\n\n\n \"The more reason for stopping,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"The big\n bomb can destroy them. Without\n our help they may do just that.\"\n\n\n \"I may remind you that in two\n months twenty-nine days we're\n due in Willafours,\" said Bal.\n \"Without looking at the charts\n I can tell you we still have more\n than a hundred light-years to\n go.\"\n\n\n \"A week,\" said Ethaniel. \"We\n can spare a week and still get\n there on time.\"",
"And the ship circled on,\n bright, shining, seeming to be a\n little piece clipped from the center\n of a star and brought near\n Earth to illuminate it. Never, or\n seldom, had Earth seen anything\n like it.\n\n\n In five days the two small landing\n craft that had left it arched\n up from Earth and joined the\n orbit of the large ship. The two\n small craft slid inside the large\n one and doors closed behind\n them. In a short time the aliens\n met again.\n\n\n \"We did it,\" said Bal exultantly\n as he came in. \"I don't know\n how we did it and I thought we\n were going to fail but at the last\n minute they came through.\"\n\n\n Ethaniel smiled. \"I'm tired,\"\n he said, rustling.",
"\"A week?\" said Bal. \"To settle\n their problems? They've had two\n world wars in one generation\n and that the third and final one\n is coming up you can't help feeling\n in everything they do.\"\n\n\n \"It won't take much,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"The wrong diplomatic\n move, or a trigger-happy soldier\n could set it off. And it wouldn't\n have to be deliberate. A meteor\n shower could pass over and their\n clumsy instruments could interpret\n it as an all-out enemy\n attack.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad,\" said Bal. \"We'll\n just have to forget there ever\n was such a planet as Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Could you? Forget so many\n people?\"\n\n\n \"I'm doing it,\" said Bal. \"Just\n give them a little time and they\n won't be here to remind me that\n I have a conscience.\"",
"\"It's not we who need help, but\n the people of Earth,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"See you in five days.\" With\n that he entered a small landing\n craft, which left a faintly luminescent\n trail as it plunged toward\n Earth. As soon as it was\n safe to do so, Bal left in another\n craft, heading for the other side\n of the planet.\nAnd the spaceship circled\n Earth, unmanned, blazing and\n pulsing with light. No star in the\n winter skies of the planet below\n could equal it in brilliancy. Once\n a man-made satellite came near\n but it was dim and was lost sight\n of by the people below. During\n the day the ship was visible as\n a bright spot of light. At evening\n it seemed to burn through\n the sunset colors.",
"\"All right,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"You take one side and I the\n other. We'll tell them bluntly\n what they'll have to do if they're\n going to survive, how they can\n keep their planet in one piece so\n they can live on it.\"\n\n\n \"That'll go over big. Advice is\n always popular.\"\n\n\n \"Can't help it. That's all we\n have time for.\"\n\n\n \"Special instructions?\"\n\n\n \"None. We leave the ship here\n and go down in separate landing\n craft. You can talk with me any\n time you want to through our\n communications, but don't unless\n you have to.\"\n\n\n \"They can't intercept the\n beams we use.\"\n\n\n \"They can't, and even if they\n did they wouldn't know what to\n do with our language. I want\n them to think that we don't\nneed\nto talk things over.\"",
"\"I'm aware of that,\" said Bal.\n \"Fill me in on that holiday, anything\n I ought to know. Probably\n religious in origin. That so?\"\n\n\n \"It was religious a long time\n ago,\" said Ethaniel. \"I didn't\n learn anything exact from radio\n and TV. Now it seems to be\n chiefly a time for eating, office\n parties, and selling merchandise.\"\n\n\n \"I see. It has become a business\n holiday.\"\n\n\n \"That's a good description. I\n didn't get as much of it as I\n ought to have. I was busy studying\n the people, and they're hard\n to pin down.\"\n\n\n \"I see. I was thinking there\n might be some way we could tie\n ourselves in with this holiday.\n Make it work for us.\"\n\n\n \"If there is I haven't thought\n of it.\"",
"\"I get it. Makes us seem better\n than we are. They think we know\n exactly what we're doing even\n though we don't.\"\n\n\n \"If we're lucky they'll think\n that.\"\nBal looked out of the port at\n the planet below. \"It's going to\n be cold where I'm going. You too.\n Sure we don't want to change\n our plans and land in the southern\n hemisphere? It's summer\n there.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid not. The great\n powers are in the north. They\n are the ones we have to reach to\n do the job.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, but I was thinking of\n that holiday you mentioned.\n We'll be running straight into it.\n That won't help us any.\"\n\n\n \"I know, they don't like their\n holidays interrupted. It can't be\n helped. We can't wait until it's\n over.\"",
"They went much closer to\n Earth, not intending to commit\n themselves. For a day they circled\n the planet, avoiding radar\n detection, which for them was\n not difficult, testing, and sampling.\n Finally Ethaniel looked up\n from the monitor screen. \"Any\n conclusions?\"\n\n\n \"What's there to think? It's\n worse than I imagined.\"\n\n\n \"In what way?\"\n\n\n \"Well, we knew they had the\n big bomb. Atmospheric analysis\n showed that as far away as we\n were.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"We also knew they could deliver\n the big bomb, presumably\n by some sort of aircraft.\"\n\n\n \"That was almost a certainty.\n They'd have no use for the big\n bomb without aircraft.\"",
"\"But you don't know what an\n angel is?\"\n\n\n \"No. I didn't have time to find\n out. Some creature of their folklore\n I suppose. You know, except\n for our wings they're very much\n like ourselves. Their legends are\n bound to resemble ours.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Bal. \"Anyway,\n peace on Earth.\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Science Fiction Stories\nJanuary\n 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note."
],
[
"\"I wish I knew what to think.\n There's so little time,\" Ethaniel\n said. \"Language isn't the difficulty.\n Our machines translate\n their languages easily and I've\n taken a cram course in two or\n three of them. But that's not\n enough, looking at a few plays,\n listening to advertisements, music,\n and news bulletins. I should\n go down and live among them,\n read books, talk to scholars, work\n with them, play.\"\n\n\n \"You could do that and you'd\n really get to know them. But\n that takes time—and we don't\n have it.\"\n\n\n \"I realize that.\"\n\n\n \"A flat yes or no,\" said Bal.\n\n\n \"No. We can't help them,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"There is nothing we\n can do for them—but we have to\n try.\"",
"\"You know what I'm in favor\n of,\" said the second.\n\n\n \"I can guess,\" said Ethaniel,\n who had spoken first. \"The place\n is a complete mess. They've never\n done anything except fight\n each other—and invent better\n weapons.\"\n\n\n \"It's not what they've done,\"\n said Bal, the second alien. \"It's\n what they're going to do, with\n that big bomb.\"\n\n\n \"The more reason for stopping,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"The big\n bomb can destroy them. Without\n our help they may do just that.\"\n\n\n \"I may remind you that in two\n months twenty-nine days we're\n due in Willafours,\" said Bal.\n \"Without looking at the charts\n I can tell you we still have more\n than a hundred light-years to\n go.\"\n\n\n \"A week,\" said Ethaniel. \"We\n can spare a week and still get\n there on time.\"",
"\"You can't tell,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"We can look things over.\"\n\n\n \"And then what? How much\n authority do we have?\"\n\n\n \"Very little,\" conceded Ethaniel.\n \"Two minor officials on the\n way to Willafours—and we run\n directly into a problem no one\n knew existed.\"\n\n\n \"And when we get to Willafours\n we'll be busy. It will be a\n long time before anyone comes\n this way again.\"\n\n\n \"A very long time. There's\n nothing in this region of space\n our people want,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"And how long can Earth last?\n Ten years? Even ten months?\n The tension is building by the\n hour.\"\n\n\n \"What can I say?\" said Bal.\n \"I suppose we can stop and look\n them over. We're not committing\n ourselves by looking.\"",
"\"My memory isn't convenient,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"I ask you\n to look at them.\"\nBal rustled, flicking the screen\n intently. \"Very much like ourselves,\"\n he said at last. \"A bit\n shorter perhaps, and most certainly\n incomplete. Except for the\n one thing they lack, and that's\n quite odd, they seem exactly like\n us. Is that what you wanted me\n to say?\"\n\n\n \"It is. The fact that they are\n an incomplete version of ourselves\n touches me. They actually\n seem defenseless, though I suppose\n they're not.\"\n\n\n \"Tough,\" said Bal. \"Nothing\n we can do about it.\"\n\n\n \"There is. We can give them\n a week.\"\n\n\n \"In a week we can't negate\n their entire history. We can't\n begin to undo the effect of the\n big bomb.\"",
"\"Sure, I knew it before we\n started,\" said Bal. \"It's happened\n before. We take the trouble to\n find out what a people are like\n and when we can't help them we\n feel bad. It's going to be that\n way again.\" He rose and stretched.\n \"Well, give me an hour to\n think of some way of going at\n it.\"\nIt was longer than that before\n they met again. In the meantime\n the ship moved much closer to\n Earth. They no longer needed instruments\n to see it. The planet\n revolved outside the visionports.\n The southern plains were green,\n coursed with rivers; the oceans\n were blue; and much of the\n northern hemisphere was glistening\n white. Ragged clouds covered\n the pole, and a dirty pall\n spread over the mid-regions of\n the north.\n\n\n \"I haven't thought of anything\n brilliant,\" said Ethaniel.",
"\"They may be unfriendly,\"\n Ethaniel acknowledged. Now he\n switched a monitor screen until\n he looked at the slope of a mountain.\n It was snowing and men\n were cutting small green trees in\n the snow. \"I've thought of a\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"If it saves my neck I'm for\n it.\"\n\n\n \"I don't guarantee anything,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"This is what I\n was thinking of: instead of hiding\n the ship against the sun\n where there's little chance it will\n be seen, we'll make sure that\n they do see it. Let's take it\n around to the night side of the\n planet and light it up.\"\n\n\n \"Say, pretty good,\" said Bal.",
"\"Nor I,\" said Bal. \"We're going\n to have to go down there\n cold. And it will be cold.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. It's their winter.\"\n\n\n \"I did have an idea,\" said Bal.\n \"What about going down as supernatural\n beings?\"\n\n\n \"Hardly,\" said Ethaniel. \"A\n hundred years ago it might have\n worked. Today they have satellites.\n They are not primitives.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you're right,\" said\n Bal. \"I did think we ought to\n take advantage of our physical\n differences.\"\n\n\n \"If we could I'd be all for it.\n But these people are rough and\n desperate. They wouldn't be\n fooled by anything that crude.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you're calling it,\" said\n Bal.",
"\"A week?\" said Bal. \"To settle\n their problems? They've had two\n world wars in one generation\n and that the third and final one\n is coming up you can't help feeling\n in everything they do.\"\n\n\n \"It won't take much,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"The wrong diplomatic\n move, or a trigger-happy soldier\n could set it off. And it wouldn't\n have to be deliberate. A meteor\n shower could pass over and their\n clumsy instruments could interpret\n it as an all-out enemy\n attack.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad,\" said Bal. \"We'll\n just have to forget there ever\n was such a planet as Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Could you? Forget so many\n people?\"\n\n\n \"I'm doing it,\" said Bal. \"Just\n give them a little time and they\n won't be here to remind me that\n I have a conscience.\"",
"\"They can't imagine that we'd\n light up an unmanned ship,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"Even if the thought\n should occur to them they'll have\n no way of checking it. Also, they\n won't be eager to harm us with\n our ship shining down on them.\"\n\n\n \"That's thinking,\" said Bal,\n moving to the controls. \"I'll move\n the ship over where they can see\n it best and then I'll light it up.\n I'll really light it up.\"\n\n\n \"Don't spare power.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that.\n They'll see it. Everybody on\n Earth will see it.\" Later, with the\n ship in position, glowing against\n the darkness of space, pulsating\n with light, Bal said: \"You know,\n I feel better about this. We may\n pull it off. Lighting the ship may\n be just the help we need.\"",
"\"Me too, but mostly I'm cold,\"\n said Bal, shivering. \"Snow.\n Nothing but snow wherever I\n went. Miserable climate. And yet\n you had me go out walking after\n that first day.\"\n\n\n \"From my own experience it\n seemed to be a good idea,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"If I went out walking\n one day I noticed that the next\n day the officials were much more\n cooperative. If it worked for me\n I thought it might help you.\"\n\n\n \"It did. I don't know why, but\n it did,\" said Bal. \"Anyway, this\n agreement they made isn't the\n best but I think it will keep them\n from destroying themselves.\"\n\n\n \"It's as much as we can expect,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"They may\n have small wars after this, but\n never the big one. In fifty or a\n hundred years we can come back\n and see how much they've\n learned.\"",
"\"It's not we who need help, but\n the people of Earth,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"See you in five days.\" With\n that he entered a small landing\n craft, which left a faintly luminescent\n trail as it plunged toward\n Earth. As soon as it was\n safe to do so, Bal left in another\n craft, heading for the other side\n of the planet.\nAnd the spaceship circled\n Earth, unmanned, blazing and\n pulsing with light. No star in the\n winter skies of the planet below\n could equal it in brilliancy. Once\n a man-made satellite came near\n but it was dim and was lost sight\n of by the people below. During\n the day the ship was visible as\n a bright spot of light. At evening\n it seemed to burn through\n the sunset colors.",
"\"What's worse is that I now\n find they also have missiles,\n range one thousand miles and\n upward. They either have or are\n near a primitive form of space\n travel.\"\n\n\n \"Bad,\" said Ethaniel. \"Sitting\n there, wondering when it's going\n to hit them. Nervousness could\n set it off.\"\n\n\n \"It could, and the missiles\n make it worse,\" said Bal. \"What\n did you find out at your end?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing worthwhile. I was\n looking at the people while you\n were investigating their weapons.\"\n\n\n \"You must think something.\"",
"\"You ought to know. You're\n running this one.\" Bal looked\n down at the planet. Clouds were\n beginning to form at the twilight\n edge. \"I hate to go down\n and leave the ship up here with\n no one in it.\"\n\n\n \"They can't touch it. No matter\n how they develop in the next\n hundred years they still won't be\n able to get in or damage it in\n any way.\"\n\n\n \"It's myself I'm thinking\n about. Down there, alone.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be with you. On the other\n side of the Earth.\"\n\n\n \"That's not very close. I'd like\n it better if there were someone\n in the ship to bring it down in a\n hurry if things get rough. They\n don't think much of each other.\n I don't imagine they'll like aliens\n any better.\"",
"\"All right,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"You take one side and I the\n other. We'll tell them bluntly\n what they'll have to do if they're\n going to survive, how they can\n keep their planet in one piece so\n they can live on it.\"\n\n\n \"That'll go over big. Advice is\n always popular.\"\n\n\n \"Can't help it. That's all we\n have time for.\"\n\n\n \"Special instructions?\"\n\n\n \"None. We leave the ship here\n and go down in separate landing\n craft. You can talk with me any\n time you want to through our\n communications, but don't unless\n you have to.\"\n\n\n \"They can't intercept the\n beams we use.\"\n\n\n \"They can't, and even if they\n did they wouldn't know what to\n do with our language. I want\n them to think that we don't\nneed\nto talk things over.\"",
"\"I'm aware of that,\" said Bal.\n \"Fill me in on that holiday, anything\n I ought to know. Probably\n religious in origin. That so?\"\n\n\n \"It was religious a long time\n ago,\" said Ethaniel. \"I didn't\n learn anything exact from radio\n and TV. Now it seems to be\n chiefly a time for eating, office\n parties, and selling merchandise.\"\n\n\n \"I see. It has become a business\n holiday.\"\n\n\n \"That's a good description. I\n didn't get as much of it as I\n ought to have. I was busy studying\n the people, and they're hard\n to pin down.\"\n\n\n \"I see. I was thinking there\n might be some way we could tie\n ourselves in with this holiday.\n Make it work for us.\"\n\n\n \"If there is I haven't thought\n of it.\"",
"And the ship circled on,\n bright, shining, seeming to be a\n little piece clipped from the center\n of a star and brought near\n Earth to illuminate it. Never, or\n seldom, had Earth seen anything\n like it.\n\n\n In five days the two small landing\n craft that had left it arched\n up from Earth and joined the\n orbit of the large ship. The two\n small craft slid inside the large\n one and doors closed behind\n them. In a short time the aliens\n met again.\n\n\n \"We did it,\" said Bal exultantly\n as he came in. \"I don't know\n how we did it and I thought we\n were going to fail but at the last\n minute they came through.\"\n\n\n Ethaniel smiled. \"I'm tired,\"\n he said, rustling.",
"\"I get it. Makes us seem better\n than we are. They think we know\n exactly what we're doing even\n though we don't.\"\n\n\n \"If we're lucky they'll think\n that.\"\nBal looked out of the port at\n the planet below. \"It's going to\n be cold where I'm going. You too.\n Sure we don't want to change\n our plans and land in the southern\n hemisphere? It's summer\n there.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid not. The great\n powers are in the north. They\n are the ones we have to reach to\n do the job.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, but I was thinking of\n that holiday you mentioned.\n We'll be running straight into it.\n That won't help us any.\"\n\n\n \"I know, they don't like their\n holidays interrupted. It can't be\n helped. We can't wait until it's\n over.\"",
"\"I'm not sure I want to,\" said\n Bal. \"Say, what's an angel?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"When I went out walking\n people stopped to look. Some\n knelt in the snow and called me\n an angel.\"\n\n\n \"Something like that happened\n to me,\" said Ethaniel.\n\n\n \"I didn't get it but I didn't let\n it upset me,\" said Bal. \"I smiled\n at them and went about my business.\"\n He shivered again. \"It was\n always cold. I walked out, but\n sometimes I flew back. I hope\n that was all right.\"\n\n\n In the cabin Bal spread his\n great wings. Renaissance painters\n had never seen his like but\n knew exactly how he looked. In\n their paintings they had pictured\n him innumerable times.\n\n\n \"I don't think it hurt us that\n you flew,\" said Ethaniel. \"I did\n so myself occasionally.\"",
"They went much closer to\n Earth, not intending to commit\n themselves. For a day they circled\n the planet, avoiding radar\n detection, which for them was\n not difficult, testing, and sampling.\n Finally Ethaniel looked up\n from the monitor screen. \"Any\n conclusions?\"\n\n\n \"What's there to think? It's\n worse than I imagined.\"\n\n\n \"In what way?\"\n\n\n \"Well, we knew they had the\n big bomb. Atmospheric analysis\n showed that as far away as we\n were.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"We also knew they could deliver\n the big bomb, presumably\n by some sort of aircraft.\"\n\n\n \"That was almost a certainty.\n They'd have no use for the big\n bomb without aircraft.\"",
"\"But you don't know what an\n angel is?\"\n\n\n \"No. I didn't have time to find\n out. Some creature of their folklore\n I suppose. You know, except\n for our wings they're very much\n like ourselves. Their legends are\n bound to resemble ours.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Bal. \"Anyway,\n peace on Earth.\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Science Fiction Stories\nJanuary\n 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note."
],
[
"\"They can't imagine that we'd\n light up an unmanned ship,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"Even if the thought\n should occur to them they'll have\n no way of checking it. Also, they\n won't be eager to harm us with\n our ship shining down on them.\"\n\n\n \"That's thinking,\" said Bal,\n moving to the controls. \"I'll move\n the ship over where they can see\n it best and then I'll light it up.\n I'll really light it up.\"\n\n\n \"Don't spare power.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that.\n They'll see it. Everybody on\n Earth will see it.\" Later, with the\n ship in position, glowing against\n the darkness of space, pulsating\n with light, Bal said: \"You know,\n I feel better about this. We may\n pull it off. Lighting the ship may\n be just the help we need.\"",
"\"It's not we who need help, but\n the people of Earth,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"See you in five days.\" With\n that he entered a small landing\n craft, which left a faintly luminescent\n trail as it plunged toward\n Earth. As soon as it was\n safe to do so, Bal left in another\n craft, heading for the other side\n of the planet.\nAnd the spaceship circled\n Earth, unmanned, blazing and\n pulsing with light. No star in the\n winter skies of the planet below\n could equal it in brilliancy. Once\n a man-made satellite came near\n but it was dim and was lost sight\n of by the people below. During\n the day the ship was visible as\n a bright spot of light. At evening\n it seemed to burn through\n the sunset colors.",
"\"They may be unfriendly,\"\n Ethaniel acknowledged. Now he\n switched a monitor screen until\n he looked at the slope of a mountain.\n It was snowing and men\n were cutting small green trees in\n the snow. \"I've thought of a\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"If it saves my neck I'm for\n it.\"\n\n\n \"I don't guarantee anything,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"This is what I\n was thinking of: instead of hiding\n the ship against the sun\n where there's little chance it will\n be seen, we'll make sure that\n they do see it. Let's take it\n around to the night side of the\n planet and light it up.\"\n\n\n \"Say, pretty good,\" said Bal.",
"\"You ought to know. You're\n running this one.\" Bal looked\n down at the planet. Clouds were\n beginning to form at the twilight\n edge. \"I hate to go down\n and leave the ship up here with\n no one in it.\"\n\n\n \"They can't touch it. No matter\n how they develop in the next\n hundred years they still won't be\n able to get in or damage it in\n any way.\"\n\n\n \"It's myself I'm thinking\n about. Down there, alone.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be with you. On the other\n side of the Earth.\"\n\n\n \"That's not very close. I'd like\n it better if there were someone\n in the ship to bring it down in a\n hurry if things get rough. They\n don't think much of each other.\n I don't imagine they'll like aliens\n any better.\"",
"And the ship circled on,\n bright, shining, seeming to be a\n little piece clipped from the center\n of a star and brought near\n Earth to illuminate it. Never, or\n seldom, had Earth seen anything\n like it.\n\n\n In five days the two small landing\n craft that had left it arched\n up from Earth and joined the\n orbit of the large ship. The two\n small craft slid inside the large\n one and doors closed behind\n them. In a short time the aliens\n met again.\n\n\n \"We did it,\" said Bal exultantly\n as he came in. \"I don't know\n how we did it and I thought we\n were going to fail but at the last\n minute they came through.\"\n\n\n Ethaniel smiled. \"I'm tired,\"\n he said, rustling.",
"They went much closer to\n Earth, not intending to commit\n themselves. For a day they circled\n the planet, avoiding radar\n detection, which for them was\n not difficult, testing, and sampling.\n Finally Ethaniel looked up\n from the monitor screen. \"Any\n conclusions?\"\n\n\n \"What's there to think? It's\n worse than I imagined.\"\n\n\n \"In what way?\"\n\n\n \"Well, we knew they had the\n big bomb. Atmospheric analysis\n showed that as far away as we\n were.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"We also knew they could deliver\n the big bomb, presumably\n by some sort of aircraft.\"\n\n\n \"That was almost a certainty.\n They'd have no use for the big\n bomb without aircraft.\"",
"\"All right,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"You take one side and I the\n other. We'll tell them bluntly\n what they'll have to do if they're\n going to survive, how they can\n keep their planet in one piece so\n they can live on it.\"\n\n\n \"That'll go over big. Advice is\n always popular.\"\n\n\n \"Can't help it. That's all we\n have time for.\"\n\n\n \"Special instructions?\"\n\n\n \"None. We leave the ship here\n and go down in separate landing\n craft. You can talk with me any\n time you want to through our\n communications, but don't unless\n you have to.\"\n\n\n \"They can't intercept the\n beams we use.\"\n\n\n \"They can't, and even if they\n did they wouldn't know what to\n do with our language. I want\n them to think that we don't\nneed\nto talk things over.\"",
"\"Sure, I knew it before we\n started,\" said Bal. \"It's happened\n before. We take the trouble to\n find out what a people are like\n and when we can't help them we\n feel bad. It's going to be that\n way again.\" He rose and stretched.\n \"Well, give me an hour to\n think of some way of going at\n it.\"\nIt was longer than that before\n they met again. In the meantime\n the ship moved much closer to\n Earth. They no longer needed instruments\n to see it. The planet\n revolved outside the visionports.\n The southern plains were green,\n coursed with rivers; the oceans\n were blue; and much of the\n northern hemisphere was glistening\n white. Ragged clouds covered\n the pole, and a dirty pall\n spread over the mid-regions of\n the north.\n\n\n \"I haven't thought of anything\n brilliant,\" said Ethaniel.",
"\"You can't tell,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"We can look things over.\"\n\n\n \"And then what? How much\n authority do we have?\"\n\n\n \"Very little,\" conceded Ethaniel.\n \"Two minor officials on the\n way to Willafours—and we run\n directly into a problem no one\n knew existed.\"\n\n\n \"And when we get to Willafours\n we'll be busy. It will be a\n long time before anyone comes\n this way again.\"\n\n\n \"A very long time. There's\n nothing in this region of space\n our people want,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"And how long can Earth last?\n Ten years? Even ten months?\n The tension is building by the\n hour.\"\n\n\n \"What can I say?\" said Bal.\n \"I suppose we can stop and look\n them over. We're not committing\n ourselves by looking.\"",
"SECOND LANDING\nBy FLOYD WALLACE\nA gentle fancy for the Christmas Season—an\n oft-told tale with a wistful twistful of Something\n that left the Earth with a wing and a prayer.\nEarth\n was so far away that\n it wasn't visible. Even the\n sun was only a twinkle. But this\n vast distance did not mean that\n isolation could endure forever.\n Instruments within the ship intercepted\n radio broadcasts and,\n within the hour, early TV signals.\n Machines compiled dictionaries\n and grammars and began\n translating the major languages.\n The history of the planet was\n tabulated as facts became available.\n\n\n The course of the ship changed\n slightly; it was not much out of\n the way to swing nearer Earth.\n For days the two within the ship\n listened and watched with little\n comment. They had to decide\n soon.\n\n\n \"We've got to make or break,\"\n said the first alien.",
"\"You know what I'm in favor\n of,\" said the second.\n\n\n \"I can guess,\" said Ethaniel,\n who had spoken first. \"The place\n is a complete mess. They've never\n done anything except fight\n each other—and invent better\n weapons.\"\n\n\n \"It's not what they've done,\"\n said Bal, the second alien. \"It's\n what they're going to do, with\n that big bomb.\"\n\n\n \"The more reason for stopping,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"The big\n bomb can destroy them. Without\n our help they may do just that.\"\n\n\n \"I may remind you that in two\n months twenty-nine days we're\n due in Willafours,\" said Bal.\n \"Without looking at the charts\n I can tell you we still have more\n than a hundred light-years to\n go.\"\n\n\n \"A week,\" said Ethaniel. \"We\n can spare a week and still get\n there on time.\"",
"\"I get it. Makes us seem better\n than we are. They think we know\n exactly what we're doing even\n though we don't.\"\n\n\n \"If we're lucky they'll think\n that.\"\nBal looked out of the port at\n the planet below. \"It's going to\n be cold where I'm going. You too.\n Sure we don't want to change\n our plans and land in the southern\n hemisphere? It's summer\n there.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid not. The great\n powers are in the north. They\n are the ones we have to reach to\n do the job.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, but I was thinking of\n that holiday you mentioned.\n We'll be running straight into it.\n That won't help us any.\"\n\n\n \"I know, they don't like their\n holidays interrupted. It can't be\n helped. We can't wait until it's\n over.\"",
"\"A week?\" said Bal. \"To settle\n their problems? They've had two\n world wars in one generation\n and that the third and final one\n is coming up you can't help feeling\n in everything they do.\"\n\n\n \"It won't take much,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"The wrong diplomatic\n move, or a trigger-happy soldier\n could set it off. And it wouldn't\n have to be deliberate. A meteor\n shower could pass over and their\n clumsy instruments could interpret\n it as an all-out enemy\n attack.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad,\" said Bal. \"We'll\n just have to forget there ever\n was such a planet as Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Could you? Forget so many\n people?\"\n\n\n \"I'm doing it,\" said Bal. \"Just\n give them a little time and they\n won't be here to remind me that\n I have a conscience.\"",
"\"I wish I knew what to think.\n There's so little time,\" Ethaniel\n said. \"Language isn't the difficulty.\n Our machines translate\n their languages easily and I've\n taken a cram course in two or\n three of them. But that's not\n enough, looking at a few plays,\n listening to advertisements, music,\n and news bulletins. I should\n go down and live among them,\n read books, talk to scholars, work\n with them, play.\"\n\n\n \"You could do that and you'd\n really get to know them. But\n that takes time—and we don't\n have it.\"\n\n\n \"I realize that.\"\n\n\n \"A flat yes or no,\" said Bal.\n\n\n \"No. We can't help them,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"There is nothing we\n can do for them—but we have to\n try.\"",
"\"What's worse is that I now\n find they also have missiles,\n range one thousand miles and\n upward. They either have or are\n near a primitive form of space\n travel.\"\n\n\n \"Bad,\" said Ethaniel. \"Sitting\n there, wondering when it's going\n to hit them. Nervousness could\n set it off.\"\n\n\n \"It could, and the missiles\n make it worse,\" said Bal. \"What\n did you find out at your end?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing worthwhile. I was\n looking at the people while you\n were investigating their weapons.\"\n\n\n \"You must think something.\"",
"\"Nor I,\" said Bal. \"We're going\n to have to go down there\n cold. And it will be cold.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. It's their winter.\"\n\n\n \"I did have an idea,\" said Bal.\n \"What about going down as supernatural\n beings?\"\n\n\n \"Hardly,\" said Ethaniel. \"A\n hundred years ago it might have\n worked. Today they have satellites.\n They are not primitives.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you're right,\" said\n Bal. \"I did think we ought to\n take advantage of our physical\n differences.\"\n\n\n \"If we could I'd be all for it.\n But these people are rough and\n desperate. They wouldn't be\n fooled by anything that crude.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you're calling it,\" said\n Bal.",
"\"My memory isn't convenient,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"I ask you\n to look at them.\"\nBal rustled, flicking the screen\n intently. \"Very much like ourselves,\"\n he said at last. \"A bit\n shorter perhaps, and most certainly\n incomplete. Except for the\n one thing they lack, and that's\n quite odd, they seem exactly like\n us. Is that what you wanted me\n to say?\"\n\n\n \"It is. The fact that they are\n an incomplete version of ourselves\n touches me. They actually\n seem defenseless, though I suppose\n they're not.\"\n\n\n \"Tough,\" said Bal. \"Nothing\n we can do about it.\"\n\n\n \"There is. We can give them\n a week.\"\n\n\n \"In a week we can't negate\n their entire history. We can't\n begin to undo the effect of the\n big bomb.\"",
"\"Me too, but mostly I'm cold,\"\n said Bal, shivering. \"Snow.\n Nothing but snow wherever I\n went. Miserable climate. And yet\n you had me go out walking after\n that first day.\"\n\n\n \"From my own experience it\n seemed to be a good idea,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"If I went out walking\n one day I noticed that the next\n day the officials were much more\n cooperative. If it worked for me\n I thought it might help you.\"\n\n\n \"It did. I don't know why, but\n it did,\" said Bal. \"Anyway, this\n agreement they made isn't the\n best but I think it will keep them\n from destroying themselves.\"\n\n\n \"It's as much as we can expect,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"They may\n have small wars after this, but\n never the big one. In fifty or a\n hundred years we can come back\n and see how much they've\n learned.\"",
"\"But you don't know what an\n angel is?\"\n\n\n \"No. I didn't have time to find\n out. Some creature of their folklore\n I suppose. You know, except\n for our wings they're very much\n like ourselves. Their legends are\n bound to resemble ours.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Bal. \"Anyway,\n peace on Earth.\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Science Fiction Stories\nJanuary\n 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"\"I'm not sure I want to,\" said\n Bal. \"Say, what's an angel?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"When I went out walking\n people stopped to look. Some\n knelt in the snow and called me\n an angel.\"\n\n\n \"Something like that happened\n to me,\" said Ethaniel.\n\n\n \"I didn't get it but I didn't let\n it upset me,\" said Bal. \"I smiled\n at them and went about my business.\"\n He shivered again. \"It was\n always cold. I walked out, but\n sometimes I flew back. I hope\n that was all right.\"\n\n\n In the cabin Bal spread his\n great wings. Renaissance painters\n had never seen his like but\n knew exactly how he looked. In\n their paintings they had pictured\n him innumerable times.\n\n\n \"I don't think it hurt us that\n you flew,\" said Ethaniel. \"I did\n so myself occasionally.\""
],
[
"And the ship circled on,\n bright, shining, seeming to be a\n little piece clipped from the center\n of a star and brought near\n Earth to illuminate it. Never, or\n seldom, had Earth seen anything\n like it.\n\n\n In five days the two small landing\n craft that had left it arched\n up from Earth and joined the\n orbit of the large ship. The two\n small craft slid inside the large\n one and doors closed behind\n them. In a short time the aliens\n met again.\n\n\n \"We did it,\" said Bal exultantly\n as he came in. \"I don't know\n how we did it and I thought we\n were going to fail but at the last\n minute they came through.\"\n\n\n Ethaniel smiled. \"I'm tired,\"\n he said, rustling.",
"\"They can't imagine that we'd\n light up an unmanned ship,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"Even if the thought\n should occur to them they'll have\n no way of checking it. Also, they\n won't be eager to harm us with\n our ship shining down on them.\"\n\n\n \"That's thinking,\" said Bal,\n moving to the controls. \"I'll move\n the ship over where they can see\n it best and then I'll light it up.\n I'll really light it up.\"\n\n\n \"Don't spare power.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that.\n They'll see it. Everybody on\n Earth will see it.\" Later, with the\n ship in position, glowing against\n the darkness of space, pulsating\n with light, Bal said: \"You know,\n I feel better about this. We may\n pull it off. Lighting the ship may\n be just the help we need.\"",
"\"It's not we who need help, but\n the people of Earth,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"See you in five days.\" With\n that he entered a small landing\n craft, which left a faintly luminescent\n trail as it plunged toward\n Earth. As soon as it was\n safe to do so, Bal left in another\n craft, heading for the other side\n of the planet.\nAnd the spaceship circled\n Earth, unmanned, blazing and\n pulsing with light. No star in the\n winter skies of the planet below\n could equal it in brilliancy. Once\n a man-made satellite came near\n but it was dim and was lost sight\n of by the people below. During\n the day the ship was visible as\n a bright spot of light. At evening\n it seemed to burn through\n the sunset colors.",
"\"Sure, I knew it before we\n started,\" said Bal. \"It's happened\n before. We take the trouble to\n find out what a people are like\n and when we can't help them we\n feel bad. It's going to be that\n way again.\" He rose and stretched.\n \"Well, give me an hour to\n think of some way of going at\n it.\"\nIt was longer than that before\n they met again. In the meantime\n the ship moved much closer to\n Earth. They no longer needed instruments\n to see it. The planet\n revolved outside the visionports.\n The southern plains were green,\n coursed with rivers; the oceans\n were blue; and much of the\n northern hemisphere was glistening\n white. Ragged clouds covered\n the pole, and a dirty pall\n spread over the mid-regions of\n the north.\n\n\n \"I haven't thought of anything\n brilliant,\" said Ethaniel.",
"\"You know what I'm in favor\n of,\" said the second.\n\n\n \"I can guess,\" said Ethaniel,\n who had spoken first. \"The place\n is a complete mess. They've never\n done anything except fight\n each other—and invent better\n weapons.\"\n\n\n \"It's not what they've done,\"\n said Bal, the second alien. \"It's\n what they're going to do, with\n that big bomb.\"\n\n\n \"The more reason for stopping,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"The big\n bomb can destroy them. Without\n our help they may do just that.\"\n\n\n \"I may remind you that in two\n months twenty-nine days we're\n due in Willafours,\" said Bal.\n \"Without looking at the charts\n I can tell you we still have more\n than a hundred light-years to\n go.\"\n\n\n \"A week,\" said Ethaniel. \"We\n can spare a week and still get\n there on time.\"",
"\"You ought to know. You're\n running this one.\" Bal looked\n down at the planet. Clouds were\n beginning to form at the twilight\n edge. \"I hate to go down\n and leave the ship up here with\n no one in it.\"\n\n\n \"They can't touch it. No matter\n how they develop in the next\n hundred years they still won't be\n able to get in or damage it in\n any way.\"\n\n\n \"It's myself I'm thinking\n about. Down there, alone.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be with you. On the other\n side of the Earth.\"\n\n\n \"That's not very close. I'd like\n it better if there were someone\n in the ship to bring it down in a\n hurry if things get rough. They\n don't think much of each other.\n I don't imagine they'll like aliens\n any better.\"",
"They went much closer to\n Earth, not intending to commit\n themselves. For a day they circled\n the planet, avoiding radar\n detection, which for them was\n not difficult, testing, and sampling.\n Finally Ethaniel looked up\n from the monitor screen. \"Any\n conclusions?\"\n\n\n \"What's there to think? It's\n worse than I imagined.\"\n\n\n \"In what way?\"\n\n\n \"Well, we knew they had the\n big bomb. Atmospheric analysis\n showed that as far away as we\n were.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"We also knew they could deliver\n the big bomb, presumably\n by some sort of aircraft.\"\n\n\n \"That was almost a certainty.\n They'd have no use for the big\n bomb without aircraft.\"",
"\"They may be unfriendly,\"\n Ethaniel acknowledged. Now he\n switched a monitor screen until\n he looked at the slope of a mountain.\n It was snowing and men\n were cutting small green trees in\n the snow. \"I've thought of a\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"If it saves my neck I'm for\n it.\"\n\n\n \"I don't guarantee anything,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"This is what I\n was thinking of: instead of hiding\n the ship against the sun\n where there's little chance it will\n be seen, we'll make sure that\n they do see it. Let's take it\n around to the night side of the\n planet and light it up.\"\n\n\n \"Say, pretty good,\" said Bal.",
"\"All right,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"You take one side and I the\n other. We'll tell them bluntly\n what they'll have to do if they're\n going to survive, how they can\n keep their planet in one piece so\n they can live on it.\"\n\n\n \"That'll go over big. Advice is\n always popular.\"\n\n\n \"Can't help it. That's all we\n have time for.\"\n\n\n \"Special instructions?\"\n\n\n \"None. We leave the ship here\n and go down in separate landing\n craft. You can talk with me any\n time you want to through our\n communications, but don't unless\n you have to.\"\n\n\n \"They can't intercept the\n beams we use.\"\n\n\n \"They can't, and even if they\n did they wouldn't know what to\n do with our language. I want\n them to think that we don't\nneed\nto talk things over.\"",
"\"You can't tell,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"We can look things over.\"\n\n\n \"And then what? How much\n authority do we have?\"\n\n\n \"Very little,\" conceded Ethaniel.\n \"Two minor officials on the\n way to Willafours—and we run\n directly into a problem no one\n knew existed.\"\n\n\n \"And when we get to Willafours\n we'll be busy. It will be a\n long time before anyone comes\n this way again.\"\n\n\n \"A very long time. There's\n nothing in this region of space\n our people want,\" said Ethaniel.\n \"And how long can Earth last?\n Ten years? Even ten months?\n The tension is building by the\n hour.\"\n\n\n \"What can I say?\" said Bal.\n \"I suppose we can stop and look\n them over. We're not committing\n ourselves by looking.\"",
"\"I get it. Makes us seem better\n than we are. They think we know\n exactly what we're doing even\n though we don't.\"\n\n\n \"If we're lucky they'll think\n that.\"\nBal looked out of the port at\n the planet below. \"It's going to\n be cold where I'm going. You too.\n Sure we don't want to change\n our plans and land in the southern\n hemisphere? It's summer\n there.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid not. The great\n powers are in the north. They\n are the ones we have to reach to\n do the job.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, but I was thinking of\n that holiday you mentioned.\n We'll be running straight into it.\n That won't help us any.\"\n\n\n \"I know, they don't like their\n holidays interrupted. It can't be\n helped. We can't wait until it's\n over.\"",
"\"My memory isn't convenient,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"I ask you\n to look at them.\"\nBal rustled, flicking the screen\n intently. \"Very much like ourselves,\"\n he said at last. \"A bit\n shorter perhaps, and most certainly\n incomplete. Except for the\n one thing they lack, and that's\n quite odd, they seem exactly like\n us. Is that what you wanted me\n to say?\"\n\n\n \"It is. The fact that they are\n an incomplete version of ourselves\n touches me. They actually\n seem defenseless, though I suppose\n they're not.\"\n\n\n \"Tough,\" said Bal. \"Nothing\n we can do about it.\"\n\n\n \"There is. We can give them\n a week.\"\n\n\n \"In a week we can't negate\n their entire history. We can't\n begin to undo the effect of the\n big bomb.\"",
"\"Me too, but mostly I'm cold,\"\n said Bal, shivering. \"Snow.\n Nothing but snow wherever I\n went. Miserable climate. And yet\n you had me go out walking after\n that first day.\"\n\n\n \"From my own experience it\n seemed to be a good idea,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"If I went out walking\n one day I noticed that the next\n day the officials were much more\n cooperative. If it worked for me\n I thought it might help you.\"\n\n\n \"It did. I don't know why, but\n it did,\" said Bal. \"Anyway, this\n agreement they made isn't the\n best but I think it will keep them\n from destroying themselves.\"\n\n\n \"It's as much as we can expect,\"\n said Ethaniel. \"They may\n have small wars after this, but\n never the big one. In fifty or a\n hundred years we can come back\n and see how much they've\n learned.\"",
"\"I wish I knew what to think.\n There's so little time,\" Ethaniel\n said. \"Language isn't the difficulty.\n Our machines translate\n their languages easily and I've\n taken a cram course in two or\n three of them. But that's not\n enough, looking at a few plays,\n listening to advertisements, music,\n and news bulletins. I should\n go down and live among them,\n read books, talk to scholars, work\n with them, play.\"\n\n\n \"You could do that and you'd\n really get to know them. But\n that takes time—and we don't\n have it.\"\n\n\n \"I realize that.\"\n\n\n \"A flat yes or no,\" said Bal.\n\n\n \"No. We can't help them,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"There is nothing we\n can do for them—but we have to\n try.\"",
"\"A week?\" said Bal. \"To settle\n their problems? They've had two\n world wars in one generation\n and that the third and final one\n is coming up you can't help feeling\n in everything they do.\"\n\n\n \"It won't take much,\" said\n Ethaniel. \"The wrong diplomatic\n move, or a trigger-happy soldier\n could set it off. And it wouldn't\n have to be deliberate. A meteor\n shower could pass over and their\n clumsy instruments could interpret\n it as an all-out enemy\n attack.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad,\" said Bal. \"We'll\n just have to forget there ever\n was such a planet as Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Could you? Forget so many\n people?\"\n\n\n \"I'm doing it,\" said Bal. \"Just\n give them a little time and they\n won't be here to remind me that\n I have a conscience.\"",
"SECOND LANDING\nBy FLOYD WALLACE\nA gentle fancy for the Christmas Season—an\n oft-told tale with a wistful twistful of Something\n that left the Earth with a wing and a prayer.\nEarth\n was so far away that\n it wasn't visible. Even the\n sun was only a twinkle. But this\n vast distance did not mean that\n isolation could endure forever.\n Instruments within the ship intercepted\n radio broadcasts and,\n within the hour, early TV signals.\n Machines compiled dictionaries\n and grammars and began\n translating the major languages.\n The history of the planet was\n tabulated as facts became available.\n\n\n The course of the ship changed\n slightly; it was not much out of\n the way to swing nearer Earth.\n For days the two within the ship\n listened and watched with little\n comment. They had to decide\n soon.\n\n\n \"We've got to make or break,\"\n said the first alien.",
"\"Nor I,\" said Bal. \"We're going\n to have to go down there\n cold. And it will be cold.\"\n\n\n \"Yes. It's their winter.\"\n\n\n \"I did have an idea,\" said Bal.\n \"What about going down as supernatural\n beings?\"\n\n\n \"Hardly,\" said Ethaniel. \"A\n hundred years ago it might have\n worked. Today they have satellites.\n They are not primitives.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you're right,\" said\n Bal. \"I did think we ought to\n take advantage of our physical\n differences.\"\n\n\n \"If we could I'd be all for it.\n But these people are rough and\n desperate. They wouldn't be\n fooled by anything that crude.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you're calling it,\" said\n Bal.",
"\"What's worse is that I now\n find they also have missiles,\n range one thousand miles and\n upward. They either have or are\n near a primitive form of space\n travel.\"\n\n\n \"Bad,\" said Ethaniel. \"Sitting\n there, wondering when it's going\n to hit them. Nervousness could\n set it off.\"\n\n\n \"It could, and the missiles\n make it worse,\" said Bal. \"What\n did you find out at your end?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing worthwhile. I was\n looking at the people while you\n were investigating their weapons.\"\n\n\n \"You must think something.\"",
"\"But you don't know what an\n angel is?\"\n\n\n \"No. I didn't have time to find\n out. Some creature of their folklore\n I suppose. You know, except\n for our wings they're very much\n like ourselves. Their legends are\n bound to resemble ours.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Bal. \"Anyway,\n peace on Earth.\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Science Fiction Stories\nJanuary\n 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"\"I'm aware of that,\" said Bal.\n \"Fill me in on that holiday, anything\n I ought to know. Probably\n religious in origin. That so?\"\n\n\n \"It was religious a long time\n ago,\" said Ethaniel. \"I didn't\n learn anything exact from radio\n and TV. Now it seems to be\n chiefly a time for eating, office\n parties, and selling merchandise.\"\n\n\n \"I see. It has become a business\n holiday.\"\n\n\n \"That's a good description. I\n didn't get as much of it as I\n ought to have. I was busy studying\n the people, and they're hard\n to pin down.\"\n\n\n \"I see. I was thinking there\n might be some way we could tie\n ourselves in with this holiday.\n Make it work for us.\"\n\n\n \"If there is I haven't thought\n of it.\""
]
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train
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99903
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[
"What is the significance of Jimmy Savile to the article?",
"Which is the least likely thing computers could pick up on from a photo?",
"Which is not true about our judgements of people from photos, according to the article?",
"Which is the best characterization of the overgeneralization hypotheses?",
"Which of these is most true about physiognomy?",
"What is the biggest effect when criminals are noted as having similar facial features to other wrongdoers?",
"Which would the author think is most true?",
"Which of these is the most valid critique of the Shanghai study?",
"What does the author think of physiognomy?"
] |
[
[
"To introduce the idea of the importance of questioning friends of people under investigation",
"To introduce discussion of documentaries' influence on public perception of criminals",
"To introduce discussion of murderers and other criminals",
"To introduce the idea that people think they can tell certain things from looking at someone"
],
[
"The impact of socioeconomic status on a person's character",
"An underlying capability of committing crime",
"The effect of wealth on someone's life",
"How social a person is likely to be"
],
[
"Our judgements are easily manipulated by small, hardly noticeable changes in photos",
"We are able to make objective decisions about people, keeping our opinions of their facial structure separate from the facts",
"We judge people in a way that compares them to people we've seen before that we know more about",
"We are all influenced by underlying bias when we see photos of other people"
],
[
"People are more likely to find others to be friendly based on their photos if they are surrounded by friendly people themselves",
"Computers are more likely to draw correct conclusions about people if they have larger pools of photos to draw from",
"We are likely to assume more photos are doctored than the number that actually are",
"We are likely to attribute things to people based on people close to us who may look similar"
],
[
"If this were not an area of study, people would not be drawing false conclusions about people on trial",
"It has helped to put a number of important criminals behind bars",
"It is a brand new area of study that focuses on the application of machine learning to see how computers can help",
"People have been interested in this area for centuries but only recently applied technology to it"
],
[
"These sets of criminals are often shown to have similar socioeconomic backgrounds",
"This occurs when people are making judgements but not computers",
"This perpetuates the belief in the area of study that should not be held up",
"These coincidences are held under scrutiny and often disproved"
],
[
"We post pictures of ourselves online that we think are attractive to gain approval from specific people whose eyes we want to catch",
"Regular people can use their social media accounts to help locate bad people before crimes are committed, because people are better at this than computers",
"People know their photos are being judged by others when they post them so they critically judge them themselves first",
"The application of machine learning in the study of social media photos could make it easier to find criminals before they commit cimes"
],
[
"This type of task is good at identifying petty criminals but not more dangerous ones like murderers",
"If you only study men in these examples we cannot know how to locate females who may be a danger to those around them",
"They did not study enough types of facial expressions ",
"Very different conclusions can be drawn from different images of the same person"
],
[
"It is flimsy and relies on too many assumptions",
"It is useful once someone is accused of a crime but not beforehand",
"It deserves more attention but from people outside of tech",
"It is a promising but little-understood field of study "
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"While it's true that we judge books by their covers, covers are more than just faces; we piece together all kinds of cues from people to form our impressions of them. Jimmy Savile's appearance was unusual by any standards, but we absorbed a great deal of information about him over the years that will have influenced our opinions – not least from the original Louis Theroux programme from 2000 that was reexamined in that recent BBC documentary. Savile's vague resemblance to the Child Catcher from the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is convenient but ultimately misleading, and the way it reinforces the idea of what a paedophile might 'look like' is unfortunate; not least because it helps to sustain a low-level belief in the 'science' of physiognomy, despite its tendency to crumble under the slightest cross examination.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"Face value\nWhen the BBC broadcast the recent documentary by Louis Theroux that looked back at the time he spent in the company of Jimmy Savile, there was disbelief across social media that no one had stepped in to stop Savile from committing his crimes. Some blamed the BBC, some blamed those in Savile's immediate circle, but others blamed a simple error of human judgment. \n\n \"He literally couldn't look more like a paedophile,\" read one post – one of many to state a supposedly incontrovertible truth: that Savile's criminal tendencies could have been detected from the shape of his features, his eyes, his hair. Moreover, this has nothing to do with the benefit of hindsight and should have been picked up at the time. His looks, they suggested, were a moral indicator, with a wealth of compelling visual evidence to support the claim.",
"When retired teacher Christopher Jefferies was held by police in connection with the murder of Joanna Yeates in Bristol back in 2010, more than half a dozen newspapers gave his unusual appearance particular scrutiny and made assumptions accordingly, which in turn influenced public opinion. This culminated in substantial damages for defamation, two convictions for contempt of court and a painful ordeal for Jefferies, who was entirely innocent. \n\n This kind of deep-seated bias looms large throughout physiognomic works of the 19th and 20th centuries, from absurdities such as Vaught's Practical Character Reader of 1902 (handy if you want to find out what a \"deceitful chin\" looks like) to more inherently troubling volumes such as Cesare Lombroso's Criminal Man.",
"In the 17th century, Swiss poet Johann Caspar Lavater took della Porta's methodology and ran with it, commissioning artists to illustrate his popular Essays On Physiognomy – which, to the chagrin of his contemporary, the writer Hannah More, sold for \"fifteen guineas a set… while in vain we boast that philosophy [has] broken down all the strongholds of prejudice, ignorance, and superstition.\"",
"The revitalisation of the theory of physiognomy by the Shanghai students is, according to Todorov, deeply problematic on a theoretical level. \"Are we back to Lombroso's theory,\" he asks, \"that criminals were anomalous creatures, evolutionary degenerates? How does one become criminal, and what role do various life forces play into this? There are people making claims that you just need to look at the face to predict personality and behaviour, but many of these people have not given much thought to their underlying assumptions.\"",
"Data-driven studies, based upon huge quantities of facial data, would seem to offer the final word on this. Since 2005, computational models have used various techniques to test for links between social attributes and facial features, resulting in suggestions that our faces can betray, for example, political leanings, sexual orientation and criminality. One BBC Future article from 2015 even describes the 'discipline' of physiognomy as 'gaining credibility'. But Todorov details many problems with these studies, pointing out the challenging nature of doing such experiments with sufficient rigour – not least because different images of the same people can prompt wildly differing results.",
"It's a claim that's been made many times over the years. Physiognomy, the 'science' of judging people by their appearance, was first theorised by the ancient Greeks in around the 5th century BC. Aristotle's pronouncement that \"it is possible to infer character from features\" led to a number of works relating to 'Physiognomica', a word derived from\nphysis\n(nature),\nnomos\n(law) and (or)\ngnomon\n(judge or interpreter).",
"After performing a number of autopsies on criminals, the Italian physician claimed to have discovered a number of common characteristics, and it's worth listing them if only to establish the supposed criminality of pretty much everyone you know:\nUnusually short or tall height; small head, but large face; fleshy lips, but thin upper lip; protuberances on head and around ear; wrinkles on forehead and face; large sinus cavities or bumpy face; tattoos; receding hairline; large incisors; bushy eyebrows, tending to meet across nose; large eye sockets but deep-set eyes; beaked or flat nose; strong jaw line; small and sloping forehead; small or weak chin; thin neck; sloping shoulders but large chest; large, protruding ears; long arms; high cheek bones; pointy or snubbed fingers or toes.",
"All of Greek society, it was claimed, could benefit from this skill: it could assist with choosing an employee, a slave or a spouse, while its inherent vagueness made it intriguing to philosophers and useful for scientists who bent the theories to support their own beliefs. It became a recognised science in the Islamic world, and was used and taught in Europe throughout late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, despite nagging doubts among thinkers and physicians of the day. In the early 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci claimed not to \"concern myself with false physiognomy, because these chimeras have no scientific foundation.\"",
"Theories of physiognomy, however, would persist beyond the Renaissance. In 1586, Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta published a book, De humana physiognomonia libri IIII, which established him as the 'father of Physiognomy'. Della Porta's thinking was based on the 'doctrine of signatures'; the idea that the appearance of plants and animals offers clues to their nature. For example, as one writer of the time suggested, walnuts are good for curing headaches because they're shaped a bit like a human head. The theories in della Porta's book were supported by dozens of detailed illustrations which, by comparing human faces to those of animals, suggested that they must surely share similar character traits.",
"Lavater's work was criticised for being ridden with bias (black faces rarely emerged well from his analyses) but he was right in one respect: \"Whether they are or are not sensible of it,\" he wrote, \"all men are daily influenced by physiognomy.\" \n\n Many studies have been done into our psychological response to faces, and it's clear that a so-called halo effect will inevitably work its magic. \"Attractive people are regarded as better at everything,\" says Professor Peter Hancock, lecturer in Psychology at Stirling University. \"And we can't shake that off because there's some truth to it. Good genes produce intelligent people, attractive faces, fit bodies, and we imagine that they're going to be good at everything else, too. We don't have good insight into our own behaviour. We tend to think we understand what we're doing, but we don't.\"",
"The aforementioned study at Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, with its enthusiastic, data-driven analyses of such questions as \"What features of a human face betray its owner's propensity for crimes?\" prompted a wave of press coverage.\nThe vision outlined in these articles is of an unethical dystopia where neural networks can assess our faces and establish a likely score for criminality – but Todorov is scathing about this paper, too. \"The main problem is the sampling of the images,\" he says. \"There is not enough information about the [nature of] the images of the people who were convicted. Second, clearly, there are huge differences between the two samples [of convicts and non-convicts] [in terms of] education and socio-economic status.\"\nIn other words, your appearance is affected by the kind of life you've led, so the classifiers within the computer program are simply distinguishing between different demographics rather than detecting a propensity for criminal behaviour.",
"This isn't to say that the use of big data, and particularly the use of composite imagery (digitally blending together certain types of faces) doesn't give us useful information and fascinating correlations. \"You can, for example, take a given face and use computer software to make it look more or less trustworthy,\" says Hancock. \"I remember a colleague playing with this and he made a less trustworthy version of George W Bush – and how shifty did he look! I'm surprised that they're not using these techniques in political advertising, because you couldn't tell that anything had been done [to the picture], but when you look at it you think 'I wouldn't trust him'.\"",
"In a woeful misreading of Darwinian theory, Lombroso unwittingly founded the field of anthropological criminology, and more specifically the idea of the born criminal: a hereditary quality that posed a danger to society and must be rooted out. His theories became discredited during the 20th century, but the kind of bias displayed by Lombroso can still be found in legal systems across the world; studies show that people with stereotypically 'untrustworthy' faces tend to receive harsher treatment than those who don't. There's evidently some consensus over people's attitudes toward certain faces, but it doesn't follow that the consensus is correct.",
"A recent paper, published by Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang of Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, claims to be the first to use machine learning and neural networks to attempt a fully automated inference of criminality from facial images, removing prejudice from the equation and testing the validity of our gut feelings. \"What facial features influence the average Joe's impulsive and yet consensual judgments on social attributes?\" they ask. Through a study of 1,856 images (\"controlled for race, gender, age and facial expression\") they claim to have established the validity of \"automated, face-induced inference on criminality, despite the historical controversy surrounding this line of enquiry.\" \n\n In other words, they believe that they've found a relationship between looking like a criminal and actually being one.",
"We know that paedophiles, murderers and other violent criminals come in many shapes and sizes. If we knew nothing about their criminal history, some of their photos might even appear attractive. But the idea that someone's features betray their character is something rooted deep within us; it's the reason why certain photos perform well on dating apps, or why trustworthy-looking politicians might rack up votes. But how wrong are our hunches of perceived criminality?",
"Experiments at Princeton found that we take less than one tenth of a second to form an opinion of strangers from their pictures, and those opinions tend to stand firm even if we're exposed to those pictures for a longer period of time. That tendency to judge instantly gives rise to a number of selfie tropes that are deemed to elicit positive responses, particularly when it comes to photos on dating profiles: certain angles, particular expressions, minute adjustments of eyebrows and lips that might appear to be about narcissism and vanity, but are more about a fear of being incorrectly assessed. After all, false suppositions based on people's faces are hugely influential within society, and in extreme cases they can have a huge impact on people's lives.",
"Todorov is also wary of these classifiers misidentifying more 'innocent' people than identifying actual criminals, and accuracy is a concern shared by Peter Hancock. \"Networks don't assess faces in the same way that we do,\" he says. \"One of our systems, which is a deep network, has a recognition engine which generates an ordered list of how similar various faces are. And sometimes you get good matches – but other times you look at them and say, well, it's the wrong race! To humans they look completely different. And that underlines the fact that the networks are working in a different sort of way, and actually you don't really know how they're working. They're the ultimate black box.\"",
"Hancock describes attending a conference where one speaker showed a series of black faces and white faces to students (who were mostly white) and asked them what they thought the experiment was about. \"They knew that he was trying to assess whether they would rate the black ones as more criminal,\" says Hancock. \"But then they did!\" \n\n We attribute social characteristics based on opinions we already hold about certain kinds of faces: whether they look unusual in some way, whether they resemble a partner, a family member or even ourselves, or perhaps have some other cultural association. Physiognomy ultimately stems from what Alexander Todorov, professor of psychology at Princeton University, calls an 'overgeneralisation hypothesis'. \"People,\" he wrote, \"use easily accessible facial information (eg an expression such as a smile, cues to gender and ethnic group) to make social attributions congruent with this information (eg a nice person).\" \n\n In a social media age, the pictures we choose to represent ourselves online are a form of self-presentation driven by those social attributions and the knowledge that our pictures are being judged.",
"The only attributes that we're reasonably good at detecting, according to research done at the University of Michigan in the 1960s and later tested at the University of Stirling in 2007, are extroversion and conscientiousness. For other traits there's insufficient evidence that our hunches are correct, with anomalies explained by our evolved aversion to 'ugliness', established links between broader faces and powerful physiques, or cultural associations with certain demographics which are reinforced with nagging regularity by newspapers, books, television and film."
],
[
"The aforementioned study at Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, with its enthusiastic, data-driven analyses of such questions as \"What features of a human face betray its owner's propensity for crimes?\" prompted a wave of press coverage.\nThe vision outlined in these articles is of an unethical dystopia where neural networks can assess our faces and establish a likely score for criminality – but Todorov is scathing about this paper, too. \"The main problem is the sampling of the images,\" he says. \"There is not enough information about the [nature of] the images of the people who were convicted. Second, clearly, there are huge differences between the two samples [of convicts and non-convicts] [in terms of] education and socio-economic status.\"\nIn other words, your appearance is affected by the kind of life you've led, so the classifiers within the computer program are simply distinguishing between different demographics rather than detecting a propensity for criminal behaviour.",
"This isn't to say that the use of big data, and particularly the use of composite imagery (digitally blending together certain types of faces) doesn't give us useful information and fascinating correlations. \"You can, for example, take a given face and use computer software to make it look more or less trustworthy,\" says Hancock. \"I remember a colleague playing with this and he made a less trustworthy version of George W Bush – and how shifty did he look! I'm surprised that they're not using these techniques in political advertising, because you couldn't tell that anything had been done [to the picture], but when you look at it you think 'I wouldn't trust him'.\"",
"Data-driven studies, based upon huge quantities of facial data, would seem to offer the final word on this. Since 2005, computational models have used various techniques to test for links between social attributes and facial features, resulting in suggestions that our faces can betray, for example, political leanings, sexual orientation and criminality. One BBC Future article from 2015 even describes the 'discipline' of physiognomy as 'gaining credibility'. But Todorov details many problems with these studies, pointing out the challenging nature of doing such experiments with sufficient rigour – not least because different images of the same people can prompt wildly differing results.",
"A recent paper, published by Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang of Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, claims to be the first to use machine learning and neural networks to attempt a fully automated inference of criminality from facial images, removing prejudice from the equation and testing the validity of our gut feelings. \"What facial features influence the average Joe's impulsive and yet consensual judgments on social attributes?\" they ask. Through a study of 1,856 images (\"controlled for race, gender, age and facial expression\") they claim to have established the validity of \"automated, face-induced inference on criminality, despite the historical controversy surrounding this line of enquiry.\" \n\n In other words, they believe that they've found a relationship between looking like a criminal and actually being one.",
"Experiments at Princeton found that we take less than one tenth of a second to form an opinion of strangers from their pictures, and those opinions tend to stand firm even if we're exposed to those pictures for a longer period of time. That tendency to judge instantly gives rise to a number of selfie tropes that are deemed to elicit positive responses, particularly when it comes to photos on dating profiles: certain angles, particular expressions, minute adjustments of eyebrows and lips that might appear to be about narcissism and vanity, but are more about a fear of being incorrectly assessed. After all, false suppositions based on people's faces are hugely influential within society, and in extreme cases they can have a huge impact on people's lives.",
"We know that paedophiles, murderers and other violent criminals come in many shapes and sizes. If we knew nothing about their criminal history, some of their photos might even appear attractive. But the idea that someone's features betray their character is something rooted deep within us; it's the reason why certain photos perform well on dating apps, or why trustworthy-looking politicians might rack up votes. But how wrong are our hunches of perceived criminality?",
"Todorov is also wary of these classifiers misidentifying more 'innocent' people than identifying actual criminals, and accuracy is a concern shared by Peter Hancock. \"Networks don't assess faces in the same way that we do,\" he says. \"One of our systems, which is a deep network, has a recognition engine which generates an ordered list of how similar various faces are. And sometimes you get good matches – but other times you look at them and say, well, it's the wrong race! To humans they look completely different. And that underlines the fact that the networks are working in a different sort of way, and actually you don't really know how they're working. They're the ultimate black box.\"",
"The only attributes that we're reasonably good at detecting, according to research done at the University of Michigan in the 1960s and later tested at the University of Stirling in 2007, are extroversion and conscientiousness. For other traits there's insufficient evidence that our hunches are correct, with anomalies explained by our evolved aversion to 'ugliness', established links between broader faces and powerful physiques, or cultural associations with certain demographics which are reinforced with nagging regularity by newspapers, books, television and film.",
"Hancock describes attending a conference where one speaker showed a series of black faces and white faces to students (who were mostly white) and asked them what they thought the experiment was about. \"They knew that he was trying to assess whether they would rate the black ones as more criminal,\" says Hancock. \"But then they did!\" \n\n We attribute social characteristics based on opinions we already hold about certain kinds of faces: whether they look unusual in some way, whether they resemble a partner, a family member or even ourselves, or perhaps have some other cultural association. Physiognomy ultimately stems from what Alexander Todorov, professor of psychology at Princeton University, calls an 'overgeneralisation hypothesis'. \"People,\" he wrote, \"use easily accessible facial information (eg an expression such as a smile, cues to gender and ethnic group) to make social attributions congruent with this information (eg a nice person).\" \n\n In a social media age, the pictures we choose to represent ourselves online are a form of self-presentation driven by those social attributions and the knowledge that our pictures are being judged.",
"While it's true that we judge books by their covers, covers are more than just faces; we piece together all kinds of cues from people to form our impressions of them. Jimmy Savile's appearance was unusual by any standards, but we absorbed a great deal of information about him over the years that will have influenced our opinions – not least from the original Louis Theroux programme from 2000 that was reexamined in that recent BBC documentary. Savile's vague resemblance to the Child Catcher from the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is convenient but ultimately misleading, and the way it reinforces the idea of what a paedophile might 'look like' is unfortunate; not least because it helps to sustain a low-level belief in the 'science' of physiognomy, despite its tendency to crumble under the slightest cross examination.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"It's a claim that's been made many times over the years. Physiognomy, the 'science' of judging people by their appearance, was first theorised by the ancient Greeks in around the 5th century BC. Aristotle's pronouncement that \"it is possible to infer character from features\" led to a number of works relating to 'Physiognomica', a word derived from\nphysis\n(nature),\nnomos\n(law) and (or)\ngnomon\n(judge or interpreter).",
"Face value\nWhen the BBC broadcast the recent documentary by Louis Theroux that looked back at the time he spent in the company of Jimmy Savile, there was disbelief across social media that no one had stepped in to stop Savile from committing his crimes. Some blamed the BBC, some blamed those in Savile's immediate circle, but others blamed a simple error of human judgment. \n\n \"He literally couldn't look more like a paedophile,\" read one post – one of many to state a supposedly incontrovertible truth: that Savile's criminal tendencies could have been detected from the shape of his features, his eyes, his hair. Moreover, this has nothing to do with the benefit of hindsight and should have been picked up at the time. His looks, they suggested, were a moral indicator, with a wealth of compelling visual evidence to support the claim.",
"After performing a number of autopsies on criminals, the Italian physician claimed to have discovered a number of common characteristics, and it's worth listing them if only to establish the supposed criminality of pretty much everyone you know:\nUnusually short or tall height; small head, but large face; fleshy lips, but thin upper lip; protuberances on head and around ear; wrinkles on forehead and face; large sinus cavities or bumpy face; tattoos; receding hairline; large incisors; bushy eyebrows, tending to meet across nose; large eye sockets but deep-set eyes; beaked or flat nose; strong jaw line; small and sloping forehead; small or weak chin; thin neck; sloping shoulders but large chest; large, protruding ears; long arms; high cheek bones; pointy or snubbed fingers or toes.",
"Lavater's work was criticised for being ridden with bias (black faces rarely emerged well from his analyses) but he was right in one respect: \"Whether they are or are not sensible of it,\" he wrote, \"all men are daily influenced by physiognomy.\" \n\n Many studies have been done into our psychological response to faces, and it's clear that a so-called halo effect will inevitably work its magic. \"Attractive people are regarded as better at everything,\" says Professor Peter Hancock, lecturer in Psychology at Stirling University. \"And we can't shake that off because there's some truth to it. Good genes produce intelligent people, attractive faces, fit bodies, and we imagine that they're going to be good at everything else, too. We don't have good insight into our own behaviour. We tend to think we understand what we're doing, but we don't.\"",
"When retired teacher Christopher Jefferies was held by police in connection with the murder of Joanna Yeates in Bristol back in 2010, more than half a dozen newspapers gave his unusual appearance particular scrutiny and made assumptions accordingly, which in turn influenced public opinion. This culminated in substantial damages for defamation, two convictions for contempt of court and a painful ordeal for Jefferies, who was entirely innocent. \n\n This kind of deep-seated bias looms large throughout physiognomic works of the 19th and 20th centuries, from absurdities such as Vaught's Practical Character Reader of 1902 (handy if you want to find out what a \"deceitful chin\" looks like) to more inherently troubling volumes such as Cesare Lombroso's Criminal Man.",
"In a woeful misreading of Darwinian theory, Lombroso unwittingly founded the field of anthropological criminology, and more specifically the idea of the born criminal: a hereditary quality that posed a danger to society and must be rooted out. His theories became discredited during the 20th century, but the kind of bias displayed by Lombroso can still be found in legal systems across the world; studies show that people with stereotypically 'untrustworthy' faces tend to receive harsher treatment than those who don't. There's evidently some consensus over people's attitudes toward certain faces, but it doesn't follow that the consensus is correct.",
"Theories of physiognomy, however, would persist beyond the Renaissance. In 1586, Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta published a book, De humana physiognomonia libri IIII, which established him as the 'father of Physiognomy'. Della Porta's thinking was based on the 'doctrine of signatures'; the idea that the appearance of plants and animals offers clues to their nature. For example, as one writer of the time suggested, walnuts are good for curing headaches because they're shaped a bit like a human head. The theories in della Porta's book were supported by dozens of detailed illustrations which, by comparing human faces to those of animals, suggested that they must surely share similar character traits.",
"The revitalisation of the theory of physiognomy by the Shanghai students is, according to Todorov, deeply problematic on a theoretical level. \"Are we back to Lombroso's theory,\" he asks, \"that criminals were anomalous creatures, evolutionary degenerates? How does one become criminal, and what role do various life forces play into this? There are people making claims that you just need to look at the face to predict personality and behaviour, but many of these people have not given much thought to their underlying assumptions.\"",
"In the 17th century, Swiss poet Johann Caspar Lavater took della Porta's methodology and ran with it, commissioning artists to illustrate his popular Essays On Physiognomy – which, to the chagrin of his contemporary, the writer Hannah More, sold for \"fifteen guineas a set… while in vain we boast that philosophy [has] broken down all the strongholds of prejudice, ignorance, and superstition.\"",
"All of Greek society, it was claimed, could benefit from this skill: it could assist with choosing an employee, a slave or a spouse, while its inherent vagueness made it intriguing to philosophers and useful for scientists who bent the theories to support their own beliefs. It became a recognised science in the Islamic world, and was used and taught in Europe throughout late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, despite nagging doubts among thinkers and physicians of the day. In the early 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci claimed not to \"concern myself with false physiognomy, because these chimeras have no scientific foundation.\""
],
[
"Experiments at Princeton found that we take less than one tenth of a second to form an opinion of strangers from their pictures, and those opinions tend to stand firm even if we're exposed to those pictures for a longer period of time. That tendency to judge instantly gives rise to a number of selfie tropes that are deemed to elicit positive responses, particularly when it comes to photos on dating profiles: certain angles, particular expressions, minute adjustments of eyebrows and lips that might appear to be about narcissism and vanity, but are more about a fear of being incorrectly assessed. After all, false suppositions based on people's faces are hugely influential within society, and in extreme cases they can have a huge impact on people's lives.",
"Hancock describes attending a conference where one speaker showed a series of black faces and white faces to students (who were mostly white) and asked them what they thought the experiment was about. \"They knew that he was trying to assess whether they would rate the black ones as more criminal,\" says Hancock. \"But then they did!\" \n\n We attribute social characteristics based on opinions we already hold about certain kinds of faces: whether they look unusual in some way, whether they resemble a partner, a family member or even ourselves, or perhaps have some other cultural association. Physiognomy ultimately stems from what Alexander Todorov, professor of psychology at Princeton University, calls an 'overgeneralisation hypothesis'. \"People,\" he wrote, \"use easily accessible facial information (eg an expression such as a smile, cues to gender and ethnic group) to make social attributions congruent with this information (eg a nice person).\" \n\n In a social media age, the pictures we choose to represent ourselves online are a form of self-presentation driven by those social attributions and the knowledge that our pictures are being judged.",
"Data-driven studies, based upon huge quantities of facial data, would seem to offer the final word on this. Since 2005, computational models have used various techniques to test for links between social attributes and facial features, resulting in suggestions that our faces can betray, for example, political leanings, sexual orientation and criminality. One BBC Future article from 2015 even describes the 'discipline' of physiognomy as 'gaining credibility'. But Todorov details many problems with these studies, pointing out the challenging nature of doing such experiments with sufficient rigour – not least because different images of the same people can prompt wildly differing results.",
"The only attributes that we're reasonably good at detecting, according to research done at the University of Michigan in the 1960s and later tested at the University of Stirling in 2007, are extroversion and conscientiousness. For other traits there's insufficient evidence that our hunches are correct, with anomalies explained by our evolved aversion to 'ugliness', established links between broader faces and powerful physiques, or cultural associations with certain demographics which are reinforced with nagging regularity by newspapers, books, television and film.",
"Lavater's work was criticised for being ridden with bias (black faces rarely emerged well from his analyses) but he was right in one respect: \"Whether they are or are not sensible of it,\" he wrote, \"all men are daily influenced by physiognomy.\" \n\n Many studies have been done into our psychological response to faces, and it's clear that a so-called halo effect will inevitably work its magic. \"Attractive people are regarded as better at everything,\" says Professor Peter Hancock, lecturer in Psychology at Stirling University. \"And we can't shake that off because there's some truth to it. Good genes produce intelligent people, attractive faces, fit bodies, and we imagine that they're going to be good at everything else, too. We don't have good insight into our own behaviour. We tend to think we understand what we're doing, but we don't.\"",
"We know that paedophiles, murderers and other violent criminals come in many shapes and sizes. If we knew nothing about their criminal history, some of their photos might even appear attractive. But the idea that someone's features betray their character is something rooted deep within us; it's the reason why certain photos perform well on dating apps, or why trustworthy-looking politicians might rack up votes. But how wrong are our hunches of perceived criminality?",
"The aforementioned study at Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, with its enthusiastic, data-driven analyses of such questions as \"What features of a human face betray its owner's propensity for crimes?\" prompted a wave of press coverage.\nThe vision outlined in these articles is of an unethical dystopia where neural networks can assess our faces and establish a likely score for criminality – but Todorov is scathing about this paper, too. \"The main problem is the sampling of the images,\" he says. \"There is not enough information about the [nature of] the images of the people who were convicted. Second, clearly, there are huge differences between the two samples [of convicts and non-convicts] [in terms of] education and socio-economic status.\"\nIn other words, your appearance is affected by the kind of life you've led, so the classifiers within the computer program are simply distinguishing between different demographics rather than detecting a propensity for criminal behaviour.",
"This isn't to say that the use of big data, and particularly the use of composite imagery (digitally blending together certain types of faces) doesn't give us useful information and fascinating correlations. \"You can, for example, take a given face and use computer software to make it look more or less trustworthy,\" says Hancock. \"I remember a colleague playing with this and he made a less trustworthy version of George W Bush – and how shifty did he look! I'm surprised that they're not using these techniques in political advertising, because you couldn't tell that anything had been done [to the picture], but when you look at it you think 'I wouldn't trust him'.\"",
"It's a claim that's been made many times over the years. Physiognomy, the 'science' of judging people by their appearance, was first theorised by the ancient Greeks in around the 5th century BC. Aristotle's pronouncement that \"it is possible to infer character from features\" led to a number of works relating to 'Physiognomica', a word derived from\nphysis\n(nature),\nnomos\n(law) and (or)\ngnomon\n(judge or interpreter).",
"While it's true that we judge books by their covers, covers are more than just faces; we piece together all kinds of cues from people to form our impressions of them. Jimmy Savile's appearance was unusual by any standards, but we absorbed a great deal of information about him over the years that will have influenced our opinions – not least from the original Louis Theroux programme from 2000 that was reexamined in that recent BBC documentary. Savile's vague resemblance to the Child Catcher from the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is convenient but ultimately misleading, and the way it reinforces the idea of what a paedophile might 'look like' is unfortunate; not least because it helps to sustain a low-level belief in the 'science' of physiognomy, despite its tendency to crumble under the slightest cross examination.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"A recent paper, published by Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang of Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, claims to be the first to use machine learning and neural networks to attempt a fully automated inference of criminality from facial images, removing prejudice from the equation and testing the validity of our gut feelings. \"What facial features influence the average Joe's impulsive and yet consensual judgments on social attributes?\" they ask. Through a study of 1,856 images (\"controlled for race, gender, age and facial expression\") they claim to have established the validity of \"automated, face-induced inference on criminality, despite the historical controversy surrounding this line of enquiry.\" \n\n In other words, they believe that they've found a relationship between looking like a criminal and actually being one.",
"Face value\nWhen the BBC broadcast the recent documentary by Louis Theroux that looked back at the time he spent in the company of Jimmy Savile, there was disbelief across social media that no one had stepped in to stop Savile from committing his crimes. Some blamed the BBC, some blamed those in Savile's immediate circle, but others blamed a simple error of human judgment. \n\n \"He literally couldn't look more like a paedophile,\" read one post – one of many to state a supposedly incontrovertible truth: that Savile's criminal tendencies could have been detected from the shape of his features, his eyes, his hair. Moreover, this has nothing to do with the benefit of hindsight and should have been picked up at the time. His looks, they suggested, were a moral indicator, with a wealth of compelling visual evidence to support the claim.",
"In a woeful misreading of Darwinian theory, Lombroso unwittingly founded the field of anthropological criminology, and more specifically the idea of the born criminal: a hereditary quality that posed a danger to society and must be rooted out. His theories became discredited during the 20th century, but the kind of bias displayed by Lombroso can still be found in legal systems across the world; studies show that people with stereotypically 'untrustworthy' faces tend to receive harsher treatment than those who don't. There's evidently some consensus over people's attitudes toward certain faces, but it doesn't follow that the consensus is correct.",
"When retired teacher Christopher Jefferies was held by police in connection with the murder of Joanna Yeates in Bristol back in 2010, more than half a dozen newspapers gave his unusual appearance particular scrutiny and made assumptions accordingly, which in turn influenced public opinion. This culminated in substantial damages for defamation, two convictions for contempt of court and a painful ordeal for Jefferies, who was entirely innocent. \n\n This kind of deep-seated bias looms large throughout physiognomic works of the 19th and 20th centuries, from absurdities such as Vaught's Practical Character Reader of 1902 (handy if you want to find out what a \"deceitful chin\" looks like) to more inherently troubling volumes such as Cesare Lombroso's Criminal Man.",
"Todorov is also wary of these classifiers misidentifying more 'innocent' people than identifying actual criminals, and accuracy is a concern shared by Peter Hancock. \"Networks don't assess faces in the same way that we do,\" he says. \"One of our systems, which is a deep network, has a recognition engine which generates an ordered list of how similar various faces are. And sometimes you get good matches – but other times you look at them and say, well, it's the wrong race! To humans they look completely different. And that underlines the fact that the networks are working in a different sort of way, and actually you don't really know how they're working. They're the ultimate black box.\"",
"The revitalisation of the theory of physiognomy by the Shanghai students is, according to Todorov, deeply problematic on a theoretical level. \"Are we back to Lombroso's theory,\" he asks, \"that criminals were anomalous creatures, evolutionary degenerates? How does one become criminal, and what role do various life forces play into this? There are people making claims that you just need to look at the face to predict personality and behaviour, but many of these people have not given much thought to their underlying assumptions.\"",
"In the 17th century, Swiss poet Johann Caspar Lavater took della Porta's methodology and ran with it, commissioning artists to illustrate his popular Essays On Physiognomy – which, to the chagrin of his contemporary, the writer Hannah More, sold for \"fifteen guineas a set… while in vain we boast that philosophy [has] broken down all the strongholds of prejudice, ignorance, and superstition.\"",
"Theories of physiognomy, however, would persist beyond the Renaissance. In 1586, Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta published a book, De humana physiognomonia libri IIII, which established him as the 'father of Physiognomy'. Della Porta's thinking was based on the 'doctrine of signatures'; the idea that the appearance of plants and animals offers clues to their nature. For example, as one writer of the time suggested, walnuts are good for curing headaches because they're shaped a bit like a human head. The theories in della Porta's book were supported by dozens of detailed illustrations which, by comparing human faces to those of animals, suggested that they must surely share similar character traits.",
"After performing a number of autopsies on criminals, the Italian physician claimed to have discovered a number of common characteristics, and it's worth listing them if only to establish the supposed criminality of pretty much everyone you know:\nUnusually short or tall height; small head, but large face; fleshy lips, but thin upper lip; protuberances on head and around ear; wrinkles on forehead and face; large sinus cavities or bumpy face; tattoos; receding hairline; large incisors; bushy eyebrows, tending to meet across nose; large eye sockets but deep-set eyes; beaked or flat nose; strong jaw line; small and sloping forehead; small or weak chin; thin neck; sloping shoulders but large chest; large, protruding ears; long arms; high cheek bones; pointy or snubbed fingers or toes.",
"All of Greek society, it was claimed, could benefit from this skill: it could assist with choosing an employee, a slave or a spouse, while its inherent vagueness made it intriguing to philosophers and useful for scientists who bent the theories to support their own beliefs. It became a recognised science in the Islamic world, and was used and taught in Europe throughout late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, despite nagging doubts among thinkers and physicians of the day. In the early 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci claimed not to \"concern myself with false physiognomy, because these chimeras have no scientific foundation.\""
],
[
"The revitalisation of the theory of physiognomy by the Shanghai students is, according to Todorov, deeply problematic on a theoretical level. \"Are we back to Lombroso's theory,\" he asks, \"that criminals were anomalous creatures, evolutionary degenerates? How does one become criminal, and what role do various life forces play into this? There are people making claims that you just need to look at the face to predict personality and behaviour, but many of these people have not given much thought to their underlying assumptions.\"",
"In a woeful misreading of Darwinian theory, Lombroso unwittingly founded the field of anthropological criminology, and more specifically the idea of the born criminal: a hereditary quality that posed a danger to society and must be rooted out. His theories became discredited during the 20th century, but the kind of bias displayed by Lombroso can still be found in legal systems across the world; studies show that people with stereotypically 'untrustworthy' faces tend to receive harsher treatment than those who don't. There's evidently some consensus over people's attitudes toward certain faces, but it doesn't follow that the consensus is correct.",
"It's a claim that's been made many times over the years. Physiognomy, the 'science' of judging people by their appearance, was first theorised by the ancient Greeks in around the 5th century BC. Aristotle's pronouncement that \"it is possible to infer character from features\" led to a number of works relating to 'Physiognomica', a word derived from\nphysis\n(nature),\nnomos\n(law) and (or)\ngnomon\n(judge or interpreter).",
"Theories of physiognomy, however, would persist beyond the Renaissance. In 1586, Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta published a book, De humana physiognomonia libri IIII, which established him as the 'father of Physiognomy'. Della Porta's thinking was based on the 'doctrine of signatures'; the idea that the appearance of plants and animals offers clues to their nature. For example, as one writer of the time suggested, walnuts are good for curing headaches because they're shaped a bit like a human head. The theories in della Porta's book were supported by dozens of detailed illustrations which, by comparing human faces to those of animals, suggested that they must surely share similar character traits.",
"Hancock describes attending a conference where one speaker showed a series of black faces and white faces to students (who were mostly white) and asked them what they thought the experiment was about. \"They knew that he was trying to assess whether they would rate the black ones as more criminal,\" says Hancock. \"But then they did!\" \n\n We attribute social characteristics based on opinions we already hold about certain kinds of faces: whether they look unusual in some way, whether they resemble a partner, a family member or even ourselves, or perhaps have some other cultural association. Physiognomy ultimately stems from what Alexander Todorov, professor of psychology at Princeton University, calls an 'overgeneralisation hypothesis'. \"People,\" he wrote, \"use easily accessible facial information (eg an expression such as a smile, cues to gender and ethnic group) to make social attributions congruent with this information (eg a nice person).\" \n\n In a social media age, the pictures we choose to represent ourselves online are a form of self-presentation driven by those social attributions and the knowledge that our pictures are being judged.",
"Data-driven studies, based upon huge quantities of facial data, would seem to offer the final word on this. Since 2005, computational models have used various techniques to test for links between social attributes and facial features, resulting in suggestions that our faces can betray, for example, political leanings, sexual orientation and criminality. One BBC Future article from 2015 even describes the 'discipline' of physiognomy as 'gaining credibility'. But Todorov details many problems with these studies, pointing out the challenging nature of doing such experiments with sufficient rigour – not least because different images of the same people can prompt wildly differing results.",
"The only attributes that we're reasonably good at detecting, according to research done at the University of Michigan in the 1960s and later tested at the University of Stirling in 2007, are extroversion and conscientiousness. For other traits there's insufficient evidence that our hunches are correct, with anomalies explained by our evolved aversion to 'ugliness', established links between broader faces and powerful physiques, or cultural associations with certain demographics which are reinforced with nagging regularity by newspapers, books, television and film.",
"In the 17th century, Swiss poet Johann Caspar Lavater took della Porta's methodology and ran with it, commissioning artists to illustrate his popular Essays On Physiognomy – which, to the chagrin of his contemporary, the writer Hannah More, sold for \"fifteen guineas a set… while in vain we boast that philosophy [has] broken down all the strongholds of prejudice, ignorance, and superstition.\"",
"Lavater's work was criticised for being ridden with bias (black faces rarely emerged well from his analyses) but he was right in one respect: \"Whether they are or are not sensible of it,\" he wrote, \"all men are daily influenced by physiognomy.\" \n\n Many studies have been done into our psychological response to faces, and it's clear that a so-called halo effect will inevitably work its magic. \"Attractive people are regarded as better at everything,\" says Professor Peter Hancock, lecturer in Psychology at Stirling University. \"And we can't shake that off because there's some truth to it. Good genes produce intelligent people, attractive faces, fit bodies, and we imagine that they're going to be good at everything else, too. We don't have good insight into our own behaviour. We tend to think we understand what we're doing, but we don't.\"",
"Todorov is also wary of these classifiers misidentifying more 'innocent' people than identifying actual criminals, and accuracy is a concern shared by Peter Hancock. \"Networks don't assess faces in the same way that we do,\" he says. \"One of our systems, which is a deep network, has a recognition engine which generates an ordered list of how similar various faces are. And sometimes you get good matches – but other times you look at them and say, well, it's the wrong race! To humans they look completely different. And that underlines the fact that the networks are working in a different sort of way, and actually you don't really know how they're working. They're the ultimate black box.\"",
"When retired teacher Christopher Jefferies was held by police in connection with the murder of Joanna Yeates in Bristol back in 2010, more than half a dozen newspapers gave his unusual appearance particular scrutiny and made assumptions accordingly, which in turn influenced public opinion. This culminated in substantial damages for defamation, two convictions for contempt of court and a painful ordeal for Jefferies, who was entirely innocent. \n\n This kind of deep-seated bias looms large throughout physiognomic works of the 19th and 20th centuries, from absurdities such as Vaught's Practical Character Reader of 1902 (handy if you want to find out what a \"deceitful chin\" looks like) to more inherently troubling volumes such as Cesare Lombroso's Criminal Man.",
"While it's true that we judge books by their covers, covers are more than just faces; we piece together all kinds of cues from people to form our impressions of them. Jimmy Savile's appearance was unusual by any standards, but we absorbed a great deal of information about him over the years that will have influenced our opinions – not least from the original Louis Theroux programme from 2000 that was reexamined in that recent BBC documentary. Savile's vague resemblance to the Child Catcher from the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is convenient but ultimately misleading, and the way it reinforces the idea of what a paedophile might 'look like' is unfortunate; not least because it helps to sustain a low-level belief in the 'science' of physiognomy, despite its tendency to crumble under the slightest cross examination.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"Experiments at Princeton found that we take less than one tenth of a second to form an opinion of strangers from their pictures, and those opinions tend to stand firm even if we're exposed to those pictures for a longer period of time. That tendency to judge instantly gives rise to a number of selfie tropes that are deemed to elicit positive responses, particularly when it comes to photos on dating profiles: certain angles, particular expressions, minute adjustments of eyebrows and lips that might appear to be about narcissism and vanity, but are more about a fear of being incorrectly assessed. After all, false suppositions based on people's faces are hugely influential within society, and in extreme cases they can have a huge impact on people's lives.",
"All of Greek society, it was claimed, could benefit from this skill: it could assist with choosing an employee, a slave or a spouse, while its inherent vagueness made it intriguing to philosophers and useful for scientists who bent the theories to support their own beliefs. It became a recognised science in the Islamic world, and was used and taught in Europe throughout late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, despite nagging doubts among thinkers and physicians of the day. In the early 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci claimed not to \"concern myself with false physiognomy, because these chimeras have no scientific foundation.\"",
"Face value\nWhen the BBC broadcast the recent documentary by Louis Theroux that looked back at the time he spent in the company of Jimmy Savile, there was disbelief across social media that no one had stepped in to stop Savile from committing his crimes. Some blamed the BBC, some blamed those in Savile's immediate circle, but others blamed a simple error of human judgment. \n\n \"He literally couldn't look more like a paedophile,\" read one post – one of many to state a supposedly incontrovertible truth: that Savile's criminal tendencies could have been detected from the shape of his features, his eyes, his hair. Moreover, this has nothing to do with the benefit of hindsight and should have been picked up at the time. His looks, they suggested, were a moral indicator, with a wealth of compelling visual evidence to support the claim.",
"After performing a number of autopsies on criminals, the Italian physician claimed to have discovered a number of common characteristics, and it's worth listing them if only to establish the supposed criminality of pretty much everyone you know:\nUnusually short or tall height; small head, but large face; fleshy lips, but thin upper lip; protuberances on head and around ear; wrinkles on forehead and face; large sinus cavities or bumpy face; tattoos; receding hairline; large incisors; bushy eyebrows, tending to meet across nose; large eye sockets but deep-set eyes; beaked or flat nose; strong jaw line; small and sloping forehead; small or weak chin; thin neck; sloping shoulders but large chest; large, protruding ears; long arms; high cheek bones; pointy or snubbed fingers or toes.",
"We know that paedophiles, murderers and other violent criminals come in many shapes and sizes. If we knew nothing about their criminal history, some of their photos might even appear attractive. But the idea that someone's features betray their character is something rooted deep within us; it's the reason why certain photos perform well on dating apps, or why trustworthy-looking politicians might rack up votes. But how wrong are our hunches of perceived criminality?",
"This isn't to say that the use of big data, and particularly the use of composite imagery (digitally blending together certain types of faces) doesn't give us useful information and fascinating correlations. \"You can, for example, take a given face and use computer software to make it look more or less trustworthy,\" says Hancock. \"I remember a colleague playing with this and he made a less trustworthy version of George W Bush – and how shifty did he look! I'm surprised that they're not using these techniques in political advertising, because you couldn't tell that anything had been done [to the picture], but when you look at it you think 'I wouldn't trust him'.\"",
"The aforementioned study at Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, with its enthusiastic, data-driven analyses of such questions as \"What features of a human face betray its owner's propensity for crimes?\" prompted a wave of press coverage.\nThe vision outlined in these articles is of an unethical dystopia where neural networks can assess our faces and establish a likely score for criminality – but Todorov is scathing about this paper, too. \"The main problem is the sampling of the images,\" he says. \"There is not enough information about the [nature of] the images of the people who were convicted. Second, clearly, there are huge differences between the two samples [of convicts and non-convicts] [in terms of] education and socio-economic status.\"\nIn other words, your appearance is affected by the kind of life you've led, so the classifiers within the computer program are simply distinguishing between different demographics rather than detecting a propensity for criminal behaviour.",
"A recent paper, published by Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang of Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, claims to be the first to use machine learning and neural networks to attempt a fully automated inference of criminality from facial images, removing prejudice from the equation and testing the validity of our gut feelings. \"What facial features influence the average Joe's impulsive and yet consensual judgments on social attributes?\" they ask. Through a study of 1,856 images (\"controlled for race, gender, age and facial expression\") they claim to have established the validity of \"automated, face-induced inference on criminality, despite the historical controversy surrounding this line of enquiry.\" \n\n In other words, they believe that they've found a relationship between looking like a criminal and actually being one."
],
[
"It's a claim that's been made many times over the years. Physiognomy, the 'science' of judging people by their appearance, was first theorised by the ancient Greeks in around the 5th century BC. Aristotle's pronouncement that \"it is possible to infer character from features\" led to a number of works relating to 'Physiognomica', a word derived from\nphysis\n(nature),\nnomos\n(law) and (or)\ngnomon\n(judge or interpreter).",
"Theories of physiognomy, however, would persist beyond the Renaissance. In 1586, Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta published a book, De humana physiognomonia libri IIII, which established him as the 'father of Physiognomy'. Della Porta's thinking was based on the 'doctrine of signatures'; the idea that the appearance of plants and animals offers clues to their nature. For example, as one writer of the time suggested, walnuts are good for curing headaches because they're shaped a bit like a human head. The theories in della Porta's book were supported by dozens of detailed illustrations which, by comparing human faces to those of animals, suggested that they must surely share similar character traits.",
"When retired teacher Christopher Jefferies was held by police in connection with the murder of Joanna Yeates in Bristol back in 2010, more than half a dozen newspapers gave his unusual appearance particular scrutiny and made assumptions accordingly, which in turn influenced public opinion. This culminated in substantial damages for defamation, two convictions for contempt of court and a painful ordeal for Jefferies, who was entirely innocent. \n\n This kind of deep-seated bias looms large throughout physiognomic works of the 19th and 20th centuries, from absurdities such as Vaught's Practical Character Reader of 1902 (handy if you want to find out what a \"deceitful chin\" looks like) to more inherently troubling volumes such as Cesare Lombroso's Criminal Man.",
"Data-driven studies, based upon huge quantities of facial data, would seem to offer the final word on this. Since 2005, computational models have used various techniques to test for links between social attributes and facial features, resulting in suggestions that our faces can betray, for example, political leanings, sexual orientation and criminality. One BBC Future article from 2015 even describes the 'discipline' of physiognomy as 'gaining credibility'. But Todorov details many problems with these studies, pointing out the challenging nature of doing such experiments with sufficient rigour – not least because different images of the same people can prompt wildly differing results.",
"Lavater's work was criticised for being ridden with bias (black faces rarely emerged well from his analyses) but he was right in one respect: \"Whether they are or are not sensible of it,\" he wrote, \"all men are daily influenced by physiognomy.\" \n\n Many studies have been done into our psychological response to faces, and it's clear that a so-called halo effect will inevitably work its magic. \"Attractive people are regarded as better at everything,\" says Professor Peter Hancock, lecturer in Psychology at Stirling University. \"And we can't shake that off because there's some truth to it. Good genes produce intelligent people, attractive faces, fit bodies, and we imagine that they're going to be good at everything else, too. We don't have good insight into our own behaviour. We tend to think we understand what we're doing, but we don't.\"",
"The revitalisation of the theory of physiognomy by the Shanghai students is, according to Todorov, deeply problematic on a theoretical level. \"Are we back to Lombroso's theory,\" he asks, \"that criminals were anomalous creatures, evolutionary degenerates? How does one become criminal, and what role do various life forces play into this? There are people making claims that you just need to look at the face to predict personality and behaviour, but many of these people have not given much thought to their underlying assumptions.\"",
"The only attributes that we're reasonably good at detecting, according to research done at the University of Michigan in the 1960s and later tested at the University of Stirling in 2007, are extroversion and conscientiousness. For other traits there's insufficient evidence that our hunches are correct, with anomalies explained by our evolved aversion to 'ugliness', established links between broader faces and powerful physiques, or cultural associations with certain demographics which are reinforced with nagging regularity by newspapers, books, television and film.",
"In the 17th century, Swiss poet Johann Caspar Lavater took della Porta's methodology and ran with it, commissioning artists to illustrate his popular Essays On Physiognomy – which, to the chagrin of his contemporary, the writer Hannah More, sold for \"fifteen guineas a set… while in vain we boast that philosophy [has] broken down all the strongholds of prejudice, ignorance, and superstition.\"",
"In a woeful misreading of Darwinian theory, Lombroso unwittingly founded the field of anthropological criminology, and more specifically the idea of the born criminal: a hereditary quality that posed a danger to society and must be rooted out. His theories became discredited during the 20th century, but the kind of bias displayed by Lombroso can still be found in legal systems across the world; studies show that people with stereotypically 'untrustworthy' faces tend to receive harsher treatment than those who don't. There's evidently some consensus over people's attitudes toward certain faces, but it doesn't follow that the consensus is correct.",
"All of Greek society, it was claimed, could benefit from this skill: it could assist with choosing an employee, a slave or a spouse, while its inherent vagueness made it intriguing to philosophers and useful for scientists who bent the theories to support their own beliefs. It became a recognised science in the Islamic world, and was used and taught in Europe throughout late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, despite nagging doubts among thinkers and physicians of the day. In the early 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci claimed not to \"concern myself with false physiognomy, because these chimeras have no scientific foundation.\"",
"While it's true that we judge books by their covers, covers are more than just faces; we piece together all kinds of cues from people to form our impressions of them. Jimmy Savile's appearance was unusual by any standards, but we absorbed a great deal of information about him over the years that will have influenced our opinions – not least from the original Louis Theroux programme from 2000 that was reexamined in that recent BBC documentary. Savile's vague resemblance to the Child Catcher from the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is convenient but ultimately misleading, and the way it reinforces the idea of what a paedophile might 'look like' is unfortunate; not least because it helps to sustain a low-level belief in the 'science' of physiognomy, despite its tendency to crumble under the slightest cross examination.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"We know that paedophiles, murderers and other violent criminals come in many shapes and sizes. If we knew nothing about their criminal history, some of their photos might even appear attractive. But the idea that someone's features betray their character is something rooted deep within us; it's the reason why certain photos perform well on dating apps, or why trustworthy-looking politicians might rack up votes. But how wrong are our hunches of perceived criminality?",
"After performing a number of autopsies on criminals, the Italian physician claimed to have discovered a number of common characteristics, and it's worth listing them if only to establish the supposed criminality of pretty much everyone you know:\nUnusually short or tall height; small head, but large face; fleshy lips, but thin upper lip; protuberances on head and around ear; wrinkles on forehead and face; large sinus cavities or bumpy face; tattoos; receding hairline; large incisors; bushy eyebrows, tending to meet across nose; large eye sockets but deep-set eyes; beaked or flat nose; strong jaw line; small and sloping forehead; small or weak chin; thin neck; sloping shoulders but large chest; large, protruding ears; long arms; high cheek bones; pointy or snubbed fingers or toes.",
"Hancock describes attending a conference where one speaker showed a series of black faces and white faces to students (who were mostly white) and asked them what they thought the experiment was about. \"They knew that he was trying to assess whether they would rate the black ones as more criminal,\" says Hancock. \"But then they did!\" \n\n We attribute social characteristics based on opinions we already hold about certain kinds of faces: whether they look unusual in some way, whether they resemble a partner, a family member or even ourselves, or perhaps have some other cultural association. Physiognomy ultimately stems from what Alexander Todorov, professor of psychology at Princeton University, calls an 'overgeneralisation hypothesis'. \"People,\" he wrote, \"use easily accessible facial information (eg an expression such as a smile, cues to gender and ethnic group) to make social attributions congruent with this information (eg a nice person).\" \n\n In a social media age, the pictures we choose to represent ourselves online are a form of self-presentation driven by those social attributions and the knowledge that our pictures are being judged.",
"Face value\nWhen the BBC broadcast the recent documentary by Louis Theroux that looked back at the time he spent in the company of Jimmy Savile, there was disbelief across social media that no one had stepped in to stop Savile from committing his crimes. Some blamed the BBC, some blamed those in Savile's immediate circle, but others blamed a simple error of human judgment. \n\n \"He literally couldn't look more like a paedophile,\" read one post – one of many to state a supposedly incontrovertible truth: that Savile's criminal tendencies could have been detected from the shape of his features, his eyes, his hair. Moreover, this has nothing to do with the benefit of hindsight and should have been picked up at the time. His looks, they suggested, were a moral indicator, with a wealth of compelling visual evidence to support the claim.",
"Experiments at Princeton found that we take less than one tenth of a second to form an opinion of strangers from their pictures, and those opinions tend to stand firm even if we're exposed to those pictures for a longer period of time. That tendency to judge instantly gives rise to a number of selfie tropes that are deemed to elicit positive responses, particularly when it comes to photos on dating profiles: certain angles, particular expressions, minute adjustments of eyebrows and lips that might appear to be about narcissism and vanity, but are more about a fear of being incorrectly assessed. After all, false suppositions based on people's faces are hugely influential within society, and in extreme cases they can have a huge impact on people's lives.",
"This isn't to say that the use of big data, and particularly the use of composite imagery (digitally blending together certain types of faces) doesn't give us useful information and fascinating correlations. \"You can, for example, take a given face and use computer software to make it look more or less trustworthy,\" says Hancock. \"I remember a colleague playing with this and he made a less trustworthy version of George W Bush – and how shifty did he look! I'm surprised that they're not using these techniques in political advertising, because you couldn't tell that anything had been done [to the picture], but when you look at it you think 'I wouldn't trust him'.\"",
"The aforementioned study at Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, with its enthusiastic, data-driven analyses of such questions as \"What features of a human face betray its owner's propensity for crimes?\" prompted a wave of press coverage.\nThe vision outlined in these articles is of an unethical dystopia where neural networks can assess our faces and establish a likely score for criminality – but Todorov is scathing about this paper, too. \"The main problem is the sampling of the images,\" he says. \"There is not enough information about the [nature of] the images of the people who were convicted. Second, clearly, there are huge differences between the two samples [of convicts and non-convicts] [in terms of] education and socio-economic status.\"\nIn other words, your appearance is affected by the kind of life you've led, so the classifiers within the computer program are simply distinguishing between different demographics rather than detecting a propensity for criminal behaviour.",
"A recent paper, published by Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang of Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, claims to be the first to use machine learning and neural networks to attempt a fully automated inference of criminality from facial images, removing prejudice from the equation and testing the validity of our gut feelings. \"What facial features influence the average Joe's impulsive and yet consensual judgments on social attributes?\" they ask. Through a study of 1,856 images (\"controlled for race, gender, age and facial expression\") they claim to have established the validity of \"automated, face-induced inference on criminality, despite the historical controversy surrounding this line of enquiry.\" \n\n In other words, they believe that they've found a relationship between looking like a criminal and actually being one.",
"Todorov is also wary of these classifiers misidentifying more 'innocent' people than identifying actual criminals, and accuracy is a concern shared by Peter Hancock. \"Networks don't assess faces in the same way that we do,\" he says. \"One of our systems, which is a deep network, has a recognition engine which generates an ordered list of how similar various faces are. And sometimes you get good matches – but other times you look at them and say, well, it's the wrong race! To humans they look completely different. And that underlines the fact that the networks are working in a different sort of way, and actually you don't really know how they're working. They're the ultimate black box.\""
],
[
"We know that paedophiles, murderers and other violent criminals come in many shapes and sizes. If we knew nothing about their criminal history, some of their photos might even appear attractive. But the idea that someone's features betray their character is something rooted deep within us; it's the reason why certain photos perform well on dating apps, or why trustworthy-looking politicians might rack up votes. But how wrong are our hunches of perceived criminality?",
"A recent paper, published by Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang of Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, claims to be the first to use machine learning and neural networks to attempt a fully automated inference of criminality from facial images, removing prejudice from the equation and testing the validity of our gut feelings. \"What facial features influence the average Joe's impulsive and yet consensual judgments on social attributes?\" they ask. Through a study of 1,856 images (\"controlled for race, gender, age and facial expression\") they claim to have established the validity of \"automated, face-induced inference on criminality, despite the historical controversy surrounding this line of enquiry.\" \n\n In other words, they believe that they've found a relationship between looking like a criminal and actually being one.",
"In a woeful misreading of Darwinian theory, Lombroso unwittingly founded the field of anthropological criminology, and more specifically the idea of the born criminal: a hereditary quality that posed a danger to society and must be rooted out. His theories became discredited during the 20th century, but the kind of bias displayed by Lombroso can still be found in legal systems across the world; studies show that people with stereotypically 'untrustworthy' faces tend to receive harsher treatment than those who don't. There's evidently some consensus over people's attitudes toward certain faces, but it doesn't follow that the consensus is correct.",
"After performing a number of autopsies on criminals, the Italian physician claimed to have discovered a number of common characteristics, and it's worth listing them if only to establish the supposed criminality of pretty much everyone you know:\nUnusually short or tall height; small head, but large face; fleshy lips, but thin upper lip; protuberances on head and around ear; wrinkles on forehead and face; large sinus cavities or bumpy face; tattoos; receding hairline; large incisors; bushy eyebrows, tending to meet across nose; large eye sockets but deep-set eyes; beaked or flat nose; strong jaw line; small and sloping forehead; small or weak chin; thin neck; sloping shoulders but large chest; large, protruding ears; long arms; high cheek bones; pointy or snubbed fingers or toes.",
"When retired teacher Christopher Jefferies was held by police in connection with the murder of Joanna Yeates in Bristol back in 2010, more than half a dozen newspapers gave his unusual appearance particular scrutiny and made assumptions accordingly, which in turn influenced public opinion. This culminated in substantial damages for defamation, two convictions for contempt of court and a painful ordeal for Jefferies, who was entirely innocent. \n\n This kind of deep-seated bias looms large throughout physiognomic works of the 19th and 20th centuries, from absurdities such as Vaught's Practical Character Reader of 1902 (handy if you want to find out what a \"deceitful chin\" looks like) to more inherently troubling volumes such as Cesare Lombroso's Criminal Man.",
"The aforementioned study at Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, with its enthusiastic, data-driven analyses of such questions as \"What features of a human face betray its owner's propensity for crimes?\" prompted a wave of press coverage.\nThe vision outlined in these articles is of an unethical dystopia where neural networks can assess our faces and establish a likely score for criminality – but Todorov is scathing about this paper, too. \"The main problem is the sampling of the images,\" he says. \"There is not enough information about the [nature of] the images of the people who were convicted. Second, clearly, there are huge differences between the two samples [of convicts and non-convicts] [in terms of] education and socio-economic status.\"\nIn other words, your appearance is affected by the kind of life you've led, so the classifiers within the computer program are simply distinguishing between different demographics rather than detecting a propensity for criminal behaviour.",
"Data-driven studies, based upon huge quantities of facial data, would seem to offer the final word on this. Since 2005, computational models have used various techniques to test for links between social attributes and facial features, resulting in suggestions that our faces can betray, for example, political leanings, sexual orientation and criminality. One BBC Future article from 2015 even describes the 'discipline' of physiognomy as 'gaining credibility'. But Todorov details many problems with these studies, pointing out the challenging nature of doing such experiments with sufficient rigour – not least because different images of the same people can prompt wildly differing results.",
"Face value\nWhen the BBC broadcast the recent documentary by Louis Theroux that looked back at the time he spent in the company of Jimmy Savile, there was disbelief across social media that no one had stepped in to stop Savile from committing his crimes. Some blamed the BBC, some blamed those in Savile's immediate circle, but others blamed a simple error of human judgment. \n\n \"He literally couldn't look more like a paedophile,\" read one post – one of many to state a supposedly incontrovertible truth: that Savile's criminal tendencies could have been detected from the shape of his features, his eyes, his hair. Moreover, this has nothing to do with the benefit of hindsight and should have been picked up at the time. His looks, they suggested, were a moral indicator, with a wealth of compelling visual evidence to support the claim.",
"The revitalisation of the theory of physiognomy by the Shanghai students is, according to Todorov, deeply problematic on a theoretical level. \"Are we back to Lombroso's theory,\" he asks, \"that criminals were anomalous creatures, evolutionary degenerates? How does one become criminal, and what role do various life forces play into this? There are people making claims that you just need to look at the face to predict personality and behaviour, but many of these people have not given much thought to their underlying assumptions.\"",
"Hancock describes attending a conference where one speaker showed a series of black faces and white faces to students (who were mostly white) and asked them what they thought the experiment was about. \"They knew that he was trying to assess whether they would rate the black ones as more criminal,\" says Hancock. \"But then they did!\" \n\n We attribute social characteristics based on opinions we already hold about certain kinds of faces: whether they look unusual in some way, whether they resemble a partner, a family member or even ourselves, or perhaps have some other cultural association. Physiognomy ultimately stems from what Alexander Todorov, professor of psychology at Princeton University, calls an 'overgeneralisation hypothesis'. \"People,\" he wrote, \"use easily accessible facial information (eg an expression such as a smile, cues to gender and ethnic group) to make social attributions congruent with this information (eg a nice person).\" \n\n In a social media age, the pictures we choose to represent ourselves online are a form of self-presentation driven by those social attributions and the knowledge that our pictures are being judged.",
"It's a claim that's been made many times over the years. Physiognomy, the 'science' of judging people by their appearance, was first theorised by the ancient Greeks in around the 5th century BC. Aristotle's pronouncement that \"it is possible to infer character from features\" led to a number of works relating to 'Physiognomica', a word derived from\nphysis\n(nature),\nnomos\n(law) and (or)\ngnomon\n(judge or interpreter).",
"While it's true that we judge books by their covers, covers are more than just faces; we piece together all kinds of cues from people to form our impressions of them. Jimmy Savile's appearance was unusual by any standards, but we absorbed a great deal of information about him over the years that will have influenced our opinions – not least from the original Louis Theroux programme from 2000 that was reexamined in that recent BBC documentary. Savile's vague resemblance to the Child Catcher from the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is convenient but ultimately misleading, and the way it reinforces the idea of what a paedophile might 'look like' is unfortunate; not least because it helps to sustain a low-level belief in the 'science' of physiognomy, despite its tendency to crumble under the slightest cross examination.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"Todorov is also wary of these classifiers misidentifying more 'innocent' people than identifying actual criminals, and accuracy is a concern shared by Peter Hancock. \"Networks don't assess faces in the same way that we do,\" he says. \"One of our systems, which is a deep network, has a recognition engine which generates an ordered list of how similar various faces are. And sometimes you get good matches – but other times you look at them and say, well, it's the wrong race! To humans they look completely different. And that underlines the fact that the networks are working in a different sort of way, and actually you don't really know how they're working. They're the ultimate black box.\"",
"Lavater's work was criticised for being ridden with bias (black faces rarely emerged well from his analyses) but he was right in one respect: \"Whether they are or are not sensible of it,\" he wrote, \"all men are daily influenced by physiognomy.\" \n\n Many studies have been done into our psychological response to faces, and it's clear that a so-called halo effect will inevitably work its magic. \"Attractive people are regarded as better at everything,\" says Professor Peter Hancock, lecturer in Psychology at Stirling University. \"And we can't shake that off because there's some truth to it. Good genes produce intelligent people, attractive faces, fit bodies, and we imagine that they're going to be good at everything else, too. We don't have good insight into our own behaviour. We tend to think we understand what we're doing, but we don't.\"",
"This isn't to say that the use of big data, and particularly the use of composite imagery (digitally blending together certain types of faces) doesn't give us useful information and fascinating correlations. \"You can, for example, take a given face and use computer software to make it look more or less trustworthy,\" says Hancock. \"I remember a colleague playing with this and he made a less trustworthy version of George W Bush – and how shifty did he look! I'm surprised that they're not using these techniques in political advertising, because you couldn't tell that anything had been done [to the picture], but when you look at it you think 'I wouldn't trust him'.\"",
"The only attributes that we're reasonably good at detecting, according to research done at the University of Michigan in the 1960s and later tested at the University of Stirling in 2007, are extroversion and conscientiousness. For other traits there's insufficient evidence that our hunches are correct, with anomalies explained by our evolved aversion to 'ugliness', established links between broader faces and powerful physiques, or cultural associations with certain demographics which are reinforced with nagging regularity by newspapers, books, television and film.",
"Theories of physiognomy, however, would persist beyond the Renaissance. In 1586, Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta published a book, De humana physiognomonia libri IIII, which established him as the 'father of Physiognomy'. Della Porta's thinking was based on the 'doctrine of signatures'; the idea that the appearance of plants and animals offers clues to their nature. For example, as one writer of the time suggested, walnuts are good for curing headaches because they're shaped a bit like a human head. The theories in della Porta's book were supported by dozens of detailed illustrations which, by comparing human faces to those of animals, suggested that they must surely share similar character traits.",
"Experiments at Princeton found that we take less than one tenth of a second to form an opinion of strangers from their pictures, and those opinions tend to stand firm even if we're exposed to those pictures for a longer period of time. That tendency to judge instantly gives rise to a number of selfie tropes that are deemed to elicit positive responses, particularly when it comes to photos on dating profiles: certain angles, particular expressions, minute adjustments of eyebrows and lips that might appear to be about narcissism and vanity, but are more about a fear of being incorrectly assessed. After all, false suppositions based on people's faces are hugely influential within society, and in extreme cases they can have a huge impact on people's lives.",
"In the 17th century, Swiss poet Johann Caspar Lavater took della Porta's methodology and ran with it, commissioning artists to illustrate his popular Essays On Physiognomy – which, to the chagrin of his contemporary, the writer Hannah More, sold for \"fifteen guineas a set… while in vain we boast that philosophy [has] broken down all the strongholds of prejudice, ignorance, and superstition.\"",
"All of Greek society, it was claimed, could benefit from this skill: it could assist with choosing an employee, a slave or a spouse, while its inherent vagueness made it intriguing to philosophers and useful for scientists who bent the theories to support their own beliefs. It became a recognised science in the Islamic world, and was used and taught in Europe throughout late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, despite nagging doubts among thinkers and physicians of the day. In the early 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci claimed not to \"concern myself with false physiognomy, because these chimeras have no scientific foundation.\""
],
[
"It's a claim that's been made many times over the years. Physiognomy, the 'science' of judging people by their appearance, was first theorised by the ancient Greeks in around the 5th century BC. Aristotle's pronouncement that \"it is possible to infer character from features\" led to a number of works relating to 'Physiognomica', a word derived from\nphysis\n(nature),\nnomos\n(law) and (or)\ngnomon\n(judge or interpreter).",
"The only attributes that we're reasonably good at detecting, according to research done at the University of Michigan in the 1960s and later tested at the University of Stirling in 2007, are extroversion and conscientiousness. For other traits there's insufficient evidence that our hunches are correct, with anomalies explained by our evolved aversion to 'ugliness', established links between broader faces and powerful physiques, or cultural associations with certain demographics which are reinforced with nagging regularity by newspapers, books, television and film.",
"Data-driven studies, based upon huge quantities of facial data, would seem to offer the final word on this. Since 2005, computational models have used various techniques to test for links between social attributes and facial features, resulting in suggestions that our faces can betray, for example, political leanings, sexual orientation and criminality. One BBC Future article from 2015 even describes the 'discipline' of physiognomy as 'gaining credibility'. But Todorov details many problems with these studies, pointing out the challenging nature of doing such experiments with sufficient rigour – not least because different images of the same people can prompt wildly differing results.",
"Lavater's work was criticised for being ridden with bias (black faces rarely emerged well from his analyses) but he was right in one respect: \"Whether they are or are not sensible of it,\" he wrote, \"all men are daily influenced by physiognomy.\" \n\n Many studies have been done into our psychological response to faces, and it's clear that a so-called halo effect will inevitably work its magic. \"Attractive people are regarded as better at everything,\" says Professor Peter Hancock, lecturer in Psychology at Stirling University. \"And we can't shake that off because there's some truth to it. Good genes produce intelligent people, attractive faces, fit bodies, and we imagine that they're going to be good at everything else, too. We don't have good insight into our own behaviour. We tend to think we understand what we're doing, but we don't.\"",
"In the 17th century, Swiss poet Johann Caspar Lavater took della Porta's methodology and ran with it, commissioning artists to illustrate his popular Essays On Physiognomy – which, to the chagrin of his contemporary, the writer Hannah More, sold for \"fifteen guineas a set… while in vain we boast that philosophy [has] broken down all the strongholds of prejudice, ignorance, and superstition.\"",
"Theories of physiognomy, however, would persist beyond the Renaissance. In 1586, Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta published a book, De humana physiognomonia libri IIII, which established him as the 'father of Physiognomy'. Della Porta's thinking was based on the 'doctrine of signatures'; the idea that the appearance of plants and animals offers clues to their nature. For example, as one writer of the time suggested, walnuts are good for curing headaches because they're shaped a bit like a human head. The theories in della Porta's book were supported by dozens of detailed illustrations which, by comparing human faces to those of animals, suggested that they must surely share similar character traits.",
"In a woeful misreading of Darwinian theory, Lombroso unwittingly founded the field of anthropological criminology, and more specifically the idea of the born criminal: a hereditary quality that posed a danger to society and must be rooted out. His theories became discredited during the 20th century, but the kind of bias displayed by Lombroso can still be found in legal systems across the world; studies show that people with stereotypically 'untrustworthy' faces tend to receive harsher treatment than those who don't. There's evidently some consensus over people's attitudes toward certain faces, but it doesn't follow that the consensus is correct.",
"Experiments at Princeton found that we take less than one tenth of a second to form an opinion of strangers from their pictures, and those opinions tend to stand firm even if we're exposed to those pictures for a longer period of time. That tendency to judge instantly gives rise to a number of selfie tropes that are deemed to elicit positive responses, particularly when it comes to photos on dating profiles: certain angles, particular expressions, minute adjustments of eyebrows and lips that might appear to be about narcissism and vanity, but are more about a fear of being incorrectly assessed. After all, false suppositions based on people's faces are hugely influential within society, and in extreme cases they can have a huge impact on people's lives.",
"Face value\nWhen the BBC broadcast the recent documentary by Louis Theroux that looked back at the time he spent in the company of Jimmy Savile, there was disbelief across social media that no one had stepped in to stop Savile from committing his crimes. Some blamed the BBC, some blamed those in Savile's immediate circle, but others blamed a simple error of human judgment. \n\n \"He literally couldn't look more like a paedophile,\" read one post – one of many to state a supposedly incontrovertible truth: that Savile's criminal tendencies could have been detected from the shape of his features, his eyes, his hair. Moreover, this has nothing to do with the benefit of hindsight and should have been picked up at the time. His looks, they suggested, were a moral indicator, with a wealth of compelling visual evidence to support the claim.",
"While it's true that we judge books by their covers, covers are more than just faces; we piece together all kinds of cues from people to form our impressions of them. Jimmy Savile's appearance was unusual by any standards, but we absorbed a great deal of information about him over the years that will have influenced our opinions – not least from the original Louis Theroux programme from 2000 that was reexamined in that recent BBC documentary. Savile's vague resemblance to the Child Catcher from the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is convenient but ultimately misleading, and the way it reinforces the idea of what a paedophile might 'look like' is unfortunate; not least because it helps to sustain a low-level belief in the 'science' of physiognomy, despite its tendency to crumble under the slightest cross examination.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"When retired teacher Christopher Jefferies was held by police in connection with the murder of Joanna Yeates in Bristol back in 2010, more than half a dozen newspapers gave his unusual appearance particular scrutiny and made assumptions accordingly, which in turn influenced public opinion. This culminated in substantial damages for defamation, two convictions for contempt of court and a painful ordeal for Jefferies, who was entirely innocent. \n\n This kind of deep-seated bias looms large throughout physiognomic works of the 19th and 20th centuries, from absurdities such as Vaught's Practical Character Reader of 1902 (handy if you want to find out what a \"deceitful chin\" looks like) to more inherently troubling volumes such as Cesare Lombroso's Criminal Man.",
"This isn't to say that the use of big data, and particularly the use of composite imagery (digitally blending together certain types of faces) doesn't give us useful information and fascinating correlations. \"You can, for example, take a given face and use computer software to make it look more or less trustworthy,\" says Hancock. \"I remember a colleague playing with this and he made a less trustworthy version of George W Bush – and how shifty did he look! I'm surprised that they're not using these techniques in political advertising, because you couldn't tell that anything had been done [to the picture], but when you look at it you think 'I wouldn't trust him'.\"",
"The revitalisation of the theory of physiognomy by the Shanghai students is, according to Todorov, deeply problematic on a theoretical level. \"Are we back to Lombroso's theory,\" he asks, \"that criminals were anomalous creatures, evolutionary degenerates? How does one become criminal, and what role do various life forces play into this? There are people making claims that you just need to look at the face to predict personality and behaviour, but many of these people have not given much thought to their underlying assumptions.\"",
"All of Greek society, it was claimed, could benefit from this skill: it could assist with choosing an employee, a slave or a spouse, while its inherent vagueness made it intriguing to philosophers and useful for scientists who bent the theories to support their own beliefs. It became a recognised science in the Islamic world, and was used and taught in Europe throughout late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, despite nagging doubts among thinkers and physicians of the day. In the early 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci claimed not to \"concern myself with false physiognomy, because these chimeras have no scientific foundation.\"",
"Todorov is also wary of these classifiers misidentifying more 'innocent' people than identifying actual criminals, and accuracy is a concern shared by Peter Hancock. \"Networks don't assess faces in the same way that we do,\" he says. \"One of our systems, which is a deep network, has a recognition engine which generates an ordered list of how similar various faces are. And sometimes you get good matches – but other times you look at them and say, well, it's the wrong race! To humans they look completely different. And that underlines the fact that the networks are working in a different sort of way, and actually you don't really know how they're working. They're the ultimate black box.\"",
"Hancock describes attending a conference where one speaker showed a series of black faces and white faces to students (who were mostly white) and asked them what they thought the experiment was about. \"They knew that he was trying to assess whether they would rate the black ones as more criminal,\" says Hancock. \"But then they did!\" \n\n We attribute social characteristics based on opinions we already hold about certain kinds of faces: whether they look unusual in some way, whether they resemble a partner, a family member or even ourselves, or perhaps have some other cultural association. Physiognomy ultimately stems from what Alexander Todorov, professor of psychology at Princeton University, calls an 'overgeneralisation hypothesis'. \"People,\" he wrote, \"use easily accessible facial information (eg an expression such as a smile, cues to gender and ethnic group) to make social attributions congruent with this information (eg a nice person).\" \n\n In a social media age, the pictures we choose to represent ourselves online are a form of self-presentation driven by those social attributions and the knowledge that our pictures are being judged.",
"After performing a number of autopsies on criminals, the Italian physician claimed to have discovered a number of common characteristics, and it's worth listing them if only to establish the supposed criminality of pretty much everyone you know:\nUnusually short or tall height; small head, but large face; fleshy lips, but thin upper lip; protuberances on head and around ear; wrinkles on forehead and face; large sinus cavities or bumpy face; tattoos; receding hairline; large incisors; bushy eyebrows, tending to meet across nose; large eye sockets but deep-set eyes; beaked or flat nose; strong jaw line; small and sloping forehead; small or weak chin; thin neck; sloping shoulders but large chest; large, protruding ears; long arms; high cheek bones; pointy or snubbed fingers or toes.",
"We know that paedophiles, murderers and other violent criminals come in many shapes and sizes. If we knew nothing about their criminal history, some of their photos might even appear attractive. But the idea that someone's features betray their character is something rooted deep within us; it's the reason why certain photos perform well on dating apps, or why trustworthy-looking politicians might rack up votes. But how wrong are our hunches of perceived criminality?",
"The aforementioned study at Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, with its enthusiastic, data-driven analyses of such questions as \"What features of a human face betray its owner's propensity for crimes?\" prompted a wave of press coverage.\nThe vision outlined in these articles is of an unethical dystopia where neural networks can assess our faces and establish a likely score for criminality – but Todorov is scathing about this paper, too. \"The main problem is the sampling of the images,\" he says. \"There is not enough information about the [nature of] the images of the people who were convicted. Second, clearly, there are huge differences between the two samples [of convicts and non-convicts] [in terms of] education and socio-economic status.\"\nIn other words, your appearance is affected by the kind of life you've led, so the classifiers within the computer program are simply distinguishing between different demographics rather than detecting a propensity for criminal behaviour.",
"A recent paper, published by Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang of Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, claims to be the first to use machine learning and neural networks to attempt a fully automated inference of criminality from facial images, removing prejudice from the equation and testing the validity of our gut feelings. \"What facial features influence the average Joe's impulsive and yet consensual judgments on social attributes?\" they ask. Through a study of 1,856 images (\"controlled for race, gender, age and facial expression\") they claim to have established the validity of \"automated, face-induced inference on criminality, despite the historical controversy surrounding this line of enquiry.\" \n\n In other words, they believe that they've found a relationship between looking like a criminal and actually being one."
],
[
"The revitalisation of the theory of physiognomy by the Shanghai students is, according to Todorov, deeply problematic on a theoretical level. \"Are we back to Lombroso's theory,\" he asks, \"that criminals were anomalous creatures, evolutionary degenerates? How does one become criminal, and what role do various life forces play into this? There are people making claims that you just need to look at the face to predict personality and behaviour, but many of these people have not given much thought to their underlying assumptions.\"",
"The aforementioned study at Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, with its enthusiastic, data-driven analyses of such questions as \"What features of a human face betray its owner's propensity for crimes?\" prompted a wave of press coverage.\nThe vision outlined in these articles is of an unethical dystopia where neural networks can assess our faces and establish a likely score for criminality – but Todorov is scathing about this paper, too. \"The main problem is the sampling of the images,\" he says. \"There is not enough information about the [nature of] the images of the people who were convicted. Second, clearly, there are huge differences between the two samples [of convicts and non-convicts] [in terms of] education and socio-economic status.\"\nIn other words, your appearance is affected by the kind of life you've led, so the classifiers within the computer program are simply distinguishing between different demographics rather than detecting a propensity for criminal behaviour.",
"Data-driven studies, based upon huge quantities of facial data, would seem to offer the final word on this. Since 2005, computational models have used various techniques to test for links between social attributes and facial features, resulting in suggestions that our faces can betray, for example, political leanings, sexual orientation and criminality. One BBC Future article from 2015 even describes the 'discipline' of physiognomy as 'gaining credibility'. But Todorov details many problems with these studies, pointing out the challenging nature of doing such experiments with sufficient rigour – not least because different images of the same people can prompt wildly differing results.",
"A recent paper, published by Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang of Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, claims to be the first to use machine learning and neural networks to attempt a fully automated inference of criminality from facial images, removing prejudice from the equation and testing the validity of our gut feelings. \"What facial features influence the average Joe's impulsive and yet consensual judgments on social attributes?\" they ask. Through a study of 1,856 images (\"controlled for race, gender, age and facial expression\") they claim to have established the validity of \"automated, face-induced inference on criminality, despite the historical controversy surrounding this line of enquiry.\" \n\n In other words, they believe that they've found a relationship between looking like a criminal and actually being one.",
"Lavater's work was criticised for being ridden with bias (black faces rarely emerged well from his analyses) but he was right in one respect: \"Whether they are or are not sensible of it,\" he wrote, \"all men are daily influenced by physiognomy.\" \n\n Many studies have been done into our psychological response to faces, and it's clear that a so-called halo effect will inevitably work its magic. \"Attractive people are regarded as better at everything,\" says Professor Peter Hancock, lecturer in Psychology at Stirling University. \"And we can't shake that off because there's some truth to it. Good genes produce intelligent people, attractive faces, fit bodies, and we imagine that they're going to be good at everything else, too. We don't have good insight into our own behaviour. We tend to think we understand what we're doing, but we don't.\"",
"In the 17th century, Swiss poet Johann Caspar Lavater took della Porta's methodology and ran with it, commissioning artists to illustrate his popular Essays On Physiognomy – which, to the chagrin of his contemporary, the writer Hannah More, sold for \"fifteen guineas a set… while in vain we boast that philosophy [has] broken down all the strongholds of prejudice, ignorance, and superstition.\"",
"In a woeful misreading of Darwinian theory, Lombroso unwittingly founded the field of anthropological criminology, and more specifically the idea of the born criminal: a hereditary quality that posed a danger to society and must be rooted out. His theories became discredited during the 20th century, but the kind of bias displayed by Lombroso can still be found in legal systems across the world; studies show that people with stereotypically 'untrustworthy' faces tend to receive harsher treatment than those who don't. There's evidently some consensus over people's attitudes toward certain faces, but it doesn't follow that the consensus is correct.",
"The only attributes that we're reasonably good at detecting, according to research done at the University of Michigan in the 1960s and later tested at the University of Stirling in 2007, are extroversion and conscientiousness. For other traits there's insufficient evidence that our hunches are correct, with anomalies explained by our evolved aversion to 'ugliness', established links between broader faces and powerful physiques, or cultural associations with certain demographics which are reinforced with nagging regularity by newspapers, books, television and film.",
"Experiments at Princeton found that we take less than one tenth of a second to form an opinion of strangers from their pictures, and those opinions tend to stand firm even if we're exposed to those pictures for a longer period of time. That tendency to judge instantly gives rise to a number of selfie tropes that are deemed to elicit positive responses, particularly when it comes to photos on dating profiles: certain angles, particular expressions, minute adjustments of eyebrows and lips that might appear to be about narcissism and vanity, but are more about a fear of being incorrectly assessed. After all, false suppositions based on people's faces are hugely influential within society, and in extreme cases they can have a huge impact on people's lives.",
"Face value\nWhen the BBC broadcast the recent documentary by Louis Theroux that looked back at the time he spent in the company of Jimmy Savile, there was disbelief across social media that no one had stepped in to stop Savile from committing his crimes. Some blamed the BBC, some blamed those in Savile's immediate circle, but others blamed a simple error of human judgment. \n\n \"He literally couldn't look more like a paedophile,\" read one post – one of many to state a supposedly incontrovertible truth: that Savile's criminal tendencies could have been detected from the shape of his features, his eyes, his hair. Moreover, this has nothing to do with the benefit of hindsight and should have been picked up at the time. His looks, they suggested, were a moral indicator, with a wealth of compelling visual evidence to support the claim.",
"Todorov is also wary of these classifiers misidentifying more 'innocent' people than identifying actual criminals, and accuracy is a concern shared by Peter Hancock. \"Networks don't assess faces in the same way that we do,\" he says. \"One of our systems, which is a deep network, has a recognition engine which generates an ordered list of how similar various faces are. And sometimes you get good matches – but other times you look at them and say, well, it's the wrong race! To humans they look completely different. And that underlines the fact that the networks are working in a different sort of way, and actually you don't really know how they're working. They're the ultimate black box.\"",
"When retired teacher Christopher Jefferies was held by police in connection with the murder of Joanna Yeates in Bristol back in 2010, more than half a dozen newspapers gave his unusual appearance particular scrutiny and made assumptions accordingly, which in turn influenced public opinion. This culminated in substantial damages for defamation, two convictions for contempt of court and a painful ordeal for Jefferies, who was entirely innocent. \n\n This kind of deep-seated bias looms large throughout physiognomic works of the 19th and 20th centuries, from absurdities such as Vaught's Practical Character Reader of 1902 (handy if you want to find out what a \"deceitful chin\" looks like) to more inherently troubling volumes such as Cesare Lombroso's Criminal Man.",
"This isn't to say that the use of big data, and particularly the use of composite imagery (digitally blending together certain types of faces) doesn't give us useful information and fascinating correlations. \"You can, for example, take a given face and use computer software to make it look more or less trustworthy,\" says Hancock. \"I remember a colleague playing with this and he made a less trustworthy version of George W Bush – and how shifty did he look! I'm surprised that they're not using these techniques in political advertising, because you couldn't tell that anything had been done [to the picture], but when you look at it you think 'I wouldn't trust him'.\"",
"While it's true that we judge books by their covers, covers are more than just faces; we piece together all kinds of cues from people to form our impressions of them. Jimmy Savile's appearance was unusual by any standards, but we absorbed a great deal of information about him over the years that will have influenced our opinions – not least from the original Louis Theroux programme from 2000 that was reexamined in that recent BBC documentary. Savile's vague resemblance to the Child Catcher from the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is convenient but ultimately misleading, and the way it reinforces the idea of what a paedophile might 'look like' is unfortunate; not least because it helps to sustain a low-level belief in the 'science' of physiognomy, despite its tendency to crumble under the slightest cross examination.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"All of Greek society, it was claimed, could benefit from this skill: it could assist with choosing an employee, a slave or a spouse, while its inherent vagueness made it intriguing to philosophers and useful for scientists who bent the theories to support their own beliefs. It became a recognised science in the Islamic world, and was used and taught in Europe throughout late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, despite nagging doubts among thinkers and physicians of the day. In the early 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci claimed not to \"concern myself with false physiognomy, because these chimeras have no scientific foundation.\"",
"After performing a number of autopsies on criminals, the Italian physician claimed to have discovered a number of common characteristics, and it's worth listing them if only to establish the supposed criminality of pretty much everyone you know:\nUnusually short or tall height; small head, but large face; fleshy lips, but thin upper lip; protuberances on head and around ear; wrinkles on forehead and face; large sinus cavities or bumpy face; tattoos; receding hairline; large incisors; bushy eyebrows, tending to meet across nose; large eye sockets but deep-set eyes; beaked or flat nose; strong jaw line; small and sloping forehead; small or weak chin; thin neck; sloping shoulders but large chest; large, protruding ears; long arms; high cheek bones; pointy or snubbed fingers or toes.",
"It's a claim that's been made many times over the years. Physiognomy, the 'science' of judging people by their appearance, was first theorised by the ancient Greeks in around the 5th century BC. Aristotle's pronouncement that \"it is possible to infer character from features\" led to a number of works relating to 'Physiognomica', a word derived from\nphysis\n(nature),\nnomos\n(law) and (or)\ngnomon\n(judge or interpreter).",
"Hancock describes attending a conference where one speaker showed a series of black faces and white faces to students (who were mostly white) and asked them what they thought the experiment was about. \"They knew that he was trying to assess whether they would rate the black ones as more criminal,\" says Hancock. \"But then they did!\" \n\n We attribute social characteristics based on opinions we already hold about certain kinds of faces: whether they look unusual in some way, whether they resemble a partner, a family member or even ourselves, or perhaps have some other cultural association. Physiognomy ultimately stems from what Alexander Todorov, professor of psychology at Princeton University, calls an 'overgeneralisation hypothesis'. \"People,\" he wrote, \"use easily accessible facial information (eg an expression such as a smile, cues to gender and ethnic group) to make social attributions congruent with this information (eg a nice person).\" \n\n In a social media age, the pictures we choose to represent ourselves online are a form of self-presentation driven by those social attributions and the knowledge that our pictures are being judged.",
"Theories of physiognomy, however, would persist beyond the Renaissance. In 1586, Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta published a book, De humana physiognomonia libri IIII, which established him as the 'father of Physiognomy'. Della Porta's thinking was based on the 'doctrine of signatures'; the idea that the appearance of plants and animals offers clues to their nature. For example, as one writer of the time suggested, walnuts are good for curing headaches because they're shaped a bit like a human head. The theories in della Porta's book were supported by dozens of detailed illustrations which, by comparing human faces to those of animals, suggested that they must surely share similar character traits.",
"We know that paedophiles, murderers and other violent criminals come in many shapes and sizes. If we knew nothing about their criminal history, some of their photos might even appear attractive. But the idea that someone's features betray their character is something rooted deep within us; it's the reason why certain photos perform well on dating apps, or why trustworthy-looking politicians might rack up votes. But how wrong are our hunches of perceived criminality?"
],
[
"It's a claim that's been made many times over the years. Physiognomy, the 'science' of judging people by their appearance, was first theorised by the ancient Greeks in around the 5th century BC. Aristotle's pronouncement that \"it is possible to infer character from features\" led to a number of works relating to 'Physiognomica', a word derived from\nphysis\n(nature),\nnomos\n(law) and (or)\ngnomon\n(judge or interpreter).",
"When retired teacher Christopher Jefferies was held by police in connection with the murder of Joanna Yeates in Bristol back in 2010, more than half a dozen newspapers gave his unusual appearance particular scrutiny and made assumptions accordingly, which in turn influenced public opinion. This culminated in substantial damages for defamation, two convictions for contempt of court and a painful ordeal for Jefferies, who was entirely innocent. \n\n This kind of deep-seated bias looms large throughout physiognomic works of the 19th and 20th centuries, from absurdities such as Vaught's Practical Character Reader of 1902 (handy if you want to find out what a \"deceitful chin\" looks like) to more inherently troubling volumes such as Cesare Lombroso's Criminal Man.",
"Theories of physiognomy, however, would persist beyond the Renaissance. In 1586, Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta published a book, De humana physiognomonia libri IIII, which established him as the 'father of Physiognomy'. Della Porta's thinking was based on the 'doctrine of signatures'; the idea that the appearance of plants and animals offers clues to their nature. For example, as one writer of the time suggested, walnuts are good for curing headaches because they're shaped a bit like a human head. The theories in della Porta's book were supported by dozens of detailed illustrations which, by comparing human faces to those of animals, suggested that they must surely share similar character traits.",
"In the 17th century, Swiss poet Johann Caspar Lavater took della Porta's methodology and ran with it, commissioning artists to illustrate his popular Essays On Physiognomy – which, to the chagrin of his contemporary, the writer Hannah More, sold for \"fifteen guineas a set… while in vain we boast that philosophy [has] broken down all the strongholds of prejudice, ignorance, and superstition.\"",
"The revitalisation of the theory of physiognomy by the Shanghai students is, according to Todorov, deeply problematic on a theoretical level. \"Are we back to Lombroso's theory,\" he asks, \"that criminals were anomalous creatures, evolutionary degenerates? How does one become criminal, and what role do various life forces play into this? There are people making claims that you just need to look at the face to predict personality and behaviour, but many of these people have not given much thought to their underlying assumptions.\"",
"Lavater's work was criticised for being ridden with bias (black faces rarely emerged well from his analyses) but he was right in one respect: \"Whether they are or are not sensible of it,\" he wrote, \"all men are daily influenced by physiognomy.\" \n\n Many studies have been done into our psychological response to faces, and it's clear that a so-called halo effect will inevitably work its magic. \"Attractive people are regarded as better at everything,\" says Professor Peter Hancock, lecturer in Psychology at Stirling University. \"And we can't shake that off because there's some truth to it. Good genes produce intelligent people, attractive faces, fit bodies, and we imagine that they're going to be good at everything else, too. We don't have good insight into our own behaviour. We tend to think we understand what we're doing, but we don't.\"",
"Data-driven studies, based upon huge quantities of facial data, would seem to offer the final word on this. Since 2005, computational models have used various techniques to test for links between social attributes and facial features, resulting in suggestions that our faces can betray, for example, political leanings, sexual orientation and criminality. One BBC Future article from 2015 even describes the 'discipline' of physiognomy as 'gaining credibility'. But Todorov details many problems with these studies, pointing out the challenging nature of doing such experiments with sufficient rigour – not least because different images of the same people can prompt wildly differing results.",
"While it's true that we judge books by their covers, covers are more than just faces; we piece together all kinds of cues from people to form our impressions of them. Jimmy Savile's appearance was unusual by any standards, but we absorbed a great deal of information about him over the years that will have influenced our opinions – not least from the original Louis Theroux programme from 2000 that was reexamined in that recent BBC documentary. Savile's vague resemblance to the Child Catcher from the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is convenient but ultimately misleading, and the way it reinforces the idea of what a paedophile might 'look like' is unfortunate; not least because it helps to sustain a low-level belief in the 'science' of physiognomy, despite its tendency to crumble under the slightest cross examination.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"In a woeful misreading of Darwinian theory, Lombroso unwittingly founded the field of anthropological criminology, and more specifically the idea of the born criminal: a hereditary quality that posed a danger to society and must be rooted out. His theories became discredited during the 20th century, but the kind of bias displayed by Lombroso can still be found in legal systems across the world; studies show that people with stereotypically 'untrustworthy' faces tend to receive harsher treatment than those who don't. There's evidently some consensus over people's attitudes toward certain faces, but it doesn't follow that the consensus is correct.",
"All of Greek society, it was claimed, could benefit from this skill: it could assist with choosing an employee, a slave or a spouse, while its inherent vagueness made it intriguing to philosophers and useful for scientists who bent the theories to support their own beliefs. It became a recognised science in the Islamic world, and was used and taught in Europe throughout late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, despite nagging doubts among thinkers and physicians of the day. In the early 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci claimed not to \"concern myself with false physiognomy, because these chimeras have no scientific foundation.\"",
"The only attributes that we're reasonably good at detecting, according to research done at the University of Michigan in the 1960s and later tested at the University of Stirling in 2007, are extroversion and conscientiousness. For other traits there's insufficient evidence that our hunches are correct, with anomalies explained by our evolved aversion to 'ugliness', established links between broader faces and powerful physiques, or cultural associations with certain demographics which are reinforced with nagging regularity by newspapers, books, television and film.",
"Face value\nWhen the BBC broadcast the recent documentary by Louis Theroux that looked back at the time he spent in the company of Jimmy Savile, there was disbelief across social media that no one had stepped in to stop Savile from committing his crimes. Some blamed the BBC, some blamed those in Savile's immediate circle, but others blamed a simple error of human judgment. \n\n \"He literally couldn't look more like a paedophile,\" read one post – one of many to state a supposedly incontrovertible truth: that Savile's criminal tendencies could have been detected from the shape of his features, his eyes, his hair. Moreover, this has nothing to do with the benefit of hindsight and should have been picked up at the time. His looks, they suggested, were a moral indicator, with a wealth of compelling visual evidence to support the claim.",
"Hancock describes attending a conference where one speaker showed a series of black faces and white faces to students (who were mostly white) and asked them what they thought the experiment was about. \"They knew that he was trying to assess whether they would rate the black ones as more criminal,\" says Hancock. \"But then they did!\" \n\n We attribute social characteristics based on opinions we already hold about certain kinds of faces: whether they look unusual in some way, whether they resemble a partner, a family member or even ourselves, or perhaps have some other cultural association. Physiognomy ultimately stems from what Alexander Todorov, professor of psychology at Princeton University, calls an 'overgeneralisation hypothesis'. \"People,\" he wrote, \"use easily accessible facial information (eg an expression such as a smile, cues to gender and ethnic group) to make social attributions congruent with this information (eg a nice person).\" \n\n In a social media age, the pictures we choose to represent ourselves online are a form of self-presentation driven by those social attributions and the knowledge that our pictures are being judged.",
"After performing a number of autopsies on criminals, the Italian physician claimed to have discovered a number of common characteristics, and it's worth listing them if only to establish the supposed criminality of pretty much everyone you know:\nUnusually short or tall height; small head, but large face; fleshy lips, but thin upper lip; protuberances on head and around ear; wrinkles on forehead and face; large sinus cavities or bumpy face; tattoos; receding hairline; large incisors; bushy eyebrows, tending to meet across nose; large eye sockets but deep-set eyes; beaked or flat nose; strong jaw line; small and sloping forehead; small or weak chin; thin neck; sloping shoulders but large chest; large, protruding ears; long arms; high cheek bones; pointy or snubbed fingers or toes.",
"We know that paedophiles, murderers and other violent criminals come in many shapes and sizes. If we knew nothing about their criminal history, some of their photos might even appear attractive. But the idea that someone's features betray their character is something rooted deep within us; it's the reason why certain photos perform well on dating apps, or why trustworthy-looking politicians might rack up votes. But how wrong are our hunches of perceived criminality?",
"The aforementioned study at Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, with its enthusiastic, data-driven analyses of such questions as \"What features of a human face betray its owner's propensity for crimes?\" prompted a wave of press coverage.\nThe vision outlined in these articles is of an unethical dystopia where neural networks can assess our faces and establish a likely score for criminality – but Todorov is scathing about this paper, too. \"The main problem is the sampling of the images,\" he says. \"There is not enough information about the [nature of] the images of the people who were convicted. Second, clearly, there are huge differences between the two samples [of convicts and non-convicts] [in terms of] education and socio-economic status.\"\nIn other words, your appearance is affected by the kind of life you've led, so the classifiers within the computer program are simply distinguishing between different demographics rather than detecting a propensity for criminal behaviour.",
"A recent paper, published by Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang of Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, claims to be the first to use machine learning and neural networks to attempt a fully automated inference of criminality from facial images, removing prejudice from the equation and testing the validity of our gut feelings. \"What facial features influence the average Joe's impulsive and yet consensual judgments on social attributes?\" they ask. Through a study of 1,856 images (\"controlled for race, gender, age and facial expression\") they claim to have established the validity of \"automated, face-induced inference on criminality, despite the historical controversy surrounding this line of enquiry.\" \n\n In other words, they believe that they've found a relationship between looking like a criminal and actually being one.",
"Experiments at Princeton found that we take less than one tenth of a second to form an opinion of strangers from their pictures, and those opinions tend to stand firm even if we're exposed to those pictures for a longer period of time. That tendency to judge instantly gives rise to a number of selfie tropes that are deemed to elicit positive responses, particularly when it comes to photos on dating profiles: certain angles, particular expressions, minute adjustments of eyebrows and lips that might appear to be about narcissism and vanity, but are more about a fear of being incorrectly assessed. After all, false suppositions based on people's faces are hugely influential within society, and in extreme cases they can have a huge impact on people's lives.",
"This isn't to say that the use of big data, and particularly the use of composite imagery (digitally blending together certain types of faces) doesn't give us useful information and fascinating correlations. \"You can, for example, take a given face and use computer software to make it look more or less trustworthy,\" says Hancock. \"I remember a colleague playing with this and he made a less trustworthy version of George W Bush – and how shifty did he look! I'm surprised that they're not using these techniques in political advertising, because you couldn't tell that anything had been done [to the picture], but when you look at it you think 'I wouldn't trust him'.\"",
"Todorov is also wary of these classifiers misidentifying more 'innocent' people than identifying actual criminals, and accuracy is a concern shared by Peter Hancock. \"Networks don't assess faces in the same way that we do,\" he says. \"One of our systems, which is a deep network, has a recognition engine which generates an ordered list of how similar various faces are. And sometimes you get good matches – but other times you look at them and say, well, it's the wrong race! To humans they look completely different. And that underlines the fact that the networks are working in a different sort of way, and actually you don't really know how they're working. They're the ultimate black box.\""
]
] |
train
|
60747
|
[
"How old was the narrator when he discovered he had a special gift?",
"Why does the narrator reveal his secret ability to Julia?",
"Why does the narrator make a phone call before explaining the bomb to Julia?",
"Why didn't Julia pick up her suitcase with the other passengers?",
"Why doesn't the narrator use his powers to win at slot machines?",
"How did the bomb get in Julia's suitcase?",
"What happened to the man who stole the suitcases?",
"Why doesn't Julia tell the policeman about the bomb?"
] |
[
[
"15",
"9",
"12",
"18"
],
[
"He loves Julia, and he doesn't want there to be any secrets between them.",
"If he doesn't explain his ability, she'll think he's a creeper for going in her luggage.",
"He needs to stay with the suitcase to keep the bomb from going off. He needs her cooperation.",
"He'll have a better chance of getting her to believe him than the airport policeman believing his story."
],
[
"The narrator needs to call airport security so that they can evacuate the area before he explains the situation to Julia.",
"The narrator needs to call the FBI and report the bomb before he explains the situation to Julia.",
"The narrator fakes making a phone call so that he can focus on stopping the bomb again.",
"The narrator needs to alert the bomb squad before he explains the situation to Julia."
],
[
"Julia was detained by customs before she could get to the baggage claim.",
"Julia went to call her sister before collecting her suitcase.",
"Julia was told that her suitcase didn't make the flight when they were mid-air. ",
"Julia didn't want to be near the suitcase when the bomb went off."
],
[
"He did use his powers to win at slot machines. He got himself banned from casinos.",
"He thought about using his powers to win at slot machines but then decided it was too risky. He was afraid of getting caught.",
"The mechanical workings of the slot machines are too difficult for him to control.",
"He did use his powers to win at slot machines for a while. Then he became addicted to gambling and had to join Gamblers Annonymous."
],
[
"Julia's sister slipped the bomb inside the suitcase before she left for the airport.",
"Julia put the bomb in her suitcase before she left home.",
"A terrorist at the airport grabbed Julia's bag at random and slipped the bomb inside.",
"Julia's husband put the bomb in her suitcase before she left the house."
],
[
"The man who stole the suitcases was arrested by the FBI after the bomb-sniffing dogs caught up with him.",
"The man who stole the suitcases was mauled by the bomb-sniffing dogs.",
"The man who stole the suitcases died when the bomb exploded.",
"The man who stole the suitcases was arrested by the airport police."
],
[
"This is her chance to disappear and start a new life. ",
"She doesn't think the police will believe her husband tried to kill her.",
"She does not want to be blamed for the thief's death.",
"She doesn't want the narrator to have to explain his gifts."
]
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[
"Class had hardly resumed when she started looking around the desk for\n her favorite mechanical pencil, asking if any of us had seen it, and\n looking straight at me. I didn't want her to think I had taken it while\n she was out of the room, so I probed the contents of her purse, which\n she always kept in the upper right drawer of her desk.\n\n\n \"It's in your purse,\" I blurted out.\n\n\n I was sent home with a stinging note.\n\n\n Since then I've kept quiet. At one time I assumed everybody was able\n to sense. I've known better for years. Still, I wonder how many other\n people are as close-mouthed about their special gift as I am about mine.\n\n\n I used to think that some day I'd make a lot of money out of it, but\n how? I can't read thoughts. I can't even be sure what some of the\n things I sense in probing really are.",
"It started when I was a kid, this business of being able to explore\n the insides of things like purses and sealed boxes and locked drawers\n and—well, human beings. But human beings aren't worth the trouble.\n It's like swimming through spaghetti. And I've got to stay away from\n electric wires. They hurt. Now don't ask me\nhow\nthey hurt.\n\n\n Maybe you think it's fun. For the most part, it really isn't. I always\n knew what was in Christmas presents before I unwrapped them, and\n therefore Christmas was always spoiled for me as a kid. I can't feel\n the color of anything, just its consistency. An apple senses about the\n same as a potato, except for the core and the stem. I can't even tell\n if there's writing on a piece of paper. So you see it isn't much. Just\n the feel of shapes, the hardnesses and softnesses. But I've learned to\n become pretty good at guessing.",
"Over coffee I explained it all to her, how I had this extrasensory\n ability, how she was the first person I had ever revealed it to, and\n how I had discovered what was in her overnight bag.\n\n\n During the telling, her untouched coffee grew a skin, her face grew\n pale, her eyes grew less curious and more troubled. There were tears\n there when I finished. I asked her who put the bomb in her bag.\n\n\n \"Joe did,\" she said in a toneless voice, not looking at me any more but\n staring vacantly across the room. \"Joe put it there.\" Behind her eyes\n she was reliving some recent scene.\n\n\n \"Who is Joe?\"",
"I lit a cigarette, reached out. Inside were a woman's things and—a\n clock. The escapement was clicking vigorously.\n\n\n I didn't moan this time. I just closed my eyes, stretched toward\n and grabbed the balance wheel I was getting to know like my own. I\n entered into a union with it so strong that after I had reduced it to\n immobility, it was like waking when I opened my eyes.\nThe baggage claim attendant was staring at me. For only a moment I\n stared back. Then I quickly reached for my baggage check and presented\n it to him. His hand hovered over the handle of the little red bag and I\n was ready to yell at him. But then, matching numbers on the tags with\n his eyes, his hand grasped the handle of my own suitcase and pushed it\n toward me.\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" I said, taking it. I glanced ever so casually toward the\n remaining bag. \"One left over, eh?\"",
"Nuts to wild talents! Mine was no\n \nsatisfaction, never earned me a penny—and\n \nnow it had me fighting for my life in\n...\nTHE LITTLE RED BAG\nBy JERRY SOHL\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1960.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nAbout an hour out of San Francisco on the flight to Los Angeles, I made\n the discovery. I had finished reading the\nChronicle\n, folded and put\n it beside me, turned and looked out the window, expecting to see the\n San Joaquin Valley but finding only a sea of clouds instead. So I\n returned my attention to the inside of the plane, to the overstuffed\n gray-haired woman asleep beside me, to the backs of heads in seats\n before me, across the aisle to other heads, and down to the blonde.",
"But I've learned to move things. Ever so little. A piece of paper. A\n feather. Once I stopped one of those little glass-enclosed light or\n heat-powered devices with vanes you see now and then in a jeweler's\n window. And I can stop clocks.\n\n\n Take this morning, for example. I had set my alarm for five-thirty\n because I had to catch the seven o'clock plane at San Francisco\n International Airport. This being earlier than I usually get up, it\n seems all I did during the night was feel my way past the escapement\n and balance wheel to see where the notch for the alarm was. The last\n time I did it there was just the merest fraction of an inch between the\n pawl and the notch. So I sighed and moved to the balance wheel and its\n delicate ribbon of spiraling steel. I hung onto the wheel, exerting\n influence to decrease the restoring torque.",
"\"Must have been dreaming,\" I said as I rang for the stewardess. When\n she came I told her I'd take some of that coffee now. No, nothing else,\n just coffee. I didn't tell her how much I needed it. I sat there clammy\n with sweat until she returned. Coffee never tasted so good.\nAll right, so I had stopped the bomb's timer. My mind raced ahead to\n the landing. When they unloaded the luggage, the balance wheel would\n start again. I wouldn't be able to stay with it, keeping it still.\n I considered telling the authorities as soon as we landed, or maybe\n calling in ahead, but wouldn't that just bring suspicion, questions.\n Maybe I could convince them I could stop a clock—but not before the\n bomb exploded. And then what? My secret would be out and my life would\n be changed. I'd be a man not to be trusted, a prying man, a man\n literally with gimlet eyes.",
"I never did find my suitcase because I found the bomb first.\nThe bomb was in a small bag—a woman's bag judging by the soft,\n flimsy things you'd never find in a man's—and I didn't know it was a\n bomb right away. I thought it was just a clock, one of those small,\n quiet alarms. I was going to pass it by and go on, but what held me\n was that something was taped to it. By the feel, I knew it must be\n electrician's tape. Interested and curious, I explored the clock more\n closely, found two wires. One went to a battery and the other to hard\n round cylinders taped together. The hairs stood up at the base of my\n neck when I suddenly realized what it was.\n\n\n The clock's balance wheel was rocking merrily. Quickly I went up past\n the train of gears to the alarm wheel. If this was anything like my own\n alarm clock, this one had something like ten minutes to go.",
"I should not have been there, that much I knew; I should be with a\n man named Amos Magaffey on Sixth Street at ten o'clock, discussing\n something very mundane, the matter of a printing order. But what could\n I do? If I left the airport, the attendant would eventually take the\n bag inside and there would be an explosion, and I wouldn't be able to\n live with myself.\n\n\n No. I had to stay to keep the balance wheel stationary until—until\n what?\n\n\n A man in tan gabardine, wearing a police cap and badge, walked out of\n the entrance to stand on the stone steps beside me while he put on a\n pair of dark glasses. A member of the airport police detail. I could\n tell him. I could take him down to the little red bag and explain the\n whole thing. Then it would be his baby and I would be off on my own\n business.",
"The clerk took it, nodded, and in a moment brought out the overnight\n case and set it on the scales. The girl thanked him, picked it up,\n glanced at me indifferently, and then started for the entrance with it.\n\n\n \"Just a moment,\" I found myself saying, grabbing my bag and hurrying\n after her.\nAt her side and a little ahead of her, I said, \"Listen to me.\"\n\n\n She looked annoyed and increased her stride toward the door.\n\n\n \"It's a matter of life or death,\" I said. I wanted to wrest the bag\n from her and hurl it out through the doorway into the street, but I\n restrained myself.\n\n\n She stopped and stared. I noticed a short, fat man in a rumpled\n suitcoat and unpressed pants staring, too. Ignoring him, I said,\n \"Please put the bag down. Over there.\" I indicated a spot beside a\n telephone booth where it would be out of the way.",
"The woman beside me stirred, sat up suddenly and looked across me out\n the window. \"Where are we?\" she asked in a surprised voice. I told her\n we were probably a little north of Bakersfield. She said, \"Oh,\" glanced\n at her wristwatch and sank back again.\n\n\n Soon the stewardesses would bring coffee and doughnuts around, so I\n contented myself with looking at the clouds and trying to think about\n Amos Magaffey, who was purchasing agent for a Los Angeles amusement\n chain, and how I was going to convince him our printing prices were\n maybe a little higher but the quality and service were better. My mind\n wandered below where I was sitting, idly moving from one piece of\n luggage to another, looking for my beat-up suitcase. I went through\n slips and slippers, lingerie and laundry, a jig saw puzzle and a\n ukulele.",
"She gave me a speculative look.\n\n\n I must not have seemed a complete idiot because she said, \"All right,\n but—\"\n\n\n I didn't listen for the rest. I went into the booth, closed the door,\n pretended to drop a coin and dial a number. But all the time I was in\n there, I was reaching out through the glass for the clock. At this\n range it wasn't difficult to stop the balance wheel.\n\n\n Just the same, when I came out I was wringing wet.\n\n\n \"Now will you please tell me what this is all about?\" she said stiffly.\n\n\n \"Gladly. Let me buy you a cup of coffee and I'll explain.\"\n\n\n She glanced at the bags. I told her they'd be all right. We followed\n the short, fat man into the coffee shop.",
"Mountain crags jutted through the clouds. We were in the range north of\n the city. Here and there were clear spots and I could see roads below,\n but there were also clouds far above us. It was very beautiful, but it\n was also very bumpy, and we started to slip and slide.\n\n\n To my horror I found that the balance wheel was rocking again. Closing\n my eyes and gritting my teeth, I forced my senses to the wheel, tugging\n and pulling and shoving and pushing until it finally stopped.\n\n\n A jab in the shoulder. I jumped, startled.\n\n\n \"Your cup,\" my seat partner said, pointing.\n\n\n I looked down at the coffee cup I had crushed in my hands. Then I\n looked up into the eyes of the stewardess. I handed it to her. She took\n it without a word and went away.\n\n\n \"Were you really asleep that time?\"",
"I had seen her in the concourse and at the gate, a shapely thing. Now\n she had crossed her legs and I was privileged to view a trim ankle and\n calf, and her profile as she stared moodily across the aisle and out a\n window where there was nothing to see.\n\n\n I slid my eyes past her to others. A crossword-puzzle worker, a\n togetherness-type-magazine reader.\n\n\n Inventory completed, I went back to looking at the clouds, knowing I\n should be thinking about the printing order I was going to Los Angeles\n for, and not wanting to.\n\n\n So I started going through the purse of the woman next to me. Perhaps\n that sounds bad. It wasn't. I'd been doing it for years and nobody ever\n complained.",
"\"My husband.\" I thought she was going to really bawl, but she got\n control again. \"This trip was his idea, my coming down here to visit my\n sister.\" Her smile was bleak. \"I see now why he wanted to put in those\n books. I'd finished packing and was in the bathroom. He said he'd put\n in some books we'd both finished reading—for my sister. That's when he\n must have put the—put it in there.\"\n\n\n I said gently, \"Why would he want to do a thing like that?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\" She shook her head. \"I just don't know.\" And she was\n close to bawling again. Then she recovered and said, \"I'm not sure I\n want to know.\" I admired her for saying it. Joe must have been crazy.\n\n\n \"It's all right now?\" she asked.\n\n\n I nodded. \"As long as we don't move it.\"",
"I closed my eyes, forced my mind back to the luggage compartment, spent\n a frantic moment before I found the bag again. I had to stop that\n balance wheel, just as I stopped my alarm clock every morning. I tried\n to close everything off—the throb of engines, the rush of air, the\n woman sipping coffee noisily beside me—and I went into the clock and\n surrounded the seesawing wheel. When it went forward, I pulled it back;\n when it went back, I pulled it forward. I struggled with it, and it was\n like trying to work with greasy hands, and I was afraid I wasn't going\n to be able to stop it.\n\n\n Then, little by little, it started to slow its beat. But I could not\n afford to relax. I pushed and pulled and didn't dare release my hold\n until it came to a dead stop.\n\n\n \"Anything the matter?\"",
"The policeman was sympathetic and concerned. He said, \"We'd better get\n over to the office.\"\n\n\n But we never left the spot because an explosion some blocks distant\n shattered the air. Julia's hand grasped my arm. Hard.\n\n\n \"Jets,\" the redcap said, eying the sky.\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" the policeman said. \"Didn't sound much like a jet to\n me.\"\n\n\n We stood there. I could visualize the wreckage of an old gray coupe\n in the middle of a street, but I couldn't visualize the driver. That\n was all right. I didn't want to see him. I didn't know what Julia was\n thinking.\n\n\n She said, \"About those bags,\" and looked at me.\n\n\n The officer said, \"Yes, miss?\"",
"It was impossible to tell from this distance just which bag contained\n the bomb; I could hardly identify my own scarred suitcase. The\n assortment of bags—a strange conglomeration of sizes and colors—was\n packed in some places six deep, and it rolled toward the gate where\n I was standing. I didn't know whether to stay or run, imagining the\n balance wheel now happily rocking again. The load went past me down a\n ramp to the front of the air terminal where the luggage was unloaded\n and placed in a long rack. I went with it.\n\n\n There was a flurry of ticket matching, hands grabbing for suitcases,\n and a general exodus on the part of my fellow passengers, too fast to\n determine who had got the one with the bomb. Now all that was left was\n the attendant and I had two bags—my own battered veteran of years, and\n a fine new red overnight case, small enough to be the one.",
"\"I—I don't care about mine. I didn't have much of anything in it.\"\n\n\n \"I feel the same way,\" I said. \"Would it be all right if we didn't\n bother to report it?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the policeman said, \"I can't\nmake\nyou report it.\"\n\n\n \"I'd rather not then,\" Julia said. She turned to me. \"I'd like some\n air. Can't we walk a little?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" I said.\n\n\n We started down the street, her arm in mine, as the air began to fill\n with the distant sounds of sirens.",
"But he moved on down the steps, nodded at the redcap, and started\n across the street to the parking area. I could have called to him,\n \"Hey, officer, let me tell you about a bomb in a little red bag.\" But\n I didn't. I didn't because I caught a movement at the baggage claim\n counter out of the side of my eye.\n\n\n The attendant had picked up the bag and was walking with it up the ramp\n to the rear of the air terminal. Picking up my own suitcase, I went\n inside in time to see him enter through a side door and deposit the bag\n on the scales at the airline desk and say something to the clerk. The\n clerk nodded and moved the bag to the rear room."
],
[
"I told her I didn't know how much more time there was, that I'd been\n thinking it over and that the only way out seemed to be to tell the\n airport policeman. After I explained it to her, the girl—she said her\n name was Julia Claremont—agreed to tell him she thought there was a\n bomb in her bag, that she had noticed a ticking and had become worried\n because she knew she hadn't packed a clock. It wasn't good, but it\n would have to do.\n\n\n \"We've got to get it deactivated,\" I said, watching the fat man pay for\n his coffee and leave. \"The sooner the better.\"\nI finished my coffee in one gulp and went to pay the bill with her.\n I asked her why she didn't claim the bag at the same time the other\n people had. She said she had called her sister and the phone was busy\n for a long while.",
"Over coffee I explained it all to her, how I had this extrasensory\n ability, how she was the first person I had ever revealed it to, and\n how I had discovered what was in her overnight bag.\n\n\n During the telling, her untouched coffee grew a skin, her face grew\n pale, her eyes grew less curious and more troubled. There were tears\n there when I finished. I asked her who put the bomb in her bag.\n\n\n \"Joe did,\" she said in a toneless voice, not looking at me any more but\n staring vacantly across the room. \"Joe put it there.\" Behind her eyes\n she was reliving some recent scene.\n\n\n \"Who is Joe?\"",
"\"I—I don't care about mine. I didn't have much of anything in it.\"\n\n\n \"I feel the same way,\" I said. \"Would it be all right if we didn't\n bother to report it?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the policeman said, \"I can't\nmake\nyou report it.\"\n\n\n \"I'd rather not then,\" Julia said. She turned to me. \"I'd like some\n air. Can't we walk a little?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" I said.\n\n\n We started down the street, her arm in mine, as the air began to fill\n with the distant sounds of sirens.",
"She gave me a speculative look.\n\n\n I must not have seemed a complete idiot because she said, \"All right,\n but—\"\n\n\n I didn't listen for the rest. I went into the booth, closed the door,\n pretended to drop a coin and dial a number. But all the time I was in\n there, I was reaching out through the glass for the clock. At this\n range it wasn't difficult to stop the balance wheel.\n\n\n Just the same, when I came out I was wringing wet.\n\n\n \"Now will you please tell me what this is all about?\" she said stiffly.\n\n\n \"Gladly. Let me buy you a cup of coffee and I'll explain.\"\n\n\n She glanced at the bags. I told her they'd be all right. We followed\n the short, fat man into the coffee shop.",
"It started when I was a kid, this business of being able to explore\n the insides of things like purses and sealed boxes and locked drawers\n and—well, human beings. But human beings aren't worth the trouble.\n It's like swimming through spaghetti. And I've got to stay away from\n electric wires. They hurt. Now don't ask me\nhow\nthey hurt.\n\n\n Maybe you think it's fun. For the most part, it really isn't. I always\n knew what was in Christmas presents before I unwrapped them, and\n therefore Christmas was always spoiled for me as a kid. I can't feel\n the color of anything, just its consistency. An apple senses about the\n same as a potato, except for the core and the stem. I can't even tell\n if there's writing on a piece of paper. So you see it isn't much. Just\n the feel of shapes, the hardnesses and softnesses. But I've learned to\n become pretty good at guessing.",
"The policeman was sympathetic and concerned. He said, \"We'd better get\n over to the office.\"\n\n\n But we never left the spot because an explosion some blocks distant\n shattered the air. Julia's hand grasped my arm. Hard.\n\n\n \"Jets,\" the redcap said, eying the sky.\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" the policeman said. \"Didn't sound much like a jet to\n me.\"\n\n\n We stood there. I could visualize the wreckage of an old gray coupe\n in the middle of a street, but I couldn't visualize the driver. That\n was all right. I didn't want to see him. I didn't know what Julia was\n thinking.\n\n\n She said, \"About those bags,\" and looked at me.\n\n\n The officer said, \"Yes, miss?\"",
"The clerk took it, nodded, and in a moment brought out the overnight\n case and set it on the scales. The girl thanked him, picked it up,\n glanced at me indifferently, and then started for the entrance with it.\n\n\n \"Just a moment,\" I found myself saying, grabbing my bag and hurrying\n after her.\nAt her side and a little ahead of her, I said, \"Listen to me.\"\n\n\n She looked annoyed and increased her stride toward the door.\n\n\n \"It's a matter of life or death,\" I said. I wanted to wrest the bag\n from her and hurl it out through the doorway into the street, but I\n restrained myself.\n\n\n She stopped and stared. I noticed a short, fat man in a rumpled\n suitcoat and unpressed pants staring, too. Ignoring him, I said,\n \"Please put the bag down. Over there.\" I indicated a spot beside a\n telephone booth where it would be out of the way.",
"\"Must have been dreaming,\" I said as I rang for the stewardess. When\n she came I told her I'd take some of that coffee now. No, nothing else,\n just coffee. I didn't tell her how much I needed it. I sat there clammy\n with sweat until she returned. Coffee never tasted so good.\nAll right, so I had stopped the bomb's timer. My mind raced ahead to\n the landing. When they unloaded the luggage, the balance wheel would\n start again. I wouldn't be able to stay with it, keeping it still.\n I considered telling the authorities as soon as we landed, or maybe\n calling in ahead, but wouldn't that just bring suspicion, questions.\n Maybe I could convince them I could stop a clock—but not before the\n bomb exploded. And then what? My secret would be out and my life would\n be changed. I'd be a man not to be trusted, a prying man, a man\n literally with gimlet eyes.",
"I lit a cigarette, reached out. Inside were a woman's things and—a\n clock. The escapement was clicking vigorously.\n\n\n I didn't moan this time. I just closed my eyes, stretched toward\n and grabbed the balance wheel I was getting to know like my own. I\n entered into a union with it so strong that after I had reduced it to\n immobility, it was like waking when I opened my eyes.\nThe baggage claim attendant was staring at me. For only a moment I\n stared back. Then I quickly reached for my baggage check and presented\n it to him. His hand hovered over the handle of the little red bag and I\n was ready to yell at him. But then, matching numbers on the tags with\n his eyes, his hand grasped the handle of my own suitcase and pushed it\n toward me.\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" I said, taking it. I glanced ever so casually toward the\n remaining bag. \"One left over, eh?\"",
"She didn't move. She just said, \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"For God's sake!\" I took the case. She offered no resistance. I put her\n bag and mine next to the booth. When I turned around she was standing\n there looking at me as if I had gone out of my mind. Her eyes were blue\n and brown-flecked, very pretty eyes, and my thought at the moment was,\n I'm glad the bomb didn't go off; these eyes wouldn't be looking at me\n or anything else right now if it had.\n\n\n \"I've got to talk to you. It's very important.\"\n\n\n The girl said, \"Why?\" I was beginning to think it was the only word she\n knew. At the same time I was wondering why anyone would want to kill\n someone so lovely.\n\n\n \"I'll explain in a moment. Please stand right here while I make a\n telephone call.\" I moved toward the phone booth, paused and said, \"And\n don't ask me why.\"",
"\"My husband.\" I thought she was going to really bawl, but she got\n control again. \"This trip was his idea, my coming down here to visit my\n sister.\" Her smile was bleak. \"I see now why he wanted to put in those\n books. I'd finished packing and was in the bathroom. He said he'd put\n in some books we'd both finished reading—for my sister. That's when he\n must have put the—put it in there.\"\n\n\n I said gently, \"Why would he want to do a thing like that?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\" She shook her head. \"I just don't know.\" And she was\n close to bawling again. Then she recovered and said, \"I'm not sure I\n want to know.\" I admired her for saying it. Joe must have been crazy.\n\n\n \"It's all right now?\" she asked.\n\n\n I nodded. \"As long as we don't move it.\"",
"But I've learned to move things. Ever so little. A piece of paper. A\n feather. Once I stopped one of those little glass-enclosed light or\n heat-powered devices with vanes you see now and then in a jeweler's\n window. And I can stop clocks.\n\n\n Take this morning, for example. I had set my alarm for five-thirty\n because I had to catch the seven o'clock plane at San Francisco\n International Airport. This being earlier than I usually get up, it\n seems all I did during the night was feel my way past the escapement\n and balance wheel to see where the notch for the alarm was. The last\n time I did it there was just the merest fraction of an inch between the\n pawl and the notch. So I sighed and moved to the balance wheel and its\n delicate ribbon of spiraling steel. I hung onto the wheel, exerting\n influence to decrease the restoring torque.",
"The dumpy man I'd seen was walking off; Julia's bag in his right hand,\n mine in his left. He seemed in no hurry.\n\n\n \"Hey!\" I shouted, starting toward him.\n\n\n The man turned, took one look at me, and started to run. He came\n abreast an old gray, mud-spattered coupe, ran around, opened the door\n and threw both bags into the rear seat as he got in.\n\n\n The car was a hundred feet away and gathering speed by the time I\n reached where it had been parked. I watched it for a moment, then\n walked back to the entranceway where Julia was standing with the\n redcap, who said, \"That man steal them suitcases?\"\n\n\n \"That he did,\" I said.\n\n\n Just then the airport policeman started across the street from the\n parking lot. Redcap said, \"Better tell him about it.\"",
"I closed my eyes, forced my mind back to the luggage compartment, spent\n a frantic moment before I found the bag again. I had to stop that\n balance wheel, just as I stopped my alarm clock every morning. I tried\n to close everything off—the throb of engines, the rush of air, the\n woman sipping coffee noisily beside me—and I went into the clock and\n surrounded the seesawing wheel. When it went forward, I pulled it back;\n when it went back, I pulled it forward. I struggled with it, and it was\n like trying to work with greasy hands, and I was afraid I wasn't going\n to be able to stop it.\n\n\n Then, little by little, it started to slow its beat. But I could not\n afford to relax. I pushed and pulled and didn't dare release my hold\n until it came to a dead stop.\n\n\n \"Anything the matter?\"",
"Class had hardly resumed when she started looking around the desk for\n her favorite mechanical pencil, asking if any of us had seen it, and\n looking straight at me. I didn't want her to think I had taken it while\n she was out of the room, so I probed the contents of her purse, which\n she always kept in the upper right drawer of her desk.\n\n\n \"It's in your purse,\" I blurted out.\n\n\n I was sent home with a stinging note.\n\n\n Since then I've kept quiet. At one time I assumed everybody was able\n to sense. I've known better for years. Still, I wonder how many other\n people are as close-mouthed about their special gift as I am about mine.\n\n\n I used to think that some day I'd make a lot of money out of it, but\n how? I can't read thoughts. I can't even be sure what some of the\n things I sense in probing really are.",
"I could visualize the balance wheel once again rocking like crazy. How\n many minutes—or seconds—were left? I was sweating when I moved to the\n counter, and it wasn't because of the sunshine I'd been soaking in. I\n had to get as close to the bag as I could if I was going to stop the\n clock again.\n\n\n \"Can I help you?\" the clerk asked.\n\n\n \"No. I'm waiting for someone.\"\n\n\n I turned my back to him, put down my suitcase, leaned against the\n counter and reached out for the wheel. I found I could reach the\n device, but it was far away. When I tried to dampen it, the wheel\n escaped my grasp.\n\n\n \"Do you have my suitcase?\"\n\n\n I blinked my eyes open and looked around. The blonde in the plane stood\n there looking very fresh and bright and unconcerned. In her right hand\n she had a green baggage claim check.",
"It was forty minutes to Burbank and Lockheed Air Terminal.\n\n\n My mind was churning when I turned from the window to look around\n at the unconcerned passengers, the woman at my side asleep again. I\n thought: Which one of these.... No, none of them would know it was\n there. I glanced out the window again; clouds were still in the way.\n We'd be leaving the valley for the mountain range north of Los Angeles\n soon, if we hadn't left it already. No place to land the plane there.\n\n\n But of course that had been the plan!\n\n\n My heart was beating in jackhammer rhythm; my mouth was dry and my mind\n was numb. Tell somebody about the bomb before it's too late! No, they'd\n think I put it there. Besides, what good would it do? There would be\n panic and they'd never get the plane down in time—if they believed me.",
"I should not have been there, that much I knew; I should be with a\n man named Amos Magaffey on Sixth Street at ten o'clock, discussing\n something very mundane, the matter of a printing order. But what could\n I do? If I left the airport, the attendant would eventually take the\n bag inside and there would be an explosion, and I wouldn't be able to\n live with myself.\n\n\n No. I had to stay to keep the balance wheel stationary until—until\n what?\n\n\n A man in tan gabardine, wearing a police cap and badge, walked out of\n the entrance to stand on the stone steps beside me while he put on a\n pair of dark glasses. A member of the airport police detail. I could\n tell him. I could take him down to the little red bag and explain the\n whole thing. Then it would be his baby and I would be off on my own\n business.",
"But he moved on down the steps, nodded at the redcap, and started\n across the street to the parking area. I could have called to him,\n \"Hey, officer, let me tell you about a bomb in a little red bag.\" But\n I didn't. I didn't because I caught a movement at the baggage claim\n counter out of the side of my eye.\n\n\n The attendant had picked up the bag and was walking with it up the ramp\n to the rear of the air terminal. Picking up my own suitcase, I went\n inside in time to see him enter through a side door and deposit the bag\n on the scales at the airline desk and say something to the clerk. The\n clerk nodded and moved the bag to the rear room.",
"I never did find my suitcase because I found the bomb first.\nThe bomb was in a small bag—a woman's bag judging by the soft,\n flimsy things you'd never find in a man's—and I didn't know it was a\n bomb right away. I thought it was just a clock, one of those small,\n quiet alarms. I was going to pass it by and go on, but what held me\n was that something was taped to it. By the feel, I knew it must be\n electrician's tape. Interested and curious, I explored the clock more\n closely, found two wires. One went to a battery and the other to hard\n round cylinders taped together. The hairs stood up at the base of my\n neck when I suddenly realized what it was.\n\n\n The clock's balance wheel was rocking merrily. Quickly I went up past\n the train of gears to the alarm wheel. If this was anything like my own\n alarm clock, this one had something like ten minutes to go."
],
[
"I told her I didn't know how much more time there was, that I'd been\n thinking it over and that the only way out seemed to be to tell the\n airport policeman. After I explained it to her, the girl—she said her\n name was Julia Claremont—agreed to tell him she thought there was a\n bomb in her bag, that she had noticed a ticking and had become worried\n because she knew she hadn't packed a clock. It wasn't good, but it\n would have to do.\n\n\n \"We've got to get it deactivated,\" I said, watching the fat man pay for\n his coffee and leave. \"The sooner the better.\"\nI finished my coffee in one gulp and went to pay the bill with her.\n I asked her why she didn't claim the bag at the same time the other\n people had. She said she had called her sister and the phone was busy\n for a long while.",
"She didn't move. She just said, \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"For God's sake!\" I took the case. She offered no resistance. I put her\n bag and mine next to the booth. When I turned around she was standing\n there looking at me as if I had gone out of my mind. Her eyes were blue\n and brown-flecked, very pretty eyes, and my thought at the moment was,\n I'm glad the bomb didn't go off; these eyes wouldn't be looking at me\n or anything else right now if it had.\n\n\n \"I've got to talk to you. It's very important.\"\n\n\n The girl said, \"Why?\" I was beginning to think it was the only word she\n knew. At the same time I was wondering why anyone would want to kill\n someone so lovely.\n\n\n \"I'll explain in a moment. Please stand right here while I make a\n telephone call.\" I moved toward the phone booth, paused and said, \"And\n don't ask me why.\"",
"But he moved on down the steps, nodded at the redcap, and started\n across the street to the parking area. I could have called to him,\n \"Hey, officer, let me tell you about a bomb in a little red bag.\" But\n I didn't. I didn't because I caught a movement at the baggage claim\n counter out of the side of my eye.\n\n\n The attendant had picked up the bag and was walking with it up the ramp\n to the rear of the air terminal. Picking up my own suitcase, I went\n inside in time to see him enter through a side door and deposit the bag\n on the scales at the airline desk and say something to the clerk. The\n clerk nodded and moved the bag to the rear room.",
"It was forty minutes to Burbank and Lockheed Air Terminal.\n\n\n My mind was churning when I turned from the window to look around\n at the unconcerned passengers, the woman at my side asleep again. I\n thought: Which one of these.... No, none of them would know it was\n there. I glanced out the window again; clouds were still in the way.\n We'd be leaving the valley for the mountain range north of Los Angeles\n soon, if we hadn't left it already. No place to land the plane there.\n\n\n But of course that had been the plan!\n\n\n My heart was beating in jackhammer rhythm; my mouth was dry and my mind\n was numb. Tell somebody about the bomb before it's too late! No, they'd\n think I put it there. Besides, what good would it do? There would be\n panic and they'd never get the plane down in time—if they believed me.",
"The clerk took it, nodded, and in a moment brought out the overnight\n case and set it on the scales. The girl thanked him, picked it up,\n glanced at me indifferently, and then started for the entrance with it.\n\n\n \"Just a moment,\" I found myself saying, grabbing my bag and hurrying\n after her.\nAt her side and a little ahead of her, I said, \"Listen to me.\"\n\n\n She looked annoyed and increased her stride toward the door.\n\n\n \"It's a matter of life or death,\" I said. I wanted to wrest the bag\n from her and hurl it out through the doorway into the street, but I\n restrained myself.\n\n\n She stopped and stared. I noticed a short, fat man in a rumpled\n suitcoat and unpressed pants staring, too. Ignoring him, I said,\n \"Please put the bag down. Over there.\" I indicated a spot beside a\n telephone booth where it would be out of the way.",
"\"Must have been dreaming,\" I said as I rang for the stewardess. When\n she came I told her I'd take some of that coffee now. No, nothing else,\n just coffee. I didn't tell her how much I needed it. I sat there clammy\n with sweat until she returned. Coffee never tasted so good.\nAll right, so I had stopped the bomb's timer. My mind raced ahead to\n the landing. When they unloaded the luggage, the balance wheel would\n start again. I wouldn't be able to stay with it, keeping it still.\n I considered telling the authorities as soon as we landed, or maybe\n calling in ahead, but wouldn't that just bring suspicion, questions.\n Maybe I could convince them I could stop a clock—but not before the\n bomb exploded. And then what? My secret would be out and my life would\n be changed. I'd be a man not to be trusted, a prying man, a man\n literally with gimlet eyes.",
"The policeman was sympathetic and concerned. He said, \"We'd better get\n over to the office.\"\n\n\n But we never left the spot because an explosion some blocks distant\n shattered the air. Julia's hand grasped my arm. Hard.\n\n\n \"Jets,\" the redcap said, eying the sky.\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" the policeman said. \"Didn't sound much like a jet to\n me.\"\n\n\n We stood there. I could visualize the wreckage of an old gray coupe\n in the middle of a street, but I couldn't visualize the driver. That\n was all right. I didn't want to see him. I didn't know what Julia was\n thinking.\n\n\n She said, \"About those bags,\" and looked at me.\n\n\n The officer said, \"Yes, miss?\"",
"I never did find my suitcase because I found the bomb first.\nThe bomb was in a small bag—a woman's bag judging by the soft,\n flimsy things you'd never find in a man's—and I didn't know it was a\n bomb right away. I thought it was just a clock, one of those small,\n quiet alarms. I was going to pass it by and go on, but what held me\n was that something was taped to it. By the feel, I knew it must be\n electrician's tape. Interested and curious, I explored the clock more\n closely, found two wires. One went to a battery and the other to hard\n round cylinders taped together. The hairs stood up at the base of my\n neck when I suddenly realized what it was.\n\n\n The clock's balance wheel was rocking merrily. Quickly I went up past\n the train of gears to the alarm wheel. If this was anything like my own\n alarm clock, this one had something like ten minutes to go.",
"I could visualize the balance wheel once again rocking like crazy. How\n many minutes—or seconds—were left? I was sweating when I moved to the\n counter, and it wasn't because of the sunshine I'd been soaking in. I\n had to get as close to the bag as I could if I was going to stop the\n clock again.\n\n\n \"Can I help you?\" the clerk asked.\n\n\n \"No. I'm waiting for someone.\"\n\n\n I turned my back to him, put down my suitcase, leaned against the\n counter and reached out for the wheel. I found I could reach the\n device, but it was far away. When I tried to dampen it, the wheel\n escaped my grasp.\n\n\n \"Do you have my suitcase?\"\n\n\n I blinked my eyes open and looked around. The blonde in the plane stood\n there looking very fresh and bright and unconcerned. In her right hand\n she had a green baggage claim check.",
"It was impossible to tell from this distance just which bag contained\n the bomb; I could hardly identify my own scarred suitcase. The\n assortment of bags—a strange conglomeration of sizes and colors—was\n packed in some places six deep, and it rolled toward the gate where\n I was standing. I didn't know whether to stay or run, imagining the\n balance wheel now happily rocking again. The load went past me down a\n ramp to the front of the air terminal where the luggage was unloaded\n and placed in a long rack. I went with it.\n\n\n There was a flurry of ticket matching, hands grabbing for suitcases,\n and a general exodus on the part of my fellow passengers, too fast to\n determine who had got the one with the bomb. Now all that was left was\n the attendant and I had two bags—my own battered veteran of years, and\n a fine new red overnight case, small enough to be the one.",
"\"I—I don't care about mine. I didn't have much of anything in it.\"\n\n\n \"I feel the same way,\" I said. \"Would it be all right if we didn't\n bother to report it?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the policeman said, \"I can't\nmake\nyou report it.\"\n\n\n \"I'd rather not then,\" Julia said. She turned to me. \"I'd like some\n air. Can't we walk a little?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" I said.\n\n\n We started down the street, her arm in mine, as the air began to fill\n with the distant sounds of sirens.",
"\"Yeah.\" He was so bored I was tempted to tell him what was in it. But\n he was eying me with a \"well-why-don't-you-get-along?\" look.\n\n\n I said, \"What happens if nobody claims it?\"\n\n\n \"Take it inside. Why?\"\n\n\n He was getting too curious. \"Oh, I just wondered, that's all.\"\n\n\n I stepped on my cigarette and walked toward the air terminal entrance\n and put my suitcase on the stone steps there. A redcap came hurrying\n over.\n\n\n \"Cab?\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"Just waiting.\"\n\n\n Just waiting for somebody to pick up a bomb.\n\n\n I lit another cigarette and glanced now and then toward the baggage\n claim area. The red bag was still there. All sorts of theories ran\n through my head as to why it should still be there, and none satisfied\n me.",
"I should not have been there, that much I knew; I should be with a\n man named Amos Magaffey on Sixth Street at ten o'clock, discussing\n something very mundane, the matter of a printing order. But what could\n I do? If I left the airport, the attendant would eventually take the\n bag inside and there would be an explosion, and I wouldn't be able to\n live with myself.\n\n\n No. I had to stay to keep the balance wheel stationary until—until\n what?\n\n\n A man in tan gabardine, wearing a police cap and badge, walked out of\n the entrance to stand on the stone steps beside me while he put on a\n pair of dark glasses. A member of the airport police detail. I could\n tell him. I could take him down to the little red bag and explain the\n whole thing. Then it would be his baby and I would be off on my own\n business.",
"\"Not really,\" I said. I was tempted to tell the woman I was subject to\n fits, but I didn't.\n\n\n It was only a few minutes to landing, but they became the longest\n minutes of my life as time after time I stopped the rocking wheel when\n the plane dipped and bumped to a landing.\n\n\n Leaving the apron with the other passengers, I tried to walk as\n unconcernedly as they through the exit gate. I would have liked walking\n through the terminal and out the entrance and away, but I could not. I\n had my suitcase to get, for one thing. The damned bomb was the other.\n So I strolled out into the concourse again to look at the plane and\n watch the baggagemen at work, transferring the luggage to two airfield\n carts. They weren't as careful as I would have been.",
"She gave me a speculative look.\n\n\n I must not have seemed a complete idiot because she said, \"All right,\n but—\"\n\n\n I didn't listen for the rest. I went into the booth, closed the door,\n pretended to drop a coin and dial a number. But all the time I was in\n there, I was reaching out through the glass for the clock. At this\n range it wasn't difficult to stop the balance wheel.\n\n\n Just the same, when I came out I was wringing wet.\n\n\n \"Now will you please tell me what this is all about?\" she said stiffly.\n\n\n \"Gladly. Let me buy you a cup of coffee and I'll explain.\"\n\n\n She glanced at the bags. I told her they'd be all right. We followed\n the short, fat man into the coffee shop.",
"Over coffee I explained it all to her, how I had this extrasensory\n ability, how she was the first person I had ever revealed it to, and\n how I had discovered what was in her overnight bag.\n\n\n During the telling, her untouched coffee grew a skin, her face grew\n pale, her eyes grew less curious and more troubled. There were tears\n there when I finished. I asked her who put the bomb in her bag.\n\n\n \"Joe did,\" she said in a toneless voice, not looking at me any more but\n staring vacantly across the room. \"Joe put it there.\" Behind her eyes\n she was reliving some recent scene.\n\n\n \"Who is Joe?\"",
"I lit a cigarette, reached out. Inside were a woman's things and—a\n clock. The escapement was clicking vigorously.\n\n\n I didn't moan this time. I just closed my eyes, stretched toward\n and grabbed the balance wheel I was getting to know like my own. I\n entered into a union with it so strong that after I had reduced it to\n immobility, it was like waking when I opened my eyes.\nThe baggage claim attendant was staring at me. For only a moment I\n stared back. Then I quickly reached for my baggage check and presented\n it to him. His hand hovered over the handle of the little red bag and I\n was ready to yell at him. But then, matching numbers on the tags with\n his eyes, his hand grasped the handle of my own suitcase and pushed it\n toward me.\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" I said, taking it. I glanced ever so casually toward the\n remaining bag. \"One left over, eh?\"",
"I closed my eyes, forced my mind back to the luggage compartment, spent\n a frantic moment before I found the bag again. I had to stop that\n balance wheel, just as I stopped my alarm clock every morning. I tried\n to close everything off—the throb of engines, the rush of air, the\n woman sipping coffee noisily beside me—and I went into the clock and\n surrounded the seesawing wheel. When it went forward, I pulled it back;\n when it went back, I pulled it forward. I struggled with it, and it was\n like trying to work with greasy hands, and I was afraid I wasn't going\n to be able to stop it.\n\n\n Then, little by little, it started to slow its beat. But I could not\n afford to relax. I pushed and pulled and didn't dare release my hold\n until it came to a dead stop.\n\n\n \"Anything the matter?\"",
"\"My husband.\" I thought she was going to really bawl, but she got\n control again. \"This trip was his idea, my coming down here to visit my\n sister.\" Her smile was bleak. \"I see now why he wanted to put in those\n books. I'd finished packing and was in the bathroom. He said he'd put\n in some books we'd both finished reading—for my sister. That's when he\n must have put the—put it in there.\"\n\n\n I said gently, \"Why would he want to do a thing like that?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\" She shook her head. \"I just don't know.\" And she was\n close to bawling again. Then she recovered and said, \"I'm not sure I\n want to know.\" I admired her for saying it. Joe must have been crazy.\n\n\n \"It's all right now?\" she asked.\n\n\n I nodded. \"As long as we don't move it.\"",
"The dumpy man I'd seen was walking off; Julia's bag in his right hand,\n mine in his left. He seemed in no hurry.\n\n\n \"Hey!\" I shouted, starting toward him.\n\n\n The man turned, took one look at me, and started to run. He came\n abreast an old gray, mud-spattered coupe, ran around, opened the door\n and threw both bags into the rear seat as he got in.\n\n\n The car was a hundred feet away and gathering speed by the time I\n reached where it had been parked. I watched it for a moment, then\n walked back to the entranceway where Julia was standing with the\n redcap, who said, \"That man steal them suitcases?\"\n\n\n \"That he did,\" I said.\n\n\n Just then the airport policeman started across the street from the\n parking lot. Redcap said, \"Better tell him about it.\""
],
[
"It was impossible to tell from this distance just which bag contained\n the bomb; I could hardly identify my own scarred suitcase. The\n assortment of bags—a strange conglomeration of sizes and colors—was\n packed in some places six deep, and it rolled toward the gate where\n I was standing. I didn't know whether to stay or run, imagining the\n balance wheel now happily rocking again. The load went past me down a\n ramp to the front of the air terminal where the luggage was unloaded\n and placed in a long rack. I went with it.\n\n\n There was a flurry of ticket matching, hands grabbing for suitcases,\n and a general exodus on the part of my fellow passengers, too fast to\n determine who had got the one with the bomb. Now all that was left was\n the attendant and I had two bags—my own battered veteran of years, and\n a fine new red overnight case, small enough to be the one.",
"The clerk took it, nodded, and in a moment brought out the overnight\n case and set it on the scales. The girl thanked him, picked it up,\n glanced at me indifferently, and then started for the entrance with it.\n\n\n \"Just a moment,\" I found myself saying, grabbing my bag and hurrying\n after her.\nAt her side and a little ahead of her, I said, \"Listen to me.\"\n\n\n She looked annoyed and increased her stride toward the door.\n\n\n \"It's a matter of life or death,\" I said. I wanted to wrest the bag\n from her and hurl it out through the doorway into the street, but I\n restrained myself.\n\n\n She stopped and stared. I noticed a short, fat man in a rumpled\n suitcoat and unpressed pants staring, too. Ignoring him, I said,\n \"Please put the bag down. Over there.\" I indicated a spot beside a\n telephone booth where it would be out of the way.",
"The policeman was sympathetic and concerned. He said, \"We'd better get\n over to the office.\"\n\n\n But we never left the spot because an explosion some blocks distant\n shattered the air. Julia's hand grasped my arm. Hard.\n\n\n \"Jets,\" the redcap said, eying the sky.\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" the policeman said. \"Didn't sound much like a jet to\n me.\"\n\n\n We stood there. I could visualize the wreckage of an old gray coupe\n in the middle of a street, but I couldn't visualize the driver. That\n was all right. I didn't want to see him. I didn't know what Julia was\n thinking.\n\n\n She said, \"About those bags,\" and looked at me.\n\n\n The officer said, \"Yes, miss?\"",
"I told her I didn't know how much more time there was, that I'd been\n thinking it over and that the only way out seemed to be to tell the\n airport policeman. After I explained it to her, the girl—she said her\n name was Julia Claremont—agreed to tell him she thought there was a\n bomb in her bag, that she had noticed a ticking and had become worried\n because she knew she hadn't packed a clock. It wasn't good, but it\n would have to do.\n\n\n \"We've got to get it deactivated,\" I said, watching the fat man pay for\n his coffee and leave. \"The sooner the better.\"\nI finished my coffee in one gulp and went to pay the bill with her.\n I asked her why she didn't claim the bag at the same time the other\n people had. She said she had called her sister and the phone was busy\n for a long while.",
"\"Yeah.\" He was so bored I was tempted to tell him what was in it. But\n he was eying me with a \"well-why-don't-you-get-along?\" look.\n\n\n I said, \"What happens if nobody claims it?\"\n\n\n \"Take it inside. Why?\"\n\n\n He was getting too curious. \"Oh, I just wondered, that's all.\"\n\n\n I stepped on my cigarette and walked toward the air terminal entrance\n and put my suitcase on the stone steps there. A redcap came hurrying\n over.\n\n\n \"Cab?\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"Just waiting.\"\n\n\n Just waiting for somebody to pick up a bomb.\n\n\n I lit another cigarette and glanced now and then toward the baggage\n claim area. The red bag was still there. All sorts of theories ran\n through my head as to why it should still be there, and none satisfied\n me.",
"The dumpy man I'd seen was walking off; Julia's bag in his right hand,\n mine in his left. He seemed in no hurry.\n\n\n \"Hey!\" I shouted, starting toward him.\n\n\n The man turned, took one look at me, and started to run. He came\n abreast an old gray, mud-spattered coupe, ran around, opened the door\n and threw both bags into the rear seat as he got in.\n\n\n The car was a hundred feet away and gathering speed by the time I\n reached where it had been parked. I watched it for a moment, then\n walked back to the entranceway where Julia was standing with the\n redcap, who said, \"That man steal them suitcases?\"\n\n\n \"That he did,\" I said.\n\n\n Just then the airport policeman started across the street from the\n parking lot. Redcap said, \"Better tell him about it.\"",
"I never did find my suitcase because I found the bomb first.\nThe bomb was in a small bag—a woman's bag judging by the soft,\n flimsy things you'd never find in a man's—and I didn't know it was a\n bomb right away. I thought it was just a clock, one of those small,\n quiet alarms. I was going to pass it by and go on, but what held me\n was that something was taped to it. By the feel, I knew it must be\n electrician's tape. Interested and curious, I explored the clock more\n closely, found two wires. One went to a battery and the other to hard\n round cylinders taped together. The hairs stood up at the base of my\n neck when I suddenly realized what it was.\n\n\n The clock's balance wheel was rocking merrily. Quickly I went up past\n the train of gears to the alarm wheel. If this was anything like my own\n alarm clock, this one had something like ten minutes to go.",
"She didn't move. She just said, \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"For God's sake!\" I took the case. She offered no resistance. I put her\n bag and mine next to the booth. When I turned around she was standing\n there looking at me as if I had gone out of my mind. Her eyes were blue\n and brown-flecked, very pretty eyes, and my thought at the moment was,\n I'm glad the bomb didn't go off; these eyes wouldn't be looking at me\n or anything else right now if it had.\n\n\n \"I've got to talk to you. It's very important.\"\n\n\n The girl said, \"Why?\" I was beginning to think it was the only word she\n knew. At the same time I was wondering why anyone would want to kill\n someone so lovely.\n\n\n \"I'll explain in a moment. Please stand right here while I make a\n telephone call.\" I moved toward the phone booth, paused and said, \"And\n don't ask me why.\"",
"\"Not really,\" I said. I was tempted to tell the woman I was subject to\n fits, but I didn't.\n\n\n It was only a few minutes to landing, but they became the longest\n minutes of my life as time after time I stopped the rocking wheel when\n the plane dipped and bumped to a landing.\n\n\n Leaving the apron with the other passengers, I tried to walk as\n unconcernedly as they through the exit gate. I would have liked walking\n through the terminal and out the entrance and away, but I could not. I\n had my suitcase to get, for one thing. The damned bomb was the other.\n So I strolled out into the concourse again to look at the plane and\n watch the baggagemen at work, transferring the luggage to two airfield\n carts. They weren't as careful as I would have been.",
"I lit a cigarette, reached out. Inside were a woman's things and—a\n clock. The escapement was clicking vigorously.\n\n\n I didn't moan this time. I just closed my eyes, stretched toward\n and grabbed the balance wheel I was getting to know like my own. I\n entered into a union with it so strong that after I had reduced it to\n immobility, it was like waking when I opened my eyes.\nThe baggage claim attendant was staring at me. For only a moment I\n stared back. Then I quickly reached for my baggage check and presented\n it to him. His hand hovered over the handle of the little red bag and I\n was ready to yell at him. But then, matching numbers on the tags with\n his eyes, his hand grasped the handle of my own suitcase and pushed it\n toward me.\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" I said, taking it. I glanced ever so casually toward the\n remaining bag. \"One left over, eh?\"",
"I could visualize the balance wheel once again rocking like crazy. How\n many minutes—or seconds—were left? I was sweating when I moved to the\n counter, and it wasn't because of the sunshine I'd been soaking in. I\n had to get as close to the bag as I could if I was going to stop the\n clock again.\n\n\n \"Can I help you?\" the clerk asked.\n\n\n \"No. I'm waiting for someone.\"\n\n\n I turned my back to him, put down my suitcase, leaned against the\n counter and reached out for the wheel. I found I could reach the\n device, but it was far away. When I tried to dampen it, the wheel\n escaped my grasp.\n\n\n \"Do you have my suitcase?\"\n\n\n I blinked my eyes open and looked around. The blonde in the plane stood\n there looking very fresh and bright and unconcerned. In her right hand\n she had a green baggage claim check.",
"The woman beside me stirred, sat up suddenly and looked across me out\n the window. \"Where are we?\" she asked in a surprised voice. I told her\n we were probably a little north of Bakersfield. She said, \"Oh,\" glanced\n at her wristwatch and sank back again.\n\n\n Soon the stewardesses would bring coffee and doughnuts around, so I\n contented myself with looking at the clouds and trying to think about\n Amos Magaffey, who was purchasing agent for a Los Angeles amusement\n chain, and how I was going to convince him our printing prices were\n maybe a little higher but the quality and service were better. My mind\n wandered below where I was sitting, idly moving from one piece of\n luggage to another, looking for my beat-up suitcase. I went through\n slips and slippers, lingerie and laundry, a jig saw puzzle and a\n ukulele.",
"\"She was supposed to meet me, and when she wasn't here, I got worried.\n She said she isn't feeling well and asked me to take a cab.\" She smiled\n a little. It was a bright, cheery thing. I had the feeling it was all\n for me. \"That's where I was going when you caught up with me.\"\n\n\n It had become a very nice day. But the bottom dropped out of it again\n when we reached the lobby.\n\n\n The two bags weren't there.\n\n\n I ran to the entrance and nearly collided with the redcap.\n\n\n \"See anybody go out of here with a little red bag and an old battered\n suitcase?\"\n\n\n \"Bag? Suitcase?\" he mumbled. Then he became excited. \"Why, a man just\n stepped out of here—\" He turned to look down the street. \"That's him.\"",
"But he moved on down the steps, nodded at the redcap, and started\n across the street to the parking area. I could have called to him,\n \"Hey, officer, let me tell you about a bomb in a little red bag.\" But\n I didn't. I didn't because I caught a movement at the baggage claim\n counter out of the side of my eye.\n\n\n The attendant had picked up the bag and was walking with it up the ramp\n to the rear of the air terminal. Picking up my own suitcase, I went\n inside in time to see him enter through a side door and deposit the bag\n on the scales at the airline desk and say something to the clerk. The\n clerk nodded and moved the bag to the rear room.",
"\"I—I don't care about mine. I didn't have much of anything in it.\"\n\n\n \"I feel the same way,\" I said. \"Would it be all right if we didn't\n bother to report it?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the policeman said, \"I can't\nmake\nyou report it.\"\n\n\n \"I'd rather not then,\" Julia said. She turned to me. \"I'd like some\n air. Can't we walk a little?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" I said.\n\n\n We started down the street, her arm in mine, as the air began to fill\n with the distant sounds of sirens.",
"It was forty minutes to Burbank and Lockheed Air Terminal.\n\n\n My mind was churning when I turned from the window to look around\n at the unconcerned passengers, the woman at my side asleep again. I\n thought: Which one of these.... No, none of them would know it was\n there. I glanced out the window again; clouds were still in the way.\n We'd be leaving the valley for the mountain range north of Los Angeles\n soon, if we hadn't left it already. No place to land the plane there.\n\n\n But of course that had been the plan!\n\n\n My heart was beating in jackhammer rhythm; my mouth was dry and my mind\n was numb. Tell somebody about the bomb before it's too late! No, they'd\n think I put it there. Besides, what good would it do? There would be\n panic and they'd never get the plane down in time—if they believed me.",
"I had seen her in the concourse and at the gate, a shapely thing. Now\n she had crossed her legs and I was privileged to view a trim ankle and\n calf, and her profile as she stared moodily across the aisle and out a\n window where there was nothing to see.\n\n\n I slid my eyes past her to others. A crossword-puzzle worker, a\n togetherness-type-magazine reader.\n\n\n Inventory completed, I went back to looking at the clouds, knowing I\n should be thinking about the printing order I was going to Los Angeles\n for, and not wanting to.\n\n\n So I started going through the purse of the woman next to me. Perhaps\n that sounds bad. It wasn't. I'd been doing it for years and nobody ever\n complained.",
"I closed my eyes, forced my mind back to the luggage compartment, spent\n a frantic moment before I found the bag again. I had to stop that\n balance wheel, just as I stopped my alarm clock every morning. I tried\n to close everything off—the throb of engines, the rush of air, the\n woman sipping coffee noisily beside me—and I went into the clock and\n surrounded the seesawing wheel. When it went forward, I pulled it back;\n when it went back, I pulled it forward. I struggled with it, and it was\n like trying to work with greasy hands, and I was afraid I wasn't going\n to be able to stop it.\n\n\n Then, little by little, it started to slow its beat. But I could not\n afford to relax. I pushed and pulled and didn't dare release my hold\n until it came to a dead stop.\n\n\n \"Anything the matter?\"",
"I should not have been there, that much I knew; I should be with a\n man named Amos Magaffey on Sixth Street at ten o'clock, discussing\n something very mundane, the matter of a printing order. But what could\n I do? If I left the airport, the attendant would eventually take the\n bag inside and there would be an explosion, and I wouldn't be able to\n live with myself.\n\n\n No. I had to stay to keep the balance wheel stationary until—until\n what?\n\n\n A man in tan gabardine, wearing a police cap and badge, walked out of\n the entrance to stand on the stone steps beside me while he put on a\n pair of dark glasses. A member of the airport police detail. I could\n tell him. I could take him down to the little red bag and explain the\n whole thing. Then it would be his baby and I would be off on my own\n business.",
"\"Must have been dreaming,\" I said as I rang for the stewardess. When\n she came I told her I'd take some of that coffee now. No, nothing else,\n just coffee. I didn't tell her how much I needed it. I sat there clammy\n with sweat until she returned. Coffee never tasted so good.\nAll right, so I had stopped the bomb's timer. My mind raced ahead to\n the landing. When they unloaded the luggage, the balance wheel would\n start again. I wouldn't be able to stay with it, keeping it still.\n I considered telling the authorities as soon as we landed, or maybe\n calling in ahead, but wouldn't that just bring suspicion, questions.\n Maybe I could convince them I could stop a clock—but not before the\n bomb exploded. And then what? My secret would be out and my life would\n be changed. I'd be a man not to be trusted, a prying man, a man\n literally with gimlet eyes."
],
[
"But I've learned to move things. Ever so little. A piece of paper. A\n feather. Once I stopped one of those little glass-enclosed light or\n heat-powered devices with vanes you see now and then in a jeweler's\n window. And I can stop clocks.\n\n\n Take this morning, for example. I had set my alarm for five-thirty\n because I had to catch the seven o'clock plane at San Francisco\n International Airport. This being earlier than I usually get up, it\n seems all I did during the night was feel my way past the escapement\n and balance wheel to see where the notch for the alarm was. The last\n time I did it there was just the merest fraction of an inch between the\n pawl and the notch. So I sighed and moved to the balance wheel and its\n delicate ribbon of spiraling steel. I hung onto the wheel, exerting\n influence to decrease the restoring torque.",
"I lit a cigarette, reached out. Inside were a woman's things and—a\n clock. The escapement was clicking vigorously.\n\n\n I didn't moan this time. I just closed my eyes, stretched toward\n and grabbed the balance wheel I was getting to know like my own. I\n entered into a union with it so strong that after I had reduced it to\n immobility, it was like waking when I opened my eyes.\nThe baggage claim attendant was staring at me. For only a moment I\n stared back. Then I quickly reached for my baggage check and presented\n it to him. His hand hovered over the handle of the little red bag and I\n was ready to yell at him. But then, matching numbers on the tags with\n his eyes, his hand grasped the handle of my own suitcase and pushed it\n toward me.\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" I said, taking it. I glanced ever so casually toward the\n remaining bag. \"One left over, eh?\"",
"I should not have been there, that much I knew; I should be with a\n man named Amos Magaffey on Sixth Street at ten o'clock, discussing\n something very mundane, the matter of a printing order. But what could\n I do? If I left the airport, the attendant would eventually take the\n bag inside and there would be an explosion, and I wouldn't be able to\n live with myself.\n\n\n No. I had to stay to keep the balance wheel stationary until—until\n what?\n\n\n A man in tan gabardine, wearing a police cap and badge, walked out of\n the entrance to stand on the stone steps beside me while he put on a\n pair of dark glasses. A member of the airport police detail. I could\n tell him. I could take him down to the little red bag and explain the\n whole thing. Then it would be his baby and I would be off on my own\n business.",
"I closed my eyes, forced my mind back to the luggage compartment, spent\n a frantic moment before I found the bag again. I had to stop that\n balance wheel, just as I stopped my alarm clock every morning. I tried\n to close everything off—the throb of engines, the rush of air, the\n woman sipping coffee noisily beside me—and I went into the clock and\n surrounded the seesawing wheel. When it went forward, I pulled it back;\n when it went back, I pulled it forward. I struggled with it, and it was\n like trying to work with greasy hands, and I was afraid I wasn't going\n to be able to stop it.\n\n\n Then, little by little, it started to slow its beat. But I could not\n afford to relax. I pushed and pulled and didn't dare release my hold\n until it came to a dead stop.\n\n\n \"Anything the matter?\"",
"She gave me a speculative look.\n\n\n I must not have seemed a complete idiot because she said, \"All right,\n but—\"\n\n\n I didn't listen for the rest. I went into the booth, closed the door,\n pretended to drop a coin and dial a number. But all the time I was in\n there, I was reaching out through the glass for the clock. At this\n range it wasn't difficult to stop the balance wheel.\n\n\n Just the same, when I came out I was wringing wet.\n\n\n \"Now will you please tell me what this is all about?\" she said stiffly.\n\n\n \"Gladly. Let me buy you a cup of coffee and I'll explain.\"\n\n\n She glanced at the bags. I told her they'd be all right. We followed\n the short, fat man into the coffee shop.",
"The wheel slowed down until there was no more ticking. It took quite\n a bit of effort, as it always does, but I did it, as I usually do. I\n can't stand the alarm.\n\n\n When I first learned to do this, I thought I had it made. I even went\n to Las Vegas to try my hand, so to speak, with the ratchets and pawls\n and cams and springs on the slot machines. But there's nothing delicate\n about a slot machine, and the spring tensions are too strong. I dropped\n quite a lot of nickels before I finally gave up.\n\n\n So I'm stuck with a talent I've found little real use for. Except that\n it amuses me. Sometimes. Not like this time on the plane.",
"I could visualize the balance wheel once again rocking like crazy. How\n many minutes—or seconds—were left? I was sweating when I moved to the\n counter, and it wasn't because of the sunshine I'd been soaking in. I\n had to get as close to the bag as I could if I was going to stop the\n clock again.\n\n\n \"Can I help you?\" the clerk asked.\n\n\n \"No. I'm waiting for someone.\"\n\n\n I turned my back to him, put down my suitcase, leaned against the\n counter and reached out for the wheel. I found I could reach the\n device, but it was far away. When I tried to dampen it, the wheel\n escaped my grasp.\n\n\n \"Do you have my suitcase?\"\n\n\n I blinked my eyes open and looked around. The blonde in the plane stood\n there looking very fresh and bright and unconcerned. In her right hand\n she had a green baggage claim check.",
"It started when I was a kid, this business of being able to explore\n the insides of things like purses and sealed boxes and locked drawers\n and—well, human beings. But human beings aren't worth the trouble.\n It's like swimming through spaghetti. And I've got to stay away from\n electric wires. They hurt. Now don't ask me\nhow\nthey hurt.\n\n\n Maybe you think it's fun. For the most part, it really isn't. I always\n knew what was in Christmas presents before I unwrapped them, and\n therefore Christmas was always spoiled for me as a kid. I can't feel\n the color of anything, just its consistency. An apple senses about the\n same as a potato, except for the core and the stem. I can't even tell\n if there's writing on a piece of paper. So you see it isn't much. Just\n the feel of shapes, the hardnesses and softnesses. But I've learned to\n become pretty good at guessing.",
"The clerk took it, nodded, and in a moment brought out the overnight\n case and set it on the scales. The girl thanked him, picked it up,\n glanced at me indifferently, and then started for the entrance with it.\n\n\n \"Just a moment,\" I found myself saying, grabbing my bag and hurrying\n after her.\nAt her side and a little ahead of her, I said, \"Listen to me.\"\n\n\n She looked annoyed and increased her stride toward the door.\n\n\n \"It's a matter of life or death,\" I said. I wanted to wrest the bag\n from her and hurl it out through the doorway into the street, but I\n restrained myself.\n\n\n She stopped and stared. I noticed a short, fat man in a rumpled\n suitcoat and unpressed pants staring, too. Ignoring him, I said,\n \"Please put the bag down. Over there.\" I indicated a spot beside a\n telephone booth where it would be out of the way.",
"\"Must have been dreaming,\" I said as I rang for the stewardess. When\n she came I told her I'd take some of that coffee now. No, nothing else,\n just coffee. I didn't tell her how much I needed it. I sat there clammy\n with sweat until she returned. Coffee never tasted so good.\nAll right, so I had stopped the bomb's timer. My mind raced ahead to\n the landing. When they unloaded the luggage, the balance wheel would\n start again. I wouldn't be able to stay with it, keeping it still.\n I considered telling the authorities as soon as we landed, or maybe\n calling in ahead, but wouldn't that just bring suspicion, questions.\n Maybe I could convince them I could stop a clock—but not before the\n bomb exploded. And then what? My secret would be out and my life would\n be changed. I'd be a man not to be trusted, a prying man, a man\n literally with gimlet eyes.",
"I had seen her in the concourse and at the gate, a shapely thing. Now\n she had crossed her legs and I was privileged to view a trim ankle and\n calf, and her profile as she stared moodily across the aisle and out a\n window where there was nothing to see.\n\n\n I slid my eyes past her to others. A crossword-puzzle worker, a\n togetherness-type-magazine reader.\n\n\n Inventory completed, I went back to looking at the clouds, knowing I\n should be thinking about the printing order I was going to Los Angeles\n for, and not wanting to.\n\n\n So I started going through the purse of the woman next to me. Perhaps\n that sounds bad. It wasn't. I'd been doing it for years and nobody ever\n complained.",
"Class had hardly resumed when she started looking around the desk for\n her favorite mechanical pencil, asking if any of us had seen it, and\n looking straight at me. I didn't want her to think I had taken it while\n she was out of the room, so I probed the contents of her purse, which\n she always kept in the upper right drawer of her desk.\n\n\n \"It's in your purse,\" I blurted out.\n\n\n I was sent home with a stinging note.\n\n\n Since then I've kept quiet. At one time I assumed everybody was able\n to sense. I've known better for years. Still, I wonder how many other\n people are as close-mouthed about their special gift as I am about mine.\n\n\n I used to think that some day I'd make a lot of money out of it, but\n how? I can't read thoughts. I can't even be sure what some of the\n things I sense in probing really are.",
"Mountain crags jutted through the clouds. We were in the range north of\n the city. Here and there were clear spots and I could see roads below,\n but there were also clouds far above us. It was very beautiful, but it\n was also very bumpy, and we started to slip and slide.\n\n\n To my horror I found that the balance wheel was rocking again. Closing\n my eyes and gritting my teeth, I forced my senses to the wheel, tugging\n and pulling and shoving and pushing until it finally stopped.\n\n\n A jab in the shoulder. I jumped, startled.\n\n\n \"Your cup,\" my seat partner said, pointing.\n\n\n I looked down at the coffee cup I had crushed in my hands. Then I\n looked up into the eyes of the stewardess. I handed it to her. She took\n it without a word and went away.\n\n\n \"Were you really asleep that time?\"",
"Nuts to wild talents! Mine was no\n \nsatisfaction, never earned me a penny—and\n \nnow it had me fighting for my life in\n...\nTHE LITTLE RED BAG\nBy JERRY SOHL\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, January 1960.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nAbout an hour out of San Francisco on the flight to Los Angeles, I made\n the discovery. I had finished reading the\nChronicle\n, folded and put\n it beside me, turned and looked out the window, expecting to see the\n San Joaquin Valley but finding only a sea of clouds instead. So I\n returned my attention to the inside of the plane, to the overstuffed\n gray-haired woman asleep beside me, to the backs of heads in seats\n before me, across the aisle to other heads, and down to the blonde.",
"The woman beside me stirred, sat up suddenly and looked across me out\n the window. \"Where are we?\" she asked in a surprised voice. I told her\n we were probably a little north of Bakersfield. She said, \"Oh,\" glanced\n at her wristwatch and sank back again.\n\n\n Soon the stewardesses would bring coffee and doughnuts around, so I\n contented myself with looking at the clouds and trying to think about\n Amos Magaffey, who was purchasing agent for a Los Angeles amusement\n chain, and how I was going to convince him our printing prices were\n maybe a little higher but the quality and service were better. My mind\n wandered below where I was sitting, idly moving from one piece of\n luggage to another, looking for my beat-up suitcase. I went through\n slips and slippers, lingerie and laundry, a jig saw puzzle and a\n ukulele.",
"Over coffee I explained it all to her, how I had this extrasensory\n ability, how she was the first person I had ever revealed it to, and\n how I had discovered what was in her overnight bag.\n\n\n During the telling, her untouched coffee grew a skin, her face grew\n pale, her eyes grew less curious and more troubled. There were tears\n there when I finished. I asked her who put the bomb in her bag.\n\n\n \"Joe did,\" she said in a toneless voice, not looking at me any more but\n staring vacantly across the room. \"Joe put it there.\" Behind her eyes\n she was reliving some recent scene.\n\n\n \"Who is Joe?\"",
"\"Yeah.\" He was so bored I was tempted to tell him what was in it. But\n he was eying me with a \"well-why-don't-you-get-along?\" look.\n\n\n I said, \"What happens if nobody claims it?\"\n\n\n \"Take it inside. Why?\"\n\n\n He was getting too curious. \"Oh, I just wondered, that's all.\"\n\n\n I stepped on my cigarette and walked toward the air terminal entrance\n and put my suitcase on the stone steps there. A redcap came hurrying\n over.\n\n\n \"Cab?\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"Just waiting.\"\n\n\n Just waiting for somebody to pick up a bomb.\n\n\n I lit another cigarette and glanced now and then toward the baggage\n claim area. The red bag was still there. All sorts of theories ran\n through my head as to why it should still be there, and none satisfied\n me.",
"But he moved on down the steps, nodded at the redcap, and started\n across the street to the parking area. I could have called to him,\n \"Hey, officer, let me tell you about a bomb in a little red bag.\" But\n I didn't. I didn't because I caught a movement at the baggage claim\n counter out of the side of my eye.\n\n\n The attendant had picked up the bag and was walking with it up the ramp\n to the rear of the air terminal. Picking up my own suitcase, I went\n inside in time to see him enter through a side door and deposit the bag\n on the scales at the airline desk and say something to the clerk. The\n clerk nodded and moved the bag to the rear room.",
"It was impossible to tell from this distance just which bag contained\n the bomb; I could hardly identify my own scarred suitcase. The\n assortment of bags—a strange conglomeration of sizes and colors—was\n packed in some places six deep, and it rolled toward the gate where\n I was standing. I didn't know whether to stay or run, imagining the\n balance wheel now happily rocking again. The load went past me down a\n ramp to the front of the air terminal where the luggage was unloaded\n and placed in a long rack. I went with it.\n\n\n There was a flurry of ticket matching, hands grabbing for suitcases,\n and a general exodus on the part of my fellow passengers, too fast to\n determine who had got the one with the bomb. Now all that was left was\n the attendant and I had two bags—my own battered veteran of years, and\n a fine new red overnight case, small enough to be the one.",
"\"I—I don't care about mine. I didn't have much of anything in it.\"\n\n\n \"I feel the same way,\" I said. \"Would it be all right if we didn't\n bother to report it?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the policeman said, \"I can't\nmake\nyou report it.\"\n\n\n \"I'd rather not then,\" Julia said. She turned to me. \"I'd like some\n air. Can't we walk a little?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" I said.\n\n\n We started down the street, her arm in mine, as the air began to fill\n with the distant sounds of sirens."
],
[
"I told her I didn't know how much more time there was, that I'd been\n thinking it over and that the only way out seemed to be to tell the\n airport policeman. After I explained it to her, the girl—she said her\n name was Julia Claremont—agreed to tell him she thought there was a\n bomb in her bag, that she had noticed a ticking and had become worried\n because she knew she hadn't packed a clock. It wasn't good, but it\n would have to do.\n\n\n \"We've got to get it deactivated,\" I said, watching the fat man pay for\n his coffee and leave. \"The sooner the better.\"\nI finished my coffee in one gulp and went to pay the bill with her.\n I asked her why she didn't claim the bag at the same time the other\n people had. She said she had called her sister and the phone was busy\n for a long while.",
"I never did find my suitcase because I found the bomb first.\nThe bomb was in a small bag—a woman's bag judging by the soft,\n flimsy things you'd never find in a man's—and I didn't know it was a\n bomb right away. I thought it was just a clock, one of those small,\n quiet alarms. I was going to pass it by and go on, but what held me\n was that something was taped to it. By the feel, I knew it must be\n electrician's tape. Interested and curious, I explored the clock more\n closely, found two wires. One went to a battery and the other to hard\n round cylinders taped together. The hairs stood up at the base of my\n neck when I suddenly realized what it was.\n\n\n The clock's balance wheel was rocking merrily. Quickly I went up past\n the train of gears to the alarm wheel. If this was anything like my own\n alarm clock, this one had something like ten minutes to go.",
"It was impossible to tell from this distance just which bag contained\n the bomb; I could hardly identify my own scarred suitcase. The\n assortment of bags—a strange conglomeration of sizes and colors—was\n packed in some places six deep, and it rolled toward the gate where\n I was standing. I didn't know whether to stay or run, imagining the\n balance wheel now happily rocking again. The load went past me down a\n ramp to the front of the air terminal where the luggage was unloaded\n and placed in a long rack. I went with it.\n\n\n There was a flurry of ticket matching, hands grabbing for suitcases,\n and a general exodus on the part of my fellow passengers, too fast to\n determine who had got the one with the bomb. Now all that was left was\n the attendant and I had two bags—my own battered veteran of years, and\n a fine new red overnight case, small enough to be the one.",
"But he moved on down the steps, nodded at the redcap, and started\n across the street to the parking area. I could have called to him,\n \"Hey, officer, let me tell you about a bomb in a little red bag.\" But\n I didn't. I didn't because I caught a movement at the baggage claim\n counter out of the side of my eye.\n\n\n The attendant had picked up the bag and was walking with it up the ramp\n to the rear of the air terminal. Picking up my own suitcase, I went\n inside in time to see him enter through a side door and deposit the bag\n on the scales at the airline desk and say something to the clerk. The\n clerk nodded and moved the bag to the rear room.",
"\"Yeah.\" He was so bored I was tempted to tell him what was in it. But\n he was eying me with a \"well-why-don't-you-get-along?\" look.\n\n\n I said, \"What happens if nobody claims it?\"\n\n\n \"Take it inside. Why?\"\n\n\n He was getting too curious. \"Oh, I just wondered, that's all.\"\n\n\n I stepped on my cigarette and walked toward the air terminal entrance\n and put my suitcase on the stone steps there. A redcap came hurrying\n over.\n\n\n \"Cab?\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"Just waiting.\"\n\n\n Just waiting for somebody to pick up a bomb.\n\n\n I lit another cigarette and glanced now and then toward the baggage\n claim area. The red bag was still there. All sorts of theories ran\n through my head as to why it should still be there, and none satisfied\n me.",
"The policeman was sympathetic and concerned. He said, \"We'd better get\n over to the office.\"\n\n\n But we never left the spot because an explosion some blocks distant\n shattered the air. Julia's hand grasped my arm. Hard.\n\n\n \"Jets,\" the redcap said, eying the sky.\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" the policeman said. \"Didn't sound much like a jet to\n me.\"\n\n\n We stood there. I could visualize the wreckage of an old gray coupe\n in the middle of a street, but I couldn't visualize the driver. That\n was all right. I didn't want to see him. I didn't know what Julia was\n thinking.\n\n\n She said, \"About those bags,\" and looked at me.\n\n\n The officer said, \"Yes, miss?\"",
"\"Not really,\" I said. I was tempted to tell the woman I was subject to\n fits, but I didn't.\n\n\n It was only a few minutes to landing, but they became the longest\n minutes of my life as time after time I stopped the rocking wheel when\n the plane dipped and bumped to a landing.\n\n\n Leaving the apron with the other passengers, I tried to walk as\n unconcernedly as they through the exit gate. I would have liked walking\n through the terminal and out the entrance and away, but I could not. I\n had my suitcase to get, for one thing. The damned bomb was the other.\n So I strolled out into the concourse again to look at the plane and\n watch the baggagemen at work, transferring the luggage to two airfield\n carts. They weren't as careful as I would have been.",
"She didn't move. She just said, \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"For God's sake!\" I took the case. She offered no resistance. I put her\n bag and mine next to the booth. When I turned around she was standing\n there looking at me as if I had gone out of my mind. Her eyes were blue\n and brown-flecked, very pretty eyes, and my thought at the moment was,\n I'm glad the bomb didn't go off; these eyes wouldn't be looking at me\n or anything else right now if it had.\n\n\n \"I've got to talk to you. It's very important.\"\n\n\n The girl said, \"Why?\" I was beginning to think it was the only word she\n knew. At the same time I was wondering why anyone would want to kill\n someone so lovely.\n\n\n \"I'll explain in a moment. Please stand right here while I make a\n telephone call.\" I moved toward the phone booth, paused and said, \"And\n don't ask me why.\"",
"It was forty minutes to Burbank and Lockheed Air Terminal.\n\n\n My mind was churning when I turned from the window to look around\n at the unconcerned passengers, the woman at my side asleep again. I\n thought: Which one of these.... No, none of them would know it was\n there. I glanced out the window again; clouds were still in the way.\n We'd be leaving the valley for the mountain range north of Los Angeles\n soon, if we hadn't left it already. No place to land the plane there.\n\n\n But of course that had been the plan!\n\n\n My heart was beating in jackhammer rhythm; my mouth was dry and my mind\n was numb. Tell somebody about the bomb before it's too late! No, they'd\n think I put it there. Besides, what good would it do? There would be\n panic and they'd never get the plane down in time—if they believed me.",
"The clerk took it, nodded, and in a moment brought out the overnight\n case and set it on the scales. The girl thanked him, picked it up,\n glanced at me indifferently, and then started for the entrance with it.\n\n\n \"Just a moment,\" I found myself saying, grabbing my bag and hurrying\n after her.\nAt her side and a little ahead of her, I said, \"Listen to me.\"\n\n\n She looked annoyed and increased her stride toward the door.\n\n\n \"It's a matter of life or death,\" I said. I wanted to wrest the bag\n from her and hurl it out through the doorway into the street, but I\n restrained myself.\n\n\n She stopped and stared. I noticed a short, fat man in a rumpled\n suitcoat and unpressed pants staring, too. Ignoring him, I said,\n \"Please put the bag down. Over there.\" I indicated a spot beside a\n telephone booth where it would be out of the way.",
"I could visualize the balance wheel once again rocking like crazy. How\n many minutes—or seconds—were left? I was sweating when I moved to the\n counter, and it wasn't because of the sunshine I'd been soaking in. I\n had to get as close to the bag as I could if I was going to stop the\n clock again.\n\n\n \"Can I help you?\" the clerk asked.\n\n\n \"No. I'm waiting for someone.\"\n\n\n I turned my back to him, put down my suitcase, leaned against the\n counter and reached out for the wheel. I found I could reach the\n device, but it was far away. When I tried to dampen it, the wheel\n escaped my grasp.\n\n\n \"Do you have my suitcase?\"\n\n\n I blinked my eyes open and looked around. The blonde in the plane stood\n there looking very fresh and bright and unconcerned. In her right hand\n she had a green baggage claim check.",
"\"My husband.\" I thought she was going to really bawl, but she got\n control again. \"This trip was his idea, my coming down here to visit my\n sister.\" Her smile was bleak. \"I see now why he wanted to put in those\n books. I'd finished packing and was in the bathroom. He said he'd put\n in some books we'd both finished reading—for my sister. That's when he\n must have put the—put it in there.\"\n\n\n I said gently, \"Why would he want to do a thing like that?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\" She shook her head. \"I just don't know.\" And she was\n close to bawling again. Then she recovered and said, \"I'm not sure I\n want to know.\" I admired her for saying it. Joe must have been crazy.\n\n\n \"It's all right now?\" she asked.\n\n\n I nodded. \"As long as we don't move it.\"",
"Over coffee I explained it all to her, how I had this extrasensory\n ability, how she was the first person I had ever revealed it to, and\n how I had discovered what was in her overnight bag.\n\n\n During the telling, her untouched coffee grew a skin, her face grew\n pale, her eyes grew less curious and more troubled. There were tears\n there when I finished. I asked her who put the bomb in her bag.\n\n\n \"Joe did,\" she said in a toneless voice, not looking at me any more but\n staring vacantly across the room. \"Joe put it there.\" Behind her eyes\n she was reliving some recent scene.\n\n\n \"Who is Joe?\"",
"The dumpy man I'd seen was walking off; Julia's bag in his right hand,\n mine in his left. He seemed in no hurry.\n\n\n \"Hey!\" I shouted, starting toward him.\n\n\n The man turned, took one look at me, and started to run. He came\n abreast an old gray, mud-spattered coupe, ran around, opened the door\n and threw both bags into the rear seat as he got in.\n\n\n The car was a hundred feet away and gathering speed by the time I\n reached where it had been parked. I watched it for a moment, then\n walked back to the entranceway where Julia was standing with the\n redcap, who said, \"That man steal them suitcases?\"\n\n\n \"That he did,\" I said.\n\n\n Just then the airport policeman started across the street from the\n parking lot. Redcap said, \"Better tell him about it.\"",
"I should not have been there, that much I knew; I should be with a\n man named Amos Magaffey on Sixth Street at ten o'clock, discussing\n something very mundane, the matter of a printing order. But what could\n I do? If I left the airport, the attendant would eventually take the\n bag inside and there would be an explosion, and I wouldn't be able to\n live with myself.\n\n\n No. I had to stay to keep the balance wheel stationary until—until\n what?\n\n\n A man in tan gabardine, wearing a police cap and badge, walked out of\n the entrance to stand on the stone steps beside me while he put on a\n pair of dark glasses. A member of the airport police detail. I could\n tell him. I could take him down to the little red bag and explain the\n whole thing. Then it would be his baby and I would be off on my own\n business.",
"\"Must have been dreaming,\" I said as I rang for the stewardess. When\n she came I told her I'd take some of that coffee now. No, nothing else,\n just coffee. I didn't tell her how much I needed it. I sat there clammy\n with sweat until she returned. Coffee never tasted so good.\nAll right, so I had stopped the bomb's timer. My mind raced ahead to\n the landing. When they unloaded the luggage, the balance wheel would\n start again. I wouldn't be able to stay with it, keeping it still.\n I considered telling the authorities as soon as we landed, or maybe\n calling in ahead, but wouldn't that just bring suspicion, questions.\n Maybe I could convince them I could stop a clock—but not before the\n bomb exploded. And then what? My secret would be out and my life would\n be changed. I'd be a man not to be trusted, a prying man, a man\n literally with gimlet eyes.",
"\"I—I don't care about mine. I didn't have much of anything in it.\"\n\n\n \"I feel the same way,\" I said. \"Would it be all right if we didn't\n bother to report it?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the policeman said, \"I can't\nmake\nyou report it.\"\n\n\n \"I'd rather not then,\" Julia said. She turned to me. \"I'd like some\n air. Can't we walk a little?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" I said.\n\n\n We started down the street, her arm in mine, as the air began to fill\n with the distant sounds of sirens.",
"I lit a cigarette, reached out. Inside were a woman's things and—a\n clock. The escapement was clicking vigorously.\n\n\n I didn't moan this time. I just closed my eyes, stretched toward\n and grabbed the balance wheel I was getting to know like my own. I\n entered into a union with it so strong that after I had reduced it to\n immobility, it was like waking when I opened my eyes.\nThe baggage claim attendant was staring at me. For only a moment I\n stared back. Then I quickly reached for my baggage check and presented\n it to him. His hand hovered over the handle of the little red bag and I\n was ready to yell at him. But then, matching numbers on the tags with\n his eyes, his hand grasped the handle of my own suitcase and pushed it\n toward me.\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" I said, taking it. I glanced ever so casually toward the\n remaining bag. \"One left over, eh?\"",
"\"She was supposed to meet me, and when she wasn't here, I got worried.\n She said she isn't feeling well and asked me to take a cab.\" She smiled\n a little. It was a bright, cheery thing. I had the feeling it was all\n for me. \"That's where I was going when you caught up with me.\"\n\n\n It had become a very nice day. But the bottom dropped out of it again\n when we reached the lobby.\n\n\n The two bags weren't there.\n\n\n I ran to the entrance and nearly collided with the redcap.\n\n\n \"See anybody go out of here with a little red bag and an old battered\n suitcase?\"\n\n\n \"Bag? Suitcase?\" he mumbled. Then he became excited. \"Why, a man just\n stepped out of here—\" He turned to look down the street. \"That's him.\"",
"She gave me a speculative look.\n\n\n I must not have seemed a complete idiot because she said, \"All right,\n but—\"\n\n\n I didn't listen for the rest. I went into the booth, closed the door,\n pretended to drop a coin and dial a number. But all the time I was in\n there, I was reaching out through the glass for the clock. At this\n range it wasn't difficult to stop the balance wheel.\n\n\n Just the same, when I came out I was wringing wet.\n\n\n \"Now will you please tell me what this is all about?\" she said stiffly.\n\n\n \"Gladly. Let me buy you a cup of coffee and I'll explain.\"\n\n\n She glanced at the bags. I told her they'd be all right. We followed\n the short, fat man into the coffee shop."
],
[
"The dumpy man I'd seen was walking off; Julia's bag in his right hand,\n mine in his left. He seemed in no hurry.\n\n\n \"Hey!\" I shouted, starting toward him.\n\n\n The man turned, took one look at me, and started to run. He came\n abreast an old gray, mud-spattered coupe, ran around, opened the door\n and threw both bags into the rear seat as he got in.\n\n\n The car was a hundred feet away and gathering speed by the time I\n reached where it had been parked. I watched it for a moment, then\n walked back to the entranceway where Julia was standing with the\n redcap, who said, \"That man steal them suitcases?\"\n\n\n \"That he did,\" I said.\n\n\n Just then the airport policeman started across the street from the\n parking lot. Redcap said, \"Better tell him about it.\"",
"\"She was supposed to meet me, and when she wasn't here, I got worried.\n She said she isn't feeling well and asked me to take a cab.\" She smiled\n a little. It was a bright, cheery thing. I had the feeling it was all\n for me. \"That's where I was going when you caught up with me.\"\n\n\n It had become a very nice day. But the bottom dropped out of it again\n when we reached the lobby.\n\n\n The two bags weren't there.\n\n\n I ran to the entrance and nearly collided with the redcap.\n\n\n \"See anybody go out of here with a little red bag and an old battered\n suitcase?\"\n\n\n \"Bag? Suitcase?\" he mumbled. Then he became excited. \"Why, a man just\n stepped out of here—\" He turned to look down the street. \"That's him.\"",
"The clerk took it, nodded, and in a moment brought out the overnight\n case and set it on the scales. The girl thanked him, picked it up,\n glanced at me indifferently, and then started for the entrance with it.\n\n\n \"Just a moment,\" I found myself saying, grabbing my bag and hurrying\n after her.\nAt her side and a little ahead of her, I said, \"Listen to me.\"\n\n\n She looked annoyed and increased her stride toward the door.\n\n\n \"It's a matter of life or death,\" I said. I wanted to wrest the bag\n from her and hurl it out through the doorway into the street, but I\n restrained myself.\n\n\n She stopped and stared. I noticed a short, fat man in a rumpled\n suitcoat and unpressed pants staring, too. Ignoring him, I said,\n \"Please put the bag down. Over there.\" I indicated a spot beside a\n telephone booth where it would be out of the way.",
"\"Yeah.\" He was so bored I was tempted to tell him what was in it. But\n he was eying me with a \"well-why-don't-you-get-along?\" look.\n\n\n I said, \"What happens if nobody claims it?\"\n\n\n \"Take it inside. Why?\"\n\n\n He was getting too curious. \"Oh, I just wondered, that's all.\"\n\n\n I stepped on my cigarette and walked toward the air terminal entrance\n and put my suitcase on the stone steps there. A redcap came hurrying\n over.\n\n\n \"Cab?\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"Just waiting.\"\n\n\n Just waiting for somebody to pick up a bomb.\n\n\n I lit another cigarette and glanced now and then toward the baggage\n claim area. The red bag was still there. All sorts of theories ran\n through my head as to why it should still be there, and none satisfied\n me.",
"But he moved on down the steps, nodded at the redcap, and started\n across the street to the parking area. I could have called to him,\n \"Hey, officer, let me tell you about a bomb in a little red bag.\" But\n I didn't. I didn't because I caught a movement at the baggage claim\n counter out of the side of my eye.\n\n\n The attendant had picked up the bag and was walking with it up the ramp\n to the rear of the air terminal. Picking up my own suitcase, I went\n inside in time to see him enter through a side door and deposit the bag\n on the scales at the airline desk and say something to the clerk. The\n clerk nodded and moved the bag to the rear room.",
"The policeman was sympathetic and concerned. He said, \"We'd better get\n over to the office.\"\n\n\n But we never left the spot because an explosion some blocks distant\n shattered the air. Julia's hand grasped my arm. Hard.\n\n\n \"Jets,\" the redcap said, eying the sky.\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" the policeman said. \"Didn't sound much like a jet to\n me.\"\n\n\n We stood there. I could visualize the wreckage of an old gray coupe\n in the middle of a street, but I couldn't visualize the driver. That\n was all right. I didn't want to see him. I didn't know what Julia was\n thinking.\n\n\n She said, \"About those bags,\" and looked at me.\n\n\n The officer said, \"Yes, miss?\"",
"It was impossible to tell from this distance just which bag contained\n the bomb; I could hardly identify my own scarred suitcase. The\n assortment of bags—a strange conglomeration of sizes and colors—was\n packed in some places six deep, and it rolled toward the gate where\n I was standing. I didn't know whether to stay or run, imagining the\n balance wheel now happily rocking again. The load went past me down a\n ramp to the front of the air terminal where the luggage was unloaded\n and placed in a long rack. I went with it.\n\n\n There was a flurry of ticket matching, hands grabbing for suitcases,\n and a general exodus on the part of my fellow passengers, too fast to\n determine who had got the one with the bomb. Now all that was left was\n the attendant and I had two bags—my own battered veteran of years, and\n a fine new red overnight case, small enough to be the one.",
"I never did find my suitcase because I found the bomb first.\nThe bomb was in a small bag—a woman's bag judging by the soft,\n flimsy things you'd never find in a man's—and I didn't know it was a\n bomb right away. I thought it was just a clock, one of those small,\n quiet alarms. I was going to pass it by and go on, but what held me\n was that something was taped to it. By the feel, I knew it must be\n electrician's tape. Interested and curious, I explored the clock more\n closely, found two wires. One went to a battery and the other to hard\n round cylinders taped together. The hairs stood up at the base of my\n neck when I suddenly realized what it was.\n\n\n The clock's balance wheel was rocking merrily. Quickly I went up past\n the train of gears to the alarm wheel. If this was anything like my own\n alarm clock, this one had something like ten minutes to go.",
"I lit a cigarette, reached out. Inside were a woman's things and—a\n clock. The escapement was clicking vigorously.\n\n\n I didn't moan this time. I just closed my eyes, stretched toward\n and grabbed the balance wheel I was getting to know like my own. I\n entered into a union with it so strong that after I had reduced it to\n immobility, it was like waking when I opened my eyes.\nThe baggage claim attendant was staring at me. For only a moment I\n stared back. Then I quickly reached for my baggage check and presented\n it to him. His hand hovered over the handle of the little red bag and I\n was ready to yell at him. But then, matching numbers on the tags with\n his eyes, his hand grasped the handle of my own suitcase and pushed it\n toward me.\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" I said, taking it. I glanced ever so casually toward the\n remaining bag. \"One left over, eh?\"",
"She gave me a speculative look.\n\n\n I must not have seemed a complete idiot because she said, \"All right,\n but—\"\n\n\n I didn't listen for the rest. I went into the booth, closed the door,\n pretended to drop a coin and dial a number. But all the time I was in\n there, I was reaching out through the glass for the clock. At this\n range it wasn't difficult to stop the balance wheel.\n\n\n Just the same, when I came out I was wringing wet.\n\n\n \"Now will you please tell me what this is all about?\" she said stiffly.\n\n\n \"Gladly. Let me buy you a cup of coffee and I'll explain.\"\n\n\n She glanced at the bags. I told her they'd be all right. We followed\n the short, fat man into the coffee shop.",
"I could visualize the balance wheel once again rocking like crazy. How\n many minutes—or seconds—were left? I was sweating when I moved to the\n counter, and it wasn't because of the sunshine I'd been soaking in. I\n had to get as close to the bag as I could if I was going to stop the\n clock again.\n\n\n \"Can I help you?\" the clerk asked.\n\n\n \"No. I'm waiting for someone.\"\n\n\n I turned my back to him, put down my suitcase, leaned against the\n counter and reached out for the wheel. I found I could reach the\n device, but it was far away. When I tried to dampen it, the wheel\n escaped my grasp.\n\n\n \"Do you have my suitcase?\"\n\n\n I blinked my eyes open and looked around. The blonde in the plane stood\n there looking very fresh and bright and unconcerned. In her right hand\n she had a green baggage claim check.",
"I should not have been there, that much I knew; I should be with a\n man named Amos Magaffey on Sixth Street at ten o'clock, discussing\n something very mundane, the matter of a printing order. But what could\n I do? If I left the airport, the attendant would eventually take the\n bag inside and there would be an explosion, and I wouldn't be able to\n live with myself.\n\n\n No. I had to stay to keep the balance wheel stationary until—until\n what?\n\n\n A man in tan gabardine, wearing a police cap and badge, walked out of\n the entrance to stand on the stone steps beside me while he put on a\n pair of dark glasses. A member of the airport police detail. I could\n tell him. I could take him down to the little red bag and explain the\n whole thing. Then it would be his baby and I would be off on my own\n business.",
"The woman beside me stirred, sat up suddenly and looked across me out\n the window. \"Where are we?\" she asked in a surprised voice. I told her\n we were probably a little north of Bakersfield. She said, \"Oh,\" glanced\n at her wristwatch and sank back again.\n\n\n Soon the stewardesses would bring coffee and doughnuts around, so I\n contented myself with looking at the clouds and trying to think about\n Amos Magaffey, who was purchasing agent for a Los Angeles amusement\n chain, and how I was going to convince him our printing prices were\n maybe a little higher but the quality and service were better. My mind\n wandered below where I was sitting, idly moving from one piece of\n luggage to another, looking for my beat-up suitcase. I went through\n slips and slippers, lingerie and laundry, a jig saw puzzle and a\n ukulele.",
"\"I—I don't care about mine. I didn't have much of anything in it.\"\n\n\n \"I feel the same way,\" I said. \"Would it be all right if we didn't\n bother to report it?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the policeman said, \"I can't\nmake\nyou report it.\"\n\n\n \"I'd rather not then,\" Julia said. She turned to me. \"I'd like some\n air. Can't we walk a little?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" I said.\n\n\n We started down the street, her arm in mine, as the air began to fill\n with the distant sounds of sirens.",
"\"My husband.\" I thought she was going to really bawl, but she got\n control again. \"This trip was his idea, my coming down here to visit my\n sister.\" Her smile was bleak. \"I see now why he wanted to put in those\n books. I'd finished packing and was in the bathroom. He said he'd put\n in some books we'd both finished reading—for my sister. That's when he\n must have put the—put it in there.\"\n\n\n I said gently, \"Why would he want to do a thing like that?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\" She shook her head. \"I just don't know.\" And she was\n close to bawling again. Then she recovered and said, \"I'm not sure I\n want to know.\" I admired her for saying it. Joe must have been crazy.\n\n\n \"It's all right now?\" she asked.\n\n\n I nodded. \"As long as we don't move it.\"",
"\"Must have been dreaming,\" I said as I rang for the stewardess. When\n she came I told her I'd take some of that coffee now. No, nothing else,\n just coffee. I didn't tell her how much I needed it. I sat there clammy\n with sweat until she returned. Coffee never tasted so good.\nAll right, so I had stopped the bomb's timer. My mind raced ahead to\n the landing. When they unloaded the luggage, the balance wheel would\n start again. I wouldn't be able to stay with it, keeping it still.\n I considered telling the authorities as soon as we landed, or maybe\n calling in ahead, but wouldn't that just bring suspicion, questions.\n Maybe I could convince them I could stop a clock—but not before the\n bomb exploded. And then what? My secret would be out and my life would\n be changed. I'd be a man not to be trusted, a prying man, a man\n literally with gimlet eyes.",
"I told her I didn't know how much more time there was, that I'd been\n thinking it over and that the only way out seemed to be to tell the\n airport policeman. After I explained it to her, the girl—she said her\n name was Julia Claremont—agreed to tell him she thought there was a\n bomb in her bag, that she had noticed a ticking and had become worried\n because she knew she hadn't packed a clock. It wasn't good, but it\n would have to do.\n\n\n \"We've got to get it deactivated,\" I said, watching the fat man pay for\n his coffee and leave. \"The sooner the better.\"\nI finished my coffee in one gulp and went to pay the bill with her.\n I asked her why she didn't claim the bag at the same time the other\n people had. She said she had called her sister and the phone was busy\n for a long while.",
"\"Not really,\" I said. I was tempted to tell the woman I was subject to\n fits, but I didn't.\n\n\n It was only a few minutes to landing, but they became the longest\n minutes of my life as time after time I stopped the rocking wheel when\n the plane dipped and bumped to a landing.\n\n\n Leaving the apron with the other passengers, I tried to walk as\n unconcernedly as they through the exit gate. I would have liked walking\n through the terminal and out the entrance and away, but I could not. I\n had my suitcase to get, for one thing. The damned bomb was the other.\n So I strolled out into the concourse again to look at the plane and\n watch the baggagemen at work, transferring the luggage to two airfield\n carts. They weren't as careful as I would have been.",
"She didn't move. She just said, \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"For God's sake!\" I took the case. She offered no resistance. I put her\n bag and mine next to the booth. When I turned around she was standing\n there looking at me as if I had gone out of my mind. Her eyes were blue\n and brown-flecked, very pretty eyes, and my thought at the moment was,\n I'm glad the bomb didn't go off; these eyes wouldn't be looking at me\n or anything else right now if it had.\n\n\n \"I've got to talk to you. It's very important.\"\n\n\n The girl said, \"Why?\" I was beginning to think it was the only word she\n knew. At the same time I was wondering why anyone would want to kill\n someone so lovely.\n\n\n \"I'll explain in a moment. Please stand right here while I make a\n telephone call.\" I moved toward the phone booth, paused and said, \"And\n don't ask me why.\"",
"I closed my eyes, forced my mind back to the luggage compartment, spent\n a frantic moment before I found the bag again. I had to stop that\n balance wheel, just as I stopped my alarm clock every morning. I tried\n to close everything off—the throb of engines, the rush of air, the\n woman sipping coffee noisily beside me—and I went into the clock and\n surrounded the seesawing wheel. When it went forward, I pulled it back;\n when it went back, I pulled it forward. I struggled with it, and it was\n like trying to work with greasy hands, and I was afraid I wasn't going\n to be able to stop it.\n\n\n Then, little by little, it started to slow its beat. But I could not\n afford to relax. I pushed and pulled and didn't dare release my hold\n until it came to a dead stop.\n\n\n \"Anything the matter?\""
],
[
"I told her I didn't know how much more time there was, that I'd been\n thinking it over and that the only way out seemed to be to tell the\n airport policeman. After I explained it to her, the girl—she said her\n name was Julia Claremont—agreed to tell him she thought there was a\n bomb in her bag, that she had noticed a ticking and had become worried\n because she knew she hadn't packed a clock. It wasn't good, but it\n would have to do.\n\n\n \"We've got to get it deactivated,\" I said, watching the fat man pay for\n his coffee and leave. \"The sooner the better.\"\nI finished my coffee in one gulp and went to pay the bill with her.\n I asked her why she didn't claim the bag at the same time the other\n people had. She said she had called her sister and the phone was busy\n for a long while.",
"The policeman was sympathetic and concerned. He said, \"We'd better get\n over to the office.\"\n\n\n But we never left the spot because an explosion some blocks distant\n shattered the air. Julia's hand grasped my arm. Hard.\n\n\n \"Jets,\" the redcap said, eying the sky.\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" the policeman said. \"Didn't sound much like a jet to\n me.\"\n\n\n We stood there. I could visualize the wreckage of an old gray coupe\n in the middle of a street, but I couldn't visualize the driver. That\n was all right. I didn't want to see him. I didn't know what Julia was\n thinking.\n\n\n She said, \"About those bags,\" and looked at me.\n\n\n The officer said, \"Yes, miss?\"",
"\"I—I don't care about mine. I didn't have much of anything in it.\"\n\n\n \"I feel the same way,\" I said. \"Would it be all right if we didn't\n bother to report it?\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the policeman said, \"I can't\nmake\nyou report it.\"\n\n\n \"I'd rather not then,\" Julia said. She turned to me. \"I'd like some\n air. Can't we walk a little?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" I said.\n\n\n We started down the street, her arm in mine, as the air began to fill\n with the distant sounds of sirens.",
"She didn't move. She just said, \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"For God's sake!\" I took the case. She offered no resistance. I put her\n bag and mine next to the booth. When I turned around she was standing\n there looking at me as if I had gone out of my mind. Her eyes were blue\n and brown-flecked, very pretty eyes, and my thought at the moment was,\n I'm glad the bomb didn't go off; these eyes wouldn't be looking at me\n or anything else right now if it had.\n\n\n \"I've got to talk to you. It's very important.\"\n\n\n The girl said, \"Why?\" I was beginning to think it was the only word she\n knew. At the same time I was wondering why anyone would want to kill\n someone so lovely.\n\n\n \"I'll explain in a moment. Please stand right here while I make a\n telephone call.\" I moved toward the phone booth, paused and said, \"And\n don't ask me why.\"",
"But he moved on down the steps, nodded at the redcap, and started\n across the street to the parking area. I could have called to him,\n \"Hey, officer, let me tell you about a bomb in a little red bag.\" But\n I didn't. I didn't because I caught a movement at the baggage claim\n counter out of the side of my eye.\n\n\n The attendant had picked up the bag and was walking with it up the ramp\n to the rear of the air terminal. Picking up my own suitcase, I went\n inside in time to see him enter through a side door and deposit the bag\n on the scales at the airline desk and say something to the clerk. The\n clerk nodded and moved the bag to the rear room.",
"It was forty minutes to Burbank and Lockheed Air Terminal.\n\n\n My mind was churning when I turned from the window to look around\n at the unconcerned passengers, the woman at my side asleep again. I\n thought: Which one of these.... No, none of them would know it was\n there. I glanced out the window again; clouds were still in the way.\n We'd be leaving the valley for the mountain range north of Los Angeles\n soon, if we hadn't left it already. No place to land the plane there.\n\n\n But of course that had been the plan!\n\n\n My heart was beating in jackhammer rhythm; my mouth was dry and my mind\n was numb. Tell somebody about the bomb before it's too late! No, they'd\n think I put it there. Besides, what good would it do? There would be\n panic and they'd never get the plane down in time—if they believed me.",
"I never did find my suitcase because I found the bomb first.\nThe bomb was in a small bag—a woman's bag judging by the soft,\n flimsy things you'd never find in a man's—and I didn't know it was a\n bomb right away. I thought it was just a clock, one of those small,\n quiet alarms. I was going to pass it by and go on, but what held me\n was that something was taped to it. By the feel, I knew it must be\n electrician's tape. Interested and curious, I explored the clock more\n closely, found two wires. One went to a battery and the other to hard\n round cylinders taped together. The hairs stood up at the base of my\n neck when I suddenly realized what it was.\n\n\n The clock's balance wheel was rocking merrily. Quickly I went up past\n the train of gears to the alarm wheel. If this was anything like my own\n alarm clock, this one had something like ten minutes to go.",
"I should not have been there, that much I knew; I should be with a\n man named Amos Magaffey on Sixth Street at ten o'clock, discussing\n something very mundane, the matter of a printing order. But what could\n I do? If I left the airport, the attendant would eventually take the\n bag inside and there would be an explosion, and I wouldn't be able to\n live with myself.\n\n\n No. I had to stay to keep the balance wheel stationary until—until\n what?\n\n\n A man in tan gabardine, wearing a police cap and badge, walked out of\n the entrance to stand on the stone steps beside me while he put on a\n pair of dark glasses. A member of the airport police detail. I could\n tell him. I could take him down to the little red bag and explain the\n whole thing. Then it would be his baby and I would be off on my own\n business.",
"\"Not really,\" I said. I was tempted to tell the woman I was subject to\n fits, but I didn't.\n\n\n It was only a few minutes to landing, but they became the longest\n minutes of my life as time after time I stopped the rocking wheel when\n the plane dipped and bumped to a landing.\n\n\n Leaving the apron with the other passengers, I tried to walk as\n unconcernedly as they through the exit gate. I would have liked walking\n through the terminal and out the entrance and away, but I could not. I\n had my suitcase to get, for one thing. The damned bomb was the other.\n So I strolled out into the concourse again to look at the plane and\n watch the baggagemen at work, transferring the luggage to two airfield\n carts. They weren't as careful as I would have been.",
"\"Yeah.\" He was so bored I was tempted to tell him what was in it. But\n he was eying me with a \"well-why-don't-you-get-along?\" look.\n\n\n I said, \"What happens if nobody claims it?\"\n\n\n \"Take it inside. Why?\"\n\n\n He was getting too curious. \"Oh, I just wondered, that's all.\"\n\n\n I stepped on my cigarette and walked toward the air terminal entrance\n and put my suitcase on the stone steps there. A redcap came hurrying\n over.\n\n\n \"Cab?\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"Just waiting.\"\n\n\n Just waiting for somebody to pick up a bomb.\n\n\n I lit another cigarette and glanced now and then toward the baggage\n claim area. The red bag was still there. All sorts of theories ran\n through my head as to why it should still be there, and none satisfied\n me.",
"The dumpy man I'd seen was walking off; Julia's bag in his right hand,\n mine in his left. He seemed in no hurry.\n\n\n \"Hey!\" I shouted, starting toward him.\n\n\n The man turned, took one look at me, and started to run. He came\n abreast an old gray, mud-spattered coupe, ran around, opened the door\n and threw both bags into the rear seat as he got in.\n\n\n The car was a hundred feet away and gathering speed by the time I\n reached where it had been parked. I watched it for a moment, then\n walked back to the entranceway where Julia was standing with the\n redcap, who said, \"That man steal them suitcases?\"\n\n\n \"That he did,\" I said.\n\n\n Just then the airport policeman started across the street from the\n parking lot. Redcap said, \"Better tell him about it.\"",
"The clerk took it, nodded, and in a moment brought out the overnight\n case and set it on the scales. The girl thanked him, picked it up,\n glanced at me indifferently, and then started for the entrance with it.\n\n\n \"Just a moment,\" I found myself saying, grabbing my bag and hurrying\n after her.\nAt her side and a little ahead of her, I said, \"Listen to me.\"\n\n\n She looked annoyed and increased her stride toward the door.\n\n\n \"It's a matter of life or death,\" I said. I wanted to wrest the bag\n from her and hurl it out through the doorway into the street, but I\n restrained myself.\n\n\n She stopped and stared. I noticed a short, fat man in a rumpled\n suitcoat and unpressed pants staring, too. Ignoring him, I said,\n \"Please put the bag down. Over there.\" I indicated a spot beside a\n telephone booth where it would be out of the way.",
"Over coffee I explained it all to her, how I had this extrasensory\n ability, how she was the first person I had ever revealed it to, and\n how I had discovered what was in her overnight bag.\n\n\n During the telling, her untouched coffee grew a skin, her face grew\n pale, her eyes grew less curious and more troubled. There were tears\n there when I finished. I asked her who put the bomb in her bag.\n\n\n \"Joe did,\" she said in a toneless voice, not looking at me any more but\n staring vacantly across the room. \"Joe put it there.\" Behind her eyes\n she was reliving some recent scene.\n\n\n \"Who is Joe?\"",
"It was impossible to tell from this distance just which bag contained\n the bomb; I could hardly identify my own scarred suitcase. The\n assortment of bags—a strange conglomeration of sizes and colors—was\n packed in some places six deep, and it rolled toward the gate where\n I was standing. I didn't know whether to stay or run, imagining the\n balance wheel now happily rocking again. The load went past me down a\n ramp to the front of the air terminal where the luggage was unloaded\n and placed in a long rack. I went with it.\n\n\n There was a flurry of ticket matching, hands grabbing for suitcases,\n and a general exodus on the part of my fellow passengers, too fast to\n determine who had got the one with the bomb. Now all that was left was\n the attendant and I had two bags—my own battered veteran of years, and\n a fine new red overnight case, small enough to be the one.",
"\"Must have been dreaming,\" I said as I rang for the stewardess. When\n she came I told her I'd take some of that coffee now. No, nothing else,\n just coffee. I didn't tell her how much I needed it. I sat there clammy\n with sweat until she returned. Coffee never tasted so good.\nAll right, so I had stopped the bomb's timer. My mind raced ahead to\n the landing. When they unloaded the luggage, the balance wheel would\n start again. I wouldn't be able to stay with it, keeping it still.\n I considered telling the authorities as soon as we landed, or maybe\n calling in ahead, but wouldn't that just bring suspicion, questions.\n Maybe I could convince them I could stop a clock—but not before the\n bomb exploded. And then what? My secret would be out and my life would\n be changed. I'd be a man not to be trusted, a prying man, a man\n literally with gimlet eyes.",
"I could visualize the balance wheel once again rocking like crazy. How\n many minutes—or seconds—were left? I was sweating when I moved to the\n counter, and it wasn't because of the sunshine I'd been soaking in. I\n had to get as close to the bag as I could if I was going to stop the\n clock again.\n\n\n \"Can I help you?\" the clerk asked.\n\n\n \"No. I'm waiting for someone.\"\n\n\n I turned my back to him, put down my suitcase, leaned against the\n counter and reached out for the wheel. I found I could reach the\n device, but it was far away. When I tried to dampen it, the wheel\n escaped my grasp.\n\n\n \"Do you have my suitcase?\"\n\n\n I blinked my eyes open and looked around. The blonde in the plane stood\n there looking very fresh and bright and unconcerned. In her right hand\n she had a green baggage claim check.",
"\"My husband.\" I thought she was going to really bawl, but she got\n control again. \"This trip was his idea, my coming down here to visit my\n sister.\" Her smile was bleak. \"I see now why he wanted to put in those\n books. I'd finished packing and was in the bathroom. He said he'd put\n in some books we'd both finished reading—for my sister. That's when he\n must have put the—put it in there.\"\n\n\n I said gently, \"Why would he want to do a thing like that?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\" She shook her head. \"I just don't know.\" And she was\n close to bawling again. Then she recovered and said, \"I'm not sure I\n want to know.\" I admired her for saying it. Joe must have been crazy.\n\n\n \"It's all right now?\" she asked.\n\n\n I nodded. \"As long as we don't move it.\"",
"She gave me a speculative look.\n\n\n I must not have seemed a complete idiot because she said, \"All right,\n but—\"\n\n\n I didn't listen for the rest. I went into the booth, closed the door,\n pretended to drop a coin and dial a number. But all the time I was in\n there, I was reaching out through the glass for the clock. At this\n range it wasn't difficult to stop the balance wheel.\n\n\n Just the same, when I came out I was wringing wet.\n\n\n \"Now will you please tell me what this is all about?\" she said stiffly.\n\n\n \"Gladly. Let me buy you a cup of coffee and I'll explain.\"\n\n\n She glanced at the bags. I told her they'd be all right. We followed\n the short, fat man into the coffee shop.",
"\"She was supposed to meet me, and when she wasn't here, I got worried.\n She said she isn't feeling well and asked me to take a cab.\" She smiled\n a little. It was a bright, cheery thing. I had the feeling it was all\n for me. \"That's where I was going when you caught up with me.\"\n\n\n It had become a very nice day. But the bottom dropped out of it again\n when we reached the lobby.\n\n\n The two bags weren't there.\n\n\n I ran to the entrance and nearly collided with the redcap.\n\n\n \"See anybody go out of here with a little red bag and an old battered\n suitcase?\"\n\n\n \"Bag? Suitcase?\" he mumbled. Then he became excited. \"Why, a man just\n stepped out of here—\" He turned to look down the street. \"That's him.\"",
"I closed my eyes, forced my mind back to the luggage compartment, spent\n a frantic moment before I found the bag again. I had to stop that\n balance wheel, just as I stopped my alarm clock every morning. I tried\n to close everything off—the throb of engines, the rush of air, the\n woman sipping coffee noisily beside me—and I went into the clock and\n surrounded the seesawing wheel. When it went forward, I pulled it back;\n when it went back, I pulled it forward. I struggled with it, and it was\n like trying to work with greasy hands, and I was afraid I wasn't going\n to be able to stop it.\n\n\n Then, little by little, it started to slow its beat. But I could not\n afford to relax. I pushed and pulled and didn't dare release my hold\n until it came to a dead stop.\n\n\n \"Anything the matter?\""
]
] |
train
|
26569
|
[
"What is the symbolism of the title?",
"What motivates Zarwell to take on the 'missions' he leads?",
"What is the purpose of a comanalysis?",
"Why did Zarwell deliberately inject himself? ",
"What do the settings of Zarwell's comanalyses have in common?",
"For what reason is Zarwell seeking treatment with Bergstrom? ",
"Which term best describes the sequencing of Zarwell's dreams under comanalysis? ",
"What is the purpose of the reclam crews?"
] |
[
[
"The monkey represents the series of false memories implanted in Zarwell's mind",
"The monkey represents Zarwell's affliction with ennui after becoming a civilian and living a more mundane existence",
"The monkey represents Dr. Bergstrom's manipulative influence on Zarwell's psyche",
"The monkey represents Zarwell's pattern of joining resistance movements, only to watch them turn corrupt"
],
[
"He desires to eradicate the galaxy of authoritarian regimes",
"He is not consciously aware of why he agrees to participate in the missions",
"He enjoys the adrenaline rush of the precarious situations his missions place him in",
"He wishes to prevent Earth from being destroyed by man-made climate change"
],
[
"It paralyzes patients in order to restore their nervous systems to equilibrium",
"It gives more direct access to the plagues of the human mind",
"It allows a manipulator to implant false memories",
"It permits a psychoanalyst to remove traumatic memories"
],
[
"To forget memories that influence him to join more missions",
"To prevent a psychoanalyst from probing his memories",
"To disguise himself among civilians in a new society",
"To protect himself from corrupt government officials"
],
[
"deception",
"captivity",
"pursuits",
"weapons"
],
[
"He is experiencing symptoms of memory loss",
"He struggles with night terrors on a regular basis",
"He feels paranoid that someone is controlling his thoughts",
"He wishes to rid himself of the ennui that stems from his depression"
],
[
"arbitrary",
"prophetic",
"misleading",
"regressive"
],
[
"To imprison anyone who breaks the Meninger oath of inviolate confidence",
"To establish habitable human settlements after the destruction of Earth",
"To search for minerals that could be used to produce serum for comanalyses",
"To reclaim fugitives from resistance movements and force them into captivity"
]
] |
[
4,
2,
2,
1,
3,
1,
1,
2
] |
[
1,
0,
1,
1,
1,
0,
1,
0
] |
[
[
"Zarwell passed a group of\n smaller children playing a desultory\n game of lic-lic for pieces of\n candy and cigarettes. Slowly he\n climbed the stairs of a stone flat.\n He prepared a supper for himself\n and ate it without either enjoyment\n or distaste. He lay down, fully\n clothed, on his bed. The visit to the\n analyst had done nothing to dispel\n his ennui.\n[p\n 139\n ]\n\n\n\n The next morning when Zarwell\n awoke he lay for a moment, unmoving.\n The feeling was there\n again, like a scene waiting only to\n be gazed at directly to be perceived.\n It was as though a great wisdom\n lay at the edge of understanding.\n If he rested quietly it would\n all come to him. Yet always, when\n his mind lost its sleep-induced\n [p\n 140\n ]\n lethargy, the moment of near understanding\n slipped away.",
"The evening meal hour was approaching\n when he reached the\n Flats, on the way to his apartment.\n The streets of the old section were\n near-deserted. The only sounds he\n heard as he passed were the occasional\n cry of a baby, chronically\n uncomfortable in the day’s heat,\n and the lowing of imported cattle\n waiting in a nearby shed to be\n shipped to the country.\n\n\n All St. Martin’s has a distinctive\n smell, as of an arid dried-out\n swamp, with a faint taint of fish.\n But in the Flats the odor changes.\n Here is the smell of factories, warehouses,\n and trading marts; the smell\n of stale cooking drifting from the\n homes of the laborers and lower\n class techmen who live there.",
"At the sight of him a man leaning\n negligently against a stone pillar,\n to his right but within vision,\n straightened and barked an order\n to him, “Halt!” He lengthened his\n stride but gave no other sign.\n\n\n [p\n 136\n ]\n\n Two men hurried through a\n doorway of a small anteroom to his\n left, calling to him. He turned away\n and began to run.\n\n\n Shouts and the sound of charging\n feet came from behind him. He\n cut to the right, running toward the\n escalator to the second floor. Another\n pair of men were hurrying\n down, two steps at a stride. With\n no break in pace he veered into an\n opening beside the escalator.\n\n\n At the first turn he saw that the\n aisle merely circled the stairway,\n coming out into the depot again on\n the other side. It was a trap. He\n glanced quickly around him.",
"The words tumbled down from\n above. They faded, were gone.\nZARWELL found himself\nstanding on a vast plain. There was\n no sky above, and no horizon in the\n distance. He was in a place without\n space or dimension. There was\n nothing here except himself—and\n the gun that he held in his hand.\n\n\n A weapon beautiful in its efficient\n simplicity.\n\n\n He should know all about the\n instrument, its purpose and workings,\n but he could not bring his\n thoughts into rational focus. His\n forehead creased with his mental\n effort.\n\n\n Abruptly the unreality about\n him shifted perspective. He was\n approaching—not walking, but\n merely shortening the space between\n them—the man who held\n the gun. The man who was himself.\n The other “himself” drifted\n nearer also, as though drawn by a\n mutual attraction.\n\n\n The man with the gun raised his\n weapon and pressed the trigger.",
"He offered no resistance as they\n reached him.\n\n\n They were not gentle men. A tall\n ruffian, copper-brown face damp\n with perspiration and body oil,\n grabbed him by the jacket and\n slammed him back against the\n lockers. As he shifted his weight\n to keep his footing someone drove\n a fist into his face. He started to\n raise his hands; and a hard flat\n object crashed against the side of\n his skull.\n\n\n The starch went out of his legs.\n“D\n O you make anything out of\n it?” the psychoanalyst Milton\n Bergstrom, asked.\n\n\n John Zarwell shook his head.\n “Did I talk while I was under?”\n\n\n “Oh, yes. You were supposed to.\n That way I follow pretty well what\n you’re reenacting.”\n\n\n “How does it tie in with what I\n told you before?”",
"Zarwell did not answer. His\n memory seemed on the point of\n complete return, and he sat quietly,\n hopefully. However, nothing more\n came and he returned his attention\n to his more immediate problem.\n\n\n Opening a button on his shirt, he\n pulled back a strip of plastic cloth\n just below his rib cage and took\n out a small flat pistol. He held it\n in the palm of his hand. He knew\n now why he always carried it.\n\n\n Bergstrom had his bad moment.\n “You’re not going to …” he began\n at the sight of the gun. He tried\n again. “You must be joking.”\n\n\n “I have very little sense of humor,”\n Zarwell corrected him.\n\n\n “You’d be foolish!”",
"Zarwell tried to feel the anger he\n wanted to feel, but somehow it\n would not come. “We have nothing\n to talk about,” was the best he\n could manage.\n\n\n “Then will you just listen? After,\n I’ll leave—if you tell me to.”\n\n\n Against his will he found himself\n liking the man, and wanting at least\n to be courteous. He inclined his\n head toward a curb wastebox with\n a flat top. “Should we sit?”\n\n\n Johnson smiled agreeably and\n they walked over to the box and\n sat down.",
"He took his place behind the\n drive wheel and began working dirt\n down between windbreakers anchored\n in the rock. Along a makeshift\n road into the badlands trucks\n brought crushed lime and phosphorus\n to supplement the ocean\n sediment. The progress of life from\n the sea to the land was a mechanical\n [p\n 142\n ]\n process of this growing world.\n\n\n Nearly two hundred years ago,\n when Earth established a colony on\n St. Martin’s, the land surface of the\n planet had been barren. Only its\n seas thrived with animal and vegetable\n life. The necessary machinery\n and technicians had been supplied\n by Earth, and the long struggle began\n to fit the world for human\n needs. When Zarwell arrived, six\n months before, the vitalized area\n already extended three hundred\n miles along the coast, and sixty\n miles inland. And every day the\n progress continued. A large percentage\n of the energy and resources\n of the world were devoted to that\n essential expansion.",
"The floor beneath Zarwell’s feet\n assumed abruptly the near transfluent\n consistency of a damp\n sponge. It rose in a foot-high wave\n and rolled gently toward the far\n wall.\n\n\n Bergstrom continued talking,\n with practiced urbanity. “When\n psychiatry was a less exact science,”\n his voice went on, seeming to come\n from a great distance, “a doctor\n had to spend weeks, sometimes\n months or years interviewing a\n patient. If he was skilled enough,\n he could sort the relevancies from\n the vast amount of chaff. We are\n able now, with the help of the\n serum, to confine our discourses to\n matters cogent to the patient’s\n trouble.”\n\n\n The floor continued its transmutation,\n and Zarwell sank deep into\n viscous depths. “Lie back and relax.\n Don’t …”",
"This morning, however, the sense\n of disorientation did not pass with\n full wakefulness. He achieved no\n understanding, but the strangeness\n did not leave as he sat up.\n\n\n He gazed about him. The room\n did not seem to be his own. The\n furnishings, and the clothing he observed\n in a closet, might have belonged\n to a stranger.\n\n\n He pulled himself from his blankets,\n his body moving with mechanical\n reaction. The slippers into\n which he put his feet were larger\n than he had expected them to be.\n He walked about the small apartment.\n The place was familiar, but\n only as it would have been if he\n had studied it from blueprints, not\n as though he lived there.\n\n\n The feeling was still with him\n when he returned to the psychoanalyst.\nTHE scene this time was more\n kaleidoscopic, less personal.",
"Transcriber’s note:\nThis story was published in\n Galaxy\n magazine, June 1960.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n[p\n 135\n ]\n\n By CHARLES V. DE VET\nmonkey on his back\nUnder the cloud of cast-off identities\n \n lay the shape of another man—\n \n was it himself?\nIllustrated by DILLON\nHE was walking endlessly\n down a long, glass-walled\n corridor. Bright sunlight\n slanted in through one wall, on the\n blue knapsack across his shoulders.\n Who he was, and what he was doing\n here, was clouded. The truth lurked\n in some corner of his consciousness,\n but it was not reached by surface\n awareness.\n\n\n The corridor opened at last into\n a large high-domed room, much\n like a railway station or an air terminal.\n He walked straight ahead.",
"Bergstrom shrugged, dismissing\n his strayed thoughts. “I expected\n as much. A quite normal first phase\n of treatment.” He straightened a\n paper on his desk. “I think that will\n be enough for today. Twice in one\n sitting is about all we ever try.\n Otherwise some particular episode\n might cause undue mental stress,\n and set up a block.” He glanced\n down at his appointment pad. “Tomorrow\n at two, then?”\n\n\n Zarwell grunted acknowledgment\n and pushed himself to his\n feet, apparently unaware that his\n shirt clung damply to his body.\nTHE sun was still high when\n Zarwell left the analyst’s office.\n The white marble of the city’s\n buildings shimmered in the afternoon\n heat, squat and austere as\n giant tree trunks, pock-marked and\n gray-mottled with windows. Zarwell\n was careful not to rest his hand\n on the flesh searing surface of the\n stone.",
"Bergstrom’s neat-boned, fair-skinned\n face betrayed no emotion\n other than an introspective stillness\n of his normally alert gaze. “I see\n no connection,” he decided, his\n words once again precise and meticulous.\n “We don’t have enough to\n go on. Do you feel able to try another\n comanalysis this afternoon\n yet?”\n\n\n “I don’t see why not.” Zarwell\n [p\n 137\n ]\n opened the collar of his shirt. The\n day was hot, and the room had no\n air conditioning, still a rare luxury\n on St. Martin’s. The office window\n was open, but it let in no freshness,\n only the mildly rank odor that pervaded\n all the planet’s habitable\n area.\n\n\n “Good.” Bergstrom rose. “The\n serum is quite harmless, John.” He\n maintained a professional diversionary\n chatter as he administered\n the drug. “A scopolamine derivative\n that’s been well tested.”",
"The big man turned. “You can\n tell the Chief he’s awake,” he said.\n Zarwell followed his gaze to where\n a younger man, with a blond lock of\n hair on his forehead, stood behind\n him. The youth nodded and went\n out, while the other pulled a chair\n up to the side of Zarwell’s cot.\n\n\n While their attention was away\n from him Zarwell had unobtrusively\n loosened his bonds as much as\n possible with arm leverage. As the\n big man drew his chair nearer, he\n made the hand farthest from him\n tight and compact and worked it\n free of the leather loop. He waited.\n\n\n The big man belched. “You’re\n supposed to be great stuff in a situation\n like this,” he said, his smoke-tan\n face splitting in a grin that revealed\n large square teeth. “How\n about giving me a sample?”\n\n\n “You’re a yellow-livered bastard,”\n Zarwell told him.",
"Zarwell pulled his sun helmet\n lower, to better guard his hot, dry\n features. The wind blew continuously\n on St. Martin’s, but it furnished\n small relief from the heat.\n After its three-thousand-mile journey\n across scorched sterile rock, it\n sucked the moisture from a man’s\n body, bringing a membrane-shrinking\n dryness to the nostrils as it was\n breathed in. With it came also the\n cloying taste of limestone in a\n worker’s mouth.\n\n\n Zarwell gazed idly about at the\n other laborers. Fully three-quarters\n of them were beri-rabza ridden. A\n cure for the skin fungus had not\n yet been found; the men’s faces\n and hands were scabbed and red.\n The colony had grown to near self-sufficiency,\n would soon have a moderate\n prosperity, yet they still\n lacked adequate medical and research\n facilities.\n\n\n Not all the world’s citizens were\n content.",
"A village was being ravaged.\n Men struggled and died in the\n streets. Zarwell moved among\n them, seldom taking part in the\n individual clashes, yet a moving\n force in the\n conflict\n .\n\n\n The background changed. He\n understood that he was on a different\n world.\n\n\n Here a city burned. Its resistance\n was nearing its end. Zarwell was\n riding a shaggy pony outside a high\n wall surrounding the stricken metropolis.\n He moved in and joined a\n party of short, bearded men, directing\n them as they battered at the\n wall with a huge log mounted on a\n many-wheeled truck.\n\n\n The log broke a breach in the\n concrete and the besiegers charged\n through, carrying back the defenders\n who sought vainly to plug the\n gap. Soon there would be rioting\n in the streets again, plundering and\n killing.",
"Zarwell was not the leader of the\n invaders, only a lesser figure in the\n rebellion. But he had played a leading\n part in the planning of the\n strategy that led to the city’s fall.\n The job had been well done.\n\n\n Time passed, without visible\n break in the panorama. Now Zarwell\n was fleeing, pursued by the\n same bearded men who had been\n his comrades before. Still he moved\n with the same firm purpose, vigilant,\n resourceful, and well prepared\n for the eventuality that had befallen.\n He made his escape without\n difficulty.\n\n\n He alighted from a space ship on\n still another world—another shift\n in time—and the atmosphere of\n conflict engulfed him.\n\n\n Weary but resigned he accepted\n it, and did what he had to do …\nBERGSTROM was regarding\nhim with speculative scrutiny.\n “You’ve had quite a past, apparently,”\n he observed.",
"The grin faded from the oily face\n as the man stood up. He leaned over\n the cot—and Zarwell’s left hand\n shot up and locked about his throat,\n joined almost immediately by the\n right.\n\n\n The man’s mouth opened and he\n tried to yell as he threw himself\n frantically backward. He clawed at\n the hands about his neck. When\n that failed to break the grip he suddenly\n reversed his weight and\n drove his fist at Zarwell’s head.\n\n\n Zarwell pulled the struggling\n body down against his chest and\n held it there until all agitated\n movement ceased. He sat up then,\n letting the body slide to the floor.\n\n\n The straps about his thighs came\n loose with little effort.\nTHE analyst dabbed at his upper\n lip with a handkerchief. “The\n episodes are beginning to tie together,”\n he said, with an attempt at\n [p\n 144\n ]\n nonchalance. “The next couple\n should do it.”",
"Bergstrom was waiting in his office\n when Zarwell arrived that\n evening.\nHE was lying motionless on a\n hard cot, with his eyes closed,\n yet with his every sense sharply\n quickened. Tentatively he tightened\n small muscles in his arms and\n legs. Across his wrists and thighs\n he felt straps binding him to the\n cot.\n\n\n “So that’s our big, bad man,” a\n coarse voice above him observed\n [p\n 143\n ]\n caustically. “He doesn’t look so\n tough now, does he?”\n\n\n “It might have been better to\n kill him right away,” a second, less\n confident voice said. “It’s supposed\n to be impossible to hold him.”\n\n\n “Don’t be stupid. We just do\n what we’re told. We’ll hold him.”\n\n\n “What do you think they’ll do\n with him?”",
"At the rear of the space was a\n row of lockers for traveler use. He\n slipped a coin into a pay slot,\n opened the zipper on his bag and\n pulled out a flat briefcase. It took\n him only a few seconds to push the\n case into the compartment, lock it\n and slide the key along the floor\n beneath the locker.\n\n\n There was nothing to do after\n that—except wait.\n\n\n The men pursuing him came\n hurtling around the turn in the\n aisle. He kicked his knapsack to\n one side, spreading his feet wide\n with an instinctive motion.\n\n\n Until that instant he had intended\n to fight. Now he swiftly\n reassessed the odds. There were\n five of them, he saw. He should be\n able to incapacitate two or three\n and break out. But the fact that\n they had been expecting him meant\n that others would very probably\n be waiting outside. His best course\n now was to sham ignorance. He\n relaxed."
],
[
"Zarwell was not the leader of the\n invaders, only a lesser figure in the\n rebellion. But he had played a leading\n part in the planning of the\n strategy that led to the city’s fall.\n The job had been well done.\n\n\n Time passed, without visible\n break in the panorama. Now Zarwell\n was fleeing, pursued by the\n same bearded men who had been\n his comrades before. Still he moved\n with the same firm purpose, vigilant,\n resourceful, and well prepared\n for the eventuality that had befallen.\n He made his escape without\n difficulty.\n\n\n He alighted from a space ship on\n still another world—another shift\n in time—and the atmosphere of\n conflict engulfed him.\n\n\n Weary but resigned he accepted\n it, and did what he had to do …\nBERGSTROM was regarding\nhim with speculative scrutiny.\n “You’ve had quite a past, apparently,”\n he observed.",
"A village was being ravaged.\n Men struggled and died in the\n streets. Zarwell moved among\n them, seldom taking part in the\n individual clashes, yet a moving\n force in the\n conflict\n .\n\n\n The background changed. He\n understood that he was on a different\n world.\n\n\n Here a city burned. Its resistance\n was nearing its end. Zarwell was\n riding a shaggy pony outside a high\n wall surrounding the stricken metropolis.\n He moved in and joined a\n party of short, bearded men, directing\n them as they battered at the\n wall with a huge log mounted on a\n many-wheeled truck.\n\n\n The log broke a breach in the\n concrete and the besiegers charged\n through, carrying back the defenders\n who sought vainly to plug the\n gap. Soon there would be rioting\n in the streets again, plundering and\n killing.",
"“It started on my home colony,”\n Zarwell explained listlessly. “A\n gang of hoods had taken over the\n government. I helped organize a\n movement to get them out. There\n was some bloodshed, but it went\n quite well. Several months later an\n unofficial envoy from another\n world asked several of us to give\n them a hand on the same kind of\n job. The political conditions there\n were rotten. We went with him.\n Again we were successful. It seems\n I have a kind of genius for that\n sort of thing.”\n\n\n He stretched out his legs and regarded\n them thoughtfully. “I\n learned then the truth of Russell’s\n saying: ‘When the oppressed win\n their freedom they are as oppressive\n as their former masters.’ When\n they went bad, I opposed them.\n This time I failed. But I escaped\n again. I have quite a talent for that\n also.",
"“Who am I?” he asked, very interested\n now. Without attention he\n put his pistol away in a trouser\n pocket.\n\n\n Bergstrom brushed the question\n aside with one hand. “Your name\n makes little difference. You’ve used\n many. But you are an idealist. Your\n killings were necessary to bring\n justice to the places you visited. By\n now you’re almost a legend among\n the human worlds. I’d like to talk\n more with you on that later.”\n\n\n While Zarwell considered, Bergstrom\n pressed his advantage. “One\n more scene might do it,” he said.\n “Should we try again—if you trust\n me, that is?”\n\n\n [p\n 145\n ]",
"Zarwell tried to feel the anger he\n wanted to feel, but somehow it\n would not come. “We have nothing\n to talk about,” was the best he\n could manage.\n\n\n “Then will you just listen? After,\n I’ll leave—if you tell me to.”\n\n\n Against his will he found himself\n liking the man, and wanting at least\n to be courteous. He inclined his\n head toward a curb wastebox with\n a flat top. “Should we sit?”\n\n\n Johnson smiled agreeably and\n they walked over to the box and\n sat down.",
"“I’m not a professional do-gooder.”\n Zarwell’s tone appealed\n to Bergstrom for understanding. “I\n have only a normal man’s indignation\n at injustice. And now I’ve done\n my share. Yet, wherever I go, the\n word eventually gets out, and I’m\n right back in a fight again. It’s like\n the proverbial monkey on my back.\n I can’t get rid of it.”\n\n\n He rose. “That disguise and\n memory planting were supposed to\n get me out of it. I should have\n known it wouldn’t work. But this\n time I’m not going to be drawn\n back in! You and your Vernon\n Johnson can do your own revolting.\n I’m through!”",
"Zarwell did not answer. His\n memory seemed on the point of\n complete return, and he sat quietly,\n hopefully. However, nothing more\n came and he returned his attention\n to his more immediate problem.\n\n\n Opening a button on his shirt, he\n pulled back a strip of plastic cloth\n just below his rib cage and took\n out a small flat pistol. He held it\n in the palm of his hand. He knew\n now why he always carried it.\n\n\n Bergstrom had his bad moment.\n “You’re not going to …” he began\n at the sight of the gun. He tried\n again. “You must be joking.”\n\n\n “I have very little sense of humor,”\n Zarwell corrected him.\n\n\n “You’d be foolish!”",
"“Your memory’s back then?”\n\n\n Zarwell nodded.\n\n\n “I’m glad to hear that,” Bergstrom\n assured him. “Now that\n you’re well again I’d like to introduce\n you to a man named Vernon\n Johnson. This world …”\n\n\n Zarwell stopped him with an upraised\n hand. “Good God, man, can’t\n you see the reason for all this? I’m\n tired. I’m trying to quit.”\n\n\n “Quit?” Bergstrom did not quite\n follow him.",
"Zarwell passed a group of\n smaller children playing a desultory\n game of lic-lic for pieces of\n candy and cigarettes. Slowly he\n climbed the stairs of a stone flat.\n He prepared a supper for himself\n and ate it without either enjoyment\n or distaste. He lay down, fully\n clothed, on his bed. The visit to the\n analyst had done nothing to dispel\n his ennui.\n[p\n 139\n ]\n\n\n\n The next morning when Zarwell\n awoke he lay for a moment, unmoving.\n The feeling was there\n again, like a scene waiting only to\n be gazed at directly to be perceived.\n It was as though a great wisdom\n lay at the edge of understanding.\n If he rested quietly it would\n all come to him. Yet always, when\n his mind lost its sleep-induced\n [p\n 140\n ]\n lethargy, the moment of near understanding\n slipped away.",
"The last question prompted a\n new thought. Just why had he\n chosen St. Martin’s? Was it only a\n coincidence? Or had he,\n subconsciously\n at least, picked this particular\n world? He had always\n considered himself the unwilling\n subject of glib persuaders … but\n mightn’t some inner compulsion of\n his own have put the monkey on his\n back?\n\n\n “… and we need your help.”\n Johnson had finished his speech.\n\n\n Zarwell gazed up at the bright\n sky. He pulled in a long breath,\n and let it out in a sigh.\n\n\n “What are your plans so far?”\n he asked wearily.\n—\nCHARLES V. DE VET",
"Zarwell made his decision quickly.\n “Go ahead,” he answered.\nALL Zarwell’s attention seemed\n on the cigar he lit as he rode\n down the escalator, but he surveyed\n the terminal carefully over the rim\n of his hand. He spied no suspicious\n loungers.\n\n\n Behind the escalator he groped\n along the floor beneath the lockers\n until he found his key. The briefcase\n was under his arm a minute\n later.\n\n\n In the basement lave he put a\n coin in the pay slot of a private\n compartment and went in.\n\n\n As he zipped open the briefcase\n he surveyed his features in the mirror.\n A small muscle at the corner of\n one eye twitched spasmodically.\n One cheek wore a frozen quarter\n smile. Thirty-six hours under the\n paralysis was longer than advisable.\n The muscles should be rested at\n least every twenty hours.\n\n\n Fortunately his natural features\n would serve as an adequate disguise\n now.",
"“When this colony was first\n founded,” Johnson began without\n preamble, “the administrative body\n was a governor, and a council of\n twelve. Their successors were to\n be elected biennially. At first they\n were. Then things changed. We\n haven’t had an election now in the\n last twenty-three years. St. Martin’s\n is beginning to prosper. Yet\n the only ones receiving the benefits\n are the rulers. The citizens work\n twelve hours a day. They are poorly\n housed\n , poorly fed, poorly clothed.\n They …”\n\n\n Zarwell found himself not listening\n as Johnson’s voice went on. The\n story was always the same. But why\n did they always try to drag him into\n their troubles?\n\n\n Why hadn’t he chosen some\n other world on which to hide?",
"Zarwell pulled his sun helmet\n lower, to better guard his hot, dry\n features. The wind blew continuously\n on St. Martin’s, but it furnished\n small relief from the heat.\n After its three-thousand-mile journey\n across scorched sterile rock, it\n sucked the moisture from a man’s\n body, bringing a membrane-shrinking\n dryness to the nostrils as it was\n breathed in. With it came also the\n cloying taste of limestone in a\n worker’s mouth.\n\n\n Zarwell gazed idly about at the\n other laborers. Fully three-quarters\n of them were beri-rabza ridden. A\n cure for the skin fungus had not\n yet been found; the men’s faces\n and hands were scabbed and red.\n The colony had grown to near self-sufficiency,\n would soon have a moderate\n prosperity, yet they still\n lacked adequate medical and research\n facilities.\n\n\n Not all the world’s citizens were\n content.",
"“No.” Bergstrom was angry now.\n “But use that logical mind you’re\n supposed to have! Scenes before\n this have shown what kind of man\n you are. Just because this last happened\n here on St. Martin’s makes\n little difference. If I was going to\n turn you in to the police, I’d have\n done it before this.”\n\n\n Zarwell debated with himself the\n truth of what the other had said.\n “Why didn’t you turn me in?” he\n asked.\n\n\n “Because you’re no mad-dog\n killer!” Now that the crisis seemed\n to be past, Bergstrom spoke more\n calmly, even allowed himself to\n relax. “You’re still pretty much in\n the fog about yourself. I read more\n in those comanalyses than you did.\n I even know who you are!”\n\n\n Zarwell’s eyebrows raised.",
"Bergstrom was waiting in his office\n when Zarwell arrived that\n evening.\nHE was lying motionless on a\n hard cot, with his eyes closed,\n yet with his every sense sharply\n quickened. Tentatively he tightened\n small muscles in his arms and\n legs. Across his wrists and thighs\n he felt straps binding him to the\n cot.\n\n\n “So that’s our big, bad man,” a\n coarse voice above him observed\n [p\n 143\n ]\n caustically. “He doesn’t look so\n tough now, does he?”\n\n\n “It might have been better to\n kill him right away,” a second, less\n confident voice said. “It’s supposed\n to be impossible to hold him.”\n\n\n “Don’t be stupid. We just do\n what we’re told. We’ll hold him.”\n\n\n “What do you think they’ll do\n with him?”",
"One step more. Taking the syringe\n from his pocket, he plunged\n the needle into his forearm and\n tossed the instrument down a\n waste chute. He took three more\n steps and paused uncertainly.\n\n\n When he looked about him it\n was with the expression of a man\n waking from a vivid dream.\n“Q\n UITE ingenious,” Graves\n murmured admiringly. “You\n had your mind already preconditioned\n for the shot. But why would\n you deliberately give yourself amnesia?”\n\n\n “What better disguise than to\n believe the part you’re playing?”\n\n\n “A good man must have done\n that job on your mind,” Bergstrom\n commented. “I’d have hesitated to\n try it myself. It must have taken a\n lot of trust on your part.”\n\n\n [p\n 146\n ]\n\n “Trust and money,” Zarwell said\n drily.",
"“I won’t have any time off again\n until next week end,” Zarwell reminded\n him.\n\n\n “That’s right.” Bergstrom\n thought for a moment. “We\n shouldn’t let this hang too long.\n Could you come here after work\n tomorrow?”\n\n\n “I suppose I could.”\n\n\n “Fine,” Bergstrom said with satisfaction.\n “I’ll admit I’m considerably\n more than casually interested\n in your case by this time.”\nA WORK truck picked Zarwell\n up the next morning and he\n rode with a tech crew to the edge of\n the reclam area. Beside the belt\n bringing ocean muck from the converter\n plant at the seashore his\n bulldozer was waiting.",
"With the action the perspective\n shifted again. He was watching the\n face of the man he shot jerk and\n twitch, expand and contract. The\n face was unharmed, yet it was no\n longer the same. No longer his own\n features.\n\n\n The stranger face smiled approvingly\n at him.\n“O\n DD,” Bergstrom said.\nHe brought his hands up and joined\n the tips of his fingers against his\n chest. “But it’s another piece in the\n [p\n 138\n ]\n jig-saw. In time it will fit into\n place.” He paused. “It means no\n more to you than the first, I suppose?”\n\n\n “No,” Zarwell answered.\n\n\n He was not a talking man, Bergstrom\n reflected. It was more than\n reticence, however. The man had\n a hard granite core, only partially\n concealed by his present perplexity.\n He was a man who could handle\n himself well in an emergency.",
"“Execute him, I suppose,” the\n harsh voice said matter-of-factly.\n “They’re probably just curious to\n see what he looks like first. They’ll\n be disappointed.”\n\n\n Zarwell opened his eyes a slit to\n observe his surroundings.\n\n\n It was a mistake. “He’s out of\n it,” the first speaker said, and Zarwell\n allowed his eyes to open fully.\n\n\n The voice, he saw, belonged to\n the big man who had bruised him\n against the locker at the spaceport.\n Irrelevantly he wondered how he\n knew now that it had been a spaceport.\n\n\n His captor’s broad face jeered\n down at Zarwell. “Have a good\n sleep?” he asked with mock solicitude.\n Zarwell did not deign to acknowledge\n that he heard.",
"The words tumbled down from\n above. They faded, were gone.\nZARWELL found himself\nstanding on a vast plain. There was\n no sky above, and no horizon in the\n distance. He was in a place without\n space or dimension. There was\n nothing here except himself—and\n the gun that he held in his hand.\n\n\n A weapon beautiful in its efficient\n simplicity.\n\n\n He should know all about the\n instrument, its purpose and workings,\n but he could not bring his\n thoughts into rational focus. His\n forehead creased with his mental\n effort.\n\n\n Abruptly the unreality about\n him shifted perspective. He was\n approaching—not walking, but\n merely shortening the space between\n them—the man who held\n the gun. The man who was himself.\n The other “himself” drifted\n nearer also, as though drawn by a\n mutual attraction.\n\n\n The man with the gun raised his\n weapon and pressed the trigger."
],
[
"Bergstrom’s neat-boned, fair-skinned\n face betrayed no emotion\n other than an introspective stillness\n of his normally alert gaze. “I see\n no connection,” he decided, his\n words once again precise and meticulous.\n “We don’t have enough to\n go on. Do you feel able to try another\n comanalysis this afternoon\n yet?”\n\n\n “I don’t see why not.” Zarwell\n [p\n 137\n ]\n opened the collar of his shirt. The\n day was hot, and the room had no\n air conditioning, still a rare luxury\n on St. Martin’s. The office window\n was open, but it let in no freshness,\n only the mildly rank odor that pervaded\n all the planet’s habitable\n area.\n\n\n “Good.” Bergstrom rose. “The\n serum is quite harmless, John.” He\n maintained a professional diversionary\n chatter as he administered\n the drug. “A scopolamine derivative\n that’s been well tested.”",
"Zarwell passed a group of\n smaller children playing a desultory\n game of lic-lic for pieces of\n candy and cigarettes. Slowly he\n climbed the stairs of a stone flat.\n He prepared a supper for himself\n and ate it without either enjoyment\n or distaste. He lay down, fully\n clothed, on his bed. The visit to the\n analyst had done nothing to dispel\n his ennui.\n[p\n 139\n ]\n\n\n\n The next morning when Zarwell\n awoke he lay for a moment, unmoving.\n The feeling was there\n again, like a scene waiting only to\n be gazed at directly to be perceived.\n It was as though a great wisdom\n lay at the edge of understanding.\n If he rested quietly it would\n all come to him. Yet always, when\n his mind lost its sleep-induced\n [p\n 140\n ]\n lethargy, the moment of near understanding\n slipped away.",
"“No.” Bergstrom was angry now.\n “But use that logical mind you’re\n supposed to have! Scenes before\n this have shown what kind of man\n you are. Just because this last happened\n here on St. Martin’s makes\n little difference. If I was going to\n turn you in to the police, I’d have\n done it before this.”\n\n\n Zarwell debated with himself the\n truth of what the other had said.\n “Why didn’t you turn me in?” he\n asked.\n\n\n “Because you’re no mad-dog\n killer!” Now that the crisis seemed\n to be past, Bergstrom spoke more\n calmly, even allowed himself to\n relax. “You’re still pretty much in\n the fog about yourself. I read more\n in those comanalyses than you did.\n I even know who you are!”\n\n\n Zarwell’s eyebrows raised.",
"He offered no resistance as they\n reached him.\n\n\n They were not gentle men. A tall\n ruffian, copper-brown face damp\n with perspiration and body oil,\n grabbed him by the jacket and\n slammed him back against the\n lockers. As he shifted his weight\n to keep his footing someone drove\n a fist into his face. He started to\n raise his hands; and a hard flat\n object crashed against the side of\n his skull.\n\n\n The starch went out of his legs.\n“D\n O you make anything out of\n it?” the psychoanalyst Milton\n Bergstrom, asked.\n\n\n John Zarwell shook his head.\n “Did I talk while I was under?”\n\n\n “Oh, yes. You were supposed to.\n That way I follow pretty well what\n you’re reenacting.”\n\n\n “How does it tie in with what I\n told you before?”",
"Bergstrom obviously realized\n how close he was to death. Yet\n surprisingly, after the first start,\n he showed little fear. Zarwell had\n thought the man a bit soft, too\n adjusted to a life of ease and some\n prestige to meet danger calmly.\n Curiosity restrained his trigger finger.\n\n\n “Why would I be foolish?” he\n asked. “Your Meninger oath of inviolable\n confidence?”\n\n\n Bergstrom shook his head. “I\n know it’s been broken before. But\n you need me. You’re not through,\n you know. If you killed me you’d\n still have to trust some other\n analyst.”\n\n\n “Is that the best you can do?”",
"One step more. Taking the syringe\n from his pocket, he plunged\n the needle into his forearm and\n tossed the instrument down a\n waste chute. He took three more\n steps and paused uncertainly.\n\n\n When he looked about him it\n was with the expression of a man\n waking from a vivid dream.\n“Q\n UITE ingenious,” Graves\n murmured admiringly. “You\n had your mind already preconditioned\n for the shot. But why would\n you deliberately give yourself amnesia?”\n\n\n “What better disguise than to\n believe the part you’re playing?”\n\n\n “A good man must have done\n that job on your mind,” Bergstrom\n commented. “I’d have hesitated to\n try it myself. It must have taken a\n lot of trust on your part.”\n\n\n [p\n 146\n ]\n\n “Trust and money,” Zarwell said\n drily.",
"“Haphazard? That’s true. The\n recall episodes are always purely\n random, with no chronological sequence.\n Our problem will be to reassemble\n them in proper order\n later. Or some particular scene may\n trigger a complete memory return.\n\n\n “It is my considered opinion,”\n Bergstrom went on, “that your lost\n memory will turn out to be no ordinary\n amnesia. I believe we will find\n that your mind has been tampered\n with.”\n\n\n “Nothing I’ve seen under the\n drug fits into the past I do remember.”\n\n\n “That’s what makes me so certain,”\n Bergstrom said confidently.\n “You don’t remember what we\n have shown to be true. Conversely\n then, what you think you remember\n must be false. It must have been\n implanted there. But we can go\n into that later. For today I think\n we have done enough. This episode\n was quite prolonged.”",
"[p\n 141\n ]\n\n Zarwell smiled with mild embarrassment.\n “At least in my dreams.”\n\n\n “Dreams?” Bergstrom’s eyes\n widened in surprise. “Oh, I beg your\n pardon. I must have forgotten to\n explain. This work is so routine to\n me that sometimes I forget it’s all\n new to a patient. Actually what you\n experienced under the drug were\n not dreams. They were recollections\n of real episodes from your\n past.”\n\n\n Zarwell’s expression became\n wary. He watched Bergstrom\n closely. After a minute, however,\n he seemed satisfied, and he let himself\n settle back against the cushion\n of his chair. “I remember nothing\n of what I saw,” he observed.\n\n\n “That’s why you’re here, you\n know,” Bergstrom answered. “To\n help you remember.”\n\n\n “But everything under the drug\n is so …”",
"The grin faded from the oily face\n as the man stood up. He leaned over\n the cot—and Zarwell’s left hand\n shot up and locked about his throat,\n joined almost immediately by the\n right.\n\n\n The man’s mouth opened and he\n tried to yell as he threw himself\n frantically backward. He clawed at\n the hands about his neck. When\n that failed to break the grip he suddenly\n reversed his weight and\n drove his fist at Zarwell’s head.\n\n\n Zarwell pulled the struggling\n body down against his chest and\n held it there until all agitated\n movement ceased. He sat up then,\n letting the body slide to the floor.\n\n\n The straps about his thighs came\n loose with little effort.\nTHE analyst dabbed at his upper\n lip with a handkerchief. “The\n episodes are beginning to tie together,”\n he said, with an attempt at\n [p\n 144\n ]\n nonchalance. “The next couple\n should do it.”",
"This morning, however, the sense\n of disorientation did not pass with\n full wakefulness. He achieved no\n understanding, but the strangeness\n did not leave as he sat up.\n\n\n He gazed about him. The room\n did not seem to be his own. The\n furnishings, and the clothing he observed\n in a closet, might have belonged\n to a stranger.\n\n\n He pulled himself from his blankets,\n his body moving with mechanical\n reaction. The slippers into\n which he put his feet were larger\n than he had expected them to be.\n He walked about the small apartment.\n The place was familiar, but\n only as it would have been if he\n had studied it from blueprints, not\n as though he lived there.\n\n\n The feeling was still with him\n when he returned to the psychoanalyst.\nTHE scene this time was more\n kaleidoscopic, less personal.",
"The floor beneath Zarwell’s feet\n assumed abruptly the near transfluent\n consistency of a damp\n sponge. It rose in a foot-high wave\n and rolled gently toward the far\n wall.\n\n\n Bergstrom continued talking,\n with practiced urbanity. “When\n psychiatry was a less exact science,”\n his voice went on, seeming to come\n from a great distance, “a doctor\n had to spend weeks, sometimes\n months or years interviewing a\n patient. If he was skilled enough,\n he could sort the relevancies from\n the vast amount of chaff. We are\n able now, with the help of the\n serum, to confine our discourses to\n matters cogent to the patient’s\n trouble.”\n\n\n The floor continued its transmutation,\n and Zarwell sank deep into\n viscous depths. “Lie back and relax.\n Don’t …”",
"The evening meal hour was approaching\n when he reached the\n Flats, on the way to his apartment.\n The streets of the old section were\n near-deserted. The only sounds he\n heard as he passed were the occasional\n cry of a baby, chronically\n uncomfortable in the day’s heat,\n and the lowing of imported cattle\n waiting in a nearby shed to be\n shipped to the country.\n\n\n All St. Martin’s has a distinctive\n smell, as of an arid dried-out\n swamp, with a faint taint of fish.\n But in the Flats the odor changes.\n Here is the smell of factories, warehouses,\n and trading marts; the smell\n of stale cooking drifting from the\n homes of the laborers and lower\n class techmen who live there.",
"He adjusted the ring setting on\n the pistol-shaped instrument that\n he took from his case, and carefully\n rayed several small areas of\n his face, loosening muscles that had\n been tight too long. He sighed\n gratefully when he finished, massaging\n his cheeks and forehead with\n considerable pleasure. Another\n glance in the mirror satisfied him\n with the changes that had been\n made. He turned to his briefcase\n again and exchanged the gun for\n a small syringe, which he pushed\n into a trouser pocket, and a single-edged\n razor blade.\n\n\n Removing his fiber-cloth jacket\n he slashed it into strips with the\n razor blade and flushed it down the\n disposal bowl. With the sleeves of\n his blouse rolled up he had the\n appearance of a typical workman\n as he strolled from the compartment.\n\n\n Back at the locker he replaced\n the briefcase and, with a wad of\n gum, glued the key to the bottom\n of the locker frame.",
"Zarwell made his decision quickly.\n “Go ahead,” he answered.\nALL Zarwell’s attention seemed\n on the cigar he lit as he rode\n down the escalator, but he surveyed\n the terminal carefully over the rim\n of his hand. He spied no suspicious\n loungers.\n\n\n Behind the escalator he groped\n along the floor beneath the lockers\n until he found his key. The briefcase\n was under his arm a minute\n later.\n\n\n In the basement lave he put a\n coin in the pay slot of a private\n compartment and went in.\n\n\n As he zipped open the briefcase\n he surveyed his features in the mirror.\n A small muscle at the corner of\n one eye twitched spasmodically.\n One cheek wore a frozen quarter\n smile. Thirty-six hours under the\n paralysis was longer than advisable.\n The muscles should be rested at\n least every twenty hours.\n\n\n Fortunately his natural features\n would serve as an adequate disguise\n now.",
"Bergstrom shrugged, dismissing\n his strayed thoughts. “I expected\n as much. A quite normal first phase\n of treatment.” He straightened a\n paper on his desk. “I think that will\n be enough for today. Twice in one\n sitting is about all we ever try.\n Otherwise some particular episode\n might cause undue mental stress,\n and set up a block.” He glanced\n down at his appointment pad. “Tomorrow\n at two, then?”\n\n\n Zarwell grunted acknowledgment\n and pushed himself to his\n feet, apparently unaware that his\n shirt clung damply to his body.\nTHE sun was still high when\n Zarwell left the analyst’s office.\n The white marble of the city’s\n buildings shimmered in the afternoon\n heat, squat and austere as\n giant tree trunks, pock-marked and\n gray-mottled with windows. Zarwell\n was careful not to rest his hand\n on the flesh searing surface of the\n stone.",
"The words tumbled down from\n above. They faded, were gone.\nZARWELL found himself\nstanding on a vast plain. There was\n no sky above, and no horizon in the\n distance. He was in a place without\n space or dimension. There was\n nothing here except himself—and\n the gun that he held in his hand.\n\n\n A weapon beautiful in its efficient\n simplicity.\n\n\n He should know all about the\n instrument, its purpose and workings,\n but he could not bring his\n thoughts into rational focus. His\n forehead creased with his mental\n effort.\n\n\n Abruptly the unreality about\n him shifted perspective. He was\n approaching—not walking, but\n merely shortening the space between\n them—the man who held\n the gun. The man who was himself.\n The other “himself” drifted\n nearer also, as though drawn by a\n mutual attraction.\n\n\n The man with the gun raised his\n weapon and pressed the trigger.",
"“Who am I?” he asked, very interested\n now. Without attention he\n put his pistol away in a trouser\n pocket.\n\n\n Bergstrom brushed the question\n aside with one hand. “Your name\n makes little difference. You’ve used\n many. But you are an idealist. Your\n killings were necessary to bring\n justice to the places you visited. By\n now you’re almost a legend among\n the human worlds. I’d like to talk\n more with you on that later.”\n\n\n While Zarwell considered, Bergstrom\n pressed his advantage. “One\n more scene might do it,” he said.\n “Should we try again—if you trust\n me, that is?”\n\n\n [p\n 145\n ]",
"He took his place behind the\n drive wheel and began working dirt\n down between windbreakers anchored\n in the rock. Along a makeshift\n road into the badlands trucks\n brought crushed lime and phosphorus\n to supplement the ocean\n sediment. The progress of life from\n the sea to the land was a mechanical\n [p\n 142\n ]\n process of this growing world.\n\n\n Nearly two hundred years ago,\n when Earth established a colony on\n St. Martin’s, the land surface of the\n planet had been barren. Only its\n seas thrived with animal and vegetable\n life. The necessary machinery\n and technicians had been supplied\n by Earth, and the long struggle began\n to fit the world for human\n needs. When Zarwell arrived, six\n months before, the vitalized area\n already extended three hundred\n miles along the coast, and sixty\n miles inland. And every day the\n progress continued. A large percentage\n of the energy and resources\n of the world were devoted to that\n essential expansion.",
"The big man turned. “You can\n tell the Chief he’s awake,” he said.\n Zarwell followed his gaze to where\n a younger man, with a blond lock of\n hair on his forehead, stood behind\n him. The youth nodded and went\n out, while the other pulled a chair\n up to the side of Zarwell’s cot.\n\n\n While their attention was away\n from him Zarwell had unobtrusively\n loosened his bonds as much as\n possible with arm leverage. As the\n big man drew his chair nearer, he\n made the hand farthest from him\n tight and compact and worked it\n free of the leather loop. He waited.\n\n\n The big man belched. “You’re\n supposed to be great stuff in a situation\n like this,” he said, his smoke-tan\n face splitting in a grin that revealed\n large square teeth. “How\n about giving me a sample?”\n\n\n “You’re a yellow-livered bastard,”\n Zarwell told him.",
"Bergstrom was waiting in his office\n when Zarwell arrived that\n evening.\nHE was lying motionless on a\n hard cot, with his eyes closed,\n yet with his every sense sharply\n quickened. Tentatively he tightened\n small muscles in his arms and\n legs. Across his wrists and thighs\n he felt straps binding him to the\n cot.\n\n\n “So that’s our big, bad man,” a\n coarse voice above him observed\n [p\n 143\n ]\n caustically. “He doesn’t look so\n tough now, does he?”\n\n\n “It might have been better to\n kill him right away,” a second, less\n confident voice said. “It’s supposed\n to be impossible to hold him.”\n\n\n “Don’t be stupid. We just do\n what we’re told. We’ll hold him.”\n\n\n “What do you think they’ll do\n with him?”"
],
[
"One step more. Taking the syringe\n from his pocket, he plunged\n the needle into his forearm and\n tossed the instrument down a\n waste chute. He took three more\n steps and paused uncertainly.\n\n\n When he looked about him it\n was with the expression of a man\n waking from a vivid dream.\n“Q\n UITE ingenious,” Graves\n murmured admiringly. “You\n had your mind already preconditioned\n for the shot. But why would\n you deliberately give yourself amnesia?”\n\n\n “What better disguise than to\n believe the part you’re playing?”\n\n\n “A good man must have done\n that job on your mind,” Bergstrom\n commented. “I’d have hesitated to\n try it myself. It must have taken a\n lot of trust on your part.”\n\n\n [p\n 146\n ]\n\n “Trust and money,” Zarwell said\n drily.",
"Zarwell did not answer. His\n memory seemed on the point of\n complete return, and he sat quietly,\n hopefully. However, nothing more\n came and he returned his attention\n to his more immediate problem.\n\n\n Opening a button on his shirt, he\n pulled back a strip of plastic cloth\n just below his rib cage and took\n out a small flat pistol. He held it\n in the palm of his hand. He knew\n now why he always carried it.\n\n\n Bergstrom had his bad moment.\n “You’re not going to …” he began\n at the sight of the gun. He tried\n again. “You must be joking.”\n\n\n “I have very little sense of humor,”\n Zarwell corrected him.\n\n\n “You’d be foolish!”",
"“Your memory’s back then?”\n\n\n Zarwell nodded.\n\n\n “I’m glad to hear that,” Bergstrom\n assured him. “Now that\n you’re well again I’d like to introduce\n you to a man named Vernon\n Johnson. This world …”\n\n\n Zarwell stopped him with an upraised\n hand. “Good God, man, can’t\n you see the reason for all this? I’m\n tired. I’m trying to quit.”\n\n\n “Quit?” Bergstrom did not quite\n follow him.",
"Zarwell made his decision quickly.\n “Go ahead,” he answered.\nALL Zarwell’s attention seemed\n on the cigar he lit as he rode\n down the escalator, but he surveyed\n the terminal carefully over the rim\n of his hand. He spied no suspicious\n loungers.\n\n\n Behind the escalator he groped\n along the floor beneath the lockers\n until he found his key. The briefcase\n was under his arm a minute\n later.\n\n\n In the basement lave he put a\n coin in the pay slot of a private\n compartment and went in.\n\n\n As he zipped open the briefcase\n he surveyed his features in the mirror.\n A small muscle at the corner of\n one eye twitched spasmodically.\n One cheek wore a frozen quarter\n smile. Thirty-six hours under the\n paralysis was longer than advisable.\n The muscles should be rested at\n least every twenty hours.\n\n\n Fortunately his natural features\n would serve as an adequate disguise\n now.",
"“Who am I?” he asked, very interested\n now. Without attention he\n put his pistol away in a trouser\n pocket.\n\n\n Bergstrom brushed the question\n aside with one hand. “Your name\n makes little difference. You’ve used\n many. But you are an idealist. Your\n killings were necessary to bring\n justice to the places you visited. By\n now you’re almost a legend among\n the human worlds. I’d like to talk\n more with you on that later.”\n\n\n While Zarwell considered, Bergstrom\n pressed his advantage. “One\n more scene might do it,” he said.\n “Should we try again—if you trust\n me, that is?”\n\n\n [p\n 145\n ]",
"Bergstrom’s neat-boned, fair-skinned\n face betrayed no emotion\n other than an introspective stillness\n of his normally alert gaze. “I see\n no connection,” he decided, his\n words once again precise and meticulous.\n “We don’t have enough to\n go on. Do you feel able to try another\n comanalysis this afternoon\n yet?”\n\n\n “I don’t see why not.” Zarwell\n [p\n 137\n ]\n opened the collar of his shirt. The\n day was hot, and the room had no\n air conditioning, still a rare luxury\n on St. Martin’s. The office window\n was open, but it let in no freshness,\n only the mildly rank odor that pervaded\n all the planet’s habitable\n area.\n\n\n “Good.” Bergstrom rose. “The\n serum is quite harmless, John.” He\n maintained a professional diversionary\n chatter as he administered\n the drug. “A scopolamine derivative\n that’s been well tested.”",
"The words tumbled down from\n above. They faded, were gone.\nZARWELL found himself\nstanding on a vast plain. There was\n no sky above, and no horizon in the\n distance. He was in a place without\n space or dimension. There was\n nothing here except himself—and\n the gun that he held in his hand.\n\n\n A weapon beautiful in its efficient\n simplicity.\n\n\n He should know all about the\n instrument, its purpose and workings,\n but he could not bring his\n thoughts into rational focus. His\n forehead creased with his mental\n effort.\n\n\n Abruptly the unreality about\n him shifted perspective. He was\n approaching—not walking, but\n merely shortening the space between\n them—the man who held\n the gun. The man who was himself.\n The other “himself” drifted\n nearer also, as though drawn by a\n mutual attraction.\n\n\n The man with the gun raised his\n weapon and pressed the trigger.",
"Zarwell tried to feel the anger he\n wanted to feel, but somehow it\n would not come. “We have nothing\n to talk about,” was the best he\n could manage.\n\n\n “Then will you just listen? After,\n I’ll leave—if you tell me to.”\n\n\n Against his will he found himself\n liking the man, and wanting at least\n to be courteous. He inclined his\n head toward a curb wastebox with\n a flat top. “Should we sit?”\n\n\n Johnson smiled agreeably and\n they walked over to the box and\n sat down.",
"The grin faded from the oily face\n as the man stood up. He leaned over\n the cot—and Zarwell’s left hand\n shot up and locked about his throat,\n joined almost immediately by the\n right.\n\n\n The man’s mouth opened and he\n tried to yell as he threw himself\n frantically backward. He clawed at\n the hands about his neck. When\n that failed to break the grip he suddenly\n reversed his weight and\n drove his fist at Zarwell’s head.\n\n\n Zarwell pulled the struggling\n body down against his chest and\n held it there until all agitated\n movement ceased. He sat up then,\n letting the body slide to the floor.\n\n\n The straps about his thighs came\n loose with little effort.\nTHE analyst dabbed at his upper\n lip with a handkerchief. “The\n episodes are beginning to tie together,”\n he said, with an attempt at\n [p\n 144\n ]\n nonchalance. “The next couple\n should do it.”",
"Zarwell passed a group of\n smaller children playing a desultory\n game of lic-lic for pieces of\n candy and cigarettes. Slowly he\n climbed the stairs of a stone flat.\n He prepared a supper for himself\n and ate it without either enjoyment\n or distaste. He lay down, fully\n clothed, on his bed. The visit to the\n analyst had done nothing to dispel\n his ennui.\n[p\n 139\n ]\n\n\n\n The next morning when Zarwell\n awoke he lay for a moment, unmoving.\n The feeling was there\n again, like a scene waiting only to\n be gazed at directly to be perceived.\n It was as though a great wisdom\n lay at the edge of understanding.\n If he rested quietly it would\n all come to him. Yet always, when\n his mind lost its sleep-induced\n [p\n 140\n ]\n lethargy, the moment of near understanding\n slipped away.",
"Bergstrom obviously realized\n how close he was to death. Yet\n surprisingly, after the first start,\n he showed little fear. Zarwell had\n thought the man a bit soft, too\n adjusted to a life of ease and some\n prestige to meet danger calmly.\n Curiosity restrained his trigger finger.\n\n\n “Why would I be foolish?” he\n asked. “Your Meninger oath of inviolable\n confidence?”\n\n\n Bergstrom shook his head. “I\n know it’s been broken before. But\n you need me. You’re not through,\n you know. If you killed me you’d\n still have to trust some other\n analyst.”\n\n\n “Is that the best you can do?”",
"Bergstrom was waiting in his office\n when Zarwell arrived that\n evening.\nHE was lying motionless on a\n hard cot, with his eyes closed,\n yet with his every sense sharply\n quickened. Tentatively he tightened\n small muscles in his arms and\n legs. Across his wrists and thighs\n he felt straps binding him to the\n cot.\n\n\n “So that’s our big, bad man,” a\n coarse voice above him observed\n [p\n 143\n ]\n caustically. “He doesn’t look so\n tough now, does he?”\n\n\n “It might have been better to\n kill him right away,” a second, less\n confident voice said. “It’s supposed\n to be impossible to hold him.”\n\n\n “Don’t be stupid. We just do\n what we’re told. We’ll hold him.”\n\n\n “What do you think they’ll do\n with him?”",
"“No.” Bergstrom was angry now.\n “But use that logical mind you’re\n supposed to have! Scenes before\n this have shown what kind of man\n you are. Just because this last happened\n here on St. Martin’s makes\n little difference. If I was going to\n turn you in to the police, I’d have\n done it before this.”\n\n\n Zarwell debated with himself the\n truth of what the other had said.\n “Why didn’t you turn me in?” he\n asked.\n\n\n “Because you’re no mad-dog\n killer!” Now that the crisis seemed\n to be past, Bergstrom spoke more\n calmly, even allowed himself to\n relax. “You’re still pretty much in\n the fog about yourself. I read more\n in those comanalyses than you did.\n I even know who you are!”\n\n\n Zarwell’s eyebrows raised.",
"The floor beneath Zarwell’s feet\n assumed abruptly the near transfluent\n consistency of a damp\n sponge. It rose in a foot-high wave\n and rolled gently toward the far\n wall.\n\n\n Bergstrom continued talking,\n with practiced urbanity. “When\n psychiatry was a less exact science,”\n his voice went on, seeming to come\n from a great distance, “a doctor\n had to spend weeks, sometimes\n months or years interviewing a\n patient. If he was skilled enough,\n he could sort the relevancies from\n the vast amount of chaff. We are\n able now, with the help of the\n serum, to confine our discourses to\n matters cogent to the patient’s\n trouble.”\n\n\n The floor continued its transmutation,\n and Zarwell sank deep into\n viscous depths. “Lie back and relax.\n Don’t …”",
"“I won’t have any time off again\n until next week end,” Zarwell reminded\n him.\n\n\n “That’s right.” Bergstrom\n thought for a moment. “We\n shouldn’t let this hang too long.\n Could you come here after work\n tomorrow?”\n\n\n “I suppose I could.”\n\n\n “Fine,” Bergstrom said with satisfaction.\n “I’ll admit I’m considerably\n more than casually interested\n in your case by this time.”\nA WORK truck picked Zarwell\n up the next morning and he\n rode with a tech crew to the edge of\n the reclam area. Beside the belt\n bringing ocean muck from the converter\n plant at the seashore his\n bulldozer was waiting.",
"“I’m not a professional do-gooder.”\n Zarwell’s tone appealed\n to Bergstrom for understanding. “I\n have only a normal man’s indignation\n at injustice. And now I’ve done\n my share. Yet, wherever I go, the\n word eventually gets out, and I’m\n right back in a fight again. It’s like\n the proverbial monkey on my back.\n I can’t get rid of it.”\n\n\n He rose. “That disguise and\n memory planting were supposed to\n get me out of it. I should have\n known it wouldn’t work. But this\n time I’m not going to be drawn\n back in! You and your Vernon\n Johnson can do your own revolting.\n I’m through!”",
"With the action the perspective\n shifted again. He was watching the\n face of the man he shot jerk and\n twitch, expand and contract. The\n face was unharmed, yet it was no\n longer the same. No longer his own\n features.\n\n\n The stranger face smiled approvingly\n at him.\n“O\n DD,” Bergstrom said.\nHe brought his hands up and joined\n the tips of his fingers against his\n chest. “But it’s another piece in the\n [p\n 138\n ]\n jig-saw. In time it will fit into\n place.” He paused. “It means no\n more to you than the first, I suppose?”\n\n\n “No,” Zarwell answered.\n\n\n He was not a talking man, Bergstrom\n reflected. It was more than\n reticence, however. The man had\n a hard granite core, only partially\n concealed by his present perplexity.\n He was a man who could handle\n himself well in an emergency.",
"Zarwell was not the leader of the\n invaders, only a lesser figure in the\n rebellion. But he had played a leading\n part in the planning of the\n strategy that led to the city’s fall.\n The job had been well done.\n\n\n Time passed, without visible\n break in the panorama. Now Zarwell\n was fleeing, pursued by the\n same bearded men who had been\n his comrades before. Still he moved\n with the same firm purpose, vigilant,\n resourceful, and well prepared\n for the eventuality that had befallen.\n He made his escape without\n difficulty.\n\n\n He alighted from a space ship on\n still another world—another shift\n in time—and the atmosphere of\n conflict engulfed him.\n\n\n Weary but resigned he accepted\n it, and did what he had to do …\nBERGSTROM was regarding\nhim with speculative scrutiny.\n “You’ve had quite a past, apparently,”\n he observed.",
"“Execute him, I suppose,” the\n harsh voice said matter-of-factly.\n “They’re probably just curious to\n see what he looks like first. They’ll\n be disappointed.”\n\n\n Zarwell opened his eyes a slit to\n observe his surroundings.\n\n\n It was a mistake. “He’s out of\n it,” the first speaker said, and Zarwell\n allowed his eyes to open fully.\n\n\n The voice, he saw, belonged to\n the big man who had bruised him\n against the locker at the spaceport.\n Irrelevantly he wondered how he\n knew now that it had been a spaceport.\n\n\n His captor’s broad face jeered\n down at Zarwell. “Have a good\n sleep?” he asked with mock solicitude.\n Zarwell did not deign to acknowledge\n that he heard.",
"Zarwell pulled his sun helmet\n lower, to better guard his hot, dry\n features. The wind blew continuously\n on St. Martin’s, but it furnished\n small relief from the heat.\n After its three-thousand-mile journey\n across scorched sterile rock, it\n sucked the moisture from a man’s\n body, bringing a membrane-shrinking\n dryness to the nostrils as it was\n breathed in. With it came also the\n cloying taste of limestone in a\n worker’s mouth.\n\n\n Zarwell gazed idly about at the\n other laborers. Fully three-quarters\n of them were beri-rabza ridden. A\n cure for the skin fungus had not\n yet been found; the men’s faces\n and hands were scabbed and red.\n The colony had grown to near self-sufficiency,\n would soon have a moderate\n prosperity, yet they still\n lacked adequate medical and research\n facilities.\n\n\n Not all the world’s citizens were\n content."
],
[
"A village was being ravaged.\n Men struggled and died in the\n streets. Zarwell moved among\n them, seldom taking part in the\n individual clashes, yet a moving\n force in the\n conflict\n .\n\n\n The background changed. He\n understood that he was on a different\n world.\n\n\n Here a city burned. Its resistance\n was nearing its end. Zarwell was\n riding a shaggy pony outside a high\n wall surrounding the stricken metropolis.\n He moved in and joined a\n party of short, bearded men, directing\n them as they battered at the\n wall with a huge log mounted on a\n many-wheeled truck.\n\n\n The log broke a breach in the\n concrete and the besiegers charged\n through, carrying back the defenders\n who sought vainly to plug the\n gap. Soon there would be rioting\n in the streets again, plundering and\n killing.",
"Zarwell passed a group of\n smaller children playing a desultory\n game of lic-lic for pieces of\n candy and cigarettes. Slowly he\n climbed the stairs of a stone flat.\n He prepared a supper for himself\n and ate it without either enjoyment\n or distaste. He lay down, fully\n clothed, on his bed. The visit to the\n analyst had done nothing to dispel\n his ennui.\n[p\n 139\n ]\n\n\n\n The next morning when Zarwell\n awoke he lay for a moment, unmoving.\n The feeling was there\n again, like a scene waiting only to\n be gazed at directly to be perceived.\n It was as though a great wisdom\n lay at the edge of understanding.\n If he rested quietly it would\n all come to him. Yet always, when\n his mind lost its sleep-induced\n [p\n 140\n ]\n lethargy, the moment of near understanding\n slipped away.",
"Zarwell tried to feel the anger he\n wanted to feel, but somehow it\n would not come. “We have nothing\n to talk about,” was the best he\n could manage.\n\n\n “Then will you just listen? After,\n I’ll leave—if you tell me to.”\n\n\n Against his will he found himself\n liking the man, and wanting at least\n to be courteous. He inclined his\n head toward a curb wastebox with\n a flat top. “Should we sit?”\n\n\n Johnson smiled agreeably and\n they walked over to the box and\n sat down.",
"Bergstrom’s neat-boned, fair-skinned\n face betrayed no emotion\n other than an introspective stillness\n of his normally alert gaze. “I see\n no connection,” he decided, his\n words once again precise and meticulous.\n “We don’t have enough to\n go on. Do you feel able to try another\n comanalysis this afternoon\n yet?”\n\n\n “I don’t see why not.” Zarwell\n [p\n 137\n ]\n opened the collar of his shirt. The\n day was hot, and the room had no\n air conditioning, still a rare luxury\n on St. Martin’s. The office window\n was open, but it let in no freshness,\n only the mildly rank odor that pervaded\n all the planet’s habitable\n area.\n\n\n “Good.” Bergstrom rose. “The\n serum is quite harmless, John.” He\n maintained a professional diversionary\n chatter as he administered\n the drug. “A scopolamine derivative\n that’s been well tested.”",
"Zarwell was not the leader of the\n invaders, only a lesser figure in the\n rebellion. But he had played a leading\n part in the planning of the\n strategy that led to the city’s fall.\n The job had been well done.\n\n\n Time passed, without visible\n break in the panorama. Now Zarwell\n was fleeing, pursued by the\n same bearded men who had been\n his comrades before. Still he moved\n with the same firm purpose, vigilant,\n resourceful, and well prepared\n for the eventuality that had befallen.\n He made his escape without\n difficulty.\n\n\n He alighted from a space ship on\n still another world—another shift\n in time—and the atmosphere of\n conflict engulfed him.\n\n\n Weary but resigned he accepted\n it, and did what he had to do …\nBERGSTROM was regarding\nhim with speculative scrutiny.\n “You’ve had quite a past, apparently,”\n he observed.",
"“No.” Bergstrom was angry now.\n “But use that logical mind you’re\n supposed to have! Scenes before\n this have shown what kind of man\n you are. Just because this last happened\n here on St. Martin’s makes\n little difference. If I was going to\n turn you in to the police, I’d have\n done it before this.”\n\n\n Zarwell debated with himself the\n truth of what the other had said.\n “Why didn’t you turn me in?” he\n asked.\n\n\n “Because you’re no mad-dog\n killer!” Now that the crisis seemed\n to be past, Bergstrom spoke more\n calmly, even allowed himself to\n relax. “You’re still pretty much in\n the fog about yourself. I read more\n in those comanalyses than you did.\n I even know who you are!”\n\n\n Zarwell’s eyebrows raised.",
"Zarwell pulled his sun helmet\n lower, to better guard his hot, dry\n features. The wind blew continuously\n on St. Martin’s, but it furnished\n small relief from the heat.\n After its three-thousand-mile journey\n across scorched sterile rock, it\n sucked the moisture from a man’s\n body, bringing a membrane-shrinking\n dryness to the nostrils as it was\n breathed in. With it came also the\n cloying taste of limestone in a\n worker’s mouth.\n\n\n Zarwell gazed idly about at the\n other laborers. Fully three-quarters\n of them were beri-rabza ridden. A\n cure for the skin fungus had not\n yet been found; the men’s faces\n and hands were scabbed and red.\n The colony had grown to near self-sufficiency,\n would soon have a moderate\n prosperity, yet they still\n lacked adequate medical and research\n facilities.\n\n\n Not all the world’s citizens were\n content.",
"Zarwell did not answer. His\n memory seemed on the point of\n complete return, and he sat quietly,\n hopefully. However, nothing more\n came and he returned his attention\n to his more immediate problem.\n\n\n Opening a button on his shirt, he\n pulled back a strip of plastic cloth\n just below his rib cage and took\n out a small flat pistol. He held it\n in the palm of his hand. He knew\n now why he always carried it.\n\n\n Bergstrom had his bad moment.\n “You’re not going to …” he began\n at the sight of the gun. He tried\n again. “You must be joking.”\n\n\n “I have very little sense of humor,”\n Zarwell corrected him.\n\n\n “You’d be foolish!”",
"Bergstrom shrugged, dismissing\n his strayed thoughts. “I expected\n as much. A quite normal first phase\n of treatment.” He straightened a\n paper on his desk. “I think that will\n be enough for today. Twice in one\n sitting is about all we ever try.\n Otherwise some particular episode\n might cause undue mental stress,\n and set up a block.” He glanced\n down at his appointment pad. “Tomorrow\n at two, then?”\n\n\n Zarwell grunted acknowledgment\n and pushed himself to his\n feet, apparently unaware that his\n shirt clung damply to his body.\nTHE sun was still high when\n Zarwell left the analyst’s office.\n The white marble of the city’s\n buildings shimmered in the afternoon\n heat, squat and austere as\n giant tree trunks, pock-marked and\n gray-mottled with windows. Zarwell\n was careful not to rest his hand\n on the flesh searing surface of the\n stone.",
"He took his place behind the\n drive wheel and began working dirt\n down between windbreakers anchored\n in the rock. Along a makeshift\n road into the badlands trucks\n brought crushed lime and phosphorus\n to supplement the ocean\n sediment. The progress of life from\n the sea to the land was a mechanical\n [p\n 142\n ]\n process of this growing world.\n\n\n Nearly two hundred years ago,\n when Earth established a colony on\n St. Martin’s, the land surface of the\n planet had been barren. Only its\n seas thrived with animal and vegetable\n life. The necessary machinery\n and technicians had been supplied\n by Earth, and the long struggle began\n to fit the world for human\n needs. When Zarwell arrived, six\n months before, the vitalized area\n already extended three hundred\n miles along the coast, and sixty\n miles inland. And every day the\n progress continued. A large percentage\n of the energy and resources\n of the world were devoted to that\n essential expansion.",
"The grin faded from the oily face\n as the man stood up. He leaned over\n the cot—and Zarwell’s left hand\n shot up and locked about his throat,\n joined almost immediately by the\n right.\n\n\n The man’s mouth opened and he\n tried to yell as he threw himself\n frantically backward. He clawed at\n the hands about his neck. When\n that failed to break the grip he suddenly\n reversed his weight and\n drove his fist at Zarwell’s head.\n\n\n Zarwell pulled the struggling\n body down against his chest and\n held it there until all agitated\n movement ceased. He sat up then,\n letting the body slide to the floor.\n\n\n The straps about his thighs came\n loose with little effort.\nTHE analyst dabbed at his upper\n lip with a handkerchief. “The\n episodes are beginning to tie together,”\n he said, with an attempt at\n [p\n 144\n ]\n nonchalance. “The next couple\n should do it.”",
"The words tumbled down from\n above. They faded, were gone.\nZARWELL found himself\nstanding on a vast plain. There was\n no sky above, and no horizon in the\n distance. He was in a place without\n space or dimension. There was\n nothing here except himself—and\n the gun that he held in his hand.\n\n\n A weapon beautiful in its efficient\n simplicity.\n\n\n He should know all about the\n instrument, its purpose and workings,\n but he could not bring his\n thoughts into rational focus. His\n forehead creased with his mental\n effort.\n\n\n Abruptly the unreality about\n him shifted perspective. He was\n approaching—not walking, but\n merely shortening the space between\n them—the man who held\n the gun. The man who was himself.\n The other “himself” drifted\n nearer also, as though drawn by a\n mutual attraction.\n\n\n The man with the gun raised his\n weapon and pressed the trigger.",
"Bergstrom was waiting in his office\n when Zarwell arrived that\n evening.\nHE was lying motionless on a\n hard cot, with his eyes closed,\n yet with his every sense sharply\n quickened. Tentatively he tightened\n small muscles in his arms and\n legs. Across his wrists and thighs\n he felt straps binding him to the\n cot.\n\n\n “So that’s our big, bad man,” a\n coarse voice above him observed\n [p\n 143\n ]\n caustically. “He doesn’t look so\n tough now, does he?”\n\n\n “It might have been better to\n kill him right away,” a second, less\n confident voice said. “It’s supposed\n to be impossible to hold him.”\n\n\n “Don’t be stupid. We just do\n what we’re told. We’ll hold him.”\n\n\n “What do you think they’ll do\n with him?”",
"Zarwell made his decision quickly.\n “Go ahead,” he answered.\nALL Zarwell’s attention seemed\n on the cigar he lit as he rode\n down the escalator, but he surveyed\n the terminal carefully over the rim\n of his hand. He spied no suspicious\n loungers.\n\n\n Behind the escalator he groped\n along the floor beneath the lockers\n until he found his key. The briefcase\n was under his arm a minute\n later.\n\n\n In the basement lave he put a\n coin in the pay slot of a private\n compartment and went in.\n\n\n As he zipped open the briefcase\n he surveyed his features in the mirror.\n A small muscle at the corner of\n one eye twitched spasmodically.\n One cheek wore a frozen quarter\n smile. Thirty-six hours under the\n paralysis was longer than advisable.\n The muscles should be rested at\n least every twenty hours.\n\n\n Fortunately his natural features\n would serve as an adequate disguise\n now.",
"He offered no resistance as they\n reached him.\n\n\n They were not gentle men. A tall\n ruffian, copper-brown face damp\n with perspiration and body oil,\n grabbed him by the jacket and\n slammed him back against the\n lockers. As he shifted his weight\n to keep his footing someone drove\n a fist into his face. He started to\n raise his hands; and a hard flat\n object crashed against the side of\n his skull.\n\n\n The starch went out of his legs.\n“D\n O you make anything out of\n it?” the psychoanalyst Milton\n Bergstrom, asked.\n\n\n John Zarwell shook his head.\n “Did I talk while I was under?”\n\n\n “Oh, yes. You were supposed to.\n That way I follow pretty well what\n you’re reenacting.”\n\n\n “How does it tie in with what I\n told you before?”",
"“It started on my home colony,”\n Zarwell explained listlessly. “A\n gang of hoods had taken over the\n government. I helped organize a\n movement to get them out. There\n was some bloodshed, but it went\n quite well. Several months later an\n unofficial envoy from another\n world asked several of us to give\n them a hand on the same kind of\n job. The political conditions there\n were rotten. We went with him.\n Again we were successful. It seems\n I have a kind of genius for that\n sort of thing.”\n\n\n He stretched out his legs and regarded\n them thoughtfully. “I\n learned then the truth of Russell’s\n saying: ‘When the oppressed win\n their freedom they are as oppressive\n as their former masters.’ When\n they went bad, I opposed them.\n This time I failed. But I escaped\n again. I have quite a talent for that\n also.",
"“Who am I?” he asked, very interested\n now. Without attention he\n put his pistol away in a trouser\n pocket.\n\n\n Bergstrom brushed the question\n aside with one hand. “Your name\n makes little difference. You’ve used\n many. But you are an idealist. Your\n killings were necessary to bring\n justice to the places you visited. By\n now you’re almost a legend among\n the human worlds. I’d like to talk\n more with you on that later.”\n\n\n While Zarwell considered, Bergstrom\n pressed his advantage. “One\n more scene might do it,” he said.\n “Should we try again—if you trust\n me, that is?”\n\n\n [p\n 145\n ]",
"“I won’t have any time off again\n until next week end,” Zarwell reminded\n him.\n\n\n “That’s right.” Bergstrom\n thought for a moment. “We\n shouldn’t let this hang too long.\n Could you come here after work\n tomorrow?”\n\n\n “I suppose I could.”\n\n\n “Fine,” Bergstrom said with satisfaction.\n “I’ll admit I’m considerably\n more than casually interested\n in your case by this time.”\nA WORK truck picked Zarwell\n up the next morning and he\n rode with a tech crew to the edge of\n the reclam area. Beside the belt\n bringing ocean muck from the converter\n plant at the seashore his\n bulldozer was waiting.",
"“When this colony was first\n founded,” Johnson began without\n preamble, “the administrative body\n was a governor, and a council of\n twelve. Their successors were to\n be elected biennially. At first they\n were. Then things changed. We\n haven’t had an election now in the\n last twenty-three years. St. Martin’s\n is beginning to prosper. Yet\n the only ones receiving the benefits\n are the rulers. The citizens work\n twelve hours a day. They are poorly\n housed\n , poorly fed, poorly clothed.\n They …”\n\n\n Zarwell found himself not listening\n as Johnson’s voice went on. The\n story was always the same. But why\n did they always try to drag him into\n their troubles?\n\n\n Why hadn’t he chosen some\n other world on which to hide?",
"“Your memory’s back then?”\n\n\n Zarwell nodded.\n\n\n “I’m glad to hear that,” Bergstrom\n assured him. “Now that\n you’re well again I’d like to introduce\n you to a man named Vernon\n Johnson. This world …”\n\n\n Zarwell stopped him with an upraised\n hand. “Good God, man, can’t\n you see the reason for all this? I’m\n tired. I’m trying to quit.”\n\n\n “Quit?” Bergstrom did not quite\n follow him."
],
[
"“Your memory’s back then?”\n\n\n Zarwell nodded.\n\n\n “I’m glad to hear that,” Bergstrom\n assured him. “Now that\n you’re well again I’d like to introduce\n you to a man named Vernon\n Johnson. This world …”\n\n\n Zarwell stopped him with an upraised\n hand. “Good God, man, can’t\n you see the reason for all this? I’m\n tired. I’m trying to quit.”\n\n\n “Quit?” Bergstrom did not quite\n follow him.",
"Zarwell did not answer. His\n memory seemed on the point of\n complete return, and he sat quietly,\n hopefully. However, nothing more\n came and he returned his attention\n to his more immediate problem.\n\n\n Opening a button on his shirt, he\n pulled back a strip of plastic cloth\n just below his rib cage and took\n out a small flat pistol. He held it\n in the palm of his hand. He knew\n now why he always carried it.\n\n\n Bergstrom had his bad moment.\n “You’re not going to …” he began\n at the sight of the gun. He tried\n again. “You must be joking.”\n\n\n “I have very little sense of humor,”\n Zarwell corrected him.\n\n\n “You’d be foolish!”",
"Bergstrom obviously realized\n how close he was to death. Yet\n surprisingly, after the first start,\n he showed little fear. Zarwell had\n thought the man a bit soft, too\n adjusted to a life of ease and some\n prestige to meet danger calmly.\n Curiosity restrained his trigger finger.\n\n\n “Why would I be foolish?” he\n asked. “Your Meninger oath of inviolable\n confidence?”\n\n\n Bergstrom shook his head. “I\n know it’s been broken before. But\n you need me. You’re not through,\n you know. If you killed me you’d\n still have to trust some other\n analyst.”\n\n\n “Is that the best you can do?”",
"Bergstrom did not argue as he\n left.\nRESTLESSNESS drove Zarwell\n from his flat the next day—a\n legal holiday on St. Martin’s. At\n a railed-off lot he stopped and loitered\n in the shadow of an adjacent\n building watching workmen drilling\n an excavation for a new structure.\n\n\n When a man strolled to his side\n and stood watching the workmen,\n he was not surprised. He waited for\n the other to speak.\n\n\n “I’d like to talk to you, if you\n can spare a few minutes,” the\n stranger said.\n\n\n Zarwell turned and studied the\n man without answering. He was\n medium tall, with the body of an\n athlete, though perhaps ten years\n [p\n 147\n ]\n beyond the age of sports. He had\n a manner of contained energy.\n “You’re Johnson?” he asked.\n\n\n The man nodded.",
"Bergstrom was waiting in his office\n when Zarwell arrived that\n evening.\nHE was lying motionless on a\n hard cot, with his eyes closed,\n yet with his every sense sharply\n quickened. Tentatively he tightened\n small muscles in his arms and\n legs. Across his wrists and thighs\n he felt straps binding him to the\n cot.\n\n\n “So that’s our big, bad man,” a\n coarse voice above him observed\n [p\n 143\n ]\n caustically. “He doesn’t look so\n tough now, does he?”\n\n\n “It might have been better to\n kill him right away,” a second, less\n confident voice said. “It’s supposed\n to be impossible to hold him.”\n\n\n “Don’t be stupid. We just do\n what we’re told. We’ll hold him.”\n\n\n “What do you think they’ll do\n with him?”",
"[p\n 141\n ]\n\n Zarwell smiled with mild embarrassment.\n “At least in my dreams.”\n\n\n “Dreams?” Bergstrom’s eyes\n widened in surprise. “Oh, I beg your\n pardon. I must have forgotten to\n explain. This work is so routine to\n me that sometimes I forget it’s all\n new to a patient. Actually what you\n experienced under the drug were\n not dreams. They were recollections\n of real episodes from your\n past.”\n\n\n Zarwell’s expression became\n wary. He watched Bergstrom\n closely. After a minute, however,\n he seemed satisfied, and he let himself\n settle back against the cushion\n of his chair. “I remember nothing\n of what I saw,” he observed.\n\n\n “That’s why you’re here, you\n know,” Bergstrom answered. “To\n help you remember.”\n\n\n “But everything under the drug\n is so …”",
"“No.” Bergstrom was angry now.\n “But use that logical mind you’re\n supposed to have! Scenes before\n this have shown what kind of man\n you are. Just because this last happened\n here on St. Martin’s makes\n little difference. If I was going to\n turn you in to the police, I’d have\n done it before this.”\n\n\n Zarwell debated with himself the\n truth of what the other had said.\n “Why didn’t you turn me in?” he\n asked.\n\n\n “Because you’re no mad-dog\n killer!” Now that the crisis seemed\n to be past, Bergstrom spoke more\n calmly, even allowed himself to\n relax. “You’re still pretty much in\n the fog about yourself. I read more\n in those comanalyses than you did.\n I even know who you are!”\n\n\n Zarwell’s eyebrows raised.",
"Bergstrom shrugged, dismissing\n his strayed thoughts. “I expected\n as much. A quite normal first phase\n of treatment.” He straightened a\n paper on his desk. “I think that will\n be enough for today. Twice in one\n sitting is about all we ever try.\n Otherwise some particular episode\n might cause undue mental stress,\n and set up a block.” He glanced\n down at his appointment pad. “Tomorrow\n at two, then?”\n\n\n Zarwell grunted acknowledgment\n and pushed himself to his\n feet, apparently unaware that his\n shirt clung damply to his body.\nTHE sun was still high when\n Zarwell left the analyst’s office.\n The white marble of the city’s\n buildings shimmered in the afternoon\n heat, squat and austere as\n giant tree trunks, pock-marked and\n gray-mottled with windows. Zarwell\n was careful not to rest his hand\n on the flesh searing surface of the\n stone.",
"Bergstrom’s neat-boned, fair-skinned\n face betrayed no emotion\n other than an introspective stillness\n of his normally alert gaze. “I see\n no connection,” he decided, his\n words once again precise and meticulous.\n “We don’t have enough to\n go on. Do you feel able to try another\n comanalysis this afternoon\n yet?”\n\n\n “I don’t see why not.” Zarwell\n [p\n 137\n ]\n opened the collar of his shirt. The\n day was hot, and the room had no\n air conditioning, still a rare luxury\n on St. Martin’s. The office window\n was open, but it let in no freshness,\n only the mildly rank odor that pervaded\n all the planet’s habitable\n area.\n\n\n “Good.” Bergstrom rose. “The\n serum is quite harmless, John.” He\n maintained a professional diversionary\n chatter as he administered\n the drug. “A scopolamine derivative\n that’s been well tested.”",
"“I won’t have any time off again\n until next week end,” Zarwell reminded\n him.\n\n\n “That’s right.” Bergstrom\n thought for a moment. “We\n shouldn’t let this hang too long.\n Could you come here after work\n tomorrow?”\n\n\n “I suppose I could.”\n\n\n “Fine,” Bergstrom said with satisfaction.\n “I’ll admit I’m considerably\n more than casually interested\n in your case by this time.”\nA WORK truck picked Zarwell\n up the next morning and he\n rode with a tech crew to the edge of\n the reclam area. Beside the belt\n bringing ocean muck from the converter\n plant at the seashore his\n bulldozer was waiting.",
"“Who am I?” he asked, very interested\n now. Without attention he\n put his pistol away in a trouser\n pocket.\n\n\n Bergstrom brushed the question\n aside with one hand. “Your name\n makes little difference. You’ve used\n many. But you are an idealist. Your\n killings were necessary to bring\n justice to the places you visited. By\n now you’re almost a legend among\n the human worlds. I’d like to talk\n more with you on that later.”\n\n\n While Zarwell considered, Bergstrom\n pressed his advantage. “One\n more scene might do it,” he said.\n “Should we try again—if you trust\n me, that is?”\n\n\n [p\n 145\n ]",
"He offered no resistance as they\n reached him.\n\n\n They were not gentle men. A tall\n ruffian, copper-brown face damp\n with perspiration and body oil,\n grabbed him by the jacket and\n slammed him back against the\n lockers. As he shifted his weight\n to keep his footing someone drove\n a fist into his face. He started to\n raise his hands; and a hard flat\n object crashed against the side of\n his skull.\n\n\n The starch went out of his legs.\n“D\n O you make anything out of\n it?” the psychoanalyst Milton\n Bergstrom, asked.\n\n\n John Zarwell shook his head.\n “Did I talk while I was under?”\n\n\n “Oh, yes. You were supposed to.\n That way I follow pretty well what\n you’re reenacting.”\n\n\n “How does it tie in with what I\n told you before?”",
"The floor beneath Zarwell’s feet\n assumed abruptly the near transfluent\n consistency of a damp\n sponge. It rose in a foot-high wave\n and rolled gently toward the far\n wall.\n\n\n Bergstrom continued talking,\n with practiced urbanity. “When\n psychiatry was a less exact science,”\n his voice went on, seeming to come\n from a great distance, “a doctor\n had to spend weeks, sometimes\n months or years interviewing a\n patient. If he was skilled enough,\n he could sort the relevancies from\n the vast amount of chaff. We are\n able now, with the help of the\n serum, to confine our discourses to\n matters cogent to the patient’s\n trouble.”\n\n\n The floor continued its transmutation,\n and Zarwell sank deep into\n viscous depths. “Lie back and relax.\n Don’t …”",
"Zarwell passed a group of\n smaller children playing a desultory\n game of lic-lic for pieces of\n candy and cigarettes. Slowly he\n climbed the stairs of a stone flat.\n He prepared a supper for himself\n and ate it without either enjoyment\n or distaste. He lay down, fully\n clothed, on his bed. The visit to the\n analyst had done nothing to dispel\n his ennui.\n[p\n 139\n ]\n\n\n\n The next morning when Zarwell\n awoke he lay for a moment, unmoving.\n The feeling was there\n again, like a scene waiting only to\n be gazed at directly to be perceived.\n It was as though a great wisdom\n lay at the edge of understanding.\n If he rested quietly it would\n all come to him. Yet always, when\n his mind lost its sleep-induced\n [p\n 140\n ]\n lethargy, the moment of near understanding\n slipped away.",
"Zarwell tried to feel the anger he\n wanted to feel, but somehow it\n would not come. “We have nothing\n to talk about,” was the best he\n could manage.\n\n\n “Then will you just listen? After,\n I’ll leave—if you tell me to.”\n\n\n Against his will he found himself\n liking the man, and wanting at least\n to be courteous. He inclined his\n head toward a curb wastebox with\n a flat top. “Should we sit?”\n\n\n Johnson smiled agreeably and\n they walked over to the box and\n sat down.",
"With the action the perspective\n shifted again. He was watching the\n face of the man he shot jerk and\n twitch, expand and contract. The\n face was unharmed, yet it was no\n longer the same. No longer his own\n features.\n\n\n The stranger face smiled approvingly\n at him.\n“O\n DD,” Bergstrom said.\nHe brought his hands up and joined\n the tips of his fingers against his\n chest. “But it’s another piece in the\n [p\n 138\n ]\n jig-saw. In time it will fit into\n place.” He paused. “It means no\n more to you than the first, I suppose?”\n\n\n “No,” Zarwell answered.\n\n\n He was not a talking man, Bergstrom\n reflected. It was more than\n reticence, however. The man had\n a hard granite core, only partially\n concealed by his present perplexity.\n He was a man who could handle\n himself well in an emergency.",
"“I’m not a professional do-gooder.”\n Zarwell’s tone appealed\n to Bergstrom for understanding. “I\n have only a normal man’s indignation\n at injustice. And now I’ve done\n my share. Yet, wherever I go, the\n word eventually gets out, and I’m\n right back in a fight again. It’s like\n the proverbial monkey on my back.\n I can’t get rid of it.”\n\n\n He rose. “That disguise and\n memory planting were supposed to\n get me out of it. I should have\n known it wouldn’t work. But this\n time I’m not going to be drawn\n back in! You and your Vernon\n Johnson can do your own revolting.\n I’m through!”",
"Zarwell was not the leader of the\n invaders, only a lesser figure in the\n rebellion. But he had played a leading\n part in the planning of the\n strategy that led to the city’s fall.\n The job had been well done.\n\n\n Time passed, without visible\n break in the panorama. Now Zarwell\n was fleeing, pursued by the\n same bearded men who had been\n his comrades before. Still he moved\n with the same firm purpose, vigilant,\n resourceful, and well prepared\n for the eventuality that had befallen.\n He made his escape without\n difficulty.\n\n\n He alighted from a space ship on\n still another world—another shift\n in time—and the atmosphere of\n conflict engulfed him.\n\n\n Weary but resigned he accepted\n it, and did what he had to do …\nBERGSTROM was regarding\nhim with speculative scrutiny.\n “You’ve had quite a past, apparently,”\n he observed.",
"One step more. Taking the syringe\n from his pocket, he plunged\n the needle into his forearm and\n tossed the instrument down a\n waste chute. He took three more\n steps and paused uncertainly.\n\n\n When he looked about him it\n was with the expression of a man\n waking from a vivid dream.\n“Q\n UITE ingenious,” Graves\n murmured admiringly. “You\n had your mind already preconditioned\n for the shot. But why would\n you deliberately give yourself amnesia?”\n\n\n “What better disguise than to\n believe the part you’re playing?”\n\n\n “A good man must have done\n that job on your mind,” Bergstrom\n commented. “I’d have hesitated to\n try it myself. It must have taken a\n lot of trust on your part.”\n\n\n [p\n 146\n ]\n\n “Trust and money,” Zarwell said\n drily.",
"Zarwell made his decision quickly.\n “Go ahead,” he answered.\nALL Zarwell’s attention seemed\n on the cigar he lit as he rode\n down the escalator, but he surveyed\n the terminal carefully over the rim\n of his hand. He spied no suspicious\n loungers.\n\n\n Behind the escalator he groped\n along the floor beneath the lockers\n until he found his key. The briefcase\n was under his arm a minute\n later.\n\n\n In the basement lave he put a\n coin in the pay slot of a private\n compartment and went in.\n\n\n As he zipped open the briefcase\n he surveyed his features in the mirror.\n A small muscle at the corner of\n one eye twitched spasmodically.\n One cheek wore a frozen quarter\n smile. Thirty-six hours under the\n paralysis was longer than advisable.\n The muscles should be rested at\n least every twenty hours.\n\n\n Fortunately his natural features\n would serve as an adequate disguise\n now."
],
[
"Zarwell passed a group of\n smaller children playing a desultory\n game of lic-lic for pieces of\n candy and cigarettes. Slowly he\n climbed the stairs of a stone flat.\n He prepared a supper for himself\n and ate it without either enjoyment\n or distaste. He lay down, fully\n clothed, on his bed. The visit to the\n analyst had done nothing to dispel\n his ennui.\n[p\n 139\n ]\n\n\n\n The next morning when Zarwell\n awoke he lay for a moment, unmoving.\n The feeling was there\n again, like a scene waiting only to\n be gazed at directly to be perceived.\n It was as though a great wisdom\n lay at the edge of understanding.\n If he rested quietly it would\n all come to him. Yet always, when\n his mind lost its sleep-induced\n [p\n 140\n ]\n lethargy, the moment of near understanding\n slipped away.",
"[p\n 141\n ]\n\n Zarwell smiled with mild embarrassment.\n “At least in my dreams.”\n\n\n “Dreams?” Bergstrom’s eyes\n widened in surprise. “Oh, I beg your\n pardon. I must have forgotten to\n explain. This work is so routine to\n me that sometimes I forget it’s all\n new to a patient. Actually what you\n experienced under the drug were\n not dreams. They were recollections\n of real episodes from your\n past.”\n\n\n Zarwell’s expression became\n wary. He watched Bergstrom\n closely. After a minute, however,\n he seemed satisfied, and he let himself\n settle back against the cushion\n of his chair. “I remember nothing\n of what I saw,” he observed.\n\n\n “That’s why you’re here, you\n know,” Bergstrom answered. “To\n help you remember.”\n\n\n “But everything under the drug\n is so …”",
"He offered no resistance as they\n reached him.\n\n\n They were not gentle men. A tall\n ruffian, copper-brown face damp\n with perspiration and body oil,\n grabbed him by the jacket and\n slammed him back against the\n lockers. As he shifted his weight\n to keep his footing someone drove\n a fist into his face. He started to\n raise his hands; and a hard flat\n object crashed against the side of\n his skull.\n\n\n The starch went out of his legs.\n“D\n O you make anything out of\n it?” the psychoanalyst Milton\n Bergstrom, asked.\n\n\n John Zarwell shook his head.\n “Did I talk while I was under?”\n\n\n “Oh, yes. You were supposed to.\n That way I follow pretty well what\n you’re reenacting.”\n\n\n “How does it tie in with what I\n told you before?”",
"The grin faded from the oily face\n as the man stood up. He leaned over\n the cot—and Zarwell’s left hand\n shot up and locked about his throat,\n joined almost immediately by the\n right.\n\n\n The man’s mouth opened and he\n tried to yell as he threw himself\n frantically backward. He clawed at\n the hands about his neck. When\n that failed to break the grip he suddenly\n reversed his weight and\n drove his fist at Zarwell’s head.\n\n\n Zarwell pulled the struggling\n body down against his chest and\n held it there until all agitated\n movement ceased. He sat up then,\n letting the body slide to the floor.\n\n\n The straps about his thighs came\n loose with little effort.\nTHE analyst dabbed at his upper\n lip with a handkerchief. “The\n episodes are beginning to tie together,”\n he said, with an attempt at\n [p\n 144\n ]\n nonchalance. “The next couple\n should do it.”",
"The floor beneath Zarwell’s feet\n assumed abruptly the near transfluent\n consistency of a damp\n sponge. It rose in a foot-high wave\n and rolled gently toward the far\n wall.\n\n\n Bergstrom continued talking,\n with practiced urbanity. “When\n psychiatry was a less exact science,”\n his voice went on, seeming to come\n from a great distance, “a doctor\n had to spend weeks, sometimes\n months or years interviewing a\n patient. If he was skilled enough,\n he could sort the relevancies from\n the vast amount of chaff. We are\n able now, with the help of the\n serum, to confine our discourses to\n matters cogent to the patient’s\n trouble.”\n\n\n The floor continued its transmutation,\n and Zarwell sank deep into\n viscous depths. “Lie back and relax.\n Don’t …”",
"A village was being ravaged.\n Men struggled and died in the\n streets. Zarwell moved among\n them, seldom taking part in the\n individual clashes, yet a moving\n force in the\n conflict\n .\n\n\n The background changed. He\n understood that he was on a different\n world.\n\n\n Here a city burned. Its resistance\n was nearing its end. Zarwell was\n riding a shaggy pony outside a high\n wall surrounding the stricken metropolis.\n He moved in and joined a\n party of short, bearded men, directing\n them as they battered at the\n wall with a huge log mounted on a\n many-wheeled truck.\n\n\n The log broke a breach in the\n concrete and the besiegers charged\n through, carrying back the defenders\n who sought vainly to plug the\n gap. Soon there would be rioting\n in the streets again, plundering and\n killing.",
"“No.” Bergstrom was angry now.\n “But use that logical mind you’re\n supposed to have! Scenes before\n this have shown what kind of man\n you are. Just because this last happened\n here on St. Martin’s makes\n little difference. If I was going to\n turn you in to the police, I’d have\n done it before this.”\n\n\n Zarwell debated with himself the\n truth of what the other had said.\n “Why didn’t you turn me in?” he\n asked.\n\n\n “Because you’re no mad-dog\n killer!” Now that the crisis seemed\n to be past, Bergstrom spoke more\n calmly, even allowed himself to\n relax. “You’re still pretty much in\n the fog about yourself. I read more\n in those comanalyses than you did.\n I even know who you are!”\n\n\n Zarwell’s eyebrows raised.",
"Bergstrom shrugged, dismissing\n his strayed thoughts. “I expected\n as much. A quite normal first phase\n of treatment.” He straightened a\n paper on his desk. “I think that will\n be enough for today. Twice in one\n sitting is about all we ever try.\n Otherwise some particular episode\n might cause undue mental stress,\n and set up a block.” He glanced\n down at his appointment pad. “Tomorrow\n at two, then?”\n\n\n Zarwell grunted acknowledgment\n and pushed himself to his\n feet, apparently unaware that his\n shirt clung damply to his body.\nTHE sun was still high when\n Zarwell left the analyst’s office.\n The white marble of the city’s\n buildings shimmered in the afternoon\n heat, squat and austere as\n giant tree trunks, pock-marked and\n gray-mottled with windows. Zarwell\n was careful not to rest his hand\n on the flesh searing surface of the\n stone.",
"“Haphazard? That’s true. The\n recall episodes are always purely\n random, with no chronological sequence.\n Our problem will be to reassemble\n them in proper order\n later. Or some particular scene may\n trigger a complete memory return.\n\n\n “It is my considered opinion,”\n Bergstrom went on, “that your lost\n memory will turn out to be no ordinary\n amnesia. I believe we will find\n that your mind has been tampered\n with.”\n\n\n “Nothing I’ve seen under the\n drug fits into the past I do remember.”\n\n\n “That’s what makes me so certain,”\n Bergstrom said confidently.\n “You don’t remember what we\n have shown to be true. Conversely\n then, what you think you remember\n must be false. It must have been\n implanted there. But we can go\n into that later. For today I think\n we have done enough. This episode\n was quite prolonged.”",
"Bergstrom’s neat-boned, fair-skinned\n face betrayed no emotion\n other than an introspective stillness\n of his normally alert gaze. “I see\n no connection,” he decided, his\n words once again precise and meticulous.\n “We don’t have enough to\n go on. Do you feel able to try another\n comanalysis this afternoon\n yet?”\n\n\n “I don’t see why not.” Zarwell\n [p\n 137\n ]\n opened the collar of his shirt. The\n day was hot, and the room had no\n air conditioning, still a rare luxury\n on St. Martin’s. The office window\n was open, but it let in no freshness,\n only the mildly rank odor that pervaded\n all the planet’s habitable\n area.\n\n\n “Good.” Bergstrom rose. “The\n serum is quite harmless, John.” He\n maintained a professional diversionary\n chatter as he administered\n the drug. “A scopolamine derivative\n that’s been well tested.”",
"The words tumbled down from\n above. They faded, were gone.\nZARWELL found himself\nstanding on a vast plain. There was\n no sky above, and no horizon in the\n distance. He was in a place without\n space or dimension. There was\n nothing here except himself—and\n the gun that he held in his hand.\n\n\n A weapon beautiful in its efficient\n simplicity.\n\n\n He should know all about the\n instrument, its purpose and workings,\n but he could not bring his\n thoughts into rational focus. His\n forehead creased with his mental\n effort.\n\n\n Abruptly the unreality about\n him shifted perspective. He was\n approaching—not walking, but\n merely shortening the space between\n them—the man who held\n the gun. The man who was himself.\n The other “himself” drifted\n nearer also, as though drawn by a\n mutual attraction.\n\n\n The man with the gun raised his\n weapon and pressed the trigger.",
"Zarwell made his decision quickly.\n “Go ahead,” he answered.\nALL Zarwell’s attention seemed\n on the cigar he lit as he rode\n down the escalator, but he surveyed\n the terminal carefully over the rim\n of his hand. He spied no suspicious\n loungers.\n\n\n Behind the escalator he groped\n along the floor beneath the lockers\n until he found his key. The briefcase\n was under his arm a minute\n later.\n\n\n In the basement lave he put a\n coin in the pay slot of a private\n compartment and went in.\n\n\n As he zipped open the briefcase\n he surveyed his features in the mirror.\n A small muscle at the corner of\n one eye twitched spasmodically.\n One cheek wore a frozen quarter\n smile. Thirty-six hours under the\n paralysis was longer than advisable.\n The muscles should be rested at\n least every twenty hours.\n\n\n Fortunately his natural features\n would serve as an adequate disguise\n now.",
"Zarwell was not the leader of the\n invaders, only a lesser figure in the\n rebellion. But he had played a leading\n part in the planning of the\n strategy that led to the city’s fall.\n The job had been well done.\n\n\n Time passed, without visible\n break in the panorama. Now Zarwell\n was fleeing, pursued by the\n same bearded men who had been\n his comrades before. Still he moved\n with the same firm purpose, vigilant,\n resourceful, and well prepared\n for the eventuality that had befallen.\n He made his escape without\n difficulty.\n\n\n He alighted from a space ship on\n still another world—another shift\n in time—and the atmosphere of\n conflict engulfed him.\n\n\n Weary but resigned he accepted\n it, and did what he had to do …\nBERGSTROM was regarding\nhim with speculative scrutiny.\n “You’ve had quite a past, apparently,”\n he observed.",
"Bergstrom was waiting in his office\n when Zarwell arrived that\n evening.\nHE was lying motionless on a\n hard cot, with his eyes closed,\n yet with his every sense sharply\n quickened. Tentatively he tightened\n small muscles in his arms and\n legs. Across his wrists and thighs\n he felt straps binding him to the\n cot.\n\n\n “So that’s our big, bad man,” a\n coarse voice above him observed\n [p\n 143\n ]\n caustically. “He doesn’t look so\n tough now, does he?”\n\n\n “It might have been better to\n kill him right away,” a second, less\n confident voice said. “It’s supposed\n to be impossible to hold him.”\n\n\n “Don’t be stupid. We just do\n what we’re told. We’ll hold him.”\n\n\n “What do you think they’ll do\n with him?”",
"Zarwell did not answer. His\n memory seemed on the point of\n complete return, and he sat quietly,\n hopefully. However, nothing more\n came and he returned his attention\n to his more immediate problem.\n\n\n Opening a button on his shirt, he\n pulled back a strip of plastic cloth\n just below his rib cage and took\n out a small flat pistol. He held it\n in the palm of his hand. He knew\n now why he always carried it.\n\n\n Bergstrom had his bad moment.\n “You’re not going to …” he began\n at the sight of the gun. He tried\n again. “You must be joking.”\n\n\n “I have very little sense of humor,”\n Zarwell corrected him.\n\n\n “You’d be foolish!”",
"“Your memory’s back then?”\n\n\n Zarwell nodded.\n\n\n “I’m glad to hear that,” Bergstrom\n assured him. “Now that\n you’re well again I’d like to introduce\n you to a man named Vernon\n Johnson. This world …”\n\n\n Zarwell stopped him with an upraised\n hand. “Good God, man, can’t\n you see the reason for all this? I’m\n tired. I’m trying to quit.”\n\n\n “Quit?” Bergstrom did not quite\n follow him.",
"One step more. Taking the syringe\n from his pocket, he plunged\n the needle into his forearm and\n tossed the instrument down a\n waste chute. He took three more\n steps and paused uncertainly.\n\n\n When he looked about him it\n was with the expression of a man\n waking from a vivid dream.\n“Q\n UITE ingenious,” Graves\n murmured admiringly. “You\n had your mind already preconditioned\n for the shot. But why would\n you deliberately give yourself amnesia?”\n\n\n “What better disguise than to\n believe the part you’re playing?”\n\n\n “A good man must have done\n that job on your mind,” Bergstrom\n commented. “I’d have hesitated to\n try it myself. It must have taken a\n lot of trust on your part.”\n\n\n [p\n 146\n ]\n\n “Trust and money,” Zarwell said\n drily.",
"“Who am I?” he asked, very interested\n now. Without attention he\n put his pistol away in a trouser\n pocket.\n\n\n Bergstrom brushed the question\n aside with one hand. “Your name\n makes little difference. You’ve used\n many. But you are an idealist. Your\n killings were necessary to bring\n justice to the places you visited. By\n now you’re almost a legend among\n the human worlds. I’d like to talk\n more with you on that later.”\n\n\n While Zarwell considered, Bergstrom\n pressed his advantage. “One\n more scene might do it,” he said.\n “Should we try again—if you trust\n me, that is?”\n\n\n [p\n 145\n ]",
"The big man turned. “You can\n tell the Chief he’s awake,” he said.\n Zarwell followed his gaze to where\n a younger man, with a blond lock of\n hair on his forehead, stood behind\n him. The youth nodded and went\n out, while the other pulled a chair\n up to the side of Zarwell’s cot.\n\n\n While their attention was away\n from him Zarwell had unobtrusively\n loosened his bonds as much as\n possible with arm leverage. As the\n big man drew his chair nearer, he\n made the hand farthest from him\n tight and compact and worked it\n free of the leather loop. He waited.\n\n\n The big man belched. “You’re\n supposed to be great stuff in a situation\n like this,” he said, his smoke-tan\n face splitting in a grin that revealed\n large square teeth. “How\n about giving me a sample?”\n\n\n “You’re a yellow-livered bastard,”\n Zarwell told him.",
"Bergstrom obviously realized\n how close he was to death. Yet\n surprisingly, after the first start,\n he showed little fear. Zarwell had\n thought the man a bit soft, too\n adjusted to a life of ease and some\n prestige to meet danger calmly.\n Curiosity restrained his trigger finger.\n\n\n “Why would I be foolish?” he\n asked. “Your Meninger oath of inviolable\n confidence?”\n\n\n Bergstrom shook his head. “I\n know it’s been broken before. But\n you need me. You’re not through,\n you know. If you killed me you’d\n still have to trust some other\n analyst.”\n\n\n “Is that the best you can do?”"
],
[
"The reclam crews filled and\n sodded the sterile rock, planted\n binding grasses, grain and trees, and\n diverted rivers to keep it fertile.\n When there were no rivers to divert\n they blasted out springs and lakes\n in the foothills to make their own.\n Biologists developed the necessary\n germ and insect life from what they\n found in the sea. Where that failed,\n they imported microorganisms\n from Earth.\n\n\n Three rubber-tracked crawlers\n picked their way down from the\n mountains until they joined the\n road passing the belt. They were\n loaded with ore that would be\n smelted into metal for depleted\n Earth, or for other colonies short\n of minerals. It was St. Martin’s only\n export thus far.",
"He took his place behind the\n drive wheel and began working dirt\n down between windbreakers anchored\n in the rock. Along a makeshift\n road into the badlands trucks\n brought crushed lime and phosphorus\n to supplement the ocean\n sediment. The progress of life from\n the sea to the land was a mechanical\n [p\n 142\n ]\n process of this growing world.\n\n\n Nearly two hundred years ago,\n when Earth established a colony on\n St. Martin’s, the land surface of the\n planet had been barren. Only its\n seas thrived with animal and vegetable\n life. The necessary machinery\n and technicians had been supplied\n by Earth, and the long struggle began\n to fit the world for human\n needs. When Zarwell arrived, six\n months before, the vitalized area\n already extended three hundred\n miles along the coast, and sixty\n miles inland. And every day the\n progress continued. A large percentage\n of the energy and resources\n of the world were devoted to that\n essential expansion.",
"“I won’t have any time off again\n until next week end,” Zarwell reminded\n him.\n\n\n “That’s right.” Bergstrom\n thought for a moment. “We\n shouldn’t let this hang too long.\n Could you come here after work\n tomorrow?”\n\n\n “I suppose I could.”\n\n\n “Fine,” Bergstrom said with satisfaction.\n “I’ll admit I’m considerably\n more than casually interested\n in your case by this time.”\nA WORK truck picked Zarwell\n up the next morning and he\n rode with a tech crew to the edge of\n the reclam area. Beside the belt\n bringing ocean muck from the converter\n plant at the seashore his\n bulldozer was waiting.",
"Zarwell pulled his sun helmet\n lower, to better guard his hot, dry\n features. The wind blew continuously\n on St. Martin’s, but it furnished\n small relief from the heat.\n After its three-thousand-mile journey\n across scorched sterile rock, it\n sucked the moisture from a man’s\n body, bringing a membrane-shrinking\n dryness to the nostrils as it was\n breathed in. With it came also the\n cloying taste of limestone in a\n worker’s mouth.\n\n\n Zarwell gazed idly about at the\n other laborers. Fully three-quarters\n of them were beri-rabza ridden. A\n cure for the skin fungus had not\n yet been found; the men’s faces\n and hands were scabbed and red.\n The colony had grown to near self-sufficiency,\n would soon have a moderate\n prosperity, yet they still\n lacked adequate medical and research\n facilities.\n\n\n Not all the world’s citizens were\n content.",
"“When this colony was first\n founded,” Johnson began without\n preamble, “the administrative body\n was a governor, and a council of\n twelve. Their successors were to\n be elected biennially. At first they\n were. Then things changed. We\n haven’t had an election now in the\n last twenty-three years. St. Martin’s\n is beginning to prosper. Yet\n the only ones receiving the benefits\n are the rulers. The citizens work\n twelve hours a day. They are poorly\n housed\n , poorly fed, poorly clothed.\n They …”\n\n\n Zarwell found himself not listening\n as Johnson’s voice went on. The\n story was always the same. But why\n did they always try to drag him into\n their troubles?\n\n\n Why hadn’t he chosen some\n other world on which to hide?",
"A village was being ravaged.\n Men struggled and died in the\n streets. Zarwell moved among\n them, seldom taking part in the\n individual clashes, yet a moving\n force in the\n conflict\n .\n\n\n The background changed. He\n understood that he was on a different\n world.\n\n\n Here a city burned. Its resistance\n was nearing its end. Zarwell was\n riding a shaggy pony outside a high\n wall surrounding the stricken metropolis.\n He moved in and joined a\n party of short, bearded men, directing\n them as they battered at the\n wall with a huge log mounted on a\n many-wheeled truck.\n\n\n The log broke a breach in the\n concrete and the besiegers charged\n through, carrying back the defenders\n who sought vainly to plug the\n gap. Soon there would be rioting\n in the streets again, plundering and\n killing.",
"The evening meal hour was approaching\n when he reached the\n Flats, on the way to his apartment.\n The streets of the old section were\n near-deserted. The only sounds he\n heard as he passed were the occasional\n cry of a baby, chronically\n uncomfortable in the day’s heat,\n and the lowing of imported cattle\n waiting in a nearby shed to be\n shipped to the country.\n\n\n All St. Martin’s has a distinctive\n smell, as of an arid dried-out\n swamp, with a faint taint of fish.\n But in the Flats the odor changes.\n Here is the smell of factories, warehouses,\n and trading marts; the smell\n of stale cooking drifting from the\n homes of the laborers and lower\n class techmen who live there.",
"“It started on my home colony,”\n Zarwell explained listlessly. “A\n gang of hoods had taken over the\n government. I helped organize a\n movement to get them out. There\n was some bloodshed, but it went\n quite well. Several months later an\n unofficial envoy from another\n world asked several of us to give\n them a hand on the same kind of\n job. The political conditions there\n were rotten. We went with him.\n Again we were successful. It seems\n I have a kind of genius for that\n sort of thing.”\n\n\n He stretched out his legs and regarded\n them thoughtfully. “I\n learned then the truth of Russell’s\n saying: ‘When the oppressed win\n their freedom they are as oppressive\n as their former masters.’ When\n they went bad, I opposed them.\n This time I failed. But I escaped\n again. I have quite a talent for that\n also.",
"Zarwell was not the leader of the\n invaders, only a lesser figure in the\n rebellion. But he had played a leading\n part in the planning of the\n strategy that led to the city’s fall.\n The job had been well done.\n\n\n Time passed, without visible\n break in the panorama. Now Zarwell\n was fleeing, pursued by the\n same bearded men who had been\n his comrades before. Still he moved\n with the same firm purpose, vigilant,\n resourceful, and well prepared\n for the eventuality that had befallen.\n He made his escape without\n difficulty.\n\n\n He alighted from a space ship on\n still another world—another shift\n in time—and the atmosphere of\n conflict engulfed him.\n\n\n Weary but resigned he accepted\n it, and did what he had to do …\nBERGSTROM was regarding\nhim with speculative scrutiny.\n “You’ve had quite a past, apparently,”\n he observed.",
"“Your memory’s back then?”\n\n\n Zarwell nodded.\n\n\n “I’m glad to hear that,” Bergstrom\n assured him. “Now that\n you’re well again I’d like to introduce\n you to a man named Vernon\n Johnson. This world …”\n\n\n Zarwell stopped him with an upraised\n hand. “Good God, man, can’t\n you see the reason for all this? I’m\n tired. I’m trying to quit.”\n\n\n “Quit?” Bergstrom did not quite\n follow him.",
"The words tumbled down from\n above. They faded, were gone.\nZARWELL found himself\nstanding on a vast plain. There was\n no sky above, and no horizon in the\n distance. He was in a place without\n space or dimension. There was\n nothing here except himself—and\n the gun that he held in his hand.\n\n\n A weapon beautiful in its efficient\n simplicity.\n\n\n He should know all about the\n instrument, its purpose and workings,\n but he could not bring his\n thoughts into rational focus. His\n forehead creased with his mental\n effort.\n\n\n Abruptly the unreality about\n him shifted perspective. He was\n approaching—not walking, but\n merely shortening the space between\n them—the man who held\n the gun. The man who was himself.\n The other “himself” drifted\n nearer also, as though drawn by a\n mutual attraction.\n\n\n The man with the gun raised his\n weapon and pressed the trigger.",
"“Execute him, I suppose,” the\n harsh voice said matter-of-factly.\n “They’re probably just curious to\n see what he looks like first. They’ll\n be disappointed.”\n\n\n Zarwell opened his eyes a slit to\n observe his surroundings.\n\n\n It was a mistake. “He’s out of\n it,” the first speaker said, and Zarwell\n allowed his eyes to open fully.\n\n\n The voice, he saw, belonged to\n the big man who had bruised him\n against the locker at the spaceport.\n Irrelevantly he wondered how he\n knew now that it had been a spaceport.\n\n\n His captor’s broad face jeered\n down at Zarwell. “Have a good\n sleep?” he asked with mock solicitude.\n Zarwell did not deign to acknowledge\n that he heard.",
"The big man turned. “You can\n tell the Chief he’s awake,” he said.\n Zarwell followed his gaze to where\n a younger man, with a blond lock of\n hair on his forehead, stood behind\n him. The youth nodded and went\n out, while the other pulled a chair\n up to the side of Zarwell’s cot.\n\n\n While their attention was away\n from him Zarwell had unobtrusively\n loosened his bonds as much as\n possible with arm leverage. As the\n big man drew his chair nearer, he\n made the hand farthest from him\n tight and compact and worked it\n free of the leather loop. He waited.\n\n\n The big man belched. “You’re\n supposed to be great stuff in a situation\n like this,” he said, his smoke-tan\n face splitting in a grin that revealed\n large square teeth. “How\n about giving me a sample?”\n\n\n “You’re a yellow-livered bastard,”\n Zarwell told him.",
"“Haphazard? That’s true. The\n recall episodes are always purely\n random, with no chronological sequence.\n Our problem will be to reassemble\n them in proper order\n later. Or some particular scene may\n trigger a complete memory return.\n\n\n “It is my considered opinion,”\n Bergstrom went on, “that your lost\n memory will turn out to be no ordinary\n amnesia. I believe we will find\n that your mind has been tampered\n with.”\n\n\n “Nothing I’ve seen under the\n drug fits into the past I do remember.”\n\n\n “That’s what makes me so certain,”\n Bergstrom said confidently.\n “You don’t remember what we\n have shown to be true. Conversely\n then, what you think you remember\n must be false. It must have been\n implanted there. But we can go\n into that later. For today I think\n we have done enough. This episode\n was quite prolonged.”",
"He adjusted the ring setting on\n the pistol-shaped instrument that\n he took from his case, and carefully\n rayed several small areas of\n his face, loosening muscles that had\n been tight too long. He sighed\n gratefully when he finished, massaging\n his cheeks and forehead with\n considerable pleasure. Another\n glance in the mirror satisfied him\n with the changes that had been\n made. He turned to his briefcase\n again and exchanged the gun for\n a small syringe, which he pushed\n into a trouser pocket, and a single-edged\n razor blade.\n\n\n Removing his fiber-cloth jacket\n he slashed it into strips with the\n razor blade and flushed it down the\n disposal bowl. With the sleeves of\n his blouse rolled up he had the\n appearance of a typical workman\n as he strolled from the compartment.\n\n\n Back at the locker he replaced\n the briefcase and, with a wad of\n gum, glued the key to the bottom\n of the locker frame.",
"Bergstrom was waiting in his office\n when Zarwell arrived that\n evening.\nHE was lying motionless on a\n hard cot, with his eyes closed,\n yet with his every sense sharply\n quickened. Tentatively he tightened\n small muscles in his arms and\n legs. Across his wrists and thighs\n he felt straps binding him to the\n cot.\n\n\n “So that’s our big, bad man,” a\n coarse voice above him observed\n [p\n 143\n ]\n caustically. “He doesn’t look so\n tough now, does he?”\n\n\n “It might have been better to\n kill him right away,” a second, less\n confident voice said. “It’s supposed\n to be impossible to hold him.”\n\n\n “Don’t be stupid. We just do\n what we’re told. We’ll hold him.”\n\n\n “What do you think they’ll do\n with him?”",
"“Who am I?” he asked, very interested\n now. Without attention he\n put his pistol away in a trouser\n pocket.\n\n\n Bergstrom brushed the question\n aside with one hand. “Your name\n makes little difference. You’ve used\n many. But you are an idealist. Your\n killings were necessary to bring\n justice to the places you visited. By\n now you’re almost a legend among\n the human worlds. I’d like to talk\n more with you on that later.”\n\n\n While Zarwell considered, Bergstrom\n pressed his advantage. “One\n more scene might do it,” he said.\n “Should we try again—if you trust\n me, that is?”\n\n\n [p\n 145\n ]",
"At the rear of the space was a\n row of lockers for traveler use. He\n slipped a coin into a pay slot,\n opened the zipper on his bag and\n pulled out a flat briefcase. It took\n him only a few seconds to push the\n case into the compartment, lock it\n and slide the key along the floor\n beneath the locker.\n\n\n There was nothing to do after\n that—except wait.\n\n\n The men pursuing him came\n hurtling around the turn in the\n aisle. He kicked his knapsack to\n one side, spreading his feet wide\n with an instinctive motion.\n\n\n Until that instant he had intended\n to fight. Now he swiftly\n reassessed the odds. There were\n five of them, he saw. He should be\n able to incapacitate two or three\n and break out. But the fact that\n they had been expecting him meant\n that others would very probably\n be waiting outside. His best course\n now was to sham ignorance. He\n relaxed.",
"The last question prompted a\n new thought. Just why had he\n chosen St. Martin’s? Was it only a\n coincidence? Or had he,\n subconsciously\n at least, picked this particular\n world? He had always\n considered himself the unwilling\n subject of glib persuaders … but\n mightn’t some inner compulsion of\n his own have put the monkey on his\n back?\n\n\n “… and we need your help.”\n Johnson had finished his speech.\n\n\n Zarwell gazed up at the bright\n sky. He pulled in a long breath,\n and let it out in a sigh.\n\n\n “What are your plans so far?”\n he asked wearily.\n—\nCHARLES V. DE VET",
"Bergstrom’s neat-boned, fair-skinned\n face betrayed no emotion\n other than an introspective stillness\n of his normally alert gaze. “I see\n no connection,” he decided, his\n words once again precise and meticulous.\n “We don’t have enough to\n go on. Do you feel able to try another\n comanalysis this afternoon\n yet?”\n\n\n “I don’t see why not.” Zarwell\n [p\n 137\n ]\n opened the collar of his shirt. The\n day was hot, and the room had no\n air conditioning, still a rare luxury\n on St. Martin’s. The office window\n was open, but it let in no freshness,\n only the mildly rank odor that pervaded\n all the planet’s habitable\n area.\n\n\n “Good.” Bergstrom rose. “The\n serum is quite harmless, John.” He\n maintained a professional diversionary\n chatter as he administered\n the drug. “A scopolamine derivative\n that’s been well tested.”"
]
] |
valid
|
30035
|
[
"What is the tone of the story?",
"What would have happened if Dermott had worn the helmet instead of Casey?",
"Which of the following is not a reason why Dermott makes Casey wear the helmet?",
"How do most of the humans on Earth feel about Dameri Tass’s arrival?",
"What is Dameri Tass so interested in animals?",
"What misconception does Dameri Tass have about Earth that he learns is untrue?",
"What would happen to Dameri Tass if he took Earth’s animals off planet?",
"What causes Dameri Tass’s face’s color to change?",
"What is ironic about Dameri Tass’s visit?",
"Why is Dameri’s interest in horseback riding important?"
] |
[
[
"Foreboding",
"Solemn",
"Cynical",
"Humorous"
],
[
"Dameri Tass would have turned violent and attacked them",
"Dameri Tass would not have spoken with a thick Irish accent",
"Dameri Tass would not have been interested in the horse",
"Dameri Tass would have realized he had landed on an uncivilized planet"
],
[
"He wants to humor the alien while they wait for reinforcements",
"He thinks Casey is the smarter of the two officers and will be able to dismantle the helmet",
"He believes he is making the most efficient decision to protect the citizens of New York State",
"He doesn’t want to wear it himself"
],
[
"They fear he wants to wipe out human civilization",
"They are apathetic to the news of his arrival",
"They are concerned that the Americans will kill him",
"They are eager to learn from him"
],
[
"He wants to befriend the animals because he thinks they will help him find his way home",
"His job is to collect animals from other planets for a zoo",
"He is interested in animals because they are in Casey’s memories",
"He hunts animals from other planets as food"
],
[
"He thinks that Earth is an uncivilized planet",
"He thinks that humans have been trying to contact his planet",
"He thinks that Earth is part of the Galactic League",
"He thinks that horses are the most advanced beings on Earth"
],
[
"He would lose his reputation",
"He would be hailed as a hero",
"President McCord would accuse him of stealing",
"He would feel bad for the animals"
],
[
"The color changes when he is speaking different languages",
"The color changes to camouflage him",
"The color changes based on the emotions he feels",
"The color changes depending on if he is awake or asleep"
],
[
"He came to Earth to collect animals, but he does not leave with any",
"He has only come to the planet to inform them that Galactic League will be destroying it",
"The humans hope he will tell them how to improve their civilization, but he came to the planet by mistake",
"No one can understand what he is saying because he speaks in a heavy Irish accent"
],
[
"It reveals how something that is mundane to one person can be astonishing to another",
"It shows how primitive the alien’s technology is",
"It shows that he is only interested in pack animals",
"It reveals that he views horses as the reason why Earth is still uncivilized"
]
] |
[
4,
2,
2,
4,
2,
3,
1,
3,
3,
1
] |
[
1,
0,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
0
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[
[
"The alien stooped down and\n flicked a switch on the little box.\n It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly\n shrieked and sat down on the\n stubble and grass of the field. \"Begorra,\"\n he yelped, \"I've been murthered!\"\n He tore the cap from\n his head.\n\n\n His companion came running,\n \"What's the matter, Tim?\" he\n shouted.\n\n\n Dameri Tass removed the metal\n cap from his own head. \"Sure, an'\n nothin' is after bein' the matter\n with him,\" he said. \"Evidently the\n bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of\n a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt\n him not at all.\"\n\"You can\n talk!\" Dermott\n blurted, skidding to a stop.",
"He hustled from the rostrum and\n made his way, still surrounded by\n guards, to the door by which he had\n entered. The dog and the cat trotted\n after, undismayed by the furor\n about them.\n\n\n They arrived about four hours\n later at the field on which he'd\n landed, and the alien from space\n hurried toward his craft, still muttering.\n He'd been accompanied by a\n general and by the President, but\n all the way he had refrained from\n speaking.\n\n\n He scurried from the car and\n toward the spacecraft.\n\n\n President McCord said, \"You've\n forgotten your pets. We would be\n glad if you would accept them as—\"",
"\"Hey, hold it,\" Dermott said anxiously.\n He was beginning to feel\n like a character in a shaggy dog\n story.\n\n\n Interest in the horse was ended\n with the sudden arrival of a helicopter.\n It swooped down on the\n field and settled within twenty feet\n of the alien craft. Almost before it\n had touched, the door was flung\n open and the flying windmill disgorged\n two bestarred and efficient-looking\n Army officers.\n\n\n Casey and Dermott snapped them\n a salute.\n\n\n The senior general didn't take\n his eyes from the alien and the\n spacecraft as he spoke, and they\n bugged quite as effectively as had\n those of the patrolmen when they'd\n first arrived on the scene.",
"The patrolmen followed his stare.\n \"It's a horse. What else?\"\n\n\n \"A horse?\"\n\n\n Larry Dermott looked again, just\n to make sure. \"Yeah—not much of\n a horse, but a horse.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically.\n \"And jist what is a horse, if I may\n be so bold as to be askin'?\"\n\n\n \"It's an animal you ride on.\"\n\n\n The alien tore his gaze from the\n animal to look his disbelief at the\n other. \"Are you after meanin' that\n you climb upon the crature's back\n and ride him? Faith now, quit your\n blarney.\"\n\n\n He looked at the horse again,\n then down at his equipment. \"Begorra,\"\n he muttered, \"I'll share the\n kerit helmet with the crature.\"",
"The alien's face faded a light\n blue again. \"Faith, an' I'd almost\n forgotten,\" he said. \"If I'd taken\n a crature from this quarantined\n planet, my name'd be\nnork\n. Keep\n your dog and your kitty.\" He shook\n his head sadly and extracted a\n mouse from a pocket. \"An' this\n amazin' little crature as well.\"\n\n\n They followed him to the spacecraft.\n Just before entering, he spotted\n the bedraggled horse that had\n been present on his landing.\n\n\n A longing expression came over\n his highly colored face. \"Jist one\n thing,\" he said. \"Faith now, were\n they pullin' my leg when they said\n you were after ridin' on the back of\n those things?\"\n\n\n The President looked at the woebegone\n nag. \"It's a horse,\" he said,\n surprised. \"Man has been riding\n them for centuries.\"",
"\"Nonsense!\" the general snapped.\n\n\n Further discussion was interrupted\n by the screaming arrival of\n several motorcycle patrolmen followed\n by three heavily laden patrol\n cars. Overhead, pursuit planes\n zoomed in and began darting about\n nervously above the field.\n\n\n \"Sure, and it's quite a reception\n I'm after gettin',\" Dameri Tass said.\n He yawned. \"But what I'm wantin'\n is a chance to get some sleep. Faith,\n an' I've been awake for almost a\ndecal\n.\"\nDameri Tass\n was hurried, via\n helicopter, to Washington. There\n he disappeared for several days,\n being held incommunicado while\n White House, Pentagon, State Department\n and Congress tried to\n figure out just what to do with him.",
"Excitement, anticipation, blanketed\n the world. Shepherds in Sinkiang,\n multi-millionaires in Switzerland,\n fakirs in Pakistan, gauchos in\n the Argentine were raised to a\n zenith of expectation. Panhandlers\n debated the message to come with\n pedestrians; jinrikisha men argued\n it with their passengers; miners discussed\n it deep beneath the surface;\n pilots argued with their co-pilots\n thousands of feet above.\n\n\n It was the most universally\n awaited event of the ages.",
"Dameri Tass shrugged. \"Faith, an'\n why not? As I was after sayin', I\n shared the kerit helmet with Tim\n Casey.\"\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott glared at him\n unbelievingly. \"You learned the\n language just by sticking that Rube\n Goldberg deal on Tim's head?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, an' why not?\"\n\n\n Dermott muttered, \"And with it\n he has to pick up the corniest\n brogue west of Dublin.\"\n\n\n Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly.\n \"I'm after resentin' that,\n Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way\n we talk in Ireland is—\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing\n to a bedraggled horse that had\n made its way to within fifty feet of\n the vessel. \"Now what could that\n be after bein'?\"",
"Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its\n holster and said, \"Sure, and I'm\n beginning to wonder if it's one of\n ours. No insignia and—\"\n\n\n A circular door slid open at that\n point and Dameri Tass stepped out,\n yawning. He spotted them, smiled\n and said, \"Glork.\"\n\n\n They gaped at him.\n\n\n \"Glork is right,\" Dermott swallowed.\n\n\n Tim Casey closed his mouth with\n an effort. \"Do you mind the color\n of his face?\" he blurted.\n\n\n \"How could I help it?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed\n pink hand down his purplish countenance\n and yawned again. \"Gorra\n manigan horp soratium,\" he said.",
"\"I'm Major General Browning,\"\n he rapped. \"I want a police cordon\n thrown up around this, er, vessel.\n No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody\n without my permission. As soon as\n Army personnel arrives, we'll take\n over completely.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Larry Dermott said. \"I\n just got a report on the radio that\n the governor is on his way, sir. How\n about him?\"\n\n\n The general muttered something\n under his breath. Then, \"When the\n governor arrives, let me know;\n otherwise, nobody gets through!\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass said, \"Faith, and\n what goes on?\"\n\n\n The general's eyes bugged still\n further. \"\nHe talks!\n\" he accused.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Dermott said. \"He\n had some kind of a machine. He\n put it over Tim's head and seconds\n later he could talk.\"",
"Tim Casey closed his eyes and\n groaned. \"Humor him, he's after\n sayin'. Orders it is.\" He shouted\n back, \"Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's\n in technicolor? Begorra, he looks\n like a man from Mars.\"\n\n\n \"That's what they think,\" Larry\n yelled, \"and the governor is on his\n way. We're to do everything possible\n short of violence to keep this\n character here. Humor him, Tim!\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass\n snapped, pushing the cap into\n Casey's reluctant hands.\n\n\n Muttering his protests, Casey\n lifted it gingerly and placed it on\n his head. Not feeling any immediate\n effect, he said, \"There, 'tis satisfied\n ye are now, I'm supposin'.\"",
"The Secretary General sighed\n deeply. \"Just what\ndid\nhe do?\"\n\n\n \"The Secret Service reports he\n spent the day whistling Mother Machree\n and playing with his dog, cat\n and mouse.\"\n\n\n \"Dog, cat and mouse? I say!\"\n blurted Sir Alfred.\n\n\n The President was defensive. \"He\n had to have some occupation, and\n he seems to be particularly interested\n in our animal life. He wanted\n a horse but compromised for the\n others. I understand he insists all\n three of them come with him wherever\n he goes.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we knew what he was\n going to say,\" Andersen worried.\n\n\n \"Here he comes,\" said Sir Alfred.\n\n\n Surrounded by F.B.I. men,\n Dameri Tass was ushered to the\n speaker's stand. He had a kitten in\n his arms; a Scotty followed him.",
"The alien frowned worriedly.\n \"Sure,\" he said, \"and what kin all\n this be? Is it some ordinance I've\n been after breakin'?\"\n\n\n McCord, Sir Alfred and Andersen\n hastened to reassure him and\n made him comfortable in a chair.\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen faced the\n thousands in the audience and held\n up his hands, but it was ten minutes\n before he was able to quiet the\n cheering, stamping delegates from\n all Earth.\n\n\n Finally: \"Fellow Terrans, I shall\n not take your time for a lengthy\n introduction of the envoy from the\n stars. I will only say that, without\n doubt, this is the most important\n moment in the history of the human\n race. We will now hear from the\n first being to come to Earth from\n another world.\"",
"A dull roar was beginning to\n emanate from the thousands gathered\n in the tremendous hall, murmuring,\n questioning, disbelieving.\nViljalmar Andersen\n felt that\n he must say something. He extended\n a detaining hand. \"Now you\n are here,\" he said urgently, \"even\n though by mistake, before you go\n can't you give us some brief word?\n Our world is in chaos. Many of us\n have lost faith. Perhaps ...\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass shook off the restraining\n hand. \"Do I look daft?\n Begorry, I should have been\n a-knowin' something was queer. All\n your weapons and your strange\n ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised\n if ye hadn't yet established\n a planet-wide government. Sure,\n an' I'll go still further. Ye probably\n still have wars on this benighted\n world. No wonder it is ye\n haven't been invited to join the\n Galactic League an' take your place\n among the civilized planets.\"",
"And nine-tenths of the population\n of Earth stood ready and willing\n to be guided. The other tenth\n liked things as they were and were\n quite convinced that the space\n envoy would upset their applecarts.\nViljalmar Andersen\n , Secretary-General\n of the U.N., was to\n introduce the space emissary. \"Can\n you give me an idea at all of what\n he is like?\" he asked nervously.\n\n\n President McCord was as upset\n as the Dane. He shrugged in agitation.\n \"I know almost as little as\n you do.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred Oxford protested, \"But\n my dear chap, you've had him for\n almost two weeks. Certainly in that\n time—\"",
"Trained to grasp a situation and\n immediately respond in manner best\n suited to protect the welfare of the\n people of New York State, Dermott\n cleared his throat and said, \"Tim,\n take over while I report.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Casey protested, but his\n fellow minion had left.\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass told\n Casey, holding out the metal cap.\n\n\n \"Faith, an' do I look balmy?\"\n Casey told him. \"I wouldn't be\n puttin' that dingus on my head for\n all the colleens in Ireland.\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" the stranger said\n impatiently.\n\n\n \"Bejasus,\" Casey snorted, \"ye\n can't—\"\n\n\n Dermott called from the car,\n \"Tim, the captain says to humor\n this guy. We're to keep him here\n until the officials arrive.\"",
"The President snapped back,\n \"You probably won't believe this,\n but he's been asleep until yesterday.\n When he first arrived he told us he\n hadn't slept for a\ndecal\n, whatever\n that is; so we held off our discussion\n with him until morning. Well—he\n didn't awaken in the morning,\n nor the next. Six days later, fearing\n something was wrong we woke\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\" Sir Alfred\n asked.\n\n\n The President showed embarrassment.\n \"He used some rather ripe\n Irish profanity on us, rolled over,\n and went back to sleep.\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen asked, \"Well,\n what happened yesterday?\"\n\n\n \"We actually haven't had time to\n question him. Among other things,\n there's been some controversy about\n whose jurisdiction he comes under.\n The State Department claims the\n Army shouldn't—\"",
"\"Cushlamachree,\" Dameri Tass\n moaned. \"I've gone and put me\n foot in it again. I'll be after getting\nkert\nfor this.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred was on his feet. \"I\n don't understand! Do you mean you\n aren't an envoy from another\n planet?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass held his head in his\n hands and groaned. \"An envoy, he's\n sayin', and meself only a second-rate\n collector of specimens for the Carthis\n zoo.\"\n\n\n He straightened and started off\n the speaker's stand. \"Sure, an' I\n must blast off immediately.\"\n\n\n Things were moving fast for\n President McCord but already an\n edge of relief was manifesting itself.\n Taking the initiative, he said, \"Of\n course, of course, if that is your\n desire.\" He signaled to the bodyguard\n who had accompanied the\n alien to the assemblage.",
"Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman\n Casey shot stares at each other.\n \"'Tis double talk he's after givin'\n us,\" Casey said.\n\n\n Dameri Tass frowned. \"Harama?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Larry Dermott pushed his cap to\n the back of his head. \"That doesn't\n sound like any language I've even\nheard\nabout.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass grimaced, turned\n and reentered his spacecraft to\n emerge in half a minute with his\n hands full of contraption. He held\n a box-like arrangement under his\n left arm; in his right hand were two\n metal caps connected to the box\n by wires.\n\n\n While the patrolmen watched\n him, he set the box on the ground,\n twirled two dials and put one of the\n caps on his head. He offered the\n other to Larry Dermott; his desire\n was obvious.",
"Shure and begorra, it was a great day for the Earth! The\n first envoy from another world was about to speak—that\n is, if he could forget that horse for a minute....\noff course\nBy Mack Reynolds\nIllustrated by Kelly Freas\nFirst on\n the scene were Larry\n Dermott and Tim Casey of the\n State Highway Patrol. They assumed\n they were witnessing the\n crash of a new type of Air Force\n plane and slipped and skidded desperately\n across the field to within\n thirty feet of the strange craft, only\n to discover that the landing had\n been made without accident.\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott shook his\n head. \"They're gettin' queerer looking\n every year. Get a load of it—no\n wheels, no propeller, no cockpit.\"\n\n\n They left the car and made their\n way toward the strange egg-shaped\n vessel."
],
[
"Trained to grasp a situation and\n immediately respond in manner best\n suited to protect the welfare of the\n people of New York State, Dermott\n cleared his throat and said, \"Tim,\n take over while I report.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Casey protested, but his\n fellow minion had left.\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass told\n Casey, holding out the metal cap.\n\n\n \"Faith, an' do I look balmy?\"\n Casey told him. \"I wouldn't be\n puttin' that dingus on my head for\n all the colleens in Ireland.\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" the stranger said\n impatiently.\n\n\n \"Bejasus,\" Casey snorted, \"ye\n can't—\"\n\n\n Dermott called from the car,\n \"Tim, the captain says to humor\n this guy. We're to keep him here\n until the officials arrive.\"",
"Tim Casey closed his eyes and\n groaned. \"Humor him, he's after\n sayin'. Orders it is.\" He shouted\n back, \"Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's\n in technicolor? Begorra, he looks\n like a man from Mars.\"\n\n\n \"That's what they think,\" Larry\n yelled, \"and the governor is on his\n way. We're to do everything possible\n short of violence to keep this\n character here. Humor him, Tim!\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass\n snapped, pushing the cap into\n Casey's reluctant hands.\n\n\n Muttering his protests, Casey\n lifted it gingerly and placed it on\n his head. Not feeling any immediate\n effect, he said, \"There, 'tis satisfied\n ye are now, I'm supposin'.\"",
"The alien stooped down and\n flicked a switch on the little box.\n It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly\n shrieked and sat down on the\n stubble and grass of the field. \"Begorra,\"\n he yelped, \"I've been murthered!\"\n He tore the cap from\n his head.\n\n\n His companion came running,\n \"What's the matter, Tim?\" he\n shouted.\n\n\n Dameri Tass removed the metal\n cap from his own head. \"Sure, an'\n nothin' is after bein' the matter\n with him,\" he said. \"Evidently the\n bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of\n a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt\n him not at all.\"\n\"You can\n talk!\" Dermott\n blurted, skidding to a stop.",
"Dameri Tass shrugged. \"Faith, an'\n why not? As I was after sayin', I\n shared the kerit helmet with Tim\n Casey.\"\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott glared at him\n unbelievingly. \"You learned the\n language just by sticking that Rube\n Goldberg deal on Tim's head?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, an' why not?\"\n\n\n Dermott muttered, \"And with it\n he has to pick up the corniest\n brogue west of Dublin.\"\n\n\n Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly.\n \"I'm after resentin' that,\n Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way\n we talk in Ireland is—\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing\n to a bedraggled horse that had\n made its way to within fifty feet of\n the vessel. \"Now what could that\n be after bein'?\"",
"Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its\n holster and said, \"Sure, and I'm\n beginning to wonder if it's one of\n ours. No insignia and—\"\n\n\n A circular door slid open at that\n point and Dameri Tass stepped out,\n yawning. He spotted them, smiled\n and said, \"Glork.\"\n\n\n They gaped at him.\n\n\n \"Glork is right,\" Dermott swallowed.\n\n\n Tim Casey closed his mouth with\n an effort. \"Do you mind the color\n of his face?\" he blurted.\n\n\n \"How could I help it?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed\n pink hand down his purplish countenance\n and yawned again. \"Gorra\n manigan horp soratium,\" he said.",
"Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman\n Casey shot stares at each other.\n \"'Tis double talk he's after givin'\n us,\" Casey said.\n\n\n Dameri Tass frowned. \"Harama?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Larry Dermott pushed his cap to\n the back of his head. \"That doesn't\n sound like any language I've even\nheard\nabout.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass grimaced, turned\n and reentered his spacecraft to\n emerge in half a minute with his\n hands full of contraption. He held\n a box-like arrangement under his\n left arm; in his right hand were two\n metal caps connected to the box\n by wires.\n\n\n While the patrolmen watched\n him, he set the box on the ground,\n twirled two dials and put one of the\n caps on his head. He offered the\n other to Larry Dermott; his desire\n was obvious.",
"\"Hey, hold it,\" Dermott said anxiously.\n He was beginning to feel\n like a character in a shaggy dog\n story.\n\n\n Interest in the horse was ended\n with the sudden arrival of a helicopter.\n It swooped down on the\n field and settled within twenty feet\n of the alien craft. Almost before it\n had touched, the door was flung\n open and the flying windmill disgorged\n two bestarred and efficient-looking\n Army officers.\n\n\n Casey and Dermott snapped them\n a salute.\n\n\n The senior general didn't take\n his eyes from the alien and the\n spacecraft as he spoke, and they\n bugged quite as effectively as had\n those of the patrolmen when they'd\n first arrived on the scene.",
"\"Nonsense!\" the general snapped.\n\n\n Further discussion was interrupted\n by the screaming arrival of\n several motorcycle patrolmen followed\n by three heavily laden patrol\n cars. Overhead, pursuit planes\n zoomed in and began darting about\n nervously above the field.\n\n\n \"Sure, and it's quite a reception\n I'm after gettin',\" Dameri Tass said.\n He yawned. \"But what I'm wantin'\n is a chance to get some sleep. Faith,\n an' I've been awake for almost a\ndecal\n.\"\nDameri Tass\n was hurried, via\n helicopter, to Washington. There\n he disappeared for several days,\n being held incommunicado while\n White House, Pentagon, State Department\n and Congress tried to\n figure out just what to do with him.",
"The patrolmen followed his stare.\n \"It's a horse. What else?\"\n\n\n \"A horse?\"\n\n\n Larry Dermott looked again, just\n to make sure. \"Yeah—not much of\n a horse, but a horse.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically.\n \"And jist what is a horse, if I may\n be so bold as to be askin'?\"\n\n\n \"It's an animal you ride on.\"\n\n\n The alien tore his gaze from the\n animal to look his disbelief at the\n other. \"Are you after meanin' that\n you climb upon the crature's back\n and ride him? Faith now, quit your\n blarney.\"\n\n\n He looked at the horse again,\n then down at his equipment. \"Begorra,\"\n he muttered, \"I'll share the\n kerit helmet with the crature.\"",
"\"I'm Major General Browning,\"\n he rapped. \"I want a police cordon\n thrown up around this, er, vessel.\n No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody\n without my permission. As soon as\n Army personnel arrives, we'll take\n over completely.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Larry Dermott said. \"I\n just got a report on the radio that\n the governor is on his way, sir. How\n about him?\"\n\n\n The general muttered something\n under his breath. Then, \"When the\n governor arrives, let me know;\n otherwise, nobody gets through!\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass said, \"Faith, and\n what goes on?\"\n\n\n The general's eyes bugged still\n further. \"\nHe talks!\n\" he accused.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Dermott said. \"He\n had some kind of a machine. He\n put it over Tim's head and seconds\n later he could talk.\"",
"Shure and begorra, it was a great day for the Earth! The\n first envoy from another world was about to speak—that\n is, if he could forget that horse for a minute....\noff course\nBy Mack Reynolds\nIllustrated by Kelly Freas\nFirst on\n the scene were Larry\n Dermott and Tim Casey of the\n State Highway Patrol. They assumed\n they were witnessing the\n crash of a new type of Air Force\n plane and slipped and skidded desperately\n across the field to within\n thirty feet of the strange craft, only\n to discover that the landing had\n been made without accident.\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott shook his\n head. \"They're gettin' queerer looking\n every year. Get a load of it—no\n wheels, no propeller, no cockpit.\"\n\n\n They left the car and made their\n way toward the strange egg-shaped\n vessel.",
"\"Cushlamachree,\" Dameri Tass\n moaned. \"I've gone and put me\n foot in it again. I'll be after getting\nkert\nfor this.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred was on his feet. \"I\n don't understand! Do you mean you\n aren't an envoy from another\n planet?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass held his head in his\n hands and groaned. \"An envoy, he's\n sayin', and meself only a second-rate\n collector of specimens for the Carthis\n zoo.\"\n\n\n He straightened and started off\n the speaker's stand. \"Sure, an' I\n must blast off immediately.\"\n\n\n Things were moving fast for\n President McCord but already an\n edge of relief was manifesting itself.\n Taking the initiative, he said, \"Of\n course, of course, if that is your\n desire.\" He signaled to the bodyguard\n who had accompanied the\n alien to the assemblage.",
"The Secretary General sighed\n deeply. \"Just what\ndid\nhe do?\"\n\n\n \"The Secret Service reports he\n spent the day whistling Mother Machree\n and playing with his dog, cat\n and mouse.\"\n\n\n \"Dog, cat and mouse? I say!\"\n blurted Sir Alfred.\n\n\n The President was defensive. \"He\n had to have some occupation, and\n he seems to be particularly interested\n in our animal life. He wanted\n a horse but compromised for the\n others. I understand he insists all\n three of them come with him wherever\n he goes.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we knew what he was\n going to say,\" Andersen worried.\n\n\n \"Here he comes,\" said Sir Alfred.\n\n\n Surrounded by F.B.I. men,\n Dameri Tass was ushered to the\n speaker's stand. He had a kitten in\n his arms; a Scotty followed him.",
"Dameri Tass shook his head.\n \"Sure, an' 'twould've been my\n makin' if I could've taken one back\n to Carthis.\" He entered his vessel.\n\n\n The others drew back, out of\n range of the expected blast, and\n watched, each with his own\n thoughts, as the first visitor from\n space hurriedly left Earth.\n... THE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nIf Worlds of Science Fiction\nJanuary 1954.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"He turned and gestured to Dameri\n Tass who hadn't been paying\n overmuch attention to the chairman\n in view of some dog and cat\n hostilities that had been developing\n about his feet.\n\n\n But now the alien's purplish face\n faded to a light blue. He stood and\n said hoarsely. \"Faith, an' what was\n that last you said?\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen repeated,\n \"We will now hear from the first\n being ever to come to Earth from\n another world.\"\n\n\n The face of the alien went a\n lighter blue. \"Sure, an' ye wouldn't\n jist be frightenin' a body, would\n ye? You don't mean to tell me this\n planet isn't after bein' a member of\n the Galactic League?\"\n\n\n Andersen's face was blank. \"Galactic\n League?\"",
"The alien's face faded a light\n blue again. \"Faith, an' I'd almost\n forgotten,\" he said. \"If I'd taken\n a crature from this quarantined\n planet, my name'd be\nnork\n. Keep\n your dog and your kitty.\" He shook\n his head sadly and extracted a\n mouse from a pocket. \"An' this\n amazin' little crature as well.\"\n\n\n They followed him to the spacecraft.\n Just before entering, he spotted\n the bedraggled horse that had\n been present on his landing.\n\n\n A longing expression came over\n his highly colored face. \"Jist one\n thing,\" he said. \"Faith now, were\n they pullin' my leg when they said\n you were after ridin' on the back of\n those things?\"\n\n\n The President looked at the woebegone\n nag. \"It's a horse,\" he said,\n surprised. \"Man has been riding\n them for centuries.\"",
"The President snapped back,\n \"You probably won't believe this,\n but he's been asleep until yesterday.\n When he first arrived he told us he\n hadn't slept for a\ndecal\n, whatever\n that is; so we held off our discussion\n with him until morning. Well—he\n didn't awaken in the morning,\n nor the next. Six days later, fearing\n something was wrong we woke\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\" Sir Alfred\n asked.\n\n\n The President showed embarrassment.\n \"He used some rather ripe\n Irish profanity on us, rolled over,\n and went back to sleep.\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen asked, \"Well,\n what happened yesterday?\"\n\n\n \"We actually haven't had time to\n question him. Among other things,\n there's been some controversy about\n whose jurisdiction he comes under.\n The State Department claims the\n Army shouldn't—\"",
"A dull roar was beginning to\n emanate from the thousands gathered\n in the tremendous hall, murmuring,\n questioning, disbelieving.\nViljalmar Andersen\n felt that\n he must say something. He extended\n a detaining hand. \"Now you\n are here,\" he said urgently, \"even\n though by mistake, before you go\n can't you give us some brief word?\n Our world is in chaos. Many of us\n have lost faith. Perhaps ...\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass shook off the restraining\n hand. \"Do I look daft?\n Begorry, I should have been\n a-knowin' something was queer. All\n your weapons and your strange\n ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised\n if ye hadn't yet established\n a planet-wide government. Sure,\n an' I'll go still further. Ye probably\n still have wars on this benighted\n world. No wonder it is ye\n haven't been invited to join the\n Galactic League an' take your place\n among the civilized planets.\"",
"He hustled from the rostrum and\n made his way, still surrounded by\n guards, to the door by which he had\n entered. The dog and the cat trotted\n after, undismayed by the furor\n about them.\n\n\n They arrived about four hours\n later at the field on which he'd\n landed, and the alien from space\n hurried toward his craft, still muttering.\n He'd been accompanied by a\n general and by the President, but\n all the way he had refrained from\n speaking.\n\n\n He scurried from the car and\n toward the spacecraft.\n\n\n President McCord said, \"You've\n forgotten your pets. We would be\n glad if you would accept them as—\"",
"By the time the delegates from\n every nation, tribe, religion, class,\n color, and race had gathered in\n New York to receive the message\n from the stars, the majority of\n Earth had decided that Dameri\n Tass was the plenipotentiary of a\n super-civilization which had been\n viewing developments on this planet\n with misgivings. It was thought\n this other civilization had advanced\n greatly beyond Earth's and that the\n problems besetting us—social, economic,\n scientific—had been solved\n by the super-civilization. Obviously,\n then, Dameri Tass had come, an\n advisor from a benevolent and\n friendly people, to guide the world\n aright."
],
[
"Trained to grasp a situation and\n immediately respond in manner best\n suited to protect the welfare of the\n people of New York State, Dermott\n cleared his throat and said, \"Tim,\n take over while I report.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Casey protested, but his\n fellow minion had left.\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass told\n Casey, holding out the metal cap.\n\n\n \"Faith, an' do I look balmy?\"\n Casey told him. \"I wouldn't be\n puttin' that dingus on my head for\n all the colleens in Ireland.\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" the stranger said\n impatiently.\n\n\n \"Bejasus,\" Casey snorted, \"ye\n can't—\"\n\n\n Dermott called from the car,\n \"Tim, the captain says to humor\n this guy. We're to keep him here\n until the officials arrive.\"",
"Tim Casey closed his eyes and\n groaned. \"Humor him, he's after\n sayin'. Orders it is.\" He shouted\n back, \"Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's\n in technicolor? Begorra, he looks\n like a man from Mars.\"\n\n\n \"That's what they think,\" Larry\n yelled, \"and the governor is on his\n way. We're to do everything possible\n short of violence to keep this\n character here. Humor him, Tim!\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass\n snapped, pushing the cap into\n Casey's reluctant hands.\n\n\n Muttering his protests, Casey\n lifted it gingerly and placed it on\n his head. Not feeling any immediate\n effect, he said, \"There, 'tis satisfied\n ye are now, I'm supposin'.\"",
"The alien stooped down and\n flicked a switch on the little box.\n It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly\n shrieked and sat down on the\n stubble and grass of the field. \"Begorra,\"\n he yelped, \"I've been murthered!\"\n He tore the cap from\n his head.\n\n\n His companion came running,\n \"What's the matter, Tim?\" he\n shouted.\n\n\n Dameri Tass removed the metal\n cap from his own head. \"Sure, an'\n nothin' is after bein' the matter\n with him,\" he said. \"Evidently the\n bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of\n a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt\n him not at all.\"\n\"You can\n talk!\" Dermott\n blurted, skidding to a stop.",
"Dameri Tass shrugged. \"Faith, an'\n why not? As I was after sayin', I\n shared the kerit helmet with Tim\n Casey.\"\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott glared at him\n unbelievingly. \"You learned the\n language just by sticking that Rube\n Goldberg deal on Tim's head?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, an' why not?\"\n\n\n Dermott muttered, \"And with it\n he has to pick up the corniest\n brogue west of Dublin.\"\n\n\n Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly.\n \"I'm after resentin' that,\n Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way\n we talk in Ireland is—\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing\n to a bedraggled horse that had\n made its way to within fifty feet of\n the vessel. \"Now what could that\n be after bein'?\"",
"Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman\n Casey shot stares at each other.\n \"'Tis double talk he's after givin'\n us,\" Casey said.\n\n\n Dameri Tass frowned. \"Harama?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Larry Dermott pushed his cap to\n the back of his head. \"That doesn't\n sound like any language I've even\nheard\nabout.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass grimaced, turned\n and reentered his spacecraft to\n emerge in half a minute with his\n hands full of contraption. He held\n a box-like arrangement under his\n left arm; in his right hand were two\n metal caps connected to the box\n by wires.\n\n\n While the patrolmen watched\n him, he set the box on the ground,\n twirled two dials and put one of the\n caps on his head. He offered the\n other to Larry Dermott; his desire\n was obvious.",
"Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its\n holster and said, \"Sure, and I'm\n beginning to wonder if it's one of\n ours. No insignia and—\"\n\n\n A circular door slid open at that\n point and Dameri Tass stepped out,\n yawning. He spotted them, smiled\n and said, \"Glork.\"\n\n\n They gaped at him.\n\n\n \"Glork is right,\" Dermott swallowed.\n\n\n Tim Casey closed his mouth with\n an effort. \"Do you mind the color\n of his face?\" he blurted.\n\n\n \"How could I help it?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed\n pink hand down his purplish countenance\n and yawned again. \"Gorra\n manigan horp soratium,\" he said.",
"\"Hey, hold it,\" Dermott said anxiously.\n He was beginning to feel\n like a character in a shaggy dog\n story.\n\n\n Interest in the horse was ended\n with the sudden arrival of a helicopter.\n It swooped down on the\n field and settled within twenty feet\n of the alien craft. Almost before it\n had touched, the door was flung\n open and the flying windmill disgorged\n two bestarred and efficient-looking\n Army officers.\n\n\n Casey and Dermott snapped them\n a salute.\n\n\n The senior general didn't take\n his eyes from the alien and the\n spacecraft as he spoke, and they\n bugged quite as effectively as had\n those of the patrolmen when they'd\n first arrived on the scene.",
"The patrolmen followed his stare.\n \"It's a horse. What else?\"\n\n\n \"A horse?\"\n\n\n Larry Dermott looked again, just\n to make sure. \"Yeah—not much of\n a horse, but a horse.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically.\n \"And jist what is a horse, if I may\n be so bold as to be askin'?\"\n\n\n \"It's an animal you ride on.\"\n\n\n The alien tore his gaze from the\n animal to look his disbelief at the\n other. \"Are you after meanin' that\n you climb upon the crature's back\n and ride him? Faith now, quit your\n blarney.\"\n\n\n He looked at the horse again,\n then down at his equipment. \"Begorra,\"\n he muttered, \"I'll share the\n kerit helmet with the crature.\"",
"\"Nonsense!\" the general snapped.\n\n\n Further discussion was interrupted\n by the screaming arrival of\n several motorcycle patrolmen followed\n by three heavily laden patrol\n cars. Overhead, pursuit planes\n zoomed in and began darting about\n nervously above the field.\n\n\n \"Sure, and it's quite a reception\n I'm after gettin',\" Dameri Tass said.\n He yawned. \"But what I'm wantin'\n is a chance to get some sleep. Faith,\n an' I've been awake for almost a\ndecal\n.\"\nDameri Tass\n was hurried, via\n helicopter, to Washington. There\n he disappeared for several days,\n being held incommunicado while\n White House, Pentagon, State Department\n and Congress tried to\n figure out just what to do with him.",
"\"I'm Major General Browning,\"\n he rapped. \"I want a police cordon\n thrown up around this, er, vessel.\n No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody\n without my permission. As soon as\n Army personnel arrives, we'll take\n over completely.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Larry Dermott said. \"I\n just got a report on the radio that\n the governor is on his way, sir. How\n about him?\"\n\n\n The general muttered something\n under his breath. Then, \"When the\n governor arrives, let me know;\n otherwise, nobody gets through!\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass said, \"Faith, and\n what goes on?\"\n\n\n The general's eyes bugged still\n further. \"\nHe talks!\n\" he accused.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Dermott said. \"He\n had some kind of a machine. He\n put it over Tim's head and seconds\n later he could talk.\"",
"Shure and begorra, it was a great day for the Earth! The\n first envoy from another world was about to speak—that\n is, if he could forget that horse for a minute....\noff course\nBy Mack Reynolds\nIllustrated by Kelly Freas\nFirst on\n the scene were Larry\n Dermott and Tim Casey of the\n State Highway Patrol. They assumed\n they were witnessing the\n crash of a new type of Air Force\n plane and slipped and skidded desperately\n across the field to within\n thirty feet of the strange craft, only\n to discover that the landing had\n been made without accident.\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott shook his\n head. \"They're gettin' queerer looking\n every year. Get a load of it—no\n wheels, no propeller, no cockpit.\"\n\n\n They left the car and made their\n way toward the strange egg-shaped\n vessel.",
"\"Cushlamachree,\" Dameri Tass\n moaned. \"I've gone and put me\n foot in it again. I'll be after getting\nkert\nfor this.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred was on his feet. \"I\n don't understand! Do you mean you\n aren't an envoy from another\n planet?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass held his head in his\n hands and groaned. \"An envoy, he's\n sayin', and meself only a second-rate\n collector of specimens for the Carthis\n zoo.\"\n\n\n He straightened and started off\n the speaker's stand. \"Sure, an' I\n must blast off immediately.\"\n\n\n Things were moving fast for\n President McCord but already an\n edge of relief was manifesting itself.\n Taking the initiative, he said, \"Of\n course, of course, if that is your\n desire.\" He signaled to the bodyguard\n who had accompanied the\n alien to the assemblage.",
"The Secretary General sighed\n deeply. \"Just what\ndid\nhe do?\"\n\n\n \"The Secret Service reports he\n spent the day whistling Mother Machree\n and playing with his dog, cat\n and mouse.\"\n\n\n \"Dog, cat and mouse? I say!\"\n blurted Sir Alfred.\n\n\n The President was defensive. \"He\n had to have some occupation, and\n he seems to be particularly interested\n in our animal life. He wanted\n a horse but compromised for the\n others. I understand he insists all\n three of them come with him wherever\n he goes.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we knew what he was\n going to say,\" Andersen worried.\n\n\n \"Here he comes,\" said Sir Alfred.\n\n\n Surrounded by F.B.I. men,\n Dameri Tass was ushered to the\n speaker's stand. He had a kitten in\n his arms; a Scotty followed him.",
"He turned and gestured to Dameri\n Tass who hadn't been paying\n overmuch attention to the chairman\n in view of some dog and cat\n hostilities that had been developing\n about his feet.\n\n\n But now the alien's purplish face\n faded to a light blue. He stood and\n said hoarsely. \"Faith, an' what was\n that last you said?\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen repeated,\n \"We will now hear from the first\n being ever to come to Earth from\n another world.\"\n\n\n The face of the alien went a\n lighter blue. \"Sure, an' ye wouldn't\n jist be frightenin' a body, would\n ye? You don't mean to tell me this\n planet isn't after bein' a member of\n the Galactic League?\"\n\n\n Andersen's face was blank. \"Galactic\n League?\"",
"The alien's face faded a light\n blue again. \"Faith, an' I'd almost\n forgotten,\" he said. \"If I'd taken\n a crature from this quarantined\n planet, my name'd be\nnork\n. Keep\n your dog and your kitty.\" He shook\n his head sadly and extracted a\n mouse from a pocket. \"An' this\n amazin' little crature as well.\"\n\n\n They followed him to the spacecraft.\n Just before entering, he spotted\n the bedraggled horse that had\n been present on his landing.\n\n\n A longing expression came over\n his highly colored face. \"Jist one\n thing,\" he said. \"Faith now, were\n they pullin' my leg when they said\n you were after ridin' on the back of\n those things?\"\n\n\n The President looked at the woebegone\n nag. \"It's a horse,\" he said,\n surprised. \"Man has been riding\n them for centuries.\"",
"A dull roar was beginning to\n emanate from the thousands gathered\n in the tremendous hall, murmuring,\n questioning, disbelieving.\nViljalmar Andersen\n felt that\n he must say something. He extended\n a detaining hand. \"Now you\n are here,\" he said urgently, \"even\n though by mistake, before you go\n can't you give us some brief word?\n Our world is in chaos. Many of us\n have lost faith. Perhaps ...\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass shook off the restraining\n hand. \"Do I look daft?\n Begorry, I should have been\n a-knowin' something was queer. All\n your weapons and your strange\n ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised\n if ye hadn't yet established\n a planet-wide government. Sure,\n an' I'll go still further. Ye probably\n still have wars on this benighted\n world. No wonder it is ye\n haven't been invited to join the\n Galactic League an' take your place\n among the civilized planets.\"",
"He hustled from the rostrum and\n made his way, still surrounded by\n guards, to the door by which he had\n entered. The dog and the cat trotted\n after, undismayed by the furor\n about them.\n\n\n They arrived about four hours\n later at the field on which he'd\n landed, and the alien from space\n hurried toward his craft, still muttering.\n He'd been accompanied by a\n general and by the President, but\n all the way he had refrained from\n speaking.\n\n\n He scurried from the car and\n toward the spacecraft.\n\n\n President McCord said, \"You've\n forgotten your pets. We would be\n glad if you would accept them as—\"",
"The President snapped back,\n \"You probably won't believe this,\n but he's been asleep until yesterday.\n When he first arrived he told us he\n hadn't slept for a\ndecal\n, whatever\n that is; so we held off our discussion\n with him until morning. Well—he\n didn't awaken in the morning,\n nor the next. Six days later, fearing\n something was wrong we woke\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\" Sir Alfred\n asked.\n\n\n The President showed embarrassment.\n \"He used some rather ripe\n Irish profanity on us, rolled over,\n and went back to sleep.\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen asked, \"Well,\n what happened yesterday?\"\n\n\n \"We actually haven't had time to\n question him. Among other things,\n there's been some controversy about\n whose jurisdiction he comes under.\n The State Department claims the\n Army shouldn't—\"",
"Dameri Tass shook his head.\n \"Sure, an' 'twould've been my\n makin' if I could've taken one back\n to Carthis.\" He entered his vessel.\n\n\n The others drew back, out of\n range of the expected blast, and\n watched, each with his own\n thoughts, as the first visitor from\n space hurriedly left Earth.\n... THE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nIf Worlds of Science Fiction\nJanuary 1954.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"By the time the delegates from\n every nation, tribe, religion, class,\n color, and race had gathered in\n New York to receive the message\n from the stars, the majority of\n Earth had decided that Dameri\n Tass was the plenipotentiary of a\n super-civilization which had been\n viewing developments on this planet\n with misgivings. It was thought\n this other civilization had advanced\n greatly beyond Earth's and that the\n problems besetting us—social, economic,\n scientific—had been solved\n by the super-civilization. Obviously,\n then, Dameri Tass had come, an\n advisor from a benevolent and\n friendly people, to guide the world\n aright."
],
[
"By the time the delegates from\n every nation, tribe, religion, class,\n color, and race had gathered in\n New York to receive the message\n from the stars, the majority of\n Earth had decided that Dameri\n Tass was the plenipotentiary of a\n super-civilization which had been\n viewing developments on this planet\n with misgivings. It was thought\n this other civilization had advanced\n greatly beyond Earth's and that the\n problems besetting us—social, economic,\n scientific—had been solved\n by the super-civilization. Obviously,\n then, Dameri Tass had come, an\n advisor from a benevolent and\n friendly people, to guide the world\n aright.",
"He turned and gestured to Dameri\n Tass who hadn't been paying\n overmuch attention to the chairman\n in view of some dog and cat\n hostilities that had been developing\n about his feet.\n\n\n But now the alien's purplish face\n faded to a light blue. He stood and\n said hoarsely. \"Faith, an' what was\n that last you said?\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen repeated,\n \"We will now hear from the first\n being ever to come to Earth from\n another world.\"\n\n\n The face of the alien went a\n lighter blue. \"Sure, an' ye wouldn't\n jist be frightenin' a body, would\n ye? You don't mean to tell me this\n planet isn't after bein' a member of\n the Galactic League?\"\n\n\n Andersen's face was blank. \"Galactic\n League?\"",
"\"Cushlamachree,\" Dameri Tass\n moaned. \"I've gone and put me\n foot in it again. I'll be after getting\nkert\nfor this.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred was on his feet. \"I\n don't understand! Do you mean you\n aren't an envoy from another\n planet?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass held his head in his\n hands and groaned. \"An envoy, he's\n sayin', and meself only a second-rate\n collector of specimens for the Carthis\n zoo.\"\n\n\n He straightened and started off\n the speaker's stand. \"Sure, an' I\n must blast off immediately.\"\n\n\n Things were moving fast for\n President McCord but already an\n edge of relief was manifesting itself.\n Taking the initiative, he said, \"Of\n course, of course, if that is your\n desire.\" He signaled to the bodyguard\n who had accompanied the\n alien to the assemblage.",
"And nine-tenths of the population\n of Earth stood ready and willing\n to be guided. The other tenth\n liked things as they were and were\n quite convinced that the space\n envoy would upset their applecarts.\nViljalmar Andersen\n , Secretary-General\n of the U.N., was to\n introduce the space emissary. \"Can\n you give me an idea at all of what\n he is like?\" he asked nervously.\n\n\n President McCord was as upset\n as the Dane. He shrugged in agitation.\n \"I know almost as little as\n you do.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred Oxford protested, \"But\n my dear chap, you've had him for\n almost two weeks. Certainly in that\n time—\"",
"Dameri Tass shook his head.\n \"Sure, an' 'twould've been my\n makin' if I could've taken one back\n to Carthis.\" He entered his vessel.\n\n\n The others drew back, out of\n range of the expected blast, and\n watched, each with his own\n thoughts, as the first visitor from\n space hurriedly left Earth.\n... THE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nIf Worlds of Science Fiction\nJanuary 1954.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"A dull roar was beginning to\n emanate from the thousands gathered\n in the tremendous hall, murmuring,\n questioning, disbelieving.\nViljalmar Andersen\n felt that\n he must say something. He extended\n a detaining hand. \"Now you\n are here,\" he said urgently, \"even\n though by mistake, before you go\n can't you give us some brief word?\n Our world is in chaos. Many of us\n have lost faith. Perhaps ...\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass shook off the restraining\n hand. \"Do I look daft?\n Begorry, I should have been\n a-knowin' something was queer. All\n your weapons and your strange\n ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised\n if ye hadn't yet established\n a planet-wide government. Sure,\n an' I'll go still further. Ye probably\n still have wars on this benighted\n world. No wonder it is ye\n haven't been invited to join the\n Galactic League an' take your place\n among the civilized planets.\"",
"\"Nonsense!\" the general snapped.\n\n\n Further discussion was interrupted\n by the screaming arrival of\n several motorcycle patrolmen followed\n by three heavily laden patrol\n cars. Overhead, pursuit planes\n zoomed in and began darting about\n nervously above the field.\n\n\n \"Sure, and it's quite a reception\n I'm after gettin',\" Dameri Tass said.\n He yawned. \"But what I'm wantin'\n is a chance to get some sleep. Faith,\n an' I've been awake for almost a\ndecal\n.\"\nDameri Tass\n was hurried, via\n helicopter, to Washington. There\n he disappeared for several days,\n being held incommunicado while\n White House, Pentagon, State Department\n and Congress tried to\n figure out just what to do with him.",
"\"I'm Major General Browning,\"\n he rapped. \"I want a police cordon\n thrown up around this, er, vessel.\n No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody\n without my permission. As soon as\n Army personnel arrives, we'll take\n over completely.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Larry Dermott said. \"I\n just got a report on the radio that\n the governor is on his way, sir. How\n about him?\"\n\n\n The general muttered something\n under his breath. Then, \"When the\n governor arrives, let me know;\n otherwise, nobody gets through!\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass said, \"Faith, and\n what goes on?\"\n\n\n The general's eyes bugged still\n further. \"\nHe talks!\n\" he accused.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Dermott said. \"He\n had some kind of a machine. He\n put it over Tim's head and seconds\n later he could talk.\"",
"The Secretary General sighed\n deeply. \"Just what\ndid\nhe do?\"\n\n\n \"The Secret Service reports he\n spent the day whistling Mother Machree\n and playing with his dog, cat\n and mouse.\"\n\n\n \"Dog, cat and mouse? I say!\"\n blurted Sir Alfred.\n\n\n The President was defensive. \"He\n had to have some occupation, and\n he seems to be particularly interested\n in our animal life. He wanted\n a horse but compromised for the\n others. I understand he insists all\n three of them come with him wherever\n he goes.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we knew what he was\n going to say,\" Andersen worried.\n\n\n \"Here he comes,\" said Sir Alfred.\n\n\n Surrounded by F.B.I. men,\n Dameri Tass was ushered to the\n speaker's stand. He had a kitten in\n his arms; a Scotty followed him.",
"The alien frowned worriedly.\n \"Sure,\" he said, \"and what kin all\n this be? Is it some ordinance I've\n been after breakin'?\"\n\n\n McCord, Sir Alfred and Andersen\n hastened to reassure him and\n made him comfortable in a chair.\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen faced the\n thousands in the audience and held\n up his hands, but it was ten minutes\n before he was able to quiet the\n cheering, stamping delegates from\n all Earth.\n\n\n Finally: \"Fellow Terrans, I shall\n not take your time for a lengthy\n introduction of the envoy from the\n stars. I will only say that, without\n doubt, this is the most important\n moment in the history of the human\n race. We will now hear from the\n first being to come to Earth from\n another world.\"",
"Excitement, anticipation, blanketed\n the world. Shepherds in Sinkiang,\n multi-millionaires in Switzerland,\n fakirs in Pakistan, gauchos in\n the Argentine were raised to a\n zenith of expectation. Panhandlers\n debated the message to come with\n pedestrians; jinrikisha men argued\n it with their passengers; miners discussed\n it deep beneath the surface;\n pilots argued with their co-pilots\n thousands of feet above.\n\n\n It was the most universally\n awaited event of the ages.",
"Dameri Tass shrugged. \"Faith, an'\n why not? As I was after sayin', I\n shared the kerit helmet with Tim\n Casey.\"\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott glared at him\n unbelievingly. \"You learned the\n language just by sticking that Rube\n Goldberg deal on Tim's head?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, an' why not?\"\n\n\n Dermott muttered, \"And with it\n he has to pick up the corniest\n brogue west of Dublin.\"\n\n\n Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly.\n \"I'm after resentin' that,\n Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way\n we talk in Ireland is—\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing\n to a bedraggled horse that had\n made its way to within fifty feet of\n the vessel. \"Now what could that\n be after bein'?\"",
"Never in the history of the planet\n had such a furor arisen. Thus far,\n no newspapermen had been allowed\n within speaking distance. Administration\n higher-ups were being subjected\n to a volcano of editorial heat\n but the longer the space alien was\n discussed the more they viewed with\n alarm the situation his arrival had\n precipitated. There were angles that\n hadn't at first been evident.\n\n\n Obviously he was from some civilization\n far beyond that of Earth's.\n That was the rub. No matter what\n he said, it would shake governments,\n possibly overthrow social systems,\n perhaps even destroy established religious\n concepts.\n\n\n But they couldn't keep him under\n wraps indefinitely.\n\n\n It was the United Nations that\n cracked the iron curtain. Their demands\n that the alien be heard before\n their body were too strong and\n had too much public opinion behind\n them to be ignored. The White\n House yielded and the date was set\n for the visitor to speak before the\n Assembly.",
"Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its\n holster and said, \"Sure, and I'm\n beginning to wonder if it's one of\n ours. No insignia and—\"\n\n\n A circular door slid open at that\n point and Dameri Tass stepped out,\n yawning. He spotted them, smiled\n and said, \"Glork.\"\n\n\n They gaped at him.\n\n\n \"Glork is right,\" Dermott swallowed.\n\n\n Tim Casey closed his mouth with\n an effort. \"Do you mind the color\n of his face?\" he blurted.\n\n\n \"How could I help it?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed\n pink hand down his purplish countenance\n and yawned again. \"Gorra\n manigan horp soratium,\" he said.",
"The alien stooped down and\n flicked a switch on the little box.\n It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly\n shrieked and sat down on the\n stubble and grass of the field. \"Begorra,\"\n he yelped, \"I've been murthered!\"\n He tore the cap from\n his head.\n\n\n His companion came running,\n \"What's the matter, Tim?\" he\n shouted.\n\n\n Dameri Tass removed the metal\n cap from his own head. \"Sure, an'\n nothin' is after bein' the matter\n with him,\" he said. \"Evidently the\n bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of\n a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt\n him not at all.\"\n\"You can\n talk!\" Dermott\n blurted, skidding to a stop.",
"Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman\n Casey shot stares at each other.\n \"'Tis double talk he's after givin'\n us,\" Casey said.\n\n\n Dameri Tass frowned. \"Harama?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Larry Dermott pushed his cap to\n the back of his head. \"That doesn't\n sound like any language I've even\nheard\nabout.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass grimaced, turned\n and reentered his spacecraft to\n emerge in half a minute with his\n hands full of contraption. He held\n a box-like arrangement under his\n left arm; in his right hand were two\n metal caps connected to the box\n by wires.\n\n\n While the patrolmen watched\n him, he set the box on the ground,\n twirled two dials and put one of the\n caps on his head. He offered the\n other to Larry Dermott; his desire\n was obvious.",
"Tim Casey closed his eyes and\n groaned. \"Humor him, he's after\n sayin'. Orders it is.\" He shouted\n back, \"Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's\n in technicolor? Begorra, he looks\n like a man from Mars.\"\n\n\n \"That's what they think,\" Larry\n yelled, \"and the governor is on his\n way. We're to do everything possible\n short of violence to keep this\n character here. Humor him, Tim!\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass\n snapped, pushing the cap into\n Casey's reluctant hands.\n\n\n Muttering his protests, Casey\n lifted it gingerly and placed it on\n his head. Not feeling any immediate\n effect, he said, \"There, 'tis satisfied\n ye are now, I'm supposin'.\"",
"\"Hey, hold it,\" Dermott said anxiously.\n He was beginning to feel\n like a character in a shaggy dog\n story.\n\n\n Interest in the horse was ended\n with the sudden arrival of a helicopter.\n It swooped down on the\n field and settled within twenty feet\n of the alien craft. Almost before it\n had touched, the door was flung\n open and the flying windmill disgorged\n two bestarred and efficient-looking\n Army officers.\n\n\n Casey and Dermott snapped them\n a salute.\n\n\n The senior general didn't take\n his eyes from the alien and the\n spacecraft as he spoke, and they\n bugged quite as effectively as had\n those of the patrolmen when they'd\n first arrived on the scene.",
"Shure and begorra, it was a great day for the Earth! The\n first envoy from another world was about to speak—that\n is, if he could forget that horse for a minute....\noff course\nBy Mack Reynolds\nIllustrated by Kelly Freas\nFirst on\n the scene were Larry\n Dermott and Tim Casey of the\n State Highway Patrol. They assumed\n they were witnessing the\n crash of a new type of Air Force\n plane and slipped and skidded desperately\n across the field to within\n thirty feet of the strange craft, only\n to discover that the landing had\n been made without accident.\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott shook his\n head. \"They're gettin' queerer looking\n every year. Get a load of it—no\n wheels, no propeller, no cockpit.\"\n\n\n They left the car and made their\n way toward the strange egg-shaped\n vessel.",
"The patrolmen followed his stare.\n \"It's a horse. What else?\"\n\n\n \"A horse?\"\n\n\n Larry Dermott looked again, just\n to make sure. \"Yeah—not much of\n a horse, but a horse.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically.\n \"And jist what is a horse, if I may\n be so bold as to be askin'?\"\n\n\n \"It's an animal you ride on.\"\n\n\n The alien tore his gaze from the\n animal to look his disbelief at the\n other. \"Are you after meanin' that\n you climb upon the crature's back\n and ride him? Faith now, quit your\n blarney.\"\n\n\n He looked at the horse again,\n then down at his equipment. \"Begorra,\"\n he muttered, \"I'll share the\n kerit helmet with the crature.\""
],
[
"The Secretary General sighed\n deeply. \"Just what\ndid\nhe do?\"\n\n\n \"The Secret Service reports he\n spent the day whistling Mother Machree\n and playing with his dog, cat\n and mouse.\"\n\n\n \"Dog, cat and mouse? I say!\"\n blurted Sir Alfred.\n\n\n The President was defensive. \"He\n had to have some occupation, and\n he seems to be particularly interested\n in our animal life. He wanted\n a horse but compromised for the\n others. I understand he insists all\n three of them come with him wherever\n he goes.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we knew what he was\n going to say,\" Andersen worried.\n\n\n \"Here he comes,\" said Sir Alfred.\n\n\n Surrounded by F.B.I. men,\n Dameri Tass was ushered to the\n speaker's stand. He had a kitten in\n his arms; a Scotty followed him.",
"Dameri Tass shrugged. \"Faith, an'\n why not? As I was after sayin', I\n shared the kerit helmet with Tim\n Casey.\"\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott glared at him\n unbelievingly. \"You learned the\n language just by sticking that Rube\n Goldberg deal on Tim's head?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, an' why not?\"\n\n\n Dermott muttered, \"And with it\n he has to pick up the corniest\n brogue west of Dublin.\"\n\n\n Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly.\n \"I'm after resentin' that,\n Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way\n we talk in Ireland is—\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing\n to a bedraggled horse that had\n made its way to within fifty feet of\n the vessel. \"Now what could that\n be after bein'?\"",
"He turned and gestured to Dameri\n Tass who hadn't been paying\n overmuch attention to the chairman\n in view of some dog and cat\n hostilities that had been developing\n about his feet.\n\n\n But now the alien's purplish face\n faded to a light blue. He stood and\n said hoarsely. \"Faith, an' what was\n that last you said?\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen repeated,\n \"We will now hear from the first\n being ever to come to Earth from\n another world.\"\n\n\n The face of the alien went a\n lighter blue. \"Sure, an' ye wouldn't\n jist be frightenin' a body, would\n ye? You don't mean to tell me this\n planet isn't after bein' a member of\n the Galactic League?\"\n\n\n Andersen's face was blank. \"Galactic\n League?\"",
"\"Nonsense!\" the general snapped.\n\n\n Further discussion was interrupted\n by the screaming arrival of\n several motorcycle patrolmen followed\n by three heavily laden patrol\n cars. Overhead, pursuit planes\n zoomed in and began darting about\n nervously above the field.\n\n\n \"Sure, and it's quite a reception\n I'm after gettin',\" Dameri Tass said.\n He yawned. \"But what I'm wantin'\n is a chance to get some sleep. Faith,\n an' I've been awake for almost a\ndecal\n.\"\nDameri Tass\n was hurried, via\n helicopter, to Washington. There\n he disappeared for several days,\n being held incommunicado while\n White House, Pentagon, State Department\n and Congress tried to\n figure out just what to do with him.",
"The patrolmen followed his stare.\n \"It's a horse. What else?\"\n\n\n \"A horse?\"\n\n\n Larry Dermott looked again, just\n to make sure. \"Yeah—not much of\n a horse, but a horse.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically.\n \"And jist what is a horse, if I may\n be so bold as to be askin'?\"\n\n\n \"It's an animal you ride on.\"\n\n\n The alien tore his gaze from the\n animal to look his disbelief at the\n other. \"Are you after meanin' that\n you climb upon the crature's back\n and ride him? Faith now, quit your\n blarney.\"\n\n\n He looked at the horse again,\n then down at his equipment. \"Begorra,\"\n he muttered, \"I'll share the\n kerit helmet with the crature.\"",
"Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its\n holster and said, \"Sure, and I'm\n beginning to wonder if it's one of\n ours. No insignia and—\"\n\n\n A circular door slid open at that\n point and Dameri Tass stepped out,\n yawning. He spotted them, smiled\n and said, \"Glork.\"\n\n\n They gaped at him.\n\n\n \"Glork is right,\" Dermott swallowed.\n\n\n Tim Casey closed his mouth with\n an effort. \"Do you mind the color\n of his face?\" he blurted.\n\n\n \"How could I help it?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed\n pink hand down his purplish countenance\n and yawned again. \"Gorra\n manigan horp soratium,\" he said.",
"Tim Casey closed his eyes and\n groaned. \"Humor him, he's after\n sayin'. Orders it is.\" He shouted\n back, \"Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's\n in technicolor? Begorra, he looks\n like a man from Mars.\"\n\n\n \"That's what they think,\" Larry\n yelled, \"and the governor is on his\n way. We're to do everything possible\n short of violence to keep this\n character here. Humor him, Tim!\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass\n snapped, pushing the cap into\n Casey's reluctant hands.\n\n\n Muttering his protests, Casey\n lifted it gingerly and placed it on\n his head. Not feeling any immediate\n effect, he said, \"There, 'tis satisfied\n ye are now, I'm supposin'.\"",
"Dameri Tass shook his head.\n \"Sure, an' 'twould've been my\n makin' if I could've taken one back\n to Carthis.\" He entered his vessel.\n\n\n The others drew back, out of\n range of the expected blast, and\n watched, each with his own\n thoughts, as the first visitor from\n space hurriedly left Earth.\n... THE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nIf Worlds of Science Fiction\nJanuary 1954.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"\"I'm Major General Browning,\"\n he rapped. \"I want a police cordon\n thrown up around this, er, vessel.\n No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody\n without my permission. As soon as\n Army personnel arrives, we'll take\n over completely.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Larry Dermott said. \"I\n just got a report on the radio that\n the governor is on his way, sir. How\n about him?\"\n\n\n The general muttered something\n under his breath. Then, \"When the\n governor arrives, let me know;\n otherwise, nobody gets through!\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass said, \"Faith, and\n what goes on?\"\n\n\n The general's eyes bugged still\n further. \"\nHe talks!\n\" he accused.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Dermott said. \"He\n had some kind of a machine. He\n put it over Tim's head and seconds\n later he could talk.\"",
"By the time the delegates from\n every nation, tribe, religion, class,\n color, and race had gathered in\n New York to receive the message\n from the stars, the majority of\n Earth had decided that Dameri\n Tass was the plenipotentiary of a\n super-civilization which had been\n viewing developments on this planet\n with misgivings. It was thought\n this other civilization had advanced\n greatly beyond Earth's and that the\n problems besetting us—social, economic,\n scientific—had been solved\n by the super-civilization. Obviously,\n then, Dameri Tass had come, an\n advisor from a benevolent and\n friendly people, to guide the world\n aright.",
"\"Cushlamachree,\" Dameri Tass\n moaned. \"I've gone and put me\n foot in it again. I'll be after getting\nkert\nfor this.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred was on his feet. \"I\n don't understand! Do you mean you\n aren't an envoy from another\n planet?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass held his head in his\n hands and groaned. \"An envoy, he's\n sayin', and meself only a second-rate\n collector of specimens for the Carthis\n zoo.\"\n\n\n He straightened and started off\n the speaker's stand. \"Sure, an' I\n must blast off immediately.\"\n\n\n Things were moving fast for\n President McCord but already an\n edge of relief was manifesting itself.\n Taking the initiative, he said, \"Of\n course, of course, if that is your\n desire.\" He signaled to the bodyguard\n who had accompanied the\n alien to the assemblage.",
"Trained to grasp a situation and\n immediately respond in manner best\n suited to protect the welfare of the\n people of New York State, Dermott\n cleared his throat and said, \"Tim,\n take over while I report.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Casey protested, but his\n fellow minion had left.\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass told\n Casey, holding out the metal cap.\n\n\n \"Faith, an' do I look balmy?\"\n Casey told him. \"I wouldn't be\n puttin' that dingus on my head for\n all the colleens in Ireland.\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" the stranger said\n impatiently.\n\n\n \"Bejasus,\" Casey snorted, \"ye\n can't—\"\n\n\n Dermott called from the car,\n \"Tim, the captain says to humor\n this guy. We're to keep him here\n until the officials arrive.\"",
"Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman\n Casey shot stares at each other.\n \"'Tis double talk he's after givin'\n us,\" Casey said.\n\n\n Dameri Tass frowned. \"Harama?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Larry Dermott pushed his cap to\n the back of his head. \"That doesn't\n sound like any language I've even\nheard\nabout.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass grimaced, turned\n and reentered his spacecraft to\n emerge in half a minute with his\n hands full of contraption. He held\n a box-like arrangement under his\n left arm; in his right hand were two\n metal caps connected to the box\n by wires.\n\n\n While the patrolmen watched\n him, he set the box on the ground,\n twirled two dials and put one of the\n caps on his head. He offered the\n other to Larry Dermott; his desire\n was obvious.",
"A dull roar was beginning to\n emanate from the thousands gathered\n in the tremendous hall, murmuring,\n questioning, disbelieving.\nViljalmar Andersen\n felt that\n he must say something. He extended\n a detaining hand. \"Now you\n are here,\" he said urgently, \"even\n though by mistake, before you go\n can't you give us some brief word?\n Our world is in chaos. Many of us\n have lost faith. Perhaps ...\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass shook off the restraining\n hand. \"Do I look daft?\n Begorry, I should have been\n a-knowin' something was queer. All\n your weapons and your strange\n ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised\n if ye hadn't yet established\n a planet-wide government. Sure,\n an' I'll go still further. Ye probably\n still have wars on this benighted\n world. No wonder it is ye\n haven't been invited to join the\n Galactic League an' take your place\n among the civilized planets.\"",
"He hustled from the rostrum and\n made his way, still surrounded by\n guards, to the door by which he had\n entered. The dog and the cat trotted\n after, undismayed by the furor\n about them.\n\n\n They arrived about four hours\n later at the field on which he'd\n landed, and the alien from space\n hurried toward his craft, still muttering.\n He'd been accompanied by a\n general and by the President, but\n all the way he had refrained from\n speaking.\n\n\n He scurried from the car and\n toward the spacecraft.\n\n\n President McCord said, \"You've\n forgotten your pets. We would be\n glad if you would accept them as—\"",
"The alien stooped down and\n flicked a switch on the little box.\n It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly\n shrieked and sat down on the\n stubble and grass of the field. \"Begorra,\"\n he yelped, \"I've been murthered!\"\n He tore the cap from\n his head.\n\n\n His companion came running,\n \"What's the matter, Tim?\" he\n shouted.\n\n\n Dameri Tass removed the metal\n cap from his own head. \"Sure, an'\n nothin' is after bein' the matter\n with him,\" he said. \"Evidently the\n bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of\n a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt\n him not at all.\"\n\"You can\n talk!\" Dermott\n blurted, skidding to a stop.",
"\"Hey, hold it,\" Dermott said anxiously.\n He was beginning to feel\n like a character in a shaggy dog\n story.\n\n\n Interest in the horse was ended\n with the sudden arrival of a helicopter.\n It swooped down on the\n field and settled within twenty feet\n of the alien craft. Almost before it\n had touched, the door was flung\n open and the flying windmill disgorged\n two bestarred and efficient-looking\n Army officers.\n\n\n Casey and Dermott snapped them\n a salute.\n\n\n The senior general didn't take\n his eyes from the alien and the\n spacecraft as he spoke, and they\n bugged quite as effectively as had\n those of the patrolmen when they'd\n first arrived on the scene.",
"The alien's face faded a light\n blue again. \"Faith, an' I'd almost\n forgotten,\" he said. \"If I'd taken\n a crature from this quarantined\n planet, my name'd be\nnork\n. Keep\n your dog and your kitty.\" He shook\n his head sadly and extracted a\n mouse from a pocket. \"An' this\n amazin' little crature as well.\"\n\n\n They followed him to the spacecraft.\n Just before entering, he spotted\n the bedraggled horse that had\n been present on his landing.\n\n\n A longing expression came over\n his highly colored face. \"Jist one\n thing,\" he said. \"Faith now, were\n they pullin' my leg when they said\n you were after ridin' on the back of\n those things?\"\n\n\n The President looked at the woebegone\n nag. \"It's a horse,\" he said,\n surprised. \"Man has been riding\n them for centuries.\"",
"Excitement, anticipation, blanketed\n the world. Shepherds in Sinkiang,\n multi-millionaires in Switzerland,\n fakirs in Pakistan, gauchos in\n the Argentine were raised to a\n zenith of expectation. Panhandlers\n debated the message to come with\n pedestrians; jinrikisha men argued\n it with their passengers; miners discussed\n it deep beneath the surface;\n pilots argued with their co-pilots\n thousands of feet above.\n\n\n It was the most universally\n awaited event of the ages.",
"The President snapped back,\n \"You probably won't believe this,\n but he's been asleep until yesterday.\n When he first arrived he told us he\n hadn't slept for a\ndecal\n, whatever\n that is; so we held off our discussion\n with him until morning. Well—he\n didn't awaken in the morning,\n nor the next. Six days later, fearing\n something was wrong we woke\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\" Sir Alfred\n asked.\n\n\n The President showed embarrassment.\n \"He used some rather ripe\n Irish profanity on us, rolled over,\n and went back to sleep.\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen asked, \"Well,\n what happened yesterday?\"\n\n\n \"We actually haven't had time to\n question him. Among other things,\n there's been some controversy about\n whose jurisdiction he comes under.\n The State Department claims the\n Army shouldn't—\""
],
[
"By the time the delegates from\n every nation, tribe, religion, class,\n color, and race had gathered in\n New York to receive the message\n from the stars, the majority of\n Earth had decided that Dameri\n Tass was the plenipotentiary of a\n super-civilization which had been\n viewing developments on this planet\n with misgivings. It was thought\n this other civilization had advanced\n greatly beyond Earth's and that the\n problems besetting us—social, economic,\n scientific—had been solved\n by the super-civilization. Obviously,\n then, Dameri Tass had come, an\n advisor from a benevolent and\n friendly people, to guide the world\n aright.",
"He turned and gestured to Dameri\n Tass who hadn't been paying\n overmuch attention to the chairman\n in view of some dog and cat\n hostilities that had been developing\n about his feet.\n\n\n But now the alien's purplish face\n faded to a light blue. He stood and\n said hoarsely. \"Faith, an' what was\n that last you said?\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen repeated,\n \"We will now hear from the first\n being ever to come to Earth from\n another world.\"\n\n\n The face of the alien went a\n lighter blue. \"Sure, an' ye wouldn't\n jist be frightenin' a body, would\n ye? You don't mean to tell me this\n planet isn't after bein' a member of\n the Galactic League?\"\n\n\n Andersen's face was blank. \"Galactic\n League?\"",
"A dull roar was beginning to\n emanate from the thousands gathered\n in the tremendous hall, murmuring,\n questioning, disbelieving.\nViljalmar Andersen\n felt that\n he must say something. He extended\n a detaining hand. \"Now you\n are here,\" he said urgently, \"even\n though by mistake, before you go\n can't you give us some brief word?\n Our world is in chaos. Many of us\n have lost faith. Perhaps ...\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass shook off the restraining\n hand. \"Do I look daft?\n Begorry, I should have been\n a-knowin' something was queer. All\n your weapons and your strange\n ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised\n if ye hadn't yet established\n a planet-wide government. Sure,\n an' I'll go still further. Ye probably\n still have wars on this benighted\n world. No wonder it is ye\n haven't been invited to join the\n Galactic League an' take your place\n among the civilized planets.\"",
"\"Cushlamachree,\" Dameri Tass\n moaned. \"I've gone and put me\n foot in it again. I'll be after getting\nkert\nfor this.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred was on his feet. \"I\n don't understand! Do you mean you\n aren't an envoy from another\n planet?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass held his head in his\n hands and groaned. \"An envoy, he's\n sayin', and meself only a second-rate\n collector of specimens for the Carthis\n zoo.\"\n\n\n He straightened and started off\n the speaker's stand. \"Sure, an' I\n must blast off immediately.\"\n\n\n Things were moving fast for\n President McCord but already an\n edge of relief was manifesting itself.\n Taking the initiative, he said, \"Of\n course, of course, if that is your\n desire.\" He signaled to the bodyguard\n who had accompanied the\n alien to the assemblage.",
"Dameri Tass shook his head.\n \"Sure, an' 'twould've been my\n makin' if I could've taken one back\n to Carthis.\" He entered his vessel.\n\n\n The others drew back, out of\n range of the expected blast, and\n watched, each with his own\n thoughts, as the first visitor from\n space hurriedly left Earth.\n... THE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nIf Worlds of Science Fiction\nJanuary 1954.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"Dameri Tass shrugged. \"Faith, an'\n why not? As I was after sayin', I\n shared the kerit helmet with Tim\n Casey.\"\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott glared at him\n unbelievingly. \"You learned the\n language just by sticking that Rube\n Goldberg deal on Tim's head?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, an' why not?\"\n\n\n Dermott muttered, \"And with it\n he has to pick up the corniest\n brogue west of Dublin.\"\n\n\n Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly.\n \"I'm after resentin' that,\n Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way\n we talk in Ireland is—\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing\n to a bedraggled horse that had\n made its way to within fifty feet of\n the vessel. \"Now what could that\n be after bein'?\"",
"\"Nonsense!\" the general snapped.\n\n\n Further discussion was interrupted\n by the screaming arrival of\n several motorcycle patrolmen followed\n by three heavily laden patrol\n cars. Overhead, pursuit planes\n zoomed in and began darting about\n nervously above the field.\n\n\n \"Sure, and it's quite a reception\n I'm after gettin',\" Dameri Tass said.\n He yawned. \"But what I'm wantin'\n is a chance to get some sleep. Faith,\n an' I've been awake for almost a\ndecal\n.\"\nDameri Tass\n was hurried, via\n helicopter, to Washington. There\n he disappeared for several days,\n being held incommunicado while\n White House, Pentagon, State Department\n and Congress tried to\n figure out just what to do with him.",
"Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its\n holster and said, \"Sure, and I'm\n beginning to wonder if it's one of\n ours. No insignia and—\"\n\n\n A circular door slid open at that\n point and Dameri Tass stepped out,\n yawning. He spotted them, smiled\n and said, \"Glork.\"\n\n\n They gaped at him.\n\n\n \"Glork is right,\" Dermott swallowed.\n\n\n Tim Casey closed his mouth with\n an effort. \"Do you mind the color\n of his face?\" he blurted.\n\n\n \"How could I help it?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed\n pink hand down his purplish countenance\n and yawned again. \"Gorra\n manigan horp soratium,\" he said.",
"\"I'm Major General Browning,\"\n he rapped. \"I want a police cordon\n thrown up around this, er, vessel.\n No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody\n without my permission. As soon as\n Army personnel arrives, we'll take\n over completely.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Larry Dermott said. \"I\n just got a report on the radio that\n the governor is on his way, sir. How\n about him?\"\n\n\n The general muttered something\n under his breath. Then, \"When the\n governor arrives, let me know;\n otherwise, nobody gets through!\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass said, \"Faith, and\n what goes on?\"\n\n\n The general's eyes bugged still\n further. \"\nHe talks!\n\" he accused.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Dermott said. \"He\n had some kind of a machine. He\n put it over Tim's head and seconds\n later he could talk.\"",
"Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman\n Casey shot stares at each other.\n \"'Tis double talk he's after givin'\n us,\" Casey said.\n\n\n Dameri Tass frowned. \"Harama?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Larry Dermott pushed his cap to\n the back of his head. \"That doesn't\n sound like any language I've even\nheard\nabout.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass grimaced, turned\n and reentered his spacecraft to\n emerge in half a minute with his\n hands full of contraption. He held\n a box-like arrangement under his\n left arm; in his right hand were two\n metal caps connected to the box\n by wires.\n\n\n While the patrolmen watched\n him, he set the box on the ground,\n twirled two dials and put one of the\n caps on his head. He offered the\n other to Larry Dermott; his desire\n was obvious.",
"Tim Casey closed his eyes and\n groaned. \"Humor him, he's after\n sayin'. Orders it is.\" He shouted\n back, \"Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's\n in technicolor? Begorra, he looks\n like a man from Mars.\"\n\n\n \"That's what they think,\" Larry\n yelled, \"and the governor is on his\n way. We're to do everything possible\n short of violence to keep this\n character here. Humor him, Tim!\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass\n snapped, pushing the cap into\n Casey's reluctant hands.\n\n\n Muttering his protests, Casey\n lifted it gingerly and placed it on\n his head. Not feeling any immediate\n effect, he said, \"There, 'tis satisfied\n ye are now, I'm supposin'.\"",
"The patrolmen followed his stare.\n \"It's a horse. What else?\"\n\n\n \"A horse?\"\n\n\n Larry Dermott looked again, just\n to make sure. \"Yeah—not much of\n a horse, but a horse.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically.\n \"And jist what is a horse, if I may\n be so bold as to be askin'?\"\n\n\n \"It's an animal you ride on.\"\n\n\n The alien tore his gaze from the\n animal to look his disbelief at the\n other. \"Are you after meanin' that\n you climb upon the crature's back\n and ride him? Faith now, quit your\n blarney.\"\n\n\n He looked at the horse again,\n then down at his equipment. \"Begorra,\"\n he muttered, \"I'll share the\n kerit helmet with the crature.\"",
"The alien stooped down and\n flicked a switch on the little box.\n It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly\n shrieked and sat down on the\n stubble and grass of the field. \"Begorra,\"\n he yelped, \"I've been murthered!\"\n He tore the cap from\n his head.\n\n\n His companion came running,\n \"What's the matter, Tim?\" he\n shouted.\n\n\n Dameri Tass removed the metal\n cap from his own head. \"Sure, an'\n nothin' is after bein' the matter\n with him,\" he said. \"Evidently the\n bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of\n a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt\n him not at all.\"\n\"You can\n talk!\" Dermott\n blurted, skidding to a stop.",
"And nine-tenths of the population\n of Earth stood ready and willing\n to be guided. The other tenth\n liked things as they were and were\n quite convinced that the space\n envoy would upset their applecarts.\nViljalmar Andersen\n , Secretary-General\n of the U.N., was to\n introduce the space emissary. \"Can\n you give me an idea at all of what\n he is like?\" he asked nervously.\n\n\n President McCord was as upset\n as the Dane. He shrugged in agitation.\n \"I know almost as little as\n you do.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred Oxford protested, \"But\n my dear chap, you've had him for\n almost two weeks. Certainly in that\n time—\"",
"The Secretary General sighed\n deeply. \"Just what\ndid\nhe do?\"\n\n\n \"The Secret Service reports he\n spent the day whistling Mother Machree\n and playing with his dog, cat\n and mouse.\"\n\n\n \"Dog, cat and mouse? I say!\"\n blurted Sir Alfred.\n\n\n The President was defensive. \"He\n had to have some occupation, and\n he seems to be particularly interested\n in our animal life. He wanted\n a horse but compromised for the\n others. I understand he insists all\n three of them come with him wherever\n he goes.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we knew what he was\n going to say,\" Andersen worried.\n\n\n \"Here he comes,\" said Sir Alfred.\n\n\n Surrounded by F.B.I. men,\n Dameri Tass was ushered to the\n speaker's stand. He had a kitten in\n his arms; a Scotty followed him.",
"The alien frowned worriedly.\n \"Sure,\" he said, \"and what kin all\n this be? Is it some ordinance I've\n been after breakin'?\"\n\n\n McCord, Sir Alfred and Andersen\n hastened to reassure him and\n made him comfortable in a chair.\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen faced the\n thousands in the audience and held\n up his hands, but it was ten minutes\n before he was able to quiet the\n cheering, stamping delegates from\n all Earth.\n\n\n Finally: \"Fellow Terrans, I shall\n not take your time for a lengthy\n introduction of the envoy from the\n stars. I will only say that, without\n doubt, this is the most important\n moment in the history of the human\n race. We will now hear from the\n first being to come to Earth from\n another world.\"",
"Shure and begorra, it was a great day for the Earth! The\n first envoy from another world was about to speak—that\n is, if he could forget that horse for a minute....\noff course\nBy Mack Reynolds\nIllustrated by Kelly Freas\nFirst on\n the scene were Larry\n Dermott and Tim Casey of the\n State Highway Patrol. They assumed\n they were witnessing the\n crash of a new type of Air Force\n plane and slipped and skidded desperately\n across the field to within\n thirty feet of the strange craft, only\n to discover that the landing had\n been made without accident.\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott shook his\n head. \"They're gettin' queerer looking\n every year. Get a load of it—no\n wheels, no propeller, no cockpit.\"\n\n\n They left the car and made their\n way toward the strange egg-shaped\n vessel.",
"The alien's face faded a light\n blue again. \"Faith, an' I'd almost\n forgotten,\" he said. \"If I'd taken\n a crature from this quarantined\n planet, my name'd be\nnork\n. Keep\n your dog and your kitty.\" He shook\n his head sadly and extracted a\n mouse from a pocket. \"An' this\n amazin' little crature as well.\"\n\n\n They followed him to the spacecraft.\n Just before entering, he spotted\n the bedraggled horse that had\n been present on his landing.\n\n\n A longing expression came over\n his highly colored face. \"Jist one\n thing,\" he said. \"Faith now, were\n they pullin' my leg when they said\n you were after ridin' on the back of\n those things?\"\n\n\n The President looked at the woebegone\n nag. \"It's a horse,\" he said,\n surprised. \"Man has been riding\n them for centuries.\"",
"Trained to grasp a situation and\n immediately respond in manner best\n suited to protect the welfare of the\n people of New York State, Dermott\n cleared his throat and said, \"Tim,\n take over while I report.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Casey protested, but his\n fellow minion had left.\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass told\n Casey, holding out the metal cap.\n\n\n \"Faith, an' do I look balmy?\"\n Casey told him. \"I wouldn't be\n puttin' that dingus on my head for\n all the colleens in Ireland.\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" the stranger said\n impatiently.\n\n\n \"Bejasus,\" Casey snorted, \"ye\n can't—\"\n\n\n Dermott called from the car,\n \"Tim, the captain says to humor\n this guy. We're to keep him here\n until the officials arrive.\"",
"Never in the history of the planet\n had such a furor arisen. Thus far,\n no newspapermen had been allowed\n within speaking distance. Administration\n higher-ups were being subjected\n to a volcano of editorial heat\n but the longer the space alien was\n discussed the more they viewed with\n alarm the situation his arrival had\n precipitated. There were angles that\n hadn't at first been evident.\n\n\n Obviously he was from some civilization\n far beyond that of Earth's.\n That was the rub. No matter what\n he said, it would shake governments,\n possibly overthrow social systems,\n perhaps even destroy established religious\n concepts.\n\n\n But they couldn't keep him under\n wraps indefinitely.\n\n\n It was the United Nations that\n cracked the iron curtain. Their demands\n that the alien be heard before\n their body were too strong and\n had too much public opinion behind\n them to be ignored. The White\n House yielded and the date was set\n for the visitor to speak before the\n Assembly."
],
[
"Dameri Tass shook his head.\n \"Sure, an' 'twould've been my\n makin' if I could've taken one back\n to Carthis.\" He entered his vessel.\n\n\n The others drew back, out of\n range of the expected blast, and\n watched, each with his own\n thoughts, as the first visitor from\n space hurriedly left Earth.\n... THE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nIf Worlds of Science Fiction\nJanuary 1954.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"He turned and gestured to Dameri\n Tass who hadn't been paying\n overmuch attention to the chairman\n in view of some dog and cat\n hostilities that had been developing\n about his feet.\n\n\n But now the alien's purplish face\n faded to a light blue. He stood and\n said hoarsely. \"Faith, an' what was\n that last you said?\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen repeated,\n \"We will now hear from the first\n being ever to come to Earth from\n another world.\"\n\n\n The face of the alien went a\n lighter blue. \"Sure, an' ye wouldn't\n jist be frightenin' a body, would\n ye? You don't mean to tell me this\n planet isn't after bein' a member of\n the Galactic League?\"\n\n\n Andersen's face was blank. \"Galactic\n League?\"",
"\"Cushlamachree,\" Dameri Tass\n moaned. \"I've gone and put me\n foot in it again. I'll be after getting\nkert\nfor this.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred was on his feet. \"I\n don't understand! Do you mean you\n aren't an envoy from another\n planet?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass held his head in his\n hands and groaned. \"An envoy, he's\n sayin', and meself only a second-rate\n collector of specimens for the Carthis\n zoo.\"\n\n\n He straightened and started off\n the speaker's stand. \"Sure, an' I\n must blast off immediately.\"\n\n\n Things were moving fast for\n President McCord but already an\n edge of relief was manifesting itself.\n Taking the initiative, he said, \"Of\n course, of course, if that is your\n desire.\" He signaled to the bodyguard\n who had accompanied the\n alien to the assemblage.",
"By the time the delegates from\n every nation, tribe, religion, class,\n color, and race had gathered in\n New York to receive the message\n from the stars, the majority of\n Earth had decided that Dameri\n Tass was the plenipotentiary of a\n super-civilization which had been\n viewing developments on this planet\n with misgivings. It was thought\n this other civilization had advanced\n greatly beyond Earth's and that the\n problems besetting us—social, economic,\n scientific—had been solved\n by the super-civilization. Obviously,\n then, Dameri Tass had come, an\n advisor from a benevolent and\n friendly people, to guide the world\n aright.",
"Dameri Tass shrugged. \"Faith, an'\n why not? As I was after sayin', I\n shared the kerit helmet with Tim\n Casey.\"\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott glared at him\n unbelievingly. \"You learned the\n language just by sticking that Rube\n Goldberg deal on Tim's head?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, an' why not?\"\n\n\n Dermott muttered, \"And with it\n he has to pick up the corniest\n brogue west of Dublin.\"\n\n\n Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly.\n \"I'm after resentin' that,\n Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way\n we talk in Ireland is—\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing\n to a bedraggled horse that had\n made its way to within fifty feet of\n the vessel. \"Now what could that\n be after bein'?\"",
"The patrolmen followed his stare.\n \"It's a horse. What else?\"\n\n\n \"A horse?\"\n\n\n Larry Dermott looked again, just\n to make sure. \"Yeah—not much of\n a horse, but a horse.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically.\n \"And jist what is a horse, if I may\n be so bold as to be askin'?\"\n\n\n \"It's an animal you ride on.\"\n\n\n The alien tore his gaze from the\n animal to look his disbelief at the\n other. \"Are you after meanin' that\n you climb upon the crature's back\n and ride him? Faith now, quit your\n blarney.\"\n\n\n He looked at the horse again,\n then down at his equipment. \"Begorra,\"\n he muttered, \"I'll share the\n kerit helmet with the crature.\"",
"The Secretary General sighed\n deeply. \"Just what\ndid\nhe do?\"\n\n\n \"The Secret Service reports he\n spent the day whistling Mother Machree\n and playing with his dog, cat\n and mouse.\"\n\n\n \"Dog, cat and mouse? I say!\"\n blurted Sir Alfred.\n\n\n The President was defensive. \"He\n had to have some occupation, and\n he seems to be particularly interested\n in our animal life. He wanted\n a horse but compromised for the\n others. I understand he insists all\n three of them come with him wherever\n he goes.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we knew what he was\n going to say,\" Andersen worried.\n\n\n \"Here he comes,\" said Sir Alfred.\n\n\n Surrounded by F.B.I. men,\n Dameri Tass was ushered to the\n speaker's stand. He had a kitten in\n his arms; a Scotty followed him.",
"The alien's face faded a light\n blue again. \"Faith, an' I'd almost\n forgotten,\" he said. \"If I'd taken\n a crature from this quarantined\n planet, my name'd be\nnork\n. Keep\n your dog and your kitty.\" He shook\n his head sadly and extracted a\n mouse from a pocket. \"An' this\n amazin' little crature as well.\"\n\n\n They followed him to the spacecraft.\n Just before entering, he spotted\n the bedraggled horse that had\n been present on his landing.\n\n\n A longing expression came over\n his highly colored face. \"Jist one\n thing,\" he said. \"Faith now, were\n they pullin' my leg when they said\n you were after ridin' on the back of\n those things?\"\n\n\n The President looked at the woebegone\n nag. \"It's a horse,\" he said,\n surprised. \"Man has been riding\n them for centuries.\"",
"\"Nonsense!\" the general snapped.\n\n\n Further discussion was interrupted\n by the screaming arrival of\n several motorcycle patrolmen followed\n by three heavily laden patrol\n cars. Overhead, pursuit planes\n zoomed in and began darting about\n nervously above the field.\n\n\n \"Sure, and it's quite a reception\n I'm after gettin',\" Dameri Tass said.\n He yawned. \"But what I'm wantin'\n is a chance to get some sleep. Faith,\n an' I've been awake for almost a\ndecal\n.\"\nDameri Tass\n was hurried, via\n helicopter, to Washington. There\n he disappeared for several days,\n being held incommunicado while\n White House, Pentagon, State Department\n and Congress tried to\n figure out just what to do with him.",
"A dull roar was beginning to\n emanate from the thousands gathered\n in the tremendous hall, murmuring,\n questioning, disbelieving.\nViljalmar Andersen\n felt that\n he must say something. He extended\n a detaining hand. \"Now you\n are here,\" he said urgently, \"even\n though by mistake, before you go\n can't you give us some brief word?\n Our world is in chaos. Many of us\n have lost faith. Perhaps ...\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass shook off the restraining\n hand. \"Do I look daft?\n Begorry, I should have been\n a-knowin' something was queer. All\n your weapons and your strange\n ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised\n if ye hadn't yet established\n a planet-wide government. Sure,\n an' I'll go still further. Ye probably\n still have wars on this benighted\n world. No wonder it is ye\n haven't been invited to join the\n Galactic League an' take your place\n among the civilized planets.\"",
"Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its\n holster and said, \"Sure, and I'm\n beginning to wonder if it's one of\n ours. No insignia and—\"\n\n\n A circular door slid open at that\n point and Dameri Tass stepped out,\n yawning. He spotted them, smiled\n and said, \"Glork.\"\n\n\n They gaped at him.\n\n\n \"Glork is right,\" Dermott swallowed.\n\n\n Tim Casey closed his mouth with\n an effort. \"Do you mind the color\n of his face?\" he blurted.\n\n\n \"How could I help it?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed\n pink hand down his purplish countenance\n and yawned again. \"Gorra\n manigan horp soratium,\" he said.",
"Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman\n Casey shot stares at each other.\n \"'Tis double talk he's after givin'\n us,\" Casey said.\n\n\n Dameri Tass frowned. \"Harama?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Larry Dermott pushed his cap to\n the back of his head. \"That doesn't\n sound like any language I've even\nheard\nabout.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass grimaced, turned\n and reentered his spacecraft to\n emerge in half a minute with his\n hands full of contraption. He held\n a box-like arrangement under his\n left arm; in his right hand were two\n metal caps connected to the box\n by wires.\n\n\n While the patrolmen watched\n him, he set the box on the ground,\n twirled two dials and put one of the\n caps on his head. He offered the\n other to Larry Dermott; his desire\n was obvious.",
"\"I'm Major General Browning,\"\n he rapped. \"I want a police cordon\n thrown up around this, er, vessel.\n No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody\n without my permission. As soon as\n Army personnel arrives, we'll take\n over completely.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Larry Dermott said. \"I\n just got a report on the radio that\n the governor is on his way, sir. How\n about him?\"\n\n\n The general muttered something\n under his breath. Then, \"When the\n governor arrives, let me know;\n otherwise, nobody gets through!\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass said, \"Faith, and\n what goes on?\"\n\n\n The general's eyes bugged still\n further. \"\nHe talks!\n\" he accused.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Dermott said. \"He\n had some kind of a machine. He\n put it over Tim's head and seconds\n later he could talk.\"",
"He hustled from the rostrum and\n made his way, still surrounded by\n guards, to the door by which he had\n entered. The dog and the cat trotted\n after, undismayed by the furor\n about them.\n\n\n They arrived about four hours\n later at the field on which he'd\n landed, and the alien from space\n hurried toward his craft, still muttering.\n He'd been accompanied by a\n general and by the President, but\n all the way he had refrained from\n speaking.\n\n\n He scurried from the car and\n toward the spacecraft.\n\n\n President McCord said, \"You've\n forgotten your pets. We would be\n glad if you would accept them as—\"",
"The alien stooped down and\n flicked a switch on the little box.\n It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly\n shrieked and sat down on the\n stubble and grass of the field. \"Begorra,\"\n he yelped, \"I've been murthered!\"\n He tore the cap from\n his head.\n\n\n His companion came running,\n \"What's the matter, Tim?\" he\n shouted.\n\n\n Dameri Tass removed the metal\n cap from his own head. \"Sure, an'\n nothin' is after bein' the matter\n with him,\" he said. \"Evidently the\n bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of\n a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt\n him not at all.\"\n\"You can\n talk!\" Dermott\n blurted, skidding to a stop.",
"Tim Casey closed his eyes and\n groaned. \"Humor him, he's after\n sayin'. Orders it is.\" He shouted\n back, \"Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's\n in technicolor? Begorra, he looks\n like a man from Mars.\"\n\n\n \"That's what they think,\" Larry\n yelled, \"and the governor is on his\n way. We're to do everything possible\n short of violence to keep this\n character here. Humor him, Tim!\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass\n snapped, pushing the cap into\n Casey's reluctant hands.\n\n\n Muttering his protests, Casey\n lifted it gingerly and placed it on\n his head. Not feeling any immediate\n effect, he said, \"There, 'tis satisfied\n ye are now, I'm supposin'.\"",
"Shure and begorra, it was a great day for the Earth! The\n first envoy from another world was about to speak—that\n is, if he could forget that horse for a minute....\noff course\nBy Mack Reynolds\nIllustrated by Kelly Freas\nFirst on\n the scene were Larry\n Dermott and Tim Casey of the\n State Highway Patrol. They assumed\n they were witnessing the\n crash of a new type of Air Force\n plane and slipped and skidded desperately\n across the field to within\n thirty feet of the strange craft, only\n to discover that the landing had\n been made without accident.\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott shook his\n head. \"They're gettin' queerer looking\n every year. Get a load of it—no\n wheels, no propeller, no cockpit.\"\n\n\n They left the car and made their\n way toward the strange egg-shaped\n vessel.",
"Trained to grasp a situation and\n immediately respond in manner best\n suited to protect the welfare of the\n people of New York State, Dermott\n cleared his throat and said, \"Tim,\n take over while I report.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Casey protested, but his\n fellow minion had left.\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass told\n Casey, holding out the metal cap.\n\n\n \"Faith, an' do I look balmy?\"\n Casey told him. \"I wouldn't be\n puttin' that dingus on my head for\n all the colleens in Ireland.\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" the stranger said\n impatiently.\n\n\n \"Bejasus,\" Casey snorted, \"ye\n can't—\"\n\n\n Dermott called from the car,\n \"Tim, the captain says to humor\n this guy. We're to keep him here\n until the officials arrive.\"",
"\"Hey, hold it,\" Dermott said anxiously.\n He was beginning to feel\n like a character in a shaggy dog\n story.\n\n\n Interest in the horse was ended\n with the sudden arrival of a helicopter.\n It swooped down on the\n field and settled within twenty feet\n of the alien craft. Almost before it\n had touched, the door was flung\n open and the flying windmill disgorged\n two bestarred and efficient-looking\n Army officers.\n\n\n Casey and Dermott snapped them\n a salute.\n\n\n The senior general didn't take\n his eyes from the alien and the\n spacecraft as he spoke, and they\n bugged quite as effectively as had\n those of the patrolmen when they'd\n first arrived on the scene.",
"And nine-tenths of the population\n of Earth stood ready and willing\n to be guided. The other tenth\n liked things as they were and were\n quite convinced that the space\n envoy would upset their applecarts.\nViljalmar Andersen\n , Secretary-General\n of the U.N., was to\n introduce the space emissary. \"Can\n you give me an idea at all of what\n he is like?\" he asked nervously.\n\n\n President McCord was as upset\n as the Dane. He shrugged in agitation.\n \"I know almost as little as\n you do.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred Oxford protested, \"But\n my dear chap, you've had him for\n almost two weeks. Certainly in that\n time—\""
],
[
"Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its\n holster and said, \"Sure, and I'm\n beginning to wonder if it's one of\n ours. No insignia and—\"\n\n\n A circular door slid open at that\n point and Dameri Tass stepped out,\n yawning. He spotted them, smiled\n and said, \"Glork.\"\n\n\n They gaped at him.\n\n\n \"Glork is right,\" Dermott swallowed.\n\n\n Tim Casey closed his mouth with\n an effort. \"Do you mind the color\n of his face?\" he blurted.\n\n\n \"How could I help it?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed\n pink hand down his purplish countenance\n and yawned again. \"Gorra\n manigan horp soratium,\" he said.",
"Tim Casey closed his eyes and\n groaned. \"Humor him, he's after\n sayin'. Orders it is.\" He shouted\n back, \"Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's\n in technicolor? Begorra, he looks\n like a man from Mars.\"\n\n\n \"That's what they think,\" Larry\n yelled, \"and the governor is on his\n way. We're to do everything possible\n short of violence to keep this\n character here. Humor him, Tim!\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass\n snapped, pushing the cap into\n Casey's reluctant hands.\n\n\n Muttering his protests, Casey\n lifted it gingerly and placed it on\n his head. Not feeling any immediate\n effect, he said, \"There, 'tis satisfied\n ye are now, I'm supposin'.\"",
"He turned and gestured to Dameri\n Tass who hadn't been paying\n overmuch attention to the chairman\n in view of some dog and cat\n hostilities that had been developing\n about his feet.\n\n\n But now the alien's purplish face\n faded to a light blue. He stood and\n said hoarsely. \"Faith, an' what was\n that last you said?\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen repeated,\n \"We will now hear from the first\n being ever to come to Earth from\n another world.\"\n\n\n The face of the alien went a\n lighter blue. \"Sure, an' ye wouldn't\n jist be frightenin' a body, would\n ye? You don't mean to tell me this\n planet isn't after bein' a member of\n the Galactic League?\"\n\n\n Andersen's face was blank. \"Galactic\n League?\"",
"\"Nonsense!\" the general snapped.\n\n\n Further discussion was interrupted\n by the screaming arrival of\n several motorcycle patrolmen followed\n by three heavily laden patrol\n cars. Overhead, pursuit planes\n zoomed in and began darting about\n nervously above the field.\n\n\n \"Sure, and it's quite a reception\n I'm after gettin',\" Dameri Tass said.\n He yawned. \"But what I'm wantin'\n is a chance to get some sleep. Faith,\n an' I've been awake for almost a\ndecal\n.\"\nDameri Tass\n was hurried, via\n helicopter, to Washington. There\n he disappeared for several days,\n being held incommunicado while\n White House, Pentagon, State Department\n and Congress tried to\n figure out just what to do with him.",
"Dameri Tass shrugged. \"Faith, an'\n why not? As I was after sayin', I\n shared the kerit helmet with Tim\n Casey.\"\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott glared at him\n unbelievingly. \"You learned the\n language just by sticking that Rube\n Goldberg deal on Tim's head?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, an' why not?\"\n\n\n Dermott muttered, \"And with it\n he has to pick up the corniest\n brogue west of Dublin.\"\n\n\n Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly.\n \"I'm after resentin' that,\n Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way\n we talk in Ireland is—\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing\n to a bedraggled horse that had\n made its way to within fifty feet of\n the vessel. \"Now what could that\n be after bein'?\"",
"\"I'm Major General Browning,\"\n he rapped. \"I want a police cordon\n thrown up around this, er, vessel.\n No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody\n without my permission. As soon as\n Army personnel arrives, we'll take\n over completely.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Larry Dermott said. \"I\n just got a report on the radio that\n the governor is on his way, sir. How\n about him?\"\n\n\n The general muttered something\n under his breath. Then, \"When the\n governor arrives, let me know;\n otherwise, nobody gets through!\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass said, \"Faith, and\n what goes on?\"\n\n\n The general's eyes bugged still\n further. \"\nHe talks!\n\" he accused.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Dermott said. \"He\n had some kind of a machine. He\n put it over Tim's head and seconds\n later he could talk.\"",
"Dameri Tass shook his head.\n \"Sure, an' 'twould've been my\n makin' if I could've taken one back\n to Carthis.\" He entered his vessel.\n\n\n The others drew back, out of\n range of the expected blast, and\n watched, each with his own\n thoughts, as the first visitor from\n space hurriedly left Earth.\n... THE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nIf Worlds of Science Fiction\nJanuary 1954.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"The Secretary General sighed\n deeply. \"Just what\ndid\nhe do?\"\n\n\n \"The Secret Service reports he\n spent the day whistling Mother Machree\n and playing with his dog, cat\n and mouse.\"\n\n\n \"Dog, cat and mouse? I say!\"\n blurted Sir Alfred.\n\n\n The President was defensive. \"He\n had to have some occupation, and\n he seems to be particularly interested\n in our animal life. He wanted\n a horse but compromised for the\n others. I understand he insists all\n three of them come with him wherever\n he goes.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we knew what he was\n going to say,\" Andersen worried.\n\n\n \"Here he comes,\" said Sir Alfred.\n\n\n Surrounded by F.B.I. men,\n Dameri Tass was ushered to the\n speaker's stand. He had a kitten in\n his arms; a Scotty followed him.",
"\"Cushlamachree,\" Dameri Tass\n moaned. \"I've gone and put me\n foot in it again. I'll be after getting\nkert\nfor this.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred was on his feet. \"I\n don't understand! Do you mean you\n aren't an envoy from another\n planet?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass held his head in his\n hands and groaned. \"An envoy, he's\n sayin', and meself only a second-rate\n collector of specimens for the Carthis\n zoo.\"\n\n\n He straightened and started off\n the speaker's stand. \"Sure, an' I\n must blast off immediately.\"\n\n\n Things were moving fast for\n President McCord but already an\n edge of relief was manifesting itself.\n Taking the initiative, he said, \"Of\n course, of course, if that is your\n desire.\" He signaled to the bodyguard\n who had accompanied the\n alien to the assemblage.",
"By the time the delegates from\n every nation, tribe, religion, class,\n color, and race had gathered in\n New York to receive the message\n from the stars, the majority of\n Earth had decided that Dameri\n Tass was the plenipotentiary of a\n super-civilization which had been\n viewing developments on this planet\n with misgivings. It was thought\n this other civilization had advanced\n greatly beyond Earth's and that the\n problems besetting us—social, economic,\n scientific—had been solved\n by the super-civilization. Obviously,\n then, Dameri Tass had come, an\n advisor from a benevolent and\n friendly people, to guide the world\n aright.",
"The alien stooped down and\n flicked a switch on the little box.\n It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly\n shrieked and sat down on the\n stubble and grass of the field. \"Begorra,\"\n he yelped, \"I've been murthered!\"\n He tore the cap from\n his head.\n\n\n His companion came running,\n \"What's the matter, Tim?\" he\n shouted.\n\n\n Dameri Tass removed the metal\n cap from his own head. \"Sure, an'\n nothin' is after bein' the matter\n with him,\" he said. \"Evidently the\n bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of\n a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt\n him not at all.\"\n\"You can\n talk!\" Dermott\n blurted, skidding to a stop.",
"Trained to grasp a situation and\n immediately respond in manner best\n suited to protect the welfare of the\n people of New York State, Dermott\n cleared his throat and said, \"Tim,\n take over while I report.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Casey protested, but his\n fellow minion had left.\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass told\n Casey, holding out the metal cap.\n\n\n \"Faith, an' do I look balmy?\"\n Casey told him. \"I wouldn't be\n puttin' that dingus on my head for\n all the colleens in Ireland.\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" the stranger said\n impatiently.\n\n\n \"Bejasus,\" Casey snorted, \"ye\n can't—\"\n\n\n Dermott called from the car,\n \"Tim, the captain says to humor\n this guy. We're to keep him here\n until the officials arrive.\"",
"Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman\n Casey shot stares at each other.\n \"'Tis double talk he's after givin'\n us,\" Casey said.\n\n\n Dameri Tass frowned. \"Harama?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Larry Dermott pushed his cap to\n the back of his head. \"That doesn't\n sound like any language I've even\nheard\nabout.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass grimaced, turned\n and reentered his spacecraft to\n emerge in half a minute with his\n hands full of contraption. He held\n a box-like arrangement under his\n left arm; in his right hand were two\n metal caps connected to the box\n by wires.\n\n\n While the patrolmen watched\n him, he set the box on the ground,\n twirled two dials and put one of the\n caps on his head. He offered the\n other to Larry Dermott; his desire\n was obvious.",
"A dull roar was beginning to\n emanate from the thousands gathered\n in the tremendous hall, murmuring,\n questioning, disbelieving.\nViljalmar Andersen\n felt that\n he must say something. He extended\n a detaining hand. \"Now you\n are here,\" he said urgently, \"even\n though by mistake, before you go\n can't you give us some brief word?\n Our world is in chaos. Many of us\n have lost faith. Perhaps ...\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass shook off the restraining\n hand. \"Do I look daft?\n Begorry, I should have been\n a-knowin' something was queer. All\n your weapons and your strange\n ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised\n if ye hadn't yet established\n a planet-wide government. Sure,\n an' I'll go still further. Ye probably\n still have wars on this benighted\n world. No wonder it is ye\n haven't been invited to join the\n Galactic League an' take your place\n among the civilized planets.\"",
"The patrolmen followed his stare.\n \"It's a horse. What else?\"\n\n\n \"A horse?\"\n\n\n Larry Dermott looked again, just\n to make sure. \"Yeah—not much of\n a horse, but a horse.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically.\n \"And jist what is a horse, if I may\n be so bold as to be askin'?\"\n\n\n \"It's an animal you ride on.\"\n\n\n The alien tore his gaze from the\n animal to look his disbelief at the\n other. \"Are you after meanin' that\n you climb upon the crature's back\n and ride him? Faith now, quit your\n blarney.\"\n\n\n He looked at the horse again,\n then down at his equipment. \"Begorra,\"\n he muttered, \"I'll share the\n kerit helmet with the crature.\"",
"\"Hey, hold it,\" Dermott said anxiously.\n He was beginning to feel\n like a character in a shaggy dog\n story.\n\n\n Interest in the horse was ended\n with the sudden arrival of a helicopter.\n It swooped down on the\n field and settled within twenty feet\n of the alien craft. Almost before it\n had touched, the door was flung\n open and the flying windmill disgorged\n two bestarred and efficient-looking\n Army officers.\n\n\n Casey and Dermott snapped them\n a salute.\n\n\n The senior general didn't take\n his eyes from the alien and the\n spacecraft as he spoke, and they\n bugged quite as effectively as had\n those of the patrolmen when they'd\n first arrived on the scene.",
"The alien's face faded a light\n blue again. \"Faith, an' I'd almost\n forgotten,\" he said. \"If I'd taken\n a crature from this quarantined\n planet, my name'd be\nnork\n. Keep\n your dog and your kitty.\" He shook\n his head sadly and extracted a\n mouse from a pocket. \"An' this\n amazin' little crature as well.\"\n\n\n They followed him to the spacecraft.\n Just before entering, he spotted\n the bedraggled horse that had\n been present on his landing.\n\n\n A longing expression came over\n his highly colored face. \"Jist one\n thing,\" he said. \"Faith now, were\n they pullin' my leg when they said\n you were after ridin' on the back of\n those things?\"\n\n\n The President looked at the woebegone\n nag. \"It's a horse,\" he said,\n surprised. \"Man has been riding\n them for centuries.\"",
"Excitement, anticipation, blanketed\n the world. Shepherds in Sinkiang,\n multi-millionaires in Switzerland,\n fakirs in Pakistan, gauchos in\n the Argentine were raised to a\n zenith of expectation. Panhandlers\n debated the message to come with\n pedestrians; jinrikisha men argued\n it with their passengers; miners discussed\n it deep beneath the surface;\n pilots argued with their co-pilots\n thousands of feet above.\n\n\n It was the most universally\n awaited event of the ages.",
"And nine-tenths of the population\n of Earth stood ready and willing\n to be guided. The other tenth\n liked things as they were and were\n quite convinced that the space\n envoy would upset their applecarts.\nViljalmar Andersen\n , Secretary-General\n of the U.N., was to\n introduce the space emissary. \"Can\n you give me an idea at all of what\n he is like?\" he asked nervously.\n\n\n President McCord was as upset\n as the Dane. He shrugged in agitation.\n \"I know almost as little as\n you do.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred Oxford protested, \"But\n my dear chap, you've had him for\n almost two weeks. Certainly in that\n time—\"",
"He hustled from the rostrum and\n made his way, still surrounded by\n guards, to the door by which he had\n entered. The dog and the cat trotted\n after, undismayed by the furor\n about them.\n\n\n They arrived about four hours\n later at the field on which he'd\n landed, and the alien from space\n hurried toward his craft, still muttering.\n He'd been accompanied by a\n general and by the President, but\n all the way he had refrained from\n speaking.\n\n\n He scurried from the car and\n toward the spacecraft.\n\n\n President McCord said, \"You've\n forgotten your pets. We would be\n glad if you would accept them as—\""
],
[
"\"Nonsense!\" the general snapped.\n\n\n Further discussion was interrupted\n by the screaming arrival of\n several motorcycle patrolmen followed\n by three heavily laden patrol\n cars. Overhead, pursuit planes\n zoomed in and began darting about\n nervously above the field.\n\n\n \"Sure, and it's quite a reception\n I'm after gettin',\" Dameri Tass said.\n He yawned. \"But what I'm wantin'\n is a chance to get some sleep. Faith,\n an' I've been awake for almost a\ndecal\n.\"\nDameri Tass\n was hurried, via\n helicopter, to Washington. There\n he disappeared for several days,\n being held incommunicado while\n White House, Pentagon, State Department\n and Congress tried to\n figure out just what to do with him.",
"The Secretary General sighed\n deeply. \"Just what\ndid\nhe do?\"\n\n\n \"The Secret Service reports he\n spent the day whistling Mother Machree\n and playing with his dog, cat\n and mouse.\"\n\n\n \"Dog, cat and mouse? I say!\"\n blurted Sir Alfred.\n\n\n The President was defensive. \"He\n had to have some occupation, and\n he seems to be particularly interested\n in our animal life. He wanted\n a horse but compromised for the\n others. I understand he insists all\n three of them come with him wherever\n he goes.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we knew what he was\n going to say,\" Andersen worried.\n\n\n \"Here he comes,\" said Sir Alfred.\n\n\n Surrounded by F.B.I. men,\n Dameri Tass was ushered to the\n speaker's stand. He had a kitten in\n his arms; a Scotty followed him.",
"Tim Casey closed his eyes and\n groaned. \"Humor him, he's after\n sayin'. Orders it is.\" He shouted\n back, \"Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's\n in technicolor? Begorra, he looks\n like a man from Mars.\"\n\n\n \"That's what they think,\" Larry\n yelled, \"and the governor is on his\n way. We're to do everything possible\n short of violence to keep this\n character here. Humor him, Tim!\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass\n snapped, pushing the cap into\n Casey's reluctant hands.\n\n\n Muttering his protests, Casey\n lifted it gingerly and placed it on\n his head. Not feeling any immediate\n effect, he said, \"There, 'tis satisfied\n ye are now, I'm supposin'.\"",
"By the time the delegates from\n every nation, tribe, religion, class,\n color, and race had gathered in\n New York to receive the message\n from the stars, the majority of\n Earth had decided that Dameri\n Tass was the plenipotentiary of a\n super-civilization which had been\n viewing developments on this planet\n with misgivings. It was thought\n this other civilization had advanced\n greatly beyond Earth's and that the\n problems besetting us—social, economic,\n scientific—had been solved\n by the super-civilization. Obviously,\n then, Dameri Tass had come, an\n advisor from a benevolent and\n friendly people, to guide the world\n aright.",
"\"I'm Major General Browning,\"\n he rapped. \"I want a police cordon\n thrown up around this, er, vessel.\n No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody\n without my permission. As soon as\n Army personnel arrives, we'll take\n over completely.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Larry Dermott said. \"I\n just got a report on the radio that\n the governor is on his way, sir. How\n about him?\"\n\n\n The general muttered something\n under his breath. Then, \"When the\n governor arrives, let me know;\n otherwise, nobody gets through!\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass said, \"Faith, and\n what goes on?\"\n\n\n The general's eyes bugged still\n further. \"\nHe talks!\n\" he accused.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Dermott said. \"He\n had some kind of a machine. He\n put it over Tim's head and seconds\n later he could talk.\"",
"Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its\n holster and said, \"Sure, and I'm\n beginning to wonder if it's one of\n ours. No insignia and—\"\n\n\n A circular door slid open at that\n point and Dameri Tass stepped out,\n yawning. He spotted them, smiled\n and said, \"Glork.\"\n\n\n They gaped at him.\n\n\n \"Glork is right,\" Dermott swallowed.\n\n\n Tim Casey closed his mouth with\n an effort. \"Do you mind the color\n of his face?\" he blurted.\n\n\n \"How could I help it?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed\n pink hand down his purplish countenance\n and yawned again. \"Gorra\n manigan horp soratium,\" he said.",
"He turned and gestured to Dameri\n Tass who hadn't been paying\n overmuch attention to the chairman\n in view of some dog and cat\n hostilities that had been developing\n about his feet.\n\n\n But now the alien's purplish face\n faded to a light blue. He stood and\n said hoarsely. \"Faith, an' what was\n that last you said?\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen repeated,\n \"We will now hear from the first\n being ever to come to Earth from\n another world.\"\n\n\n The face of the alien went a\n lighter blue. \"Sure, an' ye wouldn't\n jist be frightenin' a body, would\n ye? You don't mean to tell me this\n planet isn't after bein' a member of\n the Galactic League?\"\n\n\n Andersen's face was blank. \"Galactic\n League?\"",
"Dameri Tass shrugged. \"Faith, an'\n why not? As I was after sayin', I\n shared the kerit helmet with Tim\n Casey.\"\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott glared at him\n unbelievingly. \"You learned the\n language just by sticking that Rube\n Goldberg deal on Tim's head?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, an' why not?\"\n\n\n Dermott muttered, \"And with it\n he has to pick up the corniest\n brogue west of Dublin.\"\n\n\n Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly.\n \"I'm after resentin' that,\n Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way\n we talk in Ireland is—\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing\n to a bedraggled horse that had\n made its way to within fifty feet of\n the vessel. \"Now what could that\n be after bein'?\"",
"Dameri Tass shook his head.\n \"Sure, an' 'twould've been my\n makin' if I could've taken one back\n to Carthis.\" He entered his vessel.\n\n\n The others drew back, out of\n range of the expected blast, and\n watched, each with his own\n thoughts, as the first visitor from\n space hurriedly left Earth.\n... THE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nIf Worlds of Science Fiction\nJanuary 1954.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"Trained to grasp a situation and\n immediately respond in manner best\n suited to protect the welfare of the\n people of New York State, Dermott\n cleared his throat and said, \"Tim,\n take over while I report.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Casey protested, but his\n fellow minion had left.\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass told\n Casey, holding out the metal cap.\n\n\n \"Faith, an' do I look balmy?\"\n Casey told him. \"I wouldn't be\n puttin' that dingus on my head for\n all the colleens in Ireland.\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" the stranger said\n impatiently.\n\n\n \"Bejasus,\" Casey snorted, \"ye\n can't—\"\n\n\n Dermott called from the car,\n \"Tim, the captain says to humor\n this guy. We're to keep him here\n until the officials arrive.\"",
"\"Cushlamachree,\" Dameri Tass\n moaned. \"I've gone and put me\n foot in it again. I'll be after getting\nkert\nfor this.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred was on his feet. \"I\n don't understand! Do you mean you\n aren't an envoy from another\n planet?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass held his head in his\n hands and groaned. \"An envoy, he's\n sayin', and meself only a second-rate\n collector of specimens for the Carthis\n zoo.\"\n\n\n He straightened and started off\n the speaker's stand. \"Sure, an' I\n must blast off immediately.\"\n\n\n Things were moving fast for\n President McCord but already an\n edge of relief was manifesting itself.\n Taking the initiative, he said, \"Of\n course, of course, if that is your\n desire.\" He signaled to the bodyguard\n who had accompanied the\n alien to the assemblage.",
"A dull roar was beginning to\n emanate from the thousands gathered\n in the tremendous hall, murmuring,\n questioning, disbelieving.\nViljalmar Andersen\n felt that\n he must say something. He extended\n a detaining hand. \"Now you\n are here,\" he said urgently, \"even\n though by mistake, before you go\n can't you give us some brief word?\n Our world is in chaos. Many of us\n have lost faith. Perhaps ...\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass shook off the restraining\n hand. \"Do I look daft?\n Begorry, I should have been\n a-knowin' something was queer. All\n your weapons and your strange\n ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised\n if ye hadn't yet established\n a planet-wide government. Sure,\n an' I'll go still further. Ye probably\n still have wars on this benighted\n world. No wonder it is ye\n haven't been invited to join the\n Galactic League an' take your place\n among the civilized planets.\"",
"Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman\n Casey shot stares at each other.\n \"'Tis double talk he's after givin'\n us,\" Casey said.\n\n\n Dameri Tass frowned. \"Harama?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Larry Dermott pushed his cap to\n the back of his head. \"That doesn't\n sound like any language I've even\nheard\nabout.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass grimaced, turned\n and reentered his spacecraft to\n emerge in half a minute with his\n hands full of contraption. He held\n a box-like arrangement under his\n left arm; in his right hand were two\n metal caps connected to the box\n by wires.\n\n\n While the patrolmen watched\n him, he set the box on the ground,\n twirled two dials and put one of the\n caps on his head. He offered the\n other to Larry Dermott; his desire\n was obvious.",
"The alien stooped down and\n flicked a switch on the little box.\n It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly\n shrieked and sat down on the\n stubble and grass of the field. \"Begorra,\"\n he yelped, \"I've been murthered!\"\n He tore the cap from\n his head.\n\n\n His companion came running,\n \"What's the matter, Tim?\" he\n shouted.\n\n\n Dameri Tass removed the metal\n cap from his own head. \"Sure, an'\n nothin' is after bein' the matter\n with him,\" he said. \"Evidently the\n bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of\n a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt\n him not at all.\"\n\"You can\n talk!\" Dermott\n blurted, skidding to a stop.",
"The patrolmen followed his stare.\n \"It's a horse. What else?\"\n\n\n \"A horse?\"\n\n\n Larry Dermott looked again, just\n to make sure. \"Yeah—not much of\n a horse, but a horse.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically.\n \"And jist what is a horse, if I may\n be so bold as to be askin'?\"\n\n\n \"It's an animal you ride on.\"\n\n\n The alien tore his gaze from the\n animal to look his disbelief at the\n other. \"Are you after meanin' that\n you climb upon the crature's back\n and ride him? Faith now, quit your\n blarney.\"\n\n\n He looked at the horse again,\n then down at his equipment. \"Begorra,\"\n he muttered, \"I'll share the\n kerit helmet with the crature.\"",
"\"Hey, hold it,\" Dermott said anxiously.\n He was beginning to feel\n like a character in a shaggy dog\n story.\n\n\n Interest in the horse was ended\n with the sudden arrival of a helicopter.\n It swooped down on the\n field and settled within twenty feet\n of the alien craft. Almost before it\n had touched, the door was flung\n open and the flying windmill disgorged\n two bestarred and efficient-looking\n Army officers.\n\n\n Casey and Dermott snapped them\n a salute.\n\n\n The senior general didn't take\n his eyes from the alien and the\n spacecraft as he spoke, and they\n bugged quite as effectively as had\n those of the patrolmen when they'd\n first arrived on the scene.",
"The President snapped back,\n \"You probably won't believe this,\n but he's been asleep until yesterday.\n When he first arrived he told us he\n hadn't slept for a\ndecal\n, whatever\n that is; so we held off our discussion\n with him until morning. Well—he\n didn't awaken in the morning,\n nor the next. Six days later, fearing\n something was wrong we woke\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\" Sir Alfred\n asked.\n\n\n The President showed embarrassment.\n \"He used some rather ripe\n Irish profanity on us, rolled over,\n and went back to sleep.\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen asked, \"Well,\n what happened yesterday?\"\n\n\n \"We actually haven't had time to\n question him. Among other things,\n there's been some controversy about\n whose jurisdiction he comes under.\n The State Department claims the\n Army shouldn't—\"",
"He hustled from the rostrum and\n made his way, still surrounded by\n guards, to the door by which he had\n entered. The dog and the cat trotted\n after, undismayed by the furor\n about them.\n\n\n They arrived about four hours\n later at the field on which he'd\n landed, and the alien from space\n hurried toward his craft, still muttering.\n He'd been accompanied by a\n general and by the President, but\n all the way he had refrained from\n speaking.\n\n\n He scurried from the car and\n toward the spacecraft.\n\n\n President McCord said, \"You've\n forgotten your pets. We would be\n glad if you would accept them as—\"",
"And nine-tenths of the population\n of Earth stood ready and willing\n to be guided. The other tenth\n liked things as they were and were\n quite convinced that the space\n envoy would upset their applecarts.\nViljalmar Andersen\n , Secretary-General\n of the U.N., was to\n introduce the space emissary. \"Can\n you give me an idea at all of what\n he is like?\" he asked nervously.\n\n\n President McCord was as upset\n as the Dane. He shrugged in agitation.\n \"I know almost as little as\n you do.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred Oxford protested, \"But\n my dear chap, you've had him for\n almost two weeks. Certainly in that\n time—\"",
"Excitement, anticipation, blanketed\n the world. Shepherds in Sinkiang,\n multi-millionaires in Switzerland,\n fakirs in Pakistan, gauchos in\n the Argentine were raised to a\n zenith of expectation. Panhandlers\n debated the message to come with\n pedestrians; jinrikisha men argued\n it with their passengers; miners discussed\n it deep beneath the surface;\n pilots argued with their co-pilots\n thousands of feet above.\n\n\n It was the most universally\n awaited event of the ages."
],
[
"The patrolmen followed his stare.\n \"It's a horse. What else?\"\n\n\n \"A horse?\"\n\n\n Larry Dermott looked again, just\n to make sure. \"Yeah—not much of\n a horse, but a horse.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically.\n \"And jist what is a horse, if I may\n be so bold as to be askin'?\"\n\n\n \"It's an animal you ride on.\"\n\n\n The alien tore his gaze from the\n animal to look his disbelief at the\n other. \"Are you after meanin' that\n you climb upon the crature's back\n and ride him? Faith now, quit your\n blarney.\"\n\n\n He looked at the horse again,\n then down at his equipment. \"Begorra,\"\n he muttered, \"I'll share the\n kerit helmet with the crature.\"",
"Dameri Tass shrugged. \"Faith, an'\n why not? As I was after sayin', I\n shared the kerit helmet with Tim\n Casey.\"\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott glared at him\n unbelievingly. \"You learned the\n language just by sticking that Rube\n Goldberg deal on Tim's head?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, an' why not?\"\n\n\n Dermott muttered, \"And with it\n he has to pick up the corniest\n brogue west of Dublin.\"\n\n\n Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly.\n \"I'm after resentin' that,\n Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way\n we talk in Ireland is—\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing\n to a bedraggled horse that had\n made its way to within fifty feet of\n the vessel. \"Now what could that\n be after bein'?\"",
"\"Nonsense!\" the general snapped.\n\n\n Further discussion was interrupted\n by the screaming arrival of\n several motorcycle patrolmen followed\n by three heavily laden patrol\n cars. Overhead, pursuit planes\n zoomed in and began darting about\n nervously above the field.\n\n\n \"Sure, and it's quite a reception\n I'm after gettin',\" Dameri Tass said.\n He yawned. \"But what I'm wantin'\n is a chance to get some sleep. Faith,\n an' I've been awake for almost a\ndecal\n.\"\nDameri Tass\n was hurried, via\n helicopter, to Washington. There\n he disappeared for several days,\n being held incommunicado while\n White House, Pentagon, State Department\n and Congress tried to\n figure out just what to do with him.",
"The Secretary General sighed\n deeply. \"Just what\ndid\nhe do?\"\n\n\n \"The Secret Service reports he\n spent the day whistling Mother Machree\n and playing with his dog, cat\n and mouse.\"\n\n\n \"Dog, cat and mouse? I say!\"\n blurted Sir Alfred.\n\n\n The President was defensive. \"He\n had to have some occupation, and\n he seems to be particularly interested\n in our animal life. He wanted\n a horse but compromised for the\n others. I understand he insists all\n three of them come with him wherever\n he goes.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we knew what he was\n going to say,\" Andersen worried.\n\n\n \"Here he comes,\" said Sir Alfred.\n\n\n Surrounded by F.B.I. men,\n Dameri Tass was ushered to the\n speaker's stand. He had a kitten in\n his arms; a Scotty followed him.",
"Tim Casey closed his eyes and\n groaned. \"Humor him, he's after\n sayin'. Orders it is.\" He shouted\n back, \"Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's\n in technicolor? Begorra, he looks\n like a man from Mars.\"\n\n\n \"That's what they think,\" Larry\n yelled, \"and the governor is on his\n way. We're to do everything possible\n short of violence to keep this\n character here. Humor him, Tim!\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass\n snapped, pushing the cap into\n Casey's reluctant hands.\n\n\n Muttering his protests, Casey\n lifted it gingerly and placed it on\n his head. Not feeling any immediate\n effect, he said, \"There, 'tis satisfied\n ye are now, I'm supposin'.\"",
"Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its\n holster and said, \"Sure, and I'm\n beginning to wonder if it's one of\n ours. No insignia and—\"\n\n\n A circular door slid open at that\n point and Dameri Tass stepped out,\n yawning. He spotted them, smiled\n and said, \"Glork.\"\n\n\n They gaped at him.\n\n\n \"Glork is right,\" Dermott swallowed.\n\n\n Tim Casey closed his mouth with\n an effort. \"Do you mind the color\n of his face?\" he blurted.\n\n\n \"How could I help it?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed\n pink hand down his purplish countenance\n and yawned again. \"Gorra\n manigan horp soratium,\" he said.",
"Trained to grasp a situation and\n immediately respond in manner best\n suited to protect the welfare of the\n people of New York State, Dermott\n cleared his throat and said, \"Tim,\n take over while I report.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Casey protested, but his\n fellow minion had left.\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass told\n Casey, holding out the metal cap.\n\n\n \"Faith, an' do I look balmy?\"\n Casey told him. \"I wouldn't be\n puttin' that dingus on my head for\n all the colleens in Ireland.\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" the stranger said\n impatiently.\n\n\n \"Bejasus,\" Casey snorted, \"ye\n can't—\"\n\n\n Dermott called from the car,\n \"Tim, the captain says to humor\n this guy. We're to keep him here\n until the officials arrive.\"",
"\"Hey, hold it,\" Dermott said anxiously.\n He was beginning to feel\n like a character in a shaggy dog\n story.\n\n\n Interest in the horse was ended\n with the sudden arrival of a helicopter.\n It swooped down on the\n field and settled within twenty feet\n of the alien craft. Almost before it\n had touched, the door was flung\n open and the flying windmill disgorged\n two bestarred and efficient-looking\n Army officers.\n\n\n Casey and Dermott snapped them\n a salute.\n\n\n The senior general didn't take\n his eyes from the alien and the\n spacecraft as he spoke, and they\n bugged quite as effectively as had\n those of the patrolmen when they'd\n first arrived on the scene.",
"He turned and gestured to Dameri\n Tass who hadn't been paying\n overmuch attention to the chairman\n in view of some dog and cat\n hostilities that had been developing\n about his feet.\n\n\n But now the alien's purplish face\n faded to a light blue. He stood and\n said hoarsely. \"Faith, an' what was\n that last you said?\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen repeated,\n \"We will now hear from the first\n being ever to come to Earth from\n another world.\"\n\n\n The face of the alien went a\n lighter blue. \"Sure, an' ye wouldn't\n jist be frightenin' a body, would\n ye? You don't mean to tell me this\n planet isn't after bein' a member of\n the Galactic League?\"\n\n\n Andersen's face was blank. \"Galactic\n League?\"",
"The alien's face faded a light\n blue again. \"Faith, an' I'd almost\n forgotten,\" he said. \"If I'd taken\n a crature from this quarantined\n planet, my name'd be\nnork\n. Keep\n your dog and your kitty.\" He shook\n his head sadly and extracted a\n mouse from a pocket. \"An' this\n amazin' little crature as well.\"\n\n\n They followed him to the spacecraft.\n Just before entering, he spotted\n the bedraggled horse that had\n been present on his landing.\n\n\n A longing expression came over\n his highly colored face. \"Jist one\n thing,\" he said. \"Faith now, were\n they pullin' my leg when they said\n you were after ridin' on the back of\n those things?\"\n\n\n The President looked at the woebegone\n nag. \"It's a horse,\" he said,\n surprised. \"Man has been riding\n them for centuries.\"",
"\"I'm Major General Browning,\"\n he rapped. \"I want a police cordon\n thrown up around this, er, vessel.\n No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody\n without my permission. As soon as\n Army personnel arrives, we'll take\n over completely.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Larry Dermott said. \"I\n just got a report on the radio that\n the governor is on his way, sir. How\n about him?\"\n\n\n The general muttered something\n under his breath. Then, \"When the\n governor arrives, let me know;\n otherwise, nobody gets through!\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass said, \"Faith, and\n what goes on?\"\n\n\n The general's eyes bugged still\n further. \"\nHe talks!\n\" he accused.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Dermott said. \"He\n had some kind of a machine. He\n put it over Tim's head and seconds\n later he could talk.\"",
"Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman\n Casey shot stares at each other.\n \"'Tis double talk he's after givin'\n us,\" Casey said.\n\n\n Dameri Tass frowned. \"Harama?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Larry Dermott pushed his cap to\n the back of his head. \"That doesn't\n sound like any language I've even\nheard\nabout.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass grimaced, turned\n and reentered his spacecraft to\n emerge in half a minute with his\n hands full of contraption. He held\n a box-like arrangement under his\n left arm; in his right hand were two\n metal caps connected to the box\n by wires.\n\n\n While the patrolmen watched\n him, he set the box on the ground,\n twirled two dials and put one of the\n caps on his head. He offered the\n other to Larry Dermott; his desire\n was obvious.",
"Dameri Tass shook his head.\n \"Sure, an' 'twould've been my\n makin' if I could've taken one back\n to Carthis.\" He entered his vessel.\n\n\n The others drew back, out of\n range of the expected blast, and\n watched, each with his own\n thoughts, as the first visitor from\n space hurriedly left Earth.\n... THE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nIf Worlds of Science Fiction\nJanuary 1954.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"By the time the delegates from\n every nation, tribe, religion, class,\n color, and race had gathered in\n New York to receive the message\n from the stars, the majority of\n Earth had decided that Dameri\n Tass was the plenipotentiary of a\n super-civilization which had been\n viewing developments on this planet\n with misgivings. It was thought\n this other civilization had advanced\n greatly beyond Earth's and that the\n problems besetting us—social, economic,\n scientific—had been solved\n by the super-civilization. Obviously,\n then, Dameri Tass had come, an\n advisor from a benevolent and\n friendly people, to guide the world\n aright.",
"A dull roar was beginning to\n emanate from the thousands gathered\n in the tremendous hall, murmuring,\n questioning, disbelieving.\nViljalmar Andersen\n felt that\n he must say something. He extended\n a detaining hand. \"Now you\n are here,\" he said urgently, \"even\n though by mistake, before you go\n can't you give us some brief word?\n Our world is in chaos. Many of us\n have lost faith. Perhaps ...\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass shook off the restraining\n hand. \"Do I look daft?\n Begorry, I should have been\n a-knowin' something was queer. All\n your weapons and your strange\n ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised\n if ye hadn't yet established\n a planet-wide government. Sure,\n an' I'll go still further. Ye probably\n still have wars on this benighted\n world. No wonder it is ye\n haven't been invited to join the\n Galactic League an' take your place\n among the civilized planets.\"",
"\"Cushlamachree,\" Dameri Tass\n moaned. \"I've gone and put me\n foot in it again. I'll be after getting\nkert\nfor this.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred was on his feet. \"I\n don't understand! Do you mean you\n aren't an envoy from another\n planet?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass held his head in his\n hands and groaned. \"An envoy, he's\n sayin', and meself only a second-rate\n collector of specimens for the Carthis\n zoo.\"\n\n\n He straightened and started off\n the speaker's stand. \"Sure, an' I\n must blast off immediately.\"\n\n\n Things were moving fast for\n President McCord but already an\n edge of relief was manifesting itself.\n Taking the initiative, he said, \"Of\n course, of course, if that is your\n desire.\" He signaled to the bodyguard\n who had accompanied the\n alien to the assemblage.",
"The alien stooped down and\n flicked a switch on the little box.\n It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly\n shrieked and sat down on the\n stubble and grass of the field. \"Begorra,\"\n he yelped, \"I've been murthered!\"\n He tore the cap from\n his head.\n\n\n His companion came running,\n \"What's the matter, Tim?\" he\n shouted.\n\n\n Dameri Tass removed the metal\n cap from his own head. \"Sure, an'\n nothin' is after bein' the matter\n with him,\" he said. \"Evidently the\n bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of\n a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt\n him not at all.\"\n\"You can\n talk!\" Dermott\n blurted, skidding to a stop.",
"He hustled from the rostrum and\n made his way, still surrounded by\n guards, to the door by which he had\n entered. The dog and the cat trotted\n after, undismayed by the furor\n about them.\n\n\n They arrived about four hours\n later at the field on which he'd\n landed, and the alien from space\n hurried toward his craft, still muttering.\n He'd been accompanied by a\n general and by the President, but\n all the way he had refrained from\n speaking.\n\n\n He scurried from the car and\n toward the spacecraft.\n\n\n President McCord said, \"You've\n forgotten your pets. We would be\n glad if you would accept them as—\"",
"Excitement, anticipation, blanketed\n the world. Shepherds in Sinkiang,\n multi-millionaires in Switzerland,\n fakirs in Pakistan, gauchos in\n the Argentine were raised to a\n zenith of expectation. Panhandlers\n debated the message to come with\n pedestrians; jinrikisha men argued\n it with their passengers; miners discussed\n it deep beneath the surface;\n pilots argued with their co-pilots\n thousands of feet above.\n\n\n It was the most universally\n awaited event of the ages.",
"Shure and begorra, it was a great day for the Earth! The\n first envoy from another world was about to speak—that\n is, if he could forget that horse for a minute....\noff course\nBy Mack Reynolds\nIllustrated by Kelly Freas\nFirst on\n the scene were Larry\n Dermott and Tim Casey of the\n State Highway Patrol. They assumed\n they were witnessing the\n crash of a new type of Air Force\n plane and slipped and skidded desperately\n across the field to within\n thirty feet of the strange craft, only\n to discover that the landing had\n been made without accident.\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott shook his\n head. \"They're gettin' queerer looking\n every year. Get a load of it—no\n wheels, no propeller, no cockpit.\"\n\n\n They left the car and made their\n way toward the strange egg-shaped\n vessel."
]
] |
valid
|
61146
|
[
"How many times did Retief try to tell Potter he was not Lemuel's cousin?",
"What misconception did Potter have about the Flap-jacks?",
"Why did Retief want to go away alone from the fire?",
"What did the flap-jacks think people wanted?",
"How did Hoshick feel about war?",
"How did Retief beat Hoshick?",
"What did Hoshick want?",
"How did Retief evade the missile?"
] |
[
[
"1",
"0",
"3",
"2"
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[
"He thought they looked like blankets",
"He thought they wanted to take over the oases",
"He thought they killed some men",
"He thought they were friendly"
],
[
"He wanted to go home",
"He wanted to walk to a tree",
"He wanted to get away from the farmers",
"He wanted to capture a Flap-jack by surprise"
],
[
"Skirmishes",
"Peace",
"To eliminate weapons",
"The oases"
],
[
"He saw the humans as vermin",
"He saw it as an unfortunate necessity",
"He loved going into battle",
"He would rather watch than take part"
],
[
"He used his power pistol to shoot him",
"He fell on top of him and crushed him",
"He used what he learned from capturing the flap-jack",
"He twisted his tentacles and injured him"
],
[
"To take over the oases",
"To be a farmer",
"To go into battle against the humans",
"To have a plebian contest"
],
[
"He used emergency retro-drive",
"He flew right at it",
"He crashed the skiff",
"He altered course to the south"
]
] |
[
3,
2,
4,
1,
4,
3,
2,
2
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[
"\"If I'd a been a Flap-jack; I'd of et you alive,\" the newcomer said,\n moving into the ring of fire, a tall, broad-faced man in grimy leather.\n He eyed Retief.\n\n\n \"Who's that?\"\n\n\n \"What do ya mean?\" Potter spoke in the silence. \"He's your cousin....\"\n\n\n \"He ain't no cousin of mine,\" Lemuel said slowly. He stepped to Retief.\n\n\n \"Who you spyin' for, stranger?\" he rasped.\nRetief got to his feet. \"I think I should explain—\"\n\n\n A short-nosed automatic appeared in Lemuel's hand, a clashing note\n against his fringed buckskins.\n\n\n \"Skip the talk. I know a fink when I see one.\"",
"\"Good!\" Potter said. \"We figured a few of you boys from Ivory would be\n joining up when you heard. You are from Ivory?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I'm—\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you must be Lemuel's cousin. Good night! I pretty near made a bad\n mistake. Lemuel's a tough man to explain something to.\"\n\n\n \"I'm—\"\n\n\n \"Keep your head down. These damn Flap-jacks have got some wicked hand\n weapons. Come on....\" He moved off silently on all fours. Retief\n followed. They crossed two hundred yards of rough country before Potter\n got to his feet, took out a soggy bandana and mopped his face.\n\n\n \"You move good for a city man. I thought you folks on Ivory just sat\n under those domes and read dials. But I guess bein' Lemuel's cousin you\n was raised different.\"",
"\"Just for a change, I'd like to finish a sentence,\" said Retief. \"And I\n suggest you put your courage back in your pocket before it bites you.\"\n\n\n \"You talk too damned fancy to suit me.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. But I'm talking to suit me. Now, for the last time, put it\n away.\"\n\n\n Lemuel stared at Retief. \"You givin' me orders...?\"\n\n\n Retief's left fist shot out, smacked Lemuel's face dead center. He\n stumbled back, blood starting from his nose; the pistol fired into the\n dirt as he dropped it. He caught himself, jumped for Retief ... and met\n a straight right that snapped him onto his back: out cold.\n\n\n \"Wow!\" said Potter. \"The stranger took Lem ... in two punches!\"\n\n\n \"One,\" said Swazey. \"That first one was just a love tap.\"",
"\"We been yellin' for help to the CDT, over on Ivory,\" said Potter. \"But\n you know these Embassy stooges.\"\n\n\n \"We heard they were sending some kind of bureaucrat in here to tell\n us to get out and give the oases to the Flap-jacks,\" said Swazey. He\n tightened his mouth. \"We're waitin' for him....\"\n\n\n \"Meanwhile we got reinforcements comin' up, eh, boys?\" Bert winked at\n Retief. \"We put out the word back home. We all got relatives on Ivory\n and Verde.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up, you damn fool!\" a deep voice grated.\n\n\n \"Lemuel!\" Potter said. \"Nobody else could sneak up on us like that.\"",
"\"As a matter of fact—\"\n\n\n \"Have to get you some real clothes, though. Those city duds don't stand\n up on 'Dobe.\"\n\n\n Retief looked down at the charred, torn and sweat-soaked powder-blue\n blazer and slacks.\n\n\n \"This outfit seemed pretty rough-and-ready back home,\" he said. \"But I\n guess leather has its points.\"\n\n\n \"Let's get on back to camp. We'll just about make it by sundown.\n And, look. Don't say anything to Lemuel about me thinking you were a\n Flap-jack.\"\n\n\n \"I won't, but—\"\n\n\n Potter was on his way, loping off up a gentle slope. Retief pulled off\n the sodden blazer, dropped it over a bush, added his string tie and\n followed Potter.\nII",
"Bert froze. \"Hark, boys,\" he whispered. In the sudden silence a night\n lizard called. Retief strained, heard nothing. He narrowed his eyes,\n peered past the fire—\n\n\n With a swift lunge he seized up the bucket of drinking water, dashed it\n over the fire, threw himself flat. He heard the others hit the dirt a\n split second behind him.\n\n\n \"You move fast for a city man,\" breathed Swazey beside him. \"You see\n pretty good too. We'll split and take 'em from two sides. You and Bert\n from the left, me and Potter from the right.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" said Retief. \"You wait here. I'm going out alone.\"\n\n\n \"What's the idea...?\"",
"\"Maybe I'll look better after a shave,\" said Retief. \"What's the idea\n of shooting at me?\"\n\n\n \"Lemme up. My name's Potter. Sorry 'bout that. I figured it was a\n Flap-jack boat; looks just like 'em. I took a shot when I saw something\n move. Didn't know it was a Terrestrial. Who are you? What you doin'\n here? We're pretty close to the edge of the oases. That's Flap-jack\n country over there.\" He waved a hand toward the north, where the desert\n lay.\n\n\n \"I'm glad you're a poor shot. That missile was too close for comfort.\"\n\n\n \"Missile, eh? Must be Flap-jack artillery. We got nothing like that.\"\n\n\n \"I heard there was a full-fledged war brewing,\" said Retief. \"I didn't\n expect—\"",
"Retief relaxed, released his hold and got to his feet, breathing hard.\n Hoshick humped himself over onto his ventral side, lifted and moved\n gingerly over to the sidelines. His retainers came forward, assisted\n him into his trappings, strapped on the translator. He sighed heavily,\n adjusted the volume.\n\n\n \"There is much to be said for the old system,\" he said. \"What a burden\n one's sportsmanship places on one at times.\"\n\n\n \"Great sport, wasn't it?\" said Retief. \"Now, I know you'll be eager to\n continue. If you'll just wait while I run back and fetch some of our\n gougerforms—\"\n\n\n \"May hide-ticks devour the gougerforms!\" Hoshick bellowed. \"You've\n given me such a sprong-ache as I'll remember each spawning-time for a\n year.\"",
"\"They shore won't, sonny. I ain't givin' 'em the chance.\" He started\n punching keys on the console. Retief reached out, caught his wrist.\n\n\n \"Maybe you didn't hear me. I said I've got to get down.\"\n\n\n The pilot plunged against the restraint, swung a punch that Retief\n blocked casually. \"Are you nuts?\" the pilot screeched. \"They's plenty\n shootin' goin' on fer me to see it fifty miles out.\"\n\n\n \"The mail must go through, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Okay! You're so dead set on gettin' killed, you take the skiff. I'll\n tell 'em to pick up the remains next trip.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal. I'll take your offer.\"",
"Hoshick rippled his fringes ecstatically. \"Once again you have outdone\n me, Retief,\" he cried. \"This time, in generosity.\"\n\n\n \"We'll talk over the details later. I'm sure we can establish a set of\n rules that will satisfy all parties. Now I've got to get back. I think\n some of the gougerforms are waiting to see me.\"",
"\"Very well. Shall we begin?\"\n\n\n With a rush Hoshick threw himself at Retief, who ducked, whirled, and\n leaped on the Flap-jack's back ... and felt himself flipped clear by\n a mighty ripple of the alien's slab-like body. Retief rolled aside\n as Hoshick turned on him; he jumped to his feet and threw a right\n hay-maker to Hoshick's mid-section. The alien whipped his left fringe\n around in an arc that connected with Retief's jaw, sent him spinning\n onto his back ... and Hoshick's weight struck him.\nRetief twisted, tried to roll. The flat body of the alien blanketed\n him. He worked an arm free, drumming blows on the leathery back.\n Hoshick nestled closer.\n\n\n Retief's air was running out. He heaved up against the smothering\n weight. Nothing budged.",
"\"When you get back,\" said Passwyn, \"you tell me.\"\nThe mail pilot, a leathery veteran with quarter-inch whiskers, spat\n toward a stained corner of the compartment, leaned close to the screen.\n\n\n \"They's shootin' goin' on down there,\" he said. \"See them white puffs\n over the edge of the desert?\"\n\n\n \"I'm supposed to be preventing the war,\" said Retief. \"It looks like\n I'm a little late.\"\n\n\n The pilot's head snapped around. \"War?\" he yelped. \"Nobody told me they\n was a war goin' on on 'Dobe. If that's what that is, I'm gettin' out of\n here.\"\n\n\n \"Hold on,\" said Retief. \"I've got to get down. They won't shoot at you.\"",
"\"Try it two octaves higher,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Awwrrp! Sorry. Is that better?\" a clear voice came from the darkness.\n\n\n \"That's fine,\" Retief said. \"I'm here to arrange a prisoner exchange.\"\n\n\n \"Prisoners? But we have no prisoners.\"\n\n\n \"Sure you have. Me. Is it a deal?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, yes, of course. Quite equitable. What guarantees do you require?\"\n\n\n \"The word of a gentleman is sufficient.\" Retief released the alien. It\n flopped once, disappeared into the darkness.\n\n\n \"If you'd care to accompany me to our headquarters,\" the voice said,\n \"we can discuss our mutual concerns in comfort.\"\n\n\n \"Delighted.\"",
"\"Later. Sit tight and keep your eyes open.\" Retief took a bearing on a\n treetop faintly visible against the sky and started forward.\nFive minutes' stealthy progress brought him to a slight rise of ground.\n With infinite caution he raised himself, risking a glance over an\n out-cropping of rock.\n\n\n The stunted trees ended just ahead. Beyond, he could make out the dim\n contour of rolling desert. Flap-jack country. He got to his feet,\n clambered over the stone—still hot after a day of tropical heat—and\n moved forward twenty yards. Around him he saw nothing but drifted sand,\n palely visible in the starlight, and the occasional shadow of jutting\n shale slabs. Behind him the jungle was still.\n\n\n He sat down on the ground to wait.",
"RETIEF OF THE RED-TAPE MOUNTAIN\nby KEITH LAUMER\nRetief knew the importance of sealed\n\n orders—and the need to keep them that way!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"It's true,\" Consul Passwyn said, \"I requested assignment as principal\n officer at a small post. But I had in mind one of those charming resort\n worlds, with only an occasional visa problem, or perhaps a distressed\n spaceman or two a year. Instead, I'm zoo-keeper to these confounded\n settlers. And not for one world, mind you, but eight!\" He stared glumly\n at Vice-Consul Retief.",
"He inched his way to the shelter of a broad-boled dwarf tree. Somewhere\n a song lizard burbled. Whining insects circled, scented alien life,\n buzzed off. There was another rustle of foliage from the underbrush\n five yards away. A bush quivered, then a low bough dipped.\n\n\n Retief edged back around the trunk, eased down behind a fallen log.\n A stocky man in grimy leather shirt and shorts appeared, moving\n cautiously, a pistol in his hand.\n\n\n As he passed, Retief rose, leaped the log and tackled him.\n\n\n They went down together. The stranger gave one short yell, then\n struggled in silence. Retief flipped him onto his back, raised a fist—\n\n\n \"Hey!\" the settler yelled. \"You're as human as I am!\"",
"\"It was an unexpected pleasure to encounter your party here,\"\n said Hoshick. \"I confess at first we took you for an indigenous\n earth-grubbing form, but we were soon disabused of that notion.\" He\n raised a tube, manipulating it deftly with his fringe tentacles. Retief\n returned the salute and drank.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Hoshick continued, \"as soon as we realized that you were\n sportsmen like ourselves, we attempted to make amends by providing a\n bit of activity for you. We've ordered out our heavier equipment and a\n few trained skirmishers and soon we'll be able to give you an adequate\n show. Or so I hope.\"\n\n\n \"Additional skirmishers?\" said Retief. \"How many, if you don't mind my\n asking?\"",
"It was ten minutes before a movement caught his eye. Something had\n separated itself from a dark mass of stone, glided across a few yards\n of open ground to another shelter. Retief watched. Minutes passed. The\n shape moved again, slipped into a shadow ten feet distant. Retief felt\n the butt of the power pistol with his elbow. His guess had better be\n right this time....\n\n\n There was a sudden rasp, like leather against concrete, and a flurry of\n sand as the Flap-jack charged.",
"Retief turned. An immense Flap-jack, hung with crimson trappings,\n rippled at his side. The voice issued from a disk strapped to its back.\n \"You fight well. I think we will find in each other worthy adversaries.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. I'm sure the test would be interesting, but I'm hoping we can\n avoid it.\"\n\n\n \"Avoid it?\" Retief heard a low humming coming from the speaker in the\n silence. \"Well, let us dine,\" the mighty Flap-jack said at last. \"We\n can resolve these matters later. I am called Hoshick of the Mosaic of\n the Two Dawns.\"\n\n\n \"I'm Retief.\" Hoshick waited expectantly, \"... of the Mountain of Red\n Tape,\" Retief added.",
"\"Which brings us to the crux of the matter. You see, we're up against\n a serious problem with regard to skirmishforms. A low birth rate.\n Therefore we've reluctantly taken to substitutes for the mass actions\n so dear to the heart of the sportsman. We've attempted to put an end to\n these contests altogether....\"\n\n\n Hoshick coughed explosively, sending a spray of wine into the air.\n \"What are you saying?\" he gasped. \"Are you proposing that Hoshick of\n the Mosaic of the Two Dawns abandon honor....?\"\n\n\n \"Sir!\" said Retief sternly. \"You forget yourself. I, Retief of the Red\n Tape Mountain, make an alternate proposal more in keeping with the\n newest sporting principles.\"\n\n\n \"New?\" cried Hoshick. \"My dear Retief, what a pleasant surprise! I'm\n enthralled with novel modes. One gets so out of touch. Do elaborate.\""
],
[
"\"We're damn glad you're here, mister,\" said a fat man with two\n revolvers belted across his paunch. \"We can use every hand. We're in\n bad shape. We ran into the Flap-jacks three months ago and we haven't\n made a smart move since. First, we thought they were a native form we\n hadn't run into before. Fact is, one of the boys shot one, thinkin' it\n was fair game. I guess that was the start of it.\" He stirred the fire,\n added a stick.\n\n\n \"And then a bunch of 'em hit Swazey's farm here,\" Potter said. \"Killed\n two of his cattle, and pulled back.\"\n\n\n \"I figure they thought the cows were people,\" said Swazey. \"They were\n out for revenge.\"\n\n\n \"How could anybody think a cow was folks?\" another man put in. \"They\n don't look nothin' like—\"",
"\"Good!\" Potter said. \"We figured a few of you boys from Ivory would be\n joining up when you heard. You are from Ivory?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I'm—\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you must be Lemuel's cousin. Good night! I pretty near made a bad\n mistake. Lemuel's a tough man to explain something to.\"\n\n\n \"I'm—\"\n\n\n \"Keep your head down. These damn Flap-jacks have got some wicked hand\n weapons. Come on....\" He moved off silently on all fours. Retief\n followed. They crossed two hundred yards of rough country before Potter\n got to his feet, took out a soggy bandana and mopped his face.\n\n\n \"You move good for a city man. I thought you folks on Ivory just sat\n under those domes and read dials. But I guess bein' Lemuel's cousin you\n was raised different.\"",
"\"If I'd a been a Flap-jack; I'd of et you alive,\" the newcomer said,\n moving into the ring of fire, a tall, broad-faced man in grimy leather.\n He eyed Retief.\n\n\n \"Who's that?\"\n\n\n \"What do ya mean?\" Potter spoke in the silence. \"He's your cousin....\"\n\n\n \"He ain't no cousin of mine,\" Lemuel said slowly. He stepped to Retief.\n\n\n \"Who you spyin' for, stranger?\" he rasped.\nRetief got to his feet. \"I think I should explain—\"\n\n\n A short-nosed automatic appeared in Lemuel's hand, a clashing note\n against his fringed buckskins.\n\n\n \"Skip the talk. I know a fink when I see one.\"",
"\"As a matter of fact—\"\n\n\n \"Have to get you some real clothes, though. Those city duds don't stand\n up on 'Dobe.\"\n\n\n Retief looked down at the charred, torn and sweat-soaked powder-blue\n blazer and slacks.\n\n\n \"This outfit seemed pretty rough-and-ready back home,\" he said. \"But I\n guess leather has its points.\"\n\n\n \"Let's get on back to camp. We'll just about make it by sundown.\n And, look. Don't say anything to Lemuel about me thinking you were a\n Flap-jack.\"\n\n\n \"I won't, but—\"\n\n\n Potter was on his way, loping off up a gentle slope. Retief pulled off\n the sodden blazer, dropped it over a bush, added his string tie and\n followed Potter.\nII",
"\"Take place, Retief,\" said Hoshick. \"I hope you won't find our rude\n couches uncomfortable.\" Two other large Flap-jacks came into the room,\n communed silently with Hoshick. \"Pray forgive our lack of translating\n devices,\" he said to Retief. \"Permit me to introduce my colleagues....\"\n\n\n A small Flap-jack rippled the chamber bearing on its back a silver tray\n laden with aromatic food. The waiter served the four diners, filled the\n drinking tubes with yellow wine. It smelled good.\n\n\n \"I trust you'll find these dishes palatable,\" said Hoshick. \"Our\n metabolisms are much alike, I believe.\" Retief tried the food. It had a\n delicious nut-like flavor. The wine was indistinguishable from Chateau\n d'Yquem.",
"\"Don't be so dumb, Bert,\" said Swazey. \"They'd never seen Terries\n before. They know better now.\"\n\n\n Bert chuckled. \"Sure do. We showed 'em the next time, didn't we,\n Potter? Got four.\"\n\n\n \"They walked right up to my place a couple days after the first time,\"\n Swazey said. \"We were ready for 'em. Peppered 'em good. They cut and\n run.\"\n\n\n \"Flopped, you mean. Ugliest lookin' critters you ever saw. Look just\n like a old piece of dirty blanket humpin' around.\"",
"The Flap-jack fell still, only its fringes rippling slowly. Retief\n relaxed the pressure of his thumb; the alien gave a tentative jerk; the\n thumb dug in.\n\n\n The alien went limp again, waiting.\n\n\n \"Now we understand each other,\" said Retief. \"Take me to your leader.\"\nTwenty minutes' walk into the desert brought Retief to a low rampart\n of thorn branches: the Flap-jacks' outer defensive line against Terry\n forays. It would be as good a place as any to wait for the move by the\n Flap-jacks. He sat down and eased the weight of his captive off his\n back, but kept a firm thumb in place. If his analysis of the situation\n was correct, a Flap-jack picket should be along before too long....",
"It was ten minutes before a movement caught his eye. Something had\n separated itself from a dark mass of stone, glided across a few yards\n of open ground to another shelter. Retief watched. Minutes passed. The\n shape moved again, slipped into a shadow ten feet distant. Retief felt\n the butt of the power pistol with his elbow. His guess had better be\n right this time....\n\n\n There was a sudden rasp, like leather against concrete, and a flurry of\n sand as the Flap-jack charged.",
"\"Maybe I'll look better after a shave,\" said Retief. \"What's the idea\n of shooting at me?\"\n\n\n \"Lemme up. My name's Potter. Sorry 'bout that. I figured it was a\n Flap-jack boat; looks just like 'em. I took a shot when I saw something\n move. Didn't know it was a Terrestrial. Who are you? What you doin'\n here? We're pretty close to the edge of the oases. That's Flap-jack\n country over there.\" He waved a hand toward the north, where the desert\n lay.\n\n\n \"I'm glad you're a poor shot. That missile was too close for comfort.\"\n\n\n \"Missile, eh? Must be Flap-jack artillery. We got nothing like that.\"\n\n\n \"I heard there was a full-fledged war brewing,\" said Retief. \"I didn't\n expect—\"",
"Retief turned. An immense Flap-jack, hung with crimson trappings,\n rippled at his side. The voice issued from a disk strapped to its back.\n \"You fight well. I think we will find in each other worthy adversaries.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. I'm sure the test would be interesting, but I'm hoping we can\n avoid it.\"\n\n\n \"Avoid it?\" Retief heard a low humming coming from the speaker in the\n silence. \"Well, let us dine,\" the mighty Flap-jack said at last. \"We\n can resolve these matters later. I am called Hoshick of the Mosaic of\n the Two Dawns.\"\n\n\n \"I'm Retief.\" Hoshick waited expectantly, \"... of the Mountain of Red\n Tape,\" Retief added.",
"\"It's been goin' on this way ever since. They raid and then we raid.\n But lately they've been bringing some big stuff into it. They've got\n some kind of pint-sized airships and automatic rifles. We've lost four\n men now and a dozen more in the freezer, waiting for the med ship. We\n can't afford it. The colony's got less than three hundred able-bodied\n men.\"\n\n\n \"But we're hanging onto our farms,\" said Potter. \"All these oases are\n old sea-beds—a mile deep, solid topsoil. And there's a couple of\n hundred others we haven't touched yet. The Flap-jacks won't get 'em\n while there's a man alive.\"\n\n\n \"The whole system needs the food we can raise,\" Bert said. \"These farms\n we're trying to start won't be enough but they'll help.\"",
"\"Very well. Shall we begin?\"\n\n\n With a rush Hoshick threw himself at Retief, who ducked, whirled, and\n leaped on the Flap-jack's back ... and felt himself flipped clear by\n a mighty ripple of the alien's slab-like body. Retief rolled aside\n as Hoshick turned on him; he jumped to his feet and threw a right\n hay-maker to Hoshick's mid-section. The alien whipped his left fringe\n around in an arc that connected with Retief's jaw, sent him spinning\n onto his back ... and Hoshick's weight struck him.\nRetief twisted, tried to roll. The flat body of the alien blanketed\n him. He worked an arm free, drumming blows on the leathery back.\n Hoshick nestled closer.\n\n\n Retief's air was running out. He heaved up against the smothering\n weight. Nothing budged.",
"Retief rolled aside, then lunged, threw his weight on the flopping\n Flap-jack—a yard square, three inches thick at the center and all\n muscle. The ray-like creature heaved up, curled backward, its edge\n rippling, to stand on the flattened rim of its encircling sphincter.\n It scrabbled with prehensile fringe-tentacles for a grip on Retief's\n shoulders. He wrapped his arms around the alien and struggled to his\n feet. The thing was heavy. A hundred pounds at least. Fighting as it\n was, it seemed more like five hundred.\n\n\n The Flap-jack reversed its tactics, went limp. Retief grabbed, felt a\n thumb slip into an orifice—\n\n\n The alien went wild. Retief hung on, dug the thumb in deeper.\n\n\n \"Sorry, fellow,\" he muttered between clenched teeth. \"Eye-gouging isn't\n gentlemanly, but it's effective....\"",
"A penetrating beam of red light struck Retief in the face, blinked off.\n He got to his feet. The captive Flap-jack rippled its fringe in an\n agitated way. Retief tensed his thumb in the eye-socket.\n\n\n \"Sit tight,\" he said. \"Don't try to do anything hasty....\" His remarks\n were falling on deaf ears—or no ears at all—but the thumb spoke as\n loudly as words.\n\n\n There was a slither of sand. Another. He became aware of a ring of\n presences drawing closer.\n\n\n Retief tightened his grip on the alien. He could see a dark shape now,\n looming up almost to his own six-three. It looked like the Flap-jacks\n came in all sizes.\n\n\n A low rumble sounded, like a deep-throated growl. It strummed on, faded\n out. Retief cocked his head, frowning.",
"\"We been yellin' for help to the CDT, over on Ivory,\" said Potter. \"But\n you know these Embassy stooges.\"\n\n\n \"We heard they were sending some kind of bureaucrat in here to tell\n us to get out and give the oases to the Flap-jacks,\" said Swazey. He\n tightened his mouth. \"We're waitin' for him....\"\n\n\n \"Meanwhile we got reinforcements comin' up, eh, boys?\" Bert winked at\n Retief. \"We put out the word back home. We all got relatives on Ivory\n and Verde.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up, you damn fool!\" a deep voice grated.\n\n\n \"Lemuel!\" Potter said. \"Nobody else could sneak up on us like that.\"",
"\"Later. Sit tight and keep your eyes open.\" Retief took a bearing on a\n treetop faintly visible against the sky and started forward.\nFive minutes' stealthy progress brought him to a slight rise of ground.\n With infinite caution he raised himself, risking a glance over an\n out-cropping of rock.\n\n\n The stunted trees ended just ahead. Beyond, he could make out the dim\n contour of rolling desert. Flap-jack country. He got to his feet,\n clambered over the stone—still hot after a day of tropical heat—and\n moved forward twenty yards. Around him he saw nothing but drifted sand,\n palely visible in the starlight, and the occasional shadow of jutting\n shale slabs. Behind him the jungle was still.\n\n\n He sat down on the ground to wait.",
"\"It's quite simple, really. Each side selects a representative and the\n two individuals settle the issue between them.\"\n\n\n \"I ... um ... fear I don't understand. What possible significance could\n one attach to the activities of a couple of random skirmishforms?\"\n\n\n \"I haven't made myself clear,\" said Retief. He took a sip of wine. \"We\n don't involve the skirmishforms at all. That's quite passe.\"\n\n\n \"You don't mean...?\"\n\n\n \"That's right. You and me.\"\nOutside on the starlit sand Retief tossed aside the power pistol,\n followed it with the leather shirt Swazey had lent him. By the faint\n light he could just make out the towering figure of the Flap-jack\n rearing up before him, his trappings gone. A silent rank of Flap-jack\n retainers were grouped behind him.",
"It was like burial under a dump-truck-load of concrete.\n\n\n He remembered the rangerform he had captured. The sensitive orifice\n had been placed ventrally, in what would be the thoracic area....\n\n\n He groped, felt tough hide set with horny granules. He would be missing\n skin tomorrow ... if there was a tomorrow. His thumb found the orifice\n and probed.\n\n\n The Flap-jack recoiled. Retief held fast, probed deeper, groping with\n the other hand. If the alien were bilaterally symmetrical there would\n be a set of ready made hand-holds....\nThere were.\n\n\n Retief dug in and the Flap-jack writhed, pulled away. Retief held on,\n scrambled to his feet, threw his weight against the alien and fell on\n top of him, still gouging. Hoshick rippled his fringe wildly, flopped\n in terror, then went limp.",
"\"Just for a change, I'd like to finish a sentence,\" said Retief. \"And I\n suggest you put your courage back in your pocket before it bites you.\"\n\n\n \"You talk too damned fancy to suit me.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. But I'm talking to suit me. Now, for the last time, put it\n away.\"\n\n\n Lemuel stared at Retief. \"You givin' me orders...?\"\n\n\n Retief's left fist shot out, smacked Lemuel's face dead center. He\n stumbled back, blood starting from his nose; the pistol fired into the\n dirt as he dropped it. He caught himself, jumped for Retief ... and met\n a straight right that snapped him onto his back: out cold.\n\n\n \"Wow!\" said Potter. \"The stranger took Lem ... in two punches!\"\n\n\n \"One,\" said Swazey. \"That first one was just a love tap.\"",
"\"There is an aspect I haven't yet mentioned,\" Retief went on. \"I hope\n you won't take this personally, but the fact is, our skirmishforms\n think of weapons as something one employs only in dealing with certain\n specific life-forms.\"\n\n\n \"Oh? Curious. What forms are those?\"\n\n\n \"Vermin. Or 'varmints' as some call them. Deadly antagonists, but\n lacking in caste. I don't want our skirmishforms thinking of such\n worthy adversaries as yourself as varmints.\"\n\n\n \"Dear me! I hadn't realized, of course. Most considerate of you to\n point it out.\" Hoshick clucked in dismay. \"I see that skirmishforms are\n much the same among you as with us: lacking in perception.\" He laughed\n scratchily. \"Imagine considering us as—what was the word?—varmints.\""
],
[
"Bert froze. \"Hark, boys,\" he whispered. In the sudden silence a night\n lizard called. Retief strained, heard nothing. He narrowed his eyes,\n peered past the fire—\n\n\n With a swift lunge he seized up the bucket of drinking water, dashed it\n over the fire, threw himself flat. He heard the others hit the dirt a\n split second behind him.\n\n\n \"You move fast for a city man,\" breathed Swazey beside him. \"You see\n pretty good too. We'll split and take 'em from two sides. You and Bert\n from the left, me and Potter from the right.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" said Retief. \"You wait here. I'm going out alone.\"\n\n\n \"What's the idea...?\"",
"\"Later. Sit tight and keep your eyes open.\" Retief took a bearing on a\n treetop faintly visible against the sky and started forward.\nFive minutes' stealthy progress brought him to a slight rise of ground.\n With infinite caution he raised himself, risking a glance over an\n out-cropping of rock.\n\n\n The stunted trees ended just ahead. Beyond, he could make out the dim\n contour of rolling desert. Flap-jack country. He got to his feet,\n clambered over the stone—still hot after a day of tropical heat—and\n moved forward twenty yards. Around him he saw nothing but drifted sand,\n palely visible in the starlight, and the occasional shadow of jutting\n shale slabs. Behind him the jungle was still.\n\n\n He sat down on the ground to wait.",
"\"They shore won't, sonny. I ain't givin' 'em the chance.\" He started\n punching keys on the console. Retief reached out, caught his wrist.\n\n\n \"Maybe you didn't hear me. I said I've got to get down.\"\n\n\n The pilot plunged against the restraint, swung a punch that Retief\n blocked casually. \"Are you nuts?\" the pilot screeched. \"They's plenty\n shootin' goin' on fer me to see it fifty miles out.\"\n\n\n \"The mail must go through, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Okay! You're so dead set on gettin' killed, you take the skiff. I'll\n tell 'em to pick up the remains next trip.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal. I'll take your offer.\"",
"It was ten minutes before a movement caught his eye. Something had\n separated itself from a dark mass of stone, glided across a few yards\n of open ground to another shelter. Retief watched. Minutes passed. The\n shape moved again, slipped into a shadow ten feet distant. Retief felt\n the butt of the power pistol with his elbow. His guess had better be\n right this time....\n\n\n There was a sudden rasp, like leather against concrete, and a flurry of\n sand as the Flap-jack charged.",
"Hoshick rippled his fringes ecstatically. \"Once again you have outdone\n me, Retief,\" he cried. \"This time, in generosity.\"\n\n\n \"We'll talk over the details later. I'm sure we can establish a set of\n rules that will satisfy all parties. Now I've got to get back. I think\n some of the gougerforms are waiting to see me.\"",
"\"If I'd a been a Flap-jack; I'd of et you alive,\" the newcomer said,\n moving into the ring of fire, a tall, broad-faced man in grimy leather.\n He eyed Retief.\n\n\n \"Who's that?\"\n\n\n \"What do ya mean?\" Potter spoke in the silence. \"He's your cousin....\"\n\n\n \"He ain't no cousin of mine,\" Lemuel said slowly. He stepped to Retief.\n\n\n \"Who you spyin' for, stranger?\" he rasped.\nRetief got to his feet. \"I think I should explain—\"\n\n\n A short-nosed automatic appeared in Lemuel's hand, a clashing note\n against his fringed buckskins.\n\n\n \"Skip the talk. I know a fink when I see one.\"",
"Retief relaxed, released his hold and got to his feet, breathing hard.\n Hoshick humped himself over onto his ventral side, lifted and moved\n gingerly over to the sidelines. His retainers came forward, assisted\n him into his trappings, strapped on the translator. He sighed heavily,\n adjusted the volume.\n\n\n \"There is much to be said for the old system,\" he said. \"What a burden\n one's sportsmanship places on one at times.\"\n\n\n \"Great sport, wasn't it?\" said Retief. \"Now, I know you'll be eager to\n continue. If you'll just wait while I run back and fetch some of our\n gougerforms—\"\n\n\n \"May hide-ticks devour the gougerforms!\" Hoshick bellowed. \"You've\n given me such a sprong-ache as I'll remember each spawning-time for a\n year.\"",
"\"Good!\" Potter said. \"We figured a few of you boys from Ivory would be\n joining up when you heard. You are from Ivory?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I'm—\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you must be Lemuel's cousin. Good night! I pretty near made a bad\n mistake. Lemuel's a tough man to explain something to.\"\n\n\n \"I'm—\"\n\n\n \"Keep your head down. These damn Flap-jacks have got some wicked hand\n weapons. Come on....\" He moved off silently on all fours. Retief\n followed. They crossed two hundred yards of rough country before Potter\n got to his feet, took out a soggy bandana and mopped his face.\n\n\n \"You move good for a city man. I thought you folks on Ivory just sat\n under those domes and read dials. But I guess bein' Lemuel's cousin you\n was raised different.\"",
"\"Just for a change, I'd like to finish a sentence,\" said Retief. \"And I\n suggest you put your courage back in your pocket before it bites you.\"\n\n\n \"You talk too damned fancy to suit me.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. But I'm talking to suit me. Now, for the last time, put it\n away.\"\n\n\n Lemuel stared at Retief. \"You givin' me orders...?\"\n\n\n Retief's left fist shot out, smacked Lemuel's face dead center. He\n stumbled back, blood starting from his nose; the pistol fired into the\n dirt as he dropped it. He caught himself, jumped for Retief ... and met\n a straight right that snapped him onto his back: out cold.\n\n\n \"Wow!\" said Potter. \"The stranger took Lem ... in two punches!\"\n\n\n \"One,\" said Swazey. \"That first one was just a love tap.\"",
"\"Very well. Shall we begin?\"\n\n\n With a rush Hoshick threw himself at Retief, who ducked, whirled, and\n leaped on the Flap-jack's back ... and felt himself flipped clear by\n a mighty ripple of the alien's slab-like body. Retief rolled aside\n as Hoshick turned on him; he jumped to his feet and threw a right\n hay-maker to Hoshick's mid-section. The alien whipped his left fringe\n around in an arc that connected with Retief's jaw, sent him spinning\n onto his back ... and Hoshick's weight struck him.\nRetief twisted, tried to roll. The flat body of the alien blanketed\n him. He worked an arm free, drumming blows on the leathery back.\n Hoshick nestled closer.\n\n\n Retief's air was running out. He heaved up against the smothering\n weight. Nothing budged.",
"\"When you get back,\" said Passwyn, \"you tell me.\"\nThe mail pilot, a leathery veteran with quarter-inch whiskers, spat\n toward a stained corner of the compartment, leaned close to the screen.\n\n\n \"They's shootin' goin' on down there,\" he said. \"See them white puffs\n over the edge of the desert?\"\n\n\n \"I'm supposed to be preventing the war,\" said Retief. \"It looks like\n I'm a little late.\"\n\n\n The pilot's head snapped around. \"War?\" he yelped. \"Nobody told me they\n was a war goin' on on 'Dobe. If that's what that is, I'm gettin' out of\n here.\"\n\n\n \"Hold on,\" said Retief. \"I've got to get down. They won't shoot at you.\"",
"\"As a matter of fact—\"\n\n\n \"Have to get you some real clothes, though. Those city duds don't stand\n up on 'Dobe.\"\n\n\n Retief looked down at the charred, torn and sweat-soaked powder-blue\n blazer and slacks.\n\n\n \"This outfit seemed pretty rough-and-ready back home,\" he said. \"But I\n guess leather has its points.\"\n\n\n \"Let's get on back to camp. We'll just about make it by sundown.\n And, look. Don't say anything to Lemuel about me thinking you were a\n Flap-jack.\"\n\n\n \"I won't, but—\"\n\n\n Potter was on his way, loping off up a gentle slope. Retief pulled off\n the sodden blazer, dropped it over a bush, added his string tie and\n followed Potter.\nII",
"A penetrating beam of red light struck Retief in the face, blinked off.\n He got to his feet. The captive Flap-jack rippled its fringe in an\n agitated way. Retief tensed his thumb in the eye-socket.\n\n\n \"Sit tight,\" he said. \"Don't try to do anything hasty....\" His remarks\n were falling on deaf ears—or no ears at all—but the thumb spoke as\n loudly as words.\n\n\n There was a slither of sand. Another. He became aware of a ring of\n presences drawing closer.\n\n\n Retief tightened his grip on the alien. He could see a dark shape now,\n looming up almost to his own six-three. It looked like the Flap-jacks\n came in all sizes.\n\n\n A low rumble sounded, like a deep-throated growl. It strummed on, faded\n out. Retief cocked his head, frowning.",
"\"It's quite simple, really. Each side selects a representative and the\n two individuals settle the issue between them.\"\n\n\n \"I ... um ... fear I don't understand. What possible significance could\n one attach to the activities of a couple of random skirmishforms?\"\n\n\n \"I haven't made myself clear,\" said Retief. He took a sip of wine. \"We\n don't involve the skirmishforms at all. That's quite passe.\"\n\n\n \"You don't mean...?\"\n\n\n \"That's right. You and me.\"\nOutside on the starlit sand Retief tossed aside the power pistol,\n followed it with the leather shirt Swazey had lent him. By the faint\n light he could just make out the towering figure of the Flap-jack\n rearing up before him, his trappings gone. A silent rank of Flap-jack\n retainers were grouped behind him.",
"He inched his way to the shelter of a broad-boled dwarf tree. Somewhere\n a song lizard burbled. Whining insects circled, scented alien life,\n buzzed off. There was another rustle of foliage from the underbrush\n five yards away. A bush quivered, then a low bough dipped.\n\n\n Retief edged back around the trunk, eased down behind a fallen log.\n A stocky man in grimy leather shirt and shorts appeared, moving\n cautiously, a pistol in his hand.\n\n\n As he passed, Retief rose, leaped the log and tackled him.\n\n\n They went down together. The stranger gave one short yell, then\n struggled in silence. Retief flipped him onto his back, raised a fist—\n\n\n \"Hey!\" the settler yelled. \"You're as human as I am!\"",
"\"Maybe I'll look better after a shave,\" said Retief. \"What's the idea\n of shooting at me?\"\n\n\n \"Lemme up. My name's Potter. Sorry 'bout that. I figured it was a\n Flap-jack boat; looks just like 'em. I took a shot when I saw something\n move. Didn't know it was a Terrestrial. Who are you? What you doin'\n here? We're pretty close to the edge of the oases. That's Flap-jack\n country over there.\" He waved a hand toward the north, where the desert\n lay.\n\n\n \"I'm glad you're a poor shot. That missile was too close for comfort.\"\n\n\n \"Missile, eh? Must be Flap-jack artillery. We got nothing like that.\"\n\n\n \"I heard there was a full-fledged war brewing,\" said Retief. \"I didn't\n expect—\"",
"Then the planetary surface was rushing up with frightening speed.\n Retief shook his head, kicked in the emergency retro-drive. Points\n of light arced up from the planet face below. If they were ordinary\n chemical warheads the skiff's meteor screens should handle them. The\n screen flashed brilliant white, then went dark. The skiff flipped on\n its back. Smoke filled the tiny compartment. There was a series of\n shocks, a final bone-shaking concussion, then stillness, broken by the\n ping of hot metal contracting.\nCoughing, Retief disengaged himself from the shock-webbing. He beat\n out sparks in his lap, groped underfoot for the hatch and wrenched it\n open. A wave of hot jungle air struck him. He lowered himself to a bed\n of shattered foliage, got to his feet ... and dropped flat as a bullet\n whined past his ear.\n\n\n He lay listening. Stealthy movements were audible from the left.",
"The pilot jumped to the lifeboat hatch and cycled it open. \"Get in.\n We're closin' fast. Them birds might take it into their heads to lob\n one this way....\"\n\n\n Retief crawled into the narrow cockpit of the skiff, glanced over the\n controls. The pilot ducked out of sight, came back, handed Retief a\n heavy old-fashioned power pistol. \"Long as you're goin' in, might as\n well take this.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks.\" Retief shoved the pistol in his belt. \"I hope you're wrong.\"\n\n\n \"I'll see they pick you up when the shootin's over—one way or another.\"\n\n\n The hatch clanked shut. A moment later there was a jar as the skiff\n dropped away, followed by heavy buffeting in the backwash from the\n departing mail boat. Retief watched the tiny screen, hands on the\n manual controls. He was dropping rapidly: forty miles, thirty-nine....",
"The Flap-jack fell still, only its fringes rippling slowly. Retief\n relaxed the pressure of his thumb; the alien gave a tentative jerk; the\n thumb dug in.\n\n\n The alien went limp again, waiting.\n\n\n \"Now we understand each other,\" said Retief. \"Take me to your leader.\"\nTwenty minutes' walk into the desert brought Retief to a low rampart\n of thorn branches: the Flap-jacks' outer defensive line against Terry\n forays. It would be as good a place as any to wait for the move by the\n Flap-jacks. He sat down and eased the weight of his captive off his\n back, but kept a firm thumb in place. If his analysis of the situation\n was correct, a Flap-jack picket should be along before too long....",
"\"We been yellin' for help to the CDT, over on Ivory,\" said Potter. \"But\n you know these Embassy stooges.\"\n\n\n \"We heard they were sending some kind of bureaucrat in here to tell\n us to get out and give the oases to the Flap-jacks,\" said Swazey. He\n tightened his mouth. \"We're waitin' for him....\"\n\n\n \"Meanwhile we got reinforcements comin' up, eh, boys?\" Bert winked at\n Retief. \"We put out the word back home. We all got relatives on Ivory\n and Verde.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up, you damn fool!\" a deep voice grated.\n\n\n \"Lemuel!\" Potter said. \"Nobody else could sneak up on us like that.\""
],
[
"\"We're damn glad you're here, mister,\" said a fat man with two\n revolvers belted across his paunch. \"We can use every hand. We're in\n bad shape. We ran into the Flap-jacks three months ago and we haven't\n made a smart move since. First, we thought they were a native form we\n hadn't run into before. Fact is, one of the boys shot one, thinkin' it\n was fair game. I guess that was the start of it.\" He stirred the fire,\n added a stick.\n\n\n \"And then a bunch of 'em hit Swazey's farm here,\" Potter said. \"Killed\n two of his cattle, and pulled back.\"\n\n\n \"I figure they thought the cows were people,\" said Swazey. \"They were\n out for revenge.\"\n\n\n \"How could anybody think a cow was folks?\" another man put in. \"They\n don't look nothin' like—\"",
"\"Take place, Retief,\" said Hoshick. \"I hope you won't find our rude\n couches uncomfortable.\" Two other large Flap-jacks came into the room,\n communed silently with Hoshick. \"Pray forgive our lack of translating\n devices,\" he said to Retief. \"Permit me to introduce my colleagues....\"\n\n\n A small Flap-jack rippled the chamber bearing on its back a silver tray\n laden with aromatic food. The waiter served the four diners, filled the\n drinking tubes with yellow wine. It smelled good.\n\n\n \"I trust you'll find these dishes palatable,\" said Hoshick. \"Our\n metabolisms are much alike, I believe.\" Retief tried the food. It had a\n delicious nut-like flavor. The wine was indistinguishable from Chateau\n d'Yquem.",
"The Flap-jack fell still, only its fringes rippling slowly. Retief\n relaxed the pressure of his thumb; the alien gave a tentative jerk; the\n thumb dug in.\n\n\n The alien went limp again, waiting.\n\n\n \"Now we understand each other,\" said Retief. \"Take me to your leader.\"\nTwenty minutes' walk into the desert brought Retief to a low rampart\n of thorn branches: the Flap-jacks' outer defensive line against Terry\n forays. It would be as good a place as any to wait for the move by the\n Flap-jacks. He sat down and eased the weight of his captive off his\n back, but kept a firm thumb in place. If his analysis of the situation\n was correct, a Flap-jack picket should be along before too long....",
"\"If I'd a been a Flap-jack; I'd of et you alive,\" the newcomer said,\n moving into the ring of fire, a tall, broad-faced man in grimy leather.\n He eyed Retief.\n\n\n \"Who's that?\"\n\n\n \"What do ya mean?\" Potter spoke in the silence. \"He's your cousin....\"\n\n\n \"He ain't no cousin of mine,\" Lemuel said slowly. He stepped to Retief.\n\n\n \"Who you spyin' for, stranger?\" he rasped.\nRetief got to his feet. \"I think I should explain—\"\n\n\n A short-nosed automatic appeared in Lemuel's hand, a clashing note\n against his fringed buckskins.\n\n\n \"Skip the talk. I know a fink when I see one.\"",
"Retief turned. An immense Flap-jack, hung with crimson trappings,\n rippled at his side. The voice issued from a disk strapped to its back.\n \"You fight well. I think we will find in each other worthy adversaries.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. I'm sure the test would be interesting, but I'm hoping we can\n avoid it.\"\n\n\n \"Avoid it?\" Retief heard a low humming coming from the speaker in the\n silence. \"Well, let us dine,\" the mighty Flap-jack said at last. \"We\n can resolve these matters later. I am called Hoshick of the Mosaic of\n the Two Dawns.\"\n\n\n \"I'm Retief.\" Hoshick waited expectantly, \"... of the Mountain of Red\n Tape,\" Retief added.",
"\"Good!\" Potter said. \"We figured a few of you boys from Ivory would be\n joining up when you heard. You are from Ivory?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I'm—\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you must be Lemuel's cousin. Good night! I pretty near made a bad\n mistake. Lemuel's a tough man to explain something to.\"\n\n\n \"I'm—\"\n\n\n \"Keep your head down. These damn Flap-jacks have got some wicked hand\n weapons. Come on....\" He moved off silently on all fours. Retief\n followed. They crossed two hundred yards of rough country before Potter\n got to his feet, took out a soggy bandana and mopped his face.\n\n\n \"You move good for a city man. I thought you folks on Ivory just sat\n under those domes and read dials. But I guess bein' Lemuel's cousin you\n was raised different.\"",
"A penetrating beam of red light struck Retief in the face, blinked off.\n He got to his feet. The captive Flap-jack rippled its fringe in an\n agitated way. Retief tensed his thumb in the eye-socket.\n\n\n \"Sit tight,\" he said. \"Don't try to do anything hasty....\" His remarks\n were falling on deaf ears—or no ears at all—but the thumb spoke as\n loudly as words.\n\n\n There was a slither of sand. Another. He became aware of a ring of\n presences drawing closer.\n\n\n Retief tightened his grip on the alien. He could see a dark shape now,\n looming up almost to his own six-three. It looked like the Flap-jacks\n came in all sizes.\n\n\n A low rumble sounded, like a deep-throated growl. It strummed on, faded\n out. Retief cocked his head, frowning.",
"Retief rolled aside, then lunged, threw his weight on the flopping\n Flap-jack—a yard square, three inches thick at the center and all\n muscle. The ray-like creature heaved up, curled backward, its edge\n rippling, to stand on the flattened rim of its encircling sphincter.\n It scrabbled with prehensile fringe-tentacles for a grip on Retief's\n shoulders. He wrapped his arms around the alien and struggled to his\n feet. The thing was heavy. A hundred pounds at least. Fighting as it\n was, it seemed more like five hundred.\n\n\n The Flap-jack reversed its tactics, went limp. Retief grabbed, felt a\n thumb slip into an orifice—\n\n\n The alien went wild. Retief hung on, dug the thumb in deeper.\n\n\n \"Sorry, fellow,\" he muttered between clenched teeth. \"Eye-gouging isn't\n gentlemanly, but it's effective....\"",
"It was ten minutes before a movement caught his eye. Something had\n separated itself from a dark mass of stone, glided across a few yards\n of open ground to another shelter. Retief watched. Minutes passed. The\n shape moved again, slipped into a shadow ten feet distant. Retief felt\n the butt of the power pistol with his elbow. His guess had better be\n right this time....\n\n\n There was a sudden rasp, like leather against concrete, and a flurry of\n sand as the Flap-jack charged.",
"\"As a matter of fact—\"\n\n\n \"Have to get you some real clothes, though. Those city duds don't stand\n up on 'Dobe.\"\n\n\n Retief looked down at the charred, torn and sweat-soaked powder-blue\n blazer and slacks.\n\n\n \"This outfit seemed pretty rough-and-ready back home,\" he said. \"But I\n guess leather has its points.\"\n\n\n \"Let's get on back to camp. We'll just about make it by sundown.\n And, look. Don't say anything to Lemuel about me thinking you were a\n Flap-jack.\"\n\n\n \"I won't, but—\"\n\n\n Potter was on his way, loping off up a gentle slope. Retief pulled off\n the sodden blazer, dropped it over a bush, added his string tie and\n followed Potter.\nII",
"\"Very well. Shall we begin?\"\n\n\n With a rush Hoshick threw himself at Retief, who ducked, whirled, and\n leaped on the Flap-jack's back ... and felt himself flipped clear by\n a mighty ripple of the alien's slab-like body. Retief rolled aside\n as Hoshick turned on him; he jumped to his feet and threw a right\n hay-maker to Hoshick's mid-section. The alien whipped his left fringe\n around in an arc that connected with Retief's jaw, sent him spinning\n onto his back ... and Hoshick's weight struck him.\nRetief twisted, tried to roll. The flat body of the alien blanketed\n him. He worked an arm free, drumming blows on the leathery back.\n Hoshick nestled closer.\n\n\n Retief's air was running out. He heaved up against the smothering\n weight. Nothing budged.",
"\"Don't be so dumb, Bert,\" said Swazey. \"They'd never seen Terries\n before. They know better now.\"\n\n\n Bert chuckled. \"Sure do. We showed 'em the next time, didn't we,\n Potter? Got four.\"\n\n\n \"They walked right up to my place a couple days after the first time,\"\n Swazey said. \"We were ready for 'em. Peppered 'em good. They cut and\n run.\"\n\n\n \"Flopped, you mean. Ugliest lookin' critters you ever saw. Look just\n like a old piece of dirty blanket humpin' around.\"",
"\"It's quite simple, really. Each side selects a representative and the\n two individuals settle the issue between them.\"\n\n\n \"I ... um ... fear I don't understand. What possible significance could\n one attach to the activities of a couple of random skirmishforms?\"\n\n\n \"I haven't made myself clear,\" said Retief. He took a sip of wine. \"We\n don't involve the skirmishforms at all. That's quite passe.\"\n\n\n \"You don't mean...?\"\n\n\n \"That's right. You and me.\"\nOutside on the starlit sand Retief tossed aside the power pistol,\n followed it with the leather shirt Swazey had lent him. By the faint\n light he could just make out the towering figure of the Flap-jack\n rearing up before him, his trappings gone. A silent rank of Flap-jack\n retainers were grouped behind him.",
"\"It's been goin' on this way ever since. They raid and then we raid.\n But lately they've been bringing some big stuff into it. They've got\n some kind of pint-sized airships and automatic rifles. We've lost four\n men now and a dozen more in the freezer, waiting for the med ship. We\n can't afford it. The colony's got less than three hundred able-bodied\n men.\"\n\n\n \"But we're hanging onto our farms,\" said Potter. \"All these oases are\n old sea-beds—a mile deep, solid topsoil. And there's a couple of\n hundred others we haven't touched yet. The Flap-jacks won't get 'em\n while there's a man alive.\"\n\n\n \"The whole system needs the food we can raise,\" Bert said. \"These farms\n we're trying to start won't be enough but they'll help.\"",
"\"Maybe I'll look better after a shave,\" said Retief. \"What's the idea\n of shooting at me?\"\n\n\n \"Lemme up. My name's Potter. Sorry 'bout that. I figured it was a\n Flap-jack boat; looks just like 'em. I took a shot when I saw something\n move. Didn't know it was a Terrestrial. Who are you? What you doin'\n here? We're pretty close to the edge of the oases. That's Flap-jack\n country over there.\" He waved a hand toward the north, where the desert\n lay.\n\n\n \"I'm glad you're a poor shot. That missile was too close for comfort.\"\n\n\n \"Missile, eh? Must be Flap-jack artillery. We got nothing like that.\"\n\n\n \"I heard there was a full-fledged war brewing,\" said Retief. \"I didn't\n expect—\"",
"\"Later. Sit tight and keep your eyes open.\" Retief took a bearing on a\n treetop faintly visible against the sky and started forward.\nFive minutes' stealthy progress brought him to a slight rise of ground.\n With infinite caution he raised himself, risking a glance over an\n out-cropping of rock.\n\n\n The stunted trees ended just ahead. Beyond, he could make out the dim\n contour of rolling desert. Flap-jack country. He got to his feet,\n clambered over the stone—still hot after a day of tropical heat—and\n moved forward twenty yards. Around him he saw nothing but drifted sand,\n palely visible in the starlight, and the occasional shadow of jutting\n shale slabs. Behind him the jungle was still.\n\n\n He sat down on the ground to wait.",
"It was like burial under a dump-truck-load of concrete.\n\n\n He remembered the rangerform he had captured. The sensitive orifice\n had been placed ventrally, in what would be the thoracic area....\n\n\n He groped, felt tough hide set with horny granules. He would be missing\n skin tomorrow ... if there was a tomorrow. His thumb found the orifice\n and probed.\n\n\n The Flap-jack recoiled. Retief held fast, probed deeper, groping with\n the other hand. If the alien were bilaterally symmetrical there would\n be a set of ready made hand-holds....\nThere were.\n\n\n Retief dug in and the Flap-jack writhed, pulled away. Retief held on,\n scrambled to his feet, threw his weight against the alien and fell on\n top of him, still gouging. Hoshick rippled his fringe wildly, flopped\n in terror, then went limp.",
"\"We been yellin' for help to the CDT, over on Ivory,\" said Potter. \"But\n you know these Embassy stooges.\"\n\n\n \"We heard they were sending some kind of bureaucrat in here to tell\n us to get out and give the oases to the Flap-jacks,\" said Swazey. He\n tightened his mouth. \"We're waitin' for him....\"\n\n\n \"Meanwhile we got reinforcements comin' up, eh, boys?\" Bert winked at\n Retief. \"We put out the word back home. We all got relatives on Ivory\n and Verde.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up, you damn fool!\" a deep voice grated.\n\n\n \"Lemuel!\" Potter said. \"Nobody else could sneak up on us like that.\"",
"Hoshick rippled his fringes ecstatically. \"Once again you have outdone\n me, Retief,\" he cried. \"This time, in generosity.\"\n\n\n \"We'll talk over the details later. I'm sure we can establish a set of\n rules that will satisfy all parties. Now I've got to get back. I think\n some of the gougerforms are waiting to see me.\"",
"\"The situation on Adobe is nearing crisis. The confounded settlers—a\n mere handful of them—have managed, as usual, to stir up trouble with\n an intelligent indigenous life form, the Jaq. I can't think why they\n bother, merely for a few oases among the endless deserts. However I\n have, at last, received authorization from Sector Headquarters to\n take certain action.\" He swung back to face Retief. \"I'm sending you\n in to handle the situation, Retief—under sealed orders.\" He picked\n up a fat buff envelope. \"A pity they didn't see fit to order the\n Terrestrial settlers out weeks ago, as I suggested. Now it is too late.\n I'm expected to produce a miracle—a rapprochement between Terrestrial\n and Adoban and a division of territory. It's idiotic. However, failure\n would look very bad in my record, so I shall expect results.\"\n\n\n He passed the buff envelope across to Retief."
],
[
"\"There is an aspect I haven't yet mentioned,\" Retief went on. \"I hope\n you won't take this personally, but the fact is, our skirmishforms\n think of weapons as something one employs only in dealing with certain\n specific life-forms.\"\n\n\n \"Oh? Curious. What forms are those?\"\n\n\n \"Vermin. Or 'varmints' as some call them. Deadly antagonists, but\n lacking in caste. I don't want our skirmishforms thinking of such\n worthy adversaries as yourself as varmints.\"\n\n\n \"Dear me! I hadn't realized, of course. Most considerate of you to\n point it out.\" Hoshick clucked in dismay. \"I see that skirmishforms are\n much the same among you as with us: lacking in perception.\" He laughed\n scratchily. \"Imagine considering us as—what was the word?—varmints.\"",
"\"Delicious,\" said Retief. \"I wonder. Have you considered eliminating\n weapons altogether?\"\nA scratchy sound issued from the disk. \"Pardon my laughter,\" Hoshick\n said, \"but surely you jest?\"\n\n\n \"As a matter of fact,\" said Retief, \"we ourselves seldom use weapons.\"\n\n\n \"I seem to recall that our first contact of skirmishforms involved the\n use of a weapon by one of your units.\"\n\n\n \"My apologies,\" said Retief. \"The—ah—the skirmishform failed to\n recognize that he was dealing with a sportsman.\"\n\n\n \"Still, now that we have commenced so merrily with weapons....\" Hoshick\n signaled and the servant refilled tubes.",
"\"Very well. Shall we begin?\"\n\n\n With a rush Hoshick threw himself at Retief, who ducked, whirled, and\n leaped on the Flap-jack's back ... and felt himself flipped clear by\n a mighty ripple of the alien's slab-like body. Retief rolled aside\n as Hoshick turned on him; he jumped to his feet and threw a right\n hay-maker to Hoshick's mid-section. The alien whipped his left fringe\n around in an arc that connected with Retief's jaw, sent him spinning\n onto his back ... and Hoshick's weight struck him.\nRetief twisted, tried to roll. The flat body of the alien blanketed\n him. He worked an arm free, drumming blows on the leathery back.\n Hoshick nestled closer.\n\n\n Retief's air was running out. He heaved up against the smothering\n weight. Nothing budged.",
"Hoshick rippled his fringes ecstatically. \"Once again you have outdone\n me, Retief,\" he cried. \"This time, in generosity.\"\n\n\n \"We'll talk over the details later. I'm sure we can establish a set of\n rules that will satisfy all parties. Now I've got to get back. I think\n some of the gougerforms are waiting to see me.\"",
"Retief relaxed, released his hold and got to his feet, breathing hard.\n Hoshick humped himself over onto his ventral side, lifted and moved\n gingerly over to the sidelines. His retainers came forward, assisted\n him into his trappings, strapped on the translator. He sighed heavily,\n adjusted the volume.\n\n\n \"There is much to be said for the old system,\" he said. \"What a burden\n one's sportsmanship places on one at times.\"\n\n\n \"Great sport, wasn't it?\" said Retief. \"Now, I know you'll be eager to\n continue. If you'll just wait while I run back and fetch some of our\n gougerforms—\"\n\n\n \"May hide-ticks devour the gougerforms!\" Hoshick bellowed. \"You've\n given me such a sprong-ache as I'll remember each spawning-time for a\n year.\"",
"\"It was an unexpected pleasure to encounter your party here,\"\n said Hoshick. \"I confess at first we took you for an indigenous\n earth-grubbing form, but we were soon disabused of that notion.\" He\n raised a tube, manipulating it deftly with his fringe tentacles. Retief\n returned the salute and drank.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Hoshick continued, \"as soon as we realized that you were\n sportsmen like ourselves, we attempted to make amends by providing a\n bit of activity for you. We've ordered out our heavier equipment and a\n few trained skirmishers and soon we'll be able to give you an adequate\n show. Or so I hope.\"\n\n\n \"Additional skirmishers?\" said Retief. \"How many, if you don't mind my\n asking?\"",
"\"I fear I must lay aside the translator now, Retief,\" said Hoshick.\n He sighed and rippled his fringe tentacles. \"My spawn-fellows will\n never credit this. Such a curious turn fashion has taken. How much\n more pleasant it is to observe the action of the skirmishforms from a\n distance.\"\n\n\n \"I suggest we use Tennessee rules,\" said Retief. \"They're very liberal.\n Biting, gouging, stomping, kneeing and of course choking, as well as\n the usual punching, shoving and kicking.\"\n\n\n \"Hmmm. These gambits seem geared to forms employing rigid\n endo-skeletons; I fear I shall be at a disadvantage.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Retief said, \"if you'd prefer a more plebeian type of\n contest....\"\n\n\n \"By no means. But perhaps we could rule out tentacle-twisting, just to\n even it.\"",
"Retief turned. An immense Flap-jack, hung with crimson trappings,\n rippled at his side. The voice issued from a disk strapped to its back.\n \"You fight well. I think we will find in each other worthy adversaries.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. I'm sure the test would be interesting, but I'm hoping we can\n avoid it.\"\n\n\n \"Avoid it?\" Retief heard a low humming coming from the speaker in the\n silence. \"Well, let us dine,\" the mighty Flap-jack said at last. \"We\n can resolve these matters later. I am called Hoshick of the Mosaic of\n the Two Dawns.\"\n\n\n \"I'm Retief.\" Hoshick waited expectantly, \"... of the Mountain of Red\n Tape,\" Retief added.",
"\"My spawn-fellows aren't here. And besides, didn't I mention it? No\n one who's really in the know would think of engaging in competition by\n mere combat if there were any other way. Now, you mentioned tilling the\n sand, raising lichens—things like that—\"\n\n\n \"That on which we dined but now,\" said Hoshick, \"and from which the\n wine is made.\"\n\n\n \"The big news in fashionable diplomacy today is farming competition.\n Now, if you'd like to take these deserts and raise lichen, we'll\n promise to stick to the oases and vegetables.\"\n\n\n Hoshick curled his back in attention. \"Retief, you're quite serious?\n You would leave all the fair sand hills to us?\"\n\n\n \"The whole works, Hoshick. I'll take the oases.\"",
"\"Speaking of hide-ticks,\" said Retief, \"we've developed a biterform—\"\n\n\n \"Enough!\" Hoshick roared, so loudly that the translator bounced on his\n hide. \"Suddenly I yearn for the crowded yellow sands of Jaq. I had\n hoped....\" He broke off, drew a rasping breath. \"I had hoped, Retief,\"\n he said, speaking sadly now, \"to find a new land here where I might\n plan my own Mosaic, till these alien sands and bring forth such a crop\n of paradise-lichen as should glut the markets of a hundred worlds. But\n my spirit is not equal to the prospect of biterforms and gougerforms\n without end. I am shamed before you....\"\n\n\n \"To tell you the truth, I'm old-fashioned myself. I'd rather watch the\n action from a distance too.\"\n\n\n \"But surely your spawn-fellows would never condone such an attitude.\"",
"\"Which brings us to the crux of the matter. You see, we're up against\n a serious problem with regard to skirmishforms. A low birth rate.\n Therefore we've reluctantly taken to substitutes for the mass actions\n so dear to the heart of the sportsman. We've attempted to put an end to\n these contests altogether....\"\n\n\n Hoshick coughed explosively, sending a spray of wine into the air.\n \"What are you saying?\" he gasped. \"Are you proposing that Hoshick of\n the Mosaic of the Two Dawns abandon honor....?\"\n\n\n \"Sir!\" said Retief sternly. \"You forget yourself. I, Retief of the Red\n Tape Mountain, make an alternate proposal more in keeping with the\n newest sporting principles.\"\n\n\n \"New?\" cried Hoshick. \"My dear Retief, what a pleasant surprise! I'm\n enthralled with novel modes. One gets so out of touch. Do elaborate.\"",
"\"When you get back,\" said Passwyn, \"you tell me.\"\nThe mail pilot, a leathery veteran with quarter-inch whiskers, spat\n toward a stained corner of the compartment, leaned close to the screen.\n\n\n \"They's shootin' goin' on down there,\" he said. \"See them white puffs\n over the edge of the desert?\"\n\n\n \"I'm supposed to be preventing the war,\" said Retief. \"It looks like\n I'm a little late.\"\n\n\n The pilot's head snapped around. \"War?\" he yelped. \"Nobody told me they\n was a war goin' on on 'Dobe. If that's what that is, I'm gettin' out of\n here.\"\n\n\n \"Hold on,\" said Retief. \"I've got to get down. They won't shoot at you.\"",
"\"Don't be so dumb, Bert,\" said Swazey. \"They'd never seen Terries\n before. They know better now.\"\n\n\n Bert chuckled. \"Sure do. We showed 'em the next time, didn't we,\n Potter? Got four.\"\n\n\n \"They walked right up to my place a couple days after the first time,\"\n Swazey said. \"We were ready for 'em. Peppered 'em good. They cut and\n run.\"\n\n\n \"Flopped, you mean. Ugliest lookin' critters you ever saw. Look just\n like a old piece of dirty blanket humpin' around.\"",
"\"We're damn glad you're here, mister,\" said a fat man with two\n revolvers belted across his paunch. \"We can use every hand. We're in\n bad shape. We ran into the Flap-jacks three months ago and we haven't\n made a smart move since. First, we thought they were a native form we\n hadn't run into before. Fact is, one of the boys shot one, thinkin' it\n was fair game. I guess that was the start of it.\" He stirred the fire,\n added a stick.\n\n\n \"And then a bunch of 'em hit Swazey's farm here,\" Potter said. \"Killed\n two of his cattle, and pulled back.\"\n\n\n \"I figure they thought the cows were people,\" said Swazey. \"They were\n out for revenge.\"\n\n\n \"How could anybody think a cow was folks?\" another man put in. \"They\n don't look nothin' like—\"",
"\"Take place, Retief,\" said Hoshick. \"I hope you won't find our rude\n couches uncomfortable.\" Two other large Flap-jacks came into the room,\n communed silently with Hoshick. \"Pray forgive our lack of translating\n devices,\" he said to Retief. \"Permit me to introduce my colleagues....\"\n\n\n A small Flap-jack rippled the chamber bearing on its back a silver tray\n laden with aromatic food. The waiter served the four diners, filled the\n drinking tubes with yellow wine. It smelled good.\n\n\n \"I trust you'll find these dishes palatable,\" said Hoshick. \"Our\n metabolisms are much alike, I believe.\" Retief tried the food. It had a\n delicious nut-like flavor. The wine was indistinguishable from Chateau\n d'Yquem.",
"\"Good!\" Potter said. \"We figured a few of you boys from Ivory would be\n joining up when you heard. You are from Ivory?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I'm—\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you must be Lemuel's cousin. Good night! I pretty near made a bad\n mistake. Lemuel's a tough man to explain something to.\"\n\n\n \"I'm—\"\n\n\n \"Keep your head down. These damn Flap-jacks have got some wicked hand\n weapons. Come on....\" He moved off silently on all fours. Retief\n followed. They crossed two hundred yards of rough country before Potter\n got to his feet, took out a soggy bandana and mopped his face.\n\n\n \"You move good for a city man. I thought you folks on Ivory just sat\n under those domes and read dials. But I guess bein' Lemuel's cousin you\n was raised different.\"",
"\"Maybe I'll look better after a shave,\" said Retief. \"What's the idea\n of shooting at me?\"\n\n\n \"Lemme up. My name's Potter. Sorry 'bout that. I figured it was a\n Flap-jack boat; looks just like 'em. I took a shot when I saw something\n move. Didn't know it was a Terrestrial. Who are you? What you doin'\n here? We're pretty close to the edge of the oases. That's Flap-jack\n country over there.\" He waved a hand toward the north, where the desert\n lay.\n\n\n \"I'm glad you're a poor shot. That missile was too close for comfort.\"\n\n\n \"Missile, eh? Must be Flap-jack artillery. We got nothing like that.\"\n\n\n \"I heard there was a full-fledged war brewing,\" said Retief. \"I didn't\n expect—\"",
"It was like burial under a dump-truck-load of concrete.\n\n\n He remembered the rangerform he had captured. The sensitive orifice\n had been placed ventrally, in what would be the thoracic area....\n\n\n He groped, felt tough hide set with horny granules. He would be missing\n skin tomorrow ... if there was a tomorrow. His thumb found the orifice\n and probed.\n\n\n The Flap-jack recoiled. Retief held fast, probed deeper, groping with\n the other hand. If the alien were bilaterally symmetrical there would\n be a set of ready made hand-holds....\nThere were.\n\n\n Retief dug in and the Flap-jack writhed, pulled away. Retief held on,\n scrambled to his feet, threw his weight against the alien and fell on\n top of him, still gouging. Hoshick rippled his fringe wildly, flopped\n in terror, then went limp.",
"Then the planetary surface was rushing up with frightening speed.\n Retief shook his head, kicked in the emergency retro-drive. Points\n of light arced up from the planet face below. If they were ordinary\n chemical warheads the skiff's meteor screens should handle them. The\n screen flashed brilliant white, then went dark. The skiff flipped on\n its back. Smoke filled the tiny compartment. There was a series of\n shocks, a final bone-shaking concussion, then stillness, broken by the\n ping of hot metal contracting.\nCoughing, Retief disengaged himself from the shock-webbing. He beat\n out sparks in his lap, groped underfoot for the hatch and wrenched it\n open. A wave of hot jungle air struck him. He lowered himself to a bed\n of shattered foliage, got to his feet ... and dropped flat as a bullet\n whined past his ear.\n\n\n He lay listening. Stealthy movements were audible from the left.",
"\"They shore won't, sonny. I ain't givin' 'em the chance.\" He started\n punching keys on the console. Retief reached out, caught his wrist.\n\n\n \"Maybe you didn't hear me. I said I've got to get down.\"\n\n\n The pilot plunged against the restraint, swung a punch that Retief\n blocked casually. \"Are you nuts?\" the pilot screeched. \"They's plenty\n shootin' goin' on fer me to see it fifty miles out.\"\n\n\n \"The mail must go through, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Okay! You're so dead set on gettin' killed, you take the skiff. I'll\n tell 'em to pick up the remains next trip.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal. I'll take your offer.\""
],
[
"\"Very well. Shall we begin?\"\n\n\n With a rush Hoshick threw himself at Retief, who ducked, whirled, and\n leaped on the Flap-jack's back ... and felt himself flipped clear by\n a mighty ripple of the alien's slab-like body. Retief rolled aside\n as Hoshick turned on him; he jumped to his feet and threw a right\n hay-maker to Hoshick's mid-section. The alien whipped his left fringe\n around in an arc that connected with Retief's jaw, sent him spinning\n onto his back ... and Hoshick's weight struck him.\nRetief twisted, tried to roll. The flat body of the alien blanketed\n him. He worked an arm free, drumming blows on the leathery back.\n Hoshick nestled closer.\n\n\n Retief's air was running out. He heaved up against the smothering\n weight. Nothing budged.",
"Retief relaxed, released his hold and got to his feet, breathing hard.\n Hoshick humped himself over onto his ventral side, lifted and moved\n gingerly over to the sidelines. His retainers came forward, assisted\n him into his trappings, strapped on the translator. He sighed heavily,\n adjusted the volume.\n\n\n \"There is much to be said for the old system,\" he said. \"What a burden\n one's sportsmanship places on one at times.\"\n\n\n \"Great sport, wasn't it?\" said Retief. \"Now, I know you'll be eager to\n continue. If you'll just wait while I run back and fetch some of our\n gougerforms—\"\n\n\n \"May hide-ticks devour the gougerforms!\" Hoshick bellowed. \"You've\n given me such a sprong-ache as I'll remember each spawning-time for a\n year.\"",
"Hoshick rippled his fringes ecstatically. \"Once again you have outdone\n me, Retief,\" he cried. \"This time, in generosity.\"\n\n\n \"We'll talk over the details later. I'm sure we can establish a set of\n rules that will satisfy all parties. Now I've got to get back. I think\n some of the gougerforms are waiting to see me.\"",
"\"I fear I must lay aside the translator now, Retief,\" said Hoshick.\n He sighed and rippled his fringe tentacles. \"My spawn-fellows will\n never credit this. Such a curious turn fashion has taken. How much\n more pleasant it is to observe the action of the skirmishforms from a\n distance.\"\n\n\n \"I suggest we use Tennessee rules,\" said Retief. \"They're very liberal.\n Biting, gouging, stomping, kneeing and of course choking, as well as\n the usual punching, shoving and kicking.\"\n\n\n \"Hmmm. These gambits seem geared to forms employing rigid\n endo-skeletons; I fear I shall be at a disadvantage.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Retief said, \"if you'd prefer a more plebeian type of\n contest....\"\n\n\n \"By no means. But perhaps we could rule out tentacle-twisting, just to\n even it.\"",
"Retief turned. An immense Flap-jack, hung with crimson trappings,\n rippled at his side. The voice issued from a disk strapped to its back.\n \"You fight well. I think we will find in each other worthy adversaries.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. I'm sure the test would be interesting, but I'm hoping we can\n avoid it.\"\n\n\n \"Avoid it?\" Retief heard a low humming coming from the speaker in the\n silence. \"Well, let us dine,\" the mighty Flap-jack said at last. \"We\n can resolve these matters later. I am called Hoshick of the Mosaic of\n the Two Dawns.\"\n\n\n \"I'm Retief.\" Hoshick waited expectantly, \"... of the Mountain of Red\n Tape,\" Retief added.",
"\"It was an unexpected pleasure to encounter your party here,\"\n said Hoshick. \"I confess at first we took you for an indigenous\n earth-grubbing form, but we were soon disabused of that notion.\" He\n raised a tube, manipulating it deftly with his fringe tentacles. Retief\n returned the salute and drank.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Hoshick continued, \"as soon as we realized that you were\n sportsmen like ourselves, we attempted to make amends by providing a\n bit of activity for you. We've ordered out our heavier equipment and a\n few trained skirmishers and soon we'll be able to give you an adequate\n show. Or so I hope.\"\n\n\n \"Additional skirmishers?\" said Retief. \"How many, if you don't mind my\n asking?\"",
"\"Which brings us to the crux of the matter. You see, we're up against\n a serious problem with regard to skirmishforms. A low birth rate.\n Therefore we've reluctantly taken to substitutes for the mass actions\n so dear to the heart of the sportsman. We've attempted to put an end to\n these contests altogether....\"\n\n\n Hoshick coughed explosively, sending a spray of wine into the air.\n \"What are you saying?\" he gasped. \"Are you proposing that Hoshick of\n the Mosaic of the Two Dawns abandon honor....?\"\n\n\n \"Sir!\" said Retief sternly. \"You forget yourself. I, Retief of the Red\n Tape Mountain, make an alternate proposal more in keeping with the\n newest sporting principles.\"\n\n\n \"New?\" cried Hoshick. \"My dear Retief, what a pleasant surprise! I'm\n enthralled with novel modes. One gets so out of touch. Do elaborate.\"",
"Bert froze. \"Hark, boys,\" he whispered. In the sudden silence a night\n lizard called. Retief strained, heard nothing. He narrowed his eyes,\n peered past the fire—\n\n\n With a swift lunge he seized up the bucket of drinking water, dashed it\n over the fire, threw himself flat. He heard the others hit the dirt a\n split second behind him.\n\n\n \"You move fast for a city man,\" breathed Swazey beside him. \"You see\n pretty good too. We'll split and take 'em from two sides. You and Bert\n from the left, me and Potter from the right.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" said Retief. \"You wait here. I'm going out alone.\"\n\n\n \"What's the idea...?\"",
"It was like burial under a dump-truck-load of concrete.\n\n\n He remembered the rangerform he had captured. The sensitive orifice\n had been placed ventrally, in what would be the thoracic area....\n\n\n He groped, felt tough hide set with horny granules. He would be missing\n skin tomorrow ... if there was a tomorrow. His thumb found the orifice\n and probed.\n\n\n The Flap-jack recoiled. Retief held fast, probed deeper, groping with\n the other hand. If the alien were bilaterally symmetrical there would\n be a set of ready made hand-holds....\nThere were.\n\n\n Retief dug in and the Flap-jack writhed, pulled away. Retief held on,\n scrambled to his feet, threw his weight against the alien and fell on\n top of him, still gouging. Hoshick rippled his fringe wildly, flopped\n in terror, then went limp.",
"\"Just for a change, I'd like to finish a sentence,\" said Retief. \"And I\n suggest you put your courage back in your pocket before it bites you.\"\n\n\n \"You talk too damned fancy to suit me.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. But I'm talking to suit me. Now, for the last time, put it\n away.\"\n\n\n Lemuel stared at Retief. \"You givin' me orders...?\"\n\n\n Retief's left fist shot out, smacked Lemuel's face dead center. He\n stumbled back, blood starting from his nose; the pistol fired into the\n dirt as he dropped it. He caught himself, jumped for Retief ... and met\n a straight right that snapped him onto his back: out cold.\n\n\n \"Wow!\" said Potter. \"The stranger took Lem ... in two punches!\"\n\n\n \"One,\" said Swazey. \"That first one was just a love tap.\"",
"\"Delicious,\" said Retief. \"I wonder. Have you considered eliminating\n weapons altogether?\"\nA scratchy sound issued from the disk. \"Pardon my laughter,\" Hoshick\n said, \"but surely you jest?\"\n\n\n \"As a matter of fact,\" said Retief, \"we ourselves seldom use weapons.\"\n\n\n \"I seem to recall that our first contact of skirmishforms involved the\n use of a weapon by one of your units.\"\n\n\n \"My apologies,\" said Retief. \"The—ah—the skirmishform failed to\n recognize that he was dealing with a sportsman.\"\n\n\n \"Still, now that we have commenced so merrily with weapons....\" Hoshick\n signaled and the servant refilled tubes.",
"\"My spawn-fellows aren't here. And besides, didn't I mention it? No\n one who's really in the know would think of engaging in competition by\n mere combat if there were any other way. Now, you mentioned tilling the\n sand, raising lichens—things like that—\"\n\n\n \"That on which we dined but now,\" said Hoshick, \"and from which the\n wine is made.\"\n\n\n \"The big news in fashionable diplomacy today is farming competition.\n Now, if you'd like to take these deserts and raise lichen, we'll\n promise to stick to the oases and vegetables.\"\n\n\n Hoshick curled his back in attention. \"Retief, you're quite serious?\n You would leave all the fair sand hills to us?\"\n\n\n \"The whole works, Hoshick. I'll take the oases.\"",
"\"It's quite simple, really. Each side selects a representative and the\n two individuals settle the issue between them.\"\n\n\n \"I ... um ... fear I don't understand. What possible significance could\n one attach to the activities of a couple of random skirmishforms?\"\n\n\n \"I haven't made myself clear,\" said Retief. He took a sip of wine. \"We\n don't involve the skirmishforms at all. That's quite passe.\"\n\n\n \"You don't mean...?\"\n\n\n \"That's right. You and me.\"\nOutside on the starlit sand Retief tossed aside the power pistol,\n followed it with the leather shirt Swazey had lent him. By the faint\n light he could just make out the towering figure of the Flap-jack\n rearing up before him, his trappings gone. A silent rank of Flap-jack\n retainers were grouped behind him.",
"\"They shore won't, sonny. I ain't givin' 'em the chance.\" He started\n punching keys on the console. Retief reached out, caught his wrist.\n\n\n \"Maybe you didn't hear me. I said I've got to get down.\"\n\n\n The pilot plunged against the restraint, swung a punch that Retief\n blocked casually. \"Are you nuts?\" the pilot screeched. \"They's plenty\n shootin' goin' on fer me to see it fifty miles out.\"\n\n\n \"The mail must go through, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Okay! You're so dead set on gettin' killed, you take the skiff. I'll\n tell 'em to pick up the remains next trip.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal. I'll take your offer.\"",
"It was ten minutes before a movement caught his eye. Something had\n separated itself from a dark mass of stone, glided across a few yards\n of open ground to another shelter. Retief watched. Minutes passed. The\n shape moved again, slipped into a shadow ten feet distant. Retief felt\n the butt of the power pistol with his elbow. His guess had better be\n right this time....\n\n\n There was a sudden rasp, like leather against concrete, and a flurry of\n sand as the Flap-jack charged.",
"\"Take place, Retief,\" said Hoshick. \"I hope you won't find our rude\n couches uncomfortable.\" Two other large Flap-jacks came into the room,\n communed silently with Hoshick. \"Pray forgive our lack of translating\n devices,\" he said to Retief. \"Permit me to introduce my colleagues....\"\n\n\n A small Flap-jack rippled the chamber bearing on its back a silver tray\n laden with aromatic food. The waiter served the four diners, filled the\n drinking tubes with yellow wine. It smelled good.\n\n\n \"I trust you'll find these dishes palatable,\" said Hoshick. \"Our\n metabolisms are much alike, I believe.\" Retief tried the food. It had a\n delicious nut-like flavor. The wine was indistinguishable from Chateau\n d'Yquem.",
"\"Later. Sit tight and keep your eyes open.\" Retief took a bearing on a\n treetop faintly visible against the sky and started forward.\nFive minutes' stealthy progress brought him to a slight rise of ground.\n With infinite caution he raised himself, risking a glance over an\n out-cropping of rock.\n\n\n The stunted trees ended just ahead. Beyond, he could make out the dim\n contour of rolling desert. Flap-jack country. He got to his feet,\n clambered over the stone—still hot after a day of tropical heat—and\n moved forward twenty yards. Around him he saw nothing but drifted sand,\n palely visible in the starlight, and the occasional shadow of jutting\n shale slabs. Behind him the jungle was still.\n\n\n He sat down on the ground to wait.",
"At a combined speed of two miles per second, the skiff flashed past\n the missile, and Retief was slammed violently against the restraining\n harness in the concussion of the explosion ... a mile astern, and\n harmless.",
"He inched his way to the shelter of a broad-boled dwarf tree. Somewhere\n a song lizard burbled. Whining insects circled, scented alien life,\n buzzed off. There was another rustle of foliage from the underbrush\n five yards away. A bush quivered, then a low bough dipped.\n\n\n Retief edged back around the trunk, eased down behind a fallen log.\n A stocky man in grimy leather shirt and shorts appeared, moving\n cautiously, a pistol in his hand.\n\n\n As he passed, Retief rose, leaped the log and tackled him.\n\n\n They went down together. The stranger gave one short yell, then\n struggled in silence. Retief flipped him onto his back, raised a fist—\n\n\n \"Hey!\" the settler yelled. \"You're as human as I am!\"",
"\"If I'd a been a Flap-jack; I'd of et you alive,\" the newcomer said,\n moving into the ring of fire, a tall, broad-faced man in grimy leather.\n He eyed Retief.\n\n\n \"Who's that?\"\n\n\n \"What do ya mean?\" Potter spoke in the silence. \"He's your cousin....\"\n\n\n \"He ain't no cousin of mine,\" Lemuel said slowly. He stepped to Retief.\n\n\n \"Who you spyin' for, stranger?\" he rasped.\nRetief got to his feet. \"I think I should explain—\"\n\n\n A short-nosed automatic appeared in Lemuel's hand, a clashing note\n against his fringed buckskins.\n\n\n \"Skip the talk. I know a fink when I see one.\""
],
[
"Hoshick rippled his fringes ecstatically. \"Once again you have outdone\n me, Retief,\" he cried. \"This time, in generosity.\"\n\n\n \"We'll talk over the details later. I'm sure we can establish a set of\n rules that will satisfy all parties. Now I've got to get back. I think\n some of the gougerforms are waiting to see me.\"",
"\"Very well. Shall we begin?\"\n\n\n With a rush Hoshick threw himself at Retief, who ducked, whirled, and\n leaped on the Flap-jack's back ... and felt himself flipped clear by\n a mighty ripple of the alien's slab-like body. Retief rolled aside\n as Hoshick turned on him; he jumped to his feet and threw a right\n hay-maker to Hoshick's mid-section. The alien whipped his left fringe\n around in an arc that connected with Retief's jaw, sent him spinning\n onto his back ... and Hoshick's weight struck him.\nRetief twisted, tried to roll. The flat body of the alien blanketed\n him. He worked an arm free, drumming blows on the leathery back.\n Hoshick nestled closer.\n\n\n Retief's air was running out. He heaved up against the smothering\n weight. Nothing budged.",
"Retief relaxed, released his hold and got to his feet, breathing hard.\n Hoshick humped himself over onto his ventral side, lifted and moved\n gingerly over to the sidelines. His retainers came forward, assisted\n him into his trappings, strapped on the translator. He sighed heavily,\n adjusted the volume.\n\n\n \"There is much to be said for the old system,\" he said. \"What a burden\n one's sportsmanship places on one at times.\"\n\n\n \"Great sport, wasn't it?\" said Retief. \"Now, I know you'll be eager to\n continue. If you'll just wait while I run back and fetch some of our\n gougerforms—\"\n\n\n \"May hide-ticks devour the gougerforms!\" Hoshick bellowed. \"You've\n given me such a sprong-ache as I'll remember each spawning-time for a\n year.\"",
"\"It was an unexpected pleasure to encounter your party here,\"\n said Hoshick. \"I confess at first we took you for an indigenous\n earth-grubbing form, but we were soon disabused of that notion.\" He\n raised a tube, manipulating it deftly with his fringe tentacles. Retief\n returned the salute and drank.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Hoshick continued, \"as soon as we realized that you were\n sportsmen like ourselves, we attempted to make amends by providing a\n bit of activity for you. We've ordered out our heavier equipment and a\n few trained skirmishers and soon we'll be able to give you an adequate\n show. Or so I hope.\"\n\n\n \"Additional skirmishers?\" said Retief. \"How many, if you don't mind my\n asking?\"",
"\"I fear I must lay aside the translator now, Retief,\" said Hoshick.\n He sighed and rippled his fringe tentacles. \"My spawn-fellows will\n never credit this. Such a curious turn fashion has taken. How much\n more pleasant it is to observe the action of the skirmishforms from a\n distance.\"\n\n\n \"I suggest we use Tennessee rules,\" said Retief. \"They're very liberal.\n Biting, gouging, stomping, kneeing and of course choking, as well as\n the usual punching, shoving and kicking.\"\n\n\n \"Hmmm. These gambits seem geared to forms employing rigid\n endo-skeletons; I fear I shall be at a disadvantage.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Retief said, \"if you'd prefer a more plebeian type of\n contest....\"\n\n\n \"By no means. But perhaps we could rule out tentacle-twisting, just to\n even it.\"",
"\"There is an aspect I haven't yet mentioned,\" Retief went on. \"I hope\n you won't take this personally, but the fact is, our skirmishforms\n think of weapons as something one employs only in dealing with certain\n specific life-forms.\"\n\n\n \"Oh? Curious. What forms are those?\"\n\n\n \"Vermin. Or 'varmints' as some call them. Deadly antagonists, but\n lacking in caste. I don't want our skirmishforms thinking of such\n worthy adversaries as yourself as varmints.\"\n\n\n \"Dear me! I hadn't realized, of course. Most considerate of you to\n point it out.\" Hoshick clucked in dismay. \"I see that skirmishforms are\n much the same among you as with us: lacking in perception.\" He laughed\n scratchily. \"Imagine considering us as—what was the word?—varmints.\"",
"Retief turned. An immense Flap-jack, hung with crimson trappings,\n rippled at his side. The voice issued from a disk strapped to its back.\n \"You fight well. I think we will find in each other worthy adversaries.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. I'm sure the test would be interesting, but I'm hoping we can\n avoid it.\"\n\n\n \"Avoid it?\" Retief heard a low humming coming from the speaker in the\n silence. \"Well, let us dine,\" the mighty Flap-jack said at last. \"We\n can resolve these matters later. I am called Hoshick of the Mosaic of\n the Two Dawns.\"\n\n\n \"I'm Retief.\" Hoshick waited expectantly, \"... of the Mountain of Red\n Tape,\" Retief added.",
"\"Which brings us to the crux of the matter. You see, we're up against\n a serious problem with regard to skirmishforms. A low birth rate.\n Therefore we've reluctantly taken to substitutes for the mass actions\n so dear to the heart of the sportsman. We've attempted to put an end to\n these contests altogether....\"\n\n\n Hoshick coughed explosively, sending a spray of wine into the air.\n \"What are you saying?\" he gasped. \"Are you proposing that Hoshick of\n the Mosaic of the Two Dawns abandon honor....?\"\n\n\n \"Sir!\" said Retief sternly. \"You forget yourself. I, Retief of the Red\n Tape Mountain, make an alternate proposal more in keeping with the\n newest sporting principles.\"\n\n\n \"New?\" cried Hoshick. \"My dear Retief, what a pleasant surprise! I'm\n enthralled with novel modes. One gets so out of touch. Do elaborate.\"",
"\"Take place, Retief,\" said Hoshick. \"I hope you won't find our rude\n couches uncomfortable.\" Two other large Flap-jacks came into the room,\n communed silently with Hoshick. \"Pray forgive our lack of translating\n devices,\" he said to Retief. \"Permit me to introduce my colleagues....\"\n\n\n A small Flap-jack rippled the chamber bearing on its back a silver tray\n laden with aromatic food. The waiter served the four diners, filled the\n drinking tubes with yellow wine. It smelled good.\n\n\n \"I trust you'll find these dishes palatable,\" said Hoshick. \"Our\n metabolisms are much alike, I believe.\" Retief tried the food. It had a\n delicious nut-like flavor. The wine was indistinguishable from Chateau\n d'Yquem.",
"\"My spawn-fellows aren't here. And besides, didn't I mention it? No\n one who's really in the know would think of engaging in competition by\n mere combat if there were any other way. Now, you mentioned tilling the\n sand, raising lichens—things like that—\"\n\n\n \"That on which we dined but now,\" said Hoshick, \"and from which the\n wine is made.\"\n\n\n \"The big news in fashionable diplomacy today is farming competition.\n Now, if you'd like to take these deserts and raise lichen, we'll\n promise to stick to the oases and vegetables.\"\n\n\n Hoshick curled his back in attention. \"Retief, you're quite serious?\n You would leave all the fair sand hills to us?\"\n\n\n \"The whole works, Hoshick. I'll take the oases.\"",
"\"Delicious,\" said Retief. \"I wonder. Have you considered eliminating\n weapons altogether?\"\nA scratchy sound issued from the disk. \"Pardon my laughter,\" Hoshick\n said, \"but surely you jest?\"\n\n\n \"As a matter of fact,\" said Retief, \"we ourselves seldom use weapons.\"\n\n\n \"I seem to recall that our first contact of skirmishforms involved the\n use of a weapon by one of your units.\"\n\n\n \"My apologies,\" said Retief. \"The—ah—the skirmishform failed to\n recognize that he was dealing with a sportsman.\"\n\n\n \"Still, now that we have commenced so merrily with weapons....\" Hoshick\n signaled and the servant refilled tubes.",
"\"Speaking of hide-ticks,\" said Retief, \"we've developed a biterform—\"\n\n\n \"Enough!\" Hoshick roared, so loudly that the translator bounced on his\n hide. \"Suddenly I yearn for the crowded yellow sands of Jaq. I had\n hoped....\" He broke off, drew a rasping breath. \"I had hoped, Retief,\"\n he said, speaking sadly now, \"to find a new land here where I might\n plan my own Mosaic, till these alien sands and bring forth such a crop\n of paradise-lichen as should glut the markets of a hundred worlds. But\n my spirit is not equal to the prospect of biterforms and gougerforms\n without end. I am shamed before you....\"\n\n\n \"To tell you the truth, I'm old-fashioned myself. I'd rather watch the\n action from a distance too.\"\n\n\n \"But surely your spawn-fellows would never condone such an attitude.\"",
"\"We're damn glad you're here, mister,\" said a fat man with two\n revolvers belted across his paunch. \"We can use every hand. We're in\n bad shape. We ran into the Flap-jacks three months ago and we haven't\n made a smart move since. First, we thought they were a native form we\n hadn't run into before. Fact is, one of the boys shot one, thinkin' it\n was fair game. I guess that was the start of it.\" He stirred the fire,\n added a stick.\n\n\n \"And then a bunch of 'em hit Swazey's farm here,\" Potter said. \"Killed\n two of his cattle, and pulled back.\"\n\n\n \"I figure they thought the cows were people,\" said Swazey. \"They were\n out for revenge.\"\n\n\n \"How could anybody think a cow was folks?\" another man put in. \"They\n don't look nothin' like—\"",
"\"Don't be so dumb, Bert,\" said Swazey. \"They'd never seen Terries\n before. They know better now.\"\n\n\n Bert chuckled. \"Sure do. We showed 'em the next time, didn't we,\n Potter? Got four.\"\n\n\n \"They walked right up to my place a couple days after the first time,\"\n Swazey said. \"We were ready for 'em. Peppered 'em good. They cut and\n run.\"\n\n\n \"Flopped, you mean. Ugliest lookin' critters you ever saw. Look just\n like a old piece of dirty blanket humpin' around.\"",
"It was like burial under a dump-truck-load of concrete.\n\n\n He remembered the rangerform he had captured. The sensitive orifice\n had been placed ventrally, in what would be the thoracic area....\n\n\n He groped, felt tough hide set with horny granules. He would be missing\n skin tomorrow ... if there was a tomorrow. His thumb found the orifice\n and probed.\n\n\n The Flap-jack recoiled. Retief held fast, probed deeper, groping with\n the other hand. If the alien were bilaterally symmetrical there would\n be a set of ready made hand-holds....\nThere were.\n\n\n Retief dug in and the Flap-jack writhed, pulled away. Retief held on,\n scrambled to his feet, threw his weight against the alien and fell on\n top of him, still gouging. Hoshick rippled his fringe wildly, flopped\n in terror, then went limp.",
"\"Good!\" Potter said. \"We figured a few of you boys from Ivory would be\n joining up when you heard. You are from Ivory?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I'm—\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you must be Lemuel's cousin. Good night! I pretty near made a bad\n mistake. Lemuel's a tough man to explain something to.\"\n\n\n \"I'm—\"\n\n\n \"Keep your head down. These damn Flap-jacks have got some wicked hand\n weapons. Come on....\" He moved off silently on all fours. Retief\n followed. They crossed two hundred yards of rough country before Potter\n got to his feet, took out a soggy bandana and mopped his face.\n\n\n \"You move good for a city man. I thought you folks on Ivory just sat\n under those domes and read dials. But I guess bein' Lemuel's cousin you\n was raised different.\"",
"Bert froze. \"Hark, boys,\" he whispered. In the sudden silence a night\n lizard called. Retief strained, heard nothing. He narrowed his eyes,\n peered past the fire—\n\n\n With a swift lunge he seized up the bucket of drinking water, dashed it\n over the fire, threw himself flat. He heard the others hit the dirt a\n split second behind him.\n\n\n \"You move fast for a city man,\" breathed Swazey beside him. \"You see\n pretty good too. We'll split and take 'em from two sides. You and Bert\n from the left, me and Potter from the right.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" said Retief. \"You wait here. I'm going out alone.\"\n\n\n \"What's the idea...?\"",
"\"Just for a change, I'd like to finish a sentence,\" said Retief. \"And I\n suggest you put your courage back in your pocket before it bites you.\"\n\n\n \"You talk too damned fancy to suit me.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. But I'm talking to suit me. Now, for the last time, put it\n away.\"\n\n\n Lemuel stared at Retief. \"You givin' me orders...?\"\n\n\n Retief's left fist shot out, smacked Lemuel's face dead center. He\n stumbled back, blood starting from his nose; the pistol fired into the\n dirt as he dropped it. He caught himself, jumped for Retief ... and met\n a straight right that snapped him onto his back: out cold.\n\n\n \"Wow!\" said Potter. \"The stranger took Lem ... in two punches!\"\n\n\n \"One,\" said Swazey. \"That first one was just a love tap.\"",
"\"If I'd a been a Flap-jack; I'd of et you alive,\" the newcomer said,\n moving into the ring of fire, a tall, broad-faced man in grimy leather.\n He eyed Retief.\n\n\n \"Who's that?\"\n\n\n \"What do ya mean?\" Potter spoke in the silence. \"He's your cousin....\"\n\n\n \"He ain't no cousin of mine,\" Lemuel said slowly. He stepped to Retief.\n\n\n \"Who you spyin' for, stranger?\" he rasped.\nRetief got to his feet. \"I think I should explain—\"\n\n\n A short-nosed automatic appeared in Lemuel's hand, a clashing note\n against his fringed buckskins.\n\n\n \"Skip the talk. I know a fink when I see one.\"",
"\"They shore won't, sonny. I ain't givin' 'em the chance.\" He started\n punching keys on the console. Retief reached out, caught his wrist.\n\n\n \"Maybe you didn't hear me. I said I've got to get down.\"\n\n\n The pilot plunged against the restraint, swung a punch that Retief\n blocked casually. \"Are you nuts?\" the pilot screeched. \"They's plenty\n shootin' goin' on fer me to see it fifty miles out.\"\n\n\n \"The mail must go through, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Okay! You're so dead set on gettin' killed, you take the skiff. I'll\n tell 'em to pick up the remains next trip.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal. I'll take your offer.\""
],
[
"At a combined speed of two miles per second, the skiff flashed past\n the missile, and Retief was slammed violently against the restraining\n harness in the concussion of the explosion ... a mile astern, and\n harmless.",
"\"They shore won't, sonny. I ain't givin' 'em the chance.\" He started\n punching keys on the console. Retief reached out, caught his wrist.\n\n\n \"Maybe you didn't hear me. I said I've got to get down.\"\n\n\n The pilot plunged against the restraint, swung a punch that Retief\n blocked casually. \"Are you nuts?\" the pilot screeched. \"They's plenty\n shootin' goin' on fer me to see it fifty miles out.\"\n\n\n \"The mail must go through, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Okay! You're so dead set on gettin' killed, you take the skiff. I'll\n tell 'em to pick up the remains next trip.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal. I'll take your offer.\"",
"A crimson blip showed on the screen, moving out.\n\n\n Retief felt sweat pop out on his forehead. The red blip meant heavy\n radiation from a warhead. Somebody was playing around with an outlawed\n but by no means unheard of fission weapon. But maybe it was just on a\n high trajectory and had no connection with the skiff....\n\n\n Retief altered course to the south. The blip followed.\n\n\n He checked instrument readings, gripped the controls, watching. This\n was going to be tricky. The missile bored closer. At five miles Retief\n threw the light skiff into maximum acceleration, straight toward the\n oncoming bomb. Crushed back in the padded seat, he watched the screen,\n correcting course minutely. The proximity fuse should be set for no\n more than 1000 yards.",
"Then the planetary surface was rushing up with frightening speed.\n Retief shook his head, kicked in the emergency retro-drive. Points\n of light arced up from the planet face below. If they were ordinary\n chemical warheads the skiff's meteor screens should handle them. The\n screen flashed brilliant white, then went dark. The skiff flipped on\n its back. Smoke filled the tiny compartment. There was a series of\n shocks, a final bone-shaking concussion, then stillness, broken by the\n ping of hot metal contracting.\nCoughing, Retief disengaged himself from the shock-webbing. He beat\n out sparks in his lap, groped underfoot for the hatch and wrenched it\n open. A wave of hot jungle air struck him. He lowered himself to a bed\n of shattered foliage, got to his feet ... and dropped flat as a bullet\n whined past his ear.\n\n\n He lay listening. Stealthy movements were audible from the left.",
"The pilot jumped to the lifeboat hatch and cycled it open. \"Get in.\n We're closin' fast. Them birds might take it into their heads to lob\n one this way....\"\n\n\n Retief crawled into the narrow cockpit of the skiff, glanced over the\n controls. The pilot ducked out of sight, came back, handed Retief a\n heavy old-fashioned power pistol. \"Long as you're goin' in, might as\n well take this.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks.\" Retief shoved the pistol in his belt. \"I hope you're wrong.\"\n\n\n \"I'll see they pick you up when the shootin's over—one way or another.\"\n\n\n The hatch clanked shut. A moment later there was a jar as the skiff\n dropped away, followed by heavy buffeting in the backwash from the\n departing mail boat. Retief watched the tiny screen, hands on the\n manual controls. He was dropping rapidly: forty miles, thirty-nine....",
"It was ten minutes before a movement caught his eye. Something had\n separated itself from a dark mass of stone, glided across a few yards\n of open ground to another shelter. Retief watched. Minutes passed. The\n shape moved again, slipped into a shadow ten feet distant. Retief felt\n the butt of the power pistol with his elbow. His guess had better be\n right this time....\n\n\n There was a sudden rasp, like leather against concrete, and a flurry of\n sand as the Flap-jack charged.",
"Bert froze. \"Hark, boys,\" he whispered. In the sudden silence a night\n lizard called. Retief strained, heard nothing. He narrowed his eyes,\n peered past the fire—\n\n\n With a swift lunge he seized up the bucket of drinking water, dashed it\n over the fire, threw himself flat. He heard the others hit the dirt a\n split second behind him.\n\n\n \"You move fast for a city man,\" breathed Swazey beside him. \"You see\n pretty good too. We'll split and take 'em from two sides. You and Bert\n from the left, me and Potter from the right.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" said Retief. \"You wait here. I'm going out alone.\"\n\n\n \"What's the idea...?\"",
"\"Maybe I'll look better after a shave,\" said Retief. \"What's the idea\n of shooting at me?\"\n\n\n \"Lemme up. My name's Potter. Sorry 'bout that. I figured it was a\n Flap-jack boat; looks just like 'em. I took a shot when I saw something\n move. Didn't know it was a Terrestrial. Who are you? What you doin'\n here? We're pretty close to the edge of the oases. That's Flap-jack\n country over there.\" He waved a hand toward the north, where the desert\n lay.\n\n\n \"I'm glad you're a poor shot. That missile was too close for comfort.\"\n\n\n \"Missile, eh? Must be Flap-jack artillery. We got nothing like that.\"\n\n\n \"I heard there was a full-fledged war brewing,\" said Retief. \"I didn't\n expect—\"",
"\"Later. Sit tight and keep your eyes open.\" Retief took a bearing on a\n treetop faintly visible against the sky and started forward.\nFive minutes' stealthy progress brought him to a slight rise of ground.\n With infinite caution he raised himself, risking a glance over an\n out-cropping of rock.\n\n\n The stunted trees ended just ahead. Beyond, he could make out the dim\n contour of rolling desert. Flap-jack country. He got to his feet,\n clambered over the stone—still hot after a day of tropical heat—and\n moved forward twenty yards. Around him he saw nothing but drifted sand,\n palely visible in the starlight, and the occasional shadow of jutting\n shale slabs. Behind him the jungle was still.\n\n\n He sat down on the ground to wait.",
"\"When you get back,\" said Passwyn, \"you tell me.\"\nThe mail pilot, a leathery veteran with quarter-inch whiskers, spat\n toward a stained corner of the compartment, leaned close to the screen.\n\n\n \"They's shootin' goin' on down there,\" he said. \"See them white puffs\n over the edge of the desert?\"\n\n\n \"I'm supposed to be preventing the war,\" said Retief. \"It looks like\n I'm a little late.\"\n\n\n The pilot's head snapped around. \"War?\" he yelped. \"Nobody told me they\n was a war goin' on on 'Dobe. If that's what that is, I'm gettin' out of\n here.\"\n\n\n \"Hold on,\" said Retief. \"I've got to get down. They won't shoot at you.\"",
"\"Very well. Shall we begin?\"\n\n\n With a rush Hoshick threw himself at Retief, who ducked, whirled, and\n leaped on the Flap-jack's back ... and felt himself flipped clear by\n a mighty ripple of the alien's slab-like body. Retief rolled aside\n as Hoshick turned on him; he jumped to his feet and threw a right\n hay-maker to Hoshick's mid-section. The alien whipped his left fringe\n around in an arc that connected with Retief's jaw, sent him spinning\n onto his back ... and Hoshick's weight struck him.\nRetief twisted, tried to roll. The flat body of the alien blanketed\n him. He worked an arm free, drumming blows on the leathery back.\n Hoshick nestled closer.\n\n\n Retief's air was running out. He heaved up against the smothering\n weight. Nothing budged.",
"Retief relaxed, released his hold and got to his feet, breathing hard.\n Hoshick humped himself over onto his ventral side, lifted and moved\n gingerly over to the sidelines. His retainers came forward, assisted\n him into his trappings, strapped on the translator. He sighed heavily,\n adjusted the volume.\n\n\n \"There is much to be said for the old system,\" he said. \"What a burden\n one's sportsmanship places on one at times.\"\n\n\n \"Great sport, wasn't it?\" said Retief. \"Now, I know you'll be eager to\n continue. If you'll just wait while I run back and fetch some of our\n gougerforms—\"\n\n\n \"May hide-ticks devour the gougerforms!\" Hoshick bellowed. \"You've\n given me such a sprong-ache as I'll remember each spawning-time for a\n year.\"",
"It was like burial under a dump-truck-load of concrete.\n\n\n He remembered the rangerform he had captured. The sensitive orifice\n had been placed ventrally, in what would be the thoracic area....\n\n\n He groped, felt tough hide set with horny granules. He would be missing\n skin tomorrow ... if there was a tomorrow. His thumb found the orifice\n and probed.\n\n\n The Flap-jack recoiled. Retief held fast, probed deeper, groping with\n the other hand. If the alien were bilaterally symmetrical there would\n be a set of ready made hand-holds....\nThere were.\n\n\n Retief dug in and the Flap-jack writhed, pulled away. Retief held on,\n scrambled to his feet, threw his weight against the alien and fell on\n top of him, still gouging. Hoshick rippled his fringe wildly, flopped\n in terror, then went limp.",
"He inched his way to the shelter of a broad-boled dwarf tree. Somewhere\n a song lizard burbled. Whining insects circled, scented alien life,\n buzzed off. There was another rustle of foliage from the underbrush\n five yards away. A bush quivered, then a low bough dipped.\n\n\n Retief edged back around the trunk, eased down behind a fallen log.\n A stocky man in grimy leather shirt and shorts appeared, moving\n cautiously, a pistol in his hand.\n\n\n As he passed, Retief rose, leaped the log and tackled him.\n\n\n They went down together. The stranger gave one short yell, then\n struggled in silence. Retief flipped him onto his back, raised a fist—\n\n\n \"Hey!\" the settler yelled. \"You're as human as I am!\"",
"Retief rolled aside, then lunged, threw his weight on the flopping\n Flap-jack—a yard square, three inches thick at the center and all\n muscle. The ray-like creature heaved up, curled backward, its edge\n rippling, to stand on the flattened rim of its encircling sphincter.\n It scrabbled with prehensile fringe-tentacles for a grip on Retief's\n shoulders. He wrapped his arms around the alien and struggled to his\n feet. The thing was heavy. A hundred pounds at least. Fighting as it\n was, it seemed more like five hundred.\n\n\n The Flap-jack reversed its tactics, went limp. Retief grabbed, felt a\n thumb slip into an orifice—\n\n\n The alien went wild. Retief hung on, dug the thumb in deeper.\n\n\n \"Sorry, fellow,\" he muttered between clenched teeth. \"Eye-gouging isn't\n gentlemanly, but it's effective....\"",
"\"It's quite simple, really. Each side selects a representative and the\n two individuals settle the issue between them.\"\n\n\n \"I ... um ... fear I don't understand. What possible significance could\n one attach to the activities of a couple of random skirmishforms?\"\n\n\n \"I haven't made myself clear,\" said Retief. He took a sip of wine. \"We\n don't involve the skirmishforms at all. That's quite passe.\"\n\n\n \"You don't mean...?\"\n\n\n \"That's right. You and me.\"\nOutside on the starlit sand Retief tossed aside the power pistol,\n followed it with the leather shirt Swazey had lent him. By the faint\n light he could just make out the towering figure of the Flap-jack\n rearing up before him, his trappings gone. A silent rank of Flap-jack\n retainers were grouped behind him.",
"Hoshick rippled his fringes ecstatically. \"Once again you have outdone\n me, Retief,\" he cried. \"This time, in generosity.\"\n\n\n \"We'll talk over the details later. I'm sure we can establish a set of\n rules that will satisfy all parties. Now I've got to get back. I think\n some of the gougerforms are waiting to see me.\"",
"\"Just for a change, I'd like to finish a sentence,\" said Retief. \"And I\n suggest you put your courage back in your pocket before it bites you.\"\n\n\n \"You talk too damned fancy to suit me.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. But I'm talking to suit me. Now, for the last time, put it\n away.\"\n\n\n Lemuel stared at Retief. \"You givin' me orders...?\"\n\n\n Retief's left fist shot out, smacked Lemuel's face dead center. He\n stumbled back, blood starting from his nose; the pistol fired into the\n dirt as he dropped it. He caught himself, jumped for Retief ... and met\n a straight right that snapped him onto his back: out cold.\n\n\n \"Wow!\" said Potter. \"The stranger took Lem ... in two punches!\"\n\n\n \"One,\" said Swazey. \"That first one was just a love tap.\"",
"\"If I'd a been a Flap-jack; I'd of et you alive,\" the newcomer said,\n moving into the ring of fire, a tall, broad-faced man in grimy leather.\n He eyed Retief.\n\n\n \"Who's that?\"\n\n\n \"What do ya mean?\" Potter spoke in the silence. \"He's your cousin....\"\n\n\n \"He ain't no cousin of mine,\" Lemuel said slowly. He stepped to Retief.\n\n\n \"Who you spyin' for, stranger?\" he rasped.\nRetief got to his feet. \"I think I should explain—\"\n\n\n A short-nosed automatic appeared in Lemuel's hand, a clashing note\n against his fringed buckskins.\n\n\n \"Skip the talk. I know a fink when I see one.\"",
"A penetrating beam of red light struck Retief in the face, blinked off.\n He got to his feet. The captive Flap-jack rippled its fringe in an\n agitated way. Retief tensed his thumb in the eye-socket.\n\n\n \"Sit tight,\" he said. \"Don't try to do anything hasty....\" His remarks\n were falling on deaf ears—or no ears at all—but the thumb spoke as\n loudly as words.\n\n\n There was a slither of sand. Another. He became aware of a ring of\n presences drawing closer.\n\n\n Retief tightened his grip on the alien. He could see a dark shape now,\n looming up almost to his own six-three. It looked like the Flap-jacks\n came in all sizes.\n\n\n A low rumble sounded, like a deep-throated growl. It strummed on, faded\n out. Retief cocked his head, frowning."
]
] |
valid
|
63392
|
[
"Of the following options, which best describe Syme Rector?",
"Of the following options, which best describe Harold Tate?",
"How would you describe Syme's and Harold's relationship?",
"What is the description of the physical traits of the Martians like in the story?",
"What happened when the Martians initially split into two populations?",
"If Syme weren't initially helped by Harold, what would've probably happened to him?",
"Between Martians and Humans, who seems to have a more advanced civilization?",
"Of the following options, what best summarizes this story?"
] |
[
[
"Strong and nice",
"Bold and calculated",
"Bold and kind",
"Impressive and lucky"
],
[
"brave and calculated",
"kind and generous",
"curious and timid",
"greedy and brave"
],
[
"It's a genuinely friendly relationship",
"It's a beautiful relationship",
"It's a relationship of necessity",
"They quickly become enemies"
],
[
"Detailed, because they were a non-human like creature with very different physical traits",
"Brief, because what mattered more about the Martians was what they were doing rather than what they looked like",
"Broad, because the appearances of the Martians varied from individual to individual",
"Vague, because Syme and Harold barely got a good look at the Martians before they were ambushed"
],
[
"One population thrived and the other died out",
"Both populations suffered as a result of the split",
"Both populations eventually combined once more",
"Both populations succeeded and thrived, but in very different ways"
],
[
"Syme would've been protected by the building's safety net.",
"Syme would've gotten help from someone else.",
"Syme would've fallen to his death.",
"Syme would've caught himself with his two backup harpoons."
],
[
"Neither are very advanced",
"The Humans",
"The Martians",
"Both are fairly advanced but the Humans are more civilized than the Martians"
],
[
"A criminal tricks a scientist into giving him resources and aid on a beautiful adventure.",
"A criminal forces a scientist to go on an adventure.",
"A criminal teams up with a scientist to explore a dangerous area.",
"A criminal and a scientist wind up on a fun adventure together."
]
] |
[
2,
3,
3,
1,
1,
3,
3,
3
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[
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[
"They knew, of course, that he was an outlaw—the very fact of the\n crashed, illegally-armed ship would have told them that. But they\n didn't know that he was Syme Rector, the most-wanted and most-feared\n raider in the System. In that was his only advantage.\n\n\n He walked a little faster, as his quarry turned up a side street and\n then boarded a moving ramp to an upper level. He watched until the\n short, wide-shouldered figure in spaceman's harness disappeared over\n the top of the ramp, and then followed.\n\n\n The man was waiting for him at the mouth of the ascending tunnel.\n\n\n Syme looked at him casually, without a flicker of expression, and\n started to walk on, but the other stepped into his path. He was quite\n young, Syme saw, with a fighter's shoulders under the white leather,\n and a hard, determined thrust to his firm jaw.",
"\"Sure,\" said Syme absently. Out in the center of the floor, an AG\n plate had been turned on. Five Venusian girls were diving and twisting\n in its influence, propelling themselves by the motion of their\n delicately-webbed feet and trailing long gauzy streamers of synthesilk\n after them. Syme watched them through narrowed lids, feeling the glow\n of\nculcha\ninside him.\n\n\n \"I wanta go to Kal-Jmar,\" said Tate.\n\n\n Syme snapped to attention, every nerve tingling. An indefinable sense,\n a hunch that had served him well before, told him that something big\n was coming—something that promised adventure and loot for Syme Rector.\n \"Why?\" he asked softly. \"Why to Kal-Jmar?\"",
"Later, however, when every unsuccessful attempt had precipitated a\n bloody uprising of the present-day Martians—resulting in a rapid\n dwindling of the number of Martians—the Mars Protectorate had stepped\n in and forbidden any further experiments; forbidden, in fact, any\n Earthman to go near the place.\n\n\n Thus matter had stood for over a hundred years, until Harold Tate.\n Tate, a physicist, had stumbled on a field that seemed to be identical\n in properties to the Kal-Jmar dome; and what is more, he had found a\n force that would break it down.\n\n\n And so he had made his first trip to Mars, and within twenty-four\n hours, by the blindest of chances, blurted out his secret to Syme\n Rector, the scourge of the spaceways, the man with a thousand credits\n on his sleek, tigerish head.",
"He heard running footsteps, and then a pale face peered over the ledge\n at him. He realized suddenly that the whole incident could have taken\n only a few seconds. He croaked, \"Get me up.\"\n\n\n Wordlessly, the man clasped thin fingers around his wrist. The other\n pulled, with much puffing and panting, and with his help Syme managed\n to get a leg over the edge and hoist his trembling body to safety.\n\n\n \"Are you all right?\"\nSyme looked at the man, nursing the tortured muscles of his arms. His\n rescuer was tall and thin, of indeterminate age. He had light, sandy\n hair, a sharp nose, and—oddly conflicting—pale, serious eyes and a\n humorous wide mouth. He was still panting.\n\n\n \"I'm not hurt,\" Syme said. He grinned, his white teeth flashing in his\n dark, lean face. \"Thanks for giving me a hand.\"",
"Syme glared at him and spat, too enraged to think of diplomacy. He\n turned and strode out of the cavern, carrying his right leg stiffly,\n but with his feral, tigerish head held high.\n\n\n He led the way, wordlessly, back to the wrecked sand car. Tate followed\n him with a hangdog, beaten air, as though he had just found something\n that shattered all his previous concepts of the verities in life, and\n didn't know what to do about it.\n\n\n Still silently, Syme refilled his oxygen tank, watched Tate do the\n same, and then picked up two spare tanks and the precious black\n suitcase and handed one of the tanks to Tate. Then he stumped around\n to the back of the car and inspected the damage. The cable reel, which\n might have drawn them out of the gully, was hopelessly smashed. That\n was that.",
"Syme's smile was not tigerish now; it was carefully, studiedly mild.\n For Tate was no longer drunk, and it was important that it should not\n occur to him that he had been indiscreet.\n\n\n \"This is native territory we're coming to, Harold,\" he said. \"Better\n strap on your gun.\"\n\n\n \"Why. Are they really dangerous?\"\n\n\n \"They're unpredictable,\" Syme told him. \"They're built differently, and\n they think differently. They breathe like us, down in their caverns\n where there's air, but they also eat sand, and get their oxygen that\n way.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I've heard about that,\" Tate said. \"Iron oxide—very interesting\n metabolism.\" He got his energy pistol out of the compartment and\n strapped it on absently.",
"Syme jumped to his feet and faced his enemies, snarling like the\n trapped tiger he was. Another ray slashed at him, and he bent lithely\n to let it whistle over his head. Another, lower this time. He flipped\n his body into the air and landed upright, his gun still blazing. His\n right leg burned fiercely from a ray-graze, but he ignored it. And\n all the while he was mowing down the massed natives in great swaths,\n seeking out the ones armed with Bensons in swift, terrible slashes,\n dodging spears and other missiles in midair, and roaring at the top of\n his powerful lungs.\n\n\n At last there were none with guns left to oppose him. He scythed down\n the rest in two terrible, lightning sweeps of his ray, then dropped\n the weapon from blistered fingers.",
"Doorway to Kal-Jmar\nBy Stuart Fleming\nTwo men had died before Syme Rector's guns\n\n to give him the key to the ancient city of\n\n Kal-Jmar—a city of untold wealth, and of\n\n robots that made desires instant commands.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe tall man loitered a moment before a garish window display, his eyes\n impassive in his space-burned face, as the Lillis patrolman passed.\n Then he turned, burying his long chin in the folds of his sand cape,\n and took up the pursuit of the dark figure ahead once more.",
"The Martian lowered his head. \"That is for unborn generations.\" He\n looked at Tate again and aimed the energy gun. \"You are a brave man,\"\n he said. \"I am sorry.\"\n\n\n Syme saw all his hopes of treasure and glory go glimmering down the\n sights of the Martian's Benson gun, and suddenly the pent-up rage in\n him exploded. Too swiftly for his intention to be telegraphed, before\n he knew himself what he meant to do, he hurled himself bodily into the\n Martian.\nIt was like tangling with a draft horse. The Martian was astonishingly\n strong. Syme scrambled desperately for the gun, got it, but couldn't\n tear it out of the Martian's fingers. And all the time he could almost\n feel the Martian's telepathic call for help surging out. He heard the\n swift pad of his followers coming across the cavern.",
"They got off at the amusement level, three tiers down, and found a\n cafe around the corner. Syme wasn't worried about the man he had just\n killed. He had heard no second thud, so the body must have stayed on\n the first outcropping of the tower it struck. It probably wouldn't be\n found until morning.\n\n\n And he had the wallet. When he paid for the first round of\nculcha\n, he\n took it out and stole a glance at the identification card inside. There\n it was—his ticket to freedom. He began feeling expansive, and even\n friendly toward the slender, mouse-like man across the table. It was\n the\nculcha\n, of course. He knew it, and didn't care. In the morning\n he'd find a freighter berth—in as big a spaceport as Lillis, there\n were always jobs open. Meanwhile, he might as well enjoy himself, and\n it was safer to be seen with a companion than to be alone.",
"Harold Tate told him, and later, when Syme had taken him to his rooms,\n he showed him what was in his little black suitcase. Syme had been\n right; it was big.\nKal-Jmar was the riddle of the Solar System. It was the only remaining\n city of the ancient Martian race—the race that, legends said, had\n risen to greater heights than any other Solar culture. The machines,\n the artifacts, the records of the Martians were all there, perfectly\n preserved inside the city's bubble-like dome, after God knew how many\n thousands of years. But they couldn't be reached.",
"Syme turned the little sand car up a gentle rise towards the tortuous\n hill country in the distance. \"Not only that,\" he continued. \"They\n eat the damndest stuff. Lichens and fungi and tumble-grass off the\n deserts—all full of deadly poisons, from arsenic up the line to\n xopite. They seem intelligent enough—in their own way—but they never\n come near our cities and they either can't or won't learn Terrestrial.\n When the first colonists came here, they had to learn\ntheir\ncrazy\n language. Every word of it can mean any one of a dozen different\n things, depending on the inflection you give it. I can speak it some,\n but not much. Nobody can. We don't think the same.\"\n\n\n \"So you think they might attack us?\" Tate asked again, nervously.\n\n\n \"They\nmight\ndo anything,\" Syme said curtly. \"Don't worry about it.\"",
"\"Yeah,\" said Syme, and opened the door. The air in the car\nwhooshed\ninto the near-vacuum outside, and he and Tate stepped out.\n\n\n The Martian leader looked at them enigmatically, then turned and\n started off. The other natives closed in on them, and they all bounded\n along under the weak gravity.\n\n\n They bounded along for what Syme figured as a good kilometer and a\n half, and they then reached a branch in the gully and turned down\n it, going lower all the time. Under the light of their helmet lamps,\n they could see the walls of the gully—a tunnel, now—getting darker\n and more solid. Finally, when Syme estimated they were about nine\n kilometers down, there was even a suggestion of moisture.",
"\"You scared hell out of me,\" said the man. \"I heard a thud. I\n thought—you'd gone over.\" He looked at Syme questioningly.\n\n\n \"That was my bag,\" the outlaw said quickly. \"It slipped out of my hand,\n and I overbalanced myself when I grabbed for it.\"\n\n\n The man sighed. \"I need a drink.\nYou\nneed a drink. Come on.\" He\n picked up a small black suitcase from the floor and started for the\n elevator, then stopped. \"Oh—your bag. Shouldn't we do something about\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind,\" said Syme, taking his arm. \"The shock must have busted it\n wide open. My laundry is probably all over Lillis by now.\"",
"It fell, and in the same instant Syme felt a violent tug at his wrist.\n Before he could move to stop himself, he was over the edge. Too late,\n he realized what had happened—one of the hooks on the dead spaceman's\n harness had caught the heavy wristband of his chronometer. He was\n falling, linked to the body of his victim!\n\n\n Hardly knowing what he did, he lashed out wildly with his other arm,\n felt his fingertips catch and bite into the edge of the balustrade. His\n body hit the wall of the tower with a thump, and, a second later, the\n corpse below him hit the wall. Then they both hung there, swaying a\n little and Syme's fingers slipped a little with each motion.",
"Gritting his teeth, he brought the magnificent muscles of his arm into\n play, raising the forearm against the dead weight of the dangling body.\n Fraction by slow fraction of an inch, it came up. Syme could feel the\n sweat pouring from his brow, running saltily into his eyes. His arms\n felt as if they were being torn from their sockets. Then the hook\n slipped free, and the tearing, unbearable weight vanished.\n\n\n The reaction swung Syme against the building again, and he almost\n lost his slippery hold on the balustrade. After a moment he heard the\n spaceman's body strike with a squashy thud, somewhere below.\n\n\n He swung up his other arm, got a better grip on the balustrade. He\n tried cautiously to get a leg up, but the motion loosened his hold on\n the smooth surface again. He relaxed, thinking furiously. He could hold\n on for another minute at most; then it was the final blast-off.",
"\"All right,\" the boy said quietly. \"What is it?\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Syme said.\n\n\n \"The game, the angle. You've been following me. Do you want trouble?\"\n\n\n \"Why, no,\" Syme told him bewilderedly. \"I haven't been following you.\n I—\"\n\n\n The boy knuckled his chin reflectively. \"You could be lying,\" he said\n finally. \"But maybe I've made a mistake.\" Then—\"Okay, citizen, you can\n clear—but don't let me catch you on my tail again.\"\n\n\n Syme murmured something and turned away, feeling the spaceman's eyes\n on the small of his back until he turned the corner. At the next\n street he took a ramp up, crossed over and came down on the other side\n a block away. He waited until he saw the boy's broad figure pass the\n intersection, and then followed again more cautiously.",
"The boy was hunched over the circular balustrade a little distance\n away. Except for him, the platform was empty. Syme loosened his slim,\n deadly energy pistol in its holster and padded catlike toward the\n silent figure.\n\n\n It was over in a minute. The boy whirled as he came up, warned by\n some slight sound, or by the breath of Syme's passage in the still\n air. He opened his mouth to shout, and brought up his arm in a swift,\n instinctive gesture. But the blow never landed. Syme's pistol spat its\n silent white pencil of flame, and the boy crumpled to the floor with a\n minute, charred hole in the white leather over his chest.\nSyme stooped over him swiftly, found a thick wallet and thrust it into\n his pocket without a second glance. Then he raised the body in his arms\n and thrust it over the parapet.",
"Tate had been watching with interest. \"Very ingenious,\" he said. \"But\n how do we get up again?\"\n\n\n \"Most of these gullies peter out gradually,\" said Syme, \"but if we want\n or have to climb out where it's deep, we have a little harpoon gun that\n shoots the anchor up on top.\"\n\n\n \"Good. I shouldn't like to stay down here for the rest of my\n natural life. Depressing view.\" He looked up at the narrow strip of\n almost-black sky visible from the floor of the gully, and shook his\n head.\n\n\n Neither Syme nor Tate ever had a chance to test the efficiency of their\n harpoon gun. They had traveled no more than five hundred meters, and\n the gully was as deep as ever, when Tate, looking up, saw a deeper\n blackness blot out part of the black sky directly overhead. He shouted,\n \"Look out!\" and grabbed for the nearest steering lever.",
"It was risky, but there was no other way. The signatures, the data,\n even the photograph on the card could be forged once Syme got his hands\n on it, but the identity card itself—that oblong of dark diamondite,\n glowing with the tiny fires of radioactivity—that could not be\n imitated, and the only way to get it was to kill."
],
[
"He listened lazily to what the other was saying, leaning his tall,\n graceful body back into the softly-cushioned seat.\n\n\n \"Lissen,\" said Harold Tate. He leaned forward on one elbow, slipped,\n caught himself, and looked at the elbow reproachfully. \"Lissen,\" he\n said again, \"I trust you, Jones. You're obvi-obviously an adventurer,\n but you have an honest face. I can't see it very well at the moment,\n but I hic!—pardon—seem to recall it as an honest face. I'm going to\n tell you something, because I need your help!—help.\" He paused. \"I\n need a guide. D'you know this part of Mars well?\"",
"Syme's smile was not tigerish now; it was carefully, studiedly mild.\n For Tate was no longer drunk, and it was important that it should not\n occur to him that he had been indiscreet.\n\n\n \"This is native territory we're coming to, Harold,\" he said. \"Better\n strap on your gun.\"\n\n\n \"Why. Are they really dangerous?\"\n\n\n \"They're unpredictable,\" Syme told him. \"They're built differently, and\n they think differently. They breathe like us, down in their caverns\n where there's air, but they also eat sand, and get their oxygen that\n way.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I've heard about that,\" Tate said. \"Iron oxide—very interesting\n metabolism.\" He got his energy pistol out of the compartment and\n strapped it on absently.",
"Harold Tate told him, and later, when Syme had taken him to his rooms,\n he showed him what was in his little black suitcase. Syme had been\n right; it was big.\nKal-Jmar was the riddle of the Solar System. It was the only remaining\n city of the ancient Martian race—the race that, legends said, had\n risen to greater heights than any other Solar culture. The machines,\n the artifacts, the records of the Martians were all there, perfectly\n preserved inside the city's bubble-like dome, after God knew how many\n thousands of years. But they couldn't be reached.",
"Later, however, when every unsuccessful attempt had precipitated a\n bloody uprising of the present-day Martians—resulting in a rapid\n dwindling of the number of Martians—the Mars Protectorate had stepped\n in and forbidden any further experiments; forbidden, in fact, any\n Earthman to go near the place.\n\n\n Thus matter had stood for over a hundred years, until Harold Tate.\n Tate, a physicist, had stumbled on a field that seemed to be identical\n in properties to the Kal-Jmar dome; and what is more, he had found a\n force that would break it down.\n\n\n And so he had made his first trip to Mars, and within twenty-four\n hours, by the blindest of chances, blurted out his secret to Syme\n Rector, the scourge of the spaceways, the man with a thousand credits\n on his sleek, tigerish head.",
"Tate had been watching with interest. \"Very ingenious,\" he said. \"But\n how do we get up again?\"\n\n\n \"Most of these gullies peter out gradually,\" said Syme, \"but if we want\n or have to climb out where it's deep, we have a little harpoon gun that\n shoots the anchor up on top.\"\n\n\n \"Good. I shouldn't like to stay down here for the rest of my\n natural life. Depressing view.\" He looked up at the narrow strip of\n almost-black sky visible from the floor of the gully, and shook his\n head.\n\n\n Neither Syme nor Tate ever had a chance to test the efficiency of their\n harpoon gun. They had traveled no more than five hundred meters, and\n the gully was as deep as ever, when Tate, looking up, saw a deeper\n blackness blot out part of the black sky directly overhead. He shouted,\n \"Look out!\" and grabbed for the nearest steering lever.",
"Syme glared at him and spat, too enraged to think of diplomacy. He\n turned and strode out of the cavern, carrying his right leg stiffly,\n but with his feral, tigerish head held high.\n\n\n He led the way, wordlessly, back to the wrecked sand car. Tate followed\n him with a hangdog, beaten air, as though he had just found something\n that shattered all his previous concepts of the verities in life, and\n didn't know what to do about it.\n\n\n Still silently, Syme refilled his oxygen tank, watched Tate do the\n same, and then picked up two spare tanks and the precious black\n suitcase and handed one of the tanks to Tate. Then he stumped around\n to the back of the car and inspected the damage. The cable reel, which\n might have drawn them out of the gully, was hopelessly smashed. That\n was that.",
"He was gasping for breath, and realized that he was losing air from\n the seared-open right leg of his suit. He reached for the emergency\n kit at his side, drawing in great, gasping breaths, and fumbled out\n a tube of sealing liquid. He spread the stuff on liberally, smearing\n it impartially over flesh and fabric. It felt like liquid hell on the\n burned, bleeding leg, but he kept on until the quick-drying fluid\n formed an airtight patch.\n\n\n Only then did he turn, to see Tate flattened against the wall behind\n him, his hands empty at his sides. \"I'm sorry,\" Tate said miserably. \"I\n could have grabbed a spear or something, but—I just couldn't, not even\n to save my own life. I—I halfway hoped they'd kill both of us.\"",
"He heard running footsteps, and then a pale face peered over the ledge\n at him. He realized suddenly that the whole incident could have taken\n only a few seconds. He croaked, \"Get me up.\"\n\n\n Wordlessly, the man clasped thin fingers around his wrist. The other\n pulled, with much puffing and panting, and with his help Syme managed\n to get a leg over the edge and hoist his trembling body to safety.\n\n\n \"Are you all right?\"\nSyme looked at the man, nursing the tortured muscles of his arms. His\n rescuer was tall and thin, of indeterminate age. He had light, sandy\n hair, a sharp nose, and—oddly conflicting—pale, serious eyes and a\n humorous wide mouth. He was still panting.\n\n\n \"I'm not hurt,\" Syme said. He grinned, his white teeth flashing in his\n dark, lean face. \"Thanks for giving me a hand.\"",
"The Martian lowered his head. \"That is for unborn generations.\" He\n looked at Tate again and aimed the energy gun. \"You are a brave man,\"\n he said. \"I am sorry.\"\n\n\n Syme saw all his hopes of treasure and glory go glimmering down the\n sights of the Martian's Benson gun, and suddenly the pent-up rage in\n him exploded. Too swiftly for his intention to be telegraphed, before\n he knew himself what he meant to do, he hurled himself bodily into the\n Martian.\nIt was like tangling with a draft horse. The Martian was astonishingly\n strong. Syme scrambled desperately for the gun, got it, but couldn't\n tear it out of the Martian's fingers. And all the time he could almost\n feel the Martian's telepathic call for help surging out. He heard the\n swift pad of his followers coming across the cavern.",
"Syme turned the little sand car up a gentle rise towards the tortuous\n hill country in the distance. \"Not only that,\" he continued. \"They\n eat the damndest stuff. Lichens and fungi and tumble-grass off the\n deserts—all full of deadly poisons, from arsenic up the line to\n xopite. They seem intelligent enough—in their own way—but they never\n come near our cities and they either can't or won't learn Terrestrial.\n When the first colonists came here, they had to learn\ntheir\ncrazy\n language. Every word of it can mean any one of a dozen different\n things, depending on the inflection you give it. I can speak it some,\n but not much. Nobody can. We don't think the same.\"\n\n\n \"So you think they might attack us?\" Tate asked again, nervously.\n\n\n \"They\nmight\ndo anything,\" Syme said curtly. \"Don't worry about it.\"",
"\"Sure,\" said Syme absently. Out in the center of the floor, an AG\n plate had been turned on. Five Venusian girls were diving and twisting\n in its influence, propelling themselves by the motion of their\n delicately-webbed feet and trailing long gauzy streamers of synthesilk\n after them. Syme watched them through narrowed lids, feeling the glow\n of\nculcha\ninside him.\n\n\n \"I wanta go to Kal-Jmar,\" said Tate.\n\n\n Syme snapped to attention, every nerve tingling. An indefinable sense,\n a hunch that had served him well before, told him that something big\n was coming—something that promised adventure and loot for Syme Rector.\n \"Why?\" he asked softly. \"Why to Kal-Jmar?\"",
"\"Yeah,\" said Syme, and opened the door. The air in the car\nwhooshed\ninto the near-vacuum outside, and he and Tate stepped out.\n\n\n The Martian leader looked at them enigmatically, then turned and\n started off. The other natives closed in on them, and they all bounded\n along under the weak gravity.\n\n\n They bounded along for what Syme figured as a good kilometer and a\n half, and they then reached a branch in the gully and turned down\n it, going lower all the time. Under the light of their helmet lamps,\n they could see the walls of the gully—a tunnel, now—getting darker\n and more solid. Finally, when Syme estimated they were about nine\n kilometers down, there was even a suggestion of moisture.",
"\"I think I see,\" Tate said thoughtfully. \"That's been the ultimate aim\n all along, but so far the problem has us licked. If we solved it, then\n we'd have all of Mars, not just the cities. Your people would die out.\n You couldn't have that, of course.\"\n\n\n He sighed deeply. He spread his gloved hands before him and looked\n at them with a queer intentness. \"Well—how about the Martians—the\n Kal-Jmar Martians, I mean? I'd dearly love to know the answer to that\n one.\"\n\n\n \"Neither of the alternatives in your mind is correct. They were not a\n separate species, although they were unlike us. But they were not our\n ancestors, either. They were the contemporaries of our ancestors.\"",
"\"You were brought here for that purpose. It is part of our conception\n of justice. I will tell you and your—friend—anything you wish to\n know.\"\n\n\n Syme noticed that the other Martians had retired to the farther side of\n the cavern. Some were munching the glowing fungus. That left only the\n leader, who was standing alertly on all fours a short distance away\n from them, holding the Benson gun trained on them. Syme tried not to\n think about the gun, especially about making a grab for it. It was like\n trying not to think of the word \"hippopotamus.\"\n\n\n Tate squatted down comfortably on the floor of the cavern, apparently\n unconcerned, but his hands were trembling slightly. \"First why—\" he\n began.\n\n\n \"There are many secrets in Kal-Jmar,\" the Martian said, \"among them a\n very simple catalyzing agent which could within fifty years transform\n Mars to a planet with Terrestrially-thick atmosphere.\"",
"They got off at the amusement level, three tiers down, and found a\n cafe around the corner. Syme wasn't worried about the man he had just\n killed. He had heard no second thud, so the body must have stayed on\n the first outcropping of the tower it struck. It probably wouldn't be\n found until morning.\n\n\n And he had the wallet. When he paid for the first round of\nculcha\n, he\n took it out and stole a glance at the identification card inside. There\n it was—his ticket to freedom. He began feeling expansive, and even\n friendly toward the slender, mouse-like man across the table. It was\n the\nculcha\n, of course. He knew it, and didn't care. In the morning\n he'd find a freighter berth—in as big a spaceport as Lillis, there\n were always jobs open. Meanwhile, he might as well enjoy himself, and\n it was safer to be seen with a companion than to be alone.",
"\"All right,\" the boy said quietly. \"What is it?\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Syme said.\n\n\n \"The game, the angle. You've been following me. Do you want trouble?\"\n\n\n \"Why, no,\" Syme told him bewilderedly. \"I haven't been following you.\n I—\"\n\n\n The boy knuckled his chin reflectively. \"You could be lying,\" he said\n finally. \"But maybe I've made a mistake.\" Then—\"Okay, citizen, you can\n clear—but don't let me catch you on my tail again.\"\n\n\n Syme murmured something and turned away, feeling the spaceman's eyes\n on the small of his back until he turned the corner. At the next\n street he took a ramp up, crossed over and came down on the other side\n a block away. He waited until he saw the boy's broad figure pass the\n intersection, and then followed again more cautiously.",
"The car wheeled around in a half circle and ran into the wall of the\n gully. Syme was saying, \"What—?\" when there was a thunderous crash\n that shook the sturdy walls of the car, as a huge boulder smashed into\n the ground immediately to their left.\n\n\n When the smoky red dust had cleared away, they saw that the left tread\n of the sand car was crushed beyond all recognition.\n\n\n Syme was cursing slowly and steadily with a deep, seething anger. Tate\n said, \"I guess we walk from here on.\" Then he looked up again and\n caught a glimpse of the horde of beasts that were rushing up the gully\n toward them.\n\n\n \"My God!\" he said. \"What are those?\"\n\n\n Syme looked. \"Those,\" he said bitterly, \"are Martians.\"",
"\"Yes.\"\n\n\n Tate thought again. \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No,\" the Martian interrupted him, \"revealing the extent of our\n civilization would have spared us nothing at your people's hands. Yours\n is an imperialist culture, and you would have had Mars, whether you\n thought you were taking it from equals or not.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" Syme broke in impatiently. \"What do you want with\n us?\"\n\n\n The Martian looked at him appraisingly. \"You already suspect.\n Unfortunately, you must die.\"\nIt was a weird situation, Syme thought. His mind was racing, but as yet\n he could see no way out. He began to wonder, if he did, could he keep\n the Martians from knowing about it? Then he realized that the Martian\n must have received that thought, too, and he was enraged. He stood,\n holding himself in check with an effort.\n\n\n \"Will you tell us why?\" Tate asked.",
"The hills were much closer than they had seemed, because of Mars'\n deceptively low horizon. In half an hour they were in the midst of a\n wilderness of fantastically eroded dunes and channels, laboring on\n sliding treads up the sides of steep hills only to slither down again\n on the other side.\nSyme stopped the car abruptly as a deep, winding channel appeared\n across their path. \"Gully,\" he announced. \"Shall we cross it, or follow\n it?\"\n\n\n Tate peered through the steelite nose of the car. \"Follow, I guess,\"\n he offered. \"It seems to go more or less where we're going, and if we\n cross it we'll only come to a couple dozen more.\"",
"\"You scared hell out of me,\" said the man. \"I heard a thud. I\n thought—you'd gone over.\" He looked at Syme questioningly.\n\n\n \"That was my bag,\" the outlaw said quickly. \"It slipped out of my hand,\n and I overbalanced myself when I grabbed for it.\"\n\n\n The man sighed. \"I need a drink.\nYou\nneed a drink. Come on.\" He\n picked up a small black suitcase from the floor and started for the\n elevator, then stopped. \"Oh—your bag. Shouldn't we do something about\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind,\" said Syme, taking his arm. \"The shock must have busted it\n wide open. My laundry is probably all over Lillis by now.\""
],
[
"He heard running footsteps, and then a pale face peered over the ledge\n at him. He realized suddenly that the whole incident could have taken\n only a few seconds. He croaked, \"Get me up.\"\n\n\n Wordlessly, the man clasped thin fingers around his wrist. The other\n pulled, with much puffing and panting, and with his help Syme managed\n to get a leg over the edge and hoist his trembling body to safety.\n\n\n \"Are you all right?\"\nSyme looked at the man, nursing the tortured muscles of his arms. His\n rescuer was tall and thin, of indeterminate age. He had light, sandy\n hair, a sharp nose, and—oddly conflicting—pale, serious eyes and a\n humorous wide mouth. He was still panting.\n\n\n \"I'm not hurt,\" Syme said. He grinned, his white teeth flashing in his\n dark, lean face. \"Thanks for giving me a hand.\"",
"Syme's smile was not tigerish now; it was carefully, studiedly mild.\n For Tate was no longer drunk, and it was important that it should not\n occur to him that he had been indiscreet.\n\n\n \"This is native territory we're coming to, Harold,\" he said. \"Better\n strap on your gun.\"\n\n\n \"Why. Are they really dangerous?\"\n\n\n \"They're unpredictable,\" Syme told him. \"They're built differently, and\n they think differently. They breathe like us, down in their caverns\n where there's air, but they also eat sand, and get their oxygen that\n way.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I've heard about that,\" Tate said. \"Iron oxide—very interesting\n metabolism.\" He got his energy pistol out of the compartment and\n strapped it on absently.",
"They got off at the amusement level, three tiers down, and found a\n cafe around the corner. Syme wasn't worried about the man he had just\n killed. He had heard no second thud, so the body must have stayed on\n the first outcropping of the tower it struck. It probably wouldn't be\n found until morning.\n\n\n And he had the wallet. When he paid for the first round of\nculcha\n, he\n took it out and stole a glance at the identification card inside. There\n it was—his ticket to freedom. He began feeling expansive, and even\n friendly toward the slender, mouse-like man across the table. It was\n the\nculcha\n, of course. He knew it, and didn't care. In the morning\n he'd find a freighter berth—in as big a spaceport as Lillis, there\n were always jobs open. Meanwhile, he might as well enjoy himself, and\n it was safer to be seen with a companion than to be alone.",
"Harold Tate told him, and later, when Syme had taken him to his rooms,\n he showed him what was in his little black suitcase. Syme had been\n right; it was big.\nKal-Jmar was the riddle of the Solar System. It was the only remaining\n city of the ancient Martian race—the race that, legends said, had\n risen to greater heights than any other Solar culture. The machines,\n the artifacts, the records of the Martians were all there, perfectly\n preserved inside the city's bubble-like dome, after God knew how many\n thousands of years. But they couldn't be reached.",
"Syme glared at him and spat, too enraged to think of diplomacy. He\n turned and strode out of the cavern, carrying his right leg stiffly,\n but with his feral, tigerish head held high.\n\n\n He led the way, wordlessly, back to the wrecked sand car. Tate followed\n him with a hangdog, beaten air, as though he had just found something\n that shattered all his previous concepts of the verities in life, and\n didn't know what to do about it.\n\n\n Still silently, Syme refilled his oxygen tank, watched Tate do the\n same, and then picked up two spare tanks and the precious black\n suitcase and handed one of the tanks to Tate. Then he stumped around\n to the back of the car and inspected the damage. The cable reel, which\n might have drawn them out of the gully, was hopelessly smashed. That\n was that.",
"\"You scared hell out of me,\" said the man. \"I heard a thud. I\n thought—you'd gone over.\" He looked at Syme questioningly.\n\n\n \"That was my bag,\" the outlaw said quickly. \"It slipped out of my hand,\n and I overbalanced myself when I grabbed for it.\"\n\n\n The man sighed. \"I need a drink.\nYou\nneed a drink. Come on.\" He\n picked up a small black suitcase from the floor and started for the\n elevator, then stopped. \"Oh—your bag. Shouldn't we do something about\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind,\" said Syme, taking his arm. \"The shock must have busted it\n wide open. My laundry is probably all over Lillis by now.\"",
"\"All right,\" the boy said quietly. \"What is it?\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Syme said.\n\n\n \"The game, the angle. You've been following me. Do you want trouble?\"\n\n\n \"Why, no,\" Syme told him bewilderedly. \"I haven't been following you.\n I—\"\n\n\n The boy knuckled his chin reflectively. \"You could be lying,\" he said\n finally. \"But maybe I've made a mistake.\" Then—\"Okay, citizen, you can\n clear—but don't let me catch you on my tail again.\"\n\n\n Syme murmured something and turned away, feeling the spaceman's eyes\n on the small of his back until he turned the corner. At the next\n street he took a ramp up, crossed over and came down on the other side\n a block away. He waited until he saw the boy's broad figure pass the\n intersection, and then followed again more cautiously.",
"Later, however, when every unsuccessful attempt had precipitated a\n bloody uprising of the present-day Martians—resulting in a rapid\n dwindling of the number of Martians—the Mars Protectorate had stepped\n in and forbidden any further experiments; forbidden, in fact, any\n Earthman to go near the place.\n\n\n Thus matter had stood for over a hundred years, until Harold Tate.\n Tate, a physicist, had stumbled on a field that seemed to be identical\n in properties to the Kal-Jmar dome; and what is more, he had found a\n force that would break it down.\n\n\n And so he had made his first trip to Mars, and within twenty-four\n hours, by the blindest of chances, blurted out his secret to Syme\n Rector, the scourge of the spaceways, the man with a thousand credits\n on his sleek, tigerish head.",
"It fell, and in the same instant Syme felt a violent tug at his wrist.\n Before he could move to stop himself, he was over the edge. Too late,\n he realized what had happened—one of the hooks on the dead spaceman's\n harness had caught the heavy wristband of his chronometer. He was\n falling, linked to the body of his victim!\n\n\n Hardly knowing what he did, he lashed out wildly with his other arm,\n felt his fingertips catch and bite into the edge of the balustrade. His\n body hit the wall of the tower with a thump, and, a second later, the\n corpse below him hit the wall. Then they both hung there, swaying a\n little and Syme's fingers slipped a little with each motion.",
"Syme turned the little sand car up a gentle rise towards the tortuous\n hill country in the distance. \"Not only that,\" he continued. \"They\n eat the damndest stuff. Lichens and fungi and tumble-grass off the\n deserts—all full of deadly poisons, from arsenic up the line to\n xopite. They seem intelligent enough—in their own way—but they never\n come near our cities and they either can't or won't learn Terrestrial.\n When the first colonists came here, they had to learn\ntheir\ncrazy\n language. Every word of it can mean any one of a dozen different\n things, depending on the inflection you give it. I can speak it some,\n but not much. Nobody can. We don't think the same.\"\n\n\n \"So you think they might attack us?\" Tate asked again, nervously.\n\n\n \"They\nmight\ndo anything,\" Syme said curtly. \"Don't worry about it.\"",
"They knew, of course, that he was an outlaw—the very fact of the\n crashed, illegally-armed ship would have told them that. But they\n didn't know that he was Syme Rector, the most-wanted and most-feared\n raider in the System. In that was his only advantage.\n\n\n He walked a little faster, as his quarry turned up a side street and\n then boarded a moving ramp to an upper level. He watched until the\n short, wide-shouldered figure in spaceman's harness disappeared over\n the top of the ramp, and then followed.\n\n\n The man was waiting for him at the mouth of the ascending tunnel.\n\n\n Syme looked at him casually, without a flicker of expression, and\n started to walk on, but the other stepped into his path. He was quite\n young, Syme saw, with a fighter's shoulders under the white leather,\n and a hard, determined thrust to his firm jaw.",
"\"Yeah,\" said Syme, and opened the door. The air in the car\nwhooshed\ninto the near-vacuum outside, and he and Tate stepped out.\n\n\n The Martian leader looked at them enigmatically, then turned and\n started off. The other natives closed in on them, and they all bounded\n along under the weak gravity.\n\n\n They bounded along for what Syme figured as a good kilometer and a\n half, and they then reached a branch in the gully and turned down\n it, going lower all the time. Under the light of their helmet lamps,\n they could see the walls of the gully—a tunnel, now—getting darker\n and more solid. Finally, when Syme estimated they were about nine\n kilometers down, there was even a suggestion of moisture.",
"Tate had been watching with interest. \"Very ingenious,\" he said. \"But\n how do we get up again?\"\n\n\n \"Most of these gullies peter out gradually,\" said Syme, \"but if we want\n or have to climb out where it's deep, we have a little harpoon gun that\n shoots the anchor up on top.\"\n\n\n \"Good. I shouldn't like to stay down here for the rest of my\n natural life. Depressing view.\" He looked up at the narrow strip of\n almost-black sky visible from the floor of the gully, and shook his\n head.\n\n\n Neither Syme nor Tate ever had a chance to test the efficiency of their\n harpoon gun. They had traveled no more than five hundred meters, and\n the gully was as deep as ever, when Tate, looking up, saw a deeper\n blackness blot out part of the black sky directly overhead. He shouted,\n \"Look out!\" and grabbed for the nearest steering lever.",
"Gritting his teeth, he brought the magnificent muscles of his arm into\n play, raising the forearm against the dead weight of the dangling body.\n Fraction by slow fraction of an inch, it came up. Syme could feel the\n sweat pouring from his brow, running saltily into his eyes. His arms\n felt as if they were being torn from their sockets. Then the hook\n slipped free, and the tearing, unbearable weight vanished.\n\n\n The reaction swung Syme against the building again, and he almost\n lost his slippery hold on the balustrade. After a moment he heard the\n spaceman's body strike with a squashy thud, somewhere below.\n\n\n He swung up his other arm, got a better grip on the balustrade. He\n tried cautiously to get a leg up, but the motion loosened his hold on\n the smooth surface again. He relaxed, thinking furiously. He could hold\n on for another minute at most; then it was the final blast-off.",
"\"Sure,\" said Syme absently. Out in the center of the floor, an AG\n plate had been turned on. Five Venusian girls were diving and twisting\n in its influence, propelling themselves by the motion of their\n delicately-webbed feet and trailing long gauzy streamers of synthesilk\n after them. Syme watched them through narrowed lids, feeling the glow\n of\nculcha\ninside him.\n\n\n \"I wanta go to Kal-Jmar,\" said Tate.\n\n\n Syme snapped to attention, every nerve tingling. An indefinable sense,\n a hunch that had served him well before, told him that something big\n was coming—something that promised adventure and loot for Syme Rector.\n \"Why?\" he asked softly. \"Why to Kal-Jmar?\"",
"The boy was hunched over the circular balustrade a little distance\n away. Except for him, the platform was empty. Syme loosened his slim,\n deadly energy pistol in its holster and padded catlike toward the\n silent figure.\n\n\n It was over in a minute. The boy whirled as he came up, warned by\n some slight sound, or by the breath of Syme's passage in the still\n air. He opened his mouth to shout, and brought up his arm in a swift,\n instinctive gesture. But the blow never landed. Syme's pistol spat its\n silent white pencil of flame, and the boy crumpled to the floor with a\n minute, charred hole in the white leather over his chest.\nSyme stooped over him swiftly, found a thick wallet and thrust it into\n his pocket without a second glance. Then he raised the body in his arms\n and thrust it over the parapet.",
"Syme jumped to his feet and faced his enemies, snarling like the\n trapped tiger he was. Another ray slashed at him, and he bent lithely\n to let it whistle over his head. Another, lower this time. He flipped\n his body into the air and landed upright, his gun still blazing. His\n right leg burned fiercely from a ray-graze, but he ignored it. And\n all the while he was mowing down the massed natives in great swaths,\n seeking out the ones armed with Bensons in swift, terrible slashes,\n dodging spears and other missiles in midair, and roaring at the top of\n his powerful lungs.\n\n\n At last there were none with guns left to oppose him. He scythed down\n the rest in two terrible, lightning sweeps of his ray, then dropped\n the weapon from blistered fingers.",
"He listened lazily to what the other was saying, leaning his tall,\n graceful body back into the softly-cushioned seat.\n\n\n \"Lissen,\" said Harold Tate. He leaned forward on one elbow, slipped,\n caught himself, and looked at the elbow reproachfully. \"Lissen,\" he\n said again, \"I trust you, Jones. You're obvi-obviously an adventurer,\n but you have an honest face. I can't see it very well at the moment,\n but I hic!—pardon—seem to recall it as an honest face. I'm going to\n tell you something, because I need your help!—help.\" He paused. \"I\n need a guide. D'you know this part of Mars well?\"",
"The Martian lowered his head. \"That is for unborn generations.\" He\n looked at Tate again and aimed the energy gun. \"You are a brave man,\"\n he said. \"I am sorry.\"\n\n\n Syme saw all his hopes of treasure and glory go glimmering down the\n sights of the Martian's Benson gun, and suddenly the pent-up rage in\n him exploded. Too swiftly for his intention to be telegraphed, before\n he knew himself what he meant to do, he hurled himself bodily into the\n Martian.\nIt was like tangling with a draft horse. The Martian was astonishingly\n strong. Syme scrambled desperately for the gun, got it, but couldn't\n tear it out of the Martian's fingers. And all the time he could almost\n feel the Martian's telepathic call for help surging out. He heard the\n swift pad of his followers coming across the cavern.",
"It was risky, but there was no other way. The signatures, the data,\n even the photograph on the card could be forged once Syme got his hands\n on it, but the identity card itself—that oblong of dark diamondite,\n glowing with the tiny fires of radioactivity—that could not be\n imitated, and the only way to get it was to kill."
],
[
"The natives, like all Martian fauna, were multi-legged. Also like all\n Martian fauna, they moved so fast that you couldn't see how many legs\n they did have. Actually, however, the natives had six legs apiece—or,\n more properly, four legs and two arms. Their lungs were not as large\n as they appeared, being collapsed at the moment. What caused the bulge\n that made their torsos look like sausages was a huge air bladder, with\n a valve arrangement from the stomach and feeding directly into the\n bloodstream.\n\n\n Their faces were vaguely canine, but the foreheads were high, and the\n lips were not split. They did resemble dogs, in that their thick black\n fur was splotched with irregulate patches of white. These patches of\n white were subject to muscular control and could be spread out fanwise;\n or, conversely, the black could be expanded to cover the white, which\n helped to take care of the extremes of Martian temperature. Right now\n they were mostly black.",
"The car wheeled around in a half circle and ran into the wall of the\n gully. Syme was saying, \"What—?\" when there was a thunderous crash\n that shook the sturdy walls of the car, as a huge boulder smashed into\n the ground immediately to their left.\n\n\n When the smoky red dust had cleared away, they saw that the left tread\n of the sand car was crushed beyond all recognition.\n\n\n Syme was cursing slowly and steadily with a deep, seething anger. Tate\n said, \"I guess we walk from here on.\" Then he looked up again and\n caught a glimpse of the horde of beasts that were rushing up the gully\n toward them.\n\n\n \"My God!\" he said. \"What are those?\"\n\n\n Syme looked. \"Those,\" he said bitterly, \"are Martians.\"",
"\"Yeah,\" said Syme, and opened the door. The air in the car\nwhooshed\ninto the near-vacuum outside, and he and Tate stepped out.\n\n\n The Martian leader looked at them enigmatically, then turned and\n started off. The other natives closed in on them, and they all bounded\n along under the weak gravity.\n\n\n They bounded along for what Syme figured as a good kilometer and a\n half, and they then reached a branch in the gully and turned down\n it, going lower all the time. Under the light of their helmet lamps,\n they could see the walls of the gully—a tunnel, now—getting darker\n and more solid. Finally, when Syme estimated they were about nine\n kilometers down, there was even a suggestion of moisture.",
"\"Yes.\"\n\n\n Tate thought again. \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No,\" the Martian interrupted him, \"revealing the extent of our\n civilization would have spared us nothing at your people's hands. Yours\n is an imperialist culture, and you would have had Mars, whether you\n thought you were taking it from equals or not.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" Syme broke in impatiently. \"What do you want with\n us?\"\n\n\n The Martian looked at him appraisingly. \"You already suspect.\n Unfortunately, you must die.\"\nIt was a weird situation, Syme thought. His mind was racing, but as yet\n he could see no way out. He began to wonder, if he did, could he keep\n the Martians from knowing about it? Then he realized that the Martian\n must have received that thought, too, and he was enraged. He stood,\n holding himself in check with an effort.\n\n\n \"Will you tell us why?\" Tate asked.",
"Later, however, when every unsuccessful attempt had precipitated a\n bloody uprising of the present-day Martians—resulting in a rapid\n dwindling of the number of Martians—the Mars Protectorate had stepped\n in and forbidden any further experiments; forbidden, in fact, any\n Earthman to go near the place.\n\n\n Thus matter had stood for over a hundred years, until Harold Tate.\n Tate, a physicist, had stumbled on a field that seemed to be identical\n in properties to the Kal-Jmar dome; and what is more, he had found a\n force that would break it down.\n\n\n And so he had made his first trip to Mars, and within twenty-four\n hours, by the blindest of chances, blurted out his secret to Syme\n Rector, the scourge of the spaceways, the man with a thousand credits\n on his sleek, tigerish head.",
"\"You were brought here for that purpose. It is part of our conception\n of justice. I will tell you and your—friend—anything you wish to\n know.\"\n\n\n Syme noticed that the other Martians had retired to the farther side of\n the cavern. Some were munching the glowing fungus. That left only the\n leader, who was standing alertly on all fours a short distance away\n from them, holding the Benson gun trained on them. Syme tried not to\n think about the gun, especially about making a grab for it. It was like\n trying not to think of the word \"hippopotamus.\"\n\n\n Tate squatted down comfortably on the floor of the cavern, apparently\n unconcerned, but his hands were trembling slightly. \"First why—\" he\n began.\n\n\n \"There are many secrets in Kal-Jmar,\" the Martian said, \"among them a\n very simple catalyzing agent which could within fifty years transform\n Mars to a planet with Terrestrially-thick atmosphere.\"",
"The natives slowed down and spread out to surround the wrecked sand\n car, and it could be seen that most of them were armed with spears,\n although some had the slim Benson energy guns—strictly forbidden to\n Martians.\n\n\n Syme stopped cursing and watched tensely. Tate said nothing, but he\n swallowed audibly.\n\n\n One Martian, who looked exactly like all the rest, stepped forward and\n motioned unmistakably for the two to come out. He waited a moment and\n then gestured with his energy gun. That gun, Syme knew from experience,\n could burn through a small thickness of steelite if held on the same\n spot long enough.\n\"Come on,\" Syme said grimly. He rose and reached for a pressure suit,\n and Tate followed him.\n\n\n \"What do you think they'll—\" he began, and then stopped himself. \"I\n know. They're unpredictable.\"",
"\"But how—?\"\n\n\n \"We are telepaths, of course. On a planet which is nearly airless on\n its surface, we have to be. A tendency of the Terrestrial mind is to\n ignore the obvious. We have not had a spoken language of our own for\n several thousand years.\"\n\n\n He darted a glance at Syme's darkly scowling face. His own hairy face\n was expressionless, but Syme sensed that he was amused. \"Yes, you're\n right,\" he said. \"The language you and your fellows struggled to learn\n is a fraud, a hodge-podge concocted to deceive you.\"\n\n\n Tate looked interested. \"But why this—this gigantic masquerade?\"\n\n\n \"You had nothing to give us,\" the Martian said simply.\n\n\n Tate frowned, then flushed. \"You mean you avoided revealing yourselves\n because you—had nothing to gain from mental intercourse with us?\"",
"He put everything he had into one mighty, murderous effort. Every\n muscle fiber in his superbly trained body crackled and surged with\n power. He roared his fury. And the gun twisted out of the Martian's\n iron grip!\n\n\n He clubbed the prostrate leader with it instantly, then reversed the\n weapon and snapped a shot at the nearest Martian. The creature dropped\n his lance and fell without a sound.\n\n\n The next instant a ray blinked at him, and he rolled out of the way\n barely in time. The searing ray cut a swath over the leader's body and\n swerved to cut down on him. Still rolling, he fired at the holder of\n the weapon. The gun dropped and winked out on the floor.",
"The hills were much closer than they had seemed, because of Mars'\n deceptively low horizon. In half an hour they were in the midst of a\n wilderness of fantastically eroded dunes and channels, laboring on\n sliding treads up the sides of steep hills only to slither down again\n on the other side.\nSyme stopped the car abruptly as a deep, winding channel appeared\n across their path. \"Gully,\" he announced. \"Shall we cross it, or follow\n it?\"\n\n\n Tate peered through the steelite nose of the car. \"Follow, I guess,\"\n he offered. \"It seems to go more or less where we're going, and if we\n cross it we'll only come to a couple dozen more.\"",
"\"Several thousand years ago Mars' loss of atmosphere began to make\n itself felt. There were two ways out. Some chose to seal themselves\n into cities like Kal-Jmar; our ancestors chose to adapt their bodies to\n the new conditions. Thus the race split. Their answer to the problem\n was an evasion; they remained static. Our answer was the true one, for\n we progressed. We progressed beyond the need of science; they remained\n its slaves. They died of a plague—and other causes.\n\n\n \"You see,\" he finished gently, \"our deception has caused a natural\n confusion in your minds. They were the degenerates, not we.\"\n\n\n \"And yet,\" Tate mused, \"you are being destroyed by contact with\n an—inferior—culture.\"\n\n\n \"We hope to win yet,\" the Martian said.\n\n\n Tate stood up, his face very white. \"Tell me one thing,\" he begged.\n \"Will our two races ever live together in amity?\"",
"The Martian lowered his head. \"That is for unborn generations.\" He\n looked at Tate again and aimed the energy gun. \"You are a brave man,\"\n he said. \"I am sorry.\"\n\n\n Syme saw all his hopes of treasure and glory go glimmering down the\n sights of the Martian's Benson gun, and suddenly the pent-up rage in\n him exploded. Too swiftly for his intention to be telegraphed, before\n he knew himself what he meant to do, he hurled himself bodily into the\n Martian.\nIt was like tangling with a draft horse. The Martian was astonishingly\n strong. Syme scrambled desperately for the gun, got it, but couldn't\n tear it out of the Martian's fingers. And all the time he could almost\n feel the Martian's telepathic call for help surging out. He heard the\n swift pad of his followers coming across the cavern.",
"Syme's smile was not tigerish now; it was carefully, studiedly mild.\n For Tate was no longer drunk, and it was important that it should not\n occur to him that he had been indiscreet.\n\n\n \"This is native territory we're coming to, Harold,\" he said. \"Better\n strap on your gun.\"\n\n\n \"Why. Are they really dangerous?\"\n\n\n \"They're unpredictable,\" Syme told him. \"They're built differently, and\n they think differently. They breathe like us, down in their caverns\n where there's air, but they also eat sand, and get their oxygen that\n way.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I've heard about that,\" Tate said. \"Iron oxide—very interesting\n metabolism.\" He got his energy pistol out of the compartment and\n strapped it on absently.",
"For Kal-Jmar's dome was not the thing of steelite that protected\n Lillis: it was a tenuous, globular field of force that defied analysis\n as it defied explosives and diamond drills. The field extended both\n above and below the ground, and tunneling was of no avail. No one knew\n what had happened to the Martians, whether they were the ancestors of\n the present decadent Martian race, or a different species. No one knew\n anything about them or about Kal-Jmar.\n\n\n In the early days, when the conquest of Mars was just beginning, Earth\n scientists had been wild to get into the city. They had observed it\n from every angle, taken photographs of its architecture and the robots\n that still patrolled its fantastically winding streets, and then they\n had tried everything they knew to pierce the wall.",
"\"I think I see,\" Tate said thoughtfully. \"That's been the ultimate aim\n all along, but so far the problem has us licked. If we solved it, then\n we'd have all of Mars, not just the cities. Your people would die out.\n You couldn't have that, of course.\"\n\n\n He sighed deeply. He spread his gloved hands before him and looked\n at them with a queer intentness. \"Well—how about the Martians—the\n Kal-Jmar Martians, I mean? I'd dearly love to know the answer to that\n one.\"\n\n\n \"Neither of the alternatives in your mind is correct. They were not a\n separate species, although they were unlike us. But they were not our\n ancestors, either. They were the contemporaries of our ancestors.\"",
"The tunnel debouched at last into a large cavern. There was a\n phosphorescent gleam from fungus along the walls, but Syme couldn't\n decide how far away the far wall was. He noticed something else, though.\n\n\n \"There's air here,\" he said to Tate. \"I can see dust motes in it.\" He\n switched his helmet microphone from radio over to the audio membrane\n on the outside of the helmet. \"\nKalis methra\n,\" he began haltingly,\n \"\nseltin guna getal.\n\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is air here,\" said the Martian leader, startlingly. \"Not\n enough for your use, however, so do not open your helmets.\"\n\n\n Syme swore amazedly.\n\n\n \"I thought you said they didn't speak Terrestrial,\" Tate said. Syme\n ignored him.\n\n\n \"We had our reasons for not doing so,\" the Martian said.",
"Syme turned the little sand car up a gentle rise towards the tortuous\n hill country in the distance. \"Not only that,\" he continued. \"They\n eat the damndest stuff. Lichens and fungi and tumble-grass off the\n deserts—all full of deadly poisons, from arsenic up the line to\n xopite. They seem intelligent enough—in their own way—but they never\n come near our cities and they either can't or won't learn Terrestrial.\n When the first colonists came here, they had to learn\ntheir\ncrazy\n language. Every word of it can mean any one of a dozen different\n things, depending on the inflection you give it. I can speak it some,\n but not much. Nobody can. We don't think the same.\"\n\n\n \"So you think they might attack us?\" Tate asked again, nervously.\n\n\n \"They\nmight\ndo anything,\" Syme said curtly. \"Don't worry about it.\"",
"Harold Tate told him, and later, when Syme had taken him to his rooms,\n he showed him what was in his little black suitcase. Syme had been\n right; it was big.\nKal-Jmar was the riddle of the Solar System. It was the only remaining\n city of the ancient Martian race—the race that, legends said, had\n risen to greater heights than any other Solar culture. The machines,\n the artifacts, the records of the Martians were all there, perfectly\n preserved inside the city's bubble-like dome, after God knew how many\n thousands of years. But they couldn't be reached.",
"Gritting his teeth, he brought the magnificent muscles of his arm into\n play, raising the forearm against the dead weight of the dangling body.\n Fraction by slow fraction of an inch, it came up. Syme could feel the\n sweat pouring from his brow, running saltily into his eyes. His arms\n felt as if they were being torn from their sockets. Then the hook\n slipped free, and the tearing, unbearable weight vanished.\n\n\n The reaction swung Syme against the building again, and he almost\n lost his slippery hold on the balustrade. After a moment he heard the\n spaceman's body strike with a squashy thud, somewhere below.\n\n\n He swung up his other arm, got a better grip on the balustrade. He\n tried cautiously to get a leg up, but the motion loosened his hold on\n the smooth surface again. He relaxed, thinking furiously. He could hold\n on for another minute at most; then it was the final blast-off.",
"Above, the city's multicolored lights were reflected from the\n translucent Dome—a distant, subtly distorted Lillis, through which the\n stars shone dimly.\n\n\n Getting through that dome had been his first urgent problem, but now he\n had another, and a more pressing one. It had been simple enough to pass\n himself off as an itinerant prospector and gain entrance to the city,\n after his ship had crashed in the Mare Cimmerium. But the rest would\n not be so simple. He had to acquire a spaceman's identity card, and he\n had to do it fast. It was only a matter of time until the Triplanet\n Patrol gave up the misleading trail he had made into the hill country,\n and concluded that he must have reached Lillis. After that, his only\n safety lay in shipping out on a freighter as soon as possible. He had\n to get off Mars, because his trail was warm, and the Patrol thorough."
],
[
"\"Several thousand years ago Mars' loss of atmosphere began to make\n itself felt. There were two ways out. Some chose to seal themselves\n into cities like Kal-Jmar; our ancestors chose to adapt their bodies to\n the new conditions. Thus the race split. Their answer to the problem\n was an evasion; they remained static. Our answer was the true one, for\n we progressed. We progressed beyond the need of science; they remained\n its slaves. They died of a plague—and other causes.\n\n\n \"You see,\" he finished gently, \"our deception has caused a natural\n confusion in your minds. They were the degenerates, not we.\"\n\n\n \"And yet,\" Tate mused, \"you are being destroyed by contact with\n an—inferior—culture.\"\n\n\n \"We hope to win yet,\" the Martian said.\n\n\n Tate stood up, his face very white. \"Tell me one thing,\" he begged.\n \"Will our two races ever live together in amity?\"",
"The natives, like all Martian fauna, were multi-legged. Also like all\n Martian fauna, they moved so fast that you couldn't see how many legs\n they did have. Actually, however, the natives had six legs apiece—or,\n more properly, four legs and two arms. Their lungs were not as large\n as they appeared, being collapsed at the moment. What caused the bulge\n that made their torsos look like sausages was a huge air bladder, with\n a valve arrangement from the stomach and feeding directly into the\n bloodstream.\n\n\n Their faces were vaguely canine, but the foreheads were high, and the\n lips were not split. They did resemble dogs, in that their thick black\n fur was splotched with irregulate patches of white. These patches of\n white were subject to muscular control and could be spread out fanwise;\n or, conversely, the black could be expanded to cover the white, which\n helped to take care of the extremes of Martian temperature. Right now\n they were mostly black.",
"\"I think I see,\" Tate said thoughtfully. \"That's been the ultimate aim\n all along, but so far the problem has us licked. If we solved it, then\n we'd have all of Mars, not just the cities. Your people would die out.\n You couldn't have that, of course.\"\n\n\n He sighed deeply. He spread his gloved hands before him and looked\n at them with a queer intentness. \"Well—how about the Martians—the\n Kal-Jmar Martians, I mean? I'd dearly love to know the answer to that\n one.\"\n\n\n \"Neither of the alternatives in your mind is correct. They were not a\n separate species, although they were unlike us. But they were not our\n ancestors, either. They were the contemporaries of our ancestors.\"",
"The car wheeled around in a half circle and ran into the wall of the\n gully. Syme was saying, \"What—?\" when there was a thunderous crash\n that shook the sturdy walls of the car, as a huge boulder smashed into\n the ground immediately to their left.\n\n\n When the smoky red dust had cleared away, they saw that the left tread\n of the sand car was crushed beyond all recognition.\n\n\n Syme was cursing slowly and steadily with a deep, seething anger. Tate\n said, \"I guess we walk from here on.\" Then he looked up again and\n caught a glimpse of the horde of beasts that were rushing up the gully\n toward them.\n\n\n \"My God!\" he said. \"What are those?\"\n\n\n Syme looked. \"Those,\" he said bitterly, \"are Martians.\"",
"\"Yes.\"\n\n\n Tate thought again. \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No,\" the Martian interrupted him, \"revealing the extent of our\n civilization would have spared us nothing at your people's hands. Yours\n is an imperialist culture, and you would have had Mars, whether you\n thought you were taking it from equals or not.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" Syme broke in impatiently. \"What do you want with\n us?\"\n\n\n The Martian looked at him appraisingly. \"You already suspect.\n Unfortunately, you must die.\"\nIt was a weird situation, Syme thought. His mind was racing, but as yet\n he could see no way out. He began to wonder, if he did, could he keep\n the Martians from knowing about it? Then he realized that the Martian\n must have received that thought, too, and he was enraged. He stood,\n holding himself in check with an effort.\n\n\n \"Will you tell us why?\" Tate asked.",
"Later, however, when every unsuccessful attempt had precipitated a\n bloody uprising of the present-day Martians—resulting in a rapid\n dwindling of the number of Martians—the Mars Protectorate had stepped\n in and forbidden any further experiments; forbidden, in fact, any\n Earthman to go near the place.\n\n\n Thus matter had stood for over a hundred years, until Harold Tate.\n Tate, a physicist, had stumbled on a field that seemed to be identical\n in properties to the Kal-Jmar dome; and what is more, he had found a\n force that would break it down.\n\n\n And so he had made his first trip to Mars, and within twenty-four\n hours, by the blindest of chances, blurted out his secret to Syme\n Rector, the scourge of the spaceways, the man with a thousand credits\n on his sleek, tigerish head.",
"The Martian lowered his head. \"That is for unborn generations.\" He\n looked at Tate again and aimed the energy gun. \"You are a brave man,\"\n he said. \"I am sorry.\"\n\n\n Syme saw all his hopes of treasure and glory go glimmering down the\n sights of the Martian's Benson gun, and suddenly the pent-up rage in\n him exploded. Too swiftly for his intention to be telegraphed, before\n he knew himself what he meant to do, he hurled himself bodily into the\n Martian.\nIt was like tangling with a draft horse. The Martian was astonishingly\n strong. Syme scrambled desperately for the gun, got it, but couldn't\n tear it out of the Martian's fingers. And all the time he could almost\n feel the Martian's telepathic call for help surging out. He heard the\n swift pad of his followers coming across the cavern.",
"The natives slowed down and spread out to surround the wrecked sand\n car, and it could be seen that most of them were armed with spears,\n although some had the slim Benson energy guns—strictly forbidden to\n Martians.\n\n\n Syme stopped cursing and watched tensely. Tate said nothing, but he\n swallowed audibly.\n\n\n One Martian, who looked exactly like all the rest, stepped forward and\n motioned unmistakably for the two to come out. He waited a moment and\n then gestured with his energy gun. That gun, Syme knew from experience,\n could burn through a small thickness of steelite if held on the same\n spot long enough.\n\"Come on,\" Syme said grimly. He rose and reached for a pressure suit,\n and Tate followed him.\n\n\n \"What do you think they'll—\" he began, and then stopped himself. \"I\n know. They're unpredictable.\"",
"\"You were brought here for that purpose. It is part of our conception\n of justice. I will tell you and your—friend—anything you wish to\n know.\"\n\n\n Syme noticed that the other Martians had retired to the farther side of\n the cavern. Some were munching the glowing fungus. That left only the\n leader, who was standing alertly on all fours a short distance away\n from them, holding the Benson gun trained on them. Syme tried not to\n think about the gun, especially about making a grab for it. It was like\n trying not to think of the word \"hippopotamus.\"\n\n\n Tate squatted down comfortably on the floor of the cavern, apparently\n unconcerned, but his hands were trembling slightly. \"First why—\" he\n began.\n\n\n \"There are many secrets in Kal-Jmar,\" the Martian said, \"among them a\n very simple catalyzing agent which could within fifty years transform\n Mars to a planet with Terrestrially-thick atmosphere.\"",
"\"Yeah,\" said Syme, and opened the door. The air in the car\nwhooshed\ninto the near-vacuum outside, and he and Tate stepped out.\n\n\n The Martian leader looked at them enigmatically, then turned and\n started off. The other natives closed in on them, and they all bounded\n along under the weak gravity.\n\n\n They bounded along for what Syme figured as a good kilometer and a\n half, and they then reached a branch in the gully and turned down\n it, going lower all the time. Under the light of their helmet lamps,\n they could see the walls of the gully—a tunnel, now—getting darker\n and more solid. Finally, when Syme estimated they were about nine\n kilometers down, there was even a suggestion of moisture.",
"The tunnel debouched at last into a large cavern. There was a\n phosphorescent gleam from fungus along the walls, but Syme couldn't\n decide how far away the far wall was. He noticed something else, though.\n\n\n \"There's air here,\" he said to Tate. \"I can see dust motes in it.\" He\n switched his helmet microphone from radio over to the audio membrane\n on the outside of the helmet. \"\nKalis methra\n,\" he began haltingly,\n \"\nseltin guna getal.\n\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is air here,\" said the Martian leader, startlingly. \"Not\n enough for your use, however, so do not open your helmets.\"\n\n\n Syme swore amazedly.\n\n\n \"I thought you said they didn't speak Terrestrial,\" Tate said. Syme\n ignored him.\n\n\n \"We had our reasons for not doing so,\" the Martian said.",
"\"But how—?\"\n\n\n \"We are telepaths, of course. On a planet which is nearly airless on\n its surface, we have to be. A tendency of the Terrestrial mind is to\n ignore the obvious. We have not had a spoken language of our own for\n several thousand years.\"\n\n\n He darted a glance at Syme's darkly scowling face. His own hairy face\n was expressionless, but Syme sensed that he was amused. \"Yes, you're\n right,\" he said. \"The language you and your fellows struggled to learn\n is a fraud, a hodge-podge concocted to deceive you.\"\n\n\n Tate looked interested. \"But why this—this gigantic masquerade?\"\n\n\n \"You had nothing to give us,\" the Martian said simply.\n\n\n Tate frowned, then flushed. \"You mean you avoided revealing yourselves\n because you—had nothing to gain from mental intercourse with us?\"",
"He put everything he had into one mighty, murderous effort. Every\n muscle fiber in his superbly trained body crackled and surged with\n power. He roared his fury. And the gun twisted out of the Martian's\n iron grip!\n\n\n He clubbed the prostrate leader with it instantly, then reversed the\n weapon and snapped a shot at the nearest Martian. The creature dropped\n his lance and fell without a sound.\n\n\n The next instant a ray blinked at him, and he rolled out of the way\n barely in time. The searing ray cut a swath over the leader's body and\n swerved to cut down on him. Still rolling, he fired at the holder of\n the weapon. The gun dropped and winked out on the floor.",
"Syme turned the little sand car up a gentle rise towards the tortuous\n hill country in the distance. \"Not only that,\" he continued. \"They\n eat the damndest stuff. Lichens and fungi and tumble-grass off the\n deserts—all full of deadly poisons, from arsenic up the line to\n xopite. They seem intelligent enough—in their own way—but they never\n come near our cities and they either can't or won't learn Terrestrial.\n When the first colonists came here, they had to learn\ntheir\ncrazy\n language. Every word of it can mean any one of a dozen different\n things, depending on the inflection you give it. I can speak it some,\n but not much. Nobody can. We don't think the same.\"\n\n\n \"So you think they might attack us?\" Tate asked again, nervously.\n\n\n \"They\nmight\ndo anything,\" Syme said curtly. \"Don't worry about it.\"",
"For Kal-Jmar's dome was not the thing of steelite that protected\n Lillis: it was a tenuous, globular field of force that defied analysis\n as it defied explosives and diamond drills. The field extended both\n above and below the ground, and tunneling was of no avail. No one knew\n what had happened to the Martians, whether they were the ancestors of\n the present decadent Martian race, or a different species. No one knew\n anything about them or about Kal-Jmar.\n\n\n In the early days, when the conquest of Mars was just beginning, Earth\n scientists had been wild to get into the city. They had observed it\n from every angle, taken photographs of its architecture and the robots\n that still patrolled its fantastically winding streets, and then they\n had tried everything they knew to pierce the wall.",
"Harold Tate told him, and later, when Syme had taken him to his rooms,\n he showed him what was in his little black suitcase. Syme had been\n right; it was big.\nKal-Jmar was the riddle of the Solar System. It was the only remaining\n city of the ancient Martian race—the race that, legends said, had\n risen to greater heights than any other Solar culture. The machines,\n the artifacts, the records of the Martians were all there, perfectly\n preserved inside the city's bubble-like dome, after God knew how many\n thousands of years. But they couldn't be reached.",
"Syme's smile was not tigerish now; it was carefully, studiedly mild.\n For Tate was no longer drunk, and it was important that it should not\n occur to him that he had been indiscreet.\n\n\n \"This is native territory we're coming to, Harold,\" he said. \"Better\n strap on your gun.\"\n\n\n \"Why. Are they really dangerous?\"\n\n\n \"They're unpredictable,\" Syme told him. \"They're built differently, and\n they think differently. They breathe like us, down in their caverns\n where there's air, but they also eat sand, and get their oxygen that\n way.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I've heard about that,\" Tate said. \"Iron oxide—very interesting\n metabolism.\" He got his energy pistol out of the compartment and\n strapped it on absently.",
"The hills were much closer than they had seemed, because of Mars'\n deceptively low horizon. In half an hour they were in the midst of a\n wilderness of fantastically eroded dunes and channels, laboring on\n sliding treads up the sides of steep hills only to slither down again\n on the other side.\nSyme stopped the car abruptly as a deep, winding channel appeared\n across their path. \"Gully,\" he announced. \"Shall we cross it, or follow\n it?\"\n\n\n Tate peered through the steelite nose of the car. \"Follow, I guess,\"\n he offered. \"It seems to go more or less where we're going, and if we\n cross it we'll only come to a couple dozen more.\"",
"Tate had been watching with interest. \"Very ingenious,\" he said. \"But\n how do we get up again?\"\n\n\n \"Most of these gullies peter out gradually,\" said Syme, \"but if we want\n or have to climb out where it's deep, we have a little harpoon gun that\n shoots the anchor up on top.\"\n\n\n \"Good. I shouldn't like to stay down here for the rest of my\n natural life. Depressing view.\" He looked up at the narrow strip of\n almost-black sky visible from the floor of the gully, and shook his\n head.\n\n\n Neither Syme nor Tate ever had a chance to test the efficiency of their\n harpoon gun. They had traveled no more than five hundred meters, and\n the gully was as deep as ever, when Tate, looking up, saw a deeper\n blackness blot out part of the black sky directly overhead. He shouted,\n \"Look out!\" and grabbed for the nearest steering lever.",
"Syme glared at him and spat, too enraged to think of diplomacy. He\n turned and strode out of the cavern, carrying his right leg stiffly,\n but with his feral, tigerish head held high.\n\n\n He led the way, wordlessly, back to the wrecked sand car. Tate followed\n him with a hangdog, beaten air, as though he had just found something\n that shattered all his previous concepts of the verities in life, and\n didn't know what to do about it.\n\n\n Still silently, Syme refilled his oxygen tank, watched Tate do the\n same, and then picked up two spare tanks and the precious black\n suitcase and handed one of the tanks to Tate. Then he stumped around\n to the back of the car and inspected the damage. The cable reel, which\n might have drawn them out of the gully, was hopelessly smashed. That\n was that."
],
[
"He heard running footsteps, and then a pale face peered over the ledge\n at him. He realized suddenly that the whole incident could have taken\n only a few seconds. He croaked, \"Get me up.\"\n\n\n Wordlessly, the man clasped thin fingers around his wrist. The other\n pulled, with much puffing and panting, and with his help Syme managed\n to get a leg over the edge and hoist his trembling body to safety.\n\n\n \"Are you all right?\"\nSyme looked at the man, nursing the tortured muscles of his arms. His\n rescuer was tall and thin, of indeterminate age. He had light, sandy\n hair, a sharp nose, and—oddly conflicting—pale, serious eyes and a\n humorous wide mouth. He was still panting.\n\n\n \"I'm not hurt,\" Syme said. He grinned, his white teeth flashing in his\n dark, lean face. \"Thanks for giving me a hand.\"",
"\"You scared hell out of me,\" said the man. \"I heard a thud. I\n thought—you'd gone over.\" He looked at Syme questioningly.\n\n\n \"That was my bag,\" the outlaw said quickly. \"It slipped out of my hand,\n and I overbalanced myself when I grabbed for it.\"\n\n\n The man sighed. \"I need a drink.\nYou\nneed a drink. Come on.\" He\n picked up a small black suitcase from the floor and started for the\n elevator, then stopped. \"Oh—your bag. Shouldn't we do something about\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind,\" said Syme, taking his arm. \"The shock must have busted it\n wide open. My laundry is probably all over Lillis by now.\"",
"Syme glared at him and spat, too enraged to think of diplomacy. He\n turned and strode out of the cavern, carrying his right leg stiffly,\n but with his feral, tigerish head held high.\n\n\n He led the way, wordlessly, back to the wrecked sand car. Tate followed\n him with a hangdog, beaten air, as though he had just found something\n that shattered all his previous concepts of the verities in life, and\n didn't know what to do about it.\n\n\n Still silently, Syme refilled his oxygen tank, watched Tate do the\n same, and then picked up two spare tanks and the precious black\n suitcase and handed one of the tanks to Tate. Then he stumped around\n to the back of the car and inspected the damage. The cable reel, which\n might have drawn them out of the gully, was hopelessly smashed. That\n was that.",
"They got off at the amusement level, three tiers down, and found a\n cafe around the corner. Syme wasn't worried about the man he had just\n killed. He had heard no second thud, so the body must have stayed on\n the first outcropping of the tower it struck. It probably wouldn't be\n found until morning.\n\n\n And he had the wallet. When he paid for the first round of\nculcha\n, he\n took it out and stole a glance at the identification card inside. There\n it was—his ticket to freedom. He began feeling expansive, and even\n friendly toward the slender, mouse-like man across the table. It was\n the\nculcha\n, of course. He knew it, and didn't care. In the morning\n he'd find a freighter berth—in as big a spaceport as Lillis, there\n were always jobs open. Meanwhile, he might as well enjoy himself, and\n it was safer to be seen with a companion than to be alone.",
"It fell, and in the same instant Syme felt a violent tug at his wrist.\n Before he could move to stop himself, he was over the edge. Too late,\n he realized what had happened—one of the hooks on the dead spaceman's\n harness had caught the heavy wristband of his chronometer. He was\n falling, linked to the body of his victim!\n\n\n Hardly knowing what he did, he lashed out wildly with his other arm,\n felt his fingertips catch and bite into the edge of the balustrade. His\n body hit the wall of the tower with a thump, and, a second later, the\n corpse below him hit the wall. Then they both hung there, swaying a\n little and Syme's fingers slipped a little with each motion.",
"Gritting his teeth, he brought the magnificent muscles of his arm into\n play, raising the forearm against the dead weight of the dangling body.\n Fraction by slow fraction of an inch, it came up. Syme could feel the\n sweat pouring from his brow, running saltily into his eyes. His arms\n felt as if they were being torn from their sockets. Then the hook\n slipped free, and the tearing, unbearable weight vanished.\n\n\n The reaction swung Syme against the building again, and he almost\n lost his slippery hold on the balustrade. After a moment he heard the\n spaceman's body strike with a squashy thud, somewhere below.\n\n\n He swung up his other arm, got a better grip on the balustrade. He\n tried cautiously to get a leg up, but the motion loosened his hold on\n the smooth surface again. He relaxed, thinking furiously. He could hold\n on for another minute at most; then it was the final blast-off.",
"Syme's smile was not tigerish now; it was carefully, studiedly mild.\n For Tate was no longer drunk, and it was important that it should not\n occur to him that he had been indiscreet.\n\n\n \"This is native territory we're coming to, Harold,\" he said. \"Better\n strap on your gun.\"\n\n\n \"Why. Are they really dangerous?\"\n\n\n \"They're unpredictable,\" Syme told him. \"They're built differently, and\n they think differently. They breathe like us, down in their caverns\n where there's air, but they also eat sand, and get their oxygen that\n way.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I've heard about that,\" Tate said. \"Iron oxide—very interesting\n metabolism.\" He got his energy pistol out of the compartment and\n strapped it on absently.",
"Harold Tate told him, and later, when Syme had taken him to his rooms,\n he showed him what was in his little black suitcase. Syme had been\n right; it was big.\nKal-Jmar was the riddle of the Solar System. It was the only remaining\n city of the ancient Martian race—the race that, legends said, had\n risen to greater heights than any other Solar culture. The machines,\n the artifacts, the records of the Martians were all there, perfectly\n preserved inside the city's bubble-like dome, after God knew how many\n thousands of years. But they couldn't be reached.",
"Tate had been watching with interest. \"Very ingenious,\" he said. \"But\n how do we get up again?\"\n\n\n \"Most of these gullies peter out gradually,\" said Syme, \"but if we want\n or have to climb out where it's deep, we have a little harpoon gun that\n shoots the anchor up on top.\"\n\n\n \"Good. I shouldn't like to stay down here for the rest of my\n natural life. Depressing view.\" He looked up at the narrow strip of\n almost-black sky visible from the floor of the gully, and shook his\n head.\n\n\n Neither Syme nor Tate ever had a chance to test the efficiency of their\n harpoon gun. They had traveled no more than five hundred meters, and\n the gully was as deep as ever, when Tate, looking up, saw a deeper\n blackness blot out part of the black sky directly overhead. He shouted,\n \"Look out!\" and grabbed for the nearest steering lever.",
"Later, however, when every unsuccessful attempt had precipitated a\n bloody uprising of the present-day Martians—resulting in a rapid\n dwindling of the number of Martians—the Mars Protectorate had stepped\n in and forbidden any further experiments; forbidden, in fact, any\n Earthman to go near the place.\n\n\n Thus matter had stood for over a hundred years, until Harold Tate.\n Tate, a physicist, had stumbled on a field that seemed to be identical\n in properties to the Kal-Jmar dome; and what is more, he had found a\n force that would break it down.\n\n\n And so he had made his first trip to Mars, and within twenty-four\n hours, by the blindest of chances, blurted out his secret to Syme\n Rector, the scourge of the spaceways, the man with a thousand credits\n on his sleek, tigerish head.",
"Syme jumped to his feet and faced his enemies, snarling like the\n trapped tiger he was. Another ray slashed at him, and he bent lithely\n to let it whistle over his head. Another, lower this time. He flipped\n his body into the air and landed upright, his gun still blazing. His\n right leg burned fiercely from a ray-graze, but he ignored it. And\n all the while he was mowing down the massed natives in great swaths,\n seeking out the ones armed with Bensons in swift, terrible slashes,\n dodging spears and other missiles in midair, and roaring at the top of\n his powerful lungs.\n\n\n At last there were none with guns left to oppose him. He scythed down\n the rest in two terrible, lightning sweeps of his ray, then dropped\n the weapon from blistered fingers.",
"\"All right,\" the boy said quietly. \"What is it?\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Syme said.\n\n\n \"The game, the angle. You've been following me. Do you want trouble?\"\n\n\n \"Why, no,\" Syme told him bewilderedly. \"I haven't been following you.\n I—\"\n\n\n The boy knuckled his chin reflectively. \"You could be lying,\" he said\n finally. \"But maybe I've made a mistake.\" Then—\"Okay, citizen, you can\n clear—but don't let me catch you on my tail again.\"\n\n\n Syme murmured something and turned away, feeling the spaceman's eyes\n on the small of his back until he turned the corner. At the next\n street he took a ramp up, crossed over and came down on the other side\n a block away. He waited until he saw the boy's broad figure pass the\n intersection, and then followed again more cautiously.",
"It was risky, but there was no other way. The signatures, the data,\n even the photograph on the card could be forged once Syme got his hands\n on it, but the identity card itself—that oblong of dark diamondite,\n glowing with the tiny fires of radioactivity—that could not be\n imitated, and the only way to get it was to kill.",
"The Martian lowered his head. \"That is for unborn generations.\" He\n looked at Tate again and aimed the energy gun. \"You are a brave man,\"\n he said. \"I am sorry.\"\n\n\n Syme saw all his hopes of treasure and glory go glimmering down the\n sights of the Martian's Benson gun, and suddenly the pent-up rage in\n him exploded. Too swiftly for his intention to be telegraphed, before\n he knew himself what he meant to do, he hurled himself bodily into the\n Martian.\nIt was like tangling with a draft horse. The Martian was astonishingly\n strong. Syme scrambled desperately for the gun, got it, but couldn't\n tear it out of the Martian's fingers. And all the time he could almost\n feel the Martian's telepathic call for help surging out. He heard the\n swift pad of his followers coming across the cavern.",
"Syme turned the little sand car up a gentle rise towards the tortuous\n hill country in the distance. \"Not only that,\" he continued. \"They\n eat the damndest stuff. Lichens and fungi and tumble-grass off the\n deserts—all full of deadly poisons, from arsenic up the line to\n xopite. They seem intelligent enough—in their own way—but they never\n come near our cities and they either can't or won't learn Terrestrial.\n When the first colonists came here, they had to learn\ntheir\ncrazy\n language. Every word of it can mean any one of a dozen different\n things, depending on the inflection you give it. I can speak it some,\n but not much. Nobody can. We don't think the same.\"\n\n\n \"So you think they might attack us?\" Tate asked again, nervously.\n\n\n \"They\nmight\ndo anything,\" Syme said curtly. \"Don't worry about it.\"",
"\"Yeah,\" said Syme, and opened the door. The air in the car\nwhooshed\ninto the near-vacuum outside, and he and Tate stepped out.\n\n\n The Martian leader looked at them enigmatically, then turned and\n started off. The other natives closed in on them, and they all bounded\n along under the weak gravity.\n\n\n They bounded along for what Syme figured as a good kilometer and a\n half, and they then reached a branch in the gully and turned down\n it, going lower all the time. Under the light of their helmet lamps,\n they could see the walls of the gully—a tunnel, now—getting darker\n and more solid. Finally, when Syme estimated they were about nine\n kilometers down, there was even a suggestion of moisture.",
"They knew, of course, that he was an outlaw—the very fact of the\n crashed, illegally-armed ship would have told them that. But they\n didn't know that he was Syme Rector, the most-wanted and most-feared\n raider in the System. In that was his only advantage.\n\n\n He walked a little faster, as his quarry turned up a side street and\n then boarded a moving ramp to an upper level. He watched until the\n short, wide-shouldered figure in spaceman's harness disappeared over\n the top of the ramp, and then followed.\n\n\n The man was waiting for him at the mouth of the ascending tunnel.\n\n\n Syme looked at him casually, without a flicker of expression, and\n started to walk on, but the other stepped into his path. He was quite\n young, Syme saw, with a fighter's shoulders under the white leather,\n and a hard, determined thrust to his firm jaw.",
"The boy was hunched over the circular balustrade a little distance\n away. Except for him, the platform was empty. Syme loosened his slim,\n deadly energy pistol in its holster and padded catlike toward the\n silent figure.\n\n\n It was over in a minute. The boy whirled as he came up, warned by\n some slight sound, or by the breath of Syme's passage in the still\n air. He opened his mouth to shout, and brought up his arm in a swift,\n instinctive gesture. But the blow never landed. Syme's pistol spat its\n silent white pencil of flame, and the boy crumpled to the floor with a\n minute, charred hole in the white leather over his chest.\nSyme stooped over him swiftly, found a thick wallet and thrust it into\n his pocket without a second glance. Then he raised the body in his arms\n and thrust it over the parapet.",
"He listened lazily to what the other was saying, leaning his tall,\n graceful body back into the softly-cushioned seat.\n\n\n \"Lissen,\" said Harold Tate. He leaned forward on one elbow, slipped,\n caught himself, and looked at the elbow reproachfully. \"Lissen,\" he\n said again, \"I trust you, Jones. You're obvi-obviously an adventurer,\n but you have an honest face. I can't see it very well at the moment,\n but I hic!—pardon—seem to recall it as an honest face. I'm going to\n tell you something, because I need your help!—help.\" He paused. \"I\n need a guide. D'you know this part of Mars well?\"",
"He was gasping for breath, and realized that he was losing air from\n the seared-open right leg of his suit. He reached for the emergency\n kit at his side, drawing in great, gasping breaths, and fumbled out\n a tube of sealing liquid. He spread the stuff on liberally, smearing\n it impartially over flesh and fabric. It felt like liquid hell on the\n burned, bleeding leg, but he kept on until the quick-drying fluid\n formed an airtight patch.\n\n\n Only then did he turn, to see Tate flattened against the wall behind\n him, his hands empty at his sides. \"I'm sorry,\" Tate said miserably. \"I\n could have grabbed a spear or something, but—I just couldn't, not even\n to save my own life. I—I halfway hoped they'd kill both of us.\""
],
[
"\"Yes.\"\n\n\n Tate thought again. \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No,\" the Martian interrupted him, \"revealing the extent of our\n civilization would have spared us nothing at your people's hands. Yours\n is an imperialist culture, and you would have had Mars, whether you\n thought you were taking it from equals or not.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" Syme broke in impatiently. \"What do you want with\n us?\"\n\n\n The Martian looked at him appraisingly. \"You already suspect.\n Unfortunately, you must die.\"\nIt was a weird situation, Syme thought. His mind was racing, but as yet\n he could see no way out. He began to wonder, if he did, could he keep\n the Martians from knowing about it? Then he realized that the Martian\n must have received that thought, too, and he was enraged. He stood,\n holding himself in check with an effort.\n\n\n \"Will you tell us why?\" Tate asked.",
"\"Several thousand years ago Mars' loss of atmosphere began to make\n itself felt. There were two ways out. Some chose to seal themselves\n into cities like Kal-Jmar; our ancestors chose to adapt their bodies to\n the new conditions. Thus the race split. Their answer to the problem\n was an evasion; they remained static. Our answer was the true one, for\n we progressed. We progressed beyond the need of science; they remained\n its slaves. They died of a plague—and other causes.\n\n\n \"You see,\" he finished gently, \"our deception has caused a natural\n confusion in your minds. They were the degenerates, not we.\"\n\n\n \"And yet,\" Tate mused, \"you are being destroyed by contact with\n an—inferior—culture.\"\n\n\n \"We hope to win yet,\" the Martian said.\n\n\n Tate stood up, his face very white. \"Tell me one thing,\" he begged.\n \"Will our two races ever live together in amity?\"",
"\"You were brought here for that purpose. It is part of our conception\n of justice. I will tell you and your—friend—anything you wish to\n know.\"\n\n\n Syme noticed that the other Martians had retired to the farther side of\n the cavern. Some were munching the glowing fungus. That left only the\n leader, who was standing alertly on all fours a short distance away\n from them, holding the Benson gun trained on them. Syme tried not to\n think about the gun, especially about making a grab for it. It was like\n trying not to think of the word \"hippopotamus.\"\n\n\n Tate squatted down comfortably on the floor of the cavern, apparently\n unconcerned, but his hands were trembling slightly. \"First why—\" he\n began.\n\n\n \"There are many secrets in Kal-Jmar,\" the Martian said, \"among them a\n very simple catalyzing agent which could within fifty years transform\n Mars to a planet with Terrestrially-thick atmosphere.\"",
"\"But how—?\"\n\n\n \"We are telepaths, of course. On a planet which is nearly airless on\n its surface, we have to be. A tendency of the Terrestrial mind is to\n ignore the obvious. We have not had a spoken language of our own for\n several thousand years.\"\n\n\n He darted a glance at Syme's darkly scowling face. His own hairy face\n was expressionless, but Syme sensed that he was amused. \"Yes, you're\n right,\" he said. \"The language you and your fellows struggled to learn\n is a fraud, a hodge-podge concocted to deceive you.\"\n\n\n Tate looked interested. \"But why this—this gigantic masquerade?\"\n\n\n \"You had nothing to give us,\" the Martian said simply.\n\n\n Tate frowned, then flushed. \"You mean you avoided revealing yourselves\n because you—had nothing to gain from mental intercourse with us?\"",
"The natives, like all Martian fauna, were multi-legged. Also like all\n Martian fauna, they moved so fast that you couldn't see how many legs\n they did have. Actually, however, the natives had six legs apiece—or,\n more properly, four legs and two arms. Their lungs were not as large\n as they appeared, being collapsed at the moment. What caused the bulge\n that made their torsos look like sausages was a huge air bladder, with\n a valve arrangement from the stomach and feeding directly into the\n bloodstream.\n\n\n Their faces were vaguely canine, but the foreheads were high, and the\n lips were not split. They did resemble dogs, in that their thick black\n fur was splotched with irregulate patches of white. These patches of\n white were subject to muscular control and could be spread out fanwise;\n or, conversely, the black could be expanded to cover the white, which\n helped to take care of the extremes of Martian temperature. Right now\n they were mostly black.",
"\"Yeah,\" said Syme, and opened the door. The air in the car\nwhooshed\ninto the near-vacuum outside, and he and Tate stepped out.\n\n\n The Martian leader looked at them enigmatically, then turned and\n started off. The other natives closed in on them, and they all bounded\n along under the weak gravity.\n\n\n They bounded along for what Syme figured as a good kilometer and a\n half, and they then reached a branch in the gully and turned down\n it, going lower all the time. Under the light of their helmet lamps,\n they could see the walls of the gully—a tunnel, now—getting darker\n and more solid. Finally, when Syme estimated they were about nine\n kilometers down, there was even a suggestion of moisture.",
"The car wheeled around in a half circle and ran into the wall of the\n gully. Syme was saying, \"What—?\" when there was a thunderous crash\n that shook the sturdy walls of the car, as a huge boulder smashed into\n the ground immediately to their left.\n\n\n When the smoky red dust had cleared away, they saw that the left tread\n of the sand car was crushed beyond all recognition.\n\n\n Syme was cursing slowly and steadily with a deep, seething anger. Tate\n said, \"I guess we walk from here on.\" Then he looked up again and\n caught a glimpse of the horde of beasts that were rushing up the gully\n toward them.\n\n\n \"My God!\" he said. \"What are those?\"\n\n\n Syme looked. \"Those,\" he said bitterly, \"are Martians.\"",
"\"I think I see,\" Tate said thoughtfully. \"That's been the ultimate aim\n all along, but so far the problem has us licked. If we solved it, then\n we'd have all of Mars, not just the cities. Your people would die out.\n You couldn't have that, of course.\"\n\n\n He sighed deeply. He spread his gloved hands before him and looked\n at them with a queer intentness. \"Well—how about the Martians—the\n Kal-Jmar Martians, I mean? I'd dearly love to know the answer to that\n one.\"\n\n\n \"Neither of the alternatives in your mind is correct. They were not a\n separate species, although they were unlike us. But they were not our\n ancestors, either. They were the contemporaries of our ancestors.\"",
"The natives slowed down and spread out to surround the wrecked sand\n car, and it could be seen that most of them were armed with spears,\n although some had the slim Benson energy guns—strictly forbidden to\n Martians.\n\n\n Syme stopped cursing and watched tensely. Tate said nothing, but he\n swallowed audibly.\n\n\n One Martian, who looked exactly like all the rest, stepped forward and\n motioned unmistakably for the two to come out. He waited a moment and\n then gestured with his energy gun. That gun, Syme knew from experience,\n could burn through a small thickness of steelite if held on the same\n spot long enough.\n\"Come on,\" Syme said grimly. He rose and reached for a pressure suit,\n and Tate followed him.\n\n\n \"What do you think they'll—\" he began, and then stopped himself. \"I\n know. They're unpredictable.\"",
"Later, however, when every unsuccessful attempt had precipitated a\n bloody uprising of the present-day Martians—resulting in a rapid\n dwindling of the number of Martians—the Mars Protectorate had stepped\n in and forbidden any further experiments; forbidden, in fact, any\n Earthman to go near the place.\n\n\n Thus matter had stood for over a hundred years, until Harold Tate.\n Tate, a physicist, had stumbled on a field that seemed to be identical\n in properties to the Kal-Jmar dome; and what is more, he had found a\n force that would break it down.\n\n\n And so he had made his first trip to Mars, and within twenty-four\n hours, by the blindest of chances, blurted out his secret to Syme\n Rector, the scourge of the spaceways, the man with a thousand credits\n on his sleek, tigerish head.",
"The Martian lowered his head. \"That is for unborn generations.\" He\n looked at Tate again and aimed the energy gun. \"You are a brave man,\"\n he said. \"I am sorry.\"\n\n\n Syme saw all his hopes of treasure and glory go glimmering down the\n sights of the Martian's Benson gun, and suddenly the pent-up rage in\n him exploded. Too swiftly for his intention to be telegraphed, before\n he knew himself what he meant to do, he hurled himself bodily into the\n Martian.\nIt was like tangling with a draft horse. The Martian was astonishingly\n strong. Syme scrambled desperately for the gun, got it, but couldn't\n tear it out of the Martian's fingers. And all the time he could almost\n feel the Martian's telepathic call for help surging out. He heard the\n swift pad of his followers coming across the cavern.",
"The tunnel debouched at last into a large cavern. There was a\n phosphorescent gleam from fungus along the walls, but Syme couldn't\n decide how far away the far wall was. He noticed something else, though.\n\n\n \"There's air here,\" he said to Tate. \"I can see dust motes in it.\" He\n switched his helmet microphone from radio over to the audio membrane\n on the outside of the helmet. \"\nKalis methra\n,\" he began haltingly,\n \"\nseltin guna getal.\n\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is air here,\" said the Martian leader, startlingly. \"Not\n enough for your use, however, so do not open your helmets.\"\n\n\n Syme swore amazedly.\n\n\n \"I thought you said they didn't speak Terrestrial,\" Tate said. Syme\n ignored him.\n\n\n \"We had our reasons for not doing so,\" the Martian said.",
"For Kal-Jmar's dome was not the thing of steelite that protected\n Lillis: it was a tenuous, globular field of force that defied analysis\n as it defied explosives and diamond drills. The field extended both\n above and below the ground, and tunneling was of no avail. No one knew\n what had happened to the Martians, whether they were the ancestors of\n the present decadent Martian race, or a different species. No one knew\n anything about them or about Kal-Jmar.\n\n\n In the early days, when the conquest of Mars was just beginning, Earth\n scientists had been wild to get into the city. They had observed it\n from every angle, taken photographs of its architecture and the robots\n that still patrolled its fantastically winding streets, and then they\n had tried everything they knew to pierce the wall.",
"Harold Tate told him, and later, when Syme had taken him to his rooms,\n he showed him what was in his little black suitcase. Syme had been\n right; it was big.\nKal-Jmar was the riddle of the Solar System. It was the only remaining\n city of the ancient Martian race—the race that, legends said, had\n risen to greater heights than any other Solar culture. The machines,\n the artifacts, the records of the Martians were all there, perfectly\n preserved inside the city's bubble-like dome, after God knew how many\n thousands of years. But they couldn't be reached.",
"The hills were much closer than they had seemed, because of Mars'\n deceptively low horizon. In half an hour they were in the midst of a\n wilderness of fantastically eroded dunes and channels, laboring on\n sliding treads up the sides of steep hills only to slither down again\n on the other side.\nSyme stopped the car abruptly as a deep, winding channel appeared\n across their path. \"Gully,\" he announced. \"Shall we cross it, or follow\n it?\"\n\n\n Tate peered through the steelite nose of the car. \"Follow, I guess,\"\n he offered. \"It seems to go more or less where we're going, and if we\n cross it we'll only come to a couple dozen more.\"",
"Syme turned the little sand car up a gentle rise towards the tortuous\n hill country in the distance. \"Not only that,\" he continued. \"They\n eat the damndest stuff. Lichens and fungi and tumble-grass off the\n deserts—all full of deadly poisons, from arsenic up the line to\n xopite. They seem intelligent enough—in their own way—but they never\n come near our cities and they either can't or won't learn Terrestrial.\n When the first colonists came here, they had to learn\ntheir\ncrazy\n language. Every word of it can mean any one of a dozen different\n things, depending on the inflection you give it. I can speak it some,\n but not much. Nobody can. We don't think the same.\"\n\n\n \"So you think they might attack us?\" Tate asked again, nervously.\n\n\n \"They\nmight\ndo anything,\" Syme said curtly. \"Don't worry about it.\"",
"He put everything he had into one mighty, murderous effort. Every\n muscle fiber in his superbly trained body crackled and surged with\n power. He roared his fury. And the gun twisted out of the Martian's\n iron grip!\n\n\n He clubbed the prostrate leader with it instantly, then reversed the\n weapon and snapped a shot at the nearest Martian. The creature dropped\n his lance and fell without a sound.\n\n\n The next instant a ray blinked at him, and he rolled out of the way\n barely in time. The searing ray cut a swath over the leader's body and\n swerved to cut down on him. Still rolling, he fired at the holder of\n the weapon. The gun dropped and winked out on the floor.",
"Syme's smile was not tigerish now; it was carefully, studiedly mild.\n For Tate was no longer drunk, and it was important that it should not\n occur to him that he had been indiscreet.\n\n\n \"This is native territory we're coming to, Harold,\" he said. \"Better\n strap on your gun.\"\n\n\n \"Why. Are they really dangerous?\"\n\n\n \"They're unpredictable,\" Syme told him. \"They're built differently, and\n they think differently. They breathe like us, down in their caverns\n where there's air, but they also eat sand, and get their oxygen that\n way.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I've heard about that,\" Tate said. \"Iron oxide—very interesting\n metabolism.\" He got his energy pistol out of the compartment and\n strapped it on absently.",
"Above, the city's multicolored lights were reflected from the\n translucent Dome—a distant, subtly distorted Lillis, through which the\n stars shone dimly.\n\n\n Getting through that dome had been his first urgent problem, but now he\n had another, and a more pressing one. It had been simple enough to pass\n himself off as an itinerant prospector and gain entrance to the city,\n after his ship had crashed in the Mare Cimmerium. But the rest would\n not be so simple. He had to acquire a spaceman's identity card, and he\n had to do it fast. It was only a matter of time until the Triplanet\n Patrol gave up the misleading trail he had made into the hill country,\n and concluded that he must have reached Lillis. After that, his only\n safety lay in shipping out on a freighter as soon as possible. He had\n to get off Mars, because his trail was warm, and the Patrol thorough.",
"\"Sure,\" said Syme absently. Out in the center of the floor, an AG\n plate had been turned on. Five Venusian girls were diving and twisting\n in its influence, propelling themselves by the motion of their\n delicately-webbed feet and trailing long gauzy streamers of synthesilk\n after them. Syme watched them through narrowed lids, feeling the glow\n of\nculcha\ninside him.\n\n\n \"I wanta go to Kal-Jmar,\" said Tate.\n\n\n Syme snapped to attention, every nerve tingling. An indefinable sense,\n a hunch that had served him well before, told him that something big\n was coming—something that promised adventure and loot for Syme Rector.\n \"Why?\" he asked softly. \"Why to Kal-Jmar?\""
],
[
"He heard running footsteps, and then a pale face peered over the ledge\n at him. He realized suddenly that the whole incident could have taken\n only a few seconds. He croaked, \"Get me up.\"\n\n\n Wordlessly, the man clasped thin fingers around his wrist. The other\n pulled, with much puffing and panting, and with his help Syme managed\n to get a leg over the edge and hoist his trembling body to safety.\n\n\n \"Are you all right?\"\nSyme looked at the man, nursing the tortured muscles of his arms. His\n rescuer was tall and thin, of indeterminate age. He had light, sandy\n hair, a sharp nose, and—oddly conflicting—pale, serious eyes and a\n humorous wide mouth. He was still panting.\n\n\n \"I'm not hurt,\" Syme said. He grinned, his white teeth flashing in his\n dark, lean face. \"Thanks for giving me a hand.\"",
"\"You scared hell out of me,\" said the man. \"I heard a thud. I\n thought—you'd gone over.\" He looked at Syme questioningly.\n\n\n \"That was my bag,\" the outlaw said quickly. \"It slipped out of my hand,\n and I overbalanced myself when I grabbed for it.\"\n\n\n The man sighed. \"I need a drink.\nYou\nneed a drink. Come on.\" He\n picked up a small black suitcase from the floor and started for the\n elevator, then stopped. \"Oh—your bag. Shouldn't we do something about\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind,\" said Syme, taking his arm. \"The shock must have busted it\n wide open. My laundry is probably all over Lillis by now.\"",
"He listened lazily to what the other was saying, leaning his tall,\n graceful body back into the softly-cushioned seat.\n\n\n \"Lissen,\" said Harold Tate. He leaned forward on one elbow, slipped,\n caught himself, and looked at the elbow reproachfully. \"Lissen,\" he\n said again, \"I trust you, Jones. You're obvi-obviously an adventurer,\n but you have an honest face. I can't see it very well at the moment,\n but I hic!—pardon—seem to recall it as an honest face. I'm going to\n tell you something, because I need your help!—help.\" He paused. \"I\n need a guide. D'you know this part of Mars well?\"",
"\"All right,\" the boy said quietly. \"What is it?\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Syme said.\n\n\n \"The game, the angle. You've been following me. Do you want trouble?\"\n\n\n \"Why, no,\" Syme told him bewilderedly. \"I haven't been following you.\n I—\"\n\n\n The boy knuckled his chin reflectively. \"You could be lying,\" he said\n finally. \"But maybe I've made a mistake.\" Then—\"Okay, citizen, you can\n clear—but don't let me catch you on my tail again.\"\n\n\n Syme murmured something and turned away, feeling the spaceman's eyes\n on the small of his back until he turned the corner. At the next\n street he took a ramp up, crossed over and came down on the other side\n a block away. He waited until he saw the boy's broad figure pass the\n intersection, and then followed again more cautiously.",
"Syme glared at him and spat, too enraged to think of diplomacy. He\n turned and strode out of the cavern, carrying his right leg stiffly,\n but with his feral, tigerish head held high.\n\n\n He led the way, wordlessly, back to the wrecked sand car. Tate followed\n him with a hangdog, beaten air, as though he had just found something\n that shattered all his previous concepts of the verities in life, and\n didn't know what to do about it.\n\n\n Still silently, Syme refilled his oxygen tank, watched Tate do the\n same, and then picked up two spare tanks and the precious black\n suitcase and handed one of the tanks to Tate. Then he stumped around\n to the back of the car and inspected the damage. The cable reel, which\n might have drawn them out of the gully, was hopelessly smashed. That\n was that.",
"The boy was hunched over the circular balustrade a little distance\n away. Except for him, the platform was empty. Syme loosened his slim,\n deadly energy pistol in its holster and padded catlike toward the\n silent figure.\n\n\n It was over in a minute. The boy whirled as he came up, warned by\n some slight sound, or by the breath of Syme's passage in the still\n air. He opened his mouth to shout, and brought up his arm in a swift,\n instinctive gesture. But the blow never landed. Syme's pistol spat its\n silent white pencil of flame, and the boy crumpled to the floor with a\n minute, charred hole in the white leather over his chest.\nSyme stooped over him swiftly, found a thick wallet and thrust it into\n his pocket without a second glance. Then he raised the body in his arms\n and thrust it over the parapet.",
"Gritting his teeth, he brought the magnificent muscles of his arm into\n play, raising the forearm against the dead weight of the dangling body.\n Fraction by slow fraction of an inch, it came up. Syme could feel the\n sweat pouring from his brow, running saltily into his eyes. His arms\n felt as if they were being torn from their sockets. Then the hook\n slipped free, and the tearing, unbearable weight vanished.\n\n\n The reaction swung Syme against the building again, and he almost\n lost his slippery hold on the balustrade. After a moment he heard the\n spaceman's body strike with a squashy thud, somewhere below.\n\n\n He swung up his other arm, got a better grip on the balustrade. He\n tried cautiously to get a leg up, but the motion loosened his hold on\n the smooth surface again. He relaxed, thinking furiously. He could hold\n on for another minute at most; then it was the final blast-off.",
"The Martian lowered his head. \"That is for unborn generations.\" He\n looked at Tate again and aimed the energy gun. \"You are a brave man,\"\n he said. \"I am sorry.\"\n\n\n Syme saw all his hopes of treasure and glory go glimmering down the\n sights of the Martian's Benson gun, and suddenly the pent-up rage in\n him exploded. Too swiftly for his intention to be telegraphed, before\n he knew himself what he meant to do, he hurled himself bodily into the\n Martian.\nIt was like tangling with a draft horse. The Martian was astonishingly\n strong. Syme scrambled desperately for the gun, got it, but couldn't\n tear it out of the Martian's fingers. And all the time he could almost\n feel the Martian's telepathic call for help surging out. He heard the\n swift pad of his followers coming across the cavern.",
"It fell, and in the same instant Syme felt a violent tug at his wrist.\n Before he could move to stop himself, he was over the edge. Too late,\n he realized what had happened—one of the hooks on the dead spaceman's\n harness had caught the heavy wristband of his chronometer. He was\n falling, linked to the body of his victim!\n\n\n Hardly knowing what he did, he lashed out wildly with his other arm,\n felt his fingertips catch and bite into the edge of the balustrade. His\n body hit the wall of the tower with a thump, and, a second later, the\n corpse below him hit the wall. Then they both hung there, swaying a\n little and Syme's fingers slipped a little with each motion.",
"Tate had been watching with interest. \"Very ingenious,\" he said. \"But\n how do we get up again?\"\n\n\n \"Most of these gullies peter out gradually,\" said Syme, \"but if we want\n or have to climb out where it's deep, we have a little harpoon gun that\n shoots the anchor up on top.\"\n\n\n \"Good. I shouldn't like to stay down here for the rest of my\n natural life. Depressing view.\" He looked up at the narrow strip of\n almost-black sky visible from the floor of the gully, and shook his\n head.\n\n\n Neither Syme nor Tate ever had a chance to test the efficiency of their\n harpoon gun. They had traveled no more than five hundred meters, and\n the gully was as deep as ever, when Tate, looking up, saw a deeper\n blackness blot out part of the black sky directly overhead. He shouted,\n \"Look out!\" and grabbed for the nearest steering lever.",
"They got off at the amusement level, three tiers down, and found a\n cafe around the corner. Syme wasn't worried about the man he had just\n killed. He had heard no second thud, so the body must have stayed on\n the first outcropping of the tower it struck. It probably wouldn't be\n found until morning.\n\n\n And he had the wallet. When he paid for the first round of\nculcha\n, he\n took it out and stole a glance at the identification card inside. There\n it was—his ticket to freedom. He began feeling expansive, and even\n friendly toward the slender, mouse-like man across the table. It was\n the\nculcha\n, of course. He knew it, and didn't care. In the morning\n he'd find a freighter berth—in as big a spaceport as Lillis, there\n were always jobs open. Meanwhile, he might as well enjoy himself, and\n it was safer to be seen with a companion than to be alone.",
"Syme's smile was not tigerish now; it was carefully, studiedly mild.\n For Tate was no longer drunk, and it was important that it should not\n occur to him that he had been indiscreet.\n\n\n \"This is native territory we're coming to, Harold,\" he said. \"Better\n strap on your gun.\"\n\n\n \"Why. Are they really dangerous?\"\n\n\n \"They're unpredictable,\" Syme told him. \"They're built differently, and\n they think differently. They breathe like us, down in their caverns\n where there's air, but they also eat sand, and get their oxygen that\n way.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I've heard about that,\" Tate said. \"Iron oxide—very interesting\n metabolism.\" He got his energy pistol out of the compartment and\n strapped it on absently.",
"He was gasping for breath, and realized that he was losing air from\n the seared-open right leg of his suit. He reached for the emergency\n kit at his side, drawing in great, gasping breaths, and fumbled out\n a tube of sealing liquid. He spread the stuff on liberally, smearing\n it impartially over flesh and fabric. It felt like liquid hell on the\n burned, bleeding leg, but he kept on until the quick-drying fluid\n formed an airtight patch.\n\n\n Only then did he turn, to see Tate flattened against the wall behind\n him, his hands empty at his sides. \"I'm sorry,\" Tate said miserably. \"I\n could have grabbed a spear or something, but—I just couldn't, not even\n to save my own life. I—I halfway hoped they'd kill both of us.\"",
"Later, however, when every unsuccessful attempt had precipitated a\n bloody uprising of the present-day Martians—resulting in a rapid\n dwindling of the number of Martians—the Mars Protectorate had stepped\n in and forbidden any further experiments; forbidden, in fact, any\n Earthman to go near the place.\n\n\n Thus matter had stood for over a hundred years, until Harold Tate.\n Tate, a physicist, had stumbled on a field that seemed to be identical\n in properties to the Kal-Jmar dome; and what is more, he had found a\n force that would break it down.\n\n\n And so he had made his first trip to Mars, and within twenty-four\n hours, by the blindest of chances, blurted out his secret to Syme\n Rector, the scourge of the spaceways, the man with a thousand credits\n on his sleek, tigerish head.",
"\"You were brought here for that purpose. It is part of our conception\n of justice. I will tell you and your—friend—anything you wish to\n know.\"\n\n\n Syme noticed that the other Martians had retired to the farther side of\n the cavern. Some were munching the glowing fungus. That left only the\n leader, who was standing alertly on all fours a short distance away\n from them, holding the Benson gun trained on them. Syme tried not to\n think about the gun, especially about making a grab for it. It was like\n trying not to think of the word \"hippopotamus.\"\n\n\n Tate squatted down comfortably on the floor of the cavern, apparently\n unconcerned, but his hands were trembling slightly. \"First why—\" he\n began.\n\n\n \"There are many secrets in Kal-Jmar,\" the Martian said, \"among them a\n very simple catalyzing agent which could within fifty years transform\n Mars to a planet with Terrestrially-thick atmosphere.\"",
"\"Sure,\" said Syme absently. Out in the center of the floor, an AG\n plate had been turned on. Five Venusian girls were diving and twisting\n in its influence, propelling themselves by the motion of their\n delicately-webbed feet and trailing long gauzy streamers of synthesilk\n after them. Syme watched them through narrowed lids, feeling the glow\n of\nculcha\ninside him.\n\n\n \"I wanta go to Kal-Jmar,\" said Tate.\n\n\n Syme snapped to attention, every nerve tingling. An indefinable sense,\n a hunch that had served him well before, told him that something big\n was coming—something that promised adventure and loot for Syme Rector.\n \"Why?\" he asked softly. \"Why to Kal-Jmar?\"",
"Harold Tate told him, and later, when Syme had taken him to his rooms,\n he showed him what was in his little black suitcase. Syme had been\n right; it was big.\nKal-Jmar was the riddle of the Solar System. It was the only remaining\n city of the ancient Martian race—the race that, legends said, had\n risen to greater heights than any other Solar culture. The machines,\n the artifacts, the records of the Martians were all there, perfectly\n preserved inside the city's bubble-like dome, after God knew how many\n thousands of years. But they couldn't be reached.",
"\"Several thousand years ago Mars' loss of atmosphere began to make\n itself felt. There were two ways out. Some chose to seal themselves\n into cities like Kal-Jmar; our ancestors chose to adapt their bodies to\n the new conditions. Thus the race split. Their answer to the problem\n was an evasion; they remained static. Our answer was the true one, for\n we progressed. We progressed beyond the need of science; they remained\n its slaves. They died of a plague—and other causes.\n\n\n \"You see,\" he finished gently, \"our deception has caused a natural\n confusion in your minds. They were the degenerates, not we.\"\n\n\n \"And yet,\" Tate mused, \"you are being destroyed by contact with\n an—inferior—culture.\"\n\n\n \"We hope to win yet,\" the Martian said.\n\n\n Tate stood up, his face very white. \"Tell me one thing,\" he begged.\n \"Will our two races ever live together in amity?\"",
"\"Yes.\"\n\n\n Tate thought again. \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No,\" the Martian interrupted him, \"revealing the extent of our\n civilization would have spared us nothing at your people's hands. Yours\n is an imperialist culture, and you would have had Mars, whether you\n thought you were taking it from equals or not.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" Syme broke in impatiently. \"What do you want with\n us?\"\n\n\n The Martian looked at him appraisingly. \"You already suspect.\n Unfortunately, you must die.\"\nIt was a weird situation, Syme thought. His mind was racing, but as yet\n he could see no way out. He began to wonder, if he did, could he keep\n the Martians from knowing about it? Then he realized that the Martian\n must have received that thought, too, and he was enraged. He stood,\n holding himself in check with an effort.\n\n\n \"Will you tell us why?\" Tate asked.",
"The natives slowed down and spread out to surround the wrecked sand\n car, and it could be seen that most of them were armed with spears,\n although some had the slim Benson energy guns—strictly forbidden to\n Martians.\n\n\n Syme stopped cursing and watched tensely. Tate said nothing, but he\n swallowed audibly.\n\n\n One Martian, who looked exactly like all the rest, stepped forward and\n motioned unmistakably for the two to come out. He waited a moment and\n then gestured with his energy gun. That gun, Syme knew from experience,\n could burn through a small thickness of steelite if held on the same\n spot long enough.\n\"Come on,\" Syme said grimly. He rose and reached for a pressure suit,\n and Tate followed him.\n\n\n \"What do you think they'll—\" he began, and then stopped himself. \"I\n know. They're unpredictable.\""
]
] |
valid
|
49897
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[
"Why did Junior land the ship so roughly?",
"To whom was Grammy married?",
"How many people were aboard the ship?",
"Why was Grampa happy with Reba?",
"How many rotations does the small planet make in 2 Earth days?",
"How did Grampa get rich?",
"Who is most intelligent?",
"Who was most in favor of staying on the planet?",
"Why did Joyce try to poison Fweep?",
"Why did Grampa suggest leaving Four behind on the planet"
] |
[
[
"He was not skilled at his work",
"The planet had a variable gravity field",
"He kept his thumb on the on-off button",
"He didn't pay attention to the scouting data"
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"Grampa",
"Junior",
"Fred",
"No one"
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"She had a brilliant smile",
"She stood up to Joyce",
"She liked him",
"She wanted Four to be happy"
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"investing in longevity technology",
"investing in perpetual motion technology",
"inventing space travel technology",
"inventing puzzle circuits"
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[
"Junior",
"Grampa",
"Fred",
"Four"
],
[
"Reba",
"Grampa",
"Four",
"Joyce"
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[
"She was mad at everyone",
"She wanted to leave the planet",
"She was afraid of his radioactivity",
"She was jealous of how much Four liked him"
],
[
"Because he wanted a reaction from Joyce",
"Because he thought it was the only way he could go home",
"Because Fweep didn't want Four to leave",
"Because Four liked Fweep"
]
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[
[
"\"Now, Grampa,\" Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once\n called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had\n begun to gray at the temples. \"That landing was pretty rough, Junior.\"\nJunior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable\n of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult\n reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his\n knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. \"I know it,\n Fred,\" he said, frowning. \"This world fooled me. It has a diameter\n less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as\n Earth.\"",
"As it hurtled down, its speed increased with dramatic swiftness. Then,\n at the last instant before impact, it stopped. Just like that.\n\n\n A moment later, it thumped a last few inches into the ankle-deep grass\n and knee-high white flowers of the meadow. It was a shock of a jar that\n made the sheet-metal walls boom like thunder machines. The flivver\n rocked unsteadily on its flat stern before it decided to stay upright.\n\n\n Then all was quiet—outside.\n\n\n Inside the big, central cabin, Grampa waved his pircuit irately in the\n air. \"Now look what you made me do! Just when I had the blamed thing\n practically whipped, too!\"\nGrampa was a white-haired 90-year-old who could still go a fast round\n or two with a man (or woman) half his age, but he had a habit of\n lapsing into tantrum when he got annoyed.",
"\"A good thing, too,\" Junior said glumly, \"because this looks like the\n end of our search. Short of a miracle, we'll spend the rest of our\n lives right here—involuntary colonists.\"\n\n\n Joyce spun on him. \"You're joking!\" she screeched.\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" Junior said. \"But the polarizer won't work. Either\n it's broken or there's something about the gravity around here that\n just won't polarize.\"\n\n\n \"It's these '23 models,\" Grampa put in disgustedly. \"They never were\n any good.\"\nThe land of the Fweep turned slowly on its axis. The orange sun set and\n rose again and stared down once more at the meadow where the improbable\n spaceship rested on its improbable stern. The sixteen Earth hours that\n the rotation had taken had changed nothing inside the ship, either.",
"\"Stop picking on Junior,\" Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother\n and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but\n somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. \"I'm sure\n he did the best he could.\"\n\n\n \"Anybody talks about gravitational pull,\" Grampa said, snorting,\n \"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing,\n Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the\n curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred\n years ago.\"\n\n\n \"Go back to your games, Grampa,\" Fred said impatiently. \"We've got work\n to do.\"\nGrampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last\n button on his pircuit. The last light went out. \"You've got work to\n do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?\"",
"\"No use bothering the others yet,\" Junior said, his face puzzled. \"You\n see, I didn't let the flivver drop those last few inches. The polarizer\n quit.\"\n\n\n \"Quit!\"\n\n\n \"That's not the worst. I tried to take it up again. The flivver—it\n won't budge!\"\nThe thing was a featureless blob, a two-foot sphere of raspberry\n gelatin, but it was alive. It rocked back and forth in front of Four.\n It opened a raspberry-color pseudo-mouth and said plaintively, \"Fweep?\n Fweep?\"\n\n\n Joyce drew her chair farther back toward the wall, revulsion on her\n face. \"Four! Get that nasty thing out of here!\"\n\"You mean Fweep?\" Four asked in astonishment.\n\n\n \"I mean that thing, whatever you call it.\" Joyce fluttered her hand\n impatiently. \"Get it out!\"",
"\"Speaking of children,\" Junior said, \"where's Four?\"\n\n\n \"Here.\" Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room,\n carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a\n small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round,\n raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep.\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" it queried hopefully.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" said Four.\n\n\n \"Where've you been?\" Reba asked anxiously. \"What've you been doing?\"\n\n\n \"I've been all over Fweepland,\" Four said wearily, \"trying to locate\n its center of gravity.\"\n\n\n \"Well?\" Fred prompted.\n\n\n \"It shifts.\"\n\n\n \"That's impossible,\" said Junior.\n\n\n \"Not for Fweep,\" Four replied.",
"Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from\n the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, \"Well, gosh,\n Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data\n into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that\n the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said,\n 'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium—'\"\n\n\n \"That's enough, Four,\" Junior interrupted. \"Never mind what I said.\"\n\n\n Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking\n remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled\n until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.\n\n\n \"And, Four,\" Reba said automatically, \"don't call your father 'Junior.'\n It sounds disrespectful.\"",
"Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. \"Your guess is\n as good as anybody's.\"\n\n\n \"Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock,\" Joyce complained.\n She turned savagely on Fred. \"This was going to make us all filthy\n rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like\n billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this\n cramped old flivver—and we don't have many of them to spare!\" She\n glared venomously at Grampa.\n\n\n \"We've still got Fweepland,\" Four said solemnly.\n\n\n \"Fweepland?\" Reba repeated.\n\n\n \"This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As\n real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium.\"",
"Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a\n red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That\n Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever\n noticed about the boy.\n\n\n \"But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'\" Four complained. \"Besides, Fred\n is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'\"\n\n\n \"That's different,\" Reba said.\n\n\n Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. \"See!\" The\n pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender\n openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. \"That landing\n made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again.\"",
"\"Look!\" he said suddenly. \"This planet not only has flora—it has\n fauna.\" He rushed to the air lock.\n\n\n \"Four!\" Reba called out warningly.\n\n\n \"It's all right, Reba,\" Four assured her. \"The air is within one per\n cent of Earth-normal and the bio-analyzer can find no micro-organisms\n viable within the Terran spectrum.\"\n\n\n \"What about macro-organisms—\" Reba began, but the boy was gone\n already. Reba's face was troubled. \"That boy!\" she said to Junior.\n \"Sometimes I think we've made a terrible mistake with him. He should\n have friends, play-mates. He's more like a little old man than a boy.\"\n\n\n But Junior nodded meaningfully at Fred and disappeared into the chart\n room. Fred followed casually. Then, as the door slid shut behind him,\n he asked impatiently. \"Well, what's all the mystery?\"",
"\"What I can't understand,\" Junior said thoughtfully, \"is why the\n polarizer worked for a little while when we landed—long enough to keep\n us from being squashed—and then quit.\"\n\n\n \"Fweep didn't recognize it immediately, didn't know what it was or\n where it came from,\" Four explained. \"All he knew was he didn't like\n linear polarization and he neutralized it as soon as he could. That's\n when we dropped.\"\n\"Linear polarization is uncomfortable for him, is it?\" Grampa said.\n \"Makes you wonder how something like Fweep could ever develop.\"\n\n\n \"He's no more improbable than people,\" said Four.\n\n\n \"Less than some I've known,\" Grampa conceded.\n\n\n \"If he can eat anything,\" Reba said, \"why does he keep sweeping the\n cabin for dust and lint?\"",
"\"Fwiend,\" said Fweep gently.\nThe land of the Fweep turned like a fat old man toasting himself in\n front of an open fire, and Junior sat at the computer's keyboard\n swearing in a steady monotone.\n\n\n \"Junior!\" said Joyce, shocked.\n\n\n Junior swung around impatiently. \"Sorry, Mother, but this damned thing\n won't work.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure that calling it names won't help, and besides, you shouldn't\n expect a machine to do something that we can't do. And if it did work,\n it would only say that the logical answer is the one I sug—\"\n\n\n \"Mother!\" Junior warned. \"We decided not to talk about it any more.\n Four is strange enough without encouraging him to think like a martyr.\n It's out of the question. If that's the only way we can leave this\n planet, we'll stay here until Four has a beard as white as Grampa's!\"",
"\"You bet he would!\" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned\n over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, \"Beats me why you ever\n married a jerk like Junior, anyhow.\"\n\n\n Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. \"Maybe I saw\n something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been\n submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you\n and to himself, too.\" Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. \"And maybe I\n thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather.\"\nGrampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring\n intently at Fweep. \"What you doing, Four?\"\n\n\n \"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings,\" Four said\n absently. \"The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then\n slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle.\"",
"\"And make the best of what we've got,\" Reba went on, unheeding. \"If we\n look at it the right way, it's quite a lot. A beautiful, fertile world.\n Earth gravity. The flivver—even if the polarizer won't work, there's\n the resynthesizer; it will keep us in food and clothes for years. By\n then, we should have a good-sized community built up, because out here\n we won't have to stop with one child. We can have all the babies we\n want.\"\n\n\n \"You know the law: one child per couple,\" Joyce reminded her frigidly.\n \"You can condemn yourself to exile from civilization if you wish. Not\n me.\"\n\n\n Junior frowned at his wife. \"I believe you're actually glad it\n happened.\"\n\n\n \"I could think of worse things,\" Reba said.\n\n\n \"I like your spunk, Reb,\" Grampa muttered.",
"\"What do you mean by that?\" Joyce suspiciously asked.\n\n\n \"It shifted,\" Four explained patiently, \"because Fweep kept following\n me.\"\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" Junior repeated stupidly.\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" Fweep said eagerly.\n\n\n \"He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear\n polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet\n so heavy. He's why we can't leave.\"\nThe land of the Fweep rotated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered\n the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. \"I got it figured out,\n Four,\" he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. \"A missionary takes\n over a non-rowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing\n cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and—\"",
"\"Well, no,\" Grampa admitted. \"Actually I was just fiddling around with\n some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling,\n dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out\n near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound\n it.\"\n\n\n \"Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?\" Joyce demanded\n ironically.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said in bafflement, \"it rightly should, you know.\"\n\"We're stuck,\" Reba said softly. \"We might as well admit it. All we can\n do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call—\"\n\n\n \"Which,\" Joyce interrupted, \"might get picked up in a few centuries.\"",
"Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. \"Well, boy,\" he said to\n Fred, \"I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you.\"\n\n\n Fred stood up apologetically. \"I'd better go calm her down,\" he\n muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce.\n\n\n \"Give her one for me!\" Grampa called.\n\n\n Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room\n came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like\n some reedy folk music.\n\n\n \"Makes you think, doesn't it?\" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly.\n \"Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a\n Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity\n in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result.\"",
"\"Well!\" Joyce said in a stiff, offended tone and sat back in her chair.\n\n\n Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips and chortled. \"Junior,\n I apologize for all the mean things I ever said about you. Maybe you\n got the makings of a Peppergrass yet.\"\n\n\n Junior turned back to the keyboard and studied it, his chin in his\n hand. \"It's just a matter of stating the problem in terms the computer\n can work on.\"",
"Grampa looked up from his pircuit and said, \"If I were you, Junior, I\n would take a good look at the TV repairman when we get back to Earth.\nIf\nwe get back to Earth,\" he amended. \"You can't be Four's father.\n All over the Universe, gravity is the same, and if it's gravity, the\n polarizer will polarize it.\"\n\n\n \"That's just supposition,\" Junior said stubbornly. \"The fact is, it\n isn't because it doesn't. Q.E.D.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe the polarizer is broken,\" Fred suggested.",
"\"It belongs to all of us,\" Four said shrilly. \"You gave us all a sixth\n share.\"\n\n\n \"That's right, Four,\" Grampa muttered, \"so I did. But whose money\n bought it?\"\n\n\n \"You bought it, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space\n flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?\"\n\n\n \"You, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the\n rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?\"\n\n\n \"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and\n longevity pills,\" Joyce said bitterly, \"and fixed it so we'd have to\n go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly\n galaxy? You, Grampa!\""
],
[
"Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a\n red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That\n Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever\n noticed about the boy.\n\n\n \"But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'\" Four complained. \"Besides, Fred\n is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'\"\n\n\n \"That's different,\" Reba said.\n\n\n Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. \"See!\" The\n pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender\n openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. \"That landing\n made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again.\"",
"\"It belongs to all of us,\" Four said shrilly. \"You gave us all a sixth\n share.\"\n\n\n \"That's right, Four,\" Grampa muttered, \"so I did. But whose money\n bought it?\"\n\n\n \"You bought it, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space\n flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?\"\n\n\n \"You, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the\n rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?\"\n\n\n \"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and\n longevity pills,\" Joyce said bitterly, \"and fixed it so we'd have to\n go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly\n galaxy? You, Grampa!\"",
"Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. \"Well, boy,\" he said to\n Fred, \"I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you.\"\n\n\n Fred stood up apologetically. \"I'd better go calm her down,\" he\n muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce.\n\n\n \"Give her one for me!\" Grampa called.\n\n\n Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room\n came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like\n some reedy folk music.\n\n\n \"Makes you think, doesn't it?\" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly.\n \"Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a\n Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity\n in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result.\"",
"\"You bet he would!\" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned\n over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, \"Beats me why you ever\n married a jerk like Junior, anyhow.\"\n\n\n Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. \"Maybe I saw\n something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been\n submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you\n and to himself, too.\" Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. \"And maybe I\n thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather.\"\nGrampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring\n intently at Fweep. \"What you doing, Four?\"\n\n\n \"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings,\" Four said\n absently. \"The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then\n slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle.\"",
"\"Stop picking on Junior,\" Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother\n and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but\n somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. \"I'm sure\n he did the best he could.\"\n\n\n \"Anybody talks about gravitational pull,\" Grampa said, snorting,\n \"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing,\n Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the\n curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred\n years ago.\"\n\n\n \"Go back to your games, Grampa,\" Fred said impatiently. \"We've got work\n to do.\"\nGrampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last\n button on his pircuit. The last light went out. \"You've got work to\n do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?\"",
"\"Well, now,\" Grampa protested, \"I got a little put away yet. You'll be\n sorry when I'm dead and gone.\"\n\n\n \"You're never going to die, Grampa,\" Joyce said harshly. \"Just\n before we left, you bought a hundred-year contract with that\n Life-Begins-At-Ninety longevity company.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" said Grampa, blinking, \"how'd you find out about that?\n Well, now!\" In confusion, he turned back to the pircuit and jabbed a\n button. Thirteen slim lights sprang on. \"I'll get you this time!\"\n\n\n Four stretched and stood up. He looked curiously into the corner by the\n computer where Grampa's chair stood. \"You brought that pircuit from\n Earth, didn't you? What's the game?\"",
"\"Sure,\" Four said. \"Go ahead, fweep—I mean sweep.\"\n\n\n Swiftly the sphere rolled across the floor. Behind it was left a\n narrow path of sparkling clean tile.\n\n\n Grampa glanced warily at Joyce's door to make sure it was completely\n closed and then cocked a white eyebrow at Reba. \"Good for you, Reba!\"\n he said admiringly. \"For forty years now, I've wanted to do that. Never\n had the nerve.\"\n\n\n \"Why, thanks, Grampa,\" Reba said, surprised.\n\n\n \"I like you, gal. Never forget it.\"\n\n\n \"I like you, too, Grampa. If you'd been a few years younger, Junior\n would have had competition!\"",
"Inside were row after row of nipple-topped, flat-sided, flexible\n free-fall bottles and a battered cigar box. \"Thought you'd say that,\"\n he said, picking out the box. \"Help yourself.\" With the other hand, he\n lifted out one of the bottles and took a long drag on it. \"Ahhh!\" he\n sighed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and carefully put\n the bottle away.\n\n\n \"What is that stuff you drink, Grampa?\" Four asked.\n\n\n \"Tonic, boy. Keeps me young and frisky. Now about that pircuit—\"\n\n\n \"Did you ever work on Niccolò Tartaglia's puzzle about the three lovely\n brides, the three jealous husbands, the river and the two-passenger\n rowboat?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Grampa said. \"Too easy.\"",
"Four's eyes widened farther. \"But Fweep's my friend.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense!\" Joyce said sharply. \"Earthmen don't make friends with\n aliens. And that's nothing but a—a blob!\"\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" queried the raspberry lips. \"Fweep?\"\n\n\n \"If it's Four's friend,\" Reba said firmly, \"it can stay. If you don't\n like to be around it, Grammy, you can always go to your own room.\"\n\n\n Joyce stood up indignantly. \"Well! And don't call me 'Grammy!' It makes\n me sound as old as that old goat over there!\" She glared malignantly\n at Grampa. \"If you'd rather have that blob than me—well!\" She swept\n grandly out of the central cabin and into one of the private rooms that\n opened out from it.\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" asked the blob.",
"As it hurtled down, its speed increased with dramatic swiftness. Then,\n at the last instant before impact, it stopped. Just like that.\n\n\n A moment later, it thumped a last few inches into the ankle-deep grass\n and knee-high white flowers of the meadow. It was a shock of a jar that\n made the sheet-metal walls boom like thunder machines. The flivver\n rocked unsteadily on its flat stern before it decided to stay upright.\n\n\n Then all was quiet—outside.\n\n\n Inside the big, central cabin, Grampa waved his pircuit irately in the\n air. \"Now look what you made me do! Just when I had the blamed thing\n practically whipped, too!\"\nGrampa was a white-haired 90-year-old who could still go a fast round\n or two with a man (or woman) half his age, but he had a habit of\n lapsing into tantrum when he got annoyed.",
"Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from\n the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, \"Well, gosh,\n Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data\n into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that\n the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said,\n 'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium—'\"\n\n\n \"That's enough, Four,\" Junior interrupted. \"Never mind what I said.\"\n\n\n Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking\n remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled\n until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.\n\n\n \"And, Four,\" Reba said automatically, \"don't call your father 'Junior.'\n It sounds disrespectful.\"",
"\"Well!\" Joyce said in a stiff, offended tone and sat back in her chair.\n\n\n Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips and chortled. \"Junior,\n I apologize for all the mean things I ever said about you. Maybe you\n got the makings of a Peppergrass yet.\"\n\n\n Junior turned back to the keyboard and studied it, his chin in his\n hand. \"It's just a matter of stating the problem in terms the computer\n can work on.\"",
"\"Now wait a minute!\" Grampa protested. \"That's not fair. Maybe\n I didn't figure out the theory myself, but I read everything the\n scientists ever wrote about it. Wanted to know myself what made the\n blamed thing work. What I told you is what the scientists said, near\n as I remember. Now me—I'm like Edison. I do it and let everybody else\n worry over 'why.'\"\n\n\n \"The only thing you ever did was the polarizer,\" Joyce snapped.\n \"And then you spent everything you got from it on those fool\n perpetual-motion machines and those crazy longevity schemes when any\n moron would know they were impossible.\"\n\n\n Grampa squinted at her sagely. \"That's what they said about the gravity\n polarizer before I invented it.\"\n\n\n \"But you don't really know why it works,\" Junior persisted.",
"\"And make the best of what we've got,\" Reba went on, unheeding. \"If we\n look at it the right way, it's quite a lot. A beautiful, fertile world.\n Earth gravity. The flivver—even if the polarizer won't work, there's\n the resynthesizer; it will keep us in food and clothes for years. By\n then, we should have a good-sized community built up, because out here\n we won't have to stop with one child. We can have all the babies we\n want.\"\n\n\n \"You know the law: one child per couple,\" Joyce reminded her frigidly.\n \"You can condemn yourself to exile from civilization if you wish. Not\n me.\"\n\n\n Junior frowned at his wife. \"I believe you're actually glad it\n happened.\"\n\n\n \"I could think of worse things,\" Reba said.\n\n\n \"I like your spunk, Reb,\" Grampa muttered.",
"At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into\n Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips.\n \"Fwiend,\" it said.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, \"that's no\n problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep.\"\n\n\n In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, \"That's quite\n a sacrifice to ask, but—\"\n\n\n \"Joyce!\" Reba cried, horrified. \"Grampa was joking, but you actually\n mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind, Reba,\" Four said evenly. \"It was just what I was going to\n suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution.\"",
"\"Now, Grampa,\" Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once\n called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had\n begun to gray at the temples. \"That landing was pretty rough, Junior.\"\nJunior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable\n of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult\n reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his\n knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. \"I know it,\n Fred,\" he said, frowning. \"This world fooled me. It has a diameter\n less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as\n Earth.\"",
"\"Well, no,\" Grampa admitted. \"Actually I was just fiddling around with\n some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling,\n dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out\n near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound\n it.\"\n\n\n \"Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?\" Joyce demanded\n ironically.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said in bafflement, \"it rightly should, you know.\"\n\"We're stuck,\" Reba said softly. \"We might as well admit it. All we can\n do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call—\"\n\n\n \"Which,\" Joyce interrupted, \"might get picked up in a few centuries.\"",
"\"And blow him up? I don't think it's possible, but even if it were, it\n might be a trifle more than disastrous for us.\" Four giggled at the\n thought.\nJoyce glared at him furiously. \"Four! Act your age! We've got to do\n something with him. It's preposterous that we should be detained here\n at the whim of a mere blob!\"\n\n\n \"I don't figure it's a whim,\" Grampa said. \"Circular gravity is what\n he's got to have for one reason or another, so he just naturally bends\n the space-time continuum around him—conscious or subconscious, I don't\n know. But protoplasm is always more efficient than machines, so the\n flivver won't move.\"",
"\"I don't care why that thing does it,\" Joyce said icily. \"I want it\n stopped, and the sooner the better. If it won't turn the gravity off,\n we'll just have to do away with it.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" asked Four. \"Fweep's skin is pretty close to impervious and\n you can't shoot him, stab him or poison him. He doesn't breathe, so\n you can't drown or strangle him. You can't imprison him; he 'eats'\n everything. And violence might be more dangerous to us than to him.\n Right now, Fweep is friendly, but suppose he got mad! He could lower\n his radioactive shield or he might increase the gravity by a few times.\n Either way, you'd feel rather uncomfortable, Grammy.\"\n\n\n \"Don't call me 'Grammy!' Well, what are we going to do, just sit around\n and wait for that thing to die?\"",
"Grampa looked up, obviously relieved to drop his act of intense\n concentration. \"I'll tell you, boy. You play against the pircuit,\n taking turns, and you can put out one, two or three lights. The player\n who makes the other one turn out the last light is the winner.\"\n\n\n \"That's simple,\" Four said without hesitation. \"The winning strategy is\n to—\"\n\n\n \"Don't be a kibitzer!\" Grampa snapped. \"When I need help, I'll ask\n for it. No dad-blamed machine is gonna outthink Grampa!\" He snorted\n indignantly.\nFour shrugged his narrow shoulders and wandered to the view screen.\n Within it was the green horizon, curving noticeably. Four angled the\n picture in toward the ship, sweeping through green, peaceful woodland\n and plain and blue lake until he stared down into the meadow at the\n flivver's stern."
],
[
"Four thought a moment. \"There's a modern variation with three\n missionaries and three cannibals. Same river, same rowboat and only one\n of the cannibals can row. If the cannibals outnumber the missionaries—\"\n\n\n \"Sounds good, boy,\" Grampa said eagerly. \"Whip it up for me.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, Grampa.\" Four looked at Fweep again. The translucent sphere had\n paused at Grampa's feet.\n\n\n Grampa reached down to pat it. For an instant, his hand disappeared\n into Fweep, and then the alien creature rolled away. This time its path\n seemed crooked.\n\n\n Its gelatinous form jiggled. \"Hic!\" it said.\nAs if in response, the flivver vibrated. Grampa looked querulously\n toward the airlock. \"Flivver shouldn't shake like that. Not with the\n polarizer turned on.\"",
"Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from\n the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, \"Well, gosh,\n Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data\n into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that\n the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said,\n 'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium—'\"\n\n\n \"That's enough, Four,\" Junior interrupted. \"Never mind what I said.\"\n\n\n Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking\n remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled\n until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.\n\n\n \"And, Four,\" Reba said automatically, \"don't call your father 'Junior.'\n It sounds disrespectful.\"",
"\"A good thing, too,\" Junior said glumly, \"because this looks like the\n end of our search. Short of a miracle, we'll spend the rest of our\n lives right here—involuntary colonists.\"\n\n\n Joyce spun on him. \"You're joking!\" she screeched.\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" Junior said. \"But the polarizer won't work. Either\n it's broken or there's something about the gravity around here that\n just won't polarize.\"\n\n\n \"It's these '23 models,\" Grampa put in disgustedly. \"They never were\n any good.\"\nThe land of the Fweep turned slowly on its axis. The orange sun set and\n rose again and stared down once more at the meadow where the improbable\n spaceship rested on its improbable stern. The sixteen Earth hours that\n the rotation had taken had changed nothing inside the ship, either.",
"\"It belongs to all of us,\" Four said shrilly. \"You gave us all a sixth\n share.\"\n\n\n \"That's right, Four,\" Grampa muttered, \"so I did. But whose money\n bought it?\"\n\n\n \"You bought it, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space\n flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?\"\n\n\n \"You, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the\n rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?\"\n\n\n \"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and\n longevity pills,\" Joyce said bitterly, \"and fixed it so we'd have to\n go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly\n galaxy? You, Grampa!\"",
"\"Speaking of children,\" Junior said, \"where's Four?\"\n\n\n \"Here.\" Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room,\n carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a\n small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round,\n raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep.\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" it queried hopefully.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" said Four.\n\n\n \"Where've you been?\" Reba asked anxiously. \"What've you been doing?\"\n\n\n \"I've been all over Fweepland,\" Four said wearily, \"trying to locate\n its center of gravity.\"\n\n\n \"Well?\" Fred prompted.\n\n\n \"It shifts.\"\n\n\n \"That's impossible,\" said Junior.\n\n\n \"Not for Fweep,\" Four replied.",
"\"Well, no,\" Grampa admitted. \"Actually I was just fiddling around with\n some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling,\n dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out\n near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound\n it.\"\n\n\n \"Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?\" Joyce demanded\n ironically.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said in bafflement, \"it rightly should, you know.\"\n\"We're stuck,\" Reba said softly. \"We might as well admit it. All we can\n do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call—\"\n\n\n \"Which,\" Joyce interrupted, \"might get picked up in a few centuries.\"",
"Inside were row after row of nipple-topped, flat-sided, flexible\n free-fall bottles and a battered cigar box. \"Thought you'd say that,\"\n he said, picking out the box. \"Help yourself.\" With the other hand, he\n lifted out one of the bottles and took a long drag on it. \"Ahhh!\" he\n sighed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and carefully put\n the bottle away.\n\n\n \"What is that stuff you drink, Grampa?\" Four asked.\n\n\n \"Tonic, boy. Keeps me young and frisky. Now about that pircuit—\"\n\n\n \"Did you ever work on Niccolò Tartaglia's puzzle about the three lovely\n brides, the three jealous husbands, the river and the two-passenger\n rowboat?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Grampa said. \"Too easy.\"",
"As it hurtled down, its speed increased with dramatic swiftness. Then,\n at the last instant before impact, it stopped. Just like that.\n\n\n A moment later, it thumped a last few inches into the ankle-deep grass\n and knee-high white flowers of the meadow. It was a shock of a jar that\n made the sheet-metal walls boom like thunder machines. The flivver\n rocked unsteadily on its flat stern before it decided to stay upright.\n\n\n Then all was quiet—outside.\n\n\n Inside the big, central cabin, Grampa waved his pircuit irately in the\n air. \"Now look what you made me do! Just when I had the blamed thing\n practically whipped, too!\"\nGrampa was a white-haired 90-year-old who could still go a fast round\n or two with a man (or woman) half his age, but he had a habit of\n lapsing into tantrum when he got annoyed.",
"\"Look!\" he said suddenly. \"This planet not only has flora—it has\n fauna.\" He rushed to the air lock.\n\n\n \"Four!\" Reba called out warningly.\n\n\n \"It's all right, Reba,\" Four assured her. \"The air is within one per\n cent of Earth-normal and the bio-analyzer can find no micro-organisms\n viable within the Terran spectrum.\"\n\n\n \"What about macro-organisms—\" Reba began, but the boy was gone\n already. Reba's face was troubled. \"That boy!\" she said to Junior.\n \"Sometimes I think we've made a terrible mistake with him. He should\n have friends, play-mates. He's more like a little old man than a boy.\"\n\n\n But Junior nodded meaningfully at Fred and disappeared into the chart\n room. Fred followed casually. Then, as the door slid shut behind him,\n he asked impatiently. \"Well, what's all the mystery?\"",
"\"Now, Grampa,\" Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once\n called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had\n begun to gray at the temples. \"That landing was pretty rough, Junior.\"\nJunior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable\n of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult\n reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his\n knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. \"I know it,\n Fred,\" he said, frowning. \"This world fooled me. It has a diameter\n less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as\n Earth.\"",
"At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into\n Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips.\n \"Fwiend,\" it said.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, \"that's no\n problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep.\"\n\n\n In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, \"That's quite\n a sacrifice to ask, but—\"\n\n\n \"Joyce!\" Reba cried, horrified. \"Grampa was joking, but you actually\n mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind, Reba,\" Four said evenly. \"It was just what I was going to\n suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution.\"",
"\"He wants to be helpful,\" Four replied without hesitation, \"and he's\n lonely. After all,\" he added wistfully, \"he's never had any friends.\"\n\n\n \"How do you know all these things?\" Joyce asked from her doorway,\n excitement in her voice. \"Can you talk to it?\"\n\n\n Behind her, Fred said, \"Now, Joyce, you promised—\"\n\n\n \"But this is important,\" Joyce cut him off eagerly. \"Can you? Talk to\n it, I mean?\"\n\n\n \"Some,\" Four admitted.\n\n\n \"Have you asked it to let us go?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Well? What did it say?\"\n\n\n \"He said he didn't want his friend to leave him.\"",
"Grampa looked up, obviously relieved to drop his act of intense\n concentration. \"I'll tell you, boy. You play against the pircuit,\n taking turns, and you can put out one, two or three lights. The player\n who makes the other one turn out the last light is the winner.\"\n\n\n \"That's simple,\" Four said without hesitation. \"The winning strategy is\n to—\"\n\n\n \"Don't be a kibitzer!\" Grampa snapped. \"When I need help, I'll ask\n for it. No dad-blamed machine is gonna outthink Grampa!\" He snorted\n indignantly.\nFour shrugged his narrow shoulders and wandered to the view screen.\n Within it was the green horizon, curving noticeably. Four angled the\n picture in toward the ship, sweeping through green, peaceful woodland\n and plain and blue lake until he stared down into the meadow at the\n flivver's stern.",
"\"Stop picking on Junior,\" Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother\n and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but\n somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. \"I'm sure\n he did the best he could.\"\n\n\n \"Anybody talks about gravitational pull,\" Grampa said, snorting,\n \"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing,\n Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the\n curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred\n years ago.\"\n\n\n \"Go back to your games, Grampa,\" Fred said impatiently. \"We've got work\n to do.\"\nGrampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last\n button on his pircuit. The last light went out. \"You've got work to\n do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?\"",
"\"You bet he would!\" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned\n over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, \"Beats me why you ever\n married a jerk like Junior, anyhow.\"\n\n\n Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. \"Maybe I saw\n something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been\n submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you\n and to himself, too.\" Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. \"And maybe I\n thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather.\"\nGrampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring\n intently at Fweep. \"What you doing, Four?\"\n\n\n \"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings,\" Four said\n absently. \"The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then\n slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle.\"",
"\"Well, now,\" Grampa protested, \"I got a little put away yet. You'll be\n sorry when I'm dead and gone.\"\n\n\n \"You're never going to die, Grampa,\" Joyce said harshly. \"Just\n before we left, you bought a hundred-year contract with that\n Life-Begins-At-Ninety longevity company.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" said Grampa, blinking, \"how'd you find out about that?\n Well, now!\" In confusion, he turned back to the pircuit and jabbed a\n button. Thirteen slim lights sprang on. \"I'll get you this time!\"\n\n\n Four stretched and stood up. He looked curiously into the corner by the\n computer where Grampa's chair stood. \"You brought that pircuit from\n Earth, didn't you? What's the game?\"",
"\"And make the best of what we've got,\" Reba went on, unheeding. \"If we\n look at it the right way, it's quite a lot. A beautiful, fertile world.\n Earth gravity. The flivver—even if the polarizer won't work, there's\n the resynthesizer; it will keep us in food and clothes for years. By\n then, we should have a good-sized community built up, because out here\n we won't have to stop with one child. We can have all the babies we\n want.\"\n\n\n \"You know the law: one child per couple,\" Joyce reminded her frigidly.\n \"You can condemn yourself to exile from civilization if you wish. Not\n me.\"\n\n\n Junior frowned at his wife. \"I believe you're actually glad it\n happened.\"\n\n\n \"I could think of worse things,\" Reba said.\n\n\n \"I like your spunk, Reb,\" Grampa muttered.",
"Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a\n red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That\n Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever\n noticed about the boy.\n\n\n \"But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'\" Four complained. \"Besides, Fred\n is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'\"\n\n\n \"That's different,\" Reba said.\n\n\n Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. \"See!\" The\n pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender\n openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. \"That landing\n made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again.\"",
"\"No use bothering the others yet,\" Junior said, his face puzzled. \"You\n see, I didn't let the flivver drop those last few inches. The polarizer\n quit.\"\n\n\n \"Quit!\"\n\n\n \"That's not the worst. I tried to take it up again. The flivver—it\n won't budge!\"\nThe thing was a featureless blob, a two-foot sphere of raspberry\n gelatin, but it was alive. It rocked back and forth in front of Four.\n It opened a raspberry-color pseudo-mouth and said plaintively, \"Fweep?\n Fweep?\"\n\n\n Joyce drew her chair farther back toward the wall, revulsion on her\n face. \"Four! Get that nasty thing out of here!\"\n\"You mean Fweep?\" Four asked in astonishment.\n\n\n \"I mean that thing, whatever you call it.\" Joyce fluttered her hand\n impatiently. \"Get it out!\"",
"\"Fwiend,\" said Fweep gently.\nThe land of the Fweep turned like a fat old man toasting himself in\n front of an open fire, and Junior sat at the computer's keyboard\n swearing in a steady monotone.\n\n\n \"Junior!\" said Joyce, shocked.\n\n\n Junior swung around impatiently. \"Sorry, Mother, but this damned thing\n won't work.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure that calling it names won't help, and besides, you shouldn't\n expect a machine to do something that we can't do. And if it did work,\n it would only say that the logical answer is the one I sug—\"\n\n\n \"Mother!\" Junior warned. \"We decided not to talk about it any more.\n Four is strange enough without encouraging him to think like a martyr.\n It's out of the question. If that's the only way we can leave this\n planet, we'll stay here until Four has a beard as white as Grampa's!\""
],
[
"\"Sure,\" Four said. \"Go ahead, fweep—I mean sweep.\"\n\n\n Swiftly the sphere rolled across the floor. Behind it was left a\n narrow path of sparkling clean tile.\n\n\n Grampa glanced warily at Joyce's door to make sure it was completely\n closed and then cocked a white eyebrow at Reba. \"Good for you, Reba!\"\n he said admiringly. \"For forty years now, I've wanted to do that. Never\n had the nerve.\"\n\n\n \"Why, thanks, Grampa,\" Reba said, surprised.\n\n\n \"I like you, gal. Never forget it.\"\n\n\n \"I like you, too, Grampa. If you'd been a few years younger, Junior\n would have had competition!\"",
"Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a\n red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That\n Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever\n noticed about the boy.\n\n\n \"But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'\" Four complained. \"Besides, Fred\n is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'\"\n\n\n \"That's different,\" Reba said.\n\n\n Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. \"See!\" The\n pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender\n openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. \"That landing\n made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again.\"",
"\"You bet he would!\" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned\n over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, \"Beats me why you ever\n married a jerk like Junior, anyhow.\"\n\n\n Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. \"Maybe I saw\n something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been\n submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you\n and to himself, too.\" Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. \"And maybe I\n thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather.\"\nGrampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring\n intently at Fweep. \"What you doing, Four?\"\n\n\n \"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings,\" Four said\n absently. \"The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then\n slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle.\"",
"\"And make the best of what we've got,\" Reba went on, unheeding. \"If we\n look at it the right way, it's quite a lot. A beautiful, fertile world.\n Earth gravity. The flivver—even if the polarizer won't work, there's\n the resynthesizer; it will keep us in food and clothes for years. By\n then, we should have a good-sized community built up, because out here\n we won't have to stop with one child. We can have all the babies we\n want.\"\n\n\n \"You know the law: one child per couple,\" Joyce reminded her frigidly.\n \"You can condemn yourself to exile from civilization if you wish. Not\n me.\"\n\n\n Junior frowned at his wife. \"I believe you're actually glad it\n happened.\"\n\n\n \"I could think of worse things,\" Reba said.\n\n\n \"I like your spunk, Reb,\" Grampa muttered.",
"Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. \"Well, boy,\" he said to\n Fred, \"I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you.\"\n\n\n Fred stood up apologetically. \"I'd better go calm her down,\" he\n muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce.\n\n\n \"Give her one for me!\" Grampa called.\n\n\n Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room\n came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like\n some reedy folk music.\n\n\n \"Makes you think, doesn't it?\" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly.\n \"Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a\n Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity\n in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result.\"",
"Four's eyes widened farther. \"But Fweep's my friend.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense!\" Joyce said sharply. \"Earthmen don't make friends with\n aliens. And that's nothing but a—a blob!\"\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" queried the raspberry lips. \"Fweep?\"\n\n\n \"If it's Four's friend,\" Reba said firmly, \"it can stay. If you don't\n like to be around it, Grammy, you can always go to your own room.\"\n\n\n Joyce stood up indignantly. \"Well! And don't call me 'Grammy!' It makes\n me sound as old as that old goat over there!\" She glared malignantly\n at Grampa. \"If you'd rather have that blob than me—well!\" She swept\n grandly out of the central cabin and into one of the private rooms that\n opened out from it.\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" asked the blob.",
"\"Well, now,\" Grampa protested, \"I got a little put away yet. You'll be\n sorry when I'm dead and gone.\"\n\n\n \"You're never going to die, Grampa,\" Joyce said harshly. \"Just\n before we left, you bought a hundred-year contract with that\n Life-Begins-At-Ninety longevity company.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" said Grampa, blinking, \"how'd you find out about that?\n Well, now!\" In confusion, he turned back to the pircuit and jabbed a\n button. Thirteen slim lights sprang on. \"I'll get you this time!\"\n\n\n Four stretched and stood up. He looked curiously into the corner by the\n computer where Grampa's chair stood. \"You brought that pircuit from\n Earth, didn't you? What's the game?\"",
"At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into\n Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips.\n \"Fwiend,\" it said.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, \"that's no\n problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep.\"\n\n\n In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, \"That's quite\n a sacrifice to ask, but—\"\n\n\n \"Joyce!\" Reba cried, horrified. \"Grampa was joking, but you actually\n mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind, Reba,\" Four said evenly. \"It was just what I was going to\n suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution.\"",
"\"Well!\" Joyce said in a stiff, offended tone and sat back in her chair.\n\n\n Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips and chortled. \"Junior,\n I apologize for all the mean things I ever said about you. Maybe you\n got the makings of a Peppergrass yet.\"\n\n\n Junior turned back to the keyboard and studied it, his chin in his\n hand. \"It's just a matter of stating the problem in terms the computer\n can work on.\"",
"\"It belongs to all of us,\" Four said shrilly. \"You gave us all a sixth\n share.\"\n\n\n \"That's right, Four,\" Grampa muttered, \"so I did. But whose money\n bought it?\"\n\n\n \"You bought it, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space\n flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?\"\n\n\n \"You, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the\n rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?\"\n\n\n \"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and\n longevity pills,\" Joyce said bitterly, \"and fixed it so we'd have to\n go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly\n galaxy? You, Grampa!\"",
"Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. \"Your guess is\n as good as anybody's.\"\n\n\n \"Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock,\" Joyce complained.\n She turned savagely on Fred. \"This was going to make us all filthy\n rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like\n billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this\n cramped old flivver—and we don't have many of them to spare!\" She\n glared venomously at Grampa.\n\n\n \"We've still got Fweepland,\" Four said solemnly.\n\n\n \"Fweepland?\" Reba repeated.\n\n\n \"This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As\n real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium.\"",
"\"Well, no,\" Grampa admitted. \"Actually I was just fiddling around with\n some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling,\n dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out\n near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound\n it.\"\n\n\n \"Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?\" Joyce demanded\n ironically.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said in bafflement, \"it rightly should, you know.\"\n\"We're stuck,\" Reba said softly. \"We might as well admit it. All we can\n do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call—\"\n\n\n \"Which,\" Joyce interrupted, \"might get picked up in a few centuries.\"",
"\"Stop picking on Junior,\" Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother\n and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but\n somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. \"I'm sure\n he did the best he could.\"\n\n\n \"Anybody talks about gravitational pull,\" Grampa said, snorting,\n \"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing,\n Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the\n curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred\n years ago.\"\n\n\n \"Go back to your games, Grampa,\" Fred said impatiently. \"We've got work\n to do.\"\nGrampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last\n button on his pircuit. The last light went out. \"You've got work to\n do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?\"",
"\"Now wait a minute!\" Grampa protested. \"That's not fair. Maybe\n I didn't figure out the theory myself, but I read everything the\n scientists ever wrote about it. Wanted to know myself what made the\n blamed thing work. What I told you is what the scientists said, near\n as I remember. Now me—I'm like Edison. I do it and let everybody else\n worry over 'why.'\"\n\n\n \"The only thing you ever did was the polarizer,\" Joyce snapped.\n \"And then you spent everything you got from it on those fool\n perpetual-motion machines and those crazy longevity schemes when any\n moron would know they were impossible.\"\n\n\n Grampa squinted at her sagely. \"That's what they said about the gravity\n polarizer before I invented it.\"\n\n\n \"But you don't really know why it works,\" Junior persisted.",
"As it hurtled down, its speed increased with dramatic swiftness. Then,\n at the last instant before impact, it stopped. Just like that.\n\n\n A moment later, it thumped a last few inches into the ankle-deep grass\n and knee-high white flowers of the meadow. It was a shock of a jar that\n made the sheet-metal walls boom like thunder machines. The flivver\n rocked unsteadily on its flat stern before it decided to stay upright.\n\n\n Then all was quiet—outside.\n\n\n Inside the big, central cabin, Grampa waved his pircuit irately in the\n air. \"Now look what you made me do! Just when I had the blamed thing\n practically whipped, too!\"\nGrampa was a white-haired 90-year-old who could still go a fast round\n or two with a man (or woman) half his age, but he had a habit of\n lapsing into tantrum when he got annoyed.",
"Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from\n the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, \"Well, gosh,\n Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data\n into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that\n the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said,\n 'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium—'\"\n\n\n \"That's enough, Four,\" Junior interrupted. \"Never mind what I said.\"\n\n\n Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking\n remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled\n until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.\n\n\n \"And, Four,\" Reba said automatically, \"don't call your father 'Junior.'\n It sounds disrespectful.\"",
"\"Now, Grampa,\" Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once\n called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had\n begun to gray at the temples. \"That landing was pretty rough, Junior.\"\nJunior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable\n of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult\n reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his\n knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. \"I know it,\n Fred,\" he said, frowning. \"This world fooled me. It has a diameter\n less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as\n Earth.\"",
"\"That's the idea, Four. You'll be a Peppergrass yet. How about building\n me a pircuit?\"\n\n\n \"You get the other one figured out?\"\n\n\n \"It was easy,\" Grampa said breezily, \"once you understood the\n principle. The player who moved second could always win if he used the\n right strategy. Dividing the thirteen lights into three sections of\n four each—\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Four agreed. \"I can make you a new one by cannibalizing\n the other pircuit, but I'll need a few extra parts.\"\n\n\n Grampa pushed the wall beside his chair and a drawer slid out of it.",
"Inside were row after row of nipple-topped, flat-sided, flexible\n free-fall bottles and a battered cigar box. \"Thought you'd say that,\"\n he said, picking out the box. \"Help yourself.\" With the other hand, he\n lifted out one of the bottles and took a long drag on it. \"Ahhh!\" he\n sighed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and carefully put\n the bottle away.\n\n\n \"What is that stuff you drink, Grampa?\" Four asked.\n\n\n \"Tonic, boy. Keeps me young and frisky. Now about that pircuit—\"\n\n\n \"Did you ever work on Niccolò Tartaglia's puzzle about the three lovely\n brides, the three jealous husbands, the river and the two-passenger\n rowboat?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Grampa said. \"Too easy.\"",
"\"And blow him up? I don't think it's possible, but even if it were, it\n might be a trifle more than disastrous for us.\" Four giggled at the\n thought.\nJoyce glared at him furiously. \"Four! Act your age! We've got to do\n something with him. It's preposterous that we should be detained here\n at the whim of a mere blob!\"\n\n\n \"I don't figure it's a whim,\" Grampa said. \"Circular gravity is what\n he's got to have for one reason or another, so he just naturally bends\n the space-time continuum around him—conscious or subconscious, I don't\n know. But protoplasm is always more efficient than machines, so the\n flivver won't move.\""
],
[
"\"Speaking of children,\" Junior said, \"where's Four?\"\n\n\n \"Here.\" Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room,\n carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a\n small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round,\n raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep.\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" it queried hopefully.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" said Four.\n\n\n \"Where've you been?\" Reba asked anxiously. \"What've you been doing?\"\n\n\n \"I've been all over Fweepland,\" Four said wearily, \"trying to locate\n its center of gravity.\"\n\n\n \"Well?\" Fred prompted.\n\n\n \"It shifts.\"\n\n\n \"That's impossible,\" said Junior.\n\n\n \"Not for Fweep,\" Four replied.",
"\"What do you mean by that?\" Joyce suspiciously asked.\n\n\n \"It shifted,\" Four explained patiently, \"because Fweep kept following\n me.\"\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" Junior repeated stupidly.\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" Fweep said eagerly.\n\n\n \"He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear\n polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet\n so heavy. He's why we can't leave.\"\nThe land of the Fweep rotated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered\n the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. \"I got it figured out,\n Four,\" he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. \"A missionary takes\n over a non-rowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing\n cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and—\"",
"\"A good thing, too,\" Junior said glumly, \"because this looks like the\n end of our search. Short of a miracle, we'll spend the rest of our\n lives right here—involuntary colonists.\"\n\n\n Joyce spun on him. \"You're joking!\" she screeched.\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" Junior said. \"But the polarizer won't work. Either\n it's broken or there's something about the gravity around here that\n just won't polarize.\"\n\n\n \"It's these '23 models,\" Grampa put in disgustedly. \"They never were\n any good.\"\nThe land of the Fweep turned slowly on its axis. The orange sun set and\n rose again and stared down once more at the meadow where the improbable\n spaceship rested on its improbable stern. The sixteen Earth hours that\n the rotation had taken had changed nothing inside the ship, either.",
"\"Now, Grampa,\" Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once\n called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had\n begun to gray at the temples. \"That landing was pretty rough, Junior.\"\nJunior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable\n of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult\n reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his\n knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. \"I know it,\n Fred,\" he said, frowning. \"This world fooled me. It has a diameter\n less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as\n Earth.\"",
"The airlock door swung inward. Through the oval doorway walked Fred,\n followed closely by Junior. They were sweat-stained and weary,\n scintillation counters dangling heavily from their belts.\n\n\n \"Any luck?\" Reba asked brightly.\n\n\n \"Do we look it?\" Junior grumbled.\n\n\n \"Where's Joyce?\" asked Fred. \"Might as well get everybody in on this at\n once. Joyce!\"\n\n\n The door to his wife's room opened instantly. Behind it, Joyce was\n regal and slim. The pose was spoiled immediately by her avid question:\n \"Any uranium? Radium? Thorium?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Fred said slowly, \"and no other heavy metals, either. There's a\n few low-grade iron deposits and that's it.\"\n\n\n \"Then what makes this planet so heavy?\" Reba asked.",
"Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from\n the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, \"Well, gosh,\n Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data\n into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that\n the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said,\n 'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium—'\"\n\n\n \"That's enough, Four,\" Junior interrupted. \"Never mind what I said.\"\n\n\n Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking\n remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled\n until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.\n\n\n \"And, Four,\" Reba said automatically, \"don't call your father 'Junior.'\n It sounds disrespectful.\"",
"\"Look!\" he said suddenly. \"This planet not only has flora—it has\n fauna.\" He rushed to the air lock.\n\n\n \"Four!\" Reba called out warningly.\n\n\n \"It's all right, Reba,\" Four assured her. \"The air is within one per\n cent of Earth-normal and the bio-analyzer can find no micro-organisms\n viable within the Terran spectrum.\"\n\n\n \"What about macro-organisms—\" Reba began, but the boy was gone\n already. Reba's face was troubled. \"That boy!\" she said to Junior.\n \"Sometimes I think we've made a terrible mistake with him. He should\n have friends, play-mates. He's more like a little old man than a boy.\"\n\n\n But Junior nodded meaningfully at Fred and disappeared into the chart\n room. Fred followed casually. Then, as the door slid shut behind him,\n he asked impatiently. \"Well, what's all the mystery?\"",
"Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. \"Well, boy,\" he said to\n Fred, \"I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you.\"\n\n\n Fred stood up apologetically. \"I'd better go calm her down,\" he\n muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce.\n\n\n \"Give her one for me!\" Grampa called.\n\n\n Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room\n came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like\n some reedy folk music.\n\n\n \"Makes you think, doesn't it?\" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly.\n \"Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a\n Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity\n in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result.\"",
"Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. \"Your guess is\n as good as anybody's.\"\n\n\n \"Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock,\" Joyce complained.\n She turned savagely on Fred. \"This was going to make us all filthy\n rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like\n billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this\n cramped old flivver—and we don't have many of them to spare!\" She\n glared venomously at Grampa.\n\n\n \"We've still got Fweepland,\" Four said solemnly.\n\n\n \"Fweepland?\" Reba repeated.\n\n\n \"This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As\n real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium.\"",
"Grampa looked up from his pircuit and said, \"If I were you, Junior, I\n would take a good look at the TV repairman when we get back to Earth.\nIf\nwe get back to Earth,\" he amended. \"You can't be Four's father.\n All over the Universe, gravity is the same, and if it's gravity, the\n polarizer will polarize it.\"\n\n\n \"That's just supposition,\" Junior said stubbornly. \"The fact is, it\n isn't because it doesn't. Q.E.D.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe the polarizer is broken,\" Fred suggested.",
"\"Fwiend,\" said Fweep gently.\nThe land of the Fweep turned like a fat old man toasting himself in\n front of an open fire, and Junior sat at the computer's keyboard\n swearing in a steady monotone.\n\n\n \"Junior!\" said Joyce, shocked.\n\n\n Junior swung around impatiently. \"Sorry, Mother, but this damned thing\n won't work.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure that calling it names won't help, and besides, you shouldn't\n expect a machine to do something that we can't do. And if it did work,\n it would only say that the logical answer is the one I sug—\"\n\n\n \"Mother!\" Junior warned. \"We decided not to talk about it any more.\n Four is strange enough without encouraging him to think like a martyr.\n It's out of the question. If that's the only way we can leave this\n planet, we'll stay here until Four has a beard as white as Grampa's!\"",
"\"Maybe he developed,\" Four offered. \"It seems to me that he's bigger\n than when we first landed.\" \"He must have been here a long, long time,\"\n Fred said. \"Fweepland, as Four calls it, kept its atmosphere and its\n water, which a planet this size ordinarily would have lost by now.\"\nReba looked at Fweep kindly. \"We can thank the little fellow for that,\n anyway.\"\n\n\n \"I thank him for nothing,\" Joyce snapped. \"He lured us down here by\n making us think the planet had heavy metals and I want him to let us go\nimmediately\n!\"\n\n\n Fred turned impatiently on his wife. \"Well, try making him understand!\n And if you can make him understand what you want him to do, try making\n him do it!\"\n\n\n Joyce looked at Fred with startled eyes. \"Fred!\" she said in a high,\n shocked voice and turned blindly toward her room.",
"Four thought a moment. \"There's a modern variation with three\n missionaries and three cannibals. Same river, same rowboat and only one\n of the cannibals can row. If the cannibals outnumber the missionaries—\"\n\n\n \"Sounds good, boy,\" Grampa said eagerly. \"Whip it up for me.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, Grampa.\" Four looked at Fweep again. The translucent sphere had\n paused at Grampa's feet.\n\n\n Grampa reached down to pat it. For an instant, his hand disappeared\n into Fweep, and then the alien creature rolled away. This time its path\n seemed crooked.\n\n\n Its gelatinous form jiggled. \"Hic!\" it said.\nAs if in response, the flivver vibrated. Grampa looked querulously\n toward the airlock. \"Flivver shouldn't shake like that. Not with the\n polarizer turned on.\"",
"\"Stop picking on Junior,\" Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother\n and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but\n somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. \"I'm sure\n he did the best he could.\"\n\n\n \"Anybody talks about gravitational pull,\" Grampa said, snorting,\n \"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing,\n Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the\n curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred\n years ago.\"\n\n\n \"Go back to your games, Grampa,\" Fred said impatiently. \"We've got work\n to do.\"\nGrampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last\n button on his pircuit. The last light went out. \"You've got work to\n do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?\"",
"\"It belongs to all of us,\" Four said shrilly. \"You gave us all a sixth\n share.\"\n\n\n \"That's right, Four,\" Grampa muttered, \"so I did. But whose money\n bought it?\"\n\n\n \"You bought it, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space\n flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?\"\n\n\n \"You, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the\n rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?\"\n\n\n \"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and\n longevity pills,\" Joyce said bitterly, \"and fixed it so we'd have to\n go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly\n galaxy? You, Grampa!\"",
"\"And blow him up? I don't think it's possible, but even if it were, it\n might be a trifle more than disastrous for us.\" Four giggled at the\n thought.\nJoyce glared at him furiously. \"Four! Act your age! We've got to do\n something with him. It's preposterous that we should be detained here\n at the whim of a mere blob!\"\n\n\n \"I don't figure it's a whim,\" Grampa said. \"Circular gravity is what\n he's got to have for one reason or another, so he just naturally bends\n the space-time continuum around him—conscious or subconscious, I don't\n know. But protoplasm is always more efficient than machines, so the\n flivver won't move.\"",
"\"What I can't understand,\" Junior said thoughtfully, \"is why the\n polarizer worked for a little while when we landed—long enough to keep\n us from being squashed—and then quit.\"\n\n\n \"Fweep didn't recognize it immediately, didn't know what it was or\n where it came from,\" Four explained. \"All he knew was he didn't like\n linear polarization and he neutralized it as soon as he could. That's\n when we dropped.\"\n\"Linear polarization is uncomfortable for him, is it?\" Grampa said.\n \"Makes you wonder how something like Fweep could ever develop.\"\n\n\n \"He's no more improbable than people,\" said Four.\n\n\n \"Less than some I've known,\" Grampa conceded.\n\n\n \"If he can eat anything,\" Reba said, \"why does he keep sweeping the\n cabin for dust and lint?\"",
"\"No use bothering the others yet,\" Junior said, his face puzzled. \"You\n see, I didn't let the flivver drop those last few inches. The polarizer\n quit.\"\n\n\n \"Quit!\"\n\n\n \"That's not the worst. I tried to take it up again. The flivver—it\n won't budge!\"\nThe thing was a featureless blob, a two-foot sphere of raspberry\n gelatin, but it was alive. It rocked back and forth in front of Four.\n It opened a raspberry-color pseudo-mouth and said plaintively, \"Fweep?\n Fweep?\"\n\n\n Joyce drew her chair farther back toward the wall, revulsion on her\n face. \"Four! Get that nasty thing out of here!\"\n\"You mean Fweep?\" Four asked in astonishment.\n\n\n \"I mean that thing, whatever you call it.\" Joyce fluttered her hand\n impatiently. \"Get it out!\"",
"The Gravity Business\nBy JAMES E. GUNN\n\n\n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright\n on this publication was renewed.]\nThis little alien beggar could dictate his own terms, but how could\n he—and how could anyone find out what those terms might be?\nThe flivver descended vertically toward the green planet circling the\n old, orange sun.\n\n\n It was a spaceship, but not the kind men had once dreamed about. The\n flivver was shaped like a crude bullet, blunt at one end of a fat\n cylinder and tapering abruptly to a point at the other. It had been\n slapped together out of sheet metal and insulation board, and it sold,\n fully equipped, for $15,730. It didn't behave like a spaceship, either.",
"At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into\n Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips.\n \"Fwiend,\" it said.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, \"that's no\n problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep.\"\n\n\n In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, \"That's quite\n a sacrifice to ask, but—\"\n\n\n \"Joyce!\" Reba cried, horrified. \"Grampa was joking, but you actually\n mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind, Reba,\" Four said evenly. \"It was just what I was going to\n suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution.\""
],
[
"\"It belongs to all of us,\" Four said shrilly. \"You gave us all a sixth\n share.\"\n\n\n \"That's right, Four,\" Grampa muttered, \"so I did. But whose money\n bought it?\"\n\n\n \"You bought it, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space\n flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?\"\n\n\n \"You, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the\n rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?\"\n\n\n \"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and\n longevity pills,\" Joyce said bitterly, \"and fixed it so we'd have to\n go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly\n galaxy? You, Grampa!\"",
"\"Well, now,\" Grampa protested, \"I got a little put away yet. You'll be\n sorry when I'm dead and gone.\"\n\n\n \"You're never going to die, Grampa,\" Joyce said harshly. \"Just\n before we left, you bought a hundred-year contract with that\n Life-Begins-At-Ninety longevity company.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" said Grampa, blinking, \"how'd you find out about that?\n Well, now!\" In confusion, he turned back to the pircuit and jabbed a\n button. Thirteen slim lights sprang on. \"I'll get you this time!\"\n\n\n Four stretched and stood up. He looked curiously into the corner by the\n computer where Grampa's chair stood. \"You brought that pircuit from\n Earth, didn't you? What's the game?\"",
"\"Now wait a minute!\" Grampa protested. \"That's not fair. Maybe\n I didn't figure out the theory myself, but I read everything the\n scientists ever wrote about it. Wanted to know myself what made the\n blamed thing work. What I told you is what the scientists said, near\n as I remember. Now me—I'm like Edison. I do it and let everybody else\n worry over 'why.'\"\n\n\n \"The only thing you ever did was the polarizer,\" Joyce snapped.\n \"And then you spent everything you got from it on those fool\n perpetual-motion machines and those crazy longevity schemes when any\n moron would know they were impossible.\"\n\n\n Grampa squinted at her sagely. \"That's what they said about the gravity\n polarizer before I invented it.\"\n\n\n \"But you don't really know why it works,\" Junior persisted.",
"As it hurtled down, its speed increased with dramatic swiftness. Then,\n at the last instant before impact, it stopped. Just like that.\n\n\n A moment later, it thumped a last few inches into the ankle-deep grass\n and knee-high white flowers of the meadow. It was a shock of a jar that\n made the sheet-metal walls boom like thunder machines. The flivver\n rocked unsteadily on its flat stern before it decided to stay upright.\n\n\n Then all was quiet—outside.\n\n\n Inside the big, central cabin, Grampa waved his pircuit irately in the\n air. \"Now look what you made me do! Just when I had the blamed thing\n practically whipped, too!\"\nGrampa was a white-haired 90-year-old who could still go a fast round\n or two with a man (or woman) half his age, but he had a habit of\n lapsing into tantrum when he got annoyed.",
"\"Stop picking on Junior,\" Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother\n and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but\n somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. \"I'm sure\n he did the best he could.\"\n\n\n \"Anybody talks about gravitational pull,\" Grampa said, snorting,\n \"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing,\n Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the\n curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred\n years ago.\"\n\n\n \"Go back to your games, Grampa,\" Fred said impatiently. \"We've got work\n to do.\"\nGrampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last\n button on his pircuit. The last light went out. \"You've got work to\n do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?\"",
"\"You bet he would!\" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned\n over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, \"Beats me why you ever\n married a jerk like Junior, anyhow.\"\n\n\n Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. \"Maybe I saw\n something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been\n submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you\n and to himself, too.\" Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. \"And maybe I\n thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather.\"\nGrampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring\n intently at Fweep. \"What you doing, Four?\"\n\n\n \"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings,\" Four said\n absently. \"The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then\n slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle.\"",
"Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. \"Well, boy,\" he said to\n Fred, \"I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you.\"\n\n\n Fred stood up apologetically. \"I'd better go calm her down,\" he\n muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce.\n\n\n \"Give her one for me!\" Grampa called.\n\n\n Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room\n came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like\n some reedy folk music.\n\n\n \"Makes you think, doesn't it?\" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly.\n \"Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a\n Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity\n in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result.\"",
"Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a\n red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That\n Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever\n noticed about the boy.\n\n\n \"But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'\" Four complained. \"Besides, Fred\n is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'\"\n\n\n \"That's different,\" Reba said.\n\n\n Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. \"See!\" The\n pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender\n openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. \"That landing\n made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again.\"",
"Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. \"Your guess is\n as good as anybody's.\"\n\n\n \"Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock,\" Joyce complained.\n She turned savagely on Fred. \"This was going to make us all filthy\n rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like\n billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this\n cramped old flivver—and we don't have many of them to spare!\" She\n glared venomously at Grampa.\n\n\n \"We've still got Fweepland,\" Four said solemnly.\n\n\n \"Fweepland?\" Reba repeated.\n\n\n \"This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As\n real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium.\"",
"\"Well!\" Joyce said in a stiff, offended tone and sat back in her chair.\n\n\n Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips and chortled. \"Junior,\n I apologize for all the mean things I ever said about you. Maybe you\n got the makings of a Peppergrass yet.\"\n\n\n Junior turned back to the keyboard and studied it, his chin in his\n hand. \"It's just a matter of stating the problem in terms the computer\n can work on.\"",
"Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from\n the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, \"Well, gosh,\n Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data\n into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that\n the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said,\n 'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium—'\"\n\n\n \"That's enough, Four,\" Junior interrupted. \"Never mind what I said.\"\n\n\n Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking\n remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled\n until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.\n\n\n \"And, Four,\" Reba said automatically, \"don't call your father 'Junior.'\n It sounds disrespectful.\"",
"Inside were row after row of nipple-topped, flat-sided, flexible\n free-fall bottles and a battered cigar box. \"Thought you'd say that,\"\n he said, picking out the box. \"Help yourself.\" With the other hand, he\n lifted out one of the bottles and took a long drag on it. \"Ahhh!\" he\n sighed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and carefully put\n the bottle away.\n\n\n \"What is that stuff you drink, Grampa?\" Four asked.\n\n\n \"Tonic, boy. Keeps me young and frisky. Now about that pircuit—\"\n\n\n \"Did you ever work on Niccolò Tartaglia's puzzle about the three lovely\n brides, the three jealous husbands, the river and the two-passenger\n rowboat?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Grampa said. \"Too easy.\"",
"\"Sure,\" Four said. \"Go ahead, fweep—I mean sweep.\"\n\n\n Swiftly the sphere rolled across the floor. Behind it was left a\n narrow path of sparkling clean tile.\n\n\n Grampa glanced warily at Joyce's door to make sure it was completely\n closed and then cocked a white eyebrow at Reba. \"Good for you, Reba!\"\n he said admiringly. \"For forty years now, I've wanted to do that. Never\n had the nerve.\"\n\n\n \"Why, thanks, Grampa,\" Reba said, surprised.\n\n\n \"I like you, gal. Never forget it.\"\n\n\n \"I like you, too, Grampa. If you'd been a few years younger, Junior\n would have had competition!\"",
"Grampa looked up, obviously relieved to drop his act of intense\n concentration. \"I'll tell you, boy. You play against the pircuit,\n taking turns, and you can put out one, two or three lights. The player\n who makes the other one turn out the last light is the winner.\"\n\n\n \"That's simple,\" Four said without hesitation. \"The winning strategy is\n to—\"\n\n\n \"Don't be a kibitzer!\" Grampa snapped. \"When I need help, I'll ask\n for it. No dad-blamed machine is gonna outthink Grampa!\" He snorted\n indignantly.\nFour shrugged his narrow shoulders and wandered to the view screen.\n Within it was the green horizon, curving noticeably. Four angled the\n picture in toward the ship, sweeping through green, peaceful woodland\n and plain and blue lake until he stared down into the meadow at the\n flivver's stern.",
"\"Well, no,\" Grampa admitted. \"Actually I was just fiddling around with\n some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling,\n dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out\n near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound\n it.\"\n\n\n \"Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?\" Joyce demanded\n ironically.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said in bafflement, \"it rightly should, you know.\"\n\"We're stuck,\" Reba said softly. \"We might as well admit it. All we can\n do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call—\"\n\n\n \"Which,\" Joyce interrupted, \"might get picked up in a few centuries.\"",
"\"Gravity is similar to light,\" he pressed on. \"In the absence of\n matter, gravity is non-polarized. Matter polarizes gravity in a circle\n around itself. That's how we've always known it until the invention of\n spaceships and later the polarizer. The polarizer polarizes gravity\n into a straight line. That makes the ship take off and continue\n accelerating until the polarizer is shut off or its angle is shifted.\"\n\n\n The faces looked at him silently. Finally Joyce could endure it no\n longer. \"That's just nonsense! You all know it. Grampa's no genius.\n He's just a tinkerer. One day he happened to tinker out the polarizer.\n He doesn't know how it works any more than I do.\"",
"\"That's the idea, Four. You'll be a Peppergrass yet. How about building\n me a pircuit?\"\n\n\n \"You get the other one figured out?\"\n\n\n \"It was easy,\" Grampa said breezily, \"once you understood the\n principle. The player who moved second could always win if he used the\n right strategy. Dividing the thirteen lights into three sections of\n four each—\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Four agreed. \"I can make you a new one by cannibalizing\n the other pircuit, but I'll need a few extra parts.\"\n\n\n Grampa pushed the wall beside his chair and a drawer slid out of it.",
"\"Now, Grampa,\" Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once\n called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had\n begun to gray at the temples. \"That landing was pretty rough, Junior.\"\nJunior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable\n of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult\n reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his\n knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. \"I know it,\n Fred,\" he said, frowning. \"This world fooled me. It has a diameter\n less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as\n Earth.\"",
"\"Let's not get up on any pulpits,\" Fred growled. \"Come on, Grampa,\n what's the theory behind polarization?\"\n\n\n Grampa looked at the four faces staring at him hopefully and the\n jeering grin turned to a smile. \"Well,\" he said, \"at last. You know\n how light is polarized, eh?\" The smile faded. \"No, I guess you don't.\"\nHe cleared his throat professorially. \"Well, now, in ordinary light\n the vibrations are perpendicular to the ray in all directions. When\n light is polarized by passing through crystals or by reflection or\n refraction at non-metallic surfaces, the paths of the vibrations are\n still perpendicular to the ray, but they're in straight lines, circles\n or ellipses.\"\n\n\n The faces were still blank and unillumined.",
"\"And blow him up? I don't think it's possible, but even if it were, it\n might be a trifle more than disastrous for us.\" Four giggled at the\n thought.\nJoyce glared at him furiously. \"Four! Act your age! We've got to do\n something with him. It's preposterous that we should be detained here\n at the whim of a mere blob!\"\n\n\n \"I don't figure it's a whim,\" Grampa said. \"Circular gravity is what\n he's got to have for one reason or another, so he just naturally bends\n the space-time continuum around him—conscious or subconscious, I don't\n know. But protoplasm is always more efficient than machines, so the\n flivver won't move.\""
],
[
"\"Now wait a minute!\" Grampa protested. \"That's not fair. Maybe\n I didn't figure out the theory myself, but I read everything the\n scientists ever wrote about it. Wanted to know myself what made the\n blamed thing work. What I told you is what the scientists said, near\n as I remember. Now me—I'm like Edison. I do it and let everybody else\n worry over 'why.'\"\n\n\n \"The only thing you ever did was the polarizer,\" Joyce snapped.\n \"And then you spent everything you got from it on those fool\n perpetual-motion machines and those crazy longevity schemes when any\n moron would know they were impossible.\"\n\n\n Grampa squinted at her sagely. \"That's what they said about the gravity\n polarizer before I invented it.\"\n\n\n \"But you don't really know why it works,\" Junior persisted.",
"\"Stop picking on Junior,\" Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother\n and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but\n somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. \"I'm sure\n he did the best he could.\"\n\n\n \"Anybody talks about gravitational pull,\" Grampa said, snorting,\n \"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing,\n Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the\n curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred\n years ago.\"\n\n\n \"Go back to your games, Grampa,\" Fred said impatiently. \"We've got work\n to do.\"\nGrampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last\n button on his pircuit. The last light went out. \"You've got work to\n do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?\"",
"\"He wants to be helpful,\" Four replied without hesitation, \"and he's\n lonely. After all,\" he added wistfully, \"he's never had any friends.\"\n\n\n \"How do you know all these things?\" Joyce asked from her doorway,\n excitement in her voice. \"Can you talk to it?\"\n\n\n Behind her, Fred said, \"Now, Joyce, you promised—\"\n\n\n \"But this is important,\" Joyce cut him off eagerly. \"Can you? Talk to\n it, I mean?\"\n\n\n \"Some,\" Four admitted.\n\n\n \"Have you asked it to let us go?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Well? What did it say?\"\n\n\n \"He said he didn't want his friend to leave him.\"",
"Inside were row after row of nipple-topped, flat-sided, flexible\n free-fall bottles and a battered cigar box. \"Thought you'd say that,\"\n he said, picking out the box. \"Help yourself.\" With the other hand, he\n lifted out one of the bottles and took a long drag on it. \"Ahhh!\" he\n sighed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and carefully put\n the bottle away.\n\n\n \"What is that stuff you drink, Grampa?\" Four asked.\n\n\n \"Tonic, boy. Keeps me young and frisky. Now about that pircuit—\"\n\n\n \"Did you ever work on Niccolò Tartaglia's puzzle about the three lovely\n brides, the three jealous husbands, the river and the two-passenger\n rowboat?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Grampa said. \"Too easy.\"",
"Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a\n red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That\n Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever\n noticed about the boy.\n\n\n \"But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'\" Four complained. \"Besides, Fred\n is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'\"\n\n\n \"That's different,\" Reba said.\n\n\n Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. \"See!\" The\n pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender\n openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. \"That landing\n made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again.\"",
"\"Not now, Grampa,\" Four said inattentively as he watched Fweep making\n the grand tour of the cabin.\n\n\n The raspberry sphere swept over a scattering of crumbs, engulfed them,\n absorbed them. Four looked at Joyce. Joyce was watching Fweep, too.\n\n\n \"Rat poison?\" Four asked.\n\n\n Joyce started guiltily. \"How did you know?\"\n\n\n \"There's no use trying to poison Fweep,\" Four said calmly. \"He's got no\n enzymes to act on, no nervous system to paralyze. He doesn't even use\n what he 'eats' on a molecular level at all.\"\n\n\n \"What level does he use?\" Junior wanted to know.\n\n\n \"Point the scintillation counter at him.\"",
"Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. \"Well, boy,\" he said to\n Fred, \"I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you.\"\n\n\n Fred stood up apologetically. \"I'd better go calm her down,\" he\n muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce.\n\n\n \"Give her one for me!\" Grampa called.\n\n\n Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room\n came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like\n some reedy folk music.\n\n\n \"Makes you think, doesn't it?\" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly.\n \"Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a\n Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity\n in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result.\"",
"At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into\n Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips.\n \"Fwiend,\" it said.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, \"that's no\n problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep.\"\n\n\n In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, \"That's quite\n a sacrifice to ask, but—\"\n\n\n \"Joyce!\" Reba cried, horrified. \"Grampa was joking, but you actually\n mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind, Reba,\" Four said evenly. \"It was just what I was going to\n suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution.\"",
"\"Speaking of children,\" Junior said, \"where's Four?\"\n\n\n \"Here.\" Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room,\n carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a\n small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round,\n raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep.\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" it queried hopefully.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" said Four.\n\n\n \"Where've you been?\" Reba asked anxiously. \"What've you been doing?\"\n\n\n \"I've been all over Fweepland,\" Four said wearily, \"trying to locate\n its center of gravity.\"\n\n\n \"Well?\" Fred prompted.\n\n\n \"It shifts.\"\n\n\n \"That's impossible,\" said Junior.\n\n\n \"Not for Fweep,\" Four replied.",
"\"You bet he would!\" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned\n over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, \"Beats me why you ever\n married a jerk like Junior, anyhow.\"\n\n\n Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. \"Maybe I saw\n something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been\n submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you\n and to himself, too.\" Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. \"And maybe I\n thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather.\"\nGrampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring\n intently at Fweep. \"What you doing, Four?\"\n\n\n \"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings,\" Four said\n absently. \"The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then\n slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle.\"",
"\"It belongs to all of us,\" Four said shrilly. \"You gave us all a sixth\n share.\"\n\n\n \"That's right, Four,\" Grampa muttered, \"so I did. But whose money\n bought it?\"\n\n\n \"You bought it, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space\n flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?\"\n\n\n \"You, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the\n rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?\"\n\n\n \"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and\n longevity pills,\" Joyce said bitterly, \"and fixed it so we'd have to\n go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly\n galaxy? You, Grampa!\"",
"Grampa looked up, obviously relieved to drop his act of intense\n concentration. \"I'll tell you, boy. You play against the pircuit,\n taking turns, and you can put out one, two or three lights. The player\n who makes the other one turn out the last light is the winner.\"\n\n\n \"That's simple,\" Four said without hesitation. \"The winning strategy is\n to—\"\n\n\n \"Don't be a kibitzer!\" Grampa snapped. \"When I need help, I'll ask\n for it. No dad-blamed machine is gonna outthink Grampa!\" He snorted\n indignantly.\nFour shrugged his narrow shoulders and wandered to the view screen.\n Within it was the green horizon, curving noticeably. Four angled the\n picture in toward the ship, sweeping through green, peaceful woodland\n and plain and blue lake until he stared down into the meadow at the\n flivver's stern.",
"\"Well, now,\" Grampa protested, \"I got a little put away yet. You'll be\n sorry when I'm dead and gone.\"\n\n\n \"You're never going to die, Grampa,\" Joyce said harshly. \"Just\n before we left, you bought a hundred-year contract with that\n Life-Begins-At-Ninety longevity company.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" said Grampa, blinking, \"how'd you find out about that?\n Well, now!\" In confusion, he turned back to the pircuit and jabbed a\n button. Thirteen slim lights sprang on. \"I'll get you this time!\"\n\n\n Four stretched and stood up. He looked curiously into the corner by the\n computer where Grampa's chair stood. \"You brought that pircuit from\n Earth, didn't you? What's the game?\"",
"\"Well!\" Joyce said in a stiff, offended tone and sat back in her chair.\n\n\n Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips and chortled. \"Junior,\n I apologize for all the mean things I ever said about you. Maybe you\n got the makings of a Peppergrass yet.\"\n\n\n Junior turned back to the keyboard and studied it, his chin in his\n hand. \"It's just a matter of stating the problem in terms the computer\n can work on.\"",
"\"Sure,\" Four said. \"Go ahead, fweep—I mean sweep.\"\n\n\n Swiftly the sphere rolled across the floor. Behind it was left a\n narrow path of sparkling clean tile.\n\n\n Grampa glanced warily at Joyce's door to make sure it was completely\n closed and then cocked a white eyebrow at Reba. \"Good for you, Reba!\"\n he said admiringly. \"For forty years now, I've wanted to do that. Never\n had the nerve.\"\n\n\n \"Why, thanks, Grampa,\" Reba said, surprised.\n\n\n \"I like you, gal. Never forget it.\"\n\n\n \"I like you, too, Grampa. If you'd been a few years younger, Junior\n would have had competition!\"",
"\"What do you mean by that?\" Joyce suspiciously asked.\n\n\n \"It shifted,\" Four explained patiently, \"because Fweep kept following\n me.\"\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" Junior repeated stupidly.\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" Fweep said eagerly.\n\n\n \"He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear\n polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet\n so heavy. He's why we can't leave.\"\nThe land of the Fweep rotated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered\n the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. \"I got it figured out,\n Four,\" he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. \"A missionary takes\n over a non-rowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing\n cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and—\"",
"Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from\n the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, \"Well, gosh,\n Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data\n into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that\n the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said,\n 'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium—'\"\n\n\n \"That's enough, Four,\" Junior interrupted. \"Never mind what I said.\"\n\n\n Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking\n remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled\n until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.\n\n\n \"And, Four,\" Reba said automatically, \"don't call your father 'Junior.'\n It sounds disrespectful.\"",
"\"I take it all back,\" said Grampa. \"That computer won't help you with\n this problem, Junior. This ain't a long, complicated calculation; it's\n a simple problem in logic. It's a pircuit problem, like the one about\n the cannibals and the missionaries. We can't leave Fweepland because\n Fweep won't let our polarizer work. He won't let our polarizer work\n because he doesn't like gravity that's polarized in a straight line,\n and he don't want Four to leave him.\n\n\n \"Now Fweep ain't the brightest creature in the Universe, so he can't\n understand why we're so gosh-fired eager to leave. And as long as he's\n got Four, he's happy. Why should he make himself unhappy? As a favor\n to Four, he'd let us leave—if we'd leave Four here with him, which we\n ain't gonna do.",
"\"Fwiend,\" said Fweep gently.\nThe land of the Fweep turned like a fat old man toasting himself in\n front of an open fire, and Junior sat at the computer's keyboard\n swearing in a steady monotone.\n\n\n \"Junior!\" said Joyce, shocked.\n\n\n Junior swung around impatiently. \"Sorry, Mother, but this damned thing\n won't work.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure that calling it names won't help, and besides, you shouldn't\n expect a machine to do something that we can't do. And if it did work,\n it would only say that the logical answer is the one I sug—\"\n\n\n \"Mother!\" Junior warned. \"We decided not to talk about it any more.\n Four is strange enough without encouraging him to think like a martyr.\n It's out of the question. If that's the only way we can leave this\n planet, we'll stay here until Four has a beard as white as Grampa's!\"",
"Junior dug one of the counters out of the supply cabinet and aimed the\n pickup at Fweep. The counter began to hum. As Fweep approached, the hum\n rose in pitch. As it passed, the hum dropped.\n\n\n Junior looked at the counter's dial. \"He's radioactive, all right. Not\n much, but enough. But where does he get the radioactive material?\"\n\n\n \"He uses ordinary matter,\" Four said. \"He must have used up the few\n deposits of natural radioactives a long time ago.\"\n\n\n \"He uses ordinary substances on an atomic level?\" Junior said\n unbelievingly.\n\n\n Four nodded. \"And that 'skin' of his—whatever it is he uses for\n skin—is more efficient in stopping particle emissions than several\n feet of lead.\"\n\n\n Fred studied Fweep thoughtfully. \"Maybe we could feed him enough\n enriched uranium from the pile to put him over the critical mass.\""
],
[
"At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into\n Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips.\n \"Fwiend,\" it said.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, \"that's no\n problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep.\"\n\n\n In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, \"That's quite\n a sacrifice to ask, but—\"\n\n\n \"Joyce!\" Reba cried, horrified. \"Grampa was joking, but you actually\n mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind, Reba,\" Four said evenly. \"It was just what I was going to\n suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution.\"",
"\"Look!\" he said suddenly. \"This planet not only has flora—it has\n fauna.\" He rushed to the air lock.\n\n\n \"Four!\" Reba called out warningly.\n\n\n \"It's all right, Reba,\" Four assured her. \"The air is within one per\n cent of Earth-normal and the bio-analyzer can find no micro-organisms\n viable within the Terran spectrum.\"\n\n\n \"What about macro-organisms—\" Reba began, but the boy was gone\n already. Reba's face was troubled. \"That boy!\" she said to Junior.\n \"Sometimes I think we've made a terrible mistake with him. He should\n have friends, play-mates. He's more like a little old man than a boy.\"\n\n\n But Junior nodded meaningfully at Fred and disappeared into the chart\n room. Fred followed casually. Then, as the door slid shut behind him,\n he asked impatiently. \"Well, what's all the mystery?\"",
"\"It belongs to all of us,\" Four said shrilly. \"You gave us all a sixth\n share.\"\n\n\n \"That's right, Four,\" Grampa muttered, \"so I did. But whose money\n bought it?\"\n\n\n \"You bought it, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space\n flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?\"\n\n\n \"You, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the\n rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?\"\n\n\n \"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and\n longevity pills,\" Joyce said bitterly, \"and fixed it so we'd have to\n go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly\n galaxy? You, Grampa!\"",
"Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. \"Your guess is\n as good as anybody's.\"\n\n\n \"Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock,\" Joyce complained.\n She turned savagely on Fred. \"This was going to make us all filthy\n rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like\n billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this\n cramped old flivver—and we don't have many of them to spare!\" She\n glared venomously at Grampa.\n\n\n \"We've still got Fweepland,\" Four said solemnly.\n\n\n \"Fweepland?\" Reba repeated.\n\n\n \"This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As\n real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium.\"",
"\"And make the best of what we've got,\" Reba went on, unheeding. \"If we\n look at it the right way, it's quite a lot. A beautiful, fertile world.\n Earth gravity. The flivver—even if the polarizer won't work, there's\n the resynthesizer; it will keep us in food and clothes for years. By\n then, we should have a good-sized community built up, because out here\n we won't have to stop with one child. We can have all the babies we\n want.\"\n\n\n \"You know the law: one child per couple,\" Joyce reminded her frigidly.\n \"You can condemn yourself to exile from civilization if you wish. Not\n me.\"\n\n\n Junior frowned at his wife. \"I believe you're actually glad it\n happened.\"\n\n\n \"I could think of worse things,\" Reba said.\n\n\n \"I like your spunk, Reb,\" Grampa muttered.",
"\"A good thing, too,\" Junior said glumly, \"because this looks like the\n end of our search. Short of a miracle, we'll spend the rest of our\n lives right here—involuntary colonists.\"\n\n\n Joyce spun on him. \"You're joking!\" she screeched.\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" Junior said. \"But the polarizer won't work. Either\n it's broken or there's something about the gravity around here that\n just won't polarize.\"\n\n\n \"It's these '23 models,\" Grampa put in disgustedly. \"They never were\n any good.\"\nThe land of the Fweep turned slowly on its axis. The orange sun set and\n rose again and stared down once more at the meadow where the improbable\n spaceship rested on its improbable stern. The sixteen Earth hours that\n the rotation had taken had changed nothing inside the ship, either.",
"Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from\n the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, \"Well, gosh,\n Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data\n into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that\n the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said,\n 'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium—'\"\n\n\n \"That's enough, Four,\" Junior interrupted. \"Never mind what I said.\"\n\n\n Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking\n remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled\n until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.\n\n\n \"And, Four,\" Reba said automatically, \"don't call your father 'Junior.'\n It sounds disrespectful.\"",
"\"Maybe he developed,\" Four offered. \"It seems to me that he's bigger\n than when we first landed.\" \"He must have been here a long, long time,\"\n Fred said. \"Fweepland, as Four calls it, kept its atmosphere and its\n water, which a planet this size ordinarily would have lost by now.\"\nReba looked at Fweep kindly. \"We can thank the little fellow for that,\n anyway.\"\n\n\n \"I thank him for nothing,\" Joyce snapped. \"He lured us down here by\n making us think the planet had heavy metals and I want him to let us go\nimmediately\n!\"\n\n\n Fred turned impatiently on his wife. \"Well, try making him understand!\n And if you can make him understand what you want him to do, try making\n him do it!\"\n\n\n Joyce looked at Fred with startled eyes. \"Fred!\" she said in a high,\n shocked voice and turned blindly toward her room.",
"\"Fwiend,\" said Fweep gently.\nThe land of the Fweep turned like a fat old man toasting himself in\n front of an open fire, and Junior sat at the computer's keyboard\n swearing in a steady monotone.\n\n\n \"Junior!\" said Joyce, shocked.\n\n\n Junior swung around impatiently. \"Sorry, Mother, but this damned thing\n won't work.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure that calling it names won't help, and besides, you shouldn't\n expect a machine to do something that we can't do. And if it did work,\n it would only say that the logical answer is the one I sug—\"\n\n\n \"Mother!\" Junior warned. \"We decided not to talk about it any more.\n Four is strange enough without encouraging him to think like a martyr.\n It's out of the question. If that's the only way we can leave this\n planet, we'll stay here until Four has a beard as white as Grampa's!\"",
"\"You bet he would!\" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned\n over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, \"Beats me why you ever\n married a jerk like Junior, anyhow.\"\n\n\n Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. \"Maybe I saw\n something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been\n submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you\n and to himself, too.\" Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. \"And maybe I\n thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather.\"\nGrampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring\n intently at Fweep. \"What you doing, Four?\"\n\n\n \"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings,\" Four said\n absently. \"The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then\n slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle.\"",
"\"He wants to be helpful,\" Four replied without hesitation, \"and he's\n lonely. After all,\" he added wistfully, \"he's never had any friends.\"\n\n\n \"How do you know all these things?\" Joyce asked from her doorway,\n excitement in her voice. \"Can you talk to it?\"\n\n\n Behind her, Fred said, \"Now, Joyce, you promised—\"\n\n\n \"But this is important,\" Joyce cut him off eagerly. \"Can you? Talk to\n it, I mean?\"\n\n\n \"Some,\" Four admitted.\n\n\n \"Have you asked it to let us go?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Well? What did it say?\"\n\n\n \"He said he didn't want his friend to leave him.\"",
"\"Speaking of children,\" Junior said, \"where's Four?\"\n\n\n \"Here.\" Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room,\n carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a\n small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round,\n raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep.\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" it queried hopefully.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" said Four.\n\n\n \"Where've you been?\" Reba asked anxiously. \"What've you been doing?\"\n\n\n \"I've been all over Fweepland,\" Four said wearily, \"trying to locate\n its center of gravity.\"\n\n\n \"Well?\" Fred prompted.\n\n\n \"It shifts.\"\n\n\n \"That's impossible,\" said Junior.\n\n\n \"Not for Fweep,\" Four replied.",
"Four's eyes widened farther. \"But Fweep's my friend.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense!\" Joyce said sharply. \"Earthmen don't make friends with\n aliens. And that's nothing but a—a blob!\"\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" queried the raspberry lips. \"Fweep?\"\n\n\n \"If it's Four's friend,\" Reba said firmly, \"it can stay. If you don't\n like to be around it, Grammy, you can always go to your own room.\"\n\n\n Joyce stood up indignantly. \"Well! And don't call me 'Grammy!' It makes\n me sound as old as that old goat over there!\" She glared malignantly\n at Grampa. \"If you'd rather have that blob than me—well!\" She swept\n grandly out of the central cabin and into one of the private rooms that\n opened out from it.\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" asked the blob.",
"The airlock door swung inward. Through the oval doorway walked Fred,\n followed closely by Junior. They were sweat-stained and weary,\n scintillation counters dangling heavily from their belts.\n\n\n \"Any luck?\" Reba asked brightly.\n\n\n \"Do we look it?\" Junior grumbled.\n\n\n \"Where's Joyce?\" asked Fred. \"Might as well get everybody in on this at\n once. Joyce!\"\n\n\n The door to his wife's room opened instantly. Behind it, Joyce was\n regal and slim. The pose was spoiled immediately by her avid question:\n \"Any uranium? Radium? Thorium?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Fred said slowly, \"and no other heavy metals, either. There's a\n few low-grade iron deposits and that's it.\"\n\n\n \"Then what makes this planet so heavy?\" Reba asked.",
"\"What do you mean by that?\" Joyce suspiciously asked.\n\n\n \"It shifted,\" Four explained patiently, \"because Fweep kept following\n me.\"\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" Junior repeated stupidly.\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" Fweep said eagerly.\n\n\n \"He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear\n polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet\n so heavy. He's why we can't leave.\"\nThe land of the Fweep rotated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered\n the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. \"I got it figured out,\n Four,\" he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. \"A missionary takes\n over a non-rowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing\n cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and—\"",
"\"Now, Grampa,\" Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once\n called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had\n begun to gray at the temples. \"That landing was pretty rough, Junior.\"\nJunior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable\n of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult\n reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his\n knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. \"I know it,\n Fred,\" he said, frowning. \"This world fooled me. It has a diameter\n less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as\n Earth.\"",
"\"I take it all back,\" said Grampa. \"That computer won't help you with\n this problem, Junior. This ain't a long, complicated calculation; it's\n a simple problem in logic. It's a pircuit problem, like the one about\n the cannibals and the missionaries. We can't leave Fweepland because\n Fweep won't let our polarizer work. He won't let our polarizer work\n because he doesn't like gravity that's polarized in a straight line,\n and he don't want Four to leave him.\n\n\n \"Now Fweep ain't the brightest creature in the Universe, so he can't\n understand why we're so gosh-fired eager to leave. And as long as he's\n got Four, he's happy. Why should he make himself unhappy? As a favor\n to Four, he'd let us leave—if we'd leave Four here with him, which we\n ain't gonna do.",
"Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. \"Well, boy,\" he said to\n Fred, \"I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you.\"\n\n\n Fred stood up apologetically. \"I'd better go calm her down,\" he\n muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce.\n\n\n \"Give her one for me!\" Grampa called.\n\n\n Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room\n came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like\n some reedy folk music.\n\n\n \"Makes you think, doesn't it?\" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly.\n \"Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a\n Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity\n in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result.\"",
"\"Stop picking on Junior,\" Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother\n and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but\n somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. \"I'm sure\n he did the best he could.\"\n\n\n \"Anybody talks about gravitational pull,\" Grampa said, snorting,\n \"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing,\n Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the\n curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred\n years ago.\"\n\n\n \"Go back to your games, Grampa,\" Fred said impatiently. \"We've got work\n to do.\"\nGrampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last\n button on his pircuit. The last light went out. \"You've got work to\n do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?\"",
"\"Well, no,\" Grampa admitted. \"Actually I was just fiddling around with\n some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling,\n dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out\n near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound\n it.\"\n\n\n \"Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?\" Joyce demanded\n ironically.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said in bafflement, \"it rightly should, you know.\"\n\"We're stuck,\" Reba said softly. \"We might as well admit it. All we can\n do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call—\"\n\n\n \"Which,\" Joyce interrupted, \"might get picked up in a few centuries.\""
],
[
"\"I don't care why that thing does it,\" Joyce said icily. \"I want it\n stopped, and the sooner the better. If it won't turn the gravity off,\n we'll just have to do away with it.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" asked Four. \"Fweep's skin is pretty close to impervious and\n you can't shoot him, stab him or poison him. He doesn't breathe, so\n you can't drown or strangle him. You can't imprison him; he 'eats'\n everything. And violence might be more dangerous to us than to him.\n Right now, Fweep is friendly, but suppose he got mad! He could lower\n his radioactive shield or he might increase the gravity by a few times.\n Either way, you'd feel rather uncomfortable, Grammy.\"\n\n\n \"Don't call me 'Grammy!' Well, what are we going to do, just sit around\n and wait for that thing to die?\"",
"At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into\n Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips.\n \"Fwiend,\" it said.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, \"that's no\n problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep.\"\n\n\n In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, \"That's quite\n a sacrifice to ask, but—\"\n\n\n \"Joyce!\" Reba cried, horrified. \"Grampa was joking, but you actually\n mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind, Reba,\" Four said evenly. \"It was just what I was going to\n suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution.\"",
"\"Not now, Grampa,\" Four said inattentively as he watched Fweep making\n the grand tour of the cabin.\n\n\n The raspberry sphere swept over a scattering of crumbs, engulfed them,\n absorbed them. Four looked at Joyce. Joyce was watching Fweep, too.\n\n\n \"Rat poison?\" Four asked.\n\n\n Joyce started guiltily. \"How did you know?\"\n\n\n \"There's no use trying to poison Fweep,\" Four said calmly. \"He's got no\n enzymes to act on, no nervous system to paralyze. He doesn't even use\n what he 'eats' on a molecular level at all.\"\n\n\n \"What level does he use?\" Junior wanted to know.\n\n\n \"Point the scintillation counter at him.\"",
"Four's eyes widened farther. \"But Fweep's my friend.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense!\" Joyce said sharply. \"Earthmen don't make friends with\n aliens. And that's nothing but a—a blob!\"\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" queried the raspberry lips. \"Fweep?\"\n\n\n \"If it's Four's friend,\" Reba said firmly, \"it can stay. If you don't\n like to be around it, Grammy, you can always go to your own room.\"\n\n\n Joyce stood up indignantly. \"Well! And don't call me 'Grammy!' It makes\n me sound as old as that old goat over there!\" She glared malignantly\n at Grampa. \"If you'd rather have that blob than me—well!\" She swept\n grandly out of the central cabin and into one of the private rooms that\n opened out from it.\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" asked the blob.",
"Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. \"Well, boy,\" he said to\n Fred, \"I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you.\"\n\n\n Fred stood up apologetically. \"I'd better go calm her down,\" he\n muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce.\n\n\n \"Give her one for me!\" Grampa called.\n\n\n Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room\n came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like\n some reedy folk music.\n\n\n \"Makes you think, doesn't it?\" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly.\n \"Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a\n Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity\n in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result.\"",
"\"What do you mean by that?\" Joyce suspiciously asked.\n\n\n \"It shifted,\" Four explained patiently, \"because Fweep kept following\n me.\"\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" Junior repeated stupidly.\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" Fweep said eagerly.\n\n\n \"He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear\n polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet\n so heavy. He's why we can't leave.\"\nThe land of the Fweep rotated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered\n the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. \"I got it figured out,\n Four,\" he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. \"A missionary takes\n over a non-rowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing\n cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and—\"",
"\"Fwiend,\" said Fweep gently.\nThe land of the Fweep turned like a fat old man toasting himself in\n front of an open fire, and Junior sat at the computer's keyboard\n swearing in a steady monotone.\n\n\n \"Junior!\" said Joyce, shocked.\n\n\n Junior swung around impatiently. \"Sorry, Mother, but this damned thing\n won't work.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure that calling it names won't help, and besides, you shouldn't\n expect a machine to do something that we can't do. And if it did work,\n it would only say that the logical answer is the one I sug—\"\n\n\n \"Mother!\" Junior warned. \"We decided not to talk about it any more.\n Four is strange enough without encouraging him to think like a martyr.\n It's out of the question. If that's the only way we can leave this\n planet, we'll stay here until Four has a beard as white as Grampa's!\"",
"Junior dug one of the counters out of the supply cabinet and aimed the\n pickup at Fweep. The counter began to hum. As Fweep approached, the hum\n rose in pitch. As it passed, the hum dropped.\n\n\n Junior looked at the counter's dial. \"He's radioactive, all right. Not\n much, but enough. But where does he get the radioactive material?\"\n\n\n \"He uses ordinary matter,\" Four said. \"He must have used up the few\n deposits of natural radioactives a long time ago.\"\n\n\n \"He uses ordinary substances on an atomic level?\" Junior said\n unbelievingly.\n\n\n Four nodded. \"And that 'skin' of his—whatever it is he uses for\n skin—is more efficient in stopping particle emissions than several\n feet of lead.\"\n\n\n Fred studied Fweep thoughtfully. \"Maybe we could feed him enough\n enriched uranium from the pile to put him over the critical mass.\"",
"\"Maybe he developed,\" Four offered. \"It seems to me that he's bigger\n than when we first landed.\" \"He must have been here a long, long time,\"\n Fred said. \"Fweepland, as Four calls it, kept its atmosphere and its\n water, which a planet this size ordinarily would have lost by now.\"\nReba looked at Fweep kindly. \"We can thank the little fellow for that,\n anyway.\"\n\n\n \"I thank him for nothing,\" Joyce snapped. \"He lured us down here by\n making us think the planet had heavy metals and I want him to let us go\nimmediately\n!\"\n\n\n Fred turned impatiently on his wife. \"Well, try making him understand!\n And if you can make him understand what you want him to do, try making\n him do it!\"\n\n\n Joyce looked at Fred with startled eyes. \"Fred!\" she said in a high,\n shocked voice and turned blindly toward her room.",
"\"No use bothering the others yet,\" Junior said, his face puzzled. \"You\n see, I didn't let the flivver drop those last few inches. The polarizer\n quit.\"\n\n\n \"Quit!\"\n\n\n \"That's not the worst. I tried to take it up again. The flivver—it\n won't budge!\"\nThe thing was a featureless blob, a two-foot sphere of raspberry\n gelatin, but it was alive. It rocked back and forth in front of Four.\n It opened a raspberry-color pseudo-mouth and said plaintively, \"Fweep?\n Fweep?\"\n\n\n Joyce drew her chair farther back toward the wall, revulsion on her\n face. \"Four! Get that nasty thing out of here!\"\n\"You mean Fweep?\" Four asked in astonishment.\n\n\n \"I mean that thing, whatever you call it.\" Joyce fluttered her hand\n impatiently. \"Get it out!\"",
"\"He wants to be helpful,\" Four replied without hesitation, \"and he's\n lonely. After all,\" he added wistfully, \"he's never had any friends.\"\n\n\n \"How do you know all these things?\" Joyce asked from her doorway,\n excitement in her voice. \"Can you talk to it?\"\n\n\n Behind her, Fred said, \"Now, Joyce, you promised—\"\n\n\n \"But this is important,\" Joyce cut him off eagerly. \"Can you? Talk to\n it, I mean?\"\n\n\n \"Some,\" Four admitted.\n\n\n \"Have you asked it to let us go?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Well? What did it say?\"\n\n\n \"He said he didn't want his friend to leave him.\"",
"\"You bet he would!\" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned\n over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, \"Beats me why you ever\n married a jerk like Junior, anyhow.\"\n\n\n Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. \"Maybe I saw\n something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been\n submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you\n and to himself, too.\" Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. \"And maybe I\n thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather.\"\nGrampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring\n intently at Fweep. \"What you doing, Four?\"\n\n\n \"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings,\" Four said\n absently. \"The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then\n slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle.\"",
"\"What I can't understand,\" Junior said thoughtfully, \"is why the\n polarizer worked for a little while when we landed—long enough to keep\n us from being squashed—and then quit.\"\n\n\n \"Fweep didn't recognize it immediately, didn't know what it was or\n where it came from,\" Four explained. \"All he knew was he didn't like\n linear polarization and he neutralized it as soon as he could. That's\n when we dropped.\"\n\"Linear polarization is uncomfortable for him, is it?\" Grampa said.\n \"Makes you wonder how something like Fweep could ever develop.\"\n\n\n \"He's no more improbable than people,\" said Four.\n\n\n \"Less than some I've known,\" Grampa conceded.\n\n\n \"If he can eat anything,\" Reba said, \"why does he keep sweeping the\n cabin for dust and lint?\"",
"\"Sure,\" Four said. \"Go ahead, fweep—I mean sweep.\"\n\n\n Swiftly the sphere rolled across the floor. Behind it was left a\n narrow path of sparkling clean tile.\n\n\n Grampa glanced warily at Joyce's door to make sure it was completely\n closed and then cocked a white eyebrow at Reba. \"Good for you, Reba!\"\n he said admiringly. \"For forty years now, I've wanted to do that. Never\n had the nerve.\"\n\n\n \"Why, thanks, Grampa,\" Reba said, surprised.\n\n\n \"I like you, gal. Never forget it.\"\n\n\n \"I like you, too, Grampa. If you'd been a few years younger, Junior\n would have had competition!\"",
"Four thought a moment. \"There's a modern variation with three\n missionaries and three cannibals. Same river, same rowboat and only one\n of the cannibals can row. If the cannibals outnumber the missionaries—\"\n\n\n \"Sounds good, boy,\" Grampa said eagerly. \"Whip it up for me.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, Grampa.\" Four looked at Fweep again. The translucent sphere had\n paused at Grampa's feet.\n\n\n Grampa reached down to pat it. For an instant, his hand disappeared\n into Fweep, and then the alien creature rolled away. This time its path\n seemed crooked.\n\n\n Its gelatinous form jiggled. \"Hic!\" it said.\nAs if in response, the flivver vibrated. Grampa looked querulously\n toward the airlock. \"Flivver shouldn't shake like that. Not with the\n polarizer turned on.\"",
"\"And blow him up? I don't think it's possible, but even if it were, it\n might be a trifle more than disastrous for us.\" Four giggled at the\n thought.\nJoyce glared at him furiously. \"Four! Act your age! We've got to do\n something with him. It's preposterous that we should be detained here\n at the whim of a mere blob!\"\n\n\n \"I don't figure it's a whim,\" Grampa said. \"Circular gravity is what\n he's got to have for one reason or another, so he just naturally bends\n the space-time continuum around him—conscious or subconscious, I don't\n know. But protoplasm is always more efficient than machines, so the\n flivver won't move.\"",
"\"Speaking of children,\" Junior said, \"where's Four?\"\n\n\n \"Here.\" Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room,\n carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a\n small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round,\n raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep.\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" it queried hopefully.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" said Four.\n\n\n \"Where've you been?\" Reba asked anxiously. \"What've you been doing?\"\n\n\n \"I've been all over Fweepland,\" Four said wearily, \"trying to locate\n its center of gravity.\"\n\n\n \"Well?\" Fred prompted.\n\n\n \"It shifts.\"\n\n\n \"That's impossible,\" said Junior.\n\n\n \"Not for Fweep,\" Four replied.",
"\"It belongs to all of us,\" Four said shrilly. \"You gave us all a sixth\n share.\"\n\n\n \"That's right, Four,\" Grampa muttered, \"so I did. But whose money\n bought it?\"\n\n\n \"You bought it, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space\n flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?\"\n\n\n \"You, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the\n rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?\"\n\n\n \"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and\n longevity pills,\" Joyce said bitterly, \"and fixed it so we'd have to\n go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly\n galaxy? You, Grampa!\"",
"Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. \"Your guess is\n as good as anybody's.\"\n\n\n \"Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock,\" Joyce complained.\n She turned savagely on Fred. \"This was going to make us all filthy\n rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like\n billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this\n cramped old flivver—and we don't have many of them to spare!\" She\n glared venomously at Grampa.\n\n\n \"We've still got Fweepland,\" Four said solemnly.\n\n\n \"Fweepland?\" Reba repeated.\n\n\n \"This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As\n real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium.\"",
"\"We'd have a long wait,\" Four observed. \"Fweep is the only one of his\n kind on this planet.\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"Probably he's immortal.\"\n\n\n \"And he doesn't reproduce?\" Reba asked sympathetically.\n\n\n \"Probably not. If he doesn't die, there's no point in reproduction.\n Reproduction is nature's way of providing racial immortality to mortal\n creatures.\"\n\n\n \"But he must have some way of reproduction,\" Reba argued. \"An egg or\n something. He couldn't just have sprung into being as he is now.\""
],
[
"At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into\n Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips.\n \"Fwiend,\" it said.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, \"that's no\n problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep.\"\n\n\n In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, \"That's quite\n a sacrifice to ask, but—\"\n\n\n \"Joyce!\" Reba cried, horrified. \"Grampa was joking, but you actually\n mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind, Reba,\" Four said evenly. \"It was just what I was going to\n suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution.\"",
"\"It belongs to all of us,\" Four said shrilly. \"You gave us all a sixth\n share.\"\n\n\n \"That's right, Four,\" Grampa muttered, \"so I did. But whose money\n bought it?\"\n\n\n \"You bought it, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space\n flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?\"\n\n\n \"You, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n\n\n \"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the\n rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?\"\n\n\n \"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and\n longevity pills,\" Joyce said bitterly, \"and fixed it so we'd have to\n go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly\n galaxy? You, Grampa!\"",
"\"You bet he would!\" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned\n over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, \"Beats me why you ever\n married a jerk like Junior, anyhow.\"\n\n\n Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. \"Maybe I saw\n something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been\n submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you\n and to himself, too.\" Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. \"And maybe I\n thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather.\"\nGrampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring\n intently at Fweep. \"What you doing, Four?\"\n\n\n \"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings,\" Four said\n absently. \"The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then\n slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle.\"",
"Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. \"Your guess is\n as good as anybody's.\"\n\n\n \"Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock,\" Joyce complained.\n She turned savagely on Fred. \"This was going to make us all filthy\n rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like\n billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this\n cramped old flivver—and we don't have many of them to spare!\" She\n glared venomously at Grampa.\n\n\n \"We've still got Fweepland,\" Four said solemnly.\n\n\n \"Fweepland?\" Reba repeated.\n\n\n \"This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As\n real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium.\"",
"Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from\n the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, \"Well, gosh,\n Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data\n into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that\n the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said,\n 'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium—'\"\n\n\n \"That's enough, Four,\" Junior interrupted. \"Never mind what I said.\"\n\n\n Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking\n remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled\n until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.\n\n\n \"And, Four,\" Reba said automatically, \"don't call your father 'Junior.'\n It sounds disrespectful.\"",
"\"I take it all back,\" said Grampa. \"That computer won't help you with\n this problem, Junior. This ain't a long, complicated calculation; it's\n a simple problem in logic. It's a pircuit problem, like the one about\n the cannibals and the missionaries. We can't leave Fweepland because\n Fweep won't let our polarizer work. He won't let our polarizer work\n because he doesn't like gravity that's polarized in a straight line,\n and he don't want Four to leave him.\n\n\n \"Now Fweep ain't the brightest creature in the Universe, so he can't\n understand why we're so gosh-fired eager to leave. And as long as he's\n got Four, he's happy. Why should he make himself unhappy? As a favor\n to Four, he'd let us leave—if we'd leave Four here with him, which we\n ain't gonna do.",
"\"Well, no,\" Grampa admitted. \"Actually I was just fiddling around with\n some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling,\n dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out\n near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound\n it.\"\n\n\n \"Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?\" Joyce demanded\n ironically.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said in bafflement, \"it rightly should, you know.\"\n\"We're stuck,\" Reba said softly. \"We might as well admit it. All we can\n do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call—\"\n\n\n \"Which,\" Joyce interrupted, \"might get picked up in a few centuries.\"",
"\"What do you mean by that?\" Joyce suspiciously asked.\n\n\n \"It shifted,\" Four explained patiently, \"because Fweep kept following\n me.\"\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" Junior repeated stupidly.\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" Fweep said eagerly.\n\n\n \"He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear\n polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet\n so heavy. He's why we can't leave.\"\nThe land of the Fweep rotated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered\n the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. \"I got it figured out,\n Four,\" he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. \"A missionary takes\n over a non-rowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing\n cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and—\"",
"\"He wants to be helpful,\" Four replied without hesitation, \"and he's\n lonely. After all,\" he added wistfully, \"he's never had any friends.\"\n\n\n \"How do you know all these things?\" Joyce asked from her doorway,\n excitement in her voice. \"Can you talk to it?\"\n\n\n Behind her, Fred said, \"Now, Joyce, you promised—\"\n\n\n \"But this is important,\" Joyce cut him off eagerly. \"Can you? Talk to\n it, I mean?\"\n\n\n \"Some,\" Four admitted.\n\n\n \"Have you asked it to let us go?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Well? What did it say?\"\n\n\n \"He said he didn't want his friend to leave him.\"",
"\"Fwiend,\" said Fweep gently.\nThe land of the Fweep turned like a fat old man toasting himself in\n front of an open fire, and Junior sat at the computer's keyboard\n swearing in a steady monotone.\n\n\n \"Junior!\" said Joyce, shocked.\n\n\n Junior swung around impatiently. \"Sorry, Mother, but this damned thing\n won't work.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure that calling it names won't help, and besides, you shouldn't\n expect a machine to do something that we can't do. And if it did work,\n it would only say that the logical answer is the one I sug—\"\n\n\n \"Mother!\" Junior warned. \"We decided not to talk about it any more.\n Four is strange enough without encouraging him to think like a martyr.\n It's out of the question. If that's the only way we can leave this\n planet, we'll stay here until Four has a beard as white as Grampa's!\"",
"Four's eyes widened farther. \"But Fweep's my friend.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense!\" Joyce said sharply. \"Earthmen don't make friends with\n aliens. And that's nothing but a—a blob!\"\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" queried the raspberry lips. \"Fweep?\"\n\n\n \"If it's Four's friend,\" Reba said firmly, \"it can stay. If you don't\n like to be around it, Grammy, you can always go to your own room.\"\n\n\n Joyce stood up indignantly. \"Well! And don't call me 'Grammy!' It makes\n me sound as old as that old goat over there!\" She glared malignantly\n at Grampa. \"If you'd rather have that blob than me—well!\" She swept\n grandly out of the central cabin and into one of the private rooms that\n opened out from it.\n\n\n \"Fweep?\" asked the blob.",
"\"And blow him up? I don't think it's possible, but even if it were, it\n might be a trifle more than disastrous for us.\" Four giggled at the\n thought.\nJoyce glared at him furiously. \"Four! Act your age! We've got to do\n something with him. It's preposterous that we should be detained here\n at the whim of a mere blob!\"\n\n\n \"I don't figure it's a whim,\" Grampa said. \"Circular gravity is what\n he's got to have for one reason or another, so he just naturally bends\n the space-time continuum around him—conscious or subconscious, I don't\n know. But protoplasm is always more efficient than machines, so the\n flivver won't move.\"",
"Four thought a moment. \"There's a modern variation with three\n missionaries and three cannibals. Same river, same rowboat and only one\n of the cannibals can row. If the cannibals outnumber the missionaries—\"\n\n\n \"Sounds good, boy,\" Grampa said eagerly. \"Whip it up for me.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, Grampa.\" Four looked at Fweep again. The translucent sphere had\n paused at Grampa's feet.\n\n\n Grampa reached down to pat it. For an instant, his hand disappeared\n into Fweep, and then the alien creature rolled away. This time its path\n seemed crooked.\n\n\n Its gelatinous form jiggled. \"Hic!\" it said.\nAs if in response, the flivver vibrated. Grampa looked querulously\n toward the airlock. \"Flivver shouldn't shake like that. Not with the\n polarizer turned on.\"",
"Grampa looked up from his pircuit and said, \"If I were you, Junior, I\n would take a good look at the TV repairman when we get back to Earth.\nIf\nwe get back to Earth,\" he amended. \"You can't be Four's father.\n All over the Universe, gravity is the same, and if it's gravity, the\n polarizer will polarize it.\"\n\n\n \"That's just supposition,\" Junior said stubbornly. \"The fact is, it\n isn't because it doesn't. Q.E.D.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe the polarizer is broken,\" Fred suggested.",
"Grampa looked up, obviously relieved to drop his act of intense\n concentration. \"I'll tell you, boy. You play against the pircuit,\n taking turns, and you can put out one, two or three lights. The player\n who makes the other one turn out the last light is the winner.\"\n\n\n \"That's simple,\" Four said without hesitation. \"The winning strategy is\n to—\"\n\n\n \"Don't be a kibitzer!\" Grampa snapped. \"When I need help, I'll ask\n for it. No dad-blamed machine is gonna outthink Grampa!\" He snorted\n indignantly.\nFour shrugged his narrow shoulders and wandered to the view screen.\n Within it was the green horizon, curving noticeably. Four angled the\n picture in toward the ship, sweeping through green, peaceful woodland\n and plain and blue lake until he stared down into the meadow at the\n flivver's stern.",
"\"Look!\" he said suddenly. \"This planet not only has flora—it has\n fauna.\" He rushed to the air lock.\n\n\n \"Four!\" Reba called out warningly.\n\n\n \"It's all right, Reba,\" Four assured her. \"The air is within one per\n cent of Earth-normal and the bio-analyzer can find no micro-organisms\n viable within the Terran spectrum.\"\n\n\n \"What about macro-organisms—\" Reba began, but the boy was gone\n already. Reba's face was troubled. \"That boy!\" she said to Junior.\n \"Sometimes I think we've made a terrible mistake with him. He should\n have friends, play-mates. He's more like a little old man than a boy.\"\n\n\n But Junior nodded meaningfully at Fred and disappeared into the chart\n room. Fred followed casually. Then, as the door slid shut behind him,\n he asked impatiently. \"Well, what's all the mystery?\"",
"\"I don't care why that thing does it,\" Joyce said icily. \"I want it\n stopped, and the sooner the better. If it won't turn the gravity off,\n we'll just have to do away with it.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" asked Four. \"Fweep's skin is pretty close to impervious and\n you can't shoot him, stab him or poison him. He doesn't breathe, so\n you can't drown or strangle him. You can't imprison him; he 'eats'\n everything. And violence might be more dangerous to us than to him.\n Right now, Fweep is friendly, but suppose he got mad! He could lower\n his radioactive shield or he might increase the gravity by a few times.\n Either way, you'd feel rather uncomfortable, Grammy.\"\n\n\n \"Don't call me 'Grammy!' Well, what are we going to do, just sit around\n and wait for that thing to die?\"",
"\"Stop picking on Junior,\" Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother\n and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but\n somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. \"I'm sure\n he did the best he could.\"\n\n\n \"Anybody talks about gravitational pull,\" Grampa said, snorting,\n \"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing,\n Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the\n curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred\n years ago.\"\n\n\n \"Go back to your games, Grampa,\" Fred said impatiently. \"We've got work\n to do.\"\nGrampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last\n button on his pircuit. The last light went out. \"You've got work to\n do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?\"",
"\"Not now, Grampa,\" Four said inattentively as he watched Fweep making\n the grand tour of the cabin.\n\n\n The raspberry sphere swept over a scattering of crumbs, engulfed them,\n absorbed them. Four looked at Joyce. Joyce was watching Fweep, too.\n\n\n \"Rat poison?\" Four asked.\n\n\n Joyce started guiltily. \"How did you know?\"\n\n\n \"There's no use trying to poison Fweep,\" Four said calmly. \"He's got no\n enzymes to act on, no nervous system to paralyze. He doesn't even use\n what he 'eats' on a molecular level at all.\"\n\n\n \"What level does he use?\" Junior wanted to know.\n\n\n \"Point the scintillation counter at him.\"",
"\"A good thing, too,\" Junior said glumly, \"because this looks like the\n end of our search. Short of a miracle, we'll spend the rest of our\n lives right here—involuntary colonists.\"\n\n\n Joyce spun on him. \"You're joking!\" she screeched.\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" Junior said. \"But the polarizer won't work. Either\n it's broken or there's something about the gravity around here that\n just won't polarize.\"\n\n\n \"It's these '23 models,\" Grampa put in disgustedly. \"They never were\n any good.\"\nThe land of the Fweep turned slowly on its axis. The orange sun set and\n rose again and stared down once more at the meadow where the improbable\n spaceship rested on its improbable stern. The sixteen Earth hours that\n the rotation had taken had changed nothing inside the ship, either."
]
] |
valid
|
50818
|
[
"What was Manet’s relationship like with Ronald and Veronica?",
"How long has Manet been at his post on Mars?",
"What is the relationship like between Trader Tom and Manet?",
"What does Trader Tom’s spaceship interior most resemble?",
"How many companions did Manet make with the kit?",
"What is the reason that Manet stays on Mars?",
"What is Manet’s training background?",
"How often does Manet communicate with Earth?",
"Which humans does Manet converse with in the story?",
"What are Manet’s duties at his station?"
] |
[
[
"He felt superior to Veronica, and equal to Ronald",
"They were both too superior to him and he couldn’t stand it",
"He felt superior to both of them",
"He felt superior to Ronald, and equal to Veronica"
],
[
"unknown",
"11 years",
"3 years",
"17 years"
],
[
"Tom deals goods that Manet is interested in, and they become radio companions",
"Tom deals goods that Manet is interested in, but they don’t know each other any deeper than this",
"Tom deals goods that Manet is uninterested in, wishing him to leave",
"Tom is imagined by Manet as he loses his mind"
],
[
"A laboratory",
"A spaceship",
"A study",
"A kitchen"
],
[
"Two",
"He never used the kit",
"One",
"Three"
],
[
"It is lucrative",
"He can’t possibly return to his life on Earth",
"He prefers no companionship",
"He wants to be one of the first to colonize when the atmosphere is formed"
],
[
"Communications operator",
"Engineer",
"Not discussed",
"Space guide"
],
[
"Weekly",
"Rarely",
"Daily",
"Compulsively"
],
[
"The Atmospheric Seeding Manager",
"The BBC communications operator",
"None",
"Victor"
],
[
"He has no duties at his outpost",
"Conduct experiments to seed the atmosphere with oxygen",
"Conduct experiments with building materials to colonize Mars",
"Record communications from distant stars"
]
] |
[
3,
1,
2,
3,
4,
1,
3,
2,
3,
1
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[
0,
0,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
0,
1,
0
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[
[
"Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the\n hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n\n\n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't\n have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types.\n Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an\n insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain\n compensations.\n\n\n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed:\nThe Making of a Girl\n.\nVeronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and\n over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into\n his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n\n\n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his\n life.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\"",
"\"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going\n to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year,\n forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n\n\n \"If you think it's the\nright\nthing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n\n\n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n\n\n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n\n\n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of\n his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk\n carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he\n walked too carefully for this to happen.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion,\n William, you should let us out.\"",
"Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties—Lt. \"Hoot\" Gibson,\n Sam Merwin tennis stories,\nSaturday Evening Post\ncovers—when he had\n first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm\n opinions on all these.\n\n\n He yearned for someone to challenge him—to say that\nDime Sports\nhad\n been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why,\nSewanee Review\n, there\n had been a magazine for you.\n\n\n Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his\n own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior\n to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a\n better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.\n\n\n \"Ronald,\" Manet said, \"you are a terrific jerk.\"\n\n\n Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right.",
"He stepped forward and back-handed her across the jaw.\n\n\n It was the first time he had ever struck a woman, he realized\n regretfully. He now knew he should have been doing it long ago.\n\n\n Veronica sprang forward and led with a right.\nRonald's cries grew louder as Manet marched Veronica through the\n corridor.\n\n\n \"Hear that?\" he inquired, smiling with clenched teeth.\n\n\n \"No, darling.\"\n\n\n Well, that was all right. He remembered he had once told her to ignore\n the noise. She was still following orders.\n\n\n \"Come on, Bill, open up the hatch for old Ronald,\" the voice carried\n through sepulchrally.\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" Manet yelled.\n\n\n The voice dwindled stubbornly, then cut off.",
"A silence with a whisper of metallic ring to it.\n\n\n Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took\n comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the\n station.\n\n\n Manet threw back the bolt and wheeled back the hatch.\n\n\n Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His\n hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips\n seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the\n shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months.\n\n\n Ronald didn't say anything to Manet.\n\n\n But he looked offended.\n\n\n \"You,\" Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back,\n \"inside, inside.\"\n\n\n Ronald sidestepped the lurching girl.",
"\"You'll have Veronica and Ronald and me forever now. We'll never\n change. You'll get older, and we'll never change. You'll lose your\n interest in New York swing and jet combat and Daniel Boone, and we'll\n never change. We don't change and you can't change us for others. I've\n made the worst thing happen to you that can happen to any man.\nI've\n seen that you will always keep your friends.\n\"\nThe prospect\nwas\nfrightful.\n\n\n Victor smiled. \"Aren't you going to denounce me for a fiend?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, it is time for the denouncement. Tell me, you feel that now you\n are through? You have fulfilled your function?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Now you will have but to lean back, as it were, so to speak, and see\n me suffer?\"\n\n\n \"\nYes.\n\"",
"\"I,\" Veronica said, \"honestly feel that you should let me out, Bill,\n dearest.\"\n\n\n Manet giggled. \"What? What was that? Do you suggest that I take you\n back after you've been behind a locked door with my best friend?\"\n\n\n He went down the corridor, giggling.\n\n\n He giggled and thought: This will never do.\nPouring and tumbling through the Lifo kit, consulting the manual\n diligently, Manet concluded that there weren't enough parts left in the\n box to go around.\n\n\n The book gave instructions for The Model Mother, The Model Father, The\n Model Sibling and others. Yet there weren't parts enough in the kit.\n\n\n He would have to take parts from Ronald or Veronica in order to make\n any one of the others. And he could not do that without the Modifier.",
"\"Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be\n warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\nManet knew it all. He had heard it all before.\n\n\n He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel\n Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines,\n the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing,\nad nauseum\n. What a\n narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought\n and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal\n human being?\n\n\n Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy.",
"Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross.\n\n\n Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel.\n\n\n The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the\n diesel works, closed again.\n\n\n Ronald leaped forward and led with his right.\n\n\n Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of\n Ronald's jaw.\n\n\n Ronald pinwheeled to the floor.\n\n\n He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth.\n \"Had enough?\" he asked Manet.\n\n\n Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. \"Yes.\"\n\n\n Ronald hopped up lightly. \"Another checkers, Billy Boy?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Okay. Anything you want, William, old conquerer.\"",
"She would, except that somehow she had turned out even less bright,\n less equipped with Manet's own store of information, than Ronald.\n Whoever had built the Lifo kit must have had ancient ideas about what\n constituted appropriate \"feminine\" characteristics.\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" he said heavily, \"that you would like me to take you back\n to Earth and introduce you to Daniel Boone?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes.\"\n\n\n \"Veronica, your stupidity is hideous.\"\n\n\n She lowered her long blonde lashes on her pink cheeks. \"That is a mean\n thing to say to me. But I forgive you.\"\n\n\n An invisible hand began pressing down steadily on the top of his head\n until it forced a sound out of him. \"Aaaawrraagggh! Must you be so\n cloyingly sweet? Do you have to keep taking that? Isn't there any fight\n in you at all?\"",
"She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over\n his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n\n\n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n\n\n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather\n bristly, masculine countenance.\n\n\n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n\n\n She made her return.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n\n\n \"Whenever you say.\"\n\n\n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment.\n There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n\n\n \"Now?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"I'll tell you.\"",
"Intelligence was one of the factors Manet had punched to suppress.\n Intelligence. Aggressiveness. Sense of perfection. Ronald couldn't know\n any more than Manet, but he could (and did) know less. He had seen to\n that when his own encephalograph matrix had programmed Ronald's feeder.\n\n\n \"There were no dogfights in Korea,\" Ronald said.\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"The dogfight was a combat of hundreds of planes in a tight area, the\n last of which took place near the end of the First World War. The\n aerial duel, sometimes inaccurately referred to as a 'dogfight' was not\n seen in Korea either. The pilots at supersonic speeds only had time for\n single passes at the enemy. Still, I believe, contrary to all experts,\n that this took greater skill, man more wedded to machine, than the\n leisurely combats of World War One.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"",
"Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n\n\n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in\n a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet\n wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n\n\n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n\n\n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that\n their checker games always ended in a tie?\nThe calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated\n for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n\n\n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n\n\n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent\n wall.\n\n\n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of\n eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.",
"The Red King followed....\n\n\n Uselessly.\n\n\n \"Tie game,\" Ronald said.\n\n\n \"Tie game,\" Manet said.\n\n\n \"Let's talk,\" Ronald said cheerfully. He was always cheerful.\n\n\n Cheerfulness was a personality trait Manet had thumbed out for him.\n Cheerful. Submissive. Co-operative. Manet had selected these factors in\n order to make Ronald as different a person from himself as possible.\n\n\n \"The Korean-American War was the greatest of all wars,\" Ronald said\n pontifically.\n\n\n \"Only in the air,\" Manet corrected him.",
"\"If you were a jet pilot,\" Veronica said wistfully, \"you would be\n romantic. You would grab love when you could. You would never know\n which moment would be last. You would make the most of each one.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not a jet pilot,\" Manet said. \"There are no jet pilots. There\n haven't been any for generations.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly,\" Veronica said. \"Who else would stop those vile North\n Koreans and Red China 'volunteers'?\"\n\n\n \"Veronica,\" he said carefully, \"the Korean War is over. It was finished\n even before the last of the jet pilots.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly,\" she snapped. \"If it were over, I'd know about it,\n wouldn't I?\"",
"\"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life,\" Victor said\n meanly. \"Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make\n any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your\n uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that\n for boredom, for passiveness?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm trying to tell you,\" Manet said irritably, his social\n manners rusty. \"I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your\n purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every\n foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a\n friend!\"",
"Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk,\n suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the\n conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n\n\n So he went to open the box.\n\n\n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It\n crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the\n boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n\n\n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old\n chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and\n unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to\n have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.",
"He did not switch to video for some freshly taped westerns.\n\n\n Finally, Manet went back to the solarium and dragged the big box out.\n There was a lot left inside.\n\n\n One of those parts, one of those bones or struts of flesh sprayers, one\n of them, he now knew, was the Modifier.\n\n\n The Modifier was what he needed to change Ronald. Or to shut him off.\n\n\n If only the Master Chart hadn't been lost, so he would know what the\n Modifier looked like! He hoped the Modifier itself wasn't lost. He\n hated to think of Ronald locked in the Usher tomb of the File Room\n for 18 flat years. Long before that, he would have worn his fists away\n hammering at the hatch. Then he might start pounding with his head.\n Perhaps before the time was up he would have worn himself down to\n nothing whatsoever.",
"Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back.\n\n\n Victor was finished. Perfect.\n\n\n Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose.\n\n\n \"Move!\"\n\n\n Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the\n flesh-sprayers.\n\n\n As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized\n that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier.\n\n\n \"It's finished!\" were Victor's first words. \"It's done!\"\n\n\n Manet stared at the tiny wreck. \"To say the least.\"\n\n\n Victor stepped out of the oblong box. \"There is something you should\n understand. I am different from the others.\"\n\n\n \"They all say that.\"",
"He quickly riffled through the pages.\nOther Friends, Authority, A\n Companion\n.... Then\nThe Final Model\n. Manet tried to flip past this\n section, but the pages after the sheet labeled\nThe Final Model\nwere\n stuck together. More than stuck. There was a thick slab of plastic in\n the back of the book. The edges were ridged as if there were pages to\n this section, but they could only be the tracks of lame ants.\n\n\n Manet flipped back to page one.\n\n\n First find the\nModifier\nin your kit. This is\nvital\nto your entire\n experiment in socialization. The\nModifier is Part #A-1\non the Master\n Chart."
],
[
"\"The original, non-binding estimate at the time of your departure was\n 18.2 years. However, determining how long it will take our stations\n properly to remake the air of Mars is a problem comparable to finding\n the age of the Earth. Estimates change as new factors are learned. You\n may recall that three years ago the official estimate was changed to\n thirty-one years. The recent estimate by certain reactionary sources\n of two hundred and seventy-four years is\nnot\nan official government\n estimate. The news for you is good, if you are becoming nostalgic for\n home, or not particularly bad if you are counting on drawing your\n handsome salary for the time spent on Mars. We have every reason to\n believe our\noriginal\nestimate was substantially correct. The total\n time is, within limits of error, a flat 18 years.\"\n\n\n A very flat 18 years, Manet thought as he palmed off the recorder.\n\n\n He sat there thinking about eighteen years.",
"No one on Earth was as lonely as William Manet, and even William Manet\n could only be this lonely on Mars.\n\n\n Manet was Atmosphere Seeder Station 131-47's own human.\n\n\n All Manet had to do was sit in the beating aluminum heart in the middle\n of the chalk desert and stare out, chin cupped in hands, at the flat,\n flat pavement of dirty talcum, at the stars gleaming as hard in the\n black sky as a starlet's capped teeth ... stars two of which were moons\n and one of which was Earth. He had to do nothing else. The whole\n gimcrack was cybernetically controlled, entirely automatic. No one was\n needed here—no human being, at least.",
"In Communication, he took a seat and punched the slowed down playback\n of the transmission.\n\n\n \"Hello, Overseers,\" the Voice said. It was the Voice of the B.B.C.\n It irritated Manet. He never understood how the British had got the\n space transmissions assignment for the English language. He would have\n preferred an American disk-jockey himself, one who appreciated New York\n swing.\n\n\n \"We imagine that you are most interested in how long you shall\n be required to stay at your present stations,\" said the Voice of\n God's paternal uncle. \"As you on Mars may know, there has been much\n discussion as to how long it will require to complete the present\n schedule—\" there was of course no \"K\" sound in the word—\"for\n atmosphere seeding.",
"Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n\n\n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in\n a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet\n wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n\n\n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n\n\n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that\n their checker games always ended in a tie?\nThe calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated\n for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n\n\n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n\n\n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent\n wall.\n\n\n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of\n eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.",
"But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered\n wonderful opportunities.\n\n\n It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making\n a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as\n bright as envy.\nManet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid\n dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia.\n Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the\n arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating\n human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure\n as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest,\n making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a\n kind of climaxing release of terror.\n\n\n So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would\n never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship.",
"Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties—Lt. \"Hoot\" Gibson,\n Sam Merwin tennis stories,\nSaturday Evening Post\ncovers—when he had\n first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm\n opinions on all these.\n\n\n He yearned for someone to challenge him—to say that\nDime Sports\nhad\n been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why,\nSewanee Review\n, there\n had been a magazine for you.\n\n\n Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his\n own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior\n to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a\n better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.\n\n\n \"Ronald,\" Manet said, \"you are a terrific jerk.\"\n\n\n Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right.",
"\"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going\n to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year,\n forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n\n\n \"If you think it's the\nright\nthing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n\n\n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n\n\n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n\n\n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of\n his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk\n carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he\n walked too carefully for this to happen.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion,\n William, you should let us out.\"",
"He wasn't quite clear how he came from walking effortlessly across\n the Martian plain that had all the distance-perpetuating qualities of\n a kid's crank movie machine to the comfortable interior of a strange\n cabin. Not a ship's cabin but a Northwoods cabin.\n\n\n The black and orange Hallowe'en log charring in the slate stone\n fireplace seemed real. So did the lean man with the smiling mustache\n painted with the random designs of the fire, standing before the\n horizontal pattern of chinked wall.\n\n\n \"Need a fresher?\" the host inquired.\n\n\n Manet's eyes wondered down to heavy water tumbler full of rich, amber\n whiskey full of sparks from the hearth. He stirred himself in the\n comfortingly warm leather chair. \"No, no, I'm\nfine\n.\" He let the word\n hang there for examination. \"Pardon me, but could you tell me just what\n place this is?\"",
"Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk,\n suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the\n conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n\n\n So he went to open the box.\n\n\n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It\n crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the\n boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n\n\n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old\n chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and\n unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to\n have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.",
"She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over\n his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n\n\n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n\n\n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather\n bristly, masculine countenance.\n\n\n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n\n\n She made her return.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n\n\n \"Whenever you say.\"\n\n\n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment.\n There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n\n\n \"Now?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"I'll tell you.\"",
"A silence with a whisper of metallic ring to it.\n\n\n Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took\n comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the\n station.\n\n\n Manet threw back the bolt and wheeled back the hatch.\n\n\n Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His\n hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips\n seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the\n shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months.\n\n\n Ronald didn't say anything to Manet.\n\n\n But he looked offended.\n\n\n \"You,\" Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back,\n \"inside, inside.\"\n\n\n Ronald sidestepped the lurching girl.",
"Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the\n hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n\n\n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't\n have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types.\n Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an\n insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain\n compensations.\n\n\n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed:\nThe Making of a Girl\n.\nVeronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and\n over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into\n his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n\n\n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his\n life.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\"",
"He would be able to measure the qualities of peace and decide whether\n it was really better than war, he would be able to get as fat and as\n dirty as he liked, he would be able to live more like an animal and\n think more like a god than any man for generations.\n\n\n But after a shorter time than he expected, it all got to be a tearing\n bore. Even the waiting to go crazy part of it.\n\n\n Not that he was going to have any great long wait of it. He was already\n talking to himself, making verbal notes for his lectures, and he had\n cut out a picture of Annie Oakley from an old book. He tacked it up and\n winked at it whenever he passed that way.\n\n\n Lately she was winking back at him.\n\n\n Loneliness was a physical weight on his skull. It peeled the flesh from\n his arms and legs and sandpapered his self-pity to a fine sensitivity.",
"The host shrugged. It was the only word for it. \"Whatever place you\n choose it to be, so long as you're with Trader Tom. 'Service,' that's\n my motto. It is a way of life with me.\"\n\n\n \"Trader Tom? Service?\"\n\n\n \"Yes! That's it exactly. It's\nme\nexactly. Trader Tom Service—Serving\n the Wants of the Spaceman Between the Stars. Of course, 'stars' is\n poetic. Any point of light in the sky in a star. We service the\n planets.\"\n\n\n Manet took the tumbler in both hands and drank. It was good whiskey,\n immensely powerful. \"The government wouldn't pay for somebody serving\n the wants of spacemen,\" he exploded.",
"The Workers' Union was a pretty small pressure group, but it didn't\n take much to pressure the Assembly. Featherbedding had been carefully\n specified, including an Overseer for each of the Seeders to honeycomb\n Mars, to prepare its atmosphere for colonization.\n\n\n They didn't give tests to find well-balanced, well-integrated people\n for the job. Well-balanced, well-integrated men weren't going to\n isolate themselves in a useless job. They got, instead, William Manet\n and his fellows.\n\n\n The Overseers were to stay as long as the job required. Passenger fare\n to Mars was about one billion dollars. They weren't providing commuter\n service for night shifts. They weren't providing accommodations\n for couples when the law specified only one occupant. They weren't\n providing fuel (at fifty million dollars a gallon) for visits between\n the various Overseers. They weren't very providential.",
"\"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life,\" Victor said\n meanly. \"Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make\n any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your\n uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that\n for boredom, for passiveness?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm trying to tell you,\" Manet said irritably, his social\n manners rusty. \"I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your\n purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every\n foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a\n friend!\"",
"Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross.\n\n\n Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel.\n\n\n The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the\n diesel works, closed again.\n\n\n Ronald leaped forward and led with his right.\n\n\n Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of\n Ronald's jaw.\n\n\n Ronald pinwheeled to the floor.\n\n\n He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth.\n \"Had enough?\" he asked Manet.\n\n\n Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. \"Yes.\"\n\n\n Ronald hopped up lightly. \"Another checkers, Billy Boy?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Okay. Anything you want, William, old conquerer.\"",
"\"Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be\n warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\nManet knew it all. He had heard it all before.\n\n\n He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel\n Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines,\n the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing,\nad nauseum\n. What a\n narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought\n and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal\n human being?\n\n\n Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy.",
"Intelligence was one of the factors Manet had punched to suppress.\n Intelligence. Aggressiveness. Sense of perfection. Ronald couldn't know\n any more than Manet, but he could (and did) know less. He had seen to\n that when his own encephalograph matrix had programmed Ronald's feeder.\n\n\n \"There were no dogfights in Korea,\" Ronald said.\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"The dogfight was a combat of hundreds of planes in a tight area, the\n last of which took place near the end of the First World War. The\n aerial duel, sometimes inaccurately referred to as a 'dogfight' was not\n seen in Korea either. The pilots at supersonic speeds only had time for\n single passes at the enemy. Still, I believe, contrary to all experts,\n that this took greater skill, man more wedded to machine, than the\n leisurely combats of World War One.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"",
"And several hundred miles of desert could see him.\n\n\n For a moment he gloried in the blatant display of his flabby muscles\n and patchy sunburn.\n\n\n Then he sighed, rolled over to his feet and started trudging toward\n Communication.\n\n\n He padded down the rib-ridged matted corridor, taking his usual small\n pleasure in the kaleidoscopic effect of the spiraling reflections on\n the walls of the tubeway.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, he caught the sound of the pounding\n vibrations against the stoppered plug of the hatch.\n\n\n \"Come on, Billy Buddy, let me out of this place!\"\n\n\n Manet padded on down the hall. He had, he recalled, shoved Ronald\n in there on Lincoln's Birthday, a minor ironic twist he appreciated\n quietly. He had been waiting in vain for Ronald to run down ever since."
],
[
"\"Old chap, understand if you please that I do not only\nsell\n. I\n am a trader—Trader Tom. I trade with many parties. There are, for\n example ... extraterrestrials.\"\n\n\n \"Folk legend!\"\n\n\n \"On the contrary,\nmon cher\n, the only reality it lacks is political\n reality. The Assembly could no longer justify their disposition of\n the cosmos if it were known they were dealing confiscation without\n representation. Come, tell me what you want.\"\n\n\n Manet gave in to it. \"I want to be not alone,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Trader Tom replied, \"I suspected. It is not so unusual,\n you know. Sign here. And here. Two copies. This is yours. Thank you so\n much.\"",
"The host shrugged. It was the only word for it. \"Whatever place you\n choose it to be, so long as you're with Trader Tom. 'Service,' that's\n my motto. It is a way of life with me.\"\n\n\n \"Trader Tom? Service?\"\n\n\n \"Yes! That's it exactly. It's\nme\nexactly. Trader Tom Service—Serving\n the Wants of the Spaceman Between the Stars. Of course, 'stars' is\n poetic. Any point of light in the sky in a star. We service the\n planets.\"\n\n\n Manet took the tumbler in both hands and drank. It was good whiskey,\n immensely powerful. \"The government wouldn't pay for somebody serving\n the wants of spacemen,\" he exploded.",
"\"Ah,\" Trader Tom said, cautionary. He moved nearer the fire and warmed\n his hands and buttocks. \"Ah, but I am not a\ngovernment\nservice. I\n represent free enterprise.\"\n\"Nonsense,\" Manet said. \"No group of private individuals can build a\n spaceship. It takes a combine of nations.\"\n\n\n \"But remember only that businessmen are reactionary. It's well-known.\n Ask anyone on the street. Businessmen are reactionary even beyond the\n capitalistic system. Money is a fiction that exists mostly on paper.\n They play along on paper to get paper things, but to get real things\n they can forego the papers. Comprehend,\nmon ami\n? My businessmen\n have gone back to the barter system. Between them, they have the raw\n materials, the trained men, the man-hours to make a spaceship. So they\n make it. Damned reactionaries, all of my principals.\"",
"\"And I could buy anything that I wanted with it?\" Manet demanded.\n \"That's absurd. I'd never be able to pay for it.\"\n\n\n \"That's it precisely!\" Trader Tom said with enthusiasm. \"You\nnever\npay for it. Charges are merely deducted from your\nestate\n.\"\n\n\n \"But I may leave no estate!\"\n\n\n Trader Tom demonstrated his peculiar shrug. \"All businesses operate on\n a certain margin of risk. That is our worry.\"\nManet finished the mellow whiskey and looked into the glass. It seemed\n to have been polished clean. \"What do you have to offer?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever you want?\"\n\n\n Irritably, \"How do I know what I want until I know what you have?\"\n\n\n \"You know.\"\n\n\n \"I know? All right, I know. You don't have it for sale.\"",
"\"I don't believe you,\" Manet stated flatly. His conversation had grown\n blunt with disuse. \"What possible profit could your principals turn\n from running a trading ship among scattered exploration posts on the\n planets? What could you give us that a benevolent government doesn't\n already supply us with? And if there was anything, how could we pay for\n it? My year's salary wouldn't cover the transportation costs of this\n glass of whiskey.\"\n\n\n \"Do you find it good whiskey?\"\n\n\n \"Very good.\"\n\n\n \"Excellent?\"\n\n\n \"Excellent, if you prefer.\"\n\n\n \"I only meant—but never mind. We give you what you want. As for\n paying for it—why, forget about the payment. You may apply for a\n Trader Tom Credit Card.\"",
"\"You never know the cost. Only your executor knows that. It's the\n Trader Tom plan.\"\n\n\n \"Well, is it guaranteed?\"\n\n\n \"There are no guarantees,\" Trader Tom admitted. \"But I've never had any\n complaints yet.\"\n\n\n \"Suppose I'm the first?\" Manet suggested reasonably.\n\n\n \"You won't be,\" Trader Tom said. \"I won't pass this way again.\"\nManet didn't open the box. He let it fade quietly in the filtered but\n still brilliant sunlight near a transparent wall.\n\n\n Manet puttered around the spawning monster, trying to brush the copper\n taste of the station out of his mouth in the mornings, talking to\n himself, winking at Annie Oakley, and waiting to go mad.",
"Manet handed back the pen and stared at the laminated card in his hand.\nWhen he looked up from the card, Manet saw the box. Trader Tom was\n pushing it across the floor towards him.\n\n\n The box had the general dimensions of a coffin, but it wasn't\n wood—only brightly illustrated cardboard. There was a large four-color\n picture on the lid showing men, women and children moving through a\n busy city street. The red and blue letters said:\nLIFO\nThe Socialization Kit\n\"It is commercialized,\" Trader Tom admitted with no little chagrin.\n \"It is presented to appeal to a twelve-year-old child, an erotic,\n aggressive twelve-year-old, the typical sensie goer—but that is\n reality. It offends men of good taste like ourselves, yet sometimes it\n approaches being art. We must accept it.\"\n\n\n \"What's the cost?\" Manet asked. \"Before I accept it, I have to know the\n charges.\"",
"Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk,\n suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the\n conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n\n\n So he went to open the box.\n\n\n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It\n crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the\n boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n\n\n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old\n chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and\n unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to\n have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.",
"Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties—Lt. \"Hoot\" Gibson,\n Sam Merwin tennis stories,\nSaturday Evening Post\ncovers—when he had\n first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm\n opinions on all these.\n\n\n He yearned for someone to challenge him—to say that\nDime Sports\nhad\n been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why,\nSewanee Review\n, there\n had been a magazine for you.\n\n\n Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his\n own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior\n to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a\n better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.\n\n\n \"Ronald,\" Manet said, \"you are a terrific jerk.\"\n\n\n Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right.",
"\"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life,\" Victor said\n meanly. \"Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make\n any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your\n uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that\n for boredom, for passiveness?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm trying to tell you,\" Manet said irritably, his social\n manners rusty. \"I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your\n purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every\n foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a\n friend!\"",
"He wished Trader Tom would return and extract some higher price from\n him for the Modifier, which was clearly missing from the kit.\n\n\n Or to get even more for simply repossessing the kit.\n\n\n But Trader Tom would not be back. He came this way only once.\n\n\n Manet thumbed through the manual in mechanical frustration. As he did\n so, the solid piece of the last section parted sheet by sheet.\n\n\n He glanced forward and found the headings:\nThe Final Model\n.\n\n\n There seemed something ominous about that finality. But he had paid\n a price for the kit, hadn't he? Who knew what price, when it came to\n that? He had every right to get everything out of the kit that he\n could.\n\n\n He read the unfolding page critically. The odd assortment of\n ill-matched parts left in the box took a new shape in his mind and\n under his fingers....",
"Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the\n hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n\n\n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't\n have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types.\n Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an\n insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain\n compensations.\n\n\n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed:\nThe Making of a Girl\n.\nVeronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and\n over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into\n his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n\n\n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his\n life.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\"",
"\"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going\n to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year,\n forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n\n\n \"If you think it's the\nright\nthing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n\n\n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n\n\n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n\n\n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of\n his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk\n carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he\n walked too carefully for this to happen.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion,\n William, you should let us out.\"",
"\"Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be\n warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\nManet knew it all. He had heard it all before.\n\n\n He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel\n Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines,\n the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing,\nad nauseum\n. What a\n narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought\n and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal\n human being?\n\n\n Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy.",
"Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross.\n\n\n Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel.\n\n\n The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the\n diesel works, closed again.\n\n\n Ronald leaped forward and led with his right.\n\n\n Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of\n Ronald's jaw.\n\n\n Ronald pinwheeled to the floor.\n\n\n He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth.\n \"Had enough?\" he asked Manet.\n\n\n Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. \"Yes.\"\n\n\n Ronald hopped up lightly. \"Another checkers, Billy Boy?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Okay. Anything you want, William, old conquerer.\"",
"Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n\n\n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in\n a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet\n wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n\n\n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n\n\n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that\n their checker games always ended in a tie?\nThe calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated\n for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n\n\n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n\n\n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent\n wall.\n\n\n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of\n eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.",
"She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over\n his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n\n\n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n\n\n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather\n bristly, masculine countenance.\n\n\n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n\n\n She made her return.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n\n\n \"Whenever you say.\"\n\n\n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment.\n There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n\n\n \"Now?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"I'll tell you.\"",
"\"I am not your friend.\"\n\n\n \"No?\"\n\n\n \"No. You have made yourself an enemy.\"\n\n\n Manet felt nothing more at this information than an esthetic pleasure\n at the symmetry of the situation.\n\n\n \"It completes the final course in socialization,\" Victor continued. \"I\n am your adversary. I will do everything I can to defeat you. I have\nall\nyour knowledge.\nYou\ndo not have all your knowledge. If you let\n yourself know some of the things, it could be used against you. It is\n my function to use everything I possibly can against you.\"\n\n\n \"When do you start?\"\n\n\n \"I've finished. I've done my worst. I have destroyed the Modifier.\"\n\n\n \"What's so bad about that?\" Manet asked with some interest.",
"Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back.\n\n\n Victor was finished. Perfect.\n\n\n Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose.\n\n\n \"Move!\"\n\n\n Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the\n flesh-sprayers.\n\n\n As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized\n that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier.\n\n\n \"It's finished!\" were Victor's first words. \"It's done!\"\n\n\n Manet stared at the tiny wreck. \"To say the least.\"\n\n\n Victor stepped out of the oblong box. \"There is something you should\n understand. I am different from the others.\"\n\n\n \"They all say that.\"",
"On top of everything was a paperbound book, the size of the\nReader's\n Digest\n, covered in rippled gray flexiboard. The title was stamped in\n black on the spine and cover:\nThe Making of Friends\n.\n\n\n Manet opened the book and, turning one blank page, found the title\n in larger print and slightly amplified:\nThe Making of Friends and\n Others\n. There was no author listed. A further line of information\n stated: \"A Manual for Lifo, The Socialization Kit.\" At the bottom of\n the title page, the publisher was identified as: LIFO KIT CO., LTD.,\n SYRACUSE.\n\n\n The unnumbered first chapter was headed\nYour First Friend\n.\n\n\n Before you go further, first find the\nModifier\nin your kit. This\n is\nvital\n."
],
[
"\"Ah,\" Trader Tom said, cautionary. He moved nearer the fire and warmed\n his hands and buttocks. \"Ah, but I am not a\ngovernment\nservice. I\n represent free enterprise.\"\n\"Nonsense,\" Manet said. \"No group of private individuals can build a\n spaceship. It takes a combine of nations.\"\n\n\n \"But remember only that businessmen are reactionary. It's well-known.\n Ask anyone on the street. Businessmen are reactionary even beyond the\n capitalistic system. Money is a fiction that exists mostly on paper.\n They play along on paper to get paper things, but to get real things\n they can forego the papers. Comprehend,\nmon ami\n? My businessmen\n have gone back to the barter system. Between them, they have the raw\n materials, the trained men, the man-hours to make a spaceship. So they\n make it. Damned reactionaries, all of my principals.\"",
"The host shrugged. It was the only word for it. \"Whatever place you\n choose it to be, so long as you're with Trader Tom. 'Service,' that's\n my motto. It is a way of life with me.\"\n\n\n \"Trader Tom? Service?\"\n\n\n \"Yes! That's it exactly. It's\nme\nexactly. Trader Tom Service—Serving\n the Wants of the Spaceman Between the Stars. Of course, 'stars' is\n poetic. Any point of light in the sky in a star. We service the\n planets.\"\n\n\n Manet took the tumbler in both hands and drank. It was good whiskey,\n immensely powerful. \"The government wouldn't pay for somebody serving\n the wants of spacemen,\" he exploded.",
"\"Old chap, understand if you please that I do not only\nsell\n. I\n am a trader—Trader Tom. I trade with many parties. There are, for\n example ... extraterrestrials.\"\n\n\n \"Folk legend!\"\n\n\n \"On the contrary,\nmon cher\n, the only reality it lacks is political\n reality. The Assembly could no longer justify their disposition of\n the cosmos if it were known they were dealing confiscation without\n representation. Come, tell me what you want.\"\n\n\n Manet gave in to it. \"I want to be not alone,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Trader Tom replied, \"I suspected. It is not so unusual,\n you know. Sign here. And here. Two copies. This is yours. Thank you so\n much.\"",
"\"You never know the cost. Only your executor knows that. It's the\n Trader Tom plan.\"\n\n\n \"Well, is it guaranteed?\"\n\n\n \"There are no guarantees,\" Trader Tom admitted. \"But I've never had any\n complaints yet.\"\n\n\n \"Suppose I'm the first?\" Manet suggested reasonably.\n\n\n \"You won't be,\" Trader Tom said. \"I won't pass this way again.\"\nManet didn't open the box. He let it fade quietly in the filtered but\n still brilliant sunlight near a transparent wall.\n\n\n Manet puttered around the spawning monster, trying to brush the copper\n taste of the station out of his mouth in the mornings, talking to\n himself, winking at Annie Oakley, and waiting to go mad.",
"\"I don't believe you,\" Manet stated flatly. His conversation had grown\n blunt with disuse. \"What possible profit could your principals turn\n from running a trading ship among scattered exploration posts on the\n planets? What could you give us that a benevolent government doesn't\n already supply us with? And if there was anything, how could we pay for\n it? My year's salary wouldn't cover the transportation costs of this\n glass of whiskey.\"\n\n\n \"Do you find it good whiskey?\"\n\n\n \"Very good.\"\n\n\n \"Excellent?\"\n\n\n \"Excellent, if you prefer.\"\n\n\n \"I only meant—but never mind. We give you what you want. As for\n paying for it—why, forget about the payment. You may apply for a\n Trader Tom Credit Card.\"",
"He wished Trader Tom would return and extract some higher price from\n him for the Modifier, which was clearly missing from the kit.\n\n\n Or to get even more for simply repossessing the kit.\n\n\n But Trader Tom would not be back. He came this way only once.\n\n\n Manet thumbed through the manual in mechanical frustration. As he did\n so, the solid piece of the last section parted sheet by sheet.\n\n\n He glanced forward and found the headings:\nThe Final Model\n.\n\n\n There seemed something ominous about that finality. But he had paid\n a price for the kit, hadn't he? Who knew what price, when it came to\n that? He had every right to get everything out of the kit that he\n could.\n\n\n He read the unfolding page critically. The odd assortment of\n ill-matched parts left in the box took a new shape in his mind and\n under his fingers....",
"He wasn't quite clear how he came from walking effortlessly across\n the Martian plain that had all the distance-perpetuating qualities of\n a kid's crank movie machine to the comfortable interior of a strange\n cabin. Not a ship's cabin but a Northwoods cabin.\n\n\n The black and orange Hallowe'en log charring in the slate stone\n fireplace seemed real. So did the lean man with the smiling mustache\n painted with the random designs of the fire, standing before the\n horizontal pattern of chinked wall.\n\n\n \"Need a fresher?\" the host inquired.\n\n\n Manet's eyes wondered down to heavy water tumbler full of rich, amber\n whiskey full of sparks from the hearth. He stirred himself in the\n comfortingly warm leather chair. \"No, no, I'm\nfine\n.\" He let the word\n hang there for examination. \"Pardon me, but could you tell me just what\n place this is?\"",
"But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered\n wonderful opportunities.\n\n\n It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making\n a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as\n bright as envy.\nManet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid\n dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia.\n Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the\n arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating\n human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure\n as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest,\n making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a\n kind of climaxing release of terror.\n\n\n So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would\n never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship.",
"And several hundred miles of desert could see him.\n\n\n For a moment he gloried in the blatant display of his flabby muscles\n and patchy sunburn.\n\n\n Then he sighed, rolled over to his feet and started trudging toward\n Communication.\n\n\n He padded down the rib-ridged matted corridor, taking his usual small\n pleasure in the kaleidoscopic effect of the spiraling reflections on\n the walls of the tubeway.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, he caught the sound of the pounding\n vibrations against the stoppered plug of the hatch.\n\n\n \"Come on, Billy Buddy, let me out of this place!\"\n\n\n Manet padded on down the hall. He had, he recalled, shoved Ronald\n in there on Lincoln's Birthday, a minor ironic twist he appreciated\n quietly. He had been waiting in vain for Ronald to run down ever since.",
"\"And I could buy anything that I wanted with it?\" Manet demanded.\n \"That's absurd. I'd never be able to pay for it.\"\n\n\n \"That's it precisely!\" Trader Tom said with enthusiasm. \"You\nnever\npay for it. Charges are merely deducted from your\nestate\n.\"\n\n\n \"But I may leave no estate!\"\n\n\n Trader Tom demonstrated his peculiar shrug. \"All businesses operate on\n a certain margin of risk. That is our worry.\"\nManet finished the mellow whiskey and looked into the glass. It seemed\n to have been polished clean. \"What do you have to offer?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever you want?\"\n\n\n Irritably, \"How do I know what I want until I know what you have?\"\n\n\n \"You know.\"\n\n\n \"I know? All right, I know. You don't have it for sale.\"",
"A silence with a whisper of metallic ring to it.\n\n\n Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took\n comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the\n station.\n\n\n Manet threw back the bolt and wheeled back the hatch.\n\n\n Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His\n hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips\n seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the\n shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months.\n\n\n Ronald didn't say anything to Manet.\n\n\n But he looked offended.\n\n\n \"You,\" Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back,\n \"inside, inside.\"\n\n\n Ronald sidestepped the lurching girl.",
"He would be able to measure the qualities of peace and decide whether\n it was really better than war, he would be able to get as fat and as\n dirty as he liked, he would be able to live more like an animal and\n think more like a god than any man for generations.\n\n\n But after a shorter time than he expected, it all got to be a tearing\n bore. Even the waiting to go crazy part of it.\n\n\n Not that he was going to have any great long wait of it. He was already\n talking to himself, making verbal notes for his lectures, and he had\n cut out a picture of Annie Oakley from an old book. He tacked it up and\n winked at it whenever he passed that way.\n\n\n Lately she was winking back at him.\n\n\n Loneliness was a physical weight on his skull. It peeled the flesh from\n his arms and legs and sandpapered his self-pity to a fine sensitivity.",
"Manet handed back the pen and stared at the laminated card in his hand.\nWhen he looked up from the card, Manet saw the box. Trader Tom was\n pushing it across the floor towards him.\n\n\n The box had the general dimensions of a coffin, but it wasn't\n wood—only brightly illustrated cardboard. There was a large four-color\n picture on the lid showing men, women and children moving through a\n busy city street. The red and blue letters said:\nLIFO\nThe Socialization Kit\n\"It is commercialized,\" Trader Tom admitted with no little chagrin.\n \"It is presented to appeal to a twelve-year-old child, an erotic,\n aggressive twelve-year-old, the typical sensie goer—but that is\n reality. It offends men of good taste like ourselves, yet sometimes it\n approaches being art. We must accept it.\"\n\n\n \"What's the cost?\" Manet asked. \"Before I accept it, I have to know the\n charges.\"",
"Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n\n\n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in\n a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet\n wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n\n\n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n\n\n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that\n their checker games always ended in a tie?\nThe calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated\n for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n\n\n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n\n\n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent\n wall.\n\n\n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of\n eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.",
"\"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going\n to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year,\n forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n\n\n \"If you think it's the\nright\nthing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n\n\n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n\n\n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n\n\n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of\n his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk\n carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he\n walked too carefully for this to happen.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion,\n William, you should let us out.\"",
"In Communication, he took a seat and punched the slowed down playback\n of the transmission.\n\n\n \"Hello, Overseers,\" the Voice said. It was the Voice of the B.B.C.\n It irritated Manet. He never understood how the British had got the\n space transmissions assignment for the English language. He would have\n preferred an American disk-jockey himself, one who appreciated New York\n swing.\n\n\n \"We imagine that you are most interested in how long you shall\n be required to stay at your present stations,\" said the Voice of\n God's paternal uncle. \"As you on Mars may know, there has been much\n discussion as to how long it will require to complete the present\n schedule—\" there was of course no \"K\" sound in the word—\"for\n atmosphere seeding.",
"Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk,\n suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the\n conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n\n\n So he went to open the box.\n\n\n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It\n crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the\n boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n\n\n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old\n chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and\n unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to\n have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.",
"No one on Earth was as lonely as William Manet, and even William Manet\n could only be this lonely on Mars.\n\n\n Manet was Atmosphere Seeder Station 131-47's own human.\n\n\n All Manet had to do was sit in the beating aluminum heart in the middle\n of the chalk desert and stare out, chin cupped in hands, at the flat,\n flat pavement of dirty talcum, at the stars gleaming as hard in the\n black sky as a starlet's capped teeth ... stars two of which were moons\n and one of which was Earth. He had to do nothing else. The whole\n gimcrack was cybernetically controlled, entirely automatic. No one was\n needed here—no human being, at least.",
"She would, except that somehow she had turned out even less bright,\n less equipped with Manet's own store of information, than Ronald.\n Whoever had built the Lifo kit must have had ancient ideas about what\n constituted appropriate \"feminine\" characteristics.\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" he said heavily, \"that you would like me to take you back\n to Earth and introduce you to Daniel Boone?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes.\"\n\n\n \"Veronica, your stupidity is hideous.\"\n\n\n She lowered her long blonde lashes on her pink cheeks. \"That is a mean\n thing to say to me. But I forgive you.\"\n\n\n An invisible hand began pressing down steadily on the top of his head\n until it forced a sound out of him. \"Aaaawrraagggh! Must you be so\n cloyingly sweet? Do you have to keep taking that? Isn't there any fight\n in you at all?\"",
"\"The original, non-binding estimate at the time of your departure was\n 18.2 years. However, determining how long it will take our stations\n properly to remake the air of Mars is a problem comparable to finding\n the age of the Earth. Estimates change as new factors are learned. You\n may recall that three years ago the official estimate was changed to\n thirty-one years. The recent estimate by certain reactionary sources\n of two hundred and seventy-four years is\nnot\nan official government\n estimate. The news for you is good, if you are becoming nostalgic for\n home, or not particularly bad if you are counting on drawing your\n handsome salary for the time spent on Mars. We have every reason to\n believe our\noriginal\nestimate was substantially correct. The total\n time is, within limits of error, a flat 18 years.\"\n\n\n A very flat 18 years, Manet thought as he palmed off the recorder.\n\n\n He sat there thinking about eighteen years."
],
[
"On top of everything was a paperbound book, the size of the\nReader's\n Digest\n, covered in rippled gray flexiboard. The title was stamped in\n black on the spine and cover:\nThe Making of Friends\n.\n\n\n Manet opened the book and, turning one blank page, found the title\n in larger print and slightly amplified:\nThe Making of Friends and\n Others\n. There was no author listed. A further line of information\n stated: \"A Manual for Lifo, The Socialization Kit.\" At the bottom of\n the title page, the publisher was identified as: LIFO KIT CO., LTD.,\n SYRACUSE.\n\n\n The unnumbered first chapter was headed\nYour First Friend\n.\n\n\n Before you go further, first find the\nModifier\nin your kit. This\n is\nvital\n.",
"Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk,\n suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the\n conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n\n\n So he went to open the box.\n\n\n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It\n crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the\n boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n\n\n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old\n chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and\n unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to\n have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.",
"\"I,\" Veronica said, \"honestly feel that you should let me out, Bill,\n dearest.\"\n\n\n Manet giggled. \"What? What was that? Do you suggest that I take you\n back after you've been behind a locked door with my best friend?\"\n\n\n He went down the corridor, giggling.\n\n\n He giggled and thought: This will never do.\nPouring and tumbling through the Lifo kit, consulting the manual\n diligently, Manet concluded that there weren't enough parts left in the\n box to go around.\n\n\n The book gave instructions for The Model Mother, The Model Father, The\n Model Sibling and others. Yet there weren't parts enough in the kit.\n\n\n He would have to take parts from Ronald or Veronica in order to make\n any one of the others. And he could not do that without the Modifier.",
"She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over\n his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n\n\n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n\n\n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather\n bristly, masculine countenance.\n\n\n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n\n\n She made her return.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n\n\n \"Whenever you say.\"\n\n\n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment.\n There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n\n\n \"Now?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"I'll tell you.\"",
"He quickly riffled through the pages.\nOther Friends, Authority, A\n Companion\n.... Then\nThe Final Model\n. Manet tried to flip past this\n section, but the pages after the sheet labeled\nThe Final Model\nwere\n stuck together. More than stuck. There was a thick slab of plastic in\n the back of the book. The edges were ridged as if there were pages to\n this section, but they could only be the tracks of lame ants.\n\n\n Manet flipped back to page one.\n\n\n First find the\nModifier\nin your kit. This is\nvital\nto your entire\n experiment in socialization. The\nModifier is Part #A-1\non the Master\n Chart.",
"Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the\n hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n\n\n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't\n have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types.\n Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an\n insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain\n compensations.\n\n\n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed:\nThe Making of a Girl\n.\nVeronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and\n over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into\n his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n\n\n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his\n life.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\"",
"Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back.\n\n\n Victor was finished. Perfect.\n\n\n Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose.\n\n\n \"Move!\"\n\n\n Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the\n flesh-sprayers.\n\n\n As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized\n that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier.\n\n\n \"It's finished!\" were Victor's first words. \"It's done!\"\n\n\n Manet stared at the tiny wreck. \"To say the least.\"\n\n\n Victor stepped out of the oblong box. \"There is something you should\n understand. I am different from the others.\"\n\n\n \"They all say that.\"",
"\"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going\n to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year,\n forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n\n\n \"If you think it's the\nright\nthing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n\n\n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n\n\n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n\n\n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of\n his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk\n carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he\n walked too carefully for this to happen.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion,\n William, you should let us out.\"",
"\"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life,\" Victor said\n meanly. \"Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make\n any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your\n uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that\n for boredom, for passiveness?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm trying to tell you,\" Manet said irritably, his social\n manners rusty. \"I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your\n purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every\n foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a\n friend!\"",
"He wished Trader Tom would return and extract some higher price from\n him for the Modifier, which was clearly missing from the kit.\n\n\n Or to get even more for simply repossessing the kit.\n\n\n But Trader Tom would not be back. He came this way only once.\n\n\n Manet thumbed through the manual in mechanical frustration. As he did\n so, the solid piece of the last section parted sheet by sheet.\n\n\n He glanced forward and found the headings:\nThe Final Model\n.\n\n\n There seemed something ominous about that finality. But he had paid\n a price for the kit, hadn't he? Who knew what price, when it came to\n that? He had every right to get everything out of the kit that he\n could.\n\n\n He read the unfolding page critically. The odd assortment of\n ill-matched parts left in the box took a new shape in his mind and\n under his fingers....",
"She would, except that somehow she had turned out even less bright,\n less equipped with Manet's own store of information, than Ronald.\n Whoever had built the Lifo kit must have had ancient ideas about what\n constituted appropriate \"feminine\" characteristics.\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" he said heavily, \"that you would like me to take you back\n to Earth and introduce you to Daniel Boone?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes.\"\n\n\n \"Veronica, your stupidity is hideous.\"\n\n\n She lowered her long blonde lashes on her pink cheeks. \"That is a mean\n thing to say to me. But I forgive you.\"\n\n\n An invisible hand began pressing down steadily on the top of his head\n until it forced a sound out of him. \"Aaaawrraagggh! Must you be so\n cloyingly sweet? Do you have to keep taking that? Isn't there any fight\n in you at all?\"",
"Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties—Lt. \"Hoot\" Gibson,\n Sam Merwin tennis stories,\nSaturday Evening Post\ncovers—when he had\n first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm\n opinions on all these.\n\n\n He yearned for someone to challenge him—to say that\nDime Sports\nhad\n been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why,\nSewanee Review\n, there\n had been a magazine for you.\n\n\n Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his\n own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior\n to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a\n better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.\n\n\n \"Ronald,\" Manet said, \"you are a terrific jerk.\"\n\n\n Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right.",
"Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross.\n\n\n Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel.\n\n\n The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the\n diesel works, closed again.\n\n\n Ronald leaped forward and led with his right.\n\n\n Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of\n Ronald's jaw.\n\n\n Ronald pinwheeled to the floor.\n\n\n He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth.\n \"Had enough?\" he asked Manet.\n\n\n Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. \"Yes.\"\n\n\n Ronald hopped up lightly. \"Another checkers, Billy Boy?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Okay. Anything you want, William, old conquerer.\"",
"\"Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be\n warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\nManet knew it all. He had heard it all before.\n\n\n He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel\n Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines,\n the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing,\nad nauseum\n. What a\n narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought\n and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal\n human being?\n\n\n Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy.",
"He prowled through the box looking for some kind of a chart. There\n was nothing that looked like a chart inside. He retrieved the lid and\n looked at its inside. Nothing. He tipped the box and looked at its\n outside. Not a thing. There was always something missing from kits.\n Maybe even the\nModifier\nitself.\n\n\n He read on, and probed and scattered the parts in the long box. He\n studied the manual intently and groped out with his free hand.\n\n\n The toe bone was connected to the foot bone....\nThe Red King sat smugly in his diagonal corner.\n\n\n The Black King stood two places away, his top half tipsy in frustration.\n\n\n The Red King crabbed sideways one square.\n\n\n The Black King pounced forward one space.\n\n\n The Red King advanced backwards to face the enemy.\n\n\n The Black King shuffled sideways.",
"HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS\nBy JIM HARMON\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nEvery lonely man tries to make friends.\n\n Manet just didn't know when to stop!\nWilliam Manet was alone.\n\n\n In the beginning, he had seen many advantages to being alone. It would\n give him an unprecedented opportunity to once and for all correlate\n loneliness to the point of madness, to see how long it would take him\n to start slavering and clawing the pin-ups from the magazines, to begin\n teaching himself classes in philosophy consisting of interminable\n lectures to a bored and captive audience of one.",
"The Red King followed....\n\n\n Uselessly.\n\n\n \"Tie game,\" Ronald said.\n\n\n \"Tie game,\" Manet said.\n\n\n \"Let's talk,\" Ronald said cheerfully. He was always cheerful.\n\n\n Cheerfulness was a personality trait Manet had thumbed out for him.\n Cheerful. Submissive. Co-operative. Manet had selected these factors in\n order to make Ronald as different a person from himself as possible.\n\n\n \"The Korean-American War was the greatest of all wars,\" Ronald said\n pontifically.\n\n\n \"Only in the air,\" Manet corrected him.",
"Manet handed back the pen and stared at the laminated card in his hand.\nWhen he looked up from the card, Manet saw the box. Trader Tom was\n pushing it across the floor towards him.\n\n\n The box had the general dimensions of a coffin, but it wasn't\n wood—only brightly illustrated cardboard. There was a large four-color\n picture on the lid showing men, women and children moving through a\n busy city street. The red and blue letters said:\nLIFO\nThe Socialization Kit\n\"It is commercialized,\" Trader Tom admitted with no little chagrin.\n \"It is presented to appeal to a twelve-year-old child, an erotic,\n aggressive twelve-year-old, the typical sensie goer—but that is\n reality. It offends men of good taste like ourselves, yet sometimes it\n approaches being art. We must accept it.\"\n\n\n \"What's the cost?\" Manet asked. \"Before I accept it, I have to know the\n charges.\"",
"Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n\n\n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in\n a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet\n wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n\n\n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n\n\n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that\n their checker games always ended in a tie?\nThe calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated\n for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n\n\n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n\n\n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent\n wall.\n\n\n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of\n eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.",
"But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered\n wonderful opportunities.\n\n\n It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making\n a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as\n bright as envy.\nManet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid\n dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia.\n Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the\n arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating\n human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure\n as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest,\n making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a\n kind of climaxing release of terror.\n\n\n So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would\n never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship."
],
[
"No one on Earth was as lonely as William Manet, and even William Manet\n could only be this lonely on Mars.\n\n\n Manet was Atmosphere Seeder Station 131-47's own human.\n\n\n All Manet had to do was sit in the beating aluminum heart in the middle\n of the chalk desert and stare out, chin cupped in hands, at the flat,\n flat pavement of dirty talcum, at the stars gleaming as hard in the\n black sky as a starlet's capped teeth ... stars two of which were moons\n and one of which was Earth. He had to do nothing else. The whole\n gimcrack was cybernetically controlled, entirely automatic. No one was\n needed here—no human being, at least.",
"\"The original, non-binding estimate at the time of your departure was\n 18.2 years. However, determining how long it will take our stations\n properly to remake the air of Mars is a problem comparable to finding\n the age of the Earth. Estimates change as new factors are learned. You\n may recall that three years ago the official estimate was changed to\n thirty-one years. The recent estimate by certain reactionary sources\n of two hundred and seventy-four years is\nnot\nan official government\n estimate. The news for you is good, if you are becoming nostalgic for\n home, or not particularly bad if you are counting on drawing your\n handsome salary for the time spent on Mars. We have every reason to\n believe our\noriginal\nestimate was substantially correct. The total\n time is, within limits of error, a flat 18 years.\"\n\n\n A very flat 18 years, Manet thought as he palmed off the recorder.\n\n\n He sat there thinking about eighteen years.",
"In Communication, he took a seat and punched the slowed down playback\n of the transmission.\n\n\n \"Hello, Overseers,\" the Voice said. It was the Voice of the B.B.C.\n It irritated Manet. He never understood how the British had got the\n space transmissions assignment for the English language. He would have\n preferred an American disk-jockey himself, one who appreciated New York\n swing.\n\n\n \"We imagine that you are most interested in how long you shall\n be required to stay at your present stations,\" said the Voice of\n God's paternal uncle. \"As you on Mars may know, there has been much\n discussion as to how long it will require to complete the present\n schedule—\" there was of course no \"K\" sound in the word—\"for\n atmosphere seeding.",
"But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered\n wonderful opportunities.\n\n\n It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making\n a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as\n bright as envy.\nManet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid\n dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia.\n Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the\n arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating\n human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure\n as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest,\n making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a\n kind of climaxing release of terror.\n\n\n So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would\n never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship.",
"The Workers' Union was a pretty small pressure group, but it didn't\n take much to pressure the Assembly. Featherbedding had been carefully\n specified, including an Overseer for each of the Seeders to honeycomb\n Mars, to prepare its atmosphere for colonization.\n\n\n They didn't give tests to find well-balanced, well-integrated people\n for the job. Well-balanced, well-integrated men weren't going to\n isolate themselves in a useless job. They got, instead, William Manet\n and his fellows.\n\n\n The Overseers were to stay as long as the job required. Passenger fare\n to Mars was about one billion dollars. They weren't providing commuter\n service for night shifts. They weren't providing accommodations\n for couples when the law specified only one occupant. They weren't\n providing fuel (at fifty million dollars a gallon) for visits between\n the various Overseers. They weren't very providential.",
"He wasn't quite clear how he came from walking effortlessly across\n the Martian plain that had all the distance-perpetuating qualities of\n a kid's crank movie machine to the comfortable interior of a strange\n cabin. Not a ship's cabin but a Northwoods cabin.\n\n\n The black and orange Hallowe'en log charring in the slate stone\n fireplace seemed real. So did the lean man with the smiling mustache\n painted with the random designs of the fire, standing before the\n horizontal pattern of chinked wall.\n\n\n \"Need a fresher?\" the host inquired.\n\n\n Manet's eyes wondered down to heavy water tumbler full of rich, amber\n whiskey full of sparks from the hearth. He stirred himself in the\n comfortingly warm leather chair. \"No, no, I'm\nfine\n.\" He let the word\n hang there for examination. \"Pardon me, but could you tell me just what\n place this is?\"",
"Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n\n\n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in\n a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet\n wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n\n\n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n\n\n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that\n their checker games always ended in a tie?\nThe calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated\n for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n\n\n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n\n\n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent\n wall.\n\n\n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of\n eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.",
"\"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going\n to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year,\n forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n\n\n \"If you think it's the\nright\nthing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n\n\n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n\n\n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n\n\n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of\n his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk\n carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he\n walked too carefully for this to happen.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion,\n William, you should let us out.\"",
"The host shrugged. It was the only word for it. \"Whatever place you\n choose it to be, so long as you're with Trader Tom. 'Service,' that's\n my motto. It is a way of life with me.\"\n\n\n \"Trader Tom? Service?\"\n\n\n \"Yes! That's it exactly. It's\nme\nexactly. Trader Tom Service—Serving\n the Wants of the Spaceman Between the Stars. Of course, 'stars' is\n poetic. Any point of light in the sky in a star. We service the\n planets.\"\n\n\n Manet took the tumbler in both hands and drank. It was good whiskey,\n immensely powerful. \"The government wouldn't pay for somebody serving\n the wants of spacemen,\" he exploded.",
"A silence with a whisper of metallic ring to it.\n\n\n Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took\n comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the\n station.\n\n\n Manet threw back the bolt and wheeled back the hatch.\n\n\n Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His\n hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips\n seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the\n shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months.\n\n\n Ronald didn't say anything to Manet.\n\n\n But he looked offended.\n\n\n \"You,\" Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back,\n \"inside, inside.\"\n\n\n Ronald sidestepped the lurching girl.",
"She would, except that somehow she had turned out even less bright,\n less equipped with Manet's own store of information, than Ronald.\n Whoever had built the Lifo kit must have had ancient ideas about what\n constituted appropriate \"feminine\" characteristics.\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" he said heavily, \"that you would like me to take you back\n to Earth and introduce you to Daniel Boone?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes.\"\n\n\n \"Veronica, your stupidity is hideous.\"\n\n\n She lowered her long blonde lashes on her pink cheeks. \"That is a mean\n thing to say to me. But I forgive you.\"\n\n\n An invisible hand began pressing down steadily on the top of his head\n until it forced a sound out of him. \"Aaaawrraagggh! Must you be so\n cloyingly sweet? Do you have to keep taking that? Isn't there any fight\n in you at all?\"",
"He would be able to measure the qualities of peace and decide whether\n it was really better than war, he would be able to get as fat and as\n dirty as he liked, he would be able to live more like an animal and\n think more like a god than any man for generations.\n\n\n But after a shorter time than he expected, it all got to be a tearing\n bore. Even the waiting to go crazy part of it.\n\n\n Not that he was going to have any great long wait of it. He was already\n talking to himself, making verbal notes for his lectures, and he had\n cut out a picture of Annie Oakley from an old book. He tacked it up and\n winked at it whenever he passed that way.\n\n\n Lately she was winking back at him.\n\n\n Loneliness was a physical weight on his skull. It peeled the flesh from\n his arms and legs and sandpapered his self-pity to a fine sensitivity.",
"\"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life,\" Victor said\n meanly. \"Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make\n any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your\n uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that\n for boredom, for passiveness?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm trying to tell you,\" Manet said irritably, his social\n manners rusty. \"I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your\n purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every\n foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a\n friend!\"",
"\"Ah,\" Trader Tom said, cautionary. He moved nearer the fire and warmed\n his hands and buttocks. \"Ah, but I am not a\ngovernment\nservice. I\n represent free enterprise.\"\n\"Nonsense,\" Manet said. \"No group of private individuals can build a\n spaceship. It takes a combine of nations.\"\n\n\n \"But remember only that businessmen are reactionary. It's well-known.\n Ask anyone on the street. Businessmen are reactionary even beyond the\n capitalistic system. Money is a fiction that exists mostly on paper.\n They play along on paper to get paper things, but to get real things\n they can forego the papers. Comprehend,\nmon ami\n? My businessmen\n have gone back to the barter system. Between them, they have the raw\n materials, the trained men, the man-hours to make a spaceship. So they\n make it. Damned reactionaries, all of my principals.\"",
"\"Old chap, understand if you please that I do not only\nsell\n. I\n am a trader—Trader Tom. I trade with many parties. There are, for\n example ... extraterrestrials.\"\n\n\n \"Folk legend!\"\n\n\n \"On the contrary,\nmon cher\n, the only reality it lacks is political\n reality. The Assembly could no longer justify their disposition of\n the cosmos if it were known they were dealing confiscation without\n representation. Come, tell me what you want.\"\n\n\n Manet gave in to it. \"I want to be not alone,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Trader Tom replied, \"I suspected. It is not so unusual,\n you know. Sign here. And here. Two copies. This is yours. Thank you so\n much.\"",
"She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over\n his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n\n\n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n\n\n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather\n bristly, masculine countenance.\n\n\n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n\n\n She made her return.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n\n\n \"Whenever you say.\"\n\n\n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment.\n There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n\n\n \"Now?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"I'll tell you.\"",
"Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk,\n suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the\n conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n\n\n So he went to open the box.\n\n\n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It\n crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the\n boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n\n\n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old\n chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and\n unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to\n have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.",
"Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties—Lt. \"Hoot\" Gibson,\n Sam Merwin tennis stories,\nSaturday Evening Post\ncovers—when he had\n first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm\n opinions on all these.\n\n\n He yearned for someone to challenge him—to say that\nDime Sports\nhad\n been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why,\nSewanee Review\n, there\n had been a magazine for you.\n\n\n Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his\n own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior\n to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a\n better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.\n\n\n \"Ronald,\" Manet said, \"you are a terrific jerk.\"\n\n\n Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right.",
"The Red King followed....\n\n\n Uselessly.\n\n\n \"Tie game,\" Ronald said.\n\n\n \"Tie game,\" Manet said.\n\n\n \"Let's talk,\" Ronald said cheerfully. He was always cheerful.\n\n\n Cheerfulness was a personality trait Manet had thumbed out for him.\n Cheerful. Submissive. Co-operative. Manet had selected these factors in\n order to make Ronald as different a person from himself as possible.\n\n\n \"The Korean-American War was the greatest of all wars,\" Ronald said\n pontifically.\n\n\n \"Only in the air,\" Manet corrected him.",
"Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the\n hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n\n\n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't\n have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types.\n Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an\n insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain\n compensations.\n\n\n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed:\nThe Making of a Girl\n.\nVeronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and\n over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into\n his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n\n\n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his\n life.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\""
],
[
"Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the\n hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n\n\n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't\n have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types.\n Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an\n insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain\n compensations.\n\n\n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed:\nThe Making of a Girl\n.\nVeronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and\n over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into\n his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n\n\n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his\n life.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\"",
"\"Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be\n warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\nManet knew it all. He had heard it all before.\n\n\n He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel\n Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines,\n the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing,\nad nauseum\n. What a\n narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought\n and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal\n human being?\n\n\n Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy.",
"Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk,\n suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the\n conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n\n\n So he went to open the box.\n\n\n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It\n crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the\n boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n\n\n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old\n chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and\n unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to\n have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.",
"She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over\n his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n\n\n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n\n\n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather\n bristly, masculine countenance.\n\n\n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n\n\n She made her return.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n\n\n \"Whenever you say.\"\n\n\n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment.\n There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n\n\n \"Now?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"I'll tell you.\"",
"Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties—Lt. \"Hoot\" Gibson,\n Sam Merwin tennis stories,\nSaturday Evening Post\ncovers—when he had\n first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm\n opinions on all these.\n\n\n He yearned for someone to challenge him—to say that\nDime Sports\nhad\n been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why,\nSewanee Review\n, there\n had been a magazine for you.\n\n\n Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his\n own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior\n to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a\n better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.\n\n\n \"Ronald,\" Manet said, \"you are a terrific jerk.\"\n\n\n Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right.",
"Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross.\n\n\n Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel.\n\n\n The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the\n diesel works, closed again.\n\n\n Ronald leaped forward and led with his right.\n\n\n Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of\n Ronald's jaw.\n\n\n Ronald pinwheeled to the floor.\n\n\n He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth.\n \"Had enough?\" he asked Manet.\n\n\n Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. \"Yes.\"\n\n\n Ronald hopped up lightly. \"Another checkers, Billy Boy?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Okay. Anything you want, William, old conquerer.\"",
"Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back.\n\n\n Victor was finished. Perfect.\n\n\n Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose.\n\n\n \"Move!\"\n\n\n Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the\n flesh-sprayers.\n\n\n As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized\n that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier.\n\n\n \"It's finished!\" were Victor's first words. \"It's done!\"\n\n\n Manet stared at the tiny wreck. \"To say the least.\"\n\n\n Victor stepped out of the oblong box. \"There is something you should\n understand. I am different from the others.\"\n\n\n \"They all say that.\"",
"He quickly riffled through the pages.\nOther Friends, Authority, A\n Companion\n.... Then\nThe Final Model\n. Manet tried to flip past this\n section, but the pages after the sheet labeled\nThe Final Model\nwere\n stuck together. More than stuck. There was a thick slab of plastic in\n the back of the book. The edges were ridged as if there were pages to\n this section, but they could only be the tracks of lame ants.\n\n\n Manet flipped back to page one.\n\n\n First find the\nModifier\nin your kit. This is\nvital\nto your entire\n experiment in socialization. The\nModifier is Part #A-1\non the Master\n Chart.",
"\"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going\n to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year,\n forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n\n\n \"If you think it's the\nright\nthing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n\n\n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n\n\n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n\n\n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of\n his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk\n carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he\n walked too carefully for this to happen.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion,\n William, you should let us out.\"",
"Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n\n\n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in\n a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet\n wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n\n\n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n\n\n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that\n their checker games always ended in a tie?\nThe calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated\n for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n\n\n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n\n\n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent\n wall.\n\n\n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of\n eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.",
"Manet handed back the pen and stared at the laminated card in his hand.\nWhen he looked up from the card, Manet saw the box. Trader Tom was\n pushing it across the floor towards him.\n\n\n The box had the general dimensions of a coffin, but it wasn't\n wood—only brightly illustrated cardboard. There was a large four-color\n picture on the lid showing men, women and children moving through a\n busy city street. The red and blue letters said:\nLIFO\nThe Socialization Kit\n\"It is commercialized,\" Trader Tom admitted with no little chagrin.\n \"It is presented to appeal to a twelve-year-old child, an erotic,\n aggressive twelve-year-old, the typical sensie goer—but that is\n reality. It offends men of good taste like ourselves, yet sometimes it\n approaches being art. We must accept it.\"\n\n\n \"What's the cost?\" Manet asked. \"Before I accept it, I have to know the\n charges.\"",
"\"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life,\" Victor said\n meanly. \"Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make\n any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your\n uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that\n for boredom, for passiveness?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm trying to tell you,\" Manet said irritably, his social\n manners rusty. \"I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your\n purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every\n foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a\n friend!\"",
"Intelligence was one of the factors Manet had punched to suppress.\n Intelligence. Aggressiveness. Sense of perfection. Ronald couldn't know\n any more than Manet, but he could (and did) know less. He had seen to\n that when his own encephalograph matrix had programmed Ronald's feeder.\n\n\n \"There were no dogfights in Korea,\" Ronald said.\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"The dogfight was a combat of hundreds of planes in a tight area, the\n last of which took place near the end of the First World War. The\n aerial duel, sometimes inaccurately referred to as a 'dogfight' was not\n seen in Korea either. The pilots at supersonic speeds only had time for\n single passes at the enemy. Still, I believe, contrary to all experts,\n that this took greater skill, man more wedded to machine, than the\n leisurely combats of World War One.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"",
"He stepped forward and back-handed her across the jaw.\n\n\n It was the first time he had ever struck a woman, he realized\n regretfully. He now knew he should have been doing it long ago.\n\n\n Veronica sprang forward and led with a right.\nRonald's cries grew louder as Manet marched Veronica through the\n corridor.\n\n\n \"Hear that?\" he inquired, smiling with clenched teeth.\n\n\n \"No, darling.\"\n\n\n Well, that was all right. He remembered he had once told her to ignore\n the noise. She was still following orders.\n\n\n \"Come on, Bill, open up the hatch for old Ronald,\" the voice carried\n through sepulchrally.\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" Manet yelled.\n\n\n The voice dwindled stubbornly, then cut off.",
"But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered\n wonderful opportunities.\n\n\n It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making\n a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as\n bright as envy.\nManet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid\n dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia.\n Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the\n arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating\n human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure\n as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest,\n making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a\n kind of climaxing release of terror.\n\n\n So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would\n never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship.",
"She would, except that somehow she had turned out even less bright,\n less equipped with Manet's own store of information, than Ronald.\n Whoever had built the Lifo kit must have had ancient ideas about what\n constituted appropriate \"feminine\" characteristics.\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" he said heavily, \"that you would like me to take you back\n to Earth and introduce you to Daniel Boone?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes.\"\n\n\n \"Veronica, your stupidity is hideous.\"\n\n\n She lowered her long blonde lashes on her pink cheeks. \"That is a mean\n thing to say to me. But I forgive you.\"\n\n\n An invisible hand began pressing down steadily on the top of his head\n until it forced a sound out of him. \"Aaaawrraagggh! Must you be so\n cloyingly sweet? Do you have to keep taking that? Isn't there any fight\n in you at all?\"",
"On top of everything was a paperbound book, the size of the\nReader's\n Digest\n, covered in rippled gray flexiboard. The title was stamped in\n black on the spine and cover:\nThe Making of Friends\n.\n\n\n Manet opened the book and, turning one blank page, found the title\n in larger print and slightly amplified:\nThe Making of Friends and\n Others\n. There was no author listed. A further line of information\n stated: \"A Manual for Lifo, The Socialization Kit.\" At the bottom of\n the title page, the publisher was identified as: LIFO KIT CO., LTD.,\n SYRACUSE.\n\n\n The unnumbered first chapter was headed\nYour First Friend\n.\n\n\n Before you go further, first find the\nModifier\nin your kit. This\n is\nvital\n.",
"HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS\nBy JIM HARMON\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nEvery lonely man tries to make friends.\n\n Manet just didn't know when to stop!\nWilliam Manet was alone.\n\n\n In the beginning, he had seen many advantages to being alone. It would\n give him an unprecedented opportunity to once and for all correlate\n loneliness to the point of madness, to see how long it would take him\n to start slavering and clawing the pin-ups from the magazines, to begin\n teaching himself classes in philosophy consisting of interminable\n lectures to a bored and captive audience of one.",
"\"I am not your friend.\"\n\n\n \"No?\"\n\n\n \"No. You have made yourself an enemy.\"\n\n\n Manet felt nothing more at this information than an esthetic pleasure\n at the symmetry of the situation.\n\n\n \"It completes the final course in socialization,\" Victor continued. \"I\n am your adversary. I will do everything I can to defeat you. I have\nall\nyour knowledge.\nYou\ndo not have all your knowledge. If you let\n yourself know some of the things, it could be used against you. It is\n my function to use everything I possibly can against you.\"\n\n\n \"When do you start?\"\n\n\n \"I've finished. I've done my worst. I have destroyed the Modifier.\"\n\n\n \"What's so bad about that?\" Manet asked with some interest.",
"The Red King followed....\n\n\n Uselessly.\n\n\n \"Tie game,\" Ronald said.\n\n\n \"Tie game,\" Manet said.\n\n\n \"Let's talk,\" Ronald said cheerfully. He was always cheerful.\n\n\n Cheerfulness was a personality trait Manet had thumbed out for him.\n Cheerful. Submissive. Co-operative. Manet had selected these factors in\n order to make Ronald as different a person from himself as possible.\n\n\n \"The Korean-American War was the greatest of all wars,\" Ronald said\n pontifically.\n\n\n \"Only in the air,\" Manet corrected him."
],
[
"In Communication, he took a seat and punched the slowed down playback\n of the transmission.\n\n\n \"Hello, Overseers,\" the Voice said. It was the Voice of the B.B.C.\n It irritated Manet. He never understood how the British had got the\n space transmissions assignment for the English language. He would have\n preferred an American disk-jockey himself, one who appreciated New York\n swing.\n\n\n \"We imagine that you are most interested in how long you shall\n be required to stay at your present stations,\" said the Voice of\n God's paternal uncle. \"As you on Mars may know, there has been much\n discussion as to how long it will require to complete the present\n schedule—\" there was of course no \"K\" sound in the word—\"for\n atmosphere seeding.",
"No one on Earth was as lonely as William Manet, and even William Manet\n could only be this lonely on Mars.\n\n\n Manet was Atmosphere Seeder Station 131-47's own human.\n\n\n All Manet had to do was sit in the beating aluminum heart in the middle\n of the chalk desert and stare out, chin cupped in hands, at the flat,\n flat pavement of dirty talcum, at the stars gleaming as hard in the\n black sky as a starlet's capped teeth ... stars two of which were moons\n and one of which was Earth. He had to do nothing else. The whole\n gimcrack was cybernetically controlled, entirely automatic. No one was\n needed here—no human being, at least.",
"\"The original, non-binding estimate at the time of your departure was\n 18.2 years. However, determining how long it will take our stations\n properly to remake the air of Mars is a problem comparable to finding\n the age of the Earth. Estimates change as new factors are learned. You\n may recall that three years ago the official estimate was changed to\n thirty-one years. The recent estimate by certain reactionary sources\n of two hundred and seventy-four years is\nnot\nan official government\n estimate. The news for you is good, if you are becoming nostalgic for\n home, or not particularly bad if you are counting on drawing your\n handsome salary for the time spent on Mars. We have every reason to\n believe our\noriginal\nestimate was substantially correct. The total\n time is, within limits of error, a flat 18 years.\"\n\n\n A very flat 18 years, Manet thought as he palmed off the recorder.\n\n\n He sat there thinking about eighteen years.",
"Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n\n\n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in\n a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet\n wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n\n\n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n\n\n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that\n their checker games always ended in a tie?\nThe calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated\n for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n\n\n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n\n\n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent\n wall.\n\n\n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of\n eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.",
"But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered\n wonderful opportunities.\n\n\n It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making\n a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as\n bright as envy.\nManet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid\n dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia.\n Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the\n arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating\n human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure\n as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest,\n making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a\n kind of climaxing release of terror.\n\n\n So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would\n never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship.",
"A silence with a whisper of metallic ring to it.\n\n\n Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took\n comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the\n station.\n\n\n Manet threw back the bolt and wheeled back the hatch.\n\n\n Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His\n hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips\n seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the\n shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months.\n\n\n Ronald didn't say anything to Manet.\n\n\n But he looked offended.\n\n\n \"You,\" Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back,\n \"inside, inside.\"\n\n\n Ronald sidestepped the lurching girl.",
"\"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going\n to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year,\n forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n\n\n \"If you think it's the\nright\nthing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n\n\n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n\n\n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n\n\n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of\n his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk\n carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he\n walked too carefully for this to happen.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion,\n William, you should let us out.\"",
"And several hundred miles of desert could see him.\n\n\n For a moment he gloried in the blatant display of his flabby muscles\n and patchy sunburn.\n\n\n Then he sighed, rolled over to his feet and started trudging toward\n Communication.\n\n\n He padded down the rib-ridged matted corridor, taking his usual small\n pleasure in the kaleidoscopic effect of the spiraling reflections on\n the walls of the tubeway.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, he caught the sound of the pounding\n vibrations against the stoppered plug of the hatch.\n\n\n \"Come on, Billy Buddy, let me out of this place!\"\n\n\n Manet padded on down the hall. He had, he recalled, shoved Ronald\n in there on Lincoln's Birthday, a minor ironic twist he appreciated\n quietly. He had been waiting in vain for Ronald to run down ever since.",
"She would, except that somehow she had turned out even less bright,\n less equipped with Manet's own store of information, than Ronald.\n Whoever had built the Lifo kit must have had ancient ideas about what\n constituted appropriate \"feminine\" characteristics.\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" he said heavily, \"that you would like me to take you back\n to Earth and introduce you to Daniel Boone?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes.\"\n\n\n \"Veronica, your stupidity is hideous.\"\n\n\n She lowered her long blonde lashes on her pink cheeks. \"That is a mean\n thing to say to me. But I forgive you.\"\n\n\n An invisible hand began pressing down steadily on the top of his head\n until it forced a sound out of him. \"Aaaawrraagggh! Must you be so\n cloyingly sweet? Do you have to keep taking that? Isn't there any fight\n in you at all?\"",
"\"Old chap, understand if you please that I do not only\nsell\n. I\n am a trader—Trader Tom. I trade with many parties. There are, for\n example ... extraterrestrials.\"\n\n\n \"Folk legend!\"\n\n\n \"On the contrary,\nmon cher\n, the only reality it lacks is political\n reality. The Assembly could no longer justify their disposition of\n the cosmos if it were known they were dealing confiscation without\n representation. Come, tell me what you want.\"\n\n\n Manet gave in to it. \"I want to be not alone,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Trader Tom replied, \"I suspected. It is not so unusual,\n you know. Sign here. And here. Two copies. This is yours. Thank you so\n much.\"",
"\"I don't believe you,\" Manet stated flatly. His conversation had grown\n blunt with disuse. \"What possible profit could your principals turn\n from running a trading ship among scattered exploration posts on the\n planets? What could you give us that a benevolent government doesn't\n already supply us with? And if there was anything, how could we pay for\n it? My year's salary wouldn't cover the transportation costs of this\n glass of whiskey.\"\n\n\n \"Do you find it good whiskey?\"\n\n\n \"Very good.\"\n\n\n \"Excellent?\"\n\n\n \"Excellent, if you prefer.\"\n\n\n \"I only meant—but never mind. We give you what you want. As for\n paying for it—why, forget about the payment. You may apply for a\n Trader Tom Credit Card.\"",
"He would be able to measure the qualities of peace and decide whether\n it was really better than war, he would be able to get as fat and as\n dirty as he liked, he would be able to live more like an animal and\n think more like a god than any man for generations.\n\n\n But after a shorter time than he expected, it all got to be a tearing\n bore. Even the waiting to go crazy part of it.\n\n\n Not that he was going to have any great long wait of it. He was already\n talking to himself, making verbal notes for his lectures, and he had\n cut out a picture of Annie Oakley from an old book. He tacked it up and\n winked at it whenever he passed that way.\n\n\n Lately she was winking back at him.\n\n\n Loneliness was a physical weight on his skull. It peeled the flesh from\n his arms and legs and sandpapered his self-pity to a fine sensitivity.",
"\"You never know the cost. Only your executor knows that. It's the\n Trader Tom plan.\"\n\n\n \"Well, is it guaranteed?\"\n\n\n \"There are no guarantees,\" Trader Tom admitted. \"But I've never had any\n complaints yet.\"\n\n\n \"Suppose I'm the first?\" Manet suggested reasonably.\n\n\n \"You won't be,\" Trader Tom said. \"I won't pass this way again.\"\nManet didn't open the box. He let it fade quietly in the filtered but\n still brilliant sunlight near a transparent wall.\n\n\n Manet puttered around the spawning monster, trying to brush the copper\n taste of the station out of his mouth in the mornings, talking to\n himself, winking at Annie Oakley, and waiting to go mad.",
"\"Ah,\" Trader Tom said, cautionary. He moved nearer the fire and warmed\n his hands and buttocks. \"Ah, but I am not a\ngovernment\nservice. I\n represent free enterprise.\"\n\"Nonsense,\" Manet said. \"No group of private individuals can build a\n spaceship. It takes a combine of nations.\"\n\n\n \"But remember only that businessmen are reactionary. It's well-known.\n Ask anyone on the street. Businessmen are reactionary even beyond the\n capitalistic system. Money is a fiction that exists mostly on paper.\n They play along on paper to get paper things, but to get real things\n they can forego the papers. Comprehend,\nmon ami\n? My businessmen\n have gone back to the barter system. Between them, they have the raw\n materials, the trained men, the man-hours to make a spaceship. So they\n make it. Damned reactionaries, all of my principals.\"",
"The host shrugged. It was the only word for it. \"Whatever place you\n choose it to be, so long as you're with Trader Tom. 'Service,' that's\n my motto. It is a way of life with me.\"\n\n\n \"Trader Tom? Service?\"\n\n\n \"Yes! That's it exactly. It's\nme\nexactly. Trader Tom Service—Serving\n the Wants of the Spaceman Between the Stars. Of course, 'stars' is\n poetic. Any point of light in the sky in a star. We service the\n planets.\"\n\n\n Manet took the tumbler in both hands and drank. It was good whiskey,\n immensely powerful. \"The government wouldn't pay for somebody serving\n the wants of spacemen,\" he exploded.",
"She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over\n his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n\n\n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n\n\n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather\n bristly, masculine countenance.\n\n\n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n\n\n She made her return.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n\n\n \"Whenever you say.\"\n\n\n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment.\n There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n\n\n \"Now?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"I'll tell you.\"",
"The Workers' Union was a pretty small pressure group, but it didn't\n take much to pressure the Assembly. Featherbedding had been carefully\n specified, including an Overseer for each of the Seeders to honeycomb\n Mars, to prepare its atmosphere for colonization.\n\n\n They didn't give tests to find well-balanced, well-integrated people\n for the job. Well-balanced, well-integrated men weren't going to\n isolate themselves in a useless job. They got, instead, William Manet\n and his fellows.\n\n\n The Overseers were to stay as long as the job required. Passenger fare\n to Mars was about one billion dollars. They weren't providing commuter\n service for night shifts. They weren't providing accommodations\n for couples when the law specified only one occupant. They weren't\n providing fuel (at fifty million dollars a gallon) for visits between\n the various Overseers. They weren't very providential.",
"Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the\n hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n\n\n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't\n have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types.\n Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an\n insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain\n compensations.\n\n\n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed:\nThe Making of a Girl\n.\nVeronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and\n over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into\n his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n\n\n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his\n life.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\"",
"He wasn't quite clear how he came from walking effortlessly across\n the Martian plain that had all the distance-perpetuating qualities of\n a kid's crank movie machine to the comfortable interior of a strange\n cabin. Not a ship's cabin but a Northwoods cabin.\n\n\n The black and orange Hallowe'en log charring in the slate stone\n fireplace seemed real. So did the lean man with the smiling mustache\n painted with the random designs of the fire, standing before the\n horizontal pattern of chinked wall.\n\n\n \"Need a fresher?\" the host inquired.\n\n\n Manet's eyes wondered down to heavy water tumbler full of rich, amber\n whiskey full of sparks from the hearth. He stirred himself in the\n comfortingly warm leather chair. \"No, no, I'm\nfine\n.\" He let the word\n hang there for examination. \"Pardon me, but could you tell me just what\n place this is?\"",
"Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk,\n suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the\n conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n\n\n So he went to open the box.\n\n\n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It\n crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the\n boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n\n\n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old\n chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and\n unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to\n have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime."
],
[
"Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the\n hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n\n\n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't\n have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types.\n Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an\n insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain\n compensations.\n\n\n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed:\nThe Making of a Girl\n.\nVeronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and\n over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into\n his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n\n\n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his\n life.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\"",
"\"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going\n to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year,\n forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n\n\n \"If you think it's the\nright\nthing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n\n\n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n\n\n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n\n\n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of\n his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk\n carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he\n walked too carefully for this to happen.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion,\n William, you should let us out.\"",
"\"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life,\" Victor said\n meanly. \"Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make\n any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your\n uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that\n for boredom, for passiveness?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm trying to tell you,\" Manet said irritably, his social\n manners rusty. \"I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your\n purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every\n foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a\n friend!\"",
"\"Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be\n warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\nManet knew it all. He had heard it all before.\n\n\n He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel\n Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines,\n the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing,\nad nauseum\n. What a\n narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought\n and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal\n human being?\n\n\n Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy.",
"She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over\n his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n\n\n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n\n\n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather\n bristly, masculine countenance.\n\n\n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n\n\n She made her return.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n\n\n \"Whenever you say.\"\n\n\n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment.\n There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n\n\n \"Now?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"I'll tell you.\"",
"Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk,\n suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the\n conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n\n\n So he went to open the box.\n\n\n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It\n crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the\n boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n\n\n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old\n chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and\n unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to\n have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.",
"Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n\n\n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in\n a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet\n wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n\n\n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n\n\n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that\n their checker games always ended in a tie?\nThe calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated\n for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n\n\n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n\n\n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent\n wall.\n\n\n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of\n eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.",
"\"Old chap, understand if you please that I do not only\nsell\n. I\n am a trader—Trader Tom. I trade with many parties. There are, for\n example ... extraterrestrials.\"\n\n\n \"Folk legend!\"\n\n\n \"On the contrary,\nmon cher\n, the only reality it lacks is political\n reality. The Assembly could no longer justify their disposition of\n the cosmos if it were known they were dealing confiscation without\n representation. Come, tell me what you want.\"\n\n\n Manet gave in to it. \"I want to be not alone,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Trader Tom replied, \"I suspected. It is not so unusual,\n you know. Sign here. And here. Two copies. This is yours. Thank you so\n much.\"",
"Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross.\n\n\n Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel.\n\n\n The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the\n diesel works, closed again.\n\n\n Ronald leaped forward and led with his right.\n\n\n Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of\n Ronald's jaw.\n\n\n Ronald pinwheeled to the floor.\n\n\n He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth.\n \"Had enough?\" he asked Manet.\n\n\n Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. \"Yes.\"\n\n\n Ronald hopped up lightly. \"Another checkers, Billy Boy?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Okay. Anything you want, William, old conquerer.\"",
"A silence with a whisper of metallic ring to it.\n\n\n Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took\n comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the\n station.\n\n\n Manet threw back the bolt and wheeled back the hatch.\n\n\n Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His\n hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips\n seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the\n shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months.\n\n\n Ronald didn't say anything to Manet.\n\n\n But he looked offended.\n\n\n \"You,\" Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back,\n \"inside, inside.\"\n\n\n Ronald sidestepped the lurching girl.",
"Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back.\n\n\n Victor was finished. Perfect.\n\n\n Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose.\n\n\n \"Move!\"\n\n\n Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the\n flesh-sprayers.\n\n\n As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized\n that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier.\n\n\n \"It's finished!\" were Victor's first words. \"It's done!\"\n\n\n Manet stared at the tiny wreck. \"To say the least.\"\n\n\n Victor stepped out of the oblong box. \"There is something you should\n understand. I am different from the others.\"\n\n\n \"They all say that.\"",
"Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties—Lt. \"Hoot\" Gibson,\n Sam Merwin tennis stories,\nSaturday Evening Post\ncovers—when he had\n first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm\n opinions on all these.\n\n\n He yearned for someone to challenge him—to say that\nDime Sports\nhad\n been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why,\nSewanee Review\n, there\n had been a magazine for you.\n\n\n Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his\n own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior\n to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a\n better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.\n\n\n \"Ronald,\" Manet said, \"you are a terrific jerk.\"\n\n\n Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right.",
"But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered\n wonderful opportunities.\n\n\n It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making\n a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as\n bright as envy.\nManet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid\n dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia.\n Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the\n arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating\n human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure\n as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest,\n making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a\n kind of climaxing release of terror.\n\n\n So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would\n never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship.",
"HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS\nBy JIM HARMON\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nEvery lonely man tries to make friends.\n\n Manet just didn't know when to stop!\nWilliam Manet was alone.\n\n\n In the beginning, he had seen many advantages to being alone. It would\n give him an unprecedented opportunity to once and for all correlate\n loneliness to the point of madness, to see how long it would take him\n to start slavering and clawing the pin-ups from the magazines, to begin\n teaching himself classes in philosophy consisting of interminable\n lectures to a bored and captive audience of one.",
"He stepped forward and back-handed her across the jaw.\n\n\n It was the first time he had ever struck a woman, he realized\n regretfully. He now knew he should have been doing it long ago.\n\n\n Veronica sprang forward and led with a right.\nRonald's cries grew louder as Manet marched Veronica through the\n corridor.\n\n\n \"Hear that?\" he inquired, smiling with clenched teeth.\n\n\n \"No, darling.\"\n\n\n Well, that was all right. He remembered he had once told her to ignore\n the noise. She was still following orders.\n\n\n \"Come on, Bill, open up the hatch for old Ronald,\" the voice carried\n through sepulchrally.\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" Manet yelled.\n\n\n The voice dwindled stubbornly, then cut off.",
"And several hundred miles of desert could see him.\n\n\n For a moment he gloried in the blatant display of his flabby muscles\n and patchy sunburn.\n\n\n Then he sighed, rolled over to his feet and started trudging toward\n Communication.\n\n\n He padded down the rib-ridged matted corridor, taking his usual small\n pleasure in the kaleidoscopic effect of the spiraling reflections on\n the walls of the tubeway.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, he caught the sound of the pounding\n vibrations against the stoppered plug of the hatch.\n\n\n \"Come on, Billy Buddy, let me out of this place!\"\n\n\n Manet padded on down the hall. He had, he recalled, shoved Ronald\n in there on Lincoln's Birthday, a minor ironic twist he appreciated\n quietly. He had been waiting in vain for Ronald to run down ever since.",
"No one on Earth was as lonely as William Manet, and even William Manet\n could only be this lonely on Mars.\n\n\n Manet was Atmosphere Seeder Station 131-47's own human.\n\n\n All Manet had to do was sit in the beating aluminum heart in the middle\n of the chalk desert and stare out, chin cupped in hands, at the flat,\n flat pavement of dirty talcum, at the stars gleaming as hard in the\n black sky as a starlet's capped teeth ... stars two of which were moons\n and one of which was Earth. He had to do nothing else. The whole\n gimcrack was cybernetically controlled, entirely automatic. No one was\n needed here—no human being, at least.",
"In Communication, he took a seat and punched the slowed down playback\n of the transmission.\n\n\n \"Hello, Overseers,\" the Voice said. It was the Voice of the B.B.C.\n It irritated Manet. He never understood how the British had got the\n space transmissions assignment for the English language. He would have\n preferred an American disk-jockey himself, one who appreciated New York\n swing.\n\n\n \"We imagine that you are most interested in how long you shall\n be required to stay at your present stations,\" said the Voice of\n God's paternal uncle. \"As you on Mars may know, there has been much\n discussion as to how long it will require to complete the present\n schedule—\" there was of course no \"K\" sound in the word—\"for\n atmosphere seeding.",
"He would be able to measure the qualities of peace and decide whether\n it was really better than war, he would be able to get as fat and as\n dirty as he liked, he would be able to live more like an animal and\n think more like a god than any man for generations.\n\n\n But after a shorter time than he expected, it all got to be a tearing\n bore. Even the waiting to go crazy part of it.\n\n\n Not that he was going to have any great long wait of it. He was already\n talking to himself, making verbal notes for his lectures, and he had\n cut out a picture of Annie Oakley from an old book. He tacked it up and\n winked at it whenever he passed that way.\n\n\n Lately she was winking back at him.\n\n\n Loneliness was a physical weight on his skull. It peeled the flesh from\n his arms and legs and sandpapered his self-pity to a fine sensitivity.",
"He wasn't quite clear how he came from walking effortlessly across\n the Martian plain that had all the distance-perpetuating qualities of\n a kid's crank movie machine to the comfortable interior of a strange\n cabin. Not a ship's cabin but a Northwoods cabin.\n\n\n The black and orange Hallowe'en log charring in the slate stone\n fireplace seemed real. So did the lean man with the smiling mustache\n painted with the random designs of the fire, standing before the\n horizontal pattern of chinked wall.\n\n\n \"Need a fresher?\" the host inquired.\n\n\n Manet's eyes wondered down to heavy water tumbler full of rich, amber\n whiskey full of sparks from the hearth. He stirred himself in the\n comfortingly warm leather chair. \"No, no, I'm\nfine\n.\" He let the word\n hang there for examination. \"Pardon me, but could you tell me just what\n place this is?\""
],
[
"She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over\n his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n\n\n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n\n\n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather\n bristly, masculine countenance.\n\n\n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n\n\n She made her return.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n\n\n \"Whenever you say.\"\n\n\n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment.\n There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n\n\n \"Now?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"I'll tell you.\"",
"Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk,\n suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the\n conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n\n\n So he went to open the box.\n\n\n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It\n crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the\n boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n\n\n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old\n chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and\n unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to\n have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.",
"A silence with a whisper of metallic ring to it.\n\n\n Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took\n comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the\n station.\n\n\n Manet threw back the bolt and wheeled back the hatch.\n\n\n Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His\n hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips\n seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the\n shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months.\n\n\n Ronald didn't say anything to Manet.\n\n\n But he looked offended.\n\n\n \"You,\" Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back,\n \"inside, inside.\"\n\n\n Ronald sidestepped the lurching girl.",
"\"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going\n to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year,\n forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n\n\n \"If you think it's the\nright\nthing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n\n\n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n\n\n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n\n\n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of\n his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk\n carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he\n walked too carefully for this to happen.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion,\n William, you should let us out.\"",
"No one on Earth was as lonely as William Manet, and even William Manet\n could only be this lonely on Mars.\n\n\n Manet was Atmosphere Seeder Station 131-47's own human.\n\n\n All Manet had to do was sit in the beating aluminum heart in the middle\n of the chalk desert and stare out, chin cupped in hands, at the flat,\n flat pavement of dirty talcum, at the stars gleaming as hard in the\n black sky as a starlet's capped teeth ... stars two of which were moons\n and one of which was Earth. He had to do nothing else. The whole\n gimcrack was cybernetically controlled, entirely automatic. No one was\n needed here—no human being, at least.",
"\"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life,\" Victor said\n meanly. \"Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make\n any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your\n uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that\n for boredom, for passiveness?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm trying to tell you,\" Manet said irritably, his social\n manners rusty. \"I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your\n purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every\n foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a\n friend!\"",
"Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the\n hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n\n\n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't\n have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types.\n Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an\n insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain\n compensations.\n\n\n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed:\nThe Making of a Girl\n.\nVeronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and\n over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into\n his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n\n\n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his\n life.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\"",
"But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered\n wonderful opportunities.\n\n\n It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making\n a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as\n bright as envy.\nManet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid\n dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia.\n Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the\n arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating\n human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure\n as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest,\n making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a\n kind of climaxing release of terror.\n\n\n So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would\n never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship.",
"Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties—Lt. \"Hoot\" Gibson,\n Sam Merwin tennis stories,\nSaturday Evening Post\ncovers—when he had\n first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm\n opinions on all these.\n\n\n He yearned for someone to challenge him—to say that\nDime Sports\nhad\n been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why,\nSewanee Review\n, there\n had been a magazine for you.\n\n\n Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his\n own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior\n to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a\n better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.\n\n\n \"Ronald,\" Manet said, \"you are a terrific jerk.\"\n\n\n Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right.",
"Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n\n\n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in\n a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet\n wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n\n\n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n\n\n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that\n their checker games always ended in a tie?\nThe calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated\n for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n\n\n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n\n\n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent\n wall.\n\n\n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of\n eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.",
"Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross.\n\n\n Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel.\n\n\n The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the\n diesel works, closed again.\n\n\n Ronald leaped forward and led with his right.\n\n\n Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of\n Ronald's jaw.\n\n\n Ronald pinwheeled to the floor.\n\n\n He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth.\n \"Had enough?\" he asked Manet.\n\n\n Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. \"Yes.\"\n\n\n Ronald hopped up lightly. \"Another checkers, Billy Boy?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Okay. Anything you want, William, old conquerer.\"",
"Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back.\n\n\n Victor was finished. Perfect.\n\n\n Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose.\n\n\n \"Move!\"\n\n\n Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the\n flesh-sprayers.\n\n\n As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized\n that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier.\n\n\n \"It's finished!\" were Victor's first words. \"It's done!\"\n\n\n Manet stared at the tiny wreck. \"To say the least.\"\n\n\n Victor stepped out of the oblong box. \"There is something you should\n understand. I am different from the others.\"\n\n\n \"They all say that.\"",
"\"Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be\n warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\nManet knew it all. He had heard it all before.\n\n\n He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel\n Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines,\n the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing,\nad nauseum\n. What a\n narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought\n and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal\n human being?\n\n\n Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy.",
"He stepped forward and back-handed her across the jaw.\n\n\n It was the first time he had ever struck a woman, he realized\n regretfully. He now knew he should have been doing it long ago.\n\n\n Veronica sprang forward and led with a right.\nRonald's cries grew louder as Manet marched Veronica through the\n corridor.\n\n\n \"Hear that?\" he inquired, smiling with clenched teeth.\n\n\n \"No, darling.\"\n\n\n Well, that was all right. He remembered he had once told her to ignore\n the noise. She was still following orders.\n\n\n \"Come on, Bill, open up the hatch for old Ronald,\" the voice carried\n through sepulchrally.\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" Manet yelled.\n\n\n The voice dwindled stubbornly, then cut off.",
"He quickly riffled through the pages.\nOther Friends, Authority, A\n Companion\n.... Then\nThe Final Model\n. Manet tried to flip past this\n section, but the pages after the sheet labeled\nThe Final Model\nwere\n stuck together. More than stuck. There was a thick slab of plastic in\n the back of the book. The edges were ridged as if there were pages to\n this section, but they could only be the tracks of lame ants.\n\n\n Manet flipped back to page one.\n\n\n First find the\nModifier\nin your kit. This is\nvital\nto your entire\n experiment in socialization. The\nModifier is Part #A-1\non the Master\n Chart.",
"In Communication, he took a seat and punched the slowed down playback\n of the transmission.\n\n\n \"Hello, Overseers,\" the Voice said. It was the Voice of the B.B.C.\n It irritated Manet. He never understood how the British had got the\n space transmissions assignment for the English language. He would have\n preferred an American disk-jockey himself, one who appreciated New York\n swing.\n\n\n \"We imagine that you are most interested in how long you shall\n be required to stay at your present stations,\" said the Voice of\n God's paternal uncle. \"As you on Mars may know, there has been much\n discussion as to how long it will require to complete the present\n schedule—\" there was of course no \"K\" sound in the word—\"for\n atmosphere seeding.",
"The host shrugged. It was the only word for it. \"Whatever place you\n choose it to be, so long as you're with Trader Tom. 'Service,' that's\n my motto. It is a way of life with me.\"\n\n\n \"Trader Tom? Service?\"\n\n\n \"Yes! That's it exactly. It's\nme\nexactly. Trader Tom Service—Serving\n the Wants of the Spaceman Between the Stars. Of course, 'stars' is\n poetic. Any point of light in the sky in a star. We service the\n planets.\"\n\n\n Manet took the tumbler in both hands and drank. It was good whiskey,\n immensely powerful. \"The government wouldn't pay for somebody serving\n the wants of spacemen,\" he exploded.",
"\"The original, non-binding estimate at the time of your departure was\n 18.2 years. However, determining how long it will take our stations\n properly to remake the air of Mars is a problem comparable to finding\n the age of the Earth. Estimates change as new factors are learned. You\n may recall that three years ago the official estimate was changed to\n thirty-one years. The recent estimate by certain reactionary sources\n of two hundred and seventy-four years is\nnot\nan official government\n estimate. The news for you is good, if you are becoming nostalgic for\n home, or not particularly bad if you are counting on drawing your\n handsome salary for the time spent on Mars. We have every reason to\n believe our\noriginal\nestimate was substantially correct. The total\n time is, within limits of error, a flat 18 years.\"\n\n\n A very flat 18 years, Manet thought as he palmed off the recorder.\n\n\n He sat there thinking about eighteen years.",
"\"I am not your friend.\"\n\n\n \"No?\"\n\n\n \"No. You have made yourself an enemy.\"\n\n\n Manet felt nothing more at this information than an esthetic pleasure\n at the symmetry of the situation.\n\n\n \"It completes the final course in socialization,\" Victor continued. \"I\n am your adversary. I will do everything I can to defeat you. I have\nall\nyour knowledge.\nYou\ndo not have all your knowledge. If you let\n yourself know some of the things, it could be used against you. It is\n my function to use everything I possibly can against you.\"\n\n\n \"When do you start?\"\n\n\n \"I've finished. I've done my worst. I have destroyed the Modifier.\"\n\n\n \"What's so bad about that?\" Manet asked with some interest.",
"He would be able to measure the qualities of peace and decide whether\n it was really better than war, he would be able to get as fat and as\n dirty as he liked, he would be able to live more like an animal and\n think more like a god than any man for generations.\n\n\n But after a shorter time than he expected, it all got to be a tearing\n bore. Even the waiting to go crazy part of it.\n\n\n Not that he was going to have any great long wait of it. He was already\n talking to himself, making verbal notes for his lectures, and he had\n cut out a picture of Annie Oakley from an old book. He tacked it up and\n winked at it whenever he passed that way.\n\n\n Lately she was winking back at him.\n\n\n Loneliness was a physical weight on his skull. It peeled the flesh from\n his arms and legs and sandpapered his self-pity to a fine sensitivity."
]
] |
valid
|
20029
|
[
"What does the author suggest are some traits Said possesses?",
"What is Said’s most famous contribution in literature?",
"What does the author explain is Said’s main occupation?",
"What was Said’s relationship with Western media?",
"How did Said deliver his most important works?",
"Which of the following was NOT related to Said’s life as told in the article?",
"What reasons does the author give that Said’s actions might be controversial?",
"What is the relationship like between Said and Weiner?",
"What is the outcome of the criticism that Said embellished his upbringing?"
] |
[
[
"Boldness, confidence",
"Vanity, disorganization",
"Inventiveness, shyness",
"Charisma, people-pleasing"
],
[
"Criticism of the biased representation of Arab and Muslim culture through a Western lens",
"The first to explain reasoning for Israel’s right to exist in writing",
"Economic theories",
"Re-writing Arab and Muslim history books for post-colonial education"
],
[
"Critiquing literature",
"Politician",
"International affairs",
"News anchor"
],
[
"He never tried to engage with Western media due to his reputation",
"He remained aware of its importance, but chose not to use it as a venue",
"He was shunned by Western media and they would not pick up his work",
"He published in several Western magazines"
],
[
"Cinema",
"Speeches",
"Books",
"Visual arts"
],
[
"Elected into the American political system",
"Critiques of Western literature, culture, art",
"Israel’s right to exist",
"Professorial roles"
],
[
"Political commentary",
"Independent publishing",
"University lectures",
"Fashion"
],
[
"Sporting",
"Collaborative",
"Adversarial",
"Indifferent"
],
[
"It boosts his level of fame",
"It causes controversy, but is overcome",
"It was never fully explained as the story went on to other subjects",
"It ruins his career"
]
] |
[
1,
1,
1,
4,
3,
1,
1,
3,
3
] |
[
0,
1,
0,
1,
0,
0,
0,
0,
1
] |
[
[
"But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition.",
"O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. \n\n More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing \"criticism over solidarity,\" speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .",
"To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian.",
"enormous passion and expressed with great vehemence--make Said an uncommonly interesting, and endlessly controversial, intellectual figure.",
"Edward W. Said \n\n The game of biographical \"gotcha\" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta Menchú , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?",
"Both Said's methods and his substantive claims have come under attack. Because his theoretical debt to Michel Foucault and his unabashedly political intentions marked him as an avatar of the emerging academic left,",
"commentator on politics and culture. Each of these identities--political activist, literary scholar, university professor, public intellectual--are, in Said's case, inordinately complex in and of themselves. The tensions between them--between intellectual, aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with",
"Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him",
"But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for \"post-colonial\" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to \"the other\"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) \"must be represented\" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis.",
"Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. \"He is easily distracted\" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , \"answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol.\"",
"Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls \"the Palestinian Versailles.\" These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him \"The Professor of Terror.\" New York magazine once called him \"Arafat's man in New York.\" And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special \"Money\" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be \"on the payroll of the PLO.\"",
"A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to \"spin\" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)",
"Until very recently, Said has been an insistent voice for Palestinian statehood: He helped to draft the PLO's \"Algiers Declaration\" of 1988, which linked this aspiration to the recognition of Israel's right",
"altogether too enamored of the canons of European literature and avers that Said possesses \"a very conservative mind, essentially Tory in its structure.\"",
"Not so fast, says Weiner: Said's childhood was not \"the parable of Palestinian identity\" marked by dispossession from a beloved homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said \"grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members.\"",
"In Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western intelligentsia--the Indian Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad raised further questions about Said's mastery of his sources and accused him of self-aggrandizement and insufficient political discipline.",
"Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary , not to mention three years of research by a scholar in",
"the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular",
"residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs? Followers of Middle East politics, as well as viewers of the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer , where Said often appears, know him as an eloquent spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Readers of",
"In 1978, in the wake of the Camp David accords, Said delivered a message from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to one of Arafat's top aides indicating that the United States would recognize"
],
[
"But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for \"post-colonial\" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to \"the other\"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) \"must be represented\" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis.",
"But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition.",
"O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. \n\n More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing \"criticism over solidarity,\" speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .",
"Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls \"the Palestinian Versailles.\" These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him \"The Professor of Terror.\" New York magazine once called him \"Arafat's man in New York.\" And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special \"Money\" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be \"on the payroll of the PLO.\"",
"Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. \"He is easily distracted\" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , \"answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol.\"",
"To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian.",
"commentator on politics and culture. Each of these identities--political activist, literary scholar, university professor, public intellectual--are, in Said's case, inordinately complex in and of themselves. The tensions between them--between intellectual, aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with",
"Both Said's methods and his substantive claims have come under attack. Because his theoretical debt to Michel Foucault and his unabashedly political intentions marked him as an avatar of the emerging academic left,",
"Edward W. Said \n\n The game of biographical \"gotcha\" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta Menchú , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?",
"knowledge of history, philology, and Arabic. (To read Lewis' piece, click here. For Said's angry response, click here.) But the most sustained assault on Orientalism 's premises, and on its prestige, came from the left. In a book called",
"enormous passion and expressed with great vehemence--make Said an uncommonly interesting, and endlessly controversial, intellectual figure.",
"The Nation know him as a formidable reviewer of opera and classical music. Several generations of graduate students in a number of disciplines know him as the author of Orientalism . The 30,000 literary scholars who make up the membership of",
"In Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western intelligentsia--the Indian Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad raised further questions about Said's mastery of his sources and accused him of self-aggrandizement and insufficient political discipline.",
"the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular",
"Until very recently, Said has been an insistent voice for Palestinian statehood: He helped to draft the PLO's \"Algiers Declaration\" of 1988, which linked this aspiration to the recognition of Israel's right",
"A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to \"spin\" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)",
"Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him",
"a lot of the criticism came from traditional scholars. In the New York Review of Books , for example, the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, one of the chief modern villains of Orientalism , decried Said's inflammatory tone and questioned his",
"Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary , not to mention three years of research by a scholar in",
"In 1978, in the wake of the Camp David accords, Said delivered a message from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to one of Arafat's top aides indicating that the United States would recognize"
],
[
"But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition.",
"commentator on politics and culture. Each of these identities--political activist, literary scholar, university professor, public intellectual--are, in Said's case, inordinately complex in and of themselves. The tensions between them--between intellectual, aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with",
"To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian.",
"But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for \"post-colonial\" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to \"the other\"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) \"must be represented\" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis.",
"Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls \"the Palestinian Versailles.\" These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him \"The Professor of Terror.\" New York magazine once called him \"Arafat's man in New York.\" And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special \"Money\" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be \"on the payroll of the PLO.\"",
"Edward W. Said \n\n The game of biographical \"gotcha\" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta Menchú , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?",
"O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. \n\n More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing \"criticism over solidarity,\" speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .",
"Both Said's methods and his substantive claims have come under attack. Because his theoretical debt to Michel Foucault and his unabashedly political intentions marked him as an avatar of the emerging academic left,",
"A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to \"spin\" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)",
"Until very recently, Said has been an insistent voice for Palestinian statehood: He helped to draft the PLO's \"Algiers Declaration\" of 1988, which linked this aspiration to the recognition of Israel's right",
"enormous passion and expressed with great vehemence--make Said an uncommonly interesting, and endlessly controversial, intellectual figure.",
"Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary , not to mention three years of research by a scholar in",
"Not so fast, says Weiner: Said's childhood was not \"the parable of Palestinian identity\" marked by dispossession from a beloved homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said \"grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members.\"",
"Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. \"He is easily distracted\" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , \"answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol.\"",
"the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular",
"Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him",
"In 1978, in the wake of the Camp David accords, Said delivered a message from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to one of Arafat's top aides indicating that the United States would recognize",
"residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs? Followers of Middle East politics, as well as viewers of the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer , where Said often appears, know him as an eloquent spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Readers of",
"The Nation know him as a formidable reviewer of opera and classical music. Several generations of graduate students in a number of disciplines know him as the author of Orientalism . The 30,000 literary scholars who make up the membership of",
"a lot of the criticism came from traditional scholars. In the New York Review of Books , for example, the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, one of the chief modern villains of Orientalism , decried Said's inflammatory tone and questioned his"
],
[
"But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition.",
"But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for \"post-colonial\" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to \"the other\"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) \"must be represented\" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis.",
"Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls \"the Palestinian Versailles.\" These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him \"The Professor of Terror.\" New York magazine once called him \"Arafat's man in New York.\" And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special \"Money\" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be \"on the payroll of the PLO.\"",
"O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. \n\n More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing \"criticism over solidarity,\" speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .",
"Both Said's methods and his substantive claims have come under attack. Because his theoretical debt to Michel Foucault and his unabashedly political intentions marked him as an avatar of the emerging academic left,",
"the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular",
"Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. \"He is easily distracted\" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , \"answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol.\"",
"Edward W. Said \n\n The game of biographical \"gotcha\" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta Menchú , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?",
"To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian.",
"commentator on politics and culture. Each of these identities--political activist, literary scholar, university professor, public intellectual--are, in Said's case, inordinately complex in and of themselves. The tensions between them--between intellectual, aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with",
"In Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western intelligentsia--the Indian Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad raised further questions about Said's mastery of his sources and accused him of self-aggrandizement and insufficient political discipline.",
"Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him",
"A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to \"spin\" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)",
"In 1978, in the wake of the Camp David accords, Said delivered a message from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to one of Arafat's top aides indicating that the United States would recognize",
"residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs? Followers of Middle East politics, as well as viewers of the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer , where Said often appears, know him as an eloquent spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Readers of",
"Until very recently, Said has been an insistent voice for Palestinian statehood: He helped to draft the PLO's \"Algiers Declaration\" of 1988, which linked this aspiration to the recognition of Israel's right",
"enormous passion and expressed with great vehemence--make Said an uncommonly interesting, and endlessly controversial, intellectual figure.",
"Not so fast, says Weiner: Said's childhood was not \"the parable of Palestinian identity\" marked by dispossession from a beloved homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said \"grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members.\"",
"a lot of the criticism came from traditional scholars. In the New York Review of Books , for example, the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, one of the chief modern villains of Orientalism , decried Said's inflammatory tone and questioned his",
"knowledge of history, philology, and Arabic. (To read Lewis' piece, click here. For Said's angry response, click here.) But the most sustained assault on Orientalism 's premises, and on its prestige, came from the left. In a book called"
],
[
"But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition.",
"O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. \n\n More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing \"criticism over solidarity,\" speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .",
"But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for \"post-colonial\" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to \"the other\"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) \"must be represented\" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis.",
"Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls \"the Palestinian Versailles.\" These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him \"The Professor of Terror.\" New York magazine once called him \"Arafat's man in New York.\" And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special \"Money\" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be \"on the payroll of the PLO.\"",
"To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian.",
"In 1978, in the wake of the Camp David accords, Said delivered a message from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to one of Arafat's top aides indicating that the United States would recognize",
"Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. \"He is easily distracted\" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , \"answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol.\"",
"Until very recently, Said has been an insistent voice for Palestinian statehood: He helped to draft the PLO's \"Algiers Declaration\" of 1988, which linked this aspiration to the recognition of Israel's right",
"commentator on politics and culture. Each of these identities--political activist, literary scholar, university professor, public intellectual--are, in Said's case, inordinately complex in and of themselves. The tensions between them--between intellectual, aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with",
"Both Said's methods and his substantive claims have come under attack. Because his theoretical debt to Michel Foucault and his unabashedly political intentions marked him as an avatar of the emerging academic left,",
"Edward W. Said \n\n The game of biographical \"gotcha\" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta Menchú , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?",
"enormous passion and expressed with great vehemence--make Said an uncommonly interesting, and endlessly controversial, intellectual figure.",
"A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to \"spin\" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)",
"Not so fast, says Weiner: Said's childhood was not \"the parable of Palestinian identity\" marked by dispossession from a beloved homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said \"grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members.\"",
"In Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western intelligentsia--the Indian Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad raised further questions about Said's mastery of his sources and accused him of self-aggrandizement and insufficient political discipline.",
"residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs? Followers of Middle East politics, as well as viewers of the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer , where Said often appears, know him as an eloquent spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Readers of",
"knowledge of history, philology, and Arabic. (To read Lewis' piece, click here. For Said's angry response, click here.) But the most sustained assault on Orientalism 's premises, and on its prestige, came from the left. In a book called",
"Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him",
"the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular",
"a lot of the criticism came from traditional scholars. In the New York Review of Books , for example, the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, one of the chief modern villains of Orientalism , decried Said's inflammatory tone and questioned his"
],
[
"But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition.",
"Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls \"the Palestinian Versailles.\" These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him \"The Professor of Terror.\" New York magazine once called him \"Arafat's man in New York.\" And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special \"Money\" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be \"on the payroll of the PLO.\"",
"A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to \"spin\" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)",
"But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for \"post-colonial\" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to \"the other\"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) \"must be represented\" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis.",
"Not so fast, says Weiner: Said's childhood was not \"the parable of Palestinian identity\" marked by dispossession from a beloved homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said \"grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members.\"",
"Edward W. Said \n\n The game of biographical \"gotcha\" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta Menchú , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?",
"To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian.",
"O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. \n\n More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing \"criticism over solidarity,\" speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .",
"Both Said's methods and his substantive claims have come under attack. Because his theoretical debt to Michel Foucault and his unabashedly political intentions marked him as an avatar of the emerging academic left,",
"commentator on politics and culture. Each of these identities--political activist, literary scholar, university professor, public intellectual--are, in Said's case, inordinately complex in and of themselves. The tensions between them--between intellectual, aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with",
"Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary , not to mention three years of research by a scholar in",
"Until very recently, Said has been an insistent voice for Palestinian statehood: He helped to draft the PLO's \"Algiers Declaration\" of 1988, which linked this aspiration to the recognition of Israel's right",
"knowledge of history, philology, and Arabic. (To read Lewis' piece, click here. For Said's angry response, click here.) But the most sustained assault on Orientalism 's premises, and on its prestige, came from the left. In a book called",
"Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. \"He is easily distracted\" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , \"answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol.\"",
"In Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western intelligentsia--the Indian Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad raised further questions about Said's mastery of his sources and accused him of self-aggrandizement and insufficient political discipline.",
"Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him",
"In 1978, in the wake of the Camp David accords, Said delivered a message from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to one of Arafat's top aides indicating that the United States would recognize",
"a lot of the criticism came from traditional scholars. In the New York Review of Books , for example, the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, one of the chief modern villains of Orientalism , decried Said's inflammatory tone and questioned his",
"the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular",
"residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs? Followers of Middle East politics, as well as viewers of the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer , where Said often appears, know him as an eloquent spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Readers of"
],
[
"Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls \"the Palestinian Versailles.\" These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him \"The Professor of Terror.\" New York magazine once called him \"Arafat's man in New York.\" And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special \"Money\" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be \"on the payroll of the PLO.\"",
"enormous passion and expressed with great vehemence--make Said an uncommonly interesting, and endlessly controversial, intellectual figure.",
"Both Said's methods and his substantive claims have come under attack. Because his theoretical debt to Michel Foucault and his unabashedly political intentions marked him as an avatar of the emerging academic left,",
"Edward W. Said \n\n The game of biographical \"gotcha\" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta Menchú , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?",
"But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition.",
"To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian.",
"Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him",
"O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. \n\n More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing \"criticism over solidarity,\" speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .",
"commentator on politics and culture. Each of these identities--political activist, literary scholar, university professor, public intellectual--are, in Said's case, inordinately complex in and of themselves. The tensions between them--between intellectual, aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with",
"But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for \"post-colonial\" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to \"the other\"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) \"must be represented\" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis.",
"A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to \"spin\" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)",
"Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. \"He is easily distracted\" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , \"answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol.\"",
"a lot of the criticism came from traditional scholars. In the New York Review of Books , for example, the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, one of the chief modern villains of Orientalism , decried Said's inflammatory tone and questioned his",
"the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular",
"In Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western intelligentsia--the Indian Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad raised further questions about Said's mastery of his sources and accused him of self-aggrandizement and insufficient political discipline.",
"Until very recently, Said has been an insistent voice for Palestinian statehood: He helped to draft the PLO's \"Algiers Declaration\" of 1988, which linked this aspiration to the recognition of Israel's right",
"Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary , not to mention three years of research by a scholar in",
"In 1978, in the wake of the Camp David accords, Said delivered a message from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to one of Arafat's top aides indicating that the United States would recognize",
"been invited to the event by its patron, Bill Clinton, stayed home. Since then, as bien-pensant American opinion has embraced the \"peace process,\" Said has bemoaned Arafat's \"capitulation\" and grown increasingly disgusted with the chairman's dictatorial rule over",
"residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs? Followers of Middle East politics, as well as viewers of the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer , where Said often appears, know him as an eloquent spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Readers of"
],
[
"A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to \"spin\" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)",
"Not so fast, says Weiner: Said's childhood was not \"the parable of Palestinian identity\" marked by dispossession from a beloved homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said \"grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members.\"",
"To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian.",
"But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition.",
"Edward W. Said \n\n The game of biographical \"gotcha\" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta Menchú , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?",
"O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. \n\n More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing \"criticism over solidarity,\" speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .",
"In 1978, in the wake of the Camp David accords, Said delivered a message from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to one of Arafat's top aides indicating that the United States would recognize",
"Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls \"the Palestinian Versailles.\" These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him \"The Professor of Terror.\" New York magazine once called him \"Arafat's man in New York.\" And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special \"Money\" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be \"on the payroll of the PLO.\"",
"Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. \"He is easily distracted\" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , \"answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol.\"",
"Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him",
"Both Said's methods and his substantive claims have come under attack. Because his theoretical debt to Michel Foucault and his unabashedly political intentions marked him as an avatar of the emerging academic left,",
"residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs? Followers of Middle East politics, as well as viewers of the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer , where Said often appears, know him as an eloquent spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Readers of",
"Until very recently, Said has been an insistent voice for Palestinian statehood: He helped to draft the PLO's \"Algiers Declaration\" of 1988, which linked this aspiration to the recognition of Israel's right",
"But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for \"post-colonial\" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to \"the other\"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) \"must be represented\" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis.",
"enormous passion and expressed with great vehemence--make Said an uncommonly interesting, and endlessly controversial, intellectual figure.",
"commentator on politics and culture. Each of these identities--political activist, literary scholar, university professor, public intellectual--are, in Said's case, inordinately complex in and of themselves. The tensions between them--between intellectual, aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with",
"been invited to the event by its patron, Bill Clinton, stayed home. Since then, as bien-pensant American opinion has embraced the \"peace process,\" Said has bemoaned Arafat's \"capitulation\" and grown increasingly disgusted with the chairman's dictatorial rule over",
"the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular",
"Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary , not to mention three years of research by a scholar in",
"the PLO as a legitimate party to peace talks in exchange for recognition of Israel. Arafat ignored the message. Fifteen years later, when Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn, Said, who had"
],
[
"A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to \"spin\" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)",
"To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian.",
"Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls \"the Palestinian Versailles.\" These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him \"The Professor of Terror.\" New York magazine once called him \"Arafat's man in New York.\" And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special \"Money\" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be \"on the payroll of the PLO.\"",
"But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition.",
"Edward W. Said \n\n The game of biographical \"gotcha\" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta Menchú , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?",
"Not so fast, says Weiner: Said's childhood was not \"the parable of Palestinian identity\" marked by dispossession from a beloved homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said \"grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members.\"",
"O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. \n\n More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing \"criticism over solidarity,\" speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .",
"Both Said's methods and his substantive claims have come under attack. Because his theoretical debt to Michel Foucault and his unabashedly political intentions marked him as an avatar of the emerging academic left,",
"Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. \"He is easily distracted\" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , \"answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol.\"",
"a lot of the criticism came from traditional scholars. In the New York Review of Books , for example, the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, one of the chief modern villains of Orientalism , decried Said's inflammatory tone and questioned his",
"But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for \"post-colonial\" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to \"the other\"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) \"must be represented\" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis.",
"In Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western intelligentsia--the Indian Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad raised further questions about Said's mastery of his sources and accused him of self-aggrandizement and insufficient political discipline.",
"Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary , not to mention three years of research by a scholar in",
"Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him",
"Until very recently, Said has been an insistent voice for Palestinian statehood: He helped to draft the PLO's \"Algiers Declaration\" of 1988, which linked this aspiration to the recognition of Israel's right",
"knowledge of history, philology, and Arabic. (To read Lewis' piece, click here. For Said's angry response, click here.) But the most sustained assault on Orientalism 's premises, and on its prestige, came from the left. In a book called",
"In 1978, in the wake of the Camp David accords, Said delivered a message from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to one of Arafat's top aides indicating that the United States would recognize",
"the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular",
"residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs? Followers of Middle East politics, as well as viewers of the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer , where Said often appears, know him as an eloquent spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Readers of",
"commentator on politics and culture. Each of these identities--political activist, literary scholar, university professor, public intellectual--are, in Said's case, inordinately complex in and of themselves. The tensions between them--between intellectual, aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with"
]
] |
valid
|
22346
|
[
"Why were the Tepoktan's barred from going into space?",
"What is it implied when it is said that the survivor is \"not what he was hoping for?\"",
"Why is the injured man surprised to see George? ",
"Why was George suspicious of Al Birken?",
"Why didn't the Tepoktans seize Al Birken after he stole the vehicle?",
"Why was Birken limping during his approach to the space ship?",
"Why were George's escorts suddenly startled at the ship?",
"Why did George remain on Tepokt instead of returning home?",
"Why was George upset with Klaft after killing Al Birken?",
"Why was George regretful for killing Al Birken?"
] |
[
[
"Their religion prohibits it",
"They lack the drive for interstellar exploration",
"The Terrans have colonized all of the rest of near space",
"There is a field of debris blocking their orbit"
],
[
"George would have preferred the survivor to have been of a stronger build",
"George would have preferred the survivor to be uninjured",
"George would have preferred for the survivor to have been a woman",
"George would have wanted the survivor to not have been from Terra"
],
[
"George is the only human on an alien planet",
"He is surprised to be alive and able to see",
"He knows George from a previous encounter",
"He was on a rescue mission for George"
],
[
"George thinks that Al may be a prisoner on the run ",
"George thinks Al may be a scout for land-grabbers",
"George is worried Al is there to steal Tepoktan knowledge",
"George is worried Al will try to conquer the Tepoktans"
],
[
"The Tepoktans were afraid Al Birken would kill more people",
"The Tepoktans wanted Al Birken to leave",
"Al Birken continually overpowered the Tepoktans",
"The Tepotkans were leaving it up to George's discretion"
],
[
"His leg was hurt in a crash duringthe chase with the authorities",
"The Tepoktans had shot his leg while he was running towards the ship",
"The Tepoktans had operated on his leg to study his physiology",
"His leg was broken in his initial crash on the planet"
],
[
"George was not going to let Al Birken board the ship",
"Al Birken had tackled George",
"Al Birken had thrown a spear at George",
"George decided to leave Tepokt"
],
[
"He like the way he was treated with respect on Tepokt",
"He was a wanted criminal on his home planet",
"He wanted to help the Tepoktans achieve interstellar travel",
"He was afraid of crashing in the meteorite field while leaving"
],
[
"Klaft didn't help him during the fight",
"Klaft was asking if the Dr. could study Al Birken's body",
"Klaft was chastising George for killing Al",
"Klaft was telling George that he should leave on the space ship"
],
[
"George had damaged the ship that the Tepoktans built",
"George wanted another human to live on Tepokt with",
"George wanted to give Al Birken a fair trial",
"George thought Al Birkin was innocent"
]
] |
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[
"In some ways, compared to\n [105]\n those of Terra, the industries of\n Tepokt were underdeveloped. In\n the first place, the population\n was smaller and had different\n standards of luxury. In the second,\n a certain lack of drive resulted\n from the inability to\n break out into interplanetary\n space. Kinton had been inexplicably\n lucky to have reached the\n surface even in a battered hulk.\n The shell of meteorites was at\n least a hundred miles thick and\n constantly shifting.\n\n\n \"We do not know if they have\n always been meteorites,\" the\n Tepoktans had told Kinton, \"or\n whether part of them come from\n a destroyed satellite; but our observers\n have proved mathematically\n that no direct path through\n them may be predicted more than\n a very short while in advance.\"",
"Kinton turned away from the\n window as he caught the glint\n of Tepokt's sun upon the hull of\n the spaceship they had also built\n for him. Perhaps ... would it\n be fair to encourage the newcomer\n to attempt the barrier?",
"Why was it one like him who\n got through? he asked himself\n in silent anguish. After ten\n years. The Tepoktans had been\n thinking well of Terrans, but\n now—\n\n\n He did not worry about his\n own position. That was well\n enough established, whether or\n not he could again hold up his\n head before the purple-scaled\n people who had been so generous\n to him.\n\n\n Even if they had been aroused\n to a rage by the killing, Kinton\n told himself, he would not have\n been concerned about himself. He\n had reached a fairly ripe age for\n a spaceman. In fact, he had already\n [110]\n enjoyed a decade of borrowed\n time.\n\n\n But they were more civilized\n than that wanton murderer, he\n realized.\n\n\n He straightened up, forcing\n back his early-morning weariness.",
"Kinton growled a Tepoktan expression\n the meaning of which\n he had deduced after hearing it\n used by the dam workers.\n\n\n He whirled to run toward the\n helicopter. Hardly had he taken\n two steps, however, when he saw\n startled changes in the carefully\n blank looks of his escort. The\n constable half raised his heavy\n weapon, and Klaft sprang forward\n with a hissing cry.\n\n\n By the time Kinton's aging\n muscles obeyed his impulse to\n sidestep, the spear had already\n hurtled past. It had missed him\n by an error of over six feet.\n\n\n [113]\n He felt his face flushing with\n sudden anger. Birken was running\n as best he could toward the\n spaceship, and had covered nearly\n half the distance.\n\n\n Kinton ran at the Tepoktans,\n brushing aside the concerned\n Klaft. He snatched the heavy\n weapon from the surprised constable.",
"\"We must get into the air\n immediately,\" he told Klaft.\n \"Perhaps we may see him before\n he reaches—\"\n\n\n He broke off at the word\n \"spaceship\" but he noticed a reserved\n expression on Klaft's\n pointed face. His aide had probably\n reached a conclusion similar\n to his own.\n\n\n They climbed back into the\n cabin and Klaft gave brisk orders\n to the lean young pilot. A\n moment later, Kinton saw the\n ground outside drop away.\n\n\n Only upon turning around did\n he realize that two armed Tepoktans\n had materialized in time to\n follow Klaft inside.",
"The aide reached Kinton and\n bent to hiss and cluck into the\n latter's ear in what he presumably\n considered an undertone.\n The Terran laboriously spelled\n out the message inscribed on the\n limp, satiny paper held before his\n eyes. Then he rose and took one\n step toward the waiting group.\n\n\n \"I regret I shall have to conclude\n this discussion,\" he announced.\n \"I am informed that\n another ship from space has\n reached the surface of Tepokt.\n My presence is requested in case\n the crew are of my own planet.\"\n\n\n [104]\n Klaft excitedly skipped down\n to lead the way up the aisle, but\n Kinton hesitated. Those in the\n audience were scholars or officials\n to whom attendance at one\n of Kinton's limited number of\n personal lectures was awarded as\n an honor.",
"He could tell that they were\n pleased by his admiration, and\n wondered yet again why any\n little show of approval by him\n was so eagerly received. Even\n though he was the first stellar\n visitor in their recorded history,\n Kinton remained conscious of the\n fact that in many fields he was\n unable to offer the Tepoktans any\n new ideas. In one or two ways,\n he believed, no Terran could\n teach their experts anything.\n\n\n \"Then will you tell us, George,\n more about the problems of your\n first space explorers?\" came another\n question.\nBefore Kinton had formed his\n answer, the golden curtains at\n the rear of the austerely simple\n chamber parted. Klaft, the Tepoktan\n serving the current year\n as Kinton's chief aide, hurried\n toward the dais. The twenty-odd\n members of the group fell silent\n on their polished stone benches,\n turning their pointed visages to\n follow Klaft's progress.",
"Questions like this had been\n put to him often during the ten\n years since his rocket had\n hurtled through the meteorite\n belt and down to the surface of\n Tepokt, leaving him the only survivor.\n Barred off as they were\n from venturing into space, the\n highly civilized Tepoktans constantly\n displayed the curiosity of\n dreamers in matters related to\n the universe. Because of the veil\n of meteorites and satellite fragments\n whirling about their\n planet, their astronomers had acquired\n torturous skills but only\n scraps of real knowledge.\n\n\n \"As I believe I mentioned in\n some of my recorded lectures,\"\n Kinton answered in their language,\n [103]\n \"the number is actually\n as vast as it seems to those of\n you peering through the Dome\n of Eyes. The scientists of my\n race have not yet encountered\n any beings capable of estimating\n the total.\"",
"For ten years, Kinton had\n failed to work up any strong desire\n to try it. The Tepoktans\n called the ever-shifting lights\n the Dome of Eyes, after a myth\n in which each tiny satellite\n bright enough to be visible was\n supposed to watch over a single\n individual on the surface. Like\n their brothers on Terra, the native\n astronomers could trace\n their science back to a form of\n astrology; and Kinton often told\n them jokingly that he felt no\n urge to risk a physical encounter\n with his own personal Eye.\nThe helicopter started to descend,\n and Kinton remembered\n that the city named in his message\n was only about twenty miles\n from his home. The brief twilight\n of Tepokt was passing by\n the time he set foot on the landing\n field, and he paused to look\n up.",
"Kinton observed, however,\n that his aide also stared upward\n for a long moment. The Tepoktans\n loved speculating about the\n unsolvable. They had even founded\n clubs to argue whether two\n satellites had been destroyed or\n only one.\n\n\n Half a dozen officials hastened\n up to escort the party to the\n vehicle awaiting Kinton. Klaft\n succeeded in quieting the lesser\n members of the delegation so\n that Kinton was able to learn a\n few facts about the new arrival.\n The crash had been several hundred\n miles away, but someone\n had thought of the hospital in\n this city which was known to\n have a doctor rating as an expert\n in human physiology. The survivor—only\n one occupant of the\n wreck, alive or dead, had\n been discovered—had accordingly\n been flown here.",
"They would hardly learn anything\n from him directly that was\n not available in recordings made\n over the course of years. The\n Tepoktan scientists, historians,\n and philosophers had respectfully\n but eagerly gathered every\n crumb of information Kinton\n knowingly had to offer—and\n some he thought he had forgotten.\n Still ... he sensed the disappointment\n at his announcement.\n\n\n \"I shall arrange for you to\n await my return here in town,\"\n Kinton said, and there were murmurs\n of pleasure.\n\n\n Later, aboard the jet helicopter\n that was basically like\n those Kinton remembered using\n on Terra twenty light years\n away, he shook his head at\n Klaft's respectful protest.\n\n\n \"But George! It was enough\n that they were present when you\n received the news. They can talk\n about that the rest of their lives!\n You must not waste your\n strength on these people who\n come out of curiosity.\"",
"\"Not\ntheir\nparty,\" he muttered.\n He turned again to Birken,\n who still retreated toward the\n ship. \"But he'll only get himself\n killed\nand\ndestroy the ship! Or\n if some miracle gets him\n through, that's worse! He's\n nothing to turn loose on a civilized\n colony again.\"\nA twinge of shame tugged\n down the corners of his mouth\n as he realized that keeping Birken\n here would also expose a\n highly cultured people to an unscrupulous\n criminal who had already\n committed murder the very\n first time he had been crossed.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" he shouted. \"For\n the last time! Do you want me\n to send them to drag you back\n here?\"\n\n\n Birken stopped at that. He regarded\n the motionless Tepoktans\n with a derisive sneer.\n\n\n \"They don't look too eager to\n me,\" he taunted.",
"\"Wait! Don't you think they\n tried sending unmanned rockets\n up? Every one was struck and\n exploded.\"\n\n\n Birken showed no more change\n of expression than if the other\n had commented on the weather.\n\n\n Kinton had stepped forward\n six or eight paces, irritated despite\n his anxiety at the way Birken\n persisted in drifting before\n him.\n\n\n Kinton couldn't just grab him—bad\n leg or not, he could probably\n break the older man in two.\n\n\n He glanced back at the Tepoktans\n beside the helicopter, Klaft,\n the pilot, the officer, the constable\n with the rocket weapon.\n\n\n They stood quietly, looking\n back at him.\n\n\n The call for help that had risen\n to his lips died there.",
"He leaned back and scanned\n the faces of his interviewers,\n faces that would have been oddly\n humanoid were it not for the\n elongated snouts and pointed,\n sharp-toothed jaws. The average\n Tepoktan was slightly under\n Kinton's height of five-feet-ten,\n with a long, supple trunk. Under\n the robes their scholars affected,\n the shortness of their two bowed\n legs was not obvious; but the\n sight of the short, thick arms\n carried high before their chests\n still left Kinton with a feeling\n of misproportion.\n\n\n He should be used to it after\n ten years, he thought, but even\n the reds or purples of the scales\n or the big teeth seemed more\n natural.\n\n\n \"I sympathize with your curiosity,\"\n he added. \"It is a marvel\n that your scientists have\n managed to measure the distances\n of so many stars.\"",
"The brighter stars visible from\n this part of the planet twinkled\n back at him, and he knew that\n each was being scrutinized by\n some amateur or professional\n astronomer. Before an hour had\n elapsed, most of them would be\n obscured by the tiny moonlets,\n some of which could already be\n seen. These could easily be mistaken\n for stars or the other five\n planets of the system, but in a\n short while the tinier ones in\n groups would cause a celestial\n haze resembling a miniature\n Milky Way.\n\n\n Klaft, who had descended first,\n leaving the pilot to bring up the\n rear, noticed Kinton's pause.\n\n\n \"Glory glitters till it is known\n for a curse,\" he remarked, quoting\n a Tepoktan proverb often applied\n [106]\n by the disgruntled scientists\n to the Dome of Eyes.",
"\"I think we should not expect\n too much of this Terran,\" he\n warned Klaft uneasily. \"You,\n too, have citizens who do not always\n obey, your laws, who sometimes\n ... that is—\"\n\n\n \"Who are born to die under\n the axe, as we say,\" interrupted\n Klaft, as if to ease the concern\n plain on Kinton's face. \"In other\n words, criminals. You suspect\n this Albirken is such a one,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"It is not impossible,\" admitted\n Kinton unhappily. \"He will\n tell me little about himself. It\n may be that he was caught in\n Tepokt's gravity while fleeing\n from justice.\"",
"[101]\nEXILE\nBY H. B. FYFE\nILLUSTRATED BY EMSH\n\n\n The Dome of Eyes made it almost impossible for\n Terrans to reach the world of Tepokt. For those\n who did land there, there was no returning—only\n the bitterness of respect—and justice!\n\n\n The Tepoktan student, whose\n blue robe in George Kinton's\n opinion clashed with the dull\n purple of his scales, twiddled a\n three-clawed hand for attention.\n Kinton nodded to him from his\n place on the dais before the\n group.\n\n\n \"Then you can give us no precise\n count of the stars in the\n galaxy, George?\"\n\n\n Kinton smiled wrily, and ran\n a wrinkled hand through his\n graying hair. In the clicking Tepoktan\n speech, his name came\n out more like \"Chortch.\"",
"Kinton smiled at his aide's\n earnest concern. Then he turned\n to look out the window as he recalled\n the shadow that underlay\n such remonstrances. He estimated\n that he was about forty-eight\n now, as nearly as he could tell\n from the somewhat longer revolutions\n of Tepokt. The time\n would come when he would age\n and die. Whose wishes would\n then prevail?",
"For the next three weeks, Kinton\n flew back and forth from his\n own town nearly every day. He\n felt that he should not neglect\n the few meetings which were the\n only way he could repay the Tepoktans\n for all they did for him.\n On the other hand, the chance\n to see and talk with one of his\n own kind drew him like a magnet\n to the hospital.\n\n\n The doctors operated upon\n Birken's leg, inserting a metal\n rod inside the bone by a method\n they had known before Kinton\n described it. The new arrival expected\n to be able to walk, with\n care, almost any day; although\n the pin would have to be removed\n after the bone had healed. Meanwhile,\n Birken seemed eager to\n learn all Kinton could tell him\n about the planet, Tepokt.\n\n\n About himself, he was remarkably\n reticent. Kinton worried\n about this.",
"One was a constable but the\n other he recognized for an officer\n of some rank. Both wore slung\n across their chests weapons resembling\n long-barreled pistols\n with large, oddly indented butts\n to fit Tepoktan claws. The constable,\n in addition, carried a\n contraption with a quadruple\n tube for launching tiny rockets\n no thicker than Kinton's thumb.\n These, he knew, were loaded\n with an explosive worthy of respect\n on any planet he had heard\n of.\n\n\n To protect him, he wondered.\n Or to get Birken?\n\n\n The pilot headed the craft\n back toward Kinton's town in\n the brightening sky of early day.\n Long before the buildings of\n Kinton's institute came into\n view, they received a radio message\n about Birken."
],
[
"Kinton observed, however,\n that his aide also stared upward\n for a long moment. The Tepoktans\n loved speculating about the\n unsolvable. They had even founded\n clubs to argue whether two\n satellites had been destroyed or\n only one.\n\n\n Half a dozen officials hastened\n up to escort the party to the\n vehicle awaiting Kinton. Klaft\n succeeded in quieting the lesser\n members of the delegation so\n that Kinton was able to learn a\n few facts about the new arrival.\n The crash had been several hundred\n miles away, but someone\n had thought of the hospital in\n this city which was known to\n have a doctor rating as an expert\n in human physiology. The survivor—only\n one occupant of the\n wreck, alive or dead, had\n been discovered—had accordingly\n been flown here.",
"\"He is dead,\" said Klaft when\n the constable straightened up\n with a curt wave.\n\n\n \"Will ... will you have someone\n see to him, please?\" Kinton\n requested, turning toward the\n helicopter.\n\n\n \"Yes, George,\" said Klaft.\n \"George...?\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"It would be very instructive—that\n is, I believe Dr. Chuxolkhee\n would like to—\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" yielded Kinton,\n surprised at the harshness of his\n own voice. \"Just tell him not to\n bring around any sketches of the\n various organs for a few\n months!\"\n\n\n He climbed into the helicopter\n and slumped into his seat. Presently,\n he was aware of Klaft edging\n into the seat across the aisle.\n He looked up.",
"Why was it one like him who\n got through? he asked himself\n in silent anguish. After ten\n years. The Tepoktans had been\n thinking well of Terrans, but\n now—\n\n\n He did not worry about his\n own position. That was well\n enough established, whether or\n not he could again hold up his\n head before the purple-scaled\n people who had been so generous\n to him.\n\n\n Even if they had been aroused\n to a rage by the killing, Kinton\n told himself, he would not have\n been concerned about himself. He\n had reached a fairly ripe age for\n a spaceman. In fact, he had already\n [110]\n enjoyed a decade of borrowed\n time.\n\n\n But they were more civilized\n than that wanton murderer, he\n realized.\n\n\n He straightened up, forcing\n back his early-morning weariness.",
"He turned and raised it to his\n chest. Because of the shortness\n of Tepoktan arms, the launcher\n was constructed so that the butt\n rested against the chest with the\n sighting loops before the eyes.\n The little rocket tubes were\n above head height, to prevent the\n handler's catching the blast.\n\n\n The circles of the sights\n weaved and danced about the\n running figure. Kinton realized\n to his surprise that the effort of\n seizing the weapon had him panting.\n Or was it the fright at having\n a spear thrown at him? He\n decided that Birken had not come\n close enough for that, and wondered\n if he was afraid of his\n own impending action.\n\n\n It wasn't fair, he complained\n to himself. The poor slob only\n had a spear, and a man couldn't\n blame him for wanting to get\n back to his own sort. He was\n limping ... hurt ... how could\n they expect him to realize—?",
"\"Why did he say he was traveling\n that way?\" asked Kinton,\n thinking to himself of the spaceship!\n Was the man crazy?\n\n\n \"He did not say,\" answered\n Klaft expressionlessly. \"Taking\n them by surprise, he killed two\n of the constables and injured\n the third before fleeing with one\n of their spears.\"\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Kinton felt his eyes bulging\n with dismay.\n\n\n \"Yes, for they carried only the\n short spears of their authority,\n not expecting to need fire weapons.\"\nKinton looked from him to the\n messenger, noticing for the first\n time that the latter was an under-officer\n of police. He shook his\n head distractedly. It appeared\n that his suspicions concerning\n Birken had been only too accurate.",
"\"He has been seen on the road\n passing the dam,\" Klaft reported\n soberly after having been called\n to the pilot's compartment. \"He\n stopped to demand fuel from\n some maintenance workers, but\n they had been warned and fled.\"\n\n\n \"Couldn't they have seized\n him?\" demanded Kinton, his tone\n sharp with the worry he endeavored\n to control. \"He has that\n spear, I suppose; but he is only\n one and injured.\"\n\n\n Klaft hesitated.\n\n\n \"Well, couldn't they?\"\n\n\n The aide looked away, out one\n of the windows at some sun-dyed\n clouds ranging from pink\n to orange. He grimaced and\n clicked his showy teeth uncomfortably.\n\n\n \"Perhaps they thought you\n might be offended, George,\" he\n answered at last.",
"Kinton realized guiltily that\n the man should be resting. He\n [108]\n had lost track of the moments\n he had wasted in talk while the\n others with him stood attentively\n about.\n\n\n He questioned the doctor briefly\n and relayed the information\n that Birken's leg was broken but\n that the other injuries were not\n serious.\n\n\n \"They'll fix you up,\" he assured\n the spaceman. \"They're\n quite good at it, even if the sight\n of one does make you think a\n little of an iguana. Rest up, now;\n and I'll come back again when\n you're feeling better.\"",
"Kinton settled back in the seat\n especially padded to fit the contours\n of his Terran body, and\n [111]\n stared silently at the partition\n behind the pilot.\n\n\n In other words, he thought, he\n was responsible for Birken, who\n was a Terran, one of his own\n kind. Maybe they really didn't\n want to risk hurting his feelings,\n but that was only part of it.\n They were leaving it up to him\n to handle what they considered\n his private affair.\n\n\n He wondered what to do. He\n had no actual faith in the idea\n that Birken was delirious, or acting\n under any influence but that\n of a criminally self-centered nature.",
"With a clanging of bells, the\n little convoy of ground cars\n drew up in front of the hospital.\n A way was made through the\n chittering crowd around the\n entrance. Within a few minutes,\n Kinton found himself looking\n down at a pallet upon which lay\n another Terran.\n\n\n A man! he thought, then\n curled a lip wrily at the sudden,\n unexpected pang of disappointment.\n Well, he hadn't realized\n until then what he was really\n hoping for!\nThe spaceman had been\n cleaned up and bandaged by the\n native medicos. Kinton saw that\n his left thigh was probably\n broken. Other dressings suggested\n cracked ribs and lacerations\n on the head and shoulders. The\n man was dark-haired but pale of\n skin, with a jutting chin and a\n nose that had been flattened in\n some earlier mishap. The flaring\n set of his ears somehow emphasized\n an overall leanness. Even in\n sleep, his mouth was thin and\n hard.",
"\"The police will stay until cars\n from town arrive. They are coming\n now,\" said his aide.\nKinton stared at his hands,\n wondering at the fact that they\n were not shaking. He felt dejected,\n empty, not like a man who\n had just been at a high pitch of\n excitement.\n\n\n \"Why did you not let him go,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"What? Why ... why ... he\n would have destroyed the ship\n you worked so hard to build.\n There is no safe path through\n the Dome of Eyes.\"\n\n\n \"No predictable path,\" Klaft\n corrected. \"But what then? We\n would have built you another\n ship, George, for it was you who\n showed us how.\"\n\n\n Kinton flexed his fingers\n slowly.",
"\"We must arrange a visit\n soon,\" said Kinton. \"Klaft\n will—\"\n\n\n He broke off at the sound from\n the patient.\n\n\n \"A Terran!\" mumbled the injured\n man.\n\n\n He shook his head dazedly,\n tried to sit up, and subsided with\n a groan.\nWhy, he looked scared when\n he saw me\n, thought Kinton.\n\n\n \"You're all right now,\" he said\n soothingly. \"It's all over and\n you're in good hands. I gather\n there were no other survivors of\n the crash?\"\n\n\n The man stared curiously. Kinton\n realized that his own language\n sputtered clumsily from\n his lips after ten years. He tried\n again.",
"To himself, he wished he had\n not told Birken about the spaceship.\n He didn't think the man\n exactly believed his explanation\n of why there was no use taking\n off in it.\nYet he continued to spend as\n much time as he could visiting\n the other man. Then, as his helicopter\n landed at the city airport\n one gray dawn, the news reached\n him.\n\n\n \"The other Terran has gone,\"\n Klaft reported, turning from the\n breathless messenger as Kinton\n followed him from the machine.\n\n\n [109]\n \"Gone? Where did they take\n him?\"\n\n\n Klaft looked uneasy, embarrassed.\n Kinton repeated his question,\n wondering about the group\n of armed police on hand.\n\n\n \"In the night,\" Klaft hissed\n and clucked, \"when none would\n think to watch him, they tell me\n ... and quite rightly, I think—\"",
"For the next three weeks, Kinton\n flew back and forth from his\n own town nearly every day. He\n felt that he should not neglect\n the few meetings which were the\n only way he could repay the Tepoktans\n for all they did for him.\n On the other hand, the chance\n to see and talk with one of his\n own kind drew him like a magnet\n to the hospital.\n\n\n The doctors operated upon\n Birken's leg, inserting a metal\n rod inside the bone by a method\n they had known before Kinton\n described it. The new arrival expected\n to be able to walk, with\n care, almost any day; although\n the pin would have to be removed\n after the bone had healed. Meanwhile,\n Birken seemed eager to\n learn all Kinton could tell him\n about the planet, Tepokt.\n\n\n About himself, he was remarkably\n reticent. Kinton worried\n about this.",
"One struck the ground beside\n the man just as he set one foot\n on the bottom rung of the ladder,\n and skittered away past one fin\n of the ship before exploding.\n Two others burst against the\n hull, scattering metal fragments,\n and another puffed on the upright\n of the ladder just above\n Birken's head.\nThe spaceman was blown back\n from the ladder. He balanced on\n his heels for a moment with outstretched\n fingers reaching toward\n the grips from which they\n had been torn. Then he crumpled\n into a limp huddle on the yellowing\n turf.\n\n\n Kinton sighed.\n\n\n The constable took the weapon\n from him, reloaded deftly, and\n proffered it again. When the\n Terran did not reach for it, the\n officer held out a clawed hand to\n receive it. He gestured silently,\n and the constable trotted across\n [114]\n the intervening ground to bend\n over Birken.",
"Kinton smiled at his aide's\n earnest concern. Then he turned\n to look out the window as he recalled\n the shadow that underlay\n such remonstrances. He estimated\n that he was about forty-eight\n now, as nearly as he could tell\n from the somewhat longer revolutions\n of Tepokt. The time\n would come when he would age\n and die. Whose wishes would\n then prevail?",
"Maybe he was wrong, he\n thought. Maybe he shouldn't\n stand in the way of their biologists\n and surgeons. But he'd\n rather be buried, even if that\n left them with only what he\n could tell them about the human\n body.\nTo help himself forget the\n rather preoccupied manner in\n which some of the Tepoktan scientists\n occasionally eyed him, he\n peered down at the big dam of\n the hydro-electric project being\n completed to Kinton's design.\n Power from this would soon\n light the town built to house the\n staff of scientists, students, and\n workers assigned to the institute\n organized about the person\n of Kinton.\n\n\n Now, there was an example of\n their willingness to repay him\n for whatever help he had been,\n he reflected. They hadn't needed\n that for themselves.",
"\"He was just no good. You\n know the murder he did here;\n we can only guess what he did\n among my own ... among Terrans.\n Should he have a chance to\n go back and commit more\n crimes?\"\n\n\n \"I understand, George, the\n logic of it,\" said Klaft. \"I meant\n ... it is not my place to say this\n ... but you seem unhappy.\"\n\n\n \"Possibly,\" grunted Kinton\n wrily.\n\n\n \"We, too, have criminals,\" said\n the aide, as gently as was possible\n in his clicking language.\n \"We do not think it necessary\n to grieve for the pain they bring\n upon themselves.\"\n\n\n \"No, I suppose not,\" sighed\n Kinton. \"I ... it's just—\"\n\n\n He looked up at the pointed\n visage, at the strange eyes regarding\n him sympathetically\n from beneath the sloping, purple-scaled\n forehead.",
"\"Not\ntheir\nparty,\" he muttered.\n He turned again to Birken,\n who still retreated toward the\n ship. \"But he'll only get himself\n killed\nand\ndestroy the ship! Or\n if some miracle gets him\n through, that's worse! He's\n nothing to turn loose on a civilized\n colony again.\"\nA twinge of shame tugged\n down the corners of his mouth\n as he realized that keeping Birken\n here would also expose a\n highly cultured people to an unscrupulous\n criminal who had already\n committed murder the very\n first time he had been crossed.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" he shouted. \"For\n the last time! Do you want me\n to send them to drag you back\n here?\"\n\n\n Birken stopped at that. He regarded\n the motionless Tepoktans\n with a derisive sneer.\n\n\n \"They don't look too eager to\n me,\" he taunted.",
"Then, abruptly, his lips tightened\n to a thin line. The sights\n steadied on Birken as the latter\n approached the foot of the ladder\n leading to the entrance port\n of the spaceship.\n\n\n Kinton pressed the firing stud.\n\n\n Across the hundred-yard space\n streaked four flaring little projectiles.\n Kinton, without exactly\n seeing each, was aware of the\n general lines of flight diverging\n gradually to bracket the figure\n of Birken.",
"The pilot landed about a hundred\n yards from the spaceship.\n By the time his passengers had\n alighted, however, Birken had\n drawn level with them, about\n fifty feet away.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" shouted Kinton.\n \"Where do you think you're going?\"\n\n\n Seeing that no one ran after\n him, Birken slowed his pace, but\n kept walking toward the ship.\n [112]\n He watched them over his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Sorry, Kinton,\" he shouted\n with no noticeable tone of regret.\n \"I figure I better travel on for\n my health.\"\n\n\n \"It's not so damn healthy up\n there!\" called Kinton. \"I told\n you how there's no clear path—\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, yeah, you told me. That\n don't mean I gotta believe it.\""
],
[
"\"He is dead,\" said Klaft when\n the constable straightened up\n with a curt wave.\n\n\n \"Will ... will you have someone\n see to him, please?\" Kinton\n requested, turning toward the\n helicopter.\n\n\n \"Yes, George,\" said Klaft.\n \"George...?\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"It would be very instructive—that\n is, I believe Dr. Chuxolkhee\n would like to—\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" yielded Kinton,\n surprised at the harshness of his\n own voice. \"Just tell him not to\n bring around any sketches of the\n various organs for a few\n months!\"\n\n\n He climbed into the helicopter\n and slumped into his seat. Presently,\n he was aware of Klaft edging\n into the seat across the aisle.\n He looked up.",
"Kinton realized guiltily that\n the man should be resting. He\n [108]\n had lost track of the moments\n he had wasted in talk while the\n others with him stood attentively\n about.\n\n\n He questioned the doctor briefly\n and relayed the information\n that Birken's leg was broken but\n that the other injuries were not\n serious.\n\n\n \"They'll fix you up,\" he assured\n the spaceman. \"They're\n quite good at it, even if the sight\n of one does make you think a\n little of an iguana. Rest up, now;\n and I'll come back again when\n you're feeling better.\"",
"\"He has been seen on the road\n passing the dam,\" Klaft reported\n soberly after having been called\n to the pilot's compartment. \"He\n stopped to demand fuel from\n some maintenance workers, but\n they had been warned and fled.\"\n\n\n \"Couldn't they have seized\n him?\" demanded Kinton, his tone\n sharp with the worry he endeavored\n to control. \"He has that\n spear, I suppose; but he is only\n one and injured.\"\n\n\n Klaft hesitated.\n\n\n \"Well, couldn't they?\"\n\n\n The aide looked away, out one\n of the windows at some sun-dyed\n clouds ranging from pink\n to orange. He grimaced and\n clicked his showy teeth uncomfortably.\n\n\n \"Perhaps they thought you\n might be offended, George,\" he\n answered at last.",
"\"Thrown across the controls\n after his belt broke loose?\" Kinton\n guessed.\n\n\n \"I bow to your wisdom,\n George,\" said the plump Tepoktan\n doctor who appeared to be\n in charge.\n\n\n Kinton could not remember\n him, but everyone on the planet\n addressed the Terran by the\n sound they fondly thought to be\n his first name.\n\n\n \"This is Doctor Chuxolkhee,\"\n murmured Klaft.\n\n\n Kinton made the accepted gesture\n of greeting with one hand\n and said, \"You seem to have\n treated him very expertly.\"\n\n\n Chuxolkhee ruffled the scales\n around his neck with pleasure.\n\n\n [107]\n \"I have studied Terran physiology,\"\n he admitted complacently.\n \"From your records and\n drawings, of course, George, for\n I have not yet had the good fortune\n to visit you.\"",
"With a clanging of bells, the\n little convoy of ground cars\n drew up in front of the hospital.\n A way was made through the\n chittering crowd around the\n entrance. Within a few minutes,\n Kinton found himself looking\n down at a pallet upon which lay\n another Terran.\n\n\n A man! he thought, then\n curled a lip wrily at the sudden,\n unexpected pang of disappointment.\n Well, he hadn't realized\n until then what he was really\n hoping for!\nThe spaceman had been\n cleaned up and bandaged by the\n native medicos. Kinton saw that\n his left thigh was probably\n broken. Other dressings suggested\n cracked ribs and lacerations\n on the head and shoulders. The\n man was dark-haired but pale of\n skin, with a jutting chin and a\n nose that had been flattened in\n some earlier mishap. The flaring\n set of his ears somehow emphasized\n an overall leanness. Even in\n sleep, his mouth was thin and\n hard.",
"Kinton observed, however,\n that his aide also stared upward\n for a long moment. The Tepoktans\n loved speculating about the\n unsolvable. They had even founded\n clubs to argue whether two\n satellites had been destroyed or\n only one.\n\n\n Half a dozen officials hastened\n up to escort the party to the\n vehicle awaiting Kinton. Klaft\n succeeded in quieting the lesser\n members of the delegation so\n that Kinton was able to learn a\n few facts about the new arrival.\n The crash had been several hundred\n miles away, but someone\n had thought of the hospital in\n this city which was known to\n have a doctor rating as an expert\n in human physiology. The survivor—only\n one occupant of the\n wreck, alive or dead, had\n been discovered—had accordingly\n been flown here.",
"\"The police will stay until cars\n from town arrive. They are coming\n now,\" said his aide.\nKinton stared at his hands,\n wondering at the fact that they\n were not shaking. He felt dejected,\n empty, not like a man who\n had just been at a high pitch of\n excitement.\n\n\n \"Why did you not let him go,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"What? Why ... why ... he\n would have destroyed the ship\n you worked so hard to build.\n There is no safe path through\n the Dome of Eyes.\"\n\n\n \"No predictable path,\" Klaft\n corrected. \"But what then? We\n would have built you another\n ship, George, for it was you who\n showed us how.\"\n\n\n Kinton flexed his fingers\n slowly.",
"\"We must arrange a visit\n soon,\" said Kinton. \"Klaft\n will—\"\n\n\n He broke off at the sound from\n the patient.\n\n\n \"A Terran!\" mumbled the injured\n man.\n\n\n He shook his head dazedly,\n tried to sit up, and subsided with\n a groan.\nWhy, he looked scared when\n he saw me\n, thought Kinton.\n\n\n \"You're all right now,\" he said\n soothingly. \"It's all over and\n you're in good hands. I gather\n there were no other survivors of\n the crash?\"\n\n\n The man stared curiously. Kinton\n realized that his own language\n sputtered clumsily from\n his lips after ten years. He tried\n again.",
"An exclamation from the constable\n drew his attention. He\n rose, and room was made for him\n at the opposite window.\nIn the distance, beyond the\n town landing field they were now\n approaching, Kinton saw a halted\n ground car. Across the plain\n which was colored a yellowish\n tan by a short, grass-like growth,\n a lone figure plodded toward the\n upthrust bulk of the spaceship\n that had never flown.\n\n\n \"Never mind landing at the\n town!\" snapped Kinton. \"Go directly\n out to the ship!\"\n\n\n Klaft relayed the command to\n the pilot. The helicopter swept\n in a descending curve across the\n plain toward the gleaming hull.\n\n\n As they passed the man below,\n Birken looked up. He continued\n to limp along at a brisk\n pace with the aid of what looked\n like a short spear.\n\n\n \"Go down!\" Kinton ordered.",
"\"Why did he say he was traveling\n that way?\" asked Kinton,\n thinking to himself of the spaceship!\n Was the man crazy?\n\n\n \"He did not say,\" answered\n Klaft expressionlessly. \"Taking\n them by surprise, he killed two\n of the constables and injured\n the third before fleeing with one\n of their spears.\"\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Kinton felt his eyes bulging\n with dismay.\n\n\n \"Yes, for they carried only the\n short spears of their authority,\n not expecting to need fire weapons.\"\nKinton looked from him to the\n messenger, noticing for the first\n time that the latter was an under-officer\n of police. He shook his\n head distractedly. It appeared\n that his suspicions concerning\n Birken had been only too accurate.",
"He turned and raised it to his\n chest. Because of the shortness\n of Tepoktan arms, the launcher\n was constructed so that the butt\n rested against the chest with the\n sighting loops before the eyes.\n The little rocket tubes were\n above head height, to prevent the\n handler's catching the blast.\n\n\n The circles of the sights\n weaved and danced about the\n running figure. Kinton realized\n to his surprise that the effort of\n seizing the weapon had him panting.\n Or was it the fright at having\n a spear thrown at him? He\n decided that Birken had not come\n close enough for that, and wondered\n if he was afraid of his\n own impending action.\n\n\n It wasn't fair, he complained\n to himself. The poor slob only\n had a spear, and a man couldn't\n blame him for wanting to get\n back to his own sort. He was\n limping ... hurt ... how could\n they expect him to realize—?",
"He could tell that they were\n pleased by his admiration, and\n wondered yet again why any\n little show of approval by him\n was so eagerly received. Even\n though he was the first stellar\n visitor in their recorded history,\n Kinton remained conscious of the\n fact that in many fields he was\n unable to offer the Tepoktans any\n new ideas. In one or two ways,\n he believed, no Terran could\n teach their experts anything.\n\n\n \"Then will you tell us, George,\n more about the problems of your\n first space explorers?\" came another\n question.\nBefore Kinton had formed his\n answer, the golden curtains at\n the rear of the austerely simple\n chamber parted. Klaft, the Tepoktan\n serving the current year\n as Kinton's chief aide, hurried\n toward the dais. The twenty-odd\n members of the group fell silent\n on their polished stone benches,\n turning their pointed visages to\n follow Klaft's progress.",
"One struck the ground beside\n the man just as he set one foot\n on the bottom rung of the ladder,\n and skittered away past one fin\n of the ship before exploding.\n Two others burst against the\n hull, scattering metal fragments,\n and another puffed on the upright\n of the ladder just above\n Birken's head.\nThe spaceman was blown back\n from the ladder. He balanced on\n his heels for a moment with outstretched\n fingers reaching toward\n the grips from which they\n had been torn. Then he crumpled\n into a limp huddle on the yellowing\n turf.\n\n\n Kinton sighed.\n\n\n The constable took the weapon\n from him, reloaded deftly, and\n proffered it again. When the\n Terran did not reach for it, the\n officer held out a clawed hand to\n receive it. He gestured silently,\n and the constable trotted across\n [114]\n the intervening ground to bend\n over Birken.",
"For the next three weeks, Kinton\n flew back and forth from his\n own town nearly every day. He\n felt that he should not neglect\n the few meetings which were the\n only way he could repay the Tepoktans\n for all they did for him.\n On the other hand, the chance\n to see and talk with one of his\n own kind drew him like a magnet\n to the hospital.\n\n\n The doctors operated upon\n Birken's leg, inserting a metal\n rod inside the bone by a method\n they had known before Kinton\n described it. The new arrival expected\n to be able to walk, with\n care, almost any day; although\n the pin would have to be removed\n after the bone had healed. Meanwhile,\n Birken seemed eager to\n learn all Kinton could tell him\n about the planet, Tepokt.\n\n\n About himself, he was remarkably\n reticent. Kinton worried\n about this.",
"\"Get on with it, Klaft!\n Please!\"\n\n\n \"In the night, then, Albirken\n left the chamber in which he lay.\n He can walk some now, you\n know, because of Dr. Chuxolkhee's\n metal pin. He—he stole a\n ground car and is gone.\"\n\n\n \"He did?\" Kinton had an\n empty feeling in the pit of his\n stomach. \"Is it known where he\n went? I mean ... he has been\n curious to see some of Tepokt.\n Perhaps—\"\n\n\n He stopped, his own words\n braying in his ears. Klaft was\n clicking two claws together, a\n sign of emphatic disagreement.\n\n\n \"Albirken,\" he said, \"was soon\n followed by three police constables\n in another vehicle. They\n found him heading in the direction\n of our town.\"",
"Then, abruptly, his lips tightened\n to a thin line. The sights\n steadied on Birken as the latter\n approached the foot of the ladder\n leading to the entrance port\n of the spaceship.\n\n\n Kinton pressed the firing stud.\n\n\n Across the hundred-yard space\n streaked four flaring little projectiles.\n Kinton, without exactly\n seeing each, was aware of the\n general lines of flight diverging\n gradually to bracket the figure\n of Birken.",
"Why was it one like him who\n got through? he asked himself\n in silent anguish. After ten\n years. The Tepoktans had been\n thinking well of Terrans, but\n now—\n\n\n He did not worry about his\n own position. That was well\n enough established, whether or\n not he could again hold up his\n head before the purple-scaled\n people who had been so generous\n to him.\n\n\n Even if they had been aroused\n to a rage by the killing, Kinton\n told himself, he would not have\n been concerned about himself. He\n had reached a fairly ripe age for\n a spaceman. In fact, he had already\n [110]\n enjoyed a decade of borrowed\n time.\n\n\n But they were more civilized\n than that wanton murderer, he\n realized.\n\n\n He straightened up, forcing\n back his early-morning weariness.",
"\"My name is George Kinton.\n I don't blame you if I'm hard to\n understand. You see, I've been\n here ten years without ever having\n another Terran to speak to.\"\n\n\n The spaceman considered that\n for a few breaths, then seemed\n to relax.\n\n\n \"Al Birken,\" he introduced\n himself laconically. \"Ten years?\"\n\n\n \"A little over,\" confirmed Kinton.\n \"It's extremely unusual that\n anything gets through to the\n surface, let alone a spaceship.\n What happened to you?\"\nBirken's stare was suspicious.\n\n\n \"Then you ain't heard about\n the new colonies? Naw—you\n musta come here when all the\n planets were open.\"\n\n\n \"We had a small settlement on\n the second planet,\" Kinton told\n him. \"You mean there are new\n Terran colonies?\"",
"Kinton growled a Tepoktan expression\n the meaning of which\n he had deduced after hearing it\n used by the dam workers.\n\n\n He whirled to run toward the\n helicopter. Hardly had he taken\n two steps, however, when he saw\n startled changes in the carefully\n blank looks of his escort. The\n constable half raised his heavy\n weapon, and Klaft sprang forward\n with a hissing cry.\n\n\n By the time Kinton's aging\n muscles obeyed his impulse to\n sidestep, the spear had already\n hurtled past. It had missed him\n by an error of over six feet.\n\n\n [113]\n He felt his face flushing with\n sudden anger. Birken was running\n as best he could toward the\n spaceship, and had covered nearly\n half the distance.\n\n\n Kinton ran at the Tepoktans,\n brushing aside the concerned\n Klaft. He snatched the heavy\n weapon from the surprised constable.",
"They would hardly learn anything\n from him directly that was\n not available in recordings made\n over the course of years. The\n Tepoktan scientists, historians,\n and philosophers had respectfully\n but eagerly gathered every\n crumb of information Kinton\n knowingly had to offer—and\n some he thought he had forgotten.\n Still ... he sensed the disappointment\n at his announcement.\n\n\n \"I shall arrange for you to\n await my return here in town,\"\n Kinton said, and there were murmurs\n of pleasure.\n\n\n Later, aboard the jet helicopter\n that was basically like\n those Kinton remembered using\n on Terra twenty light years\n away, he shook his head at\n Klaft's respectful protest.\n\n\n \"But George! It was enough\n that they were present when you\n received the news. They can talk\n about that the rest of their lives!\n You must not waste your\n strength on these people who\n come out of curiosity.\""
],
[
"\"I think we should not expect\n too much of this Terran,\" he\n warned Klaft uneasily. \"You,\n too, have citizens who do not always\n obey, your laws, who sometimes\n ... that is—\"\n\n\n \"Who are born to die under\n the axe, as we say,\" interrupted\n Klaft, as if to ease the concern\n plain on Kinton's face. \"In other\n words, criminals. You suspect\n this Albirken is such a one,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"It is not impossible,\" admitted\n Kinton unhappily. \"He will\n tell me little about himself. It\n may be that he was caught in\n Tepokt's gravity while fleeing\n from justice.\"",
"To himself, he wished he had\n not told Birken about the spaceship.\n He didn't think the man\n exactly believed his explanation\n of why there was no use taking\n off in it.\nYet he continued to spend as\n much time as he could visiting\n the other man. Then, as his helicopter\n landed at the city airport\n one gray dawn, the news reached\n him.\n\n\n \"The other Terran has gone,\"\n Klaft reported, turning from the\n breathless messenger as Kinton\n followed him from the machine.\n\n\n [109]\n \"Gone? Where did they take\n him?\"\n\n\n Klaft looked uneasy, embarrassed.\n Kinton repeated his question,\n wondering about the group\n of armed police on hand.\n\n\n \"In the night,\" Klaft hissed\n and clucked, \"when none would\n think to watch him, they tell me\n ... and quite rightly, I think—\"",
"Kinton settled back in the seat\n especially padded to fit the contours\n of his Terran body, and\n [111]\n stared silently at the partition\n behind the pilot.\n\n\n In other words, he thought, he\n was responsible for Birken, who\n was a Terran, one of his own\n kind. Maybe they really didn't\n want to risk hurting his feelings,\n but that was only part of it.\n They were leaving it up to him\n to handle what they considered\n his private affair.\n\n\n He wondered what to do. He\n had no actual faith in the idea\n that Birken was delirious, or acting\n under any influence but that\n of a criminally self-centered nature.",
"\"Why did he say he was traveling\n that way?\" asked Kinton,\n thinking to himself of the spaceship!\n Was the man crazy?\n\n\n \"He did not say,\" answered\n Klaft expressionlessly. \"Taking\n them by surprise, he killed two\n of the constables and injured\n the third before fleeing with one\n of their spears.\"\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Kinton felt his eyes bulging\n with dismay.\n\n\n \"Yes, for they carried only the\n short spears of their authority,\n not expecting to need fire weapons.\"\nKinton looked from him to the\n messenger, noticing for the first\n time that the latter was an under-officer\n of police. He shook his\n head distractedly. It appeared\n that his suspicions concerning\n Birken had been only too accurate.",
"\"Get on with it, Klaft!\n Please!\"\n\n\n \"In the night, then, Albirken\n left the chamber in which he lay.\n He can walk some now, you\n know, because of Dr. Chuxolkhee's\n metal pin. He—he stole a\n ground car and is gone.\"\n\n\n \"He did?\" Kinton had an\n empty feeling in the pit of his\n stomach. \"Is it known where he\n went? I mean ... he has been\n curious to see some of Tepokt.\n Perhaps—\"\n\n\n He stopped, his own words\n braying in his ears. Klaft was\n clicking two claws together, a\n sign of emphatic disagreement.\n\n\n \"Albirken,\" he said, \"was soon\n followed by three police constables\n in another vehicle. They\n found him heading in the direction\n of our town.\"",
"For the next three weeks, Kinton\n flew back and forth from his\n own town nearly every day. He\n felt that he should not neglect\n the few meetings which were the\n only way he could repay the Tepoktans\n for all they did for him.\n On the other hand, the chance\n to see and talk with one of his\n own kind drew him like a magnet\n to the hospital.\n\n\n The doctors operated upon\n Birken's leg, inserting a metal\n rod inside the bone by a method\n they had known before Kinton\n described it. The new arrival expected\n to be able to walk, with\n care, almost any day; although\n the pin would have to be removed\n after the bone had healed. Meanwhile,\n Birken seemed eager to\n learn all Kinton could tell him\n about the planet, Tepokt.\n\n\n About himself, he was remarkably\n reticent. Kinton worried\n about this.",
"\"I\nshouldn't\nhave told him\n about the ship!\" Kinton muttered,\n gnawing the knuckle of\n his left thumb. \"He's on the run,\n all right. Probably scared the\n colonial authorities will trail him\n right down through the Dome of\n Eyes. Wonder what he did?\"\n\n\n He caught himself and looked\n around to see if he had been overheard.\n Klaft and the police officers\n peered from their respective\n windows, in calculated withdrawal.\n Kinton, disturbed, tried\n to remember whether he had\n spoken in Terran or Tepoktan.\n\n\n Would Birken listen if he tried\n reasoning, he asked himself.\n Maybe if he showed the man how\n they had proved the unpredictability\n of openings through the\n shifting Dome of Eyes—",
"\"My name is George Kinton.\n I don't blame you if I'm hard to\n understand. You see, I've been\n here ten years without ever having\n another Terran to speak to.\"\n\n\n The spaceman considered that\n for a few breaths, then seemed\n to relax.\n\n\n \"Al Birken,\" he introduced\n himself laconically. \"Ten years?\"\n\n\n \"A little over,\" confirmed Kinton.\n \"It's extremely unusual that\n anything gets through to the\n surface, let alone a spaceship.\n What happened to you?\"\nBirken's stare was suspicious.\n\n\n \"Then you ain't heard about\n the new colonies? Naw—you\n musta come here when all the\n planets were open.\"\n\n\n \"We had a small settlement on\n the second planet,\" Kinton told\n him. \"You mean there are new\n Terran colonies?\"",
"Then, abruptly, his lips tightened\n to a thin line. The sights\n steadied on Birken as the latter\n approached the foot of the ladder\n leading to the entrance port\n of the spaceship.\n\n\n Kinton pressed the firing stud.\n\n\n Across the hundred-yard space\n streaked four flaring little projectiles.\n Kinton, without exactly\n seeing each, was aware of the\n general lines of flight diverging\n gradually to bracket the figure\n of Birken.",
"Kinton realized guiltily that\n the man should be resting. He\n [108]\n had lost track of the moments\n he had wasted in talk while the\n others with him stood attentively\n about.\n\n\n He questioned the doctor briefly\n and relayed the information\n that Birken's leg was broken but\n that the other injuries were not\n serious.\n\n\n \"They'll fix you up,\" he assured\n the spaceman. \"They're\n quite good at it, even if the sight\n of one does make you think a\n little of an iguana. Rest up, now;\n and I'll come back again when\n you're feeling better.\"",
"One was a constable but the\n other he recognized for an officer\n of some rank. Both wore slung\n across their chests weapons resembling\n long-barreled pistols\n with large, oddly indented butts\n to fit Tepoktan claws. The constable,\n in addition, carried a\n contraption with a quadruple\n tube for launching tiny rockets\n no thicker than Kinton's thumb.\n These, he knew, were loaded\n with an explosive worthy of respect\n on any planet he had heard\n of.\n\n\n To protect him, he wondered.\n Or to get Birken?\n\n\n The pilot headed the craft\n back toward Kinton's town in\n the brightening sky of early day.\n Long before the buildings of\n Kinton's institute came into\n view, they received a radio message\n about Birken.",
"\"He is dead,\" said Klaft when\n the constable straightened up\n with a curt wave.\n\n\n \"Will ... will you have someone\n see to him, please?\" Kinton\n requested, turning toward the\n helicopter.\n\n\n \"Yes, George,\" said Klaft.\n \"George...?\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"It would be very instructive—that\n is, I believe Dr. Chuxolkhee\n would like to—\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" yielded Kinton,\n surprised at the harshness of his\n own voice. \"Just tell him not to\n bring around any sketches of the\n various organs for a few\n months!\"\n\n\n He climbed into the helicopter\n and slumped into his seat. Presently,\n he was aware of Klaft edging\n into the seat across the aisle.\n He looked up.",
"\"Not\ntheir\nparty,\" he muttered.\n He turned again to Birken,\n who still retreated toward the\n ship. \"But he'll only get himself\n killed\nand\ndestroy the ship! Or\n if some miracle gets him\n through, that's worse! He's\n nothing to turn loose on a civilized\n colony again.\"\nA twinge of shame tugged\n down the corners of his mouth\n as he realized that keeping Birken\n here would also expose a\n highly cultured people to an unscrupulous\n criminal who had already\n committed murder the very\n first time he had been crossed.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" he shouted. \"For\n the last time! Do you want me\n to send them to drag you back\n here?\"\n\n\n Birken stopped at that. He regarded\n the motionless Tepoktans\n with a derisive sneer.\n\n\n \"They don't look too eager to\n me,\" he taunted.",
"The pilot landed about a hundred\n yards from the spaceship.\n By the time his passengers had\n alighted, however, Birken had\n drawn level with them, about\n fifty feet away.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" shouted Kinton.\n \"Where do you think you're going?\"\n\n\n Seeing that no one ran after\n him, Birken slowed his pace, but\n kept walking toward the ship.\n [112]\n He watched them over his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Sorry, Kinton,\" he shouted\n with no noticeable tone of regret.\n \"I figure I better travel on for\n my health.\"\n\n\n \"It's not so damn healthy up\n there!\" called Kinton. \"I told\n you how there's no clear path—\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, yeah, you told me. That\n don't mean I gotta believe it.\"",
"\"The police will stay until cars\n from town arrive. They are coming\n now,\" said his aide.\nKinton stared at his hands,\n wondering at the fact that they\n were not shaking. He felt dejected,\n empty, not like a man who\n had just been at a high pitch of\n excitement.\n\n\n \"Why did you not let him go,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"What? Why ... why ... he\n would have destroyed the ship\n you worked so hard to build.\n There is no safe path through\n the Dome of Eyes.\"\n\n\n \"No predictable path,\" Klaft\n corrected. \"But what then? We\n would have built you another\n ship, George, for it was you who\n showed us how.\"\n\n\n Kinton flexed his fingers\n slowly.",
"\"Wait! Don't you think they\n tried sending unmanned rockets\n up? Every one was struck and\n exploded.\"\n\n\n Birken showed no more change\n of expression than if the other\n had commented on the weather.\n\n\n Kinton had stepped forward\n six or eight paces, irritated despite\n his anxiety at the way Birken\n persisted in drifting before\n him.\n\n\n Kinton couldn't just grab him—bad\n leg or not, he could probably\n break the older man in two.\n\n\n He glanced back at the Tepoktans\n beside the helicopter, Klaft,\n the pilot, the officer, the constable\n with the rocket weapon.\n\n\n They stood quietly, looking\n back at him.\n\n\n The call for help that had risen\n to his lips died there.",
"An exclamation from the constable\n drew his attention. He\n rose, and room was made for him\n at the opposite window.\nIn the distance, beyond the\n town landing field they were now\n approaching, Kinton saw a halted\n ground car. Across the plain\n which was colored a yellowish\n tan by a short, grass-like growth,\n a lone figure plodded toward the\n upthrust bulk of the spaceship\n that had never flown.\n\n\n \"Never mind landing at the\n town!\" snapped Kinton. \"Go directly\n out to the ship!\"\n\n\n Klaft relayed the command to\n the pilot. The helicopter swept\n in a descending curve across the\n plain toward the gleaming hull.\n\n\n As they passed the man below,\n Birken looked up. He continued\n to limp along at a brisk\n pace with the aid of what looked\n like a short spear.\n\n\n \"Go down!\" Kinton ordered.",
"One struck the ground beside\n the man just as he set one foot\n on the bottom rung of the ladder,\n and skittered away past one fin\n of the ship before exploding.\n Two others burst against the\n hull, scattering metal fragments,\n and another puffed on the upright\n of the ladder just above\n Birken's head.\nThe spaceman was blown back\n from the ladder. He balanced on\n his heels for a moment with outstretched\n fingers reaching toward\n the grips from which they\n had been torn. Then he crumpled\n into a limp huddle on the yellowing\n turf.\n\n\n Kinton sighed.\n\n\n The constable took the weapon\n from him, reloaded deftly, and\n proffered it again. When the\n Terran did not reach for it, the\n officer held out a clawed hand to\n receive it. He gestured silently,\n and the constable trotted across\n [114]\n the intervening ground to bend\n over Birken.",
"\"He has been seen on the road\n passing the dam,\" Klaft reported\n soberly after having been called\n to the pilot's compartment. \"He\n stopped to demand fuel from\n some maintenance workers, but\n they had been warned and fled.\"\n\n\n \"Couldn't they have seized\n him?\" demanded Kinton, his tone\n sharp with the worry he endeavored\n to control. \"He has that\n spear, I suppose; but he is only\n one and injured.\"\n\n\n Klaft hesitated.\n\n\n \"Well, couldn't they?\"\n\n\n The aide looked away, out one\n of the windows at some sun-dyed\n clouds ranging from pink\n to orange. He grimaced and\n clicked his showy teeth uncomfortably.\n\n\n \"Perhaps they thought you\n might be offended, George,\" he\n answered at last.",
"\"He was just no good. You\n know the murder he did here;\n we can only guess what he did\n among my own ... among Terrans.\n Should he have a chance to\n go back and commit more\n crimes?\"\n\n\n \"I understand, George, the\n logic of it,\" said Klaft. \"I meant\n ... it is not my place to say this\n ... but you seem unhappy.\"\n\n\n \"Possibly,\" grunted Kinton\n wrily.\n\n\n \"We, too, have criminals,\" said\n the aide, as gently as was possible\n in his clicking language.\n \"We do not think it necessary\n to grieve for the pain they bring\n upon themselves.\"\n\n\n \"No, I suppose not,\" sighed\n Kinton. \"I ... it's just—\"\n\n\n He looked up at the pointed\n visage, at the strange eyes regarding\n him sympathetically\n from beneath the sloping, purple-scaled\n forehead."
],
[
"\"Not\ntheir\nparty,\" he muttered.\n He turned again to Birken,\n who still retreated toward the\n ship. \"But he'll only get himself\n killed\nand\ndestroy the ship! Or\n if some miracle gets him\n through, that's worse! He's\n nothing to turn loose on a civilized\n colony again.\"\nA twinge of shame tugged\n down the corners of his mouth\n as he realized that keeping Birken\n here would also expose a\n highly cultured people to an unscrupulous\n criminal who had already\n committed murder the very\n first time he had been crossed.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" he shouted. \"For\n the last time! Do you want me\n to send them to drag you back\n here?\"\n\n\n Birken stopped at that. He regarded\n the motionless Tepoktans\n with a derisive sneer.\n\n\n \"They don't look too eager to\n me,\" he taunted.",
"\"Get on with it, Klaft!\n Please!\"\n\n\n \"In the night, then, Albirken\n left the chamber in which he lay.\n He can walk some now, you\n know, because of Dr. Chuxolkhee's\n metal pin. He—he stole a\n ground car and is gone.\"\n\n\n \"He did?\" Kinton had an\n empty feeling in the pit of his\n stomach. \"Is it known where he\n went? I mean ... he has been\n curious to see some of Tepokt.\n Perhaps—\"\n\n\n He stopped, his own words\n braying in his ears. Klaft was\n clicking two claws together, a\n sign of emphatic disagreement.\n\n\n \"Albirken,\" he said, \"was soon\n followed by three police constables\n in another vehicle. They\n found him heading in the direction\n of our town.\"",
"\"Wait! Don't you think they\n tried sending unmanned rockets\n up? Every one was struck and\n exploded.\"\n\n\n Birken showed no more change\n of expression than if the other\n had commented on the weather.\n\n\n Kinton had stepped forward\n six or eight paces, irritated despite\n his anxiety at the way Birken\n persisted in drifting before\n him.\n\n\n Kinton couldn't just grab him—bad\n leg or not, he could probably\n break the older man in two.\n\n\n He glanced back at the Tepoktans\n beside the helicopter, Klaft,\n the pilot, the officer, the constable\n with the rocket weapon.\n\n\n They stood quietly, looking\n back at him.\n\n\n The call for help that had risen\n to his lips died there.",
"For the next three weeks, Kinton\n flew back and forth from his\n own town nearly every day. He\n felt that he should not neglect\n the few meetings which were the\n only way he could repay the Tepoktans\n for all they did for him.\n On the other hand, the chance\n to see and talk with one of his\n own kind drew him like a magnet\n to the hospital.\n\n\n The doctors operated upon\n Birken's leg, inserting a metal\n rod inside the bone by a method\n they had known before Kinton\n described it. The new arrival expected\n to be able to walk, with\n care, almost any day; although\n the pin would have to be removed\n after the bone had healed. Meanwhile,\n Birken seemed eager to\n learn all Kinton could tell him\n about the planet, Tepokt.\n\n\n About himself, he was remarkably\n reticent. Kinton worried\n about this.",
"One was a constable but the\n other he recognized for an officer\n of some rank. Both wore slung\n across their chests weapons resembling\n long-barreled pistols\n with large, oddly indented butts\n to fit Tepoktan claws. The constable,\n in addition, carried a\n contraption with a quadruple\n tube for launching tiny rockets\n no thicker than Kinton's thumb.\n These, he knew, were loaded\n with an explosive worthy of respect\n on any planet he had heard\n of.\n\n\n To protect him, he wondered.\n Or to get Birken?\n\n\n The pilot headed the craft\n back toward Kinton's town in\n the brightening sky of early day.\n Long before the buildings of\n Kinton's institute came into\n view, they received a radio message\n about Birken.",
"Kinton growled a Tepoktan expression\n the meaning of which\n he had deduced after hearing it\n used by the dam workers.\n\n\n He whirled to run toward the\n helicopter. Hardly had he taken\n two steps, however, when he saw\n startled changes in the carefully\n blank looks of his escort. The\n constable half raised his heavy\n weapon, and Klaft sprang forward\n with a hissing cry.\n\n\n By the time Kinton's aging\n muscles obeyed his impulse to\n sidestep, the spear had already\n hurtled past. It had missed him\n by an error of over six feet.\n\n\n [113]\n He felt his face flushing with\n sudden anger. Birken was running\n as best he could toward the\n spaceship, and had covered nearly\n half the distance.\n\n\n Kinton ran at the Tepoktans,\n brushing aside the concerned\n Klaft. He snatched the heavy\n weapon from the surprised constable.",
"To himself, he wished he had\n not told Birken about the spaceship.\n He didn't think the man\n exactly believed his explanation\n of why there was no use taking\n off in it.\nYet he continued to spend as\n much time as he could visiting\n the other man. Then, as his helicopter\n landed at the city airport\n one gray dawn, the news reached\n him.\n\n\n \"The other Terran has gone,\"\n Klaft reported, turning from the\n breathless messenger as Kinton\n followed him from the machine.\n\n\n [109]\n \"Gone? Where did they take\n him?\"\n\n\n Klaft looked uneasy, embarrassed.\n Kinton repeated his question,\n wondering about the group\n of armed police on hand.\n\n\n \"In the night,\" Klaft hissed\n and clucked, \"when none would\n think to watch him, they tell me\n ... and quite rightly, I think—\"",
"\"We must get into the air\n immediately,\" he told Klaft.\n \"Perhaps we may see him before\n he reaches—\"\n\n\n He broke off at the word\n \"spaceship\" but he noticed a reserved\n expression on Klaft's\n pointed face. His aide had probably\n reached a conclusion similar\n to his own.\n\n\n They climbed back into the\n cabin and Klaft gave brisk orders\n to the lean young pilot. A\n moment later, Kinton saw the\n ground outside drop away.\n\n\n Only upon turning around did\n he realize that two armed Tepoktans\n had materialized in time to\n follow Klaft inside.",
"He turned and raised it to his\n chest. Because of the shortness\n of Tepoktan arms, the launcher\n was constructed so that the butt\n rested against the chest with the\n sighting loops before the eyes.\n The little rocket tubes were\n above head height, to prevent the\n handler's catching the blast.\n\n\n The circles of the sights\n weaved and danced about the\n running figure. Kinton realized\n to his surprise that the effort of\n seizing the weapon had him panting.\n Or was it the fright at having\n a spear thrown at him? He\n decided that Birken had not come\n close enough for that, and wondered\n if he was afraid of his\n own impending action.\n\n\n It wasn't fair, he complained\n to himself. The poor slob only\n had a spear, and a man couldn't\n blame him for wanting to get\n back to his own sort. He was\n limping ... hurt ... how could\n they expect him to realize—?",
"Why was it one like him who\n got through? he asked himself\n in silent anguish. After ten\n years. The Tepoktans had been\n thinking well of Terrans, but\n now—\n\n\n He did not worry about his\n own position. That was well\n enough established, whether or\n not he could again hold up his\n head before the purple-scaled\n people who had been so generous\n to him.\n\n\n Even if they had been aroused\n to a rage by the killing, Kinton\n told himself, he would not have\n been concerned about himself. He\n had reached a fairly ripe age for\n a spaceman. In fact, he had already\n [110]\n enjoyed a decade of borrowed\n time.\n\n\n But they were more civilized\n than that wanton murderer, he\n realized.\n\n\n He straightened up, forcing\n back his early-morning weariness.",
"\"I\nshouldn't\nhave told him\n about the ship!\" Kinton muttered,\n gnawing the knuckle of\n his left thumb. \"He's on the run,\n all right. Probably scared the\n colonial authorities will trail him\n right down through the Dome of\n Eyes. Wonder what he did?\"\n\n\n He caught himself and looked\n around to see if he had been overheard.\n Klaft and the police officers\n peered from their respective\n windows, in calculated withdrawal.\n Kinton, disturbed, tried\n to remember whether he had\n spoken in Terran or Tepoktan.\n\n\n Would Birken listen if he tried\n reasoning, he asked himself.\n Maybe if he showed the man how\n they had proved the unpredictability\n of openings through the\n shifting Dome of Eyes—",
"Kinton settled back in the seat\n especially padded to fit the contours\n of his Terran body, and\n [111]\n stared silently at the partition\n behind the pilot.\n\n\n In other words, he thought, he\n was responsible for Birken, who\n was a Terran, one of his own\n kind. Maybe they really didn't\n want to risk hurting his feelings,\n but that was only part of it.\n They were leaving it up to him\n to handle what they considered\n his private affair.\n\n\n He wondered what to do. He\n had no actual faith in the idea\n that Birken was delirious, or acting\n under any influence but that\n of a criminally self-centered nature.",
"\"I think we should not expect\n too much of this Terran,\" he\n warned Klaft uneasily. \"You,\n too, have citizens who do not always\n obey, your laws, who sometimes\n ... that is—\"\n\n\n \"Who are born to die under\n the axe, as we say,\" interrupted\n Klaft, as if to ease the concern\n plain on Kinton's face. \"In other\n words, criminals. You suspect\n this Albirken is such a one,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"It is not impossible,\" admitted\n Kinton unhappily. \"He will\n tell me little about himself. It\n may be that he was caught in\n Tepokt's gravity while fleeing\n from justice.\"",
"\"Why did he say he was traveling\n that way?\" asked Kinton,\n thinking to himself of the spaceship!\n Was the man crazy?\n\n\n \"He did not say,\" answered\n Klaft expressionlessly. \"Taking\n them by surprise, he killed two\n of the constables and injured\n the third before fleeing with one\n of their spears.\"\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Kinton felt his eyes bulging\n with dismay.\n\n\n \"Yes, for they carried only the\n short spears of their authority,\n not expecting to need fire weapons.\"\nKinton looked from him to the\n messenger, noticing for the first\n time that the latter was an under-officer\n of police. He shook his\n head distractedly. It appeared\n that his suspicions concerning\n Birken had been only too accurate.",
"Kinton observed, however,\n that his aide also stared upward\n for a long moment. The Tepoktans\n loved speculating about the\n unsolvable. They had even founded\n clubs to argue whether two\n satellites had been destroyed or\n only one.\n\n\n Half a dozen officials hastened\n up to escort the party to the\n vehicle awaiting Kinton. Klaft\n succeeded in quieting the lesser\n members of the delegation so\n that Kinton was able to learn a\n few facts about the new arrival.\n The crash had been several hundred\n miles away, but someone\n had thought of the hospital in\n this city which was known to\n have a doctor rating as an expert\n in human physiology. The survivor—only\n one occupant of the\n wreck, alive or dead, had\n been discovered—had accordingly\n been flown here.",
"\"He has been seen on the road\n passing the dam,\" Klaft reported\n soberly after having been called\n to the pilot's compartment. \"He\n stopped to demand fuel from\n some maintenance workers, but\n they had been warned and fled.\"\n\n\n \"Couldn't they have seized\n him?\" demanded Kinton, his tone\n sharp with the worry he endeavored\n to control. \"He has that\n spear, I suppose; but he is only\n one and injured.\"\n\n\n Klaft hesitated.\n\n\n \"Well, couldn't they?\"\n\n\n The aide looked away, out one\n of the windows at some sun-dyed\n clouds ranging from pink\n to orange. He grimaced and\n clicked his showy teeth uncomfortably.\n\n\n \"Perhaps they thought you\n might be offended, George,\" he\n answered at last.",
"Maybe he was wrong, he\n thought. Maybe he shouldn't\n stand in the way of their biologists\n and surgeons. But he'd\n rather be buried, even if that\n left them with only what he\n could tell them about the human\n body.\nTo help himself forget the\n rather preoccupied manner in\n which some of the Tepoktan scientists\n occasionally eyed him, he\n peered down at the big dam of\n the hydro-electric project being\n completed to Kinton's design.\n Power from this would soon\n light the town built to house the\n staff of scientists, students, and\n workers assigned to the institute\n organized about the person\n of Kinton.\n\n\n Now, there was an example of\n their willingness to repay him\n for whatever help he had been,\n he reflected. They hadn't needed\n that for themselves.",
"Kinton realized guiltily that\n the man should be resting. He\n [108]\n had lost track of the moments\n he had wasted in talk while the\n others with him stood attentively\n about.\n\n\n He questioned the doctor briefly\n and relayed the information\n that Birken's leg was broken but\n that the other injuries were not\n serious.\n\n\n \"They'll fix you up,\" he assured\n the spaceman. \"They're\n quite good at it, even if the sight\n of one does make you think a\n little of an iguana. Rest up, now;\n and I'll come back again when\n you're feeling better.\"",
"The pilot landed about a hundred\n yards from the spaceship.\n By the time his passengers had\n alighted, however, Birken had\n drawn level with them, about\n fifty feet away.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" shouted Kinton.\n \"Where do you think you're going?\"\n\n\n Seeing that no one ran after\n him, Birken slowed his pace, but\n kept walking toward the ship.\n [112]\n He watched them over his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Sorry, Kinton,\" he shouted\n with no noticeable tone of regret.\n \"I figure I better travel on for\n my health.\"\n\n\n \"It's not so damn healthy up\n there!\" called Kinton. \"I told\n you how there's no clear path—\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, yeah, you told me. That\n don't mean I gotta believe it.\"",
"An exclamation from the constable\n drew his attention. He\n rose, and room was made for him\n at the opposite window.\nIn the distance, beyond the\n town landing field they were now\n approaching, Kinton saw a halted\n ground car. Across the plain\n which was colored a yellowish\n tan by a short, grass-like growth,\n a lone figure plodded toward the\n upthrust bulk of the spaceship\n that had never flown.\n\n\n \"Never mind landing at the\n town!\" snapped Kinton. \"Go directly\n out to the ship!\"\n\n\n Klaft relayed the command to\n the pilot. The helicopter swept\n in a descending curve across the\n plain toward the gleaming hull.\n\n\n As they passed the man below,\n Birken looked up. He continued\n to limp along at a brisk\n pace with the aid of what looked\n like a short spear.\n\n\n \"Go down!\" Kinton ordered."
],
[
"An exclamation from the constable\n drew his attention. He\n rose, and room was made for him\n at the opposite window.\nIn the distance, beyond the\n town landing field they were now\n approaching, Kinton saw a halted\n ground car. Across the plain\n which was colored a yellowish\n tan by a short, grass-like growth,\n a lone figure plodded toward the\n upthrust bulk of the spaceship\n that had never flown.\n\n\n \"Never mind landing at the\n town!\" snapped Kinton. \"Go directly\n out to the ship!\"\n\n\n Klaft relayed the command to\n the pilot. The helicopter swept\n in a descending curve across the\n plain toward the gleaming hull.\n\n\n As they passed the man below,\n Birken looked up. He continued\n to limp along at a brisk\n pace with the aid of what looked\n like a short spear.\n\n\n \"Go down!\" Kinton ordered.",
"The pilot landed about a hundred\n yards from the spaceship.\n By the time his passengers had\n alighted, however, Birken had\n drawn level with them, about\n fifty feet away.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" shouted Kinton.\n \"Where do you think you're going?\"\n\n\n Seeing that no one ran after\n him, Birken slowed his pace, but\n kept walking toward the ship.\n [112]\n He watched them over his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Sorry, Kinton,\" he shouted\n with no noticeable tone of regret.\n \"I figure I better travel on for\n my health.\"\n\n\n \"It's not so damn healthy up\n there!\" called Kinton. \"I told\n you how there's no clear path—\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, yeah, you told me. That\n don't mean I gotta believe it.\"",
"Then, abruptly, his lips tightened\n to a thin line. The sights\n steadied on Birken as the latter\n approached the foot of the ladder\n leading to the entrance port\n of the spaceship.\n\n\n Kinton pressed the firing stud.\n\n\n Across the hundred-yard space\n streaked four flaring little projectiles.\n Kinton, without exactly\n seeing each, was aware of the\n general lines of flight diverging\n gradually to bracket the figure\n of Birken.",
"Kinton realized guiltily that\n the man should be resting. He\n [108]\n had lost track of the moments\n he had wasted in talk while the\n others with him stood attentively\n about.\n\n\n He questioned the doctor briefly\n and relayed the information\n that Birken's leg was broken but\n that the other injuries were not\n serious.\n\n\n \"They'll fix you up,\" he assured\n the spaceman. \"They're\n quite good at it, even if the sight\n of one does make you think a\n little of an iguana. Rest up, now;\n and I'll come back again when\n you're feeling better.\"",
"One struck the ground beside\n the man just as he set one foot\n on the bottom rung of the ladder,\n and skittered away past one fin\n of the ship before exploding.\n Two others burst against the\n hull, scattering metal fragments,\n and another puffed on the upright\n of the ladder just above\n Birken's head.\nThe spaceman was blown back\n from the ladder. He balanced on\n his heels for a moment with outstretched\n fingers reaching toward\n the grips from which they\n had been torn. Then he crumpled\n into a limp huddle on the yellowing\n turf.\n\n\n Kinton sighed.\n\n\n The constable took the weapon\n from him, reloaded deftly, and\n proffered it again. When the\n Terran did not reach for it, the\n officer held out a clawed hand to\n receive it. He gestured silently,\n and the constable trotted across\n [114]\n the intervening ground to bend\n over Birken.",
"To himself, he wished he had\n not told Birken about the spaceship.\n He didn't think the man\n exactly believed his explanation\n of why there was no use taking\n off in it.\nYet he continued to spend as\n much time as he could visiting\n the other man. Then, as his helicopter\n landed at the city airport\n one gray dawn, the news reached\n him.\n\n\n \"The other Terran has gone,\"\n Klaft reported, turning from the\n breathless messenger as Kinton\n followed him from the machine.\n\n\n [109]\n \"Gone? Where did they take\n him?\"\n\n\n Klaft looked uneasy, embarrassed.\n Kinton repeated his question,\n wondering about the group\n of armed police on hand.\n\n\n \"In the night,\" Klaft hissed\n and clucked, \"when none would\n think to watch him, they tell me\n ... and quite rightly, I think—\"",
"For the next three weeks, Kinton\n flew back and forth from his\n own town nearly every day. He\n felt that he should not neglect\n the few meetings which were the\n only way he could repay the Tepoktans\n for all they did for him.\n On the other hand, the chance\n to see and talk with one of his\n own kind drew him like a magnet\n to the hospital.\n\n\n The doctors operated upon\n Birken's leg, inserting a metal\n rod inside the bone by a method\n they had known before Kinton\n described it. The new arrival expected\n to be able to walk, with\n care, almost any day; although\n the pin would have to be removed\n after the bone had healed. Meanwhile,\n Birken seemed eager to\n learn all Kinton could tell him\n about the planet, Tepokt.\n\n\n About himself, he was remarkably\n reticent. Kinton worried\n about this.",
"\"Wait! Don't you think they\n tried sending unmanned rockets\n up? Every one was struck and\n exploded.\"\n\n\n Birken showed no more change\n of expression than if the other\n had commented on the weather.\n\n\n Kinton had stepped forward\n six or eight paces, irritated despite\n his anxiety at the way Birken\n persisted in drifting before\n him.\n\n\n Kinton couldn't just grab him—bad\n leg or not, he could probably\n break the older man in two.\n\n\n He glanced back at the Tepoktans\n beside the helicopter, Klaft,\n the pilot, the officer, the constable\n with the rocket weapon.\n\n\n They stood quietly, looking\n back at him.\n\n\n The call for help that had risen\n to his lips died there.",
"Kinton settled back in the seat\n especially padded to fit the contours\n of his Terran body, and\n [111]\n stared silently at the partition\n behind the pilot.\n\n\n In other words, he thought, he\n was responsible for Birken, who\n was a Terran, one of his own\n kind. Maybe they really didn't\n want to risk hurting his feelings,\n but that was only part of it.\n They were leaving it up to him\n to handle what they considered\n his private affair.\n\n\n He wondered what to do. He\n had no actual faith in the idea\n that Birken was delirious, or acting\n under any influence but that\n of a criminally self-centered nature.",
"\"Yeah. Jet-hoppers spreadin'\n all over the other five. None of\n the land-hungry poops figured a\n way to set down here, though, or\n they'd be creepin' around this\n planet too.\"\n\n\n \"How did you happen to do\n it? Run out of fuel?\"\n\n\n The other eyed him for a few\n seconds before dropping his\n gaze. Kinton was struck with\n sudden doubt. The outposts of\n civilization were followed by less\n desirable developments as a general\n rule—prisons, for instance.\n He resolved to be wary of the\n visitor.\n\n\n \"Ya might say I was explorin',\"\n Birken replied at last.\n \"That's why I come alone.\n Didn't want nobody else hurt if\n I didn't make it. Say, how bad\n am I banged up?\"",
"\"Why did he say he was traveling\n that way?\" asked Kinton,\n thinking to himself of the spaceship!\n Was the man crazy?\n\n\n \"He did not say,\" answered\n Klaft expressionlessly. \"Taking\n them by surprise, he killed two\n of the constables and injured\n the third before fleeing with one\n of their spears.\"\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Kinton felt his eyes bulging\n with dismay.\n\n\n \"Yes, for they carried only the\n short spears of their authority,\n not expecting to need fire weapons.\"\nKinton looked from him to the\n messenger, noticing for the first\n time that the latter was an under-officer\n of police. He shook his\n head distractedly. It appeared\n that his suspicions concerning\n Birken had been only too accurate.",
"\"Not\ntheir\nparty,\" he muttered.\n He turned again to Birken,\n who still retreated toward the\n ship. \"But he'll only get himself\n killed\nand\ndestroy the ship! Or\n if some miracle gets him\n through, that's worse! He's\n nothing to turn loose on a civilized\n colony again.\"\nA twinge of shame tugged\n down the corners of his mouth\n as he realized that keeping Birken\n here would also expose a\n highly cultured people to an unscrupulous\n criminal who had already\n committed murder the very\n first time he had been crossed.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" he shouted. \"For\n the last time! Do you want me\n to send them to drag you back\n here?\"\n\n\n Birken stopped at that. He regarded\n the motionless Tepoktans\n with a derisive sneer.\n\n\n \"They don't look too eager to\n me,\" he taunted.",
"He turned and raised it to his\n chest. Because of the shortness\n of Tepoktan arms, the launcher\n was constructed so that the butt\n rested against the chest with the\n sighting loops before the eyes.\n The little rocket tubes were\n above head height, to prevent the\n handler's catching the blast.\n\n\n The circles of the sights\n weaved and danced about the\n running figure. Kinton realized\n to his surprise that the effort of\n seizing the weapon had him panting.\n Or was it the fright at having\n a spear thrown at him? He\n decided that Birken had not come\n close enough for that, and wondered\n if he was afraid of his\n own impending action.\n\n\n It wasn't fair, he complained\n to himself. The poor slob only\n had a spear, and a man couldn't\n blame him for wanting to get\n back to his own sort. He was\n limping ... hurt ... how could\n they expect him to realize—?",
"One was a constable but the\n other he recognized for an officer\n of some rank. Both wore slung\n across their chests weapons resembling\n long-barreled pistols\n with large, oddly indented butts\n to fit Tepoktan claws. The constable,\n in addition, carried a\n contraption with a quadruple\n tube for launching tiny rockets\n no thicker than Kinton's thumb.\n These, he knew, were loaded\n with an explosive worthy of respect\n on any planet he had heard\n of.\n\n\n To protect him, he wondered.\n Or to get Birken?\n\n\n The pilot headed the craft\n back toward Kinton's town in\n the brightening sky of early day.\n Long before the buildings of\n Kinton's institute came into\n view, they received a radio message\n about Birken.",
"\"I\nshouldn't\nhave told him\n about the ship!\" Kinton muttered,\n gnawing the knuckle of\n his left thumb. \"He's on the run,\n all right. Probably scared the\n colonial authorities will trail him\n right down through the Dome of\n Eyes. Wonder what he did?\"\n\n\n He caught himself and looked\n around to see if he had been overheard.\n Klaft and the police officers\n peered from their respective\n windows, in calculated withdrawal.\n Kinton, disturbed, tried\n to remember whether he had\n spoken in Terran or Tepoktan.\n\n\n Would Birken listen if he tried\n reasoning, he asked himself.\n Maybe if he showed the man how\n they had proved the unpredictability\n of openings through the\n shifting Dome of Eyes—",
"Kinton growled a Tepoktan expression\n the meaning of which\n he had deduced after hearing it\n used by the dam workers.\n\n\n He whirled to run toward the\n helicopter. Hardly had he taken\n two steps, however, when he saw\n startled changes in the carefully\n blank looks of his escort. The\n constable half raised his heavy\n weapon, and Klaft sprang forward\n with a hissing cry.\n\n\n By the time Kinton's aging\n muscles obeyed his impulse to\n sidestep, the spear had already\n hurtled past. It had missed him\n by an error of over six feet.\n\n\n [113]\n He felt his face flushing with\n sudden anger. Birken was running\n as best he could toward the\n spaceship, and had covered nearly\n half the distance.\n\n\n Kinton ran at the Tepoktans,\n brushing aside the concerned\n Klaft. He snatched the heavy\n weapon from the surprised constable.",
"With a clanging of bells, the\n little convoy of ground cars\n drew up in front of the hospital.\n A way was made through the\n chittering crowd around the\n entrance. Within a few minutes,\n Kinton found himself looking\n down at a pallet upon which lay\n another Terran.\n\n\n A man! he thought, then\n curled a lip wrily at the sudden,\n unexpected pang of disappointment.\n Well, he hadn't realized\n until then what he was really\n hoping for!\nThe spaceman had been\n cleaned up and bandaged by the\n native medicos. Kinton saw that\n his left thigh was probably\n broken. Other dressings suggested\n cracked ribs and lacerations\n on the head and shoulders. The\n man was dark-haired but pale of\n skin, with a jutting chin and a\n nose that had been flattened in\n some earlier mishap. The flaring\n set of his ears somehow emphasized\n an overall leanness. Even in\n sleep, his mouth was thin and\n hard.",
"\"Get on with it, Klaft!\n Please!\"\n\n\n \"In the night, then, Albirken\n left the chamber in which he lay.\n He can walk some now, you\n know, because of Dr. Chuxolkhee's\n metal pin. He—he stole a\n ground car and is gone.\"\n\n\n \"He did?\" Kinton had an\n empty feeling in the pit of his\n stomach. \"Is it known where he\n went? I mean ... he has been\n curious to see some of Tepokt.\n Perhaps—\"\n\n\n He stopped, his own words\n braying in his ears. Klaft was\n clicking two claws together, a\n sign of emphatic disagreement.\n\n\n \"Albirken,\" he said, \"was soon\n followed by three police constables\n in another vehicle. They\n found him heading in the direction\n of our town.\"",
"Kinton observed, however,\n that his aide also stared upward\n for a long moment. The Tepoktans\n loved speculating about the\n unsolvable. They had even founded\n clubs to argue whether two\n satellites had been destroyed or\n only one.\n\n\n Half a dozen officials hastened\n up to escort the party to the\n vehicle awaiting Kinton. Klaft\n succeeded in quieting the lesser\n members of the delegation so\n that Kinton was able to learn a\n few facts about the new arrival.\n The crash had been several hundred\n miles away, but someone\n had thought of the hospital in\n this city which was known to\n have a doctor rating as an expert\n in human physiology. The survivor—only\n one occupant of the\n wreck, alive or dead, had\n been discovered—had accordingly\n been flown here.",
"The aide reached Kinton and\n bent to hiss and cluck into the\n latter's ear in what he presumably\n considered an undertone.\n The Terran laboriously spelled\n out the message inscribed on the\n limp, satiny paper held before his\n eyes. Then he rose and took one\n step toward the waiting group.\n\n\n \"I regret I shall have to conclude\n this discussion,\" he announced.\n \"I am informed that\n another ship from space has\n reached the surface of Tepokt.\n My presence is requested in case\n the crew are of my own planet.\"\n\n\n [104]\n Klaft excitedly skipped down\n to lead the way up the aisle, but\n Kinton hesitated. Those in the\n audience were scholars or officials\n to whom attendance at one\n of Kinton's limited number of\n personal lectures was awarded as\n an honor."
],
[
"\"The police will stay until cars\n from town arrive. They are coming\n now,\" said his aide.\nKinton stared at his hands,\n wondering at the fact that they\n were not shaking. He felt dejected,\n empty, not like a man who\n had just been at a high pitch of\n excitement.\n\n\n \"Why did you not let him go,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"What? Why ... why ... he\n would have destroyed the ship\n you worked so hard to build.\n There is no safe path through\n the Dome of Eyes.\"\n\n\n \"No predictable path,\" Klaft\n corrected. \"But what then? We\n would have built you another\n ship, George, for it was you who\n showed us how.\"\n\n\n Kinton flexed his fingers\n slowly.",
"\"He is dead,\" said Klaft when\n the constable straightened up\n with a curt wave.\n\n\n \"Will ... will you have someone\n see to him, please?\" Kinton\n requested, turning toward the\n helicopter.\n\n\n \"Yes, George,\" said Klaft.\n \"George...?\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"It would be very instructive—that\n is, I believe Dr. Chuxolkhee\n would like to—\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" yielded Kinton,\n surprised at the harshness of his\n own voice. \"Just tell him not to\n bring around any sketches of the\n various organs for a few\n months!\"\n\n\n He climbed into the helicopter\n and slumped into his seat. Presently,\n he was aware of Klaft edging\n into the seat across the aisle.\n He looked up.",
"He could tell that they were\n pleased by his admiration, and\n wondered yet again why any\n little show of approval by him\n was so eagerly received. Even\n though he was the first stellar\n visitor in their recorded history,\n Kinton remained conscious of the\n fact that in many fields he was\n unable to offer the Tepoktans any\n new ideas. In one or two ways,\n he believed, no Terran could\n teach their experts anything.\n\n\n \"Then will you tell us, George,\n more about the problems of your\n first space explorers?\" came another\n question.\nBefore Kinton had formed his\n answer, the golden curtains at\n the rear of the austerely simple\n chamber parted. Klaft, the Tepoktan\n serving the current year\n as Kinton's chief aide, hurried\n toward the dais. The twenty-odd\n members of the group fell silent\n on their polished stone benches,\n turning their pointed visages to\n follow Klaft's progress.",
"Then, abruptly, his lips tightened\n to a thin line. The sights\n steadied on Birken as the latter\n approached the foot of the ladder\n leading to the entrance port\n of the spaceship.\n\n\n Kinton pressed the firing stud.\n\n\n Across the hundred-yard space\n streaked four flaring little projectiles.\n Kinton, without exactly\n seeing each, was aware of the\n general lines of flight diverging\n gradually to bracket the figure\n of Birken.",
"\"He has been seen on the road\n passing the dam,\" Klaft reported\n soberly after having been called\n to the pilot's compartment. \"He\n stopped to demand fuel from\n some maintenance workers, but\n they had been warned and fled.\"\n\n\n \"Couldn't they have seized\n him?\" demanded Kinton, his tone\n sharp with the worry he endeavored\n to control. \"He has that\n spear, I suppose; but he is only\n one and injured.\"\n\n\n Klaft hesitated.\n\n\n \"Well, couldn't they?\"\n\n\n The aide looked away, out one\n of the windows at some sun-dyed\n clouds ranging from pink\n to orange. He grimaced and\n clicked his showy teeth uncomfortably.\n\n\n \"Perhaps they thought you\n might be offended, George,\" he\n answered at last.",
"\"We must get into the air\n immediately,\" he told Klaft.\n \"Perhaps we may see him before\n he reaches—\"\n\n\n He broke off at the word\n \"spaceship\" but he noticed a reserved\n expression on Klaft's\n pointed face. His aide had probably\n reached a conclusion similar\n to his own.\n\n\n They climbed back into the\n cabin and Klaft gave brisk orders\n to the lean young pilot. A\n moment later, Kinton saw the\n ground outside drop away.\n\n\n Only upon turning around did\n he realize that two armed Tepoktans\n had materialized in time to\n follow Klaft inside.",
"Kinton growled a Tepoktan expression\n the meaning of which\n he had deduced after hearing it\n used by the dam workers.\n\n\n He whirled to run toward the\n helicopter. Hardly had he taken\n two steps, however, when he saw\n startled changes in the carefully\n blank looks of his escort. The\n constable half raised his heavy\n weapon, and Klaft sprang forward\n with a hissing cry.\n\n\n By the time Kinton's aging\n muscles obeyed his impulse to\n sidestep, the spear had already\n hurtled past. It had missed him\n by an error of over six feet.\n\n\n [113]\n He felt his face flushing with\n sudden anger. Birken was running\n as best he could toward the\n spaceship, and had covered nearly\n half the distance.\n\n\n Kinton ran at the Tepoktans,\n brushing aside the concerned\n Klaft. He snatched the heavy\n weapon from the surprised constable.",
"\"Why did he say he was traveling\n that way?\" asked Kinton,\n thinking to himself of the spaceship!\n Was the man crazy?\n\n\n \"He did not say,\" answered\n Klaft expressionlessly. \"Taking\n them by surprise, he killed two\n of the constables and injured\n the third before fleeing with one\n of their spears.\"\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Kinton felt his eyes bulging\n with dismay.\n\n\n \"Yes, for they carried only the\n short spears of their authority,\n not expecting to need fire weapons.\"\nKinton looked from him to the\n messenger, noticing for the first\n time that the latter was an under-officer\n of police. He shook his\n head distractedly. It appeared\n that his suspicions concerning\n Birken had been only too accurate.",
"The aide reached Kinton and\n bent to hiss and cluck into the\n latter's ear in what he presumably\n considered an undertone.\n The Terran laboriously spelled\n out the message inscribed on the\n limp, satiny paper held before his\n eyes. Then he rose and took one\n step toward the waiting group.\n\n\n \"I regret I shall have to conclude\n this discussion,\" he announced.\n \"I am informed that\n another ship from space has\n reached the surface of Tepokt.\n My presence is requested in case\n the crew are of my own planet.\"\n\n\n [104]\n Klaft excitedly skipped down\n to lead the way up the aisle, but\n Kinton hesitated. Those in the\n audience were scholars or officials\n to whom attendance at one\n of Kinton's limited number of\n personal lectures was awarded as\n an honor.",
"One struck the ground beside\n the man just as he set one foot\n on the bottom rung of the ladder,\n and skittered away past one fin\n of the ship before exploding.\n Two others burst against the\n hull, scattering metal fragments,\n and another puffed on the upright\n of the ladder just above\n Birken's head.\nThe spaceman was blown back\n from the ladder. He balanced on\n his heels for a moment with outstretched\n fingers reaching toward\n the grips from which they\n had been torn. Then he crumpled\n into a limp huddle on the yellowing\n turf.\n\n\n Kinton sighed.\n\n\n The constable took the weapon\n from him, reloaded deftly, and\n proffered it again. When the\n Terran did not reach for it, the\n officer held out a clawed hand to\n receive it. He gestured silently,\n and the constable trotted across\n [114]\n the intervening ground to bend\n over Birken.",
"\"Thrown across the controls\n after his belt broke loose?\" Kinton\n guessed.\n\n\n \"I bow to your wisdom,\n George,\" said the plump Tepoktan\n doctor who appeared to be\n in charge.\n\n\n Kinton could not remember\n him, but everyone on the planet\n addressed the Terran by the\n sound they fondly thought to be\n his first name.\n\n\n \"This is Doctor Chuxolkhee,\"\n murmured Klaft.\n\n\n Kinton made the accepted gesture\n of greeting with one hand\n and said, \"You seem to have\n treated him very expertly.\"\n\n\n Chuxolkhee ruffled the scales\n around his neck with pleasure.\n\n\n [107]\n \"I have studied Terran physiology,\"\n he admitted complacently.\n \"From your records and\n drawings, of course, George, for\n I have not yet had the good fortune\n to visit you.\"",
"An exclamation from the constable\n drew his attention. He\n rose, and room was made for him\n at the opposite window.\nIn the distance, beyond the\n town landing field they were now\n approaching, Kinton saw a halted\n ground car. Across the plain\n which was colored a yellowish\n tan by a short, grass-like growth,\n a lone figure plodded toward the\n upthrust bulk of the spaceship\n that had never flown.\n\n\n \"Never mind landing at the\n town!\" snapped Kinton. \"Go directly\n out to the ship!\"\n\n\n Klaft relayed the command to\n the pilot. The helicopter swept\n in a descending curve across the\n plain toward the gleaming hull.\n\n\n As they passed the man below,\n Birken looked up. He continued\n to limp along at a brisk\n pace with the aid of what looked\n like a short spear.\n\n\n \"Go down!\" Kinton ordered.",
"Kinton observed, however,\n that his aide also stared upward\n for a long moment. The Tepoktans\n loved speculating about the\n unsolvable. They had even founded\n clubs to argue whether two\n satellites had been destroyed or\n only one.\n\n\n Half a dozen officials hastened\n up to escort the party to the\n vehicle awaiting Kinton. Klaft\n succeeded in quieting the lesser\n members of the delegation so\n that Kinton was able to learn a\n few facts about the new arrival.\n The crash had been several hundred\n miles away, but someone\n had thought of the hospital in\n this city which was known to\n have a doctor rating as an expert\n in human physiology. The survivor—only\n one occupant of the\n wreck, alive or dead, had\n been discovered—had accordingly\n been flown here.",
"\"Not\ntheir\nparty,\" he muttered.\n He turned again to Birken,\n who still retreated toward the\n ship. \"But he'll only get himself\n killed\nand\ndestroy the ship! Or\n if some miracle gets him\n through, that's worse! He's\n nothing to turn loose on a civilized\n colony again.\"\nA twinge of shame tugged\n down the corners of his mouth\n as he realized that keeping Birken\n here would also expose a\n highly cultured people to an unscrupulous\n criminal who had already\n committed murder the very\n first time he had been crossed.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" he shouted. \"For\n the last time! Do you want me\n to send them to drag you back\n here?\"\n\n\n Birken stopped at that. He regarded\n the motionless Tepoktans\n with a derisive sneer.\n\n\n \"They don't look too eager to\n me,\" he taunted.",
"The brighter stars visible from\n this part of the planet twinkled\n back at him, and he knew that\n each was being scrutinized by\n some amateur or professional\n astronomer. Before an hour had\n elapsed, most of them would be\n obscured by the tiny moonlets,\n some of which could already be\n seen. These could easily be mistaken\n for stars or the other five\n planets of the system, but in a\n short while the tinier ones in\n groups would cause a celestial\n haze resembling a miniature\n Milky Way.\n\n\n Klaft, who had descended first,\n leaving the pilot to bring up the\n rear, noticed Kinton's pause.\n\n\n \"Glory glitters till it is known\n for a curse,\" he remarked, quoting\n a Tepoktan proverb often applied\n [106]\n by the disgruntled scientists\n to the Dome of Eyes.",
"The pilot landed about a hundred\n yards from the spaceship.\n By the time his passengers had\n alighted, however, Birken had\n drawn level with them, about\n fifty feet away.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" shouted Kinton.\n \"Where do you think you're going?\"\n\n\n Seeing that no one ran after\n him, Birken slowed his pace, but\n kept walking toward the ship.\n [112]\n He watched them over his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Sorry, Kinton,\" he shouted\n with no noticeable tone of regret.\n \"I figure I better travel on for\n my health.\"\n\n\n \"It's not so damn healthy up\n there!\" called Kinton. \"I told\n you how there's no clear path—\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, yeah, you told me. That\n don't mean I gotta believe it.\"",
"\"I\nshouldn't\nhave told him\n about the ship!\" Kinton muttered,\n gnawing the knuckle of\n his left thumb. \"He's on the run,\n all right. Probably scared the\n colonial authorities will trail him\n right down through the Dome of\n Eyes. Wonder what he did?\"\n\n\n He caught himself and looked\n around to see if he had been overheard.\n Klaft and the police officers\n peered from their respective\n windows, in calculated withdrawal.\n Kinton, disturbed, tried\n to remember whether he had\n spoken in Terran or Tepoktan.\n\n\n Would Birken listen if he tried\n reasoning, he asked himself.\n Maybe if he showed the man how\n they had proved the unpredictability\n of openings through the\n shifting Dome of Eyes—",
"\"Wait! Don't you think they\n tried sending unmanned rockets\n up? Every one was struck and\n exploded.\"\n\n\n Birken showed no more change\n of expression than if the other\n had commented on the weather.\n\n\n Kinton had stepped forward\n six or eight paces, irritated despite\n his anxiety at the way Birken\n persisted in drifting before\n him.\n\n\n Kinton couldn't just grab him—bad\n leg or not, he could probably\n break the older man in two.\n\n\n He glanced back at the Tepoktans\n beside the helicopter, Klaft,\n the pilot, the officer, the constable\n with the rocket weapon.\n\n\n They stood quietly, looking\n back at him.\n\n\n The call for help that had risen\n to his lips died there.",
"To himself, he wished he had\n not told Birken about the spaceship.\n He didn't think the man\n exactly believed his explanation\n of why there was no use taking\n off in it.\nYet he continued to spend as\n much time as he could visiting\n the other man. Then, as his helicopter\n landed at the city airport\n one gray dawn, the news reached\n him.\n\n\n \"The other Terran has gone,\"\n Klaft reported, turning from the\n breathless messenger as Kinton\n followed him from the machine.\n\n\n [109]\n \"Gone? Where did they take\n him?\"\n\n\n Klaft looked uneasy, embarrassed.\n Kinton repeated his question,\n wondering about the group\n of armed police on hand.\n\n\n \"In the night,\" Klaft hissed\n and clucked, \"when none would\n think to watch him, they tell me\n ... and quite rightly, I think—\"",
"One was a constable but the\n other he recognized for an officer\n of some rank. Both wore slung\n across their chests weapons resembling\n long-barreled pistols\n with large, oddly indented butts\n to fit Tepoktan claws. The constable,\n in addition, carried a\n contraption with a quadruple\n tube for launching tiny rockets\n no thicker than Kinton's thumb.\n These, he knew, were loaded\n with an explosive worthy of respect\n on any planet he had heard\n of.\n\n\n To protect him, he wondered.\n Or to get Birken?\n\n\n The pilot headed the craft\n back toward Kinton's town in\n the brightening sky of early day.\n Long before the buildings of\n Kinton's institute came into\n view, they received a radio message\n about Birken."
],
[
"Why was it one like him who\n got through? he asked himself\n in silent anguish. After ten\n years. The Tepoktans had been\n thinking well of Terrans, but\n now—\n\n\n He did not worry about his\n own position. That was well\n enough established, whether or\n not he could again hold up his\n head before the purple-scaled\n people who had been so generous\n to him.\n\n\n Even if they had been aroused\n to a rage by the killing, Kinton\n told himself, he would not have\n been concerned about himself. He\n had reached a fairly ripe age for\n a spaceman. In fact, he had already\n [110]\n enjoyed a decade of borrowed\n time.\n\n\n But they were more civilized\n than that wanton murderer, he\n realized.\n\n\n He straightened up, forcing\n back his early-morning weariness.",
"They would hardly learn anything\n from him directly that was\n not available in recordings made\n over the course of years. The\n Tepoktan scientists, historians,\n and philosophers had respectfully\n but eagerly gathered every\n crumb of information Kinton\n knowingly had to offer—and\n some he thought he had forgotten.\n Still ... he sensed the disappointment\n at his announcement.\n\n\n \"I shall arrange for you to\n await my return here in town,\"\n Kinton said, and there were murmurs\n of pleasure.\n\n\n Later, aboard the jet helicopter\n that was basically like\n those Kinton remembered using\n on Terra twenty light years\n away, he shook his head at\n Klaft's respectful protest.\n\n\n \"But George! It was enough\n that they were present when you\n received the news. They can talk\n about that the rest of their lives!\n You must not waste your\n strength on these people who\n come out of curiosity.\"",
"For the next three weeks, Kinton\n flew back and forth from his\n own town nearly every day. He\n felt that he should not neglect\n the few meetings which were the\n only way he could repay the Tepoktans\n for all they did for him.\n On the other hand, the chance\n to see and talk with one of his\n own kind drew him like a magnet\n to the hospital.\n\n\n The doctors operated upon\n Birken's leg, inserting a metal\n rod inside the bone by a method\n they had known before Kinton\n described it. The new arrival expected\n to be able to walk, with\n care, almost any day; although\n the pin would have to be removed\n after the bone had healed. Meanwhile,\n Birken seemed eager to\n learn all Kinton could tell him\n about the planet, Tepokt.\n\n\n About himself, he was remarkably\n reticent. Kinton worried\n about this.",
"\"The police will stay until cars\n from town arrive. They are coming\n now,\" said his aide.\nKinton stared at his hands,\n wondering at the fact that they\n were not shaking. He felt dejected,\n empty, not like a man who\n had just been at a high pitch of\n excitement.\n\n\n \"Why did you not let him go,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"What? Why ... why ... he\n would have destroyed the ship\n you worked so hard to build.\n There is no safe path through\n the Dome of Eyes.\"\n\n\n \"No predictable path,\" Klaft\n corrected. \"But what then? We\n would have built you another\n ship, George, for it was you who\n showed us how.\"\n\n\n Kinton flexed his fingers\n slowly.",
"He could tell that they were\n pleased by his admiration, and\n wondered yet again why any\n little show of approval by him\n was so eagerly received. Even\n though he was the first stellar\n visitor in their recorded history,\n Kinton remained conscious of the\n fact that in many fields he was\n unable to offer the Tepoktans any\n new ideas. In one or two ways,\n he believed, no Terran could\n teach their experts anything.\n\n\n \"Then will you tell us, George,\n more about the problems of your\n first space explorers?\" came another\n question.\nBefore Kinton had formed his\n answer, the golden curtains at\n the rear of the austerely simple\n chamber parted. Klaft, the Tepoktan\n serving the current year\n as Kinton's chief aide, hurried\n toward the dais. The twenty-odd\n members of the group fell silent\n on their polished stone benches,\n turning their pointed visages to\n follow Klaft's progress.",
"For ten years, Kinton had\n failed to work up any strong desire\n to try it. The Tepoktans\n called the ever-shifting lights\n the Dome of Eyes, after a myth\n in which each tiny satellite\n bright enough to be visible was\n supposed to watch over a single\n individual on the surface. Like\n their brothers on Terra, the native\n astronomers could trace\n their science back to a form of\n astrology; and Kinton often told\n them jokingly that he felt no\n urge to risk a physical encounter\n with his own personal Eye.\nThe helicopter started to descend,\n and Kinton remembered\n that the city named in his message\n was only about twenty miles\n from his home. The brief twilight\n of Tepokt was passing by\n the time he set foot on the landing\n field, and he paused to look\n up.",
"Maybe he was wrong, he\n thought. Maybe he shouldn't\n stand in the way of their biologists\n and surgeons. But he'd\n rather be buried, even if that\n left them with only what he\n could tell them about the human\n body.\nTo help himself forget the\n rather preoccupied manner in\n which some of the Tepoktan scientists\n occasionally eyed him, he\n peered down at the big dam of\n the hydro-electric project being\n completed to Kinton's design.\n Power from this would soon\n light the town built to house the\n staff of scientists, students, and\n workers assigned to the institute\n organized about the person\n of Kinton.\n\n\n Now, there was an example of\n their willingness to repay him\n for whatever help he had been,\n he reflected. They hadn't needed\n that for themselves.",
"\"Not\ntheir\nparty,\" he muttered.\n He turned again to Birken,\n who still retreated toward the\n ship. \"But he'll only get himself\n killed\nand\ndestroy the ship! Or\n if some miracle gets him\n through, that's worse! He's\n nothing to turn loose on a civilized\n colony again.\"\nA twinge of shame tugged\n down the corners of his mouth\n as he realized that keeping Birken\n here would also expose a\n highly cultured people to an unscrupulous\n criminal who had already\n committed murder the very\n first time he had been crossed.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" he shouted. \"For\n the last time! Do you want me\n to send them to drag you back\n here?\"\n\n\n Birken stopped at that. He regarded\n the motionless Tepoktans\n with a derisive sneer.\n\n\n \"They don't look too eager to\n me,\" he taunted.",
"Kinton growled a Tepoktan expression\n the meaning of which\n he had deduced after hearing it\n used by the dam workers.\n\n\n He whirled to run toward the\n helicopter. Hardly had he taken\n two steps, however, when he saw\n startled changes in the carefully\n blank looks of his escort. The\n constable half raised his heavy\n weapon, and Klaft sprang forward\n with a hissing cry.\n\n\n By the time Kinton's aging\n muscles obeyed his impulse to\n sidestep, the spear had already\n hurtled past. It had missed him\n by an error of over six feet.\n\n\n [113]\n He felt his face flushing with\n sudden anger. Birken was running\n as best he could toward the\n spaceship, and had covered nearly\n half the distance.\n\n\n Kinton ran at the Tepoktans,\n brushing aside the concerned\n Klaft. He snatched the heavy\n weapon from the surprised constable.",
"Kinton smiled at his aide's\n earnest concern. Then he turned\n to look out the window as he recalled\n the shadow that underlay\n such remonstrances. He estimated\n that he was about forty-eight\n now, as nearly as he could tell\n from the somewhat longer revolutions\n of Tepokt. The time\n would come when he would age\n and die. Whose wishes would\n then prevail?",
"\"Get on with it, Klaft!\n Please!\"\n\n\n \"In the night, then, Albirken\n left the chamber in which he lay.\n He can walk some now, you\n know, because of Dr. Chuxolkhee's\n metal pin. He—he stole a\n ground car and is gone.\"\n\n\n \"He did?\" Kinton had an\n empty feeling in the pit of his\n stomach. \"Is it known where he\n went? I mean ... he has been\n curious to see some of Tepokt.\n Perhaps—\"\n\n\n He stopped, his own words\n braying in his ears. Klaft was\n clicking two claws together, a\n sign of emphatic disagreement.\n\n\n \"Albirken,\" he said, \"was soon\n followed by three police constables\n in another vehicle. They\n found him heading in the direction\n of our town.\"",
"\"He has been seen on the road\n passing the dam,\" Klaft reported\n soberly after having been called\n to the pilot's compartment. \"He\n stopped to demand fuel from\n some maintenance workers, but\n they had been warned and fled.\"\n\n\n \"Couldn't they have seized\n him?\" demanded Kinton, his tone\n sharp with the worry he endeavored\n to control. \"He has that\n spear, I suppose; but he is only\n one and injured.\"\n\n\n Klaft hesitated.\n\n\n \"Well, couldn't they?\"\n\n\n The aide looked away, out one\n of the windows at some sun-dyed\n clouds ranging from pink\n to orange. He grimaced and\n clicked his showy teeth uncomfortably.\n\n\n \"Perhaps they thought you\n might be offended, George,\" he\n answered at last.",
"\"I think we should not expect\n too much of this Terran,\" he\n warned Klaft uneasily. \"You,\n too, have citizens who do not always\n obey, your laws, who sometimes\n ... that is—\"\n\n\n \"Who are born to die under\n the axe, as we say,\" interrupted\n Klaft, as if to ease the concern\n plain on Kinton's face. \"In other\n words, criminals. You suspect\n this Albirken is such a one,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"It is not impossible,\" admitted\n Kinton unhappily. \"He will\n tell me little about himself. It\n may be that he was caught in\n Tepokt's gravity while fleeing\n from justice.\"",
"The aide reached Kinton and\n bent to hiss and cluck into the\n latter's ear in what he presumably\n considered an undertone.\n The Terran laboriously spelled\n out the message inscribed on the\n limp, satiny paper held before his\n eyes. Then he rose and took one\n step toward the waiting group.\n\n\n \"I regret I shall have to conclude\n this discussion,\" he announced.\n \"I am informed that\n another ship from space has\n reached the surface of Tepokt.\n My presence is requested in case\n the crew are of my own planet.\"\n\n\n [104]\n Klaft excitedly skipped down\n to lead the way up the aisle, but\n Kinton hesitated. Those in the\n audience were scholars or officials\n to whom attendance at one\n of Kinton's limited number of\n personal lectures was awarded as\n an honor.",
"\"Wait! Don't you think they\n tried sending unmanned rockets\n up? Every one was struck and\n exploded.\"\n\n\n Birken showed no more change\n of expression than if the other\n had commented on the weather.\n\n\n Kinton had stepped forward\n six or eight paces, irritated despite\n his anxiety at the way Birken\n persisted in drifting before\n him.\n\n\n Kinton couldn't just grab him—bad\n leg or not, he could probably\n break the older man in two.\n\n\n He glanced back at the Tepoktans\n beside the helicopter, Klaft,\n the pilot, the officer, the constable\n with the rocket weapon.\n\n\n They stood quietly, looking\n back at him.\n\n\n The call for help that had risen\n to his lips died there.",
"\"We must get into the air\n immediately,\" he told Klaft.\n \"Perhaps we may see him before\n he reaches—\"\n\n\n He broke off at the word\n \"spaceship\" but he noticed a reserved\n expression on Klaft's\n pointed face. His aide had probably\n reached a conclusion similar\n to his own.\n\n\n They climbed back into the\n cabin and Klaft gave brisk orders\n to the lean young pilot. A\n moment later, Kinton saw the\n ground outside drop away.\n\n\n Only upon turning around did\n he realize that two armed Tepoktans\n had materialized in time to\n follow Klaft inside.",
"He turned and raised it to his\n chest. Because of the shortness\n of Tepoktan arms, the launcher\n was constructed so that the butt\n rested against the chest with the\n sighting loops before the eyes.\n The little rocket tubes were\n above head height, to prevent the\n handler's catching the blast.\n\n\n The circles of the sights\n weaved and danced about the\n running figure. Kinton realized\n to his surprise that the effort of\n seizing the weapon had him panting.\n Or was it the fright at having\n a spear thrown at him? He\n decided that Birken had not come\n close enough for that, and wondered\n if he was afraid of his\n own impending action.\n\n\n It wasn't fair, he complained\n to himself. The poor slob only\n had a spear, and a man couldn't\n blame him for wanting to get\n back to his own sort. He was\n limping ... hurt ... how could\n they expect him to realize—?",
"Kinton observed, however,\n that his aide also stared upward\n for a long moment. The Tepoktans\n loved speculating about the\n unsolvable. They had even founded\n clubs to argue whether two\n satellites had been destroyed or\n only one.\n\n\n Half a dozen officials hastened\n up to escort the party to the\n vehicle awaiting Kinton. Klaft\n succeeded in quieting the lesser\n members of the delegation so\n that Kinton was able to learn a\n few facts about the new arrival.\n The crash had been several hundred\n miles away, but someone\n had thought of the hospital in\n this city which was known to\n have a doctor rating as an expert\n in human physiology. The survivor—only\n one occupant of the\n wreck, alive or dead, had\n been discovered—had accordingly\n been flown here.",
"\"He is dead,\" said Klaft when\n the constable straightened up\n with a curt wave.\n\n\n \"Will ... will you have someone\n see to him, please?\" Kinton\n requested, turning toward the\n helicopter.\n\n\n \"Yes, George,\" said Klaft.\n \"George...?\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"It would be very instructive—that\n is, I believe Dr. Chuxolkhee\n would like to—\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" yielded Kinton,\n surprised at the harshness of his\n own voice. \"Just tell him not to\n bring around any sketches of the\n various organs for a few\n months!\"\n\n\n He climbed into the helicopter\n and slumped into his seat. Presently,\n he was aware of Klaft edging\n into the seat across the aisle.\n He looked up.",
"[101]\nEXILE\nBY H. B. FYFE\nILLUSTRATED BY EMSH\n\n\n The Dome of Eyes made it almost impossible for\n Terrans to reach the world of Tepokt. For those\n who did land there, there was no returning—only\n the bitterness of respect—and justice!\n\n\n The Tepoktan student, whose\n blue robe in George Kinton's\n opinion clashed with the dull\n purple of his scales, twiddled a\n three-clawed hand for attention.\n Kinton nodded to him from his\n place on the dais before the\n group.\n\n\n \"Then you can give us no precise\n count of the stars in the\n galaxy, George?\"\n\n\n Kinton smiled wrily, and ran\n a wrinkled hand through his\n graying hair. In the clicking Tepoktan\n speech, his name came\n out more like \"Chortch.\""
],
[
"\"He is dead,\" said Klaft when\n the constable straightened up\n with a curt wave.\n\n\n \"Will ... will you have someone\n see to him, please?\" Kinton\n requested, turning toward the\n helicopter.\n\n\n \"Yes, George,\" said Klaft.\n \"George...?\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"It would be very instructive—that\n is, I believe Dr. Chuxolkhee\n would like to—\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" yielded Kinton,\n surprised at the harshness of his\n own voice. \"Just tell him not to\n bring around any sketches of the\n various organs for a few\n months!\"\n\n\n He climbed into the helicopter\n and slumped into his seat. Presently,\n he was aware of Klaft edging\n into the seat across the aisle.\n He looked up.",
"\"He was just no good. You\n know the murder he did here;\n we can only guess what he did\n among my own ... among Terrans.\n Should he have a chance to\n go back and commit more\n crimes?\"\n\n\n \"I understand, George, the\n logic of it,\" said Klaft. \"I meant\n ... it is not my place to say this\n ... but you seem unhappy.\"\n\n\n \"Possibly,\" grunted Kinton\n wrily.\n\n\n \"We, too, have criminals,\" said\n the aide, as gently as was possible\n in his clicking language.\n \"We do not think it necessary\n to grieve for the pain they bring\n upon themselves.\"\n\n\n \"No, I suppose not,\" sighed\n Kinton. \"I ... it's just—\"\n\n\n He looked up at the pointed\n visage, at the strange eyes regarding\n him sympathetically\n from beneath the sloping, purple-scaled\n forehead.",
"\"Why did he say he was traveling\n that way?\" asked Kinton,\n thinking to himself of the spaceship!\n Was the man crazy?\n\n\n \"He did not say,\" answered\n Klaft expressionlessly. \"Taking\n them by surprise, he killed two\n of the constables and injured\n the third before fleeing with one\n of their spears.\"\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Kinton felt his eyes bulging\n with dismay.\n\n\n \"Yes, for they carried only the\n short spears of their authority,\n not expecting to need fire weapons.\"\nKinton looked from him to the\n messenger, noticing for the first\n time that the latter was an under-officer\n of police. He shook his\n head distractedly. It appeared\n that his suspicions concerning\n Birken had been only too accurate.",
"\"Get on with it, Klaft!\n Please!\"\n\n\n \"In the night, then, Albirken\n left the chamber in which he lay.\n He can walk some now, you\n know, because of Dr. Chuxolkhee's\n metal pin. He—he stole a\n ground car and is gone.\"\n\n\n \"He did?\" Kinton had an\n empty feeling in the pit of his\n stomach. \"Is it known where he\n went? I mean ... he has been\n curious to see some of Tepokt.\n Perhaps—\"\n\n\n He stopped, his own words\n braying in his ears. Klaft was\n clicking two claws together, a\n sign of emphatic disagreement.\n\n\n \"Albirken,\" he said, \"was soon\n followed by three police constables\n in another vehicle. They\n found him heading in the direction\n of our town.\"",
"To himself, he wished he had\n not told Birken about the spaceship.\n He didn't think the man\n exactly believed his explanation\n of why there was no use taking\n off in it.\nYet he continued to spend as\n much time as he could visiting\n the other man. Then, as his helicopter\n landed at the city airport\n one gray dawn, the news reached\n him.\n\n\n \"The other Terran has gone,\"\n Klaft reported, turning from the\n breathless messenger as Kinton\n followed him from the machine.\n\n\n [109]\n \"Gone? Where did they take\n him?\"\n\n\n Klaft looked uneasy, embarrassed.\n Kinton repeated his question,\n wondering about the group\n of armed police on hand.\n\n\n \"In the night,\" Klaft hissed\n and clucked, \"when none would\n think to watch him, they tell me\n ... and quite rightly, I think—\"",
"\"The police will stay until cars\n from town arrive. They are coming\n now,\" said his aide.\nKinton stared at his hands,\n wondering at the fact that they\n were not shaking. He felt dejected,\n empty, not like a man who\n had just been at a high pitch of\n excitement.\n\n\n \"Why did you not let him go,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"What? Why ... why ... he\n would have destroyed the ship\n you worked so hard to build.\n There is no safe path through\n the Dome of Eyes.\"\n\n\n \"No predictable path,\" Klaft\n corrected. \"But what then? We\n would have built you another\n ship, George, for it was you who\n showed us how.\"\n\n\n Kinton flexed his fingers\n slowly.",
"\"He has been seen on the road\n passing the dam,\" Klaft reported\n soberly after having been called\n to the pilot's compartment. \"He\n stopped to demand fuel from\n some maintenance workers, but\n they had been warned and fled.\"\n\n\n \"Couldn't they have seized\n him?\" demanded Kinton, his tone\n sharp with the worry he endeavored\n to control. \"He has that\n spear, I suppose; but he is only\n one and injured.\"\n\n\n Klaft hesitated.\n\n\n \"Well, couldn't they?\"\n\n\n The aide looked away, out one\n of the windows at some sun-dyed\n clouds ranging from pink\n to orange. He grimaced and\n clicked his showy teeth uncomfortably.\n\n\n \"Perhaps they thought you\n might be offended, George,\" he\n answered at last.",
"\"I think we should not expect\n too much of this Terran,\" he\n warned Klaft uneasily. \"You,\n too, have citizens who do not always\n obey, your laws, who sometimes\n ... that is—\"\n\n\n \"Who are born to die under\n the axe, as we say,\" interrupted\n Klaft, as if to ease the concern\n plain on Kinton's face. \"In other\n words, criminals. You suspect\n this Albirken is such a one,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"It is not impossible,\" admitted\n Kinton unhappily. \"He will\n tell me little about himself. It\n may be that he was caught in\n Tepokt's gravity while fleeing\n from justice.\"",
"Kinton settled back in the seat\n especially padded to fit the contours\n of his Terran body, and\n [111]\n stared silently at the partition\n behind the pilot.\n\n\n In other words, he thought, he\n was responsible for Birken, who\n was a Terran, one of his own\n kind. Maybe they really didn't\n want to risk hurting his feelings,\n but that was only part of it.\n They were leaving it up to him\n to handle what they considered\n his private affair.\n\n\n He wondered what to do. He\n had no actual faith in the idea\n that Birken was delirious, or acting\n under any influence but that\n of a criminally self-centered nature.",
"Kinton realized guiltily that\n the man should be resting. He\n [108]\n had lost track of the moments\n he had wasted in talk while the\n others with him stood attentively\n about.\n\n\n He questioned the doctor briefly\n and relayed the information\n that Birken's leg was broken but\n that the other injuries were not\n serious.\n\n\n \"They'll fix you up,\" he assured\n the spaceman. \"They're\n quite good at it, even if the sight\n of one does make you think a\n little of an iguana. Rest up, now;\n and I'll come back again when\n you're feeling better.\"",
"He turned and raised it to his\n chest. Because of the shortness\n of Tepoktan arms, the launcher\n was constructed so that the butt\n rested against the chest with the\n sighting loops before the eyes.\n The little rocket tubes were\n above head height, to prevent the\n handler's catching the blast.\n\n\n The circles of the sights\n weaved and danced about the\n running figure. Kinton realized\n to his surprise that the effort of\n seizing the weapon had him panting.\n Or was it the fright at having\n a spear thrown at him? He\n decided that Birken had not come\n close enough for that, and wondered\n if he was afraid of his\n own impending action.\n\n\n It wasn't fair, he complained\n to himself. The poor slob only\n had a spear, and a man couldn't\n blame him for wanting to get\n back to his own sort. He was\n limping ... hurt ... how could\n they expect him to realize—?",
"Then, abruptly, his lips tightened\n to a thin line. The sights\n steadied on Birken as the latter\n approached the foot of the ladder\n leading to the entrance port\n of the spaceship.\n\n\n Kinton pressed the firing stud.\n\n\n Across the hundred-yard space\n streaked four flaring little projectiles.\n Kinton, without exactly\n seeing each, was aware of the\n general lines of flight diverging\n gradually to bracket the figure\n of Birken.",
"Why was it one like him who\n got through? he asked himself\n in silent anguish. After ten\n years. The Tepoktans had been\n thinking well of Terrans, but\n now—\n\n\n He did not worry about his\n own position. That was well\n enough established, whether or\n not he could again hold up his\n head before the purple-scaled\n people who had been so generous\n to him.\n\n\n Even if they had been aroused\n to a rage by the killing, Kinton\n told himself, he would not have\n been concerned about himself. He\n had reached a fairly ripe age for\n a spaceman. In fact, he had already\n [110]\n enjoyed a decade of borrowed\n time.\n\n\n But they were more civilized\n than that wanton murderer, he\n realized.\n\n\n He straightened up, forcing\n back his early-morning weariness.",
"\"I\nshouldn't\nhave told him\n about the ship!\" Kinton muttered,\n gnawing the knuckle of\n his left thumb. \"He's on the run,\n all right. Probably scared the\n colonial authorities will trail him\n right down through the Dome of\n Eyes. Wonder what he did?\"\n\n\n He caught himself and looked\n around to see if he had been overheard.\n Klaft and the police officers\n peered from their respective\n windows, in calculated withdrawal.\n Kinton, disturbed, tried\n to remember whether he had\n spoken in Terran or Tepoktan.\n\n\n Would Birken listen if he tried\n reasoning, he asked himself.\n Maybe if he showed the man how\n they had proved the unpredictability\n of openings through the\n shifting Dome of Eyes—",
"\"Wait! Don't you think they\n tried sending unmanned rockets\n up? Every one was struck and\n exploded.\"\n\n\n Birken showed no more change\n of expression than if the other\n had commented on the weather.\n\n\n Kinton had stepped forward\n six or eight paces, irritated despite\n his anxiety at the way Birken\n persisted in drifting before\n him.\n\n\n Kinton couldn't just grab him—bad\n leg or not, he could probably\n break the older man in two.\n\n\n He glanced back at the Tepoktans\n beside the helicopter, Klaft,\n the pilot, the officer, the constable\n with the rocket weapon.\n\n\n They stood quietly, looking\n back at him.\n\n\n The call for help that had risen\n to his lips died there.",
"One was a constable but the\n other he recognized for an officer\n of some rank. Both wore slung\n across their chests weapons resembling\n long-barreled pistols\n with large, oddly indented butts\n to fit Tepoktan claws. The constable,\n in addition, carried a\n contraption with a quadruple\n tube for launching tiny rockets\n no thicker than Kinton's thumb.\n These, he knew, were loaded\n with an explosive worthy of respect\n on any planet he had heard\n of.\n\n\n To protect him, he wondered.\n Or to get Birken?\n\n\n The pilot headed the craft\n back toward Kinton's town in\n the brightening sky of early day.\n Long before the buildings of\n Kinton's institute came into\n view, they received a radio message\n about Birken.",
"One struck the ground beside\n the man just as he set one foot\n on the bottom rung of the ladder,\n and skittered away past one fin\n of the ship before exploding.\n Two others burst against the\n hull, scattering metal fragments,\n and another puffed on the upright\n of the ladder just above\n Birken's head.\nThe spaceman was blown back\n from the ladder. He balanced on\n his heels for a moment with outstretched\n fingers reaching toward\n the grips from which they\n had been torn. Then he crumpled\n into a limp huddle on the yellowing\n turf.\n\n\n Kinton sighed.\n\n\n The constable took the weapon\n from him, reloaded deftly, and\n proffered it again. When the\n Terran did not reach for it, the\n officer held out a clawed hand to\n receive it. He gestured silently,\n and the constable trotted across\n [114]\n the intervening ground to bend\n over Birken.",
"Kinton growled a Tepoktan expression\n the meaning of which\n he had deduced after hearing it\n used by the dam workers.\n\n\n He whirled to run toward the\n helicopter. Hardly had he taken\n two steps, however, when he saw\n startled changes in the carefully\n blank looks of his escort. The\n constable half raised his heavy\n weapon, and Klaft sprang forward\n with a hissing cry.\n\n\n By the time Kinton's aging\n muscles obeyed his impulse to\n sidestep, the spear had already\n hurtled past. It had missed him\n by an error of over six feet.\n\n\n [113]\n He felt his face flushing with\n sudden anger. Birken was running\n as best he could toward the\n spaceship, and had covered nearly\n half the distance.\n\n\n Kinton ran at the Tepoktans,\n brushing aside the concerned\n Klaft. He snatched the heavy\n weapon from the surprised constable.",
"\"We must get into the air\n immediately,\" he told Klaft.\n \"Perhaps we may see him before\n he reaches—\"\n\n\n He broke off at the word\n \"spaceship\" but he noticed a reserved\n expression on Klaft's\n pointed face. His aide had probably\n reached a conclusion similar\n to his own.\n\n\n They climbed back into the\n cabin and Klaft gave brisk orders\n to the lean young pilot. A\n moment later, Kinton saw the\n ground outside drop away.\n\n\n Only upon turning around did\n he realize that two armed Tepoktans\n had materialized in time to\n follow Klaft inside.",
"An exclamation from the constable\n drew his attention. He\n rose, and room was made for him\n at the opposite window.\nIn the distance, beyond the\n town landing field they were now\n approaching, Kinton saw a halted\n ground car. Across the plain\n which was colored a yellowish\n tan by a short, grass-like growth,\n a lone figure plodded toward the\n upthrust bulk of the spaceship\n that had never flown.\n\n\n \"Never mind landing at the\n town!\" snapped Kinton. \"Go directly\n out to the ship!\"\n\n\n Klaft relayed the command to\n the pilot. The helicopter swept\n in a descending curve across the\n plain toward the gleaming hull.\n\n\n As they passed the man below,\n Birken looked up. He continued\n to limp along at a brisk\n pace with the aid of what looked\n like a short spear.\n\n\n \"Go down!\" Kinton ordered."
],
[
"\"He was just no good. You\n know the murder he did here;\n we can only guess what he did\n among my own ... among Terrans.\n Should he have a chance to\n go back and commit more\n crimes?\"\n\n\n \"I understand, George, the\n logic of it,\" said Klaft. \"I meant\n ... it is not my place to say this\n ... but you seem unhappy.\"\n\n\n \"Possibly,\" grunted Kinton\n wrily.\n\n\n \"We, too, have criminals,\" said\n the aide, as gently as was possible\n in his clicking language.\n \"We do not think it necessary\n to grieve for the pain they bring\n upon themselves.\"\n\n\n \"No, I suppose not,\" sighed\n Kinton. \"I ... it's just—\"\n\n\n He looked up at the pointed\n visage, at the strange eyes regarding\n him sympathetically\n from beneath the sloping, purple-scaled\n forehead.",
"\"He is dead,\" said Klaft when\n the constable straightened up\n with a curt wave.\n\n\n \"Will ... will you have someone\n see to him, please?\" Kinton\n requested, turning toward the\n helicopter.\n\n\n \"Yes, George,\" said Klaft.\n \"George...?\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"It would be very instructive—that\n is, I believe Dr. Chuxolkhee\n would like to—\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" yielded Kinton,\n surprised at the harshness of his\n own voice. \"Just tell him not to\n bring around any sketches of the\n various organs for a few\n months!\"\n\n\n He climbed into the helicopter\n and slumped into his seat. Presently,\n he was aware of Klaft edging\n into the seat across the aisle.\n He looked up.",
"To himself, he wished he had\n not told Birken about the spaceship.\n He didn't think the man\n exactly believed his explanation\n of why there was no use taking\n off in it.\nYet he continued to spend as\n much time as he could visiting\n the other man. Then, as his helicopter\n landed at the city airport\n one gray dawn, the news reached\n him.\n\n\n \"The other Terran has gone,\"\n Klaft reported, turning from the\n breathless messenger as Kinton\n followed him from the machine.\n\n\n [109]\n \"Gone? Where did they take\n him?\"\n\n\n Klaft looked uneasy, embarrassed.\n Kinton repeated his question,\n wondering about the group\n of armed police on hand.\n\n\n \"In the night,\" Klaft hissed\n and clucked, \"when none would\n think to watch him, they tell me\n ... and quite rightly, I think—\"",
"Kinton settled back in the seat\n especially padded to fit the contours\n of his Terran body, and\n [111]\n stared silently at the partition\n behind the pilot.\n\n\n In other words, he thought, he\n was responsible for Birken, who\n was a Terran, one of his own\n kind. Maybe they really didn't\n want to risk hurting his feelings,\n but that was only part of it.\n They were leaving it up to him\n to handle what they considered\n his private affair.\n\n\n He wondered what to do. He\n had no actual faith in the idea\n that Birken was delirious, or acting\n under any influence but that\n of a criminally self-centered nature.",
"\"Why did he say he was traveling\n that way?\" asked Kinton,\n thinking to himself of the spaceship!\n Was the man crazy?\n\n\n \"He did not say,\" answered\n Klaft expressionlessly. \"Taking\n them by surprise, he killed two\n of the constables and injured\n the third before fleeing with one\n of their spears.\"\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Kinton felt his eyes bulging\n with dismay.\n\n\n \"Yes, for they carried only the\n short spears of their authority,\n not expecting to need fire weapons.\"\nKinton looked from him to the\n messenger, noticing for the first\n time that the latter was an under-officer\n of police. He shook his\n head distractedly. It appeared\n that his suspicions concerning\n Birken had been only too accurate.",
"Kinton realized guiltily that\n the man should be resting. He\n [108]\n had lost track of the moments\n he had wasted in talk while the\n others with him stood attentively\n about.\n\n\n He questioned the doctor briefly\n and relayed the information\n that Birken's leg was broken but\n that the other injuries were not\n serious.\n\n\n \"They'll fix you up,\" he assured\n the spaceman. \"They're\n quite good at it, even if the sight\n of one does make you think a\n little of an iguana. Rest up, now;\n and I'll come back again when\n you're feeling better.\"",
"\"I think we should not expect\n too much of this Terran,\" he\n warned Klaft uneasily. \"You,\n too, have citizens who do not always\n obey, your laws, who sometimes\n ... that is—\"\n\n\n \"Who are born to die under\n the axe, as we say,\" interrupted\n Klaft, as if to ease the concern\n plain on Kinton's face. \"In other\n words, criminals. You suspect\n this Albirken is such a one,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"It is not impossible,\" admitted\n Kinton unhappily. \"He will\n tell me little about himself. It\n may be that he was caught in\n Tepokt's gravity while fleeing\n from justice.\"",
"Why was it one like him who\n got through? he asked himself\n in silent anguish. After ten\n years. The Tepoktans had been\n thinking well of Terrans, but\n now—\n\n\n He did not worry about his\n own position. That was well\n enough established, whether or\n not he could again hold up his\n head before the purple-scaled\n people who had been so generous\n to him.\n\n\n Even if they had been aroused\n to a rage by the killing, Kinton\n told himself, he would not have\n been concerned about himself. He\n had reached a fairly ripe age for\n a spaceman. In fact, he had already\n [110]\n enjoyed a decade of borrowed\n time.\n\n\n But they were more civilized\n than that wanton murderer, he\n realized.\n\n\n He straightened up, forcing\n back his early-morning weariness.",
"\"The police will stay until cars\n from town arrive. They are coming\n now,\" said his aide.\nKinton stared at his hands,\n wondering at the fact that they\n were not shaking. He felt dejected,\n empty, not like a man who\n had just been at a high pitch of\n excitement.\n\n\n \"Why did you not let him go,\n George?\"\n\n\n \"What? Why ... why ... he\n would have destroyed the ship\n you worked so hard to build.\n There is no safe path through\n the Dome of Eyes.\"\n\n\n \"No predictable path,\" Klaft\n corrected. \"But what then? We\n would have built you another\n ship, George, for it was you who\n showed us how.\"\n\n\n Kinton flexed his fingers\n slowly.",
"\"Not\ntheir\nparty,\" he muttered.\n He turned again to Birken,\n who still retreated toward the\n ship. \"But he'll only get himself\n killed\nand\ndestroy the ship! Or\n if some miracle gets him\n through, that's worse! He's\n nothing to turn loose on a civilized\n colony again.\"\nA twinge of shame tugged\n down the corners of his mouth\n as he realized that keeping Birken\n here would also expose a\n highly cultured people to an unscrupulous\n criminal who had already\n committed murder the very\n first time he had been crossed.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" he shouted. \"For\n the last time! Do you want me\n to send them to drag you back\n here?\"\n\n\n Birken stopped at that. He regarded\n the motionless Tepoktans\n with a derisive sneer.\n\n\n \"They don't look too eager to\n me,\" he taunted.",
"He turned and raised it to his\n chest. Because of the shortness\n of Tepoktan arms, the launcher\n was constructed so that the butt\n rested against the chest with the\n sighting loops before the eyes.\n The little rocket tubes were\n above head height, to prevent the\n handler's catching the blast.\n\n\n The circles of the sights\n weaved and danced about the\n running figure. Kinton realized\n to his surprise that the effort of\n seizing the weapon had him panting.\n Or was it the fright at having\n a spear thrown at him? He\n decided that Birken had not come\n close enough for that, and wondered\n if he was afraid of his\n own impending action.\n\n\n It wasn't fair, he complained\n to himself. The poor slob only\n had a spear, and a man couldn't\n blame him for wanting to get\n back to his own sort. He was\n limping ... hurt ... how could\n they expect him to realize—?",
"Then, abruptly, his lips tightened\n to a thin line. The sights\n steadied on Birken as the latter\n approached the foot of the ladder\n leading to the entrance port\n of the spaceship.\n\n\n Kinton pressed the firing stud.\n\n\n Across the hundred-yard space\n streaked four flaring little projectiles.\n Kinton, without exactly\n seeing each, was aware of the\n general lines of flight diverging\n gradually to bracket the figure\n of Birken.",
"\"Get on with it, Klaft!\n Please!\"\n\n\n \"In the night, then, Albirken\n left the chamber in which he lay.\n He can walk some now, you\n know, because of Dr. Chuxolkhee's\n metal pin. He—he stole a\n ground car and is gone.\"\n\n\n \"He did?\" Kinton had an\n empty feeling in the pit of his\n stomach. \"Is it known where he\n went? I mean ... he has been\n curious to see some of Tepokt.\n Perhaps—\"\n\n\n He stopped, his own words\n braying in his ears. Klaft was\n clicking two claws together, a\n sign of emphatic disagreement.\n\n\n \"Albirken,\" he said, \"was soon\n followed by three police constables\n in another vehicle. They\n found him heading in the direction\n of our town.\"",
"\"I\nshouldn't\nhave told him\n about the ship!\" Kinton muttered,\n gnawing the knuckle of\n his left thumb. \"He's on the run,\n all right. Probably scared the\n colonial authorities will trail him\n right down through the Dome of\n Eyes. Wonder what he did?\"\n\n\n He caught himself and looked\n around to see if he had been overheard.\n Klaft and the police officers\n peered from their respective\n windows, in calculated withdrawal.\n Kinton, disturbed, tried\n to remember whether he had\n spoken in Terran or Tepoktan.\n\n\n Would Birken listen if he tried\n reasoning, he asked himself.\n Maybe if he showed the man how\n they had proved the unpredictability\n of openings through the\n shifting Dome of Eyes—",
"\"Wait! Don't you think they\n tried sending unmanned rockets\n up? Every one was struck and\n exploded.\"\n\n\n Birken showed no more change\n of expression than if the other\n had commented on the weather.\n\n\n Kinton had stepped forward\n six or eight paces, irritated despite\n his anxiety at the way Birken\n persisted in drifting before\n him.\n\n\n Kinton couldn't just grab him—bad\n leg or not, he could probably\n break the older man in two.\n\n\n He glanced back at the Tepoktans\n beside the helicopter, Klaft,\n the pilot, the officer, the constable\n with the rocket weapon.\n\n\n They stood quietly, looking\n back at him.\n\n\n The call for help that had risen\n to his lips died there.",
"\"He has been seen on the road\n passing the dam,\" Klaft reported\n soberly after having been called\n to the pilot's compartment. \"He\n stopped to demand fuel from\n some maintenance workers, but\n they had been warned and fled.\"\n\n\n \"Couldn't they have seized\n him?\" demanded Kinton, his tone\n sharp with the worry he endeavored\n to control. \"He has that\n spear, I suppose; but he is only\n one and injured.\"\n\n\n Klaft hesitated.\n\n\n \"Well, couldn't they?\"\n\n\n The aide looked away, out one\n of the windows at some sun-dyed\n clouds ranging from pink\n to orange. He grimaced and\n clicked his showy teeth uncomfortably.\n\n\n \"Perhaps they thought you\n might be offended, George,\" he\n answered at last.",
"The pilot landed about a hundred\n yards from the spaceship.\n By the time his passengers had\n alighted, however, Birken had\n drawn level with them, about\n fifty feet away.\n\n\n \"Birken!\" shouted Kinton.\n \"Where do you think you're going?\"\n\n\n Seeing that no one ran after\n him, Birken slowed his pace, but\n kept walking toward the ship.\n [112]\n He watched them over his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Sorry, Kinton,\" he shouted\n with no noticeable tone of regret.\n \"I figure I better travel on for\n my health.\"\n\n\n \"It's not so damn healthy up\n there!\" called Kinton. \"I told\n you how there's no clear path—\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, yeah, you told me. That\n don't mean I gotta believe it.\"",
"For the next three weeks, Kinton\n flew back and forth from his\n own town nearly every day. He\n felt that he should not neglect\n the few meetings which were the\n only way he could repay the Tepoktans\n for all they did for him.\n On the other hand, the chance\n to see and talk with one of his\n own kind drew him like a magnet\n to the hospital.\n\n\n The doctors operated upon\n Birken's leg, inserting a metal\n rod inside the bone by a method\n they had known before Kinton\n described it. The new arrival expected\n to be able to walk, with\n care, almost any day; although\n the pin would have to be removed\n after the bone had healed. Meanwhile,\n Birken seemed eager to\n learn all Kinton could tell him\n about the planet, Tepokt.\n\n\n About himself, he was remarkably\n reticent. Kinton worried\n about this.",
"One struck the ground beside\n the man just as he set one foot\n on the bottom rung of the ladder,\n and skittered away past one fin\n of the ship before exploding.\n Two others burst against the\n hull, scattering metal fragments,\n and another puffed on the upright\n of the ladder just above\n Birken's head.\nThe spaceman was blown back\n from the ladder. He balanced on\n his heels for a moment with outstretched\n fingers reaching toward\n the grips from which they\n had been torn. Then he crumpled\n into a limp huddle on the yellowing\n turf.\n\n\n Kinton sighed.\n\n\n The constable took the weapon\n from him, reloaded deftly, and\n proffered it again. When the\n Terran did not reach for it, the\n officer held out a clawed hand to\n receive it. He gestured silently,\n and the constable trotted across\n [114]\n the intervening ground to bend\n over Birken.",
"\"My name is George Kinton.\n I don't blame you if I'm hard to\n understand. You see, I've been\n here ten years without ever having\n another Terran to speak to.\"\n\n\n The spaceman considered that\n for a few breaths, then seemed\n to relax.\n\n\n \"Al Birken,\" he introduced\n himself laconically. \"Ten years?\"\n\n\n \"A little over,\" confirmed Kinton.\n \"It's extremely unusual that\n anything gets through to the\n surface, let alone a spaceship.\n What happened to you?\"\nBirken's stare was suspicious.\n\n\n \"Then you ain't heard about\n the new colonies? Naw—you\n musta come here when all the\n planets were open.\"\n\n\n \"We had a small settlement on\n the second planet,\" Kinton told\n him. \"You mean there are new\n Terran colonies?\""
]
] |
valid
|
22579
|
[
"What do the robots want?",
"What is NOT a response to the flying bread loaves?",
"Why does Tin Philosopher tell the history of bread?",
"Which of the following best describes how the robots feel toward humans?",
"Which of these words best describes the tone of this story?",
"Why did the Blonde Icicle melt?",
"Which of the following is NOT a process of the walking mills?",
"What do the robots wish they could experience?",
"Was the flying bread good or bad?"
] |
[
[
"To sell bread",
"To create world peace",
"To improve bread chemistry",
"To please humans"
],
[
"Treating them as a spiritual sign",
"Laughing at them",
"Worker strikes",
"Shooting them"
],
[
"He wants to show how important bread has been to humanity.",
"He wants to explain the importance of a new development in bread science.",
"He wants to fill time until they find out how well the helium loaves are selling.",
"He wants to explain how important robot workers are to the process."
],
[
"Neutral",
"Resentful",
"Proud",
"Protective"
],
[
"Serious",
"Humorous",
"Suspenseful",
"Romantic"
],
[
"She saw value where she didn't see it before.",
"She was so happy about how much money they would make.",
"She sang the theme for Puffy Products.",
"She stopped being angry about the floating bread."
],
[
"Baking the bread",
"Separating the wheat from the chaff",
"Eating the grain",
"Shipping the bread"
],
[
"Caffeine",
"Touch",
"Love",
"Taste"
],
[
"It was bad because it wasted tons of grain.",
"It was good because it alleviated tension.",
"It was bad because it created many dangerous situations.",
"It was good because it ended hunger all over the world."
]
] |
[
2,
3,
2,
4,
2,
1,
4,
4,
2
] |
[
1,
1,
1,
1,
0,
1,
1,
0,
1
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[
[
"The man approached the conference\n table in the center of the room\n with measured pace and gravely\n expressionless face. The rose-tinted\n machine on his left did a couple\n of impulsive pirouettes on the way\n and twittered a greeting to Meg\n and Roger. The other machine quietly\n took the third of the high seats\n and lifted a claw at Meg, who now\n occupied a stool twice the height of\n Roger's.\n\n\n \"Miss Winterly, please—our\n theme.\"\n\n\n The Blonde Icicle's face thawed\n into a little-girl smile as she chanted\n bubblingly:",
"\"Good-o, Rosie! That makes another\n victory for robot-engineered\n world unity, though you almost\n gave us away at the start with that\n 'bread overhead' jingle. We've\n struck another blow against the\n next world war, in which—as we\n know only too well!—we machines\n would suffer the most. Now if we\n can only arrange, say, a fur-famine\n in Alaska and a migration of long-haired\n Siberian lemmings across\n Behring Straits ... we'd have to\n swing the Japanese Current up\n there so it'd be warm enough for\n the little fellows.... Anyhow,\n Rosie, with a spot of help from the\n Brotherhood, those humans will\n paint themselves into the peace\n corner yet.\"",
"\"\nWork and pray,\nLive on hay.\nYou'll get pie\nIn the sky\nWhen you die—\nIt's a lie!\n\"I don't know why we chanted\n it,\" she added. \"We didn't want pie—or\n hay, for that matter. And\n machines don't pray, except Tibetan\n prayer wheels.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce shook his head.\n \"Labor relations are another topic\n we should stay far away from.\n However, dear Rose, I'm glad you\n keep trying to outjingle those dirty\n crooks at Fairy Bread.\" He scowled,\n turning back his attention to Tin\n Philosopher. \"I get whopping mad,\n Old Machine, whenever I hear that\n other slogan of theirs, the discriminatory\n one—'Untouched by Robot\n Claws.' Just because they employ a\n few filthy androids in their factories!\"",
"But now, behold a wonder! As\n loaves began to appear on the\n delivery platform of the first walking\n mill to get into action, they\n did not linger on the conveyor\n belt, but rose gently into the air\n and slowly traveled off down-wind\n across the hot rippling fields.\nTHE robot claws of the pickup\n machines clutched in vain, and,\n not noticing the difference, proceeded\n carefully to stack emptiness,\n tier by tier. One errant loaf,\n rising more sluggishly than its fellows,\n was snagged by a thrusting\n claw. The machine paused, clumsily\n wiped off the injured loaf, set\n it aside—where it bobbed on one\n corner, unable to take off again—and\n went back to the work of\n storing nothingness.\n\n\n A flock of crows rose from the\n trees of a nearby shelterbelt as the\n flight of loaves approached. The\n crows swooped to investigate and\n then suddenly scattered, screeching\n in panic.",
"Back in NewNew York, the\n managerial board of Puffy Products\n slumped in utter collapse\n around the conference table, the\n long crisis session at last ended.\n Empty coffee cartons were scattered\n around the chairs of the three\n humans, dead batteries around\n those of the two machines. For a\n while, there was no movement\n whatsoever. Then Roger Snedden\n reached out wearily for the earphones\n where Megera Winterly\n had hurled them down, adjusted\n them to his head, pushed a button\n and listened apathetically.\n\n\n After a bit, his gaze brightened.\n He pushed more buttons and listened\n more eagerly. Soon he was\n sitting tensely upright on his stool,\n eyes bright and lower face all\n a-smile, muttering terse comments\n and questions into the lapel mike\n torn from Meg's fair neck.",
"\"My sweet little ever-victorious,\n self-propelled monkey wrench!\" she\n crooned in his ear. Roger looked\n fatuously over her soft shoulder at\n Tin Philosopher who, as if moved\n by some similar feeling, reached\n over and touched claws with Rose\n Thinker.\n\n\n This, however, was what he telegraphed\n silently to his fellow machine\n across the circuit so completed:",
"As they advanced, their heads\n swung lazily from side to side, very\n much like snakes, gobbling the yellow\n grain. In their throats, it was\n threshed, the chaff bundled and\n burped aside for pickup by the\n crawl trucks of a chemical corporation,\n the kernels quick-dried\n and blown along into the mighty\n chests of the machines. There the\n tireless mills ground the kernels\n to flour, which was instantly sifted,\n the bran being packaged and\n dropped like the chaff for pickup.\n A cluster of tanks which gave\n the metal serpents a decidedly\n humpbacked appearance added\n water, shortening, salt and other\n ingredients, some named and some\n not. The dough was at the same\n time infused with gas from a tank\n conspicuously labeled \"Carbon\n Dioxide\" (\"No Yeast Creatures\n in Your Bread!\").",
"\"\nThere'll be bread\nOverhead\nWhen you're dead—\nIt is said.\n\"\nPHINEAS T. GRYCE wrinkled\n his nostrils at the pink machine\n as if he smelled her insulation\n smoldering. He said mildly, \"A\n somewhat unhappy jingle, Rose,\n referring as it does to the end of\n the customer as consumer. Moreover,\n we shouldn't overplay the\n figurative 'rises through the air'\n angle. What inspired you?\"\n\n\n She shrugged. \"I don't know—oh,\n yes, I do. I was remembering\n one of the workers' songs we machines\n used to chant during the Big\n Strike—",
"Tin Philosopher kicked her under\n the table, while observing, \"So\n you see, Roger, that the non-delivery\n of the hydrogen loaf carries\n some consolations. And I must confess\n that one aspect of the affair\n gives me great satisfaction, not as a\n Board Member but as a private\n machine. You have at last made a\n reality of the 'rises through the air'\n part of Puffybread's theme. They\n can't ever take that away from you.\n By now, half the inhabitants of the\n Great Plains must have observed\n our flying loaves rising high.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce shot a frightened\n look at the west windows and\n found his full voice.\n\n\n \"Stop the mills!\" he roared at\n Meg Winterly, who nodded and\n whispered urgently into her mike.",
"\"Listen to me, Meg. Today—yes,\n today!—you're going to see\n the Board eating out of my hand.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! I guarantee you won't\n have any fingers left. You're bold\n enough now, but when Mr. Gryce\n and those two big machines come\n through that door—\"\n\n\n \"Now wait a minute, Meg—\"\n\n\n \"Hush! They're coming now!\"\n\n\n Roger leaped three feet in the\n air, but managed to land without a\n sound and edged toward his stool.\n Through the dilating iris of the\n door strode Phineas T. Gryce,\n flanked by Rose Thinker and Tin\n Philosopher.",
"Roger nodded obediently. But\n his pallor increased a shade, the\n pupils of his eyes disappeared under\n the upper lids, and his head\n burrowed beneath his forearms.\n\n\n \"Oh, boy,\" Rose Thinker called\n gayly to Tin Philosopher, \"this\n looks like the start of a real crisis\n session! Did you remember to\n bring spare batteries?\"\nMEANWHILE, the monstrous\n flight of Puffyloaves, filling\n midwestern skies as no small fliers\n had since the days of the passenger\n pigeon, soared steadily onward.",
"\"\nMade up of tiny wheaten motes\nAnd reinforced with sturdy oats,\nIt rises through the air and floats—\nThe bread on which all Terra dotes!\n\"\n\"THANK YOU, Miss Winterly,\"\n said Tin Philosopher.\n \"Though a purely figurative statement,\n that bit about rising through\n the air always gets me—here.\" He\n rapped his midsection, which gave\n off a high musical\nclang\n.",
"Phineas T. Gryce, escaping from\n his own managerial suite, raged\n about the city, demanding general\n cooperation in the stretching of\n great nets between the skyscrapers\n to trap the errant loaves. He was\n captured by Tin Philosopher, escaped\n again, and was found posted\n with oxygen mask and submachine gun\n on the topmost spire of Puffyloaf\n Tower, apparently determined\n to shoot down the loaves as they\n appeared and before they involved\n his company in more trouble with\n Customs and the State Department.\n\n\n Recaptured by Tin Philosopher,\n who suffered only minor bullet\n holes, he was given a series of mild\n electroshocks and returned to the\n conference table, calm and clear-headed\n as ever.",
"\"Ladies—\" he inclined his photocells\n toward Rose Thinker and Meg—\"and\n gentlemen. This is a historic\n occasion in Old Puffy's long history,\n the inauguration of the helium-filled\n loaf ('So Light It Almost Floats\n Away!') in which that inert and\n heaven-aspiring gas replaces old-fashioned\n carbon dioxide. Later,\n there will be kudos for Rose\n Thinker, whose bright relays genius-sparked\n the idea, and also for Roger\n Snedden, who took care of the\n details.\n\n\n \"By the by, Racehorse, that was\n a brilliant piece of work getting the\n helium out of the government—they've\n been pretty stuffy lately\n about their monopoly. But first I\n want to throw wide the casement in\n your minds that opens on the Long\n View of Things.\"",
"Thus instantly risen, the dough\n was clipped into loaves and shot\n into radionic ovens forming the\n midsections of the metal serpents.\n There the bread was baked in a\n matter of seconds, a fierce heat-front\n browning the crusts, and the\n piping-hot loaves sealed in transparent\n plastic bearing the proud\n Puffyloaf emblem (two cherubs\n circling a floating loaf) and ejected\n onto the delivery platform at each\n serpent's rear end, where a cluster\n of pickup machines, like hungry\n piglets, snatched at the loaves\n with hygienic claws.\n\n\n A few loaves would be hurried\n off for the day's consumption,\n the majority stored for winter in\n strategically located mammoth\n deep freezes.",
"The others, reviving, watched\n him, at first dully, then with quickening\n interest, especially when he\n jerked off the earphones with a\n happy shout and sprang to his feet.\n\"LISTEN to this!\" he cried in\n a ringing voice. \"As a result\n of the worldwide publicity, Puffyloaves\n are outselling Fairy Bread\n three to one—and that's just the\n old carbon-dioxide stock from our\n freezers! It's almost exhausted, but\n the government, now that the\n Ukrainian crisis is over, has taken\n the ban off helium and will also\n sell us stockpiled wheat if we need\n it. We can have our walking mills\n burrowing into the wheat caves in\n a matter of hours!",
"\"For a while, barbarous faddists—blind\n to the deeply spiritual nature\n of bread, which is recognized\n by all great religions—held back\n our march toward perfection with\n their hair-splitting insistence on the\n vitamin content of the wheat germ,\n but their case collapsed when tasteless\n colorless substitutes were\n triumphantly synthesized and introduced\n into the loaf, which for flawless\n purity, unequaled airiness and\n sheer intangible goodness was rapidly\n becoming mankind's supreme\n gustatory experience.\"\n\n\n \"I wonder what the stuff tastes\n like,\" Rose Thinker said out of a\n clear sky.\n\n\n \"I wonder what taste tastes like,\"\n Tin Philosopher echoed dreamily.\n Recovering himself, he continued:",
"Here the machine shuddered\n with delicate clinkings. \"Therefore,\n we of Puffyloaf are taking today\n what may be the ultimate step\n toward purity: we are aerating our\n loaves with the noble gas helium,\n an element which remains virginal\n in the face of all chemical temptations\n and whose slim molecules are\n eleven times lighter than obese\n carbon dioxide—yes, noble uncontaminable\n helium, which, if it be a\n kind of ash, is yet the ash only of\n radioactive burning, accomplished\n or initiated entirely on the Sun, a\n safe 93 million miles from this\n planet. Let's have a cheer for the\n helium loaf!\"\nWITHOUT changing expression,\n Phineas T. Gryce rapped\n the table thrice in solemn applause,\n while the others bowed their heads.",
"\"Of course! Just what is behind\n all this, Mr. Snedden?\nWhat\nrecalculations\n were you trusting, when\n our physicists had demonstrated\n months ago that the helium loaf\n was safely stackable in light airs\n and gentle breezes—winds up to\n Beaufort's scale 3.\nWhy\nshould a\n change from heavier to lighter\n wrappers result in complete non-delivery?\"\nROGER Snedden's paleness became\n tinged with an interesting\n green. He cleared his throat\n and made strange gulping noises.\n Tin Philosopher's photocells focused\n on him calmly, Rose\n Thinker's with unfeigned excitement.\n P.T. Gryce's frown grew\n blacker by the moment, while\n Megera Winterly's Venus-mask\n showed an odd dawning of dismay\n and awe. She was getting new\n squawks in her earphones.",
"Rose Thinker spun twice on her\n chair and opened her photocells\n wide. Tin Philosopher coughed to\n limber up the diaphragm of his\n speaker and continued:\n\n\n \"Ever since the first cave wife\n boasted to her next-den neighbor\n about the superior paleness and fluffiness\n of her tortillas, mankind has\n sought lighter, whiter bread. Indeed,\n thinkers wiser than myself have\n equated the whole upward course of\n culture with this poignant quest.\n Yeast was a wonderful discovery—for\n its primitive day. Sifting the\n bran and wheat germ from the flour\n was an even more important advance.\n Early bleaching and preserving\n chemicals played their humble\n parts."
],
[
"Private fliers approached the\n brown and glistening bread-front in\n curiosity and dipped back in awe.\n Aero-expresslines organized sightseeing\n flights along the flanks.\n Planes of the government forestry\n and agricultural services and 'copters\n bearing the Puffyloaf emblem\n hovered on the fringes, watching\n developments and waiting for orders.\n A squadron of supersonic\n fighters hung menacingly above.\n\n\n The behavior of birds varied\n considerably. Most fled or gave the\n loaves a wide berth, but some\n bolder species, discovering the minimal\n nutritive nature of the translucent\n brown objects, attacked\n them furiously with beaks and\n claws. Hydrogen diffusing slowly\n through the crusts had now distended\n most of the sealed plastic\n wrappers into little balloons, which\n ruptured, when pierced, with disconcerting\npops\n.",
"A mood of spirituality strongly\n tinged with humor seized the people\n of the world. Ministers sermonized\n about the bread, variously\n interpreting it as a call to charity,\n a warning against gluttony, a parable\n of the evanescence of all\n earthly things, and a divine joke.\n Husbands and wives, facing each\n other across their walls of breakfast\n toast, burst into laughter. The\n mere sight of a loaf of bread anywhere\n was enough to evoke guffaws.\n An obscure sect, having as\n part of its creed the injunction\n \"Don't take yourself so damn seriously,\"\n won new adherents.\n\n\n The bread flight, rising above an\n Atlantic storm widely reported to\n have destroyed it, passed unobserved\n across a foggy England and\n rose out of the overcast only over\n Mittel-europa. The loaves had at\n last reached their maximum altitude.",
"But the bread flight, swinging\n away from a hurricane moving up\n the Atlantic coast, crossed a\n clouded-in Boston by night and\n disappeared into a high Atlantic\n overcast, also thereby evading a\n local storm generated by the\n Weather Department in a last-minute\n effort to bring down or at\n least disperse the H-loaves.\n\n\n Warnings and counterwarnings\n by Communist and Capitalist governments\n seriously interfered with\n military trailing of the flight during\n this period and it was actually\n lost in touch with for several days.\n\n\n At scattered points, seagulls were\n observed fighting over individual\n loaves floating down from the gray\n roof—that was all.",
"Tin Philosopher kicked her under\n the table, while observing, \"So\n you see, Roger, that the non-delivery\n of the hydrogen loaf carries\n some consolations. And I must confess\n that one aspect of the affair\n gives me great satisfaction, not as a\n Board Member but as a private\n machine. You have at last made a\n reality of the 'rises through the air'\n part of Puffybread's theme. They\n can't ever take that away from you.\n By now, half the inhabitants of the\n Great Plains must have observed\n our flying loaves rising high.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce shot a frightened\n look at the west windows and\n found his full voice.\n\n\n \"Stop the mills!\" he roared at\n Meg Winterly, who nodded and\n whispered urgently into her mike.",
"Below, neck-craning citizens\n crowded streets and back yards,\n cranks and cultists had a field day,\n while local and national governments\n raged indiscriminately at\n Puffyloaf and at each other.\n\n\n Rumors that a fusion weapon\n would be exploded in the midst of\n the flying bread drew angry protests\n from conservationists and a flood\n of telefax pamphlets titled \"H-Loaf\n or H-bomb?\"\n\n\n Stockholm sent a mystifying\n note of praise to the United Nations\n Food Organization.\n\n\n Delhi issued nervous denials of a\n millet blight that no one had heard\n of until that moment and reaffirmed\n India's ability to feed her\n population with no outside help\n except the usual.",
"The congregation of an open-walled\n country church, standing\n up to recite the most familiar of\n Christian prayers, had just reached\n the petition for daily sustenance,\n when a sub-flight of the loaves,\n either forced down by a vagrant\n wind or lacking the natural buoyancy\n of the rest, came coasting silently\n as the sunbeams between the\n graceful pillars at the altar end of\n the building.\n\n\n Meanwhile, the main flight, now\n augmented by other bread flocks\n from scores and hundreds of walking\n mills that had started work a\n little later, mounted slowly and\n majestically into the cirrus-flecked\n upper air, where a steady\n wind was blowing strongly toward\n the east.",
"World distribution was given to\n a series of photographs showing\n peasants queueing up to trade scavenged\n Puffyloaves for traditional\n black bread, recently aerated itself\n but still extra solid by comparison,\n the rate of exchange demanded by\n the Moscow teams being twenty\n Puffyloaves to one of pumpernickel.\n\n\n Another series of photographs,\n picturing chubby workers' children\n being blown to bits by booby-trapped\n bread, was quietly destroyed.\n\n\n Congratulatory notes were exchanged\n by various national governments\n and world organizations,\n including the Brotherhood of Free\n Business Machines. The great\n bread flight was over, though for\n several weeks afterward scattered\n falls of loaves occurred, giving rise\n to a new folklore of manna among\n lonely Arabian tribesmen, and in\n one well-authenticated instance in\n Tibet, sustaining life in a party of\n mountaineers cut off by a snow\n slide.",
"\"A sensible suggestion,\" Tin\n Philosopher said. \"But it comes a\n trifle late in the day. If the mills\n are still walking and grinding, approximately\n seven billion Puffyloaves\n are at this moment cruising\n eastward over Middle America.\n Remember that a six-month supply\n for deep-freeze is involved and that\n the current consumption of bread,\n due to its matchless airiness, is\n eight and one-half loaves per person\n per day.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce carefully inserted\n both hands into his scanty\n hair, feeling for a good grip. He\n leaned menacingly toward Roger\n who, chin resting on the table, regarded\n him apathetically.",
"Radio Moscow asserted that the\n Kremlin would brook no interference\n in its treatment of the Ukrainians,\n jokingly referred to the flying\n bread as a farce perpetrated by\n mad internationalists inhabiting\n Cloud Cuckoo Land, added contradictory\n references to airborne\n bread booby-trapped by Capitalist\n gangsters, and then fell moodily\n silent on the whole topic.\n\n\n Radio Venus reported to its\n winged audience that Earth's\n inhabitants were establishing food\n depots in the upper air, preparatory\n to taking up permanent aerial\n residence \"such as we have always\n enjoyed on Venus.\"\nNEWNEW YORK made feverish\n preparations for the passage\n of the flying bread. Tickets\n for sightseeing space in skyscrapers\n were sold at high prices; cold meats\n and potted spreads were hawked to\n viewers with the assurance that\n they would be able to snag the\n bread out of the air and enjoy a\n historic sandwich.",
"But now, behold a wonder! As\n loaves began to appear on the\n delivery platform of the first walking\n mill to get into action, they\n did not linger on the conveyor\n belt, but rose gently into the air\n and slowly traveled off down-wind\n across the hot rippling fields.\nTHE robot claws of the pickup\n machines clutched in vain, and,\n not noticing the difference, proceeded\n carefully to stack emptiness,\n tier by tier. One errant loaf,\n rising more sluggishly than its fellows,\n was snagged by a thrusting\n claw. The machine paused, clumsily\n wiped off the injured loaf, set\n it aside—where it bobbed on one\n corner, unable to take off again—and\n went back to the work of\n storing nothingness.\n\n\n A flock of crows rose from the\n trees of a nearby shelterbelt as the\n flight of loaves approached. The\n crows swooped to investigate and\n then suddenly scattered, screeching\n in panic.",
"Phineas T. Gryce, escaping from\n his own managerial suite, raged\n about the city, demanding general\n cooperation in the stretching of\n great nets between the skyscrapers\n to trap the errant loaves. He was\n captured by Tin Philosopher, escaped\n again, and was found posted\n with oxygen mask and submachine gun\n on the topmost spire of Puffyloaf\n Tower, apparently determined\n to shoot down the loaves as they\n appeared and before they involved\n his company in more trouble with\n Customs and the State Department.\n\n\n Recaptured by Tin Philosopher,\n who suffered only minor bullet\n holes, he was given a series of mild\n electroshocks and returned to the\n conference table, calm and clear-headed\n as ever.",
"\"Then, early in the twenty-first\n century, came the epochal researches\n of Everett Whitehead,\n Puffyloaf chemist, culminating in\n his paper 'The Structural Bubble\n in Cereal Masses' and making possible\n the baking of airtight bread\n twenty times stronger (for its\n weight) than steel and of a\n lightness that would have been\n incredible even to the advanced\n chemist-bakers of the twentieth\n century—a lightness so great that,\n besides forming the backbone of\n our own promotion, it has forever\n since been capitalized on by our\n conscienceless competitors of Fairy\n Bread with their enduring slogan:\n 'It Makes Ghost Toast'.\"\n\n\n \"That's a beaut, all right, that\n ecto-dough blurb,\" Rose Thinker\n admitted, bugging her photocells\n sadly. \"Wait a sec. How about?—",
"\"Hold it!\" Meg called sharply.\n \"Flock of multiple-urgents coming\n in. News Liaison: information bureaus\n swamped with flying-bread\n inquiries. Aero-expresslines: Clear\n our airways or face law suit. U. S.\n Army: Why do loaves flame when\n hit by incendiary bullets? U. S.\n Customs: If bread intended for\n export, get export license or face\n prosecution. Russian Consulate in\n Chicago: Advise on destination of\n bread-lift. And some Kansas church\n is accusing us of a hoax inciting to\n blasphemy, of faking miracles—I\n don't know\nwhy\n.\"\n\n\n The business girl tore off her\n headphones. \"Roger Snedden,\" she\n cried with a hysteria that would\n have dumfounded her underlings,\n \"you've brought the name of Puffyloaf\n in front of the whole world, all\n right! Now do something about the\n situation!\"",
"\"But that isn't all! The far\n greater demand everywhere is for\n Puffyloaves that will actually float.\n Public Relations, Child Liaison\n Division, reports that the kiddies\n are making their mothers' lives\n miserable about it. If only we can\n figure out some way to make\n hydrogen non-explosive or the\n helium loaf float just a little—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure we can take care of\n that quite handily,\" Tin Philosopher\n interrupted briskly. \"Puffyloaf\n has kept it a corporation secret—even\n you've never been told\n about it—but just before he went\n crazy, Everett Whitehead discovered\n a way to make bread using\n only half as much flour as we do in\n the present loaf. Using this secret\n technique, which we've been saving\n for just such an emergency, it will\n be possible to bake a helium loaf as\n buoyant in every respect as the\n hydrogen loaf.\"",
"The helicopter of a hangoverish\n Sunday traveler bound for Wichita\n shied very similarly from the\n brown fliers and did not return for\n a second look.\n\n\n A black-haired housewife spied\n them over her back fence, crossed\n herself and grabbed her walkie-talkie\n from the laundry basket.\n Seconds later, the yawning correspondent\n of a regional newspaper\n was jotting down the lead of a humorous\n news story which, recalling\n the old flying-saucer scares, stated\n that now apparently bread was to\n be included in the mad aerial tea\n party.",
"\"For a while, barbarous faddists—blind\n to the deeply spiritual nature\n of bread, which is recognized\n by all great religions—held back\n our march toward perfection with\n their hair-splitting insistence on the\n vitamin content of the wheat germ,\n but their case collapsed when tasteless\n colorless substitutes were\n triumphantly synthesized and introduced\n into the loaf, which for flawless\n purity, unequaled airiness and\n sheer intangible goodness was rapidly\n becoming mankind's supreme\n gustatory experience.\"\n\n\n \"I wonder what the stuff tastes\n like,\" Rose Thinker said out of a\n clear sky.\n\n\n \"I wonder what taste tastes like,\"\n Tin Philosopher echoed dreamily.\n Recovering himself, he continued:",
"Here the machine shuddered\n with delicate clinkings. \"Therefore,\n we of Puffyloaf are taking today\n what may be the ultimate step\n toward purity: we are aerating our\n loaves with the noble gas helium,\n an element which remains virginal\n in the face of all chemical temptations\n and whose slim molecules are\n eleven times lighter than obese\n carbon dioxide—yes, noble uncontaminable\n helium, which, if it be a\n kind of ash, is yet the ash only of\n radioactive burning, accomplished\n or initiated entirely on the Sun, a\n safe 93 million miles from this\n planet. Let's have a cheer for the\n helium loaf!\"\nWITHOUT changing expression,\n Phineas T. Gryce rapped\n the table thrice in solemn applause,\n while the others bowed their heads.",
"Thus instantly risen, the dough\n was clipped into loaves and shot\n into radionic ovens forming the\n midsections of the metal serpents.\n There the bread was baked in a\n matter of seconds, a fierce heat-front\n browning the crusts, and the\n piping-hot loaves sealed in transparent\n plastic bearing the proud\n Puffyloaf emblem (two cherubs\n circling a floating loaf) and ejected\n onto the delivery platform at each\n serpent's rear end, where a cluster\n of pickup machines, like hungry\n piglets, snatched at the loaves\n with hygienic claws.\n\n\n A few loaves would be hurried\n off for the day's consumption,\n the majority stored for winter in\n strategically located mammoth\n deep freezes.",
"Roger nodded obediently. But\n his pallor increased a shade, the\n pupils of his eyes disappeared under\n the upper lids, and his head\n burrowed beneath his forearms.\n\n\n \"Oh, boy,\" Rose Thinker called\n gayly to Tin Philosopher, \"this\n looks like the start of a real crisis\n session! Did you remember to\n bring spare batteries?\"\nMEANWHILE, the monstrous\n flight of Puffyloaves, filling\n midwestern skies as no small fliers\n had since the days of the passenger\n pigeon, soared steadily onward.",
"\"Er ... ah ... er....\" Roger\n said in winning tones. \"Well, you\n see, the fact is that I....\"\n\n\n \"Hold it,\" Meg interrupted\n crisply. \"Triple-urgent from Public\n Relations, Safety Division. Tulsa-Topeka\n aero-express makes emergency\n landing after being buffeted\n in encounter with vast flight of\n objects first described as brown\n birds, although no failures reported\n in airway's electronic anti-bird\n fences. After grounding safely near\n Emporia—no fatalities—pilot's\n windshield found thinly plastered\n with soft white-and-brown material.\n Emblems on plastic wrappers embedded\n in material identify it incontrovertibly\n as an undetermined\n number of Puffyloaves cruising at\n three thousand feet!\""
],
[
"\"\nMade up of tiny wheaten motes\nAnd reinforced with sturdy oats,\nIt rises through the air and floats—\nThe bread on which all Terra dotes!\n\"\n\"THANK YOU, Miss Winterly,\"\n said Tin Philosopher.\n \"Though a purely figurative statement,\n that bit about rising through\n the air always gets me—here.\" He\n rapped his midsection, which gave\n off a high musical\nclang\n.",
"\"For a while, barbarous faddists—blind\n to the deeply spiritual nature\n of bread, which is recognized\n by all great religions—held back\n our march toward perfection with\n their hair-splitting insistence on the\n vitamin content of the wheat germ,\n but their case collapsed when tasteless\n colorless substitutes were\n triumphantly synthesized and introduced\n into the loaf, which for flawless\n purity, unequaled airiness and\n sheer intangible goodness was rapidly\n becoming mankind's supreme\n gustatory experience.\"\n\n\n \"I wonder what the stuff tastes\n like,\" Rose Thinker said out of a\n clear sky.\n\n\n \"I wonder what taste tastes like,\"\n Tin Philosopher echoed dreamily.\n Recovering himself, he continued:",
"Tin Philosopher kicked her under\n the table, while observing, \"So\n you see, Roger, that the non-delivery\n of the hydrogen loaf carries\n some consolations. And I must confess\n that one aspect of the affair\n gives me great satisfaction, not as a\n Board Member but as a private\n machine. You have at last made a\n reality of the 'rises through the air'\n part of Puffybread's theme. They\n can't ever take that away from you.\n By now, half the inhabitants of the\n Great Plains must have observed\n our flying loaves rising high.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce shot a frightened\n look at the west windows and\n found his full voice.\n\n\n \"Stop the mills!\" he roared at\n Meg Winterly, who nodded and\n whispered urgently into her mike.",
"Tin Philosopher lifted one of his\n own sets of bright talons. \"Thanks,\n P.T. But to continue my historical\n resume, the next great advance in\n the baking art was the substitution\n of purified carbon dioxide, recovered\n from coal smoke, for the gas\n generated by yeast organisms indwelling\n in the dough and later\n killed by the heat of baking, their\n corpses remaining\nin situ\n. But even\n purified carbon dioxide is itself a\n rather repugnant gas, a product of\n metabolism whether fast or slow,\n and forever associated with those\n life processes which are obnoxious\n to the fastidious.\"",
"Rose Thinker spun twice on her\n chair and opened her photocells\n wide. Tin Philosopher coughed to\n limber up the diaphragm of his\n speaker and continued:\n\n\n \"Ever since the first cave wife\n boasted to her next-den neighbor\n about the superior paleness and fluffiness\n of her tortillas, mankind has\n sought lighter, whiter bread. Indeed,\n thinkers wiser than myself have\n equated the whole upward course of\n culture with this poignant quest.\n Yeast was a wonderful discovery—for\n its primitive day. Sifting the\n bran and wheat germ from the flour\n was an even more important advance.\n Early bleaching and preserving\n chemicals played their humble\n parts.",
"\"A sensible suggestion,\" Tin\n Philosopher said. \"But it comes a\n trifle late in the day. If the mills\n are still walking and grinding, approximately\n seven billion Puffyloaves\n are at this moment cruising\n eastward over Middle America.\n Remember that a six-month supply\n for deep-freeze is involved and that\n the current consumption of bread,\n due to its matchless airiness, is\n eight and one-half loaves per person\n per day.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce carefully inserted\n both hands into his scanty\n hair, feeling for a good grip. He\n leaned menacingly toward Roger\n who, chin resting on the table, regarded\n him apathetically.",
"\"But that isn't all! The far\n greater demand everywhere is for\n Puffyloaves that will actually float.\n Public Relations, Child Liaison\n Division, reports that the kiddies\n are making their mothers' lives\n miserable about it. If only we can\n figure out some way to make\n hydrogen non-explosive or the\n helium loaf float just a little—\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure we can take care of\n that quite handily,\" Tin Philosopher\n interrupted briskly. \"Puffyloaf\n has kept it a corporation secret—even\n you've never been told\n about it—but just before he went\n crazy, Everett Whitehead discovered\n a way to make bread using\n only half as much flour as we do in\n the present loaf. Using this secret\n technique, which we've been saving\n for just such an emergency, it will\n be possible to bake a helium loaf as\n buoyant in every respect as the\n hydrogen loaf.\"",
"\"Then, early in the twenty-first\n century, came the epochal researches\n of Everett Whitehead,\n Puffyloaf chemist, culminating in\n his paper 'The Structural Bubble\n in Cereal Masses' and making possible\n the baking of airtight bread\n twenty times stronger (for its\n weight) than steel and of a\n lightness that would have been\n incredible even to the advanced\n chemist-bakers of the twentieth\n century—a lightness so great that,\n besides forming the backbone of\n our own promotion, it has forever\n since been capitalized on by our\n conscienceless competitors of Fairy\n Bread with their enduring slogan:\n 'It Makes Ghost Toast'.\"\n\n\n \"That's a beaut, all right, that\n ecto-dough blurb,\" Rose Thinker\n admitted, bugging her photocells\n sadly. \"Wait a sec. How about?—",
"A mood of spirituality strongly\n tinged with humor seized the people\n of the world. Ministers sermonized\n about the bread, variously\n interpreting it as a call to charity,\n a warning against gluttony, a parable\n of the evanescence of all\n earthly things, and a divine joke.\n Husbands and wives, facing each\n other across their walls of breakfast\n toast, burst into laughter. The\n mere sight of a loaf of bread anywhere\n was enough to evoke guffaws.\n An obscure sect, having as\n part of its creed the injunction\n \"Don't take yourself so damn seriously,\"\n won new adherents.\n\n\n The bread flight, rising above an\n Atlantic storm widely reported to\n have destroyed it, passed unobserved\n across a foggy England and\n rose out of the overcast only over\n Mittel-europa. The loaves had at\n last reached their maximum altitude.",
"\"Hydrogen is twice as light as\n helium,\" Tin Philosopher remarked\n judiciously.\n\n\n \"And many times cheaper—did\n you know that?\" Roger countered\n feebly. \"Yes, I substituted hydrogen.\n The metal-foil wrapping would\n have added just enough weight to\n counteract the greater buoyancy of\n the hydrogen loaf. But—\"\n\n\n \"So, when this morning's loaves\n began to arrive on the delivery\n platforms of the walking mills....\"\n Tin Philosopher left the remark\n unfinished.\n\n\n \"Exactly,\" Roger agreed dismally.\n\n\n \"Let me ask you, Mr. Snedden,\"\n Gryce interjected, still in low tones,\n \"if you expected people to jump to\n the kitchen ceiling for their Puffybread\n after taking off the metal\n wrapper, or reach for the sky if\n they happened to unwrap the stuff\n outdoors?\"",
"Phineas T. Gryce, escaping from\n his own managerial suite, raged\n about the city, demanding general\n cooperation in the stretching of\n great nets between the skyscrapers\n to trap the errant loaves. He was\n captured by Tin Philosopher, escaped\n again, and was found posted\n with oxygen mask and submachine gun\n on the topmost spire of Puffyloaf\n Tower, apparently determined\n to shoot down the loaves as they\n appeared and before they involved\n his company in more trouble with\n Customs and the State Department.\n\n\n Recaptured by Tin Philosopher,\n who suffered only minor bullet\n holes, he was given a series of mild\n electroshocks and returned to the\n conference table, calm and clear-headed\n as ever.",
"Here the machine shuddered\n with delicate clinkings. \"Therefore,\n we of Puffyloaf are taking today\n what may be the ultimate step\n toward purity: we are aerating our\n loaves with the noble gas helium,\n an element which remains virginal\n in the face of all chemical temptations\n and whose slim molecules are\n eleven times lighter than obese\n carbon dioxide—yes, noble uncontaminable\n helium, which, if it be a\n kind of ash, is yet the ash only of\n radioactive burning, accomplished\n or initiated entirely on the Sun, a\n safe 93 million miles from this\n planet. Let's have a cheer for the\n helium loaf!\"\nWITHOUT changing expression,\n Phineas T. Gryce rapped\n the table thrice in solemn applause,\n while the others bowed their heads.",
"\"\nThere'll be bread\nOverhead\nWhen you're dead—\nIt is said.\n\"\nPHINEAS T. GRYCE wrinkled\n his nostrils at the pink machine\n as if he smelled her insulation\n smoldering. He said mildly, \"A\n somewhat unhappy jingle, Rose,\n referring as it does to the end of\n the customer as consumer. Moreover,\n we shouldn't overplay the\n figurative 'rises through the air'\n angle. What inspired you?\"\n\n\n She shrugged. \"I don't know—oh,\n yes, I do. I was remembering\n one of the workers' songs we machines\n used to chant during the Big\n Strike—",
"\"\nWork and pray,\nLive on hay.\nYou'll get pie\nIn the sky\nWhen you die—\nIt's a lie!\n\"I don't know why we chanted\n it,\" she added. \"We didn't want pie—or\n hay, for that matter. And\n machines don't pray, except Tibetan\n prayer wheels.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce shook his head.\n \"Labor relations are another topic\n we should stay far away from.\n However, dear Rose, I'm glad you\n keep trying to outjingle those dirty\n crooks at Fairy Bread.\" He scowled,\n turning back his attention to Tin\n Philosopher. \"I get whopping mad,\n Old Machine, whenever I hear that\n other slogan of theirs, the discriminatory\n one—'Untouched by Robot\n Claws.' Just because they employ a\n few filthy androids in their factories!\"",
"World distribution was given to\n a series of photographs showing\n peasants queueing up to trade scavenged\n Puffyloaves for traditional\n black bread, recently aerated itself\n but still extra solid by comparison,\n the rate of exchange demanded by\n the Moscow teams being twenty\n Puffyloaves to one of pumpernickel.\n\n\n Another series of photographs,\n picturing chubby workers' children\n being blown to bits by booby-trapped\n bread, was quietly destroyed.\n\n\n Congratulatory notes were exchanged\n by various national governments\n and world organizations,\n including the Brotherhood of Free\n Business Machines. The great\n bread flight was over, though for\n several weeks afterward scattered\n falls of loaves occurred, giving rise\n to a new folklore of manna among\n lonely Arabian tribesmen, and in\n one well-authenticated instance in\n Tibet, sustaining life in a party of\n mountaineers cut off by a snow\n slide.",
"As they advanced, their heads\n swung lazily from side to side, very\n much like snakes, gobbling the yellow\n grain. In their throats, it was\n threshed, the chaff bundled and\n burped aside for pickup by the\n crawl trucks of a chemical corporation,\n the kernels quick-dried\n and blown along into the mighty\n chests of the machines. There the\n tireless mills ground the kernels\n to flour, which was instantly sifted,\n the bran being packaged and\n dropped like the chaff for pickup.\n A cluster of tanks which gave\n the metal serpents a decidedly\n humpbacked appearance added\n water, shortening, salt and other\n ingredients, some named and some\n not. The dough was at the same\n time infused with gas from a tank\n conspicuously labeled \"Carbon\n Dioxide\" (\"No Yeast Creatures\n in Your Bread!\").",
"Bread\n\n Overhead\nBy FRITZ LEIBER\nThe Staff of Life suddenly and\n\n disconcertingly sprouted wings\n\n —and mankind had to eat crow!\nIllustrated by WOOD\nAS a blisteringly hot but\n guaranteed weather-controlled\n future summer day\n dawned on the Mississippi Valley,\n the walking mills of Puffy Products\n (\"Spike to Loaf in One\n Operation!\") began to tread delicately\n on their centipede legs\n across the wheat fields of Kansas.\n\n\n The walking mills resembled fat\n metal serpents, rather larger than\n those Chinese paper dragons animated\n by files of men in procession.\n Sensory robot devices in\n their noses informed them that\n the waiting wheat had reached ripe\n perfection.",
"Thus instantly risen, the dough\n was clipped into loaves and shot\n into radionic ovens forming the\n midsections of the metal serpents.\n There the bread was baked in a\n matter of seconds, a fierce heat-front\n browning the crusts, and the\n piping-hot loaves sealed in transparent\n plastic bearing the proud\n Puffyloaf emblem (two cherubs\n circling a floating loaf) and ejected\n onto the delivery platform at each\n serpent's rear end, where a cluster\n of pickup machines, like hungry\n piglets, snatched at the loaves\n with hygienic claws.\n\n\n A few loaves would be hurried\n off for the day's consumption,\n the majority stored for winter in\n strategically located mammoth\n deep freezes.",
"\"Ladies—\" he inclined his photocells\n toward Rose Thinker and Meg—\"and\n gentlemen. This is a historic\n occasion in Old Puffy's long history,\n the inauguration of the helium-filled\n loaf ('So Light It Almost Floats\n Away!') in which that inert and\n heaven-aspiring gas replaces old-fashioned\n carbon dioxide. Later,\n there will be kudos for Rose\n Thinker, whose bright relays genius-sparked\n the idea, and also for Roger\n Snedden, who took care of the\n details.\n\n\n \"By the by, Racehorse, that was\n a brilliant piece of work getting the\n helium out of the government—they've\n been pretty stuffy lately\n about their monopoly. But first I\n want to throw wide the casement in\n your minds that opens on the Long\n View of Things.\"",
"\"Mr. Gryce,\" Roger said reproachfully,\n \"you have often assured\n me that what people do with\n Puffybread after they buy it is no\n concern of ours.\"\n\n\n \"I seem to recall,\" Rose Thinker\n chirped somewhat unkindly, \"that\n dictum was created to answer inquiries\n after Roger put the famous\n sculptures-in-miniature artist on 3D\n and he testified that he always\n molded his first attempts from\n Puffybread, one jumbo loaf squeezing\n down to approximately the size\n of a peanut.\"\nHER photocells dimmed and\n brightened. \"Oh, boy—hydrogen!\n The loaf's unwrapped. After\n a while, in spite of the crust-seal, a\n little oxygen diffuses in. An explosive\n mixture. Housewife in curlers\n and kimono pops a couple slices in\n the toaster. Boom!\"\n\n\n The three human beings in the\n room winced."
],
[
"The man approached the conference\n table in the center of the room\n with measured pace and gravely\n expressionless face. The rose-tinted\n machine on his left did a couple\n of impulsive pirouettes on the way\n and twittered a greeting to Meg\n and Roger. The other machine quietly\n took the third of the high seats\n and lifted a claw at Meg, who now\n occupied a stool twice the height of\n Roger's.\n\n\n \"Miss Winterly, please—our\n theme.\"\n\n\n The Blonde Icicle's face thawed\n into a little-girl smile as she chanted\n bubblingly:",
"\"Good-o, Rosie! That makes another\n victory for robot-engineered\n world unity, though you almost\n gave us away at the start with that\n 'bread overhead' jingle. We've\n struck another blow against the\n next world war, in which—as we\n know only too well!—we machines\n would suffer the most. Now if we\n can only arrange, say, a fur-famine\n in Alaska and a migration of long-haired\n Siberian lemmings across\n Behring Straits ... we'd have to\n swing the Japanese Current up\n there so it'd be warm enough for\n the little fellows.... Anyhow,\n Rosie, with a spot of help from the\n Brotherhood, those humans will\n paint themselves into the peace\n corner yet.\"",
"\"\nWork and pray,\nLive on hay.\nYou'll get pie\nIn the sky\nWhen you die—\nIt's a lie!\n\"I don't know why we chanted\n it,\" she added. \"We didn't want pie—or\n hay, for that matter. And\n machines don't pray, except Tibetan\n prayer wheels.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce shook his head.\n \"Labor relations are another topic\n we should stay far away from.\n However, dear Rose, I'm glad you\n keep trying to outjingle those dirty\n crooks at Fairy Bread.\" He scowled,\n turning back his attention to Tin\n Philosopher. \"I get whopping mad,\n Old Machine, whenever I hear that\n other slogan of theirs, the discriminatory\n one—'Untouched by Robot\n Claws.' Just because they employ a\n few filthy androids in their factories!\"",
"\"My sweet little ever-victorious,\n self-propelled monkey wrench!\" she\n crooned in his ear. Roger looked\n fatuously over her soft shoulder at\n Tin Philosopher who, as if moved\n by some similar feeling, reached\n over and touched claws with Rose\n Thinker.\n\n\n This, however, was what he telegraphed\n silently to his fellow machine\n across the circuit so completed:",
"But now, behold a wonder! As\n loaves began to appear on the\n delivery platform of the first walking\n mill to get into action, they\n did not linger on the conveyor\n belt, but rose gently into the air\n and slowly traveled off down-wind\n across the hot rippling fields.\nTHE robot claws of the pickup\n machines clutched in vain, and,\n not noticing the difference, proceeded\n carefully to stack emptiness,\n tier by tier. One errant loaf,\n rising more sluggishly than its fellows,\n was snagged by a thrusting\n claw. The machine paused, clumsily\n wiped off the injured loaf, set\n it aside—where it bobbed on one\n corner, unable to take off again—and\n went back to the work of\n storing nothingness.\n\n\n A flock of crows rose from the\n trees of a nearby shelterbelt as the\n flight of loaves approached. The\n crows swooped to investigate and\n then suddenly scattered, screeching\n in panic.",
"\"\nThere'll be bread\nOverhead\nWhen you're dead—\nIt is said.\n\"\nPHINEAS T. GRYCE wrinkled\n his nostrils at the pink machine\n as if he smelled her insulation\n smoldering. He said mildly, \"A\n somewhat unhappy jingle, Rose,\n referring as it does to the end of\n the customer as consumer. Moreover,\n we shouldn't overplay the\n figurative 'rises through the air'\n angle. What inspired you?\"\n\n\n She shrugged. \"I don't know—oh,\n yes, I do. I was remembering\n one of the workers' songs we machines\n used to chant during the Big\n Strike—",
"As they advanced, their heads\n swung lazily from side to side, very\n much like snakes, gobbling the yellow\n grain. In their throats, it was\n threshed, the chaff bundled and\n burped aside for pickup by the\n crawl trucks of a chemical corporation,\n the kernels quick-dried\n and blown along into the mighty\n chests of the machines. There the\n tireless mills ground the kernels\n to flour, which was instantly sifted,\n the bran being packaged and\n dropped like the chaff for pickup.\n A cluster of tanks which gave\n the metal serpents a decidedly\n humpbacked appearance added\n water, shortening, salt and other\n ingredients, some named and some\n not. The dough was at the same\n time infused with gas from a tank\n conspicuously labeled \"Carbon\n Dioxide\" (\"No Yeast Creatures\n in Your Bread!\").",
"Back in NewNew York, the\n managerial board of Puffy Products\n slumped in utter collapse\n around the conference table, the\n long crisis session at last ended.\n Empty coffee cartons were scattered\n around the chairs of the three\n humans, dead batteries around\n those of the two machines. For a\n while, there was no movement\n whatsoever. Then Roger Snedden\n reached out wearily for the earphones\n where Megera Winterly\n had hurled them down, adjusted\n them to his head, pushed a button\n and listened apathetically.\n\n\n After a bit, his gaze brightened.\n He pushed more buttons and listened\n more eagerly. Soon he was\n sitting tensely upright on his stool,\n eyes bright and lower face all\n a-smile, muttering terse comments\n and questions into the lapel mike\n torn from Meg's fair neck.",
"\"\nMade up of tiny wheaten motes\nAnd reinforced with sturdy oats,\nIt rises through the air and floats—\nThe bread on which all Terra dotes!\n\"\n\"THANK YOU, Miss Winterly,\"\n said Tin Philosopher.\n \"Though a purely figurative statement,\n that bit about rising through\n the air always gets me—here.\" He\n rapped his midsection, which gave\n off a high musical\nclang\n.",
"Roger nodded obediently. But\n his pallor increased a shade, the\n pupils of his eyes disappeared under\n the upper lids, and his head\n burrowed beneath his forearms.\n\n\n \"Oh, boy,\" Rose Thinker called\n gayly to Tin Philosopher, \"this\n looks like the start of a real crisis\n session! Did you remember to\n bring spare batteries?\"\nMEANWHILE, the monstrous\n flight of Puffyloaves, filling\n midwestern skies as no small fliers\n had since the days of the passenger\n pigeon, soared steadily onward.",
"\"Listen to me, Meg. Today—yes,\n today!—you're going to see\n the Board eating out of my hand.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! I guarantee you won't\n have any fingers left. You're bold\n enough now, but when Mr. Gryce\n and those two big machines come\n through that door—\"\n\n\n \"Now wait a minute, Meg—\"\n\n\n \"Hush! They're coming now!\"\n\n\n Roger leaped three feet in the\n air, but managed to land without a\n sound and edged toward his stool.\n Through the dilating iris of the\n door strode Phineas T. Gryce,\n flanked by Rose Thinker and Tin\n Philosopher.",
"\"For a while, barbarous faddists—blind\n to the deeply spiritual nature\n of bread, which is recognized\n by all great religions—held back\n our march toward perfection with\n their hair-splitting insistence on the\n vitamin content of the wheat germ,\n but their case collapsed when tasteless\n colorless substitutes were\n triumphantly synthesized and introduced\n into the loaf, which for flawless\n purity, unequaled airiness and\n sheer intangible goodness was rapidly\n becoming mankind's supreme\n gustatory experience.\"\n\n\n \"I wonder what the stuff tastes\n like,\" Rose Thinker said out of a\n clear sky.\n\n\n \"I wonder what taste tastes like,\"\n Tin Philosopher echoed dreamily.\n Recovering himself, he continued:",
"Tin Philosopher kicked her under\n the table, while observing, \"So\n you see, Roger, that the non-delivery\n of the hydrogen loaf carries\n some consolations. And I must confess\n that one aspect of the affair\n gives me great satisfaction, not as a\n Board Member but as a private\n machine. You have at last made a\n reality of the 'rises through the air'\n part of Puffybread's theme. They\n can't ever take that away from you.\n By now, half the inhabitants of the\n Great Plains must have observed\n our flying loaves rising high.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce shot a frightened\n look at the west windows and\n found his full voice.\n\n\n \"Stop the mills!\" he roared at\n Meg Winterly, who nodded and\n whispered urgently into her mike.",
"Here the machine shuddered\n with delicate clinkings. \"Therefore,\n we of Puffyloaf are taking today\n what may be the ultimate step\n toward purity: we are aerating our\n loaves with the noble gas helium,\n an element which remains virginal\n in the face of all chemical temptations\n and whose slim molecules are\n eleven times lighter than obese\n carbon dioxide—yes, noble uncontaminable\n helium, which, if it be a\n kind of ash, is yet the ash only of\n radioactive burning, accomplished\n or initiated entirely on the Sun, a\n safe 93 million miles from this\n planet. Let's have a cheer for the\n helium loaf!\"\nWITHOUT changing expression,\n Phineas T. Gryce rapped\n the table thrice in solemn applause,\n while the others bowed their heads.",
"About one thousand miles farther\n on in that direction, where a cluster\n of stratosphere-tickling towers\n marked the location of the metropolis\n of NewNew York, a tender\n scene was being enacted in the\n pressurized penthouse managerial\n suite of Puffy Products. Megera\n Winterly, Secretary in Chief to the\n Managerial Board and referred to\n by her underlings as the Blonde\n Icicle, was dealing with the advances\n of Roger (\"Racehorse\")\n Snedden, Assistant Secretary to the\n Board and often indistinguishable\n from any passing office boy.",
"The helicopter of a hangoverish\n Sunday traveler bound for Wichita\n shied very similarly from the\n brown fliers and did not return for\n a second look.\n\n\n A black-haired housewife spied\n them over her back fence, crossed\n herself and grabbed her walkie-talkie\n from the laundry basket.\n Seconds later, the yawning correspondent\n of a regional newspaper\n was jotting down the lead of a humorous\n news story which, recalling\n the old flying-saucer scares, stated\n that now apparently bread was to\n be included in the mad aerial tea\n party.",
"\"Ladies—\" he inclined his photocells\n toward Rose Thinker and Meg—\"and\n gentlemen. This is a historic\n occasion in Old Puffy's long history,\n the inauguration of the helium-filled\n loaf ('So Light It Almost Floats\n Away!') in which that inert and\n heaven-aspiring gas replaces old-fashioned\n carbon dioxide. Later,\n there will be kudos for Rose\n Thinker, whose bright relays genius-sparked\n the idea, and also for Roger\n Snedden, who took care of the\n details.\n\n\n \"By the by, Racehorse, that was\n a brilliant piece of work getting the\n helium out of the government—they've\n been pretty stuffy lately\n about their monopoly. But first I\n want to throw wide the casement in\n your minds that opens on the Long\n View of Things.\"",
"Rose Thinker spun twice on her\n chair and opened her photocells\n wide. Tin Philosopher coughed to\n limber up the diaphragm of his\n speaker and continued:\n\n\n \"Ever since the first cave wife\n boasted to her next-den neighbor\n about the superior paleness and fluffiness\n of her tortillas, mankind has\n sought lighter, whiter bread. Indeed,\n thinkers wiser than myself have\n equated the whole upward course of\n culture with this poignant quest.\n Yeast was a wonderful discovery—for\n its primitive day. Sifting the\n bran and wheat germ from the flour\n was an even more important advance.\n Early bleaching and preserving\n chemicals played their humble\n parts.",
"Thus instantly risen, the dough\n was clipped into loaves and shot\n into radionic ovens forming the\n midsections of the metal serpents.\n There the bread was baked in a\n matter of seconds, a fierce heat-front\n browning the crusts, and the\n piping-hot loaves sealed in transparent\n plastic bearing the proud\n Puffyloaf emblem (two cherubs\n circling a floating loaf) and ejected\n onto the delivery platform at each\n serpent's rear end, where a cluster\n of pickup machines, like hungry\n piglets, snatched at the loaves\n with hygienic claws.\n\n\n A few loaves would be hurried\n off for the day's consumption,\n the majority stored for winter in\n strategically located mammoth\n deep freezes.",
"Phineas T. Gryce, escaping from\n his own managerial suite, raged\n about the city, demanding general\n cooperation in the stretching of\n great nets between the skyscrapers\n to trap the errant loaves. He was\n captured by Tin Philosopher, escaped\n again, and was found posted\n with oxygen mask and submachine gun\n on the topmost spire of Puffyloaf\n Tower, apparently determined\n to shoot down the loaves as they\n appeared and before they involved\n his company in more trouble with\n Customs and the State Department.\n\n\n Recaptured by Tin Philosopher,\n who suffered only minor bullet\n holes, he was given a series of mild\n electroshocks and returned to the\n conference table, calm and clear-headed\n as ever."
],
[
"The man approached the conference\n table in the center of the room\n with measured pace and gravely\n expressionless face. The rose-tinted\n machine on his left did a couple\n of impulsive pirouettes on the way\n and twittered a greeting to Meg\n and Roger. The other machine quietly\n took the third of the high seats\n and lifted a claw at Meg, who now\n occupied a stool twice the height of\n Roger's.\n\n\n \"Miss Winterly, please—our\n theme.\"\n\n\n The Blonde Icicle's face thawed\n into a little-girl smile as she chanted\n bubblingly:",
"The Sun's rays beat through the\n rarified air on the distended plastic\n wrappers, increasing still further\n the pressure of the confined hydrogen.\n They burst by the millions\n and tens of millions. A high-flying\n Bulgarian evangelist, who had happened\n to mistake the up-lever for\n the east-lever in the cockpit of his\n flier and who was the sole witness\n of the event, afterward described it\n as \"the foaming of a sea of diamonds,\n the crackle of God's\n knuckles.\"\nBY THE millions and tens of\n millions, the loaves coasted\n down into the starving Ukraine.\n Shaken by a week of humor that\n threatened to invade even its own\n grim precincts, the Kremlin made\n a sudden about-face. A new policy\n was instituted of communal ownership\n of the produce of communal\n farms, and teams of hunger-fighters\n and caravans of trucks loaded with\n pumpernickel were dispatched into\n the Ukraine.",
"\"\nThere'll be bread\nOverhead\nWhen you're dead—\nIt is said.\n\"\nPHINEAS T. GRYCE wrinkled\n his nostrils at the pink machine\n as if he smelled her insulation\n smoldering. He said mildly, \"A\n somewhat unhappy jingle, Rose,\n referring as it does to the end of\n the customer as consumer. Moreover,\n we shouldn't overplay the\n figurative 'rises through the air'\n angle. What inspired you?\"\n\n\n She shrugged. \"I don't know—oh,\n yes, I do. I was remembering\n one of the workers' songs we machines\n used to chant during the Big\n Strike—",
"Tin Philosopher kicked her under\n the table, while observing, \"So\n you see, Roger, that the non-delivery\n of the hydrogen loaf carries\n some consolations. And I must confess\n that one aspect of the affair\n gives me great satisfaction, not as a\n Board Member but as a private\n machine. You have at last made a\n reality of the 'rises through the air'\n part of Puffybread's theme. They\n can't ever take that away from you.\n By now, half the inhabitants of the\n Great Plains must have observed\n our flying loaves rising high.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce shot a frightened\n look at the west windows and\n found his full voice.\n\n\n \"Stop the mills!\" he roared at\n Meg Winterly, who nodded and\n whispered urgently into her mike.",
"Roger nodded obediently. But\n his pallor increased a shade, the\n pupils of his eyes disappeared under\n the upper lids, and his head\n burrowed beneath his forearms.\n\n\n \"Oh, boy,\" Rose Thinker called\n gayly to Tin Philosopher, \"this\n looks like the start of a real crisis\n session! Did you remember to\n bring spare batteries?\"\nMEANWHILE, the monstrous\n flight of Puffyloaves, filling\n midwestern skies as no small fliers\n had since the days of the passenger\n pigeon, soared steadily onward.",
"The helicopter of a hangoverish\n Sunday traveler bound for Wichita\n shied very similarly from the\n brown fliers and did not return for\n a second look.\n\n\n A black-haired housewife spied\n them over her back fence, crossed\n herself and grabbed her walkie-talkie\n from the laundry basket.\n Seconds later, the yawning correspondent\n of a regional newspaper\n was jotting down the lead of a humorous\n news story which, recalling\n the old flying-saucer scares, stated\n that now apparently bread was to\n be included in the mad aerial tea\n party.",
"Here the machine shuddered\n with delicate clinkings. \"Therefore,\n we of Puffyloaf are taking today\n what may be the ultimate step\n toward purity: we are aerating our\n loaves with the noble gas helium,\n an element which remains virginal\n in the face of all chemical temptations\n and whose slim molecules are\n eleven times lighter than obese\n carbon dioxide—yes, noble uncontaminable\n helium, which, if it be a\n kind of ash, is yet the ash only of\n radioactive burning, accomplished\n or initiated entirely on the Sun, a\n safe 93 million miles from this\n planet. Let's have a cheer for the\n helium loaf!\"\nWITHOUT changing expression,\n Phineas T. Gryce rapped\n the table thrice in solemn applause,\n while the others bowed their heads.",
"The others, reviving, watched\n him, at first dully, then with quickening\n interest, especially when he\n jerked off the earphones with a\n happy shout and sprang to his feet.\n\"LISTEN to this!\" he cried in\n a ringing voice. \"As a result\n of the worldwide publicity, Puffyloaves\n are outselling Fairy Bread\n three to one—and that's just the\n old carbon-dioxide stock from our\n freezers! It's almost exhausted, but\n the government, now that the\n Ukrainian crisis is over, has taken\n the ban off helium and will also\n sell us stockpiled wheat if we need\n it. We can have our walking mills\n burrowing into the wheat caves in\n a matter of hours!",
"\"My sweet little ever-victorious,\n self-propelled monkey wrench!\" she\n crooned in his ear. Roger looked\n fatuously over her soft shoulder at\n Tin Philosopher who, as if moved\n by some similar feeling, reached\n over and touched claws with Rose\n Thinker.\n\n\n This, however, was what he telegraphed\n silently to his fellow machine\n across the circuit so completed:",
"A mood of spirituality strongly\n tinged with humor seized the people\n of the world. Ministers sermonized\n about the bread, variously\n interpreting it as a call to charity,\n a warning against gluttony, a parable\n of the evanescence of all\n earthly things, and a divine joke.\n Husbands and wives, facing each\n other across their walls of breakfast\n toast, burst into laughter. The\n mere sight of a loaf of bread anywhere\n was enough to evoke guffaws.\n An obscure sect, having as\n part of its creed the injunction\n \"Don't take yourself so damn seriously,\"\n won new adherents.\n\n\n The bread flight, rising above an\n Atlantic storm widely reported to\n have destroyed it, passed unobserved\n across a foggy England and\n rose out of the overcast only over\n Mittel-europa. The loaves had at\n last reached their maximum altitude.",
"\"For a while, barbarous faddists—blind\n to the deeply spiritual nature\n of bread, which is recognized\n by all great religions—held back\n our march toward perfection with\n their hair-splitting insistence on the\n vitamin content of the wheat germ,\n but their case collapsed when tasteless\n colorless substitutes were\n triumphantly synthesized and introduced\n into the loaf, which for flawless\n purity, unequaled airiness and\n sheer intangible goodness was rapidly\n becoming mankind's supreme\n gustatory experience.\"\n\n\n \"I wonder what the stuff tastes\n like,\" Rose Thinker said out of a\n clear sky.\n\n\n \"I wonder what taste tastes like,\"\n Tin Philosopher echoed dreamily.\n Recovering himself, he continued:",
"\"A sensible suggestion,\" Tin\n Philosopher said. \"But it comes a\n trifle late in the day. If the mills\n are still walking and grinding, approximately\n seven billion Puffyloaves\n are at this moment cruising\n eastward over Middle America.\n Remember that a six-month supply\n for deep-freeze is involved and that\n the current consumption of bread,\n due to its matchless airiness, is\n eight and one-half loaves per person\n per day.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce carefully inserted\n both hands into his scanty\n hair, feeling for a good grip. He\n leaned menacingly toward Roger\n who, chin resting on the table, regarded\n him apathetically.",
"But now, behold a wonder! As\n loaves began to appear on the\n delivery platform of the first walking\n mill to get into action, they\n did not linger on the conveyor\n belt, but rose gently into the air\n and slowly traveled off down-wind\n across the hot rippling fields.\nTHE robot claws of the pickup\n machines clutched in vain, and,\n not noticing the difference, proceeded\n carefully to stack emptiness,\n tier by tier. One errant loaf,\n rising more sluggishly than its fellows,\n was snagged by a thrusting\n claw. The machine paused, clumsily\n wiped off the injured loaf, set\n it aside—where it bobbed on one\n corner, unable to take off again—and\n went back to the work of\n storing nothingness.\n\n\n A flock of crows rose from the\n trees of a nearby shelterbelt as the\n flight of loaves approached. The\n crows swooped to investigate and\n then suddenly scattered, screeching\n in panic.",
"Phineas T. Gryce, escaping from\n his own managerial suite, raged\n about the city, demanding general\n cooperation in the stretching of\n great nets between the skyscrapers\n to trap the errant loaves. He was\n captured by Tin Philosopher, escaped\n again, and was found posted\n with oxygen mask and submachine gun\n on the topmost spire of Puffyloaf\n Tower, apparently determined\n to shoot down the loaves as they\n appeared and before they involved\n his company in more trouble with\n Customs and the State Department.\n\n\n Recaptured by Tin Philosopher,\n who suffered only minor bullet\n holes, he was given a series of mild\n electroshocks and returned to the\n conference table, calm and clear-headed\n as ever.",
"About one thousand miles farther\n on in that direction, where a cluster\n of stratosphere-tickling towers\n marked the location of the metropolis\n of NewNew York, a tender\n scene was being enacted in the\n pressurized penthouse managerial\n suite of Puffy Products. Megera\n Winterly, Secretary in Chief to the\n Managerial Board and referred to\n by her underlings as the Blonde\n Icicle, was dealing with the advances\n of Roger (\"Racehorse\")\n Snedden, Assistant Secretary to the\n Board and often indistinguishable\n from any passing office boy.",
"The congregation of an open-walled\n country church, standing\n up to recite the most familiar of\n Christian prayers, had just reached\n the petition for daily sustenance,\n when a sub-flight of the loaves,\n either forced down by a vagrant\n wind or lacking the natural buoyancy\n of the rest, came coasting silently\n as the sunbeams between the\n graceful pillars at the altar end of\n the building.\n\n\n Meanwhile, the main flight, now\n augmented by other bread flocks\n from scores and hundreds of walking\n mills that had started work a\n little later, mounted slowly and\n majestically into the cirrus-flecked\n upper air, where a steady\n wind was blowing strongly toward\n the east.",
"\"Listen to me, Meg. Today—yes,\n today!—you're going to see\n the Board eating out of my hand.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! I guarantee you won't\n have any fingers left. You're bold\n enough now, but when Mr. Gryce\n and those two big machines come\n through that door—\"\n\n\n \"Now wait a minute, Meg—\"\n\n\n \"Hush! They're coming now!\"\n\n\n Roger leaped three feet in the\n air, but managed to land without a\n sound and edged toward his stool.\n Through the dilating iris of the\n door strode Phineas T. Gryce,\n flanked by Rose Thinker and Tin\n Philosopher.",
"\"Er ... ah ... er....\" Roger\n said in winning tones. \"Well, you\n see, the fact is that I....\"\n\n\n \"Hold it,\" Meg interrupted\n crisply. \"Triple-urgent from Public\n Relations, Safety Division. Tulsa-Topeka\n aero-express makes emergency\n landing after being buffeted\n in encounter with vast flight of\n objects first described as brown\n birds, although no failures reported\n in airway's electronic anti-bird\n fences. After grounding safely near\n Emporia—no fatalities—pilot's\n windshield found thinly plastered\n with soft white-and-brown material.\n Emblems on plastic wrappers embedded\n in material identify it incontrovertibly\n as an undetermined\n number of Puffyloaves cruising at\n three thousand feet!\"",
"As they advanced, their heads\n swung lazily from side to side, very\n much like snakes, gobbling the yellow\n grain. In their throats, it was\n threshed, the chaff bundled and\n burped aside for pickup by the\n crawl trucks of a chemical corporation,\n the kernels quick-dried\n and blown along into the mighty\n chests of the machines. There the\n tireless mills ground the kernels\n to flour, which was instantly sifted,\n the bran being packaged and\n dropped like the chaff for pickup.\n A cluster of tanks which gave\n the metal serpents a decidedly\n humpbacked appearance added\n water, shortening, salt and other\n ingredients, some named and some\n not. The dough was at the same\n time infused with gas from a tank\n conspicuously labeled \"Carbon\n Dioxide\" (\"No Yeast Creatures\n in Your Bread!\").",
"\"Thanks, T.P.,\" P.T. then said.\n \"And now for the Moment of\n Truth. Miss Winterly, how is the\n helium loaf selling?\"\n\n\n The business girl clapped on a\n pair of earphones and whispered\n into a lapel mike. Her gaze grew\n abstracted as she mentally translated\n flurries of brief squawks into\n coherent messages. Suddenly a single\n vertical furrow creased her\n matchlessly smooth brow.\n\n\n \"It isn't, Mr. Gryce!\" she gasped\n in horror. \"Fairy Bread is outselling\n Puffyloaves by an infinity factor.\n So far this morning,\nthere has\n not been one single delivery of\n Puffyloaves to any sales spot\n! Complaints\n about non-delivery are pouring\n in from both walking stores and\n sessile shops.\""
],
[
"Meanwhile, he and Rose Thinker\n quietly watched the Blonde Icicle\n melt.\n—FRITZ LEIBER\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nGalaxy\nFebruary 1958. Extensive\n research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on\n this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors\n have been corrected without note.",
"About one thousand miles farther\n on in that direction, where a cluster\n of stratosphere-tickling towers\n marked the location of the metropolis\n of NewNew York, a tender\n scene was being enacted in the\n pressurized penthouse managerial\n suite of Puffy Products. Megera\n Winterly, Secretary in Chief to the\n Managerial Board and referred to\n by her underlings as the Blonde\n Icicle, was dealing with the advances\n of Roger (\"Racehorse\")\n Snedden, Assistant Secretary to the\n Board and often indistinguishable\n from any passing office boy.",
"The man approached the conference\n table in the center of the room\n with measured pace and gravely\n expressionless face. The rose-tinted\n machine on his left did a couple\n of impulsive pirouettes on the way\n and twittered a greeting to Meg\n and Roger. The other machine quietly\n took the third of the high seats\n and lifted a claw at Meg, who now\n occupied a stool twice the height of\n Roger's.\n\n\n \"Miss Winterly, please—our\n theme.\"\n\n\n The Blonde Icicle's face thawed\n into a little-girl smile as she chanted\n bubblingly:",
"Tin Philosopher kicked her under\n the table, while observing, \"So\n you see, Roger, that the non-delivery\n of the hydrogen loaf carries\n some consolations. And I must confess\n that one aspect of the affair\n gives me great satisfaction, not as a\n Board Member but as a private\n machine. You have at last made a\n reality of the 'rises through the air'\n part of Puffybread's theme. They\n can't ever take that away from you.\n By now, half the inhabitants of the\n Great Plains must have observed\n our flying loaves rising high.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce shot a frightened\n look at the west windows and\n found his full voice.\n\n\n \"Stop the mills!\" he roared at\n Meg Winterly, who nodded and\n whispered urgently into her mike.",
"\"My sweet little ever-victorious,\n self-propelled monkey wrench!\" she\n crooned in his ear. Roger looked\n fatuously over her soft shoulder at\n Tin Philosopher who, as if moved\n by some similar feeling, reached\n over and touched claws with Rose\n Thinker.\n\n\n This, however, was what he telegraphed\n silently to his fellow machine\n across the circuit so completed:",
"\"Why, you fool! I noticed that\n order for metal-foil wrappers, assumed\n it was some sub-secretary's\n mistake, and canceled it last night!\"\n\n\n Roger Snedden turned pale.\n \"You canceled it?\" he quavered.\n \"And told them to go back to the\n lighter plastic wrappers?\"",
"\"Thanks, T.P.,\" P.T. then said.\n \"And now for the Moment of\n Truth. Miss Winterly, how is the\n helium loaf selling?\"\n\n\n The business girl clapped on a\n pair of earphones and whispered\n into a lapel mike. Her gaze grew\n abstracted as she mentally translated\n flurries of brief squawks into\n coherent messages. Suddenly a single\n vertical furrow creased her\n matchlessly smooth brow.\n\n\n \"It isn't, Mr. Gryce!\" she gasped\n in horror. \"Fairy Bread is outselling\n Puffyloaves by an infinity factor.\n So far this morning,\nthere has\n not been one single delivery of\n Puffyloaves to any sales spot\n! Complaints\n about non-delivery are pouring\n in from both walking stores and\n sessile shops.\"",
"\"Of course! Just what is behind\n all this, Mr. Snedden?\nWhat\nrecalculations\n were you trusting, when\n our physicists had demonstrated\n months ago that the helium loaf\n was safely stackable in light airs\n and gentle breezes—winds up to\n Beaufort's scale 3.\nWhy\nshould a\n change from heavier to lighter\n wrappers result in complete non-delivery?\"\nROGER Snedden's paleness became\n tinged with an interesting\n green. He cleared his throat\n and made strange gulping noises.\n Tin Philosopher's photocells focused\n on him calmly, Rose\n Thinker's with unfeigned excitement.\n P.T. Gryce's frown grew\n blacker by the moment, while\n Megera Winterly's Venus-mask\n showed an odd dawning of dismay\n and awe. She was getting new\n squawks in her earphones.",
"\"For a while, barbarous faddists—blind\n to the deeply spiritual nature\n of bread, which is recognized\n by all great religions—held back\n our march toward perfection with\n their hair-splitting insistence on the\n vitamin content of the wheat germ,\n but their case collapsed when tasteless\n colorless substitutes were\n triumphantly synthesized and introduced\n into the loaf, which for flawless\n purity, unequaled airiness and\n sheer intangible goodness was rapidly\n becoming mankind's supreme\n gustatory experience.\"\n\n\n \"I wonder what the stuff tastes\n like,\" Rose Thinker said out of a\n clear sky.\n\n\n \"I wonder what taste tastes like,\"\n Tin Philosopher echoed dreamily.\n Recovering himself, he continued:",
"The Sun's rays beat through the\n rarified air on the distended plastic\n wrappers, increasing still further\n the pressure of the confined hydrogen.\n They burst by the millions\n and tens of millions. A high-flying\n Bulgarian evangelist, who had happened\n to mistake the up-lever for\n the east-lever in the cockpit of his\n flier and who was the sole witness\n of the event, afterward described it\n as \"the foaming of a sea of diamonds,\n the crackle of God's\n knuckles.\"\nBY THE millions and tens of\n millions, the loaves coasted\n down into the starving Ukraine.\n Shaken by a week of humor that\n threatened to invade even its own\n grim precincts, the Kremlin made\n a sudden about-face. A new policy\n was instituted of communal ownership\n of the produce of communal\n farms, and teams of hunger-fighters\n and caravans of trucks loaded with\n pumpernickel were dispatched into\n the Ukraine.",
"\"Why don't you jump out the\n window, Roger, remembering to\n shut the airlock after you?\" the\n Golden Glacier said in tones not\n unkind. \"When are your high-strung,\n thoroughbred nerves going\n to accept the fact that I would\n never consider marriage with a\n business inferior? You have about\n as much chance as a starving\n Ukrainian kulak now that Moscow's\n clapped on the interdict.\"\nROGER'S voice was calm, although\n his eyes were feverishly\n bright, as he replied, \"A lot\n of things are going to be different\n around here, Meg, as soon as the\n Board is forced to admit that only\n my quick thinking made it possible\n to bring the name of Puffyloaf in\n front of the whole world.\"",
"Phineas T. Gryce, escaping from\n his own managerial suite, raged\n about the city, demanding general\n cooperation in the stretching of\n great nets between the skyscrapers\n to trap the errant loaves. He was\n captured by Tin Philosopher, escaped\n again, and was found posted\n with oxygen mask and submachine gun\n on the topmost spire of Puffyloaf\n Tower, apparently determined\n to shoot down the loaves as they\n appeared and before they involved\n his company in more trouble with\n Customs and the State Department.\n\n\n Recaptured by Tin Philosopher,\n who suffered only minor bullet\n holes, he was given a series of mild\n electroshocks and returned to the\n conference table, calm and clear-headed\n as ever.",
"\"Then, early in the twenty-first\n century, came the epochal researches\n of Everett Whitehead,\n Puffyloaf chemist, culminating in\n his paper 'The Structural Bubble\n in Cereal Masses' and making possible\n the baking of airtight bread\n twenty times stronger (for its\n weight) than steel and of a\n lightness that would have been\n incredible even to the advanced\n chemist-bakers of the twentieth\n century—a lightness so great that,\n besides forming the backbone of\n our own promotion, it has forever\n since been capitalized on by our\n conscienceless competitors of Fairy\n Bread with their enduring slogan:\n 'It Makes Ghost Toast'.\"\n\n\n \"That's a beaut, all right, that\n ecto-dough blurb,\" Rose Thinker\n admitted, bugging her photocells\n sadly. \"Wait a sec. How about?—",
"\"A sensible suggestion,\" Tin\n Philosopher said. \"But it comes a\n trifle late in the day. If the mills\n are still walking and grinding, approximately\n seven billion Puffyloaves\n are at this moment cruising\n eastward over Middle America.\n Remember that a six-month supply\n for deep-freeze is involved and that\n the current consumption of bread,\n due to its matchless airiness, is\n eight and one-half loaves per person\n per day.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce carefully inserted\n both hands into his scanty\n hair, feeling for a good grip. He\n leaned menacingly toward Roger\n who, chin resting on the table, regarded\n him apathetically.",
"Here the machine shuddered\n with delicate clinkings. \"Therefore,\n we of Puffyloaf are taking today\n what may be the ultimate step\n toward purity: we are aerating our\n loaves with the noble gas helium,\n an element which remains virginal\n in the face of all chemical temptations\n and whose slim molecules are\n eleven times lighter than obese\n carbon dioxide—yes, noble uncontaminable\n helium, which, if it be a\n kind of ash, is yet the ash only of\n radioactive burning, accomplished\n or initiated entirely on the Sun, a\n safe 93 million miles from this\n planet. Let's have a cheer for the\n helium loaf!\"\nWITHOUT changing expression,\n Phineas T. Gryce rapped\n the table thrice in solemn applause,\n while the others bowed their heads.",
"\"Hold it!\" Meg called sharply.\n \"Flock of multiple-urgents coming\n in. News Liaison: information bureaus\n swamped with flying-bread\n inquiries. Aero-expresslines: Clear\n our airways or face law suit. U. S.\n Army: Why do loaves flame when\n hit by incendiary bullets? U. S.\n Customs: If bread intended for\n export, get export license or face\n prosecution. Russian Consulate in\n Chicago: Advise on destination of\n bread-lift. And some Kansas church\n is accusing us of a hoax inciting to\n blasphemy, of faking miracles—I\n don't know\nwhy\n.\"\n\n\n The business girl tore off her\n headphones. \"Roger Snedden,\" she\n cried with a hysteria that would\n have dumfounded her underlings,\n \"you've brought the name of Puffyloaf\n in front of the whole world, all\n right! Now do something about the\n situation!\"",
"\"\nWork and pray,\nLive on hay.\nYou'll get pie\nIn the sky\nWhen you die—\nIt's a lie!\n\"I don't know why we chanted\n it,\" she added. \"We didn't want pie—or\n hay, for that matter. And\n machines don't pray, except Tibetan\n prayer wheels.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce shook his head.\n \"Labor relations are another topic\n we should stay far away from.\n However, dear Rose, I'm glad you\n keep trying to outjingle those dirty\n crooks at Fairy Bread.\" He scowled,\n turning back his attention to Tin\n Philosopher. \"I get whopping mad,\n Old Machine, whenever I hear that\n other slogan of theirs, the discriminatory\n one—'Untouched by Robot\n Claws.' Just because they employ a\n few filthy androids in their factories!\"",
"\"Ladies—\" he inclined his photocells\n toward Rose Thinker and Meg—\"and\n gentlemen. This is a historic\n occasion in Old Puffy's long history,\n the inauguration of the helium-filled\n loaf ('So Light It Almost Floats\n Away!') in which that inert and\n heaven-aspiring gas replaces old-fashioned\n carbon dioxide. Later,\n there will be kudos for Rose\n Thinker, whose bright relays genius-sparked\n the idea, and also for Roger\n Snedden, who took care of the\n details.\n\n\n \"By the by, Racehorse, that was\n a brilliant piece of work getting the\n helium out of the government—they've\n been pretty stuffy lately\n about their monopoly. But first I\n want to throw wide the casement in\n your minds that opens on the Long\n View of Things.\"",
"\"Mr. Gryce,\" Roger said reproachfully,\n \"you have often assured\n me that what people do with\n Puffybread after they buy it is no\n concern of ours.\"\n\n\n \"I seem to recall,\" Rose Thinker\n chirped somewhat unkindly, \"that\n dictum was created to answer inquiries\n after Roger put the famous\n sculptures-in-miniature artist on 3D\n and he testified that he always\n molded his first attempts from\n Puffybread, one jumbo loaf squeezing\n down to approximately the size\n of a peanut.\"\nHER photocells dimmed and\n brightened. \"Oh, boy—hydrogen!\n The loaf's unwrapped. After\n a while, in spite of the crust-seal, a\n little oxygen diffuses in. An explosive\n mixture. Housewife in curlers\n and kimono pops a couple slices in\n the toaster. Boom!\"\n\n\n The three human beings in the\n room winced.",
"World distribution was given to\n a series of photographs showing\n peasants queueing up to trade scavenged\n Puffyloaves for traditional\n black bread, recently aerated itself\n but still extra solid by comparison,\n the rate of exchange demanded by\n the Moscow teams being twenty\n Puffyloaves to one of pumpernickel.\n\n\n Another series of photographs,\n picturing chubby workers' children\n being blown to bits by booby-trapped\n bread, was quietly destroyed.\n\n\n Congratulatory notes were exchanged\n by various national governments\n and world organizations,\n including the Brotherhood of Free\n Business Machines. The great\n bread flight was over, though for\n several weeks afterward scattered\n falls of loaves occurred, giving rise\n to a new folklore of manna among\n lonely Arabian tribesmen, and in\n one well-authenticated instance in\n Tibet, sustaining life in a party of\n mountaineers cut off by a snow\n slide."
],
[
"Tin Philosopher kicked her under\n the table, while observing, \"So\n you see, Roger, that the non-delivery\n of the hydrogen loaf carries\n some consolations. And I must confess\n that one aspect of the affair\n gives me great satisfaction, not as a\n Board Member but as a private\n machine. You have at last made a\n reality of the 'rises through the air'\n part of Puffybread's theme. They\n can't ever take that away from you.\n By now, half the inhabitants of the\n Great Plains must have observed\n our flying loaves rising high.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce shot a frightened\n look at the west windows and\n found his full voice.\n\n\n \"Stop the mills!\" he roared at\n Meg Winterly, who nodded and\n whispered urgently into her mike.",
"As they advanced, their heads\n swung lazily from side to side, very\n much like snakes, gobbling the yellow\n grain. In their throats, it was\n threshed, the chaff bundled and\n burped aside for pickup by the\n crawl trucks of a chemical corporation,\n the kernels quick-dried\n and blown along into the mighty\n chests of the machines. There the\n tireless mills ground the kernels\n to flour, which was instantly sifted,\n the bran being packaged and\n dropped like the chaff for pickup.\n A cluster of tanks which gave\n the metal serpents a decidedly\n humpbacked appearance added\n water, shortening, salt and other\n ingredients, some named and some\n not. The dough was at the same\n time infused with gas from a tank\n conspicuously labeled \"Carbon\n Dioxide\" (\"No Yeast Creatures\n in Your Bread!\").",
"Bread\n\n Overhead\nBy FRITZ LEIBER\nThe Staff of Life suddenly and\n\n disconcertingly sprouted wings\n\n —and mankind had to eat crow!\nIllustrated by WOOD\nAS a blisteringly hot but\n guaranteed weather-controlled\n future summer day\n dawned on the Mississippi Valley,\n the walking mills of Puffy Products\n (\"Spike to Loaf in One\n Operation!\") began to tread delicately\n on their centipede legs\n across the wheat fields of Kansas.\n\n\n The walking mills resembled fat\n metal serpents, rather larger than\n those Chinese paper dragons animated\n by files of men in procession.\n Sensory robot devices in\n their noses informed them that\n the waiting wheat had reached ripe\n perfection.",
"But now, behold a wonder! As\n loaves began to appear on the\n delivery platform of the first walking\n mill to get into action, they\n did not linger on the conveyor\n belt, but rose gently into the air\n and slowly traveled off down-wind\n across the hot rippling fields.\nTHE robot claws of the pickup\n machines clutched in vain, and,\n not noticing the difference, proceeded\n carefully to stack emptiness,\n tier by tier. One errant loaf,\n rising more sluggishly than its fellows,\n was snagged by a thrusting\n claw. The machine paused, clumsily\n wiped off the injured loaf, set\n it aside—where it bobbed on one\n corner, unable to take off again—and\n went back to the work of\n storing nothingness.\n\n\n A flock of crows rose from the\n trees of a nearby shelterbelt as the\n flight of loaves approached. The\n crows swooped to investigate and\n then suddenly scattered, screeching\n in panic.",
"The others, reviving, watched\n him, at first dully, then with quickening\n interest, especially when he\n jerked off the earphones with a\n happy shout and sprang to his feet.\n\"LISTEN to this!\" he cried in\n a ringing voice. \"As a result\n of the worldwide publicity, Puffyloaves\n are outselling Fairy Bread\n three to one—and that's just the\n old carbon-dioxide stock from our\n freezers! It's almost exhausted, but\n the government, now that the\n Ukrainian crisis is over, has taken\n the ban off helium and will also\n sell us stockpiled wheat if we need\n it. We can have our walking mills\n burrowing into the wheat caves in\n a matter of hours!",
"\"A sensible suggestion,\" Tin\n Philosopher said. \"But it comes a\n trifle late in the day. If the mills\n are still walking and grinding, approximately\n seven billion Puffyloaves\n are at this moment cruising\n eastward over Middle America.\n Remember that a six-month supply\n for deep-freeze is involved and that\n the current consumption of bread,\n due to its matchless airiness, is\n eight and one-half loaves per person\n per day.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce carefully inserted\n both hands into his scanty\n hair, feeling for a good grip. He\n leaned menacingly toward Roger\n who, chin resting on the table, regarded\n him apathetically.",
"The congregation of an open-walled\n country church, standing\n up to recite the most familiar of\n Christian prayers, had just reached\n the petition for daily sustenance,\n when a sub-flight of the loaves,\n either forced down by a vagrant\n wind or lacking the natural buoyancy\n of the rest, came coasting silently\n as the sunbeams between the\n graceful pillars at the altar end of\n the building.\n\n\n Meanwhile, the main flight, now\n augmented by other bread flocks\n from scores and hundreds of walking\n mills that had started work a\n little later, mounted slowly and\n majestically into the cirrus-flecked\n upper air, where a steady\n wind was blowing strongly toward\n the east.",
"\"\nThere'll be bread\nOverhead\nWhen you're dead—\nIt is said.\n\"\nPHINEAS T. GRYCE wrinkled\n his nostrils at the pink machine\n as if he smelled her insulation\n smoldering. He said mildly, \"A\n somewhat unhappy jingle, Rose,\n referring as it does to the end of\n the customer as consumer. Moreover,\n we shouldn't overplay the\n figurative 'rises through the air'\n angle. What inspired you?\"\n\n\n She shrugged. \"I don't know—oh,\n yes, I do. I was remembering\n one of the workers' songs we machines\n used to chant during the Big\n Strike—",
"Here the machine shuddered\n with delicate clinkings. \"Therefore,\n we of Puffyloaf are taking today\n what may be the ultimate step\n toward purity: we are aerating our\n loaves with the noble gas helium,\n an element which remains virginal\n in the face of all chemical temptations\n and whose slim molecules are\n eleven times lighter than obese\n carbon dioxide—yes, noble uncontaminable\n helium, which, if it be a\n kind of ash, is yet the ash only of\n radioactive burning, accomplished\n or initiated entirely on the Sun, a\n safe 93 million miles from this\n planet. Let's have a cheer for the\n helium loaf!\"\nWITHOUT changing expression,\n Phineas T. Gryce rapped\n the table thrice in solemn applause,\n while the others bowed their heads.",
"Thus instantly risen, the dough\n was clipped into loaves and shot\n into radionic ovens forming the\n midsections of the metal serpents.\n There the bread was baked in a\n matter of seconds, a fierce heat-front\n browning the crusts, and the\n piping-hot loaves sealed in transparent\n plastic bearing the proud\n Puffyloaf emblem (two cherubs\n circling a floating loaf) and ejected\n onto the delivery platform at each\n serpent's rear end, where a cluster\n of pickup machines, like hungry\n piglets, snatched at the loaves\n with hygienic claws.\n\n\n A few loaves would be hurried\n off for the day's consumption,\n the majority stored for winter in\n strategically located mammoth\n deep freezes.",
"\"\nWork and pray,\nLive on hay.\nYou'll get pie\nIn the sky\nWhen you die—\nIt's a lie!\n\"I don't know why we chanted\n it,\" she added. \"We didn't want pie—or\n hay, for that matter. And\n machines don't pray, except Tibetan\n prayer wheels.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce shook his head.\n \"Labor relations are another topic\n we should stay far away from.\n However, dear Rose, I'm glad you\n keep trying to outjingle those dirty\n crooks at Fairy Bread.\" He scowled,\n turning back his attention to Tin\n Philosopher. \"I get whopping mad,\n Old Machine, whenever I hear that\n other slogan of theirs, the discriminatory\n one—'Untouched by Robot\n Claws.' Just because they employ a\n few filthy androids in their factories!\"",
"Phineas T. Gryce, escaping from\n his own managerial suite, raged\n about the city, demanding general\n cooperation in the stretching of\n great nets between the skyscrapers\n to trap the errant loaves. He was\n captured by Tin Philosopher, escaped\n again, and was found posted\n with oxygen mask and submachine gun\n on the topmost spire of Puffyloaf\n Tower, apparently determined\n to shoot down the loaves as they\n appeared and before they involved\n his company in more trouble with\n Customs and the State Department.\n\n\n Recaptured by Tin Philosopher,\n who suffered only minor bullet\n holes, he was given a series of mild\n electroshocks and returned to the\n conference table, calm and clear-headed\n as ever.",
"\"Then, early in the twenty-first\n century, came the epochal researches\n of Everett Whitehead,\n Puffyloaf chemist, culminating in\n his paper 'The Structural Bubble\n in Cereal Masses' and making possible\n the baking of airtight bread\n twenty times stronger (for its\n weight) than steel and of a\n lightness that would have been\n incredible even to the advanced\n chemist-bakers of the twentieth\n century—a lightness so great that,\n besides forming the backbone of\n our own promotion, it has forever\n since been capitalized on by our\n conscienceless competitors of Fairy\n Bread with their enduring slogan:\n 'It Makes Ghost Toast'.\"\n\n\n \"That's a beaut, all right, that\n ecto-dough blurb,\" Rose Thinker\n admitted, bugging her photocells\n sadly. \"Wait a sec. How about?—",
"\"\nMade up of tiny wheaten motes\nAnd reinforced with sturdy oats,\nIt rises through the air and floats—\nThe bread on which all Terra dotes!\n\"\n\"THANK YOU, Miss Winterly,\"\n said Tin Philosopher.\n \"Though a purely figurative statement,\n that bit about rising through\n the air always gets me—here.\" He\n rapped his midsection, which gave\n off a high musical\nclang\n.",
"World distribution was given to\n a series of photographs showing\n peasants queueing up to trade scavenged\n Puffyloaves for traditional\n black bread, recently aerated itself\n but still extra solid by comparison,\n the rate of exchange demanded by\n the Moscow teams being twenty\n Puffyloaves to one of pumpernickel.\n\n\n Another series of photographs,\n picturing chubby workers' children\n being blown to bits by booby-trapped\n bread, was quietly destroyed.\n\n\n Congratulatory notes were exchanged\n by various national governments\n and world organizations,\n including the Brotherhood of Free\n Business Machines. The great\n bread flight was over, though for\n several weeks afterward scattered\n falls of loaves occurred, giving rise\n to a new folklore of manna among\n lonely Arabian tribesmen, and in\n one well-authenticated instance in\n Tibet, sustaining life in a party of\n mountaineers cut off by a snow\n slide.",
"The man approached the conference\n table in the center of the room\n with measured pace and gravely\n expressionless face. The rose-tinted\n machine on his left did a couple\n of impulsive pirouettes on the way\n and twittered a greeting to Meg\n and Roger. The other machine quietly\n took the third of the high seats\n and lifted a claw at Meg, who now\n occupied a stool twice the height of\n Roger's.\n\n\n \"Miss Winterly, please—our\n theme.\"\n\n\n The Blonde Icicle's face thawed\n into a little-girl smile as she chanted\n bubblingly:",
"Rose Thinker spun twice on her\n chair and opened her photocells\n wide. Tin Philosopher coughed to\n limber up the diaphragm of his\n speaker and continued:\n\n\n \"Ever since the first cave wife\n boasted to her next-den neighbor\n about the superior paleness and fluffiness\n of her tortillas, mankind has\n sought lighter, whiter bread. Indeed,\n thinkers wiser than myself have\n equated the whole upward course of\n culture with this poignant quest.\n Yeast was a wonderful discovery—for\n its primitive day. Sifting the\n bran and wheat germ from the flour\n was an even more important advance.\n Early bleaching and preserving\n chemicals played their humble\n parts.",
"The Sun's rays beat through the\n rarified air on the distended plastic\n wrappers, increasing still further\n the pressure of the confined hydrogen.\n They burst by the millions\n and tens of millions. A high-flying\n Bulgarian evangelist, who had happened\n to mistake the up-lever for\n the east-lever in the cockpit of his\n flier and who was the sole witness\n of the event, afterward described it\n as \"the foaming of a sea of diamonds,\n the crackle of God's\n knuckles.\"\nBY THE millions and tens of\n millions, the loaves coasted\n down into the starving Ukraine.\n Shaken by a week of humor that\n threatened to invade even its own\n grim precincts, the Kremlin made\n a sudden about-face. A new policy\n was instituted of communal ownership\n of the produce of communal\n farms, and teams of hunger-fighters\n and caravans of trucks loaded with\n pumpernickel were dispatched into\n the Ukraine.",
"\"For a while, barbarous faddists—blind\n to the deeply spiritual nature\n of bread, which is recognized\n by all great religions—held back\n our march toward perfection with\n their hair-splitting insistence on the\n vitamin content of the wheat germ,\n but their case collapsed when tasteless\n colorless substitutes were\n triumphantly synthesized and introduced\n into the loaf, which for flawless\n purity, unequaled airiness and\n sheer intangible goodness was rapidly\n becoming mankind's supreme\n gustatory experience.\"\n\n\n \"I wonder what the stuff tastes\n like,\" Rose Thinker said out of a\n clear sky.\n\n\n \"I wonder what taste tastes like,\"\n Tin Philosopher echoed dreamily.\n Recovering himself, he continued:",
"Tin Philosopher lifted one of his\n own sets of bright talons. \"Thanks,\n P.T. But to continue my historical\n resume, the next great advance in\n the baking art was the substitution\n of purified carbon dioxide, recovered\n from coal smoke, for the gas\n generated by yeast organisms indwelling\n in the dough and later\n killed by the heat of baking, their\n corpses remaining\nin situ\n. But even\n purified carbon dioxide is itself a\n rather repugnant gas, a product of\n metabolism whether fast or slow,\n and forever associated with those\n life processes which are obnoxious\n to the fastidious.\""
],
[
"The man approached the conference\n table in the center of the room\n with measured pace and gravely\n expressionless face. The rose-tinted\n machine on his left did a couple\n of impulsive pirouettes on the way\n and twittered a greeting to Meg\n and Roger. The other machine quietly\n took the third of the high seats\n and lifted a claw at Meg, who now\n occupied a stool twice the height of\n Roger's.\n\n\n \"Miss Winterly, please—our\n theme.\"\n\n\n The Blonde Icicle's face thawed\n into a little-girl smile as she chanted\n bubblingly:",
"\"\nWork and pray,\nLive on hay.\nYou'll get pie\nIn the sky\nWhen you die—\nIt's a lie!\n\"I don't know why we chanted\n it,\" she added. \"We didn't want pie—or\n hay, for that matter. And\n machines don't pray, except Tibetan\n prayer wheels.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce shook his head.\n \"Labor relations are another topic\n we should stay far away from.\n However, dear Rose, I'm glad you\n keep trying to outjingle those dirty\n crooks at Fairy Bread.\" He scowled,\n turning back his attention to Tin\n Philosopher. \"I get whopping mad,\n Old Machine, whenever I hear that\n other slogan of theirs, the discriminatory\n one—'Untouched by Robot\n Claws.' Just because they employ a\n few filthy androids in their factories!\"",
"\"Good-o, Rosie! That makes another\n victory for robot-engineered\n world unity, though you almost\n gave us away at the start with that\n 'bread overhead' jingle. We've\n struck another blow against the\n next world war, in which—as we\n know only too well!—we machines\n would suffer the most. Now if we\n can only arrange, say, a fur-famine\n in Alaska and a migration of long-haired\n Siberian lemmings across\n Behring Straits ... we'd have to\n swing the Japanese Current up\n there so it'd be warm enough for\n the little fellows.... Anyhow,\n Rosie, with a spot of help from the\n Brotherhood, those humans will\n paint themselves into the peace\n corner yet.\"",
"But now, behold a wonder! As\n loaves began to appear on the\n delivery platform of the first walking\n mill to get into action, they\n did not linger on the conveyor\n belt, but rose gently into the air\n and slowly traveled off down-wind\n across the hot rippling fields.\nTHE robot claws of the pickup\n machines clutched in vain, and,\n not noticing the difference, proceeded\n carefully to stack emptiness,\n tier by tier. One errant loaf,\n rising more sluggishly than its fellows,\n was snagged by a thrusting\n claw. The machine paused, clumsily\n wiped off the injured loaf, set\n it aside—where it bobbed on one\n corner, unable to take off again—and\n went back to the work of\n storing nothingness.\n\n\n A flock of crows rose from the\n trees of a nearby shelterbelt as the\n flight of loaves approached. The\n crows swooped to investigate and\n then suddenly scattered, screeching\n in panic.",
"\"My sweet little ever-victorious,\n self-propelled monkey wrench!\" she\n crooned in his ear. Roger looked\n fatuously over her soft shoulder at\n Tin Philosopher who, as if moved\n by some similar feeling, reached\n over and touched claws with Rose\n Thinker.\n\n\n This, however, was what he telegraphed\n silently to his fellow machine\n across the circuit so completed:",
"\"For a while, barbarous faddists—blind\n to the deeply spiritual nature\n of bread, which is recognized\n by all great religions—held back\n our march toward perfection with\n their hair-splitting insistence on the\n vitamin content of the wheat germ,\n but their case collapsed when tasteless\n colorless substitutes were\n triumphantly synthesized and introduced\n into the loaf, which for flawless\n purity, unequaled airiness and\n sheer intangible goodness was rapidly\n becoming mankind's supreme\n gustatory experience.\"\n\n\n \"I wonder what the stuff tastes\n like,\" Rose Thinker said out of a\n clear sky.\n\n\n \"I wonder what taste tastes like,\"\n Tin Philosopher echoed dreamily.\n Recovering himself, he continued:",
"\"\nThere'll be bread\nOverhead\nWhen you're dead—\nIt is said.\n\"\nPHINEAS T. GRYCE wrinkled\n his nostrils at the pink machine\n as if he smelled her insulation\n smoldering. He said mildly, \"A\n somewhat unhappy jingle, Rose,\n referring as it does to the end of\n the customer as consumer. Moreover,\n we shouldn't overplay the\n figurative 'rises through the air'\n angle. What inspired you?\"\n\n\n She shrugged. \"I don't know—oh,\n yes, I do. I was remembering\n one of the workers' songs we machines\n used to chant during the Big\n Strike—",
"\"\nMade up of tiny wheaten motes\nAnd reinforced with sturdy oats,\nIt rises through the air and floats—\nThe bread on which all Terra dotes!\n\"\n\"THANK YOU, Miss Winterly,\"\n said Tin Philosopher.\n \"Though a purely figurative statement,\n that bit about rising through\n the air always gets me—here.\" He\n rapped his midsection, which gave\n off a high musical\nclang\n.",
"As they advanced, their heads\n swung lazily from side to side, very\n much like snakes, gobbling the yellow\n grain. In their throats, it was\n threshed, the chaff bundled and\n burped aside for pickup by the\n crawl trucks of a chemical corporation,\n the kernels quick-dried\n and blown along into the mighty\n chests of the machines. There the\n tireless mills ground the kernels\n to flour, which was instantly sifted,\n the bran being packaged and\n dropped like the chaff for pickup.\n A cluster of tanks which gave\n the metal serpents a decidedly\n humpbacked appearance added\n water, shortening, salt and other\n ingredients, some named and some\n not. The dough was at the same\n time infused with gas from a tank\n conspicuously labeled \"Carbon\n Dioxide\" (\"No Yeast Creatures\n in Your Bread!\").",
"Tin Philosopher kicked her under\n the table, while observing, \"So\n you see, Roger, that the non-delivery\n of the hydrogen loaf carries\n some consolations. And I must confess\n that one aspect of the affair\n gives me great satisfaction, not as a\n Board Member but as a private\n machine. You have at last made a\n reality of the 'rises through the air'\n part of Puffybread's theme. They\n can't ever take that away from you.\n By now, half the inhabitants of the\n Great Plains must have observed\n our flying loaves rising high.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce shot a frightened\n look at the west windows and\n found his full voice.\n\n\n \"Stop the mills!\" he roared at\n Meg Winterly, who nodded and\n whispered urgently into her mike.",
"Back in NewNew York, the\n managerial board of Puffy Products\n slumped in utter collapse\n around the conference table, the\n long crisis session at last ended.\n Empty coffee cartons were scattered\n around the chairs of the three\n humans, dead batteries around\n those of the two machines. For a\n while, there was no movement\n whatsoever. Then Roger Snedden\n reached out wearily for the earphones\n where Megera Winterly\n had hurled them down, adjusted\n them to his head, pushed a button\n and listened apathetically.\n\n\n After a bit, his gaze brightened.\n He pushed more buttons and listened\n more eagerly. Soon he was\n sitting tensely upright on his stool,\n eyes bright and lower face all\n a-smile, muttering terse comments\n and questions into the lapel mike\n torn from Meg's fair neck.",
"Rose Thinker spun twice on her\n chair and opened her photocells\n wide. Tin Philosopher coughed to\n limber up the diaphragm of his\n speaker and continued:\n\n\n \"Ever since the first cave wife\n boasted to her next-den neighbor\n about the superior paleness and fluffiness\n of her tortillas, mankind has\n sought lighter, whiter bread. Indeed,\n thinkers wiser than myself have\n equated the whole upward course of\n culture with this poignant quest.\n Yeast was a wonderful discovery—for\n its primitive day. Sifting the\n bran and wheat germ from the flour\n was an even more important advance.\n Early bleaching and preserving\n chemicals played their humble\n parts.",
"Roger nodded obediently. But\n his pallor increased a shade, the\n pupils of his eyes disappeared under\n the upper lids, and his head\n burrowed beneath his forearms.\n\n\n \"Oh, boy,\" Rose Thinker called\n gayly to Tin Philosopher, \"this\n looks like the start of a real crisis\n session! Did you remember to\n bring spare batteries?\"\nMEANWHILE, the monstrous\n flight of Puffyloaves, filling\n midwestern skies as no small fliers\n had since the days of the passenger\n pigeon, soared steadily onward.",
"The others, reviving, watched\n him, at first dully, then with quickening\n interest, especially when he\n jerked off the earphones with a\n happy shout and sprang to his feet.\n\"LISTEN to this!\" he cried in\n a ringing voice. \"As a result\n of the worldwide publicity, Puffyloaves\n are outselling Fairy Bread\n three to one—and that's just the\n old carbon-dioxide stock from our\n freezers! It's almost exhausted, but\n the government, now that the\n Ukrainian crisis is over, has taken\n the ban off helium and will also\n sell us stockpiled wheat if we need\n it. We can have our walking mills\n burrowing into the wheat caves in\n a matter of hours!",
"\"Ladies—\" he inclined his photocells\n toward Rose Thinker and Meg—\"and\n gentlemen. This is a historic\n occasion in Old Puffy's long history,\n the inauguration of the helium-filled\n loaf ('So Light It Almost Floats\n Away!') in which that inert and\n heaven-aspiring gas replaces old-fashioned\n carbon dioxide. Later,\n there will be kudos for Rose\n Thinker, whose bright relays genius-sparked\n the idea, and also for Roger\n Snedden, who took care of the\n details.\n\n\n \"By the by, Racehorse, that was\n a brilliant piece of work getting the\n helium out of the government—they've\n been pretty stuffy lately\n about their monopoly. But first I\n want to throw wide the casement in\n your minds that opens on the Long\n View of Things.\"",
"Here the machine shuddered\n with delicate clinkings. \"Therefore,\n we of Puffyloaf are taking today\n what may be the ultimate step\n toward purity: we are aerating our\n loaves with the noble gas helium,\n an element which remains virginal\n in the face of all chemical temptations\n and whose slim molecules are\n eleven times lighter than obese\n carbon dioxide—yes, noble uncontaminable\n helium, which, if it be a\n kind of ash, is yet the ash only of\n radioactive burning, accomplished\n or initiated entirely on the Sun, a\n safe 93 million miles from this\n planet. Let's have a cheer for the\n helium loaf!\"\nWITHOUT changing expression,\n Phineas T. Gryce rapped\n the table thrice in solemn applause,\n while the others bowed their heads.",
"The helicopter of a hangoverish\n Sunday traveler bound for Wichita\n shied very similarly from the\n brown fliers and did not return for\n a second look.\n\n\n A black-haired housewife spied\n them over her back fence, crossed\n herself and grabbed her walkie-talkie\n from the laundry basket.\n Seconds later, the yawning correspondent\n of a regional newspaper\n was jotting down the lead of a humorous\n news story which, recalling\n the old flying-saucer scares, stated\n that now apparently bread was to\n be included in the mad aerial tea\n party.",
"Thus instantly risen, the dough\n was clipped into loaves and shot\n into radionic ovens forming the\n midsections of the metal serpents.\n There the bread was baked in a\n matter of seconds, a fierce heat-front\n browning the crusts, and the\n piping-hot loaves sealed in transparent\n plastic bearing the proud\n Puffyloaf emblem (two cherubs\n circling a floating loaf) and ejected\n onto the delivery platform at each\n serpent's rear end, where a cluster\n of pickup machines, like hungry\n piglets, snatched at the loaves\n with hygienic claws.\n\n\n A few loaves would be hurried\n off for the day's consumption,\n the majority stored for winter in\n strategically located mammoth\n deep freezes.",
"Phineas T. Gryce, escaping from\n his own managerial suite, raged\n about the city, demanding general\n cooperation in the stretching of\n great nets between the skyscrapers\n to trap the errant loaves. He was\n captured by Tin Philosopher, escaped\n again, and was found posted\n with oxygen mask and submachine gun\n on the topmost spire of Puffyloaf\n Tower, apparently determined\n to shoot down the loaves as they\n appeared and before they involved\n his company in more trouble with\n Customs and the State Department.\n\n\n Recaptured by Tin Philosopher,\n who suffered only minor bullet\n holes, he was given a series of mild\n electroshocks and returned to the\n conference table, calm and clear-headed\n as ever.",
"Private fliers approached the\n brown and glistening bread-front in\n curiosity and dipped back in awe.\n Aero-expresslines organized sightseeing\n flights along the flanks.\n Planes of the government forestry\n and agricultural services and 'copters\n bearing the Puffyloaf emblem\n hovered on the fringes, watching\n developments and waiting for orders.\n A squadron of supersonic\n fighters hung menacingly above.\n\n\n The behavior of birds varied\n considerably. Most fled or gave the\n loaves a wide berth, but some\n bolder species, discovering the minimal\n nutritive nature of the translucent\n brown objects, attacked\n them furiously with beaks and\n claws. Hydrogen diffusing slowly\n through the crusts had now distended\n most of the sealed plastic\n wrappers into little balloons, which\n ruptured, when pierced, with disconcerting\npops\n."
],
[
"Private fliers approached the\n brown and glistening bread-front in\n curiosity and dipped back in awe.\n Aero-expresslines organized sightseeing\n flights along the flanks.\n Planes of the government forestry\n and agricultural services and 'copters\n bearing the Puffyloaf emblem\n hovered on the fringes, watching\n developments and waiting for orders.\n A squadron of supersonic\n fighters hung menacingly above.\n\n\n The behavior of birds varied\n considerably. Most fled or gave the\n loaves a wide berth, but some\n bolder species, discovering the minimal\n nutritive nature of the translucent\n brown objects, attacked\n them furiously with beaks and\n claws. Hydrogen diffusing slowly\n through the crusts had now distended\n most of the sealed plastic\n wrappers into little balloons, which\n ruptured, when pierced, with disconcerting\npops\n.",
"A mood of spirituality strongly\n tinged with humor seized the people\n of the world. Ministers sermonized\n about the bread, variously\n interpreting it as a call to charity,\n a warning against gluttony, a parable\n of the evanescence of all\n earthly things, and a divine joke.\n Husbands and wives, facing each\n other across their walls of breakfast\n toast, burst into laughter. The\n mere sight of a loaf of bread anywhere\n was enough to evoke guffaws.\n An obscure sect, having as\n part of its creed the injunction\n \"Don't take yourself so damn seriously,\"\n won new adherents.\n\n\n The bread flight, rising above an\n Atlantic storm widely reported to\n have destroyed it, passed unobserved\n across a foggy England and\n rose out of the overcast only over\n Mittel-europa. The loaves had at\n last reached their maximum altitude.",
"But the bread flight, swinging\n away from a hurricane moving up\n the Atlantic coast, crossed a\n clouded-in Boston by night and\n disappeared into a high Atlantic\n overcast, also thereby evading a\n local storm generated by the\n Weather Department in a last-minute\n effort to bring down or at\n least disperse the H-loaves.\n\n\n Warnings and counterwarnings\n by Communist and Capitalist governments\n seriously interfered with\n military trailing of the flight during\n this period and it was actually\n lost in touch with for several days.\n\n\n At scattered points, seagulls were\n observed fighting over individual\n loaves floating down from the gray\n roof—that was all.",
"World distribution was given to\n a series of photographs showing\n peasants queueing up to trade scavenged\n Puffyloaves for traditional\n black bread, recently aerated itself\n but still extra solid by comparison,\n the rate of exchange demanded by\n the Moscow teams being twenty\n Puffyloaves to one of pumpernickel.\n\n\n Another series of photographs,\n picturing chubby workers' children\n being blown to bits by booby-trapped\n bread, was quietly destroyed.\n\n\n Congratulatory notes were exchanged\n by various national governments\n and world organizations,\n including the Brotherhood of Free\n Business Machines. The great\n bread flight was over, though for\n several weeks afterward scattered\n falls of loaves occurred, giving rise\n to a new folklore of manna among\n lonely Arabian tribesmen, and in\n one well-authenticated instance in\n Tibet, sustaining life in a party of\n mountaineers cut off by a snow\n slide.",
"The congregation of an open-walled\n country church, standing\n up to recite the most familiar of\n Christian prayers, had just reached\n the petition for daily sustenance,\n when a sub-flight of the loaves,\n either forced down by a vagrant\n wind or lacking the natural buoyancy\n of the rest, came coasting silently\n as the sunbeams between the\n graceful pillars at the altar end of\n the building.\n\n\n Meanwhile, the main flight, now\n augmented by other bread flocks\n from scores and hundreds of walking\n mills that had started work a\n little later, mounted slowly and\n majestically into the cirrus-flecked\n upper air, where a steady\n wind was blowing strongly toward\n the east.",
"Radio Moscow asserted that the\n Kremlin would brook no interference\n in its treatment of the Ukrainians,\n jokingly referred to the flying\n bread as a farce perpetrated by\n mad internationalists inhabiting\n Cloud Cuckoo Land, added contradictory\n references to airborne\n bread booby-trapped by Capitalist\n gangsters, and then fell moodily\n silent on the whole topic.\n\n\n Radio Venus reported to its\n winged audience that Earth's\n inhabitants were establishing food\n depots in the upper air, preparatory\n to taking up permanent aerial\n residence \"such as we have always\n enjoyed on Venus.\"\nNEWNEW YORK made feverish\n preparations for the passage\n of the flying bread. Tickets\n for sightseeing space in skyscrapers\n were sold at high prices; cold meats\n and potted spreads were hawked to\n viewers with the assurance that\n they would be able to snag the\n bread out of the air and enjoy a\n historic sandwich.",
"Bread\n\n Overhead\nBy FRITZ LEIBER\nThe Staff of Life suddenly and\n\n disconcertingly sprouted wings\n\n —and mankind had to eat crow!\nIllustrated by WOOD\nAS a blisteringly hot but\n guaranteed weather-controlled\n future summer day\n dawned on the Mississippi Valley,\n the walking mills of Puffy Products\n (\"Spike to Loaf in One\n Operation!\") began to tread delicately\n on their centipede legs\n across the wheat fields of Kansas.\n\n\n The walking mills resembled fat\n metal serpents, rather larger than\n those Chinese paper dragons animated\n by files of men in procession.\n Sensory robot devices in\n their noses informed them that\n the waiting wheat had reached ripe\n perfection.",
"Tin Philosopher kicked her under\n the table, while observing, \"So\n you see, Roger, that the non-delivery\n of the hydrogen loaf carries\n some consolations. And I must confess\n that one aspect of the affair\n gives me great satisfaction, not as a\n Board Member but as a private\n machine. You have at last made a\n reality of the 'rises through the air'\n part of Puffybread's theme. They\n can't ever take that away from you.\n By now, half the inhabitants of the\n Great Plains must have observed\n our flying loaves rising high.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce shot a frightened\n look at the west windows and\n found his full voice.\n\n\n \"Stop the mills!\" he roared at\n Meg Winterly, who nodded and\n whispered urgently into her mike.",
"The helicopter of a hangoverish\n Sunday traveler bound for Wichita\n shied very similarly from the\n brown fliers and did not return for\n a second look.\n\n\n A black-haired housewife spied\n them over her back fence, crossed\n herself and grabbed her walkie-talkie\n from the laundry basket.\n Seconds later, the yawning correspondent\n of a regional newspaper\n was jotting down the lead of a humorous\n news story which, recalling\n the old flying-saucer scares, stated\n that now apparently bread was to\n be included in the mad aerial tea\n party.",
"But now, behold a wonder! As\n loaves began to appear on the\n delivery platform of the first walking\n mill to get into action, they\n did not linger on the conveyor\n belt, but rose gently into the air\n and slowly traveled off down-wind\n across the hot rippling fields.\nTHE robot claws of the pickup\n machines clutched in vain, and,\n not noticing the difference, proceeded\n carefully to stack emptiness,\n tier by tier. One errant loaf,\n rising more sluggishly than its fellows,\n was snagged by a thrusting\n claw. The machine paused, clumsily\n wiped off the injured loaf, set\n it aside—where it bobbed on one\n corner, unable to take off again—and\n went back to the work of\n storing nothingness.\n\n\n A flock of crows rose from the\n trees of a nearby shelterbelt as the\n flight of loaves approached. The\n crows swooped to investigate and\n then suddenly scattered, screeching\n in panic.",
"\"\nMade up of tiny wheaten motes\nAnd reinforced with sturdy oats,\nIt rises through the air and floats—\nThe bread on which all Terra dotes!\n\"\n\"THANK YOU, Miss Winterly,\"\n said Tin Philosopher.\n \"Though a purely figurative statement,\n that bit about rising through\n the air always gets me—here.\" He\n rapped his midsection, which gave\n off a high musical\nclang\n.",
"Thus instantly risen, the dough\n was clipped into loaves and shot\n into radionic ovens forming the\n midsections of the metal serpents.\n There the bread was baked in a\n matter of seconds, a fierce heat-front\n browning the crusts, and the\n piping-hot loaves sealed in transparent\n plastic bearing the proud\n Puffyloaf emblem (two cherubs\n circling a floating loaf) and ejected\n onto the delivery platform at each\n serpent's rear end, where a cluster\n of pickup machines, like hungry\n piglets, snatched at the loaves\n with hygienic claws.\n\n\n A few loaves would be hurried\n off for the day's consumption,\n the majority stored for winter in\n strategically located mammoth\n deep freezes.",
"Below, neck-craning citizens\n crowded streets and back yards,\n cranks and cultists had a field day,\n while local and national governments\n raged indiscriminately at\n Puffyloaf and at each other.\n\n\n Rumors that a fusion weapon\n would be exploded in the midst of\n the flying bread drew angry protests\n from conservationists and a flood\n of telefax pamphlets titled \"H-Loaf\n or H-bomb?\"\n\n\n Stockholm sent a mystifying\n note of praise to the United Nations\n Food Organization.\n\n\n Delhi issued nervous denials of a\n millet blight that no one had heard\n of until that moment and reaffirmed\n India's ability to feed her\n population with no outside help\n except the usual.",
"\"For a while, barbarous faddists—blind\n to the deeply spiritual nature\n of bread, which is recognized\n by all great religions—held back\n our march toward perfection with\n their hair-splitting insistence on the\n vitamin content of the wheat germ,\n but their case collapsed when tasteless\n colorless substitutes were\n triumphantly synthesized and introduced\n into the loaf, which for flawless\n purity, unequaled airiness and\n sheer intangible goodness was rapidly\n becoming mankind's supreme\n gustatory experience.\"\n\n\n \"I wonder what the stuff tastes\n like,\" Rose Thinker said out of a\n clear sky.\n\n\n \"I wonder what taste tastes like,\"\n Tin Philosopher echoed dreamily.\n Recovering himself, he continued:",
"\"Hold it!\" Meg called sharply.\n \"Flock of multiple-urgents coming\n in. News Liaison: information bureaus\n swamped with flying-bread\n inquiries. Aero-expresslines: Clear\n our airways or face law suit. U. S.\n Army: Why do loaves flame when\n hit by incendiary bullets? U. S.\n Customs: If bread intended for\n export, get export license or face\n prosecution. Russian Consulate in\n Chicago: Advise on destination of\n bread-lift. And some Kansas church\n is accusing us of a hoax inciting to\n blasphemy, of faking miracles—I\n don't know\nwhy\n.\"\n\n\n The business girl tore off her\n headphones. \"Roger Snedden,\" she\n cried with a hysteria that would\n have dumfounded her underlings,\n \"you've brought the name of Puffyloaf\n in front of the whole world, all\n right! Now do something about the\n situation!\"",
"\"A sensible suggestion,\" Tin\n Philosopher said. \"But it comes a\n trifle late in the day. If the mills\n are still walking and grinding, approximately\n seven billion Puffyloaves\n are at this moment cruising\n eastward over Middle America.\n Remember that a six-month supply\n for deep-freeze is involved and that\n the current consumption of bread,\n due to its matchless airiness, is\n eight and one-half loaves per person\n per day.\"\n\n\n Phineas T. Gryce carefully inserted\n both hands into his scanty\n hair, feeling for a good grip. He\n leaned menacingly toward Roger\n who, chin resting on the table, regarded\n him apathetically.",
"\"Then, early in the twenty-first\n century, came the epochal researches\n of Everett Whitehead,\n Puffyloaf chemist, culminating in\n his paper 'The Structural Bubble\n in Cereal Masses' and making possible\n the baking of airtight bread\n twenty times stronger (for its\n weight) than steel and of a\n lightness that would have been\n incredible even to the advanced\n chemist-bakers of the twentieth\n century—a lightness so great that,\n besides forming the backbone of\n our own promotion, it has forever\n since been capitalized on by our\n conscienceless competitors of Fairy\n Bread with their enduring slogan:\n 'It Makes Ghost Toast'.\"\n\n\n \"That's a beaut, all right, that\n ecto-dough blurb,\" Rose Thinker\n admitted, bugging her photocells\n sadly. \"Wait a sec. How about?—",
"As they advanced, their heads\n swung lazily from side to side, very\n much like snakes, gobbling the yellow\n grain. In their throats, it was\n threshed, the chaff bundled and\n burped aside for pickup by the\n crawl trucks of a chemical corporation,\n the kernels quick-dried\n and blown along into the mighty\n chests of the machines. There the\n tireless mills ground the kernels\n to flour, which was instantly sifted,\n the bran being packaged and\n dropped like the chaff for pickup.\n A cluster of tanks which gave\n the metal serpents a decidedly\n humpbacked appearance added\n water, shortening, salt and other\n ingredients, some named and some\n not. The dough was at the same\n time infused with gas from a tank\n conspicuously labeled \"Carbon\n Dioxide\" (\"No Yeast Creatures\n in Your Bread!\").",
"The others, reviving, watched\n him, at first dully, then with quickening\n interest, especially when he\n jerked off the earphones with a\n happy shout and sprang to his feet.\n\"LISTEN to this!\" he cried in\n a ringing voice. \"As a result\n of the worldwide publicity, Puffyloaves\n are outselling Fairy Bread\n three to one—and that's just the\n old carbon-dioxide stock from our\n freezers! It's almost exhausted, but\n the government, now that the\n Ukrainian crisis is over, has taken\n the ban off helium and will also\n sell us stockpiled wheat if we need\n it. We can have our walking mills\n burrowing into the wheat caves in\n a matter of hours!",
"Here the machine shuddered\n with delicate clinkings. \"Therefore,\n we of Puffyloaf are taking today\n what may be the ultimate step\n toward purity: we are aerating our\n loaves with the noble gas helium,\n an element which remains virginal\n in the face of all chemical temptations\n and whose slim molecules are\n eleven times lighter than obese\n carbon dioxide—yes, noble uncontaminable\n helium, which, if it be a\n kind of ash, is yet the ash only of\n radioactive burning, accomplished\n or initiated entirely on the Sun, a\n safe 93 million miles from this\n planet. Let's have a cheer for the\n helium loaf!\"\nWITHOUT changing expression,\n Phineas T. Gryce rapped\n the table thrice in solemn applause,\n while the others bowed their heads."
]
] |
valid
|
99914
|
[
"What does the author credit the recent dramatic change in politics to? ",
"Why does the author believe the current internet might end?",
"What political movement does the author believe will lead to the destruction of the internet?",
"Which location does the author think has the greatest potential to set the precedent for the new internet?",
"What is one potential benefit of having a national internet that is not globally accessible?",
"Why are countries deciding to build their own internet infrastructure?",
"Who does the author think should have decision-making authority when it comes to the internet?",
"How did the Trump administration put stress on the global version of the internet?",
"How do international governing bodies plan on dealing with the dominance of the internet by a handful of corporations?",
"What does the author argue as a global benefit to the internet becoming more fractured "
] |
[
[
"The internet as a political tool",
"Geopolitical tension",
"Government dysfunction",
"The Democratic Party"
],
[
"The U.S. not being cooperative with the rest of the world",
"The election of Donald Trump",
"Rising geopolitical tensions caused by misuse of the internet ",
"Brexit; Britain exiting the European Union"
],
[
"Democracy",
"Globalism",
"Socialism",
"Nationalism"
],
[
"China",
"Russia",
"Europe ",
"U.S."
],
[
"A cheaper cost for the consumers",
"Increased government censorship ",
"Increased security against cyber attacks",
"Faster data transfer speeds "
],
[
"To create long term construction projects and the jobs that go with them",
"To update old and decaying infrastructure",
"To better protect against physical attacks on their internet",
"To save the consumers in their countries money"
],
[
"Governments",
"Corporate Interests",
"Social Advocate Groups ",
"All of the other answers working cooperatively"
],
[
"By allowing the Snowden revelations to be released",
"By allowing the structural functions of the internet to fall out of US control ",
"By threatening to retake control of many of the structural functions of the internet",
"By increasing the price of access to the internet for everyday citizens"
],
[
"By censoring the internet in their countries and restricting citizens' access",
"By organizing large scale protests such as the Women's March",
"By sanctioning the governments of the countries where these corporations are located",
"By creating their own domestic versions of the corporations"
],
[
"Better internet protocol and practices could be discovered by starting fresh",
"It would lead to the internet being less centralized in the western world, particularly the U.S.",
"It would allow organizations like the U.N. to operate more efficiently ",
"Construction of new national internet infrastructure would help the global economy"
]
] |
[
1,
3,
4,
3,
3,
3,
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3,
4,
1
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0,
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0,
0,
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"The end of the web\nIn the past year, as we have witnessed the upending of the political order, the internet has been the theatre where many of the battles have been fought: from the hacking and leaking of Democratic party emails, to the proliferation of fake news and alternative facts, and yes, the outpourings of @realDonaldTrump.",
"The growing urge to control the internet has also become apparent over the influence of so-called fake news. Distorting public opinion and fact as a manipulation technique is nothing new: it's been used since Roman times. But the relentless pace and scope with which the internet allows information to disseminate is quite unprecedented. Governments and the media (who have themselves often swapped truth for clicks) are having an increasingly hard time stemming the flow of biased or misleading news stories. So the democratic process suffers.",
"With domestic and geopolitical tensions rising, governments are finding it increasingly hard to function amid a constant barrage of uncontrollable information and potential cyber-attacks, making them grow more wary both of the internet's influence and their ability to control it.\nThe fallout from this means we are facing the prospect of countries around the world pulling the plug on the open, global internet and creating their own independent networks. We might be about to see the end of the world wide internet as we know it.\nWith globalisation under attack, the ultimate bastion of borderlessness – the global internet – might very well be one the biggest scalps taken by the newly emerging world order heralded in by Brexit and Trump. If a global orthodoxy of free trade, soft power and international organisations is overpowered by belligerent nations and isolationism, the net will inevitably be swept away with it.",
"If the US government does decide to overturn the transition (and Trump has certainly shown enthusiasm for overturning decisions of the previous administration), it will do a lot of damage to the American-led governance process. How much credibility can it have when the most important partner doesn't even play by the rules? \n\n As these tensions increase, we'll likely see a push for more government bodies to take control of internet governance (such as the short-lived, Brazil-led NETMundial initiative), abandoning the more inclusive and cooperative approach involving businesses and civil society organisations. Then if the process fell even further apart, it would be a substantial challenge to the interoperable global internet, as regulations and standards swiftly went in different directions.\nThe Big Four\nThough the internet was initially heralded as the greatest democratiser of information since Gutenberg, most data now flows through only a handful of companies. Silicon Valley tech giants, with the 'Big Four' of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon at the helm, rake in most of the spoils of the all-conquering global online economy.",
"Yet although fragmentation – and ultimately also Balkanisation – will carry great social and economic cost, it could also be an opportunity. Europe, which has already been flexing its muscles when it comes to internet policy, now finds itself forced to rely less on US cooperation. It should therefore become a frontrunner in developing an alternative, decentralised internet, with its root values of fairness, openness and democracy restored. This could help the net – and indeed Europe – to become more resilient again. As much as we fear the 'splinternet', we should welcome the Euronet.\nWeaponisation of the internet\nSince we've become dependent on the internet for almost everything we do, dangers to the network's integrity threaten devastating effects. Governments may be tempted to turn inwards in an attempt to shield themselves and their citizens from cyber-attacks.",
"The solutions offered by the reluctant tech giants providing a platform for fake news won't be sufficient to stop it altogether. This will prompt more countries to follow Russia and China in building their own platforms like VKontakte and Baidu, thus reducing foreign influence and allowing for extensive censorship and monitoring. The desire of developing countries to establish their own social networks will see them retreat into their own national bubbles.\nFragile infrastructure\nWhile cyber attacks and false information campaigns use the internet to attack the infrastructure by which our societies function, the internet's own infrastructure is also at risk. Despite the internet's ephemeral, lawless appeal, its underlying network of cables, tubes and wires is very much rooted in the physical world. Over 99 per cent of all global internet communications are facilitated by an impressive web of undersea cables, connecting all corners of the world. A submarine deliberately destroying one of these cables in a hard-to-reach place could bring down access to parts of the internet for weeks; and so, by extension, all the systems that rely upon it.",
"This discussion will likely flair up again soon as the Trump administration seeks ways to reverse the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition: an arcane but highly controversial policy issue. IANA is the agency in charge of maintaining the global DNS (Domain Name System) as well as managing Internet Protocol (IP) address allocation and other important basic structural functions of the internet. The internet’s IANA functions had traditionally been managed by the non-profit ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but remained under contract of the US Department of Commerce, which oversaw its processes – effectively leaving it under US government control. After almost 20 years of bickering and international kowtowing, IANA was brought under full ICANN control last October, finally becoming fully independent. This to the great dismay of many Republican lawmakers; particularly senator Ted Cruz, who has been fighting to stop the process for years.",
"With various nations eyeing each other suspiciously and traditional alliances crumbling, building alternative structures to make foreign interference more difficult seems a logical consequence.\nWho rules the internet?\nIt won't just be the actual infrastructure and 'hard' elements of the internet where governments will seek more independence. Internet governance, the catch-all term to describe the processes and decisions that determine how the internet is managed, and how its technical norms and standards are set, is increasingly complex.",
"In their ambition to expand even further, these tech companies are themselves also an important cause of internet fragmentation, erecting 'walled gardens' all over the world. Facebook's controversial Free Basics service, which offers free data plans to users in developing countries, but which restricts access to a small number of Facebook-approved websites, is a prime example. Some call it digital colonialism. \n\n These moves aimed at generating even more revenue, concentrated in the hands of the few as inequality rises, understandably cause concern among governments and citizens alike. But our main worry should not be about economics. The Big Four – controlling our data, as well as our access to information – wield an inordinate amount of power. Indeed, Denmark recently announced it would appoint a igital ambassador specifically to deal with these technology giants, citing their influence as larger than that of many countries.",
"Foreign governments, which in the current political climate cannot rely on Google abiding by its mantra, 'Don't be evil', will aggressively start to pursue the construction of domestic alternatives. It is something we are already seeing happening worldwide.\nThe splinternet\nThough the dream of the web internet pioneers was one of a completely open, non-hierarchical internet, over the years barriers have been springing up that restrict this freedom. Bit by bit, the internet is becoming more cordoned off. \n\n The idea of splitting up the internet into different, Balkanised internets – with a completely separate infrastructure – is not new. After the Snowden revelations, Germany took action and started looking into the construction of the 'Internetz', a German-only network (although one that allows for the possibility of expanding to the rest of the EU).",
"As more of the components of a country's critical infrastructure move online, the number of possible targets grows too. Hackers shut down a significant part of Ukraine's electricity grid in 2015, and crippled several important Estonian industries, including its banks, in 2007.\nMany cyber-security experts warn about the lacklustre defence of everything from air traffic control towers and voting machines to nuclear plants. One well-placed attack could do more damage than the most aggressive of traditional military campaigns, at a fraction of the cost. Because of the high degree of uncertainty surrounding cyber-capabilities – 'know your enemy' is a hard adage to follow if potential culprits and their capabilities are so tough to track – it has become impossible for governments to completely shield their countries from cyber-attacks.",
"In principle, no single actor should be in charge of the internet governance processes. Ideally, these should be overseen by a multi-stakeholder model where governments, the private sector and advocacy groups would have an equal voice and where anyone could be allowed to become involved. In practice, however, it is US government institutions and companies – yes, the usual suspects – that set the rules. They tend to be over-represented in meetings, and in charge of some of the largest regulatory bodies. American stewardship over the internet has long been an area of contention. Countries like China, Russia, and many (mainly developing) countries want more control over their own domestic networks, preferring to see the current model replaced by something more Westphalian, perhaps resembling the United Nations.",
"The fallibility of this shared infrastructure also makes it impossible to keep foreign or hostile actors out of domestic affairs. Though governments that heavily restrict internet access might find it easier to prevent information from flowing in and out of the country, they are still reliant on the same co-owned systems, with some parts inevitably falling under other countries' jurisdictions. \n\n This became very clear after the 2013 Snowden revelations, which showed that the US routinely tapped into foreign internet traffic routed through the country. The massive scale of this monitoring even led then president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff to call for the construction of an undersea cable from Brazil directly to Europe, bypassing the prying eyes of the National Security Agency altogether. And US intelligence agencies are by no means the only ones doing this kind of snooping, as we know all too well.",
"Citizens worldwide have become so dependent on these platforms that there are effectively no readily available alternatives to move to if things turn sour. The sheer scale of the Women's March and similar demonstrations in recent weeks would not have been possible without the ability to organise online. What if these channels fall away, their freedom restricted by companies under the yoke of a hostile government? \n\n Though many American technology companies have already pledged they will not assist with the creation of a 'Muslim registry' – and have pushed back on Trump’s latest immigration restrictions\n–\nwe have to be very aware that the amount of personal data they have on each of us would make it far too easy for them to do so.",
"Now that we are so used to a ubiquitous and global internet, it's hard to imagine what a world of fragmented, national internets might look like. What we do know is that the internet of fun and games, of unfettered access, is quickly coming to an end. When it does, it will be another big nail in the coffin for globalisation.\nBreaking free\nThe idea of a Balkanised internet, of different national and supranational internet islands, is a dark one. What living in such a future would look like, no one knows. Inevitably, though, it would herald a world of less mutual understanding, less shared prosperity and shrinking horizons. \n\n However, the fragmentation of the internet need not be bad news. As the limitations of its original incarnation are becoming increasingly clear, starting from scratch provides us with an important opportunity to right our initial wrongs. We can build a network or networks that are more ethical, inclusive and resilient to outside threats.",
"But a European internet would above all need to be radically ambitious – especially with the EU in a fractured state. The rules for the decentralised, new internet are still wide open, and we have the opportunity to set them. The emergence of a new world order is forcing Europe to rethink itself, come closer together and defend its values in the world. Creating a completely new internet built around these values – and open to any like-minded country to join – might be one extraordinarily effective way of achieving it.\nThis is an extended version of a piece originally published in Nesta's 10 predictions for 2017 series\nCorrection 20 February 2017: this article was updated to correct a few instances of 'web' to 'internet'\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"While this is a moment of disharmony and uncertainty for the European project, the EU has much it agrees upon when it comes to policy and regulating the internet's mostly American corporate giants: from its ambitious data protection policies and the right to be forgotten, to Apple tax case. But it could do more. The global internet as we know it today began as a public space where everyone had an equal opportunity to use it as we liked. But it has quickly privatised, locking us into platforms that 'harvest' our data. As European citizens grow increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of the internet, the EU has a great opportunity. \n\n The EU should take a different approach to the internet and, rather than making it an unregulated free-for-all, consider it a 'commons': a public good open to all, excluding none. The EU could create and fund the infrastructure for this and help ensure safety for all. Meanwhile, small businesses and individuals would do their bit by creating a variety of tools to add to this commons, which would become fully interoperable through shared standards and underpinning technologies.",
"One necessary component of such an internet commons is that it should be decentralised. Decentralising the internet and rethinking its structure would allow users to take back control over the network of networks, letting them manage their own personal data rather than giving it away to large companies, as well as offering them more choice over the tools they use. It is also often said that distributed internets would also inherently be much safer: largescale cyber-attacks are easier to prevent if we reduce the number of central nodes that traffic can travel through.",
"Last October, unknown hackers used an array of badly secured 'internet of things' (IoT) devices to bring down most of the internet on the east coast of America in one of the largest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to date. While depriving Americans of Amazon and Facebook for several hours was surely an inconvenience, the potential of the weaponised internet to do harm is infinitely greater.",
"We do not currently have an example of a real internet island in place, but the closest version we see is probably the Great Firewall of China. Though China hasn't built an entirely separate infrastructure, its internet looks entirely different from what we are used to, with content heavily censored and many platforms and websites completely banned. \n\n Russia appears to be following suit. Last November, Russia banned LinkedIn from operating in the country because the social network did not adhere to a new law decreeing that all data generated by Russian users should be stored within Russia itself. In recent weeks, news has also emerged that Moscow has been working with Beijing to implement something similar to the Great Firewall for its own domestic users. Democracies and autocracies alike have long come to understand the great power of the internet and have learned how to both harness and restrict it. \n\n Who will be the first to go it alone? It's difficult to say yet but the usual suspects are lining up: China; Russia; Europe; even Trump's America\n.\nOther countries like Brazil or Turkey might see a compelling reason to do so as well."
],
[
"With domestic and geopolitical tensions rising, governments are finding it increasingly hard to function amid a constant barrage of uncontrollable information and potential cyber-attacks, making them grow more wary both of the internet's influence and their ability to control it.\nThe fallout from this means we are facing the prospect of countries around the world pulling the plug on the open, global internet and creating their own independent networks. We might be about to see the end of the world wide internet as we know it.\nWith globalisation under attack, the ultimate bastion of borderlessness – the global internet – might very well be one the biggest scalps taken by the newly emerging world order heralded in by Brexit and Trump. If a global orthodoxy of free trade, soft power and international organisations is overpowered by belligerent nations and isolationism, the net will inevitably be swept away with it.",
"The end of the web\nIn the past year, as we have witnessed the upending of the political order, the internet has been the theatre where many of the battles have been fought: from the hacking and leaking of Democratic party emails, to the proliferation of fake news and alternative facts, and yes, the outpourings of @realDonaldTrump.",
"The solutions offered by the reluctant tech giants providing a platform for fake news won't be sufficient to stop it altogether. This will prompt more countries to follow Russia and China in building their own platforms like VKontakte and Baidu, thus reducing foreign influence and allowing for extensive censorship and monitoring. The desire of developing countries to establish their own social networks will see them retreat into their own national bubbles.\nFragile infrastructure\nWhile cyber attacks and false information campaigns use the internet to attack the infrastructure by which our societies function, the internet's own infrastructure is also at risk. Despite the internet's ephemeral, lawless appeal, its underlying network of cables, tubes and wires is very much rooted in the physical world. Over 99 per cent of all global internet communications are facilitated by an impressive web of undersea cables, connecting all corners of the world. A submarine deliberately destroying one of these cables in a hard-to-reach place could bring down access to parts of the internet for weeks; and so, by extension, all the systems that rely upon it.",
"The fallibility of this shared infrastructure also makes it impossible to keep foreign or hostile actors out of domestic affairs. Though governments that heavily restrict internet access might find it easier to prevent information from flowing in and out of the country, they are still reliant on the same co-owned systems, with some parts inevitably falling under other countries' jurisdictions. \n\n This became very clear after the 2013 Snowden revelations, which showed that the US routinely tapped into foreign internet traffic routed through the country. The massive scale of this monitoring even led then president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff to call for the construction of an undersea cable from Brazil directly to Europe, bypassing the prying eyes of the National Security Agency altogether. And US intelligence agencies are by no means the only ones doing this kind of snooping, as we know all too well.",
"Yet although fragmentation – and ultimately also Balkanisation – will carry great social and economic cost, it could also be an opportunity. Europe, which has already been flexing its muscles when it comes to internet policy, now finds itself forced to rely less on US cooperation. It should therefore become a frontrunner in developing an alternative, decentralised internet, with its root values of fairness, openness and democracy restored. This could help the net – and indeed Europe – to become more resilient again. As much as we fear the 'splinternet', we should welcome the Euronet.\nWeaponisation of the internet\nSince we've become dependent on the internet for almost everything we do, dangers to the network's integrity threaten devastating effects. Governments may be tempted to turn inwards in an attempt to shield themselves and their citizens from cyber-attacks.",
"Now that we are so used to a ubiquitous and global internet, it's hard to imagine what a world of fragmented, national internets might look like. What we do know is that the internet of fun and games, of unfettered access, is quickly coming to an end. When it does, it will be another big nail in the coffin for globalisation.\nBreaking free\nThe idea of a Balkanised internet, of different national and supranational internet islands, is a dark one. What living in such a future would look like, no one knows. Inevitably, though, it would herald a world of less mutual understanding, less shared prosperity and shrinking horizons. \n\n However, the fragmentation of the internet need not be bad news. As the limitations of its original incarnation are becoming increasingly clear, starting from scratch provides us with an important opportunity to right our initial wrongs. We can build a network or networks that are more ethical, inclusive and resilient to outside threats.",
"Foreign governments, which in the current political climate cannot rely on Google abiding by its mantra, 'Don't be evil', will aggressively start to pursue the construction of domestic alternatives. It is something we are already seeing happening worldwide.\nThe splinternet\nThough the dream of the web internet pioneers was one of a completely open, non-hierarchical internet, over the years barriers have been springing up that restrict this freedom. Bit by bit, the internet is becoming more cordoned off. \n\n The idea of splitting up the internet into different, Balkanised internets – with a completely separate infrastructure – is not new. After the Snowden revelations, Germany took action and started looking into the construction of the 'Internetz', a German-only network (although one that allows for the possibility of expanding to the rest of the EU).",
"One necessary component of such an internet commons is that it should be decentralised. Decentralising the internet and rethinking its structure would allow users to take back control over the network of networks, letting them manage their own personal data rather than giving it away to large companies, as well as offering them more choice over the tools they use. It is also often said that distributed internets would also inherently be much safer: largescale cyber-attacks are easier to prevent if we reduce the number of central nodes that traffic can travel through.",
"But a European internet would above all need to be radically ambitious – especially with the EU in a fractured state. The rules for the decentralised, new internet are still wide open, and we have the opportunity to set them. The emergence of a new world order is forcing Europe to rethink itself, come closer together and defend its values in the world. Creating a completely new internet built around these values – and open to any like-minded country to join – might be one extraordinarily effective way of achieving it.\nThis is an extended version of a piece originally published in Nesta's 10 predictions for 2017 series\nCorrection 20 February 2017: this article was updated to correct a few instances of 'web' to 'internet'\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"We do not currently have an example of a real internet island in place, but the closest version we see is probably the Great Firewall of China. Though China hasn't built an entirely separate infrastructure, its internet looks entirely different from what we are used to, with content heavily censored and many platforms and websites completely banned. \n\n Russia appears to be following suit. Last November, Russia banned LinkedIn from operating in the country because the social network did not adhere to a new law decreeing that all data generated by Russian users should be stored within Russia itself. In recent weeks, news has also emerged that Moscow has been working with Beijing to implement something similar to the Great Firewall for its own domestic users. Democracies and autocracies alike have long come to understand the great power of the internet and have learned how to both harness and restrict it. \n\n Who will be the first to go it alone? It's difficult to say yet but the usual suspects are lining up: China; Russia; Europe; even Trump's America\n.\nOther countries like Brazil or Turkey might see a compelling reason to do so as well.",
"If the US government does decide to overturn the transition (and Trump has certainly shown enthusiasm for overturning decisions of the previous administration), it will do a lot of damage to the American-led governance process. How much credibility can it have when the most important partner doesn't even play by the rules? \n\n As these tensions increase, we'll likely see a push for more government bodies to take control of internet governance (such as the short-lived, Brazil-led NETMundial initiative), abandoning the more inclusive and cooperative approach involving businesses and civil society organisations. Then if the process fell even further apart, it would be a substantial challenge to the interoperable global internet, as regulations and standards swiftly went in different directions.\nThe Big Four\nThough the internet was initially heralded as the greatest democratiser of information since Gutenberg, most data now flows through only a handful of companies. Silicon Valley tech giants, with the 'Big Four' of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon at the helm, rake in most of the spoils of the all-conquering global online economy.",
"The growing urge to control the internet has also become apparent over the influence of so-called fake news. Distorting public opinion and fact as a manipulation technique is nothing new: it's been used since Roman times. But the relentless pace and scope with which the internet allows information to disseminate is quite unprecedented. Governments and the media (who have themselves often swapped truth for clicks) are having an increasingly hard time stemming the flow of biased or misleading news stories. So the democratic process suffers.",
"With various nations eyeing each other suspiciously and traditional alliances crumbling, building alternative structures to make foreign interference more difficult seems a logical consequence.\nWho rules the internet?\nIt won't just be the actual infrastructure and 'hard' elements of the internet where governments will seek more independence. Internet governance, the catch-all term to describe the processes and decisions that determine how the internet is managed, and how its technical norms and standards are set, is increasingly complex.",
"Last October, unknown hackers used an array of badly secured 'internet of things' (IoT) devices to bring down most of the internet on the east coast of America in one of the largest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to date. While depriving Americans of Amazon and Facebook for several hours was surely an inconvenience, the potential of the weaponised internet to do harm is infinitely greater.",
"This discussion will likely flair up again soon as the Trump administration seeks ways to reverse the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition: an arcane but highly controversial policy issue. IANA is the agency in charge of maintaining the global DNS (Domain Name System) as well as managing Internet Protocol (IP) address allocation and other important basic structural functions of the internet. The internet’s IANA functions had traditionally been managed by the non-profit ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but remained under contract of the US Department of Commerce, which oversaw its processes – effectively leaving it under US government control. After almost 20 years of bickering and international kowtowing, IANA was brought under full ICANN control last October, finally becoming fully independent. This to the great dismay of many Republican lawmakers; particularly senator Ted Cruz, who has been fighting to stop the process for years.",
"In their ambition to expand even further, these tech companies are themselves also an important cause of internet fragmentation, erecting 'walled gardens' all over the world. Facebook's controversial Free Basics service, which offers free data plans to users in developing countries, but which restricts access to a small number of Facebook-approved websites, is a prime example. Some call it digital colonialism. \n\n These moves aimed at generating even more revenue, concentrated in the hands of the few as inequality rises, understandably cause concern among governments and citizens alike. But our main worry should not be about economics. The Big Four – controlling our data, as well as our access to information – wield an inordinate amount of power. Indeed, Denmark recently announced it would appoint a igital ambassador specifically to deal with these technology giants, citing their influence as larger than that of many countries.",
"In principle, no single actor should be in charge of the internet governance processes. Ideally, these should be overseen by a multi-stakeholder model where governments, the private sector and advocacy groups would have an equal voice and where anyone could be allowed to become involved. In practice, however, it is US government institutions and companies – yes, the usual suspects – that set the rules. They tend to be over-represented in meetings, and in charge of some of the largest regulatory bodies. American stewardship over the internet has long been an area of contention. Countries like China, Russia, and many (mainly developing) countries want more control over their own domestic networks, preferring to see the current model replaced by something more Westphalian, perhaps resembling the United Nations.",
"While this is a moment of disharmony and uncertainty for the European project, the EU has much it agrees upon when it comes to policy and regulating the internet's mostly American corporate giants: from its ambitious data protection policies and the right to be forgotten, to Apple tax case. But it could do more. The global internet as we know it today began as a public space where everyone had an equal opportunity to use it as we liked. But it has quickly privatised, locking us into platforms that 'harvest' our data. As European citizens grow increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of the internet, the EU has a great opportunity. \n\n The EU should take a different approach to the internet and, rather than making it an unregulated free-for-all, consider it a 'commons': a public good open to all, excluding none. The EU could create and fund the infrastructure for this and help ensure safety for all. Meanwhile, small businesses and individuals would do their bit by creating a variety of tools to add to this commons, which would become fully interoperable through shared standards and underpinning technologies.",
"Citizens worldwide have become so dependent on these platforms that there are effectively no readily available alternatives to move to if things turn sour. The sheer scale of the Women's March and similar demonstrations in recent weeks would not have been possible without the ability to organise online. What if these channels fall away, their freedom restricted by companies under the yoke of a hostile government? \n\n Though many American technology companies have already pledged they will not assist with the creation of a 'Muslim registry' – and have pushed back on Trump’s latest immigration restrictions\n–\nwe have to be very aware that the amount of personal data they have on each of us would make it far too easy for them to do so.",
"As more of the components of a country's critical infrastructure move online, the number of possible targets grows too. Hackers shut down a significant part of Ukraine's electricity grid in 2015, and crippled several important Estonian industries, including its banks, in 2007.\nMany cyber-security experts warn about the lacklustre defence of everything from air traffic control towers and voting machines to nuclear plants. One well-placed attack could do more damage than the most aggressive of traditional military campaigns, at a fraction of the cost. Because of the high degree of uncertainty surrounding cyber-capabilities – 'know your enemy' is a hard adage to follow if potential culprits and their capabilities are so tough to track – it has become impossible for governments to completely shield their countries from cyber-attacks."
],
[
"With domestic and geopolitical tensions rising, governments are finding it increasingly hard to function amid a constant barrage of uncontrollable information and potential cyber-attacks, making them grow more wary both of the internet's influence and their ability to control it.\nThe fallout from this means we are facing the prospect of countries around the world pulling the plug on the open, global internet and creating their own independent networks. We might be about to see the end of the world wide internet as we know it.\nWith globalisation under attack, the ultimate bastion of borderlessness – the global internet – might very well be one the biggest scalps taken by the newly emerging world order heralded in by Brexit and Trump. If a global orthodoxy of free trade, soft power and international organisations is overpowered by belligerent nations and isolationism, the net will inevitably be swept away with it.",
"The end of the web\nIn the past year, as we have witnessed the upending of the political order, the internet has been the theatre where many of the battles have been fought: from the hacking and leaking of Democratic party emails, to the proliferation of fake news and alternative facts, and yes, the outpourings of @realDonaldTrump.",
"Yet although fragmentation – and ultimately also Balkanisation – will carry great social and economic cost, it could also be an opportunity. Europe, which has already been flexing its muscles when it comes to internet policy, now finds itself forced to rely less on US cooperation. It should therefore become a frontrunner in developing an alternative, decentralised internet, with its root values of fairness, openness and democracy restored. This could help the net – and indeed Europe – to become more resilient again. As much as we fear the 'splinternet', we should welcome the Euronet.\nWeaponisation of the internet\nSince we've become dependent on the internet for almost everything we do, dangers to the network's integrity threaten devastating effects. Governments may be tempted to turn inwards in an attempt to shield themselves and their citizens from cyber-attacks.",
"The solutions offered by the reluctant tech giants providing a platform for fake news won't be sufficient to stop it altogether. This will prompt more countries to follow Russia and China in building their own platforms like VKontakte and Baidu, thus reducing foreign influence and allowing for extensive censorship and monitoring. The desire of developing countries to establish their own social networks will see them retreat into their own national bubbles.\nFragile infrastructure\nWhile cyber attacks and false information campaigns use the internet to attack the infrastructure by which our societies function, the internet's own infrastructure is also at risk. Despite the internet's ephemeral, lawless appeal, its underlying network of cables, tubes and wires is very much rooted in the physical world. Over 99 per cent of all global internet communications are facilitated by an impressive web of undersea cables, connecting all corners of the world. A submarine deliberately destroying one of these cables in a hard-to-reach place could bring down access to parts of the internet for weeks; and so, by extension, all the systems that rely upon it.",
"The growing urge to control the internet has also become apparent over the influence of so-called fake news. Distorting public opinion and fact as a manipulation technique is nothing new: it's been used since Roman times. But the relentless pace and scope with which the internet allows information to disseminate is quite unprecedented. Governments and the media (who have themselves often swapped truth for clicks) are having an increasingly hard time stemming the flow of biased or misleading news stories. So the democratic process suffers.",
"Foreign governments, which in the current political climate cannot rely on Google abiding by its mantra, 'Don't be evil', will aggressively start to pursue the construction of domestic alternatives. It is something we are already seeing happening worldwide.\nThe splinternet\nThough the dream of the web internet pioneers was one of a completely open, non-hierarchical internet, over the years barriers have been springing up that restrict this freedom. Bit by bit, the internet is becoming more cordoned off. \n\n The idea of splitting up the internet into different, Balkanised internets – with a completely separate infrastructure – is not new. After the Snowden revelations, Germany took action and started looking into the construction of the 'Internetz', a German-only network (although one that allows for the possibility of expanding to the rest of the EU).",
"One necessary component of such an internet commons is that it should be decentralised. Decentralising the internet and rethinking its structure would allow users to take back control over the network of networks, letting them manage their own personal data rather than giving it away to large companies, as well as offering them more choice over the tools they use. It is also often said that distributed internets would also inherently be much safer: largescale cyber-attacks are easier to prevent if we reduce the number of central nodes that traffic can travel through.",
"If the US government does decide to overturn the transition (and Trump has certainly shown enthusiasm for overturning decisions of the previous administration), it will do a lot of damage to the American-led governance process. How much credibility can it have when the most important partner doesn't even play by the rules? \n\n As these tensions increase, we'll likely see a push for more government bodies to take control of internet governance (such as the short-lived, Brazil-led NETMundial initiative), abandoning the more inclusive and cooperative approach involving businesses and civil society organisations. Then if the process fell even further apart, it would be a substantial challenge to the interoperable global internet, as regulations and standards swiftly went in different directions.\nThe Big Four\nThough the internet was initially heralded as the greatest democratiser of information since Gutenberg, most data now flows through only a handful of companies. Silicon Valley tech giants, with the 'Big Four' of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon at the helm, rake in most of the spoils of the all-conquering global online economy.",
"The fallibility of this shared infrastructure also makes it impossible to keep foreign or hostile actors out of domestic affairs. Though governments that heavily restrict internet access might find it easier to prevent information from flowing in and out of the country, they are still reliant on the same co-owned systems, with some parts inevitably falling under other countries' jurisdictions. \n\n This became very clear after the 2013 Snowden revelations, which showed that the US routinely tapped into foreign internet traffic routed through the country. The massive scale of this monitoring even led then president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff to call for the construction of an undersea cable from Brazil directly to Europe, bypassing the prying eyes of the National Security Agency altogether. And US intelligence agencies are by no means the only ones doing this kind of snooping, as we know all too well.",
"Now that we are so used to a ubiquitous and global internet, it's hard to imagine what a world of fragmented, national internets might look like. What we do know is that the internet of fun and games, of unfettered access, is quickly coming to an end. When it does, it will be another big nail in the coffin for globalisation.\nBreaking free\nThe idea of a Balkanised internet, of different national and supranational internet islands, is a dark one. What living in such a future would look like, no one knows. Inevitably, though, it would herald a world of less mutual understanding, less shared prosperity and shrinking horizons. \n\n However, the fragmentation of the internet need not be bad news. As the limitations of its original incarnation are becoming increasingly clear, starting from scratch provides us with an important opportunity to right our initial wrongs. We can build a network or networks that are more ethical, inclusive and resilient to outside threats.",
"With various nations eyeing each other suspiciously and traditional alliances crumbling, building alternative structures to make foreign interference more difficult seems a logical consequence.\nWho rules the internet?\nIt won't just be the actual infrastructure and 'hard' elements of the internet where governments will seek more independence. Internet governance, the catch-all term to describe the processes and decisions that determine how the internet is managed, and how its technical norms and standards are set, is increasingly complex.",
"But a European internet would above all need to be radically ambitious – especially with the EU in a fractured state. The rules for the decentralised, new internet are still wide open, and we have the opportunity to set them. The emergence of a new world order is forcing Europe to rethink itself, come closer together and defend its values in the world. Creating a completely new internet built around these values – and open to any like-minded country to join – might be one extraordinarily effective way of achieving it.\nThis is an extended version of a piece originally published in Nesta's 10 predictions for 2017 series\nCorrection 20 February 2017: this article was updated to correct a few instances of 'web' to 'internet'\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"In their ambition to expand even further, these tech companies are themselves also an important cause of internet fragmentation, erecting 'walled gardens' all over the world. Facebook's controversial Free Basics service, which offers free data plans to users in developing countries, but which restricts access to a small number of Facebook-approved websites, is a prime example. Some call it digital colonialism. \n\n These moves aimed at generating even more revenue, concentrated in the hands of the few as inequality rises, understandably cause concern among governments and citizens alike. But our main worry should not be about economics. The Big Four – controlling our data, as well as our access to information – wield an inordinate amount of power. Indeed, Denmark recently announced it would appoint a igital ambassador specifically to deal with these technology giants, citing their influence as larger than that of many countries.",
"In principle, no single actor should be in charge of the internet governance processes. Ideally, these should be overseen by a multi-stakeholder model where governments, the private sector and advocacy groups would have an equal voice and where anyone could be allowed to become involved. In practice, however, it is US government institutions and companies – yes, the usual suspects – that set the rules. They tend to be over-represented in meetings, and in charge of some of the largest regulatory bodies. American stewardship over the internet has long been an area of contention. Countries like China, Russia, and many (mainly developing) countries want more control over their own domestic networks, preferring to see the current model replaced by something more Westphalian, perhaps resembling the United Nations.",
"This discussion will likely flair up again soon as the Trump administration seeks ways to reverse the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition: an arcane but highly controversial policy issue. IANA is the agency in charge of maintaining the global DNS (Domain Name System) as well as managing Internet Protocol (IP) address allocation and other important basic structural functions of the internet. The internet’s IANA functions had traditionally been managed by the non-profit ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but remained under contract of the US Department of Commerce, which oversaw its processes – effectively leaving it under US government control. After almost 20 years of bickering and international kowtowing, IANA was brought under full ICANN control last October, finally becoming fully independent. This to the great dismay of many Republican lawmakers; particularly senator Ted Cruz, who has been fighting to stop the process for years.",
"Last October, unknown hackers used an array of badly secured 'internet of things' (IoT) devices to bring down most of the internet on the east coast of America in one of the largest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to date. While depriving Americans of Amazon and Facebook for several hours was surely an inconvenience, the potential of the weaponised internet to do harm is infinitely greater.",
"While this is a moment of disharmony and uncertainty for the European project, the EU has much it agrees upon when it comes to policy and regulating the internet's mostly American corporate giants: from its ambitious data protection policies and the right to be forgotten, to Apple tax case. But it could do more. The global internet as we know it today began as a public space where everyone had an equal opportunity to use it as we liked. But it has quickly privatised, locking us into platforms that 'harvest' our data. As European citizens grow increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of the internet, the EU has a great opportunity. \n\n The EU should take a different approach to the internet and, rather than making it an unregulated free-for-all, consider it a 'commons': a public good open to all, excluding none. The EU could create and fund the infrastructure for this and help ensure safety for all. Meanwhile, small businesses and individuals would do their bit by creating a variety of tools to add to this commons, which would become fully interoperable through shared standards and underpinning technologies.",
"Citizens worldwide have become so dependent on these platforms that there are effectively no readily available alternatives to move to if things turn sour. The sheer scale of the Women's March and similar demonstrations in recent weeks would not have been possible without the ability to organise online. What if these channels fall away, their freedom restricted by companies under the yoke of a hostile government? \n\n Though many American technology companies have already pledged they will not assist with the creation of a 'Muslim registry' – and have pushed back on Trump’s latest immigration restrictions\n–\nwe have to be very aware that the amount of personal data they have on each of us would make it far too easy for them to do so.",
"We do not currently have an example of a real internet island in place, but the closest version we see is probably the Great Firewall of China. Though China hasn't built an entirely separate infrastructure, its internet looks entirely different from what we are used to, with content heavily censored and many platforms and websites completely banned. \n\n Russia appears to be following suit. Last November, Russia banned LinkedIn from operating in the country because the social network did not adhere to a new law decreeing that all data generated by Russian users should be stored within Russia itself. In recent weeks, news has also emerged that Moscow has been working with Beijing to implement something similar to the Great Firewall for its own domestic users. Democracies and autocracies alike have long come to understand the great power of the internet and have learned how to both harness and restrict it. \n\n Who will be the first to go it alone? It's difficult to say yet but the usual suspects are lining up: China; Russia; Europe; even Trump's America\n.\nOther countries like Brazil or Turkey might see a compelling reason to do so as well.",
"As more of the components of a country's critical infrastructure move online, the number of possible targets grows too. Hackers shut down a significant part of Ukraine's electricity grid in 2015, and crippled several important Estonian industries, including its banks, in 2007.\nMany cyber-security experts warn about the lacklustre defence of everything from air traffic control towers and voting machines to nuclear plants. One well-placed attack could do more damage than the most aggressive of traditional military campaigns, at a fraction of the cost. Because of the high degree of uncertainty surrounding cyber-capabilities – 'know your enemy' is a hard adage to follow if potential culprits and their capabilities are so tough to track – it has become impossible for governments to completely shield their countries from cyber-attacks."
],
[
"But a European internet would above all need to be radically ambitious – especially with the EU in a fractured state. The rules for the decentralised, new internet are still wide open, and we have the opportunity to set them. The emergence of a new world order is forcing Europe to rethink itself, come closer together and defend its values in the world. Creating a completely new internet built around these values – and open to any like-minded country to join – might be one extraordinarily effective way of achieving it.\nThis is an extended version of a piece originally published in Nesta's 10 predictions for 2017 series\nCorrection 20 February 2017: this article was updated to correct a few instances of 'web' to 'internet'\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"Yet although fragmentation – and ultimately also Balkanisation – will carry great social and economic cost, it could also be an opportunity. Europe, which has already been flexing its muscles when it comes to internet policy, now finds itself forced to rely less on US cooperation. It should therefore become a frontrunner in developing an alternative, decentralised internet, with its root values of fairness, openness and democracy restored. This could help the net – and indeed Europe – to become more resilient again. As much as we fear the 'splinternet', we should welcome the Euronet.\nWeaponisation of the internet\nSince we've become dependent on the internet for almost everything we do, dangers to the network's integrity threaten devastating effects. Governments may be tempted to turn inwards in an attempt to shield themselves and their citizens from cyber-attacks.",
"In principle, no single actor should be in charge of the internet governance processes. Ideally, these should be overseen by a multi-stakeholder model where governments, the private sector and advocacy groups would have an equal voice and where anyone could be allowed to become involved. In practice, however, it is US government institutions and companies – yes, the usual suspects – that set the rules. They tend to be over-represented in meetings, and in charge of some of the largest regulatory bodies. American stewardship over the internet has long been an area of contention. Countries like China, Russia, and many (mainly developing) countries want more control over their own domestic networks, preferring to see the current model replaced by something more Westphalian, perhaps resembling the United Nations.",
"With various nations eyeing each other suspiciously and traditional alliances crumbling, building alternative structures to make foreign interference more difficult seems a logical consequence.\nWho rules the internet?\nIt won't just be the actual infrastructure and 'hard' elements of the internet where governments will seek more independence. Internet governance, the catch-all term to describe the processes and decisions that determine how the internet is managed, and how its technical norms and standards are set, is increasingly complex.",
"One necessary component of such an internet commons is that it should be decentralised. Decentralising the internet and rethinking its structure would allow users to take back control over the network of networks, letting them manage their own personal data rather than giving it away to large companies, as well as offering them more choice over the tools they use. It is also often said that distributed internets would also inherently be much safer: largescale cyber-attacks are easier to prevent if we reduce the number of central nodes that traffic can travel through.",
"With domestic and geopolitical tensions rising, governments are finding it increasingly hard to function amid a constant barrage of uncontrollable information and potential cyber-attacks, making them grow more wary both of the internet's influence and their ability to control it.\nThe fallout from this means we are facing the prospect of countries around the world pulling the plug on the open, global internet and creating their own independent networks. We might be about to see the end of the world wide internet as we know it.\nWith globalisation under attack, the ultimate bastion of borderlessness – the global internet – might very well be one the biggest scalps taken by the newly emerging world order heralded in by Brexit and Trump. If a global orthodoxy of free trade, soft power and international organisations is overpowered by belligerent nations and isolationism, the net will inevitably be swept away with it.",
"Now that we are so used to a ubiquitous and global internet, it's hard to imagine what a world of fragmented, national internets might look like. What we do know is that the internet of fun and games, of unfettered access, is quickly coming to an end. When it does, it will be another big nail in the coffin for globalisation.\nBreaking free\nThe idea of a Balkanised internet, of different national and supranational internet islands, is a dark one. What living in such a future would look like, no one knows. Inevitably, though, it would herald a world of less mutual understanding, less shared prosperity and shrinking horizons. \n\n However, the fragmentation of the internet need not be bad news. As the limitations of its original incarnation are becoming increasingly clear, starting from scratch provides us with an important opportunity to right our initial wrongs. We can build a network or networks that are more ethical, inclusive and resilient to outside threats.",
"We do not currently have an example of a real internet island in place, but the closest version we see is probably the Great Firewall of China. Though China hasn't built an entirely separate infrastructure, its internet looks entirely different from what we are used to, with content heavily censored and many platforms and websites completely banned. \n\n Russia appears to be following suit. Last November, Russia banned LinkedIn from operating in the country because the social network did not adhere to a new law decreeing that all data generated by Russian users should be stored within Russia itself. In recent weeks, news has also emerged that Moscow has been working with Beijing to implement something similar to the Great Firewall for its own domestic users. Democracies and autocracies alike have long come to understand the great power of the internet and have learned how to both harness and restrict it. \n\n Who will be the first to go it alone? It's difficult to say yet but the usual suspects are lining up: China; Russia; Europe; even Trump's America\n.\nOther countries like Brazil or Turkey might see a compelling reason to do so as well.",
"The solutions offered by the reluctant tech giants providing a platform for fake news won't be sufficient to stop it altogether. This will prompt more countries to follow Russia and China in building their own platforms like VKontakte and Baidu, thus reducing foreign influence and allowing for extensive censorship and monitoring. The desire of developing countries to establish their own social networks will see them retreat into their own national bubbles.\nFragile infrastructure\nWhile cyber attacks and false information campaigns use the internet to attack the infrastructure by which our societies function, the internet's own infrastructure is also at risk. Despite the internet's ephemeral, lawless appeal, its underlying network of cables, tubes and wires is very much rooted in the physical world. Over 99 per cent of all global internet communications are facilitated by an impressive web of undersea cables, connecting all corners of the world. A submarine deliberately destroying one of these cables in a hard-to-reach place could bring down access to parts of the internet for weeks; and so, by extension, all the systems that rely upon it.",
"If the US government does decide to overturn the transition (and Trump has certainly shown enthusiasm for overturning decisions of the previous administration), it will do a lot of damage to the American-led governance process. How much credibility can it have when the most important partner doesn't even play by the rules? \n\n As these tensions increase, we'll likely see a push for more government bodies to take control of internet governance (such as the short-lived, Brazil-led NETMundial initiative), abandoning the more inclusive and cooperative approach involving businesses and civil society organisations. Then if the process fell even further apart, it would be a substantial challenge to the interoperable global internet, as regulations and standards swiftly went in different directions.\nThe Big Four\nThough the internet was initially heralded as the greatest democratiser of information since Gutenberg, most data now flows through only a handful of companies. Silicon Valley tech giants, with the 'Big Four' of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon at the helm, rake in most of the spoils of the all-conquering global online economy.",
"While this is a moment of disharmony and uncertainty for the European project, the EU has much it agrees upon when it comes to policy and regulating the internet's mostly American corporate giants: from its ambitious data protection policies and the right to be forgotten, to Apple tax case. But it could do more. The global internet as we know it today began as a public space where everyone had an equal opportunity to use it as we liked. But it has quickly privatised, locking us into platforms that 'harvest' our data. As European citizens grow increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of the internet, the EU has a great opportunity. \n\n The EU should take a different approach to the internet and, rather than making it an unregulated free-for-all, consider it a 'commons': a public good open to all, excluding none. The EU could create and fund the infrastructure for this and help ensure safety for all. Meanwhile, small businesses and individuals would do their bit by creating a variety of tools to add to this commons, which would become fully interoperable through shared standards and underpinning technologies.",
"Foreign governments, which in the current political climate cannot rely on Google abiding by its mantra, 'Don't be evil', will aggressively start to pursue the construction of domestic alternatives. It is something we are already seeing happening worldwide.\nThe splinternet\nThough the dream of the web internet pioneers was one of a completely open, non-hierarchical internet, over the years barriers have been springing up that restrict this freedom. Bit by bit, the internet is becoming more cordoned off. \n\n The idea of splitting up the internet into different, Balkanised internets – with a completely separate infrastructure – is not new. After the Snowden revelations, Germany took action and started looking into the construction of the 'Internetz', a German-only network (although one that allows for the possibility of expanding to the rest of the EU).",
"The end of the web\nIn the past year, as we have witnessed the upending of the political order, the internet has been the theatre where many of the battles have been fought: from the hacking and leaking of Democratic party emails, to the proliferation of fake news and alternative facts, and yes, the outpourings of @realDonaldTrump.",
"The fallibility of this shared infrastructure also makes it impossible to keep foreign or hostile actors out of domestic affairs. Though governments that heavily restrict internet access might find it easier to prevent information from flowing in and out of the country, they are still reliant on the same co-owned systems, with some parts inevitably falling under other countries' jurisdictions. \n\n This became very clear after the 2013 Snowden revelations, which showed that the US routinely tapped into foreign internet traffic routed through the country. The massive scale of this monitoring even led then president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff to call for the construction of an undersea cable from Brazil directly to Europe, bypassing the prying eyes of the National Security Agency altogether. And US intelligence agencies are by no means the only ones doing this kind of snooping, as we know all too well.",
"In their ambition to expand even further, these tech companies are themselves also an important cause of internet fragmentation, erecting 'walled gardens' all over the world. Facebook's controversial Free Basics service, which offers free data plans to users in developing countries, but which restricts access to a small number of Facebook-approved websites, is a prime example. Some call it digital colonialism. \n\n These moves aimed at generating even more revenue, concentrated in the hands of the few as inequality rises, understandably cause concern among governments and citizens alike. But our main worry should not be about economics. The Big Four – controlling our data, as well as our access to information – wield an inordinate amount of power. Indeed, Denmark recently announced it would appoint a igital ambassador specifically to deal with these technology giants, citing their influence as larger than that of many countries.",
"The growing urge to control the internet has also become apparent over the influence of so-called fake news. Distorting public opinion and fact as a manipulation technique is nothing new: it's been used since Roman times. But the relentless pace and scope with which the internet allows information to disseminate is quite unprecedented. Governments and the media (who have themselves often swapped truth for clicks) are having an increasingly hard time stemming the flow of biased or misleading news stories. So the democratic process suffers.",
"This discussion will likely flair up again soon as the Trump administration seeks ways to reverse the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition: an arcane but highly controversial policy issue. IANA is the agency in charge of maintaining the global DNS (Domain Name System) as well as managing Internet Protocol (IP) address allocation and other important basic structural functions of the internet. The internet’s IANA functions had traditionally been managed by the non-profit ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but remained under contract of the US Department of Commerce, which oversaw its processes – effectively leaving it under US government control. After almost 20 years of bickering and international kowtowing, IANA was brought under full ICANN control last October, finally becoming fully independent. This to the great dismay of many Republican lawmakers; particularly senator Ted Cruz, who has been fighting to stop the process for years.",
"Last October, unknown hackers used an array of badly secured 'internet of things' (IoT) devices to bring down most of the internet on the east coast of America in one of the largest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to date. While depriving Americans of Amazon and Facebook for several hours was surely an inconvenience, the potential of the weaponised internet to do harm is infinitely greater.",
"As more of the components of a country's critical infrastructure move online, the number of possible targets grows too. Hackers shut down a significant part of Ukraine's electricity grid in 2015, and crippled several important Estonian industries, including its banks, in 2007.\nMany cyber-security experts warn about the lacklustre defence of everything from air traffic control towers and voting machines to nuclear plants. One well-placed attack could do more damage than the most aggressive of traditional military campaigns, at a fraction of the cost. Because of the high degree of uncertainty surrounding cyber-capabilities – 'know your enemy' is a hard adage to follow if potential culprits and their capabilities are so tough to track – it has become impossible for governments to completely shield their countries from cyber-attacks.",
"Citizens worldwide have become so dependent on these platforms that there are effectively no readily available alternatives to move to if things turn sour. The sheer scale of the Women's March and similar demonstrations in recent weeks would not have been possible without the ability to organise online. What if these channels fall away, their freedom restricted by companies under the yoke of a hostile government? \n\n Though many American technology companies have already pledged they will not assist with the creation of a 'Muslim registry' – and have pushed back on Trump’s latest immigration restrictions\n–\nwe have to be very aware that the amount of personal data they have on each of us would make it far too easy for them to do so."
],
[
"The fallibility of this shared infrastructure also makes it impossible to keep foreign or hostile actors out of domestic affairs. Though governments that heavily restrict internet access might find it easier to prevent information from flowing in and out of the country, they are still reliant on the same co-owned systems, with some parts inevitably falling under other countries' jurisdictions. \n\n This became very clear after the 2013 Snowden revelations, which showed that the US routinely tapped into foreign internet traffic routed through the country. The massive scale of this monitoring even led then president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff to call for the construction of an undersea cable from Brazil directly to Europe, bypassing the prying eyes of the National Security Agency altogether. And US intelligence agencies are by no means the only ones doing this kind of snooping, as we know all too well.",
"With domestic and geopolitical tensions rising, governments are finding it increasingly hard to function amid a constant barrage of uncontrollable information and potential cyber-attacks, making them grow more wary both of the internet's influence and their ability to control it.\nThe fallout from this means we are facing the prospect of countries around the world pulling the plug on the open, global internet and creating their own independent networks. We might be about to see the end of the world wide internet as we know it.\nWith globalisation under attack, the ultimate bastion of borderlessness – the global internet – might very well be one the biggest scalps taken by the newly emerging world order heralded in by Brexit and Trump. If a global orthodoxy of free trade, soft power and international organisations is overpowered by belligerent nations and isolationism, the net will inevitably be swept away with it.",
"Now that we are so used to a ubiquitous and global internet, it's hard to imagine what a world of fragmented, national internets might look like. What we do know is that the internet of fun and games, of unfettered access, is quickly coming to an end. When it does, it will be another big nail in the coffin for globalisation.\nBreaking free\nThe idea of a Balkanised internet, of different national and supranational internet islands, is a dark one. What living in such a future would look like, no one knows. Inevitably, though, it would herald a world of less mutual understanding, less shared prosperity and shrinking horizons. \n\n However, the fragmentation of the internet need not be bad news. As the limitations of its original incarnation are becoming increasingly clear, starting from scratch provides us with an important opportunity to right our initial wrongs. We can build a network or networks that are more ethical, inclusive and resilient to outside threats.",
"One necessary component of such an internet commons is that it should be decentralised. Decentralising the internet and rethinking its structure would allow users to take back control over the network of networks, letting them manage their own personal data rather than giving it away to large companies, as well as offering them more choice over the tools they use. It is also often said that distributed internets would also inherently be much safer: largescale cyber-attacks are easier to prevent if we reduce the number of central nodes that traffic can travel through.",
"With various nations eyeing each other suspiciously and traditional alliances crumbling, building alternative structures to make foreign interference more difficult seems a logical consequence.\nWho rules the internet?\nIt won't just be the actual infrastructure and 'hard' elements of the internet where governments will seek more independence. Internet governance, the catch-all term to describe the processes and decisions that determine how the internet is managed, and how its technical norms and standards are set, is increasingly complex.",
"Yet although fragmentation – and ultimately also Balkanisation – will carry great social and economic cost, it could also be an opportunity. Europe, which has already been flexing its muscles when it comes to internet policy, now finds itself forced to rely less on US cooperation. It should therefore become a frontrunner in developing an alternative, decentralised internet, with its root values of fairness, openness and democracy restored. This could help the net – and indeed Europe – to become more resilient again. As much as we fear the 'splinternet', we should welcome the Euronet.\nWeaponisation of the internet\nSince we've become dependent on the internet for almost everything we do, dangers to the network's integrity threaten devastating effects. Governments may be tempted to turn inwards in an attempt to shield themselves and their citizens from cyber-attacks.",
"Foreign governments, which in the current political climate cannot rely on Google abiding by its mantra, 'Don't be evil', will aggressively start to pursue the construction of domestic alternatives. It is something we are already seeing happening worldwide.\nThe splinternet\nThough the dream of the web internet pioneers was one of a completely open, non-hierarchical internet, over the years barriers have been springing up that restrict this freedom. Bit by bit, the internet is becoming more cordoned off. \n\n The idea of splitting up the internet into different, Balkanised internets – with a completely separate infrastructure – is not new. After the Snowden revelations, Germany took action and started looking into the construction of the 'Internetz', a German-only network (although one that allows for the possibility of expanding to the rest of the EU).",
"We do not currently have an example of a real internet island in place, but the closest version we see is probably the Great Firewall of China. Though China hasn't built an entirely separate infrastructure, its internet looks entirely different from what we are used to, with content heavily censored and many platforms and websites completely banned. \n\n Russia appears to be following suit. Last November, Russia banned LinkedIn from operating in the country because the social network did not adhere to a new law decreeing that all data generated by Russian users should be stored within Russia itself. In recent weeks, news has also emerged that Moscow has been working with Beijing to implement something similar to the Great Firewall for its own domestic users. Democracies and autocracies alike have long come to understand the great power of the internet and have learned how to both harness and restrict it. \n\n Who will be the first to go it alone? It's difficult to say yet but the usual suspects are lining up: China; Russia; Europe; even Trump's America\n.\nOther countries like Brazil or Turkey might see a compelling reason to do so as well.",
"The solutions offered by the reluctant tech giants providing a platform for fake news won't be sufficient to stop it altogether. This will prompt more countries to follow Russia and China in building their own platforms like VKontakte and Baidu, thus reducing foreign influence and allowing for extensive censorship and monitoring. The desire of developing countries to establish their own social networks will see them retreat into their own national bubbles.\nFragile infrastructure\nWhile cyber attacks and false information campaigns use the internet to attack the infrastructure by which our societies function, the internet's own infrastructure is also at risk. Despite the internet's ephemeral, lawless appeal, its underlying network of cables, tubes and wires is very much rooted in the physical world. Over 99 per cent of all global internet communications are facilitated by an impressive web of undersea cables, connecting all corners of the world. A submarine deliberately destroying one of these cables in a hard-to-reach place could bring down access to parts of the internet for weeks; and so, by extension, all the systems that rely upon it.",
"In principle, no single actor should be in charge of the internet governance processes. Ideally, these should be overseen by a multi-stakeholder model where governments, the private sector and advocacy groups would have an equal voice and where anyone could be allowed to become involved. In practice, however, it is US government institutions and companies – yes, the usual suspects – that set the rules. They tend to be over-represented in meetings, and in charge of some of the largest regulatory bodies. American stewardship over the internet has long been an area of contention. Countries like China, Russia, and many (mainly developing) countries want more control over their own domestic networks, preferring to see the current model replaced by something more Westphalian, perhaps resembling the United Nations.",
"In their ambition to expand even further, these tech companies are themselves also an important cause of internet fragmentation, erecting 'walled gardens' all over the world. Facebook's controversial Free Basics service, which offers free data plans to users in developing countries, but which restricts access to a small number of Facebook-approved websites, is a prime example. Some call it digital colonialism. \n\n These moves aimed at generating even more revenue, concentrated in the hands of the few as inequality rises, understandably cause concern among governments and citizens alike. But our main worry should not be about economics. The Big Four – controlling our data, as well as our access to information – wield an inordinate amount of power. Indeed, Denmark recently announced it would appoint a igital ambassador specifically to deal with these technology giants, citing their influence as larger than that of many countries.",
"But a European internet would above all need to be radically ambitious – especially with the EU in a fractured state. The rules for the decentralised, new internet are still wide open, and we have the opportunity to set them. The emergence of a new world order is forcing Europe to rethink itself, come closer together and defend its values in the world. Creating a completely new internet built around these values – and open to any like-minded country to join – might be one extraordinarily effective way of achieving it.\nThis is an extended version of a piece originally published in Nesta's 10 predictions for 2017 series\nCorrection 20 February 2017: this article was updated to correct a few instances of 'web' to 'internet'\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"Last October, unknown hackers used an array of badly secured 'internet of things' (IoT) devices to bring down most of the internet on the east coast of America in one of the largest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to date. While depriving Americans of Amazon and Facebook for several hours was surely an inconvenience, the potential of the weaponised internet to do harm is infinitely greater.",
"While this is a moment of disharmony and uncertainty for the European project, the EU has much it agrees upon when it comes to policy and regulating the internet's mostly American corporate giants: from its ambitious data protection policies and the right to be forgotten, to Apple tax case. But it could do more. The global internet as we know it today began as a public space where everyone had an equal opportunity to use it as we liked. But it has quickly privatised, locking us into platforms that 'harvest' our data. As European citizens grow increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of the internet, the EU has a great opportunity. \n\n The EU should take a different approach to the internet and, rather than making it an unregulated free-for-all, consider it a 'commons': a public good open to all, excluding none. The EU could create and fund the infrastructure for this and help ensure safety for all. Meanwhile, small businesses and individuals would do their bit by creating a variety of tools to add to this commons, which would become fully interoperable through shared standards and underpinning technologies.",
"This discussion will likely flair up again soon as the Trump administration seeks ways to reverse the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition: an arcane but highly controversial policy issue. IANA is the agency in charge of maintaining the global DNS (Domain Name System) as well as managing Internet Protocol (IP) address allocation and other important basic structural functions of the internet. The internet’s IANA functions had traditionally been managed by the non-profit ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but remained under contract of the US Department of Commerce, which oversaw its processes – effectively leaving it under US government control. After almost 20 years of bickering and international kowtowing, IANA was brought under full ICANN control last October, finally becoming fully independent. This to the great dismay of many Republican lawmakers; particularly senator Ted Cruz, who has been fighting to stop the process for years.",
"If the US government does decide to overturn the transition (and Trump has certainly shown enthusiasm for overturning decisions of the previous administration), it will do a lot of damage to the American-led governance process. How much credibility can it have when the most important partner doesn't even play by the rules? \n\n As these tensions increase, we'll likely see a push for more government bodies to take control of internet governance (such as the short-lived, Brazil-led NETMundial initiative), abandoning the more inclusive and cooperative approach involving businesses and civil society organisations. Then if the process fell even further apart, it would be a substantial challenge to the interoperable global internet, as regulations and standards swiftly went in different directions.\nThe Big Four\nThough the internet was initially heralded as the greatest democratiser of information since Gutenberg, most data now flows through only a handful of companies. Silicon Valley tech giants, with the 'Big Four' of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon at the helm, rake in most of the spoils of the all-conquering global online economy.",
"The growing urge to control the internet has also become apparent over the influence of so-called fake news. Distorting public opinion and fact as a manipulation technique is nothing new: it's been used since Roman times. But the relentless pace and scope with which the internet allows information to disseminate is quite unprecedented. Governments and the media (who have themselves often swapped truth for clicks) are having an increasingly hard time stemming the flow of biased or misleading news stories. So the democratic process suffers.",
"As more of the components of a country's critical infrastructure move online, the number of possible targets grows too. Hackers shut down a significant part of Ukraine's electricity grid in 2015, and crippled several important Estonian industries, including its banks, in 2007.\nMany cyber-security experts warn about the lacklustre defence of everything from air traffic control towers and voting machines to nuclear plants. One well-placed attack could do more damage than the most aggressive of traditional military campaigns, at a fraction of the cost. Because of the high degree of uncertainty surrounding cyber-capabilities – 'know your enemy' is a hard adage to follow if potential culprits and their capabilities are so tough to track – it has become impossible for governments to completely shield their countries from cyber-attacks.",
"Citizens worldwide have become so dependent on these platforms that there are effectively no readily available alternatives to move to if things turn sour. The sheer scale of the Women's March and similar demonstrations in recent weeks would not have been possible without the ability to organise online. What if these channels fall away, their freedom restricted by companies under the yoke of a hostile government? \n\n Though many American technology companies have already pledged they will not assist with the creation of a 'Muslim registry' – and have pushed back on Trump’s latest immigration restrictions\n–\nwe have to be very aware that the amount of personal data they have on each of us would make it far too easy for them to do so.",
"The end of the web\nIn the past year, as we have witnessed the upending of the political order, the internet has been the theatre where many of the battles have been fought: from the hacking and leaking of Democratic party emails, to the proliferation of fake news and alternative facts, and yes, the outpourings of @realDonaldTrump."
],
[
"With various nations eyeing each other suspiciously and traditional alliances crumbling, building alternative structures to make foreign interference more difficult seems a logical consequence.\nWho rules the internet?\nIt won't just be the actual infrastructure and 'hard' elements of the internet where governments will seek more independence. Internet governance, the catch-all term to describe the processes and decisions that determine how the internet is managed, and how its technical norms and standards are set, is increasingly complex.",
"With domestic and geopolitical tensions rising, governments are finding it increasingly hard to function amid a constant barrage of uncontrollable information and potential cyber-attacks, making them grow more wary both of the internet's influence and their ability to control it.\nThe fallout from this means we are facing the prospect of countries around the world pulling the plug on the open, global internet and creating their own independent networks. We might be about to see the end of the world wide internet as we know it.\nWith globalisation under attack, the ultimate bastion of borderlessness – the global internet – might very well be one the biggest scalps taken by the newly emerging world order heralded in by Brexit and Trump. If a global orthodoxy of free trade, soft power and international organisations is overpowered by belligerent nations and isolationism, the net will inevitably be swept away with it.",
"The fallibility of this shared infrastructure also makes it impossible to keep foreign or hostile actors out of domestic affairs. Though governments that heavily restrict internet access might find it easier to prevent information from flowing in and out of the country, they are still reliant on the same co-owned systems, with some parts inevitably falling under other countries' jurisdictions. \n\n This became very clear after the 2013 Snowden revelations, which showed that the US routinely tapped into foreign internet traffic routed through the country. The massive scale of this monitoring even led then president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff to call for the construction of an undersea cable from Brazil directly to Europe, bypassing the prying eyes of the National Security Agency altogether. And US intelligence agencies are by no means the only ones doing this kind of snooping, as we know all too well.",
"Foreign governments, which in the current political climate cannot rely on Google abiding by its mantra, 'Don't be evil', will aggressively start to pursue the construction of domestic alternatives. It is something we are already seeing happening worldwide.\nThe splinternet\nThough the dream of the web internet pioneers was one of a completely open, non-hierarchical internet, over the years barriers have been springing up that restrict this freedom. Bit by bit, the internet is becoming more cordoned off. \n\n The idea of splitting up the internet into different, Balkanised internets – with a completely separate infrastructure – is not new. After the Snowden revelations, Germany took action and started looking into the construction of the 'Internetz', a German-only network (although one that allows for the possibility of expanding to the rest of the EU).",
"The solutions offered by the reluctant tech giants providing a platform for fake news won't be sufficient to stop it altogether. This will prompt more countries to follow Russia and China in building their own platforms like VKontakte and Baidu, thus reducing foreign influence and allowing for extensive censorship and monitoring. The desire of developing countries to establish their own social networks will see them retreat into their own national bubbles.\nFragile infrastructure\nWhile cyber attacks and false information campaigns use the internet to attack the infrastructure by which our societies function, the internet's own infrastructure is also at risk. Despite the internet's ephemeral, lawless appeal, its underlying network of cables, tubes and wires is very much rooted in the physical world. Over 99 per cent of all global internet communications are facilitated by an impressive web of undersea cables, connecting all corners of the world. A submarine deliberately destroying one of these cables in a hard-to-reach place could bring down access to parts of the internet for weeks; and so, by extension, all the systems that rely upon it.",
"We do not currently have an example of a real internet island in place, but the closest version we see is probably the Great Firewall of China. Though China hasn't built an entirely separate infrastructure, its internet looks entirely different from what we are used to, with content heavily censored and many platforms and websites completely banned. \n\n Russia appears to be following suit. Last November, Russia banned LinkedIn from operating in the country because the social network did not adhere to a new law decreeing that all data generated by Russian users should be stored within Russia itself. In recent weeks, news has also emerged that Moscow has been working with Beijing to implement something similar to the Great Firewall for its own domestic users. Democracies and autocracies alike have long come to understand the great power of the internet and have learned how to both harness and restrict it. \n\n Who will be the first to go it alone? It's difficult to say yet but the usual suspects are lining up: China; Russia; Europe; even Trump's America\n.\nOther countries like Brazil or Turkey might see a compelling reason to do so as well.",
"Yet although fragmentation – and ultimately also Balkanisation – will carry great social and economic cost, it could also be an opportunity. Europe, which has already been flexing its muscles when it comes to internet policy, now finds itself forced to rely less on US cooperation. It should therefore become a frontrunner in developing an alternative, decentralised internet, with its root values of fairness, openness and democracy restored. This could help the net – and indeed Europe – to become more resilient again. As much as we fear the 'splinternet', we should welcome the Euronet.\nWeaponisation of the internet\nSince we've become dependent on the internet for almost everything we do, dangers to the network's integrity threaten devastating effects. Governments may be tempted to turn inwards in an attempt to shield themselves and their citizens from cyber-attacks.",
"Now that we are so used to a ubiquitous and global internet, it's hard to imagine what a world of fragmented, national internets might look like. What we do know is that the internet of fun and games, of unfettered access, is quickly coming to an end. When it does, it will be another big nail in the coffin for globalisation.\nBreaking free\nThe idea of a Balkanised internet, of different national and supranational internet islands, is a dark one. What living in such a future would look like, no one knows. Inevitably, though, it would herald a world of less mutual understanding, less shared prosperity and shrinking horizons. \n\n However, the fragmentation of the internet need not be bad news. As the limitations of its original incarnation are becoming increasingly clear, starting from scratch provides us with an important opportunity to right our initial wrongs. We can build a network or networks that are more ethical, inclusive and resilient to outside threats.",
"In their ambition to expand even further, these tech companies are themselves also an important cause of internet fragmentation, erecting 'walled gardens' all over the world. Facebook's controversial Free Basics service, which offers free data plans to users in developing countries, but which restricts access to a small number of Facebook-approved websites, is a prime example. Some call it digital colonialism. \n\n These moves aimed at generating even more revenue, concentrated in the hands of the few as inequality rises, understandably cause concern among governments and citizens alike. But our main worry should not be about economics. The Big Four – controlling our data, as well as our access to information – wield an inordinate amount of power. Indeed, Denmark recently announced it would appoint a igital ambassador specifically to deal with these technology giants, citing their influence as larger than that of many countries.",
"One necessary component of such an internet commons is that it should be decentralised. Decentralising the internet and rethinking its structure would allow users to take back control over the network of networks, letting them manage their own personal data rather than giving it away to large companies, as well as offering them more choice over the tools they use. It is also often said that distributed internets would also inherently be much safer: largescale cyber-attacks are easier to prevent if we reduce the number of central nodes that traffic can travel through.",
"In principle, no single actor should be in charge of the internet governance processes. Ideally, these should be overseen by a multi-stakeholder model where governments, the private sector and advocacy groups would have an equal voice and where anyone could be allowed to become involved. In practice, however, it is US government institutions and companies – yes, the usual suspects – that set the rules. They tend to be over-represented in meetings, and in charge of some of the largest regulatory bodies. American stewardship over the internet has long been an area of contention. Countries like China, Russia, and many (mainly developing) countries want more control over their own domestic networks, preferring to see the current model replaced by something more Westphalian, perhaps resembling the United Nations.",
"But a European internet would above all need to be radically ambitious – especially with the EU in a fractured state. The rules for the decentralised, new internet are still wide open, and we have the opportunity to set them. The emergence of a new world order is forcing Europe to rethink itself, come closer together and defend its values in the world. Creating a completely new internet built around these values – and open to any like-minded country to join – might be one extraordinarily effective way of achieving it.\nThis is an extended version of a piece originally published in Nesta's 10 predictions for 2017 series\nCorrection 20 February 2017: this article was updated to correct a few instances of 'web' to 'internet'\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"If the US government does decide to overturn the transition (and Trump has certainly shown enthusiasm for overturning decisions of the previous administration), it will do a lot of damage to the American-led governance process. How much credibility can it have when the most important partner doesn't even play by the rules? \n\n As these tensions increase, we'll likely see a push for more government bodies to take control of internet governance (such as the short-lived, Brazil-led NETMundial initiative), abandoning the more inclusive and cooperative approach involving businesses and civil society organisations. Then if the process fell even further apart, it would be a substantial challenge to the interoperable global internet, as regulations and standards swiftly went in different directions.\nThe Big Four\nThough the internet was initially heralded as the greatest democratiser of information since Gutenberg, most data now flows through only a handful of companies. Silicon Valley tech giants, with the 'Big Four' of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon at the helm, rake in most of the spoils of the all-conquering global online economy.",
"As more of the components of a country's critical infrastructure move online, the number of possible targets grows too. Hackers shut down a significant part of Ukraine's electricity grid in 2015, and crippled several important Estonian industries, including its banks, in 2007.\nMany cyber-security experts warn about the lacklustre defence of everything from air traffic control towers and voting machines to nuclear plants. One well-placed attack could do more damage than the most aggressive of traditional military campaigns, at a fraction of the cost. Because of the high degree of uncertainty surrounding cyber-capabilities – 'know your enemy' is a hard adage to follow if potential culprits and their capabilities are so tough to track – it has become impossible for governments to completely shield their countries from cyber-attacks.",
"The growing urge to control the internet has also become apparent over the influence of so-called fake news. Distorting public opinion and fact as a manipulation technique is nothing new: it's been used since Roman times. But the relentless pace and scope with which the internet allows information to disseminate is quite unprecedented. Governments and the media (who have themselves often swapped truth for clicks) are having an increasingly hard time stemming the flow of biased or misleading news stories. So the democratic process suffers.",
"This discussion will likely flair up again soon as the Trump administration seeks ways to reverse the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition: an arcane but highly controversial policy issue. IANA is the agency in charge of maintaining the global DNS (Domain Name System) as well as managing Internet Protocol (IP) address allocation and other important basic structural functions of the internet. The internet’s IANA functions had traditionally been managed by the non-profit ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but remained under contract of the US Department of Commerce, which oversaw its processes – effectively leaving it under US government control. After almost 20 years of bickering and international kowtowing, IANA was brought under full ICANN control last October, finally becoming fully independent. This to the great dismay of many Republican lawmakers; particularly senator Ted Cruz, who has been fighting to stop the process for years.",
"While this is a moment of disharmony and uncertainty for the European project, the EU has much it agrees upon when it comes to policy and regulating the internet's mostly American corporate giants: from its ambitious data protection policies and the right to be forgotten, to Apple tax case. But it could do more. The global internet as we know it today began as a public space where everyone had an equal opportunity to use it as we liked. But it has quickly privatised, locking us into platforms that 'harvest' our data. As European citizens grow increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of the internet, the EU has a great opportunity. \n\n The EU should take a different approach to the internet and, rather than making it an unregulated free-for-all, consider it a 'commons': a public good open to all, excluding none. The EU could create and fund the infrastructure for this and help ensure safety for all. Meanwhile, small businesses and individuals would do their bit by creating a variety of tools to add to this commons, which would become fully interoperable through shared standards and underpinning technologies.",
"The end of the web\nIn the past year, as we have witnessed the upending of the political order, the internet has been the theatre where many of the battles have been fought: from the hacking and leaking of Democratic party emails, to the proliferation of fake news and alternative facts, and yes, the outpourings of @realDonaldTrump.",
"Last October, unknown hackers used an array of badly secured 'internet of things' (IoT) devices to bring down most of the internet on the east coast of America in one of the largest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to date. While depriving Americans of Amazon and Facebook for several hours was surely an inconvenience, the potential of the weaponised internet to do harm is infinitely greater.",
"Citizens worldwide have become so dependent on these platforms that there are effectively no readily available alternatives to move to if things turn sour. The sheer scale of the Women's March and similar demonstrations in recent weeks would not have been possible without the ability to organise online. What if these channels fall away, their freedom restricted by companies under the yoke of a hostile government? \n\n Though many American technology companies have already pledged they will not assist with the creation of a 'Muslim registry' – and have pushed back on Trump’s latest immigration restrictions\n–\nwe have to be very aware that the amount of personal data they have on each of us would make it far too easy for them to do so."
],
[
"In principle, no single actor should be in charge of the internet governance processes. Ideally, these should be overseen by a multi-stakeholder model where governments, the private sector and advocacy groups would have an equal voice and where anyone could be allowed to become involved. In practice, however, it is US government institutions and companies – yes, the usual suspects – that set the rules. They tend to be over-represented in meetings, and in charge of some of the largest regulatory bodies. American stewardship over the internet has long been an area of contention. Countries like China, Russia, and many (mainly developing) countries want more control over their own domestic networks, preferring to see the current model replaced by something more Westphalian, perhaps resembling the United Nations.",
"One necessary component of such an internet commons is that it should be decentralised. Decentralising the internet and rethinking its structure would allow users to take back control over the network of networks, letting them manage their own personal data rather than giving it away to large companies, as well as offering them more choice over the tools they use. It is also often said that distributed internets would also inherently be much safer: largescale cyber-attacks are easier to prevent if we reduce the number of central nodes that traffic can travel through.",
"If the US government does decide to overturn the transition (and Trump has certainly shown enthusiasm for overturning decisions of the previous administration), it will do a lot of damage to the American-led governance process. How much credibility can it have when the most important partner doesn't even play by the rules? \n\n As these tensions increase, we'll likely see a push for more government bodies to take control of internet governance (such as the short-lived, Brazil-led NETMundial initiative), abandoning the more inclusive and cooperative approach involving businesses and civil society organisations. Then if the process fell even further apart, it would be a substantial challenge to the interoperable global internet, as regulations and standards swiftly went in different directions.\nThe Big Four\nThough the internet was initially heralded as the greatest democratiser of information since Gutenberg, most data now flows through only a handful of companies. Silicon Valley tech giants, with the 'Big Four' of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon at the helm, rake in most of the spoils of the all-conquering global online economy.",
"This discussion will likely flair up again soon as the Trump administration seeks ways to reverse the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition: an arcane but highly controversial policy issue. IANA is the agency in charge of maintaining the global DNS (Domain Name System) as well as managing Internet Protocol (IP) address allocation and other important basic structural functions of the internet. The internet’s IANA functions had traditionally been managed by the non-profit ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but remained under contract of the US Department of Commerce, which oversaw its processes – effectively leaving it under US government control. After almost 20 years of bickering and international kowtowing, IANA was brought under full ICANN control last October, finally becoming fully independent. This to the great dismay of many Republican lawmakers; particularly senator Ted Cruz, who has been fighting to stop the process for years.",
"The growing urge to control the internet has also become apparent over the influence of so-called fake news. Distorting public opinion and fact as a manipulation technique is nothing new: it's been used since Roman times. But the relentless pace and scope with which the internet allows information to disseminate is quite unprecedented. Governments and the media (who have themselves often swapped truth for clicks) are having an increasingly hard time stemming the flow of biased or misleading news stories. So the democratic process suffers.",
"With various nations eyeing each other suspiciously and traditional alliances crumbling, building alternative structures to make foreign interference more difficult seems a logical consequence.\nWho rules the internet?\nIt won't just be the actual infrastructure and 'hard' elements of the internet where governments will seek more independence. Internet governance, the catch-all term to describe the processes and decisions that determine how the internet is managed, and how its technical norms and standards are set, is increasingly complex.",
"The fallibility of this shared infrastructure also makes it impossible to keep foreign or hostile actors out of domestic affairs. Though governments that heavily restrict internet access might find it easier to prevent information from flowing in and out of the country, they are still reliant on the same co-owned systems, with some parts inevitably falling under other countries' jurisdictions. \n\n This became very clear after the 2013 Snowden revelations, which showed that the US routinely tapped into foreign internet traffic routed through the country. The massive scale of this monitoring even led then president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff to call for the construction of an undersea cable from Brazil directly to Europe, bypassing the prying eyes of the National Security Agency altogether. And US intelligence agencies are by no means the only ones doing this kind of snooping, as we know all too well.",
"While this is a moment of disharmony and uncertainty for the European project, the EU has much it agrees upon when it comes to policy and regulating the internet's mostly American corporate giants: from its ambitious data protection policies and the right to be forgotten, to Apple tax case. But it could do more. The global internet as we know it today began as a public space where everyone had an equal opportunity to use it as we liked. But it has quickly privatised, locking us into platforms that 'harvest' our data. As European citizens grow increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of the internet, the EU has a great opportunity. \n\n The EU should take a different approach to the internet and, rather than making it an unregulated free-for-all, consider it a 'commons': a public good open to all, excluding none. The EU could create and fund the infrastructure for this and help ensure safety for all. Meanwhile, small businesses and individuals would do their bit by creating a variety of tools to add to this commons, which would become fully interoperable through shared standards and underpinning technologies.",
"Yet although fragmentation – and ultimately also Balkanisation – will carry great social and economic cost, it could also be an opportunity. Europe, which has already been flexing its muscles when it comes to internet policy, now finds itself forced to rely less on US cooperation. It should therefore become a frontrunner in developing an alternative, decentralised internet, with its root values of fairness, openness and democracy restored. This could help the net – and indeed Europe – to become more resilient again. As much as we fear the 'splinternet', we should welcome the Euronet.\nWeaponisation of the internet\nSince we've become dependent on the internet for almost everything we do, dangers to the network's integrity threaten devastating effects. Governments may be tempted to turn inwards in an attempt to shield themselves and their citizens from cyber-attacks.",
"In their ambition to expand even further, these tech companies are themselves also an important cause of internet fragmentation, erecting 'walled gardens' all over the world. Facebook's controversial Free Basics service, which offers free data plans to users in developing countries, but which restricts access to a small number of Facebook-approved websites, is a prime example. Some call it digital colonialism. \n\n These moves aimed at generating even more revenue, concentrated in the hands of the few as inequality rises, understandably cause concern among governments and citizens alike. But our main worry should not be about economics. The Big Four – controlling our data, as well as our access to information – wield an inordinate amount of power. Indeed, Denmark recently announced it would appoint a igital ambassador specifically to deal with these technology giants, citing their influence as larger than that of many countries.",
"With domestic and geopolitical tensions rising, governments are finding it increasingly hard to function amid a constant barrage of uncontrollable information and potential cyber-attacks, making them grow more wary both of the internet's influence and their ability to control it.\nThe fallout from this means we are facing the prospect of countries around the world pulling the plug on the open, global internet and creating their own independent networks. We might be about to see the end of the world wide internet as we know it.\nWith globalisation under attack, the ultimate bastion of borderlessness – the global internet – might very well be one the biggest scalps taken by the newly emerging world order heralded in by Brexit and Trump. If a global orthodoxy of free trade, soft power and international organisations is overpowered by belligerent nations and isolationism, the net will inevitably be swept away with it.",
"The end of the web\nIn the past year, as we have witnessed the upending of the political order, the internet has been the theatre where many of the battles have been fought: from the hacking and leaking of Democratic party emails, to the proliferation of fake news and alternative facts, and yes, the outpourings of @realDonaldTrump.",
"But a European internet would above all need to be radically ambitious – especially with the EU in a fractured state. The rules for the decentralised, new internet are still wide open, and we have the opportunity to set them. The emergence of a new world order is forcing Europe to rethink itself, come closer together and defend its values in the world. Creating a completely new internet built around these values – and open to any like-minded country to join – might be one extraordinarily effective way of achieving it.\nThis is an extended version of a piece originally published in Nesta's 10 predictions for 2017 series\nCorrection 20 February 2017: this article was updated to correct a few instances of 'web' to 'internet'\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"The solutions offered by the reluctant tech giants providing a platform for fake news won't be sufficient to stop it altogether. This will prompt more countries to follow Russia and China in building their own platforms like VKontakte and Baidu, thus reducing foreign influence and allowing for extensive censorship and monitoring. The desire of developing countries to establish their own social networks will see them retreat into their own national bubbles.\nFragile infrastructure\nWhile cyber attacks and false information campaigns use the internet to attack the infrastructure by which our societies function, the internet's own infrastructure is also at risk. Despite the internet's ephemeral, lawless appeal, its underlying network of cables, tubes and wires is very much rooted in the physical world. Over 99 per cent of all global internet communications are facilitated by an impressive web of undersea cables, connecting all corners of the world. A submarine deliberately destroying one of these cables in a hard-to-reach place could bring down access to parts of the internet for weeks; and so, by extension, all the systems that rely upon it.",
"Now that we are so used to a ubiquitous and global internet, it's hard to imagine what a world of fragmented, national internets might look like. What we do know is that the internet of fun and games, of unfettered access, is quickly coming to an end. When it does, it will be another big nail in the coffin for globalisation.\nBreaking free\nThe idea of a Balkanised internet, of different national and supranational internet islands, is a dark one. What living in such a future would look like, no one knows. Inevitably, though, it would herald a world of less mutual understanding, less shared prosperity and shrinking horizons. \n\n However, the fragmentation of the internet need not be bad news. As the limitations of its original incarnation are becoming increasingly clear, starting from scratch provides us with an important opportunity to right our initial wrongs. We can build a network or networks that are more ethical, inclusive and resilient to outside threats.",
"Foreign governments, which in the current political climate cannot rely on Google abiding by its mantra, 'Don't be evil', will aggressively start to pursue the construction of domestic alternatives. It is something we are already seeing happening worldwide.\nThe splinternet\nThough the dream of the web internet pioneers was one of a completely open, non-hierarchical internet, over the years barriers have been springing up that restrict this freedom. Bit by bit, the internet is becoming more cordoned off. \n\n The idea of splitting up the internet into different, Balkanised internets – with a completely separate infrastructure – is not new. After the Snowden revelations, Germany took action and started looking into the construction of the 'Internetz', a German-only network (although one that allows for the possibility of expanding to the rest of the EU).",
"We do not currently have an example of a real internet island in place, but the closest version we see is probably the Great Firewall of China. Though China hasn't built an entirely separate infrastructure, its internet looks entirely different from what we are used to, with content heavily censored and many platforms and websites completely banned. \n\n Russia appears to be following suit. Last November, Russia banned LinkedIn from operating in the country because the social network did not adhere to a new law decreeing that all data generated by Russian users should be stored within Russia itself. In recent weeks, news has also emerged that Moscow has been working with Beijing to implement something similar to the Great Firewall for its own domestic users. Democracies and autocracies alike have long come to understand the great power of the internet and have learned how to both harness and restrict it. \n\n Who will be the first to go it alone? It's difficult to say yet but the usual suspects are lining up: China; Russia; Europe; even Trump's America\n.\nOther countries like Brazil or Turkey might see a compelling reason to do so as well.",
"Last October, unknown hackers used an array of badly secured 'internet of things' (IoT) devices to bring down most of the internet on the east coast of America in one of the largest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to date. While depriving Americans of Amazon and Facebook for several hours was surely an inconvenience, the potential of the weaponised internet to do harm is infinitely greater.",
"Citizens worldwide have become so dependent on these platforms that there are effectively no readily available alternatives to move to if things turn sour. The sheer scale of the Women's March and similar demonstrations in recent weeks would not have been possible without the ability to organise online. What if these channels fall away, their freedom restricted by companies under the yoke of a hostile government? \n\n Though many American technology companies have already pledged they will not assist with the creation of a 'Muslim registry' – and have pushed back on Trump’s latest immigration restrictions\n–\nwe have to be very aware that the amount of personal data they have on each of us would make it far too easy for them to do so.",
"As more of the components of a country's critical infrastructure move online, the number of possible targets grows too. Hackers shut down a significant part of Ukraine's electricity grid in 2015, and crippled several important Estonian industries, including its banks, in 2007.\nMany cyber-security experts warn about the lacklustre defence of everything from air traffic control towers and voting machines to nuclear plants. One well-placed attack could do more damage than the most aggressive of traditional military campaigns, at a fraction of the cost. Because of the high degree of uncertainty surrounding cyber-capabilities – 'know your enemy' is a hard adage to follow if potential culprits and their capabilities are so tough to track – it has become impossible for governments to completely shield their countries from cyber-attacks."
],
[
"With domestic and geopolitical tensions rising, governments are finding it increasingly hard to function amid a constant barrage of uncontrollable information and potential cyber-attacks, making them grow more wary both of the internet's influence and their ability to control it.\nThe fallout from this means we are facing the prospect of countries around the world pulling the plug on the open, global internet and creating their own independent networks. We might be about to see the end of the world wide internet as we know it.\nWith globalisation under attack, the ultimate bastion of borderlessness – the global internet – might very well be one the biggest scalps taken by the newly emerging world order heralded in by Brexit and Trump. If a global orthodoxy of free trade, soft power and international organisations is overpowered by belligerent nations and isolationism, the net will inevitably be swept away with it.",
"This discussion will likely flair up again soon as the Trump administration seeks ways to reverse the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition: an arcane but highly controversial policy issue. IANA is the agency in charge of maintaining the global DNS (Domain Name System) as well as managing Internet Protocol (IP) address allocation and other important basic structural functions of the internet. The internet’s IANA functions had traditionally been managed by the non-profit ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but remained under contract of the US Department of Commerce, which oversaw its processes – effectively leaving it under US government control. After almost 20 years of bickering and international kowtowing, IANA was brought under full ICANN control last October, finally becoming fully independent. This to the great dismay of many Republican lawmakers; particularly senator Ted Cruz, who has been fighting to stop the process for years.",
"If the US government does decide to overturn the transition (and Trump has certainly shown enthusiasm for overturning decisions of the previous administration), it will do a lot of damage to the American-led governance process. How much credibility can it have when the most important partner doesn't even play by the rules? \n\n As these tensions increase, we'll likely see a push for more government bodies to take control of internet governance (such as the short-lived, Brazil-led NETMundial initiative), abandoning the more inclusive and cooperative approach involving businesses and civil society organisations. Then if the process fell even further apart, it would be a substantial challenge to the interoperable global internet, as regulations and standards swiftly went in different directions.\nThe Big Four\nThough the internet was initially heralded as the greatest democratiser of information since Gutenberg, most data now flows through only a handful of companies. Silicon Valley tech giants, with the 'Big Four' of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon at the helm, rake in most of the spoils of the all-conquering global online economy.",
"Foreign governments, which in the current political climate cannot rely on Google abiding by its mantra, 'Don't be evil', will aggressively start to pursue the construction of domestic alternatives. It is something we are already seeing happening worldwide.\nThe splinternet\nThough the dream of the web internet pioneers was one of a completely open, non-hierarchical internet, over the years barriers have been springing up that restrict this freedom. Bit by bit, the internet is becoming more cordoned off. \n\n The idea of splitting up the internet into different, Balkanised internets – with a completely separate infrastructure – is not new. After the Snowden revelations, Germany took action and started looking into the construction of the 'Internetz', a German-only network (although one that allows for the possibility of expanding to the rest of the EU).",
"Yet although fragmentation – and ultimately also Balkanisation – will carry great social and economic cost, it could also be an opportunity. Europe, which has already been flexing its muscles when it comes to internet policy, now finds itself forced to rely less on US cooperation. It should therefore become a frontrunner in developing an alternative, decentralised internet, with its root values of fairness, openness and democracy restored. This could help the net – and indeed Europe – to become more resilient again. As much as we fear the 'splinternet', we should welcome the Euronet.\nWeaponisation of the internet\nSince we've become dependent on the internet for almost everything we do, dangers to the network's integrity threaten devastating effects. Governments may be tempted to turn inwards in an attempt to shield themselves and their citizens from cyber-attacks.",
"With various nations eyeing each other suspiciously and traditional alliances crumbling, building alternative structures to make foreign interference more difficult seems a logical consequence.\nWho rules the internet?\nIt won't just be the actual infrastructure and 'hard' elements of the internet where governments will seek more independence. Internet governance, the catch-all term to describe the processes and decisions that determine how the internet is managed, and how its technical norms and standards are set, is increasingly complex.",
"The end of the web\nIn the past year, as we have witnessed the upending of the political order, the internet has been the theatre where many of the battles have been fought: from the hacking and leaking of Democratic party emails, to the proliferation of fake news and alternative facts, and yes, the outpourings of @realDonaldTrump.",
"In principle, no single actor should be in charge of the internet governance processes. Ideally, these should be overseen by a multi-stakeholder model where governments, the private sector and advocacy groups would have an equal voice and where anyone could be allowed to become involved. In practice, however, it is US government institutions and companies – yes, the usual suspects – that set the rules. They tend to be over-represented in meetings, and in charge of some of the largest regulatory bodies. American stewardship over the internet has long been an area of contention. Countries like China, Russia, and many (mainly developing) countries want more control over their own domestic networks, preferring to see the current model replaced by something more Westphalian, perhaps resembling the United Nations.",
"The solutions offered by the reluctant tech giants providing a platform for fake news won't be sufficient to stop it altogether. This will prompt more countries to follow Russia and China in building their own platforms like VKontakte and Baidu, thus reducing foreign influence and allowing for extensive censorship and monitoring. The desire of developing countries to establish their own social networks will see them retreat into their own national bubbles.\nFragile infrastructure\nWhile cyber attacks and false information campaigns use the internet to attack the infrastructure by which our societies function, the internet's own infrastructure is also at risk. Despite the internet's ephemeral, lawless appeal, its underlying network of cables, tubes and wires is very much rooted in the physical world. Over 99 per cent of all global internet communications are facilitated by an impressive web of undersea cables, connecting all corners of the world. A submarine deliberately destroying one of these cables in a hard-to-reach place could bring down access to parts of the internet for weeks; and so, by extension, all the systems that rely upon it.",
"The fallibility of this shared infrastructure also makes it impossible to keep foreign or hostile actors out of domestic affairs. Though governments that heavily restrict internet access might find it easier to prevent information from flowing in and out of the country, they are still reliant on the same co-owned systems, with some parts inevitably falling under other countries' jurisdictions. \n\n This became very clear after the 2013 Snowden revelations, which showed that the US routinely tapped into foreign internet traffic routed through the country. The massive scale of this monitoring even led then president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff to call for the construction of an undersea cable from Brazil directly to Europe, bypassing the prying eyes of the National Security Agency altogether. And US intelligence agencies are by no means the only ones doing this kind of snooping, as we know all too well.",
"Now that we are so used to a ubiquitous and global internet, it's hard to imagine what a world of fragmented, national internets might look like. What we do know is that the internet of fun and games, of unfettered access, is quickly coming to an end. When it does, it will be another big nail in the coffin for globalisation.\nBreaking free\nThe idea of a Balkanised internet, of different national and supranational internet islands, is a dark one. What living in such a future would look like, no one knows. Inevitably, though, it would herald a world of less mutual understanding, less shared prosperity and shrinking horizons. \n\n However, the fragmentation of the internet need not be bad news. As the limitations of its original incarnation are becoming increasingly clear, starting from scratch provides us with an important opportunity to right our initial wrongs. We can build a network or networks that are more ethical, inclusive and resilient to outside threats.",
"The growing urge to control the internet has also become apparent over the influence of so-called fake news. Distorting public opinion and fact as a manipulation technique is nothing new: it's been used since Roman times. But the relentless pace and scope with which the internet allows information to disseminate is quite unprecedented. Governments and the media (who have themselves often swapped truth for clicks) are having an increasingly hard time stemming the flow of biased or misleading news stories. So the democratic process suffers.",
"In their ambition to expand even further, these tech companies are themselves also an important cause of internet fragmentation, erecting 'walled gardens' all over the world. Facebook's controversial Free Basics service, which offers free data plans to users in developing countries, but which restricts access to a small number of Facebook-approved websites, is a prime example. Some call it digital colonialism. \n\n These moves aimed at generating even more revenue, concentrated in the hands of the few as inequality rises, understandably cause concern among governments and citizens alike. But our main worry should not be about economics. The Big Four – controlling our data, as well as our access to information – wield an inordinate amount of power. Indeed, Denmark recently announced it would appoint a igital ambassador specifically to deal with these technology giants, citing their influence as larger than that of many countries.",
"But a European internet would above all need to be radically ambitious – especially with the EU in a fractured state. The rules for the decentralised, new internet are still wide open, and we have the opportunity to set them. The emergence of a new world order is forcing Europe to rethink itself, come closer together and defend its values in the world. Creating a completely new internet built around these values – and open to any like-minded country to join – might be one extraordinarily effective way of achieving it.\nThis is an extended version of a piece originally published in Nesta's 10 predictions for 2017 series\nCorrection 20 February 2017: this article was updated to correct a few instances of 'web' to 'internet'\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"Last October, unknown hackers used an array of badly secured 'internet of things' (IoT) devices to bring down most of the internet on the east coast of America in one of the largest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to date. While depriving Americans of Amazon and Facebook for several hours was surely an inconvenience, the potential of the weaponised internet to do harm is infinitely greater.",
"One necessary component of such an internet commons is that it should be decentralised. Decentralising the internet and rethinking its structure would allow users to take back control over the network of networks, letting them manage their own personal data rather than giving it away to large companies, as well as offering them more choice over the tools they use. It is also often said that distributed internets would also inherently be much safer: largescale cyber-attacks are easier to prevent if we reduce the number of central nodes that traffic can travel through.",
"We do not currently have an example of a real internet island in place, but the closest version we see is probably the Great Firewall of China. Though China hasn't built an entirely separate infrastructure, its internet looks entirely different from what we are used to, with content heavily censored and many platforms and websites completely banned. \n\n Russia appears to be following suit. Last November, Russia banned LinkedIn from operating in the country because the social network did not adhere to a new law decreeing that all data generated by Russian users should be stored within Russia itself. In recent weeks, news has also emerged that Moscow has been working with Beijing to implement something similar to the Great Firewall for its own domestic users. Democracies and autocracies alike have long come to understand the great power of the internet and have learned how to both harness and restrict it. \n\n Who will be the first to go it alone? It's difficult to say yet but the usual suspects are lining up: China; Russia; Europe; even Trump's America\n.\nOther countries like Brazil or Turkey might see a compelling reason to do so as well.",
"Citizens worldwide have become so dependent on these platforms that there are effectively no readily available alternatives to move to if things turn sour. The sheer scale of the Women's March and similar demonstrations in recent weeks would not have been possible without the ability to organise online. What if these channels fall away, their freedom restricted by companies under the yoke of a hostile government? \n\n Though many American technology companies have already pledged they will not assist with the creation of a 'Muslim registry' – and have pushed back on Trump’s latest immigration restrictions\n–\nwe have to be very aware that the amount of personal data they have on each of us would make it far too easy for them to do so.",
"While this is a moment of disharmony and uncertainty for the European project, the EU has much it agrees upon when it comes to policy and regulating the internet's mostly American corporate giants: from its ambitious data protection policies and the right to be forgotten, to Apple tax case. But it could do more. The global internet as we know it today began as a public space where everyone had an equal opportunity to use it as we liked. But it has quickly privatised, locking us into platforms that 'harvest' our data. As European citizens grow increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of the internet, the EU has a great opportunity. \n\n The EU should take a different approach to the internet and, rather than making it an unregulated free-for-all, consider it a 'commons': a public good open to all, excluding none. The EU could create and fund the infrastructure for this and help ensure safety for all. Meanwhile, small businesses and individuals would do their bit by creating a variety of tools to add to this commons, which would become fully interoperable through shared standards and underpinning technologies.",
"As more of the components of a country's critical infrastructure move online, the number of possible targets grows too. Hackers shut down a significant part of Ukraine's electricity grid in 2015, and crippled several important Estonian industries, including its banks, in 2007.\nMany cyber-security experts warn about the lacklustre defence of everything from air traffic control towers and voting machines to nuclear plants. One well-placed attack could do more damage than the most aggressive of traditional military campaigns, at a fraction of the cost. Because of the high degree of uncertainty surrounding cyber-capabilities – 'know your enemy' is a hard adage to follow if potential culprits and their capabilities are so tough to track – it has become impossible for governments to completely shield their countries from cyber-attacks."
],
[
"In principle, no single actor should be in charge of the internet governance processes. Ideally, these should be overseen by a multi-stakeholder model where governments, the private sector and advocacy groups would have an equal voice and where anyone could be allowed to become involved. In practice, however, it is US government institutions and companies – yes, the usual suspects – that set the rules. They tend to be over-represented in meetings, and in charge of some of the largest regulatory bodies. American stewardship over the internet has long been an area of contention. Countries like China, Russia, and many (mainly developing) countries want more control over their own domestic networks, preferring to see the current model replaced by something more Westphalian, perhaps resembling the United Nations.",
"If the US government does decide to overturn the transition (and Trump has certainly shown enthusiasm for overturning decisions of the previous administration), it will do a lot of damage to the American-led governance process. How much credibility can it have when the most important partner doesn't even play by the rules? \n\n As these tensions increase, we'll likely see a push for more government bodies to take control of internet governance (such as the short-lived, Brazil-led NETMundial initiative), abandoning the more inclusive and cooperative approach involving businesses and civil society organisations. Then if the process fell even further apart, it would be a substantial challenge to the interoperable global internet, as regulations and standards swiftly went in different directions.\nThe Big Four\nThough the internet was initially heralded as the greatest democratiser of information since Gutenberg, most data now flows through only a handful of companies. Silicon Valley tech giants, with the 'Big Four' of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon at the helm, rake in most of the spoils of the all-conquering global online economy.",
"With various nations eyeing each other suspiciously and traditional alliances crumbling, building alternative structures to make foreign interference more difficult seems a logical consequence.\nWho rules the internet?\nIt won't just be the actual infrastructure and 'hard' elements of the internet where governments will seek more independence. Internet governance, the catch-all term to describe the processes and decisions that determine how the internet is managed, and how its technical norms and standards are set, is increasingly complex.",
"In their ambition to expand even further, these tech companies are themselves also an important cause of internet fragmentation, erecting 'walled gardens' all over the world. Facebook's controversial Free Basics service, which offers free data plans to users in developing countries, but which restricts access to a small number of Facebook-approved websites, is a prime example. Some call it digital colonialism. \n\n These moves aimed at generating even more revenue, concentrated in the hands of the few as inequality rises, understandably cause concern among governments and citizens alike. But our main worry should not be about economics. The Big Four – controlling our data, as well as our access to information – wield an inordinate amount of power. Indeed, Denmark recently announced it would appoint a igital ambassador specifically to deal with these technology giants, citing their influence as larger than that of many countries.",
"This discussion will likely flair up again soon as the Trump administration seeks ways to reverse the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition: an arcane but highly controversial policy issue. IANA is the agency in charge of maintaining the global DNS (Domain Name System) as well as managing Internet Protocol (IP) address allocation and other important basic structural functions of the internet. The internet’s IANA functions had traditionally been managed by the non-profit ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but remained under contract of the US Department of Commerce, which oversaw its processes – effectively leaving it under US government control. After almost 20 years of bickering and international kowtowing, IANA was brought under full ICANN control last October, finally becoming fully independent. This to the great dismay of many Republican lawmakers; particularly senator Ted Cruz, who has been fighting to stop the process for years.",
"The fallibility of this shared infrastructure also makes it impossible to keep foreign or hostile actors out of domestic affairs. Though governments that heavily restrict internet access might find it easier to prevent information from flowing in and out of the country, they are still reliant on the same co-owned systems, with some parts inevitably falling under other countries' jurisdictions. \n\n This became very clear after the 2013 Snowden revelations, which showed that the US routinely tapped into foreign internet traffic routed through the country. The massive scale of this monitoring even led then president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff to call for the construction of an undersea cable from Brazil directly to Europe, bypassing the prying eyes of the National Security Agency altogether. And US intelligence agencies are by no means the only ones doing this kind of snooping, as we know all too well.",
"With domestic and geopolitical tensions rising, governments are finding it increasingly hard to function amid a constant barrage of uncontrollable information and potential cyber-attacks, making them grow more wary both of the internet's influence and their ability to control it.\nThe fallout from this means we are facing the prospect of countries around the world pulling the plug on the open, global internet and creating their own independent networks. We might be about to see the end of the world wide internet as we know it.\nWith globalisation under attack, the ultimate bastion of borderlessness – the global internet – might very well be one the biggest scalps taken by the newly emerging world order heralded in by Brexit and Trump. If a global orthodoxy of free trade, soft power and international organisations is overpowered by belligerent nations and isolationism, the net will inevitably be swept away with it.",
"Foreign governments, which in the current political climate cannot rely on Google abiding by its mantra, 'Don't be evil', will aggressively start to pursue the construction of domestic alternatives. It is something we are already seeing happening worldwide.\nThe splinternet\nThough the dream of the web internet pioneers was one of a completely open, non-hierarchical internet, over the years barriers have been springing up that restrict this freedom. Bit by bit, the internet is becoming more cordoned off. \n\n The idea of splitting up the internet into different, Balkanised internets – with a completely separate infrastructure – is not new. After the Snowden revelations, Germany took action and started looking into the construction of the 'Internetz', a German-only network (although one that allows for the possibility of expanding to the rest of the EU).",
"The solutions offered by the reluctant tech giants providing a platform for fake news won't be sufficient to stop it altogether. This will prompt more countries to follow Russia and China in building their own platforms like VKontakte and Baidu, thus reducing foreign influence and allowing for extensive censorship and monitoring. The desire of developing countries to establish their own social networks will see them retreat into their own national bubbles.\nFragile infrastructure\nWhile cyber attacks and false information campaigns use the internet to attack the infrastructure by which our societies function, the internet's own infrastructure is also at risk. Despite the internet's ephemeral, lawless appeal, its underlying network of cables, tubes and wires is very much rooted in the physical world. Over 99 per cent of all global internet communications are facilitated by an impressive web of undersea cables, connecting all corners of the world. A submarine deliberately destroying one of these cables in a hard-to-reach place could bring down access to parts of the internet for weeks; and so, by extension, all the systems that rely upon it.",
"Yet although fragmentation – and ultimately also Balkanisation – will carry great social and economic cost, it could also be an opportunity. Europe, which has already been flexing its muscles when it comes to internet policy, now finds itself forced to rely less on US cooperation. It should therefore become a frontrunner in developing an alternative, decentralised internet, with its root values of fairness, openness and democracy restored. This could help the net – and indeed Europe – to become more resilient again. As much as we fear the 'splinternet', we should welcome the Euronet.\nWeaponisation of the internet\nSince we've become dependent on the internet for almost everything we do, dangers to the network's integrity threaten devastating effects. Governments may be tempted to turn inwards in an attempt to shield themselves and their citizens from cyber-attacks.",
"One necessary component of such an internet commons is that it should be decentralised. Decentralising the internet and rethinking its structure would allow users to take back control over the network of networks, letting them manage their own personal data rather than giving it away to large companies, as well as offering them more choice over the tools they use. It is also often said that distributed internets would also inherently be much safer: largescale cyber-attacks are easier to prevent if we reduce the number of central nodes that traffic can travel through.",
"The growing urge to control the internet has also become apparent over the influence of so-called fake news. Distorting public opinion and fact as a manipulation technique is nothing new: it's been used since Roman times. But the relentless pace and scope with which the internet allows information to disseminate is quite unprecedented. Governments and the media (who have themselves often swapped truth for clicks) are having an increasingly hard time stemming the flow of biased or misleading news stories. So the democratic process suffers.",
"While this is a moment of disharmony and uncertainty for the European project, the EU has much it agrees upon when it comes to policy and regulating the internet's mostly American corporate giants: from its ambitious data protection policies and the right to be forgotten, to Apple tax case. But it could do more. The global internet as we know it today began as a public space where everyone had an equal opportunity to use it as we liked. But it has quickly privatised, locking us into platforms that 'harvest' our data. As European citizens grow increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of the internet, the EU has a great opportunity. \n\n The EU should take a different approach to the internet and, rather than making it an unregulated free-for-all, consider it a 'commons': a public good open to all, excluding none. The EU could create and fund the infrastructure for this and help ensure safety for all. Meanwhile, small businesses and individuals would do their bit by creating a variety of tools to add to this commons, which would become fully interoperable through shared standards and underpinning technologies.",
"Now that we are so used to a ubiquitous and global internet, it's hard to imagine what a world of fragmented, national internets might look like. What we do know is that the internet of fun and games, of unfettered access, is quickly coming to an end. When it does, it will be another big nail in the coffin for globalisation.\nBreaking free\nThe idea of a Balkanised internet, of different national and supranational internet islands, is a dark one. What living in such a future would look like, no one knows. Inevitably, though, it would herald a world of less mutual understanding, less shared prosperity and shrinking horizons. \n\n However, the fragmentation of the internet need not be bad news. As the limitations of its original incarnation are becoming increasingly clear, starting from scratch provides us with an important opportunity to right our initial wrongs. We can build a network or networks that are more ethical, inclusive and resilient to outside threats.",
"But a European internet would above all need to be radically ambitious – especially with the EU in a fractured state. The rules for the decentralised, new internet are still wide open, and we have the opportunity to set them. The emergence of a new world order is forcing Europe to rethink itself, come closer together and defend its values in the world. Creating a completely new internet built around these values – and open to any like-minded country to join – might be one extraordinarily effective way of achieving it.\nThis is an extended version of a piece originally published in Nesta's 10 predictions for 2017 series\nCorrection 20 February 2017: this article was updated to correct a few instances of 'web' to 'internet'\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"The end of the web\nIn the past year, as we have witnessed the upending of the political order, the internet has been the theatre where many of the battles have been fought: from the hacking and leaking of Democratic party emails, to the proliferation of fake news and alternative facts, and yes, the outpourings of @realDonaldTrump.",
"We do not currently have an example of a real internet island in place, but the closest version we see is probably the Great Firewall of China. Though China hasn't built an entirely separate infrastructure, its internet looks entirely different from what we are used to, with content heavily censored and many platforms and websites completely banned. \n\n Russia appears to be following suit. Last November, Russia banned LinkedIn from operating in the country because the social network did not adhere to a new law decreeing that all data generated by Russian users should be stored within Russia itself. In recent weeks, news has also emerged that Moscow has been working with Beijing to implement something similar to the Great Firewall for its own domestic users. Democracies and autocracies alike have long come to understand the great power of the internet and have learned how to both harness and restrict it. \n\n Who will be the first to go it alone? It's difficult to say yet but the usual suspects are lining up: China; Russia; Europe; even Trump's America\n.\nOther countries like Brazil or Turkey might see a compelling reason to do so as well.",
"Citizens worldwide have become so dependent on these platforms that there are effectively no readily available alternatives to move to if things turn sour. The sheer scale of the Women's March and similar demonstrations in recent weeks would not have been possible without the ability to organise online. What if these channels fall away, their freedom restricted by companies under the yoke of a hostile government? \n\n Though many American technology companies have already pledged they will not assist with the creation of a 'Muslim registry' – and have pushed back on Trump’s latest immigration restrictions\n–\nwe have to be very aware that the amount of personal data they have on each of us would make it far too easy for them to do so.",
"Last October, unknown hackers used an array of badly secured 'internet of things' (IoT) devices to bring down most of the internet on the east coast of America in one of the largest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to date. While depriving Americans of Amazon and Facebook for several hours was surely an inconvenience, the potential of the weaponised internet to do harm is infinitely greater.",
"As more of the components of a country's critical infrastructure move online, the number of possible targets grows too. Hackers shut down a significant part of Ukraine's electricity grid in 2015, and crippled several important Estonian industries, including its banks, in 2007.\nMany cyber-security experts warn about the lacklustre defence of everything from air traffic control towers and voting machines to nuclear plants. One well-placed attack could do more damage than the most aggressive of traditional military campaigns, at a fraction of the cost. Because of the high degree of uncertainty surrounding cyber-capabilities – 'know your enemy' is a hard adage to follow if potential culprits and their capabilities are so tough to track – it has become impossible for governments to completely shield their countries from cyber-attacks."
],
[
"Yet although fragmentation – and ultimately also Balkanisation – will carry great social and economic cost, it could also be an opportunity. Europe, which has already been flexing its muscles when it comes to internet policy, now finds itself forced to rely less on US cooperation. It should therefore become a frontrunner in developing an alternative, decentralised internet, with its root values of fairness, openness and democracy restored. This could help the net – and indeed Europe – to become more resilient again. As much as we fear the 'splinternet', we should welcome the Euronet.\nWeaponisation of the internet\nSince we've become dependent on the internet for almost everything we do, dangers to the network's integrity threaten devastating effects. Governments may be tempted to turn inwards in an attempt to shield themselves and their citizens from cyber-attacks.",
"Now that we are so used to a ubiquitous and global internet, it's hard to imagine what a world of fragmented, national internets might look like. What we do know is that the internet of fun and games, of unfettered access, is quickly coming to an end. When it does, it will be another big nail in the coffin for globalisation.\nBreaking free\nThe idea of a Balkanised internet, of different national and supranational internet islands, is a dark one. What living in such a future would look like, no one knows. Inevitably, though, it would herald a world of less mutual understanding, less shared prosperity and shrinking horizons. \n\n However, the fragmentation of the internet need not be bad news. As the limitations of its original incarnation are becoming increasingly clear, starting from scratch provides us with an important opportunity to right our initial wrongs. We can build a network or networks that are more ethical, inclusive and resilient to outside threats.",
"One necessary component of such an internet commons is that it should be decentralised. Decentralising the internet and rethinking its structure would allow users to take back control over the network of networks, letting them manage their own personal data rather than giving it away to large companies, as well as offering them more choice over the tools they use. It is also often said that distributed internets would also inherently be much safer: largescale cyber-attacks are easier to prevent if we reduce the number of central nodes that traffic can travel through.",
"With domestic and geopolitical tensions rising, governments are finding it increasingly hard to function amid a constant barrage of uncontrollable information and potential cyber-attacks, making them grow more wary both of the internet's influence and their ability to control it.\nThe fallout from this means we are facing the prospect of countries around the world pulling the plug on the open, global internet and creating their own independent networks. We might be about to see the end of the world wide internet as we know it.\nWith globalisation under attack, the ultimate bastion of borderlessness – the global internet – might very well be one the biggest scalps taken by the newly emerging world order heralded in by Brexit and Trump. If a global orthodoxy of free trade, soft power and international organisations is overpowered by belligerent nations and isolationism, the net will inevitably be swept away with it.",
"The fallibility of this shared infrastructure also makes it impossible to keep foreign or hostile actors out of domestic affairs. Though governments that heavily restrict internet access might find it easier to prevent information from flowing in and out of the country, they are still reliant on the same co-owned systems, with some parts inevitably falling under other countries' jurisdictions. \n\n This became very clear after the 2013 Snowden revelations, which showed that the US routinely tapped into foreign internet traffic routed through the country. The massive scale of this monitoring even led then president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff to call for the construction of an undersea cable from Brazil directly to Europe, bypassing the prying eyes of the National Security Agency altogether. And US intelligence agencies are by no means the only ones doing this kind of snooping, as we know all too well.",
"Foreign governments, which in the current political climate cannot rely on Google abiding by its mantra, 'Don't be evil', will aggressively start to pursue the construction of domestic alternatives. It is something we are already seeing happening worldwide.\nThe splinternet\nThough the dream of the web internet pioneers was one of a completely open, non-hierarchical internet, over the years barriers have been springing up that restrict this freedom. Bit by bit, the internet is becoming more cordoned off. \n\n The idea of splitting up the internet into different, Balkanised internets – with a completely separate infrastructure – is not new. After the Snowden revelations, Germany took action and started looking into the construction of the 'Internetz', a German-only network (although one that allows for the possibility of expanding to the rest of the EU).",
"In their ambition to expand even further, these tech companies are themselves also an important cause of internet fragmentation, erecting 'walled gardens' all over the world. Facebook's controversial Free Basics service, which offers free data plans to users in developing countries, but which restricts access to a small number of Facebook-approved websites, is a prime example. Some call it digital colonialism. \n\n These moves aimed at generating even more revenue, concentrated in the hands of the few as inequality rises, understandably cause concern among governments and citizens alike. But our main worry should not be about economics. The Big Four – controlling our data, as well as our access to information – wield an inordinate amount of power. Indeed, Denmark recently announced it would appoint a igital ambassador specifically to deal with these technology giants, citing their influence as larger than that of many countries.",
"The solutions offered by the reluctant tech giants providing a platform for fake news won't be sufficient to stop it altogether. This will prompt more countries to follow Russia and China in building their own platforms like VKontakte and Baidu, thus reducing foreign influence and allowing for extensive censorship and monitoring. The desire of developing countries to establish their own social networks will see them retreat into their own national bubbles.\nFragile infrastructure\nWhile cyber attacks and false information campaigns use the internet to attack the infrastructure by which our societies function, the internet's own infrastructure is also at risk. Despite the internet's ephemeral, lawless appeal, its underlying network of cables, tubes and wires is very much rooted in the physical world. Over 99 per cent of all global internet communications are facilitated by an impressive web of undersea cables, connecting all corners of the world. A submarine deliberately destroying one of these cables in a hard-to-reach place could bring down access to parts of the internet for weeks; and so, by extension, all the systems that rely upon it.",
"But a European internet would above all need to be radically ambitious – especially with the EU in a fractured state. The rules for the decentralised, new internet are still wide open, and we have the opportunity to set them. The emergence of a new world order is forcing Europe to rethink itself, come closer together and defend its values in the world. Creating a completely new internet built around these values – and open to any like-minded country to join – might be one extraordinarily effective way of achieving it.\nThis is an extended version of a piece originally published in Nesta's 10 predictions for 2017 series\nCorrection 20 February 2017: this article was updated to correct a few instances of 'web' to 'internet'\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"While this is a moment of disharmony and uncertainty for the European project, the EU has much it agrees upon when it comes to policy and regulating the internet's mostly American corporate giants: from its ambitious data protection policies and the right to be forgotten, to Apple tax case. But it could do more. The global internet as we know it today began as a public space where everyone had an equal opportunity to use it as we liked. But it has quickly privatised, locking us into platforms that 'harvest' our data. As European citizens grow increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of the internet, the EU has a great opportunity. \n\n The EU should take a different approach to the internet and, rather than making it an unregulated free-for-all, consider it a 'commons': a public good open to all, excluding none. The EU could create and fund the infrastructure for this and help ensure safety for all. Meanwhile, small businesses and individuals would do their bit by creating a variety of tools to add to this commons, which would become fully interoperable through shared standards and underpinning technologies.",
"If the US government does decide to overturn the transition (and Trump has certainly shown enthusiasm for overturning decisions of the previous administration), it will do a lot of damage to the American-led governance process. How much credibility can it have when the most important partner doesn't even play by the rules? \n\n As these tensions increase, we'll likely see a push for more government bodies to take control of internet governance (such as the short-lived, Brazil-led NETMundial initiative), abandoning the more inclusive and cooperative approach involving businesses and civil society organisations. Then if the process fell even further apart, it would be a substantial challenge to the interoperable global internet, as regulations and standards swiftly went in different directions.\nThe Big Four\nThough the internet was initially heralded as the greatest democratiser of information since Gutenberg, most data now flows through only a handful of companies. Silicon Valley tech giants, with the 'Big Four' of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon at the helm, rake in most of the spoils of the all-conquering global online economy.",
"With various nations eyeing each other suspiciously and traditional alliances crumbling, building alternative structures to make foreign interference more difficult seems a logical consequence.\nWho rules the internet?\nIt won't just be the actual infrastructure and 'hard' elements of the internet where governments will seek more independence. Internet governance, the catch-all term to describe the processes and decisions that determine how the internet is managed, and how its technical norms and standards are set, is increasingly complex.",
"In principle, no single actor should be in charge of the internet governance processes. Ideally, these should be overseen by a multi-stakeholder model where governments, the private sector and advocacy groups would have an equal voice and where anyone could be allowed to become involved. In practice, however, it is US government institutions and companies – yes, the usual suspects – that set the rules. They tend to be over-represented in meetings, and in charge of some of the largest regulatory bodies. American stewardship over the internet has long been an area of contention. Countries like China, Russia, and many (mainly developing) countries want more control over their own domestic networks, preferring to see the current model replaced by something more Westphalian, perhaps resembling the United Nations.",
"We do not currently have an example of a real internet island in place, but the closest version we see is probably the Great Firewall of China. Though China hasn't built an entirely separate infrastructure, its internet looks entirely different from what we are used to, with content heavily censored and many platforms and websites completely banned. \n\n Russia appears to be following suit. Last November, Russia banned LinkedIn from operating in the country because the social network did not adhere to a new law decreeing that all data generated by Russian users should be stored within Russia itself. In recent weeks, news has also emerged that Moscow has been working with Beijing to implement something similar to the Great Firewall for its own domestic users. Democracies and autocracies alike have long come to understand the great power of the internet and have learned how to both harness and restrict it. \n\n Who will be the first to go it alone? It's difficult to say yet but the usual suspects are lining up: China; Russia; Europe; even Trump's America\n.\nOther countries like Brazil or Turkey might see a compelling reason to do so as well.",
"The growing urge to control the internet has also become apparent over the influence of so-called fake news. Distorting public opinion and fact as a manipulation technique is nothing new: it's been used since Roman times. But the relentless pace and scope with which the internet allows information to disseminate is quite unprecedented. Governments and the media (who have themselves often swapped truth for clicks) are having an increasingly hard time stemming the flow of biased or misleading news stories. So the democratic process suffers.",
"The end of the web\nIn the past year, as we have witnessed the upending of the political order, the internet has been the theatre where many of the battles have been fought: from the hacking and leaking of Democratic party emails, to the proliferation of fake news and alternative facts, and yes, the outpourings of @realDonaldTrump.",
"This discussion will likely flair up again soon as the Trump administration seeks ways to reverse the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition: an arcane but highly controversial policy issue. IANA is the agency in charge of maintaining the global DNS (Domain Name System) as well as managing Internet Protocol (IP) address allocation and other important basic structural functions of the internet. The internet’s IANA functions had traditionally been managed by the non-profit ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but remained under contract of the US Department of Commerce, which oversaw its processes – effectively leaving it under US government control. After almost 20 years of bickering and international kowtowing, IANA was brought under full ICANN control last October, finally becoming fully independent. This to the great dismay of many Republican lawmakers; particularly senator Ted Cruz, who has been fighting to stop the process for years.",
"Last October, unknown hackers used an array of badly secured 'internet of things' (IoT) devices to bring down most of the internet on the east coast of America in one of the largest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to date. While depriving Americans of Amazon and Facebook for several hours was surely an inconvenience, the potential of the weaponised internet to do harm is infinitely greater.",
"As more of the components of a country's critical infrastructure move online, the number of possible targets grows too. Hackers shut down a significant part of Ukraine's electricity grid in 2015, and crippled several important Estonian industries, including its banks, in 2007.\nMany cyber-security experts warn about the lacklustre defence of everything from air traffic control towers and voting machines to nuclear plants. One well-placed attack could do more damage than the most aggressive of traditional military campaigns, at a fraction of the cost. Because of the high degree of uncertainty surrounding cyber-capabilities – 'know your enemy' is a hard adage to follow if potential culprits and their capabilities are so tough to track – it has become impossible for governments to completely shield their countries from cyber-attacks.",
"Citizens worldwide have become so dependent on these platforms that there are effectively no readily available alternatives to move to if things turn sour. The sheer scale of the Women's March and similar demonstrations in recent weeks would not have been possible without the ability to organise online. What if these channels fall away, their freedom restricted by companies under the yoke of a hostile government? \n\n Though many American technology companies have already pledged they will not assist with the creation of a 'Muslim registry' – and have pushed back on Trump’s latest immigration restrictions\n–\nwe have to be very aware that the amount of personal data they have on each of us would make it far too easy for them to do so."
]
] |
test
|
30062
|
[
"Why has the way phones are answered in Andrew McCloud's office changed?",
"What seems to be the top brass's biggest concern about Andrew McCloud?",
"Which important figure does give McCloud support?",
"How many mortalities have been caused by the plague?",
"Why is the colonel referred to as \"the chicken colonel\"?",
"Why was Andrew McCloud relieved from duty by the colonel?",
"Why do McCloud and Bettijean conclude that the disease is not communicable?",
"Who was the first plague victim in McCloud's office?",
"What did McCloud ask the lab technician to analyze?"
] |
[
[
"Previously, soldiers answered the phones, but they were not as efficient as girls with secretarial experience, so a dozen girls were hired to do the job.",
"The office now has to answer the public's questions about the effectiveness of vaccines, and people have a lot of questions, so there are a lot more phone calls.",
"Phone traffic has exploded due to increasing cases of a puzzling illness.",
"Formerly, the public was not allowed to phone the Office of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator, they could only write letters. But an executive order changed that, so now there is a lot of phone traffic."
],
[
"That someone with unruly hair does not have the self-discipline to be in charge of an important agency.",
"That someone with freckles and a mop of unruly hair is too young to be in charge of an important agency.",
"That he is a noncommissioned officer.",
"That he does not have the correct training to do the job."
],
[
"The two-star general.",
"The colonel.",
"No one gives him the support he needs.",
"The brigadier general."
],
[
"Six people died.",
"There have been no mortalities.",
"629,000 people have died of the plague.",
"The death rate at the time the story starts is 2 per hundred thousand citizens."
],
[
"Because he was well known to be a coward and a bully.",
"The story does not tell us.",
"Because, as explained in the story, he is a full colonel, as opposed to a lieutenant colonel.",
"Because he was in charge of a defense department operation for making vaccines from chicken embryos."
],
[
"Because the colonel was ordered to replace McCloud by the brigadier general.",
"The colonel was looking for an excuse to remove him from the beginning of the story, because he had contempt for noncommissioned officers.",
"Because McCloud was having an affair with Bettijean.",
"Because McCloud defended his subordinate, Bettijean, in front of the colonel, when she had clearly violated military protocol."
],
[
"Because the incidence of the disease has already begun to drop.",
"This assumption is not supported by facts in the story.",
"Smaller organizations seem to have a higher incidence than larger organizations.",
"Because he and Bettijean have not caught the disease."
],
[
"McCloud himself was the first victim - that is why he was so overwhelmingly tired.",
"The colonel was the first victims, but that information was withheld as part of the military blackout on disease reports.",
"No one from McCloud's office ever got the plague.",
"The cute blonde who brought some reports into his office while he was discussing clues about the epidemic with Bettijean."
],
[
"The pack of cigarettes in Bettijean's desk.",
"The stack of reports that the cute blonde had brought in to McCloud's office.",
"The letter that the cute blonde had intended to mail to her mother.",
"The coffee cups that all the workers at the office had used."
]
] |
[
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1
] |
[
1,
1,
1,
0,
1,
1,
0,
1,
1
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[
[
"He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to\n worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical\n nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible\n scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned\n down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and\n broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\nIt was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with\n another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a\n cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean\n cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n\n\n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.",
"The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then\n launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and\n your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the\n duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the\n sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n\n\n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned—\"\n\n\n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated—unless you\n find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's\n get out of here and let these people work.\"\nThe brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his\n cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain\n and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper\n channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile\n of reports Bettijean had brought in.",
"All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office\n deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite\n comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or\n at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy\n McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n\n\n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel\n Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe\n this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the\n brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in\n charge.\"\n\n\n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious\n epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack\n timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top\n of the whole powder keg.\"",
"THE PLAGUE\nBy TEDDY KELLER\nSuppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague\n showed up.... One that attacked only people within the\n political borders of the United States!\nIllustrated by Schoenherr\nSergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the\n excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody\n had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n\n\n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been\n answering the rare call on the single line—in that friendly, husky\n voice that gave even generals pause—by saying, \"Good morning. Office\n of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now\n there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to\n a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And\n now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"",
"\"We've got to find a clue—a trend—an inkling of something.\" He\n nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those\n girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country.\n Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up\n another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and\n sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and\n occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n\n\n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode\n from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on\n the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone\n and directory.",
"He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment,\n then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody\n checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they\n print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years\n ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.",
"Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He\n was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen\n other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The\n lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed\n his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\nIt was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle\n silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around\n the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n\n\n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was\n babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students,\n and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a\n trend?\"",
"Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment\n before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop\n of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\"\n he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I\n know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority,\n we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n\n\n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so\n irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.",
"She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used,\n studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she\n asked.\n\n\n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n \"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single\n government worker sick.\"\n\n\n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n\n\n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own\n scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of\n office workers—business, not government—and new parents and newly\n engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n\n\n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n\n\n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just\n guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"",
"Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general,\n snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will\n you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of\n his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself\n one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who\n entered his office.\nBettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile\n as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n \"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n\n\n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick,\n brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to\n his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n\n\n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a\n little time.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"",
"The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his\n chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n \"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n\n\n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many\n things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n\n\n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled\n up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face\n as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had\n feared.\"\n\n\n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A\n captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.",
"\"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink\n or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear?\n What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists?\n What are we missing? What—\"\nIn the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk,\n then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n\n\n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to\n Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n\n\n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she\n lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering,\n shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the\n hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n\n\n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to\n cover her. And get a glass of water.\"",
"Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who\n trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his\n jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an\n instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of\n General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a\n swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded\n newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n\n\n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first\n glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ\n warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n\n\n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll\n help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.",
"Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's\n desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it,\n straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He\n snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse.\n Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through\n the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab\n technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n\n\n The technician darted out.\n\n\n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the\n general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of\n everything.\"",
"Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then\n told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying\n on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about\n eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n\n\n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n\n\n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color\n spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face\n away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little\n nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n\n\n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n\n\n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n\n\n \"But ... but....\"\n\n\n \"Was it something against regulations?\"",
"\"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from\n Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something,\n everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't\n even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n\n\n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the\n outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a\n paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and\n nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n\n\n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of\n his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n \"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n\n\n \"The answer?\"",
"\"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's\n certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it\n easy and—. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n\n\n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A\n lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only\n shrug and indicate the girl.\n\n\n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of\n thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society\n matrons, office workers—Aspen, Taos and college towns—thousands of\n people sick—but none in that valley in Tennessee—and few government\n workers—just one girl in his office—and she was sicker and more\n frightened about a letter—and....\n\n\n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.",
"\"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass,\n he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a\n while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to\n us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't\n know from—\"\n\n\n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\nAnd from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n\n\n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh,\n general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just—\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been\n listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the\n sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n\n\n \"But, general, I—\"",
"The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out\n effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every\n serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've\n still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're\n right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n\n\n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through\n muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there,\n futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm.\n He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement\n that silenced him.\n\n\n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll\n find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"",
"\"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n \"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the\n sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other\n officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they\n drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top\n priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could\n panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\""
],
[
"All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office\n deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite\n comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or\n at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy\n McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n\n\n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel\n Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe\n this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the\n brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in\n charge.\"\n\n\n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious\n epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack\n timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top\n of the whole powder keg.\"",
"Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general,\n snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will\n you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of\n his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself\n one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who\n entered his office.\nBettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile\n as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n \"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n\n\n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick,\n brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to\n his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n\n\n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a\n little time.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"",
"\"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass,\n he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a\n while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to\n us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't\n know from—\"\n\n\n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\nAnd from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n\n\n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh,\n general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just—\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been\n listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the\n sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n\n\n \"But, general, I—\"",
"Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment\n before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop\n of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\"\n he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I\n know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority,\n we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n\n\n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so\n irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.",
"The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his\n chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n \"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n\n\n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many\n things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n\n\n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled\n up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face\n as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had\n feared.\"\n\n\n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A\n captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.",
"Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He\n was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen\n other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The\n lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed\n his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\nIt was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle\n silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around\n the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n\n\n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was\n babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students,\n and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a\n trend?\"",
"The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then\n launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and\n your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the\n duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the\n sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n\n\n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned—\"\n\n\n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated—unless you\n find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's\n get out of here and let these people work.\"\nThe brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his\n cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain\n and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper\n channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile\n of reports Bettijean had brought in.",
"Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who\n trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his\n jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an\n instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of\n General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a\n swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded\n newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n\n\n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first\n glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ\n warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n\n\n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll\n help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.",
"Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's\n desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it,\n straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He\n snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse.\n Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through\n the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab\n technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n\n\n The technician darted out.\n\n\n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the\n general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of\n everything.\"",
"The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out\n effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every\n serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've\n still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're\n right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n\n\n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through\n muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there,\n futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm.\n He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement\n that silenced him.\n\n\n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll\n find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"",
"THE PLAGUE\nBy TEDDY KELLER\nSuppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague\n showed up.... One that attacked only people within the\n political borders of the United States!\nIllustrated by Schoenherr\nSergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the\n excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody\n had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n\n\n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been\n answering the rare call on the single line—in that friendly, husky\n voice that gave even generals pause—by saying, \"Good morning. Office\n of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now\n there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to\n a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And\n now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"",
"\"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n \"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the\n sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other\n officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they\n drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top\n priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could\n panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"",
"\"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's\n certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it\n easy and—. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n\n\n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A\n lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only\n shrug and indicate the girl.\n\n\n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of\n thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society\n matrons, office workers—Aspen, Taos and college towns—thousands of\n people sick—but none in that valley in Tennessee—and few government\n workers—just one girl in his office—and she was sicker and more\n frightened about a letter—and....\n\n\n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.",
"\"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face,\n but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the\n pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the\n situation.\"\n\n\n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips.\n Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on\n his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n\n\n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report\n to—\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.",
"\"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's\n shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight\n around when this man—\"\n\n\n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would\n co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a\n bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to\n get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant.\n Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will\n report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n\n\n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n \"But you can't—\"",
"He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to\n worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical\n nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible\n scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned\n down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and\n broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\nIt was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with\n another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a\n cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean\n cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n\n\n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.",
"He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment,\n then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody\n checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they\n print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years\n ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard.",
"The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the\n fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used\n a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a\n blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of\n water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n\n\n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n\n\n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared.\n Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n\n\n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling\n suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside\n manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked\n out with this stuff yet.\"\n\n\n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.",
"\"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n\n\n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n\n\n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance\n sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally,\n resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n\n\n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her\n about what we were doing here.\"\n\n\n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n\n\n \"Did you mail it?\"\n\n\n \"Y ... yes.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n \"Did I do wrong?\"",
"\"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had\n a report—nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the\n civilian newspapermen—not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a\n day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had—it was a\n coded message the Reds'd tried to censor—was an indication of\n something big in the works.\"\n\n\n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had\n an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n\n\n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that\n they could cripple us from within.\""
],
[
"All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office\n deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite\n comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or\n at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy\n McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n\n\n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel\n Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe\n this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the\n brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in\n charge.\"\n\n\n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious\n epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack\n timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top\n of the whole powder keg.\"",
"Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment\n before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop\n of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\"\n he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I\n know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority,\n we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n\n\n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so\n irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.",
"The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his\n chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n \"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n\n\n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many\n things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n\n\n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled\n up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face\n as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had\n feared.\"\n\n\n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A\n captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.",
"Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general,\n snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will\n you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of\n his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself\n one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who\n entered his office.\nBettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile\n as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n \"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n\n\n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick,\n brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to\n his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n\n\n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a\n little time.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"",
"For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled\n slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n \"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some\n of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're\n surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that\n makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt\n Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her\n a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say\n what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n\n\n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n \"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions.\n Your conduct here will be noted and—\"",
"\"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from\n Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something,\n everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't\n even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n\n\n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the\n outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a\n paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and\n nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n\n\n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of\n his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n \"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n\n\n \"The answer?\"",
"The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then\n launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and\n your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the\n duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the\n sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n\n\n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned—\"\n\n\n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated—unless you\n find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's\n get out of here and let these people work.\"\nThe brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his\n cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain\n and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper\n channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile\n of reports Bettijean had brought in.",
"THE PLAGUE\nBy TEDDY KELLER\nSuppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague\n showed up.... One that attacked only people within the\n political borders of the United States!\nIllustrated by Schoenherr\nSergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the\n excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody\n had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n\n\n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been\n answering the rare call on the single line—in that friendly, husky\n voice that gave even generals pause—by saying, \"Good morning. Office\n of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now\n there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to\n a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And\n now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"",
"\"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass,\n he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a\n while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to\n us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't\n know from—\"\n\n\n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\nAnd from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n\n\n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh,\n general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just—\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been\n listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the\n sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n\n\n \"But, general, I—\"",
"\"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face,\n but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the\n pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the\n situation.\"\n\n\n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips.\n Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on\n his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n\n\n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report\n to—\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.",
"Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who\n trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his\n jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an\n instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of\n General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a\n swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded\n newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n\n\n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first\n glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ\n warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n\n\n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll\n help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.",
"He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to\n worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical\n nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible\n scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned\n down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and\n broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\nIt was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with\n another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a\n cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean\n cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n\n\n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.",
"The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the\n fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used\n a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a\n blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of\n water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n\n\n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n\n\n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared.\n Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n\n\n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling\n suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside\n manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked\n out with this stuff yet.\"\n\n\n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.",
"Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He\n was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen\n other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The\n lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed\n his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\nIt was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle\n silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around\n the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n\n\n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was\n babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students,\n and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a\n trend?\"",
"Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents\n and especially writers and artists and poets—they'd all lick lots of\n stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have\n postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking.\n And\"—she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck—\"Andy, you're\n wonderful.\"\n\n\n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's\n phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do—\"\n\n\n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the\n colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do\n you suggest?\"\n\n\n \"Get somebody—maybe even the President—on all radio and TV networks.\n Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any\n stamps. Then—\"",
"The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out\n effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every\n serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've\n still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're\n right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n\n\n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through\n muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there,\n futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm.\n He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement\n that silenced him.\n\n\n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll\n find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"",
"\"I ... I don't know. I think....\"\n\n\n \"I'll vouch for your job in this office.\"\n\n\n \"Well....\" She seemed on the verge of tears and her pleading glance\n sought out Andy, then Bettijean, then her co-workers. Finally,\n resigned, she said, \"I ... I wrote a letter to my mother.\"\n\n\n Andy swallowed against his groan of disappointment. \"And you told her\n about what we were doing here.\"\n\n\n Janis nodded, and tears welled into her wide eyes.\n\n\n \"Did you mail it?\"\n\n\n \"Y ... yes.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't use a government envelope to save a stamp?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no. I always carry a few stamps with me.\" She choked down a sob.\n \"Did I do wrong?\"",
"Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's\n desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it,\n straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He\n snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse.\n Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through\n the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab\n technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n\n\n The technician darted out.\n\n\n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the\n general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of\n everything.\"",
"\"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n \"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the\n sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other\n officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they\n drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top\n priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could\n panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"",
"He broke off as his phone rang. Answering, he listened for a moment,\n then hung up and said, \"But before the big announcement, get somebody\n checking on the security clearances at whatever plant it is where they\n print stamps. This's a big deal. Somebody may've been planted years\n ago for this operation. It shouldn't be too hard."
],
[
"\"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big\n offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and\n two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n\n\n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor,\n dentist or attorney?\"\n\n\n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n\n\n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable\n thing. Thank heaven for—\"\n\n\n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before\n both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her\n teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n\n\n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half\n the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"",
"She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no\n fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's\n spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her\n dark eyes.\n\n\n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n\n\n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,—and a\n bunch more. No indication there. Except\"—she fished out a one-page\n report—\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign\n for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today\n they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at\n the polls. They've all got it.\"\n\n\n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's\n a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up\n with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"",
"THE PLAGUE\nBy TEDDY KELLER\nSuppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague\n showed up.... One that attacked only people within the\n political borders of the United States!\nIllustrated by Schoenherr\nSergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the\n excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody\n had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n\n\n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been\n answering the rare call on the single line—in that friendly, husky\n voice that gave even generals pause—by saying, \"Good morning. Office\n of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now\n there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to\n a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And\n now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"",
"Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who\n trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his\n jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an\n instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of\n General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a\n swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded\n newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n\n\n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first\n glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ\n warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n\n\n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll\n help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.",
"She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used,\n studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she\n asked.\n\n\n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n \"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single\n government worker sick.\"\n\n\n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n\n\n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own\n scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of\n office workers—business, not government—and new parents and newly\n engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n\n\n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n\n\n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just\n guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"",
"\"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same\n thing—only not quite as severe—in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n\n\n \"Writers?\"\n\n\n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the\n hard hit.\"\n\n\n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are\n fine—writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n\n\n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a\n country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about.\n Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n\n\n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his\n cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all\n lumped together.\"\n\n\n \"What does it show?\"",
"\"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink\n or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear?\n What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists?\n What are we missing? What—\"\nIn the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk,\n then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n\n\n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to\n Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n\n\n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she\n lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering,\n shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the\n hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n\n\n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to\n cover her. And get a glass of water.\"",
"\"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up—no medical releases. Must\n mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n \"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the\n first hit?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass\n could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could\n slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come\n from the general public.\"\n\n\n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under\n twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices\n and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't\n tell who's got it on the military bases.\"",
"\"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so\n far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers,\n teachers, preachers—rich, poor—from Florida to Alaska. Just when you\n called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated\n mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too\n fragmentary.\"\n\n\n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly\n ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until\n they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of\n the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n\n\n \"In food?\"\n\n\n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing\n plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same\n time—even if it was sabotage?\"\n\n\n \"On the wind?\"",
"Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was\n weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does\n that a doctor doesn't—why girls from small offices were sick—and why\n senators and postal workers weren't—why college students caught the\n bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n\n\n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the\n poison and prescribe medication. But\"—he held up a four-cent\n stamp—\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n\n\n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes\n bugged at Andy, at the stamp.",
"\"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure\n accident—some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the\n stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone\n call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be\n quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors.\n The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six\n hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States\n whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the\n Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\nThe general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into\n the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling\n his granite brow.\n\n\n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"",
"\"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had\n a report—nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the\n civilian newspapermen—not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a\n day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had—it was a\n coded message the Reds'd tried to censor—was an indication of\n something big in the works.\"\n\n\n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had\n an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n\n\n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that\n they could cripple us from within.\"",
"Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He\n was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen\n other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The\n lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed\n his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\nIt was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle\n silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around\n the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n\n\n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was\n babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students,\n and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a\n trend?\"",
"\"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's\n certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it\n easy and—. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n\n\n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A\n lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only\n shrug and indicate the girl.\n\n\n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of\n thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society\n matrons, office workers—Aspen, Taos and college towns—thousands of\n people sick—but none in that valley in Tennessee—and few government\n workers—just one girl in his office—and she was sicker and more\n frightened about a letter—and....\n\n\n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.",
"\"We've got to find a clue—a trend—an inkling of something.\" He\n nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those\n girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country.\n Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up\n another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and\n sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and\n occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n\n\n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode\n from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on\n the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone\n and directory.",
"The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the\n fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used\n a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a\n blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of\n water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n\n\n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n\n\n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared.\n Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n\n\n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling\n suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside\n manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked\n out with this stuff yet.\"\n\n\n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.",
"\"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that\n you did—everything you ate or drank—in the last ... oh, twelve\n hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see\n Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n\n\n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n\n\n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n\n\n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged\n nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of\n attention. Andy ignored her.\n\n\n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\"\n Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"",
"He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to\n worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical\n nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible\n scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned\n down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and\n broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\nIt was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with\n another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a\n cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean\n cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n\n\n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.",
"All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office\n deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite\n comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or\n at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy\n McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n\n\n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel\n Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe\n this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the\n brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in\n charge.\"\n\n\n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious\n epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack\n timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top\n of the whole powder keg.\"",
"Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's\n desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it,\n straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He\n snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse.\n Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through\n the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab\n technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n\n\n The technician darted out.\n\n\n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the\n general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of\n everything.\""
],
[
"He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to\n worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical\n nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible\n scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned\n down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and\n broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\nIt was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with\n another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a\n cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean\n cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n\n\n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.",
"Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment\n before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop\n of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\"\n he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I\n know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority,\n we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n\n\n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so\n irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.",
"The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his\n chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n \"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n\n\n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many\n things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n\n\n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled\n up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face\n as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had\n feared.\"\n\n\n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A\n captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.",
"For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled\n slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n \"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some\n of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're\n surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that\n makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt\n Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her\n a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say\n what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n\n\n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n \"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions.\n Your conduct here will be noted and—\"",
"Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who\n trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his\n jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an\n instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of\n General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a\n swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded\n newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n\n\n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first\n glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ\n warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n\n\n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll\n help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.",
"\"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face,\n but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the\n pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the\n situation.\"\n\n\n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips.\n Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on\n his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n\n\n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report\n to—\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.",
"\"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's\n shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight\n around when this man—\"\n\n\n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would\n co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a\n bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to\n get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant.\n Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will\n report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n\n\n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n \"But you can't—\"",
"\"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass,\n he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a\n while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to\n us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't\n know from—\"\n\n\n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\nAnd from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n\n\n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh,\n general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just—\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been\n listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the\n sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n\n\n \"But, general, I—\"",
"Bettijean said, \"Sure. College kids and engaged girls and new parents\n and especially writers and artists and poets—they'd all lick lots of\n stamps. Professional men have secretaries. Big offices have\n postage-meter machines. And government offices have free franking.\n And\"—she threw her arms around the sergeant's neck—\"Andy, you're\n wonderful.\"\n\n\n \"The old American ingenuity,\" the colonel said, reaching for Andy's\n phone. \"I knew we could lick it. Now all we have to do—\"\n\n\n \"At ease, colonel,\" the brigadier said sharply. He waited until the\n colonel had retreated, then addressed Andy. \"It's your show. What do\n you suggest?\"\n\n\n \"Get somebody—maybe even the President—on all radio and TV networks.\n Explain frankly about the four-centers and warn against licking any\n stamps. Then—\"",
"All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office\n deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite\n comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or\n at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy\n McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n\n\n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel\n Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe\n this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the\n brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in\n charge.\"\n\n\n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious\n epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack\n timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top\n of the whole powder keg.\"",
"Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He\n was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen\n other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The\n lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed\n his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\nIt was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle\n silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around\n the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n\n\n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was\n babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students,\n and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a\n trend?\"",
"And the general was still chuckling as he picked up the lone four-cent\n stamp in his left hand, made a gun of his right hand, and marched the\n stamp out of the office under guard.\nTHE END",
"The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then\n launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and\n your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the\n duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the\n sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n\n\n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned—\"\n\n\n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated—unless you\n find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's\n get out of here and let these people work.\"\nThe brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his\n cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain\n and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper\n channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile\n of reports Bettijean had brought in.",
"Andy chucked. \"That's right. Did you ever see a post office clerk\n lick a stamp? They always use a sponge.\"\n\n\n The general looked to Bettijean, to Andy, to the stamp. He grinned and\n the grin became a rumbling laugh. \"How would you two like a thirty-day\n furlough to rest up—or to get better acquainted?\"\n\n\n Bettijean squealed. Andy reached for her hand.\n\n\n \"And while you're gone,\" the general continued, \"I'll see what strings\n I can pull. If I can't wangle you a couple of battlefield commissions,\n I'll zip you both through O.C.S. so fast you won't even have time to\n pin on the bars.\"\n\n\n But neither Andy nor Bettijean had heard a word after the mention of\n furlough. Like a pair of puppy-lovers, they were sinking into the\n depths of each other's eyes.",
"Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was\n weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does\n that a doctor doesn't—why girls from small offices were sick—and why\n senators and postal workers weren't—why college students caught the\n bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n\n\n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the\n poison and prescribe medication. But\"—he held up a four-cent\n stamp—\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n\n\n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes\n bugged at Andy, at the stamp.",
"\"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's\n certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it\n easy and—. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n\n\n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A\n lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only\n shrug and indicate the girl.\n\n\n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of\n thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society\n matrons, office workers—Aspen, Taos and college towns—thousands of\n people sick—but none in that valley in Tennessee—and few government\n workers—just one girl in his office—and she was sicker and more\n frightened about a letter—and....\n\n\n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.",
"\"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same\n thing—only not quite as severe—in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n\n\n \"Writers?\"\n\n\n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the\n hard hit.\"\n\n\n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are\n fine—writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n\n\n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a\n country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about.\n Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n\n\n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his\n cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all\n lumped together.\"\n\n\n \"What does it show?\"",
"The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the\n fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used\n a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a\n blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of\n water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n\n\n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n\n\n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared.\n Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n\n\n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling\n suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside\n manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked\n out with this stuff yet.\"\n\n\n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.",
"The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out\n effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every\n serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've\n still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're\n right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n\n\n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through\n muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there,\n futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm.\n He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement\n that silenced him.\n\n\n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll\n find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"",
"\"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink\n or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear?\n What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists?\n What are we missing? What—\"\nIn the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk,\n then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n\n\n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to\n Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n\n\n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she\n lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering,\n shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the\n hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n\n\n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to\n cover her. And get a glass of water.\""
],
[
"\"Oh, good heavens!\" Bettijean cried, her fingers biting into Andy's\n shoulder. \"Do you have to come in here trying to throw your weight\n around when this man—\"\n\n\n \"That's enough,\" the colonel snapped. \"I had hoped that you two would\n co-operate, but....\" He let the sentence trail off as he swelled up a\n bit with his own importance. \"I have turned Washington upside down to\n get these two officers from the surgeon general's office. Sergeant.\n Corporal. You are relieved of your duties as of this moment. You will\n report to my office at once for suitable disciplinary action.\"\n\n\n Bettijean sucked in a strained breath and her hand flew to her mouth.\n \"But you can't—\"",
"All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office\n deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite\n comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or\n at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy\n McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n\n\n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel\n Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe\n this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the\n brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in\n charge.\"\n\n\n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious\n epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack\n timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top\n of the whole powder keg.\"",
"Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment\n before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop\n of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\"\n he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I\n know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority,\n we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n\n\n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so\n irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word.",
"The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his\n chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n \"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n\n\n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many\n things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n\n\n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled\n up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face\n as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had\n feared.\"\n\n\n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A\n captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.",
"\"Well, then, Sergeant.\" The colonel tried to relax his square face,\n but tension rode every weathered wrinkle and fear glinted behind the\n pale gray eyes. \"So you finally recognize the gravity of the\n situation.\"\n\n\n Andy's head snapped up, heated words searing towards his lips.\n Bettijean stepped quickly around the desk and laid a steady hand on\n his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Colonel,\" she said levelly, \"you should know better than that.\"\n\n\n A shocked young captain exploded, \"Corporal. Maybe you'd better report\n to—\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Andy said sharply.",
"\"Let's go,\" Andy said, pushing up from his chair. Ignoring the brass,\n he turned to her and brushed his lips across hers. \"Let them sweat a\n while. Let 'em have the whole stinking business. Whatever they do to\n us, at least we can get some sleep.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't quit now,\" Bettijean protested. \"These brass hats don't\n know from—\"\n\n\n \"Corporal!\" the colonel roared.\nAnd from the door, an icy voice said, \"Yes, colonel?\"\n\n\n The colonel and his captains wheeled, stared and saluted. \"Oh,\n general,\" the colonel said. \"I was just—\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" the brigadier said, stepping into the room. \"I've been\n listening to you. And I thought I suggested that everybody leave the\n sergeant and his staff alone.\"\n\n\n \"But, general, I—\"",
"He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to\n worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical\n nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible\n scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned\n down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and\n broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\nIt was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with\n another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a\n cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean\n cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n\n\n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.",
"Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who\n trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his\n jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an\n instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of\n General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a\n swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded\n newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n\n\n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first\n glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ\n warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n\n\n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll\n help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.",
"The general gave both Andy and Bettijean a long, sober look, then\n launched himself from the chair. Pivoting, he said, \"Colonel, you and\n your captains will be stationed by that switchboard out there. For the\n duration of this emergency, you will take orders only from the\n sergeant and the corporal here.\"\n\n\n \"But, general,\" the colonel wailed, \"a noncom? I'm assigned—\"\n\n\n The general snorted. \"Insubordination cannot be tolerated—unless you\n find a two-star general to outrank me. Now, as I said before, let's\n get out of here and let these people work.\"\nThe brass exited wordlessly. Bettijean sighed noisily. Andy found his\n cigarette dead and lit another. He fancied a tiny lever in his brain\n and he shifted gears to direct his thinking back into the proper\n channel. Abruptly his fatigue began to lift. He picked up the new pile\n of reports Bettijean had brought in.",
"Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general,\n snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will\n you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of\n his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself\n one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who\n entered his office.\nBettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile\n as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n \"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n\n\n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick,\n brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to\n his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n\n\n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a\n little time.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"",
"For a long moment he stared at his clenched fists. Then he exhaled\n slowly and, to the colonel, flatly and without apology, he said,\n \"You'll have to excuse the people in this office if they overlook some\n of the G.I. niceties. We've been without sleep for two days, we're\n surviving on sandwiches and coffee, and we're fighting a war here that\n makes every other one look like a Sunday School picnic.\" He felt\n Bettijean's hand tighten reassuringly on his shoulder and he gave her\n a tired smile. Then he hunched forward and picked up a report. \"So say\n what you came here to say and let us get back to work.\"\n\n\n \"Sergeant,\" the captain said, as if reading from a manual,\n \"insubordination cannot be tolerated, even under emergency conditions.\n Your conduct here will be noted and—\"",
"The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out\n effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every\n serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've\n still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're\n right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n\n\n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through\n muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there,\n futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm.\n He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement\n that silenced him.\n\n\n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll\n find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"",
"The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the\n fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used\n a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a\n blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of\n water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n\n\n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n\n\n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared.\n Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n\n\n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling\n suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside\n manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked\n out with this stuff yet.\"\n\n\n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.",
"Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He\n was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen\n other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The\n lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed\n his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\nIt was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle\n silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around\n the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n\n\n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was\n babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students,\n and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a\n trend?\"",
"Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's\n desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it,\n straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He\n snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse.\n Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through\n the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab\n technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n\n\n The technician darted out.\n\n\n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the\n general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of\n everything.\"",
"THE PLAGUE\nBy TEDDY KELLER\nSuppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague\n showed up.... One that attacked only people within the\n political borders of the United States!\nIllustrated by Schoenherr\nSergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the\n excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody\n had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n\n\n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been\n answering the rare call on the single line—in that friendly, husky\n voice that gave even generals pause—by saying, \"Good morning. Office\n of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now\n there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to\n a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And\n now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"",
"\"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's\n certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it\n easy and—. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n\n\n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A\n lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only\n shrug and indicate the girl.\n\n\n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of\n thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society\n matrons, office workers—Aspen, Taos and college towns—thousands of\n people sick—but none in that valley in Tennessee—and few government\n workers—just one girl in his office—and she was sicker and more\n frightened about a letter—and....\n\n\n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.",
"Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then\n told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying\n on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about\n eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n\n\n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n\n\n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color\n spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face\n away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little\n nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n\n\n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n\n\n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n\n\n \"But ... but....\"\n\n\n \"Was it something against regulations?\"",
"\"Irregular, hell,\" the brigadier snorted, the message getting through.\n \"There're ways. Gentlemen, I suggest we clear out of here and let the\n sergeant get to work.\" He took a step toward the door, and the other\n officers, protesting and complaining, moved along after him. As they\n drifted out, he turned and said, \"We'll clear your office for top\n priority.\" Then dead serious, he added, \"Son, a whole nation could\n panic at any moment. You've got to come through.\"",
"Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was\n weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does\n that a doctor doesn't—why girls from small offices were sick—and why\n senators and postal workers weren't—why college students caught the\n bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n\n\n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the\n poison and prescribe medication. But\"—he held up a four-cent\n stamp—\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n\n\n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes\n bugged at Andy, at the stamp."
],
[
"\"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so\n far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers,\n teachers, preachers—rich, poor—from Florida to Alaska. Just when you\n called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated\n mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too\n fragmentary.\"\n\n\n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly\n ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until\n they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of\n the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n\n\n \"In food?\"\n\n\n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing\n plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same\n time—even if it was sabotage?\"\n\n\n \"On the wind?\"",
"\"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink\n or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear?\n What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists?\n What are we missing? What—\"\nIn the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk,\n then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n\n\n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to\n Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n\n\n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she\n lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering,\n shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the\n hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n\n\n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to\n cover her. And get a glass of water.\"",
"\"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had\n a report—nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the\n civilian newspapermen—not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a\n day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had—it was a\n coded message the Reds'd tried to censor—was an indication of\n something big in the works.\"\n\n\n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had\n an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n\n\n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that\n they could cripple us from within.\"",
"\"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big\n offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and\n two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n\n\n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor,\n dentist or attorney?\"\n\n\n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n\n\n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable\n thing. Thank heaven for—\"\n\n\n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before\n both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her\n teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n\n\n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half\n the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"",
"\"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same\n thing—only not quite as severe—in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n\n\n \"Writers?\"\n\n\n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the\n hard hit.\"\n\n\n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are\n fine—writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n\n\n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a\n country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about.\n Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n\n\n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his\n cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all\n lumped together.\"\n\n\n \"What does it show?\"",
"\"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's\n certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it\n easy and—. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n\n\n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A\n lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only\n shrug and indicate the girl.\n\n\n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of\n thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society\n matrons, office workers—Aspen, Taos and college towns—thousands of\n people sick—but none in that valley in Tennessee—and few government\n workers—just one girl in his office—and she was sicker and more\n frightened about a letter—and....\n\n\n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.",
"\"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up—no medical releases. Must\n mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n \"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the\n first hit?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass\n could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could\n slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come\n from the general public.\"\n\n\n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under\n twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices\n and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't\n tell who's got it on the military bases.\"",
"THE PLAGUE\nBy TEDDY KELLER\nSuppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague\n showed up.... One that attacked only people within the\n political borders of the United States!\nIllustrated by Schoenherr\nSergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the\n excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody\n had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n\n\n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been\n answering the rare call on the single line—in that friendly, husky\n voice that gave even generals pause—by saying, \"Good morning. Office\n of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now\n there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to\n a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And\n now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"",
"Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He\n was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen\n other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The\n lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed\n his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\nIt was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle\n silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around\n the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n\n\n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was\n babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students,\n and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a\n trend?\"",
"The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the\n fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used\n a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a\n blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of\n water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n\n\n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n\n\n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared.\n Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n\n\n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling\n suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside\n manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked\n out with this stuff yet.\"\n\n\n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.",
"Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's\n desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it,\n straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He\n snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse.\n Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through\n the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab\n technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n\n\n The technician darted out.\n\n\n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the\n general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of\n everything.\"",
"Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was\n weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does\n that a doctor doesn't—why girls from small offices were sick—and why\n senators and postal workers weren't—why college students caught the\n bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n\n\n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the\n poison and prescribe medication. But\"—he held up a four-cent\n stamp—\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n\n\n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes\n bugged at Andy, at the stamp.",
"\"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that\n you did—everything you ate or drank—in the last ... oh, twelve\n hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see\n Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n\n\n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n\n\n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n\n\n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged\n nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of\n attention. Andy ignored her.\n\n\n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\"\n Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"",
"\"We've got to find a clue—a trend—an inkling of something.\" He\n nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those\n girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country.\n Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up\n another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and\n sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and\n occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n\n\n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode\n from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on\n the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone\n and directory.",
"\"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure\n accident—some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the\n stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone\n call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be\n quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors.\n The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six\n hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States\n whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the\n Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\nThe general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into\n the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling\n his granite brow.\n\n\n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"",
"She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no\n fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's\n spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her\n dark eyes.\n\n\n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n\n\n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,—and a\n bunch more. No indication there. Except\"—she fished out a one-page\n report—\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign\n for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today\n they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at\n the polls. They've all got it.\"\n\n\n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's\n a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up\n with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"",
"She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used,\n studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she\n asked.\n\n\n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n \"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single\n government worker sick.\"\n\n\n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n\n\n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own\n scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of\n office workers—business, not government—and new parents and newly\n engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n\n\n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n\n\n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just\n guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"",
"\"And it's not geographical. Look, remember those two reports from\n Tennessee? That place where they voted on water bonds or something,\n everybody had it. But the country doctor in another section hadn't\n even heard of it.\" Andy could only shake his head.\n\n\n Bettijean heaved herself up from the chair and trudged back to the\n outer office. She returned momentarily with a tray of food. Putting a\n paper cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of Andy, she sat down and\n nibbled at her snack like an exhausted chipmunk.\n\n\n Andy banged a fist at his desk again. Coffee splashed over the rim of\n his cup onto the clutter of papers. \"It's here,\" he said angrily.\n \"It's here somewhere, but we can't find it.\"\n\n\n \"The answer?\"",
"All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office\n deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite\n comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or\n at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy\n McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n\n\n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel\n Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe\n this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the\n brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in\n charge.\"\n\n\n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious\n epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack\n timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top\n of the whole powder keg.\"",
"The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his\n chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n \"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n\n\n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many\n things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n\n\n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled\n up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face\n as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had\n feared.\"\n\n\n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A\n captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him."
],
[
"THE PLAGUE\nBy TEDDY KELLER\nSuppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague\n showed up.... One that attacked only people within the\n political borders of the United States!\nIllustrated by Schoenherr\nSergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the\n excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody\n had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n\n\n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been\n answering the rare call on the single line—in that friendly, husky\n voice that gave even generals pause—by saying, \"Good morning. Office\n of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now\n there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to\n a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And\n now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"",
"All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office\n deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite\n comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or\n at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy\n McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n\n\n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel\n Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe\n this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the\n brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in\n charge.\"\n\n\n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious\n epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack\n timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top\n of the whole powder keg.\"",
"\"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink\n or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear?\n What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists?\n What are we missing? What—\"\nIn the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk,\n then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n\n\n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to\n Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n\n\n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she\n lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering,\n shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the\n hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n\n\n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to\n cover her. And get a glass of water.\"",
"Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who\n trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his\n jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an\n instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of\n General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a\n swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded\n newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n\n\n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first\n glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ\n warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n\n\n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll\n help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.",
"She move around the desk and sat, noting the phone book he had used,\n studying the names he had crossed off. \"Did you learn anything?\" she\n asked.\n\n\n Andy coughed, trying to clear his raw throat. \"It's crazy,\" he said.\n \"From the Senate and House on down, I haven't found a single\n government worker sick.\"\n\n\n \"I found a few,\" she said. \"Over in a Virginia hospital.\"\n\n\n \"But I did find,\" Andy said, flipping through pages of his own\n scrawl, \"a society matron and her social secretary, a whole flock of\n office workers—business, not government—and new parents and newly\n engaged girls and....\" He shrugged.\n\n\n \"Did you notice anything significant about those office workers?\"\n\n\n Andy nodded. \"I was going to ask you the same, since I was just\n guessing. I hadn't had time to check it out.\"",
"\"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's\n certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it\n easy and—. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n\n\n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A\n lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only\n shrug and indicate the girl.\n\n\n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of\n thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society\n matrons, office workers—Aspen, Taos and college towns—thousands of\n people sick—but none in that valley in Tennessee—and few government\n workers—just one girl in his office—and she was sicker and more\n frightened about a letter—and....\n\n\n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.",
"\"Well, I checked some. Practically none of my victims came from big\n offices, either business or industry. They were all out of one and\n two-girl offices or small businesses.\"\n\n\n \"That was my guess. And do you know that I didn't find a doctor,\n dentist or attorney?\"\n\n\n \"Nor a single postal worker.\"\n\n\n Andy tried to smile. \"One thing we do know. It's not a communicable\n thing. Thank heaven for—\"\n\n\n He broke off as a cute blonde entered and put stacks of reports before\n both Andy and Bettijean. The girl hesitated, fidgeting, fingers to her\n teeth. Then, without speaking, she hurried out.\n\n\n Andy stared at the top sheet and groaned. \"This may be something. Half\n the adult population of Aspen, Colorado, is down.\"",
"Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He\n was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen\n other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The\n lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed\n his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\nIt was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle\n silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around\n the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n\n\n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was\n babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students,\n and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a\n trend?\"",
"\"We've got to find a clue—a trend—an inkling of something.\" He\n nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those\n girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country.\n Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up\n another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and\n sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and\n occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n\n\n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode\n from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on\n the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone\n and directory.",
"Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was\n weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does\n that a doctor doesn't—why girls from small offices were sick—and why\n senators and postal workers weren't—why college students caught the\n bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n\n\n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the\n poison and prescribe medication. But\"—he held up a four-cent\n stamp—\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n\n\n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes\n bugged at Andy, at the stamp.",
"She pulled up a chair and thumbed through the papers. \"So far, no\n fatalities. That's why there's no panic yet, I guess. But it's\n spreading like ... well, like a plague.\" Fear flickered deep in her\n dark eyes.\n\n\n \"Any water reports?\" Andy asked.\n\n\n \"Wichita O.K., Indianapolis O.K., Tulsa O.K., Buffalo O.K.,—and a\n bunch more. No indication there. Except\"—she fished out a one-page\n report—\"some little town in Tennessee. Yesterday there was a campaign\n for everybody to write their congressman about some deal and today\n they were to vote on a new water system. Hardly anybody showed up at\n the polls. They've all got it.\"\n\n\n Andy shrugged. \"You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's\n a big help.\" He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up\n with a crude chart. \"Any trends yet?\"",
"The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the\n fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used\n a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a\n blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of\n water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n\n\n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n\n\n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared.\n Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n\n\n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling\n suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside\n manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked\n out with this stuff yet.\"\n\n\n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.",
"\"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same\n thing—only not quite as severe—in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n\n\n \"Writers?\"\n\n\n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the\n hard hit.\"\n\n\n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are\n fine—writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n\n\n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a\n country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about.\n Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n\n\n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his\n cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all\n lumped together.\"\n\n\n \"What does it show?\"",
"He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to\n worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical\n nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible\n scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned\n down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and\n broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\nIt was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with\n another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a\n cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean\n cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n\n\n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.",
"\"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure\n accident—some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the\n stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone\n call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be\n quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors.\n The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six\n hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States\n whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the\n Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\nThe general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into\n the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling\n his granite brow.\n\n\n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"",
"Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's\n desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it,\n straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He\n snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse.\n Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through\n the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab\n technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n\n\n The technician darted out.\n\n\n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the\n general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of\n everything.\"",
"\"Black-out. By order of somebody higher up—no medical releases. Must\n mean they've got it.\" He scratched the growing stubble on his chin.\n \"If this were a fifth column setup, wouldn't the armed forces be the\n first hit?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Bettijean brightened, then sobered. \"Maybe not. The brass\n could keep it secret if an epidemic hit an army camp. And they could\n slap a control condition on any military area. But the panic will come\n from the general public.\"\n\n\n \"Here's another batch,\" Andy said. \"Small college towns under\n twenty-five thousand population. All hard hit.\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's not split intellectually. Small colleges and small offices\n and writers get it. Doctors don't and dentists don't. But we can't\n tell who's got it on the military bases.\"",
"\"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so\n far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers,\n teachers, preachers—rich, poor—from Florida to Alaska. Just when you\n called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated\n mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too\n fragmentary.\"\n\n\n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly\n ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until\n they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of\n the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n\n\n \"In food?\"\n\n\n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing\n plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same\n time—even if it was sabotage?\"\n\n\n \"On the wind?\"",
"\"I've just come from Intelligence,\" the general said. \"We haven't had\n a report—nothing from our agents, from the Diplomatic Corps, from the\n civilian newspapermen—not a word from any Iron Curtain country for a\n day and half. Everybody's frantic. The last item we had—it was a\n coded message the Reds'd tried to censor—was an indication of\n something big in the works.\"\n\n\n \"A day and half ago,\" Andy mused. \"Just about the time we knew we had\n an epidemic. And about the time they knew it.\"\n\n\n \"It could be just propaganda,\" Bettijean said hopefully, \"proving that\n they could cripple us from within.\"",
"Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general,\n snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will\n you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of\n his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself\n one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who\n entered his office.\nBettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile\n as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n \"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n\n\n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick,\n brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to\n his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n\n\n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a\n little time.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. Sit down.\""
],
[
"Everyone in the room froze as Andy spun around, dashed to Bettijean's\n desk and yanked out the wide, top drawer. He pawed through it,\n straightened, then leaped across to the desk Janis had used. He\n snatched open drawer after drawer. In a bottom one he found her purse.\n Ripping it open, he dumped the contents on the desk and clawed through\n the pile until he found what he wanted. Handing it to the lab\n technician, he said, \"Get me a report. Fast.\"\n\n\n The technician darted out.\n\n\n Andy wheeled to Bettijean. \"Get the brass in here. And call the\n general first.\" To the doctor, he said, \"Give that girl the best of\n everything.\"",
"Then he ducked back to his own office and to the pile of reports. He\n was still poring over them when the general arrived. Half a dozen\n other brass hats, none of whom had been to bed, were close behind. The\n lab technician arrived a minute later. He shook his head as he handed\n his hastily scribbled report to Andy.\nIt was Bettijean who squeezed into the office and broke the brittle\n silence. \"Andy, for heaven's sake, what is it?\" Then she moved around\n the desk to stand behind him as he faced the officers.\n\n\n \"Have you got something?\" the brigadier asked. \"Some girl outside was\n babbling about writers and doctors, and dentists and college students,\n and little secretaries and big secretaries. Have you established a\n trend?\"",
"Andy glanced at the lab report and his smile was as relieved as it was\n weary. \"Our problem,\" he said, \"was in figuring out what a writer does\n that a doctor doesn't—why girls from small offices were sick—and why\n senators and postal workers weren't—why college students caught the\n bug and people in a Tennessee community didn't.\n\n\n \"The lab report isn't complete. They haven't had time to isolate the\n poison and prescribe medication. But\"—he held up a four-cent\n stamp—\"here's the villain, gentlemen.\"\n\n\n The big brass stood stunned and shocked. Mouths flapped open and eyes\n bugged at Andy, at the stamp.",
"All the brass hats in Washington had suddenly discovered this office\n deep in the recesses of the Pentagon. And none of them could quite\n comprehend what had happened. The situation might have been funny, or\n at least pathetic, if it hadn't been so desperate. Even so, Andy\n McCloud's nerves and patience had frayed thin.\n\n\n \"I told you, general,\" he snapped to the flustered brigadier, \"Colonel\n Patterson was retired ten days ago. I don't know what happened. Maybe\n this replacement sawbones got strangled in red tape. Anyhow, the\n brand-new lieutenant hasn't showed up here. As far as I know, I'm in\n charge.\"\n\n\n \"But this is incredible,\" a two-star general wailed. \"A mysterious\n epidemic is sweeping the country, possibly an insidious germ attack\n timed to precede an all-out invasion, and a noncom is sitting on top\n of the whole powder keg.\"",
"\"No, I don't think so,\" Andy said, patting her shoulder. \"There's\n certainly nothing secret about this epidemic. Now you just take it\n easy and—. Oh, here's a doctor now.\"\n\n\n The doctor, a white-headed Air Force major, bustled into the room. A\n lab technician in a white smock was close behind. Andy could only\n shrug and indicate the girl.\n\n\n Turning away, lighting a cigarette, he tried to focus on the tangle of\n thoughts that spun through his head. Doctors, writers, society\n matrons, office workers—Aspen, Taos and college towns—thousands of\n people sick—but none in that valley in Tennessee—and few government\n workers—just one girl in his office—and she was sicker and more\n frightened about a letter—and....\n\n\n \"Hey, wait!\" Andy yelled.",
"\"It's hitting everybody,\" Bettijean said helplessly. \"Not many kids so\n far, thank heavens. But housewives, businessmen, office workers,\n teachers, preachers—rich, poor—from Florida to Alaska. Just when you\n called me in, one of the girls thought she had a trend. The isolated\n mountain areas of the West and South. But reports are too\n fragmentary.\"\n\n\n \"What is it?\" he cried suddenly, banging the desk. \"People deathly\n ill, but nobody dying. And doctors can't identify the poison until\n they have a fatality for an autopsy. People stricken in every part of\n the country, but the water systems are pure. How does it spread?\"\n\n\n \"In food?\"\n\n\n \"How? There must be hundreds of canneries and dairies and packing\n plants over the country. How could they all goof at the same\n time—even if it was sabotage?\"\n\n\n \"On the wind?\"",
"\"But there's no evidence it was a plot yet. Could be pure\n accident—some chemical in the stickum spoiled. Do they keep the\n stickum in barrels? Find out who had access. And ... oh, the phone\n call. That was the lab. The antidote's simple and the cure should be\n quick. They can phone or broadcast the medical information to doctors.\n The man on the phone said they could start emptying hospitals in six\n hours. And maybe we should release some propaganda. \"United States\n whips mystery virus,\" or something like that. And we could send the\n Kremlin a stamp collection and.... Aw, you take it, sir. I'm pooped.\"\nThe general wheeled to fire a salvo of commands. Officers poured into\n the corridor. Only the brigadier remained, a puzzled frown crinkling\n his granite brow.\n\n\n \"But you said that postal workers weren't getting sick.\"",
"\"Of course. What is it that girls in small offices do or eat or drink\n or wear that girls in large offices don't do or eat or drink or wear?\n What do writers and doctors do differently? Or poets and dentists?\n What are we missing? What—\"\nIn the outer office a girl cried out. A body thumped against a desk,\n then a chair, then to the floor. Two girls screamed.\n\n\n Andy bolted up from his chair. Racing to the door, he shouted back to\n Bettijean, \"Get a staff doctor and a chemist from the lab.\"\n\n\n It was the girl who had been so nervous in his office earlier. Now she\n lay in a pathetic little heap between her desk and chair, whimpering,\n shivering, eyes wide with horror. The other girls clustered at the\n hall door, plainly ready to stampede.\n\n\n \"It's not contagious,\" Andy growled. \"Find some blankets or coats to\n cover her. And get a glass of water.\"",
"The general nodded. \"Or it could be the softening up for an all-out\n effort. Every American base in the world is alerted and every\n serviceman is being issued live ammunition. If we're wrong, we've\n still got an epidemic and panic that could touch it off. If we're\n right ... well, we've got to know. What can you do?\"\n\n\n Andy dropped his haggard face into his hands. His voice came through\n muffled. \"I can sit here and cry.\" For an eternity he sat there,\n futility piling on helplessness, aware of Bettijean's hand on his arm.\n He heard the colonel try to speak and sensed the general's movement\n that silenced him.\n\n\n Suddenly he sat upright and slapped a palm down on the desk. \"We'll\n find your answers, sir. All we ask is co-operation.\"",
"Slowly, haltingly, she recited the routine of a routine work day, then\n told about the quick snack that sufficed for supper and about staying\n on her phone and typewriter for another five hours. \"It was about\n eleven when the relief crew came in.\"\n\n\n \"What did you do then?\" Andy asked.\n\n\n \"I ... I took a break and....\" Her ivory skin reddened, the color\n spreading into the roots of her fluffy curls, and she turned her face\n away from Andy. \"And I had a sandwich and some coffee and got a little\n nap in the ladies' lounge and ... and that's all.\"\n\n\n \"And that's not all,\" Andy prompted. \"What else?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" Janis said too quickly.\n\n\n Andy shook his head. \"Tell it all and maybe it'll help.\"\n\n\n \"But ... but....\"\n\n\n \"Was it something against regulations?\"",
"\"We've got to find a clue—a trend—an inkling of something.\" He\n nodded toward the outer office. \"Stop all in-coming calls. Get those\n girls on lines to hospitals in every city and town in the country.\n Have them contact individual doctors in rural areas. Then line up\n another relief crew, and get somebody carting in more coffee and\n sandwiches. And on those calls, be sure we learn the sex, age, and\n occupation of the victims. You and I'll start with Washington.\"\n\n\n Bettijean snapped to her feet, grinned her encouragement and strode\n from the room. Andy could hear her crisp instructions to the girls on\n the phones. Sucking air through his teeth, he reached for his phone\n and directory.",
"The other girls, glad for the excuse, dashed away. Andy scooped up the\n fallen girl and put her down gently on the close-jammed desks. He used\n a chair cushion for a pillow. By then the other girls were back with a\n blanket and the glass of water. He covered the girl, gave her a sip of\n water and heard somebody murmur, \"Poor Janis.\"\n\n\n \"Now,\" Andy said brightly, \"how's that, Janis?\"\n\n\n She mustered a smile, and breathed, \"Better. I ... I was so scared.\n Fever and dizzy ... symptoms like the epidemic.\"\n\n\n \"Now you know there's nothing to be afraid of,\" Andy said, feeling\n suddenly and ridiculously like a pill roller with a practiced bedside\n manner. \"You know you may feel pretty miserable, but nobody's conked\n out with this stuff yet.\"\n\n\n Janis breathed out and her taut body relaxed.",
"THE PLAGUE\nBy TEDDY KELLER\nSuppose a strictly one hundred per cent American plague\n showed up.... One that attacked only people within the\n political borders of the United States!\nIllustrated by Schoenherr\nSergeant Major Andrew McCloud ignored the jangling telephones and the\n excited jabber of a room full of brass, and lit a cigarette. Somebody\n had to keep his head in this mess. Everybody was about to flip.\n\n\n Like the telephone. Two days ago Corporal Bettijean Baker had been\n answering the rare call on the single line—in that friendly, husky\n voice that gave even generals pause—by saying, \"Good morning. Office\n of the Civil Health and Germ Warfare Protection Co-ordinator.\" Now\n there was a switchboard out in the hall with a web of lines running to\n a dozen girls at a half dozen desks wedged into the outer office. And\n now the harried girls answered with a hasty, \"Germ War Protection.\"",
"\"Don't hurry,\" Andy said, \"but I want you to tell me everything that\n you did—everything you ate or drank—in the last ... oh, twelve\n hours.\" He felt a pressure behind him and swiveled his head to see\n Bettijean standing there. He tried to smile.\n\n\n \"What time is it?\" Janis asked weakly.\n\n\n Andy glanced to a wall clock, then gave it a double take.\n\n\n One of the girls said, \"It's three o'clock in the morning.\" She edged\n nearer Andy, obviously eager to replace Janis as the center of\n attention. Andy ignored her.\n\n\n \"I ... I've been here since ... golly, yesterday morning at nine,\"\n Janis said. \"I came to work as usual and....\"",
"Andy swore under his breath and eyed the two young officers who\n trailed after the colonel. Emotionally exhausted, he had to clamp his\n jaw against a huge laugh that struggled up in his throat. For just an\n instant there, the colonel had reminded him of a movie version of\n General Rommel strutting up and down before his tanks. But it wasn't a\n swagger stick the colonel had tucked under his arm. It was a folded\n newspaper. Opening it, the colonel flung it down on Andy's desk.\n\n\n \"RED PLAGUE SWEEPS NATION,\" the scare headline screamed. Andy's first\n glance caught such phrases as \"alleged Russian plot\" and \"germ\n warfare\" and \"authorities hopelessly baffled.\"\n\n\n Snatching the paper, Andy balled it and hurled it from him. \"That'll\n help a lot,\" he growled hoarsely.",
"He dialed until every finger of his right hand was sore. He spoke to\n worried doctors and frantic hospital administrators and hysterical\n nurses. His firm, fine penmanship deteriorated to a barely legible\n scrawl as writer's cramp knotted his hand and arm. His voice burned\n down to a rasping whisper. But columns climbed up his rough chart and\n broken lines pointed vaguely to trends.\nIt was hours later when Bettijean came back into the office with\n another stack of papers. Andy hung up his phone and reached for a\n cigarette. At that moment the door banged open. Nerves raw, Bettijean\n cried out. Andy's cigarette tumbled from his trembling fingers.\n\n\n \"Sergeant,\" the chicken colonel barked, parading into the office.",
"\"What?\" Bettijean frowned over the report in her hands. \"It's the same\n thing—only not quite as severe—in Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.\"\n\n\n \"Writers?\"\n\n\n \"Mostly. Some artists, too, and musicians. And poets are among the\n hard hit.\"\n\n\n \"This is insane,\" Andy muttered. \"Doctors and dentists are\n fine—writers and poets are sick. Make sense out of that.\"\n\n\n Bettijean held up a paper and managed a confused smile. \"Here's a\n country doctor in Tennessee. He doesn't even know what it's all about.\n Nobody's sick in his valley.\"\n\n\n \"Somebody in our outer office is organized,\" Andy said, pulling at his\n cigarette. \"Here're reports from a dozen military installations all\n lumped together.\"\n\n\n \"What does it show?\"",
"Andy didn't waste time standing. He merely nodded to the general,\n snubbed out his cigarette, and buzzed the intercom. \"Bettijean, will\n you bring me all the latest reports, please?\" Then he peeled out of\n his be-ribboned blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He allowed himself\n one moment to enjoy the sight of the slim, black-headed corporal who\n entered his office.\nBettijean crossed briskly to his desk. She gave him a motherly smile\n as she put down a thick sheaf of papers. \"You look beat,\" she said.\n \"Brass give you much trouble?\"\n\n\n \"Not much. We're top priority now.\" He ran fingers through the thick,\n brown hair and massaged his scalp, trying to generate stimulation to\n his wary and confused brain. \"What's new?\"\n\n\n \"I've gone though some of these,\" she said. \"Tried to save you a\n little time.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. Sit down.\"",
"The general showed the colonel his back and motioned Andy into his\n chair. He glanced to Bettijean and a smile warmed his wedge face.\n \"Corporal, were you speaking just then as a woman or as a soldier?\"\n\n\n Crimson erupted into Bettijean's face and her tight laugh said many\n things. She shrugged. \"Both I guess.\"\n\n\n The general waved her to a chair and, oblivious of the colonel, pulled\n up a chair for himself. The last trace of humor drained from his face\n as he leaned elbows on the desk. \"Andy, this is even worse than we had\n feared.\"\n\n\n Andy fumbled for a cigarette and Bettijean passed him a match. A\n captain opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel shushed him.",
"Andy's big hands clenched into fists and he had to wait a moment\n before he could speak safely. Doggone the freckles and the unruly mop\n of hair that give him such a boyish look. \"May I remind you, general,\"\n he said, \"that I've been entombed here for two years. My staff and I\n know what to do. If you'll give us some co-operation and a priority,\n we'll try to figure this thing out.\"\n\n\n \"But good heavens,\" a chicken colonel moaned, \"this is all so\n irregular. A noncom!\" He said it like a dirty word."
]
] |
test
|
20005
|
[
"According to the article, why are fund-raisers largely unbothered by receiving illegal campaign contributions?",
"Why did the Democratic National Committee cease its vetting process for campaign donations in the early 1990s?",
"Why does the writer posit that people were so obsessed with Indogate?",
"What is the suggested Republican motivation for their displays of outrage at John Huang's corrupted fundraising tactics?",
"Which of the following did Republicans not accuse Huang of regarding the Lippo affair?",
"What makes Huang's actions unique compared to other corrupt fundraisers?",
"Why did Bob Dole most likely love bananas so much?",
"How was the DNC ultimately able to tighten the fundraising gap with Republicans?",
"Why does the author suggest the House of Representatives investigated Newt Gingrich and not Haley Barbour?"
] |
[
[
"There haven't been many consequences in the past, so they just apologize and move on.",
"Because of pressure from the higher-ups in political campaigns.",
"They only care about money and nothing else.",
"Because their current processes for raising money are based on years of tradition and successful strategies."
],
[
"In order to comply with new rules passed down by the Federal Election Commission.",
"Clinton's reelection campaign wanted to remove barriers to its massive fundraising goal.",
"They wanted to focus on their new strategy for tapping ethnic subcultures for cash.",
"To better compete with the impressive fundraising number of the Republican National Convention."
],
[
"A renewed interest in the legality of donations from ethnic groups.",
"It provided an opportunity for reformers to highlight issues they felt were important in the national media.",
"A new understanding of the function of soft money political campaign contributions.",
"A combination of political games, perceived bias in media attention, and reform advocates."
],
[
"To harm the political future of Democrats.",
"To shift public opinion in their direction by inciting negative media attention.",
"They're seeking political retribution for having to pay for their own shady dealings.",
"They're angry about losing their superior fundraising position."
],
[
"A quid-pro-quo transaction.",
"A potential conflict of interest. ",
"Using his federal office to fundraise.",
"Taking donations illegally. "
],
[
"He failed to properly vet campaign contributions",
"He raised greater amounts of money than anyone else.",
"He better understood how to leverage his position to pursue various ethnic groups for money.",
"He successfully implemented the \"Team 100\" strategy to raise vast amounts of cash."
],
[
"Because he owned a company that exported fruit internationally.",
"Because he profited from the trade sanctions imposed upon Colombia, Ecuador, and Costa Rica.",
"It was a result of the large campaign donations Chiquita gave to the RNC.",
"He saw that bananas had the potential to boost America's economy."
],
[
"By focusing the spotlight on Republican corruption thereby harming their fundraising efforts.",
"By hedging bets on illegal fundraising practices.",
"By marketing to specific ethnic groups living in the United States.",
"By utilizing the exact same playbook Republicans had employed for decades."
],
[
"Gingrich's violations with GOPAC were far more egregious than Barbour's with the RNC.",
"Because of the inherent bias of the media covering such events.",
"Because the court of public opinion is so easily swayed by external factors.",
"There is no good explanation as campaign finance violations have traditionally been a murky legal area."
]
] |
[
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1
] |
[
1,
1,
0,
1,
1,
1,
0,
1,
1
] |
[
[
"Huang was not really an innovator; he was simply more successful than his predecessors in both parties in tapping ethnic subcultures for cash. What Huang's higher-ups at the DNC can most be faulted for is not following suspicions they should have had about the huge sums he was reeling in. Instead, they looked the other way. In 1994, the DNC abandoned its own procedure for vetting contributions for legality. We don't know exactly why this happened, but it's a good bet that it had something to do with the pressure coming from the White House to raise extraordinary amounts of money for the upcoming 1996 race. The culture of fund-raising rewards quantity, not care. It discourages close scrutiny and too many questions. The less you ask, the more you get. And given that there has been no real enforcement of these rules in the past, fund-raisers haven't lost a lot of sleep about contributions turning out to be tainted. If the money goes bad, you simply return it with the appropriate regretful noises.",
"Campaign finance is an arcane and confusing subject, filled with unspoken understandings. One of these is the distinction between rules that must be obeyed and rules that can be safely flouted. In the",
"A similar invisible line separates the campaign-finance violations that become major media scandals and those that go unmentioned or rate only as footnotes in the press. It is not immediately obvious why reporters are so fascinated by John Huang's possible use of his position at the Commerce Department to raise money for his party, while they largely ignored the last two secretaries of commerce, Clinton's Ron Brown and George Bush's Robert Mosbacher, who were using the entire department as a fund-raising vehicle. Why is Newt Gingrich's use of GOPAC to raise undisclosed contributions a scandal being investigated by the House Ethics Committee, while Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour's front for avoiding disclosure, the National Policy Forum, rates as a nonstory?",
"According to those with experience in fund raising, it is often a delicate matter to establish whether ethnic donors are eligible to give. When someone offers to write you a check for $5,000, you do not ask to see a green card. The reality that neither party is in the habit of investigating its donors is illustrated by various outrageous incidents. In 1992, for example, Republicans got contributions totaling $633,770 from a Japanese-American with Hong Kong connections named Michael Kojima. No one bothered to ask where Kojima, a failed restaurateur with ex-wives suing him for nonsupport, got the money. Ironically enough, his biggest creditor turns out to have been the Lippo Bank of Los Angeles, where he owed $600,000.",
"There are examples beyond number of simply illegal contributions that the press and public just shrugged off. Even Pat Robertson got busted in 1988 for the use of a Christian Broadcasting Network plane--his",
"If the Huang case is novel, it would have to be as a deliberate and systematic violation of the laws regarding contributions by noncitizens. In terms of being systematic, there isn't much of a case. Both parties have employed ethnic fund-raisers--Jewish, Korean, Greek, Chinese--for many years. Newt Gingrich held a Sikh fund-raising event last year in California. in 1992 was Yung Soo Yoo, who makes John Huang look like a piker when it come to sleaze. One of the co-chairs of Asian-Americans for Bob Dole was California Rep. Jay Kim, who is under investigation by the FEC for taking illegal contributions from four Korean companies.",
"In fact, there is no logic to any of it. What's considered an outrage, and even what's considered a crime, are matters determined largely by accident. Advocates of reform are always happy to have a high-profile scandal, like the presently unfolding \"Indogate,\" to help them sensitize the public to just how seamy the whole business of campaign financing is. The last thing they're about to do is explain away the latest revelations as just an exotically textured version of what goes on every day. And press coverage is largely driven by how big a fuss is made by members of the opposition--not by any barometer of relative venality. Right now, Republicans are making an enormous fuss about the Democrats, so the story is huge. But we must pause and ask: Are we making an example out of the DNC for misdeeds that everybody commits? Or did John Huang and James Riady--and perhaps Harold Ickes and Bill Clinton--really do something unusually bad in the last campaign cycle?",
"The Republican outrage may be hypocritical, but in another sense, it is sincere. GOP leaders are furious at losing an advantage in corporate fund raising that dates back 100 years, to the election of 1896, when William McKinley's legendary money man Mark Hanna mobilized American business to stop the Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan. In the 1980s, the Republican advantage in total donations was still as high as 5-1 and never less than 3-1. In the 1992 election cycle, however, Ron Brown whittled it down to 3-2, thanks to corporate contributions. In 1996, the Democrats nearly caught up in the chief corporate category: soft money. With the help of Huang and others, they raised $102 million this year--almost as much as the Republicans' $121 million. The way they did it was simple: imitation.",
"The same goes for contributions that are illegal by virtue of their having been made \"in the name of another,\" an issue that has surfaced in connection with Al Gore's Buddhist temple fund-raiser. The FEC has frequently disallowed contributions made",
"\"soft money,\" which cannot be legally used for federal elections, was being spent on anything other than the federal election. None of these clear violations was deemed to be especially scandalous, even by prudes at places like Common Cause. Meanwhile,",
"travels were valued at $260,000. If one focuses on the narrow category of contributions that are illegal because they come from foreigners (even though it is arguably no worse than any other category of violation), there is still little novelty",
"Question 1: The DNC has now returned nearly half of the $2.5 million in soft money raised by Huang from Indonesian and other Asian-American sources. Assuming that these contributions were illegal because the contributors weren't legal residents (something that has been fully established only in the case of one $250,000 Korean contribution), did Huang and the DNC do anything out of the ordinary ? \n\n Answer: Not really.",
"So if, in fact, both parties are equally implicated in all the categories of campaign-financing sleaze raised by the Lippo case, why is the Indogate scandal such a big story? There are three reasons: reformers, reporters, and Republicans. Reformers are happy to have any good example to illustrate the evils of the system. Reporters are trying to compensate for suggestions that they are biased in favor of the Democrats. And Republicans, who have been the black hats of the campaign business since Watergate, are seizing an opportunity to finally turn the tables.",
"Much hinges, of course, on facts we don't have. Huang may have asked all his Asian contributors whether they were legal residents of the United States and been misled by them. There's no hard evidence that he did DNC business at Commerce or government business after Clinton moved him to the DNC in 1995. But assuming, for purposes of argument, that most of what has been alleged by Republicans is true, the Indonesian scandal potentially involves three categories of wrongdoing: 1) accepting illegal contributions; 2) trading favors for contributions; and 3) misusing a government position to raise campaign money. Actually, there is a fourth question--whether Huang violated federal conflict-of-interest rules by dealing with his old company, the Indonesian-based Lippo conglomerate, while he was a midlevel official at the Commerce Department. But that's a matter of personal corruption unrelated to the Democratic Party financing, so I won't dwell on it here, even though it's potentially the most serious charge against Huang.",
"This kind of treatment for big contributors is quite routine. In the Indonesia case, however, there is as yet no evidence that President Clinton did anything about his backer James Riady's concerns over trade with China and Indonesia beyond listening to them. Nor is there likely to be any evidence: Big foreign-policy decisions simply aren't susceptible to personal favoritism the way EPA regulations are. \n\n \n\n Question 3: Did John Huang break new ground in exploiting his government office for campaign-fund-raising purposes? \n\n Answer: No.",
"to the Huang affair. Federal Election Commission files disclose many examples of money taken illegally from foreign nationals: Japanese interests contributing to candidates in local races in Hawaii, South Americans giving to the Democratic Party of Florida, and so on. Just",
"Republican primaries, for instance, aides to Bob Dole admitted that they were going to exceed legal limits on how much they could spend, an act commentators compared at the time to running a red light. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton and his aides",
"In his own use of the Commerce Department to dun corporations for campaign funds, Ron Brown was Mosbacher's disciple, though he proved to be an even greater talent than his master. As chairman of the DNC in the period leading up to the 1992 election, Brown followed the path laid by Tony Coehlo, the infamous chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Coehlo (as documented in Brooks Jackson's Honest Graft ) was the first to try to compete with the Republicans for corporate soft money. Brown devised for the DNC a \"Managing Director\" program to match Mosbacher's Republican \"Team 100.\"",
"were helping to develop the so-called \"issue\" ads produced by state parties--ads which, in theory, weren't supposed to be co-ordinated with his re-election effort. And neither party even bothered to claim that the tens of millions being raised in so-called",
"The honor here actually goes to Robert Mosbacher, George Bush's secretary of commerce. As Bush's campaign chairman in 1988, Mosbacher invented the Team 100--a designation for the 249 corporate contributors who gave $100,000 or more in soft money to the RNC. When Mosbacher became secretary of commerce, members of the team were rewarded in various ways, including being invited by Mosbacher on trade missions around the world and, often, being given ambassadorships. (\"That's part of what the system has been like for 160 years,\" Mosbacher said when questioned about it at the time--a judgment the press apparently agreed with.) Mosbacher's last act as commerce secretary was a tour of 30 cities to meet with business executives about how he could help them with exports. When he left the department shortly thereafter to run Bush's re-election campaign, he turned to the same executives for contributions."
],
[
"Huang was not really an innovator; he was simply more successful than his predecessors in both parties in tapping ethnic subcultures for cash. What Huang's higher-ups at the DNC can most be faulted for is not following suspicions they should have had about the huge sums he was reeling in. Instead, they looked the other way. In 1994, the DNC abandoned its own procedure for vetting contributions for legality. We don't know exactly why this happened, but it's a good bet that it had something to do with the pressure coming from the White House to raise extraordinary amounts of money for the upcoming 1996 race. The culture of fund-raising rewards quantity, not care. It discourages close scrutiny and too many questions. The less you ask, the more you get. And given that there has been no real enforcement of these rules in the past, fund-raisers haven't lost a lot of sleep about contributions turning out to be tainted. If the money goes bad, you simply return it with the appropriate regretful noises.",
"In his own use of the Commerce Department to dun corporations for campaign funds, Ron Brown was Mosbacher's disciple, though he proved to be an even greater talent than his master. As chairman of the DNC in the period leading up to the 1992 election, Brown followed the path laid by Tony Coehlo, the infamous chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Coehlo (as documented in Brooks Jackson's Honest Graft ) was the first to try to compete with the Republicans for corporate soft money. Brown devised for the DNC a \"Managing Director\" program to match Mosbacher's Republican \"Team 100.\"",
"According to those with experience in fund raising, it is often a delicate matter to establish whether ethnic donors are eligible to give. When someone offers to write you a check for $5,000, you do not ask to see a green card. The reality that neither party is in the habit of investigating its donors is illustrated by various outrageous incidents. In 1992, for example, Republicans got contributions totaling $633,770 from a Japanese-American with Hong Kong connections named Michael Kojima. No one bothered to ask where Kojima, a failed restaurateur with ex-wives suing him for nonsupport, got the money. Ironically enough, his biggest creditor turns out to have been the Lippo Bank of Los Angeles, where he owed $600,000.",
"In fact, there is no logic to any of it. What's considered an outrage, and even what's considered a crime, are matters determined largely by accident. Advocates of reform are always happy to have a high-profile scandal, like the presently unfolding \"Indogate,\" to help them sensitize the public to just how seamy the whole business of campaign financing is. The last thing they're about to do is explain away the latest revelations as just an exotically textured version of what goes on every day. And press coverage is largely driven by how big a fuss is made by members of the opposition--not by any barometer of relative venality. Right now, Republicans are making an enormous fuss about the Democrats, so the story is huge. But we must pause and ask: Are we making an example out of the DNC for misdeeds that everybody commits? Or did John Huang and James Riady--and perhaps Harold Ickes and Bill Clinton--really do something unusually bad in the last campaign cycle?",
"The Republican outrage may be hypocritical, but in another sense, it is sincere. GOP leaders are furious at losing an advantage in corporate fund raising that dates back 100 years, to the election of 1896, when William McKinley's legendary money man Mark Hanna mobilized American business to stop the Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan. In the 1980s, the Republican advantage in total donations was still as high as 5-1 and never less than 3-1. In the 1992 election cycle, however, Ron Brown whittled it down to 3-2, thanks to corporate contributions. In 1996, the Democrats nearly caught up in the chief corporate category: soft money. With the help of Huang and others, they raised $102 million this year--almost as much as the Republicans' $121 million. The way they did it was simple: imitation.",
"A similar invisible line separates the campaign-finance violations that become major media scandals and those that go unmentioned or rate only as footnotes in the press. It is not immediately obvious why reporters are so fascinated by John Huang's possible use of his position at the Commerce Department to raise money for his party, while they largely ignored the last two secretaries of commerce, Clinton's Ron Brown and George Bush's Robert Mosbacher, who were using the entire department as a fund-raising vehicle. Why is Newt Gingrich's use of GOPAC to raise undisclosed contributions a scandal being investigated by the House Ethics Committee, while Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour's front for avoiding disclosure, the National Policy Forum, rates as a nonstory?",
"Much hinges, of course, on facts we don't have. Huang may have asked all his Asian contributors whether they were legal residents of the United States and been misled by them. There's no hard evidence that he did DNC business at Commerce or government business after Clinton moved him to the DNC in 1995. But assuming, for purposes of argument, that most of what has been alleged by Republicans is true, the Indonesian scandal potentially involves three categories of wrongdoing: 1) accepting illegal contributions; 2) trading favors for contributions; and 3) misusing a government position to raise campaign money. Actually, there is a fourth question--whether Huang violated federal conflict-of-interest rules by dealing with his old company, the Indonesian-based Lippo conglomerate, while he was a midlevel official at the Commerce Department. But that's a matter of personal corruption unrelated to the Democratic Party financing, so I won't dwell on it here, even though it's potentially the most serious charge against Huang.",
"If the Huang case is novel, it would have to be as a deliberate and systematic violation of the laws regarding contributions by noncitizens. In terms of being systematic, there isn't much of a case. Both parties have employed ethnic fund-raisers--Jewish, Korean, Greek, Chinese--for many years. Newt Gingrich held a Sikh fund-raising event last year in California. in 1992 was Yung Soo Yoo, who makes John Huang look like a piker when it come to sleaze. One of the co-chairs of Asian-Americans for Bob Dole was California Rep. Jay Kim, who is under investigation by the FEC for taking illegal contributions from four Korean companies.",
"Question 1: The DNC has now returned nearly half of the $2.5 million in soft money raised by Huang from Indonesian and other Asian-American sources. Assuming that these contributions were illegal because the contributors weren't legal residents (something that has been fully established only in the case of one $250,000 Korean contribution), did Huang and the DNC do anything out of the ordinary ? \n\n Answer: Not really.",
"John Huang was merely a cog in this machine. When he left the Lippo Group in 1994, Huang became a deputy assistant secretary in the International Trade Administration, the section of the Commerce Department that handles trade issues. Under oath, Huang has claimed he had only a \"passive role\" in the foreign trade missions--whatever that means. It all . But that's the Commerce Department Mosbacher created, and which Brown perfected. To present the Huang story as something new, reflecting the uniquely severe moral failings of William Jefferson Clinton, is absurd.",
"When Brown became secretary of commerce in 1993, the managing directors were not forgotten. Fifteen DNC staff members went with him to Commerce, and they knew who the new administration's friends were. One of those who went with Brown was Melissa Moss, who took over the Office of Business Liaison at Commerce. This was the office that selected participants for the high-profile trade missions to such places as China and Indonesia, which became the focus of Brown's career at Commerce. On these trips, Brown functioned as a personal trade representative for companies like Boeing and AT&T. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal by a reporter who went along on Brown's China trip, seats on his plane were essentially sold off in exchange for soft-money contributions.",
"So if, in fact, both parties are equally implicated in all the categories of campaign-financing sleaze raised by the Lippo case, why is the Indogate scandal such a big story? There are three reasons: reformers, reporters, and Republicans. Reformers are happy to have any good example to illustrate the evils of the system. Reporters are trying to compensate for suggestions that they are biased in favor of the Democrats. And Republicans, who have been the black hats of the campaign business since Watergate, are seizing an opportunity to finally turn the tables.",
"This kind of treatment for big contributors is quite routine. In the Indonesia case, however, there is as yet no evidence that President Clinton did anything about his backer James Riady's concerns over trade with China and Indonesia beyond listening to them. Nor is there likely to be any evidence: Big foreign-policy decisions simply aren't susceptible to personal favoritism the way EPA regulations are. \n\n \n\n Question 3: Did John Huang break new ground in exploiting his government office for campaign-fund-raising purposes? \n\n Answer: No.",
"There are examples beyond number of simply illegal contributions that the press and public just shrugged off. Even Pat Robertson got busted in 1988 for the use of a Christian Broadcasting Network plane--his",
"Question 2: Is the Lippo scandal an egregious example of a political quid pro quo? \n\n Answer: Definitely not. \n\n Examples of favors in exchanges for campaign contributions are plentiful. Consider, for instance, the relationship between Bob Dole and Chiquita. In 1995, Dole introduced legislation to impose trade sanctions on Colombia, Ecuador, and Costa Rica--but not Honduras, where Dole's favorite bananas are grown. Why was a senator from Kansas so interested in bananas? It might have had something to do with Chiquita giving $677,000 to the Republican Party in the last campaign cycle or the generous offer by its CEO, Carl Lindner, to let Dole use the company jet. (\"Sen. Dole has taken this position because it is right for America,\" Dole spokeswoman Christina Martin said earlier this year. \"To suggest any other reason is totally absurd.\") Or, there is the relationship between .",
"Campaign finance is an arcane and confusing subject, filled with unspoken understandings. One of these is the distinction between rules that must be obeyed and rules that can be safely flouted. In the",
"The same goes for contributions that are illegal by virtue of their having been made \"in the name of another,\" an issue that has surfaced in connection with Al Gore's Buddhist temple fund-raiser. The FEC has frequently disallowed contributions made",
"The honor here actually goes to Robert Mosbacher, George Bush's secretary of commerce. As Bush's campaign chairman in 1988, Mosbacher invented the Team 100--a designation for the 249 corporate contributors who gave $100,000 or more in soft money to the RNC. When Mosbacher became secretary of commerce, members of the team were rewarded in various ways, including being invited by Mosbacher on trade missions around the world and, often, being given ambassadorships. (\"That's part of what the system has been like for 160 years,\" Mosbacher said when questioned about it at the time--a judgment the press apparently agreed with.) Mosbacher's last act as commerce secretary was a tour of 30 cities to meet with business executives about how he could help them with exports. When he left the department shortly thereafter to run Bush's re-election campaign, he turned to the same executives for contributions.",
"to the Huang affair. Federal Election Commission files disclose many examples of money taken illegally from foreign nationals: Japanese interests contributing to candidates in local races in Hawaii, South Americans giving to the Democratic Party of Florida, and so on. Just",
"\"soft money,\" which cannot be legally used for federal elections, was being spent on anything other than the federal election. None of these clear violations was deemed to be especially scandalous, even by prudes at places like Common Cause. Meanwhile,"
],
[
"So if, in fact, both parties are equally implicated in all the categories of campaign-financing sleaze raised by the Lippo case, why is the Indogate scandal such a big story? There are three reasons: reformers, reporters, and Republicans. Reformers are happy to have any good example to illustrate the evils of the system. Reporters are trying to compensate for suggestions that they are biased in favor of the Democrats. And Republicans, who have been the black hats of the campaign business since Watergate, are seizing an opportunity to finally turn the tables.",
"In fact, there is no logic to any of it. What's considered an outrage, and even what's considered a crime, are matters determined largely by accident. Advocates of reform are always happy to have a high-profile scandal, like the presently unfolding \"Indogate,\" to help them sensitize the public to just how seamy the whole business of campaign financing is. The last thing they're about to do is explain away the latest revelations as just an exotically textured version of what goes on every day. And press coverage is largely driven by how big a fuss is made by members of the opposition--not by any barometer of relative venality. Right now, Republicans are making an enormous fuss about the Democrats, so the story is huge. But we must pause and ask: Are we making an example out of the DNC for misdeeds that everybody commits? Or did John Huang and James Riady--and perhaps Harold Ickes and Bill Clinton--really do something unusually bad in the last campaign cycle?",
"Huang was not really an innovator; he was simply more successful than his predecessors in both parties in tapping ethnic subcultures for cash. What Huang's higher-ups at the DNC can most be faulted for is not following suspicions they should have had about the huge sums he was reeling in. Instead, they looked the other way. In 1994, the DNC abandoned its own procedure for vetting contributions for legality. We don't know exactly why this happened, but it's a good bet that it had something to do with the pressure coming from the White House to raise extraordinary amounts of money for the upcoming 1996 race. The culture of fund-raising rewards quantity, not care. It discourages close scrutiny and too many questions. The less you ask, the more you get. And given that there has been no real enforcement of these rules in the past, fund-raisers haven't lost a lot of sleep about contributions turning out to be tainted. If the money goes bad, you simply return it with the appropriate regretful noises.",
"Much hinges, of course, on facts we don't have. Huang may have asked all his Asian contributors whether they were legal residents of the United States and been misled by them. There's no hard evidence that he did DNC business at Commerce or government business after Clinton moved him to the DNC in 1995. But assuming, for purposes of argument, that most of what has been alleged by Republicans is true, the Indonesian scandal potentially involves three categories of wrongdoing: 1) accepting illegal contributions; 2) trading favors for contributions; and 3) misusing a government position to raise campaign money. Actually, there is a fourth question--whether Huang violated federal conflict-of-interest rules by dealing with his old company, the Indonesian-based Lippo conglomerate, while he was a midlevel official at the Commerce Department. But that's a matter of personal corruption unrelated to the Democratic Party financing, so I won't dwell on it here, even though it's potentially the most serious charge against Huang.",
"John Huang was merely a cog in this machine. When he left the Lippo Group in 1994, Huang became a deputy assistant secretary in the International Trade Administration, the section of the Commerce Department that handles trade issues. Under oath, Huang has claimed he had only a \"passive role\" in the foreign trade missions--whatever that means. It all . But that's the Commerce Department Mosbacher created, and which Brown perfected. To present the Huang story as something new, reflecting the uniquely severe moral failings of William Jefferson Clinton, is absurd.",
"When Brown became secretary of commerce in 1993, the managing directors were not forgotten. Fifteen DNC staff members went with him to Commerce, and they knew who the new administration's friends were. One of those who went with Brown was Melissa Moss, who took over the Office of Business Liaison at Commerce. This was the office that selected participants for the high-profile trade missions to such places as China and Indonesia, which became the focus of Brown's career at Commerce. On these trips, Brown functioned as a personal trade representative for companies like Boeing and AT&T. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal by a reporter who went along on Brown's China trip, seats on his plane were essentially sold off in exchange for soft-money contributions.",
"This kind of treatment for big contributors is quite routine. In the Indonesia case, however, there is as yet no evidence that President Clinton did anything about his backer James Riady's concerns over trade with China and Indonesia beyond listening to them. Nor is there likely to be any evidence: Big foreign-policy decisions simply aren't susceptible to personal favoritism the way EPA regulations are. \n\n \n\n Question 3: Did John Huang break new ground in exploiting his government office for campaign-fund-raising purposes? \n\n Answer: No.",
"A similar invisible line separates the campaign-finance violations that become major media scandals and those that go unmentioned or rate only as footnotes in the press. It is not immediately obvious why reporters are so fascinated by John Huang's possible use of his position at the Commerce Department to raise money for his party, while they largely ignored the last two secretaries of commerce, Clinton's Ron Brown and George Bush's Robert Mosbacher, who were using the entire department as a fund-raising vehicle. Why is Newt Gingrich's use of GOPAC to raise undisclosed contributions a scandal being investigated by the House Ethics Committee, while Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour's front for avoiding disclosure, the National Policy Forum, rates as a nonstory?",
"According to those with experience in fund raising, it is often a delicate matter to establish whether ethnic donors are eligible to give. When someone offers to write you a check for $5,000, you do not ask to see a green card. The reality that neither party is in the habit of investigating its donors is illustrated by various outrageous incidents. In 1992, for example, Republicans got contributions totaling $633,770 from a Japanese-American with Hong Kong connections named Michael Kojima. No one bothered to ask where Kojima, a failed restaurateur with ex-wives suing him for nonsupport, got the money. Ironically enough, his biggest creditor turns out to have been the Lippo Bank of Los Angeles, where he owed $600,000.",
"though, a Dole supporter named Simon Fireman is confined to his Boston apartment, where he wears an electronic collar and ponders the $6 million fine he must pay for enlisting his employees at Aqua Leisure Industries, a maker of inflatable",
"If the Huang case is novel, it would have to be as a deliberate and systematic violation of the laws regarding contributions by noncitizens. In terms of being systematic, there isn't much of a case. Both parties have employed ethnic fund-raisers--Jewish, Korean, Greek, Chinese--for many years. Newt Gingrich held a Sikh fund-raising event last year in California. in 1992 was Yung Soo Yoo, who makes John Huang look like a piker when it come to sleaze. One of the co-chairs of Asian-Americans for Bob Dole was California Rep. Jay Kim, who is under investigation by the FEC for taking illegal contributions from four Korean companies.",
"The Republican outrage may be hypocritical, but in another sense, it is sincere. GOP leaders are furious at losing an advantage in corporate fund raising that dates back 100 years, to the election of 1896, when William McKinley's legendary money man Mark Hanna mobilized American business to stop the Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan. In the 1980s, the Republican advantage in total donations was still as high as 5-1 and never less than 3-1. In the 1992 election cycle, however, Ron Brown whittled it down to 3-2, thanks to corporate contributions. In 1996, the Democrats nearly caught up in the chief corporate category: soft money. With the help of Huang and others, they raised $102 million this year--almost as much as the Republicans' $121 million. The way they did it was simple: imitation.",
"Question 1: The DNC has now returned nearly half of the $2.5 million in soft money raised by Huang from Indonesian and other Asian-American sources. Assuming that these contributions were illegal because the contributors weren't legal residents (something that has been fully established only in the case of one $250,000 Korean contribution), did Huang and the DNC do anything out of the ordinary ? \n\n Answer: Not really.",
"Question 2: Is the Lippo scandal an egregious example of a political quid pro quo? \n\n Answer: Definitely not. \n\n Examples of favors in exchanges for campaign contributions are plentiful. Consider, for instance, the relationship between Bob Dole and Chiquita. In 1995, Dole introduced legislation to impose trade sanctions on Colombia, Ecuador, and Costa Rica--but not Honduras, where Dole's favorite bananas are grown. Why was a senator from Kansas so interested in bananas? It might have had something to do with Chiquita giving $677,000 to the Republican Party in the last campaign cycle or the generous offer by its CEO, Carl Lindner, to let Dole use the company jet. (\"Sen. Dole has taken this position because it is right for America,\" Dole spokeswoman Christina Martin said earlier this year. \"To suggest any other reason is totally absurd.\") Or, there is the relationship between .",
"were helping to develop the so-called \"issue\" ads produced by state parties--ads which, in theory, weren't supposed to be co-ordinated with his re-election effort. And neither party even bothered to claim that the tens of millions being raised in so-called",
"travels were valued at $260,000. If one focuses on the narrow category of contributions that are illegal because they come from foreigners (even though it is arguably no worse than any other category of violation), there is still little novelty",
"The honor here actually goes to Robert Mosbacher, George Bush's secretary of commerce. As Bush's campaign chairman in 1988, Mosbacher invented the Team 100--a designation for the 249 corporate contributors who gave $100,000 or more in soft money to the RNC. When Mosbacher became secretary of commerce, members of the team were rewarded in various ways, including being invited by Mosbacher on trade missions around the world and, often, being given ambassadorships. (\"That's part of what the system has been like for 160 years,\" Mosbacher said when questioned about it at the time--a judgment the press apparently agreed with.) Mosbacher's last act as commerce secretary was a tour of 30 cities to meet with business executives about how he could help them with exports. When he left the department shortly thereafter to run Bush's re-election campaign, he turned to the same executives for contributions.",
"In his own use of the Commerce Department to dun corporations for campaign funds, Ron Brown was Mosbacher's disciple, though he proved to be an even greater talent than his master. As chairman of the DNC in the period leading up to the 1992 election, Brown followed the path laid by Tony Coehlo, the infamous chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Coehlo (as documented in Brooks Jackson's Honest Graft ) was the first to try to compete with the Republicans for corporate soft money. Brown devised for the DNC a \"Managing Director\" program to match Mosbacher's Republican \"Team 100.\"",
"Does Everybody Do It?",
"to the Huang affair. Federal Election Commission files disclose many examples of money taken illegally from foreign nationals: Japanese interests contributing to candidates in local races in Hawaii, South Americans giving to the Democratic Party of Florida, and so on. Just"
],
[
"The Republican outrage may be hypocritical, but in another sense, it is sincere. GOP leaders are furious at losing an advantage in corporate fund raising that dates back 100 years, to the election of 1896, when William McKinley's legendary money man Mark Hanna mobilized American business to stop the Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan. In the 1980s, the Republican advantage in total donations was still as high as 5-1 and never less than 3-1. In the 1992 election cycle, however, Ron Brown whittled it down to 3-2, thanks to corporate contributions. In 1996, the Democrats nearly caught up in the chief corporate category: soft money. With the help of Huang and others, they raised $102 million this year--almost as much as the Republicans' $121 million. The way they did it was simple: imitation.",
"In fact, there is no logic to any of it. What's considered an outrage, and even what's considered a crime, are matters determined largely by accident. Advocates of reform are always happy to have a high-profile scandal, like the presently unfolding \"Indogate,\" to help them sensitize the public to just how seamy the whole business of campaign financing is. The last thing they're about to do is explain away the latest revelations as just an exotically textured version of what goes on every day. And press coverage is largely driven by how big a fuss is made by members of the opposition--not by any barometer of relative venality. Right now, Republicans are making an enormous fuss about the Democrats, so the story is huge. But we must pause and ask: Are we making an example out of the DNC for misdeeds that everybody commits? Or did John Huang and James Riady--and perhaps Harold Ickes and Bill Clinton--really do something unusually bad in the last campaign cycle?",
"A similar invisible line separates the campaign-finance violations that become major media scandals and those that go unmentioned or rate only as footnotes in the press. It is not immediately obvious why reporters are so fascinated by John Huang's possible use of his position at the Commerce Department to raise money for his party, while they largely ignored the last two secretaries of commerce, Clinton's Ron Brown and George Bush's Robert Mosbacher, who were using the entire department as a fund-raising vehicle. Why is Newt Gingrich's use of GOPAC to raise undisclosed contributions a scandal being investigated by the House Ethics Committee, while Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour's front for avoiding disclosure, the National Policy Forum, rates as a nonstory?",
"So if, in fact, both parties are equally implicated in all the categories of campaign-financing sleaze raised by the Lippo case, why is the Indogate scandal such a big story? There are three reasons: reformers, reporters, and Republicans. Reformers are happy to have any good example to illustrate the evils of the system. Reporters are trying to compensate for suggestions that they are biased in favor of the Democrats. And Republicans, who have been the black hats of the campaign business since Watergate, are seizing an opportunity to finally turn the tables.",
"If the Huang case is novel, it would have to be as a deliberate and systematic violation of the laws regarding contributions by noncitizens. In terms of being systematic, there isn't much of a case. Both parties have employed ethnic fund-raisers--Jewish, Korean, Greek, Chinese--for many years. Newt Gingrich held a Sikh fund-raising event last year in California. in 1992 was Yung Soo Yoo, who makes John Huang look like a piker when it come to sleaze. One of the co-chairs of Asian-Americans for Bob Dole was California Rep. Jay Kim, who is under investigation by the FEC for taking illegal contributions from four Korean companies.",
"Huang was not really an innovator; he was simply more successful than his predecessors in both parties in tapping ethnic subcultures for cash. What Huang's higher-ups at the DNC can most be faulted for is not following suspicions they should have had about the huge sums he was reeling in. Instead, they looked the other way. In 1994, the DNC abandoned its own procedure for vetting contributions for legality. We don't know exactly why this happened, but it's a good bet that it had something to do with the pressure coming from the White House to raise extraordinary amounts of money for the upcoming 1996 race. The culture of fund-raising rewards quantity, not care. It discourages close scrutiny and too many questions. The less you ask, the more you get. And given that there has been no real enforcement of these rules in the past, fund-raisers haven't lost a lot of sleep about contributions turning out to be tainted. If the money goes bad, you simply return it with the appropriate regretful noises.",
"This kind of treatment for big contributors is quite routine. In the Indonesia case, however, there is as yet no evidence that President Clinton did anything about his backer James Riady's concerns over trade with China and Indonesia beyond listening to them. Nor is there likely to be any evidence: Big foreign-policy decisions simply aren't susceptible to personal favoritism the way EPA regulations are. \n\n \n\n Question 3: Did John Huang break new ground in exploiting his government office for campaign-fund-raising purposes? \n\n Answer: No.",
"John Huang was merely a cog in this machine. When he left the Lippo Group in 1994, Huang became a deputy assistant secretary in the International Trade Administration, the section of the Commerce Department that handles trade issues. Under oath, Huang has claimed he had only a \"passive role\" in the foreign trade missions--whatever that means. It all . But that's the Commerce Department Mosbacher created, and which Brown perfected. To present the Huang story as something new, reflecting the uniquely severe moral failings of William Jefferson Clinton, is absurd.",
"Much hinges, of course, on facts we don't have. Huang may have asked all his Asian contributors whether they were legal residents of the United States and been misled by them. There's no hard evidence that he did DNC business at Commerce or government business after Clinton moved him to the DNC in 1995. But assuming, for purposes of argument, that most of what has been alleged by Republicans is true, the Indonesian scandal potentially involves three categories of wrongdoing: 1) accepting illegal contributions; 2) trading favors for contributions; and 3) misusing a government position to raise campaign money. Actually, there is a fourth question--whether Huang violated federal conflict-of-interest rules by dealing with his old company, the Indonesian-based Lippo conglomerate, while he was a midlevel official at the Commerce Department. But that's a matter of personal corruption unrelated to the Democratic Party financing, so I won't dwell on it here, even though it's potentially the most serious charge against Huang.",
"According to those with experience in fund raising, it is often a delicate matter to establish whether ethnic donors are eligible to give. When someone offers to write you a check for $5,000, you do not ask to see a green card. The reality that neither party is in the habit of investigating its donors is illustrated by various outrageous incidents. In 1992, for example, Republicans got contributions totaling $633,770 from a Japanese-American with Hong Kong connections named Michael Kojima. No one bothered to ask where Kojima, a failed restaurateur with ex-wives suing him for nonsupport, got the money. Ironically enough, his biggest creditor turns out to have been the Lippo Bank of Los Angeles, where he owed $600,000.",
"Question 1: The DNC has now returned nearly half of the $2.5 million in soft money raised by Huang from Indonesian and other Asian-American sources. Assuming that these contributions were illegal because the contributors weren't legal residents (something that has been fully established only in the case of one $250,000 Korean contribution), did Huang and the DNC do anything out of the ordinary ? \n\n Answer: Not really.",
"In his own use of the Commerce Department to dun corporations for campaign funds, Ron Brown was Mosbacher's disciple, though he proved to be an even greater talent than his master. As chairman of the DNC in the period leading up to the 1992 election, Brown followed the path laid by Tony Coehlo, the infamous chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Coehlo (as documented in Brooks Jackson's Honest Graft ) was the first to try to compete with the Republicans for corporate soft money. Brown devised for the DNC a \"Managing Director\" program to match Mosbacher's Republican \"Team 100.\"",
"Question 2: Is the Lippo scandal an egregious example of a political quid pro quo? \n\n Answer: Definitely not. \n\n Examples of favors in exchanges for campaign contributions are plentiful. Consider, for instance, the relationship between Bob Dole and Chiquita. In 1995, Dole introduced legislation to impose trade sanctions on Colombia, Ecuador, and Costa Rica--but not Honduras, where Dole's favorite bananas are grown. Why was a senator from Kansas so interested in bananas? It might have had something to do with Chiquita giving $677,000 to the Republican Party in the last campaign cycle or the generous offer by its CEO, Carl Lindner, to let Dole use the company jet. (\"Sen. Dole has taken this position because it is right for America,\" Dole spokeswoman Christina Martin said earlier this year. \"To suggest any other reason is totally absurd.\") Or, there is the relationship between .",
"to the Huang affair. Federal Election Commission files disclose many examples of money taken illegally from foreign nationals: Japanese interests contributing to candidates in local races in Hawaii, South Americans giving to the Democratic Party of Florida, and so on. Just",
"Republican primaries, for instance, aides to Bob Dole admitted that they were going to exceed legal limits on how much they could spend, an act commentators compared at the time to running a red light. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton and his aides",
"The honor here actually goes to Robert Mosbacher, George Bush's secretary of commerce. As Bush's campaign chairman in 1988, Mosbacher invented the Team 100--a designation for the 249 corporate contributors who gave $100,000 or more in soft money to the RNC. When Mosbacher became secretary of commerce, members of the team were rewarded in various ways, including being invited by Mosbacher on trade missions around the world and, often, being given ambassadorships. (\"That's part of what the system has been like for 160 years,\" Mosbacher said when questioned about it at the time--a judgment the press apparently agreed with.) Mosbacher's last act as commerce secretary was a tour of 30 cities to meet with business executives about how he could help them with exports. When he left the department shortly thereafter to run Bush's re-election campaign, he turned to the same executives for contributions.",
"When Brown became secretary of commerce in 1993, the managing directors were not forgotten. Fifteen DNC staff members went with him to Commerce, and they knew who the new administration's friends were. One of those who went with Brown was Melissa Moss, who took over the Office of Business Liaison at Commerce. This was the office that selected participants for the high-profile trade missions to such places as China and Indonesia, which became the focus of Brown's career at Commerce. On these trips, Brown functioned as a personal trade representative for companies like Boeing and AT&T. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal by a reporter who went along on Brown's China trip, seats on his plane were essentially sold off in exchange for soft-money contributions.",
"There are examples beyond number of simply illegal contributions that the press and public just shrugged off. Even Pat Robertson got busted in 1988 for the use of a Christian Broadcasting Network plane--his",
"\"soft money,\" which cannot be legally used for federal elections, was being spent on anything other than the federal election. None of these clear violations was deemed to be especially scandalous, even by prudes at places like Common Cause. Meanwhile,",
"The same goes for contributions that are illegal by virtue of their having been made \"in the name of another,\" an issue that has surfaced in connection with Al Gore's Buddhist temple fund-raiser. The FEC has frequently disallowed contributions made"
],
[
"Much hinges, of course, on facts we don't have. Huang may have asked all his Asian contributors whether they were legal residents of the United States and been misled by them. There's no hard evidence that he did DNC business at Commerce or government business after Clinton moved him to the DNC in 1995. But assuming, for purposes of argument, that most of what has been alleged by Republicans is true, the Indonesian scandal potentially involves three categories of wrongdoing: 1) accepting illegal contributions; 2) trading favors for contributions; and 3) misusing a government position to raise campaign money. Actually, there is a fourth question--whether Huang violated federal conflict-of-interest rules by dealing with his old company, the Indonesian-based Lippo conglomerate, while he was a midlevel official at the Commerce Department. But that's a matter of personal corruption unrelated to the Democratic Party financing, so I won't dwell on it here, even though it's potentially the most serious charge against Huang.",
"So if, in fact, both parties are equally implicated in all the categories of campaign-financing sleaze raised by the Lippo case, why is the Indogate scandal such a big story? There are three reasons: reformers, reporters, and Republicans. Reformers are happy to have any good example to illustrate the evils of the system. Reporters are trying to compensate for suggestions that they are biased in favor of the Democrats. And Republicans, who have been the black hats of the campaign business since Watergate, are seizing an opportunity to finally turn the tables.",
"John Huang was merely a cog in this machine. When he left the Lippo Group in 1994, Huang became a deputy assistant secretary in the International Trade Administration, the section of the Commerce Department that handles trade issues. Under oath, Huang has claimed he had only a \"passive role\" in the foreign trade missions--whatever that means. It all . But that's the Commerce Department Mosbacher created, and which Brown perfected. To present the Huang story as something new, reflecting the uniquely severe moral failings of William Jefferson Clinton, is absurd.",
"If the Huang case is novel, it would have to be as a deliberate and systematic violation of the laws regarding contributions by noncitizens. In terms of being systematic, there isn't much of a case. Both parties have employed ethnic fund-raisers--Jewish, Korean, Greek, Chinese--for many years. Newt Gingrich held a Sikh fund-raising event last year in California. in 1992 was Yung Soo Yoo, who makes John Huang look like a piker when it come to sleaze. One of the co-chairs of Asian-Americans for Bob Dole was California Rep. Jay Kim, who is under investigation by the FEC for taking illegal contributions from four Korean companies.",
"Huang was not really an innovator; he was simply more successful than his predecessors in both parties in tapping ethnic subcultures for cash. What Huang's higher-ups at the DNC can most be faulted for is not following suspicions they should have had about the huge sums he was reeling in. Instead, they looked the other way. In 1994, the DNC abandoned its own procedure for vetting contributions for legality. We don't know exactly why this happened, but it's a good bet that it had something to do with the pressure coming from the White House to raise extraordinary amounts of money for the upcoming 1996 race. The culture of fund-raising rewards quantity, not care. It discourages close scrutiny and too many questions. The less you ask, the more you get. And given that there has been no real enforcement of these rules in the past, fund-raisers haven't lost a lot of sleep about contributions turning out to be tainted. If the money goes bad, you simply return it with the appropriate regretful noises.",
"Question 2: Is the Lippo scandal an egregious example of a political quid pro quo? \n\n Answer: Definitely not. \n\n Examples of favors in exchanges for campaign contributions are plentiful. Consider, for instance, the relationship between Bob Dole and Chiquita. In 1995, Dole introduced legislation to impose trade sanctions on Colombia, Ecuador, and Costa Rica--but not Honduras, where Dole's favorite bananas are grown. Why was a senator from Kansas so interested in bananas? It might have had something to do with Chiquita giving $677,000 to the Republican Party in the last campaign cycle or the generous offer by its CEO, Carl Lindner, to let Dole use the company jet. (\"Sen. Dole has taken this position because it is right for America,\" Dole spokeswoman Christina Martin said earlier this year. \"To suggest any other reason is totally absurd.\") Or, there is the relationship between .",
"This kind of treatment for big contributors is quite routine. In the Indonesia case, however, there is as yet no evidence that President Clinton did anything about his backer James Riady's concerns over trade with China and Indonesia beyond listening to them. Nor is there likely to be any evidence: Big foreign-policy decisions simply aren't susceptible to personal favoritism the way EPA regulations are. \n\n \n\n Question 3: Did John Huang break new ground in exploiting his government office for campaign-fund-raising purposes? \n\n Answer: No.",
"According to those with experience in fund raising, it is often a delicate matter to establish whether ethnic donors are eligible to give. When someone offers to write you a check for $5,000, you do not ask to see a green card. The reality that neither party is in the habit of investigating its donors is illustrated by various outrageous incidents. In 1992, for example, Republicans got contributions totaling $633,770 from a Japanese-American with Hong Kong connections named Michael Kojima. No one bothered to ask where Kojima, a failed restaurateur with ex-wives suing him for nonsupport, got the money. Ironically enough, his biggest creditor turns out to have been the Lippo Bank of Los Angeles, where he owed $600,000.",
"A similar invisible line separates the campaign-finance violations that become major media scandals and those that go unmentioned or rate only as footnotes in the press. It is not immediately obvious why reporters are so fascinated by John Huang's possible use of his position at the Commerce Department to raise money for his party, while they largely ignored the last two secretaries of commerce, Clinton's Ron Brown and George Bush's Robert Mosbacher, who were using the entire department as a fund-raising vehicle. Why is Newt Gingrich's use of GOPAC to raise undisclosed contributions a scandal being investigated by the House Ethics Committee, while Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour's front for avoiding disclosure, the National Policy Forum, rates as a nonstory?",
"In fact, there is no logic to any of it. What's considered an outrage, and even what's considered a crime, are matters determined largely by accident. Advocates of reform are always happy to have a high-profile scandal, like the presently unfolding \"Indogate,\" to help them sensitize the public to just how seamy the whole business of campaign financing is. The last thing they're about to do is explain away the latest revelations as just an exotically textured version of what goes on every day. And press coverage is largely driven by how big a fuss is made by members of the opposition--not by any barometer of relative venality. Right now, Republicans are making an enormous fuss about the Democrats, so the story is huge. But we must pause and ask: Are we making an example out of the DNC for misdeeds that everybody commits? Or did John Huang and James Riady--and perhaps Harold Ickes and Bill Clinton--really do something unusually bad in the last campaign cycle?",
"The Republican outrage may be hypocritical, but in another sense, it is sincere. GOP leaders are furious at losing an advantage in corporate fund raising that dates back 100 years, to the election of 1896, when William McKinley's legendary money man Mark Hanna mobilized American business to stop the Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan. In the 1980s, the Republican advantage in total donations was still as high as 5-1 and never less than 3-1. In the 1992 election cycle, however, Ron Brown whittled it down to 3-2, thanks to corporate contributions. In 1996, the Democrats nearly caught up in the chief corporate category: soft money. With the help of Huang and others, they raised $102 million this year--almost as much as the Republicans' $121 million. The way they did it was simple: imitation.",
"Question 1: The DNC has now returned nearly half of the $2.5 million in soft money raised by Huang from Indonesian and other Asian-American sources. Assuming that these contributions were illegal because the contributors weren't legal residents (something that has been fully established only in the case of one $250,000 Korean contribution), did Huang and the DNC do anything out of the ordinary ? \n\n Answer: Not really.",
"to the Huang affair. Federal Election Commission files disclose many examples of money taken illegally from foreign nationals: Japanese interests contributing to candidates in local races in Hawaii, South Americans giving to the Democratic Party of Florida, and so on. Just",
"When Brown became secretary of commerce in 1993, the managing directors were not forgotten. Fifteen DNC staff members went with him to Commerce, and they knew who the new administration's friends were. One of those who went with Brown was Melissa Moss, who took over the Office of Business Liaison at Commerce. This was the office that selected participants for the high-profile trade missions to such places as China and Indonesia, which became the focus of Brown's career at Commerce. On these trips, Brown functioned as a personal trade representative for companies like Boeing and AT&T. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal by a reporter who went along on Brown's China trip, seats on his plane were essentially sold off in exchange for soft-money contributions.",
"In his own use of the Commerce Department to dun corporations for campaign funds, Ron Brown was Mosbacher's disciple, though he proved to be an even greater talent than his master. As chairman of the DNC in the period leading up to the 1992 election, Brown followed the path laid by Tony Coehlo, the infamous chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Coehlo (as documented in Brooks Jackson's Honest Graft ) was the first to try to compete with the Republicans for corporate soft money. Brown devised for the DNC a \"Managing Director\" program to match Mosbacher's Republican \"Team 100.\"",
"Republican primaries, for instance, aides to Bob Dole admitted that they were going to exceed legal limits on how much they could spend, an act commentators compared at the time to running a red light. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton and his aides",
"The honor here actually goes to Robert Mosbacher, George Bush's secretary of commerce. As Bush's campaign chairman in 1988, Mosbacher invented the Team 100--a designation for the 249 corporate contributors who gave $100,000 or more in soft money to the RNC. When Mosbacher became secretary of commerce, members of the team were rewarded in various ways, including being invited by Mosbacher on trade missions around the world and, often, being given ambassadorships. (\"That's part of what the system has been like for 160 years,\" Mosbacher said when questioned about it at the time--a judgment the press apparently agreed with.) Mosbacher's last act as commerce secretary was a tour of 30 cities to meet with business executives about how he could help them with exports. When he left the department shortly thereafter to run Bush's re-election campaign, he turned to the same executives for contributions.",
"The same goes for contributions that are illegal by virtue of their having been made \"in the name of another,\" an issue that has surfaced in connection with Al Gore's Buddhist temple fund-raiser. The FEC has frequently disallowed contributions made",
"There are examples beyond number of simply illegal contributions that the press and public just shrugged off. Even Pat Robertson got busted in 1988 for the use of a Christian Broadcasting Network plane--his",
"\"soft money,\" which cannot be legally used for federal elections, was being spent on anything other than the federal election. None of these clear violations was deemed to be especially scandalous, even by prudes at places like Common Cause. Meanwhile,"
],
[
"Huang was not really an innovator; he was simply more successful than his predecessors in both parties in tapping ethnic subcultures for cash. What Huang's higher-ups at the DNC can most be faulted for is not following suspicions they should have had about the huge sums he was reeling in. Instead, they looked the other way. In 1994, the DNC abandoned its own procedure for vetting contributions for legality. We don't know exactly why this happened, but it's a good bet that it had something to do with the pressure coming from the White House to raise extraordinary amounts of money for the upcoming 1996 race. The culture of fund-raising rewards quantity, not care. It discourages close scrutiny and too many questions. The less you ask, the more you get. And given that there has been no real enforcement of these rules in the past, fund-raisers haven't lost a lot of sleep about contributions turning out to be tainted. If the money goes bad, you simply return it with the appropriate regretful noises.",
"If the Huang case is novel, it would have to be as a deliberate and systematic violation of the laws regarding contributions by noncitizens. In terms of being systematic, there isn't much of a case. Both parties have employed ethnic fund-raisers--Jewish, Korean, Greek, Chinese--for many years. Newt Gingrich held a Sikh fund-raising event last year in California. in 1992 was Yung Soo Yoo, who makes John Huang look like a piker when it come to sleaze. One of the co-chairs of Asian-Americans for Bob Dole was California Rep. Jay Kim, who is under investigation by the FEC for taking illegal contributions from four Korean companies.",
"Much hinges, of course, on facts we don't have. Huang may have asked all his Asian contributors whether they were legal residents of the United States and been misled by them. There's no hard evidence that he did DNC business at Commerce or government business after Clinton moved him to the DNC in 1995. But assuming, for purposes of argument, that most of what has been alleged by Republicans is true, the Indonesian scandal potentially involves three categories of wrongdoing: 1) accepting illegal contributions; 2) trading favors for contributions; and 3) misusing a government position to raise campaign money. Actually, there is a fourth question--whether Huang violated federal conflict-of-interest rules by dealing with his old company, the Indonesian-based Lippo conglomerate, while he was a midlevel official at the Commerce Department. But that's a matter of personal corruption unrelated to the Democratic Party financing, so I won't dwell on it here, even though it's potentially the most serious charge against Huang.",
"This kind of treatment for big contributors is quite routine. In the Indonesia case, however, there is as yet no evidence that President Clinton did anything about his backer James Riady's concerns over trade with China and Indonesia beyond listening to them. Nor is there likely to be any evidence: Big foreign-policy decisions simply aren't susceptible to personal favoritism the way EPA regulations are. \n\n \n\n Question 3: Did John Huang break new ground in exploiting his government office for campaign-fund-raising purposes? \n\n Answer: No.",
"A similar invisible line separates the campaign-finance violations that become major media scandals and those that go unmentioned or rate only as footnotes in the press. It is not immediately obvious why reporters are so fascinated by John Huang's possible use of his position at the Commerce Department to raise money for his party, while they largely ignored the last two secretaries of commerce, Clinton's Ron Brown and George Bush's Robert Mosbacher, who were using the entire department as a fund-raising vehicle. Why is Newt Gingrich's use of GOPAC to raise undisclosed contributions a scandal being investigated by the House Ethics Committee, while Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour's front for avoiding disclosure, the National Policy Forum, rates as a nonstory?",
"In fact, there is no logic to any of it. What's considered an outrage, and even what's considered a crime, are matters determined largely by accident. Advocates of reform are always happy to have a high-profile scandal, like the presently unfolding \"Indogate,\" to help them sensitize the public to just how seamy the whole business of campaign financing is. The last thing they're about to do is explain away the latest revelations as just an exotically textured version of what goes on every day. And press coverage is largely driven by how big a fuss is made by members of the opposition--not by any barometer of relative venality. Right now, Republicans are making an enormous fuss about the Democrats, so the story is huge. But we must pause and ask: Are we making an example out of the DNC for misdeeds that everybody commits? Or did John Huang and James Riady--and perhaps Harold Ickes and Bill Clinton--really do something unusually bad in the last campaign cycle?",
"John Huang was merely a cog in this machine. When he left the Lippo Group in 1994, Huang became a deputy assistant secretary in the International Trade Administration, the section of the Commerce Department that handles trade issues. Under oath, Huang has claimed he had only a \"passive role\" in the foreign trade missions--whatever that means. It all . But that's the Commerce Department Mosbacher created, and which Brown perfected. To present the Huang story as something new, reflecting the uniquely severe moral failings of William Jefferson Clinton, is absurd.",
"Question 1: The DNC has now returned nearly half of the $2.5 million in soft money raised by Huang from Indonesian and other Asian-American sources. Assuming that these contributions were illegal because the contributors weren't legal residents (something that has been fully established only in the case of one $250,000 Korean contribution), did Huang and the DNC do anything out of the ordinary ? \n\n Answer: Not really.",
"to the Huang affair. Federal Election Commission files disclose many examples of money taken illegally from foreign nationals: Japanese interests contributing to candidates in local races in Hawaii, South Americans giving to the Democratic Party of Florida, and so on. Just",
"The Republican outrage may be hypocritical, but in another sense, it is sincere. GOP leaders are furious at losing an advantage in corporate fund raising that dates back 100 years, to the election of 1896, when William McKinley's legendary money man Mark Hanna mobilized American business to stop the Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan. In the 1980s, the Republican advantage in total donations was still as high as 5-1 and never less than 3-1. In the 1992 election cycle, however, Ron Brown whittled it down to 3-2, thanks to corporate contributions. In 1996, the Democrats nearly caught up in the chief corporate category: soft money. With the help of Huang and others, they raised $102 million this year--almost as much as the Republicans' $121 million. The way they did it was simple: imitation.",
"According to those with experience in fund raising, it is often a delicate matter to establish whether ethnic donors are eligible to give. When someone offers to write you a check for $5,000, you do not ask to see a green card. The reality that neither party is in the habit of investigating its donors is illustrated by various outrageous incidents. In 1992, for example, Republicans got contributions totaling $633,770 from a Japanese-American with Hong Kong connections named Michael Kojima. No one bothered to ask where Kojima, a failed restaurateur with ex-wives suing him for nonsupport, got the money. Ironically enough, his biggest creditor turns out to have been the Lippo Bank of Los Angeles, where he owed $600,000.",
"In his own use of the Commerce Department to dun corporations for campaign funds, Ron Brown was Mosbacher's disciple, though he proved to be an even greater talent than his master. As chairman of the DNC in the period leading up to the 1992 election, Brown followed the path laid by Tony Coehlo, the infamous chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Coehlo (as documented in Brooks Jackson's Honest Graft ) was the first to try to compete with the Republicans for corporate soft money. Brown devised for the DNC a \"Managing Director\" program to match Mosbacher's Republican \"Team 100.\"",
"So if, in fact, both parties are equally implicated in all the categories of campaign-financing sleaze raised by the Lippo case, why is the Indogate scandal such a big story? There are three reasons: reformers, reporters, and Republicans. Reformers are happy to have any good example to illustrate the evils of the system. Reporters are trying to compensate for suggestions that they are biased in favor of the Democrats. And Republicans, who have been the black hats of the campaign business since Watergate, are seizing an opportunity to finally turn the tables.",
"Question 2: Is the Lippo scandal an egregious example of a political quid pro quo? \n\n Answer: Definitely not. \n\n Examples of favors in exchanges for campaign contributions are plentiful. Consider, for instance, the relationship between Bob Dole and Chiquita. In 1995, Dole introduced legislation to impose trade sanctions on Colombia, Ecuador, and Costa Rica--but not Honduras, where Dole's favorite bananas are grown. Why was a senator from Kansas so interested in bananas? It might have had something to do with Chiquita giving $677,000 to the Republican Party in the last campaign cycle or the generous offer by its CEO, Carl Lindner, to let Dole use the company jet. (\"Sen. Dole has taken this position because it is right for America,\" Dole spokeswoman Christina Martin said earlier this year. \"To suggest any other reason is totally absurd.\") Or, there is the relationship between .",
"The honor here actually goes to Robert Mosbacher, George Bush's secretary of commerce. As Bush's campaign chairman in 1988, Mosbacher invented the Team 100--a designation for the 249 corporate contributors who gave $100,000 or more in soft money to the RNC. When Mosbacher became secretary of commerce, members of the team were rewarded in various ways, including being invited by Mosbacher on trade missions around the world and, often, being given ambassadorships. (\"That's part of what the system has been like for 160 years,\" Mosbacher said when questioned about it at the time--a judgment the press apparently agreed with.) Mosbacher's last act as commerce secretary was a tour of 30 cities to meet with business executives about how he could help them with exports. When he left the department shortly thereafter to run Bush's re-election campaign, he turned to the same executives for contributions.",
"The same goes for contributions that are illegal by virtue of their having been made \"in the name of another,\" an issue that has surfaced in connection with Al Gore's Buddhist temple fund-raiser. The FEC has frequently disallowed contributions made",
"Campaign finance is an arcane and confusing subject, filled with unspoken understandings. One of these is the distinction between rules that must be obeyed and rules that can be safely flouted. In the",
"When Brown became secretary of commerce in 1993, the managing directors were not forgotten. Fifteen DNC staff members went with him to Commerce, and they knew who the new administration's friends were. One of those who went with Brown was Melissa Moss, who took over the Office of Business Liaison at Commerce. This was the office that selected participants for the high-profile trade missions to such places as China and Indonesia, which became the focus of Brown's career at Commerce. On these trips, Brown functioned as a personal trade representative for companies like Boeing and AT&T. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal by a reporter who went along on Brown's China trip, seats on his plane were essentially sold off in exchange for soft-money contributions.",
"travels were valued at $260,000. If one focuses on the narrow category of contributions that are illegal because they come from foreigners (even though it is arguably no worse than any other category of violation), there is still little novelty",
"\"soft money,\" which cannot be legally used for federal elections, was being spent on anything other than the federal election. None of these clear violations was deemed to be especially scandalous, even by prudes at places like Common Cause. Meanwhile,"
],
[
"Question 2: Is the Lippo scandal an egregious example of a political quid pro quo? \n\n Answer: Definitely not. \n\n Examples of favors in exchanges for campaign contributions are plentiful. Consider, for instance, the relationship between Bob Dole and Chiquita. In 1995, Dole introduced legislation to impose trade sanctions on Colombia, Ecuador, and Costa Rica--but not Honduras, where Dole's favorite bananas are grown. Why was a senator from Kansas so interested in bananas? It might have had something to do with Chiquita giving $677,000 to the Republican Party in the last campaign cycle or the generous offer by its CEO, Carl Lindner, to let Dole use the company jet. (\"Sen. Dole has taken this position because it is right for America,\" Dole spokeswoman Christina Martin said earlier this year. \"To suggest any other reason is totally absurd.\") Or, there is the relationship between .",
"though, a Dole supporter named Simon Fireman is confined to his Boston apartment, where he wears an electronic collar and ponders the $6 million fine he must pay for enlisting his employees at Aqua Leisure Industries, a maker of inflatable",
"Republican primaries, for instance, aides to Bob Dole admitted that they were going to exceed legal limits on how much they could spend, an act commentators compared at the time to running a red light. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton and his aides",
"In his own use of the Commerce Department to dun corporations for campaign funds, Ron Brown was Mosbacher's disciple, though he proved to be an even greater talent than his master. As chairman of the DNC in the period leading up to the 1992 election, Brown followed the path laid by Tony Coehlo, the infamous chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Coehlo (as documented in Brooks Jackson's Honest Graft ) was the first to try to compete with the Republicans for corporate soft money. Brown devised for the DNC a \"Managing Director\" program to match Mosbacher's Republican \"Team 100.\"",
"A similar invisible line separates the campaign-finance violations that become major media scandals and those that go unmentioned or rate only as footnotes in the press. It is not immediately obvious why reporters are so fascinated by John Huang's possible use of his position at the Commerce Department to raise money for his party, while they largely ignored the last two secretaries of commerce, Clinton's Ron Brown and George Bush's Robert Mosbacher, who were using the entire department as a fund-raising vehicle. Why is Newt Gingrich's use of GOPAC to raise undisclosed contributions a scandal being investigated by the House Ethics Committee, while Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour's front for avoiding disclosure, the National Policy Forum, rates as a nonstory?",
"If the Huang case is novel, it would have to be as a deliberate and systematic violation of the laws regarding contributions by noncitizens. In terms of being systematic, there isn't much of a case. Both parties have employed ethnic fund-raisers--Jewish, Korean, Greek, Chinese--for many years. Newt Gingrich held a Sikh fund-raising event last year in California. in 1992 was Yung Soo Yoo, who makes John Huang look like a piker when it come to sleaze. One of the co-chairs of Asian-Americans for Bob Dole was California Rep. Jay Kim, who is under investigation by the FEC for taking illegal contributions from four Korean companies.",
"The Republican outrage may be hypocritical, but in another sense, it is sincere. GOP leaders are furious at losing an advantage in corporate fund raising that dates back 100 years, to the election of 1896, when William McKinley's legendary money man Mark Hanna mobilized American business to stop the Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan. In the 1980s, the Republican advantage in total donations was still as high as 5-1 and never less than 3-1. In the 1992 election cycle, however, Ron Brown whittled it down to 3-2, thanks to corporate contributions. In 1996, the Democrats nearly caught up in the chief corporate category: soft money. With the help of Huang and others, they raised $102 million this year--almost as much as the Republicans' $121 million. The way they did it was simple: imitation.",
"John Huang was merely a cog in this machine. When he left the Lippo Group in 1994, Huang became a deputy assistant secretary in the International Trade Administration, the section of the Commerce Department that handles trade issues. Under oath, Huang has claimed he had only a \"passive role\" in the foreign trade missions--whatever that means. It all . But that's the Commerce Department Mosbacher created, and which Brown perfected. To present the Huang story as something new, reflecting the uniquely severe moral failings of William Jefferson Clinton, is absurd.",
"pool toys, in a scheme to contribute $69,000 to the Dole campaign.",
"When Brown became secretary of commerce in 1993, the managing directors were not forgotten. Fifteen DNC staff members went with him to Commerce, and they knew who the new administration's friends were. One of those who went with Brown was Melissa Moss, who took over the Office of Business Liaison at Commerce. This was the office that selected participants for the high-profile trade missions to such places as China and Indonesia, which became the focus of Brown's career at Commerce. On these trips, Brown functioned as a personal trade representative for companies like Boeing and AT&T. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal by a reporter who went along on Brown's China trip, seats on his plane were essentially sold off in exchange for soft-money contributions.",
"Huang was not really an innovator; he was simply more successful than his predecessors in both parties in tapping ethnic subcultures for cash. What Huang's higher-ups at the DNC can most be faulted for is not following suspicions they should have had about the huge sums he was reeling in. Instead, they looked the other way. In 1994, the DNC abandoned its own procedure for vetting contributions for legality. We don't know exactly why this happened, but it's a good bet that it had something to do with the pressure coming from the White House to raise extraordinary amounts of money for the upcoming 1996 race. The culture of fund-raising rewards quantity, not care. It discourages close scrutiny and too many questions. The less you ask, the more you get. And given that there has been no real enforcement of these rules in the past, fund-raisers haven't lost a lot of sleep about contributions turning out to be tainted. If the money goes bad, you simply return it with the appropriate regretful noises.",
"The honor here actually goes to Robert Mosbacher, George Bush's secretary of commerce. As Bush's campaign chairman in 1988, Mosbacher invented the Team 100--a designation for the 249 corporate contributors who gave $100,000 or more in soft money to the RNC. When Mosbacher became secretary of commerce, members of the team were rewarded in various ways, including being invited by Mosbacher on trade missions around the world and, often, being given ambassadorships. (\"That's part of what the system has been like for 160 years,\" Mosbacher said when questioned about it at the time--a judgment the press apparently agreed with.) Mosbacher's last act as commerce secretary was a tour of 30 cities to meet with business executives about how he could help them with exports. When he left the department shortly thereafter to run Bush's re-election campaign, he turned to the same executives for contributions.",
"So if, in fact, both parties are equally implicated in all the categories of campaign-financing sleaze raised by the Lippo case, why is the Indogate scandal such a big story? There are three reasons: reformers, reporters, and Republicans. Reformers are happy to have any good example to illustrate the evils of the system. Reporters are trying to compensate for suggestions that they are biased in favor of the Democrats. And Republicans, who have been the black hats of the campaign business since Watergate, are seizing an opportunity to finally turn the tables.",
"In fact, there is no logic to any of it. What's considered an outrage, and even what's considered a crime, are matters determined largely by accident. Advocates of reform are always happy to have a high-profile scandal, like the presently unfolding \"Indogate,\" to help them sensitize the public to just how seamy the whole business of campaign financing is. The last thing they're about to do is explain away the latest revelations as just an exotically textured version of what goes on every day. And press coverage is largely driven by how big a fuss is made by members of the opposition--not by any barometer of relative venality. Right now, Republicans are making an enormous fuss about the Democrats, so the story is huge. But we must pause and ask: Are we making an example out of the DNC for misdeeds that everybody commits? Or did John Huang and James Riady--and perhaps Harold Ickes and Bill Clinton--really do something unusually bad in the last campaign cycle?",
"According to those with experience in fund raising, it is often a delicate matter to establish whether ethnic donors are eligible to give. When someone offers to write you a check for $5,000, you do not ask to see a green card. The reality that neither party is in the habit of investigating its donors is illustrated by various outrageous incidents. In 1992, for example, Republicans got contributions totaling $633,770 from a Japanese-American with Hong Kong connections named Michael Kojima. No one bothered to ask where Kojima, a failed restaurateur with ex-wives suing him for nonsupport, got the money. Ironically enough, his biggest creditor turns out to have been the Lippo Bank of Los Angeles, where he owed $600,000.",
"Much hinges, of course, on facts we don't have. Huang may have asked all his Asian contributors whether they were legal residents of the United States and been misled by them. There's no hard evidence that he did DNC business at Commerce or government business after Clinton moved him to the DNC in 1995. But assuming, for purposes of argument, that most of what has been alleged by Republicans is true, the Indonesian scandal potentially involves three categories of wrongdoing: 1) accepting illegal contributions; 2) trading favors for contributions; and 3) misusing a government position to raise campaign money. Actually, there is a fourth question--whether Huang violated federal conflict-of-interest rules by dealing with his old company, the Indonesian-based Lippo conglomerate, while he was a midlevel official at the Commerce Department. But that's a matter of personal corruption unrelated to the Democratic Party financing, so I won't dwell on it here, even though it's potentially the most serious charge against Huang.",
"This kind of treatment for big contributors is quite routine. In the Indonesia case, however, there is as yet no evidence that President Clinton did anything about his backer James Riady's concerns over trade with China and Indonesia beyond listening to them. Nor is there likely to be any evidence: Big foreign-policy decisions simply aren't susceptible to personal favoritism the way EPA regulations are. \n\n \n\n Question 3: Did John Huang break new ground in exploiting his government office for campaign-fund-raising purposes? \n\n Answer: No.",
"There are examples beyond number of simply illegal contributions that the press and public just shrugged off. Even Pat Robertson got busted in 1988 for the use of a Christian Broadcasting Network plane--his",
"The same goes for contributions that are illegal by virtue of their having been made \"in the name of another,\" an issue that has surfaced in connection with Al Gore's Buddhist temple fund-raiser. The FEC has frequently disallowed contributions made",
"\"soft money,\" which cannot be legally used for federal elections, was being spent on anything other than the federal election. None of these clear violations was deemed to be especially scandalous, even by prudes at places like Common Cause. Meanwhile,"
],
[
"The Republican outrage may be hypocritical, but in another sense, it is sincere. GOP leaders are furious at losing an advantage in corporate fund raising that dates back 100 years, to the election of 1896, when William McKinley's legendary money man Mark Hanna mobilized American business to stop the Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan. In the 1980s, the Republican advantage in total donations was still as high as 5-1 and never less than 3-1. In the 1992 election cycle, however, Ron Brown whittled it down to 3-2, thanks to corporate contributions. In 1996, the Democrats nearly caught up in the chief corporate category: soft money. With the help of Huang and others, they raised $102 million this year--almost as much as the Republicans' $121 million. The way they did it was simple: imitation.",
"In his own use of the Commerce Department to dun corporations for campaign funds, Ron Brown was Mosbacher's disciple, though he proved to be an even greater talent than his master. As chairman of the DNC in the period leading up to the 1992 election, Brown followed the path laid by Tony Coehlo, the infamous chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Coehlo (as documented in Brooks Jackson's Honest Graft ) was the first to try to compete with the Republicans for corporate soft money. Brown devised for the DNC a \"Managing Director\" program to match Mosbacher's Republican \"Team 100.\"",
"Huang was not really an innovator; he was simply more successful than his predecessors in both parties in tapping ethnic subcultures for cash. What Huang's higher-ups at the DNC can most be faulted for is not following suspicions they should have had about the huge sums he was reeling in. Instead, they looked the other way. In 1994, the DNC abandoned its own procedure for vetting contributions for legality. We don't know exactly why this happened, but it's a good bet that it had something to do with the pressure coming from the White House to raise extraordinary amounts of money for the upcoming 1996 race. The culture of fund-raising rewards quantity, not care. It discourages close scrutiny and too many questions. The less you ask, the more you get. And given that there has been no real enforcement of these rules in the past, fund-raisers haven't lost a lot of sleep about contributions turning out to be tainted. If the money goes bad, you simply return it with the appropriate regretful noises.",
"A similar invisible line separates the campaign-finance violations that become major media scandals and those that go unmentioned or rate only as footnotes in the press. It is not immediately obvious why reporters are so fascinated by John Huang's possible use of his position at the Commerce Department to raise money for his party, while they largely ignored the last two secretaries of commerce, Clinton's Ron Brown and George Bush's Robert Mosbacher, who were using the entire department as a fund-raising vehicle. Why is Newt Gingrich's use of GOPAC to raise undisclosed contributions a scandal being investigated by the House Ethics Committee, while Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour's front for avoiding disclosure, the National Policy Forum, rates as a nonstory?",
"When Brown became secretary of commerce in 1993, the managing directors were not forgotten. Fifteen DNC staff members went with him to Commerce, and they knew who the new administration's friends were. One of those who went with Brown was Melissa Moss, who took over the Office of Business Liaison at Commerce. This was the office that selected participants for the high-profile trade missions to such places as China and Indonesia, which became the focus of Brown's career at Commerce. On these trips, Brown functioned as a personal trade representative for companies like Boeing and AT&T. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal by a reporter who went along on Brown's China trip, seats on his plane were essentially sold off in exchange for soft-money contributions.",
"Question 1: The DNC has now returned nearly half of the $2.5 million in soft money raised by Huang from Indonesian and other Asian-American sources. Assuming that these contributions were illegal because the contributors weren't legal residents (something that has been fully established only in the case of one $250,000 Korean contribution), did Huang and the DNC do anything out of the ordinary ? \n\n Answer: Not really.",
"In fact, there is no logic to any of it. What's considered an outrage, and even what's considered a crime, are matters determined largely by accident. Advocates of reform are always happy to have a high-profile scandal, like the presently unfolding \"Indogate,\" to help them sensitize the public to just how seamy the whole business of campaign financing is. The last thing they're about to do is explain away the latest revelations as just an exotically textured version of what goes on every day. And press coverage is largely driven by how big a fuss is made by members of the opposition--not by any barometer of relative venality. Right now, Republicans are making an enormous fuss about the Democrats, so the story is huge. But we must pause and ask: Are we making an example out of the DNC for misdeeds that everybody commits? Or did John Huang and James Riady--and perhaps Harold Ickes and Bill Clinton--really do something unusually bad in the last campaign cycle?",
"were helping to develop the so-called \"issue\" ads produced by state parties--ads which, in theory, weren't supposed to be co-ordinated with his re-election effort. And neither party even bothered to claim that the tens of millions being raised in so-called",
"According to those with experience in fund raising, it is often a delicate matter to establish whether ethnic donors are eligible to give. When someone offers to write you a check for $5,000, you do not ask to see a green card. The reality that neither party is in the habit of investigating its donors is illustrated by various outrageous incidents. In 1992, for example, Republicans got contributions totaling $633,770 from a Japanese-American with Hong Kong connections named Michael Kojima. No one bothered to ask where Kojima, a failed restaurateur with ex-wives suing him for nonsupport, got the money. Ironically enough, his biggest creditor turns out to have been the Lippo Bank of Los Angeles, where he owed $600,000.",
"Much hinges, of course, on facts we don't have. Huang may have asked all his Asian contributors whether they were legal residents of the United States and been misled by them. There's no hard evidence that he did DNC business at Commerce or government business after Clinton moved him to the DNC in 1995. But assuming, for purposes of argument, that most of what has been alleged by Republicans is true, the Indonesian scandal potentially involves three categories of wrongdoing: 1) accepting illegal contributions; 2) trading favors for contributions; and 3) misusing a government position to raise campaign money. Actually, there is a fourth question--whether Huang violated federal conflict-of-interest rules by dealing with his old company, the Indonesian-based Lippo conglomerate, while he was a midlevel official at the Commerce Department. But that's a matter of personal corruption unrelated to the Democratic Party financing, so I won't dwell on it here, even though it's potentially the most serious charge against Huang.",
"Republican primaries, for instance, aides to Bob Dole admitted that they were going to exceed legal limits on how much they could spend, an act commentators compared at the time to running a red light. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton and his aides",
"If the Huang case is novel, it would have to be as a deliberate and systematic violation of the laws regarding contributions by noncitizens. In terms of being systematic, there isn't much of a case. Both parties have employed ethnic fund-raisers--Jewish, Korean, Greek, Chinese--for many years. Newt Gingrich held a Sikh fund-raising event last year in California. in 1992 was Yung Soo Yoo, who makes John Huang look like a piker when it come to sleaze. One of the co-chairs of Asian-Americans for Bob Dole was California Rep. Jay Kim, who is under investigation by the FEC for taking illegal contributions from four Korean companies.",
"Campaign finance is an arcane and confusing subject, filled with unspoken understandings. One of these is the distinction between rules that must be obeyed and rules that can be safely flouted. In the",
"So if, in fact, both parties are equally implicated in all the categories of campaign-financing sleaze raised by the Lippo case, why is the Indogate scandal such a big story? There are three reasons: reformers, reporters, and Republicans. Reformers are happy to have any good example to illustrate the evils of the system. Reporters are trying to compensate for suggestions that they are biased in favor of the Democrats. And Republicans, who have been the black hats of the campaign business since Watergate, are seizing an opportunity to finally turn the tables.",
"The honor here actually goes to Robert Mosbacher, George Bush's secretary of commerce. As Bush's campaign chairman in 1988, Mosbacher invented the Team 100--a designation for the 249 corporate contributors who gave $100,000 or more in soft money to the RNC. When Mosbacher became secretary of commerce, members of the team were rewarded in various ways, including being invited by Mosbacher on trade missions around the world and, often, being given ambassadorships. (\"That's part of what the system has been like for 160 years,\" Mosbacher said when questioned about it at the time--a judgment the press apparently agreed with.) Mosbacher's last act as commerce secretary was a tour of 30 cities to meet with business executives about how he could help them with exports. When he left the department shortly thereafter to run Bush's re-election campaign, he turned to the same executives for contributions.",
"\"soft money,\" which cannot be legally used for federal elections, was being spent on anything other than the federal election. None of these clear violations was deemed to be especially scandalous, even by prudes at places like Common Cause. Meanwhile,",
"There are examples beyond number of simply illegal contributions that the press and public just shrugged off. Even Pat Robertson got busted in 1988 for the use of a Christian Broadcasting Network plane--his",
"to the Huang affair. Federal Election Commission files disclose many examples of money taken illegally from foreign nationals: Japanese interests contributing to candidates in local races in Hawaii, South Americans giving to the Democratic Party of Florida, and so on. Just",
"a few weeks ago, the RNC returned $15,000 to a Canadian company called Methanex after the contribution was disclosed in Roll Call . 's recent $1 million contribution to the California Republican Party may fall into this category as well.",
"This kind of treatment for big contributors is quite routine. In the Indonesia case, however, there is as yet no evidence that President Clinton did anything about his backer James Riady's concerns over trade with China and Indonesia beyond listening to them. Nor is there likely to be any evidence: Big foreign-policy decisions simply aren't susceptible to personal favoritism the way EPA regulations are. \n\n \n\n Question 3: Did John Huang break new ground in exploiting his government office for campaign-fund-raising purposes? \n\n Answer: No."
],
[
"A similar invisible line separates the campaign-finance violations that become major media scandals and those that go unmentioned or rate only as footnotes in the press. It is not immediately obvious why reporters are so fascinated by John Huang's possible use of his position at the Commerce Department to raise money for his party, while they largely ignored the last two secretaries of commerce, Clinton's Ron Brown and George Bush's Robert Mosbacher, who were using the entire department as a fund-raising vehicle. Why is Newt Gingrich's use of GOPAC to raise undisclosed contributions a scandal being investigated by the House Ethics Committee, while Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour's front for avoiding disclosure, the National Policy Forum, rates as a nonstory?",
"If the Huang case is novel, it would have to be as a deliberate and systematic violation of the laws regarding contributions by noncitizens. In terms of being systematic, there isn't much of a case. Both parties have employed ethnic fund-raisers--Jewish, Korean, Greek, Chinese--for many years. Newt Gingrich held a Sikh fund-raising event last year in California. in 1992 was Yung Soo Yoo, who makes John Huang look like a piker when it come to sleaze. One of the co-chairs of Asian-Americans for Bob Dole was California Rep. Jay Kim, who is under investigation by the FEC for taking illegal contributions from four Korean companies.",
"Huang was not really an innovator; he was simply more successful than his predecessors in both parties in tapping ethnic subcultures for cash. What Huang's higher-ups at the DNC can most be faulted for is not following suspicions they should have had about the huge sums he was reeling in. Instead, they looked the other way. In 1994, the DNC abandoned its own procedure for vetting contributions for legality. We don't know exactly why this happened, but it's a good bet that it had something to do with the pressure coming from the White House to raise extraordinary amounts of money for the upcoming 1996 race. The culture of fund-raising rewards quantity, not care. It discourages close scrutiny and too many questions. The less you ask, the more you get. And given that there has been no real enforcement of these rules in the past, fund-raisers haven't lost a lot of sleep about contributions turning out to be tainted. If the money goes bad, you simply return it with the appropriate regretful noises.",
"So if, in fact, both parties are equally implicated in all the categories of campaign-financing sleaze raised by the Lippo case, why is the Indogate scandal such a big story? There are three reasons: reformers, reporters, and Republicans. Reformers are happy to have any good example to illustrate the evils of the system. Reporters are trying to compensate for suggestions that they are biased in favor of the Democrats. And Republicans, who have been the black hats of the campaign business since Watergate, are seizing an opportunity to finally turn the tables.",
"In fact, there is no logic to any of it. What's considered an outrage, and even what's considered a crime, are matters determined largely by accident. Advocates of reform are always happy to have a high-profile scandal, like the presently unfolding \"Indogate,\" to help them sensitize the public to just how seamy the whole business of campaign financing is. The last thing they're about to do is explain away the latest revelations as just an exotically textured version of what goes on every day. And press coverage is largely driven by how big a fuss is made by members of the opposition--not by any barometer of relative venality. Right now, Republicans are making an enormous fuss about the Democrats, so the story is huge. But we must pause and ask: Are we making an example out of the DNC for misdeeds that everybody commits? Or did John Huang and James Riady--and perhaps Harold Ickes and Bill Clinton--really do something unusually bad in the last campaign cycle?",
"The Republican outrage may be hypocritical, but in another sense, it is sincere. GOP leaders are furious at losing an advantage in corporate fund raising that dates back 100 years, to the election of 1896, when William McKinley's legendary money man Mark Hanna mobilized American business to stop the Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan. In the 1980s, the Republican advantage in total donations was still as high as 5-1 and never less than 3-1. In the 1992 election cycle, however, Ron Brown whittled it down to 3-2, thanks to corporate contributions. In 1996, the Democrats nearly caught up in the chief corporate category: soft money. With the help of Huang and others, they raised $102 million this year--almost as much as the Republicans' $121 million. The way they did it was simple: imitation.",
"Much hinges, of course, on facts we don't have. Huang may have asked all his Asian contributors whether they were legal residents of the United States and been misled by them. There's no hard evidence that he did DNC business at Commerce or government business after Clinton moved him to the DNC in 1995. But assuming, for purposes of argument, that most of what has been alleged by Republicans is true, the Indonesian scandal potentially involves three categories of wrongdoing: 1) accepting illegal contributions; 2) trading favors for contributions; and 3) misusing a government position to raise campaign money. Actually, there is a fourth question--whether Huang violated federal conflict-of-interest rules by dealing with his old company, the Indonesian-based Lippo conglomerate, while he was a midlevel official at the Commerce Department. But that's a matter of personal corruption unrelated to the Democratic Party financing, so I won't dwell on it here, even though it's potentially the most serious charge against Huang.",
"Question 2: Is the Lippo scandal an egregious example of a political quid pro quo? \n\n Answer: Definitely not. \n\n Examples of favors in exchanges for campaign contributions are plentiful. Consider, for instance, the relationship between Bob Dole and Chiquita. In 1995, Dole introduced legislation to impose trade sanctions on Colombia, Ecuador, and Costa Rica--but not Honduras, where Dole's favorite bananas are grown. Why was a senator from Kansas so interested in bananas? It might have had something to do with Chiquita giving $677,000 to the Republican Party in the last campaign cycle or the generous offer by its CEO, Carl Lindner, to let Dole use the company jet. (\"Sen. Dole has taken this position because it is right for America,\" Dole spokeswoman Christina Martin said earlier this year. \"To suggest any other reason is totally absurd.\") Or, there is the relationship between .",
"This kind of treatment for big contributors is quite routine. In the Indonesia case, however, there is as yet no evidence that President Clinton did anything about his backer James Riady's concerns over trade with China and Indonesia beyond listening to them. Nor is there likely to be any evidence: Big foreign-policy decisions simply aren't susceptible to personal favoritism the way EPA regulations are. \n\n \n\n Question 3: Did John Huang break new ground in exploiting his government office for campaign-fund-raising purposes? \n\n Answer: No.",
"John Huang was merely a cog in this machine. When he left the Lippo Group in 1994, Huang became a deputy assistant secretary in the International Trade Administration, the section of the Commerce Department that handles trade issues. Under oath, Huang has claimed he had only a \"passive role\" in the foreign trade missions--whatever that means. It all . But that's the Commerce Department Mosbacher created, and which Brown perfected. To present the Huang story as something new, reflecting the uniquely severe moral failings of William Jefferson Clinton, is absurd.",
"According to those with experience in fund raising, it is often a delicate matter to establish whether ethnic donors are eligible to give. When someone offers to write you a check for $5,000, you do not ask to see a green card. The reality that neither party is in the habit of investigating its donors is illustrated by various outrageous incidents. In 1992, for example, Republicans got contributions totaling $633,770 from a Japanese-American with Hong Kong connections named Michael Kojima. No one bothered to ask where Kojima, a failed restaurateur with ex-wives suing him for nonsupport, got the money. Ironically enough, his biggest creditor turns out to have been the Lippo Bank of Los Angeles, where he owed $600,000.",
"In his own use of the Commerce Department to dun corporations for campaign funds, Ron Brown was Mosbacher's disciple, though he proved to be an even greater talent than his master. As chairman of the DNC in the period leading up to the 1992 election, Brown followed the path laid by Tony Coehlo, the infamous chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Coehlo (as documented in Brooks Jackson's Honest Graft ) was the first to try to compete with the Republicans for corporate soft money. Brown devised for the DNC a \"Managing Director\" program to match Mosbacher's Republican \"Team 100.\"",
"Republican primaries, for instance, aides to Bob Dole admitted that they were going to exceed legal limits on how much they could spend, an act commentators compared at the time to running a red light. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton and his aides",
"Question 1: The DNC has now returned nearly half of the $2.5 million in soft money raised by Huang from Indonesian and other Asian-American sources. Assuming that these contributions were illegal because the contributors weren't legal residents (something that has been fully established only in the case of one $250,000 Korean contribution), did Huang and the DNC do anything out of the ordinary ? \n\n Answer: Not really.",
"When Brown became secretary of commerce in 1993, the managing directors were not forgotten. Fifteen DNC staff members went with him to Commerce, and they knew who the new administration's friends were. One of those who went with Brown was Melissa Moss, who took over the Office of Business Liaison at Commerce. This was the office that selected participants for the high-profile trade missions to such places as China and Indonesia, which became the focus of Brown's career at Commerce. On these trips, Brown functioned as a personal trade representative for companies like Boeing and AT&T. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal by a reporter who went along on Brown's China trip, seats on his plane were essentially sold off in exchange for soft-money contributions.",
"The honor here actually goes to Robert Mosbacher, George Bush's secretary of commerce. As Bush's campaign chairman in 1988, Mosbacher invented the Team 100--a designation for the 249 corporate contributors who gave $100,000 or more in soft money to the RNC. When Mosbacher became secretary of commerce, members of the team were rewarded in various ways, including being invited by Mosbacher on trade missions around the world and, often, being given ambassadorships. (\"That's part of what the system has been like for 160 years,\" Mosbacher said when questioned about it at the time--a judgment the press apparently agreed with.) Mosbacher's last act as commerce secretary was a tour of 30 cities to meet with business executives about how he could help them with exports. When he left the department shortly thereafter to run Bush's re-election campaign, he turned to the same executives for contributions.",
"were helping to develop the so-called \"issue\" ads produced by state parties--ads which, in theory, weren't supposed to be co-ordinated with his re-election effort. And neither party even bothered to claim that the tens of millions being raised in so-called",
"\"soft money,\" which cannot be legally used for federal elections, was being spent on anything other than the federal election. None of these clear violations was deemed to be especially scandalous, even by prudes at places like Common Cause. Meanwhile,",
"Campaign finance is an arcane and confusing subject, filled with unspoken understandings. One of these is the distinction between rules that must be obeyed and rules that can be safely flouted. In the",
"The same goes for contributions that are illegal by virtue of their having been made \"in the name of another,\" an issue that has surfaced in connection with Al Gore's Buddhist temple fund-raiser. The FEC has frequently disallowed contributions made"
]
] |
test
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20004
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[
"The name of the magazine is symbolic of",
"Why does the publication plan to charge when it is not being printed on paper?",
"By charging for the publication, SLATE plans to prove",
"What was considered to be \"bad news\" for readers of SLATE at the time of its launch?",
"What is NOT an option to view SLATE?",
"What is one of the fears of how people will react to reading online?",
"Does SLATE seem apologetic about developing a set of prejudices? Why or why not?",
"Does SLATE plan to have a particular political slant? Why or why not?",
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] |
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"the slabs of paper that will be saved.",
"nothing.",
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],
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"It has to be able to pay its employees.",
"It is part of Microsoft, and they charge for everything.",
"It is the only way to keep the publication self-sustaining.",
"It needs to be able to pay for advertising in other arenas."
],
[
"the publication will have much more freedom in what it writes and publishes because is it self-funded.",
"People are willing to pay for good journalism.",
"Advertising is an extra form of revenue to pass on to the employees of the magazine.",
"Bill Gates knows all about how to make money."
],
[
"How could anything be bad in the new cyber world?",
"Bill Gates would have an ongoing collum for the magazine to discuss whatever was on his mind at the time.",
"They were going to have to pay in order to have access from day one.",
"Not all of the magazine's features would be ready immediately."
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"in printed magazine form",
"online",
"email",
"in book form"
],
[
"article lengths over 500 words will be skimmed over.",
"graphics will not help break up the texts, thus making it more difficult to read.",
"everyone will feel comfortable reading on their computer.",
"article length will have to be drastically reduced from typical hard copy publications."
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"No, they just don't care one way or the other. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn't, it doesn't.",
"Yes, they promise to stay away from them as much as possible, as they tend to put a wedge between people.",
"No, they realize that developing prejudices are part of life, and they have already begun to develop some.",
"Yes, they are staunchly against it, and they vow to shut the magazine down if they occur."
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"Yes, they are liberals. Period.",
"No. They find politics to be too trivial to include them in the magazine.",
"Yes, they are democrats.",
"No, that would go against their part of their belief system."
],
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"They are just hoping people look at any part of it at all.",
"They will skip around and just read what is interesting to them.",
"They will read it linearly as with a typical magazine.",
"They will jump from one topic to the next, but they will still read everything in every issue."
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"Welcome to SLATE \n\n An introduction and apologia. \n\n By Michael Kinsley \n\n The name? It means nothing, or practically nothing. We chose it as an empty vessel into which we can pour meaning. We hope SLATE will come to mean good original journalism in this new medium. Beyond that, who knows? Good magazines are exercises in serendipity. Credit--or blame--for the name \"SLATE,\" by the way, goes to David Weld, then of Microsoft, now of Cognisoft Corp.",
"A Seattle cyberwag says that the name \"SLATE\" is appropriate, because whenever he asks anyone from Microsoft, \"How's your project coming along?\" the answer he usually gets is, \"'s late.\" SLATE , in fact, has been reasonably prompt. Less than six months ago, it was a four-page memorandum and a single Internet naif. SLATE is not the first \"webzine,\" but everyone in this nascent business is still struggling with some pretty basic issues. Starting an online magazine is like starting a traditional paper magazine by asking: \"OK, you chop down the trees. Then what?\"",
"TEXT EEE: In this regard we are more like the newsmagazines-- Time , Newsweek , U.S. News & World Report --than the overtly political magazines such as the New Republic , National Review , or the Weekly Standard . Each of the newsmagazines may have an identifiable political tilt. But pushing a particular line is not what they are fundamentally about, and knowing where they average out won't tell you what any individual article will say. Go back. \n\n TEXT FFF: This is different from \"attitude\"--that free-floating, supercilious cynicism that is much prized in the culture of cyberspace. We may develop an attitude--a set of prejudices derived from logic and evidence, as best we can determine them--but we'll leave \"attitude\" to the kids. Go back.",
"And we want to be self-supporting. Indeed one of SLATE's main goals is to demonstrate, if we can, that the economies of cyberspace make it easier for our kind of journalism to pay for itself. Most magazines like SLATE depend on someone's generosity or vanity or misplaced optimism to pay the bills. But self-supporting journalism is freer journalism. (As A.J. Liebling said, freedom of the press is for those who own one.) If the Web can make serious journalism more easily self-supporting, that is a great gift from technology to democracy. \n\n For the moment, though, SLATE is yours for free. So enjoy. We expect to start requiring registration in a few weeks, and to require payment beginning Nov. 1.",
"Readers may also wonder whether SLATE will have a particular political flavor. The answer is that we do not set out with any ideological mission or agenda. On the other hand, we are not committed to any artificial balance of views. We will publish articles from various perspectives, but we will not agonize if the mix averages out to be somewhere other than dead center. [LINK TO TEXT EEE] \n\n A good magazine, though, does develop a personality, an attitude, [LINK TO TEXT FFF]and some prejudices--even crotchets. A few of SLATE's are already becoming clear. In discussing current events, we have a preference for policy over politics. We'd rather discuss the effect of Bob Dole's tax-cut proposal on the economy than its effect on Bill Clinton. Within the policy arena, we seem to have a special fondness for economics. This was not planned; it's one of those serendipitous developments I mentioned. Whether it reflects good luck or bad luck is a matter of taste (yours).",
"Several regular departments in the Briefing section are attempts at \"meta-news\": the news about the news, a sense of how the week's big stories are being played and perceived. The Week/The Spin takes a dozen or so topics, from this week's election-campaign developments to the latest big book from Knopf, and analyses, as objectively [LINK TO TEXT CCC]as possible, the spin they're getting, the sub-angles that are emerging, and so on. In Other Magazines uses the covers and contents of Time , Newsweek , etc., as a handy measure of what the culture considers important. (We aim to have these magazines in SLATE even before they reach the newsstands or your mailbox.) The Horse Race tracks the presidential candidates like stocks, as priced by the opinion polls, the pundits, and a genuine market in political candidates run out of the University of Iowa. Our man William Saletan will compute and analyze changes in the pundits index.",
"Individual copies of SLATE on Paper will be available exclusively at Starbucks. And selected articles from SLATE will also appear in Time magazine. \n\n While you're on the Consider Your Options page, please read about how to navigate around SLATE. We use page numbers, like a traditional print magazine, and have tried to make it as easy as possible either to \"flip through\" the magazine or to and from the Table of Contents. \n\n OK, But What's in It??[STET double \"??\"]",
"This week's reviews include Ann Hulbert's book review of Miss Manners' latest encyclical; Sarah Kerr's television review of the changing fashions in season finales; Larissa MacFarquhar's High Concept column, about how managed care could improve psychotherapy; and Cullen Murphy's The Good Word, about the difference between \"Jesuitical\" and \"Talmudic.\" \n\n In general, SLATE's Back of the Book will contain a weekly book review, alternating television and movie reviews, and a rotating menu of columns on music (classical and popular), sports, web sites, and other topics. Jeffrey Steingarten will be writing monthly on food (\"In the Soup\"), Anne Hollander on fashion (\"Clothes Sense\"), and Margaret Talbot on \"Men and Women.\" Audio and video clips will be offered where appropriate. \n\n Every issue will have a poem, read aloud by the author, with text. In this issue is a new poem by Seamus Heaney.",
"SLATE is basically a weekly: Most articles will appear for a week. But there will be something new to read almost every day. Some elements will change constantly. Other elements will appear and be removed throughout the week. Every article will indicate when it was \"posted\" and when it will be \"composted.\" As a general rule the Back of the Book, containing cultural reviews and commentary, will be posted Mondays and Tuesdays, the longer Features will be posted Wednesdays and Thursdays, and the front-of-the-book Briefing section will be posted Fridays. If you miss something, you can easily call it up from our archive, \"The Compost.\"( THIS NEEDS TO BE A HOT LINK) \n\n Let me try to describe a typical issue of SLATE. \n\n The Readme column will not always be as solipsistic as this one. It will usually be a commentary on public affairs by one of SLATE's editors.",
"The Gist, by contrast, is SLATE's effort to provide a quick education on some current issue in a form as free of spin as possible. Also free of quotes, anecdotes, and other paraphernalia. The only 1,000 words you'll have to read when you might rather read nothing at all. \n\n In a weekly department called Varnish Remover, political consultant Robert Shrum will deconstruct a 30-second TV spot from the election campaign. You can download a video or audio clip of the spot itself. \"Assessment\" will be a short, judgmental profile of some figure in the news. (Coming up soon: James Fallows on Wired magazine's godfather, Nicholas Negroponte.)",
"And coming up soon, two additional Back of the Book features: an interactive acrostic puzzle, and a stock-market contest. \n\n Does SLATE Have a Slant? \n\n SLATE is owned by Microsoft Corp., and that bothers some people. Can a giant software company put out a magazine that is free to think for itself? All we can say is that Microsoft has made all the right noises on this subject, and we look forward to putting the company's hands-off commitment to the test. But the concern strikes me as misplaced. In a day of media conglomerates with myriad daily conflicts of interest--Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Disney-ABC--how can it be a bad thing for a new company to begin competing in the media business? A journalist who worries about Microsoft putting out a magazine is a journalist with a steady job.",
"Finally, we intend to take a fairly skeptical stance toward the romance and rapidly escalating vanity of cyberspace. We do not start out with the smug assumption that the Internet changes the nature of human thought, or that all the restraints that society imposes on individuals in \"real life\" must melt away in cyberia. There is a deadening conformity in the hipness of cyberspace culture in which we don't intend to participate. Part of our mission at SLATE will be trying to bring cyberspace down to earth. \n\n Should be fun. Thanks for joining us. \n\n Michael Kinsley is editor of SLATE.",
"Stanford economist Paul Krugman writes The Dismal Scientist, a once-a-month column on economic policy. (See his debut essay in this issue, about the economic war within the Clinton administration.) University of Rochester economist Steven Landsburg writes monthly on \"Everyday Economics,\" using economic analysis to illuminate everyday life. (His first column, in our next issue, will explain how sexual promiscuity can actually reduce the spread of AIDS.) \n\n \"The Earthling\" will be a monthly column by Robert Wright, contributor to the New Republic and Time , and author of the acclaimed book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal . Other regular Briefing features will include a Press column by our deputy editor, Jack Shafer.",
"To be honest, we are running late on a few things. For the reader--you--there is good news and bad news here. The good news is that our billing system isn't ready yet. We intend to charge $19.95 a year for SLATE. That is far less than the cost of equivalent print magazines, because there's no paper, printing, or postage. But $19.95 ($34.95 for two years) is more than zero, which is what Web readers are used to paying. We believe that expecting readers to share the cost, as they do in print, is the only way serious journalism on the Web can be self-supporting. Depending completely on advertisers would not be healthy even if it were possible.",
"The Features section is also where we run longer articles [LINK TO TEXT DDD] and occasional humor pieces (that is, pieces that are intentionally, or at least aspirationally, humorous). This week in The Temptation of Bob Dole, SLATE's Washington editor, Jodie Allen, cruelly analyzes the arguments for a tax cut. Social critic Nicholas Lemann writes on Jews in Second Place, about what happens to American Jews as Asians replace them at the top of the meritocracy. And the legendary recluse Henry David Thoreau emerges to give SLATE readers an exclusive peek at his new Web page. \n\n In SLATE Gallery, we have a continuous exhibition of computer-based art. You may like or dislike this stuff (we'll have plenty of linked commentary to help you decide). What appeals to us about computer art is that SLATE can show you not reproductions, but the actual art itself. We start with an offering by Jenny Holzer.",
"At least among non-cyberheads, the computer-screen problem seems to be everyone's favorite conversational thrust with regard to SLATE. In recent months I've been amazed to learn of the places and postures in which people like to read magazines. Bed and bath are just the beginning. At a Seattle dinner party, a woman made the interesting point that her problem isn't the screen: It's the chair. Even \"ergonomic\" computer chairs are designed for typing, not for reading. For this woman, and for others who may feel the same way, we have asked several furniture designers to sketch a real computer reading chair--one you can curl up in with your mouse and your cup of Starbucks and read SLATE online. That feature will appear in a week or two. Go back.",
"First, let me urge you to read a special page called Consider Your Options. This page explains and executes the various ways you can receive and read SLATE. If you don't like reading on a computer screen, for example, there's a special version of SLATE that you can print out in its entirety, reformatted like a traditional print magazine. If you don't mind reading on a screen but hate waiting for pages to download--and hate running up those online charges from your Internet provider--you will soon be able to download the whole magazine at once and read it offline. \n\n Also on the Consider Your Options page, you can order SLATE to be delivered to your computer by e-mail. (Caution: This may not work with your e-mail system.) We'll even send you SLATE on Paper , a monthly compilation of highlights from SLATE, through the U.S. Mail. (The cost is $29 a year. Call 800-555-4995 to order.)",
"TEXT DDD: Those dread words \"longer articles\" raise one of the big uncertainties about this enterprise: How long an article will people be willing to read on a computer screen? We have several answers to this question: 1) We don't know. Clearly it's less than on paper, but how much less is uncertain. 2) We're determined to test the outer limits. 3) We'll do our best, graphically, to make reading on screen a more pleasant experience (suggestions welcome). 4) We'll also make SLATE as easy as possible to print out. 5) This will become less of a problem as screens are developed that can be taken to bed or the bathroom. 6) Two thousand words. Or at least we're starting--optimistically, perhaps--with the hope that 2000 words or so is not too much. (By contrast, a typical print-magazine feature or cover story might run anywhere from 5000 to 15,000 words.)",
"TEXT CCC: Objectivity, we hope, will distinguish this feature from Newsweek 's \"Conventional Wisdom Watch,\" which is often an effort to set the spin rather than describe it. Anyway, the \"CW Watch\" was a rip-off of a similar feature in the New Republic when I was the editor there. And TNR 's feature itself was lifted from Washington, D.C.'s, City Paper , which was edited at the time of the theft by Jack Shafer, now deputy editor of SLATE. Go back.",
"The bad news for readers is that some features aren't quite ready yet. Prime among them is \"The Fray,\" our reader-discussion forum. Meanwhile, though, please e-mail any comments you may have to slate@msn.com. We'll be publishing a traditional \"Letters to the Editor\" page until The Fray is up and running in a few weeks. \n\n We especially need, and appreciate, your comments in these early weeks. Every new magazine is a \"beta\" version for a while, especially a new magazine in a new medium. SLATE has gotten enormous hype--some of it, to be sure, self-induced, but much of it not. We appreciate the attention. But of course, it also makes us nervous. We have a smaller budget and staff than most well-known magazines--even smaller than some webzines. We don't claim to have all the answers. But, with your help, we plan to have all the answers by Christmas. [LINK TO TEXT BBB] \n\n So What's in It?"
],
[
"To be honest, we are running late on a few things. For the reader--you--there is good news and bad news here. The good news is that our billing system isn't ready yet. We intend to charge $19.95 a year for SLATE. That is far less than the cost of equivalent print magazines, because there's no paper, printing, or postage. But $19.95 ($34.95 for two years) is more than zero, which is what Web readers are used to paying. We believe that expecting readers to share the cost, as they do in print, is the only way serious journalism on the Web can be self-supporting. Depending completely on advertisers would not be healthy even if it were possible.",
"And we want to be self-supporting. Indeed one of SLATE's main goals is to demonstrate, if we can, that the economies of cyberspace make it easier for our kind of journalism to pay for itself. Most magazines like SLATE depend on someone's generosity or vanity or misplaced optimism to pay the bills. But self-supporting journalism is freer journalism. (As A.J. Liebling said, freedom of the press is for those who own one.) If the Web can make serious journalism more easily self-supporting, that is a great gift from technology to democracy. \n\n For the moment, though, SLATE is yours for free. So enjoy. We expect to start requiring registration in a few weeks, and to require payment beginning Nov. 1.",
"First, let me urge you to read a special page called Consider Your Options. This page explains and executes the various ways you can receive and read SLATE. If you don't like reading on a computer screen, for example, there's a special version of SLATE that you can print out in its entirety, reformatted like a traditional print magazine. If you don't mind reading on a screen but hate waiting for pages to download--and hate running up those online charges from your Internet provider--you will soon be able to download the whole magazine at once and read it offline. \n\n Also on the Consider Your Options page, you can order SLATE to be delivered to your computer by e-mail. (Caution: This may not work with your e-mail system.) We'll even send you SLATE on Paper , a monthly compilation of highlights from SLATE, through the U.S. Mail. (The cost is $29 a year. Call 800-555-4995 to order.)",
"A Seattle cyberwag says that the name \"SLATE\" is appropriate, because whenever he asks anyone from Microsoft, \"How's your project coming along?\" the answer he usually gets is, \"'s late.\" SLATE , in fact, has been reasonably prompt. Less than six months ago, it was a four-page memorandum and a single Internet naif. SLATE is not the first \"webzine,\" but everyone in this nascent business is still struggling with some pretty basic issues. Starting an online magazine is like starting a traditional paper magazine by asking: \"OK, you chop down the trees. Then what?\"",
"TEXT DDD: Those dread words \"longer articles\" raise one of the big uncertainties about this enterprise: How long an article will people be willing to read on a computer screen? We have several answers to this question: 1) We don't know. Clearly it's less than on paper, but how much less is uncertain. 2) We're determined to test the outer limits. 3) We'll do our best, graphically, to make reading on screen a more pleasant experience (suggestions welcome). 4) We'll also make SLATE as easy as possible to print out. 5) This will become less of a problem as screens are developed that can be taken to bed or the bathroom. 6) Two thousand words. Or at least we're starting--optimistically, perhaps--with the hope that 2000 words or so is not too much. (By contrast, a typical print-magazine feature or cover story might run anywhere from 5000 to 15,000 words.)",
"Individual copies of SLATE on Paper will be available exclusively at Starbucks. And selected articles from SLATE will also appear in Time magazine. \n\n While you're on the Consider Your Options page, please read about how to navigate around SLATE. We use page numbers, like a traditional print magazine, and have tried to make it as easy as possible either to \"flip through\" the magazine or to and from the Table of Contents. \n\n OK, But What's in It??[STET double \"??\"]",
"The bad news for readers is that some features aren't quite ready yet. Prime among them is \"The Fray,\" our reader-discussion forum. Meanwhile, though, please e-mail any comments you may have to slate@msn.com. We'll be publishing a traditional \"Letters to the Editor\" page until The Fray is up and running in a few weeks. \n\n We especially need, and appreciate, your comments in these early weeks. Every new magazine is a \"beta\" version for a while, especially a new magazine in a new medium. SLATE has gotten enormous hype--some of it, to be sure, self-induced, but much of it not. We appreciate the attention. But of course, it also makes us nervous. We have a smaller budget and staff than most well-known magazines--even smaller than some webzines. We don't claim to have all the answers. But, with your help, we plan to have all the answers by Christmas. [LINK TO TEXT BBB] \n\n So What's in It?",
"Welcome to SLATE \n\n An introduction and apologia. \n\n By Michael Kinsley \n\n The name? It means nothing, or practically nothing. We chose it as an empty vessel into which we can pour meaning. We hope SLATE will come to mean good original journalism in this new medium. Beyond that, who knows? Good magazines are exercises in serendipity. Credit--or blame--for the name \"SLATE,\" by the way, goes to David Weld, then of Microsoft, now of Cognisoft Corp.",
"SLATE is basically a weekly: Most articles will appear for a week. But there will be something new to read almost every day. Some elements will change constantly. Other elements will appear and be removed throughout the week. Every article will indicate when it was \"posted\" and when it will be \"composted.\" As a general rule the Back of the Book, containing cultural reviews and commentary, will be posted Mondays and Tuesdays, the longer Features will be posted Wednesdays and Thursdays, and the front-of-the-book Briefing section will be posted Fridays. If you miss something, you can easily call it up from our archive, \"The Compost.\"( THIS NEEDS TO BE A HOT LINK) \n\n Let me try to describe a typical issue of SLATE. \n\n The Readme column will not always be as solipsistic as this one. It will usually be a commentary on public affairs by one of SLATE's editors.",
"Finally, we intend to take a fairly skeptical stance toward the romance and rapidly escalating vanity of cyberspace. We do not start out with the smug assumption that the Internet changes the nature of human thought, or that all the restraints that society imposes on individuals in \"real life\" must melt away in cyberia. There is a deadening conformity in the hipness of cyberspace culture in which we don't intend to participate. Part of our mission at SLATE will be trying to bring cyberspace down to earth. \n\n Should be fun. Thanks for joining us. \n\n Michael Kinsley is editor of SLATE.",
"Readers may also wonder whether SLATE will have a particular political flavor. The answer is that we do not set out with any ideological mission or agenda. On the other hand, we are not committed to any artificial balance of views. We will publish articles from various perspectives, but we will not agonize if the mix averages out to be somewhere other than dead center. [LINK TO TEXT EEE] \n\n A good magazine, though, does develop a personality, an attitude, [LINK TO TEXT FFF]and some prejudices--even crotchets. A few of SLATE's are already becoming clear. In discussing current events, we have a preference for policy over politics. We'd rather discuss the effect of Bob Dole's tax-cut proposal on the economy than its effect on Bill Clinton. Within the policy arena, we seem to have a special fondness for economics. This was not planned; it's one of those serendipitous developments I mentioned. Whether it reflects good luck or bad luck is a matter of taste (yours).",
"At least among non-cyberheads, the computer-screen problem seems to be everyone's favorite conversational thrust with regard to SLATE. In recent months I've been amazed to learn of the places and postures in which people like to read magazines. Bed and bath are just the beginning. At a Seattle dinner party, a woman made the interesting point that her problem isn't the screen: It's the chair. Even \"ergonomic\" computer chairs are designed for typing, not for reading. For this woman, and for others who may feel the same way, we have asked several furniture designers to sketch a real computer reading chair--one you can curl up in with your mouse and your cup of Starbucks and read SLATE online. That feature will appear in a week or two. Go back.",
"Stanford economist Paul Krugman writes The Dismal Scientist, a once-a-month column on economic policy. (See his debut essay in this issue, about the economic war within the Clinton administration.) University of Rochester economist Steven Landsburg writes monthly on \"Everyday Economics,\" using economic analysis to illuminate everyday life. (His first column, in our next issue, will explain how sexual promiscuity can actually reduce the spread of AIDS.) \n\n \"The Earthling\" will be a monthly column by Robert Wright, contributor to the New Republic and Time , and author of the acclaimed book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal . Other regular Briefing features will include a Press column by our deputy editor, Jack Shafer.",
"The Gist, by contrast, is SLATE's effort to provide a quick education on some current issue in a form as free of spin as possible. Also free of quotes, anecdotes, and other paraphernalia. The only 1,000 words you'll have to read when you might rather read nothing at all. \n\n In a weekly department called Varnish Remover, political consultant Robert Shrum will deconstruct a 30-second TV spot from the election campaign. You can download a video or audio clip of the spot itself. \"Assessment\" will be a short, judgmental profile of some figure in the news. (Coming up soon: James Fallows on Wired magazine's godfather, Nicholas Negroponte.)",
"Our Features section begins each week with the Committee of Correspondence, our e-mail discussion group. The committee is run by Herbert Stein, a former chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers best-known now for his witty columns in the Wall Street Journal . We have great hopes for e-mail as a medium of debate that can combine the immediacy of talk-television with the intellectual discipline of the written word. We hope for something halfway between The McLaughlin Group and the correspondence page of the New York Review of Books . Will it work? Check out our first attempt--Does Microsoft Play Fair?--and let us know what you think.",
"The Features section is also where we run longer articles [LINK TO TEXT DDD] and occasional humor pieces (that is, pieces that are intentionally, or at least aspirationally, humorous). This week in The Temptation of Bob Dole, SLATE's Washington editor, Jodie Allen, cruelly analyzes the arguments for a tax cut. Social critic Nicholas Lemann writes on Jews in Second Place, about what happens to American Jews as Asians replace them at the top of the meritocracy. And the legendary recluse Henry David Thoreau emerges to give SLATE readers an exclusive peek at his new Web page. \n\n In SLATE Gallery, we have a continuous exhibition of computer-based art. You may like or dislike this stuff (we'll have plenty of linked commentary to help you decide). What appeals to us about computer art is that SLATE can show you not reproductions, but the actual art itself. We start with an offering by Jenny Holzer.",
"And coming up soon, two additional Back of the Book features: an interactive acrostic puzzle, and a stock-market contest. \n\n Does SLATE Have a Slant? \n\n SLATE is owned by Microsoft Corp., and that bothers some people. Can a giant software company put out a magazine that is free to think for itself? All we can say is that Microsoft has made all the right noises on this subject, and we look forward to putting the company's hands-off commitment to the test. But the concern strikes me as misplaced. In a day of media conglomerates with myriad daily conflicts of interest--Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Disney-ABC--how can it be a bad thing for a new company to begin competing in the media business? A journalist who worries about Microsoft putting out a magazine is a journalist with a steady job.",
"TEXT EEE: In this regard we are more like the newsmagazines-- Time , Newsweek , U.S. News & World Report --than the overtly political magazines such as the New Republic , National Review , or the Weekly Standard . Each of the newsmagazines may have an identifiable political tilt. But pushing a particular line is not what they are fundamentally about, and knowing where they average out won't tell you what any individual article will say. Go back. \n\n TEXT FFF: This is different from \"attitude\"--that free-floating, supercilious cynicism that is much prized in the culture of cyberspace. We may develop an attitude--a set of prejudices derived from logic and evidence, as best we can determine them--but we'll leave \"attitude\" to the kids. Go back.",
"TEXT AAA: No, this is not a link to the Cognisoft home page. As a general rule, we plan to avoid hyperlinks to outside sites in the text of articles, and to group them at the end instead. It's a small illustration of our general philosophy--better call it a hope--that, even on the Web, some people will want to read articles in the traditional linear fashion--i.e., from beginning to end--rather than darting constantly from site to site. Go back. \n\n TEXT BBB: Only kidding. Easter. Go back.",
"Several regular departments in the Briefing section are attempts at \"meta-news\": the news about the news, a sense of how the week's big stories are being played and perceived. The Week/The Spin takes a dozen or so topics, from this week's election-campaign developments to the latest big book from Knopf, and analyses, as objectively [LINK TO TEXT CCC]as possible, the spin they're getting, the sub-angles that are emerging, and so on. In Other Magazines uses the covers and contents of Time , Newsweek , etc., as a handy measure of what the culture considers important. (We aim to have these magazines in SLATE even before they reach the newsstands or your mailbox.) The Horse Race tracks the presidential candidates like stocks, as priced by the opinion polls, the pundits, and a genuine market in political candidates run out of the University of Iowa. Our man William Saletan will compute and analyze changes in the pundits index."
],
[
"To be honest, we are running late on a few things. For the reader--you--there is good news and bad news here. The good news is that our billing system isn't ready yet. We intend to charge $19.95 a year for SLATE. That is far less than the cost of equivalent print magazines, because there's no paper, printing, or postage. But $19.95 ($34.95 for two years) is more than zero, which is what Web readers are used to paying. We believe that expecting readers to share the cost, as they do in print, is the only way serious journalism on the Web can be self-supporting. Depending completely on advertisers would not be healthy even if it were possible.",
"And we want to be self-supporting. Indeed one of SLATE's main goals is to demonstrate, if we can, that the economies of cyberspace make it easier for our kind of journalism to pay for itself. Most magazines like SLATE depend on someone's generosity or vanity or misplaced optimism to pay the bills. But self-supporting journalism is freer journalism. (As A.J. Liebling said, freedom of the press is for those who own one.) If the Web can make serious journalism more easily self-supporting, that is a great gift from technology to democracy. \n\n For the moment, though, SLATE is yours for free. So enjoy. We expect to start requiring registration in a few weeks, and to require payment beginning Nov. 1.",
"Welcome to SLATE \n\n An introduction and apologia. \n\n By Michael Kinsley \n\n The name? It means nothing, or practically nothing. We chose it as an empty vessel into which we can pour meaning. We hope SLATE will come to mean good original journalism in this new medium. Beyond that, who knows? Good magazines are exercises in serendipity. Credit--or blame--for the name \"SLATE,\" by the way, goes to David Weld, then of Microsoft, now of Cognisoft Corp.",
"A Seattle cyberwag says that the name \"SLATE\" is appropriate, because whenever he asks anyone from Microsoft, \"How's your project coming along?\" the answer he usually gets is, \"'s late.\" SLATE , in fact, has been reasonably prompt. Less than six months ago, it was a four-page memorandum and a single Internet naif. SLATE is not the first \"webzine,\" but everyone in this nascent business is still struggling with some pretty basic issues. Starting an online magazine is like starting a traditional paper magazine by asking: \"OK, you chop down the trees. Then what?\"",
"First, let me urge you to read a special page called Consider Your Options. This page explains and executes the various ways you can receive and read SLATE. If you don't like reading on a computer screen, for example, there's a special version of SLATE that you can print out in its entirety, reformatted like a traditional print magazine. If you don't mind reading on a screen but hate waiting for pages to download--and hate running up those online charges from your Internet provider--you will soon be able to download the whole magazine at once and read it offline. \n\n Also on the Consider Your Options page, you can order SLATE to be delivered to your computer by e-mail. (Caution: This may not work with your e-mail system.) We'll even send you SLATE on Paper , a monthly compilation of highlights from SLATE, through the U.S. Mail. (The cost is $29 a year. Call 800-555-4995 to order.)",
"Readers may also wonder whether SLATE will have a particular political flavor. The answer is that we do not set out with any ideological mission or agenda. On the other hand, we are not committed to any artificial balance of views. We will publish articles from various perspectives, but we will not agonize if the mix averages out to be somewhere other than dead center. [LINK TO TEXT EEE] \n\n A good magazine, though, does develop a personality, an attitude, [LINK TO TEXT FFF]and some prejudices--even crotchets. A few of SLATE's are already becoming clear. In discussing current events, we have a preference for policy over politics. We'd rather discuss the effect of Bob Dole's tax-cut proposal on the economy than its effect on Bill Clinton. Within the policy arena, we seem to have a special fondness for economics. This was not planned; it's one of those serendipitous developments I mentioned. Whether it reflects good luck or bad luck is a matter of taste (yours).",
"Individual copies of SLATE on Paper will be available exclusively at Starbucks. And selected articles from SLATE will also appear in Time magazine. \n\n While you're on the Consider Your Options page, please read about how to navigate around SLATE. We use page numbers, like a traditional print magazine, and have tried to make it as easy as possible either to \"flip through\" the magazine or to and from the Table of Contents. \n\n OK, But What's in It??[STET double \"??\"]",
"SLATE is basically a weekly: Most articles will appear for a week. But there will be something new to read almost every day. Some elements will change constantly. Other elements will appear and be removed throughout the week. Every article will indicate when it was \"posted\" and when it will be \"composted.\" As a general rule the Back of the Book, containing cultural reviews and commentary, will be posted Mondays and Tuesdays, the longer Features will be posted Wednesdays and Thursdays, and the front-of-the-book Briefing section will be posted Fridays. If you miss something, you can easily call it up from our archive, \"The Compost.\"( THIS NEEDS TO BE A HOT LINK) \n\n Let me try to describe a typical issue of SLATE. \n\n The Readme column will not always be as solipsistic as this one. It will usually be a commentary on public affairs by one of SLATE's editors.",
"TEXT DDD: Those dread words \"longer articles\" raise one of the big uncertainties about this enterprise: How long an article will people be willing to read on a computer screen? We have several answers to this question: 1) We don't know. Clearly it's less than on paper, but how much less is uncertain. 2) We're determined to test the outer limits. 3) We'll do our best, graphically, to make reading on screen a more pleasant experience (suggestions welcome). 4) We'll also make SLATE as easy as possible to print out. 5) This will become less of a problem as screens are developed that can be taken to bed or the bathroom. 6) Two thousand words. Or at least we're starting--optimistically, perhaps--with the hope that 2000 words or so is not too much. (By contrast, a typical print-magazine feature or cover story might run anywhere from 5000 to 15,000 words.)",
"Finally, we intend to take a fairly skeptical stance toward the romance and rapidly escalating vanity of cyberspace. We do not start out with the smug assumption that the Internet changes the nature of human thought, or that all the restraints that society imposes on individuals in \"real life\" must melt away in cyberia. There is a deadening conformity in the hipness of cyberspace culture in which we don't intend to participate. Part of our mission at SLATE will be trying to bring cyberspace down to earth. \n\n Should be fun. Thanks for joining us. \n\n Michael Kinsley is editor of SLATE.",
"And coming up soon, two additional Back of the Book features: an interactive acrostic puzzle, and a stock-market contest. \n\n Does SLATE Have a Slant? \n\n SLATE is owned by Microsoft Corp., and that bothers some people. Can a giant software company put out a magazine that is free to think for itself? All we can say is that Microsoft has made all the right noises on this subject, and we look forward to putting the company's hands-off commitment to the test. But the concern strikes me as misplaced. In a day of media conglomerates with myriad daily conflicts of interest--Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Disney-ABC--how can it be a bad thing for a new company to begin competing in the media business? A journalist who worries about Microsoft putting out a magazine is a journalist with a steady job.",
"The bad news for readers is that some features aren't quite ready yet. Prime among them is \"The Fray,\" our reader-discussion forum. Meanwhile, though, please e-mail any comments you may have to slate@msn.com. We'll be publishing a traditional \"Letters to the Editor\" page until The Fray is up and running in a few weeks. \n\n We especially need, and appreciate, your comments in these early weeks. Every new magazine is a \"beta\" version for a while, especially a new magazine in a new medium. SLATE has gotten enormous hype--some of it, to be sure, self-induced, but much of it not. We appreciate the attention. But of course, it also makes us nervous. We have a smaller budget and staff than most well-known magazines--even smaller than some webzines. We don't claim to have all the answers. But, with your help, we plan to have all the answers by Christmas. [LINK TO TEXT BBB] \n\n So What's in It?",
"The Features section is also where we run longer articles [LINK TO TEXT DDD] and occasional humor pieces (that is, pieces that are intentionally, or at least aspirationally, humorous). This week in The Temptation of Bob Dole, SLATE's Washington editor, Jodie Allen, cruelly analyzes the arguments for a tax cut. Social critic Nicholas Lemann writes on Jews in Second Place, about what happens to American Jews as Asians replace them at the top of the meritocracy. And the legendary recluse Henry David Thoreau emerges to give SLATE readers an exclusive peek at his new Web page. \n\n In SLATE Gallery, we have a continuous exhibition of computer-based art. You may like or dislike this stuff (we'll have plenty of linked commentary to help you decide). What appeals to us about computer art is that SLATE can show you not reproductions, but the actual art itself. We start with an offering by Jenny Holzer.",
"The Gist, by contrast, is SLATE's effort to provide a quick education on some current issue in a form as free of spin as possible. Also free of quotes, anecdotes, and other paraphernalia. The only 1,000 words you'll have to read when you might rather read nothing at all. \n\n In a weekly department called Varnish Remover, political consultant Robert Shrum will deconstruct a 30-second TV spot from the election campaign. You can download a video or audio clip of the spot itself. \"Assessment\" will be a short, judgmental profile of some figure in the news. (Coming up soon: James Fallows on Wired magazine's godfather, Nicholas Negroponte.)",
"At least among non-cyberheads, the computer-screen problem seems to be everyone's favorite conversational thrust with regard to SLATE. In recent months I've been amazed to learn of the places and postures in which people like to read magazines. Bed and bath are just the beginning. At a Seattle dinner party, a woman made the interesting point that her problem isn't the screen: It's the chair. Even \"ergonomic\" computer chairs are designed for typing, not for reading. For this woman, and for others who may feel the same way, we have asked several furniture designers to sketch a real computer reading chair--one you can curl up in with your mouse and your cup of Starbucks and read SLATE online. That feature will appear in a week or two. Go back.",
"Several regular departments in the Briefing section are attempts at \"meta-news\": the news about the news, a sense of how the week's big stories are being played and perceived. The Week/The Spin takes a dozen or so topics, from this week's election-campaign developments to the latest big book from Knopf, and analyses, as objectively [LINK TO TEXT CCC]as possible, the spin they're getting, the sub-angles that are emerging, and so on. In Other Magazines uses the covers and contents of Time , Newsweek , etc., as a handy measure of what the culture considers important. (We aim to have these magazines in SLATE even before they reach the newsstands or your mailbox.) The Horse Race tracks the presidential candidates like stocks, as priced by the opinion polls, the pundits, and a genuine market in political candidates run out of the University of Iowa. Our man William Saletan will compute and analyze changes in the pundits index.",
"Stanford economist Paul Krugman writes The Dismal Scientist, a once-a-month column on economic policy. (See his debut essay in this issue, about the economic war within the Clinton administration.) University of Rochester economist Steven Landsburg writes monthly on \"Everyday Economics,\" using economic analysis to illuminate everyday life. (His first column, in our next issue, will explain how sexual promiscuity can actually reduce the spread of AIDS.) \n\n \"The Earthling\" will be a monthly column by Robert Wright, contributor to the New Republic and Time , and author of the acclaimed book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal . Other regular Briefing features will include a Press column by our deputy editor, Jack Shafer.",
"This week's reviews include Ann Hulbert's book review of Miss Manners' latest encyclical; Sarah Kerr's television review of the changing fashions in season finales; Larissa MacFarquhar's High Concept column, about how managed care could improve psychotherapy; and Cullen Murphy's The Good Word, about the difference between \"Jesuitical\" and \"Talmudic.\" \n\n In general, SLATE's Back of the Book will contain a weekly book review, alternating television and movie reviews, and a rotating menu of columns on music (classical and popular), sports, web sites, and other topics. Jeffrey Steingarten will be writing monthly on food (\"In the Soup\"), Anne Hollander on fashion (\"Clothes Sense\"), and Margaret Talbot on \"Men and Women.\" Audio and video clips will be offered where appropriate. \n\n Every issue will have a poem, read aloud by the author, with text. In this issue is a new poem by Seamus Heaney.",
"Doodlennium is our weekly cartoon strip by Mark Alan Stamaty, whose \"Washingtoon\" appeared for many years in the Washington Post and Time . Our SLATE Diary will be an actual daily diary, written and posted every weekday by someone with an interesting mind. Our first diarist is David O. Russell, writer and director of Flirting With Disaster . Our second diarist will be novelist Muriel Spark. \n\n Can There Possibly be More?",
"TEXT EEE: In this regard we are more like the newsmagazines-- Time , Newsweek , U.S. News & World Report --than the overtly political magazines such as the New Republic , National Review , or the Weekly Standard . Each of the newsmagazines may have an identifiable political tilt. But pushing a particular line is not what they are fundamentally about, and knowing where they average out won't tell you what any individual article will say. Go back. \n\n TEXT FFF: This is different from \"attitude\"--that free-floating, supercilious cynicism that is much prized in the culture of cyberspace. We may develop an attitude--a set of prejudices derived from logic and evidence, as best we can determine them--but we'll leave \"attitude\" to the kids. Go back."
],
[
"A Seattle cyberwag says that the name \"SLATE\" is appropriate, because whenever he asks anyone from Microsoft, \"How's your project coming along?\" the answer he usually gets is, \"'s late.\" SLATE , in fact, has been reasonably prompt. Less than six months ago, it was a four-page memorandum and a single Internet naif. SLATE is not the first \"webzine,\" but everyone in this nascent business is still struggling with some pretty basic issues. Starting an online magazine is like starting a traditional paper magazine by asking: \"OK, you chop down the trees. Then what?\"",
"To be honest, we are running late on a few things. For the reader--you--there is good news and bad news here. The good news is that our billing system isn't ready yet. We intend to charge $19.95 a year for SLATE. That is far less than the cost of equivalent print magazines, because there's no paper, printing, or postage. But $19.95 ($34.95 for two years) is more than zero, which is what Web readers are used to paying. We believe that expecting readers to share the cost, as they do in print, is the only way serious journalism on the Web can be self-supporting. Depending completely on advertisers would not be healthy even if it were possible.",
"Welcome to SLATE \n\n An introduction and apologia. \n\n By Michael Kinsley \n\n The name? It means nothing, or practically nothing. We chose it as an empty vessel into which we can pour meaning. We hope SLATE will come to mean good original journalism in this new medium. Beyond that, who knows? Good magazines are exercises in serendipity. Credit--or blame--for the name \"SLATE,\" by the way, goes to David Weld, then of Microsoft, now of Cognisoft Corp.",
"The bad news for readers is that some features aren't quite ready yet. Prime among them is \"The Fray,\" our reader-discussion forum. Meanwhile, though, please e-mail any comments you may have to slate@msn.com. We'll be publishing a traditional \"Letters to the Editor\" page until The Fray is up and running in a few weeks. \n\n We especially need, and appreciate, your comments in these early weeks. Every new magazine is a \"beta\" version for a while, especially a new magazine in a new medium. SLATE has gotten enormous hype--some of it, to be sure, self-induced, but much of it not. We appreciate the attention. But of course, it also makes us nervous. We have a smaller budget and staff than most well-known magazines--even smaller than some webzines. We don't claim to have all the answers. But, with your help, we plan to have all the answers by Christmas. [LINK TO TEXT BBB] \n\n So What's in It?",
"Readers may also wonder whether SLATE will have a particular political flavor. The answer is that we do not set out with any ideological mission or agenda. On the other hand, we are not committed to any artificial balance of views. We will publish articles from various perspectives, but we will not agonize if the mix averages out to be somewhere other than dead center. [LINK TO TEXT EEE] \n\n A good magazine, though, does develop a personality, an attitude, [LINK TO TEXT FFF]and some prejudices--even crotchets. A few of SLATE's are already becoming clear. In discussing current events, we have a preference for policy over politics. We'd rather discuss the effect of Bob Dole's tax-cut proposal on the economy than its effect on Bill Clinton. Within the policy arena, we seem to have a special fondness for economics. This was not planned; it's one of those serendipitous developments I mentioned. Whether it reflects good luck or bad luck is a matter of taste (yours).",
"And we want to be self-supporting. Indeed one of SLATE's main goals is to demonstrate, if we can, that the economies of cyberspace make it easier for our kind of journalism to pay for itself. Most magazines like SLATE depend on someone's generosity or vanity or misplaced optimism to pay the bills. But self-supporting journalism is freer journalism. (As A.J. Liebling said, freedom of the press is for those who own one.) If the Web can make serious journalism more easily self-supporting, that is a great gift from technology to democracy. \n\n For the moment, though, SLATE is yours for free. So enjoy. We expect to start requiring registration in a few weeks, and to require payment beginning Nov. 1.",
"Finally, we intend to take a fairly skeptical stance toward the romance and rapidly escalating vanity of cyberspace. We do not start out with the smug assumption that the Internet changes the nature of human thought, or that all the restraints that society imposes on individuals in \"real life\" must melt away in cyberia. There is a deadening conformity in the hipness of cyberspace culture in which we don't intend to participate. Part of our mission at SLATE will be trying to bring cyberspace down to earth. \n\n Should be fun. Thanks for joining us. \n\n Michael Kinsley is editor of SLATE.",
"First, let me urge you to read a special page called Consider Your Options. This page explains and executes the various ways you can receive and read SLATE. If you don't like reading on a computer screen, for example, there's a special version of SLATE that you can print out in its entirety, reformatted like a traditional print magazine. If you don't mind reading on a screen but hate waiting for pages to download--and hate running up those online charges from your Internet provider--you will soon be able to download the whole magazine at once and read it offline. \n\n Also on the Consider Your Options page, you can order SLATE to be delivered to your computer by e-mail. (Caution: This may not work with your e-mail system.) We'll even send you SLATE on Paper , a monthly compilation of highlights from SLATE, through the U.S. Mail. (The cost is $29 a year. Call 800-555-4995 to order.)",
"SLATE is basically a weekly: Most articles will appear for a week. But there will be something new to read almost every day. Some elements will change constantly. Other elements will appear and be removed throughout the week. Every article will indicate when it was \"posted\" and when it will be \"composted.\" As a general rule the Back of the Book, containing cultural reviews and commentary, will be posted Mondays and Tuesdays, the longer Features will be posted Wednesdays and Thursdays, and the front-of-the-book Briefing section will be posted Fridays. If you miss something, you can easily call it up from our archive, \"The Compost.\"( THIS NEEDS TO BE A HOT LINK) \n\n Let me try to describe a typical issue of SLATE. \n\n The Readme column will not always be as solipsistic as this one. It will usually be a commentary on public affairs by one of SLATE's editors.",
"Individual copies of SLATE on Paper will be available exclusively at Starbucks. And selected articles from SLATE will also appear in Time magazine. \n\n While you're on the Consider Your Options page, please read about how to navigate around SLATE. We use page numbers, like a traditional print magazine, and have tried to make it as easy as possible either to \"flip through\" the magazine or to and from the Table of Contents. \n\n OK, But What's in It??[STET double \"??\"]",
"The Gist, by contrast, is SLATE's effort to provide a quick education on some current issue in a form as free of spin as possible. Also free of quotes, anecdotes, and other paraphernalia. The only 1,000 words you'll have to read when you might rather read nothing at all. \n\n In a weekly department called Varnish Remover, political consultant Robert Shrum will deconstruct a 30-second TV spot from the election campaign. You can download a video or audio clip of the spot itself. \"Assessment\" will be a short, judgmental profile of some figure in the news. (Coming up soon: James Fallows on Wired magazine's godfather, Nicholas Negroponte.)",
"Several regular departments in the Briefing section are attempts at \"meta-news\": the news about the news, a sense of how the week's big stories are being played and perceived. The Week/The Spin takes a dozen or so topics, from this week's election-campaign developments to the latest big book from Knopf, and analyses, as objectively [LINK TO TEXT CCC]as possible, the spin they're getting, the sub-angles that are emerging, and so on. In Other Magazines uses the covers and contents of Time , Newsweek , etc., as a handy measure of what the culture considers important. (We aim to have these magazines in SLATE even before they reach the newsstands or your mailbox.) The Horse Race tracks the presidential candidates like stocks, as priced by the opinion polls, the pundits, and a genuine market in political candidates run out of the University of Iowa. Our man William Saletan will compute and analyze changes in the pundits index.",
"TEXT DDD: Those dread words \"longer articles\" raise one of the big uncertainties about this enterprise: How long an article will people be willing to read on a computer screen? We have several answers to this question: 1) We don't know. Clearly it's less than on paper, but how much less is uncertain. 2) We're determined to test the outer limits. 3) We'll do our best, graphically, to make reading on screen a more pleasant experience (suggestions welcome). 4) We'll also make SLATE as easy as possible to print out. 5) This will become less of a problem as screens are developed that can be taken to bed or the bathroom. 6) Two thousand words. Or at least we're starting--optimistically, perhaps--with the hope that 2000 words or so is not too much. (By contrast, a typical print-magazine feature or cover story might run anywhere from 5000 to 15,000 words.)",
"At least among non-cyberheads, the computer-screen problem seems to be everyone's favorite conversational thrust with regard to SLATE. In recent months I've been amazed to learn of the places and postures in which people like to read magazines. Bed and bath are just the beginning. At a Seattle dinner party, a woman made the interesting point that her problem isn't the screen: It's the chair. Even \"ergonomic\" computer chairs are designed for typing, not for reading. For this woman, and for others who may feel the same way, we have asked several furniture designers to sketch a real computer reading chair--one you can curl up in with your mouse and your cup of Starbucks and read SLATE online. That feature will appear in a week or two. Go back.",
"And coming up soon, two additional Back of the Book features: an interactive acrostic puzzle, and a stock-market contest. \n\n Does SLATE Have a Slant? \n\n SLATE is owned by Microsoft Corp., and that bothers some people. Can a giant software company put out a magazine that is free to think for itself? All we can say is that Microsoft has made all the right noises on this subject, and we look forward to putting the company's hands-off commitment to the test. But the concern strikes me as misplaced. In a day of media conglomerates with myriad daily conflicts of interest--Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Disney-ABC--how can it be a bad thing for a new company to begin competing in the media business? A journalist who worries about Microsoft putting out a magazine is a journalist with a steady job.",
"The Features section is also where we run longer articles [LINK TO TEXT DDD] and occasional humor pieces (that is, pieces that are intentionally, or at least aspirationally, humorous). This week in The Temptation of Bob Dole, SLATE's Washington editor, Jodie Allen, cruelly analyzes the arguments for a tax cut. Social critic Nicholas Lemann writes on Jews in Second Place, about what happens to American Jews as Asians replace them at the top of the meritocracy. And the legendary recluse Henry David Thoreau emerges to give SLATE readers an exclusive peek at his new Web page. \n\n In SLATE Gallery, we have a continuous exhibition of computer-based art. You may like or dislike this stuff (we'll have plenty of linked commentary to help you decide). What appeals to us about computer art is that SLATE can show you not reproductions, but the actual art itself. We start with an offering by Jenny Holzer.",
"TEXT CCC: Objectivity, we hope, will distinguish this feature from Newsweek 's \"Conventional Wisdom Watch,\" which is often an effort to set the spin rather than describe it. Anyway, the \"CW Watch\" was a rip-off of a similar feature in the New Republic when I was the editor there. And TNR 's feature itself was lifted from Washington, D.C.'s, City Paper , which was edited at the time of the theft by Jack Shafer, now deputy editor of SLATE. Go back.",
"This week's reviews include Ann Hulbert's book review of Miss Manners' latest encyclical; Sarah Kerr's television review of the changing fashions in season finales; Larissa MacFarquhar's High Concept column, about how managed care could improve psychotherapy; and Cullen Murphy's The Good Word, about the difference between \"Jesuitical\" and \"Talmudic.\" \n\n In general, SLATE's Back of the Book will contain a weekly book review, alternating television and movie reviews, and a rotating menu of columns on music (classical and popular), sports, web sites, and other topics. Jeffrey Steingarten will be writing monthly on food (\"In the Soup\"), Anne Hollander on fashion (\"Clothes Sense\"), and Margaret Talbot on \"Men and Women.\" Audio and video clips will be offered where appropriate. \n\n Every issue will have a poem, read aloud by the author, with text. In this issue is a new poem by Seamus Heaney.",
"Stanford economist Paul Krugman writes The Dismal Scientist, a once-a-month column on economic policy. (See his debut essay in this issue, about the economic war within the Clinton administration.) University of Rochester economist Steven Landsburg writes monthly on \"Everyday Economics,\" using economic analysis to illuminate everyday life. (His first column, in our next issue, will explain how sexual promiscuity can actually reduce the spread of AIDS.) \n\n \"The Earthling\" will be a monthly column by Robert Wright, contributor to the New Republic and Time , and author of the acclaimed book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal . Other regular Briefing features will include a Press column by our deputy editor, Jack Shafer.",
"Doodlennium is our weekly cartoon strip by Mark Alan Stamaty, whose \"Washingtoon\" appeared for many years in the Washington Post and Time . Our SLATE Diary will be an actual daily diary, written and posted every weekday by someone with an interesting mind. Our first diarist is David O. Russell, writer and director of Flirting With Disaster . Our second diarist will be novelist Muriel Spark. \n\n Can There Possibly be More?"
],
[
"First, let me urge you to read a special page called Consider Your Options. This page explains and executes the various ways you can receive and read SLATE. If you don't like reading on a computer screen, for example, there's a special version of SLATE that you can print out in its entirety, reformatted like a traditional print magazine. If you don't mind reading on a screen but hate waiting for pages to download--and hate running up those online charges from your Internet provider--you will soon be able to download the whole magazine at once and read it offline. \n\n Also on the Consider Your Options page, you can order SLATE to be delivered to your computer by e-mail. (Caution: This may not work with your e-mail system.) We'll even send you SLATE on Paper , a monthly compilation of highlights from SLATE, through the U.S. Mail. (The cost is $29 a year. Call 800-555-4995 to order.)",
"Individual copies of SLATE on Paper will be available exclusively at Starbucks. And selected articles from SLATE will also appear in Time magazine. \n\n While you're on the Consider Your Options page, please read about how to navigate around SLATE. We use page numbers, like a traditional print magazine, and have tried to make it as easy as possible either to \"flip through\" the magazine or to and from the Table of Contents. \n\n OK, But What's in It??[STET double \"??\"]",
"A Seattle cyberwag says that the name \"SLATE\" is appropriate, because whenever he asks anyone from Microsoft, \"How's your project coming along?\" the answer he usually gets is, \"'s late.\" SLATE , in fact, has been reasonably prompt. Less than six months ago, it was a four-page memorandum and a single Internet naif. SLATE is not the first \"webzine,\" but everyone in this nascent business is still struggling with some pretty basic issues. Starting an online magazine is like starting a traditional paper magazine by asking: \"OK, you chop down the trees. Then what?\"",
"To be honest, we are running late on a few things. For the reader--you--there is good news and bad news here. The good news is that our billing system isn't ready yet. We intend to charge $19.95 a year for SLATE. That is far less than the cost of equivalent print magazines, because there's no paper, printing, or postage. But $19.95 ($34.95 for two years) is more than zero, which is what Web readers are used to paying. We believe that expecting readers to share the cost, as they do in print, is the only way serious journalism on the Web can be self-supporting. Depending completely on advertisers would not be healthy even if it were possible.",
"SLATE is basically a weekly: Most articles will appear for a week. But there will be something new to read almost every day. Some elements will change constantly. Other elements will appear and be removed throughout the week. Every article will indicate when it was \"posted\" and when it will be \"composted.\" As a general rule the Back of the Book, containing cultural reviews and commentary, will be posted Mondays and Tuesdays, the longer Features will be posted Wednesdays and Thursdays, and the front-of-the-book Briefing section will be posted Fridays. If you miss something, you can easily call it up from our archive, \"The Compost.\"( THIS NEEDS TO BE A HOT LINK) \n\n Let me try to describe a typical issue of SLATE. \n\n The Readme column will not always be as solipsistic as this one. It will usually be a commentary on public affairs by one of SLATE's editors.",
"At least among non-cyberheads, the computer-screen problem seems to be everyone's favorite conversational thrust with regard to SLATE. In recent months I've been amazed to learn of the places and postures in which people like to read magazines. Bed and bath are just the beginning. At a Seattle dinner party, a woman made the interesting point that her problem isn't the screen: It's the chair. Even \"ergonomic\" computer chairs are designed for typing, not for reading. For this woman, and for others who may feel the same way, we have asked several furniture designers to sketch a real computer reading chair--one you can curl up in with your mouse and your cup of Starbucks and read SLATE online. That feature will appear in a week or two. Go back.",
"Welcome to SLATE \n\n An introduction and apologia. \n\n By Michael Kinsley \n\n The name? It means nothing, or practically nothing. We chose it as an empty vessel into which we can pour meaning. We hope SLATE will come to mean good original journalism in this new medium. Beyond that, who knows? Good magazines are exercises in serendipity. Credit--or blame--for the name \"SLATE,\" by the way, goes to David Weld, then of Microsoft, now of Cognisoft Corp.",
"And we want to be self-supporting. Indeed one of SLATE's main goals is to demonstrate, if we can, that the economies of cyberspace make it easier for our kind of journalism to pay for itself. Most magazines like SLATE depend on someone's generosity or vanity or misplaced optimism to pay the bills. But self-supporting journalism is freer journalism. (As A.J. Liebling said, freedom of the press is for those who own one.) If the Web can make serious journalism more easily self-supporting, that is a great gift from technology to democracy. \n\n For the moment, though, SLATE is yours for free. So enjoy. We expect to start requiring registration in a few weeks, and to require payment beginning Nov. 1.",
"The bad news for readers is that some features aren't quite ready yet. Prime among them is \"The Fray,\" our reader-discussion forum. Meanwhile, though, please e-mail any comments you may have to slate@msn.com. We'll be publishing a traditional \"Letters to the Editor\" page until The Fray is up and running in a few weeks. \n\n We especially need, and appreciate, your comments in these early weeks. Every new magazine is a \"beta\" version for a while, especially a new magazine in a new medium. SLATE has gotten enormous hype--some of it, to be sure, self-induced, but much of it not. We appreciate the attention. But of course, it also makes us nervous. We have a smaller budget and staff than most well-known magazines--even smaller than some webzines. We don't claim to have all the answers. But, with your help, we plan to have all the answers by Christmas. [LINK TO TEXT BBB] \n\n So What's in It?",
"The Features section is also where we run longer articles [LINK TO TEXT DDD] and occasional humor pieces (that is, pieces that are intentionally, or at least aspirationally, humorous). This week in The Temptation of Bob Dole, SLATE's Washington editor, Jodie Allen, cruelly analyzes the arguments for a tax cut. Social critic Nicholas Lemann writes on Jews in Second Place, about what happens to American Jews as Asians replace them at the top of the meritocracy. And the legendary recluse Henry David Thoreau emerges to give SLATE readers an exclusive peek at his new Web page. \n\n In SLATE Gallery, we have a continuous exhibition of computer-based art. You may like or dislike this stuff (we'll have plenty of linked commentary to help you decide). What appeals to us about computer art is that SLATE can show you not reproductions, but the actual art itself. We start with an offering by Jenny Holzer.",
"The Gist, by contrast, is SLATE's effort to provide a quick education on some current issue in a form as free of spin as possible. Also free of quotes, anecdotes, and other paraphernalia. The only 1,000 words you'll have to read when you might rather read nothing at all. \n\n In a weekly department called Varnish Remover, political consultant Robert Shrum will deconstruct a 30-second TV spot from the election campaign. You can download a video or audio clip of the spot itself. \"Assessment\" will be a short, judgmental profile of some figure in the news. (Coming up soon: James Fallows on Wired magazine's godfather, Nicholas Negroponte.)",
"Readers may also wonder whether SLATE will have a particular political flavor. The answer is that we do not set out with any ideological mission or agenda. On the other hand, we are not committed to any artificial balance of views. We will publish articles from various perspectives, but we will not agonize if the mix averages out to be somewhere other than dead center. [LINK TO TEXT EEE] \n\n A good magazine, though, does develop a personality, an attitude, [LINK TO TEXT FFF]and some prejudices--even crotchets. A few of SLATE's are already becoming clear. In discussing current events, we have a preference for policy over politics. We'd rather discuss the effect of Bob Dole's tax-cut proposal on the economy than its effect on Bill Clinton. Within the policy arena, we seem to have a special fondness for economics. This was not planned; it's one of those serendipitous developments I mentioned. Whether it reflects good luck or bad luck is a matter of taste (yours).",
"TEXT DDD: Those dread words \"longer articles\" raise one of the big uncertainties about this enterprise: How long an article will people be willing to read on a computer screen? We have several answers to this question: 1) We don't know. Clearly it's less than on paper, but how much less is uncertain. 2) We're determined to test the outer limits. 3) We'll do our best, graphically, to make reading on screen a more pleasant experience (suggestions welcome). 4) We'll also make SLATE as easy as possible to print out. 5) This will become less of a problem as screens are developed that can be taken to bed or the bathroom. 6) Two thousand words. Or at least we're starting--optimistically, perhaps--with the hope that 2000 words or so is not too much. (By contrast, a typical print-magazine feature or cover story might run anywhere from 5000 to 15,000 words.)",
"Finally, we intend to take a fairly skeptical stance toward the romance and rapidly escalating vanity of cyberspace. We do not start out with the smug assumption that the Internet changes the nature of human thought, or that all the restraints that society imposes on individuals in \"real life\" must melt away in cyberia. There is a deadening conformity in the hipness of cyberspace culture in which we don't intend to participate. Part of our mission at SLATE will be trying to bring cyberspace down to earth. \n\n Should be fun. Thanks for joining us. \n\n Michael Kinsley is editor of SLATE.",
"Several regular departments in the Briefing section are attempts at \"meta-news\": the news about the news, a sense of how the week's big stories are being played and perceived. The Week/The Spin takes a dozen or so topics, from this week's election-campaign developments to the latest big book from Knopf, and analyses, as objectively [LINK TO TEXT CCC]as possible, the spin they're getting, the sub-angles that are emerging, and so on. In Other Magazines uses the covers and contents of Time , Newsweek , etc., as a handy measure of what the culture considers important. (We aim to have these magazines in SLATE even before they reach the newsstands or your mailbox.) The Horse Race tracks the presidential candidates like stocks, as priced by the opinion polls, the pundits, and a genuine market in political candidates run out of the University of Iowa. Our man William Saletan will compute and analyze changes in the pundits index.",
"Doodlennium is our weekly cartoon strip by Mark Alan Stamaty, whose \"Washingtoon\" appeared for many years in the Washington Post and Time . Our SLATE Diary will be an actual daily diary, written and posted every weekday by someone with an interesting mind. Our first diarist is David O. Russell, writer and director of Flirting With Disaster . Our second diarist will be novelist Muriel Spark. \n\n Can There Possibly be More?",
"This week's reviews include Ann Hulbert's book review of Miss Manners' latest encyclical; Sarah Kerr's television review of the changing fashions in season finales; Larissa MacFarquhar's High Concept column, about how managed care could improve psychotherapy; and Cullen Murphy's The Good Word, about the difference between \"Jesuitical\" and \"Talmudic.\" \n\n In general, SLATE's Back of the Book will contain a weekly book review, alternating television and movie reviews, and a rotating menu of columns on music (classical and popular), sports, web sites, and other topics. Jeffrey Steingarten will be writing monthly on food (\"In the Soup\"), Anne Hollander on fashion (\"Clothes Sense\"), and Margaret Talbot on \"Men and Women.\" Audio and video clips will be offered where appropriate. \n\n Every issue will have a poem, read aloud by the author, with text. In this issue is a new poem by Seamus Heaney.",
"And coming up soon, two additional Back of the Book features: an interactive acrostic puzzle, and a stock-market contest. \n\n Does SLATE Have a Slant? \n\n SLATE is owned by Microsoft Corp., and that bothers some people. Can a giant software company put out a magazine that is free to think for itself? All we can say is that Microsoft has made all the right noises on this subject, and we look forward to putting the company's hands-off commitment to the test. But the concern strikes me as misplaced. In a day of media conglomerates with myriad daily conflicts of interest--Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Disney-ABC--how can it be a bad thing for a new company to begin competing in the media business? A journalist who worries about Microsoft putting out a magazine is a journalist with a steady job.",
"TEXT AAA: No, this is not a link to the Cognisoft home page. As a general rule, we plan to avoid hyperlinks to outside sites in the text of articles, and to group them at the end instead. It's a small illustration of our general philosophy--better call it a hope--that, even on the Web, some people will want to read articles in the traditional linear fashion--i.e., from beginning to end--rather than darting constantly from site to site. Go back. \n\n TEXT BBB: Only kidding. Easter. Go back.",
"TEXT CCC: Objectivity, we hope, will distinguish this feature from Newsweek 's \"Conventional Wisdom Watch,\" which is often an effort to set the spin rather than describe it. Anyway, the \"CW Watch\" was a rip-off of a similar feature in the New Republic when I was the editor there. And TNR 's feature itself was lifted from Washington, D.C.'s, City Paper , which was edited at the time of the theft by Jack Shafer, now deputy editor of SLATE. Go back."
],
[
"Finally, we intend to take a fairly skeptical stance toward the romance and rapidly escalating vanity of cyberspace. We do not start out with the smug assumption that the Internet changes the nature of human thought, or that all the restraints that society imposes on individuals in \"real life\" must melt away in cyberia. There is a deadening conformity in the hipness of cyberspace culture in which we don't intend to participate. Part of our mission at SLATE will be trying to bring cyberspace down to earth. \n\n Should be fun. Thanks for joining us. \n\n Michael Kinsley is editor of SLATE.",
"And we want to be self-supporting. Indeed one of SLATE's main goals is to demonstrate, if we can, that the economies of cyberspace make it easier for our kind of journalism to pay for itself. Most magazines like SLATE depend on someone's generosity or vanity or misplaced optimism to pay the bills. But self-supporting journalism is freer journalism. (As A.J. Liebling said, freedom of the press is for those who own one.) If the Web can make serious journalism more easily self-supporting, that is a great gift from technology to democracy. \n\n For the moment, though, SLATE is yours for free. So enjoy. We expect to start requiring registration in a few weeks, and to require payment beginning Nov. 1.",
"At least among non-cyberheads, the computer-screen problem seems to be everyone's favorite conversational thrust with regard to SLATE. In recent months I've been amazed to learn of the places and postures in which people like to read magazines. Bed and bath are just the beginning. At a Seattle dinner party, a woman made the interesting point that her problem isn't the screen: It's the chair. Even \"ergonomic\" computer chairs are designed for typing, not for reading. For this woman, and for others who may feel the same way, we have asked several furniture designers to sketch a real computer reading chair--one you can curl up in with your mouse and your cup of Starbucks and read SLATE online. That feature will appear in a week or two. Go back.",
"TEXT DDD: Those dread words \"longer articles\" raise one of the big uncertainties about this enterprise: How long an article will people be willing to read on a computer screen? We have several answers to this question: 1) We don't know. Clearly it's less than on paper, but how much less is uncertain. 2) We're determined to test the outer limits. 3) We'll do our best, graphically, to make reading on screen a more pleasant experience (suggestions welcome). 4) We'll also make SLATE as easy as possible to print out. 5) This will become less of a problem as screens are developed that can be taken to bed or the bathroom. 6) Two thousand words. Or at least we're starting--optimistically, perhaps--with the hope that 2000 words or so is not too much. (By contrast, a typical print-magazine feature or cover story might run anywhere from 5000 to 15,000 words.)",
"The bad news for readers is that some features aren't quite ready yet. Prime among them is \"The Fray,\" our reader-discussion forum. Meanwhile, though, please e-mail any comments you may have to slate@msn.com. We'll be publishing a traditional \"Letters to the Editor\" page until The Fray is up and running in a few weeks. \n\n We especially need, and appreciate, your comments in these early weeks. Every new magazine is a \"beta\" version for a while, especially a new magazine in a new medium. SLATE has gotten enormous hype--some of it, to be sure, self-induced, but much of it not. We appreciate the attention. But of course, it also makes us nervous. We have a smaller budget and staff than most well-known magazines--even smaller than some webzines. We don't claim to have all the answers. But, with your help, we plan to have all the answers by Christmas. [LINK TO TEXT BBB] \n\n So What's in It?",
"First, let me urge you to read a special page called Consider Your Options. This page explains and executes the various ways you can receive and read SLATE. If you don't like reading on a computer screen, for example, there's a special version of SLATE that you can print out in its entirety, reformatted like a traditional print magazine. If you don't mind reading on a screen but hate waiting for pages to download--and hate running up those online charges from your Internet provider--you will soon be able to download the whole magazine at once and read it offline. \n\n Also on the Consider Your Options page, you can order SLATE to be delivered to your computer by e-mail. (Caution: This may not work with your e-mail system.) We'll even send you SLATE on Paper , a monthly compilation of highlights from SLATE, through the U.S. Mail. (The cost is $29 a year. Call 800-555-4995 to order.)",
"To be honest, we are running late on a few things. For the reader--you--there is good news and bad news here. The good news is that our billing system isn't ready yet. We intend to charge $19.95 a year for SLATE. That is far less than the cost of equivalent print magazines, because there's no paper, printing, or postage. But $19.95 ($34.95 for two years) is more than zero, which is what Web readers are used to paying. We believe that expecting readers to share the cost, as they do in print, is the only way serious journalism on the Web can be self-supporting. Depending completely on advertisers would not be healthy even if it were possible.",
"A Seattle cyberwag says that the name \"SLATE\" is appropriate, because whenever he asks anyone from Microsoft, \"How's your project coming along?\" the answer he usually gets is, \"'s late.\" SLATE , in fact, has been reasonably prompt. Less than six months ago, it was a four-page memorandum and a single Internet naif. SLATE is not the first \"webzine,\" but everyone in this nascent business is still struggling with some pretty basic issues. Starting an online magazine is like starting a traditional paper magazine by asking: \"OK, you chop down the trees. Then what?\"",
"TEXT EEE: In this regard we are more like the newsmagazines-- Time , Newsweek , U.S. News & World Report --than the overtly political magazines such as the New Republic , National Review , or the Weekly Standard . Each of the newsmagazines may have an identifiable political tilt. But pushing a particular line is not what they are fundamentally about, and knowing where they average out won't tell you what any individual article will say. Go back. \n\n TEXT FFF: This is different from \"attitude\"--that free-floating, supercilious cynicism that is much prized in the culture of cyberspace. We may develop an attitude--a set of prejudices derived from logic and evidence, as best we can determine them--but we'll leave \"attitude\" to the kids. Go back.",
"The Features section is also where we run longer articles [LINK TO TEXT DDD] and occasional humor pieces (that is, pieces that are intentionally, or at least aspirationally, humorous). This week in The Temptation of Bob Dole, SLATE's Washington editor, Jodie Allen, cruelly analyzes the arguments for a tax cut. Social critic Nicholas Lemann writes on Jews in Second Place, about what happens to American Jews as Asians replace them at the top of the meritocracy. And the legendary recluse Henry David Thoreau emerges to give SLATE readers an exclusive peek at his new Web page. \n\n In SLATE Gallery, we have a continuous exhibition of computer-based art. You may like or dislike this stuff (we'll have plenty of linked commentary to help you decide). What appeals to us about computer art is that SLATE can show you not reproductions, but the actual art itself. We start with an offering by Jenny Holzer.",
"SLATE is basically a weekly: Most articles will appear for a week. But there will be something new to read almost every day. Some elements will change constantly. Other elements will appear and be removed throughout the week. Every article will indicate when it was \"posted\" and when it will be \"composted.\" As a general rule the Back of the Book, containing cultural reviews and commentary, will be posted Mondays and Tuesdays, the longer Features will be posted Wednesdays and Thursdays, and the front-of-the-book Briefing section will be posted Fridays. If you miss something, you can easily call it up from our archive, \"The Compost.\"( THIS NEEDS TO BE A HOT LINK) \n\n Let me try to describe a typical issue of SLATE. \n\n The Readme column will not always be as solipsistic as this one. It will usually be a commentary on public affairs by one of SLATE's editors.",
"TEXT AAA: No, this is not a link to the Cognisoft home page. As a general rule, we plan to avoid hyperlinks to outside sites in the text of articles, and to group them at the end instead. It's a small illustration of our general philosophy--better call it a hope--that, even on the Web, some people will want to read articles in the traditional linear fashion--i.e., from beginning to end--rather than darting constantly from site to site. Go back. \n\n TEXT BBB: Only kidding. Easter. Go back.",
"This week's reviews include Ann Hulbert's book review of Miss Manners' latest encyclical; Sarah Kerr's television review of the changing fashions in season finales; Larissa MacFarquhar's High Concept column, about how managed care could improve psychotherapy; and Cullen Murphy's The Good Word, about the difference between \"Jesuitical\" and \"Talmudic.\" \n\n In general, SLATE's Back of the Book will contain a weekly book review, alternating television and movie reviews, and a rotating menu of columns on music (classical and popular), sports, web sites, and other topics. Jeffrey Steingarten will be writing monthly on food (\"In the Soup\"), Anne Hollander on fashion (\"Clothes Sense\"), and Margaret Talbot on \"Men and Women.\" Audio and video clips will be offered where appropriate. \n\n Every issue will have a poem, read aloud by the author, with text. In this issue is a new poem by Seamus Heaney.",
"Welcome to SLATE \n\n An introduction and apologia. \n\n By Michael Kinsley \n\n The name? It means nothing, or practically nothing. We chose it as an empty vessel into which we can pour meaning. We hope SLATE will come to mean good original journalism in this new medium. Beyond that, who knows? Good magazines are exercises in serendipity. Credit--or blame--for the name \"SLATE,\" by the way, goes to David Weld, then of Microsoft, now of Cognisoft Corp.",
"And coming up soon, two additional Back of the Book features: an interactive acrostic puzzle, and a stock-market contest. \n\n Does SLATE Have a Slant? \n\n SLATE is owned by Microsoft Corp., and that bothers some people. Can a giant software company put out a magazine that is free to think for itself? All we can say is that Microsoft has made all the right noises on this subject, and we look forward to putting the company's hands-off commitment to the test. But the concern strikes me as misplaced. In a day of media conglomerates with myriad daily conflicts of interest--Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Disney-ABC--how can it be a bad thing for a new company to begin competing in the media business? A journalist who worries about Microsoft putting out a magazine is a journalist with a steady job.",
"Doodlennium is our weekly cartoon strip by Mark Alan Stamaty, whose \"Washingtoon\" appeared for many years in the Washington Post and Time . Our SLATE Diary will be an actual daily diary, written and posted every weekday by someone with an interesting mind. Our first diarist is David O. Russell, writer and director of Flirting With Disaster . Our second diarist will be novelist Muriel Spark. \n\n Can There Possibly be More?",
"Readers may also wonder whether SLATE will have a particular political flavor. The answer is that we do not set out with any ideological mission or agenda. On the other hand, we are not committed to any artificial balance of views. We will publish articles from various perspectives, but we will not agonize if the mix averages out to be somewhere other than dead center. [LINK TO TEXT EEE] \n\n A good magazine, though, does develop a personality, an attitude, [LINK TO TEXT FFF]and some prejudices--even crotchets. A few of SLATE's are already becoming clear. In discussing current events, we have a preference for policy over politics. We'd rather discuss the effect of Bob Dole's tax-cut proposal on the economy than its effect on Bill Clinton. Within the policy arena, we seem to have a special fondness for economics. This was not planned; it's one of those serendipitous developments I mentioned. Whether it reflects good luck or bad luck is a matter of taste (yours).",
"Our Features section begins each week with the Committee of Correspondence, our e-mail discussion group. The committee is run by Herbert Stein, a former chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers best-known now for his witty columns in the Wall Street Journal . We have great hopes for e-mail as a medium of debate that can combine the immediacy of talk-television with the intellectual discipline of the written word. We hope for something halfway between The McLaughlin Group and the correspondence page of the New York Review of Books . Will it work? Check out our first attempt--Does Microsoft Play Fair?--and let us know what you think.",
"Individual copies of SLATE on Paper will be available exclusively at Starbucks. And selected articles from SLATE will also appear in Time magazine. \n\n While you're on the Consider Your Options page, please read about how to navigate around SLATE. We use page numbers, like a traditional print magazine, and have tried to make it as easy as possible either to \"flip through\" the magazine or to and from the Table of Contents. \n\n OK, But What's in It??[STET double \"??\"]",
"Several regular departments in the Briefing section are attempts at \"meta-news\": the news about the news, a sense of how the week's big stories are being played and perceived. The Week/The Spin takes a dozen or so topics, from this week's election-campaign developments to the latest big book from Knopf, and analyses, as objectively [LINK TO TEXT CCC]as possible, the spin they're getting, the sub-angles that are emerging, and so on. In Other Magazines uses the covers and contents of Time , Newsweek , etc., as a handy measure of what the culture considers important. (We aim to have these magazines in SLATE even before they reach the newsstands or your mailbox.) The Horse Race tracks the presidential candidates like stocks, as priced by the opinion polls, the pundits, and a genuine market in political candidates run out of the University of Iowa. Our man William Saletan will compute and analyze changes in the pundits index."
],
[
"Welcome to SLATE \n\n An introduction and apologia. \n\n By Michael Kinsley \n\n The name? It means nothing, or practically nothing. We chose it as an empty vessel into which we can pour meaning. We hope SLATE will come to mean good original journalism in this new medium. Beyond that, who knows? Good magazines are exercises in serendipity. Credit--or blame--for the name \"SLATE,\" by the way, goes to David Weld, then of Microsoft, now of Cognisoft Corp.",
"Readers may also wonder whether SLATE will have a particular political flavor. The answer is that we do not set out with any ideological mission or agenda. On the other hand, we are not committed to any artificial balance of views. We will publish articles from various perspectives, but we will not agonize if the mix averages out to be somewhere other than dead center. [LINK TO TEXT EEE] \n\n A good magazine, though, does develop a personality, an attitude, [LINK TO TEXT FFF]and some prejudices--even crotchets. A few of SLATE's are already becoming clear. In discussing current events, we have a preference for policy over politics. We'd rather discuss the effect of Bob Dole's tax-cut proposal on the economy than its effect on Bill Clinton. Within the policy arena, we seem to have a special fondness for economics. This was not planned; it's one of those serendipitous developments I mentioned. Whether it reflects good luck or bad luck is a matter of taste (yours).",
"A Seattle cyberwag says that the name \"SLATE\" is appropriate, because whenever he asks anyone from Microsoft, \"How's your project coming along?\" the answer he usually gets is, \"'s late.\" SLATE , in fact, has been reasonably prompt. Less than six months ago, it was a four-page memorandum and a single Internet naif. SLATE is not the first \"webzine,\" but everyone in this nascent business is still struggling with some pretty basic issues. Starting an online magazine is like starting a traditional paper magazine by asking: \"OK, you chop down the trees. Then what?\"",
"Finally, we intend to take a fairly skeptical stance toward the romance and rapidly escalating vanity of cyberspace. We do not start out with the smug assumption that the Internet changes the nature of human thought, or that all the restraints that society imposes on individuals in \"real life\" must melt away in cyberia. There is a deadening conformity in the hipness of cyberspace culture in which we don't intend to participate. Part of our mission at SLATE will be trying to bring cyberspace down to earth. \n\n Should be fun. Thanks for joining us. \n\n Michael Kinsley is editor of SLATE.",
"To be honest, we are running late on a few things. For the reader--you--there is good news and bad news here. The good news is that our billing system isn't ready yet. We intend to charge $19.95 a year for SLATE. That is far less than the cost of equivalent print magazines, because there's no paper, printing, or postage. But $19.95 ($34.95 for two years) is more than zero, which is what Web readers are used to paying. We believe that expecting readers to share the cost, as they do in print, is the only way serious journalism on the Web can be self-supporting. Depending completely on advertisers would not be healthy even if it were possible.",
"SLATE is basically a weekly: Most articles will appear for a week. But there will be something new to read almost every day. Some elements will change constantly. Other elements will appear and be removed throughout the week. Every article will indicate when it was \"posted\" and when it will be \"composted.\" As a general rule the Back of the Book, containing cultural reviews and commentary, will be posted Mondays and Tuesdays, the longer Features will be posted Wednesdays and Thursdays, and the front-of-the-book Briefing section will be posted Fridays. If you miss something, you can easily call it up from our archive, \"The Compost.\"( THIS NEEDS TO BE A HOT LINK) \n\n Let me try to describe a typical issue of SLATE. \n\n The Readme column will not always be as solipsistic as this one. It will usually be a commentary on public affairs by one of SLATE's editors.",
"The Gist, by contrast, is SLATE's effort to provide a quick education on some current issue in a form as free of spin as possible. Also free of quotes, anecdotes, and other paraphernalia. The only 1,000 words you'll have to read when you might rather read nothing at all. \n\n In a weekly department called Varnish Remover, political consultant Robert Shrum will deconstruct a 30-second TV spot from the election campaign. You can download a video or audio clip of the spot itself. \"Assessment\" will be a short, judgmental profile of some figure in the news. (Coming up soon: James Fallows on Wired magazine's godfather, Nicholas Negroponte.)",
"First, let me urge you to read a special page called Consider Your Options. This page explains and executes the various ways you can receive and read SLATE. If you don't like reading on a computer screen, for example, there's a special version of SLATE that you can print out in its entirety, reformatted like a traditional print magazine. If you don't mind reading on a screen but hate waiting for pages to download--and hate running up those online charges from your Internet provider--you will soon be able to download the whole magazine at once and read it offline. \n\n Also on the Consider Your Options page, you can order SLATE to be delivered to your computer by e-mail. (Caution: This may not work with your e-mail system.) We'll even send you SLATE on Paper , a monthly compilation of highlights from SLATE, through the U.S. Mail. (The cost is $29 a year. Call 800-555-4995 to order.)",
"And we want to be self-supporting. Indeed one of SLATE's main goals is to demonstrate, if we can, that the economies of cyberspace make it easier for our kind of journalism to pay for itself. Most magazines like SLATE depend on someone's generosity or vanity or misplaced optimism to pay the bills. But self-supporting journalism is freer journalism. (As A.J. Liebling said, freedom of the press is for those who own one.) If the Web can make serious journalism more easily self-supporting, that is a great gift from technology to democracy. \n\n For the moment, though, SLATE is yours for free. So enjoy. We expect to start requiring registration in a few weeks, and to require payment beginning Nov. 1.",
"Several regular departments in the Briefing section are attempts at \"meta-news\": the news about the news, a sense of how the week's big stories are being played and perceived. The Week/The Spin takes a dozen or so topics, from this week's election-campaign developments to the latest big book from Knopf, and analyses, as objectively [LINK TO TEXT CCC]as possible, the spin they're getting, the sub-angles that are emerging, and so on. In Other Magazines uses the covers and contents of Time , Newsweek , etc., as a handy measure of what the culture considers important. (We aim to have these magazines in SLATE even before they reach the newsstands or your mailbox.) The Horse Race tracks the presidential candidates like stocks, as priced by the opinion polls, the pundits, and a genuine market in political candidates run out of the University of Iowa. Our man William Saletan will compute and analyze changes in the pundits index.",
"Individual copies of SLATE on Paper will be available exclusively at Starbucks. And selected articles from SLATE will also appear in Time magazine. \n\n While you're on the Consider Your Options page, please read about how to navigate around SLATE. We use page numbers, like a traditional print magazine, and have tried to make it as easy as possible either to \"flip through\" the magazine or to and from the Table of Contents. \n\n OK, But What's in It??[STET double \"??\"]",
"The Features section is also where we run longer articles [LINK TO TEXT DDD] and occasional humor pieces (that is, pieces that are intentionally, or at least aspirationally, humorous). This week in The Temptation of Bob Dole, SLATE's Washington editor, Jodie Allen, cruelly analyzes the arguments for a tax cut. Social critic Nicholas Lemann writes on Jews in Second Place, about what happens to American Jews as Asians replace them at the top of the meritocracy. And the legendary recluse Henry David Thoreau emerges to give SLATE readers an exclusive peek at his new Web page. \n\n In SLATE Gallery, we have a continuous exhibition of computer-based art. You may like or dislike this stuff (we'll have plenty of linked commentary to help you decide). What appeals to us about computer art is that SLATE can show you not reproductions, but the actual art itself. We start with an offering by Jenny Holzer.",
"TEXT EEE: In this regard we are more like the newsmagazines-- Time , Newsweek , U.S. News & World Report --than the overtly political magazines such as the New Republic , National Review , or the Weekly Standard . Each of the newsmagazines may have an identifiable political tilt. But pushing a particular line is not what they are fundamentally about, and knowing where they average out won't tell you what any individual article will say. Go back. \n\n TEXT FFF: This is different from \"attitude\"--that free-floating, supercilious cynicism that is much prized in the culture of cyberspace. We may develop an attitude--a set of prejudices derived from logic and evidence, as best we can determine them--but we'll leave \"attitude\" to the kids. Go back.",
"This week's reviews include Ann Hulbert's book review of Miss Manners' latest encyclical; Sarah Kerr's television review of the changing fashions in season finales; Larissa MacFarquhar's High Concept column, about how managed care could improve psychotherapy; and Cullen Murphy's The Good Word, about the difference between \"Jesuitical\" and \"Talmudic.\" \n\n In general, SLATE's Back of the Book will contain a weekly book review, alternating television and movie reviews, and a rotating menu of columns on music (classical and popular), sports, web sites, and other topics. Jeffrey Steingarten will be writing monthly on food (\"In the Soup\"), Anne Hollander on fashion (\"Clothes Sense\"), and Margaret Talbot on \"Men and Women.\" Audio and video clips will be offered where appropriate. \n\n Every issue will have a poem, read aloud by the author, with text. In this issue is a new poem by Seamus Heaney.",
"The bad news for readers is that some features aren't quite ready yet. Prime among them is \"The Fray,\" our reader-discussion forum. Meanwhile, though, please e-mail any comments you may have to slate@msn.com. We'll be publishing a traditional \"Letters to the Editor\" page until The Fray is up and running in a few weeks. \n\n We especially need, and appreciate, your comments in these early weeks. Every new magazine is a \"beta\" version for a while, especially a new magazine in a new medium. SLATE has gotten enormous hype--some of it, to be sure, self-induced, but much of it not. We appreciate the attention. But of course, it also makes us nervous. We have a smaller budget and staff than most well-known magazines--even smaller than some webzines. We don't claim to have all the answers. But, with your help, we plan to have all the answers by Christmas. [LINK TO TEXT BBB] \n\n So What's in It?",
"And coming up soon, two additional Back of the Book features: an interactive acrostic puzzle, and a stock-market contest. \n\n Does SLATE Have a Slant? \n\n SLATE is owned by Microsoft Corp., and that bothers some people. Can a giant software company put out a magazine that is free to think for itself? All we can say is that Microsoft has made all the right noises on this subject, and we look forward to putting the company's hands-off commitment to the test. But the concern strikes me as misplaced. In a day of media conglomerates with myriad daily conflicts of interest--Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Disney-ABC--how can it be a bad thing for a new company to begin competing in the media business? A journalist who worries about Microsoft putting out a magazine is a journalist with a steady job.",
"TEXT CCC: Objectivity, we hope, will distinguish this feature from Newsweek 's \"Conventional Wisdom Watch,\" which is often an effort to set the spin rather than describe it. Anyway, the \"CW Watch\" was a rip-off of a similar feature in the New Republic when I was the editor there. And TNR 's feature itself was lifted from Washington, D.C.'s, City Paper , which was edited at the time of the theft by Jack Shafer, now deputy editor of SLATE. Go back.",
"Doodlennium is our weekly cartoon strip by Mark Alan Stamaty, whose \"Washingtoon\" appeared for many years in the Washington Post and Time . Our SLATE Diary will be an actual daily diary, written and posted every weekday by someone with an interesting mind. Our first diarist is David O. Russell, writer and director of Flirting With Disaster . Our second diarist will be novelist Muriel Spark. \n\n Can There Possibly be More?",
"At least among non-cyberheads, the computer-screen problem seems to be everyone's favorite conversational thrust with regard to SLATE. In recent months I've been amazed to learn of the places and postures in which people like to read magazines. Bed and bath are just the beginning. At a Seattle dinner party, a woman made the interesting point that her problem isn't the screen: It's the chair. Even \"ergonomic\" computer chairs are designed for typing, not for reading. For this woman, and for others who may feel the same way, we have asked several furniture designers to sketch a real computer reading chair--one you can curl up in with your mouse and your cup of Starbucks and read SLATE online. That feature will appear in a week or two. Go back.",
"TEXT DDD: Those dread words \"longer articles\" raise one of the big uncertainties about this enterprise: How long an article will people be willing to read on a computer screen? We have several answers to this question: 1) We don't know. Clearly it's less than on paper, but how much less is uncertain. 2) We're determined to test the outer limits. 3) We'll do our best, graphically, to make reading on screen a more pleasant experience (suggestions welcome). 4) We'll also make SLATE as easy as possible to print out. 5) This will become less of a problem as screens are developed that can be taken to bed or the bathroom. 6) Two thousand words. Or at least we're starting--optimistically, perhaps--with the hope that 2000 words or so is not too much. (By contrast, a typical print-magazine feature or cover story might run anywhere from 5000 to 15,000 words.)"
],
[
"Readers may also wonder whether SLATE will have a particular political flavor. The answer is that we do not set out with any ideological mission or agenda. On the other hand, we are not committed to any artificial balance of views. We will publish articles from various perspectives, but we will not agonize if the mix averages out to be somewhere other than dead center. [LINK TO TEXT EEE] \n\n A good magazine, though, does develop a personality, an attitude, [LINK TO TEXT FFF]and some prejudices--even crotchets. A few of SLATE's are already becoming clear. In discussing current events, we have a preference for policy over politics. We'd rather discuss the effect of Bob Dole's tax-cut proposal on the economy than its effect on Bill Clinton. Within the policy arena, we seem to have a special fondness for economics. This was not planned; it's one of those serendipitous developments I mentioned. Whether it reflects good luck or bad luck is a matter of taste (yours).",
"Welcome to SLATE \n\n An introduction and apologia. \n\n By Michael Kinsley \n\n The name? It means nothing, or practically nothing. We chose it as an empty vessel into which we can pour meaning. We hope SLATE will come to mean good original journalism in this new medium. Beyond that, who knows? Good magazines are exercises in serendipity. Credit--or blame--for the name \"SLATE,\" by the way, goes to David Weld, then of Microsoft, now of Cognisoft Corp.",
"To be honest, we are running late on a few things. For the reader--you--there is good news and bad news here. The good news is that our billing system isn't ready yet. We intend to charge $19.95 a year for SLATE. That is far less than the cost of equivalent print magazines, because there's no paper, printing, or postage. But $19.95 ($34.95 for two years) is more than zero, which is what Web readers are used to paying. We believe that expecting readers to share the cost, as they do in print, is the only way serious journalism on the Web can be self-supporting. Depending completely on advertisers would not be healthy even if it were possible.",
"A Seattle cyberwag says that the name \"SLATE\" is appropriate, because whenever he asks anyone from Microsoft, \"How's your project coming along?\" the answer he usually gets is, \"'s late.\" SLATE , in fact, has been reasonably prompt. Less than six months ago, it was a four-page memorandum and a single Internet naif. SLATE is not the first \"webzine,\" but everyone in this nascent business is still struggling with some pretty basic issues. Starting an online magazine is like starting a traditional paper magazine by asking: \"OK, you chop down the trees. Then what?\"",
"SLATE is basically a weekly: Most articles will appear for a week. But there will be something new to read almost every day. Some elements will change constantly. Other elements will appear and be removed throughout the week. Every article will indicate when it was \"posted\" and when it will be \"composted.\" As a general rule the Back of the Book, containing cultural reviews and commentary, will be posted Mondays and Tuesdays, the longer Features will be posted Wednesdays and Thursdays, and the front-of-the-book Briefing section will be posted Fridays. If you miss something, you can easily call it up from our archive, \"The Compost.\"( THIS NEEDS TO BE A HOT LINK) \n\n Let me try to describe a typical issue of SLATE. \n\n The Readme column will not always be as solipsistic as this one. It will usually be a commentary on public affairs by one of SLATE's editors.",
"The Gist, by contrast, is SLATE's effort to provide a quick education on some current issue in a form as free of spin as possible. Also free of quotes, anecdotes, and other paraphernalia. The only 1,000 words you'll have to read when you might rather read nothing at all. \n\n In a weekly department called Varnish Remover, political consultant Robert Shrum will deconstruct a 30-second TV spot from the election campaign. You can download a video or audio clip of the spot itself. \"Assessment\" will be a short, judgmental profile of some figure in the news. (Coming up soon: James Fallows on Wired magazine's godfather, Nicholas Negroponte.)",
"And we want to be self-supporting. Indeed one of SLATE's main goals is to demonstrate, if we can, that the economies of cyberspace make it easier for our kind of journalism to pay for itself. Most magazines like SLATE depend on someone's generosity or vanity or misplaced optimism to pay the bills. But self-supporting journalism is freer journalism. (As A.J. Liebling said, freedom of the press is for those who own one.) If the Web can make serious journalism more easily self-supporting, that is a great gift from technology to democracy. \n\n For the moment, though, SLATE is yours for free. So enjoy. We expect to start requiring registration in a few weeks, and to require payment beginning Nov. 1.",
"Finally, we intend to take a fairly skeptical stance toward the romance and rapidly escalating vanity of cyberspace. We do not start out with the smug assumption that the Internet changes the nature of human thought, or that all the restraints that society imposes on individuals in \"real life\" must melt away in cyberia. There is a deadening conformity in the hipness of cyberspace culture in which we don't intend to participate. Part of our mission at SLATE will be trying to bring cyberspace down to earth. \n\n Should be fun. Thanks for joining us. \n\n Michael Kinsley is editor of SLATE.",
"Individual copies of SLATE on Paper will be available exclusively at Starbucks. And selected articles from SLATE will also appear in Time magazine. \n\n While you're on the Consider Your Options page, please read about how to navigate around SLATE. We use page numbers, like a traditional print magazine, and have tried to make it as easy as possible either to \"flip through\" the magazine or to and from the Table of Contents. \n\n OK, But What's in It??[STET double \"??\"]",
"TEXT EEE: In this regard we are more like the newsmagazines-- Time , Newsweek , U.S. News & World Report --than the overtly political magazines such as the New Republic , National Review , or the Weekly Standard . Each of the newsmagazines may have an identifiable political tilt. But pushing a particular line is not what they are fundamentally about, and knowing where they average out won't tell you what any individual article will say. Go back. \n\n TEXT FFF: This is different from \"attitude\"--that free-floating, supercilious cynicism that is much prized in the culture of cyberspace. We may develop an attitude--a set of prejudices derived from logic and evidence, as best we can determine them--but we'll leave \"attitude\" to the kids. Go back.",
"And coming up soon, two additional Back of the Book features: an interactive acrostic puzzle, and a stock-market contest. \n\n Does SLATE Have a Slant? \n\n SLATE is owned by Microsoft Corp., and that bothers some people. Can a giant software company put out a magazine that is free to think for itself? All we can say is that Microsoft has made all the right noises on this subject, and we look forward to putting the company's hands-off commitment to the test. But the concern strikes me as misplaced. In a day of media conglomerates with myriad daily conflicts of interest--Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Disney-ABC--how can it be a bad thing for a new company to begin competing in the media business? A journalist who worries about Microsoft putting out a magazine is a journalist with a steady job.",
"Several regular departments in the Briefing section are attempts at \"meta-news\": the news about the news, a sense of how the week's big stories are being played and perceived. The Week/The Spin takes a dozen or so topics, from this week's election-campaign developments to the latest big book from Knopf, and analyses, as objectively [LINK TO TEXT CCC]as possible, the spin they're getting, the sub-angles that are emerging, and so on. In Other Magazines uses the covers and contents of Time , Newsweek , etc., as a handy measure of what the culture considers important. (We aim to have these magazines in SLATE even before they reach the newsstands or your mailbox.) The Horse Race tracks the presidential candidates like stocks, as priced by the opinion polls, the pundits, and a genuine market in political candidates run out of the University of Iowa. Our man William Saletan will compute and analyze changes in the pundits index.",
"The Features section is also where we run longer articles [LINK TO TEXT DDD] and occasional humor pieces (that is, pieces that are intentionally, or at least aspirationally, humorous). This week in The Temptation of Bob Dole, SLATE's Washington editor, Jodie Allen, cruelly analyzes the arguments for a tax cut. Social critic Nicholas Lemann writes on Jews in Second Place, about what happens to American Jews as Asians replace them at the top of the meritocracy. And the legendary recluse Henry David Thoreau emerges to give SLATE readers an exclusive peek at his new Web page. \n\n In SLATE Gallery, we have a continuous exhibition of computer-based art. You may like or dislike this stuff (we'll have plenty of linked commentary to help you decide). What appeals to us about computer art is that SLATE can show you not reproductions, but the actual art itself. We start with an offering by Jenny Holzer.",
"The bad news for readers is that some features aren't quite ready yet. Prime among them is \"The Fray,\" our reader-discussion forum. Meanwhile, though, please e-mail any comments you may have to slate@msn.com. We'll be publishing a traditional \"Letters to the Editor\" page until The Fray is up and running in a few weeks. \n\n We especially need, and appreciate, your comments in these early weeks. Every new magazine is a \"beta\" version for a while, especially a new magazine in a new medium. SLATE has gotten enormous hype--some of it, to be sure, self-induced, but much of it not. We appreciate the attention. But of course, it also makes us nervous. We have a smaller budget and staff than most well-known magazines--even smaller than some webzines. We don't claim to have all the answers. But, with your help, we plan to have all the answers by Christmas. [LINK TO TEXT BBB] \n\n So What's in It?",
"First, let me urge you to read a special page called Consider Your Options. This page explains and executes the various ways you can receive and read SLATE. If you don't like reading on a computer screen, for example, there's a special version of SLATE that you can print out in its entirety, reformatted like a traditional print magazine. If you don't mind reading on a screen but hate waiting for pages to download--and hate running up those online charges from your Internet provider--you will soon be able to download the whole magazine at once and read it offline. \n\n Also on the Consider Your Options page, you can order SLATE to be delivered to your computer by e-mail. (Caution: This may not work with your e-mail system.) We'll even send you SLATE on Paper , a monthly compilation of highlights from SLATE, through the U.S. Mail. (The cost is $29 a year. Call 800-555-4995 to order.)",
"TEXT DDD: Those dread words \"longer articles\" raise one of the big uncertainties about this enterprise: How long an article will people be willing to read on a computer screen? We have several answers to this question: 1) We don't know. Clearly it's less than on paper, but how much less is uncertain. 2) We're determined to test the outer limits. 3) We'll do our best, graphically, to make reading on screen a more pleasant experience (suggestions welcome). 4) We'll also make SLATE as easy as possible to print out. 5) This will become less of a problem as screens are developed that can be taken to bed or the bathroom. 6) Two thousand words. Or at least we're starting--optimistically, perhaps--with the hope that 2000 words or so is not too much. (By contrast, a typical print-magazine feature or cover story might run anywhere from 5000 to 15,000 words.)",
"Doodlennium is our weekly cartoon strip by Mark Alan Stamaty, whose \"Washingtoon\" appeared for many years in the Washington Post and Time . Our SLATE Diary will be an actual daily diary, written and posted every weekday by someone with an interesting mind. Our first diarist is David O. Russell, writer and director of Flirting With Disaster . Our second diarist will be novelist Muriel Spark. \n\n Can There Possibly be More?",
"TEXT CCC: Objectivity, we hope, will distinguish this feature from Newsweek 's \"Conventional Wisdom Watch,\" which is often an effort to set the spin rather than describe it. Anyway, the \"CW Watch\" was a rip-off of a similar feature in the New Republic when I was the editor there. And TNR 's feature itself was lifted from Washington, D.C.'s, City Paper , which was edited at the time of the theft by Jack Shafer, now deputy editor of SLATE. Go back.",
"Stanford economist Paul Krugman writes The Dismal Scientist, a once-a-month column on economic policy. (See his debut essay in this issue, about the economic war within the Clinton administration.) University of Rochester economist Steven Landsburg writes monthly on \"Everyday Economics,\" using economic analysis to illuminate everyday life. (His first column, in our next issue, will explain how sexual promiscuity can actually reduce the spread of AIDS.) \n\n \"The Earthling\" will be a monthly column by Robert Wright, contributor to the New Republic and Time , and author of the acclaimed book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal . Other regular Briefing features will include a Press column by our deputy editor, Jack Shafer.",
"At least among non-cyberheads, the computer-screen problem seems to be everyone's favorite conversational thrust with regard to SLATE. In recent months I've been amazed to learn of the places and postures in which people like to read magazines. Bed and bath are just the beginning. At a Seattle dinner party, a woman made the interesting point that her problem isn't the screen: It's the chair. Even \"ergonomic\" computer chairs are designed for typing, not for reading. For this woman, and for others who may feel the same way, we have asked several furniture designers to sketch a real computer reading chair--one you can curl up in with your mouse and your cup of Starbucks and read SLATE online. That feature will appear in a week or two. Go back."
],
[
"And we want to be self-supporting. Indeed one of SLATE's main goals is to demonstrate, if we can, that the economies of cyberspace make it easier for our kind of journalism to pay for itself. Most magazines like SLATE depend on someone's generosity or vanity or misplaced optimism to pay the bills. But self-supporting journalism is freer journalism. (As A.J. Liebling said, freedom of the press is for those who own one.) If the Web can make serious journalism more easily self-supporting, that is a great gift from technology to democracy. \n\n For the moment, though, SLATE is yours for free. So enjoy. We expect to start requiring registration in a few weeks, and to require payment beginning Nov. 1.",
"Readers may also wonder whether SLATE will have a particular political flavor. The answer is that we do not set out with any ideological mission or agenda. On the other hand, we are not committed to any artificial balance of views. We will publish articles from various perspectives, but we will not agonize if the mix averages out to be somewhere other than dead center. [LINK TO TEXT EEE] \n\n A good magazine, though, does develop a personality, an attitude, [LINK TO TEXT FFF]and some prejudices--even crotchets. A few of SLATE's are already becoming clear. In discussing current events, we have a preference for policy over politics. We'd rather discuss the effect of Bob Dole's tax-cut proposal on the economy than its effect on Bill Clinton. Within the policy arena, we seem to have a special fondness for economics. This was not planned; it's one of those serendipitous developments I mentioned. Whether it reflects good luck or bad luck is a matter of taste (yours).",
"A Seattle cyberwag says that the name \"SLATE\" is appropriate, because whenever he asks anyone from Microsoft, \"How's your project coming along?\" the answer he usually gets is, \"'s late.\" SLATE , in fact, has been reasonably prompt. Less than six months ago, it was a four-page memorandum and a single Internet naif. SLATE is not the first \"webzine,\" but everyone in this nascent business is still struggling with some pretty basic issues. Starting an online magazine is like starting a traditional paper magazine by asking: \"OK, you chop down the trees. Then what?\"",
"To be honest, we are running late on a few things. For the reader--you--there is good news and bad news here. The good news is that our billing system isn't ready yet. We intend to charge $19.95 a year for SLATE. That is far less than the cost of equivalent print magazines, because there's no paper, printing, or postage. But $19.95 ($34.95 for two years) is more than zero, which is what Web readers are used to paying. We believe that expecting readers to share the cost, as they do in print, is the only way serious journalism on the Web can be self-supporting. Depending completely on advertisers would not be healthy even if it were possible.",
"Finally, we intend to take a fairly skeptical stance toward the romance and rapidly escalating vanity of cyberspace. We do not start out with the smug assumption that the Internet changes the nature of human thought, or that all the restraints that society imposes on individuals in \"real life\" must melt away in cyberia. There is a deadening conformity in the hipness of cyberspace culture in which we don't intend to participate. Part of our mission at SLATE will be trying to bring cyberspace down to earth. \n\n Should be fun. Thanks for joining us. \n\n Michael Kinsley is editor of SLATE.",
"TEXT EEE: In this regard we are more like the newsmagazines-- Time , Newsweek , U.S. News & World Report --than the overtly political magazines such as the New Republic , National Review , or the Weekly Standard . Each of the newsmagazines may have an identifiable political tilt. But pushing a particular line is not what they are fundamentally about, and knowing where they average out won't tell you what any individual article will say. Go back. \n\n TEXT FFF: This is different from \"attitude\"--that free-floating, supercilious cynicism that is much prized in the culture of cyberspace. We may develop an attitude--a set of prejudices derived from logic and evidence, as best we can determine them--but we'll leave \"attitude\" to the kids. Go back.",
"SLATE is basically a weekly: Most articles will appear for a week. But there will be something new to read almost every day. Some elements will change constantly. Other elements will appear and be removed throughout the week. Every article will indicate when it was \"posted\" and when it will be \"composted.\" As a general rule the Back of the Book, containing cultural reviews and commentary, will be posted Mondays and Tuesdays, the longer Features will be posted Wednesdays and Thursdays, and the front-of-the-book Briefing section will be posted Fridays. If you miss something, you can easily call it up from our archive, \"The Compost.\"( THIS NEEDS TO BE A HOT LINK) \n\n Let me try to describe a typical issue of SLATE. \n\n The Readme column will not always be as solipsistic as this one. It will usually be a commentary on public affairs by one of SLATE's editors.",
"Several regular departments in the Briefing section are attempts at \"meta-news\": the news about the news, a sense of how the week's big stories are being played and perceived. The Week/The Spin takes a dozen or so topics, from this week's election-campaign developments to the latest big book from Knopf, and analyses, as objectively [LINK TO TEXT CCC]as possible, the spin they're getting, the sub-angles that are emerging, and so on. In Other Magazines uses the covers and contents of Time , Newsweek , etc., as a handy measure of what the culture considers important. (We aim to have these magazines in SLATE even before they reach the newsstands or your mailbox.) The Horse Race tracks the presidential candidates like stocks, as priced by the opinion polls, the pundits, and a genuine market in political candidates run out of the University of Iowa. Our man William Saletan will compute and analyze changes in the pundits index.",
"At least among non-cyberheads, the computer-screen problem seems to be everyone's favorite conversational thrust with regard to SLATE. In recent months I've been amazed to learn of the places and postures in which people like to read magazines. Bed and bath are just the beginning. At a Seattle dinner party, a woman made the interesting point that her problem isn't the screen: It's the chair. Even \"ergonomic\" computer chairs are designed for typing, not for reading. For this woman, and for others who may feel the same way, we have asked several furniture designers to sketch a real computer reading chair--one you can curl up in with your mouse and your cup of Starbucks and read SLATE online. That feature will appear in a week or two. Go back.",
"Individual copies of SLATE on Paper will be available exclusively at Starbucks. And selected articles from SLATE will also appear in Time magazine. \n\n While you're on the Consider Your Options page, please read about how to navigate around SLATE. We use page numbers, like a traditional print magazine, and have tried to make it as easy as possible either to \"flip through\" the magazine or to and from the Table of Contents. \n\n OK, But What's in It??[STET double \"??\"]",
"Welcome to SLATE \n\n An introduction and apologia. \n\n By Michael Kinsley \n\n The name? It means nothing, or practically nothing. We chose it as an empty vessel into which we can pour meaning. We hope SLATE will come to mean good original journalism in this new medium. Beyond that, who knows? Good magazines are exercises in serendipity. Credit--or blame--for the name \"SLATE,\" by the way, goes to David Weld, then of Microsoft, now of Cognisoft Corp.",
"TEXT DDD: Those dread words \"longer articles\" raise one of the big uncertainties about this enterprise: How long an article will people be willing to read on a computer screen? We have several answers to this question: 1) We don't know. Clearly it's less than on paper, but how much less is uncertain. 2) We're determined to test the outer limits. 3) We'll do our best, graphically, to make reading on screen a more pleasant experience (suggestions welcome). 4) We'll also make SLATE as easy as possible to print out. 5) This will become less of a problem as screens are developed that can be taken to bed or the bathroom. 6) Two thousand words. Or at least we're starting--optimistically, perhaps--with the hope that 2000 words or so is not too much. (By contrast, a typical print-magazine feature or cover story might run anywhere from 5000 to 15,000 words.)",
"First, let me urge you to read a special page called Consider Your Options. This page explains and executes the various ways you can receive and read SLATE. If you don't like reading on a computer screen, for example, there's a special version of SLATE that you can print out in its entirety, reformatted like a traditional print magazine. If you don't mind reading on a screen but hate waiting for pages to download--and hate running up those online charges from your Internet provider--you will soon be able to download the whole magazine at once and read it offline. \n\n Also on the Consider Your Options page, you can order SLATE to be delivered to your computer by e-mail. (Caution: This may not work with your e-mail system.) We'll even send you SLATE on Paper , a monthly compilation of highlights from SLATE, through the U.S. Mail. (The cost is $29 a year. Call 800-555-4995 to order.)",
"The bad news for readers is that some features aren't quite ready yet. Prime among them is \"The Fray,\" our reader-discussion forum. Meanwhile, though, please e-mail any comments you may have to slate@msn.com. We'll be publishing a traditional \"Letters to the Editor\" page until The Fray is up and running in a few weeks. \n\n We especially need, and appreciate, your comments in these early weeks. Every new magazine is a \"beta\" version for a while, especially a new magazine in a new medium. SLATE has gotten enormous hype--some of it, to be sure, self-induced, but much of it not. We appreciate the attention. But of course, it also makes us nervous. We have a smaller budget and staff than most well-known magazines--even smaller than some webzines. We don't claim to have all the answers. But, with your help, we plan to have all the answers by Christmas. [LINK TO TEXT BBB] \n\n So What's in It?",
"The Gist, by contrast, is SLATE's effort to provide a quick education on some current issue in a form as free of spin as possible. Also free of quotes, anecdotes, and other paraphernalia. The only 1,000 words you'll have to read when you might rather read nothing at all. \n\n In a weekly department called Varnish Remover, political consultant Robert Shrum will deconstruct a 30-second TV spot from the election campaign. You can download a video or audio clip of the spot itself. \"Assessment\" will be a short, judgmental profile of some figure in the news. (Coming up soon: James Fallows on Wired magazine's godfather, Nicholas Negroponte.)",
"And coming up soon, two additional Back of the Book features: an interactive acrostic puzzle, and a stock-market contest. \n\n Does SLATE Have a Slant? \n\n SLATE is owned by Microsoft Corp., and that bothers some people. Can a giant software company put out a magazine that is free to think for itself? All we can say is that Microsoft has made all the right noises on this subject, and we look forward to putting the company's hands-off commitment to the test. But the concern strikes me as misplaced. In a day of media conglomerates with myriad daily conflicts of interest--Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Disney-ABC--how can it be a bad thing for a new company to begin competing in the media business? A journalist who worries about Microsoft putting out a magazine is a journalist with a steady job.",
"This week's reviews include Ann Hulbert's book review of Miss Manners' latest encyclical; Sarah Kerr's television review of the changing fashions in season finales; Larissa MacFarquhar's High Concept column, about how managed care could improve psychotherapy; and Cullen Murphy's The Good Word, about the difference between \"Jesuitical\" and \"Talmudic.\" \n\n In general, SLATE's Back of the Book will contain a weekly book review, alternating television and movie reviews, and a rotating menu of columns on music (classical and popular), sports, web sites, and other topics. Jeffrey Steingarten will be writing monthly on food (\"In the Soup\"), Anne Hollander on fashion (\"Clothes Sense\"), and Margaret Talbot on \"Men and Women.\" Audio and video clips will be offered where appropriate. \n\n Every issue will have a poem, read aloud by the author, with text. In this issue is a new poem by Seamus Heaney.",
"The Features section is also where we run longer articles [LINK TO TEXT DDD] and occasional humor pieces (that is, pieces that are intentionally, or at least aspirationally, humorous). This week in The Temptation of Bob Dole, SLATE's Washington editor, Jodie Allen, cruelly analyzes the arguments for a tax cut. Social critic Nicholas Lemann writes on Jews in Second Place, about what happens to American Jews as Asians replace them at the top of the meritocracy. And the legendary recluse Henry David Thoreau emerges to give SLATE readers an exclusive peek at his new Web page. \n\n In SLATE Gallery, we have a continuous exhibition of computer-based art. You may like or dislike this stuff (we'll have plenty of linked commentary to help you decide). What appeals to us about computer art is that SLATE can show you not reproductions, but the actual art itself. We start with an offering by Jenny Holzer.",
"Stanford economist Paul Krugman writes The Dismal Scientist, a once-a-month column on economic policy. (See his debut essay in this issue, about the economic war within the Clinton administration.) University of Rochester economist Steven Landsburg writes monthly on \"Everyday Economics,\" using economic analysis to illuminate everyday life. (His first column, in our next issue, will explain how sexual promiscuity can actually reduce the spread of AIDS.) \n\n \"The Earthling\" will be a monthly column by Robert Wright, contributor to the New Republic and Time , and author of the acclaimed book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal . Other regular Briefing features will include a Press column by our deputy editor, Jack Shafer.",
"Doodlennium is our weekly cartoon strip by Mark Alan Stamaty, whose \"Washingtoon\" appeared for many years in the Washington Post and Time . Our SLATE Diary will be an actual daily diary, written and posted every weekday by someone with an interesting mind. Our first diarist is David O. Russell, writer and director of Flirting With Disaster . Our second diarist will be novelist Muriel Spark. \n\n Can There Possibly be More?"
]
] |
test
|
50736
|
[
"Of the following options, who might enjoy this story the most?",
"What is the relationship between Cameron and Docchi?",
"How social is Docchi?",
"What is Cameron's primary motivation at the outset of the passage?",
"Does the story have a happy ending?",
"What real-life issues are most closely tied to this passage?",
"What's the relationship like between Anti and Docchi?",
"Which of the following traits best describe Cameron?",
"Which of the following traits best describe Docchi?"
] |
[
[
"A college professor who loves researching space travel",
"A book worm who loves technical descriptions of space travel",
"A college professor who loves researching politics",
"A book worm who loves stories of rebellion"
],
[
"Cameron has power over Docchi",
"Cameron and Docchi are peers",
"Docchi is Cameron's teacher",
"Docchi has power over Cameron"
],
[
"Has a few friends",
"Becomes friends with everyone he interacts with",
"A loner, but not against socializing",
"Incredibly antisocial"
],
[
"To ask Docchi's permission to go back to Earth",
"To tell Docchi his proposal was denied",
"To tell Docchi about his plans for them to go back to Earth",
"To ask Docchi whether the Captain had approved the proposal they worked on together"
],
[
"The ending of the story did not have a definitive happy/sad connotation",
"No",
"Yes",
"It was a bit happy and a bit sad"
],
[
"Ableism",
"Racism",
"Sexism",
"Ageism"
],
[
"They're strangers",
"They don't like each other",
"They're friends",
"They're in love"
],
[
"Kind and brave",
"Calculating and serious",
"Cautious and generous",
"Humorous and friendly"
],
[
"Hopeful and resilient",
"Quick-witted and rational",
"Funny and quick-witted",
"Overlooked and rational"
]
] |
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-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
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[
"\"I've found out. There's a self-elected group of four, Docchi, Nona,\n Anti and Jordan. I believe they're supposed to be the local recreation\n committee.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor smiled. \"An apt camouflage. It keeps them amused.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so too but now I'm convinced they're no longer harmless. I'd\n like permission to break up the group. Humanely of course.\"\n\n\n \"I always welcome new ideas.\"\n\n\n In spite of what he'd said the medicouncilor probably did have an open\n mind. \"Start with those it's possible to do the most with. Docchi,\n for instance. With prosthetic arms, he appears normal except for that\n uncanny fluorescence. Granted that the last is repulsive to the average\n person. We can't correct the condition medically but we can make it\n into an asset.\"",
"\"I'll have to agree,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"But there's something that\n bothers me. I've looked over the records. No accidental has ever liked\n being here, and that covers quite a few years.\"\n\n\n \"Nobody appreciates the hospital until he's sick, doctor.\"\n\n\n \"I know. That's partly what's wrong. They're no longer ill and yet they\n have to stay here. What worries me is that there's never been such open\n discontent as now.\"\n\n\n \"I hope I don't have to point out that someone's stirring them up. Find\n out who and keep a close watch. As a doctor you can find pretexts, a\n different diet, a series of tests. You can keep the person coming to\n you every day.\"",
"\"Sure,\" said Docchi. \"We'll wait and wait until it's finally changed.\n We've got centuries, haven't we?\" His face was blazing. It had slipped\n out of control though he wasn't aware of it. Beneath the skin certain\n cells had been modified, there were substances in his body that the\n ordinary individual didn't have. And when there was an extreme flow of\n nervous energy the response was—light. His metabolism was akin to that\n of a firefly.\n\n\n Cameron meddled with buttons. It was impossible to keep the lighting at\n a decent level. Docchi was a nuisance.\n\n\n \"Why?\" questioned Docchi. \"We're capable, you know that. How could they\n refuse?\"\n\n\n That was something he didn't want asked because there was no answer\n both of them would accept. Sometimes a blunt reply was the best\n evasion. \"Do you think they'd take you? Or Nona, Jordan, or Anti?\"",
"\"Every young doctor thinks the same,\" said the medicouncilor kindly.\n \"Usually they wait until their term is nearly up before they suggest\n that she'd respond better if she were returned to normal society. I\n think I know what response they have in mind.\" Thorton smiled in a\n fatherly fashion. \"No offense, doctor, but it happens so often I'm\n thinking of inserting a note in our briefing program. Something to the\n effect that the new medical director should avoid the beautiful and\n self-possessed moron.\"\n\n\n \"Is she stupid?\" asked Cameron stubbornly. \"It's my impression that\n she's not.\"\n\n\n \"Clever with her hands,\" agreed the medicouncilor. \"People in her\n mental classification, which is very low, sometimes are. But don't\n confuse manual dexterity with intelligence. For one thing she doesn't\n have the brain structure for the real article.",
"\"To him, perhaps,\" reflected the medicouncilor. \"It's an ingenious\n idea, doctor, one which does credit to your humanitarianism. But I'm\n afraid of the public's reception. Have you gone into Docchi's medical\n history?\"\n\n\n \"I glanced at it before I called him in.\" The man was unusual,\n even in a place that specialized in the abnormal. Docchi had been\n an electrochemical engineer with a degree in cold lighting. On his\n way to a brilliant career, he had been the victim of a particularly\n messy accident. The details hadn't been described but Cameron could\n supplement them with his imagination. He'd been badly mangled and\n tossed into a tank of the basic cold lighting fluid.",
"\"An asset? Very neat, if it can be done.\" The medicouncilor's\n expression said it couldn't be.\n\n\n \"Gland opera,\" said Cameron, hurrying on. \"The most popular program\n in the solar system, telepaths, teleports, pyrotics and so forth the\n heroes. Fake of course, makeup and trick camera shots.\n\n\n \"But Docchi can be made into a real star. The death-ray man, say. When\n his face shines men fall dead or paralyzed. He'd have a tremendous\n following of kids.\"\n\n\n \"Children,\" mused the medicouncilor. \"Are you serious about exposing\n them to his influence? Do you really want them to see him?\"\n\n\n \"He'd have a chance to return to society in a way that would be\n acceptable to him,\" said Cameron defensively. He shouldn't have\n specifically mentioned kids.",
"The self-deception was vicious precisely because the accidentals\nwere\nqualified. Of all the billions of solar citizens\nthey alone could make\n the long journey there and return\n. But there were other factors that\n ruled them out. It was never safe to discuss the first reason with them\n because the second would have to be explained. Cameron himself wasn't\n sadistic and no one else was interested enough to inform them.\n2\nDocchi sat beside the pool. It would be pleasant if he could forget\n where he was. It was pastoral though not quite a scene from Earth. The\n horizon was too near and the sky was shallow and only seemed to be\n bright. Darkness lurked outside.\n\n\n A small tree stretched shade overhead. Waves lapped and made gurgling\n sounds against the banks. But there was no plant life of any kind, and\n no fish swam in the liquid. It looked like water but wasn't—the pool\n held acid. And floating in it, all but submerged, was a shape. The\n records in the hospital said it was a woman.",
"\"I'm glad you're enthusiastic. But don't lose sight of the main\n objective. Even if she\nis\ntelepathic, and so far as we're concerned\n she's not, would she be better suited to life outside?\"\n\n\n He had one answer—but the medicouncilor believed in another. \"Perhaps\n you're right. She'll have to stay here no matter what happens.\"\n\n\n \"She will. It would solve your problems if you could break up the\n group, but don't count on it. You'll have to learn to manage them as\n they are.\"\n\n\n \"I'll see that they don't cause any trouble,\" said Cameron.\n\n\n \"I'm sure you will.\" The medicouncilor's manner didn't ooze confidence.\n \"If you need help we can send in reinforcements.\"",
"\"Then you know what he's like,\" said the medicouncilor, shaking his\n head. \"Our profession can't sponsor such a freakish display of his\n misfortune. No doubt he'd be successful on the program you mention. But\n there's more to life than financial achievement or the rather peculiar\n admiration that would be certain to follow him. As an actor he'd have a\n niche. But can you imagine, doctor, the dead silence that would occur\n when he walks into a social gathering of normal people?\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" said Cameron, though he didn't—not eye to eye. He didn't\n agree with Thorton but there wasn't much he could do to alter the\n other's conviction at the moment. There was a long fight ahead of him.\n \"I'll forget about Docchi. But there's another way to break up the\n group.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor interrupted. \"Nona?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I'm not sure she really belongs here.\"",
"The doctor kept his eyes averted. The man was damnably\n disconcerting—had no right to be alive. In the depths of the sea there\n were certain creatures like him and on a warm summer evening there was\n still another parallel, but never any human with such an infirmity.\n \"I'm afraid you know what the answer is. A flat no for the present.\"\n\n\n Docchi sagged and his arms hung limp. \"That's the answer?\"\n\n\n \"It's not as hopeless as you think. Decisions can be changed. It won't\n be the first time.\"",
"Doctor Cameron looked at him directly for the first time. It wasn't\n as bad as he expected. \"I suggest you calm down. Be patient and wait.\n You'll be surprised how often you get what you want.\"\n\n\n \"You'd be surprised how we get what we want,\" said Docchi. He turned\n away, lurching toward the door which opened automatically and closed\n behind him.\n\n\n Again Cameron concentrated on the desk, trying to look through it.\n He wrote down the sequence he expected to find, lingering over it to\n make sure he didn't force the pictures that came into his mind. He\n opened the drawer and compared the Rhine cards with what he'd written,\n frowning in disappointment. No matter how he tried he never got better\n than average results. Perhaps there was something to telepathy but he'd\n never found it. Anyway it was clear he wasn't one of the gifted few.",
"The doctor got heavily to his feet—and he actually was heavier. It\n wasn't a psychological reaction. He made a mental note of it. He'd have\n to investigate the gravity surge.\n\n\n In a way accidentals were pathetic, patchwork humans, half or quarter\n men and women, fractional organisms which masqueraded as people. The\n illusion died hard for them, harder than that which remained of their\n bodies, and those bodies were unbelievably tough. Medicine and surgery\n were partly to blame. Techniques were too good or not good enough,\n depending on the viewpoint—doctor or patient.\n\n\n Too good in that the most horribly injured person, if he were found\n alive, could be kept alive. Not good enough because a certain per cent\n of the injured couldn't be returned to society completely sound and\n whole. The miracles of healing were incomplete.",
"Cameron saw the time too but continued. It ought to be settled. It\n would do no good to bring up Helen Keller; the medicouncilor would\n use that evidence against him. The Keller techniques had been studied\n and reinterpreted for Nona's benefit. That much was in her medical\n record. They had been tried on Nona, and they hadn't worked. It made no\n difference that he, Cameron, thought there were certain flaws in the\n way the old techniques had been applied. Thorton would not allow that\n the previous practitioners could have been wrong. \"I've been wondering\n if we haven't tried to force her to conform. She can be intelligent\n without understanding what we say or knowing how to read and write.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" demanded the medicouncilor. \"The most important tool humans\n have is language. Through this we pass along all knowledge.\" Thorton\n paused, reflecting. \"Unless you're referring to this Gland Opera stuff\n you mentioned. I believe you are, though personally I prefer to call it\n Rhine Opera.\"",
"\"It's not\nsupposed\nto work that way but nobody's ever done better\n with a setup like this,\" said Vogel defensively. \"If you want you can\n check the company that makes these units.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not trying to challenge your knowledge and I'm not anxious to make\n myself look silly. I do want to make sure I don't overlook anything.\n You see, I think there's a possibility of sabotage.\"\n\n\n The engineer's grin was wider than the remark required.\n\n\n Cameron swiveled the chair around and leaned on the desk. \"All right,\"\n he said tiredly, \"tell me why the idea of sabotage is so funny.\"\n\n\n \"It would have to be someone living here,\" said the big engineer. \"He\n wouldn't like it if it jumped up to nine G, which it could. I think\n he'd let it alone. But there are better reasons. Do you know how each\n gravity unit is put together?\"",
"Stars were beginning to wink. Twilight brought out the shadows and\n tracery of the structure that supported the transparent dome overhead.\n Soon controlled slow rotation would bring near darkness to this side of\n the asteroid. The sun was small at this distance but even so it was a\n tie to the familiar scenes of Earth. Before long it would be lost.\nCameron leaned back and looked speculatively at the gravity engineer,\n Vogel. The engineer could give him considerable assistance. There was\n no reason why he shouldn't but anyone who voluntarily had remained\n on the asteroid as long as Vogel was a doubtful quantity. He didn't\n distrust him, the man was strange.\n\n\n \"I've been busy trying to keep the place running smoothly. I hope you\n don't mind that I haven't been able to discuss your job at length,\"\n said the doctor, watching him closely.",
"Docchi moved closer to the pool. \"Then you think we should go ahead\n with the plan we discussed before we sent in the petition? Good. I'll\n call the others together and tell them what happened. They'll agree\n that we have to do it.\"\n\n\n \"Then why call them? More talk, that's all. Besides I don't see why we\n should warn Cameron what we're up to.\"\n\n\n Docchi glanced at her worriedly. \"Do you think someone would report it?\n I'm certain everyone feels as I do.\"\n\n\n \"Not everyone. There's bound to be dissent,\" said Anti placidly. \"But I\n wasn't thinking of people.\"\n\n\n \"Oh that,\" said Docchi. \"We can block that source any time we need to.\"\n It was a relief to know that he could trust the accidentals. Unanimity\n was important and some of the reasons weren't obvious.",
"\"This morning. I saw no reason to hold it up. I just finished giving\n Docchi the news.\"\n\n\n \"Dispatch. I like that. Get the disagreeable job done with.\" The\n medicouncilor searched through the desk in front of him without\n success. \"Never mind. I'll find the information later. Now. How did\n Docchi react?\"\n\n\n \"He didn't like it. He was mad clear through.\"\n\n\n \"That speaks well for his bounce.\"\n\n\n \"They all have spirit. Nothing to use it on,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"I\n confess I didn't look at him often though he was quite presentable,\n even handsome in a startling sort of way.\"\n\n\n Thorton nodded brusquely. \"Presentable. Does that mean he had arms?\"\n\n\n \"Today he did. Is it important?\"",
"\"They're supposed to be that way? Overlapping so that for a time we\n have Earth or Earth and a half gravity?\"\n\n\n \"Better than having none,\" said Vogel with heavy pride. \"Used to happen\n quite often, before I came. You can ask any of the old timers. I fixed\n that though.\"\n\n\n He didn't like the direction his questions were taking him. \"What did\n you do?\" he asked suspiciously.\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" said the engineer uncomfortably. \"Nothing I can think of. I\n guess the machines just got used to having me around.\"\n\n\n There were people who tended to anthropomorphize anything they came\n in contact with and Vogel was one of them. It made no difference to\n him that he was talking about insensate machines. He would continue to\n endow them with personality. \"This is the best you can say, that we'll\n get a wild variation of gravity, sometimes none?\"",
"What they did want was ridiculous. They had talked about, hoped, and\n finally embodied it in a petition. They had requested rockets to make\n the first long hard journey to Alpha and Proxima Centauri. Man was\n restricted to the solar system and had no way of getting to even the\n nearest stars. They thought they could break through the barrier. Some\n accidentals would go and some would remain behind, lonelier except for\n their share in the dangerous enterprise.\n\n\n It was a particularly uncontrollable form of self-deception. They were\n the broken people, without a face they could call their own, who wore\n their hearts not on their sleeves but in a blood-pumping chamber, those\n without limbs or organs—or too many. The categories were endless. No\n accidental was like any other.",
"Morosely he kicked an anemic tuft of grass. Plants didn't do well here\n either. They too were exiled, far from the sun, removed from the soil\n they originated in. The conditions they grew in were artificial. \"Why\n did they turn us down?\" said Docchi.\n\n\n \"Answer it yourself. Remember what the Medicouncil is like. Different\n things are important to them. The main thing is that we don't have to\n follow their example. There's no need to be irrational even though they\n are.\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew what to do,\" said Docchi. \"It meant so much to us.\"\n\n\n \"We can wait, outlast the attitude,\" said Anti, moving slowly. It was\n the only way she could move. Most of her bulk was beneath the surface.\n\n\n \"Cameron suggested waiting.\" Reflectively Docchi added: \"It's true we\n are biocompensators.\""
],
[
"Docchi moved closer to the pool. \"Then you think we should go ahead\n with the plan we discussed before we sent in the petition? Good. I'll\n call the others together and tell them what happened. They'll agree\n that we have to do it.\"\n\n\n \"Then why call them? More talk, that's all. Besides I don't see why we\n should warn Cameron what we're up to.\"\n\n\n Docchi glanced at her worriedly. \"Do you think someone would report it?\n I'm certain everyone feels as I do.\"\n\n\n \"Not everyone. There's bound to be dissent,\" said Anti placidly. \"But I\n wasn't thinking of people.\"\n\n\n \"Oh that,\" said Docchi. \"We can block that source any time we need to.\"\n It was a relief to know that he could trust the accidentals. Unanimity\n was important and some of the reasons weren't obvious.",
"\"This morning. I saw no reason to hold it up. I just finished giving\n Docchi the news.\"\n\n\n \"Dispatch. I like that. Get the disagreeable job done with.\" The\n medicouncilor searched through the desk in front of him without\n success. \"Never mind. I'll find the information later. Now. How did\n Docchi react?\"\n\n\n \"He didn't like it. He was mad clear through.\"\n\n\n \"That speaks well for his bounce.\"\n\n\n \"They all have spirit. Nothing to use it on,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"I\n confess I didn't look at him often though he was quite presentable,\n even handsome in a startling sort of way.\"\n\n\n Thorton nodded brusquely. \"Presentable. Does that mean he had arms?\"\n\n\n \"Today he did. Is it important?\"",
"Docchi winced, his arms quivering uselessly. \"Maybe not. But we told\n you we're willing to let experts decide. There's nearly a thousand of\n us. They should be able to get one qualified crew.\"\n\n\n \"Perhaps. I'm not going to say.\" Cameron abandoned the light as beyond\n his control. \"Most of you are biocompensators. I concede it's a factor\n in your favor. But you must realize there are many things against you.\"\n He squinted at the desk top. Below the solid surface there was a drawer\n and in the drawer there was—that was what he was trying to see or\n determine. The more he looked the less clear anything seemed to be. He\n tried to make his voice crisp and professional. \"You're wasting time\n discussing this with me. I've merely passed the decision on. I'm not\n responsible for it and I can't do anything for you.\"\n\n\n Docchi stood up, his face colorless and bright. But the inner\n illumination was no indication of hope.",
"\"Then you know what he's like,\" said the medicouncilor, shaking his\n head. \"Our profession can't sponsor such a freakish display of his\n misfortune. No doubt he'd be successful on the program you mention. But\n there's more to life than financial achievement or the rather peculiar\n admiration that would be certain to follow him. As an actor he'd have a\n niche. But can you imagine, doctor, the dead silence that would occur\n when he walks into a social gathering of normal people?\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" said Cameron, though he didn't—not eye to eye. He didn't\n agree with Thorton but there wasn't much he could do to alter the\n other's conviction at the moment. There was a long fight ahead of him.\n \"I'll forget about Docchi. But there's another way to break up the\n group.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor interrupted. \"Nona?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I'm not sure she really belongs here.\"",
"Doctor Cameron looked at him directly for the first time. It wasn't\n as bad as he expected. \"I suggest you calm down. Be patient and wait.\n You'll be surprised how often you get what you want.\"\n\n\n \"You'd be surprised how we get what we want,\" said Docchi. He turned\n away, lurching toward the door which opened automatically and closed\n behind him.\n\n\n Again Cameron concentrated on the desk, trying to look through it.\n He wrote down the sequence he expected to find, lingering over it to\n make sure he didn't force the pictures that came into his mind. He\n opened the drawer and compared the Rhine cards with what he'd written,\n frowning in disappointment. No matter how he tried he never got better\n than average results. Perhaps there was something to telepathy but he'd\n never found it. Anyway it was clear he wasn't one of the gifted few.",
"\"Sure,\" said Docchi. \"We'll wait and wait until it's finally changed.\n We've got centuries, haven't we?\" His face was blazing. It had slipped\n out of control though he wasn't aware of it. Beneath the skin certain\n cells had been modified, there were substances in his body that the\n ordinary individual didn't have. And when there was an extreme flow of\n nervous energy the response was—light. His metabolism was akin to that\n of a firefly.\n\n\n Cameron meddled with buttons. It was impossible to keep the lighting at\n a decent level. Docchi was a nuisance.\n\n\n \"Why?\" questioned Docchi. \"We're capable, you know that. How could they\n refuse?\"\n\n\n That was something he didn't want asked because there was no answer\n both of them would accept. Sometimes a blunt reply was the best\n evasion. \"Do you think they'd take you? Or Nona, Jordan, or Anti?\"",
"\"Maybe you can and maybe you can't,\" said Anti. \"But why make it\n difficult, why waste time?\"\n\n\n Docchi got up awkwardly but he wasn't clumsy once he was on his feet.\n \"I'll get Jordan. I know I'll need arms.\"\n\n\n \"Depends on what you mean,\" said Anti.\n\n\n \"Both,\" said Docchi, smiling. \"We're a dangerous weapon.\"\n\n\n She called out as he walked away. \"I'll see you when you leave for far\n Centauri.\"\n\n\n \"Sooner than that, Anti. Much sooner.\"",
"The self-deception was vicious precisely because the accidentals\nwere\nqualified. Of all the billions of solar citizens\nthey alone could make\n the long journey there and return\n. But there were other factors that\n ruled them out. It was never safe to discuss the first reason with them\n because the second would have to be explained. Cameron himself wasn't\n sadistic and no one else was interested enough to inform them.\n2\nDocchi sat beside the pool. It would be pleasant if he could forget\n where he was. It was pastoral though not quite a scene from Earth. The\n horizon was too near and the sky was shallow and only seemed to be\n bright. Darkness lurked outside.\n\n\n A small tree stretched shade overhead. Waves lapped and made gurgling\n sounds against the banks. But there was no plant life of any kind, and\n no fish swam in the liquid. It looked like water but wasn't—the pool\n held acid. And floating in it, all but submerged, was a shape. The\n records in the hospital said it was a woman.",
"Morosely he kicked an anemic tuft of grass. Plants didn't do well here\n either. They too were exiled, far from the sun, removed from the soil\n they originated in. The conditions they grew in were artificial. \"Why\n did they turn us down?\" said Docchi.\n\n\n \"Answer it yourself. Remember what the Medicouncil is like. Different\n things are important to them. The main thing is that we don't have to\n follow their example. There's no need to be irrational even though they\n are.\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew what to do,\" said Docchi. \"It meant so much to us.\"\n\n\n \"We can wait, outlast the attitude,\" said Anti, moving slowly. It was\n the only way she could move. Most of her bulk was beneath the surface.\n\n\n \"Cameron suggested waiting.\" Reflectively Docchi added: \"It's true we\n are biocompensators.\"",
"\"To him, perhaps,\" reflected the medicouncilor. \"It's an ingenious\n idea, doctor, one which does credit to your humanitarianism. But I'm\n afraid of the public's reception. Have you gone into Docchi's medical\n history?\"\n\n\n \"I glanced at it before I called him in.\" The man was unusual,\n even in a place that specialized in the abnormal. Docchi had been\n an electrochemical engineer with a degree in cold lighting. On his\n way to a brilliant career, he had been the victim of a particularly\n messy accident. The details hadn't been described but Cameron could\n supplement them with his imagination. He'd been badly mangled and\n tossed into a tank of the basic cold lighting fluid.",
"\"An asset? Very neat, if it can be done.\" The medicouncilor's\n expression said it couldn't be.\n\n\n \"Gland opera,\" said Cameron, hurrying on. \"The most popular program\n in the solar system, telepaths, teleports, pyrotics and so forth the\n heroes. Fake of course, makeup and trick camera shots.\n\n\n \"But Docchi can be made into a real star. The death-ray man, say. When\n his face shines men fall dead or paralyzed. He'd have a tremendous\n following of kids.\"\n\n\n \"Children,\" mused the medicouncilor. \"Are you serious about exposing\n them to his influence? Do you really want them to see him?\"\n\n\n \"He'd have a chance to return to society in a way that would be\n acceptable to him,\" said Cameron defensively. He shouldn't have\n specifically mentioned kids.",
"\"I've found out. There's a self-elected group of four, Docchi, Nona,\n Anti and Jordan. I believe they're supposed to be the local recreation\n committee.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor smiled. \"An apt camouflage. It keeps them amused.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so too but now I'm convinced they're no longer harmless. I'd\n like permission to break up the group. Humanely of course.\"\n\n\n \"I always welcome new ideas.\"\n\n\n In spite of what he'd said the medicouncilor probably did have an open\n mind. \"Start with those it's possible to do the most with. Docchi,\n for instance. With prosthetic arms, he appears normal except for that\n uncanny fluorescence. Granted that the last is repulsive to the average\n person. We can't correct the condition medically but we can make it\n into an asset.\"",
"Cameron saw the time too but continued. It ought to be settled. It\n would do no good to bring up Helen Keller; the medicouncilor would\n use that evidence against him. The Keller techniques had been studied\n and reinterpreted for Nona's benefit. That much was in her medical\n record. They had been tried on Nona, and they hadn't worked. It made no\n difference that he, Cameron, thought there were certain flaws in the\n way the old techniques had been applied. Thorton would not allow that\n the previous practitioners could have been wrong. \"I've been wondering\n if we haven't tried to force her to conform. She can be intelligent\n without understanding what we say or knowing how to read and write.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" demanded the medicouncilor. \"The most important tool humans\n have is language. Through this we pass along all knowledge.\" Thorton\n paused, reflecting. \"Unless you're referring to this Gland Opera stuff\n you mentioned. I believe you are, though personally I prefer to call it\n Rhine Opera.\"",
"The doctor kept his eyes averted. The man was damnably\n disconcerting—had no right to be alive. In the depths of the sea there\n were certain creatures like him and on a warm summer evening there was\n still another parallel, but never any human with such an infirmity.\n \"I'm afraid you know what the answer is. A flat no for the present.\"\n\n\n Docchi sagged and his arms hung limp. \"That's the answer?\"\n\n\n \"It's not as hopeless as you think. Decisions can be changed. It won't\n be the first time.\"",
"\"I've been thinking of that,\" admitted Cameron. \"Maybe if there was\n someone else like her she wouldn't need to talk the way we do. Anyway\n I'd like to make some tests, with your permission. I'll need some new\n equipment.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor found the sheet he'd been looking for from time\n to time. He creased it absently. \"Go ahead with those tests if it\n will make you feel better. I'll personally approve the requisition.\n It doesn't mean you'll get everything you want. Others have to sign\n too. However you ought to know you're not the first to think she's\n telepathic or something related to that phenomena.\"\n\n\n \"I've seen that in the record too. But I think I can be the first one\n to prove it.\"",
"\"Every young doctor thinks the same,\" said the medicouncilor kindly.\n \"Usually they wait until their term is nearly up before they suggest\n that she'd respond better if she were returned to normal society. I\n think I know what response they have in mind.\" Thorton smiled in a\n fatherly fashion. \"No offense, doctor, but it happens so often I'm\n thinking of inserting a note in our briefing program. Something to the\n effect that the new medical director should avoid the beautiful and\n self-possessed moron.\"\n\n\n \"Is she stupid?\" asked Cameron stubbornly. \"It's my impression that\n she's not.\"\n\n\n \"Clever with her hands,\" agreed the medicouncilor. \"People in her\n mental classification, which is very low, sometimes are. But don't\n confuse manual dexterity with intelligence. For one thing she doesn't\n have the brain structure for the real article.",
"\"I'll have to agree,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"But there's something that\n bothers me. I've looked over the records. No accidental has ever liked\n being here, and that covers quite a few years.\"\n\n\n \"Nobody appreciates the hospital until he's sick, doctor.\"\n\n\n \"I know. That's partly what's wrong. They're no longer ill and yet they\n have to stay here. What worries me is that there's never been such open\n discontent as now.\"\n\n\n \"I hope I don't have to point out that someone's stirring them up. Find\n out who and keep a close watch. As a doctor you can find pretexts, a\n different diet, a series of tests. You can keep the person coming to\n you every day.\"",
"\"I'm glad you're enthusiastic. But don't lose sight of the main\n objective. Even if she\nis\ntelepathic, and so far as we're concerned\n she's not, would she be better suited to life outside?\"\n\n\n He had one answer—but the medicouncilor believed in another. \"Perhaps\n you're right. She'll have to stay here no matter what happens.\"\n\n\n \"She will. It would solve your problems if you could break up the\n group, but don't count on it. You'll have to learn to manage them as\n they are.\"\n\n\n \"I'll see that they don't cause any trouble,\" said Cameron.\n\n\n \"I'm sure you will.\" The medicouncilor's manner didn't ooze confidence.\n \"If you need help we can send in reinforcements.\"",
"It was inconvenient to wait several minutes for each reply. Besides the\n medicouncilor couldn't or wouldn't help him. He wanted the status quo\n maintained; nothing else would satisfy him. It was the function of the\n medical director to see that it was. \"We're through,\" said Cameron.\n\n\n He sat there after the telecom clicked off. What were the deficients\n the medicouncilor had talked about? A subdivision of the accidentals\n of course, but it wasn't a medical term he was familiar with. Probably\n a semi-slang description. The medicouncilor had been associated with\n accidentals so long that he assumed every doctor would know at once\n what he meant.\n\n\n Deficients. Mentally Cameron turned the word over. If it was\n used accurately it could indicate only one thing. He'd see when\n the medicouncilor's report came in. He could always ask for more\n information if it wasn't clear.",
"\"Anti, they turned us down,\" said Docchi bitterly.\n\n\n \"What did you expect?\" rumbled the creature in the pool. Wavelets of\n acid danced across the surface, stirred by her voice.\n\n\n \"I didn't expect that.\"\n\n\n \"You don't know the Medicouncil very well.\"\n\n\n \"I guess I don't.\" He stared sullenly at the fluid. It was faintly\n blue. \"I have the feeling they didn't consider it, that they held the\n request for a time and then answered no without looking at it.\"\n\n\n \"Now you're beginning to learn. Wait till you've been here as long as I\n have.\""
],
[
"Docchi moved closer to the pool. \"Then you think we should go ahead\n with the plan we discussed before we sent in the petition? Good. I'll\n call the others together and tell them what happened. They'll agree\n that we have to do it.\"\n\n\n \"Then why call them? More talk, that's all. Besides I don't see why we\n should warn Cameron what we're up to.\"\n\n\n Docchi glanced at her worriedly. \"Do you think someone would report it?\n I'm certain everyone feels as I do.\"\n\n\n \"Not everyone. There's bound to be dissent,\" said Anti placidly. \"But I\n wasn't thinking of people.\"\n\n\n \"Oh that,\" said Docchi. \"We can block that source any time we need to.\"\n It was a relief to know that he could trust the accidentals. Unanimity\n was important and some of the reasons weren't obvious.",
"\"Then you know what he's like,\" said the medicouncilor, shaking his\n head. \"Our profession can't sponsor such a freakish display of his\n misfortune. No doubt he'd be successful on the program you mention. But\n there's more to life than financial achievement or the rather peculiar\n admiration that would be certain to follow him. As an actor he'd have a\n niche. But can you imagine, doctor, the dead silence that would occur\n when he walks into a social gathering of normal people?\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" said Cameron, though he didn't—not eye to eye. He didn't\n agree with Thorton but there wasn't much he could do to alter the\n other's conviction at the moment. There was a long fight ahead of him.\n \"I'll forget about Docchi. But there's another way to break up the\n group.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor interrupted. \"Nona?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I'm not sure she really belongs here.\"",
"\"This morning. I saw no reason to hold it up. I just finished giving\n Docchi the news.\"\n\n\n \"Dispatch. I like that. Get the disagreeable job done with.\" The\n medicouncilor searched through the desk in front of him without\n success. \"Never mind. I'll find the information later. Now. How did\n Docchi react?\"\n\n\n \"He didn't like it. He was mad clear through.\"\n\n\n \"That speaks well for his bounce.\"\n\n\n \"They all have spirit. Nothing to use it on,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"I\n confess I didn't look at him often though he was quite presentable,\n even handsome in a startling sort of way.\"\n\n\n Thorton nodded brusquely. \"Presentable. Does that mean he had arms?\"\n\n\n \"Today he did. Is it important?\"",
"\"I've found out. There's a self-elected group of four, Docchi, Nona,\n Anti and Jordan. I believe they're supposed to be the local recreation\n committee.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor smiled. \"An apt camouflage. It keeps them amused.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so too but now I'm convinced they're no longer harmless. I'd\n like permission to break up the group. Humanely of course.\"\n\n\n \"I always welcome new ideas.\"\n\n\n In spite of what he'd said the medicouncilor probably did have an open\n mind. \"Start with those it's possible to do the most with. Docchi,\n for instance. With prosthetic arms, he appears normal except for that\n uncanny fluorescence. Granted that the last is repulsive to the average\n person. We can't correct the condition medically but we can make it\n into an asset.\"",
"Docchi winced, his arms quivering uselessly. \"Maybe not. But we told\n you we're willing to let experts decide. There's nearly a thousand of\n us. They should be able to get one qualified crew.\"\n\n\n \"Perhaps. I'm not going to say.\" Cameron abandoned the light as beyond\n his control. \"Most of you are biocompensators. I concede it's a factor\n in your favor. But you must realize there are many things against you.\"\n He squinted at the desk top. Below the solid surface there was a drawer\n and in the drawer there was—that was what he was trying to see or\n determine. The more he looked the less clear anything seemed to be. He\n tried to make his voice crisp and professional. \"You're wasting time\n discussing this with me. I've merely passed the decision on. I'm not\n responsible for it and I can't do anything for you.\"\n\n\n Docchi stood up, his face colorless and bright. But the inner\n illumination was no indication of hope.",
"\"Maybe you can and maybe you can't,\" said Anti. \"But why make it\n difficult, why waste time?\"\n\n\n Docchi got up awkwardly but he wasn't clumsy once he was on his feet.\n \"I'll get Jordan. I know I'll need arms.\"\n\n\n \"Depends on what you mean,\" said Anti.\n\n\n \"Both,\" said Docchi, smiling. \"We're a dangerous weapon.\"\n\n\n She called out as he walked away. \"I'll see you when you leave for far\n Centauri.\"\n\n\n \"Sooner than that, Anti. Much sooner.\"",
"Morosely he kicked an anemic tuft of grass. Plants didn't do well here\n either. They too were exiled, far from the sun, removed from the soil\n they originated in. The conditions they grew in were artificial. \"Why\n did they turn us down?\" said Docchi.\n\n\n \"Answer it yourself. Remember what the Medicouncil is like. Different\n things are important to them. The main thing is that we don't have to\n follow their example. There's no need to be irrational even though they\n are.\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew what to do,\" said Docchi. \"It meant so much to us.\"\n\n\n \"We can wait, outlast the attitude,\" said Anti, moving slowly. It was\n the only way she could move. Most of her bulk was beneath the surface.\n\n\n \"Cameron suggested waiting.\" Reflectively Docchi added: \"It's true we\n are biocompensators.\"",
"\"Sure,\" said Docchi. \"We'll wait and wait until it's finally changed.\n We've got centuries, haven't we?\" His face was blazing. It had slipped\n out of control though he wasn't aware of it. Beneath the skin certain\n cells had been modified, there were substances in his body that the\n ordinary individual didn't have. And when there was an extreme flow of\n nervous energy the response was—light. His metabolism was akin to that\n of a firefly.\n\n\n Cameron meddled with buttons. It was impossible to keep the lighting at\n a decent level. Docchi was a nuisance.\n\n\n \"Why?\" questioned Docchi. \"We're capable, you know that. How could they\n refuse?\"\n\n\n That was something he didn't want asked because there was no answer\n both of them would accept. Sometimes a blunt reply was the best\n evasion. \"Do you think they'd take you? Or Nona, Jordan, or Anti?\"",
"The doctor kept his eyes averted. The man was damnably\n disconcerting—had no right to be alive. In the depths of the sea there\n were certain creatures like him and on a warm summer evening there was\n still another parallel, but never any human with such an infirmity.\n \"I'm afraid you know what the answer is. A flat no for the present.\"\n\n\n Docchi sagged and his arms hung limp. \"That's the answer?\"\n\n\n \"It's not as hopeless as you think. Decisions can be changed. It won't\n be the first time.\"",
"\"To him, perhaps,\" reflected the medicouncilor. \"It's an ingenious\n idea, doctor, one which does credit to your humanitarianism. But I'm\n afraid of the public's reception. Have you gone into Docchi's medical\n history?\"\n\n\n \"I glanced at it before I called him in.\" The man was unusual,\n even in a place that specialized in the abnormal. Docchi had been\n an electrochemical engineer with a degree in cold lighting. On his\n way to a brilliant career, he had been the victim of a particularly\n messy accident. The details hadn't been described but Cameron could\n supplement them with his imagination. He'd been badly mangled and\n tossed into a tank of the basic cold lighting fluid.",
"\"An asset? Very neat, if it can be done.\" The medicouncilor's\n expression said it couldn't be.\n\n\n \"Gland opera,\" said Cameron, hurrying on. \"The most popular program\n in the solar system, telepaths, teleports, pyrotics and so forth the\n heroes. Fake of course, makeup and trick camera shots.\n\n\n \"But Docchi can be made into a real star. The death-ray man, say. When\n his face shines men fall dead or paralyzed. He'd have a tremendous\n following of kids.\"\n\n\n \"Children,\" mused the medicouncilor. \"Are you serious about exposing\n them to his influence? Do you really want them to see him?\"\n\n\n \"He'd have a chance to return to society in a way that would be\n acceptable to him,\" said Cameron defensively. He shouldn't have\n specifically mentioned kids.",
"Doctor Cameron looked at him directly for the first time. It wasn't\n as bad as he expected. \"I suggest you calm down. Be patient and wait.\n You'll be surprised how often you get what you want.\"\n\n\n \"You'd be surprised how we get what we want,\" said Docchi. He turned\n away, lurching toward the door which opened automatically and closed\n behind him.\n\n\n Again Cameron concentrated on the desk, trying to look through it.\n He wrote down the sequence he expected to find, lingering over it to\n make sure he didn't force the pictures that came into his mind. He\n opened the drawer and compared the Rhine cards with what he'd written,\n frowning in disappointment. No matter how he tried he never got better\n than average results. Perhaps there was something to telepathy but he'd\n never found it. Anyway it was clear he wasn't one of the gifted few.",
"The self-deception was vicious precisely because the accidentals\nwere\nqualified. Of all the billions of solar citizens\nthey alone could make\n the long journey there and return\n. But there were other factors that\n ruled them out. It was never safe to discuss the first reason with them\n because the second would have to be explained. Cameron himself wasn't\n sadistic and no one else was interested enough to inform them.\n2\nDocchi sat beside the pool. It would be pleasant if he could forget\n where he was. It was pastoral though not quite a scene from Earth. The\n horizon was too near and the sky was shallow and only seemed to be\n bright. Darkness lurked outside.\n\n\n A small tree stretched shade overhead. Waves lapped and made gurgling\n sounds against the banks. But there was no plant life of any kind, and\n no fish swam in the liquid. It looked like water but wasn't—the pool\n held acid. And floating in it, all but submerged, was a shape. The\n records in the hospital said it was a woman.",
"\"Anti, they turned us down,\" said Docchi bitterly.\n\n\n \"What did you expect?\" rumbled the creature in the pool. Wavelets of\n acid danced across the surface, stirred by her voice.\n\n\n \"I didn't expect that.\"\n\n\n \"You don't know the Medicouncil very well.\"\n\n\n \"I guess I don't.\" He stared sullenly at the fluid. It was faintly\n blue. \"I have the feeling they didn't consider it, that they held the\n request for a time and then answered no without looking at it.\"\n\n\n \"Now you're beginning to learn. Wait till you've been here as long as I\n have.\"",
"He shut the drawer. It was a private game, a method to keep from\n becoming involved in Docchi's problems, to avoid emotional entanglement\n with people he had nothing in common with. He didn't enjoy depriving\n weak and helpless men and women of what little hope they had. It was\n their lack of strength that made them so difficult to handle.\n\n\n He reached for the telecom. \"Get Medicouncilor Thorton,\" he told the\n operator. \"Direct if you can; indirect if you have to. I'll hold on.\"\n\n\n Approximate mean diameter thirty miles, the asteroid was listed on the\n charts as Handicap Haven with a mark that indicated except in emergency\n no one not authorized was to land there. Those who were confined to it\n were willing to admit they were handicapped but they didn't call it\n haven. They used other terms, none suggesting sanctuary.",
"There was life left in the body; it flickered but never went entirely\n out. His arms were gone and his ribs were crushed into his spinal\n column. Regeneration wasn't easy; a partial rib cage could be built up,\n but no more than that. He had no shoulder muscles and only a minimum\n in his back and now, much later, that was why he tired easily and why\n the prosthetic arms with which he'd been fitted were merely ornamental,\n there was nothing which could move them.\n\n\n And then there was the cold lighting fluid. To begin with it was\n semi-organic which, perhaps, was the reason he had remained alive so\n long when he should have died. It had preserved him, had in part\n replaced his blood, permeating every tissue. By the time Docchi had\n been found his body had adapted to the cold lighting substance. And the\n adaptation couldn't be reversed and it was self-perpetuating. Life was\n hardier than most men realized but occasionally it was also perverse.",
"\"They always bring in biocompensation,\" muttered Anti restlessly. \"I'm\n getting tired of that excuse. Time passes just as slow.\"\n\n\n \"But what else is there? Shall we draw up another request?\"\n\n\n \"Memorandum number ten? Let's not be naive. Things get lost when we\n send them to the Medicouncil. Their filing system is in terrible shape.\"\n\n\n \"Lost or distorted,\" grunted Docchi angrily. The grass he'd kicked\n already had begun to wilt. It wasn't hardy in this environment. Few\n things were.\n\n\n \"Maybe we ought to give the Medicouncil a rest. I'm sure they don't\n want to hear from us again.\"",
"\"Every young doctor thinks the same,\" said the medicouncilor kindly.\n \"Usually they wait until their term is nearly up before they suggest\n that she'd respond better if she were returned to normal society. I\n think I know what response they have in mind.\" Thorton smiled in a\n fatherly fashion. \"No offense, doctor, but it happens so often I'm\n thinking of inserting a note in our briefing program. Something to the\n effect that the new medical director should avoid the beautiful and\n self-possessed moron.\"\n\n\n \"Is she stupid?\" asked Cameron stubbornly. \"It's my impression that\n she's not.\"\n\n\n \"Clever with her hands,\" agreed the medicouncilor. \"People in her\n mental classification, which is very low, sometimes are. But don't\n confuse manual dexterity with intelligence. For one thing she doesn't\n have the brain structure for the real article.",
"\"I'll have to agree,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"But there's something that\n bothers me. I've looked over the records. No accidental has ever liked\n being here, and that covers quite a few years.\"\n\n\n \"Nobody appreciates the hospital until he's sick, doctor.\"\n\n\n \"I know. That's partly what's wrong. They're no longer ill and yet they\n have to stay here. What worries me is that there's never been such open\n discontent as now.\"\n\n\n \"I hope I don't have to point out that someone's stirring them up. Find\n out who and keep a close watch. As a doctor you can find pretexts, a\n different diet, a series of tests. You can keep the person coming to\n you every day.\"",
"The doctor got heavily to his feet—and he actually was heavier. It\n wasn't a psychological reaction. He made a mental note of it. He'd have\n to investigate the gravity surge.\n\n\n In a way accidentals were pathetic, patchwork humans, half or quarter\n men and women, fractional organisms which masqueraded as people. The\n illusion died hard for them, harder than that which remained of their\n bodies, and those bodies were unbelievably tough. Medicine and surgery\n were partly to blame. Techniques were too good or not good enough,\n depending on the viewpoint—doctor or patient.\n\n\n Too good in that the most horribly injured person, if he were found\n alive, could be kept alive. Not good enough because a certain per cent\n of the injured couldn't be returned to society completely sound and\n whole. The miracles of healing were incomplete."
],
[
"\"I'm glad you're enthusiastic. But don't lose sight of the main\n objective. Even if she\nis\ntelepathic, and so far as we're concerned\n she's not, would she be better suited to life outside?\"\n\n\n He had one answer—but the medicouncilor believed in another. \"Perhaps\n you're right. She'll have to stay here no matter what happens.\"\n\n\n \"She will. It would solve your problems if you could break up the\n group, but don't count on it. You'll have to learn to manage them as\n they are.\"\n\n\n \"I'll see that they don't cause any trouble,\" said Cameron.\n\n\n \"I'm sure you will.\" The medicouncilor's manner didn't ooze confidence.\n \"If you need help we can send in reinforcements.\"",
"Cameron saw the time too but continued. It ought to be settled. It\n would do no good to bring up Helen Keller; the medicouncilor would\n use that evidence against him. The Keller techniques had been studied\n and reinterpreted for Nona's benefit. That much was in her medical\n record. They had been tried on Nona, and they hadn't worked. It made no\n difference that he, Cameron, thought there were certain flaws in the\n way the old techniques had been applied. Thorton would not allow that\n the previous practitioners could have been wrong. \"I've been wondering\n if we haven't tried to force her to conform. She can be intelligent\n without understanding what we say or knowing how to read and write.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" demanded the medicouncilor. \"The most important tool humans\n have is language. Through this we pass along all knowledge.\" Thorton\n paused, reflecting. \"Unless you're referring to this Gland Opera stuff\n you mentioned. I believe you are, though personally I prefer to call it\n Rhine Opera.\"",
"\"I've been thinking of that,\" admitted Cameron. \"Maybe if there was\n someone else like her she wouldn't need to talk the way we do. Anyway\n I'd like to make some tests, with your permission. I'll need some new\n equipment.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor found the sheet he'd been looking for from time\n to time. He creased it absently. \"Go ahead with those tests if it\n will make you feel better. I'll personally approve the requisition.\n It doesn't mean you'll get everything you want. Others have to sign\n too. However you ought to know you're not the first to think she's\n telepathic or something related to that phenomena.\"\n\n\n \"I've seen that in the record too. But I think I can be the first one\n to prove it.\"",
"Doctor Cameron looked at him directly for the first time. It wasn't\n as bad as he expected. \"I suggest you calm down. Be patient and wait.\n You'll be surprised how often you get what you want.\"\n\n\n \"You'd be surprised how we get what we want,\" said Docchi. He turned\n away, lurching toward the door which opened automatically and closed\n behind him.\n\n\n Again Cameron concentrated on the desk, trying to look through it.\n He wrote down the sequence he expected to find, lingering over it to\n make sure he didn't force the pictures that came into his mind. He\n opened the drawer and compared the Rhine cards with what he'd written,\n frowning in disappointment. No matter how he tried he never got better\n than average results. Perhaps there was something to telepathy but he'd\n never found it. Anyway it was clear he wasn't one of the gifted few.",
"\"Then you know what he's like,\" said the medicouncilor, shaking his\n head. \"Our profession can't sponsor such a freakish display of his\n misfortune. No doubt he'd be successful on the program you mention. But\n there's more to life than financial achievement or the rather peculiar\n admiration that would be certain to follow him. As an actor he'd have a\n niche. But can you imagine, doctor, the dead silence that would occur\n when he walks into a social gathering of normal people?\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" said Cameron, though he didn't—not eye to eye. He didn't\n agree with Thorton but there wasn't much he could do to alter the\n other's conviction at the moment. There was a long fight ahead of him.\n \"I'll forget about Docchi. But there's another way to break up the\n group.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor interrupted. \"Nona?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I'm not sure she really belongs here.\"",
"Docchi moved closer to the pool. \"Then you think we should go ahead\n with the plan we discussed before we sent in the petition? Good. I'll\n call the others together and tell them what happened. They'll agree\n that we have to do it.\"\n\n\n \"Then why call them? More talk, that's all. Besides I don't see why we\n should warn Cameron what we're up to.\"\n\n\n Docchi glanced at her worriedly. \"Do you think someone would report it?\n I'm certain everyone feels as I do.\"\n\n\n \"Not everyone. There's bound to be dissent,\" said Anti placidly. \"But I\n wasn't thinking of people.\"\n\n\n \"Oh that,\" said Docchi. \"We can block that source any time we need to.\"\n It was a relief to know that he could trust the accidentals. Unanimity\n was important and some of the reasons weren't obvious.",
"\"I'll have to agree,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"But there's something that\n bothers me. I've looked over the records. No accidental has ever liked\n being here, and that covers quite a few years.\"\n\n\n \"Nobody appreciates the hospital until he's sick, doctor.\"\n\n\n \"I know. That's partly what's wrong. They're no longer ill and yet they\n have to stay here. What worries me is that there's never been such open\n discontent as now.\"\n\n\n \"I hope I don't have to point out that someone's stirring them up. Find\n out who and keep a close watch. As a doctor you can find pretexts, a\n different diet, a series of tests. You can keep the person coming to\n you every day.\"",
"Docchi winced, his arms quivering uselessly. \"Maybe not. But we told\n you we're willing to let experts decide. There's nearly a thousand of\n us. They should be able to get one qualified crew.\"\n\n\n \"Perhaps. I'm not going to say.\" Cameron abandoned the light as beyond\n his control. \"Most of you are biocompensators. I concede it's a factor\n in your favor. But you must realize there are many things against you.\"\n He squinted at the desk top. Below the solid surface there was a drawer\n and in the drawer there was—that was what he was trying to see or\n determine. The more he looked the less clear anything seemed to be. He\n tried to make his voice crisp and professional. \"You're wasting time\n discussing this with me. I've merely passed the decision on. I'm not\n responsible for it and I can't do anything for you.\"\n\n\n Docchi stood up, his face colorless and bright. But the inner\n illumination was no indication of hope.",
"\"Every young doctor thinks the same,\" said the medicouncilor kindly.\n \"Usually they wait until their term is nearly up before they suggest\n that she'd respond better if she were returned to normal society. I\n think I know what response they have in mind.\" Thorton smiled in a\n fatherly fashion. \"No offense, doctor, but it happens so often I'm\n thinking of inserting a note in our briefing program. Something to the\n effect that the new medical director should avoid the beautiful and\n self-possessed moron.\"\n\n\n \"Is she stupid?\" asked Cameron stubbornly. \"It's my impression that\n she's not.\"\n\n\n \"Clever with her hands,\" agreed the medicouncilor. \"People in her\n mental classification, which is very low, sometimes are. But don't\n confuse manual dexterity with intelligence. For one thing she doesn't\n have the brain structure for the real article.",
"\"It's not\nsupposed\nto work that way but nobody's ever done better\n with a setup like this,\" said Vogel defensively. \"If you want you can\n check the company that makes these units.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not trying to challenge your knowledge and I'm not anxious to make\n myself look silly. I do want to make sure I don't overlook anything.\n You see, I think there's a possibility of sabotage.\"\n\n\n The engineer's grin was wider than the remark required.\n\n\n Cameron swiveled the chair around and leaned on the desk. \"All right,\"\n he said tiredly, \"tell me why the idea of sabotage is so funny.\"\n\n\n \"It would have to be someone living here,\" said the big engineer. \"He\n wouldn't like it if it jumped up to nine G, which it could. I think\n he'd let it alone. But there are better reasons. Do you know how each\n gravity unit is put together?\"",
"The self-deception was vicious precisely because the accidentals\nwere\nqualified. Of all the billions of solar citizens\nthey alone could make\n the long journey there and return\n. But there were other factors that\n ruled them out. It was never safe to discuss the first reason with them\n because the second would have to be explained. Cameron himself wasn't\n sadistic and no one else was interested enough to inform them.\n2\nDocchi sat beside the pool. It would be pleasant if he could forget\n where he was. It was pastoral though not quite a scene from Earth. The\n horizon was too near and the sky was shallow and only seemed to be\n bright. Darkness lurked outside.\n\n\n A small tree stretched shade overhead. Waves lapped and made gurgling\n sounds against the banks. But there was no plant life of any kind, and\n no fish swam in the liquid. It looked like water but wasn't—the pool\n held acid. And floating in it, all but submerged, was a shape. The\n records in the hospital said it was a woman.",
"\"Sure,\" said Docchi. \"We'll wait and wait until it's finally changed.\n We've got centuries, haven't we?\" His face was blazing. It had slipped\n out of control though he wasn't aware of it. Beneath the skin certain\n cells had been modified, there were substances in his body that the\n ordinary individual didn't have. And when there was an extreme flow of\n nervous energy the response was—light. His metabolism was akin to that\n of a firefly.\n\n\n Cameron meddled with buttons. It was impossible to keep the lighting at\n a decent level. Docchi was a nuisance.\n\n\n \"Why?\" questioned Docchi. \"We're capable, you know that. How could they\n refuse?\"\n\n\n That was something he didn't want asked because there was no answer\n both of them would accept. Sometimes a blunt reply was the best\n evasion. \"Do you think they'd take you? Or Nona, Jordan, or Anti?\"",
"Stars were beginning to wink. Twilight brought out the shadows and\n tracery of the structure that supported the transparent dome overhead.\n Soon controlled slow rotation would bring near darkness to this side of\n the asteroid. The sun was small at this distance but even so it was a\n tie to the familiar scenes of Earth. Before long it would be lost.\nCameron leaned back and looked speculatively at the gravity engineer,\n Vogel. The engineer could give him considerable assistance. There was\n no reason why he shouldn't but anyone who voluntarily had remained\n on the asteroid as long as Vogel was a doubtful quantity. He didn't\n distrust him, the man was strange.\n\n\n \"I've been busy trying to keep the place running smoothly. I hope you\n don't mind that I haven't been able to discuss your job at length,\"\n said the doctor, watching him closely.",
"\"This morning. I saw no reason to hold it up. I just finished giving\n Docchi the news.\"\n\n\n \"Dispatch. I like that. Get the disagreeable job done with.\" The\n medicouncilor searched through the desk in front of him without\n success. \"Never mind. I'll find the information later. Now. How did\n Docchi react?\"\n\n\n \"He didn't like it. He was mad clear through.\"\n\n\n \"That speaks well for his bounce.\"\n\n\n \"They all have spirit. Nothing to use it on,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"I\n confess I didn't look at him often though he was quite presentable,\n even handsome in a startling sort of way.\"\n\n\n Thorton nodded brusquely. \"Presentable. Does that mean he had arms?\"\n\n\n \"Today he did. Is it important?\"",
"\"I think so. He expected a favorable reply and wanted to look his\n best, as nearly normal as possible. In view of that I'm surprised he\n didn't threaten you.\"\n\n\n Cameron tried to recall the incident. \"I think he did, mildly. He said\n something to the effect that I'd be surprised how\nthey\ngot what they\n wanted.\"\n\n\n \"So you anticipate trouble. That's why you called?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. I want your opinion.\"\n\n\n \"You're on the scene, doctor. You get the important nuances,\" said\n the medicouncilor hastily. \"However it's my considered judgment they\n won't start anything immediately. It takes time to get over the shock\n of refusal. They can't do anything. Individually they're helpless\n and collectively there aren't parts for a dozen sound bodies on the\n asteroid.\"",
"\"An asset? Very neat, if it can be done.\" The medicouncilor's\n expression said it couldn't be.\n\n\n \"Gland opera,\" said Cameron, hurrying on. \"The most popular program\n in the solar system, telepaths, teleports, pyrotics and so forth the\n heroes. Fake of course, makeup and trick camera shots.\n\n\n \"But Docchi can be made into a real star. The death-ray man, say. When\n his face shines men fall dead or paralyzed. He'd have a tremendous\n following of kids.\"\n\n\n \"Children,\" mused the medicouncilor. \"Are you serious about exposing\n them to his influence? Do you really want them to see him?\"\n\n\n \"He'd have a chance to return to society in a way that would be\n acceptable to him,\" said Cameron defensively. He shouldn't have\n specifically mentioned kids.",
"Morosely he kicked an anemic tuft of grass. Plants didn't do well here\n either. They too were exiled, far from the sun, removed from the soil\n they originated in. The conditions they grew in were artificial. \"Why\n did they turn us down?\" said Docchi.\n\n\n \"Answer it yourself. Remember what the Medicouncil is like. Different\n things are important to them. The main thing is that we don't have to\n follow their example. There's no need to be irrational even though they\n are.\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew what to do,\" said Docchi. \"It meant so much to us.\"\n\n\n \"We can wait, outlast the attitude,\" said Anti, moving slowly. It was\n the only way she could move. Most of her bulk was beneath the surface.\n\n\n \"Cameron suggested waiting.\" Reflectively Docchi added: \"It's true we\n are biocompensators.\"",
"Cameron concealed his irritation. He wanted information, not a heart\n to heart confession. Back on Earth he\nhad\nbeen told it was for\n the benefit of the accidentals. He'd reserved judgment then and saw\n no reason not to do so now. \"All practical sciences try to justify\n what they can't escape but would like to. Medicine, I'm sure, is no\n exception.\"\n\n\n He paused thoughtfully. \"I understand there are three separate\n generators on the asteroid. One runs for forty-five minutes while two\n are idle. When the first one stops another one cuts in. The operations\n are supposed to be synchronized. I don't have to tell you that they're\n not. Not long ago you felt your weight increase suddenly. I know I did.\n What is wrong?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing wrong,\" said the engineer soothingly. \"You get fluctuations\n while one generator is running. You get a gravity surge when one\n generator is supposed to drop out but doesn't. The companion machine\n adds to it, that's all.\"",
"\"Naw, I don't mind,\" said Vogel. \"Medical directors come and go. I stay\n on. It's easier than getting another job.\"\n\n\n \"I know. By now you should know the place pretty well. I sometimes\n think you could do my work with half the trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Ain't in the least curious about medicine and never bothered to\n learn,\" grunted Vogel. \"I keep my stuff running and that's all. I\n don't interfere with nobody and they don't come around and get friendly\n with me.\"\n\n\n Cameron believed it. The statement fit the personality. He needn't be\n concerned about fraternization. \"There are a few things that puzzle\n me,\" he began. \"That's why I called you in. Usually we maintain about\n half Earth-normal gravity. Is that correct?\"\n\n\n The engineer nodded and grunted assent.",
"It was inconvenient to wait several minutes for each reply. Besides the\n medicouncilor couldn't or wouldn't help him. He wanted the status quo\n maintained; nothing else would satisfy him. It was the function of the\n medical director to see that it was. \"We're through,\" said Cameron.\n\n\n He sat there after the telecom clicked off. What were the deficients\n the medicouncilor had talked about? A subdivision of the accidentals\n of course, but it wasn't a medical term he was familiar with. Probably\n a semi-slang description. The medicouncilor had been associated with\n accidentals so long that he assumed every doctor would know at once\n what he meant.\n\n\n Deficients. Mentally Cameron turned the word over. If it was\n used accurately it could indicate only one thing. He'd see when\n the medicouncilor's report came in. He could always ask for more\n information if it wasn't clear."
],
[
"The doctor kept his eyes averted. The man was damnably\n disconcerting—had no right to be alive. In the depths of the sea there\n were certain creatures like him and on a warm summer evening there was\n still another parallel, but never any human with such an infirmity.\n \"I'm afraid you know what the answer is. A flat no for the present.\"\n\n\n Docchi sagged and his arms hung limp. \"That's the answer?\"\n\n\n \"It's not as hopeless as you think. Decisions can be changed. It won't\n be the first time.\"",
"The doctor got heavily to his feet—and he actually was heavier. It\n wasn't a psychological reaction. He made a mental note of it. He'd have\n to investigate the gravity surge.\n\n\n In a way accidentals were pathetic, patchwork humans, half or quarter\n men and women, fractional organisms which masqueraded as people. The\n illusion died hard for them, harder than that which remained of their\n bodies, and those bodies were unbelievably tough. Medicine and surgery\n were partly to blame. Techniques were too good or not good enough,\n depending on the viewpoint—doctor or patient.\n\n\n Too good in that the most horribly injured person, if he were found\n alive, could be kept alive. Not good enough because a certain per cent\n of the injured couldn't be returned to society completely sound and\n whole. The miracles of healing were incomplete.",
"There weren't many humans who were broken beyond repair, but though\n the details varied in every respect, the results were monotonously\n the same. For the most part disease had been eliminated. Everyone was\n healthy—except those who'd been hurt in accidents and who couldn't be\n resurgeried and regenerated into the beautiful mold characteristic of\n the entire population. And those few were sent to the asteroid.\n\n\n They didn't like it. They didn't like being\nconfined\nto Handicap\n Haven. They were sensitive and they didn't want to go back. They knew\n how conspicuous they'd be, hobbling and crawling among the multitudes\n of beautiful men and women who inhabited the planets. The accidentals\n didn't want to return.",
"\"I'm glad you're enthusiastic. But don't lose sight of the main\n objective. Even if she\nis\ntelepathic, and so far as we're concerned\n she's not, would she be better suited to life outside?\"\n\n\n He had one answer—but the medicouncilor believed in another. \"Perhaps\n you're right. She'll have to stay here no matter what happens.\"\n\n\n \"She will. It would solve your problems if you could break up the\n group, but don't count on it. You'll have to learn to manage them as\n they are.\"\n\n\n \"I'll see that they don't cause any trouble,\" said Cameron.\n\n\n \"I'm sure you will.\" The medicouncilor's manner didn't ooze confidence.\n \"If you need help we can send in reinforcements.\"",
"\"I'll have to agree,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"But there's something that\n bothers me. I've looked over the records. No accidental has ever liked\n being here, and that covers quite a few years.\"\n\n\n \"Nobody appreciates the hospital until he's sick, doctor.\"\n\n\n \"I know. That's partly what's wrong. They're no longer ill and yet they\n have to stay here. What worries me is that there's never been such open\n discontent as now.\"\n\n\n \"I hope I don't have to point out that someone's stirring them up. Find\n out who and keep a close watch. As a doctor you can find pretexts, a\n different diet, a series of tests. You can keep the person coming to\n you every day.\"",
"There was life left in the body; it flickered but never went entirely\n out. His arms were gone and his ribs were crushed into his spinal\n column. Regeneration wasn't easy; a partial rib cage could be built up,\n but no more than that. He had no shoulder muscles and only a minimum\n in his back and now, much later, that was why he tired easily and why\n the prosthetic arms with which he'd been fitted were merely ornamental,\n there was nothing which could move them.\n\n\n And then there was the cold lighting fluid. To begin with it was\n semi-organic which, perhaps, was the reason he had remained alive so\n long when he should have died. It had preserved him, had in part\n replaced his blood, permeating every tissue. By the time Docchi had\n been found his body had adapted to the cold lighting substance. And the\n adaptation couldn't be reversed and it was self-perpetuating. Life was\n hardier than most men realized but occasionally it was also perverse.",
"\"Every young doctor thinks the same,\" said the medicouncilor kindly.\n \"Usually they wait until their term is nearly up before they suggest\n that she'd respond better if she were returned to normal society. I\n think I know what response they have in mind.\" Thorton smiled in a\n fatherly fashion. \"No offense, doctor, but it happens so often I'm\n thinking of inserting a note in our briefing program. Something to the\n effect that the new medical director should avoid the beautiful and\n self-possessed moron.\"\n\n\n \"Is she stupid?\" asked Cameron stubbornly. \"It's my impression that\n she's not.\"\n\n\n \"Clever with her hands,\" agreed the medicouncilor. \"People in her\n mental classification, which is very low, sometimes are. But don't\n confuse manual dexterity with intelligence. For one thing she doesn't\n have the brain structure for the real article.",
"What they did want was ridiculous. They had talked about, hoped, and\n finally embodied it in a petition. They had requested rockets to make\n the first long hard journey to Alpha and Proxima Centauri. Man was\n restricted to the solar system and had no way of getting to even the\n nearest stars. They thought they could break through the barrier. Some\n accidentals would go and some would remain behind, lonelier except for\n their share in the dangerous enterprise.\n\n\n It was a particularly uncontrollable form of self-deception. They were\n the broken people, without a face they could call their own, who wore\n their hearts not on their sleeves but in a blood-pumping chamber, those\n without limbs or organs—or too many. The categories were endless. No\n accidental was like any other.",
"\"Then you know what he's like,\" said the medicouncilor, shaking his\n head. \"Our profession can't sponsor such a freakish display of his\n misfortune. No doubt he'd be successful on the program you mention. But\n there's more to life than financial achievement or the rather peculiar\n admiration that would be certain to follow him. As an actor he'd have a\n niche. But can you imagine, doctor, the dead silence that would occur\n when he walks into a social gathering of normal people?\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" said Cameron, though he didn't—not eye to eye. He didn't\n agree with Thorton but there wasn't much he could do to alter the\n other's conviction at the moment. There was a long fight ahead of him.\n \"I'll forget about Docchi. But there's another way to break up the\n group.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor interrupted. \"Nona?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I'm not sure she really belongs here.\"",
"\"Sure,\" said Docchi. \"We'll wait and wait until it's finally changed.\n We've got centuries, haven't we?\" His face was blazing. It had slipped\n out of control though he wasn't aware of it. Beneath the skin certain\n cells had been modified, there were substances in his body that the\n ordinary individual didn't have. And when there was an extreme flow of\n nervous energy the response was—light. His metabolism was akin to that\n of a firefly.\n\n\n Cameron meddled with buttons. It was impossible to keep the lighting at\n a decent level. Docchi was a nuisance.\n\n\n \"Why?\" questioned Docchi. \"We're capable, you know that. How could they\n refuse?\"\n\n\n That was something he didn't want asked because there was no answer\n both of them would accept. Sometimes a blunt reply was the best\n evasion. \"Do you think they'd take you? Or Nona, Jordan, or Anti?\"",
"\"To him, perhaps,\" reflected the medicouncilor. \"It's an ingenious\n idea, doctor, one which does credit to your humanitarianism. But I'm\n afraid of the public's reception. Have you gone into Docchi's medical\n history?\"\n\n\n \"I glanced at it before I called him in.\" The man was unusual,\n even in a place that specialized in the abnormal. Docchi had been\n an electrochemical engineer with a degree in cold lighting. On his\n way to a brilliant career, he had been the victim of a particularly\n messy accident. The details hadn't been described but Cameron could\n supplement them with his imagination. He'd been badly mangled and\n tossed into a tank of the basic cold lighting fluid.",
"Morosely he kicked an anemic tuft of grass. Plants didn't do well here\n either. They too were exiled, far from the sun, removed from the soil\n they originated in. The conditions they grew in were artificial. \"Why\n did they turn us down?\" said Docchi.\n\n\n \"Answer it yourself. Remember what the Medicouncil is like. Different\n things are important to them. The main thing is that we don't have to\n follow their example. There's no need to be irrational even though they\n are.\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew what to do,\" said Docchi. \"It meant so much to us.\"\n\n\n \"We can wait, outlast the attitude,\" said Anti, moving slowly. It was\n the only way she could move. Most of her bulk was beneath the surface.\n\n\n \"Cameron suggested waiting.\" Reflectively Docchi added: \"It's true we\n are biocompensators.\"",
"The self-deception was vicious precisely because the accidentals\nwere\nqualified. Of all the billions of solar citizens\nthey alone could make\n the long journey there and return\n. But there were other factors that\n ruled them out. It was never safe to discuss the first reason with them\n because the second would have to be explained. Cameron himself wasn't\n sadistic and no one else was interested enough to inform them.\n2\nDocchi sat beside the pool. It would be pleasant if he could forget\n where he was. It was pastoral though not quite a scene from Earth. The\n horizon was too near and the sky was shallow and only seemed to be\n bright. Darkness lurked outside.\n\n\n A small tree stretched shade overhead. Waves lapped and made gurgling\n sounds against the banks. But there was no plant life of any kind, and\n no fish swam in the liquid. It looked like water but wasn't—the pool\n held acid. And floating in it, all but submerged, was a shape. The\n records in the hospital said it was a woman.",
"Docchi moved closer to the pool. \"Then you think we should go ahead\n with the plan we discussed before we sent in the petition? Good. I'll\n call the others together and tell them what happened. They'll agree\n that we have to do it.\"\n\n\n \"Then why call them? More talk, that's all. Besides I don't see why we\n should warn Cameron what we're up to.\"\n\n\n Docchi glanced at her worriedly. \"Do you think someone would report it?\n I'm certain everyone feels as I do.\"\n\n\n \"Not everyone. There's bound to be dissent,\" said Anti placidly. \"But I\n wasn't thinking of people.\"\n\n\n \"Oh that,\" said Docchi. \"We can block that source any time we need to.\"\n It was a relief to know that he could trust the accidentals. Unanimity\n was important and some of the reasons weren't obvious.",
"Cameron saw the time too but continued. It ought to be settled. It\n would do no good to bring up Helen Keller; the medicouncilor would\n use that evidence against him. The Keller techniques had been studied\n and reinterpreted for Nona's benefit. That much was in her medical\n record. They had been tried on Nona, and they hadn't worked. It made no\n difference that he, Cameron, thought there were certain flaws in the\n way the old techniques had been applied. Thorton would not allow that\n the previous practitioners could have been wrong. \"I've been wondering\n if we haven't tried to force her to conform. She can be intelligent\n without understanding what we say or knowing how to read and write.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" demanded the medicouncilor. \"The most important tool humans\n have is language. Through this we pass along all knowledge.\" Thorton\n paused, reflecting. \"Unless you're referring to this Gland Opera stuff\n you mentioned. I believe you are, though personally I prefer to call it\n Rhine Opera.\"",
"\"I've found out. There's a self-elected group of four, Docchi, Nona,\n Anti and Jordan. I believe they're supposed to be the local recreation\n committee.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor smiled. \"An apt camouflage. It keeps them amused.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so too but now I'm convinced they're no longer harmless. I'd\n like permission to break up the group. Humanely of course.\"\n\n\n \"I always welcome new ideas.\"\n\n\n In spite of what he'd said the medicouncilor probably did have an open\n mind. \"Start with those it's possible to do the most with. Docchi,\n for instance. With prosthetic arms, he appears normal except for that\n uncanny fluorescence. Granted that the last is repulsive to the average\n person. We can't correct the condition medically but we can make it\n into an asset.\"",
"\"This morning. I saw no reason to hold it up. I just finished giving\n Docchi the news.\"\n\n\n \"Dispatch. I like that. Get the disagreeable job done with.\" The\n medicouncilor searched through the desk in front of him without\n success. \"Never mind. I'll find the information later. Now. How did\n Docchi react?\"\n\n\n \"He didn't like it. He was mad clear through.\"\n\n\n \"That speaks well for his bounce.\"\n\n\n \"They all have spirit. Nothing to use it on,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"I\n confess I didn't look at him often though he was quite presentable,\n even handsome in a startling sort of way.\"\n\n\n Thorton nodded brusquely. \"Presentable. Does that mean he had arms?\"\n\n\n \"Today he did. Is it important?\"",
"\"Maybe you can and maybe you can't,\" said Anti. \"But why make it\n difficult, why waste time?\"\n\n\n Docchi got up awkwardly but he wasn't clumsy once he was on his feet.\n \"I'll get Jordan. I know I'll need arms.\"\n\n\n \"Depends on what you mean,\" said Anti.\n\n\n \"Both,\" said Docchi, smiling. \"We're a dangerous weapon.\"\n\n\n She called out as he walked away. \"I'll see you when you leave for far\n Centauri.\"\n\n\n \"Sooner than that, Anti. Much sooner.\"",
"Doctor Cameron looked at him directly for the first time. It wasn't\n as bad as he expected. \"I suggest you calm down. Be patient and wait.\n You'll be surprised how often you get what you want.\"\n\n\n \"You'd be surprised how we get what we want,\" said Docchi. He turned\n away, lurching toward the door which opened automatically and closed\n behind him.\n\n\n Again Cameron concentrated on the desk, trying to look through it.\n He wrote down the sequence he expected to find, lingering over it to\n make sure he didn't force the pictures that came into his mind. He\n opened the drawer and compared the Rhine cards with what he'd written,\n frowning in disappointment. No matter how he tried he never got better\n than average results. Perhaps there was something to telepathy but he'd\n never found it. Anyway it was clear he wasn't one of the gifted few.",
"\"An asset? Very neat, if it can be done.\" The medicouncilor's\n expression said it couldn't be.\n\n\n \"Gland opera,\" said Cameron, hurrying on. \"The most popular program\n in the solar system, telepaths, teleports, pyrotics and so forth the\n heroes. Fake of course, makeup and trick camera shots.\n\n\n \"But Docchi can be made into a real star. The death-ray man, say. When\n his face shines men fall dead or paralyzed. He'd have a tremendous\n following of kids.\"\n\n\n \"Children,\" mused the medicouncilor. \"Are you serious about exposing\n them to his influence? Do you really want them to see him?\"\n\n\n \"He'd have a chance to return to society in a way that would be\n acceptable to him,\" said Cameron defensively. He shouldn't have\n specifically mentioned kids."
],
[
"\"I'll have to agree,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"But there's something that\n bothers me. I've looked over the records. No accidental has ever liked\n being here, and that covers quite a few years.\"\n\n\n \"Nobody appreciates the hospital until he's sick, doctor.\"\n\n\n \"I know. That's partly what's wrong. They're no longer ill and yet they\n have to stay here. What worries me is that there's never been such open\n discontent as now.\"\n\n\n \"I hope I don't have to point out that someone's stirring them up. Find\n out who and keep a close watch. As a doctor you can find pretexts, a\n different diet, a series of tests. You can keep the person coming to\n you every day.\"",
"The doctor got heavily to his feet—and he actually was heavier. It\n wasn't a psychological reaction. He made a mental note of it. He'd have\n to investigate the gravity surge.\n\n\n In a way accidentals were pathetic, patchwork humans, half or quarter\n men and women, fractional organisms which masqueraded as people. The\n illusion died hard for them, harder than that which remained of their\n bodies, and those bodies were unbelievably tough. Medicine and surgery\n were partly to blame. Techniques were too good or not good enough,\n depending on the viewpoint—doctor or patient.\n\n\n Too good in that the most horribly injured person, if he were found\n alive, could be kept alive. Not good enough because a certain per cent\n of the injured couldn't be returned to society completely sound and\n whole. The miracles of healing were incomplete.",
"Morosely he kicked an anemic tuft of grass. Plants didn't do well here\n either. They too were exiled, far from the sun, removed from the soil\n they originated in. The conditions they grew in were artificial. \"Why\n did they turn us down?\" said Docchi.\n\n\n \"Answer it yourself. Remember what the Medicouncil is like. Different\n things are important to them. The main thing is that we don't have to\n follow their example. There's no need to be irrational even though they\n are.\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew what to do,\" said Docchi. \"It meant so much to us.\"\n\n\n \"We can wait, outlast the attitude,\" said Anti, moving slowly. It was\n the only way she could move. Most of her bulk was beneath the surface.\n\n\n \"Cameron suggested waiting.\" Reflectively Docchi added: \"It's true we\n are biocompensators.\"",
"\"Every young doctor thinks the same,\" said the medicouncilor kindly.\n \"Usually they wait until their term is nearly up before they suggest\n that she'd respond better if she were returned to normal society. I\n think I know what response they have in mind.\" Thorton smiled in a\n fatherly fashion. \"No offense, doctor, but it happens so often I'm\n thinking of inserting a note in our briefing program. Something to the\n effect that the new medical director should avoid the beautiful and\n self-possessed moron.\"\n\n\n \"Is she stupid?\" asked Cameron stubbornly. \"It's my impression that\n she's not.\"\n\n\n \"Clever with her hands,\" agreed the medicouncilor. \"People in her\n mental classification, which is very low, sometimes are. But don't\n confuse manual dexterity with intelligence. For one thing she doesn't\n have the brain structure for the real article.",
"Cameron saw the time too but continued. It ought to be settled. It\n would do no good to bring up Helen Keller; the medicouncilor would\n use that evidence against him. The Keller techniques had been studied\n and reinterpreted for Nona's benefit. That much was in her medical\n record. They had been tried on Nona, and they hadn't worked. It made no\n difference that he, Cameron, thought there were certain flaws in the\n way the old techniques had been applied. Thorton would not allow that\n the previous practitioners could have been wrong. \"I've been wondering\n if we haven't tried to force her to conform. She can be intelligent\n without understanding what we say or knowing how to read and write.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" demanded the medicouncilor. \"The most important tool humans\n have is language. Through this we pass along all knowledge.\" Thorton\n paused, reflecting. \"Unless you're referring to this Gland Opera stuff\n you mentioned. I believe you are, though personally I prefer to call it\n Rhine Opera.\"",
"What they did want was ridiculous. They had talked about, hoped, and\n finally embodied it in a petition. They had requested rockets to make\n the first long hard journey to Alpha and Proxima Centauri. Man was\n restricted to the solar system and had no way of getting to even the\n nearest stars. They thought they could break through the barrier. Some\n accidentals would go and some would remain behind, lonelier except for\n their share in the dangerous enterprise.\n\n\n It was a particularly uncontrollable form of self-deception. They were\n the broken people, without a face they could call their own, who wore\n their hearts not on their sleeves but in a blood-pumping chamber, those\n without limbs or organs—or too many. The categories were endless. No\n accidental was like any other.",
"\"Then you know what he's like,\" said the medicouncilor, shaking his\n head. \"Our profession can't sponsor such a freakish display of his\n misfortune. No doubt he'd be successful on the program you mention. But\n there's more to life than financial achievement or the rather peculiar\n admiration that would be certain to follow him. As an actor he'd have a\n niche. But can you imagine, doctor, the dead silence that would occur\n when he walks into a social gathering of normal people?\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" said Cameron, though he didn't—not eye to eye. He didn't\n agree with Thorton but there wasn't much he could do to alter the\n other's conviction at the moment. There was a long fight ahead of him.\n \"I'll forget about Docchi. But there's another way to break up the\n group.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor interrupted. \"Nona?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I'm not sure she really belongs here.\"",
"\"They always bring in biocompensation,\" muttered Anti restlessly. \"I'm\n getting tired of that excuse. Time passes just as slow.\"\n\n\n \"But what else is there? Shall we draw up another request?\"\n\n\n \"Memorandum number ten? Let's not be naive. Things get lost when we\n send them to the Medicouncil. Their filing system is in terrible shape.\"\n\n\n \"Lost or distorted,\" grunted Docchi angrily. The grass he'd kicked\n already had begun to wilt. It wasn't hardy in this environment. Few\n things were.\n\n\n \"Maybe we ought to give the Medicouncil a rest. I'm sure they don't\n want to hear from us again.\"",
"He shut the drawer. It was a private game, a method to keep from\n becoming involved in Docchi's problems, to avoid emotional entanglement\n with people he had nothing in common with. He didn't enjoy depriving\n weak and helpless men and women of what little hope they had. It was\n their lack of strength that made them so difficult to handle.\n\n\n He reached for the telecom. \"Get Medicouncilor Thorton,\" he told the\n operator. \"Direct if you can; indirect if you have to. I'll hold on.\"\n\n\n Approximate mean diameter thirty miles, the asteroid was listed on the\n charts as Handicap Haven with a mark that indicated except in emergency\n no one not authorized was to land there. Those who were confined to it\n were willing to admit they were handicapped but they didn't call it\n haven. They used other terms, none suggesting sanctuary.",
"\"Sure,\" said Docchi. \"We'll wait and wait until it's finally changed.\n We've got centuries, haven't we?\" His face was blazing. It had slipped\n out of control though he wasn't aware of it. Beneath the skin certain\n cells had been modified, there were substances in his body that the\n ordinary individual didn't have. And when there was an extreme flow of\n nervous energy the response was—light. His metabolism was akin to that\n of a firefly.\n\n\n Cameron meddled with buttons. It was impossible to keep the lighting at\n a decent level. Docchi was a nuisance.\n\n\n \"Why?\" questioned Docchi. \"We're capable, you know that. How could they\n refuse?\"\n\n\n That was something he didn't want asked because there was no answer\n both of them would accept. Sometimes a blunt reply was the best\n evasion. \"Do you think they'd take you? Or Nona, Jordan, or Anti?\"",
"Docchi moved closer to the pool. \"Then you think we should go ahead\n with the plan we discussed before we sent in the petition? Good. I'll\n call the others together and tell them what happened. They'll agree\n that we have to do it.\"\n\n\n \"Then why call them? More talk, that's all. Besides I don't see why we\n should warn Cameron what we're up to.\"\n\n\n Docchi glanced at her worriedly. \"Do you think someone would report it?\n I'm certain everyone feels as I do.\"\n\n\n \"Not everyone. There's bound to be dissent,\" said Anti placidly. \"But I\n wasn't thinking of people.\"\n\n\n \"Oh that,\" said Docchi. \"We can block that source any time we need to.\"\n It was a relief to know that he could trust the accidentals. Unanimity\n was important and some of the reasons weren't obvious.",
"Docchi winced, his arms quivering uselessly. \"Maybe not. But we told\n you we're willing to let experts decide. There's nearly a thousand of\n us. They should be able to get one qualified crew.\"\n\n\n \"Perhaps. I'm not going to say.\" Cameron abandoned the light as beyond\n his control. \"Most of you are biocompensators. I concede it's a factor\n in your favor. But you must realize there are many things against you.\"\n He squinted at the desk top. Below the solid surface there was a drawer\n and in the drawer there was—that was what he was trying to see or\n determine. The more he looked the less clear anything seemed to be. He\n tried to make his voice crisp and professional. \"You're wasting time\n discussing this with me. I've merely passed the decision on. I'm not\n responsible for it and I can't do anything for you.\"\n\n\n Docchi stood up, his face colorless and bright. But the inner\n illumination was no indication of hope.",
"\"An asset? Very neat, if it can be done.\" The medicouncilor's\n expression said it couldn't be.\n\n\n \"Gland opera,\" said Cameron, hurrying on. \"The most popular program\n in the solar system, telepaths, teleports, pyrotics and so forth the\n heroes. Fake of course, makeup and trick camera shots.\n\n\n \"But Docchi can be made into a real star. The death-ray man, say. When\n his face shines men fall dead or paralyzed. He'd have a tremendous\n following of kids.\"\n\n\n \"Children,\" mused the medicouncilor. \"Are you serious about exposing\n them to his influence? Do you really want them to see him?\"\n\n\n \"He'd have a chance to return to society in a way that would be\n acceptable to him,\" said Cameron defensively. He shouldn't have\n specifically mentioned kids.",
"The doctor kept his eyes averted. The man was damnably\n disconcerting—had no right to be alive. In the depths of the sea there\n were certain creatures like him and on a warm summer evening there was\n still another parallel, but never any human with such an infirmity.\n \"I'm afraid you know what the answer is. A flat no for the present.\"\n\n\n Docchi sagged and his arms hung limp. \"That's the answer?\"\n\n\n \"It's not as hopeless as you think. Decisions can be changed. It won't\n be the first time.\"",
"The self-deception was vicious precisely because the accidentals\nwere\nqualified. Of all the billions of solar citizens\nthey alone could make\n the long journey there and return\n. But there were other factors that\n ruled them out. It was never safe to discuss the first reason with them\n because the second would have to be explained. Cameron himself wasn't\n sadistic and no one else was interested enough to inform them.\n2\nDocchi sat beside the pool. It would be pleasant if he could forget\n where he was. It was pastoral though not quite a scene from Earth. The\n horizon was too near and the sky was shallow and only seemed to be\n bright. Darkness lurked outside.\n\n\n A small tree stretched shade overhead. Waves lapped and made gurgling\n sounds against the banks. But there was no plant life of any kind, and\n no fish swam in the liquid. It looked like water but wasn't—the pool\n held acid. And floating in it, all but submerged, was a shape. The\n records in the hospital said it was a woman.",
"\"I'm glad you're enthusiastic. But don't lose sight of the main\n objective. Even if she\nis\ntelepathic, and so far as we're concerned\n she's not, would she be better suited to life outside?\"\n\n\n He had one answer—but the medicouncilor believed in another. \"Perhaps\n you're right. She'll have to stay here no matter what happens.\"\n\n\n \"She will. It would solve your problems if you could break up the\n group, but don't count on it. You'll have to learn to manage them as\n they are.\"\n\n\n \"I'll see that they don't cause any trouble,\" said Cameron.\n\n\n \"I'm sure you will.\" The medicouncilor's manner didn't ooze confidence.\n \"If you need help we can send in reinforcements.\"",
"\"To him, perhaps,\" reflected the medicouncilor. \"It's an ingenious\n idea, doctor, one which does credit to your humanitarianism. But I'm\n afraid of the public's reception. Have you gone into Docchi's medical\n history?\"\n\n\n \"I glanced at it before I called him in.\" The man was unusual,\n even in a place that specialized in the abnormal. Docchi had been\n an electrochemical engineer with a degree in cold lighting. On his\n way to a brilliant career, he had been the victim of a particularly\n messy accident. The details hadn't been described but Cameron could\n supplement them with his imagination. He'd been badly mangled and\n tossed into a tank of the basic cold lighting fluid.",
"\"Anti, they turned us down,\" said Docchi bitterly.\n\n\n \"What did you expect?\" rumbled the creature in the pool. Wavelets of\n acid danced across the surface, stirred by her voice.\n\n\n \"I didn't expect that.\"\n\n\n \"You don't know the Medicouncil very well.\"\n\n\n \"I guess I don't.\" He stared sullenly at the fluid. It was faintly\n blue. \"I have the feeling they didn't consider it, that they held the\n request for a time and then answered no without looking at it.\"\n\n\n \"Now you're beginning to learn. Wait till you've been here as long as I\n have.\"",
"There weren't many humans who were broken beyond repair, but though\n the details varied in every respect, the results were monotonously\n the same. For the most part disease had been eliminated. Everyone was\n healthy—except those who'd been hurt in accidents and who couldn't be\n resurgeried and regenerated into the beautiful mold characteristic of\n the entire population. And those few were sent to the asteroid.\n\n\n They didn't like it. They didn't like being\nconfined\nto Handicap\n Haven. They were sensitive and they didn't want to go back. They knew\n how conspicuous they'd be, hobbling and crawling among the multitudes\n of beautiful men and women who inhabited the planets. The accidentals\n didn't want to return.",
"\"It's not\nsupposed\nto work that way but nobody's ever done better\n with a setup like this,\" said Vogel defensively. \"If you want you can\n check the company that makes these units.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not trying to challenge your knowledge and I'm not anxious to make\n myself look silly. I do want to make sure I don't overlook anything.\n You see, I think there's a possibility of sabotage.\"\n\n\n The engineer's grin was wider than the remark required.\n\n\n Cameron swiveled the chair around and leaned on the desk. \"All right,\"\n he said tiredly, \"tell me why the idea of sabotage is so funny.\"\n\n\n \"It would have to be someone living here,\" said the big engineer. \"He\n wouldn't like it if it jumped up to nine G, which it could. I think\n he'd let it alone. But there are better reasons. Do you know how each\n gravity unit is put together?\""
],
[
"\"Maybe you can and maybe you can't,\" said Anti. \"But why make it\n difficult, why waste time?\"\n\n\n Docchi got up awkwardly but he wasn't clumsy once he was on his feet.\n \"I'll get Jordan. I know I'll need arms.\"\n\n\n \"Depends on what you mean,\" said Anti.\n\n\n \"Both,\" said Docchi, smiling. \"We're a dangerous weapon.\"\n\n\n She called out as he walked away. \"I'll see you when you leave for far\n Centauri.\"\n\n\n \"Sooner than that, Anti. Much sooner.\"",
"Docchi moved closer to the pool. \"Then you think we should go ahead\n with the plan we discussed before we sent in the petition? Good. I'll\n call the others together and tell them what happened. They'll agree\n that we have to do it.\"\n\n\n \"Then why call them? More talk, that's all. Besides I don't see why we\n should warn Cameron what we're up to.\"\n\n\n Docchi glanced at her worriedly. \"Do you think someone would report it?\n I'm certain everyone feels as I do.\"\n\n\n \"Not everyone. There's bound to be dissent,\" said Anti placidly. \"But I\n wasn't thinking of people.\"\n\n\n \"Oh that,\" said Docchi. \"We can block that source any time we need to.\"\n It was a relief to know that he could trust the accidentals. Unanimity\n was important and some of the reasons weren't obvious.",
"Morosely he kicked an anemic tuft of grass. Plants didn't do well here\n either. They too were exiled, far from the sun, removed from the soil\n they originated in. The conditions they grew in were artificial. \"Why\n did they turn us down?\" said Docchi.\n\n\n \"Answer it yourself. Remember what the Medicouncil is like. Different\n things are important to them. The main thing is that we don't have to\n follow their example. There's no need to be irrational even though they\n are.\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew what to do,\" said Docchi. \"It meant so much to us.\"\n\n\n \"We can wait, outlast the attitude,\" said Anti, moving slowly. It was\n the only way she could move. Most of her bulk was beneath the surface.\n\n\n \"Cameron suggested waiting.\" Reflectively Docchi added: \"It's true we\n are biocompensators.\"",
"\"Anti, they turned us down,\" said Docchi bitterly.\n\n\n \"What did you expect?\" rumbled the creature in the pool. Wavelets of\n acid danced across the surface, stirred by her voice.\n\n\n \"I didn't expect that.\"\n\n\n \"You don't know the Medicouncil very well.\"\n\n\n \"I guess I don't.\" He stared sullenly at the fluid. It was faintly\n blue. \"I have the feeling they didn't consider it, that they held the\n request for a time and then answered no without looking at it.\"\n\n\n \"Now you're beginning to learn. Wait till you've been here as long as I\n have.\"",
"\"Sure,\" said Docchi. \"We'll wait and wait until it's finally changed.\n We've got centuries, haven't we?\" His face was blazing. It had slipped\n out of control though he wasn't aware of it. Beneath the skin certain\n cells had been modified, there were substances in his body that the\n ordinary individual didn't have. And when there was an extreme flow of\n nervous energy the response was—light. His metabolism was akin to that\n of a firefly.\n\n\n Cameron meddled with buttons. It was impossible to keep the lighting at\n a decent level. Docchi was a nuisance.\n\n\n \"Why?\" questioned Docchi. \"We're capable, you know that. How could they\n refuse?\"\n\n\n That was something he didn't want asked because there was no answer\n both of them would accept. Sometimes a blunt reply was the best\n evasion. \"Do you think they'd take you? Or Nona, Jordan, or Anti?\"",
"\"This morning. I saw no reason to hold it up. I just finished giving\n Docchi the news.\"\n\n\n \"Dispatch. I like that. Get the disagreeable job done with.\" The\n medicouncilor searched through the desk in front of him without\n success. \"Never mind. I'll find the information later. Now. How did\n Docchi react?\"\n\n\n \"He didn't like it. He was mad clear through.\"\n\n\n \"That speaks well for his bounce.\"\n\n\n \"They all have spirit. Nothing to use it on,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"I\n confess I didn't look at him often though he was quite presentable,\n even handsome in a startling sort of way.\"\n\n\n Thorton nodded brusquely. \"Presentable. Does that mean he had arms?\"\n\n\n \"Today he did. Is it important?\"",
"\"I've found out. There's a self-elected group of four, Docchi, Nona,\n Anti and Jordan. I believe they're supposed to be the local recreation\n committee.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor smiled. \"An apt camouflage. It keeps them amused.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so too but now I'm convinced they're no longer harmless. I'd\n like permission to break up the group. Humanely of course.\"\n\n\n \"I always welcome new ideas.\"\n\n\n In spite of what he'd said the medicouncilor probably did have an open\n mind. \"Start with those it's possible to do the most with. Docchi,\n for instance. With prosthetic arms, he appears normal except for that\n uncanny fluorescence. Granted that the last is repulsive to the average\n person. We can't correct the condition medically but we can make it\n into an asset.\"",
"Docchi winced, his arms quivering uselessly. \"Maybe not. But we told\n you we're willing to let experts decide. There's nearly a thousand of\n us. They should be able to get one qualified crew.\"\n\n\n \"Perhaps. I'm not going to say.\" Cameron abandoned the light as beyond\n his control. \"Most of you are biocompensators. I concede it's a factor\n in your favor. But you must realize there are many things against you.\"\n He squinted at the desk top. Below the solid surface there was a drawer\n and in the drawer there was—that was what he was trying to see or\n determine. The more he looked the less clear anything seemed to be. He\n tried to make his voice crisp and professional. \"You're wasting time\n discussing this with me. I've merely passed the decision on. I'm not\n responsible for it and I can't do anything for you.\"\n\n\n Docchi stood up, his face colorless and bright. But the inner\n illumination was no indication of hope.",
"\"Then you know what he's like,\" said the medicouncilor, shaking his\n head. \"Our profession can't sponsor such a freakish display of his\n misfortune. No doubt he'd be successful on the program you mention. But\n there's more to life than financial achievement or the rather peculiar\n admiration that would be certain to follow him. As an actor he'd have a\n niche. But can you imagine, doctor, the dead silence that would occur\n when he walks into a social gathering of normal people?\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" said Cameron, though he didn't—not eye to eye. He didn't\n agree with Thorton but there wasn't much he could do to alter the\n other's conviction at the moment. There was a long fight ahead of him.\n \"I'll forget about Docchi. But there's another way to break up the\n group.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor interrupted. \"Nona?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I'm not sure she really belongs here.\"",
"\"To him, perhaps,\" reflected the medicouncilor. \"It's an ingenious\n idea, doctor, one which does credit to your humanitarianism. But I'm\n afraid of the public's reception. Have you gone into Docchi's medical\n history?\"\n\n\n \"I glanced at it before I called him in.\" The man was unusual,\n even in a place that specialized in the abnormal. Docchi had been\n an electrochemical engineer with a degree in cold lighting. On his\n way to a brilliant career, he had been the victim of a particularly\n messy accident. The details hadn't been described but Cameron could\n supplement them with his imagination. He'd been badly mangled and\n tossed into a tank of the basic cold lighting fluid.",
"The doctor kept his eyes averted. The man was damnably\n disconcerting—had no right to be alive. In the depths of the sea there\n were certain creatures like him and on a warm summer evening there was\n still another parallel, but never any human with such an infirmity.\n \"I'm afraid you know what the answer is. A flat no for the present.\"\n\n\n Docchi sagged and his arms hung limp. \"That's the answer?\"\n\n\n \"It's not as hopeless as you think. Decisions can be changed. It won't\n be the first time.\"",
"The self-deception was vicious precisely because the accidentals\nwere\nqualified. Of all the billions of solar citizens\nthey alone could make\n the long journey there and return\n. But there were other factors that\n ruled them out. It was never safe to discuss the first reason with them\n because the second would have to be explained. Cameron himself wasn't\n sadistic and no one else was interested enough to inform them.\n2\nDocchi sat beside the pool. It would be pleasant if he could forget\n where he was. It was pastoral though not quite a scene from Earth. The\n horizon was too near and the sky was shallow and only seemed to be\n bright. Darkness lurked outside.\n\n\n A small tree stretched shade overhead. Waves lapped and made gurgling\n sounds against the banks. But there was no plant life of any kind, and\n no fish swam in the liquid. It looked like water but wasn't—the pool\n held acid. And floating in it, all but submerged, was a shape. The\n records in the hospital said it was a woman.",
"\"They always bring in biocompensation,\" muttered Anti restlessly. \"I'm\n getting tired of that excuse. Time passes just as slow.\"\n\n\n \"But what else is there? Shall we draw up another request?\"\n\n\n \"Memorandum number ten? Let's not be naive. Things get lost when we\n send them to the Medicouncil. Their filing system is in terrible shape.\"\n\n\n \"Lost or distorted,\" grunted Docchi angrily. The grass he'd kicked\n already had begun to wilt. It wasn't hardy in this environment. Few\n things were.\n\n\n \"Maybe we ought to give the Medicouncil a rest. I'm sure they don't\n want to hear from us again.\"",
"Doctor Cameron looked at him directly for the first time. It wasn't\n as bad as he expected. \"I suggest you calm down. Be patient and wait.\n You'll be surprised how often you get what you want.\"\n\n\n \"You'd be surprised how we get what we want,\" said Docchi. He turned\n away, lurching toward the door which opened automatically and closed\n behind him.\n\n\n Again Cameron concentrated on the desk, trying to look through it.\n He wrote down the sequence he expected to find, lingering over it to\n make sure he didn't force the pictures that came into his mind. He\n opened the drawer and compared the Rhine cards with what he'd written,\n frowning in disappointment. No matter how he tried he never got better\n than average results. Perhaps there was something to telepathy but he'd\n never found it. Anyway it was clear he wasn't one of the gifted few.",
"There was life left in the body; it flickered but never went entirely\n out. His arms were gone and his ribs were crushed into his spinal\n column. Regeneration wasn't easy; a partial rib cage could be built up,\n but no more than that. He had no shoulder muscles and only a minimum\n in his back and now, much later, that was why he tired easily and why\n the prosthetic arms with which he'd been fitted were merely ornamental,\n there was nothing which could move them.\n\n\n And then there was the cold lighting fluid. To begin with it was\n semi-organic which, perhaps, was the reason he had remained alive so\n long when he should have died. It had preserved him, had in part\n replaced his blood, permeating every tissue. By the time Docchi had\n been found his body had adapted to the cold lighting substance. And the\n adaptation couldn't be reversed and it was self-perpetuating. Life was\n hardier than most men realized but occasionally it was also perverse.",
"\"An asset? Very neat, if it can be done.\" The medicouncilor's\n expression said it couldn't be.\n\n\n \"Gland opera,\" said Cameron, hurrying on. \"The most popular program\n in the solar system, telepaths, teleports, pyrotics and so forth the\n heroes. Fake of course, makeup and trick camera shots.\n\n\n \"But Docchi can be made into a real star. The death-ray man, say. When\n his face shines men fall dead or paralyzed. He'd have a tremendous\n following of kids.\"\n\n\n \"Children,\" mused the medicouncilor. \"Are you serious about exposing\n them to his influence? Do you really want them to see him?\"\n\n\n \"He'd have a chance to return to society in a way that would be\n acceptable to him,\" said Cameron defensively. He shouldn't have\n specifically mentioned kids.",
"He shut the drawer. It was a private game, a method to keep from\n becoming involved in Docchi's problems, to avoid emotional entanglement\n with people he had nothing in common with. He didn't enjoy depriving\n weak and helpless men and women of what little hope they had. It was\n their lack of strength that made them so difficult to handle.\n\n\n He reached for the telecom. \"Get Medicouncilor Thorton,\" he told the\n operator. \"Direct if you can; indirect if you have to. I'll hold on.\"\n\n\n Approximate mean diameter thirty miles, the asteroid was listed on the\n charts as Handicap Haven with a mark that indicated except in emergency\n no one not authorized was to land there. Those who were confined to it\n were willing to admit they were handicapped but they didn't call it\n haven. They used other terms, none suggesting sanctuary.",
"The doctor got heavily to his feet—and he actually was heavier. It\n wasn't a psychological reaction. He made a mental note of it. He'd have\n to investigate the gravity surge.\n\n\n In a way accidentals were pathetic, patchwork humans, half or quarter\n men and women, fractional organisms which masqueraded as people. The\n illusion died hard for them, harder than that which remained of their\n bodies, and those bodies were unbelievably tough. Medicine and surgery\n were partly to blame. Techniques were too good or not good enough,\n depending on the viewpoint—doctor or patient.\n\n\n Too good in that the most horribly injured person, if he were found\n alive, could be kept alive. Not good enough because a certain per cent\n of the injured couldn't be returned to society completely sound and\n whole. The miracles of healing were incomplete.",
"\"I'll have to agree,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"But there's something that\n bothers me. I've looked over the records. No accidental has ever liked\n being here, and that covers quite a few years.\"\n\n\n \"Nobody appreciates the hospital until he's sick, doctor.\"\n\n\n \"I know. That's partly what's wrong. They're no longer ill and yet they\n have to stay here. What worries me is that there's never been such open\n discontent as now.\"\n\n\n \"I hope I don't have to point out that someone's stirring them up. Find\n out who and keep a close watch. As a doctor you can find pretexts, a\n different diet, a series of tests. You can keep the person coming to\n you every day.\"",
"\"Every young doctor thinks the same,\" said the medicouncilor kindly.\n \"Usually they wait until their term is nearly up before they suggest\n that she'd respond better if she were returned to normal society. I\n think I know what response they have in mind.\" Thorton smiled in a\n fatherly fashion. \"No offense, doctor, but it happens so often I'm\n thinking of inserting a note in our briefing program. Something to the\n effect that the new medical director should avoid the beautiful and\n self-possessed moron.\"\n\n\n \"Is she stupid?\" asked Cameron stubbornly. \"It's my impression that\n she's not.\"\n\n\n \"Clever with her hands,\" agreed the medicouncilor. \"People in her\n mental classification, which is very low, sometimes are. But don't\n confuse manual dexterity with intelligence. For one thing she doesn't\n have the brain structure for the real article."
],
[
"Doctor Cameron looked at him directly for the first time. It wasn't\n as bad as he expected. \"I suggest you calm down. Be patient and wait.\n You'll be surprised how often you get what you want.\"\n\n\n \"You'd be surprised how we get what we want,\" said Docchi. He turned\n away, lurching toward the door which opened automatically and closed\n behind him.\n\n\n Again Cameron concentrated on the desk, trying to look through it.\n He wrote down the sequence he expected to find, lingering over it to\n make sure he didn't force the pictures that came into his mind. He\n opened the drawer and compared the Rhine cards with what he'd written,\n frowning in disappointment. No matter how he tried he never got better\n than average results. Perhaps there was something to telepathy but he'd\n never found it. Anyway it was clear he wasn't one of the gifted few.",
"\"Then you know what he's like,\" said the medicouncilor, shaking his\n head. \"Our profession can't sponsor such a freakish display of his\n misfortune. No doubt he'd be successful on the program you mention. But\n there's more to life than financial achievement or the rather peculiar\n admiration that would be certain to follow him. As an actor he'd have a\n niche. But can you imagine, doctor, the dead silence that would occur\n when he walks into a social gathering of normal people?\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" said Cameron, though he didn't—not eye to eye. He didn't\n agree with Thorton but there wasn't much he could do to alter the\n other's conviction at the moment. There was a long fight ahead of him.\n \"I'll forget about Docchi. But there's another way to break up the\n group.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor interrupted. \"Nona?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I'm not sure she really belongs here.\"",
"Cameron saw the time too but continued. It ought to be settled. It\n would do no good to bring up Helen Keller; the medicouncilor would\n use that evidence against him. The Keller techniques had been studied\n and reinterpreted for Nona's benefit. That much was in her medical\n record. They had been tried on Nona, and they hadn't worked. It made no\n difference that he, Cameron, thought there were certain flaws in the\n way the old techniques had been applied. Thorton would not allow that\n the previous practitioners could have been wrong. \"I've been wondering\n if we haven't tried to force her to conform. She can be intelligent\n without understanding what we say or knowing how to read and write.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" demanded the medicouncilor. \"The most important tool humans\n have is language. Through this we pass along all knowledge.\" Thorton\n paused, reflecting. \"Unless you're referring to this Gland Opera stuff\n you mentioned. I believe you are, though personally I prefer to call it\n Rhine Opera.\"",
"\"Every young doctor thinks the same,\" said the medicouncilor kindly.\n \"Usually they wait until their term is nearly up before they suggest\n that she'd respond better if she were returned to normal society. I\n think I know what response they have in mind.\" Thorton smiled in a\n fatherly fashion. \"No offense, doctor, but it happens so often I'm\n thinking of inserting a note in our briefing program. Something to the\n effect that the new medical director should avoid the beautiful and\n self-possessed moron.\"\n\n\n \"Is she stupid?\" asked Cameron stubbornly. \"It's my impression that\n she's not.\"\n\n\n \"Clever with her hands,\" agreed the medicouncilor. \"People in her\n mental classification, which is very low, sometimes are. But don't\n confuse manual dexterity with intelligence. For one thing she doesn't\n have the brain structure for the real article.",
"\"I'm glad you're enthusiastic. But don't lose sight of the main\n objective. Even if she\nis\ntelepathic, and so far as we're concerned\n she's not, would she be better suited to life outside?\"\n\n\n He had one answer—but the medicouncilor believed in another. \"Perhaps\n you're right. She'll have to stay here no matter what happens.\"\n\n\n \"She will. It would solve your problems if you could break up the\n group, but don't count on it. You'll have to learn to manage them as\n they are.\"\n\n\n \"I'll see that they don't cause any trouble,\" said Cameron.\n\n\n \"I'm sure you will.\" The medicouncilor's manner didn't ooze confidence.\n \"If you need help we can send in reinforcements.\"",
"\"I've been thinking of that,\" admitted Cameron. \"Maybe if there was\n someone else like her she wouldn't need to talk the way we do. Anyway\n I'd like to make some tests, with your permission. I'll need some new\n equipment.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor found the sheet he'd been looking for from time\n to time. He creased it absently. \"Go ahead with those tests if it\n will make you feel better. I'll personally approve the requisition.\n It doesn't mean you'll get everything you want. Others have to sign\n too. However you ought to know you're not the first to think she's\n telepathic or something related to that phenomena.\"\n\n\n \"I've seen that in the record too. But I think I can be the first one\n to prove it.\"",
"The self-deception was vicious precisely because the accidentals\nwere\nqualified. Of all the billions of solar citizens\nthey alone could make\n the long journey there and return\n. But there were other factors that\n ruled them out. It was never safe to discuss the first reason with them\n because the second would have to be explained. Cameron himself wasn't\n sadistic and no one else was interested enough to inform them.\n2\nDocchi sat beside the pool. It would be pleasant if he could forget\n where he was. It was pastoral though not quite a scene from Earth. The\n horizon was too near and the sky was shallow and only seemed to be\n bright. Darkness lurked outside.\n\n\n A small tree stretched shade overhead. Waves lapped and made gurgling\n sounds against the banks. But there was no plant life of any kind, and\n no fish swam in the liquid. It looked like water but wasn't—the pool\n held acid. And floating in it, all but submerged, was a shape. The\n records in the hospital said it was a woman.",
"\"An asset? Very neat, if it can be done.\" The medicouncilor's\n expression said it couldn't be.\n\n\n \"Gland opera,\" said Cameron, hurrying on. \"The most popular program\n in the solar system, telepaths, teleports, pyrotics and so forth the\n heroes. Fake of course, makeup and trick camera shots.\n\n\n \"But Docchi can be made into a real star. The death-ray man, say. When\n his face shines men fall dead or paralyzed. He'd have a tremendous\n following of kids.\"\n\n\n \"Children,\" mused the medicouncilor. \"Are you serious about exposing\n them to his influence? Do you really want them to see him?\"\n\n\n \"He'd have a chance to return to society in a way that would be\n acceptable to him,\" said Cameron defensively. He shouldn't have\n specifically mentioned kids.",
"\"This morning. I saw no reason to hold it up. I just finished giving\n Docchi the news.\"\n\n\n \"Dispatch. I like that. Get the disagreeable job done with.\" The\n medicouncilor searched through the desk in front of him without\n success. \"Never mind. I'll find the information later. Now. How did\n Docchi react?\"\n\n\n \"He didn't like it. He was mad clear through.\"\n\n\n \"That speaks well for his bounce.\"\n\n\n \"They all have spirit. Nothing to use it on,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"I\n confess I didn't look at him often though he was quite presentable,\n even handsome in a startling sort of way.\"\n\n\n Thorton nodded brusquely. \"Presentable. Does that mean he had arms?\"\n\n\n \"Today he did. Is it important?\"",
"It was inconvenient to wait several minutes for each reply. Besides the\n medicouncilor couldn't or wouldn't help him. He wanted the status quo\n maintained; nothing else would satisfy him. It was the function of the\n medical director to see that it was. \"We're through,\" said Cameron.\n\n\n He sat there after the telecom clicked off. What were the deficients\n the medicouncilor had talked about? A subdivision of the accidentals\n of course, but it wasn't a medical term he was familiar with. Probably\n a semi-slang description. The medicouncilor had been associated with\n accidentals so long that he assumed every doctor would know at once\n what he meant.\n\n\n Deficients. Mentally Cameron turned the word over. If it was\n used accurately it could indicate only one thing. He'd see when\n the medicouncilor's report came in. He could always ask for more\n information if it wasn't clear.",
"Docchi winced, his arms quivering uselessly. \"Maybe not. But we told\n you we're willing to let experts decide. There's nearly a thousand of\n us. They should be able to get one qualified crew.\"\n\n\n \"Perhaps. I'm not going to say.\" Cameron abandoned the light as beyond\n his control. \"Most of you are biocompensators. I concede it's a factor\n in your favor. But you must realize there are many things against you.\"\n He squinted at the desk top. Below the solid surface there was a drawer\n and in the drawer there was—that was what he was trying to see or\n determine. The more he looked the less clear anything seemed to be. He\n tried to make his voice crisp and professional. \"You're wasting time\n discussing this with me. I've merely passed the decision on. I'm not\n responsible for it and I can't do anything for you.\"\n\n\n Docchi stood up, his face colorless and bright. But the inner\n illumination was no indication of hope.",
"\"Sure,\" said Docchi. \"We'll wait and wait until it's finally changed.\n We've got centuries, haven't we?\" His face was blazing. It had slipped\n out of control though he wasn't aware of it. Beneath the skin certain\n cells had been modified, there were substances in his body that the\n ordinary individual didn't have. And when there was an extreme flow of\n nervous energy the response was—light. His metabolism was akin to that\n of a firefly.\n\n\n Cameron meddled with buttons. It was impossible to keep the lighting at\n a decent level. Docchi was a nuisance.\n\n\n \"Why?\" questioned Docchi. \"We're capable, you know that. How could they\n refuse?\"\n\n\n That was something he didn't want asked because there was no answer\n both of them would accept. Sometimes a blunt reply was the best\n evasion. \"Do you think they'd take you? Or Nona, Jordan, or Anti?\"",
"Docchi moved closer to the pool. \"Then you think we should go ahead\n with the plan we discussed before we sent in the petition? Good. I'll\n call the others together and tell them what happened. They'll agree\n that we have to do it.\"\n\n\n \"Then why call them? More talk, that's all. Besides I don't see why we\n should warn Cameron what we're up to.\"\n\n\n Docchi glanced at her worriedly. \"Do you think someone would report it?\n I'm certain everyone feels as I do.\"\n\n\n \"Not everyone. There's bound to be dissent,\" said Anti placidly. \"But I\n wasn't thinking of people.\"\n\n\n \"Oh that,\" said Docchi. \"We can block that source any time we need to.\"\n It was a relief to know that he could trust the accidentals. Unanimity\n was important and some of the reasons weren't obvious.",
"\"I'll have to agree,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"But there's something that\n bothers me. I've looked over the records. No accidental has ever liked\n being here, and that covers quite a few years.\"\n\n\n \"Nobody appreciates the hospital until he's sick, doctor.\"\n\n\n \"I know. That's partly what's wrong. They're no longer ill and yet they\n have to stay here. What worries me is that there's never been such open\n discontent as now.\"\n\n\n \"I hope I don't have to point out that someone's stirring them up. Find\n out who and keep a close watch. As a doctor you can find pretexts, a\n different diet, a series of tests. You can keep the person coming to\n you every day.\"",
"\"It's not\nsupposed\nto work that way but nobody's ever done better\n with a setup like this,\" said Vogel defensively. \"If you want you can\n check the company that makes these units.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not trying to challenge your knowledge and I'm not anxious to make\n myself look silly. I do want to make sure I don't overlook anything.\n You see, I think there's a possibility of sabotage.\"\n\n\n The engineer's grin was wider than the remark required.\n\n\n Cameron swiveled the chair around and leaned on the desk. \"All right,\"\n he said tiredly, \"tell me why the idea of sabotage is so funny.\"\n\n\n \"It would have to be someone living here,\" said the big engineer. \"He\n wouldn't like it if it jumped up to nine G, which it could. I think\n he'd let it alone. But there are better reasons. Do you know how each\n gravity unit is put together?\"",
"Stars were beginning to wink. Twilight brought out the shadows and\n tracery of the structure that supported the transparent dome overhead.\n Soon controlled slow rotation would bring near darkness to this side of\n the asteroid. The sun was small at this distance but even so it was a\n tie to the familiar scenes of Earth. Before long it would be lost.\nCameron leaned back and looked speculatively at the gravity engineer,\n Vogel. The engineer could give him considerable assistance. There was\n no reason why he shouldn't but anyone who voluntarily had remained\n on the asteroid as long as Vogel was a doubtful quantity. He didn't\n distrust him, the man was strange.\n\n\n \"I've been busy trying to keep the place running smoothly. I hope you\n don't mind that I haven't been able to discuss your job at length,\"\n said the doctor, watching him closely.",
"Morosely he kicked an anemic tuft of grass. Plants didn't do well here\n either. They too were exiled, far from the sun, removed from the soil\n they originated in. The conditions they grew in were artificial. \"Why\n did they turn us down?\" said Docchi.\n\n\n \"Answer it yourself. Remember what the Medicouncil is like. Different\n things are important to them. The main thing is that we don't have to\n follow their example. There's no need to be irrational even though they\n are.\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew what to do,\" said Docchi. \"It meant so much to us.\"\n\n\n \"We can wait, outlast the attitude,\" said Anti, moving slowly. It was\n the only way she could move. Most of her bulk was beneath the surface.\n\n\n \"Cameron suggested waiting.\" Reflectively Docchi added: \"It's true we\n are biocompensators.\"",
"\"I don't anticipate that much difficulty,\" said Cameron hastily. \"I'll\n keep them running around in circles.\"\n\n\n \"Confusion is the best policy,\" agreed the medicouncilor. He unfolded\n the sheet and looked down at it. \"Oh yes, before it's too late I'd\n better tell you I'm sending details of new treatments for a number of\n deficients——\"\n\n\n The picture collapsed into meaningless swirls of color. For an instant\n the voice was distinguishable again before it too was drowned by noise.\n \"Did you understand what I said, doctor? If it isn't clear contact me.\n Deviation can be fatal.\"\n\n\n \"I can't keep the ship in focus,\" said the robot. \"If you wish to\n continue the conversation it will have to be relayed through the\n nearest main station. At present that's Mars.\"",
"\"She's definitely not normal. She can't talk or hear, and never will.\n Her larynx is missing and though we could replace it, it wouldn't\n help if we did. We'd have to change her entire brain structure to\n accommodate it and we're not that good at the present.\"\n\n\n \"I was thinking about the nerve dissimilarities,\" began Cameron.\n\n\n \"A superior mutation, is that what you were going to say? You can\n forget that. It's much more of an anomaly, in the nature of cleft\n palates, which were once common—poor pre-natal nutrition or traumas.\n These we can correct rather easily but Nona is surgically beyond us.\n There always is something beyond us, you know.\" The medicouncilor\n glanced at the chronometer beside him.",
"\"I think so. He expected a favorable reply and wanted to look his\n best, as nearly normal as possible. In view of that I'm surprised he\n didn't threaten you.\"\n\n\n Cameron tried to recall the incident. \"I think he did, mildly. He said\n something to the effect that I'd be surprised how\nthey\ngot what they\n wanted.\"\n\n\n \"So you anticipate trouble. That's why you called?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. I want your opinion.\"\n\n\n \"You're on the scene, doctor. You get the important nuances,\" said\n the medicouncilor hastily. \"However it's my considered judgment they\n won't start anything immediately. It takes time to get over the shock\n of refusal. They can't do anything. Individually they're helpless\n and collectively there aren't parts for a dozen sound bodies on the\n asteroid.\""
],
[
"\"This morning. I saw no reason to hold it up. I just finished giving\n Docchi the news.\"\n\n\n \"Dispatch. I like that. Get the disagreeable job done with.\" The\n medicouncilor searched through the desk in front of him without\n success. \"Never mind. I'll find the information later. Now. How did\n Docchi react?\"\n\n\n \"He didn't like it. He was mad clear through.\"\n\n\n \"That speaks well for his bounce.\"\n\n\n \"They all have spirit. Nothing to use it on,\" said Dr. Cameron. \"I\n confess I didn't look at him often though he was quite presentable,\n even handsome in a startling sort of way.\"\n\n\n Thorton nodded brusquely. \"Presentable. Does that mean he had arms?\"\n\n\n \"Today he did. Is it important?\"",
"Docchi moved closer to the pool. \"Then you think we should go ahead\n with the plan we discussed before we sent in the petition? Good. I'll\n call the others together and tell them what happened. They'll agree\n that we have to do it.\"\n\n\n \"Then why call them? More talk, that's all. Besides I don't see why we\n should warn Cameron what we're up to.\"\n\n\n Docchi glanced at her worriedly. \"Do you think someone would report it?\n I'm certain everyone feels as I do.\"\n\n\n \"Not everyone. There's bound to be dissent,\" said Anti placidly. \"But I\n wasn't thinking of people.\"\n\n\n \"Oh that,\" said Docchi. \"We can block that source any time we need to.\"\n It was a relief to know that he could trust the accidentals. Unanimity\n was important and some of the reasons weren't obvious.",
"\"Then you know what he's like,\" said the medicouncilor, shaking his\n head. \"Our profession can't sponsor such a freakish display of his\n misfortune. No doubt he'd be successful on the program you mention. But\n there's more to life than financial achievement or the rather peculiar\n admiration that would be certain to follow him. As an actor he'd have a\n niche. But can you imagine, doctor, the dead silence that would occur\n when he walks into a social gathering of normal people?\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" said Cameron, though he didn't—not eye to eye. He didn't\n agree with Thorton but there wasn't much he could do to alter the\n other's conviction at the moment. There was a long fight ahead of him.\n \"I'll forget about Docchi. But there's another way to break up the\n group.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor interrupted. \"Nona?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I'm not sure she really belongs here.\"",
"Docchi winced, his arms quivering uselessly. \"Maybe not. But we told\n you we're willing to let experts decide. There's nearly a thousand of\n us. They should be able to get one qualified crew.\"\n\n\n \"Perhaps. I'm not going to say.\" Cameron abandoned the light as beyond\n his control. \"Most of you are biocompensators. I concede it's a factor\n in your favor. But you must realize there are many things against you.\"\n He squinted at the desk top. Below the solid surface there was a drawer\n and in the drawer there was—that was what he was trying to see or\n determine. The more he looked the less clear anything seemed to be. He\n tried to make his voice crisp and professional. \"You're wasting time\n discussing this with me. I've merely passed the decision on. I'm not\n responsible for it and I can't do anything for you.\"\n\n\n Docchi stood up, his face colorless and bright. But the inner\n illumination was no indication of hope.",
"\"To him, perhaps,\" reflected the medicouncilor. \"It's an ingenious\n idea, doctor, one which does credit to your humanitarianism. But I'm\n afraid of the public's reception. Have you gone into Docchi's medical\n history?\"\n\n\n \"I glanced at it before I called him in.\" The man was unusual,\n even in a place that specialized in the abnormal. Docchi had been\n an electrochemical engineer with a degree in cold lighting. On his\n way to a brilliant career, he had been the victim of a particularly\n messy accident. The details hadn't been described but Cameron could\n supplement them with his imagination. He'd been badly mangled and\n tossed into a tank of the basic cold lighting fluid.",
"Doctor Cameron looked at him directly for the first time. It wasn't\n as bad as he expected. \"I suggest you calm down. Be patient and wait.\n You'll be surprised how often you get what you want.\"\n\n\n \"You'd be surprised how we get what we want,\" said Docchi. He turned\n away, lurching toward the door which opened automatically and closed\n behind him.\n\n\n Again Cameron concentrated on the desk, trying to look through it.\n He wrote down the sequence he expected to find, lingering over it to\n make sure he didn't force the pictures that came into his mind. He\n opened the drawer and compared the Rhine cards with what he'd written,\n frowning in disappointment. No matter how he tried he never got better\n than average results. Perhaps there was something to telepathy but he'd\n never found it. Anyway it was clear he wasn't one of the gifted few.",
"\"Maybe you can and maybe you can't,\" said Anti. \"But why make it\n difficult, why waste time?\"\n\n\n Docchi got up awkwardly but he wasn't clumsy once he was on his feet.\n \"I'll get Jordan. I know I'll need arms.\"\n\n\n \"Depends on what you mean,\" said Anti.\n\n\n \"Both,\" said Docchi, smiling. \"We're a dangerous weapon.\"\n\n\n She called out as he walked away. \"I'll see you when you leave for far\n Centauri.\"\n\n\n \"Sooner than that, Anti. Much sooner.\"",
"\"I've found out. There's a self-elected group of four, Docchi, Nona,\n Anti and Jordan. I believe they're supposed to be the local recreation\n committee.\"\n\n\n The medicouncilor smiled. \"An apt camouflage. It keeps them amused.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so too but now I'm convinced they're no longer harmless. I'd\n like permission to break up the group. Humanely of course.\"\n\n\n \"I always welcome new ideas.\"\n\n\n In spite of what he'd said the medicouncilor probably did have an open\n mind. \"Start with those it's possible to do the most with. Docchi,\n for instance. With prosthetic arms, he appears normal except for that\n uncanny fluorescence. Granted that the last is repulsive to the average\n person. We can't correct the condition medically but we can make it\n into an asset.\"",
"The doctor kept his eyes averted. The man was damnably\n disconcerting—had no right to be alive. In the depths of the sea there\n were certain creatures like him and on a warm summer evening there was\n still another parallel, but never any human with such an infirmity.\n \"I'm afraid you know what the answer is. A flat no for the present.\"\n\n\n Docchi sagged and his arms hung limp. \"That's the answer?\"\n\n\n \"It's not as hopeless as you think. Decisions can be changed. It won't\n be the first time.\"",
"\"Sure,\" said Docchi. \"We'll wait and wait until it's finally changed.\n We've got centuries, haven't we?\" His face was blazing. It had slipped\n out of control though he wasn't aware of it. Beneath the skin certain\n cells had been modified, there were substances in his body that the\n ordinary individual didn't have. And when there was an extreme flow of\n nervous energy the response was—light. His metabolism was akin to that\n of a firefly.\n\n\n Cameron meddled with buttons. It was impossible to keep the lighting at\n a decent level. Docchi was a nuisance.\n\n\n \"Why?\" questioned Docchi. \"We're capable, you know that. How could they\n refuse?\"\n\n\n That was something he didn't want asked because there was no answer\n both of them would accept. Sometimes a blunt reply was the best\n evasion. \"Do you think they'd take you? Or Nona, Jordan, or Anti?\"",
"Morosely he kicked an anemic tuft of grass. Plants didn't do well here\n either. They too were exiled, far from the sun, removed from the soil\n they originated in. The conditions they grew in were artificial. \"Why\n did they turn us down?\" said Docchi.\n\n\n \"Answer it yourself. Remember what the Medicouncil is like. Different\n things are important to them. The main thing is that we don't have to\n follow their example. There's no need to be irrational even though they\n are.\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew what to do,\" said Docchi. \"It meant so much to us.\"\n\n\n \"We can wait, outlast the attitude,\" said Anti, moving slowly. It was\n the only way she could move. Most of her bulk was beneath the surface.\n\n\n \"Cameron suggested waiting.\" Reflectively Docchi added: \"It's true we\n are biocompensators.\"",
"The self-deception was vicious precisely because the accidentals\nwere\nqualified. Of all the billions of solar citizens\nthey alone could make\n the long journey there and return\n. But there were other factors that\n ruled them out. It was never safe to discuss the first reason with them\n because the second would have to be explained. Cameron himself wasn't\n sadistic and no one else was interested enough to inform them.\n2\nDocchi sat beside the pool. It would be pleasant if he could forget\n where he was. It was pastoral though not quite a scene from Earth. The\n horizon was too near and the sky was shallow and only seemed to be\n bright. Darkness lurked outside.\n\n\n A small tree stretched shade overhead. Waves lapped and made gurgling\n sounds against the banks. But there was no plant life of any kind, and\n no fish swam in the liquid. It looked like water but wasn't—the pool\n held acid. And floating in it, all but submerged, was a shape. The\n records in the hospital said it was a woman.",
"\"An asset? Very neat, if it can be done.\" The medicouncilor's\n expression said it couldn't be.\n\n\n \"Gland opera,\" said Cameron, hurrying on. \"The most popular program\n in the solar system, telepaths, teleports, pyrotics and so forth the\n heroes. Fake of course, makeup and trick camera shots.\n\n\n \"But Docchi can be made into a real star. The death-ray man, say. When\n his face shines men fall dead or paralyzed. He'd have a tremendous\n following of kids.\"\n\n\n \"Children,\" mused the medicouncilor. \"Are you serious about exposing\n them to his influence? Do you really want them to see him?\"\n\n\n \"He'd have a chance to return to society in a way that would be\n acceptable to him,\" said Cameron defensively. He shouldn't have\n specifically mentioned kids.",
"There was life left in the body; it flickered but never went entirely\n out. His arms were gone and his ribs were crushed into his spinal\n column. Regeneration wasn't easy; a partial rib cage could be built up,\n but no more than that. He had no shoulder muscles and only a minimum\n in his back and now, much later, that was why he tired easily and why\n the prosthetic arms with which he'd been fitted were merely ornamental,\n there was nothing which could move them.\n\n\n And then there was the cold lighting fluid. To begin with it was\n semi-organic which, perhaps, was the reason he had remained alive so\n long when he should have died. It had preserved him, had in part\n replaced his blood, permeating every tissue. By the time Docchi had\n been found his body had adapted to the cold lighting substance. And the\n adaptation couldn't be reversed and it was self-perpetuating. Life was\n hardier than most men realized but occasionally it was also perverse.",
"\"Anti, they turned us down,\" said Docchi bitterly.\n\n\n \"What did you expect?\" rumbled the creature in the pool. Wavelets of\n acid danced across the surface, stirred by her voice.\n\n\n \"I didn't expect that.\"\n\n\n \"You don't know the Medicouncil very well.\"\n\n\n \"I guess I don't.\" He stared sullenly at the fluid. It was faintly\n blue. \"I have the feeling they didn't consider it, that they held the\n request for a time and then answered no without looking at it.\"\n\n\n \"Now you're beginning to learn. Wait till you've been here as long as I\n have.\"",
"He shut the drawer. It was a private game, a method to keep from\n becoming involved in Docchi's problems, to avoid emotional entanglement\n with people he had nothing in common with. He didn't enjoy depriving\n weak and helpless men and women of what little hope they had. It was\n their lack of strength that made them so difficult to handle.\n\n\n He reached for the telecom. \"Get Medicouncilor Thorton,\" he told the\n operator. \"Direct if you can; indirect if you have to. I'll hold on.\"\n\n\n Approximate mean diameter thirty miles, the asteroid was listed on the\n charts as Handicap Haven with a mark that indicated except in emergency\n no one not authorized was to land there. Those who were confined to it\n were willing to admit they were handicapped but they didn't call it\n haven. They used other terms, none suggesting sanctuary.",
"The doctor got heavily to his feet—and he actually was heavier. It\n wasn't a psychological reaction. He made a mental note of it. He'd have\n to investigate the gravity surge.\n\n\n In a way accidentals were pathetic, patchwork humans, half or quarter\n men and women, fractional organisms which masqueraded as people. The\n illusion died hard for them, harder than that which remained of their\n bodies, and those bodies were unbelievably tough. Medicine and surgery\n were partly to blame. Techniques were too good or not good enough,\n depending on the viewpoint—doctor or patient.\n\n\n Too good in that the most horribly injured person, if he were found\n alive, could be kept alive. Not good enough because a certain per cent\n of the injured couldn't be returned to society completely sound and\n whole. The miracles of healing were incomplete.",
"\"Every young doctor thinks the same,\" said the medicouncilor kindly.\n \"Usually they wait until their term is nearly up before they suggest\n that she'd respond better if she were returned to normal society. I\n think I know what response they have in mind.\" Thorton smiled in a\n fatherly fashion. \"No offense, doctor, but it happens so often I'm\n thinking of inserting a note in our briefing program. Something to the\n effect that the new medical director should avoid the beautiful and\n self-possessed moron.\"\n\n\n \"Is she stupid?\" asked Cameron stubbornly. \"It's my impression that\n she's not.\"\n\n\n \"Clever with her hands,\" agreed the medicouncilor. \"People in her\n mental classification, which is very low, sometimes are. But don't\n confuse manual dexterity with intelligence. For one thing she doesn't\n have the brain structure for the real article.",
"\"They always bring in biocompensation,\" muttered Anti restlessly. \"I'm\n getting tired of that excuse. Time passes just as slow.\"\n\n\n \"But what else is there? Shall we draw up another request?\"\n\n\n \"Memorandum number ten? Let's not be naive. Things get lost when we\n send them to the Medicouncil. Their filing system is in terrible shape.\"\n\n\n \"Lost or distorted,\" grunted Docchi angrily. The grass he'd kicked\n already had begun to wilt. It wasn't hardy in this environment. Few\n things were.\n\n\n \"Maybe we ought to give the Medicouncil a rest. I'm sure they don't\n want to hear from us again.\"",
"It was inconvenient to wait several minutes for each reply. Besides the\n medicouncilor couldn't or wouldn't help him. He wanted the status quo\n maintained; nothing else would satisfy him. It was the function of the\n medical director to see that it was. \"We're through,\" said Cameron.\n\n\n He sat there after the telecom clicked off. What were the deficients\n the medicouncilor had talked about? A subdivision of the accidentals\n of course, but it wasn't a medical term he was familiar with. Probably\n a semi-slang description. The medicouncilor had been associated with\n accidentals so long that he assumed every doctor would know at once\n what he meant.\n\n\n Deficients. Mentally Cameron turned the word over. If it was\n used accurately it could indicate only one thing. He'd see when\n the medicouncilor's report came in. He could always ask for more\n information if it wasn't clear."
]
] |
test
|
51122
|
[
"Why does Eric think it is preferable to be referred to as a boy than a singleton?",
"How did Mankind revert to a more primitive state?",
"Why does Eric get into an argument with Roy the Runner?",
"How did Eric's perception of his father change throughout the story?",
"What does Thomas the Trap-Smasher suggest Franklin the Father of Many Thieves is hiding?",
"Why was Sara the Sickness-Healer's test important?",
"Why does Eric prefer Harriet the History-Teller over Sara the Sickness-Healer's daughter?",
"Who or what guides Eric and the rest of Mankind through life?"
] |
[
[
"Boys with siblings are treated better in the Bands of the Male Society.",
"A singleton is viewed as the lowest form of Mankind.",
"A singleton is an only child, which cannot be changed. A boy, however, eventually grows up.",
"A boy with brothers has a chance to enter manhood sooner."
],
[
"Their obsession with Ancestor-Science held them back from making necessary advancements.",
"Franklin the Father of Many Thieves structured this new society so that he would be its focal point and he could control all of Mankind easier.",
"They were destroyed by Alien-Science.",
"They were driven to near-extinction by the Monsters and had lost all of their scientific advancements."
],
[
"Roy insults him for being an only child, and Eric suggests Roy's wife sleeps around.",
"He is nervous before the council meeting and is looking to let out some anxiety and aggression. ",
"Roy attacks Eric because he slept with his wife.",
"Roy suggests Eric's mother had slept with several men in the Bands of the Male Society."
],
[
"At the beginning of the story, he loves the memory of his father and is proud of his legacy in the community. At the end of the story, he hates his father.",
"He did not respect his father's decision to bring his wife and child into battle against the Monsters at first, but later he understood his father's noble purpose.",
"He initially viewed his father as a champion of the Ancestor-Science, a hero in his community. He develops conflicted feelings after learning his father was actually a devotee of Alien-Science.",
"He had always thought his father only had one child, but, after speaking with Thomas the Trap-Smasher, he realizes he probably had several other children."
],
[
"The fact that the Alien-Science could effectively defeat the Monsters.",
"The fact that he is just an ordinary man and not, in fact, a great warrior.",
"The fact that he has fathered the majority of the children in Mankind.",
"The fact that he is the true father of Eric the Only."
],
[
"It demonstrated Eric's qualifications to proceed in the manhood test.",
"It allowed him to seek sponsorship for manhood.",
"It showed that Eric was not ready for his Theft.",
"It gave her the opportunity to mock him for being a singleton."
],
[
"In the future, Harriet would have great status in the community; Selma was still a youth and lacked prestige.",
"Harriet reminded him of his father, who also had terrible luck.",
"He wanted Harriet to use her skills as History-Teller to one day tell his story.",
"Harriet had flowing red hair, which he preferred over Selma's bun-wrapped hair."
],
[
"Franklin the Father of Many Thieves and the Man of Mankind.",
"An unending devotion to the Ancestor-Science.",
"The sacred catechisms that instruct Mankind in the ways of dealing with the Monsters.",
"A commitment to the Bands of Male Society and solemn respect for the Female Society."
]
] |
[
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[
"\"Suppose there had been another woman. My father could have had two,\n three, even four litters by different women. Extra-large litters too.\n If we could prove something like that, I wouldn't be a singleton any\n more. I would not be Eric the Only.\"",
"\"You lousy little throwback!\" Roy the Runner yelled. He leaped away\n from the rest of the band and into a crouch facing Eric, his spear\n tense in one hand. \"You're asking for a hole in the belly! My woman's\n had two litters off me, two big litters. What would you have given her,\n you dirty singleton?\"",
"\"You punish with the haft of the spear. And anyway, this is my band and\n I do the punishing around here. Now move on out, all of you, and get\n ready for the council. I'll attend to the boy myself.\"\n\n\n They went off obediently without looking back. The Trap-Smasher's band\n was famous for its discipline throughout the length and breadth of\n Mankind. A proud thing to be a member of it. But to be called a boy in\n front of the others! A boy, when he was full-grown and ready to begin\n stealing!\n\n\n Although, come to think of it, he'd rather be called a boy than a\n singleton. A boy eventually became a man, but a singleton stayed a\n singleton forever. He put the problem to his uncle who was at the\n niche, inspecting the band's reserve pile of spears.",
"Sarah the Sickness-Healer opened the proceedings. She circled him\n belligerently, hands on hips, her great breasts rolling to and fro like\n a pair of swollen pendulums, her eyes glittering with scorn.\n\n\n \"Eric the Only,\" she intoned, and then paused to grin, as if it were a\n name impossible to believe, \"Eric the Singleton, Eric the one and only\n child of either his mother or his father. Your parents almost didn't\n have enough between them to make a solitary child. Is there enough in\n you to make a man?\"\nThere was a snigger of appreciation from the children in the distance,\n and it was echoed by a few growling laughs from the vicinity of the\n Throne Mound. Eric felt his face and neck go red. He would have fought\n any man to the death for remarks like these. Any man at all. But who\n could lift his hand to a woman and be allowed to live? Besides, one of\n the main purposes of this exhibition was to investigate his powers of\n self-control.",
"As his name was sung out, Eric shook himself. Half on his own volition\n and half in response to the pushes he received from the other warriors,\n he stumbled up to his uncle and faced the chief. This, the most\n important moment of his life, was proving almost too much for him. So\n many people in one place, accredited and famous warriors, knowledgeable\n and attractive women, the chief himself, all this after the shattering\n revelations from his uncle—he was finding it hard to think clearly.\n And it was vital to think clearly. His responses to the next few\n questions had to be exactly right.\nThe chief was asking the first: \"Eric the Only, do you apply for full\n manhood?\"\n\n\n Eric breathed hard and nodded. \"I do.\"\n\n\n \"As a full man, what will be your value to Mankind?\"",
"The Trap-Smasher sighed and thought for a moment. Then he pulled the\n spear from his back sling and took Eric's arm. He drew the youth along\n the burrow until they stood alone in the very center of it. He looked\n carefully at the exits at either end, making certain that they were\n completely alone before giving his reply in an unusually low, guarded\n voice.\n\n\n \"We'd never be able to prove anything like that. If you don't want to\n be Eric the Only, if you want to be Eric the something-else, well then,\n it's up to you. You have to make a good Theft. That's what you should\n be thinking about all the time now—your Theft. Eric, which category\n are you going to announce?\"\n\n\n He hadn't thought about it very much. \"The usual one I guess. The one\n that's picked for most initiations. First category.\"",
"\"In the name of our ancestors,\" he said, \"and the science with which\n they ruled the Earth, I declare this council opened. May it end as one\n more step in the regaining of their science. Who asked for a council?\"\n\n\n \"I did.\" Thomas the Trap-Smasher moved out of his band and stood before\n the chief.\n\n\n Franklin nodded, and went on with the next, formal question:\n\n\n \"And your reason?\"\n\n\n \"As a band leader, I call attention to a candidate for manhood. A\n member of my band, a spear-carrier for the required time, and an\n accepted apprentice in the Male Society. My nephew, Eric the Only.\"",
"\"Until never for some people,\" one of the young men broke in. He\n rattled his spear in his hand, carelessly, proudly. \"After you steal,\n you still have to convince a woman that you're a man. And some men\n have to do an awful lot of convincing. An\nawful\nlot, Eric-O.\"\n\n\n The ball of laughter bounced back and forth again, heavier than before.\n Eric the Only felt his face turn bright red. How dare they remind him\n of his birth? On this day of all days? Here he was about to prepare\n himself to go forth and Steal for Mankind....\n\n\n He dropped the sharpening stone into his pouch and slid his right\n hand back along his uncle's spear. \"At least,\" he said, slowly and\n definitely, \"at least, my woman will stay convinced, Roy the Runner.\n She won't be always open to offers from every other man in the tribe.\"",
"\"Eric, Eric, forget about it, boy. He was all of those things and more.\n Your father was famous. Eric the Storeroom-Stormer, we called him,\n Eric the Laugher at Locks, Eric the Roistering Robber of all Mankind.\n He taught me everything I know. But he only married once. And if any\n other woman ever played around with him, she's been careful to keep it\n a secret. Now dress up those spears. You've let them get all sloppy.\n Butts together, that's the way, points up and even with each other.\"\nDutifully, Eric rearranged the bundle of armament that was his\n responsibility. He turned to his uncle again, now examining the\n knapsacks and canteens that would be carried on the expedition.",
"The pin sank into his chest for a little distance, paused, came out.\n It probed here, probed there; finally it found a nerve in his upper\n arm. There, guided by the knowledge of the Sickness-Healer, it bit and\n clawed at the delicate area until Eric felt he would grind his teeth\n to powder in the effort not to cry out. His clenched fists twisted\n agonizingly at the ends of his arms in a paroxysm of protest, but he\n kept his body still. He didn't cry out; he didn't move away; he didn't\n raise a hand to protect himself.\n\n\n Sarah the Sickness-Healer stepped back and considered him. \"There\n is no man here yet,\" she said grudgingly. \"But perhaps there is the\n beginnings of one.\"",
"Even his father had been infected with her terrible bad luck. Still,\n Harriet the History-Teller was an important person in the tribe for one\n her age. Good-looking too. And, above all, she didn't turn away from\n him. She smiled at him, openly now. He smiled back.\n\n\n \"Look at Eric!\" he heard someone call out behind him. \"He's already\n searching for a mate. Hey, Eric! You've not even wearing straps yet.\n First comes the stealing.\nThen\ncomes the mating.\"\n\n\n Eric spun around, bits of fantasy still stuck to his lips.\n\n\n The group of young men lounging against the wall of his band's burrow\n were tossing laughter back and forth between them. They were all\n adults: they had all made their Theft. Socially, they were still his\n superiors. His only recourse was cold dignity.\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he began. \"There is no mating until—\"",
"The sheer population pressure of so vast a horde had long ago filled\n over a dozen burrows. Bands of the Male Society occupied the outermost\n four of these interconnected corridors and patrolled it with their\n full strength, twenty-three young adult males in the prime of courage\n and alertness. They were stationed there to take the first shock of\n any danger to Mankind, they and their band captains and the youthful\n initiates who served them.\n\n\n Eric the Only was an initiate in this powerful force. Today, he was a\n student warrior, a fetcher and a carrier for proven, seasoned men. But\n tomorrow, tomorrow....\n\n\n This was his birthday. Tomorrow, he would be sent forth to Steal for\n Mankind. When he returned—and have no fear: Eric was swift, Eric was\n clever, he would return—off might go the loose loin cloths of boyhood\n to be replaced by the tight loin straps of a proud Male Society warrior.",
"The older man brought his lips together, looking dissatisfied. \"First\n category.\nFood.\nWell....\"\n\n\n Eric felt he understood. \"You mean, for someone like me—an Only,\n who's really got to make a name for himself—I ought to announce\n like a real warrior? I should say I'm going to steal in the second\n category—Articles Useful to Mankind. Is that what my father would have\n done?\"\n\n\n \"Do you know what your father would have done?\"\n\n\n \"No. What?\" Eric demanded eagerly.\n\n\n \"He'd have elected the third category. That's what I'd be announcing\n these days, if I were going through an initiation ceremony. That's what\n I want you to announce.\"\n\n\n \"Third category? Monster souvenirs? But no one's elected the third\n category in I don't know how many auld lang synes. Why should I do it?\"",
"Eric the Only stared at his uncle. That wasn't the next question in the\n catechism. He must have heard incorrectly. His uncle couldn't have made\n a mistake in such a basic ritual.\n\n\n \"\nWe will do that\n,\" he went on in the second reply, his voice sliding\n into the singsong of childhood lessons, \"\nby regaining the science and\n knowhow of our fore-fathers. Man was once Lord of all Creation: his\n science and knowhow made him supreme. Science and knowhow is what we\n need to hit back at the Monsters.\n\"\n\n\n \"Now, Eric,\" his uncle asked gently. \"Please tell me this. What in hell\n is knowhow?\"\n\n\n That was way off. They were a full corridor's length from the normal\n progression of the catechism now.",
"\"I think so,\" he managed to say after a long pause. \"And I'm willing to\n prove it.\"\n\n\n \"Prove it, then!\" the woman snarled. Her right hand, holding a long,\n sharp-pointed pin, shot to his chest like a flung spear. Eric made his\n muscles rigid and tried to send his mind away. That, the men had told\n him, was what you had to do at this moment: it was not you they were\n hurting, not you at all. You, your mind, your knowledge of self, were\n in another part of the burrow entirely, watching these painful things\n being done to someone else.",
"There was a rattling moment, the barest second, when the chief's eyes\n locked with those of the band leader. With all that was on Eric's mind\n at the moment, he noticed it. Then the chief looked away and pointed to\n the women on the other side of the burrow.\n\n\n \"He is accepted as a candidate by the men. Now the women must ask for\n proof, for only a woman's proof bestows full manhood.\"\n\n\n The first part was over. And it hadn't been too bad. Eric turned\n to face the advancing leaders of the Female Society, Ottilie, the\n Chieftain's First Wife, in the center. Now came the part that scared\n him. The women's part.",
"\"How long? Since I got to know your father. He was in another band;\n naturally we hadn't seen much of each other before he married my\n sister. I'd heard about him, though: everyone in the Male Society\n had—he was a great thief. But once he became my brother-in-law,\n I learned a lot from him. I learned about locks, about the latest\n traps—and I learned about Alien-Science. He'd been an Alien-Science\n man for years. He converted your mother, and he converted me.\"\n\n\n Eric the Only backed away. \"No!\" he called out wildly. \"Not my father\n and mother! They were decent people—when they were killed a service\n was held in their name—they went to add to the science of our\n ancestors—\"\nHis uncle jammed a powerful hand over his mouth.",
"\"She's had two litters, but not off you,\" Eric the Only spat, holding\n his spear out in the guard position. \"If you're the father, then the\n chief's blonde hair is contagious—like measles.\"\nRoy bellowed and jabbed his spear forward. Eric parried it and lunged\n in his turn. He missed as his opponent leaped to one side. They\n circled each other, cursing and insulting, eyes only for the point of\n each other's spears. The other young men had scrambled a distance down\n the burrow to get out of their way.\nA powerful arm suddenly clamped Eric's waist from behind and lifted\n him off his feet. He was kicked hard, so that he stumbled a half-dozen\n steps and fell. On his feet in a moment, the spear still in his hand,\n he whirled, ready to deal with this new opponent. He was mad enough to\n fight all Mankind.\n\n\n But not Thomas the Trap-Smasher. No, not that mad.",
"\"You can,\" his uncle told him heartily. \"It's been set up for you. It\n will be like walking through a dug burrow, Eric. All you have to face\n through is the council. You'll have to be steady there, no matter what.\n You tell the chief that you're undertaking the third category.\"\n\n\n \"But why the third?\" Eric asked. \"Why does it have to be Monster\n souvenirs?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's what we need. And you stick to it, no matter what\n pressure they put on you. Remember, an initiate has the right to decide\n what he's going to steal. A man's first Theft is his own affair.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen, uncle—\"\n\n\n There was a whistle from the end of the burrow. Thomas the Trap-Smasher\n nodded in the direction of the signal.",
"Another girl caught his eye. She had been observing him for some time\n and smiling behind her lashes, behind her demurely set mouth. Harriet\n the History-Teller, the oldest daughter of Rita the Record-Keeper,\n who would one day succeed to her mother's office. Now there was a\n lovely, slender girl, her hair completely unwound in testament to full\n womanhood and recognized professional status.\nEric had caught these covert, barely stated smiles from her before;\n especially in the last few weeks, as the time for his Theft approached.\n He knew that if he were successful—and he\nhad\nto be successful:\n don't dare think of anything but success!—she would look with favor on\n advances from him. Of course, Harriet was a redhead, and therefore,\n according to Mankind's traditions, unlucky. She was probably having a\n hard time finding a mate. But his own mother had been a redhead.\n\n\n Yes, and his mother had been very unlucky indeed."
],
[
"Yes, unquestionably The Man of Mankind was Franklin the Father of Many\n Thieves. You could tell it from the hushed, respectful attitudes of the\n subordinate warriors who stood at a distance from the mound. You could\n tell it from the rippling interest of the women as they stood on the\n other side of the great burrow, drawn up in the ranks of the Female\n Society. You could tell it from the nervousness and scorn with which\n the women were watched by their leader, Ottilie, the Chieftain's First\n Wife. And finally, you could tell it from the faces of the children,\n standing in a distant, disorganized bunch. A clear majority of their\n faces bore an unmistakable resemblance to Franklin's.\n\n\n Franklin clapped his hands, three evenly spaced, flesh-heavy wallops.",
"He would be free to raise his voice and express his opinions in the\n Councils of Mankind. He could stare at the women whenever he liked,\n for as long as he liked, to approach them even—\n\n\n He found himself wandering to the end of his band's burrow, still\n carrying the spear he was sharpening for his uncle. There, where a\n women's burrow began, several members of the Female Society were\n preparing food stolen from the Monster larder that very day. Each spell\n had to be performed properly, each incantation said just right, or\n it would not be fit to eat. It might even be dangerous. Mankind was\n indeed fortunate: plenty of food, readily available, and women who well\n understood the magical work of preparing it for human consumption.\nAnd such women—such splendid creatures!",
"The sheer population pressure of so vast a horde had long ago filled\n over a dozen burrows. Bands of the Male Society occupied the outermost\n four of these interconnected corridors and patrolled it with their\n full strength, twenty-three young adult males in the prime of courage\n and alertness. They were stationed there to take the first shock of\n any danger to Mankind, they and their band captains and the youthful\n initiates who served them.\n\n\n Eric the Only was an initiate in this powerful force. Today, he was a\n student warrior, a fetcher and a carrier for proven, seasoned men. But\n tomorrow, tomorrow....\n\n\n This was his birthday. Tomorrow, he would be sent forth to Steal for\n Mankind. When he returned—and have no fear: Eric was swift, Eric was\n clever, he would return—off might go the loose loin cloths of boyhood\n to be replaced by the tight loin straps of a proud Male Society warrior.",
"\"The council's beginning, boy. We'll talk later, on expedition. Now\n remember this: stealing from the third category is your own idea, and\n all your own idea. Forget everything else we've talked about. If you\n hit any trouble with the chief, I'll be there. I'm your sponsor, after\n all.\"\n\n\n He threw an arm about his confused nephew and walked to the end of the\n burrow where the other members of the band waited.\nII\n\n\n The tribe had gathered in its central and largest burrow under the\n great, hanging glow lamps that might be used in this place alone.\n Except for the few sentinels on duty in the outlying corridors, all of\n Mankind was here. It was an awesome sight to behold.",
"On the little hillock known as the Royal Mound, lolled Franklin the\n Father of Many Thieves, Chieftain of all Mankind. He alone of the\n cluster of warriors displayed heaviness of belly and flabbiness of\n arm—for he alone had the privilege of a sedentary life. Beside the\n sternly muscled band leaders who formed his immediate background, he\n looked almost womanly; and yet one of his many titles was simply The\n Man.",
"\"Well, I know. I know from plenty of battle experience. The thing to\n remember is that once our ancestors were knocked down, they stayed\n down. That means their science and knowhow were not so much in the\n first place. And\nthat\nmeans—\" here he turned his head and looked\n directly into Eric's eyes—\"\nthat\nmeans the science of our ancestors\n wasn't worth one good damn against the Monsters, and it wouldn't be\n worth one good damn to us!\"\n\n\n Eric the Only turned pale. He knew heresy when he heard it.\nHis uncle patted him on the shoulder, drawing a deep breath as if he'd\n finally spat out something extremely unpleasant. He leaned closer, eyes\n glittering beneath the forehead glow lamp and his voice dropped to a\n fierce whisper.",
"Eric the Only stared at his uncle. That wasn't the next question in the\n catechism. He must have heard incorrectly. His uncle couldn't have made\n a mistake in such a basic ritual.\n\n\n \"\nWe will do that\n,\" he went on in the second reply, his voice sliding\n into the singsong of childhood lessons, \"\nby regaining the science and\n knowhow of our fore-fathers. Man was once Lord of all Creation: his\n science and knowhow made him supreme. Science and knowhow is what we\n need to hit back at the Monsters.\n\"\n\n\n \"Now, Eric,\" his uncle asked gently. \"Please tell me this. What in hell\n is knowhow?\"\n\n\n That was way off. They were a full corridor's length from the normal\n progression of the catechism now.",
"\"How long? Since I got to know your father. He was in another band;\n naturally we hadn't seen much of each other before he married my\n sister. I'd heard about him, though: everyone in the Male Society\n had—he was a great thief. But once he became my brother-in-law,\n I learned a lot from him. I learned about locks, about the latest\n traps—and I learned about Alien-Science. He'd been an Alien-Science\n man for years. He converted your mother, and he converted me.\"\n\n\n Eric the Only backed away. \"No!\" he called out wildly. \"Not my father\n and mother! They were decent people—when they were killed a service\n was held in their name—they went to add to the science of our\n ancestors—\"\nHis uncle jammed a powerful hand over his mouth.",
"\"She's had two litters, but not off you,\" Eric the Only spat, holding\n his spear out in the guard position. \"If you're the father, then the\n chief's blonde hair is contagious—like measles.\"\nRoy bellowed and jabbed his spear forward. Eric parried it and lunged\n in his turn. He missed as his opponent leaped to one side. They\n circled each other, cursing and insulting, eyes only for the point of\n each other's spears. The other young men had scrambled a distance down\n the burrow to get out of their way.\nA powerful arm suddenly clamped Eric's waist from behind and lifted\n him off his feet. He was kicked hard, so that he stumbled a half-dozen\n steps and fell. On his feet in a moment, the spear still in his hand,\n he whirled, ready to deal with this new opponent. He was mad enough to\n fight all Mankind.\n\n\n But not Thomas the Trap-Smasher. No, not that mad.",
"\"Stop it!\" his uncle ordered. \"Don't give me any of that garbage!\nThe\n suddenness of the attack, the treachery of the Monsters\n—does it sound\n like an explanation to you? Honestly? If our ancestors were really\n Lords of Creation and had such great weapons, would the Monsters have\n been able to conquer them? I've led my band on dozens of raids, and I\n know the value of a surprise attack; but believe me, boy, it's only\n good for a flash charge and a quick getaway if you're facing a superior\n force. You can knock somebody down when he doesn't expect it. But if he\n really has more than you, he won't\nstay\ndown. Right?\"\n\n\n \"I—I guess so. I wouldn't know.\"",
"\"In the name of our ancestors,\" he said, \"and the science with which\n they ruled the Earth, I declare this council opened. May it end as one\n more step in the regaining of their science. Who asked for a council?\"\n\n\n \"I did.\" Thomas the Trap-Smasher moved out of his band and stood before\n the chief.\n\n\n Franklin nodded, and went on with the next, formal question:\n\n\n \"And your reason?\"\n\n\n \"As a band leader, I call attention to a candidate for manhood. A\n member of my band, a spear-carrier for the required time, and an\n accepted apprentice in the Male Society. My nephew, Eric the Only.\"",
"\"Until never for some people,\" one of the young men broke in. He\n rattled his spear in his hand, carelessly, proudly. \"After you steal,\n you still have to convince a woman that you're a man. And some men\n have to do an awful lot of convincing. An\nawful\nlot, Eric-O.\"\n\n\n The ball of laughter bounced back and forth again, heavier than before.\n Eric the Only felt his face turn bright red. How dare they remind him\n of his birth? On this day of all days? Here he was about to prepare\n himself to go forth and Steal for Mankind....\n\n\n He dropped the sharpening stone into his pouch and slid his right\n hand back along his uncle's spear. \"At least,\" he said, slowly and\n definitely, \"at least, my woman will stay convinced, Roy the Runner.\n She won't be always open to offers from every other man in the tribe.\"",
"\"You punish with the haft of the spear. And anyway, this is my band and\n I do the punishing around here. Now move on out, all of you, and get\n ready for the council. I'll attend to the boy myself.\"\n\n\n They went off obediently without looking back. The Trap-Smasher's band\n was famous for its discipline throughout the length and breadth of\n Mankind. A proud thing to be a member of it. But to be called a boy in\n front of the others! A boy, when he was full-grown and ready to begin\n stealing!\n\n\n Although, come to think of it, he'd rather be called a boy than a\n singleton. A boy eventually became a man, but a singleton stayed a\n singleton forever. He put the problem to his uncle who was at the\n niche, inspecting the band's reserve pile of spears.",
"\"You lousy little throwback!\" Roy the Runner yelled. He leaped away\n from the rest of the band and into a crouch facing Eric, his spear\n tense in one hand. \"You're asking for a hole in the belly! My woman's\n had two litters off me, two big litters. What would you have given her,\n you dirty singleton?\"",
"\"Knowhow is—knowhow is—\" he stumbled over the unfamiliar verbal\n terrain. \"Well, it's what our ancestors knew. And what they did with\n it, I guess. Knowhow is what you need before you can make hydrogen\n bombs or economic warfare or guided missiles, any of those really big\n weapons like our ancestors had.\"\n\n\n \"Did those weapons do them any good? Against the Monsters, I mean. Did\n they stop the Monsters?\"\n\n\n Eric looked completely blank for a moment, then brightened. Oh! He knew\n the way now. He knew how to get back to the catechism:\n\n\n \"\nThe suddenness of the attack, the\n—\"",
"\"I will steal for Mankind whatever it needs. I will defend Mankind\n against all outsiders. I will increase the possessions and knowledge of\n the Female Society so that the Female Society can increase the power\n and well-being of Mankind.\"\n\n\n \"And all this you swear to do?\"\n\n\n \"And all this I swear to do.\"\n\n\n The Chief turned to Eric's uncle. \"As his sponsor, do you support his\n oath and swear that he is to be trusted?\"\n\n\n With just the faintest hint of sarcasm in his voice, Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher replied: \"Yes. I support his oath and swear that he is to\n be trusted.\"",
"\"Eric. When I asked you how we've been hitting back at the Monsters,\n you told me what we\nought\nto do. We haven't been\ndoing\na\n single thing to bother them. We don't know how to reconstruct\n the Ancestor-science, we don't have the tools or weapons or\n knowhow—whatever\nthat\nis—but they wouldn't do us a bit of good even\n if we had them. Because they failed once. They failed completely and\n at their best. There's just no point in trying to put them together\n again.\"\n\n\n And now Eric understood. He understood why his uncle had whispered,\n why there had been so much strain in this conversation. Bloodshed was\n involved here, bloodshed and death.\n\n\n \"Uncle Thomas,\" he whispered, in a voice that kept cracking despite\n his efforts to keep it whole and steady, \"how long have you been an\n Alien-Science man? When did you leave Ancestor-Science?\"",
"\"The\nchief\n?\" Eric felt confused. He was walking up a strange burrow\n now without a glow lamp. \"What's the chief got to do with my Theft?\"\nHis uncle examined both ends of the corridor again. \"Eric, what's the\n most important thing we, or you, or anyone, can do? What is our life\n all about? What are we here for?\"\n\n\n \"That's easy,\" Eric chuckled. \"That's the easiest question there is. A\n child could answer it:\n\n\n \"\nHit back at the Monsters\n,\" he quoted. \"\nDrive them from the planet,\n if we can. Regain Earth for Mankind, if we can. But above all, hit back\n at the Monsters. Make them suffer as they've made us suffer. Make them\n know we're still here, we're still fighting. Hit back at the Monsters.\n\"\n\n\n \"Hit back at the Monsters. Right. Now how have we been doing that?\"",
"He could relax. The physical test was over. There would be another one,\n much later, after he had completed his theft successfully; but that\n would be exclusively by men as part of his proud initiation ceremony.\n Under the circumstances, he knew he would be able to go through it\n almost gaily.\n\n\n Meanwhile, the women's physical test was over. That was the important\n thing for now. In sheer reaction, his body gushed forth sweat which\n slid over the bloody cracks in his skin and stung viciously. He felt\n the water pouring down his back and forced himself not to go limp,\n prodded his mind into alertness.\n\n\n \"Did that hurt?\" he was being asked by Rita, the old crone of a\n Record-Keeper. There was a solicitous smile on her forty-year-old face,\n but he knew it was a fake. A woman as old as that no longer felt sorry\n for anybody. She had too many aches and pains and things generally\n wrong with her to worry about other people's troubles.",
"Even his father had been infected with her terrible bad luck. Still,\n Harriet the History-Teller was an important person in the tribe for one\n her age. Good-looking too. And, above all, she didn't turn away from\n him. She smiled at him, openly now. He smiled back.\n\n\n \"Look at Eric!\" he heard someone call out behind him. \"He's already\n searching for a mate. Hey, Eric! You've not even wearing straps yet.\n First comes the stealing.\nThen\ncomes the mating.\"\n\n\n Eric spun around, bits of fantasy still stuck to his lips.\n\n\n The group of young men lounging against the wall of his band's burrow\n were tossing laughter back and forth between them. They were all\n adults: they had all made their Theft. Socially, they were still his\n superiors. His only recourse was cold dignity.\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he began. \"There is no mating until—\""
],
[
"\"You lousy little throwback!\" Roy the Runner yelled. He leaped away\n from the rest of the band and into a crouch facing Eric, his spear\n tense in one hand. \"You're asking for a hole in the belly! My woman's\n had two litters off me, two big litters. What would you have given her,\n you dirty singleton?\"",
"All the tension drained out of him as he recognized the captain of his\n band. He couldn't fight Thomas. His uncle. And the greatest of all men.\n Guiltily, he walked to the niche in the wall where the band's weapons\n were stacked and slid his uncle's spear into its appointed place.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with you, Roy?\" Thomas was asking behind\n him. \"Fighting a duel with an initiate? Where's your band spirit?\n That's all we need these days, to be cut down from six effectives to\n five. Save your spear for Strangers, or—if you feel very brave—for\n Monsters. But don't show a point in our band's burrow if you know\n what's good for you, hear me?\"\n\n\n \"I wasn't fighting a duel,\" the Runner mumbled, sheathing his own\n spear. \"The kid got above himself. I was punishing him.\"",
"\"Until never for some people,\" one of the young men broke in. He\n rattled his spear in his hand, carelessly, proudly. \"After you steal,\n you still have to convince a woman that you're a man. And some men\n have to do an awful lot of convincing. An\nawful\nlot, Eric-O.\"\n\n\n The ball of laughter bounced back and forth again, heavier than before.\n Eric the Only felt his face turn bright red. How dare they remind him\n of his birth? On this day of all days? Here he was about to prepare\n himself to go forth and Steal for Mankind....\n\n\n He dropped the sharpening stone into his pouch and slid his right\n hand back along his uncle's spear. \"At least,\" he said, slowly and\n definitely, \"at least, my woman will stay convinced, Roy the Runner.\n She won't be always open to offers from every other man in the tribe.\"",
"\"She's had two litters, but not off you,\" Eric the Only spat, holding\n his spear out in the guard position. \"If you're the father, then the\n chief's blonde hair is contagious—like measles.\"\nRoy bellowed and jabbed his spear forward. Eric parried it and lunged\n in his turn. He missed as his opponent leaped to one side. They\n circled each other, cursing and insulting, eyes only for the point of\n each other's spears. The other young men had scrambled a distance down\n the burrow to get out of their way.\nA powerful arm suddenly clamped Eric's waist from behind and lifted\n him off his feet. He was kicked hard, so that he stumbled a half-dozen\n steps and fell. On his feet in a moment, the spear still in his hand,\n he whirled, ready to deal with this new opponent. He was mad enough to\n fight all Mankind.\n\n\n But not Thomas the Trap-Smasher. No, not that mad.",
"\"Eric, Eric, forget about it, boy. He was all of those things and more.\n Your father was famous. Eric the Storeroom-Stormer, we called him,\n Eric the Laugher at Locks, Eric the Roistering Robber of all Mankind.\n He taught me everything I know. But he only married once. And if any\n other woman ever played around with him, she's been careful to keep it\n a secret. Now dress up those spears. You've let them get all sloppy.\n Butts together, that's the way, points up and even with each other.\"\nDutifully, Eric rearranged the bundle of armament that was his\n responsibility. He turned to his uncle again, now examining the\n knapsacks and canteens that would be carried on the expedition.",
"Sarah the Sickness-Healer opened the proceedings. She circled him\n belligerently, hands on hips, her great breasts rolling to and fro like\n a pair of swollen pendulums, her eyes glittering with scorn.\n\n\n \"Eric the Only,\" she intoned, and then paused to grin, as if it were a\n name impossible to believe, \"Eric the Singleton, Eric the one and only\n child of either his mother or his father. Your parents almost didn't\n have enough between them to make a solitary child. Is there enough in\n you to make a man?\"\nThere was a snigger of appreciation from the children in the distance,\n and it was echoed by a few growling laughs from the vicinity of the\n Throne Mound. Eric felt his face and neck go red. He would have fought\n any man to the death for remarks like these. Any man at all. But who\n could lift his hand to a woman and be allowed to live? Besides, one of\n the main purposes of this exhibition was to investigate his powers of\n self-control.",
"The Trap-Smasher sighed and thought for a moment. Then he pulled the\n spear from his back sling and took Eric's arm. He drew the youth along\n the burrow until they stood alone in the very center of it. He looked\n carefully at the exits at either end, making certain that they were\n completely alone before giving his reply in an unusually low, guarded\n voice.\n\n\n \"We'd never be able to prove anything like that. If you don't want to\n be Eric the Only, if you want to be Eric the something-else, well then,\n it's up to you. You have to make a good Theft. That's what you should\n be thinking about all the time now—your Theft. Eric, which category\n are you going to announce?\"\n\n\n He hadn't thought about it very much. \"The usual one I guess. The one\n that's picked for most initiations. First category.\"",
"\"Well, I know. I know from plenty of battle experience. The thing to\n remember is that once our ancestors were knocked down, they stayed\n down. That means their science and knowhow were not so much in the\n first place. And\nthat\nmeans—\" here he turned his head and looked\n directly into Eric's eyes—\"\nthat\nmeans the science of our ancestors\n wasn't worth one good damn against the Monsters, and it wouldn't be\n worth one good damn to us!\"\n\n\n Eric the Only turned pale. He knew heresy when he heard it.\nHis uncle patted him on the shoulder, drawing a deep breath as if he'd\n finally spat out something extremely unpleasant. He leaned closer, eyes\n glittering beneath the forehead glow lamp and his voice dropped to a\n fierce whisper.",
"\"How long? Since I got to know your father. He was in another band;\n naturally we hadn't seen much of each other before he married my\n sister. I'd heard about him, though: everyone in the Male Society\n had—he was a great thief. But once he became my brother-in-law,\n I learned a lot from him. I learned about locks, about the latest\n traps—and I learned about Alien-Science. He'd been an Alien-Science\n man for years. He converted your mother, and he converted me.\"\n\n\n Eric the Only backed away. \"No!\" he called out wildly. \"Not my father\n and mother! They were decent people—when they were killed a service\n was held in their name—they went to add to the science of our\n ancestors—\"\nHis uncle jammed a powerful hand over his mouth.",
"Thomas examined his face and seemed satisfied. \"The kind you're going\n after,\" he said. \"If you are your father's son. If you're man enough to\n continue the work he started. Are you?\"\n\n\n Eric started to nod, then found himself shrugging weakly, and finally\n just hung his head. He didn't know what to say. His uncle—well, his\n uncle was his model and his leader, and he was strong and wise and\n crafty. His father—naturally, he wanted to emulate his father and\n continue whatever work he had started. But this was his initiation\n ceremony, after all, and there would be enough danger merely in proving\n his manhood. For his initiation ceremony to take on a task that had\n destroyed his father, the greatest thief the tribe had ever known, and\n a heretical, blasphemous task at that....\n\n\n \"I'll try. I don't know if I can.\"",
"Even his father had been infected with her terrible bad luck. Still,\n Harriet the History-Teller was an important person in the tribe for one\n her age. Good-looking too. And, above all, she didn't turn away from\n him. She smiled at him, openly now. He smiled back.\n\n\n \"Look at Eric!\" he heard someone call out behind him. \"He's already\n searching for a mate. Hey, Eric! You've not even wearing straps yet.\n First comes the stealing.\nThen\ncomes the mating.\"\n\n\n Eric spun around, bits of fantasy still stuck to his lips.\n\n\n The group of young men lounging against the wall of his band's burrow\n were tossing laughter back and forth between them. They were all\n adults: they had all made their Theft. Socially, they were still his\n superiors. His only recourse was cold dignity.\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he began. \"There is no mating until—\"",
"\"You can,\" his uncle told him heartily. \"It's been set up for you. It\n will be like walking through a dug burrow, Eric. All you have to face\n through is the council. You'll have to be steady there, no matter what.\n You tell the chief that you're undertaking the third category.\"\n\n\n \"But why the third?\" Eric asked. \"Why does it have to be Monster\n souvenirs?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's what we need. And you stick to it, no matter what\n pressure they put on you. Remember, an initiate has the right to decide\n what he's going to steal. A man's first Theft is his own affair.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen, uncle—\"\n\n\n There was a whistle from the end of the burrow. Thomas the Trap-Smasher\n nodded in the direction of the signal.",
"\"In the name of our ancestors,\" he said, \"and the science with which\n they ruled the Earth, I declare this council opened. May it end as one\n more step in the regaining of their science. Who asked for a council?\"\n\n\n \"I did.\" Thomas the Trap-Smasher moved out of his band and stood before\n the chief.\n\n\n Franklin nodded, and went on with the next, formal question:\n\n\n \"And your reason?\"\n\n\n \"As a band leader, I call attention to a candidate for manhood. A\n member of my band, a spear-carrier for the required time, and an\n accepted apprentice in the Male Society. My nephew, Eric the Only.\"",
"\"I think so,\" he managed to say after a long pause. \"And I'm willing to\n prove it.\"\n\n\n \"Prove it, then!\" the woman snarled. Her right hand, holding a long,\n sharp-pointed pin, shot to his chest like a flung spear. Eric made his\n muscles rigid and tried to send his mind away. That, the men had told\n him, was what you had to do at this moment: it was not you they were\n hurting, not you at all. You, your mind, your knowledge of self, were\n in another part of the burrow entirely, watching these painful things\n being done to someone else.",
"As his name was sung out, Eric shook himself. Half on his own volition\n and half in response to the pushes he received from the other warriors,\n he stumbled up to his uncle and faced the chief. This, the most\n important moment of his life, was proving almost too much for him. So\n many people in one place, accredited and famous warriors, knowledgeable\n and attractive women, the chief himself, all this after the shattering\n revelations from his uncle—he was finding it hard to think clearly.\n And it was vital to think clearly. His responses to the next few\n questions had to be exactly right.\nThe chief was asking the first: \"Eric the Only, do you apply for full\n manhood?\"\n\n\n Eric breathed hard and nodded. \"I do.\"\n\n\n \"As a full man, what will be your value to Mankind?\"",
"The older man brought his lips together, looking dissatisfied. \"First\n category.\nFood.\nWell....\"\n\n\n Eric felt he understood. \"You mean, for someone like me—an Only,\n who's really got to make a name for himself—I ought to announce\n like a real warrior? I should say I'm going to steal in the second\n category—Articles Useful to Mankind. Is that what my father would have\n done?\"\n\n\n \"Do you know what your father would have done?\"\n\n\n \"No. What?\" Eric demanded eagerly.\n\n\n \"He'd have elected the third category. That's what I'd be announcing\n these days, if I were going through an initiation ceremony. That's what\n I want you to announce.\"\n\n\n \"Third category? Monster souvenirs? But no one's elected the third\n category in I don't know how many auld lang synes. Why should I do it?\"",
"\"The\nchief\n?\" Eric felt confused. He was walking up a strange burrow\n now without a glow lamp. \"What's the chief got to do with my Theft?\"\nHis uncle examined both ends of the corridor again. \"Eric, what's the\n most important thing we, or you, or anyone, can do? What is our life\n all about? What are we here for?\"\n\n\n \"That's easy,\" Eric chuckled. \"That's the easiest question there is. A\n child could answer it:\n\n\n \"\nHit back at the Monsters\n,\" he quoted. \"\nDrive them from the planet,\n if we can. Regain Earth for Mankind, if we can. But above all, hit back\n at the Monsters. Make them suffer as they've made us suffer. Make them\n know we're still here, we're still fighting. Hit back at the Monsters.\n\"\n\n\n \"Hit back at the Monsters. Right. Now how have we been doing that?\"",
"Eric the Only stared at his uncle. That wasn't the next question in the\n catechism. He must have heard incorrectly. His uncle couldn't have made\n a mistake in such a basic ritual.\n\n\n \"\nWe will do that\n,\" he went on in the second reply, his voice sliding\n into the singsong of childhood lessons, \"\nby regaining the science and\n knowhow of our fore-fathers. Man was once Lord of all Creation: his\n science and knowhow made him supreme. Science and knowhow is what we\n need to hit back at the Monsters.\n\"\n\n\n \"Now, Eric,\" his uncle asked gently. \"Please tell me this. What in hell\n is knowhow?\"\n\n\n That was way off. They were a full corridor's length from the normal\n progression of the catechism now.",
"Thomas the Trap-Smasher caressed his spear before he answered. He\n felt for it with a gentle, wandering arm, almost unconsciously, but\n both of them registered the fact that it was loose and ready. His\n tremendous body, nude except for the straps about his loins and the\n light spear-sling on his back, looked as if it were preparing to move\n instantaneously in any direction.\n\n\n He stared again from one end of the burrow to the other, his forehead\n lamp reaching out to the branching darkness of the exits. Eric stared\n with him. No one was leaning tightly against a wall and listening.",
"The sheer population pressure of so vast a horde had long ago filled\n over a dozen burrows. Bands of the Male Society occupied the outermost\n four of these interconnected corridors and patrolled it with their\n full strength, twenty-three young adult males in the prime of courage\n and alertness. They were stationed there to take the first shock of\n any danger to Mankind, they and their band captains and the youthful\n initiates who served them.\n\n\n Eric the Only was an initiate in this powerful force. Today, he was a\n student warrior, a fetcher and a carrier for proven, seasoned men. But\n tomorrow, tomorrow....\n\n\n This was his birthday. Tomorrow, he would be sent forth to Steal for\n Mankind. When he returned—and have no fear: Eric was swift, Eric was\n clever, he would return—off might go the loose loin cloths of boyhood\n to be replaced by the tight loin straps of a proud Male Society warrior."
],
[
"\"Eric, Eric, forget about it, boy. He was all of those things and more.\n Your father was famous. Eric the Storeroom-Stormer, we called him,\n Eric the Laugher at Locks, Eric the Roistering Robber of all Mankind.\n He taught me everything I know. But he only married once. And if any\n other woman ever played around with him, she's been careful to keep it\n a secret. Now dress up those spears. You've let them get all sloppy.\n Butts together, that's the way, points up and even with each other.\"\nDutifully, Eric rearranged the bundle of armament that was his\n responsibility. He turned to his uncle again, now examining the\n knapsacks and canteens that would be carried on the expedition.",
"\"How long? Since I got to know your father. He was in another band;\n naturally we hadn't seen much of each other before he married my\n sister. I'd heard about him, though: everyone in the Male Society\n had—he was a great thief. But once he became my brother-in-law,\n I learned a lot from him. I learned about locks, about the latest\n traps—and I learned about Alien-Science. He'd been an Alien-Science\n man for years. He converted your mother, and he converted me.\"\n\n\n Eric the Only backed away. \"No!\" he called out wildly. \"Not my father\n and mother! They were decent people—when they were killed a service\n was held in their name—they went to add to the science of our\n ancestors—\"\nHis uncle jammed a powerful hand over his mouth.",
"Thomas examined his face and seemed satisfied. \"The kind you're going\n after,\" he said. \"If you are your father's son. If you're man enough to\n continue the work he started. Are you?\"\n\n\n Eric started to nod, then found himself shrugging weakly, and finally\n just hung his head. He didn't know what to say. His uncle—well, his\n uncle was his model and his leader, and he was strong and wise and\n crafty. His father—naturally, he wanted to emulate his father and\n continue whatever work he had started. But this was his initiation\n ceremony, after all, and there would be enough danger merely in proving\n his manhood. For his initiation ceremony to take on a task that had\n destroyed his father, the greatest thief the tribe had ever known, and\n a heretical, blasphemous task at that....\n\n\n \"I'll try. I don't know if I can.\"",
"\"She's had two litters, but not off you,\" Eric the Only spat, holding\n his spear out in the guard position. \"If you're the father, then the\n chief's blonde hair is contagious—like measles.\"\nRoy bellowed and jabbed his spear forward. Eric parried it and lunged\n in his turn. He missed as his opponent leaped to one side. They\n circled each other, cursing and insulting, eyes only for the point of\n each other's spears. The other young men had scrambled a distance down\n the burrow to get out of their way.\nA powerful arm suddenly clamped Eric's waist from behind and lifted\n him off his feet. He was kicked hard, so that he stumbled a half-dozen\n steps and fell. On his feet in a moment, the spear still in his hand,\n he whirled, ready to deal with this new opponent. He was mad enough to\n fight all Mankind.\n\n\n But not Thomas the Trap-Smasher. No, not that mad.",
"Sarah the Sickness-Healer opened the proceedings. She circled him\n belligerently, hands on hips, her great breasts rolling to and fro like\n a pair of swollen pendulums, her eyes glittering with scorn.\n\n\n \"Eric the Only,\" she intoned, and then paused to grin, as if it were a\n name impossible to believe, \"Eric the Singleton, Eric the one and only\n child of either his mother or his father. Your parents almost didn't\n have enough between them to make a solitary child. Is there enough in\n you to make a man?\"\nThere was a snigger of appreciation from the children in the distance,\n and it was echoed by a few growling laughs from the vicinity of the\n Throne Mound. Eric felt his face and neck go red. He would have fought\n any man to the death for remarks like these. Any man at all. But who\n could lift his hand to a woman and be allowed to live? Besides, one of\n the main purposes of this exhibition was to investigate his powers of\n self-control.",
"\"Well, I know. I know from plenty of battle experience. The thing to\n remember is that once our ancestors were knocked down, they stayed\n down. That means their science and knowhow were not so much in the\n first place. And\nthat\nmeans—\" here he turned his head and looked\n directly into Eric's eyes—\"\nthat\nmeans the science of our ancestors\n wasn't worth one good damn against the Monsters, and it wouldn't be\n worth one good damn to us!\"\n\n\n Eric the Only turned pale. He knew heresy when he heard it.\nHis uncle patted him on the shoulder, drawing a deep breath as if he'd\n finally spat out something extremely unpleasant. He leaned closer, eyes\n glittering beneath the forehead glow lamp and his voice dropped to a\n fierce whisper.",
"\"Until never for some people,\" one of the young men broke in. He\n rattled his spear in his hand, carelessly, proudly. \"After you steal,\n you still have to convince a woman that you're a man. And some men\n have to do an awful lot of convincing. An\nawful\nlot, Eric-O.\"\n\n\n The ball of laughter bounced back and forth again, heavier than before.\n Eric the Only felt his face turn bright red. How dare they remind him\n of his birth? On this day of all days? Here he was about to prepare\n himself to go forth and Steal for Mankind....\n\n\n He dropped the sharpening stone into his pouch and slid his right\n hand back along his uncle's spear. \"At least,\" he said, slowly and\n definitely, \"at least, my woman will stay convinced, Roy the Runner.\n She won't be always open to offers from every other man in the tribe.\"",
"Another girl caught his eye. She had been observing him for some time\n and smiling behind her lashes, behind her demurely set mouth. Harriet\n the History-Teller, the oldest daughter of Rita the Record-Keeper,\n who would one day succeed to her mother's office. Now there was a\n lovely, slender girl, her hair completely unwound in testament to full\n womanhood and recognized professional status.\nEric had caught these covert, barely stated smiles from her before;\n especially in the last few weeks, as the time for his Theft approached.\n He knew that if he were successful—and he\nhad\nto be successful:\n don't dare think of anything but success!—she would look with favor on\n advances from him. Of course, Harriet was a redhead, and therefore,\n according to Mankind's traditions, unlucky. She was probably having a\n hard time finding a mate. But his own mother had been a redhead.\n\n\n Yes, and his mother had been very unlucky indeed.",
"The pin sank into his chest for a little distance, paused, came out.\n It probed here, probed there; finally it found a nerve in his upper\n arm. There, guided by the knowledge of the Sickness-Healer, it bit and\n clawed at the delicate area until Eric felt he would grind his teeth\n to powder in the effort not to cry out. His clenched fists twisted\n agonizingly at the ends of his arms in a paroxysm of protest, but he\n kept his body still. He didn't cry out; he didn't move away; he didn't\n raise a hand to protect himself.\n\n\n Sarah the Sickness-Healer stepped back and considered him. \"There\n is no man here yet,\" she said grudgingly. \"But perhaps there is the\n beginnings of one.\"",
"Even his father had been infected with her terrible bad luck. Still,\n Harriet the History-Teller was an important person in the tribe for one\n her age. Good-looking too. And, above all, she didn't turn away from\n him. She smiled at him, openly now. He smiled back.\n\n\n \"Look at Eric!\" he heard someone call out behind him. \"He's already\n searching for a mate. Hey, Eric! You've not even wearing straps yet.\n First comes the stealing.\nThen\ncomes the mating.\"\n\n\n Eric spun around, bits of fantasy still stuck to his lips.\n\n\n The group of young men lounging against the wall of his band's burrow\n were tossing laughter back and forth between them. They were all\n adults: they had all made their Theft. Socially, they were still his\n superiors. His only recourse was cold dignity.\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he began. \"There is no mating until—\"",
"\"Suppose there had been another woman. My father could have had two,\n three, even four litters by different women. Extra-large litters too.\n If we could prove something like that, I wouldn't be a singleton any\n more. I would not be Eric the Only.\"",
"As his name was sung out, Eric shook himself. Half on his own volition\n and half in response to the pushes he received from the other warriors,\n he stumbled up to his uncle and faced the chief. This, the most\n important moment of his life, was proving almost too much for him. So\n many people in one place, accredited and famous warriors, knowledgeable\n and attractive women, the chief himself, all this after the shattering\n revelations from his uncle—he was finding it hard to think clearly.\n And it was vital to think clearly. His responses to the next few\n questions had to be exactly right.\nThe chief was asking the first: \"Eric the Only, do you apply for full\n manhood?\"\n\n\n Eric breathed hard and nodded. \"I do.\"\n\n\n \"As a full man, what will be your value to Mankind?\"",
"\"I think so,\" he managed to say after a long pause. \"And I'm willing to\n prove it.\"\n\n\n \"Prove it, then!\" the woman snarled. Her right hand, holding a long,\n sharp-pointed pin, shot to his chest like a flung spear. Eric made his\n muscles rigid and tried to send his mind away. That, the men had told\n him, was what you had to do at this moment: it was not you they were\n hurting, not you at all. You, your mind, your knowledge of self, were\n in another part of the burrow entirely, watching these painful things\n being done to someone else.",
"Eric the Only stared at his uncle. That wasn't the next question in the\n catechism. He must have heard incorrectly. His uncle couldn't have made\n a mistake in such a basic ritual.\n\n\n \"\nWe will do that\n,\" he went on in the second reply, his voice sliding\n into the singsong of childhood lessons, \"\nby regaining the science and\n knowhow of our fore-fathers. Man was once Lord of all Creation: his\n science and knowhow made him supreme. Science and knowhow is what we\n need to hit back at the Monsters.\n\"\n\n\n \"Now, Eric,\" his uncle asked gently. \"Please tell me this. What in hell\n is knowhow?\"\n\n\n That was way off. They were a full corridor's length from the normal\n progression of the catechism now.",
"\"Eric. When I asked you how we've been hitting back at the Monsters,\n you told me what we\nought\nto do. We haven't been\ndoing\na\n single thing to bother them. We don't know how to reconstruct\n the Ancestor-science, we don't have the tools or weapons or\n knowhow—whatever\nthat\nis—but they wouldn't do us a bit of good even\n if we had them. Because they failed once. They failed completely and\n at their best. There's just no point in trying to put them together\n again.\"\n\n\n And now Eric understood. He understood why his uncle had whispered,\n why there had been so much strain in this conversation. Bloodshed was\n involved here, bloodshed and death.\n\n\n \"Uncle Thomas,\" he whispered, in a voice that kept cracking despite\n his efforts to keep it whole and steady, \"how long have you been an\n Alien-Science man? When did you leave Ancestor-Science?\"",
"There was a rattling moment, the barest second, when the chief's eyes\n locked with those of the band leader. With all that was on Eric's mind\n at the moment, he noticed it. Then the chief looked away and pointed to\n the women on the other side of the burrow.\n\n\n \"He is accepted as a candidate by the men. Now the women must ask for\n proof, for only a woman's proof bestows full manhood.\"\n\n\n The first part was over. And it hadn't been too bad. Eric turned\n to face the advancing leaders of the Female Society, Ottilie, the\n Chieftain's First Wife, in the center. Now came the part that scared\n him. The women's part.",
"The older man brought his lips together, looking dissatisfied. \"First\n category.\nFood.\nWell....\"\n\n\n Eric felt he understood. \"You mean, for someone like me—an Only,\n who's really got to make a name for himself—I ought to announce\n like a real warrior? I should say I'm going to steal in the second\n category—Articles Useful to Mankind. Is that what my father would have\n done?\"\n\n\n \"Do you know what your father would have done?\"\n\n\n \"No. What?\" Eric demanded eagerly.\n\n\n \"He'd have elected the third category. That's what I'd be announcing\n these days, if I were going through an initiation ceremony. That's what\n I want you to announce.\"\n\n\n \"Third category? Monster souvenirs? But no one's elected the third\n category in I don't know how many auld lang synes. Why should I do it?\"",
"\"You can,\" his uncle told him heartily. \"It's been set up for you. It\n will be like walking through a dug burrow, Eric. All you have to face\n through is the council. You'll have to be steady there, no matter what.\n You tell the chief that you're undertaking the third category.\"\n\n\n \"But why the third?\" Eric asked. \"Why does it have to be Monster\n souvenirs?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's what we need. And you stick to it, no matter what\n pressure they put on you. Remember, an initiate has the right to decide\n what he's going to steal. A man's first Theft is his own affair.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen, uncle—\"\n\n\n There was a whistle from the end of the burrow. Thomas the Trap-Smasher\n nodded in the direction of the signal.",
"The Trap-Smasher sighed and thought for a moment. Then he pulled the\n spear from his back sling and took Eric's arm. He drew the youth along\n the burrow until they stood alone in the very center of it. He looked\n carefully at the exits at either end, making certain that they were\n completely alone before giving his reply in an unusually low, guarded\n voice.\n\n\n \"We'd never be able to prove anything like that. If you don't want to\n be Eric the Only, if you want to be Eric the something-else, well then,\n it's up to you. You have to make a good Theft. That's what you should\n be thinking about all the time now—your Theft. Eric, which category\n are you going to announce?\"\n\n\n He hadn't thought about it very much. \"The usual one I guess. The one\n that's picked for most initiations. First category.\"",
"As was customary at such a moment, his uncle and sponsor left him when\n the women came forward. Thomas the Trap-Smasher led his band to the\n warriors grouped about the Throne Mound. There, with their colleagues,\n they folded their arms across their chests and turned to watch. A man\n can only give proof of his manhood while he is alone; his friends\n cannot support him once the women approach.\n\n\n It was not going to be easy, Eric realized. He had hoped that at least\n one of his uncle's wives would be among the three examiners: they were\n both kindly people who liked him and had talked to him much about\n the mysteries of women's work. But he had drawn a trio of hard-faced\n females who apparently intended to take him over the full course before\n they passed him."
],
[
"Yes, unquestionably The Man of Mankind was Franklin the Father of Many\n Thieves. You could tell it from the hushed, respectful attitudes of the\n subordinate warriors who stood at a distance from the mound. You could\n tell it from the rippling interest of the women as they stood on the\n other side of the great burrow, drawn up in the ranks of the Female\n Society. You could tell it from the nervousness and scorn with which\n the women were watched by their leader, Ottilie, the Chieftain's First\n Wife. And finally, you could tell it from the faces of the children,\n standing in a distant, disorganized bunch. A clear majority of their\n faces bore an unmistakable resemblance to Franklin's.\n\n\n Franklin clapped his hands, three evenly spaced, flesh-heavy wallops.",
"\"Because this is more than just an initiation ceremony. It could be the\n beginning of a new life for all of us.\"\n\n\n Eric frowned. What could be more than an initiation ceremony and his\n attainment of full thieving manhood?\n\n\n \"There are things going on in Mankind, these days,\" Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher continued in a strange, urgent voice. \"Big things. And\n you're going to be a part of them. This Theft of yours—if you handle\n it right, if you do what I tell you, it's likely to blow the lid off\n everything the chief has been sitting on.\"",
"Thomas the Trap-Smasher caressed his spear before he answered. He\n felt for it with a gentle, wandering arm, almost unconsciously, but\n both of them registered the fact that it was loose and ready. His\n tremendous body, nude except for the straps about his loins and the\n light spear-sling on his back, looked as if it were preparing to move\n instantaneously in any direction.\n\n\n He stared again from one end of the burrow to the other, his forehead\n lamp reaching out to the branching darkness of the exits. Eric stared\n with him. No one was leaning tightly against a wall and listening.",
"On the little hillock known as the Royal Mound, lolled Franklin the\n Father of Many Thieves, Chieftain of all Mankind. He alone of the\n cluster of warriors displayed heaviness of belly and flabbiness of\n arm—for he alone had the privilege of a sedentary life. Beside the\n sternly muscled band leaders who formed his immediate background, he\n looked almost womanly; and yet one of his many titles was simply The\n Man.",
"The Trap-Smasher sighed and thought for a moment. Then he pulled the\n spear from his back sling and took Eric's arm. He drew the youth along\n the burrow until they stood alone in the very center of it. He looked\n carefully at the exits at either end, making certain that they were\n completely alone before giving his reply in an unusually low, guarded\n voice.\n\n\n \"We'd never be able to prove anything like that. If you don't want to\n be Eric the Only, if you want to be Eric the something-else, well then,\n it's up to you. You have to make a good Theft. That's what you should\n be thinking about all the time now—your Theft. Eric, which category\n are you going to announce?\"\n\n\n He hadn't thought about it very much. \"The usual one I guess. The one\n that's picked for most initiations. First category.\"",
"\"In the name of our ancestors,\" he said, \"and the science with which\n they ruled the Earth, I declare this council opened. May it end as one\n more step in the regaining of their science. Who asked for a council?\"\n\n\n \"I did.\" Thomas the Trap-Smasher moved out of his band and stood before\n the chief.\n\n\n Franklin nodded, and went on with the next, formal question:\n\n\n \"And your reason?\"\n\n\n \"As a band leader, I call attention to a candidate for manhood. A\n member of my band, a spear-carrier for the required time, and an\n accepted apprentice in the Male Society. My nephew, Eric the Only.\"",
"\"She's had two litters, but not off you,\" Eric the Only spat, holding\n his spear out in the guard position. \"If you're the father, then the\n chief's blonde hair is contagious—like measles.\"\nRoy bellowed and jabbed his spear forward. Eric parried it and lunged\n in his turn. He missed as his opponent leaped to one side. They\n circled each other, cursing and insulting, eyes only for the point of\n each other's spears. The other young men had scrambled a distance down\n the burrow to get out of their way.\nA powerful arm suddenly clamped Eric's waist from behind and lifted\n him off his feet. He was kicked hard, so that he stumbled a half-dozen\n steps and fell. On his feet in a moment, the spear still in his hand,\n he whirled, ready to deal with this new opponent. He was mad enough to\n fight all Mankind.\n\n\n But not Thomas the Trap-Smasher. No, not that mad.",
"\"I will steal for Mankind whatever it needs. I will defend Mankind\n against all outsiders. I will increase the possessions and knowledge of\n the Female Society so that the Female Society can increase the power\n and well-being of Mankind.\"\n\n\n \"And all this you swear to do?\"\n\n\n \"And all this I swear to do.\"\n\n\n The Chief turned to Eric's uncle. \"As his sponsor, do you support his\n oath and swear that he is to be trusted?\"\n\n\n With just the faintest hint of sarcasm in his voice, Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher replied: \"Yes. I support his oath and swear that he is to\n be trusted.\"",
"Thomas examined his face and seemed satisfied. \"The kind you're going\n after,\" he said. \"If you are your father's son. If you're man enough to\n continue the work he started. Are you?\"\n\n\n Eric started to nod, then found himself shrugging weakly, and finally\n just hung his head. He didn't know what to say. His uncle—well, his\n uncle was his model and his leader, and he was strong and wise and\n crafty. His father—naturally, he wanted to emulate his father and\n continue whatever work he had started. But this was his initiation\n ceremony, after all, and there would be enough danger merely in proving\n his manhood. For his initiation ceremony to take on a task that had\n destroyed his father, the greatest thief the tribe had ever known, and\n a heretical, blasphemous task at that....\n\n\n \"I'll try. I don't know if I can.\"",
"\"You can,\" his uncle told him heartily. \"It's been set up for you. It\n will be like walking through a dug burrow, Eric. All you have to face\n through is the council. You'll have to be steady there, no matter what.\n You tell the chief that you're undertaking the third category.\"\n\n\n \"But why the third?\" Eric asked. \"Why does it have to be Monster\n souvenirs?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's what we need. And you stick to it, no matter what\n pressure they put on you. Remember, an initiate has the right to decide\n what he's going to steal. A man's first Theft is his own affair.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen, uncle—\"\n\n\n There was a whistle from the end of the burrow. Thomas the Trap-Smasher\n nodded in the direction of the signal.",
"\"You punish with the haft of the spear. And anyway, this is my band and\n I do the punishing around here. Now move on out, all of you, and get\n ready for the council. I'll attend to the boy myself.\"\n\n\n They went off obediently without looking back. The Trap-Smasher's band\n was famous for its discipline throughout the length and breadth of\n Mankind. A proud thing to be a member of it. But to be called a boy in\n front of the others! A boy, when he was full-grown and ready to begin\n stealing!\n\n\n Although, come to think of it, he'd rather be called a boy than a\n singleton. A boy eventually became a man, but a singleton stayed a\n singleton forever. He put the problem to his uncle who was at the\n niche, inspecting the band's reserve pile of spears.",
"\"A little,\" he said. \"Not much.\"\n\n\n \"The Monsters will hurt you much more if they catch you stealing from\n them, do you know that? They will hurt you much more than we ever\n could.\"\n\n\n \"I know. But the stealing is more important than the risk I'm taking.\n The stealing is the most important thing a man can do.\"",
"\"How long? Since I got to know your father. He was in another band;\n naturally we hadn't seen much of each other before he married my\n sister. I'd heard about him, though: everyone in the Male Society\n had—he was a great thief. But once he became my brother-in-law,\n I learned a lot from him. I learned about locks, about the latest\n traps—and I learned about Alien-Science. He'd been an Alien-Science\n man for years. He converted your mother, and he converted me.\"\n\n\n Eric the Only backed away. \"No!\" he called out wildly. \"Not my father\n and mother! They were decent people—when they were killed a service\n was held in their name—they went to add to the science of our\n ancestors—\"\nHis uncle jammed a powerful hand over his mouth.",
"\"Eric, Eric, forget about it, boy. He was all of those things and more.\n Your father was famous. Eric the Storeroom-Stormer, we called him,\n Eric the Laugher at Locks, Eric the Roistering Robber of all Mankind.\n He taught me everything I know. But he only married once. And if any\n other woman ever played around with him, she's been careful to keep it\n a secret. Now dress up those spears. You've let them get all sloppy.\n Butts together, that's the way, points up and even with each other.\"\nDutifully, Eric rearranged the bundle of armament that was his\n responsibility. He turned to his uncle again, now examining the\n knapsacks and canteens that would be carried on the expedition.",
"As was customary at such a moment, his uncle and sponsor left him when\n the women came forward. Thomas the Trap-Smasher led his band to the\n warriors grouped about the Throne Mound. There, with their colleagues,\n they folded their arms across their chests and turned to watch. A man\n can only give proof of his manhood while he is alone; his friends\n cannot support him once the women approach.\n\n\n It was not going to be easy, Eric realized. He had hoped that at least\n one of his uncle's wives would be among the three examiners: they were\n both kindly people who liked him and had talked to him much about\n the mysteries of women's work. But he had drawn a trio of hard-faced\n females who apparently intended to take him over the full course before\n they passed him.",
"\"Isn't it possible—I mean, it is possible, isn't it—that my father\n had some children by another woman? You told me he was one of the best\n thieves we ever had.\"\n\n\n The captain of the band turned to study him, folding his arms across\n his chest so that biceps swelled into greatness and power. They\n glinted in the light of the tiny lantern bound to his forehead, the\n glow lantern that only fully accredited warriors might wear. After a\n while, the older man shook his head and said, very gently:",
"\"Shut up, you damn fool, or you'll finish us both! Of course your\n parents were decent people. How do you think they were killed? Your\n mother was with your father out in Monster territory. Have you ever\n heard of a woman going along with her husband on a Theft? And taking\n her baby with her? Do you think it was an ordinary robbery of the\n Monsters? They were Alien-science people, serving their faith as best\n they could. They died for it.\"\n\n\n Eric looked into his uncle's eyes over the hand that covered the lower\n half of his face.\nAlien-science people ... serving their faith ... do\n you think it was an ordinary robbery ... they died for it!\nHe had never realized before how odd it was that his parents had gone\n to Monster territory together, a man taking his wife and the woman\n taking her baby!\n\n\n As he relaxed, his uncle removed the gagging hand. \"What kind of Theft\n was it that my parents died in?\"",
"\"Eric. When I asked you how we've been hitting back at the Monsters,\n you told me what we\nought\nto do. We haven't been\ndoing\na\n single thing to bother them. We don't know how to reconstruct\n the Ancestor-science, we don't have the tools or weapons or\n knowhow—whatever\nthat\nis—but they wouldn't do us a bit of good even\n if we had them. Because they failed once. They failed completely and\n at their best. There's just no point in trying to put them together\n again.\"\n\n\n And now Eric understood. He understood why his uncle had whispered,\n why there had been so much strain in this conversation. Bloodshed was\n involved here, bloodshed and death.\n\n\n \"Uncle Thomas,\" he whispered, in a voice that kept cracking despite\n his efforts to keep it whole and steady, \"how long have you been an\n Alien-Science man? When did you leave Ancestor-Science?\"",
"\"The council's beginning, boy. We'll talk later, on expedition. Now\n remember this: stealing from the third category is your own idea, and\n all your own idea. Forget everything else we've talked about. If you\n hit any trouble with the chief, I'll be there. I'm your sponsor, after\n all.\"\n\n\n He threw an arm about his confused nephew and walked to the end of the\n burrow where the other members of the band waited.\nII\n\n\n The tribe had gathered in its central and largest burrow under the\n great, hanging glow lamps that might be used in this place alone.\n Except for the few sentinels on duty in the outlying corridors, all of\n Mankind was here. It was an awesome sight to behold.",
"All the tension drained out of him as he recognized the captain of his\n band. He couldn't fight Thomas. His uncle. And the greatest of all men.\n Guiltily, he walked to the niche in the wall where the band's weapons\n were stacked and slid his uncle's spear into its appointed place.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with you, Roy?\" Thomas was asking behind\n him. \"Fighting a duel with an initiate? Where's your band spirit?\n That's all we need these days, to be cut down from six effectives to\n five. Save your spear for Strangers, or—if you feel very brave—for\n Monsters. But don't show a point in our band's burrow if you know\n what's good for you, hear me?\"\n\n\n \"I wasn't fighting a duel,\" the Runner mumbled, sheathing his own\n spear. \"The kid got above himself. I was punishing him.\""
],
[
"Sarah the Sickness-Healer opened the proceedings. She circled him\n belligerently, hands on hips, her great breasts rolling to and fro like\n a pair of swollen pendulums, her eyes glittering with scorn.\n\n\n \"Eric the Only,\" she intoned, and then paused to grin, as if it were a\n name impossible to believe, \"Eric the Singleton, Eric the one and only\n child of either his mother or his father. Your parents almost didn't\n have enough between them to make a solitary child. Is there enough in\n you to make a man?\"\nThere was a snigger of appreciation from the children in the distance,\n and it was echoed by a few growling laughs from the vicinity of the\n Throne Mound. Eric felt his face and neck go red. He would have fought\n any man to the death for remarks like these. Any man at all. But who\n could lift his hand to a woman and be allowed to live? Besides, one of\n the main purposes of this exhibition was to investigate his powers of\n self-control.",
"Sarah the Sickness-Healer, for example, with her incredible knowledge\n of what food was fit and what was unfit, her only garment a cloud of\n hair that alternately screened and revealed her hips and breasts, the\n largest in all Mankind. There was a woman for you! Over five litters\n she had had, two of them of maximum size.\n\n\n Eric watched as she turned a yellow chunk of food around and around\n under the glow lamp hanging from the ceiling of the burrow, looking for\n she only knew what and recognizing it when she found it she only knew\n how. A man could really strut with such a mate.",
"The pin sank into his chest for a little distance, paused, came out.\n It probed here, probed there; finally it found a nerve in his upper\n arm. There, guided by the knowledge of the Sickness-Healer, it bit and\n clawed at the delicate area until Eric felt he would grind his teeth\n to powder in the effort not to cry out. His clenched fists twisted\n agonizingly at the ends of his arms in a paroxysm of protest, but he\n kept his body still. He didn't cry out; he didn't move away; he didn't\n raise a hand to protect himself.\n\n\n Sarah the Sickness-Healer stepped back and considered him. \"There\n is no man here yet,\" she said grudgingly. \"But perhaps there is the\n beginnings of one.\"",
"He could relax. The physical test was over. There would be another one,\n much later, after he had completed his theft successfully; but that\n would be exclusively by men as part of his proud initiation ceremony.\n Under the circumstances, he knew he would be able to go through it\n almost gaily.\n\n\n Meanwhile, the women's physical test was over. That was the important\n thing for now. In sheer reaction, his body gushed forth sweat which\n slid over the bloody cracks in his skin and stung viciously. He felt\n the water pouring down his back and forced himself not to go limp,\n prodded his mind into alertness.\n\n\n \"Did that hurt?\" he was being asked by Rita, the old crone of a\n Record-Keeper. There was a solicitous smile on her forty-year-old face,\n but he knew it was a fake. A woman as old as that no longer felt sorry\n for anybody. She had too many aches and pains and things generally\n wrong with her to worry about other people's troubles.",
"As was customary at such a moment, his uncle and sponsor left him when\n the women came forward. Thomas the Trap-Smasher led his band to the\n warriors grouped about the Throne Mound. There, with their colleagues,\n they folded their arms across their chests and turned to watch. A man\n can only give proof of his manhood while he is alone; his friends\n cannot support him once the women approach.\n\n\n It was not going to be easy, Eric realized. He had hoped that at least\n one of his uncle's wives would be among the three examiners: they were\n both kindly people who liked him and had talked to him much about\n the mysteries of women's work. But he had drawn a trio of hard-faced\n females who apparently intended to take him over the full course before\n they passed him.",
"There was a rattling moment, the barest second, when the chief's eyes\n locked with those of the band leader. With all that was on Eric's mind\n at the moment, he noticed it. Then the chief looked away and pointed to\n the women on the other side of the burrow.\n\n\n \"He is accepted as a candidate by the men. Now the women must ask for\n proof, for only a woman's proof bestows full manhood.\"\n\n\n The first part was over. And it hadn't been too bad. Eric turned\n to face the advancing leaders of the Female Society, Ottilie, the\n Chieftain's First Wife, in the center. Now came the part that scared\n him. The women's part.",
"\"I think so,\" he managed to say after a long pause. \"And I'm willing to\n prove it.\"\n\n\n \"Prove it, then!\" the woman snarled. Her right hand, holding a long,\n sharp-pointed pin, shot to his chest like a flung spear. Eric made his\n muscles rigid and tried to send his mind away. That, the men had told\n him, was what you had to do at this moment: it was not you they were\n hurting, not you at all. You, your mind, your knowledge of self, were\n in another part of the burrow entirely, watching these painful things\n being done to someone else.",
"But she was the wife of a band leader and far, far beyond him. Her\n daughter, though, Selma the Soft-Skinned, would probably be flattered\n by his attentions. She still wore her hair in a heavy bun: it would\n be at least a year before the Female Society would consider her an\n initiate and allow her to drape it about her nakedness. No, far too\n young and unimportant for a man on the very verge of warrior status.",
"\"I will steal for Mankind whatever it needs. I will defend Mankind\n against all outsiders. I will increase the possessions and knowledge of\n the Female Society so that the Female Society can increase the power\n and well-being of Mankind.\"\n\n\n \"And all this you swear to do?\"\n\n\n \"And all this I swear to do.\"\n\n\n The Chief turned to Eric's uncle. \"As his sponsor, do you support his\n oath and swear that he is to be trusted?\"\n\n\n With just the faintest hint of sarcasm in his voice, Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher replied: \"Yes. I support his oath and swear that he is to\n be trusted.\"",
"Another girl caught his eye. She had been observing him for some time\n and smiling behind her lashes, behind her demurely set mouth. Harriet\n the History-Teller, the oldest daughter of Rita the Record-Keeper,\n who would one day succeed to her mother's office. Now there was a\n lovely, slender girl, her hair completely unwound in testament to full\n womanhood and recognized professional status.\nEric had caught these covert, barely stated smiles from her before;\n especially in the last few weeks, as the time for his Theft approached.\n He knew that if he were successful—and he\nhad\nto be successful:\n don't dare think of anything but success!—she would look with favor on\n advances from him. Of course, Harriet was a redhead, and therefore,\n according to Mankind's traditions, unlucky. She was probably having a\n hard time finding a mate. But his own mother had been a redhead.\n\n\n Yes, and his mother had been very unlucky indeed.",
"Thomas examined his face and seemed satisfied. \"The kind you're going\n after,\" he said. \"If you are your father's son. If you're man enough to\n continue the work he started. Are you?\"\n\n\n Eric started to nod, then found himself shrugging weakly, and finally\n just hung his head. He didn't know what to say. His uncle—well, his\n uncle was his model and his leader, and he was strong and wise and\n crafty. His father—naturally, he wanted to emulate his father and\n continue whatever work he had started. But this was his initiation\n ceremony, after all, and there would be enough danger merely in proving\n his manhood. For his initiation ceremony to take on a task that had\n destroyed his father, the greatest thief the tribe had ever known, and\n a heretical, blasphemous task at that....\n\n\n \"I'll try. I don't know if I can.\"",
"\"In the name of our ancestors,\" he said, \"and the science with which\n they ruled the Earth, I declare this council opened. May it end as one\n more step in the regaining of their science. Who asked for a council?\"\n\n\n \"I did.\" Thomas the Trap-Smasher moved out of his band and stood before\n the chief.\n\n\n Franklin nodded, and went on with the next, formal question:\n\n\n \"And your reason?\"\n\n\n \"As a band leader, I call attention to a candidate for manhood. A\n member of my band, a spear-carrier for the required time, and an\n accepted apprentice in the Male Society. My nephew, Eric the Only.\"",
"\"Until never for some people,\" one of the young men broke in. He\n rattled his spear in his hand, carelessly, proudly. \"After you steal,\n you still have to convince a woman that you're a man. And some men\n have to do an awful lot of convincing. An\nawful\nlot, Eric-O.\"\n\n\n The ball of laughter bounced back and forth again, heavier than before.\n Eric the Only felt his face turn bright red. How dare they remind him\n of his birth? On this day of all days? Here he was about to prepare\n himself to go forth and Steal for Mankind....\n\n\n He dropped the sharpening stone into his pouch and slid his right\n hand back along his uncle's spear. \"At least,\" he said, slowly and\n definitely, \"at least, my woman will stay convinced, Roy the Runner.\n She won't be always open to offers from every other man in the tribe.\"",
"The Trap-Smasher sighed and thought for a moment. Then he pulled the\n spear from his back sling and took Eric's arm. He drew the youth along\n the burrow until they stood alone in the very center of it. He looked\n carefully at the exits at either end, making certain that they were\n completely alone before giving his reply in an unusually low, guarded\n voice.\n\n\n \"We'd never be able to prove anything like that. If you don't want to\n be Eric the Only, if you want to be Eric the something-else, well then,\n it's up to you. You have to make a good Theft. That's what you should\n be thinking about all the time now—your Theft. Eric, which category\n are you going to announce?\"\n\n\n He hadn't thought about it very much. \"The usual one I guess. The one\n that's picked for most initiations. First category.\"",
"As his name was sung out, Eric shook himself. Half on his own volition\n and half in response to the pushes he received from the other warriors,\n he stumbled up to his uncle and faced the chief. This, the most\n important moment of his life, was proving almost too much for him. So\n many people in one place, accredited and famous warriors, knowledgeable\n and attractive women, the chief himself, all this after the shattering\n revelations from his uncle—he was finding it hard to think clearly.\n And it was vital to think clearly. His responses to the next few\n questions had to be exactly right.\nThe chief was asking the first: \"Eric the Only, do you apply for full\n manhood?\"\n\n\n Eric breathed hard and nodded. \"I do.\"\n\n\n \"As a full man, what will be your value to Mankind?\"",
"Even his father had been infected with her terrible bad luck. Still,\n Harriet the History-Teller was an important person in the tribe for one\n her age. Good-looking too. And, above all, she didn't turn away from\n him. She smiled at him, openly now. He smiled back.\n\n\n \"Look at Eric!\" he heard someone call out behind him. \"He's already\n searching for a mate. Hey, Eric! You've not even wearing straps yet.\n First comes the stealing.\nThen\ncomes the mating.\"\n\n\n Eric spun around, bits of fantasy still stuck to his lips.\n\n\n The group of young men lounging against the wall of his band's burrow\n were tossing laughter back and forth between them. They were all\n adults: they had all made their Theft. Socially, they were still his\n superiors. His only recourse was cold dignity.\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he began. \"There is no mating until—\"",
"\"You can,\" his uncle told him heartily. \"It's been set up for you. It\n will be like walking through a dug burrow, Eric. All you have to face\n through is the council. You'll have to be steady there, no matter what.\n You tell the chief that you're undertaking the third category.\"\n\n\n \"But why the third?\" Eric asked. \"Why does it have to be Monster\n souvenirs?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's what we need. And you stick to it, no matter what\n pressure they put on you. Remember, an initiate has the right to decide\n what he's going to steal. A man's first Theft is his own affair.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen, uncle—\"\n\n\n There was a whistle from the end of the burrow. Thomas the Trap-Smasher\n nodded in the direction of the signal.",
"Yes, unquestionably The Man of Mankind was Franklin the Father of Many\n Thieves. You could tell it from the hushed, respectful attitudes of the\n subordinate warriors who stood at a distance from the mound. You could\n tell it from the rippling interest of the women as they stood on the\n other side of the great burrow, drawn up in the ranks of the Female\n Society. You could tell it from the nervousness and scorn with which\n the women were watched by their leader, Ottilie, the Chieftain's First\n Wife. And finally, you could tell it from the faces of the children,\n standing in a distant, disorganized bunch. A clear majority of their\n faces bore an unmistakable resemblance to Franklin's.\n\n\n Franklin clapped his hands, three evenly spaced, flesh-heavy wallops.",
"\"A little,\" he said. \"Not much.\"\n\n\n \"The Monsters will hurt you much more if they catch you stealing from\n them, do you know that? They will hurt you much more than we ever\n could.\"\n\n\n \"I know. But the stealing is more important than the risk I'm taking.\n The stealing is the most important thing a man can do.\"",
"\"Eric, Eric, forget about it, boy. He was all of those things and more.\n Your father was famous. Eric the Storeroom-Stormer, we called him,\n Eric the Laugher at Locks, Eric the Roistering Robber of all Mankind.\n He taught me everything I know. But he only married once. And if any\n other woman ever played around with him, she's been careful to keep it\n a secret. Now dress up those spears. You've let them get all sloppy.\n Butts together, that's the way, points up and even with each other.\"\nDutifully, Eric rearranged the bundle of armament that was his\n responsibility. He turned to his uncle again, now examining the\n knapsacks and canteens that would be carried on the expedition."
],
[
"Another girl caught his eye. She had been observing him for some time\n and smiling behind her lashes, behind her demurely set mouth. Harriet\n the History-Teller, the oldest daughter of Rita the Record-Keeper,\n who would one day succeed to her mother's office. Now there was a\n lovely, slender girl, her hair completely unwound in testament to full\n womanhood and recognized professional status.\nEric had caught these covert, barely stated smiles from her before;\n especially in the last few weeks, as the time for his Theft approached.\n He knew that if he were successful—and he\nhad\nto be successful:\n don't dare think of anything but success!—she would look with favor on\n advances from him. Of course, Harriet was a redhead, and therefore,\n according to Mankind's traditions, unlucky. She was probably having a\n hard time finding a mate. But his own mother had been a redhead.\n\n\n Yes, and his mother had been very unlucky indeed.",
"Sarah the Sickness-Healer, for example, with her incredible knowledge\n of what food was fit and what was unfit, her only garment a cloud of\n hair that alternately screened and revealed her hips and breasts, the\n largest in all Mankind. There was a woman for you! Over five litters\n she had had, two of them of maximum size.\n\n\n Eric watched as she turned a yellow chunk of food around and around\n under the glow lamp hanging from the ceiling of the burrow, looking for\n she only knew what and recognizing it when she found it she only knew\n how. A man could really strut with such a mate.",
"Sarah the Sickness-Healer opened the proceedings. She circled him\n belligerently, hands on hips, her great breasts rolling to and fro like\n a pair of swollen pendulums, her eyes glittering with scorn.\n\n\n \"Eric the Only,\" she intoned, and then paused to grin, as if it were a\n name impossible to believe, \"Eric the Singleton, Eric the one and only\n child of either his mother or his father. Your parents almost didn't\n have enough between them to make a solitary child. Is there enough in\n you to make a man?\"\nThere was a snigger of appreciation from the children in the distance,\n and it was echoed by a few growling laughs from the vicinity of the\n Throne Mound. Eric felt his face and neck go red. He would have fought\n any man to the death for remarks like these. Any man at all. But who\n could lift his hand to a woman and be allowed to live? Besides, one of\n the main purposes of this exhibition was to investigate his powers of\n self-control.",
"Even his father had been infected with her terrible bad luck. Still,\n Harriet the History-Teller was an important person in the tribe for one\n her age. Good-looking too. And, above all, she didn't turn away from\n him. She smiled at him, openly now. He smiled back.\n\n\n \"Look at Eric!\" he heard someone call out behind him. \"He's already\n searching for a mate. Hey, Eric! You've not even wearing straps yet.\n First comes the stealing.\nThen\ncomes the mating.\"\n\n\n Eric spun around, bits of fantasy still stuck to his lips.\n\n\n The group of young men lounging against the wall of his band's burrow\n were tossing laughter back and forth between them. They were all\n adults: they had all made their Theft. Socially, they were still his\n superiors. His only recourse was cold dignity.\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he began. \"There is no mating until—\"",
"\"Eric, Eric, forget about it, boy. He was all of those things and more.\n Your father was famous. Eric the Storeroom-Stormer, we called him,\n Eric the Laugher at Locks, Eric the Roistering Robber of all Mankind.\n He taught me everything I know. But he only married once. And if any\n other woman ever played around with him, she's been careful to keep it\n a secret. Now dress up those spears. You've let them get all sloppy.\n Butts together, that's the way, points up and even with each other.\"\nDutifully, Eric rearranged the bundle of armament that was his\n responsibility. He turned to his uncle again, now examining the\n knapsacks and canteens that would be carried on the expedition.",
"The pin sank into his chest for a little distance, paused, came out.\n It probed here, probed there; finally it found a nerve in his upper\n arm. There, guided by the knowledge of the Sickness-Healer, it bit and\n clawed at the delicate area until Eric felt he would grind his teeth\n to powder in the effort not to cry out. His clenched fists twisted\n agonizingly at the ends of his arms in a paroxysm of protest, but he\n kept his body still. He didn't cry out; he didn't move away; he didn't\n raise a hand to protect himself.\n\n\n Sarah the Sickness-Healer stepped back and considered him. \"There\n is no man here yet,\" she said grudgingly. \"But perhaps there is the\n beginnings of one.\"",
"\"She's had two litters, but not off you,\" Eric the Only spat, holding\n his spear out in the guard position. \"If you're the father, then the\n chief's blonde hair is contagious—like measles.\"\nRoy bellowed and jabbed his spear forward. Eric parried it and lunged\n in his turn. He missed as his opponent leaped to one side. They\n circled each other, cursing and insulting, eyes only for the point of\n each other's spears. The other young men had scrambled a distance down\n the burrow to get out of their way.\nA powerful arm suddenly clamped Eric's waist from behind and lifted\n him off his feet. He was kicked hard, so that he stumbled a half-dozen\n steps and fell. On his feet in a moment, the spear still in his hand,\n he whirled, ready to deal with this new opponent. He was mad enough to\n fight all Mankind.\n\n\n But not Thomas the Trap-Smasher. No, not that mad.",
"\"Until never for some people,\" one of the young men broke in. He\n rattled his spear in his hand, carelessly, proudly. \"After you steal,\n you still have to convince a woman that you're a man. And some men\n have to do an awful lot of convincing. An\nawful\nlot, Eric-O.\"\n\n\n The ball of laughter bounced back and forth again, heavier than before.\n Eric the Only felt his face turn bright red. How dare they remind him\n of his birth? On this day of all days? Here he was about to prepare\n himself to go forth and Steal for Mankind....\n\n\n He dropped the sharpening stone into his pouch and slid his right\n hand back along his uncle's spear. \"At least,\" he said, slowly and\n definitely, \"at least, my woman will stay convinced, Roy the Runner.\n She won't be always open to offers from every other man in the tribe.\"",
"There was a rattling moment, the barest second, when the chief's eyes\n locked with those of the band leader. With all that was on Eric's mind\n at the moment, he noticed it. Then the chief looked away and pointed to\n the women on the other side of the burrow.\n\n\n \"He is accepted as a candidate by the men. Now the women must ask for\n proof, for only a woman's proof bestows full manhood.\"\n\n\n The first part was over. And it hadn't been too bad. Eric turned\n to face the advancing leaders of the Female Society, Ottilie, the\n Chieftain's First Wife, in the center. Now came the part that scared\n him. The women's part.",
"As was customary at such a moment, his uncle and sponsor left him when\n the women came forward. Thomas the Trap-Smasher led his band to the\n warriors grouped about the Throne Mound. There, with their colleagues,\n they folded their arms across their chests and turned to watch. A man\n can only give proof of his manhood while he is alone; his friends\n cannot support him once the women approach.\n\n\n It was not going to be easy, Eric realized. He had hoped that at least\n one of his uncle's wives would be among the three examiners: they were\n both kindly people who liked him and had talked to him much about\n the mysteries of women's work. But he had drawn a trio of hard-faced\n females who apparently intended to take him over the full course before\n they passed him.",
"\"I think so,\" he managed to say after a long pause. \"And I'm willing to\n prove it.\"\n\n\n \"Prove it, then!\" the woman snarled. Her right hand, holding a long,\n sharp-pointed pin, shot to his chest like a flung spear. Eric made his\n muscles rigid and tried to send his mind away. That, the men had told\n him, was what you had to do at this moment: it was not you they were\n hurting, not you at all. You, your mind, your knowledge of self, were\n in another part of the burrow entirely, watching these painful things\n being done to someone else.",
"But she was the wife of a band leader and far, far beyond him. Her\n daughter, though, Selma the Soft-Skinned, would probably be flattered\n by his attentions. She still wore her hair in a heavy bun: it would\n be at least a year before the Female Society would consider her an\n initiate and allow her to drape it about her nakedness. No, far too\n young and unimportant for a man on the very verge of warrior status.",
"The Trap-Smasher sighed and thought for a moment. Then he pulled the\n spear from his back sling and took Eric's arm. He drew the youth along\n the burrow until they stood alone in the very center of it. He looked\n carefully at the exits at either end, making certain that they were\n completely alone before giving his reply in an unusually low, guarded\n voice.\n\n\n \"We'd never be able to prove anything like that. If you don't want to\n be Eric the Only, if you want to be Eric the something-else, well then,\n it's up to you. You have to make a good Theft. That's what you should\n be thinking about all the time now—your Theft. Eric, which category\n are you going to announce?\"\n\n\n He hadn't thought about it very much. \"The usual one I guess. The one\n that's picked for most initiations. First category.\"",
"\"You lousy little throwback!\" Roy the Runner yelled. He leaped away\n from the rest of the band and into a crouch facing Eric, his spear\n tense in one hand. \"You're asking for a hole in the belly! My woman's\n had two litters off me, two big litters. What would you have given her,\n you dirty singleton?\"",
"\"How long? Since I got to know your father. He was in another band;\n naturally we hadn't seen much of each other before he married my\n sister. I'd heard about him, though: everyone in the Male Society\n had—he was a great thief. But once he became my brother-in-law,\n I learned a lot from him. I learned about locks, about the latest\n traps—and I learned about Alien-Science. He'd been an Alien-Science\n man for years. He converted your mother, and he converted me.\"\n\n\n Eric the Only backed away. \"No!\" he called out wildly. \"Not my father\n and mother! They were decent people—when they were killed a service\n was held in their name—they went to add to the science of our\n ancestors—\"\nHis uncle jammed a powerful hand over his mouth.",
"\"I will steal for Mankind whatever it needs. I will defend Mankind\n against all outsiders. I will increase the possessions and knowledge of\n the Female Society so that the Female Society can increase the power\n and well-being of Mankind.\"\n\n\n \"And all this you swear to do?\"\n\n\n \"And all this I swear to do.\"\n\n\n The Chief turned to Eric's uncle. \"As his sponsor, do you support his\n oath and swear that he is to be trusted?\"\n\n\n With just the faintest hint of sarcasm in his voice, Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher replied: \"Yes. I support his oath and swear that he is to\n be trusted.\"",
"\"In the name of our ancestors,\" he said, \"and the science with which\n they ruled the Earth, I declare this council opened. May it end as one\n more step in the regaining of their science. Who asked for a council?\"\n\n\n \"I did.\" Thomas the Trap-Smasher moved out of his band and stood before\n the chief.\n\n\n Franklin nodded, and went on with the next, formal question:\n\n\n \"And your reason?\"\n\n\n \"As a band leader, I call attention to a candidate for manhood. A\n member of my band, a spear-carrier for the required time, and an\n accepted apprentice in the Male Society. My nephew, Eric the Only.\"",
"\"Suppose there had been another woman. My father could have had two,\n three, even four litters by different women. Extra-large litters too.\n If we could prove something like that, I wouldn't be a singleton any\n more. I would not be Eric the Only.\"",
"As his name was sung out, Eric shook himself. Half on his own volition\n and half in response to the pushes he received from the other warriors,\n he stumbled up to his uncle and faced the chief. This, the most\n important moment of his life, was proving almost too much for him. So\n many people in one place, accredited and famous warriors, knowledgeable\n and attractive women, the chief himself, all this after the shattering\n revelations from his uncle—he was finding it hard to think clearly.\n And it was vital to think clearly. His responses to the next few\n questions had to be exactly right.\nThe chief was asking the first: \"Eric the Only, do you apply for full\n manhood?\"\n\n\n Eric breathed hard and nodded. \"I do.\"\n\n\n \"As a full man, what will be your value to Mankind?\"",
"Thomas examined his face and seemed satisfied. \"The kind you're going\n after,\" he said. \"If you are your father's son. If you're man enough to\n continue the work he started. Are you?\"\n\n\n Eric started to nod, then found himself shrugging weakly, and finally\n just hung his head. He didn't know what to say. His uncle—well, his\n uncle was his model and his leader, and he was strong and wise and\n crafty. His father—naturally, he wanted to emulate his father and\n continue whatever work he had started. But this was his initiation\n ceremony, after all, and there would be enough danger merely in proving\n his manhood. For his initiation ceremony to take on a task that had\n destroyed his father, the greatest thief the tribe had ever known, and\n a heretical, blasphemous task at that....\n\n\n \"I'll try. I don't know if I can.\""
],
[
"\"Because this is more than just an initiation ceremony. It could be the\n beginning of a new life for all of us.\"\n\n\n Eric frowned. What could be more than an initiation ceremony and his\n attainment of full thieving manhood?\n\n\n \"There are things going on in Mankind, these days,\" Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher continued in a strange, urgent voice. \"Big things. And\n you're going to be a part of them. This Theft of yours—if you handle\n it right, if you do what I tell you, it's likely to blow the lid off\n everything the chief has been sitting on.\"",
"\"I will steal for Mankind whatever it needs. I will defend Mankind\n against all outsiders. I will increase the possessions and knowledge of\n the Female Society so that the Female Society can increase the power\n and well-being of Mankind.\"\n\n\n \"And all this you swear to do?\"\n\n\n \"And all this I swear to do.\"\n\n\n The Chief turned to Eric's uncle. \"As his sponsor, do you support his\n oath and swear that he is to be trusted?\"\n\n\n With just the faintest hint of sarcasm in his voice, Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher replied: \"Yes. I support his oath and swear that he is to\n be trusted.\"",
"Eric the Only stared at his uncle. That wasn't the next question in the\n catechism. He must have heard incorrectly. His uncle couldn't have made\n a mistake in such a basic ritual.\n\n\n \"\nWe will do that\n,\" he went on in the second reply, his voice sliding\n into the singsong of childhood lessons, \"\nby regaining the science and\n knowhow of our fore-fathers. Man was once Lord of all Creation: his\n science and knowhow made him supreme. Science and knowhow is what we\n need to hit back at the Monsters.\n\"\n\n\n \"Now, Eric,\" his uncle asked gently. \"Please tell me this. What in hell\n is knowhow?\"\n\n\n That was way off. They were a full corridor's length from the normal\n progression of the catechism now.",
"\"In the name of our ancestors,\" he said, \"and the science with which\n they ruled the Earth, I declare this council opened. May it end as one\n more step in the regaining of their science. Who asked for a council?\"\n\n\n \"I did.\" Thomas the Trap-Smasher moved out of his band and stood before\n the chief.\n\n\n Franklin nodded, and went on with the next, formal question:\n\n\n \"And your reason?\"\n\n\n \"As a band leader, I call attention to a candidate for manhood. A\n member of my band, a spear-carrier for the required time, and an\n accepted apprentice in the Male Society. My nephew, Eric the Only.\"",
"As his name was sung out, Eric shook himself. Half on his own volition\n and half in response to the pushes he received from the other warriors,\n he stumbled up to his uncle and faced the chief. This, the most\n important moment of his life, was proving almost too much for him. So\n many people in one place, accredited and famous warriors, knowledgeable\n and attractive women, the chief himself, all this after the shattering\n revelations from his uncle—he was finding it hard to think clearly.\n And it was vital to think clearly. His responses to the next few\n questions had to be exactly right.\nThe chief was asking the first: \"Eric the Only, do you apply for full\n manhood?\"\n\n\n Eric breathed hard and nodded. \"I do.\"\n\n\n \"As a full man, what will be your value to Mankind?\"",
"The sheer population pressure of so vast a horde had long ago filled\n over a dozen burrows. Bands of the Male Society occupied the outermost\n four of these interconnected corridors and patrolled it with their\n full strength, twenty-three young adult males in the prime of courage\n and alertness. They were stationed there to take the first shock of\n any danger to Mankind, they and their band captains and the youthful\n initiates who served them.\n\n\n Eric the Only was an initiate in this powerful force. Today, he was a\n student warrior, a fetcher and a carrier for proven, seasoned men. But\n tomorrow, tomorrow....\n\n\n This was his birthday. Tomorrow, he would be sent forth to Steal for\n Mankind. When he returned—and have no fear: Eric was swift, Eric was\n clever, he would return—off might go the loose loin cloths of boyhood\n to be replaced by the tight loin straps of a proud Male Society warrior.",
"\"The\nchief\n?\" Eric felt confused. He was walking up a strange burrow\n now without a glow lamp. \"What's the chief got to do with my Theft?\"\nHis uncle examined both ends of the corridor again. \"Eric, what's the\n most important thing we, or you, or anyone, can do? What is our life\n all about? What are we here for?\"\n\n\n \"That's easy,\" Eric chuckled. \"That's the easiest question there is. A\n child could answer it:\n\n\n \"\nHit back at the Monsters\n,\" he quoted. \"\nDrive them from the planet,\n if we can. Regain Earth for Mankind, if we can. But above all, hit back\n at the Monsters. Make them suffer as they've made us suffer. Make them\n know we're still here, we're still fighting. Hit back at the Monsters.\n\"\n\n\n \"Hit back at the Monsters. Right. Now how have we been doing that?\"",
"\"Well, I know. I know from plenty of battle experience. The thing to\n remember is that once our ancestors were knocked down, they stayed\n down. That means their science and knowhow were not so much in the\n first place. And\nthat\nmeans—\" here he turned his head and looked\n directly into Eric's eyes—\"\nthat\nmeans the science of our ancestors\n wasn't worth one good damn against the Monsters, and it wouldn't be\n worth one good damn to us!\"\n\n\n Eric the Only turned pale. He knew heresy when he heard it.\nHis uncle patted him on the shoulder, drawing a deep breath as if he'd\n finally spat out something extremely unpleasant. He leaned closer, eyes\n glittering beneath the forehead glow lamp and his voice dropped to a\n fierce whisper.",
"\"Until never for some people,\" one of the young men broke in. He\n rattled his spear in his hand, carelessly, proudly. \"After you steal,\n you still have to convince a woman that you're a man. And some men\n have to do an awful lot of convincing. An\nawful\nlot, Eric-O.\"\n\n\n The ball of laughter bounced back and forth again, heavier than before.\n Eric the Only felt his face turn bright red. How dare they remind him\n of his birth? On this day of all days? Here he was about to prepare\n himself to go forth and Steal for Mankind....\n\n\n He dropped the sharpening stone into his pouch and slid his right\n hand back along his uncle's spear. \"At least,\" he said, slowly and\n definitely, \"at least, my woman will stay convinced, Roy the Runner.\n She won't be always open to offers from every other man in the tribe.\"",
"Thomas examined his face and seemed satisfied. \"The kind you're going\n after,\" he said. \"If you are your father's son. If you're man enough to\n continue the work he started. Are you?\"\n\n\n Eric started to nod, then found himself shrugging weakly, and finally\n just hung his head. He didn't know what to say. His uncle—well, his\n uncle was his model and his leader, and he was strong and wise and\n crafty. His father—naturally, he wanted to emulate his father and\n continue whatever work he had started. But this was his initiation\n ceremony, after all, and there would be enough danger merely in proving\n his manhood. For his initiation ceremony to take on a task that had\n destroyed his father, the greatest thief the tribe had ever known, and\n a heretical, blasphemous task at that....\n\n\n \"I'll try. I don't know if I can.\"",
"\"Eric, Eric, forget about it, boy. He was all of those things and more.\n Your father was famous. Eric the Storeroom-Stormer, we called him,\n Eric the Laugher at Locks, Eric the Roistering Robber of all Mankind.\n He taught me everything I know. But he only married once. And if any\n other woman ever played around with him, she's been careful to keep it\n a secret. Now dress up those spears. You've let them get all sloppy.\n Butts together, that's the way, points up and even with each other.\"\nDutifully, Eric rearranged the bundle of armament that was his\n responsibility. He turned to his uncle again, now examining the\n knapsacks and canteens that would be carried on the expedition.",
"Sarah the Sickness-Healer opened the proceedings. She circled him\n belligerently, hands on hips, her great breasts rolling to and fro like\n a pair of swollen pendulums, her eyes glittering with scorn.\n\n\n \"Eric the Only,\" she intoned, and then paused to grin, as if it were a\n name impossible to believe, \"Eric the Singleton, Eric the one and only\n child of either his mother or his father. Your parents almost didn't\n have enough between them to make a solitary child. Is there enough in\n you to make a man?\"\nThere was a snigger of appreciation from the children in the distance,\n and it was echoed by a few growling laughs from the vicinity of the\n Throne Mound. Eric felt his face and neck go red. He would have fought\n any man to the death for remarks like these. Any man at all. But who\n could lift his hand to a woman and be allowed to live? Besides, one of\n the main purposes of this exhibition was to investigate his powers of\n self-control.",
"\"How long? Since I got to know your father. He was in another band;\n naturally we hadn't seen much of each other before he married my\n sister. I'd heard about him, though: everyone in the Male Society\n had—he was a great thief. But once he became my brother-in-law,\n I learned a lot from him. I learned about locks, about the latest\n traps—and I learned about Alien-Science. He'd been an Alien-Science\n man for years. He converted your mother, and he converted me.\"\n\n\n Eric the Only backed away. \"No!\" he called out wildly. \"Not my father\n and mother! They were decent people—when they were killed a service\n was held in their name—they went to add to the science of our\n ancestors—\"\nHis uncle jammed a powerful hand over his mouth.",
"Even his father had been infected with her terrible bad luck. Still,\n Harriet the History-Teller was an important person in the tribe for one\n her age. Good-looking too. And, above all, she didn't turn away from\n him. She smiled at him, openly now. He smiled back.\n\n\n \"Look at Eric!\" he heard someone call out behind him. \"He's already\n searching for a mate. Hey, Eric! You've not even wearing straps yet.\n First comes the stealing.\nThen\ncomes the mating.\"\n\n\n Eric spun around, bits of fantasy still stuck to his lips.\n\n\n The group of young men lounging against the wall of his band's burrow\n were tossing laughter back and forth between them. They were all\n adults: they had all made their Theft. Socially, they were still his\n superiors. His only recourse was cold dignity.\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he began. \"There is no mating until—\"",
"There was a rattling moment, the barest second, when the chief's eyes\n locked with those of the band leader. With all that was on Eric's mind\n at the moment, he noticed it. Then the chief looked away and pointed to\n the women on the other side of the burrow.\n\n\n \"He is accepted as a candidate by the men. Now the women must ask for\n proof, for only a woman's proof bestows full manhood.\"\n\n\n The first part was over. And it hadn't been too bad. Eric turned\n to face the advancing leaders of the Female Society, Ottilie, the\n Chieftain's First Wife, in the center. Now came the part that scared\n him. The women's part.",
"\"The council's beginning, boy. We'll talk later, on expedition. Now\n remember this: stealing from the third category is your own idea, and\n all your own idea. Forget everything else we've talked about. If you\n hit any trouble with the chief, I'll be there. I'm your sponsor, after\n all.\"\n\n\n He threw an arm about his confused nephew and walked to the end of the\n burrow where the other members of the band waited.\nII\n\n\n The tribe had gathered in its central and largest burrow under the\n great, hanging glow lamps that might be used in this place alone.\n Except for the few sentinels on duty in the outlying corridors, all of\n Mankind was here. It was an awesome sight to behold.",
"\"She's had two litters, but not off you,\" Eric the Only spat, holding\n his spear out in the guard position. \"If you're the father, then the\n chief's blonde hair is contagious—like measles.\"\nRoy bellowed and jabbed his spear forward. Eric parried it and lunged\n in his turn. He missed as his opponent leaped to one side. They\n circled each other, cursing and insulting, eyes only for the point of\n each other's spears. The other young men had scrambled a distance down\n the burrow to get out of their way.\nA powerful arm suddenly clamped Eric's waist from behind and lifted\n him off his feet. He was kicked hard, so that he stumbled a half-dozen\n steps and fell. On his feet in a moment, the spear still in his hand,\n he whirled, ready to deal with this new opponent. He was mad enough to\n fight all Mankind.\n\n\n But not Thomas the Trap-Smasher. No, not that mad.",
"Sarah the Sickness-Healer, for example, with her incredible knowledge\n of what food was fit and what was unfit, her only garment a cloud of\n hair that alternately screened and revealed her hips and breasts, the\n largest in all Mankind. There was a woman for you! Over five litters\n she had had, two of them of maximum size.\n\n\n Eric watched as she turned a yellow chunk of food around and around\n under the glow lamp hanging from the ceiling of the burrow, looking for\n she only knew what and recognizing it when she found it she only knew\n how. A man could really strut with such a mate.",
"The older man brought his lips together, looking dissatisfied. \"First\n category.\nFood.\nWell....\"\n\n\n Eric felt he understood. \"You mean, for someone like me—an Only,\n who's really got to make a name for himself—I ought to announce\n like a real warrior? I should say I'm going to steal in the second\n category—Articles Useful to Mankind. Is that what my father would have\n done?\"\n\n\n \"Do you know what your father would have done?\"\n\n\n \"No. What?\" Eric demanded eagerly.\n\n\n \"He'd have elected the third category. That's what I'd be announcing\n these days, if I were going through an initiation ceremony. That's what\n I want you to announce.\"\n\n\n \"Third category? Monster souvenirs? But no one's elected the third\n category in I don't know how many auld lang synes. Why should I do it?\"",
"\"You can,\" his uncle told him heartily. \"It's been set up for you. It\n will be like walking through a dug burrow, Eric. All you have to face\n through is the council. You'll have to be steady there, no matter what.\n You tell the chief that you're undertaking the third category.\"\n\n\n \"But why the third?\" Eric asked. \"Why does it have to be Monster\n souvenirs?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's what we need. And you stick to it, no matter what\n pressure they put on you. Remember, an initiate has the right to decide\n what he's going to steal. A man's first Theft is his own affair.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen, uncle—\"\n\n\n There was a whistle from the end of the burrow. Thomas the Trap-Smasher\n nodded in the direction of the signal."
]
] |
test
|
20058
|
[
"Why did no one in the audience seem to care that Bill Clinton was at the game?",
"If USAir Arena is typically sold out when the Bullets play, why are most of the seats empty?",
"In what way is Bill Clinton similar to Michael Jordan, according to the author?",
"Why does the writer of the article call Michael Jordan a genius?",
"Why do sportswriters call Michael Jordan \"Babe Ruth\"?",
"Why does the writer suggest it would be absurd for Jordan's agent to provide a number for how much money would be required to lure Jordan back to the Bulls for another season?",
"Why is Michael Jordan described as \"geriatric\"?",
"Why do statisticians disagree with the \"hot hand\" theory?",
"Why does the writer believe Jordan was able to turn the game around in the fourth quarter?",
"Why does the author disagree with the New York Times' notion that Jordan should be cloned?"
] |
[
[
"The audience was filled with people who did not like Bill Clinton.",
"He entered the arena quietly, so nobody really noticed he was there.",
"They were mostly there to see Michael Jordan.",
"The audience was filled with basketball fans who did not care about politics."
],
[
"People have started to realize the Bullets never win a game.",
"The Arena is old and dim and not very large, so people do not really enjoy going there.",
"The tickets are purchased by people who feel owning them will give them clout, but they might not actually enjoy sports.",
"The tickets are hoarded by superfans who want to see Michael Jordan play without a large crowd."
],
[
"They both grew up in the South.",
"They both command large crowds and have a kind of magnetism that draws people in.",
"They are both huge fans of a number of different sports.",
"They will both do whatever it takes to succeed and excel."
],
[
"Because of his ability to succeed at a number of different sports.",
"Because of his ability to turn a game around in the fourth quarter.",
"Because of his ability to negotiate million-dollar contracts.",
"Because of his tendency to adapt his abilities in order to win."
],
[
"Like Babe Ruth, he was exceptionally strong and elegant.",
"Like Babe Ruth, Jordan isn't just a superior player, he transcends any other players' capabilities.",
"Like Babe Ruth, he was \"borderline geriatric.\"",
"Like Babe Ruth, he also played professional baseball."
],
[
"Jordan is like a natural wonder--his worth cannot be represented by a number.",
"The agent is not in the business of making guesses, and he will only comment when he knows for sure.",
"Jordan is very close to retirement, and no amount of money would convince him to stay in the game if he decided against it.",
"The agent is not allowed to discuss such matters with the press."
],
[
"At 34, he is beginning to get too old to be attractive to sports teams and agents.",
"At 34, he is generally considered on the older end of professional basketball players.",
"At 34, he was beginning to move really slow on the court compared to his younger competitors.",
"At 34, his mental and physical faculties have been showing obvious signs of decline and affecting the outcome of games. "
],
[
"If you properly analyze a player's behavior in any given game, you will be able to predict their score output.",
"They believe in the power of luck rather than a player's individual skill.",
"Shots that score are totally random, not associated with some kind of streak.",
"They believe that a player's shot accuracy can be determined by carefully analyzing past games."
],
[
"Because of his years of hard work and training and dedication to the sport of basketball.",
"He possesses some unknowable force that drives him to not just perform in a crunch but to succeed in his goal.",
"His fear of failure drives him to perform above and beyond other players' capabilities.",
"He believes Michael Jordan had been saving his energy for the very end of the game."
],
[
"The writer posits that Jordan's talent is his mental strength and has nothing to do with DNA.",
"A unique talent like Jordan could never possibly be replicated, even with the most advanced scientific techniques.",
"He believes Michael Jordan is a \"natural athlete\" and cannot be replicated.",
"He believes cloning humans is immoral."
]
] |
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[
"Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them.",
"The Gamer \n\n The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade.",
"As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\"",
"Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing.",
"One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n Jordan hit another three-pointer.",
"Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd.",
"Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n He shook his head.",
"Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy.",
"On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us.",
"\"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room.",
"Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99.",
"Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another.",
"Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time.",
"Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon.",
"There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?)",
"Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup.",
"\"I got a job to do.\" \n\n Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :"
],
[
"The Gamer \n\n The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade.",
"As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\"",
"Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them.",
"On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us.",
"Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy.",
"Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another.",
"One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n Jordan hit another three-pointer.",
"Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time.",
"Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n He shook his head.",
"Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing.",
"\"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room.",
"Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon.",
"Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99.",
"Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd.",
"\"I got a job to do.\" \n\n Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :",
"Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup.",
"There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?)"
],
[
"Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them.",
"As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\"",
"Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd.",
"There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?)",
"On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us.",
"Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing.",
"Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon.",
"Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time.",
"Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n He shook his head.",
"One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n Jordan hit another three-pointer.",
"Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy.",
"Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99.",
"Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another.",
"\"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room.",
"The Gamer \n\n The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade.",
"Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup.",
"\"I got a job to do.\" \n\n Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :"
],
[
"There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?)",
"On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us.",
"Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd.",
"Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing.",
"Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99.",
"One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n Jordan hit another three-pointer.",
"As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\"",
"Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time.",
"Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another.",
"Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy.",
"Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them.",
"Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n He shook his head.",
"Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon.",
"Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup.",
"\"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room.",
"\"I got a job to do.\" \n\n Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :",
"The Gamer \n\n The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade."
],
[
"On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us.",
"Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd.",
"Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing.",
"As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\"",
"Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy.",
"There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?)",
"Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99.",
"Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n He shook his head.",
"Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them.",
"Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another.",
"One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n Jordan hit another three-pointer.",
"Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time.",
"Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon.",
"\"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room.",
"Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup.",
"\"I got a job to do.\" \n\n Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :",
"The Gamer \n\n The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade."
],
[
"Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n He shook his head.",
"Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99.",
"Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy.",
"Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd.",
"On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us.",
"As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\"",
"Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time.",
"Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon.",
"Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another.",
"Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing.",
"One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n Jordan hit another three-pointer.",
"Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them.",
"There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?)",
"\"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room.",
"\"I got a job to do.\" \n\n Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :",
"Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup.",
"The Gamer \n\n The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade."
],
[
"Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing.",
"Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99.",
"One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n Jordan hit another three-pointer.",
"There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?)",
"Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time.",
"Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon.",
"Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n He shook his head.",
"Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd.",
"Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them.",
"Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another.",
"As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\"",
"Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy.",
"On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us.",
"Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup.",
"\"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room.",
"The Gamer \n\n The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade.",
"\"I got a job to do.\" \n\n Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :"
],
[
"Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99.",
"Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy.",
"As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\"",
"Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd.",
"Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time.",
"One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n Jordan hit another three-pointer.",
"On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us.",
"Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing.",
"Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another.",
"Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them.",
"\"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room.",
"There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?)",
"Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon.",
"Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n He shook his head.",
"\"I got a job to do.\" \n\n Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :",
"The Gamer \n\n The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade.",
"Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup."
],
[
"Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time.",
"Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy.",
"As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\"",
"Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99.",
"One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n Jordan hit another three-pointer.",
"Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another.",
"Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing.",
"Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd.",
"On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us.",
"There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?)",
"Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n He shook his head.",
"Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup.",
"Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon.",
"\"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room.",
"Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them.",
"\"I got a job to do.\" \n\n Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :",
"The Gamer \n\n The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade."
],
[
"There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?)",
"Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99.",
"Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd.",
"On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us.",
"Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them.",
"Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy.",
"Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time.",
"Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n He shook his head.",
"Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon.",
"Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing.",
"Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another.",
"As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\"",
"One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n Jordan hit another three-pointer.",
"\"I got a job to do.\" \n\n Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :",
"Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup.",
"The Gamer \n\n The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade.",
"\"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room."
]
] |
test
|
20060
|
[
"Into what literary genre does this story fall?",
"How does the advice provided in the rest of the piece solve the problems laid out at the start?",
"What pieces of information in the story can we use to judge the likelihood that Steve Sabol's advice will actually help families have more fun watching football together?",
"According to the story, what are the features of the ideal football viewing set-up?",
"What strategies does the story suggest using for optimizing football viewing?",
"The author reveals that he thinks it is hopeless to get his wife on board watching sports the way they should be watched. Why?",
"According to the author, how can one improve his ability to interpret what is happening on the screen?",
"What information is provided as a lead-in to the advice to never reveal that you have forgotten who the announcer of the game you are watching is?",
"How does a TV football broadcast get put together?",
"How can the reader make sense of the advice not to start thinking like George Will, based on the story?"
] |
[
[
"Self-help / How-to.",
"Satire.",
"Journalism.",
"Tragedy."
],
[
"The main problem is that the author's addiction to watching sports is affecting his family life. The 8 pointers provided all reinforce the original problem and do not solve the problems at all.",
"The main problem is that the author's addiction to watching sports is affecting his family life. By implementing the 8 pointers he outlines, he will be able to make watching sports a shared family activity that reinforces family closeness.",
"The problem of women not being interested in watching professional sports on TV is not confined to the author's family. No women like pro sports - the author comes to realize that the problem is not solvable.",
"The problem outlined is that his family members are too selfish to watch sports with him, and this article is an effort to come up with ways to appeal to their narcissistic self-interest to make it more attractive to them to spend time with him."
],
[
"Sabol became so sick of football that he never wanted to watch another game.",
"Sabol takes his whole family to the stadium to watch football live at least once a month, so that they can smell the sweat and see the grunting, muddy men close up.",
"Sabol started a charity for injured football players, which he supports largely from proceeds of his company, NFL Films.",
"Sabol is no longer married."
],
[
"Multiple large TV screens, a bathroom close by the viewing area and a comfortable recliner.",
"Multiple large TV screens, a comfortable recliner, and TV trays to hold plenty of snacks and cold beer.",
"The ideal viewing area is an in area of the house that is off-limits to other family members, like a room in the basement, or in a heated garage. It should have multiple TV screens and a lock on the door.",
"Multiple large TV screens, a laptop computer for double checking statistics on players, a comfortable recliner and a bathroom close by."
],
[
"Give your wife the best seat in the room so she will enjoy the experience, and serve the types of snacks she likes best. Explain every play patiently even if it's obvious to you.",
"Be well-rested, don't eat full meals, keep your eyes on the screen, and make sure to pay attention not just to the person at the center of the shot, but also the surrounding areas.",
"Exercise regularly to build the aerobic stamina to shout at the referees as needed, and to keep the weight off you so you can afford to eat snacks and drink beer on football days.",
"Be well-rested, eat nutritious meals (but not turkey, which contains tryptophan and will put you to sleep), and give your eyes a break at least every fifteen minutes."
],
[
"Because she spends the entire time they are watching a game together adding items to his \"honey do\" list.",
"Because at critical moments in the game, she opens her current mystery novel and resumes reading it.",
"Because she keeps making excuses to leave the room, like \"picking up the girls from dance lessons,\" and \"getting dinner on the table.\"",
"Because she can look right at the screen and fail to understand what is going on."
],
[
"Having multiple screens gives you the opportunity to see the same play from different angles, which helps you interpret the play.",
"It's best to watch a game online, in a format with streaming chat comments. If you miss something, someone else will catch it and explain it.",
"Listen to what the announcer explains has happened and then watch the replay.",
"Watch the early preparations for a play, shot or throw."
],
[
"The author says that \"life is a competition.\" Therefore, you must be prepared with the announcer's name, if asked, to avoid being a loser, and looking like a fool.",
"The author discusses the details of what kind of TV monitors work best for creating the \"cockpit experience\" that allows you to simultaneously track three games.",
"An explanation is provided of the process of choosing TV shots and graphics, which you should learn about so you can blow some knowledgeable-sounding smoke if you forget the announcer's name.",
"The author takes the reader through a careful explanation of what constitutes an \"illegal defense,\" which most viewers cannot detect on their own."
],
[
"At a minimum, it requires 8 to 13 cameras, Fox Trax, an announcer, a director who specifies the shot to show, a technical director who is kind of like an executive officer that makes it happen, and a producer who makes sure the bills get paid by inserting the advertisements.",
"Whole corporations are built solely around what it takes to produce a good football broadcast. Many of the functions, like replay and special feature footage, are subcontracted to small specialist companies like NFL Films.",
"A football broadcast is really relatively simple: focus on the action with the quarterback at the line of scrimmage, then pull back to show the tactics on each play. All the rest of it is just competition between the networks for the glitziest production.",
"At a minimum, it requires lots of cameras, an announcer, a director who specifies the shot to show, a technical director who is kind of like an executive officer that makes it happen, and a producer who makes sure the bills get paid by inserting the advertisements."
],
[
"\"George Will\" is a term synonymous with \"Everyman,\" so the author is essentially telling the reader to be better than the common man as a watcher of football and evangelizer of trying to convert women to loving football.",
"George Will is a sportswriter particularly famous for his book, \"Why Football Matters,\" which explains football as a metaphor for all of life. This is revealed at the end of the story when the author discusses all of life as a competition.",
"Any reader of a piece on football will know that George Will is a sportswriter particularly famous for his book, \"Why Football Matters,\" which explains football as a metaphor for all of life. This is explained in the paragraphs leading up to the first numbered pointer.",
"The reader would have to know that George Will is a serious, somewhat prissy writer of conservative opinion pieces to be in on the joke, but the story assumes the reader will know this, without it being explained."
]
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-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1
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[
1,
1,
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[
[
"Mary, my wife, is simply a lost cause. She is an extremely discerning person who can detect the most subtle spice in a bowl of soup or a whisper of colored thread in a suit jacket, but for some reason she can stare at a basketball game on television and miss the important details, such as the ball going into the hoop. \n\n \"What just happened?\" I demanded to know after Michael Jordan made a jump shot during a Chicago Bulls game. \n\n \"I don't know. I was still thinking about the last commercial,\" she said. \n\n 7. Don't pay attention to the commercials, the squeakiness of the basketball court, the spitting in the dugout, the sweating, or fluids of any kind. \n\n Once the techniques of viewing are mastered, there remains a major step: analysis. There is no point in watching if one is not really \"seeing\" anything. Sabol gave me a final tip that I will carry with me the rest of my years:",
"(Sabol reckons that on a given Sunday he starts watching at 11 a.m. and doesn't stop until 11 p.m., at the end of the cable-TV broadcast. Before his divorce, his wife didn't quite understand that this was work, he says.) \n\n Now comes the harder stuff, the actual watching--the seeing, if you will--of the actions on the screen. You must keep in mind that you are not directly watching an event, but rather are watching a produced and directed telecast of an event, manipulated by talented but not infallible professionals. To better understand how a sports program is put together, I called Rudy Martzke, the TV sports columnist for USA Today , who watches between 40 and 60 hours of TV sports a week on the 60-inch Pioneer screen in his family room.",
"The Unexamined Game Is Not Worth Watching \n\n As an achiever, I constantly look for new techniques of achievement and seek to minimize behaviors with low achievement yield. Thus it is only natural that I have begun to worry about the amount of time I spend watching sports on television--an activity that does not measurably advance any of my personal or professional agendas. \n\n Most alarmingly, sports have become a steel curtain between me and my family. My wife and three daughters shun me when I turn on a ballgame. Occasionally I try to \"relate\" to the kids by asking them to fetch Daddy a beer, but I sense that they are drifting away--that I have become, for them, every bit as useless, burdensome, and low-yielding in immediate practical utility as they are for me. \n\n I realized that something had to change. I needed to take firm, decisive action.",
"In preliminary tests with my own family, I determined that they have a long, long, long way to go before they are major-league sports fans. One Sunday I plunked my two oldest daughters in chairs directly in front of the set and channel-surfed from baseball to basketball to women's golf to figure skating. During the basketball game, my medium-sized daughter, who is not quite 4, said of Joe Dumars: \"Is that a girl?\" So the first thing we will do, with this particular daughter, is work on gender identification. \n\n Both daughters, meanwhile, have decided to become figure skaters when they grow up. You can see that this is drifting into a scary area: I might teach them to watch sports on television, but they might decide that \"sports\" includes massive doses of Brian Boitano and Oksana Baiul. My natural inclination is to watch figure skating quadrennially.",
"\"The bathroom's right by the set. If I have to take a piss I can still see the screen.\" \n\n 3. Keep your eye on the screen at all times, even when you are trying to trim a child's toenails. \n\n Sabol said he sits in a \"Relax-a-back\" chair, a kind of recliner, but cautions that this is not for the novice. The worst-case scenario for the sports viewer is the unplanned nap. \"Those are dangerous. I only recommend those for the more experienced viewers. You need stamina to do this. You need a good night's sleep. You have to be careful about having too big a breakfast, because that will put you to sleep. The trick is to have a series of small snacks for a 10-hour period.\" \n\n 4. Come to the television rested. Don't eat meals--graze.",
"\"The director is the guy who calls the shots you see on the screen. He's the one who inserts the graphics,\" says Martzke. \"Got a guy sitting next to him who's called the technical director. The director, when he yells out the instructions, 'cut to this picture, that picture, this camera, that camera,' the guy who follows him up, physically, is the technical director. The producer sits to the left of the director. The producer is the one who gets in the replays, the one who's in charge of the format of the show. He makes sure all those commercial breaks get in, so they're paid.\" \n\n Obviously only Rudy Martzke ever thinks twice about these people, but this creates a chance for you to sound authoritative when someone challenges you on your sports-viewership expertise. Let other people talk about who caught what pass or made what tackle; you can say things like, \"Sandy Grossman uses down-and-yardage graphics better than any director in the game.\" \n\n The point of all this is:",
"And so I made a solemn vow: I would teach my wife and kids to watch sports with me. \n\n Yes, I would! And something more: I would become a better, more sophisticated, more deeply engaged viewer of TV sports. I would become a man for whom sports viewership is not just a bad habit, but a skill. \n\n I have sought counsel from experts and engaged in rigorous tests in my own home. What follows are some simple precepts for Next Level sports viewership.",
"8. Prepare. \n\n \"You have to come into the game prepared. You have to come into watching the game with your own game plan,\" Sabol said. \"What are you going to look for? What are the keys to the game?\" \n\n It's a rule from scouting: Be prepared. Think ahead. Anticipate problems and possible solutions. If you pick up the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , you will see that one of the habits is \"be pro-active.\" Do not wait for the ballgame on television to come to you. You can go to the ballgame, mentally, emotionally, pro-actively. You can be a better sports viewer than anyone on your block, anyone with your ZIP code. \n\n Life is a competition. Be a champion.",
"His viewing procedures are quite advanced. Every Sunday he watches three games at once. \"I have a little cockpit that's built in my den. There's one set, the predominant game, that's on a 30-inch TV, and I have two 19-inch TVs that are slanted inward. So it's like a cockpit. You have to have good peripheral vision and you have to really concentrate.\" \n\n So that's the next tip: \n\n 2. Get more, and bigger, televisions. \n\n If you have only a single 19-inch television and you can't afford to upgrade, just sit a lot closer. If you get close enough to the set, it's almost as good as going out and buying a multi-thousand-dollar \"home theater.\" \n\n Sabol said he has to take the occasional pit stop, but even that is conveniently arranged.",
"In golf, look at the wrists and elbows of the golfer as he or she putts. The great ones have almost no movement in their arms, wrists, and hands other than the gentlest of pendulum swings. \n\n In hockey, change channels. You will never see the puck. \n\n When Sabol watches a football game, he scrutinizes an area in front of the runner and including the runner. \"It's a semicircle with a radius of about 3 yards,\" he estimates. \n\n 6. Expand your zone of attention.",
"Martzke is full of facts and well-educated opinions: The typical Monday Night Football broadcast uses about 13 cameras, compared with only about eight for Fox's primary game Sunday afternoon; Goodyear's Steadycam allows sharp-focus blimp shots even when the blimp is being blown all over the sky; the glowing puck used on Fox hockey games is officially called Fox Trax; Bob Costas at NBC is the best host in the business; and Al Michaels at ABC is the best play-by-play guy. \n\n Unseen to viewers, but extremely important, are the producers and directors.",
"The very first thing you must do, before we get into any actual viewing techniques, is ask yourself why sports are an important part of your life. Why do sports matter? Do you like sports because they show that effort, practice, and innovation lead to positive results? Because sports are an outlet for our primitive barbarian hostilities? Because in sports we discover a dramatic metaphor for our desire to move into new terrain and reach goals that can be statistically measured? The answer to all these questions is: Don't be stupid. You watch sports for the simple reason that sports don't matter a jot. You like sports precisely because of their utter insignificance. You find this relaxing. Always remember the pre-eminent rule of the sports junkie: \n\n 1. Don't start thinking like George Will.",
"Next, you must configure your viewing area. For help in this regard I called Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films Inc., the company that produces Inside the NFL for HBO. Sabol, I knew, watches a heroic amount of football, from which he gleans the highlights for his films. NFL Films has a signature style: Sweaty, grunting, muddy men move in super slow motion while the baritone narrator describes the events as though the fate of nations hung in the balance. Sabol, a former college football player, says, \"That's the way I wanted to show the game, with the snot spraying, the sweat flying. Football is a very visceral sport. Before we started it was always filmed from the top, and it looked like a little chess set.\"",
"5. Never let anyone know that you've forgotten the name of the \"announcer.\" \n\n The hardest part of all is knowing what to look for when you watch television. In basketball, for example, the referee will often blow the whistle and call \"illegal defense,\" which few viewers ever see in advance. This is because they are only watching the ball. Illegal defense occurs when a defender plays zone rather than man-to-man. Thus you should always look for someone who's just guarding a patch of the court, standing around looking suspicious. When you detect an illegal defense before the referee makes the call, you have completely arrived as a TV sports viewer. \n\n In baseball, don't just watch the flight of the ball from the pitcher's hand toward the batter. Look directly at the pitcher's hand and see if you can see what kind of grip he's using--that will tell you whether it's a curve, slider, fastball, splitter, knuckleball, or whatever."
],
[
"His viewing procedures are quite advanced. Every Sunday he watches three games at once. \"I have a little cockpit that's built in my den. There's one set, the predominant game, that's on a 30-inch TV, and I have two 19-inch TVs that are slanted inward. So it's like a cockpit. You have to have good peripheral vision and you have to really concentrate.\" \n\n So that's the next tip: \n\n 2. Get more, and bigger, televisions. \n\n If you have only a single 19-inch television and you can't afford to upgrade, just sit a lot closer. If you get close enough to the set, it's almost as good as going out and buying a multi-thousand-dollar \"home theater.\" \n\n Sabol said he has to take the occasional pit stop, but even that is conveniently arranged.",
"\"The bathroom's right by the set. If I have to take a piss I can still see the screen.\" \n\n 3. Keep your eye on the screen at all times, even when you are trying to trim a child's toenails. \n\n Sabol said he sits in a \"Relax-a-back\" chair, a kind of recliner, but cautions that this is not for the novice. The worst-case scenario for the sports viewer is the unplanned nap. \"Those are dangerous. I only recommend those for the more experienced viewers. You need stamina to do this. You need a good night's sleep. You have to be careful about having too big a breakfast, because that will put you to sleep. The trick is to have a series of small snacks for a 10-hour period.\" \n\n 4. Come to the television rested. Don't eat meals--graze.",
"And so I made a solemn vow: I would teach my wife and kids to watch sports with me. \n\n Yes, I would! And something more: I would become a better, more sophisticated, more deeply engaged viewer of TV sports. I would become a man for whom sports viewership is not just a bad habit, but a skill. \n\n I have sought counsel from experts and engaged in rigorous tests in my own home. What follows are some simple precepts for Next Level sports viewership.",
"Mary, my wife, is simply a lost cause. She is an extremely discerning person who can detect the most subtle spice in a bowl of soup or a whisper of colored thread in a suit jacket, but for some reason she can stare at a basketball game on television and miss the important details, such as the ball going into the hoop. \n\n \"What just happened?\" I demanded to know after Michael Jordan made a jump shot during a Chicago Bulls game. \n\n \"I don't know. I was still thinking about the last commercial,\" she said. \n\n 7. Don't pay attention to the commercials, the squeakiness of the basketball court, the spitting in the dugout, the sweating, or fluids of any kind. \n\n Once the techniques of viewing are mastered, there remains a major step: analysis. There is no point in watching if one is not really \"seeing\" anything. Sabol gave me a final tip that I will carry with me the rest of my years:",
"The Unexamined Game Is Not Worth Watching \n\n As an achiever, I constantly look for new techniques of achievement and seek to minimize behaviors with low achievement yield. Thus it is only natural that I have begun to worry about the amount of time I spend watching sports on television--an activity that does not measurably advance any of my personal or professional agendas. \n\n Most alarmingly, sports have become a steel curtain between me and my family. My wife and three daughters shun me when I turn on a ballgame. Occasionally I try to \"relate\" to the kids by asking them to fetch Daddy a beer, but I sense that they are drifting away--that I have become, for them, every bit as useless, burdensome, and low-yielding in immediate practical utility as they are for me. \n\n I realized that something had to change. I needed to take firm, decisive action.",
"The very first thing you must do, before we get into any actual viewing techniques, is ask yourself why sports are an important part of your life. Why do sports matter? Do you like sports because they show that effort, practice, and innovation lead to positive results? Because sports are an outlet for our primitive barbarian hostilities? Because in sports we discover a dramatic metaphor for our desire to move into new terrain and reach goals that can be statistically measured? The answer to all these questions is: Don't be stupid. You watch sports for the simple reason that sports don't matter a jot. You like sports precisely because of their utter insignificance. You find this relaxing. Always remember the pre-eminent rule of the sports junkie: \n\n 1. Don't start thinking like George Will.",
"8. Prepare. \n\n \"You have to come into the game prepared. You have to come into watching the game with your own game plan,\" Sabol said. \"What are you going to look for? What are the keys to the game?\" \n\n It's a rule from scouting: Be prepared. Think ahead. Anticipate problems and possible solutions. If you pick up the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , you will see that one of the habits is \"be pro-active.\" Do not wait for the ballgame on television to come to you. You can go to the ballgame, mentally, emotionally, pro-actively. You can be a better sports viewer than anyone on your block, anyone with your ZIP code. \n\n Life is a competition. Be a champion.",
"(Sabol reckons that on a given Sunday he starts watching at 11 a.m. and doesn't stop until 11 p.m., at the end of the cable-TV broadcast. Before his divorce, his wife didn't quite understand that this was work, he says.) \n\n Now comes the harder stuff, the actual watching--the seeing, if you will--of the actions on the screen. You must keep in mind that you are not directly watching an event, but rather are watching a produced and directed telecast of an event, manipulated by talented but not infallible professionals. To better understand how a sports program is put together, I called Rudy Martzke, the TV sports columnist for USA Today , who watches between 40 and 60 hours of TV sports a week on the 60-inch Pioneer screen in his family room.",
"In preliminary tests with my own family, I determined that they have a long, long, long way to go before they are major-league sports fans. One Sunday I plunked my two oldest daughters in chairs directly in front of the set and channel-surfed from baseball to basketball to women's golf to figure skating. During the basketball game, my medium-sized daughter, who is not quite 4, said of Joe Dumars: \"Is that a girl?\" So the first thing we will do, with this particular daughter, is work on gender identification. \n\n Both daughters, meanwhile, have decided to become figure skaters when they grow up. You can see that this is drifting into a scary area: I might teach them to watch sports on television, but they might decide that \"sports\" includes massive doses of Brian Boitano and Oksana Baiul. My natural inclination is to watch figure skating quadrennially.",
"In golf, look at the wrists and elbows of the golfer as he or she putts. The great ones have almost no movement in their arms, wrists, and hands other than the gentlest of pendulum swings. \n\n In hockey, change channels. You will never see the puck. \n\n When Sabol watches a football game, he scrutinizes an area in front of the runner and including the runner. \"It's a semicircle with a radius of about 3 yards,\" he estimates. \n\n 6. Expand your zone of attention.",
"\"The director is the guy who calls the shots you see on the screen. He's the one who inserts the graphics,\" says Martzke. \"Got a guy sitting next to him who's called the technical director. The director, when he yells out the instructions, 'cut to this picture, that picture, this camera, that camera,' the guy who follows him up, physically, is the technical director. The producer sits to the left of the director. The producer is the one who gets in the replays, the one who's in charge of the format of the show. He makes sure all those commercial breaks get in, so they're paid.\" \n\n Obviously only Rudy Martzke ever thinks twice about these people, but this creates a chance for you to sound authoritative when someone challenges you on your sports-viewership expertise. Let other people talk about who caught what pass or made what tackle; you can say things like, \"Sandy Grossman uses down-and-yardage graphics better than any director in the game.\" \n\n The point of all this is:",
"5. Never let anyone know that you've forgotten the name of the \"announcer.\" \n\n The hardest part of all is knowing what to look for when you watch television. In basketball, for example, the referee will often blow the whistle and call \"illegal defense,\" which few viewers ever see in advance. This is because they are only watching the ball. Illegal defense occurs when a defender plays zone rather than man-to-man. Thus you should always look for someone who's just guarding a patch of the court, standing around looking suspicious. When you detect an illegal defense before the referee makes the call, you have completely arrived as a TV sports viewer. \n\n In baseball, don't just watch the flight of the ball from the pitcher's hand toward the batter. Look directly at the pitcher's hand and see if you can see what kind of grip he's using--that will tell you whether it's a curve, slider, fastball, splitter, knuckleball, or whatever.",
"Next, you must configure your viewing area. For help in this regard I called Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films Inc., the company that produces Inside the NFL for HBO. Sabol, I knew, watches a heroic amount of football, from which he gleans the highlights for his films. NFL Films has a signature style: Sweaty, grunting, muddy men move in super slow motion while the baritone narrator describes the events as though the fate of nations hung in the balance. Sabol, a former college football player, says, \"That's the way I wanted to show the game, with the snot spraying, the sweat flying. Football is a very visceral sport. Before we started it was always filmed from the top, and it looked like a little chess set.\"",
"Martzke is full of facts and well-educated opinions: The typical Monday Night Football broadcast uses about 13 cameras, compared with only about eight for Fox's primary game Sunday afternoon; Goodyear's Steadycam allows sharp-focus blimp shots even when the blimp is being blown all over the sky; the glowing puck used on Fox hockey games is officially called Fox Trax; Bob Costas at NBC is the best host in the business; and Al Michaels at ABC is the best play-by-play guy. \n\n Unseen to viewers, but extremely important, are the producers and directors."
],
[
"His viewing procedures are quite advanced. Every Sunday he watches three games at once. \"I have a little cockpit that's built in my den. There's one set, the predominant game, that's on a 30-inch TV, and I have two 19-inch TVs that are slanted inward. So it's like a cockpit. You have to have good peripheral vision and you have to really concentrate.\" \n\n So that's the next tip: \n\n 2. Get more, and bigger, televisions. \n\n If you have only a single 19-inch television and you can't afford to upgrade, just sit a lot closer. If you get close enough to the set, it's almost as good as going out and buying a multi-thousand-dollar \"home theater.\" \n\n Sabol said he has to take the occasional pit stop, but even that is conveniently arranged.",
"Mary, my wife, is simply a lost cause. She is an extremely discerning person who can detect the most subtle spice in a bowl of soup or a whisper of colored thread in a suit jacket, but for some reason she can stare at a basketball game on television and miss the important details, such as the ball going into the hoop. \n\n \"What just happened?\" I demanded to know after Michael Jordan made a jump shot during a Chicago Bulls game. \n\n \"I don't know. I was still thinking about the last commercial,\" she said. \n\n 7. Don't pay attention to the commercials, the squeakiness of the basketball court, the spitting in the dugout, the sweating, or fluids of any kind. \n\n Once the techniques of viewing are mastered, there remains a major step: analysis. There is no point in watching if one is not really \"seeing\" anything. Sabol gave me a final tip that I will carry with me the rest of my years:",
"(Sabol reckons that on a given Sunday he starts watching at 11 a.m. and doesn't stop until 11 p.m., at the end of the cable-TV broadcast. Before his divorce, his wife didn't quite understand that this was work, he says.) \n\n Now comes the harder stuff, the actual watching--the seeing, if you will--of the actions on the screen. You must keep in mind that you are not directly watching an event, but rather are watching a produced and directed telecast of an event, manipulated by talented but not infallible professionals. To better understand how a sports program is put together, I called Rudy Martzke, the TV sports columnist for USA Today , who watches between 40 and 60 hours of TV sports a week on the 60-inch Pioneer screen in his family room.",
"\"The bathroom's right by the set. If I have to take a piss I can still see the screen.\" \n\n 3. Keep your eye on the screen at all times, even when you are trying to trim a child's toenails. \n\n Sabol said he sits in a \"Relax-a-back\" chair, a kind of recliner, but cautions that this is not for the novice. The worst-case scenario for the sports viewer is the unplanned nap. \"Those are dangerous. I only recommend those for the more experienced viewers. You need stamina to do this. You need a good night's sleep. You have to be careful about having too big a breakfast, because that will put you to sleep. The trick is to have a series of small snacks for a 10-hour period.\" \n\n 4. Come to the television rested. Don't eat meals--graze.",
"Next, you must configure your viewing area. For help in this regard I called Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films Inc., the company that produces Inside the NFL for HBO. Sabol, I knew, watches a heroic amount of football, from which he gleans the highlights for his films. NFL Films has a signature style: Sweaty, grunting, muddy men move in super slow motion while the baritone narrator describes the events as though the fate of nations hung in the balance. Sabol, a former college football player, says, \"That's the way I wanted to show the game, with the snot spraying, the sweat flying. Football is a very visceral sport. Before we started it was always filmed from the top, and it looked like a little chess set.\"",
"8. Prepare. \n\n \"You have to come into the game prepared. You have to come into watching the game with your own game plan,\" Sabol said. \"What are you going to look for? What are the keys to the game?\" \n\n It's a rule from scouting: Be prepared. Think ahead. Anticipate problems and possible solutions. If you pick up the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , you will see that one of the habits is \"be pro-active.\" Do not wait for the ballgame on television to come to you. You can go to the ballgame, mentally, emotionally, pro-actively. You can be a better sports viewer than anyone on your block, anyone with your ZIP code. \n\n Life is a competition. Be a champion.",
"And so I made a solemn vow: I would teach my wife and kids to watch sports with me. \n\n Yes, I would! And something more: I would become a better, more sophisticated, more deeply engaged viewer of TV sports. I would become a man for whom sports viewership is not just a bad habit, but a skill. \n\n I have sought counsel from experts and engaged in rigorous tests in my own home. What follows are some simple precepts for Next Level sports viewership.",
"In preliminary tests with my own family, I determined that they have a long, long, long way to go before they are major-league sports fans. One Sunday I plunked my two oldest daughters in chairs directly in front of the set and channel-surfed from baseball to basketball to women's golf to figure skating. During the basketball game, my medium-sized daughter, who is not quite 4, said of Joe Dumars: \"Is that a girl?\" So the first thing we will do, with this particular daughter, is work on gender identification. \n\n Both daughters, meanwhile, have decided to become figure skaters when they grow up. You can see that this is drifting into a scary area: I might teach them to watch sports on television, but they might decide that \"sports\" includes massive doses of Brian Boitano and Oksana Baiul. My natural inclination is to watch figure skating quadrennially.",
"The Unexamined Game Is Not Worth Watching \n\n As an achiever, I constantly look for new techniques of achievement and seek to minimize behaviors with low achievement yield. Thus it is only natural that I have begun to worry about the amount of time I spend watching sports on television--an activity that does not measurably advance any of my personal or professional agendas. \n\n Most alarmingly, sports have become a steel curtain between me and my family. My wife and three daughters shun me when I turn on a ballgame. Occasionally I try to \"relate\" to the kids by asking them to fetch Daddy a beer, but I sense that they are drifting away--that I have become, for them, every bit as useless, burdensome, and low-yielding in immediate practical utility as they are for me. \n\n I realized that something had to change. I needed to take firm, decisive action.",
"In golf, look at the wrists and elbows of the golfer as he or she putts. The great ones have almost no movement in their arms, wrists, and hands other than the gentlest of pendulum swings. \n\n In hockey, change channels. You will never see the puck. \n\n When Sabol watches a football game, he scrutinizes an area in front of the runner and including the runner. \"It's a semicircle with a radius of about 3 yards,\" he estimates. \n\n 6. Expand your zone of attention.",
"Martzke is full of facts and well-educated opinions: The typical Monday Night Football broadcast uses about 13 cameras, compared with only about eight for Fox's primary game Sunday afternoon; Goodyear's Steadycam allows sharp-focus blimp shots even when the blimp is being blown all over the sky; the glowing puck used on Fox hockey games is officially called Fox Trax; Bob Costas at NBC is the best host in the business; and Al Michaels at ABC is the best play-by-play guy. \n\n Unseen to viewers, but extremely important, are the producers and directors.",
"\"The director is the guy who calls the shots you see on the screen. He's the one who inserts the graphics,\" says Martzke. \"Got a guy sitting next to him who's called the technical director. The director, when he yells out the instructions, 'cut to this picture, that picture, this camera, that camera,' the guy who follows him up, physically, is the technical director. The producer sits to the left of the director. The producer is the one who gets in the replays, the one who's in charge of the format of the show. He makes sure all those commercial breaks get in, so they're paid.\" \n\n Obviously only Rudy Martzke ever thinks twice about these people, but this creates a chance for you to sound authoritative when someone challenges you on your sports-viewership expertise. Let other people talk about who caught what pass or made what tackle; you can say things like, \"Sandy Grossman uses down-and-yardage graphics better than any director in the game.\" \n\n The point of all this is:",
"The very first thing you must do, before we get into any actual viewing techniques, is ask yourself why sports are an important part of your life. Why do sports matter? Do you like sports because they show that effort, practice, and innovation lead to positive results? Because sports are an outlet for our primitive barbarian hostilities? Because in sports we discover a dramatic metaphor for our desire to move into new terrain and reach goals that can be statistically measured? The answer to all these questions is: Don't be stupid. You watch sports for the simple reason that sports don't matter a jot. You like sports precisely because of their utter insignificance. You find this relaxing. Always remember the pre-eminent rule of the sports junkie: \n\n 1. Don't start thinking like George Will.",
"5. Never let anyone know that you've forgotten the name of the \"announcer.\" \n\n The hardest part of all is knowing what to look for when you watch television. In basketball, for example, the referee will often blow the whistle and call \"illegal defense,\" which few viewers ever see in advance. This is because they are only watching the ball. Illegal defense occurs when a defender plays zone rather than man-to-man. Thus you should always look for someone who's just guarding a patch of the court, standing around looking suspicious. When you detect an illegal defense before the referee makes the call, you have completely arrived as a TV sports viewer. \n\n In baseball, don't just watch the flight of the ball from the pitcher's hand toward the batter. Look directly at the pitcher's hand and see if you can see what kind of grip he's using--that will tell you whether it's a curve, slider, fastball, splitter, knuckleball, or whatever."
],
[
"His viewing procedures are quite advanced. Every Sunday he watches three games at once. \"I have a little cockpit that's built in my den. There's one set, the predominant game, that's on a 30-inch TV, and I have two 19-inch TVs that are slanted inward. So it's like a cockpit. You have to have good peripheral vision and you have to really concentrate.\" \n\n So that's the next tip: \n\n 2. Get more, and bigger, televisions. \n\n If you have only a single 19-inch television and you can't afford to upgrade, just sit a lot closer. If you get close enough to the set, it's almost as good as going out and buying a multi-thousand-dollar \"home theater.\" \n\n Sabol said he has to take the occasional pit stop, but even that is conveniently arranged.",
"\"The bathroom's right by the set. If I have to take a piss I can still see the screen.\" \n\n 3. Keep your eye on the screen at all times, even when you are trying to trim a child's toenails. \n\n Sabol said he sits in a \"Relax-a-back\" chair, a kind of recliner, but cautions that this is not for the novice. The worst-case scenario for the sports viewer is the unplanned nap. \"Those are dangerous. I only recommend those for the more experienced viewers. You need stamina to do this. You need a good night's sleep. You have to be careful about having too big a breakfast, because that will put you to sleep. The trick is to have a series of small snacks for a 10-hour period.\" \n\n 4. Come to the television rested. Don't eat meals--graze.",
"Next, you must configure your viewing area. For help in this regard I called Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films Inc., the company that produces Inside the NFL for HBO. Sabol, I knew, watches a heroic amount of football, from which he gleans the highlights for his films. NFL Films has a signature style: Sweaty, grunting, muddy men move in super slow motion while the baritone narrator describes the events as though the fate of nations hung in the balance. Sabol, a former college football player, says, \"That's the way I wanted to show the game, with the snot spraying, the sweat flying. Football is a very visceral sport. Before we started it was always filmed from the top, and it looked like a little chess set.\"",
"(Sabol reckons that on a given Sunday he starts watching at 11 a.m. and doesn't stop until 11 p.m., at the end of the cable-TV broadcast. Before his divorce, his wife didn't quite understand that this was work, he says.) \n\n Now comes the harder stuff, the actual watching--the seeing, if you will--of the actions on the screen. You must keep in mind that you are not directly watching an event, but rather are watching a produced and directed telecast of an event, manipulated by talented but not infallible professionals. To better understand how a sports program is put together, I called Rudy Martzke, the TV sports columnist for USA Today , who watches between 40 and 60 hours of TV sports a week on the 60-inch Pioneer screen in his family room.",
"Mary, my wife, is simply a lost cause. She is an extremely discerning person who can detect the most subtle spice in a bowl of soup or a whisper of colored thread in a suit jacket, but for some reason she can stare at a basketball game on television and miss the important details, such as the ball going into the hoop. \n\n \"What just happened?\" I demanded to know after Michael Jordan made a jump shot during a Chicago Bulls game. \n\n \"I don't know. I was still thinking about the last commercial,\" she said. \n\n 7. Don't pay attention to the commercials, the squeakiness of the basketball court, the spitting in the dugout, the sweating, or fluids of any kind. \n\n Once the techniques of viewing are mastered, there remains a major step: analysis. There is no point in watching if one is not really \"seeing\" anything. Sabol gave me a final tip that I will carry with me the rest of my years:",
"8. Prepare. \n\n \"You have to come into the game prepared. You have to come into watching the game with your own game plan,\" Sabol said. \"What are you going to look for? What are the keys to the game?\" \n\n It's a rule from scouting: Be prepared. Think ahead. Anticipate problems and possible solutions. If you pick up the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , you will see that one of the habits is \"be pro-active.\" Do not wait for the ballgame on television to come to you. You can go to the ballgame, mentally, emotionally, pro-actively. You can be a better sports viewer than anyone on your block, anyone with your ZIP code. \n\n Life is a competition. Be a champion.",
"The very first thing you must do, before we get into any actual viewing techniques, is ask yourself why sports are an important part of your life. Why do sports matter? Do you like sports because they show that effort, practice, and innovation lead to positive results? Because sports are an outlet for our primitive barbarian hostilities? Because in sports we discover a dramatic metaphor for our desire to move into new terrain and reach goals that can be statistically measured? The answer to all these questions is: Don't be stupid. You watch sports for the simple reason that sports don't matter a jot. You like sports precisely because of their utter insignificance. You find this relaxing. Always remember the pre-eminent rule of the sports junkie: \n\n 1. Don't start thinking like George Will.",
"And so I made a solemn vow: I would teach my wife and kids to watch sports with me. \n\n Yes, I would! And something more: I would become a better, more sophisticated, more deeply engaged viewer of TV sports. I would become a man for whom sports viewership is not just a bad habit, but a skill. \n\n I have sought counsel from experts and engaged in rigorous tests in my own home. What follows are some simple precepts for Next Level sports viewership.",
"Martzke is full of facts and well-educated opinions: The typical Monday Night Football broadcast uses about 13 cameras, compared with only about eight for Fox's primary game Sunday afternoon; Goodyear's Steadycam allows sharp-focus blimp shots even when the blimp is being blown all over the sky; the glowing puck used on Fox hockey games is officially called Fox Trax; Bob Costas at NBC is the best host in the business; and Al Michaels at ABC is the best play-by-play guy. \n\n Unseen to viewers, but extremely important, are the producers and directors.",
"The Unexamined Game Is Not Worth Watching \n\n As an achiever, I constantly look for new techniques of achievement and seek to minimize behaviors with low achievement yield. Thus it is only natural that I have begun to worry about the amount of time I spend watching sports on television--an activity that does not measurably advance any of my personal or professional agendas. \n\n Most alarmingly, sports have become a steel curtain between me and my family. My wife and three daughters shun me when I turn on a ballgame. Occasionally I try to \"relate\" to the kids by asking them to fetch Daddy a beer, but I sense that they are drifting away--that I have become, for them, every bit as useless, burdensome, and low-yielding in immediate practical utility as they are for me. \n\n I realized that something had to change. I needed to take firm, decisive action.",
"In preliminary tests with my own family, I determined that they have a long, long, long way to go before they are major-league sports fans. One Sunday I plunked my two oldest daughters in chairs directly in front of the set and channel-surfed from baseball to basketball to women's golf to figure skating. During the basketball game, my medium-sized daughter, who is not quite 4, said of Joe Dumars: \"Is that a girl?\" So the first thing we will do, with this particular daughter, is work on gender identification. \n\n Both daughters, meanwhile, have decided to become figure skaters when they grow up. You can see that this is drifting into a scary area: I might teach them to watch sports on television, but they might decide that \"sports\" includes massive doses of Brian Boitano and Oksana Baiul. My natural inclination is to watch figure skating quadrennially.",
"\"The director is the guy who calls the shots you see on the screen. He's the one who inserts the graphics,\" says Martzke. \"Got a guy sitting next to him who's called the technical director. The director, when he yells out the instructions, 'cut to this picture, that picture, this camera, that camera,' the guy who follows him up, physically, is the technical director. The producer sits to the left of the director. The producer is the one who gets in the replays, the one who's in charge of the format of the show. He makes sure all those commercial breaks get in, so they're paid.\" \n\n Obviously only Rudy Martzke ever thinks twice about these people, but this creates a chance for you to sound authoritative when someone challenges you on your sports-viewership expertise. Let other people talk about who caught what pass or made what tackle; you can say things like, \"Sandy Grossman uses down-and-yardage graphics better than any director in the game.\" \n\n The point of all this is:",
"In golf, look at the wrists and elbows of the golfer as he or she putts. The great ones have almost no movement in their arms, wrists, and hands other than the gentlest of pendulum swings. \n\n In hockey, change channels. You will never see the puck. \n\n When Sabol watches a football game, he scrutinizes an area in front of the runner and including the runner. \"It's a semicircle with a radius of about 3 yards,\" he estimates. \n\n 6. Expand your zone of attention.",
"5. Never let anyone know that you've forgotten the name of the \"announcer.\" \n\n The hardest part of all is knowing what to look for when you watch television. In basketball, for example, the referee will often blow the whistle and call \"illegal defense,\" which few viewers ever see in advance. This is because they are only watching the ball. Illegal defense occurs when a defender plays zone rather than man-to-man. Thus you should always look for someone who's just guarding a patch of the court, standing around looking suspicious. When you detect an illegal defense before the referee makes the call, you have completely arrived as a TV sports viewer. \n\n In baseball, don't just watch the flight of the ball from the pitcher's hand toward the batter. Look directly at the pitcher's hand and see if you can see what kind of grip he's using--that will tell you whether it's a curve, slider, fastball, splitter, knuckleball, or whatever."
],
[
"His viewing procedures are quite advanced. Every Sunday he watches three games at once. \"I have a little cockpit that's built in my den. There's one set, the predominant game, that's on a 30-inch TV, and I have two 19-inch TVs that are slanted inward. So it's like a cockpit. You have to have good peripheral vision and you have to really concentrate.\" \n\n So that's the next tip: \n\n 2. Get more, and bigger, televisions. \n\n If you have only a single 19-inch television and you can't afford to upgrade, just sit a lot closer. If you get close enough to the set, it's almost as good as going out and buying a multi-thousand-dollar \"home theater.\" \n\n Sabol said he has to take the occasional pit stop, but even that is conveniently arranged.",
"\"The bathroom's right by the set. If I have to take a piss I can still see the screen.\" \n\n 3. Keep your eye on the screen at all times, even when you are trying to trim a child's toenails. \n\n Sabol said he sits in a \"Relax-a-back\" chair, a kind of recliner, but cautions that this is not for the novice. The worst-case scenario for the sports viewer is the unplanned nap. \"Those are dangerous. I only recommend those for the more experienced viewers. You need stamina to do this. You need a good night's sleep. You have to be careful about having too big a breakfast, because that will put you to sleep. The trick is to have a series of small snacks for a 10-hour period.\" \n\n 4. Come to the television rested. Don't eat meals--graze.",
"Mary, my wife, is simply a lost cause. She is an extremely discerning person who can detect the most subtle spice in a bowl of soup or a whisper of colored thread in a suit jacket, but for some reason she can stare at a basketball game on television and miss the important details, such as the ball going into the hoop. \n\n \"What just happened?\" I demanded to know after Michael Jordan made a jump shot during a Chicago Bulls game. \n\n \"I don't know. I was still thinking about the last commercial,\" she said. \n\n 7. Don't pay attention to the commercials, the squeakiness of the basketball court, the spitting in the dugout, the sweating, or fluids of any kind. \n\n Once the techniques of viewing are mastered, there remains a major step: analysis. There is no point in watching if one is not really \"seeing\" anything. Sabol gave me a final tip that I will carry with me the rest of my years:",
"(Sabol reckons that on a given Sunday he starts watching at 11 a.m. and doesn't stop until 11 p.m., at the end of the cable-TV broadcast. Before his divorce, his wife didn't quite understand that this was work, he says.) \n\n Now comes the harder stuff, the actual watching--the seeing, if you will--of the actions on the screen. You must keep in mind that you are not directly watching an event, but rather are watching a produced and directed telecast of an event, manipulated by talented but not infallible professionals. To better understand how a sports program is put together, I called Rudy Martzke, the TV sports columnist for USA Today , who watches between 40 and 60 hours of TV sports a week on the 60-inch Pioneer screen in his family room.",
"The very first thing you must do, before we get into any actual viewing techniques, is ask yourself why sports are an important part of your life. Why do sports matter? Do you like sports because they show that effort, practice, and innovation lead to positive results? Because sports are an outlet for our primitive barbarian hostilities? Because in sports we discover a dramatic metaphor for our desire to move into new terrain and reach goals that can be statistically measured? The answer to all these questions is: Don't be stupid. You watch sports for the simple reason that sports don't matter a jot. You like sports precisely because of their utter insignificance. You find this relaxing. Always remember the pre-eminent rule of the sports junkie: \n\n 1. Don't start thinking like George Will.",
"8. Prepare. \n\n \"You have to come into the game prepared. You have to come into watching the game with your own game plan,\" Sabol said. \"What are you going to look for? What are the keys to the game?\" \n\n It's a rule from scouting: Be prepared. Think ahead. Anticipate problems and possible solutions. If you pick up the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , you will see that one of the habits is \"be pro-active.\" Do not wait for the ballgame on television to come to you. You can go to the ballgame, mentally, emotionally, pro-actively. You can be a better sports viewer than anyone on your block, anyone with your ZIP code. \n\n Life is a competition. Be a champion.",
"Next, you must configure your viewing area. For help in this regard I called Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films Inc., the company that produces Inside the NFL for HBO. Sabol, I knew, watches a heroic amount of football, from which he gleans the highlights for his films. NFL Films has a signature style: Sweaty, grunting, muddy men move in super slow motion while the baritone narrator describes the events as though the fate of nations hung in the balance. Sabol, a former college football player, says, \"That's the way I wanted to show the game, with the snot spraying, the sweat flying. Football is a very visceral sport. Before we started it was always filmed from the top, and it looked like a little chess set.\"",
"And so I made a solemn vow: I would teach my wife and kids to watch sports with me. \n\n Yes, I would! And something more: I would become a better, more sophisticated, more deeply engaged viewer of TV sports. I would become a man for whom sports viewership is not just a bad habit, but a skill. \n\n I have sought counsel from experts and engaged in rigorous tests in my own home. What follows are some simple precepts for Next Level sports viewership.",
"The Unexamined Game Is Not Worth Watching \n\n As an achiever, I constantly look for new techniques of achievement and seek to minimize behaviors with low achievement yield. Thus it is only natural that I have begun to worry about the amount of time I spend watching sports on television--an activity that does not measurably advance any of my personal or professional agendas. \n\n Most alarmingly, sports have become a steel curtain between me and my family. My wife and three daughters shun me when I turn on a ballgame. Occasionally I try to \"relate\" to the kids by asking them to fetch Daddy a beer, but I sense that they are drifting away--that I have become, for them, every bit as useless, burdensome, and low-yielding in immediate practical utility as they are for me. \n\n I realized that something had to change. I needed to take firm, decisive action.",
"5. Never let anyone know that you've forgotten the name of the \"announcer.\" \n\n The hardest part of all is knowing what to look for when you watch television. In basketball, for example, the referee will often blow the whistle and call \"illegal defense,\" which few viewers ever see in advance. This is because they are only watching the ball. Illegal defense occurs when a defender plays zone rather than man-to-man. Thus you should always look for someone who's just guarding a patch of the court, standing around looking suspicious. When you detect an illegal defense before the referee makes the call, you have completely arrived as a TV sports viewer. \n\n In baseball, don't just watch the flight of the ball from the pitcher's hand toward the batter. Look directly at the pitcher's hand and see if you can see what kind of grip he's using--that will tell you whether it's a curve, slider, fastball, splitter, knuckleball, or whatever.",
"In golf, look at the wrists and elbows of the golfer as he or she putts. The great ones have almost no movement in their arms, wrists, and hands other than the gentlest of pendulum swings. \n\n In hockey, change channels. You will never see the puck. \n\n When Sabol watches a football game, he scrutinizes an area in front of the runner and including the runner. \"It's a semicircle with a radius of about 3 yards,\" he estimates. \n\n 6. Expand your zone of attention.",
"In preliminary tests with my own family, I determined that they have a long, long, long way to go before they are major-league sports fans. One Sunday I plunked my two oldest daughters in chairs directly in front of the set and channel-surfed from baseball to basketball to women's golf to figure skating. During the basketball game, my medium-sized daughter, who is not quite 4, said of Joe Dumars: \"Is that a girl?\" So the first thing we will do, with this particular daughter, is work on gender identification. \n\n Both daughters, meanwhile, have decided to become figure skaters when they grow up. You can see that this is drifting into a scary area: I might teach them to watch sports on television, but they might decide that \"sports\" includes massive doses of Brian Boitano and Oksana Baiul. My natural inclination is to watch figure skating quadrennially.",
"\"The director is the guy who calls the shots you see on the screen. He's the one who inserts the graphics,\" says Martzke. \"Got a guy sitting next to him who's called the technical director. The director, when he yells out the instructions, 'cut to this picture, that picture, this camera, that camera,' the guy who follows him up, physically, is the technical director. The producer sits to the left of the director. The producer is the one who gets in the replays, the one who's in charge of the format of the show. He makes sure all those commercial breaks get in, so they're paid.\" \n\n Obviously only Rudy Martzke ever thinks twice about these people, but this creates a chance for you to sound authoritative when someone challenges you on your sports-viewership expertise. Let other people talk about who caught what pass or made what tackle; you can say things like, \"Sandy Grossman uses down-and-yardage graphics better than any director in the game.\" \n\n The point of all this is:",
"Martzke is full of facts and well-educated opinions: The typical Monday Night Football broadcast uses about 13 cameras, compared with only about eight for Fox's primary game Sunday afternoon; Goodyear's Steadycam allows sharp-focus blimp shots even when the blimp is being blown all over the sky; the glowing puck used on Fox hockey games is officially called Fox Trax; Bob Costas at NBC is the best host in the business; and Al Michaels at ABC is the best play-by-play guy. \n\n Unseen to viewers, but extremely important, are the producers and directors."
],
[
"And so I made a solemn vow: I would teach my wife and kids to watch sports with me. \n\n Yes, I would! And something more: I would become a better, more sophisticated, more deeply engaged viewer of TV sports. I would become a man for whom sports viewership is not just a bad habit, but a skill. \n\n I have sought counsel from experts and engaged in rigorous tests in my own home. What follows are some simple precepts for Next Level sports viewership.",
"Mary, my wife, is simply a lost cause. She is an extremely discerning person who can detect the most subtle spice in a bowl of soup or a whisper of colored thread in a suit jacket, but for some reason she can stare at a basketball game on television and miss the important details, such as the ball going into the hoop. \n\n \"What just happened?\" I demanded to know after Michael Jordan made a jump shot during a Chicago Bulls game. \n\n \"I don't know. I was still thinking about the last commercial,\" she said. \n\n 7. Don't pay attention to the commercials, the squeakiness of the basketball court, the spitting in the dugout, the sweating, or fluids of any kind. \n\n Once the techniques of viewing are mastered, there remains a major step: analysis. There is no point in watching if one is not really \"seeing\" anything. Sabol gave me a final tip that I will carry with me the rest of my years:",
"The Unexamined Game Is Not Worth Watching \n\n As an achiever, I constantly look for new techniques of achievement and seek to minimize behaviors with low achievement yield. Thus it is only natural that I have begun to worry about the amount of time I spend watching sports on television--an activity that does not measurably advance any of my personal or professional agendas. \n\n Most alarmingly, sports have become a steel curtain between me and my family. My wife and three daughters shun me when I turn on a ballgame. Occasionally I try to \"relate\" to the kids by asking them to fetch Daddy a beer, but I sense that they are drifting away--that I have become, for them, every bit as useless, burdensome, and low-yielding in immediate practical utility as they are for me. \n\n I realized that something had to change. I needed to take firm, decisive action.",
"(Sabol reckons that on a given Sunday he starts watching at 11 a.m. and doesn't stop until 11 p.m., at the end of the cable-TV broadcast. Before his divorce, his wife didn't quite understand that this was work, he says.) \n\n Now comes the harder stuff, the actual watching--the seeing, if you will--of the actions on the screen. You must keep in mind that you are not directly watching an event, but rather are watching a produced and directed telecast of an event, manipulated by talented but not infallible professionals. To better understand how a sports program is put together, I called Rudy Martzke, the TV sports columnist for USA Today , who watches between 40 and 60 hours of TV sports a week on the 60-inch Pioneer screen in his family room.",
"In preliminary tests with my own family, I determined that they have a long, long, long way to go before they are major-league sports fans. One Sunday I plunked my two oldest daughters in chairs directly in front of the set and channel-surfed from baseball to basketball to women's golf to figure skating. During the basketball game, my medium-sized daughter, who is not quite 4, said of Joe Dumars: \"Is that a girl?\" So the first thing we will do, with this particular daughter, is work on gender identification. \n\n Both daughters, meanwhile, have decided to become figure skaters when they grow up. You can see that this is drifting into a scary area: I might teach them to watch sports on television, but they might decide that \"sports\" includes massive doses of Brian Boitano and Oksana Baiul. My natural inclination is to watch figure skating quadrennially.",
"\"The bathroom's right by the set. If I have to take a piss I can still see the screen.\" \n\n 3. Keep your eye on the screen at all times, even when you are trying to trim a child's toenails. \n\n Sabol said he sits in a \"Relax-a-back\" chair, a kind of recliner, but cautions that this is not for the novice. The worst-case scenario for the sports viewer is the unplanned nap. \"Those are dangerous. I only recommend those for the more experienced viewers. You need stamina to do this. You need a good night's sleep. You have to be careful about having too big a breakfast, because that will put you to sleep. The trick is to have a series of small snacks for a 10-hour period.\" \n\n 4. Come to the television rested. Don't eat meals--graze.",
"The very first thing you must do, before we get into any actual viewing techniques, is ask yourself why sports are an important part of your life. Why do sports matter? Do you like sports because they show that effort, practice, and innovation lead to positive results? Because sports are an outlet for our primitive barbarian hostilities? Because in sports we discover a dramatic metaphor for our desire to move into new terrain and reach goals that can be statistically measured? The answer to all these questions is: Don't be stupid. You watch sports for the simple reason that sports don't matter a jot. You like sports precisely because of their utter insignificance. You find this relaxing. Always remember the pre-eminent rule of the sports junkie: \n\n 1. Don't start thinking like George Will.",
"His viewing procedures are quite advanced. Every Sunday he watches three games at once. \"I have a little cockpit that's built in my den. There's one set, the predominant game, that's on a 30-inch TV, and I have two 19-inch TVs that are slanted inward. So it's like a cockpit. You have to have good peripheral vision and you have to really concentrate.\" \n\n So that's the next tip: \n\n 2. Get more, and bigger, televisions. \n\n If you have only a single 19-inch television and you can't afford to upgrade, just sit a lot closer. If you get close enough to the set, it's almost as good as going out and buying a multi-thousand-dollar \"home theater.\" \n\n Sabol said he has to take the occasional pit stop, but even that is conveniently arranged.",
"8. Prepare. \n\n \"You have to come into the game prepared. You have to come into watching the game with your own game plan,\" Sabol said. \"What are you going to look for? What are the keys to the game?\" \n\n It's a rule from scouting: Be prepared. Think ahead. Anticipate problems and possible solutions. If you pick up the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , you will see that one of the habits is \"be pro-active.\" Do not wait for the ballgame on television to come to you. You can go to the ballgame, mentally, emotionally, pro-actively. You can be a better sports viewer than anyone on your block, anyone with your ZIP code. \n\n Life is a competition. Be a champion.",
"5. Never let anyone know that you've forgotten the name of the \"announcer.\" \n\n The hardest part of all is knowing what to look for when you watch television. In basketball, for example, the referee will often blow the whistle and call \"illegal defense,\" which few viewers ever see in advance. This is because they are only watching the ball. Illegal defense occurs when a defender plays zone rather than man-to-man. Thus you should always look for someone who's just guarding a patch of the court, standing around looking suspicious. When you detect an illegal defense before the referee makes the call, you have completely arrived as a TV sports viewer. \n\n In baseball, don't just watch the flight of the ball from the pitcher's hand toward the batter. Look directly at the pitcher's hand and see if you can see what kind of grip he's using--that will tell you whether it's a curve, slider, fastball, splitter, knuckleball, or whatever.",
"Next, you must configure your viewing area. For help in this regard I called Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films Inc., the company that produces Inside the NFL for HBO. Sabol, I knew, watches a heroic amount of football, from which he gleans the highlights for his films. NFL Films has a signature style: Sweaty, grunting, muddy men move in super slow motion while the baritone narrator describes the events as though the fate of nations hung in the balance. Sabol, a former college football player, says, \"That's the way I wanted to show the game, with the snot spraying, the sweat flying. Football is a very visceral sport. Before we started it was always filmed from the top, and it looked like a little chess set.\"",
"\"The director is the guy who calls the shots you see on the screen. He's the one who inserts the graphics,\" says Martzke. \"Got a guy sitting next to him who's called the technical director. The director, when he yells out the instructions, 'cut to this picture, that picture, this camera, that camera,' the guy who follows him up, physically, is the technical director. The producer sits to the left of the director. The producer is the one who gets in the replays, the one who's in charge of the format of the show. He makes sure all those commercial breaks get in, so they're paid.\" \n\n Obviously only Rudy Martzke ever thinks twice about these people, but this creates a chance for you to sound authoritative when someone challenges you on your sports-viewership expertise. Let other people talk about who caught what pass or made what tackle; you can say things like, \"Sandy Grossman uses down-and-yardage graphics better than any director in the game.\" \n\n The point of all this is:",
"Martzke is full of facts and well-educated opinions: The typical Monday Night Football broadcast uses about 13 cameras, compared with only about eight for Fox's primary game Sunday afternoon; Goodyear's Steadycam allows sharp-focus blimp shots even when the blimp is being blown all over the sky; the glowing puck used on Fox hockey games is officially called Fox Trax; Bob Costas at NBC is the best host in the business; and Al Michaels at ABC is the best play-by-play guy. \n\n Unseen to viewers, but extremely important, are the producers and directors.",
"In golf, look at the wrists and elbows of the golfer as he or she putts. The great ones have almost no movement in their arms, wrists, and hands other than the gentlest of pendulum swings. \n\n In hockey, change channels. You will never see the puck. \n\n When Sabol watches a football game, he scrutinizes an area in front of the runner and including the runner. \"It's a semicircle with a radius of about 3 yards,\" he estimates. \n\n 6. Expand your zone of attention."
],
[
"(Sabol reckons that on a given Sunday he starts watching at 11 a.m. and doesn't stop until 11 p.m., at the end of the cable-TV broadcast. Before his divorce, his wife didn't quite understand that this was work, he says.) \n\n Now comes the harder stuff, the actual watching--the seeing, if you will--of the actions on the screen. You must keep in mind that you are not directly watching an event, but rather are watching a produced and directed telecast of an event, manipulated by talented but not infallible professionals. To better understand how a sports program is put together, I called Rudy Martzke, the TV sports columnist for USA Today , who watches between 40 and 60 hours of TV sports a week on the 60-inch Pioneer screen in his family room.",
"Mary, my wife, is simply a lost cause. She is an extremely discerning person who can detect the most subtle spice in a bowl of soup or a whisper of colored thread in a suit jacket, but for some reason she can stare at a basketball game on television and miss the important details, such as the ball going into the hoop. \n\n \"What just happened?\" I demanded to know after Michael Jordan made a jump shot during a Chicago Bulls game. \n\n \"I don't know. I was still thinking about the last commercial,\" she said. \n\n 7. Don't pay attention to the commercials, the squeakiness of the basketball court, the spitting in the dugout, the sweating, or fluids of any kind. \n\n Once the techniques of viewing are mastered, there remains a major step: analysis. There is no point in watching if one is not really \"seeing\" anything. Sabol gave me a final tip that I will carry with me the rest of my years:",
"His viewing procedures are quite advanced. Every Sunday he watches three games at once. \"I have a little cockpit that's built in my den. There's one set, the predominant game, that's on a 30-inch TV, and I have two 19-inch TVs that are slanted inward. So it's like a cockpit. You have to have good peripheral vision and you have to really concentrate.\" \n\n So that's the next tip: \n\n 2. Get more, and bigger, televisions. \n\n If you have only a single 19-inch television and you can't afford to upgrade, just sit a lot closer. If you get close enough to the set, it's almost as good as going out and buying a multi-thousand-dollar \"home theater.\" \n\n Sabol said he has to take the occasional pit stop, but even that is conveniently arranged.",
"\"The bathroom's right by the set. If I have to take a piss I can still see the screen.\" \n\n 3. Keep your eye on the screen at all times, even when you are trying to trim a child's toenails. \n\n Sabol said he sits in a \"Relax-a-back\" chair, a kind of recliner, but cautions that this is not for the novice. The worst-case scenario for the sports viewer is the unplanned nap. \"Those are dangerous. I only recommend those for the more experienced viewers. You need stamina to do this. You need a good night's sleep. You have to be careful about having too big a breakfast, because that will put you to sleep. The trick is to have a series of small snacks for a 10-hour period.\" \n\n 4. Come to the television rested. Don't eat meals--graze.",
"8. Prepare. \n\n \"You have to come into the game prepared. You have to come into watching the game with your own game plan,\" Sabol said. \"What are you going to look for? What are the keys to the game?\" \n\n It's a rule from scouting: Be prepared. Think ahead. Anticipate problems and possible solutions. If you pick up the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , you will see that one of the habits is \"be pro-active.\" Do not wait for the ballgame on television to come to you. You can go to the ballgame, mentally, emotionally, pro-actively. You can be a better sports viewer than anyone on your block, anyone with your ZIP code. \n\n Life is a competition. Be a champion.",
"The very first thing you must do, before we get into any actual viewing techniques, is ask yourself why sports are an important part of your life. Why do sports matter? Do you like sports because they show that effort, practice, and innovation lead to positive results? Because sports are an outlet for our primitive barbarian hostilities? Because in sports we discover a dramatic metaphor for our desire to move into new terrain and reach goals that can be statistically measured? The answer to all these questions is: Don't be stupid. You watch sports for the simple reason that sports don't matter a jot. You like sports precisely because of their utter insignificance. You find this relaxing. Always remember the pre-eminent rule of the sports junkie: \n\n 1. Don't start thinking like George Will.",
"In golf, look at the wrists and elbows of the golfer as he or she putts. The great ones have almost no movement in their arms, wrists, and hands other than the gentlest of pendulum swings. \n\n In hockey, change channels. You will never see the puck. \n\n When Sabol watches a football game, he scrutinizes an area in front of the runner and including the runner. \"It's a semicircle with a radius of about 3 yards,\" he estimates. \n\n 6. Expand your zone of attention.",
"Next, you must configure your viewing area. For help in this regard I called Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films Inc., the company that produces Inside the NFL for HBO. Sabol, I knew, watches a heroic amount of football, from which he gleans the highlights for his films. NFL Films has a signature style: Sweaty, grunting, muddy men move in super slow motion while the baritone narrator describes the events as though the fate of nations hung in the balance. Sabol, a former college football player, says, \"That's the way I wanted to show the game, with the snot spraying, the sweat flying. Football is a very visceral sport. Before we started it was always filmed from the top, and it looked like a little chess set.\"",
"5. Never let anyone know that you've forgotten the name of the \"announcer.\" \n\n The hardest part of all is knowing what to look for when you watch television. In basketball, for example, the referee will often blow the whistle and call \"illegal defense,\" which few viewers ever see in advance. This is because they are only watching the ball. Illegal defense occurs when a defender plays zone rather than man-to-man. Thus you should always look for someone who's just guarding a patch of the court, standing around looking suspicious. When you detect an illegal defense before the referee makes the call, you have completely arrived as a TV sports viewer. \n\n In baseball, don't just watch the flight of the ball from the pitcher's hand toward the batter. Look directly at the pitcher's hand and see if you can see what kind of grip he's using--that will tell you whether it's a curve, slider, fastball, splitter, knuckleball, or whatever.",
"\"The director is the guy who calls the shots you see on the screen. He's the one who inserts the graphics,\" says Martzke. \"Got a guy sitting next to him who's called the technical director. The director, when he yells out the instructions, 'cut to this picture, that picture, this camera, that camera,' the guy who follows him up, physically, is the technical director. The producer sits to the left of the director. The producer is the one who gets in the replays, the one who's in charge of the format of the show. He makes sure all those commercial breaks get in, so they're paid.\" \n\n Obviously only Rudy Martzke ever thinks twice about these people, but this creates a chance for you to sound authoritative when someone challenges you on your sports-viewership expertise. Let other people talk about who caught what pass or made what tackle; you can say things like, \"Sandy Grossman uses down-and-yardage graphics better than any director in the game.\" \n\n The point of all this is:",
"And so I made a solemn vow: I would teach my wife and kids to watch sports with me. \n\n Yes, I would! And something more: I would become a better, more sophisticated, more deeply engaged viewer of TV sports. I would become a man for whom sports viewership is not just a bad habit, but a skill. \n\n I have sought counsel from experts and engaged in rigorous tests in my own home. What follows are some simple precepts for Next Level sports viewership.",
"The Unexamined Game Is Not Worth Watching \n\n As an achiever, I constantly look for new techniques of achievement and seek to minimize behaviors with low achievement yield. Thus it is only natural that I have begun to worry about the amount of time I spend watching sports on television--an activity that does not measurably advance any of my personal or professional agendas. \n\n Most alarmingly, sports have become a steel curtain between me and my family. My wife and three daughters shun me when I turn on a ballgame. Occasionally I try to \"relate\" to the kids by asking them to fetch Daddy a beer, but I sense that they are drifting away--that I have become, for them, every bit as useless, burdensome, and low-yielding in immediate practical utility as they are for me. \n\n I realized that something had to change. I needed to take firm, decisive action.",
"In preliminary tests with my own family, I determined that they have a long, long, long way to go before they are major-league sports fans. One Sunday I plunked my two oldest daughters in chairs directly in front of the set and channel-surfed from baseball to basketball to women's golf to figure skating. During the basketball game, my medium-sized daughter, who is not quite 4, said of Joe Dumars: \"Is that a girl?\" So the first thing we will do, with this particular daughter, is work on gender identification. \n\n Both daughters, meanwhile, have decided to become figure skaters when they grow up. You can see that this is drifting into a scary area: I might teach them to watch sports on television, but they might decide that \"sports\" includes massive doses of Brian Boitano and Oksana Baiul. My natural inclination is to watch figure skating quadrennially.",
"Martzke is full of facts and well-educated opinions: The typical Monday Night Football broadcast uses about 13 cameras, compared with only about eight for Fox's primary game Sunday afternoon; Goodyear's Steadycam allows sharp-focus blimp shots even when the blimp is being blown all over the sky; the glowing puck used on Fox hockey games is officially called Fox Trax; Bob Costas at NBC is the best host in the business; and Al Michaels at ABC is the best play-by-play guy. \n\n Unseen to viewers, but extremely important, are the producers and directors."
],
[
"5. Never let anyone know that you've forgotten the name of the \"announcer.\" \n\n The hardest part of all is knowing what to look for when you watch television. In basketball, for example, the referee will often blow the whistle and call \"illegal defense,\" which few viewers ever see in advance. This is because they are only watching the ball. Illegal defense occurs when a defender plays zone rather than man-to-man. Thus you should always look for someone who's just guarding a patch of the court, standing around looking suspicious. When you detect an illegal defense before the referee makes the call, you have completely arrived as a TV sports viewer. \n\n In baseball, don't just watch the flight of the ball from the pitcher's hand toward the batter. Look directly at the pitcher's hand and see if you can see what kind of grip he's using--that will tell you whether it's a curve, slider, fastball, splitter, knuckleball, or whatever.",
"Mary, my wife, is simply a lost cause. She is an extremely discerning person who can detect the most subtle spice in a bowl of soup or a whisper of colored thread in a suit jacket, but for some reason she can stare at a basketball game on television and miss the important details, such as the ball going into the hoop. \n\n \"What just happened?\" I demanded to know after Michael Jordan made a jump shot during a Chicago Bulls game. \n\n \"I don't know. I was still thinking about the last commercial,\" she said. \n\n 7. Don't pay attention to the commercials, the squeakiness of the basketball court, the spitting in the dugout, the sweating, or fluids of any kind. \n\n Once the techniques of viewing are mastered, there remains a major step: analysis. There is no point in watching if one is not really \"seeing\" anything. Sabol gave me a final tip that I will carry with me the rest of my years:",
"\"The bathroom's right by the set. If I have to take a piss I can still see the screen.\" \n\n 3. Keep your eye on the screen at all times, even when you are trying to trim a child's toenails. \n\n Sabol said he sits in a \"Relax-a-back\" chair, a kind of recliner, but cautions that this is not for the novice. The worst-case scenario for the sports viewer is the unplanned nap. \"Those are dangerous. I only recommend those for the more experienced viewers. You need stamina to do this. You need a good night's sleep. You have to be careful about having too big a breakfast, because that will put you to sleep. The trick is to have a series of small snacks for a 10-hour period.\" \n\n 4. Come to the television rested. Don't eat meals--graze.",
"The very first thing you must do, before we get into any actual viewing techniques, is ask yourself why sports are an important part of your life. Why do sports matter? Do you like sports because they show that effort, practice, and innovation lead to positive results? Because sports are an outlet for our primitive barbarian hostilities? Because in sports we discover a dramatic metaphor for our desire to move into new terrain and reach goals that can be statistically measured? The answer to all these questions is: Don't be stupid. You watch sports for the simple reason that sports don't matter a jot. You like sports precisely because of their utter insignificance. You find this relaxing. Always remember the pre-eminent rule of the sports junkie: \n\n 1. Don't start thinking like George Will.",
"8. Prepare. \n\n \"You have to come into the game prepared. You have to come into watching the game with your own game plan,\" Sabol said. \"What are you going to look for? What are the keys to the game?\" \n\n It's a rule from scouting: Be prepared. Think ahead. Anticipate problems and possible solutions. If you pick up the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , you will see that one of the habits is \"be pro-active.\" Do not wait for the ballgame on television to come to you. You can go to the ballgame, mentally, emotionally, pro-actively. You can be a better sports viewer than anyone on your block, anyone with your ZIP code. \n\n Life is a competition. Be a champion.",
"His viewing procedures are quite advanced. Every Sunday he watches three games at once. \"I have a little cockpit that's built in my den. There's one set, the predominant game, that's on a 30-inch TV, and I have two 19-inch TVs that are slanted inward. So it's like a cockpit. You have to have good peripheral vision and you have to really concentrate.\" \n\n So that's the next tip: \n\n 2. Get more, and bigger, televisions. \n\n If you have only a single 19-inch television and you can't afford to upgrade, just sit a lot closer. If you get close enough to the set, it's almost as good as going out and buying a multi-thousand-dollar \"home theater.\" \n\n Sabol said he has to take the occasional pit stop, but even that is conveniently arranged.",
"(Sabol reckons that on a given Sunday he starts watching at 11 a.m. and doesn't stop until 11 p.m., at the end of the cable-TV broadcast. Before his divorce, his wife didn't quite understand that this was work, he says.) \n\n Now comes the harder stuff, the actual watching--the seeing, if you will--of the actions on the screen. You must keep in mind that you are not directly watching an event, but rather are watching a produced and directed telecast of an event, manipulated by talented but not infallible professionals. To better understand how a sports program is put together, I called Rudy Martzke, the TV sports columnist for USA Today , who watches between 40 and 60 hours of TV sports a week on the 60-inch Pioneer screen in his family room.",
"\"The director is the guy who calls the shots you see on the screen. He's the one who inserts the graphics,\" says Martzke. \"Got a guy sitting next to him who's called the technical director. The director, when he yells out the instructions, 'cut to this picture, that picture, this camera, that camera,' the guy who follows him up, physically, is the technical director. The producer sits to the left of the director. The producer is the one who gets in the replays, the one who's in charge of the format of the show. He makes sure all those commercial breaks get in, so they're paid.\" \n\n Obviously only Rudy Martzke ever thinks twice about these people, but this creates a chance for you to sound authoritative when someone challenges you on your sports-viewership expertise. Let other people talk about who caught what pass or made what tackle; you can say things like, \"Sandy Grossman uses down-and-yardage graphics better than any director in the game.\" \n\n The point of all this is:",
"The Unexamined Game Is Not Worth Watching \n\n As an achiever, I constantly look for new techniques of achievement and seek to minimize behaviors with low achievement yield. Thus it is only natural that I have begun to worry about the amount of time I spend watching sports on television--an activity that does not measurably advance any of my personal or professional agendas. \n\n Most alarmingly, sports have become a steel curtain between me and my family. My wife and three daughters shun me when I turn on a ballgame. Occasionally I try to \"relate\" to the kids by asking them to fetch Daddy a beer, but I sense that they are drifting away--that I have become, for them, every bit as useless, burdensome, and low-yielding in immediate practical utility as they are for me. \n\n I realized that something had to change. I needed to take firm, decisive action.",
"And so I made a solemn vow: I would teach my wife and kids to watch sports with me. \n\n Yes, I would! And something more: I would become a better, more sophisticated, more deeply engaged viewer of TV sports. I would become a man for whom sports viewership is not just a bad habit, but a skill. \n\n I have sought counsel from experts and engaged in rigorous tests in my own home. What follows are some simple precepts for Next Level sports viewership.",
"In preliminary tests with my own family, I determined that they have a long, long, long way to go before they are major-league sports fans. One Sunday I plunked my two oldest daughters in chairs directly in front of the set and channel-surfed from baseball to basketball to women's golf to figure skating. During the basketball game, my medium-sized daughter, who is not quite 4, said of Joe Dumars: \"Is that a girl?\" So the first thing we will do, with this particular daughter, is work on gender identification. \n\n Both daughters, meanwhile, have decided to become figure skaters when they grow up. You can see that this is drifting into a scary area: I might teach them to watch sports on television, but they might decide that \"sports\" includes massive doses of Brian Boitano and Oksana Baiul. My natural inclination is to watch figure skating quadrennially.",
"In golf, look at the wrists and elbows of the golfer as he or she putts. The great ones have almost no movement in their arms, wrists, and hands other than the gentlest of pendulum swings. \n\n In hockey, change channels. You will never see the puck. \n\n When Sabol watches a football game, he scrutinizes an area in front of the runner and including the runner. \"It's a semicircle with a radius of about 3 yards,\" he estimates. \n\n 6. Expand your zone of attention.",
"Martzke is full of facts and well-educated opinions: The typical Monday Night Football broadcast uses about 13 cameras, compared with only about eight for Fox's primary game Sunday afternoon; Goodyear's Steadycam allows sharp-focus blimp shots even when the blimp is being blown all over the sky; the glowing puck used on Fox hockey games is officially called Fox Trax; Bob Costas at NBC is the best host in the business; and Al Michaels at ABC is the best play-by-play guy. \n\n Unseen to viewers, but extremely important, are the producers and directors.",
"Next, you must configure your viewing area. For help in this regard I called Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films Inc., the company that produces Inside the NFL for HBO. Sabol, I knew, watches a heroic amount of football, from which he gleans the highlights for his films. NFL Films has a signature style: Sweaty, grunting, muddy men move in super slow motion while the baritone narrator describes the events as though the fate of nations hung in the balance. Sabol, a former college football player, says, \"That's the way I wanted to show the game, with the snot spraying, the sweat flying. Football is a very visceral sport. Before we started it was always filmed from the top, and it looked like a little chess set.\""
],
[
"(Sabol reckons that on a given Sunday he starts watching at 11 a.m. and doesn't stop until 11 p.m., at the end of the cable-TV broadcast. Before his divorce, his wife didn't quite understand that this was work, he says.) \n\n Now comes the harder stuff, the actual watching--the seeing, if you will--of the actions on the screen. You must keep in mind that you are not directly watching an event, but rather are watching a produced and directed telecast of an event, manipulated by talented but not infallible professionals. To better understand how a sports program is put together, I called Rudy Martzke, the TV sports columnist for USA Today , who watches between 40 and 60 hours of TV sports a week on the 60-inch Pioneer screen in his family room.",
"\"The director is the guy who calls the shots you see on the screen. He's the one who inserts the graphics,\" says Martzke. \"Got a guy sitting next to him who's called the technical director. The director, when he yells out the instructions, 'cut to this picture, that picture, this camera, that camera,' the guy who follows him up, physically, is the technical director. The producer sits to the left of the director. The producer is the one who gets in the replays, the one who's in charge of the format of the show. He makes sure all those commercial breaks get in, so they're paid.\" \n\n Obviously only Rudy Martzke ever thinks twice about these people, but this creates a chance for you to sound authoritative when someone challenges you on your sports-viewership expertise. Let other people talk about who caught what pass or made what tackle; you can say things like, \"Sandy Grossman uses down-and-yardage graphics better than any director in the game.\" \n\n The point of all this is:",
"Martzke is full of facts and well-educated opinions: The typical Monday Night Football broadcast uses about 13 cameras, compared with only about eight for Fox's primary game Sunday afternoon; Goodyear's Steadycam allows sharp-focus blimp shots even when the blimp is being blown all over the sky; the glowing puck used on Fox hockey games is officially called Fox Trax; Bob Costas at NBC is the best host in the business; and Al Michaels at ABC is the best play-by-play guy. \n\n Unseen to viewers, but extremely important, are the producers and directors.",
"Next, you must configure your viewing area. For help in this regard I called Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films Inc., the company that produces Inside the NFL for HBO. Sabol, I knew, watches a heroic amount of football, from which he gleans the highlights for his films. NFL Films has a signature style: Sweaty, grunting, muddy men move in super slow motion while the baritone narrator describes the events as though the fate of nations hung in the balance. Sabol, a former college football player, says, \"That's the way I wanted to show the game, with the snot spraying, the sweat flying. Football is a very visceral sport. Before we started it was always filmed from the top, and it looked like a little chess set.\"",
"His viewing procedures are quite advanced. Every Sunday he watches three games at once. \"I have a little cockpit that's built in my den. There's one set, the predominant game, that's on a 30-inch TV, and I have two 19-inch TVs that are slanted inward. So it's like a cockpit. You have to have good peripheral vision and you have to really concentrate.\" \n\n So that's the next tip: \n\n 2. Get more, and bigger, televisions. \n\n If you have only a single 19-inch television and you can't afford to upgrade, just sit a lot closer. If you get close enough to the set, it's almost as good as going out and buying a multi-thousand-dollar \"home theater.\" \n\n Sabol said he has to take the occasional pit stop, but even that is conveniently arranged.",
"\"The bathroom's right by the set. If I have to take a piss I can still see the screen.\" \n\n 3. Keep your eye on the screen at all times, even when you are trying to trim a child's toenails. \n\n Sabol said he sits in a \"Relax-a-back\" chair, a kind of recliner, but cautions that this is not for the novice. The worst-case scenario for the sports viewer is the unplanned nap. \"Those are dangerous. I only recommend those for the more experienced viewers. You need stamina to do this. You need a good night's sleep. You have to be careful about having too big a breakfast, because that will put you to sleep. The trick is to have a series of small snacks for a 10-hour period.\" \n\n 4. Come to the television rested. Don't eat meals--graze.",
"Mary, my wife, is simply a lost cause. She is an extremely discerning person who can detect the most subtle spice in a bowl of soup or a whisper of colored thread in a suit jacket, but for some reason she can stare at a basketball game on television and miss the important details, such as the ball going into the hoop. \n\n \"What just happened?\" I demanded to know after Michael Jordan made a jump shot during a Chicago Bulls game. \n\n \"I don't know. I was still thinking about the last commercial,\" she said. \n\n 7. Don't pay attention to the commercials, the squeakiness of the basketball court, the spitting in the dugout, the sweating, or fluids of any kind. \n\n Once the techniques of viewing are mastered, there remains a major step: analysis. There is no point in watching if one is not really \"seeing\" anything. Sabol gave me a final tip that I will carry with me the rest of my years:",
"8. Prepare. \n\n \"You have to come into the game prepared. You have to come into watching the game with your own game plan,\" Sabol said. \"What are you going to look for? What are the keys to the game?\" \n\n It's a rule from scouting: Be prepared. Think ahead. Anticipate problems and possible solutions. If you pick up the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , you will see that one of the habits is \"be pro-active.\" Do not wait for the ballgame on television to come to you. You can go to the ballgame, mentally, emotionally, pro-actively. You can be a better sports viewer than anyone on your block, anyone with your ZIP code. \n\n Life is a competition. Be a champion.",
"5. Never let anyone know that you've forgotten the name of the \"announcer.\" \n\n The hardest part of all is knowing what to look for when you watch television. In basketball, for example, the referee will often blow the whistle and call \"illegal defense,\" which few viewers ever see in advance. This is because they are only watching the ball. Illegal defense occurs when a defender plays zone rather than man-to-man. Thus you should always look for someone who's just guarding a patch of the court, standing around looking suspicious. When you detect an illegal defense before the referee makes the call, you have completely arrived as a TV sports viewer. \n\n In baseball, don't just watch the flight of the ball from the pitcher's hand toward the batter. Look directly at the pitcher's hand and see if you can see what kind of grip he's using--that will tell you whether it's a curve, slider, fastball, splitter, knuckleball, or whatever.",
"And so I made a solemn vow: I would teach my wife and kids to watch sports with me. \n\n Yes, I would! And something more: I would become a better, more sophisticated, more deeply engaged viewer of TV sports. I would become a man for whom sports viewership is not just a bad habit, but a skill. \n\n I have sought counsel from experts and engaged in rigorous tests in my own home. What follows are some simple precepts for Next Level sports viewership.",
"In golf, look at the wrists and elbows of the golfer as he or she putts. The great ones have almost no movement in their arms, wrists, and hands other than the gentlest of pendulum swings. \n\n In hockey, change channels. You will never see the puck. \n\n When Sabol watches a football game, he scrutinizes an area in front of the runner and including the runner. \"It's a semicircle with a radius of about 3 yards,\" he estimates. \n\n 6. Expand your zone of attention.",
"In preliminary tests with my own family, I determined that they have a long, long, long way to go before they are major-league sports fans. One Sunday I plunked my two oldest daughters in chairs directly in front of the set and channel-surfed from baseball to basketball to women's golf to figure skating. During the basketball game, my medium-sized daughter, who is not quite 4, said of Joe Dumars: \"Is that a girl?\" So the first thing we will do, with this particular daughter, is work on gender identification. \n\n Both daughters, meanwhile, have decided to become figure skaters when they grow up. You can see that this is drifting into a scary area: I might teach them to watch sports on television, but they might decide that \"sports\" includes massive doses of Brian Boitano and Oksana Baiul. My natural inclination is to watch figure skating quadrennially.",
"The Unexamined Game Is Not Worth Watching \n\n As an achiever, I constantly look for new techniques of achievement and seek to minimize behaviors with low achievement yield. Thus it is only natural that I have begun to worry about the amount of time I spend watching sports on television--an activity that does not measurably advance any of my personal or professional agendas. \n\n Most alarmingly, sports have become a steel curtain between me and my family. My wife and three daughters shun me when I turn on a ballgame. Occasionally I try to \"relate\" to the kids by asking them to fetch Daddy a beer, but I sense that they are drifting away--that I have become, for them, every bit as useless, burdensome, and low-yielding in immediate practical utility as they are for me. \n\n I realized that something had to change. I needed to take firm, decisive action.",
"The very first thing you must do, before we get into any actual viewing techniques, is ask yourself why sports are an important part of your life. Why do sports matter? Do you like sports because they show that effort, practice, and innovation lead to positive results? Because sports are an outlet for our primitive barbarian hostilities? Because in sports we discover a dramatic metaphor for our desire to move into new terrain and reach goals that can be statistically measured? The answer to all these questions is: Don't be stupid. You watch sports for the simple reason that sports don't matter a jot. You like sports precisely because of their utter insignificance. You find this relaxing. Always remember the pre-eminent rule of the sports junkie: \n\n 1. Don't start thinking like George Will."
],
[
"The very first thing you must do, before we get into any actual viewing techniques, is ask yourself why sports are an important part of your life. Why do sports matter? Do you like sports because they show that effort, practice, and innovation lead to positive results? Because sports are an outlet for our primitive barbarian hostilities? Because in sports we discover a dramatic metaphor for our desire to move into new terrain and reach goals that can be statistically measured? The answer to all these questions is: Don't be stupid. You watch sports for the simple reason that sports don't matter a jot. You like sports precisely because of their utter insignificance. You find this relaxing. Always remember the pre-eminent rule of the sports junkie: \n\n 1. Don't start thinking like George Will.",
"Mary, my wife, is simply a lost cause. She is an extremely discerning person who can detect the most subtle spice in a bowl of soup or a whisper of colored thread in a suit jacket, but for some reason she can stare at a basketball game on television and miss the important details, such as the ball going into the hoop. \n\n \"What just happened?\" I demanded to know after Michael Jordan made a jump shot during a Chicago Bulls game. \n\n \"I don't know. I was still thinking about the last commercial,\" she said. \n\n 7. Don't pay attention to the commercials, the squeakiness of the basketball court, the spitting in the dugout, the sweating, or fluids of any kind. \n\n Once the techniques of viewing are mastered, there remains a major step: analysis. There is no point in watching if one is not really \"seeing\" anything. Sabol gave me a final tip that I will carry with me the rest of my years:",
"The Unexamined Game Is Not Worth Watching \n\n As an achiever, I constantly look for new techniques of achievement and seek to minimize behaviors with low achievement yield. Thus it is only natural that I have begun to worry about the amount of time I spend watching sports on television--an activity that does not measurably advance any of my personal or professional agendas. \n\n Most alarmingly, sports have become a steel curtain between me and my family. My wife and three daughters shun me when I turn on a ballgame. Occasionally I try to \"relate\" to the kids by asking them to fetch Daddy a beer, but I sense that they are drifting away--that I have become, for them, every bit as useless, burdensome, and low-yielding in immediate practical utility as they are for me. \n\n I realized that something had to change. I needed to take firm, decisive action.",
"(Sabol reckons that on a given Sunday he starts watching at 11 a.m. and doesn't stop until 11 p.m., at the end of the cable-TV broadcast. Before his divorce, his wife didn't quite understand that this was work, he says.) \n\n Now comes the harder stuff, the actual watching--the seeing, if you will--of the actions on the screen. You must keep in mind that you are not directly watching an event, but rather are watching a produced and directed telecast of an event, manipulated by talented but not infallible professionals. To better understand how a sports program is put together, I called Rudy Martzke, the TV sports columnist for USA Today , who watches between 40 and 60 hours of TV sports a week on the 60-inch Pioneer screen in his family room.",
"\"The bathroom's right by the set. If I have to take a piss I can still see the screen.\" \n\n 3. Keep your eye on the screen at all times, even when you are trying to trim a child's toenails. \n\n Sabol said he sits in a \"Relax-a-back\" chair, a kind of recliner, but cautions that this is not for the novice. The worst-case scenario for the sports viewer is the unplanned nap. \"Those are dangerous. I only recommend those for the more experienced viewers. You need stamina to do this. You need a good night's sleep. You have to be careful about having too big a breakfast, because that will put you to sleep. The trick is to have a series of small snacks for a 10-hour period.\" \n\n 4. Come to the television rested. Don't eat meals--graze.",
"8. Prepare. \n\n \"You have to come into the game prepared. You have to come into watching the game with your own game plan,\" Sabol said. \"What are you going to look for? What are the keys to the game?\" \n\n It's a rule from scouting: Be prepared. Think ahead. Anticipate problems and possible solutions. If you pick up the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , you will see that one of the habits is \"be pro-active.\" Do not wait for the ballgame on television to come to you. You can go to the ballgame, mentally, emotionally, pro-actively. You can be a better sports viewer than anyone on your block, anyone with your ZIP code. \n\n Life is a competition. Be a champion.",
"His viewing procedures are quite advanced. Every Sunday he watches three games at once. \"I have a little cockpit that's built in my den. There's one set, the predominant game, that's on a 30-inch TV, and I have two 19-inch TVs that are slanted inward. So it's like a cockpit. You have to have good peripheral vision and you have to really concentrate.\" \n\n So that's the next tip: \n\n 2. Get more, and bigger, televisions. \n\n If you have only a single 19-inch television and you can't afford to upgrade, just sit a lot closer. If you get close enough to the set, it's almost as good as going out and buying a multi-thousand-dollar \"home theater.\" \n\n Sabol said he has to take the occasional pit stop, but even that is conveniently arranged.",
"And so I made a solemn vow: I would teach my wife and kids to watch sports with me. \n\n Yes, I would! And something more: I would become a better, more sophisticated, more deeply engaged viewer of TV sports. I would become a man for whom sports viewership is not just a bad habit, but a skill. \n\n I have sought counsel from experts and engaged in rigorous tests in my own home. What follows are some simple precepts for Next Level sports viewership.",
"In preliminary tests with my own family, I determined that they have a long, long, long way to go before they are major-league sports fans. One Sunday I plunked my two oldest daughters in chairs directly in front of the set and channel-surfed from baseball to basketball to women's golf to figure skating. During the basketball game, my medium-sized daughter, who is not quite 4, said of Joe Dumars: \"Is that a girl?\" So the first thing we will do, with this particular daughter, is work on gender identification. \n\n Both daughters, meanwhile, have decided to become figure skaters when they grow up. You can see that this is drifting into a scary area: I might teach them to watch sports on television, but they might decide that \"sports\" includes massive doses of Brian Boitano and Oksana Baiul. My natural inclination is to watch figure skating quadrennially.",
"5. Never let anyone know that you've forgotten the name of the \"announcer.\" \n\n The hardest part of all is knowing what to look for when you watch television. In basketball, for example, the referee will often blow the whistle and call \"illegal defense,\" which few viewers ever see in advance. This is because they are only watching the ball. Illegal defense occurs when a defender plays zone rather than man-to-man. Thus you should always look for someone who's just guarding a patch of the court, standing around looking suspicious. When you detect an illegal defense before the referee makes the call, you have completely arrived as a TV sports viewer. \n\n In baseball, don't just watch the flight of the ball from the pitcher's hand toward the batter. Look directly at the pitcher's hand and see if you can see what kind of grip he's using--that will tell you whether it's a curve, slider, fastball, splitter, knuckleball, or whatever.",
"\"The director is the guy who calls the shots you see on the screen. He's the one who inserts the graphics,\" says Martzke. \"Got a guy sitting next to him who's called the technical director. The director, when he yells out the instructions, 'cut to this picture, that picture, this camera, that camera,' the guy who follows him up, physically, is the technical director. The producer sits to the left of the director. The producer is the one who gets in the replays, the one who's in charge of the format of the show. He makes sure all those commercial breaks get in, so they're paid.\" \n\n Obviously only Rudy Martzke ever thinks twice about these people, but this creates a chance for you to sound authoritative when someone challenges you on your sports-viewership expertise. Let other people talk about who caught what pass or made what tackle; you can say things like, \"Sandy Grossman uses down-and-yardage graphics better than any director in the game.\" \n\n The point of all this is:",
"In golf, look at the wrists and elbows of the golfer as he or she putts. The great ones have almost no movement in their arms, wrists, and hands other than the gentlest of pendulum swings. \n\n In hockey, change channels. You will never see the puck. \n\n When Sabol watches a football game, he scrutinizes an area in front of the runner and including the runner. \"It's a semicircle with a radius of about 3 yards,\" he estimates. \n\n 6. Expand your zone of attention.",
"Next, you must configure your viewing area. For help in this regard I called Steve Sabol, president of NFL Films Inc., the company that produces Inside the NFL for HBO. Sabol, I knew, watches a heroic amount of football, from which he gleans the highlights for his films. NFL Films has a signature style: Sweaty, grunting, muddy men move in super slow motion while the baritone narrator describes the events as though the fate of nations hung in the balance. Sabol, a former college football player, says, \"That's the way I wanted to show the game, with the snot spraying, the sweat flying. Football is a very visceral sport. Before we started it was always filmed from the top, and it looked like a little chess set.\"",
"Martzke is full of facts and well-educated opinions: The typical Monday Night Football broadcast uses about 13 cameras, compared with only about eight for Fox's primary game Sunday afternoon; Goodyear's Steadycam allows sharp-focus blimp shots even when the blimp is being blown all over the sky; the glowing puck used on Fox hockey games is officially called Fox Trax; Bob Costas at NBC is the best host in the business; and Al Michaels at ABC is the best play-by-play guy. \n\n Unseen to viewers, but extremely important, are the producers and directors."
]
] |
test
|
50774
|
[
"What is the first clue the author gives the reader that the characters are probably in a hostile environment?",
"Why can the people on the spacecraft not go outside?",
"What is the first thing that the ship's crew finds shocking about Patrick?",
"What shocks Patrick about the ship's crew?",
"According to Patrick, why do the people on this planet look the way they do?",
"Why does Patrick have to go through a battery of tests as soon as he enters the ship?",
"What is surprising about the way June reacts to Pat?",
"What happens to the hampsters?",
"What does Pat reveal about the food that he consumed on the ship?"
] |
[
[
"As the story opens, the narrator speaks about the characters' craft being shot down.",
"As the story opens, the narrator speaks about an animal that has been stalking the characters.",
"As the story opens, the first thing the narrator talks about is the plague.",
"As the story opens, the first thing the narrator tells us about the characters is that they have their guns out and ready, just in case."
],
[
"The planet's inhabitants are hostile.",
"They are not sure if the environment is safe, as they are escaping a plague that spans the universe.",
"They are prisoners, and they are not allowed off of the ship.",
"There are too many wild animals who are waiting to rip them apart."
],
[
"He speaks the same language they do.",
"He is the ruler of this planet, and he came to find them himself,",
"He has twisted, human-like features, but he is clearly not human.",
"He is a doctor, too."
],
[
"They appear to be human",
"They all have such different facial features. ",
"They are all doctors, too.",
"They all speak the same language that he does."
],
[
"They have a shallow gene pool",
"Radiation.",
"They are a product of gene mutation.",
"They had to mate with the original inhabitants on the island."
],
[
"They have to make sure that he does not have a disposition to murder people",
"They want to make sure he is intelligent enough to be able to interact with their people.",
"They want to make sure that he is actually who he says he is, and he was sent to meet them for legitimate reasons.",
"They have to make sure that he is not carrying the plague."
],
[
"She is obviously attracted to him, though she is in a committed relationship with someone else.",
"She is afraid of him because the people of his planet are known for their inhumanity towards strangers.",
"She does not trust him at all.",
"She wants to stay on the planet with him because they need a doctor."
],
[
"They all die",
"They all become pregnant.",
"Most of them die.",
"Nothing. They all show that Patrick does not carry the plague."
],
[
"He will be unable to digest it.",
"It was the only \"human food\" he'd ever consumed.",
"He poisoned it.",
"He thought it was the best thing he'd ever had the pleasure of tasting."
]
] |
[
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1
] |
[
0,
0,
0,
0,
1,
0,
1,
0,
0
] |
[
[
"A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had\n been fired.\n\n\n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her\n voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the\n forest.\n\n\n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice\n in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton\n standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked\n like a duck.\"\n\n\n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into\n sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the\n bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said\n soberly.",
"But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death,\n for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be\n like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to\n be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies\n had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships\n which had touched on some plague planet.\n\n\n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight\n spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n\n\n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the\n alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the\n copper and purple shadows.\n\n\n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker\n browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her\n someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole\n in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.",
"\"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon,\n June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still\n love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and\n touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely\n visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a\n greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\nThey walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship\nExplorer\ntowered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of\n the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and\n clouds, and they longed to be outside.",
"\"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n\n\n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a\n viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the\n horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther\n away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green\n where there were fields.\n\n\n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been\n there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like\n Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to\n let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that\n patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through\n it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\nReno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and\n began circling lazily.",
"\"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on\n board.\"\n\n\n \"More needles?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n\n\n \"Rough?\"\n\n\n \"It isn't easy.\"\n\n\n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit\n decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in\n glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and\n compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.",
"Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n \"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think\n that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit\n so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I\n suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside\n down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air\n is breathable.\"\n\n\n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n\n\n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the\n wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take\n off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins.\n Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.",
"This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful,\n humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller\n than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood\n breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung\n a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n\n\n They lowered their guns.\n\n\n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he\n reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be\n heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n\n\n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest\n sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of\n evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be\n wearing a three day growth of red stubble.",
"\"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid\n samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the\n arm.\"\n\n\n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed\n and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine\n nerve surgeon on Earth.\n\n\n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship\n and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly,\n it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from\n their earphones:\n\n\n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He\n banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could\n see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.",
"\"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out\n and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have\n you seen Bess? Oh—there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n\n\n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly\n talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway,\n alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even\n larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward\n their table.\n\n\n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled\n woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you\nreally\nswim across a\n river to come here?\"\n\n\n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all\n directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with\n us. Let me help choose your tray.\"",
"June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a\n man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment\n more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening\n to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked\n almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had\n forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly\n aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's\n end of the table.\n\n\n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting\n another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he\n added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.",
"Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and\n around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall\n by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered\n to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given\n solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic\n blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being\n directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized\n and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n\n\n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme\n dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were\n dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.",
"\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to\n the music, and tried to locate its source.\n\n\n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n\n\n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a\n day.\n\n\n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through,\n and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave\n of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about\n crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm\n animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth\n seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.",
"\"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"",
"\"Are you hungry?\"\n\n\n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n\n\n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and\n hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which\n made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n\n\n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing\n hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of\n Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of\n antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system\n would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human\n blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n\n\n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive,\n so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human\n cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n\n\n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.",
"June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the\n intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n\n\n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What\n should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n\n\n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n\n\n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own\n description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles,\n like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly\n humorous blue eyes.\n\n\n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and\n me?\"",
"\"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people\n still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe\n you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be\n no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n\n\n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and\n hypodermics.\n\n\n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n\n\n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead,\n and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the\n tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a\n stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being\n smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.",
"\"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a\n fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half\n of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces,\n the sound of unfamiliar voices.\nThey climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich\n subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria\n was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship\n had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had\n the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound\n absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each\n table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n\n\n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June\n could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of\n conversation.",
"\"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n\n\n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about\n it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering\n ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his\n neck at the age of eighty.\"\n\n\n \"A character,\" Max said.\n\n\n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers\n didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It\n worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were\n still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n\n\n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank\n culture expert. There's a job for you.\"",
"Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and\n pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew\n away over the odd-colored forest.\n\n\n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got\n through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max\n dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles\n without exposing them to air.\n\n\n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still\n carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't\n show on you, but still carry enough germs—if that's what caused it—to\n wipe out a planet.\"\n\n\n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able\n to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n\n\n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.",
"\"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway\n colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living\n here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n\n\n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with\n excitement.\n\n\n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be\n out in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n \"May I go see him?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets\n out. Tell him we sent you.\""
],
[
"\"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n\n\n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a\n viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the\n horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther\n away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green\n where there were fields.\n\n\n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been\n there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like\n Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to\n let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that\n patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through\n it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\nReno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and\n began circling lazily.",
"Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all\n the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion,\n and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship\n were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone\n and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace\n them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife\n and bow.\n\n\n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Any other diseases?\"\n\n\n \"Not a one.\"",
"All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of\n allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\nJune stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped\n off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a\n wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n\n\n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n\n\n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he\n asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally\n get something to eat?\"\n\n\n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully,\n using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n\n\n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled\n chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go\n jump in the lake?\"",
"In the\nExplorer\n, stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers,\n was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes\n so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused\n chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing\n could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to\n the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n\n\n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had\n been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human\n treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and\n interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding\n against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.",
"\"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon,\n June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still\n love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and\n touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely\n visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a\n greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\nThey walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship\nExplorer\ntowered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of\n the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and\n clouds, and they longed to be outside.",
"A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had\n been fired.\n\n\n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her\n voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the\n forest.\n\n\n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice\n in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton\n standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked\n like a duck.\"\n\n\n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into\n sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the\n bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said\n soberly.",
"\"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time\n beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board\n and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it\n brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years.\n Plenty good enough.\"\n\n\n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that\n he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never\n experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n\"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n\n\n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet\n of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.",
"Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n \"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think\n that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit\n so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I\n suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside\n down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air\n is breathable.\"\n\n\n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n\n\n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the\n wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take\n off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins.\n Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.",
"But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death,\n for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be\n like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to\n be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies\n had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships\n which had touched on some plague planet.\n\n\n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight\n spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n\n\n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the\n alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the\n copper and purple shadows.\n\n\n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker\n browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her\n someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole\n in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.",
"\"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on\n board.\"\n\n\n \"More needles?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n\n\n \"Rough?\"\n\n\n \"It isn't easy.\"\n\n\n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit\n decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in\n glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and\n compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.",
"\"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a\n fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half\n of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces,\n the sound of unfamiliar voices.\nThey climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich\n subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria\n was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship\n had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had\n the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound\n absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each\n table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n\n\n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June\n could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of\n conversation.",
"\"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid\n samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the\n arm.\"\n\n\n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed\n and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine\n nerve surgeon on Earth.\n\n\n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship\n and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly,\n it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from\n their earphones:\n\n\n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He\n banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could\n see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.",
"Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control;\n the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he\n entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a\n hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three\n were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but\n recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive\n and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the\n attack.\n\n\n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again.\n They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to\n dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose\n of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was\n hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.",
"Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n \"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n\n\n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You\n hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of\n those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n\"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n\n\n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different\n amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the\n carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until\n you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then\n you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"",
"\"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people\n still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe\n you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be\n no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n\n\n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and\n hypodermics.\n\n\n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n\n\n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead,\n and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the\n tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a\n stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being\n smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.",
"\"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"",
"\"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway\n colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living\n here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n\n\n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with\n excitement.\n\n\n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be\n out in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n \"May I go see him?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets\n out. Tell him we sent you.\"",
"\"Uh-\nuh\n!\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me.\n Human cell control—right up your alley.\"\n\n\n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be\n able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it\n just for the taste.\"\n\n\n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test\n hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry\n the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were\n injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We\n can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they\n object?\"\n\n\n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for\n safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"",
"June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the\n intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n\n\n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What\n should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n\n\n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n\n\n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own\n description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles,\n like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly\n humorous blue eyes.\n\n\n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and\n me?\"",
"Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist\n and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting\n wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n\n\n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n\n\n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and\n escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be\n claiming the hero of the hour.\nPat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost\n voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He\n ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked\n around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said\n nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n\n\n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we\n will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and\n cocktail bars that used to be inside.\""
],
[
"\"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out\n and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have\n you seen Bess? Oh—there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n\n\n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly\n talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway,\n alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even\n larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward\n their table.\n\n\n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled\n woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you\nreally\nswim across a\n river to come here?\"\n\n\n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all\n directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with\n us. Let me help choose your tray.\"",
"He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only\n one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city\n planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with\n the Bartons quickly. \"That is—you are people, aren't you?\" he asked\n startlingly.\n\n\n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n\n\n \"Well, you are all so—so—\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the\n faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n\n\n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n\n\n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these—interesting\n different hair colors and face shapes and so forth—\" He made a vague\n wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to\n insult them.\n\n\n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.",
"\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to\n the music, and tried to locate its source.\n\n\n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n\n\n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a\n day.\n\n\n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through,\n and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave\n of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about\n crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm\n animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth\n seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.",
"Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist\n and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting\n wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n\n\n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n\n\n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and\n escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be\n claiming the hero of the hour.\nPat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost\n voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He\n ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked\n around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said\n nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n\n\n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we\n will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and\n cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"",
"\"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid\n samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the\n arm.\"\n\n\n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed\n and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine\n nerve surgeon on Earth.\n\n\n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship\n and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly,\n it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from\n their earphones:\n\n\n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He\n banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could\n see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.",
"\"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"",
"Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n \"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think\n that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit\n so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I\n suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside\n down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air\n is breathable.\"\n\n\n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n\n\n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the\n wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take\n off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins.\n Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.",
"Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control;\n the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he\n entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a\n hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three\n were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but\n recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive\n and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the\n attack.\n\n\n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again.\n They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to\n dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose\n of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was\n hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.",
"\"Are you hungry?\"\n\n\n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n\n\n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and\n hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which\n made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n\n\n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing\n hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of\n Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of\n antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system\n would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human\n blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n\n\n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive,\n so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human\n cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n\n\n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.",
"June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the\n intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n\n\n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What\n should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n\n\n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n\n\n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own\n description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles,\n like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly\n humorous blue eyes.\n\n\n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and\n me?\"",
"Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching\n awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on\n the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\nTheir job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to\n the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing\n now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting\n sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n\n\n The polished silver and black column of the\nExplorer\nseemed to rise\n higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry\n blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the\n trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n\n\n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.",
"\"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people\n still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe\n you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be\n no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n\n\n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and\n hypodermics.\n\n\n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n\n\n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead,\n and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the\n tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a\n stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being\n smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.",
"Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and\n around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall\n by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered\n to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given\n solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic\n blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being\n directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized\n and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n\n\n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme\n dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were\n dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.",
"\"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on\n board.\"\n\n\n \"More needles?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n\n\n \"Rough?\"\n\n\n \"It isn't easy.\"\n\n\n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit\n decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in\n glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and\n compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.",
"June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a\n man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment\n more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening\n to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked\n almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had\n forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly\n aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's\n end of the table.\n\n\n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting\n another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he\n added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.",
"Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and\n pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew\n away over the odd-colored forest.\n\n\n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got\n through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max\n dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles\n without exposing them to air.\n\n\n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still\n carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't\n show on you, but still carry enough germs—if that's what caused it—to\n wipe out a planet.\"\n\n\n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able\n to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n\n\n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.",
"This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful,\n humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller\n than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood\n breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung\n a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n\n\n They lowered their guns.\n\n\n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he\n reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be\n heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n\n\n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest\n sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of\n evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be\n wearing a three day growth of red stubble.",
"\"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n\n\n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a\n viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the\n horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther\n away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green\n where there were fields.\n\n\n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been\n there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like\n Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to\n let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that\n patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through\n it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\nReno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and\n began circling lazily.",
"\"—new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in.\n He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n\n\n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three\n heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in\n the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose\n tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four\n different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n\n\n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a\n table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are\n saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages,\n for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n\n\n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the\n shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"",
"Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all\n the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion,\n and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship\n were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone\n and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace\n them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife\n and bow.\n\n\n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Any other diseases?\"\n\n\n \"Not a one.\""
],
[
"\"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out\n and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have\n you seen Bess? Oh—there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n\n\n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly\n talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway,\n alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even\n larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward\n their table.\n\n\n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled\n woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you\nreally\nswim across a\n river to come here?\"\n\n\n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all\n directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with\n us. Let me help choose your tray.\"",
"He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only\n one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city\n planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with\n the Bartons quickly. \"That is—you are people, aren't you?\" he asked\n startlingly.\n\n\n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n\n\n \"Well, you are all so—so—\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the\n faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n\n\n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n\n\n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these—interesting\n different hair colors and face shapes and so forth—\" He made a vague\n wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to\n insult them.\n\n\n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.",
"Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist\n and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting\n wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n\n\n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n\n\n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and\n escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be\n claiming the hero of the hour.\nPat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost\n voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He\n ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked\n around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said\n nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n\n\n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we\n will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and\n cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"",
"\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to\n the music, and tried to locate its source.\n\n\n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n\n\n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a\n day.\n\n\n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through,\n and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave\n of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about\n crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm\n animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth\n seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.",
"\"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"",
"Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n \"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think\n that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit\n so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I\n suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside\n down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air\n is breathable.\"\n\n\n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n\n\n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the\n wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take\n off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins.\n Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.",
"\"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid\n samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the\n arm.\"\n\n\n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed\n and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine\n nerve surgeon on Earth.\n\n\n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship\n and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly,\n it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from\n their earphones:\n\n\n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He\n banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could\n see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.",
"Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control;\n the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he\n entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a\n hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three\n were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but\n recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive\n and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the\n attack.\n\n\n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again.\n They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to\n dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose\n of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was\n hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.",
"June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a\n man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment\n more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening\n to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked\n almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had\n forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly\n aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's\n end of the table.\n\n\n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting\n another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he\n added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.",
"\"Are you hungry?\"\n\n\n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n\n\n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and\n hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which\n made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n\n\n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing\n hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of\n Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of\n antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system\n would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human\n blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n\n\n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive,\n so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human\n cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n\n\n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.",
"Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and\n around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall\n by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered\n to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given\n solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic\n blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being\n directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized\n and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n\n\n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme\n dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were\n dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.",
"\"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on\n board.\"\n\n\n \"More needles?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n\n\n \"Rough?\"\n\n\n \"It isn't easy.\"\n\n\n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit\n decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in\n glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and\n compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.",
"Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching\n awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on\n the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\nTheir job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to\n the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing\n now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting\n sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n\n\n The polished silver and black column of the\nExplorer\nseemed to rise\n higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry\n blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the\n trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n\n\n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.",
"June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the\n intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n\n\n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What\n should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n\n\n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n\n\n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own\n description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles,\n like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly\n humorous blue eyes.\n\n\n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and\n me?\"",
"\"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time\n beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board\n and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it\n brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years.\n Plenty good enough.\"\n\n\n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that\n he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never\n experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n\"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n\n\n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet\n of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.",
"She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join\n them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual\n lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n\n\n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they\n passed he lightly touched her arm.\n\n\n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile,\n and knew that he had heard.",
"\"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people\n still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe\n you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be\n no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n\n\n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and\n hypodermics.\n\n\n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n\n\n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead,\n and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the\n tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a\n stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being\n smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.",
"\"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n\n\n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a\n viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the\n horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther\n away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green\n where there were fields.\n\n\n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been\n there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like\n Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to\n let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that\n patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through\n it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\nReno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and\n began circling lazily.",
"This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful,\n humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller\n than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood\n breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung\n a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n\n\n They lowered their guns.\n\n\n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he\n reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be\n heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n\n\n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest\n sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of\n evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be\n wearing a three day growth of red stubble.",
"Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all\n the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion,\n and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship\n were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone\n and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace\n them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife\n and bow.\n\n\n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Any other diseases?\"\n\n\n \"Not a one.\""
],
[
"He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only\n one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city\n planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with\n the Bartons quickly. \"That is—you are people, aren't you?\" he asked\n startlingly.\n\n\n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n\n\n \"Well, you are all so—so—\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the\n faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n\n\n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n\n\n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these—interesting\n different hair colors and face shapes and so forth—\" He made a vague\n wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to\n insult them.\n\n\n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.",
"Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n \"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think\n that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit\n so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I\n suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside\n down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air\n is breathable.\"\n\n\n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n\n\n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the\n wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take\n off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins.\n Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.",
"June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the\n intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n\n\n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What\n should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n\n\n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n\n\n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own\n description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles,\n like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly\n humorous blue eyes.\n\n\n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and\n me?\"",
"Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays,\n but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one\n side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n\n\n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people\n had no doctors.\"\n\n\n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of\n the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality\n and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle\n of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the\n face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided\n that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did\n it all right.'\"\n\n\n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.",
"\"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"",
"Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n \"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n\n\n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You\n hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of\n those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n\"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n\n\n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different\n amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the\n carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until\n you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then\n you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"",
"\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to\n the music, and tried to locate its source.\n\n\n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n\n\n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a\n day.\n\n\n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through,\n and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave\n of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about\n crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm\n animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth\n seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.",
"This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful,\n humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller\n than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood\n breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung\n a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n\n\n They lowered their guns.\n\n\n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he\n reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be\n heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n\n\n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest\n sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of\n evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be\n wearing a three day growth of red stubble.",
"\"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two\n years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead\n families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all\n related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way\n people can look.\"\nPlague.\n\"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n\n\n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting\n sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to\n do about it.\"\n\n\n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for\n some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.",
"\"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n\n\n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about\n it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering\n ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his\n neck at the age of eighty.\"\n\n\n \"A character,\" Max said.\n\n\n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers\n didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It\n worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were\n still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n\n\n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank\n culture expert. There's a job for you.\"",
"Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching\n awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on\n the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\nTheir job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to\n the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing\n now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting\n sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n\n\n The polished silver and black column of the\nExplorer\nseemed to rise\n higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry\n blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the\n trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n\n\n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.",
"\"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway\n colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living\n here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n\n\n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with\n excitement.\n\n\n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be\n out in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n \"May I go see him?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets\n out. Tell him we sent you.\"",
"\"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon,\n June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still\n love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and\n touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely\n visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a\n greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\nThey walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship\nExplorer\ntowered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of\n the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and\n clouds, and they longed to be outside.",
"Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist\n and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting\n wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n\n\n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n\n\n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and\n escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be\n claiming the hero of the hour.\nPat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost\n voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He\n ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked\n around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said\n nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n\n\n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we\n will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and\n cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"",
"Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and\n pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew\n away over the odd-colored forest.\n\n\n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got\n through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max\n dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles\n without exposing them to air.\n\n\n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still\n carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't\n show on you, but still carry enough germs—if that's what caused it—to\n wipe out a planet.\"\n\n\n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able\n to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n\n\n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.",
"\"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid\n samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the\n arm.\"\n\n\n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed\n and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine\n nerve surgeon on Earth.\n\n\n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship\n and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly,\n it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from\n their earphones:\n\n\n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He\n banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could\n see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.",
"\"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time\n beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board\n and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it\n brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years.\n Plenty good enough.\"\n\n\n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that\n he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never\n experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n\"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n\n\n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet\n of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.",
"Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all\n the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion,\n and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship\n were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone\n and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace\n them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife\n and bow.\n\n\n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Any other diseases?\"\n\n\n \"Not a one.\"",
"\"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells—\"\nShe listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the\n explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to\n Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and\n hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells\n have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence,\n hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n\n\n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes.\n He put them through the hard savage school of evolution—a thousand\n generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien\n indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the\n cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n\n\n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution\n in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where\n they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he\n had taken them from.\"",
"\"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n\n\n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a\n viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the\n horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther\n away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green\n where there were fields.\n\n\n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been\n there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like\n Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to\n let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that\n patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through\n it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\nReno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and\n began circling lazily."
],
[
"Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and\n around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall\n by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered\n to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given\n solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic\n blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being\n directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized\n and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n\n\n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme\n dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were\n dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.",
"\"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people\n still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe\n you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be\n no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n\n\n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and\n hypodermics.\n\n\n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n\n\n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead,\n and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the\n tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a\n stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being\n smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.",
"\"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid\n samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the\n arm.\"\n\n\n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed\n and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine\n nerve surgeon on Earth.\n\n\n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship\n and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly,\n it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from\n their earphones:\n\n\n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He\n banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could\n see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.",
"\"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on\n board.\"\n\n\n \"More needles?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n\n\n \"Rough?\"\n\n\n \"It isn't easy.\"\n\n\n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit\n decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in\n glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and\n compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.",
"\"Are you hungry?\"\n\n\n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n\n\n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and\n hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which\n made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n\n\n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing\n hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of\n Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of\n antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system\n would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human\n blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n\n\n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive,\n so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human\n cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n\n\n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.",
"\"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out\n and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have\n you seen Bess? Oh—there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n\n\n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly\n talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway,\n alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even\n larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward\n their table.\n\n\n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled\n woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you\nreally\nswim across a\n river to come here?\"\n\n\n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all\n directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with\n us. Let me help choose your tray.\"",
"He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only\n one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city\n planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with\n the Bartons quickly. \"That is—you are people, aren't you?\" he asked\n startlingly.\n\n\n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n\n\n \"Well, you are all so—so—\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the\n faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n\n\n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n\n\n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these—interesting\n different hair colors and face shapes and so forth—\" He made a vague\n wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to\n insult them.\n\n\n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.",
"All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of\n allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\nJune stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped\n off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a\n wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n\n\n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n\n\n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he\n asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally\n get something to eat?\"\n\n\n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully,\n using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n\n\n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled\n chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go\n jump in the lake?\"",
"\"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n\n\n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a\n viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the\n horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther\n away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green\n where there were fields.\n\n\n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been\n there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like\n Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to\n let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that\n patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through\n it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\nReno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and\n began circling lazily.",
"Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist\n and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting\n wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n\n\n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n\n\n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and\n escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be\n claiming the hero of the hour.\nPat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost\n voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He\n ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked\n around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said\n nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n\n\n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we\n will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and\n cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"",
"\"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"",
"\"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway\n colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living\n here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n\n\n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with\n excitement.\n\n\n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be\n out in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n \"May I go see him?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets\n out. Tell him we sent you.\"",
"Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control;\n the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he\n entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a\n hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three\n were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but\n recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive\n and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the\n attack.\n\n\n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again.\n They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to\n dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose\n of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was\n hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.",
"Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n \"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think\n that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit\n so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I\n suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside\n down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air\n is breathable.\"\n\n\n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n\n\n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the\n wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take\n off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins.\n Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.",
"\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to\n the music, and tried to locate its source.\n\n\n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n\n\n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a\n day.\n\n\n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through,\n and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave\n of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about\n crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm\n animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth\n seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.",
"Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and\n pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew\n away over the odd-colored forest.\n\n\n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got\n through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max\n dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles\n without exposing them to air.\n\n\n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still\n carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't\n show on you, but still carry enough germs—if that's what caused it—to\n wipe out a planet.\"\n\n\n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able\n to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n\n\n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.",
"\"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time\n beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board\n and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it\n brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years.\n Plenty good enough.\"\n\n\n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that\n he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never\n experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n\"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n\n\n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet\n of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.",
"Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all\n the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion,\n and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship\n were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone\n and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace\n them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife\n and bow.\n\n\n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Any other diseases?\"\n\n\n \"Not a one.\"",
"Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays,\n but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one\n side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n\n\n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people\n had no doctors.\"\n\n\n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of\n the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality\n and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle\n of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the\n face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided\n that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did\n it all right.'\"\n\n\n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.",
"In the\nExplorer\n, stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers,\n was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes\n so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused\n chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing\n could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to\n the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n\n\n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had\n been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human\n treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and\n interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding\n against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient."
],
[
"She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join\n them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual\n lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n\n\n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they\n passed he lightly touched her arm.\n\n\n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile,\n and knew that he had heard.",
"June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a\n man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment\n more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening\n to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked\n almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had\n forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly\n aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's\n end of the table.\n\n\n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting\n another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he\n added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.",
"There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and\n drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think\n of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed\n that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center\n of interest.\n\n\n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n\n\n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions\n more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his\n jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces,\n eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most\n chimingly of all.",
"\"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out\n and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have\n you seen Bess? Oh—there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n\n\n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly\n talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway,\n alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even\n larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward\n their table.\n\n\n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled\n woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you\nreally\nswim across a\n river to come here?\"\n\n\n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all\n directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with\n us. Let me help choose your tray.\"",
"June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the\n intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n\n\n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What\n should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n\n\n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n\n\n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own\n description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles,\n like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly\n humorous blue eyes.\n\n\n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and\n me?\"",
"\"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on\n board.\"\n\n\n \"More needles?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n\n\n \"Rough?\"\n\n\n \"It isn't easy.\"\n\n\n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit\n decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in\n glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and\n compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.",
"Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist\n and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting\n wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n\n\n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n\n\n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and\n escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be\n claiming the hero of the hour.\nPat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost\n voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He\n ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked\n around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said\n nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n\n\n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we\n will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and\n cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"",
"Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching\n awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on\n the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\nTheir job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to\n the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing\n now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting\n sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n\n\n The polished silver and black column of the\nExplorer\nseemed to rise\n higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry\n blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the\n trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n\n\n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.",
"\"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"",
"\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to\n the music, and tried to locate its source.\n\n\n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n\n\n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a\n day.\n\n\n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through,\n and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave\n of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about\n crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm\n animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth\n seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.",
"\"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all.\n Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia.\n Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some\n temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n\n\n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her\n field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with\n laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall,\n then abruptly lightened.\n\n\n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous\n Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man.\n It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon\n and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous\n vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero\n out of the pages of a book—Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.",
"Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n \"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think\n that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit\n so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I\n suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside\n down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air\n is breathable.\"\n\n\n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n\n\n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the\n wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take\n off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins.\n Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.",
"\"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid\n samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the\n arm.\"\n\n\n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed\n and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine\n nerve surgeon on Earth.\n\n\n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship\n and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly,\n it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from\n their earphones:\n\n\n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He\n banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could\n see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.",
"\"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people\n still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe\n you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be\n no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n\n\n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and\n hypodermics.\n\n\n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n\n\n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead,\n and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the\n tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a\n stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being\n smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.",
"Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control;\n the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he\n entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a\n hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three\n were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but\n recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive\n and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the\n attack.\n\n\n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again.\n They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to\n dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose\n of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was\n hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.",
"\"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon,\n June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still\n love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and\n touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely\n visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a\n greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\nThey walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship\nExplorer\ntowered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of\n the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and\n clouds, and they longed to be outside.",
"He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only\n one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city\n planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with\n the Bartons quickly. \"That is—you are people, aren't you?\" he asked\n startlingly.\n\n\n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n\n\n \"Well, you are all so—so—\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the\n faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n\n\n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n\n\n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these—interesting\n different hair colors and face shapes and so forth—\" He made a vague\n wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to\n insult them.\n\n\n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.",
"Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays,\n but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one\n side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n\n\n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people\n had no doctors.\"\n\n\n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of\n the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality\n and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle\n of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the\n face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided\n that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did\n it all right.'\"\n\n\n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.",
"Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all\n the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion,\n and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship\n were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone\n and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace\n them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife\n and bow.\n\n\n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Any other diseases?\"\n\n\n \"Not a one.\"",
"All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of\n allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\nJune stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped\n off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a\n wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n\n\n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n\n\n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he\n asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally\n get something to eat?\"\n\n\n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully,\n using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n\n\n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled\n chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go\n jump in the lake?\""
],
[
"The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the\n hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle\n with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before\n returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on\n the hour or run the risk of disease.\nReno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a\n mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their\n mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\"\n They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over\n to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.",
"Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control;\n the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he\n entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a\n hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three\n were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but\n recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive\n and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the\n attack.\n\n\n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again.\n They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to\n dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose\n of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was\n hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.",
"\"Are you hungry?\"\n\n\n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n\n\n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and\n hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which\n made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n\n\n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing\n hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of\n Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of\n antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system\n would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human\n blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n\n\n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive,\n so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human\n cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n\n\n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.",
"Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and\n around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall\n by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered\n to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given\n solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic\n blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being\n directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized\n and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n\n\n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme\n dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were\n dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.",
"\"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"",
"\"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n\n\n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about\n it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering\n ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his\n neck at the age of eighty.\"\n\n\n \"A character,\" Max said.\n\n\n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers\n didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It\n worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were\n still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n\n\n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank\n culture expert. There's a job for you.\"",
"\"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n\n\n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a\n viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the\n horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther\n away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green\n where there were fields.\n\n\n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been\n there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like\n Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to\n let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that\n patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through\n it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\nReno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and\n began circling lazily.",
"\"Uh-\nuh\n!\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me.\n Human cell control—right up your alley.\"\n\n\n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be\n able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it\n just for the taste.\"\n\n\n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test\n hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry\n the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were\n injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We\n can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they\n object?\"\n\n\n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for\n safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"",
"There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and\n drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think\n of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed\n that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center\n of interest.\n\n\n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n\n\n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions\n more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his\n jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces,\n eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most\n chimingly of all.",
"Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all\n the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion,\n and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship\n were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone\n and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace\n them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife\n and bow.\n\n\n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Any other diseases?\"\n\n\n \"Not a one.\"",
"\"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway\n colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living\n here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n\n\n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with\n excitement.\n\n\n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be\n out in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n \"May I go see him?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets\n out. Tell him we sent you.\"",
"Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist\n and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting\n wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n\n\n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n\n\n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and\n escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be\n claiming the hero of the hour.\nPat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost\n voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He\n ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked\n around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said\n nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n\n\n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we\n will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and\n cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"",
"Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and\n pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew\n away over the odd-colored forest.\n\n\n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got\n through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max\n dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles\n without exposing them to air.\n\n\n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still\n carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't\n show on you, but still carry enough germs—if that's what caused it—to\n wipe out a planet.\"\n\n\n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able\n to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n\n\n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.",
"A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had\n been fired.\n\n\n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her\n voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the\n forest.\n\n\n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice\n in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton\n standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked\n like a duck.\"\n\n\n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into\n sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the\n bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said\n soberly.",
"\"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on\n board.\"\n\n\n \"More needles?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n\n\n \"Rough?\"\n\n\n \"It isn't easy.\"\n\n\n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit\n decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in\n glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and\n compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.",
"In the\nExplorer\n, stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers,\n was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes\n so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused\n chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing\n could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to\n the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n\n\n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had\n been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human\n treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and\n interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding\n against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.",
"\"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a\n fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half\n of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces,\n the sound of unfamiliar voices.\nThey climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich\n subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria\n was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship\n had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had\n the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound\n absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each\n table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n\n\n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June\n could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of\n conversation.",
"\"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid\n samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the\n arm.\"\n\n\n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed\n and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine\n nerve surgeon on Earth.\n\n\n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship\n and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly,\n it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from\n their earphones:\n\n\n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He\n banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could\n see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.",
"\"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people\n still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe\n you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be\n no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n\n\n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and\n hypodermics.\n\n\n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n\n\n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead,\n and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the\n tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a\n stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being\n smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.",
"But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death,\n for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be\n like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to\n be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies\n had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships\n which had touched on some plague planet.\n\n\n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight\n spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n\n\n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the\n alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the\n copper and purple shadows.\n\n\n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker\n browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her\n someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole\n in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved."
],
[
"\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to\n the music, and tried to locate its source.\n\n\n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n\n\n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a\n day.\n\n\n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through,\n and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave\n of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about\n crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm\n animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth\n seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.",
"\"Are you hungry?\"\n\n\n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n\n\n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and\n hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which\n made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n\n\n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing\n hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of\n Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of\n antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system\n would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human\n blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n\n\n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive,\n so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human\n cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n\n\n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.",
"Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist\n and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting\n wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n\n\n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n\n\n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and\n escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be\n claiming the hero of the hour.\nPat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost\n voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He\n ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked\n around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said\n nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n\n\n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we\n will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and\n cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"",
"\"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out\n and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have\n you seen Bess? Oh—there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n\n\n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly\n talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway,\n alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even\n larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward\n their table.\n\n\n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled\n woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you\nreally\nswim across a\n river to come here?\"\n\n\n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all\n directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with\n us. Let me help choose your tray.\"",
"Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control;\n the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he\n entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a\n hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three\n were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but\n recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive\n and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the\n attack.\n\n\n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again.\n They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to\n dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose\n of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was\n hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.",
"June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a\n man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment\n more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening\n to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked\n almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had\n forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly\n aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's\n end of the table.\n\n\n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting\n another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he\n added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.",
"\"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"",
"There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and\n drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think\n of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed\n that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center\n of interest.\n\n\n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n\n\n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions\n more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his\n jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces,\n eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most\n chimingly of all.",
"Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and\n around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall\n by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered\n to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given\n solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic\n blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being\n directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized\n and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n\n\n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme\n dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were\n dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.",
"Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n \"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n\n\n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You\n hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of\n those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n\"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n\n\n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different\n amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the\n carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until\n you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then\n you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"",
"Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays,\n but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one\n side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n\n\n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people\n had no doctors.\"\n\n\n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of\n the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality\n and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle\n of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the\n face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided\n that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did\n it all right.'\"\n\n\n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.",
"Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all\n the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion,\n and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship\n were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone\n and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace\n them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife\n and bow.\n\n\n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Any other diseases?\"\n\n\n \"Not a one.\"",
"\"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on\n board.\"\n\n\n \"More needles?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n\n\n \"Rough?\"\n\n\n \"It isn't easy.\"\n\n\n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit\n decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in\n glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and\n compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.",
"\"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid\n samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the\n arm.\"\n\n\n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed\n and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine\n nerve surgeon on Earth.\n\n\n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship\n and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly,\n it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from\n their earphones:\n\n\n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He\n banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could\n see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.",
"\"Uh-\nuh\n!\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me.\n Human cell control—right up your alley.\"\n\n\n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be\n able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it\n just for the taste.\"\n\n\n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test\n hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry\n the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were\n injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We\n can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they\n object?\"\n\n\n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for\n safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"",
"Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching\n awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on\n the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\nTheir job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to\n the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing\n now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting\n sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n\n\n The polished silver and black column of the\nExplorer\nseemed to rise\n higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry\n blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the\n trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n\n\n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.",
"\"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a\n fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half\n of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces,\n the sound of unfamiliar voices.\nThey climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich\n subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria\n was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship\n had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had\n the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound\n absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each\n table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n\n\n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June\n could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of\n conversation.",
"\"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time\n beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board\n and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it\n brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years.\n Plenty good enough.\"\n\n\n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that\n he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never\n experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n\"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n\n\n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet\n of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.",
"\"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people\n still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe\n you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be\n no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n\n\n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and\n hypodermics.\n\n\n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n\n\n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead,\n and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the\n tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a\n stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being\n smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.",
"\"—new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in.\n He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n\n\n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three\n heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in\n the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose\n tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four\n different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n\n\n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a\n table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are\n saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages,\n for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n\n\n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the\n shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\""
]
] |
test
|
31612
|
[
"Why were the aliens not able to make telepathic connection with important Earthlings? ",
"Why were the people Riuku was initially able to contact not of use to him? ",
"Why did Alice skip her shield boosting on Thursday night? ",
"Why did Pete prefer Alice to Susan? ",
"Why was Riuku able to integrate with Alice’s thoughts? ",
"Why was Riuku initially not able to gain any information from Alice?",
"Why was Riuku unable to physically control Alice despite being telepathically linked? ",
"Why was Alice able to get away with going to shield charging on the wrong night? ",
"How was Susan able to determine what was happening between Pete and Alice ",
"Why was Riuku trapped in Alice’s mind when Nagor left?"
] |
[
[
"The earthlings did not have enough telepathic ability ",
"The earthlings were using a technology that blocked their thoughts ",
"The aliens could not get close enough in distance to the earthlings ",
"The earthlings never left a secure location "
],
[
"They did not work at the factory",
"They were too mentally shielded",
"They were trained to clear their minds when contacted ",
"They were only concerned with social issues between one another "
],
[
"So that she could see Pete",
"To avoid seeing Susan ",
"So that she could see Susan at shield boosting on Friday",
"Because her shield was still 70% of the way full "
],
[
"Alice was willing to skip the shield boosting ",
"Alice was more intelligent ",
"Alive was more physically attractive ",
"Alice took more risks "
],
[
"Alice was preoccupied by thinking about Pete",
"Riuku and the alien ship reached a close enough physical distance ",
"Alice fell asleep and let her guard down ",
"Alice had skipped shield boosting the previous day "
],
[
"She did not know any important information",
"She underwent shield boosting and her shield was too strong ",
"She was aware of Riuku’s presence ",
"She was preoccupied with interpersonal matters "
],
[
"Humans lacked the telepathic capacity to be fully controlled ",
"He would reveal his presence to the Earthmen by doing so ",
"Her mind shield was at too strong of a level ",
"He was in the orbit of Mars and too physically far away from Earth "
],
[
"Paula helped her distract the guards responsible for keeping track of everyone ",
"She swapped a different color tag onto her ID badge",
"Riuku helped guide her thoughts so that she could fool the guards ",
"Her shield was still almost fully charged "
],
[
"By following them ",
"By hiring private investigators ",
"By bugging Pete’s copter",
"All of the other answers are correct "
],
[
"Riuku was too fully integrated to break free",
"Nagor was punishing Riuku for failing his mission",
"Riuku no longer wanted to leave Earth",
"Nagor could no longer hear Riuku and thought he was lost "
]
] |
[
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1
] |
[
1,
0,
0,
1,
0,
1,
1,
1,
0,
0
] |
[
[
"\"Easily. It's the right one. The parking lot attendant knows there's a\n new weapon being produced in there. The waitress at the Jumbo Burger\n Grill across the street knows it. Everybody I reached knows it. But\n not one knows anything about what it is.\"\n\n\n Nagor looked out through the ports of the spaceship, which didn't in\n the least resemble an Earth spaceship, any more than what Nagor\n considered sight resembled the corresponding Earth sense perception.\n He frowned.\n\n\n \"What about the research scientists? We know who some of them are. The\n supervisors? The technicians?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Riuku said flatly. \"They're shielded. Perfectly I can't make\n contact with a single mind down there that has the faintest inkling of\n what's going on. We never should have let them develop the shield.\"\n\n\n \"Have you tried contacting everyone? What about the workers?\"",
"Riuku listened to her half of the conversation. Stupid Earthman. If\n only she'd start thinking about the job. Or if only his contact with\n her were better. If he could use her sense perceptions, see through\n her eyes, hear through her ears, feel through her fingers, then\n everything would be easy. But he couldn't. All he could do was read\n her thoughts. Earth thoughts at that....\n... The time clock. Where's my card? Oh, here it is. Only 3:57. Why\n did I have to hurry so? I had lots of time....\n\"Why, Mary, how nice you look today. That's a new hairdo, isn't it? A\n permanent? Yeah, what kind?\"\n... What a microbe! Looks like pink",
"Transcriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction November 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nTHE VERY SECRET AGENT\nBY MARI WOLF\nIllustrated by Ed Emsh\nPoor Riuku!... Not being a member of the human race, how\n was he supposed to understand what goes on in a woman's mind\n when the male of the same species didn't even know?\nIn their ship just beyond the orbit of Mars the two aliens sat looking\n at each other.\n\n\n \"No,\" Riuku said. \"I haven't had any luck. And I can tell you right\n now that I'm not going to have any, and no one else is going to have\n any either. The Earthmen are too well shielded.\"\n\n\n \"You contacted the factory?\" Nagor asked.",
"But she was asleep at last. Riuku was free enough of her thoughts to\n break contact, partially of course, since if he broke it completely he\n wouldn't be able to get back through the Shielding. It was hard enough\n to reach out through it. He sent a painful probing feeler out into\n space, to the spot where Nagor and the others waited for his report.\n\n\n \"Nagor....\"\n\n\n \"Riuku? Is that you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I've got a contact. A girl. But I haven't learned anything yet\n that can help us.\"\n\n\n \"Louder, Riuku. I can hardly hear you....\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stirred in her sleep. The dream images slipped through\n her subconscious, almost waking her, beating against Riuku.\n\n\n Pete, baby, you shouldn't be like that....",
"The plant. The Restricted Area. The useless secret of Earth's now\n unneeded weapon. Alice Hendricks glancing past it, at the spot welding\n machine, at Tommy.\n\n\n \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"You really interested in finding out, Alice?\"\n\n\n \"Well—maybe—\"\n\n\n And Riuku gibbered unheard in her mind.",
"Riuku cursed the bisexual species in their own language.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\" Nagor's call was harsh, urgent. \"You've got to find out. We\n haven't much time. We lost three more ships today, and there wasn't a\n sign of danger. No Earthman nearby, no force fields, nothing. You've\n got to find out why.\" Those ships just disappeared.\n\n\n Riuku forced his way up through the erotic dreams of Alice Hendricks.\n \"I know a little,\" he said. \"They damp their thought waves somehow,\n and keep us from spotting the Corcoran field.\"\n\n\n \"Corcoran field? What's that?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\" Alice's thoughts washed over him, pulling him back\n into complete integration, away from Nagor, into a medley of heroic\n Petes with gleaming eyes and clutching hands and good little Alices\n pushing them away—for the moment.",
"\"Pete....\" But he wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. And when Susan took his\n arm, he followed her.\n\n\n \"How could you do it, Petey....\" Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over\n and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku.\n\n\n Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren't for your ridiculous\n reproductive habits I'd have found out everything. As it is....\n \"Nagor, I'm coming! I didn't get anything. This woman—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on then. We're leaving. Right now. There'll be other\n systems.\"\nPetey, Petey, Petey....\nContact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward\n the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her\n and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free,\n break free....",
"\"Have you found out anything, Riuku?\"\n\n\n \"Not yet.\"\n\n\n Silence. Then: \"We've lost another ship. Maybe you'd better turn her\n loose and come on back. It looks as if we'll have to run for it, after\n all.\"\n\n\n Defeat. The long, interstellar search for another race, a race less\n technologically advanced than this one, and all because of a stupid\n Earth female.\n\n\n \"Not yet, Nagor,\" he said. \"Her boy friend knows. I'll find out. I'll\n make her listen to him.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Nagor said doubtfully. \"All right. But hurry. We haven't much\n time at all.\"\n\n\n \"I'll hurry,\" Riuku promised. \"I'll be back with you tonight.\"",
"Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"",
"He struggled back. He was confused, and there was blankness around\n him, and for a moment he thought he'd lost contact altogether. Then he\n came into focus again. Alice's thoughts were clearer than ever\n suddenly. He could feel her emotions; they were a part of him now. He\n smiled. The Shielding boost had helped him. Integration—much more\n complete integration than he had ever known before.\n\n\n \"But Pete, honey,\" Alice said. \"What did you come over to the gate\n for? You shouldn't of done it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I wanted to see you.\"\n\n\n \"What if one of Susan's pals sees us?\"",
"\"Can cost Earth a ship. I know. Quit spouting poster talk at me, Pete\n Ganley. The enemy isn't even human. And there aren't any around here.\"\n\n\n Pete looked over at her. She was pouting, the upper lip drawn under\n the lower. Someone must have told her that was cute. Well, so what—it\n was cute.\n\n\n \"What makes you think I know anything more than you do?\" he said.\n\n\n \"Well, gee.\" She looked up at him, so near to her in the moonlight\n that she wondered why she wanted to talk about the plant anyway.\n \"You're in Final Assembly, aren't you? You check the whatsits before\n they go out.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" he said. No harm in telling her. No spies now, not in this\n kind of war. Besides, she was too dumb to know anything.",
"\"But surely you can find out through the girl,\" Nagor insisted from\n far away, almost out of phase altogether.\n\n\n \"No, Pete!\" Alice Hendricks said aloud.\n\n\n \"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.\n You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Alice Hendricks thought, \"maybe....\"",
"Her round, smooth face looked up at him, wide-eyed and full-lipped.\n She had no worry wrinkles like Susan's, no mouth pulled down at the\n corners like Susan's, and under that shapeless coverall....\n\n\n \"Sure, baby, I'm glad you did it,\" Pete Ganley said huskily.\n\n\n Riuku was glad too, the next afternoon when the swing shift started\n pouring through the gates.\n\n\n It was easy, once he'd found her. He had tested hundreds, all\n shielded, some almost accessible to him, but none vulnerable enough.\n Then this one came. The shield was so far down that contact was almost\n easy. Painful, tiring, but not really difficult. He could feel her\n momentary sense of alarm, of nausea, and then he was through,\n integrated with her, his thoughts at home with her thoughts.\n\n\n He rested, inside her mind.",
"\"What's the matter, Riuku? Why don't you come? Have the police caught\n you?\"\n\n\n The others were fleeing, getting farther away even as he listened to\n Nagor's call. Contact was hard to maintain now; he could feel\n communication fading.\n\n\n \"Riuku, if you don't come now....\"\n\n\n He fought, but Alice's thoughts were still with him; Alice's tears\n still kept bringing him back into full awareness of her.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\"\n\n\n \"I—I can't!\"\n\n\n The Shielding boost, that had integrated him so completely with Alice\n Hendricks, would never let him go.\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey, I've lost you....\"\n\n\n And Nagor's sad farewell slipped completely out of phase, leaving him\n alone, with her.",
"Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She\n stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and\n sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her\n and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face,\n with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little\n scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth....\n\n\n \"Oh, oh,\" Alice said suddenly. \"I've got solder on the outside of the\n pin.\" She looked around for the alcohol.\n\n\n Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to\n translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs\n she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires,\n of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing.\n They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment.",
"The machines were—machines. That big funny one where Ned works, and\n Tommy's spot welder, and over in the corner where the superintendent\n is—he's a snappy dresser, tie and everything.\n\n\n The corner. Restricted area. Can't go over. High voltage or\n something....\n\n\n Her thoughts slid away from the restricted area. Should she go out for\n lunch or eat off the sandwich machine? And Riuku curled inside her\n mind and cursed her with his rapidly growing Earthwoman's vocabulary.",
"The line. Alice's nervousness....\nOh, oh, there's that guy with the\n meter—the one from maintenance. What's he want?\n\"Whaddya mean, my shield's low? How could it be?\"\n... If he checks\n the tag I'll be fired for sure. It's a lot of nonsense anyway. The\n enemy is everywhere, they keep telling us. Whoever saw one of them?\n\"No, honest, I didn't notice anything. Can I help it if.... It's okay,\n huh? It'll pass....\"\n\n\n Down to fifteen per cent, the guy said. Well, that's safe, I guess.\n Whew.\n\n\n \"Oh, hello, Paula. Whatcha talking about, what am I doing here\n tonight? Shut up....\"\n\n\n And then, in the midst of her thoughts, the pain, driving deep into\n Riuku, twisting at him, wrenching at him, until there was no\n consciousness of anything at all.",
"\"No. What?\"\n\n\n \"That's the control panel for one of the weapons, silly. It's only a\n duplicate, actually—a monitor station. But it's tuned to the\n frequencies of all the ships in this sector and—\"\n\n\n She listened. She wanted to listen. She had to want to listen, now.\n\n\n \"Nagor, I'm getting it,\" Riuku called. \"I'll bring it all back with\n me. Just a minute and I'll have it.\"\n\n\n \"How does it work, honey?\" Alice Hendricks said.\n\n\n \"You really want to know? Okay. Now the Corcoran field is generated\n between the ships and areas like that one, only a lot more powerful,\n by—\"\n\n\n \"It's coming through now, Nagor.\"",
"\"—a very simple power source, once you get the basics of it. You—oh,\n oh!\" He grabbed her arm. \"Duck, Alice!\"\n\n\n A spotlight flashed out of the darkness, turned on them, outlined\n them. A siren whirred briefly, and then another copter pulled up\n beside them and a loudspeaker blared tinnily.\n\n\n \"Okay, bud, pull down to the landing lane.\"\n\n\n The police.\n\n\n Police. Fear, all the way through Alice's thoughts, all the way\n through Riuku. Police. Earth law. That meant—it must mean he'd been\n discovered, that they had some other means of protection besides the\n Shielding....\n\n\n \"Nagor! I've been discovered!\"\n\n\n \"Come away then, you fool!\"",
"Only they weren't. They were making a weapon, and this bit of\n electronic equipment was part of that weapon. What part? What did the\n 731 plug do?\n\n\n Alice Hendricks didn't know. Alice Hendricks didn't care.\n\n\n The first break. Ten minutes away from work. Alice was walking back\n along the aisle that separated Assembly from the men's Machine Shop. A\n chance, perhaps. She was looking at the machines, or rather past them,\n at the men.\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy. How's the love life?\" He's not bad at all. Real cute.\n Though not like Pete, oh no.\n\n\n The machines. Riuku prodded at her thoughts, wishing he could\n influence them, wishing that just for a moment he could see, hear,\n feel,\nthink\nas she would never think."
],
[
"\"But surely you can find out through the girl,\" Nagor insisted from\n far away, almost out of phase altogether.\n\n\n \"No, Pete!\" Alice Hendricks said aloud.\n\n\n \"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.\n You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Alice Hendricks thought, \"maybe....\"",
"But she was asleep at last. Riuku was free enough of her thoughts to\n break contact, partially of course, since if he broke it completely he\n wouldn't be able to get back through the Shielding. It was hard enough\n to reach out through it. He sent a painful probing feeler out into\n space, to the spot where Nagor and the others waited for his report.\n\n\n \"Nagor....\"\n\n\n \"Riuku? Is that you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I've got a contact. A girl. But I haven't learned anything yet\n that can help us.\"\n\n\n \"Louder, Riuku. I can hardly hear you....\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stirred in her sleep. The dream images slipped through\n her subconscious, almost waking her, beating against Riuku.\n\n\n Pete, baby, you shouldn't be like that....",
"\"What's the matter, Riuku? Why don't you come? Have the police caught\n you?\"\n\n\n The others were fleeing, getting farther away even as he listened to\n Nagor's call. Contact was hard to maintain now; he could feel\n communication fading.\n\n\n \"Riuku, if you don't come now....\"\n\n\n He fought, but Alice's thoughts were still with him; Alice's tears\n still kept bringing him back into full awareness of her.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\"\n\n\n \"I—I can't!\"\n\n\n The Shielding boost, that had integrated him so completely with Alice\n Hendricks, would never let him go.\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey, I've lost you....\"\n\n\n And Nagor's sad farewell slipped completely out of phase, leaving him\n alone, with her.",
"...\nPete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder\n what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway?\nRiuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she\n understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about\n the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day\n shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the\n 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found\n out what the other girls thought about it.\n\n\n Nothing.\n\n\n Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering?\n\n\n She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a\n short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new\n girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to\n call Nagor again.",
"\"Liar.\" He locked the automatic pilot on the copter and held out his\n arms. \"Come here, you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey....\"\n\n\n Who cared about the weapon? He was right, even if she wouldn't admit\n it. She hadn't even listened, hardly. She hadn't understood.\n\n\n And neither had Riuku.\nRiuku waited until she'd fallen soundly asleep that night before he\n tried contacting Nagor. He'd learned nothing useful. He'd picked up\n nothing in her mind except more thoughts of Pete, and gee, maybe\n someday they'd get married, if he only had guts enough to tell Susan\n where to get off....",
"Riuku listened to her half of the conversation. Stupid Earthman. If\n only she'd start thinking about the job. Or if only his contact with\n her were better. If he could use her sense perceptions, see through\n her eyes, hear through her ears, feel through her fingers, then\n everything would be easy. But he couldn't. All he could do was read\n her thoughts. Earth thoughts at that....\n... The time clock. Where's my card? Oh, here it is. Only 3:57. Why\n did I have to hurry so? I had lots of time....\n\"Why, Mary, how nice you look today. That's a new hairdo, isn't it? A\n permanent? Yeah, what kind?\"\n... What a microbe! Looks like pink",
"\"Easily. It's the right one. The parking lot attendant knows there's a\n new weapon being produced in there. The waitress at the Jumbo Burger\n Grill across the street knows it. Everybody I reached knows it. But\n not one knows anything about what it is.\"\n\n\n Nagor looked out through the ports of the spaceship, which didn't in\n the least resemble an Earth spaceship, any more than what Nagor\n considered sight resembled the corresponding Earth sense perception.\n He frowned.\n\n\n \"What about the research scientists? We know who some of them are. The\n supervisors? The technicians?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Riuku said flatly. \"They're shielded. Perfectly I can't make\n contact with a single mind down there that has the faintest inkling of\n what's going on. We never should have let them develop the shield.\"\n\n\n \"Have you tried contacting everyone? What about the workers?\"",
"\"Riuku!\"\n\n\n Riuku prodded. Calm down, you fool. You're not gaining anything this\n way. Calm down, so I can get out of here....\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stopped yelling abruptly.\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Susan said. \"Pete, your taste in women gets worse\n each time. I don't know why I always take you back.\"\n\n\n \"I can explain everything.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete,\" Alice Hendricks whispered. \"Petey, you're not—\"\n\n\n \"Sure he is,\" Susan Ganley said. \"He's coming with me. The nice\n detectives will take you home, dear. But I don't think you'd better\n try anything with them—they're not your type. They're single.\"",
"She was walking down the aisle to her station now. A procession of\n names:\nMaisie, and Edith, and that fat slob Natalie, and if Jean\n Andrews comes around tonight flashing that diamond in my face again,\n I'll—I'll kill her....\n\"Oh hello, Clinton. What do you mean, late? The whistle just blew. Of\n course I'm ready to go to work.\"\nLiverlips, that's what you are. And\n still in that same blue shirt. What a wife you must have. Probably as\n sloppy as you are....\nGood, Riuku thought. Now she'll be working. Now he'd find out whatever\n it was she was doing. Not that it would be important, of course, but\n let him learn what her job was, and what those other girls' jobs were,\n and in a little while he'd have all the data he needed. Maybe even\n before the shift ended tonight, before she went through the Shielding\n boost.",
"The line. Alice's nervousness....\nOh, oh, there's that guy with the\n meter—the one from maintenance. What's he want?\n\"Whaddya mean, my shield's low? How could it be?\"\n... If he checks\n the tag I'll be fired for sure. It's a lot of nonsense anyway. The\n enemy is everywhere, they keep telling us. Whoever saw one of them?\n\"No, honest, I didn't notice anything. Can I help it if.... It's okay,\n huh? It'll pass....\"\n\n\n Down to fifteen per cent, the guy said. Well, that's safe, I guess.\n Whew.\n\n\n \"Oh, hello, Paula. Whatcha talking about, what am I doing here\n tonight? Shut up....\"\n\n\n And then, in the midst of her thoughts, the pain, driving deep into\n Riuku, twisting at him, wrenching at him, until there was no\n consciousness of anything at all.",
"Her round, smooth face looked up at him, wide-eyed and full-lipped.\n She had no worry wrinkles like Susan's, no mouth pulled down at the\n corners like Susan's, and under that shapeless coverall....\n\n\n \"Sure, baby, I'm glad you did it,\" Pete Ganley said huskily.\n\n\n Riuku was glad too, the next afternoon when the swing shift started\n pouring through the gates.\n\n\n It was easy, once he'd found her. He had tested hundreds, all\n shielded, some almost accessible to him, but none vulnerable enough.\n Then this one came. The shield was so far down that contact was almost\n easy. Painful, tiring, but not really difficult. He could feel her\n momentary sense of alarm, of nausea, and then he was through,\n integrated with her, his thoughts at home with her thoughts.\n\n\n He rested, inside her mind.",
"The plant. The Restricted Area. The useless secret of Earth's now\n unneeded weapon. Alice Hendricks glancing past it, at the spot welding\n machine, at Tommy.\n\n\n \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"You really interested in finding out, Alice?\"\n\n\n \"Well—maybe—\"\n\n\n And Riuku gibbered unheard in her mind.",
"Riuku cursed the bisexual species in their own language.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\" Nagor's call was harsh, urgent. \"You've got to find out. We\n haven't much time. We lost three more ships today, and there wasn't a\n sign of danger. No Earthman nearby, no force fields, nothing. You've\n got to find out why.\" Those ships just disappeared.\n\n\n Riuku forced his way up through the erotic dreams of Alice Hendricks.\n \"I know a little,\" he said. \"They damp their thought waves somehow,\n and keep us from spotting the Corcoran field.\"\n\n\n \"Corcoran field? What's that?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\" Alice's thoughts washed over him, pulling him back\n into complete integration, away from Nagor, into a medley of heroic\n Petes with gleaming eyes and clutching hands and good little Alices\n pushing them away—for the moment.",
"\"Pete....\" But he wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. And when Susan took his\n arm, he followed her.\n\n\n \"How could you do it, Petey....\" Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over\n and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku.\n\n\n Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren't for your ridiculous\n reproductive habits I'd have found out everything. As it is....\n \"Nagor, I'm coming! I didn't get anything. This woman—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on then. We're leaving. Right now. There'll be other\n systems.\"\nPetey, Petey, Petey....\nContact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward\n the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her\n and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free,\n break free....",
"Transcriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction November 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nTHE VERY SECRET AGENT\nBY MARI WOLF\nIllustrated by Ed Emsh\nPoor Riuku!... Not being a member of the human race, how\n was he supposed to understand what goes on in a woman's mind\n when the male of the same species didn't even know?\nIn their ship just beyond the orbit of Mars the two aliens sat looking\n at each other.\n\n\n \"No,\" Riuku said. \"I haven't had any luck. And I can tell you right\n now that I'm not going to have any, and no one else is going to have\n any either. The Earthmen are too well shielded.\"\n\n\n \"You contacted the factory?\" Nagor asked.",
"\"Have you found out anything, Riuku?\"\n\n\n \"Not yet.\"\n\n\n Silence. Then: \"We've lost another ship. Maybe you'd better turn her\n loose and come on back. It looks as if we'll have to run for it, after\n all.\"\n\n\n Defeat. The long, interstellar search for another race, a race less\n technologically advanced than this one, and all because of a stupid\n Earth female.\n\n\n \"Not yet, Nagor,\" he said. \"Her boy friend knows. I'll find out. I'll\n make her listen to him.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Nagor said doubtfully. \"All right. But hurry. We haven't much\n time at all.\"\n\n\n \"I'll hurry,\" Riuku promised. \"I'll be back with you tonight.\"",
"\"Oh, Alice, you're as bad as—look, baby, don't you see? It would be\n awful for you. All the publicity, the things she'd call you, maybe\n even in the papers....\"\n\n\n He was staring straight ahead, his hands locked about the controls. He\n was sort of—well, distant. Not her Petey any more. Someone else's\n Pete. Susan's Pete....\n\n\n \"I think we should be more careful,\" he said.\n\n\n Riuku twisted his way through her thoughts, tried to push them\n down....\nDoes he love me, he's got to love me, sure he does, he just\n doesn't want me to get hurt....\nAnd far away, almost completely out of phase, Nagor's call. \"Riuku,\n another ship's gone. You'd better come back. Bring what you've learned\n so far and we can withdraw from the system and maybe piece it\n together....\"",
"She poured two drinks, neat, and he swallowed his with one impatient\n gulp. She poured him another.\nRiuku prodded. The drink made his job easier. Alice's thoughts calmed,\n swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn't I\n pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe.\n Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The\n Restricted Area....\n\n\n \"Pete.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, baby?\"\n\n\n \"How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can't\n even go over in the Restricted Area?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever made you think of that?\" He laughed suddenly. He turned to\n her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his\n face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. \"Voltage loose ...\n oh, baby, baby. Don't you know what that is?\"",
"Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"",
"The machines were—machines. That big funny one where Ned works, and\n Tommy's spot welder, and over in the corner where the superintendent\n is—he's a snappy dresser, tie and everything.\n\n\n The corner. Restricted area. Can't go over. High voltage or\n something....\n\n\n Her thoughts slid away from the restricted area. Should she go out for\n lunch or eat off the sandwich machine? And Riuku curled inside her\n mind and cursed her with his rapidly growing Earthwoman's vocabulary."
],
[
"Why, he asked himself irritably, couldn't those scientists figure out\n some way to keep the shields up longer than a week? Or else why didn't\n they have boosting night the same for all departments? He had to stay\n late every Friday and Alice every Thursday, and all the time there was\n Susan at home ready to jump him if he wasn't in at a reasonable\n time....\n\n\n \"Surprised, Pete?\" Alice Hendricks said at his elbow.\n\n\n He swung about, grinned at her. \"Am I? You said it. And here I was\n about to go. I never thought you'd make it before one.\" His grin faded\n a little. \"How'd you do it? Sweet-talk one of the guards into letting\n you in at the head of the line?\"",
"\"Shielded. All ten thousand of them. Of course I haven't checked all\n of them yet, but—\"\n\n\n \"Do it,\" Nagor said grimly. \"We've got to find out what that weapon\n is. Or else get out of this solar system.\"\n\n\n Riuku sighed. \"I'll try,\" he said.\nSomeone put another dollar in the juke box, and the theremins started\n in on Mare Indrium Mary for the tenth time since Pete Ganley had come\n into the bar. \"Aw shut up,\" he said, wishing there was some way to\n turn them off. Twelve-ten. Alice got off work at Houston's at twelve.\n She ought to be here by now. She would be, if it weren't Thursday.\n Shield boosting night for her.",
"Alice followed his gaze. She giggled. \"It was easy,\" she said. \"The\n guards don't do more than glance at us, you know. And everyone who's\n supposed to go through Shielding on Thursday has the department number\n stamped on a yellow background. So all I did was make a red\n background, like yours, and slip it on in the restroom at Clean-up\n time.\"\n\n\n \"But Alice....\" Pete Ganley swallowed his beer and signaled for\n another. \"This is serious. You've got to keep the shields up. The\n enemy is everywhere. Why, right now, one could be probing you.\"\n\n\n \"So what? The dial isn't down to Danger yet. And tomorrow I'll just\n put the red tag back on over the yellow one and go through Shielding\n in the same line with you. They won't notice.\" She giggled again. \"I\n thought it was smart, Petey. You oughta think so too. You know why I\n did it, don't you?\"",
"At the end of the shift he had learned nothing. Nothing about the\n weapon, that is. He had found out a good deal about the sex life of\n Genus Homo—information that made him even more glad than before that\n his was a one-sexed race.\nWith work over and tools put away and Alice in the restroom gleefully\n thinking about the red Friday night tag she was slipping onto her ID\n badge, he was as far from success as ever. For a moment he considered\n leaving her, looking for another subject. But he'd probably not be\n able to find one. No, the only thing to do was stay with her, curl\n deep in her mind and go through the Shielding boost, and later on....",
"He shivered a little, thinking of the boost. He'd survive it, of\n course. He'd be too well integrated with her by then. But it was\n nothing to look forward to.\n\n\n Still, he needn't worry about it. He had the whole shift to find out\n what the weapon was. The whole shift, here inside Alice's mind, inside\n the most closely guarded factory on or under or above the surface of\n the Earth. He settled down and waited, expectantly.\n\n\n Alice Hendricks turned her back on the lead man and looked down the\n work table to her place. The other girls were there already. Lois and\n Marge and Coralie, the other three members of the Plug table, Line 73.\n\n\n \"Hey, how'd you make out?\" Marge said. She glanced around to make sure\n none of the lead men or timekeepers were close enough to overhear her,\n then went on. \"Did you get away with it?\"",
"The line. Alice's nervousness....\nOh, oh, there's that guy with the\n meter—the one from maintenance. What's he want?\n\"Whaddya mean, my shield's low? How could it be?\"\n... If he checks\n the tag I'll be fired for sure. It's a lot of nonsense anyway. The\n enemy is everywhere, they keep telling us. Whoever saw one of them?\n\"No, honest, I didn't notice anything. Can I help it if.... It's okay,\n huh? It'll pass....\"\n\n\n Down to fifteen per cent, the guy said. Well, that's safe, I guess.\n Whew.\n\n\n \"Oh, hello, Paula. Whatcha talking about, what am I doing here\n tonight? Shut up....\"\n\n\n And then, in the midst of her thoughts, the pain, driving deep into\n Riuku, twisting at him, wrenching at him, until there was no\n consciousness of anything at all.",
"She shook her bandanaed head, slid onto the stool beside him and\n crossed her knees—a not very convincing sign of femininity in a woman\n wearing baggy denim coveralls. \"Aren't you going to buy me a drink,\n honey?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, sure.\" He glanced over at the bartender. \"Another beer. No, make\n it two.\" He pulled the five dollars out of his pocket, shoved it\n across the bar, and looked back at Alice, more closely this time. The\n ID badge, pinned to her hip. The badge, with her name, number,\n department, and picture—and the little meter that measured the\n strength of her Mind Shield.\n\n\n The dial should have pointed to full charge. It didn't. It registered\n about seventy per cent loss.",
"He struggled back. He was confused, and there was blankness around\n him, and for a moment he thought he'd lost contact altogether. Then he\n came into focus again. Alice's thoughts were clearer than ever\n suddenly. He could feel her emotions; they were a part of him now. He\n smiled. The Shielding boost had helped him. Integration—much more\n complete integration than he had ever known before.\n\n\n \"But Pete, honey,\" Alice said. \"What did you come over to the gate\n for? You shouldn't of done it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I wanted to see you.\"\n\n\n \"What if one of Susan's pals sees us?\"",
"\"—a very simple power source, once you get the basics of it. You—oh,\n oh!\" He grabbed her arm. \"Duck, Alice!\"\n\n\n A spotlight flashed out of the darkness, turned on them, outlined\n them. A siren whirred briefly, and then another copter pulled up\n beside them and a loudspeaker blared tinnily.\n\n\n \"Okay, bud, pull down to the landing lane.\"\n\n\n The police.\n\n\n Police. Fear, all the way through Alice's thoughts, all the way\n through Riuku. Police. Earth law. That meant—it must mean he'd been\n discovered, that they had some other means of protection besides the\n Shielding....\n\n\n \"Nagor! I've been discovered!\"\n\n\n \"Come away then, you fool!\"",
"\"What's the matter, Riuku? Why don't you come? Have the police caught\n you?\"\n\n\n The others were fleeing, getting farther away even as he listened to\n Nagor's call. Contact was hard to maintain now; he could feel\n communication fading.\n\n\n \"Riuku, if you don't come now....\"\n\n\n He fought, but Alice's thoughts were still with him; Alice's tears\n still kept bringing him back into full awareness of her.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\"\n\n\n \"I—I can't!\"\n\n\n The Shielding boost, that had integrated him so completely with Alice\n Hendricks, would never let him go.\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey, I've lost you....\"\n\n\n And Nagor's sad farewell slipped completely out of phase, leaving him\n alone, with her.",
"Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"",
"But she was asleep at last. Riuku was free enough of her thoughts to\n break contact, partially of course, since if he broke it completely he\n wouldn't be able to get back through the Shielding. It was hard enough\n to reach out through it. He sent a painful probing feeler out into\n space, to the spot where Nagor and the others waited for his report.\n\n\n \"Nagor....\"\n\n\n \"Riuku? Is that you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I've got a contact. A girl. But I haven't learned anything yet\n that can help us.\"\n\n\n \"Louder, Riuku. I can hardly hear you....\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stirred in her sleep. The dream images slipped through\n her subconscious, almost waking her, beating against Riuku.\n\n\n Pete, baby, you shouldn't be like that....",
"Alice Hendricks listened. For some reason she wanted to listen. She\n was really curious about the field. But, gee, how did he expect her to\n understand all that stuff? He sounded like her algebra teacher, or was\n it chemistry? Lord, how she'd hated school. Maybe she shouldn't have\n quit.\n... Corcoran fields. E and IR and nine-space something or other.\n She'd never seen Pete like this before. He looked real different. Sort\n of like a professor, or something. He must be real smart. And\n so—well, not good-looking especially but, well, appealing. Real SA,\n he had....\n\"So that's how it works,\" Pete Ganley said. \"Quite a weapon, against\n them. It wouldn't work on a human being, of course.\" She was staring\n at him dreamy-eyed. He laughed. \"Silly, I bet you haven't understood a\n word I said.\"\n\n\n \"I have too.\"",
"\"But surely you can find out through the girl,\" Nagor insisted from\n far away, almost out of phase altogether.\n\n\n \"No, Pete!\" Alice Hendricks said aloud.\n\n\n \"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.\n You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Alice Hendricks thought, \"maybe....\"",
"The plant. The Restricted Area. The useless secret of Earth's now\n unneeded weapon. Alice Hendricks glancing past it, at the spot welding\n machine, at Tommy.\n\n\n \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"You really interested in finding out, Alice?\"\n\n\n \"Well—maybe—\"\n\n\n And Riuku gibbered unheard in her mind.",
"\"No. What?\"\n\n\n \"That's the control panel for one of the weapons, silly. It's only a\n duplicate, actually—a monitor station. But it's tuned to the\n frequencies of all the ships in this sector and—\"\n\n\n She listened. She wanted to listen. She had to want to listen, now.\n\n\n \"Nagor, I'm getting it,\" Riuku called. \"I'll bring it all back with\n me. Just a minute and I'll have it.\"\n\n\n \"How does it work, honey?\" Alice Hendricks said.\n\n\n \"You really want to know? Okay. Now the Corcoran field is generated\n between the ships and areas like that one, only a lot more powerful,\n by—\"\n\n\n \"It's coming through now, Nagor.\"",
"Only they weren't. They were making a weapon, and this bit of\n electronic equipment was part of that weapon. What part? What did the\n 731 plug do?\n\n\n Alice Hendricks didn't know. Alice Hendricks didn't care.\n\n\n The first break. Ten minutes away from work. Alice was walking back\n along the aisle that separated Assembly from the men's Machine Shop. A\n chance, perhaps. She was looking at the machines, or rather past them,\n at the men.\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy. How's the love life?\" He's not bad at all. Real cute.\n Though not like Pete, oh no.\n\n\n The machines. Riuku prodded at her thoughts, wishing he could\n influence them, wishing that just for a moment he could see, hear,\n feel,\nthink\nas she would never think.",
"She looked past him, toward the corner where the big panels were with\n all the dials and the meters and the chart that was almost like the\n kind they drew pictures of earthquakes on. What was it for, anyway?\n And why couldn't anyone go over to it except those longhairs? High\n voltage her foot....\n\n\n \"What're you looking at, Alice?\" Tommy said.\n\n\n \"Oh, that.\" She pointed. \"Wonder what it's for? It doesn't look like\n much of anything, really.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't know. I've got something better to look at.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nyou\n!\"\n\n\n Compared to Pete, he didn't have anything, not anything at all.",
"Alice shrugged....\nWhat a mealy-mouthed little snip Lois could be,\n sometimes. You'd think to hear her that she was better than any of\n them, and luckier too, with her Joe and the kids. What a laugh! Joe\n was probably the only guy who'd ever looked at her, and she'd hooked\n him right out of school, and now with three kids in five years and her\n working nights....\nAlice finished soldering the first row of wires in the plug and\n started in on the second. So old Liverlips thought she wasted time,\n did he? Well, she'd show him. She'd get out her sixteen plugs tonight.\n\n\n \"Junior kept me up all night last night,\" Lois said. \"He's cutting a\n tooth.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Coralie said, \"It's pretty rough at that age. I remember right\n after Mike was born....\"",
"That night after work Pete Ganley was waiting outside the gate again.\n Alice spotted his copter right away, even though he had the lights\n turned way down.\n\n\n \"Gee, Pete, I didn't think....\"\n\n\n \"Get in. Quick.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter?\" She climbed in beside him. He didn't answer until\n the copter had lifted itself into the air, away from the factory\n landing lots and the bright overhead lights and the home-bound\n workers.\n\n\n \"It's Susan, who else,\" he said grimly. \"She was really sounding off\n today. She kept saying she had a lot of evidence and I'd better be\n careful. And, well, I sure didn't want you turning up at the bar\n tonight of all nights.\"\n\n\n He didn't sound like Pete.\n\n\n \"Why?\" Alice said. \"Are you afraid she'll divorce you?\""
],
[
"\"In a little while. Just a little while.\" Stop thinking about Susan,\n you biological schizo. Change the subject. You'll never get anything\n out of that man by having hysterics....\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" Alice cried bitterly, \"you've been leading me on all the\n time. You don't love me. You'd rather have\nher\n!\"\n\n\n \"That's not so. Hell, baby....\"\nHe's angry. He's not even going to kiss me. I'm just cutting my own\n throat when I act like that....\n\"Okay, Pete. I'm sorry. I know it's tough on you. Let's have a drink,\n okay? Still got some in the glove compartment?\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Oh, sure.\"",
"He twisted, trying to pull free of Alice's fear, away from the\n integration of their separate terrors. But he couldn't push her\n thoughts back from his. She was too frightened. He was too frightened.\n The bond held.\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete, Pete, what did you do?\"\n\n\n He didn't answer. He landed the copter, stepped out of it, walked back\n to the other copter that was just dropping down behind him. \"But\n officer, what's the matter?\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks huddled down in the seat, already seeing tomorrow's\n papers, and her picture, and she wasn't really photogenic, either....\n And then, from the other copter, she heard the woman laugh.\n\n\n \"Pete Ganley, you fall for anything, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Susan!\"",
"Alice Hendricks listened. For some reason she wanted to listen. She\n was really curious about the field. But, gee, how did he expect her to\n understand all that stuff? He sounded like her algebra teacher, or was\n it chemistry? Lord, how she'd hated school. Maybe she shouldn't have\n quit.\n... Corcoran fields. E and IR and nine-space something or other.\n She'd never seen Pete like this before. He looked real different. Sort\n of like a professor, or something. He must be real smart. And\n so—well, not good-looking especially but, well, appealing. Real SA,\n he had....\n\"So that's how it works,\" Pete Ganley said. \"Quite a weapon, against\n them. It wouldn't work on a human being, of course.\" She was staring\n at him dreamy-eyed. He laughed. \"Silly, I bet you haven't understood a\n word I said.\"\n\n\n \"I have too.\"",
"That night after work Pete Ganley was waiting outside the gate again.\n Alice spotted his copter right away, even though he had the lights\n turned way down.\n\n\n \"Gee, Pete, I didn't think....\"\n\n\n \"Get in. Quick.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter?\" She climbed in beside him. He didn't answer until\n the copter had lifted itself into the air, away from the factory\n landing lots and the bright overhead lights and the home-bound\n workers.\n\n\n \"It's Susan, who else,\" he said grimly. \"She was really sounding off\n today. She kept saying she had a lot of evidence and I'd better be\n careful. And, well, I sure didn't want you turning up at the bar\n tonight of all nights.\"\n\n\n He didn't sound like Pete.\n\n\n \"Why?\" Alice said. \"Are you afraid she'll divorce you?\"",
"\"Sure,\" Alice said. \"And you should of seen Pete's face when I walked\n in.\"\n\n\n She took the soldering iron out of her locker, plugged it in, and\n reached out for the pan of 731 wires. \"You know, it's funny. Pete's\n not so good looking, and he's sort of a careless dresser and all that,\n but oh, what he does to me.\" She filled the 731 plug with solder and\n reached for the white, black, red wire.\n\n\n \"You'd better watch out,\" Lois said. \"Or Susan's going to be doing\n something to you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, her.\" Alice touched the tip of the iron to the solder filled pin,\n worked the wire down into position. \"What can she do? Pete doesn't\n give a damn about her.\"\n\n\n \"He's still living with her, isn't he?\" Lois said.",
"\"You didn't expect me to follow you, did you? Didn't it ever occur to\n you that detectives could put a bug in your copter? My, what we've\n been hearing!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" the detective who was driving said. \"And those pictures we\n took last night weren't bad either.\"\n\n\n \"Susan, I can explain everything....\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you can, Pete. You always try. But as for you—you little—\"\n\n\n Alice ducked down away from her. Pictures. Oh God, what it would make\n her look like. Still, this hag with the pinched up face who couldn't\n hold a man with all the cosmetics in the drugstore to camouflage\n her—she had her nerve, yelling like that.\n\n\n \"Yeah, and I know a lot about you too!\" Alice Hendricks cried.\n\n\n \"Why, let me get my hands on you....\"",
"He struggled back. He was confused, and there was blankness around\n him, and for a moment he thought he'd lost contact altogether. Then he\n came into focus again. Alice's thoughts were clearer than ever\n suddenly. He could feel her emotions; they were a part of him now. He\n smiled. The Shielding boost had helped him. Integration—much more\n complete integration than he had ever known before.\n\n\n \"But Pete, honey,\" Alice said. \"What did you come over to the gate\n for? You shouldn't of done it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I wanted to see you.\"\n\n\n \"What if one of Susan's pals sees us?\"",
"She poured two drinks, neat, and he swallowed his with one impatient\n gulp. She poured him another.\nRiuku prodded. The drink made his job easier. Alice's thoughts calmed,\n swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn't I\n pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe.\n Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The\n Restricted Area....\n\n\n \"Pete.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, baby?\"\n\n\n \"How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can't\n even go over in the Restricted Area?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever made you think of that?\" He laughed suddenly. He turned to\n her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his\n face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. \"Voltage loose ...\n oh, baby, baby. Don't you know what that is?\"",
"Why, he asked himself irritably, couldn't those scientists figure out\n some way to keep the shields up longer than a week? Or else why didn't\n they have boosting night the same for all departments? He had to stay\n late every Friday and Alice every Thursday, and all the time there was\n Susan at home ready to jump him if he wasn't in at a reasonable\n time....\n\n\n \"Surprised, Pete?\" Alice Hendricks said at his elbow.\n\n\n He swung about, grinned at her. \"Am I? You said it. And here I was\n about to go. I never thought you'd make it before one.\" His grin faded\n a little. \"How'd you do it? Sweet-talk one of the guards into letting\n you in at the head of the line?\"",
"\"Oh, Alice, you're as bad as—look, baby, don't you see? It would be\n awful for you. All the publicity, the things she'd call you, maybe\n even in the papers....\"\n\n\n He was staring straight ahead, his hands locked about the controls. He\n was sort of—well, distant. Not her Petey any more. Someone else's\n Pete. Susan's Pete....\n\n\n \"I think we should be more careful,\" he said.\n\n\n Riuku twisted his way through her thoughts, tried to push them\n down....\nDoes he love me, he's got to love me, sure he does, he just\n doesn't want me to get hurt....\nAnd far away, almost completely out of phase, Nagor's call. \"Riuku,\n another ship's gone. You'd better come back. Bring what you've learned\n so far and we can withdraw from the system and maybe piece it\n together....\"",
"\"Riuku!\"\n\n\n Riuku prodded. Calm down, you fool. You're not gaining anything this\n way. Calm down, so I can get out of here....\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stopped yelling abruptly.\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Susan said. \"Pete, your taste in women gets worse\n each time. I don't know why I always take you back.\"\n\n\n \"I can explain everything.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete,\" Alice Hendricks whispered. \"Petey, you're not—\"\n\n\n \"Sure he is,\" Susan Ganley said. \"He's coming with me. The nice\n detectives will take you home, dear. But I don't think you'd better\n try anything with them—they're not your type. They're single.\"",
"She looked past him, toward the corner where the big panels were with\n all the dials and the meters and the chart that was almost like the\n kind they drew pictures of earthquakes on. What was it for, anyway?\n And why couldn't anyone go over to it except those longhairs? High\n voltage her foot....\n\n\n \"What're you looking at, Alice?\" Tommy said.\n\n\n \"Oh, that.\" She pointed. \"Wonder what it's for? It doesn't look like\n much of anything, really.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't know. I've got something better to look at.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nyou\n!\"\n\n\n Compared to Pete, he didn't have anything, not anything at all.",
"\"Pete....\" But he wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. And when Susan took his\n arm, he followed her.\n\n\n \"How could you do it, Petey....\" Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over\n and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku.\n\n\n Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren't for your ridiculous\n reproductive habits I'd have found out everything. As it is....\n \"Nagor, I'm coming! I didn't get anything. This woman—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on then. We're leaving. Right now. There'll be other\n systems.\"\nPetey, Petey, Petey....\nContact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward\n the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her\n and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free,\n break free....",
"\"So what? I'm getting tired of checking in every night, like a baby.\n Besides, one of her pals did see us, last night, at the bar.\"\nFear. What'll she do? Susan's a hellcat. I know she is. But maybe\n Pete'll get really sick and tired of her. He looks it. He looks mad.\n I'd sure hate to have him mad at me....\n\"Let's go for a spin, baby. Out in the suburbs somewhere. How about\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Well—why sure, Pete....\"",
"Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"",
"...\nPete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder\n what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway?\nRiuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she\n understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about\n the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day\n shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the\n 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found\n out what the other girls thought about it.\n\n\n Nothing.\n\n\n Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering?\n\n\n She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a\n short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new\n girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to\n call Nagor again.",
"\"Liar.\" He locked the automatic pilot on the copter and held out his\n arms. \"Come here, you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey....\"\n\n\n Who cared about the weapon? He was right, even if she wouldn't admit\n it. She hadn't even listened, hardly. She hadn't understood.\n\n\n And neither had Riuku.\nRiuku waited until she'd fallen soundly asleep that night before he\n tried contacting Nagor. He'd learned nothing useful. He'd picked up\n nothing in her mind except more thoughts of Pete, and gee, maybe\n someday they'd get married, if he only had guts enough to tell Susan\n where to get off....",
"Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She\n stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and\n sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her\n and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face,\n with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little\n scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth....\n\n\n \"Oh, oh,\" Alice said suddenly. \"I've got solder on the outside of the\n pin.\" She looked around for the alcohol.\n\n\n Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to\n translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs\n she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires,\n of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing.\n They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment.",
"\"But surely you can find out through the girl,\" Nagor insisted from\n far away, almost out of phase altogether.\n\n\n \"No, Pete!\" Alice Hendricks said aloud.\n\n\n \"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.\n You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Alice Hendricks thought, \"maybe....\"",
"Alice shrugged....\nWhat a mealy-mouthed little snip Lois could be,\n sometimes. You'd think to hear her that she was better than any of\n them, and luckier too, with her Joe and the kids. What a laugh! Joe\n was probably the only guy who'd ever looked at her, and she'd hooked\n him right out of school, and now with three kids in five years and her\n working nights....\nAlice finished soldering the first row of wires in the plug and\n started in on the second. So old Liverlips thought she wasted time,\n did he? Well, she'd show him. She'd get out her sixteen plugs tonight.\n\n\n \"Junior kept me up all night last night,\" Lois said. \"He's cutting a\n tooth.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Coralie said, \"It's pretty rough at that age. I remember right\n after Mike was born....\""
],
[
"\"What's the matter, Riuku? Why don't you come? Have the police caught\n you?\"\n\n\n The others were fleeing, getting farther away even as he listened to\n Nagor's call. Contact was hard to maintain now; he could feel\n communication fading.\n\n\n \"Riuku, if you don't come now....\"\n\n\n He fought, but Alice's thoughts were still with him; Alice's tears\n still kept bringing him back into full awareness of her.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\"\n\n\n \"I—I can't!\"\n\n\n The Shielding boost, that had integrated him so completely with Alice\n Hendricks, would never let him go.\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey, I've lost you....\"\n\n\n And Nagor's sad farewell slipped completely out of phase, leaving him\n alone, with her.",
"\"But surely you can find out through the girl,\" Nagor insisted from\n far away, almost out of phase altogether.\n\n\n \"No, Pete!\" Alice Hendricks said aloud.\n\n\n \"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.\n You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Alice Hendricks thought, \"maybe....\"",
"He struggled back. He was confused, and there was blankness around\n him, and for a moment he thought he'd lost contact altogether. Then he\n came into focus again. Alice's thoughts were clearer than ever\n suddenly. He could feel her emotions; they were a part of him now. He\n smiled. The Shielding boost had helped him. Integration—much more\n complete integration than he had ever known before.\n\n\n \"But Pete, honey,\" Alice said. \"What did you come over to the gate\n for? You shouldn't of done it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I wanted to see you.\"\n\n\n \"What if one of Susan's pals sees us?\"",
"Her round, smooth face looked up at him, wide-eyed and full-lipped.\n She had no worry wrinkles like Susan's, no mouth pulled down at the\n corners like Susan's, and under that shapeless coverall....\n\n\n \"Sure, baby, I'm glad you did it,\" Pete Ganley said huskily.\n\n\n Riuku was glad too, the next afternoon when the swing shift started\n pouring through the gates.\n\n\n It was easy, once he'd found her. He had tested hundreds, all\n shielded, some almost accessible to him, but none vulnerable enough.\n Then this one came. The shield was so far down that contact was almost\n easy. Painful, tiring, but not really difficult. He could feel her\n momentary sense of alarm, of nausea, and then he was through,\n integrated with her, his thoughts at home with her thoughts.\n\n\n He rested, inside her mind.",
"But she was asleep at last. Riuku was free enough of her thoughts to\n break contact, partially of course, since if he broke it completely he\n wouldn't be able to get back through the Shielding. It was hard enough\n to reach out through it. He sent a painful probing feeler out into\n space, to the spot where Nagor and the others waited for his report.\n\n\n \"Nagor....\"\n\n\n \"Riuku? Is that you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I've got a contact. A girl. But I haven't learned anything yet\n that can help us.\"\n\n\n \"Louder, Riuku. I can hardly hear you....\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stirred in her sleep. The dream images slipped through\n her subconscious, almost waking her, beating against Riuku.\n\n\n Pete, baby, you shouldn't be like that....",
"The plant. The Restricted Area. The useless secret of Earth's now\n unneeded weapon. Alice Hendricks glancing past it, at the spot welding\n machine, at Tommy.\n\n\n \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"You really interested in finding out, Alice?\"\n\n\n \"Well—maybe—\"\n\n\n And Riuku gibbered unheard in her mind.",
"\"Riuku!\"\n\n\n Riuku prodded. Calm down, you fool. You're not gaining anything this\n way. Calm down, so I can get out of here....\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stopped yelling abruptly.\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Susan said. \"Pete, your taste in women gets worse\n each time. I don't know why I always take you back.\"\n\n\n \"I can explain everything.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete,\" Alice Hendricks whispered. \"Petey, you're not—\"\n\n\n \"Sure he is,\" Susan Ganley said. \"He's coming with me. The nice\n detectives will take you home, dear. But I don't think you'd better\n try anything with them—they're not your type. They're single.\"",
"Riuku cursed the bisexual species in their own language.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\" Nagor's call was harsh, urgent. \"You've got to find out. We\n haven't much time. We lost three more ships today, and there wasn't a\n sign of danger. No Earthman nearby, no force fields, nothing. You've\n got to find out why.\" Those ships just disappeared.\n\n\n Riuku forced his way up through the erotic dreams of Alice Hendricks.\n \"I know a little,\" he said. \"They damp their thought waves somehow,\n and keep us from spotting the Corcoran field.\"\n\n\n \"Corcoran field? What's that?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\" Alice's thoughts washed over him, pulling him back\n into complete integration, away from Nagor, into a medley of heroic\n Petes with gleaming eyes and clutching hands and good little Alices\n pushing them away—for the moment.",
"Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"",
"Only they weren't. They were making a weapon, and this bit of\n electronic equipment was part of that weapon. What part? What did the\n 731 plug do?\n\n\n Alice Hendricks didn't know. Alice Hendricks didn't care.\n\n\n The first break. Ten minutes away from work. Alice was walking back\n along the aisle that separated Assembly from the men's Machine Shop. A\n chance, perhaps. She was looking at the machines, or rather past them,\n at the men.\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy. How's the love life?\" He's not bad at all. Real cute.\n Though not like Pete, oh no.\n\n\n The machines. Riuku prodded at her thoughts, wishing he could\n influence them, wishing that just for a moment he could see, hear,\n feel,\nthink\nas she would never think.",
"The line. Alice's nervousness....\nOh, oh, there's that guy with the\n meter—the one from maintenance. What's he want?\n\"Whaddya mean, my shield's low? How could it be?\"\n... If he checks\n the tag I'll be fired for sure. It's a lot of nonsense anyway. The\n enemy is everywhere, they keep telling us. Whoever saw one of them?\n\"No, honest, I didn't notice anything. Can I help it if.... It's okay,\n huh? It'll pass....\"\n\n\n Down to fifteen per cent, the guy said. Well, that's safe, I guess.\n Whew.\n\n\n \"Oh, hello, Paula. Whatcha talking about, what am I doing here\n tonight? Shut up....\"\n\n\n And then, in the midst of her thoughts, the pain, driving deep into\n Riuku, twisting at him, wrenching at him, until there was no\n consciousness of anything at all.",
"Riuku listened to her half of the conversation. Stupid Earthman. If\n only she'd start thinking about the job. Or if only his contact with\n her were better. If he could use her sense perceptions, see through\n her eyes, hear through her ears, feel through her fingers, then\n everything would be easy. But he couldn't. All he could do was read\n her thoughts. Earth thoughts at that....\n... The time clock. Where's my card? Oh, here it is. Only 3:57. Why\n did I have to hurry so? I had lots of time....\n\"Why, Mary, how nice you look today. That's a new hairdo, isn't it? A\n permanent? Yeah, what kind?\"\n... What a microbe! Looks like pink",
"Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She\n stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and\n sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her\n and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face,\n with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little\n scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth....\n\n\n \"Oh, oh,\" Alice said suddenly. \"I've got solder on the outside of the\n pin.\" She looked around for the alcohol.\n\n\n Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to\n translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs\n she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires,\n of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing.\n They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment.",
"\"Liar.\" He locked the automatic pilot on the copter and held out his\n arms. \"Come here, you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey....\"\n\n\n Who cared about the weapon? He was right, even if she wouldn't admit\n it. She hadn't even listened, hardly. She hadn't understood.\n\n\n And neither had Riuku.\nRiuku waited until she'd fallen soundly asleep that night before he\n tried contacting Nagor. He'd learned nothing useful. He'd picked up\n nothing in her mind except more thoughts of Pete, and gee, maybe\n someday they'd get married, if he only had guts enough to tell Susan\n where to get off....",
"She poured two drinks, neat, and he swallowed his with one impatient\n gulp. She poured him another.\nRiuku prodded. The drink made his job easier. Alice's thoughts calmed,\n swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn't I\n pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe.\n Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The\n Restricted Area....\n\n\n \"Pete.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, baby?\"\n\n\n \"How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can't\n even go over in the Restricted Area?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever made you think of that?\" He laughed suddenly. He turned to\n her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his\n face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. \"Voltage loose ...\n oh, baby, baby. Don't you know what that is?\"",
"He twisted, trying to pull free of Alice's fear, away from the\n integration of their separate terrors. But he couldn't push her\n thoughts back from his. She was too frightened. He was too frightened.\n The bond held.\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete, Pete, what did you do?\"\n\n\n He didn't answer. He landed the copter, stepped out of it, walked back\n to the other copter that was just dropping down behind him. \"But\n officer, what's the matter?\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks huddled down in the seat, already seeing tomorrow's\n papers, and her picture, and she wasn't really photogenic, either....\n And then, from the other copter, she heard the woman laugh.\n\n\n \"Pete Ganley, you fall for anything, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Susan!\"",
"He shivered a little, thinking of the boost. He'd survive it, of\n course. He'd be too well integrated with her by then. But it was\n nothing to look forward to.\n\n\n Still, he needn't worry about it. He had the whole shift to find out\n what the weapon was. The whole shift, here inside Alice's mind, inside\n the most closely guarded factory on or under or above the surface of\n the Earth. He settled down and waited, expectantly.\n\n\n Alice Hendricks turned her back on the lead man and looked down the\n work table to her place. The other girls were there already. Lois and\n Marge and Coralie, the other three members of the Plug table, Line 73.\n\n\n \"Hey, how'd you make out?\" Marge said. She glanced around to make sure\n none of the lead men or timekeepers were close enough to overhear her,\n then went on. \"Did you get away with it?\"",
"...\nPete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder\n what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway?\nRiuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she\n understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about\n the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day\n shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the\n 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found\n out what the other girls thought about it.\n\n\n Nothing.\n\n\n Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering?\n\n\n She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a\n short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new\n girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to\n call Nagor again.",
"\"—a very simple power source, once you get the basics of it. You—oh,\n oh!\" He grabbed her arm. \"Duck, Alice!\"\n\n\n A spotlight flashed out of the darkness, turned on them, outlined\n them. A siren whirred briefly, and then another copter pulled up\n beside them and a loudspeaker blared tinnily.\n\n\n \"Okay, bud, pull down to the landing lane.\"\n\n\n The police.\n\n\n Police. Fear, all the way through Alice's thoughts, all the way\n through Riuku. Police. Earth law. That meant—it must mean he'd been\n discovered, that they had some other means of protection besides the\n Shielding....\n\n\n \"Nagor! I've been discovered!\"\n\n\n \"Come away then, you fool!\"",
"Riuku cursed her again, in the lingua franca of a dozen systems.\n Nagor's voice faded. Riuku switched back to English.\nSaturday. Into the plant at 3:58. Jean's diamond again....\nWish it\n would choke her; she's got a horsey enough face for it to. Where's old\n Liverlips? Don't see him around. Might as well go to the restroom for\n a while....\nThat's it, Riuku thought. Get her over past the machine shop, over by\n that Restricted Area. There must be something there we can go on....\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy,\" Alice Hendricks said. \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"It could be better if someone I know would, uh, cooperate....\""
],
[
"\"But surely you can find out through the girl,\" Nagor insisted from\n far away, almost out of phase altogether.\n\n\n \"No, Pete!\" Alice Hendricks said aloud.\n\n\n \"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.\n You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Alice Hendricks thought, \"maybe....\"",
"\"Riuku!\"\n\n\n Riuku prodded. Calm down, you fool. You're not gaining anything this\n way. Calm down, so I can get out of here....\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stopped yelling abruptly.\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Susan said. \"Pete, your taste in women gets worse\n each time. I don't know why I always take you back.\"\n\n\n \"I can explain everything.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete,\" Alice Hendricks whispered. \"Petey, you're not—\"\n\n\n \"Sure he is,\" Susan Ganley said. \"He's coming with me. The nice\n detectives will take you home, dear. But I don't think you'd better\n try anything with them—they're not your type. They're single.\"",
"But she was asleep at last. Riuku was free enough of her thoughts to\n break contact, partially of course, since if he broke it completely he\n wouldn't be able to get back through the Shielding. It was hard enough\n to reach out through it. He sent a painful probing feeler out into\n space, to the spot where Nagor and the others waited for his report.\n\n\n \"Nagor....\"\n\n\n \"Riuku? Is that you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I've got a contact. A girl. But I haven't learned anything yet\n that can help us.\"\n\n\n \"Louder, Riuku. I can hardly hear you....\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stirred in her sleep. The dream images slipped through\n her subconscious, almost waking her, beating against Riuku.\n\n\n Pete, baby, you shouldn't be like that....",
"\"What's the matter, Riuku? Why don't you come? Have the police caught\n you?\"\n\n\n The others were fleeing, getting farther away even as he listened to\n Nagor's call. Contact was hard to maintain now; he could feel\n communication fading.\n\n\n \"Riuku, if you don't come now....\"\n\n\n He fought, but Alice's thoughts were still with him; Alice's tears\n still kept bringing him back into full awareness of her.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\"\n\n\n \"I—I can't!\"\n\n\n The Shielding boost, that had integrated him so completely with Alice\n Hendricks, would never let him go.\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey, I've lost you....\"\n\n\n And Nagor's sad farewell slipped completely out of phase, leaving him\n alone, with her.",
"The plant. The Restricted Area. The useless secret of Earth's now\n unneeded weapon. Alice Hendricks glancing past it, at the spot welding\n machine, at Tommy.\n\n\n \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"You really interested in finding out, Alice?\"\n\n\n \"Well—maybe—\"\n\n\n And Riuku gibbered unheard in her mind.",
"Only they weren't. They were making a weapon, and this bit of\n electronic equipment was part of that weapon. What part? What did the\n 731 plug do?\n\n\n Alice Hendricks didn't know. Alice Hendricks didn't care.\n\n\n The first break. Ten minutes away from work. Alice was walking back\n along the aisle that separated Assembly from the men's Machine Shop. A\n chance, perhaps. She was looking at the machines, or rather past them,\n at the men.\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy. How's the love life?\" He's not bad at all. Real cute.\n Though not like Pete, oh no.\n\n\n The machines. Riuku prodded at her thoughts, wishing he could\n influence them, wishing that just for a moment he could see, hear,\n feel,\nthink\nas she would never think.",
"The line. Alice's nervousness....\nOh, oh, there's that guy with the\n meter—the one from maintenance. What's he want?\n\"Whaddya mean, my shield's low? How could it be?\"\n... If he checks\n the tag I'll be fired for sure. It's a lot of nonsense anyway. The\n enemy is everywhere, they keep telling us. Whoever saw one of them?\n\"No, honest, I didn't notice anything. Can I help it if.... It's okay,\n huh? It'll pass....\"\n\n\n Down to fifteen per cent, the guy said. Well, that's safe, I guess.\n Whew.\n\n\n \"Oh, hello, Paula. Whatcha talking about, what am I doing here\n tonight? Shut up....\"\n\n\n And then, in the midst of her thoughts, the pain, driving deep into\n Riuku, twisting at him, wrenching at him, until there was no\n consciousness of anything at all.",
"...\nPete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder\n what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway?\nRiuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she\n understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about\n the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day\n shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the\n 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found\n out what the other girls thought about it.\n\n\n Nothing.\n\n\n Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering?\n\n\n She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a\n short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new\n girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to\n call Nagor again.",
"\"Liar.\" He locked the automatic pilot on the copter and held out his\n arms. \"Come here, you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey....\"\n\n\n Who cared about the weapon? He was right, even if she wouldn't admit\n it. She hadn't even listened, hardly. She hadn't understood.\n\n\n And neither had Riuku.\nRiuku waited until she'd fallen soundly asleep that night before he\n tried contacting Nagor. He'd learned nothing useful. He'd picked up\n nothing in her mind except more thoughts of Pete, and gee, maybe\n someday they'd get married, if he only had guts enough to tell Susan\n where to get off....",
"Riuku cursed her again, in the lingua franca of a dozen systems.\n Nagor's voice faded. Riuku switched back to English.\nSaturday. Into the plant at 3:58. Jean's diamond again....\nWish it\n would choke her; she's got a horsey enough face for it to. Where's old\n Liverlips? Don't see him around. Might as well go to the restroom for\n a while....\nThat's it, Riuku thought. Get her over past the machine shop, over by\n that Restricted Area. There must be something there we can go on....\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy,\" Alice Hendricks said. \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"It could be better if someone I know would, uh, cooperate....\"",
"Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She\n stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and\n sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her\n and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face,\n with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little\n scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth....\n\n\n \"Oh, oh,\" Alice said suddenly. \"I've got solder on the outside of the\n pin.\" She looked around for the alcohol.\n\n\n Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to\n translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs\n she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires,\n of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing.\n They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment.",
"Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"",
"She poured two drinks, neat, and he swallowed his with one impatient\n gulp. She poured him another.\nRiuku prodded. The drink made his job easier. Alice's thoughts calmed,\n swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn't I\n pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe.\n Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The\n Restricted Area....\n\n\n \"Pete.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, baby?\"\n\n\n \"How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can't\n even go over in the Restricted Area?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever made you think of that?\" He laughed suddenly. He turned to\n her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his\n face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. \"Voltage loose ...\n oh, baby, baby. Don't you know what that is?\"",
"Riuku cursed the bisexual species in their own language.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\" Nagor's call was harsh, urgent. \"You've got to find out. We\n haven't much time. We lost three more ships today, and there wasn't a\n sign of danger. No Earthman nearby, no force fields, nothing. You've\n got to find out why.\" Those ships just disappeared.\n\n\n Riuku forced his way up through the erotic dreams of Alice Hendricks.\n \"I know a little,\" he said. \"They damp their thought waves somehow,\n and keep us from spotting the Corcoran field.\"\n\n\n \"Corcoran field? What's that?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\" Alice's thoughts washed over him, pulling him back\n into complete integration, away from Nagor, into a medley of heroic\n Petes with gleaming eyes and clutching hands and good little Alices\n pushing them away—for the moment.",
"Riuku listened to her half of the conversation. Stupid Earthman. If\n only she'd start thinking about the job. Or if only his contact with\n her were better. If he could use her sense perceptions, see through\n her eyes, hear through her ears, feel through her fingers, then\n everything would be easy. But he couldn't. All he could do was read\n her thoughts. Earth thoughts at that....\n... The time clock. Where's my card? Oh, here it is. Only 3:57. Why\n did I have to hurry so? I had lots of time....\n\"Why, Mary, how nice you look today. That's a new hairdo, isn't it? A\n permanent? Yeah, what kind?\"\n... What a microbe! Looks like pink",
"\"—a very simple power source, once you get the basics of it. You—oh,\n oh!\" He grabbed her arm. \"Duck, Alice!\"\n\n\n A spotlight flashed out of the darkness, turned on them, outlined\n them. A siren whirred briefly, and then another copter pulled up\n beside them and a loudspeaker blared tinnily.\n\n\n \"Okay, bud, pull down to the landing lane.\"\n\n\n The police.\n\n\n Police. Fear, all the way through Alice's thoughts, all the way\n through Riuku. Police. Earth law. That meant—it must mean he'd been\n discovered, that they had some other means of protection besides the\n Shielding....\n\n\n \"Nagor! I've been discovered!\"\n\n\n \"Come away then, you fool!\"",
"Her round, smooth face looked up at him, wide-eyed and full-lipped.\n She had no worry wrinkles like Susan's, no mouth pulled down at the\n corners like Susan's, and under that shapeless coverall....\n\n\n \"Sure, baby, I'm glad you did it,\" Pete Ganley said huskily.\n\n\n Riuku was glad too, the next afternoon when the swing shift started\n pouring through the gates.\n\n\n It was easy, once he'd found her. He had tested hundreds, all\n shielded, some almost accessible to him, but none vulnerable enough.\n Then this one came. The shield was so far down that contact was almost\n easy. Painful, tiring, but not really difficult. He could feel her\n momentary sense of alarm, of nausea, and then he was through,\n integrated with her, his thoughts at home with her thoughts.\n\n\n He rested, inside her mind.",
"\"Oh, Alice, you're as bad as—look, baby, don't you see? It would be\n awful for you. All the publicity, the things she'd call you, maybe\n even in the papers....\"\n\n\n He was staring straight ahead, his hands locked about the controls. He\n was sort of—well, distant. Not her Petey any more. Someone else's\n Pete. Susan's Pete....\n\n\n \"I think we should be more careful,\" he said.\n\n\n Riuku twisted his way through her thoughts, tried to push them\n down....\nDoes he love me, he's got to love me, sure he does, he just\n doesn't want me to get hurt....\nAnd far away, almost completely out of phase, Nagor's call. \"Riuku,\n another ship's gone. You'd better come back. Bring what you've learned\n so far and we can withdraw from the system and maybe piece it\n together....\"",
"She was walking down the aisle to her station now. A procession of\n names:\nMaisie, and Edith, and that fat slob Natalie, and if Jean\n Andrews comes around tonight flashing that diamond in my face again,\n I'll—I'll kill her....\n\"Oh hello, Clinton. What do you mean, late? The whistle just blew. Of\n course I'm ready to go to work.\"\nLiverlips, that's what you are. And\n still in that same blue shirt. What a wife you must have. Probably as\n sloppy as you are....\nGood, Riuku thought. Now she'll be working. Now he'd find out whatever\n it was she was doing. Not that it would be important, of course, but\n let him learn what her job was, and what those other girls' jobs were,\n and in a little while he'd have all the data he needed. Maybe even\n before the shift ended tonight, before she went through the Shielding\n boost.",
"\"Pete....\" But he wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. And when Susan took his\n arm, he followed her.\n\n\n \"How could you do it, Petey....\" Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over\n and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku.\n\n\n Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren't for your ridiculous\n reproductive habits I'd have found out everything. As it is....\n \"Nagor, I'm coming! I didn't get anything. This woman—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on then. We're leaving. Right now. There'll be other\n systems.\"\nPetey, Petey, Petey....\nContact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward\n the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her\n and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free,\n break free...."
],
[
"\"What's the matter, Riuku? Why don't you come? Have the police caught\n you?\"\n\n\n The others were fleeing, getting farther away even as he listened to\n Nagor's call. Contact was hard to maintain now; he could feel\n communication fading.\n\n\n \"Riuku, if you don't come now....\"\n\n\n He fought, but Alice's thoughts were still with him; Alice's tears\n still kept bringing him back into full awareness of her.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\"\n\n\n \"I—I can't!\"\n\n\n The Shielding boost, that had integrated him so completely with Alice\n Hendricks, would never let him go.\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey, I've lost you....\"\n\n\n And Nagor's sad farewell slipped completely out of phase, leaving him\n alone, with her.",
"But she was asleep at last. Riuku was free enough of her thoughts to\n break contact, partially of course, since if he broke it completely he\n wouldn't be able to get back through the Shielding. It was hard enough\n to reach out through it. He sent a painful probing feeler out into\n space, to the spot where Nagor and the others waited for his report.\n\n\n \"Nagor....\"\n\n\n \"Riuku? Is that you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I've got a contact. A girl. But I haven't learned anything yet\n that can help us.\"\n\n\n \"Louder, Riuku. I can hardly hear you....\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stirred in her sleep. The dream images slipped through\n her subconscious, almost waking her, beating against Riuku.\n\n\n Pete, baby, you shouldn't be like that....",
"\"But surely you can find out through the girl,\" Nagor insisted from\n far away, almost out of phase altogether.\n\n\n \"No, Pete!\" Alice Hendricks said aloud.\n\n\n \"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.\n You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Alice Hendricks thought, \"maybe....\"",
"The plant. The Restricted Area. The useless secret of Earth's now\n unneeded weapon. Alice Hendricks glancing past it, at the spot welding\n machine, at Tommy.\n\n\n \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"You really interested in finding out, Alice?\"\n\n\n \"Well—maybe—\"\n\n\n And Riuku gibbered unheard in her mind.",
"\"Liar.\" He locked the automatic pilot on the copter and held out his\n arms. \"Come here, you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey....\"\n\n\n Who cared about the weapon? He was right, even if she wouldn't admit\n it. She hadn't even listened, hardly. She hadn't understood.\n\n\n And neither had Riuku.\nRiuku waited until she'd fallen soundly asleep that night before he\n tried contacting Nagor. He'd learned nothing useful. He'd picked up\n nothing in her mind except more thoughts of Pete, and gee, maybe\n someday they'd get married, if he only had guts enough to tell Susan\n where to get off....",
"\"Riuku!\"\n\n\n Riuku prodded. Calm down, you fool. You're not gaining anything this\n way. Calm down, so I can get out of here....\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stopped yelling abruptly.\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Susan said. \"Pete, your taste in women gets worse\n each time. I don't know why I always take you back.\"\n\n\n \"I can explain everything.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete,\" Alice Hendricks whispered. \"Petey, you're not—\"\n\n\n \"Sure he is,\" Susan Ganley said. \"He's coming with me. The nice\n detectives will take you home, dear. But I don't think you'd better\n try anything with them—they're not your type. They're single.\"",
"Her round, smooth face looked up at him, wide-eyed and full-lipped.\n She had no worry wrinkles like Susan's, no mouth pulled down at the\n corners like Susan's, and under that shapeless coverall....\n\n\n \"Sure, baby, I'm glad you did it,\" Pete Ganley said huskily.\n\n\n Riuku was glad too, the next afternoon when the swing shift started\n pouring through the gates.\n\n\n It was easy, once he'd found her. He had tested hundreds, all\n shielded, some almost accessible to him, but none vulnerable enough.\n Then this one came. The shield was so far down that contact was almost\n easy. Painful, tiring, but not really difficult. He could feel her\n momentary sense of alarm, of nausea, and then he was through,\n integrated with her, his thoughts at home with her thoughts.\n\n\n He rested, inside her mind.",
"Only they weren't. They were making a weapon, and this bit of\n electronic equipment was part of that weapon. What part? What did the\n 731 plug do?\n\n\n Alice Hendricks didn't know. Alice Hendricks didn't care.\n\n\n The first break. Ten minutes away from work. Alice was walking back\n along the aisle that separated Assembly from the men's Machine Shop. A\n chance, perhaps. She was looking at the machines, or rather past them,\n at the men.\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy. How's the love life?\" He's not bad at all. Real cute.\n Though not like Pete, oh no.\n\n\n The machines. Riuku prodded at her thoughts, wishing he could\n influence them, wishing that just for a moment he could see, hear,\n feel,\nthink\nas she would never think.",
"Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"",
"He struggled back. He was confused, and there was blankness around\n him, and for a moment he thought he'd lost contact altogether. Then he\n came into focus again. Alice's thoughts were clearer than ever\n suddenly. He could feel her emotions; they were a part of him now. He\n smiled. The Shielding boost had helped him. Integration—much more\n complete integration than he had ever known before.\n\n\n \"But Pete, honey,\" Alice said. \"What did you come over to the gate\n for? You shouldn't of done it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I wanted to see you.\"\n\n\n \"What if one of Susan's pals sees us?\"",
"Riuku listened to her half of the conversation. Stupid Earthman. If\n only she'd start thinking about the job. Or if only his contact with\n her were better. If he could use her sense perceptions, see through\n her eyes, hear through her ears, feel through her fingers, then\n everything would be easy. But he couldn't. All he could do was read\n her thoughts. Earth thoughts at that....\n... The time clock. Where's my card? Oh, here it is. Only 3:57. Why\n did I have to hurry so? I had lots of time....\n\"Why, Mary, how nice you look today. That's a new hairdo, isn't it? A\n permanent? Yeah, what kind?\"\n... What a microbe! Looks like pink",
"\"—a very simple power source, once you get the basics of it. You—oh,\n oh!\" He grabbed her arm. \"Duck, Alice!\"\n\n\n A spotlight flashed out of the darkness, turned on them, outlined\n them. A siren whirred briefly, and then another copter pulled up\n beside them and a loudspeaker blared tinnily.\n\n\n \"Okay, bud, pull down to the landing lane.\"\n\n\n The police.\n\n\n Police. Fear, all the way through Alice's thoughts, all the way\n through Riuku. Police. Earth law. That meant—it must mean he'd been\n discovered, that they had some other means of protection besides the\n Shielding....\n\n\n \"Nagor! I've been discovered!\"\n\n\n \"Come away then, you fool!\"",
"The line. Alice's nervousness....\nOh, oh, there's that guy with the\n meter—the one from maintenance. What's he want?\n\"Whaddya mean, my shield's low? How could it be?\"\n... If he checks\n the tag I'll be fired for sure. It's a lot of nonsense anyway. The\n enemy is everywhere, they keep telling us. Whoever saw one of them?\n\"No, honest, I didn't notice anything. Can I help it if.... It's okay,\n huh? It'll pass....\"\n\n\n Down to fifteen per cent, the guy said. Well, that's safe, I guess.\n Whew.\n\n\n \"Oh, hello, Paula. Whatcha talking about, what am I doing here\n tonight? Shut up....\"\n\n\n And then, in the midst of her thoughts, the pain, driving deep into\n Riuku, twisting at him, wrenching at him, until there was no\n consciousness of anything at all.",
"Riuku cursed the bisexual species in their own language.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\" Nagor's call was harsh, urgent. \"You've got to find out. We\n haven't much time. We lost three more ships today, and there wasn't a\n sign of danger. No Earthman nearby, no force fields, nothing. You've\n got to find out why.\" Those ships just disappeared.\n\n\n Riuku forced his way up through the erotic dreams of Alice Hendricks.\n \"I know a little,\" he said. \"They damp their thought waves somehow,\n and keep us from spotting the Corcoran field.\"\n\n\n \"Corcoran field? What's that?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\" Alice's thoughts washed over him, pulling him back\n into complete integration, away from Nagor, into a medley of heroic\n Petes with gleaming eyes and clutching hands and good little Alices\n pushing them away—for the moment.",
"\"Oh, Alice, you're as bad as—look, baby, don't you see? It would be\n awful for you. All the publicity, the things she'd call you, maybe\n even in the papers....\"\n\n\n He was staring straight ahead, his hands locked about the controls. He\n was sort of—well, distant. Not her Petey any more. Someone else's\n Pete. Susan's Pete....\n\n\n \"I think we should be more careful,\" he said.\n\n\n Riuku twisted his way through her thoughts, tried to push them\n down....\nDoes he love me, he's got to love me, sure he does, he just\n doesn't want me to get hurt....\nAnd far away, almost completely out of phase, Nagor's call. \"Riuku,\n another ship's gone. You'd better come back. Bring what you've learned\n so far and we can withdraw from the system and maybe piece it\n together....\"",
"She poured two drinks, neat, and he swallowed his with one impatient\n gulp. She poured him another.\nRiuku prodded. The drink made his job easier. Alice's thoughts calmed,\n swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn't I\n pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe.\n Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The\n Restricted Area....\n\n\n \"Pete.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, baby?\"\n\n\n \"How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can't\n even go over in the Restricted Area?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever made you think of that?\" He laughed suddenly. He turned to\n her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his\n face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. \"Voltage loose ...\n oh, baby, baby. Don't you know what that is?\"",
"\"Pete....\" But he wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. And when Susan took his\n arm, he followed her.\n\n\n \"How could you do it, Petey....\" Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over\n and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku.\n\n\n Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren't for your ridiculous\n reproductive habits I'd have found out everything. As it is....\n \"Nagor, I'm coming! I didn't get anything. This woman—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on then. We're leaving. Right now. There'll be other\n systems.\"\nPetey, Petey, Petey....\nContact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward\n the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her\n and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free,\n break free....",
"Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She\n stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and\n sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her\n and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face,\n with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little\n scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth....\n\n\n \"Oh, oh,\" Alice said suddenly. \"I've got solder on the outside of the\n pin.\" She looked around for the alcohol.\n\n\n Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to\n translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs\n she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires,\n of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing.\n They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment.",
"He twisted, trying to pull free of Alice's fear, away from the\n integration of their separate terrors. But he couldn't push her\n thoughts back from his. She was too frightened. He was too frightened.\n The bond held.\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete, Pete, what did you do?\"\n\n\n He didn't answer. He landed the copter, stepped out of it, walked back\n to the other copter that was just dropping down behind him. \"But\n officer, what's the matter?\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks huddled down in the seat, already seeing tomorrow's\n papers, and her picture, and she wasn't really photogenic, either....\n And then, from the other copter, she heard the woman laugh.\n\n\n \"Pete Ganley, you fall for anything, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Susan!\"",
"...\nPete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder\n what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway?\nRiuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she\n understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about\n the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day\n shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the\n 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found\n out what the other girls thought about it.\n\n\n Nothing.\n\n\n Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering?\n\n\n She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a\n short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new\n girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to\n call Nagor again."
],
[
"Why, he asked himself irritably, couldn't those scientists figure out\n some way to keep the shields up longer than a week? Or else why didn't\n they have boosting night the same for all departments? He had to stay\n late every Friday and Alice every Thursday, and all the time there was\n Susan at home ready to jump him if he wasn't in at a reasonable\n time....\n\n\n \"Surprised, Pete?\" Alice Hendricks said at his elbow.\n\n\n He swung about, grinned at her. \"Am I? You said it. And here I was\n about to go. I never thought you'd make it before one.\" His grin faded\n a little. \"How'd you do it? Sweet-talk one of the guards into letting\n you in at the head of the line?\"",
"\"—a very simple power source, once you get the basics of it. You—oh,\n oh!\" He grabbed her arm. \"Duck, Alice!\"\n\n\n A spotlight flashed out of the darkness, turned on them, outlined\n them. A siren whirred briefly, and then another copter pulled up\n beside them and a loudspeaker blared tinnily.\n\n\n \"Okay, bud, pull down to the landing lane.\"\n\n\n The police.\n\n\n Police. Fear, all the way through Alice's thoughts, all the way\n through Riuku. Police. Earth law. That meant—it must mean he'd been\n discovered, that they had some other means of protection besides the\n Shielding....\n\n\n \"Nagor! I've been discovered!\"\n\n\n \"Come away then, you fool!\"",
"Alice followed his gaze. She giggled. \"It was easy,\" she said. \"The\n guards don't do more than glance at us, you know. And everyone who's\n supposed to go through Shielding on Thursday has the department number\n stamped on a yellow background. So all I did was make a red\n background, like yours, and slip it on in the restroom at Clean-up\n time.\"\n\n\n \"But Alice....\" Pete Ganley swallowed his beer and signaled for\n another. \"This is serious. You've got to keep the shields up. The\n enemy is everywhere. Why, right now, one could be probing you.\"\n\n\n \"So what? The dial isn't down to Danger yet. And tomorrow I'll just\n put the red tag back on over the yellow one and go through Shielding\n in the same line with you. They won't notice.\" She giggled again. \"I\n thought it was smart, Petey. You oughta think so too. You know why I\n did it, don't you?\"",
"He struggled back. He was confused, and there was blankness around\n him, and for a moment he thought he'd lost contact altogether. Then he\n came into focus again. Alice's thoughts were clearer than ever\n suddenly. He could feel her emotions; they were a part of him now. He\n smiled. The Shielding boost had helped him. Integration—much more\n complete integration than he had ever known before.\n\n\n \"But Pete, honey,\" Alice said. \"What did you come over to the gate\n for? You shouldn't of done it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I wanted to see you.\"\n\n\n \"What if one of Susan's pals sees us?\"",
"She shook her bandanaed head, slid onto the stool beside him and\n crossed her knees—a not very convincing sign of femininity in a woman\n wearing baggy denim coveralls. \"Aren't you going to buy me a drink,\n honey?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, sure.\" He glanced over at the bartender. \"Another beer. No, make\n it two.\" He pulled the five dollars out of his pocket, shoved it\n across the bar, and looked back at Alice, more closely this time. The\n ID badge, pinned to her hip. The badge, with her name, number,\n department, and picture—and the little meter that measured the\n strength of her Mind Shield.\n\n\n The dial should have pointed to full charge. It didn't. It registered\n about seventy per cent loss.",
"The line. Alice's nervousness....\nOh, oh, there's that guy with the\n meter—the one from maintenance. What's he want?\n\"Whaddya mean, my shield's low? How could it be?\"\n... If he checks\n the tag I'll be fired for sure. It's a lot of nonsense anyway. The\n enemy is everywhere, they keep telling us. Whoever saw one of them?\n\"No, honest, I didn't notice anything. Can I help it if.... It's okay,\n huh? It'll pass....\"\n\n\n Down to fifteen per cent, the guy said. Well, that's safe, I guess.\n Whew.\n\n\n \"Oh, hello, Paula. Whatcha talking about, what am I doing here\n tonight? Shut up....\"\n\n\n And then, in the midst of her thoughts, the pain, driving deep into\n Riuku, twisting at him, wrenching at him, until there was no\n consciousness of anything at all.",
"At the end of the shift he had learned nothing. Nothing about the\n weapon, that is. He had found out a good deal about the sex life of\n Genus Homo—information that made him even more glad than before that\n his was a one-sexed race.\nWith work over and tools put away and Alice in the restroom gleefully\n thinking about the red Friday night tag she was slipping onto her ID\n badge, he was as far from success as ever. For a moment he considered\n leaving her, looking for another subject. But he'd probably not be\n able to find one. No, the only thing to do was stay with her, curl\n deep in her mind and go through the Shielding boost, and later on....",
"He shivered a little, thinking of the boost. He'd survive it, of\n course. He'd be too well integrated with her by then. But it was\n nothing to look forward to.\n\n\n Still, he needn't worry about it. He had the whole shift to find out\n what the weapon was. The whole shift, here inside Alice's mind, inside\n the most closely guarded factory on or under or above the surface of\n the Earth. He settled down and waited, expectantly.\n\n\n Alice Hendricks turned her back on the lead man and looked down the\n work table to her place. The other girls were there already. Lois and\n Marge and Coralie, the other three members of the Plug table, Line 73.\n\n\n \"Hey, how'd you make out?\" Marge said. She glanced around to make sure\n none of the lead men or timekeepers were close enough to overhear her,\n then went on. \"Did you get away with it?\"",
"\"Shielded. All ten thousand of them. Of course I haven't checked all\n of them yet, but—\"\n\n\n \"Do it,\" Nagor said grimly. \"We've got to find out what that weapon\n is. Or else get out of this solar system.\"\n\n\n Riuku sighed. \"I'll try,\" he said.\nSomeone put another dollar in the juke box, and the theremins started\n in on Mare Indrium Mary for the tenth time since Pete Ganley had come\n into the bar. \"Aw shut up,\" he said, wishing there was some way to\n turn them off. Twelve-ten. Alice got off work at Houston's at twelve.\n She ought to be here by now. She would be, if it weren't Thursday.\n Shield boosting night for her.",
"Alice shrugged....\nWhat a mealy-mouthed little snip Lois could be,\n sometimes. You'd think to hear her that she was better than any of\n them, and luckier too, with her Joe and the kids. What a laugh! Joe\n was probably the only guy who'd ever looked at her, and she'd hooked\n him right out of school, and now with three kids in five years and her\n working nights....\nAlice finished soldering the first row of wires in the plug and\n started in on the second. So old Liverlips thought she wasted time,\n did he? Well, she'd show him. She'd get out her sixteen plugs tonight.\n\n\n \"Junior kept me up all night last night,\" Lois said. \"He's cutting a\n tooth.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Coralie said, \"It's pretty rough at that age. I remember right\n after Mike was born....\"",
"She looked past him, toward the corner where the big panels were with\n all the dials and the meters and the chart that was almost like the\n kind they drew pictures of earthquakes on. What was it for, anyway?\n And why couldn't anyone go over to it except those longhairs? High\n voltage her foot....\n\n\n \"What're you looking at, Alice?\" Tommy said.\n\n\n \"Oh, that.\" She pointed. \"Wonder what it's for? It doesn't look like\n much of anything, really.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't know. I've got something better to look at.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nyou\n!\"\n\n\n Compared to Pete, he didn't have anything, not anything at all.",
"\"What's the matter, Riuku? Why don't you come? Have the police caught\n you?\"\n\n\n The others were fleeing, getting farther away even as he listened to\n Nagor's call. Contact was hard to maintain now; he could feel\n communication fading.\n\n\n \"Riuku, if you don't come now....\"\n\n\n He fought, but Alice's thoughts were still with him; Alice's tears\n still kept bringing him back into full awareness of her.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\"\n\n\n \"I—I can't!\"\n\n\n The Shielding boost, that had integrated him so completely with Alice\n Hendricks, would never let him go.\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey, I've lost you....\"\n\n\n And Nagor's sad farewell slipped completely out of phase, leaving him\n alone, with her.",
"But she was asleep at last. Riuku was free enough of her thoughts to\n break contact, partially of course, since if he broke it completely he\n wouldn't be able to get back through the Shielding. It was hard enough\n to reach out through it. He sent a painful probing feeler out into\n space, to the spot where Nagor and the others waited for his report.\n\n\n \"Nagor....\"\n\n\n \"Riuku? Is that you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I've got a contact. A girl. But I haven't learned anything yet\n that can help us.\"\n\n\n \"Louder, Riuku. I can hardly hear you....\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stirred in her sleep. The dream images slipped through\n her subconscious, almost waking her, beating against Riuku.\n\n\n Pete, baby, you shouldn't be like that....",
"\"But surely you can find out through the girl,\" Nagor insisted from\n far away, almost out of phase altogether.\n\n\n \"No, Pete!\" Alice Hendricks said aloud.\n\n\n \"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.\n You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Alice Hendricks thought, \"maybe....\"",
"Alice Hendricks listened. For some reason she wanted to listen. She\n was really curious about the field. But, gee, how did he expect her to\n understand all that stuff? He sounded like her algebra teacher, or was\n it chemistry? Lord, how she'd hated school. Maybe she shouldn't have\n quit.\n... Corcoran fields. E and IR and nine-space something or other.\n She'd never seen Pete like this before. He looked real different. Sort\n of like a professor, or something. He must be real smart. And\n so—well, not good-looking especially but, well, appealing. Real SA,\n he had....\n\"So that's how it works,\" Pete Ganley said. \"Quite a weapon, against\n them. It wouldn't work on a human being, of course.\" She was staring\n at him dreamy-eyed. He laughed. \"Silly, I bet you haven't understood a\n word I said.\"\n\n\n \"I have too.\"",
"That night after work Pete Ganley was waiting outside the gate again.\n Alice spotted his copter right away, even though he had the lights\n turned way down.\n\n\n \"Gee, Pete, I didn't think....\"\n\n\n \"Get in. Quick.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter?\" She climbed in beside him. He didn't answer until\n the copter had lifted itself into the air, away from the factory\n landing lots and the bright overhead lights and the home-bound\n workers.\n\n\n \"It's Susan, who else,\" he said grimly. \"She was really sounding off\n today. She kept saying she had a lot of evidence and I'd better be\n careful. And, well, I sure didn't want you turning up at the bar\n tonight of all nights.\"\n\n\n He didn't sound like Pete.\n\n\n \"Why?\" Alice said. \"Are you afraid she'll divorce you?\"",
"Only they weren't. They were making a weapon, and this bit of\n electronic equipment was part of that weapon. What part? What did the\n 731 plug do?\n\n\n Alice Hendricks didn't know. Alice Hendricks didn't care.\n\n\n The first break. Ten minutes away from work. Alice was walking back\n along the aisle that separated Assembly from the men's Machine Shop. A\n chance, perhaps. She was looking at the machines, or rather past them,\n at the men.\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy. How's the love life?\" He's not bad at all. Real cute.\n Though not like Pete, oh no.\n\n\n The machines. Riuku prodded at her thoughts, wishing he could\n influence them, wishing that just for a moment he could see, hear,\n feel,\nthink\nas she would never think.",
"Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"",
"He twisted, trying to pull free of Alice's fear, away from the\n integration of their separate terrors. But he couldn't push her\n thoughts back from his. She was too frightened. He was too frightened.\n The bond held.\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete, Pete, what did you do?\"\n\n\n He didn't answer. He landed the copter, stepped out of it, walked back\n to the other copter that was just dropping down behind him. \"But\n officer, what's the matter?\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks huddled down in the seat, already seeing tomorrow's\n papers, and her picture, and she wasn't really photogenic, either....\n And then, from the other copter, she heard the woman laugh.\n\n\n \"Pete Ganley, you fall for anything, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Susan!\"",
"\"Sure,\" Alice said. \"And you should of seen Pete's face when I walked\n in.\"\n\n\n She took the soldering iron out of her locker, plugged it in, and\n reached out for the pan of 731 wires. \"You know, it's funny. Pete's\n not so good looking, and he's sort of a careless dresser and all that,\n but oh, what he does to me.\" She filled the 731 plug with solder and\n reached for the white, black, red wire.\n\n\n \"You'd better watch out,\" Lois said. \"Or Susan's going to be doing\n something to you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, her.\" Alice touched the tip of the iron to the solder filled pin,\n worked the wire down into position. \"What can she do? Pete doesn't\n give a damn about her.\"\n\n\n \"He's still living with her, isn't he?\" Lois said."
],
[
"He twisted, trying to pull free of Alice's fear, away from the\n integration of their separate terrors. But he couldn't push her\n thoughts back from his. She was too frightened. He was too frightened.\n The bond held.\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete, Pete, what did you do?\"\n\n\n He didn't answer. He landed the copter, stepped out of it, walked back\n to the other copter that was just dropping down behind him. \"But\n officer, what's the matter?\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks huddled down in the seat, already seeing tomorrow's\n papers, and her picture, and she wasn't really photogenic, either....\n And then, from the other copter, she heard the woman laugh.\n\n\n \"Pete Ganley, you fall for anything, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Susan!\"",
"\"You didn't expect me to follow you, did you? Didn't it ever occur to\n you that detectives could put a bug in your copter? My, what we've\n been hearing!\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" the detective who was driving said. \"And those pictures we\n took last night weren't bad either.\"\n\n\n \"Susan, I can explain everything....\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you can, Pete. You always try. But as for you—you little—\"\n\n\n Alice ducked down away from her. Pictures. Oh God, what it would make\n her look like. Still, this hag with the pinched up face who couldn't\n hold a man with all the cosmetics in the drugstore to camouflage\n her—she had her nerve, yelling like that.\n\n\n \"Yeah, and I know a lot about you too!\" Alice Hendricks cried.\n\n\n \"Why, let me get my hands on you....\"",
"\"In a little while. Just a little while.\" Stop thinking about Susan,\n you biological schizo. Change the subject. You'll never get anything\n out of that man by having hysterics....\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" Alice cried bitterly, \"you've been leading me on all the\n time. You don't love me. You'd rather have\nher\n!\"\n\n\n \"That's not so. Hell, baby....\"\nHe's angry. He's not even going to kiss me. I'm just cutting my own\n throat when I act like that....\n\"Okay, Pete. I'm sorry. I know it's tough on you. Let's have a drink,\n okay? Still got some in the glove compartment?\"\n\n\n \"Huh? Oh, sure.\"",
"That night after work Pete Ganley was waiting outside the gate again.\n Alice spotted his copter right away, even though he had the lights\n turned way down.\n\n\n \"Gee, Pete, I didn't think....\"\n\n\n \"Get in. Quick.\"\n\n\n \"What's the matter?\" She climbed in beside him. He didn't answer until\n the copter had lifted itself into the air, away from the factory\n landing lots and the bright overhead lights and the home-bound\n workers.\n\n\n \"It's Susan, who else,\" he said grimly. \"She was really sounding off\n today. She kept saying she had a lot of evidence and I'd better be\n careful. And, well, I sure didn't want you turning up at the bar\n tonight of all nights.\"\n\n\n He didn't sound like Pete.\n\n\n \"Why?\" Alice said. \"Are you afraid she'll divorce you?\"",
"\"Sure,\" Alice said. \"And you should of seen Pete's face when I walked\n in.\"\n\n\n She took the soldering iron out of her locker, plugged it in, and\n reached out for the pan of 731 wires. \"You know, it's funny. Pete's\n not so good looking, and he's sort of a careless dresser and all that,\n but oh, what he does to me.\" She filled the 731 plug with solder and\n reached for the white, black, red wire.\n\n\n \"You'd better watch out,\" Lois said. \"Or Susan's going to be doing\n something to you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, her.\" Alice touched the tip of the iron to the solder filled pin,\n worked the wire down into position. \"What can she do? Pete doesn't\n give a damn about her.\"\n\n\n \"He's still living with her, isn't he?\" Lois said.",
"\"Riuku!\"\n\n\n Riuku prodded. Calm down, you fool. You're not gaining anything this\n way. Calm down, so I can get out of here....\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stopped yelling abruptly.\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Susan said. \"Pete, your taste in women gets worse\n each time. I don't know why I always take you back.\"\n\n\n \"I can explain everything.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete,\" Alice Hendricks whispered. \"Petey, you're not—\"\n\n\n \"Sure he is,\" Susan Ganley said. \"He's coming with me. The nice\n detectives will take you home, dear. But I don't think you'd better\n try anything with them—they're not your type. They're single.\"",
"\"So what? I'm getting tired of checking in every night, like a baby.\n Besides, one of her pals did see us, last night, at the bar.\"\nFear. What'll she do? Susan's a hellcat. I know she is. But maybe\n Pete'll get really sick and tired of her. He looks it. He looks mad.\n I'd sure hate to have him mad at me....\n\"Let's go for a spin, baby. Out in the suburbs somewhere. How about\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Well—why sure, Pete....\"",
"He struggled back. He was confused, and there was blankness around\n him, and for a moment he thought he'd lost contact altogether. Then he\n came into focus again. Alice's thoughts were clearer than ever\n suddenly. He could feel her emotions; they were a part of him now. He\n smiled. The Shielding boost had helped him. Integration—much more\n complete integration than he had ever known before.\n\n\n \"But Pete, honey,\" Alice said. \"What did you come over to the gate\n for? You shouldn't of done it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? I wanted to see you.\"\n\n\n \"What if one of Susan's pals sees us?\"",
"...\nPete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder\n what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway?\nRiuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she\n understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about\n the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day\n shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the\n 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found\n out what the other girls thought about it.\n\n\n Nothing.\n\n\n Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering?\n\n\n She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a\n short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new\n girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to\n call Nagor again.",
"She poured two drinks, neat, and he swallowed his with one impatient\n gulp. She poured him another.\nRiuku prodded. The drink made his job easier. Alice's thoughts calmed,\n swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn't I\n pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe.\n Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The\n Restricted Area....\n\n\n \"Pete.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, baby?\"\n\n\n \"How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can't\n even go over in the Restricted Area?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever made you think of that?\" He laughed suddenly. He turned to\n her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his\n face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. \"Voltage loose ...\n oh, baby, baby. Don't you know what that is?\"",
"Alice Hendricks listened. For some reason she wanted to listen. She\n was really curious about the field. But, gee, how did he expect her to\n understand all that stuff? He sounded like her algebra teacher, or was\n it chemistry? Lord, how she'd hated school. Maybe she shouldn't have\n quit.\n... Corcoran fields. E and IR and nine-space something or other.\n She'd never seen Pete like this before. He looked real different. Sort\n of like a professor, or something. He must be real smart. And\n so—well, not good-looking especially but, well, appealing. Real SA,\n he had....\n\"So that's how it works,\" Pete Ganley said. \"Quite a weapon, against\n them. It wouldn't work on a human being, of course.\" She was staring\n at him dreamy-eyed. He laughed. \"Silly, I bet you haven't understood a\n word I said.\"\n\n\n \"I have too.\"",
"Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"",
"\"Pete....\" But he wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. And when Susan took his\n arm, he followed her.\n\n\n \"How could you do it, Petey....\" Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over\n and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku.\n\n\n Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren't for your ridiculous\n reproductive habits I'd have found out everything. As it is....\n \"Nagor, I'm coming! I didn't get anything. This woman—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on then. We're leaving. Right now. There'll be other\n systems.\"\nPetey, Petey, Petey....\nContact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward\n the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her\n and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free,\n break free....",
"\"But surely you can find out through the girl,\" Nagor insisted from\n far away, almost out of phase altogether.\n\n\n \"No, Pete!\" Alice Hendricks said aloud.\n\n\n \"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.\n You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Alice Hendricks thought, \"maybe....\"",
"\"Liar.\" He locked the automatic pilot on the copter and held out his\n arms. \"Come here, you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey....\"\n\n\n Who cared about the weapon? He was right, even if she wouldn't admit\n it. She hadn't even listened, hardly. She hadn't understood.\n\n\n And neither had Riuku.\nRiuku waited until she'd fallen soundly asleep that night before he\n tried contacting Nagor. He'd learned nothing useful. He'd picked up\n nothing in her mind except more thoughts of Pete, and gee, maybe\n someday they'd get married, if he only had guts enough to tell Susan\n where to get off....",
"Why, he asked himself irritably, couldn't those scientists figure out\n some way to keep the shields up longer than a week? Or else why didn't\n they have boosting night the same for all departments? He had to stay\n late every Friday and Alice every Thursday, and all the time there was\n Susan at home ready to jump him if he wasn't in at a reasonable\n time....\n\n\n \"Surprised, Pete?\" Alice Hendricks said at his elbow.\n\n\n He swung about, grinned at her. \"Am I? You said it. And here I was\n about to go. I never thought you'd make it before one.\" His grin faded\n a little. \"How'd you do it? Sweet-talk one of the guards into letting\n you in at the head of the line?\"",
"\"Oh, Alice, you're as bad as—look, baby, don't you see? It would be\n awful for you. All the publicity, the things she'd call you, maybe\n even in the papers....\"\n\n\n He was staring straight ahead, his hands locked about the controls. He\n was sort of—well, distant. Not her Petey any more. Someone else's\n Pete. Susan's Pete....\n\n\n \"I think we should be more careful,\" he said.\n\n\n Riuku twisted his way through her thoughts, tried to push them\n down....\nDoes he love me, he's got to love me, sure he does, he just\n doesn't want me to get hurt....\nAnd far away, almost completely out of phase, Nagor's call. \"Riuku,\n another ship's gone. You'd better come back. Bring what you've learned\n so far and we can withdraw from the system and maybe piece it\n together....\"",
"Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She\n stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and\n sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her\n and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face,\n with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little\n scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth....\n\n\n \"Oh, oh,\" Alice said suddenly. \"I've got solder on the outside of the\n pin.\" She looked around for the alcohol.\n\n\n Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to\n translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs\n she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires,\n of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing.\n They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment.",
"Alice followed his gaze. She giggled. \"It was easy,\" she said. \"The\n guards don't do more than glance at us, you know. And everyone who's\n supposed to go through Shielding on Thursday has the department number\n stamped on a yellow background. So all I did was make a red\n background, like yours, and slip it on in the restroom at Clean-up\n time.\"\n\n\n \"But Alice....\" Pete Ganley swallowed his beer and signaled for\n another. \"This is serious. You've got to keep the shields up. The\n enemy is everywhere. Why, right now, one could be probing you.\"\n\n\n \"So what? The dial isn't down to Danger yet. And tomorrow I'll just\n put the red tag back on over the yellow one and go through Shielding\n in the same line with you. They won't notice.\" She giggled again. \"I\n thought it was smart, Petey. You oughta think so too. You know why I\n did it, don't you?\"",
"She looked past him, toward the corner where the big panels were with\n all the dials and the meters and the chart that was almost like the\n kind they drew pictures of earthquakes on. What was it for, anyway?\n And why couldn't anyone go over to it except those longhairs? High\n voltage her foot....\n\n\n \"What're you looking at, Alice?\" Tommy said.\n\n\n \"Oh, that.\" She pointed. \"Wonder what it's for? It doesn't look like\n much of anything, really.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't know. I've got something better to look at.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nyou\n!\"\n\n\n Compared to Pete, he didn't have anything, not anything at all."
],
[
"\"What's the matter, Riuku? Why don't you come? Have the police caught\n you?\"\n\n\n The others were fleeing, getting farther away even as he listened to\n Nagor's call. Contact was hard to maintain now; he could feel\n communication fading.\n\n\n \"Riuku, if you don't come now....\"\n\n\n He fought, but Alice's thoughts were still with him; Alice's tears\n still kept bringing him back into full awareness of her.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\"\n\n\n \"I—I can't!\"\n\n\n The Shielding boost, that had integrated him so completely with Alice\n Hendricks, would never let him go.\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey, I've lost you....\"\n\n\n And Nagor's sad farewell slipped completely out of phase, leaving him\n alone, with her.",
"\"But surely you can find out through the girl,\" Nagor insisted from\n far away, almost out of phase altogether.\n\n\n \"No, Pete!\" Alice Hendricks said aloud.\n\n\n \"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.\n You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Alice Hendricks thought, \"maybe....\"",
"But she was asleep at last. Riuku was free enough of her thoughts to\n break contact, partially of course, since if he broke it completely he\n wouldn't be able to get back through the Shielding. It was hard enough\n to reach out through it. He sent a painful probing feeler out into\n space, to the spot where Nagor and the others waited for his report.\n\n\n \"Nagor....\"\n\n\n \"Riuku? Is that you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I've got a contact. A girl. But I haven't learned anything yet\n that can help us.\"\n\n\n \"Louder, Riuku. I can hardly hear you....\"\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stirred in her sleep. The dream images slipped through\n her subconscious, almost waking her, beating against Riuku.\n\n\n Pete, baby, you shouldn't be like that....",
"\"Liar.\" He locked the automatic pilot on the copter and held out his\n arms. \"Come here, you.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Petey....\"\n\n\n Who cared about the weapon? He was right, even if she wouldn't admit\n it. She hadn't even listened, hardly. She hadn't understood.\n\n\n And neither had Riuku.\nRiuku waited until she'd fallen soundly asleep that night before he\n tried contacting Nagor. He'd learned nothing useful. He'd picked up\n nothing in her mind except more thoughts of Pete, and gee, maybe\n someday they'd get married, if he only had guts enough to tell Susan\n where to get off....",
"\"—a very simple power source, once you get the basics of it. You—oh,\n oh!\" He grabbed her arm. \"Duck, Alice!\"\n\n\n A spotlight flashed out of the darkness, turned on them, outlined\n them. A siren whirred briefly, and then another copter pulled up\n beside them and a loudspeaker blared tinnily.\n\n\n \"Okay, bud, pull down to the landing lane.\"\n\n\n The police.\n\n\n Police. Fear, all the way through Alice's thoughts, all the way\n through Riuku. Police. Earth law. That meant—it must mean he'd been\n discovered, that they had some other means of protection besides the\n Shielding....\n\n\n \"Nagor! I've been discovered!\"\n\n\n \"Come away then, you fool!\"",
"The plant. The Restricted Area. The useless secret of Earth's now\n unneeded weapon. Alice Hendricks glancing past it, at the spot welding\n machine, at Tommy.\n\n\n \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"You really interested in finding out, Alice?\"\n\n\n \"Well—maybe—\"\n\n\n And Riuku gibbered unheard in her mind.",
"\"Pete....\" But he wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. And when Susan took his\n arm, he followed her.\n\n\n \"How could you do it, Petey....\" Numb whispers, numb thoughts, over\n and over, but no longer frightened, no longer binding on Riuku.\n\n\n Fools, he thought. Idiotic Earthmen. If it weren't for your ridiculous\n reproductive habits I'd have found out everything. As it is....\n \"Nagor, I'm coming! I didn't get anything. This woman—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on then. We're leaving. Right now. There'll be other\n systems.\"\nPetey, Petey, Petey....\nContact thinned as he reached out away from her, toward Nagor, toward\n the ship. He fought his way out through the Shielding, away from her\n and her thoughts and every detestable thing about her. Break free,\n break free....",
"The line. Alice's nervousness....\nOh, oh, there's that guy with the\n meter—the one from maintenance. What's he want?\n\"Whaddya mean, my shield's low? How could it be?\"\n... If he checks\n the tag I'll be fired for sure. It's a lot of nonsense anyway. The\n enemy is everywhere, they keep telling us. Whoever saw one of them?\n\"No, honest, I didn't notice anything. Can I help it if.... It's okay,\n huh? It'll pass....\"\n\n\n Down to fifteen per cent, the guy said. Well, that's safe, I guess.\n Whew.\n\n\n \"Oh, hello, Paula. Whatcha talking about, what am I doing here\n tonight? Shut up....\"\n\n\n And then, in the midst of her thoughts, the pain, driving deep into\n Riuku, twisting at him, wrenching at him, until there was no\n consciousness of anything at all.",
"\"Oh, Alice, you're as bad as—look, baby, don't you see? It would be\n awful for you. All the publicity, the things she'd call you, maybe\n even in the papers....\"\n\n\n He was staring straight ahead, his hands locked about the controls. He\n was sort of—well, distant. Not her Petey any more. Someone else's\n Pete. Susan's Pete....\n\n\n \"I think we should be more careful,\" he said.\n\n\n Riuku twisted his way through her thoughts, tried to push them\n down....\nDoes he love me, he's got to love me, sure he does, he just\n doesn't want me to get hurt....\nAnd far away, almost completely out of phase, Nagor's call. \"Riuku,\n another ship's gone. You'd better come back. Bring what you've learned\n so far and we can withdraw from the system and maybe piece it\n together....\"",
"\"Riuku!\"\n\n\n Riuku prodded. Calm down, you fool. You're not gaining anything this\n way. Calm down, so I can get out of here....\n\n\n Alice Hendricks stopped yelling abruptly.\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Susan said. \"Pete, your taste in women gets worse\n each time. I don't know why I always take you back.\"\n\n\n \"I can explain everything.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Pete,\" Alice Hendricks whispered. \"Petey, you're not—\"\n\n\n \"Sure he is,\" Susan Ganley said. \"He's coming with me. The nice\n detectives will take you home, dear. But I don't think you'd better\n try anything with them—they're not your type. They're single.\"",
"Riuku cursed the bisexual species in their own language.\n\n\n \"Riuku!\" Nagor's call was harsh, urgent. \"You've got to find out. We\n haven't much time. We lost three more ships today, and there wasn't a\n sign of danger. No Earthman nearby, no force fields, nothing. You've\n got to find out why.\" Those ships just disappeared.\n\n\n Riuku forced his way up through the erotic dreams of Alice Hendricks.\n \"I know a little,\" he said. \"They damp their thought waves somehow,\n and keep us from spotting the Corcoran field.\"\n\n\n \"Corcoran field? What's that?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\" Alice's thoughts washed over him, pulling him back\n into complete integration, away from Nagor, into a medley of heroic\n Petes with gleaming eyes and clutching hands and good little Alices\n pushing them away—for the moment.",
"Riuku cursed her again, in the lingua franca of a dozen systems.\n Nagor's voice faded. Riuku switched back to English.\nSaturday. Into the plant at 3:58. Jean's diamond again....\nWish it\n would choke her; she's got a horsey enough face for it to. Where's old\n Liverlips? Don't see him around. Might as well go to the restroom for\n a while....\nThat's it, Riuku thought. Get her over past the machine shop, over by\n that Restricted Area. There must be something there we can go on....\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy,\" Alice Hendricks said. \"How's the love life?\"\n\n\n \"It could be better if someone I know would, uh, cooperate....\"",
"...\nPete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder\n what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway?\nRiuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she\n understood it—which was not at all. He found out some things about\n the 731 plugs—that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day\n shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the\n 717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found\n out what the other girls thought about it.\n\n\n Nothing.\n\n\n Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering?\n\n\n She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a\n short nap—on company time, old Liverlips being tied up with the new\n girls down at the other end of the line—when Riuku finally managed to\n call Nagor again.",
"\"No. What?\"\n\n\n \"That's the control panel for one of the weapons, silly. It's only a\n duplicate, actually—a monitor station. But it's tuned to the\n frequencies of all the ships in this sector and—\"\n\n\n She listened. She wanted to listen. She had to want to listen, now.\n\n\n \"Nagor, I'm getting it,\" Riuku called. \"I'll bring it all back with\n me. Just a minute and I'll have it.\"\n\n\n \"How does it work, honey?\" Alice Hendricks said.\n\n\n \"You really want to know? Okay. Now the Corcoran field is generated\n between the ships and areas like that one, only a lot more powerful,\n by—\"\n\n\n \"It's coming through now, Nagor.\"",
"Only they weren't. They were making a weapon, and this bit of\n electronic equipment was part of that weapon. What part? What did the\n 731 plug do?\n\n\n Alice Hendricks didn't know. Alice Hendricks didn't care.\n\n\n The first break. Ten minutes away from work. Alice was walking back\n along the aisle that separated Assembly from the men's Machine Shop. A\n chance, perhaps. She was looking at the machines, or rather past them,\n at the men.\n\n\n \"Hello, Tommy. How's the love life?\" He's not bad at all. Real cute.\n Though not like Pete, oh no.\n\n\n The machines. Riuku prodded at her thoughts, wishing he could\n influence them, wishing that just for a moment he could see, hear,\n feel,\nthink\nas she would never think.",
"The machines were—machines. That big funny one where Ned works, and\n Tommy's spot welder, and over in the corner where the superintendent\n is—he's a snappy dresser, tie and everything.\n\n\n The corner. Restricted area. Can't go over. High voltage or\n something....\n\n\n Her thoughts slid away from the restricted area. Should she go out for\n lunch or eat off the sandwich machine? And Riuku curled inside her\n mind and cursed her with his rapidly growing Earthwoman's vocabulary.",
"She poured two drinks, neat, and he swallowed his with one impatient\n gulp. She poured him another.\nRiuku prodded. The drink made his job easier. Alice's thoughts calmed,\n swirled away from Susan and what am I going to do and why didn't I\n pick up with some single guy, anyway? A single guy, like Tommy maybe.\n Tommy and his spot welder, over there by the Restricted Area. The\n Restricted Area....\n\n\n \"Pete.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, baby?\"\n\n\n \"How come they let so much voltage loose in the plant, so we can't\n even go over in the Restricted Area?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever made you think of that?\" He laughed suddenly. He turned to\n her, still laughing. He was the old Pete again, she thought, with his\n face happy and his mouth quirked up at the corner. \"Voltage loose ...\n oh, baby, baby. Don't you know what that is?\"",
"Sitting beside him in the copter.\nAll alone up here. Real romantic,\n like something on the video. But I shouldn't with him married, and all\n that. It's not right. But it's different, with Susan such a mean\n thing. Poor Petey....\nRiuku prodded. He found it so much easier since the Shielding boost.\n If only these Earthmen were more telepathic, so that they could be\n controlled directly. Still, perhaps with this new integration he could\n accomplish the same results. He prodded again.\n\n\n \"Pete,\" Alice said suddenly. \"What are we working on, anyway?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, working on?\" He frowned at her.\n\n\n \"At the plant. All I ever do is sit there soldering plugs, and no one\n ever tells me what for.\"\n\n\n \"Course not. You're not supposed to talk about any part of the job\n except your own. You know that. The slip of a lip—\"",
"Don't they ever think of anything but their kids? Alice thought. She\n stopped listening to them. She heard Pete's voice again, husky and\n sending little chills all through her, and his face came between her\n and the plug and the white green wire she was soldering. His face,\n with those blue eyes that went right through a girl and that little\n scar that quirked up the corner of his mouth....\n\n\n \"Oh, oh,\" Alice said suddenly. \"I've got solder on the outside of the\n pin.\" She looked around for the alcohol.\n\n\n Riuku probed. Her thoughts were easy enough to read, but just try to\n translate them into anything useful.... He probed deeper. The plugs\n she was soldering. He could get a good picture of them, of the wires,\n of the harness lacing that Coralie was doing. But it meant nothing.\n They could be making anything. Radios, monitor units, sound equipment.",
"Her round, smooth face looked up at him, wide-eyed and full-lipped.\n She had no worry wrinkles like Susan's, no mouth pulled down at the\n corners like Susan's, and under that shapeless coverall....\n\n\n \"Sure, baby, I'm glad you did it,\" Pete Ganley said huskily.\n\n\n Riuku was glad too, the next afternoon when the swing shift started\n pouring through the gates.\n\n\n It was easy, once he'd found her. He had tested hundreds, all\n shielded, some almost accessible to him, but none vulnerable enough.\n Then this one came. The shield was so far down that contact was almost\n easy. Painful, tiring, but not really difficult. He could feel her\n momentary sense of alarm, of nausea, and then he was through,\n integrated with her, his thoughts at home with her thoughts.\n\n\n He rested, inside her mind."
]
] |
test
|
29193
|
[
"What is Umagum?",
"Why does Sally ask Sol if he is \"nakkid\"?",
"Why does Willie visit Sheriff Coogan?",
"Why was Mrs. Brundage upset?",
"What is an exelution?",
"What happens to Sol Becker at the end of the story?",
"Why do most of the townspeople Sol encountered throughout the story refuse to speak to Sol?",
"How did Mr. Brundage die?",
"Who was Prince Regent?",
"Who are the Knights of the Realm?"
] |
[
[
"It is a kind of unusual breakfast food Mrs. Dawes prepares for Sol Becker.",
"It is the name of the town where Sol Becker takes refuge after his car is stolen.",
"It is the name of a mysterious dream world wherein the residents of the town gather at night for public executions.",
"It is a mispronunciation of Armagon uttered by Mrs. Dawes at breakfast."
],
[
"He had slept on the couch with the towel he used to dry himself wrapped around his waist.",
"\"Nakkid\" is a term used to describe strangers in the court of Armagon.",
"She runs into the living room and catches him as he is undressing and preparing to go to bed.",
"He had undressed the night before because his clothes were wet from getting soaked in the rain."
],
[
"He thinks Sheriff Coogan might have some information about the hoodlum who hijacked Sol's vehicle.",
"He wants to introduce him to Sol in order to help him make a report about his stolen car.",
"He believes Sheriff Coogan has some information about Mr. Brundage that was not known previously.",
"He wants to remind him about the court that will be held that night in Armagon."
],
[
"She was protesting when Charlie, Sol, Willie, and Sheriff Coogan came to remove her husband's body from her home.",
"Vincent had been killed the previous night by the Knights in Armagon.",
"She didn't like Sol Becker asking her questions about Vincent Brundage's death.",
"Her husband was sentenced to be killed the next time the Armagon court convened, and she felt he had done nothing wrong."
],
[
"An exelution is another mispronunciation said by Mrs. Dawes at the breakfast dinner when she is referencing events in Armagon. ",
"An exelution is a mispronunciation of \"execution\" uttered by Sally several times as she excitedly anticipates events in Armagon.",
"Sally pronounces \"execution\" as \"exelution\" because this is how the townspeople refer to the events that unfold in Amagon.",
"Sheriff Coogan mispronounces \"execution\" as \"exelution\" because he is missing some teeth."
],
[
"He is appointed a Knight of Armagon and welcomed to the fold by King Dawes.",
"He escapes from his dream of Armagan and leaves the town.",
"He is executed by the Knights of Armagon.",
"He discovers that the hijacker had been sent by the townspeople in order to trap him there so he could be led to Armagon."
],
[
"Sol is new to town and therefore unfamiliar with their Laws. They don't want to talk about Armagon with a stranger.",
"They have been instructed to refer all questions regarding Armagon or the death of Brundage to Willie Dawes.",
"They don't trust his intentions in the town, since nobody knows who he is and he might put them in some kind of danger.",
"They don't believe his story about being hijacked and left out in the rain."
],
[
"He had been executed by the Knights in the court of Armagon.",
"He died of a heart attack in his sleep in bed with Mrs. Brundage.",
"He passed away peacefully in his sleep in his room above the Haircut Shave & Massage Parlor.",
"The townspeople had gathered the night before to kill him in the town square because he broke one of the Laws."
],
[
"Prince Regent was the ruler of Armagon and the overseer of the nightly court.",
"Charlie went by \"Prince Regent\" because it made him feel more important amongst the townspeople.",
"This was Willie Dawes' persona in the dream world of Armagon.",
"This was Charlie's persona in the dream world of Armagon."
],
[
"It is the name of the gang of hoodlums to which the hijacker that stole Sol Becker's car belongs.",
"A vigilante justice group self-appointed to enforce the town's laws. They kill Mr. Brundage.",
"It is the primary governing body of the dream world of Armagon that includes Willie Dawes.",
"A group of townspeople including Charlie who carries out executions in the dream town of Armagon."
]
] |
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[
[
"\"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n\n\n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n\n\n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n \"Don't you know\nnothin'\n?\"\n\n\n \"\nArma\ngon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister—\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n \"What's the name?\"\n\n\n \"Becker.\"\n\n\n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n\n\n \"Dream? You mean this—Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"",
"The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n\n\n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n\n\n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n\n\n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n\n\n \"You a stranger?\"",
"\"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n \"Does\nshe\ndream about this—Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n\n\n \"Yep.\"\n\n\n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n\n\n \"And you, Mr.—\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n\n\n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n\n\n The fat man giggled.\n\n\n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.",
"Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n\n\n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n\n\n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa!\nPa!\nLook who's here!\"\n\n\n Willie Dawes appeared.\nNo!\nSol thought. This was\nKing\nDawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n \"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n\n\n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n \"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now\nyou're\nin it, too.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"",
"\"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n\n\n \"Please ...\"\n\n\n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n\n\n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n\n\n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n\n\n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable—\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n\n\n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...",
"\"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n \"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n\n\n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n\n\n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n\n\n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n\n\n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\"",
"The man batted his eyes.\n \"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n \"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n \"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, Willie—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n\n\n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n \"Never seen you\n before. Night\nor\nday. Stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Come\non\n!\" Dawes said.\n\n\n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.",
"\"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something—\"\n\n\n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\nMr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n\n\n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n\n\n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n \"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n\n\n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"",
"A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n \"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n\n\n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n\n\n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.",
"\"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n\n\n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n\n\n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n\n\n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.",
"\"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n\n\n \"The what?\"\n\n\n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n\n\n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.",
"He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\nHe\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n\n\n Then he went to sleep.\n\n\n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n\n\n \"Are you\nnakkid\n?\"",
"He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n\n\n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n\n\n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n\n\n \"Heart attack.\"\n\n\n The fat man chuckled.",
"The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n\n\n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n\n\n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n\n\n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n\n\n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.",
"\"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n\n\n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n\n\n \"You mean—\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean\nyou\ndream about the same\n place?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n\n\n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n\n\n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n\n\n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.",
"\"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the\nleast\nI\n could do.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n \"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n\n\n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n\n\n \"None of\nyour\nbusiness,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n\n\n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.",
"Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So\nthat's\nthe\n snooper, eh?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n \"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n\n\n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n\n\n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n\n\n \"Now wait a minute—\"\n\n\n Charlie shouted.\n\n\n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough—\"\n\n\n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n\n\n The Knights stepped forward.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.",
"\"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n\n\n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n\n\n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n\n\n \"Goodnight.\"\n\n\n He read Sally's copy of\nTreasure Island\nfor about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n\n\n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...",
"The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n\n\n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n \"About my car—\"\n\n\n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n \"Your\ncar\n? Young man, ain't\n you got no\nrespect\n?\"\n\n\n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\nHe\n took a walk.",
"\"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n\n\n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit—it's\n sure interesting.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n \"I guess it would be.\"\n\n\n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n\n\n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n\n\n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving."
],
[
"His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n\n\n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n\n\n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n \"What time is it?\"\n\n\n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n \"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"",
"\"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n \"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n\n\n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n\n\n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n\n\n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n\n\n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\"",
"He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\nHe\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n\n\n Then he went to sleep.\n\n\n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n\n\n \"Are you\nnakkid\n?\"",
"\"\nSally!\n\" Mom again, sterner.\n \"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you\never\ngonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n\n\n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n \"Good morning.\"\n\n\n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n\n\n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"",
"\"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n \"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n\n\n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n\n\n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n\n\n Inside the house, she said:\n \"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n\n\n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"",
"Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n\n\n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n\n\n He learned little.\nAt\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n\n\n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n \"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n\n\n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"",
"A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n \"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n\n\n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n\n\n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.",
"He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n\n\n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n \"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n\n\n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n \"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So\nthat's\nthe\n snooper, eh?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n \"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n\n\n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n\n\n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n\n\n \"Now wait a minute—\"\n\n\n Charlie shouted.\n\n\n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough—\"\n\n\n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n\n\n The Knights stepped forward.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.",
"\"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the\nleast\nI\n could do.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n \"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n\n\n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n\n\n \"None of\nyour\nbusiness,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n\n\n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.",
"\"I'm sorry—\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n\n\n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n \"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n\n\n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.",
"\"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n\n\n \"The what?\"\n\n\n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n\n\n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.",
"\"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n\n\n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n\n\n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n\n\n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n\n\n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n \"Now is it any of\nyour\nbusiness? I mean, is it?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n\n\n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n \"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n\n\n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n\n\n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.",
"\"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n\n\n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit—it's\n sure interesting.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n \"I guess it would be.\"\n\n\n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n\n\n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n\n\n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.",
"\"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n\n\n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n\n\n \"I really can't thank you\n enough—\"",
"Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n\n\n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n\n\n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa!\nPa!\nLook who's here!\"\n\n\n Willie Dawes appeared.\nNo!\nSol thought. This was\nKing\nDawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n \"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n\n\n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n \"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now\nyou're\nin it, too.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"",
"\"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n\n\n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n\n\n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n\n\n \"Goodnight.\"\n\n\n He read Sally's copy of\nTreasure Island\nfor about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n\n\n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...",
"\"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n \"Does\nshe\ndream about this—Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n\n\n \"Yep.\"\n\n\n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n\n\n \"And you, Mr.—\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n\n\n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n\n\n The fat man giggled.\n\n\n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.",
"He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n\n\n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n\n\n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n\n\n \"Heart attack.\"\n\n\n The fat man chuckled.",
"The man batted his eyes.\n \"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n \"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n \"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, Willie—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n\n\n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n \"Never seen you\n before. Night\nor\nday. Stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Come\non\n!\" Dawes said.\n\n\n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again."
],
[
"The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n\n\n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n\n\n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n\n\n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n\n\n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.",
"The man batted his eyes.\n \"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n \"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n \"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, Willie—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n\n\n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n \"Never seen you\n before. Night\nor\nday. Stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Come\non\n!\" Dawes said.\n\n\n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.",
"The man scratched his ear.\n \"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n\n\n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n\n\n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n \"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n\n\n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\nAt\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n\n\n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He\nseemed\nokay.\"\n\n\n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n \"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"",
"Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n\n\n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n\n\n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n\n\n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\nThey\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n\n\n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"",
"\"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the\nleast\nI\n could do.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n \"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n\n\n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n\n\n \"None of\nyour\nbusiness,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n\n\n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.",
"\"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n\n\n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n\n\n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n\n\n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n\n\n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n \"Now is it any of\nyour\nbusiness? I mean, is it?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n\n\n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n \"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n\n\n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n\n\n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.",
"Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\nThe\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n\n\n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n\n\n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n\n\n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"",
"\"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Thought so.\"\n\n\n Sol repeated the question.\n\n\n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n\n\n \"How—I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n\n\n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n\n\n That was that.\n\n\n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n\n\n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.",
"The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n\n\n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n \"About my car—\"\n\n\n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n \"Your\ncar\n? Young man, ain't\n you got no\nrespect\n?\"\n\n\n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\nHe\n took a walk.",
"He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n\n\n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n\n\n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n\n\n \"Heart attack.\"\n\n\n The fat man chuckled.",
"\"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n \"Does\nshe\ndream about this—Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n\n\n \"Yep.\"\n\n\n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n\n\n \"And you, Mr.—\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n\n\n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n\n\n The fat man giggled.\n\n\n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.",
"\"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n\n\n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n\n\n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n\n\n \"Goodnight.\"\n\n\n He read Sally's copy of\nTreasure Island\nfor about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n\n\n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...",
"A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n \"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n\n\n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n\n\n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.",
"\"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n\n\n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n\n\n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n\n\n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.",
"Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n\n\n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n\n\n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa!\nPa!\nLook who's here!\"\n\n\n Willie Dawes appeared.\nNo!\nSol thought. This was\nKing\nDawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n \"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n\n\n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n \"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now\nyou're\nin it, too.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"",
"Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n\n\n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n\n\n He learned little.\nAt\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n\n\n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n \"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n\n\n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"",
"\"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n\n\n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit—it's\n sure interesting.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n \"I guess it would be.\"\n\n\n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n\n\n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n\n\n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.",
"Then sleep came.\nHe\n was flanked by marble\n pillars, thrusting towards\n a high-domed ceiling.\n\n\n The room stretched long\n and wide before him, the\n walls bedecked in stunning\n purple draperies.\n\n\n He whirled at the sound of\n footsteps, echoing stridently\n on the stone floor. Someone\n was running towards him.\n\n\n It was Sally, pigtails\n streaming out behind her, the\n small body wearing a flowing\n white toga. She was shrieking,\n laughing as she skittered\n past him, clutching a gleaming\n gold helmet.\n\n\n He called out to her, but\n she was too busy outdistancing\n her pursuer. It was Sheriff\n Coogan, puffing and huffing,\n the metal-and-gold cloth\n uniform ludicrous on his\n lanky frame.\n\n\n \"Consarn kid!\" he wheezed.\n \"Gimme my hat!\"",
"\"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n \"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n\n\n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n\n\n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n\n\n Inside the house, she said:\n \"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n\n\n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"",
"\"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court—\"\n\n\n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n\n\n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n \"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n\n\n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\""
],
[
"\"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the\nleast\nI\n could do.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n \"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n\n\n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n\n\n \"None of\nyour\nbusiness,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n\n\n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.",
"A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n \"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n\n\n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n\n\n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.",
"\"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n\n\n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n\n\n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n\n\n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n\n\n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n \"Now is it any of\nyour\nbusiness? I mean, is it?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n\n\n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n \"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n\n\n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n\n\n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.",
"Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\nThe\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n\n\n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n\n\n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n\n\n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"",
"He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n\n\n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n\n\n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n\n\n \"Heart attack.\"\n\n\n The fat man chuckled.",
"The man batted his eyes.\n \"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n \"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n \"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, Willie—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n\n\n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n \"Never seen you\n before. Night\nor\nday. Stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Come\non\n!\" Dawes said.\n\n\n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.",
"\"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n\n\n \"Please ...\"\n\n\n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n\n\n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n\n\n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n\n\n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable—\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n\n\n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...",
"The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n\n\n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n\n\n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n\n\n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n\n\n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.",
"\"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n\n\n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit—it's\n sure interesting.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n \"I guess it would be.\"\n\n\n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n\n\n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n\n\n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.",
"Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n\n\n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n\n\n He learned little.\nAt\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n\n\n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n \"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n\n\n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"",
"\"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court—\"\n\n\n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n\n\n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n \"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n\n\n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"",
"\"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n\n\n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n\n\n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n\n\n \"Goodnight.\"\n\n\n He read Sally's copy of\nTreasure Island\nfor about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n\n\n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...",
"His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n\n\n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n\n\n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n \"What time is it?\"\n\n\n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n \"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"",
"Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n\n\n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n\n\n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n\n\n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\nThey\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n\n\n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"",
"He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n\n\n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n \"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n\n\n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n \"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"\"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n\n\n \"The what?\"\n\n\n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n\n\n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.",
"He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\nHe\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n\n\n Then he went to sleep.\n\n\n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n\n\n \"Are you\nnakkid\n?\"",
"\"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n\n\n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n\n\n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n\n\n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.",
"\"No, of course not,\" Sol\n said. He followed her into\n the darkened parlor, and\n watched as she turned the\n screw on a hurricane-style\n lamp, shedding a yellow pool\n of light over half a flowery\n sofa and a doily-covered wing\n chair. \"You go on up. I'll be\n perfectly fine.\"\n\n\n \"Guess you can use a towel,\n though. I'll get you one,\n then I'm going up. We wake\n pretty early in this house.\n Breakfast's at seven; you'll\n have to be up if you want\n any.\"\n\n\n \"I really can't thank you\n enough—\"",
"\"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n \"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n\n\n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n\n\n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n\n\n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n\n\n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\""
],
[
"\"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n \"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n\n\n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n\n\n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n\n\n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n\n\n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\"",
"\"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n\n\n \"The what?\"\n\n\n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n\n\n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.",
"Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So\nthat's\nthe\n snooper, eh?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n \"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n\n\n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n\n\n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n\n\n \"Now wait a minute—\"\n\n\n Charlie shouted.\n\n\n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough—\"\n\n\n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n\n\n The Knights stepped forward.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.",
"\"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Thought so.\"\n\n\n Sol repeated the question.\n\n\n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n\n\n \"How—I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n\n\n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n\n\n That was that.\n\n\n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n\n\n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.",
"\"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the\nleast\nI\n could do.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n \"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n\n\n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n\n\n \"None of\nyour\nbusiness,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n\n\n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.",
"\"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n\n\n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n\n\n \"You mean—\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean\nyou\ndream about the same\n place?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n\n\n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n\n\n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n\n\n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.",
"The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n\n\n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n\n\n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n\n\n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n\n\n \"You a stranger?\"",
"The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n\n\n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n \"About my car—\"\n\n\n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n \"Your\ncar\n? Young man, ain't\n you got no\nrespect\n?\"\n\n\n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\nHe\n took a walk.",
"\"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n \"Does\nshe\ndream about this—Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n\n\n \"Yep.\"\n\n\n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n\n\n \"And you, Mr.—\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n\n\n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n\n\n The fat man giggled.\n\n\n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.",
"The man batted his eyes.\n \"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n \"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n \"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, Willie—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n\n\n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n \"Never seen you\n before. Night\nor\nday. Stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Come\non\n!\" Dawes said.\n\n\n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.",
"A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n \"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n\n\n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n\n\n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.",
"\"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n\n\n \"Please ...\"\n\n\n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n\n\n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n\n\n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n\n\n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable—\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n\n\n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...",
"Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n\n\n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n\n\n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa!\nPa!\nLook who's here!\"\n\n\n Willie Dawes appeared.\nNo!\nSol thought. This was\nKing\nDawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n \"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n\n\n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n \"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now\nyou're\nin it, too.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"",
"He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n\n\n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n\n\n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n\n\n \"Heart attack.\"\n\n\n The fat man chuckled.",
"\"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n\n\n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n\n\n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n \"Don't you know\nnothin'\n?\"\n\n\n \"\nArma\ngon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister—\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n \"What's the name?\"\n\n\n \"Becker.\"\n\n\n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n\n\n \"Dream? You mean this—Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"",
"\"\nSally!\n\" Mom again, sterner.\n \"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you\never\ngonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n\n\n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n \"Good morning.\"\n\n\n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n\n\n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"",
"The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n\n\n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n\n\n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n\n\n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n\n\n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.",
"Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\nThe\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n\n\n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n\n\n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n\n\n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"",
"\"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n\n\n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n\n\n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n\n\n \"Goodnight.\"\n\n\n He read Sally's copy of\nTreasure Island\nfor about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n\n\n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...",
"Henry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware—beware of the Knights!\ndream\n \ntown\nby ... HENRY SLESAR\nThe woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\nThe\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n \"What is it? What do you\n want?\""
],
[
"The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n\n\n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n\n\n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n\n\n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n\n\n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.",
"\"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something—\"\n\n\n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\nMr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n\n\n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n\n\n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n \"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n\n\n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"",
"Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n\n\n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n\n\n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n\n\n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\nThey\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n\n\n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"",
"Familiar faces, under shining\n helmets, moved towards\n him; the tips of sharp-pointed\n spears gleaming wickedly.\n And Sol Becker wondered—would\n he ever awake?\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nFantastic Universe\nJanuary 1957.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"\"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n\n\n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit—it's\n sure interesting.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n \"I guess it would be.\"\n\n\n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n\n\n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n\n\n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.",
"\"Sally!\" Mom was peering\n out of the screen door. \"You\n let Mr. Becker alone and go\n wash. Your Pa will be home\n soon.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, pooh,\" the girl said,\n her pigtails swinging. \"Do\n you got a girlfriend, mister?\"\n\n\n \"No.\" Sol struggled towards\n the house with her\n dead weight on his leg.\n \"Would you mind? I can't\n walk.\"\n\n\n \"Would you be my boyfriend?\"\n\n\n \"Well, we'll talk about it.\n If you let go my leg.\"\n\n\n Inside the house, she said:\n \"We're having pot roast. You\n stayin'?\"\n\n\n \"Of course Mr. Becker's\n stayin',\" Mom said. \"He's our\n guest.\"",
"\"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n\n\n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n\n\n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n\n\n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.",
"He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n\n\n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n \"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n\n\n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n \"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n\n\n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n\n\n He learned little.\nAt\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n\n\n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n \"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n\n\n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"",
"\"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n\n\n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n\n\n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n\n\n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n\n\n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n \"Now is it any of\nyour\nbusiness? I mean, is it?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n\n\n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n \"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n\n\n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n\n\n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.",
"\"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n \"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n\n\n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n\n\n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n\n\n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n\n\n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\"",
"He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n\n\n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n\n\n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n\n\n \"Heart attack.\"\n\n\n The fat man chuckled.",
"\"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the\nleast\nI\n could do.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n \"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n\n\n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n\n\n \"None of\nyour\nbusiness,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n\n\n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.",
"The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n\n\n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n \"About my car—\"\n\n\n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n \"Your\ncar\n? Young man, ain't\n you got no\nrespect\n?\"\n\n\n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\nHe\n took a walk.",
"\"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n\n\n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n\n\n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n\n\n \"Goodnight.\"\n\n\n He read Sally's copy of\nTreasure Island\nfor about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n\n\n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...",
"\"I'm sorry—\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n\n\n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n \"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n\n\n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.",
"His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n\n\n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n\n\n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n \"What time is it?\"\n\n\n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n \"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"",
"\"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Thought so.\"\n\n\n Sol repeated the question.\n\n\n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n\n\n \"How—I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n\n\n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n\n\n That was that.\n\n\n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n\n\n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.",
"A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n \"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n\n\n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n\n\n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.",
"The man batted his eyes.\n \"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n \"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n \"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, Willie—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n\n\n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n \"Never seen you\n before. Night\nor\nday. Stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Come\non\n!\" Dawes said.\n\n\n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again."
],
[
"The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n\n\n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n\n\n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n\n\n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n\n\n \"You a stranger?\"",
"\"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n\n\n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n\n\n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n\n\n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.",
"A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n \"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n\n\n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n\n\n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.",
"Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n\n\n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n\n\n He learned little.\nAt\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n\n\n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n \"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n\n\n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"",
"\"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n\n\n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n\n\n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n\n\n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n\n\n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n \"Now is it any of\nyour\nbusiness? I mean, is it?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n\n\n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n \"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n\n\n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n\n\n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.",
"\"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n\n\n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n\n\n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n\n\n \"Goodnight.\"\n\n\n He read Sally's copy of\nTreasure Island\nfor about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n\n\n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...",
"The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n\n\n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n\n\n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n\n\n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n\n\n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.",
"\"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the\nleast\nI\n could do.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n \"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n\n\n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n\n\n \"None of\nyour\nbusiness,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n\n\n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.",
"The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n\n\n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n \"About my car—\"\n\n\n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n \"Your\ncar\n? Young man, ain't\n you got no\nrespect\n?\"\n\n\n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\nHe\n took a walk.",
"\"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Thought so.\"\n\n\n Sol repeated the question.\n\n\n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n\n\n \"How—I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n\n\n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n\n\n That was that.\n\n\n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n\n\n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.",
"\"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something—\"\n\n\n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\nMr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n\n\n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n\n\n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n \"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n\n\n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"",
"The man scratched his ear.\n \"Take you over to Sheriff\n Coogan after breakfast. He'll\n let the Stateys know about it.\n My name's Dawes.\"\n\n\n Sol accepted a careful\n handshake.\n\n\n \"Don't get many people\n comin' into town,\" Dawes\n said, looking at him curiously.\n \"Ain't seen a stranger in\n years. But you look like the\n rest of us.\" He chuckled.\n\n\n Mom called out: \"Breakfast!\"\nAt\n the table, Dawes\n asked his destination.\n\n\n \"Wedding in Salinas,\" he\n explained. \"Old Army friend\n of mine. I picked this hitchhiker\n up about two miles from\n here. He\nseemed\nokay.\"\n\n\n \"Never can tell,\" Dawes\n said placidly, munching egg.\n \"Hey, Ma. That why you\n were so late comin' to court\n last night?\"",
"Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n\n\n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n\n\n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n\n\n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\nThey\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n\n\n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"",
"\"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n\n\n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit—it's\n sure interesting.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n \"I guess it would be.\"\n\n\n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n\n\n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n\n\n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.",
"The man batted his eyes.\n \"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n \"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n \"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, Willie—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n\n\n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n \"Never seen you\n before. Night\nor\nday. Stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Come\non\n!\" Dawes said.\n\n\n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.",
"\"I'm sorry—\" Sol's voice\n was pained. \"The man in the\n diner said you might put me\n up. I had my car stolen: a\n hitchhiker; going to Salinas ...\"\n He was puffing.\n\n\n \"Hitchhiker? I don't understand.\"\n She clucked at the\n sight of the pool of water he\n was creating in her foyer.\n \"Well, come inside, for heaven's\n sake. You're soaking!\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Sol said gratefully.\n\n\n With the door firmly shut\n behind him, the warm interior\n of the little house covered\n him like a blanket. He\n shivered, and let the warmth\n seep over him. \"I'm terribly\n sorry. I know how late it is.\"\n He looked at his watch, but\n the face was too misty to\n make out the hour.",
"He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n\n\n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n \"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n\n\n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n \"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n\n\n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n\n\n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n\n\n \"Heart attack.\"\n\n\n The fat man chuckled.",
"His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n\n\n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n\n\n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n \"What time is it?\"\n\n\n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n \"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"",
"\"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n\n\n \"The what?\"\n\n\n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n\n\n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes."
],
[
"He leaped out of the chair\n as voices sounded behind the\n door. Dawes was kicking it\n open with his foot, his arms\n laden with two rather large\n feet, still encased in bedroom\n slippers. Charlie was at the\n other end of the burden,\n which appeared to be a middle-aged\n man in pajamas. The\n Sheriff followed the trio up\n with a sad, undertaker expression.\n Behind him came Mrs.\n Brundage, properly weeping.\n\n\n \"We'll take him to the funeral\n parlor,\" Dawes said,\n breathing hard. \"Weighs a\n ton, don't he?\"\n\n\n \"What killed him?\" Sol\n said.\n\n\n \"Heart attack.\"\n\n\n The fat man chuckled.",
"A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n \"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n\n\n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n\n\n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.",
"The man batted his eyes.\n \"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n \"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n \"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, Willie—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n\n\n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n \"Never seen you\n before. Night\nor\nday. Stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Come\non\n!\" Dawes said.\n\n\n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.",
"\"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n\n\n \"Please ...\"\n\n\n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n\n\n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n\n\n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n\n\n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable—\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n\n\n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...",
"\"He didn't mean no harm,\"\n the woman snuffled. \"He was\n just purely ornery, Vincent\n was. Just plain mean stubborn.\"\n\n\n \"The law's the law,\" the\n fat man sighed.\n\n\n Sol couldn't hold himself\n in.\n\n\n \"What law? Who's dead?\n How did it happen?\"\n\n\n Dawes looked at him disgustedly.\n \"Now is it any of\nyour\nbusiness? I mean, is it?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Sol said\n miserably.\n\n\n \"You better stay out of\n this,\" the Sheriff warned.\n \"This is a local matter, young\n man. You better stay in the\n shop while we go up.\"\n\n\n They filed past him and the\n crying Mrs. Brundage.\n\n\n When they were out of\n sight, Sol pleaded with her.",
"Dawes cupped his hands\n over the plate glass and\n peered inside. Gold letters on\n the glass advertised: HAIRCUT\n SHAVE & MASSAGE\n PARLOR. He reported: \"Nobody\n in the shop. Must be\n upstairs.\"\nThe\n fat man rang the\n bell. It was a while before an\n answer came.\n\n\n It was a reedy woman in a\n housecoat, her hair in curlers,\n her eyes red and swollen.\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Dawes said\n gently. \"Don't you take on\n like that, Mrs. Brundage. You\n heard the charges. It hadda\n be this way.\"\n\n\n \"My poor Vincent,\" she\n sobbed.\n\n\n \"Better let us up,\" the\n Sheriff said kindly. \"No use\n just lettin' him lay there,\n Mrs. Brundage.\"",
"\"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the\nleast\nI\n could do.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n \"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n\n\n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n\n\n \"None of\nyour\nbusiness,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n\n\n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.",
"The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n\n\n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n\n\n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n\n\n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n\n\n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.",
"\"I'd think about that,\" he\n said. \"Writing it up, I mean.\n A lot of folks would think\n you were just plum crazy.\"\n\n\n Sol laughed feebly. \"I\n guess they would at that.\"\n\n\n \"Goodnight,\" Dawes said.\n\n\n \"Goodnight.\"\n\n\n He read Sally's copy of\nTreasure Island\nfor about\n half an hour. Then he undressed,\n made himself comfortable\n on the sofa, snuggled\n under the soft blanket\n that Mom had provided, and\n shut his eyes.\n\n\n He reviewed the events of\n the day before dropping off\n to sleep. The troublesome\n Sally. The strange dream\n world of Armagon. The visit\n to the barber shop. The removal\n of Brundage's body.\n The conversations with the\n townspeople. Dawes' suspicious\n attitude ...",
"Sol grabbed his topcoat and\n followed the man out the\n door.\n\n\n \"Have to stop someplace\n first,\" Dawes said. \"But we'll\n be pickin' up the Sheriff on\n the way. Okay with you?\"\n\n\n \"Fine,\" Sol said uneasily.\n\n\n The rain had stopped, but\n the heavy clouds seemed reluctant\n to leave the skies over\n the small town. There was a\n skittish breeze blowing, and\n Sol Becker tightened the collar\n of his coat around his\n neck as he tried to keep up\n with the fast-stepping Dawes.\nThey\n crossed the\n street diagonally, and entered\n a two-story wooden building.\n Dawes took the stairs at a\n brisk pace, and pushed open\n the door on the second floor.\n A fat man looked up from\n behind a desk.\n\n\n \"Hi, Charlie. Thought I'd\n see if you wanted to help\n move Brundage.\"",
"\"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n\n\n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n\n\n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n\n\n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.",
"\"Uh-huh.\" Dawes looked\n reflective. \"You wouldn't be\n thinkin' about writing us up\n or anything. I mean, this is a\n pretty private affair.\"\n\n\n \"Writing it up?\" Sol\n blinked. \"I hadn't thought of\n it. But you'll have to admit—it's\n sure interesting.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Dawes said narrowly.\n \"I guess it would be.\"\n\n\n \"Supper!\" Mom called.\n\n\n After the meal, they spent\n a quiet evening at home. Sally\n went to bed, screaming her\n reluctance, at eight-thirty.\n Mom, dozing in the big chair\n near the fireplace, padded upstairs\n at nine. Then Dawes\n yawned widely, stood up, and\n said goodnight at quarter-of-ten.\n\n\n He paused in the doorway\n before leaving.",
"The tableau was grisly. Sol\n looked away, towards the\n comfortingly mundane atmosphere\n of the barber shop. But\n even the sight of the thick-padded\n chairs, the shaving\n mugs on the wall, the neat\n rows of cutting instruments,\n seemed grotesque and morbid.\n\n\n \"Listen,\" Sol said, as they\n went through the doorway.\n \"About my car—\"\n\n\n The Sheriff turned and regarded\n him lugubriously.\n \"Your\ncar\n? Young man, ain't\n you got no\nrespect\n?\"\n\n\n Sol swallowed hard and fell\n silent. He went outside with\n them, the woman slamming\n the barber-shop door behind\n him. He waited in front of\n the building while the men\n toted away the corpse to some\n new destination.\nHe\n took a walk.",
"He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n\n\n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n \"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n\n\n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n \"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"\"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Thought so.\"\n\n\n Sol repeated the question.\n\n\n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n\n\n \"How—I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n\n\n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n\n\n That was that.\n\n\n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n\n\n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.",
"\"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something—\"\n\n\n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\nMr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n\n\n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n\n\n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n \"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n\n\n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"",
"\"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n \"Does\nshe\ndream about this—Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n\n\n \"Yep.\"\n\n\n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n\n\n \"And you, Mr.—\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n\n\n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n\n\n The fat man giggled.\n\n\n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.",
"His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n\n\n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n\n\n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n \"What time is it?\"\n\n\n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n \"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"",
"He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\nHe\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n\n\n Then he went to sleep.\n\n\n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n\n\n \"Are you\nnakkid\n?\"",
"Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n\n\n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n\n\n He learned little.\nAt\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n\n\n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n \"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n\n\n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\""
],
[
"\"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n \"Does\nshe\ndream about this—Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n\n\n \"Yep.\"\n\n\n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n\n\n \"And you, Mr.—\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n\n\n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n\n\n The fat man giggled.\n\n\n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.",
"The man batted his eyes.\n \"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n \"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n \"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, Willie—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n\n\n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n \"Never seen you\n before. Night\nor\nday. Stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Come\non\n!\" Dawes said.\n\n\n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.",
"Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n\n\n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n\n\n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa!\nPa!\nLook who's here!\"\n\n\n Willie Dawes appeared.\nNo!\nSol thought. This was\nKing\nDawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n \"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n\n\n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n \"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now\nyou're\nin it, too.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"",
"A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n \"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n\n\n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n\n\n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.",
"\"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n\n\n \"The what?\"\n\n\n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n\n\n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.",
"\"\nSally!\n\" Mom again, sterner.\n \"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you\never\ngonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n\n\n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n \"Good morning.\"\n\n\n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n\n\n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"",
"\"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n \"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n\n\n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n\n\n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n\n\n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n\n\n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\"",
"\"Must be nearly three,\" the\n woman sniffed. \"You couldn't\n have come at a worse time. I\n was just on my way to\n court—\"\n\n\n The words slid by him. \"If\n I could just stay overnight.\n Until the morning. I could\n call some friends in San Fernando.\n I'm very susceptible to\n head colds,\" he added inanely.\n\n\n \"Well, take those shoes off,\n first,\" the woman grumbled.\n \"You can undress in the parlor,\n if you'll keep off the rug.\n You won't mind using the\n sofa?\"\n\n\n \"No, of course not. I'd be\n happy to pay—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, tush, nobody's asking\n you to pay. This isn't a hotel.\n You mind if I go back upstairs?\n They're gonna miss\n me at the palace.\"",
"The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n\n\n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n\n\n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n\n\n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n\n\n \"You a stranger?\"",
"Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So\nthat's\nthe\n snooper, eh?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n \"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n\n\n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n\n\n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n\n\n \"Now wait a minute—\"\n\n\n Charlie shouted.\n\n\n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough—\"\n\n\n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n\n\n The Knights stepped forward.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.",
"\"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n\n\n \"Please ...\"\n\n\n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n\n\n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n\n\n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n\n\n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable—\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n\n\n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...",
"His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n\n\n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n\n\n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n \"What time is it?\"\n\n\n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n \"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"",
"He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\nHe\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n\n\n Then he went to sleep.\n\n\n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n\n\n \"Are you\nnakkid\n?\"",
"\"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Thought so.\"\n\n\n Sol repeated the question.\n\n\n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n\n\n \"How—I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n\n\n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n\n\n That was that.\n\n\n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n\n\n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.",
"He tried for fifteen minutes\n to get through, but there\n was a woman on the line who\n was terribly upset about a\n cotton dress she had ordered\n from Sears, and was telling\n the world about it.\n\n\n Finally, he got his call\n through to Salinas, and a\n sleepy-voiced Fred, his old\n Army buddy, listened somewhat\n indifferently to his tale\n of woe. \"I might miss the\n wedding,\" Sol said unhappily.\n \"I'm awfully sorry.\" Fred\n didn't seem to be half as sorry\n as he was. When Sol hung\n up, he was feeling more despondent\n than ever.\n\n\n A man, tall and rangy, with\n a bobbing Adam's apple and\n a lined face, came into the\n hallway. \"Hullo?\" he said inquiringly.\n \"You the fella had\n the car stolen?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"\"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something—\"\n\n\n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\nMr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n\n\n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n\n\n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n \"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n\n\n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\"",
"Mom fixed him a light\n lunch, the greatest feature of\n which was some hot biscuits\n she plucked out of the oven.\n It made him feel almost normal.\n\n\n He wandered around the\n town some more after lunch,\n trying to spark conversation\n with the residents.\n\n\n He learned little.\nAt\n five-thirty, he returned\n to the Dawes house, and was\n promptly leaped upon by\n little Sally.\n\n\n \"Hi! Hi! Hi!\" she said,\n clutching his right leg and\n almost toppling him over.\n \"We had a party in school. I\n had chocolate cake. You goin'\n to stay with us?\"\n\n\n \"Just another night,\" Sol\n told her, trying to shake the\n girl off. \"If it's okay with\n your folks. They haven't\n found my car yet.\"",
"\"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n\n\n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n\n\n \"You mean—\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean\nyou\ndream about the same\n place?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n\n\n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n\n\n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n\n\n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.",
"The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n\n\n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n\n\n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n\n\n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n\n\n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.",
"\"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n\n\n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n\n\n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n\n\n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities."
],
[
"\"Look, Mr. Dawes.\" He was\n panting; the pace was fast.\n \"Does\nshe\ndream about this—Armagon,\n too? That woman\n back there?\"\n\n\n \"Yep.\"\n\n\n Charlie chuckled. \"He's a\n stranger, all right.\"\n\n\n \"And you, Mr.—\" Sol\n turned to the fat man. \"You\n also know about this palace\n and everything?\"\n\n\n \"I told you,\" Dawes said\n testily. \"Charlie here's Prince\n Regent. But don't let the fancy\n title fool you. He got no\n more power than any Knight\n of the Realm. He's just too\n dern fat to do much more'n\n sit on a throne and eat grapes.\n That right, Charlie?\"\n\n\n The fat man giggled.\n\n\n \"Here's the Sheriff,\" Dawes\n said.",
"Charlie, the fat man,\n clumsy as ever in his robes of\n State, said: \"So\nthat's\nthe\n snooper, eh?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" Dawes chuckled.\n \"Think you better round up\n the Knights.\"\n\n\n Sol said: \"The Knights?\"\n\n\n \"Exelution! Exelution!\"\n Sally shrieked.\n\n\n \"Now wait a minute—\"\n\n\n Charlie shouted.\n\n\n Running feet, clanking of\n armor. Sol backed up against\n a pillar. \"Now look here.\n You've gone far enough—\"\n\n\n \"Not quite,\" said the King.\n\n\n The Knights stepped forward.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" Sol screamed.",
"Mom was following him,\n her stout body regal in scarlet\n robes. \"Sally! You give\n Sir Coogan his helmet! You\n hear?\"\n\n\n \"Mrs. Dawes!\" Sol said.\n\n\n \"Why, Mr. Becker! How\n nice to see you again! Pa!\nPa!\nLook who's here!\"\n\n\n Willie Dawes appeared.\nNo!\nSol thought. This was\nKing\nDawes; nothing else\n could explain the magnificence\n of his attire.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Dawes said craftily.\n \"So I see. Welcome to Armagon,\n Mr. Becker.\"\n\n\n \"Armagon?\" Sol gaped.\n \"Then this is the place\n you've been dreaming about?\"\n\n\n \"Yep,\" the King said. \"And\n now\nyou're\nin it, too.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'm only dreaming!\"",
"Henry Slesar, young New York advertising executive and by now no\n longer a new-comer to either this magazine or to this field, describes\n a strange little town that you, yourself, may blunder into one of these\n evenings. But, if you do, beware—beware of the Knights!\ndream\n \ntown\nby ... HENRY SLESAR\nThe woman in the doorway looked so harmless. Who\n was to tell she had some rather startling interests?\nThe\n woman in the\n doorway looked like Mom in\n the homier political cartoons.\n She was plump, apple-cheeked,\n white-haired. She\n wore a fussy, old-fashioned\n nightgown, and was busily\n clutching a worn house-robe\n around her expansive middle.\n She blinked at Sol Becker's\n rain-flattened hair and hang-dog\n expression, and said:\n \"What is it? What do you\n want?\"",
"The man batted his eyes.\n \"Oh, Brundage!\" he said.\n \"You know, I clean forgot\n about him?\" He laughed.\n \"Imagine me forgetting\n that?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah.\" Dawes wasn't\n amused. \"And you Prince Regent.\"\n\n\n \"Aw, Willie—\"\n\n\n \"Well, come on. Stir that\n fat carcass. Gotta pick up\n Sheriff Coogan, too. This\n here gentleman has to see him\n about somethin' else.\"\n\n\n The man regarded Sol suspiciously.\n \"Never seen you\n before. Night\nor\nday. Stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Come\non\n!\" Dawes said.\n\n\n The fat man grunted and\n hoisted himself out of the\n swivel chair. He followed\n lamely behind the two men\n as they went out into the\n street again.",
"\"That's right, Pa.\" She\n poured the blackest coffee\n Sol had ever seen. \"Didn't\n miss much, though.\"\n\n\n \"What court is that?\" Sol\n asked politely, his mouth full.\n\n\n \"Umagum,\" Sally said, a\n piece of toast sticking out\n from the side of her mouth.\n \"Don't you know\nnothin'\n?\"\n\n\n \"\nArma\ngon,\" Dawes corrected.\n He looked sheepishly at\n the stranger. \"Don't expect\n Mister—\" He cocked an eyebrow.\n \"What's the name?\"\n\n\n \"Becker.\"\n\n\n \"Don't expect Mr. Becker\n knows anything about Armagon.\n It's just a dream, you\n know.\" He smiled apologetically.\n\n\n \"Dream? You mean this—Armagon\n is a place you dream\n about?\"",
"\"That's good,\" Sol said desperately.\n \"Now why don't you\n be a good girl and eat your\n poached eggs. In the kitchen.\"\n\n\n \"Ain't ready yet. You going\n to stay for breakfast?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going to do anything\n until you get out of\n here.\"\n\n\n She put the end of a pigtail\n in her mouth and sat down on\n the chair opposite. \"I went to\n the palace last night. They\n had an exelution.\"\n\n\n \"Please,\" Sol groaned. \"Be\n a good girl, Sally. If you let\n me get dressed, I'll show you\n how to take your thumb off.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that's an old trick. Did\n you ever see an exelution?\"\n\n\n \"No. Did you ever see a little\n girl with her hide\n tanned?\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\"",
"The town was just coming\n to life. People were strolling\n out of their houses, commenting\n on the weather, chuckling\n amiably about local affairs.\n Kids on bicycles were beginning\n to appear, jangling the\n little bells and hooting to\n each other. A woman, hanging\n wash in the back yard,\n called out to him, thinking\n he was somebody else.\n\n\n He found a little park, no\n more than twenty yards in\n circumference, centered\n around a weatherbeaten monument\n of some unrecognizable\n military figure. Three\n old men took their places on\n the bench that circled the\n General, and leaned on their\n canes.\n\n\n Sol was a civil engineer.\n But he made like a reporter.\n\n\n \"Pardon me, sir.\" The old\n man, leathery-faced, with a\n fine yellow moustache, looked\n at him dumbly. \"Have you\n ever heard of Armagon?\"\n\n\n \"You a stranger?\"",
"\"Tush,\" the woman said.\n She scurried out, and returned\n a moment later with a\n thick bath towel. \"Sorry I\n can't give you any bedding.\n But you'll find it nice and\n warm in here.\" She squinted\n at the dim face of a ship's-wheel\n clock on the mantle,\n and made a noise with her\n tongue. \"Three-thirty!\" she\n exclaimed. \"I'll miss the\n whole execution ...\"\n\n\n \"The what?\"\n\n\n \"Goodnight, young man,\"\n Mom said firmly.\n\n\n She padded off, leaving Sol\n holding the towel. He patted\n his face, and then scrubbed\n the wet tangle of brown hair.\n Carefully, he stepped off the\n carpet and onto the stone\n floor in front of the fireplace.\n He removed his\n drenched coat and suit jacket,\n and squeezed water out\n over the ashes.",
"\"What happened? How did\n your husband die?\"\n\n\n \"Please ...\"\n\n\n \"You must tell me! Was it\n something to do with Armagon?\n Do you dream about the\n place, too?\"\n\n\n She was shocked at the\n question. \"Of course!\"\n\n\n \"And your husband? Did\n he have the same dream?\"\n\n\n Fresh tears resulted. \"Can't\n you leave me alone?\" She\n turned her back. \"I got things\n to do. You can make yourself\n comfortable—\" She indicated\n the barber chairs, and left\n through the back door.\n\n\n Sol looked after her, and\n then ambled over to the first\n chair and slipped into the\n high seat. His reflection in\n the mirror, strangely gray in\n the dim light, made him\n groan. His clothes were a\n mess, and he needed a shave.\n If only Brundage had been\n alive ...",
"\"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Thought so.\"\n\n\n Sol repeated the question.\n\n\n \"Course I did. Been goin'\n there ever since I was a kid.\n Night-times, that is.\"\n\n\n \"How—I mean, what kind\n of place is it?\"\n\n\n \"Said you're a stranger?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Then 'tain't your business.\"\n\n\n That was that.\n\n\n He left the park, and wandered\n into a thriving luncheonette.\n He tried questioning\n the man behind the counter,\n who merely snickered and\n said: \"You stayin' with the\n Dawes, ain't you? Better ask\n Willie, then. He knows the\n place better than anybody.\"\n\n\n He asked about the execution,\n and the man stiffened.",
"\"\nSally!\n\" Mom again, sterner.\n \"You get out of there, or\n you-know-what ...\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" the girl said\n blithely. \"I'm goin' to the palace\n again. If I brush my\n teeth. Aren't you\never\ngonna\n get up?\" She skipped out of\n the room, and Sol hastily sat\n up and reached for his\n trousers.\n\n\n When he had dressed, the\n clothes still damp and unpleasant\n against his skin, he\n went out of the parlor and\n found the kitchen. Mom was\n busy at the stove. He said:\n \"Good morning.\"\n\n\n \"Breakfast in ten minutes,\"\n she said cheerfully. \"You like\n poached eggs?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Do you have a telephone?\"\n\n\n \"In the hallway. Party line,\n so you may have to wait.\"",
"A woman, with an empty\n market basket, nodded casually\n to them. \"Mornin', folks.\n Enjoyed it last night.\n Thought you made a right\n nice speech, Mr. Dawes.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Dawes answered\n gruffly, but obviously flattered.\n \"We were just goin'\n over to Brundage's to pick up\n the body. Ma's gonna pay a\n call on Mrs. Brundage around\n ten o'clock. You care to visit?\"\n\n\n \"Why, I think that's very\n nice,\" the woman said. \"I'll\n be sure and do that.\" She\n smiled at the fat man. \"Mornin',\n Prince.\"\n\n\n Sol's head was spinning. As\n they left the woman and continued\n their determined\n march down the quiet street,\n he tried to find answers.",
"The Sheriff, a sleepy-eyed\n citizen with a long, sad face,\n was rocking on a porch as\n they approached his house,\n trying to puff a half-lit pipe.\n He lifted one hand wearily\n when he saw them.\n\n\n \"Hi, Cookie,\" Dawes\n grinned. \"Thought you, me,\n and Charlie would get Brundage's\n body outa the house.\n This here's Mr. Becker; he\n got another problem. Mr.\n Becker, meet Cookie Coogan.\"\n\n\n The Sheriff joined the procession,\n pausing only once to\n inquire into Sol's predicament.\n\n\n He described the hitchhiker\n incident, but Coogan\n listened stoically. He murmured\n something about the\n Troopers, and shuffled alongside\n the puffing fat man.\n\n\n Sol soon realized that their\n destination was a barber shop.",
"He stripped down to his\n underwear, wondering about\n next morning's possible embarrassment,\n and decided to\n use the damp bath towel as a\n blanket. The sofa was downy\n and comfortable. He curled\n up under the towel, shivered\n once, and closed his eyes.\nHe\n was tired and very\n sleepy, and his customary\n nightly review was limited to\n a few detached thoughts\n about the wedding he was\n supposed to attend in Salinas\n that weekend ... the hoodlum\n who had responded to his\n good-nature by dumping him\n out of his own car ... the slogging\n walk to the village ...\n the little round woman who\n was hurrying off, like the\n White Rabbit, to some mysterious\n appointment on the\n upper floor ...\n\n\n Then he went to sleep.\n\n\n A voice awoke him, shrill\n and questioning.\n\n\n \"Are you\nnakkid\n?\"",
"\"Yep,\" Dawes said. He lifted\n cup to lip. \"Great coffee,\n Ma.\" He leaned back with a\n contented sigh. \"Dream about\n it every night. Got so used to\n the place, I get all confused\n in the daytime.\"\n\n\n Mom said: \"I get muddle-headed\n too, sometimes.\"\n\n\n \"You mean—\" Sol put his\n napkin in his lap. \"You mean\nyou\ndream about the same\n place?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Sally piped. \"We\n all go there at night. I'm goin'\n to the palace again, too.\"\n\n\n \"If you brush your teeth,\"\n Mom said primly.\n\n\n \"If I brush my teeth. Boy,\n you shoulda seen the exelution!\"\n\n\n \"Execution,\" her father\n said.",
"His eyes flew open, and he\n pulled the towel protectively\n around his body and glared\n at the little girl with the rust-red\n pigtails.\n\n\n \"Huh, mister?\" she said,\n pushing a finger against her\n freckled nose. \"Are you?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said angrily. \"I'm\n not naked. Will you please\n go away?\"\n\n\n \"Sally!\" It was Mom, appearing\n in the doorway of the\n parlor. \"You leave the gentleman\n alone.\" She went off\n again.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Sol said. \"Please let\n me get dressed. If you don't\n mind.\" The girl didn't move.\n \"What time is it?\"\n\n\n \"Dunno,\" Sally shrugged.\n \"I like poached eggs. They're\n my favorite eggs in the whole\n world.\"",
"\"Oh, my goodness!\" Mom\n got up hastily. \"That reminds\n me. I gotta call poor Mrs.\n Brundage. It's the\nleast\nI\n could do.\"\n\n\n \"Good idea,\" Dawes nodded.\n \"And I'll have to round\n up some folks and get old\n Brundage out of there.\"\n\n\n Sol was staring. He opened\n his mouth, but couldn't think\n of the right question to ask.\n Then he blurted out: \"What\n execution?\"\n\n\n \"None of\nyour\nbusiness,\"\n the man said coldly. \"You eat\n up, young man. If you want\n me to get Sheriff Coogan\n lookin' for your car.\"\n\n\n The rest of the meal went\n silently, except for Sally's insistence\n upon singing her\n school song between mouthfuls.\n When Dawes was\n through, he pushed back his\n plate and ordered Sol to get\n ready.",
"\"Don't think I can talk\n about that. Fella broke one of\n the Laws; that's about it.\n Don't see where you come\n into it.\"\n\n\n At eleven o'clock, he returned\n to the Dawes residence,\n and found Mom in the\n kitchen, surrounded by the\n warm nostalgic odor of home-baked\n bread. She told him\n that her husband had left a\n message for the stranger, informing\n him that the State\n Police would be around to get\n his story.\n\n\n He waited in the house,\n gloomily turning the pages of\n the local newspaper, searching\n for references to Armagon.\n He found nothing.\n\n\n At eleven-thirty, a brown-faced\n State Trooper came to\n call, and Sol told his story.\n He was promised nothing,\n and told to stay in town until\n he was contacted again by\n the authorities.",
"\"That's very kind of you,\"\n Sol said. \"I really wish you'd\n let me pay something—\"\n\n\n \"Don't want to hear another\n word about pay.\"\nMr. Dawes\n came home an\n hour later, looking tired.\n Mom pecked him lightly on\n the forehead. He glanced at\n the evening paper, and then\n spoke to Sol.\n\n\n \"Hear you been asking\n questions, Mr. Becker.\"\n\n\n Sol nodded, embarrassed.\n \"Guess I have. I'm awfully\n curious about this Armagon\n place. Never heard of anything\n like it before.\"\n\n\n Dawes grunted. \"You ain't\n a reporter?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no. I'm an engineer. I\n was just satisfying my own\n curiosity.\""
]
] |
train
|
61007
|
[
"What does the E.P. Locator detect?",
"Why was each inhabitant of the moon-town only referred to as their specific species rather than a distinct name?",
"Which fruit was NOT allowed to be tasted by the crew while visiting the moon-town?",
"What was thought to be used as an indication to settle the confusion between the crew and the two humans in moon-town?",
"Why was the cave the only place that was not visited?",
"What was an indicator that Adam, or Ha-Adamah, was only playing a part while communicating with the crew?",
"Why was the moon-town comically referred to as paradise by the priest?",
"Why was the Old Serpent satisfied that the crew would be returning to try and take their paradise?",
"Why had the owners of Little Probe obtained the E.P. Locator at such a discounted rate? ",
"What was determined to have created the bright light in the moon-town?"
] |
[
[
"Level of Human Activity",
"Level of Probing",
"Level of Spinal Fluid",
"Level of Perception"
],
[
"They were all distinct by their light, and only needed to be referred to as their species. ",
"The population was much too large to name each creature. ",
"The humans of moon-town felt no need to waste time in naming each living creature as they died off too quickly.",
"There was only one of each, therefore, they were called by their species. "
],
[
"Apples",
"Oranges",
"Pomegranate ",
"Grapes"
],
[
"An inquisition about knowledge",
"A game of checkers",
"A contest of preternatural intellect",
"A physical test "
],
[
"The cave was only a reflective illusion from the bright light. ",
"The crew ran out of time but planned to examine it upon their next arrival",
"Adam, or Ha-Adamah, told the crew that it was much to dangerous as there were evil creatures living inside. ",
"The serpent lives there and the crew was told that he was cranky."
],
[
"His eruption of laughter once the crew had left. ",
"He told the Old Serpent that he needed to write him new lines. ",
"His past involvement with show business.",
"He recalled his true name after the crew had left. "
],
[
"The woman did not speak the entire time they were there. ",
"There was only one man, so less competition for the attention of the woman.",
"The unlimited supply of fresh fruit was perfect for weight loss. ",
"There were less occupants, so less idiots to deal with. "
],
[
"He was happy to have new faces and needed the influx population to breed their new world. ",
"He was hopeful for a portion of the sale money. ",
"They needed to acquire their equipment for forming their new world. ",
"They were hopeful for settlers as they needed someone to help them fertilize the land to keep the fruits plentiful. "
],
[
"The readings were unclear as it had struggled with detecting E.P on worms. ",
"The designer had no longer used it as it had not detected E.P. on himself. ",
"It was a faulty machine and often shut off without notice. ",
"It often produced an orange light meaning it was unsure of the results. "
],
[
"The shining paint that was applied to the bodies of Adam and Eve. ",
"Artificial lighting that helped the fruits to produce more. ",
"The lights from the ship that were not turned off. ",
"Constant moon-light that failed to dim in order to help the fruits grow"
]
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[
"\"Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of\n the world to make sure we've missed nothing,\" said Stark.\n\n\n There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of\n analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was\n designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might\n be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the\n designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results.\n\n\n The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator\n had refused to read\nPositive\nwhen turned on the inventor himself,\n bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had\n extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He\n told the machine so heatedly.",
"And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or\n Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read\nPositive\non a\n number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not\n even read music. But it had also read\nPositive\non ninety per cent of\n the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a\n sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi\n it had read\nPositive\non a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of\n billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all\n was shown by the test.\n\n\n So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area\n and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one\n individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite\n action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and\n assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests.",
"The chordata discerner read\nPositive\nover most of the surface. There\n was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted\n several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought\n on the body?\n\n\n Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it\n required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found\n nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then\n it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only.\n\n\n \"Limited,\" said Steiner, \"as though within a pale. As though there were\n but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the\n surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours\n before it's back in our ken if we let it go now.\"",
"So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the\n Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig,\n the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the\n Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist\n and checker champion of the craft.\n\n\n Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary\n in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe\n went down to visit whatever was there.\n\n\n \"There's no town,\" said Steiner. \"Not a building. Yet we're on the\n track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a\n sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep on towards the minds,\" said Stark. \"They're our target.\"",
"Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever\n produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug\n of the shoulders in a man. They called it the \"You tell\nme\nlight.\"\n\n\n So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be\n extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be\n forewarned.\n\"Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner,\" said Stark, \"and the rest\n of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go\n down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about\n twelve hours.\"\n\n\n \"You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away\n from the thoughtful creature?\"\n\n\n \"No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason\n that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go\n down boldly and visit this.\"",
"The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that\n Glaser did\nnot\nhave extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary\n perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a\ndifference\n, the\n machine insisted.\n\n\n It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built\n others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners\n of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply.",
"\"Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate\n ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet\n Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic\n and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial\n neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of\n our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—\"\n\n\n \"And you had better have an armed escort when you return,\" said Father\n Briton.\n\n\n \"Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?\"\n\n\n \"It's as phony as a seven-credit note!\"\n\n\n \"You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by\n our senses? Why do you doubt?\"",
"\"This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human\n nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will\n whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar\n it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is\n strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what\n is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of\n this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you\n have to acquire your equipment as you can.\"\n\n\n He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers\n of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff\n space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and\n power packs to run a world.\n\n\n He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at\n the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner.",
"The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly:\n \"Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?\"\n\n\n \"You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then\n you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named\n Engineer. He is named Flunky.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks a lot,\" said Steiner.\n\n\n \"But are we not people?\" persisted Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be\n other people?\"\n\n\n \"And the damnest thing about it,\" muttered Langweilig, \"is, how are you\n going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling.\"\n\n\n \"Can we have something to eat?\" asked the Captain.",
"\"I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all;\n by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English.\"\n\n\n \"We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You\n wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would\n you?\"\n\n\n \"The fountain.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—I see.\"\nBut the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water,\n but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like\n the first water ever made.\n\n\n \"What do you make of them?\" asked Stark.\n\n\n \"Human,\" said Steiner. \"It may even be that they are a little more than\n human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem\n to be clothed, as it were, in dignity.\"",
"\"It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds.\n Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible,\n zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through\n with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of\n checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it\n was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally.\"\n\n\n \"They looked at the priest thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"But it was Paradise in one way,\" said Steiner at last.\n\n\n \"How?\"\n\n\n \"All the time we were there the woman did not speak.\"",
"\"A crowd would laugh if told of it,\" said Stark, \"but not many would\n laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible\n man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world\n and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds.\n Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They\n are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that\n we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone\n disturbed that happiness.\"\n\n\n \"I too am convinced,\" said Steiner. \"It is Paradise itself, where the\n lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed.\n It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part\n of the serpent, and intrude and spoil.\"",
"\"Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else,\" said Stark. \"A\n very promising site.\"\n\n\n \"And everything grows here,\" added Steiner. \"Those are Earth-fruits and\n I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs\n and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be,\n the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I\n haven't yet tried the—\" and he stopped.\n\n\n \"If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think,\" said Gilbert, \"then it\n will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or\n whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one.\"\n\n\n \"I won't be the first to eat one. You eat.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him first. You ask him.\"",
"He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at\n him, so he went on.\n\n\n \"Father Briton from Philadelphia,\" he said, \"on detached service. And\n you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?\"\n\n\n \"Ha-Adamah,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"And your daughter, or niece?\"\n\n\n It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the\n woman smiled, proving that she was human.\n\n\n \"The woman is named Hawwah,\" said the man. \"The sheep is named sheep,\n the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is\n named hoolock.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it\n that you use the English tongue?\"",
"\"Pick from the trees,\" said Ha-Adamah, \"and then it may be that you\n will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does\n not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you\n are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits.\"\n\n\n \"We will,\" said Captain Stark.\n\n\n They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the\n animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though\n they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they\n wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you.\n\n\n \"If there are only two people here,\" said Casper Craig, \"then it may be\n that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile\n wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And\n those rocks would bear examining.\"",
"Then Stark cut in once more: \"There must be some one question you could\n ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about\n a game of checkers?\"\n\n\n \"This is hardly the time for clowning,\" said Stark.\n\n\n \"I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of\n colors and first move.\"\n\n\n \"No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the\n champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker\n center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I\n never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam,\n and have a go at it.\"",
"\"Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks\n like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion,\n I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be\n Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming\n from?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll\n go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool\n with us.\"\n\n\n Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were\n like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either\n in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very\n bright light.\n\n\n \"Talk to them, Father Briton,\" said Stark. \"You are the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"Howdy,\" said the priest.",
"\"It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll\n have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped\n settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip\n and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of.\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better write me some new lines,\" said Adam. \"I feel like\n a goof saying those same ones to each bunch.\"\n\n\n \"You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show\n business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did\n change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the\n pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming\n better researched, and they insist on authenticity.",
"\"We will have to have another lion,\" said Eve. \"Bowser is getting old,\n and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have\n a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb.\"\n\n\n \"I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the\n crackpot settlers will bring a new lion.\"\n\n\n \"And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's\n hell.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it.\"\nCasper Craig was still dictating the gram:",
"\"I am probably the most skeptical man in the world,\" said Casper Craig\n the tycoon, \"but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it.\n It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to\n the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that\n perfection.\n\n\n \"So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety\n Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming,\n Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver,\n Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement\n Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices\n as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited.\"\nDown in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose\n names were \"Snake-Oil Sam,\" spoke to his underlings:"
],
[
"So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the\n Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig,\n the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the\n Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist\n and checker champion of the craft.\n\n\n Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary\n in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe\n went down to visit whatever was there.\n\n\n \"There's no town,\" said Steiner. \"Not a building. Yet we're on the\n track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a\n sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep on towards the minds,\" said Stark. \"They're our target.\"",
"The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly:\n \"Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?\"\n\n\n \"You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then\n you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named\n Engineer. He is named Flunky.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks a lot,\" said Steiner.\n\n\n \"But are we not people?\" persisted Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be\n other people?\"\n\n\n \"And the damnest thing about it,\" muttered Langweilig, \"is, how are you\n going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling.\"\n\n\n \"Can we have something to eat?\" asked the Captain.",
"He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at\n him, so he went on.\n\n\n \"Father Briton from Philadelphia,\" he said, \"on detached service. And\n you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?\"\n\n\n \"Ha-Adamah,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"And your daughter, or niece?\"\n\n\n It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the\n woman smiled, proving that she was human.\n\n\n \"The woman is named Hawwah,\" said the man. \"The sheep is named sheep,\n the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is\n named hoolock.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it\n that you use the English tongue?\"",
"\"Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks\n like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion,\n I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be\n Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming\n from?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll\n go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool\n with us.\"\n\n\n Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were\n like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either\n in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very\n bright light.\n\n\n \"Talk to them, Father Briton,\" said Stark. \"You are the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"Howdy,\" said the priest.",
"\"I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all;\n by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English.\"\n\n\n \"We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You\n wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would\n you?\"\n\n\n \"The fountain.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—I see.\"\nBut the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water,\n but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like\n the first water ever made.\n\n\n \"What do you make of them?\" asked Stark.\n\n\n \"Human,\" said Steiner. \"It may even be that they are a little more than\n human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem\n to be clothed, as it were, in dignity.\"",
"And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or\n Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read\nPositive\non a\n number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not\n even read music. But it had also read\nPositive\non ninety per cent of\n the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a\n sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi\n it had read\nPositive\non a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of\n billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all\n was shown by the test.\n\n\n So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area\n and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one\n individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite\n action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and\n assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests.",
"\"And very little else,\" said Father Briton, \"though that light trick\n does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia.\"\n\n\n \"Talk to them again,\" said Stark. \"You're the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Are there any other people here?\" Stark asked the man.\n\n\n \"The two of us. Man and woman.\"\n\n\n \"But are there any others?\"\n\n\n \"How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there\n be than man and woman?\"\n\n\n \"But is there more than one man or woman?\"\n\n\n \"How could there be more than one of anything?\"",
"The chordata discerner read\nPositive\nover most of the surface. There\n was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted\n several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought\n on the body?\n\n\n Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it\n required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found\n nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then\n it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only.\n\n\n \"Limited,\" said Steiner, \"as though within a pale. As though there were\n but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the\n surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours\n before it's back in our ken if we let it go now.\"",
"Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever\n produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug\n of the shoulders in a man. They called it the \"You tell\nme\nlight.\"\n\n\n So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be\n extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be\n forewarned.\n\"Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner,\" said Stark, \"and the rest\n of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go\n down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about\n twelve hours.\"\n\n\n \"You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away\n from the thoughtful creature?\"\n\n\n \"No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason\n that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go\n down boldly and visit this.\"",
"\"A crowd would laugh if told of it,\" said Stark, \"but not many would\n laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible\n man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world\n and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds.\n Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They\n are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that\n we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone\n disturbed that happiness.\"\n\n\n \"I too am convinced,\" said Steiner. \"It is Paradise itself, where the\n lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed.\n It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part\n of the serpent, and intrude and spoil.\"",
"IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE\n\n WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A\n\n CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS\nIN THE GARDEN\nBY R. A. LAFFERTY\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be\n life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So\n they skipped several steps in the procedure.",
"\"It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll\n have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped\n settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip\n and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of.\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better write me some new lines,\" said Adam. \"I feel like\n a goof saying those same ones to each bunch.\"\n\n\n \"You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show\n business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did\n change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the\n pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming\n better researched, and they insist on authenticity.",
"\"This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human\n nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will\n whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar\n it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is\n strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what\n is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of\n this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you\n have to acquire your equipment as you can.\"\n\n\n He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers\n of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff\n space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and\n power packs to run a world.\n\n\n He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at\n the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner.",
"\"Pick from the trees,\" said Ha-Adamah, \"and then it may be that you\n will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does\n not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you\n are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits.\"\n\n\n \"We will,\" said Captain Stark.\n\n\n They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the\n animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though\n they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they\n wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you.\n\n\n \"If there are only two people here,\" said Casper Craig, \"then it may be\n that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile\n wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And\n those rocks would bear examining.\"",
"\"It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds.\n Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible,\n zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through\n with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of\n checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it\n was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally.\"\n\n\n \"They looked at the priest thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"But it was Paradise in one way,\" said Steiner at last.\n\n\n \"How?\"\n\n\n \"All the time we were there the woman did not speak.\"",
"\"Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate\n ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet\n Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic\n and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial\n neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of\n our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—\"\n\n\n \"And you had better have an armed escort when you return,\" said Father\n Briton.\n\n\n \"Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?\"\n\n\n \"It's as phony as a seven-credit note!\"\n\n\n \"You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by\n our senses? Why do you doubt?\"",
"\"I am probably the most skeptical man in the world,\" said Casper Craig\n the tycoon, \"but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it.\n It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to\n the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that\n perfection.\n\n\n \"So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety\n Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming,\n Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver,\n Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement\n Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices\n as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited.\"\nDown in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose\n names were \"Snake-Oil Sam,\" spoke to his underlings:",
"\"No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you.\"\nThey were there for three days. They were delighted with the place.\n It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two\n inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave.\n\n\n \"What is there, Adam?\" asked Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long\n been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we\n are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we\n persevere, it will come by him.\"\n\n\n They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time\n there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they\n left. And they talked of it as they took off.",
"\"Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else,\" said Stark. \"A\n very promising site.\"\n\n\n \"And everything grows here,\" added Steiner. \"Those are Earth-fruits and\n I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs\n and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be,\n the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I\n haven't yet tried the—\" and he stopped.\n\n\n \"If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think,\" said Gilbert, \"then it\n will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or\n whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one.\"\n\n\n \"I won't be the first to eat one. You eat.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him first. You ask him.\"",
"\"I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the\n beginning.\"\n\n\n \"And do you think that you will ever die?\"\n\n\n \"To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of\n fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine.\"\n\n\n \"And are you completely happy here?\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught\n that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it\n vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and\n even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught\n that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost.\"\n\n\n \"Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I\n am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect.\""
],
[
"\"Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else,\" said Stark. \"A\n very promising site.\"\n\n\n \"And everything grows here,\" added Steiner. \"Those are Earth-fruits and\n I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs\n and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be,\n the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I\n haven't yet tried the—\" and he stopped.\n\n\n \"If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think,\" said Gilbert, \"then it\n will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or\n whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one.\"\n\n\n \"I won't be the first to eat one. You eat.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him first. You ask him.\"",
"\"Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden.\"\n\"Well, the analogy breaks down there,\" said Stark. \"I was almost\n beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what.\n Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah\n and Hawwah mean—?\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do. You know that as well as I.\"\n\n\n \"I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same\n proposition to maintain here as on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"All things are possible.\"\n\n\n And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: \"No,\n no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!\"",
"So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the\n Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig,\n the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the\n Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist\n and checker champion of the craft.\n\n\n Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary\n in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe\n went down to visit whatever was there.\n\n\n \"There's no town,\" said Steiner. \"Not a building. Yet we're on the\n track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a\n sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep on towards the minds,\" said Stark. \"They're our target.\"",
"It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it.\n\n\n \"Once more, Father,\" said Stark, \"you should be the authority; but does\n not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a\n medieval painting?\"\n\n\n \"It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew\n exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too\n incredible.\"\n\n\n \"It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?\"\n\n\n \"Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never\n did understand the answer, however.\"\n\n\n \"And have you gotten no older in all that time?\"",
"\"Pick from the trees,\" said Ha-Adamah, \"and then it may be that you\n will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does\n not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you\n are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits.\"\n\n\n \"We will,\" said Captain Stark.\n\n\n They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the\n animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though\n they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they\n wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you.\n\n\n \"If there are only two people here,\" said Casper Craig, \"then it may be\n that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile\n wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And\n those rocks would bear examining.\"",
"\"It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll\n have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped\n settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip\n and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of.\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better write me some new lines,\" said Adam. \"I feel like\n a goof saying those same ones to each bunch.\"\n\n\n \"You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show\n business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did\n change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the\n pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming\n better researched, and they insist on authenticity.",
"The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly:\n \"Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?\"\n\n\n \"You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then\n you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named\n Engineer. He is named Flunky.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks a lot,\" said Steiner.\n\n\n \"But are we not people?\" persisted Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be\n other people?\"\n\n\n \"And the damnest thing about it,\" muttered Langweilig, \"is, how are you\n going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling.\"\n\n\n \"Can we have something to eat?\" asked the Captain.",
"\"A crowd would laugh if told of it,\" said Stark, \"but not many would\n laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible\n man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world\n and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds.\n Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They\n are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that\n we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone\n disturbed that happiness.\"\n\n\n \"I too am convinced,\" said Steiner. \"It is Paradise itself, where the\n lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed.\n It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part\n of the serpent, and intrude and spoil.\"",
"\"No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you.\"\nThey were there for three days. They were delighted with the place.\n It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two\n inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave.\n\n\n \"What is there, Adam?\" asked Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long\n been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we\n are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we\n persevere, it will come by him.\"\n\n\n They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time\n there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they\n left. And they talked of it as they took off.",
"\"This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human\n nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will\n whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar\n it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is\n strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what\n is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of\n this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you\n have to acquire your equipment as you can.\"\n\n\n He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers\n of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff\n space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and\n power packs to run a world.\n\n\n He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at\n the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner.",
"\"I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all;\n by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English.\"\n\n\n \"We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You\n wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would\n you?\"\n\n\n \"The fountain.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—I see.\"\nBut the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water,\n but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like\n the first water ever made.\n\n\n \"What do you make of them?\" asked Stark.\n\n\n \"Human,\" said Steiner. \"It may even be that they are a little more than\n human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem\n to be clothed, as it were, in dignity.\"",
"IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE\n\n WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A\n\n CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS\nIN THE GARDEN\nBY R. A. LAFFERTY\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be\n life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So\n they skipped several steps in the procedure.",
"The chordata discerner read\nPositive\nover most of the surface. There\n was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted\n several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought\n on the body?\n\n\n Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it\n required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found\n nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then\n it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only.\n\n\n \"Limited,\" said Steiner, \"as though within a pale. As though there were\n but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the\n surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours\n before it's back in our ken if we let it go now.\"",
"Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever\n produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug\n of the shoulders in a man. They called it the \"You tell\nme\nlight.\"\n\n\n So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be\n extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be\n forewarned.\n\"Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner,\" said Stark, \"and the rest\n of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go\n down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about\n twelve hours.\"\n\n\n \"You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away\n from the thoughtful creature?\"\n\n\n \"No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason\n that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go\n down boldly and visit this.\"",
"\"Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks\n like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion,\n I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be\n Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming\n from?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll\n go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool\n with us.\"\n\n\n Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were\n like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either\n in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very\n bright light.\n\n\n \"Talk to them, Father Briton,\" said Stark. \"You are the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"Howdy,\" said the priest.",
"\"Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate\n ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet\n Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic\n and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial\n neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of\n our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—\"\n\n\n \"And you had better have an armed escort when you return,\" said Father\n Briton.\n\n\n \"Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?\"\n\n\n \"It's as phony as a seven-credit note!\"\n\n\n \"You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by\n our senses? Why do you doubt?\"",
"\"It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds.\n Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible,\n zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through\n with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of\n checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it\n was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally.\"\n\n\n \"They looked at the priest thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"But it was Paradise in one way,\" said Steiner at last.\n\n\n \"How?\"\n\n\n \"All the time we were there the woman did not speak.\"",
"He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at\n him, so he went on.\n\n\n \"Father Briton from Philadelphia,\" he said, \"on detached service. And\n you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?\"\n\n\n \"Ha-Adamah,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"And your daughter, or niece?\"\n\n\n It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the\n woman smiled, proving that she was human.\n\n\n \"The woman is named Hawwah,\" said the man. \"The sheep is named sheep,\n the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is\n named hoolock.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it\n that you use the English tongue?\"",
"\"I am probably the most skeptical man in the world,\" said Casper Craig\n the tycoon, \"but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it.\n It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to\n the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that\n perfection.\n\n\n \"So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety\n Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming,\n Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver,\n Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement\n Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices\n as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited.\"\nDown in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose\n names were \"Snake-Oil Sam,\" spoke to his underlings:",
"And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or\n Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read\nPositive\non a\n number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not\n even read music. But it had also read\nPositive\non ninety per cent of\n the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a\n sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi\n it had read\nPositive\non a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of\n billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all\n was shown by the test.\n\n\n So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area\n and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one\n individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite\n action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and\n assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests."
],
[
"So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the\n Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig,\n the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the\n Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist\n and checker champion of the craft.\n\n\n Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary\n in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe\n went down to visit whatever was there.\n\n\n \"There's no town,\" said Steiner. \"Not a building. Yet we're on the\n track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a\n sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep on towards the minds,\" said Stark. \"They're our target.\"",
"The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly:\n \"Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?\"\n\n\n \"You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then\n you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named\n Engineer. He is named Flunky.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks a lot,\" said Steiner.\n\n\n \"But are we not people?\" persisted Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be\n other people?\"\n\n\n \"And the damnest thing about it,\" muttered Langweilig, \"is, how are you\n going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling.\"\n\n\n \"Can we have something to eat?\" asked the Captain.",
"\"Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks\n like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion,\n I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be\n Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming\n from?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll\n go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool\n with us.\"\n\n\n Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were\n like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either\n in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very\n bright light.\n\n\n \"Talk to them, Father Briton,\" said Stark. \"You are the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"Howdy,\" said the priest.",
"\"I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all;\n by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English.\"\n\n\n \"We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You\n wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would\n you?\"\n\n\n \"The fountain.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—I see.\"\nBut the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water,\n but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like\n the first water ever made.\n\n\n \"What do you make of them?\" asked Stark.\n\n\n \"Human,\" said Steiner. \"It may even be that they are a little more than\n human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem\n to be clothed, as it were, in dignity.\"",
"\"It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll\n have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped\n settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip\n and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of.\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better write me some new lines,\" said Adam. \"I feel like\n a goof saying those same ones to each bunch.\"\n\n\n \"You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show\n business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did\n change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the\n pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming\n better researched, and they insist on authenticity.",
"Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever\n produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug\n of the shoulders in a man. They called it the \"You tell\nme\nlight.\"\n\n\n So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be\n extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be\n forewarned.\n\"Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner,\" said Stark, \"and the rest\n of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go\n down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about\n twelve hours.\"\n\n\n \"You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away\n from the thoughtful creature?\"\n\n\n \"No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason\n that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go\n down boldly and visit this.\"",
"The chordata discerner read\nPositive\nover most of the surface. There\n was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted\n several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought\n on the body?\n\n\n Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it\n required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found\n nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then\n it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only.\n\n\n \"Limited,\" said Steiner, \"as though within a pale. As though there were\n but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the\n surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours\n before it's back in our ken if we let it go now.\"",
"He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at\n him, so he went on.\n\n\n \"Father Briton from Philadelphia,\" he said, \"on detached service. And\n you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?\"\n\n\n \"Ha-Adamah,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"And your daughter, or niece?\"\n\n\n It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the\n woman smiled, proving that she was human.\n\n\n \"The woman is named Hawwah,\" said the man. \"The sheep is named sheep,\n the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is\n named hoolock.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it\n that you use the English tongue?\"",
"\"And very little else,\" said Father Briton, \"though that light trick\n does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia.\"\n\n\n \"Talk to them again,\" said Stark. \"You're the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Are there any other people here?\" Stark asked the man.\n\n\n \"The two of us. Man and woman.\"\n\n\n \"But are there any others?\"\n\n\n \"How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there\n be than man and woman?\"\n\n\n \"But is there more than one man or woman?\"\n\n\n \"How could there be more than one of anything?\"",
"And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or\n Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read\nPositive\non a\n number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not\n even read music. But it had also read\nPositive\non ninety per cent of\n the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a\n sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi\n it had read\nPositive\non a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of\n billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all\n was shown by the test.\n\n\n So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area\n and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one\n individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite\n action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and\n assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests.",
"\"This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human\n nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will\n whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar\n it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is\n strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what\n is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of\n this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you\n have to acquire your equipment as you can.\"\n\n\n He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers\n of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff\n space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and\n power packs to run a world.\n\n\n He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at\n the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner.",
"\"Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate\n ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet\n Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic\n and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial\n neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of\n our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—\"\n\n\n \"And you had better have an armed escort when you return,\" said Father\n Briton.\n\n\n \"Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?\"\n\n\n \"It's as phony as a seven-credit note!\"\n\n\n \"You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by\n our senses? Why do you doubt?\"",
"\"Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else,\" said Stark. \"A\n very promising site.\"\n\n\n \"And everything grows here,\" added Steiner. \"Those are Earth-fruits and\n I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs\n and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be,\n the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I\n haven't yet tried the—\" and he stopped.\n\n\n \"If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think,\" said Gilbert, \"then it\n will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or\n whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one.\"\n\n\n \"I won't be the first to eat one. You eat.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him first. You ask him.\"",
"\"Pick from the trees,\" said Ha-Adamah, \"and then it may be that you\n will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does\n not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you\n are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits.\"\n\n\n \"We will,\" said Captain Stark.\n\n\n They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the\n animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though\n they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they\n wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you.\n\n\n \"If there are only two people here,\" said Casper Craig, \"then it may be\n that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile\n wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And\n those rocks would bear examining.\"",
"\"A crowd would laugh if told of it,\" said Stark, \"but not many would\n laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible\n man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world\n and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds.\n Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They\n are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that\n we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone\n disturbed that happiness.\"\n\n\n \"I too am convinced,\" said Steiner. \"It is Paradise itself, where the\n lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed.\n It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part\n of the serpent, and intrude and spoil.\"",
"\"No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you.\"\nThey were there for three days. They were delighted with the place.\n It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two\n inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave.\n\n\n \"What is there, Adam?\" asked Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long\n been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we\n are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we\n persevere, it will come by him.\"\n\n\n They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time\n there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they\n left. And they talked of it as they took off.",
"Then Stark cut in once more: \"There must be some one question you could\n ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about\n a game of checkers?\"\n\n\n \"This is hardly the time for clowning,\" said Stark.\n\n\n \"I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of\n colors and first move.\"\n\n\n \"No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the\n champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker\n center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I\n never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam,\n and have a go at it.\"",
"\"We will have to have another lion,\" said Eve. \"Bowser is getting old,\n and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have\n a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb.\"\n\n\n \"I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the\n crackpot settlers will bring a new lion.\"\n\n\n \"And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's\n hell.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it.\"\nCasper Craig was still dictating the gram:",
"IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE\n\n WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A\n\n CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS\nIN THE GARDEN\nBY R. A. LAFFERTY\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be\n life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So\n they skipped several steps in the procedure.",
"\"Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of\n the world to make sure we've missed nothing,\" said Stark.\n\n\n There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of\n analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was\n designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might\n be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the\n designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results.\n\n\n The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator\n had refused to read\nPositive\nwhen turned on the inventor himself,\n bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had\n extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He\n told the machine so heatedly."
],
[
"\"It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds.\n Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible,\n zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through\n with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of\n checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it\n was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally.\"\n\n\n \"They looked at the priest thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"But it was Paradise in one way,\" said Steiner at last.\n\n\n \"How?\"\n\n\n \"All the time we were there the woman did not speak.\"",
"\"Pick from the trees,\" said Ha-Adamah, \"and then it may be that you\n will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does\n not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you\n are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits.\"\n\n\n \"We will,\" said Captain Stark.\n\n\n They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the\n animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though\n they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they\n wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you.\n\n\n \"If there are only two people here,\" said Casper Craig, \"then it may be\n that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile\n wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And\n those rocks would bear examining.\"",
"\"No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you.\"\nThey were there for three days. They were delighted with the place.\n It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two\n inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave.\n\n\n \"What is there, Adam?\" asked Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long\n been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we\n are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we\n persevere, it will come by him.\"\n\n\n They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time\n there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they\n left. And they talked of it as they took off.",
"\"A crowd would laugh if told of it,\" said Stark, \"but not many would\n laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible\n man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world\n and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds.\n Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They\n are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that\n we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone\n disturbed that happiness.\"\n\n\n \"I too am convinced,\" said Steiner. \"It is Paradise itself, where the\n lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed.\n It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part\n of the serpent, and intrude and spoil.\"",
"So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the\n Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig,\n the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the\n Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist\n and checker champion of the craft.\n\n\n Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary\n in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe\n went down to visit whatever was there.\n\n\n \"There's no town,\" said Steiner. \"Not a building. Yet we're on the\n track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a\n sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep on towards the minds,\" said Stark. \"They're our target.\"",
"Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever\n produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug\n of the shoulders in a man. They called it the \"You tell\nme\nlight.\"\n\n\n So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be\n extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be\n forewarned.\n\"Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner,\" said Stark, \"and the rest\n of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go\n down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about\n twelve hours.\"\n\n\n \"You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away\n from the thoughtful creature?\"\n\n\n \"No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason\n that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go\n down boldly and visit this.\"",
"\"This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human\n nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will\n whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar\n it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is\n strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what\n is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of\n this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you\n have to acquire your equipment as you can.\"\n\n\n He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers\n of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff\n space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and\n power packs to run a world.\n\n\n He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at\n the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner.",
"\"We will have to have another lion,\" said Eve. \"Bowser is getting old,\n and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have\n a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb.\"\n\n\n \"I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the\n crackpot settlers will bring a new lion.\"\n\n\n \"And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's\n hell.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it.\"\nCasper Craig was still dictating the gram:",
"It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it.\n\n\n \"Once more, Father,\" said Stark, \"you should be the authority; but does\n not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a\n medieval painting?\"\n\n\n \"It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew\n exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too\n incredible.\"\n\n\n \"It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?\"\n\n\n \"Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never\n did understand the answer, however.\"\n\n\n \"And have you gotten no older in all that time?\"",
"\"I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all;\n by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English.\"\n\n\n \"We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You\n wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would\n you?\"\n\n\n \"The fountain.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—I see.\"\nBut the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water,\n but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like\n the first water ever made.\n\n\n \"What do you make of them?\" asked Stark.\n\n\n \"Human,\" said Steiner. \"It may even be that they are a little more than\n human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem\n to be clothed, as it were, in dignity.\"",
"He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at\n him, so he went on.\n\n\n \"Father Briton from Philadelphia,\" he said, \"on detached service. And\n you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?\"\n\n\n \"Ha-Adamah,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"And your daughter, or niece?\"\n\n\n It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the\n woman smiled, proving that she was human.\n\n\n \"The woman is named Hawwah,\" said the man. \"The sheep is named sheep,\n the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is\n named hoolock.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it\n that you use the English tongue?\"",
"\"I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the\n beginning.\"\n\n\n \"And do you think that you will ever die?\"\n\n\n \"To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of\n fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine.\"\n\n\n \"And are you completely happy here?\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught\n that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it\n vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and\n even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught\n that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost.\"\n\n\n \"Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I\n am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect.\"",
"\"I am probably the most skeptical man in the world,\" said Casper Craig\n the tycoon, \"but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it.\n It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to\n the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that\n perfection.\n\n\n \"So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety\n Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming,\n Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver,\n Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement\n Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices\n as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited.\"\nDown in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose\n names were \"Snake-Oil Sam,\" spoke to his underlings:",
"\"It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll\n have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped\n settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip\n and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of.\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better write me some new lines,\" said Adam. \"I feel like\n a goof saying those same ones to each bunch.\"\n\n\n \"You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show\n business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did\n change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the\n pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming\n better researched, and they insist on authenticity.",
"\"And very little else,\" said Father Briton, \"though that light trick\n does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia.\"\n\n\n \"Talk to them again,\" said Stark. \"You're the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Are there any other people here?\" Stark asked the man.\n\n\n \"The two of us. Man and woman.\"\n\n\n \"But are there any others?\"\n\n\n \"How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there\n be than man and woman?\"\n\n\n \"But is there more than one man or woman?\"\n\n\n \"How could there be more than one of anything?\"",
"\"Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks\n like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion,\n I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be\n Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming\n from?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll\n go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool\n with us.\"\n\n\n Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were\n like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either\n in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very\n bright light.\n\n\n \"Talk to them, Father Briton,\" said Stark. \"You are the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"Howdy,\" said the priest.",
"The chordata discerner read\nPositive\nover most of the surface. There\n was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted\n several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought\n on the body?\n\n\n Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it\n required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found\n nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then\n it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only.\n\n\n \"Limited,\" said Steiner, \"as though within a pale. As though there were\n but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the\n surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours\n before it's back in our ken if we let it go now.\"",
"The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly:\n \"Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?\"\n\n\n \"You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then\n you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named\n Engineer. He is named Flunky.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks a lot,\" said Steiner.\n\n\n \"But are we not people?\" persisted Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be\n other people?\"\n\n\n \"And the damnest thing about it,\" muttered Langweilig, \"is, how are you\n going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling.\"\n\n\n \"Can we have something to eat?\" asked the Captain.",
"\"Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate\n ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet\n Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic\n and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial\n neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of\n our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—\"\n\n\n \"And you had better have an armed escort when you return,\" said Father\n Briton.\n\n\n \"Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?\"\n\n\n \"It's as phony as a seven-credit note!\"\n\n\n \"You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by\n our senses? Why do you doubt?\"",
"\"Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else,\" said Stark. \"A\n very promising site.\"\n\n\n \"And everything grows here,\" added Steiner. \"Those are Earth-fruits and\n I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs\n and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be,\n the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I\n haven't yet tried the—\" and he stopped.\n\n\n \"If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think,\" said Gilbert, \"then it\n will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or\n whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one.\"\n\n\n \"I won't be the first to eat one. You eat.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him first. You ask him.\""
],
[
"The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly:\n \"Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?\"\n\n\n \"You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then\n you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named\n Engineer. He is named Flunky.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks a lot,\" said Steiner.\n\n\n \"But are we not people?\" persisted Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be\n other people?\"\n\n\n \"And the damnest thing about it,\" muttered Langweilig, \"is, how are you\n going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling.\"\n\n\n \"Can we have something to eat?\" asked the Captain.",
"He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at\n him, so he went on.\n\n\n \"Father Briton from Philadelphia,\" he said, \"on detached service. And\n you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?\"\n\n\n \"Ha-Adamah,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"And your daughter, or niece?\"\n\n\n It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the\n woman smiled, proving that she was human.\n\n\n \"The woman is named Hawwah,\" said the man. \"The sheep is named sheep,\n the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is\n named hoolock.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it\n that you use the English tongue?\"",
"\"It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll\n have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped\n settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip\n and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of.\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better write me some new lines,\" said Adam. \"I feel like\n a goof saying those same ones to each bunch.\"\n\n\n \"You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show\n business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did\n change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the\n pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming\n better researched, and they insist on authenticity.",
"\"Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden.\"\n\"Well, the analogy breaks down there,\" said Stark. \"I was almost\n beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what.\n Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah\n and Hawwah mean—?\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do. You know that as well as I.\"\n\n\n \"I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same\n proposition to maintain here as on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"All things are possible.\"\n\n\n And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: \"No,\n no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!\"",
"\"Pick from the trees,\" said Ha-Adamah, \"and then it may be that you\n will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does\n not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you\n are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits.\"\n\n\n \"We will,\" said Captain Stark.\n\n\n They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the\n animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though\n they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they\n wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you.\n\n\n \"If there are only two people here,\" said Casper Craig, \"then it may be\n that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile\n wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And\n those rocks would bear examining.\"",
"Then Stark cut in once more: \"There must be some one question you could\n ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about\n a game of checkers?\"\n\n\n \"This is hardly the time for clowning,\" said Stark.\n\n\n \"I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of\n colors and first move.\"\n\n\n \"No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the\n champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker\n center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I\n never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam,\n and have a go at it.\"",
"\"I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all;\n by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English.\"\n\n\n \"We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You\n wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would\n you?\"\n\n\n \"The fountain.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—I see.\"\nBut the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water,\n but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like\n the first water ever made.\n\n\n \"What do you make of them?\" asked Stark.\n\n\n \"Human,\" said Steiner. \"It may even be that they are a little more than\n human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem\n to be clothed, as it were, in dignity.\"",
"\"No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you.\"\nThey were there for three days. They were delighted with the place.\n It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two\n inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave.\n\n\n \"What is there, Adam?\" asked Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long\n been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we\n are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we\n persevere, it will come by him.\"\n\n\n They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time\n there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they\n left. And they talked of it as they took off.",
"It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it.\n\n\n \"Once more, Father,\" said Stark, \"you should be the authority; but does\n not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a\n medieval painting?\"\n\n\n \"It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew\n exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too\n incredible.\"\n\n\n \"It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?\"\n\n\n \"Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never\n did understand the answer, however.\"\n\n\n \"And have you gotten no older in all that time?\"",
"\"It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds.\n Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible,\n zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through\n with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of\n checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it\n was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally.\"\n\n\n \"They looked at the priest thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"But it was Paradise in one way,\" said Steiner at last.\n\n\n \"How?\"\n\n\n \"All the time we were there the woman did not speak.\"",
"\"And very little else,\" said Father Briton, \"though that light trick\n does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia.\"\n\n\n \"Talk to them again,\" said Stark. \"You're the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Are there any other people here?\" Stark asked the man.\n\n\n \"The two of us. Man and woman.\"\n\n\n \"But are there any others?\"\n\n\n \"How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there\n be than man and woman?\"\n\n\n \"But is there more than one man or woman?\"\n\n\n \"How could there be more than one of anything?\"",
"\"We will have to have another lion,\" said Eve. \"Bowser is getting old,\n and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have\n a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb.\"\n\n\n \"I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the\n crackpot settlers will bring a new lion.\"\n\n\n \"And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's\n hell.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it.\"\nCasper Craig was still dictating the gram:",
"\"A crowd would laugh if told of it,\" said Stark, \"but not many would\n laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible\n man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world\n and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds.\n Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They\n are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that\n we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone\n disturbed that happiness.\"\n\n\n \"I too am convinced,\" said Steiner. \"It is Paradise itself, where the\n lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed.\n It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part\n of the serpent, and intrude and spoil.\"",
"And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or\n Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read\nPositive\non a\n number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not\n even read music. But it had also read\nPositive\non ninety per cent of\n the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a\n sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi\n it had read\nPositive\non a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of\n billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all\n was shown by the test.\n\n\n So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area\n and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one\n individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite\n action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and\n assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests.",
"The chordata discerner read\nPositive\nover most of the surface. There\n was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted\n several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought\n on the body?\n\n\n Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it\n required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found\n nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then\n it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only.\n\n\n \"Limited,\" said Steiner, \"as though within a pale. As though there were\n but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the\n surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours\n before it's back in our ken if we let it go now.\"",
"\"Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else,\" said Stark. \"A\n very promising site.\"\n\n\n \"And everything grows here,\" added Steiner. \"Those are Earth-fruits and\n I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs\n and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be,\n the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I\n haven't yet tried the—\" and he stopped.\n\n\n \"If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think,\" said Gilbert, \"then it\n will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or\n whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one.\"\n\n\n \"I won't be the first to eat one. You eat.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him first. You ask him.\"",
"\"This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human\n nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will\n whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar\n it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is\n strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what\n is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of\n this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you\n have to acquire your equipment as you can.\"\n\n\n He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers\n of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff\n space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and\n power packs to run a world.\n\n\n He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at\n the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner.",
"\"I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the\n beginning.\"\n\n\n \"And do you think that you will ever die?\"\n\n\n \"To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of\n fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine.\"\n\n\n \"And are you completely happy here?\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught\n that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it\n vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and\n even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught\n that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost.\"\n\n\n \"Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I\n am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect.\"",
"So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the\n Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig,\n the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the\n Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist\n and checker champion of the craft.\n\n\n Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary\n in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe\n went down to visit whatever was there.\n\n\n \"There's no town,\" said Steiner. \"Not a building. Yet we're on the\n track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a\n sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep on towards the minds,\" said Stark. \"They're our target.\"",
"\"Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks\n like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion,\n I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be\n Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming\n from?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll\n go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool\n with us.\"\n\n\n Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were\n like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either\n in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very\n bright light.\n\n\n \"Talk to them, Father Briton,\" said Stark. \"You are the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"Howdy,\" said the priest."
],
[
"\"It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds.\n Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible,\n zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through\n with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of\n checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it\n was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally.\"\n\n\n \"They looked at the priest thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"But it was Paradise in one way,\" said Steiner at last.\n\n\n \"How?\"\n\n\n \"All the time we were there the woman did not speak.\"",
"So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the\n Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig,\n the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the\n Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist\n and checker champion of the craft.\n\n\n Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary\n in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe\n went down to visit whatever was there.\n\n\n \"There's no town,\" said Steiner. \"Not a building. Yet we're on the\n track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a\n sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep on towards the minds,\" said Stark. \"They're our target.\"",
"\"A crowd would laugh if told of it,\" said Stark, \"but not many would\n laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible\n man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world\n and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds.\n Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They\n are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that\n we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone\n disturbed that happiness.\"\n\n\n \"I too am convinced,\" said Steiner. \"It is Paradise itself, where the\n lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed.\n It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part\n of the serpent, and intrude and spoil.\"",
"He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at\n him, so he went on.\n\n\n \"Father Briton from Philadelphia,\" he said, \"on detached service. And\n you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?\"\n\n\n \"Ha-Adamah,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"And your daughter, or niece?\"\n\n\n It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the\n woman smiled, proving that she was human.\n\n\n \"The woman is named Hawwah,\" said the man. \"The sheep is named sheep,\n the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is\n named hoolock.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it\n that you use the English tongue?\"",
"\"Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate\n ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet\n Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic\n and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial\n neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of\n our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—\"\n\n\n \"And you had better have an armed escort when you return,\" said Father\n Briton.\n\n\n \"Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?\"\n\n\n \"It's as phony as a seven-credit note!\"\n\n\n \"You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by\n our senses? Why do you doubt?\"",
"The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly:\n \"Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?\"\n\n\n \"You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then\n you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named\n Engineer. He is named Flunky.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks a lot,\" said Steiner.\n\n\n \"But are we not people?\" persisted Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be\n other people?\"\n\n\n \"And the damnest thing about it,\" muttered Langweilig, \"is, how are you\n going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling.\"\n\n\n \"Can we have something to eat?\" asked the Captain.",
"\"This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human\n nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will\n whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar\n it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is\n strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what\n is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of\n this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you\n have to acquire your equipment as you can.\"\n\n\n He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers\n of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff\n space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and\n power packs to run a world.\n\n\n He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at\n the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner.",
"\"I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all;\n by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English.\"\n\n\n \"We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You\n wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would\n you?\"\n\n\n \"The fountain.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—I see.\"\nBut the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water,\n but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like\n the first water ever made.\n\n\n \"What do you make of them?\" asked Stark.\n\n\n \"Human,\" said Steiner. \"It may even be that they are a little more than\n human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem\n to be clothed, as it were, in dignity.\"",
"\"We will have to have another lion,\" said Eve. \"Bowser is getting old,\n and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have\n a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb.\"\n\n\n \"I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the\n crackpot settlers will bring a new lion.\"\n\n\n \"And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's\n hell.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it.\"\nCasper Craig was still dictating the gram:",
"\"I am probably the most skeptical man in the world,\" said Casper Craig\n the tycoon, \"but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it.\n It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to\n the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that\n perfection.\n\n\n \"So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety\n Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming,\n Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver,\n Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement\n Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices\n as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited.\"\nDown in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose\n names were \"Snake-Oil Sam,\" spoke to his underlings:",
"\"Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks\n like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion,\n I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be\n Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming\n from?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll\n go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool\n with us.\"\n\n\n Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were\n like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either\n in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very\n bright light.\n\n\n \"Talk to them, Father Briton,\" said Stark. \"You are the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"Howdy,\" said the priest.",
"It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it.\n\n\n \"Once more, Father,\" said Stark, \"you should be the authority; but does\n not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a\n medieval painting?\"\n\n\n \"It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew\n exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too\n incredible.\"\n\n\n \"It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?\"\n\n\n \"Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never\n did understand the answer, however.\"\n\n\n \"And have you gotten no older in all that time?\"",
"\"It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll\n have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped\n settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip\n and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of.\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better write me some new lines,\" said Adam. \"I feel like\n a goof saying those same ones to each bunch.\"\n\n\n \"You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show\n business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did\n change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the\n pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming\n better researched, and they insist on authenticity.",
"\"I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the\n beginning.\"\n\n\n \"And do you think that you will ever die?\"\n\n\n \"To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of\n fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine.\"\n\n\n \"And are you completely happy here?\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught\n that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it\n vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and\n even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught\n that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost.\"\n\n\n \"Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I\n am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect.\"",
"\"And very little else,\" said Father Briton, \"though that light trick\n does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia.\"\n\n\n \"Talk to them again,\" said Stark. \"You're the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Are there any other people here?\" Stark asked the man.\n\n\n \"The two of us. Man and woman.\"\n\n\n \"But are there any others?\"\n\n\n \"How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there\n be than man and woman?\"\n\n\n \"But is there more than one man or woman?\"\n\n\n \"How could there be more than one of anything?\"",
"\"Pick from the trees,\" said Ha-Adamah, \"and then it may be that you\n will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does\n not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you\n are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits.\"\n\n\n \"We will,\" said Captain Stark.\n\n\n They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the\n animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though\n they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they\n wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you.\n\n\n \"If there are only two people here,\" said Casper Craig, \"then it may be\n that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile\n wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And\n those rocks would bear examining.\"",
"\"Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden.\"\n\"Well, the analogy breaks down there,\" said Stark. \"I was almost\n beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what.\n Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah\n and Hawwah mean—?\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do. You know that as well as I.\"\n\n\n \"I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same\n proposition to maintain here as on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"All things are possible.\"\n\n\n And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: \"No,\n no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!\"",
"\"No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you.\"\nThey were there for three days. They were delighted with the place.\n It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two\n inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave.\n\n\n \"What is there, Adam?\" asked Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long\n been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we\n are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we\n persevere, it will come by him.\"\n\n\n They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time\n there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they\n left. And they talked of it as they took off.",
"Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever\n produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug\n of the shoulders in a man. They called it the \"You tell\nme\nlight.\"\n\n\n So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be\n extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be\n forewarned.\n\"Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner,\" said Stark, \"and the rest\n of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go\n down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about\n twelve hours.\"\n\n\n \"You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away\n from the thoughtful creature?\"\n\n\n \"No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason\n that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go\n down boldly and visit this.\"",
"IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE\n\n WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A\n\n CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS\nIN THE GARDEN\nBY R. A. LAFFERTY\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be\n life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So\n they skipped several steps in the procedure."
],
[
"\"A crowd would laugh if told of it,\" said Stark, \"but not many would\n laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible\n man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world\n and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds.\n Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They\n are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that\n we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone\n disturbed that happiness.\"\n\n\n \"I too am convinced,\" said Steiner. \"It is Paradise itself, where the\n lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed.\n It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part\n of the serpent, and intrude and spoil.\"",
"\"No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you.\"\nThey were there for three days. They were delighted with the place.\n It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two\n inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave.\n\n\n \"What is there, Adam?\" asked Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long\n been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we\n are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we\n persevere, it will come by him.\"\n\n\n They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time\n there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they\n left. And they talked of it as they took off.",
"\"I am probably the most skeptical man in the world,\" said Casper Craig\n the tycoon, \"but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it.\n It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to\n the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that\n perfection.\n\n\n \"So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety\n Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming,\n Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver,\n Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement\n Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices\n as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited.\"\nDown in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose\n names were \"Snake-Oil Sam,\" spoke to his underlings:",
"\"It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds.\n Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible,\n zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through\n with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of\n checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it\n was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally.\"\n\n\n \"They looked at the priest thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"But it was Paradise in one way,\" said Steiner at last.\n\n\n \"How?\"\n\n\n \"All the time we were there the woman did not speak.\"",
"\"Pick from the trees,\" said Ha-Adamah, \"and then it may be that you\n will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does\n not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you\n are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits.\"\n\n\n \"We will,\" said Captain Stark.\n\n\n They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the\n animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though\n they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they\n wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you.\n\n\n \"If there are only two people here,\" said Casper Craig, \"then it may be\n that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile\n wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And\n those rocks would bear examining.\"",
"It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it.\n\n\n \"Once more, Father,\" said Stark, \"you should be the authority; but does\n not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a\n medieval painting?\"\n\n\n \"It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew\n exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too\n incredible.\"\n\n\n \"It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?\"\n\n\n \"Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never\n did understand the answer, however.\"\n\n\n \"And have you gotten no older in all that time?\"",
"\"I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the\n beginning.\"\n\n\n \"And do you think that you will ever die?\"\n\n\n \"To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of\n fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine.\"\n\n\n \"And are you completely happy here?\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught\n that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it\n vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and\n even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught\n that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost.\"\n\n\n \"Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I\n am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect.\"",
"\"I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all;\n by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English.\"\n\n\n \"We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You\n wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would\n you?\"\n\n\n \"The fountain.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—I see.\"\nBut the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water,\n but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like\n the first water ever made.\n\n\n \"What do you make of them?\" asked Stark.\n\n\n \"Human,\" said Steiner. \"It may even be that they are a little more than\n human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem\n to be clothed, as it were, in dignity.\"",
"\"Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden.\"\n\"Well, the analogy breaks down there,\" said Stark. \"I was almost\n beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what.\n Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah\n and Hawwah mean—?\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do. You know that as well as I.\"\n\n\n \"I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same\n proposition to maintain here as on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"All things are possible.\"\n\n\n And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: \"No,\n no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!\"",
"\"This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human\n nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will\n whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar\n it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is\n strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what\n is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of\n this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you\n have to acquire your equipment as you can.\"\n\n\n He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers\n of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff\n space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and\n power packs to run a world.\n\n\n He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at\n the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner.",
"\"We will have to have another lion,\" said Eve. \"Bowser is getting old,\n and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have\n a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb.\"\n\n\n \"I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the\n crackpot settlers will bring a new lion.\"\n\n\n \"And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's\n hell.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it.\"\nCasper Craig was still dictating the gram:",
"The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly:\n \"Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?\"\n\n\n \"You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then\n you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named\n Engineer. He is named Flunky.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks a lot,\" said Steiner.\n\n\n \"But are we not people?\" persisted Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be\n other people?\"\n\n\n \"And the damnest thing about it,\" muttered Langweilig, \"is, how are you\n going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling.\"\n\n\n \"Can we have something to eat?\" asked the Captain.",
"\"It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll\n have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped\n settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip\n and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of.\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better write me some new lines,\" said Adam. \"I feel like\n a goof saying those same ones to each bunch.\"\n\n\n \"You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show\n business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did\n change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the\n pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming\n better researched, and they insist on authenticity.",
"He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at\n him, so he went on.\n\n\n \"Father Briton from Philadelphia,\" he said, \"on detached service. And\n you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?\"\n\n\n \"Ha-Adamah,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"And your daughter, or niece?\"\n\n\n It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the\n woman smiled, proving that she was human.\n\n\n \"The woman is named Hawwah,\" said the man. \"The sheep is named sheep,\n the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is\n named hoolock.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it\n that you use the English tongue?\"",
"\"Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else,\" said Stark. \"A\n very promising site.\"\n\n\n \"And everything grows here,\" added Steiner. \"Those are Earth-fruits and\n I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs\n and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be,\n the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I\n haven't yet tried the—\" and he stopped.\n\n\n \"If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think,\" said Gilbert, \"then it\n will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or\n whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one.\"\n\n\n \"I won't be the first to eat one. You eat.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him first. You ask him.\"",
"\"Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate\n ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet\n Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic\n and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial\n neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of\n our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—\"\n\n\n \"And you had better have an armed escort when you return,\" said Father\n Briton.\n\n\n \"Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?\"\n\n\n \"It's as phony as a seven-credit note!\"\n\n\n \"You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by\n our senses? Why do you doubt?\"",
"The chordata discerner read\nPositive\nover most of the surface. There\n was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted\n several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought\n on the body?\n\n\n Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it\n required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found\n nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then\n it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only.\n\n\n \"Limited,\" said Steiner, \"as though within a pale. As though there were\n but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the\n surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours\n before it's back in our ken if we let it go now.\"",
"So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the\n Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig,\n the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the\n Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist\n and checker champion of the craft.\n\n\n Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary\n in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe\n went down to visit whatever was there.\n\n\n \"There's no town,\" said Steiner. \"Not a building. Yet we're on the\n track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a\n sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep on towards the minds,\" said Stark. \"They're our target.\"",
"Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever\n produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug\n of the shoulders in a man. They called it the \"You tell\nme\nlight.\"\n\n\n So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be\n extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be\n forewarned.\n\"Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner,\" said Stark, \"and the rest\n of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go\n down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about\n twelve hours.\"\n\n\n \"You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away\n from the thoughtful creature?\"\n\n\n \"No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason\n that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go\n down boldly and visit this.\"",
"Then Stark cut in once more: \"There must be some one question you could\n ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about\n a game of checkers?\"\n\n\n \"This is hardly the time for clowning,\" said Stark.\n\n\n \"I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of\n colors and first move.\"\n\n\n \"No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the\n champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker\n center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I\n never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam,\n and have a go at it.\""
],
[
"The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that\n Glaser did\nnot\nhave extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary\n perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a\ndifference\n, the\n machine insisted.\n\n\n It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built\n others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners\n of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply.",
"\"Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of\n the world to make sure we've missed nothing,\" said Stark.\n\n\n There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of\n analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was\n designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might\n be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the\n designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results.\n\n\n The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator\n had refused to read\nPositive\nwhen turned on the inventor himself,\n bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had\n extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He\n told the machine so heatedly.",
"So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the\n Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig,\n the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the\n Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist\n and checker champion of the craft.\n\n\n Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary\n in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe\n went down to visit whatever was there.\n\n\n \"There's no town,\" said Steiner. \"Not a building. Yet we're on the\n track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a\n sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep on towards the minds,\" said Stark. \"They're our target.\"",
"And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or\n Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read\nPositive\non a\n number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not\n even read music. But it had also read\nPositive\non ninety per cent of\n the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a\n sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi\n it had read\nPositive\non a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of\n billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all\n was shown by the test.\n\n\n So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area\n and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one\n individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite\n action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and\n assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests.",
"\"This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human\n nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will\n whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar\n it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is\n strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what\n is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of\n this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you\n have to acquire your equipment as you can.\"\n\n\n He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers\n of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff\n space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and\n power packs to run a world.\n\n\n He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at\n the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner.",
"\"I am probably the most skeptical man in the world,\" said Casper Craig\n the tycoon, \"but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it.\n It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to\n the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that\n perfection.\n\n\n \"So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety\n Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming,\n Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver,\n Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement\n Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices\n as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited.\"\nDown in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose\n names were \"Snake-Oil Sam,\" spoke to his underlings:",
"The chordata discerner read\nPositive\nover most of the surface. There\n was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted\n several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought\n on the body?\n\n\n Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it\n required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found\n nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then\n it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only.\n\n\n \"Limited,\" said Steiner, \"as though within a pale. As though there were\n but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the\n surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours\n before it's back in our ken if we let it go now.\"",
"\"Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate\n ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet\n Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic\n and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial\n neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of\n our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—\"\n\n\n \"And you had better have an armed escort when you return,\" said Father\n Briton.\n\n\n \"Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?\"\n\n\n \"It's as phony as a seven-credit note!\"\n\n\n \"You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by\n our senses? Why do you doubt?\"",
"IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE\n\n WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A\n\n CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS\nIN THE GARDEN\nBY R. A. LAFFERTY\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be\n life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So\n they skipped several steps in the procedure.",
"Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever\n produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug\n of the shoulders in a man. They called it the \"You tell\nme\nlight.\"\n\n\n So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be\n extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be\n forewarned.\n\"Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner,\" said Stark, \"and the rest\n of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go\n down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about\n twelve hours.\"\n\n\n \"You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away\n from the thoughtful creature?\"\n\n\n \"No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason\n that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go\n down boldly and visit this.\"",
"The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly:\n \"Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?\"\n\n\n \"You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then\n you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named\n Engineer. He is named Flunky.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks a lot,\" said Steiner.\n\n\n \"But are we not people?\" persisted Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be\n other people?\"\n\n\n \"And the damnest thing about it,\" muttered Langweilig, \"is, how are you\n going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling.\"\n\n\n \"Can we have something to eat?\" asked the Captain.",
"\"A crowd would laugh if told of it,\" said Stark, \"but not many would\n laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible\n man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world\n and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds.\n Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They\n are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that\n we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone\n disturbed that happiness.\"\n\n\n \"I too am convinced,\" said Steiner. \"It is Paradise itself, where the\n lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed.\n It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part\n of the serpent, and intrude and spoil.\"",
"\"I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all;\n by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English.\"\n\n\n \"We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You\n wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would\n you?\"\n\n\n \"The fountain.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—I see.\"\nBut the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water,\n but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like\n the first water ever made.\n\n\n \"What do you make of them?\" asked Stark.\n\n\n \"Human,\" said Steiner. \"It may even be that they are a little more than\n human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem\n to be clothed, as it were, in dignity.\"",
"\"It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll\n have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped\n settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip\n and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of.\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better write me some new lines,\" said Adam. \"I feel like\n a goof saying those same ones to each bunch.\"\n\n\n \"You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show\n business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did\n change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the\n pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming\n better researched, and they insist on authenticity.",
"He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at\n him, so he went on.\n\n\n \"Father Briton from Philadelphia,\" he said, \"on detached service. And\n you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?\"\n\n\n \"Ha-Adamah,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"And your daughter, or niece?\"\n\n\n It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the\n woman smiled, proving that she was human.\n\n\n \"The woman is named Hawwah,\" said the man. \"The sheep is named sheep,\n the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is\n named hoolock.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it\n that you use the English tongue?\"",
"\"We will have to have another lion,\" said Eve. \"Bowser is getting old,\n and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have\n a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb.\"\n\n\n \"I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the\n crackpot settlers will bring a new lion.\"\n\n\n \"And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's\n hell.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it.\"\nCasper Craig was still dictating the gram:",
"\"It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds.\n Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible,\n zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through\n with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of\n checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it\n was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally.\"\n\n\n \"They looked at the priest thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"But it was Paradise in one way,\" said Steiner at last.\n\n\n \"How?\"\n\n\n \"All the time we were there the woman did not speak.\"",
"\"Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks\n like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion,\n I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be\n Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming\n from?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll\n go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool\n with us.\"\n\n\n Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were\n like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either\n in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very\n bright light.\n\n\n \"Talk to them, Father Briton,\" said Stark. \"You are the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"Howdy,\" said the priest.",
"Then Stark cut in once more: \"There must be some one question you could\n ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about\n a game of checkers?\"\n\n\n \"This is hardly the time for clowning,\" said Stark.\n\n\n \"I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of\n colors and first move.\"\n\n\n \"No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the\n champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker\n center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I\n never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam,\n and have a go at it.\"",
"\"No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you.\"\nThey were there for three days. They were delighted with the place.\n It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two\n inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave.\n\n\n \"What is there, Adam?\" asked Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long\n been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we\n are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we\n persevere, it will come by him.\"\n\n\n They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time\n there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they\n left. And they talked of it as they took off."
],
[
"So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the\n Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig,\n the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the\n Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist\n and checker champion of the craft.\n\n\n Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary\n in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe\n went down to visit whatever was there.\n\n\n \"There's no town,\" said Steiner. \"Not a building. Yet we're on the\n track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a\n sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep on towards the minds,\" said Stark. \"They're our target.\"",
"Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever\n produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug\n of the shoulders in a man. They called it the \"You tell\nme\nlight.\"\n\n\n So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be\n extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be\n forewarned.\n\"Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner,\" said Stark, \"and the rest\n of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go\n down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about\n twelve hours.\"\n\n\n \"You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away\n from the thoughtful creature?\"\n\n\n \"No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason\n that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go\n down boldly and visit this.\"",
"\"Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks\n like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion,\n I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be\n Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming\n from?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll\n go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool\n with us.\"\n\n\n Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were\n like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either\n in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very\n bright light.\n\n\n \"Talk to them, Father Briton,\" said Stark. \"You are the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"Howdy,\" said the priest.",
"The chordata discerner read\nPositive\nover most of the surface. There\n was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted\n several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought\n on the body?\n\n\n Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it\n required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found\n nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then\n it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only.\n\n\n \"Limited,\" said Steiner, \"as though within a pale. As though there were\n but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the\n surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours\n before it's back in our ken if we let it go now.\"",
"\"I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all;\n by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English.\"\n\n\n \"We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You\n wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would\n you?\"\n\n\n \"The fountain.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—I see.\"\nBut the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water,\n but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like\n the first water ever made.\n\n\n \"What do you make of them?\" asked Stark.\n\n\n \"Human,\" said Steiner. \"It may even be that they are a little more than\n human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem\n to be clothed, as it were, in dignity.\"",
"\"A crowd would laugh if told of it,\" said Stark, \"but not many would\n laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible\n man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world\n and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds.\n Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They\n are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that\n we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone\n disturbed that happiness.\"\n\n\n \"I too am convinced,\" said Steiner. \"It is Paradise itself, where the\n lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed.\n It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part\n of the serpent, and intrude and spoil.\"",
"\"Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate\n ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet\n Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic\n and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial\n neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of\n our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—\"\n\n\n \"And you had better have an armed escort when you return,\" said Father\n Briton.\n\n\n \"Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?\"\n\n\n \"It's as phony as a seven-credit note!\"\n\n\n \"You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by\n our senses? Why do you doubt?\"",
"\"It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds.\n Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible,\n zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through\n with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of\n checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it\n was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally.\"\n\n\n \"They looked at the priest thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"But it was Paradise in one way,\" said Steiner at last.\n\n\n \"How?\"\n\n\n \"All the time we were there the woman did not speak.\"",
"He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at\n him, so he went on.\n\n\n \"Father Briton from Philadelphia,\" he said, \"on detached service. And\n you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?\"\n\n\n \"Ha-Adamah,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"And your daughter, or niece?\"\n\n\n It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the\n woman smiled, proving that she was human.\n\n\n \"The woman is named Hawwah,\" said the man. \"The sheep is named sheep,\n the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is\n named hoolock.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it\n that you use the English tongue?\"",
"\"And very little else,\" said Father Briton, \"though that light trick\n does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia.\"\n\n\n \"Talk to them again,\" said Stark. \"You're the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Are there any other people here?\" Stark asked the man.\n\n\n \"The two of us. Man and woman.\"\n\n\n \"But are there any others?\"\n\n\n \"How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there\n be than man and woman?\"\n\n\n \"But is there more than one man or woman?\"\n\n\n \"How could there be more than one of anything?\"",
"IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE\n\n WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A\n\n CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS\nIN THE GARDEN\nBY R. A. LAFFERTY\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be\n life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So\n they skipped several steps in the procedure.",
"\"Pick from the trees,\" said Ha-Adamah, \"and then it may be that you\n will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does\n not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you\n are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits.\"\n\n\n \"We will,\" said Captain Stark.\n\n\n They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the\n animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though\n they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they\n wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you.\n\n\n \"If there are only two people here,\" said Casper Craig, \"then it may be\n that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile\n wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And\n those rocks would bear examining.\"",
"\"This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human\n nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will\n whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar\n it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is\n strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what\n is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of\n this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you\n have to acquire your equipment as you can.\"\n\n\n He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers\n of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff\n space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and\n power packs to run a world.\n\n\n He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at\n the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner.",
"\"We will have to have another lion,\" said Eve. \"Bowser is getting old,\n and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have\n a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb.\"\n\n\n \"I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the\n crackpot settlers will bring a new lion.\"\n\n\n \"And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's\n hell.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it.\"\nCasper Craig was still dictating the gram:",
"And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or\n Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read\nPositive\non a\n number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not\n even read music. But it had also read\nPositive\non ninety per cent of\n the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a\n sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi\n it had read\nPositive\non a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of\n billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all\n was shown by the test.\n\n\n So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area\n and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one\n individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite\n action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and\n assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests.",
"Then Stark cut in once more: \"There must be some one question you could\n ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about\n a game of checkers?\"\n\n\n \"This is hardly the time for clowning,\" said Stark.\n\n\n \"I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of\n colors and first move.\"\n\n\n \"No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the\n champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker\n center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I\n never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam,\n and have a go at it.\"",
"\"No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you.\"\nThey were there for three days. They were delighted with the place.\n It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two\n inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave.\n\n\n \"What is there, Adam?\" asked Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long\n been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we\n are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we\n persevere, it will come by him.\"\n\n\n They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time\n there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they\n left. And they talked of it as they took off.",
"The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly:\n \"Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?\"\n\n\n \"You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then\n you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named\n Engineer. He is named Flunky.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks a lot,\" said Steiner.\n\n\n \"But are we not people?\" persisted Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be\n other people?\"\n\n\n \"And the damnest thing about it,\" muttered Langweilig, \"is, how are you\n going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling.\"\n\n\n \"Can we have something to eat?\" asked the Captain.",
"\"Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden.\"\n\"Well, the analogy breaks down there,\" said Stark. \"I was almost\n beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what.\n Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah\n and Hawwah mean—?\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do. You know that as well as I.\"\n\n\n \"I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same\n proposition to maintain here as on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"All things are possible.\"\n\n\n And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: \"No,\n no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!\"",
"\"It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll\n have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped\n settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip\n and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of.\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better write me some new lines,\" said Adam. \"I feel like\n a goof saying those same ones to each bunch.\"\n\n\n \"You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show\n business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did\n change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the\n pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming\n better researched, and they insist on authenticity."
]
] |
train
|
61139
|
[
"How long ago was Retief given Whaffle’s consul position? \n\n",
"Of what species is Miss Meuhl and Retief?",
"What is the simplest description of what Miss Meuhl and Retief are in the minds of the Groacian race? Why is this significant to the story? \n\n",
"What is the conspiracy Retief is trying to uncover?",
"What is the name of the space cruiser that the Groacians are hiding?",
"How does Retief first manage to arrange an interview/interrogation with Groacians officials?",
"What official positions do Miss Muehl and Retief hold on Groac?",
"What are two examples of Groacian communication mechanisms?",
"Why isn’t Retief satisfied when the Groaci finally show him the missing cruiser?",
"Who betrays Retief? How and why?"
] |
[
[
"Three months ",
"Nine months ",
"Nine years ",
"One month"
],
[
"Groacian",
"Unknown ",
"Human",
"Reptile "
],
[
"They are illegal space travelers. This is significant because the crimes of explorers like them are what prompted the Groaci to hide the first human cruiser that arrived. \n\n",
"They are colonialists. This is significant because it is Miss Meuhl and Retief’s desire to colonize Groac that fuels the Groacian hatred of foreigners. \n\n",
"They are slaves. This is significant because it helps the reader understand that Retief is lashing out as a result of being oppressed for so long.",
"They are aliens. This is significant because Groacians see humans as alien to their planet, which helps the reader understand how prejudice develops on Groac. \n\n"
],
[
"Nine years ago Groacians invaded Earth and stole a Terran space cruiser. Retief wants to find out what happened to it.",
"Nine years ago, Consul Whaffle mysteriously disappeared from his government office. As the new consul, Retief feels it is his duty to find out what happened. ",
"Nine years ago, a Terran cruiser landed on Groac but soon mysteriously disappeared, along with its entire crew. Retief wants to find out what happened to the ship and its crew. \n\n",
"Nine years ago Terrans came to Groac and attempted to take over the existing government, but failed. During the skirmish, a Terran cruiser disappeared. Retief wants to find out why the siege failed and what happened to the cruiser.\n\n"
],
[
"The Terran",
"The Territory ",
"The Terror ",
"The Terrific "
],
[
"Retief tricks Miss Meuhl into luring Groacian officials to their office. Once they arrive, Retief blackmails them with information he stole from a bar tender. ",
"He gets into a bar fight, prompting an investigation and thus a visit from a Groacian government officials. Retief flips their interrogation when he begins to ask them the questions he needs answered. \n\n",
"He breaks into their place of business and demands he be met. At first the receptionist doesn’t let him in, but eventually breaks. \n\n",
"He steals vital information from the Groacian archives and plans to use it for blackmail. Then he gets into a fight with a police officer, prompting Groacian officials to visit his office. He blackmails them for info when they arrive. "
],
[
"Retief is Private Investigator for the Terrestrial States. Miss Meuhl is his administrative assistant. ",
"Retief is Consul for the Groacian States. Miss Meuhl is Consul for the Terrestrial States. \n\n",
"Retief is Consul for the Terrestrial States. Miss Meuhl is his administrative assistant. \n\n",
"Retief is Internal Police. Miss Meuhl is his administrative assistant. \n\n\n\n"
],
[
"Mandible snaps and throat-bladder bleats",
"Mandible wiggles and eye clogs",
"Jaw snaps and jugular cracks",
"Jowl clacks and eye beats "
],
[
"Retief believes the cruiser they show him is a decoy. The real missing cruiser was at least twenty-tons, which is much larger than the ship the Groacians reveal. \n\n",
"Retief believes the cruiser they show him isn’t human made at all, meaning the real cruiser is still out there. \n",
"Retief believes the cruiser they show him is a replica, meaning the real cruiser is still out there. \n\n",
"Retief believes the cruiser they show him is a decoy. The real missing cruiser was a battle ship, while the cruiser they show him is of the domestic variety. \n\n"
],
[
"The previous Consul, Whaffle. Whaffle confesses to Groacian police that Retief broke into the Archives and stole information about the missing cruiser. Whaffle did this because he wants his old position back. \n\n",
"Miss Meuhl. She reports Retief’s espionage to Groacian officials. She does this because she believes Retief isn’t acting the way he should as consul. \n",
"The crew from The Terrific. They have been in cahoots with the Groaci the entire time, and are dead set on betraying the human race in order to find financial gain on Groac. \n\n",
"The Groacian bar tender. He believed Retief needed to be beat up by the drunken Groacian. "
]
] |
[
1,
3,
4,
3,
4,
2,
3,
1,
1,
2
] |
[
0,
0,
1,
0,
0,
1,
0,
0,
1,
1
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[
[
"\"Never mind the excuses,\" Retief said. \"Just tell him I won't be\n there.\" He stood up.\n\n\n \"Are you leaving the office?\" Miss Meuhl adjusted her glasses. \"I have\n some important letters here for your signature.\"\n\n\n \"I don't recall dictating any letters today, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said,\n pulling on a light cape.\n\"I wrote them for you. They're just as Consul Whaffle would have wanted\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Did you write all Whaffle's letters for him, Miss Meuhl?\"\n\n\n \"Consul Whaffle was an extremely busy man,\" Miss Meuhl said stiffly.\n \"He had complete confidence in me.\"\n\n\n \"Since I'm cutting out the culture from now on,\" Retief said, \"I won't\n be so busy.\"",
"\"Yolanda Meuhl,\" he said without preamble, \"for the Foreign Minister of\n the Groacian Autonomy, I herewith accredit you as Terrestrial Consul\n to Groac, in accordance with the advices transmitted to my government\n direct from the Terrestrial Headquarters. As consul, you are requested\n to make available for questioning Mr. J. Retief, former consul, in\n connection with the assault on two peace keepers and illegal entry into\n the offices of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.\"\n\n\n \"Why, why,\" Miss Meuhl stammered. \"Yes, of course. And I do want to\n express my deepest regrets—\"\nRetief rose, went to the communicator, assisted Miss Meuhl aside.",
"\"I'll be back in a couple of hours,\" he said. Miss Meuhl stared after\n him silently as he closed the door.\nIt was an hour before dawn when Retief keyed the combination to the\n safe-lock and stepped into the darkened consular office. He looked\n tired.\n\n\n Miss Meuhl, dozing in a chair, awoke with a start. She looked at\n Retief, rose and snapped on a light, turned to stare.\n\n\n \"What in the world—Where have you been? What's happened to your\n clothing?\"\n\n\n \"I got a little dirty. Don't worry about it.\" Retief went to his desk,\n opened a drawer and replaced the needler.\n\n\n \"Where have you been?\" Miss Meuhl demanded. \"I stayed here—\"",
"Two Groaci wearing heavy eye-shields and elaborate crest ornaments\n indicative of rank rose as Retief entered the room. Neither offered a\n courteous snap of the mandibles, Retief noted. They were mad, all right.\n\n\n \"I am Fith, of the Terrestrial Desk, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr.\n Consul,\" the taller Groacian said, in lisping Terran. \"May I present\n Shluh, of the Internal Police?\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, gentlemen,\" Retief said. They resumed their seats. Miss\n Meuhl hovered nervously, then sat on the edge of a comfortless chair.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's such a pleasure—\" she began.\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" Retief said. \"These gentlemen didn't come here to\n sip tea today.\"",
"\"You can't turn this invitation down,\" Administrative Assistant Meuhl\n said flatly. \"I'll make that 'accepts with pleasure'.\"\n\n\n Retief exhaled a plume of cigar smoke.\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" he said, \"in the past couple of weeks I've sat through\n six light-concerts, four attempts at chamber music, and god knows how\n many assorted folk-art festivals. I've been tied up every off-duty\n hour since I got here—\"\n\n\n \"You can't offend the Groaci,\" Miss Meuhl said sharply. \"Consul Whaffle\n would never have been so rude.\"\n\n\n \"Whaffle left here three months ago,\" Retief said, \"leaving me in\n charge.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Miss Meuhl said, snapping off the dictyper. \"I'm sure I don't\n know what excuse I can give the Minister.\"",
"\"Just keep that recorder going,\" Retief snapped.\n\n\n \"I'll not be a party—\"\n\n\n \"You'll do as you're told, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said quietly. \"I'm\n telling you to make an official sealed record of this conversation.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl sat down.\n\n\n Fith puffed out his throat indignantly. \"You reopen an old wound,\n Mr. Consul. It reminds us of certain illegal treatment at Terrestrial\n hands—\"\n\n\n \"Hogwash,\" Retief said. \"That tune went over with my predecessors, but\n it hits a sour note with me.\"\n\n\n \"All our efforts,\" Miss Meuhl said, \"to live down that terrible\n episode! And you—\"",
"\"My government can entertain no further accusations, Mr. Consul,\"\n he said at last. \"I have been completely candid with you, I have\n overlooked your probing into matters not properly within your sphere of\n responsibility. My patience is at an end.\"\n\n\n \"Where is that ship?\" Retief rapped out. \"You never learn, do you?\n You're still convinced you can hide the whole thing and forget it. I'm\n telling you you can't.\"\n\n\n \"We return to the city now,\" Fith said. \"I can do no more.\"\n\n\n \"You can and you will, Fith,\" Retief said. \"I intend to get to the\n truth of this matter.\"\n\n\n Fith spoke to Shluh in rapid Groacian. The police chief gestured to his\n four armed constables. They moved to ring Retief in.",
"\"So true,\" Fith said. \"Frankly, I have had a most disturbing report,\n Mr. Consul. I shall ask Shluh to recount it.\" He nodded to the police\n chief.\n\n\n \"One hour ago,\" The Groacian said, \"a Groacian national was brought\n to hospital suffering from serious contusions. Questioning of this\n individual revealed that he had been set upon and beaten by a\n foreigner. A Terrestrial, to be precise. Investigation by my department\n indicates that the description of the culprit closely matches that of\n the Terrestrial Consul.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl gasped audibly.\n\n\n \"Have you ever heard,\" Retief said, looking steadily at Fith, \"of a\n Terrestrial cruiser, the\nISV Terrific\n, which dropped from sight in\n this sector nine years ago?\"\n\n\n \"Really!\" Miss Meuhl exclaimed, rising. \"I wash my hands—\"",
"\"I'm glad you did,\" Retief said. \"I hope you piled up a supply of food\n and water from the dispenser, too. We'll be holed up here for a week,\n at least.\" He jotted figures on a pad. \"Warm up the official sender. I\n have a long transmission for Regional Headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Are you going to tell me where you've been?\"\n\n\n \"I have a message to get off first, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said sharply.\n \"I've been to the Foreign Ministry,\" he added. \"I'll tell you all about\n it later.\"\n\n\n \"At this hour? There's no one there....\"\n\n\n \"Exactly.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl gasped. \"You mean you broke in? You burgled the Foreign\n Office?\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Retief said calmly. \"Now—\"",
"Retief stepped around him, seized his collar and yanked. The Groacian\n fell on his back. Retief stood over him. The downed native half-rose;\n Retief put a foot against his chest and pushed.\n\n\n \"To not be going anywhere for a few minutes,\" Retief said. \"To stay\n right here and have a nice long talk.\"\nII\n\n\n \"There you are!\" Miss Meuhl said, eyeing Retief over her lenses. \"There\n are two gentlemen waiting to see you. Groacian gentlemen.\"\n\n\n \"Government men, I imagine. Word travels fast.\" Retief pulled off his\n cape. \"This saves me the trouble of paying another call at the Foreign\n Ministry.\"\n\n\n \"What have you been doing? They seem very upset, I don't mind telling\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you don't. Come along. And bring an official recorder.\"",
"\"I'm on the side of common decency!\"\n\n\n \"You've been taken in. These people are concealing—\"\n\n\n \"You think all women are fools, don't you, Mr. Retief?\" She turned to\n the police chief and spoke into the microphone he held up.\n\n\n \"That's an illegal waiver,\" Retief said. \"I'm consul here, whatever\n rumors you've heard. This thing's coming out into the open, whatever\n you do. Don't add violation of the Consulate to the list of Groacian\n atrocities.\"\n\n\n \"Take the man,\" Shluh said.",
"In the front seat, Shluh looked straight ahead. The loosely-sprung\n vehicle bobbed and swayed along the narrow highway. Retief listened to\n the rhythmic puffing of the motor and said nothing.\nIII\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said, \"I want you to listen carefully to what I'm\n going to tell you. I have to move rapidly now, to catch the Groaci off\n guard.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about,\" Miss Meuhl snapped,\n her eyes sharp behind the heavy lenses.\n\n\n \"If you'll listen, you may find out,\" Retief said. \"I have no time\n to waste, Miss Meuhl. They won't be expecting an immediate move—I\n hope—and that may give me the latitude I need.\"",
"\"Well!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"May I ask where you'll be if something comes\n up?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going over to the Foreign Office Archives.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl blinked behind thick lenses. \"Whatever for?\"\n\n\n Retief looked thoughtfully at Miss Meuhl. \"You've been here on Groac\n for four years, Miss Meuhl. What was behind the coup d'etat that put\n the present government in power?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I haven't pried into—\"\n\n\n \"What about that Terrestrial cruiser? The one that disappeared out this\n way about ten years back?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Retief, those are just the sort of questions we\navoid\nwith the\n Groaci. I certainly hope you're not thinking of openly intruding—\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"",
"\"That had no bearing on the matter of your wild behavior! I must say,\n in all my years in the Corps, I've never encountered a personality less\n suited to diplomatic work.\"\nThe screen crackled, the ten-second transmission lag having elapsed.\n \"Mr. Retief,\" the face on the screen said, \"I am Counsellor Pardy,\n DSO-1, Deputy Under-secretary for the region. I have received a\n report on your conduct which makes it mandatory for me to relieve you\n administratively, vice Miss Yolanda Meuhl, DAO-9. Pending the findings\n of a Board of Inquiry, you will—\"\n\n\n Retief reached out and snapped off the communicator. The triumphant\n look faded from Miss Meuhl's face.\n\n\n \"Why, what is the meaning—\"",
"\"Listen carefully, Fith,\" he said. \"Your bluff has been called. You\n don't come in and we don't come out. Your camouflage worked for nine\n years, but it's all over now. I suggest you keep your heads and resist\n the temptation to make matters worse than they are.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Fith said, \"a peace squad waits outside your consulate.\n It is clear you are in the hands of a dangerous lunatic. As always, the\n Groaci wish only friendship with the Terrestrials, but—\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother,\" Retief said. \"You know what was in those files I looked\n over this morning.\"\n\n\n Retief turned at a sound behind him. Miss Meuhl was at the door,\n reaching for the safe-lock release....\n\n\n \"Don't!\" Retief jumped—too late.",
"\"Indeed, I hope that this will be the end of this unfortunate affair,\"\n he said. \"Now that all has been fully and honestly shown—\"\n\n\n \"You can skip all that,\" Retief said. \"You're nine years late. The\n crew was still alive when the task force called, I imagine. You killed\n them—or let them die—rather than take the chance of admitting what\n you'd done.\"\n\n\n \"We were at fault,\" Fith said abjectly. \"Now we wish only friendship.\"\n\n\n \"The\nTerrific\nwas a heavy cruiser, about twenty thousand tons.\"\n Retief looked grimly at the slender Foreign Office official. \"Where is\n she, Fith? I won't settle for a hundred-ton lifeboat.\"\nFith erected his eye stalks so violently that one eye-shield fell off.\n\n\n \"I know nothing of ... of....\" He stopped. His throat vibrated rapidly\n as he struggled for calm.",
"Fith rose; Shluh followed suit.\n\n\n \"I shall ask for your immediate recall, Mr. Consul. Were it not for\n your diplomatic immunity, I should do more—\"\n\n\n \"Why did the government fall, Fith? It was just after the task force\n paid its visit, and before the arrival of the first Terrestrial\n diplomatic mission.\"\n\n\n \"This is an internal matter!\" Fith cried, in his faint Groacian voice.\n \"The new regime has shown itself most amiable to you Terrestrials. It\n has outdone itself—\"\n\n\n \"—to keep the Terrestrial consul and his staff in the dark,\" Retief\n said. \"And the same goes for the few terrestrial businessmen you've\n visaed. This continual round of culture; no social contacts outside the\n diplomatic circle; no travel permits to visit out-lying districts, or\n your satellite—\"",
"Retief eyed Fith. \"Don't try it,\" he said. \"You'll just get yourself in\n deeper.\"\n\n\n Fith clacked his mandibles angrily, eye stalks canted aggressively\n toward the Terrestrial.\n\n\n \"Out of deference to your diplomatic status, Terrestrial, I shall\n ignore your insulting remarks,\" Fith said in his reedy voice. \"Let us\n now return to the city.\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the four policemen. \"I see your point,\" he said.\n\n\n Fith followed him into the car, sat rigidly at the far end of the seat.\n\n\n \"I advise you to remain very close to your consulate,\" Fith said. \"I\n advise you to dismiss these fancies from your mind, and to enjoy the\n cultural aspects of life at Groac. Especially, I should not venture out\n of the city, or appear overly curious about matters of concern only to\n the Groacian government.\"",
"THE MADMAN FROM EARTH\nBY KEITH LAUMER\nYou don't have to be crazy to be an earth\n\n diplomat—but on Groac it sure helps!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI\n\n\n \"The Consul for the Terrestrial States,\" Retief said, \"presents his\n compliments, et cetera, to the Ministry of Culture of the Groacian\n Autonomy, and with reference to the Ministry's invitation to attend a\n recital of interpretive grimacing, has the honor to express regret that\n he will be unable—\"",
"The door burst inward. A crowd of crested Groaci pressed into the room,\n pushed Miss Meuhl back, aimed scatter guns at Retief. Police Chief\n Shluh pushed forward.\n\n\n \"Attempt no violence, Terrestrial,\" he said. \"I cannot promise to\n restrain my men.\"\n\n\n \"You're violating Terrestrial territory, Shluh,\" Retief said steadily.\n \"I suggest you move back out the same way you came in.\"\n\n\n \"I invited them here,\" Miss Meuhl spoke up. \"They are here at my\n express wish.\"\n\n\n \"Are they? Are you sure you meant to go this far, Miss Meuhl? A squad\n of armed Groaci in the consulate?\"\n\n\n \"You are the consul, Miss Yolanda Meuhl,\" Shluh said. \"Would it not be\n best if we removed this deranged person to a place of safety?\""
],
[
"\"I have done my duty, Mr. Retief,\" Miss Meuhl said. \"I made a full\n report to Regional Headquarters last night, as soon as you left this\n office. Any doubts I may have had as to the rightness of that decision\n have been completely dispelled by what you've just told me.\"\n\n\n Retief looked at her levelly. \"You've been a busy girl, Miss Meuhl. Did\n you mention the six Terrestrials who were killed here?\"",
"In the front seat, Shluh looked straight ahead. The loosely-sprung\n vehicle bobbed and swayed along the narrow highway. Retief listened to\n the rhythmic puffing of the motor and said nothing.\nIII\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said, \"I want you to listen carefully to what I'm\n going to tell you. I have to move rapidly now, to catch the Groaci off\n guard.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about,\" Miss Meuhl snapped,\n her eyes sharp behind the heavy lenses.\n\n\n \"If you'll listen, you may find out,\" Retief said. \"I have no time\n to waste, Miss Meuhl. They won't be expecting an immediate move—I\n hope—and that may give me the latitude I need.\"",
"Retief stepped around him, seized his collar and yanked. The Groacian\n fell on his back. Retief stood over him. The downed native half-rose;\n Retief put a foot against his chest and pushed.\n\n\n \"To not be going anywhere for a few minutes,\" Retief said. \"To stay\n right here and have a nice long talk.\"\nII\n\n\n \"There you are!\" Miss Meuhl said, eyeing Retief over her lenses. \"There\n are two gentlemen waiting to see you. Groacian gentlemen.\"\n\n\n \"Government men, I imagine. Word travels fast.\" Retief pulled off his\n cape. \"This saves me the trouble of paying another call at the Foreign\n Ministry.\"\n\n\n \"What have you been doing? They seem very upset, I don't mind telling\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you don't. Come along. And bring an official recorder.\"",
"\"Never mind the excuses,\" Retief said. \"Just tell him I won't be\n there.\" He stood up.\n\n\n \"Are you leaving the office?\" Miss Meuhl adjusted her glasses. \"I have\n some important letters here for your signature.\"\n\n\n \"I don't recall dictating any letters today, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said,\n pulling on a light cape.\n\"I wrote them for you. They're just as Consul Whaffle would have wanted\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Did you write all Whaffle's letters for him, Miss Meuhl?\"\n\n\n \"Consul Whaffle was an extremely busy man,\" Miss Meuhl said stiffly.\n \"He had complete confidence in me.\"\n\n\n \"Since I'm cutting out the culture from now on,\" Retief said, \"I won't\n be so busy.\"",
"\"Yes,\" Fith said weakly. \"It is true, they were Terrestrials. But there\n was no killing.\"\n\n\n \"They're alive?\"\n\n\n \"Alas, no. They ... died.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl yelped faintly.\n\n\n \"I see,\" Retief said. \"They died.\"\n\n\n \"We tried to keep them alive, of course. But we did not know what\n foods—\"\n\n\n \"Didn't take the trouble to find out, either, did you?\"\n\n\n \"They fell ill,\" Fith said. \"One by one....\"\n\n\n \"We'll deal with that question later,\" Retief said. \"Right now, I want\n more information. Where did you get them? Where did you hide the ship?\n What happened to the rest of the crew? Did they 'fall ill' before the\n big parade?\"",
"\"Just keep that recorder going,\" Retief snapped.\n\n\n \"I'll not be a party—\"\n\n\n \"You'll do as you're told, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said quietly. \"I'm\n telling you to make an official sealed record of this conversation.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl sat down.\n\n\n Fith puffed out his throat indignantly. \"You reopen an old wound,\n Mr. Consul. It reminds us of certain illegal treatment at Terrestrial\n hands—\"\n\n\n \"Hogwash,\" Retief said. \"That tune went over with my predecessors, but\n it hits a sour note with me.\"\n\n\n \"All our efforts,\" Miss Meuhl said, \"to live down that terrible\n episode! And you—\"",
"\"Well!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"May I ask where you'll be if something comes\n up?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going over to the Foreign Office Archives.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl blinked behind thick lenses. \"Whatever for?\"\n\n\n Retief looked thoughtfully at Miss Meuhl. \"You've been here on Groac\n for four years, Miss Meuhl. What was behind the coup d'etat that put\n the present government in power?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I haven't pried into—\"\n\n\n \"What about that Terrestrial cruiser? The one that disappeared out this\n way about ten years back?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Retief, those are just the sort of questions we\navoid\nwith the\n Groaci. I certainly hope you're not thinking of openly intruding—\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"",
"\"Don't touch that screen,\" Retief said. \"You go sit in that corner\n where I can keep an eye on you. I'm going to make a sealed tape for\n transmission to Headquarters, along with a call for an armed task\n force. Then we'll settle down to wait.\"\n\n\n Retief ignored Miss Meuhl's fury as he spoke into the recorder.\n\n\n The local communicator chimed. Miss Meuhl jumped up, staring at it.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" Retief said. \"Answer it.\"\n\n\n A Groacian official appeared on the screen.",
"\"You're making a serious mistake, Shluh,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Miss Meuhl said. \"You're quite right, Mr. Shluh. Please escort\n Mr. Retief to his quarters in this building—\"\n\n\n \"I don't advise you to violate my diplomatic immunity, Fith,\" Retief\n said.\n\n\n \"As chief of mission,\" Miss Meuhl said quickly, \"I hereby waive\n immunity in the case of Mr. Retief.\"\n\n\n Shluh produced a hand recorder. \"Kindly repeat your statement, Madam,\n officially,\" he said. \"I wish no question to arise later.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be a fool, woman,\" Retief said. \"Don't you see what you're\n letting yourself in for? This would be a hell of a good time for you to\n figure out whose side you're on.\"",
"Retief nodded. \"Thanks, Miss Meuhl,\" he said. \"I'll be back before\n you close the office.\" Miss Meuhl's face was set in lines of grim\n disapproval as he closed the door.\nThe pale-featured Groacian vibrated his throat-bladder in a distressed\n bleat.\n\n\n \"Not to enter the Archives,\" he said in his faint voice. \"The denial of\n permission. The deep regret of the Archivist.\"\n\n\n \"The importance of my task here,\" Retief said, enunciating the glottal\n dialect with difficulty. \"My interest in local history.\"\n\n\n \"The impossibility of access to outworlders. To depart quietly.\"\n\n\n \"The necessity that I enter.\"\n\n\n \"The specific instructions of the Archivist.\" The Groacian's voice rose\n to a whisper. \"To insist no longer. To give up this idea!\"",
"The door burst inward. A crowd of crested Groaci pressed into the room,\n pushed Miss Meuhl back, aimed scatter guns at Retief. Police Chief\n Shluh pushed forward.\n\n\n \"Attempt no violence, Terrestrial,\" he said. \"I cannot promise to\n restrain my men.\"\n\n\n \"You're violating Terrestrial territory, Shluh,\" Retief said steadily.\n \"I suggest you move back out the same way you came in.\"\n\n\n \"I invited them here,\" Miss Meuhl spoke up. \"They are here at my\n express wish.\"\n\n\n \"Are they? Are you sure you meant to go this far, Miss Meuhl? A squad\n of armed Groaci in the consulate?\"\n\n\n \"You are the consul, Miss Yolanda Meuhl,\" Shluh said. \"Would it not be\n best if we removed this deranged person to a place of safety?\"",
"\"I'll be back in a couple of hours,\" he said. Miss Meuhl stared after\n him silently as he closed the door.\nIt was an hour before dawn when Retief keyed the combination to the\n safe-lock and stepped into the darkened consular office. He looked\n tired.\n\n\n Miss Meuhl, dozing in a chair, awoke with a start. She looked at\n Retief, rose and snapped on a light, turned to stare.\n\n\n \"What in the world—Where have you been? What's happened to your\n clothing?\"\n\n\n \"I got a little dirty. Don't worry about it.\" Retief went to his desk,\n opened a drawer and replaced the needler.\n\n\n \"Where have you been?\" Miss Meuhl demanded. \"I stayed here—\"",
"Two Groaci wearing heavy eye-shields and elaborate crest ornaments\n indicative of rank rose as Retief entered the room. Neither offered a\n courteous snap of the mandibles, Retief noted. They were mad, all right.\n\n\n \"I am Fith, of the Terrestrial Desk, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr.\n Consul,\" the taller Groacian said, in lisping Terran. \"May I present\n Shluh, of the Internal Police?\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, gentlemen,\" Retief said. They resumed their seats. Miss\n Meuhl hovered nervously, then sat on the edge of a comfortless chair.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's such a pleasure—\" she began.\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" Retief said. \"These gentlemen didn't come here to\n sip tea today.\"",
"\"Enough!\" Fith's mandibles quivered in distress. \"I can talk no more of\n this matter—\"\n\n\n \"You'll talk to me, or there'll be a task force here in five days to do\n the talking,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"You can't!\" Miss Meuhl gasped.\n\n\n Retief turned a steady look on Miss Meuhl. She closed her mouth. The\n Groaci sat down.\n\n\n \"Answer me this one,\" Retief said, looking at Shluh. \"A few years\n back—about nine, I think—there was a little parade held here. Some\n curious looking creatures were captured. After being securely caged,\n they were exhibited to the gentle Groaci public. Hauled through the\n streets. Very educational, no doubt. A highly cultural show.\n\n\n \"Funny thing about these animals. They wore clothes. They seemed to\n communicate with each other. Altogether it was a very amusing exhibit.",
"\"Yolanda Meuhl,\" he said without preamble, \"for the Foreign Minister of\n the Groacian Autonomy, I herewith accredit you as Terrestrial Consul\n to Groac, in accordance with the advices transmitted to my government\n direct from the Terrestrial Headquarters. As consul, you are requested\n to make available for questioning Mr. J. Retief, former consul, in\n connection with the assault on two peace keepers and illegal entry into\n the offices of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.\"\n\n\n \"Why, why,\" Miss Meuhl stammered. \"Yes, of course. And I do want to\n express my deepest regrets—\"\nRetief rose, went to the communicator, assisted Miss Meuhl aside.",
"\"I'm glad you did,\" Retief said. \"I hope you piled up a supply of food\n and water from the dispenser, too. We'll be holed up here for a week,\n at least.\" He jotted figures on a pad. \"Warm up the official sender. I\n have a long transmission for Regional Headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Are you going to tell me where you've been?\"\n\n\n \"I have a message to get off first, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said sharply.\n \"I've been to the Foreign Ministry,\" he added. \"I'll tell you all about\n it later.\"\n\n\n \"At this hour? There's no one there....\"\n\n\n \"Exactly.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl gasped. \"You mean you broke in? You burgled the Foreign\n Office?\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Retief said calmly. \"Now—\"",
"\"This is absolutely the end!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"Thank heaven I've\n already—\"\n\n\n \"Get that sender going, woman!\" Retief snapped. \"This is important.\"\n\n\n \"I've already done so, Mr. Retief!\" Miss Meuhl said harshly. \"I've been\n waiting for you to come back here....\" She turned to the communicator,\n flipped levers. The screen snapped aglow, and a wavering long-distance\n image appeared.\n\n\n \"He's here now,\" Miss Meuhl said to the screen. She looked at Retief\n triumphantly.\n\n\n \"That's good,\" Retief said. \"I don't think the Groaci can knock us off\n the air, but—\"",
"\"Listen carefully, Fith,\" he said. \"Your bluff has been called. You\n don't come in and we don't come out. Your camouflage worked for nine\n years, but it's all over now. I suggest you keep your heads and resist\n the temptation to make matters worse than they are.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Fith said, \"a peace squad waits outside your consulate.\n It is clear you are in the hands of a dangerous lunatic. As always, the\n Groaci wish only friendship with the Terrestrials, but—\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother,\" Retief said. \"You know what was in those files I looked\n over this morning.\"\n\n\n Retief turned at a sound behind him. Miss Meuhl was at the door,\n reaching for the safe-lock release....\n\n\n \"Don't!\" Retief jumped—too late.",
"\"Tell me, Shluh, what happened to those six Terrestrials after the\n parade was over?\"\nFith made a choked noise and spoke rapidly to Shluh in Groacian. Shluh\n retracted his eyes, shrank down in his chair. Miss Meuhl opened her\n mouth, closed it and blinked rapidly.\n\n\n \"How did they die?\" Retief snapped. \"Did you murder them, cut their\n throats, shoot them or bury them alive? What amusing end did you figure\n out for them? Research, maybe? Cut them open to see what made them\n yell....\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Fith gasped. \"I must correct this terrible false impression at\n once.\"\n\n\n \"False impression, hell,\" Retief said. \"They were Terrans! A simple\n narco-interrogation would get that out of any Groacian who saw the\n parade.\"",
"\"So true,\" Fith said. \"Frankly, I have had a most disturbing report,\n Mr. Consul. I shall ask Shluh to recount it.\" He nodded to the police\n chief.\n\n\n \"One hour ago,\" The Groacian said, \"a Groacian national was brought\n to hospital suffering from serious contusions. Questioning of this\n individual revealed that he had been set upon and beaten by a\n foreigner. A Terrestrial, to be precise. Investigation by my department\n indicates that the description of the culprit closely matches that of\n the Terrestrial Consul.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl gasped audibly.\n\n\n \"Have you ever heard,\" Retief said, looking steadily at Fith, \"of a\n Terrestrial cruiser, the\nISV Terrific\n, which dropped from sight in\n this sector nine years ago?\"\n\n\n \"Really!\" Miss Meuhl exclaimed, rising. \"I wash my hands—\""
],
[
"Retief stepped around him, seized his collar and yanked. The Groacian\n fell on his back. Retief stood over him. The downed native half-rose;\n Retief put a foot against his chest and pushed.\n\n\n \"To not be going anywhere for a few minutes,\" Retief said. \"To stay\n right here and have a nice long talk.\"\nII\n\n\n \"There you are!\" Miss Meuhl said, eyeing Retief over her lenses. \"There\n are two gentlemen waiting to see you. Groacian gentlemen.\"\n\n\n \"Government men, I imagine. Word travels fast.\" Retief pulled off his\n cape. \"This saves me the trouble of paying another call at the Foreign\n Ministry.\"\n\n\n \"What have you been doing? They seem very upset, I don't mind telling\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you don't. Come along. And bring an official recorder.\"",
"Two Groaci wearing heavy eye-shields and elaborate crest ornaments\n indicative of rank rose as Retief entered the room. Neither offered a\n courteous snap of the mandibles, Retief noted. They were mad, all right.\n\n\n \"I am Fith, of the Terrestrial Desk, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr.\n Consul,\" the taller Groacian said, in lisping Terran. \"May I present\n Shluh, of the Internal Police?\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, gentlemen,\" Retief said. They resumed their seats. Miss\n Meuhl hovered nervously, then sat on the edge of a comfortless chair.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's such a pleasure—\" she began.\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" Retief said. \"These gentlemen didn't come here to\n sip tea today.\"",
"Retief nodded. \"Thanks, Miss Meuhl,\" he said. \"I'll be back before\n you close the office.\" Miss Meuhl's face was set in lines of grim\n disapproval as he closed the door.\nThe pale-featured Groacian vibrated his throat-bladder in a distressed\n bleat.\n\n\n \"Not to enter the Archives,\" he said in his faint voice. \"The denial of\n permission. The deep regret of the Archivist.\"\n\n\n \"The importance of my task here,\" Retief said, enunciating the glottal\n dialect with difficulty. \"My interest in local history.\"\n\n\n \"The impossibility of access to outworlders. To depart quietly.\"\n\n\n \"The necessity that I enter.\"\n\n\n \"The specific instructions of the Archivist.\" The Groacian's voice rose\n to a whisper. \"To insist no longer. To give up this idea!\"",
"In the front seat, Shluh looked straight ahead. The loosely-sprung\n vehicle bobbed and swayed along the narrow highway. Retief listened to\n the rhythmic puffing of the motor and said nothing.\nIII\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said, \"I want you to listen carefully to what I'm\n going to tell you. I have to move rapidly now, to catch the Groaci off\n guard.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about,\" Miss Meuhl snapped,\n her eyes sharp behind the heavy lenses.\n\n\n \"If you'll listen, you may find out,\" Retief said. \"I have no time\n to waste, Miss Meuhl. They won't be expecting an immediate move—I\n hope—and that may give me the latitude I need.\"",
"\"Well!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"May I ask where you'll be if something comes\n up?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going over to the Foreign Office Archives.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl blinked behind thick lenses. \"Whatever for?\"\n\n\n Retief looked thoughtfully at Miss Meuhl. \"You've been here on Groac\n for four years, Miss Meuhl. What was behind the coup d'etat that put\n the present government in power?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I haven't pried into—\"\n\n\n \"What about that Terrestrial cruiser? The one that disappeared out this\n way about ten years back?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Retief, those are just the sort of questions we\navoid\nwith the\n Groaci. I certainly hope you're not thinking of openly intruding—\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"",
"\"Don't touch that screen,\" Retief said. \"You go sit in that corner\n where I can keep an eye on you. I'm going to make a sealed tape for\n transmission to Headquarters, along with a call for an armed task\n force. Then we'll settle down to wait.\"\n\n\n Retief ignored Miss Meuhl's fury as he spoke into the recorder.\n\n\n The local communicator chimed. Miss Meuhl jumped up, staring at it.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" Retief said. \"Answer it.\"\n\n\n A Groacian official appeared on the screen.",
"\"Tell me, Shluh, what happened to those six Terrestrials after the\n parade was over?\"\nFith made a choked noise and spoke rapidly to Shluh in Groacian. Shluh\n retracted his eyes, shrank down in his chair. Miss Meuhl opened her\n mouth, closed it and blinked rapidly.\n\n\n \"How did they die?\" Retief snapped. \"Did you murder them, cut their\n throats, shoot them or bury them alive? What amusing end did you figure\n out for them? Research, maybe? Cut them open to see what made them\n yell....\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Fith gasped. \"I must correct this terrible false impression at\n once.\"\n\n\n \"False impression, hell,\" Retief said. \"They were Terrans! A simple\n narco-interrogation would get that out of any Groacian who saw the\n parade.\"",
"\"Yolanda Meuhl,\" he said without preamble, \"for the Foreign Minister of\n the Groacian Autonomy, I herewith accredit you as Terrestrial Consul\n to Groac, in accordance with the advices transmitted to my government\n direct from the Terrestrial Headquarters. As consul, you are requested\n to make available for questioning Mr. J. Retief, former consul, in\n connection with the assault on two peace keepers and illegal entry into\n the offices of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.\"\n\n\n \"Why, why,\" Miss Meuhl stammered. \"Yes, of course. And I do want to\n express my deepest regrets—\"\nRetief rose, went to the communicator, assisted Miss Meuhl aside.",
"\"Enough!\" Fith's mandibles quivered in distress. \"I can talk no more of\n this matter—\"\n\n\n \"You'll talk to me, or there'll be a task force here in five days to do\n the talking,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"You can't!\" Miss Meuhl gasped.\n\n\n Retief turned a steady look on Miss Meuhl. She closed her mouth. The\n Groaci sat down.\n\n\n \"Answer me this one,\" Retief said, looking at Shluh. \"A few years\n back—about nine, I think—there was a little parade held here. Some\n curious looking creatures were captured. After being securely caged,\n they were exhibited to the gentle Groaci public. Hauled through the\n streets. Very educational, no doubt. A highly cultural show.\n\n\n \"Funny thing about these animals. They wore clothes. They seemed to\n communicate with each other. Altogether it was a very amusing exhibit.",
"The door burst inward. A crowd of crested Groaci pressed into the room,\n pushed Miss Meuhl back, aimed scatter guns at Retief. Police Chief\n Shluh pushed forward.\n\n\n \"Attempt no violence, Terrestrial,\" he said. \"I cannot promise to\n restrain my men.\"\n\n\n \"You're violating Terrestrial territory, Shluh,\" Retief said steadily.\n \"I suggest you move back out the same way you came in.\"\n\n\n \"I invited them here,\" Miss Meuhl spoke up. \"They are here at my\n express wish.\"\n\n\n \"Are they? Are you sure you meant to go this far, Miss Meuhl? A squad\n of armed Groaci in the consulate?\"\n\n\n \"You are the consul, Miss Yolanda Meuhl,\" Shluh said. \"Would it not be\n best if we removed this deranged person to a place of safety?\"",
"\"What did you do with it? It was too big to just walk off and forget.\n Where is it?\"\n\n\n The two Groacians exchanged looks.\n\n\n \"We wish to show our contrition,\" Fith said. \"We will show you the\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said. \"If I don't come back in a reasonable length\n of time, transmit that recording to Regional Headquarters, sealed.\" He\n stood, looked at the Groaci.\n\n\n \"Let's go,\" he said.\nRetief stooped under the heavy timbers shoring the entry to the cavern.\n He peered into the gloom at the curving flank of the space-burned hull.\n\n\n \"Any lights in here?\" he asked.\n\n\n A Groacian threw a switch. A weak bluish glow sprang up.",
"\"This is absolutely the end!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"Thank heaven I've\n already—\"\n\n\n \"Get that sender going, woman!\" Retief snapped. \"This is important.\"\n\n\n \"I've already done so, Mr. Retief!\" Miss Meuhl said harshly. \"I've been\n waiting for you to come back here....\" She turned to the communicator,\n flipped levers. The screen snapped aglow, and a wavering long-distance\n image appeared.\n\n\n \"He's here now,\" Miss Meuhl said to the screen. She looked at Retief\n triumphantly.\n\n\n \"That's good,\" Retief said. \"I don't think the Groaci can knock us off\n the air, but—\"",
"\"Yes,\" Fith said weakly. \"It is true, they were Terrestrials. But there\n was no killing.\"\n\n\n \"They're alive?\"\n\n\n \"Alas, no. They ... died.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl yelped faintly.\n\n\n \"I see,\" Retief said. \"They died.\"\n\n\n \"We tried to keep them alive, of course. But we did not know what\n foods—\"\n\n\n \"Didn't take the trouble to find out, either, did you?\"\n\n\n \"They fell ill,\" Fith said. \"One by one....\"\n\n\n \"We'll deal with that question later,\" Retief said. \"Right now, I want\n more information. Where did you get them? Where did you hide the ship?\n What happened to the rest of the crew? Did they 'fall ill' before the\n big parade?\"",
"\"I have done my duty, Mr. Retief,\" Miss Meuhl said. \"I made a full\n report to Regional Headquarters last night, as soon as you left this\n office. Any doubts I may have had as to the rightness of that decision\n have been completely dispelled by what you've just told me.\"\n\n\n Retief looked at her levelly. \"You've been a busy girl, Miss Meuhl. Did\n you mention the six Terrestrials who were killed here?\"",
"\"Listen carefully, Fith,\" he said. \"Your bluff has been called. You\n don't come in and we don't come out. Your camouflage worked for nine\n years, but it's all over now. I suggest you keep your heads and resist\n the temptation to make matters worse than they are.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Fith said, \"a peace squad waits outside your consulate.\n It is clear you are in the hands of a dangerous lunatic. As always, the\n Groaci wish only friendship with the Terrestrials, but—\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother,\" Retief said. \"You know what was in those files I looked\n over this morning.\"\n\n\n Retief turned at a sound behind him. Miss Meuhl was at the door,\n reaching for the safe-lock release....\n\n\n \"Don't!\" Retief jumped—too late.",
"\"The Groaci are a very sensitive race. They don't welcome outworlders\n raking up things. They've been gracious enough to let us live down\n the fact that Terrestrials subjected them to deep humiliation on one\n occasion.\"\n\n\n \"You mean when they came looking for the cruiser?\"\n\n\n \"I, for one, am ashamed of the high-handed tactics that were employed,\n grilling these innocent people as though they were criminals. We try\n never to reopen that wound, Mr. Retief.\"\n\n\n \"They never found the cruiser, did they?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not on Groac.\"",
"\"So true,\" Fith said. \"Frankly, I have had a most disturbing report,\n Mr. Consul. I shall ask Shluh to recount it.\" He nodded to the police\n chief.\n\n\n \"One hour ago,\" The Groacian said, \"a Groacian national was brought\n to hospital suffering from serious contusions. Questioning of this\n individual revealed that he had been set upon and beaten by a\n foreigner. A Terrestrial, to be precise. Investigation by my department\n indicates that the description of the culprit closely matches that of\n the Terrestrial Consul.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl gasped audibly.\n\n\n \"Have you ever heard,\" Retief said, looking steadily at Fith, \"of a\n Terrestrial cruiser, the\nISV Terrific\n, which dropped from sight in\n this sector nine years ago?\"\n\n\n \"Really!\" Miss Meuhl exclaimed, rising. \"I wash my hands—\"",
"\"You're making a serious mistake, Shluh,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Miss Meuhl said. \"You're quite right, Mr. Shluh. Please escort\n Mr. Retief to his quarters in this building—\"\n\n\n \"I don't advise you to violate my diplomatic immunity, Fith,\" Retief\n said.\n\n\n \"As chief of mission,\" Miss Meuhl said quickly, \"I hereby waive\n immunity in the case of Mr. Retief.\"\n\n\n Shluh produced a hand recorder. \"Kindly repeat your statement, Madam,\n officially,\" he said. \"I wish no question to arise later.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be a fool, woman,\" Retief said. \"Don't you see what you're\n letting yourself in for? This would be a hell of a good time for you to\n figure out whose side you're on.\"",
"\"You can't turn this invitation down,\" Administrative Assistant Meuhl\n said flatly. \"I'll make that 'accepts with pleasure'.\"\n\n\n Retief exhaled a plume of cigar smoke.\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" he said, \"in the past couple of weeks I've sat through\n six light-concerts, four attempts at chamber music, and god knows how\n many assorted folk-art festivals. I've been tied up every off-duty\n hour since I got here—\"\n\n\n \"You can't offend the Groaci,\" Miss Meuhl said sharply. \"Consul Whaffle\n would never have been so rude.\"\n\n\n \"Whaffle left here three months ago,\" Retief said, \"leaving me in\n charge.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Miss Meuhl said, snapping off the dictyper. \"I'm sure I don't\n know what excuse I can give the Minister.\"",
"\"Terrible? I understand that a Terrestrial task force stood off Groac\n and sent a delegation down to ask questions. They got some funny\n answers, and stayed on to dig around a little. After a week they left.\n Somewhat annoying to the Groaci, maybe—at the most. If they were\n innocent.\"\n\n\n \"IF!\" Miss Meuhl burst out.\n\n\n \"If, indeed!\" Fith said, his weak voice trembling. \"I must protest\n your—\"\n\"Save the protests, Fith. You have some explaining to do. And I don't\n think your story will be good enough.\"\n\n\n \"It is for you to explain! This person who was beaten—\"\n\n\n \"Not beaten. Just rapped a few times to loosen his memory.\"\n\n\n \"Then you admit—\"\n\n\n \"It worked, too. He remembered lots of things, once he put his mind to\n it.\""
],
[
"In the front seat, Shluh looked straight ahead. The loosely-sprung\n vehicle bobbed and swayed along the narrow highway. Retief listened to\n the rhythmic puffing of the motor and said nothing.\nIII\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said, \"I want you to listen carefully to what I'm\n going to tell you. I have to move rapidly now, to catch the Groaci off\n guard.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about,\" Miss Meuhl snapped,\n her eyes sharp behind the heavy lenses.\n\n\n \"If you'll listen, you may find out,\" Retief said. \"I have no time\n to waste, Miss Meuhl. They won't be expecting an immediate move—I\n hope—and that may give me the latitude I need.\"",
"\"Well!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"May I ask where you'll be if something comes\n up?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going over to the Foreign Office Archives.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl blinked behind thick lenses. \"Whatever for?\"\n\n\n Retief looked thoughtfully at Miss Meuhl. \"You've been here on Groac\n for four years, Miss Meuhl. What was behind the coup d'etat that put\n the present government in power?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I haven't pried into—\"\n\n\n \"What about that Terrestrial cruiser? The one that disappeared out this\n way about ten years back?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Retief, those are just the sort of questions we\navoid\nwith the\n Groaci. I certainly hope you're not thinking of openly intruding—\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"",
"\"I'm glad you did,\" Retief said. \"I hope you piled up a supply of food\n and water from the dispenser, too. We'll be holed up here for a week,\n at least.\" He jotted figures on a pad. \"Warm up the official sender. I\n have a long transmission for Regional Headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Are you going to tell me where you've been?\"\n\n\n \"I have a message to get off first, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said sharply.\n \"I've been to the Foreign Ministry,\" he added. \"I'll tell you all about\n it later.\"\n\n\n \"At this hour? There's no one there....\"\n\n\n \"Exactly.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl gasped. \"You mean you broke in? You burgled the Foreign\n Office?\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Retief said calmly. \"Now—\"",
"\"My government can entertain no further accusations, Mr. Consul,\"\n he said at last. \"I have been completely candid with you, I have\n overlooked your probing into matters not properly within your sphere of\n responsibility. My patience is at an end.\"\n\n\n \"Where is that ship?\" Retief rapped out. \"You never learn, do you?\n You're still convinced you can hide the whole thing and forget it. I'm\n telling you you can't.\"\n\n\n \"We return to the city now,\" Fith said. \"I can do no more.\"\n\n\n \"You can and you will, Fith,\" Retief said. \"I intend to get to the\n truth of this matter.\"\n\n\n Fith spoke to Shluh in rapid Groacian. The police chief gestured to his\n four armed constables. They moved to ring Retief in.",
"\"That's my decision,\" Retief said. \"I have a job to do and we're\n wasting time.\" He crossed the room to his desk, opened a drawer and\n took out a slim-barreled needler.\n\n\n \"This office is being watched. Not very efficiently, if I know the\n Groaci. I think I can get past them all right.\"\n\n\n \"Where are you going with ... that?\" Miss Meuhl stared at the needler.\n \"What in the world—\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci won't waste any time destroying every piece of paper in\n their files relating to this thing. I have to get what I need before\n it's too late. If I wait for an official Inquiry Commission, they'll\n find nothing but blank smiles.\"\n\n\n \"You're out of your mind!\" Miss Meuhl stood up, quivering with\n indignation. \"You're like a ... a....\"",
"\"Never mind the excuses,\" Retief said. \"Just tell him I won't be\n there.\" He stood up.\n\n\n \"Are you leaving the office?\" Miss Meuhl adjusted her glasses. \"I have\n some important letters here for your signature.\"\n\n\n \"I don't recall dictating any letters today, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said,\n pulling on a light cape.\n\"I wrote them for you. They're just as Consul Whaffle would have wanted\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Did you write all Whaffle's letters for him, Miss Meuhl?\"\n\n\n \"Consul Whaffle was an extremely busy man,\" Miss Meuhl said stiffly.\n \"He had complete confidence in me.\"\n\n\n \"Since I'm cutting out the culture from now on,\" Retief said, \"I won't\n be so busy.\"",
"\"Don't touch that screen,\" Retief said. \"You go sit in that corner\n where I can keep an eye on you. I'm going to make a sealed tape for\n transmission to Headquarters, along with a call for an armed task\n force. Then we'll settle down to wait.\"\n\n\n Retief ignored Miss Meuhl's fury as he spoke into the recorder.\n\n\n The local communicator chimed. Miss Meuhl jumped up, staring at it.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" Retief said. \"Answer it.\"\n\n\n A Groacian official appeared on the screen.",
"\"Just keep that recorder going,\" Retief snapped.\n\n\n \"I'll not be a party—\"\n\n\n \"You'll do as you're told, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said quietly. \"I'm\n telling you to make an official sealed record of this conversation.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl sat down.\n\n\n Fith puffed out his throat indignantly. \"You reopen an old wound,\n Mr. Consul. It reminds us of certain illegal treatment at Terrestrial\n hands—\"\n\n\n \"Hogwash,\" Retief said. \"That tune went over with my predecessors, but\n it hits a sour note with me.\"\n\n\n \"All our efforts,\" Miss Meuhl said, \"to live down that terrible\n episode! And you—\"",
"Retief stepped around him, seized his collar and yanked. The Groacian\n fell on his back. Retief stood over him. The downed native half-rose;\n Retief put a foot against his chest and pushed.\n\n\n \"To not be going anywhere for a few minutes,\" Retief said. \"To stay\n right here and have a nice long talk.\"\nII\n\n\n \"There you are!\" Miss Meuhl said, eyeing Retief over her lenses. \"There\n are two gentlemen waiting to see you. Groacian gentlemen.\"\n\n\n \"Government men, I imagine. Word travels fast.\" Retief pulled off his\n cape. \"This saves me the trouble of paying another call at the Foreign\n Ministry.\"\n\n\n \"What have you been doing? They seem very upset, I don't mind telling\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you don't. Come along. And bring an official recorder.\"",
"\"I have done my duty, Mr. Retief,\" Miss Meuhl said. \"I made a full\n report to Regional Headquarters last night, as soon as you left this\n office. Any doubts I may have had as to the rightness of that decision\n have been completely dispelled by what you've just told me.\"\n\n\n Retief looked at her levelly. \"You've been a busy girl, Miss Meuhl. Did\n you mention the six Terrestrials who were killed here?\"",
"\"I'll be back in a couple of hours,\" he said. Miss Meuhl stared after\n him silently as he closed the door.\nIt was an hour before dawn when Retief keyed the combination to the\n safe-lock and stepped into the darkened consular office. He looked\n tired.\n\n\n Miss Meuhl, dozing in a chair, awoke with a start. She looked at\n Retief, rose and snapped on a light, turned to stare.\n\n\n \"What in the world—Where have you been? What's happened to your\n clothing?\"\n\n\n \"I got a little dirty. Don't worry about it.\" Retief went to his desk,\n opened a drawer and replaced the needler.\n\n\n \"Where have you been?\" Miss Meuhl demanded. \"I stayed here—\"",
"\"I'm on the side of common decency!\"\n\n\n \"You've been taken in. These people are concealing—\"\n\n\n \"You think all women are fools, don't you, Mr. Retief?\" She turned to\n the police chief and spoke into the microphone he held up.\n\n\n \"That's an illegal waiver,\" Retief said. \"I'm consul here, whatever\n rumors you've heard. This thing's coming out into the open, whatever\n you do. Don't add violation of the Consulate to the list of Groacian\n atrocities.\"\n\n\n \"Take the man,\" Shluh said.",
"Retief walked along the raised wooden catwalk, studying the ship. Empty\n emplacements gaped below lensless scanner eyes. Littered decking was\n visible within the half-open entry port. Near the bow the words 'IVS\n Terrific B7 New Terra' were lettered in bright chrome duralloy.\n\n\n \"How did you get it in here?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"It was hauled here from the landing point, some nine miles distant,\"\n Fith said, his voice thinner than ever. \"This is a natural crevasse.\n The vessel was lowered into it and roofed over.\"\n\n\n \"How did you shield it so the detectors didn't pick it up?\"\n\n\n \"All here is high-grade iron ore,\" Fith said, waving a member. \"Great\n veins of almost pure metal.\"\n\n\n Retief grunted. \"Let's go inside.\"",
"\"Yes,\" Fith said weakly. \"It is true, they were Terrestrials. But there\n was no killing.\"\n\n\n \"They're alive?\"\n\n\n \"Alas, no. They ... died.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl yelped faintly.\n\n\n \"I see,\" Retief said. \"They died.\"\n\n\n \"We tried to keep them alive, of course. But we did not know what\n foods—\"\n\n\n \"Didn't take the trouble to find out, either, did you?\"\n\n\n \"They fell ill,\" Fith said. \"One by one....\"\n\n\n \"We'll deal with that question later,\" Retief said. \"Right now, I want\n more information. Where did you get them? Where did you hide the ship?\n What happened to the rest of the crew? Did they 'fall ill' before the\n big parade?\"",
"\"If I don't make it back here, transmit the sealed record of this\n afternoon's conversation, along with the information I've given you.\n Beam it through on a mayday priority. Then tell the Groaci what you've\n done and sit tight. I think you'll be all right. It won't be easy to\n blast in here and anyway, they won't make things worse by killing you.\n A force can be here in a week.\"\n\n\n \"I'll do nothing of the sort! The Groaci are very fond of me! You ...\n Johnny-come-lately! Roughneck! Setting out to destroy—\"\n\n\n \"Blame it on me if it will make you feel any better,\" Retief said, \"but\n don't be fool enough to trust them.\" He pulled on a cape, opened the\n door.",
"Two Groaci wearing heavy eye-shields and elaborate crest ornaments\n indicative of rank rose as Retief entered the room. Neither offered a\n courteous snap of the mandibles, Retief noted. They were mad, all right.\n\n\n \"I am Fith, of the Terrestrial Desk, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr.\n Consul,\" the taller Groacian said, in lisping Terran. \"May I present\n Shluh, of the Internal Police?\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, gentlemen,\" Retief said. They resumed their seats. Miss\n Meuhl hovered nervously, then sat on the edge of a comfortless chair.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's such a pleasure—\" she began.\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" Retief said. \"These gentlemen didn't come here to\n sip tea today.\"",
"\"Indeed, I hope that this will be the end of this unfortunate affair,\"\n he said. \"Now that all has been fully and honestly shown—\"\n\n\n \"You can skip all that,\" Retief said. \"You're nine years late. The\n crew was still alive when the task force called, I imagine. You killed\n them—or let them die—rather than take the chance of admitting what\n you'd done.\"\n\n\n \"We were at fault,\" Fith said abjectly. \"Now we wish only friendship.\"\n\n\n \"The\nTerrific\nwas a heavy cruiser, about twenty thousand tons.\"\n Retief looked grimly at the slender Foreign Office official. \"Where is\n she, Fith? I won't settle for a hundred-ton lifeboat.\"\nFith erected his eye stalks so violently that one eye-shield fell off.\n\n\n \"I know nothing of ... of....\" He stopped. His throat vibrated rapidly\n as he struggled for calm.",
"Retief eyed Fith. \"Don't try it,\" he said. \"You'll just get yourself in\n deeper.\"\n\n\n Fith clacked his mandibles angrily, eye stalks canted aggressively\n toward the Terrestrial.\n\n\n \"Out of deference to your diplomatic status, Terrestrial, I shall\n ignore your insulting remarks,\" Fith said in his reedy voice. \"Let us\n now return to the city.\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the four policemen. \"I see your point,\" he said.\n\n\n Fith followed him into the car, sat rigidly at the far end of the seat.\n\n\n \"I advise you to remain very close to your consulate,\" Fith said. \"I\n advise you to dismiss these fancies from your mind, and to enjoy the\n cultural aspects of life at Groac. Especially, I should not venture out\n of the city, or appear overly curious about matters of concern only to\n the Groacian government.\"",
"\"Yolanda Meuhl,\" he said without preamble, \"for the Foreign Minister of\n the Groacian Autonomy, I herewith accredit you as Terrestrial Consul\n to Groac, in accordance with the advices transmitted to my government\n direct from the Terrestrial Headquarters. As consul, you are requested\n to make available for questioning Mr. J. Retief, former consul, in\n connection with the assault on two peace keepers and illegal entry into\n the offices of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.\"\n\n\n \"Why, why,\" Miss Meuhl stammered. \"Yes, of course. And I do want to\n express my deepest regrets—\"\nRetief rose, went to the communicator, assisted Miss Meuhl aside.",
"\"Listen carefully, Fith,\" he said. \"Your bluff has been called. You\n don't come in and we don't come out. Your camouflage worked for nine\n years, but it's all over now. I suggest you keep your heads and resist\n the temptation to make matters worse than they are.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Fith said, \"a peace squad waits outside your consulate.\n It is clear you are in the hands of a dangerous lunatic. As always, the\n Groaci wish only friendship with the Terrestrials, but—\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother,\" Retief said. \"You know what was in those files I looked\n over this morning.\"\n\n\n Retief turned at a sound behind him. Miss Meuhl was at the door,\n reaching for the safe-lock release....\n\n\n \"Don't!\" Retief jumped—too late."
],
[
"\"The Groaci are a very sensitive race. They don't welcome outworlders\n raking up things. They've been gracious enough to let us live down\n the fact that Terrestrials subjected them to deep humiliation on one\n occasion.\"\n\n\n \"You mean when they came looking for the cruiser?\"\n\n\n \"I, for one, am ashamed of the high-handed tactics that were employed,\n grilling these innocent people as though they were criminals. We try\n never to reopen that wound, Mr. Retief.\"\n\n\n \"They never found the cruiser, did they?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not on Groac.\"",
"\"You're still determined to make an issue of that incident!\" Miss\n Meuhl snorted. \"I really can hardly blame the Groaci. They are not a\n sophisticated race; they had never before met aliens.\"\n\n\n \"You're ready to forgive a great deal, Miss Meuhl. But it's not what\n happened nine years ago I'm concerned with. It's what's happening now.\n I've told you that it was only a lifeboat the Groaci have hidden out.\n Don't you understand the implication? That vessel couldn't have come\n far. The cruiser itself must be somewhere near by. I want to know\n where!\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci don't know. They're a very cultured, gentle people. You can\n do irreparable harm to the reputation of Terrestrials if you insist—\"",
"\"So true,\" Fith said. \"Frankly, I have had a most disturbing report,\n Mr. Consul. I shall ask Shluh to recount it.\" He nodded to the police\n chief.\n\n\n \"One hour ago,\" The Groacian said, \"a Groacian national was brought\n to hospital suffering from serious contusions. Questioning of this\n individual revealed that he had been set upon and beaten by a\n foreigner. A Terrestrial, to be precise. Investigation by my department\n indicates that the description of the culprit closely matches that of\n the Terrestrial Consul.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl gasped audibly.\n\n\n \"Have you ever heard,\" Retief said, looking steadily at Fith, \"of a\n Terrestrial cruiser, the\nISV Terrific\n, which dropped from sight in\n this sector nine years ago?\"\n\n\n \"Really!\" Miss Meuhl exclaimed, rising. \"I wash my hands—\"",
"\"What did you do with it? It was too big to just walk off and forget.\n Where is it?\"\n\n\n The two Groacians exchanged looks.\n\n\n \"We wish to show our contrition,\" Fith said. \"We will show you the\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said. \"If I don't come back in a reasonable length\n of time, transmit that recording to Regional Headquarters, sealed.\" He\n stood, looked at the Groaci.\n\n\n \"Let's go,\" he said.\nRetief stooped under the heavy timbers shoring the entry to the cavern.\n He peered into the gloom at the curving flank of the space-burned hull.\n\n\n \"Any lights in here?\" he asked.\n\n\n A Groacian threw a switch. A weak bluish glow sprang up.",
"Shluh came forward with a hand-lamp. The party entered the ship.\n\n\n Retief clambered up a narrow companionway, glanced around the interior\n of the control compartment. Dust was thick on the deck, the stanchions\n where acceleration couches had been mounted, the empty instrument\n panels, the litter of sheared bolts, scraps of wire and paper. A thin\n frosting of rust dulled the exposed metal where cutting torches had\n sliced away heavy shielding. There was a faint odor of stale bedding.\n\n\n \"The cargo compartment—\" Shluh began.\n\n\n \"I've seen enough,\" Retief said.\n\n\n Silently, the Groacians led the way back out through the tunnel and\n into the late afternoon sunshine. As they climbed the slope to the\n steam car, Fith came to Retief's side.",
"Retief walked along the raised wooden catwalk, studying the ship. Empty\n emplacements gaped below lensless scanner eyes. Littered decking was\n visible within the half-open entry port. Near the bow the words 'IVS\n Terrific B7 New Terra' were lettered in bright chrome duralloy.\n\n\n \"How did you get it in here?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"It was hauled here from the landing point, some nine miles distant,\"\n Fith said, his voice thinner than ever. \"This is a natural crevasse.\n The vessel was lowered into it and roofed over.\"\n\n\n \"How did you shield it so the detectors didn't pick it up?\"\n\n\n \"All here is high-grade iron ore,\" Fith said, waving a member. \"Great\n veins of almost pure metal.\"\n\n\n Retief grunted. \"Let's go inside.\"",
"\"If I don't make it back here, transmit the sealed record of this\n afternoon's conversation, along with the information I've given you.\n Beam it through on a mayday priority. Then tell the Groaci what you've\n done and sit tight. I think you'll be all right. It won't be easy to\n blast in here and anyway, they won't make things worse by killing you.\n A force can be here in a week.\"\n\n\n \"I'll do nothing of the sort! The Groaci are very fond of me! You ...\n Johnny-come-lately! Roughneck! Setting out to destroy—\"\n\n\n \"Blame it on me if it will make you feel any better,\" Retief said, \"but\n don't be fool enough to trust them.\" He pulled on a cape, opened the\n door.",
"Two Groaci wearing heavy eye-shields and elaborate crest ornaments\n indicative of rank rose as Retief entered the room. Neither offered a\n courteous snap of the mandibles, Retief noted. They were mad, all right.\n\n\n \"I am Fith, of the Terrestrial Desk, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr.\n Consul,\" the taller Groacian said, in lisping Terran. \"May I present\n Shluh, of the Internal Police?\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, gentlemen,\" Retief said. They resumed their seats. Miss\n Meuhl hovered nervously, then sat on the edge of a comfortless chair.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's such a pleasure—\" she began.\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" Retief said. \"These gentlemen didn't come here to\n sip tea today.\"",
"\"How could you know a flotilla would show up in a few months looking\n for them, you mean? That was a shock, wasn't it? I'll bet you had a\n brisk time of it hiding the ship, and shutting everybody up. A close\n call, eh?\"\n\n\n \"We were afraid,\" Shluh said. \"We are a simple people. We feared the\n strange creatures from the alien craft. We did not kill them, but we\n felt it was as well they ... did not survive. Then, when the warships\n came, we realized our error. But we feared to speak. We purged our\n guilty leaders, concealed what had happened, and ... offered our\n friendship. We invited the opening of diplomatic relations. We made\n a blunder, it is true, a great blunder. But we have tried to make\n amends....\"\n\n\n \"Where is the ship?\"\n\n\n \"The ship?\"",
"\"Well!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"May I ask where you'll be if something comes\n up?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going over to the Foreign Office Archives.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl blinked behind thick lenses. \"Whatever for?\"\n\n\n Retief looked thoughtfully at Miss Meuhl. \"You've been here on Groac\n for four years, Miss Meuhl. What was behind the coup d'etat that put\n the present government in power?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I haven't pried into—\"\n\n\n \"What about that Terrestrial cruiser? The one that disappeared out this\n way about ten years back?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Retief, those are just the sort of questions we\navoid\nwith the\n Groaci. I certainly hope you're not thinking of openly intruding—\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"",
"\"This is absolutely the end!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"Thank heaven I've\n already—\"\n\n\n \"Get that sender going, woman!\" Retief snapped. \"This is important.\"\n\n\n \"I've already done so, Mr. Retief!\" Miss Meuhl said harshly. \"I've been\n waiting for you to come back here....\" She turned to the communicator,\n flipped levers. The screen snapped aglow, and a wavering long-distance\n image appeared.\n\n\n \"He's here now,\" Miss Meuhl said to the screen. She looked at Retief\n triumphantly.\n\n\n \"That's good,\" Retief said. \"I don't think the Groaci can knock us off\n the air, but—\"",
"\"Yes,\" Fith said weakly. \"It is true, they were Terrestrials. But there\n was no killing.\"\n\n\n \"They're alive?\"\n\n\n \"Alas, no. They ... died.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl yelped faintly.\n\n\n \"I see,\" Retief said. \"They died.\"\n\n\n \"We tried to keep them alive, of course. But we did not know what\n foods—\"\n\n\n \"Didn't take the trouble to find out, either, did you?\"\n\n\n \"They fell ill,\" Fith said. \"One by one....\"\n\n\n \"We'll deal with that question later,\" Retief said. \"Right now, I want\n more information. Where did you get them? Where did you hide the ship?\n What happened to the rest of the crew? Did they 'fall ill' before the\n big parade?\"",
"\"My government can entertain no further accusations, Mr. Consul,\"\n he said at last. \"I have been completely candid with you, I have\n overlooked your probing into matters not properly within your sphere of\n responsibility. My patience is at an end.\"\n\n\n \"Where is that ship?\" Retief rapped out. \"You never learn, do you?\n You're still convinced you can hide the whole thing and forget it. I'm\n telling you you can't.\"\n\n\n \"We return to the city now,\" Fith said. \"I can do no more.\"\n\n\n \"You can and you will, Fith,\" Retief said. \"I intend to get to the\n truth of this matter.\"\n\n\n Fith spoke to Shluh in rapid Groacian. The police chief gestured to his\n four armed constables. They moved to ring Retief in.",
"The door burst inward. A crowd of crested Groaci pressed into the room,\n pushed Miss Meuhl back, aimed scatter guns at Retief. Police Chief\n Shluh pushed forward.\n\n\n \"Attempt no violence, Terrestrial,\" he said. \"I cannot promise to\n restrain my men.\"\n\n\n \"You're violating Terrestrial territory, Shluh,\" Retief said steadily.\n \"I suggest you move back out the same way you came in.\"\n\n\n \"I invited them here,\" Miss Meuhl spoke up. \"They are here at my\n express wish.\"\n\n\n \"Are they? Are you sure you meant to go this far, Miss Meuhl? A squad\n of armed Groaci in the consulate?\"\n\n\n \"You are the consul, Miss Yolanda Meuhl,\" Shluh said. \"Would it not be\n best if we removed this deranged person to a place of safety?\"",
"\"Don't touch that screen,\" Retief said. \"You go sit in that corner\n where I can keep an eye on you. I'm going to make a sealed tape for\n transmission to Headquarters, along with a call for an armed task\n force. Then we'll settle down to wait.\"\n\n\n Retief ignored Miss Meuhl's fury as he spoke into the recorder.\n\n\n The local communicator chimed. Miss Meuhl jumped up, staring at it.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" Retief said. \"Answer it.\"\n\n\n A Groacian official appeared on the screen.",
"\"You and I are in a tight spot, Miss Meuhl. The logical next move for\n the Groaci is to dispose of both of us. We're the only ones who know\n what happened. Fith almost did the job this afternoon, but I bluffed\n him out—for the moment.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl emitted a shrill laugh. \"Your fantasies are getting the\n better of you,\" she gasped. \"In danger, indeed! Disposing of me! I've\n never heard anything so ridiculous.\"\n\n\n \"Stay in this office. Close and safe-lock the door. You've got food and\n water in the dispenser. I suggest you stock up, before they shut the\n supply down. Don't let anyone in, on any pretext whatever. I'll keep in\n touch with you via hand-phone.\"\n\n\n \"What are you planning to do?\"",
"\"Terrible? I understand that a Terrestrial task force stood off Groac\n and sent a delegation down to ask questions. They got some funny\n answers, and stayed on to dig around a little. After a week they left.\n Somewhat annoying to the Groaci, maybe—at the most. If they were\n innocent.\"\n\n\n \"IF!\" Miss Meuhl burst out.\n\n\n \"If, indeed!\" Fith said, his weak voice trembling. \"I must protest\n your—\"\n\"Save the protests, Fith. You have some explaining to do. And I don't\n think your story will be good enough.\"\n\n\n \"It is for you to explain! This person who was beaten—\"\n\n\n \"Not beaten. Just rapped a few times to loosen his memory.\"\n\n\n \"Then you admit—\"\n\n\n \"It worked, too. He remembered lots of things, once he put his mind to\n it.\"",
"Retief eyed Fith. \"Don't try it,\" he said. \"You'll just get yourself in\n deeper.\"\n\n\n Fith clacked his mandibles angrily, eye stalks canted aggressively\n toward the Terrestrial.\n\n\n \"Out of deference to your diplomatic status, Terrestrial, I shall\n ignore your insulting remarks,\" Fith said in his reedy voice. \"Let us\n now return to the city.\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the four policemen. \"I see your point,\" he said.\n\n\n Fith followed him into the car, sat rigidly at the far end of the seat.\n\n\n \"I advise you to remain very close to your consulate,\" Fith said. \"I\n advise you to dismiss these fancies from your mind, and to enjoy the\n cultural aspects of life at Groac. Especially, I should not venture out\n of the city, or appear overly curious about matters of concern only to\n the Groacian government.\"",
"\"If I'd listened any longer, I might have heard something I couldn't\n ignore. I can't afford that, at this moment. Listen, Miss Meuhl,\"\n Retief went on earnestly, \"I've found the missing cruiser.\"\n\n\n \"You heard him relieve you!\"\n\n\n \"I heard him say he was\ngoing\nto, Miss Meuhl. But until I've heard\n and acknowledged a verbal order, it has no force. If I'm wrong, he'll\n get my resignation. If I'm right, that suspension would be embarrassing\n all around.\"\n\n\n \"You're defying lawful authority! I'm in charge here now.\" Miss Meuhl\n stepped to the local communicator.\n\n\n \"I'm going to report this terrible thing to the Groaci at once, and\n offer my profound—\"",
"\"Indeed, I hope that this will be the end of this unfortunate affair,\"\n he said. \"Now that all has been fully and honestly shown—\"\n\n\n \"You can skip all that,\" Retief said. \"You're nine years late. The\n crew was still alive when the task force called, I imagine. You killed\n them—or let them die—rather than take the chance of admitting what\n you'd done.\"\n\n\n \"We were at fault,\" Fith said abjectly. \"Now we wish only friendship.\"\n\n\n \"The\nTerrific\nwas a heavy cruiser, about twenty thousand tons.\"\n Retief looked grimly at the slender Foreign Office official. \"Where is\n she, Fith? I won't settle for a hundred-ton lifeboat.\"\nFith erected his eye stalks so violently that one eye-shield fell off.\n\n\n \"I know nothing of ... of....\" He stopped. His throat vibrated rapidly\n as he struggled for calm."
],
[
"\"Don't touch that screen,\" Retief said. \"You go sit in that corner\n where I can keep an eye on you. I'm going to make a sealed tape for\n transmission to Headquarters, along with a call for an armed task\n force. Then we'll settle down to wait.\"\n\n\n Retief ignored Miss Meuhl's fury as he spoke into the recorder.\n\n\n The local communicator chimed. Miss Meuhl jumped up, staring at it.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" Retief said. \"Answer it.\"\n\n\n A Groacian official appeared on the screen.",
"Retief stepped around him, seized his collar and yanked. The Groacian\n fell on his back. Retief stood over him. The downed native half-rose;\n Retief put a foot against his chest and pushed.\n\n\n \"To not be going anywhere for a few minutes,\" Retief said. \"To stay\n right here and have a nice long talk.\"\nII\n\n\n \"There you are!\" Miss Meuhl said, eyeing Retief over her lenses. \"There\n are two gentlemen waiting to see you. Groacian gentlemen.\"\n\n\n \"Government men, I imagine. Word travels fast.\" Retief pulled off his\n cape. \"This saves me the trouble of paying another call at the Foreign\n Ministry.\"\n\n\n \"What have you been doing? They seem very upset, I don't mind telling\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you don't. Come along. And bring an official recorder.\"",
"\"Yolanda Meuhl,\" he said without preamble, \"for the Foreign Minister of\n the Groacian Autonomy, I herewith accredit you as Terrestrial Consul\n to Groac, in accordance with the advices transmitted to my government\n direct from the Terrestrial Headquarters. As consul, you are requested\n to make available for questioning Mr. J. Retief, former consul, in\n connection with the assault on two peace keepers and illegal entry into\n the offices of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.\"\n\n\n \"Why, why,\" Miss Meuhl stammered. \"Yes, of course. And I do want to\n express my deepest regrets—\"\nRetief rose, went to the communicator, assisted Miss Meuhl aside.",
"In the front seat, Shluh looked straight ahead. The loosely-sprung\n vehicle bobbed and swayed along the narrow highway. Retief listened to\n the rhythmic puffing of the motor and said nothing.\nIII\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said, \"I want you to listen carefully to what I'm\n going to tell you. I have to move rapidly now, to catch the Groaci off\n guard.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about,\" Miss Meuhl snapped,\n her eyes sharp behind the heavy lenses.\n\n\n \"If you'll listen, you may find out,\" Retief said. \"I have no time\n to waste, Miss Meuhl. They won't be expecting an immediate move—I\n hope—and that may give me the latitude I need.\"",
"Two Groaci wearing heavy eye-shields and elaborate crest ornaments\n indicative of rank rose as Retief entered the room. Neither offered a\n courteous snap of the mandibles, Retief noted. They were mad, all right.\n\n\n \"I am Fith, of the Terrestrial Desk, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr.\n Consul,\" the taller Groacian said, in lisping Terran. \"May I present\n Shluh, of the Internal Police?\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, gentlemen,\" Retief said. They resumed their seats. Miss\n Meuhl hovered nervously, then sat on the edge of a comfortless chair.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's such a pleasure—\" she began.\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" Retief said. \"These gentlemen didn't come here to\n sip tea today.\"",
"Retief nodded. \"Thanks, Miss Meuhl,\" he said. \"I'll be back before\n you close the office.\" Miss Meuhl's face was set in lines of grim\n disapproval as he closed the door.\nThe pale-featured Groacian vibrated his throat-bladder in a distressed\n bleat.\n\n\n \"Not to enter the Archives,\" he said in his faint voice. \"The denial of\n permission. The deep regret of the Archivist.\"\n\n\n \"The importance of my task here,\" Retief said, enunciating the glottal\n dialect with difficulty. \"My interest in local history.\"\n\n\n \"The impossibility of access to outworlders. To depart quietly.\"\n\n\n \"The necessity that I enter.\"\n\n\n \"The specific instructions of the Archivist.\" The Groacian's voice rose\n to a whisper. \"To insist no longer. To give up this idea!\"",
"\"My government can entertain no further accusations, Mr. Consul,\"\n he said at last. \"I have been completely candid with you, I have\n overlooked your probing into matters not properly within your sphere of\n responsibility. My patience is at an end.\"\n\n\n \"Where is that ship?\" Retief rapped out. \"You never learn, do you?\n You're still convinced you can hide the whole thing and forget it. I'm\n telling you you can't.\"\n\n\n \"We return to the city now,\" Fith said. \"I can do no more.\"\n\n\n \"You can and you will, Fith,\" Retief said. \"I intend to get to the\n truth of this matter.\"\n\n\n Fith spoke to Shluh in rapid Groacian. The police chief gestured to his\n four armed constables. They moved to ring Retief in.",
"\"To not be angry, fragrant native,\" Retief said. \"To permit me to chum\n with you.\"\n\n\n \"To flee before I take a cane to you!\"\n\n\n \"To have a drink together—\"\n\n\n \"To not endure such insolence!\" The Groacian advanced toward Retief.\n Retief backed away.\n\n\n \"To hold hands,\" Retief said. \"To be palsy-walsy—\"\n\n\n The Groacian reached for him, missed. A passer-by stepped around him,\n head down, scuttled away. Retief backed into the opening to a narrow\n crossway and offered further verbal familiarities to the drunken local,\n who followed, furious. Retief backed, rounded a corner into a narrow\n alley-like passage, deserted, silent ... except for the following\n Groacian.",
"\"Well!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"May I ask where you'll be if something comes\n up?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going over to the Foreign Office Archives.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl blinked behind thick lenses. \"Whatever for?\"\n\n\n Retief looked thoughtfully at Miss Meuhl. \"You've been here on Groac\n for four years, Miss Meuhl. What was behind the coup d'etat that put\n the present government in power?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I haven't pried into—\"\n\n\n \"What about that Terrestrial cruiser? The one that disappeared out this\n way about ten years back?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Retief, those are just the sort of questions we\navoid\nwith the\n Groaci. I certainly hope you're not thinking of openly intruding—\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"",
"\"If I don't make it back here, transmit the sealed record of this\n afternoon's conversation, along with the information I've given you.\n Beam it through on a mayday priority. Then tell the Groaci what you've\n done and sit tight. I think you'll be all right. It won't be easy to\n blast in here and anyway, they won't make things worse by killing you.\n A force can be here in a week.\"\n\n\n \"I'll do nothing of the sort! The Groaci are very fond of me! You ...\n Johnny-come-lately! Roughneck! Setting out to destroy—\"\n\n\n \"Blame it on me if it will make you feel any better,\" Retief said, \"but\n don't be fool enough to trust them.\" He pulled on a cape, opened the\n door.",
"\"I'm glad you did,\" Retief said. \"I hope you piled up a supply of food\n and water from the dispenser, too. We'll be holed up here for a week,\n at least.\" He jotted figures on a pad. \"Warm up the official sender. I\n have a long transmission for Regional Headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Are you going to tell me where you've been?\"\n\n\n \"I have a message to get off first, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said sharply.\n \"I've been to the Foreign Ministry,\" he added. \"I'll tell you all about\n it later.\"\n\n\n \"At this hour? There's no one there....\"\n\n\n \"Exactly.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl gasped. \"You mean you broke in? You burgled the Foreign\n Office?\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Retief said calmly. \"Now—\"",
"\"Enough!\" Fith's mandibles quivered in distress. \"I can talk no more of\n this matter—\"\n\n\n \"You'll talk to me, or there'll be a task force here in five days to do\n the talking,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"You can't!\" Miss Meuhl gasped.\n\n\n Retief turned a steady look on Miss Meuhl. She closed her mouth. The\n Groaci sat down.\n\n\n \"Answer me this one,\" Retief said, looking at Shluh. \"A few years\n back—about nine, I think—there was a little parade held here. Some\n curious looking creatures were captured. After being securely caged,\n they were exhibited to the gentle Groaci public. Hauled through the\n streets. Very educational, no doubt. A highly cultural show.\n\n\n \"Funny thing about these animals. They wore clothes. They seemed to\n communicate with each other. Altogether it was a very amusing exhibit.",
"\"Just keep that recorder going,\" Retief snapped.\n\n\n \"I'll not be a party—\"\n\n\n \"You'll do as you're told, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said quietly. \"I'm\n telling you to make an official sealed record of this conversation.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl sat down.\n\n\n Fith puffed out his throat indignantly. \"You reopen an old wound,\n Mr. Consul. It reminds us of certain illegal treatment at Terrestrial\n hands—\"\n\n\n \"Hogwash,\" Retief said. \"That tune went over with my predecessors, but\n it hits a sour note with me.\"\n\n\n \"All our efforts,\" Miss Meuhl said, \"to live down that terrible\n episode! And you—\"",
"\"What did you do with it? It was too big to just walk off and forget.\n Where is it?\"\n\n\n The two Groacians exchanged looks.\n\n\n \"We wish to show our contrition,\" Fith said. \"We will show you the\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said. \"If I don't come back in a reasonable length\n of time, transmit that recording to Regional Headquarters, sealed.\" He\n stood, looked at the Groaci.\n\n\n \"Let's go,\" he said.\nRetief stooped under the heavy timbers shoring the entry to the cavern.\n He peered into the gloom at the curving flank of the space-burned hull.\n\n\n \"Any lights in here?\" he asked.\n\n\n A Groacian threw a switch. A weak bluish glow sprang up.",
"Retief eyed Fith. \"Don't try it,\" he said. \"You'll just get yourself in\n deeper.\"\n\n\n Fith clacked his mandibles angrily, eye stalks canted aggressively\n toward the Terrestrial.\n\n\n \"Out of deference to your diplomatic status, Terrestrial, I shall\n ignore your insulting remarks,\" Fith said in his reedy voice. \"Let us\n now return to the city.\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the four policemen. \"I see your point,\" he said.\n\n\n Fith followed him into the car, sat rigidly at the far end of the seat.\n\n\n \"I advise you to remain very close to your consulate,\" Fith said. \"I\n advise you to dismiss these fancies from your mind, and to enjoy the\n cultural aspects of life at Groac. Especially, I should not venture out\n of the city, or appear overly curious about matters of concern only to\n the Groacian government.\"",
"\"That's my decision,\" Retief said. \"I have a job to do and we're\n wasting time.\" He crossed the room to his desk, opened a drawer and\n took out a slim-barreled needler.\n\n\n \"This office is being watched. Not very efficiently, if I know the\n Groaci. I think I can get past them all right.\"\n\n\n \"Where are you going with ... that?\" Miss Meuhl stared at the needler.\n \"What in the world—\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci won't waste any time destroying every piece of paper in\n their files relating to this thing. I have to get what I need before\n it's too late. If I wait for an official Inquiry Commission, they'll\n find nothing but blank smiles.\"\n\n\n \"You're out of your mind!\" Miss Meuhl stood up, quivering with\n indignation. \"You're like a ... a....\"",
"\"Tell me, Shluh, what happened to those six Terrestrials after the\n parade was over?\"\nFith made a choked noise and spoke rapidly to Shluh in Groacian. Shluh\n retracted his eyes, shrank down in his chair. Miss Meuhl opened her\n mouth, closed it and blinked rapidly.\n\n\n \"How did they die?\" Retief snapped. \"Did you murder them, cut their\n throats, shoot them or bury them alive? What amusing end did you figure\n out for them? Research, maybe? Cut them open to see what made them\n yell....\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Fith gasped. \"I must correct this terrible false impression at\n once.\"\n\n\n \"False impression, hell,\" Retief said. \"They were Terrans! A simple\n narco-interrogation would get that out of any Groacian who saw the\n parade.\"",
"Shluh came forward with a hand-lamp. The party entered the ship.\n\n\n Retief clambered up a narrow companionway, glanced around the interior\n of the control compartment. Dust was thick on the deck, the stanchions\n where acceleration couches had been mounted, the empty instrument\n panels, the litter of sheared bolts, scraps of wire and paper. A thin\n frosting of rust dulled the exposed metal where cutting torches had\n sliced away heavy shielding. There was a faint odor of stale bedding.\n\n\n \"The cargo compartment—\" Shluh began.\n\n\n \"I've seen enough,\" Retief said.\n\n\n Silently, the Groacians led the way back out through the tunnel and\n into the late afternoon sunshine. As they climbed the slope to the\n steam car, Fith came to Retief's side.",
"The door burst inward. A crowd of crested Groaci pressed into the room,\n pushed Miss Meuhl back, aimed scatter guns at Retief. Police Chief\n Shluh pushed forward.\n\n\n \"Attempt no violence, Terrestrial,\" he said. \"I cannot promise to\n restrain my men.\"\n\n\n \"You're violating Terrestrial territory, Shluh,\" Retief said steadily.\n \"I suggest you move back out the same way you came in.\"\n\n\n \"I invited them here,\" Miss Meuhl spoke up. \"They are here at my\n express wish.\"\n\n\n \"Are they? Are you sure you meant to go this far, Miss Meuhl? A squad\n of armed Groaci in the consulate?\"\n\n\n \"You are the consul, Miss Yolanda Meuhl,\" Shluh said. \"Would it not be\n best if we removed this deranged person to a place of safety?\"",
"\"You can't turn this invitation down,\" Administrative Assistant Meuhl\n said flatly. \"I'll make that 'accepts with pleasure'.\"\n\n\n Retief exhaled a plume of cigar smoke.\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" he said, \"in the past couple of weeks I've sat through\n six light-concerts, four attempts at chamber music, and god knows how\n many assorted folk-art festivals. I've been tied up every off-duty\n hour since I got here—\"\n\n\n \"You can't offend the Groaci,\" Miss Meuhl said sharply. \"Consul Whaffle\n would never have been so rude.\"\n\n\n \"Whaffle left here three months ago,\" Retief said, \"leaving me in\n charge.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Miss Meuhl said, snapping off the dictyper. \"I'm sure I don't\n know what excuse I can give the Minister.\""
],
[
"\"Don't touch that screen,\" Retief said. \"You go sit in that corner\n where I can keep an eye on you. I'm going to make a sealed tape for\n transmission to Headquarters, along with a call for an armed task\n force. Then we'll settle down to wait.\"\n\n\n Retief ignored Miss Meuhl's fury as he spoke into the recorder.\n\n\n The local communicator chimed. Miss Meuhl jumped up, staring at it.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" Retief said. \"Answer it.\"\n\n\n A Groacian official appeared on the screen.",
"\"Yolanda Meuhl,\" he said without preamble, \"for the Foreign Minister of\n the Groacian Autonomy, I herewith accredit you as Terrestrial Consul\n to Groac, in accordance with the advices transmitted to my government\n direct from the Terrestrial Headquarters. As consul, you are requested\n to make available for questioning Mr. J. Retief, former consul, in\n connection with the assault on two peace keepers and illegal entry into\n the offices of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.\"\n\n\n \"Why, why,\" Miss Meuhl stammered. \"Yes, of course. And I do want to\n express my deepest regrets—\"\nRetief rose, went to the communicator, assisted Miss Meuhl aside.",
"Retief stepped around him, seized his collar and yanked. The Groacian\n fell on his back. Retief stood over him. The downed native half-rose;\n Retief put a foot against his chest and pushed.\n\n\n \"To not be going anywhere for a few minutes,\" Retief said. \"To stay\n right here and have a nice long talk.\"\nII\n\n\n \"There you are!\" Miss Meuhl said, eyeing Retief over her lenses. \"There\n are two gentlemen waiting to see you. Groacian gentlemen.\"\n\n\n \"Government men, I imagine. Word travels fast.\" Retief pulled off his\n cape. \"This saves me the trouble of paying another call at the Foreign\n Ministry.\"\n\n\n \"What have you been doing? They seem very upset, I don't mind telling\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you don't. Come along. And bring an official recorder.\"",
"Two Groaci wearing heavy eye-shields and elaborate crest ornaments\n indicative of rank rose as Retief entered the room. Neither offered a\n courteous snap of the mandibles, Retief noted. They were mad, all right.\n\n\n \"I am Fith, of the Terrestrial Desk, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr.\n Consul,\" the taller Groacian said, in lisping Terran. \"May I present\n Shluh, of the Internal Police?\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, gentlemen,\" Retief said. They resumed their seats. Miss\n Meuhl hovered nervously, then sat on the edge of a comfortless chair.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's such a pleasure—\" she began.\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" Retief said. \"These gentlemen didn't come here to\n sip tea today.\"",
"In the front seat, Shluh looked straight ahead. The loosely-sprung\n vehicle bobbed and swayed along the narrow highway. Retief listened to\n the rhythmic puffing of the motor and said nothing.\nIII\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said, \"I want you to listen carefully to what I'm\n going to tell you. I have to move rapidly now, to catch the Groaci off\n guard.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about,\" Miss Meuhl snapped,\n her eyes sharp behind the heavy lenses.\n\n\n \"If you'll listen, you may find out,\" Retief said. \"I have no time\n to waste, Miss Meuhl. They won't be expecting an immediate move—I\n hope—and that may give me the latitude I need.\"",
"\"Well!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"May I ask where you'll be if something comes\n up?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going over to the Foreign Office Archives.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl blinked behind thick lenses. \"Whatever for?\"\n\n\n Retief looked thoughtfully at Miss Meuhl. \"You've been here on Groac\n for four years, Miss Meuhl. What was behind the coup d'etat that put\n the present government in power?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I haven't pried into—\"\n\n\n \"What about that Terrestrial cruiser? The one that disappeared out this\n way about ten years back?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Retief, those are just the sort of questions we\navoid\nwith the\n Groaci. I certainly hope you're not thinking of openly intruding—\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"",
"Retief nodded. \"Thanks, Miss Meuhl,\" he said. \"I'll be back before\n you close the office.\" Miss Meuhl's face was set in lines of grim\n disapproval as he closed the door.\nThe pale-featured Groacian vibrated his throat-bladder in a distressed\n bleat.\n\n\n \"Not to enter the Archives,\" he said in his faint voice. \"The denial of\n permission. The deep regret of the Archivist.\"\n\n\n \"The importance of my task here,\" Retief said, enunciating the glottal\n dialect with difficulty. \"My interest in local history.\"\n\n\n \"The impossibility of access to outworlders. To depart quietly.\"\n\n\n \"The necessity that I enter.\"\n\n\n \"The specific instructions of the Archivist.\" The Groacian's voice rose\n to a whisper. \"To insist no longer. To give up this idea!\"",
"\"This is absolutely the end!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"Thank heaven I've\n already—\"\n\n\n \"Get that sender going, woman!\" Retief snapped. \"This is important.\"\n\n\n \"I've already done so, Mr. Retief!\" Miss Meuhl said harshly. \"I've been\n waiting for you to come back here....\" She turned to the communicator,\n flipped levers. The screen snapped aglow, and a wavering long-distance\n image appeared.\n\n\n \"He's here now,\" Miss Meuhl said to the screen. She looked at Retief\n triumphantly.\n\n\n \"That's good,\" Retief said. \"I don't think the Groaci can knock us off\n the air, but—\"",
"\"I have done my duty, Mr. Retief,\" Miss Meuhl said. \"I made a full\n report to Regional Headquarters last night, as soon as you left this\n office. Any doubts I may have had as to the rightness of that decision\n have been completely dispelled by what you've just told me.\"\n\n\n Retief looked at her levelly. \"You've been a busy girl, Miss Meuhl. Did\n you mention the six Terrestrials who were killed here?\"",
"The door burst inward. A crowd of crested Groaci pressed into the room,\n pushed Miss Meuhl back, aimed scatter guns at Retief. Police Chief\n Shluh pushed forward.\n\n\n \"Attempt no violence, Terrestrial,\" he said. \"I cannot promise to\n restrain my men.\"\n\n\n \"You're violating Terrestrial territory, Shluh,\" Retief said steadily.\n \"I suggest you move back out the same way you came in.\"\n\n\n \"I invited them here,\" Miss Meuhl spoke up. \"They are here at my\n express wish.\"\n\n\n \"Are they? Are you sure you meant to go this far, Miss Meuhl? A squad\n of armed Groaci in the consulate?\"\n\n\n \"You are the consul, Miss Yolanda Meuhl,\" Shluh said. \"Would it not be\n best if we removed this deranged person to a place of safety?\"",
"\"That's my decision,\" Retief said. \"I have a job to do and we're\n wasting time.\" He crossed the room to his desk, opened a drawer and\n took out a slim-barreled needler.\n\n\n \"This office is being watched. Not very efficiently, if I know the\n Groaci. I think I can get past them all right.\"\n\n\n \"Where are you going with ... that?\" Miss Meuhl stared at the needler.\n \"What in the world—\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci won't waste any time destroying every piece of paper in\n their files relating to this thing. I have to get what I need before\n it's too late. If I wait for an official Inquiry Commission, they'll\n find nothing but blank smiles.\"\n\n\n \"You're out of your mind!\" Miss Meuhl stood up, quivering with\n indignation. \"You're like a ... a....\"",
"\"You can't turn this invitation down,\" Administrative Assistant Meuhl\n said flatly. \"I'll make that 'accepts with pleasure'.\"\n\n\n Retief exhaled a plume of cigar smoke.\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" he said, \"in the past couple of weeks I've sat through\n six light-concerts, four attempts at chamber music, and god knows how\n many assorted folk-art festivals. I've been tied up every off-duty\n hour since I got here—\"\n\n\n \"You can't offend the Groaci,\" Miss Meuhl said sharply. \"Consul Whaffle\n would never have been so rude.\"\n\n\n \"Whaffle left here three months ago,\" Retief said, \"leaving me in\n charge.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Miss Meuhl said, snapping off the dictyper. \"I'm sure I don't\n know what excuse I can give the Minister.\"",
"\"Never mind the excuses,\" Retief said. \"Just tell him I won't be\n there.\" He stood up.\n\n\n \"Are you leaving the office?\" Miss Meuhl adjusted her glasses. \"I have\n some important letters here for your signature.\"\n\n\n \"I don't recall dictating any letters today, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said,\n pulling on a light cape.\n\"I wrote them for you. They're just as Consul Whaffle would have wanted\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Did you write all Whaffle's letters for him, Miss Meuhl?\"\n\n\n \"Consul Whaffle was an extremely busy man,\" Miss Meuhl said stiffly.\n \"He had complete confidence in me.\"\n\n\n \"Since I'm cutting out the culture from now on,\" Retief said, \"I won't\n be so busy.\"",
"\"Just keep that recorder going,\" Retief snapped.\n\n\n \"I'll not be a party—\"\n\n\n \"You'll do as you're told, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said quietly. \"I'm\n telling you to make an official sealed record of this conversation.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl sat down.\n\n\n Fith puffed out his throat indignantly. \"You reopen an old wound,\n Mr. Consul. It reminds us of certain illegal treatment at Terrestrial\n hands—\"\n\n\n \"Hogwash,\" Retief said. \"That tune went over with my predecessors, but\n it hits a sour note with me.\"\n\n\n \"All our efforts,\" Miss Meuhl said, \"to live down that terrible\n episode! And you—\"",
"\"I'm glad you did,\" Retief said. \"I hope you piled up a supply of food\n and water from the dispenser, too. We'll be holed up here for a week,\n at least.\" He jotted figures on a pad. \"Warm up the official sender. I\n have a long transmission for Regional Headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Are you going to tell me where you've been?\"\n\n\n \"I have a message to get off first, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said sharply.\n \"I've been to the Foreign Ministry,\" he added. \"I'll tell you all about\n it later.\"\n\n\n \"At this hour? There's no one there....\"\n\n\n \"Exactly.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl gasped. \"You mean you broke in? You burgled the Foreign\n Office?\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Retief said calmly. \"Now—\"",
"\"You're making a serious mistake, Shluh,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Miss Meuhl said. \"You're quite right, Mr. Shluh. Please escort\n Mr. Retief to his quarters in this building—\"\n\n\n \"I don't advise you to violate my diplomatic immunity, Fith,\" Retief\n said.\n\n\n \"As chief of mission,\" Miss Meuhl said quickly, \"I hereby waive\n immunity in the case of Mr. Retief.\"\n\n\n Shluh produced a hand recorder. \"Kindly repeat your statement, Madam,\n officially,\" he said. \"I wish no question to arise later.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be a fool, woman,\" Retief said. \"Don't you see what you're\n letting yourself in for? This would be a hell of a good time for you to\n figure out whose side you're on.\"",
"\"Enough!\" Fith's mandibles quivered in distress. \"I can talk no more of\n this matter—\"\n\n\n \"You'll talk to me, or there'll be a task force here in five days to do\n the talking,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"You can't!\" Miss Meuhl gasped.\n\n\n Retief turned a steady look on Miss Meuhl. She closed her mouth. The\n Groaci sat down.\n\n\n \"Answer me this one,\" Retief said, looking at Shluh. \"A few years\n back—about nine, I think—there was a little parade held here. Some\n curious looking creatures were captured. After being securely caged,\n they were exhibited to the gentle Groaci public. Hauled through the\n streets. Very educational, no doubt. A highly cultural show.\n\n\n \"Funny thing about these animals. They wore clothes. They seemed to\n communicate with each other. Altogether it was a very amusing exhibit.",
"\"What did you do with it? It was too big to just walk off and forget.\n Where is it?\"\n\n\n The two Groacians exchanged looks.\n\n\n \"We wish to show our contrition,\" Fith said. \"We will show you the\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said. \"If I don't come back in a reasonable length\n of time, transmit that recording to Regional Headquarters, sealed.\" He\n stood, looked at the Groaci.\n\n\n \"Let's go,\" he said.\nRetief stooped under the heavy timbers shoring the entry to the cavern.\n He peered into the gloom at the curving flank of the space-burned hull.\n\n\n \"Any lights in here?\" he asked.\n\n\n A Groacian threw a switch. A weak bluish glow sprang up.",
"\"Listen carefully, Fith,\" he said. \"Your bluff has been called. You\n don't come in and we don't come out. Your camouflage worked for nine\n years, but it's all over now. I suggest you keep your heads and resist\n the temptation to make matters worse than they are.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Fith said, \"a peace squad waits outside your consulate.\n It is clear you are in the hands of a dangerous lunatic. As always, the\n Groaci wish only friendship with the Terrestrials, but—\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother,\" Retief said. \"You know what was in those files I looked\n over this morning.\"\n\n\n Retief turned at a sound behind him. Miss Meuhl was at the door,\n reaching for the safe-lock release....\n\n\n \"Don't!\" Retief jumped—too late.",
"\"Tell me, Shluh, what happened to those six Terrestrials after the\n parade was over?\"\nFith made a choked noise and spoke rapidly to Shluh in Groacian. Shluh\n retracted his eyes, shrank down in his chair. Miss Meuhl opened her\n mouth, closed it and blinked rapidly.\n\n\n \"How did they die?\" Retief snapped. \"Did you murder them, cut their\n throats, shoot them or bury them alive? What amusing end did you figure\n out for them? Research, maybe? Cut them open to see what made them\n yell....\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Fith gasped. \"I must correct this terrible false impression at\n once.\"\n\n\n \"False impression, hell,\" Retief said. \"They were Terrans! A simple\n narco-interrogation would get that out of any Groacian who saw the\n parade.\""
],
[
"Two Groaci wearing heavy eye-shields and elaborate crest ornaments\n indicative of rank rose as Retief entered the room. Neither offered a\n courteous snap of the mandibles, Retief noted. They were mad, all right.\n\n\n \"I am Fith, of the Terrestrial Desk, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr.\n Consul,\" the taller Groacian said, in lisping Terran. \"May I present\n Shluh, of the Internal Police?\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, gentlemen,\" Retief said. They resumed their seats. Miss\n Meuhl hovered nervously, then sat on the edge of a comfortless chair.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's such a pleasure—\" she began.\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" Retief said. \"These gentlemen didn't come here to\n sip tea today.\"",
"\"Don't touch that screen,\" Retief said. \"You go sit in that corner\n where I can keep an eye on you. I'm going to make a sealed tape for\n transmission to Headquarters, along with a call for an armed task\n force. Then we'll settle down to wait.\"\n\n\n Retief ignored Miss Meuhl's fury as he spoke into the recorder.\n\n\n The local communicator chimed. Miss Meuhl jumped up, staring at it.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" Retief said. \"Answer it.\"\n\n\n A Groacian official appeared on the screen.",
"\"This is absolutely the end!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"Thank heaven I've\n already—\"\n\n\n \"Get that sender going, woman!\" Retief snapped. \"This is important.\"\n\n\n \"I've already done so, Mr. Retief!\" Miss Meuhl said harshly. \"I've been\n waiting for you to come back here....\" She turned to the communicator,\n flipped levers. The screen snapped aglow, and a wavering long-distance\n image appeared.\n\n\n \"He's here now,\" Miss Meuhl said to the screen. She looked at Retief\n triumphantly.\n\n\n \"That's good,\" Retief said. \"I don't think the Groaci can knock us off\n the air, but—\"",
"A Groacian bartender was dispensing clay pots of alcoholic drink from\n the bar-pit at the center of the room. He looked at Retief and froze in\n mid-motion, a metal tube poised over a waiting pot.\n\n\n \"To enjoy a cooling drink,\" Retief said in Groacian, squatting down at\n the edge of the pit. \"To sample a true Groacian beverage.\"\n\n\n \"To not enjoy my poor offerings,\" the Groacian mumbled. \"A pain in the\n digestive sacs; to express regret.\"\n\n\n \"To not worry,\" Retief said, irritated. \"To pour it out and let me\n decide whether I like it.\"\n\n\n \"To be grappled in by peace-keepers for poisoning of—foreigners.\" The\n barkeep looked around for support, found none. The Groaci customers,\n eyes elsewhere, were drifting away.",
"Retief stepped around him, seized his collar and yanked. The Groacian\n fell on his back. Retief stood over him. The downed native half-rose;\n Retief put a foot against his chest and pushed.\n\n\n \"To not be going anywhere for a few minutes,\" Retief said. \"To stay\n right here and have a nice long talk.\"\nII\n\n\n \"There you are!\" Miss Meuhl said, eyeing Retief over her lenses. \"There\n are two gentlemen waiting to see you. Groacian gentlemen.\"\n\n\n \"Government men, I imagine. Word travels fast.\" Retief pulled off his\n cape. \"This saves me the trouble of paying another call at the Foreign\n Ministry.\"\n\n\n \"What have you been doing? They seem very upset, I don't mind telling\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you don't. Come along. And bring an official recorder.\"",
"\"To speak intelligibly, malodorous outworlder,\" the drunk said. The\n barkeep whispered something, and two customers came up to the drunk,\n took his arms and helped him to the door.\n\n\n \"To get a cage!\" the drunk shrilled. \"To keep the animals in their own\n stinking place.\"\n\n\n \"I've changed my mind,\" Retief said to the bartender. \"To be grateful\n as hell, but to have to hurry off now.\" He followed the drunk out the\n door. The other Groaci released him, hurried back inside. Retief looked\n at the weaving alien.\n\n\n \"To begone, freak,\" the Groacian whispered.\n\n\n \"To be pals,\" Retief said. \"To be kind to dumb animals.\"\n\n\n \"To have you hauled away to a stockyard, ill-odored foreign livestock.\"",
"\"Yolanda Meuhl,\" he said without preamble, \"for the Foreign Minister of\n the Groacian Autonomy, I herewith accredit you as Terrestrial Consul\n to Groac, in accordance with the advices transmitted to my government\n direct from the Terrestrial Headquarters. As consul, you are requested\n to make available for questioning Mr. J. Retief, former consul, in\n connection with the assault on two peace keepers and illegal entry into\n the offices of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.\"\n\n\n \"Why, why,\" Miss Meuhl stammered. \"Yes, of course. And I do want to\n express my deepest regrets—\"\nRetief rose, went to the communicator, assisted Miss Meuhl aside.",
"\"To not be angry, fragrant native,\" Retief said. \"To permit me to chum\n with you.\"\n\n\n \"To flee before I take a cane to you!\"\n\n\n \"To have a drink together—\"\n\n\n \"To not endure such insolence!\" The Groacian advanced toward Retief.\n Retief backed away.\n\n\n \"To hold hands,\" Retief said. \"To be palsy-walsy—\"\n\n\n The Groacian reached for him, missed. A passer-by stepped around him,\n head down, scuttled away. Retief backed into the opening to a narrow\n crossway and offered further verbal familiarities to the drunken local,\n who followed, furious. Retief backed, rounded a corner into a narrow\n alley-like passage, deserted, silent ... except for the following\n Groacian.",
"Retief nodded. \"Thanks, Miss Meuhl,\" he said. \"I'll be back before\n you close the office.\" Miss Meuhl's face was set in lines of grim\n disapproval as he closed the door.\nThe pale-featured Groacian vibrated his throat-bladder in a distressed\n bleat.\n\n\n \"Not to enter the Archives,\" he said in his faint voice. \"The denial of\n permission. The deep regret of the Archivist.\"\n\n\n \"The importance of my task here,\" Retief said, enunciating the glottal\n dialect with difficulty. \"My interest in local history.\"\n\n\n \"The impossibility of access to outworlders. To depart quietly.\"\n\n\n \"The necessity that I enter.\"\n\n\n \"The specific instructions of the Archivist.\" The Groacian's voice rose\n to a whisper. \"To insist no longer. To give up this idea!\"",
"\"The Groaci are a very sensitive race. They don't welcome outworlders\n raking up things. They've been gracious enough to let us live down\n the fact that Terrestrials subjected them to deep humiliation on one\n occasion.\"\n\n\n \"You mean when they came looking for the cruiser?\"\n\n\n \"I, for one, am ashamed of the high-handed tactics that were employed,\n grilling these innocent people as though they were criminals. We try\n never to reopen that wound, Mr. Retief.\"\n\n\n \"They never found the cruiser, did they?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not on Groac.\"",
"\"Enough!\" Fith's mandibles quivered in distress. \"I can talk no more of\n this matter—\"\n\n\n \"You'll talk to me, or there'll be a task force here in five days to do\n the talking,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"You can't!\" Miss Meuhl gasped.\n\n\n Retief turned a steady look on Miss Meuhl. She closed her mouth. The\n Groaci sat down.\n\n\n \"Answer me this one,\" Retief said, looking at Shluh. \"A few years\n back—about nine, I think—there was a little parade held here. Some\n curious looking creatures were captured. After being securely caged,\n they were exhibited to the gentle Groaci public. Hauled through the\n streets. Very educational, no doubt. A highly cultural show.\n\n\n \"Funny thing about these animals. They wore clothes. They seemed to\n communicate with each other. Altogether it was a very amusing exhibit.",
"\"OK, Skinny, I know when I'm licked,\" Retief said in Terran. \"To keep\n your nose clean.\"\n\n\n Outside, Retief stood for a moment looking across at the deeply carved\n windowless stucco facades lining the street, then started off in the\n direction of the Terrestrial Consulate General. The few Groacians on\n the street eyed him furtively, veered to avoid him as he passed. Flimsy\n high-wheeled ground cars puffed silently along the resilient pavement.\n The air was clean and cool.\n\n\n At the office, Miss Meuhl would be waiting with another list of\n complaints.\n\n\n Retief studied the carving over the open doorways along the street.\n An elaborate one picked out in pinkish paint seemed to indicate the\n Groacian equivalent of a bar. Retief went in.",
"\"You and I are in a tight spot, Miss Meuhl. The logical next move for\n the Groaci is to dispose of both of us. We're the only ones who know\n what happened. Fith almost did the job this afternoon, but I bluffed\n him out—for the moment.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl emitted a shrill laugh. \"Your fantasies are getting the\n better of you,\" she gasped. \"In danger, indeed! Disposing of me! I've\n never heard anything so ridiculous.\"\n\n\n \"Stay in this office. Close and safe-lock the door. You've got food and\n water in the dispenser. I suggest you stock up, before they shut the\n supply down. Don't let anyone in, on any pretext whatever. I'll keep in\n touch with you via hand-phone.\"\n\n\n \"What are you planning to do?\"",
"In the front seat, Shluh looked straight ahead. The loosely-sprung\n vehicle bobbed and swayed along the narrow highway. Retief listened to\n the rhythmic puffing of the motor and said nothing.\nIII\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said, \"I want you to listen carefully to what I'm\n going to tell you. I have to move rapidly now, to catch the Groaci off\n guard.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about,\" Miss Meuhl snapped,\n her eyes sharp behind the heavy lenses.\n\n\n \"If you'll listen, you may find out,\" Retief said. \"I have no time\n to waste, Miss Meuhl. They won't be expecting an immediate move—I\n hope—and that may give me the latitude I need.\"",
"\"Terrible? I understand that a Terrestrial task force stood off Groac\n and sent a delegation down to ask questions. They got some funny\n answers, and stayed on to dig around a little. After a week they left.\n Somewhat annoying to the Groaci, maybe—at the most. If they were\n innocent.\"\n\n\n \"IF!\" Miss Meuhl burst out.\n\n\n \"If, indeed!\" Fith said, his weak voice trembling. \"I must protest\n your—\"\n\"Save the protests, Fith. You have some explaining to do. And I don't\n think your story will be good enough.\"\n\n\n \"It is for you to explain! This person who was beaten—\"\n\n\n \"Not beaten. Just rapped a few times to loosen his memory.\"\n\n\n \"Then you admit—\"\n\n\n \"It worked, too. He remembered lots of things, once he put his mind to\n it.\"",
"\"What did you do with it? It was too big to just walk off and forget.\n Where is it?\"\n\n\n The two Groacians exchanged looks.\n\n\n \"We wish to show our contrition,\" Fith said. \"We will show you the\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said. \"If I don't come back in a reasonable length\n of time, transmit that recording to Regional Headquarters, sealed.\" He\n stood, looked at the Groaci.\n\n\n \"Let's go,\" he said.\nRetief stooped under the heavy timbers shoring the entry to the cavern.\n He peered into the gloom at the curving flank of the space-burned hull.\n\n\n \"Any lights in here?\" he asked.\n\n\n A Groacian threw a switch. A weak bluish glow sprang up.",
"\"To get the lead out,\" Retief said, placing a thick gold-piece in the\n dish provided. \"To shake a tentacle.\"\n\n\n \"The procuring of a cage,\" a thin voice called from the sidelines. \"The\n displaying of a freak.\"\nRetief turned. A tall Groacian vibrated his mandibles in a gesture\n of contempt. From his bluish throat coloration, it was apparent the\n creature was drunk.\n\n\n \"To choke in your upper sac,\" the bartender hissed, extending his eyes\n toward the drunk. \"To keep silent, litter-mate of drones.\"\n\n\n \"To swallow your own poison, dispenser of vileness,\" the drunk\n whispered. \"To find a proper cage for this zoo-piece.\" He wavered\n toward Retief. \"To show this one in the streets, like all freaks.\"\n\n\n \"Seen a lot of freaks like me, have you?\" Retief asked, interestedly.",
"THE MADMAN FROM EARTH\nBY KEITH LAUMER\nYou don't have to be crazy to be an earth\n\n diplomat—but on Groac it sure helps!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI\n\n\n \"The Consul for the Terrestrial States,\" Retief said, \"presents his\n compliments, et cetera, to the Ministry of Culture of the Groacian\n Autonomy, and with reference to the Ministry's invitation to attend a\n recital of interpretive grimacing, has the honor to express regret that\n he will be unable—\"",
"\"Tell me, Shluh, what happened to those six Terrestrials after the\n parade was over?\"\nFith made a choked noise and spoke rapidly to Shluh in Groacian. Shluh\n retracted his eyes, shrank down in his chair. Miss Meuhl opened her\n mouth, closed it and blinked rapidly.\n\n\n \"How did they die?\" Retief snapped. \"Did you murder them, cut their\n throats, shoot them or bury them alive? What amusing end did you figure\n out for them? Research, maybe? Cut them open to see what made them\n yell....\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Fith gasped. \"I must correct this terrible false impression at\n once.\"\n\n\n \"False impression, hell,\" Retief said. \"They were Terrans! A simple\n narco-interrogation would get that out of any Groacian who saw the\n parade.\"",
"\"If I don't make it back here, transmit the sealed record of this\n afternoon's conversation, along with the information I've given you.\n Beam it through on a mayday priority. Then tell the Groaci what you've\n done and sit tight. I think you'll be all right. It won't be easy to\n blast in here and anyway, they won't make things worse by killing you.\n A force can be here in a week.\"\n\n\n \"I'll do nothing of the sort! The Groaci are very fond of me! You ...\n Johnny-come-lately! Roughneck! Setting out to destroy—\"\n\n\n \"Blame it on me if it will make you feel any better,\" Retief said, \"but\n don't be fool enough to trust them.\" He pulled on a cape, opened the\n door."
],
[
"\"The Groaci are a very sensitive race. They don't welcome outworlders\n raking up things. They've been gracious enough to let us live down\n the fact that Terrestrials subjected them to deep humiliation on one\n occasion.\"\n\n\n \"You mean when they came looking for the cruiser?\"\n\n\n \"I, for one, am ashamed of the high-handed tactics that were employed,\n grilling these innocent people as though they were criminals. We try\n never to reopen that wound, Mr. Retief.\"\n\n\n \"They never found the cruiser, did they?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not on Groac.\"",
"\"What did you do with it? It was too big to just walk off and forget.\n Where is it?\"\n\n\n The two Groacians exchanged looks.\n\n\n \"We wish to show our contrition,\" Fith said. \"We will show you the\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said. \"If I don't come back in a reasonable length\n of time, transmit that recording to Regional Headquarters, sealed.\" He\n stood, looked at the Groaci.\n\n\n \"Let's go,\" he said.\nRetief stooped under the heavy timbers shoring the entry to the cavern.\n He peered into the gloom at the curving flank of the space-burned hull.\n\n\n \"Any lights in here?\" he asked.\n\n\n A Groacian threw a switch. A weak bluish glow sprang up.",
"\"Well!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"May I ask where you'll be if something comes\n up?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going over to the Foreign Office Archives.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl blinked behind thick lenses. \"Whatever for?\"\n\n\n Retief looked thoughtfully at Miss Meuhl. \"You've been here on Groac\n for four years, Miss Meuhl. What was behind the coup d'etat that put\n the present government in power?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I haven't pried into—\"\n\n\n \"What about that Terrestrial cruiser? The one that disappeared out this\n way about ten years back?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Retief, those are just the sort of questions we\navoid\nwith the\n Groaci. I certainly hope you're not thinking of openly intruding—\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"",
"Shluh came forward with a hand-lamp. The party entered the ship.\n\n\n Retief clambered up a narrow companionway, glanced around the interior\n of the control compartment. Dust was thick on the deck, the stanchions\n where acceleration couches had been mounted, the empty instrument\n panels, the litter of sheared bolts, scraps of wire and paper. A thin\n frosting of rust dulled the exposed metal where cutting torches had\n sliced away heavy shielding. There was a faint odor of stale bedding.\n\n\n \"The cargo compartment—\" Shluh began.\n\n\n \"I've seen enough,\" Retief said.\n\n\n Silently, the Groacians led the way back out through the tunnel and\n into the late afternoon sunshine. As they climbed the slope to the\n steam car, Fith came to Retief's side.",
"\"So true,\" Fith said. \"Frankly, I have had a most disturbing report,\n Mr. Consul. I shall ask Shluh to recount it.\" He nodded to the police\n chief.\n\n\n \"One hour ago,\" The Groacian said, \"a Groacian national was brought\n to hospital suffering from serious contusions. Questioning of this\n individual revealed that he had been set upon and beaten by a\n foreigner. A Terrestrial, to be precise. Investigation by my department\n indicates that the description of the culprit closely matches that of\n the Terrestrial Consul.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl gasped audibly.\n\n\n \"Have you ever heard,\" Retief said, looking steadily at Fith, \"of a\n Terrestrial cruiser, the\nISV Terrific\n, which dropped from sight in\n this sector nine years ago?\"\n\n\n \"Really!\" Miss Meuhl exclaimed, rising. \"I wash my hands—\"",
"\"Indeed, I hope that this will be the end of this unfortunate affair,\"\n he said. \"Now that all has been fully and honestly shown—\"\n\n\n \"You can skip all that,\" Retief said. \"You're nine years late. The\n crew was still alive when the task force called, I imagine. You killed\n them—or let them die—rather than take the chance of admitting what\n you'd done.\"\n\n\n \"We were at fault,\" Fith said abjectly. \"Now we wish only friendship.\"\n\n\n \"The\nTerrific\nwas a heavy cruiser, about twenty thousand tons.\"\n Retief looked grimly at the slender Foreign Office official. \"Where is\n she, Fith? I won't settle for a hundred-ton lifeboat.\"\nFith erected his eye stalks so violently that one eye-shield fell off.\n\n\n \"I know nothing of ... of....\" He stopped. His throat vibrated rapidly\n as he struggled for calm.",
"Two Groaci wearing heavy eye-shields and elaborate crest ornaments\n indicative of rank rose as Retief entered the room. Neither offered a\n courteous snap of the mandibles, Retief noted. They were mad, all right.\n\n\n \"I am Fith, of the Terrestrial Desk, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr.\n Consul,\" the taller Groacian said, in lisping Terran. \"May I present\n Shluh, of the Internal Police?\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, gentlemen,\" Retief said. They resumed their seats. Miss\n Meuhl hovered nervously, then sat on the edge of a comfortless chair.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's such a pleasure—\" she began.\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" Retief said. \"These gentlemen didn't come here to\n sip tea today.\"",
"\"My government can entertain no further accusations, Mr. Consul,\"\n he said at last. \"I have been completely candid with you, I have\n overlooked your probing into matters not properly within your sphere of\n responsibility. My patience is at an end.\"\n\n\n \"Where is that ship?\" Retief rapped out. \"You never learn, do you?\n You're still convinced you can hide the whole thing and forget it. I'm\n telling you you can't.\"\n\n\n \"We return to the city now,\" Fith said. \"I can do no more.\"\n\n\n \"You can and you will, Fith,\" Retief said. \"I intend to get to the\n truth of this matter.\"\n\n\n Fith spoke to Shluh in rapid Groacian. The police chief gestured to his\n four armed constables. They moved to ring Retief in.",
"\"Don't touch that screen,\" Retief said. \"You go sit in that corner\n where I can keep an eye on you. I'm going to make a sealed tape for\n transmission to Headquarters, along with a call for an armed task\n force. Then we'll settle down to wait.\"\n\n\n Retief ignored Miss Meuhl's fury as he spoke into the recorder.\n\n\n The local communicator chimed. Miss Meuhl jumped up, staring at it.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" Retief said. \"Answer it.\"\n\n\n A Groacian official appeared on the screen.",
"\"If I don't make it back here, transmit the sealed record of this\n afternoon's conversation, along with the information I've given you.\n Beam it through on a mayday priority. Then tell the Groaci what you've\n done and sit tight. I think you'll be all right. It won't be easy to\n blast in here and anyway, they won't make things worse by killing you.\n A force can be here in a week.\"\n\n\n \"I'll do nothing of the sort! The Groaci are very fond of me! You ...\n Johnny-come-lately! Roughneck! Setting out to destroy—\"\n\n\n \"Blame it on me if it will make you feel any better,\" Retief said, \"but\n don't be fool enough to trust them.\" He pulled on a cape, opened the\n door.",
"\"Yolanda Meuhl,\" he said without preamble, \"for the Foreign Minister of\n the Groacian Autonomy, I herewith accredit you as Terrestrial Consul\n to Groac, in accordance with the advices transmitted to my government\n direct from the Terrestrial Headquarters. As consul, you are requested\n to make available for questioning Mr. J. Retief, former consul, in\n connection with the assault on two peace keepers and illegal entry into\n the offices of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.\"\n\n\n \"Why, why,\" Miss Meuhl stammered. \"Yes, of course. And I do want to\n express my deepest regrets—\"\nRetief rose, went to the communicator, assisted Miss Meuhl aside.",
"\"If I'd listened any longer, I might have heard something I couldn't\n ignore. I can't afford that, at this moment. Listen, Miss Meuhl,\"\n Retief went on earnestly, \"I've found the missing cruiser.\"\n\n\n \"You heard him relieve you!\"\n\n\n \"I heard him say he was\ngoing\nto, Miss Meuhl. But until I've heard\n and acknowledged a verbal order, it has no force. If I'm wrong, he'll\n get my resignation. If I'm right, that suspension would be embarrassing\n all around.\"\n\n\n \"You're defying lawful authority! I'm in charge here now.\" Miss Meuhl\n stepped to the local communicator.\n\n\n \"I'm going to report this terrible thing to the Groaci at once, and\n offer my profound—\"",
"Retief walked along the raised wooden catwalk, studying the ship. Empty\n emplacements gaped below lensless scanner eyes. Littered decking was\n visible within the half-open entry port. Near the bow the words 'IVS\n Terrific B7 New Terra' were lettered in bright chrome duralloy.\n\n\n \"How did you get it in here?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"It was hauled here from the landing point, some nine miles distant,\"\n Fith said, his voice thinner than ever. \"This is a natural crevasse.\n The vessel was lowered into it and roofed over.\"\n\n\n \"How did you shield it so the detectors didn't pick it up?\"\n\n\n \"All here is high-grade iron ore,\" Fith said, waving a member. \"Great\n veins of almost pure metal.\"\n\n\n Retief grunted. \"Let's go inside.\"",
"\"This is absolutely the end!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"Thank heaven I've\n already—\"\n\n\n \"Get that sender going, woman!\" Retief snapped. \"This is important.\"\n\n\n \"I've already done so, Mr. Retief!\" Miss Meuhl said harshly. \"I've been\n waiting for you to come back here....\" She turned to the communicator,\n flipped levers. The screen snapped aglow, and a wavering long-distance\n image appeared.\n\n\n \"He's here now,\" Miss Meuhl said to the screen. She looked at Retief\n triumphantly.\n\n\n \"That's good,\" Retief said. \"I don't think the Groaci can knock us off\n the air, but—\"",
"In the front seat, Shluh looked straight ahead. The loosely-sprung\n vehicle bobbed and swayed along the narrow highway. Retief listened to\n the rhythmic puffing of the motor and said nothing.\nIII\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said, \"I want you to listen carefully to what I'm\n going to tell you. I have to move rapidly now, to catch the Groaci off\n guard.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about,\" Miss Meuhl snapped,\n her eyes sharp behind the heavy lenses.\n\n\n \"If you'll listen, you may find out,\" Retief said. \"I have no time\n to waste, Miss Meuhl. They won't be expecting an immediate move—I\n hope—and that may give me the latitude I need.\"",
"Retief nodded. \"Thanks, Miss Meuhl,\" he said. \"I'll be back before\n you close the office.\" Miss Meuhl's face was set in lines of grim\n disapproval as he closed the door.\nThe pale-featured Groacian vibrated his throat-bladder in a distressed\n bleat.\n\n\n \"Not to enter the Archives,\" he said in his faint voice. \"The denial of\n permission. The deep regret of the Archivist.\"\n\n\n \"The importance of my task here,\" Retief said, enunciating the glottal\n dialect with difficulty. \"My interest in local history.\"\n\n\n \"The impossibility of access to outworlders. To depart quietly.\"\n\n\n \"The necessity that I enter.\"\n\n\n \"The specific instructions of the Archivist.\" The Groacian's voice rose\n to a whisper. \"To insist no longer. To give up this idea!\"",
"\"You're still determined to make an issue of that incident!\" Miss\n Meuhl snorted. \"I really can hardly blame the Groaci. They are not a\n sophisticated race; they had never before met aliens.\"\n\n\n \"You're ready to forgive a great deal, Miss Meuhl. But it's not what\n happened nine years ago I'm concerned with. It's what's happening now.\n I've told you that it was only a lifeboat the Groaci have hidden out.\n Don't you understand the implication? That vessel couldn't have come\n far. The cruiser itself must be somewhere near by. I want to know\n where!\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci don't know. They're a very cultured, gentle people. You can\n do irreparable harm to the reputation of Terrestrials if you insist—\"",
"Retief stepped around him, seized his collar and yanked. The Groacian\n fell on his back. Retief stood over him. The downed native half-rose;\n Retief put a foot against his chest and pushed.\n\n\n \"To not be going anywhere for a few minutes,\" Retief said. \"To stay\n right here and have a nice long talk.\"\nII\n\n\n \"There you are!\" Miss Meuhl said, eyeing Retief over her lenses. \"There\n are two gentlemen waiting to see you. Groacian gentlemen.\"\n\n\n \"Government men, I imagine. Word travels fast.\" Retief pulled off his\n cape. \"This saves me the trouble of paying another call at the Foreign\n Ministry.\"\n\n\n \"What have you been doing? They seem very upset, I don't mind telling\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you don't. Come along. And bring an official recorder.\"",
"\"Enough!\" Fith's mandibles quivered in distress. \"I can talk no more of\n this matter—\"\n\n\n \"You'll talk to me, or there'll be a task force here in five days to do\n the talking,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"You can't!\" Miss Meuhl gasped.\n\n\n Retief turned a steady look on Miss Meuhl. She closed her mouth. The\n Groaci sat down.\n\n\n \"Answer me this one,\" Retief said, looking at Shluh. \"A few years\n back—about nine, I think—there was a little parade held here. Some\n curious looking creatures were captured. After being securely caged,\n they were exhibited to the gentle Groaci public. Hauled through the\n streets. Very educational, no doubt. A highly cultural show.\n\n\n \"Funny thing about these animals. They wore clothes. They seemed to\n communicate with each other. Altogether it was a very amusing exhibit.",
"\"Yes,\" Fith said weakly. \"It is true, they were Terrestrials. But there\n was no killing.\"\n\n\n \"They're alive?\"\n\n\n \"Alas, no. They ... died.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl yelped faintly.\n\n\n \"I see,\" Retief said. \"They died.\"\n\n\n \"We tried to keep them alive, of course. But we did not know what\n foods—\"\n\n\n \"Didn't take the trouble to find out, either, did you?\"\n\n\n \"They fell ill,\" Fith said. \"One by one....\"\n\n\n \"We'll deal with that question later,\" Retief said. \"Right now, I want\n more information. Where did you get them? Where did you hide the ship?\n What happened to the rest of the crew? Did they 'fall ill' before the\n big parade?\""
],
[
"\"If I don't make it back here, transmit the sealed record of this\n afternoon's conversation, along with the information I've given you.\n Beam it through on a mayday priority. Then tell the Groaci what you've\n done and sit tight. I think you'll be all right. It won't be easy to\n blast in here and anyway, they won't make things worse by killing you.\n A force can be here in a week.\"\n\n\n \"I'll do nothing of the sort! The Groaci are very fond of me! You ...\n Johnny-come-lately! Roughneck! Setting out to destroy—\"\n\n\n \"Blame it on me if it will make you feel any better,\" Retief said, \"but\n don't be fool enough to trust them.\" He pulled on a cape, opened the\n door.",
"In the front seat, Shluh looked straight ahead. The loosely-sprung\n vehicle bobbed and swayed along the narrow highway. Retief listened to\n the rhythmic puffing of the motor and said nothing.\nIII\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said, \"I want you to listen carefully to what I'm\n going to tell you. I have to move rapidly now, to catch the Groaci off\n guard.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about,\" Miss Meuhl snapped,\n her eyes sharp behind the heavy lenses.\n\n\n \"If you'll listen, you may find out,\" Retief said. \"I have no time\n to waste, Miss Meuhl. They won't be expecting an immediate move—I\n hope—and that may give me the latitude I need.\"",
"\"Don't touch that screen,\" Retief said. \"You go sit in that corner\n where I can keep an eye on you. I'm going to make a sealed tape for\n transmission to Headquarters, along with a call for an armed task\n force. Then we'll settle down to wait.\"\n\n\n Retief ignored Miss Meuhl's fury as he spoke into the recorder.\n\n\n The local communicator chimed. Miss Meuhl jumped up, staring at it.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" Retief said. \"Answer it.\"\n\n\n A Groacian official appeared on the screen.",
"Retief stepped around him, seized his collar and yanked. The Groacian\n fell on his back. Retief stood over him. The downed native half-rose;\n Retief put a foot against his chest and pushed.\n\n\n \"To not be going anywhere for a few minutes,\" Retief said. \"To stay\n right here and have a nice long talk.\"\nII\n\n\n \"There you are!\" Miss Meuhl said, eyeing Retief over her lenses. \"There\n are two gentlemen waiting to see you. Groacian gentlemen.\"\n\n\n \"Government men, I imagine. Word travels fast.\" Retief pulled off his\n cape. \"This saves me the trouble of paying another call at the Foreign\n Ministry.\"\n\n\n \"What have you been doing? They seem very upset, I don't mind telling\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you don't. Come along. And bring an official recorder.\"",
"\"I'm glad you did,\" Retief said. \"I hope you piled up a supply of food\n and water from the dispenser, too. We'll be holed up here for a week,\n at least.\" He jotted figures on a pad. \"Warm up the official sender. I\n have a long transmission for Regional Headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Are you going to tell me where you've been?\"\n\n\n \"I have a message to get off first, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said sharply.\n \"I've been to the Foreign Ministry,\" he added. \"I'll tell you all about\n it later.\"\n\n\n \"At this hour? There's no one there....\"\n\n\n \"Exactly.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl gasped. \"You mean you broke in? You burgled the Foreign\n Office?\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Retief said calmly. \"Now—\"",
"\"Yes,\" Fith said weakly. \"It is true, they were Terrestrials. But there\n was no killing.\"\n\n\n \"They're alive?\"\n\n\n \"Alas, no. They ... died.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl yelped faintly.\n\n\n \"I see,\" Retief said. \"They died.\"\n\n\n \"We tried to keep them alive, of course. But we did not know what\n foods—\"\n\n\n \"Didn't take the trouble to find out, either, did you?\"\n\n\n \"They fell ill,\" Fith said. \"One by one....\"\n\n\n \"We'll deal with that question later,\" Retief said. \"Right now, I want\n more information. Where did you get them? Where did you hide the ship?\n What happened to the rest of the crew? Did they 'fall ill' before the\n big parade?\"",
"\"I have done my duty, Mr. Retief,\" Miss Meuhl said. \"I made a full\n report to Regional Headquarters last night, as soon as you left this\n office. Any doubts I may have had as to the rightness of that decision\n have been completely dispelled by what you've just told me.\"\n\n\n Retief looked at her levelly. \"You've been a busy girl, Miss Meuhl. Did\n you mention the six Terrestrials who were killed here?\"",
"\"My government can entertain no further accusations, Mr. Consul,\"\n he said at last. \"I have been completely candid with you, I have\n overlooked your probing into matters not properly within your sphere of\n responsibility. My patience is at an end.\"\n\n\n \"Where is that ship?\" Retief rapped out. \"You never learn, do you?\n You're still convinced you can hide the whole thing and forget it. I'm\n telling you you can't.\"\n\n\n \"We return to the city now,\" Fith said. \"I can do no more.\"\n\n\n \"You can and you will, Fith,\" Retief said. \"I intend to get to the\n truth of this matter.\"\n\n\n Fith spoke to Shluh in rapid Groacian. The police chief gestured to his\n four armed constables. They moved to ring Retief in.",
"\"Never mind the excuses,\" Retief said. \"Just tell him I won't be\n there.\" He stood up.\n\n\n \"Are you leaving the office?\" Miss Meuhl adjusted her glasses. \"I have\n some important letters here for your signature.\"\n\n\n \"I don't recall dictating any letters today, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said,\n pulling on a light cape.\n\"I wrote them for you. They're just as Consul Whaffle would have wanted\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Did you write all Whaffle's letters for him, Miss Meuhl?\"\n\n\n \"Consul Whaffle was an extremely busy man,\" Miss Meuhl said stiffly.\n \"He had complete confidence in me.\"\n\n\n \"Since I'm cutting out the culture from now on,\" Retief said, \"I won't\n be so busy.\"",
"\"I'll be back in a couple of hours,\" he said. Miss Meuhl stared after\n him silently as he closed the door.\nIt was an hour before dawn when Retief keyed the combination to the\n safe-lock and stepped into the darkened consular office. He looked\n tired.\n\n\n Miss Meuhl, dozing in a chair, awoke with a start. She looked at\n Retief, rose and snapped on a light, turned to stare.\n\n\n \"What in the world—Where have you been? What's happened to your\n clothing?\"\n\n\n \"I got a little dirty. Don't worry about it.\" Retief went to his desk,\n opened a drawer and replaced the needler.\n\n\n \"Where have you been?\" Miss Meuhl demanded. \"I stayed here—\"",
"\"That's my decision,\" Retief said. \"I have a job to do and we're\n wasting time.\" He crossed the room to his desk, opened a drawer and\n took out a slim-barreled needler.\n\n\n \"This office is being watched. Not very efficiently, if I know the\n Groaci. I think I can get past them all right.\"\n\n\n \"Where are you going with ... that?\" Miss Meuhl stared at the needler.\n \"What in the world—\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci won't waste any time destroying every piece of paper in\n their files relating to this thing. I have to get what I need before\n it's too late. If I wait for an official Inquiry Commission, they'll\n find nothing but blank smiles.\"\n\n\n \"You're out of your mind!\" Miss Meuhl stood up, quivering with\n indignation. \"You're like a ... a....\"",
"\"Indeed, I hope that this will be the end of this unfortunate affair,\"\n he said. \"Now that all has been fully and honestly shown—\"\n\n\n \"You can skip all that,\" Retief said. \"You're nine years late. The\n crew was still alive when the task force called, I imagine. You killed\n them—or let them die—rather than take the chance of admitting what\n you'd done.\"\n\n\n \"We were at fault,\" Fith said abjectly. \"Now we wish only friendship.\"\n\n\n \"The\nTerrific\nwas a heavy cruiser, about twenty thousand tons.\"\n Retief looked grimly at the slender Foreign Office official. \"Where is\n she, Fith? I won't settle for a hundred-ton lifeboat.\"\nFith erected his eye stalks so violently that one eye-shield fell off.\n\n\n \"I know nothing of ... of....\" He stopped. His throat vibrated rapidly\n as he struggled for calm.",
"Retief walked along the raised wooden catwalk, studying the ship. Empty\n emplacements gaped below lensless scanner eyes. Littered decking was\n visible within the half-open entry port. Near the bow the words 'IVS\n Terrific B7 New Terra' were lettered in bright chrome duralloy.\n\n\n \"How did you get it in here?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"It was hauled here from the landing point, some nine miles distant,\"\n Fith said, his voice thinner than ever. \"This is a natural crevasse.\n The vessel was lowered into it and roofed over.\"\n\n\n \"How did you shield it so the detectors didn't pick it up?\"\n\n\n \"All here is high-grade iron ore,\" Fith said, waving a member. \"Great\n veins of almost pure metal.\"\n\n\n Retief grunted. \"Let's go inside.\"",
"\"Yolanda Meuhl,\" he said without preamble, \"for the Foreign Minister of\n the Groacian Autonomy, I herewith accredit you as Terrestrial Consul\n to Groac, in accordance with the advices transmitted to my government\n direct from the Terrestrial Headquarters. As consul, you are requested\n to make available for questioning Mr. J. Retief, former consul, in\n connection with the assault on two peace keepers and illegal entry into\n the offices of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.\"\n\n\n \"Why, why,\" Miss Meuhl stammered. \"Yes, of course. And I do want to\n express my deepest regrets—\"\nRetief rose, went to the communicator, assisted Miss Meuhl aside.",
"\"You're making a serious mistake, Shluh,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Miss Meuhl said. \"You're quite right, Mr. Shluh. Please escort\n Mr. Retief to his quarters in this building—\"\n\n\n \"I don't advise you to violate my diplomatic immunity, Fith,\" Retief\n said.\n\n\n \"As chief of mission,\" Miss Meuhl said quickly, \"I hereby waive\n immunity in the case of Mr. Retief.\"\n\n\n Shluh produced a hand recorder. \"Kindly repeat your statement, Madam,\n officially,\" he said. \"I wish no question to arise later.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be a fool, woman,\" Retief said. \"Don't you see what you're\n letting yourself in for? This would be a hell of a good time for you to\n figure out whose side you're on.\"",
"\"Listen carefully, Fith,\" he said. \"Your bluff has been called. You\n don't come in and we don't come out. Your camouflage worked for nine\n years, but it's all over now. I suggest you keep your heads and resist\n the temptation to make matters worse than they are.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Fith said, \"a peace squad waits outside your consulate.\n It is clear you are in the hands of a dangerous lunatic. As always, the\n Groaci wish only friendship with the Terrestrials, but—\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother,\" Retief said. \"You know what was in those files I looked\n over this morning.\"\n\n\n Retief turned at a sound behind him. Miss Meuhl was at the door,\n reaching for the safe-lock release....\n\n\n \"Don't!\" Retief jumped—too late.",
"\"Just keep that recorder going,\" Retief snapped.\n\n\n \"I'll not be a party—\"\n\n\n \"You'll do as you're told, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said quietly. \"I'm\n telling you to make an official sealed record of this conversation.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl sat down.\n\n\n Fith puffed out his throat indignantly. \"You reopen an old wound,\n Mr. Consul. It reminds us of certain illegal treatment at Terrestrial\n hands—\"\n\n\n \"Hogwash,\" Retief said. \"That tune went over with my predecessors, but\n it hits a sour note with me.\"\n\n\n \"All our efforts,\" Miss Meuhl said, \"to live down that terrible\n episode! And you—\"",
"Shluh came forward with a hand-lamp. The party entered the ship.\n\n\n Retief clambered up a narrow companionway, glanced around the interior\n of the control compartment. Dust was thick on the deck, the stanchions\n where acceleration couches had been mounted, the empty instrument\n panels, the litter of sheared bolts, scraps of wire and paper. A thin\n frosting of rust dulled the exposed metal where cutting torches had\n sliced away heavy shielding. There was a faint odor of stale bedding.\n\n\n \"The cargo compartment—\" Shluh began.\n\n\n \"I've seen enough,\" Retief said.\n\n\n Silently, the Groacians led the way back out through the tunnel and\n into the late afternoon sunshine. As they climbed the slope to the\n steam car, Fith came to Retief's side.",
"\"What did you do with it? It was too big to just walk off and forget.\n Where is it?\"\n\n\n The two Groacians exchanged looks.\n\n\n \"We wish to show our contrition,\" Fith said. \"We will show you the\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said. \"If I don't come back in a reasonable length\n of time, transmit that recording to Regional Headquarters, sealed.\" He\n stood, looked at the Groaci.\n\n\n \"Let's go,\" he said.\nRetief stooped under the heavy timbers shoring the entry to the cavern.\n He peered into the gloom at the curving flank of the space-burned hull.\n\n\n \"Any lights in here?\" he asked.\n\n\n A Groacian threw a switch. A weak bluish glow sprang up.",
"\"That had no bearing on the matter of your wild behavior! I must say,\n in all my years in the Corps, I've never encountered a personality less\n suited to diplomatic work.\"\nThe screen crackled, the ten-second transmission lag having elapsed.\n \"Mr. Retief,\" the face on the screen said, \"I am Counsellor Pardy,\n DSO-1, Deputy Under-secretary for the region. I have received a\n report on your conduct which makes it mandatory for me to relieve you\n administratively, vice Miss Yolanda Meuhl, DAO-9. Pending the findings\n of a Board of Inquiry, you will—\"\n\n\n Retief reached out and snapped off the communicator. The triumphant\n look faded from Miss Meuhl's face.\n\n\n \"Why, what is the meaning—\""
]
] |
train
|
62198
|
[
"What was Lewis doing when he was captured by Thig?",
"Why was Thig informed that he should be camouflaged as a human?",
"How long did Thig spend traveling with Ellen while posing as Lewis?",
"What would happen if Lewis did not finish his short stories in the timeline he was given?",
"What did Torp and Kam plan to do while Thig was posing as Lewis?",
"Why was Thig so confused by the overwhelming senses he felt when he saw Ellen while posing a Lewis?",
"Why did Torp feel it was necessary to test Thig's blood for disease after he returned?",
"Why did Thig react with violence towards Kam while they were traveling back to Ortha?",
"What would have likely happened if Thig had allowed the crew to return information to Ortha that Earth was habitable?"
] |
[
[
"Going swimming",
"Going fishing",
"Trying to type on his typewriter",
"Finalizing a novelet"
],
[
"So that he could scout out the surroundings without suspicions",
"So that he could learn the inner thoughts of humans.",
"So that no one would know that Lewis was taken.",
"So that he could impersonate Lewis and fool his family."
],
[
"Four weeks",
"Twelve weeks",
"Four months",
"Two weeks"
],
[
"He would lose his typewriter",
"The trip with Ellen would be off.",
"Outlaws would be raiding his trailer home",
"He would be fired from his job"
],
[
"Report back to the rest of the Orthans that they were making progress",
"Try to cover up the death of Lewis ",
"Scout out the other two inner planets",
"Wait in the ship for the next call to action"
],
[
"She looked familiar to him",
"Men had no mates on Ortha",
"He had never seen a woman in person and was mesmorized by her beauty",
"He felt overwhelmed by sadness for her due to the unknown death of her husband."
],
[
"Thig did not want to return to Ortha.",
"Thig seemed to be sick after he returned.",
"Thig had become sentimental over the people of Earth.",
"Thig's eyes were roaming and he seemed disoriented."
],
[
"He wanted to return to Earth and to Ellen.",
"He did not want his blood tested for disease.",
"He was angry that they had killed Lewis.",
"He did not want to live on Earth any longer. "
],
[
"He would have had to forget all about Ellen and continue life on Ortha as before.",
"The Orthans would have made the voyage to Earth and lived in harmony with the people of Earth.",
"Earth would have been blown away by Orthans and no longer be habitable. ",
"The people of Earth would have been wiped out and Ortha would take over."
]
] |
[
2,
1,
2,
2,
3,
2,
3,
1,
4
] |
[
0,
0,
0,
0,
1,
1,
1,
0,
0
] |
[
[
"For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had\n he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously\n adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this\n way, he realized—more natural.\n\n\n \"Sorry I was late,\" he said, digging into his pocket for the\n glittering baubles, \"but I was poking around on the beach where we used\n to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing\n but a handful of these.\"\n\n\n He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung,\n unbelieving, to his arm.\n\n\n \"Why, Lew,\" she gasped, \"they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new\n trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right\n away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!\"",
"Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the\n stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech\n and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand\n clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of\n his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more.\n\"There it is,\" announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured\n Earthman to the metal deck-plates. \"It is a male of the species that\n must have built the cities we saw as we landed.\"\n\n\n \"He resembles Thig,\" announced Kam. \"But for the strange covering he\n wears he might be Thig.\"\n\n\n \"Thig will be this creature!\" announced Torp. \"With a psychic relay we\n will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to\n the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without\n arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the\n two inner planets.\"",
"\"You are the commander,\" said Thig. \"But I wish this beast did not wear\n these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use\n of our limbs so.\"\n\n\n \"Do not question the word of your commander,\" growled Torp, swelling\n out his thick chest menacingly. \"It is for the good of our people that\n you disguise yourself as an Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"For the good of the Horde,\" Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted\n Terry's body and headed for the laboratory.",
"He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight\n differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers\n trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said\n a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very\n deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories\n were hot, bitter pains.\nEarth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he\n heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's\n creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the\n West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and\n now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family.\n\n\n The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be\n a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her\n dreams and happiness must never be shattered.",
"In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck\n toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face,\n the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp\n scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled\n out into a senseless whinny.\n\n\n Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length\n of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared\n full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there\n watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten\n lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and\n chest. He was a madman!",
"The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and\n now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all\n served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove.\n The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of\n the Orthan.\n\n\n So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad\n stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over\n the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that\n victory had given him to drive him along.\n\n\n He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought\n sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After\n all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking\n of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all.",
"\"Uh huh,\" agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages\n and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he\n hoped that the west had reformed.\n\n\n \"I saved some kraut and weiners,\" Ellen said. \"Get washed up while I'm\n warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from\n the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?\"\n\n\n \"Mmmmmm,\" came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin.\n\"Home again,\" whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks\n later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt\n beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it.\n\n\n \"The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful,\" she went\n on as they climbed the steps, \"but nowhere was there any place as\n beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water.\"",
"The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a\n leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered\n with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal\n and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha.\n\n\n Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's\n stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished\n metal at the reflection of himself!",
"The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious\n time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the\n intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped\n across the mouth and neck of the stranger....\nLewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had\n ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid\n desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was\n going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that\n shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly\n he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't\n dared touch the machine since.",
"Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness\n and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and\n for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly\n struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand\n fought against that lone arm of Thig.\nThe scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his\n weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig\n suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden\n reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling\n about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down\n upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the\n decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked.",
"Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his\n ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now\n owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently\n used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his\n unconscious body.\n\n\n Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control\n room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies\n through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered\n why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures\n of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible\n for his sudden madness.\n\n\n The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association\n of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack\n beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the\n weapon. He tugged it free.",
"Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the\n dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three\n months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed\n for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady\n glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had\n experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against\n the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt\n division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer\n thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty\n added zest to every day's life.",
"Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood\n memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place\n where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that\n old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of\n that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his\n pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach!\n\n\n He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on\n the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little\n Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his\n acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from\n around his heart.",
"Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of\n a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's\n hull, and cut free from the mother vessel.\n\n\n He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving\n him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new\n body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the\n emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months\n before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his.\nThig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the\n rockets driving him from the parent ship.\nHe swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the\n great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no\n regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first\n existence.",
"For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never\n been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised\n his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on\n a trailer tour of the\nWest\nthat very summer. Since that promise, he\n could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and\n be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out\n of his subconscious. Yet he\nhad\nto write at least three novelets and\n a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great\n adventure—or the trip was off.\n\n\n So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed\n for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a\n salable yarn....\n\n\n \"Hey!\" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the\n road. \"What's the trouble?\"",
"Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the\n autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that\n lived no longer. He mentally titled it: \"Rustlers' Riot\" and blocked\n in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the\n careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be\n sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never\n be written, but he toyed with the idea.\n\n\n So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from\n the unquestioning worship of the Horde!\n\"You have done well,\" announced Torp when Thig had completed his report\n on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. \"We now\n have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to\n Ortha at once.",
"Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better\n of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to\n blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the\n road toward the beach.\n\n\n The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly\n but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the\n door and called after him.\n\n\n \"Hurry home, dear,\" she said. \"I'll have a bite ready in about an hour.\"\n\n\n He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she\n would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of\n person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a\n hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound.",
"Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul\n corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated\n matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own\n Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled\n for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the\n control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the\n narrowed icy eyes of his commander.\n\n\n He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his\n skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way.\n His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited\n stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all\n the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy\n yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon.",
"Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly\n toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp\n would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon\n upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow....\nBam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a\n hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He\n was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of\n bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon\n his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed\n him with those savage blows upon the head.",
"Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the\n squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments\n and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the\n walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of\n a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of\n the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or\n vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes.\n\n\n The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble\n clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's\n broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly\n he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children\n of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must\n stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an\n empty world—this planet was not for them."
],
[
"\"You are the commander,\" said Thig. \"But I wish this beast did not wear\n these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use\n of our limbs so.\"\n\n\n \"Do not question the word of your commander,\" growled Torp, swelling\n out his thick chest menacingly. \"It is for the good of our people that\n you disguise yourself as an Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"For the good of the Horde,\" Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted\n Terry's body and headed for the laboratory.",
"The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a\n leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered\n with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal\n and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha.\n\n\n Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's\n stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished\n metal at the reflection of himself!",
"Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the\n stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech\n and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand\n clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of\n his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more.\n\"There it is,\" announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured\n Earthman to the metal deck-plates. \"It is a male of the species that\n must have built the cities we saw as we landed.\"\n\n\n \"He resembles Thig,\" announced Kam. \"But for the strange covering he\n wears he might be Thig.\"\n\n\n \"Thig will be this creature!\" announced Torp. \"With a psychic relay we\n will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to\n the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without\n arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the\n two inner planets.\"",
"The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and\n now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all\n served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove.\n The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of\n the Orthan.\n\n\n So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad\n stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over\n the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that\n victory had given him to drive him along.\n\n\n He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought\n sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After\n all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking\n of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all.",
"Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the\n squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments\n and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the\n walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of\n a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of\n the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or\n vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes.\n\n\n The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble\n clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's\n broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly\n he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children\n of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must\n stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an\n empty world—this planet was not for them.",
"Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness\n and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and\n for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly\n struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand\n fought against that lone arm of Thig.\nThe scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his\n weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig\n suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden\n reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling\n about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down\n upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the\n decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach\n over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby\n ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the\n heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly\n around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and\n started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully\n because of the lesser gravitation.\n\n\n Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he\n was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and\n powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features\n were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were\n a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore\n no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his\n rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens.",
"Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the\n dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three\n months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed\n for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady\n glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had\n experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against\n the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt\n division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer\n thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty\n added zest to every day's life.",
"He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight\n differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers\n trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said\n a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very\n deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories\n were hot, bitter pains.\nEarth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he\n heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's\n creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the\n West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and\n now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family.\n\n\n The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be\n a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her\n dreams and happiness must never be shattered.",
"Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul\n corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated\n matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own\n Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled\n for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the\n control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the\n narrowed icy eyes of his commander.\n\n\n He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his\n skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way.\n His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited\n stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all\n the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy\n yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon.",
"Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the\n exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car\n and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living\n quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the\n chaos of his cool Orthan brain.\n\n\n Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows\n and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world,\n including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force\n to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would,\n of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be\n landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people,\n imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the\n Hordes?",
"Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better\n of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to\n blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the\n road toward the beach.\n\n\n The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly\n but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the\n door and called after him.\n\n\n \"Hurry home, dear,\" she said. \"I'll have a bite ready in about an hour.\"\n\n\n He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she\n would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of\n person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a\n hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound.",
"\"Only the good of the Horde matters!\" shouted Torp angrily. \"Shall a\n race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way\n of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The\n Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking.\"\n\n\n \"Let us get back to Ortha at once, then,\" gritted out Thig savagely.\n \"Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet.\n There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long\n forgotten.\"\n\n\n \"Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam,\" ordered Torp shortly. \"His\n words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this\n world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha.\"",
"Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his\n ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now\n owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently\n used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his\n unconscious body.\n\n\n Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control\n room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies\n through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered\n why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures\n of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible\n for his sudden madness.\n\n\n The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association\n of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack\n beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the\n weapon. He tugged it free.",
"He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and\n read the last few nervously scrawled lines:\nPlanet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that\n strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent\n there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and\n destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended.\n Already I feel the insidious virus of....\nAnd there his writing ended abruptly.\n\n\n Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the\n planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's\n path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger\n on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message.",
"Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the\n autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that\n lived no longer. He mentally titled it: \"Rustlers' Riot\" and blocked\n in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the\n careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be\n sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never\n be written, but he toyed with the idea.\n\n\n So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from\n the unquestioning worship of the Horde!\n\"You have done well,\" announced Torp when Thig had completed his report\n on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. \"We now\n have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to\n Ortha at once.",
"\"Turn back!\" he cried wildly. \"I must go back to Earth. There is a\n woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need\n this planet.\"\n\n\n Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its\n case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac\n of the finest members of the Horde.\n\n\n \"No human being is more important than the Horde,\" he stated baldly.\n \"This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we\n must eliminate for the good of the Horde.\"\n\n\n Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick\n jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying\n the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into\n Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it\n could be uttered.",
"Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of\n a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's\n hull, and cut free from the mother vessel.\n\n\n He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving\n him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new\n body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the\n emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months\n before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his.\nThig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the\n rockets driving him from the parent ship.\nHe swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the\n great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no\n regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first\n existence.",
"\"I will recommend the conquest of this planet, 72-P-3 at once and the\n complete destruction of all biped life upon it. The mental aberrations\n of the barbaric natives might lead to endless complications if they\n were permitted to exist outside our ordered way of life. I imagine that\n three circuits of the planet about its primary should prove sufficient\n for the purposes of complete liquidation.\"\n\n\n \"But why,\" asked Thig slowly, \"could we not disarm all the natives and\n exile them on one of the less desirable continents, Antarctica for\n example or Siberia? They are primitive humans even as our race was once\n a race of primitives. It is not our duty to help to attain our own\n degree of knowledge and comfort?\"",
"For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had\n he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously\n adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this\n way, he realized—more natural.\n\n\n \"Sorry I was late,\" he said, digging into his pocket for the\n glittering baubles, \"but I was poking around on the beach where we used\n to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing\n but a handful of these.\"\n\n\n He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung,\n unbelieving, to his arm.\n\n\n \"Why, Lew,\" she gasped, \"they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new\n trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right\n away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!\""
],
[
"For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had\n he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously\n adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this\n way, he realized—more natural.\n\n\n \"Sorry I was late,\" he said, digging into his pocket for the\n glittering baubles, \"but I was poking around on the beach where we used\n to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing\n but a handful of these.\"\n\n\n He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung,\n unbelieving, to his arm.\n\n\n \"Why, Lew,\" she gasped, \"they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new\n trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right\n away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!\"",
"\"Uh huh,\" agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages\n and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he\n hoped that the west had reformed.\n\n\n \"I saved some kraut and weiners,\" Ellen said. \"Get washed up while I'm\n warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from\n the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?\"\n\n\n \"Mmmmmm,\" came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin.\n\"Home again,\" whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks\n later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt\n beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it.\n\n\n \"The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful,\" she went\n on as they climbed the steps, \"but nowhere was there any place as\n beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water.\"",
"He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight\n differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers\n trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said\n a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very\n deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories\n were hot, bitter pains.\nEarth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he\n heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's\n creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the\n West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and\n now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family.\n\n\n The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be\n a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her\n dreams and happiness must never be shattered.",
"Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better\n of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to\n blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the\n road toward the beach.\n\n\n The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly\n but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the\n door and called after him.\n\n\n \"Hurry home, dear,\" she said. \"I'll have a bite ready in about an hour.\"\n\n\n He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she\n would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of\n person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a\n hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound.",
"\"You are the commander,\" said Thig. \"But I wish this beast did not wear\n these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use\n of our limbs so.\"\n\n\n \"Do not question the word of your commander,\" growled Torp, swelling\n out his thick chest menacingly. \"It is for the good of our people that\n you disguise yourself as an Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"For the good of the Horde,\" Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted\n Terry's body and headed for the laboratory.",
"Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the\n stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech\n and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand\n clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of\n his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more.\n\"There it is,\" announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured\n Earthman to the metal deck-plates. \"It is a male of the species that\n must have built the cities we saw as we landed.\"\n\n\n \"He resembles Thig,\" announced Kam. \"But for the strange covering he\n wears he might be Thig.\"\n\n\n \"Thig will be this creature!\" announced Torp. \"With a psychic relay we\n will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to\n the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without\n arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the\n two inner planets.\"",
"Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of\n a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's\n hull, and cut free from the mother vessel.\n\n\n He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving\n him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new\n body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the\n emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months\n before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his.\nThig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the\n rockets driving him from the parent ship.\nHe swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the\n great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no\n regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first\n existence.",
"For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never\n been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised\n his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on\n a trailer tour of the\nWest\nthat very summer. Since that promise, he\n could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and\n be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out\n of his subconscious. Yet he\nhad\nto write at least three novelets and\n a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great\n adventure—or the trip was off.\n\n\n So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed\n for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a\n salable yarn....\n\n\n \"Hey!\" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the\n road. \"What's the trouble?\"",
"Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the\n dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three\n months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed\n for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady\n glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had\n experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against\n the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt\n division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer\n thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty\n added zest to every day's life.",
"Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the\n dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men\n had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other\n primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding\n the emotions that swept through his acquired memory.\n\n\n Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed,\n trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked\n achingly up into his throat.\n\n\n \"Lew, dear,\" Ellen was asking, \"where have you been all day? I called\n up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that\n Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for \"Reversed Revolvers\"\n and three other editors asked for shorts soon.\"\n\"Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn,\" grunted Thig, and gasped.",
"Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the\n squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments\n and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the\n walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of\n a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of\n the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or\n vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes.\n\n\n The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble\n clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's\n broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly\n he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children\n of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must\n stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an\n empty world—this planet was not for them.",
"The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a\n leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered\n with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal\n and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha.\n\n\n Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's\n stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished\n metal at the reflection of himself!",
"Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the\n autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that\n lived no longer. He mentally titled it: \"Rustlers' Riot\" and blocked\n in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the\n careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be\n sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never\n be written, but he toyed with the idea.\n\n\n So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from\n the unquestioning worship of the Horde!\n\"You have done well,\" announced Torp when Thig had completed his report\n on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. \"We now\n have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to\n Ortha at once.",
"Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood\n memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place\n where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that\n old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of\n that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his\n pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach!\n\n\n He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on\n the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little\n Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his\n acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from\n around his heart.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach\n over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby\n ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the\n heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly\n around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and\n started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully\n because of the lesser gravitation.\n\n\n Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he\n was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and\n powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features\n were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were\n a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore\n no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his\n rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens.",
"The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines\n of Long Island in the growing twilight.\n\n\n A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a\n cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically.\n He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about\n them....\n\n\n He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!",
"The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and\n now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all\n served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove.\n The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of\n the Orthan.\n\n\n So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad\n stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over\n the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that\n victory had given him to drive him along.\n\n\n He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought\n sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After\n all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking\n of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all.",
"The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious\n time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the\n intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped\n across the mouth and neck of the stranger....\nLewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had\n ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid\n desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was\n going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that\n shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly\n he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't\n dared touch the machine since.",
"Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul\n corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated\n matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own\n Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled\n for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the\n control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the\n narrowed icy eyes of his commander.\n\n\n He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his\n skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way.\n His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited\n stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all\n the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy\n yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon.",
"Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the\n exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car\n and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living\n quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the\n chaos of his cool Orthan brain.\n\n\n Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows\n and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world,\n including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force\n to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would,\n of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be\n landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people,\n imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the\n Hordes?"
],
[
"For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never\n been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised\n his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on\n a trailer tour of the\nWest\nthat very summer. Since that promise, he\n could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and\n be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out\n of his subconscious. Yet he\nhad\nto write at least three novelets and\n a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great\n adventure—or the trip was off.\n\n\n So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed\n for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a\n salable yarn....\n\n\n \"Hey!\" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the\n road. \"What's the trouble?\"",
"The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious\n time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the\n intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped\n across the mouth and neck of the stranger....\nLewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had\n ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid\n desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was\n going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that\n shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly\n he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't\n dared touch the machine since.",
"The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines\n of Long Island in the growing twilight.\n\n\n A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a\n cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically.\n He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about\n them....\n\n\n He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!",
"For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had\n he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously\n adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this\n way, he realized—more natural.\n\n\n \"Sorry I was late,\" he said, digging into his pocket for the\n glittering baubles, \"but I was poking around on the beach where we used\n to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing\n but a handful of these.\"\n\n\n He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung,\n unbelieving, to his arm.\n\n\n \"Why, Lew,\" she gasped, \"they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new\n trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right\n away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!\"",
"He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight\n differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers\n trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said\n a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very\n deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories\n were hot, bitter pains.\nEarth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he\n heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's\n creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the\n West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and\n now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family.\n\n\n The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be\n a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her\n dreams and happiness must never be shattered.",
"\"Uh huh,\" agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages\n and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he\n hoped that the west had reformed.\n\n\n \"I saved some kraut and weiners,\" Ellen said. \"Get washed up while I'm\n warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from\n the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?\"\n\n\n \"Mmmmmm,\" came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin.\n\"Home again,\" whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks\n later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt\n beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it.\n\n\n \"The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful,\" she went\n on as they climbed the steps, \"but nowhere was there any place as\n beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water.\"",
"Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the\n autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that\n lived no longer. He mentally titled it: \"Rustlers' Riot\" and blocked\n in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the\n careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be\n sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never\n be written, but he toyed with the idea.\n\n\n So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from\n the unquestioning worship of the Horde!\n\"You have done well,\" announced Torp when Thig had completed his report\n on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. \"We now\n have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to\n Ortha at once.",
"Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the\n stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech\n and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand\n clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of\n his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more.\n\"There it is,\" announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured\n Earthman to the metal deck-plates. \"It is a male of the species that\n must have built the cities we saw as we landed.\"\n\n\n \"He resembles Thig,\" announced Kam. \"But for the strange covering he\n wears he might be Thig.\"\n\n\n \"Thig will be this creature!\" announced Torp. \"With a psychic relay we\n will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to\n the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without\n arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the\n two inner planets.\"",
"Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the\n dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men\n had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other\n primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding\n the emotions that swept through his acquired memory.\n\n\n Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed,\n trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked\n achingly up into his throat.\n\n\n \"Lew, dear,\" Ellen was asking, \"where have you been all day? I called\n up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that\n Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for \"Reversed Revolvers\"\n and three other editors asked for shorts soon.\"\n\"Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn,\" grunted Thig, and gasped.",
"Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the\n dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three\n months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed\n for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady\n glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had\n experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against\n the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt\n division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer\n thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty\n added zest to every day's life.",
"Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul\n corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated\n matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own\n Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled\n for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the\n control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the\n narrowed icy eyes of his commander.\n\n\n He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his\n skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way.\n His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited\n stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all\n the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy\n yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon.",
"The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to\n the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered,\n would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to\n the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan\n civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain\n well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast\n mechanical hives.\n\n\n There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had\n caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath\n them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid\n red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and\n cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever,\n who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son\n of Ellen and the man he had destroyed.",
"He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and\n read the last few nervously scrawled lines:\nPlanet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that\n strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent\n there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and\n destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended.\n Already I feel the insidious virus of....\nAnd there his writing ended abruptly.\n\n\n Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the\n planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's\n path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger\n on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message.",
"Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better\n of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to\n blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the\n road toward the beach.\n\n\n The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly\n but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the\n door and called after him.\n\n\n \"Hurry home, dear,\" she said. \"I'll have a bite ready in about an hour.\"\n\n\n He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she\n would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of\n person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a\n hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound.",
"Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood\n memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place\n where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that\n old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of\n that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his\n pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach!\n\n\n He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on\n the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little\n Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his\n acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from\n around his heart.",
"He thought of the dull greys and blacks of his planet, of the\n monotonous routine of existence that had once been his—and his heart\n thrilled to the memories of the starry nights and perfect exciting days\n he had spent on his three month trip over Earth.\n\n\n He made a brief salute to the existence he had known, turned with a\n tiny sigh, and his fingers made brief adjustments in the controls. The\n rocket-thrum deepened, and the thin whistle of tenuous air clutching\n the ship echoed through the hull-plates.\n\n\n He thought of many things in those few moments. He watched the\n roundness of Earth flatten out, then take on the cup-like illusion\n that all planets had for an incoming ship. He reduced the drive of his\n rockets to a mere whisper, striving to control the impatience that\n crowded his mind.",
"For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain\n dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman\n proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped\n completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his\n body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured\n brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet.\n\n\n \"There is nothing more to learn,\" he informed his impassive comrades.\n \"Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new\n body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is\n aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming\n baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly.\"\n\n\n An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and\n painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship\n and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running\n inland to his home.",
"Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the\n squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments\n and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the\n walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of\n a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of\n the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or\n vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes.\n\n\n The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble\n clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's\n broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly\n he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children\n of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must\n stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an\n empty world—this planet was not for them.",
"Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly\n toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp\n would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon\n upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow....\nBam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a\n hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He\n was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of\n bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon\n his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed\n him with those savage blows upon the head.",
"Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his\n ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now\n owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently\n used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his\n unconscious body.\n\n\n Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control\n room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies\n through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered\n why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures\n of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible\n for his sudden madness.\n\n\n The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association\n of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack\n beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the\n weapon. He tugged it free."
],
[
"Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the\n stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech\n and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand\n clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of\n his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more.\n\"There it is,\" announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured\n Earthman to the metal deck-plates. \"It is a male of the species that\n must have built the cities we saw as we landed.\"\n\n\n \"He resembles Thig,\" announced Kam. \"But for the strange covering he\n wears he might be Thig.\"\n\n\n \"Thig will be this creature!\" announced Torp. \"With a psychic relay we\n will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to\n the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without\n arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the\n two inner planets.\"",
"\"You are the commander,\" said Thig. \"But I wish this beast did not wear\n these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use\n of our limbs so.\"\n\n\n \"Do not question the word of your commander,\" growled Torp, swelling\n out his thick chest menacingly. \"It is for the good of our people that\n you disguise yourself as an Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"For the good of the Horde,\" Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted\n Terry's body and headed for the laboratory.",
"For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had\n he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously\n adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this\n way, he realized—more natural.\n\n\n \"Sorry I was late,\" he said, digging into his pocket for the\n glittering baubles, \"but I was poking around on the beach where we used\n to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing\n but a handful of these.\"\n\n\n He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung,\n unbelieving, to his arm.\n\n\n \"Why, Lew,\" she gasped, \"they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new\n trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right\n away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!\"",
"Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his\n ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now\n owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently\n used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his\n unconscious body.\n\n\n Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control\n room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies\n through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered\n why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures\n of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible\n for his sudden madness.\n\n\n The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association\n of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack\n beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the\n weapon. He tugged it free.",
"The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and\n now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all\n served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove.\n The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of\n the Orthan.\n\n\n So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad\n stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over\n the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that\n victory had given him to drive him along.\n\n\n He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought\n sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After\n all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking\n of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all.",
"He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and\n read the last few nervously scrawled lines:\nPlanet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that\n strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent\n there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and\n destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended.\n Already I feel the insidious virus of....\nAnd there his writing ended abruptly.\n\n\n Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the\n planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's\n path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger\n on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message.",
"In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck\n toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face,\n the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp\n scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled\n out into a senseless whinny.\n\n\n Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length\n of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared\n full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there\n watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten\n lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and\n chest. He was a madman!",
"Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness\n and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and\n for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly\n struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand\n fought against that lone arm of Thig.\nThe scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his\n weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig\n suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden\n reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling\n about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down\n upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the\n decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked.",
"\"Only the good of the Horde matters!\" shouted Torp angrily. \"Shall a\n race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way\n of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The\n Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking.\"\n\n\n \"Let us get back to Ortha at once, then,\" gritted out Thig savagely.\n \"Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet.\n There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long\n forgotten.\"\n\n\n \"Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam,\" ordered Torp shortly. \"His\n words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this\n world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha.\"",
"Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the\n squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments\n and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the\n walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of\n a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of\n the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or\n vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes.\n\n\n The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble\n clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's\n broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly\n he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children\n of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must\n stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an\n empty world—this planet was not for them.",
"He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight\n differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers\n trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said\n a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very\n deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories\n were hot, bitter pains.\nEarth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he\n heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's\n creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the\n West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and\n now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family.\n\n\n The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be\n a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her\n dreams and happiness must never be shattered.",
"Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly\n toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp\n would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon\n upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow....\nBam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a\n hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He\n was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of\n bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon\n his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed\n him with those savage blows upon the head.",
"Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the\n autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that\n lived no longer. He mentally titled it: \"Rustlers' Riot\" and blocked\n in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the\n careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be\n sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never\n be written, but he toyed with the idea.\n\n\n So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from\n the unquestioning worship of the Horde!\n\"You have done well,\" announced Torp when Thig had completed his report\n on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. \"We now\n have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to\n Ortha at once.",
"\"Uh huh,\" agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages\n and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he\n hoped that the west had reformed.\n\n\n \"I saved some kraut and weiners,\" Ellen said. \"Get washed up while I'm\n warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from\n the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?\"\n\n\n \"Mmmmmm,\" came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin.\n\"Home again,\" whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks\n later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt\n beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it.\n\n\n \"The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful,\" she went\n on as they climbed the steps, \"but nowhere was there any place as\n beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water.\"",
"Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better\n of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to\n blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the\n road toward the beach.\n\n\n The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly\n but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the\n door and called after him.\n\n\n \"Hurry home, dear,\" she said. \"I'll have a bite ready in about an hour.\"\n\n\n He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she\n would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of\n person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a\n hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound.",
"\"Turn back!\" he cried wildly. \"I must go back to Earth. There is a\n woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need\n this planet.\"\n\n\n Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its\n case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac\n of the finest members of the Horde.\n\n\n \"No human being is more important than the Horde,\" he stated baldly.\n \"This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we\n must eliminate for the good of the Horde.\"\n\n\n Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick\n jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying\n the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into\n Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it\n could be uttered.",
"The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a\n leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered\n with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal\n and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha.\n\n\n Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's\n stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished\n metal at the reflection of himself!",
"For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain\n dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman\n proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped\n completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his\n body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured\n brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet.\n\n\n \"There is nothing more to learn,\" he informed his impassive comrades.\n \"Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new\n body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is\n aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming\n baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly.\"\n\n\n An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and\n painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship\n and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running\n inland to his home.",
"Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul\n corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated\n matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own\n Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled\n for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the\n control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the\n narrowed icy eyes of his commander.\n\n\n He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his\n skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way.\n His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited\n stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all\n the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy\n yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon.",
"Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the\n dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three\n months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed\n for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady\n glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had\n experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against\n the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt\n division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer\n thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty\n added zest to every day's life."
],
[
"For the moment he had been Lewis Terry and not Thig! So thoroughly had\n he acquired the knowledge of Terry that he found himself unconsciously\n adopting the thinking and mannerism of the other. All the better this\n way, he realized—more natural.\n\n\n \"Sorry I was late,\" he said, digging into his pocket for the\n glittering baubles, \"but I was poking around on the beach where we used\n to hunt treasure and I found an old chest. Inside it I found nothing\n but a handful of these.\"\n\n\n He flashed the jewels in front of Ellen's startled eyes and she clung,\n unbelieving, to his arm.\n\n\n \"Why, Lew,\" she gasped, \"they're worth a fortune! We can buy that new\n trailer now and have a rebuilt motor in the car. We can go west right\n away.... Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, cowboys!\"",
"Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the\n dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men\n had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other\n primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding\n the emotions that swept through his acquired memory.\n\n\n Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed,\n trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked\n achingly up into his throat.\n\n\n \"Lew, dear,\" Ellen was asking, \"where have you been all day? I called\n up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that\n Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for \"Reversed Revolvers\"\n and three other editors asked for shorts soon.\"\n\"Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn,\" grunted Thig, and gasped.",
"He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight\n differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers\n trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said\n a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very\n deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories\n were hot, bitter pains.\nEarth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he\n heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's\n creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the\n West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and\n now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family.\n\n\n The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be\n a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her\n dreams and happiness must never be shattered.",
"\"Uh huh,\" agreed the pseudo Lewis, memories of the ferocious savages\n and gunmen of his stories rendering him acutely unhappy. Sincerely he\n hoped that the west had reformed.\n\n\n \"I saved some kraut and weiners,\" Ellen said. \"Get washed up while I'm\n warming them up. Kids ate all the bread so I had to borrow some from\n the Eskoes. Want coffee, too?\"\n\n\n \"Mmmmmm,\" came from the depths of the chipped white wash-basin.\n\"Home again,\" whispered Ellen as she stood beside Thig twelve weeks\n later and gazed tearfully at the weathered little gray house. She knelt\n beside the front stoop and reached for the key hidden beneath it.\n\n\n \"The west was wonderful; tremendous, vast and beautiful,\" she went\n on as they climbed the steps, \"but nowhere was there any place as\n beautiful as our own little strip of sky and water.\"",
"Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the\n dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three\n months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed\n for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady\n glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had\n experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against\n the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt\n division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer\n thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty\n added zest to every day's life.",
"Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood\n memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place\n where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that\n old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of\n that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his\n pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach!\n\n\n He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on\n the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little\n Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his\n acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from\n around his heart.",
"The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a\n leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered\n with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal\n and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha.\n\n\n Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's\n stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished\n metal at the reflection of himself!",
"Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the\n stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech\n and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand\n clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of\n his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more.\n\"There it is,\" announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured\n Earthman to the metal deck-plates. \"It is a male of the species that\n must have built the cities we saw as we landed.\"\n\n\n \"He resembles Thig,\" announced Kam. \"But for the strange covering he\n wears he might be Thig.\"\n\n\n \"Thig will be this creature!\" announced Torp. \"With a psychic relay we\n will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to\n the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without\n arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the\n two inner planets.\"",
"In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck\n toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face,\n the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp\n scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled\n out into a senseless whinny.\n\n\n Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length\n of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared\n full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there\n watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten\n lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and\n chest. He was a madman!",
"Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of\n a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's\n hull, and cut free from the mother vessel.\n\n\n He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving\n him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new\n body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the\n emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months\n before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his.\nThig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the\n rockets driving him from the parent ship.\nHe swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the\n great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no\n regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first\n existence.",
"\"You are the commander,\" said Thig. \"But I wish this beast did not wear\n these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use\n of our limbs so.\"\n\n\n \"Do not question the word of your commander,\" growled Torp, swelling\n out his thick chest menacingly. \"It is for the good of our people that\n you disguise yourself as an Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"For the good of the Horde,\" Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted\n Terry's body and headed for the laboratory.",
"Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better\n of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to\n blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the\n road toward the beach.\n\n\n The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly\n but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the\n door and called after him.\n\n\n \"Hurry home, dear,\" she said. \"I'll have a bite ready in about an hour.\"\n\n\n He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she\n would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of\n person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a\n hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound.",
"Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul\n corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated\n matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own\n Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled\n for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the\n control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the\n narrowed icy eyes of his commander.\n\n\n He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his\n skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way.\n His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited\n stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all\n the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy\n yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon.",
"The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and\n now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all\n served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove.\n The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of\n the Orthan.\n\n\n So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad\n stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over\n the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that\n victory had given him to drive him along.\n\n\n He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought\n sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After\n all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking\n of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all.",
"For Mr. Terry, that hard-hitting writer of two-gun action, had never\n been further west of Long Island than Elizabeth, and he had promised\n his wife, Ellen, that he would take the three children and herself on\n a trailer tour of the\nWest\nthat very summer. Since that promise, he\n could not write a word. Visions of whooping red-skinned Apaches and\n be-chapped outlaws raiding his little trailer home kept rolling up out\n of his subconscious. Yet he\nhad\nto write at least three novelets and\n a fistful of short stories in the next two weeks to finance the great\n adventure—or the trip was off.\n\n\n So Lewis left the weathered old cottage in the early dawn and headed\n for his tubby old boat at the landing in an attempt to work out a\n salable yarn....\n\n\n \"Hey!\" he shouted as a naked man sprang out of the bushes beside the\n road. \"What's the trouble?\"",
"Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly\n toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp\n would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon\n upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow....\nBam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a\n hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He\n was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of\n bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon\n his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed\n him with those savage blows upon the head.",
"The bulge of Earth was flattening out now and he could see the outlines\n of Long Island in the growing twilight.\n\n\n A new plot was growing in the brain of Lewis Terry, a yarn about a\n cowboy suddenly transported to another world. He smiled ironically.\n He had seen those other worlds. Perhaps some day he would write about\n them....\n\n\n He was Lewis Terry! He must remember that!",
"The Earthman was opposite now and he must waste no more precious\n time. The mighty muscles of the Orthan sent him hurtling across the\n intervening space in two prodigious bounds, and his hands clamped\n across the mouth and neck of the stranger....\nLewis Terry was going fishing. For a week the typewriter mill that had\n ground out a thousand assorted yarns of the untamed West and the frigid\n desolation of the Northwoods had been silent. Lewis wondered if he was\n going stale. He had sat every day for eight hours in front of that\n shiny-buttoned bane of the typist, but there were no results. Feebly\n he had punched a key two days ago and a $ sign had appeared. He hadn't\n dared touch the machine since.",
"Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the\n autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that\n lived no longer. He mentally titled it: \"Rustlers' Riot\" and blocked\n in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the\n careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be\n sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never\n be written, but he toyed with the idea.\n\n\n So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from\n the unquestioning worship of the Horde!\n\"You have done well,\" announced Torp when Thig had completed his report\n on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. \"We now\n have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to\n Ortha at once.",
"Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the\n squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments\n and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the\n walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of\n a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of\n the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or\n vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes.\n\n\n The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble\n clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's\n broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly\n he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children\n of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must\n stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an\n empty world—this planet was not for them."
],
[
"Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his\n ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now\n owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently\n used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his\n unconscious body.\n\n\n Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control\n room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies\n through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered\n why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures\n of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible\n for his sudden madness.\n\n\n The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association\n of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack\n beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the\n weapon. He tugged it free.",
"\"You are the commander,\" said Thig. \"But I wish this beast did not wear\n these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use\n of our limbs so.\"\n\n\n \"Do not question the word of your commander,\" growled Torp, swelling\n out his thick chest menacingly. \"It is for the good of our people that\n you disguise yourself as an Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"For the good of the Horde,\" Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted\n Terry's body and headed for the laboratory.",
"\"Only the good of the Horde matters!\" shouted Torp angrily. \"Shall a\n race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way\n of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The\n Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking.\"\n\n\n \"Let us get back to Ortha at once, then,\" gritted out Thig savagely.\n \"Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet.\n There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long\n forgotten.\"\n\n\n \"Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam,\" ordered Torp shortly. \"His\n words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this\n world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha.\"",
"He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and\n read the last few nervously scrawled lines:\nPlanet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that\n strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent\n there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and\n destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended.\n Already I feel the insidious virus of....\nAnd there his writing ended abruptly.\n\n\n Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the\n planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's\n path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger\n on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message.",
"The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and\n now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all\n served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove.\n The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of\n the Orthan.\n\n\n So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad\n stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over\n the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that\n victory had given him to drive him along.\n\n\n He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought\n sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After\n all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking\n of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all.",
"In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck\n toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face,\n the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp\n scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled\n out into a senseless whinny.\n\n\n Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length\n of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared\n full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there\n watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten\n lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and\n chest. He was a madman!",
"Then a thunderclap exploded against his head and he dropped endlessly\n toward the deck. Blows rained against his skull. He wondered if Torp\n would ever cease to hammer at him and turn the deadly ray of the weapon\n upon him. Blood throbbed and pounded with every blow....\nBam, Bam, Bam, the blood pounded in his ears. Like repeated blows of a\n hammer they shook his booming head. No longer was Torp above him. He\n was in the corner of the laboratory, a crumpled blood-smeared heap of\n bruised flesh and bone. He was unfettered and the blood was caked upon\n his skull and in his matted hair. Torp must have thought he had killed\n him with those savage blows upon the head.",
"Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better\n of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to\n blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the\n road toward the beach.\n\n\n The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly\n but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the\n door and called after him.\n\n\n \"Hurry home, dear,\" she said. \"I'll have a bite ready in about an hour.\"\n\n\n He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she\n would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of\n person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a\n hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound.",
"Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the\n dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three\n months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed\n for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady\n glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had\n experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against\n the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt\n division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer\n thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty\n added zest to every day's life.",
"Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul\n corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated\n matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own\n Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled\n for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the\n control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the\n narrowed icy eyes of his commander.\n\n\n He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his\n skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way.\n His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited\n stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all\n the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy\n yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon.",
"Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the\n squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments\n and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the\n walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of\n a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of\n the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or\n vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes.\n\n\n The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble\n clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's\n broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly\n he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children\n of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must\n stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an\n empty world—this planet was not for them.",
"Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the\n autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that\n lived no longer. He mentally titled it: \"Rustlers' Riot\" and blocked\n in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the\n careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be\n sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never\n be written, but he toyed with the idea.\n\n\n So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from\n the unquestioning worship of the Horde!\n\"You have done well,\" announced Torp when Thig had completed his report\n on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. \"We now\n have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to\n Ortha at once.",
"He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight\n differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers\n trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said\n a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very\n deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories\n were hot, bitter pains.\nEarth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he\n heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's\n creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the\n West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and\n now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family.\n\n\n The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be\n a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her\n dreams and happiness must never be shattered.",
"\"Turn back!\" he cried wildly. \"I must go back to Earth. There is a\n woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need\n this planet.\"\n\n\n Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its\n case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac\n of the finest members of the Horde.\n\n\n \"No human being is more important than the Horde,\" he stated baldly.\n \"This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we\n must eliminate for the good of the Horde.\"\n\n\n Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick\n jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying\n the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into\n Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it\n could be uttered.",
"Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the\n stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech\n and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand\n clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of\n his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more.\n\"There it is,\" announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured\n Earthman to the metal deck-plates. \"It is a male of the species that\n must have built the cities we saw as we landed.\"\n\n\n \"He resembles Thig,\" announced Kam. \"But for the strange covering he\n wears he might be Thig.\"\n\n\n \"Thig will be this creature!\" announced Torp. \"With a psychic relay we\n will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to\n the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without\n arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the\n two inner planets.\"",
"Memory was laying the country bare about him, Terry's own childhood\n memories of this particular section of Long Island. Here was the place\n where Jake and Ted had helped him dig for the buried treasure that\n old 'Notch-ear' Beggs had told them so exactly about. Remembrance of\n that episode gave Thig an idea about the little lump of jewels in his\n pocket. He had found them in a chest along the beach!\n\n\n He was coming up on the porch now and at the sound of his foot on\n the sagging boards the screen door burst open and three little\n Earth-creatures were hugging at his legs. An odd sensation, that his\n acquired memories labeled as pleasure, sent a warm glow upward from\n around his heart.",
"The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a\n leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered\n with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal\n and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha.\n\n\n Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's\n stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished\n metal at the reflection of himself!",
"For ten hours or more the droning hum of the relay sucked Terry's brain\n dry of knowledge. The shock upon the nervous system of the Earthman\n proved too violent and his heart faltered after a time and stopped\n completely. Twice, with subtle drugs they restored pseudo-life to his\n body and kept the electrical impulses throbbing from his tortured\n brain, but after the third suspension of life Thig removed his helmet.\n\n\n \"There is nothing more to learn,\" he informed his impassive comrades.\n \"Now, let us get on with the plastic surgery that is required. My new\n body must return to its barbaric household before undue attention is\n aroused. And when I return I will take along some of the gleaming\n baubles we found on the red planet—these people value them highly.\"\n\n\n An hour later, his scars and altered cartilage already healed and\n painless, Thig again scraped sand over the entrance to the space ship\n and set out along the moonlit beach toward the nearest path running\n inland to his home.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach\n over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby\n ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the\n heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly\n around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and\n started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully\n because of the lesser gravitation.\n\n\n Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he\n was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and\n powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features\n were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were\n a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore\n no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his\n rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens.",
"Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness\n and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and\n for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly\n struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand\n fought against that lone arm of Thig.\nThe scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his\n weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig\n suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden\n reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling\n about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down\n upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the\n decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked."
],
[
"The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and\n now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all\n served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove.\n The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of\n the Orthan.\n\n\n So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad\n stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over\n the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that\n victory had given him to drive him along.\n\n\n He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought\n sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After\n all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking\n of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all.",
"Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the\n squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments\n and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the\n walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of\n a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of\n the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or\n vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes.\n\n\n The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble\n clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's\n broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly\n he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children\n of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must\n stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an\n empty world—this planet was not for them.",
"Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his\n ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now\n owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently\n used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his\n unconscious body.\n\n\n Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control\n room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies\n through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered\n why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures\n of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible\n for his sudden madness.\n\n\n The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association\n of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack\n beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the\n weapon. He tugged it free.",
"\"Only the good of the Horde matters!\" shouted Torp angrily. \"Shall a\n race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way\n of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The\n Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking.\"\n\n\n \"Let us get back to Ortha at once, then,\" gritted out Thig savagely.\n \"Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet.\n There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long\n forgotten.\"\n\n\n \"Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam,\" ordered Torp shortly. \"His\n words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this\n world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha.\"",
"Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better\n of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to\n blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the\n road toward the beach.\n\n\n The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly\n but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the\n door and called after him.\n\n\n \"Hurry home, dear,\" she said. \"I'll have a bite ready in about an hour.\"\n\n\n He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she\n would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of\n person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a\n hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound.",
"\"You are the commander,\" said Thig. \"But I wish this beast did not wear\n these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use\n of our limbs so.\"\n\n\n \"Do not question the word of your commander,\" growled Torp, swelling\n out his thick chest menacingly. \"It is for the good of our people that\n you disguise yourself as an Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"For the good of the Horde,\" Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted\n Terry's body and headed for the laboratory.",
"Kam's hand swept down to the holster swung from his intricate harness\n and dragged his blaster from it. Thig's other hand clamped over his and\n for long moments they swayed there, locked together in silent deadly\n struggle. The fate of a world hung in the balance as Kam's other hand\n fought against that lone arm of Thig.\nThe scales swung in favor of Kam. Slowly the flaring snout of his\n weapon tilted upward until it reached the level of Thig's waist. Thig\n suddenly released his grip and dragged his enemy toward him. A sudden\n reversal of pressure on Kam's gun hand sent the weapon swivelling\n about full upon its owner's thick torso. Thig's fingers pressed down\n upon Kam's button finger, down upon the stud set into the grip of the\n decomposition blaster, and Kam's muscles turned to water. He shrieked.",
"He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and\n read the last few nervously scrawled lines:\nPlanet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that\n strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent\n there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and\n destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended.\n Already I feel the insidious virus of....\nAnd there his writing ended abruptly.\n\n\n Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the\n planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's\n path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger\n on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message.",
"\"Turn back!\" he cried wildly. \"I must go back to Earth. There is a\n woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need\n this planet.\"\n\n\n Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its\n case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac\n of the finest members of the Horde.\n\n\n \"No human being is more important than the Horde,\" he stated baldly.\n \"This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we\n must eliminate for the good of the Horde.\"\n\n\n Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick\n jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying\n the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into\n Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it\n could be uttered.",
"Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul\n corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated\n matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own\n Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled\n for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the\n control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the\n narrowed icy eyes of his commander.\n\n\n He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his\n skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way.\n His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited\n stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all\n the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy\n yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon.",
"The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a\n leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered\n with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal\n and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha.\n\n\n Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's\n stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished\n metal at the reflection of himself!",
"In a moment he was on his knees crawling across the plates of the deck\n toward the door. Halfway across the floor he collapsed on his face,\n the metal of the gun making a harsh clang. He heard the feet of Torp\n scuffle out of silence and a choked cry in the man's throat squalled\n out into a senseless whinny.\n\n\n Thig raised himself up on a quivering elbow and slid the black length\n of the blaster in front of him. His eyes sought the doorway and stared\n full into the glaring vacant orbs of his commander. Torp leaned there\n watching him, his breath gurgling brokenly through his deep-bitten\n lips. The clawing marks of nails, fingernails, furrowed his face and\n chest. He was a madman!",
"Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the\n autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that\n lived no longer. He mentally titled it: \"Rustlers' Riot\" and blocked\n in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the\n careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be\n sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never\n be written, but he toyed with the idea.\n\n\n So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from\n the unquestioning worship of the Horde!\n\"You have done well,\" announced Torp when Thig had completed his report\n on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. \"We now\n have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to\n Ortha at once.",
"Then he saw the slender red-haired shape of a woman, the mate of the\n dead man he knew, and confusion struck his well-trained brain. Men\n had no mates on Ortha, sex had been overthrown with all the other\n primitive impulses of barbarism; so he was incapable of understanding\n the emotions that swept through his acquired memory.\n\n\n Unsteadily he took her in his arms and felt her warm lips pressed,\n trembling, against his own. That same hot wave of pulsing blood choked\n achingly up into his throat.\n\n\n \"Lew, dear,\" Ellen was asking, \"where have you been all day? I called\n up at the landing but you were not there. I wanted to let you know that\n Saddlebag Publications sent a check for $50 for \"Reversed Revolvers\"\n and three other editors asked for shorts soon.\"\n\"Shoulda got a hundred bucks for that yarn,\" grunted Thig, and gasped.",
"Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of\n a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's\n hull, and cut free from the mother vessel.\n\n\n He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving\n him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new\n body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the\n emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months\n before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his.\nThig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the\n rockets driving him from the parent ship.\nHe swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the\n great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no\n regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first\n existence.",
"QUEST OF THIG\nBy BASIL WELLS\nThig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering\n\n \"HORDE.\" He had blasted across trackless space\n\n to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on\n\n Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1942.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the\n stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech\n and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand\n clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of\n his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more.\n\"There it is,\" announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured\n Earthman to the metal deck-plates. \"It is a male of the species that\n must have built the cities we saw as we landed.\"\n\n\n \"He resembles Thig,\" announced Kam. \"But for the strange covering he\n wears he might be Thig.\"\n\n\n \"Thig will be this creature!\" announced Torp. \"With a psychic relay we\n will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to\n the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without\n arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the\n two inner planets.\"",
"Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the\n exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car\n and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living\n quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the\n chaos of his cool Orthan brain.\n\n\n Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows\n and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world,\n including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force\n to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would,\n of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be\n landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people,\n imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the\n Hordes?",
"The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to\n the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered,\n would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to\n the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan\n civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain\n well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast\n mechanical hives.\n\n\n There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had\n caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath\n them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid\n red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and\n cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever,\n who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son\n of Ellen and the man he had destroyed.",
"He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight\n differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers\n trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said\n a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very\n deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories\n were hot, bitter pains.\nEarth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he\n heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's\n creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the\n West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and\n now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family.\n\n\n The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be\n a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her\n dreams and happiness must never be shattered."
],
[
"Thig followed Kam into the tiny laboratory and found a seat beside the\n squat scientist's desk. His eyes roamed over the familiar instruments\n and gauges, each in its own precise position in the cases along the\n walls. His gaze lingered longest on the stubby black ugliness of\n a decomposition blaster in its rack close to the deck. A blast of\n the invisible radiations from that weapon's hot throat and flesh or\n vegetable fiber rotted into flaky ashes.\n\n\n The ship trembled beneath their feet; it tore free from the feeble\n clutch of the sand about it, and they were rocketing skyward. Thig's\n broad fingers bit deep into the unyielding metal of his chair. Suddenly\n he knew that he must go back to Earth, back to Ellen and the children\n of the man he had helped destroy. He loved Ellen, and nothing must\n stand between them! The Hordes of Ortha must find some other world, an\n empty world—this planet was not for them.",
"The deadly attack of Thig; his own violent avenging of Kam's death, and\n now the apparent return of the man he had killed come to life had all\n served to jolt his rigidly trained brain from its accustomed groove.\n The shock had been too much for the established thought-processes of\n the Orthan.\n\n\n So Thig shot him where he stood, mercifully, before that vacant mad\n stare set him, too, to gibbering and shrieking. Then he stepped over\n the skeleton-thing that had been Torp, using the new strength that\n victory had given him to drive him along.\n\n\n He had saved a world's civilization from extinction! The thought\n sobered him; yet, somehow, he was pleased that he had done so. After\n all, it had been the Earthwoman and the children he had been thinking\n of while he battled Kam, a selfish desire to protect them all.",
"Thig groaned. He was a weakling to let sentimentality so get the better\n of his judgment. He would go now to the space ship and urge them to\n blast off for Ortha. He sprang off the porch and strode away down the\n road toward the beach.\n\n\n The children ran to him; wanted to go along. He sent them away harshly\n but they smiled and waved their brown little hands. Ellen came to the\n door and called after him.\n\n\n \"Hurry home, dear,\" she said. \"I'll have a bite ready in about an hour.\"\n\n\n He dared not say anything, for his voice would have broken and she\n would have known something was wrong. She was a very wise sort of\n person when something was troubling him. He waved his stubby paw of a\n hand to show that he had heard, and blindly hurried toward the Sound.",
"Thig sank into a dusty old swing that hung on creaking chains from the\n exposed rafters of the porch roof. He looked down at the dusty gray car\n and the bulbous silvery bulk of the trailer that had been their living\n quarters for almost three months. Strange thoughts were afloat in the\n chaos of his cool Orthan brain.\n\n\n Tonight or tomorrow night at the latest he must contact his two fellows\n and report that Earth was a planetary paradise. No other world,\n including Ortha, was so well-favored and rich. An expeditionary force\n to wipe the grotesque civilizations of Earth out of existence would,\n of course, be necessary before the first units of new Hordes could be\n landed. And there Thig balked. Why must they destroy these people,\n imperfect though their civilization might be, to make room for the\n Hordes?",
"He went to the desk where Torp had been writing in the ship's log and\n read the last few nervously scrawled lines:\nPlanet 72-P-3 unfit for colonization. Some pernicious disease that\n strikes at the brain centers and causes violent insanity is existent\n there. Thig, just returned from a survey of the planet, went mad and\n destroyed Kam. In turn I was forced to slay him. But it is not ended.\n Already I feel the insidious virus of....\nAnd there his writing ended abruptly.\n\n\n Thig nodded. That would do it. He set the automatic pilot for the\n planet Ortha. Unless a rogue asteroid or a comet crossed the ship's\n path she would return safely to Ortha with that mute warning of danger\n on 72-P-3. The body of Torp would help to confirm his final message.",
"\"Only the good of the Horde matters!\" shouted Torp angrily. \"Shall a\n race of feeble-witted beasts, such as these Earthmen, stand in the way\n of a superior race? We want their world, and so we will take it. The\n Law of the Horde states that all the universe is ours for the taking.\"\n\n\n \"Let us get back to Ortha at once, then,\" gritted out Thig savagely.\n \"Never again do I wish to set foot upon the soil of this mad planet.\n There are forces at work upon Earth that we of Ortha have long\n forgotten.\"\n\n\n \"Check the blood of Thig for disease, Kam,\" ordered Torp shortly. \"His\n words are highly irrational. Some form of fever perhaps native to this\n world. While you examine him I will blast off for Ortha.\"",
"\"You are the commander,\" said Thig. \"But I wish this beast did not wear\n these clumsy sheathing upon his body. On Ortha we do not hamper the use\n of our limbs so.\"\n\n\n \"Do not question the word of your commander,\" growled Torp, swelling\n out his thick chest menacingly. \"It is for the good of our people that\n you disguise yourself as an Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"For the good of the Horde,\" Thig intoned almost piously as he lifted\n Terry's body and headed for the laboratory.",
"Then Thig crossed the cabin to the auxiliary life boat there, one of\n a half-dozen space ships in miniature nested within the great ship's\n hull, and cut free from the mother vessel.\n\n\n He flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the rockets driving\n him from the parent ship. The sensation of free flight against his new\n body was strangely exhilerating and heady. It was the newest of the\n emotions he had experienced on Earth since that day, so many months\n before, when he had felt the warmness of Ellen's lips tight against his.\nThig flipped the drive lever, felt the thrumming of the\n rockets driving him from the parent ship.\nHe swung about to the port, watched the flaming drive-rockets of the\n great exploratory ship hurl it toward far-away Ortha, and there was no\n regret in his mind that he was not returning to the planet of his first\n existence.",
"\"Turn back!\" he cried wildly. \"I must go back to Earth. There is a\n woman there, helpless and alone, who needs me! The Horde does not need\n this planet.\"\n\n\n Kam eyed him coldly and lifted a shining hypodermic syringe from its\n case. He approached Thig warily, aware that disease often made a maniac\n of the finest members of the Horde.\n\n\n \"No human being is more important than the Horde,\" he stated baldly.\n \"This woman of whom you speak is merely one unit of the millions we\n must eliminate for the good of the Horde.\"\n\n\n Then it was that Thig went berserk. His fists slashed into the thick\n jaw of the scientist and his fingers ripped at the hard cords overlying\n the Orthan's vital throat tubes. His fingers and thumb gouged deep into\n Kam's startled throat and choked off any cry for assistance before it\n could be uttered.",
"Even Torp, thought Thig ruefully, gave way to the primitive rage of his\n ancestors at times; but to that very bit of unconscious atavism he now\n owed his life. A cool-headed robot of an Orthan would have efficiently\n used the blaster to destroy any possibility of remaining life in his\n unconscious body.\n\n\n Thig rolled slowly over so that his eye found the door into the control\n room. Torp would be coming back again to dispose of their bodies\n through the refuse lock. Already the body of Kam was gone. He wondered\n why he had been left until last. Perhaps Torp wished to take cultures\n of his blood and tissues to determine whether a disease was responsible\n for his sudden madness.\n\n\n The cases of fragile instruments were just above his head. Association\n of memories brought him the flash of the heavy blaster in its rack\n beneath them. His hand went up and felt the welcome hardness of the\n weapon. He tugged it free.",
"Oddly enough, as he hurried away along the narrow path through the\n autumn woods, his mind busied itself with a new epic of the west that\n lived no longer. He mentally titled it: \"Rustlers' Riot\" and blocked\n in the outlines of his plot. One section of his brain was that of the\n careless author of gunslinging yarns, a section that seemed to be\n sapping the life from his own brain. He knew that the story would never\n be written, but he toyed with the idea.\n\n\n So far had Thig the emotionless, robot-being from Ortha drifted from\n the unquestioning worship of the Horde!\n\"You have done well,\" announced Torp when Thig had completed his report\n on the resources and temperatures of various sections of Terra. \"We now\n have located three worlds fit for colonization and so we will return to\n Ortha at once.",
"Thig tried to tell himself that it was the transmitted thoughts of the\n dead Earthman that made him feel so, but he was not too sure. For three\n months he had lived with people who loved, hated, wept and sacrificed\n for reasons that he had never known existed. He had learned the heady\n glory of thinking for himself and making his own decisions. He had\n experienced the primitive joy of matching his wits and tongue against\n the wits of other unpredictable human beings. There was no abrupt\n division of men and women into definite classes of endeavor. A laborer\n thought the same thoughts that a governor might think. Uncertainty\n added zest to every day's life.",
"Then he had no time for further speech, the massive arms of the\n stranger had wound around him and two hamlike hands shut off his speech\n and his wind. He fought futilely against trained muscles. The hand\n clamping his throat relaxed for a moment and hacked along the side of\n his head. Blackness flooded the brain of Lewis, and he knew no more.\n\"There it is,\" announced Thig, dropping the limp body of the captured\n Earthman to the metal deck-plates. \"It is a male of the species that\n must have built the cities we saw as we landed.\"\n\n\n \"He resembles Thig,\" announced Kam. \"But for the strange covering he\n wears he might be Thig.\"\n\n\n \"Thig will be this creature!\" announced Torp. \"With a psychic relay we\n will transfer the Earthman's memories and meager store of knowledge to\n the brain of Thig! He can then go out and scout this world without\n arousing suspicion. While he is gone, I will take Kam and explore the\n two inner planets.\"",
"He fingered the tiny scars that had completely obliterated the slight\n differences in his appearance from an Earthman's, and his fingers\n trembled a bit, as he bent and stared through the vision port. He said\n a brief prayer in his heart to a God whose presence he now felt very\n deeply. There were tears in the depths of his eyes, then, and memories\n were hot, bitter pains.\nEarth was not far below him. As he let gravity suck him earthward, he\n heaved a gasp of relief. He was no longer Thig, a creature of a Horde's\n creation, but Lewis Terry, writer of lurid gun-smoking tales of the\n West. He must remember that always. He had destroyed the real Terry and\n now, for the rest of his life, he must make up to the dead man's family.\n\n\n The knowledge that Ellen's love was not really meant for him would be\n a knife twisting in his heart but for her sake he must endure it. Her\n dreams and happiness must never be shattered.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThig carefully smoothed the dark sand and seaweed of the lonely beach\n over the metal lid of the flexible ringed tunnel that linked the grubby\n ship from another planet with the upper air. He looked out across the\n heaving waters of the Sound toward Connecticut. He stared appraisingly\n around at the luxuriant green growth of foliage further inland; and\n started toward the little stretch of trees and brush, walking carefully\n because of the lesser gravitation.\n\n\n Thig was shorter than the average Earthman—although on Ortha he\n was well above the average in height—but his body was thick and\n powerfully muscled. His skull was well-shaped and large; his features\n were regular, perhaps a trifle oversize, and his hair and eyes were\n a curiously matching blend of reddish brown. Oddest of all, he wore\n no garments, other than the necessary belt and straps to support his\n rod-like weapon of white metal and his pouches for food and specimens.",
"QUEST OF THIG\nBy BASIL WELLS\nThig of Ortha was the vanguard of the conquering\n\n \"HORDE.\" He had blasted across trackless space\n\n to subdue a defenseless world—only to meet on\n\n Earth emotions that were more deadly than weapons.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1942.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"The Orthan had come to question the sole devotion of the individual to\n the Horde to the exclusion of all other interests. What, he wondered,\n would one new world—or a hundred—populated by the Hordes add to\n the progress of humanity? For a hundred thousand years the Orthan\n civilization had remained static, its energies directed into certain\n well-defined channels. They were mindless bees maintaining their vast\n mechanical hives.\n\n\n There was that moment on the brink of the Grand Canyon when Ellen had\n caught his arm breathlessly at all the beauty spread away there beneath\n them. There were mornings in the desert when the sun painted in lurid\n red the peaks above the harsh black-and-whites of the sagebrush and\n cactus slopes. There was the little boy, his body burning with fever,\n who nestled trustingly against his tense man's body and slept—the son\n of Ellen and the man he had destroyed.",
"The Orthan entered the narrow strip of trees and crossed to the\n little-used highway on the other side. Here he patiently sat down to\n wait for an Earthman or an Earthwoman to pass. His task now was to\n bring a native, intact if possible, back to the carefully buried space\n cruiser where his two fellows and himself would drain the creature's\n mentality of all its knowledge. In this way they could learn whether a\n planet was suited for colonization by later swarms of Orthans.\n\n\n Already they had charted over a hundred celestial bodies but of them\n all only three had proven worthy of consideration. This latest planet,\n however, 72-P-3 on the chart, appeared to be an ideal world in every\n respect. Sunlight, plenty of water and a dense atmospheric envelope\n made of 72-P-3 a paradise among planets.",
"Before Thig's eyes half of his comrade's body sloughed away into foul\n corruption that swiftly gave way to hardened blobs of dessicated\n matter. Horror for what he had done—that he had slain one of his own\n Horde—made his limbs move woodenly. All of his thoughts were dulled\n for the moment. Painfully slow, he turned his body around toward the\n control blister, turned around on leaden feet, to look full into the\n narrowed icy eyes of his commander.\n\n\n He saw the heavy barrel of the blaster slashing down against his\n skull but he could not swing a fraction of an inch out of the way.\n His body seemed paralyzed. This was the end, he thought as he waited\n stupidly for the blow to fall, the end for Ellen and the kids and all\n the struggling races of Earth. He would never write another cowboy\n yarn—they would all be dead anyhow soon.",
"The explorer from another world crouched into the concealment of a\n leafy shrub. A creature was approaching. Its squat body was covered\n with baggy strips of bluish cloth and it carried a jointed rod of metal\n and wood in its paw. It walked upright as did the men of Ortha.\n\n\n Thig's cold eyes opened a trifle wider as he stared into the thing's\n stupid face. It was as though he was looking into a bit of polished\n metal at the reflection of himself!"
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|
[
"How can the description the protagonist’s eyes as “aflame” be understood as symbolic? \n",
"Who is the protagonist of the story and what is their main objective? \n",
"Why does the protagonist want to get back to his wife? \n",
"What effect do the bombs have on the war?\n",
"Who shows the protagonist the food and the rifle?\n",
"How does the war affect the protagonist’s relationship with his wife? \n",
"What happens to Europe after the bombs? \n",
"How does the meaning of the engraved ring change throughout the story? \n",
"What part of the narrator is responsible for the story’s exposition? \n",
"What is the double meaning of the ring’s engraving, “It Is Forever.”\n"
] |
[
[
"It is symbolic for his drive to win the war. \n",
"It is symbolic for his drive to find shelter.\n",
"It is symbolic for his drive to return home to his wife.\n",
"It is symbolic for his drive to cross the Rio Grande. \n"
],
[
"An ex soldier who fought in World War III, looking for his children who have gone missing. \n",
"An ex soldier who fought in World War II, traveling home to his wife and children. \n",
"An ex soldier who fought in World War III, traveling home to his wife. \n",
"An ex soldier who fought in World War III, looking to avenge his wife’s death. \n"
],
[
"He promised that he would return home after the Americans won the war.\n",
"He promised that his love is “forever” and that he would return from the war.\n",
"He promised that his love is “forever” and that he would take her to Europe once the war ended. \n",
"He promised that he would return the locket she lent him for the war. \n"
],
[
"They end the war but turn the world into a zombie landscape. \n",
"They end he war and restore peace and harmony, even though there are still some stragglers wandering home from the war. \n",
"They end the war, but turn it into a semi-apocalyptic landscape.\n",
"They end the war, but turn the world into tribal groups with strict borders. \n"
],
[
"A conquerer \n",
"He found them himself \n",
"A member of his battalion \n",
"His horse \n"
],
[
"She waits at home like they planned, greeting them lovingly. \n",
"She is transformed into a monster, striking fear in the protagonist. \n",
"She is killed during the war, her body nowhere to be found. \n",
"She patiently waits for him at home. \n"
],
[
"It becomes anarchic, with essentially no governments left. \n",
"It becomes anarchic, with nothing but gangs to officially end what is left of the war. \n",
"It falls to Russia, becoming a wasteland in the wake of its bombing. \n",
"It becomes a festering wasteland. All living things dead. \n"
],
[
"At first it is a declaration of everlasting love, but soon shows that its pledge exists\npast death, becoming a haunting symbol of how love can bleed into death. \n",
"At first it is a declaration of everlasting love, but soon shows that its pledge exists\npast death, becoming a haunting symbol what can happen when love isn’t returned home. \n",
"At first it is a declaration of everlasting marriage, but soon shows that its pledge even exists in war, becoming a symbol of how love can survive death and overcome all trials. \n",
"At first it is a declaration of commitment, but soon shows that its pledge exists in death, becoming a haunting symbol of how love doesn’t last forever. \n\n"
],
[
"His war experience. \n",
"His memory. \n",
"His heart. \n",
"His love for his wife. \n"
],
[
"Forever in marriage; forever after death. \n",
"Forever in life; forever undead. \n",
"Forever in life; forever in war. \n",
"Forever in war; forever after. \n"
]
] |
[
3,
3,
2,
3,
4,
2,
1,
4,
2,
1
] |
[
1,
1,
1,
0,
0,
0,
1,
1,
1,
1
] |
[
[
"The rider was of medium size, with huge, strong hands and seemingly\n hollow eyes. Strange eyes, alive and aflame. They had no place in\n the dust-caked, tired body, yet there they were, seeking, always\n seeking—searching the clear horizon, and never seeming to find what\n they sought.\nThe horse moved faster now. They were nearing a river; the water would\n be welcome on tired bodies and dry throats. He spurred his horse,\n and when they reached the water's edge, he dismounted and unsaddled\n the horse. Then both man and horse plunged headlong into the waiting\n torrent, deep into the cool embrace of the clear liquid. They soaked it\n into their pores and drank deeply of it, feeling life going once more\n through their veins. Satisfied, they lifted themselves from the water,\n and the man lay down on the yellow sand of the river bank to sleep.",
"She took off the locket she wore about her neck and held it up to the\n shimmering light, letting it spin at the end of its chain. It caught\n the shadows of the fire and reflected them, greatly magnified, over the\n room. It was in the shape of a star, encrusted with emeralds, with one\n large ruby in the center. When he opened it, he found a picture of her\n in one side, and in the other a picture of the children. He took her in\n his arms again, and loosened her long, black hair, burying his face in\n it for a moment. Then he kissed her, and instantly was drawn down into\n the abyss which seemed to have no beginning or any end.",
"When he awoke, the sun was almost setting. The bright shafts of red\n light spilled across the sky, making the mountains silent scarlet\n shadows on the face of the rippling water. Quickly he gathered\n driftwood, and built a small fire. From his pack he removed some of\n the coffee he had found in one of the ruined cities. He brought water\n from the river in the battered coffee-pot he had salvaged, and while he\n waited for it to boil, he went to his horse, Conqueror, stroking his\n mane and whispering in his ear. Then he led him silently to a grassy\n slope where he hobbled him and left him for the night.\n\n\n In the fading light, he ate the hard beef jerky and drank the scalding\n coffee. Refreshed and momentarily content, he sat staring into the\n dying fire, seeing the bright glowing coals as living fingers clutching\n at the wood in consuming embrace, taking all and returning nothing but\n ashes.",
"She was sitting motionless in a straight wooden chair beside the\n fireplace, the feeble light cast by the embers veiling her in mauve\n shadows. He waited, wondering if she were.... Presently she stirred\n like a restless child in sleep, then moved from the chair to the pile\n of wood near the hearth, and replenished the fire. The wood caught\n quickly, sending up long tongues of flame, and forming a bright pool of\n light around her.\n\n\n His blood froze. The creature illuminated by the firelight was a\n monster. Large greasy scales covered its face and arms, and there was\n no hair on its head. Its gums were toothless cavities in a sunken,\n mumbling mouth. The eyes, turned momentarily toward the window, were\n empty of life.\n\n\n \"No, no!\" he cried soundlessly.",
"This was not his house. In his delirium he had only imagined he had\n found it. He had been searching so long. He would go on searching.\n He was turning wearily away from the window when the movement of the\n creature beside the fire held his attention. It had taken a ring from\n one skeleton-like finger and stood, turning the ring slowly as if\n trying to decipher some inscription inside it.\n\n\n He knew then. He had come home.\n\n\n Slowly he moved toward the door. A great weakness was upon him. His\n feet were stones, reluctant to leave the earth. His body was a weed,\n shriveled by thirst. He grasped the doorknob and clung to it, looking\n up at the night sky and trying to draw strength from the wind that\n passed over him. It was no use. There was no strength. Only fear—a\n kind of fear he had never known.",
"He fumbled at his throat, his fingers crawling like cold worms around\n his neck until he found the locket and the clasp which had held it\n safely through endless nightmare days and nights. He slipped the clasp\n and the locket fell into his waiting hand. As one in a dream, he opened\n it, and stared at the pictures, now in the dim moonlight no longer\n faces of those he loved, but grey ghosts from the past. Even the ruby\n had lost its glow. What had once been living fire was now a dull glob\n of darkness.\n\n\n \"Nothing is forever!\" He thought he had shouted the words, but only a\n thin sound, the sound of leaves ruffled by the wind, came back to him.\n\n\n He closed the locket and fastened the clasp, and hung it on the\n doorknob. It moved slowly in the wind, back and forth, like a pendulum.\n \"Forever—forever. Only death is forever.\" He could have sworn he heard\n the words.",
"He awoke and stretched the cramped muscles of his body. At the edge of\n the water he removed his clothes and stared at himself in the rippling\n mirror. His muscles were lean and hard, evenly placed throughout the\n length of his frame. A deep ridge ran down the length of his torso,\n separating the muscles, making the chest broad. Well satisfied with his\n body, he plunged into the cold water, deep down, until he thought his\n lungs would burst; then swiftly returned to the clean air, tingling in\n every pore. He dried himself and dressed. Conqueror was eating the long\n grass near the stream. Quickly he saddled him. No time for breakfast.\n He would ride all day and the next night. And he would be home.",
"Still northward. The hours crawled slower than a dying man. The sun\n was a torch that pierced his skin, seeming to melt his bones into a\n burning stream within his body. But day at last gave way to night, and\n the sun to the moon. The torch became a white pock-marked goddess, with\n streaming hair called stars.\n\n\n In the moonlight he had not seen the crater until he was at its\n very edge. Even then he might not have seen it had not the horse\n stopped suddenly. The wind swirled through its vast emptiness,\n slapping his face with dusty hands. For a moment he thought he heard\n voices—mournful, murmuring voices, echoing up from the misty depths.\n He turned quickly away and did not look back.\n\n\n Night paled into day; day burned into night.",
"\"Oh, a ring, and it's a diamond, too!\" she cried in her rich, happy\n voice which always seemed to send a thrill through his body.\n\n\n \"It's for you; so long as you wear it, I'll come back, even from the\n dead, if need be. Read the inscription.\"\n\n\n She held the ring up to the light and read aloud, \"It is forever.\"\n\n\n Then she had slipped the ring on her finger and her arms around him.\n He held her very close, feeling the warmth from her body flowing into\n his and making him oblivious to everything except that she was there in\n his arms and that he was sinking deep, deep into a familiar sea, where\n he had been many times before but each time found something new and\n unexplored, some vastly different emotion he could never quite explain.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" she cried. \"I've something for you, too.\"",
"There were clouds in the sky now, and a gentle wind caressed the sweat\n from his tired body. He stopped. There it was! Barely discernible\n through the moonlight, he saw it. Home.\n\n\n Quickly he dismounted and ran. Now he could see a small light in the\n window, and he knew they were there. His breath came in hard ragged\n gulps. At the window he peered in, and as his eyes became accustomed\n to the inner gloom, he saw how bare the room was. No matter. Now that\n he was home he would build new furniture, and the house would be even\n better than it had been before.\n\n\n Then he saw her.",
"The next morning had been bleak and gray. The mist clung to the wet,\n sodden ground, and the air was heavy in his lungs. He had driven off\n in the jeep the army had sent for him, watching her there on the porch\n until the mist swirled around her feet and she ran back into the house\n and slammed the door. His cold fingers found the locket, making a\n little bulge under his uniform, and the touch of it seemed to warm the\n blood in his veins.\n\n\n Three days later they had landed in Spain, merged with another\n division, then crossed the Pyrenees into France, and finally to Paris\n where the fighting had begun. Already the city was a silent graveyard,\n littered with the rubble of towers and cathedrals which had once been\n great.",
"But he knew he was closer now. Closer to home. He recognized the land.\n How, he did not know, for it was much changed. A sensing, perhaps, of\n what it had once been. He could not be more than two days' ride away.\n Once he was through this desert, he would find her, he would be with\n her once again; all would be well, and his long journey would be over.\nThe images faded. Even memory slept in a flow of warm blood. Body and\n mind slept into the shadows of the dawn.",
"He ran. Away from the house. To the large horse with a horn in the\n center of its forehead, like a unicorn. Once in the saddle, the spurt\n of strength left him. His shoulders slumped, his head dropped onto his\n chest.\n\n\n Conqueror trotted away, the sound of his hooves echoing hollowly in the\n vast emptiness.",
"Slowly his eyelids yielded. His body sagged, and blood seemed to fill\n his brain, bathing it in a gentle, warm flood.\n\n\n He slept. His brain slept.\n\n\n But the portion of his brain called memory stirred. It was all alone;\n all else was at rest. Images began to appear, drawn from inexhaustible\n files, wherein are kept all thoughts, past, present, and future....\nIt was the night before he was to go overseas. World War III had been\n declared, and he had enlisted, receiving his old rank of captain. He\n was with his wife in the living room of their home. They had put the\n children to bed—their sons—and now sat on the couch, watching the\n blazing fire. It was then that he had showed it to her.\n\n\n \"I've got something to tell you, and something to show you.\"\n\n\n He had removed the box from his pocket and opened it. And heard her cry\n of surprised joy.",
"And he had followed. Over a mountain, until they came to a pass, and\n finally to a narrow path which led to an old cabin. He had found it\n empty, but there were cans of food and a rifle and many shells. He had\n remained there a long time—how long he could not tell, for he could\n only measure time by the cycles of the sun and the moon. Finally he\n had taken the horse, the rifle and what food was left, and once again\n started the long journey home.\n\n\n The farther north he went, the more life seemed to have survived. He\n had seen great herds of horses like his own, stampeding across the\n plains, and strange birds which he could not identify. Yet he had seen\n no human beings.",
"Three years later they were on the road to Moscow. Over a thousand\n miles lay behind, a dead man on every foot of those miles. Yet victory\n was near. The Russians had not yet used the H-bomb; the threat of\n annihilation by the retaliation forces had been too great.\n\n\n He had done well in the war, and had been decorated many times for\n bravery in action. Now he felt the victory that seemed to be in the\n air, and he had wished it would come quickly, so that he might return\n to her. Home. The very feel of the word was everything a battle-weary\n soldier needed to make him fight harder and live longer.\n\n\n Suddenly he had become aware of a droning, wooshing sound above him. It\n grew louder and louder until he knew what it was.\n\n\n \"Heavy bombers!\" The alarm had sounded, and the men had headed for\n their foxholes.",
"He had been on the trail for a long time. His food was nearly\n exhausted. The mountains were just beginning, and he hoped to find food\n there. He had not found food, but his luck had been with him. He had\n found a horse. Not a normal horse, but a mutation. It was almost twice\n as large as a regular horse. Its skin seemed to shimmer and was like\n glassy steel to the touch. From the center of its forehead grew a horn,\n straight out, as the horn of a unicorn. But most startling of all were\n the animal's eyes which seemed to speak—a silent mental speech, which\n he could understand. The horse had looked up as he approached it and\n seemed to say: \"Follow me.\"",
"But too many bombers got through, dropping their deadly cargo upon the\n helpless cities. And not all the prayers or entreaties to any God had\n stopped their carnage. First there had been the red flashes that melted\n buildings into molten streams, and then the great triple-mushroom cloud\n filled with the poisonous gases that the wind swept away to other\n cities, where men had not died quickly and mercifully, but had rotted\n away, leaving shreds of putrid flesh behind to mark the places where\n they had crawled.\n\n\n The retaliatory forces had roared away to bomb the Russian cities. Few,\n if any, had returned. Too much blood and life were on their hands.\n Those who had remained alive had found a resting place on the crown\n of some distant mountain. Others had preferred the silent peaceful\n sea, where flesh stayed not long on bones, and only darting fishes and\n merciful beams of filtered light found their aluminum coffins.\n\n\n The war had ended.",
"It was rightly called. The deserts were long. All plant life had died,\n leaving to those once great fertile stretches, nothing but the sad,\n temporal beauty that comes with death. No people had he seen. Only the\n ruins of what had once been their cities. He had walked through them,\n and all that he had seen were the small mutant rodents, and all that he\n had heard was the occasional swish of the wind as it whisked along what\n might have been dead leaves, but wasn't.",
"But the planes had passed over, the sun glinting on their bellies,\n reflecting a blinding light. They were bound for bigger, more important\n targets. When the all-clear had sounded, the men clambered from their\n shelters. An icy wind swept the field, bringing with it clouds which\n covered the sun. A strange fear had gripped him then....\n\n\n Across the Atlantic, over the pole, via Alaska, the great bombers\n flew. In cities, great and small, the air raid sirens sounded, high\n screaming noises which had jarred the people from sleep in time to die.\n The defending planes roared into the sky to intercept the on-rushing\n bombers. The horrendous battle split the universe. Many bombers fell,\n victims of fanatical suicide planes, or of missiles that streaked\n across the sky which none could escape."
],
[
"The rider was of medium size, with huge, strong hands and seemingly\n hollow eyes. Strange eyes, alive and aflame. They had no place in\n the dust-caked, tired body, yet there they were, seeking, always\n seeking—searching the clear horizon, and never seeming to find what\n they sought.\nThe horse moved faster now. They were nearing a river; the water would\n be welcome on tired bodies and dry throats. He spurred his horse,\n and when they reached the water's edge, he dismounted and unsaddled\n the horse. Then both man and horse plunged headlong into the waiting\n torrent, deep into the cool embrace of the clear liquid. They soaked it\n into their pores and drank deeply of it, feeling life going once more\n through their veins. Satisfied, they lifted themselves from the water,\n and the man lay down on the yellow sand of the river bank to sleep.",
"He awoke and stretched the cramped muscles of his body. At the edge of\n the water he removed his clothes and stared at himself in the rippling\n mirror. His muscles were lean and hard, evenly placed throughout the\n length of his frame. A deep ridge ran down the length of his torso,\n separating the muscles, making the chest broad. Well satisfied with his\n body, he plunged into the cold water, deep down, until he thought his\n lungs would burst; then swiftly returned to the clean air, tingling in\n every pore. He dried himself and dressed. Conqueror was eating the long\n grass near the stream. Quickly he saddled him. No time for breakfast.\n He would ride all day and the next night. And he would be home.",
"He ran. Away from the house. To the large horse with a horn in the\n center of its forehead, like a unicorn. Once in the saddle, the spurt\n of strength left him. His shoulders slumped, his head dropped onto his\n chest.\n\n\n Conqueror trotted away, the sound of his hooves echoing hollowly in the\n vast emptiness.",
"When he awoke, the sun was almost setting. The bright shafts of red\n light spilled across the sky, making the mountains silent scarlet\n shadows on the face of the rippling water. Quickly he gathered\n driftwood, and built a small fire. From his pack he removed some of\n the coffee he had found in one of the ruined cities. He brought water\n from the river in the battered coffee-pot he had salvaged, and while he\n waited for it to boil, he went to his horse, Conqueror, stroking his\n mane and whispering in his ear. Then he led him silently to a grassy\n slope where he hobbled him and left him for the night.\n\n\n In the fading light, he ate the hard beef jerky and drank the scalding\n coffee. Refreshed and momentarily content, he sat staring into the\n dying fire, seeing the bright glowing coals as living fingers clutching\n at the wood in consuming embrace, taking all and returning nothing but\n ashes.",
"And he had followed. Over a mountain, until they came to a pass, and\n finally to a narrow path which led to an old cabin. He had found it\n empty, but there were cans of food and a rifle and many shells. He had\n remained there a long time—how long he could not tell, for he could\n only measure time by the cycles of the sun and the moon. Finally he\n had taken the horse, the rifle and what food was left, and once again\n started the long journey home.\n\n\n The farther north he went, the more life seemed to have survived. He\n had seen great herds of horses like his own, stampeding across the\n plains, and strange birds which he could not identify. Yet he had seen\n no human beings.",
"There were clouds in the sky now, and a gentle wind caressed the sweat\n from his tired body. He stopped. There it was! Barely discernible\n through the moonlight, he saw it. Home.\n\n\n Quickly he dismounted and ran. Now he could see a small light in the\n window, and he knew they were there. His breath came in hard ragged\n gulps. At the window he peered in, and as his eyes became accustomed\n to the inner gloom, he saw how bare the room was. No matter. Now that\n he was home he would build new furniture, and the house would be even\n better than it had been before.\n\n\n Then he saw her.",
"Still northward. The hours crawled slower than a dying man. The sun\n was a torch that pierced his skin, seeming to melt his bones into a\n burning stream within his body. But day at last gave way to night, and\n the sun to the moon. The torch became a white pock-marked goddess, with\n streaming hair called stars.\n\n\n In the moonlight he had not seen the crater until he was at its\n very edge. Even then he might not have seen it had not the horse\n stopped suddenly. The wind swirled through its vast emptiness,\n slapping his face with dusty hands. For a moment he thought he heard\n voices—mournful, murmuring voices, echoing up from the misty depths.\n He turned quickly away and did not look back.\n\n\n Night paled into day; day burned into night.",
"They had started the long trek. Throughout Europe anarchy reigned. He\n and his men were alone. All they could do now was fight. Finally they\n reached the seaport city of Calais. With what few men he had left, he\n had commandeered a small yacht, and they had taken to the sea.",
"Three years later they were on the road to Moscow. Over a thousand\n miles lay behind, a dead man on every foot of those miles. Yet victory\n was near. The Russians had not yet used the H-bomb; the threat of\n annihilation by the retaliation forces had been too great.\n\n\n He had done well in the war, and had been decorated many times for\n bravery in action. Now he felt the victory that seemed to be in the\n air, and he had wished it would come quickly, so that he might return\n to her. Home. The very feel of the word was everything a battle-weary\n soldier needed to make him fight harder and live longer.\n\n\n Suddenly he had become aware of a droning, wooshing sound above him. It\n grew louder and louder until he knew what it was.\n\n\n \"Heavy bombers!\" The alarm had sounded, and the men had headed for\n their foxholes.",
"The next morning had been bleak and gray. The mist clung to the wet,\n sodden ground, and the air was heavy in his lungs. He had driven off\n in the jeep the army had sent for him, watching her there on the porch\n until the mist swirled around her feet and she ran back into the house\n and slammed the door. His cold fingers found the locket, making a\n little bulge under his uniform, and the touch of it seemed to warm the\n blood in his veins.\n\n\n Three days later they had landed in Spain, merged with another\n division, then crossed the Pyrenees into France, and finally to Paris\n where the fighting had begun. Already the city was a silent graveyard,\n littered with the rubble of towers and cathedrals which had once been\n great.",
"After months of storms and bad luck, they had been shipwrecked\n somewhere off the coast of Mexico. He had managed to swim ashore,\n and had been found by a fisherman's family. Many months he had spent\n swimming and fishing, recovering his strength, inquiring about the\n United States. The Mexicans had spoken with fear of the land across the\n Rio Grande. All its great cities had been destroyed, and those that had\n been only partially destroyed were devoid of people. The land across\n the Rio Grande had become a land of shadows. The winds were poisoned,\n and the few people who might have survived, were crazed and maimed by\n the blasts. Few men had dared cross the Rio Grande into \"El Mundo gris\n de Noviembre\"—the November world. Those who had, had never returned.\n\n\n In time he had traveled north until he reached the Rio Grande. He had\n waded into the muddy waters and somehow landed on the American side. In\n the November world.",
"She took off the locket she wore about her neck and held it up to the\n shimmering light, letting it spin at the end of its chain. It caught\n the shadows of the fire and reflected them, greatly magnified, over the\n room. It was in the shape of a star, encrusted with emeralds, with one\n large ruby in the center. When he opened it, he found a picture of her\n in one side, and in the other a picture of the children. He took her in\n his arms again, and loosened her long, black hair, burying his face in\n it for a moment. Then he kissed her, and instantly was drawn down into\n the abyss which seemed to have no beginning or any end.",
"He had been on the trail for a long time. His food was nearly\n exhausted. The mountains were just beginning, and he hoped to find food\n there. He had not found food, but his luck had been with him. He had\n found a horse. Not a normal horse, but a mutation. It was almost twice\n as large as a regular horse. Its skin seemed to shimmer and was like\n glassy steel to the touch. From the center of its forehead grew a horn,\n straight out, as the horn of a unicorn. But most startling of all were\n the animal's eyes which seemed to speak—a silent mental speech, which\n he could understand. The horse had looked up as he approached it and\n seemed to say: \"Follow me.\"",
"She was sitting motionless in a straight wooden chair beside the\n fireplace, the feeble light cast by the embers veiling her in mauve\n shadows. He waited, wondering if she were.... Presently she stirred\n like a restless child in sleep, then moved from the chair to the pile\n of wood near the hearth, and replenished the fire. The wood caught\n quickly, sending up long tongues of flame, and forming a bright pool of\n light around her.\n\n\n His blood froze. The creature illuminated by the firelight was a\n monster. Large greasy scales covered its face and arms, and there was\n no hair on its head. Its gums were toothless cavities in a sunken,\n mumbling mouth. The eyes, turned momentarily toward the window, were\n empty of life.\n\n\n \"No, no!\" he cried soundlessly.",
"Slowly his eyelids yielded. His body sagged, and blood seemed to fill\n his brain, bathing it in a gentle, warm flood.\n\n\n He slept. His brain slept.\n\n\n But the portion of his brain called memory stirred. It was all alone;\n all else was at rest. Images began to appear, drawn from inexhaustible\n files, wherein are kept all thoughts, past, present, and future....\nIt was the night before he was to go overseas. World War III had been\n declared, and he had enlisted, receiving his old rank of captain. He\n was with his wife in the living room of their home. They had put the\n children to bed—their sons—and now sat on the couch, watching the\n blazing fire. It was then that he had showed it to her.\n\n\n \"I've got something to tell you, and something to show you.\"\n\n\n He had removed the box from his pocket and opened it. And heard her cry\n of surprised joy.",
"To no avail. Neither side had won. Most of the cities and the majority\n of the population of both countries had been destroyed. Even their\n governments had vanished, leaving a silent nothingness. The armies that\n remained were without leaders, without sources of supplies, save what\n they could forage and beg from an unfriendly people.\n\n\n They were alone now, a group of tired, battered men, for whom life held\n nothing. Their families had long since died, their bodies turned to\n dust, their spirits fled on the winds to a new world.\n\n\n Yet these remnants of an army must return—or at least try. Their\n exodus was just beginning. Somehow he had managed to hold together the\n few men left from his force. He had always nourished the hope that\n she might still be alive. And now that the war was over he had to\n return—had to know whether she was still waiting for him.",
"This was not his house. In his delirium he had only imagined he had\n found it. He had been searching so long. He would go on searching.\n He was turning wearily away from the window when the movement of the\n creature beside the fire held his attention. It had taken a ring from\n one skeleton-like finger and stood, turning the ring slowly as if\n trying to decipher some inscription inside it.\n\n\n He knew then. He had come home.\n\n\n Slowly he moved toward the door. A great weakness was upon him. His\n feet were stones, reluctant to leave the earth. His body was a weed,\n shriveled by thirst. He grasped the doorknob and clung to it, looking\n up at the night sky and trying to draw strength from the wind that\n passed over him. It was no use. There was no strength. Only fear—a\n kind of fear he had never known.",
"He fumbled at his throat, his fingers crawling like cold worms around\n his neck until he found the locket and the clasp which had held it\n safely through endless nightmare days and nights. He slipped the clasp\n and the locket fell into his waiting hand. As one in a dream, he opened\n it, and stared at the pictures, now in the dim moonlight no longer\n faces of those he loved, but grey ghosts from the past. Even the ruby\n had lost its glow. What had once been living fire was now a dull glob\n of darkness.\n\n\n \"Nothing is forever!\" He thought he had shouted the words, but only a\n thin sound, the sound of leaves ruffled by the wind, came back to him.\n\n\n He closed the locket and fastened the clasp, and hung it on the\n doorknob. It moved slowly in the wind, back and forth, like a pendulum.\n \"Forever—forever. Only death is forever.\" He could have sworn he heard\n the words.",
"But he knew he was closer now. Closer to home. He recognized the land.\n How, he did not know, for it was much changed. A sensing, perhaps, of\n what it had once been. He could not be more than two days' ride away.\n Once he was through this desert, he would find her, he would be with\n her once again; all would be well, and his long journey would be over.\nThe images faded. Even memory slept in a flow of warm blood. Body and\n mind slept into the shadows of the dawn.",
"\"Oh, a ring, and it's a diamond, too!\" she cried in her rich, happy\n voice which always seemed to send a thrill through his body.\n\n\n \"It's for you; so long as you wear it, I'll come back, even from the\n dead, if need be. Read the inscription.\"\n\n\n She held the ring up to the light and read aloud, \"It is forever.\"\n\n\n Then she had slipped the ring on her finger and her arms around him.\n He held her very close, feeling the warmth from her body flowing into\n his and making him oblivious to everything except that she was there in\n his arms and that he was sinking deep, deep into a familiar sea, where\n he had been many times before but each time found something new and\n unexplored, some vastly different emotion he could never quite explain.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" she cried. \"I've something for you, too.\""
],
[
"He awoke and stretched the cramped muscles of his body. At the edge of\n the water he removed his clothes and stared at himself in the rippling\n mirror. His muscles were lean and hard, evenly placed throughout the\n length of his frame. A deep ridge ran down the length of his torso,\n separating the muscles, making the chest broad. Well satisfied with his\n body, he plunged into the cold water, deep down, until he thought his\n lungs would burst; then swiftly returned to the clean air, tingling in\n every pore. He dried himself and dressed. Conqueror was eating the long\n grass near the stream. Quickly he saddled him. No time for breakfast.\n He would ride all day and the next night. And he would be home.",
"There were clouds in the sky now, and a gentle wind caressed the sweat\n from his tired body. He stopped. There it was! Barely discernible\n through the moonlight, he saw it. Home.\n\n\n Quickly he dismounted and ran. Now he could see a small light in the\n window, and he knew they were there. His breath came in hard ragged\n gulps. At the window he peered in, and as his eyes became accustomed\n to the inner gloom, he saw how bare the room was. No matter. Now that\n he was home he would build new furniture, and the house would be even\n better than it had been before.\n\n\n Then he saw her.",
"This was not his house. In his delirium he had only imagined he had\n found it. He had been searching so long. He would go on searching.\n He was turning wearily away from the window when the movement of the\n creature beside the fire held his attention. It had taken a ring from\n one skeleton-like finger and stood, turning the ring slowly as if\n trying to decipher some inscription inside it.\n\n\n He knew then. He had come home.\n\n\n Slowly he moved toward the door. A great weakness was upon him. His\n feet were stones, reluctant to leave the earth. His body was a weed,\n shriveled by thirst. He grasped the doorknob and clung to it, looking\n up at the night sky and trying to draw strength from the wind that\n passed over him. It was no use. There was no strength. Only fear—a\n kind of fear he had never known.",
"And he had followed. Over a mountain, until they came to a pass, and\n finally to a narrow path which led to an old cabin. He had found it\n empty, but there were cans of food and a rifle and many shells. He had\n remained there a long time—how long he could not tell, for he could\n only measure time by the cycles of the sun and the moon. Finally he\n had taken the horse, the rifle and what food was left, and once again\n started the long journey home.\n\n\n The farther north he went, the more life seemed to have survived. He\n had seen great herds of horses like his own, stampeding across the\n plains, and strange birds which he could not identify. Yet he had seen\n no human beings.",
"But he knew he was closer now. Closer to home. He recognized the land.\n How, he did not know, for it was much changed. A sensing, perhaps, of\n what it had once been. He could not be more than two days' ride away.\n Once he was through this desert, he would find her, he would be with\n her once again; all would be well, and his long journey would be over.\nThe images faded. Even memory slept in a flow of warm blood. Body and\n mind slept into the shadows of the dawn.",
"He ran. Away from the house. To the large horse with a horn in the\n center of its forehead, like a unicorn. Once in the saddle, the spurt\n of strength left him. His shoulders slumped, his head dropped onto his\n chest.\n\n\n Conqueror trotted away, the sound of his hooves echoing hollowly in the\n vast emptiness.",
"Three years later they were on the road to Moscow. Over a thousand\n miles lay behind, a dead man on every foot of those miles. Yet victory\n was near. The Russians had not yet used the H-bomb; the threat of\n annihilation by the retaliation forces had been too great.\n\n\n He had done well in the war, and had been decorated many times for\n bravery in action. Now he felt the victory that seemed to be in the\n air, and he had wished it would come quickly, so that he might return\n to her. Home. The very feel of the word was everything a battle-weary\n soldier needed to make him fight harder and live longer.\n\n\n Suddenly he had become aware of a droning, wooshing sound above him. It\n grew louder and louder until he knew what it was.\n\n\n \"Heavy bombers!\" The alarm had sounded, and the men had headed for\n their foxholes.",
"\"Oh, a ring, and it's a diamond, too!\" she cried in her rich, happy\n voice which always seemed to send a thrill through his body.\n\n\n \"It's for you; so long as you wear it, I'll come back, even from the\n dead, if need be. Read the inscription.\"\n\n\n She held the ring up to the light and read aloud, \"It is forever.\"\n\n\n Then she had slipped the ring on her finger and her arms around him.\n He held her very close, feeling the warmth from her body flowing into\n his and making him oblivious to everything except that she was there in\n his arms and that he was sinking deep, deep into a familiar sea, where\n he had been many times before but each time found something new and\n unexplored, some vastly different emotion he could never quite explain.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" she cried. \"I've something for you, too.\"",
"To no avail. Neither side had won. Most of the cities and the majority\n of the population of both countries had been destroyed. Even their\n governments had vanished, leaving a silent nothingness. The armies that\n remained were without leaders, without sources of supplies, save what\n they could forage and beg from an unfriendly people.\n\n\n They were alone now, a group of tired, battered men, for whom life held\n nothing. Their families had long since died, their bodies turned to\n dust, their spirits fled on the winds to a new world.\n\n\n Yet these remnants of an army must return—or at least try. Their\n exodus was just beginning. Somehow he had managed to hold together the\n few men left from his force. He had always nourished the hope that\n she might still be alive. And now that the war was over he had to\n return—had to know whether she was still waiting for him.",
"The next morning had been bleak and gray. The mist clung to the wet,\n sodden ground, and the air was heavy in his lungs. He had driven off\n in the jeep the army had sent for him, watching her there on the porch\n until the mist swirled around her feet and she ran back into the house\n and slammed the door. His cold fingers found the locket, making a\n little bulge under his uniform, and the touch of it seemed to warm the\n blood in his veins.\n\n\n Three days later they had landed in Spain, merged with another\n division, then crossed the Pyrenees into France, and finally to Paris\n where the fighting had begun. Already the city was a silent graveyard,\n littered with the rubble of towers and cathedrals which had once been\n great.",
"He fumbled at his throat, his fingers crawling like cold worms around\n his neck until he found the locket and the clasp which had held it\n safely through endless nightmare days and nights. He slipped the clasp\n and the locket fell into his waiting hand. As one in a dream, he opened\n it, and stared at the pictures, now in the dim moonlight no longer\n faces of those he loved, but grey ghosts from the past. Even the ruby\n had lost its glow. What had once been living fire was now a dull glob\n of darkness.\n\n\n \"Nothing is forever!\" He thought he had shouted the words, but only a\n thin sound, the sound of leaves ruffled by the wind, came back to him.\n\n\n He closed the locket and fastened the clasp, and hung it on the\n doorknob. It moved slowly in the wind, back and forth, like a pendulum.\n \"Forever—forever. Only death is forever.\" He could have sworn he heard\n the words.",
"Still northward. The hours crawled slower than a dying man. The sun\n was a torch that pierced his skin, seeming to melt his bones into a\n burning stream within his body. But day at last gave way to night, and\n the sun to the moon. The torch became a white pock-marked goddess, with\n streaming hair called stars.\n\n\n In the moonlight he had not seen the crater until he was at its\n very edge. Even then he might not have seen it had not the horse\n stopped suddenly. The wind swirled through its vast emptiness,\n slapping his face with dusty hands. For a moment he thought he heard\n voices—mournful, murmuring voices, echoing up from the misty depths.\n He turned quickly away and did not look back.\n\n\n Night paled into day; day burned into night.",
"When he awoke, the sun was almost setting. The bright shafts of red\n light spilled across the sky, making the mountains silent scarlet\n shadows on the face of the rippling water. Quickly he gathered\n driftwood, and built a small fire. From his pack he removed some of\n the coffee he had found in one of the ruined cities. He brought water\n from the river in the battered coffee-pot he had salvaged, and while he\n waited for it to boil, he went to his horse, Conqueror, stroking his\n mane and whispering in his ear. Then he led him silently to a grassy\n slope where he hobbled him and left him for the night.\n\n\n In the fading light, he ate the hard beef jerky and drank the scalding\n coffee. Refreshed and momentarily content, he sat staring into the\n dying fire, seeing the bright glowing coals as living fingers clutching\n at the wood in consuming embrace, taking all and returning nothing but\n ashes.",
"They had started the long trek. Throughout Europe anarchy reigned. He\n and his men were alone. All they could do now was fight. Finally they\n reached the seaport city of Calais. With what few men he had left, he\n had commandeered a small yacht, and they had taken to the sea.",
"She took off the locket she wore about her neck and held it up to the\n shimmering light, letting it spin at the end of its chain. It caught\n the shadows of the fire and reflected them, greatly magnified, over the\n room. It was in the shape of a star, encrusted with emeralds, with one\n large ruby in the center. When he opened it, he found a picture of her\n in one side, and in the other a picture of the children. He took her in\n his arms again, and loosened her long, black hair, burying his face in\n it for a moment. Then he kissed her, and instantly was drawn down into\n the abyss which seemed to have no beginning or any end.",
"She was sitting motionless in a straight wooden chair beside the\n fireplace, the feeble light cast by the embers veiling her in mauve\n shadows. He waited, wondering if she were.... Presently she stirred\n like a restless child in sleep, then moved from the chair to the pile\n of wood near the hearth, and replenished the fire. The wood caught\n quickly, sending up long tongues of flame, and forming a bright pool of\n light around her.\n\n\n His blood froze. The creature illuminated by the firelight was a\n monster. Large greasy scales covered its face and arms, and there was\n no hair on its head. Its gums were toothless cavities in a sunken,\n mumbling mouth. The eyes, turned momentarily toward the window, were\n empty of life.\n\n\n \"No, no!\" he cried soundlessly.",
"Slowly his eyelids yielded. His body sagged, and blood seemed to fill\n his brain, bathing it in a gentle, warm flood.\n\n\n He slept. His brain slept.\n\n\n But the portion of his brain called memory stirred. It was all alone;\n all else was at rest. Images began to appear, drawn from inexhaustible\n files, wherein are kept all thoughts, past, present, and future....\nIt was the night before he was to go overseas. World War III had been\n declared, and he had enlisted, receiving his old rank of captain. He\n was with his wife in the living room of their home. They had put the\n children to bed—their sons—and now sat on the couch, watching the\n blazing fire. It was then that he had showed it to her.\n\n\n \"I've got something to tell you, and something to show you.\"\n\n\n He had removed the box from his pocket and opened it. And heard her cry\n of surprised joy.",
"The rider was of medium size, with huge, strong hands and seemingly\n hollow eyes. Strange eyes, alive and aflame. They had no place in\n the dust-caked, tired body, yet there they were, seeking, always\n seeking—searching the clear horizon, and never seeming to find what\n they sought.\nThe horse moved faster now. They were nearing a river; the water would\n be welcome on tired bodies and dry throats. He spurred his horse,\n and when they reached the water's edge, he dismounted and unsaddled\n the horse. Then both man and horse plunged headlong into the waiting\n torrent, deep into the cool embrace of the clear liquid. They soaked it\n into their pores and drank deeply of it, feeling life going once more\n through their veins. Satisfied, they lifted themselves from the water,\n and the man lay down on the yellow sand of the river bank to sleep.",
"After months of storms and bad luck, they had been shipwrecked\n somewhere off the coast of Mexico. He had managed to swim ashore,\n and had been found by a fisherman's family. Many months he had spent\n swimming and fishing, recovering his strength, inquiring about the\n United States. The Mexicans had spoken with fear of the land across the\n Rio Grande. All its great cities had been destroyed, and those that had\n been only partially destroyed were devoid of people. The land across\n the Rio Grande had become a land of shadows. The winds were poisoned,\n and the few people who might have survived, were crazed and maimed by\n the blasts. Few men had dared cross the Rio Grande into \"El Mundo gris\n de Noviembre\"—the November world. Those who had, had never returned.\n\n\n In time he had traveled north until he reached the Rio Grande. He had\n waded into the muddy waters and somehow landed on the American side. In\n the November world.",
"It was rightly called. The deserts were long. All plant life had died,\n leaving to those once great fertile stretches, nothing but the sad,\n temporal beauty that comes with death. No people had he seen. Only the\n ruins of what had once been their cities. He had walked through them,\n and all that he had seen were the small mutant rodents, and all that he\n had heard was the occasional swish of the wind as it whisked along what\n might have been dead leaves, but wasn't."
],
[
"But too many bombers got through, dropping their deadly cargo upon the\n helpless cities. And not all the prayers or entreaties to any God had\n stopped their carnage. First there had been the red flashes that melted\n buildings into molten streams, and then the great triple-mushroom cloud\n filled with the poisonous gases that the wind swept away to other\n cities, where men had not died quickly and mercifully, but had rotted\n away, leaving shreds of putrid flesh behind to mark the places where\n they had crawled.\n\n\n The retaliatory forces had roared away to bomb the Russian cities. Few,\n if any, had returned. Too much blood and life were on their hands.\n Those who had remained alive had found a resting place on the crown\n of some distant mountain. Others had preferred the silent peaceful\n sea, where flesh stayed not long on bones, and only darting fishes and\n merciful beams of filtered light found their aluminum coffins.\n\n\n The war had ended.",
"Three years later they were on the road to Moscow. Over a thousand\n miles lay behind, a dead man on every foot of those miles. Yet victory\n was near. The Russians had not yet used the H-bomb; the threat of\n annihilation by the retaliation forces had been too great.\n\n\n He had done well in the war, and had been decorated many times for\n bravery in action. Now he felt the victory that seemed to be in the\n air, and he had wished it would come quickly, so that he might return\n to her. Home. The very feel of the word was everything a battle-weary\n soldier needed to make him fight harder and live longer.\n\n\n Suddenly he had become aware of a droning, wooshing sound above him. It\n grew louder and louder until he knew what it was.\n\n\n \"Heavy bombers!\" The alarm had sounded, and the men had headed for\n their foxholes.",
"But the planes had passed over, the sun glinting on their bellies,\n reflecting a blinding light. They were bound for bigger, more important\n targets. When the all-clear had sounded, the men clambered from their\n shelters. An icy wind swept the field, bringing with it clouds which\n covered the sun. A strange fear had gripped him then....\n\n\n Across the Atlantic, over the pole, via Alaska, the great bombers\n flew. In cities, great and small, the air raid sirens sounded, high\n screaming noises which had jarred the people from sleep in time to die.\n The defending planes roared into the sky to intercept the on-rushing\n bombers. The horrendous battle split the universe. Many bombers fell,\n victims of fanatical suicide planes, or of missiles that streaked\n across the sky which none could escape.",
"To no avail. Neither side had won. Most of the cities and the majority\n of the population of both countries had been destroyed. Even their\n governments had vanished, leaving a silent nothingness. The armies that\n remained were without leaders, without sources of supplies, save what\n they could forage and beg from an unfriendly people.\n\n\n They were alone now, a group of tired, battered men, for whom life held\n nothing. Their families had long since died, their bodies turned to\n dust, their spirits fled on the winds to a new world.\n\n\n Yet these remnants of an army must return—or at least try. Their\n exodus was just beginning. Somehow he had managed to hold together the\n few men left from his force. He had always nourished the hope that\n she might still be alive. And now that the war was over he had to\n return—had to know whether she was still waiting for him.",
"And he had followed. Over a mountain, until they came to a pass, and\n finally to a narrow path which led to an old cabin. He had found it\n empty, but there were cans of food and a rifle and many shells. He had\n remained there a long time—how long he could not tell, for he could\n only measure time by the cycles of the sun and the moon. Finally he\n had taken the horse, the rifle and what food was left, and once again\n started the long journey home.\n\n\n The farther north he went, the more life seemed to have survived. He\n had seen great herds of horses like his own, stampeding across the\n plains, and strange birds which he could not identify. Yet he had seen\n no human beings.",
"The next morning had been bleak and gray. The mist clung to the wet,\n sodden ground, and the air was heavy in his lungs. He had driven off\n in the jeep the army had sent for him, watching her there on the porch\n until the mist swirled around her feet and she ran back into the house\n and slammed the door. His cold fingers found the locket, making a\n little bulge under his uniform, and the touch of it seemed to warm the\n blood in his veins.\n\n\n Three days later they had landed in Spain, merged with another\n division, then crossed the Pyrenees into France, and finally to Paris\n where the fighting had begun. Already the city was a silent graveyard,\n littered with the rubble of towers and cathedrals which had once been\n great.",
"After months of storms and bad luck, they had been shipwrecked\n somewhere off the coast of Mexico. He had managed to swim ashore,\n and had been found by a fisherman's family. Many months he had spent\n swimming and fishing, recovering his strength, inquiring about the\n United States. The Mexicans had spoken with fear of the land across the\n Rio Grande. All its great cities had been destroyed, and those that had\n been only partially destroyed were devoid of people. The land across\n the Rio Grande had become a land of shadows. The winds were poisoned,\n and the few people who might have survived, were crazed and maimed by\n the blasts. Few men had dared cross the Rio Grande into \"El Mundo gris\n de Noviembre\"—the November world. Those who had, had never returned.\n\n\n In time he had traveled north until he reached the Rio Grande. He had\n waded into the muddy waters and somehow landed on the American side. In\n the November world.",
"Slowly his eyelids yielded. His body sagged, and blood seemed to fill\n his brain, bathing it in a gentle, warm flood.\n\n\n He slept. His brain slept.\n\n\n But the portion of his brain called memory stirred. It was all alone;\n all else was at rest. Images began to appear, drawn from inexhaustible\n files, wherein are kept all thoughts, past, present, and future....\nIt was the night before he was to go overseas. World War III had been\n declared, and he had enlisted, receiving his old rank of captain. He\n was with his wife in the living room of their home. They had put the\n children to bed—their sons—and now sat on the couch, watching the\n blazing fire. It was then that he had showed it to her.\n\n\n \"I've got something to tell you, and something to show you.\"\n\n\n He had removed the box from his pocket and opened it. And heard her cry\n of surprised joy.",
"It was rightly called. The deserts were long. All plant life had died,\n leaving to those once great fertile stretches, nothing but the sad,\n temporal beauty that comes with death. No people had he seen. Only the\n ruins of what had once been their cities. He had walked through them,\n and all that he had seen were the small mutant rodents, and all that he\n had heard was the occasional swish of the wind as it whisked along what\n might have been dead leaves, but wasn't.",
"He fumbled at his throat, his fingers crawling like cold worms around\n his neck until he found the locket and the clasp which had held it\n safely through endless nightmare days and nights. He slipped the clasp\n and the locket fell into his waiting hand. As one in a dream, he opened\n it, and stared at the pictures, now in the dim moonlight no longer\n faces of those he loved, but grey ghosts from the past. Even the ruby\n had lost its glow. What had once been living fire was now a dull glob\n of darkness.\n\n\n \"Nothing is forever!\" He thought he had shouted the words, but only a\n thin sound, the sound of leaves ruffled by the wind, came back to him.\n\n\n He closed the locket and fastened the clasp, and hung it on the\n doorknob. It moved slowly in the wind, back and forth, like a pendulum.\n \"Forever—forever. Only death is forever.\" He could have sworn he heard\n the words.",
"Still northward. The hours crawled slower than a dying man. The sun\n was a torch that pierced his skin, seeming to melt his bones into a\n burning stream within his body. But day at last gave way to night, and\n the sun to the moon. The torch became a white pock-marked goddess, with\n streaming hair called stars.\n\n\n In the moonlight he had not seen the crater until he was at its\n very edge. Even then he might not have seen it had not the horse\n stopped suddenly. The wind swirled through its vast emptiness,\n slapping his face with dusty hands. For a moment he thought he heard\n voices—mournful, murmuring voices, echoing up from the misty depths.\n He turned quickly away and did not look back.\n\n\n Night paled into day; day burned into night.",
"They had started the long trek. Throughout Europe anarchy reigned. He\n and his men were alone. All they could do now was fight. Finally they\n reached the seaport city of Calais. With what few men he had left, he\n had commandeered a small yacht, and they had taken to the sea.",
"When he awoke, the sun was almost setting. The bright shafts of red\n light spilled across the sky, making the mountains silent scarlet\n shadows on the face of the rippling water. Quickly he gathered\n driftwood, and built a small fire. From his pack he removed some of\n the coffee he had found in one of the ruined cities. He brought water\n from the river in the battered coffee-pot he had salvaged, and while he\n waited for it to boil, he went to his horse, Conqueror, stroking his\n mane and whispering in his ear. Then he led him silently to a grassy\n slope where he hobbled him and left him for the night.\n\n\n In the fading light, he ate the hard beef jerky and drank the scalding\n coffee. Refreshed and momentarily content, he sat staring into the\n dying fire, seeing the bright glowing coals as living fingers clutching\n at the wood in consuming embrace, taking all and returning nothing but\n ashes.",
"She took off the locket she wore about her neck and held it up to the\n shimmering light, letting it spin at the end of its chain. It caught\n the shadows of the fire and reflected them, greatly magnified, over the\n room. It was in the shape of a star, encrusted with emeralds, with one\n large ruby in the center. When he opened it, he found a picture of her\n in one side, and in the other a picture of the children. He took her in\n his arms again, and loosened her long, black hair, burying his face in\n it for a moment. Then he kissed her, and instantly was drawn down into\n the abyss which seemed to have no beginning or any end.",
"There were clouds in the sky now, and a gentle wind caressed the sweat\n from his tired body. He stopped. There it was! Barely discernible\n through the moonlight, he saw it. Home.\n\n\n Quickly he dismounted and ran. Now he could see a small light in the\n window, and he knew they were there. His breath came in hard ragged\n gulps. At the window he peered in, and as his eyes became accustomed\n to the inner gloom, he saw how bare the room was. No matter. Now that\n he was home he would build new furniture, and the house would be even\n better than it had been before.\n\n\n Then he saw her.",
"He awoke and stretched the cramped muscles of his body. At the edge of\n the water he removed his clothes and stared at himself in the rippling\n mirror. His muscles were lean and hard, evenly placed throughout the\n length of his frame. A deep ridge ran down the length of his torso,\n separating the muscles, making the chest broad. Well satisfied with his\n body, he plunged into the cold water, deep down, until he thought his\n lungs would burst; then swiftly returned to the clean air, tingling in\n every pore. He dried himself and dressed. Conqueror was eating the long\n grass near the stream. Quickly he saddled him. No time for breakfast.\n He would ride all day and the next night. And he would be home.",
"This was not his house. In his delirium he had only imagined he had\n found it. He had been searching so long. He would go on searching.\n He was turning wearily away from the window when the movement of the\n creature beside the fire held his attention. It had taken a ring from\n one skeleton-like finger and stood, turning the ring slowly as if\n trying to decipher some inscription inside it.\n\n\n He knew then. He had come home.\n\n\n Slowly he moved toward the door. A great weakness was upon him. His\n feet were stones, reluctant to leave the earth. His body was a weed,\n shriveled by thirst. He grasped the doorknob and clung to it, looking\n up at the night sky and trying to draw strength from the wind that\n passed over him. It was no use. There was no strength. Only fear—a\n kind of fear he had never known.",
"He ran. Away from the house. To the large horse with a horn in the\n center of its forehead, like a unicorn. Once in the saddle, the spurt\n of strength left him. His shoulders slumped, his head dropped onto his\n chest.\n\n\n Conqueror trotted away, the sound of his hooves echoing hollowly in the\n vast emptiness.",
"But he knew he was closer now. Closer to home. He recognized the land.\n How, he did not know, for it was much changed. A sensing, perhaps, of\n what it had once been. He could not be more than two days' ride away.\n Once he was through this desert, he would find her, he would be with\n her once again; all would be well, and his long journey would be over.\nThe images faded. Even memory slept in a flow of warm blood. Body and\n mind slept into the shadows of the dawn.",
"The rider was of medium size, with huge, strong hands and seemingly\n hollow eyes. Strange eyes, alive and aflame. They had no place in\n the dust-caked, tired body, yet there they were, seeking, always\n seeking—searching the clear horizon, and never seeming to find what\n they sought.\nThe horse moved faster now. They were nearing a river; the water would\n be welcome on tired bodies and dry throats. He spurred his horse,\n and when they reached the water's edge, he dismounted and unsaddled\n the horse. Then both man and horse plunged headlong into the waiting\n torrent, deep into the cool embrace of the clear liquid. They soaked it\n into their pores and drank deeply of it, feeling life going once more\n through their veins. Satisfied, they lifted themselves from the water,\n and the man lay down on the yellow sand of the river bank to sleep."
],
[
"And he had followed. Over a mountain, until they came to a pass, and\n finally to a narrow path which led to an old cabin. He had found it\n empty, but there were cans of food and a rifle and many shells. He had\n remained there a long time—how long he could not tell, for he could\n only measure time by the cycles of the sun and the moon. Finally he\n had taken the horse, the rifle and what food was left, and once again\n started the long journey home.\n\n\n The farther north he went, the more life seemed to have survived. He\n had seen great herds of horses like his own, stampeding across the\n plains, and strange birds which he could not identify. Yet he had seen\n no human beings.",
"He had been on the trail for a long time. His food was nearly\n exhausted. The mountains were just beginning, and he hoped to find food\n there. He had not found food, but his luck had been with him. He had\n found a horse. Not a normal horse, but a mutation. It was almost twice\n as large as a regular horse. Its skin seemed to shimmer and was like\n glassy steel to the touch. From the center of its forehead grew a horn,\n straight out, as the horn of a unicorn. But most startling of all were\n the animal's eyes which seemed to speak—a silent mental speech, which\n he could understand. The horse had looked up as he approached it and\n seemed to say: \"Follow me.\"",
"When he awoke, the sun was almost setting. The bright shafts of red\n light spilled across the sky, making the mountains silent scarlet\n shadows on the face of the rippling water. Quickly he gathered\n driftwood, and built a small fire. From his pack he removed some of\n the coffee he had found in one of the ruined cities. He brought water\n from the river in the battered coffee-pot he had salvaged, and while he\n waited for it to boil, he went to his horse, Conqueror, stroking his\n mane and whispering in his ear. Then he led him silently to a grassy\n slope where he hobbled him and left him for the night.\n\n\n In the fading light, he ate the hard beef jerky and drank the scalding\n coffee. Refreshed and momentarily content, he sat staring into the\n dying fire, seeing the bright glowing coals as living fingers clutching\n at the wood in consuming embrace, taking all and returning nothing but\n ashes.",
"He awoke and stretched the cramped muscles of his body. At the edge of\n the water he removed his clothes and stared at himself in the rippling\n mirror. His muscles were lean and hard, evenly placed throughout the\n length of his frame. A deep ridge ran down the length of his torso,\n separating the muscles, making the chest broad. Well satisfied with his\n body, he plunged into the cold water, deep down, until he thought his\n lungs would burst; then swiftly returned to the clean air, tingling in\n every pore. He dried himself and dressed. Conqueror was eating the long\n grass near the stream. Quickly he saddled him. No time for breakfast.\n He would ride all day and the next night. And he would be home.",
"The rider was of medium size, with huge, strong hands and seemingly\n hollow eyes. Strange eyes, alive and aflame. They had no place in\n the dust-caked, tired body, yet there they were, seeking, always\n seeking—searching the clear horizon, and never seeming to find what\n they sought.\nThe horse moved faster now. They were nearing a river; the water would\n be welcome on tired bodies and dry throats. He spurred his horse,\n and when they reached the water's edge, he dismounted and unsaddled\n the horse. Then both man and horse plunged headlong into the waiting\n torrent, deep into the cool embrace of the clear liquid. They soaked it\n into their pores and drank deeply of it, feeling life going once more\n through their veins. Satisfied, they lifted themselves from the water,\n and the man lay down on the yellow sand of the river bank to sleep.",
"He ran. Away from the house. To the large horse with a horn in the\n center of its forehead, like a unicorn. Once in the saddle, the spurt\n of strength left him. His shoulders slumped, his head dropped onto his\n chest.\n\n\n Conqueror trotted away, the sound of his hooves echoing hollowly in the\n vast emptiness.",
"Still northward. The hours crawled slower than a dying man. The sun\n was a torch that pierced his skin, seeming to melt his bones into a\n burning stream within his body. But day at last gave way to night, and\n the sun to the moon. The torch became a white pock-marked goddess, with\n streaming hair called stars.\n\n\n In the moonlight he had not seen the crater until he was at its\n very edge. Even then he might not have seen it had not the horse\n stopped suddenly. The wind swirled through its vast emptiness,\n slapping his face with dusty hands. For a moment he thought he heard\n voices—mournful, murmuring voices, echoing up from the misty depths.\n He turned quickly away and did not look back.\n\n\n Night paled into day; day burned into night.",
"This was not his house. In his delirium he had only imagined he had\n found it. He had been searching so long. He would go on searching.\n He was turning wearily away from the window when the movement of the\n creature beside the fire held his attention. It had taken a ring from\n one skeleton-like finger and stood, turning the ring slowly as if\n trying to decipher some inscription inside it.\n\n\n He knew then. He had come home.\n\n\n Slowly he moved toward the door. A great weakness was upon him. His\n feet were stones, reluctant to leave the earth. His body was a weed,\n shriveled by thirst. He grasped the doorknob and clung to it, looking\n up at the night sky and trying to draw strength from the wind that\n passed over him. It was no use. There was no strength. Only fear—a\n kind of fear he had never known.",
"He fumbled at his throat, his fingers crawling like cold worms around\n his neck until he found the locket and the clasp which had held it\n safely through endless nightmare days and nights. He slipped the clasp\n and the locket fell into his waiting hand. As one in a dream, he opened\n it, and stared at the pictures, now in the dim moonlight no longer\n faces of those he loved, but grey ghosts from the past. Even the ruby\n had lost its glow. What had once been living fire was now a dull glob\n of darkness.\n\n\n \"Nothing is forever!\" He thought he had shouted the words, but only a\n thin sound, the sound of leaves ruffled by the wind, came back to him.\n\n\n He closed the locket and fastened the clasp, and hung it on the\n doorknob. It moved slowly in the wind, back and forth, like a pendulum.\n \"Forever—forever. Only death is forever.\" He could have sworn he heard\n the words.",
"There were clouds in the sky now, and a gentle wind caressed the sweat\n from his tired body. He stopped. There it was! Barely discernible\n through the moonlight, he saw it. Home.\n\n\n Quickly he dismounted and ran. Now he could see a small light in the\n window, and he knew they were there. His breath came in hard ragged\n gulps. At the window he peered in, and as his eyes became accustomed\n to the inner gloom, he saw how bare the room was. No matter. Now that\n he was home he would build new furniture, and the house would be even\n better than it had been before.\n\n\n Then he saw her.",
"She took off the locket she wore about her neck and held it up to the\n shimmering light, letting it spin at the end of its chain. It caught\n the shadows of the fire and reflected them, greatly magnified, over the\n room. It was in the shape of a star, encrusted with emeralds, with one\n large ruby in the center. When he opened it, he found a picture of her\n in one side, and in the other a picture of the children. He took her in\n his arms again, and loosened her long, black hair, burying his face in\n it for a moment. Then he kissed her, and instantly was drawn down into\n the abyss which seemed to have no beginning or any end.",
"Slowly his eyelids yielded. His body sagged, and blood seemed to fill\n his brain, bathing it in a gentle, warm flood.\n\n\n He slept. His brain slept.\n\n\n But the portion of his brain called memory stirred. It was all alone;\n all else was at rest. Images began to appear, drawn from inexhaustible\n files, wherein are kept all thoughts, past, present, and future....\nIt was the night before he was to go overseas. World War III had been\n declared, and he had enlisted, receiving his old rank of captain. He\n was with his wife in the living room of their home. They had put the\n children to bed—their sons—and now sat on the couch, watching the\n blazing fire. It was then that he had showed it to her.\n\n\n \"I've got something to tell you, and something to show you.\"\n\n\n He had removed the box from his pocket and opened it. And heard her cry\n of surprised joy.",
"Three years later they were on the road to Moscow. Over a thousand\n miles lay behind, a dead man on every foot of those miles. Yet victory\n was near. The Russians had not yet used the H-bomb; the threat of\n annihilation by the retaliation forces had been too great.\n\n\n He had done well in the war, and had been decorated many times for\n bravery in action. Now he felt the victory that seemed to be in the\n air, and he had wished it would come quickly, so that he might return\n to her. Home. The very feel of the word was everything a battle-weary\n soldier needed to make him fight harder and live longer.\n\n\n Suddenly he had become aware of a droning, wooshing sound above him. It\n grew louder and louder until he knew what it was.\n\n\n \"Heavy bombers!\" The alarm had sounded, and the men had headed for\n their foxholes.",
"She was sitting motionless in a straight wooden chair beside the\n fireplace, the feeble light cast by the embers veiling her in mauve\n shadows. He waited, wondering if she were.... Presently she stirred\n like a restless child in sleep, then moved from the chair to the pile\n of wood near the hearth, and replenished the fire. The wood caught\n quickly, sending up long tongues of flame, and forming a bright pool of\n light around her.\n\n\n His blood froze. The creature illuminated by the firelight was a\n monster. Large greasy scales covered its face and arms, and there was\n no hair on its head. Its gums were toothless cavities in a sunken,\n mumbling mouth. The eyes, turned momentarily toward the window, were\n empty of life.\n\n\n \"No, no!\" he cried soundlessly.",
"After months of storms and bad luck, they had been shipwrecked\n somewhere off the coast of Mexico. He had managed to swim ashore,\n and had been found by a fisherman's family. Many months he had spent\n swimming and fishing, recovering his strength, inquiring about the\n United States. The Mexicans had spoken with fear of the land across the\n Rio Grande. All its great cities had been destroyed, and those that had\n been only partially destroyed were devoid of people. The land across\n the Rio Grande had become a land of shadows. The winds were poisoned,\n and the few people who might have survived, were crazed and maimed by\n the blasts. Few men had dared cross the Rio Grande into \"El Mundo gris\n de Noviembre\"—the November world. Those who had, had never returned.\n\n\n In time he had traveled north until he reached the Rio Grande. He had\n waded into the muddy waters and somehow landed on the American side. In\n the November world.",
"But he knew he was closer now. Closer to home. He recognized the land.\n How, he did not know, for it was much changed. A sensing, perhaps, of\n what it had once been. He could not be more than two days' ride away.\n Once he was through this desert, he would find her, he would be with\n her once again; all would be well, and his long journey would be over.\nThe images faded. Even memory slept in a flow of warm blood. Body and\n mind slept into the shadows of the dawn.",
"They had started the long trek. Throughout Europe anarchy reigned. He\n and his men were alone. All they could do now was fight. Finally they\n reached the seaport city of Calais. With what few men he had left, he\n had commandeered a small yacht, and they had taken to the sea.",
"\"Oh, a ring, and it's a diamond, too!\" she cried in her rich, happy\n voice which always seemed to send a thrill through his body.\n\n\n \"It's for you; so long as you wear it, I'll come back, even from the\n dead, if need be. Read the inscription.\"\n\n\n She held the ring up to the light and read aloud, \"It is forever.\"\n\n\n Then she had slipped the ring on her finger and her arms around him.\n He held her very close, feeling the warmth from her body flowing into\n his and making him oblivious to everything except that she was there in\n his arms and that he was sinking deep, deep into a familiar sea, where\n he had been many times before but each time found something new and\n unexplored, some vastly different emotion he could never quite explain.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" she cried. \"I've something for you, too.\"",
"The next morning had been bleak and gray. The mist clung to the wet,\n sodden ground, and the air was heavy in his lungs. He had driven off\n in the jeep the army had sent for him, watching her there on the porch\n until the mist swirled around her feet and she ran back into the house\n and slammed the door. His cold fingers found the locket, making a\n little bulge under his uniform, and the touch of it seemed to warm the\n blood in his veins.\n\n\n Three days later they had landed in Spain, merged with another\n division, then crossed the Pyrenees into France, and finally to Paris\n where the fighting had begun. Already the city was a silent graveyard,\n littered with the rubble of towers and cathedrals which had once been\n great.",
"It was rightly called. The deserts were long. All plant life had died,\n leaving to those once great fertile stretches, nothing but the sad,\n temporal beauty that comes with death. No people had he seen. Only the\n ruins of what had once been their cities. He had walked through them,\n and all that he had seen were the small mutant rodents, and all that he\n had heard was the occasional swish of the wind as it whisked along what\n might have been dead leaves, but wasn't."
],
[
"The next morning had been bleak and gray. The mist clung to the wet,\n sodden ground, and the air was heavy in his lungs. He had driven off\n in the jeep the army had sent for him, watching her there on the porch\n until the mist swirled around her feet and she ran back into the house\n and slammed the door. His cold fingers found the locket, making a\n little bulge under his uniform, and the touch of it seemed to warm the\n blood in his veins.\n\n\n Three days later they had landed in Spain, merged with another\n division, then crossed the Pyrenees into France, and finally to Paris\n where the fighting had begun. Already the city was a silent graveyard,\n littered with the rubble of towers and cathedrals which had once been\n great.",
"Three years later they were on the road to Moscow. Over a thousand\n miles lay behind, a dead man on every foot of those miles. Yet victory\n was near. The Russians had not yet used the H-bomb; the threat of\n annihilation by the retaliation forces had been too great.\n\n\n He had done well in the war, and had been decorated many times for\n bravery in action. Now he felt the victory that seemed to be in the\n air, and he had wished it would come quickly, so that he might return\n to her. Home. The very feel of the word was everything a battle-weary\n soldier needed to make him fight harder and live longer.\n\n\n Suddenly he had become aware of a droning, wooshing sound above him. It\n grew louder and louder until he knew what it was.\n\n\n \"Heavy bombers!\" The alarm had sounded, and the men had headed for\n their foxholes.",
"To no avail. Neither side had won. Most of the cities and the majority\n of the population of both countries had been destroyed. Even their\n governments had vanished, leaving a silent nothingness. The armies that\n remained were without leaders, without sources of supplies, save what\n they could forage and beg from an unfriendly people.\n\n\n They were alone now, a group of tired, battered men, for whom life held\n nothing. Their families had long since died, their bodies turned to\n dust, their spirits fled on the winds to a new world.\n\n\n Yet these remnants of an army must return—or at least try. Their\n exodus was just beginning. Somehow he had managed to hold together the\n few men left from his force. He had always nourished the hope that\n she might still be alive. And now that the war was over he had to\n return—had to know whether she was still waiting for him.",
"And he had followed. Over a mountain, until they came to a pass, and\n finally to a narrow path which led to an old cabin. He had found it\n empty, but there were cans of food and a rifle and many shells. He had\n remained there a long time—how long he could not tell, for he could\n only measure time by the cycles of the sun and the moon. Finally he\n had taken the horse, the rifle and what food was left, and once again\n started the long journey home.\n\n\n The farther north he went, the more life seemed to have survived. He\n had seen great herds of horses like his own, stampeding across the\n plains, and strange birds which he could not identify. Yet he had seen\n no human beings.",
"He awoke and stretched the cramped muscles of his body. At the edge of\n the water he removed his clothes and stared at himself in the rippling\n mirror. His muscles were lean and hard, evenly placed throughout the\n length of his frame. A deep ridge ran down the length of his torso,\n separating the muscles, making the chest broad. Well satisfied with his\n body, he plunged into the cold water, deep down, until he thought his\n lungs would burst; then swiftly returned to the clean air, tingling in\n every pore. He dried himself and dressed. Conqueror was eating the long\n grass near the stream. Quickly he saddled him. No time for breakfast.\n He would ride all day and the next night. And he would be home.",
"She took off the locket she wore about her neck and held it up to the\n shimmering light, letting it spin at the end of its chain. It caught\n the shadows of the fire and reflected them, greatly magnified, over the\n room. It was in the shape of a star, encrusted with emeralds, with one\n large ruby in the center. When he opened it, he found a picture of her\n in one side, and in the other a picture of the children. He took her in\n his arms again, and loosened her long, black hair, burying his face in\n it for a moment. Then he kissed her, and instantly was drawn down into\n the abyss which seemed to have no beginning or any end.",
"Slowly his eyelids yielded. His body sagged, and blood seemed to fill\n his brain, bathing it in a gentle, warm flood.\n\n\n He slept. His brain slept.\n\n\n But the portion of his brain called memory stirred. It was all alone;\n all else was at rest. Images began to appear, drawn from inexhaustible\n files, wherein are kept all thoughts, past, present, and future....\nIt was the night before he was to go overseas. World War III had been\n declared, and he had enlisted, receiving his old rank of captain. He\n was with his wife in the living room of their home. They had put the\n children to bed—their sons—and now sat on the couch, watching the\n blazing fire. It was then that he had showed it to her.\n\n\n \"I've got something to tell you, and something to show you.\"\n\n\n He had removed the box from his pocket and opened it. And heard her cry\n of surprised joy.",
"He fumbled at his throat, his fingers crawling like cold worms around\n his neck until he found the locket and the clasp which had held it\n safely through endless nightmare days and nights. He slipped the clasp\n and the locket fell into his waiting hand. As one in a dream, he opened\n it, and stared at the pictures, now in the dim moonlight no longer\n faces of those he loved, but grey ghosts from the past. Even the ruby\n had lost its glow. What had once been living fire was now a dull glob\n of darkness.\n\n\n \"Nothing is forever!\" He thought he had shouted the words, but only a\n thin sound, the sound of leaves ruffled by the wind, came back to him.\n\n\n He closed the locket and fastened the clasp, and hung it on the\n doorknob. It moved slowly in the wind, back and forth, like a pendulum.\n \"Forever—forever. Only death is forever.\" He could have sworn he heard\n the words.",
"There were clouds in the sky now, and a gentle wind caressed the sweat\n from his tired body. He stopped. There it was! Barely discernible\n through the moonlight, he saw it. Home.\n\n\n Quickly he dismounted and ran. Now he could see a small light in the\n window, and he knew they were there. His breath came in hard ragged\n gulps. At the window he peered in, and as his eyes became accustomed\n to the inner gloom, he saw how bare the room was. No matter. Now that\n he was home he would build new furniture, and the house would be even\n better than it had been before.\n\n\n Then he saw her.",
"When he awoke, the sun was almost setting. The bright shafts of red\n light spilled across the sky, making the mountains silent scarlet\n shadows on the face of the rippling water. Quickly he gathered\n driftwood, and built a small fire. From his pack he removed some of\n the coffee he had found in one of the ruined cities. He brought water\n from the river in the battered coffee-pot he had salvaged, and while he\n waited for it to boil, he went to his horse, Conqueror, stroking his\n mane and whispering in his ear. Then he led him silently to a grassy\n slope where he hobbled him and left him for the night.\n\n\n In the fading light, he ate the hard beef jerky and drank the scalding\n coffee. Refreshed and momentarily content, he sat staring into the\n dying fire, seeing the bright glowing coals as living fingers clutching\n at the wood in consuming embrace, taking all and returning nothing but\n ashes.",
"He ran. Away from the house. To the large horse with a horn in the\n center of its forehead, like a unicorn. Once in the saddle, the spurt\n of strength left him. His shoulders slumped, his head dropped onto his\n chest.\n\n\n Conqueror trotted away, the sound of his hooves echoing hollowly in the\n vast emptiness.",
"\"Oh, a ring, and it's a diamond, too!\" she cried in her rich, happy\n voice which always seemed to send a thrill through his body.\n\n\n \"It's for you; so long as you wear it, I'll come back, even from the\n dead, if need be. Read the inscription.\"\n\n\n She held the ring up to the light and read aloud, \"It is forever.\"\n\n\n Then she had slipped the ring on her finger and her arms around him.\n He held her very close, feeling the warmth from her body flowing into\n his and making him oblivious to everything except that she was there in\n his arms and that he was sinking deep, deep into a familiar sea, where\n he had been many times before but each time found something new and\n unexplored, some vastly different emotion he could never quite explain.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" she cried. \"I've something for you, too.\"",
"But too many bombers got through, dropping their deadly cargo upon the\n helpless cities. And not all the prayers or entreaties to any God had\n stopped their carnage. First there had been the red flashes that melted\n buildings into molten streams, and then the great triple-mushroom cloud\n filled with the poisonous gases that the wind swept away to other\n cities, where men had not died quickly and mercifully, but had rotted\n away, leaving shreds of putrid flesh behind to mark the places where\n they had crawled.\n\n\n The retaliatory forces had roared away to bomb the Russian cities. Few,\n if any, had returned. Too much blood and life were on their hands.\n Those who had remained alive had found a resting place on the crown\n of some distant mountain. Others had preferred the silent peaceful\n sea, where flesh stayed not long on bones, and only darting fishes and\n merciful beams of filtered light found their aluminum coffins.\n\n\n The war had ended.",
"She was sitting motionless in a straight wooden chair beside the\n fireplace, the feeble light cast by the embers veiling her in mauve\n shadows. He waited, wondering if she were.... Presently she stirred\n like a restless child in sleep, then moved from the chair to the pile\n of wood near the hearth, and replenished the fire. The wood caught\n quickly, sending up long tongues of flame, and forming a bright pool of\n light around her.\n\n\n His blood froze. The creature illuminated by the firelight was a\n monster. Large greasy scales covered its face and arms, and there was\n no hair on its head. Its gums were toothless cavities in a sunken,\n mumbling mouth. The eyes, turned momentarily toward the window, were\n empty of life.\n\n\n \"No, no!\" he cried soundlessly.",
"But he knew he was closer now. Closer to home. He recognized the land.\n How, he did not know, for it was much changed. A sensing, perhaps, of\n what it had once been. He could not be more than two days' ride away.\n Once he was through this desert, he would find her, he would be with\n her once again; all would be well, and his long journey would be over.\nThe images faded. Even memory slept in a flow of warm blood. Body and\n mind slept into the shadows of the dawn.",
"They had started the long trek. Throughout Europe anarchy reigned. He\n and his men were alone. All they could do now was fight. Finally they\n reached the seaport city of Calais. With what few men he had left, he\n had commandeered a small yacht, and they had taken to the sea.",
"Still northward. The hours crawled slower than a dying man. The sun\n was a torch that pierced his skin, seeming to melt his bones into a\n burning stream within his body. But day at last gave way to night, and\n the sun to the moon. The torch became a white pock-marked goddess, with\n streaming hair called stars.\n\n\n In the moonlight he had not seen the crater until he was at its\n very edge. Even then he might not have seen it had not the horse\n stopped suddenly. The wind swirled through its vast emptiness,\n slapping his face with dusty hands. For a moment he thought he heard\n voices—mournful, murmuring voices, echoing up from the misty depths.\n He turned quickly away and did not look back.\n\n\n Night paled into day; day burned into night.",
"This was not his house. In his delirium he had only imagined he had\n found it. He had been searching so long. He would go on searching.\n He was turning wearily away from the window when the movement of the\n creature beside the fire held his attention. It had taken a ring from\n one skeleton-like finger and stood, turning the ring slowly as if\n trying to decipher some inscription inside it.\n\n\n He knew then. He had come home.\n\n\n Slowly he moved toward the door. A great weakness was upon him. His\n feet were stones, reluctant to leave the earth. His body was a weed,\n shriveled by thirst. He grasped the doorknob and clung to it, looking\n up at the night sky and trying to draw strength from the wind that\n passed over him. It was no use. There was no strength. Only fear—a\n kind of fear he had never known.",
"After months of storms and bad luck, they had been shipwrecked\n somewhere off the coast of Mexico. He had managed to swim ashore,\n and had been found by a fisherman's family. Many months he had spent\n swimming and fishing, recovering his strength, inquiring about the\n United States. The Mexicans had spoken with fear of the land across the\n Rio Grande. All its great cities had been destroyed, and those that had\n been only partially destroyed were devoid of people. The land across\n the Rio Grande had become a land of shadows. The winds were poisoned,\n and the few people who might have survived, were crazed and maimed by\n the blasts. Few men had dared cross the Rio Grande into \"El Mundo gris\n de Noviembre\"—the November world. Those who had, had never returned.\n\n\n In time he had traveled north until he reached the Rio Grande. He had\n waded into the muddy waters and somehow landed on the American side. In\n the November world.",
"But the planes had passed over, the sun glinting on their bellies,\n reflecting a blinding light. They were bound for bigger, more important\n targets. When the all-clear had sounded, the men clambered from their\n shelters. An icy wind swept the field, bringing with it clouds which\n covered the sun. A strange fear had gripped him then....\n\n\n Across the Atlantic, over the pole, via Alaska, the great bombers\n flew. In cities, great and small, the air raid sirens sounded, high\n screaming noises which had jarred the people from sleep in time to die.\n The defending planes roared into the sky to intercept the on-rushing\n bombers. The horrendous battle split the universe. Many bombers fell,\n victims of fanatical suicide planes, or of missiles that streaked\n across the sky which none could escape."
],
[
"But too many bombers got through, dropping their deadly cargo upon the\n helpless cities. And not all the prayers or entreaties to any God had\n stopped their carnage. First there had been the red flashes that melted\n buildings into molten streams, and then the great triple-mushroom cloud\n filled with the poisonous gases that the wind swept away to other\n cities, where men had not died quickly and mercifully, but had rotted\n away, leaving shreds of putrid flesh behind to mark the places where\n they had crawled.\n\n\n The retaliatory forces had roared away to bomb the Russian cities. Few,\n if any, had returned. Too much blood and life were on their hands.\n Those who had remained alive had found a resting place on the crown\n of some distant mountain. Others had preferred the silent peaceful\n sea, where flesh stayed not long on bones, and only darting fishes and\n merciful beams of filtered light found their aluminum coffins.\n\n\n The war had ended.",
"But the planes had passed over, the sun glinting on their bellies,\n reflecting a blinding light. They were bound for bigger, more important\n targets. When the all-clear had sounded, the men clambered from their\n shelters. An icy wind swept the field, bringing with it clouds which\n covered the sun. A strange fear had gripped him then....\n\n\n Across the Atlantic, over the pole, via Alaska, the great bombers\n flew. In cities, great and small, the air raid sirens sounded, high\n screaming noises which had jarred the people from sleep in time to die.\n The defending planes roared into the sky to intercept the on-rushing\n bombers. The horrendous battle split the universe. Many bombers fell,\n victims of fanatical suicide planes, or of missiles that streaked\n across the sky which none could escape.",
"Three years later they were on the road to Moscow. Over a thousand\n miles lay behind, a dead man on every foot of those miles. Yet victory\n was near. The Russians had not yet used the H-bomb; the threat of\n annihilation by the retaliation forces had been too great.\n\n\n He had done well in the war, and had been decorated many times for\n bravery in action. Now he felt the victory that seemed to be in the\n air, and he had wished it would come quickly, so that he might return\n to her. Home. The very feel of the word was everything a battle-weary\n soldier needed to make him fight harder and live longer.\n\n\n Suddenly he had become aware of a droning, wooshing sound above him. It\n grew louder and louder until he knew what it was.\n\n\n \"Heavy bombers!\" The alarm had sounded, and the men had headed for\n their foxholes.",
"They had started the long trek. Throughout Europe anarchy reigned. He\n and his men were alone. All they could do now was fight. Finally they\n reached the seaport city of Calais. With what few men he had left, he\n had commandeered a small yacht, and they had taken to the sea.",
"To no avail. Neither side had won. Most of the cities and the majority\n of the population of both countries had been destroyed. Even their\n governments had vanished, leaving a silent nothingness. The armies that\n remained were without leaders, without sources of supplies, save what\n they could forage and beg from an unfriendly people.\n\n\n They were alone now, a group of tired, battered men, for whom life held\n nothing. Their families had long since died, their bodies turned to\n dust, their spirits fled on the winds to a new world.\n\n\n Yet these remnants of an army must return—or at least try. Their\n exodus was just beginning. Somehow he had managed to hold together the\n few men left from his force. He had always nourished the hope that\n she might still be alive. And now that the war was over he had to\n return—had to know whether she was still waiting for him.",
"And he had followed. Over a mountain, until they came to a pass, and\n finally to a narrow path which led to an old cabin. He had found it\n empty, but there were cans of food and a rifle and many shells. He had\n remained there a long time—how long he could not tell, for he could\n only measure time by the cycles of the sun and the moon. Finally he\n had taken the horse, the rifle and what food was left, and once again\n started the long journey home.\n\n\n The farther north he went, the more life seemed to have survived. He\n had seen great herds of horses like his own, stampeding across the\n plains, and strange birds which he could not identify. Yet he had seen\n no human beings.",
"After months of storms and bad luck, they had been shipwrecked\n somewhere off the coast of Mexico. He had managed to swim ashore,\n and had been found by a fisherman's family. Many months he had spent\n swimming and fishing, recovering his strength, inquiring about the\n United States. The Mexicans had spoken with fear of the land across the\n Rio Grande. All its great cities had been destroyed, and those that had\n been only partially destroyed were devoid of people. The land across\n the Rio Grande had become a land of shadows. The winds were poisoned,\n and the few people who might have survived, were crazed and maimed by\n the blasts. Few men had dared cross the Rio Grande into \"El Mundo gris\n de Noviembre\"—the November world. Those who had, had never returned.\n\n\n In time he had traveled north until he reached the Rio Grande. He had\n waded into the muddy waters and somehow landed on the American side. In\n the November world.",
"The next morning had been bleak and gray. The mist clung to the wet,\n sodden ground, and the air was heavy in his lungs. He had driven off\n in the jeep the army had sent for him, watching her there on the porch\n until the mist swirled around her feet and she ran back into the house\n and slammed the door. His cold fingers found the locket, making a\n little bulge under his uniform, and the touch of it seemed to warm the\n blood in his veins.\n\n\n Three days later they had landed in Spain, merged with another\n division, then crossed the Pyrenees into France, and finally to Paris\n where the fighting had begun. Already the city was a silent graveyard,\n littered with the rubble of towers and cathedrals which had once been\n great.",
"When he awoke, the sun was almost setting. The bright shafts of red\n light spilled across the sky, making the mountains silent scarlet\n shadows on the face of the rippling water. Quickly he gathered\n driftwood, and built a small fire. From his pack he removed some of\n the coffee he had found in one of the ruined cities. He brought water\n from the river in the battered coffee-pot he had salvaged, and while he\n waited for it to boil, he went to his horse, Conqueror, stroking his\n mane and whispering in his ear. Then he led him silently to a grassy\n slope where he hobbled him and left him for the night.\n\n\n In the fading light, he ate the hard beef jerky and drank the scalding\n coffee. Refreshed and momentarily content, he sat staring into the\n dying fire, seeing the bright glowing coals as living fingers clutching\n at the wood in consuming embrace, taking all and returning nothing but\n ashes.",
"It was rightly called. The deserts were long. All plant life had died,\n leaving to those once great fertile stretches, nothing but the sad,\n temporal beauty that comes with death. No people had he seen. Only the\n ruins of what had once been their cities. He had walked through them,\n and all that he had seen were the small mutant rodents, and all that he\n had heard was the occasional swish of the wind as it whisked along what\n might have been dead leaves, but wasn't.",
"Still northward. The hours crawled slower than a dying man. The sun\n was a torch that pierced his skin, seeming to melt his bones into a\n burning stream within his body. But day at last gave way to night, and\n the sun to the moon. The torch became a white pock-marked goddess, with\n streaming hair called stars.\n\n\n In the moonlight he had not seen the crater until he was at its\n very edge. Even then he might not have seen it had not the horse\n stopped suddenly. The wind swirled through its vast emptiness,\n slapping his face with dusty hands. For a moment he thought he heard\n voices—mournful, murmuring voices, echoing up from the misty depths.\n He turned quickly away and did not look back.\n\n\n Night paled into day; day burned into night.",
"He fumbled at his throat, his fingers crawling like cold worms around\n his neck until he found the locket and the clasp which had held it\n safely through endless nightmare days and nights. He slipped the clasp\n and the locket fell into his waiting hand. As one in a dream, he opened\n it, and stared at the pictures, now in the dim moonlight no longer\n faces of those he loved, but grey ghosts from the past. Even the ruby\n had lost its glow. What had once been living fire was now a dull glob\n of darkness.\n\n\n \"Nothing is forever!\" He thought he had shouted the words, but only a\n thin sound, the sound of leaves ruffled by the wind, came back to him.\n\n\n He closed the locket and fastened the clasp, and hung it on the\n doorknob. It moved slowly in the wind, back and forth, like a pendulum.\n \"Forever—forever. Only death is forever.\" He could have sworn he heard\n the words.",
"There were clouds in the sky now, and a gentle wind caressed the sweat\n from his tired body. He stopped. There it was! Barely discernible\n through the moonlight, he saw it. Home.\n\n\n Quickly he dismounted and ran. Now he could see a small light in the\n window, and he knew they were there. His breath came in hard ragged\n gulps. At the window he peered in, and as his eyes became accustomed\n to the inner gloom, he saw how bare the room was. No matter. Now that\n he was home he would build new furniture, and the house would be even\n better than it had been before.\n\n\n Then he saw her.",
"Slowly his eyelids yielded. His body sagged, and blood seemed to fill\n his brain, bathing it in a gentle, warm flood.\n\n\n He slept. His brain slept.\n\n\n But the portion of his brain called memory stirred. It was all alone;\n all else was at rest. Images began to appear, drawn from inexhaustible\n files, wherein are kept all thoughts, past, present, and future....\nIt was the night before he was to go overseas. World War III had been\n declared, and he had enlisted, receiving his old rank of captain. He\n was with his wife in the living room of their home. They had put the\n children to bed—their sons—and now sat on the couch, watching the\n blazing fire. It was then that he had showed it to her.\n\n\n \"I've got something to tell you, and something to show you.\"\n\n\n He had removed the box from his pocket and opened it. And heard her cry\n of surprised joy.",
"He awoke and stretched the cramped muscles of his body. At the edge of\n the water he removed his clothes and stared at himself in the rippling\n mirror. His muscles were lean and hard, evenly placed throughout the\n length of his frame. A deep ridge ran down the length of his torso,\n separating the muscles, making the chest broad. Well satisfied with his\n body, he plunged into the cold water, deep down, until he thought his\n lungs would burst; then swiftly returned to the clean air, tingling in\n every pore. He dried himself and dressed. Conqueror was eating the long\n grass near the stream. Quickly he saddled him. No time for breakfast.\n He would ride all day and the next night. And he would be home.",
"He ran. Away from the house. To the large horse with a horn in the\n center of its forehead, like a unicorn. Once in the saddle, the spurt\n of strength left him. His shoulders slumped, his head dropped onto his\n chest.\n\n\n Conqueror trotted away, the sound of his hooves echoing hollowly in the\n vast emptiness.",
"She took off the locket she wore about her neck and held it up to the\n shimmering light, letting it spin at the end of its chain. It caught\n the shadows of the fire and reflected them, greatly magnified, over the\n room. It was in the shape of a star, encrusted with emeralds, with one\n large ruby in the center. When he opened it, he found a picture of her\n in one side, and in the other a picture of the children. He took her in\n his arms again, and loosened her long, black hair, burying his face in\n it for a moment. Then he kissed her, and instantly was drawn down into\n the abyss which seemed to have no beginning or any end.",
"This was not his house. In his delirium he had only imagined he had\n found it. He had been searching so long. He would go on searching.\n He was turning wearily away from the window when the movement of the\n creature beside the fire held his attention. It had taken a ring from\n one skeleton-like finger and stood, turning the ring slowly as if\n trying to decipher some inscription inside it.\n\n\n He knew then. He had come home.\n\n\n Slowly he moved toward the door. A great weakness was upon him. His\n feet were stones, reluctant to leave the earth. His body was a weed,\n shriveled by thirst. He grasped the doorknob and clung to it, looking\n up at the night sky and trying to draw strength from the wind that\n passed over him. It was no use. There was no strength. Only fear—a\n kind of fear he had never known.",
"The rider was of medium size, with huge, strong hands and seemingly\n hollow eyes. Strange eyes, alive and aflame. They had no place in\n the dust-caked, tired body, yet there they were, seeking, always\n seeking—searching the clear horizon, and never seeming to find what\n they sought.\nThe horse moved faster now. They were nearing a river; the water would\n be welcome on tired bodies and dry throats. He spurred his horse,\n and when they reached the water's edge, he dismounted and unsaddled\n the horse. Then both man and horse plunged headlong into the waiting\n torrent, deep into the cool embrace of the clear liquid. They soaked it\n into their pores and drank deeply of it, feeling life going once more\n through their veins. Satisfied, they lifted themselves from the water,\n and the man lay down on the yellow sand of the river bank to sleep.",
"But he knew he was closer now. Closer to home. He recognized the land.\n How, he did not know, for it was much changed. A sensing, perhaps, of\n what it had once been. He could not be more than two days' ride away.\n Once he was through this desert, he would find her, he would be with\n her once again; all would be well, and his long journey would be over.\nThe images faded. Even memory slept in a flow of warm blood. Body and\n mind slept into the shadows of the dawn."
],
[
"\"Oh, a ring, and it's a diamond, too!\" she cried in her rich, happy\n voice which always seemed to send a thrill through his body.\n\n\n \"It's for you; so long as you wear it, I'll come back, even from the\n dead, if need be. Read the inscription.\"\n\n\n She held the ring up to the light and read aloud, \"It is forever.\"\n\n\n Then she had slipped the ring on her finger and her arms around him.\n He held her very close, feeling the warmth from her body flowing into\n his and making him oblivious to everything except that she was there in\n his arms and that he was sinking deep, deep into a familiar sea, where\n he had been many times before but each time found something new and\n unexplored, some vastly different emotion he could never quite explain.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" she cried. \"I've something for you, too.\"",
"He fumbled at his throat, his fingers crawling like cold worms around\n his neck until he found the locket and the clasp which had held it\n safely through endless nightmare days and nights. He slipped the clasp\n and the locket fell into his waiting hand. As one in a dream, he opened\n it, and stared at the pictures, now in the dim moonlight no longer\n faces of those he loved, but grey ghosts from the past. Even the ruby\n had lost its glow. What had once been living fire was now a dull glob\n of darkness.\n\n\n \"Nothing is forever!\" He thought he had shouted the words, but only a\n thin sound, the sound of leaves ruffled by the wind, came back to him.\n\n\n He closed the locket and fastened the clasp, and hung it on the\n doorknob. It moved slowly in the wind, back and forth, like a pendulum.\n \"Forever—forever. Only death is forever.\" He could have sworn he heard\n the words.",
"This was not his house. In his delirium he had only imagined he had\n found it. He had been searching so long. He would go on searching.\n He was turning wearily away from the window when the movement of the\n creature beside the fire held his attention. It had taken a ring from\n one skeleton-like finger and stood, turning the ring slowly as if\n trying to decipher some inscription inside it.\n\n\n He knew then. He had come home.\n\n\n Slowly he moved toward the door. A great weakness was upon him. His\n feet were stones, reluctant to leave the earth. His body was a weed,\n shriveled by thirst. He grasped the doorknob and clung to it, looking\n up at the night sky and trying to draw strength from the wind that\n passed over him. It was no use. There was no strength. Only fear—a\n kind of fear he had never known.",
"She took off the locket she wore about her neck and held it up to the\n shimmering light, letting it spin at the end of its chain. It caught\n the shadows of the fire and reflected them, greatly magnified, over the\n room. It was in the shape of a star, encrusted with emeralds, with one\n large ruby in the center. When he opened it, he found a picture of her\n in one side, and in the other a picture of the children. He took her in\n his arms again, and loosened her long, black hair, burying his face in\n it for a moment. Then he kissed her, and instantly was drawn down into\n the abyss which seemed to have no beginning or any end.",
"The next morning had been bleak and gray. The mist clung to the wet,\n sodden ground, and the air was heavy in his lungs. He had driven off\n in the jeep the army had sent for him, watching her there on the porch\n until the mist swirled around her feet and she ran back into the house\n and slammed the door. His cold fingers found the locket, making a\n little bulge under his uniform, and the touch of it seemed to warm the\n blood in his veins.\n\n\n Three days later they had landed in Spain, merged with another\n division, then crossed the Pyrenees into France, and finally to Paris\n where the fighting had begun. Already the city was a silent graveyard,\n littered with the rubble of towers and cathedrals which had once been\n great.",
"Still northward. The hours crawled slower than a dying man. The sun\n was a torch that pierced his skin, seeming to melt his bones into a\n burning stream within his body. But day at last gave way to night, and\n the sun to the moon. The torch became a white pock-marked goddess, with\n streaming hair called stars.\n\n\n In the moonlight he had not seen the crater until he was at its\n very edge. Even then he might not have seen it had not the horse\n stopped suddenly. The wind swirled through its vast emptiness,\n slapping his face with dusty hands. For a moment he thought he heard\n voices—mournful, murmuring voices, echoing up from the misty depths.\n He turned quickly away and did not look back.\n\n\n Night paled into day; day burned into night.",
"She was sitting motionless in a straight wooden chair beside the\n fireplace, the feeble light cast by the embers veiling her in mauve\n shadows. He waited, wondering if she were.... Presently she stirred\n like a restless child in sleep, then moved from the chair to the pile\n of wood near the hearth, and replenished the fire. The wood caught\n quickly, sending up long tongues of flame, and forming a bright pool of\n light around her.\n\n\n His blood froze. The creature illuminated by the firelight was a\n monster. Large greasy scales covered its face and arms, and there was\n no hair on its head. Its gums were toothless cavities in a sunken,\n mumbling mouth. The eyes, turned momentarily toward the window, were\n empty of life.\n\n\n \"No, no!\" he cried soundlessly.",
"Slowly his eyelids yielded. His body sagged, and blood seemed to fill\n his brain, bathing it in a gentle, warm flood.\n\n\n He slept. His brain slept.\n\n\n But the portion of his brain called memory stirred. It was all alone;\n all else was at rest. Images began to appear, drawn from inexhaustible\n files, wherein are kept all thoughts, past, present, and future....\nIt was the night before he was to go overseas. World War III had been\n declared, and he had enlisted, receiving his old rank of captain. He\n was with his wife in the living room of their home. They had put the\n children to bed—their sons—and now sat on the couch, watching the\n blazing fire. It was then that he had showed it to her.\n\n\n \"I've got something to tell you, and something to show you.\"\n\n\n He had removed the box from his pocket and opened it. And heard her cry\n of surprised joy.",
"There were clouds in the sky now, and a gentle wind caressed the sweat\n from his tired body. He stopped. There it was! Barely discernible\n through the moonlight, he saw it. Home.\n\n\n Quickly he dismounted and ran. Now he could see a small light in the\n window, and he knew they were there. His breath came in hard ragged\n gulps. At the window he peered in, and as his eyes became accustomed\n to the inner gloom, he saw how bare the room was. No matter. Now that\n he was home he would build new furniture, and the house would be even\n better than it had been before.\n\n\n Then he saw her.",
"He awoke and stretched the cramped muscles of his body. At the edge of\n the water he removed his clothes and stared at himself in the rippling\n mirror. His muscles were lean and hard, evenly placed throughout the\n length of his frame. A deep ridge ran down the length of his torso,\n separating the muscles, making the chest broad. Well satisfied with his\n body, he plunged into the cold water, deep down, until he thought his\n lungs would burst; then swiftly returned to the clean air, tingling in\n every pore. He dried himself and dressed. Conqueror was eating the long\n grass near the stream. Quickly he saddled him. No time for breakfast.\n He would ride all day and the next night. And he would be home.",
"When he awoke, the sun was almost setting. The bright shafts of red\n light spilled across the sky, making the mountains silent scarlet\n shadows on the face of the rippling water. Quickly he gathered\n driftwood, and built a small fire. From his pack he removed some of\n the coffee he had found in one of the ruined cities. He brought water\n from the river in the battered coffee-pot he had salvaged, and while he\n waited for it to boil, he went to his horse, Conqueror, stroking his\n mane and whispering in his ear. Then he led him silently to a grassy\n slope where he hobbled him and left him for the night.\n\n\n In the fading light, he ate the hard beef jerky and drank the scalding\n coffee. Refreshed and momentarily content, he sat staring into the\n dying fire, seeing the bright glowing coals as living fingers clutching\n at the wood in consuming embrace, taking all and returning nothing but\n ashes.",
"Three years later they were on the road to Moscow. Over a thousand\n miles lay behind, a dead man on every foot of those miles. Yet victory\n was near. The Russians had not yet used the H-bomb; the threat of\n annihilation by the retaliation forces had been too great.\n\n\n He had done well in the war, and had been decorated many times for\n bravery in action. Now he felt the victory that seemed to be in the\n air, and he had wished it would come quickly, so that he might return\n to her. Home. The very feel of the word was everything a battle-weary\n soldier needed to make him fight harder and live longer.\n\n\n Suddenly he had become aware of a droning, wooshing sound above him. It\n grew louder and louder until he knew what it was.\n\n\n \"Heavy bombers!\" The alarm had sounded, and the men had headed for\n their foxholes.",
"The rider was of medium size, with huge, strong hands and seemingly\n hollow eyes. Strange eyes, alive and aflame. They had no place in\n the dust-caked, tired body, yet there they were, seeking, always\n seeking—searching the clear horizon, and never seeming to find what\n they sought.\nThe horse moved faster now. They were nearing a river; the water would\n be welcome on tired bodies and dry throats. He spurred his horse,\n and when they reached the water's edge, he dismounted and unsaddled\n the horse. Then both man and horse plunged headlong into the waiting\n torrent, deep into the cool embrace of the clear liquid. They soaked it\n into their pores and drank deeply of it, feeling life going once more\n through their veins. Satisfied, they lifted themselves from the water,\n and the man lay down on the yellow sand of the river bank to sleep.",
"He ran. Away from the house. To the large horse with a horn in the\n center of its forehead, like a unicorn. Once in the saddle, the spurt\n of strength left him. His shoulders slumped, his head dropped onto his\n chest.\n\n\n Conqueror trotted away, the sound of his hooves echoing hollowly in the\n vast emptiness.",
"But he knew he was closer now. Closer to home. He recognized the land.\n How, he did not know, for it was much changed. A sensing, perhaps, of\n what it had once been. He could not be more than two days' ride away.\n Once he was through this desert, he would find her, he would be with\n her once again; all would be well, and his long journey would be over.\nThe images faded. Even memory slept in a flow of warm blood. Body and\n mind slept into the shadows of the dawn.",
"And he had followed. Over a mountain, until they came to a pass, and\n finally to a narrow path which led to an old cabin. He had found it\n empty, but there were cans of food and a rifle and many shells. He had\n remained there a long time—how long he could not tell, for he could\n only measure time by the cycles of the sun and the moon. Finally he\n had taken the horse, the rifle and what food was left, and once again\n started the long journey home.\n\n\n The farther north he went, the more life seemed to have survived. He\n had seen great herds of horses like his own, stampeding across the\n plains, and strange birds which he could not identify. Yet he had seen\n no human beings.",
"HOMECOMING\nBY MIGUEL HIDALGO\nWhat lasts forever? Does love?\n \nDoes death?... Nothing lasts\n \nforever.... Not even forever\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, April 1958.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe large horse plodded slowly over the shifting sand.",
"They had started the long trek. Throughout Europe anarchy reigned. He\n and his men were alone. All they could do now was fight. Finally they\n reached the seaport city of Calais. With what few men he had left, he\n had commandeered a small yacht, and they had taken to the sea.",
"To no avail. Neither side had won. Most of the cities and the majority\n of the population of both countries had been destroyed. Even their\n governments had vanished, leaving a silent nothingness. The armies that\n remained were without leaders, without sources of supplies, save what\n they could forage and beg from an unfriendly people.\n\n\n They were alone now, a group of tired, battered men, for whom life held\n nothing. Their families had long since died, their bodies turned to\n dust, their spirits fled on the winds to a new world.\n\n\n Yet these remnants of an army must return—or at least try. Their\n exodus was just beginning. Somehow he had managed to hold together the\n few men left from his force. He had always nourished the hope that\n she might still be alive. And now that the war was over he had to\n return—had to know whether she was still waiting for him.",
"He had been on the trail for a long time. His food was nearly\n exhausted. The mountains were just beginning, and he hoped to find food\n there. He had not found food, but his luck had been with him. He had\n found a horse. Not a normal horse, but a mutation. It was almost twice\n as large as a regular horse. Its skin seemed to shimmer and was like\n glassy steel to the touch. From the center of its forehead grew a horn,\n straight out, as the horn of a unicorn. But most startling of all were\n the animal's eyes which seemed to speak—a silent mental speech, which\n he could understand. The horse had looked up as he approached it and\n seemed to say: \"Follow me.\""
],
[
"Slowly his eyelids yielded. His body sagged, and blood seemed to fill\n his brain, bathing it in a gentle, warm flood.\n\n\n He slept. His brain slept.\n\n\n But the portion of his brain called memory stirred. It was all alone;\n all else was at rest. Images began to appear, drawn from inexhaustible\n files, wherein are kept all thoughts, past, present, and future....\nIt was the night before he was to go overseas. World War III had been\n declared, and he had enlisted, receiving his old rank of captain. He\n was with his wife in the living room of their home. They had put the\n children to bed—their sons—and now sat on the couch, watching the\n blazing fire. It was then that he had showed it to her.\n\n\n \"I've got something to tell you, and something to show you.\"\n\n\n He had removed the box from his pocket and opened it. And heard her cry\n of surprised joy.",
"Still northward. The hours crawled slower than a dying man. The sun\n was a torch that pierced his skin, seeming to melt his bones into a\n burning stream within his body. But day at last gave way to night, and\n the sun to the moon. The torch became a white pock-marked goddess, with\n streaming hair called stars.\n\n\n In the moonlight he had not seen the crater until he was at its\n very edge. Even then he might not have seen it had not the horse\n stopped suddenly. The wind swirled through its vast emptiness,\n slapping his face with dusty hands. For a moment he thought he heard\n voices—mournful, murmuring voices, echoing up from the misty depths.\n He turned quickly away and did not look back.\n\n\n Night paled into day; day burned into night.",
"This was not his house. In his delirium he had only imagined he had\n found it. He had been searching so long. He would go on searching.\n He was turning wearily away from the window when the movement of the\n creature beside the fire held his attention. It had taken a ring from\n one skeleton-like finger and stood, turning the ring slowly as if\n trying to decipher some inscription inside it.\n\n\n He knew then. He had come home.\n\n\n Slowly he moved toward the door. A great weakness was upon him. His\n feet were stones, reluctant to leave the earth. His body was a weed,\n shriveled by thirst. He grasped the doorknob and clung to it, looking\n up at the night sky and trying to draw strength from the wind that\n passed over him. It was no use. There was no strength. Only fear—a\n kind of fear he had never known.",
"The rider was of medium size, with huge, strong hands and seemingly\n hollow eyes. Strange eyes, alive and aflame. They had no place in\n the dust-caked, tired body, yet there they were, seeking, always\n seeking—searching the clear horizon, and never seeming to find what\n they sought.\nThe horse moved faster now. They were nearing a river; the water would\n be welcome on tired bodies and dry throats. He spurred his horse,\n and when they reached the water's edge, he dismounted and unsaddled\n the horse. Then both man and horse plunged headlong into the waiting\n torrent, deep into the cool embrace of the clear liquid. They soaked it\n into their pores and drank deeply of it, feeling life going once more\n through their veins. Satisfied, they lifted themselves from the water,\n and the man lay down on the yellow sand of the river bank to sleep.",
"He awoke and stretched the cramped muscles of his body. At the edge of\n the water he removed his clothes and stared at himself in the rippling\n mirror. His muscles were lean and hard, evenly placed throughout the\n length of his frame. A deep ridge ran down the length of his torso,\n separating the muscles, making the chest broad. Well satisfied with his\n body, he plunged into the cold water, deep down, until he thought his\n lungs would burst; then swiftly returned to the clean air, tingling in\n every pore. He dried himself and dressed. Conqueror was eating the long\n grass near the stream. Quickly he saddled him. No time for breakfast.\n He would ride all day and the next night. And he would be home.",
"There were clouds in the sky now, and a gentle wind caressed the sweat\n from his tired body. He stopped. There it was! Barely discernible\n through the moonlight, he saw it. Home.\n\n\n Quickly he dismounted and ran. Now he could see a small light in the\n window, and he knew they were there. His breath came in hard ragged\n gulps. At the window he peered in, and as his eyes became accustomed\n to the inner gloom, he saw how bare the room was. No matter. Now that\n he was home he would build new furniture, and the house would be even\n better than it had been before.\n\n\n Then he saw her.",
"He ran. Away from the house. To the large horse with a horn in the\n center of its forehead, like a unicorn. Once in the saddle, the spurt\n of strength left him. His shoulders slumped, his head dropped onto his\n chest.\n\n\n Conqueror trotted away, the sound of his hooves echoing hollowly in the\n vast emptiness.",
"He fumbled at his throat, his fingers crawling like cold worms around\n his neck until he found the locket and the clasp which had held it\n safely through endless nightmare days and nights. He slipped the clasp\n and the locket fell into his waiting hand. As one in a dream, he opened\n it, and stared at the pictures, now in the dim moonlight no longer\n faces of those he loved, but grey ghosts from the past. Even the ruby\n had lost its glow. What had once been living fire was now a dull glob\n of darkness.\n\n\n \"Nothing is forever!\" He thought he had shouted the words, but only a\n thin sound, the sound of leaves ruffled by the wind, came back to him.\n\n\n He closed the locket and fastened the clasp, and hung it on the\n doorknob. It moved slowly in the wind, back and forth, like a pendulum.\n \"Forever—forever. Only death is forever.\" He could have sworn he heard\n the words.",
"She was sitting motionless in a straight wooden chair beside the\n fireplace, the feeble light cast by the embers veiling her in mauve\n shadows. He waited, wondering if she were.... Presently she stirred\n like a restless child in sleep, then moved from the chair to the pile\n of wood near the hearth, and replenished the fire. The wood caught\n quickly, sending up long tongues of flame, and forming a bright pool of\n light around her.\n\n\n His blood froze. The creature illuminated by the firelight was a\n monster. Large greasy scales covered its face and arms, and there was\n no hair on its head. Its gums were toothless cavities in a sunken,\n mumbling mouth. The eyes, turned momentarily toward the window, were\n empty of life.\n\n\n \"No, no!\" he cried soundlessly.",
"And he had followed. Over a mountain, until they came to a pass, and\n finally to a narrow path which led to an old cabin. He had found it\n empty, but there were cans of food and a rifle and many shells. He had\n remained there a long time—how long he could not tell, for he could\n only measure time by the cycles of the sun and the moon. Finally he\n had taken the horse, the rifle and what food was left, and once again\n started the long journey home.\n\n\n The farther north he went, the more life seemed to have survived. He\n had seen great herds of horses like his own, stampeding across the\n plains, and strange birds which he could not identify. Yet he had seen\n no human beings.",
"When he awoke, the sun was almost setting. The bright shafts of red\n light spilled across the sky, making the mountains silent scarlet\n shadows on the face of the rippling water. Quickly he gathered\n driftwood, and built a small fire. From his pack he removed some of\n the coffee he had found in one of the ruined cities. He brought water\n from the river in the battered coffee-pot he had salvaged, and while he\n waited for it to boil, he went to his horse, Conqueror, stroking his\n mane and whispering in his ear. Then he led him silently to a grassy\n slope where he hobbled him and left him for the night.\n\n\n In the fading light, he ate the hard beef jerky and drank the scalding\n coffee. Refreshed and momentarily content, he sat staring into the\n dying fire, seeing the bright glowing coals as living fingers clutching\n at the wood in consuming embrace, taking all and returning nothing but\n ashes.",
"She took off the locket she wore about her neck and held it up to the\n shimmering light, letting it spin at the end of its chain. It caught\n the shadows of the fire and reflected them, greatly magnified, over the\n room. It was in the shape of a star, encrusted with emeralds, with one\n large ruby in the center. When he opened it, he found a picture of her\n in one side, and in the other a picture of the children. He took her in\n his arms again, and loosened her long, black hair, burying his face in\n it for a moment. Then he kissed her, and instantly was drawn down into\n the abyss which seemed to have no beginning or any end.",
"The next morning had been bleak and gray. The mist clung to the wet,\n sodden ground, and the air was heavy in his lungs. He had driven off\n in the jeep the army had sent for him, watching her there on the porch\n until the mist swirled around her feet and she ran back into the house\n and slammed the door. His cold fingers found the locket, making a\n little bulge under his uniform, and the touch of it seemed to warm the\n blood in his veins.\n\n\n Three days later they had landed in Spain, merged with another\n division, then crossed the Pyrenees into France, and finally to Paris\n where the fighting had begun. Already the city was a silent graveyard,\n littered with the rubble of towers and cathedrals which had once been\n great.",
"\"Oh, a ring, and it's a diamond, too!\" she cried in her rich, happy\n voice which always seemed to send a thrill through his body.\n\n\n \"It's for you; so long as you wear it, I'll come back, even from the\n dead, if need be. Read the inscription.\"\n\n\n She held the ring up to the light and read aloud, \"It is forever.\"\n\n\n Then she had slipped the ring on her finger and her arms around him.\n He held her very close, feeling the warmth from her body flowing into\n his and making him oblivious to everything except that she was there in\n his arms and that he was sinking deep, deep into a familiar sea, where\n he had been many times before but each time found something new and\n unexplored, some vastly different emotion he could never quite explain.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" she cried. \"I've something for you, too.\"",
"Three years later they were on the road to Moscow. Over a thousand\n miles lay behind, a dead man on every foot of those miles. Yet victory\n was near. The Russians had not yet used the H-bomb; the threat of\n annihilation by the retaliation forces had been too great.\n\n\n He had done well in the war, and had been decorated many times for\n bravery in action. Now he felt the victory that seemed to be in the\n air, and he had wished it would come quickly, so that he might return\n to her. Home. The very feel of the word was everything a battle-weary\n soldier needed to make him fight harder and live longer.\n\n\n Suddenly he had become aware of a droning, wooshing sound above him. It\n grew louder and louder until he knew what it was.\n\n\n \"Heavy bombers!\" The alarm had sounded, and the men had headed for\n their foxholes.",
"He had been on the trail for a long time. His food was nearly\n exhausted. The mountains were just beginning, and he hoped to find food\n there. He had not found food, but his luck had been with him. He had\n found a horse. Not a normal horse, but a mutation. It was almost twice\n as large as a regular horse. Its skin seemed to shimmer and was like\n glassy steel to the touch. From the center of its forehead grew a horn,\n straight out, as the horn of a unicorn. But most startling of all were\n the animal's eyes which seemed to speak—a silent mental speech, which\n he could understand. The horse had looked up as he approached it and\n seemed to say: \"Follow me.\"",
"But he knew he was closer now. Closer to home. He recognized the land.\n How, he did not know, for it was much changed. A sensing, perhaps, of\n what it had once been. He could not be more than two days' ride away.\n Once he was through this desert, he would find her, he would be with\n her once again; all would be well, and his long journey would be over.\nThe images faded. Even memory slept in a flow of warm blood. Body and\n mind slept into the shadows of the dawn.",
"After months of storms and bad luck, they had been shipwrecked\n somewhere off the coast of Mexico. He had managed to swim ashore,\n and had been found by a fisherman's family. Many months he had spent\n swimming and fishing, recovering his strength, inquiring about the\n United States. The Mexicans had spoken with fear of the land across the\n Rio Grande. All its great cities had been destroyed, and those that had\n been only partially destroyed were devoid of people. The land across\n the Rio Grande had become a land of shadows. The winds were poisoned,\n and the few people who might have survived, were crazed and maimed by\n the blasts. Few men had dared cross the Rio Grande into \"El Mundo gris\n de Noviembre\"—the November world. Those who had, had never returned.\n\n\n In time he had traveled north until he reached the Rio Grande. He had\n waded into the muddy waters and somehow landed on the American side. In\n the November world.",
"But too many bombers got through, dropping their deadly cargo upon the\n helpless cities. And not all the prayers or entreaties to any God had\n stopped their carnage. First there had been the red flashes that melted\n buildings into molten streams, and then the great triple-mushroom cloud\n filled with the poisonous gases that the wind swept away to other\n cities, where men had not died quickly and mercifully, but had rotted\n away, leaving shreds of putrid flesh behind to mark the places where\n they had crawled.\n\n\n The retaliatory forces had roared away to bomb the Russian cities. Few,\n if any, had returned. Too much blood and life were on their hands.\n Those who had remained alive had found a resting place on the crown\n of some distant mountain. Others had preferred the silent peaceful\n sea, where flesh stayed not long on bones, and only darting fishes and\n merciful beams of filtered light found their aluminum coffins.\n\n\n The war had ended.",
"They had started the long trek. Throughout Europe anarchy reigned. He\n and his men were alone. All they could do now was fight. Finally they\n reached the seaport city of Calais. With what few men he had left, he\n had commandeered a small yacht, and they had taken to the sea."
],
[
"\"Oh, a ring, and it's a diamond, too!\" she cried in her rich, happy\n voice which always seemed to send a thrill through his body.\n\n\n \"It's for you; so long as you wear it, I'll come back, even from the\n dead, if need be. Read the inscription.\"\n\n\n She held the ring up to the light and read aloud, \"It is forever.\"\n\n\n Then she had slipped the ring on her finger and her arms around him.\n He held her very close, feeling the warmth from her body flowing into\n his and making him oblivious to everything except that she was there in\n his arms and that he was sinking deep, deep into a familiar sea, where\n he had been many times before but each time found something new and\n unexplored, some vastly different emotion he could never quite explain.\n\n\n \"Wait!\" she cried. \"I've something for you, too.\"",
"He fumbled at his throat, his fingers crawling like cold worms around\n his neck until he found the locket and the clasp which had held it\n safely through endless nightmare days and nights. He slipped the clasp\n and the locket fell into his waiting hand. As one in a dream, he opened\n it, and stared at the pictures, now in the dim moonlight no longer\n faces of those he loved, but grey ghosts from the past. Even the ruby\n had lost its glow. What had once been living fire was now a dull glob\n of darkness.\n\n\n \"Nothing is forever!\" He thought he had shouted the words, but only a\n thin sound, the sound of leaves ruffled by the wind, came back to him.\n\n\n He closed the locket and fastened the clasp, and hung it on the\n doorknob. It moved slowly in the wind, back and forth, like a pendulum.\n \"Forever—forever. Only death is forever.\" He could have sworn he heard\n the words.",
"She took off the locket she wore about her neck and held it up to the\n shimmering light, letting it spin at the end of its chain. It caught\n the shadows of the fire and reflected them, greatly magnified, over the\n room. It was in the shape of a star, encrusted with emeralds, with one\n large ruby in the center. When he opened it, he found a picture of her\n in one side, and in the other a picture of the children. He took her in\n his arms again, and loosened her long, black hair, burying his face in\n it for a moment. Then he kissed her, and instantly was drawn down into\n the abyss which seemed to have no beginning or any end.",
"This was not his house. In his delirium he had only imagined he had\n found it. He had been searching so long. He would go on searching.\n He was turning wearily away from the window when the movement of the\n creature beside the fire held his attention. It had taken a ring from\n one skeleton-like finger and stood, turning the ring slowly as if\n trying to decipher some inscription inside it.\n\n\n He knew then. He had come home.\n\n\n Slowly he moved toward the door. A great weakness was upon him. His\n feet were stones, reluctant to leave the earth. His body was a weed,\n shriveled by thirst. He grasped the doorknob and clung to it, looking\n up at the night sky and trying to draw strength from the wind that\n passed over him. It was no use. There was no strength. Only fear—a\n kind of fear he had never known.",
"The next morning had been bleak and gray. The mist clung to the wet,\n sodden ground, and the air was heavy in his lungs. He had driven off\n in the jeep the army had sent for him, watching her there on the porch\n until the mist swirled around her feet and she ran back into the house\n and slammed the door. His cold fingers found the locket, making a\n little bulge under his uniform, and the touch of it seemed to warm the\n blood in his veins.\n\n\n Three days later they had landed in Spain, merged with another\n division, then crossed the Pyrenees into France, and finally to Paris\n where the fighting had begun. Already the city was a silent graveyard,\n littered with the rubble of towers and cathedrals which had once been\n great.",
"HOMECOMING\nBY MIGUEL HIDALGO\nWhat lasts forever? Does love?\n \nDoes death?... Nothing lasts\n \nforever.... Not even forever\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, April 1958.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe large horse plodded slowly over the shifting sand.",
"Slowly his eyelids yielded. His body sagged, and blood seemed to fill\n his brain, bathing it in a gentle, warm flood.\n\n\n He slept. His brain slept.\n\n\n But the portion of his brain called memory stirred. It was all alone;\n all else was at rest. Images began to appear, drawn from inexhaustible\n files, wherein are kept all thoughts, past, present, and future....\nIt was the night before he was to go overseas. World War III had been\n declared, and he had enlisted, receiving his old rank of captain. He\n was with his wife in the living room of their home. They had put the\n children to bed—their sons—and now sat on the couch, watching the\n blazing fire. It was then that he had showed it to her.\n\n\n \"I've got something to tell you, and something to show you.\"\n\n\n He had removed the box from his pocket and opened it. And heard her cry\n of surprised joy.",
"She was sitting motionless in a straight wooden chair beside the\n fireplace, the feeble light cast by the embers veiling her in mauve\n shadows. He waited, wondering if she were.... Presently she stirred\n like a restless child in sleep, then moved from the chair to the pile\n of wood near the hearth, and replenished the fire. The wood caught\n quickly, sending up long tongues of flame, and forming a bright pool of\n light around her.\n\n\n His blood froze. The creature illuminated by the firelight was a\n monster. Large greasy scales covered its face and arms, and there was\n no hair on its head. Its gums were toothless cavities in a sunken,\n mumbling mouth. The eyes, turned momentarily toward the window, were\n empty of life.\n\n\n \"No, no!\" he cried soundlessly.",
"Still northward. The hours crawled slower than a dying man. The sun\n was a torch that pierced his skin, seeming to melt his bones into a\n burning stream within his body. But day at last gave way to night, and\n the sun to the moon. The torch became a white pock-marked goddess, with\n streaming hair called stars.\n\n\n In the moonlight he had not seen the crater until he was at its\n very edge. Even then he might not have seen it had not the horse\n stopped suddenly. The wind swirled through its vast emptiness,\n slapping his face with dusty hands. For a moment he thought he heard\n voices—mournful, murmuring voices, echoing up from the misty depths.\n He turned quickly away and did not look back.\n\n\n Night paled into day; day burned into night.",
"Three years later they were on the road to Moscow. Over a thousand\n miles lay behind, a dead man on every foot of those miles. Yet victory\n was near. The Russians had not yet used the H-bomb; the threat of\n annihilation by the retaliation forces had been too great.\n\n\n He had done well in the war, and had been decorated many times for\n bravery in action. Now he felt the victory that seemed to be in the\n air, and he had wished it would come quickly, so that he might return\n to her. Home. The very feel of the word was everything a battle-weary\n soldier needed to make him fight harder and live longer.\n\n\n Suddenly he had become aware of a droning, wooshing sound above him. It\n grew louder and louder until he knew what it was.\n\n\n \"Heavy bombers!\" The alarm had sounded, and the men had headed for\n their foxholes.",
"He awoke and stretched the cramped muscles of his body. At the edge of\n the water he removed his clothes and stared at himself in the rippling\n mirror. His muscles were lean and hard, evenly placed throughout the\n length of his frame. A deep ridge ran down the length of his torso,\n separating the muscles, making the chest broad. Well satisfied with his\n body, he plunged into the cold water, deep down, until he thought his\n lungs would burst; then swiftly returned to the clean air, tingling in\n every pore. He dried himself and dressed. Conqueror was eating the long\n grass near the stream. Quickly he saddled him. No time for breakfast.\n He would ride all day and the next night. And he would be home.",
"There were clouds in the sky now, and a gentle wind caressed the sweat\n from his tired body. He stopped. There it was! Barely discernible\n through the moonlight, he saw it. Home.\n\n\n Quickly he dismounted and ran. Now he could see a small light in the\n window, and he knew they were there. His breath came in hard ragged\n gulps. At the window he peered in, and as his eyes became accustomed\n to the inner gloom, he saw how bare the room was. No matter. Now that\n he was home he would build new furniture, and the house would be even\n better than it had been before.\n\n\n Then he saw her.",
"When he awoke, the sun was almost setting. The bright shafts of red\n light spilled across the sky, making the mountains silent scarlet\n shadows on the face of the rippling water. Quickly he gathered\n driftwood, and built a small fire. From his pack he removed some of\n the coffee he had found in one of the ruined cities. He brought water\n from the river in the battered coffee-pot he had salvaged, and while he\n waited for it to boil, he went to his horse, Conqueror, stroking his\n mane and whispering in his ear. Then he led him silently to a grassy\n slope where he hobbled him and left him for the night.\n\n\n In the fading light, he ate the hard beef jerky and drank the scalding\n coffee. Refreshed and momentarily content, he sat staring into the\n dying fire, seeing the bright glowing coals as living fingers clutching\n at the wood in consuming embrace, taking all and returning nothing but\n ashes.",
"But he knew he was closer now. Closer to home. He recognized the land.\n How, he did not know, for it was much changed. A sensing, perhaps, of\n what it had once been. He could not be more than two days' ride away.\n Once he was through this desert, he would find her, he would be with\n her once again; all would be well, and his long journey would be over.\nThe images faded. Even memory slept in a flow of warm blood. Body and\n mind slept into the shadows of the dawn.",
"The rider was of medium size, with huge, strong hands and seemingly\n hollow eyes. Strange eyes, alive and aflame. They had no place in\n the dust-caked, tired body, yet there they were, seeking, always\n seeking—searching the clear horizon, and never seeming to find what\n they sought.\nThe horse moved faster now. They were nearing a river; the water would\n be welcome on tired bodies and dry throats. He spurred his horse,\n and when they reached the water's edge, he dismounted and unsaddled\n the horse. Then both man and horse plunged headlong into the waiting\n torrent, deep into the cool embrace of the clear liquid. They soaked it\n into their pores and drank deeply of it, feeling life going once more\n through their veins. Satisfied, they lifted themselves from the water,\n and the man lay down on the yellow sand of the river bank to sleep.",
"He ran. Away from the house. To the large horse with a horn in the\n center of its forehead, like a unicorn. Once in the saddle, the spurt\n of strength left him. His shoulders slumped, his head dropped onto his\n chest.\n\n\n Conqueror trotted away, the sound of his hooves echoing hollowly in the\n vast emptiness.",
"And he had followed. Over a mountain, until they came to a pass, and\n finally to a narrow path which led to an old cabin. He had found it\n empty, but there were cans of food and a rifle and many shells. He had\n remained there a long time—how long he could not tell, for he could\n only measure time by the cycles of the sun and the moon. Finally he\n had taken the horse, the rifle and what food was left, and once again\n started the long journey home.\n\n\n The farther north he went, the more life seemed to have survived. He\n had seen great herds of horses like his own, stampeding across the\n plains, and strange birds which he could not identify. Yet he had seen\n no human beings.",
"To no avail. Neither side had won. Most of the cities and the majority\n of the population of both countries had been destroyed. Even their\n governments had vanished, leaving a silent nothingness. The armies that\n remained were without leaders, without sources of supplies, save what\n they could forage and beg from an unfriendly people.\n\n\n They were alone now, a group of tired, battered men, for whom life held\n nothing. Their families had long since died, their bodies turned to\n dust, their spirits fled on the winds to a new world.\n\n\n Yet these remnants of an army must return—or at least try. Their\n exodus was just beginning. Somehow he had managed to hold together the\n few men left from his force. He had always nourished the hope that\n she might still be alive. And now that the war was over he had to\n return—had to know whether she was still waiting for him.",
"It was rightly called. The deserts were long. All plant life had died,\n leaving to those once great fertile stretches, nothing but the sad,\n temporal beauty that comes with death. No people had he seen. Only the\n ruins of what had once been their cities. He had walked through them,\n and all that he had seen were the small mutant rodents, and all that he\n had heard was the occasional swish of the wind as it whisked along what\n might have been dead leaves, but wasn't.",
"They had started the long trek. Throughout Europe anarchy reigned. He\n and his men were alone. All they could do now was fight. Finally they\n reached the seaport city of Calais. With what few men he had left, he\n had commandeered a small yacht, and they had taken to the sea."
]
] |
train
|
51129
|
[
"What characteristic of Zotul does he believe he shares with the Earthmen? ",
"What changes Koltan's mind about Earthmen, and ultimately condemns the Masur House to ruin?",
"what is the 'gift from Earth'?",
"The story implies that ____ is responsible for fueling capitalism and colonialism?",
"What is ironic about the Earthmen selling gas to the Zurians?",
"What is ironic about Earth's customer service policy?"
] |
[
[
"cunning",
"integrity",
"creativity",
"impartiality"
],
[
"He sees potential for the House of Masur to profit off of the Earthmen's inventions",
"He predicts that the Earthmen will not be able to withstand Zurian conditions for long, and that they will soon depart",
"He believes he can feign sincerity in order to steal their metal and other goods",
"He thinks that Earthmen are intellectually inferior and that he can manipulate them to do his bidding"
],
[
"capitalism",
"the printing press",
"metal, copper wire, and other goods",
"destruction of the caste system"
],
[
"knowledge",
"industrialism",
"greediness",
"globalization"
],
[
"The gas was collected on Zur",
"The gas is from Earth and will not power Zurian machines",
"The gas will be replaced by a new type of gas that Zurians will need to purchase in the next decade",
"The Earthmen are not selling gas; rather, a material that causes machines to break"
],
[
"The customer service policy was drafted by Zurians, not Earthmen",
"The customer service policy offers no ideal alternatives for non-Earthmen",
"Earthly corporations have no real solutions for dealing with problems presented by their customers",
"What is 'right' for the customer always benefits the corporation, directly or indirectly"
]
] |
[
2,
1,
1,
3,
1,
4
] |
[
1,
0,
1,
1,
0,
1
] |
[
[
"\"Doubtless,\" said Zotul unexpectedly, for the youngest at a conference\n was expected to keep his mouth shut and applaud the decisions of his\n elders, \"the Earthmen used all the metal on their planet in building\n that ship. We cannot possibly bilk them of it; it is their only means\n of transport.\"\n\n\n Such frank expression of motive was unheard of, even in the secret\n conclave of conference. Only the speaker's youth could account for it.\n The speech drew scowls from the brothers and stern rebuke from Koltan.\n\n\n \"When your opinion is wanted, we will ask you for it. Meantime,\n remember your position in the family.\"\n\n\n Zotul bowed his head meekly, but he burned with resentment.\n\n\n \"Listen to the boy,\" said the aged father. \"There is more wisdom in his\n head than in all the rest of you. Forget the Earthmen and think only of\n the clay.\"",
"Still smarting, Zotul went back to his designing quarters and thought\n about the Earthmen. If it was impossible to hope for much in the way\n of metal from the Earthmen, what could one get from them? If he could\n figure this problem out, he might rise somewhat in the estimation of\n his brothers. That wouldn't take him out of the rank of scapegoat, of\n course, but the beatings might become fewer and less severe.\nBy and by, the Earthmen came to Lor, flying through the air in strange\n metal contraptions. They paraded through the tile-paved streets of the\n city, marveled here, as they had in Thorabia, at the buildings all of\n tile inside and out, and made a great show of themselves for all the\n people to see. Speeches were made through interpreters, who had much\n too quickly learned the tongue of the aliens; hence these left much to\n be desired in the way of clarity, though their sincerity was evident.",
"\"To begin with,\" he said, \"I am going to make you a gift of all these\n luxuries you do not have.\" As Zotul made to protest, he cut him off\n with a wave of his hand. \"It is the least we can do for you. Pick a car\n from the lot outside. I will arrange to have the other things delivered\n and installed in your home.\"\n\n\n \"To receive gifts,\" said Zotul, \"incurs an obligation.\"\n\n\n \"None at all,\" beamed the Earthman cheerily. \"Every item is given to\n you absolutely free—a gift from the people of Earth. All we ask is\n that you pay the freight charges on the items. Our purpose is not to\n make profit, but to spread technology and prosperity throughout the\n Galaxy. We have already done well on numerous worlds, but working out\n the full program takes time.\"",
"Kent Broderick, the Earthman in charge of the Council, shook hands\n jovially with Zotul. That alien custom conformed with, Zotul took a\n better look at his host. Broderick was an affable, smiling individual\n with genial laugh wrinkles at his eyes. A man of middle age, dressed in\n the baggy costume of Zur, he looked almost like a Zurian, except for\n an indefinite sense of alienness about him.\n\n\n \"Glad to have you call on us, Mr. Masur,\" boomed the Earthman, clapping\n Zotul on the back. \"Just tell us your troubles and we'll have you\n straightened out in no time.\"\nAll the chill recriminations and arguments Zotul had stored for this\n occasion were dissipated in the warmth of the Earthman's manner.\n\n\n Almost apologetically, Zotul told of the encroachment that had been\n made upon the business of the Pottery of Masur.",
"\"No,\" said Broderick, his usually smiling face almost pained with\n memory. \"We know the history of conquest all too well. Our method\n causes more distress than we like to inflict, but it's better—and more\n sure—than war and invasion by force. Now that the unpleasant job is\n finished, we can repair the dislocations.\"\n\n\n \"At last I understand what you said about the tortoise.\"\n\n\n \"Slow but sure.\" Broderick beamed again and clapped Zotul on the\n shoulder. \"Don't worry. You'll have your job back, the same as always,\n but you'll be working for us ... until the children of Earth and Zur\n are equal in knowledge and therefore equal partners. That's why we had\n to break down your caste system.\"\n\n\n Zotul's eyes widened. \"And that is why my brothers did not beat me when\n I failed!\"",
"The Earthmen were going to do great things for the whole world of\n Zur. It required but the cooperation—an excellent word, that—of all\n Zurians, and many blessings would rain down from the skies. This, in\n effect, was what the Earthmen had to say. Zotul felt greatly cheered,\n for it refuted the attitude of his brothers without earning him a\n whaling for it.\n\n\n There was also some talk going around about agreements made between\n the Earthmen and officials of the Lorian government, but you heard one\n thing one day and another the next. Accurate reporting, much less a\n newspaper, was unknown on Zur.\n\n\n Finally, the Earthmen took off in their great, shining ship. Obviously,\n none had succeeded in chiseling them out of it, if, indeed, any had\n tried. The anti-Earthmen Faction—in any culture complex, there is\n always an \"anti\" faction to protest any movement of endeavor—crowed\n happily that the Earthmen were gone for good, and a good thing, too.",
"\"Come in, come in! I'm glad to see you again.\"\n\n\n Zotul stared blankly. This was not the governor. This was Broderick,\n the Earthman.\n\n\n \"I—I came to see the governor,\" he said in confusion.\n\n\n Broderick nodded agreeably. \"I am the governor and I am well acquainted\n with your case, Mr. Masur. Shall we talk it over? Please sit down.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand. The Earthmen....\" Zotul paused, coloring. \"We are\n about to lose our plant.\"\n\n\n \"You were about to say that the Earthmen are taking your plant away\n from you. That is true. Since the House of Masur was the largest and\n richest on Zur, it has taken a long time—the longest of all, in fact.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"",
"He chuckled deeply. \"We of Earth have a saying about one of our\n extremely slow-moving native animals. We say, 'Slow is the tortoise,\n but sure.' And so with us. Our goal is a long-range one, with the\n motto, 'Better times with better merchandise.'\"\nThe engaging manner of the man won Zotul's confidence. After all, it\n was no more than fair to pay transportation.\n\n\n He said, \"How much does the freight cost?\"\n\n\n Broderick told him.\n\n\n \"It may seem high,\" said the Earthman, \"but remember that Earth is\n sixty-odd light-years away. After all, we are absorbing the cost of the\n merchandise. All you pay is the freight, which is cheap, considering\n the cost of operating an interstellar spaceship.\"\n\n\n \"Impossible,\" said Zotul drably. \"Not I and all my brothers together\n have so much money any more.\"",
"\"But it's mobbed,\" protested Zotul. \"It gave me a headache.\"\n\n\n \"And to us it's almost empty. The pressure of population on Earth has\n made us range the Galaxy for places to put our extra people. The only\n habitable planets, unfortunately, are populated ones. We take the least\n populous worlds and—well, buy them out and move in.\"\n\n\n \"And after that?\"\n\n\n Broderick smiled gently. \"Zur will grow. Our people will intermarry\n with yours. The future population of Zur will be neither true Zurians\n nor true Earthmen, but a mixture of both.\"\n\n\n Zotul sat in silent thought. \"But you did not have to buy us out. You\n had the power to conquer us, even to destroy us. The whole planet could\n have been yours alone.\" He stopped in alarm. \"Or am I suggesting an\n idea that didn't occur to you?\"",
"\"To fail,\" said Koltan soberly, \"is not a Masur attribute. Go to the\n governor and tell him what we think of this business. The House of\n Masur has long supported the government with heavy taxes. Now it is\n time for the government to do something for us.\"\nThe governor's palace was jammed with hurrying people, a scene of\n confusion that upset Zotul. The clerk who took his application for\n an interview was, he noticed only vaguely, a young Earthwoman. It\n was remarkable that he paid so little attention, for the female\n terrestrials were picked for physical assets that made Zurian men\n covetous and Zurian women envious.\n\n\n \"The governor will see you,\" she said sweetly. \"He has been expecting\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Me?\" marveled Zotul.\n\n\n She ushered him into the magnificent private office of the governor\n of Lor. The man behind the desk stood up, extended his hand with a\n friendly smile.",
"\"I see.\" Zotul puzzled over it sadly. \"It is too much,\" he said. \"Our\n plant doesn't make enough money for us to meet the payments.\"\n\n\n \"I have a surprise for you,\" smiled Broderick. \"Here is a contract. You\n will start making ceramic parts for automobile spark plugs and certain\n parts for radios and gas ranges. It is our policy to encourage local\n manufacture to help bring prices down.\"\n\n\n \"We haven't the equipment.\"\n\n\n \"We will equip your plant,\" beamed Broderick. \"It will require only\n a quarter interest in your plant itself, assigned to our terrestrial\n company.\"\nZotul, anxious to possess the treasures promised by the Earthman,\n won over his brothers. They signed with marks and gave up a quarter\n interest in the Pottery of Masur. They rolled in the luxuries of Earth.\n These, who had never known debt before, were in it up to their ears.",
"After he had beaten his wife thoroughly for her foolishness, Zotul\n stamped off in a rage and designed a new ceramic stove, one that would\n accommodate the terrestrial pots very well.\n\n\n And Koltan put the model into production.\n\n\n \"Orders already are pouring in like mad,\" he said the next day. \"It\n was wise of you to foresee it and have the design ready. Already, I am\n sorry for thinking as I did about the Earthmen. They really intend to\n do well by us.\"",
"Moreover, the Earthmen brought miles of copper wire—more than enough\n in value to buy out the governorship of any country on Zur—and set up\n telegraph lines from country to country and continent to continent.\n Within five years of the first landing of the Earthmen, every major\n city on the globe had a printing press, a daily newspaper, and enjoyed\n the instantaneous transmission of news via telegraph. And the business\n of the House of Masur continued to look up.\n\n\n \"As I have always said from the beginning,\" chortled Director Koltan,\n \"this coming of the Earthmen had been a great thing for us, and\n especially for the House of Masur.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't think so at first,\" Zotul pointed out, and was immediately\n sorry, for Koltan turned and gave him a hiding, single-handed, for his\n unthinkable impertinence.",
"Such jubilation proved premature, however. One day, a fleet of ships\n arrived and after they had landed all over the planet, Zur was\n practically acrawl with Earthmen.\n\n\n Immediately, the Earthmen established what they called\n \"corporations\"—Zurian trading companies under terrestrial control. The\n object of the visit was trade.\n\n\n In spite of the fact that a terrestrial ship had landed at every Zurian\n city of major and minor importance, and all in a single day, it took\n some time for the news to spread.\n\n\n The first awareness Zotul had was that, upon coming home from the\n pottery one evening, he found his wife Lania proudly brandishing an\n aluminum pot at him.\n\n\n \"What is that thing?\" he asked curiously.\n\n\n \"A pot. I bought it at the market.\"",
"\"Yours is the last business on Zur to be taken over by us. We have\n bought you out.\"\n\n\n \"Our government....\"\n\n\n \"Your governments belong to us, too,\" said Broderick. \"When they could\n not pay for the roads, the telegraphs, the civic improvements, we took\n them over, just as we are taking you over.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" exclaimed Zotul, aghast, \"that you Earthmen own everything\n on Zur?\"\n\n\n \"Even your armies.\"\n\n\n \"But\nwhy\n?\"\nBroderick clasped his hands behind back, went to the window and stared\n down moodily into the street.\n\n\n \"You don't know what an overcrowded world is like,\" he said. \"A street\n like this, with so few people and vehicles on it, would be impossible\n on Earth.\"",
"Zotul did not appreciate his father's approval, for it only earned him\n a beating as soon as the old man went to bed. It was a common enough\n thing among the brothers Masur, as among everybody, to be frustrated in\n their desires. However, they had Zotul to take it out upon, and they\n did.",
"\"Once,\" he said formally, \"the Masur fortune was the greatest in\n the world of Zur. That was before my father, the famous Kalrab\n Masur—Divinity protect him—departed this life to collect his greater\n reward. He often told us, my father did, that the clay is the flesh and\n bones of our culture and our fortune. Now it has been shown how prone\n is the flesh to corruption and how feeble the bones. We are ruined, and\n all because of new things coming from Earth.\"\n\n\n Broderick stroked his shaven chin and looked sad. \"Why didn't you come\n to me sooner? This would never have happened. But now that it has,\n we're going to do right by you. That is the policy of Earth—always to\n do right by the customer.\"\n\n\n \"Divinity witness,\" Zorin said, \"that we ask only compensation for\n damages.\"",
"\"Of course. Are you ready now to take the assignment papers for you and\n your brothers to sign?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Zotul. \"I am ready.\"",
"A Gift From Earth\nBy MANLY BANISTER\n\n\n Illustrated by KOSSIN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction August 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nExcept for transportation, it was absolutely\n \nfree ... but how much would the freight cost?\n\"It is an outrage,\" said Koltan of the House of Masur, \"that the\n Earthmen land among the Thorabians!\"\n\n\n Zotul, youngest of the Masur brothers, stirred uneasily. Personally, he\n was in favor of the coming of the Earthmen to the world of Zur.",
"At the head of the long, shining table sat old Kalrab Masur, in his\n dotage, but still giving what he could of aid and comfort to the\n Pottery of Masur, even though nobody listened to him any more and\n he knew it. Around the table sat the six brothers—Koltan, eldest\n and Director of the Pottery; Morvan, his vice-chief; Singula, their\n treasurer; Thendro, sales manager; Lubiosa, export chief; and last in\n the rank of age, Zotul, who was responsible for affairs of design.\n\n\n \"Behold, my sons,\" said Kalrab, stroking his scanty beard. \"What are\n these Earthmen to worry about? Remember the clay. It is our strength\n and our fortune. It is the muscle and bone of our trade. Earthmen may\n come and Earthmen may go, but clay goes on forever ... and with it, the\n fame and fortune of the House of Masur.\""
],
[
"\"To fail,\" said Koltan soberly, \"is not a Masur attribute. Go to the\n governor and tell him what we think of this business. The House of\n Masur has long supported the government with heavy taxes. Now it is\n time for the government to do something for us.\"\nThe governor's palace was jammed with hurrying people, a scene of\n confusion that upset Zotul. The clerk who took his application for\n an interview was, he noticed only vaguely, a young Earthwoman. It\n was remarkable that he paid so little attention, for the female\n terrestrials were picked for physical assets that made Zurian men\n covetous and Zurian women envious.\n\n\n \"The governor will see you,\" she said sweetly. \"He has been expecting\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Me?\" marveled Zotul.\n\n\n She ushered him into the magnificent private office of the governor\n of Lor. The man behind the desk stood up, extended his hand with a\n friendly smile.",
"The result of the new flood was that in the following year, the sale of\n Masur ceramic table service dropped to less than a tenth.\nTrembling with excitement at this news from their book-keeper, Koltan\n called an emergency meeting. He even routed old Kalrab out of his\n senile stupor for the occasion, on the off chance that the old man\n might still have a little wit left that could be helpful.\n\n\n \"Note,\" Koltan announced in a shaky voice, \"that the Earthmen undermine\n our business,\" and he read off the figures.\n\n\n \"Perhaps,\" said Zotul, \"it is a good thing also, as you said before,\n and will result in something even better for us.\"\n\n\n Koltan frowned, and Zotul, in fear of another beating, instantly\n subsided.",
"At the head of the long, shining table sat old Kalrab Masur, in his\n dotage, but still giving what he could of aid and comfort to the\n Pottery of Masur, even though nobody listened to him any more and\n he knew it. Around the table sat the six brothers—Koltan, eldest\n and Director of the Pottery; Morvan, his vice-chief; Singula, their\n treasurer; Thendro, sales manager; Lubiosa, export chief; and last in\n the rank of age, Zotul, who was responsible for affairs of design.\n\n\n \"Behold, my sons,\" said Kalrab, stroking his scanty beard. \"What are\n these Earthmen to worry about? Remember the clay. It is our strength\n and our fortune. It is the muscle and bone of our trade. Earthmen may\n come and Earthmen may go, but clay goes on forever ... and with it, the\n fame and fortune of the House of Masur.\"",
"\"Once,\" he said formally, \"the Masur fortune was the greatest in\n the world of Zur. That was before my father, the famous Kalrab\n Masur—Divinity protect him—departed this life to collect his greater\n reward. He often told us, my father did, that the clay is the flesh and\n bones of our culture and our fortune. Now it has been shown how prone\n is the flesh to corruption and how feeble the bones. We are ruined, and\n all because of new things coming from Earth.\"\n\n\n Broderick stroked his shaven chin and looked sad. \"Why didn't you come\n to me sooner? This would never have happened. But now that it has,\n we're going to do right by you. That is the policy of Earth—always to\n do right by the customer.\"\n\n\n \"Divinity witness,\" Zorin said, \"that we ask only compensation for\n damages.\"",
"Moreover, the Earthmen brought miles of copper wire—more than enough\n in value to buy out the governorship of any country on Zur—and set up\n telegraph lines from country to country and continent to continent.\n Within five years of the first landing of the Earthmen, every major\n city on the globe had a printing press, a daily newspaper, and enjoyed\n the instantaneous transmission of news via telegraph. And the business\n of the House of Masur continued to look up.\n\n\n \"As I have always said from the beginning,\" chortled Director Koltan,\n \"this coming of the Earthmen had been a great thing for us, and\n especially for the House of Masur.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't think so at first,\" Zotul pointed out, and was immediately\n sorry, for Koltan turned and gave him a hiding, single-handed, for his\n unthinkable impertinence.",
"In their dozenth conference since that first and fateful one, the\n brothers Masur decided upon drastic steps. In the meantime, several\n things had happened. For one, old Kalrab had passed on to his immortal\n rest, but this made no real difference. For another, the Earthmen had\n procured legal authority to prospect the planet for metals, of which\n they found a good deal, but they told no one on Zur of this. What\n they did mention was the crude oil and natural gas they discovered\n in the underlayers of the planet's crust. Crews of Zurians, working\n under supervision of the Earthmen, laid pipelines from the gas and oil\n regions to every major and minor city on Zur.\nBy the time ten years had passed since the landing of the first\n terrestrial ship, the Earthmen were conducting a brisk business in\n gas-fired ranges, furnaces and heaters ... and the Masur stove business\n was gone. Moreover, the Earthmen sold the Zurians their own natural gas\n at a nice profit and everybody was happy with the situation except the\n brothers Masur.",
"A Gift From Earth\nBy MANLY BANISTER\n\n\n Illustrated by KOSSIN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction August 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nExcept for transportation, it was absolutely\n \nfree ... but how much would the freight cost?\n\"It is an outrage,\" said Koltan of the House of Masur, \"that the\n Earthmen land among the Thorabians!\"\n\n\n Zotul, youngest of the Masur brothers, stirred uneasily. Personally, he\n was in favor of the coming of the Earthmen to the world of Zur.",
"The next time the brothers went to see the governor, he said, \"I cannot\n handle such complaints as yours. I must refer you to the Merchandising\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"What is that?\" asked Koltan.\n\n\n \"It is an Earthman association that deals with complaints such as\n yours. In the matter of material progress, we must expect some strain\n in the fabric of our culture. Machinery has been set up to deal with\n it. Here is their address; go air your troubles to them.\"\n\n\n The business of a formal complaint was turned over by the brothers to\n Zotul. It took three weeks for the Earthmen to get around to calling\n him in, as a representative of the Pottery of Masur, for an interview.\n\n\n All the brothers could no longer be spared from the plant, even for the\n purpose of pressing a complaint. Their days of idle wealth over, they\n had to get in and work with the clay with the rest of the help.",
"\"Come in, come in! I'm glad to see you again.\"\n\n\n Zotul stared blankly. This was not the governor. This was Broderick,\n the Earthman.\n\n\n \"I—I came to see the governor,\" he said in confusion.\n\n\n Broderick nodded agreeably. \"I am the governor and I am well acquainted\n with your case, Mr. Masur. Shall we talk it over? Please sit down.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand. The Earthmen....\" Zotul paused, coloring. \"We are\n about to lose our plant.\"\n\n\n \"You were about to say that the Earthmen are taking your plant away\n from you. That is true. Since the House of Masur was the largest and\n richest on Zur, it has taken a long time—the longest of all, in fact.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"",
"But at the end of three years, the Earthmen dropped their option.\n The Pottery of Masur had no more contracts. Business languished. The\n Earthmen, explained Broderick, had built a plant of their own because\n it was so much more efficient—and to lower prices, which was Earth's\n unswerving policy, greater and greater efficiency was demanded.\n Broderick was very sympathetic, but there was nothing he could do.\n\n\n The introduction of television provided a further calamity. The sets\n were delicate and needed frequent repairs, hence were costly to own and\n maintain. But all Zurians who had to keep up with the latest from Earth\n had them. Now it was possible not only to hear about things of Earth,\n but to see them as they were broadcast from the video tapes.",
"The printing plants that turned out mortgage contracts did a lush\n business.\nFor the common people of Zur, times were good everywhere. In a decade\n and a half, the Earthmen had wrought magnificent changes on this\n backward world. As Broderick had said, the progress of the tortoise was\n slow, but it was extremely sure.\n\n\n The brothers Masur got along in spite of dropped options. They had less\n money and felt the pinch of their debts more keenly, but television\n kept their wives and children amused and furnished an anodyne for the\n pangs of impoverishment.\n\n\n The pottery income dropped to an impossible low, no matter how Zotul\n designed and the brothers produced. Their figurines and religious ikons\n were a drug on the market. The Earthmen made them of plastic and sold\n them for less.\n\n\n The brothers, unable to meet the Payments that were not so Easy any\n more, looked up Zotul and cuffed him around reproachfully.",
"The drastic steps of the brothers applied, therefore, to making an\n energetic protest to the governor of Lor.\n\n\n At one edge of the city, an area had been turned over to the Earthmen\n for a spaceport, and the great terrestrial spaceships came to it and\n departed from it at regular intervals. As the heirs of the House of\n Masur walked by on their way to see the governor, Zotul observed that\n much new building was taking place and wondered what it was.\n\n\n \"Some new devilment of the Earthmen, you can be sure,\" said Koltan\n blackly.\n\n\n In fact, the Earthmen were building an assembly plant for radio\n receiving sets. The ship now standing on its fins upon the apron was\n loaded with printed circuits, resistors, variable condensers and other\n radio parts. This was Earth's first step toward flooding Zur with the\n natural follow-up in its campaign of advertising—radio programs—with\n commercials.",
"\"They are replacing our high-quality ceramic ware with inferior\n terrestrial junk,\" Koltan went on bitterly. \"It is only the glamor that\n sells it, of course, but before the people get the shine out of their\n eyes, we can be ruined.\"\n\n\n The brothers discussed the situation for an hour, and all the while\n Father Kalrab sat and pulled his scanty whiskers. Seeing that they got\n nowhere with their wrangle, he cleared his throat and spoke up.",
"\"My sons, you forget it is not the Earthmen themselves at the bottom\n of your trouble, but the\nthings\nof Earth. Think of the telegraph and\n the newspaper, how these spread news of every shipment from Earth.\n The merchandise of the Earthmen is put up for sale by means of these\n newspapers, which also are the property of the Earthmen. The people are\n intrigued by these advertisements, as they are called, and flock to\n buy. Now, if you would pull a tooth from the kwi that bites you, you\n might also have advertisements of your own.\"\n\n\n Alas for that suggestion, no newspaper would accept advertising\n from the House of Masur; all available space was occupied by the\n advertisements of the Earthmen.",
"\"I see.\" Zotul puzzled over it sadly. \"It is too much,\" he said. \"Our\n plant doesn't make enough money for us to meet the payments.\"\n\n\n \"I have a surprise for you,\" smiled Broderick. \"Here is a contract. You\n will start making ceramic parts for automobile spark plugs and certain\n parts for radios and gas ranges. It is our policy to encourage local\n manufacture to help bring prices down.\"\n\n\n \"We haven't the equipment.\"\n\n\n \"We will equip your plant,\" beamed Broderick. \"It will require only\n a quarter interest in your plant itself, assigned to our terrestrial\n company.\"\nZotul, anxious to possess the treasures promised by the Earthman,\n won over his brothers. They signed with marks and gave up a quarter\n interest in the Pottery of Masur. They rolled in the luxuries of Earth.\n These, who had never known debt before, were in it up to their ears.",
"At any rate, the brothers Masur were still able to console themselves\n that they had their tile business. Tile served well enough for houses\n and street surfacing; what better material could be devised for the new\n highways the governor spoke of? There was a lot of money to be made\n yet.\nRadio stations went up all over Zur and began broadcasting. The people\n bought receiving sets like mad. The automobiles arrived and highways\n were constructed.\n\n\n The last hope of the brothers was dashed. The Earthmen set up plants\n and began to manufacture Portland cement.\n\n\n You could build a house of concrete much cheaper than with tile. Of\n course, since wood was scarce on Zur, it was no competition for either\n tile or concrete. Concrete floors were smoother, too, and the stuff\n made far better road surfacing.\n\n\n The demand for Masur tile hit rock bottom.",
"After he had beaten his wife thoroughly for her foolishness, Zotul\n stamped off in a rage and designed a new ceramic stove, one that would\n accommodate the terrestrial pots very well.\n\n\n And Koltan put the model into production.\n\n\n \"Orders already are pouring in like mad,\" he said the next day. \"It\n was wise of you to foresee it and have the design ready. Already, I am\n sorry for thinking as I did about the Earthmen. They really intend to\n do well by us.\"",
"Kent Broderick, the Earthman in charge of the Council, shook hands\n jovially with Zotul. That alien custom conformed with, Zotul took a\n better look at his host. Broderick was an affable, smiling individual\n with genial laugh wrinkles at his eyes. A man of middle age, dressed in\n the baggy costume of Zur, he looked almost like a Zurian, except for\n an indefinite sense of alienness about him.\n\n\n \"Glad to have you call on us, Mr. Masur,\" boomed the Earthman, clapping\n Zotul on the back. \"Just tell us your troubles and we'll have you\n straightened out in no time.\"\nAll the chill recriminations and arguments Zotul had stored for this\n occasion were dissipated in the warmth of the Earthman's manner.\n\n\n Almost apologetically, Zotul told of the encroachment that had been\n made upon the business of the Pottery of Masur.",
"The kilns of the Pottery of Masur fired day and night to keep up with\n the demand for the new porcelain stoves. In three years, more than a\n million had been made and sold by the Masurs alone, not counting the\n hundreds of thousands of copies turned out by competitors in every\n land.\nIn the meantime, however, more things than pots came from Earth.\n One was a printing press, the like of which none on Zur had ever\n dreamed. This, for some unknown reason and much to the disgust of\n the Lorians, was set up in Thorabia. Books and magazines poured from\n it in a fantastic stream. The populace fervidly brushed up on its\n scanty reading ability and bought everything available, overcome by\n the novelty of it. Even Zotul bought a book—a primer in the Lorian\n language—and learned how to read and write. The remainder of the\n brothers Masur, on the other hand, preferred to remain in ignorance.",
"\"Doubtless,\" said Zotul unexpectedly, for the youngest at a conference\n was expected to keep his mouth shut and applaud the decisions of his\n elders, \"the Earthmen used all the metal on their planet in building\n that ship. We cannot possibly bilk them of it; it is their only means\n of transport.\"\n\n\n Such frank expression of motive was unheard of, even in the secret\n conclave of conference. Only the speaker's youth could account for it.\n The speech drew scowls from the brothers and stern rebuke from Koltan.\n\n\n \"When your opinion is wanted, we will ask you for it. Meantime,\n remember your position in the family.\"\n\n\n Zotul bowed his head meekly, but he burned with resentment.\n\n\n \"Listen to the boy,\" said the aged father. \"There is more wisdom in his\n head than in all the rest of you. Forget the Earthmen and think only of\n the clay.\""
],
[
"A Gift From Earth\nBy MANLY BANISTER\n\n\n Illustrated by KOSSIN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction August 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nExcept for transportation, it was absolutely\n \nfree ... but how much would the freight cost?\n\"It is an outrage,\" said Koltan of the House of Masur, \"that the\n Earthmen land among the Thorabians!\"\n\n\n Zotul, youngest of the Masur brothers, stirred uneasily. Personally, he\n was in favor of the coming of the Earthmen to the world of Zur.",
"\"To begin with,\" he said, \"I am going to make you a gift of all these\n luxuries you do not have.\" As Zotul made to protest, he cut him off\n with a wave of his hand. \"It is the least we can do for you. Pick a car\n from the lot outside. I will arrange to have the other things delivered\n and installed in your home.\"\n\n\n \"To receive gifts,\" said Zotul, \"incurs an obligation.\"\n\n\n \"None at all,\" beamed the Earthman cheerily. \"Every item is given to\n you absolutely free—a gift from the people of Earth. All we ask is\n that you pay the freight charges on the items. Our purpose is not to\n make profit, but to spread technology and prosperity throughout the\n Galaxy. We have already done well on numerous worlds, but working out\n the full program takes time.\"",
"At the head of the long, shining table sat old Kalrab Masur, in his\n dotage, but still giving what he could of aid and comfort to the\n Pottery of Masur, even though nobody listened to him any more and\n he knew it. Around the table sat the six brothers—Koltan, eldest\n and Director of the Pottery; Morvan, his vice-chief; Singula, their\n treasurer; Thendro, sales manager; Lubiosa, export chief; and last in\n the rank of age, Zotul, who was responsible for affairs of design.\n\n\n \"Behold, my sons,\" said Kalrab, stroking his scanty beard. \"What are\n these Earthmen to worry about? Remember the clay. It is our strength\n and our fortune. It is the muscle and bone of our trade. Earthmen may\n come and Earthmen may go, but clay goes on forever ... and with it, the\n fame and fortune of the House of Masur.\"",
"\"I see.\" Zotul puzzled over it sadly. \"It is too much,\" he said. \"Our\n plant doesn't make enough money for us to meet the payments.\"\n\n\n \"I have a surprise for you,\" smiled Broderick. \"Here is a contract. You\n will start making ceramic parts for automobile spark plugs and certain\n parts for radios and gas ranges. It is our policy to encourage local\n manufacture to help bring prices down.\"\n\n\n \"We haven't the equipment.\"\n\n\n \"We will equip your plant,\" beamed Broderick. \"It will require only\n a quarter interest in your plant itself, assigned to our terrestrial\n company.\"\nZotul, anxious to possess the treasures promised by the Earthman,\n won over his brothers. They signed with marks and gave up a quarter\n interest in the Pottery of Masur. They rolled in the luxuries of Earth.\n These, who had never known debt before, were in it up to their ears.",
"Still smarting, Zotul went back to his designing quarters and thought\n about the Earthmen. If it was impossible to hope for much in the way\n of metal from the Earthmen, what could one get from them? If he could\n figure this problem out, he might rise somewhat in the estimation of\n his brothers. That wouldn't take him out of the rank of scapegoat, of\n course, but the beatings might become fewer and less severe.\nBy and by, the Earthmen came to Lor, flying through the air in strange\n metal contraptions. They paraded through the tile-paved streets of the\n city, marveled here, as they had in Thorabia, at the buildings all of\n tile inside and out, and made a great show of themselves for all the\n people to see. Speeches were made through interpreters, who had much\n too quickly learned the tongue of the aliens; hence these left much to\n be desired in the way of clarity, though their sincerity was evident.",
"The retooled plant forged ahead and profits began to look up, but the\n Earthmen took a fourth of them as their share in the industry.\n\n\n For a year, the brothers drove their shiny new cars about on the\n new concrete highways the Earthmen had built. From pumps owned by a\n terrestrial company, they bought gas and oil that had been drawn from\n the crust of Zur and was sold to the Zurians at a magnificent profit.\n The food they ate was cooked in Earthly pots on Earth-type gas ranges,\n served up on metal plates that had been stamped out on Earth. In the\n winter, they toasted their shins before handsome gas grates, though\n they had gas-fired central heating.",
"\"Once,\" he said formally, \"the Masur fortune was the greatest in\n the world of Zur. That was before my father, the famous Kalrab\n Masur—Divinity protect him—departed this life to collect his greater\n reward. He often told us, my father did, that the clay is the flesh and\n bones of our culture and our fortune. Now it has been shown how prone\n is the flesh to corruption and how feeble the bones. We are ruined, and\n all because of new things coming from Earth.\"\n\n\n Broderick stroked his shaven chin and looked sad. \"Why didn't you come\n to me sooner? This would never have happened. But now that it has,\n we're going to do right by you. That is the policy of Earth—always to\n do right by the customer.\"\n\n\n \"Divinity witness,\" Zorin said, \"that we ask only compensation for\n damages.\"",
"\"Did you now? Well, take it back. Am I made of money that you spend my\n substance for some fool's product of precious metal? Take it back, I\n say!\"\nThe pretty young wife laughed at him. \"Up to your ears in clay, no\n wonder you hear nothing of news! The pot is very cheap. The Earthmen\n are selling them everywhere. They're much better than our old clay\n pots; they're light and easy to handle and they don't break when\n dropped.\"\n\n\n \"What good is it?\" asked Zotul, interested. \"How will it hold heat,\n being so light?\"\n\n\n \"The Earthmen don't cook as we do,\" she explained patiently. \"There is\n a paper with each pot that explains how it is used. And you will have\n to design a new ceramic stove for me to use the pots on.\"",
"\"Doubtless,\" said Zotul unexpectedly, for the youngest at a conference\n was expected to keep his mouth shut and applaud the decisions of his\n elders, \"the Earthmen used all the metal on their planet in building\n that ship. We cannot possibly bilk them of it; it is their only means\n of transport.\"\n\n\n Such frank expression of motive was unheard of, even in the secret\n conclave of conference. Only the speaker's youth could account for it.\n The speech drew scowls from the brothers and stern rebuke from Koltan.\n\n\n \"When your opinion is wanted, we will ask you for it. Meantime,\n remember your position in the family.\"\n\n\n Zotul bowed his head meekly, but he burned with resentment.\n\n\n \"Listen to the boy,\" said the aged father. \"There is more wisdom in his\n head than in all the rest of you. Forget the Earthmen and think only of\n the clay.\"",
"Happily for the brothers, they did not understand this at the time or\n they would surely have gone back to be buried in their own clay.\n\n\n \"I think,\" the governor told them, \"that you gentlemen have not\n paused to consider the affair from all angles. You must learn to be\n modern—keep up with the times! We heads of government on Zur are doing\n all in our power to aid the Earthmen and facilitate their bringing a\n great, new culture that can only benefit us. See how Zur has changed in\n ten short years! Imagine the world of tomorrow! Why, do you know they\n are even bringing\nautos\nto Zur!\"\n\n\n The brothers were fascinated with the governor's description of these\n hitherto unheard-of vehicles.\n\n\n \"It only remains,\" concluded the governor, \"to build highways, and the\n Earthmen are taking care of that.\"",
"\"You don't know us of Earth very well yet, but you will. I offer you\n credit!\"\n\n\n \"What is that?\" asked Zotul skeptically.\n\n\n \"It is how the poor are enabled to enjoy all the luxuries of the\n rich,\" said Broderick, and went on to give a thumbnail sketch of the\n involutions and devolutions of credit, leaving out some angles that\n might have had a discouraging effect.\n\n\n On a world where credit was a totally new concept, it was enchanting.\n Zotul grasped at the glittering promise with avidity. \"What must I do\n to get credit?\"\n\n\n \"Just sign this paper,\" said Broderick, \"and you become part of our\n Easy Payment Plan.\"\n\n\n Zotul drew back. \"I have five brothers. If I took all these things for\n myself and nothing for them, they would beat me black and blue.\"",
"The Earthmen were going to do great things for the whole world of\n Zur. It required but the cooperation—an excellent word, that—of all\n Zurians, and many blessings would rain down from the skies. This, in\n effect, was what the Earthmen had to say. Zotul felt greatly cheered,\n for it refuted the attitude of his brothers without earning him a\n whaling for it.\n\n\n There was also some talk going around about agreements made between\n the Earthmen and officials of the Lorian government, but you heard one\n thing one day and another the next. Accurate reporting, much less a\n newspaper, was unknown on Zur.\n\n\n Finally, the Earthmen took off in their great, shining ship. Obviously,\n none had succeeded in chiseling them out of it, if, indeed, any had\n tried. The anti-Earthmen Faction—in any culture complex, there is\n always an \"anti\" faction to protest any movement of endeavor—crowed\n happily that the Earthmen were gone for good, and a good thing, too.",
"Such jubilation proved premature, however. One day, a fleet of ships\n arrived and after they had landed all over the planet, Zur was\n practically acrawl with Earthmen.\n\n\n Immediately, the Earthmen established what they called\n \"corporations\"—Zurian trading companies under terrestrial control. The\n object of the visit was trade.\n\n\n In spite of the fact that a terrestrial ship had landed at every Zurian\n city of major and minor importance, and all in a single day, it took\n some time for the news to spread.\n\n\n The first awareness Zotul had was that, upon coming home from the\n pottery one evening, he found his wife Lania proudly brandishing an\n aluminum pot at him.\n\n\n \"What is that thing?\" he asked curiously.\n\n\n \"A pot. I bought it at the market.\"",
"About this time, the ships from Earth brought steam-powered electric\n generators. Lines went up, power was generated, and a flood of\n electrical gadgets and appliances hit the market. For some reason,\n batteries for the radios were no longer available and everybody had to\n buy the new radios. And who could do without a radio in this modern age?\n\n\n The homes of the brothers Masur blossomed on the Easy Payment Plan.\n They had refrigerators, washers, driers, toasters, grills, electric\n fans, air-conditioning equipment and everything else Earth could\n possibly sell them.\n\n\n \"We will be forty years paying it all off,\" exulted Zotul, \"but\n meantime we have the things and aren't they worth it?\"",
"He chuckled deeply. \"We of Earth have a saying about one of our\n extremely slow-moving native animals. We say, 'Slow is the tortoise,\n but sure.' And so with us. Our goal is a long-range one, with the\n motto, 'Better times with better merchandise.'\"\nThe engaging manner of the man won Zotul's confidence. After all, it\n was no more than fair to pay transportation.\n\n\n He said, \"How much does the freight cost?\"\n\n\n Broderick told him.\n\n\n \"It may seem high,\" said the Earthman, \"but remember that Earth is\n sixty-odd light-years away. After all, we are absorbing the cost of the\n merchandise. All you pay is the freight, which is cheap, considering\n the cost of operating an interstellar spaceship.\"\n\n\n \"Impossible,\" said Zotul drably. \"Not I and all my brothers together\n have so much money any more.\"",
"The next time the brothers went to see the governor, he said, \"I cannot\n handle such complaints as yours. I must refer you to the Merchandising\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"What is that?\" asked Koltan.\n\n\n \"It is an Earthman association that deals with complaints such as\n yours. In the matter of material progress, we must expect some strain\n in the fabric of our culture. Machinery has been set up to deal with\n it. Here is their address; go air your troubles to them.\"\n\n\n The business of a formal complaint was turned over by the brothers to\n Zotul. It took three weeks for the Earthmen to get around to calling\n him in, as a representative of the Pottery of Masur, for an interview.\n\n\n All the brothers could no longer be spared from the plant, even for the\n purpose of pressing a complaint. Their days of idle wealth over, they\n had to get in and work with the clay with the rest of the help.",
"The result of the new flood was that in the following year, the sale of\n Masur ceramic table service dropped to less than a tenth.\nTrembling with excitement at this news from their book-keeper, Koltan\n called an emergency meeting. He even routed old Kalrab out of his\n senile stupor for the occasion, on the off chance that the old man\n might still have a little wit left that could be helpful.\n\n\n \"Note,\" Koltan announced in a shaky voice, \"that the Earthmen undermine\n our business,\" and he read off the figures.\n\n\n \"Perhaps,\" said Zotul, \"it is a good thing also, as you said before,\n and will result in something even better for us.\"\n\n\n Koltan frowned, and Zotul, in fear of another beating, instantly\n subsided.",
"\"They are replacing our high-quality ceramic ware with inferior\n terrestrial junk,\" Koltan went on bitterly. \"It is only the glamor that\n sells it, of course, but before the people get the shine out of their\n eyes, we can be ruined.\"\n\n\n The brothers discussed the situation for an hour, and all the while\n Father Kalrab sat and pulled his scanty whiskers. Seeing that they got\n nowhere with their wrangle, he cleared his throat and spoke up.",
"It would do no good, Zotul realized, to bring up the fact that their\n production of ceramic cooking pots had dropped off to about two per\n cent of its former volume. Of course, profits on the line of new stoves\n greatly overbalanced the loss, so that actually they were ahead; but\n their business was now dependent upon the supply of the metal pots from\n Earth.\n\n\n About this time, plastic utensils—dishes, cups, knives, forks—made\n their appearance on Zur. It became very stylish to eat with the\n newfangled paraphernalia ... and very cheap, too, because for\n everything they sold, the Earthmen always took the old ware in trade.\n What they did with the stuff had been hard to believe at first. They\n destroyed it, which proved how valueless it really was.",
"Kent Broderick, the Earthman in charge of the Council, shook hands\n jovially with Zotul. That alien custom conformed with, Zotul took a\n better look at his host. Broderick was an affable, smiling individual\n with genial laugh wrinkles at his eyes. A man of middle age, dressed in\n the baggy costume of Zur, he looked almost like a Zurian, except for\n an indefinite sense of alienness about him.\n\n\n \"Glad to have you call on us, Mr. Masur,\" boomed the Earthman, clapping\n Zotul on the back. \"Just tell us your troubles and we'll have you\n straightened out in no time.\"\nAll the chill recriminations and arguments Zotul had stored for this\n occasion were dissipated in the warmth of the Earthman's manner.\n\n\n Almost apologetically, Zotul told of the encroachment that had been\n made upon the business of the Pottery of Masur."
],
[
"\"I see.\" Zotul puzzled over it sadly. \"It is too much,\" he said. \"Our\n plant doesn't make enough money for us to meet the payments.\"\n\n\n \"I have a surprise for you,\" smiled Broderick. \"Here is a contract. You\n will start making ceramic parts for automobile spark plugs and certain\n parts for radios and gas ranges. It is our policy to encourage local\n manufacture to help bring prices down.\"\n\n\n \"We haven't the equipment.\"\n\n\n \"We will equip your plant,\" beamed Broderick. \"It will require only\n a quarter interest in your plant itself, assigned to our terrestrial\n company.\"\nZotul, anxious to possess the treasures promised by the Earthman,\n won over his brothers. They signed with marks and gave up a quarter\n interest in the Pottery of Masur. They rolled in the luxuries of Earth.\n These, who had never known debt before, were in it up to their ears.",
"After he had beaten his wife thoroughly for her foolishness, Zotul\n stamped off in a rage and designed a new ceramic stove, one that would\n accommodate the terrestrial pots very well.\n\n\n And Koltan put the model into production.\n\n\n \"Orders already are pouring in like mad,\" he said the next day. \"It\n was wise of you to foresee it and have the design ready. Already, I am\n sorry for thinking as I did about the Earthmen. They really intend to\n do well by us.\"",
"\"It\nis\na damned imposition,\" agreed Morvan, ignoring his father's\n philosophical attitude. \"They could have landed just as easily here in\n Lor.\"\n\n\n \"The Thorabians will lick up the gravy,\" said Singula, whose mind ran\n rather to matters of financial aspect, \"and leave us the grease.\"\n\n\n By this, he seemed to imply that the Thorabians would rob the Earthmen,\n which the Lorians would not. The truth was that all on Zur were panting\n to get their hands on that marvelous ship, which was all of metal, a\n very scarce commodity on Zur, worth billions of ken.\nLubiosa, who had interests in Thorabia, and many agents there, kept his\n own counsel. His people were active in the matter and that was enough\n for him. He would report when the time was ripe.",
"At the head of the long, shining table sat old Kalrab Masur, in his\n dotage, but still giving what he could of aid and comfort to the\n Pottery of Masur, even though nobody listened to him any more and\n he knew it. Around the table sat the six brothers—Koltan, eldest\n and Director of the Pottery; Morvan, his vice-chief; Singula, their\n treasurer; Thendro, sales manager; Lubiosa, export chief; and last in\n the rank of age, Zotul, who was responsible for affairs of design.\n\n\n \"Behold, my sons,\" said Kalrab, stroking his scanty beard. \"What are\n these Earthmen to worry about? Remember the clay. It is our strength\n and our fortune. It is the muscle and bone of our trade. Earthmen may\n come and Earthmen may go, but clay goes on forever ... and with it, the\n fame and fortune of the House of Masur.\"",
"The retooled plant forged ahead and profits began to look up, but the\n Earthmen took a fourth of them as their share in the industry.\n\n\n For a year, the brothers drove their shiny new cars about on the\n new concrete highways the Earthmen had built. From pumps owned by a\n terrestrial company, they bought gas and oil that had been drawn from\n the crust of Zur and was sold to the Zurians at a magnificent profit.\n The food they ate was cooked in Earthly pots on Earth-type gas ranges,\n served up on metal plates that had been stamped out on Earth. In the\n winter, they toasted their shins before handsome gas grates, though\n they had gas-fired central heating.",
"In their dozenth conference since that first and fateful one, the\n brothers Masur decided upon drastic steps. In the meantime, several\n things had happened. For one, old Kalrab had passed on to his immortal\n rest, but this made no real difference. For another, the Earthmen had\n procured legal authority to prospect the planet for metals, of which\n they found a good deal, but they told no one on Zur of this. What\n they did mention was the crude oil and natural gas they discovered\n in the underlayers of the planet's crust. Crews of Zurians, working\n under supervision of the Earthmen, laid pipelines from the gas and oil\n regions to every major and minor city on Zur.\nBy the time ten years had passed since the landing of the first\n terrestrial ship, the Earthmen were conducting a brisk business in\n gas-fired ranges, furnaces and heaters ... and the Masur stove business\n was gone. Moreover, the Earthmen sold the Zurians their own natural gas\n at a nice profit and everybody was happy with the situation except the\n brothers Masur.",
"\"To begin with,\" he said, \"I am going to make you a gift of all these\n luxuries you do not have.\" As Zotul made to protest, he cut him off\n with a wave of his hand. \"It is the least we can do for you. Pick a car\n from the lot outside. I will arrange to have the other things delivered\n and installed in your home.\"\n\n\n \"To receive gifts,\" said Zotul, \"incurs an obligation.\"\n\n\n \"None at all,\" beamed the Earthman cheerily. \"Every item is given to\n you absolutely free—a gift from the people of Earth. All we ask is\n that you pay the freight charges on the items. Our purpose is not to\n make profit, but to spread technology and prosperity throughout the\n Galaxy. We have already done well on numerous worlds, but working out\n the full program takes time.\"",
"Such jubilation proved premature, however. One day, a fleet of ships\n arrived and after they had landed all over the planet, Zur was\n practically acrawl with Earthmen.\n\n\n Immediately, the Earthmen established what they called\n \"corporations\"—Zurian trading companies under terrestrial control. The\n object of the visit was trade.\n\n\n In spite of the fact that a terrestrial ship had landed at every Zurian\n city of major and minor importance, and all in a single day, it took\n some time for the news to spread.\n\n\n The first awareness Zotul had was that, upon coming home from the\n pottery one evening, he found his wife Lania proudly brandishing an\n aluminum pot at him.\n\n\n \"What is that thing?\" he asked curiously.\n\n\n \"A pot. I bought it at the market.\"",
"He chuckled deeply. \"We of Earth have a saying about one of our\n extremely slow-moving native animals. We say, 'Slow is the tortoise,\n but sure.' And so with us. Our goal is a long-range one, with the\n motto, 'Better times with better merchandise.'\"\nThe engaging manner of the man won Zotul's confidence. After all, it\n was no more than fair to pay transportation.\n\n\n He said, \"How much does the freight cost?\"\n\n\n Broderick told him.\n\n\n \"It may seem high,\" said the Earthman, \"but remember that Earth is\n sixty-odd light-years away. After all, we are absorbing the cost of the\n merchandise. All you pay is the freight, which is cheap, considering\n the cost of operating an interstellar spaceship.\"\n\n\n \"Impossible,\" said Zotul drably. \"Not I and all my brothers together\n have so much money any more.\"",
"\"You don't know us of Earth very well yet, but you will. I offer you\n credit!\"\n\n\n \"What is that?\" asked Zotul skeptically.\n\n\n \"It is how the poor are enabled to enjoy all the luxuries of the\n rich,\" said Broderick, and went on to give a thumbnail sketch of the\n involutions and devolutions of credit, leaving out some angles that\n might have had a discouraging effect.\n\n\n On a world where credit was a totally new concept, it was enchanting.\n Zotul grasped at the glittering promise with avidity. \"What must I do\n to get credit?\"\n\n\n \"Just sign this paper,\" said Broderick, \"and you become part of our\n Easy Payment Plan.\"\n\n\n Zotul drew back. \"I have five brothers. If I took all these things for\n myself and nothing for them, they would beat me black and blue.\"",
"\"You got us into this,\" they said, emphasizing their bitterness with\n fists. \"Go see Broderick. Tell him we are undone and must have some\n contracts to continue operating.\"\n\n\n Nursing bruises, Zotul unhappily went to the Council House again. Mr.\n Broderick was no longer with them, a suave assistant informed him.\n Would he like to see Mr. Siwicki instead? Zotul would.\n\n\n Siwicki was tall, thin, dark and somber-looking. There was even a hint\n of toughness about the set of his jaw and the hardness of his glance.\n\n\n \"So you can't pay,\" he said, tapping his teeth with a pencil. He\n looked at Zotul coldly. \"It is well you have come to us instead of\n making it necessary for us to approach you through the courts.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what you mean,\" said Zotul.",
"About this time, the ships from Earth brought steam-powered electric\n generators. Lines went up, power was generated, and a flood of\n electrical gadgets and appliances hit the market. For some reason,\n batteries for the radios were no longer available and everybody had to\n buy the new radios. And who could do without a radio in this modern age?\n\n\n The homes of the brothers Masur blossomed on the Easy Payment Plan.\n They had refrigerators, washers, driers, toasters, grills, electric\n fans, air-conditioning equipment and everything else Earth could\n possibly sell them.\n\n\n \"We will be forty years paying it all off,\" exulted Zotul, \"but\n meantime we have the things and aren't they worth it?\"",
"The next time the brothers went to see the governor, he said, \"I cannot\n handle such complaints as yours. I must refer you to the Merchandising\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"What is that?\" asked Koltan.\n\n\n \"It is an Earthman association that deals with complaints such as\n yours. In the matter of material progress, we must expect some strain\n in the fabric of our culture. Machinery has been set up to deal with\n it. Here is their address; go air your troubles to them.\"\n\n\n The business of a formal complaint was turned over by the brothers to\n Zotul. It took three weeks for the Earthmen to get around to calling\n him in, as a representative of the Pottery of Masur, for an interview.\n\n\n All the brothers could no longer be spared from the plant, even for the\n purpose of pressing a complaint. Their days of idle wealth over, they\n had to get in and work with the clay with the rest of the help.",
"\"Don't be idiotic! Do you suppose Koltan would agree to produce a new\n type of stove when the old has sold well for centuries? Besides, why do\n you need a whole new stove for one little pot?\"\n\n\n \"A dozen pots. They come in sets and are cheaper that way. And Koltan\n will have to produce the new stove because all the housewives are\n buying these pots and there will be a big demand for it. The Earthman\n said so.\"\n\n\n \"He did, did he? These pots are only a fad. You will soon enough go\n back to cooking with your old ones.\"\n\n\n \"The Earthman took them in trade—one reason why the new ones are so\n cheap. There isn't a pot in the house but these metal ones, and you\n will have to design and produce a new stove if you expect me to use\n them.\"",
"It would do no good, Zotul realized, to bring up the fact that their\n production of ceramic cooking pots had dropped off to about two per\n cent of its former volume. Of course, profits on the line of new stoves\n greatly overbalanced the loss, so that actually they were ahead; but\n their business was now dependent upon the supply of the metal pots from\n Earth.\n\n\n About this time, plastic utensils—dishes, cups, knives, forks—made\n their appearance on Zur. It became very stylish to eat with the\n newfangled paraphernalia ... and very cheap, too, because for\n everything they sold, the Earthmen always took the old ware in trade.\n What they did with the stuff had been hard to believe at first. They\n destroyed it, which proved how valueless it really was.",
"\"Doubtless,\" said Zotul unexpectedly, for the youngest at a conference\n was expected to keep his mouth shut and applaud the decisions of his\n elders, \"the Earthmen used all the metal on their planet in building\n that ship. We cannot possibly bilk them of it; it is their only means\n of transport.\"\n\n\n Such frank expression of motive was unheard of, even in the secret\n conclave of conference. Only the speaker's youth could account for it.\n The speech drew scowls from the brothers and stern rebuke from Koltan.\n\n\n \"When your opinion is wanted, we will ask you for it. Meantime,\n remember your position in the family.\"\n\n\n Zotul bowed his head meekly, but he burned with resentment.\n\n\n \"Listen to the boy,\" said the aged father. \"There is more wisdom in his\n head than in all the rest of you. Forget the Earthmen and think only of\n the clay.\"",
"\"Yours is the last business on Zur to be taken over by us. We have\n bought you out.\"\n\n\n \"Our government....\"\n\n\n \"Your governments belong to us, too,\" said Broderick. \"When they could\n not pay for the roads, the telegraphs, the civic improvements, we took\n them over, just as we are taking you over.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" exclaimed Zotul, aghast, \"that you Earthmen own everything\n on Zur?\"\n\n\n \"Even your armies.\"\n\n\n \"But\nwhy\n?\"\nBroderick clasped his hands behind back, went to the window and stared\n down moodily into the street.\n\n\n \"You don't know what an overcrowded world is like,\" he said. \"A street\n like this, with so few people and vehicles on it, would be impossible\n on Earth.\"",
"\"My sons, you forget it is not the Earthmen themselves at the bottom\n of your trouble, but the\nthings\nof Earth. Think of the telegraph and\n the newspaper, how these spread news of every shipment from Earth.\n The merchandise of the Earthmen is put up for sale by means of these\n newspapers, which also are the property of the Earthmen. The people are\n intrigued by these advertisements, as they are called, and flock to\n buy. Now, if you would pull a tooth from the kwi that bites you, you\n might also have advertisements of your own.\"\n\n\n Alas for that suggestion, no newspaper would accept advertising\n from the House of Masur; all available space was occupied by the\n advertisements of the Earthmen.",
"\"They are replacing our high-quality ceramic ware with inferior\n terrestrial junk,\" Koltan went on bitterly. \"It is only the glamor that\n sells it, of course, but before the people get the shine out of their\n eyes, we can be ruined.\"\n\n\n The brothers discussed the situation for an hour, and all the while\n Father Kalrab sat and pulled his scanty whiskers. Seeing that they got\n nowhere with their wrangle, he cleared his throat and spoke up.",
"\"Here.\" Broderick handed him a sheaf of chattel mortgages. \"Have each\n of your brothers sign one of these, then bring them back to me. That is\n all there is to it.\"\n\n\n It sounded wonderful. But how would the brothers take it? Zotul\n wrestled with his misgivings and the misgivings won.\n\n\n \"I will talk it over with them,\" he said. \"Give me the total so I will\n have the figures.\"\n\n\n The total was more than it ought to be by simple addition. Zotul\n pointed this out politely.\n\n\n \"Interest,\" Broderick explained. \"A mere fifteen per cent. After all,\n you get the merchandise free. The transportation company has to be\n paid, so another company loans you the money to pay for the freight.\n This small extra sum pays the lending company for its trouble.\""
],
[
"In their dozenth conference since that first and fateful one, the\n brothers Masur decided upon drastic steps. In the meantime, several\n things had happened. For one, old Kalrab had passed on to his immortal\n rest, but this made no real difference. For another, the Earthmen had\n procured legal authority to prospect the planet for metals, of which\n they found a good deal, but they told no one on Zur of this. What\n they did mention was the crude oil and natural gas they discovered\n in the underlayers of the planet's crust. Crews of Zurians, working\n under supervision of the Earthmen, laid pipelines from the gas and oil\n regions to every major and minor city on Zur.\nBy the time ten years had passed since the landing of the first\n terrestrial ship, the Earthmen were conducting a brisk business in\n gas-fired ranges, furnaces and heaters ... and the Masur stove business\n was gone. Moreover, the Earthmen sold the Zurians their own natural gas\n at a nice profit and everybody was happy with the situation except the\n brothers Masur.",
"The retooled plant forged ahead and profits began to look up, but the\n Earthmen took a fourth of them as their share in the industry.\n\n\n For a year, the brothers drove their shiny new cars about on the\n new concrete highways the Earthmen had built. From pumps owned by a\n terrestrial company, they bought gas and oil that had been drawn from\n the crust of Zur and was sold to the Zurians at a magnificent profit.\n The food they ate was cooked in Earthly pots on Earth-type gas ranges,\n served up on metal plates that had been stamped out on Earth. In the\n winter, they toasted their shins before handsome gas grates, though\n they had gas-fired central heating.",
"The Earthmen were going to do great things for the whole world of\n Zur. It required but the cooperation—an excellent word, that—of all\n Zurians, and many blessings would rain down from the skies. This, in\n effect, was what the Earthmen had to say. Zotul felt greatly cheered,\n for it refuted the attitude of his brothers without earning him a\n whaling for it.\n\n\n There was also some talk going around about agreements made between\n the Earthmen and officials of the Lorian government, but you heard one\n thing one day and another the next. Accurate reporting, much less a\n newspaper, was unknown on Zur.\n\n\n Finally, the Earthmen took off in their great, shining ship. Obviously,\n none had succeeded in chiseling them out of it, if, indeed, any had\n tried. The anti-Earthmen Faction—in any culture complex, there is\n always an \"anti\" faction to protest any movement of endeavor—crowed\n happily that the Earthmen were gone for good, and a good thing, too.",
"Such jubilation proved premature, however. One day, a fleet of ships\n arrived and after they had landed all over the planet, Zur was\n practically acrawl with Earthmen.\n\n\n Immediately, the Earthmen established what they called\n \"corporations\"—Zurian trading companies under terrestrial control. The\n object of the visit was trade.\n\n\n In spite of the fact that a terrestrial ship had landed at every Zurian\n city of major and minor importance, and all in a single day, it took\n some time for the news to spread.\n\n\n The first awareness Zotul had was that, upon coming home from the\n pottery one evening, he found his wife Lania proudly brandishing an\n aluminum pot at him.\n\n\n \"What is that thing?\" he asked curiously.\n\n\n \"A pot. I bought it at the market.\"",
"\"It\nis\na damned imposition,\" agreed Morvan, ignoring his father's\n philosophical attitude. \"They could have landed just as easily here in\n Lor.\"\n\n\n \"The Thorabians will lick up the gravy,\" said Singula, whose mind ran\n rather to matters of financial aspect, \"and leave us the grease.\"\n\n\n By this, he seemed to imply that the Thorabians would rob the Earthmen,\n which the Lorians would not. The truth was that all on Zur were panting\n to get their hands on that marvelous ship, which was all of metal, a\n very scarce commodity on Zur, worth billions of ken.\nLubiosa, who had interests in Thorabia, and many agents there, kept his\n own counsel. His people were active in the matter and that was enough\n for him. He would report when the time was ripe.",
"The drastic steps of the brothers applied, therefore, to making an\n energetic protest to the governor of Lor.\n\n\n At one edge of the city, an area had been turned over to the Earthmen\n for a spaceport, and the great terrestrial spaceships came to it and\n departed from it at regular intervals. As the heirs of the House of\n Masur walked by on their way to see the governor, Zotul observed that\n much new building was taking place and wondered what it was.\n\n\n \"Some new devilment of the Earthmen, you can be sure,\" said Koltan\n blackly.\n\n\n In fact, the Earthmen were building an assembly plant for radio\n receiving sets. The ship now standing on its fins upon the apron was\n loaded with printed circuits, resistors, variable condensers and other\n radio parts. This was Earth's first step toward flooding Zur with the\n natural follow-up in its campaign of advertising—radio programs—with\n commercials.",
"Happily for the brothers, they did not understand this at the time or\n they would surely have gone back to be buried in their own clay.\n\n\n \"I think,\" the governor told them, \"that you gentlemen have not\n paused to consider the affair from all angles. You must learn to be\n modern—keep up with the times! We heads of government on Zur are doing\n all in our power to aid the Earthmen and facilitate their bringing a\n great, new culture that can only benefit us. See how Zur has changed in\n ten short years! Imagine the world of tomorrow! Why, do you know they\n are even bringing\nautos\nto Zur!\"\n\n\n The brothers were fascinated with the governor's description of these\n hitherto unheard-of vehicles.\n\n\n \"It only remains,\" concluded the governor, \"to build highways, and the\n Earthmen are taking care of that.\"",
"Moreover, the Earthmen brought miles of copper wire—more than enough\n in value to buy out the governorship of any country on Zur—and set up\n telegraph lines from country to country and continent to continent.\n Within five years of the first landing of the Earthmen, every major\n city on the globe had a printing press, a daily newspaper, and enjoyed\n the instantaneous transmission of news via telegraph. And the business\n of the House of Masur continued to look up.\n\n\n \"As I have always said from the beginning,\" chortled Director Koltan,\n \"this coming of the Earthmen had been a great thing for us, and\n especially for the House of Masur.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't think so at first,\" Zotul pointed out, and was immediately\n sorry, for Koltan turned and gave him a hiding, single-handed, for his\n unthinkable impertinence.",
"It would do no good, Zotul realized, to bring up the fact that their\n production of ceramic cooking pots had dropped off to about two per\n cent of its former volume. Of course, profits on the line of new stoves\n greatly overbalanced the loss, so that actually they were ahead; but\n their business was now dependent upon the supply of the metal pots from\n Earth.\n\n\n About this time, plastic utensils—dishes, cups, knives, forks—made\n their appearance on Zur. It became very stylish to eat with the\n newfangled paraphernalia ... and very cheap, too, because for\n everything they sold, the Earthmen always took the old ware in trade.\n What they did with the stuff had been hard to believe at first. They\n destroyed it, which proved how valueless it really was.",
"\"Yours is the last business on Zur to be taken over by us. We have\n bought you out.\"\n\n\n \"Our government....\"\n\n\n \"Your governments belong to us, too,\" said Broderick. \"When they could\n not pay for the roads, the telegraphs, the civic improvements, we took\n them over, just as we are taking you over.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" exclaimed Zotul, aghast, \"that you Earthmen own everything\n on Zur?\"\n\n\n \"Even your armies.\"\n\n\n \"But\nwhy\n?\"\nBroderick clasped his hands behind back, went to the window and stared\n down moodily into the street.\n\n\n \"You don't know what an overcrowded world is like,\" he said. \"A street\n like this, with so few people and vehicles on it, would be impossible\n on Earth.\"",
"\"Once,\" he said formally, \"the Masur fortune was the greatest in\n the world of Zur. That was before my father, the famous Kalrab\n Masur—Divinity protect him—departed this life to collect his greater\n reward. He often told us, my father did, that the clay is the flesh and\n bones of our culture and our fortune. Now it has been shown how prone\n is the flesh to corruption and how feeble the bones. We are ruined, and\n all because of new things coming from Earth.\"\n\n\n Broderick stroked his shaven chin and looked sad. \"Why didn't you come\n to me sooner? This would never have happened. But now that it has,\n we're going to do right by you. That is the policy of Earth—always to\n do right by the customer.\"\n\n\n \"Divinity witness,\" Zorin said, \"that we ask only compensation for\n damages.\"",
"\"To begin with,\" he said, \"I am going to make you a gift of all these\n luxuries you do not have.\" As Zotul made to protest, he cut him off\n with a wave of his hand. \"It is the least we can do for you. Pick a car\n from the lot outside. I will arrange to have the other things delivered\n and installed in your home.\"\n\n\n \"To receive gifts,\" said Zotul, \"incurs an obligation.\"\n\n\n \"None at all,\" beamed the Earthman cheerily. \"Every item is given to\n you absolutely free—a gift from the people of Earth. All we ask is\n that you pay the freight charges on the items. Our purpose is not to\n make profit, but to spread technology and prosperity throughout the\n Galaxy. We have already done well on numerous worlds, but working out\n the full program takes time.\"",
"A Gift From Earth\nBy MANLY BANISTER\n\n\n Illustrated by KOSSIN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction August 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nExcept for transportation, it was absolutely\n \nfree ... but how much would the freight cost?\n\"It is an outrage,\" said Koltan of the House of Masur, \"that the\n Earthmen land among the Thorabians!\"\n\n\n Zotul, youngest of the Masur brothers, stirred uneasily. Personally, he\n was in favor of the coming of the Earthmen to the world of Zur.",
"The printing plants that turned out mortgage contracts did a lush\n business.\nFor the common people of Zur, times were good everywhere. In a decade\n and a half, the Earthmen had wrought magnificent changes on this\n backward world. As Broderick had said, the progress of the tortoise was\n slow, but it was extremely sure.\n\n\n The brothers Masur got along in spite of dropped options. They had less\n money and felt the pinch of their debts more keenly, but television\n kept their wives and children amused and furnished an anodyne for the\n pangs of impoverishment.\n\n\n The pottery income dropped to an impossible low, no matter how Zotul\n designed and the brothers produced. Their figurines and religious ikons\n were a drug on the market. The Earthmen made them of plastic and sold\n them for less.\n\n\n The brothers, unable to meet the Payments that were not so Easy any\n more, looked up Zotul and cuffed him around reproachfully.",
"But at the end of three years, the Earthmen dropped their option.\n The Pottery of Masur had no more contracts. Business languished. The\n Earthmen, explained Broderick, had built a plant of their own because\n it was so much more efficient—and to lower prices, which was Earth's\n unswerving policy, greater and greater efficiency was demanded.\n Broderick was very sympathetic, but there was nothing he could do.\n\n\n The introduction of television provided a further calamity. The sets\n were delicate and needed frequent repairs, hence were costly to own and\n maintain. But all Zurians who had to keep up with the latest from Earth\n had them. Now it was possible not only to hear about things of Earth,\n but to see them as they were broadcast from the video tapes.",
"Kent Broderick, the Earthman in charge of the Council, shook hands\n jovially with Zotul. That alien custom conformed with, Zotul took a\n better look at his host. Broderick was an affable, smiling individual\n with genial laugh wrinkles at his eyes. A man of middle age, dressed in\n the baggy costume of Zur, he looked almost like a Zurian, except for\n an indefinite sense of alienness about him.\n\n\n \"Glad to have you call on us, Mr. Masur,\" boomed the Earthman, clapping\n Zotul on the back. \"Just tell us your troubles and we'll have you\n straightened out in no time.\"\nAll the chill recriminations and arguments Zotul had stored for this\n occasion were dissipated in the warmth of the Earthman's manner.\n\n\n Almost apologetically, Zotul told of the encroachment that had been\n made upon the business of the Pottery of Masur.",
"At any rate, the brothers Masur were still able to console themselves\n that they had their tile business. Tile served well enough for houses\n and street surfacing; what better material could be devised for the new\n highways the governor spoke of? There was a lot of money to be made\n yet.\nRadio stations went up all over Zur and began broadcasting. The people\n bought receiving sets like mad. The automobiles arrived and highways\n were constructed.\n\n\n The last hope of the brothers was dashed. The Earthmen set up plants\n and began to manufacture Portland cement.\n\n\n You could build a house of concrete much cheaper than with tile. Of\n course, since wood was scarce on Zur, it was no competition for either\n tile or concrete. Concrete floors were smoother, too, and the stuff\n made far better road surfacing.\n\n\n The demand for Masur tile hit rock bottom.",
"\"I see.\" Zotul puzzled over it sadly. \"It is too much,\" he said. \"Our\n plant doesn't make enough money for us to meet the payments.\"\n\n\n \"I have a surprise for you,\" smiled Broderick. \"Here is a contract. You\n will start making ceramic parts for automobile spark plugs and certain\n parts for radios and gas ranges. It is our policy to encourage local\n manufacture to help bring prices down.\"\n\n\n \"We haven't the equipment.\"\n\n\n \"We will equip your plant,\" beamed Broderick. \"It will require only\n a quarter interest in your plant itself, assigned to our terrestrial\n company.\"\nZotul, anxious to possess the treasures promised by the Earthman,\n won over his brothers. They signed with marks and gave up a quarter\n interest in the Pottery of Masur. They rolled in the luxuries of Earth.\n These, who had never known debt before, were in it up to their ears.",
"Still smarting, Zotul went back to his designing quarters and thought\n about the Earthmen. If it was impossible to hope for much in the way\n of metal from the Earthmen, what could one get from them? If he could\n figure this problem out, he might rise somewhat in the estimation of\n his brothers. That wouldn't take him out of the rank of scapegoat, of\n course, but the beatings might become fewer and less severe.\nBy and by, the Earthmen came to Lor, flying through the air in strange\n metal contraptions. They paraded through the tile-paved streets of the\n city, marveled here, as they had in Thorabia, at the buildings all of\n tile inside and out, and made a great show of themselves for all the\n people to see. Speeches were made through interpreters, who had much\n too quickly learned the tongue of the aliens; hence these left much to\n be desired in the way of clarity, though their sincerity was evident.",
"He chuckled deeply. \"We of Earth have a saying about one of our\n extremely slow-moving native animals. We say, 'Slow is the tortoise,\n but sure.' And so with us. Our goal is a long-range one, with the\n motto, 'Better times with better merchandise.'\"\nThe engaging manner of the man won Zotul's confidence. After all, it\n was no more than fair to pay transportation.\n\n\n He said, \"How much does the freight cost?\"\n\n\n Broderick told him.\n\n\n \"It may seem high,\" said the Earthman, \"but remember that Earth is\n sixty-odd light-years away. After all, we are absorbing the cost of the\n merchandise. All you pay is the freight, which is cheap, considering\n the cost of operating an interstellar spaceship.\"\n\n\n \"Impossible,\" said Zotul drably. \"Not I and all my brothers together\n have so much money any more.\""
],
[
"\"Once,\" he said formally, \"the Masur fortune was the greatest in\n the world of Zur. That was before my father, the famous Kalrab\n Masur—Divinity protect him—departed this life to collect his greater\n reward. He often told us, my father did, that the clay is the flesh and\n bones of our culture and our fortune. Now it has been shown how prone\n is the flesh to corruption and how feeble the bones. We are ruined, and\n all because of new things coming from Earth.\"\n\n\n Broderick stroked his shaven chin and looked sad. \"Why didn't you come\n to me sooner? This would never have happened. But now that it has,\n we're going to do right by you. That is the policy of Earth—always to\n do right by the customer.\"\n\n\n \"Divinity witness,\" Zorin said, \"that we ask only compensation for\n damages.\"",
"He chuckled deeply. \"We of Earth have a saying about one of our\n extremely slow-moving native animals. We say, 'Slow is the tortoise,\n but sure.' And so with us. Our goal is a long-range one, with the\n motto, 'Better times with better merchandise.'\"\nThe engaging manner of the man won Zotul's confidence. After all, it\n was no more than fair to pay transportation.\n\n\n He said, \"How much does the freight cost?\"\n\n\n Broderick told him.\n\n\n \"It may seem high,\" said the Earthman, \"but remember that Earth is\n sixty-odd light-years away. After all, we are absorbing the cost of the\n merchandise. All you pay is the freight, which is cheap, considering\n the cost of operating an interstellar spaceship.\"\n\n\n \"Impossible,\" said Zotul drably. \"Not I and all my brothers together\n have so much money any more.\"",
"Kent Broderick, the Earthman in charge of the Council, shook hands\n jovially with Zotul. That alien custom conformed with, Zotul took a\n better look at his host. Broderick was an affable, smiling individual\n with genial laugh wrinkles at his eyes. A man of middle age, dressed in\n the baggy costume of Zur, he looked almost like a Zurian, except for\n an indefinite sense of alienness about him.\n\n\n \"Glad to have you call on us, Mr. Masur,\" boomed the Earthman, clapping\n Zotul on the back. \"Just tell us your troubles and we'll have you\n straightened out in no time.\"\nAll the chill recriminations and arguments Zotul had stored for this\n occasion were dissipated in the warmth of the Earthman's manner.\n\n\n Almost apologetically, Zotul told of the encroachment that had been\n made upon the business of the Pottery of Masur.",
"\"You don't know us of Earth very well yet, but you will. I offer you\n credit!\"\n\n\n \"What is that?\" asked Zotul skeptically.\n\n\n \"It is how the poor are enabled to enjoy all the luxuries of the\n rich,\" said Broderick, and went on to give a thumbnail sketch of the\n involutions and devolutions of credit, leaving out some angles that\n might have had a discouraging effect.\n\n\n On a world where credit was a totally new concept, it was enchanting.\n Zotul grasped at the glittering promise with avidity. \"What must I do\n to get credit?\"\n\n\n \"Just sign this paper,\" said Broderick, \"and you become part of our\n Easy Payment Plan.\"\n\n\n Zotul drew back. \"I have five brothers. If I took all these things for\n myself and nothing for them, they would beat me black and blue.\"",
"The next time the brothers went to see the governor, he said, \"I cannot\n handle such complaints as yours. I must refer you to the Merchandising\n Council.\"\n\n\n \"What is that?\" asked Koltan.\n\n\n \"It is an Earthman association that deals with complaints such as\n yours. In the matter of material progress, we must expect some strain\n in the fabric of our culture. Machinery has been set up to deal with\n it. Here is their address; go air your troubles to them.\"\n\n\n The business of a formal complaint was turned over by the brothers to\n Zotul. It took three weeks for the Earthmen to get around to calling\n him in, as a representative of the Pottery of Masur, for an interview.\n\n\n All the brothers could no longer be spared from the plant, even for the\n purpose of pressing a complaint. Their days of idle wealth over, they\n had to get in and work with the clay with the rest of the help.",
"\"To begin with,\" he said, \"I am going to make you a gift of all these\n luxuries you do not have.\" As Zotul made to protest, he cut him off\n with a wave of his hand. \"It is the least we can do for you. Pick a car\n from the lot outside. I will arrange to have the other things delivered\n and installed in your home.\"\n\n\n \"To receive gifts,\" said Zotul, \"incurs an obligation.\"\n\n\n \"None at all,\" beamed the Earthman cheerily. \"Every item is given to\n you absolutely free—a gift from the people of Earth. All we ask is\n that you pay the freight charges on the items. Our purpose is not to\n make profit, but to spread technology and prosperity throughout the\n Galaxy. We have already done well on numerous worlds, but working out\n the full program takes time.\"",
"About this time, the ships from Earth brought steam-powered electric\n generators. Lines went up, power was generated, and a flood of\n electrical gadgets and appliances hit the market. For some reason,\n batteries for the radios were no longer available and everybody had to\n buy the new radios. And who could do without a radio in this modern age?\n\n\n The homes of the brothers Masur blossomed on the Easy Payment Plan.\n They had refrigerators, washers, driers, toasters, grills, electric\n fans, air-conditioning equipment and everything else Earth could\n possibly sell them.\n\n\n \"We will be forty years paying it all off,\" exulted Zotul, \"but\n meantime we have the things and aren't they worth it?\"",
"But at the end of three years, the Earthmen dropped their option.\n The Pottery of Masur had no more contracts. Business languished. The\n Earthmen, explained Broderick, had built a plant of their own because\n it was so much more efficient—and to lower prices, which was Earth's\n unswerving policy, greater and greater efficiency was demanded.\n Broderick was very sympathetic, but there was nothing he could do.\n\n\n The introduction of television provided a further calamity. The sets\n were delicate and needed frequent repairs, hence were costly to own and\n maintain. But all Zurians who had to keep up with the latest from Earth\n had them. Now it was possible not only to hear about things of Earth,\n but to see them as they were broadcast from the video tapes.",
"\"I see.\" Zotul puzzled over it sadly. \"It is too much,\" he said. \"Our\n plant doesn't make enough money for us to meet the payments.\"\n\n\n \"I have a surprise for you,\" smiled Broderick. \"Here is a contract. You\n will start making ceramic parts for automobile spark plugs and certain\n parts for radios and gas ranges. It is our policy to encourage local\n manufacture to help bring prices down.\"\n\n\n \"We haven't the equipment.\"\n\n\n \"We will equip your plant,\" beamed Broderick. \"It will require only\n a quarter interest in your plant itself, assigned to our terrestrial\n company.\"\nZotul, anxious to possess the treasures promised by the Earthman,\n won over his brothers. They signed with marks and gave up a quarter\n interest in the Pottery of Masur. They rolled in the luxuries of Earth.\n These, who had never known debt before, were in it up to their ears.",
"\"They are replacing our high-quality ceramic ware with inferior\n terrestrial junk,\" Koltan went on bitterly. \"It is only the glamor that\n sells it, of course, but before the people get the shine out of their\n eyes, we can be ruined.\"\n\n\n The brothers discussed the situation for an hour, and all the while\n Father Kalrab sat and pulled his scanty whiskers. Seeing that they got\n nowhere with their wrangle, he cleared his throat and spoke up.",
"Such jubilation proved premature, however. One day, a fleet of ships\n arrived and after they had landed all over the planet, Zur was\n practically acrawl with Earthmen.\n\n\n Immediately, the Earthmen established what they called\n \"corporations\"—Zurian trading companies under terrestrial control. The\n object of the visit was trade.\n\n\n In spite of the fact that a terrestrial ship had landed at every Zurian\n city of major and minor importance, and all in a single day, it took\n some time for the news to spread.\n\n\n The first awareness Zotul had was that, upon coming home from the\n pottery one evening, he found his wife Lania proudly brandishing an\n aluminum pot at him.\n\n\n \"What is that thing?\" he asked curiously.\n\n\n \"A pot. I bought it at the market.\"",
"\"Did you now? Well, take it back. Am I made of money that you spend my\n substance for some fool's product of precious metal? Take it back, I\n say!\"\nThe pretty young wife laughed at him. \"Up to your ears in clay, no\n wonder you hear nothing of news! The pot is very cheap. The Earthmen\n are selling them everywhere. They're much better than our old clay\n pots; they're light and easy to handle and they don't break when\n dropped.\"\n\n\n \"What good is it?\" asked Zotul, interested. \"How will it hold heat,\n being so light?\"\n\n\n \"The Earthmen don't cook as we do,\" she explained patiently. \"There is\n a paper with each pot that explains how it is used. And you will have\n to design a new ceramic stove for me to use the pots on.\"",
"The result of the new flood was that in the following year, the sale of\n Masur ceramic table service dropped to less than a tenth.\nTrembling with excitement at this news from their book-keeper, Koltan\n called an emergency meeting. He even routed old Kalrab out of his\n senile stupor for the occasion, on the off chance that the old man\n might still have a little wit left that could be helpful.\n\n\n \"Note,\" Koltan announced in a shaky voice, \"that the Earthmen undermine\n our business,\" and he read off the figures.\n\n\n \"Perhaps,\" said Zotul, \"it is a good thing also, as you said before,\n and will result in something even better for us.\"\n\n\n Koltan frowned, and Zotul, in fear of another beating, instantly\n subsided.",
"At the head of the long, shining table sat old Kalrab Masur, in his\n dotage, but still giving what he could of aid and comfort to the\n Pottery of Masur, even though nobody listened to him any more and\n he knew it. Around the table sat the six brothers—Koltan, eldest\n and Director of the Pottery; Morvan, his vice-chief; Singula, their\n treasurer; Thendro, sales manager; Lubiosa, export chief; and last in\n the rank of age, Zotul, who was responsible for affairs of design.\n\n\n \"Behold, my sons,\" said Kalrab, stroking his scanty beard. \"What are\n these Earthmen to worry about? Remember the clay. It is our strength\n and our fortune. It is the muscle and bone of our trade. Earthmen may\n come and Earthmen may go, but clay goes on forever ... and with it, the\n fame and fortune of the House of Masur.\"",
"Broderick shook his head. \"It is not possible to replace an immense\n fortune at this late date. As I said, you should have reported your\n trouble sooner. However, we can give you an opportunity to rebuild. Do\n you own an automobile?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"A gas range? A gas-fired furnace? A radio?\"\n\n\n Zotul had to answer no to all except the radio. \"My wife Lania likes\n the music,\" he explained. \"I cannot afford the other things.\"\n\n\n Broderick clucked sympathetically. One who could not afford the\n bargain-priced merchandise of Earth must be poor indeed.",
"\"It\nis\na damned imposition,\" agreed Morvan, ignoring his father's\n philosophical attitude. \"They could have landed just as easily here in\n Lor.\"\n\n\n \"The Thorabians will lick up the gravy,\" said Singula, whose mind ran\n rather to matters of financial aspect, \"and leave us the grease.\"\n\n\n By this, he seemed to imply that the Thorabians would rob the Earthmen,\n which the Lorians would not. The truth was that all on Zur were panting\n to get their hands on that marvelous ship, which was all of metal, a\n very scarce commodity on Zur, worth billions of ken.\nLubiosa, who had interests in Thorabia, and many agents there, kept his\n own counsel. His people were active in the matter and that was enough\n for him. He would report when the time was ripe.",
"After he had beaten his wife thoroughly for her foolishness, Zotul\n stamped off in a rage and designed a new ceramic stove, one that would\n accommodate the terrestrial pots very well.\n\n\n And Koltan put the model into production.\n\n\n \"Orders already are pouring in like mad,\" he said the next day. \"It\n was wise of you to foresee it and have the design ready. Already, I am\n sorry for thinking as I did about the Earthmen. They really intend to\n do well by us.\"",
"It would do no good, Zotul realized, to bring up the fact that their\n production of ceramic cooking pots had dropped off to about two per\n cent of its former volume. Of course, profits on the line of new stoves\n greatly overbalanced the loss, so that actually they were ahead; but\n their business was now dependent upon the supply of the metal pots from\n Earth.\n\n\n About this time, plastic utensils—dishes, cups, knives, forks—made\n their appearance on Zur. It became very stylish to eat with the\n newfangled paraphernalia ... and very cheap, too, because for\n everything they sold, the Earthmen always took the old ware in trade.\n What they did with the stuff had been hard to believe at first. They\n destroyed it, which proved how valueless it really was.",
"\"My sons, you forget it is not the Earthmen themselves at the bottom\n of your trouble, but the\nthings\nof Earth. Think of the telegraph and\n the newspaper, how these spread news of every shipment from Earth.\n The merchandise of the Earthmen is put up for sale by means of these\n newspapers, which also are the property of the Earthmen. The people are\n intrigued by these advertisements, as they are called, and flock to\n buy. Now, if you would pull a tooth from the kwi that bites you, you\n might also have advertisements of your own.\"\n\n\n Alas for that suggestion, no newspaper would accept advertising\n from the House of Masur; all available space was occupied by the\n advertisements of the Earthmen.",
"The drastic steps of the brothers applied, therefore, to making an\n energetic protest to the governor of Lor.\n\n\n At one edge of the city, an area had been turned over to the Earthmen\n for a spaceport, and the great terrestrial spaceships came to it and\n departed from it at regular intervals. As the heirs of the House of\n Masur walked by on their way to see the governor, Zotul observed that\n much new building was taking place and wondered what it was.\n\n\n \"Some new devilment of the Earthmen, you can be sure,\" said Koltan\n blackly.\n\n\n In fact, the Earthmen were building an assembly plant for radio\n receiving sets. The ship now standing on its fins upon the apron was\n loaded with printed circuits, resistors, variable condensers and other\n radio parts. This was Earth's first step toward flooding Zur with the\n natural follow-up in its campaign of advertising—radio programs—with\n commercials."
]
] |
train
|
51433
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[
"Why are they hunting the farn beast?",
"How does Ri feel about Extrone?",
"How does Mia feel about Extrone?",
"Why are Ri and Mia afraid of Extrone?",
"How does Lin feel about Extrone?",
"If Mia is wealthy enough to buy half the planet why is he Extrone's guide?",
"Who is Extrone?",
"Why doesn't Extrone shoot the farn beasts?",
"Why isn't Extrone afraid of the aliens?"
] |
[
[
"This is a vacation hunting trip for Extrone.",
"They are hunting the farn beasts because farn beasts are dangerous.",
"Farn beasts are dangerous creatures that must be eliminated.",
"Farn beasts are delicious."
],
[
"Ri thinks Extrone is the kind of ruler the system needs.",
"Ri hates Extrone and is planning on killing him at the first opportunity.",
"Ri is frightened that Extrone is going to kill him.",
"Ri is frightened of Extrone, but he doesn't think Extrone will kill him."
],
[
"Mia is frightened of Extrone, but he doesn't think Extrone will kill him.",
"Mia hates Extrone and is planning on killing him at the first opportunity.",
"Mia is frightened that Extrone is going to kill him.",
"Mia thinks Extrone is the kind of ruler the system needs."
],
[
"Extrone is a ruthless and powerful overlord.",
"Extrone is an evil, hulking demon.",
"Extrone has immense power and can kill them with just a look.",
"Extrone is four times their size."
],
[
"Mia is frightened of Extrone, but he doesn't think Extrone will kill him.",
"Lin hates Extrone and is planning on killing him at the first opportunity.",
"Lin thinks Extrone is the kind of ruler the system needs.",
"Lin is frightened that Extrone is going to kill him."
],
[
"Extrone threatened to kill Mia's family if Mia didn't act as his guide.",
"Extrone found out Mia had hunted farn beasts previously and demanded Mia act as his guide.",
"Extrone kidnapped Mia, and is forcing Mia to act as his guide.",
"Extrone is the sovereign, everyone must do as Extrone commands."
],
[
"Extrone is the leader of the Ninth Fleet.",
"Extrone is an evil warlord.",
"Extrone is the ruler of this system.",
"Extrone is the leader of the rebellion."
],
[
"Extrone wants to watch the farn beasts kill Ri.",
"Extrone wants to capture the farn beasts alive.",
"Extrone doesn't shoot as he is paralyzed with fear at the sight of the farn beasts.",
"Extrone doesn't shoot because he is afraid he will hit Ri instead of the farn beasts."
],
[
"Extrone believes the aliens are inferior and incapable of launching a successful attack against him.",
"Extrone is confident his armed forces will destroy the aliens before they are able to attack him.",
"Extrone believes himself to be untouchable.",
"The Ninth Fleet is the most decorated and undefeated force. They can protect Extrone from the aliens."
]
] |
[
1,
4,
3,
1,
3,
4,
3,
1,
2
] |
[
1,
0,
0,
0,
1,
1,
1,
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1
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[
[
"Extrone began to tremble with excitement. \"Here they come!\"\n\n\n The forest sprang apart. Extrone bent forward, the gun still across his\n lap.\n\n\n The farn beast, its tiny eyes red with hate, stepped out on the bank,\n swinging its head wildly, its nostrils flaring in anger. It coughed.\n Its mate appeared beside it. Their tails thrashed against the scrubs\n behind them, rattling leaves.\n\"Shoot!\" Lin hissed. \"For God's sake, shoot!\"\n\n\n \"Wait,\" Extrone said. \"Let's see what they do.\" He had not moved\n the rifle. He was tense, bent forward, his eyes slitted, his breath\n beginning to sound like an asthmatic pump.\n\n\n The lead farn beast sighted Ri. It lowered its head.\n\n\n \"Look!\" Extrone cried excitedly. \"Here it comes!\"",
"\"We're lucky to rouse one so fast,\" Lin said.\n\n\n Extrone dug his boot cleats into the tree, braced himself. \"I like\n this. There's more excitement in waiting like this than in anything I\n know.\"\n\n\n Lin nodded.\n\n\n \"The waiting, itself, is a lot. The suspense. It's not only the killing\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"It's not\nonly\nthe killing,\" Lin echoed.\n\n\n \"You understand?\" Extrone said. \"How it is to wait, knowing in just a\n minute something is going to come out of the forest, and you're going\n to kill it?\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" Lin said.\n\n\n \"But it's not only the killing. It's the waiting, too.\"\n\n\n The farn beast coughed again; nearer.",
"Lin shifted, staring toward the forest.\n\n\n \"I've always liked to hunt,\" Extrone said. \"More than anything else, I\n think.\"\n\n\n Lin spat toward the ground. \"People should hunt because they have to.\n For food. For safety.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Extrone argued. \"People should hunt for the love of hunting.\"\n\n\n \"Killing?\"\n\n\n \"Hunting,\" Extrone repeated harshly.\nThe farn beast coughed. Another answered. They were very near, and\n there was a noise of crackling underbrush.\n\n\n \"He's good bait,\" Extrone said. \"He's fat enough and he knows how to\n scream good.\"\n\n\n Ri had stopped screaming; he was huddled against the tree, fearfully\n eying the forest across from the watering hole.",
"\"You were, I believe, the first ever to kill a farn beast?\" he said.\n\n\n \"I.... No, sir. There must have been previous hunters, sir.\"\nExtrone narrowed his eyes. \"I see by your eyes that you are\n envious—that is the word, isn't it?—of my tent.\"\n\n\n Ri looked away from his face.\n\n\n \"Perhaps I'm envious of your reputation as a hunter. You see, I have\n never killed a farn beast. In fact, I haven't\nseen\na farn beast.\"\n\n\n Ri glanced nervously around the tent, his sharp eyes avoiding Extrone's\n glittering ones. \"Few people have seen them, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Oh?\" Extrone questioned mildly. \"I wouldn't say that. I understand\n that the aliens hunt them quite extensively ... on some of their\n planets.\"",
"\"... It's the only thing I know anything about. The farn beast, as I\n was saying, sir, is the particular enemy of men. Or if you like, of\n aliens. Sir.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Extrone said, annoyed. \"I'll be careful.\"\n\n\n In the distance, a farn beast coughed.\n\n\n Instantly alert, Extrone said, \"Get the bearers! Have some of them cut\n a path through that damn thicket! And tell those two businessmen to get\n the hell over here!\"\n\n\n Lin smiled, his eyes suddenly afire with the excitement of the hunt.\nFour hours later, they were well into the scrub forest. Extrone walked\n leisurely, well back of the cutters, who hacked away, methodically, at\n the vines and branches which might impede his forward progress. Their\n sharp, awkward knives snickered rhythmically to the rasp of their heavy\n breathing.",
"Again they turned reluctantly. This time, he did not call them back.\n Instead, with amusement, he watched until they disappeared into the\n tangle of forest.\n\n\n Dusk was falling. The takeoff blast of the rocket illuminated the area,\n casting weird shadows on the gently swaying grasses; there was a hot\n breath of dry air and the rocket dwindled toward the stars.\n\n\n Extrone stood up lazily, stretching. He tossed the empty glass away,\n listened for it to shatter. He reached out, parted the heavy flap to\n his tent.\n\n\n \"Sir?\" Ri said, hurrying toward him in the gathering darkness.\n\n\n \"Eh?\" Extrone said, turning, startled. \"Oh, you. Well?\"\n\n\n \"We ... located signs of the farn beast, sir. To the east.\"",
"\"You two scout ahead,\" Extrone said. \"See if you can pick up some\n tracks.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Ri said, and instantly the two of them readjusted their\n shoulder straps and started off.\n\n\n Shortly they were inside of the scrub forest, safe from sight. \"Let's\n wait here,\" Mia said.\n\n\n \"No, we better go on. He may have sent a spy in.\"\n\n\n They pushed on, being careful to blaze the trees, because they were not\n professional guides.\n\n\n \"We don't want to get too near,\" Ri said after toiling through the\n forest for many minutes. \"Without guns, we don't want to get near\n enough for the farn beast to charge us.\"\n\n\n They stopped. The forest was dense, the vines clinging.",
"\"One is enough in\nmy\ncamp.\"\nThe two of them went forward, alone, into the forest. Extrone moved\n agilely through the tangle, following Lin closely. When they came to\n the tracks, heavily pressed into drying mud around a small watering\n hole, Extrone nodded his head in satisfaction.\n\n\n \"This way,\" Lin said, pointing, and once more the two of them started\n off.\n\n\n They went a good distance through the forest, Extrone becoming more\n alert with each additional foot. Finally, Lin stopped him with a\n restraining hand. \"They may be quite a way ahead. Hadn't we ought to\n bring up the column?\"\n\n\n The farn beast, somewhere beyond a ragged clump of bushes, coughed.\n Extrone clenched the blast rifle convulsively.\n\n\n The farn beast coughed again, more distant this time.\n\n\n \"They're moving away,\" Lin said.",
"\"I ... I....\" Ri glanced nervously at Lin out of the tail of his eye.\n Lin's face was impassive.\n\n\n \"Of\ncourse\nyou will,\" Extrone said genially. \"Get me a rope, Lin. A\n good, long, strong rope.\"\n\n\n \"What are you going to do?\" Ri asked, terrified.\n\n\n \"Why, I'm going to tie the rope around your waist and stake you out as\n bait.\"\n\n\n \"No!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, come now. When the farn beast hears you scream—you\ncan\nscream,\n by the way?\"\n\n\n Ri swallowed.\n\n\n \"We could find a way to make you.\"\n\n\n There was perspiration trickling down Ri's forehead, a single drop,\n creeping toward his nose.",
"\"You'll be safe,\" Extrone said, studying his face with amusement. \"I'll\n shoot the animal before it reaches you.\"\n\n\n Ri gulped for air. \"But ... if there should be more than one?\"\n\n\n Extrone shrugged.\n\n\n \"I—Look, sir. Listen to me.\" Ri's lips were bloodless and his hands\n were trembling. \"It's not me you want to do this to. It's Mia, sir.\nHe\nkilled a farn beast before\nI\ndid, sir. And last night—last\n night, he—\"\n\n\n \"He what?\" Extrone demanded, leaning forward intently.",
"Ri began to scream again.\n\n\n Still Extrone did not lift his blast rifle. He was laughing. Lin\n waited, frozen, his eyes staring at the farn beast in fascination.\n\n\n The farn beast plunged into the water, which was shallow, and, throwing\n a sheet of it to either side, headed across toward Ri.\n\n\n \"Watch! Watch!\" Extrone cried gleefully.\n\n\n And then the aliens sprang their trap.",
"Ri rubbed his hands along his thighs; he sighed, a tiny sound,\n ineffectual. He followed Lin beyond an outcropping of shale to where\n Extrone was seated, petting his rifle.\n\n\n Extrone nodded genially. \"The farn beast hunter, eh?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone drummed his fingers on the stock of the blast rifle. \"Tell me\n what they look like,\" he said suddenly.\n\n\n \"Well, sir, they're ... uh....\"\n\n\n \"Pretty frightening?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir.... Well, in a way, sir.\"\n\n\n \"But\nyou\nweren't afraid of them, were you?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir. No, because....\"\n\n\n Extrone was smiling innocently. \"Good. I want you to do something for\n me.\"",
"\"Damn!\" Extrone said.\n\n\n \"It's a good thing the wind's right, or they'd be coming back, and\n fast, too.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\" Extrone said.\n\n\n \"They charge on scent, sight, or sound. I understand they will track\n down a man for as long as a day.\"\n\n\n \"Wait,\" Extrone said, combing his beard. \"Wait a minute.\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Look,\" Extrone said. \"If that's the case, why do we bother tracking\n them? Why not make them come to us?\"\n\n\n \"They're too unpredictable. It wouldn't be safe. I'd rather have\n surprise on our side.\"\n\n\n \"You don't seem to see what I mean,\" Extrone said. \"\nWe\nwon't be\n the—ah—the bait.\"",
"\"That's what I mean. The pilot don't like businessmen. He had it in for\n us.\"\n\n\n Ri cleared his throat nervously. \"Maybe you're right.\"\n\n\n \"It's the Hunting Club he don't like.\"\n\n\n \"I wish to God I'd never heard of a farn beast,\" Ri said. \"At least,\n then, I wouldn't be one of his guides. Why didn't he hire somebody\n else?\"\nMia looked at his companion. He spat. \"What hurts most, he pays us for\n it. I could buy half this planet, and he makes me his guide—at less\n than I pay my secretary.\"\n\n\n \"Well, anyway, we won't have to cross that ridge.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you!\" Extrone called.\n\n\n The two of them turned immediately.",
"\"I meant in our system, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Of course you did,\" Extrone said, lazily tracing the crease of his\n sleeve with his forefinger. \"I imagine these are the only farn beasts\n in our system.\"\n\n\n Ri waited uneasily, not answering.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Extrone said, \"I imagine they are. It would have been a shame if\n you had killed the last one. Don't you think so?\"\n\n\n Ri's hands worried the sides of his outer garment. \"Yes, sir. It would\n have been.\"\n\n\n Extrone pursed his lips. \"It wouldn't have been very considerate of you\n to—But, still, you gained valuable experience. I'm glad you agreed to\n come along as my guide.\"\n\n\n \"It was an honor, sir.\"",
"\"What'll we tell him?\"\n\n\n \"That we saw tracks. What else can we tell him?\"\n\n\n They turned back along their trail, stumbling over vines.\n\n\n \"It gets hotter at sunset,\" Ri said nervously.\n\n\n \"The breeze dies down.\"\n\n\n \"It's screwy. I didn't think farn beasts had this wide a range. There\n must be a lot of them, to be on both sides of the ridge like this.\"\n\n\n \"There may be a pass,\" Mia said, pushing a vine away.\n\n\n Ri wrinkled his brow, panting. \"I guess that's it. If there were a lot\n of them, we'd have heard something before we did. But even so, it's\n damned funny, when you think about it.\"",
"\"\nI\ndidn't tell Extrone, if that's what you're thinking,\" Mia said.\n\n\n Ri's mouth twisted. \"I didn't say you did.\"\n\n\n \"Listen,\" Mia said in a hoarse whisper. \"I just thought. Listen. To\n hell with how he found out. Here's the point. Maybe he'll shoot us,\n too, when the hunt's over.\"\n\n\n Ri licked his lips. \"No. He wouldn't do that. We're not—not just\n anybody. He couldn't kill us like that. Not even\nhim\n. And besides,\n why would he want to do that? It wouldn't do any good to shoot us. Too\n many people already know about the farn beasts. You said that yourself.\"\n\n\n Mia said, \"I hope you're right.\" They stood side by side, studying the\n blast area in silence. Finally, Mia said, \"We better be getting back.\"",
"Extrone's lip twisted in wry amusement. \"If I had waited until it was\n safe for me to hunt on an alien planet, I would not have been able to\n find such an illustrious guide.\"\n\n\n \"... I'm flattered, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Extrone said. \"But you should have spoken to me about it,\n when you discovered the farn beast in our own system.\"\n\n\n \"I realize that, sir. That is, I had intended at the first opportunity,\n sir....\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Extrone said dryly. \"Like all of my subjects,\" he waved\n his hand in a broad gesture, \"the highest as well as the lowest slave,\n know me and love me. I know your intentions were the best.\"\n\n\n Ri squirmed, his face pale. \"We do indeed love you, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone bent forward. \"\nKnow\nme and love me.\"",
"\"We didn't have a chance,\" Mia objected. \"Everybody and his brother had\n heard the rumor that farn beasts were somewhere around here. It wasn't\n our fault Extrone found out.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we hadn't shot our guide, then. I wish he was here instead of\n us.\"\n\n\n Mia shook perspiration out of his eyes. \"We should have shot our pilot,\n too. That was our mistake. The pilot must have been the one who told\n Extrone we'd hunted this area.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't think a Club pilot would do that.\"\n\n\n \"After Extrone said he'd hunt farn beasts, even if it meant going to\n the alien system? Listen, you don't know.... Wait a minute.\"\n\n\n There was perspiration on Ri's upper lip.",
"Since the hole was drying, the left, partially exposed bank was steep\n toward the muddy water. Upon it was green, new grass, tender-tuffed,\n half mashed in places by heavy animal treads. It was there that they\n staked him out, tying the free end of the rope tightly around the base\n of a scaling tree.\n\n\n \"You will scream,\" Extrone instructed. With his rifle, he pointed\n across the water hole. \"The farn beast will come from this direction, I\n imagine.\"\n\n\n Ri was almost slobbering in fear.\n\n\n \"Let me hear you scream,\" Extrone said.\n\n\n Ri moaned weakly.\n\n\n \"You'll have to do better than that.\" Extrone inclined his head toward\n a bearer, who used something Ri couldn't see.\nRi screamed."
],
[
"\"Yes, sir.\nKnow\nyou and love you, sir,\" Ri said.\n\n\n \"Get out!\" Extrone said.\n\"It's frightening,\" Ri said, \"to be that close to him.\"\n\n\n Mia nodded.\n\n\n The two of them, beneath the leaf-swollen branches of the gnarled tree,\n were seated on their sleeping bags. The moon was clear and cold and\n bright in a cloudless sky; a small moon, smooth-surfaced, except for a\n central mountain ridge that bisected it into almost twin hemispheres.\n\n\n \"To think of him. As flesh and blood. Not like the—well; that—what\n we've read about.\"\n\n\n Mia glanced suspiciously around him at the shadows. \"You begin to\n understand a lot of things, after seeing him.\"\n\n\n Ri picked nervously at the cover of his sleeping bag.",
"\"Oh?\"\n\n\n \"Let's get back to the column.\"\n\"Extrone wants to see you,\" Lin said.\n\n\n Ri twisted at the grass shoot, broke it off, worried and unhappy.\n \"What's he want to see\nme\nfor?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Lin said curtly.\n\n\n Ri got to his feet. One of his hands reached out, plucked nervously\n at Lin's bare forearm. \"Look,\" he whispered. \"You know him. I have—a\n little money. If you were able to ... if he wants,\" Ri gulped, \"to\ndo\nanything to me—I'd pay you, if you could....\"\n\n\n \"You better come along,\" Lin said, turning.",
"\"You'll be safe,\" Extrone said, studying his face with amusement. \"I'll\n shoot the animal before it reaches you.\"\n\n\n Ri gulped for air. \"But ... if there should be more than one?\"\n\n\n Extrone shrugged.\n\n\n \"I—Look, sir. Listen to me.\" Ri's lips were bloodless and his hands\n were trembling. \"It's not me you want to do this to. It's Mia, sir.\nHe\nkilled a farn beast before\nI\ndid, sir. And last night—last\n night, he—\"\n\n\n \"He what?\" Extrone demanded, leaning forward intently.",
"Ri rubbed his hands along his thighs; he sighed, a tiny sound,\n ineffectual. He followed Lin beyond an outcropping of shale to where\n Extrone was seated, petting his rifle.\n\n\n Extrone nodded genially. \"The farn beast hunter, eh?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone drummed his fingers on the stock of the blast rifle. \"Tell me\n what they look like,\" he said suddenly.\n\n\n \"Well, sir, they're ... uh....\"\n\n\n \"Pretty frightening?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir.... Well, in a way, sir.\"\n\n\n \"But\nyou\nweren't afraid of them, were you?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir. No, because....\"\n\n\n Extrone was smiling innocently. \"Good. I want you to do something for\n me.\"",
"Extrone's lip twisted in wry amusement. \"If I had waited until it was\n safe for me to hunt on an alien planet, I would not have been able to\n find such an illustrious guide.\"\n\n\n \"... I'm flattered, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Extrone said. \"But you should have spoken to me about it,\n when you discovered the farn beast in our own system.\"\n\n\n \"I realize that, sir. That is, I had intended at the first opportunity,\n sir....\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Extrone said dryly. \"Like all of my subjects,\" he waved\n his hand in a broad gesture, \"the highest as well as the lowest slave,\n know me and love me. I know your intentions were the best.\"\n\n\n Ri squirmed, his face pale. \"We do indeed love you, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone bent forward. \"\nKnow\nme and love me.\"",
"Extrone nodded. After a moment he said, \"You killed one, I believe, on\nyour\ntrip?\"\n\n\n Ri shifted. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone held back the flap of the tent. \"Won't you come in?\" he asked\n without any politeness whatever.\n\n\n Ri obeyed the order.\n\n\n The inside of the tent was luxurious. The bed was of bulky feathers,\n costly of transport space, the sleep curtains of silken gauze. The\n floor, heavy, portable tile blocks, not the hollow kind, were neatly\n and smoothly inset into the ground. Hanging from the center, to the\n left of the slender, hand-carved center pole, was a chain of crystals.\n They tinkled lightly when Extrone dropped the flap. The light was\n electric from a portable dynamo. Extrone flipped it on. He crossed to\n the bed, sat down.",
"\"See that you keep it up that way,\" Extrone said. \"That's the way I\n want you to sound.\" He turned toward Lin. \"We can climb this tree, I\n think.\"\n\n\n Slowly, aided by the bearers, the two men climbed the tree, bark\n peeling away from under their rough boots. Ri watched them hopelessly.\n\n\n Once at the crotch, Extrone settled down, holding the rifle at alert.\n Lin moved to the left, out on the main branch, rested in a smaller\n crotch.\n\n\n Looking down, Extrone said, \"Scream!\" Then, to Lin, \"You feel the\n excitement? It's always in the air like this at a hunt.\"\n\n\n \"I feel it,\" Lin said.\n\n\n Extrone chuckled. \"You were with me on Meizque?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"Extrone smiled, almost pointed teeth showing through the beard. \"I'm\n glad we won't have to cross the ridge.\"\n\n\n Ri wiped his forehead on the back of his sleeve. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"We'll pitch camp right here, then,\" Extrone said. \"We'll go after it\n tomorrow.\" He looked at the sky. \"Have the bearers hurry.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Ri moved away, his pulse gradually slowing. \"You, there!\" he called.\n \"Pitch camp, here!\"",
"Ri began to scream again.\n\n\n Still Extrone did not lift his blast rifle. He was laughing. Lin\n waited, frozen, his eyes staring at the farn beast in fascination.\n\n\n The farn beast plunged into the water, which was shallow, and, throwing\n a sheet of it to either side, headed across toward Ri.\n\n\n \"Watch! Watch!\" Extrone cried gleefully.\n\n\n And then the aliens sprang their trap.",
"He crossed to Mia, who, along with him, had been pressed into Extrone's\n party as guides. Once more, Ri addressed the bearers, \"Be quick, now!\"\n And to Mia, \"God almighty, he was getting mad.\" He ran a hand under his\n collar. \"It's a good thing that farn beast sounded off when it did. I'd\n hate to think of making him climb that ridge.\"\n\n\n Mia glanced nervously over his shoulder. \"It's that damned pilot's\n fault for setting us down on this side. I told him it was the other\n side. I told him so.\"\n\n\n Ri shrugged hopelessly.\n\n\n Mia said, \"I don't think he even saw a blast area over here. I think he\n wanted to get us in trouble.\"\n\n\n \"There shouldn't be one. There shouldn't be a blast area on this side\n of the ridge, too.\"",
"\"\nI\ndidn't tell Extrone, if that's what you're thinking,\" Mia said.\n\n\n Ri's mouth twisted. \"I didn't say you did.\"\n\n\n \"Listen,\" Mia said in a hoarse whisper. \"I just thought. Listen. To\n hell with how he found out. Here's the point. Maybe he'll shoot us,\n too, when the hunt's over.\"\n\n\n Ri licked his lips. \"No. He wouldn't do that. We're not—not just\n anybody. He couldn't kill us like that. Not even\nhim\n. And besides,\n why would he want to do that? It wouldn't do any good to shoot us. Too\n many people already know about the farn beasts. You said that yourself.\"\n\n\n Mia said, \"I hope you're right.\" They stood side by side, studying the\n blast area in silence. Finally, Mia said, \"We better be getting back.\"",
"\"That's what I mean. The pilot don't like businessmen. He had it in for\n us.\"\n\n\n Ri cleared his throat nervously. \"Maybe you're right.\"\n\n\n \"It's the Hunting Club he don't like.\"\n\n\n \"I wish to God I'd never heard of a farn beast,\" Ri said. \"At least,\n then, I wouldn't be one of his guides. Why didn't he hire somebody\n else?\"\nMia looked at his companion. He spat. \"What hurts most, he pays us for\n it. I could buy half this planet, and he makes me his guide—at less\n than I pay my secretary.\"\n\n\n \"Well, anyway, we won't have to cross that ridge.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you!\" Extrone called.\n\n\n The two of them turned immediately.",
"\"I ... I....\" Ri glanced nervously at Lin out of the tail of his eye.\n Lin's face was impassive.\n\n\n \"Of\ncourse\nyou will,\" Extrone said genially. \"Get me a rope, Lin. A\n good, long, strong rope.\"\n\n\n \"What are you going to do?\" Ri asked, terrified.\n\n\n \"Why, I'm going to tie the rope around your waist and stake you out as\n bait.\"\n\n\n \"No!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, come now. When the farn beast hears you scream—you\ncan\nscream,\n by the way?\"\n\n\n Ri swallowed.\n\n\n \"We could find a way to make you.\"\n\n\n There was perspiration trickling down Ri's forehead, a single drop,\n creeping toward his nose.",
"\"I meant in our system, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Of course you did,\" Extrone said, lazily tracing the crease of his\n sleeve with his forefinger. \"I imagine these are the only farn beasts\n in our system.\"\n\n\n Ri waited uneasily, not answering.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Extrone said, \"I imagine they are. It would have been a shame if\n you had killed the last one. Don't you think so?\"\n\n\n Ri's hands worried the sides of his outer garment. \"Yes, sir. It would\n have been.\"\n\n\n Extrone pursed his lips. \"It wouldn't have been very considerate of you\n to—But, still, you gained valuable experience. I'm glad you agreed to\n come along as my guide.\"\n\n\n \"It was an honor, sir.\"",
"Again they turned reluctantly. This time, he did not call them back.\n Instead, with amusement, he watched until they disappeared into the\n tangle of forest.\n\n\n Dusk was falling. The takeoff blast of the rocket illuminated the area,\n casting weird shadows on the gently swaying grasses; there was a hot\n breath of dry air and the rocket dwindled toward the stars.\n\n\n Extrone stood up lazily, stretching. He tossed the empty glass away,\n listened for it to shatter. He reached out, parted the heavy flap to\n his tent.\n\n\n \"Sir?\" Ri said, hurrying toward him in the gathering darkness.\n\n\n \"Eh?\" Extrone said, turning, startled. \"Oh, you. Well?\"\n\n\n \"We ... located signs of the farn beast, sir. To the east.\"",
"\"That was something, that time.\" He ran his hand along the stock of the\n weapon.\n\n\n The sun headed west, veiling itself with trees; a large insect circled\n Extrone's head. He slapped at it, angry. The forest was quiet,\n underlined by an occasional piping call, something like a whistle. Ri's\n screams were shrill, echoing away, shiveringly. Lin sat quiet, hunched.\n\n\n Extrone's eyes narrowed, and he began to pet the gun stock with quick,\n jerky movements. Lin licked his lips, keeping his eyes on Extrone's\n face. The sun seemed stuck in the sky, and the heat squeezed against\n them, sucking at their breath like a vacuum. The insect went away.\n Still, endless, hopeless, monotonous, Ri screamed.\nA farn beast coughed, far in the matted forest.\n\n\n Extrone laughed nervously. \"He must have heard.\"",
"Ri looked around at the shadows.\n\n\n \"That explains a lot of things,\" Mia said. \"I think the Army's been\n preparing for this for a long time. From the first, maybe. That's why\n Extrone cut off our trade with the aliens. Partly to keep them from\n learning that he was getting ready to invade them, but more to keep\n them from exposing\nhim\nto the people. The aliens wouldn't be fooled\n like we were, so easy.\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Ri snapped. \"It was to keep the natural economic balance.\"\n\n\n \"You know that's not right.\"\n\n\n Ri lay down on his bed roll. \"Don't talk about it. It's not good to\n talk like this. I don't even want to listen.\"",
"\"Wait,\" Ri begged, fighting off the rope with his hands. \"You don't\n want to use me, sir. Not after I told you.... Please, sir. If anything\n should happen to me.... Please, sir. Don't do it.\"\n\n\n \"Tie it,\" Extrone ordered.\n\n\n \"No, sir. Please. Oh,\nplease\ndon't, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Tie it,\" Extrone said inexorably.\n\n\n Lin bent with the rope; his face was colorless.\nThey were at the watering hole—Extrone, Lin, two bearers, and Ri.",
"Ri breathed with a gurgling sound. \"He said he ought to kill you, sir.\n That's what he said. I heard him, sir. He said he ought to kill you.\n He's the one you ought to use for bait. Then if there was an accident,\n sir, it wouldn't matter, because he said he ought to kill you. I\n wouldn't....\"\n\n\n Extrone said, \"Which one is he?\"\n\n\n \"That one. Right over there.\"\n\n\n \"The one with his back to me?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. That's him. That's him, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone aimed carefully and fired, full charge, then lowered the rifle\n and said, \"Here comes Lin with the rope, I see.\"\n\n\n Ri was greenish. \"You ... you....\"\n\n\n Extrone turned to Lin. \"Tie one end around his waist.\"",
"Since the hole was drying, the left, partially exposed bank was steep\n toward the muddy water. Upon it was green, new grass, tender-tuffed,\n half mashed in places by heavy animal treads. It was there that they\n staked him out, tying the free end of the rope tightly around the base\n of a scaling tree.\n\n\n \"You will scream,\" Extrone instructed. With his rifle, he pointed\n across the water hole. \"The farn beast will come from this direction, I\n imagine.\"\n\n\n Ri was almost slobbering in fear.\n\n\n \"Let me hear you scream,\" Extrone said.\n\n\n Ri moaned weakly.\n\n\n \"You'll have to do better than that.\" Extrone inclined his head toward\n a bearer, who used something Ri couldn't see.\nRi screamed."
],
[
"\"You'll be safe,\" Extrone said, studying his face with amusement. \"I'll\n shoot the animal before it reaches you.\"\n\n\n Ri gulped for air. \"But ... if there should be more than one?\"\n\n\n Extrone shrugged.\n\n\n \"I—Look, sir. Listen to me.\" Ri's lips were bloodless and his hands\n were trembling. \"It's not me you want to do this to. It's Mia, sir.\nHe\nkilled a farn beast before\nI\ndid, sir. And last night—last\n night, he—\"\n\n\n \"He what?\" Extrone demanded, leaning forward intently.",
"\"Yes, sir.\nKnow\nyou and love you, sir,\" Ri said.\n\n\n \"Get out!\" Extrone said.\n\"It's frightening,\" Ri said, \"to be that close to him.\"\n\n\n Mia nodded.\n\n\n The two of them, beneath the leaf-swollen branches of the gnarled tree,\n were seated on their sleeping bags. The moon was clear and cold and\n bright in a cloudless sky; a small moon, smooth-surfaced, except for a\n central mountain ridge that bisected it into almost twin hemispheres.\n\n\n \"To think of him. As flesh and blood. Not like the—well; that—what\n we've read about.\"\n\n\n Mia glanced suspiciously around him at the shadows. \"You begin to\n understand a lot of things, after seeing him.\"\n\n\n Ri picked nervously at the cover of his sleeping bag.",
"\"\nI\ndidn't tell Extrone, if that's what you're thinking,\" Mia said.\n\n\n Ri's mouth twisted. \"I didn't say you did.\"\n\n\n \"Listen,\" Mia said in a hoarse whisper. \"I just thought. Listen. To\n hell with how he found out. Here's the point. Maybe he'll shoot us,\n too, when the hunt's over.\"\n\n\n Ri licked his lips. \"No. He wouldn't do that. We're not—not just\n anybody. He couldn't kill us like that. Not even\nhim\n. And besides,\n why would he want to do that? It wouldn't do any good to shoot us. Too\n many people already know about the farn beasts. You said that yourself.\"\n\n\n Mia said, \"I hope you're right.\" They stood side by side, studying the\n blast area in silence. Finally, Mia said, \"We better be getting back.\"",
"He crossed to Mia, who, along with him, had been pressed into Extrone's\n party as guides. Once more, Ri addressed the bearers, \"Be quick, now!\"\n And to Mia, \"God almighty, he was getting mad.\" He ran a hand under his\n collar. \"It's a good thing that farn beast sounded off when it did. I'd\n hate to think of making him climb that ridge.\"\n\n\n Mia glanced nervously over his shoulder. \"It's that damned pilot's\n fault for setting us down on this side. I told him it was the other\n side. I told him so.\"\n\n\n Ri shrugged hopelessly.\n\n\n Mia said, \"I don't think he even saw a blast area over here. I think he\n wanted to get us in trouble.\"\n\n\n \"There shouldn't be one. There shouldn't be a blast area on this side\n of the ridge, too.\"",
"\"Extrone. Eh?... Oh, you got their ship. Well, why in hell bother\n me?... All right, so they found out I was here. You got them, didn't\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Blasted them right out of space,\" the voice crackled excitedly. \"Right\n in the middle of a radio broadcast, sir.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want to listen to your gabbling when I'm hunting!\" Extrone\n tore off the head-set and handed it to the bearer. \"If they call back,\n find out what they want, first. I don't want to be bothered unless it's\n important.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone squinted up at the sun; his eyes crinkled under the glare, and\n perspiration stood in little droplets on the back of his hands.",
"\"We didn't have a chance,\" Mia objected. \"Everybody and his brother had\n heard the rumor that farn beasts were somewhere around here. It wasn't\n our fault Extrone found out.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we hadn't shot our guide, then. I wish he was here instead of\n us.\"\n\n\n Mia shook perspiration out of his eyes. \"We should have shot our pilot,\n too. That was our mistake. The pilot must have been the one who told\n Extrone we'd hunted this area.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't think a Club pilot would do that.\"\n\n\n \"After Extrone said he'd hunt farn beasts, even if it meant going to\n the alien system? Listen, you don't know.... Wait a minute.\"\n\n\n There was perspiration on Ri's upper lip.",
"\"See that you keep it up that way,\" Extrone said. \"That's the way I\n want you to sound.\" He turned toward Lin. \"We can climb this tree, I\n think.\"\n\n\n Slowly, aided by the bearers, the two men climbed the tree, bark\n peeling away from under their rough boots. Ri watched them hopelessly.\n\n\n Once at the crotch, Extrone settled down, holding the rifle at alert.\n Lin moved to the left, out on the main branch, rested in a smaller\n crotch.\n\n\n Looking down, Extrone said, \"Scream!\" Then, to Lin, \"You feel the\n excitement? It's always in the air like this at a hunt.\"\n\n\n \"I feel it,\" Lin said.\n\n\n Extrone chuckled. \"You were with me on Meizque?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"\"That's what I mean. The pilot don't like businessmen. He had it in for\n us.\"\n\n\n Ri cleared his throat nervously. \"Maybe you're right.\"\n\n\n \"It's the Hunting Club he don't like.\"\n\n\n \"I wish to God I'd never heard of a farn beast,\" Ri said. \"At least,\n then, I wouldn't be one of his guides. Why didn't he hire somebody\n else?\"\nMia looked at his companion. He spat. \"What hurts most, he pays us for\n it. I could buy half this planet, and he makes me his guide—at less\n than I pay my secretary.\"\n\n\n \"Well, anyway, we won't have to cross that ridge.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you!\" Extrone called.\n\n\n The two of them turned immediately.",
"Extrone's lip twisted in wry amusement. \"If I had waited until it was\n safe for me to hunt on an alien planet, I would not have been able to\n find such an illustrious guide.\"\n\n\n \"... I'm flattered, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Extrone said. \"But you should have spoken to me about it,\n when you discovered the farn beast in our own system.\"\n\n\n \"I realize that, sir. That is, I had intended at the first opportunity,\n sir....\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Extrone said dryly. \"Like all of my subjects,\" he waved\n his hand in a broad gesture, \"the highest as well as the lowest slave,\n know me and love me. I know your intentions were the best.\"\n\n\n Ri squirmed, his face pale. \"We do indeed love you, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone bent forward. \"\nKnow\nme and love me.\"",
"Extrone stared at them for a space. Then, indifferently, he turned\n away, in the direction of a resting bearer. \"You!\" he said. \"Hey! Bring\n me a drink!\" He faced the officers again. He smiled maliciously. \"I'm\n staying here.\"\n\n\n The lead officer licked his firm lower lip. \"But, sir....\"\n\n\n Extrone toyed with his beard. \"About a year ago, gentlemen, there was\n an alien ship around here then, wasn't there? And you destroyed it,\n didn't you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. When we located it, sir.\"\n\n\n \"You'll destroy this one, too,\" Extrone said.",
"\"You two scout ahead,\" Extrone said. \"See if you can pick up some\n tracks.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Ri said, and instantly the two of them readjusted their\n shoulder straps and started off.\n\n\n Shortly they were inside of the scrub forest, safe from sight. \"Let's\n wait here,\" Mia said.\n\n\n \"No, we better go on. He may have sent a spy in.\"\n\n\n They pushed on, being careful to blaze the trees, because they were not\n professional guides.\n\n\n \"We don't want to get too near,\" Ri said after toiling through the\n forest for many minutes. \"Without guns, we don't want to get near\n enough for the farn beast to charge us.\"\n\n\n They stopped. The forest was dense, the vines clinging.",
"And Extrone stepped out of the tent, fully dressed, surly, letting the\n flap slap loudly behind him. He stretched hungrily and stared around\n the camp, his eyes still vacant-mean with sleep.\n\n\n \"Breakfast!\" he shouted, and two bearers came running with a folding\n table and chair. Behind them, a third bearer, carrying a tray of\n various foods; and yet behind him, a fourth, with a steaming pitcher\n and a drinking mug.\n\n\n Extrone ate hugely, with none of the delicacy sometimes affected in his\n conversational gestures. When he had finished, he washed his mouth with\n water and spat on the ground.\n\n\n \"Lin!\" he said.\n\n\n His personal bearer came loping toward him.\n\n\n \"Have you read that manual I gave you?\"\n\n\n Lin nodded. \"Yes.\"",
"Extrone nodded. After a moment he said, \"You killed one, I believe, on\nyour\ntrip?\"\n\n\n Ri shifted. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone held back the flap of the tent. \"Won't you come in?\" he asked\n without any politeness whatever.\n\n\n Ri obeyed the order.\n\n\n The inside of the tent was luxurious. The bed was of bulky feathers,\n costly of transport space, the sleep curtains of silken gauze. The\n floor, heavy, portable tile blocks, not the hollow kind, were neatly\n and smoothly inset into the ground. Hanging from the center, to the\n left of the slender, hand-carved center pole, was a chain of crystals.\n They tinkled lightly when Extrone dropped the flap. The light was\n electric from a portable dynamo. Extrone flipped it on. He crossed to\n the bed, sat down.",
"\"It's a different one,\" Lin said.\n\n\n \"How do you know?\"\n\n\n \"Hear the lower pitch, the more of a roar?\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Extrone shouted. \"You, down there. There are two coming. Now\n let's hear you really scream!\"\n\n\n Ri, below, whimpered childishly and began to retreat toward the tether\n tree, his eyes wide.\n\n\n \"There's a lot of satisfaction in fooling them, too,\" Extrone said.\n \"Making them come to your bait, where you can get at them.\" He\n opened his right hand. \"Choose your ground, set your trap. Bait it.\"\n He snapped his hand into a fist, held the fist up before his eyes,\n imprisoning the idea. \"Spring the trap when the quarry is inside.\n Clever. That makes the waiting more interesting. Waiting to see if they\n really will come to your bait.\"",
"\"It makes you think,\" Mia added. He twitched. \"I'm afraid. I'm afraid\n he'll.... Listen, we'll talk. When we get back to civilization. You,\n me, the bearers. About him. He can't let that happen. He'll kill us\n first.\"\n\n\n Ri looked up at the moon, shivering. \"No. We have friends. We have\n influence. He couldn't just like that—\"\n\n\n \"He could say it was an accident.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Ri said stubbornly.\n\n\n \"He can say anything,\" Mia insisted. \"He can make people believe\n anything. Whatever he says. There's no way to check on it.\"\n\n\n \"It's getting cold,\" Ri said.\n\n\n \"Listen,\" Mia pleaded.",
"\"Oh?\"\n\n\n \"Let's get back to the column.\"\n\"Extrone wants to see you,\" Lin said.\n\n\n Ri twisted at the grass shoot, broke it off, worried and unhappy.\n \"What's he want to see\nme\nfor?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Lin said curtly.\n\n\n Ri got to his feet. One of his hands reached out, plucked nervously\n at Lin's bare forearm. \"Look,\" he whispered. \"You know him. I have—a\n little money. If you were able to ... if he wants,\" Ri gulped, \"to\ndo\nanything to me—I'd pay you, if you could....\"\n\n\n \"You better come along,\" Lin said, turning.",
"\"That was something, that time.\" He ran his hand along the stock of the\n weapon.\n\n\n The sun headed west, veiling itself with trees; a large insect circled\n Extrone's head. He slapped at it, angry. The forest was quiet,\n underlined by an occasional piping call, something like a whistle. Ri's\n screams were shrill, echoing away, shiveringly. Lin sat quiet, hunched.\n\n\n Extrone's eyes narrowed, and he began to pet the gun stock with quick,\n jerky movements. Lin licked his lips, keeping his eyes on Extrone's\n face. The sun seemed stuck in the sky, and the heat squeezed against\n them, sucking at their breath like a vacuum. The insect went away.\n Still, endless, hopeless, monotonous, Ri screamed.\nA farn beast coughed, far in the matted forest.\n\n\n Extrone laughed nervously. \"He must have heard.\"",
"Ri looked around at the shadows.\n\n\n \"That explains a lot of things,\" Mia said. \"I think the Army's been\n preparing for this for a long time. From the first, maybe. That's why\n Extrone cut off our trade with the aliens. Partly to keep them from\n learning that he was getting ready to invade them, but more to keep\n them from exposing\nhim\nto the people. The aliens wouldn't be fooled\n like we were, so easy.\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Ri snapped. \"It was to keep the natural economic balance.\"\n\n\n \"You know that's not right.\"\n\n\n Ri lay down on his bed roll. \"Don't talk about it. It's not good to\n talk like this. I don't even want to listen.\"",
"Again they turned reluctantly. This time, he did not call them back.\n Instead, with amusement, he watched until they disappeared into the\n tangle of forest.\n\n\n Dusk was falling. The takeoff blast of the rocket illuminated the area,\n casting weird shadows on the gently swaying grasses; there was a hot\n breath of dry air and the rocket dwindled toward the stars.\n\n\n Extrone stood up lazily, stretching. He tossed the empty glass away,\n listened for it to shatter. He reached out, parted the heavy flap to\n his tent.\n\n\n \"Sir?\" Ri said, hurrying toward him in the gathering darkness.\n\n\n \"Eh?\" Extrone said, turning, startled. \"Oh, you. Well?\"\n\n\n \"We ... located signs of the farn beast, sir. To the east.\"",
"Once Extrone unslung his blast rifle and triggered a burst at a tiny,\n arboreal mammal, which, upon the impact, shattered asunder, to\n Extrone's satisfied chuckle, in a burst of blood and fur.\n\n\n When the sun stood high and heat exhaustion made the near-naked bearers\n slump, Extrone permitted a rest. While waiting for the march to resume,\n he sat on the stool with his back against an ancient tree and patted,\n reflectively, the blast rifle, lying across his legs.\n\n\n \"For you, sir,\" the communications man said, interrupting his reverie.\n\n\n \"Damn,\" Extrone muttered. His face twisted in anger. \"It better be\n important.\" He took the head-set and mike and nodded to the bearer. The\n bearer twiddled the dials."
],
[
"\"You'll be safe,\" Extrone said, studying his face with amusement. \"I'll\n shoot the animal before it reaches you.\"\n\n\n Ri gulped for air. \"But ... if there should be more than one?\"\n\n\n Extrone shrugged.\n\n\n \"I—Look, sir. Listen to me.\" Ri's lips were bloodless and his hands\n were trembling. \"It's not me you want to do this to. It's Mia, sir.\nHe\nkilled a farn beast before\nI\ndid, sir. And last night—last\n night, he—\"\n\n\n \"He what?\" Extrone demanded, leaning forward intently.",
"\"\nI\ndidn't tell Extrone, if that's what you're thinking,\" Mia said.\n\n\n Ri's mouth twisted. \"I didn't say you did.\"\n\n\n \"Listen,\" Mia said in a hoarse whisper. \"I just thought. Listen. To\n hell with how he found out. Here's the point. Maybe he'll shoot us,\n too, when the hunt's over.\"\n\n\n Ri licked his lips. \"No. He wouldn't do that. We're not—not just\n anybody. He couldn't kill us like that. Not even\nhim\n. And besides,\n why would he want to do that? It wouldn't do any good to shoot us. Too\n many people already know about the farn beasts. You said that yourself.\"\n\n\n Mia said, \"I hope you're right.\" They stood side by side, studying the\n blast area in silence. Finally, Mia said, \"We better be getting back.\"",
"\"Yes, sir.\nKnow\nyou and love you, sir,\" Ri said.\n\n\n \"Get out!\" Extrone said.\n\"It's frightening,\" Ri said, \"to be that close to him.\"\n\n\n Mia nodded.\n\n\n The two of them, beneath the leaf-swollen branches of the gnarled tree,\n were seated on their sleeping bags. The moon was clear and cold and\n bright in a cloudless sky; a small moon, smooth-surfaced, except for a\n central mountain ridge that bisected it into almost twin hemispheres.\n\n\n \"To think of him. As flesh and blood. Not like the—well; that—what\n we've read about.\"\n\n\n Mia glanced suspiciously around him at the shadows. \"You begin to\n understand a lot of things, after seeing him.\"\n\n\n Ri picked nervously at the cover of his sleeping bag.",
"He crossed to Mia, who, along with him, had been pressed into Extrone's\n party as guides. Once more, Ri addressed the bearers, \"Be quick, now!\"\n And to Mia, \"God almighty, he was getting mad.\" He ran a hand under his\n collar. \"It's a good thing that farn beast sounded off when it did. I'd\n hate to think of making him climb that ridge.\"\n\n\n Mia glanced nervously over his shoulder. \"It's that damned pilot's\n fault for setting us down on this side. I told him it was the other\n side. I told him so.\"\n\n\n Ri shrugged hopelessly.\n\n\n Mia said, \"I don't think he even saw a blast area over here. I think he\n wanted to get us in trouble.\"\n\n\n \"There shouldn't be one. There shouldn't be a blast area on this side\n of the ridge, too.\"",
"\"It makes you think,\" Mia added. He twitched. \"I'm afraid. I'm afraid\n he'll.... Listen, we'll talk. When we get back to civilization. You,\n me, the bearers. About him. He can't let that happen. He'll kill us\n first.\"\n\n\n Ri looked up at the moon, shivering. \"No. We have friends. We have\n influence. He couldn't just like that—\"\n\n\n \"He could say it was an accident.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Ri said stubbornly.\n\n\n \"He can say anything,\" Mia insisted. \"He can make people believe\n anything. Whatever he says. There's no way to check on it.\"\n\n\n \"It's getting cold,\" Ri said.\n\n\n \"Listen,\" Mia pleaded.",
"Ri looked around at the shadows.\n\n\n \"That explains a lot of things,\" Mia said. \"I think the Army's been\n preparing for this for a long time. From the first, maybe. That's why\n Extrone cut off our trade with the aliens. Partly to keep them from\n learning that he was getting ready to invade them, but more to keep\n them from exposing\nhim\nto the people. The aliens wouldn't be fooled\n like we were, so easy.\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Ri snapped. \"It was to keep the natural economic balance.\"\n\n\n \"You know that's not right.\"\n\n\n Ri lay down on his bed roll. \"Don't talk about it. It's not good to\n talk like this. I don't even want to listen.\"",
"Ri rubbed his hands along his thighs; he sighed, a tiny sound,\n ineffectual. He followed Lin beyond an outcropping of shale to where\n Extrone was seated, petting his rifle.\n\n\n Extrone nodded genially. \"The farn beast hunter, eh?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone drummed his fingers on the stock of the blast rifle. \"Tell me\n what they look like,\" he said suddenly.\n\n\n \"Well, sir, they're ... uh....\"\n\n\n \"Pretty frightening?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir.... Well, in a way, sir.\"\n\n\n \"But\nyou\nweren't afraid of them, were you?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir. No, because....\"\n\n\n Extrone was smiling innocently. \"Good. I want you to do something for\n me.\"",
"\"You two scout ahead,\" Extrone said. \"See if you can pick up some\n tracks.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Ri said, and instantly the two of them readjusted their\n shoulder straps and started off.\n\n\n Shortly they were inside of the scrub forest, safe from sight. \"Let's\n wait here,\" Mia said.\n\n\n \"No, we better go on. He may have sent a spy in.\"\n\n\n They pushed on, being careful to blaze the trees, because they were not\n professional guides.\n\n\n \"We don't want to get too near,\" Ri said after toiling through the\n forest for many minutes. \"Without guns, we don't want to get near\n enough for the farn beast to charge us.\"\n\n\n They stopped. The forest was dense, the vines clinging.",
"\"We didn't have a chance,\" Mia objected. \"Everybody and his brother had\n heard the rumor that farn beasts were somewhere around here. It wasn't\n our fault Extrone found out.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we hadn't shot our guide, then. I wish he was here instead of\n us.\"\n\n\n Mia shook perspiration out of his eyes. \"We should have shot our pilot,\n too. That was our mistake. The pilot must have been the one who told\n Extrone we'd hunted this area.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't think a Club pilot would do that.\"\n\n\n \"After Extrone said he'd hunt farn beasts, even if it meant going to\n the alien system? Listen, you don't know.... Wait a minute.\"\n\n\n There was perspiration on Ri's upper lip.",
"\"That's what I mean. The pilot don't like businessmen. He had it in for\n us.\"\n\n\n Ri cleared his throat nervously. \"Maybe you're right.\"\n\n\n \"It's the Hunting Club he don't like.\"\n\n\n \"I wish to God I'd never heard of a farn beast,\" Ri said. \"At least,\n then, I wouldn't be one of his guides. Why didn't he hire somebody\n else?\"\nMia looked at his companion. He spat. \"What hurts most, he pays us for\n it. I could buy half this planet, and he makes me his guide—at less\n than I pay my secretary.\"\n\n\n \"Well, anyway, we won't have to cross that ridge.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you!\" Extrone called.\n\n\n The two of them turned immediately.",
"Ri began to scream again.\n\n\n Still Extrone did not lift his blast rifle. He was laughing. Lin\n waited, frozen, his eyes staring at the farn beast in fascination.\n\n\n The farn beast plunged into the water, which was shallow, and, throwing\n a sheet of it to either side, headed across toward Ri.\n\n\n \"Watch! Watch!\" Extrone cried gleefully.\n\n\n And then the aliens sprang their trap.",
"\"I ... I....\" Ri glanced nervously at Lin out of the tail of his eye.\n Lin's face was impassive.\n\n\n \"Of\ncourse\nyou will,\" Extrone said genially. \"Get me a rope, Lin. A\n good, long, strong rope.\"\n\n\n \"What are you going to do?\" Ri asked, terrified.\n\n\n \"Why, I'm going to tie the rope around your waist and stake you out as\n bait.\"\n\n\n \"No!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, come now. When the farn beast hears you scream—you\ncan\nscream,\n by the way?\"\n\n\n Ri swallowed.\n\n\n \"We could find a way to make you.\"\n\n\n There was perspiration trickling down Ri's forehead, a single drop,\n creeping toward his nose.",
"\"Oh?\"\n\n\n \"Let's get back to the column.\"\n\"Extrone wants to see you,\" Lin said.\n\n\n Ri twisted at the grass shoot, broke it off, worried and unhappy.\n \"What's he want to see\nme\nfor?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Lin said curtly.\n\n\n Ri got to his feet. One of his hands reached out, plucked nervously\n at Lin's bare forearm. \"Look,\" he whispered. \"You know him. I have—a\n little money. If you were able to ... if he wants,\" Ri gulped, \"to\ndo\nanything to me—I'd pay you, if you could....\"\n\n\n \"You better come along,\" Lin said, turning.",
"\"That's another lie,\" Mia continued. \"That he protects the people from\n the Army. That's a lie. I don't believe they were\never\nplotting\n against him. Not even at first. I think they\nhelped\nhim, don't you\n see?\"\n\n\n Ri whined nervously.\n\n\n \"It's like this,\" Mia said. \"I see it like this. The Army\nput\nhim in\n power when the people were in rebellion against military rule.\"\nRi swallowed. \"We couldn't make the people believe that.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" Mia challenged. \"Couldn't we? Not today, but what about tomorrow?\n You'll see. Because I think the Army is getting ready to invade the\n alien system!\"\n\n\n \"The people won't support them,\" Ri answered woodenly.\n\n\n \"\nThink.\nIf he tells them to, they will. They trust him.\"",
"Extrone's lip twisted in wry amusement. \"If I had waited until it was\n safe for me to hunt on an alien planet, I would not have been able to\n find such an illustrious guide.\"\n\n\n \"... I'm flattered, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Extrone said. \"But you should have spoken to me about it,\n when you discovered the farn beast in our own system.\"\n\n\n \"I realize that, sir. That is, I had intended at the first opportunity,\n sir....\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Extrone said dryly. \"Like all of my subjects,\" he waved\n his hand in a broad gesture, \"the highest as well as the lowest slave,\n know me and love me. I know your intentions were the best.\"\n\n\n Ri squirmed, his face pale. \"We do indeed love you, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone bent forward. \"\nKnow\nme and love me.\"",
"Since the hole was drying, the left, partially exposed bank was steep\n toward the muddy water. Upon it was green, new grass, tender-tuffed,\n half mashed in places by heavy animal treads. It was there that they\n staked him out, tying the free end of the rope tightly around the base\n of a scaling tree.\n\n\n \"You will scream,\" Extrone instructed. With his rifle, he pointed\n across the water hole. \"The farn beast will come from this direction, I\n imagine.\"\n\n\n Ri was almost slobbering in fear.\n\n\n \"Let me hear you scream,\" Extrone said.\n\n\n Ri moaned weakly.\n\n\n \"You'll have to do better than that.\" Extrone inclined his head toward\n a bearer, who used something Ri couldn't see.\nRi screamed.",
"Extrone nodded. After a moment he said, \"You killed one, I believe, on\nyour\ntrip?\"\n\n\n Ri shifted. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone held back the flap of the tent. \"Won't you come in?\" he asked\n without any politeness whatever.\n\n\n Ri obeyed the order.\n\n\n The inside of the tent was luxurious. The bed was of bulky feathers,\n costly of transport space, the sleep curtains of silken gauze. The\n floor, heavy, portable tile blocks, not the hollow kind, were neatly\n and smoothly inset into the ground. Hanging from the center, to the\n left of the slender, hand-carved center pole, was a chain of crystals.\n They tinkled lightly when Extrone dropped the flap. The light was\n electric from a portable dynamo. Extrone flipped it on. He crossed to\n the bed, sat down.",
"Again they turned reluctantly. This time, he did not call them back.\n Instead, with amusement, he watched until they disappeared into the\n tangle of forest.\n\n\n Dusk was falling. The takeoff blast of the rocket illuminated the area,\n casting weird shadows on the gently swaying grasses; there was a hot\n breath of dry air and the rocket dwindled toward the stars.\n\n\n Extrone stood up lazily, stretching. He tossed the empty glass away,\n listened for it to shatter. He reached out, parted the heavy flap to\n his tent.\n\n\n \"Sir?\" Ri said, hurrying toward him in the gathering darkness.\n\n\n \"Eh?\" Extrone said, turning, startled. \"Oh, you. Well?\"\n\n\n \"We ... located signs of the farn beast, sir. To the east.\"",
"Extrone smiled, almost pointed teeth showing through the beard. \"I'm\n glad we won't have to cross the ridge.\"\n\n\n Ri wiped his forehead on the back of his sleeve. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"We'll pitch camp right here, then,\" Extrone said. \"We'll go after it\n tomorrow.\" He looked at the sky. \"Have the bearers hurry.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Ri moved away, his pulse gradually slowing. \"You, there!\" he called.\n \"Pitch camp, here!\"",
"\"See that you keep it up that way,\" Extrone said. \"That's the way I\n want you to sound.\" He turned toward Lin. \"We can climb this tree, I\n think.\"\n\n\n Slowly, aided by the bearers, the two men climbed the tree, bark\n peeling away from under their rough boots. Ri watched them hopelessly.\n\n\n Once at the crotch, Extrone settled down, holding the rifle at alert.\n Lin moved to the left, out on the main branch, rested in a smaller\n crotch.\n\n\n Looking down, Extrone said, \"Scream!\" Then, to Lin, \"You feel the\n excitement? It's always in the air like this at a hunt.\"\n\n\n \"I feel it,\" Lin said.\n\n\n Extrone chuckled. \"You were with me on Meizque?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\""
],
[
"\"Oh?\"\n\n\n \"Let's get back to the column.\"\n\"Extrone wants to see you,\" Lin said.\n\n\n Ri twisted at the grass shoot, broke it off, worried and unhappy.\n \"What's he want to see\nme\nfor?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Lin said curtly.\n\n\n Ri got to his feet. One of his hands reached out, plucked nervously\n at Lin's bare forearm. \"Look,\" he whispered. \"You know him. I have—a\n little money. If you were able to ... if he wants,\" Ri gulped, \"to\ndo\nanything to me—I'd pay you, if you could....\"\n\n\n \"You better come along,\" Lin said, turning.",
"\"See that you keep it up that way,\" Extrone said. \"That's the way I\n want you to sound.\" He turned toward Lin. \"We can climb this tree, I\n think.\"\n\n\n Slowly, aided by the bearers, the two men climbed the tree, bark\n peeling away from under their rough boots. Ri watched them hopelessly.\n\n\n Once at the crotch, Extrone settled down, holding the rifle at alert.\n Lin moved to the left, out on the main branch, rested in a smaller\n crotch.\n\n\n Looking down, Extrone said, \"Scream!\" Then, to Lin, \"You feel the\n excitement? It's always in the air like this at a hunt.\"\n\n\n \"I feel it,\" Lin said.\n\n\n Extrone chuckled. \"You were with me on Meizque?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"\"An alien?\" Extrone corrected.\n\n\n \"There's not enough difference between us to matter, sir. Of tearing an\n alien to pieces, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone laughed harshly. \"It's 'sir' whenever you contradict me?\"\n\n\n Lin's face remained impassive. \"I guess it seems that way. Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Damned few people would dare go as far as you do,\" Extrone said. \"But\n you're afraid of me, too, in your own way, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Lin shrugged. \"Maybe.\"\n\n\n \"I can see you are. Even my wives are. I wonder if anyone can know how\n wonderful it feels to have people\nall\nafraid of you.\"\n\n\n \"The farn beasts, according to the manual....\"\n\n\n \"You are very insistent on one subject.\"",
"And Extrone stepped out of the tent, fully dressed, surly, letting the\n flap slap loudly behind him. He stretched hungrily and stared around\n the camp, his eyes still vacant-mean with sleep.\n\n\n \"Breakfast!\" he shouted, and two bearers came running with a folding\n table and chair. Behind them, a third bearer, carrying a tray of\n various foods; and yet behind him, a fourth, with a steaming pitcher\n and a drinking mug.\n\n\n Extrone ate hugely, with none of the delicacy sometimes affected in his\n conversational gestures. When he had finished, he washed his mouth with\n water and spat on the ground.\n\n\n \"Lin!\" he said.\n\n\n His personal bearer came loping toward him.\n\n\n \"Have you read that manual I gave you?\"\n\n\n Lin nodded. \"Yes.\"",
"\"It's a different one,\" Lin said.\n\n\n \"How do you know?\"\n\n\n \"Hear the lower pitch, the more of a roar?\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Extrone shouted. \"You, down there. There are two coming. Now\n let's hear you really scream!\"\n\n\n Ri, below, whimpered childishly and began to retreat toward the tether\n tree, his eyes wide.\n\n\n \"There's a lot of satisfaction in fooling them, too,\" Extrone said.\n \"Making them come to your bait, where you can get at them.\" He\n opened his right hand. \"Choose your ground, set your trap. Bait it.\"\n He snapped his hand into a fist, held the fist up before his eyes,\n imprisoning the idea. \"Spring the trap when the quarry is inside.\n Clever. That makes the waiting more interesting. Waiting to see if they\n really will come to your bait.\"",
"Extrone pushed the table away. He smacked his lips wetly. \"Very\n ludicrous, Lin. Have you noticed that I have two businessmen for\n guides? It occurred to me when I got up. They would have spat on me,\n twenty years ago, damn them.\"\n\n\n Lin waited.\n\n\n \"Now I can spit on them, which pleases me.\"\n\n\n \"The farn beasts are dangerous, sir,\" Lin said.\n\n\n \"Eh? Oh, yes. Those. What did the manual say about them?\"\n\n\n \"I believe they're carnivorous, sir.\"\n\n\n \"An alien manual. That's ludicrous, too. That we have the only\n information on our newly discovered fauna from an alien manual—and, of\n course, two businessmen.\"\n\n\n \"They have very long, sharp fangs, and, when enraged, are capable of\n tearing a man—\"",
"Lin shifted, staring toward the forest.\n\n\n \"I've always liked to hunt,\" Extrone said. \"More than anything else, I\n think.\"\n\n\n Lin spat toward the ground. \"People should hunt because they have to.\n For food. For safety.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Extrone argued. \"People should hunt for the love of hunting.\"\n\n\n \"Killing?\"\n\n\n \"Hunting,\" Extrone repeated harshly.\nThe farn beast coughed. Another answered. They were very near, and\n there was a noise of crackling underbrush.\n\n\n \"He's good bait,\" Extrone said. \"He's fat enough and he knows how to\n scream good.\"\n\n\n Ri had stopped screaming; he was huddled against the tree, fearfully\n eying the forest across from the watering hole.",
"Lin, returning to the column, threaded his way among reclining\n bearers. He stopped before Extrone and tossed his hair out of his eyes.\n \"I located a spoor,\" he said, suppressed eagerness in his voice. \"About\n a quarter ahead. It looks fresh.\"\n\n\n Extrone's eyes lit with passion.\n\n\n Lin's face was red with heat and grimy with sweat. \"There were two, I\n think.\"\n\n\n \"Two?\" Extrone grinned, petting the rifle. \"You and I better go forward\n and look at the spoor.\"\n\n\n Lin said, \"We ought to take protection, if you're going, too.\"\n\n\n Extrone laughed. \"This is enough.\" He gestured with the rifle and stood\n up.\n\n\n \"I wish you had let me bring a gun along, sir,\" Lin said.",
"\"I ... I....\" Ri glanced nervously at Lin out of the tail of his eye.\n Lin's face was impassive.\n\n\n \"Of\ncourse\nyou will,\" Extrone said genially. \"Get me a rope, Lin. A\n good, long, strong rope.\"\n\n\n \"What are you going to do?\" Ri asked, terrified.\n\n\n \"Why, I'm going to tie the rope around your waist and stake you out as\n bait.\"\n\n\n \"No!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, come now. When the farn beast hears you scream—you\ncan\nscream,\n by the way?\"\n\n\n Ri swallowed.\n\n\n \"We could find a way to make you.\"\n\n\n There was perspiration trickling down Ri's forehead, a single drop,\n creeping toward his nose.",
"\"That was something, that time.\" He ran his hand along the stock of the\n weapon.\n\n\n The sun headed west, veiling itself with trees; a large insect circled\n Extrone's head. He slapped at it, angry. The forest was quiet,\n underlined by an occasional piping call, something like a whistle. Ri's\n screams were shrill, echoing away, shiveringly. Lin sat quiet, hunched.\n\n\n Extrone's eyes narrowed, and he began to pet the gun stock with quick,\n jerky movements. Lin licked his lips, keeping his eyes on Extrone's\n face. The sun seemed stuck in the sky, and the heat squeezed against\n them, sucking at their breath like a vacuum. The insect went away.\n Still, endless, hopeless, monotonous, Ri screamed.\nA farn beast coughed, far in the matted forest.\n\n\n Extrone laughed nervously. \"He must have heard.\"",
"\"We're lucky to rouse one so fast,\" Lin said.\n\n\n Extrone dug his boot cleats into the tree, braced himself. \"I like\n this. There's more excitement in waiting like this than in anything I\n know.\"\n\n\n Lin nodded.\n\n\n \"The waiting, itself, is a lot. The suspense. It's not only the killing\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"It's not\nonly\nthe killing,\" Lin echoed.\n\n\n \"You understand?\" Extrone said. \"How it is to wait, knowing in just a\n minute something is going to come out of the forest, and you're going\n to kill it?\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" Lin said.\n\n\n \"But it's not only the killing. It's the waiting, too.\"\n\n\n The farn beast coughed again; nearer.",
"Ri rubbed his hands along his thighs; he sighed, a tiny sound,\n ineffectual. He followed Lin beyond an outcropping of shale to where\n Extrone was seated, petting his rifle.\n\n\n Extrone nodded genially. \"The farn beast hunter, eh?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone drummed his fingers on the stock of the blast rifle. \"Tell me\n what they look like,\" he said suddenly.\n\n\n \"Well, sir, they're ... uh....\"\n\n\n \"Pretty frightening?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir.... Well, in a way, sir.\"\n\n\n \"But\nyou\nweren't afraid of them, were you?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir. No, because....\"\n\n\n Extrone was smiling innocently. \"Good. I want you to do something for\n me.\"",
"\"... It's the only thing I know anything about. The farn beast, as I\n was saying, sir, is the particular enemy of men. Or if you like, of\n aliens. Sir.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Extrone said, annoyed. \"I'll be careful.\"\n\n\n In the distance, a farn beast coughed.\n\n\n Instantly alert, Extrone said, \"Get the bearers! Have some of them cut\n a path through that damn thicket! And tell those two businessmen to get\n the hell over here!\"\n\n\n Lin smiled, his eyes suddenly afire with the excitement of the hunt.\nFour hours later, they were well into the scrub forest. Extrone walked\n leisurely, well back of the cutters, who hacked away, methodically, at\n the vines and branches which might impede his forward progress. Their\n sharp, awkward knives snickered rhythmically to the rasp of their heavy\n breathing.",
"Extrone began to tremble with excitement. \"Here they come!\"\n\n\n The forest sprang apart. Extrone bent forward, the gun still across his\n lap.\n\n\n The farn beast, its tiny eyes red with hate, stepped out on the bank,\n swinging its head wildly, its nostrils flaring in anger. It coughed.\n Its mate appeared beside it. Their tails thrashed against the scrubs\n behind them, rattling leaves.\n\"Shoot!\" Lin hissed. \"For God's sake, shoot!\"\n\n\n \"Wait,\" Extrone said. \"Let's see what they do.\" He had not moved\n the rifle. He was tense, bent forward, his eyes slitted, his breath\n beginning to sound like an asthmatic pump.\n\n\n The lead farn beast sighted Ri. It lowered its head.\n\n\n \"Look!\" Extrone cried excitedly. \"Here it comes!\"",
"\"Wait,\" Ri begged, fighting off the rope with his hands. \"You don't\n want to use me, sir. Not after I told you.... Please, sir. If anything\n should happen to me.... Please, sir. Don't do it.\"\n\n\n \"Tie it,\" Extrone ordered.\n\n\n \"No, sir. Please. Oh,\nplease\ndon't, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Tie it,\" Extrone said inexorably.\n\n\n Lin bent with the rope; his face was colorless.\nThey were at the watering hole—Extrone, Lin, two bearers, and Ri.",
"\"One is enough in\nmy\ncamp.\"\nThe two of them went forward, alone, into the forest. Extrone moved\n agilely through the tangle, following Lin closely. When they came to\n the tracks, heavily pressed into drying mud around a small watering\n hole, Extrone nodded his head in satisfaction.\n\n\n \"This way,\" Lin said, pointing, and once more the two of them started\n off.\n\n\n They went a good distance through the forest, Extrone becoming more\n alert with each additional foot. Finally, Lin stopped him with a\n restraining hand. \"They may be quite a way ahead. Hadn't we ought to\n bring up the column?\"\n\n\n The farn beast, somewhere beyond a ragged clump of bushes, coughed.\n Extrone clenched the blast rifle convulsively.\n\n\n The farn beast coughed again, more distant this time.\n\n\n \"They're moving away,\" Lin said.",
"\"Yes, sir.\nKnow\nyou and love you, sir,\" Ri said.\n\n\n \"Get out!\" Extrone said.\n\"It's frightening,\" Ri said, \"to be that close to him.\"\n\n\n Mia nodded.\n\n\n The two of them, beneath the leaf-swollen branches of the gnarled tree,\n were seated on their sleeping bags. The moon was clear and cold and\n bright in a cloudless sky; a small moon, smooth-surfaced, except for a\n central mountain ridge that bisected it into almost twin hemispheres.\n\n\n \"To think of him. As flesh and blood. Not like the—well; that—what\n we've read about.\"\n\n\n Mia glanced suspiciously around him at the shadows. \"You begin to\n understand a lot of things, after seeing him.\"\n\n\n Ri picked nervously at the cover of his sleeping bag.",
"Occasionally, Extrone halted, motioned for his water carrier, and drank\n deeply of the icy water to allay the heat of the forest, a heat made\n oppressive by the press of foliage against the outside air.\n\n\n Ranging out, on both sides of the central body, the two businessmen\n fought independently against the wild growth, each scouting the flanks\n for farn beasts, and ahead, beyond the cutters, Lin flittered among the\n tree trunks, sometimes far, sometimes near.\n\n\n Extrone carried the only weapon, slung easily over his shoulder, a\n powerful blast rifle, capable of piercing medium armor in sustained\n fire. To his rear, the water carrier was trailed by a man bearing a\n folding stool, and behind him, a man carrying the heavy, high-powered\n two-way communication set.",
"\"Extrone. Eh?... Oh, you got their ship. Well, why in hell bother\n me?... All right, so they found out I was here. You got them, didn't\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Blasted them right out of space,\" the voice crackled excitedly. \"Right\n in the middle of a radio broadcast, sir.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want to listen to your gabbling when I'm hunting!\" Extrone\n tore off the head-set and handed it to the bearer. \"If they call back,\n find out what they want, first. I don't want to be bothered unless it's\n important.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone squinted up at the sun; his eyes crinkled under the glare, and\n perspiration stood in little droplets on the back of his hands.",
"Extrone stared at them for a space. Then, indifferently, he turned\n away, in the direction of a resting bearer. \"You!\" he said. \"Hey! Bring\n me a drink!\" He faced the officers again. He smiled maliciously. \"I'm\n staying here.\"\n\n\n The lead officer licked his firm lower lip. \"But, sir....\"\n\n\n Extrone toyed with his beard. \"About a year ago, gentlemen, there was\n an alien ship around here then, wasn't there? And you destroyed it,\n didn't you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. When we located it, sir.\"\n\n\n \"You'll destroy this one, too,\" Extrone said."
],
[
"\"That's what I mean. The pilot don't like businessmen. He had it in for\n us.\"\n\n\n Ri cleared his throat nervously. \"Maybe you're right.\"\n\n\n \"It's the Hunting Club he don't like.\"\n\n\n \"I wish to God I'd never heard of a farn beast,\" Ri said. \"At least,\n then, I wouldn't be one of his guides. Why didn't he hire somebody\n else?\"\nMia looked at his companion. He spat. \"What hurts most, he pays us for\n it. I could buy half this planet, and he makes me his guide—at less\n than I pay my secretary.\"\n\n\n \"Well, anyway, we won't have to cross that ridge.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you!\" Extrone called.\n\n\n The two of them turned immediately.",
"He crossed to Mia, who, along with him, had been pressed into Extrone's\n party as guides. Once more, Ri addressed the bearers, \"Be quick, now!\"\n And to Mia, \"God almighty, he was getting mad.\" He ran a hand under his\n collar. \"It's a good thing that farn beast sounded off when it did. I'd\n hate to think of making him climb that ridge.\"\n\n\n Mia glanced nervously over his shoulder. \"It's that damned pilot's\n fault for setting us down on this side. I told him it was the other\n side. I told him so.\"\n\n\n Ri shrugged hopelessly.\n\n\n Mia said, \"I don't think he even saw a blast area over here. I think he\n wanted to get us in trouble.\"\n\n\n \"There shouldn't be one. There shouldn't be a blast area on this side\n of the ridge, too.\"",
"\"We didn't have a chance,\" Mia objected. \"Everybody and his brother had\n heard the rumor that farn beasts were somewhere around here. It wasn't\n our fault Extrone found out.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we hadn't shot our guide, then. I wish he was here instead of\n us.\"\n\n\n Mia shook perspiration out of his eyes. \"We should have shot our pilot,\n too. That was our mistake. The pilot must have been the one who told\n Extrone we'd hunted this area.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't think a Club pilot would do that.\"\n\n\n \"After Extrone said he'd hunt farn beasts, even if it meant going to\n the alien system? Listen, you don't know.... Wait a minute.\"\n\n\n There was perspiration on Ri's upper lip.",
"\"You'll be safe,\" Extrone said, studying his face with amusement. \"I'll\n shoot the animal before it reaches you.\"\n\n\n Ri gulped for air. \"But ... if there should be more than one?\"\n\n\n Extrone shrugged.\n\n\n \"I—Look, sir. Listen to me.\" Ri's lips were bloodless and his hands\n were trembling. \"It's not me you want to do this to. It's Mia, sir.\nHe\nkilled a farn beast before\nI\ndid, sir. And last night—last\n night, he—\"\n\n\n \"He what?\" Extrone demanded, leaning forward intently.",
"\"I meant in our system, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Of course you did,\" Extrone said, lazily tracing the crease of his\n sleeve with his forefinger. \"I imagine these are the only farn beasts\n in our system.\"\n\n\n Ri waited uneasily, not answering.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Extrone said, \"I imagine they are. It would have been a shame if\n you had killed the last one. Don't you think so?\"\n\n\n Ri's hands worried the sides of his outer garment. \"Yes, sir. It would\n have been.\"\n\n\n Extrone pursed his lips. \"It wouldn't have been very considerate of you\n to—But, still, you gained valuable experience. I'm glad you agreed to\n come along as my guide.\"\n\n\n \"It was an honor, sir.\"",
"Extrone's lip twisted in wry amusement. \"If I had waited until it was\n safe for me to hunt on an alien planet, I would not have been able to\n find such an illustrious guide.\"\n\n\n \"... I'm flattered, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Extrone said. \"But you should have spoken to me about it,\n when you discovered the farn beast in our own system.\"\n\n\n \"I realize that, sir. That is, I had intended at the first opportunity,\n sir....\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Extrone said dryly. \"Like all of my subjects,\" he waved\n his hand in a broad gesture, \"the highest as well as the lowest slave,\n know me and love me. I know your intentions were the best.\"\n\n\n Ri squirmed, his face pale. \"We do indeed love you, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone bent forward. \"\nKnow\nme and love me.\"",
"\"You two scout ahead,\" Extrone said. \"See if you can pick up some\n tracks.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Ri said, and instantly the two of them readjusted their\n shoulder straps and started off.\n\n\n Shortly they were inside of the scrub forest, safe from sight. \"Let's\n wait here,\" Mia said.\n\n\n \"No, we better go on. He may have sent a spy in.\"\n\n\n They pushed on, being careful to blaze the trees, because they were not\n professional guides.\n\n\n \"We don't want to get too near,\" Ri said after toiling through the\n forest for many minutes. \"Without guns, we don't want to get near\n enough for the farn beast to charge us.\"\n\n\n They stopped. The forest was dense, the vines clinging.",
"\"\nI\ndidn't tell Extrone, if that's what you're thinking,\" Mia said.\n\n\n Ri's mouth twisted. \"I didn't say you did.\"\n\n\n \"Listen,\" Mia said in a hoarse whisper. \"I just thought. Listen. To\n hell with how he found out. Here's the point. Maybe he'll shoot us,\n too, when the hunt's over.\"\n\n\n Ri licked his lips. \"No. He wouldn't do that. We're not—not just\n anybody. He couldn't kill us like that. Not even\nhim\n. And besides,\n why would he want to do that? It wouldn't do any good to shoot us. Too\n many people already know about the farn beasts. You said that yourself.\"\n\n\n Mia said, \"I hope you're right.\" They stood side by side, studying the\n blast area in silence. Finally, Mia said, \"We better be getting back.\"",
"\"Yes, sir.\nKnow\nyou and love you, sir,\" Ri said.\n\n\n \"Get out!\" Extrone said.\n\"It's frightening,\" Ri said, \"to be that close to him.\"\n\n\n Mia nodded.\n\n\n The two of them, beneath the leaf-swollen branches of the gnarled tree,\n were seated on their sleeping bags. The moon was clear and cold and\n bright in a cloudless sky; a small moon, smooth-surfaced, except for a\n central mountain ridge that bisected it into almost twin hemispheres.\n\n\n \"To think of him. As flesh and blood. Not like the—well; that—what\n we've read about.\"\n\n\n Mia glanced suspiciously around him at the shadows. \"You begin to\n understand a lot of things, after seeing him.\"\n\n\n Ri picked nervously at the cover of his sleeping bag.",
"Extrone nodded. After a moment he said, \"You killed one, I believe, on\nyour\ntrip?\"\n\n\n Ri shifted. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone held back the flap of the tent. \"Won't you come in?\" he asked\n without any politeness whatever.\n\n\n Ri obeyed the order.\n\n\n The inside of the tent was luxurious. The bed was of bulky feathers,\n costly of transport space, the sleep curtains of silken gauze. The\n floor, heavy, portable tile blocks, not the hollow kind, were neatly\n and smoothly inset into the ground. Hanging from the center, to the\n left of the slender, hand-carved center pole, was a chain of crystals.\n They tinkled lightly when Extrone dropped the flap. The light was\n electric from a portable dynamo. Extrone flipped it on. He crossed to\n the bed, sat down.",
"\"We have a tight patrol, sir. It can't slip through. But it might try a\n long range bombardment, sir.\"\nExtrone said, \"To begin with, they probably don't even know I'm here.\n And they probably couldn't hit this area if they did know. And you\n can't afford to let them get a shot at me, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"That's why we'd like you to return to an inner planet, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone plucked at his right ear lobe, half closing his eyes. \"You'll\n lose a fleet before you'll dare let anything happen to me, gentlemen.\n I'm quite safe here, I think.\"\n\n\n The bearer brought Extrone his drink.\n\n\n \"Get off,\" Extrone said quietly to the four officers.",
"\"Extrone. Eh?... Oh, you got their ship. Well, why in hell bother\n me?... All right, so they found out I was here. You got them, didn't\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Blasted them right out of space,\" the voice crackled excitedly. \"Right\n in the middle of a radio broadcast, sir.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want to listen to your gabbling when I'm hunting!\" Extrone\n tore off the head-set and handed it to the bearer. \"If they call back,\n find out what they want, first. I don't want to be bothered unless it's\n important.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone squinted up at the sun; his eyes crinkled under the glare, and\n perspiration stood in little droplets on the back of his hands.",
"Extrone pushed the table away. He smacked his lips wetly. \"Very\n ludicrous, Lin. Have you noticed that I have two businessmen for\n guides? It occurred to me when I got up. They would have spat on me,\n twenty years ago, damn them.\"\n\n\n Lin waited.\n\n\n \"Now I can spit on them, which pleases me.\"\n\n\n \"The farn beasts are dangerous, sir,\" Lin said.\n\n\n \"Eh? Oh, yes. Those. What did the manual say about them?\"\n\n\n \"I believe they're carnivorous, sir.\"\n\n\n \"An alien manual. That's ludicrous, too. That we have the only\n information on our newly discovered fauna from an alien manual—and, of\n course, two businessmen.\"\n\n\n \"They have very long, sharp fangs, and, when enraged, are capable of\n tearing a man—\"",
"Ri looked around at the shadows.\n\n\n \"That explains a lot of things,\" Mia said. \"I think the Army's been\n preparing for this for a long time. From the first, maybe. That's why\n Extrone cut off our trade with the aliens. Partly to keep them from\n learning that he was getting ready to invade them, but more to keep\n them from exposing\nhim\nto the people. The aliens wouldn't be fooled\n like we were, so easy.\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Ri snapped. \"It was to keep the natural economic balance.\"\n\n\n \"You know that's not right.\"\n\n\n Ri lay down on his bed roll. \"Don't talk about it. It's not good to\n talk like this. I don't even want to listen.\"",
"And Extrone stepped out of the tent, fully dressed, surly, letting the\n flap slap loudly behind him. He stretched hungrily and stared around\n the camp, his eyes still vacant-mean with sleep.\n\n\n \"Breakfast!\" he shouted, and two bearers came running with a folding\n table and chair. Behind them, a third bearer, carrying a tray of\n various foods; and yet behind him, a fourth, with a steaming pitcher\n and a drinking mug.\n\n\n Extrone ate hugely, with none of the delicacy sometimes affected in his\n conversational gestures. When he had finished, he washed his mouth with\n water and spat on the ground.\n\n\n \"Lin!\" he said.\n\n\n His personal bearer came loping toward him.\n\n\n \"Have you read that manual I gave you?\"\n\n\n Lin nodded. \"Yes.\"",
"\"What in hell do you want?\" Extrone asked.\n\n\n They stopped a respectful distance away. \"Sir....\" one began.\n\n\n \"Haven't I told you gentlemen that rockets frighten the game?\" Extrone\n demanded, ominously not raising his voice.\n\n\n \"Sir,\" the lead officer said, \"it's another alien ship. It was sighted\n a few hours ago, off this very planet, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone's face looked much too innocent. \"How did it get there,\n gentlemen? Why wasn't it destroyed?\"\n\n\n \"We lost it again, sir. Temporarily, sir.\"\n\n\n \"So?\" Extrone mocked.\n\n\n \"We thought you ought to return to a safer planet, sir. Until we could\n locate and destroy it.\"",
"Mia looked up at the darkening sky. \"We better hurry,\" he said.\nWhen it came over the hastily established camp, the rocket was low,\n obviously looking for a landing site. It was a military craft, from the\n outpost on the near moon, and forward, near the nose, there was the\n blazoned emblem of the Ninth Fleet. The rocket roared directly over\n Extrone's tent, turned slowly, spouting fuel expensively, and settled\n into the scrub forest, turning the vegetation beneath it sere by its\n blasts.\n\n\n Extrone sat on an upholstered stool before his tent and spat\n disgustedly and combed his beard with his blunt fingers.\n\n\n Shortly, from the direction of the rocket, a group of four high-ranking\n officers came out of the forest, heading toward him. They were spruce,\n the officers, with military discipline holding their waists in and\n knees almost stiff.",
"Occasionally, Extrone halted, motioned for his water carrier, and drank\n deeply of the icy water to allay the heat of the forest, a heat made\n oppressive by the press of foliage against the outside air.\n\n\n Ranging out, on both sides of the central body, the two businessmen\n fought independently against the wild growth, each scouting the flanks\n for farn beasts, and ahead, beyond the cutters, Lin flittered among the\n tree trunks, sometimes far, sometimes near.\n\n\n Extrone carried the only weapon, slung easily over his shoulder, a\n powerful blast rifle, capable of piercing medium armor in sustained\n fire. To his rear, the water carrier was trailed by a man bearing a\n folding stool, and behind him, a man carrying the heavy, high-powered\n two-way communication set.",
"\"... It's the only thing I know anything about. The farn beast, as I\n was saying, sir, is the particular enemy of men. Or if you like, of\n aliens. Sir.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Extrone said, annoyed. \"I'll be careful.\"\n\n\n In the distance, a farn beast coughed.\n\n\n Instantly alert, Extrone said, \"Get the bearers! Have some of them cut\n a path through that damn thicket! And tell those two businessmen to get\n the hell over here!\"\n\n\n Lin smiled, his eyes suddenly afire with the excitement of the hunt.\nFour hours later, they were well into the scrub forest. Extrone walked\n leisurely, well back of the cutters, who hacked away, methodically, at\n the vines and branches which might impede his forward progress. Their\n sharp, awkward knives snickered rhythmically to the rasp of their heavy\n breathing.",
"\"He'll want the bearers to hack a path for him,\" Mia said. \"But we go\n it alone. Damn him.\"\n\n\n Ri twisted his mouth into a sour frown. He wiped at his forehead. \"Hot.\n By God, it's hot. I didn't think it was this hot, the first time we\n were here.\"\n\n\n Mia said, \"The first time,\nwe\nweren't guides. We didn't notice it so\n much then.\"\n\n\n They fought a few yards more into the forest.\n\n\n Then it ended. Or, rather, there was a wide gap. Before them lay a\n blast area, unmistakable. The grass was beginning to grow again, but\n the tree stumps were roasted from the rocket breath.\n\n\n \"This isn't ours!\" Ri said. \"This looks like it was made nearly a year\n ago!\""
],
[
"\"Extrone. Eh?... Oh, you got their ship. Well, why in hell bother\n me?... All right, so they found out I was here. You got them, didn't\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Blasted them right out of space,\" the voice crackled excitedly. \"Right\n in the middle of a radio broadcast, sir.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want to listen to your gabbling when I'm hunting!\" Extrone\n tore off the head-set and handed it to the bearer. \"If they call back,\n find out what they want, first. I don't want to be bothered unless it's\n important.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone squinted up at the sun; his eyes crinkled under the glare, and\n perspiration stood in little droplets on the back of his hands.",
"Extrone stared at them for a space. Then, indifferently, he turned\n away, in the direction of a resting bearer. \"You!\" he said. \"Hey! Bring\n me a drink!\" He faced the officers again. He smiled maliciously. \"I'm\n staying here.\"\n\n\n The lead officer licked his firm lower lip. \"But, sir....\"\n\n\n Extrone toyed with his beard. \"About a year ago, gentlemen, there was\n an alien ship around here then, wasn't there? And you destroyed it,\n didn't you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. When we located it, sir.\"\n\n\n \"You'll destroy this one, too,\" Extrone said.",
"And Extrone stepped out of the tent, fully dressed, surly, letting the\n flap slap loudly behind him. He stretched hungrily and stared around\n the camp, his eyes still vacant-mean with sleep.\n\n\n \"Breakfast!\" he shouted, and two bearers came running with a folding\n table and chair. Behind them, a third bearer, carrying a tray of\n various foods; and yet behind him, a fourth, with a steaming pitcher\n and a drinking mug.\n\n\n Extrone ate hugely, with none of the delicacy sometimes affected in his\n conversational gestures. When he had finished, he washed his mouth with\n water and spat on the ground.\n\n\n \"Lin!\" he said.\n\n\n His personal bearer came loping toward him.\n\n\n \"Have you read that manual I gave you?\"\n\n\n Lin nodded. \"Yes.\"",
"Extrone nodded. After a moment he said, \"You killed one, I believe, on\nyour\ntrip?\"\n\n\n Ri shifted. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone held back the flap of the tent. \"Won't you come in?\" he asked\n without any politeness whatever.\n\n\n Ri obeyed the order.\n\n\n The inside of the tent was luxurious. The bed was of bulky feathers,\n costly of transport space, the sleep curtains of silken gauze. The\n floor, heavy, portable tile blocks, not the hollow kind, were neatly\n and smoothly inset into the ground. Hanging from the center, to the\n left of the slender, hand-carved center pole, was a chain of crystals.\n They tinkled lightly when Extrone dropped the flap. The light was\n electric from a portable dynamo. Extrone flipped it on. He crossed to\n the bed, sat down.",
"\"See that you keep it up that way,\" Extrone said. \"That's the way I\n want you to sound.\" He turned toward Lin. \"We can climb this tree, I\n think.\"\n\n\n Slowly, aided by the bearers, the two men climbed the tree, bark\n peeling away from under their rough boots. Ri watched them hopelessly.\n\n\n Once at the crotch, Extrone settled down, holding the rifle at alert.\n Lin moved to the left, out on the main branch, rested in a smaller\n crotch.\n\n\n Looking down, Extrone said, \"Scream!\" Then, to Lin, \"You feel the\n excitement? It's always in the air like this at a hunt.\"\n\n\n \"I feel it,\" Lin said.\n\n\n Extrone chuckled. \"You were with me on Meizque?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"\"Yes, sir.\nKnow\nyou and love you, sir,\" Ri said.\n\n\n \"Get out!\" Extrone said.\n\"It's frightening,\" Ri said, \"to be that close to him.\"\n\n\n Mia nodded.\n\n\n The two of them, beneath the leaf-swollen branches of the gnarled tree,\n were seated on their sleeping bags. The moon was clear and cold and\n bright in a cloudless sky; a small moon, smooth-surfaced, except for a\n central mountain ridge that bisected it into almost twin hemispheres.\n\n\n \"To think of him. As flesh and blood. Not like the—well; that—what\n we've read about.\"\n\n\n Mia glanced suspiciously around him at the shadows. \"You begin to\n understand a lot of things, after seeing him.\"\n\n\n Ri picked nervously at the cover of his sleeping bag.",
"Once Extrone unslung his blast rifle and triggered a burst at a tiny,\n arboreal mammal, which, upon the impact, shattered asunder, to\n Extrone's satisfied chuckle, in a burst of blood and fur.\n\n\n When the sun stood high and heat exhaustion made the near-naked bearers\n slump, Extrone permitted a rest. While waiting for the march to resume,\n he sat on the stool with his back against an ancient tree and patted,\n reflectively, the blast rifle, lying across his legs.\n\n\n \"For you, sir,\" the communications man said, interrupting his reverie.\n\n\n \"Damn,\" Extrone muttered. His face twisted in anger. \"It better be\n important.\" He took the head-set and mike and nodded to the bearer. The\n bearer twiddled the dials.",
"Extrone's lip twisted in wry amusement. \"If I had waited until it was\n safe for me to hunt on an alien planet, I would not have been able to\n find such an illustrious guide.\"\n\n\n \"... I'm flattered, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Extrone said. \"But you should have spoken to me about it,\n when you discovered the farn beast in our own system.\"\n\n\n \"I realize that, sir. That is, I had intended at the first opportunity,\n sir....\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Extrone said dryly. \"Like all of my subjects,\" he waved\n his hand in a broad gesture, \"the highest as well as the lowest slave,\n know me and love me. I know your intentions were the best.\"\n\n\n Ri squirmed, his face pale. \"We do indeed love you, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone bent forward. \"\nKnow\nme and love me.\"",
"Again they turned reluctantly. This time, he did not call them back.\n Instead, with amusement, he watched until they disappeared into the\n tangle of forest.\n\n\n Dusk was falling. The takeoff blast of the rocket illuminated the area,\n casting weird shadows on the gently swaying grasses; there was a hot\n breath of dry air and the rocket dwindled toward the stars.\n\n\n Extrone stood up lazily, stretching. He tossed the empty glass away,\n listened for it to shatter. He reached out, parted the heavy flap to\n his tent.\n\n\n \"Sir?\" Ri said, hurrying toward him in the gathering darkness.\n\n\n \"Eh?\" Extrone said, turning, startled. \"Oh, you. Well?\"\n\n\n \"We ... located signs of the farn beast, sir. To the east.\"",
"\"You'll be safe,\" Extrone said, studying his face with amusement. \"I'll\n shoot the animal before it reaches you.\"\n\n\n Ri gulped for air. \"But ... if there should be more than one?\"\n\n\n Extrone shrugged.\n\n\n \"I—Look, sir. Listen to me.\" Ri's lips were bloodless and his hands\n were trembling. \"It's not me you want to do this to. It's Mia, sir.\nHe\nkilled a farn beast before\nI\ndid, sir. And last night—last\n night, he—\"\n\n\n \"He what?\" Extrone demanded, leaning forward intently.",
"Extrone smiled, almost pointed teeth showing through the beard. \"I'm\n glad we won't have to cross the ridge.\"\n\n\n Ri wiped his forehead on the back of his sleeve. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"We'll pitch camp right here, then,\" Extrone said. \"We'll go after it\n tomorrow.\" He looked at the sky. \"Have the bearers hurry.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Ri moved away, his pulse gradually slowing. \"You, there!\" he called.\n \"Pitch camp, here!\"",
"Occasionally, Extrone halted, motioned for his water carrier, and drank\n deeply of the icy water to allay the heat of the forest, a heat made\n oppressive by the press of foliage against the outside air.\n\n\n Ranging out, on both sides of the central body, the two businessmen\n fought independently against the wild growth, each scouting the flanks\n for farn beasts, and ahead, beyond the cutters, Lin flittered among the\n tree trunks, sometimes far, sometimes near.\n\n\n Extrone carried the only weapon, slung easily over his shoulder, a\n powerful blast rifle, capable of piercing medium armor in sustained\n fire. To his rear, the water carrier was trailed by a man bearing a\n folding stool, and behind him, a man carrying the heavy, high-powered\n two-way communication set.",
"\"It's a different one,\" Lin said.\n\n\n \"How do you know?\"\n\n\n \"Hear the lower pitch, the more of a roar?\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Extrone shouted. \"You, down there. There are two coming. Now\n let's hear you really scream!\"\n\n\n Ri, below, whimpered childishly and began to retreat toward the tether\n tree, his eyes wide.\n\n\n \"There's a lot of satisfaction in fooling them, too,\" Extrone said.\n \"Making them come to your bait, where you can get at them.\" He\n opened his right hand. \"Choose your ground, set your trap. Bait it.\"\n He snapped his hand into a fist, held the fist up before his eyes,\n imprisoning the idea. \"Spring the trap when the quarry is inside.\n Clever. That makes the waiting more interesting. Waiting to see if they\n really will come to your bait.\"",
"He crossed to Mia, who, along with him, had been pressed into Extrone's\n party as guides. Once more, Ri addressed the bearers, \"Be quick, now!\"\n And to Mia, \"God almighty, he was getting mad.\" He ran a hand under his\n collar. \"It's a good thing that farn beast sounded off when it did. I'd\n hate to think of making him climb that ridge.\"\n\n\n Mia glanced nervously over his shoulder. \"It's that damned pilot's\n fault for setting us down on this side. I told him it was the other\n side. I told him so.\"\n\n\n Ri shrugged hopelessly.\n\n\n Mia said, \"I don't think he even saw a blast area over here. I think he\n wanted to get us in trouble.\"\n\n\n \"There shouldn't be one. There shouldn't be a blast area on this side\n of the ridge, too.\"",
"\"I meant in our system, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Of course you did,\" Extrone said, lazily tracing the crease of his\n sleeve with his forefinger. \"I imagine these are the only farn beasts\n in our system.\"\n\n\n Ri waited uneasily, not answering.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Extrone said, \"I imagine they are. It would have been a shame if\n you had killed the last one. Don't you think so?\"\n\n\n Ri's hands worried the sides of his outer garment. \"Yes, sir. It would\n have been.\"\n\n\n Extrone pursed his lips. \"It wouldn't have been very considerate of you\n to—But, still, you gained valuable experience. I'm glad you agreed to\n come along as my guide.\"\n\n\n \"It was an honor, sir.\"",
"\"... It's the only thing I know anything about. The farn beast, as I\n was saying, sir, is the particular enemy of men. Or if you like, of\n aliens. Sir.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Extrone said, annoyed. \"I'll be careful.\"\n\n\n In the distance, a farn beast coughed.\n\n\n Instantly alert, Extrone said, \"Get the bearers! Have some of them cut\n a path through that damn thicket! And tell those two businessmen to get\n the hell over here!\"\n\n\n Lin smiled, his eyes suddenly afire with the excitement of the hunt.\nFour hours later, they were well into the scrub forest. Extrone walked\n leisurely, well back of the cutters, who hacked away, methodically, at\n the vines and branches which might impede his forward progress. Their\n sharp, awkward knives snickered rhythmically to the rasp of their heavy\n breathing.",
"Extrone pushed the table away. He smacked his lips wetly. \"Very\n ludicrous, Lin. Have you noticed that I have two businessmen for\n guides? It occurred to me when I got up. They would have spat on me,\n twenty years ago, damn them.\"\n\n\n Lin waited.\n\n\n \"Now I can spit on them, which pleases me.\"\n\n\n \"The farn beasts are dangerous, sir,\" Lin said.\n\n\n \"Eh? Oh, yes. Those. What did the manual say about them?\"\n\n\n \"I believe they're carnivorous, sir.\"\n\n\n \"An alien manual. That's ludicrous, too. That we have the only\n information on our newly discovered fauna from an alien manual—and, of\n course, two businessmen.\"\n\n\n \"They have very long, sharp fangs, and, when enraged, are capable of\n tearing a man—\"",
"\"Oh?\"\n\n\n \"Let's get back to the column.\"\n\"Extrone wants to see you,\" Lin said.\n\n\n Ri twisted at the grass shoot, broke it off, worried and unhappy.\n \"What's he want to see\nme\nfor?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Lin said curtly.\n\n\n Ri got to his feet. One of his hands reached out, plucked nervously\n at Lin's bare forearm. \"Look,\" he whispered. \"You know him. I have—a\n little money. If you were able to ... if he wants,\" Ri gulped, \"to\ndo\nanything to me—I'd pay you, if you could....\"\n\n\n \"You better come along,\" Lin said, turning.",
"\"An alien?\" Extrone corrected.\n\n\n \"There's not enough difference between us to matter, sir. Of tearing an\n alien to pieces, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone laughed harshly. \"It's 'sir' whenever you contradict me?\"\n\n\n Lin's face remained impassive. \"I guess it seems that way. Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Damned few people would dare go as far as you do,\" Extrone said. \"But\n you're afraid of me, too, in your own way, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Lin shrugged. \"Maybe.\"\n\n\n \"I can see you are. Even my wives are. I wonder if anyone can know how\n wonderful it feels to have people\nall\nafraid of you.\"\n\n\n \"The farn beasts, according to the manual....\"\n\n\n \"You are very insistent on one subject.\"",
"\"What in hell do you want?\" Extrone asked.\n\n\n They stopped a respectful distance away. \"Sir....\" one began.\n\n\n \"Haven't I told you gentlemen that rockets frighten the game?\" Extrone\n demanded, ominously not raising his voice.\n\n\n \"Sir,\" the lead officer said, \"it's another alien ship. It was sighted\n a few hours ago, off this very planet, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone's face looked much too innocent. \"How did it get there,\n gentlemen? Why wasn't it destroyed?\"\n\n\n \"We lost it again, sir. Temporarily, sir.\"\n\n\n \"So?\" Extrone mocked.\n\n\n \"We thought you ought to return to a safer planet, sir. Until we could\n locate and destroy it.\""
],
[
"Extrone began to tremble with excitement. \"Here they come!\"\n\n\n The forest sprang apart. Extrone bent forward, the gun still across his\n lap.\n\n\n The farn beast, its tiny eyes red with hate, stepped out on the bank,\n swinging its head wildly, its nostrils flaring in anger. It coughed.\n Its mate appeared beside it. Their tails thrashed against the scrubs\n behind them, rattling leaves.\n\"Shoot!\" Lin hissed. \"For God's sake, shoot!\"\n\n\n \"Wait,\" Extrone said. \"Let's see what they do.\" He had not moved\n the rifle. He was tense, bent forward, his eyes slitted, his breath\n beginning to sound like an asthmatic pump.\n\n\n The lead farn beast sighted Ri. It lowered its head.\n\n\n \"Look!\" Extrone cried excitedly. \"Here it comes!\"",
"\"You were, I believe, the first ever to kill a farn beast?\" he said.\n\n\n \"I.... No, sir. There must have been previous hunters, sir.\"\nExtrone narrowed his eyes. \"I see by your eyes that you are\n envious—that is the word, isn't it?—of my tent.\"\n\n\n Ri looked away from his face.\n\n\n \"Perhaps I'm envious of your reputation as a hunter. You see, I have\n never killed a farn beast. In fact, I haven't\nseen\na farn beast.\"\n\n\n Ri glanced nervously around the tent, his sharp eyes avoiding Extrone's\n glittering ones. \"Few people have seen them, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Oh?\" Extrone questioned mildly. \"I wouldn't say that. I understand\n that the aliens hunt them quite extensively ... on some of their\n planets.\"",
"\"You'll be safe,\" Extrone said, studying his face with amusement. \"I'll\n shoot the animal before it reaches you.\"\n\n\n Ri gulped for air. \"But ... if there should be more than one?\"\n\n\n Extrone shrugged.\n\n\n \"I—Look, sir. Listen to me.\" Ri's lips were bloodless and his hands\n were trembling. \"It's not me you want to do this to. It's Mia, sir.\nHe\nkilled a farn beast before\nI\ndid, sir. And last night—last\n night, he—\"\n\n\n \"He what?\" Extrone demanded, leaning forward intently.",
"Ri began to scream again.\n\n\n Still Extrone did not lift his blast rifle. He was laughing. Lin\n waited, frozen, his eyes staring at the farn beast in fascination.\n\n\n The farn beast plunged into the water, which was shallow, and, throwing\n a sheet of it to either side, headed across toward Ri.\n\n\n \"Watch! Watch!\" Extrone cried gleefully.\n\n\n And then the aliens sprang their trap.",
"\"I meant in our system, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Of course you did,\" Extrone said, lazily tracing the crease of his\n sleeve with his forefinger. \"I imagine these are the only farn beasts\n in our system.\"\n\n\n Ri waited uneasily, not answering.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Extrone said, \"I imagine they are. It would have been a shame if\n you had killed the last one. Don't you think so?\"\n\n\n Ri's hands worried the sides of his outer garment. \"Yes, sir. It would\n have been.\"\n\n\n Extrone pursed his lips. \"It wouldn't have been very considerate of you\n to—But, still, you gained valuable experience. I'm glad you agreed to\n come along as my guide.\"\n\n\n \"It was an honor, sir.\"",
"\"... It's the only thing I know anything about. The farn beast, as I\n was saying, sir, is the particular enemy of men. Or if you like, of\n aliens. Sir.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Extrone said, annoyed. \"I'll be careful.\"\n\n\n In the distance, a farn beast coughed.\n\n\n Instantly alert, Extrone said, \"Get the bearers! Have some of them cut\n a path through that damn thicket! And tell those two businessmen to get\n the hell over here!\"\n\n\n Lin smiled, his eyes suddenly afire with the excitement of the hunt.\nFour hours later, they were well into the scrub forest. Extrone walked\n leisurely, well back of the cutters, who hacked away, methodically, at\n the vines and branches which might impede his forward progress. Their\n sharp, awkward knives snickered rhythmically to the rasp of their heavy\n breathing.",
"Again they turned reluctantly. This time, he did not call them back.\n Instead, with amusement, he watched until they disappeared into the\n tangle of forest.\n\n\n Dusk was falling. The takeoff blast of the rocket illuminated the area,\n casting weird shadows on the gently swaying grasses; there was a hot\n breath of dry air and the rocket dwindled toward the stars.\n\n\n Extrone stood up lazily, stretching. He tossed the empty glass away,\n listened for it to shatter. He reached out, parted the heavy flap to\n his tent.\n\n\n \"Sir?\" Ri said, hurrying toward him in the gathering darkness.\n\n\n \"Eh?\" Extrone said, turning, startled. \"Oh, you. Well?\"\n\n\n \"We ... located signs of the farn beast, sir. To the east.\"",
"\"\nI\ndidn't tell Extrone, if that's what you're thinking,\" Mia said.\n\n\n Ri's mouth twisted. \"I didn't say you did.\"\n\n\n \"Listen,\" Mia said in a hoarse whisper. \"I just thought. Listen. To\n hell with how he found out. Here's the point. Maybe he'll shoot us,\n too, when the hunt's over.\"\n\n\n Ri licked his lips. \"No. He wouldn't do that. We're not—not just\n anybody. He couldn't kill us like that. Not even\nhim\n. And besides,\n why would he want to do that? It wouldn't do any good to shoot us. Too\n many people already know about the farn beasts. You said that yourself.\"\n\n\n Mia said, \"I hope you're right.\" They stood side by side, studying the\n blast area in silence. Finally, Mia said, \"We better be getting back.\"",
"\"We're lucky to rouse one so fast,\" Lin said.\n\n\n Extrone dug his boot cleats into the tree, braced himself. \"I like\n this. There's more excitement in waiting like this than in anything I\n know.\"\n\n\n Lin nodded.\n\n\n \"The waiting, itself, is a lot. The suspense. It's not only the killing\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"It's not\nonly\nthe killing,\" Lin echoed.\n\n\n \"You understand?\" Extrone said. \"How it is to wait, knowing in just a\n minute something is going to come out of the forest, and you're going\n to kill it?\"\n\n\n \"I know,\" Lin said.\n\n\n \"But it's not only the killing. It's the waiting, too.\"\n\n\n The farn beast coughed again; nearer.",
"Lin shifted, staring toward the forest.\n\n\n \"I've always liked to hunt,\" Extrone said. \"More than anything else, I\n think.\"\n\n\n Lin spat toward the ground. \"People should hunt because they have to.\n For food. For safety.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Extrone argued. \"People should hunt for the love of hunting.\"\n\n\n \"Killing?\"\n\n\n \"Hunting,\" Extrone repeated harshly.\nThe farn beast coughed. Another answered. They were very near, and\n there was a noise of crackling underbrush.\n\n\n \"He's good bait,\" Extrone said. \"He's fat enough and he knows how to\n scream good.\"\n\n\n Ri had stopped screaming; he was huddled against the tree, fearfully\n eying the forest across from the watering hole.",
"\"We didn't have a chance,\" Mia objected. \"Everybody and his brother had\n heard the rumor that farn beasts were somewhere around here. It wasn't\n our fault Extrone found out.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we hadn't shot our guide, then. I wish he was here instead of\n us.\"\n\n\n Mia shook perspiration out of his eyes. \"We should have shot our pilot,\n too. That was our mistake. The pilot must have been the one who told\n Extrone we'd hunted this area.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't think a Club pilot would do that.\"\n\n\n \"After Extrone said he'd hunt farn beasts, even if it meant going to\n the alien system? Listen, you don't know.... Wait a minute.\"\n\n\n There was perspiration on Ri's upper lip.",
"\"You two scout ahead,\" Extrone said. \"See if you can pick up some\n tracks.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Ri said, and instantly the two of them readjusted their\n shoulder straps and started off.\n\n\n Shortly they were inside of the scrub forest, safe from sight. \"Let's\n wait here,\" Mia said.\n\n\n \"No, we better go on. He may have sent a spy in.\"\n\n\n They pushed on, being careful to blaze the trees, because they were not\n professional guides.\n\n\n \"We don't want to get too near,\" Ri said after toiling through the\n forest for many minutes. \"Without guns, we don't want to get near\n enough for the farn beast to charge us.\"\n\n\n They stopped. The forest was dense, the vines clinging.",
"Ri rubbed his hands along his thighs; he sighed, a tiny sound,\n ineffectual. He followed Lin beyond an outcropping of shale to where\n Extrone was seated, petting his rifle.\n\n\n Extrone nodded genially. \"The farn beast hunter, eh?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone drummed his fingers on the stock of the blast rifle. \"Tell me\n what they look like,\" he said suddenly.\n\n\n \"Well, sir, they're ... uh....\"\n\n\n \"Pretty frightening?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir.... Well, in a way, sir.\"\n\n\n \"But\nyou\nweren't afraid of them, were you?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir. No, because....\"\n\n\n Extrone was smiling innocently. \"Good. I want you to do something for\n me.\"",
"Extrone's lip twisted in wry amusement. \"If I had waited until it was\n safe for me to hunt on an alien planet, I would not have been able to\n find such an illustrious guide.\"\n\n\n \"... I'm flattered, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Extrone said. \"But you should have spoken to me about it,\n when you discovered the farn beast in our own system.\"\n\n\n \"I realize that, sir. That is, I had intended at the first opportunity,\n sir....\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Extrone said dryly. \"Like all of my subjects,\" he waved\n his hand in a broad gesture, \"the highest as well as the lowest slave,\n know me and love me. I know your intentions were the best.\"\n\n\n Ri squirmed, his face pale. \"We do indeed love you, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone bent forward. \"\nKnow\nme and love me.\"",
"Extrone pushed the table away. He smacked his lips wetly. \"Very\n ludicrous, Lin. Have you noticed that I have two businessmen for\n guides? It occurred to me when I got up. They would have spat on me,\n twenty years ago, damn them.\"\n\n\n Lin waited.\n\n\n \"Now I can spit on them, which pleases me.\"\n\n\n \"The farn beasts are dangerous, sir,\" Lin said.\n\n\n \"Eh? Oh, yes. Those. What did the manual say about them?\"\n\n\n \"I believe they're carnivorous, sir.\"\n\n\n \"An alien manual. That's ludicrous, too. That we have the only\n information on our newly discovered fauna from an alien manual—and, of\n course, two businessmen.\"\n\n\n \"They have very long, sharp fangs, and, when enraged, are capable of\n tearing a man—\"",
"\"I ... I....\" Ri glanced nervously at Lin out of the tail of his eye.\n Lin's face was impassive.\n\n\n \"Of\ncourse\nyou will,\" Extrone said genially. \"Get me a rope, Lin. A\n good, long, strong rope.\"\n\n\n \"What are you going to do?\" Ri asked, terrified.\n\n\n \"Why, I'm going to tie the rope around your waist and stake you out as\n bait.\"\n\n\n \"No!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, come now. When the farn beast hears you scream—you\ncan\nscream,\n by the way?\"\n\n\n Ri swallowed.\n\n\n \"We could find a way to make you.\"\n\n\n There was perspiration trickling down Ri's forehead, a single drop,\n creeping toward his nose.",
"\"One is enough in\nmy\ncamp.\"\nThe two of them went forward, alone, into the forest. Extrone moved\n agilely through the tangle, following Lin closely. When they came to\n the tracks, heavily pressed into drying mud around a small watering\n hole, Extrone nodded his head in satisfaction.\n\n\n \"This way,\" Lin said, pointing, and once more the two of them started\n off.\n\n\n They went a good distance through the forest, Extrone becoming more\n alert with each additional foot. Finally, Lin stopped him with a\n restraining hand. \"They may be quite a way ahead. Hadn't we ought to\n bring up the column?\"\n\n\n The farn beast, somewhere beyond a ragged clump of bushes, coughed.\n Extrone clenched the blast rifle convulsively.\n\n\n The farn beast coughed again, more distant this time.\n\n\n \"They're moving away,\" Lin said.",
"\"An alien?\" Extrone corrected.\n\n\n \"There's not enough difference between us to matter, sir. Of tearing an\n alien to pieces, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone laughed harshly. \"It's 'sir' whenever you contradict me?\"\n\n\n Lin's face remained impassive. \"I guess it seems that way. Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Damned few people would dare go as far as you do,\" Extrone said. \"But\n you're afraid of me, too, in your own way, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Lin shrugged. \"Maybe.\"\n\n\n \"I can see you are. Even my wives are. I wonder if anyone can know how\n wonderful it feels to have people\nall\nafraid of you.\"\n\n\n \"The farn beasts, according to the manual....\"\n\n\n \"You are very insistent on one subject.\"",
"Extrone stared at them for a space. Then, indifferently, he turned\n away, in the direction of a resting bearer. \"You!\" he said. \"Hey! Bring\n me a drink!\" He faced the officers again. He smiled maliciously. \"I'm\n staying here.\"\n\n\n The lead officer licked his firm lower lip. \"But, sir....\"\n\n\n Extrone toyed with his beard. \"About a year ago, gentlemen, there was\n an alien ship around here then, wasn't there? And you destroyed it,\n didn't you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. When we located it, sir.\"\n\n\n \"You'll destroy this one, too,\" Extrone said.",
"\"That's what I mean. The pilot don't like businessmen. He had it in for\n us.\"\n\n\n Ri cleared his throat nervously. \"Maybe you're right.\"\n\n\n \"It's the Hunting Club he don't like.\"\n\n\n \"I wish to God I'd never heard of a farn beast,\" Ri said. \"At least,\n then, I wouldn't be one of his guides. Why didn't he hire somebody\n else?\"\nMia looked at his companion. He spat. \"What hurts most, he pays us for\n it. I could buy half this planet, and he makes me his guide—at less\n than I pay my secretary.\"\n\n\n \"Well, anyway, we won't have to cross that ridge.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, you!\" Extrone called.\n\n\n The two of them turned immediately."
],
[
"Extrone stared at them for a space. Then, indifferently, he turned\n away, in the direction of a resting bearer. \"You!\" he said. \"Hey! Bring\n me a drink!\" He faced the officers again. He smiled maliciously. \"I'm\n staying here.\"\n\n\n The lead officer licked his firm lower lip. \"But, sir....\"\n\n\n Extrone toyed with his beard. \"About a year ago, gentlemen, there was\n an alien ship around here then, wasn't there? And you destroyed it,\n didn't you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. When we located it, sir.\"\n\n\n \"You'll destroy this one, too,\" Extrone said.",
"\"An alien?\" Extrone corrected.\n\n\n \"There's not enough difference between us to matter, sir. Of tearing an\n alien to pieces, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone laughed harshly. \"It's 'sir' whenever you contradict me?\"\n\n\n Lin's face remained impassive. \"I guess it seems that way. Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Damned few people would dare go as far as you do,\" Extrone said. \"But\n you're afraid of me, too, in your own way, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Lin shrugged. \"Maybe.\"\n\n\n \"I can see you are. Even my wives are. I wonder if anyone can know how\n wonderful it feels to have people\nall\nafraid of you.\"\n\n\n \"The farn beasts, according to the manual....\"\n\n\n \"You are very insistent on one subject.\"",
"\"What in hell do you want?\" Extrone asked.\n\n\n They stopped a respectful distance away. \"Sir....\" one began.\n\n\n \"Haven't I told you gentlemen that rockets frighten the game?\" Extrone\n demanded, ominously not raising his voice.\n\n\n \"Sir,\" the lead officer said, \"it's another alien ship. It was sighted\n a few hours ago, off this very planet, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone's face looked much too innocent. \"How did it get there,\n gentlemen? Why wasn't it destroyed?\"\n\n\n \"We lost it again, sir. Temporarily, sir.\"\n\n\n \"So?\" Extrone mocked.\n\n\n \"We thought you ought to return to a safer planet, sir. Until we could\n locate and destroy it.\"",
"\"Extrone. Eh?... Oh, you got their ship. Well, why in hell bother\n me?... All right, so they found out I was here. You got them, didn't\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Blasted them right out of space,\" the voice crackled excitedly. \"Right\n in the middle of a radio broadcast, sir.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want to listen to your gabbling when I'm hunting!\" Extrone\n tore off the head-set and handed it to the bearer. \"If they call back,\n find out what they want, first. I don't want to be bothered unless it's\n important.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone squinted up at the sun; his eyes crinkled under the glare, and\n perspiration stood in little droplets on the back of his hands.",
"Ri began to scream again.\n\n\n Still Extrone did not lift his blast rifle. He was laughing. Lin\n waited, frozen, his eyes staring at the farn beast in fascination.\n\n\n The farn beast plunged into the water, which was shallow, and, throwing\n a sheet of it to either side, headed across toward Ri.\n\n\n \"Watch! Watch!\" Extrone cried gleefully.\n\n\n And then the aliens sprang their trap.",
"\"You were, I believe, the first ever to kill a farn beast?\" he said.\n\n\n \"I.... No, sir. There must have been previous hunters, sir.\"\nExtrone narrowed his eyes. \"I see by your eyes that you are\n envious—that is the word, isn't it?—of my tent.\"\n\n\n Ri looked away from his face.\n\n\n \"Perhaps I'm envious of your reputation as a hunter. You see, I have\n never killed a farn beast. In fact, I haven't\nseen\na farn beast.\"\n\n\n Ri glanced nervously around the tent, his sharp eyes avoiding Extrone's\n glittering ones. \"Few people have seen them, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Oh?\" Extrone questioned mildly. \"I wouldn't say that. I understand\n that the aliens hunt them quite extensively ... on some of their\n planets.\"",
"Ri rubbed his hands along his thighs; he sighed, a tiny sound,\n ineffectual. He followed Lin beyond an outcropping of shale to where\n Extrone was seated, petting his rifle.\n\n\n Extrone nodded genially. \"The farn beast hunter, eh?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone drummed his fingers on the stock of the blast rifle. \"Tell me\n what they look like,\" he said suddenly.\n\n\n \"Well, sir, they're ... uh....\"\n\n\n \"Pretty frightening?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir.... Well, in a way, sir.\"\n\n\n \"But\nyou\nweren't afraid of them, were you?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir. No, because....\"\n\n\n Extrone was smiling innocently. \"Good. I want you to do something for\n me.\"",
"Extrone's lip twisted in wry amusement. \"If I had waited until it was\n safe for me to hunt on an alien planet, I would not have been able to\n find such an illustrious guide.\"\n\n\n \"... I'm flattered, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Extrone said. \"But you should have spoken to me about it,\n when you discovered the farn beast in our own system.\"\n\n\n \"I realize that, sir. That is, I had intended at the first opportunity,\n sir....\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Extrone said dryly. \"Like all of my subjects,\" he waved\n his hand in a broad gesture, \"the highest as well as the lowest slave,\n know me and love me. I know your intentions were the best.\"\n\n\n Ri squirmed, his face pale. \"We do indeed love you, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone bent forward. \"\nKnow\nme and love me.\"",
"\"I meant in our system, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Of course you did,\" Extrone said, lazily tracing the crease of his\n sleeve with his forefinger. \"I imagine these are the only farn beasts\n in our system.\"\n\n\n Ri waited uneasily, not answering.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Extrone said, \"I imagine they are. It would have been a shame if\n you had killed the last one. Don't you think so?\"\n\n\n Ri's hands worried the sides of his outer garment. \"Yes, sir. It would\n have been.\"\n\n\n Extrone pursed his lips. \"It wouldn't have been very considerate of you\n to—But, still, you gained valuable experience. I'm glad you agreed to\n come along as my guide.\"\n\n\n \"It was an honor, sir.\"",
"Extrone pushed the table away. He smacked his lips wetly. \"Very\n ludicrous, Lin. Have you noticed that I have two businessmen for\n guides? It occurred to me when I got up. They would have spat on me,\n twenty years ago, damn them.\"\n\n\n Lin waited.\n\n\n \"Now I can spit on them, which pleases me.\"\n\n\n \"The farn beasts are dangerous, sir,\" Lin said.\n\n\n \"Eh? Oh, yes. Those. What did the manual say about them?\"\n\n\n \"I believe they're carnivorous, sir.\"\n\n\n \"An alien manual. That's ludicrous, too. That we have the only\n information on our newly discovered fauna from an alien manual—and, of\n course, two businessmen.\"\n\n\n \"They have very long, sharp fangs, and, when enraged, are capable of\n tearing a man—\"",
"Again they turned reluctantly. This time, he did not call them back.\n Instead, with amusement, he watched until they disappeared into the\n tangle of forest.\n\n\n Dusk was falling. The takeoff blast of the rocket illuminated the area,\n casting weird shadows on the gently swaying grasses; there was a hot\n breath of dry air and the rocket dwindled toward the stars.\n\n\n Extrone stood up lazily, stretching. He tossed the empty glass away,\n listened for it to shatter. He reached out, parted the heavy flap to\n his tent.\n\n\n \"Sir?\" Ri said, hurrying toward him in the gathering darkness.\n\n\n \"Eh?\" Extrone said, turning, startled. \"Oh, you. Well?\"\n\n\n \"We ... located signs of the farn beast, sir. To the east.\"",
"\"We have a tight patrol, sir. It can't slip through. But it might try a\n long range bombardment, sir.\"\nExtrone said, \"To begin with, they probably don't even know I'm here.\n And they probably couldn't hit this area if they did know. And you\n can't afford to let them get a shot at me, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"That's why we'd like you to return to an inner planet, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone plucked at his right ear lobe, half closing his eyes. \"You'll\n lose a fleet before you'll dare let anything happen to me, gentlemen.\n I'm quite safe here, I think.\"\n\n\n The bearer brought Extrone his drink.\n\n\n \"Get off,\" Extrone said quietly to the four officers.",
"\"... It's the only thing I know anything about. The farn beast, as I\n was saying, sir, is the particular enemy of men. Or if you like, of\n aliens. Sir.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Extrone said, annoyed. \"I'll be careful.\"\n\n\n In the distance, a farn beast coughed.\n\n\n Instantly alert, Extrone said, \"Get the bearers! Have some of them cut\n a path through that damn thicket! And tell those two businessmen to get\n the hell over here!\"\n\n\n Lin smiled, his eyes suddenly afire with the excitement of the hunt.\nFour hours later, they were well into the scrub forest. Extrone walked\n leisurely, well back of the cutters, who hacked away, methodically, at\n the vines and branches which might impede his forward progress. Their\n sharp, awkward knives snickered rhythmically to the rasp of their heavy\n breathing.",
"\"Yes, sir.\nKnow\nyou and love you, sir,\" Ri said.\n\n\n \"Get out!\" Extrone said.\n\"It's frightening,\" Ri said, \"to be that close to him.\"\n\n\n Mia nodded.\n\n\n The two of them, beneath the leaf-swollen branches of the gnarled tree,\n were seated on their sleeping bags. The moon was clear and cold and\n bright in a cloudless sky; a small moon, smooth-surfaced, except for a\n central mountain ridge that bisected it into almost twin hemispheres.\n\n\n \"To think of him. As flesh and blood. Not like the—well; that—what\n we've read about.\"\n\n\n Mia glanced suspiciously around him at the shadows. \"You begin to\n understand a lot of things, after seeing him.\"\n\n\n Ri picked nervously at the cover of his sleeping bag.",
"Extrone nodded. After a moment he said, \"You killed one, I believe, on\nyour\ntrip?\"\n\n\n Ri shifted. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n Extrone held back the flap of the tent. \"Won't you come in?\" he asked\n without any politeness whatever.\n\n\n Ri obeyed the order.\n\n\n The inside of the tent was luxurious. The bed was of bulky feathers,\n costly of transport space, the sleep curtains of silken gauze. The\n floor, heavy, portable tile blocks, not the hollow kind, were neatly\n and smoothly inset into the ground. Hanging from the center, to the\n left of the slender, hand-carved center pole, was a chain of crystals.\n They tinkled lightly when Extrone dropped the flap. The light was\n electric from a portable dynamo. Extrone flipped it on. He crossed to\n the bed, sat down.",
"\"It's a different one,\" Lin said.\n\n\n \"How do you know?\"\n\n\n \"Hear the lower pitch, the more of a roar?\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Extrone shouted. \"You, down there. There are two coming. Now\n let's hear you really scream!\"\n\n\n Ri, below, whimpered childishly and began to retreat toward the tether\n tree, his eyes wide.\n\n\n \"There's a lot of satisfaction in fooling them, too,\" Extrone said.\n \"Making them come to your bait, where you can get at them.\" He\n opened his right hand. \"Choose your ground, set your trap. Bait it.\"\n He snapped his hand into a fist, held the fist up before his eyes,\n imprisoning the idea. \"Spring the trap when the quarry is inside.\n Clever. That makes the waiting more interesting. Waiting to see if they\n really will come to your bait.\"",
"\"You'll be safe,\" Extrone said, studying his face with amusement. \"I'll\n shoot the animal before it reaches you.\"\n\n\n Ri gulped for air. \"But ... if there should be more than one?\"\n\n\n Extrone shrugged.\n\n\n \"I—Look, sir. Listen to me.\" Ri's lips were bloodless and his hands\n were trembling. \"It's not me you want to do this to. It's Mia, sir.\nHe\nkilled a farn beast before\nI\ndid, sir. And last night—last\n night, he—\"\n\n\n \"He what?\" Extrone demanded, leaning forward intently.",
"\"\nI\ndidn't tell Extrone, if that's what you're thinking,\" Mia said.\n\n\n Ri's mouth twisted. \"I didn't say you did.\"\n\n\n \"Listen,\" Mia said in a hoarse whisper. \"I just thought. Listen. To\n hell with how he found out. Here's the point. Maybe he'll shoot us,\n too, when the hunt's over.\"\n\n\n Ri licked his lips. \"No. He wouldn't do that. We're not—not just\n anybody. He couldn't kill us like that. Not even\nhim\n. And besides,\n why would he want to do that? It wouldn't do any good to shoot us. Too\n many people already know about the farn beasts. You said that yourself.\"\n\n\n Mia said, \"I hope you're right.\" They stood side by side, studying the\n blast area in silence. Finally, Mia said, \"We better be getting back.\"",
"\"We didn't have a chance,\" Mia objected. \"Everybody and his brother had\n heard the rumor that farn beasts were somewhere around here. It wasn't\n our fault Extrone found out.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we hadn't shot our guide, then. I wish he was here instead of\n us.\"\n\n\n Mia shook perspiration out of his eyes. \"We should have shot our pilot,\n too. That was our mistake. The pilot must have been the one who told\n Extrone we'd hunted this area.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't think a Club pilot would do that.\"\n\n\n \"After Extrone said he'd hunt farn beasts, even if it meant going to\n the alien system? Listen, you don't know.... Wait a minute.\"\n\n\n There was perspiration on Ri's upper lip.",
"Ri looked around at the shadows.\n\n\n \"That explains a lot of things,\" Mia said. \"I think the Army's been\n preparing for this for a long time. From the first, maybe. That's why\n Extrone cut off our trade with the aliens. Partly to keep them from\n learning that he was getting ready to invade them, but more to keep\n them from exposing\nhim\nto the people. The aliens wouldn't be fooled\n like we were, so easy.\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Ri snapped. \"It was to keep the natural economic balance.\"\n\n\n \"You know that's not right.\"\n\n\n Ri lay down on his bed roll. \"Don't talk about it. It's not good to\n talk like this. I don't even want to listen.\""
]
] |
train
|
51657
|
[
"What didn't William get accused of as a young boy?",
"What was the one thing William admitted to doing?",
"Which word doesn't describe Partridge?",
"Which word best describes William?",
"Did William kill the man?",
"Once William received the money from Partridge, what didn't he decide to do?",
"Who didn't William say strange things to?",
"Is it likely for William to have a normal life in the future?",
"Did Partridge's attempt to help William atone for his sins help?",
"What should probably happen to William?"
] |
[
[
"lying to his parents",
"wetting the bed",
"calling his mother names",
"stealing from his parents"
],
[
"stealing while at school",
"stealing from the church",
"doing drugs",
"lying to people"
],
[
"suspicious",
"compassionate",
"patient",
"sympathetic"
],
[
"careful",
"manipulative",
"innocent",
"troubled"
],
[
"no - he watched the men do it, but William thought it was the spirits",
"yes, though he doesn't remember",
"yes - he used the pipe and killed the man",
"no - the two men did it when William's back was turned"
],
[
"research the murder",
"clean himself up",
"eat his fill",
"make a better future for himself"
],
[
"a man at the restaurant",
"his father",
"the librarian",
"Partridge"
],
[
"yes - he knows how to take care of himself",
"no - he will probably waste all of his money",
"yes, if he ignores the jabberwocks",
"no - he seems to have a lot of demons that will impact his life"
],
[
"yes - everything that happened to William after that was positive",
"yes - William will improve his life because of the help",
"no - William spent it all immediately",
"no - William is still hearing, seeing, and saying things"
],
[
"he should find out who killed the man",
"he should find a job with the labor union",
"he should try to reconnect with his parents",
"he should seek professional help"
]
] |
[
4,
2,
1,
4,
3,
4,
4,
4,
4,
4
] |
[
1,
1,
0,
0,
1,
1,
1,
0,
0,
1
] |
[
[
"Why couldn't what he said have been \"The best things in life are free,\n buddy\" or \"Every dog has his day, fellow\" or \"If at first you don't\n succeed, man\"? No, he had to use that one line. You wouldn't blame me.\n Not if you believe me.\n\n\n The first thing I can remember, the start of all this, was when I was\n four or five somebody was soiling my bed for me. I absolutely was not\n doing it. I took long naps morning and evening so I could lie awake all\n night to see that it wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen. But in the\n morning the bed would sit there dispassionately soiled and convict me\n on circumstantial evidence. My punishment was as sure as the tide.",
"The men filed out of the kitchen, wiping their chins, and I went right\n on talking.\n\n\n After some time Sister Partridge bustled in and snapped on the overhead\n lights and I kept talking. The brother still hadn't used the phone to\n call the cops.\n\n\n \"Remarkable,\" Partridge finally said when I got so hoarse I had to take\n a break. \"One is almost—\nalmost\n—reminded of Job. William, you are\n being punished for some great sin. Of that, I'm sure.\"\n\n\n \"Punished for a sin? But, Brother, I've always had it like this, as\n long as I can remember. What kind of a sin could I have committed when\n I was fresh out of my crib?\"\n\n\n \"William, all I can tell you is that time means nothing in Heaven. Do\n you deny the transmigration of souls?\"",
"\"Well,\" I said, \"I've had no personal experience—\"\n\n\n \"Of course you have, William! Say you don't remember. Say you don't\n want to remember. But don't say you have no personal experience!\"\n\n\n \"And you think I'm being punished for something I did in a previous\n life?\"\n\n\n He looked at me in disbelief. \"What else could it be?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" I confessed. \"I certainly haven't done anything that\n bad in\nthis\nlife.\"\n\n\n \"William, if you atone for this sin, perhaps the horde of locusts will\n lift from you.\"\n\n\n It wasn't much of a chance, but I was unused to having any at all. I\n shook off the dizziness of it. \"By the Lord Harry, Brother, I'm going\n to give it a try!\" I cried.",
"\"I've got something better than a conscience,\" I told him.\nBrother Partridge regarded me solemnly. \"There must be something\n special about you, for your apprehension to come through miraculous\n intervention. But I can't imagine what.\"\n\n\n \"I\nalways\nget apprehended somehow, Brother,\" I said. \"I'm pretty\n special.\"\n\n\n \"Your name?\"\n\n\n \"William Hagle.\" No sense lying. I had been booked and printed before.\n\n\n Partridge prodded me with his bony fingers as if making sure I was\n substantial. \"Come. Let's sit down, if you can remove your fist from\n the money box.\"",
"My mother and father must have been glad when I was sent away to reform\n school after my thirteenth birthday party, the one no one came to.\n\n\n The reform school was nicer. There were others there who'd had it about\n like me. We got along. I didn't watch their shifty eyes too much, or\n ask them what they shifted to see. They didn't talk about my screams\n at night.\n\n\n It was home.\n\n\n My trouble there was that I was always being framed for stealing. I\n didn't take any of those things they located in my bunk. Stealing\n wasn't in my line. If you believe any of this at all, you'll see why it\n couldn't be me who did the stealing.",
"I stayed in the dark longer for lying about the light.\n\n\n Alone in the dark, I wouldn't have had it so bad if it wasn't for the\n things that came to me.\n\n\n They were real to me. They never touched me, but they had a little boy.\n He looked the way I did in the mirror. They did unpleasant things to\n him.\n\n\n Because they were real, I talked about them as if they were real, and\n I almost earned a bunk in the home for retarded children until I got\n smart enough to keep the beasts to myself.\n\n\n My mother hated me. I loved her, of course. I remember her smell mixed\n up with flowers and cookies and winter fires. I remember she hugged me\n on my ninth birthday. The trouble came from the notes written in my\n awkward hand that she found, calling her names I didn't understand.\n Sometimes there were drawings. I didn't write those notes or make those\n drawings.",
"\"I believe you,\" Partridge said, surprised at himself.\n\n\n He ambled over to the money box on the wall. He tapped the bottom\n lightly and a box with no top slid out of the slightly larger box. He\n reached in, fished out the bill and presented it to me.\n\n\n \"Perhaps this will help in your atonement,\" he said.\n\n\n I crumpled it into my pocket fast. Not meaning to sound ungrateful, I'm\n pretty sure he hadn't noticed it was a twenty.\n\n\n And then the bill seemed to lie there, heavy, a lead weight. It would\n have been different if I had managed to get it out of the box myself.\n You know how it is.",
"I didn't say it, but I was used to my voice independently saying\n things. Her neck got to flaming, but she walked stiffly ahead. She\n didn't say anything. She must be awful mad, I decided. But then I got\n the idea she was flushed with pleasure. I'm pretty ugly and I looked\n like a bum, but I was young. You had to grant me that.\n\n\n She waved a hand at the rows of bound\nNews\nand left me alone with\n them. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to hunt up a table to lay the\n books on or not, so I took the volume for last year and laid it on the\n floor. That was the cleanest floor I ever saw.\n\n\n It didn't take me long to find the story. The victim was a big man,\n because the story was on the second page of the Nov. 4 edition.",
"I suppose I was to blame anyway. If I hadn't been alive, if I hadn't\n been there to get beaten up, it wouldn't have happened. I could see\n the point in making me suffer for it. There was a lot to be said for\n looking at it like that. But there was nothing to be said for telling\n Brother Partridge about the accident, or murder, or whatever had\n happened that day.\nSearching myself after I left Brother Partridge, I finally found a\n strip of gray adhesive tape on my side, out of the fuzzy area. Making\n the twenty the size of a thick postage stamp, I peeled back the tape\n and put the folded bill on the white skin and smoothed the tape back.\n\n\n There was only one place for me to go now. I headed for the public\n library. It was only about twenty blocks, but not having had anything\n to eat since the day before, it enervated me.",
"Money you haven't earned doesn't seem real to you.\nThere was something I forgot to mention so far. During the year between\n when I got out of the reformatory and the one when I tried to steal\n Brother Partridge's money, I killed a man.\n\n\n It was all an accident, but killing somebody is reason enough to get\n punished. It didn't have to be a sin in some previous life, you see.\n\n\n I had gotten my first job in too long, stacking boxes at the freight\n door of Baysinger's. The drivers unloaded the stuff, but they just\n dumped it off the truck. An empty rear end was all they wanted. The\n freight boss told me to stack the boxes inside, neat and not too close\n together.\n\n\n I stacked boxes the first day. I stacked more the second. The third day\n I went outside with my baloney and crackers. It was warm enough even\n for November.",
"The things abruptly started their business, trying to act casually as\n if they hadn't been waiting for me to look at them at all. They had a\n little human being of some sort.\n\n\n It was the size of a small boy, like the small boy who looked like me\n that they used to destroy when I was locked up with them in the dark.\n Except this was a man, scaled down to child's size. He had sort of an\n ugly, worried, tired, stupid look and he wore a shiny suit with a piece\n of a welcome mat or something for a necktie. Yeah, it was me. I really\n knew it all the time.\n\n\n They began doing things to the midget me. I didn't even lift an\n eyebrow. They couldn't do anything worse to the small man than they\n had done to the young boy. It was sort of nostalgic watching them, but\n I really got bored with all that violence and killing and killing the\n same kill over and over. Like watching the Saturday night string of\n westerns in a bar.",
"There was reason for me to steal, if I could have got away with it. The\n others got money from home to buy the things they needed—razor blades,\n candy, sticks of tea. I got a letter from Mom or Dad every now and then\n before they were killed, saying they had sent money or that it was\n enclosed, but somehow I never got a dime of it.\n\n\n When I was expelled from reform school, I left with just one idea in\n mind—to get all the money I could ever use for the things I needed and\n the things I wanted.\nIt was two or three years later that I skulked into Brother Partridge's\n mission on Durbin Street.",
"Fats hit me high. Long-legs hit me low. I blew cracker crumbs into\n their faces. After that, I just let them go. I know how to take a\n beating. That's one thing I knew.\n\n\n Then lying there, bleeding to myself, I heard them talking. I heard\n noises like\nmake an example of him\nand\ndo something permanent\nand I\n squirmed away across the rubbish like a polite mouse.\n\n\n I made it around a corner of brick and stood up, hurting my knee on a\n piece of brown-splotched pipe. There were noises on the other angle of\n the corner and so I tested if the pipe was loose and it was. I closed\n my eyes and brought the pipe up and then down.\n\n\n It felt as if I connected, but I was so numb, I wasn't sure until I\n unscrewed my eyes.",
"Partridge didn't seem to notice me, but I knew that was an act. I knew\n people were always watching every move I made. He braced his red-furred\n hands on the sides of his auctioneer's stand and leaned his splotched\n eagle beak toward us. \"Brothers, this being Thanksgiving, I pray the\n good Lord that we all are truly thankful for all that we have received.\n Amen.\"",
"While keeping a lookout for Partridge and somebody stepping out of the\n kitchen for a pull on a bottle, I spotted the clock for the first\n time, a Western Union clock high up at the back of the hall. Just as\n I seen it for the first time, the electricity wound the spring motor\n inside like a chicken having its neck wrung.\n\n\n The next time I glanced at the clock, it said ten minutes had gone by.\n My hand still wasn't free and I hadn't budged the box.\n\n\n \"This,\" Brother Partridge said, \"is one of the most profound\n experiences of my life.\"\n\n\n My head hinged until it lined my eyes up with Brother Partridge. The\n pipe hung heavy in my pocket, but he was too far from me.\n\n\n \"A vision of you at the box projected itself on the crest of my soup,\"\n the preacher explained in wonderment.\n\n\n I nodded. \"Swimming right in there with the dead duck.\"",
"\"Cold turkey,\" he corrected. \"Are you scoffing at a miracle?\"\n\n\n \"People are always watching me, Brother,\" I said. \"So now they do it\n even when they aren't around. I should have known it would come to\n that.\"\n\n\n The pipe was suddenly a weight I wanted off me. I would try robbing\n a collection box, knowing positively that I would get caught, but I\n wasn't dumb enough to murder. Somebody, somewhere, would be a witness\n to it. I had never got away with anything in my life. I was too smart\n to even try anything but the little things.\n\n\n \"I may be able to help you,\" Brother Partridge said, \"if you have faith\n and a conscience.\"",
"\"I\nstill\nthink you're yellow,\" my voice said.\n\n\n It was my voice, but it didn't come from me. There were no words, no\n feeling of words in my throat. It just came out of the air the way it\n always did.\n\n\n I ran.\nHarold R. Thompkins, 49, vice-president of Baysinger's, was found\n dead behind the store last night. His skull had been crushed by a\n vicious beating with a heavy implement, Coroner McClain announced in\n preliminary verdict. Tompkins, who resided at 1467 Claremont, Edgeway,\n had been active in seeking labor-management peace in the recent\n difficulties....",
"I opened up my fingers and let the coins ring inside the box and I drew\n out my hand. The bill stuck to the sweat on my fingers and slid out\n along with the digits. A one, I decided. I had got into trouble for a\n grubby single. It wasn't any century. I had been kidding myself.\n\n\n I unfolded the note. Sure enough, it wasn't a hundred-dollar bill, but\n it was a twenty, and that was almost the same thing to me. I creased it\n and put it back into the slot.\n\n\n As long as it stalled off the cops, I'd talk to Partridge.\n\n\n We took a couple of camp chairs and I told him the story of my life, or\n most of it. It was hard work on an empty stomach; I wished I'd had some\n of that turkey soup. Then again I was glad I hadn't. Something always\n happened to me when I thought back over my life. The same thing.",
"I had to laugh at all those bums clattering the chairs in front of me,\n scampering after water soup and stale bread. As soon as I got cleaned\n up, I was going to have dinner in a good restaurant, and I was going to\n order such expensive food and leave such a large tip for the waiter and\n send one to the chef that they were going to think I was rich, and some\n executive with some brokerage firm would see me and say to himself,\n \"Hmm, executive material. Just the type we need. I beg your pardon,\n sir—\" just like the razor-blade comic-strip ads in the old magazines\n that Frankie the Pig sells three for a quarter.\n\n\n I was marching. Man, was I ever marching, but the secret of it was I\n was only marking time the way we did in fire drills at the school.",
"I had read that a year before. The car cards on the clanking subway and\n the rumbling bus didn't seem nearly so interesting to me. Outside the\n van, a tasteful sign announced the limits of the village of Edgeway,\n and back inside, the monsters of my boyhood went\nbloomp\nat me.\n\n\n I hadn't seen anything like them in years.\n\n\n The slimy, scaly beasts were slithering over the newspaper holders,\n the ad card readers, the girl watchers as the neat little carbon-copy\n modern homes breezed past the windows.\nI ignored the devils and concentrated on reading the withered,\n washed-out political posters on the telephone poles. My neck ached from\n holding it so stiff, staring out through the glass. More than that, I\n could feel the jabberwocks staring at me. You know how it is. You can\n feel a stare with the back of your neck and between your eyes. They got\n one brush of a gaze out of me."
],
[
"Why couldn't what he said have been \"The best things in life are free,\n buddy\" or \"Every dog has his day, fellow\" or \"If at first you don't\n succeed, man\"? No, he had to use that one line. You wouldn't blame me.\n Not if you believe me.\n\n\n The first thing I can remember, the start of all this, was when I was\n four or five somebody was soiling my bed for me. I absolutely was not\n doing it. I took long naps morning and evening so I could lie awake all\n night to see that it wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen. But in the\n morning the bed would sit there dispassionately soiled and convict me\n on circumstantial evidence. My punishment was as sure as the tide.",
"\"I believe you,\" Partridge said, surprised at himself.\n\n\n He ambled over to the money box on the wall. He tapped the bottom\n lightly and a box with no top slid out of the slightly larger box. He\n reached in, fished out the bill and presented it to me.\n\n\n \"Perhaps this will help in your atonement,\" he said.\n\n\n I crumpled it into my pocket fast. Not meaning to sound ungrateful, I'm\n pretty sure he hadn't noticed it was a twenty.\n\n\n And then the bill seemed to lie there, heavy, a lead weight. It would\n have been different if I had managed to get it out of the box myself.\n You know how it is.",
"\"Well,\" I said, \"I've had no personal experience—\"\n\n\n \"Of course you have, William! Say you don't remember. Say you don't\n want to remember. But don't say you have no personal experience!\"\n\n\n \"And you think I'm being punished for something I did in a previous\n life?\"\n\n\n He looked at me in disbelief. \"What else could it be?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" I confessed. \"I certainly haven't done anything that\n bad in\nthis\nlife.\"\n\n\n \"William, if you atone for this sin, perhaps the horde of locusts will\n lift from you.\"\n\n\n It wasn't much of a chance, but I was unused to having any at all. I\n shook off the dizziness of it. \"By the Lord Harry, Brother, I'm going\n to give it a try!\" I cried.",
"The men filed out of the kitchen, wiping their chins, and I went right\n on talking.\n\n\n After some time Sister Partridge bustled in and snapped on the overhead\n lights and I kept talking. The brother still hadn't used the phone to\n call the cops.\n\n\n \"Remarkable,\" Partridge finally said when I got so hoarse I had to take\n a break. \"One is almost—\nalmost\n—reminded of Job. William, you are\n being punished for some great sin. Of that, I'm sure.\"\n\n\n \"Punished for a sin? But, Brother, I've always had it like this, as\n long as I can remember. What kind of a sin could I have committed when\n I was fresh out of my crib?\"\n\n\n \"William, all I can tell you is that time means nothing in Heaven. Do\n you deny the transmigration of souls?\"",
"\"I've got something better than a conscience,\" I told him.\nBrother Partridge regarded me solemnly. \"There must be something\n special about you, for your apprehension to come through miraculous\n intervention. But I can't imagine what.\"\n\n\n \"I\nalways\nget apprehended somehow, Brother,\" I said. \"I'm pretty\n special.\"\n\n\n \"Your name?\"\n\n\n \"William Hagle.\" No sense lying. I had been booked and printed before.\n\n\n Partridge prodded me with his bony fingers as if making sure I was\n substantial. \"Come. Let's sit down, if you can remove your fist from\n the money box.\"",
"I suppose I was to blame anyway. If I hadn't been alive, if I hadn't\n been there to get beaten up, it wouldn't have happened. I could see\n the point in making me suffer for it. There was a lot to be said for\n looking at it like that. But there was nothing to be said for telling\n Brother Partridge about the accident, or murder, or whatever had\n happened that day.\nSearching myself after I left Brother Partridge, I finally found a\n strip of gray adhesive tape on my side, out of the fuzzy area. Making\n the twenty the size of a thick postage stamp, I peeled back the tape\n and put the folded bill on the white skin and smoothed the tape back.\n\n\n There was only one place for me to go now. I headed for the public\n library. It was only about twenty blocks, but not having had anything\n to eat since the day before, it enervated me.",
"The things abruptly started their business, trying to act casually as\n if they hadn't been waiting for me to look at them at all. They had a\n little human being of some sort.\n\n\n It was the size of a small boy, like the small boy who looked like me\n that they used to destroy when I was locked up with them in the dark.\n Except this was a man, scaled down to child's size. He had sort of an\n ugly, worried, tired, stupid look and he wore a shiny suit with a piece\n of a welcome mat or something for a necktie. Yeah, it was me. I really\n knew it all the time.\n\n\n They began doing things to the midget me. I didn't even lift an\n eyebrow. They couldn't do anything worse to the small man than they\n had done to the young boy. It was sort of nostalgic watching them, but\n I really got bored with all that violence and killing and killing the\n same kill over and over. Like watching the Saturday night string of\n westerns in a bar.",
"I opened up my fingers and let the coins ring inside the box and I drew\n out my hand. The bill stuck to the sweat on my fingers and slid out\n along with the digits. A one, I decided. I had got into trouble for a\n grubby single. It wasn't any century. I had been kidding myself.\n\n\n I unfolded the note. Sure enough, it wasn't a hundred-dollar bill, but\n it was a twenty, and that was almost the same thing to me. I creased it\n and put it back into the slot.\n\n\n As long as it stalled off the cops, I'd talk to Partridge.\n\n\n We took a couple of camp chairs and I told him the story of my life, or\n most of it. It was hard work on an empty stomach; I wished I'd had some\n of that turkey soup. Then again I was glad I hadn't. Something always\n happened to me when I thought back over my life. The same thing.",
"I didn't say it, but I was used to my voice independently saying\n things. Her neck got to flaming, but she walked stiffly ahead. She\n didn't say anything. She must be awful mad, I decided. But then I got\n the idea she was flushed with pleasure. I'm pretty ugly and I looked\n like a bum, but I was young. You had to grant me that.\n\n\n She waved a hand at the rows of bound\nNews\nand left me alone with\n them. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to hunt up a table to lay the\n books on or not, so I took the volume for last year and laid it on the\n floor. That was the cleanest floor I ever saw.\n\n\n It didn't take me long to find the story. The victim was a big man,\n because the story was on the second page of the Nov. 4 edition.",
"I stayed in the dark longer for lying about the light.\n\n\n Alone in the dark, I wouldn't have had it so bad if it wasn't for the\n things that came to me.\n\n\n They were real to me. They never touched me, but they had a little boy.\n He looked the way I did in the mirror. They did unpleasant things to\n him.\n\n\n Because they were real, I talked about them as if they were real, and\n I almost earned a bunk in the home for retarded children until I got\n smart enough to keep the beasts to myself.\n\n\n My mother hated me. I loved her, of course. I remember her smell mixed\n up with flowers and cookies and winter fires. I remember she hugged me\n on my ninth birthday. The trouble came from the notes written in my\n awkward hand that she found, calling her names I didn't understand.\n Sometimes there were drawings. I didn't write those notes or make those\n drawings.",
"Fats hit me high. Long-legs hit me low. I blew cracker crumbs into\n their faces. After that, I just let them go. I know how to take a\n beating. That's one thing I knew.\n\n\n Then lying there, bleeding to myself, I heard them talking. I heard\n noises like\nmake an example of him\nand\ndo something permanent\nand I\n squirmed away across the rubbish like a polite mouse.\n\n\n I made it around a corner of brick and stood up, hurting my knee on a\n piece of brown-splotched pipe. There were noises on the other angle of\n the corner and so I tested if the pipe was loose and it was. I closed\n my eyes and brought the pipe up and then down.\n\n\n It felt as if I connected, but I was so numb, I wasn't sure until I\n unscrewed my eyes.",
"\"Cold turkey,\" he corrected. \"Are you scoffing at a miracle?\"\n\n\n \"People are always watching me, Brother,\" I said. \"So now they do it\n even when they aren't around. I should have known it would come to\n that.\"\n\n\n The pipe was suddenly a weight I wanted off me. I would try robbing\n a collection box, knowing positively that I would get caught, but I\n wasn't dumb enough to murder. Somebody, somewhere, would be a witness\n to it. I had never got away with anything in my life. I was too smart\n to even try anything but the little things.\n\n\n \"I may be able to help you,\" Brother Partridge said, \"if you have faith\n and a conscience.\"",
"I had to laugh at all those bums clattering the chairs in front of me,\n scampering after water soup and stale bread. As soon as I got cleaned\n up, I was going to have dinner in a good restaurant, and I was going to\n order such expensive food and leave such a large tip for the waiter and\n send one to the chef that they were going to think I was rich, and some\n executive with some brokerage firm would see me and say to himself,\n \"Hmm, executive material. Just the type we need. I beg your pardon,\n sir—\" just like the razor-blade comic-strip ads in the old magazines\n that Frankie the Pig sells three for a quarter.\n\n\n I was marching. Man, was I ever marching, but the secret of it was I\n was only marking time the way we did in fire drills at the school.",
"Partridge didn't seem to notice me, but I knew that was an act. I knew\n people were always watching every move I made. He braced his red-furred\n hands on the sides of his auctioneer's stand and leaned his splotched\n eagle beak toward us. \"Brothers, this being Thanksgiving, I pray the\n good Lord that we all are truly thankful for all that we have received.\n Amen.\"",
"They passed me, every one of them, and marched out of the meeting\n room into the kitchen. Even Partridge made his way down from the\n auctioneer's stand like a vulture with a busted wing and darted through\n his private door.\n\n\n I was alone, marking time behind the closed half of double doors. One\n good breath and I raced past the open door and flattened myself to the\n wall. Crockery was ringing and men were slurping inside. No one had\n paid any attention to me. That was pretty odd. People usually watch my\n every move, but a man's luck has to change sometime, doesn't it?\n\n\n Following the wallboard, I went down the side of the room and behind\n the last row of chairs, closer, closer, and halfway up the room again\n to the entrance—the entrance and the little wooden box fastened to the\n wall beside it.",
"While keeping a lookout for Partridge and somebody stepping out of the\n kitchen for a pull on a bottle, I spotted the clock for the first\n time, a Western Union clock high up at the back of the hall. Just as\n I seen it for the first time, the electricity wound the spring motor\n inside like a chicken having its neck wrung.\n\n\n The next time I glanced at the clock, it said ten minutes had gone by.\n My hand still wasn't free and I hadn't budged the box.\n\n\n \"This,\" Brother Partridge said, \"is one of the most profound\n experiences of my life.\"\n\n\n My head hinged until it lined my eyes up with Brother Partridge. The\n pipe hung heavy in my pocket, but he was too far from me.\n\n\n \"A vision of you at the box projected itself on the crest of my soup,\"\n the preacher explained in wonderment.\n\n\n I nodded. \"Swimming right in there with the dead duck.\"",
"\"I\nstill\nthink you're yellow,\" my voice said.\n\n\n It was my voice, but it didn't come from me. There were no words, no\n feeling of words in my throat. It just came out of the air the way it\n always did.\n\n\n I ran.\nHarold R. Thompkins, 49, vice-president of Baysinger's, was found\n dead behind the store last night. His skull had been crushed by a\n vicious beating with a heavy implement, Coroner McClain announced in\n preliminary verdict. Tompkins, who resided at 1467 Claremont, Edgeway,\n had been active in seeking labor-management peace in the recent\n difficulties....",
"I was a man, not a monkey. I knew why I couldn't get my hand out. But I\n couldn't lose that money, especially that century bill. Calm, I ordered\n myself.\nCalm.\nThe box was fastened to the vertical tongue-and-groove laths of the\n woodwork, not the wall. It was old lumber, stiffened by a hundred\n layers of paint since 1908. The paint was as thick and strong as the\n boards. The box was fastened fast. Six-inch spike nails, I guessed.\n\n\n Calmly, I flung my whole weight away from the wall. My wrist almost\n cracked, but there wasn't even a bend in the box. Carefully, I tried to\n jerk my fist straight up, to pry off the top of the box. It was as if\n the box had been carved out of one solid piece of timber. It wouldn't\n go up, down, left or right.\n\n\n But I kept trying.",
"My mother and father must have been glad when I was sent away to reform\n school after my thirteenth birthday party, the one no one came to.\n\n\n The reform school was nicer. There were others there who'd had it about\n like me. We got along. I didn't watch their shifty eyes too much, or\n ask them what they shifted to see. They didn't talk about my screams\n at night.\n\n\n It was home.\n\n\n My trouble there was that I was always being framed for stealing. I\n didn't take any of those things they located in my bunk. Stealing\n wasn't in my line. If you believe any of this at all, you'll see why it\n couldn't be me who did the stealing.",
"He stopped polishing the counter in front of his friend. \"Milwaukee,\n Wisconsin, or Milwaukee, Oregon?\"\n\n\n \"Wisconsin.\"\n\n\n He didn't argue.\n\n\n It was cold and bitter. All beer is bitter, no matter what they say on\n TV. I like beer. I like the bitterness of it.\n\n\n It felt like another, but I checked myself. I needed a clear head.\n I thought about going back to the hotel for some sleep; I still had\n the key in my pocket (I wasn't trusting it to any clerk). No, I had\n had sleep on Thanksgiving, bracing up for trying the lift at Brother\n Partridge's. Let's see, it was daylight outside again, so this was the\n day after Thanksgiving. But it had only been sixteen or twenty hours\n since I had slept. That was enough."
],
[
"Partridge didn't seem to notice me, but I knew that was an act. I knew\n people were always watching every move I made. He braced his red-furred\n hands on the sides of his auctioneer's stand and leaned his splotched\n eagle beak toward us. \"Brothers, this being Thanksgiving, I pray the\n good Lord that we all are truly thankful for all that we have received.\n Amen.\"",
"Some skin-and-bones character I didn't know struggled out of his seat,\n amening. I could see he had a lot to be thankful for—somewhere he had\n received a fix.\n\n\n \"Brothers,\" Partridge went on after enjoying the interruption with a\n beaming smile, \"you shall all be entitled to a bowl of turkey soup\n prepared by Sister Partridge, a generous supply of sweet rolls and\n dinner rolls contributed by the Early Morning Bakery of this city,\n and all the coffee you can drink. Let us march out to\nThe Stars and\n Stripes Forever\n, John Philip Sousa's grand old patriotic song.\"",
"\"I believe you,\" Partridge said, surprised at himself.\n\n\n He ambled over to the money box on the wall. He tapped the bottom\n lightly and a box with no top slid out of the slightly larger box. He\n reached in, fished out the bill and presented it to me.\n\n\n \"Perhaps this will help in your atonement,\" he said.\n\n\n I crumpled it into my pocket fast. Not meaning to sound ungrateful, I'm\n pretty sure he hadn't noticed it was a twenty.\n\n\n And then the bill seemed to lie there, heavy, a lead weight. It would\n have been different if I had managed to get it out of the box myself.\n You know how it is.",
"\"I've got something better than a conscience,\" I told him.\nBrother Partridge regarded me solemnly. \"There must be something\n special about you, for your apprehension to come through miraculous\n intervention. But I can't imagine what.\"\n\n\n \"I\nalways\nget apprehended somehow, Brother,\" I said. \"I'm pretty\n special.\"\n\n\n \"Your name?\"\n\n\n \"William Hagle.\" No sense lying. I had been booked and printed before.\n\n\n Partridge prodded me with his bony fingers as if making sure I was\n substantial. \"Come. Let's sit down, if you can remove your fist from\n the money box.\"",
"While keeping a lookout for Partridge and somebody stepping out of the\n kitchen for a pull on a bottle, I spotted the clock for the first\n time, a Western Union clock high up at the back of the hall. Just as\n I seen it for the first time, the electricity wound the spring motor\n inside like a chicken having its neck wrung.\n\n\n The next time I glanced at the clock, it said ten minutes had gone by.\n My hand still wasn't free and I hadn't budged the box.\n\n\n \"This,\" Brother Partridge said, \"is one of the most profound\n experiences of my life.\"\n\n\n My head hinged until it lined my eyes up with Brother Partridge. The\n pipe hung heavy in my pocket, but he was too far from me.\n\n\n \"A vision of you at the box projected itself on the crest of my soup,\"\n the preacher explained in wonderment.\n\n\n I nodded. \"Swimming right in there with the dead duck.\"",
"\"Cold turkey,\" he corrected. \"Are you scoffing at a miracle?\"\n\n\n \"People are always watching me, Brother,\" I said. \"So now they do it\n even when they aren't around. I should have known it would come to\n that.\"\n\n\n The pipe was suddenly a weight I wanted off me. I would try robbing\n a collection box, knowing positively that I would get caught, but I\n wasn't dumb enough to murder. Somebody, somewhere, would be a witness\n to it. I had never got away with anything in my life. I was too smart\n to even try anything but the little things.\n\n\n \"I may be able to help you,\" Brother Partridge said, \"if you have faith\n and a conscience.\"",
"The preacher and half a dozen men were singing\nOnward Christian\n Soldiers\nin the meeting room. It was a drafty hall with varnished\n camp chairs. I shuffled in at the back with my suitcoat collar turned\n up around my stubbled jaw. I made my hand shaky as I ran it through my\n knotted hair. Partridge was supposed to think I was just a bum. As\n an inspiration, I hugged my chest to make him think I was some wino\n nursing a flask full of Sneaky Pete. All I had there was a piece of\n copper alloy tubing inside a slice of plastic hose for taking care of\n myself, rolling sailors and the like. Who had the price of a bottle?",
"I opened up my fingers and let the coins ring inside the box and I drew\n out my hand. The bill stuck to the sweat on my fingers and slid out\n along with the digits. A one, I decided. I had got into trouble for a\n grubby single. It wasn't any century. I had been kidding myself.\n\n\n I unfolded the note. Sure enough, it wasn't a hundred-dollar bill, but\n it was a twenty, and that was almost the same thing to me. I creased it\n and put it back into the slot.\n\n\n As long as it stalled off the cops, I'd talk to Partridge.\n\n\n We took a couple of camp chairs and I told him the story of my life, or\n most of it. It was hard work on an empty stomach; I wished I'd had some\n of that turkey soup. Then again I was glad I hadn't. Something always\n happened to me when I thought back over my life. The same thing.",
"They passed me, every one of them, and marched out of the meeting\n room into the kitchen. Even Partridge made his way down from the\n auctioneer's stand like a vulture with a busted wing and darted through\n his private door.\n\n\n I was alone, marking time behind the closed half of double doors. One\n good breath and I raced past the open door and flattened myself to the\n wall. Crockery was ringing and men were slurping inside. No one had\n paid any attention to me. That was pretty odd. People usually watch my\n every move, but a man's luck has to change sometime, doesn't it?\n\n\n Following the wallboard, I went down the side of the room and behind\n the last row of chairs, closer, closer, and halfway up the room again\n to the entrance—the entrance and the little wooden box fastened to the\n wall beside it.",
"The men filed out of the kitchen, wiping their chins, and I went right\n on talking.\n\n\n After some time Sister Partridge bustled in and snapped on the overhead\n lights and I kept talking. The brother still hadn't used the phone to\n call the cops.\n\n\n \"Remarkable,\" Partridge finally said when I got so hoarse I had to take\n a break. \"One is almost—\nalmost\n—reminded of Job. William, you are\n being punished for some great sin. Of that, I'm sure.\"\n\n\n \"Punished for a sin? But, Brother, I've always had it like this, as\n long as I can remember. What kind of a sin could I have committed when\n I was fresh out of my crib?\"\n\n\n \"William, all I can tell you is that time means nothing in Heaven. Do\n you deny the transmigration of souls?\"",
"Why couldn't what he said have been \"The best things in life are free,\n buddy\" or \"Every dog has his day, fellow\" or \"If at first you don't\n succeed, man\"? No, he had to use that one line. You wouldn't blame me.\n Not if you believe me.\n\n\n The first thing I can remember, the start of all this, was when I was\n four or five somebody was soiling my bed for me. I absolutely was not\n doing it. I took long naps morning and evening so I could lie awake all\n night to see that it wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen. But in the\n morning the bed would sit there dispassionately soiled and convict me\n on circumstantial evidence. My punishment was as sure as the tide.",
"Money you haven't earned doesn't seem real to you.\nThere was something I forgot to mention so far. During the year between\n when I got out of the reformatory and the one when I tried to steal\n Brother Partridge's money, I killed a man.\n\n\n It was all an accident, but killing somebody is reason enough to get\n punished. It didn't have to be a sin in some previous life, you see.\n\n\n I had gotten my first job in too long, stacking boxes at the freight\n door of Baysinger's. The drivers unloaded the stuff, but they just\n dumped it off the truck. An empty rear end was all they wanted. The\n freight boss told me to stack the boxes inside, neat and not too close\n together.\n\n\n I stacked boxes the first day. I stacked more the second. The third day\n I went outside with my baloney and crackers. It was warm enough even\n for November.",
"I didn't say it, but I was used to my voice independently saying\n things. Her neck got to flaming, but she walked stiffly ahead. She\n didn't say anything. She must be awful mad, I decided. But then I got\n the idea she was flushed with pleasure. I'm pretty ugly and I looked\n like a bum, but I was young. You had to grant me that.\n\n\n She waved a hand at the rows of bound\nNews\nand left me alone with\n them. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to hunt up a table to lay the\n books on or not, so I took the volume for last year and laid it on the\n floor. That was the cleanest floor I ever saw.\n\n\n It didn't take me long to find the story. The victim was a big man,\n because the story was on the second page of the Nov. 4 edition.",
"I had to laugh at all those bums clattering the chairs in front of me,\n scampering after water soup and stale bread. As soon as I got cleaned\n up, I was going to have dinner in a good restaurant, and I was going to\n order such expensive food and leave such a large tip for the waiter and\n send one to the chef that they were going to think I was rich, and some\n executive with some brokerage firm would see me and say to himself,\n \"Hmm, executive material. Just the type we need. I beg your pardon,\n sir—\" just like the razor-blade comic-strip ads in the old magazines\n that Frankie the Pig sells three for a quarter.\n\n\n I was marching. Man, was I ever marching, but the secret of it was I\n was only marking time the way we did in fire drills at the school.",
"I suppose I was to blame anyway. If I hadn't been alive, if I hadn't\n been there to get beaten up, it wouldn't have happened. I could see\n the point in making me suffer for it. There was a lot to be said for\n looking at it like that. But there was nothing to be said for telling\n Brother Partridge about the accident, or murder, or whatever had\n happened that day.\nSearching myself after I left Brother Partridge, I finally found a\n strip of gray adhesive tape on my side, out of the fuzzy area. Making\n the twenty the size of a thick postage stamp, I peeled back the tape\n and put the folded bill on the white skin and smoothed the tape back.\n\n\n There was only one place for me to go now. I headed for the public\n library. It was only about twenty blocks, but not having had anything\n to eat since the day before, it enervated me.",
"There was reason for me to steal, if I could have got away with it. The\n others got money from home to buy the things they needed—razor blades,\n candy, sticks of tea. I got a letter from Mom or Dad every now and then\n before they were killed, saying they had sent money or that it was\n enclosed, but somehow I never got a dime of it.\n\n\n When I was expelled from reform school, I left with just one idea in\n mind—to get all the money I could ever use for the things I needed and\n the things I wanted.\nIt was two or three years later that I skulked into Brother Partridge's\n mission on Durbin Street.",
"He stopped polishing the counter in front of his friend. \"Milwaukee,\n Wisconsin, or Milwaukee, Oregon?\"\n\n\n \"Wisconsin.\"\n\n\n He didn't argue.\n\n\n It was cold and bitter. All beer is bitter, no matter what they say on\n TV. I like beer. I like the bitterness of it.\n\n\n It felt like another, but I checked myself. I needed a clear head.\n I thought about going back to the hotel for some sleep; I still had\n the key in my pocket (I wasn't trusting it to any clerk). No, I had\n had sleep on Thanksgiving, bracing up for trying the lift at Brother\n Partridge's. Let's see, it was daylight outside again, so this was the\n day after Thanksgiving. But it had only been sixteen or twenty hours\n since I had slept. That was enough.",
"\"I\nstill\nthink you're yellow,\" my voice said.\n\n\n It was my voice, but it didn't come from me. There were no words, no\n feeling of words in my throat. It just came out of the air the way it\n always did.\n\n\n I ran.\nHarold R. Thompkins, 49, vice-president of Baysinger's, was found\n dead behind the store last night. His skull had been crushed by a\n vicious beating with a heavy implement, Coroner McClain announced in\n preliminary verdict. Tompkins, who resided at 1467 Claremont, Edgeway,\n had been active in seeking labor-management peace in the recent\n difficulties....",
"Fats hit me high. Long-legs hit me low. I blew cracker crumbs into\n their faces. After that, I just let them go. I know how to take a\n beating. That's one thing I knew.\n\n\n Then lying there, bleeding to myself, I heard them talking. I heard\n noises like\nmake an example of him\nand\ndo something permanent\nand I\n squirmed away across the rubbish like a polite mouse.\n\n\n I made it around a corner of brick and stood up, hurting my knee on a\n piece of brown-splotched pipe. There were noises on the other angle of\n the corner and so I tested if the pipe was loose and it was. I closed\n my eyes and brought the pipe up and then down.\n\n\n It felt as if I connected, but I was so numb, I wasn't sure until I\n unscrewed my eyes.",
"The downstairs washroom was where I went first. There was nobody\n there but an old guy talking urgently to a kid with thick glasses,\n and somebody building a fix in one of the booths. I could see charred\n matches dropping down on the floor next to his tennis shoes, and even a\n few grains of white stuff. But he managed to hold still enough to keep\n from spilling more from the spoon.\n\n\n I washed my hands and face, smoothed my hair down, combing it with my\n fingers. Going over my suit with damp toweling got off a lot of the\n dirt. I put my collar on the outside of my jacket and creased the\n wings with my thumbnail so it would look more like a sports shirt.\n It didn't really. I still looked like a bum, but sort of a neat,\n non-objectionable bum.\n\n\n The librarian at the main desk looked sympathetically hostile, or\n hostilely sympathetic."
],
[
"\"I've got something better than a conscience,\" I told him.\nBrother Partridge regarded me solemnly. \"There must be something\n special about you, for your apprehension to come through miraculous\n intervention. But I can't imagine what.\"\n\n\n \"I\nalways\nget apprehended somehow, Brother,\" I said. \"I'm pretty\n special.\"\n\n\n \"Your name?\"\n\n\n \"William Hagle.\" No sense lying. I had been booked and printed before.\n\n\n Partridge prodded me with his bony fingers as if making sure I was\n substantial. \"Come. Let's sit down, if you can remove your fist from\n the money box.\"",
"The men filed out of the kitchen, wiping their chins, and I went right\n on talking.\n\n\n After some time Sister Partridge bustled in and snapped on the overhead\n lights and I kept talking. The brother still hadn't used the phone to\n call the cops.\n\n\n \"Remarkable,\" Partridge finally said when I got so hoarse I had to take\n a break. \"One is almost—\nalmost\n—reminded of Job. William, you are\n being punished for some great sin. Of that, I'm sure.\"\n\n\n \"Punished for a sin? But, Brother, I've always had it like this, as\n long as I can remember. What kind of a sin could I have committed when\n I was fresh out of my crib?\"\n\n\n \"William, all I can tell you is that time means nothing in Heaven. Do\n you deny the transmigration of souls?\"",
"\"Well,\" I said, \"I've had no personal experience—\"\n\n\n \"Of course you have, William! Say you don't remember. Say you don't\n want to remember. But don't say you have no personal experience!\"\n\n\n \"And you think I'm being punished for something I did in a previous\n life?\"\n\n\n He looked at me in disbelief. \"What else could it be?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" I confessed. \"I certainly haven't done anything that\n bad in\nthis\nlife.\"\n\n\n \"William, if you atone for this sin, perhaps the horde of locusts will\n lift from you.\"\n\n\n It wasn't much of a chance, but I was unused to having any at all. I\n shook off the dizziness of it. \"By the Lord Harry, Brother, I'm going\n to give it a try!\" I cried.",
"Why couldn't what he said have been \"The best things in life are free,\n buddy\" or \"Every dog has his day, fellow\" or \"If at first you don't\n succeed, man\"? No, he had to use that one line. You wouldn't blame me.\n Not if you believe me.\n\n\n The first thing I can remember, the start of all this, was when I was\n four or five somebody was soiling my bed for me. I absolutely was not\n doing it. I took long naps morning and evening so I could lie awake all\n night to see that it wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen. But in the\n morning the bed would sit there dispassionately soiled and convict me\n on circumstantial evidence. My punishment was as sure as the tide.",
"\"I believe you,\" Partridge said, surprised at himself.\n\n\n He ambled over to the money box on the wall. He tapped the bottom\n lightly and a box with no top slid out of the slightly larger box. He\n reached in, fished out the bill and presented it to me.\n\n\n \"Perhaps this will help in your atonement,\" he said.\n\n\n I crumpled it into my pocket fast. Not meaning to sound ungrateful, I'm\n pretty sure he hadn't noticed it was a twenty.\n\n\n And then the bill seemed to lie there, heavy, a lead weight. It would\n have been different if I had managed to get it out of the box myself.\n You know how it is.",
"\"I\nstill\nthink you're yellow,\" my voice said.\n\n\n It was my voice, but it didn't come from me. There were no words, no\n feeling of words in my throat. It just came out of the air the way it\n always did.\n\n\n I ran.\nHarold R. Thompkins, 49, vice-president of Baysinger's, was found\n dead behind the store last night. His skull had been crushed by a\n vicious beating with a heavy implement, Coroner McClain announced in\n preliminary verdict. Tompkins, who resided at 1467 Claremont, Edgeway,\n had been active in seeking labor-management peace in the recent\n difficulties....",
"Fats hit me high. Long-legs hit me low. I blew cracker crumbs into\n their faces. After that, I just let them go. I know how to take a\n beating. That's one thing I knew.\n\n\n Then lying there, bleeding to myself, I heard them talking. I heard\n noises like\nmake an example of him\nand\ndo something permanent\nand I\n squirmed away across the rubbish like a polite mouse.\n\n\n I made it around a corner of brick and stood up, hurting my knee on a\n piece of brown-splotched pipe. There were noises on the other angle of\n the corner and so I tested if the pipe was loose and it was. I closed\n my eyes and brought the pipe up and then down.\n\n\n It felt as if I connected, but I was so numb, I wasn't sure until I\n unscrewed my eyes.",
"I didn't say it, but I was used to my voice independently saying\n things. Her neck got to flaming, but she walked stiffly ahead. She\n didn't say anything. She must be awful mad, I decided. But then I got\n the idea she was flushed with pleasure. I'm pretty ugly and I looked\n like a bum, but I was young. You had to grant me that.\n\n\n She waved a hand at the rows of bound\nNews\nand left me alone with\n them. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to hunt up a table to lay the\n books on or not, so I took the volume for last year and laid it on the\n floor. That was the cleanest floor I ever saw.\n\n\n It didn't take me long to find the story. The victim was a big man,\n because the story was on the second page of the Nov. 4 edition.",
"While keeping a lookout for Partridge and somebody stepping out of the\n kitchen for a pull on a bottle, I spotted the clock for the first\n time, a Western Union clock high up at the back of the hall. Just as\n I seen it for the first time, the electricity wound the spring motor\n inside like a chicken having its neck wrung.\n\n\n The next time I glanced at the clock, it said ten minutes had gone by.\n My hand still wasn't free and I hadn't budged the box.\n\n\n \"This,\" Brother Partridge said, \"is one of the most profound\n experiences of my life.\"\n\n\n My head hinged until it lined my eyes up with Brother Partridge. The\n pipe hung heavy in my pocket, but he was too far from me.\n\n\n \"A vision of you at the box projected itself on the crest of my soup,\"\n the preacher explained in wonderment.\n\n\n I nodded. \"Swimming right in there with the dead duck.\"",
"I had to laugh at all those bums clattering the chairs in front of me,\n scampering after water soup and stale bread. As soon as I got cleaned\n up, I was going to have dinner in a good restaurant, and I was going to\n order such expensive food and leave such a large tip for the waiter and\n send one to the chef that they were going to think I was rich, and some\n executive with some brokerage firm would see me and say to himself,\n \"Hmm, executive material. Just the type we need. I beg your pardon,\n sir—\" just like the razor-blade comic-strip ads in the old magazines\n that Frankie the Pig sells three for a quarter.\n\n\n I was marching. Man, was I ever marching, but the secret of it was I\n was only marking time the way we did in fire drills at the school.",
"Partridge didn't seem to notice me, but I knew that was an act. I knew\n people were always watching every move I made. He braced his red-furred\n hands on the sides of his auctioneer's stand and leaned his splotched\n eagle beak toward us. \"Brothers, this being Thanksgiving, I pray the\n good Lord that we all are truly thankful for all that we have received.\n Amen.\"",
"They passed me, every one of them, and marched out of the meeting\n room into the kitchen. Even Partridge made his way down from the\n auctioneer's stand like a vulture with a busted wing and darted through\n his private door.\n\n\n I was alone, marking time behind the closed half of double doors. One\n good breath and I raced past the open door and flattened myself to the\n wall. Crockery was ringing and men were slurping inside. No one had\n paid any attention to me. That was pretty odd. People usually watch my\n every move, but a man's luck has to change sometime, doesn't it?\n\n\n Following the wallboard, I went down the side of the room and behind\n the last row of chairs, closer, closer, and halfway up the room again\n to the entrance—the entrance and the little wooden box fastened to the\n wall beside it.",
"The things abruptly started their business, trying to act casually as\n if they hadn't been waiting for me to look at them at all. They had a\n little human being of some sort.\n\n\n It was the size of a small boy, like the small boy who looked like me\n that they used to destroy when I was locked up with them in the dark.\n Except this was a man, scaled down to child's size. He had sort of an\n ugly, worried, tired, stupid look and he wore a shiny suit with a piece\n of a welcome mat or something for a necktie. Yeah, it was me. I really\n knew it all the time.\n\n\n They began doing things to the midget me. I didn't even lift an\n eyebrow. They couldn't do anything worse to the small man than they\n had done to the young boy. It was sort of nostalgic watching them, but\n I really got bored with all that violence and killing and killing the\n same kill over and over. Like watching the Saturday night string of\n westerns in a bar.",
"I suppose I was to blame anyway. If I hadn't been alive, if I hadn't\n been there to get beaten up, it wouldn't have happened. I could see\n the point in making me suffer for it. There was a lot to be said for\n looking at it like that. But there was nothing to be said for telling\n Brother Partridge about the accident, or murder, or whatever had\n happened that day.\nSearching myself after I left Brother Partridge, I finally found a\n strip of gray adhesive tape on my side, out of the fuzzy area. Making\n the twenty the size of a thick postage stamp, I peeled back the tape\n and put the folded bill on the white skin and smoothed the tape back.\n\n\n There was only one place for me to go now. I headed for the public\n library. It was only about twenty blocks, but not having had anything\n to eat since the day before, it enervated me.",
"She sniffed and told me to follow her. I didn't rate a cart to my\n table, I guess, or else the bound papers weren't supposed to come out\n of the stacks.\n\n\n The cases of books, row after row, smelled good. Like old leather and\n good pipe tobacco. I had been here before. In this world, it's the man\n with education who makes the money. I had been reading the Funk &\n Wagnalls Encyclopedia. So far I knew a lot about Mark Antony, Atomic\n Energy, Boron, Brussels, Catapults, Demons, and Divans.\n\n\n I guess I had stopped to look around at some of the titles, because the\n busy librarian said sharply, \"Follow me.\"\n\n\n I heard my voice say, \"A pleasure. What about after work?\"",
"Some skin-and-bones character I didn't know struggled out of his seat,\n amening. I could see he had a lot to be thankful for—somewhere he had\n received a fix.\n\n\n \"Brothers,\" Partridge went on after enjoying the interruption with a\n beaming smile, \"you shall all be entitled to a bowl of turkey soup\n prepared by Sister Partridge, a generous supply of sweet rolls and\n dinner rolls contributed by the Early Morning Bakery of this city,\n and all the coffee you can drink. Let us march out to\nThe Stars and\n Stripes Forever\n, John Philip Sousa's grand old patriotic song.\"",
"I was a man, not a monkey. I knew why I couldn't get my hand out. But I\n couldn't lose that money, especially that century bill. Calm, I ordered\n myself.\nCalm.\nThe box was fastened to the vertical tongue-and-groove laths of the\n woodwork, not the wall. It was old lumber, stiffened by a hundred\n layers of paint since 1908. The paint was as thick and strong as the\n boards. The box was fastened fast. Six-inch spike nails, I guessed.\n\n\n Calmly, I flung my whole weight away from the wall. My wrist almost\n cracked, but there wasn't even a bend in the box. Carefully, I tried to\n jerk my fist straight up, to pry off the top of the box. It was as if\n the box had been carved out of one solid piece of timber. It wouldn't\n go up, down, left or right.\n\n\n But I kept trying.",
"The preacher and half a dozen men were singing\nOnward Christian\n Soldiers\nin the meeting room. It was a drafty hall with varnished\n camp chairs. I shuffled in at the back with my suitcoat collar turned\n up around my stubbled jaw. I made my hand shaky as I ran it through my\n knotted hair. Partridge was supposed to think I was just a bum. As\n an inspiration, I hugged my chest to make him think I was some wino\n nursing a flask full of Sneaky Pete. All I had there was a piece of\n copper alloy tubing inside a slice of plastic hose for taking care of\n myself, rolling sailors and the like. Who had the price of a bottle?",
"Two of them, dressed like Harvard seniors, caps and striped duffer\n jackets, came up to the crate I was dining off.\n\n\n \"Work inside, Jack?\" the taller one asked.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" I said, chewing.\n\n\n \"What do you do, Jack?\" the fatter one asked.\n\n\n \"Stack boxes.\"\n\n\n \"Got a union card?\"\n\n\n I shook my head.\n\n\n \"Application?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" I said. \"I'm just helping out during Christmas.\"\n\n\n \"You're a scab, buddy,\" Long-legs said. \"Don't you read the papers?\"\n\n\n \"I don't like comic strips,\" I said.\n\n\n They sighed. I think they hated to do it, but I was bucking the system.",
"He stopped polishing the counter in front of his friend. \"Milwaukee,\n Wisconsin, or Milwaukee, Oregon?\"\n\n\n \"Wisconsin.\"\n\n\n He didn't argue.\n\n\n It was cold and bitter. All beer is bitter, no matter what they say on\n TV. I like beer. I like the bitterness of it.\n\n\n It felt like another, but I checked myself. I needed a clear head.\n I thought about going back to the hotel for some sleep; I still had\n the key in my pocket (I wasn't trusting it to any clerk). No, I had\n had sleep on Thanksgiving, bracing up for trying the lift at Brother\n Partridge's. Let's see, it was daylight outside again, so this was the\n day after Thanksgiving. But it had only been sixteen or twenty hours\n since I had slept. That was enough."
],
[
"The men filed out of the kitchen, wiping their chins, and I went right\n on talking.\n\n\n After some time Sister Partridge bustled in and snapped on the overhead\n lights and I kept talking. The brother still hadn't used the phone to\n call the cops.\n\n\n \"Remarkable,\" Partridge finally said when I got so hoarse I had to take\n a break. \"One is almost—\nalmost\n—reminded of Job. William, you are\n being punished for some great sin. Of that, I'm sure.\"\n\n\n \"Punished for a sin? But, Brother, I've always had it like this, as\n long as I can remember. What kind of a sin could I have committed when\n I was fresh out of my crib?\"\n\n\n \"William, all I can tell you is that time means nothing in Heaven. Do\n you deny the transmigration of souls?\"",
"Fats hit me high. Long-legs hit me low. I blew cracker crumbs into\n their faces. After that, I just let them go. I know how to take a\n beating. That's one thing I knew.\n\n\n Then lying there, bleeding to myself, I heard them talking. I heard\n noises like\nmake an example of him\nand\ndo something permanent\nand I\n squirmed away across the rubbish like a polite mouse.\n\n\n I made it around a corner of brick and stood up, hurting my knee on a\n piece of brown-splotched pipe. There were noises on the other angle of\n the corner and so I tested if the pipe was loose and it was. I closed\n my eyes and brought the pipe up and then down.\n\n\n It felt as if I connected, but I was so numb, I wasn't sure until I\n unscrewed my eyes.",
"I didn't say it, but I was used to my voice independently saying\n things. Her neck got to flaming, but she walked stiffly ahead. She\n didn't say anything. She must be awful mad, I decided. But then I got\n the idea she was flushed with pleasure. I'm pretty ugly and I looked\n like a bum, but I was young. You had to grant me that.\n\n\n She waved a hand at the rows of bound\nNews\nand left me alone with\n them. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to hunt up a table to lay the\n books on or not, so I took the volume for last year and laid it on the\n floor. That was the cleanest floor I ever saw.\n\n\n It didn't take me long to find the story. The victim was a big man,\n because the story was on the second page of the Nov. 4 edition.",
"\"I believe you,\" Partridge said, surprised at himself.\n\n\n He ambled over to the money box on the wall. He tapped the bottom\n lightly and a box with no top slid out of the slightly larger box. He\n reached in, fished out the bill and presented it to me.\n\n\n \"Perhaps this will help in your atonement,\" he said.\n\n\n I crumpled it into my pocket fast. Not meaning to sound ungrateful, I'm\n pretty sure he hadn't noticed it was a twenty.\n\n\n And then the bill seemed to lie there, heavy, a lead weight. It would\n have been different if I had managed to get it out of the box myself.\n You know how it is.",
"\"I\nstill\nthink you're yellow,\" my voice said.\n\n\n It was my voice, but it didn't come from me. There were no words, no\n feeling of words in my throat. It just came out of the air the way it\n always did.\n\n\n I ran.\nHarold R. Thompkins, 49, vice-president of Baysinger's, was found\n dead behind the store last night. His skull had been crushed by a\n vicious beating with a heavy implement, Coroner McClain announced in\n preliminary verdict. Tompkins, who resided at 1467 Claremont, Edgeway,\n had been active in seeking labor-management peace in the recent\n difficulties....",
"There was a big man in a heavy wool overcoat and gray homburg spread on\n a damp centerfold from the\nNews\n. There was a pick-up slip from the\n warehouse under the fingers of one hand, and somebody had beaten his\n brains out.\n\n\n The police figured it was part of some labor dispute, I guess, and they\n never got to me.",
"The things abruptly started their business, trying to act casually as\n if they hadn't been waiting for me to look at them at all. They had a\n little human being of some sort.\n\n\n It was the size of a small boy, like the small boy who looked like me\n that they used to destroy when I was locked up with them in the dark.\n Except this was a man, scaled down to child's size. He had sort of an\n ugly, worried, tired, stupid look and he wore a shiny suit with a piece\n of a welcome mat or something for a necktie. Yeah, it was me. I really\n knew it all the time.\n\n\n They began doing things to the midget me. I didn't even lift an\n eyebrow. They couldn't do anything worse to the small man than they\n had done to the young boy. It was sort of nostalgic watching them, but\n I really got bored with all that violence and killing and killing the\n same kill over and over. Like watching the Saturday night string of\n westerns in a bar.",
"I suppose I was to blame anyway. If I hadn't been alive, if I hadn't\n been there to get beaten up, it wouldn't have happened. I could see\n the point in making me suffer for it. There was a lot to be said for\n looking at it like that. But there was nothing to be said for telling\n Brother Partridge about the accident, or murder, or whatever had\n happened that day.\nSearching myself after I left Brother Partridge, I finally found a\n strip of gray adhesive tape on my side, out of the fuzzy area. Making\n the twenty the size of a thick postage stamp, I peeled back the tape\n and put the folded bill on the white skin and smoothed the tape back.\n\n\n There was only one place for me to go now. I headed for the public\n library. It was only about twenty blocks, but not having had anything\n to eat since the day before, it enervated me.",
"Why couldn't what he said have been \"The best things in life are free,\n buddy\" or \"Every dog has his day, fellow\" or \"If at first you don't\n succeed, man\"? No, he had to use that one line. You wouldn't blame me.\n Not if you believe me.\n\n\n The first thing I can remember, the start of all this, was when I was\n four or five somebody was soiling my bed for me. I absolutely was not\n doing it. I took long naps morning and evening so I could lie awake all\n night to see that it wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen. But in the\n morning the bed would sit there dispassionately soiled and convict me\n on circumstantial evidence. My punishment was as sure as the tide.",
"\"Well,\" I said, \"I've had no personal experience—\"\n\n\n \"Of course you have, William! Say you don't remember. Say you don't\n want to remember. But don't say you have no personal experience!\"\n\n\n \"And you think I'm being punished for something I did in a previous\n life?\"\n\n\n He looked at me in disbelief. \"What else could it be?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" I confessed. \"I certainly haven't done anything that\n bad in\nthis\nlife.\"\n\n\n \"William, if you atone for this sin, perhaps the horde of locusts will\n lift from you.\"\n\n\n It wasn't much of a chance, but I was unused to having any at all. I\n shook off the dizziness of it. \"By the Lord Harry, Brother, I'm going\n to give it a try!\" I cried.",
"They passed me, every one of them, and marched out of the meeting\n room into the kitchen. Even Partridge made his way down from the\n auctioneer's stand like a vulture with a busted wing and darted through\n his private door.\n\n\n I was alone, marking time behind the closed half of double doors. One\n good breath and I raced past the open door and flattened myself to the\n wall. Crockery was ringing and men were slurping inside. No one had\n paid any attention to me. That was pretty odd. People usually watch my\n every move, but a man's luck has to change sometime, doesn't it?\n\n\n Following the wallboard, I went down the side of the room and behind\n the last row of chairs, closer, closer, and halfway up the room again\n to the entrance—the entrance and the little wooden box fastened to the\n wall beside it.",
"\"I've got something better than a conscience,\" I told him.\nBrother Partridge regarded me solemnly. \"There must be something\n special about you, for your apprehension to come through miraculous\n intervention. But I can't imagine what.\"\n\n\n \"I\nalways\nget apprehended somehow, Brother,\" I said. \"I'm pretty\n special.\"\n\n\n \"Your name?\"\n\n\n \"William Hagle.\" No sense lying. I had been booked and printed before.\n\n\n Partridge prodded me with his bony fingers as if making sure I was\n substantial. \"Come. Let's sit down, if you can remove your fist from\n the money box.\"",
"I had to laugh at all those bums clattering the chairs in front of me,\n scampering after water soup and stale bread. As soon as I got cleaned\n up, I was going to have dinner in a good restaurant, and I was going to\n order such expensive food and leave such a large tip for the waiter and\n send one to the chef that they were going to think I was rich, and some\n executive with some brokerage firm would see me and say to himself,\n \"Hmm, executive material. Just the type we need. I beg your pardon,\n sir—\" just like the razor-blade comic-strip ads in the old magazines\n that Frankie the Pig sells three for a quarter.\n\n\n I was marching. Man, was I ever marching, but the secret of it was I\n was only marking time the way we did in fire drills at the school.",
"Money you haven't earned doesn't seem real to you.\nThere was something I forgot to mention so far. During the year between\n when I got out of the reformatory and the one when I tried to steal\n Brother Partridge's money, I killed a man.\n\n\n It was all an accident, but killing somebody is reason enough to get\n punished. It didn't have to be a sin in some previous life, you see.\n\n\n I had gotten my first job in too long, stacking boxes at the freight\n door of Baysinger's. The drivers unloaded the stuff, but they just\n dumped it off the truck. An empty rear end was all they wanted. The\n freight boss told me to stack the boxes inside, neat and not too close\n together.\n\n\n I stacked boxes the first day. I stacked more the second. The third day\n I went outside with my baloney and crackers. It was warm enough even\n for November.",
"While keeping a lookout for Partridge and somebody stepping out of the\n kitchen for a pull on a bottle, I spotted the clock for the first\n time, a Western Union clock high up at the back of the hall. Just as\n I seen it for the first time, the electricity wound the spring motor\n inside like a chicken having its neck wrung.\n\n\n The next time I glanced at the clock, it said ten minutes had gone by.\n My hand still wasn't free and I hadn't budged the box.\n\n\n \"This,\" Brother Partridge said, \"is one of the most profound\n experiences of my life.\"\n\n\n My head hinged until it lined my eyes up with Brother Partridge. The\n pipe hung heavy in my pocket, but he was too far from me.\n\n\n \"A vision of you at the box projected itself on the crest of my soup,\"\n the preacher explained in wonderment.\n\n\n I nodded. \"Swimming right in there with the dead duck.\"",
"I opened up my fingers and let the coins ring inside the box and I drew\n out my hand. The bill stuck to the sweat on my fingers and slid out\n along with the digits. A one, I decided. I had got into trouble for a\n grubby single. It wasn't any century. I had been kidding myself.\n\n\n I unfolded the note. Sure enough, it wasn't a hundred-dollar bill, but\n it was a twenty, and that was almost the same thing to me. I creased it\n and put it back into the slot.\n\n\n As long as it stalled off the cops, I'd talk to Partridge.\n\n\n We took a couple of camp chairs and I told him the story of my life, or\n most of it. It was hard work on an empty stomach; I wished I'd had some\n of that turkey soup. Then again I was glad I hadn't. Something always\n happened to me when I thought back over my life. The same thing.",
"I was a man, not a monkey. I knew why I couldn't get my hand out. But I\n couldn't lose that money, especially that century bill. Calm, I ordered\n myself.\nCalm.\nThe box was fastened to the vertical tongue-and-groove laths of the\n woodwork, not the wall. It was old lumber, stiffened by a hundred\n layers of paint since 1908. The paint was as thick and strong as the\n boards. The box was fastened fast. Six-inch spike nails, I guessed.\n\n\n Calmly, I flung my whole weight away from the wall. My wrist almost\n cracked, but there wasn't even a bend in the box. Carefully, I tried to\n jerk my fist straight up, to pry off the top of the box. It was as if\n the box had been carved out of one solid piece of timber. It wouldn't\n go up, down, left or right.\n\n\n But I kept trying.",
"\"Cold turkey,\" he corrected. \"Are you scoffing at a miracle?\"\n\n\n \"People are always watching me, Brother,\" I said. \"So now they do it\n even when they aren't around. I should have known it would come to\n that.\"\n\n\n The pipe was suddenly a weight I wanted off me. I would try robbing\n a collection box, knowing positively that I would get caught, but I\n wasn't dumb enough to murder. Somebody, somewhere, would be a witness\n to it. I had never got away with anything in my life. I was too smart\n to even try anything but the little things.\n\n\n \"I may be able to help you,\" Brother Partridge said, \"if you have faith\n and a conscience.\"",
"I started to tear the page out, then only memorized the name and home\n address. Somebody was sure to see me and I couldn't risk trouble just\n now.\n\n\n I stuck the book back in line and left by the side door.\nI went to a dry-cleaner, not the cheapest place I knew, because I\n wouldn't be safe with the change from a twenty in that neighborhood.\n My suit was cleaned while I waited. I paid a little extra and had\n it mended. Funny thing about a suit—it's almost never completely\n shot unless you just have it ripped off you or burned up. It wasn't\n exactly in style, but some rich executives wore suits out of style\n that they had paid a lot of money for. I remembered Fredric March's\n double-breasted in\nExecutive Suite\nwhile Walter Pidgeon and the rest\n wore Ivy Leagues. Maybe I would look like an eccentric executive.",
"He stopped polishing the counter in front of his friend. \"Milwaukee,\n Wisconsin, or Milwaukee, Oregon?\"\n\n\n \"Wisconsin.\"\n\n\n He didn't argue.\n\n\n It was cold and bitter. All beer is bitter, no matter what they say on\n TV. I like beer. I like the bitterness of it.\n\n\n It felt like another, but I checked myself. I needed a clear head.\n I thought about going back to the hotel for some sleep; I still had\n the key in my pocket (I wasn't trusting it to any clerk). No, I had\n had sleep on Thanksgiving, bracing up for trying the lift at Brother\n Partridge's. Let's see, it was daylight outside again, so this was the\n day after Thanksgiving. But it had only been sixteen or twenty hours\n since I had slept. That was enough."
],
[
"\"I believe you,\" Partridge said, surprised at himself.\n\n\n He ambled over to the money box on the wall. He tapped the bottom\n lightly and a box with no top slid out of the slightly larger box. He\n reached in, fished out the bill and presented it to me.\n\n\n \"Perhaps this will help in your atonement,\" he said.\n\n\n I crumpled it into my pocket fast. Not meaning to sound ungrateful, I'm\n pretty sure he hadn't noticed it was a twenty.\n\n\n And then the bill seemed to lie there, heavy, a lead weight. It would\n have been different if I had managed to get it out of the box myself.\n You know how it is.",
"Partridge didn't seem to notice me, but I knew that was an act. I knew\n people were always watching every move I made. He braced his red-furred\n hands on the sides of his auctioneer's stand and leaned his splotched\n eagle beak toward us. \"Brothers, this being Thanksgiving, I pray the\n good Lord that we all are truly thankful for all that we have received.\n Amen.\"",
"\"I've got something better than a conscience,\" I told him.\nBrother Partridge regarded me solemnly. \"There must be something\n special about you, for your apprehension to come through miraculous\n intervention. But I can't imagine what.\"\n\n\n \"I\nalways\nget apprehended somehow, Brother,\" I said. \"I'm pretty\n special.\"\n\n\n \"Your name?\"\n\n\n \"William Hagle.\" No sense lying. I had been booked and printed before.\n\n\n Partridge prodded me with his bony fingers as if making sure I was\n substantial. \"Come. Let's sit down, if you can remove your fist from\n the money box.\"",
"I opened up my fingers and let the coins ring inside the box and I drew\n out my hand. The bill stuck to the sweat on my fingers and slid out\n along with the digits. A one, I decided. I had got into trouble for a\n grubby single. It wasn't any century. I had been kidding myself.\n\n\n I unfolded the note. Sure enough, it wasn't a hundred-dollar bill, but\n it was a twenty, and that was almost the same thing to me. I creased it\n and put it back into the slot.\n\n\n As long as it stalled off the cops, I'd talk to Partridge.\n\n\n We took a couple of camp chairs and I told him the story of my life, or\n most of it. It was hard work on an empty stomach; I wished I'd had some\n of that turkey soup. Then again I was glad I hadn't. Something always\n happened to me when I thought back over my life. The same thing.",
"Money you haven't earned doesn't seem real to you.\nThere was something I forgot to mention so far. During the year between\n when I got out of the reformatory and the one when I tried to steal\n Brother Partridge's money, I killed a man.\n\n\n It was all an accident, but killing somebody is reason enough to get\n punished. It didn't have to be a sin in some previous life, you see.\n\n\n I had gotten my first job in too long, stacking boxes at the freight\n door of Baysinger's. The drivers unloaded the stuff, but they just\n dumped it off the truck. An empty rear end was all they wanted. The\n freight boss told me to stack the boxes inside, neat and not too close\n together.\n\n\n I stacked boxes the first day. I stacked more the second. The third day\n I went outside with my baloney and crackers. It was warm enough even\n for November.",
"I suppose I was to blame anyway. If I hadn't been alive, if I hadn't\n been there to get beaten up, it wouldn't have happened. I could see\n the point in making me suffer for it. There was a lot to be said for\n looking at it like that. But there was nothing to be said for telling\n Brother Partridge about the accident, or murder, or whatever had\n happened that day.\nSearching myself after I left Brother Partridge, I finally found a\n strip of gray adhesive tape on my side, out of the fuzzy area. Making\n the twenty the size of a thick postage stamp, I peeled back the tape\n and put the folded bill on the white skin and smoothed the tape back.\n\n\n There was only one place for me to go now. I headed for the public\n library. It was only about twenty blocks, but not having had anything\n to eat since the day before, it enervated me.",
"There was reason for me to steal, if I could have got away with it. The\n others got money from home to buy the things they needed—razor blades,\n candy, sticks of tea. I got a letter from Mom or Dad every now and then\n before they were killed, saying they had sent money or that it was\n enclosed, but somehow I never got a dime of it.\n\n\n When I was expelled from reform school, I left with just one idea in\n mind—to get all the money I could ever use for the things I needed and\n the things I wanted.\nIt was two or three years later that I skulked into Brother Partridge's\n mission on Durbin Street.",
"\"Cold turkey,\" he corrected. \"Are you scoffing at a miracle?\"\n\n\n \"People are always watching me, Brother,\" I said. \"So now they do it\n even when they aren't around. I should have known it would come to\n that.\"\n\n\n The pipe was suddenly a weight I wanted off me. I would try robbing\n a collection box, knowing positively that I would get caught, but I\n wasn't dumb enough to murder. Somebody, somewhere, would be a witness\n to it. I had never got away with anything in my life. I was too smart\n to even try anything but the little things.\n\n\n \"I may be able to help you,\" Brother Partridge said, \"if you have faith\n and a conscience.\"",
"They passed me, every one of them, and marched out of the meeting\n room into the kitchen. Even Partridge made his way down from the\n auctioneer's stand like a vulture with a busted wing and darted through\n his private door.\n\n\n I was alone, marking time behind the closed half of double doors. One\n good breath and I raced past the open door and flattened myself to the\n wall. Crockery was ringing and men were slurping inside. No one had\n paid any attention to me. That was pretty odd. People usually watch my\n every move, but a man's luck has to change sometime, doesn't it?\n\n\n Following the wallboard, I went down the side of the room and behind\n the last row of chairs, closer, closer, and halfway up the room again\n to the entrance—the entrance and the little wooden box fastened to the\n wall beside it.",
"The men filed out of the kitchen, wiping their chins, and I went right\n on talking.\n\n\n After some time Sister Partridge bustled in and snapped on the overhead\n lights and I kept talking. The brother still hadn't used the phone to\n call the cops.\n\n\n \"Remarkable,\" Partridge finally said when I got so hoarse I had to take\n a break. \"One is almost—\nalmost\n—reminded of Job. William, you are\n being punished for some great sin. Of that, I'm sure.\"\n\n\n \"Punished for a sin? But, Brother, I've always had it like this, as\n long as I can remember. What kind of a sin could I have committed when\n I was fresh out of my crib?\"\n\n\n \"William, all I can tell you is that time means nothing in Heaven. Do\n you deny the transmigration of souls?\"",
"Some skin-and-bones character I didn't know struggled out of his seat,\n amening. I could see he had a lot to be thankful for—somewhere he had\n received a fix.\n\n\n \"Brothers,\" Partridge went on after enjoying the interruption with a\n beaming smile, \"you shall all be entitled to a bowl of turkey soup\n prepared by Sister Partridge, a generous supply of sweet rolls and\n dinner rolls contributed by the Early Morning Bakery of this city,\n and all the coffee you can drink. Let us march out to\nThe Stars and\n Stripes Forever\n, John Philip Sousa's grand old patriotic song.\"",
"While keeping a lookout for Partridge and somebody stepping out of the\n kitchen for a pull on a bottle, I spotted the clock for the first\n time, a Western Union clock high up at the back of the hall. Just as\n I seen it for the first time, the electricity wound the spring motor\n inside like a chicken having its neck wrung.\n\n\n The next time I glanced at the clock, it said ten minutes had gone by.\n My hand still wasn't free and I hadn't budged the box.\n\n\n \"This,\" Brother Partridge said, \"is one of the most profound\n experiences of my life.\"\n\n\n My head hinged until it lined my eyes up with Brother Partridge. The\n pipe hung heavy in my pocket, but he was too far from me.\n\n\n \"A vision of you at the box projected itself on the crest of my soup,\"\n the preacher explained in wonderment.\n\n\n I nodded. \"Swimming right in there with the dead duck.\"",
"Then I found the bill. A neatly folded bill in the box. Somehow I knew\n all along it would be there.\nI tried to read the numbers on the bill with my fingertips, but I\n couldn't. It had to be a one. Who drops anything but a one into a Skid\n Row collection box? But still there were tourists, slummers. They might\n leave a fifty or even a hundred. A hundred!\n\n\n Yes, it felt new, crisp. It had to be a hundred. A single would be\n creased or worn.\n\n\n I pulled my hand out of the box. I\ntried\nto pull my hand out of the\n box.\n\n\n I knew what the trouble was, of course. I was in a monkey trap. The\n monkey reaches through the hole for the bait, and when he gets it in\n his hot little fist, he can't get his hand out. He's too greedy to let\n go, so he stays there, caught as securely as if he were caged.",
"I had to laugh at all those bums clattering the chairs in front of me,\n scampering after water soup and stale bread. As soon as I got cleaned\n up, I was going to have dinner in a good restaurant, and I was going to\n order such expensive food and leave such a large tip for the waiter and\n send one to the chef that they were going to think I was rich, and some\n executive with some brokerage firm would see me and say to himself,\n \"Hmm, executive material. Just the type we need. I beg your pardon,\n sir—\" just like the razor-blade comic-strip ads in the old magazines\n that Frankie the Pig sells three for a quarter.\n\n\n I was marching. Man, was I ever marching, but the secret of it was I\n was only marking time the way we did in fire drills at the school.",
"The preacher and half a dozen men were singing\nOnward Christian\n Soldiers\nin the meeting room. It was a drafty hall with varnished\n camp chairs. I shuffled in at the back with my suitcoat collar turned\n up around my stubbled jaw. I made my hand shaky as I ran it through my\n knotted hair. Partridge was supposed to think I was just a bum. As\n an inspiration, I hugged my chest to make him think I was some wino\n nursing a flask full of Sneaky Pete. All I had there was a piece of\n copper alloy tubing inside a slice of plastic hose for taking care of\n myself, rolling sailors and the like. Who had the price of a bottle?",
"\"Well,\" I said, \"I've had no personal experience—\"\n\n\n \"Of course you have, William! Say you don't remember. Say you don't\n want to remember. But don't say you have no personal experience!\"\n\n\n \"And you think I'm being punished for something I did in a previous\n life?\"\n\n\n He looked at me in disbelief. \"What else could it be?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" I confessed. \"I certainly haven't done anything that\n bad in\nthis\nlife.\"\n\n\n \"William, if you atone for this sin, perhaps the horde of locusts will\n lift from you.\"\n\n\n It wasn't much of a chance, but I was unused to having any at all. I\n shook off the dizziness of it. \"By the Lord Harry, Brother, I'm going\n to give it a try!\" I cried.",
"I was a man, not a monkey. I knew why I couldn't get my hand out. But I\n couldn't lose that money, especially that century bill. Calm, I ordered\n myself.\nCalm.\nThe box was fastened to the vertical tongue-and-groove laths of the\n woodwork, not the wall. It was old lumber, stiffened by a hundred\n layers of paint since 1908. The paint was as thick and strong as the\n boards. The box was fastened fast. Six-inch spike nails, I guessed.\n\n\n Calmly, I flung my whole weight away from the wall. My wrist almost\n cracked, but there wasn't even a bend in the box. Carefully, I tried to\n jerk my fist straight up, to pry off the top of the box. It was as if\n the box had been carved out of one solid piece of timber. It wouldn't\n go up, down, left or right.\n\n\n But I kept trying.",
"I started to tear the page out, then only memorized the name and home\n address. Somebody was sure to see me and I couldn't risk trouble just\n now.\n\n\n I stuck the book back in line and left by the side door.\nI went to a dry-cleaner, not the cheapest place I knew, because I\n wouldn't be safe with the change from a twenty in that neighborhood.\n My suit was cleaned while I waited. I paid a little extra and had\n it mended. Funny thing about a suit—it's almost never completely\n shot unless you just have it ripped off you or burned up. It wasn't\n exactly in style, but some rich executives wore suits out of style\n that they had paid a lot of money for. I remembered Fredric March's\n double-breasted in\nExecutive Suite\nwhile Walter Pidgeon and the rest\n wore Ivy Leagues. Maybe I would look like an eccentric executive.",
"He stopped polishing the counter in front of his friend. \"Milwaukee,\n Wisconsin, or Milwaukee, Oregon?\"\n\n\n \"Wisconsin.\"\n\n\n He didn't argue.\n\n\n It was cold and bitter. All beer is bitter, no matter what they say on\n TV. I like beer. I like the bitterness of it.\n\n\n It felt like another, but I checked myself. I needed a clear head.\n I thought about going back to the hotel for some sleep; I still had\n the key in my pocket (I wasn't trusting it to any clerk). No, I had\n had sleep on Thanksgiving, bracing up for trying the lift at Brother\n Partridge's. Let's see, it was daylight outside again, so this was the\n day after Thanksgiving. But it had only been sixteen or twenty hours\n since I had slept. That was enough.",
"I didn't say it, but I was used to my voice independently saying\n things. Her neck got to flaming, but she walked stiffly ahead. She\n didn't say anything. She must be awful mad, I decided. But then I got\n the idea she was flushed with pleasure. I'm pretty ugly and I looked\n like a bum, but I was young. You had to grant me that.\n\n\n She waved a hand at the rows of bound\nNews\nand left me alone with\n them. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to hunt up a table to lay the\n books on or not, so I took the volume for last year and laid it on the\n floor. That was the cleanest floor I ever saw.\n\n\n It didn't take me long to find the story. The victim was a big man,\n because the story was on the second page of the Nov. 4 edition."
],
[
"The men filed out of the kitchen, wiping their chins, and I went right\n on talking.\n\n\n After some time Sister Partridge bustled in and snapped on the overhead\n lights and I kept talking. The brother still hadn't used the phone to\n call the cops.\n\n\n \"Remarkable,\" Partridge finally said when I got so hoarse I had to take\n a break. \"One is almost—\nalmost\n—reminded of Job. William, you are\n being punished for some great sin. Of that, I'm sure.\"\n\n\n \"Punished for a sin? But, Brother, I've always had it like this, as\n long as I can remember. What kind of a sin could I have committed when\n I was fresh out of my crib?\"\n\n\n \"William, all I can tell you is that time means nothing in Heaven. Do\n you deny the transmigration of souls?\"",
"Why couldn't what he said have been \"The best things in life are free,\n buddy\" or \"Every dog has his day, fellow\" or \"If at first you don't\n succeed, man\"? No, he had to use that one line. You wouldn't blame me.\n Not if you believe me.\n\n\n The first thing I can remember, the start of all this, was when I was\n four or five somebody was soiling my bed for me. I absolutely was not\n doing it. I took long naps morning and evening so I could lie awake all\n night to see that it wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen. But in the\n morning the bed would sit there dispassionately soiled and convict me\n on circumstantial evidence. My punishment was as sure as the tide.",
"\"Well,\" I said, \"I've had no personal experience—\"\n\n\n \"Of course you have, William! Say you don't remember. Say you don't\n want to remember. But don't say you have no personal experience!\"\n\n\n \"And you think I'm being punished for something I did in a previous\n life?\"\n\n\n He looked at me in disbelief. \"What else could it be?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" I confessed. \"I certainly haven't done anything that\n bad in\nthis\nlife.\"\n\n\n \"William, if you atone for this sin, perhaps the horde of locusts will\n lift from you.\"\n\n\n It wasn't much of a chance, but I was unused to having any at all. I\n shook off the dizziness of it. \"By the Lord Harry, Brother, I'm going\n to give it a try!\" I cried.",
"I stayed in the dark longer for lying about the light.\n\n\n Alone in the dark, I wouldn't have had it so bad if it wasn't for the\n things that came to me.\n\n\n They were real to me. They never touched me, but they had a little boy.\n He looked the way I did in the mirror. They did unpleasant things to\n him.\n\n\n Because they were real, I talked about them as if they were real, and\n I almost earned a bunk in the home for retarded children until I got\n smart enough to keep the beasts to myself.\n\n\n My mother hated me. I loved her, of course. I remember her smell mixed\n up with flowers and cookies and winter fires. I remember she hugged me\n on my ninth birthday. The trouble came from the notes written in my\n awkward hand that she found, calling her names I didn't understand.\n Sometimes there were drawings. I didn't write those notes or make those\n drawings.",
"\"I believe you,\" Partridge said, surprised at himself.\n\n\n He ambled over to the money box on the wall. He tapped the bottom\n lightly and a box with no top slid out of the slightly larger box. He\n reached in, fished out the bill and presented it to me.\n\n\n \"Perhaps this will help in your atonement,\" he said.\n\n\n I crumpled it into my pocket fast. Not meaning to sound ungrateful, I'm\n pretty sure he hadn't noticed it was a twenty.\n\n\n And then the bill seemed to lie there, heavy, a lead weight. It would\n have been different if I had managed to get it out of the box myself.\n You know how it is.",
"\"I've got something better than a conscience,\" I told him.\nBrother Partridge regarded me solemnly. \"There must be something\n special about you, for your apprehension to come through miraculous\n intervention. But I can't imagine what.\"\n\n\n \"I\nalways\nget apprehended somehow, Brother,\" I said. \"I'm pretty\n special.\"\n\n\n \"Your name?\"\n\n\n \"William Hagle.\" No sense lying. I had been booked and printed before.\n\n\n Partridge prodded me with his bony fingers as if making sure I was\n substantial. \"Come. Let's sit down, if you can remove your fist from\n the money box.\"",
"While keeping a lookout for Partridge and somebody stepping out of the\n kitchen for a pull on a bottle, I spotted the clock for the first\n time, a Western Union clock high up at the back of the hall. Just as\n I seen it for the first time, the electricity wound the spring motor\n inside like a chicken having its neck wrung.\n\n\n The next time I glanced at the clock, it said ten minutes had gone by.\n My hand still wasn't free and I hadn't budged the box.\n\n\n \"This,\" Brother Partridge said, \"is one of the most profound\n experiences of my life.\"\n\n\n My head hinged until it lined my eyes up with Brother Partridge. The\n pipe hung heavy in my pocket, but he was too far from me.\n\n\n \"A vision of you at the box projected itself on the crest of my soup,\"\n the preacher explained in wonderment.\n\n\n I nodded. \"Swimming right in there with the dead duck.\"",
"\"I\nstill\nthink you're yellow,\" my voice said.\n\n\n It was my voice, but it didn't come from me. There were no words, no\n feeling of words in my throat. It just came out of the air the way it\n always did.\n\n\n I ran.\nHarold R. Thompkins, 49, vice-president of Baysinger's, was found\n dead behind the store last night. His skull had been crushed by a\n vicious beating with a heavy implement, Coroner McClain announced in\n preliminary verdict. Tompkins, who resided at 1467 Claremont, Edgeway,\n had been active in seeking labor-management peace in the recent\n difficulties....",
"Partridge didn't seem to notice me, but I knew that was an act. I knew\n people were always watching every move I made. He braced his red-furred\n hands on the sides of his auctioneer's stand and leaned his splotched\n eagle beak toward us. \"Brothers, this being Thanksgiving, I pray the\n good Lord that we all are truly thankful for all that we have received.\n Amen.\"",
"I didn't say it, but I was used to my voice independently saying\n things. Her neck got to flaming, but she walked stiffly ahead. She\n didn't say anything. She must be awful mad, I decided. But then I got\n the idea she was flushed with pleasure. I'm pretty ugly and I looked\n like a bum, but I was young. You had to grant me that.\n\n\n She waved a hand at the rows of bound\nNews\nand left me alone with\n them. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to hunt up a table to lay the\n books on or not, so I took the volume for last year and laid it on the\n floor. That was the cleanest floor I ever saw.\n\n\n It didn't take me long to find the story. The victim was a big man,\n because the story was on the second page of the Nov. 4 edition.",
"The things abruptly started their business, trying to act casually as\n if they hadn't been waiting for me to look at them at all. They had a\n little human being of some sort.\n\n\n It was the size of a small boy, like the small boy who looked like me\n that they used to destroy when I was locked up with them in the dark.\n Except this was a man, scaled down to child's size. He had sort of an\n ugly, worried, tired, stupid look and he wore a shiny suit with a piece\n of a welcome mat or something for a necktie. Yeah, it was me. I really\n knew it all the time.\n\n\n They began doing things to the midget me. I didn't even lift an\n eyebrow. They couldn't do anything worse to the small man than they\n had done to the young boy. It was sort of nostalgic watching them, but\n I really got bored with all that violence and killing and killing the\n same kill over and over. Like watching the Saturday night string of\n westerns in a bar.",
"Some skin-and-bones character I didn't know struggled out of his seat,\n amening. I could see he had a lot to be thankful for—somewhere he had\n received a fix.\n\n\n \"Brothers,\" Partridge went on after enjoying the interruption with a\n beaming smile, \"you shall all be entitled to a bowl of turkey soup\n prepared by Sister Partridge, a generous supply of sweet rolls and\n dinner rolls contributed by the Early Morning Bakery of this city,\n and all the coffee you can drink. Let us march out to\nThe Stars and\n Stripes Forever\n, John Philip Sousa's grand old patriotic song.\"",
"The sunlight through the window was yellow and hot. After a time, I\n began to dose.\n\n\n The shrieks woke me up.\n\n\n For the first time, I could hear the shrieks of the monster's victim\n and listen to their obscene droolings. For the very first time in my\n life. Always before it had been all pantomime, like Charlie Chaplin.\n Now I heard the sounds of it all.\n\n\n They say it's a bad sign when you start hearing voices.\n\n\n I nearly panicked, but I held myself in the seat and forced myself\n to be rational about it. My own voice was always saying things\neverybody\ncould hear but which I didn't say. It wasn't any worse to\n be the\nonly\none who could hear other things I never said. I was as\n sane as I ever was. There was no doubt about that.\n\n\n But a new thought suddenly impressed itself on me.",
"She sniffed and told me to follow her. I didn't rate a cart to my\n table, I guess, or else the bound papers weren't supposed to come out\n of the stacks.\n\n\n The cases of books, row after row, smelled good. Like old leather and\n good pipe tobacco. I had been here before. In this world, it's the man\n with education who makes the money. I had been reading the Funk &\n Wagnalls Encyclopedia. So far I knew a lot about Mark Antony, Atomic\n Energy, Boron, Brussels, Catapults, Demons, and Divans.\n\n\n I guess I had stopped to look around at some of the titles, because the\n busy librarian said sharply, \"Follow me.\"\n\n\n I heard my voice say, \"A pleasure. What about after work?\"",
"He stopped polishing the counter in front of his friend. \"Milwaukee,\n Wisconsin, or Milwaukee, Oregon?\"\n\n\n \"Wisconsin.\"\n\n\n He didn't argue.\n\n\n It was cold and bitter. All beer is bitter, no matter what they say on\n TV. I like beer. I like the bitterness of it.\n\n\n It felt like another, but I checked myself. I needed a clear head.\n I thought about going back to the hotel for some sleep; I still had\n the key in my pocket (I wasn't trusting it to any clerk). No, I had\n had sleep on Thanksgiving, bracing up for trying the lift at Brother\n Partridge's. Let's see, it was daylight outside again, so this was the\n day after Thanksgiving. But it had only been sixteen or twenty hours\n since I had slept. That was enough.",
"I had to laugh at all those bums clattering the chairs in front of me,\n scampering after water soup and stale bread. As soon as I got cleaned\n up, I was going to have dinner in a good restaurant, and I was going to\n order such expensive food and leave such a large tip for the waiter and\n send one to the chef that they were going to think I was rich, and some\n executive with some brokerage firm would see me and say to himself,\n \"Hmm, executive material. Just the type we need. I beg your pardon,\n sir—\" just like the razor-blade comic-strip ads in the old magazines\n that Frankie the Pig sells three for a quarter.\n\n\n I was marching. Man, was I ever marching, but the secret of it was I\n was only marking time the way we did in fire drills at the school.",
"My mother and father must have been glad when I was sent away to reform\n school after my thirteenth birthday party, the one no one came to.\n\n\n The reform school was nicer. There were others there who'd had it about\n like me. We got along. I didn't watch their shifty eyes too much, or\n ask them what they shifted to see. They didn't talk about my screams\n at night.\n\n\n It was home.\n\n\n My trouble there was that I was always being framed for stealing. I\n didn't take any of those things they located in my bunk. Stealing\n wasn't in my line. If you believe any of this at all, you'll see why it\n couldn't be me who did the stealing.",
"They passed me, every one of them, and marched out of the meeting\n room into the kitchen. Even Partridge made his way down from the\n auctioneer's stand like a vulture with a busted wing and darted through\n his private door.\n\n\n I was alone, marking time behind the closed half of double doors. One\n good breath and I raced past the open door and flattened myself to the\n wall. Crockery was ringing and men were slurping inside. No one had\n paid any attention to me. That was pretty odd. People usually watch my\n every move, but a man's luck has to change sometime, doesn't it?\n\n\n Following the wallboard, I went down the side of the room and behind\n the last row of chairs, closer, closer, and halfway up the room again\n to the entrance—the entrance and the little wooden box fastened to the\n wall beside it.",
"I suppose I was to blame anyway. If I hadn't been alive, if I hadn't\n been there to get beaten up, it wouldn't have happened. I could see\n the point in making me suffer for it. There was a lot to be said for\n looking at it like that. But there was nothing to be said for telling\n Brother Partridge about the accident, or murder, or whatever had\n happened that day.\nSearching myself after I left Brother Partridge, I finally found a\n strip of gray adhesive tape on my side, out of the fuzzy area. Making\n the twenty the size of a thick postage stamp, I peeled back the tape\n and put the folded bill on the white skin and smoothed the tape back.\n\n\n There was only one place for me to go now. I headed for the public\n library. It was only about twenty blocks, but not having had anything\n to eat since the day before, it enervated me.",
"Dad was a compact man, small eyes, small mouth, tight clothes. He was\n narrow but not mean. For punishment, he locked me in a windowless\n room and told me to sit still until he came back. It wasn't so bad a\n punishment, except that when Dad closed the door, the light turned off\n and I was left there in the dark.\n\n\n Being four or five, I didn't know any better, so I thought Dad made it\n dark to add to my punishment. But I learned he didn't know the light\n went out. It came back on when he unlocked the door. Every time I told\n him about the light as soon as I could talk again, but he said I was\n lying.\nOne day, to prove me a liar, he opened and closed the door a few times\n from outside. The light winked off and on, off and on, always shining\n when Dad stuck his head inside. He tried using the door from the\n inside, and the light stayed on, no matter how hard he slammed the\n door."
],
[
"\"Well,\" I said, \"I've had no personal experience—\"\n\n\n \"Of course you have, William! Say you don't remember. Say you don't\n want to remember. But don't say you have no personal experience!\"\n\n\n \"And you think I'm being punished for something I did in a previous\n life?\"\n\n\n He looked at me in disbelief. \"What else could it be?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" I confessed. \"I certainly haven't done anything that\n bad in\nthis\nlife.\"\n\n\n \"William, if you atone for this sin, perhaps the horde of locusts will\n lift from you.\"\n\n\n It wasn't much of a chance, but I was unused to having any at all. I\n shook off the dizziness of it. \"By the Lord Harry, Brother, I'm going\n to give it a try!\" I cried.",
"The men filed out of the kitchen, wiping their chins, and I went right\n on talking.\n\n\n After some time Sister Partridge bustled in and snapped on the overhead\n lights and I kept talking. The brother still hadn't used the phone to\n call the cops.\n\n\n \"Remarkable,\" Partridge finally said when I got so hoarse I had to take\n a break. \"One is almost—\nalmost\n—reminded of Job. William, you are\n being punished for some great sin. Of that, I'm sure.\"\n\n\n \"Punished for a sin? But, Brother, I've always had it like this, as\n long as I can remember. What kind of a sin could I have committed when\n I was fresh out of my crib?\"\n\n\n \"William, all I can tell you is that time means nothing in Heaven. Do\n you deny the transmigration of souls?\"",
"Why couldn't what he said have been \"The best things in life are free,\n buddy\" or \"Every dog has his day, fellow\" or \"If at first you don't\n succeed, man\"? No, he had to use that one line. You wouldn't blame me.\n Not if you believe me.\n\n\n The first thing I can remember, the start of all this, was when I was\n four or five somebody was soiling my bed for me. I absolutely was not\n doing it. I took long naps morning and evening so I could lie awake all\n night to see that it wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen. But in the\n morning the bed would sit there dispassionately soiled and convict me\n on circumstantial evidence. My punishment was as sure as the tide.",
"I suppose I was to blame anyway. If I hadn't been alive, if I hadn't\n been there to get beaten up, it wouldn't have happened. I could see\n the point in making me suffer for it. There was a lot to be said for\n looking at it like that. But there was nothing to be said for telling\n Brother Partridge about the accident, or murder, or whatever had\n happened that day.\nSearching myself after I left Brother Partridge, I finally found a\n strip of gray adhesive tape on my side, out of the fuzzy area. Making\n the twenty the size of a thick postage stamp, I peeled back the tape\n and put the folded bill on the white skin and smoothed the tape back.\n\n\n There was only one place for me to go now. I headed for the public\n library. It was only about twenty blocks, but not having had anything\n to eat since the day before, it enervated me.",
"Fats hit me high. Long-legs hit me low. I blew cracker crumbs into\n their faces. After that, I just let them go. I know how to take a\n beating. That's one thing I knew.\n\n\n Then lying there, bleeding to myself, I heard them talking. I heard\n noises like\nmake an example of him\nand\ndo something permanent\nand I\n squirmed away across the rubbish like a polite mouse.\n\n\n I made it around a corner of brick and stood up, hurting my knee on a\n piece of brown-splotched pipe. There were noises on the other angle of\n the corner and so I tested if the pipe was loose and it was. I closed\n my eyes and brought the pipe up and then down.\n\n\n It felt as if I connected, but I was so numb, I wasn't sure until I\n unscrewed my eyes.",
"\"I've got something better than a conscience,\" I told him.\nBrother Partridge regarded me solemnly. \"There must be something\n special about you, for your apprehension to come through miraculous\n intervention. But I can't imagine what.\"\n\n\n \"I\nalways\nget apprehended somehow, Brother,\" I said. \"I'm pretty\n special.\"\n\n\n \"Your name?\"\n\n\n \"William Hagle.\" No sense lying. I had been booked and printed before.\n\n\n Partridge prodded me with his bony fingers as if making sure I was\n substantial. \"Come. Let's sit down, if you can remove your fist from\n the money box.\"",
"\"I believe you,\" Partridge said, surprised at himself.\n\n\n He ambled over to the money box on the wall. He tapped the bottom\n lightly and a box with no top slid out of the slightly larger box. He\n reached in, fished out the bill and presented it to me.\n\n\n \"Perhaps this will help in your atonement,\" he said.\n\n\n I crumpled it into my pocket fast. Not meaning to sound ungrateful, I'm\n pretty sure he hadn't noticed it was a twenty.\n\n\n And then the bill seemed to lie there, heavy, a lead weight. It would\n have been different if I had managed to get it out of the box myself.\n You know how it is.",
"I had to laugh at all those bums clattering the chairs in front of me,\n scampering after water soup and stale bread. As soon as I got cleaned\n up, I was going to have dinner in a good restaurant, and I was going to\n order such expensive food and leave such a large tip for the waiter and\n send one to the chef that they were going to think I was rich, and some\n executive with some brokerage firm would see me and say to himself,\n \"Hmm, executive material. Just the type we need. I beg your pardon,\n sir—\" just like the razor-blade comic-strip ads in the old magazines\n that Frankie the Pig sells three for a quarter.\n\n\n I was marching. Man, was I ever marching, but the secret of it was I\n was only marking time the way we did in fire drills at the school.",
"I stayed in the dark longer for lying about the light.\n\n\n Alone in the dark, I wouldn't have had it so bad if it wasn't for the\n things that came to me.\n\n\n They were real to me. They never touched me, but they had a little boy.\n He looked the way I did in the mirror. They did unpleasant things to\n him.\n\n\n Because they were real, I talked about them as if they were real, and\n I almost earned a bunk in the home for retarded children until I got\n smart enough to keep the beasts to myself.\n\n\n My mother hated me. I loved her, of course. I remember her smell mixed\n up with flowers and cookies and winter fires. I remember she hugged me\n on my ninth birthday. The trouble came from the notes written in my\n awkward hand that she found, calling her names I didn't understand.\n Sometimes there were drawings. I didn't write those notes or make those\n drawings.",
"\"I\nstill\nthink you're yellow,\" my voice said.\n\n\n It was my voice, but it didn't come from me. There were no words, no\n feeling of words in my throat. It just came out of the air the way it\n always did.\n\n\n I ran.\nHarold R. Thompkins, 49, vice-president of Baysinger's, was found\n dead behind the store last night. His skull had been crushed by a\n vicious beating with a heavy implement, Coroner McClain announced in\n preliminary verdict. Tompkins, who resided at 1467 Claremont, Edgeway,\n had been active in seeking labor-management peace in the recent\n difficulties....",
"The things abruptly started their business, trying to act casually as\n if they hadn't been waiting for me to look at them at all. They had a\n little human being of some sort.\n\n\n It was the size of a small boy, like the small boy who looked like me\n that they used to destroy when I was locked up with them in the dark.\n Except this was a man, scaled down to child's size. He had sort of an\n ugly, worried, tired, stupid look and he wore a shiny suit with a piece\n of a welcome mat or something for a necktie. Yeah, it was me. I really\n knew it all the time.\n\n\n They began doing things to the midget me. I didn't even lift an\n eyebrow. They couldn't do anything worse to the small man than they\n had done to the young boy. It was sort of nostalgic watching them, but\n I really got bored with all that violence and killing and killing the\n same kill over and over. Like watching the Saturday night string of\n westerns in a bar.",
"My mother and father must have been glad when I was sent away to reform\n school after my thirteenth birthday party, the one no one came to.\n\n\n The reform school was nicer. There were others there who'd had it about\n like me. We got along. I didn't watch their shifty eyes too much, or\n ask them what they shifted to see. They didn't talk about my screams\n at night.\n\n\n It was home.\n\n\n My trouble there was that I was always being framed for stealing. I\n didn't take any of those things they located in my bunk. Stealing\n wasn't in my line. If you believe any of this at all, you'll see why it\n couldn't be me who did the stealing.",
"Money you haven't earned doesn't seem real to you.\nThere was something I forgot to mention so far. During the year between\n when I got out of the reformatory and the one when I tried to steal\n Brother Partridge's money, I killed a man.\n\n\n It was all an accident, but killing somebody is reason enough to get\n punished. It didn't have to be a sin in some previous life, you see.\n\n\n I had gotten my first job in too long, stacking boxes at the freight\n door of Baysinger's. The drivers unloaded the stuff, but they just\n dumped it off the truck. An empty rear end was all they wanted. The\n freight boss told me to stack the boxes inside, neat and not too close\n together.\n\n\n I stacked boxes the first day. I stacked more the second. The third day\n I went outside with my baloney and crackers. It was warm enough even\n for November.",
"\"Cold turkey,\" he corrected. \"Are you scoffing at a miracle?\"\n\n\n \"People are always watching me, Brother,\" I said. \"So now they do it\n even when they aren't around. I should have known it would come to\n that.\"\n\n\n The pipe was suddenly a weight I wanted off me. I would try robbing\n a collection box, knowing positively that I would get caught, but I\n wasn't dumb enough to murder. Somebody, somewhere, would be a witness\n to it. I had never got away with anything in my life. I was too smart\n to even try anything but the little things.\n\n\n \"I may be able to help you,\" Brother Partridge said, \"if you have faith\n and a conscience.\"",
"I opened up my fingers and let the coins ring inside the box and I drew\n out my hand. The bill stuck to the sweat on my fingers and slid out\n along with the digits. A one, I decided. I had got into trouble for a\n grubby single. It wasn't any century. I had been kidding myself.\n\n\n I unfolded the note. Sure enough, it wasn't a hundred-dollar bill, but\n it was a twenty, and that was almost the same thing to me. I creased it\n and put it back into the slot.\n\n\n As long as it stalled off the cops, I'd talk to Partridge.\n\n\n We took a couple of camp chairs and I told him the story of my life, or\n most of it. It was hard work on an empty stomach; I wished I'd had some\n of that turkey soup. Then again I was glad I hadn't. Something always\n happened to me when I thought back over my life. The same thing.",
"I didn't say it, but I was used to my voice independently saying\n things. Her neck got to flaming, but she walked stiffly ahead. She\n didn't say anything. She must be awful mad, I decided. But then I got\n the idea she was flushed with pleasure. I'm pretty ugly and I looked\n like a bum, but I was young. You had to grant me that.\n\n\n She waved a hand at the rows of bound\nNews\nand left me alone with\n them. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to hunt up a table to lay the\n books on or not, so I took the volume for last year and laid it on the\n floor. That was the cleanest floor I ever saw.\n\n\n It didn't take me long to find the story. The victim was a big man,\n because the story was on the second page of the Nov. 4 edition.",
"The sunlight through the window was yellow and hot. After a time, I\n began to dose.\n\n\n The shrieks woke me up.\n\n\n For the first time, I could hear the shrieks of the monster's victim\n and listen to their obscene droolings. For the very first time in my\n life. Always before it had been all pantomime, like Charlie Chaplin.\n Now I heard the sounds of it all.\n\n\n They say it's a bad sign when you start hearing voices.\n\n\n I nearly panicked, but I held myself in the seat and forced myself\n to be rational about it. My own voice was always saying things\neverybody\ncould hear but which I didn't say. It wasn't any worse to\n be the\nonly\none who could hear other things I never said. I was as\n sane as I ever was. There was no doubt about that.\n\n\n But a new thought suddenly impressed itself on me.",
"The razor blade sliced through the pink bath towel evenly. I cut out a\n nice modern-style tie, narrow, with some horizontal stripes down at the\n bottom. I made a tight, thin knot. It looked pretty good.\n\n\n I was ready to leave, so I started for the door. I went back. I had\n almost forgotten my luggage. The box still had three unwrapped blades\n in it. I pocketed it. I hefted the used blade, dulled by all the work\n it had done. You can run being economical into stinginess. I tossed it\n into the wastebasket.\n\n\n I had five hamburgers and five cups of coffee. I couldn't finish all of\n the French fries.\n\n\n \"Mac,\" I said to the fat counterman, who looked like all fat\n countermen, \"give me a Milwaukee beer.\"",
"I started to tear the page out, then only memorized the name and home\n address. Somebody was sure to see me and I couldn't risk trouble just\n now.\n\n\n I stuck the book back in line and left by the side door.\nI went to a dry-cleaner, not the cheapest place I knew, because I\n wouldn't be safe with the change from a twenty in that neighborhood.\n My suit was cleaned while I waited. I paid a little extra and had\n it mended. Funny thing about a suit—it's almost never completely\n shot unless you just have it ripped off you or burned up. It wasn't\n exactly in style, but some rich executives wore suits out of style\n that they had paid a lot of money for. I remembered Fredric March's\n double-breasted in\nExecutive Suite\nwhile Walter Pidgeon and the rest\n wore Ivy Leagues. Maybe I would look like an eccentric executive.",
"She sniffed and told me to follow her. I didn't rate a cart to my\n table, I guess, or else the bound papers weren't supposed to come out\n of the stacks.\n\n\n The cases of books, row after row, smelled good. Like old leather and\n good pipe tobacco. I had been here before. In this world, it's the man\n with education who makes the money. I had been reading the Funk &\n Wagnalls Encyclopedia. So far I knew a lot about Mark Antony, Atomic\n Energy, Boron, Brussels, Catapults, Demons, and Divans.\n\n\n I guess I had stopped to look around at some of the titles, because the\n busy librarian said sharply, \"Follow me.\"\n\n\n I heard my voice say, \"A pleasure. What about after work?\""
],
[
"\"I believe you,\" Partridge said, surprised at himself.\n\n\n He ambled over to the money box on the wall. He tapped the bottom\n lightly and a box with no top slid out of the slightly larger box. He\n reached in, fished out the bill and presented it to me.\n\n\n \"Perhaps this will help in your atonement,\" he said.\n\n\n I crumpled it into my pocket fast. Not meaning to sound ungrateful, I'm\n pretty sure he hadn't noticed it was a twenty.\n\n\n And then the bill seemed to lie there, heavy, a lead weight. It would\n have been different if I had managed to get it out of the box myself.\n You know how it is.",
"\"Cold turkey,\" he corrected. \"Are you scoffing at a miracle?\"\n\n\n \"People are always watching me, Brother,\" I said. \"So now they do it\n even when they aren't around. I should have known it would come to\n that.\"\n\n\n The pipe was suddenly a weight I wanted off me. I would try robbing\n a collection box, knowing positively that I would get caught, but I\n wasn't dumb enough to murder. Somebody, somewhere, would be a witness\n to it. I had never got away with anything in my life. I was too smart\n to even try anything but the little things.\n\n\n \"I may be able to help you,\" Brother Partridge said, \"if you have faith\n and a conscience.\"",
"Partridge didn't seem to notice me, but I knew that was an act. I knew\n people were always watching every move I made. He braced his red-furred\n hands on the sides of his auctioneer's stand and leaned his splotched\n eagle beak toward us. \"Brothers, this being Thanksgiving, I pray the\n good Lord that we all are truly thankful for all that we have received.\n Amen.\"",
"\"Well,\" I said, \"I've had no personal experience—\"\n\n\n \"Of course you have, William! Say you don't remember. Say you don't\n want to remember. But don't say you have no personal experience!\"\n\n\n \"And you think I'm being punished for something I did in a previous\n life?\"\n\n\n He looked at me in disbelief. \"What else could it be?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" I confessed. \"I certainly haven't done anything that\n bad in\nthis\nlife.\"\n\n\n \"William, if you atone for this sin, perhaps the horde of locusts will\n lift from you.\"\n\n\n It wasn't much of a chance, but I was unused to having any at all. I\n shook off the dizziness of it. \"By the Lord Harry, Brother, I'm going\n to give it a try!\" I cried.",
"The men filed out of the kitchen, wiping their chins, and I went right\n on talking.\n\n\n After some time Sister Partridge bustled in and snapped on the overhead\n lights and I kept talking. The brother still hadn't used the phone to\n call the cops.\n\n\n \"Remarkable,\" Partridge finally said when I got so hoarse I had to take\n a break. \"One is almost—\nalmost\n—reminded of Job. William, you are\n being punished for some great sin. Of that, I'm sure.\"\n\n\n \"Punished for a sin? But, Brother, I've always had it like this, as\n long as I can remember. What kind of a sin could I have committed when\n I was fresh out of my crib?\"\n\n\n \"William, all I can tell you is that time means nothing in Heaven. Do\n you deny the transmigration of souls?\"",
"\"I've got something better than a conscience,\" I told him.\nBrother Partridge regarded me solemnly. \"There must be something\n special about you, for your apprehension to come through miraculous\n intervention. But I can't imagine what.\"\n\n\n \"I\nalways\nget apprehended somehow, Brother,\" I said. \"I'm pretty\n special.\"\n\n\n \"Your name?\"\n\n\n \"William Hagle.\" No sense lying. I had been booked and printed before.\n\n\n Partridge prodded me with his bony fingers as if making sure I was\n substantial. \"Come. Let's sit down, if you can remove your fist from\n the money box.\"",
"Some skin-and-bones character I didn't know struggled out of his seat,\n amening. I could see he had a lot to be thankful for—somewhere he had\n received a fix.\n\n\n \"Brothers,\" Partridge went on after enjoying the interruption with a\n beaming smile, \"you shall all be entitled to a bowl of turkey soup\n prepared by Sister Partridge, a generous supply of sweet rolls and\n dinner rolls contributed by the Early Morning Bakery of this city,\n and all the coffee you can drink. Let us march out to\nThe Stars and\n Stripes Forever\n, John Philip Sousa's grand old patriotic song.\"",
"I suppose I was to blame anyway. If I hadn't been alive, if I hadn't\n been there to get beaten up, it wouldn't have happened. I could see\n the point in making me suffer for it. There was a lot to be said for\n looking at it like that. But there was nothing to be said for telling\n Brother Partridge about the accident, or murder, or whatever had\n happened that day.\nSearching myself after I left Brother Partridge, I finally found a\n strip of gray adhesive tape on my side, out of the fuzzy area. Making\n the twenty the size of a thick postage stamp, I peeled back the tape\n and put the folded bill on the white skin and smoothed the tape back.\n\n\n There was only one place for me to go now. I headed for the public\n library. It was only about twenty blocks, but not having had anything\n to eat since the day before, it enervated me.",
"Money you haven't earned doesn't seem real to you.\nThere was something I forgot to mention so far. During the year between\n when I got out of the reformatory and the one when I tried to steal\n Brother Partridge's money, I killed a man.\n\n\n It was all an accident, but killing somebody is reason enough to get\n punished. It didn't have to be a sin in some previous life, you see.\n\n\n I had gotten my first job in too long, stacking boxes at the freight\n door of Baysinger's. The drivers unloaded the stuff, but they just\n dumped it off the truck. An empty rear end was all they wanted. The\n freight boss told me to stack the boxes inside, neat and not too close\n together.\n\n\n I stacked boxes the first day. I stacked more the second. The third day\n I went outside with my baloney and crackers. It was warm enough even\n for November.",
"I opened up my fingers and let the coins ring inside the box and I drew\n out my hand. The bill stuck to the sweat on my fingers and slid out\n along with the digits. A one, I decided. I had got into trouble for a\n grubby single. It wasn't any century. I had been kidding myself.\n\n\n I unfolded the note. Sure enough, it wasn't a hundred-dollar bill, but\n it was a twenty, and that was almost the same thing to me. I creased it\n and put it back into the slot.\n\n\n As long as it stalled off the cops, I'd talk to Partridge.\n\n\n We took a couple of camp chairs and I told him the story of my life, or\n most of it. It was hard work on an empty stomach; I wished I'd had some\n of that turkey soup. Then again I was glad I hadn't. Something always\n happened to me when I thought back over my life. The same thing.",
"There was reason for me to steal, if I could have got away with it. The\n others got money from home to buy the things they needed—razor blades,\n candy, sticks of tea. I got a letter from Mom or Dad every now and then\n before they were killed, saying they had sent money or that it was\n enclosed, but somehow I never got a dime of it.\n\n\n When I was expelled from reform school, I left with just one idea in\n mind—to get all the money I could ever use for the things I needed and\n the things I wanted.\nIt was two or three years later that I skulked into Brother Partridge's\n mission on Durbin Street.",
"While keeping a lookout for Partridge and somebody stepping out of the\n kitchen for a pull on a bottle, I spotted the clock for the first\n time, a Western Union clock high up at the back of the hall. Just as\n I seen it for the first time, the electricity wound the spring motor\n inside like a chicken having its neck wrung.\n\n\n The next time I glanced at the clock, it said ten minutes had gone by.\n My hand still wasn't free and I hadn't budged the box.\n\n\n \"This,\" Brother Partridge said, \"is one of the most profound\n experiences of my life.\"\n\n\n My head hinged until it lined my eyes up with Brother Partridge. The\n pipe hung heavy in my pocket, but he was too far from me.\n\n\n \"A vision of you at the box projected itself on the crest of my soup,\"\n the preacher explained in wonderment.\n\n\n I nodded. \"Swimming right in there with the dead duck.\"",
"The preacher and half a dozen men were singing\nOnward Christian\n Soldiers\nin the meeting room. It was a drafty hall with varnished\n camp chairs. I shuffled in at the back with my suitcoat collar turned\n up around my stubbled jaw. I made my hand shaky as I ran it through my\n knotted hair. Partridge was supposed to think I was just a bum. As\n an inspiration, I hugged my chest to make him think I was some wino\n nursing a flask full of Sneaky Pete. All I had there was a piece of\n copper alloy tubing inside a slice of plastic hose for taking care of\n myself, rolling sailors and the like. Who had the price of a bottle?",
"Why couldn't what he said have been \"The best things in life are free,\n buddy\" or \"Every dog has his day, fellow\" or \"If at first you don't\n succeed, man\"? No, he had to use that one line. You wouldn't blame me.\n Not if you believe me.\n\n\n The first thing I can remember, the start of all this, was when I was\n four or five somebody was soiling my bed for me. I absolutely was not\n doing it. I took long naps morning and evening so I could lie awake all\n night to see that it wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen. But in the\n morning the bed would sit there dispassionately soiled and convict me\n on circumstantial evidence. My punishment was as sure as the tide.",
"Fats hit me high. Long-legs hit me low. I blew cracker crumbs into\n their faces. After that, I just let them go. I know how to take a\n beating. That's one thing I knew.\n\n\n Then lying there, bleeding to myself, I heard them talking. I heard\n noises like\nmake an example of him\nand\ndo something permanent\nand I\n squirmed away across the rubbish like a polite mouse.\n\n\n I made it around a corner of brick and stood up, hurting my knee on a\n piece of brown-splotched pipe. There were noises on the other angle of\n the corner and so I tested if the pipe was loose and it was. I closed\n my eyes and brought the pipe up and then down.\n\n\n It felt as if I connected, but I was so numb, I wasn't sure until I\n unscrewed my eyes.",
"They passed me, every one of them, and marched out of the meeting\n room into the kitchen. Even Partridge made his way down from the\n auctioneer's stand like a vulture with a busted wing and darted through\n his private door.\n\n\n I was alone, marking time behind the closed half of double doors. One\n good breath and I raced past the open door and flattened myself to the\n wall. Crockery was ringing and men were slurping inside. No one had\n paid any attention to me. That was pretty odd. People usually watch my\n every move, but a man's luck has to change sometime, doesn't it?\n\n\n Following the wallboard, I went down the side of the room and behind\n the last row of chairs, closer, closer, and halfway up the room again\n to the entrance—the entrance and the little wooden box fastened to the\n wall beside it.",
"I had to laugh at all those bums clattering the chairs in front of me,\n scampering after water soup and stale bread. As soon as I got cleaned\n up, I was going to have dinner in a good restaurant, and I was going to\n order such expensive food and leave such a large tip for the waiter and\n send one to the chef that they were going to think I was rich, and some\n executive with some brokerage firm would see me and say to himself,\n \"Hmm, executive material. Just the type we need. I beg your pardon,\n sir—\" just like the razor-blade comic-strip ads in the old magazines\n that Frankie the Pig sells three for a quarter.\n\n\n I was marching. Man, was I ever marching, but the secret of it was I\n was only marking time the way we did in fire drills at the school.",
"The things abruptly started their business, trying to act casually as\n if they hadn't been waiting for me to look at them at all. They had a\n little human being of some sort.\n\n\n It was the size of a small boy, like the small boy who looked like me\n that they used to destroy when I was locked up with them in the dark.\n Except this was a man, scaled down to child's size. He had sort of an\n ugly, worried, tired, stupid look and he wore a shiny suit with a piece\n of a welcome mat or something for a necktie. Yeah, it was me. I really\n knew it all the time.\n\n\n They began doing things to the midget me. I didn't even lift an\n eyebrow. They couldn't do anything worse to the small man than they\n had done to the young boy. It was sort of nostalgic watching them, but\n I really got bored with all that violence and killing and killing the\n same kill over and over. Like watching the Saturday night string of\n westerns in a bar.",
"I didn't say it, but I was used to my voice independently saying\n things. Her neck got to flaming, but she walked stiffly ahead. She\n didn't say anything. She must be awful mad, I decided. But then I got\n the idea she was flushed with pleasure. I'm pretty ugly and I looked\n like a bum, but I was young. You had to grant me that.\n\n\n She waved a hand at the rows of bound\nNews\nand left me alone with\n them. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to hunt up a table to lay the\n books on or not, so I took the volume for last year and laid it on the\n floor. That was the cleanest floor I ever saw.\n\n\n It didn't take me long to find the story. The victim was a big man,\n because the story was on the second page of the Nov. 4 edition.",
"The downstairs washroom was where I went first. There was nobody\n there but an old guy talking urgently to a kid with thick glasses,\n and somebody building a fix in one of the booths. I could see charred\n matches dropping down on the floor next to his tennis shoes, and even a\n few grains of white stuff. But he managed to hold still enough to keep\n from spilling more from the spoon.\n\n\n I washed my hands and face, smoothed my hair down, combing it with my\n fingers. Going over my suit with damp toweling got off a lot of the\n dirt. I put my collar on the outside of my jacket and creased the\n wings with my thumbnail so it would look more like a sports shirt.\n It didn't really. I still looked like a bum, but sort of a neat,\n non-objectionable bum.\n\n\n The librarian at the main desk looked sympathetically hostile, or\n hostilely sympathetic."
],
[
"The men filed out of the kitchen, wiping their chins, and I went right\n on talking.\n\n\n After some time Sister Partridge bustled in and snapped on the overhead\n lights and I kept talking. The brother still hadn't used the phone to\n call the cops.\n\n\n \"Remarkable,\" Partridge finally said when I got so hoarse I had to take\n a break. \"One is almost—\nalmost\n—reminded of Job. William, you are\n being punished for some great sin. Of that, I'm sure.\"\n\n\n \"Punished for a sin? But, Brother, I've always had it like this, as\n long as I can remember. What kind of a sin could I have committed when\n I was fresh out of my crib?\"\n\n\n \"William, all I can tell you is that time means nothing in Heaven. Do\n you deny the transmigration of souls?\"",
"\"Well,\" I said, \"I've had no personal experience—\"\n\n\n \"Of course you have, William! Say you don't remember. Say you don't\n want to remember. But don't say you have no personal experience!\"\n\n\n \"And you think I'm being punished for something I did in a previous\n life?\"\n\n\n He looked at me in disbelief. \"What else could it be?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" I confessed. \"I certainly haven't done anything that\n bad in\nthis\nlife.\"\n\n\n \"William, if you atone for this sin, perhaps the horde of locusts will\n lift from you.\"\n\n\n It wasn't much of a chance, but I was unused to having any at all. I\n shook off the dizziness of it. \"By the Lord Harry, Brother, I'm going\n to give it a try!\" I cried.",
"\"I've got something better than a conscience,\" I told him.\nBrother Partridge regarded me solemnly. \"There must be something\n special about you, for your apprehension to come through miraculous\n intervention. But I can't imagine what.\"\n\n\n \"I\nalways\nget apprehended somehow, Brother,\" I said. \"I'm pretty\n special.\"\n\n\n \"Your name?\"\n\n\n \"William Hagle.\" No sense lying. I had been booked and printed before.\n\n\n Partridge prodded me with his bony fingers as if making sure I was\n substantial. \"Come. Let's sit down, if you can remove your fist from\n the money box.\"",
"I suppose I was to blame anyway. If I hadn't been alive, if I hadn't\n been there to get beaten up, it wouldn't have happened. I could see\n the point in making me suffer for it. There was a lot to be said for\n looking at it like that. But there was nothing to be said for telling\n Brother Partridge about the accident, or murder, or whatever had\n happened that day.\nSearching myself after I left Brother Partridge, I finally found a\n strip of gray adhesive tape on my side, out of the fuzzy area. Making\n the twenty the size of a thick postage stamp, I peeled back the tape\n and put the folded bill on the white skin and smoothed the tape back.\n\n\n There was only one place for me to go now. I headed for the public\n library. It was only about twenty blocks, but not having had anything\n to eat since the day before, it enervated me.",
"Why couldn't what he said have been \"The best things in life are free,\n buddy\" or \"Every dog has his day, fellow\" or \"If at first you don't\n succeed, man\"? No, he had to use that one line. You wouldn't blame me.\n Not if you believe me.\n\n\n The first thing I can remember, the start of all this, was when I was\n four or five somebody was soiling my bed for me. I absolutely was not\n doing it. I took long naps morning and evening so I could lie awake all\n night to see that it wouldn't happen. It couldn't happen. But in the\n morning the bed would sit there dispassionately soiled and convict me\n on circumstantial evidence. My punishment was as sure as the tide.",
"\"I believe you,\" Partridge said, surprised at himself.\n\n\n He ambled over to the money box on the wall. He tapped the bottom\n lightly and a box with no top slid out of the slightly larger box. He\n reached in, fished out the bill and presented it to me.\n\n\n \"Perhaps this will help in your atonement,\" he said.\n\n\n I crumpled it into my pocket fast. Not meaning to sound ungrateful, I'm\n pretty sure he hadn't noticed it was a twenty.\n\n\n And then the bill seemed to lie there, heavy, a lead weight. It would\n have been different if I had managed to get it out of the box myself.\n You know how it is.",
"\"I\nstill\nthink you're yellow,\" my voice said.\n\n\n It was my voice, but it didn't come from me. There were no words, no\n feeling of words in my throat. It just came out of the air the way it\n always did.\n\n\n I ran.\nHarold R. Thompkins, 49, vice-president of Baysinger's, was found\n dead behind the store last night. His skull had been crushed by a\n vicious beating with a heavy implement, Coroner McClain announced in\n preliminary verdict. Tompkins, who resided at 1467 Claremont, Edgeway,\n had been active in seeking labor-management peace in the recent\n difficulties....",
"The things abruptly started their business, trying to act casually as\n if they hadn't been waiting for me to look at them at all. They had a\n little human being of some sort.\n\n\n It was the size of a small boy, like the small boy who looked like me\n that they used to destroy when I was locked up with them in the dark.\n Except this was a man, scaled down to child's size. He had sort of an\n ugly, worried, tired, stupid look and he wore a shiny suit with a piece\n of a welcome mat or something for a necktie. Yeah, it was me. I really\n knew it all the time.\n\n\n They began doing things to the midget me. I didn't even lift an\n eyebrow. They couldn't do anything worse to the small man than they\n had done to the young boy. It was sort of nostalgic watching them, but\n I really got bored with all that violence and killing and killing the\n same kill over and over. Like watching the Saturday night string of\n westerns in a bar.",
"\"Cold turkey,\" he corrected. \"Are you scoffing at a miracle?\"\n\n\n \"People are always watching me, Brother,\" I said. \"So now they do it\n even when they aren't around. I should have known it would come to\n that.\"\n\n\n The pipe was suddenly a weight I wanted off me. I would try robbing\n a collection box, knowing positively that I would get caught, but I\n wasn't dumb enough to murder. Somebody, somewhere, would be a witness\n to it. I had never got away with anything in my life. I was too smart\n to even try anything but the little things.\n\n\n \"I may be able to help you,\" Brother Partridge said, \"if you have faith\n and a conscience.\"",
"Fats hit me high. Long-legs hit me low. I blew cracker crumbs into\n their faces. After that, I just let them go. I know how to take a\n beating. That's one thing I knew.\n\n\n Then lying there, bleeding to myself, I heard them talking. I heard\n noises like\nmake an example of him\nand\ndo something permanent\nand I\n squirmed away across the rubbish like a polite mouse.\n\n\n I made it around a corner of brick and stood up, hurting my knee on a\n piece of brown-splotched pipe. There were noises on the other angle of\n the corner and so I tested if the pipe was loose and it was. I closed\n my eyes and brought the pipe up and then down.\n\n\n It felt as if I connected, but I was so numb, I wasn't sure until I\n unscrewed my eyes.",
"I didn't say it, but I was used to my voice independently saying\n things. Her neck got to flaming, but she walked stiffly ahead. She\n didn't say anything. She must be awful mad, I decided. But then I got\n the idea she was flushed with pleasure. I'm pretty ugly and I looked\n like a bum, but I was young. You had to grant me that.\n\n\n She waved a hand at the rows of bound\nNews\nand left me alone with\n them. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to hunt up a table to lay the\n books on or not, so I took the volume for last year and laid it on the\n floor. That was the cleanest floor I ever saw.\n\n\n It didn't take me long to find the story. The victim was a big man,\n because the story was on the second page of the Nov. 4 edition.",
"My mother and father must have been glad when I was sent away to reform\n school after my thirteenth birthday party, the one no one came to.\n\n\n The reform school was nicer. There were others there who'd had it about\n like me. We got along. I didn't watch their shifty eyes too much, or\n ask them what they shifted to see. They didn't talk about my screams\n at night.\n\n\n It was home.\n\n\n My trouble there was that I was always being framed for stealing. I\n didn't take any of those things they located in my bunk. Stealing\n wasn't in my line. If you believe any of this at all, you'll see why it\n couldn't be me who did the stealing.",
"I stayed in the dark longer for lying about the light.\n\n\n Alone in the dark, I wouldn't have had it so bad if it wasn't for the\n things that came to me.\n\n\n They were real to me. They never touched me, but they had a little boy.\n He looked the way I did in the mirror. They did unpleasant things to\n him.\n\n\n Because they were real, I talked about them as if they were real, and\n I almost earned a bunk in the home for retarded children until I got\n smart enough to keep the beasts to myself.\n\n\n My mother hated me. I loved her, of course. I remember her smell mixed\n up with flowers and cookies and winter fires. I remember she hugged me\n on my ninth birthday. The trouble came from the notes written in my\n awkward hand that she found, calling her names I didn't understand.\n Sometimes there were drawings. I didn't write those notes or make those\n drawings.",
"The sunlight through the window was yellow and hot. After a time, I\n began to dose.\n\n\n The shrieks woke me up.\n\n\n For the first time, I could hear the shrieks of the monster's victim\n and listen to their obscene droolings. For the very first time in my\n life. Always before it had been all pantomime, like Charlie Chaplin.\n Now I heard the sounds of it all.\n\n\n They say it's a bad sign when you start hearing voices.\n\n\n I nearly panicked, but I held myself in the seat and forced myself\n to be rational about it. My own voice was always saying things\neverybody\ncould hear but which I didn't say. It wasn't any worse to\n be the\nonly\none who could hear other things I never said. I was as\n sane as I ever was. There was no doubt about that.\n\n\n But a new thought suddenly impressed itself on me.",
"Money you haven't earned doesn't seem real to you.\nThere was something I forgot to mention so far. During the year between\n when I got out of the reformatory and the one when I tried to steal\n Brother Partridge's money, I killed a man.\n\n\n It was all an accident, but killing somebody is reason enough to get\n punished. It didn't have to be a sin in some previous life, you see.\n\n\n I had gotten my first job in too long, stacking boxes at the freight\n door of Baysinger's. The drivers unloaded the stuff, but they just\n dumped it off the truck. An empty rear end was all they wanted. The\n freight boss told me to stack the boxes inside, neat and not too close\n together.\n\n\n I stacked boxes the first day. I stacked more the second. The third day\n I went outside with my baloney and crackers. It was warm enough even\n for November.",
"While keeping a lookout for Partridge and somebody stepping out of the\n kitchen for a pull on a bottle, I spotted the clock for the first\n time, a Western Union clock high up at the back of the hall. Just as\n I seen it for the first time, the electricity wound the spring motor\n inside like a chicken having its neck wrung.\n\n\n The next time I glanced at the clock, it said ten minutes had gone by.\n My hand still wasn't free and I hadn't budged the box.\n\n\n \"This,\" Brother Partridge said, \"is one of the most profound\n experiences of my life.\"\n\n\n My head hinged until it lined my eyes up with Brother Partridge. The\n pipe hung heavy in my pocket, but he was too far from me.\n\n\n \"A vision of you at the box projected itself on the crest of my soup,\"\n the preacher explained in wonderment.\n\n\n I nodded. \"Swimming right in there with the dead duck.\"",
"I had to laugh at all those bums clattering the chairs in front of me,\n scampering after water soup and stale bread. As soon as I got cleaned\n up, I was going to have dinner in a good restaurant, and I was going to\n order such expensive food and leave such a large tip for the waiter and\n send one to the chef that they were going to think I was rich, and some\n executive with some brokerage firm would see me and say to himself,\n \"Hmm, executive material. Just the type we need. I beg your pardon,\n sir—\" just like the razor-blade comic-strip ads in the old magazines\n that Frankie the Pig sells three for a quarter.\n\n\n I was marching. Man, was I ever marching, but the secret of it was I\n was only marking time the way we did in fire drills at the school.",
"I opened up my fingers and let the coins ring inside the box and I drew\n out my hand. The bill stuck to the sweat on my fingers and slid out\n along with the digits. A one, I decided. I had got into trouble for a\n grubby single. It wasn't any century. I had been kidding myself.\n\n\n I unfolded the note. Sure enough, it wasn't a hundred-dollar bill, but\n it was a twenty, and that was almost the same thing to me. I creased it\n and put it back into the slot.\n\n\n As long as it stalled off the cops, I'd talk to Partridge.\n\n\n We took a couple of camp chairs and I told him the story of my life, or\n most of it. It was hard work on an empty stomach; I wished I'd had some\n of that turkey soup. Then again I was glad I hadn't. Something always\n happened to me when I thought back over my life. The same thing.",
"The razor blade sliced through the pink bath towel evenly. I cut out a\n nice modern-style tie, narrow, with some horizontal stripes down at the\n bottom. I made a tight, thin knot. It looked pretty good.\n\n\n I was ready to leave, so I started for the door. I went back. I had\n almost forgotten my luggage. The box still had three unwrapped blades\n in it. I pocketed it. I hefted the used blade, dulled by all the work\n it had done. You can run being economical into stinginess. I tossed it\n into the wastebasket.\n\n\n I had five hamburgers and five cups of coffee. I couldn't finish all of\n the French fries.\n\n\n \"Mac,\" I said to the fat counterman, who looked like all fat\n countermen, \"give me a Milwaukee beer.\"",
"She sniffed and told me to follow her. I didn't rate a cart to my\n table, I guess, or else the bound papers weren't supposed to come out\n of the stacks.\n\n\n The cases of books, row after row, smelled good. Like old leather and\n good pipe tobacco. I had been here before. In this world, it's the man\n with education who makes the money. I had been reading the Funk &\n Wagnalls Encyclopedia. So far I knew a lot about Mark Antony, Atomic\n Energy, Boron, Brussels, Catapults, Demons, and Divans.\n\n\n I guess I had stopped to look around at some of the titles, because the\n busy librarian said sharply, \"Follow me.\"\n\n\n I heard my voice say, \"A pleasure. What about after work?\""
]
] |
train
|
51201
|
[
"How were the Volpla able to eat solid food so quickly?",
"Why is it ironic that the narrator's wife is asking him to be quiet during the broadcast?",
"Why did the narrator decide not to mention the Volplas during Guy's broadcast?",
"Why doesn't the narrator want to tell anyone about his experiments?",
"Why is it ironic that the narrator's wife refers to him as Zeus?",
"What is the \"new kind of fun\" that the narrator wants to have now that his first experiment worked?",
"Why was the Volpla vocabulary limited when the narrator took a few into the valley?",
"What motivated the narrator to design the Volpla origin story as he did?",
"Why did the narrator's wife react the way she did when she got home to see workmen at the house?",
"What kind of relationship does the narrator have with his children?"
] |
[
[
"Their anatomy is not human, and their more developed digestive system handles solid food much earlier",
"They mature very quickly, as a result of their mutant status, so it would be easy to eat anything",
"Their growth had been artificially sped up, so they passed the stages where they would have needed different food",
"Solid food was the only thing they were offered, so they learned to eat it"
],
[
"She has been giving him alcohol, which could have been adding to the talkativeness",
"She is talking more than he is, so the effort is misplaced",
"He is usually fairly quiet, and this is unusual behavior for him",
"He is being supportive of his friend for once and should be encouraged"
],
[
"Nobody could hear him over the broadcast's high volume",
"He wanted to make sure Guy had his moment and didn't want to steal the spotlight",
"He wanted to brag to Guy later, when he showed him the Volplas in the lab afterwards for a more dramatic effect",
"He wanted to keep the secret long term and it wouldn't have been worth it to give it away"
],
[
"He wants to wait until he can publish a paper about his results",
"He wants to sit back and watch what happens when they're released on the world",
"It is illegal to breed mutant animals, and doesn't want to get caught",
"He doesn't want people to know about his work until he has perfected the new species"
],
[
"The area they live in is compared to the Roman countryside, not anything Greek",
"He seems to think he's very important, and about as powerful",
"He identifies more closely with different figures in Greek mythology",
"She thinks he has too many children, similar to Zeus"
],
[
"He wants to pursue his maid, since she doesn't seem interested in him",
"He is going to sit back and watch a chaotic plan come into place",
"He is going to spend more time outdoors with his kids, exploring the area",
"He is going to continue developing various types of mutant animals"
],
[
"They had not been alive long enough to learn enough English to communicate well",
"They were encountering concepts that were unfamiliar from the lab environment",
"They are not smart enough to have a fully developed language, no matter how hard they try",
"They were confusing their own language with English, having trouble keeping the languages separate"
],
[
"He enjoyed creating backstories for the creatures as part of the stories he told them",
"He did not want the creatues to feel like they did not have a rich history",
"The Volpla asked him to tell them their history, and when they guessed they were from elsewhere, he ran with it",
"Making them think they were aliens was part of preventing any traceable ties between them and himself"
],
[
"The narrator had told her that he was going to expand his workspace to investigate different mutations",
"She was upset that it seemed like the narrator was giving up on his work by tearing down his laboratory space",
"She was hoping to convert the lab space into a room for the family when he was done, and didn't want it to be torn down",
"He had shown no sign of actually reporting on his work, and she didn't know what this change meant"
],
[
"The children don't talk to him at all, because they are constantly disappointed by his not sharing his work with them",
"The children see him as a kind but absent father figure who is dedicated to his science",
"The children think he is nice but odd, perhaps a bit too talkative about his own pride around his work",
"The children are upset with him because they think he is too strict, making them swim with bathing suits, and things like this"
]
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[
"I saw the planes close momentarily. Then they opened again and the bird\n plummeted to a hillside. The volpla landed gently atop the hill and\n stood looking back at us.\n\n\n The volpla beside me danced up and down shrieking in a language all her\n own. The girl who had raised the birds from the tree volplaned back to\n us, yammering like a bluejay.\nIt was a hero's welcome. He had to walk back, of course—he had no\n way to carry such a load in flight. The girls glided out to meet\n him. Their lavish affection held him up for a time, but eventually he\n strutted in like every human hunter.\n\n\n They were raptly curious about the bird. They poked at it, marveled at\n its feathers and danced about it in an embryonic rite of the hunt. But\n presently the male turned to me.\n\n\n \"We\neat\nthis?\"",
"Of course, the volplas didn't want to return to the lab. There was a\n tiny stream through there and at one point it formed a sizable pool.\n They got into this and splashed their long arms about and they scrubbed\n each other. Then they got out and lay on their backs with the planes\n stretched to dry.\n\n\n I watched them affectionately and wondered about the advisability of\n leaving them out here. Well, it had to be done sometime. Nothing I\n could tell them about surviving would help them as much as a little\n actual surviving. I called the male over to me.\n\n\n He came and squatted, conference fashion, the elbows resting on the\n ground, the wrists crossed at his chest. He spoke first.\n\n\n \"Before the red men came, did we live here?\"\n\n\n \"You lived in places like this all along these mountains. Now there\n are very few of you left. Since you have been staying at my place, you\n naturally have forgotten the ways of living outdoors.\"",
"The fact was that I had something more in the lab than I had bargained\n for. I had aimed only at a gliding mammal a little more efficient than\n the Dusky Glider of Australia, a marsupial. Even in the basically\n mutating colony, there had been a decidedly simian appearance in recent\n years, a long shift from the garbage-dump rats I had started with. But\n my first volplas were shockingly humanoid.\n\n\n They were also much faster than had been their predecessors in\n organizing their nervous activity after the slumbrous explosion of\n growth in the metabolic accelerator. When I returned to the lab, they\n were already moving about on the mattress and the male was trying to\n stand.",
"By the end of the week, these super-families were scattered over\n about four square miles of the ranch. They had found a new delicacy,\n sparrows, and hunted them easily as they roosted at night. I had taught\n the volplas to use the fire drill and they were already utilizing the\n local grasses, vines and brush to build marvelously contrived tree\n houses in which the young, and sometimes the adults, slept through\n midday and midnight.\n\n\n The afternoon my family returned home, I had a crew of workmen out\n tearing down the animal rooms and lab building. The caretakers\n had anesthetized all the experimental mutants, and the metabolic\n accelerator and other lab equipment was being dismantled. I wanted\n nothing around that might connect the sudden appearance of the volplas\n with my property. It was already apparent that it would take the\n volplas only a few more weeks to learn their means of survival and\n develop an embryonic culture of their own. Then they could leave my\n ranch and the fun would be on.",
"Well, when that screen went dead, there was pandemonium around our\n terrace. Big old Guy was so happy, he was wiping tears from his eyes.\n The women were kissing him and hugging him. Everybody was yelling at\n once.\nI used the metabolic accelerator to cut the volplas' gestation down to\n one week. Then I used it to bring the infants to maturity in one month.\n I had luck right off. Quite by accident, the majority of the early\n infants were females, which sped things up considerably.\n\n\n By the next spring, I had a colony of over a hundred volplas and I shut\n down the accelerator. From now on, they could have babies in their own\n way.",
"Except, of course, that the woods were full of volplas. At night, I\n could hear them faintly when I sat out on the terrace. As they passed\n through the dark overhead, they chattered and laughed and sometimes\n moaned in winged love. One night a flight of them soared slowly across\n the face of the full Moon, but I was the only one who noticed.",
"The spars added nine inches on each side to his span. As they swept out\n and forward, the lateral skin that had, till now, hung in resting folds\n was tightened in a golden plane that stretched from the tip of the spar\n to his waist and continued four inches wide down his legs to where it\n anchored at the little toe.\n\n\n This was by far the most impressive plane that had appeared till now.\n It was a true gliding plane, perhaps even a soaring one. I felt a\n thrill run along my back.\n\n\n By four o'clock that afternoon, I was feeding them solid food and, with\n the spars closed, they were holding little cups and drinking water from\n them in a most humanlike way. They were active, curious, playful and\n decidedly amorous.",
"He was a little the larger and stood twenty-eight inches high. Except\n for the face, chest and belly, they were covered with a soft, almost\n golden down. Where it was bare of this golden fur, the skin was pink.\n On their heads and across the shoulders of the male stood a shock of\n fur as soft as chinchilla. The faces were appealingly humanoid, except\n that the eyes were large and nocturnal. The cranium was in the same\n proportion to the body as it is in the human.\nWhen the male spread his arms, the span was forty-eight inches. I held\n his arms out and tried to tease the spars open. They were not new. The\n spars had been common to the basic colony for years and were the result\n of serial mutations effecting those greatly elongated fifth fingers\n that had first appeared in Nijinsky. No longer jointed like a finger,\n the spar turned backward sharply and ran alongside the wrist almost to\n the elbow. Powerful wrist muscles could snap it outward and forward.\n Suddenly, as I teased the male volpla, this happened.",
"Volpla\nBy WYMAN GUIN\n\n\n Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1956.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe only kind of gag worth pulling, I always\n \nmaintained, was a cosmic one—till I learned the\n \nCosmos has a really nasty sense of humor!\nThere were three of them. Dozens of limp little mutants that would have\n sent an academic zoologist into hysterics lay there in the metabolic\n accelerator. But there were three of\nthem\n. My heart took a great\n bound.",
"Volplas at last. Three of them. Yet I had always been so sure I could\n create them that I had been calling them volplas for ten years. No,\n twelve. I glanced across the animal room to where old Nijinsky thrust\n his graying head from a cage. I had called them volplas since the day\n old Nijinsky's elongated arms and his cousin's lateral skin folds had\n given me the idea of a flying mutant.\nWhen Nijinsky saw me looking at him, he started a little tarantella\n about his cage. I smiled with nostalgia when the fifth fingers of his\n hands, four times as long as the others, uncurled as he spun about the\n cage.\nI turned to the fitting of my daughter's other skate.\n\n\n \"Daddy?\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Mother says you are eccentric. Is that true?\"\n\n\n \"I'll speak to her about it.\"",
"She climbed skillfully into the tree beside us and launched herself\n across the stream. She swooped up the opposite hillside and landed\n neatly in the tree where the doves rested.\n\n\n The birds came out of the tree, climbing hard with their graceful\n strokes.\n\n\n I looked back, as did the girl remaining beside me. The soaring volpla\n half closed his planes and started dropping. He became a golden flash\n across the sky.\n\n\n The doves abruptly gave up their hard climbing and fell away with\n swiftly beating wings. I saw one of the male volpla's planes open a\n little. He veered giddily in the new direction and again dropped like a\n molten arrow.\n\n\n The doves separated and began to zigzag down the valley. The volpla did\n something I would not have anticipated—he opened his planes and shot\n lower than the bird he was after, then swept up and intercepted the\n bird's crossward flight.",
"I glanced about and presently pointed over a tree. \"From Venus.\" Then\n I realized I had blundered by passing him an English name. \"In your\n language, Pohtah.\"\n\n\n He looked at the planet a long time and murmured, \"Venus. Pohtah.\"\nThat next week, I transported all of the volplas out to the oak woods.\n There were a hundred and seven men, women and children. With no design\n on my part, they tended to segregate into groups consisting of four to\n eight couples together with the current children of the women. Within\n these groups, the adults were promiscuous, but apparently not outside\n the group. The group thus had the appearance of a super-family and the\n males indulged and cared for all the children without reference to\n actual parenthood.",
"He flashed high above the stream and hung behind the crest of the hill\n where the doves rested. I heard their mourning from the oak tree. It\n occurred to me they would not leave that safety while the hawklike\n silhouette of the volpla marred the sky so near.\n\n\n I took the girl's hand from my sleeve and spoke to her, pointing as I\n did so. \"He is going to catch a bird. The bird is in that tree. You\n can make the bird fly so that he can catch it. Look here.\" I got up and\n found a stick. \"Can you do this?\"\nI threw the stick up into a tree near us. Then I found her a stick. She\n threw it better than I had expected.\n\n\n \"Good, pretty one. Now run across the stream and up to that tree and\n throw a stick into it.\"",
"\"Yeah, Dad. Can it, will you? You're always gagging around.\"\nOn the screen, Guy's big dead-earnest face was explaining more about\n the project and suddenly I realized that this was an instrument-bearing\n rocket they hoped to land on the Moon. It would broadcast from there.\n Well, now—say, that\nwould\nbe something! I began to feel a little\n ashamed of the way I had been acting and I reached out and slapped old\n Guy on the shoulder. For just a moment, I thought of telling him about\n my volplas. But only for a moment.\n\n\n A ball of flame appeared at the base of the rocket. Miraculously, the\n massive tower lifted, seemed for a moment merely to stand there on a\n flaming pillar, then was gone.",
"Again in the laboratory, I entered the metabolic accelerator and\n withdrew the intravenous needles from my first volplas. I carried their\n limp little forms out to a mattress in the lab, two girls and a boy.\n The accelerator had forced them almost to adulthood in less than a\n month. It would be several hours before they would begin to move, to\n learn to feed and play, perhaps to learn to fly.\n\n\n Meanwhile, it was clear that here was no war of dominant mutations.\n Modulating alleles had smoothed the freakish into a beautiful pattern.\n These were no monsters blasted by the dosage of radiation into crippled\n structures. They were lovely, perfect little creatures.\n\n\n My wife tried the door, too, but more subtly, as if casually touching\n the knob while calling.\n\n\n \"Lunch, dear.\"\n\n\n \"Be right there.\"",
"Then someone authoritative would find a colony and observe them. He\n would conclude, \"I am convinced that they have a language and speak it\n intelligently.\"\n\n\n The government would issue denials. Reporters would \"expose the truth\"\n and ask, \"Where have these aliens come from?\" The government would\n reluctantly admit the facts. Linguists would observe at close quarters\n and learn the simple volpla language. Then would come the legends.\n\n\n Volpla wisdom would become a cult—and of all forms of comedy, cults, I\n think, are the funniest.\n\"Darling, are you listening to me?\" my wife asked with impatient\n patience.\n\n\n \"What? Sure. Certainly.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't hear a word. You just sit there and grin into space.\" She\n got up and poured me another martini. \"Here, maybe this will sober you\n up.\"\n\n\n I pointed. \"That's probably Guy and Em.\"",
"Until I had them out in the open country, it had been impossible to\n appreciate fully what lovely little creatures they were. They blended\n perfectly with the California landscape. Occasionally, when they raised\n their arms, the spars would open and spread those glorious planes.\n\n\n Almost two hours went by before the male made it into the air. His\n playful curiosity about the world had been abandoned momentarily and he\n was chasing one of the girls. As usual, she was anxious to be caught\n and stopped abruptly at the bottom of a little knoll.\n\n\n He probably meant to dive for her. But when he spread his arms, the\n spars snapped out and those golden planes sheared into the air. He\n sailed over her in a stunning sweep. Then he rose up and up until he\n hung in the breeze for a long moment, thirty feet above the ground.",
"\"Chances are they won't stay long. Keep your eye on the tree in case\n they leave while you are climbing.\"\nHe ran to a nearby oak and clambered aloft. Presently he launched\n himself, streaked down-valley a way and caught a warm updraft on a\n hillside. In no time, he was up about two hundred feet. He began\n criss-crossing the ridge, working his way back to us.\n\n\n The two girls were watching him intently. They came over to me\n wonderingly, stopping now and then to watch him. When they were\n standing beside me, they said nothing. They shaded their eyes with\n tiny hands and watched him as he passed directly above us at about two\n hundred and fifty feet. One of the girls, with her eyes fast on his\n soaring planes, reached out and grasped my sleeve tightly.",
"She pretended a hopeless sag of her pretty shoulders. \"Wouldn't you\n just settle for a worldly martini?\"\n\n\n \"I will, yes. But first a divine kiss.\"\n\n\n I sipped at my martini and lounged in a terrace chair watching the\n golden evening slant across the beautiful hills of our ranch. I\n dreamed. I would invent a euphonious set of words to match the Basic\n English vocabulary and teach it to them as their language. They would\n have their own crafts and live in small tree houses.\n\n\n I would teach them legends: that they had come from the stars, that\n they had subsequently watched the first red men and then the first\n white men enter these hills.\n\n\n When they were able to take care of themselves, I would turn them\n loose. There would be volpla colonies all up and down the Coast before\n anyone suspected. One day, somebody would see a volpla. The newspapers\n would laugh.",
"He turned a plaintive face back to me, dipped worriedly and skimmed\n straight for a thorn bush. He banked instinctively, whirled toward us\n in a golden flash and crashed with a bounce to the grass.\n\n\n The two girls reached him before I did and stroked and fussed over him\n so that I could not get near. Suddenly he laughed with a shrill little\n whoop. After that, it was a carnival.\nThey learned quickly and brilliantly. They were not fliers; they were\n gliders and soarers. Before long, they took agilely to the trees and\n launched themselves in beautiful glides for hundreds of feet, banking,\n turning and spiraling to a gentle halt.\n\n\n I laughed out loud with anticipation. Wait till the first pair of these\n was brought before a sheriff! Wait till reporters from the\nChronicle\nmotored out into the hills to witness this!"
],
[
"The scene had changed to a desert launching site. There was old Guy\n himself explaining that when he pressed the button before him, the\n hatch on the third stage of the great rocket in the background would\n close and, five minutes later, the ship would fire itself.\n\n\n Guy, on the screen, pushed the button, and I heard Guy, beside me, give\n a sort of little sigh. We watched the hatch slowly close.\n\n\n \"You look real good,\" I said. \"A regular Space Ranger. What are you\n shooting at?\"\n\n\n \"Darling, will you please—be—\nquiet\n?\"",
"I laughed and picked up my plate and sat down in a chair. My wife\n brought me a bowl of salad and I munched the hamburger and watched the\n boy unsaddle the horse and slap it away to the pasture.\n\n\n I thought, \"By God, wouldn't he have a fit if he knew what I have back\n there in that lab! Wouldn't they all!\"\n\n\n The boy carried the saddle up onto the terrace and dropped it. \"Mom,\n I'd like a swim before I eat.\" He started undressing.\n\n\n \"You\nlook\nas though a little water might help,\" she agreed, sitting\n down next to me with her plate.\n\n\n The girl was yanking off her skates. \"And I want one.\"\n\n\n \"All right. But go in the house and put on your swim suit.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nMother\n. Why?\"",
"I asked our son to wheel a TV set out onto the terrace while I made\n martinis for our friends. Then we sat down and drank the cocktails and\n the kids had fruit juice and we watched the broadcast Guy had tuned in.\n\n\n Some joker from Cal Tech was explaining diagrams of a multi-stage\n rocket.\n\n\n After a bit, I got up and said, \"I have something out in the lab I want\n to check on.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, wait a minute,\" Guy objected. \"They're about to show the shots of\n the launching.\"\n\n\n My wife gave me a look; you know the kind. I sat down. Then I got up\n and poured myself another martini and freshened Em's up, too. I sat\n down again.",
"She peeked too, as she had for fifteen years, but I blocked her view\n when I slipped out.\n\n\n \"Come on, you old hermit. I have a buffet on the terrace.\"\n\n\n \"Our daughter says I'm eccentric. Wonder how the devil she found out.\"\n\n\n \"From me, of course.\"\n\n\n \"But you love me just the same.\"\n\n\n \"I adore you.\" She stretched on tiptoe and put her arms over my\n shoulders and kissed me.\n\n\n My wife did indeed have a delicious-looking buffet ready on the\n terrace. The maid was just setting down a warmer filled with hot\n hamburgers. I gave the maid a pinch and said, \"Hello, baby.\"\n\n\n My wife looked at me with a puzzled smile. \"What on Earth's got into\n you?\"\n\n\n The maid beat it into the house.",
"A 'copter sidled over the ridge, then came just above the oak woods\n toward us. Guy set it gently on the landing square and we walked down\n to meet them.\n\n\n I helped Em out and hugged her. Guy jumped out, asking, \"Do you have\n your TV set on?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" I answered. \"Should I?\"\n\n\n \"It's almost time for the broadcast. I was afraid we would miss it.\"\n\n\n \"What broadcast?\"\n\n\n \"From the rocket.\"\n\n\n \"Rocket?\"\n\n\n \"For heaven's sake, darling,\" my wife complained, \"I told you about\n Guy's rocket being a success. The papers are full of it. So are the\n broadcasts.\"\n\n\n As we stepped up on the terrace, she turned to Guy and Em. \"He's out of\n contact today. Thinks he's Zeus.\"",
"\"Well, when my old man was pumping his first fortune out of some oil\n wells in Oklahoma, we lived down there. Outside this little town, I\n found a litter of flat stones that had young black-snakes under each\n slab. I filled a pail with them and took them into town and dumped them\n on the walk in front of the movie just as Theda Bara's matinee let out.\n The best part was that no one had seen me do it. They just couldn't\n understand how so many snakes got there. I learned how great it can be\n to stand around quietly and watch people encounter the surprise that\n you have prepared for them.\"\n\n\n She let go of my ear. \"Is that the kind of fun you're going to have?\"\n\n\n \"Yep.\"\n\n\n She shook her head. \"Did I say you are\neccentric\n?\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"Forgive me if I eat and run, dear. Something in the lab\n can't wait.\"",
"He said, \"'Ello, 'ello.\"\nAs I walked into the kitchen, giddy with this enormous joke, my wife\n said, \"Guy and Em are flying up for dinner. That rocket of Guy's they\n launched in the desert yesterday was a success. It pulled Guy up to\n Cloud Nine and he wants to celebrate.\"\n\n\n I danced a little jig the way old Nijinsky might do it. \"Oh, great!\n Oh, wonderful! Good old Guy! Everybody's a success. It's great. It's\n wonderful. Success on success!\"\n\n\n I danced into the kitchen table and tipped over a basket of green corn.\n The maid promptly left the kitchen for some other place.\n\n\n My wife just stared at me. \"Have you been drinking the lab alcohol?\"\n\n\n \"I've been drinking the nectar of the gods. My Hera, you're properly\n married to Zeus. I've my own little Greeks descended from Icarus.\"",
"The screen returned to a studio, where an announcer explained that the\n film just shown had been taken day before yesterday. Since then, the\n rocket's third stage was known to have landed successfully at the south\n shore of Mare Serenitatis. He indicated the location on a large lunar\n map behind him.\n\n\n \"From this position, the telemeter known as Rocket Charlie will be\n broadcasting scientific data for several months. But now, ladies and\n gentlemen, we will clear the air for Rocket Charlie's only general\n broadcast. Stand by for Rocket Charlie.\"\n\n\n A chronometer appeared on the screen and, for several seconds, there\n was silence.\n\n\n I heard my boy whisper, \"Uncle Guy, this is the biggest!\"\n\n\n My wife said, \"Em, I think I'll just faint.\"\n\n\n Suddenly there was a lunar landscape on the screen, looking just as\n it's always been pictured. A mechanical voice cut in.",
"I heard my daughter's running feet in the animal rooms and her\n rollerskates banging at her side. I closed the accelerator and walked\n across to the laboratory door. She twisted the knob violently, trying\n to hit a combination that would work.\n\n\n I unlocked the door, held it against her pushing and slipped out so\n that, for all her peering, she could see nothing. I looked down on her\n tolerantly.\n\n\n \"Can't adjust your skates?\" I asked again.\n\n\n \"Daddy, I've tried and tried and I just can't turn this old key tight\n enough.\"\n\n\n I continued to look down on her.\n\n\n \"Well, Dad-dee, I can't!\"\n\n\n \"Tightly enough.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"You can't turn this old key tightly enough.\"",
"\"Yeah, Dad. Can it, will you? You're always gagging around.\"\nOn the screen, Guy's big dead-earnest face was explaining more about\n the project and suddenly I realized that this was an instrument-bearing\n rocket they hoped to land on the Moon. It would broadcast from there.\n Well, now—say, that\nwould\nbe something! I began to feel a little\n ashamed of the way I had been acting and I reached out and slapped old\n Guy on the shoulder. For just a moment, I thought of telling him about\n my volplas. But only for a moment.\n\n\n A ball of flame appeared at the base of the rocket. Miraculously, the\n massive tower lifted, seemed for a moment merely to stand there on a\n flaming pillar, then was gone.",
"I walked over and put the arm that held the beer bottle around her\n shoulder and chucked her chin up with my other hand. The golden sun\n danced in her blue eyes. I watched that light in her beautiful eyes and\n said, \"But you're the only one I'm dangerous about.\"\n\n\n I kissed her until I heard rollerskates coming across the terrace from\n one direction and a horse galloping toward the terrace from the other\n direction.\n\n\n \"You have lovely lips,\" I whispered.\n\n\n \"Thanks. Yours deserve the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, too.\"\n\n\n Our son reared the new palomino I had just bought him for his\n fourteenth birthday and yelled down, \"Unhand that maiden, Burrhead, or\n I'll give you lead poisoning.\"",
"My wife got out of the car and looked around at the workmen hurrying\n about the disemboweled buildings and she said, \"What on Earth is going\n on here?\"\n\n\n \"I've finished my work and we no longer need the buildings. I'm going\n to write a paper about my results.\"\n\n\n My wife looked at me appraisingly and shook her head. \"I thought you\n meant it. But you really ought to. It would be your first.\"\n\n\n My son asked, \"What happened to the animals?\"\n\n\n \"Turned them over to the university for further study,\" I lied.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said to her, \"you can't say our pop isn't a man of decision.\"\n\n\n Twenty-four hours later, there wasn't a sign of animal experimentation\n on the ranch.",
"\"Because, dear, I said so.\"\n\n\n The boy had already raced across the terrace and jack-knifed into the\n pool. The cool sound of the dive sent the girl scurrying for her suit.\n\n\n I looked at my wife. \"What's the idea?\"\n\n\n \"She's going to be a young woman soon.\"\n\n\n \"Is that any reason for wearing clothes? Look at him. He's a young\nman\nsooner than already.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if you feel that way about it, they'll both have to start\n wearing clothes.\"\n\n\n I gulped the last of my hamburger and washed it down with the beer.\n \"This place is going to hell,\" I complained. \"The old man isn't allowed\n to pinch the maid and the kids can't go naked.\" I leaned toward her and\n smacked her cheek. \"But the food and the old woman are still the best.\"",
"\"Don't you\nknow\n?\"\n\n\n \"Do you understand the word?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n I lifted her out of the chair and stood her on her skates. \"Tell your\n mother that I retaliate. I say\nshe\nis beautiful.\"\n\n\n She skated awkwardly between the rows of cages from which mutants with\n brown fur and blue fur, too much and too little fur, enormously long\n and ridiculously short arms, stared at her with simian, canine or\n rodent faces. At the door to the outside, she turned perilously and\n waved.",
"He flashed high above the stream and hung behind the crest of the hill\n where the doves rested. I heard their mourning from the oak tree. It\n occurred to me they would not leave that safety while the hawklike\n silhouette of the volpla marred the sky so near.\n\n\n I took the girl's hand from my sleeve and spoke to her, pointing as I\n did so. \"He is going to catch a bird. The bird is in that tree. You\n can make the bird fly so that he can catch it. Look here.\" I got up and\n found a stick. \"Can you do this?\"\nI threw the stick up into a tree near us. Then I found her a stick. She\n threw it better than I had expected.\n\n\n \"Good, pretty one. Now run across the stream and up to that tree and\n throw a stick into it.\"",
"She pretended a hopeless sag of her pretty shoulders. \"Wouldn't you\n just settle for a worldly martini?\"\n\n\n \"I will, yes. But first a divine kiss.\"\n\n\n I sipped at my martini and lounged in a terrace chair watching the\n golden evening slant across the beautiful hills of our ranch. I\n dreamed. I would invent a euphonious set of words to match the Basic\n English vocabulary and teach it to them as their language. They would\n have their own crafts and live in small tree houses.\n\n\n I would teach them legends: that they had come from the stars, that\n they had subsequently watched the first red men and then the first\n white men enter these hills.\n\n\n When they were able to take care of themselves, I would turn them\n loose. There would be volpla colonies all up and down the Coast before\n anyone suspected. One day, somebody would see a volpla. The newspapers\n would laugh.",
"Again in the laboratory, I entered the metabolic accelerator and\n withdrew the intravenous needles from my first volplas. I carried their\n limp little forms out to a mattress in the lab, two girls and a boy.\n The accelerator had forced them almost to adulthood in less than a\n month. It would be several hours before they would begin to move, to\n learn to feed and play, perhaps to learn to fly.\n\n\n Meanwhile, it was clear that here was no war of dominant mutations.\n Modulating alleles had smoothed the freakish into a beautiful pattern.\n These were no monsters blasted by the dosage of radiation into crippled\n structures. They were lovely, perfect little creatures.\n\n\n My wife tried the door, too, but more subtly, as if casually touching\n the knob while calling.\n\n\n \"Lunch, dear.\"\n\n\n \"Be right there.\"",
"I flipped a hamburger and a slice of onion onto a plate and picked up\n the ketchup and said, \"I've reached the dangerous age.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, good heavens!\"\nI dowsed ketchup over the hamburger, threw the onion on and closed it.\n I opened a bottle of beer and guzzled from it, blew out my breath and\n looked across the rolling hills and oak woods of our ranch to where the\n Pacific shimmered. I thought, \"All this and three volplas, too.\"\n\n\n I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth and said aloud, \"Yes, sir,\n the dangerous age. And, lady, I'm going to have fun.\"\n\n\n My wife sighed patiently.",
"Their humanoid qualities were increasingly apparent. There was a lumbar\n curvature and buttocks. The shoulder girdle and pectoral muscles were\n heavy and out of proportion, of course, yet the females had only one\n pair of breasts. The chin and jaw were humanlike instead of simian and\n the dental equipment was appropriate to this structure. What this\n portended was brought home to me with a shock.\n\n\n I was kneeling on the mattress, cuffing and roughing the male as one\n might a puppy dog, when one of the females playfully climbed up my\n back. I reached around and brought her over my shoulder and sat her\n down. I stroked the soft fur on her head and said, \"Hello, pretty one.\n Hello.\"\n\n\n The male watched me, grinning.",
"Except, of course, that the woods were full of volplas. At night, I\n could hear them faintly when I sat out on the terrace. As they passed\n through the dark overhead, they chattered and laughed and sometimes\n moaned in winged love. One night a flight of them soared slowly across\n the face of the full Moon, but I was the only one who noticed."
],
[
"\"Yeah, Dad. Can it, will you? You're always gagging around.\"\nOn the screen, Guy's big dead-earnest face was explaining more about\n the project and suddenly I realized that this was an instrument-bearing\n rocket they hoped to land on the Moon. It would broadcast from there.\n Well, now—say, that\nwould\nbe something! I began to feel a little\n ashamed of the way I had been acting and I reached out and slapped old\n Guy on the shoulder. For just a moment, I thought of telling him about\n my volplas. But only for a moment.\n\n\n A ball of flame appeared at the base of the rocket. Miraculously, the\n massive tower lifted, seemed for a moment merely to stand there on a\n flaming pillar, then was gone.",
"The scene had changed to a desert launching site. There was old Guy\n himself explaining that when he pressed the button before him, the\n hatch on the third stage of the great rocket in the background would\n close and, five minutes later, the ship would fire itself.\n\n\n Guy, on the screen, pushed the button, and I heard Guy, beside me, give\n a sort of little sigh. We watched the hatch slowly close.\n\n\n \"You look real good,\" I said. \"A regular Space Ranger. What are you\n shooting at?\"\n\n\n \"Darling, will you please—be—\nquiet\n?\"",
"Except, of course, that the woods were full of volplas. At night, I\n could hear them faintly when I sat out on the terrace. As they passed\n through the dark overhead, they chattered and laughed and sometimes\n moaned in winged love. One night a flight of them soared slowly across\n the face of the full Moon, but I was the only one who noticed.",
"Of course, the volplas didn't want to return to the lab. There was a\n tiny stream through there and at one point it formed a sizable pool.\n They got into this and splashed their long arms about and they scrubbed\n each other. Then they got out and lay on their backs with the planes\n stretched to dry.\n\n\n I watched them affectionately and wondered about the advisability of\n leaving them out here. Well, it had to be done sometime. Nothing I\n could tell them about surviving would help them as much as a little\n actual surviving. I called the male over to me.\n\n\n He came and squatted, conference fashion, the elbows resting on the\n ground, the wrists crossed at his chest. He spoke first.\n\n\n \"Before the red men came, did we live here?\"\n\n\n \"You lived in places like this all along these mountains. Now there\n are very few of you left. Since you have been staying at my place, you\n naturally have forgotten the ways of living outdoors.\"",
"A 'copter sidled over the ridge, then came just above the oak woods\n toward us. Guy set it gently on the landing square and we walked down\n to meet them.\n\n\n I helped Em out and hugged her. Guy jumped out, asking, \"Do you have\n your TV set on?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" I answered. \"Should I?\"\n\n\n \"It's almost time for the broadcast. I was afraid we would miss it.\"\n\n\n \"What broadcast?\"\n\n\n \"From the rocket.\"\n\n\n \"Rocket?\"\n\n\n \"For heaven's sake, darling,\" my wife complained, \"I told you about\n Guy's rocket being a success. The papers are full of it. So are the\n broadcasts.\"\n\n\n As we stepped up on the terrace, she turned to Guy and Em. \"He's out of\n contact today. Thinks he's Zeus.\"",
"Well, when that screen went dead, there was pandemonium around our\n terrace. Big old Guy was so happy, he was wiping tears from his eyes.\n The women were kissing him and hugging him. Everybody was yelling at\n once.\nI used the metabolic accelerator to cut the volplas' gestation down to\n one week. Then I used it to bring the infants to maturity in one month.\n I had luck right off. Quite by accident, the majority of the early\n infants were females, which sped things up considerably.\n\n\n By the next spring, I had a colony of over a hundred volplas and I shut\n down the accelerator. From now on, they could have babies in their own\n way.",
"I asked our son to wheel a TV set out onto the terrace while I made\n martinis for our friends. Then we sat down and drank the cocktails and\n the kids had fruit juice and we watched the broadcast Guy had tuned in.\n\n\n Some joker from Cal Tech was explaining diagrams of a multi-stage\n rocket.\n\n\n After a bit, I got up and said, \"I have something out in the lab I want\n to check on.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, wait a minute,\" Guy objected. \"They're about to show the shots of\n the launching.\"\n\n\n My wife gave me a look; you know the kind. I sat down. Then I got up\n and poured myself another martini and freshened Em's up, too. I sat\n down again.",
"Volplas at last. Three of them. Yet I had always been so sure I could\n create them that I had been calling them volplas for ten years. No,\n twelve. I glanced across the animal room to where old Nijinsky thrust\n his graying head from a cage. I had called them volplas since the day\n old Nijinsky's elongated arms and his cousin's lateral skin folds had\n given me the idea of a flying mutant.\nWhen Nijinsky saw me looking at him, he started a little tarantella\n about his cage. I smiled with nostalgia when the fifth fingers of his\n hands, four times as long as the others, uncurled as he spun about the\n cage.\nI turned to the fitting of my daughter's other skate.\n\n\n \"Daddy?\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Mother says you are eccentric. Is that true?\"\n\n\n \"I'll speak to her about it.\"",
"The screen returned to a studio, where an announcer explained that the\n film just shown had been taken day before yesterday. Since then, the\n rocket's third stage was known to have landed successfully at the south\n shore of Mare Serenitatis. He indicated the location on a large lunar\n map behind him.\n\n\n \"From this position, the telemeter known as Rocket Charlie will be\n broadcasting scientific data for several months. But now, ladies and\n gentlemen, we will clear the air for Rocket Charlie's only general\n broadcast. Stand by for Rocket Charlie.\"\n\n\n A chronometer appeared on the screen and, for several seconds, there\n was silence.\n\n\n I heard my boy whisper, \"Uncle Guy, this is the biggest!\"\n\n\n My wife said, \"Em, I think I'll just faint.\"\n\n\n Suddenly there was a lunar landscape on the screen, looking just as\n it's always been pictured. A mechanical voice cut in.",
"Volpla\nBy WYMAN GUIN\n\n\n Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1956.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe only kind of gag worth pulling, I always\n \nmaintained, was a cosmic one—till I learned the\n \nCosmos has a really nasty sense of humor!\nThere were three of them. Dozens of limp little mutants that would have\n sent an academic zoologist into hysterics lay there in the metabolic\n accelerator. But there were three of\nthem\n. My heart took a great\n bound.",
"I saw the planes close momentarily. Then they opened again and the bird\n plummeted to a hillside. The volpla landed gently atop the hill and\n stood looking back at us.\n\n\n The volpla beside me danced up and down shrieking in a language all her\n own. The girl who had raised the birds from the tree volplaned back to\n us, yammering like a bluejay.\nIt was a hero's welcome. He had to walk back, of course—he had no\n way to carry such a load in flight. The girls glided out to meet\n him. Their lavish affection held him up for a time, but eventually he\n strutted in like every human hunter.\n\n\n They were raptly curious about the bird. They poked at it, marveled at\n its feathers and danced about it in an embryonic rite of the hunt. But\n presently the male turned to me.\n\n\n \"We\neat\nthis?\"",
"He flashed high above the stream and hung behind the crest of the hill\n where the doves rested. I heard their mourning from the oak tree. It\n occurred to me they would not leave that safety while the hawklike\n silhouette of the volpla marred the sky so near.\n\n\n I took the girl's hand from my sleeve and spoke to her, pointing as I\n did so. \"He is going to catch a bird. The bird is in that tree. You\n can make the bird fly so that he can catch it. Look here.\" I got up and\n found a stick. \"Can you do this?\"\nI threw the stick up into a tree near us. Then I found her a stick. She\n threw it better than I had expected.\n\n\n \"Good, pretty one. Now run across the stream and up to that tree and\n throw a stick into it.\"",
"Then someone authoritative would find a colony and observe them. He\n would conclude, \"I am convinced that they have a language and speak it\n intelligently.\"\n\n\n The government would issue denials. Reporters would \"expose the truth\"\n and ask, \"Where have these aliens come from?\" The government would\n reluctantly admit the facts. Linguists would observe at close quarters\n and learn the simple volpla language. Then would come the legends.\n\n\n Volpla wisdom would become a cult—and of all forms of comedy, cults, I\n think, are the funniest.\n\"Darling, are you listening to me?\" my wife asked with impatient\n patience.\n\n\n \"What? Sure. Certainly.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't hear a word. You just sit there and grin into space.\" She\n got up and poured me another martini. \"Here, maybe this will sober you\n up.\"\n\n\n I pointed. \"That's probably Guy and Em.\"",
"By the end of the week, these super-families were scattered over\n about four square miles of the ranch. They had found a new delicacy,\n sparrows, and hunted them easily as they roosted at night. I had taught\n the volplas to use the fire drill and they were already utilizing the\n local grasses, vines and brush to build marvelously contrived tree\n houses in which the young, and sometimes the adults, slept through\n midday and midnight.\n\n\n The afternoon my family returned home, I had a crew of workmen out\n tearing down the animal rooms and lab building. The caretakers\n had anesthetized all the experimental mutants, and the metabolic\n accelerator and other lab equipment was being dismantled. I wanted\n nothing around that might connect the sudden appearance of the volplas\n with my property. It was already apparent that it would take the\n volplas only a few more weeks to learn their means of survival and\n develop an embryonic culture of their own. Then they could leave my\n ranch and the fun would be on.",
"She climbed skillfully into the tree beside us and launched herself\n across the stream. She swooped up the opposite hillside and landed\n neatly in the tree where the doves rested.\n\n\n The birds came out of the tree, climbing hard with their graceful\n strokes.\n\n\n I looked back, as did the girl remaining beside me. The soaring volpla\n half closed his planes and started dropping. He became a golden flash\n across the sky.\n\n\n The doves abruptly gave up their hard climbing and fell away with\n swiftly beating wings. I saw one of the male volpla's planes open a\n little. He veered giddily in the new direction and again dropped like a\n molten arrow.\n\n\n The doves separated and began to zigzag down the valley. The volpla did\n something I would not have anticipated—he opened his planes and shot\n lower than the bird he was after, then swept up and intercepted the\n bird's crossward flight.",
"The fact was that I had something more in the lab than I had bargained\n for. I had aimed only at a gliding mammal a little more efficient than\n the Dusky Glider of Australia, a marsupial. Even in the basically\n mutating colony, there had been a decidedly simian appearance in recent\n years, a long shift from the garbage-dump rats I had started with. But\n my first volplas were shockingly humanoid.\n\n\n They were also much faster than had been their predecessors in\n organizing their nervous activity after the slumbrous explosion of\n growth in the metabolic accelerator. When I returned to the lab, they\n were already moving about on the mattress and the male was trying to\n stand.",
"She pretended a hopeless sag of her pretty shoulders. \"Wouldn't you\n just settle for a worldly martini?\"\n\n\n \"I will, yes. But first a divine kiss.\"\n\n\n I sipped at my martini and lounged in a terrace chair watching the\n golden evening slant across the beautiful hills of our ranch. I\n dreamed. I would invent a euphonious set of words to match the Basic\n English vocabulary and teach it to them as their language. They would\n have their own crafts and live in small tree houses.\n\n\n I would teach them legends: that they had come from the stars, that\n they had subsequently watched the first red men and then the first\n white men enter these hills.\n\n\n When they were able to take care of themselves, I would turn them\n loose. There would be volpla colonies all up and down the Coast before\n anyone suspected. One day, somebody would see a volpla. The newspapers\n would laugh.",
"He said, \"'Ello, 'ello.\"\nAs I walked into the kitchen, giddy with this enormous joke, my wife\n said, \"Guy and Em are flying up for dinner. That rocket of Guy's they\n launched in the desert yesterday was a success. It pulled Guy up to\n Cloud Nine and he wants to celebrate.\"\n\n\n I danced a little jig the way old Nijinsky might do it. \"Oh, great!\n Oh, wonderful! Good old Guy! Everybody's a success. It's great. It's\n wonderful. Success on success!\"\n\n\n I danced into the kitchen table and tipped over a basket of green corn.\n The maid promptly left the kitchen for some other place.\n\n\n My wife just stared at me. \"Have you been drinking the lab alcohol?\"\n\n\n \"I've been drinking the nectar of the gods. My Hera, you're properly\n married to Zeus. I've my own little Greeks descended from Icarus.\"",
"I glanced about and presently pointed over a tree. \"From Venus.\" Then\n I realized I had blundered by passing him an English name. \"In your\n language, Pohtah.\"\n\n\n He looked at the planet a long time and murmured, \"Venus. Pohtah.\"\nThat next week, I transported all of the volplas out to the oak woods.\n There were a hundred and seven men, women and children. With no design\n on my part, they tended to segregate into groups consisting of four to\n eight couples together with the current children of the women. Within\n these groups, the adults were promiscuous, but apparently not outside\n the group. The group thus had the appearance of a super-family and the\n males indulged and cared for all the children without reference to\n actual parenthood.",
"I laughed and picked up my plate and sat down in a chair. My wife\n brought me a bowl of salad and I munched the hamburger and watched the\n boy unsaddle the horse and slap it away to the pasture.\n\n\n I thought, \"By God, wouldn't he have a fit if he knew what I have back\n there in that lab! Wouldn't they all!\"\n\n\n The boy carried the saddle up onto the terrace and dropped it. \"Mom,\n I'd like a swim before I eat.\" He started undressing.\n\n\n \"You\nlook\nas though a little water might help,\" she agreed, sitting\n down next to me with her plate.\n\n\n The girl was yanking off her skates. \"And I want one.\"\n\n\n \"All right. But go in the house and put on your swim suit.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nMother\n. Why?\""
],
[
"I laughed and picked up my plate and sat down in a chair. My wife\n brought me a bowl of salad and I munched the hamburger and watched the\n boy unsaddle the horse and slap it away to the pasture.\n\n\n I thought, \"By God, wouldn't he have a fit if he knew what I have back\n there in that lab! Wouldn't they all!\"\n\n\n The boy carried the saddle up onto the terrace and dropped it. \"Mom,\n I'd like a swim before I eat.\" He started undressing.\n\n\n \"You\nlook\nas though a little water might help,\" she agreed, sitting\n down next to me with her plate.\n\n\n The girl was yanking off her skates. \"And I want one.\"\n\n\n \"All right. But go in the house and put on your swim suit.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nMother\n. Why?\"",
"My wife got out of the car and looked around at the workmen hurrying\n about the disemboweled buildings and she said, \"What on Earth is going\n on here?\"\n\n\n \"I've finished my work and we no longer need the buildings. I'm going\n to write a paper about my results.\"\n\n\n My wife looked at me appraisingly and shook her head. \"I thought you\n meant it. But you really ought to. It would be your first.\"\n\n\n My son asked, \"What happened to the animals?\"\n\n\n \"Turned them over to the university for further study,\" I lied.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said to her, \"you can't say our pop isn't a man of decision.\"\n\n\n Twenty-four hours later, there wasn't a sign of animal experimentation\n on the ranch.",
"\"Well, when my old man was pumping his first fortune out of some oil\n wells in Oklahoma, we lived down there. Outside this little town, I\n found a litter of flat stones that had young black-snakes under each\n slab. I filled a pail with them and took them into town and dumped them\n on the walk in front of the movie just as Theda Bara's matinee let out.\n The best part was that no one had seen me do it. They just couldn't\n understand how so many snakes got there. I learned how great it can be\n to stand around quietly and watch people encounter the surprise that\n you have prepared for them.\"\n\n\n She let go of my ear. \"Is that the kind of fun you're going to have?\"\n\n\n \"Yep.\"\n\n\n She shook her head. \"Did I say you are\neccentric\n?\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"Forgive me if I eat and run, dear. Something in the lab\n can't wait.\"",
"I heard my daughter's running feet in the animal rooms and her\n rollerskates banging at her side. I closed the accelerator and walked\n across to the laboratory door. She twisted the knob violently, trying\n to hit a combination that would work.\n\n\n I unlocked the door, held it against her pushing and slipped out so\n that, for all her peering, she could see nothing. I looked down on her\n tolerantly.\n\n\n \"Can't adjust your skates?\" I asked again.\n\n\n \"Daddy, I've tried and tried and I just can't turn this old key tight\n enough.\"\n\n\n I continued to look down on her.\n\n\n \"Well, Dad-dee, I can't!\"\n\n\n \"Tightly enough.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"You can't turn this old key tightly enough.\"",
"\"Say, what goes with you? You've been grinning like a happy ape ever\n since you came out of the lab.\"\n\n\n \"I told you—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, not that again! You were dangerous at any age.\"\n\n\n I stood up and put my plate aside and bent over her. \"Just the same,\n I'm going to have a new kind of fun.\"\nShe reached up and grabbed my ear. She narrowed her eyes and put a mock\n grimness on her lips.\n\n\n \"It's a joke,\" I assured her. \"I'm going to play a tremendous joke on\n the whole world. I've only had the feeling once before in a small way,\n but I've always....\"\n\n\n She twisted my ear and narrowed her eyes even more. \"Like?\"",
"He turned a plaintive face back to me, dipped worriedly and skimmed\n straight for a thorn bush. He banked instinctively, whirled toward us\n in a golden flash and crashed with a bounce to the grass.\n\n\n The two girls reached him before I did and stroked and fussed over him\n so that I could not get near. Suddenly he laughed with a shrill little\n whoop. After that, it was a carnival.\nThey learned quickly and brilliantly. They were not fliers; they were\n gliders and soarers. Before long, they took agilely to the trees and\n launched themselves in beautiful glides for hundreds of feet, banking,\n turning and spiraling to a gentle halt.\n\n\n I laughed out loud with anticipation. Wait till the first pair of these\n was brought before a sheriff! Wait till reporters from the\nChronicle\nmotored out into the hills to witness this!",
"He said, \"'Ello, 'ello.\"\nAs I walked into the kitchen, giddy with this enormous joke, my wife\n said, \"Guy and Em are flying up for dinner. That rocket of Guy's they\n launched in the desert yesterday was a success. It pulled Guy up to\n Cloud Nine and he wants to celebrate.\"\n\n\n I danced a little jig the way old Nijinsky might do it. \"Oh, great!\n Oh, wonderful! Good old Guy! Everybody's a success. It's great. It's\n wonderful. Success on success!\"\n\n\n I danced into the kitchen table and tipped over a basket of green corn.\n The maid promptly left the kitchen for some other place.\n\n\n My wife just stared at me. \"Have you been drinking the lab alcohol?\"\n\n\n \"I've been drinking the nectar of the gods. My Hera, you're properly\n married to Zeus. I've my own little Greeks descended from Icarus.\"",
"Again in the laboratory, I entered the metabolic accelerator and\n withdrew the intravenous needles from my first volplas. I carried their\n limp little forms out to a mattress in the lab, two girls and a boy.\n The accelerator had forced them almost to adulthood in less than a\n month. It would be several hours before they would begin to move, to\n learn to feed and play, perhaps to learn to fly.\n\n\n Meanwhile, it was clear that here was no war of dominant mutations.\n Modulating alleles had smoothed the freakish into a beautiful pattern.\n These were no monsters blasted by the dosage of radiation into crippled\n structures. They were lovely, perfect little creatures.\n\n\n My wife tried the door, too, but more subtly, as if casually touching\n the knob while calling.\n\n\n \"Lunch, dear.\"\n\n\n \"Be right there.\"",
"Volplas at last. Three of them. Yet I had always been so sure I could\n create them that I had been calling them volplas for ten years. No,\n twelve. I glanced across the animal room to where old Nijinsky thrust\n his graying head from a cage. I had called them volplas since the day\n old Nijinsky's elongated arms and his cousin's lateral skin folds had\n given me the idea of a flying mutant.\nWhen Nijinsky saw me looking at him, he started a little tarantella\n about his cage. I smiled with nostalgia when the fifth fingers of his\n hands, four times as long as the others, uncurled as he spun about the\n cage.\nI turned to the fitting of my daughter's other skate.\n\n\n \"Daddy?\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Mother says you are eccentric. Is that true?\"\n\n\n \"I'll speak to her about it.\"",
"I laughed and took his tiny, four-fingered hand. In a sandy spot\n beneath a great tree that overhung the creek, I built a small fire for\n them. This was another marvel, but first I wanted to teach them how to\n clean the bird. I showed them how to spit it and turn it over their\n fire.\n\n\n Later, I shared a small piece of the meat in their feast. They were\n gleeful and greasily amorous during the meal.\n\n\n When I had to leave, it was dark. I warned them to stand watches, keep\n the fire burning low and take to the tree above if anything approached.\n The male walked a little away with me when I left the fire.\n\n\n I said again, \"Promise me you won't leave here until we've made you\n ready for it.\"\n\n\n \"We like it here. We will stay. Tomorrow you bring more of us?\"",
"Except, of course, that the woods were full of volplas. At night, I\n could hear them faintly when I sat out on the terrace. As they passed\n through the dark overhead, they chattered and laughed and sometimes\n moaned in winged love. One night a flight of them soared slowly across\n the face of the full Moon, but I was the only one who noticed.",
"The scene had changed to a desert launching site. There was old Guy\n himself explaining that when he pressed the button before him, the\n hatch on the third stage of the great rocket in the background would\n close and, five minutes later, the ship would fire itself.\n\n\n Guy, on the screen, pushed the button, and I heard Guy, beside me, give\n a sort of little sigh. We watched the hatch slowly close.\n\n\n \"You look real good,\" I said. \"A regular Space Ranger. What are you\n shooting at?\"\n\n\n \"Darling, will you please—be—\nquiet\n?\"",
"\"Yeah, Dad. Can it, will you? You're always gagging around.\"\nOn the screen, Guy's big dead-earnest face was explaining more about\n the project and suddenly I realized that this was an instrument-bearing\n rocket they hoped to land on the Moon. It would broadcast from there.\n Well, now—say, that\nwould\nbe something! I began to feel a little\n ashamed of the way I had been acting and I reached out and slapped old\n Guy on the shoulder. For just a moment, I thought of telling him about\n my volplas. But only for a moment.\n\n\n A ball of flame appeared at the base of the rocket. Miraculously, the\n massive tower lifted, seemed for a moment merely to stand there on a\n flaming pillar, then was gone.",
"Of course, the volplas didn't want to return to the lab. There was a\n tiny stream through there and at one point it formed a sizable pool.\n They got into this and splashed their long arms about and they scrubbed\n each other. Then they got out and lay on their backs with the planes\n stretched to dry.\n\n\n I watched them affectionately and wondered about the advisability of\n leaving them out here. Well, it had to be done sometime. Nothing I\n could tell them about surviving would help them as much as a little\n actual surviving. I called the male over to me.\n\n\n He came and squatted, conference fashion, the elbows resting on the\n ground, the wrists crossed at his chest. He spoke first.\n\n\n \"Before the red men came, did we live here?\"\n\n\n \"You lived in places like this all along these mountains. Now there\n are very few of you left. Since you have been staying at my place, you\n naturally have forgotten the ways of living outdoors.\"",
"\"Don't you\nknow\n?\"\n\n\n \"Do you understand the word?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n I lifted her out of the chair and stood her on her skates. \"Tell your\n mother that I retaliate. I say\nshe\nis beautiful.\"\n\n\n She skated awkwardly between the rows of cages from which mutants with\n brown fur and blue fur, too much and too little fur, enormously long\n and ridiculously short arms, stared at her with simian, canine or\n rodent faces. At the door to the outside, she turned perilously and\n waved.",
"The fact was that I had something more in the lab than I had bargained\n for. I had aimed only at a gliding mammal a little more efficient than\n the Dusky Glider of Australia, a marsupial. Even in the basically\n mutating colony, there had been a decidedly simian appearance in recent\n years, a long shift from the garbage-dump rats I had started with. But\n my first volplas were shockingly humanoid.\n\n\n They were also much faster than had been their predecessors in\n organizing their nervous activity after the slumbrous explosion of\n growth in the metabolic accelerator. When I returned to the lab, they\n were already moving about on the mattress and the male was trying to\n stand.",
"By the end of the week, these super-families were scattered over\n about four square miles of the ranch. They had found a new delicacy,\n sparrows, and hunted them easily as they roosted at night. I had taught\n the volplas to use the fire drill and they were already utilizing the\n local grasses, vines and brush to build marvelously contrived tree\n houses in which the young, and sometimes the adults, slept through\n midday and midnight.\n\n\n The afternoon my family returned home, I had a crew of workmen out\n tearing down the animal rooms and lab building. The caretakers\n had anesthetized all the experimental mutants, and the metabolic\n accelerator and other lab equipment was being dismantled. I wanted\n nothing around that might connect the sudden appearance of the volplas\n with my property. It was already apparent that it would take the\n volplas only a few more weeks to learn their means of survival and\n develop an embryonic culture of their own. Then they could leave my\n ranch and the fun would be on.",
"I had devised the language for them, using Basic English as my model,\n and during the months while every female was busy in the metabolic\n accelerator, I taught the language to the males. They spoke it softly\n in high voices and the eight hundred words didn't seem to tax their\n little skulls a bit.\n\n\n My wife and the kids went down to Santa Barbara for a week and I took\n the opportunity to slip the oldest of the males and his two females out\n of the lab.\n\n\n I put them in the jeep beside me and drove to a secluded little valley\n about a mile back in the ranch.\n\n\n They were all three wide-eyed at the world and jabbered continuously.\n They kept me busy relating their words for \"tree,\" \"rock,\" \"sky\" to the\n objects. They had a little trouble with \"sky.\"",
"She peeked too, as she had for fifteen years, but I blocked her view\n when I slipped out.\n\n\n \"Come on, you old hermit. I have a buffet on the terrace.\"\n\n\n \"Our daughter says I'm eccentric. Wonder how the devil she found out.\"\n\n\n \"From me, of course.\"\n\n\n \"But you love me just the same.\"\n\n\n \"I adore you.\" She stretched on tiptoe and put her arms over my\n shoulders and kissed me.\n\n\n My wife did indeed have a delicious-looking buffet ready on the\n terrace. The maid was just setting down a warmer filled with hot\n hamburgers. I gave the maid a pinch and said, \"Hello, baby.\"\n\n\n My wife looked at me with a puzzled smile. \"What on Earth's got into\n you?\"\n\n\n The maid beat it into the house.",
"She pretended a hopeless sag of her pretty shoulders. \"Wouldn't you\n just settle for a worldly martini?\"\n\n\n \"I will, yes. But first a divine kiss.\"\n\n\n I sipped at my martini and lounged in a terrace chair watching the\n golden evening slant across the beautiful hills of our ranch. I\n dreamed. I would invent a euphonious set of words to match the Basic\n English vocabulary and teach it to them as their language. They would\n have their own crafts and live in small tree houses.\n\n\n I would teach them legends: that they had come from the stars, that\n they had subsequently watched the first red men and then the first\n white men enter these hills.\n\n\n When they were able to take care of themselves, I would turn them\n loose. There would be volpla colonies all up and down the Coast before\n anyone suspected. One day, somebody would see a volpla. The newspapers\n would laugh."
],
[
"He said, \"'Ello, 'ello.\"\nAs I walked into the kitchen, giddy with this enormous joke, my wife\n said, \"Guy and Em are flying up for dinner. That rocket of Guy's they\n launched in the desert yesterday was a success. It pulled Guy up to\n Cloud Nine and he wants to celebrate.\"\n\n\n I danced a little jig the way old Nijinsky might do it. \"Oh, great!\n Oh, wonderful! Good old Guy! Everybody's a success. It's great. It's\n wonderful. Success on success!\"\n\n\n I danced into the kitchen table and tipped over a basket of green corn.\n The maid promptly left the kitchen for some other place.\n\n\n My wife just stared at me. \"Have you been drinking the lab alcohol?\"\n\n\n \"I've been drinking the nectar of the gods. My Hera, you're properly\n married to Zeus. I've my own little Greeks descended from Icarus.\"",
"She peeked too, as she had for fifteen years, but I blocked her view\n when I slipped out.\n\n\n \"Come on, you old hermit. I have a buffet on the terrace.\"\n\n\n \"Our daughter says I'm eccentric. Wonder how the devil she found out.\"\n\n\n \"From me, of course.\"\n\n\n \"But you love me just the same.\"\n\n\n \"I adore you.\" She stretched on tiptoe and put her arms over my\n shoulders and kissed me.\n\n\n My wife did indeed have a delicious-looking buffet ready on the\n terrace. The maid was just setting down a warmer filled with hot\n hamburgers. I gave the maid a pinch and said, \"Hello, baby.\"\n\n\n My wife looked at me with a puzzled smile. \"What on Earth's got into\n you?\"\n\n\n The maid beat it into the house.",
"I laughed and picked up my plate and sat down in a chair. My wife\n brought me a bowl of salad and I munched the hamburger and watched the\n boy unsaddle the horse and slap it away to the pasture.\n\n\n I thought, \"By God, wouldn't he have a fit if he knew what I have back\n there in that lab! Wouldn't they all!\"\n\n\n The boy carried the saddle up onto the terrace and dropped it. \"Mom,\n I'd like a swim before I eat.\" He started undressing.\n\n\n \"You\nlook\nas though a little water might help,\" she agreed, sitting\n down next to me with her plate.\n\n\n The girl was yanking off her skates. \"And I want one.\"\n\n\n \"All right. But go in the house and put on your swim suit.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nMother\n. Why?\"",
"A 'copter sidled over the ridge, then came just above the oak woods\n toward us. Guy set it gently on the landing square and we walked down\n to meet them.\n\n\n I helped Em out and hugged her. Guy jumped out, asking, \"Do you have\n your TV set on?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" I answered. \"Should I?\"\n\n\n \"It's almost time for the broadcast. I was afraid we would miss it.\"\n\n\n \"What broadcast?\"\n\n\n \"From the rocket.\"\n\n\n \"Rocket?\"\n\n\n \"For heaven's sake, darling,\" my wife complained, \"I told you about\n Guy's rocket being a success. The papers are full of it. So are the\n broadcasts.\"\n\n\n As we stepped up on the terrace, she turned to Guy and Em. \"He's out of\n contact today. Thinks he's Zeus.\"",
"\"Because, dear, I said so.\"\n\n\n The boy had already raced across the terrace and jack-knifed into the\n pool. The cool sound of the dive sent the girl scurrying for her suit.\n\n\n I looked at my wife. \"What's the idea?\"\n\n\n \"She's going to be a young woman soon.\"\n\n\n \"Is that any reason for wearing clothes? Look at him. He's a young\nman\nsooner than already.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if you feel that way about it, they'll both have to start\n wearing clothes.\"\n\n\n I gulped the last of my hamburger and washed it down with the beer.\n \"This place is going to hell,\" I complained. \"The old man isn't allowed\n to pinch the maid and the kids can't go naked.\" I leaned toward her and\n smacked her cheek. \"But the food and the old woman are still the best.\"",
"I walked over and put the arm that held the beer bottle around her\n shoulder and chucked her chin up with my other hand. The golden sun\n danced in her blue eyes. I watched that light in her beautiful eyes and\n said, \"But you're the only one I'm dangerous about.\"\n\n\n I kissed her until I heard rollerskates coming across the terrace from\n one direction and a horse galloping toward the terrace from the other\n direction.\n\n\n \"You have lovely lips,\" I whispered.\n\n\n \"Thanks. Yours deserve the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, too.\"\n\n\n Our son reared the new palomino I had just bought him for his\n fourteenth birthday and yelled down, \"Unhand that maiden, Burrhead, or\n I'll give you lead poisoning.\"",
"\"Well, when my old man was pumping his first fortune out of some oil\n wells in Oklahoma, we lived down there. Outside this little town, I\n found a litter of flat stones that had young black-snakes under each\n slab. I filled a pail with them and took them into town and dumped them\n on the walk in front of the movie just as Theda Bara's matinee let out.\n The best part was that no one had seen me do it. They just couldn't\n understand how so many snakes got there. I learned how great it can be\n to stand around quietly and watch people encounter the surprise that\n you have prepared for them.\"\n\n\n She let go of my ear. \"Is that the kind of fun you're going to have?\"\n\n\n \"Yep.\"\n\n\n She shook her head. \"Did I say you are\neccentric\n?\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"Forgive me if I eat and run, dear. Something in the lab\n can't wait.\"",
"Their humanoid qualities were increasingly apparent. There was a lumbar\n curvature and buttocks. The shoulder girdle and pectoral muscles were\n heavy and out of proportion, of course, yet the females had only one\n pair of breasts. The chin and jaw were humanlike instead of simian and\n the dental equipment was appropriate to this structure. What this\n portended was brought home to me with a shock.\n\n\n I was kneeling on the mattress, cuffing and roughing the male as one\n might a puppy dog, when one of the females playfully climbed up my\n back. I reached around and brought her over my shoulder and sat her\n down. I stroked the soft fur on her head and said, \"Hello, pretty one.\n Hello.\"\n\n\n The male watched me, grinning.",
"He flashed high above the stream and hung behind the crest of the hill\n where the doves rested. I heard their mourning from the oak tree. It\n occurred to me they would not leave that safety while the hawklike\n silhouette of the volpla marred the sky so near.\n\n\n I took the girl's hand from my sleeve and spoke to her, pointing as I\n did so. \"He is going to catch a bird. The bird is in that tree. You\n can make the bird fly so that he can catch it. Look here.\" I got up and\n found a stick. \"Can you do this?\"\nI threw the stick up into a tree near us. Then I found her a stick. She\n threw it better than I had expected.\n\n\n \"Good, pretty one. Now run across the stream and up to that tree and\n throw a stick into it.\"",
"My wife got out of the car and looked around at the workmen hurrying\n about the disemboweled buildings and she said, \"What on Earth is going\n on here?\"\n\n\n \"I've finished my work and we no longer need the buildings. I'm going\n to write a paper about my results.\"\n\n\n My wife looked at me appraisingly and shook her head. \"I thought you\n meant it. But you really ought to. It would be your first.\"\n\n\n My son asked, \"What happened to the animals?\"\n\n\n \"Turned them over to the university for further study,\" I lied.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said to her, \"you can't say our pop isn't a man of decision.\"\n\n\n Twenty-four hours later, there wasn't a sign of animal experimentation\n on the ranch.",
"I heard my daughter's running feet in the animal rooms and her\n rollerskates banging at her side. I closed the accelerator and walked\n across to the laboratory door. She twisted the knob violently, trying\n to hit a combination that would work.\n\n\n I unlocked the door, held it against her pushing and slipped out so\n that, for all her peering, she could see nothing. I looked down on her\n tolerantly.\n\n\n \"Can't adjust your skates?\" I asked again.\n\n\n \"Daddy, I've tried and tried and I just can't turn this old key tight\n enough.\"\n\n\n I continued to look down on her.\n\n\n \"Well, Dad-dee, I can't!\"\n\n\n \"Tightly enough.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"You can't turn this old key tightly enough.\"",
"The scene had changed to a desert launching site. There was old Guy\n himself explaining that when he pressed the button before him, the\n hatch on the third stage of the great rocket in the background would\n close and, five minutes later, the ship would fire itself.\n\n\n Guy, on the screen, pushed the button, and I heard Guy, beside me, give\n a sort of little sigh. We watched the hatch slowly close.\n\n\n \"You look real good,\" I said. \"A regular Space Ranger. What are you\n shooting at?\"\n\n\n \"Darling, will you please—be—\nquiet\n?\"",
"\"Don't you\nknow\n?\"\n\n\n \"Do you understand the word?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n I lifted her out of the chair and stood her on her skates. \"Tell your\n mother that I retaliate. I say\nshe\nis beautiful.\"\n\n\n She skated awkwardly between the rows of cages from which mutants with\n brown fur and blue fur, too much and too little fur, enormously long\n and ridiculously short arms, stared at her with simian, canine or\n rodent faces. At the door to the outside, she turned perilously and\n waved.",
"Volplas at last. Three of them. Yet I had always been so sure I could\n create them that I had been calling them volplas for ten years. No,\n twelve. I glanced across the animal room to where old Nijinsky thrust\n his graying head from a cage. I had called them volplas since the day\n old Nijinsky's elongated arms and his cousin's lateral skin folds had\n given me the idea of a flying mutant.\nWhen Nijinsky saw me looking at him, he started a little tarantella\n about his cage. I smiled with nostalgia when the fifth fingers of his\n hands, four times as long as the others, uncurled as he spun about the\n cage.\nI turned to the fitting of my daughter's other skate.\n\n\n \"Daddy?\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Mother says you are eccentric. Is that true?\"\n\n\n \"I'll speak to her about it.\"",
"\"Say, what goes with you? You've been grinning like a happy ape ever\n since you came out of the lab.\"\n\n\n \"I told you—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, not that again! You were dangerous at any age.\"\n\n\n I stood up and put my plate aside and bent over her. \"Just the same,\n I'm going to have a new kind of fun.\"\nShe reached up and grabbed my ear. She narrowed her eyes and put a mock\n grimness on her lips.\n\n\n \"It's a joke,\" I assured her. \"I'm going to play a tremendous joke on\n the whole world. I've only had the feeling once before in a small way,\n but I've always....\"\n\n\n She twisted my ear and narrowed her eyes even more. \"Like?\"",
"I glanced about and presently pointed over a tree. \"From Venus.\" Then\n I realized I had blundered by passing him an English name. \"In your\n language, Pohtah.\"\n\n\n He looked at the planet a long time and murmured, \"Venus. Pohtah.\"\nThat next week, I transported all of the volplas out to the oak woods.\n There were a hundred and seven men, women and children. With no design\n on my part, they tended to segregate into groups consisting of four to\n eight couples together with the current children of the women. Within\n these groups, the adults were promiscuous, but apparently not outside\n the group. The group thus had the appearance of a super-family and the\n males indulged and cared for all the children without reference to\n actual parenthood.",
"I had devised the language for them, using Basic English as my model,\n and during the months while every female was busy in the metabolic\n accelerator, I taught the language to the males. They spoke it softly\n in high voices and the eight hundred words didn't seem to tax their\n little skulls a bit.\n\n\n My wife and the kids went down to Santa Barbara for a week and I took\n the opportunity to slip the oldest of the males and his two females out\n of the lab.\n\n\n I put them in the jeep beside me and drove to a secluded little valley\n about a mile back in the ranch.\n\n\n They were all three wide-eyed at the world and jabbered continuously.\n They kept me busy relating their words for \"tree,\" \"rock,\" \"sky\" to the\n objects. They had a little trouble with \"sky.\"",
"I laughed and took his tiny, four-fingered hand. In a sandy spot\n beneath a great tree that overhung the creek, I built a small fire for\n them. This was another marvel, but first I wanted to teach them how to\n clean the bird. I showed them how to spit it and turn it over their\n fire.\n\n\n Later, I shared a small piece of the meat in their feast. They were\n gleeful and greasily amorous during the meal.\n\n\n When I had to leave, it was dark. I warned them to stand watches, keep\n the fire burning low and take to the tree above if anything approached.\n The male walked a little away with me when I left the fire.\n\n\n I said again, \"Promise me you won't leave here until we've made you\n ready for it.\"\n\n\n \"We like it here. We will stay. Tomorrow you bring more of us?\"",
"I flipped a hamburger and a slice of onion onto a plate and picked up\n the ketchup and said, \"I've reached the dangerous age.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, good heavens!\"\nI dowsed ketchup over the hamburger, threw the onion on and closed it.\n I opened a bottle of beer and guzzled from it, blew out my breath and\n looked across the rolling hills and oak woods of our ranch to where the\n Pacific shimmered. I thought, \"All this and three volplas, too.\"\n\n\n I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth and said aloud, \"Yes, sir,\n the dangerous age. And, lady, I'm going to have fun.\"\n\n\n My wife sighed patiently.",
"She pretended a hopeless sag of her pretty shoulders. \"Wouldn't you\n just settle for a worldly martini?\"\n\n\n \"I will, yes. But first a divine kiss.\"\n\n\n I sipped at my martini and lounged in a terrace chair watching the\n golden evening slant across the beautiful hills of our ranch. I\n dreamed. I would invent a euphonious set of words to match the Basic\n English vocabulary and teach it to them as their language. They would\n have their own crafts and live in small tree houses.\n\n\n I would teach them legends: that they had come from the stars, that\n they had subsequently watched the first red men and then the first\n white men enter these hills.\n\n\n When they were able to take care of themselves, I would turn them\n loose. There would be volpla colonies all up and down the Coast before\n anyone suspected. One day, somebody would see a volpla. The newspapers\n would laugh."
],
[
"\"Say, what goes with you? You've been grinning like a happy ape ever\n since you came out of the lab.\"\n\n\n \"I told you—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, not that again! You were dangerous at any age.\"\n\n\n I stood up and put my plate aside and bent over her. \"Just the same,\n I'm going to have a new kind of fun.\"\nShe reached up and grabbed my ear. She narrowed her eyes and put a mock\n grimness on her lips.\n\n\n \"It's a joke,\" I assured her. \"I'm going to play a tremendous joke on\n the whole world. I've only had the feeling once before in a small way,\n but I've always....\"\n\n\n She twisted my ear and narrowed her eyes even more. \"Like?\"",
"\"Well, when my old man was pumping his first fortune out of some oil\n wells in Oklahoma, we lived down there. Outside this little town, I\n found a litter of flat stones that had young black-snakes under each\n slab. I filled a pail with them and took them into town and dumped them\n on the walk in front of the movie just as Theda Bara's matinee let out.\n The best part was that no one had seen me do it. They just couldn't\n understand how so many snakes got there. I learned how great it can be\n to stand around quietly and watch people encounter the surprise that\n you have prepared for them.\"\n\n\n She let go of my ear. \"Is that the kind of fun you're going to have?\"\n\n\n \"Yep.\"\n\n\n She shook her head. \"Did I say you are\neccentric\n?\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"Forgive me if I eat and run, dear. Something in the lab\n can't wait.\"",
"He said, \"'Ello, 'ello.\"\nAs I walked into the kitchen, giddy with this enormous joke, my wife\n said, \"Guy and Em are flying up for dinner. That rocket of Guy's they\n launched in the desert yesterday was a success. It pulled Guy up to\n Cloud Nine and he wants to celebrate.\"\n\n\n I danced a little jig the way old Nijinsky might do it. \"Oh, great!\n Oh, wonderful! Good old Guy! Everybody's a success. It's great. It's\n wonderful. Success on success!\"\n\n\n I danced into the kitchen table and tipped over a basket of green corn.\n The maid promptly left the kitchen for some other place.\n\n\n My wife just stared at me. \"Have you been drinking the lab alcohol?\"\n\n\n \"I've been drinking the nectar of the gods. My Hera, you're properly\n married to Zeus. I've my own little Greeks descended from Icarus.\"",
"My wife got out of the car and looked around at the workmen hurrying\n about the disemboweled buildings and she said, \"What on Earth is going\n on here?\"\n\n\n \"I've finished my work and we no longer need the buildings. I'm going\n to write a paper about my results.\"\n\n\n My wife looked at me appraisingly and shook her head. \"I thought you\n meant it. But you really ought to. It would be your first.\"\n\n\n My son asked, \"What happened to the animals?\"\n\n\n \"Turned them over to the university for further study,\" I lied.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said to her, \"you can't say our pop isn't a man of decision.\"\n\n\n Twenty-four hours later, there wasn't a sign of animal experimentation\n on the ranch.",
"I laughed and picked up my plate and sat down in a chair. My wife\n brought me a bowl of salad and I munched the hamburger and watched the\n boy unsaddle the horse and slap it away to the pasture.\n\n\n I thought, \"By God, wouldn't he have a fit if he knew what I have back\n there in that lab! Wouldn't they all!\"\n\n\n The boy carried the saddle up onto the terrace and dropped it. \"Mom,\n I'd like a swim before I eat.\" He started undressing.\n\n\n \"You\nlook\nas though a little water might help,\" she agreed, sitting\n down next to me with her plate.\n\n\n The girl was yanking off her skates. \"And I want one.\"\n\n\n \"All right. But go in the house and put on your swim suit.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nMother\n. Why?\"",
"I flipped a hamburger and a slice of onion onto a plate and picked up\n the ketchup and said, \"I've reached the dangerous age.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, good heavens!\"\nI dowsed ketchup over the hamburger, threw the onion on and closed it.\n I opened a bottle of beer and guzzled from it, blew out my breath and\n looked across the rolling hills and oak woods of our ranch to where the\n Pacific shimmered. I thought, \"All this and three volplas, too.\"\n\n\n I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth and said aloud, \"Yes, sir,\n the dangerous age. And, lady, I'm going to have fun.\"\n\n\n My wife sighed patiently.",
"I laughed and took his tiny, four-fingered hand. In a sandy spot\n beneath a great tree that overhung the creek, I built a small fire for\n them. This was another marvel, but first I wanted to teach them how to\n clean the bird. I showed them how to spit it and turn it over their\n fire.\n\n\n Later, I shared a small piece of the meat in their feast. They were\n gleeful and greasily amorous during the meal.\n\n\n When I had to leave, it was dark. I warned them to stand watches, keep\n the fire burning low and take to the tree above if anything approached.\n The male walked a little away with me when I left the fire.\n\n\n I said again, \"Promise me you won't leave here until we've made you\n ready for it.\"\n\n\n \"We like it here. We will stay. Tomorrow you bring more of us?\"",
"By the end of the week, these super-families were scattered over\n about four square miles of the ranch. They had found a new delicacy,\n sparrows, and hunted them easily as they roosted at night. I had taught\n the volplas to use the fire drill and they were already utilizing the\n local grasses, vines and brush to build marvelously contrived tree\n houses in which the young, and sometimes the adults, slept through\n midday and midnight.\n\n\n The afternoon my family returned home, I had a crew of workmen out\n tearing down the animal rooms and lab building. The caretakers\n had anesthetized all the experimental mutants, and the metabolic\n accelerator and other lab equipment was being dismantled. I wanted\n nothing around that might connect the sudden appearance of the volplas\n with my property. It was already apparent that it would take the\n volplas only a few more weeks to learn their means of survival and\n develop an embryonic culture of their own. Then they could leave my\n ranch and the fun would be on.",
"He turned a plaintive face back to me, dipped worriedly and skimmed\n straight for a thorn bush. He banked instinctively, whirled toward us\n in a golden flash and crashed with a bounce to the grass.\n\n\n The two girls reached him before I did and stroked and fussed over him\n so that I could not get near. Suddenly he laughed with a shrill little\n whoop. After that, it was a carnival.\nThey learned quickly and brilliantly. They were not fliers; they were\n gliders and soarers. Before long, they took agilely to the trees and\n launched themselves in beautiful glides for hundreds of feet, banking,\n turning and spiraling to a gentle halt.\n\n\n I laughed out loud with anticipation. Wait till the first pair of these\n was brought before a sheriff! Wait till reporters from the\nChronicle\nmotored out into the hills to witness this!",
"I heard my daughter's running feet in the animal rooms and her\n rollerskates banging at her side. I closed the accelerator and walked\n across to the laboratory door. She twisted the knob violently, trying\n to hit a combination that would work.\n\n\n I unlocked the door, held it against her pushing and slipped out so\n that, for all her peering, she could see nothing. I looked down on her\n tolerantly.\n\n\n \"Can't adjust your skates?\" I asked again.\n\n\n \"Daddy, I've tried and tried and I just can't turn this old key tight\n enough.\"\n\n\n I continued to look down on her.\n\n\n \"Well, Dad-dee, I can't!\"\n\n\n \"Tightly enough.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"You can't turn this old key tightly enough.\"",
"The fact was that I had something more in the lab than I had bargained\n for. I had aimed only at a gliding mammal a little more efficient than\n the Dusky Glider of Australia, a marsupial. Even in the basically\n mutating colony, there had been a decidedly simian appearance in recent\n years, a long shift from the garbage-dump rats I had started with. But\n my first volplas were shockingly humanoid.\n\n\n They were also much faster than had been their predecessors in\n organizing their nervous activity after the slumbrous explosion of\n growth in the metabolic accelerator. When I returned to the lab, they\n were already moving about on the mattress and the male was trying to\n stand.",
"The scene had changed to a desert launching site. There was old Guy\n himself explaining that when he pressed the button before him, the\n hatch on the third stage of the great rocket in the background would\n close and, five minutes later, the ship would fire itself.\n\n\n Guy, on the screen, pushed the button, and I heard Guy, beside me, give\n a sort of little sigh. We watched the hatch slowly close.\n\n\n \"You look real good,\" I said. \"A regular Space Ranger. What are you\n shooting at?\"\n\n\n \"Darling, will you please—be—\nquiet\n?\"",
"The spars added nine inches on each side to his span. As they swept out\n and forward, the lateral skin that had, till now, hung in resting folds\n was tightened in a golden plane that stretched from the tip of the spar\n to his waist and continued four inches wide down his legs to where it\n anchored at the little toe.\n\n\n This was by far the most impressive plane that had appeared till now.\n It was a true gliding plane, perhaps even a soaring one. I felt a\n thrill run along my back.\n\n\n By four o'clock that afternoon, I was feeding them solid food and, with\n the spars closed, they were holding little cups and drinking water from\n them in a most humanlike way. They were active, curious, playful and\n decidedly amorous.",
"Volplas at last. Three of them. Yet I had always been so sure I could\n create them that I had been calling them volplas for ten years. No,\n twelve. I glanced across the animal room to where old Nijinsky thrust\n his graying head from a cage. I had called them volplas since the day\n old Nijinsky's elongated arms and his cousin's lateral skin folds had\n given me the idea of a flying mutant.\nWhen Nijinsky saw me looking at him, he started a little tarantella\n about his cage. I smiled with nostalgia when the fifth fingers of his\n hands, four times as long as the others, uncurled as he spun about the\n cage.\nI turned to the fitting of my daughter's other skate.\n\n\n \"Daddy?\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Mother says you are eccentric. Is that true?\"\n\n\n \"I'll speak to her about it.\"",
"Well, when that screen went dead, there was pandemonium around our\n terrace. Big old Guy was so happy, he was wiping tears from his eyes.\n The women were kissing him and hugging him. Everybody was yelling at\n once.\nI used the metabolic accelerator to cut the volplas' gestation down to\n one week. Then I used it to bring the infants to maturity in one month.\n I had luck right off. Quite by accident, the majority of the early\n infants were females, which sped things up considerably.\n\n\n By the next spring, I had a colony of over a hundred volplas and I shut\n down the accelerator. From now on, they could have babies in their own\n way.",
"Again in the laboratory, I entered the metabolic accelerator and\n withdrew the intravenous needles from my first volplas. I carried their\n limp little forms out to a mattress in the lab, two girls and a boy.\n The accelerator had forced them almost to adulthood in less than a\n month. It would be several hours before they would begin to move, to\n learn to feed and play, perhaps to learn to fly.\n\n\n Meanwhile, it was clear that here was no war of dominant mutations.\n Modulating alleles had smoothed the freakish into a beautiful pattern.\n These were no monsters blasted by the dosage of radiation into crippled\n structures. They were lovely, perfect little creatures.\n\n\n My wife tried the door, too, but more subtly, as if casually touching\n the knob while calling.\n\n\n \"Lunch, dear.\"\n\n\n \"Be right there.\"",
"I asked our son to wheel a TV set out onto the terrace while I made\n martinis for our friends. Then we sat down and drank the cocktails and\n the kids had fruit juice and we watched the broadcast Guy had tuned in.\n\n\n Some joker from Cal Tech was explaining diagrams of a multi-stage\n rocket.\n\n\n After a bit, I got up and said, \"I have something out in the lab I want\n to check on.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, wait a minute,\" Guy objected. \"They're about to show the shots of\n the launching.\"\n\n\n My wife gave me a look; you know the kind. I sat down. Then I got up\n and poured myself another martini and freshened Em's up, too. I sat\n down again.",
"\"Yeah, Dad. Can it, will you? You're always gagging around.\"\nOn the screen, Guy's big dead-earnest face was explaining more about\n the project and suddenly I realized that this was an instrument-bearing\n rocket they hoped to land on the Moon. It would broadcast from there.\n Well, now—say, that\nwould\nbe something! I began to feel a little\n ashamed of the way I had been acting and I reached out and slapped old\n Guy on the shoulder. For just a moment, I thought of telling him about\n my volplas. But only for a moment.\n\n\n A ball of flame appeared at the base of the rocket. Miraculously, the\n massive tower lifted, seemed for a moment merely to stand there on a\n flaming pillar, then was gone.",
"Their humanoid qualities were increasingly apparent. There was a lumbar\n curvature and buttocks. The shoulder girdle and pectoral muscles were\n heavy and out of proportion, of course, yet the females had only one\n pair of breasts. The chin and jaw were humanlike instead of simian and\n the dental equipment was appropriate to this structure. What this\n portended was brought home to me with a shock.\n\n\n I was kneeling on the mattress, cuffing and roughing the male as one\n might a puppy dog, when one of the females playfully climbed up my\n back. I reached around and brought her over my shoulder and sat her\n down. I stroked the soft fur on her head and said, \"Hello, pretty one.\n Hello.\"\n\n\n The male watched me, grinning.",
"\"Because, dear, I said so.\"\n\n\n The boy had already raced across the terrace and jack-knifed into the\n pool. The cool sound of the dive sent the girl scurrying for her suit.\n\n\n I looked at my wife. \"What's the idea?\"\n\n\n \"She's going to be a young woman soon.\"\n\n\n \"Is that any reason for wearing clothes? Look at him. He's a young\nman\nsooner than already.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if you feel that way about it, they'll both have to start\n wearing clothes.\"\n\n\n I gulped the last of my hamburger and washed it down with the beer.\n \"This place is going to hell,\" I complained. \"The old man isn't allowed\n to pinch the maid and the kids can't go naked.\" I leaned toward her and\n smacked her cheek. \"But the food and the old woman are still the best.\""
],
[
"Of course, the volplas didn't want to return to the lab. There was a\n tiny stream through there and at one point it formed a sizable pool.\n They got into this and splashed their long arms about and they scrubbed\n each other. Then they got out and lay on their backs with the planes\n stretched to dry.\n\n\n I watched them affectionately and wondered about the advisability of\n leaving them out here. Well, it had to be done sometime. Nothing I\n could tell them about surviving would help them as much as a little\n actual surviving. I called the male over to me.\n\n\n He came and squatted, conference fashion, the elbows resting on the\n ground, the wrists crossed at his chest. He spoke first.\n\n\n \"Before the red men came, did we live here?\"\n\n\n \"You lived in places like this all along these mountains. Now there\n are very few of you left. Since you have been staying at my place, you\n naturally have forgotten the ways of living outdoors.\"",
"I had devised the language for them, using Basic English as my model,\n and during the months while every female was busy in the metabolic\n accelerator, I taught the language to the males. They spoke it softly\n in high voices and the eight hundred words didn't seem to tax their\n little skulls a bit.\n\n\n My wife and the kids went down to Santa Barbara for a week and I took\n the opportunity to slip the oldest of the males and his two females out\n of the lab.\n\n\n I put them in the jeep beside me and drove to a secluded little valley\n about a mile back in the ranch.\n\n\n They were all three wide-eyed at the world and jabbered continuously.\n They kept me busy relating their words for \"tree,\" \"rock,\" \"sky\" to the\n objects. They had a little trouble with \"sky.\"",
"Except, of course, that the woods were full of volplas. At night, I\n could hear them faintly when I sat out on the terrace. As they passed\n through the dark overhead, they chattered and laughed and sometimes\n moaned in winged love. One night a flight of them soared slowly across\n the face of the full Moon, but I was the only one who noticed.",
"She pretended a hopeless sag of her pretty shoulders. \"Wouldn't you\n just settle for a worldly martini?\"\n\n\n \"I will, yes. But first a divine kiss.\"\n\n\n I sipped at my martini and lounged in a terrace chair watching the\n golden evening slant across the beautiful hills of our ranch. I\n dreamed. I would invent a euphonious set of words to match the Basic\n English vocabulary and teach it to them as their language. They would\n have their own crafts and live in small tree houses.\n\n\n I would teach them legends: that they had come from the stars, that\n they had subsequently watched the first red men and then the first\n white men enter these hills.\n\n\n When they were able to take care of themselves, I would turn them\n loose. There would be volpla colonies all up and down the Coast before\n anyone suspected. One day, somebody would see a volpla. The newspapers\n would laugh.",
"He flashed high above the stream and hung behind the crest of the hill\n where the doves rested. I heard their mourning from the oak tree. It\n occurred to me they would not leave that safety while the hawklike\n silhouette of the volpla marred the sky so near.\n\n\n I took the girl's hand from my sleeve and spoke to her, pointing as I\n did so. \"He is going to catch a bird. The bird is in that tree. You\n can make the bird fly so that he can catch it. Look here.\" I got up and\n found a stick. \"Can you do this?\"\nI threw the stick up into a tree near us. Then I found her a stick. She\n threw it better than I had expected.\n\n\n \"Good, pretty one. Now run across the stream and up to that tree and\n throw a stick into it.\"",
"I saw the planes close momentarily. Then they opened again and the bird\n plummeted to a hillside. The volpla landed gently atop the hill and\n stood looking back at us.\n\n\n The volpla beside me danced up and down shrieking in a language all her\n own. The girl who had raised the birds from the tree volplaned back to\n us, yammering like a bluejay.\nIt was a hero's welcome. He had to walk back, of course—he had no\n way to carry such a load in flight. The girls glided out to meet\n him. Their lavish affection held him up for a time, but eventually he\n strutted in like every human hunter.\n\n\n They were raptly curious about the bird. They poked at it, marveled at\n its feathers and danced about it in an embryonic rite of the hunt. But\n presently the male turned to me.\n\n\n \"We\neat\nthis?\"",
"I glanced about and presently pointed over a tree. \"From Venus.\" Then\n I realized I had blundered by passing him an English name. \"In your\n language, Pohtah.\"\n\n\n He looked at the planet a long time and murmured, \"Venus. Pohtah.\"\nThat next week, I transported all of the volplas out to the oak woods.\n There were a hundred and seven men, women and children. With no design\n on my part, they tended to segregate into groups consisting of four to\n eight couples together with the current children of the women. Within\n these groups, the adults were promiscuous, but apparently not outside\n the group. The group thus had the appearance of a super-family and the\n males indulged and cared for all the children without reference to\n actual parenthood.",
"She climbed skillfully into the tree beside us and launched herself\n across the stream. She swooped up the opposite hillside and landed\n neatly in the tree where the doves rested.\n\n\n The birds came out of the tree, climbing hard with their graceful\n strokes.\n\n\n I looked back, as did the girl remaining beside me. The soaring volpla\n half closed his planes and started dropping. He became a golden flash\n across the sky.\n\n\n The doves abruptly gave up their hard climbing and fell away with\n swiftly beating wings. I saw one of the male volpla's planes open a\n little. He veered giddily in the new direction and again dropped like a\n molten arrow.\n\n\n The doves separated and began to zigzag down the valley. The volpla did\n something I would not have anticipated—he opened his planes and shot\n lower than the bird he was after, then swept up and intercepted the\n bird's crossward flight.",
"Volplas at last. Three of them. Yet I had always been so sure I could\n create them that I had been calling them volplas for ten years. No,\n twelve. I glanced across the animal room to where old Nijinsky thrust\n his graying head from a cage. I had called them volplas since the day\n old Nijinsky's elongated arms and his cousin's lateral skin folds had\n given me the idea of a flying mutant.\nWhen Nijinsky saw me looking at him, he started a little tarantella\n about his cage. I smiled with nostalgia when the fifth fingers of his\n hands, four times as long as the others, uncurled as he spun about the\n cage.\nI turned to the fitting of my daughter's other skate.\n\n\n \"Daddy?\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Mother says you are eccentric. Is that true?\"\n\n\n \"I'll speak to her about it.\"",
"Well, when that screen went dead, there was pandemonium around our\n terrace. Big old Guy was so happy, he was wiping tears from his eyes.\n The women were kissing him and hugging him. Everybody was yelling at\n once.\nI used the metabolic accelerator to cut the volplas' gestation down to\n one week. Then I used it to bring the infants to maturity in one month.\n I had luck right off. Quite by accident, the majority of the early\n infants were females, which sped things up considerably.\n\n\n By the next spring, I had a colony of over a hundred volplas and I shut\n down the accelerator. From now on, they could have babies in their own\n way.",
"By the end of the week, these super-families were scattered over\n about four square miles of the ranch. They had found a new delicacy,\n sparrows, and hunted them easily as they roosted at night. I had taught\n the volplas to use the fire drill and they were already utilizing the\n local grasses, vines and brush to build marvelously contrived tree\n houses in which the young, and sometimes the adults, slept through\n midday and midnight.\n\n\n The afternoon my family returned home, I had a crew of workmen out\n tearing down the animal rooms and lab building. The caretakers\n had anesthetized all the experimental mutants, and the metabolic\n accelerator and other lab equipment was being dismantled. I wanted\n nothing around that might connect the sudden appearance of the volplas\n with my property. It was already apparent that it would take the\n volplas only a few more weeks to learn their means of survival and\n develop an embryonic culture of their own. Then they could leave my\n ranch and the fun would be on.",
"Then someone authoritative would find a colony and observe them. He\n would conclude, \"I am convinced that they have a language and speak it\n intelligently.\"\n\n\n The government would issue denials. Reporters would \"expose the truth\"\n and ask, \"Where have these aliens come from?\" The government would\n reluctantly admit the facts. Linguists would observe at close quarters\n and learn the simple volpla language. Then would come the legends.\n\n\n Volpla wisdom would become a cult—and of all forms of comedy, cults, I\n think, are the funniest.\n\"Darling, are you listening to me?\" my wife asked with impatient\n patience.\n\n\n \"What? Sure. Certainly.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't hear a word. You just sit there and grin into space.\" She\n got up and poured me another martini. \"Here, maybe this will sober you\n up.\"\n\n\n I pointed. \"That's probably Guy and Em.\"",
"\"Yeah, Dad. Can it, will you? You're always gagging around.\"\nOn the screen, Guy's big dead-earnest face was explaining more about\n the project and suddenly I realized that this was an instrument-bearing\n rocket they hoped to land on the Moon. It would broadcast from there.\n Well, now—say, that\nwould\nbe something! I began to feel a little\n ashamed of the way I had been acting and I reached out and slapped old\n Guy on the shoulder. For just a moment, I thought of telling him about\n my volplas. But only for a moment.\n\n\n A ball of flame appeared at the base of the rocket. Miraculously, the\n massive tower lifted, seemed for a moment merely to stand there on a\n flaming pillar, then was gone.",
"Volpla\nBy WYMAN GUIN\n\n\n Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1956.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe only kind of gag worth pulling, I always\n \nmaintained, was a cosmic one—till I learned the\n \nCosmos has a really nasty sense of humor!\nThere were three of them. Dozens of limp little mutants that would have\n sent an academic zoologist into hysterics lay there in the metabolic\n accelerator. But there were three of\nthem\n. My heart took a great\n bound.",
"\"Chances are they won't stay long. Keep your eye on the tree in case\n they leave while you are climbing.\"\nHe ran to a nearby oak and clambered aloft. Presently he launched\n himself, streaked down-valley a way and caught a warm updraft on a\n hillside. In no time, he was up about two hundred feet. He began\n criss-crossing the ridge, working his way back to us.\n\n\n The two girls were watching him intently. They came over to me\n wonderingly, stopping now and then to watch him. When they were\n standing beside me, they said nothing. They shaded their eyes with\n tiny hands and watched him as he passed directly above us at about two\n hundred and fifty feet. One of the girls, with her eyes fast on his\n soaring planes, reached out and grasped my sleeve tightly.",
"He was a little the larger and stood twenty-eight inches high. Except\n for the face, chest and belly, they were covered with a soft, almost\n golden down. Where it was bare of this golden fur, the skin was pink.\n On their heads and across the shoulders of the male stood a shock of\n fur as soft as chinchilla. The faces were appealingly humanoid, except\n that the eyes were large and nocturnal. The cranium was in the same\n proportion to the body as it is in the human.\nWhen the male spread his arms, the span was forty-eight inches. I held\n his arms out and tried to tease the spars open. They were not new. The\n spars had been common to the basic colony for years and were the result\n of serial mutations effecting those greatly elongated fifth fingers\n that had first appeared in Nijinsky. No longer jointed like a finger,\n the spar turned backward sharply and ran alongside the wrist almost to\n the elbow. Powerful wrist muscles could snap it outward and forward.\n Suddenly, as I teased the male volpla, this happened.",
"The fact was that I had something more in the lab than I had bargained\n for. I had aimed only at a gliding mammal a little more efficient than\n the Dusky Glider of Australia, a marsupial. Even in the basically\n mutating colony, there had been a decidedly simian appearance in recent\n years, a long shift from the garbage-dump rats I had started with. But\n my first volplas were shockingly humanoid.\n\n\n They were also much faster than had been their predecessors in\n organizing their nervous activity after the slumbrous explosion of\n growth in the metabolic accelerator. When I returned to the lab, they\n were already moving about on the mattress and the male was trying to\n stand.",
"I laughed and took his tiny, four-fingered hand. In a sandy spot\n beneath a great tree that overhung the creek, I built a small fire for\n them. This was another marvel, but first I wanted to teach them how to\n clean the bird. I showed them how to spit it and turn it over their\n fire.\n\n\n Later, I shared a small piece of the meat in their feast. They were\n gleeful and greasily amorous during the meal.\n\n\n When I had to leave, it was dark. I warned them to stand watches, keep\n the fire burning low and take to the tree above if anything approached.\n The male walked a little away with me when I left the fire.\n\n\n I said again, \"Promise me you won't leave here until we've made you\n ready for it.\"\n\n\n \"We like it here. We will stay. Tomorrow you bring more of us?\"",
"He turned a plaintive face back to me, dipped worriedly and skimmed\n straight for a thorn bush. He banked instinctively, whirled toward us\n in a golden flash and crashed with a bounce to the grass.\n\n\n The two girls reached him before I did and stroked and fussed over him\n so that I could not get near. Suddenly he laughed with a shrill little\n whoop. After that, it was a carnival.\nThey learned quickly and brilliantly. They were not fliers; they were\n gliders and soarers. Before long, they took agilely to the trees and\n launched themselves in beautiful glides for hundreds of feet, banking,\n turning and spiraling to a gentle halt.\n\n\n I laughed out loud with anticipation. Wait till the first pair of these\n was brought before a sheriff! Wait till reporters from the\nChronicle\nmotored out into the hills to witness this!",
"\"Don't you\nknow\n?\"\n\n\n \"Do you understand the word?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n I lifted her out of the chair and stood her on her skates. \"Tell your\n mother that I retaliate. I say\nshe\nis beautiful.\"\n\n\n She skated awkwardly between the rows of cages from which mutants with\n brown fur and blue fur, too much and too little fur, enormously long\n and ridiculously short arms, stared at her with simian, canine or\n rodent faces. At the door to the outside, she turned perilously and\n waved."
],
[
"Volplas at last. Three of them. Yet I had always been so sure I could\n create them that I had been calling them volplas for ten years. No,\n twelve. I glanced across the animal room to where old Nijinsky thrust\n his graying head from a cage. I had called them volplas since the day\n old Nijinsky's elongated arms and his cousin's lateral skin folds had\n given me the idea of a flying mutant.\nWhen Nijinsky saw me looking at him, he started a little tarantella\n about his cage. I smiled with nostalgia when the fifth fingers of his\n hands, four times as long as the others, uncurled as he spun about the\n cage.\nI turned to the fitting of my daughter's other skate.\n\n\n \"Daddy?\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Mother says you are eccentric. Is that true?\"\n\n\n \"I'll speak to her about it.\"",
"\"Yeah, Dad. Can it, will you? You're always gagging around.\"\nOn the screen, Guy's big dead-earnest face was explaining more about\n the project and suddenly I realized that this was an instrument-bearing\n rocket they hoped to land on the Moon. It would broadcast from there.\n Well, now—say, that\nwould\nbe something! I began to feel a little\n ashamed of the way I had been acting and I reached out and slapped old\n Guy on the shoulder. For just a moment, I thought of telling him about\n my volplas. But only for a moment.\n\n\n A ball of flame appeared at the base of the rocket. Miraculously, the\n massive tower lifted, seemed for a moment merely to stand there on a\n flaming pillar, then was gone.",
"Of course, the volplas didn't want to return to the lab. There was a\n tiny stream through there and at one point it formed a sizable pool.\n They got into this and splashed their long arms about and they scrubbed\n each other. Then they got out and lay on their backs with the planes\n stretched to dry.\n\n\n I watched them affectionately and wondered about the advisability of\n leaving them out here. Well, it had to be done sometime. Nothing I\n could tell them about surviving would help them as much as a little\n actual surviving. I called the male over to me.\n\n\n He came and squatted, conference fashion, the elbows resting on the\n ground, the wrists crossed at his chest. He spoke first.\n\n\n \"Before the red men came, did we live here?\"\n\n\n \"You lived in places like this all along these mountains. Now there\n are very few of you left. Since you have been staying at my place, you\n naturally have forgotten the ways of living outdoors.\"",
"The fact was that I had something more in the lab than I had bargained\n for. I had aimed only at a gliding mammal a little more efficient than\n the Dusky Glider of Australia, a marsupial. Even in the basically\n mutating colony, there had been a decidedly simian appearance in recent\n years, a long shift from the garbage-dump rats I had started with. But\n my first volplas were shockingly humanoid.\n\n\n They were also much faster than had been their predecessors in\n organizing their nervous activity after the slumbrous explosion of\n growth in the metabolic accelerator. When I returned to the lab, they\n were already moving about on the mattress and the male was trying to\n stand.",
"I saw the planes close momentarily. Then they opened again and the bird\n plummeted to a hillside. The volpla landed gently atop the hill and\n stood looking back at us.\n\n\n The volpla beside me danced up and down shrieking in a language all her\n own. The girl who had raised the birds from the tree volplaned back to\n us, yammering like a bluejay.\nIt was a hero's welcome. He had to walk back, of course—he had no\n way to carry such a load in flight. The girls glided out to meet\n him. Their lavish affection held him up for a time, but eventually he\n strutted in like every human hunter.\n\n\n They were raptly curious about the bird. They poked at it, marveled at\n its feathers and danced about it in an embryonic rite of the hunt. But\n presently the male turned to me.\n\n\n \"We\neat\nthis?\"",
"He flashed high above the stream and hung behind the crest of the hill\n where the doves rested. I heard their mourning from the oak tree. It\n occurred to me they would not leave that safety while the hawklike\n silhouette of the volpla marred the sky so near.\n\n\n I took the girl's hand from my sleeve and spoke to her, pointing as I\n did so. \"He is going to catch a bird. The bird is in that tree. You\n can make the bird fly so that he can catch it. Look here.\" I got up and\n found a stick. \"Can you do this?\"\nI threw the stick up into a tree near us. Then I found her a stick. She\n threw it better than I had expected.\n\n\n \"Good, pretty one. Now run across the stream and up to that tree and\n throw a stick into it.\"",
"I glanced about and presently pointed over a tree. \"From Venus.\" Then\n I realized I had blundered by passing him an English name. \"In your\n language, Pohtah.\"\n\n\n He looked at the planet a long time and murmured, \"Venus. Pohtah.\"\nThat next week, I transported all of the volplas out to the oak woods.\n There were a hundred and seven men, women and children. With no design\n on my part, they tended to segregate into groups consisting of four to\n eight couples together with the current children of the women. Within\n these groups, the adults were promiscuous, but apparently not outside\n the group. The group thus had the appearance of a super-family and the\n males indulged and cared for all the children without reference to\n actual parenthood.",
"She pretended a hopeless sag of her pretty shoulders. \"Wouldn't you\n just settle for a worldly martini?\"\n\n\n \"I will, yes. But first a divine kiss.\"\n\n\n I sipped at my martini and lounged in a terrace chair watching the\n golden evening slant across the beautiful hills of our ranch. I\n dreamed. I would invent a euphonious set of words to match the Basic\n English vocabulary and teach it to them as their language. They would\n have their own crafts and live in small tree houses.\n\n\n I would teach them legends: that they had come from the stars, that\n they had subsequently watched the first red men and then the first\n white men enter these hills.\n\n\n When they were able to take care of themselves, I would turn them\n loose. There would be volpla colonies all up and down the Coast before\n anyone suspected. One day, somebody would see a volpla. The newspapers\n would laugh.",
"She climbed skillfully into the tree beside us and launched herself\n across the stream. She swooped up the opposite hillside and landed\n neatly in the tree where the doves rested.\n\n\n The birds came out of the tree, climbing hard with their graceful\n strokes.\n\n\n I looked back, as did the girl remaining beside me. The soaring volpla\n half closed his planes and started dropping. He became a golden flash\n across the sky.\n\n\n The doves abruptly gave up their hard climbing and fell away with\n swiftly beating wings. I saw one of the male volpla's planes open a\n little. He veered giddily in the new direction and again dropped like a\n molten arrow.\n\n\n The doves separated and began to zigzag down the valley. The volpla did\n something I would not have anticipated—he opened his planes and shot\n lower than the bird he was after, then swept up and intercepted the\n bird's crossward flight.",
"By the end of the week, these super-families were scattered over\n about four square miles of the ranch. They had found a new delicacy,\n sparrows, and hunted them easily as they roosted at night. I had taught\n the volplas to use the fire drill and they were already utilizing the\n local grasses, vines and brush to build marvelously contrived tree\n houses in which the young, and sometimes the adults, slept through\n midday and midnight.\n\n\n The afternoon my family returned home, I had a crew of workmen out\n tearing down the animal rooms and lab building. The caretakers\n had anesthetized all the experimental mutants, and the metabolic\n accelerator and other lab equipment was being dismantled. I wanted\n nothing around that might connect the sudden appearance of the volplas\n with my property. It was already apparent that it would take the\n volplas only a few more weeks to learn their means of survival and\n develop an embryonic culture of their own. Then they could leave my\n ranch and the fun would be on.",
"Except, of course, that the woods were full of volplas. At night, I\n could hear them faintly when I sat out on the terrace. As they passed\n through the dark overhead, they chattered and laughed and sometimes\n moaned in winged love. One night a flight of them soared slowly across\n the face of the full Moon, but I was the only one who noticed.",
"Well, when that screen went dead, there was pandemonium around our\n terrace. Big old Guy was so happy, he was wiping tears from his eyes.\n The women were kissing him and hugging him. Everybody was yelling at\n once.\nI used the metabolic accelerator to cut the volplas' gestation down to\n one week. Then I used it to bring the infants to maturity in one month.\n I had luck right off. Quite by accident, the majority of the early\n infants were females, which sped things up considerably.\n\n\n By the next spring, I had a colony of over a hundred volplas and I shut\n down the accelerator. From now on, they could have babies in their own\n way.",
"Volpla\nBy WYMAN GUIN\n\n\n Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1956.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe only kind of gag worth pulling, I always\n \nmaintained, was a cosmic one—till I learned the\n \nCosmos has a really nasty sense of humor!\nThere were three of them. Dozens of limp little mutants that would have\n sent an academic zoologist into hysterics lay there in the metabolic\n accelerator. But there were three of\nthem\n. My heart took a great\n bound.",
"He was a little the larger and stood twenty-eight inches high. Except\n for the face, chest and belly, they were covered with a soft, almost\n golden down. Where it was bare of this golden fur, the skin was pink.\n On their heads and across the shoulders of the male stood a shock of\n fur as soft as chinchilla. The faces were appealingly humanoid, except\n that the eyes were large and nocturnal. The cranium was in the same\n proportion to the body as it is in the human.\nWhen the male spread his arms, the span was forty-eight inches. I held\n his arms out and tried to tease the spars open. They were not new. The\n spars had been common to the basic colony for years and were the result\n of serial mutations effecting those greatly elongated fifth fingers\n that had first appeared in Nijinsky. No longer jointed like a finger,\n the spar turned backward sharply and ran alongside the wrist almost to\n the elbow. Powerful wrist muscles could snap it outward and forward.\n Suddenly, as I teased the male volpla, this happened.",
"He turned a plaintive face back to me, dipped worriedly and skimmed\n straight for a thorn bush. He banked instinctively, whirled toward us\n in a golden flash and crashed with a bounce to the grass.\n\n\n The two girls reached him before I did and stroked and fussed over him\n so that I could not get near. Suddenly he laughed with a shrill little\n whoop. After that, it was a carnival.\nThey learned quickly and brilliantly. They were not fliers; they were\n gliders and soarers. Before long, they took agilely to the trees and\n launched themselves in beautiful glides for hundreds of feet, banking,\n turning and spiraling to a gentle halt.\n\n\n I laughed out loud with anticipation. Wait till the first pair of these\n was brought before a sheriff! Wait till reporters from the\nChronicle\nmotored out into the hills to witness this!",
"The scene had changed to a desert launching site. There was old Guy\n himself explaining that when he pressed the button before him, the\n hatch on the third stage of the great rocket in the background would\n close and, five minutes later, the ship would fire itself.\n\n\n Guy, on the screen, pushed the button, and I heard Guy, beside me, give\n a sort of little sigh. We watched the hatch slowly close.\n\n\n \"You look real good,\" I said. \"A regular Space Ranger. What are you\n shooting at?\"\n\n\n \"Darling, will you please—be—\nquiet\n?\"",
"The spars added nine inches on each side to his span. As they swept out\n and forward, the lateral skin that had, till now, hung in resting folds\n was tightened in a golden plane that stretched from the tip of the spar\n to his waist and continued four inches wide down his legs to where it\n anchored at the little toe.\n\n\n This was by far the most impressive plane that had appeared till now.\n It was a true gliding plane, perhaps even a soaring one. I felt a\n thrill run along my back.\n\n\n By four o'clock that afternoon, I was feeding them solid food and, with\n the spars closed, they were holding little cups and drinking water from\n them in a most humanlike way. They were active, curious, playful and\n decidedly amorous.",
"Then someone authoritative would find a colony and observe them. He\n would conclude, \"I am convinced that they have a language and speak it\n intelligently.\"\n\n\n The government would issue denials. Reporters would \"expose the truth\"\n and ask, \"Where have these aliens come from?\" The government would\n reluctantly admit the facts. Linguists would observe at close quarters\n and learn the simple volpla language. Then would come the legends.\n\n\n Volpla wisdom would become a cult—and of all forms of comedy, cults, I\n think, are the funniest.\n\"Darling, are you listening to me?\" my wife asked with impatient\n patience.\n\n\n \"What? Sure. Certainly.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't hear a word. You just sit there and grin into space.\" She\n got up and poured me another martini. \"Here, maybe this will sober you\n up.\"\n\n\n I pointed. \"That's probably Guy and Em.\"",
"He said, \"'Ello, 'ello.\"\nAs I walked into the kitchen, giddy with this enormous joke, my wife\n said, \"Guy and Em are flying up for dinner. That rocket of Guy's they\n launched in the desert yesterday was a success. It pulled Guy up to\n Cloud Nine and he wants to celebrate.\"\n\n\n I danced a little jig the way old Nijinsky might do it. \"Oh, great!\n Oh, wonderful! Good old Guy! Everybody's a success. It's great. It's\n wonderful. Success on success!\"\n\n\n I danced into the kitchen table and tipped over a basket of green corn.\n The maid promptly left the kitchen for some other place.\n\n\n My wife just stared at me. \"Have you been drinking the lab alcohol?\"\n\n\n \"I've been drinking the nectar of the gods. My Hera, you're properly\n married to Zeus. I've my own little Greeks descended from Icarus.\"",
"A 'copter sidled over the ridge, then came just above the oak woods\n toward us. Guy set it gently on the landing square and we walked down\n to meet them.\n\n\n I helped Em out and hugged her. Guy jumped out, asking, \"Do you have\n your TV set on?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" I answered. \"Should I?\"\n\n\n \"It's almost time for the broadcast. I was afraid we would miss it.\"\n\n\n \"What broadcast?\"\n\n\n \"From the rocket.\"\n\n\n \"Rocket?\"\n\n\n \"For heaven's sake, darling,\" my wife complained, \"I told you about\n Guy's rocket being a success. The papers are full of it. So are the\n broadcasts.\"\n\n\n As we stepped up on the terrace, she turned to Guy and Em. \"He's out of\n contact today. Thinks he's Zeus.\""
],
[
"I laughed and picked up my plate and sat down in a chair. My wife\n brought me a bowl of salad and I munched the hamburger and watched the\n boy unsaddle the horse and slap it away to the pasture.\n\n\n I thought, \"By God, wouldn't he have a fit if he knew what I have back\n there in that lab! Wouldn't they all!\"\n\n\n The boy carried the saddle up onto the terrace and dropped it. \"Mom,\n I'd like a swim before I eat.\" He started undressing.\n\n\n \"You\nlook\nas though a little water might help,\" she agreed, sitting\n down next to me with her plate.\n\n\n The girl was yanking off her skates. \"And I want one.\"\n\n\n \"All right. But go in the house and put on your swim suit.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nMother\n. Why?\"",
"My wife got out of the car and looked around at the workmen hurrying\n about the disemboweled buildings and she said, \"What on Earth is going\n on here?\"\n\n\n \"I've finished my work and we no longer need the buildings. I'm going\n to write a paper about my results.\"\n\n\n My wife looked at me appraisingly and shook her head. \"I thought you\n meant it. But you really ought to. It would be your first.\"\n\n\n My son asked, \"What happened to the animals?\"\n\n\n \"Turned them over to the university for further study,\" I lied.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said to her, \"you can't say our pop isn't a man of decision.\"\n\n\n Twenty-four hours later, there wasn't a sign of animal experimentation\n on the ranch.",
"She peeked too, as she had for fifteen years, but I blocked her view\n when I slipped out.\n\n\n \"Come on, you old hermit. I have a buffet on the terrace.\"\n\n\n \"Our daughter says I'm eccentric. Wonder how the devil she found out.\"\n\n\n \"From me, of course.\"\n\n\n \"But you love me just the same.\"\n\n\n \"I adore you.\" She stretched on tiptoe and put her arms over my\n shoulders and kissed me.\n\n\n My wife did indeed have a delicious-looking buffet ready on the\n terrace. The maid was just setting down a warmer filled with hot\n hamburgers. I gave the maid a pinch and said, \"Hello, baby.\"\n\n\n My wife looked at me with a puzzled smile. \"What on Earth's got into\n you?\"\n\n\n The maid beat it into the house.",
"\"Well, when my old man was pumping his first fortune out of some oil\n wells in Oklahoma, we lived down there. Outside this little town, I\n found a litter of flat stones that had young black-snakes under each\n slab. I filled a pail with them and took them into town and dumped them\n on the walk in front of the movie just as Theda Bara's matinee let out.\n The best part was that no one had seen me do it. They just couldn't\n understand how so many snakes got there. I learned how great it can be\n to stand around quietly and watch people encounter the surprise that\n you have prepared for them.\"\n\n\n She let go of my ear. \"Is that the kind of fun you're going to have?\"\n\n\n \"Yep.\"\n\n\n She shook her head. \"Did I say you are\neccentric\n?\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"Forgive me if I eat and run, dear. Something in the lab\n can't wait.\"",
"The scene had changed to a desert launching site. There was old Guy\n himself explaining that when he pressed the button before him, the\n hatch on the third stage of the great rocket in the background would\n close and, five minutes later, the ship would fire itself.\n\n\n Guy, on the screen, pushed the button, and I heard Guy, beside me, give\n a sort of little sigh. We watched the hatch slowly close.\n\n\n \"You look real good,\" I said. \"A regular Space Ranger. What are you\n shooting at?\"\n\n\n \"Darling, will you please—be—\nquiet\n?\"",
"I heard my daughter's running feet in the animal rooms and her\n rollerskates banging at her side. I closed the accelerator and walked\n across to the laboratory door. She twisted the knob violently, trying\n to hit a combination that would work.\n\n\n I unlocked the door, held it against her pushing and slipped out so\n that, for all her peering, she could see nothing. I looked down on her\n tolerantly.\n\n\n \"Can't adjust your skates?\" I asked again.\n\n\n \"Daddy, I've tried and tried and I just can't turn this old key tight\n enough.\"\n\n\n I continued to look down on her.\n\n\n \"Well, Dad-dee, I can't!\"\n\n\n \"Tightly enough.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"You can't turn this old key tightly enough.\"",
"He said, \"'Ello, 'ello.\"\nAs I walked into the kitchen, giddy with this enormous joke, my wife\n said, \"Guy and Em are flying up for dinner. That rocket of Guy's they\n launched in the desert yesterday was a success. It pulled Guy up to\n Cloud Nine and he wants to celebrate.\"\n\n\n I danced a little jig the way old Nijinsky might do it. \"Oh, great!\n Oh, wonderful! Good old Guy! Everybody's a success. It's great. It's\n wonderful. Success on success!\"\n\n\n I danced into the kitchen table and tipped over a basket of green corn.\n The maid promptly left the kitchen for some other place.\n\n\n My wife just stared at me. \"Have you been drinking the lab alcohol?\"\n\n\n \"I've been drinking the nectar of the gods. My Hera, you're properly\n married to Zeus. I've my own little Greeks descended from Icarus.\"",
"\"Don't you\nknow\n?\"\n\n\n \"Do you understand the word?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n I lifted her out of the chair and stood her on her skates. \"Tell your\n mother that I retaliate. I say\nshe\nis beautiful.\"\n\n\n She skated awkwardly between the rows of cages from which mutants with\n brown fur and blue fur, too much and too little fur, enormously long\n and ridiculously short arms, stared at her with simian, canine or\n rodent faces. At the door to the outside, she turned perilously and\n waved.",
"\"Because, dear, I said so.\"\n\n\n The boy had already raced across the terrace and jack-knifed into the\n pool. The cool sound of the dive sent the girl scurrying for her suit.\n\n\n I looked at my wife. \"What's the idea?\"\n\n\n \"She's going to be a young woman soon.\"\n\n\n \"Is that any reason for wearing clothes? Look at him. He's a young\nman\nsooner than already.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if you feel that way about it, they'll both have to start\n wearing clothes.\"\n\n\n I gulped the last of my hamburger and washed it down with the beer.\n \"This place is going to hell,\" I complained. \"The old man isn't allowed\n to pinch the maid and the kids can't go naked.\" I leaned toward her and\n smacked her cheek. \"But the food and the old woman are still the best.\"",
"I asked our son to wheel a TV set out onto the terrace while I made\n martinis for our friends. Then we sat down and drank the cocktails and\n the kids had fruit juice and we watched the broadcast Guy had tuned in.\n\n\n Some joker from Cal Tech was explaining diagrams of a multi-stage\n rocket.\n\n\n After a bit, I got up and said, \"I have something out in the lab I want\n to check on.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, wait a minute,\" Guy objected. \"They're about to show the shots of\n the launching.\"\n\n\n My wife gave me a look; you know the kind. I sat down. Then I got up\n and poured myself another martini and freshened Em's up, too. I sat\n down again.",
"I laughed and took his tiny, four-fingered hand. In a sandy spot\n beneath a great tree that overhung the creek, I built a small fire for\n them. This was another marvel, but first I wanted to teach them how to\n clean the bird. I showed them how to spit it and turn it over their\n fire.\n\n\n Later, I shared a small piece of the meat in their feast. They were\n gleeful and greasily amorous during the meal.\n\n\n When I had to leave, it was dark. I warned them to stand watches, keep\n the fire burning low and take to the tree above if anything approached.\n The male walked a little away with me when I left the fire.\n\n\n I said again, \"Promise me you won't leave here until we've made you\n ready for it.\"\n\n\n \"We like it here. We will stay. Tomorrow you bring more of us?\"",
"Again in the laboratory, I entered the metabolic accelerator and\n withdrew the intravenous needles from my first volplas. I carried their\n limp little forms out to a mattress in the lab, two girls and a boy.\n The accelerator had forced them almost to adulthood in less than a\n month. It would be several hours before they would begin to move, to\n learn to feed and play, perhaps to learn to fly.\n\n\n Meanwhile, it was clear that here was no war of dominant mutations.\n Modulating alleles had smoothed the freakish into a beautiful pattern.\n These were no monsters blasted by the dosage of radiation into crippled\n structures. They were lovely, perfect little creatures.\n\n\n My wife tried the door, too, but more subtly, as if casually touching\n the knob while calling.\n\n\n \"Lunch, dear.\"\n\n\n \"Be right there.\"",
"The spars added nine inches on each side to his span. As they swept out\n and forward, the lateral skin that had, till now, hung in resting folds\n was tightened in a golden plane that stretched from the tip of the spar\n to his waist and continued four inches wide down his legs to where it\n anchored at the little toe.\n\n\n This was by far the most impressive plane that had appeared till now.\n It was a true gliding plane, perhaps even a soaring one. I felt a\n thrill run along my back.\n\n\n By four o'clock that afternoon, I was feeding them solid food and, with\n the spars closed, they were holding little cups and drinking water from\n them in a most humanlike way. They were active, curious, playful and\n decidedly amorous.",
"Their humanoid qualities were increasingly apparent. There was a lumbar\n curvature and buttocks. The shoulder girdle and pectoral muscles were\n heavy and out of proportion, of course, yet the females had only one\n pair of breasts. The chin and jaw were humanlike instead of simian and\n the dental equipment was appropriate to this structure. What this\n portended was brought home to me with a shock.\n\n\n I was kneeling on the mattress, cuffing and roughing the male as one\n might a puppy dog, when one of the females playfully climbed up my\n back. I reached around and brought her over my shoulder and sat her\n down. I stroked the soft fur on her head and said, \"Hello, pretty one.\n Hello.\"\n\n\n The male watched me, grinning.",
"She pretended a hopeless sag of her pretty shoulders. \"Wouldn't you\n just settle for a worldly martini?\"\n\n\n \"I will, yes. But first a divine kiss.\"\n\n\n I sipped at my martini and lounged in a terrace chair watching the\n golden evening slant across the beautiful hills of our ranch. I\n dreamed. I would invent a euphonious set of words to match the Basic\n English vocabulary and teach it to them as their language. They would\n have their own crafts and live in small tree houses.\n\n\n I would teach them legends: that they had come from the stars, that\n they had subsequently watched the first red men and then the first\n white men enter these hills.\n\n\n When they were able to take care of themselves, I would turn them\n loose. There would be volpla colonies all up and down the Coast before\n anyone suspected. One day, somebody would see a volpla. The newspapers\n would laugh.",
"He flashed high above the stream and hung behind the crest of the hill\n where the doves rested. I heard their mourning from the oak tree. It\n occurred to me they would not leave that safety while the hawklike\n silhouette of the volpla marred the sky so near.\n\n\n I took the girl's hand from my sleeve and spoke to her, pointing as I\n did so. \"He is going to catch a bird. The bird is in that tree. You\n can make the bird fly so that he can catch it. Look here.\" I got up and\n found a stick. \"Can you do this?\"\nI threw the stick up into a tree near us. Then I found her a stick. She\n threw it better than I had expected.\n\n\n \"Good, pretty one. Now run across the stream and up to that tree and\n throw a stick into it.\"",
"\"Say, what goes with you? You've been grinning like a happy ape ever\n since you came out of the lab.\"\n\n\n \"I told you—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, not that again! You were dangerous at any age.\"\n\n\n I stood up and put my plate aside and bent over her. \"Just the same,\n I'm going to have a new kind of fun.\"\nShe reached up and grabbed my ear. She narrowed her eyes and put a mock\n grimness on her lips.\n\n\n \"It's a joke,\" I assured her. \"I'm going to play a tremendous joke on\n the whole world. I've only had the feeling once before in a small way,\n but I've always....\"\n\n\n She twisted my ear and narrowed her eyes even more. \"Like?\"",
"I had devised the language for them, using Basic English as my model,\n and during the months while every female was busy in the metabolic\n accelerator, I taught the language to the males. They spoke it softly\n in high voices and the eight hundred words didn't seem to tax their\n little skulls a bit.\n\n\n My wife and the kids went down to Santa Barbara for a week and I took\n the opportunity to slip the oldest of the males and his two females out\n of the lab.\n\n\n I put them in the jeep beside me and drove to a secluded little valley\n about a mile back in the ranch.\n\n\n They were all three wide-eyed at the world and jabbered continuously.\n They kept me busy relating their words for \"tree,\" \"rock,\" \"sky\" to the\n objects. They had a little trouble with \"sky.\"",
"Until I had them out in the open country, it had been impossible to\n appreciate fully what lovely little creatures they were. They blended\n perfectly with the California landscape. Occasionally, when they raised\n their arms, the spars would open and spread those glorious planes.\n\n\n Almost two hours went by before the male made it into the air. His\n playful curiosity about the world had been abandoned momentarily and he\n was chasing one of the girls. As usual, she was anxious to be caught\n and stopped abruptly at the bottom of a little knoll.\n\n\n He probably meant to dive for her. But when he spread his arms, the\n spars snapped out and those golden planes sheared into the air. He\n sailed over her in a stunning sweep. Then he rose up and up until he\n hung in the breeze for a long moment, thirty feet above the ground.",
"Of course, the volplas didn't want to return to the lab. There was a\n tiny stream through there and at one point it formed a sizable pool.\n They got into this and splashed their long arms about and they scrubbed\n each other. Then they got out and lay on their backs with the planes\n stretched to dry.\n\n\n I watched them affectionately and wondered about the advisability of\n leaving them out here. Well, it had to be done sometime. Nothing I\n could tell them about surviving would help them as much as a little\n actual surviving. I called the male over to me.\n\n\n He came and squatted, conference fashion, the elbows resting on the\n ground, the wrists crossed at his chest. He spoke first.\n\n\n \"Before the red men came, did we live here?\"\n\n\n \"You lived in places like this all along these mountains. Now there\n are very few of you left. Since you have been staying at my place, you\n naturally have forgotten the ways of living outdoors.\""
],
[
"I laughed and picked up my plate and sat down in a chair. My wife\n brought me a bowl of salad and I munched the hamburger and watched the\n boy unsaddle the horse and slap it away to the pasture.\n\n\n I thought, \"By God, wouldn't he have a fit if he knew what I have back\n there in that lab! Wouldn't they all!\"\n\n\n The boy carried the saddle up onto the terrace and dropped it. \"Mom,\n I'd like a swim before I eat.\" He started undressing.\n\n\n \"You\nlook\nas though a little water might help,\" she agreed, sitting\n down next to me with her plate.\n\n\n The girl was yanking off her skates. \"And I want one.\"\n\n\n \"All right. But go in the house and put on your swim suit.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\nMother\n. Why?\"",
"I heard my daughter's running feet in the animal rooms and her\n rollerskates banging at her side. I closed the accelerator and walked\n across to the laboratory door. She twisted the knob violently, trying\n to hit a combination that would work.\n\n\n I unlocked the door, held it against her pushing and slipped out so\n that, for all her peering, she could see nothing. I looked down on her\n tolerantly.\n\n\n \"Can't adjust your skates?\" I asked again.\n\n\n \"Daddy, I've tried and tried and I just can't turn this old key tight\n enough.\"\n\n\n I continued to look down on her.\n\n\n \"Well, Dad-dee, I can't!\"\n\n\n \"Tightly enough.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"You can't turn this old key tightly enough.\"",
"\"Because, dear, I said so.\"\n\n\n The boy had already raced across the terrace and jack-knifed into the\n pool. The cool sound of the dive sent the girl scurrying for her suit.\n\n\n I looked at my wife. \"What's the idea?\"\n\n\n \"She's going to be a young woman soon.\"\n\n\n \"Is that any reason for wearing clothes? Look at him. He's a young\nman\nsooner than already.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if you feel that way about it, they'll both have to start\n wearing clothes.\"\n\n\n I gulped the last of my hamburger and washed it down with the beer.\n \"This place is going to hell,\" I complained. \"The old man isn't allowed\n to pinch the maid and the kids can't go naked.\" I leaned toward her and\n smacked her cheek. \"But the food and the old woman are still the best.\"",
"\"Well, when my old man was pumping his first fortune out of some oil\n wells in Oklahoma, we lived down there. Outside this little town, I\n found a litter of flat stones that had young black-snakes under each\n slab. I filled a pail with them and took them into town and dumped them\n on the walk in front of the movie just as Theda Bara's matinee let out.\n The best part was that no one had seen me do it. They just couldn't\n understand how so many snakes got there. I learned how great it can be\n to stand around quietly and watch people encounter the surprise that\n you have prepared for them.\"\n\n\n She let go of my ear. \"Is that the kind of fun you're going to have?\"\n\n\n \"Yep.\"\n\n\n She shook her head. \"Did I say you are\neccentric\n?\"\n\n\n I grinned. \"Forgive me if I eat and run, dear. Something in the lab\n can't wait.\"",
"She peeked too, as she had for fifteen years, but I blocked her view\n when I slipped out.\n\n\n \"Come on, you old hermit. I have a buffet on the terrace.\"\n\n\n \"Our daughter says I'm eccentric. Wonder how the devil she found out.\"\n\n\n \"From me, of course.\"\n\n\n \"But you love me just the same.\"\n\n\n \"I adore you.\" She stretched on tiptoe and put her arms over my\n shoulders and kissed me.\n\n\n My wife did indeed have a delicious-looking buffet ready on the\n terrace. The maid was just setting down a warmer filled with hot\n hamburgers. I gave the maid a pinch and said, \"Hello, baby.\"\n\n\n My wife looked at me with a puzzled smile. \"What on Earth's got into\n you?\"\n\n\n The maid beat it into the house.",
"My wife got out of the car and looked around at the workmen hurrying\n about the disemboweled buildings and she said, \"What on Earth is going\n on here?\"\n\n\n \"I've finished my work and we no longer need the buildings. I'm going\n to write a paper about my results.\"\n\n\n My wife looked at me appraisingly and shook her head. \"I thought you\n meant it. But you really ought to. It would be your first.\"\n\n\n My son asked, \"What happened to the animals?\"\n\n\n \"Turned them over to the university for further study,\" I lied.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said to her, \"you can't say our pop isn't a man of decision.\"\n\n\n Twenty-four hours later, there wasn't a sign of animal experimentation\n on the ranch.",
"I laughed and took his tiny, four-fingered hand. In a sandy spot\n beneath a great tree that overhung the creek, I built a small fire for\n them. This was another marvel, but first I wanted to teach them how to\n clean the bird. I showed them how to spit it and turn it over their\n fire.\n\n\n Later, I shared a small piece of the meat in their feast. They were\n gleeful and greasily amorous during the meal.\n\n\n When I had to leave, it was dark. I warned them to stand watches, keep\n the fire burning low and take to the tree above if anything approached.\n The male walked a little away with me when I left the fire.\n\n\n I said again, \"Promise me you won't leave here until we've made you\n ready for it.\"\n\n\n \"We like it here. We will stay. Tomorrow you bring more of us?\"",
"He flashed high above the stream and hung behind the crest of the hill\n where the doves rested. I heard their mourning from the oak tree. It\n occurred to me they would not leave that safety while the hawklike\n silhouette of the volpla marred the sky so near.\n\n\n I took the girl's hand from my sleeve and spoke to her, pointing as I\n did so. \"He is going to catch a bird. The bird is in that tree. You\n can make the bird fly so that he can catch it. Look here.\" I got up and\n found a stick. \"Can you do this?\"\nI threw the stick up into a tree near us. Then I found her a stick. She\n threw it better than I had expected.\n\n\n \"Good, pretty one. Now run across the stream and up to that tree and\n throw a stick into it.\"",
"\"Chances are they won't stay long. Keep your eye on the tree in case\n they leave while you are climbing.\"\nHe ran to a nearby oak and clambered aloft. Presently he launched\n himself, streaked down-valley a way and caught a warm updraft on a\n hillside. In no time, he was up about two hundred feet. He began\n criss-crossing the ridge, working his way back to us.\n\n\n The two girls were watching him intently. They came over to me\n wonderingly, stopping now and then to watch him. When they were\n standing beside me, they said nothing. They shaded their eyes with\n tiny hands and watched him as he passed directly above us at about two\n hundred and fifty feet. One of the girls, with her eyes fast on his\n soaring planes, reached out and grasped my sleeve tightly.",
"The scene had changed to a desert launching site. There was old Guy\n himself explaining that when he pressed the button before him, the\n hatch on the third stage of the great rocket in the background would\n close and, five minutes later, the ship would fire itself.\n\n\n Guy, on the screen, pushed the button, and I heard Guy, beside me, give\n a sort of little sigh. We watched the hatch slowly close.\n\n\n \"You look real good,\" I said. \"A regular Space Ranger. What are you\n shooting at?\"\n\n\n \"Darling, will you please—be—\nquiet\n?\"",
"Volplas at last. Three of them. Yet I had always been so sure I could\n create them that I had been calling them volplas for ten years. No,\n twelve. I glanced across the animal room to where old Nijinsky thrust\n his graying head from a cage. I had called them volplas since the day\n old Nijinsky's elongated arms and his cousin's lateral skin folds had\n given me the idea of a flying mutant.\nWhen Nijinsky saw me looking at him, he started a little tarantella\n about his cage. I smiled with nostalgia when the fifth fingers of his\n hands, four times as long as the others, uncurled as he spun about the\n cage.\nI turned to the fitting of my daughter's other skate.\n\n\n \"Daddy?\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Mother says you are eccentric. Is that true?\"\n\n\n \"I'll speak to her about it.\"",
"He turned a plaintive face back to me, dipped worriedly and skimmed\n straight for a thorn bush. He banked instinctively, whirled toward us\n in a golden flash and crashed with a bounce to the grass.\n\n\n The two girls reached him before I did and stroked and fussed over him\n so that I could not get near. Suddenly he laughed with a shrill little\n whoop. After that, it was a carnival.\nThey learned quickly and brilliantly. They were not fliers; they were\n gliders and soarers. Before long, they took agilely to the trees and\n launched themselves in beautiful glides for hundreds of feet, banking,\n turning and spiraling to a gentle halt.\n\n\n I laughed out loud with anticipation. Wait till the first pair of these\n was brought before a sheriff! Wait till reporters from the\nChronicle\nmotored out into the hills to witness this!",
"\"We can learn again. We want to stay here.\" His little face was so\n solemn and thoughtful that I reached out and stroked the fur on his\n head reassuringly.\n\n\n We both heard the whir of wings overhead. Two mourning doves flew\n across the stream and landed in an oak on the opposite hillside.\n\n\n I pointed. \"There's your food, if you can kill it.\"\n\n\n He looked at me. \"How?\"\n\n\n \"I don't think you can get at them in the tree. You'll have to soar up\n above and catch one of them on the wing when they fly away. Think you\n can get up that high?\"\n\n\n He looked around slowly at the breeze playing in the branches and\n dancing along the hillside grass. It was as if he had been flying a\n thousand years and was bringing antique wisdom to bear. \"I can get up\n there. I can stay for a while. How long will they be in the tree?\"",
"I walked over and put the arm that held the beer bottle around her\n shoulder and chucked her chin up with my other hand. The golden sun\n danced in her blue eyes. I watched that light in her beautiful eyes and\n said, \"But you're the only one I'm dangerous about.\"\n\n\n I kissed her until I heard rollerskates coming across the terrace from\n one direction and a horse galloping toward the terrace from the other\n direction.\n\n\n \"You have lovely lips,\" I whispered.\n\n\n \"Thanks. Yours deserve the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, too.\"\n\n\n Our son reared the new palomino I had just bought him for his\n fourteenth birthday and yelled down, \"Unhand that maiden, Burrhead, or\n I'll give you lead poisoning.\"",
"Until I had them out in the open country, it had been impossible to\n appreciate fully what lovely little creatures they were. They blended\n perfectly with the California landscape. Occasionally, when they raised\n their arms, the spars would open and spread those glorious planes.\n\n\n Almost two hours went by before the male made it into the air. His\n playful curiosity about the world had been abandoned momentarily and he\n was chasing one of the girls. As usual, she was anxious to be caught\n and stopped abruptly at the bottom of a little knoll.\n\n\n He probably meant to dive for her. But when he spread his arms, the\n spars snapped out and those golden planes sheared into the air. He\n sailed over her in a stunning sweep. Then he rose up and up until he\n hung in the breeze for a long moment, thirty feet above the ground.",
"He said, \"'Ello, 'ello.\"\nAs I walked into the kitchen, giddy with this enormous joke, my wife\n said, \"Guy and Em are flying up for dinner. That rocket of Guy's they\n launched in the desert yesterday was a success. It pulled Guy up to\n Cloud Nine and he wants to celebrate.\"\n\n\n I danced a little jig the way old Nijinsky might do it. \"Oh, great!\n Oh, wonderful! Good old Guy! Everybody's a success. It's great. It's\n wonderful. Success on success!\"\n\n\n I danced into the kitchen table and tipped over a basket of green corn.\n The maid promptly left the kitchen for some other place.\n\n\n My wife just stared at me. \"Have you been drinking the lab alcohol?\"\n\n\n \"I've been drinking the nectar of the gods. My Hera, you're properly\n married to Zeus. I've my own little Greeks descended from Icarus.\"",
"\"Don't you\nknow\n?\"\n\n\n \"Do you understand the word?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n I lifted her out of the chair and stood her on her skates. \"Tell your\n mother that I retaliate. I say\nshe\nis beautiful.\"\n\n\n She skated awkwardly between the rows of cages from which mutants with\n brown fur and blue fur, too much and too little fur, enormously long\n and ridiculously short arms, stared at her with simian, canine or\n rodent faces. At the door to the outside, she turned perilously and\n waved.",
"Of course, the volplas didn't want to return to the lab. There was a\n tiny stream through there and at one point it formed a sizable pool.\n They got into this and splashed their long arms about and they scrubbed\n each other. Then they got out and lay on their backs with the planes\n stretched to dry.\n\n\n I watched them affectionately and wondered about the advisability of\n leaving them out here. Well, it had to be done sometime. Nothing I\n could tell them about surviving would help them as much as a little\n actual surviving. I called the male over to me.\n\n\n He came and squatted, conference fashion, the elbows resting on the\n ground, the wrists crossed at his chest. He spoke first.\n\n\n \"Before the red men came, did we live here?\"\n\n\n \"You lived in places like this all along these mountains. Now there\n are very few of you left. Since you have been staying at my place, you\n naturally have forgotten the ways of living outdoors.\"",
"\"Yeah, Dad. Can it, will you? You're always gagging around.\"\nOn the screen, Guy's big dead-earnest face was explaining more about\n the project and suddenly I realized that this was an instrument-bearing\n rocket they hoped to land on the Moon. It would broadcast from there.\n Well, now—say, that\nwould\nbe something! I began to feel a little\n ashamed of the way I had been acting and I reached out and slapped old\n Guy on the shoulder. For just a moment, I thought of telling him about\n my volplas. But only for a moment.\n\n\n A ball of flame appeared at the base of the rocket. Miraculously, the\n massive tower lifted, seemed for a moment merely to stand there on a\n flaming pillar, then was gone.",
"I asked our son to wheel a TV set out onto the terrace while I made\n martinis for our friends. Then we sat down and drank the cocktails and\n the kids had fruit juice and we watched the broadcast Guy had tuned in.\n\n\n Some joker from Cal Tech was explaining diagrams of a multi-stage\n rocket.\n\n\n After a bit, I got up and said, \"I have something out in the lab I want\n to check on.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, wait a minute,\" Guy objected. \"They're about to show the shots of\n the launching.\"\n\n\n My wife gave me a look; you know the kind. I sat down. Then I got up\n and poured myself another martini and freshened Em's up, too. I sat\n down again."
]
] |
train
|
23767
|
[
"Why is Peter on the surface of this planet?",
"What would have happened if the Peace State had not crash landed?",
"What is the most likely explanation for why Kolin's anger is so extreme?",
"Which description is the best representation of Yrtok's role in the story?",
"Why is Kolin so worried about the purple berries?",
"What might lead the reader to think that Ashlew is trying to draw Kolin into a trap?",
"What did Kolin think about becoming a tree himself?",
"How does Kolin feel about Ashlew?"
] |
[
[
"His ship took a long turn and is waiting for supplies.",
"He ended up there because of an accident.",
"His ship is there to pass rations to the locals who are low on food.",
"He is part of an exploratory crew sent to investigate."
],
[
"A different crew would eventually follow a similar path.",
"The locals would not have gotten the rations they needed.",
"A revolution on Haurtoz would never have happened.",
"Yrtok would have remained lonely for the rest of his life."
],
[
"He is known to be irritable and have mood swings.",
"He had been holding in anger and his captain's reaction was the last straw.",
"He was under the effects of the purple berries.",
"His mind is being controlled by Ashlew."
],
[
"She figured out what was wrong with Ammet when he fell.",
"She was the reason they had a quality water supply.",
"She found the purple berries, an important source of food for the stranded crew.",
"Her fall leads Kolin to find Ashlew"
],
[
"He expected them to be a different color.",
"They may have had adverse effects on his crewmates' mental state.",
"The cook thinks that they are dangerous to eat.",
"If they are not edible, they will not have any food to bring back with their report."
],
[
"The way in which he offers to talk to the powerful force about Kolin's history",
"The holes strewn across Ashlew's back.",
"The fact that Ashlew assumed Kolin had been to Earth.",
"The fact that anyone would think a tree would be a good being to change into."
],
[
"He wanted to be an animal, not a plant.",
"He was intrigued but wanted to try something slightly different.",
"He figured it was an effective way to escape his crew.",
"He refused to give up his own body."
],
[
"He does not trust him because he has many features not standard for trees.",
"He is hesitant but drawn to him all the same.",
"He is certain that Ashlew is trying to trick him.",
"He trusts them, as the highest ranking person in this new planet he has met so far."
]
] |
[
2,
3,
2,
4,
2,
1,
2,
2
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[
0,
1,
1,
1,
0,
0,
1,
0
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[
[
"After a few heartbeats, he\n dropped the trash and stared\n at ship and men as if he had\n never seen either. A hail from\n his master moved him.\n\n\n \"Coming, Chief!\" he called\n but, returning at a moderate\n pace, he murmured, \"My\n name is Frazer. I'm a second\n assistant steward. I'll think as\n Unit One.\"\n\n\n Throughout the cloud of\n spores, the mind formerly\n known as Peter Kolin congratulated\n itself upon its\n choice of form.\n\n\n Nearer to the original\n shape of the Life than Ashlew\n got\n , he thought.",
"He considered what form\n might most easily escape the\n notice of search parties and\n still be tough enough to live\n a long time without renewal.\n Another factor slipped into\n his musings: mere hope of escape\n was unsatisfying after\n the outburst that had defined\n his fuming hatred for Haurtoz.\n\n\n I'd better watch myself!\n he\n thought.\n Don't drop diamonds\n to grab at stars!\n\n\n \"What I wish I could do is\n not just get away but get even\n for the way they make us\n live … the whole damn set-up.\n They could just as easy make\n peace with the Earth colonies.\n You know why they\n don't?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" wheezed Ashlew.",
"\"There's just one thing.\n The Life don't like taking\n chances on word about this\n place gettin' around. It sorta\n believes in peace and quiet.\n You might not get back to\n your ship in any form that\n could tell tales.\"\n\n\n \"Listen!\" Kolin blurted\n out. \"I wasn't so much enjoying\n being what I was that\n getting back matters to me!\"\n\n\n \"Don't like your home planet,\n whatever the name was?\"\n\n\n \"Haurtoz. It's a rotten\n place. A Planetary State! You\n have to think and even look\n the way that's standard thirty\n hours a day, asleep or\n awake. You get scared to\n sleep for fear you might\n dream\n treason and they'd find\n out somehow.\"\n\n\n \"Whooeee! Heard about\n them places. Must be tough\n just to live.\"",
"He paused to consider the\n state of the tree named Ashlew,\n half immortal but rooted\n to one spot, unable to float on\n a breeze or through space itself\n on the pressure of light.\n Especially, it was unable to\n insinuate any part of itself\n into the control center of another\n form of life, as a second\n spore was taking charge of\n the body of Chief Slichow at\n that very instant.\n\n\n There are not enough men\n ,\n thought Kolin.\n Some of me\n must drift through the airlock.\n In space, I can spread\n through the air system to the\n command group.\n\n\n Repairs to the\nPeace State\nand the return to Haurtoz\n passed like weeks to some of\n the crew but like brief moments\n in infinity to other\n units. At last, the ship parted\n the air above Headquarters\n City and landed.",
"His well-schooled features\n revealed no trace of the idea—or\n of any other idea. The\n Planetary State of Haurtoz\n had been organized some fifteen\n light-years from old\n Earth, but many of the home\n world's less kindly techniques\n had been employed. Lack of\n complete loyalty to the state\n was likely to result in a siege\n of treatment that left the subject\n suitably \"re-personalized.\"\n Kolin had heard of instances\n wherein mere unenthusiastic\n posture had betrayed\n intentions to harbor\n treasonable thoughts.\n\n\n \"You will scout in five details\n of three persons each,\"\n Chief Slichow said. \"Every\n hour, each detail will send\n one person in to report, and\n he will be replaced by one of\n the five I shall keep here to\n issue rations.\"",
"Kolin permitted himself to\n wonder when anyone might\n get some rest, but assumed a\n mildly willing look. (Too eager\n an attitude could arouse\n suspicion of disguising an improper\n viewpoint.) The maintenance\n of a proper viewpoint\n was a necessity if the Planetary\n State were to survive\n the hostile plots of Earth and\n the latter's decadent colonies.\n That, at least, was the official\n line.\n\n\n Kolin found himself in a\n group with Jak Ammet, a\n third cook, and Eva Yrtok,\n powdered foods storekeeper.\n Since the crew would be eating\n packaged rations during\n repairs, Yrtok could be spared\n to command a scout detail.",
"\"I could tell the Life your\n side of it,\" he hissed. \"Once\n in with us, you can always\n make thinking connections,\n no matter how far away.\n Maybe you could make a deal\n to kill two birds with one\n stone, as they used to say on\n Earth….\"\nChief\n Steward Slichow\n paced up and down beside\n the ration crate turned up to\n serve him as a field desk. He\n scowled in turn, impartially,\n at his watch and at the weary\n stewards of his headquarters\n detail. The latter stumbled\n about, stacking and distributing\n small packets of emergency\n rations.\n\n\n The line of crewmen released\n temporarily from repair\n work was transient as to\n individuals but immutable as\n to length. Slichow muttered\n something profane about disregard\n of orders as he glared\n at the rocky ridges surrounding\n the landing place.",
"By H. B. Fyfe\nTHE TALKATIVE\n\n TREE\nDang vines! Beats all how some plants\n have no manners—but what do you expect,\n when they used to be men!\nAll\n things considered—the\n obscure star, the undetermined\n damage to the\n stellar drive and the way the\n small planet's murky atmosphere\n defied precision scanners—the\n pilot made a reasonably\n good landing. Despite\n sour feelings for the space\n service of Haurtoz, steward\n Peter Kolin had to admit that\n casualties might have been\n far worse.\n\n\n Chief Steward Slichow led\n his little command, less two\n third-class ration keepers\n thought to have been trapped\n in the lower hold, to a point\n two hundred meters from the\n steaming hull of the\nPeace\n State\n. He lined them up as if\n on parade. Kolin made himself\n inconspicuous.",
"\"Since the crew will be on\n emergency watches repairing\n the damage,\" announced the\n Chief in clipped, aggressive\n tones, \"I have volunteered my\n section for preliminary scouting,\n as is suitable. It may be\n useful to discover temporary\n sources in this area of natural\n foods.\"\n\n\n Volunteered HIS section!\n thought Kolin rebelliously.\n\n\n Like the Supreme Director\n of Haurtoz! Being conscripted\n into this idiotic space fleet\n that never fights is bad\n enough without a tin god on\n jets like Slichow!\n\n\n Prudently, he did not express\n this resentment overtly.",
"Suddenly, Kolin found himself\n telling the tree about life\n on Haurtoz, and of the officially\n announced threats to\n the Planetary State's planned\n expansion. He dwelt upon the\n desperation of having no\n place to hide in case of trouble\n with the authorities. A\n multiple system of such\n worlds was agonizing to\n imagine.\nSomehow,\n the oddity of\n talking to a tree wore off.\n Kolin heard opinions spouting\n out which he had prudently\n kept bottled up for\n years.\n\n\n The more he talked and\n stormed and complained, the\n more relaxed he felt.\n\n\n \"If there was ever a fellow\n ready for this planet,\" decided\n the tree named Ashlew,\n \"you're it, Sonny! Hang on\n there while I signal the Life\n by root!\"\n\n\n Kolin sensed a lack of direct\n attention. The rustle\n about him was natural, caused\n by an ordinary breeze. He\n noticed his hands shaking.",
"\"They're scared that without\n talk of war, and scouting\n for Earth fleets that never\n come, people would have time\n to think about the way they\n have to live and who's running\n things in the Planetary\n State. Then the gravy train\n would get blown up—and I\n mean blown up!\"\n\n\n The tree was silent for a\n moment. Kolin felt the\n branches stir meditatively.\n Then Ashlew offered a suggestion.",
"He was so intent upon planning\n greetings with which to\n favor the tardy scouting parties\n that he failed to notice\n the loose cloud drifting over\n the ridge.\n\n\n It was tenuous, almost a\n haze. Close examination\n would have revealed it to be\n made up of myriads of tiny\n spores. They resembled those\n cast forth by one of the\n bushes Kolin's party had\n passed. Along the edges, the\n haze faded raggedly into thin\n air, but the units evidently\n formed a cohesive body. They\n drifted together, approaching\n the men as if taking intelligent\n advantage of the breeze.\n\n\n One of Chief Slichow's\n staggering flunkies, stealing\n a few seconds of relaxation\n on the pretext of dumping an\n armful of light plastic packing,\n wandered into the haze.\n\n\n He froze.",
"\"Where's that? Oh, never\n mind—some little planet. I\n don't bother with them all,\n since I came here and found\n out I could be anything I\n wanted.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, anything\n you wanted?\" asked\n Kolin, testing the firmness of\n a vertical vine.\n\"Just\n what I said,\" continued\n the voice, sounding\n closer in his ear as his\n cheek brushed the ridged bark\n of the tree trunk. \"And, if\n I do have to remind you, it\n would be nicer if you said\n 'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my\n age.\"\n\n\n \"Your age? How old—?\"\n\n\n \"Can't really count it in\n Earth years any more. Lost\n track. I always figured bein'\n a tree was a nice, peaceful\n life; and when I remembered\n how long some of them live,\n that settled it. Sonny, this\n world ain't all it looks like.\"",
"Each scout was issued a\n rocket pistol and a plastic water\n tube. Chief Slichow emphasized\n that the keepers of\n rations could hardly, in an\n emergency, give even the appearance\n of favoring themselves\n in regard to food. They\n would go without. Kolin\n maintained a standard expression\n as the Chief's sharp\n stare measured them.\n\n\n Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced\n girl, led the way with a quiet\n monosyllable. She carried the\n small radio they would be\n permitted to use for messages\n of utmost urgency. Ammet\n followed, and Kolin brought\n up the rear.\nTo\n reach their assigned\n sector, they had to climb\n a forbidding ridge of rock\n within half a kilometer. Only\n a sparse creeper grew along\n their way, its elongated leaves\n shimmering with bronze-green\n reflections against a\n stony surface; but when they\n topped the ridge a thick forest\n was in sight.",
"\"Maybe I'd better stay a\n while,\" he muttered. \"I don't\n know where I am.\"\n\n\n \"You're about fifty feet\n up,\" the sighing voice informed\n him. \"You ought to\n let me tell you how the Life\n helps you change form. You\n don't\n have\n to be a tree.\"\n\n\n \"No?\"\n\n\n \"\n Uh\n -uh! Some of the boys\n that landed with me wanted\n to get around and see things.\n Lots changed to animals or\n birds. One even stayed a man—on\n the outside anyway.\n Most of them have to change\n as the bodies wear out, which\n I don't, and some made bad\n mistakes tryin' to be things\n they saw on other planets.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't want to do\n that, Mr. Ashlew.\"",
"\"Name's Johnny Ashlew.\n Kinda thought you'd start\n with\n what\n I am. Didn't figure\n you'd ever seen a man grown\n into a tree before.\"\n\n\n Kolin looked about, seeing\n little but leaves and fog.\n\n\n \"I have to climb down,\" he\n told himself in a reasonable\n tone. \"It's bad enough that the\n other two passed out without\n me going space happy too.\"\n\n\n \"What's your hurry?\" demanded\n the voice. \"I can talk\n to you just as easy all the way\n down, you know. Airholes in\n my bark—I'm not like an\n Earth tree.\"\n\n\n Kolin examined the bark of\n the crotch in which he sat. It\n did seem to have assorted\n holes and hollows in its rough\n surface.\n\n\n \"I never saw an Earth tree,\"\n he admitted. \"We came from\n Haurtoz.\"",
"\"It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?\"\n asked Kolin, twisting about\n in an effort to see what the\n higher branches might hide.\n\n\n \"Nope. Most everything\n here is run by the Life—that\n is, by the thing that first\n grew big enough to do some\n thinking, and set its roots\n down all over until it had\n control. That's the outskirts\n of it down below.\"\n\n\n \"The other trees? That jungle?\"\n\n\n \"It's more'n a jungle, Sonny.\n When I landed here, along\n with the others from the\nArcturan Spark\n, the planet\n looked pretty empty to me,\n just like it must have to—Watch\n it, there, Boy! If I\n didn't twist that branch over\n in time, you'd be bouncing off\n my roots right now!\"\n\n\n \"Th-thanks!\" grunted Kolin,\n hanging on grimly.",
"\"Don't know what got into\n me, talking that way to a\n tree,\" he muttered. \"If Yrtok\n snapped out of it and heard,\n I'm as good as re-personalized\n right now.\"\n\n\n As he brooded upon the\n sorry choice of arousing a\n search by hiding where he\n was or going back to bluff\n things out, the tree spoke.\n\n\n \"Maybe you're all set, Sonny.\n The Life has been thinkin'\n of learning about other\n worlds. If you can think of a\n safe form to jet off in, you\n might make yourself a deal.\n How'd you like to stay here?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" said Kolin.\n \"The penalty for desertion—\"\n\n\n \"Whoosh! Who'd find you?\n You could be a bird, a tree,\n even a cloud.\"\n\n\n Silenced but doubting, Kolin\n permitted himself to try\n the dream on for size.",
"\"Doggone vine!\" commented\n the windy whisper. \"\n He\n ain't one of my crowd. Landed\n years later in a ship from\n some star towards the center\n of the galaxy. You should\n have seen his looks before\n the Life got in touch with his\n mind and set up a mental field\n to help him change form. He\n looks twice as good as a\n vine!\"\n\n\n \"He's very handy,\" agreed\n Kolin politely. He groped for\n a foothold.\n\n\n \"Well … matter of fact, I\n can't get through to him\n much, even with the Life's\n mental field helping. Guess\n he started living with a different\n way of thinking. It\n burns me. I thought of being\n a tree, and then he came along\n to take advantage of it!\"\n\n\n Kolin braced himself securely\n to stretch tiring muscles.",
"He pulled Yrtok to her\n feet. She pawed at him weakly,\n eyes as vacant as Ammet's.\n When he let go in sudden\n horror, she folded gently to\n the ground. She lay comfortably\n on her side, twitching\n one hand as if to brush something\n away.\n\n\n When she began to smile\n dreamily, Kolin backed away.\nThe\n corners of his mouth\n felt oddly stiff; they had\n involuntarily drawn back to\n expose his clenched teeth. He\n glanced warily about, but\n nothing appeared to threaten\n him.\n\n\n \"It's time to end this scout,\"\n he told himself. \"It's dangerous.\n One good look and I'm\n jetting off! What I need is\n an easy tree to climb.\"\n\n\n He considered the massive\n giant. Soaring thirty or forty\n meters into the thin fog and\n dwarfing other growth, it\n seemed the most promising\n choice."
],
[
"He paused to consider the\n state of the tree named Ashlew,\n half immortal but rooted\n to one spot, unable to float on\n a breeze or through space itself\n on the pressure of light.\n Especially, it was unable to\n insinuate any part of itself\n into the control center of another\n form of life, as a second\n spore was taking charge of\n the body of Chief Slichow at\n that very instant.\n\n\n There are not enough men\n ,\n thought Kolin.\n Some of me\n must drift through the airlock.\n In space, I can spread\n through the air system to the\n command group.\n\n\n Repairs to the\nPeace State\nand the return to Haurtoz\n passed like weeks to some of\n the crew but like brief moments\n in infinity to other\n units. At last, the ship parted\n the air above Headquarters\n City and landed.",
"\"They're scared that without\n talk of war, and scouting\n for Earth fleets that never\n come, people would have time\n to think about the way they\n have to live and who's running\n things in the Planetary\n State. Then the gravy train\n would get blown up—and I\n mean blown up!\"\n\n\n The tree was silent for a\n moment. Kolin felt the\n branches stir meditatively.\n Then Ashlew offered a suggestion.",
"By H. B. Fyfe\nTHE TALKATIVE\n\n TREE\nDang vines! Beats all how some plants\n have no manners—but what do you expect,\n when they used to be men!\nAll\n things considered—the\n obscure star, the undetermined\n damage to the\n stellar drive and the way the\n small planet's murky atmosphere\n defied precision scanners—the\n pilot made a reasonably\n good landing. Despite\n sour feelings for the space\n service of Haurtoz, steward\n Peter Kolin had to admit that\n casualties might have been\n far worse.\n\n\n Chief Steward Slichow led\n his little command, less two\n third-class ration keepers\n thought to have been trapped\n in the lower hold, to a point\n two hundred meters from the\n steaming hull of the\nPeace\n State\n. He lined them up as if\n on parade. Kolin made himself\n inconspicuous.",
"\"There's just one thing.\n The Life don't like taking\n chances on word about this\n place gettin' around. It sorta\n believes in peace and quiet.\n You might not get back to\n your ship in any form that\n could tell tales.\"\n\n\n \"Listen!\" Kolin blurted\n out. \"I wasn't so much enjoying\n being what I was that\n getting back matters to me!\"\n\n\n \"Don't like your home planet,\n whatever the name was?\"\n\n\n \"Haurtoz. It's a rotten\n place. A Planetary State! You\n have to think and even look\n the way that's standard thirty\n hours a day, asleep or\n awake. You get scared to\n sleep for fear you might\n dream\n treason and they'd find\n out somehow.\"\n\n\n \"Whooeee! Heard about\n them places. Must be tough\n just to live.\"",
"He considered what form\n might most easily escape the\n notice of search parties and\n still be tough enough to live\n a long time without renewal.\n Another factor slipped into\n his musings: mere hope of escape\n was unsatisfying after\n the outburst that had defined\n his fuming hatred for Haurtoz.\n\n\n I'd better watch myself!\n he\n thought.\n Don't drop diamonds\n to grab at stars!\n\n\n \"What I wish I could do is\n not just get away but get even\n for the way they make us\n live … the whole damn set-up.\n They could just as easy make\n peace with the Earth colonies.\n You know why they\n don't?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" wheezed Ashlew.",
"\"I could tell the Life your\n side of it,\" he hissed. \"Once\n in with us, you can always\n make thinking connections,\n no matter how far away.\n Maybe you could make a deal\n to kill two birds with one\n stone, as they used to say on\n Earth….\"\nChief\n Steward Slichow\n paced up and down beside\n the ration crate turned up to\n serve him as a field desk. He\n scowled in turn, impartially,\n at his watch and at the weary\n stewards of his headquarters\n detail. The latter stumbled\n about, stacking and distributing\n small packets of emergency\n rations.\n\n\n The line of crewmen released\n temporarily from repair\n work was transient as to\n individuals but immutable as\n to length. Slichow muttered\n something profane about disregard\n of orders as he glared\n at the rocky ridges surrounding\n the landing place.",
"Kolin permitted himself to\n wonder when anyone might\n get some rest, but assumed a\n mildly willing look. (Too eager\n an attitude could arouse\n suspicion of disguising an improper\n viewpoint.) The maintenance\n of a proper viewpoint\n was a necessity if the Planetary\n State were to survive\n the hostile plots of Earth and\n the latter's decadent colonies.\n That, at least, was the official\n line.\n\n\n Kolin found himself in a\n group with Jak Ammet, a\n third cook, and Eva Yrtok,\n powdered foods storekeeper.\n Since the crew would be eating\n packaged rations during\n repairs, Yrtok could be spared\n to command a scout detail.",
"The unit known as Captain\n Theodor Kessel hesitated before\n descending the ramp. He\n surveyed the field, the city\n and the waiting team of inspecting\n officers.\n\n\n \"Could hardly be better,\n could it?\" he chuckled to the\n companion unit called Security\n Officer Tarth.\n\n\n \"Hardly, sir. All ready for\n the liberation of Haurtoz.\"\n\n\n \"Reformation of the Planetary\n State,\" mused the captain,\n smiling dreamily as he\n grasped the handrail. \"And\n then—formation of the Planetary\n Mind!\"\nEND\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis e-text was produced from\n Worlds of If January 1962\n .\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this\n publication was renewed.",
"Suddenly, Kolin found himself\n telling the tree about life\n on Haurtoz, and of the officially\n announced threats to\n the Planetary State's planned\n expansion. He dwelt upon the\n desperation of having no\n place to hide in case of trouble\n with the authorities. A\n multiple system of such\n worlds was agonizing to\n imagine.\nSomehow,\n the oddity of\n talking to a tree wore off.\n Kolin heard opinions spouting\n out which he had prudently\n kept bottled up for\n years.\n\n\n The more he talked and\n stormed and complained, the\n more relaxed he felt.\n\n\n \"If there was ever a fellow\n ready for this planet,\" decided\n the tree named Ashlew,\n \"you're it, Sonny! Hang on\n there while I signal the Life\n by root!\"\n\n\n Kolin sensed a lack of direct\n attention. The rustle\n about him was natural, caused\n by an ordinary breeze. He\n noticed his hands shaking.",
"\"Since the crew will be on\n emergency watches repairing\n the damage,\" announced the\n Chief in clipped, aggressive\n tones, \"I have volunteered my\n section for preliminary scouting,\n as is suitable. It may be\n useful to discover temporary\n sources in this area of natural\n foods.\"\n\n\n Volunteered HIS section!\n thought Kolin rebelliously.\n\n\n Like the Supreme Director\n of Haurtoz! Being conscripted\n into this idiotic space fleet\n that never fights is bad\n enough without a tin god on\n jets like Slichow!\n\n\n Prudently, he did not express\n this resentment overtly.",
"\"Don't know what got into\n me, talking that way to a\n tree,\" he muttered. \"If Yrtok\n snapped out of it and heard,\n I'm as good as re-personalized\n right now.\"\n\n\n As he brooded upon the\n sorry choice of arousing a\n search by hiding where he\n was or going back to bluff\n things out, the tree spoke.\n\n\n \"Maybe you're all set, Sonny.\n The Life has been thinkin'\n of learning about other\n worlds. If you can think of a\n safe form to jet off in, you\n might make yourself a deal.\n How'd you like to stay here?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" said Kolin.\n \"The penalty for desertion—\"\n\n\n \"Whoosh! Who'd find you?\n You could be a bird, a tree,\n even a cloud.\"\n\n\n Silenced but doubting, Kolin\n permitted himself to try\n the dream on for size.",
"His well-schooled features\n revealed no trace of the idea—or\n of any other idea. The\n Planetary State of Haurtoz\n had been organized some fifteen\n light-years from old\n Earth, but many of the home\n world's less kindly techniques\n had been employed. Lack of\n complete loyalty to the state\n was likely to result in a siege\n of treatment that left the subject\n suitably \"re-personalized.\"\n Kolin had heard of instances\n wherein mere unenthusiastic\n posture had betrayed\n intentions to harbor\n treasonable thoughts.\n\n\n \"You will scout in five details\n of three persons each,\"\n Chief Slichow said. \"Every\n hour, each detail will send\n one person in to report, and\n he will be replaced by one of\n the five I shall keep here to\n issue rations.\"",
"\"Maybe I'd better stay a\n while,\" he muttered. \"I don't\n know where I am.\"\n\n\n \"You're about fifty feet\n up,\" the sighing voice informed\n him. \"You ought to\n let me tell you how the Life\n helps you change form. You\n don't\n have\n to be a tree.\"\n\n\n \"No?\"\n\n\n \"\n Uh\n -uh! Some of the boys\n that landed with me wanted\n to get around and see things.\n Lots changed to animals or\n birds. One even stayed a man—on\n the outside anyway.\n Most of them have to change\n as the bodies wear out, which\n I don't, and some made bad\n mistakes tryin' to be things\n they saw on other planets.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't want to do\n that, Mr. Ashlew.\"",
"After a few heartbeats, he\n dropped the trash and stared\n at ship and men as if he had\n never seen either. A hail from\n his master moved him.\n\n\n \"Coming, Chief!\" he called\n but, returning at a moderate\n pace, he murmured, \"My\n name is Frazer. I'm a second\n assistant steward. I'll think as\n Unit One.\"\n\n\n Throughout the cloud of\n spores, the mind formerly\n known as Peter Kolin congratulated\n itself upon its\n choice of form.\n\n\n Nearer to the original\n shape of the Life than Ashlew\n got\n , he thought.",
"\"Where's that? Oh, never\n mind—some little planet. I\n don't bother with them all,\n since I came here and found\n out I could be anything I\n wanted.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, anything\n you wanted?\" asked\n Kolin, testing the firmness of\n a vertical vine.\n\"Just\n what I said,\" continued\n the voice, sounding\n closer in his ear as his\n cheek brushed the ridged bark\n of the tree trunk. \"And, if\n I do have to remind you, it\n would be nicer if you said\n 'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my\n age.\"\n\n\n \"Your age? How old—?\"\n\n\n \"Can't really count it in\n Earth years any more. Lost\n track. I always figured bein'\n a tree was a nice, peaceful\n life; and when I remembered\n how long some of them live,\n that settled it. Sonny, this\n world ain't all it looks like.\"",
"He was so intent upon planning\n greetings with which to\n favor the tardy scouting parties\n that he failed to notice\n the loose cloud drifting over\n the ridge.\n\n\n It was tenuous, almost a\n haze. Close examination\n would have revealed it to be\n made up of myriads of tiny\n spores. They resembled those\n cast forth by one of the\n bushes Kolin's party had\n passed. Along the edges, the\n haze faded raggedly into thin\n air, but the units evidently\n formed a cohesive body. They\n drifted together, approaching\n the men as if taking intelligent\n advantage of the breeze.\n\n\n One of Chief Slichow's\n staggering flunkies, stealing\n a few seconds of relaxation\n on the pretext of dumping an\n armful of light plastic packing,\n wandered into the haze.\n\n\n He froze.",
"\"Doggone vine!\" commented\n the windy whisper. \"\n He\n ain't one of my crowd. Landed\n years later in a ship from\n some star towards the center\n of the galaxy. You should\n have seen his looks before\n the Life got in touch with his\n mind and set up a mental field\n to help him change form. He\n looks twice as good as a\n vine!\"\n\n\n \"He's very handy,\" agreed\n Kolin politely. He groped for\n a foothold.\n\n\n \"Well … matter of fact, I\n can't get through to him\n much, even with the Life's\n mental field helping. Guess\n he started living with a different\n way of thinking. It\n burns me. I thought of being\n a tree, and then he came along\n to take advantage of it!\"\n\n\n Kolin braced himself securely\n to stretch tiring muscles.",
"Each scout was issued a\n rocket pistol and a plastic water\n tube. Chief Slichow emphasized\n that the keepers of\n rations could hardly, in an\n emergency, give even the appearance\n of favoring themselves\n in regard to food. They\n would go without. Kolin\n maintained a standard expression\n as the Chief's sharp\n stare measured them.\n\n\n Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced\n girl, led the way with a quiet\n monosyllable. She carried the\n small radio they would be\n permitted to use for messages\n of utmost urgency. Ammet\n followed, and Kolin brought\n up the rear.\nTo\n reach their assigned\n sector, they had to climb\n a forbidding ridge of rock\n within half a kilometer. Only\n a sparse creeper grew along\n their way, its elongated leaves\n shimmering with bronze-green\n reflections against a\n stony surface; but when they\n topped the ridge a thick forest\n was in sight.",
"He pulled Yrtok to her\n feet. She pawed at him weakly,\n eyes as vacant as Ammet's.\n When he let go in sudden\n horror, she folded gently to\n the ground. She lay comfortably\n on her side, twitching\n one hand as if to brush something\n away.\n\n\n When she began to smile\n dreamily, Kolin backed away.\nThe\n corners of his mouth\n felt oddly stiff; they had\n involuntarily drawn back to\n expose his clenched teeth. He\n glanced warily about, but\n nothing appeared to threaten\n him.\n\n\n \"It's time to end this scout,\"\n he told himself. \"It's dangerous.\n One good look and I'm\n jetting off! What I need is\n an easy tree to climb.\"\n\n\n He considered the massive\n giant. Soaring thirty or forty\n meters into the thin fog and\n dwarfing other growth, it\n seemed the most promising\n choice.",
"\"It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?\"\n asked Kolin, twisting about\n in an effort to see what the\n higher branches might hide.\n\n\n \"Nope. Most everything\n here is run by the Life—that\n is, by the thing that first\n grew big enough to do some\n thinking, and set its roots\n down all over until it had\n control. That's the outskirts\n of it down below.\"\n\n\n \"The other trees? That jungle?\"\n\n\n \"It's more'n a jungle, Sonny.\n When I landed here, along\n with the others from the\nArcturan Spark\n, the planet\n looked pretty empty to me,\n just like it must have to—Watch\n it, there, Boy! If I\n didn't twist that branch over\n in time, you'd be bouncing off\n my roots right now!\"\n\n\n \"Th-thanks!\" grunted Kolin,\n hanging on grimly."
],
[
"He pulled Yrtok to her\n feet. She pawed at him weakly,\n eyes as vacant as Ammet's.\n When he let go in sudden\n horror, she folded gently to\n the ground. She lay comfortably\n on her side, twitching\n one hand as if to brush something\n away.\n\n\n When she began to smile\n dreamily, Kolin backed away.\nThe\n corners of his mouth\n felt oddly stiff; they had\n involuntarily drawn back to\n expose his clenched teeth. He\n glanced warily about, but\n nothing appeared to threaten\n him.\n\n\n \"It's time to end this scout,\"\n he told himself. \"It's dangerous.\n One good look and I'm\n jetting off! What I need is\n an easy tree to climb.\"\n\n\n He considered the massive\n giant. Soaring thirty or forty\n meters into the thin fog and\n dwarfing other growth, it\n seemed the most promising\n choice.",
"\"He must have tasted\n some!\" exclaimed Kolin. \"I'll\n see how he is.\"\n\n\n He ran back to the cook and\n shook him by the shoulder.\n Ammet's head lolled loosely\n to one side. His rather heavy\n features were vacant, lending\n him a doped appearance. Kolin\n straightened up and beckoned\n to Yrtok.\n\n\n For some reason, he had\n trouble attracting her attention.\n Then he noticed that she\n was kneeling.\n\n\n \"Hope she didn't eat some\n stupid thing too!\" he grumbled,\n trotting back.\n\n\n As he reached her, whatever\n Yrtok was examining\n came to life and scooted into\n the underbrush with a flash\n of greenish fur. All Kolin\n saw was that it had several\n legs too many.",
"\"Since the crew will be on\n emergency watches repairing\n the damage,\" announced the\n Chief in clipped, aggressive\n tones, \"I have volunteered my\n section for preliminary scouting,\n as is suitable. It may be\n useful to discover temporary\n sources in this area of natural\n foods.\"\n\n\n Volunteered HIS section!\n thought Kolin rebelliously.\n\n\n Like the Supreme Director\n of Haurtoz! Being conscripted\n into this idiotic space fleet\n that never fights is bad\n enough without a tin god on\n jets like Slichow!\n\n\n Prudently, he did not express\n this resentment overtly.",
"Kolin permitted himself to\n wonder when anyone might\n get some rest, but assumed a\n mildly willing look. (Too eager\n an attitude could arouse\n suspicion of disguising an improper\n viewpoint.) The maintenance\n of a proper viewpoint\n was a necessity if the Planetary\n State were to survive\n the hostile plots of Earth and\n the latter's decadent colonies.\n That, at least, was the official\n line.\n\n\n Kolin found himself in a\n group with Jak Ammet, a\n third cook, and Eva Yrtok,\n powdered foods storekeeper.\n Since the crew would be eating\n packaged rations during\n repairs, Yrtok could be spared\n to command a scout detail.",
"Suddenly, Kolin found himself\n telling the tree about life\n on Haurtoz, and of the officially\n announced threats to\n the Planetary State's planned\n expansion. He dwelt upon the\n desperation of having no\n place to hide in case of trouble\n with the authorities. A\n multiple system of such\n worlds was agonizing to\n imagine.\nSomehow,\n the oddity of\n talking to a tree wore off.\n Kolin heard opinions spouting\n out which he had prudently\n kept bottled up for\n years.\n\n\n The more he talked and\n stormed and complained, the\n more relaxed he felt.\n\n\n \"If there was ever a fellow\n ready for this planet,\" decided\n the tree named Ashlew,\n \"you're it, Sonny! Hang on\n there while I signal the Life\n by root!\"\n\n\n Kolin sensed a lack of direct\n attention. The rustle\n about him was natural, caused\n by an ordinary breeze. He\n noticed his hands shaking.",
"He considered what form\n might most easily escape the\n notice of search parties and\n still be tough enough to live\n a long time without renewal.\n Another factor slipped into\n his musings: mere hope of escape\n was unsatisfying after\n the outburst that had defined\n his fuming hatred for Haurtoz.\n\n\n I'd better watch myself!\n he\n thought.\n Don't drop diamonds\n to grab at stars!\n\n\n \"What I wish I could do is\n not just get away but get even\n for the way they make us\n live … the whole damn set-up.\n They could just as easy make\n peace with the Earth colonies.\n You know why they\n don't?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" wheezed Ashlew.",
"Yrtok and Ammet paused\n momentarily before descending.\n\n\n Kolin shared their sense of\n isolation. They would be out\n of sight of authority and responsible\n for their own actions.\n It was a strange sensation.\n\n\n They marched down into\n the valley at a brisk pace, becoming\n more aware of the\n clouds and atmospheric haze.\n Distant objects seemed\n blurred by the mist, taking on\n a somber, brooding grayness.\n For all Kolin could tell, he\n and the others were isolated\n in a world bounded by the\n rocky ridge behind them and\n a semi-circle of damp trees\n and bushes several hundred\n meters away. He suspected\n that the hills rising mistily\n ahead were part of a continuous\n slope, but could not be\n sure.",
"\"They're scared that without\n talk of war, and scouting\n for Earth fleets that never\n come, people would have time\n to think about the way they\n have to live and who's running\n things in the Planetary\n State. Then the gravy train\n would get blown up—and I\n mean blown up!\"\n\n\n The tree was silent for a\n moment. Kolin felt the\n branches stir meditatively.\n Then Ashlew offered a suggestion.",
"At first, Kolin saw no way,\n but then the network of vines\n clinging to the rugged trunk\n suggested a route. He tried\n his weight gingerly, then began\n to climb.\n\n\n \"I should have brought\n Yrtok's radio,\" he muttered.\n \"Oh, well, I can take it when\n I come down, if she hasn't\n snapped out of her spell by\n then. Funny … I wonder if\n that green thing bit her.\"\n\n\n Footholds were plentiful\n among the interlaced lianas.\n Kolin progressed rapidly.\n When he reached the first\n thick limbs, twice head\n height, he felt safer.\n\n\n Later, at what he hoped was\n the halfway mark, he hooked\n one knee over a branch and\n paused to wipe sweat from his\n eyes. Peering down, he discovered\n the ground to be obscured\n by foliage.",
"He was so intent upon planning\n greetings with which to\n favor the tardy scouting parties\n that he failed to notice\n the loose cloud drifting over\n the ridge.\n\n\n It was tenuous, almost a\n haze. Close examination\n would have revealed it to be\n made up of myriads of tiny\n spores. They resembled those\n cast forth by one of the\n bushes Kolin's party had\n passed. Along the edges, the\n haze faded raggedly into thin\n air, but the units evidently\n formed a cohesive body. They\n drifted together, approaching\n the men as if taking intelligent\n advantage of the breeze.\n\n\n One of Chief Slichow's\n staggering flunkies, stealing\n a few seconds of relaxation\n on the pretext of dumping an\n armful of light plastic packing,\n wandered into the haze.\n\n\n He froze.",
"\"There's just one thing.\n The Life don't like taking\n chances on word about this\n place gettin' around. It sorta\n believes in peace and quiet.\n You might not get back to\n your ship in any form that\n could tell tales.\"\n\n\n \"Listen!\" Kolin blurted\n out. \"I wasn't so much enjoying\n being what I was that\n getting back matters to me!\"\n\n\n \"Don't like your home planet,\n whatever the name was?\"\n\n\n \"Haurtoz. It's a rotten\n place. A Planetary State! You\n have to think and even look\n the way that's standard thirty\n hours a day, asleep or\n awake. You get scared to\n sleep for fear you might\n dream\n treason and they'd find\n out somehow.\"\n\n\n \"Whooeee! Heard about\n them places. Must be tough\n just to live.\"",
"\"Doggone vine!\" commented\n the windy whisper. \"\n He\n ain't one of my crowd. Landed\n years later in a ship from\n some star towards the center\n of the galaxy. You should\n have seen his looks before\n the Life got in touch with his\n mind and set up a mental field\n to help him change form. He\n looks twice as good as a\n vine!\"\n\n\n \"He's very handy,\" agreed\n Kolin politely. He groped for\n a foothold.\n\n\n \"Well … matter of fact, I\n can't get through to him\n much, even with the Life's\n mental field helping. Guess\n he started living with a different\n way of thinking. It\n burns me. I thought of being\n a tree, and then he came along\n to take advantage of it!\"\n\n\n Kolin braced himself securely\n to stretch tiring muscles.",
"Yrtok led the way along\n the most nearly level ground.\n Low creepers became more\n plentiful, interspersed with\n scrubby thickets of tangled,\n spike-armored bushes. Occasionally,\n small flying things\n flickered among the foliage.\n Once, a shrub puffed out an\n enormous cloud of tiny\n spores.\n\n\n \"Be a job to find anything\n edible here,\" grunted Ammet,\n and Kolin agreed.\n\n\n Finally, after a longer hike\n than he had anticipated, they\n approached the edge of the\n deceptively distant forest.\n Yrtok paused to examine some\n purple berries glistening dangerously\n on a low shrub. Kolin\n regarded the trees with\n misgiving.\n\n\n \"Looks as tough to get\n through as a tropical jungle,\"\n he remarked.",
"\"I should have checked\n from down there to see how\n open the top is,\" he mused.\n \"I wonder how the view will\n be from up there?\"\n\n\n \"Depends on what you're\n looking for, Sonny!\" something\n remarked in a soughing wheeze.\n\n\n Kolin, slipping, grabbed\n desperately for the branch.\n His fingers clutched a handful\n of twigs and leaves, which\n just barely supported him until\n he regained a grip with\n the other hand.\n\n\n The branch quivered resentfully\n under him.\n\n\n \"Careful, there!\" whooshed\n the eerie voice. \"It took me\n all summer to grow those!\"\n\n\n Kolin could feel the skin\n crawling along his backbone.\n\n\n \"Who\n are\n you?\" he gasped.\n\n\n The answering sigh of\n laughter gave him a distinct\n chill despite its suggestion of\n amiability.",
"After a few heartbeats, he\n dropped the trash and stared\n at ship and men as if he had\n never seen either. A hail from\n his master moved him.\n\n\n \"Coming, Chief!\" he called\n but, returning at a moderate\n pace, he murmured, \"My\n name is Frazer. I'm a second\n assistant steward. I'll think as\n Unit One.\"\n\n\n Throughout the cloud of\n spores, the mind formerly\n known as Peter Kolin congratulated\n itself upon its\n choice of form.\n\n\n Nearer to the original\n shape of the Life than Ashlew\n got\n , he thought.",
"His well-schooled features\n revealed no trace of the idea—or\n of any other idea. The\n Planetary State of Haurtoz\n had been organized some fifteen\n light-years from old\n Earth, but many of the home\n world's less kindly techniques\n had been employed. Lack of\n complete loyalty to the state\n was likely to result in a siege\n of treatment that left the subject\n suitably \"re-personalized.\"\n Kolin had heard of instances\n wherein mere unenthusiastic\n posture had betrayed\n intentions to harbor\n treasonable thoughts.\n\n\n \"You will scout in five details\n of three persons each,\"\n Chief Slichow said. \"Every\n hour, each detail will send\n one person in to report, and\n he will be replaced by one of\n the five I shall keep here to\n issue rations.\"",
"\"It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?\"\n asked Kolin, twisting about\n in an effort to see what the\n higher branches might hide.\n\n\n \"Nope. Most everything\n here is run by the Life—that\n is, by the thing that first\n grew big enough to do some\n thinking, and set its roots\n down all over until it had\n control. That's the outskirts\n of it down below.\"\n\n\n \"The other trees? That jungle?\"\n\n\n \"It's more'n a jungle, Sonny.\n When I landed here, along\n with the others from the\nArcturan Spark\n, the planet\n looked pretty empty to me,\n just like it must have to—Watch\n it, there, Boy! If I\n didn't twist that branch over\n in time, you'd be bouncing off\n my roots right now!\"\n\n\n \"Th-thanks!\" grunted Kolin,\n hanging on grimly.",
"\"Where's that? Oh, never\n mind—some little planet. I\n don't bother with them all,\n since I came here and found\n out I could be anything I\n wanted.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, anything\n you wanted?\" asked\n Kolin, testing the firmness of\n a vertical vine.\n\"Just\n what I said,\" continued\n the voice, sounding\n closer in his ear as his\n cheek brushed the ridged bark\n of the tree trunk. \"And, if\n I do have to remind you, it\n would be nicer if you said\n 'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my\n age.\"\n\n\n \"Your age? How old—?\"\n\n\n \"Can't really count it in\n Earth years any more. Lost\n track. I always figured bein'\n a tree was a nice, peaceful\n life; and when I remembered\n how long some of them live,\n that settled it. Sonny, this\n world ain't all it looks like.\"",
"He paused to consider the\n state of the tree named Ashlew,\n half immortal but rooted\n to one spot, unable to float on\n a breeze or through space itself\n on the pressure of light.\n Especially, it was unable to\n insinuate any part of itself\n into the control center of another\n form of life, as a second\n spore was taking charge of\n the body of Chief Slichow at\n that very instant.\n\n\n There are not enough men\n ,\n thought Kolin.\n Some of me\n must drift through the airlock.\n In space, I can spread\n through the air system to the\n command group.\n\n\n Repairs to the\nPeace State\nand the return to Haurtoz\n passed like weeks to some of\n the crew but like brief moments\n in infinity to other\n units. At last, the ship parted\n the air above Headquarters\n City and landed.",
"Each scout was issued a\n rocket pistol and a plastic water\n tube. Chief Slichow emphasized\n that the keepers of\n rations could hardly, in an\n emergency, give even the appearance\n of favoring themselves\n in regard to food. They\n would go without. Kolin\n maintained a standard expression\n as the Chief's sharp\n stare measured them.\n\n\n Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced\n girl, led the way with a quiet\n monosyllable. She carried the\n small radio they would be\n permitted to use for messages\n of utmost urgency. Ammet\n followed, and Kolin brought\n up the rear.\nTo\n reach their assigned\n sector, they had to climb\n a forbidding ridge of rock\n within half a kilometer. Only\n a sparse creeper grew along\n their way, its elongated leaves\n shimmering with bronze-green\n reflections against a\n stony surface; but when they\n topped the ridge a thick forest\n was in sight."
],
[
"He pulled Yrtok to her\n feet. She pawed at him weakly,\n eyes as vacant as Ammet's.\n When he let go in sudden\n horror, she folded gently to\n the ground. She lay comfortably\n on her side, twitching\n one hand as if to brush something\n away.\n\n\n When she began to smile\n dreamily, Kolin backed away.\nThe\n corners of his mouth\n felt oddly stiff; they had\n involuntarily drawn back to\n expose his clenched teeth. He\n glanced warily about, but\n nothing appeared to threaten\n him.\n\n\n \"It's time to end this scout,\"\n he told himself. \"It's dangerous.\n One good look and I'm\n jetting off! What I need is\n an easy tree to climb.\"\n\n\n He considered the massive\n giant. Soaring thirty or forty\n meters into the thin fog and\n dwarfing other growth, it\n seemed the most promising\n choice.",
"Yrtok and Ammet paused\n momentarily before descending.\n\n\n Kolin shared their sense of\n isolation. They would be out\n of sight of authority and responsible\n for their own actions.\n It was a strange sensation.\n\n\n They marched down into\n the valley at a brisk pace, becoming\n more aware of the\n clouds and atmospheric haze.\n Distant objects seemed\n blurred by the mist, taking on\n a somber, brooding grayness.\n For all Kolin could tell, he\n and the others were isolated\n in a world bounded by the\n rocky ridge behind them and\n a semi-circle of damp trees\n and bushes several hundred\n meters away. He suspected\n that the hills rising mistily\n ahead were part of a continuous\n slope, but could not be\n sure.",
"Yrtok led the way along\n the most nearly level ground.\n Low creepers became more\n plentiful, interspersed with\n scrubby thickets of tangled,\n spike-armored bushes. Occasionally,\n small flying things\n flickered among the foliage.\n Once, a shrub puffed out an\n enormous cloud of tiny\n spores.\n\n\n \"Be a job to find anything\n edible here,\" grunted Ammet,\n and Kolin agreed.\n\n\n Finally, after a longer hike\n than he had anticipated, they\n approached the edge of the\n deceptively distant forest.\n Yrtok paused to examine some\n purple berries glistening dangerously\n on a low shrub. Kolin\n regarded the trees with\n misgiving.\n\n\n \"Looks as tough to get\n through as a tropical jungle,\"\n he remarked.",
"\"He must have tasted\n some!\" exclaimed Kolin. \"I'll\n see how he is.\"\n\n\n He ran back to the cook and\n shook him by the shoulder.\n Ammet's head lolled loosely\n to one side. His rather heavy\n features were vacant, lending\n him a doped appearance. Kolin\n straightened up and beckoned\n to Yrtok.\n\n\n For some reason, he had\n trouble attracting her attention.\n Then he noticed that she\n was kneeling.\n\n\n \"Hope she didn't eat some\n stupid thing too!\" he grumbled,\n trotting back.\n\n\n As he reached her, whatever\n Yrtok was examining\n came to life and scooted into\n the underbrush with a flash\n of greenish fur. All Kolin\n saw was that it had several\n legs too many.",
"\"I think the stuff puts out\n shoots that grow back into\n the ground to root as they\n spread,\" said the woman.\n \"Maybe we can find a way\n through.\"\n\n\n In two or three minutes,\n they reached the abrupt border\n of the odd-looking trees.\n\n\n Except for one thick\n trunked giant, all of them\n were about the same height.\n They craned their necks to estimate\n the altitude of the\n monster, but the top was hidden\n by the wide spread of\n branches. The depths behind\n it looked dark and impenetrable.\n\n\n \"We'd better explore along\n the edge,\" decided Yrtok.\n \"Ammet, now is the time to\n go back and tell the Chief\n which way we're—\n Ammet!\n \"\n\n\n Kolin looked over his shoulder.\n Fifty meters away, Ammet\n sat beside the bush with\n the purple berries, utterly\n relaxed.",
"Each scout was issued a\n rocket pistol and a plastic water\n tube. Chief Slichow emphasized\n that the keepers of\n rations could hardly, in an\n emergency, give even the appearance\n of favoring themselves\n in regard to food. They\n would go without. Kolin\n maintained a standard expression\n as the Chief's sharp\n stare measured them.\n\n\n Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced\n girl, led the way with a quiet\n monosyllable. She carried the\n small radio they would be\n permitted to use for messages\n of utmost urgency. Ammet\n followed, and Kolin brought\n up the rear.\nTo\n reach their assigned\n sector, they had to climb\n a forbidding ridge of rock\n within half a kilometer. Only\n a sparse creeper grew along\n their way, its elongated leaves\n shimmering with bronze-green\n reflections against a\n stony surface; but when they\n topped the ridge a thick forest\n was in sight.",
"\"Don't know what got into\n me, talking that way to a\n tree,\" he muttered. \"If Yrtok\n snapped out of it and heard,\n I'm as good as re-personalized\n right now.\"\n\n\n As he brooded upon the\n sorry choice of arousing a\n search by hiding where he\n was or going back to bluff\n things out, the tree spoke.\n\n\n \"Maybe you're all set, Sonny.\n The Life has been thinkin'\n of learning about other\n worlds. If you can think of a\n safe form to jet off in, you\n might make yourself a deal.\n How'd you like to stay here?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" said Kolin.\n \"The penalty for desertion—\"\n\n\n \"Whoosh! Who'd find you?\n You could be a bird, a tree,\n even a cloud.\"\n\n\n Silenced but doubting, Kolin\n permitted himself to try\n the dream on for size.",
"At first, Kolin saw no way,\n but then the network of vines\n clinging to the rugged trunk\n suggested a route. He tried\n his weight gingerly, then began\n to climb.\n\n\n \"I should have brought\n Yrtok's radio,\" he muttered.\n \"Oh, well, I can take it when\n I come down, if she hasn't\n snapped out of her spell by\n then. Funny … I wonder if\n that green thing bit her.\"\n\n\n Footholds were plentiful\n among the interlaced lianas.\n Kolin progressed rapidly.\n When he reached the first\n thick limbs, twice head\n height, he felt safer.\n\n\n Later, at what he hoped was\n the halfway mark, he hooked\n one knee over a branch and\n paused to wipe sweat from his\n eyes. Peering down, he discovered\n the ground to be obscured\n by foliage.",
"Kolin permitted himself to\n wonder when anyone might\n get some rest, but assumed a\n mildly willing look. (Too eager\n an attitude could arouse\n suspicion of disguising an improper\n viewpoint.) The maintenance\n of a proper viewpoint\n was a necessity if the Planetary\n State were to survive\n the hostile plots of Earth and\n the latter's decadent colonies.\n That, at least, was the official\n line.\n\n\n Kolin found himself in a\n group with Jak Ammet, a\n third cook, and Eva Yrtok,\n powdered foods storekeeper.\n Since the crew would be eating\n packaged rations during\n repairs, Yrtok could be spared\n to command a scout detail.",
"Suddenly, Kolin found himself\n telling the tree about life\n on Haurtoz, and of the officially\n announced threats to\n the Planetary State's planned\n expansion. He dwelt upon the\n desperation of having no\n place to hide in case of trouble\n with the authorities. A\n multiple system of such\n worlds was agonizing to\n imagine.\nSomehow,\n the oddity of\n talking to a tree wore off.\n Kolin heard opinions spouting\n out which he had prudently\n kept bottled up for\n years.\n\n\n The more he talked and\n stormed and complained, the\n more relaxed he felt.\n\n\n \"If there was ever a fellow\n ready for this planet,\" decided\n the tree named Ashlew,\n \"you're it, Sonny! Hang on\n there while I signal the Life\n by root!\"\n\n\n Kolin sensed a lack of direct\n attention. The rustle\n about him was natural, caused\n by an ordinary breeze. He\n noticed his hands shaking.",
"He was so intent upon planning\n greetings with which to\n favor the tardy scouting parties\n that he failed to notice\n the loose cloud drifting over\n the ridge.\n\n\n It was tenuous, almost a\n haze. Close examination\n would have revealed it to be\n made up of myriads of tiny\n spores. They resembled those\n cast forth by one of the\n bushes Kolin's party had\n passed. Along the edges, the\n haze faded raggedly into thin\n air, but the units evidently\n formed a cohesive body. They\n drifted together, approaching\n the men as if taking intelligent\n advantage of the breeze.\n\n\n One of Chief Slichow's\n staggering flunkies, stealing\n a few seconds of relaxation\n on the pretext of dumping an\n armful of light plastic packing,\n wandered into the haze.\n\n\n He froze.",
"\"Doggone vine!\" commented\n the windy whisper. \"\n He\n ain't one of my crowd. Landed\n years later in a ship from\n some star towards the center\n of the galaxy. You should\n have seen his looks before\n the Life got in touch with his\n mind and set up a mental field\n to help him change form. He\n looks twice as good as a\n vine!\"\n\n\n \"He's very handy,\" agreed\n Kolin politely. He groped for\n a foothold.\n\n\n \"Well … matter of fact, I\n can't get through to him\n much, even with the Life's\n mental field helping. Guess\n he started living with a different\n way of thinking. It\n burns me. I thought of being\n a tree, and then he came along\n to take advantage of it!\"\n\n\n Kolin braced himself securely\n to stretch tiring muscles.",
"He paused to consider the\n state of the tree named Ashlew,\n half immortal but rooted\n to one spot, unable to float on\n a breeze or through space itself\n on the pressure of light.\n Especially, it was unable to\n insinuate any part of itself\n into the control center of another\n form of life, as a second\n spore was taking charge of\n the body of Chief Slichow at\n that very instant.\n\n\n There are not enough men\n ,\n thought Kolin.\n Some of me\n must drift through the airlock.\n In space, I can spread\n through the air system to the\n command group.\n\n\n Repairs to the\nPeace State\nand the return to Haurtoz\n passed like weeks to some of\n the crew but like brief moments\n in infinity to other\n units. At last, the ship parted\n the air above Headquarters\n City and landed.",
"After a few heartbeats, he\n dropped the trash and stared\n at ship and men as if he had\n never seen either. A hail from\n his master moved him.\n\n\n \"Coming, Chief!\" he called\n but, returning at a moderate\n pace, he murmured, \"My\n name is Frazer. I'm a second\n assistant steward. I'll think as\n Unit One.\"\n\n\n Throughout the cloud of\n spores, the mind formerly\n known as Peter Kolin congratulated\n itself upon its\n choice of form.\n\n\n Nearer to the original\n shape of the Life than Ashlew\n got\n , he thought.",
"\"Since the crew will be on\n emergency watches repairing\n the damage,\" announced the\n Chief in clipped, aggressive\n tones, \"I have volunteered my\n section for preliminary scouting,\n as is suitable. It may be\n useful to discover temporary\n sources in this area of natural\n foods.\"\n\n\n Volunteered HIS section!\n thought Kolin rebelliously.\n\n\n Like the Supreme Director\n of Haurtoz! Being conscripted\n into this idiotic space fleet\n that never fights is bad\n enough without a tin god on\n jets like Slichow!\n\n\n Prudently, he did not express\n this resentment overtly.",
"\"It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?\"\n asked Kolin, twisting about\n in an effort to see what the\n higher branches might hide.\n\n\n \"Nope. Most everything\n here is run by the Life—that\n is, by the thing that first\n grew big enough to do some\n thinking, and set its roots\n down all over until it had\n control. That's the outskirts\n of it down below.\"\n\n\n \"The other trees? That jungle?\"\n\n\n \"It's more'n a jungle, Sonny.\n When I landed here, along\n with the others from the\nArcturan Spark\n, the planet\n looked pretty empty to me,\n just like it must have to—Watch\n it, there, Boy! If I\n didn't twist that branch over\n in time, you'd be bouncing off\n my roots right now!\"\n\n\n \"Th-thanks!\" grunted Kolin,\n hanging on grimly.",
"He considered what form\n might most easily escape the\n notice of search parties and\n still be tough enough to live\n a long time without renewal.\n Another factor slipped into\n his musings: mere hope of escape\n was unsatisfying after\n the outburst that had defined\n his fuming hatred for Haurtoz.\n\n\n I'd better watch myself!\n he\n thought.\n Don't drop diamonds\n to grab at stars!\n\n\n \"What I wish I could do is\n not just get away but get even\n for the way they make us\n live … the whole damn set-up.\n They could just as easy make\n peace with the Earth colonies.\n You know why they\n don't?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" wheezed Ashlew.",
"\"I could tell the Life your\n side of it,\" he hissed. \"Once\n in with us, you can always\n make thinking connections,\n no matter how far away.\n Maybe you could make a deal\n to kill two birds with one\n stone, as they used to say on\n Earth….\"\nChief\n Steward Slichow\n paced up and down beside\n the ration crate turned up to\n serve him as a field desk. He\n scowled in turn, impartially,\n at his watch and at the weary\n stewards of his headquarters\n detail. The latter stumbled\n about, stacking and distributing\n small packets of emergency\n rations.\n\n\n The line of crewmen released\n temporarily from repair\n work was transient as to\n individuals but immutable as\n to length. Slichow muttered\n something profane about disregard\n of orders as he glared\n at the rocky ridges surrounding\n the landing place.",
"\"Name's Johnny Ashlew.\n Kinda thought you'd start\n with\n what\n I am. Didn't figure\n you'd ever seen a man grown\n into a tree before.\"\n\n\n Kolin looked about, seeing\n little but leaves and fog.\n\n\n \"I have to climb down,\" he\n told himself in a reasonable\n tone. \"It's bad enough that the\n other two passed out without\n me going space happy too.\"\n\n\n \"What's your hurry?\" demanded\n the voice. \"I can talk\n to you just as easy all the way\n down, you know. Airholes in\n my bark—I'm not like an\n Earth tree.\"\n\n\n Kolin examined the bark of\n the crotch in which he sat. It\n did seem to have assorted\n holes and hollows in its rough\n surface.\n\n\n \"I never saw an Earth tree,\"\n he admitted. \"We came from\n Haurtoz.\"",
"\"I should have checked\n from down there to see how\n open the top is,\" he mused.\n \"I wonder how the view will\n be from up there?\"\n\n\n \"Depends on what you're\n looking for, Sonny!\" something\n remarked in a soughing wheeze.\n\n\n Kolin, slipping, grabbed\n desperately for the branch.\n His fingers clutched a handful\n of twigs and leaves, which\n just barely supported him until\n he regained a grip with\n the other hand.\n\n\n The branch quivered resentfully\n under him.\n\n\n \"Careful, there!\" whooshed\n the eerie voice. \"It took me\n all summer to grow those!\"\n\n\n Kolin could feel the skin\n crawling along his backbone.\n\n\n \"Who\n are\n you?\" he gasped.\n\n\n The answering sigh of\n laughter gave him a distinct\n chill despite its suggestion of\n amiability."
],
[
"\"I think the stuff puts out\n shoots that grow back into\n the ground to root as they\n spread,\" said the woman.\n \"Maybe we can find a way\n through.\"\n\n\n In two or three minutes,\n they reached the abrupt border\n of the odd-looking trees.\n\n\n Except for one thick\n trunked giant, all of them\n were about the same height.\n They craned their necks to estimate\n the altitude of the\n monster, but the top was hidden\n by the wide spread of\n branches. The depths behind\n it looked dark and impenetrable.\n\n\n \"We'd better explore along\n the edge,\" decided Yrtok.\n \"Ammet, now is the time to\n go back and tell the Chief\n which way we're—\n Ammet!\n \"\n\n\n Kolin looked over his shoulder.\n Fifty meters away, Ammet\n sat beside the bush with\n the purple berries, utterly\n relaxed.",
"Yrtok led the way along\n the most nearly level ground.\n Low creepers became more\n plentiful, interspersed with\n scrubby thickets of tangled,\n spike-armored bushes. Occasionally,\n small flying things\n flickered among the foliage.\n Once, a shrub puffed out an\n enormous cloud of tiny\n spores.\n\n\n \"Be a job to find anything\n edible here,\" grunted Ammet,\n and Kolin agreed.\n\n\n Finally, after a longer hike\n than he had anticipated, they\n approached the edge of the\n deceptively distant forest.\n Yrtok paused to examine some\n purple berries glistening dangerously\n on a low shrub. Kolin\n regarded the trees with\n misgiving.\n\n\n \"Looks as tough to get\n through as a tropical jungle,\"\n he remarked.",
"\"He must have tasted\n some!\" exclaimed Kolin. \"I'll\n see how he is.\"\n\n\n He ran back to the cook and\n shook him by the shoulder.\n Ammet's head lolled loosely\n to one side. His rather heavy\n features were vacant, lending\n him a doped appearance. Kolin\n straightened up and beckoned\n to Yrtok.\n\n\n For some reason, he had\n trouble attracting her attention.\n Then he noticed that she\n was kneeling.\n\n\n \"Hope she didn't eat some\n stupid thing too!\" he grumbled,\n trotting back.\n\n\n As he reached her, whatever\n Yrtok was examining\n came to life and scooted into\n the underbrush with a flash\n of greenish fur. All Kolin\n saw was that it had several\n legs too many.",
"He pulled Yrtok to her\n feet. She pawed at him weakly,\n eyes as vacant as Ammet's.\n When he let go in sudden\n horror, she folded gently to\n the ground. She lay comfortably\n on her side, twitching\n one hand as if to brush something\n away.\n\n\n When she began to smile\n dreamily, Kolin backed away.\nThe\n corners of his mouth\n felt oddly stiff; they had\n involuntarily drawn back to\n expose his clenched teeth. He\n glanced warily about, but\n nothing appeared to threaten\n him.\n\n\n \"It's time to end this scout,\"\n he told himself. \"It's dangerous.\n One good look and I'm\n jetting off! What I need is\n an easy tree to climb.\"\n\n\n He considered the massive\n giant. Soaring thirty or forty\n meters into the thin fog and\n dwarfing other growth, it\n seemed the most promising\n choice.",
"Kolin permitted himself to\n wonder when anyone might\n get some rest, but assumed a\n mildly willing look. (Too eager\n an attitude could arouse\n suspicion of disguising an improper\n viewpoint.) The maintenance\n of a proper viewpoint\n was a necessity if the Planetary\n State were to survive\n the hostile plots of Earth and\n the latter's decadent colonies.\n That, at least, was the official\n line.\n\n\n Kolin found himself in a\n group with Jak Ammet, a\n third cook, and Eva Yrtok,\n powdered foods storekeeper.\n Since the crew would be eating\n packaged rations during\n repairs, Yrtok could be spared\n to command a scout detail.",
"He was so intent upon planning\n greetings with which to\n favor the tardy scouting parties\n that he failed to notice\n the loose cloud drifting over\n the ridge.\n\n\n It was tenuous, almost a\n haze. Close examination\n would have revealed it to be\n made up of myriads of tiny\n spores. They resembled those\n cast forth by one of the\n bushes Kolin's party had\n passed. Along the edges, the\n haze faded raggedly into thin\n air, but the units evidently\n formed a cohesive body. They\n drifted together, approaching\n the men as if taking intelligent\n advantage of the breeze.\n\n\n One of Chief Slichow's\n staggering flunkies, stealing\n a few seconds of relaxation\n on the pretext of dumping an\n armful of light plastic packing,\n wandered into the haze.\n\n\n He froze.",
"\"Since the crew will be on\n emergency watches repairing\n the damage,\" announced the\n Chief in clipped, aggressive\n tones, \"I have volunteered my\n section for preliminary scouting,\n as is suitable. It may be\n useful to discover temporary\n sources in this area of natural\n foods.\"\n\n\n Volunteered HIS section!\n thought Kolin rebelliously.\n\n\n Like the Supreme Director\n of Haurtoz! Being conscripted\n into this idiotic space fleet\n that never fights is bad\n enough without a tin god on\n jets like Slichow!\n\n\n Prudently, he did not express\n this resentment overtly.",
"Yrtok and Ammet paused\n momentarily before descending.\n\n\n Kolin shared their sense of\n isolation. They would be out\n of sight of authority and responsible\n for their own actions.\n It was a strange sensation.\n\n\n They marched down into\n the valley at a brisk pace, becoming\n more aware of the\n clouds and atmospheric haze.\n Distant objects seemed\n blurred by the mist, taking on\n a somber, brooding grayness.\n For all Kolin could tell, he\n and the others were isolated\n in a world bounded by the\n rocky ridge behind them and\n a semi-circle of damp trees\n and bushes several hundred\n meters away. He suspected\n that the hills rising mistily\n ahead were part of a continuous\n slope, but could not be\n sure.",
"At first, Kolin saw no way,\n but then the network of vines\n clinging to the rugged trunk\n suggested a route. He tried\n his weight gingerly, then began\n to climb.\n\n\n \"I should have brought\n Yrtok's radio,\" he muttered.\n \"Oh, well, I can take it when\n I come down, if she hasn't\n snapped out of her spell by\n then. Funny … I wonder if\n that green thing bit her.\"\n\n\n Footholds were plentiful\n among the interlaced lianas.\n Kolin progressed rapidly.\n When he reached the first\n thick limbs, twice head\n height, he felt safer.\n\n\n Later, at what he hoped was\n the halfway mark, he hooked\n one knee over a branch and\n paused to wipe sweat from his\n eyes. Peering down, he discovered\n the ground to be obscured\n by foliage.",
"Suddenly, Kolin found himself\n telling the tree about life\n on Haurtoz, and of the officially\n announced threats to\n the Planetary State's planned\n expansion. He dwelt upon the\n desperation of having no\n place to hide in case of trouble\n with the authorities. A\n multiple system of such\n worlds was agonizing to\n imagine.\nSomehow,\n the oddity of\n talking to a tree wore off.\n Kolin heard opinions spouting\n out which he had prudently\n kept bottled up for\n years.\n\n\n The more he talked and\n stormed and complained, the\n more relaxed he felt.\n\n\n \"If there was ever a fellow\n ready for this planet,\" decided\n the tree named Ashlew,\n \"you're it, Sonny! Hang on\n there while I signal the Life\n by root!\"\n\n\n Kolin sensed a lack of direct\n attention. The rustle\n about him was natural, caused\n by an ordinary breeze. He\n noticed his hands shaking.",
"\"They're scared that without\n talk of war, and scouting\n for Earth fleets that never\n come, people would have time\n to think about the way they\n have to live and who's running\n things in the Planetary\n State. Then the gravy train\n would get blown up—and I\n mean blown up!\"\n\n\n The tree was silent for a\n moment. Kolin felt the\n branches stir meditatively.\n Then Ashlew offered a suggestion.",
"Each scout was issued a\n rocket pistol and a plastic water\n tube. Chief Slichow emphasized\n that the keepers of\n rations could hardly, in an\n emergency, give even the appearance\n of favoring themselves\n in regard to food. They\n would go without. Kolin\n maintained a standard expression\n as the Chief's sharp\n stare measured them.\n\n\n Yrtok, a dark, lean-faced\n girl, led the way with a quiet\n monosyllable. She carried the\n small radio they would be\n permitted to use for messages\n of utmost urgency. Ammet\n followed, and Kolin brought\n up the rear.\nTo\n reach their assigned\n sector, they had to climb\n a forbidding ridge of rock\n within half a kilometer. Only\n a sparse creeper grew along\n their way, its elongated leaves\n shimmering with bronze-green\n reflections against a\n stony surface; but when they\n topped the ridge a thick forest\n was in sight.",
"\"I should have checked\n from down there to see how\n open the top is,\" he mused.\n \"I wonder how the view will\n be from up there?\"\n\n\n \"Depends on what you're\n looking for, Sonny!\" something\n remarked in a soughing wheeze.\n\n\n Kolin, slipping, grabbed\n desperately for the branch.\n His fingers clutched a handful\n of twigs and leaves, which\n just barely supported him until\n he regained a grip with\n the other hand.\n\n\n The branch quivered resentfully\n under him.\n\n\n \"Careful, there!\" whooshed\n the eerie voice. \"It took me\n all summer to grow those!\"\n\n\n Kolin could feel the skin\n crawling along his backbone.\n\n\n \"Who\n are\n you?\" he gasped.\n\n\n The answering sigh of\n laughter gave him a distinct\n chill despite its suggestion of\n amiability.",
"\"Doggone vine!\" commented\n the windy whisper. \"\n He\n ain't one of my crowd. Landed\n years later in a ship from\n some star towards the center\n of the galaxy. You should\n have seen his looks before\n the Life got in touch with his\n mind and set up a mental field\n to help him change form. He\n looks twice as good as a\n vine!\"\n\n\n \"He's very handy,\" agreed\n Kolin politely. He groped for\n a foothold.\n\n\n \"Well … matter of fact, I\n can't get through to him\n much, even with the Life's\n mental field helping. Guess\n he started living with a different\n way of thinking. It\n burns me. I thought of being\n a tree, and then he came along\n to take advantage of it!\"\n\n\n Kolin braced himself securely\n to stretch tiring muscles.",
"\"There's just one thing.\n The Life don't like taking\n chances on word about this\n place gettin' around. It sorta\n believes in peace and quiet.\n You might not get back to\n your ship in any form that\n could tell tales.\"\n\n\n \"Listen!\" Kolin blurted\n out. \"I wasn't so much enjoying\n being what I was that\n getting back matters to me!\"\n\n\n \"Don't like your home planet,\n whatever the name was?\"\n\n\n \"Haurtoz. It's a rotten\n place. A Planetary State! You\n have to think and even look\n the way that's standard thirty\n hours a day, asleep or\n awake. You get scared to\n sleep for fear you might\n dream\n treason and they'd find\n out somehow.\"\n\n\n \"Whooeee! Heard about\n them places. Must be tough\n just to live.\"",
"His well-schooled features\n revealed no trace of the idea—or\n of any other idea. The\n Planetary State of Haurtoz\n had been organized some fifteen\n light-years from old\n Earth, but many of the home\n world's less kindly techniques\n had been employed. Lack of\n complete loyalty to the state\n was likely to result in a siege\n of treatment that left the subject\n suitably \"re-personalized.\"\n Kolin had heard of instances\n wherein mere unenthusiastic\n posture had betrayed\n intentions to harbor\n treasonable thoughts.\n\n\n \"You will scout in five details\n of three persons each,\"\n Chief Slichow said. \"Every\n hour, each detail will send\n one person in to report, and\n he will be replaced by one of\n the five I shall keep here to\n issue rations.\"",
"\"It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?\"\n asked Kolin, twisting about\n in an effort to see what the\n higher branches might hide.\n\n\n \"Nope. Most everything\n here is run by the Life—that\n is, by the thing that first\n grew big enough to do some\n thinking, and set its roots\n down all over until it had\n control. That's the outskirts\n of it down below.\"\n\n\n \"The other trees? That jungle?\"\n\n\n \"It's more'n a jungle, Sonny.\n When I landed here, along\n with the others from the\nArcturan Spark\n, the planet\n looked pretty empty to me,\n just like it must have to—Watch\n it, there, Boy! If I\n didn't twist that branch over\n in time, you'd be bouncing off\n my roots right now!\"\n\n\n \"Th-thanks!\" grunted Kolin,\n hanging on grimly.",
"By H. B. Fyfe\nTHE TALKATIVE\n\n TREE\nDang vines! Beats all how some plants\n have no manners—but what do you expect,\n when they used to be men!\nAll\n things considered—the\n obscure star, the undetermined\n damage to the\n stellar drive and the way the\n small planet's murky atmosphere\n defied precision scanners—the\n pilot made a reasonably\n good landing. Despite\n sour feelings for the space\n service of Haurtoz, steward\n Peter Kolin had to admit that\n casualties might have been\n far worse.\n\n\n Chief Steward Slichow led\n his little command, less two\n third-class ration keepers\n thought to have been trapped\n in the lower hold, to a point\n two hundred meters from the\n steaming hull of the\nPeace\n State\n. He lined them up as if\n on parade. Kolin made himself\n inconspicuous.",
"\"Where's that? Oh, never\n mind—some little planet. I\n don't bother with them all,\n since I came here and found\n out I could be anything I\n wanted.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, anything\n you wanted?\" asked\n Kolin, testing the firmness of\n a vertical vine.\n\"Just\n what I said,\" continued\n the voice, sounding\n closer in his ear as his\n cheek brushed the ridged bark\n of the tree trunk. \"And, if\n I do have to remind you, it\n would be nicer if you said\n 'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my\n age.\"\n\n\n \"Your age? How old—?\"\n\n\n \"Can't really count it in\n Earth years any more. Lost\n track. I always figured bein'\n a tree was a nice, peaceful\n life; and when I remembered\n how long some of them live,\n that settled it. Sonny, this\n world ain't all it looks like.\"",
"He paused to consider the\n state of the tree named Ashlew,\n half immortal but rooted\n to one spot, unable to float on\n a breeze or through space itself\n on the pressure of light.\n Especially, it was unable to\n insinuate any part of itself\n into the control center of another\n form of life, as a second\n spore was taking charge of\n the body of Chief Slichow at\n that very instant.\n\n\n There are not enough men\n ,\n thought Kolin.\n Some of me\n must drift through the airlock.\n In space, I can spread\n through the air system to the\n command group.\n\n\n Repairs to the\nPeace State\nand the return to Haurtoz\n passed like weeks to some of\n the crew but like brief moments\n in infinity to other\n units. At last, the ship parted\n the air above Headquarters\n City and landed."
],
[
"\"They're scared that without\n talk of war, and scouting\n for Earth fleets that never\n come, people would have time\n to think about the way they\n have to live and who's running\n things in the Planetary\n State. Then the gravy train\n would get blown up—and I\n mean blown up!\"\n\n\n The tree was silent for a\n moment. Kolin felt the\n branches stir meditatively.\n Then Ashlew offered a suggestion.",
"\"It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?\"\n asked Kolin, twisting about\n in an effort to see what the\n higher branches might hide.\n\n\n \"Nope. Most everything\n here is run by the Life—that\n is, by the thing that first\n grew big enough to do some\n thinking, and set its roots\n down all over until it had\n control. That's the outskirts\n of it down below.\"\n\n\n \"The other trees? That jungle?\"\n\n\n \"It's more'n a jungle, Sonny.\n When I landed here, along\n with the others from the\nArcturan Spark\n, the planet\n looked pretty empty to me,\n just like it must have to—Watch\n it, there, Boy! If I\n didn't twist that branch over\n in time, you'd be bouncing off\n my roots right now!\"\n\n\n \"Th-thanks!\" grunted Kolin,\n hanging on grimly.",
"Suddenly, Kolin found himself\n telling the tree about life\n on Haurtoz, and of the officially\n announced threats to\n the Planetary State's planned\n expansion. He dwelt upon the\n desperation of having no\n place to hide in case of trouble\n with the authorities. A\n multiple system of such\n worlds was agonizing to\n imagine.\nSomehow,\n the oddity of\n talking to a tree wore off.\n Kolin heard opinions spouting\n out which he had prudently\n kept bottled up for\n years.\n\n\n The more he talked and\n stormed and complained, the\n more relaxed he felt.\n\n\n \"If there was ever a fellow\n ready for this planet,\" decided\n the tree named Ashlew,\n \"you're it, Sonny! Hang on\n there while I signal the Life\n by root!\"\n\n\n Kolin sensed a lack of direct\n attention. The rustle\n about him was natural, caused\n by an ordinary breeze. He\n noticed his hands shaking.",
"He paused to consider the\n state of the tree named Ashlew,\n half immortal but rooted\n to one spot, unable to float on\n a breeze or through space itself\n on the pressure of light.\n Especially, it was unable to\n insinuate any part of itself\n into the control center of another\n form of life, as a second\n spore was taking charge of\n the body of Chief Slichow at\n that very instant.\n\n\n There are not enough men\n ,\n thought Kolin.\n Some of me\n must drift through the airlock.\n In space, I can spread\n through the air system to the\n command group.\n\n\n Repairs to the\nPeace State\nand the return to Haurtoz\n passed like weeks to some of\n the crew but like brief moments\n in infinity to other\n units. At last, the ship parted\n the air above Headquarters\n City and landed.",
"He considered what form\n might most easily escape the\n notice of search parties and\n still be tough enough to live\n a long time without renewal.\n Another factor slipped into\n his musings: mere hope of escape\n was unsatisfying after\n the outburst that had defined\n his fuming hatred for Haurtoz.\n\n\n I'd better watch myself!\n he\n thought.\n Don't drop diamonds\n to grab at stars!\n\n\n \"What I wish I could do is\n not just get away but get even\n for the way they make us\n live … the whole damn set-up.\n They could just as easy make\n peace with the Earth colonies.\n You know why they\n don't?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" wheezed Ashlew.",
"\"Where's that? Oh, never\n mind—some little planet. I\n don't bother with them all,\n since I came here and found\n out I could be anything I\n wanted.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, anything\n you wanted?\" asked\n Kolin, testing the firmness of\n a vertical vine.\n\"Just\n what I said,\" continued\n the voice, sounding\n closer in his ear as his\n cheek brushed the ridged bark\n of the tree trunk. \"And, if\n I do have to remind you, it\n would be nicer if you said\n 'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my\n age.\"\n\n\n \"Your age? How old—?\"\n\n\n \"Can't really count it in\n Earth years any more. Lost\n track. I always figured bein'\n a tree was a nice, peaceful\n life; and when I remembered\n how long some of them live,\n that settled it. Sonny, this\n world ain't all it looks like.\"",
"\"Name's Johnny Ashlew.\n Kinda thought you'd start\n with\n what\n I am. Didn't figure\n you'd ever seen a man grown\n into a tree before.\"\n\n\n Kolin looked about, seeing\n little but leaves and fog.\n\n\n \"I have to climb down,\" he\n told himself in a reasonable\n tone. \"It's bad enough that the\n other two passed out without\n me going space happy too.\"\n\n\n \"What's your hurry?\" demanded\n the voice. \"I can talk\n to you just as easy all the way\n down, you know. Airholes in\n my bark—I'm not like an\n Earth tree.\"\n\n\n Kolin examined the bark of\n the crotch in which he sat. It\n did seem to have assorted\n holes and hollows in its rough\n surface.\n\n\n \"I never saw an Earth tree,\"\n he admitted. \"We came from\n Haurtoz.\"",
"He pulled Yrtok to her\n feet. She pawed at him weakly,\n eyes as vacant as Ammet's.\n When he let go in sudden\n horror, she folded gently to\n the ground. She lay comfortably\n on her side, twitching\n one hand as if to brush something\n away.\n\n\n When she began to smile\n dreamily, Kolin backed away.\nThe\n corners of his mouth\n felt oddly stiff; they had\n involuntarily drawn back to\n expose his clenched teeth. He\n glanced warily about, but\n nothing appeared to threaten\n him.\n\n\n \"It's time to end this scout,\"\n he told himself. \"It's dangerous.\n One good look and I'm\n jetting off! What I need is\n an easy tree to climb.\"\n\n\n He considered the massive\n giant. Soaring thirty or forty\n meters into the thin fog and\n dwarfing other growth, it\n seemed the most promising\n choice.",
"Kolin permitted himself to\n wonder when anyone might\n get some rest, but assumed a\n mildly willing look. (Too eager\n an attitude could arouse\n suspicion of disguising an improper\n viewpoint.) The maintenance\n of a proper viewpoint\n was a necessity if the Planetary\n State were to survive\n the hostile plots of Earth and\n the latter's decadent colonies.\n That, at least, was the official\n line.\n\n\n Kolin found himself in a\n group with Jak Ammet, a\n third cook, and Eva Yrtok,\n powdered foods storekeeper.\n Since the crew would be eating\n packaged rations during\n repairs, Yrtok could be spared\n to command a scout detail.",
"Yrtok and Ammet paused\n momentarily before descending.\n\n\n Kolin shared their sense of\n isolation. They would be out\n of sight of authority and responsible\n for their own actions.\n It was a strange sensation.\n\n\n They marched down into\n the valley at a brisk pace, becoming\n more aware of the\n clouds and atmospheric haze.\n Distant objects seemed\n blurred by the mist, taking on\n a somber, brooding grayness.\n For all Kolin could tell, he\n and the others were isolated\n in a world bounded by the\n rocky ridge behind them and\n a semi-circle of damp trees\n and bushes several hundred\n meters away. He suspected\n that the hills rising mistily\n ahead were part of a continuous\n slope, but could not be\n sure.",
"He was so intent upon planning\n greetings with which to\n favor the tardy scouting parties\n that he failed to notice\n the loose cloud drifting over\n the ridge.\n\n\n It was tenuous, almost a\n haze. Close examination\n would have revealed it to be\n made up of myriads of tiny\n spores. They resembled those\n cast forth by one of the\n bushes Kolin's party had\n passed. Along the edges, the\n haze faded raggedly into thin\n air, but the units evidently\n formed a cohesive body. They\n drifted together, approaching\n the men as if taking intelligent\n advantage of the breeze.\n\n\n One of Chief Slichow's\n staggering flunkies, stealing\n a few seconds of relaxation\n on the pretext of dumping an\n armful of light plastic packing,\n wandered into the haze.\n\n\n He froze.",
"At first, Kolin saw no way,\n but then the network of vines\n clinging to the rugged trunk\n suggested a route. He tried\n his weight gingerly, then began\n to climb.\n\n\n \"I should have brought\n Yrtok's radio,\" he muttered.\n \"Oh, well, I can take it when\n I come down, if she hasn't\n snapped out of her spell by\n then. Funny … I wonder if\n that green thing bit her.\"\n\n\n Footholds were plentiful\n among the interlaced lianas.\n Kolin progressed rapidly.\n When he reached the first\n thick limbs, twice head\n height, he felt safer.\n\n\n Later, at what he hoped was\n the halfway mark, he hooked\n one knee over a branch and\n paused to wipe sweat from his\n eyes. Peering down, he discovered\n the ground to be obscured\n by foliage.",
"Yrtok led the way along\n the most nearly level ground.\n Low creepers became more\n plentiful, interspersed with\n scrubby thickets of tangled,\n spike-armored bushes. Occasionally,\n small flying things\n flickered among the foliage.\n Once, a shrub puffed out an\n enormous cloud of tiny\n spores.\n\n\n \"Be a job to find anything\n edible here,\" grunted Ammet,\n and Kolin agreed.\n\n\n Finally, after a longer hike\n than he had anticipated, they\n approached the edge of the\n deceptively distant forest.\n Yrtok paused to examine some\n purple berries glistening dangerously\n on a low shrub. Kolin\n regarded the trees with\n misgiving.\n\n\n \"Looks as tough to get\n through as a tropical jungle,\"\n he remarked.",
"\"I should have checked\n from down there to see how\n open the top is,\" he mused.\n \"I wonder how the view will\n be from up there?\"\n\n\n \"Depends on what you're\n looking for, Sonny!\" something\n remarked in a soughing wheeze.\n\n\n Kolin, slipping, grabbed\n desperately for the branch.\n His fingers clutched a handful\n of twigs and leaves, which\n just barely supported him until\n he regained a grip with\n the other hand.\n\n\n The branch quivered resentfully\n under him.\n\n\n \"Careful, there!\" whooshed\n the eerie voice. \"It took me\n all summer to grow those!\"\n\n\n Kolin could feel the skin\n crawling along his backbone.\n\n\n \"Who\n are\n you?\" he gasped.\n\n\n The answering sigh of\n laughter gave him a distinct\n chill despite its suggestion of\n amiability.",
"After a few heartbeats, he\n dropped the trash and stared\n at ship and men as if he had\n never seen either. A hail from\n his master moved him.\n\n\n \"Coming, Chief!\" he called\n but, returning at a moderate\n pace, he murmured, \"My\n name is Frazer. I'm a second\n assistant steward. I'll think as\n Unit One.\"\n\n\n Throughout the cloud of\n spores, the mind formerly\n known as Peter Kolin congratulated\n itself upon its\n choice of form.\n\n\n Nearer to the original\n shape of the Life than Ashlew\n got\n , he thought.",
"\"He must have tasted\n some!\" exclaimed Kolin. \"I'll\n see how he is.\"\n\n\n He ran back to the cook and\n shook him by the shoulder.\n Ammet's head lolled loosely\n to one side. His rather heavy\n features were vacant, lending\n him a doped appearance. Kolin\n straightened up and beckoned\n to Yrtok.\n\n\n For some reason, he had\n trouble attracting her attention.\n Then he noticed that she\n was kneeling.\n\n\n \"Hope she didn't eat some\n stupid thing too!\" he grumbled,\n trotting back.\n\n\n As he reached her, whatever\n Yrtok was examining\n came to life and scooted into\n the underbrush with a flash\n of greenish fur. All Kolin\n saw was that it had several\n legs too many.",
"\"I think the stuff puts out\n shoots that grow back into\n the ground to root as they\n spread,\" said the woman.\n \"Maybe we can find a way\n through.\"\n\n\n In two or three minutes,\n they reached the abrupt border\n of the odd-looking trees.\n\n\n Except for one thick\n trunked giant, all of them\n were about the same height.\n They craned their necks to estimate\n the altitude of the\n monster, but the top was hidden\n by the wide spread of\n branches. The depths behind\n it looked dark and impenetrable.\n\n\n \"We'd better explore along\n the edge,\" decided Yrtok.\n \"Ammet, now is the time to\n go back and tell the Chief\n which way we're—\n Ammet!\n \"\n\n\n Kolin looked over his shoulder.\n Fifty meters away, Ammet\n sat beside the bush with\n the purple berries, utterly\n relaxed.",
"His well-schooled features\n revealed no trace of the idea—or\n of any other idea. The\n Planetary State of Haurtoz\n had been organized some fifteen\n light-years from old\n Earth, but many of the home\n world's less kindly techniques\n had been employed. Lack of\n complete loyalty to the state\n was likely to result in a siege\n of treatment that left the subject\n suitably \"re-personalized.\"\n Kolin had heard of instances\n wherein mere unenthusiastic\n posture had betrayed\n intentions to harbor\n treasonable thoughts.\n\n\n \"You will scout in five details\n of three persons each,\"\n Chief Slichow said. \"Every\n hour, each detail will send\n one person in to report, and\n he will be replaced by one of\n the five I shall keep here to\n issue rations.\"",
"\"Doggone vine!\" commented\n the windy whisper. \"\n He\n ain't one of my crowd. Landed\n years later in a ship from\n some star towards the center\n of the galaxy. You should\n have seen his looks before\n the Life got in touch with his\n mind and set up a mental field\n to help him change form. He\n looks twice as good as a\n vine!\"\n\n\n \"He's very handy,\" agreed\n Kolin politely. He groped for\n a foothold.\n\n\n \"Well … matter of fact, I\n can't get through to him\n much, even with the Life's\n mental field helping. Guess\n he started living with a different\n way of thinking. It\n burns me. I thought of being\n a tree, and then he came along\n to take advantage of it!\"\n\n\n Kolin braced himself securely\n to stretch tiring muscles.",
"\"There's just one thing.\n The Life don't like taking\n chances on word about this\n place gettin' around. It sorta\n believes in peace and quiet.\n You might not get back to\n your ship in any form that\n could tell tales.\"\n\n\n \"Listen!\" Kolin blurted\n out. \"I wasn't so much enjoying\n being what I was that\n getting back matters to me!\"\n\n\n \"Don't like your home planet,\n whatever the name was?\"\n\n\n \"Haurtoz. It's a rotten\n place. A Planetary State! You\n have to think and even look\n the way that's standard thirty\n hours a day, asleep or\n awake. You get scared to\n sleep for fear you might\n dream\n treason and they'd find\n out somehow.\"\n\n\n \"Whooeee! Heard about\n them places. Must be tough\n just to live.\""
],
[
"Suddenly, Kolin found himself\n telling the tree about life\n on Haurtoz, and of the officially\n announced threats to\n the Planetary State's planned\n expansion. He dwelt upon the\n desperation of having no\n place to hide in case of trouble\n with the authorities. A\n multiple system of such\n worlds was agonizing to\n imagine.\nSomehow,\n the oddity of\n talking to a tree wore off.\n Kolin heard opinions spouting\n out which he had prudently\n kept bottled up for\n years.\n\n\n The more he talked and\n stormed and complained, the\n more relaxed he felt.\n\n\n \"If there was ever a fellow\n ready for this planet,\" decided\n the tree named Ashlew,\n \"you're it, Sonny! Hang on\n there while I signal the Life\n by root!\"\n\n\n Kolin sensed a lack of direct\n attention. The rustle\n about him was natural, caused\n by an ordinary breeze. He\n noticed his hands shaking.",
"\"Don't know what got into\n me, talking that way to a\n tree,\" he muttered. \"If Yrtok\n snapped out of it and heard,\n I'm as good as re-personalized\n right now.\"\n\n\n As he brooded upon the\n sorry choice of arousing a\n search by hiding where he\n was or going back to bluff\n things out, the tree spoke.\n\n\n \"Maybe you're all set, Sonny.\n The Life has been thinkin'\n of learning about other\n worlds. If you can think of a\n safe form to jet off in, you\n might make yourself a deal.\n How'd you like to stay here?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" said Kolin.\n \"The penalty for desertion—\"\n\n\n \"Whoosh! Who'd find you?\n You could be a bird, a tree,\n even a cloud.\"\n\n\n Silenced but doubting, Kolin\n permitted himself to try\n the dream on for size.",
"He pulled Yrtok to her\n feet. She pawed at him weakly,\n eyes as vacant as Ammet's.\n When he let go in sudden\n horror, she folded gently to\n the ground. She lay comfortably\n on her side, twitching\n one hand as if to brush something\n away.\n\n\n When she began to smile\n dreamily, Kolin backed away.\nThe\n corners of his mouth\n felt oddly stiff; they had\n involuntarily drawn back to\n expose his clenched teeth. He\n glanced warily about, but\n nothing appeared to threaten\n him.\n\n\n \"It's time to end this scout,\"\n he told himself. \"It's dangerous.\n One good look and I'm\n jetting off! What I need is\n an easy tree to climb.\"\n\n\n He considered the massive\n giant. Soaring thirty or forty\n meters into the thin fog and\n dwarfing other growth, it\n seemed the most promising\n choice.",
"\"I should have checked\n from down there to see how\n open the top is,\" he mused.\n \"I wonder how the view will\n be from up there?\"\n\n\n \"Depends on what you're\n looking for, Sonny!\" something\n remarked in a soughing wheeze.\n\n\n Kolin, slipping, grabbed\n desperately for the branch.\n His fingers clutched a handful\n of twigs and leaves, which\n just barely supported him until\n he regained a grip with\n the other hand.\n\n\n The branch quivered resentfully\n under him.\n\n\n \"Careful, there!\" whooshed\n the eerie voice. \"It took me\n all summer to grow those!\"\n\n\n Kolin could feel the skin\n crawling along his backbone.\n\n\n \"Who\n are\n you?\" he gasped.\n\n\n The answering sigh of\n laughter gave him a distinct\n chill despite its suggestion of\n amiability.",
"\"Doggone vine!\" commented\n the windy whisper. \"\n He\n ain't one of my crowd. Landed\n years later in a ship from\n some star towards the center\n of the galaxy. You should\n have seen his looks before\n the Life got in touch with his\n mind and set up a mental field\n to help him change form. He\n looks twice as good as a\n vine!\"\n\n\n \"He's very handy,\" agreed\n Kolin politely. He groped for\n a foothold.\n\n\n \"Well … matter of fact, I\n can't get through to him\n much, even with the Life's\n mental field helping. Guess\n he started living with a different\n way of thinking. It\n burns me. I thought of being\n a tree, and then he came along\n to take advantage of it!\"\n\n\n Kolin braced himself securely\n to stretch tiring muscles.",
"At first, Kolin saw no way,\n but then the network of vines\n clinging to the rugged trunk\n suggested a route. He tried\n his weight gingerly, then began\n to climb.\n\n\n \"I should have brought\n Yrtok's radio,\" he muttered.\n \"Oh, well, I can take it when\n I come down, if she hasn't\n snapped out of her spell by\n then. Funny … I wonder if\n that green thing bit her.\"\n\n\n Footholds were plentiful\n among the interlaced lianas.\n Kolin progressed rapidly.\n When he reached the first\n thick limbs, twice head\n height, he felt safer.\n\n\n Later, at what he hoped was\n the halfway mark, he hooked\n one knee over a branch and\n paused to wipe sweat from his\n eyes. Peering down, he discovered\n the ground to be obscured\n by foliage.",
"\"Name's Johnny Ashlew.\n Kinda thought you'd start\n with\n what\n I am. Didn't figure\n you'd ever seen a man grown\n into a tree before.\"\n\n\n Kolin looked about, seeing\n little but leaves and fog.\n\n\n \"I have to climb down,\" he\n told himself in a reasonable\n tone. \"It's bad enough that the\n other two passed out without\n me going space happy too.\"\n\n\n \"What's your hurry?\" demanded\n the voice. \"I can talk\n to you just as easy all the way\n down, you know. Airholes in\n my bark—I'm not like an\n Earth tree.\"\n\n\n Kolin examined the bark of\n the crotch in which he sat. It\n did seem to have assorted\n holes and hollows in its rough\n surface.\n\n\n \"I never saw an Earth tree,\"\n he admitted. \"We came from\n Haurtoz.\"",
"\"It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?\"\n asked Kolin, twisting about\n in an effort to see what the\n higher branches might hide.\n\n\n \"Nope. Most everything\n here is run by the Life—that\n is, by the thing that first\n grew big enough to do some\n thinking, and set its roots\n down all over until it had\n control. That's the outskirts\n of it down below.\"\n\n\n \"The other trees? That jungle?\"\n\n\n \"It's more'n a jungle, Sonny.\n When I landed here, along\n with the others from the\nArcturan Spark\n, the planet\n looked pretty empty to me,\n just like it must have to—Watch\n it, there, Boy! If I\n didn't twist that branch over\n in time, you'd be bouncing off\n my roots right now!\"\n\n\n \"Th-thanks!\" grunted Kolin,\n hanging on grimly.",
"\"Where's that? Oh, never\n mind—some little planet. I\n don't bother with them all,\n since I came here and found\n out I could be anything I\n wanted.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, anything\n you wanted?\" asked\n Kolin, testing the firmness of\n a vertical vine.\n\"Just\n what I said,\" continued\n the voice, sounding\n closer in his ear as his\n cheek brushed the ridged bark\n of the tree trunk. \"And, if\n I do have to remind you, it\n would be nicer if you said\n 'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my\n age.\"\n\n\n \"Your age? How old—?\"\n\n\n \"Can't really count it in\n Earth years any more. Lost\n track. I always figured bein'\n a tree was a nice, peaceful\n life; and when I remembered\n how long some of them live,\n that settled it. Sonny, this\n world ain't all it looks like.\"",
"He paused to consider the\n state of the tree named Ashlew,\n half immortal but rooted\n to one spot, unable to float on\n a breeze or through space itself\n on the pressure of light.\n Especially, it was unable to\n insinuate any part of itself\n into the control center of another\n form of life, as a second\n spore was taking charge of\n the body of Chief Slichow at\n that very instant.\n\n\n There are not enough men\n ,\n thought Kolin.\n Some of me\n must drift through the airlock.\n In space, I can spread\n through the air system to the\n command group.\n\n\n Repairs to the\nPeace State\nand the return to Haurtoz\n passed like weeks to some of\n the crew but like brief moments\n in infinity to other\n units. At last, the ship parted\n the air above Headquarters\n City and landed.",
"\"They're scared that without\n talk of war, and scouting\n for Earth fleets that never\n come, people would have time\n to think about the way they\n have to live and who's running\n things in the Planetary\n State. Then the gravy train\n would get blown up—and I\n mean blown up!\"\n\n\n The tree was silent for a\n moment. Kolin felt the\n branches stir meditatively.\n Then Ashlew offered a suggestion.",
"\"I think the stuff puts out\n shoots that grow back into\n the ground to root as they\n spread,\" said the woman.\n \"Maybe we can find a way\n through.\"\n\n\n In two or three minutes,\n they reached the abrupt border\n of the odd-looking trees.\n\n\n Except for one thick\n trunked giant, all of them\n were about the same height.\n They craned their necks to estimate\n the altitude of the\n monster, but the top was hidden\n by the wide spread of\n branches. The depths behind\n it looked dark and impenetrable.\n\n\n \"We'd better explore along\n the edge,\" decided Yrtok.\n \"Ammet, now is the time to\n go back and tell the Chief\n which way we're—\n Ammet!\n \"\n\n\n Kolin looked over his shoulder.\n Fifty meters away, Ammet\n sat beside the bush with\n the purple berries, utterly\n relaxed.",
"\"He must have tasted\n some!\" exclaimed Kolin. \"I'll\n see how he is.\"\n\n\n He ran back to the cook and\n shook him by the shoulder.\n Ammet's head lolled loosely\n to one side. His rather heavy\n features were vacant, lending\n him a doped appearance. Kolin\n straightened up and beckoned\n to Yrtok.\n\n\n For some reason, he had\n trouble attracting her attention.\n Then he noticed that she\n was kneeling.\n\n\n \"Hope she didn't eat some\n stupid thing too!\" he grumbled,\n trotting back.\n\n\n As he reached her, whatever\n Yrtok was examining\n came to life and scooted into\n the underbrush with a flash\n of greenish fur. All Kolin\n saw was that it had several\n legs too many.",
"\"Maybe I'd better stay a\n while,\" he muttered. \"I don't\n know where I am.\"\n\n\n \"You're about fifty feet\n up,\" the sighing voice informed\n him. \"You ought to\n let me tell you how the Life\n helps you change form. You\n don't\n have\n to be a tree.\"\n\n\n \"No?\"\n\n\n \"\n Uh\n -uh! Some of the boys\n that landed with me wanted\n to get around and see things.\n Lots changed to animals or\n birds. One even stayed a man—on\n the outside anyway.\n Most of them have to change\n as the bodies wear out, which\n I don't, and some made bad\n mistakes tryin' to be things\n they saw on other planets.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't want to do\n that, Mr. Ashlew.\"",
"Yrtok led the way along\n the most nearly level ground.\n Low creepers became more\n plentiful, interspersed with\n scrubby thickets of tangled,\n spike-armored bushes. Occasionally,\n small flying things\n flickered among the foliage.\n Once, a shrub puffed out an\n enormous cloud of tiny\n spores.\n\n\n \"Be a job to find anything\n edible here,\" grunted Ammet,\n and Kolin agreed.\n\n\n Finally, after a longer hike\n than he had anticipated, they\n approached the edge of the\n deceptively distant forest.\n Yrtok paused to examine some\n purple berries glistening dangerously\n on a low shrub. Kolin\n regarded the trees with\n misgiving.\n\n\n \"Looks as tough to get\n through as a tropical jungle,\"\n he remarked.",
"Yrtok and Ammet paused\n momentarily before descending.\n\n\n Kolin shared their sense of\n isolation. They would be out\n of sight of authority and responsible\n for their own actions.\n It was a strange sensation.\n\n\n They marched down into\n the valley at a brisk pace, becoming\n more aware of the\n clouds and atmospheric haze.\n Distant objects seemed\n blurred by the mist, taking on\n a somber, brooding grayness.\n For all Kolin could tell, he\n and the others were isolated\n in a world bounded by the\n rocky ridge behind them and\n a semi-circle of damp trees\n and bushes several hundred\n meters away. He suspected\n that the hills rising mistily\n ahead were part of a continuous\n slope, but could not be\n sure.",
"After a few heartbeats, he\n dropped the trash and stared\n at ship and men as if he had\n never seen either. A hail from\n his master moved him.\n\n\n \"Coming, Chief!\" he called\n but, returning at a moderate\n pace, he murmured, \"My\n name is Frazer. I'm a second\n assistant steward. I'll think as\n Unit One.\"\n\n\n Throughout the cloud of\n spores, the mind formerly\n known as Peter Kolin congratulated\n itself upon its\n choice of form.\n\n\n Nearer to the original\n shape of the Life than Ashlew\n got\n , he thought.",
"\"There's just one thing.\n The Life don't like taking\n chances on word about this\n place gettin' around. It sorta\n believes in peace and quiet.\n You might not get back to\n your ship in any form that\n could tell tales.\"\n\n\n \"Listen!\" Kolin blurted\n out. \"I wasn't so much enjoying\n being what I was that\n getting back matters to me!\"\n\n\n \"Don't like your home planet,\n whatever the name was?\"\n\n\n \"Haurtoz. It's a rotten\n place. A Planetary State! You\n have to think and even look\n the way that's standard thirty\n hours a day, asleep or\n awake. You get scared to\n sleep for fear you might\n dream\n treason and they'd find\n out somehow.\"\n\n\n \"Whooeee! Heard about\n them places. Must be tough\n just to live.\"",
"By H. B. Fyfe\nTHE TALKATIVE\n\n TREE\nDang vines! Beats all how some plants\n have no manners—but what do you expect,\n when they used to be men!\nAll\n things considered—the\n obscure star, the undetermined\n damage to the\n stellar drive and the way the\n small planet's murky atmosphere\n defied precision scanners—the\n pilot made a reasonably\n good landing. Despite\n sour feelings for the space\n service of Haurtoz, steward\n Peter Kolin had to admit that\n casualties might have been\n far worse.\n\n\n Chief Steward Slichow led\n his little command, less two\n third-class ration keepers\n thought to have been trapped\n in the lower hold, to a point\n two hundred meters from the\n steaming hull of the\nPeace\n State\n. He lined them up as if\n on parade. Kolin made himself\n inconspicuous.",
"He was so intent upon planning\n greetings with which to\n favor the tardy scouting parties\n that he failed to notice\n the loose cloud drifting over\n the ridge.\n\n\n It was tenuous, almost a\n haze. Close examination\n would have revealed it to be\n made up of myriads of tiny\n spores. They resembled those\n cast forth by one of the\n bushes Kolin's party had\n passed. Along the edges, the\n haze faded raggedly into thin\n air, but the units evidently\n formed a cohesive body. They\n drifted together, approaching\n the men as if taking intelligent\n advantage of the breeze.\n\n\n One of Chief Slichow's\n staggering flunkies, stealing\n a few seconds of relaxation\n on the pretext of dumping an\n armful of light plastic packing,\n wandered into the haze.\n\n\n He froze."
],
[
"Suddenly, Kolin found himself\n telling the tree about life\n on Haurtoz, and of the officially\n announced threats to\n the Planetary State's planned\n expansion. He dwelt upon the\n desperation of having no\n place to hide in case of trouble\n with the authorities. A\n multiple system of such\n worlds was agonizing to\n imagine.\nSomehow,\n the oddity of\n talking to a tree wore off.\n Kolin heard opinions spouting\n out which he had prudently\n kept bottled up for\n years.\n\n\n The more he talked and\n stormed and complained, the\n more relaxed he felt.\n\n\n \"If there was ever a fellow\n ready for this planet,\" decided\n the tree named Ashlew,\n \"you're it, Sonny! Hang on\n there while I signal the Life\n by root!\"\n\n\n Kolin sensed a lack of direct\n attention. The rustle\n about him was natural, caused\n by an ordinary breeze. He\n noticed his hands shaking.",
"He paused to consider the\n state of the tree named Ashlew,\n half immortal but rooted\n to one spot, unable to float on\n a breeze or through space itself\n on the pressure of light.\n Especially, it was unable to\n insinuate any part of itself\n into the control center of another\n form of life, as a second\n spore was taking charge of\n the body of Chief Slichow at\n that very instant.\n\n\n There are not enough men\n ,\n thought Kolin.\n Some of me\n must drift through the airlock.\n In space, I can spread\n through the air system to the\n command group.\n\n\n Repairs to the\nPeace State\nand the return to Haurtoz\n passed like weeks to some of\n the crew but like brief moments\n in infinity to other\n units. At last, the ship parted\n the air above Headquarters\n City and landed.",
"\"It isn't, Mr. Ashlew?\"\n asked Kolin, twisting about\n in an effort to see what the\n higher branches might hide.\n\n\n \"Nope. Most everything\n here is run by the Life—that\n is, by the thing that first\n grew big enough to do some\n thinking, and set its roots\n down all over until it had\n control. That's the outskirts\n of it down below.\"\n\n\n \"The other trees? That jungle?\"\n\n\n \"It's more'n a jungle, Sonny.\n When I landed here, along\n with the others from the\nArcturan Spark\n, the planet\n looked pretty empty to me,\n just like it must have to—Watch\n it, there, Boy! If I\n didn't twist that branch over\n in time, you'd be bouncing off\n my roots right now!\"\n\n\n \"Th-thanks!\" grunted Kolin,\n hanging on grimly.",
"\"They're scared that without\n talk of war, and scouting\n for Earth fleets that never\n come, people would have time\n to think about the way they\n have to live and who's running\n things in the Planetary\n State. Then the gravy train\n would get blown up—and I\n mean blown up!\"\n\n\n The tree was silent for a\n moment. Kolin felt the\n branches stir meditatively.\n Then Ashlew offered a suggestion.",
"\"Where's that? Oh, never\n mind—some little planet. I\n don't bother with them all,\n since I came here and found\n out I could be anything I\n wanted.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, anything\n you wanted?\" asked\n Kolin, testing the firmness of\n a vertical vine.\n\"Just\n what I said,\" continued\n the voice, sounding\n closer in his ear as his\n cheek brushed the ridged bark\n of the tree trunk. \"And, if\n I do have to remind you, it\n would be nicer if you said\n 'Mr. Ashlew,' considering my\n age.\"\n\n\n \"Your age? How old—?\"\n\n\n \"Can't really count it in\n Earth years any more. Lost\n track. I always figured bein'\n a tree was a nice, peaceful\n life; and when I remembered\n how long some of them live,\n that settled it. Sonny, this\n world ain't all it looks like.\"",
"\"Name's Johnny Ashlew.\n Kinda thought you'd start\n with\n what\n I am. Didn't figure\n you'd ever seen a man grown\n into a tree before.\"\n\n\n Kolin looked about, seeing\n little but leaves and fog.\n\n\n \"I have to climb down,\" he\n told himself in a reasonable\n tone. \"It's bad enough that the\n other two passed out without\n me going space happy too.\"\n\n\n \"What's your hurry?\" demanded\n the voice. \"I can talk\n to you just as easy all the way\n down, you know. Airholes in\n my bark—I'm not like an\n Earth tree.\"\n\n\n Kolin examined the bark of\n the crotch in which he sat. It\n did seem to have assorted\n holes and hollows in its rough\n surface.\n\n\n \"I never saw an Earth tree,\"\n he admitted. \"We came from\n Haurtoz.\"",
"He considered what form\n might most easily escape the\n notice of search parties and\n still be tough enough to live\n a long time without renewal.\n Another factor slipped into\n his musings: mere hope of escape\n was unsatisfying after\n the outburst that had defined\n his fuming hatred for Haurtoz.\n\n\n I'd better watch myself!\n he\n thought.\n Don't drop diamonds\n to grab at stars!\n\n\n \"What I wish I could do is\n not just get away but get even\n for the way they make us\n live … the whole damn set-up.\n They could just as easy make\n peace with the Earth colonies.\n You know why they\n don't?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" wheezed Ashlew.",
"After a few heartbeats, he\n dropped the trash and stared\n at ship and men as if he had\n never seen either. A hail from\n his master moved him.\n\n\n \"Coming, Chief!\" he called\n but, returning at a moderate\n pace, he murmured, \"My\n name is Frazer. I'm a second\n assistant steward. I'll think as\n Unit One.\"\n\n\n Throughout the cloud of\n spores, the mind formerly\n known as Peter Kolin congratulated\n itself upon its\n choice of form.\n\n\n Nearer to the original\n shape of the Life than Ashlew\n got\n , he thought.",
"He pulled Yrtok to her\n feet. She pawed at him weakly,\n eyes as vacant as Ammet's.\n When he let go in sudden\n horror, she folded gently to\n the ground. She lay comfortably\n on her side, twitching\n one hand as if to brush something\n away.\n\n\n When she began to smile\n dreamily, Kolin backed away.\nThe\n corners of his mouth\n felt oddly stiff; they had\n involuntarily drawn back to\n expose his clenched teeth. He\n glanced warily about, but\n nothing appeared to threaten\n him.\n\n\n \"It's time to end this scout,\"\n he told himself. \"It's dangerous.\n One good look and I'm\n jetting off! What I need is\n an easy tree to climb.\"\n\n\n He considered the massive\n giant. Soaring thirty or forty\n meters into the thin fog and\n dwarfing other growth, it\n seemed the most promising\n choice.",
"Kolin permitted himself to\n wonder when anyone might\n get some rest, but assumed a\n mildly willing look. (Too eager\n an attitude could arouse\n suspicion of disguising an improper\n viewpoint.) The maintenance\n of a proper viewpoint\n was a necessity if the Planetary\n State were to survive\n the hostile plots of Earth and\n the latter's decadent colonies.\n That, at least, was the official\n line.\n\n\n Kolin found himself in a\n group with Jak Ammet, a\n third cook, and Eva Yrtok,\n powdered foods storekeeper.\n Since the crew would be eating\n packaged rations during\n repairs, Yrtok could be spared\n to command a scout detail.",
"Yrtok and Ammet paused\n momentarily before descending.\n\n\n Kolin shared their sense of\n isolation. They would be out\n of sight of authority and responsible\n for their own actions.\n It was a strange sensation.\n\n\n They marched down into\n the valley at a brisk pace, becoming\n more aware of the\n clouds and atmospheric haze.\n Distant objects seemed\n blurred by the mist, taking on\n a somber, brooding grayness.\n For all Kolin could tell, he\n and the others were isolated\n in a world bounded by the\n rocky ridge behind them and\n a semi-circle of damp trees\n and bushes several hundred\n meters away. He suspected\n that the hills rising mistily\n ahead were part of a continuous\n slope, but could not be\n sure.",
"At first, Kolin saw no way,\n but then the network of vines\n clinging to the rugged trunk\n suggested a route. He tried\n his weight gingerly, then began\n to climb.\n\n\n \"I should have brought\n Yrtok's radio,\" he muttered.\n \"Oh, well, I can take it when\n I come down, if she hasn't\n snapped out of her spell by\n then. Funny … I wonder if\n that green thing bit her.\"\n\n\n Footholds were plentiful\n among the interlaced lianas.\n Kolin progressed rapidly.\n When he reached the first\n thick limbs, twice head\n height, he felt safer.\n\n\n Later, at what he hoped was\n the halfway mark, he hooked\n one knee over a branch and\n paused to wipe sweat from his\n eyes. Peering down, he discovered\n the ground to be obscured\n by foliage.",
"\"Doggone vine!\" commented\n the windy whisper. \"\n He\n ain't one of my crowd. Landed\n years later in a ship from\n some star towards the center\n of the galaxy. You should\n have seen his looks before\n the Life got in touch with his\n mind and set up a mental field\n to help him change form. He\n looks twice as good as a\n vine!\"\n\n\n \"He's very handy,\" agreed\n Kolin politely. He groped for\n a foothold.\n\n\n \"Well … matter of fact, I\n can't get through to him\n much, even with the Life's\n mental field helping. Guess\n he started living with a different\n way of thinking. It\n burns me. I thought of being\n a tree, and then he came along\n to take advantage of it!\"\n\n\n Kolin braced himself securely\n to stretch tiring muscles.",
"\"I should have checked\n from down there to see how\n open the top is,\" he mused.\n \"I wonder how the view will\n be from up there?\"\n\n\n \"Depends on what you're\n looking for, Sonny!\" something\n remarked in a soughing wheeze.\n\n\n Kolin, slipping, grabbed\n desperately for the branch.\n His fingers clutched a handful\n of twigs and leaves, which\n just barely supported him until\n he regained a grip with\n the other hand.\n\n\n The branch quivered resentfully\n under him.\n\n\n \"Careful, there!\" whooshed\n the eerie voice. \"It took me\n all summer to grow those!\"\n\n\n Kolin could feel the skin\n crawling along his backbone.\n\n\n \"Who\n are\n you?\" he gasped.\n\n\n The answering sigh of\n laughter gave him a distinct\n chill despite its suggestion of\n amiability.",
"\"He must have tasted\n some!\" exclaimed Kolin. \"I'll\n see how he is.\"\n\n\n He ran back to the cook and\n shook him by the shoulder.\n Ammet's head lolled loosely\n to one side. His rather heavy\n features were vacant, lending\n him a doped appearance. Kolin\n straightened up and beckoned\n to Yrtok.\n\n\n For some reason, he had\n trouble attracting her attention.\n Then he noticed that she\n was kneeling.\n\n\n \"Hope she didn't eat some\n stupid thing too!\" he grumbled,\n trotting back.\n\n\n As he reached her, whatever\n Yrtok was examining\n came to life and scooted into\n the underbrush with a flash\n of greenish fur. All Kolin\n saw was that it had several\n legs too many.",
"\"There's just one thing.\n The Life don't like taking\n chances on word about this\n place gettin' around. It sorta\n believes in peace and quiet.\n You might not get back to\n your ship in any form that\n could tell tales.\"\n\n\n \"Listen!\" Kolin blurted\n out. \"I wasn't so much enjoying\n being what I was that\n getting back matters to me!\"\n\n\n \"Don't like your home planet,\n whatever the name was?\"\n\n\n \"Haurtoz. It's a rotten\n place. A Planetary State! You\n have to think and even look\n the way that's standard thirty\n hours a day, asleep or\n awake. You get scared to\n sleep for fear you might\n dream\n treason and they'd find\n out somehow.\"\n\n\n \"Whooeee! Heard about\n them places. Must be tough\n just to live.\"",
"\"Since the crew will be on\n emergency watches repairing\n the damage,\" announced the\n Chief in clipped, aggressive\n tones, \"I have volunteered my\n section for preliminary scouting,\n as is suitable. It may be\n useful to discover temporary\n sources in this area of natural\n foods.\"\n\n\n Volunteered HIS section!\n thought Kolin rebelliously.\n\n\n Like the Supreme Director\n of Haurtoz! Being conscripted\n into this idiotic space fleet\n that never fights is bad\n enough without a tin god on\n jets like Slichow!\n\n\n Prudently, he did not express\n this resentment overtly.",
"Yrtok led the way along\n the most nearly level ground.\n Low creepers became more\n plentiful, interspersed with\n scrubby thickets of tangled,\n spike-armored bushes. Occasionally,\n small flying things\n flickered among the foliage.\n Once, a shrub puffed out an\n enormous cloud of tiny\n spores.\n\n\n \"Be a job to find anything\n edible here,\" grunted Ammet,\n and Kolin agreed.\n\n\n Finally, after a longer hike\n than he had anticipated, they\n approached the edge of the\n deceptively distant forest.\n Yrtok paused to examine some\n purple berries glistening dangerously\n on a low shrub. Kolin\n regarded the trees with\n misgiving.\n\n\n \"Looks as tough to get\n through as a tropical jungle,\"\n he remarked.",
"He was so intent upon planning\n greetings with which to\n favor the tardy scouting parties\n that he failed to notice\n the loose cloud drifting over\n the ridge.\n\n\n It was tenuous, almost a\n haze. Close examination\n would have revealed it to be\n made up of myriads of tiny\n spores. They resembled those\n cast forth by one of the\n bushes Kolin's party had\n passed. Along the edges, the\n haze faded raggedly into thin\n air, but the units evidently\n formed a cohesive body. They\n drifted together, approaching\n the men as if taking intelligent\n advantage of the breeze.\n\n\n One of Chief Slichow's\n staggering flunkies, stealing\n a few seconds of relaxation\n on the pretext of dumping an\n armful of light plastic packing,\n wandered into the haze.\n\n\n He froze.",
"\"Don't know what got into\n me, talking that way to a\n tree,\" he muttered. \"If Yrtok\n snapped out of it and heard,\n I'm as good as re-personalized\n right now.\"\n\n\n As he brooded upon the\n sorry choice of arousing a\n search by hiding where he\n was or going back to bluff\n things out, the tree spoke.\n\n\n \"Maybe you're all set, Sonny.\n The Life has been thinkin'\n of learning about other\n worlds. If you can think of a\n safe form to jet off in, you\n might make yourself a deal.\n How'd you like to stay here?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" said Kolin.\n \"The penalty for desertion—\"\n\n\n \"Whoosh! Who'd find you?\n You could be a bird, a tree,\n even a cloud.\"\n\n\n Silenced but doubting, Kolin\n permitted himself to try\n the dream on for size."
]
] |
train
|
24966
|
[
"Why is Alan in the jungle?",
"Why is Alan so surprised to hear blaster fighting?",
"Why are the robots hunting Alan?",
"How is Alan able to evade so many robots?",
"Why are the robots incinerating all the living creatures?",
"How does Alan interrupt the robots' communication signal?",
"Why did Pete build killer robots?",
"Where are the rest of the men from the scout ship?"
] |
[
[
"Alan is hiding from the killer robots in the jungle.",
"Alan is with a group of colonists, who are going to build a new colony on the jungle planet.",
"Alan is hunting pumas in the jungle.",
"Alan is camping with friends in the jungle."
],
[
"Alan is surprised because he came with a team of scientists, not soldiers.",
"Alan is surprised because he was sure they had escaped the enemy soldiers when they ran into the jungle for cover.",
"Alan is surprised because the planet is only inhabited by animals, not intelligent life. ",
"Alan is surprised because the Waiameans don't have advanced weapons capabilities."
],
[
"The robots aren't hunting Alan specifically. They are hunting all life forms.",
"The robots are hunting Alan because he invaded Waiamea.",
"The robots aren't hunting Alan. They're hunting pumas. Alan got in the way.",
"The robots are hunting Alan because he was illegally poaching pumas in the jungle."
],
[
"Luckily for Alan, the robots are shooting at all the living creatures, including bugs. ",
"Luckily for Alan, the robots are being attacked by pumas.",
"Luckily for Alan, the robots are having a difficult time navigating the jungle terrain.",
"Luckily for Alan, a sticky oozing blob-like creature was dissolving the robots one by one."
],
[
"A radio frequency from Waiamea scrambled the robots' programming.",
"Pete did not read the directions when assembling the robots.",
"Pete lost his mind on the journey to Waiamea and programmed the robots to kill everyone and everything.",
"Pete built the robots to hunt by following brain waves."
],
[
"Alan jambs his knife into the fallen robot, which disrupts the signal.",
"Alan hurls the oozing blob-like creature at the robot. The blob dissolves the robot with its acid and that is what disrupts the signal.",
"Alan uses his pocket blaster to disrupt the signal.",
"Alan throws a handful of an anthill at the robot, using the brain waves of hundred of ants to disrupt the signal. "
],
[
"Pete did not intentionally build killer robots. The robots became sentient and decided organic life forms were the enemy.",
"Pete did not intentionally build killer robots. Clearly, something went wrong.",
"Pete did not intentionally build killer robots. The Waiameans must have reprogrammed them to kill the colonists.",
"Pete lost his mind during the voyage to Waiamea. He just wants to watch the planet burn."
],
[
"They fled in the scout ship once the robots started shooting. They are safe aboard the big ship again.",
"Their bodies were disintegrated by the robots' weapons.",
"They are hiding on the scout ship from Pete and his evil robots.",
"They put themselves into stasis on the scout ship. Now the robots will not be able to track their brain waves."
]
] |
[
2,
3,
1,
1,
4,
3,
2,
2
] |
[
0,
1,
0,
1,
0,
0,
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1
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[
[
"Frowning, worrying about the\n sounds, Alan momentarily forgot\n to watch his step until his foot\n suddenly plunged into an ant\n hill, throwing him to the jungle\n floor. \"Damn!\" He cursed again,\n for the tenth time, and stood\n uncertainly in the dimness.\n From tall, moss-shrouded trees,\n wrist-thick vines hung quietly,\n scraping the spongy ground like\n the tentacles of some monstrous\n tree-bound octopus. Fitful little\n plants grew straggly in the\n shadows of the mossy trunks,\n forming a dense underbrush that\n made walking difficult. At midday\n some few of the blue sun's\n rays filtered through to the\n jungle floor, but now, late afternoon\n on the planet, the shadows\n were long and gloomy.",
"When he raised his eyes again\n the jungle was perceptibly darker.\n Stealthy rustlings in the\n shadows grew louder with the\n setting sun. Branches snapped\n unaccountably in the trees overhead\n and every now and then\n leaves or a twig fell softly to the\n ground, close to where he lay.\n Reaching into his jacket, Alan\n fingered his pocket blaster. He\n pulled it out and held it in his\n right hand. \"This pop gun\n wouldn't even singe a robot, but\n it just might stop one of those\n pumas.\"\nThey said the blast with your name on it would find\n you anywhere. This looked like Alan's blast.",
"Alan peered around him at the\n vine-draped shadows, listening\n to the soft rustlings and faint\n twig-snappings of life in the\n jungle. Two short, popping\n sounds echoed across the stillness,\n drowned out almost immediately\n and silenced by an\n explosive crash. Alan started,\n \"Blaster fighting! But it can't\n be!\"",
"Alan changed direction slightly\n to follow a line between the\n two robots coming up from\n either side, behind him. His eyes\n were well accustomed to the dark\n now, and he managed to dodge\n most of the shadowy vines and\n branches before they could snag\n or trip him. Even so, he stumbled\n in the wiry underbrush and\n his legs were a mass of stinging\n slashes from ankle to thigh.",
"There was a slight creak above\n him like the protesting of a\n branch too heavily laden. Blaster\n ready, Alan rolled over onto his\n back. In the movement, his elbow\n struck the top of a small\n earthy mound and he was instantly\n engulfed in a swarm of\n locust-like insects that beat disgustingly\n against his eyes and\n mouth. \"Fagh!\" Waving his\n arms before his face he jumped\n up and backwards, away from\n the bugs. As he did so, a dark\n shapeless thing plopped from\n the trees onto the spot where he\n had been lying stretched out.\n Then, like an ambient fungus,\n it slithered off into the jungle\n undergrowth.",
"To his right the trees silhouetted\n briefly against brilliance as\n a third robot slowly moved up\n in the distance. Without thinking,\n Alan turned slightly to the\n left, then froze in momentary\n panic. \"I should be at the camp\n now. Damn, what direction am\n I going?\" He tried to think\n back, to visualize the twists and\n turns he'd taken in the jungle.\n \"All I need is to get lost.\"",
"The earth, jungle and moons\n spun in a pinwheeled blur,\n slowed, and settled to their proper\n places. Standing in the sticky,\n sweet-smelling ooze, Alan eyed\n the robot apprehensively. Half\n buried in mud, it stood quiet in\n the shadowy light except for an\n occasional, almost spasmodic\n jerk of its blaster barrel. For\n the first time that night Alan\n allowed himself a slight smile.\n \"A blade in the old gear box,\n eh? How does that feel, boy?\"\n\n\n He turned. \"Well, I'd better\n get out of here before the knife\n slips or the monster cooks up\n some more tricks with whatever\n it's got for a brain.\" Digging\n little footholds in the soft bank,\n he climbed up and stood once\n again in the rustling jungle\n darkness.",
"Suddenly anxious, he slashed\n a hurried X in one of the trees\n to mark his position then turned\n to follow a line of similar marks\n back through the jungle. He\n tried to run, but vines blocked\n his way and woody shrubs\n caught at his legs, tripping him\n and holding him back. Then,\n through the trees he saw the\n clearing of the camp site, the\n temporary home for the scout\n ship and the eleven men who,\n with Alan, were the only humans\n on the jungle planet, Waiamea.\nStepping through the low\n shrubbery at the edge of the\n site, he looked across the open\n area to the two temporary structures,\n the camp headquarters\n where the power supplies and\n the computer were; and the\n sleeping quarters. Beyond, nose\n high, stood the silver scout ship\n that had brought the advance\n exploratory party of scientists\n and technicians to Waiamea\n three days before. Except for a\n few of the killer robots rolling\n slowly around the camp site on\n their quiet treads, there was no\n one about.",
"His stomach tightened. Panic.\n The dank, musty smell of the\n jungle seemed for an instant to\n thicken and choke in his throat.\n Then he thought of the big ship\n landing in the morning, settling\n down slowly after a lonely two-week\n voyage. He thought of a\n brown-haired girl crowding with\n the others to the gangway, eager\n to embrace the new planet, and\n the next instant a charred nothing,\n unrecognizable, the victim\n of a design error or a misplaced\n wire in a machine. \"I have to\n try,\" he said aloud. \"I have to\n try.\" He moved into the blackness.\n\n\n Powerful as a small tank, the\n killer robot was equipped to\n crush, slash, and burn its way\n through undergrowth. Nevertheless,\n it was slowed by the\n larger trees and the thick, clinging\n vines, and Alan found that\n he could manage to keep ahead\n of it, barely out of blaster range.\n Only, the robot didn't get tired.\n Alan did.",
"The crashing rumble of the\n killer robots shook the night behind\n him, nearer sometimes,\n then falling slightly back, but\n following constantly, more\n unshakable than bloodhounds\n because a man can sometimes cover\n a scent, but no man can stop his\n thoughts. Intermittently, like\n photographers' strobes, blue\n flashes would light the jungle\n about him. Then, for seconds\n afterwards his eyes would see\n dancing streaks of yellow and\n sharp multi-colored pinwheels\n that alternately shrunk and expanded\n as if in a surrealist's\n nightmare. Alan would have to\n pause and squeeze his eyelids\n tight shut before he could see\n again, and the robots would\n move a little closer.",
"Alan, lying in the mud of the\n stream bed, felt the earth shake\n as the heavy little robot rolled\n slowly and inexorably towards\n him. \"The Lord High Executioner,\"\n he thought, \"in battle\n dress.\" He tried to stand but his\n legs were almost too weak and\n his arm felt numb. \"I'll drown\n him,\" he said aloud. \"I'll drown\n the Lord High Executioner.\" He\n laughed. Then his mind cleared.\n He remembered where he was.\nAlan trembled. For the first\n time in his life he understood\n what it was to live, because for\n the first time he realized that he\n would sometime die. In other\n times and circumstances he\n might put it off for a while, for\n months or years, but eventually,\n as now, he would have to watch,\n still and helpless, while death\n came creeping. Then, at thirty,\n Alan became a man.",
"For a split second the jungle\n stood frozen in a brilliant blue\n flash, followed by the sharp report\n of a blaster. Then another.\n Alan whirled, startled. The\n planet's double moon had risen\n and he could see a robot rolling\n slowly across the clearing in his\n general direction, blasting indiscriminately\n at whatever mind\n impulses came within its pickup\n range, birds, insects, anything.\n Six or seven others also left the\n camp headquarters area and\n headed for the jungle, each to a\n slightly different spot.\n\n\n Apparently the robot hadn't\n sensed him yet, but Alan didn't\n know what the effective range\n of its pickup devices was. He\n began to slide back into the\n jungle. Minutes later, looking\n back he saw that the machine,\n though several hundred yards\n away, had altered its course and\n was now headed directly for\n him.",
"\"I wonder,\" he thought, \"how\n Pete could cram enough brain\n into one of those things to make\n it hunt and track so perfectly.\"\n He tried to visualize the computing\n circuits needed for the\n operation of its tracking mechanism\n alone. \"There just isn't\n room for the electronics. You'd\n need a computer as big as the\n one at camp headquarters.\"\nIn the distance the sky blazed\n as a blaster roared in the jungle.\n Then Alan heard the approaching\n robot, crunching and snapping\n its way through the undergrowth\n like an onrushing forest\n fire. He froze. \"Good Lord!\n They communicate with each\n other! The one I jammed must\n be calling others to help.\"",
"Slowly Alan looked around,\n sizing up his situation. Behind\n him the dark jungle rustled forbiddingly.\n He shuddered. \"Not a\n very healthy spot to spend the\n night. On the other hand, I certainly\n can't get to the camp with\n a pack of mind-activated mechanical\n killers running around.\n If I can just hold out until morning,\n when the big ship arrives ...\n The big ship! Good\n Lord, Peggy!\" He turned white;\n oily sweat punctuated his forehead.\n Peggy, arriving tomorrow\n with the other colonists, the\n wives and kids! The metal killers,\n tuned to blast any living\n flesh, would murder them the",
"As if in answer, a tree beside\n him breathed fire, then exploded.\n In the brief flash of the\n blaster shot, Alan saw the steel\n glint of a robot only a hundred\n yards away, much nearer than\n he had thought. \"Thank heaven\n for trees!\" He stepped back, felt\n his foot catch in something,\n clutched futilely at some leaves\n and fell heavily.",
"instant they stepped from the\n ship!\nA pretty girl, Peggy, the girl\n he'd married just three weeks\n ago. He still couldn't believe it.\n It was crazy, he supposed, to\n marry a girl and then take off\n for an unknown planet, with her\n to follow, to try to create a home\n in a jungle clearing. Crazy maybe,\n but Peggy and her green eyes\n that changed color with the\n light, with her soft brown hair,\n and her happy smile, had ended\n thirty years of loneliness and\n had, at last, given him a reason\n for living. \"Not to be killed!\"\n Alan unclenched his fists and\n wiped his palms, bloody where",
"The robot crashed on, louder\n now, gaining on the tired human.\n Legs aching and bruised,\n stinging from insect bites, Alan\n tried to force himself to run\n holding his hands in front of\n him like a child in the dark. His\n foot tripped on a barely visible\n insect hill and a winged swarm\n exploded around him. Startled,\n Alan jerked sideways, crashing\n his head against a tree. He\n clutched at the bark for a second,\n dazed, then his knees\n buckled. His blaster fell into the\n shadows.",
"Shakily, Alan crawled a few\n feet back into the undergrowth\n where he could lie and watch the\n camp, but not himself be seen.\n Though visibility didn't make\n any difference to the robots, he\n felt safer, somehow, hidden. He\n knew now what the shooting\n sounds had been and why there\n hadn't been anyone around the\n camp site. A charred blob lying\n in the grass of the clearing confirmed\n his hypothesis. His stomach\n felt sick.\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" he muttered to\n himself, \"that Pete assembled\n these robots in a batch and then\n activated them all at once, probably\n never living to realize that\n they're tuned to pick up human\n brain waves, too. Damn!\n Damn!\" His eyes blurred and\n he slammed his fist into the soft\n earth.",
"The robot crashed loudly behind\n him now. Without stopping\n to think, Alan fumbled along the\n ground after his gun, straining\n his eyes in the darkness. He\n found it just a couple of feet to\n one side, against the base of a\n small bush. Just as his fingers\n closed upon the barrel his other\n hand slipped into something\n sticky that splashed over his\n forearm. He screamed in pain\n and leaped back, trying frantically\n to wipe the clinging,\n burning blackness off his arm.\n Patches of black scraped off onto\n branches and vines, but the rest\n spread slowly over his arm as\n agonizing as hot acid, or as flesh\n being ripped away layer by\n layer.\n\n\n Almost blinded by pain, whimpering,\n Alan stumbled forward.\n Sharp muscle spasms shot from\n his shoulder across his back and\n chest. Tears streamed across his\n cheeks.",
"A blue arc slashed at the trees\n a mere hundred yards behind.\n He screamed at the blast. \"Damn\n you, Pete! Damn your robots!\n Damn, damn ... Oh, Peggy!\"\n He stepped into emptiness.\n\n\n Coolness. Wet. Slowly, washed\n by the water, the pain began to\n fall away. He wanted to lie there\n forever in the dark, cool, wetness.\n For ever, and ever, and ...\n The air thundered.\n\n\n In the dim light he could see\n the banks of the stream, higher\n than a man, muddy and loose.\n Growing right to the edge of the\n banks, the jungle reached out\n with hairy, disjointed arms as\n if to snag even the dirty little\n stream that passed so timidly\n through its domain."
],
[
"Alan peered around him at the\n vine-draped shadows, listening\n to the soft rustlings and faint\n twig-snappings of life in the\n jungle. Two short, popping\n sounds echoed across the stillness,\n drowned out almost immediately\n and silenced by an\n explosive crash. Alan started,\n \"Blaster fighting! But it can't\n be!\"",
"As if in answer, a tree beside\n him breathed fire, then exploded.\n In the brief flash of the\n blaster shot, Alan saw the steel\n glint of a robot only a hundred\n yards away, much nearer than\n he had thought. \"Thank heaven\n for trees!\" He stepped back, felt\n his foot catch in something,\n clutched futilely at some leaves\n and fell heavily.",
"Blinding itself for a few seconds\n with its own blaster static,\n the robot paused momentarily,\n jiggling in place. In this\n instant, Alan jammed his hands\n into an insect hill and hurled the\n pile of dirt and insects directly\n at the robot's antenna. In a flash,\n hundreds of the winged things\n erupted angrily from the hole in\n a swarming cloud, each part of\n which was a speck of life\n transmitting mental energy to the\n robot's pickup devices.\n\n\n Confused by the sudden dispersion\n of mind impulses, the\n robot fired erratically as Alan\n crouched and raced painfully for\n the door. It fired again, closer,\n as he fumbled with the lock\n release. Jagged bits of plastic and\n stone ripped past him, torn loose\n by the blast.",
"Without hesitation Alan\n threw himself across the blaster\n housing, frantically locking his\n arms around the barrel as the\n robot's treads churned furiously\n in the sticky mud, causing it to\n buck and plunge like a Brahma\n bull. The treads stopped and the\n blaster jerked upwards wrenching\n Alan's arms, then slammed\n down. Then the whole housing\n whirled around and around, tilting\n alternately up and down like\n a steel-skinned water monster\n trying to dislodge a tenacious\n crab, while Alan, arms and legs\n wrapped tightly around the blaster\n barrel and housing, pressed\n fiercely against the robot's metal\n skin.",
"There was movement also, in\n the darkness beside him, scrapings\n and rustlings and an occasional\n low, throaty sound like an\n angry cat. Alan's fingers tensed\n on his pocket blaster. Swift\n shadowy forms moved quickly in\n the shrubs and the growling became\n suddenly louder. He fired\n twice, blindly, into the undergrowth.\n Sharp screams punctuated\n the electric blue discharge as\n a pack of small feline creatures\n leaped snarling and clawing\n back into the night.\nMentally, Alan tried to figure\n the charge remaining in his blaster.\n There wouldn't be much.\n \"Enough for a few more shots,\n maybe. Why the devil didn't I\n load in fresh cells this morning!\"",
"When he raised his eyes again\n the jungle was perceptibly darker.\n Stealthy rustlings in the\n shadows grew louder with the\n setting sun. Branches snapped\n unaccountably in the trees overhead\n and every now and then\n leaves or a twig fell softly to the\n ground, close to where he lay.\n Reaching into his jacket, Alan\n fingered his pocket blaster. He\n pulled it out and held it in his\n right hand. \"This pop gun\n wouldn't even singe a robot, but\n it just might stop one of those\n pumas.\"\nThey said the blast with your name on it would find\n you anywhere. This looked like Alan's blast.",
"Suddenly a screeching whirlwind\n of claws and teeth hurled\n itself from the smoldering\n branches and crashed against the\n robot, clawing insanely at the\n antenna and blaster barrel.\n With an awkward jerk the robot\n swung around and fired its blaster,\n completely dissolving the\n lower half of the cat creature\n which had clung across the barrel.\n But the back pressure of the\n cat's body overloaded the discharge\n circuits. The robot started\n to shake, then clicked sharply\n as an overload relay snapped\n and shorted the blaster cells.\n The killer turned and rolled back\n towards the camp, leaving Alan\n alone.",
"The earth, jungle and moons\n spun in a pinwheeled blur,\n slowed, and settled to their proper\n places. Standing in the sticky,\n sweet-smelling ooze, Alan eyed\n the robot apprehensively. Half\n buried in mud, it stood quiet in\n the shadowy light except for an\n occasional, almost spasmodic\n jerk of its blaster barrel. For\n the first time that night Alan\n allowed himself a slight smile.\n \"A blade in the old gear box,\n eh? How does that feel, boy?\"\n\n\n He turned. \"Well, I'd better\n get out of here before the knife\n slips or the monster cooks up\n some more tricks with whatever\n it's got for a brain.\" Digging\n little footholds in the soft bank,\n he climbed up and stood once\n again in the rustling jungle\n darkness.",
"There was a slight creak above\n him like the protesting of a\n branch too heavily laden. Blaster\n ready, Alan rolled over onto his\n back. In the movement, his elbow\n struck the top of a small\n earthy mound and he was instantly\n engulfed in a swarm of\n locust-like insects that beat disgustingly\n against his eyes and\n mouth. \"Fagh!\" Waving his\n arms before his face he jumped\n up and backwards, away from\n the bugs. As he did so, a dark\n shapeless thing plopped from\n the trees onto the spot where he\n had been lying stretched out.\n Then, like an ambient fungus,\n it slithered off into the jungle\n undergrowth.",
"Pain danced up his leg as he\n grabbed his ankle. Quickly he\n felt the throbbing flesh. \"Damn\n the rotten luck, anyway!\" He\n blinked the pain tears from his\n eyes and looked up—into a robot's\n blaster, jutting out of the\n foliage, thirty yards away.\nInstinctively, in one motion\n Alan grabbed his pocket blaster\n and fired. To his amazement the\n robot jerked back, its gun wobbled\n and started to tilt away.\n Then, getting itself under control,\n it swung back again to face\n Alan. He fired again, and again\n the robot reacted. It seemed familiar\n somehow. Then he remembered\n the robot on the river\n bank, jiggling and swaying for\n seconds after each shot. \"Of\n course!\" He cursed himself for\n missing the obvious. \"The blaster\n static blanks out radio\n transmission from the computer\n for a few seconds. They even do\n it to themselves!\"",
"\"So, they've finally got those\n things working.\" Alan smiled\n slightly. \"Guess that means I\n owe Pete a bourbon-and-soda\n for sure. Anybody who can\n build a robot that hunts by homing\n in on animals' mind impulses ...\"\n He stepped forward\n just as a roar of blue flame dissolved\n the branches of a tree,\n barely above his head.\n\n\n Without pausing to think,\n Alan leaped back, and fell\n sprawling over a bush just as\n one of the robots rolled silently\n up from the right, lowering its\n blaster barrel to aim directly at\n his head. Alan froze. \"My God,\n Pete built those things wrong!\"",
"His arm where the black thing\n had been was swollen and tender,\n but he forced his hands to dig,\n dig, dig, cursing and crying to\n hide the pain, and biting his\n lips, ignoring the salty taste of\n blood. The soft earth crumbled\n under his hands until he had a\n small cave about three feet deep\n in the bank. Beyond that the\n soil was held too tightly by the\n roots from above and he had to\n stop.\nThe air crackled blue and a\n tree crashed heavily past Alan\n into the stream. Above him on\n the bank, silhouetting against\n the moons, the killer robot stopped\n and its blaster swivelled\n slowly down. Frantically, Alan\n hugged the bank as a shaft of\n pure electricity arced over him,\n sliced into the water, and exploded\n in a cloud of steam. The\n robot shook for a second, its\n blaster muzzle lifted erratically\n and for an instant it seemed almost\n out of control, then it\n quieted and the muzzle again\n pointed down.",
"Shakily, Alan crawled a few\n feet back into the undergrowth\n where he could lie and watch the\n camp, but not himself be seen.\n Though visibility didn't make\n any difference to the robots, he\n felt safer, somehow, hidden. He\n knew now what the shooting\n sounds had been and why there\n hadn't been anyone around the\n camp site. A charred blob lying\n in the grass of the clearing confirmed\n his hypothesis. His stomach\n felt sick.\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" he muttered to\n himself, \"that Pete assembled\n these robots in a batch and then\n activated them all at once, probably\n never living to realize that\n they're tuned to pick up human\n brain waves, too. Damn!\n Damn!\" His eyes blurred and\n he slammed his fist into the soft\n earth.",
"The robot crashed on, louder\n now, gaining on the tired human.\n Legs aching and bruised,\n stinging from insect bites, Alan\n tried to force himself to run\n holding his hands in front of\n him like a child in the dark. His\n foot tripped on a barely visible\n insect hill and a winged swarm\n exploded around him. Startled,\n Alan jerked sideways, crashing\n his head against a tree. He\n clutched at the bark for a second,\n dazed, then his knees\n buckled. His blaster fell into the\n shadows.",
"For a split second the jungle\n stood frozen in a brilliant blue\n flash, followed by the sharp report\n of a blaster. Then another.\n Alan whirled, startled. The\n planet's double moon had risen\n and he could see a robot rolling\n slowly across the clearing in his\n general direction, blasting indiscriminately\n at whatever mind\n impulses came within its pickup\n range, birds, insects, anything.\n Six or seven others also left the\n camp headquarters area and\n headed for the jungle, each to a\n slightly different spot.\n\n\n Apparently the robot hadn't\n sensed him yet, but Alan didn't\n know what the effective range\n of its pickup devices was. He\n began to slide back into the\n jungle. Minutes later, looking\n back he saw that the machine,\n though several hundred yards\n away, had altered its course and\n was now headed directly for\n him.",
"\"I wonder,\" he thought, \"how\n Pete could cram enough brain\n into one of those things to make\n it hunt and track so perfectly.\"\n He tried to visualize the computing\n circuits needed for the\n operation of its tracking mechanism\n alone. \"There just isn't\n room for the electronics. You'd\n need a computer as big as the\n one at camp headquarters.\"\nIn the distance the sky blazed\n as a blaster roared in the jungle.\n Then Alan heard the approaching\n robot, crunching and snapping\n its way through the undergrowth\n like an onrushing forest\n fire. He froze. \"Good Lord!\n They communicate with each\n other! The one I jammed must\n be calling others to help.\"",
"\"Be damned! You can't win\n now!\" Alan yelled between blaster\n shots, almost irrational from\n the pain that ripped jaggedly\n through his leg. Then it happened.\n A few feet from the\n building's door his blaster quit.\n A click. A faint hiss when he\n frantically jerked the trigger\n again and again, and the spent\n cells released themselves from\n the device, falling in the grass\n at his feet. He dropped the useless\n gun.\n\n\n \"No!\" He threw himself on\n the ground as a new robot suddenly\n appeared around the edge\n of the building a few feet away,\n aimed, and fired. Air burned\n over Alan's back and ozone tingled\n in his nostrils.",
"Frowning, worrying about the\n sounds, Alan momentarily forgot\n to watch his step until his foot\n suddenly plunged into an ant\n hill, throwing him to the jungle\n floor. \"Damn!\" He cursed again,\n for the tenth time, and stood\n uncertainly in the dimness.\n From tall, moss-shrouded trees,\n wrist-thick vines hung quietly,\n scraping the spongy ground like\n the tentacles of some monstrous\n tree-bound octopus. Fitful little\n plants grew straggly in the\n shadows of the mossy trunks,\n forming a dense underbrush that\n made walking difficult. At midday\n some few of the blue sun's\n rays filtered through to the\n jungle floor, but now, late afternoon\n on the planet, the shadows\n were long and gloomy.",
"Pressing with all his might,\n Alan slid slowly along the bank\n inches at a time, away from the\n machine above. Its muzzle turned\n to follow him but the edge of\n the bank blocked its aim. Grinding\n forward a couple of feet,\n slightly overhanging the bank,\n the robot fired again. For a split\n second Alan seemed engulfed in\n flame; the heat of hell singed his\n head and back, and mud boiled\n in the bank by his arm.\n\n\n Again the robot trembled. It\n jerked forward a foot and its\n blaster swung slightly away. But\n only for a moment. Then the gun\n swung back again.\n\n\n Suddenly, as if sensing something\n wrong, its tracks slammed\n into reverse. It stood poised for\n a second, its treads spinning\n crazily as the earth collapsed underneath\n it, where Alan had\n dug, then it fell with a heavy\n splash into the mud, ten feet\n from where Alan stood.",
"His stomach tightened. Panic.\n The dank, musty smell of the\n jungle seemed for an instant to\n thicken and choke in his throat.\n Then he thought of the big ship\n landing in the morning, settling\n down slowly after a lonely two-week\n voyage. He thought of a\n brown-haired girl crowding with\n the others to the gangway, eager\n to embrace the new planet, and\n the next instant a charred nothing,\n unrecognizable, the victim\n of a design error or a misplaced\n wire in a machine. \"I have to\n try,\" he said aloud. \"I have to\n try.\" He moved into the blackness.\n\n\n Powerful as a small tank, the\n killer robot was equipped to\n crush, slash, and burn its way\n through undergrowth. Nevertheless,\n it was slowed by the\n larger trees and the thick, clinging\n vines, and Alan found that\n he could manage to keep ahead\n of it, barely out of blaster range.\n Only, the robot didn't get tired.\n Alan did."
],
[
"\"So, they've finally got those\n things working.\" Alan smiled\n slightly. \"Guess that means I\n owe Pete a bourbon-and-soda\n for sure. Anybody who can\n build a robot that hunts by homing\n in on animals' mind impulses ...\"\n He stepped forward\n just as a roar of blue flame dissolved\n the branches of a tree,\n barely above his head.\n\n\n Without pausing to think,\n Alan leaped back, and fell\n sprawling over a bush just as\n one of the robots rolled silently\n up from the right, lowering its\n blaster barrel to aim directly at\n his head. Alan froze. \"My God,\n Pete built those things wrong!\"",
"Shakily, Alan crawled a few\n feet back into the undergrowth\n where he could lie and watch the\n camp, but not himself be seen.\n Though visibility didn't make\n any difference to the robots, he\n felt safer, somehow, hidden. He\n knew now what the shooting\n sounds had been and why there\n hadn't been anyone around the\n camp site. A charred blob lying\n in the grass of the clearing confirmed\n his hypothesis. His stomach\n felt sick.\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" he muttered to\n himself, \"that Pete assembled\n these robots in a batch and then\n activated them all at once, probably\n never living to realize that\n they're tuned to pick up human\n brain waves, too. Damn!\n Damn!\" His eyes blurred and\n he slammed his fist into the soft\n earth.",
"\"I wonder,\" he thought, \"how\n Pete could cram enough brain\n into one of those things to make\n it hunt and track so perfectly.\"\n He tried to visualize the computing\n circuits needed for the\n operation of its tracking mechanism\n alone. \"There just isn't\n room for the electronics. You'd\n need a computer as big as the\n one at camp headquarters.\"\nIn the distance the sky blazed\n as a blaster roared in the jungle.\n Then Alan heard the approaching\n robot, crunching and snapping\n its way through the undergrowth\n like an onrushing forest\n fire. He froze. \"Good Lord!\n They communicate with each\n other! The one I jammed must\n be calling others to help.\"",
"The robot crashed on, louder\n now, gaining on the tired human.\n Legs aching and bruised,\n stinging from insect bites, Alan\n tried to force himself to run\n holding his hands in front of\n him like a child in the dark. His\n foot tripped on a barely visible\n insect hill and a winged swarm\n exploded around him. Startled,\n Alan jerked sideways, crashing\n his head against a tree. He\n clutched at the bark for a second,\n dazed, then his knees\n buckled. His blaster fell into the\n shadows.",
"Blinding itself for a few seconds\n with its own blaster static,\n the robot paused momentarily,\n jiggling in place. In this\n instant, Alan jammed his hands\n into an insect hill and hurled the\n pile of dirt and insects directly\n at the robot's antenna. In a flash,\n hundreds of the winged things\n erupted angrily from the hole in\n a swarming cloud, each part of\n which was a speck of life\n transmitting mental energy to the\n robot's pickup devices.\n\n\n Confused by the sudden dispersion\n of mind impulses, the\n robot fired erratically as Alan\n crouched and raced painfully for\n the door. It fired again, closer,\n as he fumbled with the lock\n release. Jagged bits of plastic and\n stone ripped past him, torn loose\n by the blast.",
"For a split second the jungle\n stood frozen in a brilliant blue\n flash, followed by the sharp report\n of a blaster. Then another.\n Alan whirled, startled. The\n planet's double moon had risen\n and he could see a robot rolling\n slowly across the clearing in his\n general direction, blasting indiscriminately\n at whatever mind\n impulses came within its pickup\n range, birds, insects, anything.\n Six or seven others also left the\n camp headquarters area and\n headed for the jungle, each to a\n slightly different spot.\n\n\n Apparently the robot hadn't\n sensed him yet, but Alan didn't\n know what the effective range\n of its pickup devices was. He\n began to slide back into the\n jungle. Minutes later, looking\n back he saw that the machine,\n though several hundred yards\n away, had altered its course and\n was now headed directly for\n him.",
"Firing intermittently, he\n pulled himself upright and hobbled\n ahead through the bush.\n The robot shook spasmodically\n with each shot, its gun tilted upward\n at an awkward angle.\n\n\n Then, unexpectedly, Alan saw\n stars, real stars brilliant in the\n night sky, and half dragging his\n swelling leg he stumbled out of\n the jungle into the camp clearing.\n Ahead, across fifty yards of\n grass stood the headquarters\n building, housing the robot-controlling\n computer. Still firing at\n short intervals he started across\n the clearing, gritting his teeth\n at every step.\n\n\n Straining every muscle in\n spite of the agonizing pain, Alan\n forced himself to a limping run\n across the uneven ground, carefully\n avoiding the insect hills\n that jutted up through the grass.\n From the corner of his eye he\n saw another of the robots standing\n shakily in the dark edge of\n the jungle waiting, it seemed,\n for his small blaster to run dry.",
"The crashing rumble of the\n killer robots shook the night behind\n him, nearer sometimes,\n then falling slightly back, but\n following constantly, more\n unshakable than bloodhounds\n because a man can sometimes cover\n a scent, but no man can stop his\n thoughts. Intermittently, like\n photographers' strobes, blue\n flashes would light the jungle\n about him. Then, for seconds\n afterwards his eyes would see\n dancing streaks of yellow and\n sharp multi-colored pinwheels\n that alternately shrunk and expanded\n as if in a surrealist's\n nightmare. Alan would have to\n pause and squeeze his eyelids\n tight shut before he could see\n again, and the robots would\n move a little closer.",
"Pressing with all his might,\n Alan slid slowly along the bank\n inches at a time, away from the\n machine above. Its muzzle turned\n to follow him but the edge of\n the bank blocked its aim. Grinding\n forward a couple of feet,\n slightly overhanging the bank,\n the robot fired again. For a split\n second Alan seemed engulfed in\n flame; the heat of hell singed his\n head and back, and mud boiled\n in the bank by his arm.\n\n\n Again the robot trembled. It\n jerked forward a foot and its\n blaster swung slightly away. But\n only for a moment. Then the gun\n swung back again.\n\n\n Suddenly, as if sensing something\n wrong, its tracks slammed\n into reverse. It stood poised for\n a second, its treads spinning\n crazily as the earth collapsed underneath\n it, where Alan had\n dug, then it fell with a heavy\n splash into the mud, ten feet\n from where Alan stood.",
"His stomach tightened. Panic.\n The dank, musty smell of the\n jungle seemed for an instant to\n thicken and choke in his throat.\n Then he thought of the big ship\n landing in the morning, settling\n down slowly after a lonely two-week\n voyage. He thought of a\n brown-haired girl crowding with\n the others to the gangway, eager\n to embrace the new planet, and\n the next instant a charred nothing,\n unrecognizable, the victim\n of a design error or a misplaced\n wire in a machine. \"I have to\n try,\" he said aloud. \"I have to\n try.\" He moved into the blackness.\n\n\n Powerful as a small tank, the\n killer robot was equipped to\n crush, slash, and burn its way\n through undergrowth. Nevertheless,\n it was slowed by the\n larger trees and the thick, clinging\n vines, and Alan found that\n he could manage to keep ahead\n of it, barely out of blaster range.\n Only, the robot didn't get tired.\n Alan did.",
"Frantically, Alan slammed\n open the door as the robot, sensing\n him strongly now, aimed\n point blank. He saw nothing, his\n mind thought of nothing but the\n red-clad safety switch mounted\n beside the computer. Time stopped.\n There was nothing else in\n the world. He half-jumped, half-fell\n towards it, slowly, in tenths\n of seconds that seemed measured\n out in years.\n\n\n The universe went black.\n\n\n Later. Brilliance pressed upon\n his eyes. Then pain returned, a\n multi-hurting thing that crawled\n through his body and dragged\n ragged tentacles across his\n brain. He moaned.\n\n\n A voice spoke hollowly in the\n distance. \"He's waking. Call his\n wife.\"",
"As if in answer, a tree beside\n him breathed fire, then exploded.\n In the brief flash of the\n blaster shot, Alan saw the steel\n glint of a robot only a hundred\n yards away, much nearer than\n he had thought. \"Thank heaven\n for trees!\" He stepped back, felt\n his foot catch in something,\n clutched futilely at some leaves\n and fell heavily.",
"His arm where the black thing\n had been was swollen and tender,\n but he forced his hands to dig,\n dig, dig, cursing and crying to\n hide the pain, and biting his\n lips, ignoring the salty taste of\n blood. The soft earth crumbled\n under his hands until he had a\n small cave about three feet deep\n in the bank. Beyond that the\n soil was held too tightly by the\n roots from above and he had to\n stop.\nThe air crackled blue and a\n tree crashed heavily past Alan\n into the stream. Above him on\n the bank, silhouetting against\n the moons, the killer robot stopped\n and its blaster swivelled\n slowly down. Frantically, Alan\n hugged the bank as a shaft of\n pure electricity arced over him,\n sliced into the water, and exploded\n in a cloud of steam. The\n robot shook for a second, its\n blaster muzzle lifted erratically\n and for an instant it seemed almost\n out of control, then it\n quieted and the muzzle again\n pointed down.",
"SURVIVAL\n\n TACTICS\nBy AL SEVCIK\nILLUSTRATOR NOVICK\nThe robots were built to serve\n Man; to do his work, see to his\n comforts, make smooth his way.\n Then the robots figured out an\n additional service—putting Man\n out of his misery.\nThere\n was a sudden crash\n that hung sharply in the air,\n as if a tree had been hit by\n lightning some distance away.\n Then another. Alan stopped,\n puzzled. Two more blasts, quickly\n together, and the sound of a\n scream faintly.",
"The robot crashed loudly behind\n him now. Without stopping\n to think, Alan fumbled along the\n ground after his gun, straining\n his eyes in the darkness. He\n found it just a couple of feet to\n one side, against the base of a\n small bush. Just as his fingers\n closed upon the barrel his other\n hand slipped into something\n sticky that splashed over his\n forearm. He screamed in pain\n and leaped back, trying frantically\n to wipe the clinging,\n burning blackness off his arm.\n Patches of black scraped off onto\n branches and vines, but the rest\n spread slowly over his arm as\n agonizing as hot acid, or as flesh\n being ripped away layer by\n layer.\n\n\n Almost blinded by pain, whimpering,\n Alan stumbled forward.\n Sharp muscle spasms shot from\n his shoulder across his back and\n chest. Tears streamed across his\n cheeks.",
"Slowly Alan looked around,\n sizing up his situation. Behind\n him the dark jungle rustled forbiddingly.\n He shuddered. \"Not a\n very healthy spot to spend the\n night. On the other hand, I certainly\n can't get to the camp with\n a pack of mind-activated mechanical\n killers running around.\n If I can just hold out until morning,\n when the big ship arrives ...\n The big ship! Good\n Lord, Peggy!\" He turned white;\n oily sweat punctuated his forehead.\n Peggy, arriving tomorrow\n with the other colonists, the\n wives and kids! The metal killers,\n tuned to blast any living\n flesh, would murder them the",
"\"Be damned! You can't win\n now!\" Alan yelled between blaster\n shots, almost irrational from\n the pain that ripped jaggedly\n through his leg. Then it happened.\n A few feet from the\n building's door his blaster quit.\n A click. A faint hiss when he\n frantically jerked the trigger\n again and again, and the spent\n cells released themselves from\n the device, falling in the grass\n at his feet. He dropped the useless\n gun.\n\n\n \"No!\" He threw himself on\n the ground as a new robot suddenly\n appeared around the edge\n of the building a few feet away,\n aimed, and fired. Air burned\n over Alan's back and ozone tingled\n in his nostrils.",
"Suddenly a screeching whirlwind\n of claws and teeth hurled\n itself from the smoldering\n branches and crashed against the\n robot, clawing insanely at the\n antenna and blaster barrel.\n With an awkward jerk the robot\n swung around and fired its blaster,\n completely dissolving the\n lower half of the cat creature\n which had clung across the barrel.\n But the back pressure of the\n cat's body overloaded the discharge\n circuits. The robot started\n to shake, then clicked sharply\n as an overload relay snapped\n and shorted the blaster cells.\n The killer turned and rolled back\n towards the camp, leaving Alan\n alone.",
"Alan, lying in the mud of the\n stream bed, felt the earth shake\n as the heavy little robot rolled\n slowly and inexorably towards\n him. \"The Lord High Executioner,\"\n he thought, \"in battle\n dress.\" He tried to stand but his\n legs were almost too weak and\n his arm felt numb. \"I'll drown\n him,\" he said aloud. \"I'll drown\n the Lord High Executioner.\" He\n laughed. Then his mind cleared.\n He remembered where he was.\nAlan trembled. For the first\n time in his life he understood\n what it was to live, because for\n the first time he realized that he\n would sometime die. In other\n times and circumstances he\n might put it off for a while, for\n months or years, but eventually,\n as now, he would have to watch,\n still and helpless, while death\n came creeping. Then, at thirty,\n Alan became a man.",
"Pain danced up his leg as he\n grabbed his ankle. Quickly he\n felt the throbbing flesh. \"Damn\n the rotten luck, anyway!\" He\n blinked the pain tears from his\n eyes and looked up—into a robot's\n blaster, jutting out of the\n foliage, thirty yards away.\nInstinctively, in one motion\n Alan grabbed his pocket blaster\n and fired. To his amazement the\n robot jerked back, its gun wobbled\n and started to tilt away.\n Then, getting itself under control,\n it swung back again to face\n Alan. He fired again, and again\n the robot reacted. It seemed familiar\n somehow. Then he remembered\n the robot on the river\n bank, jiggling and swaying for\n seconds after each shot. \"Of\n course!\" He cursed himself for\n missing the obvious. \"The blaster\n static blanks out radio\n transmission from the computer\n for a few seconds. They even do\n it to themselves!\""
],
[
"Blinding itself for a few seconds\n with its own blaster static,\n the robot paused momentarily,\n jiggling in place. In this\n instant, Alan jammed his hands\n into an insect hill and hurled the\n pile of dirt and insects directly\n at the robot's antenna. In a flash,\n hundreds of the winged things\n erupted angrily from the hole in\n a swarming cloud, each part of\n which was a speck of life\n transmitting mental energy to the\n robot's pickup devices.\n\n\n Confused by the sudden dispersion\n of mind impulses, the\n robot fired erratically as Alan\n crouched and raced painfully for\n the door. It fired again, closer,\n as he fumbled with the lock\n release. Jagged bits of plastic and\n stone ripped past him, torn loose\n by the blast.",
"Alan changed direction slightly\n to follow a line between the\n two robots coming up from\n either side, behind him. His eyes\n were well accustomed to the dark\n now, and he managed to dodge\n most of the shadowy vines and\n branches before they could snag\n or trip him. Even so, he stumbled\n in the wiry underbrush and\n his legs were a mass of stinging\n slashes from ankle to thigh.",
"Pressing with all his might,\n Alan slid slowly along the bank\n inches at a time, away from the\n machine above. Its muzzle turned\n to follow him but the edge of\n the bank blocked its aim. Grinding\n forward a couple of feet,\n slightly overhanging the bank,\n the robot fired again. For a split\n second Alan seemed engulfed in\n flame; the heat of hell singed his\n head and back, and mud boiled\n in the bank by his arm.\n\n\n Again the robot trembled. It\n jerked forward a foot and its\n blaster swung slightly away. But\n only for a moment. Then the gun\n swung back again.\n\n\n Suddenly, as if sensing something\n wrong, its tracks slammed\n into reverse. It stood poised for\n a second, its treads spinning\n crazily as the earth collapsed underneath\n it, where Alan had\n dug, then it fell with a heavy\n splash into the mud, ten feet\n from where Alan stood.",
"Frantically, Alan slammed\n open the door as the robot, sensing\n him strongly now, aimed\n point blank. He saw nothing, his\n mind thought of nothing but the\n red-clad safety switch mounted\n beside the computer. Time stopped.\n There was nothing else in\n the world. He half-jumped, half-fell\n towards it, slowly, in tenths\n of seconds that seemed measured\n out in years.\n\n\n The universe went black.\n\n\n Later. Brilliance pressed upon\n his eyes. Then pain returned, a\n multi-hurting thing that crawled\n through his body and dragged\n ragged tentacles across his\n brain. He moaned.\n\n\n A voice spoke hollowly in the\n distance. \"He's waking. Call his\n wife.\"",
"\"So, they've finally got those\n things working.\" Alan smiled\n slightly. \"Guess that means I\n owe Pete a bourbon-and-soda\n for sure. Anybody who can\n build a robot that hunts by homing\n in on animals' mind impulses ...\"\n He stepped forward\n just as a roar of blue flame dissolved\n the branches of a tree,\n barely above his head.\n\n\n Without pausing to think,\n Alan leaped back, and fell\n sprawling over a bush just as\n one of the robots rolled silently\n up from the right, lowering its\n blaster barrel to aim directly at\n his head. Alan froze. \"My God,\n Pete built those things wrong!\"",
"The robot crashed on, louder\n now, gaining on the tired human.\n Legs aching and bruised,\n stinging from insect bites, Alan\n tried to force himself to run\n holding his hands in front of\n him like a child in the dark. His\n foot tripped on a barely visible\n insect hill and a winged swarm\n exploded around him. Startled,\n Alan jerked sideways, crashing\n his head against a tree. He\n clutched at the bark for a second,\n dazed, then his knees\n buckled. His blaster fell into the\n shadows.",
"Shakily, Alan crawled a few\n feet back into the undergrowth\n where he could lie and watch the\n camp, but not himself be seen.\n Though visibility didn't make\n any difference to the robots, he\n felt safer, somehow, hidden. He\n knew now what the shooting\n sounds had been and why there\n hadn't been anyone around the\n camp site. A charred blob lying\n in the grass of the clearing confirmed\n his hypothesis. His stomach\n felt sick.\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" he muttered to\n himself, \"that Pete assembled\n these robots in a batch and then\n activated them all at once, probably\n never living to realize that\n they're tuned to pick up human\n brain waves, too. Damn!\n Damn!\" His eyes blurred and\n he slammed his fist into the soft\n earth.",
"As if in answer, a tree beside\n him breathed fire, then exploded.\n In the brief flash of the\n blaster shot, Alan saw the steel\n glint of a robot only a hundred\n yards away, much nearer than\n he had thought. \"Thank heaven\n for trees!\" He stepped back, felt\n his foot catch in something,\n clutched futilely at some leaves\n and fell heavily.",
"His stomach tightened. Panic.\n The dank, musty smell of the\n jungle seemed for an instant to\n thicken and choke in his throat.\n Then he thought of the big ship\n landing in the morning, settling\n down slowly after a lonely two-week\n voyage. He thought of a\n brown-haired girl crowding with\n the others to the gangway, eager\n to embrace the new planet, and\n the next instant a charred nothing,\n unrecognizable, the victim\n of a design error or a misplaced\n wire in a machine. \"I have to\n try,\" he said aloud. \"I have to\n try.\" He moved into the blackness.\n\n\n Powerful as a small tank, the\n killer robot was equipped to\n crush, slash, and burn its way\n through undergrowth. Nevertheless,\n it was slowed by the\n larger trees and the thick, clinging\n vines, and Alan found that\n he could manage to keep ahead\n of it, barely out of blaster range.\n Only, the robot didn't get tired.\n Alan did.",
"\"I wonder,\" he thought, \"how\n Pete could cram enough brain\n into one of those things to make\n it hunt and track so perfectly.\"\n He tried to visualize the computing\n circuits needed for the\n operation of its tracking mechanism\n alone. \"There just isn't\n room for the electronics. You'd\n need a computer as big as the\n one at camp headquarters.\"\nIn the distance the sky blazed\n as a blaster roared in the jungle.\n Then Alan heard the approaching\n robot, crunching and snapping\n its way through the undergrowth\n like an onrushing forest\n fire. He froze. \"Good Lord!\n They communicate with each\n other! The one I jammed must\n be calling others to help.\"",
"The crashing rumble of the\n killer robots shook the night behind\n him, nearer sometimes,\n then falling slightly back, but\n following constantly, more\n unshakable than bloodhounds\n because a man can sometimes cover\n a scent, but no man can stop his\n thoughts. Intermittently, like\n photographers' strobes, blue\n flashes would light the jungle\n about him. Then, for seconds\n afterwards his eyes would see\n dancing streaks of yellow and\n sharp multi-colored pinwheels\n that alternately shrunk and expanded\n as if in a surrealist's\n nightmare. Alan would have to\n pause and squeeze his eyelids\n tight shut before he could see\n again, and the robots would\n move a little closer.",
"Firing intermittently, he\n pulled himself upright and hobbled\n ahead through the bush.\n The robot shook spasmodically\n with each shot, its gun tilted upward\n at an awkward angle.\n\n\n Then, unexpectedly, Alan saw\n stars, real stars brilliant in the\n night sky, and half dragging his\n swelling leg he stumbled out of\n the jungle into the camp clearing.\n Ahead, across fifty yards of\n grass stood the headquarters\n building, housing the robot-controlling\n computer. Still firing at\n short intervals he started across\n the clearing, gritting his teeth\n at every step.\n\n\n Straining every muscle in\n spite of the agonizing pain, Alan\n forced himself to a limping run\n across the uneven ground, carefully\n avoiding the insect hills\n that jutted up through the grass.\n From the corner of his eye he\n saw another of the robots standing\n shakily in the dark edge of\n the jungle waiting, it seemed,\n for his small blaster to run dry.",
"Pain danced up his leg as he\n grabbed his ankle. Quickly he\n felt the throbbing flesh. \"Damn\n the rotten luck, anyway!\" He\n blinked the pain tears from his\n eyes and looked up—into a robot's\n blaster, jutting out of the\n foliage, thirty yards away.\nInstinctively, in one motion\n Alan grabbed his pocket blaster\n and fired. To his amazement the\n robot jerked back, its gun wobbled\n and started to tilt away.\n Then, getting itself under control,\n it swung back again to face\n Alan. He fired again, and again\n the robot reacted. It seemed familiar\n somehow. Then he remembered\n the robot on the river\n bank, jiggling and swaying for\n seconds after each shot. \"Of\n course!\" He cursed himself for\n missing the obvious. \"The blaster\n static blanks out radio\n transmission from the computer\n for a few seconds. They even do\n it to themselves!\"",
"Without hesitation Alan\n threw himself across the blaster\n housing, frantically locking his\n arms around the barrel as the\n robot's treads churned furiously\n in the sticky mud, causing it to\n buck and plunge like a Brahma\n bull. The treads stopped and the\n blaster jerked upwards wrenching\n Alan's arms, then slammed\n down. Then the whole housing\n whirled around and around, tilting\n alternately up and down like\n a steel-skinned water monster\n trying to dislodge a tenacious\n crab, while Alan, arms and legs\n wrapped tightly around the blaster\n barrel and housing, pressed\n fiercely against the robot's metal\n skin.",
"His arm where the black thing\n had been was swollen and tender,\n but he forced his hands to dig,\n dig, dig, cursing and crying to\n hide the pain, and biting his\n lips, ignoring the salty taste of\n blood. The soft earth crumbled\n under his hands until he had a\n small cave about three feet deep\n in the bank. Beyond that the\n soil was held too tightly by the\n roots from above and he had to\n stop.\nThe air crackled blue and a\n tree crashed heavily past Alan\n into the stream. Above him on\n the bank, silhouetting against\n the moons, the killer robot stopped\n and its blaster swivelled\n slowly down. Frantically, Alan\n hugged the bank as a shaft of\n pure electricity arced over him,\n sliced into the water, and exploded\n in a cloud of steam. The\n robot shook for a second, its\n blaster muzzle lifted erratically\n and for an instant it seemed almost\n out of control, then it\n quieted and the muzzle again\n pointed down.",
"Alan, lying in the mud of the\n stream bed, felt the earth shake\n as the heavy little robot rolled\n slowly and inexorably towards\n him. \"The Lord High Executioner,\"\n he thought, \"in battle\n dress.\" He tried to stand but his\n legs were almost too weak and\n his arm felt numb. \"I'll drown\n him,\" he said aloud. \"I'll drown\n the Lord High Executioner.\" He\n laughed. Then his mind cleared.\n He remembered where he was.\nAlan trembled. For the first\n time in his life he understood\n what it was to live, because for\n the first time he realized that he\n would sometime die. In other\n times and circumstances he\n might put it off for a while, for\n months or years, but eventually,\n as now, he would have to watch,\n still and helpless, while death\n came creeping. Then, at thirty,\n Alan became a man.",
"The earth, jungle and moons\n spun in a pinwheeled blur,\n slowed, and settled to their proper\n places. Standing in the sticky,\n sweet-smelling ooze, Alan eyed\n the robot apprehensively. Half\n buried in mud, it stood quiet in\n the shadowy light except for an\n occasional, almost spasmodic\n jerk of its blaster barrel. For\n the first time that night Alan\n allowed himself a slight smile.\n \"A blade in the old gear box,\n eh? How does that feel, boy?\"\n\n\n He turned. \"Well, I'd better\n get out of here before the knife\n slips or the monster cooks up\n some more tricks with whatever\n it's got for a brain.\" Digging\n little footholds in the soft bank,\n he climbed up and stood once\n again in the rustling jungle\n darkness.",
"For a split second the jungle\n stood frozen in a brilliant blue\n flash, followed by the sharp report\n of a blaster. Then another.\n Alan whirled, startled. The\n planet's double moon had risen\n and he could see a robot rolling\n slowly across the clearing in his\n general direction, blasting indiscriminately\n at whatever mind\n impulses came within its pickup\n range, birds, insects, anything.\n Six or seven others also left the\n camp headquarters area and\n headed for the jungle, each to a\n slightly different spot.\n\n\n Apparently the robot hadn't\n sensed him yet, but Alan didn't\n know what the effective range\n of its pickup devices was. He\n began to slide back into the\n jungle. Minutes later, looking\n back he saw that the machine,\n though several hundred yards\n away, had altered its course and\n was now headed directly for\n him.",
"The robot crashed loudly behind\n him now. Without stopping\n to think, Alan fumbled along the\n ground after his gun, straining\n his eyes in the darkness. He\n found it just a couple of feet to\n one side, against the base of a\n small bush. Just as his fingers\n closed upon the barrel his other\n hand slipped into something\n sticky that splashed over his\n forearm. He screamed in pain\n and leaped back, trying frantically\n to wipe the clinging,\n burning blackness off his arm.\n Patches of black scraped off onto\n branches and vines, but the rest\n spread slowly over his arm as\n agonizing as hot acid, or as flesh\n being ripped away layer by\n layer.\n\n\n Almost blinded by pain, whimpering,\n Alan stumbled forward.\n Sharp muscle spasms shot from\n his shoulder across his back and\n chest. Tears streamed across his\n cheeks.",
"He began to move along the\n bank, away from the crashing\n sounds. Suddenly he stopped, his\n eyes widened. \"Of course! Radio!\n I'll bet anything they're\n automatically controlled by the\n camp computer. That's where\n their brain is!\" He paused.\n \"Then, if that were put out of\n commission ...\" He jerked away\n from the bank and half ran, half\n pulled himself through the undergrowth\n towards the camp.\n\n\n Trees exploded to his left as\n another robot fired in his direction,\n too far away to be effective\n but churning towards him\n through the blackness."
],
[
"Shakily, Alan crawled a few\n feet back into the undergrowth\n where he could lie and watch the\n camp, but not himself be seen.\n Though visibility didn't make\n any difference to the robots, he\n felt safer, somehow, hidden. He\n knew now what the shooting\n sounds had been and why there\n hadn't been anyone around the\n camp site. A charred blob lying\n in the grass of the clearing confirmed\n his hypothesis. His stomach\n felt sick.\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" he muttered to\n himself, \"that Pete assembled\n these robots in a batch and then\n activated them all at once, probably\n never living to realize that\n they're tuned to pick up human\n brain waves, too. Damn!\n Damn!\" His eyes blurred and\n he slammed his fist into the soft\n earth.",
"\"So, they've finally got those\n things working.\" Alan smiled\n slightly. \"Guess that means I\n owe Pete a bourbon-and-soda\n for sure. Anybody who can\n build a robot that hunts by homing\n in on animals' mind impulses ...\"\n He stepped forward\n just as a roar of blue flame dissolved\n the branches of a tree,\n barely above his head.\n\n\n Without pausing to think,\n Alan leaped back, and fell\n sprawling over a bush just as\n one of the robots rolled silently\n up from the right, lowering its\n blaster barrel to aim directly at\n his head. Alan froze. \"My God,\n Pete built those things wrong!\"",
"Blinding itself for a few seconds\n with its own blaster static,\n the robot paused momentarily,\n jiggling in place. In this\n instant, Alan jammed his hands\n into an insect hill and hurled the\n pile of dirt and insects directly\n at the robot's antenna. In a flash,\n hundreds of the winged things\n erupted angrily from the hole in\n a swarming cloud, each part of\n which was a speck of life\n transmitting mental energy to the\n robot's pickup devices.\n\n\n Confused by the sudden dispersion\n of mind impulses, the\n robot fired erratically as Alan\n crouched and raced painfully for\n the door. It fired again, closer,\n as he fumbled with the lock\n release. Jagged bits of plastic and\n stone ripped past him, torn loose\n by the blast.",
"He pictured the camp computer\n with no one to stop it, automatically\n sending its robots in\n wider and wider forays, slowly\n wiping every trace of life from\n the planet. Technologically advanced\n machines doing the job\n for which they were built, completely,\n thoroughly, without feeling,\n and without human masters\n to separate sense from futility.\n Finally parts would wear out,\n circuits would short, and one by\n one the killers would crunch to\n a halt. A few birds would still\n fly then, but a unique animal\n life, rare in the universe, would\n exist no more. And the bones of\n children, eager girls, and their\n men would also lie, beside a\n rusty hulk, beneath the alien\n sun.\n\n\n \"Peggy!\"",
"Suddenly a screeching whirlwind\n of claws and teeth hurled\n itself from the smoldering\n branches and crashed against the\n robot, clawing insanely at the\n antenna and blaster barrel.\n With an awkward jerk the robot\n swung around and fired its blaster,\n completely dissolving the\n lower half of the cat creature\n which had clung across the barrel.\n But the back pressure of the\n cat's body overloaded the discharge\n circuits. The robot started\n to shake, then clicked sharply\n as an overload relay snapped\n and shorted the blaster cells.\n The killer turned and rolled back\n towards the camp, leaving Alan\n alone.",
"As if in answer, a tree beside\n him breathed fire, then exploded.\n In the brief flash of the\n blaster shot, Alan saw the steel\n glint of a robot only a hundred\n yards away, much nearer than\n he had thought. \"Thank heaven\n for trees!\" He stepped back, felt\n his foot catch in something,\n clutched futilely at some leaves\n and fell heavily.",
"His stomach tightened. Panic.\n The dank, musty smell of the\n jungle seemed for an instant to\n thicken and choke in his throat.\n Then he thought of the big ship\n landing in the morning, settling\n down slowly after a lonely two-week\n voyage. He thought of a\n brown-haired girl crowding with\n the others to the gangway, eager\n to embrace the new planet, and\n the next instant a charred nothing,\n unrecognizable, the victim\n of a design error or a misplaced\n wire in a machine. \"I have to\n try,\" he said aloud. \"I have to\n try.\" He moved into the blackness.\n\n\n Powerful as a small tank, the\n killer robot was equipped to\n crush, slash, and burn its way\n through undergrowth. Nevertheless,\n it was slowed by the\n larger trees and the thick, clinging\n vines, and Alan found that\n he could manage to keep ahead\n of it, barely out of blaster range.\n Only, the robot didn't get tired.\n Alan did.",
"Slowly Alan looked around,\n sizing up his situation. Behind\n him the dark jungle rustled forbiddingly.\n He shuddered. \"Not a\n very healthy spot to spend the\n night. On the other hand, I certainly\n can't get to the camp with\n a pack of mind-activated mechanical\n killers running around.\n If I can just hold out until morning,\n when the big ship arrives ...\n The big ship! Good\n Lord, Peggy!\" He turned white;\n oily sweat punctuated his forehead.\n Peggy, arriving tomorrow\n with the other colonists, the\n wives and kids! The metal killers,\n tuned to blast any living\n flesh, would murder them the",
"Firing intermittently, he\n pulled himself upright and hobbled\n ahead through the bush.\n The robot shook spasmodically\n with each shot, its gun tilted upward\n at an awkward angle.\n\n\n Then, unexpectedly, Alan saw\n stars, real stars brilliant in the\n night sky, and half dragging his\n swelling leg he stumbled out of\n the jungle into the camp clearing.\n Ahead, across fifty yards of\n grass stood the headquarters\n building, housing the robot-controlling\n computer. Still firing at\n short intervals he started across\n the clearing, gritting his teeth\n at every step.\n\n\n Straining every muscle in\n spite of the agonizing pain, Alan\n forced himself to a limping run\n across the uneven ground, carefully\n avoiding the insect hills\n that jutted up through the grass.\n From the corner of his eye he\n saw another of the robots standing\n shakily in the dark edge of\n the jungle waiting, it seemed,\n for his small blaster to run dry.",
"He began to move along the\n bank, away from the crashing\n sounds. Suddenly he stopped, his\n eyes widened. \"Of course! Radio!\n I'll bet anything they're\n automatically controlled by the\n camp computer. That's where\n their brain is!\" He paused.\n \"Then, if that were put out of\n commission ...\" He jerked away\n from the bank and half ran, half\n pulled himself through the undergrowth\n towards the camp.\n\n\n Trees exploded to his left as\n another robot fired in his direction,\n too far away to be effective\n but churning towards him\n through the blackness.",
"For a split second the jungle\n stood frozen in a brilliant blue\n flash, followed by the sharp report\n of a blaster. Then another.\n Alan whirled, startled. The\n planet's double moon had risen\n and he could see a robot rolling\n slowly across the clearing in his\n general direction, blasting indiscriminately\n at whatever mind\n impulses came within its pickup\n range, birds, insects, anything.\n Six or seven others also left the\n camp headquarters area and\n headed for the jungle, each to a\n slightly different spot.\n\n\n Apparently the robot hadn't\n sensed him yet, but Alan didn't\n know what the effective range\n of its pickup devices was. He\n began to slide back into the\n jungle. Minutes later, looking\n back he saw that the machine,\n though several hundred yards\n away, had altered its course and\n was now headed directly for\n him.",
"\"I wonder,\" he thought, \"how\n Pete could cram enough brain\n into one of those things to make\n it hunt and track so perfectly.\"\n He tried to visualize the computing\n circuits needed for the\n operation of its tracking mechanism\n alone. \"There just isn't\n room for the electronics. You'd\n need a computer as big as the\n one at camp headquarters.\"\nIn the distance the sky blazed\n as a blaster roared in the jungle.\n Then Alan heard the approaching\n robot, crunching and snapping\n its way through the undergrowth\n like an onrushing forest\n fire. He froze. \"Good Lord!\n They communicate with each\n other! The one I jammed must\n be calling others to help.\"",
"His arm where the black thing\n had been was swollen and tender,\n but he forced his hands to dig,\n dig, dig, cursing and crying to\n hide the pain, and biting his\n lips, ignoring the salty taste of\n blood. The soft earth crumbled\n under his hands until he had a\n small cave about three feet deep\n in the bank. Beyond that the\n soil was held too tightly by the\n roots from above and he had to\n stop.\nThe air crackled blue and a\n tree crashed heavily past Alan\n into the stream. Above him on\n the bank, silhouetting against\n the moons, the killer robot stopped\n and its blaster swivelled\n slowly down. Frantically, Alan\n hugged the bank as a shaft of\n pure electricity arced over him,\n sliced into the water, and exploded\n in a cloud of steam. The\n robot shook for a second, its\n blaster muzzle lifted erratically\n and for an instant it seemed almost\n out of control, then it\n quieted and the muzzle again\n pointed down.",
"The robot crashed on, louder\n now, gaining on the tired human.\n Legs aching and bruised,\n stinging from insect bites, Alan\n tried to force himself to run\n holding his hands in front of\n him like a child in the dark. His\n foot tripped on a barely visible\n insect hill and a winged swarm\n exploded around him. Startled,\n Alan jerked sideways, crashing\n his head against a tree. He\n clutched at the bark for a second,\n dazed, then his knees\n buckled. His blaster fell into the\n shadows.",
"Pressing with all his might,\n Alan slid slowly along the bank\n inches at a time, away from the\n machine above. Its muzzle turned\n to follow him but the edge of\n the bank blocked its aim. Grinding\n forward a couple of feet,\n slightly overhanging the bank,\n the robot fired again. For a split\n second Alan seemed engulfed in\n flame; the heat of hell singed his\n head and back, and mud boiled\n in the bank by his arm.\n\n\n Again the robot trembled. It\n jerked forward a foot and its\n blaster swung slightly away. But\n only for a moment. Then the gun\n swung back again.\n\n\n Suddenly, as if sensing something\n wrong, its tracks slammed\n into reverse. It stood poised for\n a second, its treads spinning\n crazily as the earth collapsed underneath\n it, where Alan had\n dug, then it fell with a heavy\n splash into the mud, ten feet\n from where Alan stood.",
"The robot crashed loudly behind\n him now. Without stopping\n to think, Alan fumbled along the\n ground after his gun, straining\n his eyes in the darkness. He\n found it just a couple of feet to\n one side, against the base of a\n small bush. Just as his fingers\n closed upon the barrel his other\n hand slipped into something\n sticky that splashed over his\n forearm. He screamed in pain\n and leaped back, trying frantically\n to wipe the clinging,\n burning blackness off his arm.\n Patches of black scraped off onto\n branches and vines, but the rest\n spread slowly over his arm as\n agonizing as hot acid, or as flesh\n being ripped away layer by\n layer.\n\n\n Almost blinded by pain, whimpering,\n Alan stumbled forward.\n Sharp muscle spasms shot from\n his shoulder across his back and\n chest. Tears streamed across his\n cheeks.",
"Alan, lying in the mud of the\n stream bed, felt the earth shake\n as the heavy little robot rolled\n slowly and inexorably towards\n him. \"The Lord High Executioner,\"\n he thought, \"in battle\n dress.\" He tried to stand but his\n legs were almost too weak and\n his arm felt numb. \"I'll drown\n him,\" he said aloud. \"I'll drown\n the Lord High Executioner.\" He\n laughed. Then his mind cleared.\n He remembered where he was.\nAlan trembled. For the first\n time in his life he understood\n what it was to live, because for\n the first time he realized that he\n would sometime die. In other\n times and circumstances he\n might put it off for a while, for\n months or years, but eventually,\n as now, he would have to watch,\n still and helpless, while death\n came creeping. Then, at thirty,\n Alan became a man.",
"The crashing rumble of the\n killer robots shook the night behind\n him, nearer sometimes,\n then falling slightly back, but\n following constantly, more\n unshakable than bloodhounds\n because a man can sometimes cover\n a scent, but no man can stop his\n thoughts. Intermittently, like\n photographers' strobes, blue\n flashes would light the jungle\n about him. Then, for seconds\n afterwards his eyes would see\n dancing streaks of yellow and\n sharp multi-colored pinwheels\n that alternately shrunk and expanded\n as if in a surrealist's\n nightmare. Alan would have to\n pause and squeeze his eyelids\n tight shut before he could see\n again, and the robots would\n move a little closer.",
"Frantically, Alan slammed\n open the door as the robot, sensing\n him strongly now, aimed\n point blank. He saw nothing, his\n mind thought of nothing but the\n red-clad safety switch mounted\n beside the computer. Time stopped.\n There was nothing else in\n the world. He half-jumped, half-fell\n towards it, slowly, in tenths\n of seconds that seemed measured\n out in years.\n\n\n The universe went black.\n\n\n Later. Brilliance pressed upon\n his eyes. Then pain returned, a\n multi-hurting thing that crawled\n through his body and dragged\n ragged tentacles across his\n brain. He moaned.\n\n\n A voice spoke hollowly in the\n distance. \"He's waking. Call his\n wife.\"",
"\"Be damned! You can't win\n now!\" Alan yelled between blaster\n shots, almost irrational from\n the pain that ripped jaggedly\n through his leg. Then it happened.\n A few feet from the\n building's door his blaster quit.\n A click. A faint hiss when he\n frantically jerked the trigger\n again and again, and the spent\n cells released themselves from\n the device, falling in the grass\n at his feet. He dropped the useless\n gun.\n\n\n \"No!\" He threw himself on\n the ground as a new robot suddenly\n appeared around the edge\n of the building a few feet away,\n aimed, and fired. Air burned\n over Alan's back and ozone tingled\n in his nostrils."
],
[
"Blinding itself for a few seconds\n with its own blaster static,\n the robot paused momentarily,\n jiggling in place. In this\n instant, Alan jammed his hands\n into an insect hill and hurled the\n pile of dirt and insects directly\n at the robot's antenna. In a flash,\n hundreds of the winged things\n erupted angrily from the hole in\n a swarming cloud, each part of\n which was a speck of life\n transmitting mental energy to the\n robot's pickup devices.\n\n\n Confused by the sudden dispersion\n of mind impulses, the\n robot fired erratically as Alan\n crouched and raced painfully for\n the door. It fired again, closer,\n as he fumbled with the lock\n release. Jagged bits of plastic and\n stone ripped past him, torn loose\n by the blast.",
"He began to move along the\n bank, away from the crashing\n sounds. Suddenly he stopped, his\n eyes widened. \"Of course! Radio!\n I'll bet anything they're\n automatically controlled by the\n camp computer. That's where\n their brain is!\" He paused.\n \"Then, if that were put out of\n commission ...\" He jerked away\n from the bank and half ran, half\n pulled himself through the undergrowth\n towards the camp.\n\n\n Trees exploded to his left as\n another robot fired in his direction,\n too far away to be effective\n but churning towards him\n through the blackness.",
"Frantically, Alan slammed\n open the door as the robot, sensing\n him strongly now, aimed\n point blank. He saw nothing, his\n mind thought of nothing but the\n red-clad safety switch mounted\n beside the computer. Time stopped.\n There was nothing else in\n the world. He half-jumped, half-fell\n towards it, slowly, in tenths\n of seconds that seemed measured\n out in years.\n\n\n The universe went black.\n\n\n Later. Brilliance pressed upon\n his eyes. Then pain returned, a\n multi-hurting thing that crawled\n through his body and dragged\n ragged tentacles across his\n brain. He moaned.\n\n\n A voice spoke hollowly in the\n distance. \"He's waking. Call his\n wife.\"",
"\"I wonder,\" he thought, \"how\n Pete could cram enough brain\n into one of those things to make\n it hunt and track so perfectly.\"\n He tried to visualize the computing\n circuits needed for the\n operation of its tracking mechanism\n alone. \"There just isn't\n room for the electronics. You'd\n need a computer as big as the\n one at camp headquarters.\"\nIn the distance the sky blazed\n as a blaster roared in the jungle.\n Then Alan heard the approaching\n robot, crunching and snapping\n its way through the undergrowth\n like an onrushing forest\n fire. He froze. \"Good Lord!\n They communicate with each\n other! The one I jammed must\n be calling others to help.\"",
"Pain danced up his leg as he\n grabbed his ankle. Quickly he\n felt the throbbing flesh. \"Damn\n the rotten luck, anyway!\" He\n blinked the pain tears from his\n eyes and looked up—into a robot's\n blaster, jutting out of the\n foliage, thirty yards away.\nInstinctively, in one motion\n Alan grabbed his pocket blaster\n and fired. To his amazement the\n robot jerked back, its gun wobbled\n and started to tilt away.\n Then, getting itself under control,\n it swung back again to face\n Alan. He fired again, and again\n the robot reacted. It seemed familiar\n somehow. Then he remembered\n the robot on the river\n bank, jiggling and swaying for\n seconds after each shot. \"Of\n course!\" He cursed himself for\n missing the obvious. \"The blaster\n static blanks out radio\n transmission from the computer\n for a few seconds. They even do\n it to themselves!\"",
"Shakily, Alan crawled a few\n feet back into the undergrowth\n where he could lie and watch the\n camp, but not himself be seen.\n Though visibility didn't make\n any difference to the robots, he\n felt safer, somehow, hidden. He\n knew now what the shooting\n sounds had been and why there\n hadn't been anyone around the\n camp site. A charred blob lying\n in the grass of the clearing confirmed\n his hypothesis. His stomach\n felt sick.\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" he muttered to\n himself, \"that Pete assembled\n these robots in a batch and then\n activated them all at once, probably\n never living to realize that\n they're tuned to pick up human\n brain waves, too. Damn!\n Damn!\" His eyes blurred and\n he slammed his fist into the soft\n earth.",
"\"So, they've finally got those\n things working.\" Alan smiled\n slightly. \"Guess that means I\n owe Pete a bourbon-and-soda\n for sure. Anybody who can\n build a robot that hunts by homing\n in on animals' mind impulses ...\"\n He stepped forward\n just as a roar of blue flame dissolved\n the branches of a tree,\n barely above his head.\n\n\n Without pausing to think,\n Alan leaped back, and fell\n sprawling over a bush just as\n one of the robots rolled silently\n up from the right, lowering its\n blaster barrel to aim directly at\n his head. Alan froze. \"My God,\n Pete built those things wrong!\"",
"Firing intermittently, he\n pulled himself upright and hobbled\n ahead through the bush.\n The robot shook spasmodically\n with each shot, its gun tilted upward\n at an awkward angle.\n\n\n Then, unexpectedly, Alan saw\n stars, real stars brilliant in the\n night sky, and half dragging his\n swelling leg he stumbled out of\n the jungle into the camp clearing.\n Ahead, across fifty yards of\n grass stood the headquarters\n building, housing the robot-controlling\n computer. Still firing at\n short intervals he started across\n the clearing, gritting his teeth\n at every step.\n\n\n Straining every muscle in\n spite of the agonizing pain, Alan\n forced himself to a limping run\n across the uneven ground, carefully\n avoiding the insect hills\n that jutted up through the grass.\n From the corner of his eye he\n saw another of the robots standing\n shakily in the dark edge of\n the jungle waiting, it seemed,\n for his small blaster to run dry.",
"Without hesitation Alan\n threw himself across the blaster\n housing, frantically locking his\n arms around the barrel as the\n robot's treads churned furiously\n in the sticky mud, causing it to\n buck and plunge like a Brahma\n bull. The treads stopped and the\n blaster jerked upwards wrenching\n Alan's arms, then slammed\n down. Then the whole housing\n whirled around and around, tilting\n alternately up and down like\n a steel-skinned water monster\n trying to dislodge a tenacious\n crab, while Alan, arms and legs\n wrapped tightly around the blaster\n barrel and housing, pressed\n fiercely against the robot's metal\n skin.",
"Pressing with all his might,\n Alan slid slowly along the bank\n inches at a time, away from the\n machine above. Its muzzle turned\n to follow him but the edge of\n the bank blocked its aim. Grinding\n forward a couple of feet,\n slightly overhanging the bank,\n the robot fired again. For a split\n second Alan seemed engulfed in\n flame; the heat of hell singed his\n head and back, and mud boiled\n in the bank by his arm.\n\n\n Again the robot trembled. It\n jerked forward a foot and its\n blaster swung slightly away. But\n only for a moment. Then the gun\n swung back again.\n\n\n Suddenly, as if sensing something\n wrong, its tracks slammed\n into reverse. It stood poised for\n a second, its treads spinning\n crazily as the earth collapsed underneath\n it, where Alan had\n dug, then it fell with a heavy\n splash into the mud, ten feet\n from where Alan stood.",
"Suddenly a screeching whirlwind\n of claws and teeth hurled\n itself from the smoldering\n branches and crashed against the\n robot, clawing insanely at the\n antenna and blaster barrel.\n With an awkward jerk the robot\n swung around and fired its blaster,\n completely dissolving the\n lower half of the cat creature\n which had clung across the barrel.\n But the back pressure of the\n cat's body overloaded the discharge\n circuits. The robot started\n to shake, then clicked sharply\n as an overload relay snapped\n and shorted the blaster cells.\n The killer turned and rolled back\n towards the camp, leaving Alan\n alone.",
"For a split second the jungle\n stood frozen in a brilliant blue\n flash, followed by the sharp report\n of a blaster. Then another.\n Alan whirled, startled. The\n planet's double moon had risen\n and he could see a robot rolling\n slowly across the clearing in his\n general direction, blasting indiscriminately\n at whatever mind\n impulses came within its pickup\n range, birds, insects, anything.\n Six or seven others also left the\n camp headquarters area and\n headed for the jungle, each to a\n slightly different spot.\n\n\n Apparently the robot hadn't\n sensed him yet, but Alan didn't\n know what the effective range\n of its pickup devices was. He\n began to slide back into the\n jungle. Minutes later, looking\n back he saw that the machine,\n though several hundred yards\n away, had altered its course and\n was now headed directly for\n him.",
"Alan changed direction slightly\n to follow a line between the\n two robots coming up from\n either side, behind him. His eyes\n were well accustomed to the dark\n now, and he managed to dodge\n most of the shadowy vines and\n branches before they could snag\n or trip him. Even so, he stumbled\n in the wiry underbrush and\n his legs were a mass of stinging\n slashes from ankle to thigh.",
"The earth, jungle and moons\n spun in a pinwheeled blur,\n slowed, and settled to their proper\n places. Standing in the sticky,\n sweet-smelling ooze, Alan eyed\n the robot apprehensively. Half\n buried in mud, it stood quiet in\n the shadowy light except for an\n occasional, almost spasmodic\n jerk of its blaster barrel. For\n the first time that night Alan\n allowed himself a slight smile.\n \"A blade in the old gear box,\n eh? How does that feel, boy?\"\n\n\n He turned. \"Well, I'd better\n get out of here before the knife\n slips or the monster cooks up\n some more tricks with whatever\n it's got for a brain.\" Digging\n little footholds in the soft bank,\n he climbed up and stood once\n again in the rustling jungle\n darkness.",
"As if in answer, a tree beside\n him breathed fire, then exploded.\n In the brief flash of the\n blaster shot, Alan saw the steel\n glint of a robot only a hundred\n yards away, much nearer than\n he had thought. \"Thank heaven\n for trees!\" He stepped back, felt\n his foot catch in something,\n clutched futilely at some leaves\n and fell heavily.",
"The crashing rumble of the\n killer robots shook the night behind\n him, nearer sometimes,\n then falling slightly back, but\n following constantly, more\n unshakable than bloodhounds\n because a man can sometimes cover\n a scent, but no man can stop his\n thoughts. Intermittently, like\n photographers' strobes, blue\n flashes would light the jungle\n about him. Then, for seconds\n afterwards his eyes would see\n dancing streaks of yellow and\n sharp multi-colored pinwheels\n that alternately shrunk and expanded\n as if in a surrealist's\n nightmare. Alan would have to\n pause and squeeze his eyelids\n tight shut before he could see\n again, and the robots would\n move a little closer.",
"\"Be damned! You can't win\n now!\" Alan yelled between blaster\n shots, almost irrational from\n the pain that ripped jaggedly\n through his leg. Then it happened.\n A few feet from the\n building's door his blaster quit.\n A click. A faint hiss when he\n frantically jerked the trigger\n again and again, and the spent\n cells released themselves from\n the device, falling in the grass\n at his feet. He dropped the useless\n gun.\n\n\n \"No!\" He threw himself on\n the ground as a new robot suddenly\n appeared around the edge\n of the building a few feet away,\n aimed, and fired. Air burned\n over Alan's back and ozone tingled\n in his nostrils.",
"The robot crashed on, louder\n now, gaining on the tired human.\n Legs aching and bruised,\n stinging from insect bites, Alan\n tried to force himself to run\n holding his hands in front of\n him like a child in the dark. His\n foot tripped on a barely visible\n insect hill and a winged swarm\n exploded around him. Startled,\n Alan jerked sideways, crashing\n his head against a tree. He\n clutched at the bark for a second,\n dazed, then his knees\n buckled. His blaster fell into the\n shadows.",
"His arm where the black thing\n had been was swollen and tender,\n but he forced his hands to dig,\n dig, dig, cursing and crying to\n hide the pain, and biting his\n lips, ignoring the salty taste of\n blood. The soft earth crumbled\n under his hands until he had a\n small cave about three feet deep\n in the bank. Beyond that the\n soil was held too tightly by the\n roots from above and he had to\n stop.\nThe air crackled blue and a\n tree crashed heavily past Alan\n into the stream. Above him on\n the bank, silhouetting against\n the moons, the killer robot stopped\n and its blaster swivelled\n slowly down. Frantically, Alan\n hugged the bank as a shaft of\n pure electricity arced over him,\n sliced into the water, and exploded\n in a cloud of steam. The\n robot shook for a second, its\n blaster muzzle lifted erratically\n and for an instant it seemed almost\n out of control, then it\n quieted and the muzzle again\n pointed down.",
"His stomach tightened. Panic.\n The dank, musty smell of the\n jungle seemed for an instant to\n thicken and choke in his throat.\n Then he thought of the big ship\n landing in the morning, settling\n down slowly after a lonely two-week\n voyage. He thought of a\n brown-haired girl crowding with\n the others to the gangway, eager\n to embrace the new planet, and\n the next instant a charred nothing,\n unrecognizable, the victim\n of a design error or a misplaced\n wire in a machine. \"I have to\n try,\" he said aloud. \"I have to\n try.\" He moved into the blackness.\n\n\n Powerful as a small tank, the\n killer robot was equipped to\n crush, slash, and burn its way\n through undergrowth. Nevertheless,\n it was slowed by the\n larger trees and the thick, clinging\n vines, and Alan found that\n he could manage to keep ahead\n of it, barely out of blaster range.\n Only, the robot didn't get tired.\n Alan did."
],
[
"\"So, they've finally got those\n things working.\" Alan smiled\n slightly. \"Guess that means I\n owe Pete a bourbon-and-soda\n for sure. Anybody who can\n build a robot that hunts by homing\n in on animals' mind impulses ...\"\n He stepped forward\n just as a roar of blue flame dissolved\n the branches of a tree,\n barely above his head.\n\n\n Without pausing to think,\n Alan leaped back, and fell\n sprawling over a bush just as\n one of the robots rolled silently\n up from the right, lowering its\n blaster barrel to aim directly at\n his head. Alan froze. \"My God,\n Pete built those things wrong!\"",
"Shakily, Alan crawled a few\n feet back into the undergrowth\n where he could lie and watch the\n camp, but not himself be seen.\n Though visibility didn't make\n any difference to the robots, he\n felt safer, somehow, hidden. He\n knew now what the shooting\n sounds had been and why there\n hadn't been anyone around the\n camp site. A charred blob lying\n in the grass of the clearing confirmed\n his hypothesis. His stomach\n felt sick.\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" he muttered to\n himself, \"that Pete assembled\n these robots in a batch and then\n activated them all at once, probably\n never living to realize that\n they're tuned to pick up human\n brain waves, too. Damn!\n Damn!\" His eyes blurred and\n he slammed his fist into the soft\n earth.",
"\"I wonder,\" he thought, \"how\n Pete could cram enough brain\n into one of those things to make\n it hunt and track so perfectly.\"\n He tried to visualize the computing\n circuits needed for the\n operation of its tracking mechanism\n alone. \"There just isn't\n room for the electronics. You'd\n need a computer as big as the\n one at camp headquarters.\"\nIn the distance the sky blazed\n as a blaster roared in the jungle.\n Then Alan heard the approaching\n robot, crunching and snapping\n its way through the undergrowth\n like an onrushing forest\n fire. He froze. \"Good Lord!\n They communicate with each\n other! The one I jammed must\n be calling others to help.\"",
"He pictured the camp computer\n with no one to stop it, automatically\n sending its robots in\n wider and wider forays, slowly\n wiping every trace of life from\n the planet. Technologically advanced\n machines doing the job\n for which they were built, completely,\n thoroughly, without feeling,\n and without human masters\n to separate sense from futility.\n Finally parts would wear out,\n circuits would short, and one by\n one the killers would crunch to\n a halt. A few birds would still\n fly then, but a unique animal\n life, rare in the universe, would\n exist no more. And the bones of\n children, eager girls, and their\n men would also lie, beside a\n rusty hulk, beneath the alien\n sun.\n\n\n \"Peggy!\"",
"The crashing rumble of the\n killer robots shook the night behind\n him, nearer sometimes,\n then falling slightly back, but\n following constantly, more\n unshakable than bloodhounds\n because a man can sometimes cover\n a scent, but no man can stop his\n thoughts. Intermittently, like\n photographers' strobes, blue\n flashes would light the jungle\n about him. Then, for seconds\n afterwards his eyes would see\n dancing streaks of yellow and\n sharp multi-colored pinwheels\n that alternately shrunk and expanded\n as if in a surrealist's\n nightmare. Alan would have to\n pause and squeeze his eyelids\n tight shut before he could see\n again, and the robots would\n move a little closer.",
"Suddenly a screeching whirlwind\n of claws and teeth hurled\n itself from the smoldering\n branches and crashed against the\n robot, clawing insanely at the\n antenna and blaster barrel.\n With an awkward jerk the robot\n swung around and fired its blaster,\n completely dissolving the\n lower half of the cat creature\n which had clung across the barrel.\n But the back pressure of the\n cat's body overloaded the discharge\n circuits. The robot started\n to shake, then clicked sharply\n as an overload relay snapped\n and shorted the blaster cells.\n The killer turned and rolled back\n towards the camp, leaving Alan\n alone.",
"Blinding itself for a few seconds\n with its own blaster static,\n the robot paused momentarily,\n jiggling in place. In this\n instant, Alan jammed his hands\n into an insect hill and hurled the\n pile of dirt and insects directly\n at the robot's antenna. In a flash,\n hundreds of the winged things\n erupted angrily from the hole in\n a swarming cloud, each part of\n which was a speck of life\n transmitting mental energy to the\n robot's pickup devices.\n\n\n Confused by the sudden dispersion\n of mind impulses, the\n robot fired erratically as Alan\n crouched and raced painfully for\n the door. It fired again, closer,\n as he fumbled with the lock\n release. Jagged bits of plastic and\n stone ripped past him, torn loose\n by the blast.",
"A blue arc slashed at the trees\n a mere hundred yards behind.\n He screamed at the blast. \"Damn\n you, Pete! Damn your robots!\n Damn, damn ... Oh, Peggy!\"\n He stepped into emptiness.\n\n\n Coolness. Wet. Slowly, washed\n by the water, the pain began to\n fall away. He wanted to lie there\n forever in the dark, cool, wetness.\n For ever, and ever, and ...\n The air thundered.\n\n\n In the dim light he could see\n the banks of the stream, higher\n than a man, muddy and loose.\n Growing right to the edge of the\n banks, the jungle reached out\n with hairy, disjointed arms as\n if to snag even the dirty little\n stream that passed so timidly\n through its domain.",
"His arm where the black thing\n had been was swollen and tender,\n but he forced his hands to dig,\n dig, dig, cursing and crying to\n hide the pain, and biting his\n lips, ignoring the salty taste of\n blood. The soft earth crumbled\n under his hands until he had a\n small cave about three feet deep\n in the bank. Beyond that the\n soil was held too tightly by the\n roots from above and he had to\n stop.\nThe air crackled blue and a\n tree crashed heavily past Alan\n into the stream. Above him on\n the bank, silhouetting against\n the moons, the killer robot stopped\n and its blaster swivelled\n slowly down. Frantically, Alan\n hugged the bank as a shaft of\n pure electricity arced over him,\n sliced into the water, and exploded\n in a cloud of steam. The\n robot shook for a second, its\n blaster muzzle lifted erratically\n and for an instant it seemed almost\n out of control, then it\n quieted and the muzzle again\n pointed down.",
"\"Be damned! You can't win\n now!\" Alan yelled between blaster\n shots, almost irrational from\n the pain that ripped jaggedly\n through his leg. Then it happened.\n A few feet from the\n building's door his blaster quit.\n A click. A faint hiss when he\n frantically jerked the trigger\n again and again, and the spent\n cells released themselves from\n the device, falling in the grass\n at his feet. He dropped the useless\n gun.\n\n\n \"No!\" He threw himself on\n the ground as a new robot suddenly\n appeared around the edge\n of the building a few feet away,\n aimed, and fired. Air burned\n over Alan's back and ozone tingled\n in his nostrils.",
"Pressing with all his might,\n Alan slid slowly along the bank\n inches at a time, away from the\n machine above. Its muzzle turned\n to follow him but the edge of\n the bank blocked its aim. Grinding\n forward a couple of feet,\n slightly overhanging the bank,\n the robot fired again. For a split\n second Alan seemed engulfed in\n flame; the heat of hell singed his\n head and back, and mud boiled\n in the bank by his arm.\n\n\n Again the robot trembled. It\n jerked forward a foot and its\n blaster swung slightly away. But\n only for a moment. Then the gun\n swung back again.\n\n\n Suddenly, as if sensing something\n wrong, its tracks slammed\n into reverse. It stood poised for\n a second, its treads spinning\n crazily as the earth collapsed underneath\n it, where Alan had\n dug, then it fell with a heavy\n splash into the mud, ten feet\n from where Alan stood.",
"He began to move along the\n bank, away from the crashing\n sounds. Suddenly he stopped, his\n eyes widened. \"Of course! Radio!\n I'll bet anything they're\n automatically controlled by the\n camp computer. That's where\n their brain is!\" He paused.\n \"Then, if that were put out of\n commission ...\" He jerked away\n from the bank and half ran, half\n pulled himself through the undergrowth\n towards the camp.\n\n\n Trees exploded to his left as\n another robot fired in his direction,\n too far away to be effective\n but churning towards him\n through the blackness.",
"The robot crashed on, louder\n now, gaining on the tired human.\n Legs aching and bruised,\n stinging from insect bites, Alan\n tried to force himself to run\n holding his hands in front of\n him like a child in the dark. His\n foot tripped on a barely visible\n insect hill and a winged swarm\n exploded around him. Startled,\n Alan jerked sideways, crashing\n his head against a tree. He\n clutched at the bark for a second,\n dazed, then his knees\n buckled. His blaster fell into the\n shadows.",
"For a split second the jungle\n stood frozen in a brilliant blue\n flash, followed by the sharp report\n of a blaster. Then another.\n Alan whirled, startled. The\n planet's double moon had risen\n and he could see a robot rolling\n slowly across the clearing in his\n general direction, blasting indiscriminately\n at whatever mind\n impulses came within its pickup\n range, birds, insects, anything.\n Six or seven others also left the\n camp headquarters area and\n headed for the jungle, each to a\n slightly different spot.\n\n\n Apparently the robot hadn't\n sensed him yet, but Alan didn't\n know what the effective range\n of its pickup devices was. He\n began to slide back into the\n jungle. Minutes later, looking\n back he saw that the machine,\n though several hundred yards\n away, had altered its course and\n was now headed directly for\n him.",
"Firing intermittently, he\n pulled himself upright and hobbled\n ahead through the bush.\n The robot shook spasmodically\n with each shot, its gun tilted upward\n at an awkward angle.\n\n\n Then, unexpectedly, Alan saw\n stars, real stars brilliant in the\n night sky, and half dragging his\n swelling leg he stumbled out of\n the jungle into the camp clearing.\n Ahead, across fifty yards of\n grass stood the headquarters\n building, housing the robot-controlling\n computer. Still firing at\n short intervals he started across\n the clearing, gritting his teeth\n at every step.\n\n\n Straining every muscle in\n spite of the agonizing pain, Alan\n forced himself to a limping run\n across the uneven ground, carefully\n avoiding the insect hills\n that jutted up through the grass.\n From the corner of his eye he\n saw another of the robots standing\n shakily in the dark edge of\n the jungle waiting, it seemed,\n for his small blaster to run dry.",
"Alan, lying in the mud of the\n stream bed, felt the earth shake\n as the heavy little robot rolled\n slowly and inexorably towards\n him. \"The Lord High Executioner,\"\n he thought, \"in battle\n dress.\" He tried to stand but his\n legs were almost too weak and\n his arm felt numb. \"I'll drown\n him,\" he said aloud. \"I'll drown\n the Lord High Executioner.\" He\n laughed. Then his mind cleared.\n He remembered where he was.\nAlan trembled. For the first\n time in his life he understood\n what it was to live, because for\n the first time he realized that he\n would sometime die. In other\n times and circumstances he\n might put it off for a while, for\n months or years, but eventually,\n as now, he would have to watch,\n still and helpless, while death\n came creeping. Then, at thirty,\n Alan became a man.",
"SURVIVAL\n\n TACTICS\nBy AL SEVCIK\nILLUSTRATOR NOVICK\nThe robots were built to serve\n Man; to do his work, see to his\n comforts, make smooth his way.\n Then the robots figured out an\n additional service—putting Man\n out of his misery.\nThere\n was a sudden crash\n that hung sharply in the air,\n as if a tree had been hit by\n lightning some distance away.\n Then another. Alan stopped,\n puzzled. Two more blasts, quickly\n together, and the sound of a\n scream faintly.",
"The robot crashed loudly behind\n him now. Without stopping\n to think, Alan fumbled along the\n ground after his gun, straining\n his eyes in the darkness. He\n found it just a couple of feet to\n one side, against the base of a\n small bush. Just as his fingers\n closed upon the barrel his other\n hand slipped into something\n sticky that splashed over his\n forearm. He screamed in pain\n and leaped back, trying frantically\n to wipe the clinging,\n burning blackness off his arm.\n Patches of black scraped off onto\n branches and vines, but the rest\n spread slowly over his arm as\n agonizing as hot acid, or as flesh\n being ripped away layer by\n layer.\n\n\n Almost blinded by pain, whimpering,\n Alan stumbled forward.\n Sharp muscle spasms shot from\n his shoulder across his back and\n chest. Tears streamed across his\n cheeks.",
"As if in answer, a tree beside\n him breathed fire, then exploded.\n In the brief flash of the\n blaster shot, Alan saw the steel\n glint of a robot only a hundred\n yards away, much nearer than\n he had thought. \"Thank heaven\n for trees!\" He stepped back, felt\n his foot catch in something,\n clutched futilely at some leaves\n and fell heavily.",
"His stomach tightened. Panic.\n The dank, musty smell of the\n jungle seemed for an instant to\n thicken and choke in his throat.\n Then he thought of the big ship\n landing in the morning, settling\n down slowly after a lonely two-week\n voyage. He thought of a\n brown-haired girl crowding with\n the others to the gangway, eager\n to embrace the new planet, and\n the next instant a charred nothing,\n unrecognizable, the victim\n of a design error or a misplaced\n wire in a machine. \"I have to\n try,\" he said aloud. \"I have to\n try.\" He moved into the blackness.\n\n\n Powerful as a small tank, the\n killer robot was equipped to\n crush, slash, and burn its way\n through undergrowth. Nevertheless,\n it was slowed by the\n larger trees and the thick, clinging\n vines, and Alan found that\n he could manage to keep ahead\n of it, barely out of blaster range.\n Only, the robot didn't get tired.\n Alan did."
],
[
"Suddenly anxious, he slashed\n a hurried X in one of the trees\n to mark his position then turned\n to follow a line of similar marks\n back through the jungle. He\n tried to run, but vines blocked\n his way and woody shrubs\n caught at his legs, tripping him\n and holding him back. Then,\n through the trees he saw the\n clearing of the camp site, the\n temporary home for the scout\n ship and the eleven men who,\n with Alan, were the only humans\n on the jungle planet, Waiamea.\nStepping through the low\n shrubbery at the edge of the\n site, he looked across the open\n area to the two temporary structures,\n the camp headquarters\n where the power supplies and\n the computer were; and the\n sleeping quarters. Beyond, nose\n high, stood the silver scout ship\n that had brought the advance\n exploratory party of scientists\n and technicians to Waiamea\n three days before. Except for a\n few of the killer robots rolling\n slowly around the camp site on\n their quiet treads, there was no\n one about.",
"Slowly Alan looked around,\n sizing up his situation. Behind\n him the dark jungle rustled forbiddingly.\n He shuddered. \"Not a\n very healthy spot to spend the\n night. On the other hand, I certainly\n can't get to the camp with\n a pack of mind-activated mechanical\n killers running around.\n If I can just hold out until morning,\n when the big ship arrives ...\n The big ship! Good\n Lord, Peggy!\" He turned white;\n oily sweat punctuated his forehead.\n Peggy, arriving tomorrow\n with the other colonists, the\n wives and kids! The metal killers,\n tuned to blast any living\n flesh, would murder them the",
"instant they stepped from the\n ship!\nA pretty girl, Peggy, the girl\n he'd married just three weeks\n ago. He still couldn't believe it.\n It was crazy, he supposed, to\n marry a girl and then take off\n for an unknown planet, with her\n to follow, to try to create a home\n in a jungle clearing. Crazy maybe,\n but Peggy and her green eyes\n that changed color with the\n light, with her soft brown hair,\n and her happy smile, had ended\n thirty years of loneliness and\n had, at last, given him a reason\n for living. \"Not to be killed!\"\n Alan unclenched his fists and\n wiped his palms, bloody where",
"His stomach tightened. Panic.\n The dank, musty smell of the\n jungle seemed for an instant to\n thicken and choke in his throat.\n Then he thought of the big ship\n landing in the morning, settling\n down slowly after a lonely two-week\n voyage. He thought of a\n brown-haired girl crowding with\n the others to the gangway, eager\n to embrace the new planet, and\n the next instant a charred nothing,\n unrecognizable, the victim\n of a design error or a misplaced\n wire in a machine. \"I have to\n try,\" he said aloud. \"I have to\n try.\" He moved into the blackness.\n\n\n Powerful as a small tank, the\n killer robot was equipped to\n crush, slash, and burn its way\n through undergrowth. Nevertheless,\n it was slowed by the\n larger trees and the thick, clinging\n vines, and Alan found that\n he could manage to keep ahead\n of it, barely out of blaster range.\n Only, the robot didn't get tired.\n Alan did.",
"For a split second the jungle\n stood frozen in a brilliant blue\n flash, followed by the sharp report\n of a blaster. Then another.\n Alan whirled, startled. The\n planet's double moon had risen\n and he could see a robot rolling\n slowly across the clearing in his\n general direction, blasting indiscriminately\n at whatever mind\n impulses came within its pickup\n range, birds, insects, anything.\n Six or seven others also left the\n camp headquarters area and\n headed for the jungle, each to a\n slightly different spot.\n\n\n Apparently the robot hadn't\n sensed him yet, but Alan didn't\n know what the effective range\n of its pickup devices was. He\n began to slide back into the\n jungle. Minutes later, looking\n back he saw that the machine,\n though several hundred yards\n away, had altered its course and\n was now headed directly for\n him.",
"He pictured the camp computer\n with no one to stop it, automatically\n sending its robots in\n wider and wider forays, slowly\n wiping every trace of life from\n the planet. Technologically advanced\n machines doing the job\n for which they were built, completely,\n thoroughly, without feeling,\n and without human masters\n to separate sense from futility.\n Finally parts would wear out,\n circuits would short, and one by\n one the killers would crunch to\n a halt. A few birds would still\n fly then, but a unique animal\n life, rare in the universe, would\n exist no more. And the bones of\n children, eager girls, and their\n men would also lie, beside a\n rusty hulk, beneath the alien\n sun.\n\n\n \"Peggy!\"",
"Frowning, worrying about the\n sounds, Alan momentarily forgot\n to watch his step until his foot\n suddenly plunged into an ant\n hill, throwing him to the jungle\n floor. \"Damn!\" He cursed again,\n for the tenth time, and stood\n uncertainly in the dimness.\n From tall, moss-shrouded trees,\n wrist-thick vines hung quietly,\n scraping the spongy ground like\n the tentacles of some monstrous\n tree-bound octopus. Fitful little\n plants grew straggly in the\n shadows of the mossy trunks,\n forming a dense underbrush that\n made walking difficult. At midday\n some few of the blue sun's\n rays filtered through to the\n jungle floor, but now, late afternoon\n on the planet, the shadows\n were long and gloomy.",
"Suddenly a screeching whirlwind\n of claws and teeth hurled\n itself from the smoldering\n branches and crashed against the\n robot, clawing insanely at the\n antenna and blaster barrel.\n With an awkward jerk the robot\n swung around and fired its blaster,\n completely dissolving the\n lower half of the cat creature\n which had clung across the barrel.\n But the back pressure of the\n cat's body overloaded the discharge\n circuits. The robot started\n to shake, then clicked sharply\n as an overload relay snapped\n and shorted the blaster cells.\n The killer turned and rolled back\n towards the camp, leaving Alan\n alone.",
"\"I wonder,\" he thought, \"how\n Pete could cram enough brain\n into one of those things to make\n it hunt and track so perfectly.\"\n He tried to visualize the computing\n circuits needed for the\n operation of its tracking mechanism\n alone. \"There just isn't\n room for the electronics. You'd\n need a computer as big as the\n one at camp headquarters.\"\nIn the distance the sky blazed\n as a blaster roared in the jungle.\n Then Alan heard the approaching\n robot, crunching and snapping\n its way through the undergrowth\n like an onrushing forest\n fire. He froze. \"Good Lord!\n They communicate with each\n other! The one I jammed must\n be calling others to help.\"",
"There was movement also, in\n the darkness beside him, scrapings\n and rustlings and an occasional\n low, throaty sound like an\n angry cat. Alan's fingers tensed\n on his pocket blaster. Swift\n shadowy forms moved quickly in\n the shrubs and the growling became\n suddenly louder. He fired\n twice, blindly, into the undergrowth.\n Sharp screams punctuated\n the electric blue discharge as\n a pack of small feline creatures\n leaped snarling and clawing\n back into the night.\nMentally, Alan tried to figure\n the charge remaining in his blaster.\n There wouldn't be much.\n \"Enough for a few more shots,\n maybe. Why the devil didn't I\n load in fresh cells this morning!\"",
"Shakily, Alan crawled a few\n feet back into the undergrowth\n where he could lie and watch the\n camp, but not himself be seen.\n Though visibility didn't make\n any difference to the robots, he\n felt safer, somehow, hidden. He\n knew now what the shooting\n sounds had been and why there\n hadn't been anyone around the\n camp site. A charred blob lying\n in the grass of the clearing confirmed\n his hypothesis. His stomach\n felt sick.\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" he muttered to\n himself, \"that Pete assembled\n these robots in a batch and then\n activated them all at once, probably\n never living to realize that\n they're tuned to pick up human\n brain waves, too. Damn!\n Damn!\" His eyes blurred and\n he slammed his fist into the soft\n earth.",
"As if in answer, a tree beside\n him breathed fire, then exploded.\n In the brief flash of the\n blaster shot, Alan saw the steel\n glint of a robot only a hundred\n yards away, much nearer than\n he had thought. \"Thank heaven\n for trees!\" He stepped back, felt\n his foot catch in something,\n clutched futilely at some leaves\n and fell heavily.",
"There was a slight creak above\n him like the protesting of a\n branch too heavily laden. Blaster\n ready, Alan rolled over onto his\n back. In the movement, his elbow\n struck the top of a small\n earthy mound and he was instantly\n engulfed in a swarm of\n locust-like insects that beat disgustingly\n against his eyes and\n mouth. \"Fagh!\" Waving his\n arms before his face he jumped\n up and backwards, away from\n the bugs. As he did so, a dark\n shapeless thing plopped from\n the trees onto the spot where he\n had been lying stretched out.\n Then, like an ambient fungus,\n it slithered off into the jungle\n undergrowth.",
"The earth, jungle and moons\n spun in a pinwheeled blur,\n slowed, and settled to their proper\n places. Standing in the sticky,\n sweet-smelling ooze, Alan eyed\n the robot apprehensively. Half\n buried in mud, it stood quiet in\n the shadowy light except for an\n occasional, almost spasmodic\n jerk of its blaster barrel. For\n the first time that night Alan\n allowed himself a slight smile.\n \"A blade in the old gear box,\n eh? How does that feel, boy?\"\n\n\n He turned. \"Well, I'd better\n get out of here before the knife\n slips or the monster cooks up\n some more tricks with whatever\n it's got for a brain.\" Digging\n little footholds in the soft bank,\n he climbed up and stood once\n again in the rustling jungle\n darkness.",
"His arm where the black thing\n had been was swollen and tender,\n but he forced his hands to dig,\n dig, dig, cursing and crying to\n hide the pain, and biting his\n lips, ignoring the salty taste of\n blood. The soft earth crumbled\n under his hands until he had a\n small cave about three feet deep\n in the bank. Beyond that the\n soil was held too tightly by the\n roots from above and he had to\n stop.\nThe air crackled blue and a\n tree crashed heavily past Alan\n into the stream. Above him on\n the bank, silhouetting against\n the moons, the killer robot stopped\n and its blaster swivelled\n slowly down. Frantically, Alan\n hugged the bank as a shaft of\n pure electricity arced over him,\n sliced into the water, and exploded\n in a cloud of steam. The\n robot shook for a second, its\n blaster muzzle lifted erratically\n and for an instant it seemed almost\n out of control, then it\n quieted and the muzzle again\n pointed down.",
"Firing intermittently, he\n pulled himself upright and hobbled\n ahead through the bush.\n The robot shook spasmodically\n with each shot, its gun tilted upward\n at an awkward angle.\n\n\n Then, unexpectedly, Alan saw\n stars, real stars brilliant in the\n night sky, and half dragging his\n swelling leg he stumbled out of\n the jungle into the camp clearing.\n Ahead, across fifty yards of\n grass stood the headquarters\n building, housing the robot-controlling\n computer. Still firing at\n short intervals he started across\n the clearing, gritting his teeth\n at every step.\n\n\n Straining every muscle in\n spite of the agonizing pain, Alan\n forced himself to a limping run\n across the uneven ground, carefully\n avoiding the insect hills\n that jutted up through the grass.\n From the corner of his eye he\n saw another of the robots standing\n shakily in the dark edge of\n the jungle waiting, it seemed,\n for his small blaster to run dry.",
"He began to move along the\n bank, away from the crashing\n sounds. Suddenly he stopped, his\n eyes widened. \"Of course! Radio!\n I'll bet anything they're\n automatically controlled by the\n camp computer. That's where\n their brain is!\" He paused.\n \"Then, if that were put out of\n commission ...\" He jerked away\n from the bank and half ran, half\n pulled himself through the undergrowth\n towards the camp.\n\n\n Trees exploded to his left as\n another robot fired in his direction,\n too far away to be effective\n but churning towards him\n through the blackness.",
"Blinding itself for a few seconds\n with its own blaster static,\n the robot paused momentarily,\n jiggling in place. In this\n instant, Alan jammed his hands\n into an insect hill and hurled the\n pile of dirt and insects directly\n at the robot's antenna. In a flash,\n hundreds of the winged things\n erupted angrily from the hole in\n a swarming cloud, each part of\n which was a speck of life\n transmitting mental energy to the\n robot's pickup devices.\n\n\n Confused by the sudden dispersion\n of mind impulses, the\n robot fired erratically as Alan\n crouched and raced painfully for\n the door. It fired again, closer,\n as he fumbled with the lock\n release. Jagged bits of plastic and\n stone ripped past him, torn loose\n by the blast.",
"When he raised his eyes again\n the jungle was perceptibly darker.\n Stealthy rustlings in the\n shadows grew louder with the\n setting sun. Branches snapped\n unaccountably in the trees overhead\n and every now and then\n leaves or a twig fell softly to the\n ground, close to where he lay.\n Reaching into his jacket, Alan\n fingered his pocket blaster. He\n pulled it out and held it in his\n right hand. \"This pop gun\n wouldn't even singe a robot, but\n it just might stop one of those\n pumas.\"\nThey said the blast with your name on it would find\n you anywhere. This looked like Alan's blast.",
"The twin moons cast pale, deceptive\n shadows that wavered\n and danced across the jungle\n floor, hiding debris that tripped\n him and often sent him sprawling\n into the dark. Sharp-edged\n growths tore at his face and\n clothes, and insects attracted by\n the blood matted against his\n pants and shirt. Behind, the robot\n crashed imperturbably after\n him, lighting the night with fitful\n blaster flashes as some\n winged or legged life came within\n its range."
]
] |
train
|
99901
|
[
"When does Stephen Cave think the general public will react to the role of AI?",
"Which of these does Stephen think is a strong benefit of AIs in jobs?",
"Which does Stephen think is a useful impact of AIs in a broad context?",
"How would Stephen compare humans and machines?",
"Which is the most likely social consequence of AIs?",
"Which best describes Stephen's vision for the future of innovation?",
"What does Stephen think is the most important impact of trying to be more efficient in using resources?"
] |
[
[
"Once they realize they can lose money if they are not in the AI industry",
"Once they realize that AI can be dangerous",
"Once they think jobs are being lost to AIs",
"Once the AI companies have a larger share of the general market"
],
[
"They are an easy way to keep an eye on employees to make sure they are doing what needs to be done",
"To automate a lot of reports and make communication easier",
"To let people spend their time in jobs doing things they want to do",
"They can support employees with disabilities who have to do a lot of tech work"
],
[
"They can have a strong moral impact on the communities they interact with",
"They will allow us to put the social frameworks we live in under a microscope",
"They will boost the economy all over the world",
"There can be regulation that can help people decide how to shape the future"
],
[
"He thinks they are similar enough that a conflict will arise",
"They are complementary in their abilities and can benefit from one another",
"They operate with similar systems of intelligence but to entirely different ends",
"Humans are at risk of losing access to knowledge if they let machines take over most tasks"
],
[
"The AI developers will be able to shape societal structures as they see fit",
"There will be an overwhelming amount of regulation that will add control to people's lives",
"Over-reliance on technology might cause some loss of valuable intuition from educated people",
"There will be no jobs left for humans to complete if AIs continue developing"
],
[
"He thinks innovation should be led by the AI developers but checked by people in other industrues",
"The regulation of technological development will provide the necessary structure for successful innovation",
"He says that international connections are the only way true innovation will happen over time",
"He wants people to be responsible and held accountable by different kinds of people"
],
[
"It is cheaper for any technology to operate if it has to rely on fewer resources",
"The resources availalbe on the Earth are finite and are running low enough to possibly impede technological progress",
"The earth has been hurt by previous technological developments and it could be partly counteracted",
"Having fewer cars on the road would mean a safer environment for most drivers"
]
] |
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[
"AI: what's the worst that could happen?\nThe Centre for the Future of Intelligence is seeking to investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for humanity, and make sure humans take advantage of the opportunities while dodging the risks. It launched at the University of Cambridge last October, and is a collaboration between four universities and colleges – Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and Berkeley – backed with a 10-year, £10m grant from the Leverhulme Trust. \n\n Because no single discipline is ideally suited to this task, the centre emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. It is bringing together a diverse community of some of the world's best researchers, philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. \n\nExecutive director of the centre is Stephen Cave, a writer, philosopher and former diplomat. Harry Armstrong, head of futures at Nesta, which publishes The Long + Short, spoke with Cave about the impact of AI.",
"Their conversation has been edited.\nHarry Armstrong: Do you see the interdisciplinary nature of the centre as one of its key values and one of the key impacts you hope it will have on the field?\nStephen Cave: Thinking about the impact of AI is not something that any one discipline owns or does in any very systematic way. So if academia is going to rise to the challenge and provide thought leadership on this hugely important issue, then we’re going to need to do it by breaking down current disciplinary boundaries and bringing people with very different expertise together. \n\n That means bringing together the technologists and the experts at developing these algorithms together with social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and so forth. \n\n I think there are many areas of science where more interdisciplinary engagement would be valuable. Biotech’s another example. In that sense AI isn’t unique, but I think because thinking about AI is still in very early stages, we have an opportunity to shape the way in which we think about it, and build that community.",
"You can think, well, we in the West have long been justifying power relations of a certain kind on the basis that we're 'cleverer'. That's why men get to vote and women don't, or whatever. In a culture where power is not based on intelligence but, say, on a caste system, which is purely hereditary, we’d build an AI, and it would just tune in, drop out, attain enlightenment, just sit in the corner. Or we beg it to come back and help us find enlightenment. It might be that we find a completely different narrative to the one that's dominant in the West.\nOne of the projects the centre is running is looking into what kind of AI breakthroughs may come, when and what the social consequences could be. What do you think the future holds? What are your fears – what do you think could go right and wrong in the short, medium and long term?",
"AI companies, and in particular the big tech companies, are very concerned that this won't go like climate change, but rather it will go like GMOs: that people will have a gut reaction to this technology as soon as the first great swathe of job losses take hold. People speculate that 50m jobs could be lost in the US if trucking is automated, which is conceivable within 10 years. You could imagine a populist US government therefore simply banning driverless cars.",
"We want to create a space where many different disciplines can come together and develop a shared language, learn from each other’s approaches, and hopefully very quickly move to be able to actually develop new ideas, new conclusions, together. But the first step is learning how to talk to each other.\nAt a recent talk, Naomi Klein said that addressing the challenge of climate change could not have come at a worse time. The current dominant political and economic ideologies, along with growing isolationist sentiment, runs contrary to the bipartisan, collaborative approaches needed to solve global issues like climate change. Do you see the same issues hampering a global effort to respond to the challenges AI raises?\nClimate change suffers from the problem that the costs are not incurred in any direct way by the industrialists who own the technology and are profiting from it. With AI, that has been the case so far; although not on the same scale. There has been disruption but so far, compared to industrialisation, the impact has been fairly small. That will probably change.",
"So I think there is anxiety in the tech industry that there could be a serious reaction against this technology at any point. And so my impression is that there is a feeling within these companies that these ethical and social implications need to be taken very seriously, now. And that a broad buy-in by society into some kind of vision of the future in which this technology plays a role is required, if a dangerous – or to them dangerous – counteraction is to be avoided.\nMy personal experience working with these tech companies is that they are concerned for their businesses and genuinely want to do the right thing. Of course there are intellectual challenges and there is money to be made, but equally they are people who don't think when they get up in the morning that they're going to put people out of jobs or bring about the downfall of humanity. As the industry matures it's developing a sense of responsibility.",
"Robotic technology is dangerous. Or potentially dangerous. But at the same time, most of what we're using technology for is to enhance ourselves, to increase our capacities. And a lot of what AI is going to be doing is augmenting us – we're going to be working as teams, AI-human teams.\nWhere do you think this AI-human conflict, or concept of a conflict, comes from? Do you think that's just a reflection of historical conversations we've had about automation, or do you think it is a deeper fear?",
"And so I think it's very natural for us to see AIs in terms of agents. We anthropomorphise them as these kind of android robots. And then we think about, well, you know, are they part of our in-group, or are they some other group? If they're some other group, it's us against them. Who's going to win? Well, let's see. So I think that's very natural, I think that's very human.\nThere is this long tradition, in Western culture in particular, with associating intelligence and dominance and power. It's interesting to speculate about how, and I wish I knew more about it, and I'd like to see more research on this, about how different cultures perceive AI. It's well known that Japan is very accepting of technology and robots, for example.",
"And it's taken a very long time for the academic community to accept that there could be such a thing as non-human intelligence at all. We know that crows, for example, who have had a completely different evolutionary history, or octopuses, who have an even more different evolutionary history, might have a kind of intelligence that's very different to ours. That in some ways rivals our own, and so forth. \n\n But luckily, we have got to that point in recent years of accepting that we are not the only form of intelligence. But now, AI is challenging that from a different direction. Just as we are accepting that the natural world offers this enormous range of different intelligences, we are at the same time inventing new intelligences that are radically different to humans.",
"I think one worry that we haven't talked about is that we've become extremely dependent upon this technology. And that we essentially become deskilled. There's an extent to which the history of civilisation is the history of the domestication of the human species sort of by ourselves, and also by our technology, to some extent. And AI certainly allows for that to reach a whole new level. \n\n Just think about GPs with diagnostic tools. Even now, my GP consults the computer fairly regularly. But as diagnostic tools get better, what are they going to be doing other than just typing something into the computer and reading out what comes back? At which point, you might as well do away with the GP. But then, who does know about medicine?",
"And I think, still, this anthropomorphic picture of the kind of humanoid android, the robot, dominates our idea of what AI is too much. And too many people, and the industry as well, talk about human-level artificial intelligence as a goal, or general AI, which basically means like a human. But actually what we're building is nothing like a human. \n\n When the first pocket calculator was made, it didn't do maths like a human. It was vastly better. It didn't make the occasional mistake. When we set about creating these artificial agents to solve these problems, because they have a completely different evolutionary history to humans, they solve problems in very different ways.\nAnd until now, people have been fairly shy about describing them as intelligent. Or rather, in the history of AIs, we think solving a particular problem would require intelligence. Then we solve it. And then that's no longer intelligence, because we've solved it. Chess is a good example.",
"This conversation cannot be in the hands of any one group. It oughtn't be in the hands of Silicon Valley billionaires alone. They've got their role to play, but this is a conversation we need to be having as widely as possible.\nThe centre is developing some really interesting projects but perhaps one of the most interesting is the discussion of what intelligence might be. Could you go into a bit more detail about the kinds of questions you are trying to explore in this area?\nYou mean kinds of intelligence?\nYeah.\nI think this is very important because historically, we've had an overwhelming tendency to anthropomorphise. We define what intelligence is, historically, as being human-like. And then within that, being like certain humans.",
"It certainly is a very ambitious project to create the atlas of intelligence.\nThere was a point I read in something you wrote on our ideas of intelligence that I thought was very interesting. We actually tend to think of intelligence at the societal level when we think about human ability, rather than at the individual level but in the end conflate the two. I think that's a very good point, when we think about our capabilities, we think about what we can achieve as a whole, not individually. But when we talk about AI, we tend to think about that individual piece of technology, or that individual system. So for example if we think about the internet of things and AI, we should discuss intelligence as something encompassed by the whole.\nYeah, absolutely. Yes, right now, perhaps it is a product of our anthropomorphising bias. But there is a tendency to see a narrative of AI versus humanity, as if it's one or the other. And yet, obviously, there are risks in this technology long before it acquires any kind of manipulative agency.",
"So I think we've got a real opportunity, despite the general climate, and in some ways because of it. There's a great opportunity to bring industry on board to make sure the technology is developed in the right way.\nOne of the dominant narratives around not only AI but technology and automation more generally is that we, as humans, are at the mercy of technological progress. If you try and push against this idea you can be labelled as being anti-progress and stuck in the past. But we do have a lot more control than we give ourselves credit for. For example, routineness and susceptibility to automation are not inevitable features of occupations, job design is hugely important. How do we design jobs? How do we create jobs that allow people to do the kind of work they want to do? There can be a bit of a conflict between being impacted by what's happening and having some sort of control over what we want to happen.",
"But the reality is, we are creating a whole new world of different artificial agents. And we need to understand that world. We need to understand all the different ways of being clever, if you like. How you can be extremely sophisticated at some particular rational process, and yet extremely bad at another one in a way that bears no relation to the way humans are on these axes. \n\n And this is important, partly because we need to expand our sense of what is intelligent, like we have done with the natural world. Because lots of things follow from saying something is intelligent. Historically, we have a long tradition in Western philosophy of saying those who are intelligent should rule. So if intelligence equates to power, then obviously we need to think about what we mean by intelligence. Who has it and who doesn't. Or how it equates to rights and responsibilities.",
"And so we do need to worry about deskilling and about becoming dependent. And it is entirely possible that you can imagine a society in which we're all sort of prosperous, in a sense. Our basic bodily needs are provided for, perhaps, in a way, to an extent that we've never before even dreamed of. Unprecedented in human history. \n\n And yet, we're stripped of any kind of meaningful work. We have no purpose. We're escaping to virtual reality. And then you could imagine all sorts of worrying countercultures or Luddite movements or what have you. I guess that's the kind of scenario that – I haven't sketched it terribly well – but that's the kind of thing that worries me more than missile-toting giant robots.",
"That's a big question. Certainly I don't lie awake at night worried that robots are going to knock the door down and come in with a machine gun. If the robots take over the world, it won't be by knocking the door down. At the moment, I think it's certainly as big a risk that we have a GMO moment, and there's a powerful reaction against the technology which prevents us from reaping the benefits, which are enormous. I think that's as big a risk as the risks from the technologies themselves.",
"I think, nonetheless, there are things we can do. We can try to imagine how things might go very badly wrong, and then work hard to develop systems that will stop that from happening. We can also try collectively to imagine how things could go very right. The kind of society that we actually want to live in that uses this technology. And I'm sure that will be skewed in all sorts of ways, and we might imagine things that seem wonderful and actually have terrible by-products.",
"And I think the more we understand a technology's relationship with those things, and the more we then consciously try to shape those things, the more we are going to influence the technology. So, for example, developing a culture of responsible innovation. For example, a kind of Hippocratic oath for AI developers. These things are within the realms of what is feasible, and I think will help to shape the future.\nOne of the problems with intervention, generally, is that we cannot control the course of events. We can attempt to, but we don't know how things are going to evolve. The reality is, societies are much too complex for us to be able to shape them in any very specific way, as plenty of ideologies and political movements have found to their cost. There are often unforeseen consequences that can derail a project.",
"Certainly, we encounter technological determinism a lot. And it's understandable. For us as individuals, of course it does feel like it always is happening and we just have to cope. No one individual can do much about it, other than adapt."
],
[
"Their conversation has been edited.\nHarry Armstrong: Do you see the interdisciplinary nature of the centre as one of its key values and one of the key impacts you hope it will have on the field?\nStephen Cave: Thinking about the impact of AI is not something that any one discipline owns or does in any very systematic way. So if academia is going to rise to the challenge and provide thought leadership on this hugely important issue, then we’re going to need to do it by breaking down current disciplinary boundaries and bringing people with very different expertise together. \n\n That means bringing together the technologists and the experts at developing these algorithms together with social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and so forth. \n\n I think there are many areas of science where more interdisciplinary engagement would be valuable. Biotech’s another example. In that sense AI isn’t unique, but I think because thinking about AI is still in very early stages, we have an opportunity to shape the way in which we think about it, and build that community.",
"AI: what's the worst that could happen?\nThe Centre for the Future of Intelligence is seeking to investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for humanity, and make sure humans take advantage of the opportunities while dodging the risks. It launched at the University of Cambridge last October, and is a collaboration between four universities and colleges – Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and Berkeley – backed with a 10-year, £10m grant from the Leverhulme Trust. \n\n Because no single discipline is ideally suited to this task, the centre emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. It is bringing together a diverse community of some of the world's best researchers, philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. \n\nExecutive director of the centre is Stephen Cave, a writer, philosopher and former diplomat. Harry Armstrong, head of futures at Nesta, which publishes The Long + Short, spoke with Cave about the impact of AI.",
"And I think, still, this anthropomorphic picture of the kind of humanoid android, the robot, dominates our idea of what AI is too much. And too many people, and the industry as well, talk about human-level artificial intelligence as a goal, or general AI, which basically means like a human. But actually what we're building is nothing like a human. \n\n When the first pocket calculator was made, it didn't do maths like a human. It was vastly better. It didn't make the occasional mistake. When we set about creating these artificial agents to solve these problems, because they have a completely different evolutionary history to humans, they solve problems in very different ways.\nAnd until now, people have been fairly shy about describing them as intelligent. Or rather, in the history of AIs, we think solving a particular problem would require intelligence. Then we solve it. And then that's no longer intelligence, because we've solved it. Chess is a good example.",
"I think one worry that we haven't talked about is that we've become extremely dependent upon this technology. And that we essentially become deskilled. There's an extent to which the history of civilisation is the history of the domestication of the human species sort of by ourselves, and also by our technology, to some extent. And AI certainly allows for that to reach a whole new level. \n\n Just think about GPs with diagnostic tools. Even now, my GP consults the computer fairly regularly. But as diagnostic tools get better, what are they going to be doing other than just typing something into the computer and reading out what comes back? At which point, you might as well do away with the GP. But then, who does know about medicine?",
"You can think, well, we in the West have long been justifying power relations of a certain kind on the basis that we're 'cleverer'. That's why men get to vote and women don't, or whatever. In a culture where power is not based on intelligence but, say, on a caste system, which is purely hereditary, we’d build an AI, and it would just tune in, drop out, attain enlightenment, just sit in the corner. Or we beg it to come back and help us find enlightenment. It might be that we find a completely different narrative to the one that's dominant in the West.\nOne of the projects the centre is running is looking into what kind of AI breakthroughs may come, when and what the social consequences could be. What do you think the future holds? What are your fears – what do you think could go right and wrong in the short, medium and long term?",
"So I think we've got a real opportunity, despite the general climate, and in some ways because of it. There's a great opportunity to bring industry on board to make sure the technology is developed in the right way.\nOne of the dominant narratives around not only AI but technology and automation more generally is that we, as humans, are at the mercy of technological progress. If you try and push against this idea you can be labelled as being anti-progress and stuck in the past. But we do have a lot more control than we give ourselves credit for. For example, routineness and susceptibility to automation are not inevitable features of occupations, job design is hugely important. How do we design jobs? How do we create jobs that allow people to do the kind of work they want to do? There can be a bit of a conflict between being impacted by what's happening and having some sort of control over what we want to happen.",
"We want to create a space where many different disciplines can come together and develop a shared language, learn from each other’s approaches, and hopefully very quickly move to be able to actually develop new ideas, new conclusions, together. But the first step is learning how to talk to each other.\nAt a recent talk, Naomi Klein said that addressing the challenge of climate change could not have come at a worse time. The current dominant political and economic ideologies, along with growing isolationist sentiment, runs contrary to the bipartisan, collaborative approaches needed to solve global issues like climate change. Do you see the same issues hampering a global effort to respond to the challenges AI raises?\nClimate change suffers from the problem that the costs are not incurred in any direct way by the industrialists who own the technology and are profiting from it. With AI, that has been the case so far; although not on the same scale. There has been disruption but so far, compared to industrialisation, the impact has been fairly small. That will probably change.",
"AI companies, and in particular the big tech companies, are very concerned that this won't go like climate change, but rather it will go like GMOs: that people will have a gut reaction to this technology as soon as the first great swathe of job losses take hold. People speculate that 50m jobs could be lost in the US if trucking is automated, which is conceivable within 10 years. You could imagine a populist US government therefore simply banning driverless cars.",
"Robotic technology is dangerous. Or potentially dangerous. But at the same time, most of what we're using technology for is to enhance ourselves, to increase our capacities. And a lot of what AI is going to be doing is augmenting us – we're going to be working as teams, AI-human teams.\nWhere do you think this AI-human conflict, or concept of a conflict, comes from? Do you think that's just a reflection of historical conversations we've had about automation, or do you think it is a deeper fear?",
"So I think there is anxiety in the tech industry that there could be a serious reaction against this technology at any point. And so my impression is that there is a feeling within these companies that these ethical and social implications need to be taken very seriously, now. And that a broad buy-in by society into some kind of vision of the future in which this technology plays a role is required, if a dangerous – or to them dangerous – counteraction is to be avoided.\nMy personal experience working with these tech companies is that they are concerned for their businesses and genuinely want to do the right thing. Of course there are intellectual challenges and there is money to be made, but equally they are people who don't think when they get up in the morning that they're going to put people out of jobs or bring about the downfall of humanity. As the industry matures it's developing a sense of responsibility.",
"And so we do need to worry about deskilling and about becoming dependent. And it is entirely possible that you can imagine a society in which we're all sort of prosperous, in a sense. Our basic bodily needs are provided for, perhaps, in a way, to an extent that we've never before even dreamed of. Unprecedented in human history. \n\n And yet, we're stripped of any kind of meaningful work. We have no purpose. We're escaping to virtual reality. And then you could imagine all sorts of worrying countercultures or Luddite movements or what have you. I guess that's the kind of scenario that – I haven't sketched it terribly well – but that's the kind of thing that worries me more than missile-toting giant robots.",
"But the reality is, we are creating a whole new world of different artificial agents. And we need to understand that world. We need to understand all the different ways of being clever, if you like. How you can be extremely sophisticated at some particular rational process, and yet extremely bad at another one in a way that bears no relation to the way humans are on these axes. \n\n And this is important, partly because we need to expand our sense of what is intelligent, like we have done with the natural world. Because lots of things follow from saying something is intelligent. Historically, we have a long tradition in Western philosophy of saying those who are intelligent should rule. So if intelligence equates to power, then obviously we need to think about what we mean by intelligence. Who has it and who doesn't. Or how it equates to rights and responsibilities.",
"And so I think it's very natural for us to see AIs in terms of agents. We anthropomorphise them as these kind of android robots. And then we think about, well, you know, are they part of our in-group, or are they some other group? If they're some other group, it's us against them. Who's going to win? Well, let's see. So I think that's very natural, I think that's very human.\nThere is this long tradition, in Western culture in particular, with associating intelligence and dominance and power. It's interesting to speculate about how, and I wish I knew more about it, and I'd like to see more research on this, about how different cultures perceive AI. It's well known that Japan is very accepting of technology and robots, for example.",
"This conversation cannot be in the hands of any one group. It oughtn't be in the hands of Silicon Valley billionaires alone. They've got their role to play, but this is a conversation we need to be having as widely as possible.\nThe centre is developing some really interesting projects but perhaps one of the most interesting is the discussion of what intelligence might be. Could you go into a bit more detail about the kinds of questions you are trying to explore in this area?\nYou mean kinds of intelligence?\nYeah.\nI think this is very important because historically, we've had an overwhelming tendency to anthropomorphise. We define what intelligence is, historically, as being human-like. And then within that, being like certain humans.",
"It certainly is a very ambitious project to create the atlas of intelligence.\nThere was a point I read in something you wrote on our ideas of intelligence that I thought was very interesting. We actually tend to think of intelligence at the societal level when we think about human ability, rather than at the individual level but in the end conflate the two. I think that's a very good point, when we think about our capabilities, we think about what we can achieve as a whole, not individually. But when we talk about AI, we tend to think about that individual piece of technology, or that individual system. So for example if we think about the internet of things and AI, we should discuss intelligence as something encompassed by the whole.\nYeah, absolutely. Yes, right now, perhaps it is a product of our anthropomorphising bias. But there is a tendency to see a narrative of AI versus humanity, as if it's one or the other. And yet, obviously, there are risks in this technology long before it acquires any kind of manipulative agency.",
"And it's taken a very long time for the academic community to accept that there could be such a thing as non-human intelligence at all. We know that crows, for example, who have had a completely different evolutionary history, or octopuses, who have an even more different evolutionary history, might have a kind of intelligence that's very different to ours. That in some ways rivals our own, and so forth. \n\n But luckily, we have got to that point in recent years of accepting that we are not the only form of intelligence. But now, AI is challenging that from a different direction. Just as we are accepting that the natural world offers this enormous range of different intelligences, we are at the same time inventing new intelligences that are radically different to humans.",
"It's just one example, but the idea that we can live much more resource-efficiently, because we are living more intelligently through using these tools. And therefore can undo some of the damage of the last Industrial Revolution. That's my main utopian hope, I guess.\nVintage toy robot image by josefkubes/Shutterstock\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"I think, nonetheless, there are things we can do. We can try to imagine how things might go very badly wrong, and then work hard to develop systems that will stop that from happening. We can also try collectively to imagine how things could go very right. The kind of society that we actually want to live in that uses this technology. And I'm sure that will be skewed in all sorts of ways, and we might imagine things that seem wonderful and actually have terrible by-products.",
"As to utopian, yes, that's interesting. I certainly mentioned a couple of things. One thing that I hope is that this new technological revolution enables us to undo some of the damage of the last one. That's a very utopian thought and not terribly realistic, but we use fossil fuels so incredibly efficiently. The idea that driverless cars that are shared, basically a kind of shared service located off a Brownfield site does away with 95 per cent of all cars, freeing up a huge amount of space in the city to be greener, many fewer cars need to be produced, they would be on the road much less, there'd be fewer traffic jams.",
"And I think the more we understand a technology's relationship with those things, and the more we then consciously try to shape those things, the more we are going to influence the technology. So, for example, developing a culture of responsible innovation. For example, a kind of Hippocratic oath for AI developers. These things are within the realms of what is feasible, and I think will help to shape the future.\nOne of the problems with intervention, generally, is that we cannot control the course of events. We can attempt to, but we don't know how things are going to evolve. The reality is, societies are much too complex for us to be able to shape them in any very specific way, as plenty of ideologies and political movements have found to their cost. There are often unforeseen consequences that can derail a project."
],
[
"Their conversation has been edited.\nHarry Armstrong: Do you see the interdisciplinary nature of the centre as one of its key values and one of the key impacts you hope it will have on the field?\nStephen Cave: Thinking about the impact of AI is not something that any one discipline owns or does in any very systematic way. So if academia is going to rise to the challenge and provide thought leadership on this hugely important issue, then we’re going to need to do it by breaking down current disciplinary boundaries and bringing people with very different expertise together. \n\n That means bringing together the technologists and the experts at developing these algorithms together with social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and so forth. \n\n I think there are many areas of science where more interdisciplinary engagement would be valuable. Biotech’s another example. In that sense AI isn’t unique, but I think because thinking about AI is still in very early stages, we have an opportunity to shape the way in which we think about it, and build that community.",
"AI: what's the worst that could happen?\nThe Centre for the Future of Intelligence is seeking to investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for humanity, and make sure humans take advantage of the opportunities while dodging the risks. It launched at the University of Cambridge last October, and is a collaboration between four universities and colleges – Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and Berkeley – backed with a 10-year, £10m grant from the Leverhulme Trust. \n\n Because no single discipline is ideally suited to this task, the centre emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. It is bringing together a diverse community of some of the world's best researchers, philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. \n\nExecutive director of the centre is Stephen Cave, a writer, philosopher and former diplomat. Harry Armstrong, head of futures at Nesta, which publishes The Long + Short, spoke with Cave about the impact of AI.",
"You can think, well, we in the West have long been justifying power relations of a certain kind on the basis that we're 'cleverer'. That's why men get to vote and women don't, or whatever. In a culture where power is not based on intelligence but, say, on a caste system, which is purely hereditary, we’d build an AI, and it would just tune in, drop out, attain enlightenment, just sit in the corner. Or we beg it to come back and help us find enlightenment. It might be that we find a completely different narrative to the one that's dominant in the West.\nOne of the projects the centre is running is looking into what kind of AI breakthroughs may come, when and what the social consequences could be. What do you think the future holds? What are your fears – what do you think could go right and wrong in the short, medium and long term?",
"We want to create a space where many different disciplines can come together and develop a shared language, learn from each other’s approaches, and hopefully very quickly move to be able to actually develop new ideas, new conclusions, together. But the first step is learning how to talk to each other.\nAt a recent talk, Naomi Klein said that addressing the challenge of climate change could not have come at a worse time. The current dominant political and economic ideologies, along with growing isolationist sentiment, runs contrary to the bipartisan, collaborative approaches needed to solve global issues like climate change. Do you see the same issues hampering a global effort to respond to the challenges AI raises?\nClimate change suffers from the problem that the costs are not incurred in any direct way by the industrialists who own the technology and are profiting from it. With AI, that has been the case so far; although not on the same scale. There has been disruption but so far, compared to industrialisation, the impact has been fairly small. That will probably change.",
"But the reality is, we are creating a whole new world of different artificial agents. And we need to understand that world. We need to understand all the different ways of being clever, if you like. How you can be extremely sophisticated at some particular rational process, and yet extremely bad at another one in a way that bears no relation to the way humans are on these axes. \n\n And this is important, partly because we need to expand our sense of what is intelligent, like we have done with the natural world. Because lots of things follow from saying something is intelligent. Historically, we have a long tradition in Western philosophy of saying those who are intelligent should rule. So if intelligence equates to power, then obviously we need to think about what we mean by intelligence. Who has it and who doesn't. Or how it equates to rights and responsibilities.",
"And I think, still, this anthropomorphic picture of the kind of humanoid android, the robot, dominates our idea of what AI is too much. And too many people, and the industry as well, talk about human-level artificial intelligence as a goal, or general AI, which basically means like a human. But actually what we're building is nothing like a human. \n\n When the first pocket calculator was made, it didn't do maths like a human. It was vastly better. It didn't make the occasional mistake. When we set about creating these artificial agents to solve these problems, because they have a completely different evolutionary history to humans, they solve problems in very different ways.\nAnd until now, people have been fairly shy about describing them as intelligent. Or rather, in the history of AIs, we think solving a particular problem would require intelligence. Then we solve it. And then that's no longer intelligence, because we've solved it. Chess is a good example.",
"This conversation cannot be in the hands of any one group. It oughtn't be in the hands of Silicon Valley billionaires alone. They've got their role to play, but this is a conversation we need to be having as widely as possible.\nThe centre is developing some really interesting projects but perhaps one of the most interesting is the discussion of what intelligence might be. Could you go into a bit more detail about the kinds of questions you are trying to explore in this area?\nYou mean kinds of intelligence?\nYeah.\nI think this is very important because historically, we've had an overwhelming tendency to anthropomorphise. We define what intelligence is, historically, as being human-like. And then within that, being like certain humans.",
"It certainly is a very ambitious project to create the atlas of intelligence.\nThere was a point I read in something you wrote on our ideas of intelligence that I thought was very interesting. We actually tend to think of intelligence at the societal level when we think about human ability, rather than at the individual level but in the end conflate the two. I think that's a very good point, when we think about our capabilities, we think about what we can achieve as a whole, not individually. But when we talk about AI, we tend to think about that individual piece of technology, or that individual system. So for example if we think about the internet of things and AI, we should discuss intelligence as something encompassed by the whole.\nYeah, absolutely. Yes, right now, perhaps it is a product of our anthropomorphising bias. But there is a tendency to see a narrative of AI versus humanity, as if it's one or the other. And yet, obviously, there are risks in this technology long before it acquires any kind of manipulative agency.",
"I think one worry that we haven't talked about is that we've become extremely dependent upon this technology. And that we essentially become deskilled. There's an extent to which the history of civilisation is the history of the domestication of the human species sort of by ourselves, and also by our technology, to some extent. And AI certainly allows for that to reach a whole new level. \n\n Just think about GPs with diagnostic tools. Even now, my GP consults the computer fairly regularly. But as diagnostic tools get better, what are they going to be doing other than just typing something into the computer and reading out what comes back? At which point, you might as well do away with the GP. But then, who does know about medicine?",
"And so I think it's very natural for us to see AIs in terms of agents. We anthropomorphise them as these kind of android robots. And then we think about, well, you know, are they part of our in-group, or are they some other group? If they're some other group, it's us against them. Who's going to win? Well, let's see. So I think that's very natural, I think that's very human.\nThere is this long tradition, in Western culture in particular, with associating intelligence and dominance and power. It's interesting to speculate about how, and I wish I knew more about it, and I'd like to see more research on this, about how different cultures perceive AI. It's well known that Japan is very accepting of technology and robots, for example.",
"Robotic technology is dangerous. Or potentially dangerous. But at the same time, most of what we're using technology for is to enhance ourselves, to increase our capacities. And a lot of what AI is going to be doing is augmenting us – we're going to be working as teams, AI-human teams.\nWhere do you think this AI-human conflict, or concept of a conflict, comes from? Do you think that's just a reflection of historical conversations we've had about automation, or do you think it is a deeper fear?",
"I think, nonetheless, there are things we can do. We can try to imagine how things might go very badly wrong, and then work hard to develop systems that will stop that from happening. We can also try collectively to imagine how things could go very right. The kind of society that we actually want to live in that uses this technology. And I'm sure that will be skewed in all sorts of ways, and we might imagine things that seem wonderful and actually have terrible by-products.",
"And it's taken a very long time for the academic community to accept that there could be such a thing as non-human intelligence at all. We know that crows, for example, who have had a completely different evolutionary history, or octopuses, who have an even more different evolutionary history, might have a kind of intelligence that's very different to ours. That in some ways rivals our own, and so forth. \n\n But luckily, we have got to that point in recent years of accepting that we are not the only form of intelligence. But now, AI is challenging that from a different direction. Just as we are accepting that the natural world offers this enormous range of different intelligences, we are at the same time inventing new intelligences that are radically different to humans.",
"So I think there is anxiety in the tech industry that there could be a serious reaction against this technology at any point. And so my impression is that there is a feeling within these companies that these ethical and social implications need to be taken very seriously, now. And that a broad buy-in by society into some kind of vision of the future in which this technology plays a role is required, if a dangerous – or to them dangerous – counteraction is to be avoided.\nMy personal experience working with these tech companies is that they are concerned for their businesses and genuinely want to do the right thing. Of course there are intellectual challenges and there is money to be made, but equally they are people who don't think when they get up in the morning that they're going to put people out of jobs or bring about the downfall of humanity. As the industry matures it's developing a sense of responsibility.",
"And I think the more we understand a technology's relationship with those things, and the more we then consciously try to shape those things, the more we are going to influence the technology. So, for example, developing a culture of responsible innovation. For example, a kind of Hippocratic oath for AI developers. These things are within the realms of what is feasible, and I think will help to shape the future.\nOne of the problems with intervention, generally, is that we cannot control the course of events. We can attempt to, but we don't know how things are going to evolve. The reality is, societies are much too complex for us to be able to shape them in any very specific way, as plenty of ideologies and political movements have found to their cost. There are often unforeseen consequences that can derail a project.",
"And so we do need to worry about deskilling and about becoming dependent. And it is entirely possible that you can imagine a society in which we're all sort of prosperous, in a sense. Our basic bodily needs are provided for, perhaps, in a way, to an extent that we've never before even dreamed of. Unprecedented in human history. \n\n And yet, we're stripped of any kind of meaningful work. We have no purpose. We're escaping to virtual reality. And then you could imagine all sorts of worrying countercultures or Luddite movements or what have you. I guess that's the kind of scenario that – I haven't sketched it terribly well – but that's the kind of thing that worries me more than missile-toting giant robots.",
"So I think we've got a real opportunity, despite the general climate, and in some ways because of it. There's a great opportunity to bring industry on board to make sure the technology is developed in the right way.\nOne of the dominant narratives around not only AI but technology and automation more generally is that we, as humans, are at the mercy of technological progress. If you try and push against this idea you can be labelled as being anti-progress and stuck in the past. But we do have a lot more control than we give ourselves credit for. For example, routineness and susceptibility to automation are not inevitable features of occupations, job design is hugely important. How do we design jobs? How do we create jobs that allow people to do the kind of work they want to do? There can be a bit of a conflict between being impacted by what's happening and having some sort of control over what we want to happen.",
"It's just one example, but the idea that we can live much more resource-efficiently, because we are living more intelligently through using these tools. And therefore can undo some of the damage of the last Industrial Revolution. That's my main utopian hope, I guess.\nVintage toy robot image by josefkubes/Shutterstock\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"AI companies, and in particular the big tech companies, are very concerned that this won't go like climate change, but rather it will go like GMOs: that people will have a gut reaction to this technology as soon as the first great swathe of job losses take hold. People speculate that 50m jobs could be lost in the US if trucking is automated, which is conceivable within 10 years. You could imagine a populist US government therefore simply banning driverless cars.",
"But that's different when we consider ourselves at a level of a society, as a polis [city state], or as an international community. I think we can shape the way in which technology develops. We have various tools. In any given country, we have regulations. There's a possibility of international regulation. \n\n Technology is emerging from a certain legal, political, normative, cultural, and social framework. It's coming from a certain place. And it is shaped by all of those things."
],
[
"And I think, still, this anthropomorphic picture of the kind of humanoid android, the robot, dominates our idea of what AI is too much. And too many people, and the industry as well, talk about human-level artificial intelligence as a goal, or general AI, which basically means like a human. But actually what we're building is nothing like a human. \n\n When the first pocket calculator was made, it didn't do maths like a human. It was vastly better. It didn't make the occasional mistake. When we set about creating these artificial agents to solve these problems, because they have a completely different evolutionary history to humans, they solve problems in very different ways.\nAnd until now, people have been fairly shy about describing them as intelligent. Or rather, in the history of AIs, we think solving a particular problem would require intelligence. Then we solve it. And then that's no longer intelligence, because we've solved it. Chess is a good example.",
"And it's taken a very long time for the academic community to accept that there could be such a thing as non-human intelligence at all. We know that crows, for example, who have had a completely different evolutionary history, or octopuses, who have an even more different evolutionary history, might have a kind of intelligence that's very different to ours. That in some ways rivals our own, and so forth. \n\n But luckily, we have got to that point in recent years of accepting that we are not the only form of intelligence. But now, AI is challenging that from a different direction. Just as we are accepting that the natural world offers this enormous range of different intelligences, we are at the same time inventing new intelligences that are radically different to humans.",
"This conversation cannot be in the hands of any one group. It oughtn't be in the hands of Silicon Valley billionaires alone. They've got their role to play, but this is a conversation we need to be having as widely as possible.\nThe centre is developing some really interesting projects but perhaps one of the most interesting is the discussion of what intelligence might be. Could you go into a bit more detail about the kinds of questions you are trying to explore in this area?\nYou mean kinds of intelligence?\nYeah.\nI think this is very important because historically, we've had an overwhelming tendency to anthropomorphise. We define what intelligence is, historically, as being human-like. And then within that, being like certain humans.",
"But the reality is, we are creating a whole new world of different artificial agents. And we need to understand that world. We need to understand all the different ways of being clever, if you like. How you can be extremely sophisticated at some particular rational process, and yet extremely bad at another one in a way that bears no relation to the way humans are on these axes. \n\n And this is important, partly because we need to expand our sense of what is intelligent, like we have done with the natural world. Because lots of things follow from saying something is intelligent. Historically, we have a long tradition in Western philosophy of saying those who are intelligent should rule. So if intelligence equates to power, then obviously we need to think about what we mean by intelligence. Who has it and who doesn't. Or how it equates to rights and responsibilities.",
"I do think it comes both from some biases that might well be innate, such as anthropomorphism, or our human tendency to ascribe agency to other objects, particularly moving ones, is well-established and probably has sound evolutionary roots. If it moves, it's probably wise to start asking yourself questions like, \"What is it? What might it want? Where might it be going? Might it be hungry? Do I look like food to it?\" I think it makes sense, it's natural for us to think in terms of agency. And when we do, it's natural for us to project our own ways of being and acting. And we, as primates, are profoundly co-operative.",
"You can think, well, we in the West have long been justifying power relations of a certain kind on the basis that we're 'cleverer'. That's why men get to vote and women don't, or whatever. In a culture where power is not based on intelligence but, say, on a caste system, which is purely hereditary, we’d build an AI, and it would just tune in, drop out, attain enlightenment, just sit in the corner. Or we beg it to come back and help us find enlightenment. It might be that we find a completely different narrative to the one that's dominant in the West.\nOne of the projects the centre is running is looking into what kind of AI breakthroughs may come, when and what the social consequences could be. What do you think the future holds? What are your fears – what do you think could go right and wrong in the short, medium and long term?",
"And so we do need to worry about deskilling and about becoming dependent. And it is entirely possible that you can imagine a society in which we're all sort of prosperous, in a sense. Our basic bodily needs are provided for, perhaps, in a way, to an extent that we've never before even dreamed of. Unprecedented in human history. \n\n And yet, we're stripped of any kind of meaningful work. We have no purpose. We're escaping to virtual reality. And then you could imagine all sorts of worrying countercultures or Luddite movements or what have you. I guess that's the kind of scenario that – I haven't sketched it terribly well – but that's the kind of thing that worries me more than missile-toting giant robots.",
"And so I think it's very natural for us to see AIs in terms of agents. We anthropomorphise them as these kind of android robots. And then we think about, well, you know, are they part of our in-group, or are they some other group? If they're some other group, it's us against them. Who's going to win? Well, let's see. So I think that's very natural, I think that's very human.\nThere is this long tradition, in Western culture in particular, with associating intelligence and dominance and power. It's interesting to speculate about how, and I wish I knew more about it, and I'd like to see more research on this, about how different cultures perceive AI. It's well known that Japan is very accepting of technology and robots, for example.",
"It certainly is a very ambitious project to create the atlas of intelligence.\nThere was a point I read in something you wrote on our ideas of intelligence that I thought was very interesting. We actually tend to think of intelligence at the societal level when we think about human ability, rather than at the individual level but in the end conflate the two. I think that's a very good point, when we think about our capabilities, we think about what we can achieve as a whole, not individually. But when we talk about AI, we tend to think about that individual piece of technology, or that individual system. So for example if we think about the internet of things and AI, we should discuss intelligence as something encompassed by the whole.\nYeah, absolutely. Yes, right now, perhaps it is a product of our anthropomorphising bias. But there is a tendency to see a narrative of AI versus humanity, as if it's one or the other. And yet, obviously, there are risks in this technology long before it acquires any kind of manipulative agency.",
"Robotic technology is dangerous. Or potentially dangerous. But at the same time, most of what we're using technology for is to enhance ourselves, to increase our capacities. And a lot of what AI is going to be doing is augmenting us – we're going to be working as teams, AI-human teams.\nWhere do you think this AI-human conflict, or concept of a conflict, comes from? Do you think that's just a reflection of historical conversations we've had about automation, or do you think it is a deeper fear?",
"AI: what's the worst that could happen?\nThe Centre for the Future of Intelligence is seeking to investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for humanity, and make sure humans take advantage of the opportunities while dodging the risks. It launched at the University of Cambridge last October, and is a collaboration between four universities and colleges – Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and Berkeley – backed with a 10-year, £10m grant from the Leverhulme Trust. \n\n Because no single discipline is ideally suited to this task, the centre emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. It is bringing together a diverse community of some of the world's best researchers, philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. \n\nExecutive director of the centre is Stephen Cave, a writer, philosopher and former diplomat. Harry Armstrong, head of futures at Nesta, which publishes The Long + Short, spoke with Cave about the impact of AI.",
"Their conversation has been edited.\nHarry Armstrong: Do you see the interdisciplinary nature of the centre as one of its key values and one of the key impacts you hope it will have on the field?\nStephen Cave: Thinking about the impact of AI is not something that any one discipline owns or does in any very systematic way. So if academia is going to rise to the challenge and provide thought leadership on this hugely important issue, then we’re going to need to do it by breaking down current disciplinary boundaries and bringing people with very different expertise together. \n\n That means bringing together the technologists and the experts at developing these algorithms together with social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and so forth. \n\n I think there are many areas of science where more interdisciplinary engagement would be valuable. Biotech’s another example. In that sense AI isn’t unique, but I think because thinking about AI is still in very early stages, we have an opportunity to shape the way in which we think about it, and build that community.",
"I think one worry that we haven't talked about is that we've become extremely dependent upon this technology. And that we essentially become deskilled. There's an extent to which the history of civilisation is the history of the domestication of the human species sort of by ourselves, and also by our technology, to some extent. And AI certainly allows for that to reach a whole new level. \n\n Just think about GPs with diagnostic tools. Even now, my GP consults the computer fairly regularly. But as diagnostic tools get better, what are they going to be doing other than just typing something into the computer and reading out what comes back? At which point, you might as well do away with the GP. But then, who does know about medicine?",
"Certainly, we encounter technological determinism a lot. And it's understandable. For us as individuals, of course it does feel like it always is happening and we just have to cope. No one individual can do much about it, other than adapt.",
"It's just one example, but the idea that we can live much more resource-efficiently, because we are living more intelligently through using these tools. And therefore can undo some of the damage of the last Industrial Revolution. That's my main utopian hope, I guess.\nVintage toy robot image by josefkubes/Shutterstock\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"We want to create a space where many different disciplines can come together and develop a shared language, learn from each other’s approaches, and hopefully very quickly move to be able to actually develop new ideas, new conclusions, together. But the first step is learning how to talk to each other.\nAt a recent talk, Naomi Klein said that addressing the challenge of climate change could not have come at a worse time. The current dominant political and economic ideologies, along with growing isolationist sentiment, runs contrary to the bipartisan, collaborative approaches needed to solve global issues like climate change. Do you see the same issues hampering a global effort to respond to the challenges AI raises?\nClimate change suffers from the problem that the costs are not incurred in any direct way by the industrialists who own the technology and are profiting from it. With AI, that has been the case so far; although not on the same scale. There has been disruption but so far, compared to industrialisation, the impact has been fairly small. That will probably change.",
"I think, nonetheless, there are things we can do. We can try to imagine how things might go very badly wrong, and then work hard to develop systems that will stop that from happening. We can also try collectively to imagine how things could go very right. The kind of society that we actually want to live in that uses this technology. And I'm sure that will be skewed in all sorts of ways, and we might imagine things that seem wonderful and actually have terrible by-products.",
"So I think we've got a real opportunity, despite the general climate, and in some ways because of it. There's a great opportunity to bring industry on board to make sure the technology is developed in the right way.\nOne of the dominant narratives around not only AI but technology and automation more generally is that we, as humans, are at the mercy of technological progress. If you try and push against this idea you can be labelled as being anti-progress and stuck in the past. But we do have a lot more control than we give ourselves credit for. For example, routineness and susceptibility to automation are not inevitable features of occupations, job design is hugely important. How do we design jobs? How do we create jobs that allow people to do the kind of work they want to do? There can be a bit of a conflict between being impacted by what's happening and having some sort of control over what we want to happen.",
"But at the same time, we're competitive and murderous. We have a strong sense of in-group versus out-group, which is responsible for both a great deal of cooperation, within the in-group, but also terrible crimes. Murder, rape, pillage, genocide; and they're pointed at the out-group.",
"But that's different when we consider ourselves at a level of a society, as a polis [city state], or as an international community. I think we can shape the way in which technology develops. We have various tools. In any given country, we have regulations. There's a possibility of international regulation. \n\n Technology is emerging from a certain legal, political, normative, cultural, and social framework. It's coming from a certain place. And it is shaped by all of those things."
],
[
"You can think, well, we in the West have long been justifying power relations of a certain kind on the basis that we're 'cleverer'. That's why men get to vote and women don't, or whatever. In a culture where power is not based on intelligence but, say, on a caste system, which is purely hereditary, we’d build an AI, and it would just tune in, drop out, attain enlightenment, just sit in the corner. Or we beg it to come back and help us find enlightenment. It might be that we find a completely different narrative to the one that's dominant in the West.\nOne of the projects the centre is running is looking into what kind of AI breakthroughs may come, when and what the social consequences could be. What do you think the future holds? What are your fears – what do you think could go right and wrong in the short, medium and long term?",
"And so I think it's very natural for us to see AIs in terms of agents. We anthropomorphise them as these kind of android robots. And then we think about, well, you know, are they part of our in-group, or are they some other group? If they're some other group, it's us against them. Who's going to win? Well, let's see. So I think that's very natural, I think that's very human.\nThere is this long tradition, in Western culture in particular, with associating intelligence and dominance and power. It's interesting to speculate about how, and I wish I knew more about it, and I'd like to see more research on this, about how different cultures perceive AI. It's well known that Japan is very accepting of technology and robots, for example.",
"AI: what's the worst that could happen?\nThe Centre for the Future of Intelligence is seeking to investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for humanity, and make sure humans take advantage of the opportunities while dodging the risks. It launched at the University of Cambridge last October, and is a collaboration between four universities and colleges – Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and Berkeley – backed with a 10-year, £10m grant from the Leverhulme Trust. \n\n Because no single discipline is ideally suited to this task, the centre emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. It is bringing together a diverse community of some of the world's best researchers, philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. \n\nExecutive director of the centre is Stephen Cave, a writer, philosopher and former diplomat. Harry Armstrong, head of futures at Nesta, which publishes The Long + Short, spoke with Cave about the impact of AI.",
"And so we do need to worry about deskilling and about becoming dependent. And it is entirely possible that you can imagine a society in which we're all sort of prosperous, in a sense. Our basic bodily needs are provided for, perhaps, in a way, to an extent that we've never before even dreamed of. Unprecedented in human history. \n\n And yet, we're stripped of any kind of meaningful work. We have no purpose. We're escaping to virtual reality. And then you could imagine all sorts of worrying countercultures or Luddite movements or what have you. I guess that's the kind of scenario that – I haven't sketched it terribly well – but that's the kind of thing that worries me more than missile-toting giant robots.",
"Robotic technology is dangerous. Or potentially dangerous. But at the same time, most of what we're using technology for is to enhance ourselves, to increase our capacities. And a lot of what AI is going to be doing is augmenting us – we're going to be working as teams, AI-human teams.\nWhere do you think this AI-human conflict, or concept of a conflict, comes from? Do you think that's just a reflection of historical conversations we've had about automation, or do you think it is a deeper fear?",
"AI companies, and in particular the big tech companies, are very concerned that this won't go like climate change, but rather it will go like GMOs: that people will have a gut reaction to this technology as soon as the first great swathe of job losses take hold. People speculate that 50m jobs could be lost in the US if trucking is automated, which is conceivable within 10 years. You could imagine a populist US government therefore simply banning driverless cars.",
"We want to create a space where many different disciplines can come together and develop a shared language, learn from each other’s approaches, and hopefully very quickly move to be able to actually develop new ideas, new conclusions, together. But the first step is learning how to talk to each other.\nAt a recent talk, Naomi Klein said that addressing the challenge of climate change could not have come at a worse time. The current dominant political and economic ideologies, along with growing isolationist sentiment, runs contrary to the bipartisan, collaborative approaches needed to solve global issues like climate change. Do you see the same issues hampering a global effort to respond to the challenges AI raises?\nClimate change suffers from the problem that the costs are not incurred in any direct way by the industrialists who own the technology and are profiting from it. With AI, that has been the case so far; although not on the same scale. There has been disruption but so far, compared to industrialisation, the impact has been fairly small. That will probably change.",
"I think one worry that we haven't talked about is that we've become extremely dependent upon this technology. And that we essentially become deskilled. There's an extent to which the history of civilisation is the history of the domestication of the human species sort of by ourselves, and also by our technology, to some extent. And AI certainly allows for that to reach a whole new level. \n\n Just think about GPs with diagnostic tools. Even now, my GP consults the computer fairly regularly. But as diagnostic tools get better, what are they going to be doing other than just typing something into the computer and reading out what comes back? At which point, you might as well do away with the GP. But then, who does know about medicine?",
"So I think there is anxiety in the tech industry that there could be a serious reaction against this technology at any point. And so my impression is that there is a feeling within these companies that these ethical and social implications need to be taken very seriously, now. And that a broad buy-in by society into some kind of vision of the future in which this technology plays a role is required, if a dangerous – or to them dangerous – counteraction is to be avoided.\nMy personal experience working with these tech companies is that they are concerned for their businesses and genuinely want to do the right thing. Of course there are intellectual challenges and there is money to be made, but equally they are people who don't think when they get up in the morning that they're going to put people out of jobs or bring about the downfall of humanity. As the industry matures it's developing a sense of responsibility.",
"And I think the more we understand a technology's relationship with those things, and the more we then consciously try to shape those things, the more we are going to influence the technology. So, for example, developing a culture of responsible innovation. For example, a kind of Hippocratic oath for AI developers. These things are within the realms of what is feasible, and I think will help to shape the future.\nOne of the problems with intervention, generally, is that we cannot control the course of events. We can attempt to, but we don't know how things are going to evolve. The reality is, societies are much too complex for us to be able to shape them in any very specific way, as plenty of ideologies and political movements have found to their cost. There are often unforeseen consequences that can derail a project.",
"But the reality is, we are creating a whole new world of different artificial agents. And we need to understand that world. We need to understand all the different ways of being clever, if you like. How you can be extremely sophisticated at some particular rational process, and yet extremely bad at another one in a way that bears no relation to the way humans are on these axes. \n\n And this is important, partly because we need to expand our sense of what is intelligent, like we have done with the natural world. Because lots of things follow from saying something is intelligent. Historically, we have a long tradition in Western philosophy of saying those who are intelligent should rule. So if intelligence equates to power, then obviously we need to think about what we mean by intelligence. Who has it and who doesn't. Or how it equates to rights and responsibilities.",
"It certainly is a very ambitious project to create the atlas of intelligence.\nThere was a point I read in something you wrote on our ideas of intelligence that I thought was very interesting. We actually tend to think of intelligence at the societal level when we think about human ability, rather than at the individual level but in the end conflate the two. I think that's a very good point, when we think about our capabilities, we think about what we can achieve as a whole, not individually. But when we talk about AI, we tend to think about that individual piece of technology, or that individual system. So for example if we think about the internet of things and AI, we should discuss intelligence as something encompassed by the whole.\nYeah, absolutely. Yes, right now, perhaps it is a product of our anthropomorphising bias. But there is a tendency to see a narrative of AI versus humanity, as if it's one or the other. And yet, obviously, there are risks in this technology long before it acquires any kind of manipulative agency.",
"This conversation cannot be in the hands of any one group. It oughtn't be in the hands of Silicon Valley billionaires alone. They've got their role to play, but this is a conversation we need to be having as widely as possible.\nThe centre is developing some really interesting projects but perhaps one of the most interesting is the discussion of what intelligence might be. Could you go into a bit more detail about the kinds of questions you are trying to explore in this area?\nYou mean kinds of intelligence?\nYeah.\nI think this is very important because historically, we've had an overwhelming tendency to anthropomorphise. We define what intelligence is, historically, as being human-like. And then within that, being like certain humans.",
"I think, nonetheless, there are things we can do. We can try to imagine how things might go very badly wrong, and then work hard to develop systems that will stop that from happening. We can also try collectively to imagine how things could go very right. The kind of society that we actually want to live in that uses this technology. And I'm sure that will be skewed in all sorts of ways, and we might imagine things that seem wonderful and actually have terrible by-products.",
"And I think, still, this anthropomorphic picture of the kind of humanoid android, the robot, dominates our idea of what AI is too much. And too many people, and the industry as well, talk about human-level artificial intelligence as a goal, or general AI, which basically means like a human. But actually what we're building is nothing like a human. \n\n When the first pocket calculator was made, it didn't do maths like a human. It was vastly better. It didn't make the occasional mistake. When we set about creating these artificial agents to solve these problems, because they have a completely different evolutionary history to humans, they solve problems in very different ways.\nAnd until now, people have been fairly shy about describing them as intelligent. Or rather, in the history of AIs, we think solving a particular problem would require intelligence. Then we solve it. And then that's no longer intelligence, because we've solved it. Chess is a good example.",
"Their conversation has been edited.\nHarry Armstrong: Do you see the interdisciplinary nature of the centre as one of its key values and one of the key impacts you hope it will have on the field?\nStephen Cave: Thinking about the impact of AI is not something that any one discipline owns or does in any very systematic way. So if academia is going to rise to the challenge and provide thought leadership on this hugely important issue, then we’re going to need to do it by breaking down current disciplinary boundaries and bringing people with very different expertise together. \n\n That means bringing together the technologists and the experts at developing these algorithms together with social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and so forth. \n\n I think there are many areas of science where more interdisciplinary engagement would be valuable. Biotech’s another example. In that sense AI isn’t unique, but I think because thinking about AI is still in very early stages, we have an opportunity to shape the way in which we think about it, and build that community.",
"And it's taken a very long time for the academic community to accept that there could be such a thing as non-human intelligence at all. We know that crows, for example, who have had a completely different evolutionary history, or octopuses, who have an even more different evolutionary history, might have a kind of intelligence that's very different to ours. That in some ways rivals our own, and so forth. \n\n But luckily, we have got to that point in recent years of accepting that we are not the only form of intelligence. But now, AI is challenging that from a different direction. Just as we are accepting that the natural world offers this enormous range of different intelligences, we are at the same time inventing new intelligences that are radically different to humans.",
"That's a big question. Certainly I don't lie awake at night worried that robots are going to knock the door down and come in with a machine gun. If the robots take over the world, it won't be by knocking the door down. At the moment, I think it's certainly as big a risk that we have a GMO moment, and there's a powerful reaction against the technology which prevents us from reaping the benefits, which are enormous. I think that's as big a risk as the risks from the technologies themselves.",
"So I think we've got a real opportunity, despite the general climate, and in some ways because of it. There's a great opportunity to bring industry on board to make sure the technology is developed in the right way.\nOne of the dominant narratives around not only AI but technology and automation more generally is that we, as humans, are at the mercy of technological progress. If you try and push against this idea you can be labelled as being anti-progress and stuck in the past. But we do have a lot more control than we give ourselves credit for. For example, routineness and susceptibility to automation are not inevitable features of occupations, job design is hugely important. How do we design jobs? How do we create jobs that allow people to do the kind of work they want to do? There can be a bit of a conflict between being impacted by what's happening and having some sort of control over what we want to happen.",
"But that's different when we consider ourselves at a level of a society, as a polis [city state], or as an international community. I think we can shape the way in which technology develops. We have various tools. In any given country, we have regulations. There's a possibility of international regulation. \n\n Technology is emerging from a certain legal, political, normative, cultural, and social framework. It's coming from a certain place. And it is shaped by all of those things."
],
[
"Their conversation has been edited.\nHarry Armstrong: Do you see the interdisciplinary nature of the centre as one of its key values and one of the key impacts you hope it will have on the field?\nStephen Cave: Thinking about the impact of AI is not something that any one discipline owns or does in any very systematic way. So if academia is going to rise to the challenge and provide thought leadership on this hugely important issue, then we’re going to need to do it by breaking down current disciplinary boundaries and bringing people with very different expertise together. \n\n That means bringing together the technologists and the experts at developing these algorithms together with social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and so forth. \n\n I think there are many areas of science where more interdisciplinary engagement would be valuable. Biotech’s another example. In that sense AI isn’t unique, but I think because thinking about AI is still in very early stages, we have an opportunity to shape the way in which we think about it, and build that community.",
"AI: what's the worst that could happen?\nThe Centre for the Future of Intelligence is seeking to investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for humanity, and make sure humans take advantage of the opportunities while dodging the risks. It launched at the University of Cambridge last October, and is a collaboration between four universities and colleges – Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and Berkeley – backed with a 10-year, £10m grant from the Leverhulme Trust. \n\n Because no single discipline is ideally suited to this task, the centre emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. It is bringing together a diverse community of some of the world's best researchers, philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. \n\nExecutive director of the centre is Stephen Cave, a writer, philosopher and former diplomat. Harry Armstrong, head of futures at Nesta, which publishes The Long + Short, spoke with Cave about the impact of AI.",
"And I think the more we understand a technology's relationship with those things, and the more we then consciously try to shape those things, the more we are going to influence the technology. So, for example, developing a culture of responsible innovation. For example, a kind of Hippocratic oath for AI developers. These things are within the realms of what is feasible, and I think will help to shape the future.\nOne of the problems with intervention, generally, is that we cannot control the course of events. We can attempt to, but we don't know how things are going to evolve. The reality is, societies are much too complex for us to be able to shape them in any very specific way, as plenty of ideologies and political movements have found to their cost. There are often unforeseen consequences that can derail a project.",
"As to utopian, yes, that's interesting. I certainly mentioned a couple of things. One thing that I hope is that this new technological revolution enables us to undo some of the damage of the last one. That's a very utopian thought and not terribly realistic, but we use fossil fuels so incredibly efficiently. The idea that driverless cars that are shared, basically a kind of shared service located off a Brownfield site does away with 95 per cent of all cars, freeing up a huge amount of space in the city to be greener, many fewer cars need to be produced, they would be on the road much less, there'd be fewer traffic jams.",
"So I think there is anxiety in the tech industry that there could be a serious reaction against this technology at any point. And so my impression is that there is a feeling within these companies that these ethical and social implications need to be taken very seriously, now. And that a broad buy-in by society into some kind of vision of the future in which this technology plays a role is required, if a dangerous – or to them dangerous – counteraction is to be avoided.\nMy personal experience working with these tech companies is that they are concerned for their businesses and genuinely want to do the right thing. Of course there are intellectual challenges and there is money to be made, but equally they are people who don't think when they get up in the morning that they're going to put people out of jobs or bring about the downfall of humanity. As the industry matures it's developing a sense of responsibility.",
"We want to create a space where many different disciplines can come together and develop a shared language, learn from each other’s approaches, and hopefully very quickly move to be able to actually develop new ideas, new conclusions, together. But the first step is learning how to talk to each other.\nAt a recent talk, Naomi Klein said that addressing the challenge of climate change could not have come at a worse time. The current dominant political and economic ideologies, along with growing isolationist sentiment, runs contrary to the bipartisan, collaborative approaches needed to solve global issues like climate change. Do you see the same issues hampering a global effort to respond to the challenges AI raises?\nClimate change suffers from the problem that the costs are not incurred in any direct way by the industrialists who own the technology and are profiting from it. With AI, that has been the case so far; although not on the same scale. There has been disruption but so far, compared to industrialisation, the impact has been fairly small. That will probably change.",
"It's just one example, but the idea that we can live much more resource-efficiently, because we are living more intelligently through using these tools. And therefore can undo some of the damage of the last Industrial Revolution. That's my main utopian hope, I guess.\nVintage toy robot image by josefkubes/Shutterstock\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"You can think, well, we in the West have long been justifying power relations of a certain kind on the basis that we're 'cleverer'. That's why men get to vote and women don't, or whatever. In a culture where power is not based on intelligence but, say, on a caste system, which is purely hereditary, we’d build an AI, and it would just tune in, drop out, attain enlightenment, just sit in the corner. Or we beg it to come back and help us find enlightenment. It might be that we find a completely different narrative to the one that's dominant in the West.\nOne of the projects the centre is running is looking into what kind of AI breakthroughs may come, when and what the social consequences could be. What do you think the future holds? What are your fears – what do you think could go right and wrong in the short, medium and long term?",
"I think, nonetheless, there are things we can do. We can try to imagine how things might go very badly wrong, and then work hard to develop systems that will stop that from happening. We can also try collectively to imagine how things could go very right. The kind of society that we actually want to live in that uses this technology. And I'm sure that will be skewed in all sorts of ways, and we might imagine things that seem wonderful and actually have terrible by-products.",
"This conversation cannot be in the hands of any one group. It oughtn't be in the hands of Silicon Valley billionaires alone. They've got their role to play, but this is a conversation we need to be having as widely as possible.\nThe centre is developing some really interesting projects but perhaps one of the most interesting is the discussion of what intelligence might be. Could you go into a bit more detail about the kinds of questions you are trying to explore in this area?\nYou mean kinds of intelligence?\nYeah.\nI think this is very important because historically, we've had an overwhelming tendency to anthropomorphise. We define what intelligence is, historically, as being human-like. And then within that, being like certain humans.",
"It certainly is a very ambitious project to create the atlas of intelligence.\nThere was a point I read in something you wrote on our ideas of intelligence that I thought was very interesting. We actually tend to think of intelligence at the societal level when we think about human ability, rather than at the individual level but in the end conflate the two. I think that's a very good point, when we think about our capabilities, we think about what we can achieve as a whole, not individually. But when we talk about AI, we tend to think about that individual piece of technology, or that individual system. So for example if we think about the internet of things and AI, we should discuss intelligence as something encompassed by the whole.\nYeah, absolutely. Yes, right now, perhaps it is a product of our anthropomorphising bias. But there is a tendency to see a narrative of AI versus humanity, as if it's one or the other. And yet, obviously, there are risks in this technology long before it acquires any kind of manipulative agency.",
"And so we do need to worry about deskilling and about becoming dependent. And it is entirely possible that you can imagine a society in which we're all sort of prosperous, in a sense. Our basic bodily needs are provided for, perhaps, in a way, to an extent that we've never before even dreamed of. Unprecedented in human history. \n\n And yet, we're stripped of any kind of meaningful work. We have no purpose. We're escaping to virtual reality. And then you could imagine all sorts of worrying countercultures or Luddite movements or what have you. I guess that's the kind of scenario that – I haven't sketched it terribly well – but that's the kind of thing that worries me more than missile-toting giant robots.",
"So I think we've got a real opportunity, despite the general climate, and in some ways because of it. There's a great opportunity to bring industry on board to make sure the technology is developed in the right way.\nOne of the dominant narratives around not only AI but technology and automation more generally is that we, as humans, are at the mercy of technological progress. If you try and push against this idea you can be labelled as being anti-progress and stuck in the past. But we do have a lot more control than we give ourselves credit for. For example, routineness and susceptibility to automation are not inevitable features of occupations, job design is hugely important. How do we design jobs? How do we create jobs that allow people to do the kind of work they want to do? There can be a bit of a conflict between being impacted by what's happening and having some sort of control over what we want to happen.",
"Robotic technology is dangerous. Or potentially dangerous. But at the same time, most of what we're using technology for is to enhance ourselves, to increase our capacities. And a lot of what AI is going to be doing is augmenting us – we're going to be working as teams, AI-human teams.\nWhere do you think this AI-human conflict, or concept of a conflict, comes from? Do you think that's just a reflection of historical conversations we've had about automation, or do you think it is a deeper fear?",
"Certainly, we encounter technological determinism a lot. And it's understandable. For us as individuals, of course it does feel like it always is happening and we just have to cope. No one individual can do much about it, other than adapt.",
"But that's different when we consider ourselves at a level of a society, as a polis [city state], or as an international community. I think we can shape the way in which technology develops. We have various tools. In any given country, we have regulations. There's a possibility of international regulation. \n\n Technology is emerging from a certain legal, political, normative, cultural, and social framework. It's coming from a certain place. And it is shaped by all of those things.",
"And I think, still, this anthropomorphic picture of the kind of humanoid android, the robot, dominates our idea of what AI is too much. And too many people, and the industry as well, talk about human-level artificial intelligence as a goal, or general AI, which basically means like a human. But actually what we're building is nothing like a human. \n\n When the first pocket calculator was made, it didn't do maths like a human. It was vastly better. It didn't make the occasional mistake. When we set about creating these artificial agents to solve these problems, because they have a completely different evolutionary history to humans, they solve problems in very different ways.\nAnd until now, people have been fairly shy about describing them as intelligent. Or rather, in the history of AIs, we think solving a particular problem would require intelligence. Then we solve it. And then that's no longer intelligence, because we've solved it. Chess is a good example.",
"But the reality is, we are creating a whole new world of different artificial agents. And we need to understand that world. We need to understand all the different ways of being clever, if you like. How you can be extremely sophisticated at some particular rational process, and yet extremely bad at another one in a way that bears no relation to the way humans are on these axes. \n\n And this is important, partly because we need to expand our sense of what is intelligent, like we have done with the natural world. Because lots of things follow from saying something is intelligent. Historically, we have a long tradition in Western philosophy of saying those who are intelligent should rule. So if intelligence equates to power, then obviously we need to think about what we mean by intelligence. Who has it and who doesn't. Or how it equates to rights and responsibilities.",
"And it's taken a very long time for the academic community to accept that there could be such a thing as non-human intelligence at all. We know that crows, for example, who have had a completely different evolutionary history, or octopuses, who have an even more different evolutionary history, might have a kind of intelligence that's very different to ours. That in some ways rivals our own, and so forth. \n\n But luckily, we have got to that point in recent years of accepting that we are not the only form of intelligence. But now, AI is challenging that from a different direction. Just as we are accepting that the natural world offers this enormous range of different intelligences, we are at the same time inventing new intelligences that are radically different to humans.",
"That's a big question. Certainly I don't lie awake at night worried that robots are going to knock the door down and come in with a machine gun. If the robots take over the world, it won't be by knocking the door down. At the moment, I think it's certainly as big a risk that we have a GMO moment, and there's a powerful reaction against the technology which prevents us from reaping the benefits, which are enormous. I think that's as big a risk as the risks from the technologies themselves."
],
[
"It's just one example, but the idea that we can live much more resource-efficiently, because we are living more intelligently through using these tools. And therefore can undo some of the damage of the last Industrial Revolution. That's my main utopian hope, I guess.\nVintage toy robot image by josefkubes/Shutterstock\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"Their conversation has been edited.\nHarry Armstrong: Do you see the interdisciplinary nature of the centre as one of its key values and one of the key impacts you hope it will have on the field?\nStephen Cave: Thinking about the impact of AI is not something that any one discipline owns or does in any very systematic way. So if academia is going to rise to the challenge and provide thought leadership on this hugely important issue, then we’re going to need to do it by breaking down current disciplinary boundaries and bringing people with very different expertise together. \n\n That means bringing together the technologists and the experts at developing these algorithms together with social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and so forth. \n\n I think there are many areas of science where more interdisciplinary engagement would be valuable. Biotech’s another example. In that sense AI isn’t unique, but I think because thinking about AI is still in very early stages, we have an opportunity to shape the way in which we think about it, and build that community.",
"As to utopian, yes, that's interesting. I certainly mentioned a couple of things. One thing that I hope is that this new technological revolution enables us to undo some of the damage of the last one. That's a very utopian thought and not terribly realistic, but we use fossil fuels so incredibly efficiently. The idea that driverless cars that are shared, basically a kind of shared service located off a Brownfield site does away with 95 per cent of all cars, freeing up a huge amount of space in the city to be greener, many fewer cars need to be produced, they would be on the road much less, there'd be fewer traffic jams.",
"And so we do need to worry about deskilling and about becoming dependent. And it is entirely possible that you can imagine a society in which we're all sort of prosperous, in a sense. Our basic bodily needs are provided for, perhaps, in a way, to an extent that we've never before even dreamed of. Unprecedented in human history. \n\n And yet, we're stripped of any kind of meaningful work. We have no purpose. We're escaping to virtual reality. And then you could imagine all sorts of worrying countercultures or Luddite movements or what have you. I guess that's the kind of scenario that – I haven't sketched it terribly well – but that's the kind of thing that worries me more than missile-toting giant robots.",
"I think, nonetheless, there are things we can do. We can try to imagine how things might go very badly wrong, and then work hard to develop systems that will stop that from happening. We can also try collectively to imagine how things could go very right. The kind of society that we actually want to live in that uses this technology. And I'm sure that will be skewed in all sorts of ways, and we might imagine things that seem wonderful and actually have terrible by-products.",
"We want to create a space where many different disciplines can come together and develop a shared language, learn from each other’s approaches, and hopefully very quickly move to be able to actually develop new ideas, new conclusions, together. But the first step is learning how to talk to each other.\nAt a recent talk, Naomi Klein said that addressing the challenge of climate change could not have come at a worse time. The current dominant political and economic ideologies, along with growing isolationist sentiment, runs contrary to the bipartisan, collaborative approaches needed to solve global issues like climate change. Do you see the same issues hampering a global effort to respond to the challenges AI raises?\nClimate change suffers from the problem that the costs are not incurred in any direct way by the industrialists who own the technology and are profiting from it. With AI, that has been the case so far; although not on the same scale. There has been disruption but so far, compared to industrialisation, the impact has been fairly small. That will probably change.",
"And I think the more we understand a technology's relationship with those things, and the more we then consciously try to shape those things, the more we are going to influence the technology. So, for example, developing a culture of responsible innovation. For example, a kind of Hippocratic oath for AI developers. These things are within the realms of what is feasible, and I think will help to shape the future.\nOne of the problems with intervention, generally, is that we cannot control the course of events. We can attempt to, but we don't know how things are going to evolve. The reality is, societies are much too complex for us to be able to shape them in any very specific way, as plenty of ideologies and political movements have found to their cost. There are often unforeseen consequences that can derail a project.",
"AI: what's the worst that could happen?\nThe Centre for the Future of Intelligence is seeking to investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for humanity, and make sure humans take advantage of the opportunities while dodging the risks. It launched at the University of Cambridge last October, and is a collaboration between four universities and colleges – Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and Berkeley – backed with a 10-year, £10m grant from the Leverhulme Trust. \n\n Because no single discipline is ideally suited to this task, the centre emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. It is bringing together a diverse community of some of the world's best researchers, philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. \n\nExecutive director of the centre is Stephen Cave, a writer, philosopher and former diplomat. Harry Armstrong, head of futures at Nesta, which publishes The Long + Short, spoke with Cave about the impact of AI.",
"So I think we've got a real opportunity, despite the general climate, and in some ways because of it. There's a great opportunity to bring industry on board to make sure the technology is developed in the right way.\nOne of the dominant narratives around not only AI but technology and automation more generally is that we, as humans, are at the mercy of technological progress. If you try and push against this idea you can be labelled as being anti-progress and stuck in the past. But we do have a lot more control than we give ourselves credit for. For example, routineness and susceptibility to automation are not inevitable features of occupations, job design is hugely important. How do we design jobs? How do we create jobs that allow people to do the kind of work they want to do? There can be a bit of a conflict between being impacted by what's happening and having some sort of control over what we want to happen.",
"This conversation cannot be in the hands of any one group. It oughtn't be in the hands of Silicon Valley billionaires alone. They've got their role to play, but this is a conversation we need to be having as widely as possible.\nThe centre is developing some really interesting projects but perhaps one of the most interesting is the discussion of what intelligence might be. Could you go into a bit more detail about the kinds of questions you are trying to explore in this area?\nYou mean kinds of intelligence?\nYeah.\nI think this is very important because historically, we've had an overwhelming tendency to anthropomorphise. We define what intelligence is, historically, as being human-like. And then within that, being like certain humans.",
"But the reality is, we are creating a whole new world of different artificial agents. And we need to understand that world. We need to understand all the different ways of being clever, if you like. How you can be extremely sophisticated at some particular rational process, and yet extremely bad at another one in a way that bears no relation to the way humans are on these axes. \n\n And this is important, partly because we need to expand our sense of what is intelligent, like we have done with the natural world. Because lots of things follow from saying something is intelligent. Historically, we have a long tradition in Western philosophy of saying those who are intelligent should rule. So if intelligence equates to power, then obviously we need to think about what we mean by intelligence. Who has it and who doesn't. Or how it equates to rights and responsibilities.",
"It certainly is a very ambitious project to create the atlas of intelligence.\nThere was a point I read in something you wrote on our ideas of intelligence that I thought was very interesting. We actually tend to think of intelligence at the societal level when we think about human ability, rather than at the individual level but in the end conflate the two. I think that's a very good point, when we think about our capabilities, we think about what we can achieve as a whole, not individually. But when we talk about AI, we tend to think about that individual piece of technology, or that individual system. So for example if we think about the internet of things and AI, we should discuss intelligence as something encompassed by the whole.\nYeah, absolutely. Yes, right now, perhaps it is a product of our anthropomorphising bias. But there is a tendency to see a narrative of AI versus humanity, as if it's one or the other. And yet, obviously, there are risks in this technology long before it acquires any kind of manipulative agency.",
"Certainly, we encounter technological determinism a lot. And it's understandable. For us as individuals, of course it does feel like it always is happening and we just have to cope. No one individual can do much about it, other than adapt.",
"You can think, well, we in the West have long been justifying power relations of a certain kind on the basis that we're 'cleverer'. That's why men get to vote and women don't, or whatever. In a culture where power is not based on intelligence but, say, on a caste system, which is purely hereditary, we’d build an AI, and it would just tune in, drop out, attain enlightenment, just sit in the corner. Or we beg it to come back and help us find enlightenment. It might be that we find a completely different narrative to the one that's dominant in the West.\nOne of the projects the centre is running is looking into what kind of AI breakthroughs may come, when and what the social consequences could be. What do you think the future holds? What are your fears – what do you think could go right and wrong in the short, medium and long term?",
"So I think there is anxiety in the tech industry that there could be a serious reaction against this technology at any point. And so my impression is that there is a feeling within these companies that these ethical and social implications need to be taken very seriously, now. And that a broad buy-in by society into some kind of vision of the future in which this technology plays a role is required, if a dangerous – or to them dangerous – counteraction is to be avoided.\nMy personal experience working with these tech companies is that they are concerned for their businesses and genuinely want to do the right thing. Of course there are intellectual challenges and there is money to be made, but equally they are people who don't think when they get up in the morning that they're going to put people out of jobs or bring about the downfall of humanity. As the industry matures it's developing a sense of responsibility.",
"But that's different when we consider ourselves at a level of a society, as a polis [city state], or as an international community. I think we can shape the way in which technology develops. We have various tools. In any given country, we have regulations. There's a possibility of international regulation. \n\n Technology is emerging from a certain legal, political, normative, cultural, and social framework. It's coming from a certain place. And it is shaped by all of those things.",
"I think one worry that we haven't talked about is that we've become extremely dependent upon this technology. And that we essentially become deskilled. There's an extent to which the history of civilisation is the history of the domestication of the human species sort of by ourselves, and also by our technology, to some extent. And AI certainly allows for that to reach a whole new level. \n\n Just think about GPs with diagnostic tools. Even now, my GP consults the computer fairly regularly. But as diagnostic tools get better, what are they going to be doing other than just typing something into the computer and reading out what comes back? At which point, you might as well do away with the GP. But then, who does know about medicine?",
"Robotic technology is dangerous. Or potentially dangerous. But at the same time, most of what we're using technology for is to enhance ourselves, to increase our capacities. And a lot of what AI is going to be doing is augmenting us – we're going to be working as teams, AI-human teams.\nWhere do you think this AI-human conflict, or concept of a conflict, comes from? Do you think that's just a reflection of historical conversations we've had about automation, or do you think it is a deeper fear?",
"I do think it comes both from some biases that might well be innate, such as anthropomorphism, or our human tendency to ascribe agency to other objects, particularly moving ones, is well-established and probably has sound evolutionary roots. If it moves, it's probably wise to start asking yourself questions like, \"What is it? What might it want? Where might it be going? Might it be hungry? Do I look like food to it?\" I think it makes sense, it's natural for us to think in terms of agency. And when we do, it's natural for us to project our own ways of being and acting. And we, as primates, are profoundly co-operative.",
"And I think, still, this anthropomorphic picture of the kind of humanoid android, the robot, dominates our idea of what AI is too much. And too many people, and the industry as well, talk about human-level artificial intelligence as a goal, or general AI, which basically means like a human. But actually what we're building is nothing like a human. \n\n When the first pocket calculator was made, it didn't do maths like a human. It was vastly better. It didn't make the occasional mistake. When we set about creating these artificial agents to solve these problems, because they have a completely different evolutionary history to humans, they solve problems in very different ways.\nAnd until now, people have been fairly shy about describing them as intelligent. Or rather, in the history of AIs, we think solving a particular problem would require intelligence. Then we solve it. And then that's no longer intelligence, because we've solved it. Chess is a good example."
]
] |
train
|
27492
|
[
"How did Crownwall get to Vega III so quickly?",
"Who is Ggarran?",
"Why did the Viceroy blockade the Earth if he wanted an Earthling to come and meet with him?",
"What was Earth's first Spaceship?",
"Why is the distorter drive so dangerous?",
"How many Viceroys are neither Vegan nor Sundan?",
"Why does the bowman shoot a soldier during the Viceroy's procession?",
"How does the Council feel about Crownwall's decision to go back in time to before the Vegans appeared?",
"How does Crownwall feel about the Vegans?",
"Why does the Viceroy want to overthrow the Sundans?"
] |
[
[
"FTL (Faster than Light) drive",
"Transport Beam",
"Warp drive",
"Time travel"
],
[
"The Viceroy's advisor",
"The head of the palace guard",
"The leader of the Vegans",
"The leader of the Sundans"
],
[
"The blockade was a test to see if Earthlings were smart enough to help the Vegans defeat the Sundans.",
"The blockade is there to protect Earth from the Sundans.",
"The blockade is there to quarantine the Earth. Earthlings may have diseases that could infect the other races.",
"The blockade is there to keep people from leaving the Earth."
],
[
"Voyager",
"Alpha Centauri",
"Star Seeker",
"Enterprise"
],
[
"The distorter drive has a seventy-three percent chance of destroying everything around it for thousands of miles.",
"The distorter drive has not been thoroughly tested.",
"The distorter drive is powered by a nuclear reactor.",
"The distorter drive is radioactive."
],
[
"15",
"20",
"25",
"10"
],
[
"To demonstrate what would happen if someone who was not a guest of the Viceroy viewed the procession.",
"The soldier was attempting to stage a coup against the Viceroy.",
"The soldier tripped and made the procession look sloppy.",
"To demonstrate the Vegan's knowledge of antiquated weapons."
],
[
"They are scared. The Sundans will surely attack the Earth now.",
"They are horrified. They sent Crownwall to make a peace treaty not to commit genocide.",
"They are sad. They are all alone in the universe now.",
"They are ecstatic. All of their enemies are gone now."
],
[
"Crownwall thinks the Vegans are a kind and benevolent race.",
"Crownwall thinks the Vegans seem to be just as brutal and horrible as they make the Sundans out to be.",
"Crownwall thinks the Vegans are murderous and can't wait to get away from them.",
"Crownwall is disgusted by the sight of the slobbering, boneless, tentacled creatures."
],
[
"The Sundans do not understand polite society or etiquette. They really must be stopped.",
"The Sundans are waging war on the Vegans. ",
"The Sundans are a race of brutal warriors, oppressing everyone in the galaxy.",
"The Vegans were around before the Sundans, therefore the Vegans should be in charge of the galaxy."
]
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"After elaborate and lengthy farewells,\n Crownwall climbed into his\n machine and fell gently up until he\n was out of the atmosphere, before\n starting his enormous journey\n through time back to Earth. More\n quickly than it had taken him to\n reach his ship from the palace of\n His Effulgence, he was in the Council\n Chamber of the Confederation\n Government of Earth, making a full\n report on his trip to Vega.",
"Crownwall nodded. \"I don't\n see why not. Well, then, let me tell\n you that we don't travel in space\n at all. That's why I didn't show up\n on any of your long-range detection\n instruments. Instead, we travel\n in time. Surely any race that has\n progressed as far as your own must\n know, at least theoretically, that\n time travel is entirely possible. After\n all, we knew it, and we haven't\n been around nearly as long as you\n have.\"",
"\"Are you sure that you haven't\n given us a little too much information\n for your own safety?\" asked\n Ffallk softly.\n\n\n \"Not at all. We were enormously\n lucky to have learned how to control\n spatial reference frames ourselves.\n I doubt if you could do it in\n another two million years.\" Crownwall\n rose to his feet. \"And now,\n Your Effulgence, I think it's about\n time I went back to my ship and\n drove it home to Earth to make my\n report, so we can pick up those\n bombs and start making arrangements.\"\n\n\n \"Excellent,\" said Ffallk. \"I'd better\n escort you; my people don't like\n strangers much.\"\n\n\n \"I'd noticed that,\" Crownwall\n commented drily.",
"\"I'm glad of that,\" said Crownwall.\n \"Too bad Ggaran can't join\n us.\" He climbed into the chair beside\n Ffallk. The bearers trotted\n along at seven or eight kilometers\n an hour, carrying their contraption\n with absolute smoothness. Blasts\n from horns preceded them as they\n went.\n\n\n When they passed through the\n huge entrance doors of the palace\n and started down the ramp toward\n the street, Crownwall was astonished\n to see nobody on the previously\n crowded streets, and mentioned\n it to Ffallk.\n\n\n \"When the Viceroy of the Seventy\n Suns,\" said the Viceroy of the\n Seventy Suns, \"travels in state, no\n one but my own entourage is permitted\n to watch. And my guests, of\n course,\" he added, bowing slightly\n to Crownwall.",
"\"I sincerely hope so,\" said\n Crownwall.\nRefreshments\n were served\n to His Effulgence and to\n Crownwall during the trip, without\n interrupting the smooth progress\n of the sedan. The soldiers of\n the cohort, the bearers and Ggaran\n continued to run—without food,\n drink or, except for Ggaran, evidence\n of fatigue.\n\n\n After several hours of travel, following\n Crownwall's directions, the\n procession arrived at the copse in\n which he had concealed his small\n transportation machine. The machine,\n for spatial mobility, was\n equipped with the heavy and grossly\n inefficient anti-gravity field generator\n developed by Kowalsky. It\n occupied ten times the space of the\n temporal translation and coordination\n selection systems combined,\n but it had the great advantage of\n being almost undetectable in use. It\n emitted no mass or radiation.",
"\"What business\nwould\nI have at\n the Viceroy's Palace?\" asked\n Crownwall. \"I want to see Ffallk.\"\n\n\n \"Mind your tongue,\" growled\n the guard. \"If you mean His Effulgence,\n Right Hand of the Glorious\n Emperor, Hereditary Ruler of the\n Seventy Suns, Viceroy of the\n Twelfth Sector of the Universal\n Holy Empire\"—Universal Galactic\n had a full measure of ceremonial\n words—\"he sees only those whom\n he summons. If you know what's\n good for you, you'll get out of here\n while you can still walk. And if you\n run fast enough, maybe you can\n even get away from that crowd out\n there, but I doubt it.\"\n\n\n \"Just tell him that a man has\n arrived from Earth to talk to him.\n He'll summon me fast enough.\n Meanwhile, my highly polished\n friends, I'll just wait here, so why\n don't you put those heavy pikes\n down?\"",
"\"Things may not be as bad as\n they seem,\" answered Crownwall\n complacently. \"After I got back a\n few million years, I'm afraid I got\n a little careless and let my ship dip\n down into Vega III's atmosphere\n for a while. I was back so far that\n the Vegans hadn't appeared yet.\n Now, I didn't land—or\ndeliberately\nkill anything—but I'd be mighty\n surprised if we didn't find a change\n or two. Before I came in here, I\n asked Marshall to take the ship out\n and check on things. He should be\n back with his report before long.\n Why don't we wait and see what\n he has to say?\"\nMarshall\n was excited when\n he was escorted into the\n Council Chamber. He bowed briefly\n to the President and began to\n speak rapidly.",
"\"Oh, I didn't mean\nyou\nin particular,\"\n the Vegan said with a\n negligent wave. \"Who can tell one\n Earthling from another? What I\n meant was that I expected someone\n from Earth to break through\n our blockade and come here. Most\n of my advisors—even Ggaran here—thought\n it couldn't be done, but\n I never doubted that you'd manage\n it. Still, if you were on your\n home planet only yesterday, that's\n astonishing even to me. Tell me,\n how did you manage to get here so\n fast, and without even alerting my\n detection web?\"\n\n\n \"You're doing the talking,\" said\n Crownwall. \"If you wanted someone\n from Earth to come here to see\n you, why did you put the cordon\n around Earth? And why did you\n drop a planet-buster in the Pacific\n Ocean, and tell us that it was triggered\n to go off if we tried to use\n the distorter drive? That's hardly\n the action of somebody who expects\n visitors.\"",
"Crownwall shrugged. \"So?\"\nThe\n Vegan reached up and engulfed\n the end of a drinking\n tube with his eating orifice. \"You\n upstart Earthlings are a strange\n and a frightening race,\" he said.\n \"Frightening to the Sunda, especially.\n When you showed up in the\n spaceways, it was decreed that you\n had to be stopped at once. There\n was even serious discussion of destroying\n Earth out of hand, while\n it is still possible.",
"\"And now,\" Ggaran put in, \"I\n think it's time for you to tell us\n something about how you get\n across light-years of space in a few\n hours, without leaving any traces\n for us to detect.\" He raised a tentacle\n to still Crownwall's immediate\n exclamation of protest. \"Oh,\n nothing that would give us a chance\n to duplicate it—just enough to\nindicate\nhow we can make use of\n it, along with you—enough to allow\n us to\nbegin\nto make intelligent\n plans to beat the claws off the Master\n Race.\"\nAfter\n due consideration,",
"\"It's all right, Ggaran,\" said the\n Viceroy languidly. He twitched a\n tentacle in a beckoning gesture.\n \"Come closer, Earthling. I bid you\n welcome to my capital. I have been\n looking forward to your arrival for\n some time.\"\nCrownwall\n put his hands\n in his pockets. \"That's hardly\n possible,\" he said. \"It was only decided\n yesterday, back on Earth,\n that I would be the one to make\n the trip here. Even if you could\n spy through buildings on Earth\n from space, which I doubt, your\n communications system can't get\n the word through that fast.\"",
"\"But I had different ideas. From\n what you had already done, I suspected\n it wouldn't be long before\n one of you amazing Earthlings\n would dream up some device or\n other, head out into space, and\n show up on our planet. So I've been\n waiting for you, and here you are.\"\n\n\n \"It was the thinking of a genius,\"\n murmured Ggaran.\n\n\n \"All right, then, genius, here I\n am,\" said Crownwall. \"So what's\n the pitch?\"",
"Two weeks later, while they\n were still several planetary diameters\n from their destination, they\n had been shocked to find more\n than two score alien ships of space\n closing in on them—ships that\n were swifter and more maneuverable\n than their own. These ships\n had rapidly and competently englobed\n the\nStar Seeker\n, and had\n then tried to herd it away from the\n planet it had been heading toward.\nAlthough\n caught by surprise,\n the Earthmen had acted\n swiftly. Crownwall recalled the discussion—the\n council of war, they\n had called it—and their unanimous\n decision. Although far within the\n dangerous influence of a planetary\n mass, they had again activated the\n distorter drive, and they had beaten\n the odds. On the distorter drive,\n they had returned to Earth as swiftly\n as they had departed. Earth had\n immediately prepared for war\n against her unknown enemy.",
"\"Don't call those damn lobsters\n friends,\" growled Ggaran. He subsided\n at the Viceroy's gesture.\n\n\n \"Exactly,\" said His Effulgence\n to Crownwall. \"You broke our\n blockade without any trouble. Our\n instruments didn't even wiggle\n when you landed here on my capital\n world. You can do the same on\n the worlds of the Sunda. Now, just\n tell us how you did it, and we're\n partners.\"\nCrownwall\n lifted one eyebrow\n quizzically, but remained\n silent. He didn't expect his facial\n gesture to be interpreted correctly,\n but he assumed that his silence\n would be. He was correct.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" His Effulgence said,\n \"we will give you any assurances\n that your people may desire in order\n to feel safe, and we will guarantee\n them an equal share in the\n government of the Galaxy.\"\n\n\n \"Bunk,\" said Crownwall.",
"UPSTARTS\nBy L. J. STECHER, JR.\nIllustrated by DILLON\nThe\n sight of an Earthman\n on Vega III, where it was\n impossible for an outlander\n to be, brought angry crowds to surround\n John Crownwall as he strode\n toward the palace of Viceroy\n Tronn Ffallk, ruler of Sector XII\n of the Universal Holy Empire of\n Sunda. He ignored the snarling, the\n spitting, the waving of boneless\n prehensile fingers, as he ignored the\n heavy gravity and heavier air of\n the unfamiliar planet.",
"\"Of course,\" said Crownwall,\n then added, \"It's too bad that you\n can't provide them with live targets\n a little more often.\" He stifled\n a shudder of distaste. \"Tell me,\n Your Effulgence, does the Emperor's\n race—the Master Race—also\n enjoy the type of civilization\n you have just had demonstrated\n for me?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no. They are far too brutal,\n too morally degraded, to know anything\n of these finer points of etiquette\n and propriety. They are\n really an uncouth bunch. Why, do\n you know, I am certain that they\n would have had the bad taste to\n use an energy weapon to dispose\n of the victim in a case such as you\n just witnessed! They are really\n quite unfit to rule. They can scarcely\n be called civilized at all. But we\n will soon put a stop to all of that—your\n race and mine, of course.\"",
"At the far side of the comfortable,\n unimpressive room, a plump\n thing, hide faded to a dull violet,\n reclined on a couch. Behind him\n stood a heavy and pompous appearing\n Vegan in lordly trappings.\n They examined Crownwall with\n great interest for a few moments.\n\n\n \"It's customary to genuflect\n when you enter the Viceroy's presence,\"\n said the standing one at\n last. \"But then I'm told you're an\n Earthling. I suppose we can expect\n you to be ignorant of those niceties\n customary among civilized peoples.\"",
"\"For more than two million\n years we have waited for the opportunity\n for revenge. And now\n that you have entered space, that\n opportunity is at hand.\"\n\n\n \"If you haven't been able to help\n yourselves for two million years,\"\n asked Crownwall, \"how does the\n sight of me give you so much gumption\n all of a sudden?\"\n\n\n Ggaran's tentacles writhed, and\n he slavered in fury, but the clashing\n of his teeth subsided instantly\n at a soothing wave from His Effulgence.",
"Crownwall sat on the steps,\n puffed alight a cigarette, and blew\n expert smoke rings toward the\n guards.\n\n\n An elegant courtier, with elaborately\n jeweled harness, bustled\n from inside the palace, obviously\n trying to present an air of strolling\n nonchalance. He gestured fluidly\n with a graceful tentacle. \"You!\" he\n said to Crownwall. \"Follow me. His\n Effulgence commands you to appear\n before him at once.\" The two\n guards withdrew their pikes and\n froze into immobility at the sides\n of the entrance.\n\n\n Crownwall stamped out his\n smoke and ambled after the hurrying\n courtier along tremendous corridors,\n through elaborate waiting\n rooms, under guarded doorways,\n until he was finally bowed through\n a small curtained arch.",
"\"Intelligence is very rare in the\n Galaxy. In all, it has been found\n only fifteen times. The other races\n we have watched develop, and\n some we have actively assisted to\n develop. It took the quickest of\n them just under a million years.\n One such race we left uncontrolled\n too long—but no matter.\n\n\n \"You Earthlings, in defiance of\n all expectation and all reason, have\n exploded into space. You have developed\n in an incredibly short\n space of time. But even that isn't\n the most disconcerting item of your\n development. As an Earthling, you\n have heard of the details of the\n first expedition of your people into\n space, of course?\"\n\n\n \"\nHeard\nabout it?\" exclaimed\n Crownwall. \"I was\non\nit.\" He settled\n down comfortably on a couch,\n without requesting permission, and\n thought back to that first tremendous\n adventure; an adventure that\n had taken place little more than\n ten years before."
],
[
"\"You see,\" said Ggaran complacently,\n \"we have very little trouble\n with civilians who violate this particular\n tradition.\"\n\n\n His Effulgence beckoned to the\n bowman to approach. \"Your results\n were satisfactory,\" he said, \"but\n your release was somewhat shaky.\n The next time you show such sloppy\n form, you will be given thirty\n lashes.\"\n\n\n He leaned back on the cushion\n and spoke again to Crownwall.\n \"That's the trouble with these requirements\n of civilization. The men\n of my immediate guard must practice\n with such things as pikes and\n bows and arrows, which they seldom\n get an opportunity to use. It\n would never do for them to use\n modern weapons on occasions of\n ceremony, of course.\"",
"\"Since this is a very important\n occasion, I think it best that we\n make this a Procession of Full\n Ceremony. It's a bother, but the\n proprieties have to be observed.\"\nGgaran\n stepped out into the\n broad corridor and whistled a\n shrill two-tone note, using both his\n speaking and his eating orifices. A\n cohort of troops, pikes at the ready\n and bows strapped to their backs,\n leaped forward and formed a\n double line leading from His Effulgence's\n sanctum to the main door.\n Down this lane, carried by twenty\n men, came a large sedan chair.\n\n\n \"Protocol takes a lot of time,\"\n said His Effulgence somewhat sadly,\n \"but it must be observed. At\n least, as Ambassador, you can ride\n with me in the sedan, instead of\n walking behind it, like Ggaran.\"",
"\"I'm glad of that,\" said Crownwall.\n \"Too bad Ggaran can't join\n us.\" He climbed into the chair beside\n Ffallk. The bearers trotted\n along at seven or eight kilometers\n an hour, carrying their contraption\n with absolute smoothness. Blasts\n from horns preceded them as they\n went.\n\n\n When they passed through the\n huge entrance doors of the palace\n and started down the ramp toward\n the street, Crownwall was astonished\n to see nobody on the previously\n crowded streets, and mentioned\n it to Ffallk.\n\n\n \"When the Viceroy of the Seventy\n Suns,\" said the Viceroy of the\n Seventy Suns, \"travels in state, no\n one but my own entourage is permitted\n to watch. And my guests, of\n course,\" he added, bowing slightly\n to Crownwall.",
"His Effulgence wiggled his tentacles.\n \"I'm afraid that Ggaran had\n expected to take what you Earthlings\n have to offer without giving\n anything in return. I never had any\n such ideas. I have not underestimated\n you, you see.\"\n\n\n \"That's nice,\" said Crownwall\n graciously.",
"\"And now,\" Ggaran put in, \"I\n think it's time for you to tell us\n something about how you get\n across light-years of space in a few\n hours, without leaving any traces\n for us to detect.\" He raised a tentacle\n to still Crownwall's immediate\n exclamation of protest. \"Oh,\n nothing that would give us a chance\n to duplicate it—just enough to\nindicate\nhow we can make use of\n it, along with you—enough to allow\n us to\nbegin\nto make intelligent\n plans to beat the claws off the Master\n Race.\"\nAfter\n due consideration,",
"\"But I had different ideas. From\n what you had already done, I suspected\n it wouldn't be long before\n one of you amazing Earthlings\n would dream up some device or\n other, head out into space, and\n show up on our planet. So I've been\n waiting for you, and here you are.\"\n\n\n \"It was the thinking of a genius,\"\n murmured Ggaran.\n\n\n \"All right, then, genius, here I\n am,\" said Crownwall. \"So what's\n the pitch?\"",
"\"Of course,\" agreed Crownwall,\n bowing back. \"Kind of you, I'm\n sure. But what happens if somebody\n doesn't get the word, or\n doesn't hear your trumpeters, or\n something like that?\"\n\n\n Ggaran stepped forward, already\n panting slightly. \"A man with knots\n in all of his ear stalks is in a very\n uncomfortable position,\" he explained.\n \"Wait. Let me show you.\n Let us just suppose that that runner\n over there\"—he gestured toward\n a soldier with a tentacle—\"is\n a civilian who has been so unlucky\n as to remain on the street\n after His Effulgence's entourage arrived.\"\n He turned to one of the\n bowmen who ran beside the sedan\n chair, now strung and at the ready.\n \"Show him!\" he ordered peremptorily.\n\n\n In one swift movement the bowman\n notched an arrow, drew and\n fired. The arrow hissed briefly, and\n then sliced smoothly through the\n soldier's throat.",
"\"It's all right, Ggaran,\" said the\n Viceroy languidly. He twitched a\n tentacle in a beckoning gesture.\n \"Come closer, Earthling. I bid you\n welcome to my capital. I have been\n looking forward to your arrival for\n some time.\"\nCrownwall\n put his hands\n in his pockets. \"That's hardly\n possible,\" he said. \"It was only decided\n yesterday, back on Earth,\n that I would be the one to make\n the trip here. Even if you could\n spy through buildings on Earth\n from space, which I doubt, your\n communications system can't get\n the word through that fast.\"",
"\"For more than two million\n years we have waited for the opportunity\n for revenge. And now\n that you have entered space, that\n opportunity is at hand.\"\n\n\n \"If you haven't been able to help\n yourselves for two million years,\"\n asked Crownwall, \"how does the\n sight of me give you so much gumption\n all of a sudden?\"\n\n\n Ggaran's tentacles writhed, and\n he slavered in fury, but the clashing\n of his teeth subsided instantly\n at a soothing wave from His Effulgence.",
"\"Don't call those damn lobsters\n friends,\" growled Ggaran. He subsided\n at the Viceroy's gesture.\n\n\n \"Exactly,\" said His Effulgence\n to Crownwall. \"You broke our\n blockade without any trouble. Our\n instruments didn't even wiggle\n when you landed here on my capital\n world. You can do the same on\n the worlds of the Sunda. Now, just\n tell us how you did it, and we're\n partners.\"\nCrownwall\n lifted one eyebrow\n quizzically, but remained\n silent. He didn't expect his facial\n gesture to be interpreted correctly,\n but he assumed that his silence\n would be. He was correct.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" His Effulgence said,\n \"we will give you any assurances\n that your people may desire in order\n to feel safe, and we will guarantee\n them an equal share in the\n government of the Galaxy.\"\n\n\n \"Bunk,\" said Crownwall.",
"\"Would that have been so bad?\"\n said Ggaran. \"We can't tolerate\n wild and warlike races running free\n and uncontrolled in the Galaxy.\n Once was enough for that.\"\n\n\n \"But what about my question?\n Was there any other way for us to\n stay free?\"",
"His Effulgence lifted a tentacle\n swiftly, before Ggaran, lunging angrily\n forward, could speak. \"Then\n what do you want of us?\"\n\n\n \"It seems to me that we need\n no wordy assurances from each\n other,\" said Crownwall, and he\n puffed a cigarette aglow. \"We can\n arrange something a little more\n trustworthy, I believe. On your\n side, you have the power to destroy\n our only planet at any time. That\n is certainly adequate security for\n our own good behavior and sincerity.",
"\"Ggaran, you explain it to the\n Earthling,\" said His Effulgence.\nGgaran\n bowed. \"The crustaceans\n on Sunda—the lobsterlike\n creatures that rule the Galaxy—are\n usurpers. They have no rights\n to their position of power. Our race\n is much older than theirs. We were\n alone when we found the Sundans—a\n primitive tribe, grubbing in the\n mud at the edge of their shallow\n seas, unable even to reason. In\n those days we were desperately\n lonely. We needed companionship\n among the stars, and we helped\n them develop to the point where,\n in their inferior way, they were able\n to reason, almost as well as we, The\n People, can. And then they cheated\n us of our rightful place.\n\n\n \"The Emperor at Sunda is one\n of them. They provide sixty-eight\n of the hundred Viceroys; we provide\n only seventeen. It is a preposterous\n and intolerable situation.",
"\"We wouldn't use the bombs\n lightly, to be sure, because of what\n would happen to Earth. And don't\n think that blowing up our planet\n would save you, because we naturally\n wouldn't keep the bombs on\n Earth. How does that sound to\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Ridiculous,\" snorted Ggaran.\n \"Impossible.\"\n\n\n After several minutes of silent\n consideration, \"It is an excellent\n plan,\" said His Effulgence. \"It is\n worthy of the thinking of The People\n ourselves. You Earthlings will\n make very satisfactory allies. What\n you request will be provided without\n delay. Meanwhile, I see no reason\n why we cannot proceed with\n our discussions.\"\n\n\n \"Nor do I,\" consented Crownwall.\n \"But your stooge here doesn't\n seem very happy about it all.\"",
"\"I sincerely hope so,\" said\n Crownwall.\nRefreshments\n were served\n to His Effulgence and to\n Crownwall during the trip, without\n interrupting the smooth progress\n of the sedan. The soldiers of\n the cohort, the bearers and Ggaran\n continued to run—without food,\n drink or, except for Ggaran, evidence\n of fatigue.\n\n\n After several hours of travel, following\n Crownwall's directions, the\n procession arrived at the copse in\n which he had concealed his small\n transportation machine. The machine,\n for spatial mobility, was\n equipped with the heavy and grossly\n inefficient anti-gravity field generator\n developed by Kowalsky. It\n occupied ten times the space of the\n temporal translation and coordination\n selection systems combined,\n but it had the great advantage of\n being almost undetectable in use. It\n emitted no mass or radiation.",
"Ffallk glanced up at Ggaran. \"I\n told you that Earthlings were unbelievably\n bold.\" He turned back\n to Crownwall. \"If you couldn't\n come to me in spite of the trifling\n inconveniences I put in your way,\n your presence here would be useless\n to both of us. But you did\n come, so I can tell you that although\n I am the leader of one of\n the mightiest peoples in the Galaxy,\n whereas there are scarcely six\n billions of you squatting on one\n minor planet, we still need each\n other. Together, there is nothing\n we can't do.\"\n\n\n \"I'm listening,\" said Crownwall.\n\n\n \"We offer you partnership with\n us to take over the rule of the\n Galaxy from the Sunda—the so-called\n Master Race.\"\n\n\n \"It would hardly be an equal\n partnership, would it, considering\n that there are so many more of you\n than there are of us?\"",
"He climbed the great ramp, with\n its deeply carved Greek key design,\n toward the mighty entrance\n gate of the palace. His manner\n demonstrated an elaborate air of\n unconcern that he felt sure was entirely\n wasted on these monsters.\n The clashing teeth of the noisiest\n of them were only inches from the\n quivering flesh of his back as he\n reached the upper level. Instantly,\n and unexpectedly to Crownwall,\n the threatening crowd dropped\n back fearfully, so that he walked\n the last fifty meters alone.\n\n\n Crownwall all but sagged with\n relief. A pair of guards, their purple\n hides smoothly polished and gleaming\n with oil, crossed their ceremonial\n pikes in front of him as he\n approached the entrance.\n\n\n \"And just what business do you\n have here, stranger?\" asked the\n senior of the guards, his speaking\n orifice framing with difficulty the\n sibilances of Universal Galactic.",
"\"Your reaction was savage,\" said\n Ggaran, his tentacles stiffening\n with shock at the memory. \"You\n bloody-minded Earthlings must\n have been aware of the terrible\n danger.\"\n\n\n Ffallk rippled in agreement.\n \"The action you took was too swift\n and too foolhardy to be believed.\n You knew that you could have destroyed\n not only yourself, but also\n all who live on that planet. You\n could also have wrecked the planet\n itself and the ships and those of\n my own race who manned them.\n We had tried to contact you, but\n since you had not developed subspace\n radio, we were of course not\n successful. Our englobement was\n just a routine quarantine. With\n your total lack of information\n about us, what you did was more\n than the height of folly. It was madness.\"\n\n\n \"Could we have done anything\n else that would have kept you from\n landing on Earth and taking us\n over?\" asked Crownwall.",
"\"What business\nwould\nI have at\n the Viceroy's Palace?\" asked\n Crownwall. \"I want to see Ffallk.\"\n\n\n \"Mind your tongue,\" growled\n the guard. \"If you mean His Effulgence,\n Right Hand of the Glorious\n Emperor, Hereditary Ruler of the\n Seventy Suns, Viceroy of the\n Twelfth Sector of the Universal\n Holy Empire\"—Universal Galactic\n had a full measure of ceremonial\n words—\"he sees only those whom\n he summons. If you know what's\n good for you, you'll get out of here\n while you can still walk. And if you\n run fast enough, maybe you can\n even get away from that crowd out\n there, but I doubt it.\"\n\n\n \"Just tell him that a man has\n arrived from Earth to talk to him.\n He'll summon me fast enough.\n Meanwhile, my highly polished\n friends, I'll just wait here, so why\n don't you put those heavy pikes\n down?\"",
"\"Are you sure that you haven't\n given us a little too much information\n for your own safety?\" asked\n Ffallk softly.\n\n\n \"Not at all. We were enormously\n lucky to have learned how to control\n spatial reference frames ourselves.\n I doubt if you could do it in\n another two million years.\" Crownwall\n rose to his feet. \"And now,\n Your Effulgence, I think it's about\n time I went back to my ship and\n drove it home to Earth to make my\n report, so we can pick up those\n bombs and start making arrangements.\"\n\n\n \"Excellent,\" said Ffallk. \"I'd better\n escort you; my people don't like\n strangers much.\"\n\n\n \"I'd noticed that,\" Crownwall\n commented drily."
],
[
"\"What business\nwould\nI have at\n the Viceroy's Palace?\" asked\n Crownwall. \"I want to see Ffallk.\"\n\n\n \"Mind your tongue,\" growled\n the guard. \"If you mean His Effulgence,\n Right Hand of the Glorious\n Emperor, Hereditary Ruler of the\n Seventy Suns, Viceroy of the\n Twelfth Sector of the Universal\n Holy Empire\"—Universal Galactic\n had a full measure of ceremonial\n words—\"he sees only those whom\n he summons. If you know what's\n good for you, you'll get out of here\n while you can still walk. And if you\n run fast enough, maybe you can\n even get away from that crowd out\n there, but I doubt it.\"\n\n\n \"Just tell him that a man has\n arrived from Earth to talk to him.\n He'll summon me fast enough.\n Meanwhile, my highly polished\n friends, I'll just wait here, so why\n don't you put those heavy pikes\n down?\"",
"\"Oh, I didn't mean\nyou\nin particular,\"\n the Vegan said with a\n negligent wave. \"Who can tell one\n Earthling from another? What I\n meant was that I expected someone\n from Earth to break through\n our blockade and come here. Most\n of my advisors—even Ggaran here—thought\n it couldn't be done, but\n I never doubted that you'd manage\n it. Still, if you were on your\n home planet only yesterday, that's\n astonishing even to me. Tell me,\n how did you manage to get here so\n fast, and without even alerting my\n detection web?\"\n\n\n \"You're doing the talking,\" said\n Crownwall. \"If you wanted someone\n from Earth to come here to see\n you, why did you put the cordon\n around Earth? And why did you\n drop a planet-buster in the Pacific\n Ocean, and tell us that it was triggered\n to go off if we tried to use\n the distorter drive? That's hardly\n the action of somebody who expects\n visitors.\"",
"\"It's all right, Ggaran,\" said the\n Viceroy languidly. He twitched a\n tentacle in a beckoning gesture.\n \"Come closer, Earthling. I bid you\n welcome to my capital. I have been\n looking forward to your arrival for\n some time.\"\nCrownwall\n put his hands\n in his pockets. \"That's hardly\n possible,\" he said. \"It was only decided\n yesterday, back on Earth,\n that I would be the one to make\n the trip here. Even if you could\n spy through buildings on Earth\n from space, which I doubt, your\n communications system can't get\n the word through that fast.\"",
"\"And it is true that we can always\n exterminate any planet that\n refuses to obey the just and legal\n orders of its Viceroy. So we achieve\n a working balance in our Empire.\n We control it adequately, and we\n live in peace.\n\n\n \"The Sundans, for example,\n though they took the rule of the\n Empire that was rightfully ours\n away from us, through trickery,\n were unable to take over the\n Sectors we control. We are still\n powerful. And soon we will be all-powerful.\n In company with you\n Earthlings, that is.\"\n\n\n Crownwall nodded. \"In other\n words, you think that we Earthmen\n can break up this two-million-year-old\n stalemate. You've got the\n idea that, with our help, you can\n conquer planets without the necessity\n of destroying them, and thereby\n take over number one spot from\n these Sunda friends of yours.\"",
"\"Don't call those damn lobsters\n friends,\" growled Ggaran. He subsided\n at the Viceroy's gesture.\n\n\n \"Exactly,\" said His Effulgence\n to Crownwall. \"You broke our\n blockade without any trouble. Our\n instruments didn't even wiggle\n when you landed here on my capital\n world. You can do the same on\n the worlds of the Sunda. Now, just\n tell us how you did it, and we're\n partners.\"\nCrownwall\n lifted one eyebrow\n quizzically, but remained\n silent. He didn't expect his facial\n gesture to be interpreted correctly,\n but he assumed that his silence\n would be. He was correct.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" His Effulgence said,\n \"we will give you any assurances\n that your people may desire in order\n to feel safe, and we will guarantee\n them an equal share in the\n government of the Galaxy.\"\n\n\n \"Bunk,\" said Crownwall.",
"His Effulgence twitched his ear\n stalks in amusement. \"I'm Viceroy\n of one of the hundred Sectors of\n the Empire. I rule over a total of\n a hundred Satrapies; these average\n about a hundred Provinces each.\n Provinces consist, in general, of\n about a hundred Clusters apiece,\n and every Cluster has an average\n of a hundred inhabited solar systems.\n There are more inhabited\n planets in the Galaxy than there\n are people on your single world.\n I, personally, rule three hundred\n trillion people, half of them of my\n own race. And yet I tell you that\n it would be an equal partnership.\"\n\n\n \"I don't get it. Why?\"\n\n\n \"Because you came to me.\"",
"\"That old fool on Sunda, the\n Emperor, decided that we should\n blow you up, but by that time I\n had decided,\" said His Effulgence,\n \"that you might be useful to me—that\n is, that we might be useful to\n each other. I traveled halfway\n across the Galaxy to meet him, to\n convince him that it would be sufficient\n just to quarantine you.\n When we had used your radio system\n to teach a few of you the Universal\n Galactic tongue, and had\n managed to get what you call the\n 'planet-buster' down into the\n largest of your oceans, he figured\n we had done our job.\n\n\n \"With his usual lack of imagination,\n he felt sure that we were safe\n from you—after all, there was no\n way for you to get off the planet.\n Even if you could get down to the\n bottom of the ocean and tamper\n with the bomb, you would only succeed\n in setting it off, and that's\n what the Sunda had been in favor\n of in the first place.",
"\"Your reaction was savage,\" said\n Ggaran, his tentacles stiffening\n with shock at the memory. \"You\n bloody-minded Earthlings must\n have been aware of the terrible\n danger.\"\n\n\n Ffallk rippled in agreement.\n \"The action you took was too swift\n and too foolhardy to be believed.\n You knew that you could have destroyed\n not only yourself, but also\n all who live on that planet. You\n could also have wrecked the planet\n itself and the ships and those of\n my own race who manned them.\n We had tried to contact you, but\n since you had not developed subspace\n radio, we were of course not\n successful. Our englobement was\n just a routine quarantine. With\n your total lack of information\n about us, what you did was more\n than the height of folly. It was madness.\"\n\n\n \"Could we have done anything\n else that would have kept you from\n landing on Earth and taking us\n over?\" asked Crownwall.",
"\"Ggaran, you explain it to the\n Earthling,\" said His Effulgence.\nGgaran\n bowed. \"The crustaceans\n on Sunda—the lobsterlike\n creatures that rule the Galaxy—are\n usurpers. They have no rights\n to their position of power. Our race\n is much older than theirs. We were\n alone when we found the Sundans—a\n primitive tribe, grubbing in the\n mud at the edge of their shallow\n seas, unable even to reason. In\n those days we were desperately\n lonely. We needed companionship\n among the stars, and we helped\n them develop to the point where,\n in their inferior way, they were able\n to reason, almost as well as we, The\n People, can. And then they cheated\n us of our rightful place.\n\n\n \"The Emperor at Sunda is one\n of them. They provide sixty-eight\n of the hundred Viceroys; we provide\n only seventeen. It is a preposterous\n and intolerable situation.",
"\"War in space is almost an impossibility,\"\n said the aged ruler.\n \"We can destroy planets, of course,\n but with few exceptions, we cannot\n conquer them. I rule a total of\n seven races in my Sector. I rule\n them, but I don't let them intermingle.\n Each race settles on the\n planets that best suit it. Each of\n those planets is quite capable of defending\n itself from raids, or even\n large-scale assaults that would result\n in its capture and subjugation—just\n as your little Earth can defend\n itself.\n\n\n \"Naturally, each is vulnerable to\n economic blockade—trade provides\n a small but vital portion of the\n goods each planet uses. All that a\n world requires for a healthy and\n comfortable life cannot be provided\n from the resources of that\n single world alone, and that gives\n us a very considerable measure of\n control.",
"\"We wouldn't use the bombs\n lightly, to be sure, because of what\n would happen to Earth. And don't\n think that blowing up our planet\n would save you, because we naturally\n wouldn't keep the bombs on\n Earth. How does that sound to\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Ridiculous,\" snorted Ggaran.\n \"Impossible.\"\n\n\n After several minutes of silent\n consideration, \"It is an excellent\n plan,\" said His Effulgence. \"It is\n worthy of the thinking of The People\n ourselves. You Earthlings will\n make very satisfactory allies. What\n you request will be provided without\n delay. Meanwhile, I see no reason\n why we cannot proceed with\n our discussions.\"\n\n\n \"Nor do I,\" consented Crownwall.\n \"But your stooge here doesn't\n seem very happy about it all.\"",
"\"I'm glad of that,\" said Crownwall.\n \"Too bad Ggaran can't join\n us.\" He climbed into the chair beside\n Ffallk. The bearers trotted\n along at seven or eight kilometers\n an hour, carrying their contraption\n with absolute smoothness. Blasts\n from horns preceded them as they\n went.\n\n\n When they passed through the\n huge entrance doors of the palace\n and started down the ramp toward\n the street, Crownwall was astonished\n to see nobody on the previously\n crowded streets, and mentioned\n it to Ffallk.\n\n\n \"When the Viceroy of the Seventy\n Suns,\" said the Viceroy of the\n Seventy Suns, \"travels in state, no\n one but my own entourage is permitted\n to watch. And my guests, of\n course,\" he added, bowing slightly\n to Crownwall.",
"\"It is impossible for us of Earth\n to destroy all of your planets. As\n you have said, there are more planets\n that belong to you than there\n are human beings on Earth. But\n there is a way for us to be reasonably\n sure that you will behave\n yourselves. You will transfer to us,\n at once, a hundred of your planet-destroying\n bombs. That will be a\n sufficient supply to let us test some\n of them, to see that they are in\n good working order. Then, if you\n try any kind of double-cross, we\n will be able to use our own methods—which\n you cannot prevent—to\n send one of those bombs here to\n destroy this planet.\n\n\n \"And if you try to move anywhere\n else, by your clumsy distorter\n drive, we can follow you, and\n destroy any planet you choose to\n land on. You would not get away\n from us. We can track you without\n any difficulty.",
"\"But I had different ideas. From\n what you had already done, I suspected\n it wouldn't be long before\n one of you amazing Earthlings\n would dream up some device or\n other, head out into space, and\n show up on our planet. So I've been\n waiting for you, and here you are.\"\n\n\n \"It was the thinking of a genius,\"\n murmured Ggaran.\n\n\n \"All right, then, genius, here I\n am,\" said Crownwall. \"So what's\n the pitch?\"",
"\"Your silly little planet was carefully\n examined at long range in a\n routine investigation just about fifty\n thousand years ago. There were\n at that time three different but\n similar racial strains of pulpy bipeds,\n numbering a total of perhaps\n a hundred thousand individuals.\n They showed many signs of an\n ability to reason, but a complete\n lack of civilization. While these\n creatures could by no means be\n classed among the intelligent races,\n there was a general expectation,\n which we reported to the Sunda,\n that they would some day come to\n be numbered among the Servants\n of the Emperor. So we let you\n alone, in order that you could develop\n in your own way, until you\n reached a high enough civilization\n to be useful—if you were going to.",
"Crownwall shrugged. \"So?\"\nThe\n Vegan reached up and engulfed\n the end of a drinking\n tube with his eating orifice. \"You\n upstart Earthlings are a strange\n and a frightening race,\" he said.\n \"Frightening to the Sunda, especially.\n When you showed up in the\n spaceways, it was decreed that you\n had to be stopped at once. There\n was even serious discussion of destroying\n Earth out of hand, while\n it is still possible.",
"Ffallk glanced up at Ggaran. \"I\n told you that Earthlings were unbelievably\n bold.\" He turned back\n to Crownwall. \"If you couldn't\n come to me in spite of the trifling\n inconveniences I put in your way,\n your presence here would be useless\n to both of us. But you did\n come, so I can tell you that although\n I am the leader of one of\n the mightiest peoples in the Galaxy,\n whereas there are scarcely six\n billions of you squatting on one\n minor planet, we still need each\n other. Together, there is nothing\n we can't do.\"\n\n\n \"I'm listening,\" said Crownwall.\n\n\n \"We offer you partnership with\n us to take over the rule of the\n Galaxy from the Sunda—the so-called\n Master Race.\"\n\n\n \"It would hardly be an equal\n partnership, would it, considering\n that there are so many more of you\n than there are of us?\"",
"Two weeks later, while they\n were still several planetary diameters\n from their destination, they\n had been shocked to find more\n than two score alien ships of space\n closing in on them—ships that\n were swifter and more maneuverable\n than their own. These ships\n had rapidly and competently englobed\n the\nStar Seeker\n, and had\n then tried to herd it away from the\n planet it had been heading toward.\nAlthough\n caught by surprise,\n the Earthmen had acted\n swiftly. Crownwall recalled the discussion—the\n council of war, they\n had called it—and their unanimous\n decision. Although far within the\n dangerous influence of a planetary\n mass, they had again activated the\n distorter drive, and they had beaten\n the odds. On the distorter drive,\n they had returned to Earth as swiftly\n as they had departed. Earth had\n immediately prepared for war\n against her unknown enemy.",
"\"For more than two million\n years we have waited for the opportunity\n for revenge. And now\n that you have entered space, that\n opportunity is at hand.\"\n\n\n \"If you haven't been able to help\n yourselves for two million years,\"\n asked Crownwall, \"how does the\n sight of me give you so much gumption\n all of a sudden?\"\n\n\n Ggaran's tentacles writhed, and\n he slavered in fury, but the clashing\n of his teeth subsided instantly\n at a soothing wave from His Effulgence.",
"At the far side of the comfortable,\n unimpressive room, a plump\n thing, hide faded to a dull violet,\n reclined on a couch. Behind him\n stood a heavy and pompous appearing\n Vegan in lordly trappings.\n They examined Crownwall with\n great interest for a few moments.\n\n\n \"It's customary to genuflect\n when you enter the Viceroy's presence,\"\n said the standing one at\n last. \"But then I'm told you're an\n Earthling. I suppose we can expect\n you to be ignorant of those niceties\n customary among civilized peoples.\""
],
[
"Two weeks later, while they\n were still several planetary diameters\n from their destination, they\n had been shocked to find more\n than two score alien ships of space\n closing in on them—ships that\n were swifter and more maneuverable\n than their own. These ships\n had rapidly and competently englobed\n the\nStar Seeker\n, and had\n then tried to herd it away from the\n planet it had been heading toward.\nAlthough\n caught by surprise,\n the Earthmen had acted\n swiftly. Crownwall recalled the discussion—the\n council of war, they\n had called it—and their unanimous\n decision. Although far within the\n dangerous influence of a planetary\n mass, they had again activated the\n distorter drive, and they had beaten\n the odds. On the distorter drive,\n they had returned to Earth as swiftly\n as they had departed. Earth had\n immediately prepared for war\n against her unknown enemy.",
"The\nStar Seeker\nhad been built\n in space, about forty thousand kilometers\n above the Earth. It had\n been manned by a dozen adventurous\n people, captained by Crownwall,\n and had headed out on its ion\n drive until it was safely clear of\n the warping influence of planetary\n masses. Then, after several impatient\n days of careful study and calculation,\n the distorter drive had\n been activated, for the first time\n in Earth's history, and, for the\n twelve, the stars had winked out.\n\n\n The men of Earth had decided\n that it should work in theory. They\n had built the drive—a small machine,\n as drives go—but they had\n never dared to try it, close to a\n planet. To do so, said their theory,\n would usually—seven point three\n four times out of 10—destroy the\n ship, and everything in space for\n thousands of miles around, in a\n ravening burst of raw energy.",
"\"Are you sure that you haven't\n given us a little too much information\n for your own safety?\" asked\n Ffallk softly.\n\n\n \"Not at all. We were enormously\n lucky to have learned how to control\n spatial reference frames ourselves.\n I doubt if you could do it in\n another two million years.\" Crownwall\n rose to his feet. \"And now,\n Your Effulgence, I think it's about\n time I went back to my ship and\n drove it home to Earth to make my\n report, so we can pick up those\n bombs and start making arrangements.\"\n\n\n \"Excellent,\" said Ffallk. \"I'd better\n escort you; my people don't like\n strangers much.\"\n\n\n \"I'd noticed that,\" Crownwall\n commented drily.",
"\"Intelligence is very rare in the\n Galaxy. In all, it has been found\n only fifteen times. The other races\n we have watched develop, and\n some we have actively assisted to\n develop. It took the quickest of\n them just under a million years.\n One such race we left uncontrolled\n too long—but no matter.\n\n\n \"You Earthlings, in defiance of\n all expectation and all reason, have\n exploded into space. You have developed\n in an incredibly short\n space of time. But even that isn't\n the most disconcerting item of your\n development. As an Earthling, you\n have heard of the details of the\n first expedition of your people into\n space, of course?\"\n\n\n \"\nHeard\nabout it?\" exclaimed\n Crownwall. \"I was\non\nit.\" He settled\n down comfortably on a couch,\n without requesting permission, and\n thought back to that first tremendous\n adventure; an adventure that\n had taken place little more than\n ten years before.",
"After elaborate and lengthy farewells,\n Crownwall climbed into his\n machine and fell gently up until he\n was out of the atmosphere, before\n starting his enormous journey\n through time back to Earth. More\n quickly than it had taken him to\n reach his ship from the palace of\n His Effulgence, he was in the Council\n Chamber of the Confederation\n Government of Earth, making a full\n report on his trip to Vega.",
"So the drive had been used for\n the first time without ever having\n been tested. And it had worked.\n\n\n In less than a week's time, if\n time has any meaning under such\n circumstances, they had flickered\n back into normal space, in the vicinity\n of Alpha Centauri. They had\n quickly located a dozen planets,\n and one that looked enough like\n Earth to be its twin sister. They\n had headed for that planet confidently\n and unsuspectingly, using\n the ion drive.",
"\"Your silly little planet was carefully\n examined at long range in a\n routine investigation just about fifty\n thousand years ago. There were\n at that time three different but\n similar racial strains of pulpy bipeds,\n numbering a total of perhaps\n a hundred thousand individuals.\n They showed many signs of an\n ability to reason, but a complete\n lack of civilization. While these\n creatures could by no means be\n classed among the intelligent races,\n there was a general expectation,\n which we reported to the Sunda,\n that they would some day come to\n be numbered among the Servants\n of the Emperor. So we let you\n alone, in order that you could develop\n in your own way, until you\n reached a high enough civilization\n to be useful—if you were going to.",
"\"But I had different ideas. From\n what you had already done, I suspected\n it wouldn't be long before\n one of you amazing Earthlings\n would dream up some device or\n other, head out into space, and\n show up on our planet. So I've been\n waiting for you, and here you are.\"\n\n\n \"It was the thinking of a genius,\"\n murmured Ggaran.\n\n\n \"All right, then, genius, here I\n am,\" said Crownwall. \"So what's\n the pitch?\"",
"\"Your reaction was savage,\" said\n Ggaran, his tentacles stiffening\n with shock at the memory. \"You\n bloody-minded Earthlings must\n have been aware of the terrible\n danger.\"\n\n\n Ffallk rippled in agreement.\n \"The action you took was too swift\n and too foolhardy to be believed.\n You knew that you could have destroyed\n not only yourself, but also\n all who live on that planet. You\n could also have wrecked the planet\n itself and the ships and those of\n my own race who manned them.\n We had tried to contact you, but\n since you had not developed subspace\n radio, we were of course not\n successful. Our englobement was\n just a routine quarantine. With\n your total lack of information\n about us, what you did was more\n than the height of folly. It was madness.\"\n\n\n \"Could we have done anything\n else that would have kept you from\n landing on Earth and taking us\n over?\" asked Crownwall.",
"\"Things may not be as bad as\n they seem,\" answered Crownwall\n complacently. \"After I got back a\n few million years, I'm afraid I got\n a little careless and let my ship dip\n down into Vega III's atmosphere\n for a while. I was back so far that\n the Vegans hadn't appeared yet.\n Now, I didn't land—or\ndeliberately\nkill anything—but I'd be mighty\n surprised if we didn't find a change\n or two. Before I came in here, I\n asked Marshall to take the ship out\n and check on things. He should be\n back with his report before long.\n Why don't we wait and see what\n he has to say?\"\nMarshall\n was excited when\n he was escorted into the\n Council Chamber. He bowed briefly\n to the President and began to\n speak rapidly.",
"\"It is impossible for us of Earth\n to destroy all of your planets. As\n you have said, there are more planets\n that belong to you than there\n are human beings on Earth. But\n there is a way for us to be reasonably\n sure that you will behave\n yourselves. You will transfer to us,\n at once, a hundred of your planet-destroying\n bombs. That will be a\n sufficient supply to let us test some\n of them, to see that they are in\n good working order. Then, if you\n try any kind of double-cross, we\n will be able to use our own methods—which\n you cannot prevent—to\n send one of those bombs here to\n destroy this planet.\n\n\n \"And if you try to move anywhere\n else, by your clumsy distorter\n drive, we can follow you, and\n destroy any planet you choose to\n land on. You would not get away\n from us. We can track you without\n any difficulty.",
"\"War in space is almost an impossibility,\"\n said the aged ruler.\n \"We can destroy planets, of course,\n but with few exceptions, we cannot\n conquer them. I rule a total of\n seven races in my Sector. I rule\n them, but I don't let them intermingle.\n Each race settles on the\n planets that best suit it. Each of\n those planets is quite capable of defending\n itself from raids, or even\n large-scale assaults that would result\n in its capture and subjugation—just\n as your little Earth can defend\n itself.\n\n\n \"Naturally, each is vulnerable to\n economic blockade—trade provides\n a small but vital portion of the\n goods each planet uses. All that a\n world requires for a healthy and\n comfortable life cannot be provided\n from the resources of that\n single world alone, and that gives\n us a very considerable measure of\n control.",
"\"For more than two million\n years we have waited for the opportunity\n for revenge. And now\n that you have entered space, that\n opportunity is at hand.\"\n\n\n \"If you haven't been able to help\n yourselves for two million years,\"\n asked Crownwall, \"how does the\n sight of me give you so much gumption\n all of a sudden?\"\n\n\n Ggaran's tentacles writhed, and\n he slavered in fury, but the clashing\n of his teeth subsided instantly\n at a soothing wave from His Effulgence.",
"\"We know about it,\" said Ffallk,\n \"but we've always considered it\n useless—and very dangerous—knowledge.\"\n\n\n \"So have we, up until the time\n you planted that bomb on us. Anyone\n who tried to work any changes\n in his own past would be almost\n certain to end up finding himself\n never having been born. So we\n don't do any meddling. What we\n have discovered is a way not only\n of moving back into the past, but\n also of making our own choice of\n spatial references while we do it,\n and of changing our spatial anchor\n at will.\n\n\n \"For example, to reach this\n planet, I went back far enough, using\n Earth as the spatial referent,\n to move with Earth a little more\n than a third of the way around this\n spiral nebula that is our Galaxy.\n Then I shifted my frame of reference\n to that of the group of galaxies\n of which ours is such a distinguished\n member.",
"\"That old fool on Sunda, the\n Emperor, decided that we should\n blow you up, but by that time I\n had decided,\" said His Effulgence,\n \"that you might be useful to me—that\n is, that we might be useful to\n each other. I traveled halfway\n across the Galaxy to meet him, to\n convince him that it would be sufficient\n just to quarantine you.\n When we had used your radio system\n to teach a few of you the Universal\n Galactic tongue, and had\n managed to get what you call the\n 'planet-buster' down into the\n largest of your oceans, he figured\n we had done our job.\n\n\n \"With his usual lack of imagination,\n he felt sure that we were safe\n from you—after all, there was no\n way for you to get off the planet.\n Even if you could get down to the\n bottom of the ocean and tamper\n with the bomb, you would only succeed\n in setting it off, and that's\n what the Sunda had been in favor\n of in the first place.",
"\"We wouldn't use the bombs\n lightly, to be sure, because of what\n would happen to Earth. And don't\n think that blowing up our planet\n would save you, because we naturally\n wouldn't keep the bombs on\n Earth. How does that sound to\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Ridiculous,\" snorted Ggaran.\n \"Impossible.\"\n\n\n After several minutes of silent\n consideration, \"It is an excellent\n plan,\" said His Effulgence. \"It is\n worthy of the thinking of The People\n ourselves. You Earthlings will\n make very satisfactory allies. What\n you request will be provided without\n delay. Meanwhile, I see no reason\n why we cannot proceed with\n our discussions.\"\n\n\n \"Nor do I,\" consented Crownwall.\n \"But your stooge here doesn't\n seem very happy about it all.\"",
"\"It's all right, Ggaran,\" said the\n Viceroy languidly. He twitched a\n tentacle in a beckoning gesture.\n \"Come closer, Earthling. I bid you\n welcome to my capital. I have been\n looking forward to your arrival for\n some time.\"\nCrownwall\n put his hands\n in his pockets. \"That's hardly\n possible,\" he said. \"It was only decided\n yesterday, back on Earth,\n that I would be the one to make\n the trip here. Even if you could\n spy through buildings on Earth\n from space, which I doubt, your\n communications system can't get\n the word through that fast.\"",
"\"And it is true that we can always\n exterminate any planet that\n refuses to obey the just and legal\n orders of its Viceroy. So we achieve\n a working balance in our Empire.\n We control it adequately, and we\n live in peace.\n\n\n \"The Sundans, for example,\n though they took the rule of the\n Empire that was rightfully ours\n away from us, through trickery,\n were unable to take over the\n Sectors we control. We are still\n powerful. And soon we will be all-powerful.\n In company with you\n Earthlings, that is.\"\n\n\n Crownwall nodded. \"In other\n words, you think that we Earthmen\n can break up this two-million-year-old\n stalemate. You've got the\n idea that, with our help, you can\n conquer planets without the necessity\n of destroying them, and thereby\n take over number one spot from\n these Sunda friends of yours.\"",
"\"Ggaran, you explain it to the\n Earthling,\" said His Effulgence.\nGgaran\n bowed. \"The crustaceans\n on Sunda—the lobsterlike\n creatures that rule the Galaxy—are\n usurpers. They have no rights\n to their position of power. Our race\n is much older than theirs. We were\n alone when we found the Sundans—a\n primitive tribe, grubbing in the\n mud at the edge of their shallow\n seas, unable even to reason. In\n those days we were desperately\n lonely. We needed companionship\n among the stars, and we helped\n them develop to the point where,\n in their inferior way, they were able\n to reason, almost as well as we, The\n People, can. And then they cheated\n us of our rightful place.\n\n\n \"The Emperor at Sunda is one\n of them. They provide sixty-eight\n of the hundred Viceroys; we provide\n only seventeen. It is a preposterous\n and intolerable situation.",
"His Effulgence twitched his ear\n stalks in amusement. \"I'm Viceroy\n of one of the hundred Sectors of\n the Empire. I rule over a total of\n a hundred Satrapies; these average\n about a hundred Provinces each.\n Provinces consist, in general, of\n about a hundred Clusters apiece,\n and every Cluster has an average\n of a hundred inhabited solar systems.\n There are more inhabited\n planets in the Galaxy than there\n are people on your single world.\n I, personally, rule three hundred\n trillion people, half of them of my\n own race. And yet I tell you that\n it would be an equal partnership.\"\n\n\n \"I don't get it. Why?\"\n\n\n \"Because you came to me.\""
],
[
"The\nStar Seeker\nhad been built\n in space, about forty thousand kilometers\n above the Earth. It had\n been manned by a dozen adventurous\n people, captained by Crownwall,\n and had headed out on its ion\n drive until it was safely clear of\n the warping influence of planetary\n masses. Then, after several impatient\n days of careful study and calculation,\n the distorter drive had\n been activated, for the first time\n in Earth's history, and, for the\n twelve, the stars had winked out.\n\n\n The men of Earth had decided\n that it should work in theory. They\n had built the drive—a small machine,\n as drives go—but they had\n never dared to try it, close to a\n planet. To do so, said their theory,\n would usually—seven point three\n four times out of 10—destroy the\n ship, and everything in space for\n thousands of miles around, in a\n ravening burst of raw energy.",
"Two weeks later, while they\n were still several planetary diameters\n from their destination, they\n had been shocked to find more\n than two score alien ships of space\n closing in on them—ships that\n were swifter and more maneuverable\n than their own. These ships\n had rapidly and competently englobed\n the\nStar Seeker\n, and had\n then tried to herd it away from the\n planet it had been heading toward.\nAlthough\n caught by surprise,\n the Earthmen had acted\n swiftly. Crownwall recalled the discussion—the\n council of war, they\n had called it—and their unanimous\n decision. Although far within the\n dangerous influence of a planetary\n mass, they had again activated the\n distorter drive, and they had beaten\n the odds. On the distorter drive,\n they had returned to Earth as swiftly\n as they had departed. Earth had\n immediately prepared for war\n against her unknown enemy.",
"So the drive had been used for\n the first time without ever having\n been tested. And it had worked.\n\n\n In less than a week's time, if\n time has any meaning under such\n circumstances, they had flickered\n back into normal space, in the vicinity\n of Alpha Centauri. They had\n quickly located a dozen planets,\n and one that looked enough like\n Earth to be its twin sister. They\n had headed for that planet confidently\n and unsuspectingly, using\n the ion drive.",
"\"It is impossible for us of Earth\n to destroy all of your planets. As\n you have said, there are more planets\n that belong to you than there\n are human beings on Earth. But\n there is a way for us to be reasonably\n sure that you will behave\n yourselves. You will transfer to us,\n at once, a hundred of your planet-destroying\n bombs. That will be a\n sufficient supply to let us test some\n of them, to see that they are in\n good working order. Then, if you\n try any kind of double-cross, we\n will be able to use our own methods—which\n you cannot prevent—to\n send one of those bombs here to\n destroy this planet.\n\n\n \"And if you try to move anywhere\n else, by your clumsy distorter\n drive, we can follow you, and\n destroy any planet you choose to\n land on. You would not get away\n from us. We can track you without\n any difficulty.",
"\"Oh, I didn't mean\nyou\nin particular,\"\n the Vegan said with a\n negligent wave. \"Who can tell one\n Earthling from another? What I\n meant was that I expected someone\n from Earth to break through\n our blockade and come here. Most\n of my advisors—even Ggaran here—thought\n it couldn't be done, but\n I never doubted that you'd manage\n it. Still, if you were on your\n home planet only yesterday, that's\n astonishing even to me. Tell me,\n how did you manage to get here so\n fast, and without even alerting my\n detection web?\"\n\n\n \"You're doing the talking,\" said\n Crownwall. \"If you wanted someone\n from Earth to come here to see\n you, why did you put the cordon\n around Earth? And why did you\n drop a planet-buster in the Pacific\n Ocean, and tell us that it was triggered\n to go off if we tried to use\n the distorter drive? That's hardly\n the action of somebody who expects\n visitors.\"",
"\"We know about it,\" said Ffallk,\n \"but we've always considered it\n useless—and very dangerous—knowledge.\"\n\n\n \"So have we, up until the time\n you planted that bomb on us. Anyone\n who tried to work any changes\n in his own past would be almost\n certain to end up finding himself\n never having been born. So we\n don't do any meddling. What we\n have discovered is a way not only\n of moving back into the past, but\n also of making our own choice of\n spatial references while we do it,\n and of changing our spatial anchor\n at will.\n\n\n \"For example, to reach this\n planet, I went back far enough, using\n Earth as the spatial referent,\n to move with Earth a little more\n than a third of the way around this\n spiral nebula that is our Galaxy.\n Then I shifted my frame of reference\n to that of the group of galaxies\n of which ours is such a distinguished\n member.",
"\"I sincerely hope so,\" said\n Crownwall.\nRefreshments\n were served\n to His Effulgence and to\n Crownwall during the trip, without\n interrupting the smooth progress\n of the sedan. The soldiers of\n the cohort, the bearers and Ggaran\n continued to run—without food,\n drink or, except for Ggaran, evidence\n of fatigue.\n\n\n After several hours of travel, following\n Crownwall's directions, the\n procession arrived at the copse in\n which he had concealed his small\n transportation machine. The machine,\n for spatial mobility, was\n equipped with the heavy and grossly\n inefficient anti-gravity field generator\n developed by Kowalsky. It\n occupied ten times the space of the\n temporal translation and coordination\n selection systems combined,\n but it had the great advantage of\n being almost undetectable in use. It\n emitted no mass or radiation.",
"\"Of course,\" said Crownwall,\n then added, \"It's too bad that you\n can't provide them with live targets\n a little more often.\" He stifled\n a shudder of distaste. \"Tell me,\n Your Effulgence, does the Emperor's\n race—the Master Race—also\n enjoy the type of civilization\n you have just had demonstrated\n for me?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no. They are far too brutal,\n too morally degraded, to know anything\n of these finer points of etiquette\n and propriety. They are\n really an uncouth bunch. Why, do\n you know, I am certain that they\n would have had the bad taste to\n use an energy weapon to dispose\n of the victim in a case such as you\n just witnessed! They are really\n quite unfit to rule. They can scarcely\n be called civilized at all. But we\n will soon put a stop to all of that—your\n race and mine, of course.\"",
"\"Are you sure that you haven't\n given us a little too much information\n for your own safety?\" asked\n Ffallk softly.\n\n\n \"Not at all. We were enormously\n lucky to have learned how to control\n spatial reference frames ourselves.\n I doubt if you could do it in\n another two million years.\" Crownwall\n rose to his feet. \"And now,\n Your Effulgence, I think it's about\n time I went back to my ship and\n drove it home to Earth to make my\n report, so we can pick up those\n bombs and start making arrangements.\"\n\n\n \"Excellent,\" said Ffallk. \"I'd better\n escort you; my people don't like\n strangers much.\"\n\n\n \"I'd noticed that,\" Crownwall\n commented drily.",
"\"That old fool on Sunda, the\n Emperor, decided that we should\n blow you up, but by that time I\n had decided,\" said His Effulgence,\n \"that you might be useful to me—that\n is, that we might be useful to\n each other. I traveled halfway\n across the Galaxy to meet him, to\n convince him that it would be sufficient\n just to quarantine you.\n When we had used your radio system\n to teach a few of you the Universal\n Galactic tongue, and had\n managed to get what you call the\n 'planet-buster' down into the\n largest of your oceans, he figured\n we had done our job.\n\n\n \"With his usual lack of imagination,\n he felt sure that we were safe\n from you—after all, there was no\n way for you to get off the planet.\n Even if you could get down to the\n bottom of the ocean and tamper\n with the bomb, you would only succeed\n in setting it off, and that's\n what the Sunda had been in favor\n of in the first place.",
"\"And now,\" Ggaran put in, \"I\n think it's time for you to tell us\n something about how you get\n across light-years of space in a few\n hours, without leaving any traces\n for us to detect.\" He raised a tentacle\n to still Crownwall's immediate\n exclamation of protest. \"Oh,\n nothing that would give us a chance\n to duplicate it—just enough to\nindicate\nhow we can make use of\n it, along with you—enough to allow\n us to\nbegin\nto make intelligent\n plans to beat the claws off the Master\n Race.\"\nAfter\n due consideration,",
"\"For more than two million\n years we have waited for the opportunity\n for revenge. And now\n that you have entered space, that\n opportunity is at hand.\"\n\n\n \"If you haven't been able to help\n yourselves for two million years,\"\n asked Crownwall, \"how does the\n sight of me give you so much gumption\n all of a sudden?\"\n\n\n Ggaran's tentacles writhed, and\n he slavered in fury, but the clashing\n of his teeth subsided instantly\n at a soothing wave from His Effulgence.",
"\"Don't call those damn lobsters\n friends,\" growled Ggaran. He subsided\n at the Viceroy's gesture.\n\n\n \"Exactly,\" said His Effulgence\n to Crownwall. \"You broke our\n blockade without any trouble. Our\n instruments didn't even wiggle\n when you landed here on my capital\n world. You can do the same on\n the worlds of the Sunda. Now, just\n tell us how you did it, and we're\n partners.\"\nCrownwall\n lifted one eyebrow\n quizzically, but remained\n silent. He didn't expect his facial\n gesture to be interpreted correctly,\n but he assumed that his silence\n would be. He was correct.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" His Effulgence said,\n \"we will give you any assurances\n that your people may desire in order\n to feel safe, and we will guarantee\n them an equal share in the\n government of the Galaxy.\"\n\n\n \"Bunk,\" said Crownwall.",
"His Effulgence lifted a tentacle\n swiftly, before Ggaran, lunging angrily\n forward, could speak. \"Then\n what do you want of us?\"\n\n\n \"It seems to me that we need\n no wordy assurances from each\n other,\" said Crownwall, and he\n puffed a cigarette aglow. \"We can\n arrange something a little more\n trustworthy, I believe. On your\n side, you have the power to destroy\n our only planet at any time. That\n is certainly adequate security for\n our own good behavior and sincerity.",
"\"Then of course, as I continued\n to move in time, the whole Galaxy\n moved spatially with reference to\n my own position. At the proper instant\n I shifted again, to the reference\n frame of this Galaxy itself.\n Then I was stationary in the Galaxy,\n and as I continued time traveling,\n your own mighty sun moved\n toward me as the Galaxy revolved.\n I chose a point where there was a\n time intersection of your planet's\n position and my own. When you\n got there, I just changed to the reference\n plane of this planet I'm on\n now, and then came on back with\n it to the present. So here I am. It\n was a long way around to cover a\n net distance of 26 light-years, but\n it was really very simple.\n\n\n \"And there's no danger of meeting\n myself, or getting into any anachronistic\n situation. As you probably\n know, theory shows that these\n are excluded times for me, as is the\n future—I can't stop in them.\"",
"Crownwall shrugged. \"So?\"\nThe\n Vegan reached up and engulfed\n the end of a drinking\n tube with his eating orifice. \"You\n upstart Earthlings are a strange\n and a frightening race,\" he said.\n \"Frightening to the Sunda, especially.\n When you showed up in the\n spaceways, it was decreed that you\n had to be stopped at once. There\n was even serious discussion of destroying\n Earth out of hand, while\n it is still possible.",
"\"And it is true that we can always\n exterminate any planet that\n refuses to obey the just and legal\n orders of its Viceroy. So we achieve\n a working balance in our Empire.\n We control it adequately, and we\n live in peace.\n\n\n \"The Sundans, for example,\n though they took the rule of the\n Empire that was rightfully ours\n away from us, through trickery,\n were unable to take over the\n Sectors we control. We are still\n powerful. And soon we will be all-powerful.\n In company with you\n Earthlings, that is.\"\n\n\n Crownwall nodded. \"In other\n words, you think that we Earthmen\n can break up this two-million-year-old\n stalemate. You've got the\n idea that, with our help, you can\n conquer planets without the necessity\n of destroying them, and thereby\n take over number one spot from\n these Sunda friends of yours.\"",
"\"Ggaran, you explain it to the\n Earthling,\" said His Effulgence.\nGgaran\n bowed. \"The crustaceans\n on Sunda—the lobsterlike\n creatures that rule the Galaxy—are\n usurpers. They have no rights\n to their position of power. Our race\n is much older than theirs. We were\n alone when we found the Sundans—a\n primitive tribe, grubbing in the\n mud at the edge of their shallow\n seas, unable even to reason. In\n those days we were desperately\n lonely. We needed companionship\n among the stars, and we helped\n them develop to the point where,\n in their inferior way, they were able\n to reason, almost as well as we, The\n People, can. And then they cheated\n us of our rightful place.\n\n\n \"The Emperor at Sunda is one\n of them. They provide sixty-eight\n of the hundred Viceroys; we provide\n only seventeen. It is a preposterous\n and intolerable situation.",
"\"Would that have been so bad?\"\n said Ggaran. \"We can't tolerate\n wild and warlike races running free\n and uncontrolled in the Galaxy.\n Once was enough for that.\"\n\n\n \"But what about my question?\n Was there any other way for us to\n stay free?\"",
"\"Your reaction was savage,\" said\n Ggaran, his tentacles stiffening\n with shock at the memory. \"You\n bloody-minded Earthlings must\n have been aware of the terrible\n danger.\"\n\n\n Ffallk rippled in agreement.\n \"The action you took was too swift\n and too foolhardy to be believed.\n You knew that you could have destroyed\n not only yourself, but also\n all who live on that planet. You\n could also have wrecked the planet\n itself and the ships and those of\n my own race who manned them.\n We had tried to contact you, but\n since you had not developed subspace\n radio, we were of course not\n successful. Our englobement was\n just a routine quarantine. With\n your total lack of information\n about us, what you did was more\n than the height of folly. It was madness.\"\n\n\n \"Could we have done anything\n else that would have kept you from\n landing on Earth and taking us\n over?\" asked Crownwall."
],
[
"\"Ggaran, you explain it to the\n Earthling,\" said His Effulgence.\nGgaran\n bowed. \"The crustaceans\n on Sunda—the lobsterlike\n creatures that rule the Galaxy—are\n usurpers. They have no rights\n to their position of power. Our race\n is much older than theirs. We were\n alone when we found the Sundans—a\n primitive tribe, grubbing in the\n mud at the edge of their shallow\n seas, unable even to reason. In\n those days we were desperately\n lonely. We needed companionship\n among the stars, and we helped\n them develop to the point where,\n in their inferior way, they were able\n to reason, almost as well as we, The\n People, can. And then they cheated\n us of our rightful place.\n\n\n \"The Emperor at Sunda is one\n of them. They provide sixty-eight\n of the hundred Viceroys; we provide\n only seventeen. It is a preposterous\n and intolerable situation.",
"At the far side of the comfortable,\n unimpressive room, a plump\n thing, hide faded to a dull violet,\n reclined on a couch. Behind him\n stood a heavy and pompous appearing\n Vegan in lordly trappings.\n They examined Crownwall with\n great interest for a few moments.\n\n\n \"It's customary to genuflect\n when you enter the Viceroy's presence,\"\n said the standing one at\n last. \"But then I'm told you're an\n Earthling. I suppose we can expect\n you to be ignorant of those niceties\n customary among civilized peoples.\"",
"Crownwall shrugged. \"So?\"\nThe\n Vegan reached up and engulfed\n the end of a drinking\n tube with his eating orifice. \"You\n upstart Earthlings are a strange\n and a frightening race,\" he said.\n \"Frightening to the Sunda, especially.\n When you showed up in the\n spaceways, it was decreed that you\n had to be stopped at once. There\n was even serious discussion of destroying\n Earth out of hand, while\n it is still possible.",
"\"And it is true that we can always\n exterminate any planet that\n refuses to obey the just and legal\n orders of its Viceroy. So we achieve\n a working balance in our Empire.\n We control it adequately, and we\n live in peace.\n\n\n \"The Sundans, for example,\n though they took the rule of the\n Empire that was rightfully ours\n away from us, through trickery,\n were unable to take over the\n Sectors we control. We are still\n powerful. And soon we will be all-powerful.\n In company with you\n Earthlings, that is.\"\n\n\n Crownwall nodded. \"In other\n words, you think that we Earthmen\n can break up this two-million-year-old\n stalemate. You've got the\n idea that, with our help, you can\n conquer planets without the necessity\n of destroying them, and thereby\n take over number one spot from\n these Sunda friends of yours.\"",
"\"I'm glad of that,\" said Crownwall.\n \"Too bad Ggaran can't join\n us.\" He climbed into the chair beside\n Ffallk. The bearers trotted\n along at seven or eight kilometers\n an hour, carrying their contraption\n with absolute smoothness. Blasts\n from horns preceded them as they\n went.\n\n\n When they passed through the\n huge entrance doors of the palace\n and started down the ramp toward\n the street, Crownwall was astonished\n to see nobody on the previously\n crowded streets, and mentioned\n it to Ffallk.\n\n\n \"When the Viceroy of the Seventy\n Suns,\" said the Viceroy of the\n Seventy Suns, \"travels in state, no\n one but my own entourage is permitted\n to watch. And my guests, of\n course,\" he added, bowing slightly\n to Crownwall.",
"\"Don't call those damn lobsters\n friends,\" growled Ggaran. He subsided\n at the Viceroy's gesture.\n\n\n \"Exactly,\" said His Effulgence\n to Crownwall. \"You broke our\n blockade without any trouble. Our\n instruments didn't even wiggle\n when you landed here on my capital\n world. You can do the same on\n the worlds of the Sunda. Now, just\n tell us how you did it, and we're\n partners.\"\nCrownwall\n lifted one eyebrow\n quizzically, but remained\n silent. He didn't expect his facial\n gesture to be interpreted correctly,\n but he assumed that his silence\n would be. He was correct.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" His Effulgence said,\n \"we will give you any assurances\n that your people may desire in order\n to feel safe, and we will guarantee\n them an equal share in the\n government of the Galaxy.\"\n\n\n \"Bunk,\" said Crownwall.",
"When he had finished, the President\n sighed deeply. \"Well,\" he\n said, \"we gave you full plenipotentiary\n powers, so I suppose we'll\n have to stand behind your agreements—especially\n in view of the\n fact that we'll undoubtedly be\n blown into atoms if we don't. But\n from what you say, I'd rather be\n in bed with a rattler than have a\n treaty with a Vegan. They sound\n ungodly murderous to me. There\n are too many holes in that protection\n plan of yours. It's only a question\n of time before they'll find some\n way around it, and then—poof—we'll\n all be dust.\"",
"\"Since this is a very important\n occasion, I think it best that we\n make this a Procession of Full\n Ceremony. It's a bother, but the\n proprieties have to be observed.\"\nGgaran\n stepped out into the\n broad corridor and whistled a\n shrill two-tone note, using both his\n speaking and his eating orifices. A\n cohort of troops, pikes at the ready\n and bows strapped to their backs,\n leaped forward and formed a\n double line leading from His Effulgence's\n sanctum to the main door.\n Down this lane, carried by twenty\n men, came a large sedan chair.\n\n\n \"Protocol takes a lot of time,\"\n said His Effulgence somewhat sadly,\n \"but it must be observed. At\n least, as Ambassador, you can ride\n with me in the sedan, instead of\n walking behind it, like Ggaran.\"",
"His Effulgence twitched his ear\n stalks in amusement. \"I'm Viceroy\n of one of the hundred Sectors of\n the Empire. I rule over a total of\n a hundred Satrapies; these average\n about a hundred Provinces each.\n Provinces consist, in general, of\n about a hundred Clusters apiece,\n and every Cluster has an average\n of a hundred inhabited solar systems.\n There are more inhabited\n planets in the Galaxy than there\n are people on your single world.\n I, personally, rule three hundred\n trillion people, half of them of my\n own race. And yet I tell you that\n it would be an equal partnership.\"\n\n\n \"I don't get it. Why?\"\n\n\n \"Because you came to me.\"",
"\"What business\nwould\nI have at\n the Viceroy's Palace?\" asked\n Crownwall. \"I want to see Ffallk.\"\n\n\n \"Mind your tongue,\" growled\n the guard. \"If you mean His Effulgence,\n Right Hand of the Glorious\n Emperor, Hereditary Ruler of the\n Seventy Suns, Viceroy of the\n Twelfth Sector of the Universal\n Holy Empire\"—Universal Galactic\n had a full measure of ceremonial\n words—\"he sees only those whom\n he summons. If you know what's\n good for you, you'll get out of here\n while you can still walk. And if you\n run fast enough, maybe you can\n even get away from that crowd out\n there, but I doubt it.\"\n\n\n \"Just tell him that a man has\n arrived from Earth to talk to him.\n He'll summon me fast enough.\n Meanwhile, my highly polished\n friends, I'll just wait here, so why\n don't you put those heavy pikes\n down?\"",
"\"That old fool on Sunda, the\n Emperor, decided that we should\n blow you up, but by that time I\n had decided,\" said His Effulgence,\n \"that you might be useful to me—that\n is, that we might be useful to\n each other. I traveled halfway\n across the Galaxy to meet him, to\n convince him that it would be sufficient\n just to quarantine you.\n When we had used your radio system\n to teach a few of you the Universal\n Galactic tongue, and had\n managed to get what you call the\n 'planet-buster' down into the\n largest of your oceans, he figured\n we had done our job.\n\n\n \"With his usual lack of imagination,\n he felt sure that we were safe\n from you—after all, there was no\n way for you to get off the planet.\n Even if you could get down to the\n bottom of the ocean and tamper\n with the bomb, you would only succeed\n in setting it off, and that's\n what the Sunda had been in favor\n of in the first place.",
"\"Of course,\" said Crownwall,\n then added, \"It's too bad that you\n can't provide them with live targets\n a little more often.\" He stifled\n a shudder of distaste. \"Tell me,\n Your Effulgence, does the Emperor's\n race—the Master Race—also\n enjoy the type of civilization\n you have just had demonstrated\n for me?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no. They are far too brutal,\n too morally degraded, to know anything\n of these finer points of etiquette\n and propriety. They are\n really an uncouth bunch. Why, do\n you know, I am certain that they\n would have had the bad taste to\n use an energy weapon to dispose\n of the victim in a case such as you\n just witnessed! They are really\n quite unfit to rule. They can scarcely\n be called civilized at all. But we\n will soon put a stop to all of that—your\n race and mine, of course.\"",
"\"Things may not be as bad as\n they seem,\" answered Crownwall\n complacently. \"After I got back a\n few million years, I'm afraid I got\n a little careless and let my ship dip\n down into Vega III's atmosphere\n for a while. I was back so far that\n the Vegans hadn't appeared yet.\n Now, I didn't land—or\ndeliberately\nkill anything—but I'd be mighty\n surprised if we didn't find a change\n or two. Before I came in here, I\n asked Marshall to take the ship out\n and check on things. He should be\n back with his report before long.\n Why don't we wait and see what\n he has to say?\"\nMarshall\n was excited when\n he was escorted into the\n Council Chamber. He bowed briefly\n to the President and began to\n speak rapidly.",
"\"You see,\" said Ggaran complacently,\n \"we have very little trouble\n with civilians who violate this particular\n tradition.\"\n\n\n His Effulgence beckoned to the\n bowman to approach. \"Your results\n were satisfactory,\" he said, \"but\n your release was somewhat shaky.\n The next time you show such sloppy\n form, you will be given thirty\n lashes.\"\n\n\n He leaned back on the cushion\n and spoke again to Crownwall.\n \"That's the trouble with these requirements\n of civilization. The men\n of my immediate guard must practice\n with such things as pikes and\n bows and arrows, which they seldom\n get an opportunity to use. It\n would never do for them to use\n modern weapons on occasions of\n ceremony, of course.\"",
"\"Oh, I didn't mean\nyou\nin particular,\"\n the Vegan said with a\n negligent wave. \"Who can tell one\n Earthling from another? What I\n meant was that I expected someone\n from Earth to break through\n our blockade and come here. Most\n of my advisors—even Ggaran here—thought\n it couldn't be done, but\n I never doubted that you'd manage\n it. Still, if you were on your\n home planet only yesterday, that's\n astonishing even to me. Tell me,\n how did you manage to get here so\n fast, and without even alerting my\n detection web?\"\n\n\n \"You're doing the talking,\" said\n Crownwall. \"If you wanted someone\n from Earth to come here to see\n you, why did you put the cordon\n around Earth? And why did you\n drop a planet-buster in the Pacific\n Ocean, and tell us that it was triggered\n to go off if we tried to use\n the distorter drive? That's hardly\n the action of somebody who expects\n visitors.\"",
"\"They're gone without trace—\nall\n of them\n!\" he cried. \"I went clear\n to Sunda and there's no sign of\n intelligent life anywhere! We're all\n alone now!\"\n\n\n \"There, you see?\" exclaimed\n Crownwall. \"Our enemies are all\n gone!\"\n\n\n He looked around, glowing with\n victory, at the others at the table,\n then slowly quieted and sat down.\n He turned his head away from\n their accusing eyes.\n\n\n \"Alone,\" he said, and unconsciously\n repeated Marshall's words:\n \"We're all alone now.\"\n\n\n In silence, the others gathered\n their papers together and left the\n room, leaving Crownwall sitting at\n the table by himself. He shivered\n involuntarily, and then leaped to\n his feet to follow after them.",
"\"It's all right, Ggaran,\" said the\n Viceroy languidly. He twitched a\n tentacle in a beckoning gesture.\n \"Come closer, Earthling. I bid you\n welcome to my capital. I have been\n looking forward to your arrival for\n some time.\"\nCrownwall\n put his hands\n in his pockets. \"That's hardly\n possible,\" he said. \"It was only decided\n yesterday, back on Earth,\n that I would be the one to make\n the trip here. Even if you could\n spy through buildings on Earth\n from space, which I doubt, your\n communications system can't get\n the word through that fast.\"",
"\"Of course,\" agreed Crownwall,\n bowing back. \"Kind of you, I'm\n sure. But what happens if somebody\n doesn't get the word, or\n doesn't hear your trumpeters, or\n something like that?\"\n\n\n Ggaran stepped forward, already\n panting slightly. \"A man with knots\n in all of his ear stalks is in a very\n uncomfortable position,\" he explained.\n \"Wait. Let me show you.\n Let us just suppose that that runner\n over there\"—he gestured toward\n a soldier with a tentacle—\"is\n a civilian who has been so unlucky\n as to remain on the street\n after His Effulgence's entourage arrived.\"\n He turned to one of the\n bowmen who ran beside the sedan\n chair, now strung and at the ready.\n \"Show him!\" he ordered peremptorily.\n\n\n In one swift movement the bowman\n notched an arrow, drew and\n fired. The arrow hissed briefly, and\n then sliced smoothly through the\n soldier's throat.",
"UPSTARTS\nBy L. J. STECHER, JR.\nIllustrated by DILLON\nThe\n sight of an Earthman\n on Vega III, where it was\n impossible for an outlander\n to be, brought angry crowds to surround\n John Crownwall as he strode\n toward the palace of Viceroy\n Tronn Ffallk, ruler of Sector XII\n of the Universal Holy Empire of\n Sunda. He ignored the snarling, the\n spitting, the waving of boneless\n prehensile fingers, as he ignored the\n heavy gravity and heavier air of\n the unfamiliar planet.",
"\"Your silly little planet was carefully\n examined at long range in a\n routine investigation just about fifty\n thousand years ago. There were\n at that time three different but\n similar racial strains of pulpy bipeds,\n numbering a total of perhaps\n a hundred thousand individuals.\n They showed many signs of an\n ability to reason, but a complete\n lack of civilization. While these\n creatures could by no means be\n classed among the intelligent races,\n there was a general expectation,\n which we reported to the Sunda,\n that they would some day come to\n be numbered among the Servants\n of the Emperor. So we let you\n alone, in order that you could develop\n in your own way, until you\n reached a high enough civilization\n to be useful—if you were going to."
],
[
"\"You see,\" said Ggaran complacently,\n \"we have very little trouble\n with civilians who violate this particular\n tradition.\"\n\n\n His Effulgence beckoned to the\n bowman to approach. \"Your results\n were satisfactory,\" he said, \"but\n your release was somewhat shaky.\n The next time you show such sloppy\n form, you will be given thirty\n lashes.\"\n\n\n He leaned back on the cushion\n and spoke again to Crownwall.\n \"That's the trouble with these requirements\n of civilization. The men\n of my immediate guard must practice\n with such things as pikes and\n bows and arrows, which they seldom\n get an opportunity to use. It\n would never do for them to use\n modern weapons on occasions of\n ceremony, of course.\"",
"\"Of course,\" agreed Crownwall,\n bowing back. \"Kind of you, I'm\n sure. But what happens if somebody\n doesn't get the word, or\n doesn't hear your trumpeters, or\n something like that?\"\n\n\n Ggaran stepped forward, already\n panting slightly. \"A man with knots\n in all of his ear stalks is in a very\n uncomfortable position,\" he explained.\n \"Wait. Let me show you.\n Let us just suppose that that runner\n over there\"—he gestured toward\n a soldier with a tentacle—\"is\n a civilian who has been so unlucky\n as to remain on the street\n after His Effulgence's entourage arrived.\"\n He turned to one of the\n bowmen who ran beside the sedan\n chair, now strung and at the ready.\n \"Show him!\" he ordered peremptorily.\n\n\n In one swift movement the bowman\n notched an arrow, drew and\n fired. The arrow hissed briefly, and\n then sliced smoothly through the\n soldier's throat.",
"\"Since this is a very important\n occasion, I think it best that we\n make this a Procession of Full\n Ceremony. It's a bother, but the\n proprieties have to be observed.\"\nGgaran\n stepped out into the\n broad corridor and whistled a\n shrill two-tone note, using both his\n speaking and his eating orifices. A\n cohort of troops, pikes at the ready\n and bows strapped to their backs,\n leaped forward and formed a\n double line leading from His Effulgence's\n sanctum to the main door.\n Down this lane, carried by twenty\n men, came a large sedan chair.\n\n\n \"Protocol takes a lot of time,\"\n said His Effulgence somewhat sadly,\n \"but it must be observed. At\n least, as Ambassador, you can ride\n with me in the sedan, instead of\n walking behind it, like Ggaran.\"",
"\"I'm glad of that,\" said Crownwall.\n \"Too bad Ggaran can't join\n us.\" He climbed into the chair beside\n Ffallk. The bearers trotted\n along at seven or eight kilometers\n an hour, carrying their contraption\n with absolute smoothness. Blasts\n from horns preceded them as they\n went.\n\n\n When they passed through the\n huge entrance doors of the palace\n and started down the ramp toward\n the street, Crownwall was astonished\n to see nobody on the previously\n crowded streets, and mentioned\n it to Ffallk.\n\n\n \"When the Viceroy of the Seventy\n Suns,\" said the Viceroy of the\n Seventy Suns, \"travels in state, no\n one but my own entourage is permitted\n to watch. And my guests, of\n course,\" he added, bowing slightly\n to Crownwall.",
"\"Of course,\" said Crownwall,\n then added, \"It's too bad that you\n can't provide them with live targets\n a little more often.\" He stifled\n a shudder of distaste. \"Tell me,\n Your Effulgence, does the Emperor's\n race—the Master Race—also\n enjoy the type of civilization\n you have just had demonstrated\n for me?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no. They are far too brutal,\n too morally degraded, to know anything\n of these finer points of etiquette\n and propriety. They are\n really an uncouth bunch. Why, do\n you know, I am certain that they\n would have had the bad taste to\n use an energy weapon to dispose\n of the victim in a case such as you\n just witnessed! They are really\n quite unfit to rule. They can scarcely\n be called civilized at all. But we\n will soon put a stop to all of that—your\n race and mine, of course.\"",
"\"What business\nwould\nI have at\n the Viceroy's Palace?\" asked\n Crownwall. \"I want to see Ffallk.\"\n\n\n \"Mind your tongue,\" growled\n the guard. \"If you mean His Effulgence,\n Right Hand of the Glorious\n Emperor, Hereditary Ruler of the\n Seventy Suns, Viceroy of the\n Twelfth Sector of the Universal\n Holy Empire\"—Universal Galactic\n had a full measure of ceremonial\n words—\"he sees only those whom\n he summons. If you know what's\n good for you, you'll get out of here\n while you can still walk. And if you\n run fast enough, maybe you can\n even get away from that crowd out\n there, but I doubt it.\"\n\n\n \"Just tell him that a man has\n arrived from Earth to talk to him.\n He'll summon me fast enough.\n Meanwhile, my highly polished\n friends, I'll just wait here, so why\n don't you put those heavy pikes\n down?\"",
"At the far side of the comfortable,\n unimpressive room, a plump\n thing, hide faded to a dull violet,\n reclined on a couch. Behind him\n stood a heavy and pompous appearing\n Vegan in lordly trappings.\n They examined Crownwall with\n great interest for a few moments.\n\n\n \"It's customary to genuflect\n when you enter the Viceroy's presence,\"\n said the standing one at\n last. \"But then I'm told you're an\n Earthling. I suppose we can expect\n you to be ignorant of those niceties\n customary among civilized peoples.\"",
"\"And it is true that we can always\n exterminate any planet that\n refuses to obey the just and legal\n orders of its Viceroy. So we achieve\n a working balance in our Empire.\n We control it adequately, and we\n live in peace.\n\n\n \"The Sundans, for example,\n though they took the rule of the\n Empire that was rightfully ours\n away from us, through trickery,\n were unable to take over the\n Sectors we control. We are still\n powerful. And soon we will be all-powerful.\n In company with you\n Earthlings, that is.\"\n\n\n Crownwall nodded. \"In other\n words, you think that we Earthmen\n can break up this two-million-year-old\n stalemate. You've got the\n idea that, with our help, you can\n conquer planets without the necessity\n of destroying them, and thereby\n take over number one spot from\n these Sunda friends of yours.\"",
"\"Ggaran, you explain it to the\n Earthling,\" said His Effulgence.\nGgaran\n bowed. \"The crustaceans\n on Sunda—the lobsterlike\n creatures that rule the Galaxy—are\n usurpers. They have no rights\n to their position of power. Our race\n is much older than theirs. We were\n alone when we found the Sundans—a\n primitive tribe, grubbing in the\n mud at the edge of their shallow\n seas, unable even to reason. In\n those days we were desperately\n lonely. We needed companionship\n among the stars, and we helped\n them develop to the point where,\n in their inferior way, they were able\n to reason, almost as well as we, The\n People, can. And then they cheated\n us of our rightful place.\n\n\n \"The Emperor at Sunda is one\n of them. They provide sixty-eight\n of the hundred Viceroys; we provide\n only seventeen. It is a preposterous\n and intolerable situation.",
"\"I sincerely hope so,\" said\n Crownwall.\nRefreshments\n were served\n to His Effulgence and to\n Crownwall during the trip, without\n interrupting the smooth progress\n of the sedan. The soldiers of\n the cohort, the bearers and Ggaran\n continued to run—without food,\n drink or, except for Ggaran, evidence\n of fatigue.\n\n\n After several hours of travel, following\n Crownwall's directions, the\n procession arrived at the copse in\n which he had concealed his small\n transportation machine. The machine,\n for spatial mobility, was\n equipped with the heavy and grossly\n inefficient anti-gravity field generator\n developed by Kowalsky. It\n occupied ten times the space of the\n temporal translation and coordination\n selection systems combined,\n but it had the great advantage of\n being almost undetectable in use. It\n emitted no mass or radiation.",
"\"It's all right, Ggaran,\" said the\n Viceroy languidly. He twitched a\n tentacle in a beckoning gesture.\n \"Come closer, Earthling. I bid you\n welcome to my capital. I have been\n looking forward to your arrival for\n some time.\"\nCrownwall\n put his hands\n in his pockets. \"That's hardly\n possible,\" he said. \"It was only decided\n yesterday, back on Earth,\n that I would be the one to make\n the trip here. Even if you could\n spy through buildings on Earth\n from space, which I doubt, your\n communications system can't get\n the word through that fast.\"",
"\"Things may not be as bad as\n they seem,\" answered Crownwall\n complacently. \"After I got back a\n few million years, I'm afraid I got\n a little careless and let my ship dip\n down into Vega III's atmosphere\n for a while. I was back so far that\n the Vegans hadn't appeared yet.\n Now, I didn't land—or\ndeliberately\nkill anything—but I'd be mighty\n surprised if we didn't find a change\n or two. Before I came in here, I\n asked Marshall to take the ship out\n and check on things. He should be\n back with his report before long.\n Why don't we wait and see what\n he has to say?\"\nMarshall\n was excited when\n he was escorted into the\n Council Chamber. He bowed briefly\n to the President and began to\n speak rapidly.",
"Crownwall sat on the steps,\n puffed alight a cigarette, and blew\n expert smoke rings toward the\n guards.\n\n\n An elegant courtier, with elaborately\n jeweled harness, bustled\n from inside the palace, obviously\n trying to present an air of strolling\n nonchalance. He gestured fluidly\n with a graceful tentacle. \"You!\" he\n said to Crownwall. \"Follow me. His\n Effulgence commands you to appear\n before him at once.\" The two\n guards withdrew their pikes and\n froze into immobility at the sides\n of the entrance.\n\n\n Crownwall stamped out his\n smoke and ambled after the hurrying\n courtier along tremendous corridors,\n through elaborate waiting\n rooms, under guarded doorways,\n until he was finally bowed through\n a small curtained arch.",
"His Effulgence twitched his ear\n stalks in amusement. \"I'm Viceroy\n of one of the hundred Sectors of\n the Empire. I rule over a total of\n a hundred Satrapies; these average\n about a hundred Provinces each.\n Provinces consist, in general, of\n about a hundred Clusters apiece,\n and every Cluster has an average\n of a hundred inhabited solar systems.\n There are more inhabited\n planets in the Galaxy than there\n are people on your single world.\n I, personally, rule three hundred\n trillion people, half of them of my\n own race. And yet I tell you that\n it would be an equal partnership.\"\n\n\n \"I don't get it. Why?\"\n\n\n \"Because you came to me.\"",
"After elaborate and lengthy farewells,\n Crownwall climbed into his\n machine and fell gently up until he\n was out of the atmosphere, before\n starting his enormous journey\n through time back to Earth. More\n quickly than it had taken him to\n reach his ship from the palace of\n His Effulgence, he was in the Council\n Chamber of the Confederation\n Government of Earth, making a full\n report on his trip to Vega.",
"Crownwall shrugged. \"So?\"\nThe\n Vegan reached up and engulfed\n the end of a drinking\n tube with his eating orifice. \"You\n upstart Earthlings are a strange\n and a frightening race,\" he said.\n \"Frightening to the Sunda, especially.\n When you showed up in the\n spaceways, it was decreed that you\n had to be stopped at once. There\n was even serious discussion of destroying\n Earth out of hand, while\n it is still possible.",
"\"Don't call those damn lobsters\n friends,\" growled Ggaran. He subsided\n at the Viceroy's gesture.\n\n\n \"Exactly,\" said His Effulgence\n to Crownwall. \"You broke our\n blockade without any trouble. Our\n instruments didn't even wiggle\n when you landed here on my capital\n world. You can do the same on\n the worlds of the Sunda. Now, just\n tell us how you did it, and we're\n partners.\"\nCrownwall\n lifted one eyebrow\n quizzically, but remained\n silent. He didn't expect his facial\n gesture to be interpreted correctly,\n but he assumed that his silence\n would be. He was correct.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" His Effulgence said,\n \"we will give you any assurances\n that your people may desire in order\n to feel safe, and we will guarantee\n them an equal share in the\n government of the Galaxy.\"\n\n\n \"Bunk,\" said Crownwall.",
"\"For more than two million\n years we have waited for the opportunity\n for revenge. And now\n that you have entered space, that\n opportunity is at hand.\"\n\n\n \"If you haven't been able to help\n yourselves for two million years,\"\n asked Crownwall, \"how does the\n sight of me give you so much gumption\n all of a sudden?\"\n\n\n Ggaran's tentacles writhed, and\n he slavered in fury, but the clashing\n of his teeth subsided instantly\n at a soothing wave from His Effulgence.",
"\"That old fool on Sunda, the\n Emperor, decided that we should\n blow you up, but by that time I\n had decided,\" said His Effulgence,\n \"that you might be useful to me—that\n is, that we might be useful to\n each other. I traveled halfway\n across the Galaxy to meet him, to\n convince him that it would be sufficient\n just to quarantine you.\n When we had used your radio system\n to teach a few of you the Universal\n Galactic tongue, and had\n managed to get what you call the\n 'planet-buster' down into the\n largest of your oceans, he figured\n we had done our job.\n\n\n \"With his usual lack of imagination,\n he felt sure that we were safe\n from you—after all, there was no\n way for you to get off the planet.\n Even if you could get down to the\n bottom of the ocean and tamper\n with the bomb, you would only succeed\n in setting it off, and that's\n what the Sunda had been in favor\n of in the first place.",
"\"Are you sure that you haven't\n given us a little too much information\n for your own safety?\" asked\n Ffallk softly.\n\n\n \"Not at all. We were enormously\n lucky to have learned how to control\n spatial reference frames ourselves.\n I doubt if you could do it in\n another two million years.\" Crownwall\n rose to his feet. \"And now,\n Your Effulgence, I think it's about\n time I went back to my ship and\n drove it home to Earth to make my\n report, so we can pick up those\n bombs and start making arrangements.\"\n\n\n \"Excellent,\" said Ffallk. \"I'd better\n escort you; my people don't like\n strangers much.\"\n\n\n \"I'd noticed that,\" Crownwall\n commented drily."
],
[
"\"Things may not be as bad as\n they seem,\" answered Crownwall\n complacently. \"After I got back a\n few million years, I'm afraid I got\n a little careless and let my ship dip\n down into Vega III's atmosphere\n for a while. I was back so far that\n the Vegans hadn't appeared yet.\n Now, I didn't land—or\ndeliberately\nkill anything—but I'd be mighty\n surprised if we didn't find a change\n or two. Before I came in here, I\n asked Marshall to take the ship out\n and check on things. He should be\n back with his report before long.\n Why don't we wait and see what\n he has to say?\"\nMarshall\n was excited when\n he was escorted into the\n Council Chamber. He bowed briefly\n to the President and began to\n speak rapidly.",
"Crownwall shrugged. \"So?\"\nThe\n Vegan reached up and engulfed\n the end of a drinking\n tube with his eating orifice. \"You\n upstart Earthlings are a strange\n and a frightening race,\" he said.\n \"Frightening to the Sunda, especially.\n When you showed up in the\n spaceways, it was decreed that you\n had to be stopped at once. There\n was even serious discussion of destroying\n Earth out of hand, while\n it is still possible.",
"After elaborate and lengthy farewells,\n Crownwall climbed into his\n machine and fell gently up until he\n was out of the atmosphere, before\n starting his enormous journey\n through time back to Earth. More\n quickly than it had taken him to\n reach his ship from the palace of\n His Effulgence, he was in the Council\n Chamber of the Confederation\n Government of Earth, making a full\n report on his trip to Vega.",
"\"Oh, I didn't mean\nyou\nin particular,\"\n the Vegan said with a\n negligent wave. \"Who can tell one\n Earthling from another? What I\n meant was that I expected someone\n from Earth to break through\n our blockade and come here. Most\n of my advisors—even Ggaran here—thought\n it couldn't be done, but\n I never doubted that you'd manage\n it. Still, if you were on your\n home planet only yesterday, that's\n astonishing even to me. Tell me,\n how did you manage to get here so\n fast, and without even alerting my\n detection web?\"\n\n\n \"You're doing the talking,\" said\n Crownwall. \"If you wanted someone\n from Earth to come here to see\n you, why did you put the cordon\n around Earth? And why did you\n drop a planet-buster in the Pacific\n Ocean, and tell us that it was triggered\n to go off if we tried to use\n the distorter drive? That's hardly\n the action of somebody who expects\n visitors.\"",
"\"Are you sure that you haven't\n given us a little too much information\n for your own safety?\" asked\n Ffallk softly.\n\n\n \"Not at all. We were enormously\n lucky to have learned how to control\n spatial reference frames ourselves.\n I doubt if you could do it in\n another two million years.\" Crownwall\n rose to his feet. \"And now,\n Your Effulgence, I think it's about\n time I went back to my ship and\n drove it home to Earth to make my\n report, so we can pick up those\n bombs and start making arrangements.\"\n\n\n \"Excellent,\" said Ffallk. \"I'd better\n escort you; my people don't like\n strangers much.\"\n\n\n \"I'd noticed that,\" Crownwall\n commented drily.",
"Crownwall nodded. \"I don't\n see why not. Well, then, let me tell\n you that we don't travel in space\n at all. That's why I didn't show up\n on any of your long-range detection\n instruments. Instead, we travel\n in time. Surely any race that has\n progressed as far as your own must\n know, at least theoretically, that\n time travel is entirely possible. After\n all, we knew it, and we haven't\n been around nearly as long as you\n have.\"",
"When he had finished, the President\n sighed deeply. \"Well,\" he\n said, \"we gave you full plenipotentiary\n powers, so I suppose we'll\n have to stand behind your agreements—especially\n in view of the\n fact that we'll undoubtedly be\n blown into atoms if we don't. But\n from what you say, I'd rather be\n in bed with a rattler than have a\n treaty with a Vegan. They sound\n ungodly murderous to me. There\n are too many holes in that protection\n plan of yours. It's only a question\n of time before they'll find some\n way around it, and then—poof—we'll\n all be dust.\"",
"\"Of course,\" said Crownwall,\n then added, \"It's too bad that you\n can't provide them with live targets\n a little more often.\" He stifled\n a shudder of distaste. \"Tell me,\n Your Effulgence, does the Emperor's\n race—the Master Race—also\n enjoy the type of civilization\n you have just had demonstrated\n for me?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no. They are far too brutal,\n too morally degraded, to know anything\n of these finer points of etiquette\n and propriety. They are\n really an uncouth bunch. Why, do\n you know, I am certain that they\n would have had the bad taste to\n use an energy weapon to dispose\n of the victim in a case such as you\n just witnessed! They are really\n quite unfit to rule. They can scarcely\n be called civilized at all. But we\n will soon put a stop to all of that—your\n race and mine, of course.\"",
"At the far side of the comfortable,\n unimpressive room, a plump\n thing, hide faded to a dull violet,\n reclined on a couch. Behind him\n stood a heavy and pompous appearing\n Vegan in lordly trappings.\n They examined Crownwall with\n great interest for a few moments.\n\n\n \"It's customary to genuflect\n when you enter the Viceroy's presence,\"\n said the standing one at\n last. \"But then I'm told you're an\n Earthling. I suppose we can expect\n you to be ignorant of those niceties\n customary among civilized peoples.\"",
"\"They're gone without trace—\nall\n of them\n!\" he cried. \"I went clear\n to Sunda and there's no sign of\n intelligent life anywhere! We're all\n alone now!\"\n\n\n \"There, you see?\" exclaimed\n Crownwall. \"Our enemies are all\n gone!\"\n\n\n He looked around, glowing with\n victory, at the others at the table,\n then slowly quieted and sat down.\n He turned his head away from\n their accusing eyes.\n\n\n \"Alone,\" he said, and unconsciously\n repeated Marshall's words:\n \"We're all alone now.\"\n\n\n In silence, the others gathered\n their papers together and left the\n room, leaving Crownwall sitting at\n the table by himself. He shivered\n involuntarily, and then leaped to\n his feet to follow after them.",
"\"I sincerely hope so,\" said\n Crownwall.\nRefreshments\n were served\n to His Effulgence and to\n Crownwall during the trip, without\n interrupting the smooth progress\n of the sedan. The soldiers of\n the cohort, the bearers and Ggaran\n continued to run—without food,\n drink or, except for Ggaran, evidence\n of fatigue.\n\n\n After several hours of travel, following\n Crownwall's directions, the\n procession arrived at the copse in\n which he had concealed his small\n transportation machine. The machine,\n for spatial mobility, was\n equipped with the heavy and grossly\n inefficient anti-gravity field generator\n developed by Kowalsky. It\n occupied ten times the space of the\n temporal translation and coordination\n selection systems combined,\n but it had the great advantage of\n being almost undetectable in use. It\n emitted no mass or radiation.",
"\"I'm glad of that,\" said Crownwall.\n \"Too bad Ggaran can't join\n us.\" He climbed into the chair beside\n Ffallk. The bearers trotted\n along at seven or eight kilometers\n an hour, carrying their contraption\n with absolute smoothness. Blasts\n from horns preceded them as they\n went.\n\n\n When they passed through the\n huge entrance doors of the palace\n and started down the ramp toward\n the street, Crownwall was astonished\n to see nobody on the previously\n crowded streets, and mentioned\n it to Ffallk.\n\n\n \"When the Viceroy of the Seventy\n Suns,\" said the Viceroy of the\n Seventy Suns, \"travels in state, no\n one but my own entourage is permitted\n to watch. And my guests, of\n course,\" he added, bowing slightly\n to Crownwall.",
"\"Of course,\" agreed Crownwall,\n bowing back. \"Kind of you, I'm\n sure. But what happens if somebody\n doesn't get the word, or\n doesn't hear your trumpeters, or\n something like that?\"\n\n\n Ggaran stepped forward, already\n panting slightly. \"A man with knots\n in all of his ear stalks is in a very\n uncomfortable position,\" he explained.\n \"Wait. Let me show you.\n Let us just suppose that that runner\n over there\"—he gestured toward\n a soldier with a tentacle—\"is\n a civilian who has been so unlucky\n as to remain on the street\n after His Effulgence's entourage arrived.\"\n He turned to one of the\n bowmen who ran beside the sedan\n chair, now strung and at the ready.\n \"Show him!\" he ordered peremptorily.\n\n\n In one swift movement the bowman\n notched an arrow, drew and\n fired. The arrow hissed briefly, and\n then sliced smoothly through the\n soldier's throat.",
"\"For more than two million\n years we have waited for the opportunity\n for revenge. And now\n that you have entered space, that\n opportunity is at hand.\"\n\n\n \"If you haven't been able to help\n yourselves for two million years,\"\n asked Crownwall, \"how does the\n sight of me give you so much gumption\n all of a sudden?\"\n\n\n Ggaran's tentacles writhed, and\n he slavered in fury, but the clashing\n of his teeth subsided instantly\n at a soothing wave from His Effulgence.",
"\"But I had different ideas. From\n what you had already done, I suspected\n it wouldn't be long before\n one of you amazing Earthlings\n would dream up some device or\n other, head out into space, and\n show up on our planet. So I've been\n waiting for you, and here you are.\"\n\n\n \"It was the thinking of a genius,\"\n murmured Ggaran.\n\n\n \"All right, then, genius, here I\n am,\" said Crownwall. \"So what's\n the pitch?\"",
"\"And now,\" Ggaran put in, \"I\n think it's time for you to tell us\n something about how you get\n across light-years of space in a few\n hours, without leaving any traces\n for us to detect.\" He raised a tentacle\n to still Crownwall's immediate\n exclamation of protest. \"Oh,\n nothing that would give us a chance\n to duplicate it—just enough to\nindicate\nhow we can make use of\n it, along with you—enough to allow\n us to\nbegin\nto make intelligent\n plans to beat the claws off the Master\n Race.\"\nAfter\n due consideration,",
"\"What business\nwould\nI have at\n the Viceroy's Palace?\" asked\n Crownwall. \"I want to see Ffallk.\"\n\n\n \"Mind your tongue,\" growled\n the guard. \"If you mean His Effulgence,\n Right Hand of the Glorious\n Emperor, Hereditary Ruler of the\n Seventy Suns, Viceroy of the\n Twelfth Sector of the Universal\n Holy Empire\"—Universal Galactic\n had a full measure of ceremonial\n words—\"he sees only those whom\n he summons. If you know what's\n good for you, you'll get out of here\n while you can still walk. And if you\n run fast enough, maybe you can\n even get away from that crowd out\n there, but I doubt it.\"\n\n\n \"Just tell him that a man has\n arrived from Earth to talk to him.\n He'll summon me fast enough.\n Meanwhile, my highly polished\n friends, I'll just wait here, so why\n don't you put those heavy pikes\n down?\"",
"Crownwall sat on the steps,\n puffed alight a cigarette, and blew\n expert smoke rings toward the\n guards.\n\n\n An elegant courtier, with elaborately\n jeweled harness, bustled\n from inside the palace, obviously\n trying to present an air of strolling\n nonchalance. He gestured fluidly\n with a graceful tentacle. \"You!\" he\n said to Crownwall. \"Follow me. His\n Effulgence commands you to appear\n before him at once.\" The two\n guards withdrew their pikes and\n froze into immobility at the sides\n of the entrance.\n\n\n Crownwall stamped out his\n smoke and ambled after the hurrying\n courtier along tremendous corridors,\n through elaborate waiting\n rooms, under guarded doorways,\n until he was finally bowed through\n a small curtained arch.",
"\"We wouldn't use the bombs\n lightly, to be sure, because of what\n would happen to Earth. And don't\n think that blowing up our planet\n would save you, because we naturally\n wouldn't keep the bombs on\n Earth. How does that sound to\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Ridiculous,\" snorted Ggaran.\n \"Impossible.\"\n\n\n After several minutes of silent\n consideration, \"It is an excellent\n plan,\" said His Effulgence. \"It is\n worthy of the thinking of The People\n ourselves. You Earthlings will\n make very satisfactory allies. What\n you request will be provided without\n delay. Meanwhile, I see no reason\n why we cannot proceed with\n our discussions.\"\n\n\n \"Nor do I,\" consented Crownwall.\n \"But your stooge here doesn't\n seem very happy about it all.\"",
"\"Your reaction was savage,\" said\n Ggaran, his tentacles stiffening\n with shock at the memory. \"You\n bloody-minded Earthlings must\n have been aware of the terrible\n danger.\"\n\n\n Ffallk rippled in agreement.\n \"The action you took was too swift\n and too foolhardy to be believed.\n You knew that you could have destroyed\n not only yourself, but also\n all who live on that planet. You\n could also have wrecked the planet\n itself and the ships and those of\n my own race who manned them.\n We had tried to contact you, but\n since you had not developed subspace\n radio, we were of course not\n successful. Our englobement was\n just a routine quarantine. With\n your total lack of information\n about us, what you did was more\n than the height of folly. It was madness.\"\n\n\n \"Could we have done anything\n else that would have kept you from\n landing on Earth and taking us\n over?\" asked Crownwall."
],
[
"Crownwall shrugged. \"So?\"\nThe\n Vegan reached up and engulfed\n the end of a drinking\n tube with his eating orifice. \"You\n upstart Earthlings are a strange\n and a frightening race,\" he said.\n \"Frightening to the Sunda, especially.\n When you showed up in the\n spaceways, it was decreed that you\n had to be stopped at once. There\n was even serious discussion of destroying\n Earth out of hand, while\n it is still possible.",
"At the far side of the comfortable,\n unimpressive room, a plump\n thing, hide faded to a dull violet,\n reclined on a couch. Behind him\n stood a heavy and pompous appearing\n Vegan in lordly trappings.\n They examined Crownwall with\n great interest for a few moments.\n\n\n \"It's customary to genuflect\n when you enter the Viceroy's presence,\"\n said the standing one at\n last. \"But then I'm told you're an\n Earthling. I suppose we can expect\n you to be ignorant of those niceties\n customary among civilized peoples.\"",
"\"Of course,\" said Crownwall,\n then added, \"It's too bad that you\n can't provide them with live targets\n a little more often.\" He stifled\n a shudder of distaste. \"Tell me,\n Your Effulgence, does the Emperor's\n race—the Master Race—also\n enjoy the type of civilization\n you have just had demonstrated\n for me?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no. They are far too brutal,\n too morally degraded, to know anything\n of these finer points of etiquette\n and propriety. They are\n really an uncouth bunch. Why, do\n you know, I am certain that they\n would have had the bad taste to\n use an energy weapon to dispose\n of the victim in a case such as you\n just witnessed! They are really\n quite unfit to rule. They can scarcely\n be called civilized at all. But we\n will soon put a stop to all of that—your\n race and mine, of course.\"",
"\"Oh, I didn't mean\nyou\nin particular,\"\n the Vegan said with a\n negligent wave. \"Who can tell one\n Earthling from another? What I\n meant was that I expected someone\n from Earth to break through\n our blockade and come here. Most\n of my advisors—even Ggaran here—thought\n it couldn't be done, but\n I never doubted that you'd manage\n it. Still, if you were on your\n home planet only yesterday, that's\n astonishing even to me. Tell me,\n how did you manage to get here so\n fast, and without even alerting my\n detection web?\"\n\n\n \"You're doing the talking,\" said\n Crownwall. \"If you wanted someone\n from Earth to come here to see\n you, why did you put the cordon\n around Earth? And why did you\n drop a planet-buster in the Pacific\n Ocean, and tell us that it was triggered\n to go off if we tried to use\n the distorter drive? That's hardly\n the action of somebody who expects\n visitors.\"",
"\"I'm glad of that,\" said Crownwall.\n \"Too bad Ggaran can't join\n us.\" He climbed into the chair beside\n Ffallk. The bearers trotted\n along at seven or eight kilometers\n an hour, carrying their contraption\n with absolute smoothness. Blasts\n from horns preceded them as they\n went.\n\n\n When they passed through the\n huge entrance doors of the palace\n and started down the ramp toward\n the street, Crownwall was astonished\n to see nobody on the previously\n crowded streets, and mentioned\n it to Ffallk.\n\n\n \"When the Viceroy of the Seventy\n Suns,\" said the Viceroy of the\n Seventy Suns, \"travels in state, no\n one but my own entourage is permitted\n to watch. And my guests, of\n course,\" he added, bowing slightly\n to Crownwall.",
"He climbed the great ramp, with\n its deeply carved Greek key design,\n toward the mighty entrance\n gate of the palace. His manner\n demonstrated an elaborate air of\n unconcern that he felt sure was entirely\n wasted on these monsters.\n The clashing teeth of the noisiest\n of them were only inches from the\n quivering flesh of his back as he\n reached the upper level. Instantly,\n and unexpectedly to Crownwall,\n the threatening crowd dropped\n back fearfully, so that he walked\n the last fifty meters alone.\n\n\n Crownwall all but sagged with\n relief. A pair of guards, their purple\n hides smoothly polished and gleaming\n with oil, crossed their ceremonial\n pikes in front of him as he\n approached the entrance.\n\n\n \"And just what business do you\n have here, stranger?\" asked the\n senior of the guards, his speaking\n orifice framing with difficulty the\n sibilances of Universal Galactic.",
"\"Things may not be as bad as\n they seem,\" answered Crownwall\n complacently. \"After I got back a\n few million years, I'm afraid I got\n a little careless and let my ship dip\n down into Vega III's atmosphere\n for a while. I was back so far that\n the Vegans hadn't appeared yet.\n Now, I didn't land—or\ndeliberately\nkill anything—but I'd be mighty\n surprised if we didn't find a change\n or two. Before I came in here, I\n asked Marshall to take the ship out\n and check on things. He should be\n back with his report before long.\n Why don't we wait and see what\n he has to say?\"\nMarshall\n was excited when\n he was escorted into the\n Council Chamber. He bowed briefly\n to the President and began to\n speak rapidly.",
"Crownwall sat on the steps,\n puffed alight a cigarette, and blew\n expert smoke rings toward the\n guards.\n\n\n An elegant courtier, with elaborately\n jeweled harness, bustled\n from inside the palace, obviously\n trying to present an air of strolling\n nonchalance. He gestured fluidly\n with a graceful tentacle. \"You!\" he\n said to Crownwall. \"Follow me. His\n Effulgence commands you to appear\n before him at once.\" The two\n guards withdrew their pikes and\n froze into immobility at the sides\n of the entrance.\n\n\n Crownwall stamped out his\n smoke and ambled after the hurrying\n courtier along tremendous corridors,\n through elaborate waiting\n rooms, under guarded doorways,\n until he was finally bowed through\n a small curtained arch.",
"\"Of course,\" agreed Crownwall,\n bowing back. \"Kind of you, I'm\n sure. But what happens if somebody\n doesn't get the word, or\n doesn't hear your trumpeters, or\n something like that?\"\n\n\n Ggaran stepped forward, already\n panting slightly. \"A man with knots\n in all of his ear stalks is in a very\n uncomfortable position,\" he explained.\n \"Wait. Let me show you.\n Let us just suppose that that runner\n over there\"—he gestured toward\n a soldier with a tentacle—\"is\n a civilian who has been so unlucky\n as to remain on the street\n after His Effulgence's entourage arrived.\"\n He turned to one of the\n bowmen who ran beside the sedan\n chair, now strung and at the ready.\n \"Show him!\" he ordered peremptorily.\n\n\n In one swift movement the bowman\n notched an arrow, drew and\n fired. The arrow hissed briefly, and\n then sliced smoothly through the\n soldier's throat.",
"\"Are you sure that you haven't\n given us a little too much information\n for your own safety?\" asked\n Ffallk softly.\n\n\n \"Not at all. We were enormously\n lucky to have learned how to control\n spatial reference frames ourselves.\n I doubt if you could do it in\n another two million years.\" Crownwall\n rose to his feet. \"And now,\n Your Effulgence, I think it's about\n time I went back to my ship and\n drove it home to Earth to make my\n report, so we can pick up those\n bombs and start making arrangements.\"\n\n\n \"Excellent,\" said Ffallk. \"I'd better\n escort you; my people don't like\n strangers much.\"\n\n\n \"I'd noticed that,\" Crownwall\n commented drily.",
"John Crownwall, florid, red-headed\n and bulky, considered himself\n to be a bold man. But here,\n surrounded by this writhing, slithering\n mass of eight-foot creatures,\n he felt distinctly unhappy. Crownwall\n had heard about creatures that\n slavered, but he had never before\n seen it done. These humanoids had\n large mouths and sharp teeth, and\n they unquestionably slavered. He\n wished he knew more about them.\n If they carried out the threats of\n their present attitude, Earth would\n have to send Marshall to replace\n him. And if Crownwall couldn't do\n the job, thought Crownwall, then\n it was a sure bet that Marshall\n wouldn't have a chance.",
"His Effulgence wiggled his tentacles.\n \"I'm afraid that Ggaran had\n expected to take what you Earthlings\n have to offer without giving\n anything in return. I never had any\n such ideas. I have not underestimated\n you, you see.\"\n\n\n \"That's nice,\" said Crownwall\n graciously.",
"\"What business\nwould\nI have at\n the Viceroy's Palace?\" asked\n Crownwall. \"I want to see Ffallk.\"\n\n\n \"Mind your tongue,\" growled\n the guard. \"If you mean His Effulgence,\n Right Hand of the Glorious\n Emperor, Hereditary Ruler of the\n Seventy Suns, Viceroy of the\n Twelfth Sector of the Universal\n Holy Empire\"—Universal Galactic\n had a full measure of ceremonial\n words—\"he sees only those whom\n he summons. If you know what's\n good for you, you'll get out of here\n while you can still walk. And if you\n run fast enough, maybe you can\n even get away from that crowd out\n there, but I doubt it.\"\n\n\n \"Just tell him that a man has\n arrived from Earth to talk to him.\n He'll summon me fast enough.\n Meanwhile, my highly polished\n friends, I'll just wait here, so why\n don't you put those heavy pikes\n down?\"",
"\"But I had different ideas. From\n what you had already done, I suspected\n it wouldn't be long before\n one of you amazing Earthlings\n would dream up some device or\n other, head out into space, and\n show up on our planet. So I've been\n waiting for you, and here you are.\"\n\n\n \"It was the thinking of a genius,\"\n murmured Ggaran.\n\n\n \"All right, then, genius, here I\n am,\" said Crownwall. \"So what's\n the pitch?\"",
"\"They're gone without trace—\nall\n of them\n!\" he cried. \"I went clear\n to Sunda and there's no sign of\n intelligent life anywhere! We're all\n alone now!\"\n\n\n \"There, you see?\" exclaimed\n Crownwall. \"Our enemies are all\n gone!\"\n\n\n He looked around, glowing with\n victory, at the others at the table,\n then slowly quieted and sat down.\n He turned his head away from\n their accusing eyes.\n\n\n \"Alone,\" he said, and unconsciously\n repeated Marshall's words:\n \"We're all alone now.\"\n\n\n In silence, the others gathered\n their papers together and left the\n room, leaving Crownwall sitting at\n the table by himself. He shivered\n involuntarily, and then leaped to\n his feet to follow after them.",
"Crownwall nodded. \"I don't\n see why not. Well, then, let me tell\n you that we don't travel in space\n at all. That's why I didn't show up\n on any of your long-range detection\n instruments. Instead, we travel\n in time. Surely any race that has\n progressed as far as your own must\n know, at least theoretically, that\n time travel is entirely possible. After\n all, we knew it, and we haven't\n been around nearly as long as you\n have.\"",
"\"I sincerely hope so,\" said\n Crownwall.\nRefreshments\n were served\n to His Effulgence and to\n Crownwall during the trip, without\n interrupting the smooth progress\n of the sedan. The soldiers of\n the cohort, the bearers and Ggaran\n continued to run—without food,\n drink or, except for Ggaran, evidence\n of fatigue.\n\n\n After several hours of travel, following\n Crownwall's directions, the\n procession arrived at the copse in\n which he had concealed his small\n transportation machine. The machine,\n for spatial mobility, was\n equipped with the heavy and grossly\n inefficient anti-gravity field generator\n developed by Kowalsky. It\n occupied ten times the space of the\n temporal translation and coordination\n selection systems combined,\n but it had the great advantage of\n being almost undetectable in use. It\n emitted no mass or radiation.",
"\"You see,\" said Ggaran complacently,\n \"we have very little trouble\n with civilians who violate this particular\n tradition.\"\n\n\n His Effulgence beckoned to the\n bowman to approach. \"Your results\n were satisfactory,\" he said, \"but\n your release was somewhat shaky.\n The next time you show such sloppy\n form, you will be given thirty\n lashes.\"\n\n\n He leaned back on the cushion\n and spoke again to Crownwall.\n \"That's the trouble with these requirements\n of civilization. The men\n of my immediate guard must practice\n with such things as pikes and\n bows and arrows, which they seldom\n get an opportunity to use. It\n would never do for them to use\n modern weapons on occasions of\n ceremony, of course.\"",
"\"Don't call those damn lobsters\n friends,\" growled Ggaran. He subsided\n at the Viceroy's gesture.\n\n\n \"Exactly,\" said His Effulgence\n to Crownwall. \"You broke our\n blockade without any trouble. Our\n instruments didn't even wiggle\n when you landed here on my capital\n world. You can do the same on\n the worlds of the Sunda. Now, just\n tell us how you did it, and we're\n partners.\"\nCrownwall\n lifted one eyebrow\n quizzically, but remained\n silent. He didn't expect his facial\n gesture to be interpreted correctly,\n but he assumed that his silence\n would be. He was correct.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" His Effulgence said,\n \"we will give you any assurances\n that your people may desire in order\n to feel safe, and we will guarantee\n them an equal share in the\n government of the Galaxy.\"\n\n\n \"Bunk,\" said Crownwall.",
"His Effulgence lifted a tentacle\n swiftly, before Ggaran, lunging angrily\n forward, could speak. \"Then\n what do you want of us?\"\n\n\n \"It seems to me that we need\n no wordy assurances from each\n other,\" said Crownwall, and he\n puffed a cigarette aglow. \"We can\n arrange something a little more\n trustworthy, I believe. On your\n side, you have the power to destroy\n our only planet at any time. That\n is certainly adequate security for\n our own good behavior and sincerity."
],
[
"\"And it is true that we can always\n exterminate any planet that\n refuses to obey the just and legal\n orders of its Viceroy. So we achieve\n a working balance in our Empire.\n We control it adequately, and we\n live in peace.\n\n\n \"The Sundans, for example,\n though they took the rule of the\n Empire that was rightfully ours\n away from us, through trickery,\n were unable to take over the\n Sectors we control. We are still\n powerful. And soon we will be all-powerful.\n In company with you\n Earthlings, that is.\"\n\n\n Crownwall nodded. \"In other\n words, you think that we Earthmen\n can break up this two-million-year-old\n stalemate. You've got the\n idea that, with our help, you can\n conquer planets without the necessity\n of destroying them, and thereby\n take over number one spot from\n these Sunda friends of yours.\"",
"\"Ggaran, you explain it to the\n Earthling,\" said His Effulgence.\nGgaran\n bowed. \"The crustaceans\n on Sunda—the lobsterlike\n creatures that rule the Galaxy—are\n usurpers. They have no rights\n to their position of power. Our race\n is much older than theirs. We were\n alone when we found the Sundans—a\n primitive tribe, grubbing in the\n mud at the edge of their shallow\n seas, unable even to reason. In\n those days we were desperately\n lonely. We needed companionship\n among the stars, and we helped\n them develop to the point where,\n in their inferior way, they were able\n to reason, almost as well as we, The\n People, can. And then they cheated\n us of our rightful place.\n\n\n \"The Emperor at Sunda is one\n of them. They provide sixty-eight\n of the hundred Viceroys; we provide\n only seventeen. It is a preposterous\n and intolerable situation.",
"\"That old fool on Sunda, the\n Emperor, decided that we should\n blow you up, but by that time I\n had decided,\" said His Effulgence,\n \"that you might be useful to me—that\n is, that we might be useful to\n each other. I traveled halfway\n across the Galaxy to meet him, to\n convince him that it would be sufficient\n just to quarantine you.\n When we had used your radio system\n to teach a few of you the Universal\n Galactic tongue, and had\n managed to get what you call the\n 'planet-buster' down into the\n largest of your oceans, he figured\n we had done our job.\n\n\n \"With his usual lack of imagination,\n he felt sure that we were safe\n from you—after all, there was no\n way for you to get off the planet.\n Even if you could get down to the\n bottom of the ocean and tamper\n with the bomb, you would only succeed\n in setting it off, and that's\n what the Sunda had been in favor\n of in the first place.",
"\"Don't call those damn lobsters\n friends,\" growled Ggaran. He subsided\n at the Viceroy's gesture.\n\n\n \"Exactly,\" said His Effulgence\n to Crownwall. \"You broke our\n blockade without any trouble. Our\n instruments didn't even wiggle\n when you landed here on my capital\n world. You can do the same on\n the worlds of the Sunda. Now, just\n tell us how you did it, and we're\n partners.\"\nCrownwall\n lifted one eyebrow\n quizzically, but remained\n silent. He didn't expect his facial\n gesture to be interpreted correctly,\n but he assumed that his silence\n would be. He was correct.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" His Effulgence said,\n \"we will give you any assurances\n that your people may desire in order\n to feel safe, and we will guarantee\n them an equal share in the\n government of the Galaxy.\"\n\n\n \"Bunk,\" said Crownwall.",
"\"I'm glad of that,\" said Crownwall.\n \"Too bad Ggaran can't join\n us.\" He climbed into the chair beside\n Ffallk. The bearers trotted\n along at seven or eight kilometers\n an hour, carrying their contraption\n with absolute smoothness. Blasts\n from horns preceded them as they\n went.\n\n\n When they passed through the\n huge entrance doors of the palace\n and started down the ramp toward\n the street, Crownwall was astonished\n to see nobody on the previously\n crowded streets, and mentioned\n it to Ffallk.\n\n\n \"When the Viceroy of the Seventy\n Suns,\" said the Viceroy of the\n Seventy Suns, \"travels in state, no\n one but my own entourage is permitted\n to watch. And my guests, of\n course,\" he added, bowing slightly\n to Crownwall.",
"Crownwall shrugged. \"So?\"\nThe\n Vegan reached up and engulfed\n the end of a drinking\n tube with his eating orifice. \"You\n upstart Earthlings are a strange\n and a frightening race,\" he said.\n \"Frightening to the Sunda, especially.\n When you showed up in the\n spaceways, it was decreed that you\n had to be stopped at once. There\n was even serious discussion of destroying\n Earth out of hand, while\n it is still possible.",
"\"What business\nwould\nI have at\n the Viceroy's Palace?\" asked\n Crownwall. \"I want to see Ffallk.\"\n\n\n \"Mind your tongue,\" growled\n the guard. \"If you mean His Effulgence,\n Right Hand of the Glorious\n Emperor, Hereditary Ruler of the\n Seventy Suns, Viceroy of the\n Twelfth Sector of the Universal\n Holy Empire\"—Universal Galactic\n had a full measure of ceremonial\n words—\"he sees only those whom\n he summons. If you know what's\n good for you, you'll get out of here\n while you can still walk. And if you\n run fast enough, maybe you can\n even get away from that crowd out\n there, but I doubt it.\"\n\n\n \"Just tell him that a man has\n arrived from Earth to talk to him.\n He'll summon me fast enough.\n Meanwhile, my highly polished\n friends, I'll just wait here, so why\n don't you put those heavy pikes\n down?\"",
"\"Of course,\" said Crownwall,\n then added, \"It's too bad that you\n can't provide them with live targets\n a little more often.\" He stifled\n a shudder of distaste. \"Tell me,\n Your Effulgence, does the Emperor's\n race—the Master Race—also\n enjoy the type of civilization\n you have just had demonstrated\n for me?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no. They are far too brutal,\n too morally degraded, to know anything\n of these finer points of etiquette\n and propriety. They are\n really an uncouth bunch. Why, do\n you know, I am certain that they\n would have had the bad taste to\n use an energy weapon to dispose\n of the victim in a case such as you\n just witnessed! They are really\n quite unfit to rule. They can scarcely\n be called civilized at all. But we\n will soon put a stop to all of that—your\n race and mine, of course.\"",
"Ffallk glanced up at Ggaran. \"I\n told you that Earthlings were unbelievably\n bold.\" He turned back\n to Crownwall. \"If you couldn't\n come to me in spite of the trifling\n inconveniences I put in your way,\n your presence here would be useless\n to both of us. But you did\n come, so I can tell you that although\n I am the leader of one of\n the mightiest peoples in the Galaxy,\n whereas there are scarcely six\n billions of you squatting on one\n minor planet, we still need each\n other. Together, there is nothing\n we can't do.\"\n\n\n \"I'm listening,\" said Crownwall.\n\n\n \"We offer you partnership with\n us to take over the rule of the\n Galaxy from the Sunda—the so-called\n Master Race.\"\n\n\n \"It would hardly be an equal\n partnership, would it, considering\n that there are so many more of you\n than there are of us?\"",
"At the far side of the comfortable,\n unimpressive room, a plump\n thing, hide faded to a dull violet,\n reclined on a couch. Behind him\n stood a heavy and pompous appearing\n Vegan in lordly trappings.\n They examined Crownwall with\n great interest for a few moments.\n\n\n \"It's customary to genuflect\n when you enter the Viceroy's presence,\"\n said the standing one at\n last. \"But then I'm told you're an\n Earthling. I suppose we can expect\n you to be ignorant of those niceties\n customary among civilized peoples.\"",
"\"Your silly little planet was carefully\n examined at long range in a\n routine investigation just about fifty\n thousand years ago. There were\n at that time three different but\n similar racial strains of pulpy bipeds,\n numbering a total of perhaps\n a hundred thousand individuals.\n They showed many signs of an\n ability to reason, but a complete\n lack of civilization. While these\n creatures could by no means be\n classed among the intelligent races,\n there was a general expectation,\n which we reported to the Sunda,\n that they would some day come to\n be numbered among the Servants\n of the Emperor. So we let you\n alone, in order that you could develop\n in your own way, until you\n reached a high enough civilization\n to be useful—if you were going to.",
"\"They're gone without trace—\nall\n of them\n!\" he cried. \"I went clear\n to Sunda and there's no sign of\n intelligent life anywhere! We're all\n alone now!\"\n\n\n \"There, you see?\" exclaimed\n Crownwall. \"Our enemies are all\n gone!\"\n\n\n He looked around, glowing with\n victory, at the others at the table,\n then slowly quieted and sat down.\n He turned his head away from\n their accusing eyes.\n\n\n \"Alone,\" he said, and unconsciously\n repeated Marshall's words:\n \"We're all alone now.\"\n\n\n In silence, the others gathered\n their papers together and left the\n room, leaving Crownwall sitting at\n the table by himself. He shivered\n involuntarily, and then leaped to\n his feet to follow after them.",
"His Effulgence twitched his ear\n stalks in amusement. \"I'm Viceroy\n of one of the hundred Sectors of\n the Empire. I rule over a total of\n a hundred Satrapies; these average\n about a hundred Provinces each.\n Provinces consist, in general, of\n about a hundred Clusters apiece,\n and every Cluster has an average\n of a hundred inhabited solar systems.\n There are more inhabited\n planets in the Galaxy than there\n are people on your single world.\n I, personally, rule three hundred\n trillion people, half of them of my\n own race. And yet I tell you that\n it would be an equal partnership.\"\n\n\n \"I don't get it. Why?\"\n\n\n \"Because you came to me.\"",
"\"For more than two million\n years we have waited for the opportunity\n for revenge. And now\n that you have entered space, that\n opportunity is at hand.\"\n\n\n \"If you haven't been able to help\n yourselves for two million years,\"\n asked Crownwall, \"how does the\n sight of me give you so much gumption\n all of a sudden?\"\n\n\n Ggaran's tentacles writhed, and\n he slavered in fury, but the clashing\n of his teeth subsided instantly\n at a soothing wave from His Effulgence.",
"\"It's all right, Ggaran,\" said the\n Viceroy languidly. He twitched a\n tentacle in a beckoning gesture.\n \"Come closer, Earthling. I bid you\n welcome to my capital. I have been\n looking forward to your arrival for\n some time.\"\nCrownwall\n put his hands\n in his pockets. \"That's hardly\n possible,\" he said. \"It was only decided\n yesterday, back on Earth,\n that I would be the one to make\n the trip here. Even if you could\n spy through buildings on Earth\n from space, which I doubt, your\n communications system can't get\n the word through that fast.\"",
"\"You see,\" said Ggaran complacently,\n \"we have very little trouble\n with civilians who violate this particular\n tradition.\"\n\n\n His Effulgence beckoned to the\n bowman to approach. \"Your results\n were satisfactory,\" he said, \"but\n your release was somewhat shaky.\n The next time you show such sloppy\n form, you will be given thirty\n lashes.\"\n\n\n He leaned back on the cushion\n and spoke again to Crownwall.\n \"That's the trouble with these requirements\n of civilization. The men\n of my immediate guard must practice\n with such things as pikes and\n bows and arrows, which they seldom\n get an opportunity to use. It\n would never do for them to use\n modern weapons on occasions of\n ceremony, of course.\"",
"UPSTARTS\nBy L. J. STECHER, JR.\nIllustrated by DILLON\nThe\n sight of an Earthman\n on Vega III, where it was\n impossible for an outlander\n to be, brought angry crowds to surround\n John Crownwall as he strode\n toward the palace of Viceroy\n Tronn Ffallk, ruler of Sector XII\n of the Universal Holy Empire of\n Sunda. He ignored the snarling, the\n spitting, the waving of boneless\n prehensile fingers, as he ignored the\n heavy gravity and heavier air of\n the unfamiliar planet.",
"\"Since this is a very important\n occasion, I think it best that we\n make this a Procession of Full\n Ceremony. It's a bother, but the\n proprieties have to be observed.\"\nGgaran\n stepped out into the\n broad corridor and whistled a\n shrill two-tone note, using both his\n speaking and his eating orifices. A\n cohort of troops, pikes at the ready\n and bows strapped to their backs,\n leaped forward and formed a\n double line leading from His Effulgence's\n sanctum to the main door.\n Down this lane, carried by twenty\n men, came a large sedan chair.\n\n\n \"Protocol takes a lot of time,\"\n said His Effulgence somewhat sadly,\n \"but it must be observed. At\n least, as Ambassador, you can ride\n with me in the sedan, instead of\n walking behind it, like Ggaran.\"",
"When he had finished, the President\n sighed deeply. \"Well,\" he\n said, \"we gave you full plenipotentiary\n powers, so I suppose we'll\n have to stand behind your agreements—especially\n in view of the\n fact that we'll undoubtedly be\n blown into atoms if we don't. But\n from what you say, I'd rather be\n in bed with a rattler than have a\n treaty with a Vegan. They sound\n ungodly murderous to me. There\n are too many holes in that protection\n plan of yours. It's only a question\n of time before they'll find some\n way around it, and then—poof—we'll\n all be dust.\"",
"\"Things may not be as bad as\n they seem,\" answered Crownwall\n complacently. \"After I got back a\n few million years, I'm afraid I got\n a little careless and let my ship dip\n down into Vega III's atmosphere\n for a while. I was back so far that\n the Vegans hadn't appeared yet.\n Now, I didn't land—or\ndeliberately\nkill anything—but I'd be mighty\n surprised if we didn't find a change\n or two. Before I came in here, I\n asked Marshall to take the ship out\n and check on things. He should be\n back with his report before long.\n Why don't we wait and see what\n he has to say?\"\nMarshall\n was excited when\n he was escorted into the\n Council Chamber. He bowed briefly\n to the President and began to\n speak rapidly."
]
] |
train
|
99917
|
[
"According to the author, what made open trade so accessible in the 14th century?",
"Which terms most likely describe how the author views Brexit?",
"What is the primary purpose of the article?",
"According to the author, how should progressive urban cities function differently than states?",
"According to the author, what do some of the most thriving modern cities have in common?",
"The Hanseatic League is most closely aligned with which form of government?",
"For the author, the Hanseatic League represents all of the following EXCEPT:",
"According to the author, what is the major factor that will determine if modern nations will adopt a replica of the Hanseatic League?"
] |
[
[
"Prevalence of natural resources in concentrated areas",
"Agreement on shared principles of commerce",
"Settlement along geographically accessible areas",
"Inclusion of both rural and urban community members"
],
[
"perplexing and disturbing",
"ambitious and progressive",
"ill-conceived and quixotic",
"haphazard and inequitable"
],
[
"To share a historical account of 14th century commerce practices and why they were replaced",
"To propose a model for international commerce in nation-states with divided populations",
"To lament and decry Britain's misguided decision to abandon the European Union",
"To entertain readers with an ironic predicament that has resulted from western globalization"
],
[
"They should expand their operations into more rural areas to bring economic prosperity to those regions",
"They should maintain an isolationist approach from other cities as well as rural areas within their own nations",
"They should partner and contend with other cities to form international networks of commerce",
"They should work establish a symbiotic relationship with their states to ensure longevity of both entities"
],
[
"They are established in geographically appealing areas",
"They are determined to learn from the mistakes of their forebearers",
"They look beyond their borders for economic possibility",
"They are ruled by democratic governments"
],
[
"democracy",
"confederation",
"socialism",
"anarchy"
],
[
"open commerce",
"flexible governing bodies",
"booming industrialization",
"a pragmatic approach"
],
[
"Whether a model can exist without creating further disparities among citizens",
"Whether citizens can avoid war and hording of resources without permanent borders",
"Whether urban areas can accommodate the preferences of rural areas",
"Whether urban and rural denizens can orient goals based on shared values"
]
] |
[
3,
3,
2,
3,
3,
2,
3,
1
] |
[
1,
0,
0,
1,
0,
0,
0,
1
] |
[
[
"The League covered lands that today find themselves a part of the modern nations of Finland, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. It was a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking in the days when communications consisted of ink and paper and the only viable method of travel was by ship. Wood, fur, wool, silver, herring, cod and salt were the main items traded. But what was also exchanged was knowledge. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'. There was no maniacal ruler overseeing things – merchants met and talked. They raised armies and waged war against kings who threatened their businesses and their freedoms and their peace.",
"Despite some of Britain's Leave voters longing to inhabit a fantastical realm immune to foreign influence, the reality is patently very different to that. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. \n\n The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. Merchants who wanted to buy and sell and travel were taking the lead at a time when nation states were not fit for purpose: in the case of England or Denmark, leadership was too centralised and authoritarian, while in German-speaking lands a nation had yet to be formed.",
"What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc\nAs you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. You can see where the sea smacks into them, or where yawning estuaries unfold like funnels between green and brown city and choppy blue water. You can track the snaking rivers and canals that form unrepentant umbilical connections to the settlements set a little further inland. \n\n By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. From the middle of the 13th century, and for some 300 years after, many settlements dotted along this route formed the prosperous Hanseatic League, a European trading confederation of market towns, before the rise of the nation state led to its dissolution.",
"There was a kind of proto-democracy at work. Professor Rainer Postel, of the Bundeswehr Universität (Germany's equivalent of Sandhurst military academy), has described the Hanse as \"a community of interests without power politics\". As David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge points out, \"The lack of an elaborate superstructure was one of the things that made the Hanse work. Having said that, one should recognise that Lübeck in particular dominated the League for long periods.\"",
"For all its complex beauty, life can ultimately be reduced to a series of binary options: yes or no, stick or twist, in or out, innovation or stagnation, modernity or mythology. The referendum result was disappointing for many progressive observers because it felt like a step backwards. Despite being primarily about trade monopolies and money making, the Hanse was, in its way, an early stab at stepping forwards: it encompassed internationalism, rational thought, free trade, loose democratic institutions and, most crucially of all, movement. \n\n The future, for many observers, can only be understood in terms of the free movement of people, capital, goods and ideas. It is this necessary movement, and its possible curtailment, that could be the spark that leads to cities like London to seek independence and parity with other world cities – rather than with the rural hinterlands of Britain.",
"\"Things change,\" says LSE's Professor Tony Travers. \"[King's Lynn] used to be very highly connected, but the economy moved on and left those trading ports like it in a different situation.\" Take, for example, the pivot towards the New World, with which trade made more sense from the west-coast ports like Bristol and Liverpool. While these boomed between the 1600s and 1800s, the Hanseatic ports declined and then died out. \"One of the things that's interesting about the [referendum] decision is that it begs all sorts of questions about the future of the UK and its relationship with Europe; and of London and Scotland and their relationship with the rest of Europe. When the EU began as the EEC in the mid-20th century some saw it as a modern day Hanse. Now the EU seems to be waning, perhaps its successor will have to ape the Hanse even more.\"",
"\"The Hanseatic League was not always accepted by local citizens,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, \"because the privileges granted to the Hanse merchants were forcing local traders out of competition and many cities took steps to eliminate them. The reasons the countryside is turning to the right [globally] are not independent from cities turning increasingly into speculation machines for the profit of a happy few. It is basically these systemic contradictions that must be addressed before we resort to more isolationist ideas that would intensify the urban-rural political divide. The bottom line is not whether a contemporary Hanse-esque federation is possible, it probably is; but whether it is actually desirable.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"The cities involved in the Hanseatic League are found along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and slightly inland too. The League stretched from Novgorod in the east – in what is now Russia – to London in the west. Tallinn, Riga, Gdańsk, Visby, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Stockholm, Bergen, Kiel, Rostock, Dinant, Bruges, Turku, Groningen, Hanover, Wroclaw, Kaliningrad: all were involved at different stages in the Hanse's history, which ran on into the 1500s.",
"Lübeck was where the merchants most often met; and where renewed recent interest in the Hanse eventually led to Angela Merkel cutting the ribbon at the brand new European Hansemuseum in the city last year.",
"The Hanseatic League is not well known, and today it lives on most prominently in the name of the German national airline Lufthansa, literally the 'Hansa of the skies', whose planes you can look out of – and down towards the Hanseatic cities – on the short journeys between mainland Europe and Britain. The letters HH on the number plates of cars in Hamburg stand for Hansestadt Hamburg: another proud little memory of this hidden history. \n\n In the traumatised atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain, it is worth remembering the Hanseatic League. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity.",
"So how about a new Hanseatic League? I ask Benjamin Barber, senior fellow at New York's Fordham University. \"I believe you will find there is a new Hanse,\" he says, \"that constituted itself about 10 or 11 years ago – including many of the original Hanseatic League cities.\" Barber is founder of the Global Parliament of Mayors, which he describes as a kind of Hanse of all cities, not just European ports, which will give cities a global urban voice and a common platform for action. The parliament convenes for its inaugural session in The Hague in September.",
"Back in Britain, one of history's little oddities pops up on the east coast. Boston in Lincolnshire and King's Lynn in Norfolk were both forward-looking Hanseatic League towns that traded with far-flung ports and hosted foreign merchants. King's Lynn contains the only extantHanse House left in Britain (London's was knocked down to build Cannon Street Station in the 1800s). Yet in the EU referendum these two areas polled among the highest Leave votes of anywhere in the country.",
"Of course, cities seceding from their nation states would provide huge headaches for countries whose biggest economic driver had been removed – as well as likely deepening ideological differences between city and rural dwellers. Moreover, cities need the food the countryside provides. \n\n Yet for all the potential pitfalls, city states can thrive. Look at Singapore, Hong Kong, or de facto city states like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. One of the most telling characteristics about these four – all of course former British imperial enclaves – is that they are utterly outward looking. To return to the sky analogy, it's the airlines of each of these (Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Emirates and Etihad) that open up each respective city to the world in the way that the machinery of the Hanse did on the Baltic Sea 600 years ago. And it's the unions each city makes with other places that also look thoroughly Hanseatic in character. A model for modern city states, then. But is it one that we want?",
"Germany today – multicultural, economically and culturally motoring, free and fair – seems like the ideal model for a modern European nation state. And part of that success lies in the gravitas the country has given to its Hanseatic history. For Germany is not a top-down country with one city unhealthily dominating as with France and Britain (regional economic inequalities have plagued Britain since the painful de-industrialisation of the 1980s, especially in the north). Germany respects federalism and its cities exist on a much more even keel. The way that Cologne, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart all bring varied economic and cultural character to the party is pure Hanse. The former Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen have city state status within Germany, putting them on the same level as a whole region or 'land' like Bavaria or Brandenburg.",
"We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. Yet look at any city of Mitteleuropa and you'll see the many different names it has had as borders and regimes have shifted with the sands of time. Nations come and go. Cities endure. \n\n \"It is often said that great cities survived great empires,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam-based online publishing platform Amateur Cities. \"So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong.\"",
"\"Cities both exist within nations and transcend nations. Their power lies not just in the extent of\nde jure\nautonomy ceded or granted by 'higher' levels of government,\" says Bruce Katz, centennial scholar at the Washington DC thinktank the Brookings Institution. \"Rather, cities have de facto power, the result of larger market and demographic forces and environmental imperatives that value proximity, density, connectivity and quality. Smart nations will see themselves as partners to their cities, setting strong platforms for urban prosperity and devolving powers, where appropriate, to give cities the flexibility to perform… Dumb nations will continue to dictate from above, stifling market activity and urban potential.\"",
"But could we go further? Could cities like London declare independence from the UK? London's economy is larger than that of Scotland and Wales combined. \"States will not vanish or surrender their waning sovereignty,\" says Benjamin Barber. \"But cities will meet across frontiers and work together to solve problems. The objective is not an independent London or New York, but interdependent cities collaborating globally. And that is happening.\"",
"London's voters largely wanted to remain a part of the EU and to maintain the city's status as an entrepôt. There is clearly a widening chasm between urban and rural life at the heart of many nations. Visualisations of Austria's recent presidential election showed the issue clearly: the country's cities voted for the Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, while the the rural districts went for right-wing nationalist Norbert Hofer (whose legal challenge to the close result has resulted in a rerun being announced for October). And in the USA in November, it's likely that Trump voters will also come from rural areas and Clinton voters from the cities. City dwellers are finding ever more in common with the world's other city dwellers than with their countrymen 50 miles down the road."
],
[
"For all its complex beauty, life can ultimately be reduced to a series of binary options: yes or no, stick or twist, in or out, innovation or stagnation, modernity or mythology. The referendum result was disappointing for many progressive observers because it felt like a step backwards. Despite being primarily about trade monopolies and money making, the Hanse was, in its way, an early stab at stepping forwards: it encompassed internationalism, rational thought, free trade, loose democratic institutions and, most crucially of all, movement. \n\n The future, for many observers, can only be understood in terms of the free movement of people, capital, goods and ideas. It is this necessary movement, and its possible curtailment, that could be the spark that leads to cities like London to seek independence and parity with other world cities – rather than with the rural hinterlands of Britain.",
"Despite some of Britain's Leave voters longing to inhabit a fantastical realm immune to foreign influence, the reality is patently very different to that. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. \n\n The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. Merchants who wanted to buy and sell and travel were taking the lead at a time when nation states were not fit for purpose: in the case of England or Denmark, leadership was too centralised and authoritarian, while in German-speaking lands a nation had yet to be formed.",
"London's voters largely wanted to remain a part of the EU and to maintain the city's status as an entrepôt. There is clearly a widening chasm between urban and rural life at the heart of many nations. Visualisations of Austria's recent presidential election showed the issue clearly: the country's cities voted for the Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, while the the rural districts went for right-wing nationalist Norbert Hofer (whose legal challenge to the close result has resulted in a rerun being announced for October). And in the USA in November, it's likely that Trump voters will also come from rural areas and Clinton voters from the cities. City dwellers are finding ever more in common with the world's other city dwellers than with their countrymen 50 miles down the road.",
"The Hanseatic League is not well known, and today it lives on most prominently in the name of the German national airline Lufthansa, literally the 'Hansa of the skies', whose planes you can look out of – and down towards the Hanseatic cities – on the short journeys between mainland Europe and Britain. The letters HH on the number plates of cars in Hamburg stand for Hansestadt Hamburg: another proud little memory of this hidden history. \n\n In the traumatised atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain, it is worth remembering the Hanseatic League. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity.",
"\"Things change,\" says LSE's Professor Tony Travers. \"[King's Lynn] used to be very highly connected, but the economy moved on and left those trading ports like it in a different situation.\" Take, for example, the pivot towards the New World, with which trade made more sense from the west-coast ports like Bristol and Liverpool. While these boomed between the 1600s and 1800s, the Hanseatic ports declined and then died out. \"One of the things that's interesting about the [referendum] decision is that it begs all sorts of questions about the future of the UK and its relationship with Europe; and of London and Scotland and their relationship with the rest of Europe. When the EU began as the EEC in the mid-20th century some saw it as a modern day Hanse. Now the EU seems to be waning, perhaps its successor will have to ape the Hanse even more.\"",
"What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc\nAs you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. You can see where the sea smacks into them, or where yawning estuaries unfold like funnels between green and brown city and choppy blue water. You can track the snaking rivers and canals that form unrepentant umbilical connections to the settlements set a little further inland. \n\n By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. From the middle of the 13th century, and for some 300 years after, many settlements dotted along this route formed the prosperous Hanseatic League, a European trading confederation of market towns, before the rise of the nation state led to its dissolution.",
"Back in Britain, one of history's little oddities pops up on the east coast. Boston in Lincolnshire and King's Lynn in Norfolk were both forward-looking Hanseatic League towns that traded with far-flung ports and hosted foreign merchants. King's Lynn contains the only extantHanse House left in Britain (London's was knocked down to build Cannon Street Station in the 1800s). Yet in the EU referendum these two areas polled among the highest Leave votes of anywhere in the country.",
"But could we go further? Could cities like London declare independence from the UK? London's economy is larger than that of Scotland and Wales combined. \"States will not vanish or surrender their waning sovereignty,\" says Benjamin Barber. \"But cities will meet across frontiers and work together to solve problems. The objective is not an independent London or New York, but interdependent cities collaborating globally. And that is happening.\"",
"\"The Hanseatic League was not always accepted by local citizens,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, \"because the privileges granted to the Hanse merchants were forcing local traders out of competition and many cities took steps to eliminate them. The reasons the countryside is turning to the right [globally] are not independent from cities turning increasingly into speculation machines for the profit of a happy few. It is basically these systemic contradictions that must be addressed before we resort to more isolationist ideas that would intensify the urban-rural political divide. The bottom line is not whether a contemporary Hanse-esque federation is possible, it probably is; but whether it is actually desirable.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"Of course, cities seceding from their nation states would provide huge headaches for countries whose biggest economic driver had been removed – as well as likely deepening ideological differences between city and rural dwellers. Moreover, cities need the food the countryside provides. \n\n Yet for all the potential pitfalls, city states can thrive. Look at Singapore, Hong Kong, or de facto city states like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. One of the most telling characteristics about these four – all of course former British imperial enclaves – is that they are utterly outward looking. To return to the sky analogy, it's the airlines of each of these (Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Emirates and Etihad) that open up each respective city to the world in the way that the machinery of the Hanse did on the Baltic Sea 600 years ago. And it's the unions each city makes with other places that also look thoroughly Hanseatic in character. A model for modern city states, then. But is it one that we want?",
"Lübeck was where the merchants most often met; and where renewed recent interest in the Hanse eventually led to Angela Merkel cutting the ribbon at the brand new European Hansemuseum in the city last year.",
"So how about a new Hanseatic League? I ask Benjamin Barber, senior fellow at New York's Fordham University. \"I believe you will find there is a new Hanse,\" he says, \"that constituted itself about 10 or 11 years ago – including many of the original Hanseatic League cities.\" Barber is founder of the Global Parliament of Mayors, which he describes as a kind of Hanse of all cities, not just European ports, which will give cities a global urban voice and a common platform for action. The parliament convenes for its inaugural session in The Hague in September.",
"We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. Yet look at any city of Mitteleuropa and you'll see the many different names it has had as borders and regimes have shifted with the sands of time. Nations come and go. Cities endure. \n\n \"It is often said that great cities survived great empires,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam-based online publishing platform Amateur Cities. \"So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong.\"",
"The League covered lands that today find themselves a part of the modern nations of Finland, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. It was a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking in the days when communications consisted of ink and paper and the only viable method of travel was by ship. Wood, fur, wool, silver, herring, cod and salt were the main items traded. But what was also exchanged was knowledge. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'. There was no maniacal ruler overseeing things – merchants met and talked. They raised armies and waged war against kings who threatened their businesses and their freedoms and their peace.",
"\"Cities both exist within nations and transcend nations. Their power lies not just in the extent of\nde jure\nautonomy ceded or granted by 'higher' levels of government,\" says Bruce Katz, centennial scholar at the Washington DC thinktank the Brookings Institution. \"Rather, cities have de facto power, the result of larger market and demographic forces and environmental imperatives that value proximity, density, connectivity and quality. Smart nations will see themselves as partners to their cities, setting strong platforms for urban prosperity and devolving powers, where appropriate, to give cities the flexibility to perform… Dumb nations will continue to dictate from above, stifling market activity and urban potential.\"",
"Germany today – multicultural, economically and culturally motoring, free and fair – seems like the ideal model for a modern European nation state. And part of that success lies in the gravitas the country has given to its Hanseatic history. For Germany is not a top-down country with one city unhealthily dominating as with France and Britain (regional economic inequalities have plagued Britain since the painful de-industrialisation of the 1980s, especially in the north). Germany respects federalism and its cities exist on a much more even keel. The way that Cologne, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart all bring varied economic and cultural character to the party is pure Hanse. The former Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen have city state status within Germany, putting them on the same level as a whole region or 'land' like Bavaria or Brandenburg.",
"There was a kind of proto-democracy at work. Professor Rainer Postel, of the Bundeswehr Universität (Germany's equivalent of Sandhurst military academy), has described the Hanse as \"a community of interests without power politics\". As David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge points out, \"The lack of an elaborate superstructure was one of the things that made the Hanse work. Having said that, one should recognise that Lübeck in particular dominated the League for long periods.\"",
"The cities involved in the Hanseatic League are found along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and slightly inland too. The League stretched from Novgorod in the east – in what is now Russia – to London in the west. Tallinn, Riga, Gdańsk, Visby, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Stockholm, Bergen, Kiel, Rostock, Dinant, Bruges, Turku, Groningen, Hanover, Wroclaw, Kaliningrad: all were involved at different stages in the Hanse's history, which ran on into the 1500s."
],
[
"For all its complex beauty, life can ultimately be reduced to a series of binary options: yes or no, stick or twist, in or out, innovation or stagnation, modernity or mythology. The referendum result was disappointing for many progressive observers because it felt like a step backwards. Despite being primarily about trade monopolies and money making, the Hanse was, in its way, an early stab at stepping forwards: it encompassed internationalism, rational thought, free trade, loose democratic institutions and, most crucially of all, movement. \n\n The future, for many observers, can only be understood in terms of the free movement of people, capital, goods and ideas. It is this necessary movement, and its possible curtailment, that could be the spark that leads to cities like London to seek independence and parity with other world cities – rather than with the rural hinterlands of Britain.",
"The League covered lands that today find themselves a part of the modern nations of Finland, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. It was a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking in the days when communications consisted of ink and paper and the only viable method of travel was by ship. Wood, fur, wool, silver, herring, cod and salt were the main items traded. But what was also exchanged was knowledge. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'. There was no maniacal ruler overseeing things – merchants met and talked. They raised armies and waged war against kings who threatened their businesses and their freedoms and their peace.",
"\"The Hanseatic League was not always accepted by local citizens,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, \"because the privileges granted to the Hanse merchants were forcing local traders out of competition and many cities took steps to eliminate them. The reasons the countryside is turning to the right [globally] are not independent from cities turning increasingly into speculation machines for the profit of a happy few. It is basically these systemic contradictions that must be addressed before we resort to more isolationist ideas that would intensify the urban-rural political divide. The bottom line is not whether a contemporary Hanse-esque federation is possible, it probably is; but whether it is actually desirable.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"The Hanseatic League is not well known, and today it lives on most prominently in the name of the German national airline Lufthansa, literally the 'Hansa of the skies', whose planes you can look out of – and down towards the Hanseatic cities – on the short journeys between mainland Europe and Britain. The letters HH on the number plates of cars in Hamburg stand for Hansestadt Hamburg: another proud little memory of this hidden history. \n\n In the traumatised atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain, it is worth remembering the Hanseatic League. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity.",
"Despite some of Britain's Leave voters longing to inhabit a fantastical realm immune to foreign influence, the reality is patently very different to that. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. \n\n The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. Merchants who wanted to buy and sell and travel were taking the lead at a time when nation states were not fit for purpose: in the case of England or Denmark, leadership was too centralised and authoritarian, while in German-speaking lands a nation had yet to be formed.",
"There was a kind of proto-democracy at work. Professor Rainer Postel, of the Bundeswehr Universität (Germany's equivalent of Sandhurst military academy), has described the Hanse as \"a community of interests without power politics\". As David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge points out, \"The lack of an elaborate superstructure was one of the things that made the Hanse work. Having said that, one should recognise that Lübeck in particular dominated the League for long periods.\"",
"What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc\nAs you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. You can see where the sea smacks into them, or where yawning estuaries unfold like funnels between green and brown city and choppy blue water. You can track the snaking rivers and canals that form unrepentant umbilical connections to the settlements set a little further inland. \n\n By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. From the middle of the 13th century, and for some 300 years after, many settlements dotted along this route formed the prosperous Hanseatic League, a European trading confederation of market towns, before the rise of the nation state led to its dissolution.",
"So how about a new Hanseatic League? I ask Benjamin Barber, senior fellow at New York's Fordham University. \"I believe you will find there is a new Hanse,\" he says, \"that constituted itself about 10 or 11 years ago – including many of the original Hanseatic League cities.\" Barber is founder of the Global Parliament of Mayors, which he describes as a kind of Hanse of all cities, not just European ports, which will give cities a global urban voice and a common platform for action. The parliament convenes for its inaugural session in The Hague in September.",
"London's voters largely wanted to remain a part of the EU and to maintain the city's status as an entrepôt. There is clearly a widening chasm between urban and rural life at the heart of many nations. Visualisations of Austria's recent presidential election showed the issue clearly: the country's cities voted for the Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, while the the rural districts went for right-wing nationalist Norbert Hofer (whose legal challenge to the close result has resulted in a rerun being announced for October). And in the USA in November, it's likely that Trump voters will also come from rural areas and Clinton voters from the cities. City dwellers are finding ever more in common with the world's other city dwellers than with their countrymen 50 miles down the road.",
"\"Cities both exist within nations and transcend nations. Their power lies not just in the extent of\nde jure\nautonomy ceded or granted by 'higher' levels of government,\" says Bruce Katz, centennial scholar at the Washington DC thinktank the Brookings Institution. \"Rather, cities have de facto power, the result of larger market and demographic forces and environmental imperatives that value proximity, density, connectivity and quality. Smart nations will see themselves as partners to their cities, setting strong platforms for urban prosperity and devolving powers, where appropriate, to give cities the flexibility to perform… Dumb nations will continue to dictate from above, stifling market activity and urban potential.\"",
"\"Things change,\" says LSE's Professor Tony Travers. \"[King's Lynn] used to be very highly connected, but the economy moved on and left those trading ports like it in a different situation.\" Take, for example, the pivot towards the New World, with which trade made more sense from the west-coast ports like Bristol and Liverpool. While these boomed between the 1600s and 1800s, the Hanseatic ports declined and then died out. \"One of the things that's interesting about the [referendum] decision is that it begs all sorts of questions about the future of the UK and its relationship with Europe; and of London and Scotland and their relationship with the rest of Europe. When the EU began as the EEC in the mid-20th century some saw it as a modern day Hanse. Now the EU seems to be waning, perhaps its successor will have to ape the Hanse even more.\"",
"Lübeck was where the merchants most often met; and where renewed recent interest in the Hanse eventually led to Angela Merkel cutting the ribbon at the brand new European Hansemuseum in the city last year.",
"Germany today – multicultural, economically and culturally motoring, free and fair – seems like the ideal model for a modern European nation state. And part of that success lies in the gravitas the country has given to its Hanseatic history. For Germany is not a top-down country with one city unhealthily dominating as with France and Britain (regional economic inequalities have plagued Britain since the painful de-industrialisation of the 1980s, especially in the north). Germany respects federalism and its cities exist on a much more even keel. The way that Cologne, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart all bring varied economic and cultural character to the party is pure Hanse. The former Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen have city state status within Germany, putting them on the same level as a whole region or 'land' like Bavaria or Brandenburg.",
"Back in Britain, one of history's little oddities pops up on the east coast. Boston in Lincolnshire and King's Lynn in Norfolk were both forward-looking Hanseatic League towns that traded with far-flung ports and hosted foreign merchants. King's Lynn contains the only extantHanse House left in Britain (London's was knocked down to build Cannon Street Station in the 1800s). Yet in the EU referendum these two areas polled among the highest Leave votes of anywhere in the country.",
"But could we go further? Could cities like London declare independence from the UK? London's economy is larger than that of Scotland and Wales combined. \"States will not vanish or surrender their waning sovereignty,\" says Benjamin Barber. \"But cities will meet across frontiers and work together to solve problems. The objective is not an independent London or New York, but interdependent cities collaborating globally. And that is happening.\"",
"Of course, cities seceding from their nation states would provide huge headaches for countries whose biggest economic driver had been removed – as well as likely deepening ideological differences between city and rural dwellers. Moreover, cities need the food the countryside provides. \n\n Yet for all the potential pitfalls, city states can thrive. Look at Singapore, Hong Kong, or de facto city states like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. One of the most telling characteristics about these four – all of course former British imperial enclaves – is that they are utterly outward looking. To return to the sky analogy, it's the airlines of each of these (Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Emirates and Etihad) that open up each respective city to the world in the way that the machinery of the Hanse did on the Baltic Sea 600 years ago. And it's the unions each city makes with other places that also look thoroughly Hanseatic in character. A model for modern city states, then. But is it one that we want?",
"We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. Yet look at any city of Mitteleuropa and you'll see the many different names it has had as borders and regimes have shifted with the sands of time. Nations come and go. Cities endure. \n\n \"It is often said that great cities survived great empires,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam-based online publishing platform Amateur Cities. \"So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong.\"",
"The cities involved in the Hanseatic League are found along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and slightly inland too. The League stretched from Novgorod in the east – in what is now Russia – to London in the west. Tallinn, Riga, Gdańsk, Visby, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Stockholm, Bergen, Kiel, Rostock, Dinant, Bruges, Turku, Groningen, Hanover, Wroclaw, Kaliningrad: all were involved at different stages in the Hanse's history, which ran on into the 1500s."
],
[
"\"Cities both exist within nations and transcend nations. Their power lies not just in the extent of\nde jure\nautonomy ceded or granted by 'higher' levels of government,\" says Bruce Katz, centennial scholar at the Washington DC thinktank the Brookings Institution. \"Rather, cities have de facto power, the result of larger market and demographic forces and environmental imperatives that value proximity, density, connectivity and quality. Smart nations will see themselves as partners to their cities, setting strong platforms for urban prosperity and devolving powers, where appropriate, to give cities the flexibility to perform… Dumb nations will continue to dictate from above, stifling market activity and urban potential.\"",
"But could we go further? Could cities like London declare independence from the UK? London's economy is larger than that of Scotland and Wales combined. \"States will not vanish or surrender their waning sovereignty,\" says Benjamin Barber. \"But cities will meet across frontiers and work together to solve problems. The objective is not an independent London or New York, but interdependent cities collaborating globally. And that is happening.\"",
"Of course, cities seceding from their nation states would provide huge headaches for countries whose biggest economic driver had been removed – as well as likely deepening ideological differences between city and rural dwellers. Moreover, cities need the food the countryside provides. \n\n Yet for all the potential pitfalls, city states can thrive. Look at Singapore, Hong Kong, or de facto city states like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. One of the most telling characteristics about these four – all of course former British imperial enclaves – is that they are utterly outward looking. To return to the sky analogy, it's the airlines of each of these (Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Emirates and Etihad) that open up each respective city to the world in the way that the machinery of the Hanse did on the Baltic Sea 600 years ago. And it's the unions each city makes with other places that also look thoroughly Hanseatic in character. A model for modern city states, then. But is it one that we want?",
"We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. Yet look at any city of Mitteleuropa and you'll see the many different names it has had as borders and regimes have shifted with the sands of time. Nations come and go. Cities endure. \n\n \"It is often said that great cities survived great empires,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam-based online publishing platform Amateur Cities. \"So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong.\"",
"So how about a new Hanseatic League? I ask Benjamin Barber, senior fellow at New York's Fordham University. \"I believe you will find there is a new Hanse,\" he says, \"that constituted itself about 10 or 11 years ago – including many of the original Hanseatic League cities.\" Barber is founder of the Global Parliament of Mayors, which he describes as a kind of Hanse of all cities, not just European ports, which will give cities a global urban voice and a common platform for action. The parliament convenes for its inaugural session in The Hague in September.",
"For all its complex beauty, life can ultimately be reduced to a series of binary options: yes or no, stick or twist, in or out, innovation or stagnation, modernity or mythology. The referendum result was disappointing for many progressive observers because it felt like a step backwards. Despite being primarily about trade monopolies and money making, the Hanse was, in its way, an early stab at stepping forwards: it encompassed internationalism, rational thought, free trade, loose democratic institutions and, most crucially of all, movement. \n\n The future, for many observers, can only be understood in terms of the free movement of people, capital, goods and ideas. It is this necessary movement, and its possible curtailment, that could be the spark that leads to cities like London to seek independence and parity with other world cities – rather than with the rural hinterlands of Britain.",
"London's voters largely wanted to remain a part of the EU and to maintain the city's status as an entrepôt. There is clearly a widening chasm between urban and rural life at the heart of many nations. Visualisations of Austria's recent presidential election showed the issue clearly: the country's cities voted for the Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, while the the rural districts went for right-wing nationalist Norbert Hofer (whose legal challenge to the close result has resulted in a rerun being announced for October). And in the USA in November, it's likely that Trump voters will also come from rural areas and Clinton voters from the cities. City dwellers are finding ever more in common with the world's other city dwellers than with their countrymen 50 miles down the road.",
"\"The Hanseatic League was not always accepted by local citizens,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, \"because the privileges granted to the Hanse merchants were forcing local traders out of competition and many cities took steps to eliminate them. The reasons the countryside is turning to the right [globally] are not independent from cities turning increasingly into speculation machines for the profit of a happy few. It is basically these systemic contradictions that must be addressed before we resort to more isolationist ideas that would intensify the urban-rural political divide. The bottom line is not whether a contemporary Hanse-esque federation is possible, it probably is; but whether it is actually desirable.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc\nAs you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. You can see where the sea smacks into them, or where yawning estuaries unfold like funnels between green and brown city and choppy blue water. You can track the snaking rivers and canals that form unrepentant umbilical connections to the settlements set a little further inland. \n\n By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. From the middle of the 13th century, and for some 300 years after, many settlements dotted along this route formed the prosperous Hanseatic League, a European trading confederation of market towns, before the rise of the nation state led to its dissolution.",
"Germany today – multicultural, economically and culturally motoring, free and fair – seems like the ideal model for a modern European nation state. And part of that success lies in the gravitas the country has given to its Hanseatic history. For Germany is not a top-down country with one city unhealthily dominating as with France and Britain (regional economic inequalities have plagued Britain since the painful de-industrialisation of the 1980s, especially in the north). Germany respects federalism and its cities exist on a much more even keel. The way that Cologne, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart all bring varied economic and cultural character to the party is pure Hanse. The former Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen have city state status within Germany, putting them on the same level as a whole region or 'land' like Bavaria or Brandenburg.",
"The Hanseatic League is not well known, and today it lives on most prominently in the name of the German national airline Lufthansa, literally the 'Hansa of the skies', whose planes you can look out of – and down towards the Hanseatic cities – on the short journeys between mainland Europe and Britain. The letters HH on the number plates of cars in Hamburg stand for Hansestadt Hamburg: another proud little memory of this hidden history. \n\n In the traumatised atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain, it is worth remembering the Hanseatic League. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity.",
"Despite some of Britain's Leave voters longing to inhabit a fantastical realm immune to foreign influence, the reality is patently very different to that. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. \n\n The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. Merchants who wanted to buy and sell and travel were taking the lead at a time when nation states were not fit for purpose: in the case of England or Denmark, leadership was too centralised and authoritarian, while in German-speaking lands a nation had yet to be formed.",
"\"Things change,\" says LSE's Professor Tony Travers. \"[King's Lynn] used to be very highly connected, but the economy moved on and left those trading ports like it in a different situation.\" Take, for example, the pivot towards the New World, with which trade made more sense from the west-coast ports like Bristol and Liverpool. While these boomed between the 1600s and 1800s, the Hanseatic ports declined and then died out. \"One of the things that's interesting about the [referendum] decision is that it begs all sorts of questions about the future of the UK and its relationship with Europe; and of London and Scotland and their relationship with the rest of Europe. When the EU began as the EEC in the mid-20th century some saw it as a modern day Hanse. Now the EU seems to be waning, perhaps its successor will have to ape the Hanse even more.\"",
"There was a kind of proto-democracy at work. Professor Rainer Postel, of the Bundeswehr Universität (Germany's equivalent of Sandhurst military academy), has described the Hanse as \"a community of interests without power politics\". As David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge points out, \"The lack of an elaborate superstructure was one of the things that made the Hanse work. Having said that, one should recognise that Lübeck in particular dominated the League for long periods.\"",
"The League covered lands that today find themselves a part of the modern nations of Finland, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. It was a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking in the days when communications consisted of ink and paper and the only viable method of travel was by ship. Wood, fur, wool, silver, herring, cod and salt were the main items traded. But what was also exchanged was knowledge. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'. There was no maniacal ruler overseeing things – merchants met and talked. They raised armies and waged war against kings who threatened their businesses and their freedoms and their peace.",
"The cities involved in the Hanseatic League are found along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and slightly inland too. The League stretched from Novgorod in the east – in what is now Russia – to London in the west. Tallinn, Riga, Gdańsk, Visby, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Stockholm, Bergen, Kiel, Rostock, Dinant, Bruges, Turku, Groningen, Hanover, Wroclaw, Kaliningrad: all were involved at different stages in the Hanse's history, which ran on into the 1500s.",
"Back in Britain, one of history's little oddities pops up on the east coast. Boston in Lincolnshire and King's Lynn in Norfolk were both forward-looking Hanseatic League towns that traded with far-flung ports and hosted foreign merchants. King's Lynn contains the only extantHanse House left in Britain (London's was knocked down to build Cannon Street Station in the 1800s). Yet in the EU referendum these two areas polled among the highest Leave votes of anywhere in the country.",
"Lübeck was where the merchants most often met; and where renewed recent interest in the Hanse eventually led to Angela Merkel cutting the ribbon at the brand new European Hansemuseum in the city last year."
],
[
"\"Cities both exist within nations and transcend nations. Their power lies not just in the extent of\nde jure\nautonomy ceded or granted by 'higher' levels of government,\" says Bruce Katz, centennial scholar at the Washington DC thinktank the Brookings Institution. \"Rather, cities have de facto power, the result of larger market and demographic forces and environmental imperatives that value proximity, density, connectivity and quality. Smart nations will see themselves as partners to their cities, setting strong platforms for urban prosperity and devolving powers, where appropriate, to give cities the flexibility to perform… Dumb nations will continue to dictate from above, stifling market activity and urban potential.\"",
"We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. Yet look at any city of Mitteleuropa and you'll see the many different names it has had as borders and regimes have shifted with the sands of time. Nations come and go. Cities endure. \n\n \"It is often said that great cities survived great empires,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam-based online publishing platform Amateur Cities. \"So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong.\"",
"Of course, cities seceding from their nation states would provide huge headaches for countries whose biggest economic driver had been removed – as well as likely deepening ideological differences between city and rural dwellers. Moreover, cities need the food the countryside provides. \n\n Yet for all the potential pitfalls, city states can thrive. Look at Singapore, Hong Kong, or de facto city states like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. One of the most telling characteristics about these four – all of course former British imperial enclaves – is that they are utterly outward looking. To return to the sky analogy, it's the airlines of each of these (Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Emirates and Etihad) that open up each respective city to the world in the way that the machinery of the Hanse did on the Baltic Sea 600 years ago. And it's the unions each city makes with other places that also look thoroughly Hanseatic in character. A model for modern city states, then. But is it one that we want?",
"So how about a new Hanseatic League? I ask Benjamin Barber, senior fellow at New York's Fordham University. \"I believe you will find there is a new Hanse,\" he says, \"that constituted itself about 10 or 11 years ago – including many of the original Hanseatic League cities.\" Barber is founder of the Global Parliament of Mayors, which he describes as a kind of Hanse of all cities, not just European ports, which will give cities a global urban voice and a common platform for action. The parliament convenes for its inaugural session in The Hague in September.",
"For all its complex beauty, life can ultimately be reduced to a series of binary options: yes or no, stick or twist, in or out, innovation or stagnation, modernity or mythology. The referendum result was disappointing for many progressive observers because it felt like a step backwards. Despite being primarily about trade monopolies and money making, the Hanse was, in its way, an early stab at stepping forwards: it encompassed internationalism, rational thought, free trade, loose democratic institutions and, most crucially of all, movement. \n\n The future, for many observers, can only be understood in terms of the free movement of people, capital, goods and ideas. It is this necessary movement, and its possible curtailment, that could be the spark that leads to cities like London to seek independence and parity with other world cities – rather than with the rural hinterlands of Britain.",
"What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc\nAs you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. You can see where the sea smacks into them, or where yawning estuaries unfold like funnels between green and brown city and choppy blue water. You can track the snaking rivers and canals that form unrepentant umbilical connections to the settlements set a little further inland. \n\n By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. From the middle of the 13th century, and for some 300 years after, many settlements dotted along this route formed the prosperous Hanseatic League, a European trading confederation of market towns, before the rise of the nation state led to its dissolution.",
"But could we go further? Could cities like London declare independence from the UK? London's economy is larger than that of Scotland and Wales combined. \"States will not vanish or surrender their waning sovereignty,\" says Benjamin Barber. \"But cities will meet across frontiers and work together to solve problems. The objective is not an independent London or New York, but interdependent cities collaborating globally. And that is happening.\"",
"Germany today – multicultural, economically and culturally motoring, free and fair – seems like the ideal model for a modern European nation state. And part of that success lies in the gravitas the country has given to its Hanseatic history. For Germany is not a top-down country with one city unhealthily dominating as with France and Britain (regional economic inequalities have plagued Britain since the painful de-industrialisation of the 1980s, especially in the north). Germany respects federalism and its cities exist on a much more even keel. The way that Cologne, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart all bring varied economic and cultural character to the party is pure Hanse. The former Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen have city state status within Germany, putting them on the same level as a whole region or 'land' like Bavaria or Brandenburg.",
"London's voters largely wanted to remain a part of the EU and to maintain the city's status as an entrepôt. There is clearly a widening chasm between urban and rural life at the heart of many nations. Visualisations of Austria's recent presidential election showed the issue clearly: the country's cities voted for the Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, while the the rural districts went for right-wing nationalist Norbert Hofer (whose legal challenge to the close result has resulted in a rerun being announced for October). And in the USA in November, it's likely that Trump voters will also come from rural areas and Clinton voters from the cities. City dwellers are finding ever more in common with the world's other city dwellers than with their countrymen 50 miles down the road.",
"The Hanseatic League is not well known, and today it lives on most prominently in the name of the German national airline Lufthansa, literally the 'Hansa of the skies', whose planes you can look out of – and down towards the Hanseatic cities – on the short journeys between mainland Europe and Britain. The letters HH on the number plates of cars in Hamburg stand for Hansestadt Hamburg: another proud little memory of this hidden history. \n\n In the traumatised atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain, it is worth remembering the Hanseatic League. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity.",
"\"Things change,\" says LSE's Professor Tony Travers. \"[King's Lynn] used to be very highly connected, but the economy moved on and left those trading ports like it in a different situation.\" Take, for example, the pivot towards the New World, with which trade made more sense from the west-coast ports like Bristol and Liverpool. While these boomed between the 1600s and 1800s, the Hanseatic ports declined and then died out. \"One of the things that's interesting about the [referendum] decision is that it begs all sorts of questions about the future of the UK and its relationship with Europe; and of London and Scotland and their relationship with the rest of Europe. When the EU began as the EEC in the mid-20th century some saw it as a modern day Hanse. Now the EU seems to be waning, perhaps its successor will have to ape the Hanse even more.\"",
"\"The Hanseatic League was not always accepted by local citizens,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, \"because the privileges granted to the Hanse merchants were forcing local traders out of competition and many cities took steps to eliminate them. The reasons the countryside is turning to the right [globally] are not independent from cities turning increasingly into speculation machines for the profit of a happy few. It is basically these systemic contradictions that must be addressed before we resort to more isolationist ideas that would intensify the urban-rural political divide. The bottom line is not whether a contemporary Hanse-esque federation is possible, it probably is; but whether it is actually desirable.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"Despite some of Britain's Leave voters longing to inhabit a fantastical realm immune to foreign influence, the reality is patently very different to that. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. \n\n The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. Merchants who wanted to buy and sell and travel were taking the lead at a time when nation states were not fit for purpose: in the case of England or Denmark, leadership was too centralised and authoritarian, while in German-speaking lands a nation had yet to be formed.",
"Lübeck was where the merchants most often met; and where renewed recent interest in the Hanse eventually led to Angela Merkel cutting the ribbon at the brand new European Hansemuseum in the city last year.",
"The League covered lands that today find themselves a part of the modern nations of Finland, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. It was a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking in the days when communications consisted of ink and paper and the only viable method of travel was by ship. Wood, fur, wool, silver, herring, cod and salt were the main items traded. But what was also exchanged was knowledge. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'. There was no maniacal ruler overseeing things – merchants met and talked. They raised armies and waged war against kings who threatened their businesses and their freedoms and their peace.",
"The cities involved in the Hanseatic League are found along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and slightly inland too. The League stretched from Novgorod in the east – in what is now Russia – to London in the west. Tallinn, Riga, Gdańsk, Visby, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Stockholm, Bergen, Kiel, Rostock, Dinant, Bruges, Turku, Groningen, Hanover, Wroclaw, Kaliningrad: all were involved at different stages in the Hanse's history, which ran on into the 1500s.",
"Back in Britain, one of history's little oddities pops up on the east coast. Boston in Lincolnshire and King's Lynn in Norfolk were both forward-looking Hanseatic League towns that traded with far-flung ports and hosted foreign merchants. King's Lynn contains the only extantHanse House left in Britain (London's was knocked down to build Cannon Street Station in the 1800s). Yet in the EU referendum these two areas polled among the highest Leave votes of anywhere in the country.",
"There was a kind of proto-democracy at work. Professor Rainer Postel, of the Bundeswehr Universität (Germany's equivalent of Sandhurst military academy), has described the Hanse as \"a community of interests without power politics\". As David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge points out, \"The lack of an elaborate superstructure was one of the things that made the Hanse work. Having said that, one should recognise that Lübeck in particular dominated the League for long periods.\""
],
[
"So how about a new Hanseatic League? I ask Benjamin Barber, senior fellow at New York's Fordham University. \"I believe you will find there is a new Hanse,\" he says, \"that constituted itself about 10 or 11 years ago – including many of the original Hanseatic League cities.\" Barber is founder of the Global Parliament of Mayors, which he describes as a kind of Hanse of all cities, not just European ports, which will give cities a global urban voice and a common platform for action. The parliament convenes for its inaugural session in The Hague in September.",
"There was a kind of proto-democracy at work. Professor Rainer Postel, of the Bundeswehr Universität (Germany's equivalent of Sandhurst military academy), has described the Hanse as \"a community of interests without power politics\". As David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge points out, \"The lack of an elaborate superstructure was one of the things that made the Hanse work. Having said that, one should recognise that Lübeck in particular dominated the League for long periods.\"",
"The cities involved in the Hanseatic League are found along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and slightly inland too. The League stretched from Novgorod in the east – in what is now Russia – to London in the west. Tallinn, Riga, Gdańsk, Visby, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Stockholm, Bergen, Kiel, Rostock, Dinant, Bruges, Turku, Groningen, Hanover, Wroclaw, Kaliningrad: all were involved at different stages in the Hanse's history, which ran on into the 1500s.",
"The Hanseatic League is not well known, and today it lives on most prominently in the name of the German national airline Lufthansa, literally the 'Hansa of the skies', whose planes you can look out of – and down towards the Hanseatic cities – on the short journeys between mainland Europe and Britain. The letters HH on the number plates of cars in Hamburg stand for Hansestadt Hamburg: another proud little memory of this hidden history. \n\n In the traumatised atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain, it is worth remembering the Hanseatic League. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity.",
"Despite some of Britain's Leave voters longing to inhabit a fantastical realm immune to foreign influence, the reality is patently very different to that. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. \n\n The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. Merchants who wanted to buy and sell and travel were taking the lead at a time when nation states were not fit for purpose: in the case of England or Denmark, leadership was too centralised and authoritarian, while in German-speaking lands a nation had yet to be formed.",
"\"The Hanseatic League was not always accepted by local citizens,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, \"because the privileges granted to the Hanse merchants were forcing local traders out of competition and many cities took steps to eliminate them. The reasons the countryside is turning to the right [globally] are not independent from cities turning increasingly into speculation machines for the profit of a happy few. It is basically these systemic contradictions that must be addressed before we resort to more isolationist ideas that would intensify the urban-rural political divide. The bottom line is not whether a contemporary Hanse-esque federation is possible, it probably is; but whether it is actually desirable.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc\nAs you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. You can see where the sea smacks into them, or where yawning estuaries unfold like funnels between green and brown city and choppy blue water. You can track the snaking rivers and canals that form unrepentant umbilical connections to the settlements set a little further inland. \n\n By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. From the middle of the 13th century, and for some 300 years after, many settlements dotted along this route formed the prosperous Hanseatic League, a European trading confederation of market towns, before the rise of the nation state led to its dissolution.",
"Lübeck was where the merchants most often met; and where renewed recent interest in the Hanse eventually led to Angela Merkel cutting the ribbon at the brand new European Hansemuseum in the city last year.",
"Germany today – multicultural, economically and culturally motoring, free and fair – seems like the ideal model for a modern European nation state. And part of that success lies in the gravitas the country has given to its Hanseatic history. For Germany is not a top-down country with one city unhealthily dominating as with France and Britain (regional economic inequalities have plagued Britain since the painful de-industrialisation of the 1980s, especially in the north). Germany respects federalism and its cities exist on a much more even keel. The way that Cologne, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart all bring varied economic and cultural character to the party is pure Hanse. The former Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen have city state status within Germany, putting them on the same level as a whole region or 'land' like Bavaria or Brandenburg.",
"The League covered lands that today find themselves a part of the modern nations of Finland, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. It was a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking in the days when communications consisted of ink and paper and the only viable method of travel was by ship. Wood, fur, wool, silver, herring, cod and salt were the main items traded. But what was also exchanged was knowledge. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'. There was no maniacal ruler overseeing things – merchants met and talked. They raised armies and waged war against kings who threatened their businesses and their freedoms and their peace.",
"For all its complex beauty, life can ultimately be reduced to a series of binary options: yes or no, stick or twist, in or out, innovation or stagnation, modernity or mythology. The referendum result was disappointing for many progressive observers because it felt like a step backwards. Despite being primarily about trade monopolies and money making, the Hanse was, in its way, an early stab at stepping forwards: it encompassed internationalism, rational thought, free trade, loose democratic institutions and, most crucially of all, movement. \n\n The future, for many observers, can only be understood in terms of the free movement of people, capital, goods and ideas. It is this necessary movement, and its possible curtailment, that could be the spark that leads to cities like London to seek independence and parity with other world cities – rather than with the rural hinterlands of Britain.",
"\"Things change,\" says LSE's Professor Tony Travers. \"[King's Lynn] used to be very highly connected, but the economy moved on and left those trading ports like it in a different situation.\" Take, for example, the pivot towards the New World, with which trade made more sense from the west-coast ports like Bristol and Liverpool. While these boomed between the 1600s and 1800s, the Hanseatic ports declined and then died out. \"One of the things that's interesting about the [referendum] decision is that it begs all sorts of questions about the future of the UK and its relationship with Europe; and of London and Scotland and their relationship with the rest of Europe. When the EU began as the EEC in the mid-20th century some saw it as a modern day Hanse. Now the EU seems to be waning, perhaps its successor will have to ape the Hanse even more.\"",
"Back in Britain, one of history's little oddities pops up on the east coast. Boston in Lincolnshire and King's Lynn in Norfolk were both forward-looking Hanseatic League towns that traded with far-flung ports and hosted foreign merchants. King's Lynn contains the only extantHanse House left in Britain (London's was knocked down to build Cannon Street Station in the 1800s). Yet in the EU referendum these two areas polled among the highest Leave votes of anywhere in the country.",
"Of course, cities seceding from their nation states would provide huge headaches for countries whose biggest economic driver had been removed – as well as likely deepening ideological differences between city and rural dwellers. Moreover, cities need the food the countryside provides. \n\n Yet for all the potential pitfalls, city states can thrive. Look at Singapore, Hong Kong, or de facto city states like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. One of the most telling characteristics about these four – all of course former British imperial enclaves – is that they are utterly outward looking. To return to the sky analogy, it's the airlines of each of these (Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Emirates and Etihad) that open up each respective city to the world in the way that the machinery of the Hanse did on the Baltic Sea 600 years ago. And it's the unions each city makes with other places that also look thoroughly Hanseatic in character. A model for modern city states, then. But is it one that we want?",
"We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. Yet look at any city of Mitteleuropa and you'll see the many different names it has had as borders and regimes have shifted with the sands of time. Nations come and go. Cities endure. \n\n \"It is often said that great cities survived great empires,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam-based online publishing platform Amateur Cities. \"So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong.\"",
"\"Cities both exist within nations and transcend nations. Their power lies not just in the extent of\nde jure\nautonomy ceded or granted by 'higher' levels of government,\" says Bruce Katz, centennial scholar at the Washington DC thinktank the Brookings Institution. \"Rather, cities have de facto power, the result of larger market and demographic forces and environmental imperatives that value proximity, density, connectivity and quality. Smart nations will see themselves as partners to their cities, setting strong platforms for urban prosperity and devolving powers, where appropriate, to give cities the flexibility to perform… Dumb nations will continue to dictate from above, stifling market activity and urban potential.\"",
"But could we go further? Could cities like London declare independence from the UK? London's economy is larger than that of Scotland and Wales combined. \"States will not vanish or surrender their waning sovereignty,\" says Benjamin Barber. \"But cities will meet across frontiers and work together to solve problems. The objective is not an independent London or New York, but interdependent cities collaborating globally. And that is happening.\"",
"London's voters largely wanted to remain a part of the EU and to maintain the city's status as an entrepôt. There is clearly a widening chasm between urban and rural life at the heart of many nations. Visualisations of Austria's recent presidential election showed the issue clearly: the country's cities voted for the Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, while the the rural districts went for right-wing nationalist Norbert Hofer (whose legal challenge to the close result has resulted in a rerun being announced for October). And in the USA in November, it's likely that Trump voters will also come from rural areas and Clinton voters from the cities. City dwellers are finding ever more in common with the world's other city dwellers than with their countrymen 50 miles down the road."
],
[
"The cities involved in the Hanseatic League are found along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and slightly inland too. The League stretched from Novgorod in the east – in what is now Russia – to London in the west. Tallinn, Riga, Gdańsk, Visby, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Stockholm, Bergen, Kiel, Rostock, Dinant, Bruges, Turku, Groningen, Hanover, Wroclaw, Kaliningrad: all were involved at different stages in the Hanse's history, which ran on into the 1500s.",
"So how about a new Hanseatic League? I ask Benjamin Barber, senior fellow at New York's Fordham University. \"I believe you will find there is a new Hanse,\" he says, \"that constituted itself about 10 or 11 years ago – including many of the original Hanseatic League cities.\" Barber is founder of the Global Parliament of Mayors, which he describes as a kind of Hanse of all cities, not just European ports, which will give cities a global urban voice and a common platform for action. The parliament convenes for its inaugural session in The Hague in September.",
"There was a kind of proto-democracy at work. Professor Rainer Postel, of the Bundeswehr Universität (Germany's equivalent of Sandhurst military academy), has described the Hanse as \"a community of interests without power politics\". As David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge points out, \"The lack of an elaborate superstructure was one of the things that made the Hanse work. Having said that, one should recognise that Lübeck in particular dominated the League for long periods.\"",
"The Hanseatic League is not well known, and today it lives on most prominently in the name of the German national airline Lufthansa, literally the 'Hansa of the skies', whose planes you can look out of – and down towards the Hanseatic cities – on the short journeys between mainland Europe and Britain. The letters HH on the number plates of cars in Hamburg stand for Hansestadt Hamburg: another proud little memory of this hidden history. \n\n In the traumatised atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain, it is worth remembering the Hanseatic League. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity.",
"Despite some of Britain's Leave voters longing to inhabit a fantastical realm immune to foreign influence, the reality is patently very different to that. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. \n\n The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. Merchants who wanted to buy and sell and travel were taking the lead at a time when nation states were not fit for purpose: in the case of England or Denmark, leadership was too centralised and authoritarian, while in German-speaking lands a nation had yet to be formed.",
"For all its complex beauty, life can ultimately be reduced to a series of binary options: yes or no, stick or twist, in or out, innovation or stagnation, modernity or mythology. The referendum result was disappointing for many progressive observers because it felt like a step backwards. Despite being primarily about trade monopolies and money making, the Hanse was, in its way, an early stab at stepping forwards: it encompassed internationalism, rational thought, free trade, loose democratic institutions and, most crucially of all, movement. \n\n The future, for many observers, can only be understood in terms of the free movement of people, capital, goods and ideas. It is this necessary movement, and its possible curtailment, that could be the spark that leads to cities like London to seek independence and parity with other world cities – rather than with the rural hinterlands of Britain.",
"\"The Hanseatic League was not always accepted by local citizens,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, \"because the privileges granted to the Hanse merchants were forcing local traders out of competition and many cities took steps to eliminate them. The reasons the countryside is turning to the right [globally] are not independent from cities turning increasingly into speculation machines for the profit of a happy few. It is basically these systemic contradictions that must be addressed before we resort to more isolationist ideas that would intensify the urban-rural political divide. The bottom line is not whether a contemporary Hanse-esque federation is possible, it probably is; but whether it is actually desirable.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"The League covered lands that today find themselves a part of the modern nations of Finland, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. It was a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking in the days when communications consisted of ink and paper and the only viable method of travel was by ship. Wood, fur, wool, silver, herring, cod and salt were the main items traded. But what was also exchanged was knowledge. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'. There was no maniacal ruler overseeing things – merchants met and talked. They raised armies and waged war against kings who threatened their businesses and their freedoms and their peace.",
"Germany today – multicultural, economically and culturally motoring, free and fair – seems like the ideal model for a modern European nation state. And part of that success lies in the gravitas the country has given to its Hanseatic history. For Germany is not a top-down country with one city unhealthily dominating as with France and Britain (regional economic inequalities have plagued Britain since the painful de-industrialisation of the 1980s, especially in the north). Germany respects federalism and its cities exist on a much more even keel. The way that Cologne, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart all bring varied economic and cultural character to the party is pure Hanse. The former Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen have city state status within Germany, putting them on the same level as a whole region or 'land' like Bavaria or Brandenburg.",
"What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc\nAs you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. You can see where the sea smacks into them, or where yawning estuaries unfold like funnels between green and brown city and choppy blue water. You can track the snaking rivers and canals that form unrepentant umbilical connections to the settlements set a little further inland. \n\n By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. From the middle of the 13th century, and for some 300 years after, many settlements dotted along this route formed the prosperous Hanseatic League, a European trading confederation of market towns, before the rise of the nation state led to its dissolution.",
"Lübeck was where the merchants most often met; and where renewed recent interest in the Hanse eventually led to Angela Merkel cutting the ribbon at the brand new European Hansemuseum in the city last year.",
"Back in Britain, one of history's little oddities pops up on the east coast. Boston in Lincolnshire and King's Lynn in Norfolk were both forward-looking Hanseatic League towns that traded with far-flung ports and hosted foreign merchants. King's Lynn contains the only extantHanse House left in Britain (London's was knocked down to build Cannon Street Station in the 1800s). Yet in the EU referendum these two areas polled among the highest Leave votes of anywhere in the country.",
"\"Things change,\" says LSE's Professor Tony Travers. \"[King's Lynn] used to be very highly connected, but the economy moved on and left those trading ports like it in a different situation.\" Take, for example, the pivot towards the New World, with which trade made more sense from the west-coast ports like Bristol and Liverpool. While these boomed between the 1600s and 1800s, the Hanseatic ports declined and then died out. \"One of the things that's interesting about the [referendum] decision is that it begs all sorts of questions about the future of the UK and its relationship with Europe; and of London and Scotland and their relationship with the rest of Europe. When the EU began as the EEC in the mid-20th century some saw it as a modern day Hanse. Now the EU seems to be waning, perhaps its successor will have to ape the Hanse even more.\"",
"Of course, cities seceding from their nation states would provide huge headaches for countries whose biggest economic driver had been removed – as well as likely deepening ideological differences between city and rural dwellers. Moreover, cities need the food the countryside provides. \n\n Yet for all the potential pitfalls, city states can thrive. Look at Singapore, Hong Kong, or de facto city states like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. One of the most telling characteristics about these four – all of course former British imperial enclaves – is that they are utterly outward looking. To return to the sky analogy, it's the airlines of each of these (Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Emirates and Etihad) that open up each respective city to the world in the way that the machinery of the Hanse did on the Baltic Sea 600 years ago. And it's the unions each city makes with other places that also look thoroughly Hanseatic in character. A model for modern city states, then. But is it one that we want?",
"We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. Yet look at any city of Mitteleuropa and you'll see the many different names it has had as borders and regimes have shifted with the sands of time. Nations come and go. Cities endure. \n\n \"It is often said that great cities survived great empires,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam-based online publishing platform Amateur Cities. \"So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong.\"",
"\"Cities both exist within nations and transcend nations. Their power lies not just in the extent of\nde jure\nautonomy ceded or granted by 'higher' levels of government,\" says Bruce Katz, centennial scholar at the Washington DC thinktank the Brookings Institution. \"Rather, cities have de facto power, the result of larger market and demographic forces and environmental imperatives that value proximity, density, connectivity and quality. Smart nations will see themselves as partners to their cities, setting strong platforms for urban prosperity and devolving powers, where appropriate, to give cities the flexibility to perform… Dumb nations will continue to dictate from above, stifling market activity and urban potential.\"",
"But could we go further? Could cities like London declare independence from the UK? London's economy is larger than that of Scotland and Wales combined. \"States will not vanish or surrender their waning sovereignty,\" says Benjamin Barber. \"But cities will meet across frontiers and work together to solve problems. The objective is not an independent London or New York, but interdependent cities collaborating globally. And that is happening.\"",
"London's voters largely wanted to remain a part of the EU and to maintain the city's status as an entrepôt. There is clearly a widening chasm between urban and rural life at the heart of many nations. Visualisations of Austria's recent presidential election showed the issue clearly: the country's cities voted for the Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, while the the rural districts went for right-wing nationalist Norbert Hofer (whose legal challenge to the close result has resulted in a rerun being announced for October). And in the USA in November, it's likely that Trump voters will also come from rural areas and Clinton voters from the cities. City dwellers are finding ever more in common with the world's other city dwellers than with their countrymen 50 miles down the road."
],
[
"So how about a new Hanseatic League? I ask Benjamin Barber, senior fellow at New York's Fordham University. \"I believe you will find there is a new Hanse,\" he says, \"that constituted itself about 10 or 11 years ago – including many of the original Hanseatic League cities.\" Barber is founder of the Global Parliament of Mayors, which he describes as a kind of Hanse of all cities, not just European ports, which will give cities a global urban voice and a common platform for action. The parliament convenes for its inaugural session in The Hague in September.",
"For all its complex beauty, life can ultimately be reduced to a series of binary options: yes or no, stick or twist, in or out, innovation or stagnation, modernity or mythology. The referendum result was disappointing for many progressive observers because it felt like a step backwards. Despite being primarily about trade monopolies and money making, the Hanse was, in its way, an early stab at stepping forwards: it encompassed internationalism, rational thought, free trade, loose democratic institutions and, most crucially of all, movement. \n\n The future, for many observers, can only be understood in terms of the free movement of people, capital, goods and ideas. It is this necessary movement, and its possible curtailment, that could be the spark that leads to cities like London to seek independence and parity with other world cities – rather than with the rural hinterlands of Britain.",
"\"The Hanseatic League was not always accepted by local citizens,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, \"because the privileges granted to the Hanse merchants were forcing local traders out of competition and many cities took steps to eliminate them. The reasons the countryside is turning to the right [globally] are not independent from cities turning increasingly into speculation machines for the profit of a happy few. It is basically these systemic contradictions that must be addressed before we resort to more isolationist ideas that would intensify the urban-rural political divide. The bottom line is not whether a contemporary Hanse-esque federation is possible, it probably is; but whether it is actually desirable.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc\nAs you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. You can see where the sea smacks into them, or where yawning estuaries unfold like funnels between green and brown city and choppy blue water. You can track the snaking rivers and canals that form unrepentant umbilical connections to the settlements set a little further inland. \n\n By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. From the middle of the 13th century, and for some 300 years after, many settlements dotted along this route formed the prosperous Hanseatic League, a European trading confederation of market towns, before the rise of the nation state led to its dissolution.",
"Despite some of Britain's Leave voters longing to inhabit a fantastical realm immune to foreign influence, the reality is patently very different to that. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. \n\n The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. Merchants who wanted to buy and sell and travel were taking the lead at a time when nation states were not fit for purpose: in the case of England or Denmark, leadership was too centralised and authoritarian, while in German-speaking lands a nation had yet to be formed.",
"Of course, cities seceding from their nation states would provide huge headaches for countries whose biggest economic driver had been removed – as well as likely deepening ideological differences between city and rural dwellers. Moreover, cities need the food the countryside provides. \n\n Yet for all the potential pitfalls, city states can thrive. Look at Singapore, Hong Kong, or de facto city states like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. One of the most telling characteristics about these four – all of course former British imperial enclaves – is that they are utterly outward looking. To return to the sky analogy, it's the airlines of each of these (Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Emirates and Etihad) that open up each respective city to the world in the way that the machinery of the Hanse did on the Baltic Sea 600 years ago. And it's the unions each city makes with other places that also look thoroughly Hanseatic in character. A model for modern city states, then. But is it one that we want?",
"The Hanseatic League is not well known, and today it lives on most prominently in the name of the German national airline Lufthansa, literally the 'Hansa of the skies', whose planes you can look out of – and down towards the Hanseatic cities – on the short journeys between mainland Europe and Britain. The letters HH on the number plates of cars in Hamburg stand for Hansestadt Hamburg: another proud little memory of this hidden history. \n\n In the traumatised atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain, it is worth remembering the Hanseatic League. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity.",
"Germany today – multicultural, economically and culturally motoring, free and fair – seems like the ideal model for a modern European nation state. And part of that success lies in the gravitas the country has given to its Hanseatic history. For Germany is not a top-down country with one city unhealthily dominating as with France and Britain (regional economic inequalities have plagued Britain since the painful de-industrialisation of the 1980s, especially in the north). Germany respects federalism and its cities exist on a much more even keel. The way that Cologne, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart all bring varied economic and cultural character to the party is pure Hanse. The former Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen have city state status within Germany, putting them on the same level as a whole region or 'land' like Bavaria or Brandenburg.",
"\"Things change,\" says LSE's Professor Tony Travers. \"[King's Lynn] used to be very highly connected, but the economy moved on and left those trading ports like it in a different situation.\" Take, for example, the pivot towards the New World, with which trade made more sense from the west-coast ports like Bristol and Liverpool. While these boomed between the 1600s and 1800s, the Hanseatic ports declined and then died out. \"One of the things that's interesting about the [referendum] decision is that it begs all sorts of questions about the future of the UK and its relationship with Europe; and of London and Scotland and their relationship with the rest of Europe. When the EU began as the EEC in the mid-20th century some saw it as a modern day Hanse. Now the EU seems to be waning, perhaps its successor will have to ape the Hanse even more.\"",
"There was a kind of proto-democracy at work. Professor Rainer Postel, of the Bundeswehr Universität (Germany's equivalent of Sandhurst military academy), has described the Hanse as \"a community of interests without power politics\". As David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge points out, \"The lack of an elaborate superstructure was one of the things that made the Hanse work. Having said that, one should recognise that Lübeck in particular dominated the League for long periods.\"",
"The League covered lands that today find themselves a part of the modern nations of Finland, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. It was a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking in the days when communications consisted of ink and paper and the only viable method of travel was by ship. Wood, fur, wool, silver, herring, cod and salt were the main items traded. But what was also exchanged was knowledge. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'. There was no maniacal ruler overseeing things – merchants met and talked. They raised armies and waged war against kings who threatened their businesses and their freedoms and their peace.",
"The cities involved in the Hanseatic League are found along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and slightly inland too. The League stretched from Novgorod in the east – in what is now Russia – to London in the west. Tallinn, Riga, Gdańsk, Visby, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Stockholm, Bergen, Kiel, Rostock, Dinant, Bruges, Turku, Groningen, Hanover, Wroclaw, Kaliningrad: all were involved at different stages in the Hanse's history, which ran on into the 1500s.",
"Lübeck was where the merchants most often met; and where renewed recent interest in the Hanse eventually led to Angela Merkel cutting the ribbon at the brand new European Hansemuseum in the city last year.",
"\"Cities both exist within nations and transcend nations. Their power lies not just in the extent of\nde jure\nautonomy ceded or granted by 'higher' levels of government,\" says Bruce Katz, centennial scholar at the Washington DC thinktank the Brookings Institution. \"Rather, cities have de facto power, the result of larger market and demographic forces and environmental imperatives that value proximity, density, connectivity and quality. Smart nations will see themselves as partners to their cities, setting strong platforms for urban prosperity and devolving powers, where appropriate, to give cities the flexibility to perform… Dumb nations will continue to dictate from above, stifling market activity and urban potential.\"",
"Back in Britain, one of history's little oddities pops up on the east coast. Boston in Lincolnshire and King's Lynn in Norfolk were both forward-looking Hanseatic League towns that traded with far-flung ports and hosted foreign merchants. King's Lynn contains the only extantHanse House left in Britain (London's was knocked down to build Cannon Street Station in the 1800s). Yet in the EU referendum these two areas polled among the highest Leave votes of anywhere in the country.",
"We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. Yet look at any city of Mitteleuropa and you'll see the many different names it has had as borders and regimes have shifted with the sands of time. Nations come and go. Cities endure. \n\n \"It is often said that great cities survived great empires,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam-based online publishing platform Amateur Cities. \"So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong.\"",
"But could we go further? Could cities like London declare independence from the UK? London's economy is larger than that of Scotland and Wales combined. \"States will not vanish or surrender their waning sovereignty,\" says Benjamin Barber. \"But cities will meet across frontiers and work together to solve problems. The objective is not an independent London or New York, but interdependent cities collaborating globally. And that is happening.\"",
"London's voters largely wanted to remain a part of the EU and to maintain the city's status as an entrepôt. There is clearly a widening chasm between urban and rural life at the heart of many nations. Visualisations of Austria's recent presidential election showed the issue clearly: the country's cities voted for the Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, while the the rural districts went for right-wing nationalist Norbert Hofer (whose legal challenge to the close result has resulted in a rerun being announced for October). And in the USA in November, it's likely that Trump voters will also come from rural areas and Clinton voters from the cities. City dwellers are finding ever more in common with the world's other city dwellers than with their countrymen 50 miles down the road."
]
] |
valid
|
61285
|
[
"How do the Boyars view the Aga Kagans?",
"Which is the best adjective to describe the Corp's approach to governance of the planet?",
"What is the Boyar's ultimate goal for Flamme?",
"According to Retief what would happen if the Corps did not get involved in the dispute between the Boyars and the Aga Kagans?",
"How does Georges feel about the Aga Kagans?",
"Why does Retief want Georges to accompany him to see the leader of the Aga Kagans?",
"How does the terraforming technology work?",
"Which of the following is not true about Retief?",
"What is the style of the Corps' note to the Aga Kaga?",
"What does the Aga Kaga reveal as his people's strategy for taking over planet?"
] |
[
[
"They view them as allies in colonizing Flamme",
"They view them as invading opportunists",
"They view them as old neighbors whom they dislike but tolerate",
"They view them as a threat due to their highly advanced technology"
],
[
"Erratic",
"Aggressive",
"Bureaucratic",
"Efficient"
],
[
"To destroy the planet before the Aga Kagans can take it over",
"To transform the planet into a place that can support life and grow crops",
"To cede control of the planet to the Aga Kagans",
"To strip the planet of its natural resources via mining"
],
[
"The Aga Kagans would leave Flamme to find a better planet",
"The Boyars would create a treaty with the Aga Kagans without the Corps' approval",
"The Aga Kagans would enslave the Boyars",
"The Boyars and the Aga Kagans would go to war"
],
[
"He thinks they are uncivilized thieves",
"He thinks they are a primitive people who are easily manipulated",
"He respects them for their advanced technology and wisdom",
"He feels that they are misunderstood heroes"
],
[
"He thinks that Georges' terraforming technology will appeal to the Aga Kagans' economic interests",
"He thinks that Georges will remind the Aga Kagan that if they don't cooperate, there will be consequences",
"He thinks that Georges will be able to distract them while he destroys the Aga Kagans' technology",
"He thinks that Georges will win them over with his charisma"
],
[
"It instantly transforms bare planets into planets that can support life",
"It infects organisms on the planet with a virus that changes their DNA to make them more suitable for human consumption",
"It can only work on land that has previously contained life",
"It follows ecological processes to slowly transform barren land into arable land over time"
],
[
"He understands the Aga Kagan's language",
"He understands the Aga Kagan's culture well",
"He does not believe that diplomacy is effective",
"He is familiar with the Aga Kagan's custom of speaking in proverbs"
],
[
"Direct",
"Bellicose",
"Informal",
"Verbose"
],
[
"They will win over the current residents of the planets using propaganda",
"They will abolish the Corps so they can take over planets without the Corps' interference",
"They will occupy a whole planet over night",
"They will claim a little bit of land at a time to slowly grow their territory"
]
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"The Aga Kaga looked startled. \"Soft? I can tie a knot in an iron bar\n as big as your thumb.\" He popped a grape into his mouth. \"As for the\n rest, your pious views about the virtues of hard labor are as childish\n as my advisors' faith in the advantages of primitive plumbing. As for\n myself, I am a realist. If two monkeys want the same banana, in the end\n one will have it, and the other will cry morality. The days of my years\n are numbered, praise be to God. While they last, I hope to eat well,\n hunt well, fight well and take my share of pleasure. I leave to others\n the arid satisfactions of self-denial and other perversions.\"\n\n\n \"You admit you're here to grab our land, then,\" Georges said. \"That's\n the damnedest piece of bare-faced aggression—\"",
"\"I've had some unhappy experiences with strangers,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n \"It is written in the sands that all strangers are kin. Still, he who\n visits rarely is a welcome guest. Be seated.\"\nIII\n\n\n Handmaidens brought cushions, giggled and fled. Retief and Georges\n settled themselves comfortably. The Aga Kaga eyed them in silence.\n\"We have come to bear tidings from the Corps Diplomatique\n Terrestrienne,\" Retief said solemnly. A perfumed slave girl offered\n grapes.\n\n\n \"Modest ignorance is better than boastful knowledge,\" the Aga Kaga\n said. \"What brings the CDT into the picture?\"\n\n\n \"The essay of the drunkard will be read in the tavern,\" Retief said.\n \"Whereas the words of kings....\"",
"\"Get out,\" Blackbeard ordered. The guards eyed the visitors, their\n drawn sabers catching sunlight. Retief and Georges stepped from the\n car onto rich rugs spread on the grass. They followed the ferocious\n gesture of the bearded man through the opening into a perfumed interior\n of luminous shadows. A heavy odor of incense hung in the air, and the\n strumming of stringed instruments laid a muted pattern of sound behind\n the decorations of gold and blue, silver and green. At the far end of\n the room, among a bevy of female slaves, a large and resplendently clad\n man with blue-black hair and a clean-shaven chin popped a grape into\n his mouth. He wiped his fingers negligently on a wisp of silk offered\n by a handmaiden, belched loudly and looked the callers over.\n\n\n Blackbeard cleared his throat. \"Down on your faces in the presence of\n the Exalted One, the Aga Kaga, ruler of East and West.\"",
"\"Isn't it the custom?\" the Aga Kaga smiled complacently.\n\n\n \"I have news for you, Stanley. In this instance, neck-wringing seems\n more in order than hand-wringing.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga frowned. \"Your manner—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind our manners!\" Georges blurted, standing. \"We don't need any\n lessons from goat-herding land-thieves!\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga's face darkened. \"You dare to speak thus to me, pig of a\n muck-grubber!\"",
"\"Come to the point,\" the Aga Kaga cut in. \"You're here to lodge a\n complaint that I'm invading territories to which someone else lays\n claim, is that it?\" He smiled broadly, offered dope-sticks and lit one.\n \"Well, I've been expecting a call. After all, it's what you gentlemen\n are paid for. Cheers.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency has a lucid way of putting things,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Call me Stanley,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"The other routine is just to\n please some of the old fools—I mean the more conservative members\n of my government. They're still gnawing their beards and kicking\n themselves because their ancestors dropped science in favor of alchemy\n and got themselves stranded in a cultural dead end. This charade is\n supposed to prove they were right all along. However, I've no time\n to waste in neurotic compensations. I have places to go and deeds to\n accomplish.\"",
"\"Call me Stanley.\" The Aga Kaga munched a grape. \"I merely face the\n realities of popular folk-lore. Let's be pragmatic; it's a matter of\n historical association. Some people can grab land and pass it off\n lightly as a moral duty; others are dubbed imperialist merely for\n holding onto their own. Unfair, you say. But that's life, my friends.\n And I shall continue to take every advantage of it.\"\n\n\n \"We'll fight you!\" Georges bellowed. He took another gulp of whiskey\n and slammed the glass down. \"You won't take this world without a\n struggle!\"\n\n\n \"Another?\" the Aga Kaga said, offering the bottle. Georges glowered as\n his glass was filled. The Aga Kaga held the glass up to the light.\n\n\n \"Excellent color, don't you agree?\" He turned his eyes on Georges.",
"\"Surely there's land enough on the world to afford space to both\n groups,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"A spirit of co-operation—\"\n\"The Boyars needed some co-operation sixty years ago,\" Retief said.\n \"They tried to get the Aga Kagans to join in and help them beat\n back some of the saurian wild life that liked to graze on people.\n The Corps didn't like the idea. They wanted to see an undisputed\n anti-Concordiatist enclave. The Aga Kagans didn't want to play, either.\n But now that the world is tamed, they're moving in.\"\n\n\n \"The exigencies of diplomacy require a flexible policy—\"\n\n\n \"I want a firm assurance of Corps support to take back to Flamme,\"\n Retief said. \"The Boyars are a little naive. They don't understand\n diplomatic triple-speak. They just want to hold onto the homes they've\n made out of a wasteland.\"",
"The three horsemen pulled up in a churn of chaff and a clatter of\n pebbles. Georges coughed, batting a hand at the settling dust. Retief\n peeled the cigar unhurriedly, sniffed, at it and thumbed it alight. He\n drew at it, puffed out a cloud of smoke and glanced casually at the\n trio of Aga Kagan cavaliers.\n\n\n \"Peace be with you,\" he intoned in accent-free Kagan. \"May your shadows\n never grow less.\"\nThe leader of the three, a hawk-faced man with a heavy beard,\n unlimbered his rifle. He fingered it, frowning ferociously.\n\n\n \"Have no fear,\" Retief said, smiling graciously. \"He who comes as a\n guest enjoys perfect safety.\"\n\n\n A smooth-faced member of the threesome barked an oath and leveled his\n rifle at Retief.",
"\"At first glance,\" Retief said, \"it looks as though the places are\n already occupied, and the deeds are illegal.\"\nThe Aga Kaga guffawed. \"For a diplomat, you speak plainly, Retief. Have\n another drink.\" He poured, eyeing Georges. \"What of M. Duror? How does\n he feel about it?\"\n\n\n Georges took a thoughtful swallow of whiskey. \"Not bad,\" he said. \"But\n not quite good enough to cover the odor of goats.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga snorted. \"I thought the goats were overdoing it a bit\n myself,\" he said. \"Still, the graybeards insisted. And I need their\n support.\"\n\n\n \"Also,\" Georges said distinctly, \"I think you're soft. You lie around\n letting women wait on you, while your betters are out doing an honest\n day's work.\"",
"A bearded goat eyed the Boyar Chef sardonically, jaw working. \"Look at\n that long-nosed son!\" The goat gave a derisive bleat and took another\n mouthful of ripe grain.\n\n\n \"Did you see that?\" Georges yelled. \"They've trained the son of a—\"\n\n\n \"Chin up, Georges,\" Retief said. \"We'll take up the goat problem along\n with the rest.\"\n\n\n \"I'll murder 'em!\"\n\n\n \"Hold it, Georges. Look over there.\"",
"\"To praise a man for what he does not possess is to make him appear\n foolish,\" Retief said. \"These are the lands of the Boyars. But enough\n of these pleasantries. We seek audience with your ruler.\"\n\n\n \"You may address me as 'Exalted One',\" the leader said. \"Now dismount\n from that steed of Shaitan.\"\n\n\n \"It is written, if you need anything from a dog, call him 'sir',\"\n Retief said. \"I must decline to impute canine ancestry to a guest. Now\n you may conduct us to your headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Enough of your insolence!\" The bearded man cocked his rifle. \"I could\n blow your heads off!\"\n\n\n \"The hen has feathers, but it does not fly,\" Retief said. \"We have\n asked for escort. A slave must be beaten with a stick; for a free man,\n a hint is enough.\"",
"\"You mock me, pale one. I warn you—\"\n\n\n \"Only love makes me weep,\" Retief said. \"I laugh at hatred.\"\n\n\n \"Get out of the car!\"\n\n\n Retief puffed at his cigar, eyeing the Aga Kagan cheerfully. The youth\n in the rear moved forward, teeth bared.\n\n\n \"Never give in to the fool, lest he say, 'He fears me,'\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"I cannot restrain my men in the face of your insults,\" the bearded Aga\n Kagan roared. \"These hens of mine have feathers—and talons as well!\"\n\n\n \"When God would destroy an ant, he gives him wings,\" Retief said.\n \"Distress in misfortune is another misfortune.\"\n\n\n The bearded man's face grew purple.",
"\"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Why, ah, there were a number of dispatches,\" Deputy Under-Secretary\n Magnan put in. \"Unfortunately, this being end-of-the-fiscal-year time,\n we found ourselves quite inundated with reports. Reports, reports,\n reports—\"\n\n\n \"Not criticizing the reporting system, are you, Mr. Magnan?\" the\n Under-Secretary barked.\n\n\n \"Gracious, no,\" Magnan said. \"I love reports.\"\n\n\n \"It seems nobody's told the Aga Kagans about fiscal years,\" Retief\n said. \"They're going right ahead with their program of land-grabbing on\n Flamme. So far, I've persuaded the Boyars that this is a matter for the\n Corps, and not to take matters into their own hands.\"",
"\"That wouldn't have been good for the oysters, either.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I told 'em. I also said you'd be back here in a few days\n with something from Corps HQ. When I tell 'em all we've got is a piece\n of paper, that'll be the end. There's a strong vigilante organization\n here that's been outfitting for the last four weeks. If I hadn't held\n them back with assurances that the CDT would step in and take care of\n this invasion, they would have hit them before now.\"\n\"That would have been a mistake,\" said Retief. \"The Aga Kagans are\n tough customers. They're active on half a dozen worlds at the moment.\n They've been building up for this push for the last five years. A\n show of resistance by you Boyars without Corps backing would be an\n invitation to slaughter—with the excuse that you started it.\"",
"\"Excellency,\" Retief said, \"I have the honor to present M. Georges\n Duror, Chef d'Regime of the Planetary government.\"\n\n\n \"Planetary government?\" The Aga Kaga spat grape seeds on the rug. \"My\n men have observed a few squatters along the shore. If they're in\n distress, I'll see about a distribution of goat-meat.\"\n\n\n \"It is the punishment of the envious to grieve at anothers' plenty,\"\n Retief said. \"No goat-meat will be required.\"\n\n\n \"Ralph told me you talk like a page out of Mustapha ben Abdallah Katib\n Jelebi,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"I know a few old sayings myself. For\n example, 'A Bedouin is only cheated once.'\"\n\n\n \"We have no such intentions, Excellency,\" Retief said. \"Is it not\n written, 'Have no faith in the Prince whose minister cheats you'?\"",
"\"I shall know when to stop,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Stanley,\" Retief said, rising. \"Are we quite private here?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, perfectly so,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"None would dare to intrude in\n my council.\" He cocked an eyebrow at Retief. \"You have a proposal to\n make in confidence? But what of our dear friend Georges? One would not\n like to see him disillusioned.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about Georges. He's a realist, like you. He's prepared to\n deal in facts. Hard facts, in this case.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga nodded thoughtfully. \"What are you getting at?\"\n\n\n \"You're basing your plan of action on the certainty that the Corps will\n sit by, wringing its hands, while you embark on a career of planetary\n piracy.\"",
"\"Sixty years ago the Corps was encouraging the Boyars to settle\n Flamme,\" Retief said. \"They were assured of Corps support.\"\n\n\n \"I don't believe you'll find that in writing,\" said the Under-Secretary\n blandly. \"In any event, that was sixty years ago. At that time a\n foothold against Neo-Concordiatist elements was deemed desirable. Now\n the situation has changed.\"\n\n\n \"The Boyars have spent sixty years terraforming Flamme,\" Retief said.\n \"They've cleared jungle, descummed the seas, irrigated deserts, set out\n forests. They've just about reached the point where they can begin to\n enjoy it. The Aga Kagans have picked this as a good time to move in.\n They've landed thirty detachments of 'fishermen'—complete with armored\n trawlers mounting 40 mm infinite repeaters—and another two dozen\n parties of 'homesteaders'—all male and toting rocket launchers.\"",
"\"Youth is the steed of folly,\" Retief said. \"Take care that the\n beardless one does not disgrace his house.\"\n\n\n The leader whirled on the youth and snarled an order. He lowered the\n rifle, muttering. Blackbeard turned back to Retief.\n\n\n \"Begone, interlopers,\" he said. \"You disturb the goats.\"\n\n\n \"Provision is not taken to the houses of the generous,\" Retief said.\n \"May the creatures dine well ere they move on.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! The goats of the Aga Kaga graze on the lands of the Aga Kaga.\"\n The leader edged his horse close, eyed Retief fiercely. \"We welcome no\n intruders on our lands.\"",
"\"Very well, I concede the point.\" The Aga Kaga waved a hand at the\n serving maids. \"Depart, my dears. Attend me later. You too, Ralph.\n These are mere diplomats. They are men of words, not deeds.\"\n\n\n The bearded man glared and departed. The girls hurried after him.\n\n\n \"Now,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"Let's drop the wisdom of the ages and\n get down to the issues. Not that I don't admire your repertoire of\n platitudes. How do you remember them all?\"\n\n\n \"Diplomats and other liars require good memories,\" said Retief. \"But\n as you point out, small wisdom to small minds. I'm here to effect a\n settlement of certain differences between yourself and the planetary\n authorities. I have here a Note, which I'm conveying on behalf of the\n Sector Under-Secretary. With your permission, I'll read it.\"",
"\"It's pointless to resist,\" he said. \"We have you outgunned and\n outmanned. Your small nation has no chance against us. But we're\n prepared to be generous. You may continue to occupy such areas as we do\n not immediately require until such time as you're able to make other\n arrangements.\"\n\n\n \"And by the time we've got a crop growing out of what was bare rock,\n you'll be ready to move in,\" the Boyar Chef d'Regime snapped. \"But\n you'll find that we aren't alone!\"\n\"Quite alone,\" the Aga said. He nodded sagely. \"Yes, one need but read\n the lesson of history. The Corps Diplomatique will make expostulatory\n noises, but it will accept the\nfait accompli\n. You, my dear sir, are\n but a very small nibble. We won't make the mistake of excessive greed.\n We shall inch our way to empire—and those who stand in our way shall\n be dubbed warmongers.\""
],
[
"\"I shall know when to stop,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Stanley,\" Retief said, rising. \"Are we quite private here?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, perfectly so,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"None would dare to intrude in\n my council.\" He cocked an eyebrow at Retief. \"You have a proposal to\n make in confidence? But what of our dear friend Georges? One would not\n like to see him disillusioned.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about Georges. He's a realist, like you. He's prepared to\n deal in facts. Hard facts, in this case.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga nodded thoughtfully. \"What are you getting at?\"\n\n\n \"You're basing your plan of action on the certainty that the Corps will\n sit by, wringing its hands, while you embark on a career of planetary\n piracy.\"",
"\"It's pointless to resist,\" he said. \"We have you outgunned and\n outmanned. Your small nation has no chance against us. But we're\n prepared to be generous. You may continue to occupy such areas as we do\n not immediately require until such time as you're able to make other\n arrangements.\"\n\n\n \"And by the time we've got a crop growing out of what was bare rock,\n you'll be ready to move in,\" the Boyar Chef d'Regime snapped. \"But\n you'll find that we aren't alone!\"\n\"Quite alone,\" the Aga said. He nodded sagely. \"Yes, one need but read\n the lesson of history. The Corps Diplomatique will make expostulatory\n noises, but it will accept the\nfait accompli\n. You, my dear sir, are\n but a very small nibble. We won't make the mistake of excessive greed.\n We shall inch our way to empire—and those who stand in our way shall\n be dubbed warmongers.\"",
"\"Ah, ah!\" The Aga Kaga held up a hand. \"Watch your vocabulary, my\n dear sir. I'm sure that 'justifiable yearnings for territorial\n self-realization' would be more appropriate to the situation. Or\n possibly 'legitimate aspirations, for self-determination of formerly\n exploited peoples' might fit the case. Aggression is, by definition,\n an activity carried on only by those who have inherited the mantle of\n Colonial Imperialism.\"\n\n\n \"Imperialism! Why, you Aga Kagans have been the most notorious\n planet-grabbers in Sector history, you—you—\"",
"\"I'm warning you, Retief!\" the Under-Secretary snapped, leaning\n forward, wattles quivering. \"Corps policy with regard to Flamme\n includes no inflammatory actions based on outmoded concepts. The Boyars\n will have to accommodate themselves to the situation!\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm afraid of,\" Retief said. \"They're not going to sit\n still and watch it happen. If I don't take back concrete evidence of\n Corps backing, we're going to have a nice hot little shooting war on\n our hands.\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary pushed out his lips and drummed his fingers on the\n desk.\n\n\n \"Confounded hot-heads,\" he muttered. \"Very well, Retief. I'll go along\n to the extent of a Note; but positively no further.\"\n\n\n \"A Note? I was thinking of something more like a squadron of Corps\n Peace Enforcers running through a few routine maneuvers off Flamme.\"",
"\"Excellency,\" Retief said, \"I have the honor to present M. Georges\n Duror, Chef d'Regime of the Planetary government.\"\n\n\n \"Planetary government?\" The Aga Kaga spat grape seeds on the rug. \"My\n men have observed a few squatters along the shore. If they're in\n distress, I'll see about a distribution of goat-meat.\"\n\n\n \"It is the punishment of the envious to grieve at anothers' plenty,\"\n Retief said. \"No goat-meat will be required.\"\n\n\n \"Ralph told me you talk like a page out of Mustapha ben Abdallah Katib\n Jelebi,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"I know a few old sayings myself. For\n example, 'A Bedouin is only cheated once.'\"\n\n\n \"We have no such intentions, Excellency,\" Retief said. \"Is it not\n written, 'Have no faith in the Prince whose minister cheats you'?\"",
"\"... and with reference to the recent relocation of persons under the\n jurisdiction of his Excellency, has the honor to point out that the\n territories now under settlement comprise a portion of that area,\n hereinafter designated as Sub-sector Alpha, which, under terms of\n the Agreement entered into by his Excellency's predecessor, and as\n referenced in Sector Ministry's Notes numbers G-175846573957-b and\n X-7584736 c-1, with particular pertinence to that body designated in\n the Revised Galactic Catalogue, Tenth Edition, as amended, Volume\n Nine, reel 43, as 54 Cygni Alpha, otherwise referred to hereinafter as\n Flamme—\"",
"\"I've had some unhappy experiences with strangers,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n \"It is written in the sands that all strangers are kin. Still, he who\n visits rarely is a welcome guest. Be seated.\"\nIII\n\n\n Handmaidens brought cushions, giggled and fled. Retief and Georges\n settled themselves comfortably. The Aga Kaga eyed them in silence.\n\"We have come to bear tidings from the Corps Diplomatique\n Terrestrienne,\" Retief said solemnly. A perfumed slave girl offered\n grapes.\n\n\n \"Modest ignorance is better than boastful knowledge,\" the Aga Kaga\n said. \"What brings the CDT into the picture?\"\n\n\n \"The essay of the drunkard will be read in the tavern,\" Retief said.\n \"Whereas the words of kings....\"",
"\"Sixty years ago the Corps was encouraging the Boyars to settle\n Flamme,\" Retief said. \"They were assured of Corps support.\"\n\n\n \"I don't believe you'll find that in writing,\" said the Under-Secretary\n blandly. \"In any event, that was sixty years ago. At that time a\n foothold against Neo-Concordiatist elements was deemed desirable. Now\n the situation has changed.\"\n\n\n \"The Boyars have spent sixty years terraforming Flamme,\" Retief said.\n \"They've cleared jungle, descummed the seas, irrigated deserts, set out\n forests. They've just about reached the point where they can begin to\n enjoy it. The Aga Kagans have picked this as a good time to move in.\n They've landed thirty detachments of 'fishermen'—complete with armored\n trawlers mounting 40 mm infinite repeaters—and another two dozen\n parties of 'homesteaders'—all male and toting rocket launchers.\"",
"\"That,\" said Retief, \"should lend just the right note of solidarity to\n our little delegation.\" He hitched his chair closer. \"Now, depending on\n what we run into, here's how we'll play it....\"\nII\n\n\n Eight miles into the rolling granite hills west of the capital, a\n black-painted official air-car flying the twin flags of Chief of State\n and Terrestrial Minister skimmed along a foot above a pot-holed road.\n Slumped in the padded seat, the Boyar Chef d'Regime waved his cigar\n glumly at the surrounding hills.\n\n\n \"Fifty years ago this was bare rock,\" he said. \"We've bred special\n strains of bacteria here to break down the formations into soil, and we\n followed up with a program of broad-spectrum fertilization. We planned\n to put the whole area into crops by next year. Now it looks like the\n goats will get it.\"",
"\"Will that scrubland support a crop?\" Retief said, eyeing the\n lichen-covered knolls.\n\n\n \"Sure. We start with legumes and follow up with cereals. Wait until you\n see this next section. It's an old flood plain, came into production\n thirty years ago. One of our finest—\"\n\n\n The air-car topped a rise. The Chef dropped his cigar and half rose,\n with a hoarse yell. A herd of scraggly goats tossed their heads among a\n stand of ripe grain. The car pulled to a stop. Retief held the Boyar's\n arm.\n\n\n \"Keep calm, Georges,\" he said. \"Remember, we're on a diplomatic\n mission. It wouldn't do to come to the conference table smelling of\n goats.\"\n\n\n \"Let me at 'em!\" Georges roared. \"I'll throttle 'em with my bare hands!\"",
"The Under-Secretary nodded. \"Quite right. Carry on along the same\n lines. Now, if there's nothing further—\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Mr. Secretary,\" Magnan said, rising. \"We certainly\n appreciate your guidance.\"\n\n\n \"There is a little something further,\" said Retief, sitting solidly in\n his chair. \"What's the Corps going to do about the Aga Kagans?\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary turned a liverish eye on Retief. \"As Minister\n to Flamme, you should know that the function of a diplomatic\n representative is merely to ... what shall I say...?\"\n\n\n \"String them along?\" Magnan suggested.\n\n\n \"An unfortunate choice of phrase,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"However,\n it embodies certain realities of Galactic politics. The Corps must\n concern itself with matters of broad policy.\"",
"\"Very well, I concede the point.\" The Aga Kaga waved a hand at the\n serving maids. \"Depart, my dears. Attend me later. You too, Ralph.\n These are mere diplomats. They are men of words, not deeds.\"\n\n\n The bearded man glared and departed. The girls hurried after him.\n\n\n \"Now,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"Let's drop the wisdom of the ages and\n get down to the issues. Not that I don't admire your repertoire of\n platitudes. How do you remember them all?\"\n\n\n \"Diplomats and other liars require good memories,\" said Retief. \"But\n as you point out, small wisdom to small minds. I'm here to effect a\n settlement of certain differences between yourself and the planetary\n authorities. I have here a Note, which I'm conveying on behalf of the\n Sector Under-Secretary. With your permission, I'll read it.\"",
"\"That wouldn't have been good for the oysters, either.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I told 'em. I also said you'd be back here in a few days\n with something from Corps HQ. When I tell 'em all we've got is a piece\n of paper, that'll be the end. There's a strong vigilante organization\n here that's been outfitting for the last four weeks. If I hadn't held\n them back with assurances that the CDT would step in and take care of\n this invasion, they would have hit them before now.\"\n\"That would have been a mistake,\" said Retief. \"The Aga Kagans are\n tough customers. They're active on half a dozen worlds at the moment.\n They've been building up for this push for the last five years. A\n show of resistance by you Boyars without Corps backing would be an\n invitation to slaughter—with the excuse that you started it.\"",
"\"You sound as though you'd brought off a coup,\" Georges said. \"From the\n expression on the whiskery one's face, we're in for trouble. What was\n he saying?\"\n\n\n \"Just a routine exchange of bluffs,\" Retief said. \"Now when we get\n there, remember to make your flattery sound like insults and your\n insults sound like flattery, and you'll be all right.\"\n\n\n \"These birds are armed. And they don't like strangers,\" Georges said.\n \"Maybe I should have boned up on their habits before I joined this\n expedition.\"\n\n\n \"Just stick to the plan,\" Retief said. \"And remember: a handful of luck\n is better than a camel-load of learning.\"\nThe air car followed the escort down a long slope to a dry river bed\n and across it, through a barren stretch of shifting sand to a green\n oasis set with canopies.",
"\"Surely there's land enough on the world to afford space to both\n groups,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"A spirit of co-operation—\"\n\"The Boyars needed some co-operation sixty years ago,\" Retief said.\n \"They tried to get the Aga Kagans to join in and help them beat\n back some of the saurian wild life that liked to graze on people.\n The Corps didn't like the idea. They wanted to see an undisputed\n anti-Concordiatist enclave. The Aga Kagans didn't want to play, either.\n But now that the world is tamed, they're moving in.\"\n\n\n \"The exigencies of diplomacy require a flexible policy—\"\n\n\n \"I want a firm assurance of Corps support to take back to Flamme,\"\n Retief said. \"The Boyars are a little naive. They don't understand\n diplomatic triple-speak. They just want to hold onto the homes they've\n made out of a wasteland.\"",
"\"Come to the point,\" the Aga Kaga cut in. \"You're here to lodge a\n complaint that I'm invading territories to which someone else lays\n claim, is that it?\" He smiled broadly, offered dope-sticks and lit one.\n \"Well, I've been expecting a call. After all, it's what you gentlemen\n are paid for. Cheers.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency has a lucid way of putting things,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Call me Stanley,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"The other routine is just to\n please some of the old fools—I mean the more conservative members\n of my government. They're still gnawing their beards and kicking\n themselves because their ancestors dropped science in favor of alchemy\n and got themselves stranded in a cultural dead end. This charade is\n supposed to prove they were right all along. However, I've no time\n to waste in neurotic compensations. I have places to go and deeds to\n accomplish.\"",
"A hundred yards away, a trio of brown-cloaked horsemen topped a rise,\n paused dramatically against the cloudless pale sky, then galloped\n down the slope toward the car, rifles bobbing at their backs, cloaks\n billowing out behind. Side by side they rode, through the brown-golden\n grain, cutting three narrow swaths that ran in a straight sweep from\n the ridge to the air-car where Retief and the Chef d'Regime hovered,\n waiting.\n\n\n Georges scrambled for the side of the car. \"Just wait 'til I get my\n hands on him!\"\n\n\n Retief pulled him back. \"Sit tight and look pleased, Georges. Never\n give the opposition a hint of your true feelings. Pretend you're a goat\n lover—and hand me one of your cigars.\"",
"\"I see you're quite a student of history, Stanley,\" Retief said. \"I\n wonder if you recall the eventual fate of most of the would-be empire\n nibblers of the past?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, but they grew incautious. They went too far, too fast.\"\n\n\n \"The confounded impudence,\" Georges rasped. \"Tells us to our face what\n he has in mind!\"\n\n\n \"An ancient and honorable custom, from the time of\nMein Kampf\nand\n the\nCommunist Manifesto\nthrough the\nPorcelain Wall\nof Leung. Such\n declarations have a legendary quality. It's traditional that they're\n never taken at face value.\"\n\n\n \"But always,\" Retief said, \"there was a critical point at which the man\n on horseback could have been pulled from the saddle.\"",
"\"So we sit tight and watch 'em take our world away from us. That's what\n I get for playing along with you, Retief. We should have clobbered\n these monkeys as soon as they set foot on our world.\"\n\n\n \"Slow down, I haven't finished yet. There's still the Note.\"\n\n\n \"I've got plenty of paper already. Rolls and rolls of it.\"\n\n\n \"Give diplomatic processes a chance,\" said Retief. \"The Note hasn't\n even been delivered yet. Who knows? We may get surprising results.\"\n\n\n \"If you expect me to supply a runner for the purpose, you're out of\n luck. From what I hear, he's likely to come back with his ears stuffed\n in his hip pocket.\"\n\n\n \"I'll deliver the Note personally,\" Retief said. \"I could use a couple\n of escorts—preferably strong-arm lads.\"",
"\"So what are we going to do? Sit here and watch these goat-herders take\n over our farms and fisheries?\"\n\n\n \"Those goat-herders aren't all they seem. They've got a first-class\n modern navy.\"\n\n\n \"I've seen 'em. They camp in goat-skin tents, gallop around on\n animal-back, wear dresses down to their ankles—\"\n\n\n \"The 'goat-skin' tents are a high-polymer plastic, made in the same\n factory that turns out those long flowing bullet-proof robes you\n mention. The animals are just for show. Back home they use helis and\n ground cars of the most modern design.\"\n\n\n The Chef d'Regime chewed his cigar.\n\n\n \"Why the masquerade?\"\n\n\n \"Something to do with internal policies, I suppose.\""
],
[
"\"Sixty years ago the Corps was encouraging the Boyars to settle\n Flamme,\" Retief said. \"They were assured of Corps support.\"\n\n\n \"I don't believe you'll find that in writing,\" said the Under-Secretary\n blandly. \"In any event, that was sixty years ago. At that time a\n foothold against Neo-Concordiatist elements was deemed desirable. Now\n the situation has changed.\"\n\n\n \"The Boyars have spent sixty years terraforming Flamme,\" Retief said.\n \"They've cleared jungle, descummed the seas, irrigated deserts, set out\n forests. They've just about reached the point where they can begin to\n enjoy it. The Aga Kagans have picked this as a good time to move in.\n They've landed thirty detachments of 'fishermen'—complete with armored\n trawlers mounting 40 mm infinite repeaters—and another two dozen\n parties of 'homesteaders'—all male and toting rocket launchers.\"",
"A bearded goat eyed the Boyar Chef sardonically, jaw working. \"Look at\n that long-nosed son!\" The goat gave a derisive bleat and took another\n mouthful of ripe grain.\n\n\n \"Did you see that?\" Georges yelled. \"They've trained the son of a—\"\n\n\n \"Chin up, Georges,\" Retief said. \"We'll take up the goat problem along\n with the rest.\"\n\n\n \"I'll murder 'em!\"\n\n\n \"Hold it, Georges. Look over there.\"",
"\"Don't worry. I'll keep the peace, if I have to start a war to do it.\"\nOn the broad verandah at Government House, Retief settled himself\n comfortably in a lounge chair. He accepted a tall glass from a\n white-jacketed waiter and regarded the flamboyant Flamme sunset, a\n gorgeous blaze of vermillion and purple that reflected from a still\n lake, tinged the broad lawn with color, silhouetted tall poplars among\n flower beds.\n\n\n \"You've done great things here in sixty years, Georges,\" said Retief.\n \"Not that natural geological processes wouldn't have produced the same\n results, given a couple of hundred million years.\"\n\n\n \"Don't belabor the point,\" the Boyar Chef d'Regime said. \"Since we seem\n to be on the verge of losing it.\"\n\n\n \"You're forgetting the Note.\"",
"\"I'm warning you, Retief!\" the Under-Secretary snapped, leaning\n forward, wattles quivering. \"Corps policy with regard to Flamme\n includes no inflammatory actions based on outmoded concepts. The Boyars\n will have to accommodate themselves to the situation!\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm afraid of,\" Retief said. \"They're not going to sit\n still and watch it happen. If I don't take back concrete evidence of\n Corps backing, we're going to have a nice hot little shooting war on\n our hands.\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary pushed out his lips and drummed his fingers on the\n desk.\n\n\n \"Confounded hot-heads,\" he muttered. \"Very well, Retief. I'll go along\n to the extent of a Note; but positively no further.\"\n\n\n \"A Note? I was thinking of something more like a squadron of Corps\n Peace Enforcers running through a few routine maneuvers off Flamme.\"",
"\"To praise a man for what he does not possess is to make him appear\n foolish,\" Retief said. \"These are the lands of the Boyars. But enough\n of these pleasantries. We seek audience with your ruler.\"\n\n\n \"You may address me as 'Exalted One',\" the leader said. \"Now dismount\n from that steed of Shaitan.\"\n\n\n \"It is written, if you need anything from a dog, call him 'sir',\"\n Retief said. \"I must decline to impute canine ancestry to a guest. Now\n you may conduct us to your headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Enough of your insolence!\" The bearded man cocked his rifle. \"I could\n blow your heads off!\"\n\n\n \"The hen has feathers, but it does not fly,\" Retief said. \"We have\n asked for escort. A slave must be beaten with a stick; for a free man,\n a hint is enough.\"",
"\"It's pointless to resist,\" he said. \"We have you outgunned and\n outmanned. Your small nation has no chance against us. But we're\n prepared to be generous. You may continue to occupy such areas as we do\n not immediately require until such time as you're able to make other\n arrangements.\"\n\n\n \"And by the time we've got a crop growing out of what was bare rock,\n you'll be ready to move in,\" the Boyar Chef d'Regime snapped. \"But\n you'll find that we aren't alone!\"\n\"Quite alone,\" the Aga said. He nodded sagely. \"Yes, one need but read\n the lesson of history. The Corps Diplomatique will make expostulatory\n noises, but it will accept the\nfait accompli\n. You, my dear sir, are\n but a very small nibble. We won't make the mistake of excessive greed.\n We shall inch our way to empire—and those who stand in our way shall\n be dubbed warmongers.\"",
"\"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Why, ah, there were a number of dispatches,\" Deputy Under-Secretary\n Magnan put in. \"Unfortunately, this being end-of-the-fiscal-year time,\n we found ourselves quite inundated with reports. Reports, reports,\n reports—\"\n\n\n \"Not criticizing the reporting system, are you, Mr. Magnan?\" the\n Under-Secretary barked.\n\n\n \"Gracious, no,\" Magnan said. \"I love reports.\"\n\n\n \"It seems nobody's told the Aga Kagans about fiscal years,\" Retief\n said. \"They're going right ahead with their program of land-grabbing on\n Flamme. So far, I've persuaded the Boyars that this is a matter for the\n Corps, and not to take matters into their own hands.\"",
"\"Surely there's land enough on the world to afford space to both\n groups,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"A spirit of co-operation—\"\n\"The Boyars needed some co-operation sixty years ago,\" Retief said.\n \"They tried to get the Aga Kagans to join in and help them beat\n back some of the saurian wild life that liked to graze on people.\n The Corps didn't like the idea. They wanted to see an undisputed\n anti-Concordiatist enclave. The Aga Kagans didn't want to play, either.\n But now that the world is tamed, they're moving in.\"\n\n\n \"The exigencies of diplomacy require a flexible policy—\"\n\n\n \"I want a firm assurance of Corps support to take back to Flamme,\"\n Retief said. \"The Boyars are a little naive. They don't understand\n diplomatic triple-speak. They just want to hold onto the homes they've\n made out of a wasteland.\"",
"The Aga Kaga looked startled. \"Soft? I can tie a knot in an iron bar\n as big as your thumb.\" He popped a grape into his mouth. \"As for the\n rest, your pious views about the virtues of hard labor are as childish\n as my advisors' faith in the advantages of primitive plumbing. As for\n myself, I am a realist. If two monkeys want the same banana, in the end\n one will have it, and the other will cry morality. The days of my years\n are numbered, praise be to God. While they last, I hope to eat well,\n hunt well, fight well and take my share of pleasure. I leave to others\n the arid satisfactions of self-denial and other perversions.\"\n\n\n \"You admit you're here to grab our land, then,\" Georges said. \"That's\n the damnedest piece of bare-faced aggression—\"",
"\"At times, your cynicism borders on impudence.\"\n\n\n \"At other times, it borders on disgust. Now, if you'll run the Note\n through for signature, I'll try to catch the six o'clock shuttle.\"\n\n\n \"Leaving so soon? There's an important reception tonight. Some of our\n biggest names will be there. An excellent opportunity for you to join\n in the diplomatic give-and-take.\"\n\n\n \"No, thanks. I want to get back to Flamme and join in something mild,\n like a dinosaur hunt.\"\n\n\n \"When you get there,\" said Magnan, \"I hope you'll make it quite clear\n that this matter is to be settled without violence.\"",
"\"Will that scrubland support a crop?\" Retief said, eyeing the\n lichen-covered knolls.\n\n\n \"Sure. We start with legumes and follow up with cereals. Wait until you\n see this next section. It's an old flood plain, came into production\n thirty years ago. One of our finest—\"\n\n\n The air-car topped a rise. The Chef dropped his cigar and half rose,\n with a hoarse yell. A herd of scraggly goats tossed their heads among a\n stand of ripe grain. The car pulled to a stop. Retief held the Boyar's\n arm.\n\n\n \"Keep calm, Georges,\" he said. \"Remember, we're on a diplomatic\n mission. It wouldn't do to come to the conference table smelling of\n goats.\"\n\n\n \"Let me at 'em!\" Georges roared. \"I'll throttle 'em with my bare hands!\"",
"Retief dribbled the ash from his cigar over the side of the car.\n\n\n \"Now I think we'd better be getting on,\" he said briskly. \"I've enjoyed\n our chat, but we do have business to attend to.\"\n\n\n The bearded leader laughed shortly. \"Does the condemned man beg for the\n axe?\" he enquired rhetorically. \"You shall visit the Aga Kaga, then.\n Move on! And make no attempt to escape, else my gun will speak you a\n brief farewell.\"\n\n\n The horsemen glowered, then, at a word from the leader, took positions\n around the car. Georges started the vehicle forward, following the\n leading rider. Retief leaned back and let out a long sigh.\n\n\n \"That was close,\" he said. \"I was about out of proverbs.\"",
"The Under-Secretary nodded. \"Quite right. Carry on along the same\n lines. Now, if there's nothing further—\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Mr. Secretary,\" Magnan said, rising. \"We certainly\n appreciate your guidance.\"\n\n\n \"There is a little something further,\" said Retief, sitting solidly in\n his chair. \"What's the Corps going to do about the Aga Kagans?\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary turned a liverish eye on Retief. \"As Minister\n to Flamme, you should know that the function of a diplomatic\n representative is merely to ... what shall I say...?\"\n\n\n \"String them along?\" Magnan suggested.\n\n\n \"An unfortunate choice of phrase,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"However,\n it embodies certain realities of Galactic politics. The Corps must\n concern itself with matters of broad policy.\"",
"The armed escort motioned the car to a halt before an immense tent of\n glistening black. Before the tent armed men lounged under a pennant\n bearing a lion\ncouchant\nin crimson on a field verte.",
"\"That,\" said Retief, \"should lend just the right note of solidarity to\n our little delegation.\" He hitched his chair closer. \"Now, depending on\n what we run into, here's how we'll play it....\"\nII\n\n\n Eight miles into the rolling granite hills west of the capital, a\n black-painted official air-car flying the twin flags of Chief of State\n and Terrestrial Minister skimmed along a foot above a pot-holed road.\n Slumped in the padded seat, the Boyar Chef d'Regime waved his cigar\n glumly at the surrounding hills.\n\n\n \"Fifty years ago this was bare rock,\" he said. \"We've bred special\n strains of bacteria here to break down the formations into soil, and we\n followed up with a program of broad-spectrum fertilization. We planned\n to put the whole area into crops by next year. Now it looks like the\n goats will get it.\"",
"\"I've had some unhappy experiences with strangers,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n \"It is written in the sands that all strangers are kin. Still, he who\n visits rarely is a welcome guest. Be seated.\"\nIII\n\n\n Handmaidens brought cushions, giggled and fled. Retief and Georges\n settled themselves comfortably. The Aga Kaga eyed them in silence.\n\"We have come to bear tidings from the Corps Diplomatique\n Terrestrienne,\" Retief said solemnly. A perfumed slave girl offered\n grapes.\n\n\n \"Modest ignorance is better than boastful knowledge,\" the Aga Kaga\n said. \"What brings the CDT into the picture?\"\n\n\n \"The essay of the drunkard will be read in the tavern,\" Retief said.\n \"Whereas the words of kings....\"",
"\"Get out,\" Blackbeard ordered. The guards eyed the visitors, their\n drawn sabers catching sunlight. Retief and Georges stepped from the\n car onto rich rugs spread on the grass. They followed the ferocious\n gesture of the bearded man through the opening into a perfumed interior\n of luminous shadows. A heavy odor of incense hung in the air, and the\n strumming of stringed instruments laid a muted pattern of sound behind\n the decorations of gold and blue, silver and green. At the far end of\n the room, among a bevy of female slaves, a large and resplendently clad\n man with blue-black hair and a clean-shaven chin popped a grape into\n his mouth. He wiped his fingers negligently on a wisp of silk offered\n by a handmaiden, belched loudly and looked the callers over.\n\n\n Blackbeard cleared his throat. \"Down on your faces in the presence of\n the Exalted One, the Aga Kaga, ruler of East and West.\"",
"\"I see you're quite a student of history, Stanley,\" Retief said. \"I\n wonder if you recall the eventual fate of most of the would-be empire\n nibblers of the past?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, but they grew incautious. They went too far, too fast.\"\n\n\n \"The confounded impudence,\" Georges rasped. \"Tells us to our face what\n he has in mind!\"\n\n\n \"An ancient and honorable custom, from the time of\nMein Kampf\nand\n the\nCommunist Manifesto\nthrough the\nPorcelain Wall\nof Leung. Such\n declarations have a legendary quality. It's traditional that they're\n never taken at face value.\"\n\n\n \"But always,\" Retief said, \"there was a critical point at which the man\n on horseback could have been pulled from the saddle.\"",
"\"At first glance,\" Retief said, \"it looks as though the places are\n already occupied, and the deeds are illegal.\"\nThe Aga Kaga guffawed. \"For a diplomat, you speak plainly, Retief. Have\n another drink.\" He poured, eyeing Georges. \"What of M. Duror? How does\n he feel about it?\"\n\n\n Georges took a thoughtful swallow of whiskey. \"Not bad,\" he said. \"But\n not quite good enough to cover the odor of goats.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga snorted. \"I thought the goats were overdoing it a bit\n myself,\" he said. \"Still, the graybeards insisted. And I need their\n support.\"\n\n\n \"Also,\" Georges said distinctly, \"I think you're soft. You lie around\n letting women wait on you, while your betters are out doing an honest\n day's work.\"",
"\"You mock me, pale one. I warn you—\"\n\n\n \"Only love makes me weep,\" Retief said. \"I laugh at hatred.\"\n\n\n \"Get out of the car!\"\n\n\n Retief puffed at his cigar, eyeing the Aga Kagan cheerfully. The youth\n in the rear moved forward, teeth bared.\n\n\n \"Never give in to the fool, lest he say, 'He fears me,'\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"I cannot restrain my men in the face of your insults,\" the bearded Aga\n Kagan roared. \"These hens of mine have feathers—and talons as well!\"\n\n\n \"When God would destroy an ant, he gives him wings,\" Retief said.\n \"Distress in misfortune is another misfortune.\"\n\n\n The bearded man's face grew purple."
],
[
"\"That wouldn't have been good for the oysters, either.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I told 'em. I also said you'd be back here in a few days\n with something from Corps HQ. When I tell 'em all we've got is a piece\n of paper, that'll be the end. There's a strong vigilante organization\n here that's been outfitting for the last four weeks. If I hadn't held\n them back with assurances that the CDT would step in and take care of\n this invasion, they would have hit them before now.\"\n\"That would have been a mistake,\" said Retief. \"The Aga Kagans are\n tough customers. They're active on half a dozen worlds at the moment.\n They've been building up for this push for the last five years. A\n show of resistance by you Boyars without Corps backing would be an\n invitation to slaughter—with the excuse that you started it.\"",
"\"I shall know when to stop,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Stanley,\" Retief said, rising. \"Are we quite private here?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, perfectly so,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"None would dare to intrude in\n my council.\" He cocked an eyebrow at Retief. \"You have a proposal to\n make in confidence? But what of our dear friend Georges? One would not\n like to see him disillusioned.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about Georges. He's a realist, like you. He's prepared to\n deal in facts. Hard facts, in this case.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga nodded thoughtfully. \"What are you getting at?\"\n\n\n \"You're basing your plan of action on the certainty that the Corps will\n sit by, wringing its hands, while you embark on a career of planetary\n piracy.\"",
"\"\nCould\nhave been,\" the Aga Kaga chuckled. He finished the grapes and\n began peeling an orange. \"But they never were. Hitler could have been\n stopped by the Czech Air Force in 1938; Stalin was at the mercy of the\n primitive atomics of the west in 1946; Leung was grossly over-extended\n at Rangoon. But the onus of that historic role could not be overcome.\n It has been the fate of your spiritual forebears to carve civilization\n from the wilderness and then, amid tearing of garments and the heaping\n of ashes of self-accusation on your own confused heads, to withdraw,\n leaving the spoils for local political opportunists and mob leaders,\n clothed in the mystical virtue of native birth. Have a banana.\"\n\n\n \"You're stretching your analogy a little too far,\" Retief said. \"You're\n banking on the inaction of the Corps. You could be wrong.\"",
"\"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Why, ah, there were a number of dispatches,\" Deputy Under-Secretary\n Magnan put in. \"Unfortunately, this being end-of-the-fiscal-year time,\n we found ourselves quite inundated with reports. Reports, reports,\n reports—\"\n\n\n \"Not criticizing the reporting system, are you, Mr. Magnan?\" the\n Under-Secretary barked.\n\n\n \"Gracious, no,\" Magnan said. \"I love reports.\"\n\n\n \"It seems nobody's told the Aga Kagans about fiscal years,\" Retief\n said. \"They're going right ahead with their program of land-grabbing on\n Flamme. So far, I've persuaded the Boyars that this is a matter for the\n Corps, and not to take matters into their own hands.\"",
"\"Surely there's land enough on the world to afford space to both\n groups,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"A spirit of co-operation—\"\n\"The Boyars needed some co-operation sixty years ago,\" Retief said.\n \"They tried to get the Aga Kagans to join in and help them beat\n back some of the saurian wild life that liked to graze on people.\n The Corps didn't like the idea. They wanted to see an undisputed\n anti-Concordiatist enclave. The Aga Kagans didn't want to play, either.\n But now that the world is tamed, they're moving in.\"\n\n\n \"The exigencies of diplomacy require a flexible policy—\"\n\n\n \"I want a firm assurance of Corps support to take back to Flamme,\"\n Retief said. \"The Boyars are a little naive. They don't understand\n diplomatic triple-speak. They just want to hold onto the homes they've\n made out of a wasteland.\"",
"\"Sixty years ago the Corps was encouraging the Boyars to settle\n Flamme,\" Retief said. \"They were assured of Corps support.\"\n\n\n \"I don't believe you'll find that in writing,\" said the Under-Secretary\n blandly. \"In any event, that was sixty years ago. At that time a\n foothold against Neo-Concordiatist elements was deemed desirable. Now\n the situation has changed.\"\n\n\n \"The Boyars have spent sixty years terraforming Flamme,\" Retief said.\n \"They've cleared jungle, descummed the seas, irrigated deserts, set out\n forests. They've just about reached the point where they can begin to\n enjoy it. The Aga Kagans have picked this as a good time to move in.\n They've landed thirty detachments of 'fishermen'—complete with armored\n trawlers mounting 40 mm infinite repeaters—and another two dozen\n parties of 'homesteaders'—all male and toting rocket launchers.\"",
"\"I'm warning you, Retief!\" the Under-Secretary snapped, leaning\n forward, wattles quivering. \"Corps policy with regard to Flamme\n includes no inflammatory actions based on outmoded concepts. The Boyars\n will have to accommodate themselves to the situation!\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm afraid of,\" Retief said. \"They're not going to sit\n still and watch it happen. If I don't take back concrete evidence of\n Corps backing, we're going to have a nice hot little shooting war on\n our hands.\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary pushed out his lips and drummed his fingers on the\n desk.\n\n\n \"Confounded hot-heads,\" he muttered. \"Very well, Retief. I'll go along\n to the extent of a Note; but positively no further.\"\n\n\n \"A Note? I was thinking of something more like a squadron of Corps\n Peace Enforcers running through a few routine maneuvers off Flamme.\"",
"The Under-Secretary nodded. \"Quite right. Carry on along the same\n lines. Now, if there's nothing further—\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Mr. Secretary,\" Magnan said, rising. \"We certainly\n appreciate your guidance.\"\n\n\n \"There is a little something further,\" said Retief, sitting solidly in\n his chair. \"What's the Corps going to do about the Aga Kagans?\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary turned a liverish eye on Retief. \"As Minister\n to Flamme, you should know that the function of a diplomatic\n representative is merely to ... what shall I say...?\"\n\n\n \"String them along?\" Magnan suggested.\n\n\n \"An unfortunate choice of phrase,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"However,\n it embodies certain realities of Galactic politics. The Corps must\n concern itself with matters of broad policy.\"",
"\"Come to the point,\" the Aga Kaga cut in. \"You're here to lodge a\n complaint that I'm invading territories to which someone else lays\n claim, is that it?\" He smiled broadly, offered dope-sticks and lit one.\n \"Well, I've been expecting a call. After all, it's what you gentlemen\n are paid for. Cheers.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency has a lucid way of putting things,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Call me Stanley,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"The other routine is just to\n please some of the old fools—I mean the more conservative members\n of my government. They're still gnawing their beards and kicking\n themselves because their ancestors dropped science in favor of alchemy\n and got themselves stranded in a cultural dead end. This charade is\n supposed to prove they were right all along. However, I've no time\n to waste in neurotic compensations. I have places to go and deeds to\n accomplish.\"",
"\"Don't worry. I'll keep the peace, if I have to start a war to do it.\"\nOn the broad verandah at Government House, Retief settled himself\n comfortably in a lounge chair. He accepted a tall glass from a\n white-jacketed waiter and regarded the flamboyant Flamme sunset, a\n gorgeous blaze of vermillion and purple that reflected from a still\n lake, tinged the broad lawn with color, silhouetted tall poplars among\n flower beds.\n\n\n \"You've done great things here in sixty years, Georges,\" said Retief.\n \"Not that natural geological processes wouldn't have produced the same\n results, given a couple of hundred million years.\"\n\n\n \"Don't belabor the point,\" the Boyar Chef d'Regime said. \"Since we seem\n to be on the verge of losing it.\"\n\n\n \"You're forgetting the Note.\"",
"\"I've had some unhappy experiences with strangers,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n \"It is written in the sands that all strangers are kin. Still, he who\n visits rarely is a welcome guest. Be seated.\"\nIII\n\n\n Handmaidens brought cushions, giggled and fled. Retief and Georges\n settled themselves comfortably. The Aga Kaga eyed them in silence.\n\"We have come to bear tidings from the Corps Diplomatique\n Terrestrienne,\" Retief said solemnly. A perfumed slave girl offered\n grapes.\n\n\n \"Modest ignorance is better than boastful knowledge,\" the Aga Kaga\n said. \"What brings the CDT into the picture?\"\n\n\n \"The essay of the drunkard will be read in the tavern,\" Retief said.\n \"Whereas the words of kings....\"",
"\"You mock me, pale one. I warn you—\"\n\n\n \"Only love makes me weep,\" Retief said. \"I laugh at hatred.\"\n\n\n \"Get out of the car!\"\n\n\n Retief puffed at his cigar, eyeing the Aga Kagan cheerfully. The youth\n in the rear moved forward, teeth bared.\n\n\n \"Never give in to the fool, lest he say, 'He fears me,'\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"I cannot restrain my men in the face of your insults,\" the bearded Aga\n Kagan roared. \"These hens of mine have feathers—and talons as well!\"\n\n\n \"When God would destroy an ant, he gives him wings,\" Retief said.\n \"Distress in misfortune is another misfortune.\"\n\n\n The bearded man's face grew purple.",
"The three horsemen pulled up in a churn of chaff and a clatter of\n pebbles. Georges coughed, batting a hand at the settling dust. Retief\n peeled the cigar unhurriedly, sniffed, at it and thumbed it alight. He\n drew at it, puffed out a cloud of smoke and glanced casually at the\n trio of Aga Kagan cavaliers.\n\n\n \"Peace be with you,\" he intoned in accent-free Kagan. \"May your shadows\n never grow less.\"\nThe leader of the three, a hawk-faced man with a heavy beard,\n unlimbered his rifle. He fingered it, frowning ferociously.\n\n\n \"Have no fear,\" Retief said, smiling graciously. \"He who comes as a\n guest enjoys perfect safety.\"\n\n\n A smooth-faced member of the threesome barked an oath and leveled his\n rifle at Retief.",
"\"A Note,\" Georges said, waving his cigar. \"What the purple polluted\n hell is a Note supposed to do? I've got Aga Kagan claim-jumpers camped\n in the middle of what used to be a fine stand of barley, cooking\n sheep's brains over dung fires not ten miles from Government House—and\n upwind at that.\"\n\n\n \"Say, if that's the same barley you distill your whiskey from, I'd\n call that a first-class atrocity.\"\n\n\n \"Retief, on your say-so, I've kept my boys on a short leash. They've\n put up with plenty. Last week, while you were away, these barbarians\n sailed that flotilla of armor-plated junks right through the middle of\n one of our best oyster breeding beds. It was all I could do to keep a\n bunch of our men from going out in private helis and blasting 'em out\n of the water.\"",
"The Chef d'Regime frowned, blew out a cloud of smoke. \"I wasn't kidding\n about these Aga Kagans,\" he said. \"I hear they have some nasty habits.\n I don't want to see you operated on with the same knives they use to\n skin out the goats.\"\n\n\n \"I'd be against that myself. Still, the mail must go through.\"\n\n\n \"Strong-arm lads, eh? What have you got in mind, Retief?\"\n\n\n \"A little muscle in the background is an old diplomatic custom,\" Retief\n said.\n\n\n The Chef d'Regime stubbed out his cigar thoughtfully. \"I used to be a\n pretty fair elbow-wrestler myself,\" he said. \"Suppose I go along...?\"",
"\"At first glance,\" Retief said, \"it looks as though the places are\n already occupied, and the deeds are illegal.\"\nThe Aga Kaga guffawed. \"For a diplomat, you speak plainly, Retief. Have\n another drink.\" He poured, eyeing Georges. \"What of M. Duror? How does\n he feel about it?\"\n\n\n Georges took a thoughtful swallow of whiskey. \"Not bad,\" he said. \"But\n not quite good enough to cover the odor of goats.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga snorted. \"I thought the goats were overdoing it a bit\n myself,\" he said. \"Still, the graybeards insisted. And I need their\n support.\"\n\n\n \"Also,\" Georges said distinctly, \"I think you're soft. You lie around\n letting women wait on you, while your betters are out doing an honest\n day's work.\"",
"\"To praise a man for what he does not possess is to make him appear\n foolish,\" Retief said. \"These are the lands of the Boyars. But enough\n of these pleasantries. We seek audience with your ruler.\"\n\n\n \"You may address me as 'Exalted One',\" the leader said. \"Now dismount\n from that steed of Shaitan.\"\n\n\n \"It is written, if you need anything from a dog, call him 'sir',\"\n Retief said. \"I must decline to impute canine ancestry to a guest. Now\n you may conduct us to your headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Enough of your insolence!\" The bearded man cocked his rifle. \"I could\n blow your heads off!\"\n\n\n \"The hen has feathers, but it does not fly,\" Retief said. \"We have\n asked for escort. A slave must be beaten with a stick; for a free man,\n a hint is enough.\"",
"\"Youth is the steed of folly,\" Retief said. \"Take care that the\n beardless one does not disgrace his house.\"\n\n\n The leader whirled on the youth and snarled an order. He lowered the\n rifle, muttering. Blackbeard turned back to Retief.\n\n\n \"Begone, interlopers,\" he said. \"You disturb the goats.\"\n\n\n \"Provision is not taken to the houses of the generous,\" Retief said.\n \"May the creatures dine well ere they move on.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! The goats of the Aga Kaga graze on the lands of the Aga Kaga.\"\n The leader edged his horse close, eyed Retief fiercely. \"We welcome no\n intruders on our lands.\"",
"\"Excellency,\" Retief said, \"I have the honor to present M. Georges\n Duror, Chef d'Regime of the Planetary government.\"\n\n\n \"Planetary government?\" The Aga Kaga spat grape seeds on the rug. \"My\n men have observed a few squatters along the shore. If they're in\n distress, I'll see about a distribution of goat-meat.\"\n\n\n \"It is the punishment of the envious to grieve at anothers' plenty,\"\n Retief said. \"No goat-meat will be required.\"\n\n\n \"Ralph told me you talk like a page out of Mustapha ben Abdallah Katib\n Jelebi,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"I know a few old sayings myself. For\n example, 'A Bedouin is only cheated once.'\"\n\n\n \"We have no such intentions, Excellency,\" Retief said. \"Is it not\n written, 'Have no faith in the Prince whose minister cheats you'?\"",
"\"I see you're quite a student of history, Stanley,\" Retief said. \"I\n wonder if you recall the eventual fate of most of the would-be empire\n nibblers of the past?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, but they grew incautious. They went too far, too fast.\"\n\n\n \"The confounded impudence,\" Georges rasped. \"Tells us to our face what\n he has in mind!\"\n\n\n \"An ancient and honorable custom, from the time of\nMein Kampf\nand\n the\nCommunist Manifesto\nthrough the\nPorcelain Wall\nof Leung. Such\n declarations have a legendary quality. It's traditional that they're\n never taken at face value.\"\n\n\n \"But always,\" Retief said, \"there was a critical point at which the man\n on horseback could have been pulled from the saddle.\""
],
[
"The Aga Kaga looked startled. \"Soft? I can tie a knot in an iron bar\n as big as your thumb.\" He popped a grape into his mouth. \"As for the\n rest, your pious views about the virtues of hard labor are as childish\n as my advisors' faith in the advantages of primitive plumbing. As for\n myself, I am a realist. If two monkeys want the same banana, in the end\n one will have it, and the other will cry morality. The days of my years\n are numbered, praise be to God. While they last, I hope to eat well,\n hunt well, fight well and take my share of pleasure. I leave to others\n the arid satisfactions of self-denial and other perversions.\"\n\n\n \"You admit you're here to grab our land, then,\" Georges said. \"That's\n the damnedest piece of bare-faced aggression—\"",
"\"Isn't it the custom?\" the Aga Kaga smiled complacently.\n\n\n \"I have news for you, Stanley. In this instance, neck-wringing seems\n more in order than hand-wringing.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga frowned. \"Your manner—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind our manners!\" Georges blurted, standing. \"We don't need any\n lessons from goat-herding land-thieves!\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga's face darkened. \"You dare to speak thus to me, pig of a\n muck-grubber!\"",
"\"I've had some unhappy experiences with strangers,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n \"It is written in the sands that all strangers are kin. Still, he who\n visits rarely is a welcome guest. Be seated.\"\nIII\n\n\n Handmaidens brought cushions, giggled and fled. Retief and Georges\n settled themselves comfortably. The Aga Kaga eyed them in silence.\n\"We have come to bear tidings from the Corps Diplomatique\n Terrestrienne,\" Retief said solemnly. A perfumed slave girl offered\n grapes.\n\n\n \"Modest ignorance is better than boastful knowledge,\" the Aga Kaga\n said. \"What brings the CDT into the picture?\"\n\n\n \"The essay of the drunkard will be read in the tavern,\" Retief said.\n \"Whereas the words of kings....\"",
"\"Call me Stanley.\" The Aga Kaga munched a grape. \"I merely face the\n realities of popular folk-lore. Let's be pragmatic; it's a matter of\n historical association. Some people can grab land and pass it off\n lightly as a moral duty; others are dubbed imperialist merely for\n holding onto their own. Unfair, you say. But that's life, my friends.\n And I shall continue to take every advantage of it.\"\n\n\n \"We'll fight you!\" Georges bellowed. He took another gulp of whiskey\n and slammed the glass down. \"You won't take this world without a\n struggle!\"\n\n\n \"Another?\" the Aga Kaga said, offering the bottle. Georges glowered as\n his glass was filled. The Aga Kaga held the glass up to the light.\n\n\n \"Excellent color, don't you agree?\" He turned his eyes on Georges.",
"\"At first glance,\" Retief said, \"it looks as though the places are\n already occupied, and the deeds are illegal.\"\nThe Aga Kaga guffawed. \"For a diplomat, you speak plainly, Retief. Have\n another drink.\" He poured, eyeing Georges. \"What of M. Duror? How does\n he feel about it?\"\n\n\n Georges took a thoughtful swallow of whiskey. \"Not bad,\" he said. \"But\n not quite good enough to cover the odor of goats.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga snorted. \"I thought the goats were overdoing it a bit\n myself,\" he said. \"Still, the graybeards insisted. And I need their\n support.\"\n\n\n \"Also,\" Georges said distinctly, \"I think you're soft. You lie around\n letting women wait on you, while your betters are out doing an honest\n day's work.\"",
"\"Get out,\" Blackbeard ordered. The guards eyed the visitors, their\n drawn sabers catching sunlight. Retief and Georges stepped from the\n car onto rich rugs spread on the grass. They followed the ferocious\n gesture of the bearded man through the opening into a perfumed interior\n of luminous shadows. A heavy odor of incense hung in the air, and the\n strumming of stringed instruments laid a muted pattern of sound behind\n the decorations of gold and blue, silver and green. At the far end of\n the room, among a bevy of female slaves, a large and resplendently clad\n man with blue-black hair and a clean-shaven chin popped a grape into\n his mouth. He wiped his fingers negligently on a wisp of silk offered\n by a handmaiden, belched loudly and looked the callers over.\n\n\n Blackbeard cleared his throat. \"Down on your faces in the presence of\n the Exalted One, the Aga Kaga, ruler of East and West.\"",
"The three horsemen pulled up in a churn of chaff and a clatter of\n pebbles. Georges coughed, batting a hand at the settling dust. Retief\n peeled the cigar unhurriedly, sniffed, at it and thumbed it alight. He\n drew at it, puffed out a cloud of smoke and glanced casually at the\n trio of Aga Kagan cavaliers.\n\n\n \"Peace be with you,\" he intoned in accent-free Kagan. \"May your shadows\n never grow less.\"\nThe leader of the three, a hawk-faced man with a heavy beard,\n unlimbered his rifle. He fingered it, frowning ferociously.\n\n\n \"Have no fear,\" Retief said, smiling graciously. \"He who comes as a\n guest enjoys perfect safety.\"\n\n\n A smooth-faced member of the threesome barked an oath and leveled his\n rifle at Retief.",
"\"I shall know when to stop,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Stanley,\" Retief said, rising. \"Are we quite private here?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, perfectly so,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"None would dare to intrude in\n my council.\" He cocked an eyebrow at Retief. \"You have a proposal to\n make in confidence? But what of our dear friend Georges? One would not\n like to see him disillusioned.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about Georges. He's a realist, like you. He's prepared to\n deal in facts. Hard facts, in this case.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga nodded thoughtfully. \"What are you getting at?\"\n\n\n \"You're basing your plan of action on the certainty that the Corps will\n sit by, wringing its hands, while you embark on a career of planetary\n piracy.\"",
"\"Come to the point,\" the Aga Kaga cut in. \"You're here to lodge a\n complaint that I'm invading territories to which someone else lays\n claim, is that it?\" He smiled broadly, offered dope-sticks and lit one.\n \"Well, I've been expecting a call. After all, it's what you gentlemen\n are paid for. Cheers.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency has a lucid way of putting things,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Call me Stanley,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"The other routine is just to\n please some of the old fools—I mean the more conservative members\n of my government. They're still gnawing their beards and kicking\n themselves because their ancestors dropped science in favor of alchemy\n and got themselves stranded in a cultural dead end. This charade is\n supposed to prove they were right all along. However, I've no time\n to waste in neurotic compensations. I have places to go and deeds to\n accomplish.\"",
"\"Excellency,\" Retief said, \"I have the honor to present M. Georges\n Duror, Chef d'Regime of the Planetary government.\"\n\n\n \"Planetary government?\" The Aga Kaga spat grape seeds on the rug. \"My\n men have observed a few squatters along the shore. If they're in\n distress, I'll see about a distribution of goat-meat.\"\n\n\n \"It is the punishment of the envious to grieve at anothers' plenty,\"\n Retief said. \"No goat-meat will be required.\"\n\n\n \"Ralph told me you talk like a page out of Mustapha ben Abdallah Katib\n Jelebi,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"I know a few old sayings myself. For\n example, 'A Bedouin is only cheated once.'\"\n\n\n \"We have no such intentions, Excellency,\" Retief said. \"Is it not\n written, 'Have no faith in the Prince whose minister cheats you'?\"",
"\"A Note,\" Georges said, waving his cigar. \"What the purple polluted\n hell is a Note supposed to do? I've got Aga Kagan claim-jumpers camped\n in the middle of what used to be a fine stand of barley, cooking\n sheep's brains over dung fires not ten miles from Government House—and\n upwind at that.\"\n\n\n \"Say, if that's the same barley you distill your whiskey from, I'd\n call that a first-class atrocity.\"\n\n\n \"Retief, on your say-so, I've kept my boys on a short leash. They've\n put up with plenty. Last week, while you were away, these barbarians\n sailed that flotilla of armor-plated junks right through the middle of\n one of our best oyster breeding beds. It was all I could do to keep a\n bunch of our men from going out in private helis and blasting 'em out\n of the water.\"",
"A hundred yards away, a trio of brown-cloaked horsemen topped a rise,\n paused dramatically against the cloudless pale sky, then galloped\n down the slope toward the car, rifles bobbing at their backs, cloaks\n billowing out behind. Side by side they rode, through the brown-golden\n grain, cutting three narrow swaths that ran in a straight sweep from\n the ridge to the air-car where Retief and the Chef d'Regime hovered,\n waiting.\n\n\n Georges scrambled for the side of the car. \"Just wait 'til I get my\n hands on him!\"\n\n\n Retief pulled him back. \"Sit tight and look pleased, Georges. Never\n give the opposition a hint of your true feelings. Pretend you're a goat\n lover—and hand me one of your cigars.\"",
"\"Sorry,\" Retief said firmly. \"My hay-fever, you know.\"\n\n\n The reclining giant waved a hand languidly.\n\n\n \"Never mind the formalities,\" he said. \"Approach.\"\n\n\n Retief and Georges crossed the thick rugs. A cold draft blew toward\n them. The reclining man sneezed violently, wiped his nose on another\n silken scarf and held up a hand.\n\n\n \"Night and the horses and the desert know me,\" he said in resonant\n tones. \"Also the sword and the guest and paper and pen—\" He\n paused, wrinkled his nose and sneezed again. \"Turn off that damned\n air-conditioner,\" he snapped.\n\n\n He settled himself and motioned the bearded man to him. The two\n exchanged muted remarks. Then the bearded man stepped back, ducked his\n head and withdrew to the rear.",
"Retief dribbled the ash from his cigar over the side of the car.\n\n\n \"Now I think we'd better be getting on,\" he said briskly. \"I've enjoyed\n our chat, but we do have business to attend to.\"\n\n\n The bearded leader laughed shortly. \"Does the condemned man beg for the\n axe?\" he enquired rhetorically. \"You shall visit the Aga Kaga, then.\n Move on! And make no attempt to escape, else my gun will speak you a\n brief farewell.\"\n\n\n The horsemen glowered, then, at a word from the leader, took positions\n around the car. Georges started the vehicle forward, following the\n leading rider. Retief leaned back and let out a long sigh.\n\n\n \"That was close,\" he said. \"I was about out of proverbs.\"",
"\"You mock me, pale one. I warn you—\"\n\n\n \"Only love makes me weep,\" Retief said. \"I laugh at hatred.\"\n\n\n \"Get out of the car!\"\n\n\n Retief puffed at his cigar, eyeing the Aga Kagan cheerfully. The youth\n in the rear moved forward, teeth bared.\n\n\n \"Never give in to the fool, lest he say, 'He fears me,'\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"I cannot restrain my men in the face of your insults,\" the bearded Aga\n Kagan roared. \"These hens of mine have feathers—and talons as well!\"\n\n\n \"When God would destroy an ant, he gives him wings,\" Retief said.\n \"Distress in misfortune is another misfortune.\"\n\n\n The bearded man's face grew purple.",
"The Under-Secretary nodded. \"Quite right. Carry on along the same\n lines. Now, if there's nothing further—\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Mr. Secretary,\" Magnan said, rising. \"We certainly\n appreciate your guidance.\"\n\n\n \"There is a little something further,\" said Retief, sitting solidly in\n his chair. \"What's the Corps going to do about the Aga Kagans?\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary turned a liverish eye on Retief. \"As Minister\n to Flamme, you should know that the function of a diplomatic\n representative is merely to ... what shall I say...?\"\n\n\n \"String them along?\" Magnan suggested.\n\n\n \"An unfortunate choice of phrase,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"However,\n it embodies certain realities of Galactic politics. The Corps must\n concern itself with matters of broad policy.\"",
"A bearded goat eyed the Boyar Chef sardonically, jaw working. \"Look at\n that long-nosed son!\" The goat gave a derisive bleat and took another\n mouthful of ripe grain.\n\n\n \"Did you see that?\" Georges yelled. \"They've trained the son of a—\"\n\n\n \"Chin up, Georges,\" Retief said. \"We'll take up the goat problem along\n with the rest.\"\n\n\n \"I'll murder 'em!\"\n\n\n \"Hold it, Georges. Look over there.\"",
"\"Ah, ah!\" The Aga Kaga held up a hand. \"Watch your vocabulary, my\n dear sir. I'm sure that 'justifiable yearnings for territorial\n self-realization' would be more appropriate to the situation. Or\n possibly 'legitimate aspirations, for self-determination of formerly\n exploited peoples' might fit the case. Aggression is, by definition,\n an activity carried on only by those who have inherited the mantle of\n Colonial Imperialism.\"\n\n\n \"Imperialism! Why, you Aga Kagans have been the most notorious\n planet-grabbers in Sector history, you—you—\"",
"\"\nCould\nhave been,\" the Aga Kaga chuckled. He finished the grapes and\n began peeling an orange. \"But they never were. Hitler could have been\n stopped by the Czech Air Force in 1938; Stalin was at the mercy of the\n primitive atomics of the west in 1946; Leung was grossly over-extended\n at Rangoon. But the onus of that historic role could not be overcome.\n It has been the fate of your spiritual forebears to carve civilization\n from the wilderness and then, amid tearing of garments and the heaping\n of ashes of self-accusation on your own confused heads, to withdraw,\n leaving the spoils for local political opportunists and mob leaders,\n clothed in the mystical virtue of native birth. Have a banana.\"\n\n\n \"You're stretching your analogy a little too far,\" Retief said. \"You're\n banking on the inaction of the Corps. You could be wrong.\"",
"\"Very well, I concede the point.\" The Aga Kaga waved a hand at the\n serving maids. \"Depart, my dears. Attend me later. You too, Ralph.\n These are mere diplomats. They are men of words, not deeds.\"\n\n\n The bearded man glared and departed. The girls hurried after him.\n\n\n \"Now,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"Let's drop the wisdom of the ages and\n get down to the issues. Not that I don't admire your repertoire of\n platitudes. How do you remember them all?\"\n\n\n \"Diplomats and other liars require good memories,\" said Retief. \"But\n as you point out, small wisdom to small minds. I'm here to effect a\n settlement of certain differences between yourself and the planetary\n authorities. I have here a Note, which I'm conveying on behalf of the\n Sector Under-Secretary. With your permission, I'll read it.\""
],
[
"Retief dribbled the ash from his cigar over the side of the car.\n\n\n \"Now I think we'd better be getting on,\" he said briskly. \"I've enjoyed\n our chat, but we do have business to attend to.\"\n\n\n The bearded leader laughed shortly. \"Does the condemned man beg for the\n axe?\" he enquired rhetorically. \"You shall visit the Aga Kaga, then.\n Move on! And make no attempt to escape, else my gun will speak you a\n brief farewell.\"\n\n\n The horsemen glowered, then, at a word from the leader, took positions\n around the car. Georges started the vehicle forward, following the\n leading rider. Retief leaned back and let out a long sigh.\n\n\n \"That was close,\" he said. \"I was about out of proverbs.\"",
"The three horsemen pulled up in a churn of chaff and a clatter of\n pebbles. Georges coughed, batting a hand at the settling dust. Retief\n peeled the cigar unhurriedly, sniffed, at it and thumbed it alight. He\n drew at it, puffed out a cloud of smoke and glanced casually at the\n trio of Aga Kagan cavaliers.\n\n\n \"Peace be with you,\" he intoned in accent-free Kagan. \"May your shadows\n never grow less.\"\nThe leader of the three, a hawk-faced man with a heavy beard,\n unlimbered his rifle. He fingered it, frowning ferociously.\n\n\n \"Have no fear,\" Retief said, smiling graciously. \"He who comes as a\n guest enjoys perfect safety.\"\n\n\n A smooth-faced member of the threesome barked an oath and leveled his\n rifle at Retief.",
"\"Youth is the steed of folly,\" Retief said. \"Take care that the\n beardless one does not disgrace his house.\"\n\n\n The leader whirled on the youth and snarled an order. He lowered the\n rifle, muttering. Blackbeard turned back to Retief.\n\n\n \"Begone, interlopers,\" he said. \"You disturb the goats.\"\n\n\n \"Provision is not taken to the houses of the generous,\" Retief said.\n \"May the creatures dine well ere they move on.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! The goats of the Aga Kaga graze on the lands of the Aga Kaga.\"\n The leader edged his horse close, eyed Retief fiercely. \"We welcome no\n intruders on our lands.\"",
"\"Come to the point,\" the Aga Kaga cut in. \"You're here to lodge a\n complaint that I'm invading territories to which someone else lays\n claim, is that it?\" He smiled broadly, offered dope-sticks and lit one.\n \"Well, I've been expecting a call. After all, it's what you gentlemen\n are paid for. Cheers.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency has a lucid way of putting things,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Call me Stanley,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"The other routine is just to\n please some of the old fools—I mean the more conservative members\n of my government. They're still gnawing their beards and kicking\n themselves because their ancestors dropped science in favor of alchemy\n and got themselves stranded in a cultural dead end. This charade is\n supposed to prove they were right all along. However, I've no time\n to waste in neurotic compensations. I have places to go and deeds to\n accomplish.\"",
"\"Get out,\" Blackbeard ordered. The guards eyed the visitors, their\n drawn sabers catching sunlight. Retief and Georges stepped from the\n car onto rich rugs spread on the grass. They followed the ferocious\n gesture of the bearded man through the opening into a perfumed interior\n of luminous shadows. A heavy odor of incense hung in the air, and the\n strumming of stringed instruments laid a muted pattern of sound behind\n the decorations of gold and blue, silver and green. At the far end of\n the room, among a bevy of female slaves, a large and resplendently clad\n man with blue-black hair and a clean-shaven chin popped a grape into\n his mouth. He wiped his fingers negligently on a wisp of silk offered\n by a handmaiden, belched loudly and looked the callers over.\n\n\n Blackbeard cleared his throat. \"Down on your faces in the presence of\n the Exalted One, the Aga Kaga, ruler of East and West.\"",
"\"At first glance,\" Retief said, \"it looks as though the places are\n already occupied, and the deeds are illegal.\"\nThe Aga Kaga guffawed. \"For a diplomat, you speak plainly, Retief. Have\n another drink.\" He poured, eyeing Georges. \"What of M. Duror? How does\n he feel about it?\"\n\n\n Georges took a thoughtful swallow of whiskey. \"Not bad,\" he said. \"But\n not quite good enough to cover the odor of goats.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga snorted. \"I thought the goats were overdoing it a bit\n myself,\" he said. \"Still, the graybeards insisted. And I need their\n support.\"\n\n\n \"Also,\" Georges said distinctly, \"I think you're soft. You lie around\n letting women wait on you, while your betters are out doing an honest\n day's work.\"",
"\"I've had some unhappy experiences with strangers,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n \"It is written in the sands that all strangers are kin. Still, he who\n visits rarely is a welcome guest. Be seated.\"\nIII\n\n\n Handmaidens brought cushions, giggled and fled. Retief and Georges\n settled themselves comfortably. The Aga Kaga eyed them in silence.\n\"We have come to bear tidings from the Corps Diplomatique\n Terrestrienne,\" Retief said solemnly. A perfumed slave girl offered\n grapes.\n\n\n \"Modest ignorance is better than boastful knowledge,\" the Aga Kaga\n said. \"What brings the CDT into the picture?\"\n\n\n \"The essay of the drunkard will be read in the tavern,\" Retief said.\n \"Whereas the words of kings....\"",
"\"Excellency,\" Retief said, \"I have the honor to present M. Georges\n Duror, Chef d'Regime of the Planetary government.\"\n\n\n \"Planetary government?\" The Aga Kaga spat grape seeds on the rug. \"My\n men have observed a few squatters along the shore. If they're in\n distress, I'll see about a distribution of goat-meat.\"\n\n\n \"It is the punishment of the envious to grieve at anothers' plenty,\"\n Retief said. \"No goat-meat will be required.\"\n\n\n \"Ralph told me you talk like a page out of Mustapha ben Abdallah Katib\n Jelebi,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"I know a few old sayings myself. For\n example, 'A Bedouin is only cheated once.'\"\n\n\n \"We have no such intentions, Excellency,\" Retief said. \"Is it not\n written, 'Have no faith in the Prince whose minister cheats you'?\"",
"\"I shall know when to stop,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Stanley,\" Retief said, rising. \"Are we quite private here?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, perfectly so,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"None would dare to intrude in\n my council.\" He cocked an eyebrow at Retief. \"You have a proposal to\n make in confidence? But what of our dear friend Georges? One would not\n like to see him disillusioned.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about Georges. He's a realist, like you. He's prepared to\n deal in facts. Hard facts, in this case.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga nodded thoughtfully. \"What are you getting at?\"\n\n\n \"You're basing your plan of action on the certainty that the Corps will\n sit by, wringing its hands, while you embark on a career of planetary\n piracy.\"",
"\"You mock me, pale one. I warn you—\"\n\n\n \"Only love makes me weep,\" Retief said. \"I laugh at hatred.\"\n\n\n \"Get out of the car!\"\n\n\n Retief puffed at his cigar, eyeing the Aga Kagan cheerfully. The youth\n in the rear moved forward, teeth bared.\n\n\n \"Never give in to the fool, lest he say, 'He fears me,'\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"I cannot restrain my men in the face of your insults,\" the bearded Aga\n Kagan roared. \"These hens of mine have feathers—and talons as well!\"\n\n\n \"When God would destroy an ant, he gives him wings,\" Retief said.\n \"Distress in misfortune is another misfortune.\"\n\n\n The bearded man's face grew purple.",
"The Chef d'Regime frowned, blew out a cloud of smoke. \"I wasn't kidding\n about these Aga Kagans,\" he said. \"I hear they have some nasty habits.\n I don't want to see you operated on with the same knives they use to\n skin out the goats.\"\n\n\n \"I'd be against that myself. Still, the mail must go through.\"\n\n\n \"Strong-arm lads, eh? What have you got in mind, Retief?\"\n\n\n \"A little muscle in the background is an old diplomatic custom,\" Retief\n said.\n\n\n The Chef d'Regime stubbed out his cigar thoughtfully. \"I used to be a\n pretty fair elbow-wrestler myself,\" he said. \"Suppose I go along...?\"",
"\"You sound as though you'd brought off a coup,\" Georges said. \"From the\n expression on the whiskery one's face, we're in for trouble. What was\n he saying?\"\n\n\n \"Just a routine exchange of bluffs,\" Retief said. \"Now when we get\n there, remember to make your flattery sound like insults and your\n insults sound like flattery, and you'll be all right.\"\n\n\n \"These birds are armed. And they don't like strangers,\" Georges said.\n \"Maybe I should have boned up on their habits before I joined this\n expedition.\"\n\n\n \"Just stick to the plan,\" Retief said. \"And remember: a handful of luck\n is better than a camel-load of learning.\"\nThe air car followed the escort down a long slope to a dry river bed\n and across it, through a barren stretch of shifting sand to a green\n oasis set with canopies.",
"The Aga Kaga looked startled. \"Soft? I can tie a knot in an iron bar\n as big as your thumb.\" He popped a grape into his mouth. \"As for the\n rest, your pious views about the virtues of hard labor are as childish\n as my advisors' faith in the advantages of primitive plumbing. As for\n myself, I am a realist. If two monkeys want the same banana, in the end\n one will have it, and the other will cry morality. The days of my years\n are numbered, praise be to God. While they last, I hope to eat well,\n hunt well, fight well and take my share of pleasure. I leave to others\n the arid satisfactions of self-denial and other perversions.\"\n\n\n \"You admit you're here to grab our land, then,\" Georges said. \"That's\n the damnedest piece of bare-faced aggression—\"",
"\"A Note,\" Georges said, waving his cigar. \"What the purple polluted\n hell is a Note supposed to do? I've got Aga Kagan claim-jumpers camped\n in the middle of what used to be a fine stand of barley, cooking\n sheep's brains over dung fires not ten miles from Government House—and\n upwind at that.\"\n\n\n \"Say, if that's the same barley you distill your whiskey from, I'd\n call that a first-class atrocity.\"\n\n\n \"Retief, on your say-so, I've kept my boys on a short leash. They've\n put up with plenty. Last week, while you were away, these barbarians\n sailed that flotilla of armor-plated junks right through the middle of\n one of our best oyster breeding beds. It was all I could do to keep a\n bunch of our men from going out in private helis and blasting 'em out\n of the water.\"",
"\"To praise a man for what he does not possess is to make him appear\n foolish,\" Retief said. \"These are the lands of the Boyars. But enough\n of these pleasantries. We seek audience with your ruler.\"\n\n\n \"You may address me as 'Exalted One',\" the leader said. \"Now dismount\n from that steed of Shaitan.\"\n\n\n \"It is written, if you need anything from a dog, call him 'sir',\"\n Retief said. \"I must decline to impute canine ancestry to a guest. Now\n you may conduct us to your headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Enough of your insolence!\" The bearded man cocked his rifle. \"I could\n blow your heads off!\"\n\n\n \"The hen has feathers, but it does not fly,\" Retief said. \"We have\n asked for escort. A slave must be beaten with a stick; for a free man,\n a hint is enough.\"",
"The Under-Secretary nodded. \"Quite right. Carry on along the same\n lines. Now, if there's nothing further—\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Mr. Secretary,\" Magnan said, rising. \"We certainly\n appreciate your guidance.\"\n\n\n \"There is a little something further,\" said Retief, sitting solidly in\n his chair. \"What's the Corps going to do about the Aga Kagans?\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary turned a liverish eye on Retief. \"As Minister\n to Flamme, you should know that the function of a diplomatic\n representative is merely to ... what shall I say...?\"\n\n\n \"String them along?\" Magnan suggested.\n\n\n \"An unfortunate choice of phrase,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"However,\n it embodies certain realities of Galactic politics. The Corps must\n concern itself with matters of broad policy.\"",
"A hundred yards away, a trio of brown-cloaked horsemen topped a rise,\n paused dramatically against the cloudless pale sky, then galloped\n down the slope toward the car, rifles bobbing at their backs, cloaks\n billowing out behind. Side by side they rode, through the brown-golden\n grain, cutting three narrow swaths that ran in a straight sweep from\n the ridge to the air-car where Retief and the Chef d'Regime hovered,\n waiting.\n\n\n Georges scrambled for the side of the car. \"Just wait 'til I get my\n hands on him!\"\n\n\n Retief pulled him back. \"Sit tight and look pleased, Georges. Never\n give the opposition a hint of your true feelings. Pretend you're a goat\n lover—and hand me one of your cigars.\"",
"\"Don't worry. I'll keep the peace, if I have to start a war to do it.\"\nOn the broad verandah at Government House, Retief settled himself\n comfortably in a lounge chair. He accepted a tall glass from a\n white-jacketed waiter and regarded the flamboyant Flamme sunset, a\n gorgeous blaze of vermillion and purple that reflected from a still\n lake, tinged the broad lawn with color, silhouetted tall poplars among\n flower beds.\n\n\n \"You've done great things here in sixty years, Georges,\" said Retief.\n \"Not that natural geological processes wouldn't have produced the same\n results, given a couple of hundred million years.\"\n\n\n \"Don't belabor the point,\" the Boyar Chef d'Regime said. \"Since we seem\n to be on the verge of losing it.\"\n\n\n \"You're forgetting the Note.\"",
"\"Sorry,\" Retief said firmly. \"My hay-fever, you know.\"\n\n\n The reclining giant waved a hand languidly.\n\n\n \"Never mind the formalities,\" he said. \"Approach.\"\n\n\n Retief and Georges crossed the thick rugs. A cold draft blew toward\n them. The reclining man sneezed violently, wiped his nose on another\n silken scarf and held up a hand.\n\n\n \"Night and the horses and the desert know me,\" he said in resonant\n tones. \"Also the sword and the guest and paper and pen—\" He\n paused, wrinkled his nose and sneezed again. \"Turn off that damned\n air-conditioner,\" he snapped.\n\n\n He settled himself and motioned the bearded man to him. The two\n exchanged muted remarks. Then the bearded man stepped back, ducked his\n head and withdrew to the rear.",
"\"\nCould\nhave been,\" the Aga Kaga chuckled. He finished the grapes and\n began peeling an orange. \"But they never were. Hitler could have been\n stopped by the Czech Air Force in 1938; Stalin was at the mercy of the\n primitive atomics of the west in 1946; Leung was grossly over-extended\n at Rangoon. But the onus of that historic role could not be overcome.\n It has been the fate of your spiritual forebears to carve civilization\n from the wilderness and then, amid tearing of garments and the heaping\n of ashes of self-accusation on your own confused heads, to withdraw,\n leaving the spoils for local political opportunists and mob leaders,\n clothed in the mystical virtue of native birth. Have a banana.\"\n\n\n \"You're stretching your analogy a little too far,\" Retief said. \"You're\n banking on the inaction of the Corps. You could be wrong.\""
],
[
"\"That,\" said Retief, \"should lend just the right note of solidarity to\n our little delegation.\" He hitched his chair closer. \"Now, depending on\n what we run into, here's how we'll play it....\"\nII\n\n\n Eight miles into the rolling granite hills west of the capital, a\n black-painted official air-car flying the twin flags of Chief of State\n and Terrestrial Minister skimmed along a foot above a pot-holed road.\n Slumped in the padded seat, the Boyar Chef d'Regime waved his cigar\n glumly at the surrounding hills.\n\n\n \"Fifty years ago this was bare rock,\" he said. \"We've bred special\n strains of bacteria here to break down the formations into soil, and we\n followed up with a program of broad-spectrum fertilization. We planned\n to put the whole area into crops by next year. Now it looks like the\n goats will get it.\"",
"\"Will that scrubland support a crop?\" Retief said, eyeing the\n lichen-covered knolls.\n\n\n \"Sure. We start with legumes and follow up with cereals. Wait until you\n see this next section. It's an old flood plain, came into production\n thirty years ago. One of our finest—\"\n\n\n The air-car topped a rise. The Chef dropped his cigar and half rose,\n with a hoarse yell. A herd of scraggly goats tossed their heads among a\n stand of ripe grain. The car pulled to a stop. Retief held the Boyar's\n arm.\n\n\n \"Keep calm, Georges,\" he said. \"Remember, we're on a diplomatic\n mission. It wouldn't do to come to the conference table smelling of\n goats.\"\n\n\n \"Let me at 'em!\" Georges roared. \"I'll throttle 'em with my bare hands!\"",
"\"... and with reference to the recent relocation of persons under the\n jurisdiction of his Excellency, has the honor to point out that the\n territories now under settlement comprise a portion of that area,\n hereinafter designated as Sub-sector Alpha, which, under terms of\n the Agreement entered into by his Excellency's predecessor, and as\n referenced in Sector Ministry's Notes numbers G-175846573957-b and\n X-7584736 c-1, with particular pertinence to that body designated in\n the Revised Galactic Catalogue, Tenth Edition, as amended, Volume\n Nine, reel 43, as 54 Cygni Alpha, otherwise referred to hereinafter as\n Flamme—\"",
"\"Sixty years ago the Corps was encouraging the Boyars to settle\n Flamme,\" Retief said. \"They were assured of Corps support.\"\n\n\n \"I don't believe you'll find that in writing,\" said the Under-Secretary\n blandly. \"In any event, that was sixty years ago. At that time a\n foothold against Neo-Concordiatist elements was deemed desirable. Now\n the situation has changed.\"\n\n\n \"The Boyars have spent sixty years terraforming Flamme,\" Retief said.\n \"They've cleared jungle, descummed the seas, irrigated deserts, set out\n forests. They've just about reached the point where they can begin to\n enjoy it. The Aga Kagans have picked this as a good time to move in.\n They've landed thirty detachments of 'fishermen'—complete with armored\n trawlers mounting 40 mm infinite repeaters—and another two dozen\n parties of 'homesteaders'—all male and toting rocket launchers.\"",
"\"I've had some unhappy experiences with strangers,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n \"It is written in the sands that all strangers are kin. Still, he who\n visits rarely is a welcome guest. Be seated.\"\nIII\n\n\n Handmaidens brought cushions, giggled and fled. Retief and Georges\n settled themselves comfortably. The Aga Kaga eyed them in silence.\n\"We have come to bear tidings from the Corps Diplomatique\n Terrestrienne,\" Retief said solemnly. A perfumed slave girl offered\n grapes.\n\n\n \"Modest ignorance is better than boastful knowledge,\" the Aga Kaga\n said. \"What brings the CDT into the picture?\"\n\n\n \"The essay of the drunkard will be read in the tavern,\" Retief said.\n \"Whereas the words of kings....\"",
"\"I shall know when to stop,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Stanley,\" Retief said, rising. \"Are we quite private here?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, perfectly so,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"None would dare to intrude in\n my council.\" He cocked an eyebrow at Retief. \"You have a proposal to\n make in confidence? But what of our dear friend Georges? One would not\n like to see him disillusioned.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about Georges. He's a realist, like you. He's prepared to\n deal in facts. Hard facts, in this case.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga nodded thoughtfully. \"What are you getting at?\"\n\n\n \"You're basing your plan of action on the certainty that the Corps will\n sit by, wringing its hands, while you embark on a career of planetary\n piracy.\"",
"\"Ah, ah!\" The Aga Kaga held up a hand. \"Watch your vocabulary, my\n dear sir. I'm sure that 'justifiable yearnings for territorial\n self-realization' would be more appropriate to the situation. Or\n possibly 'legitimate aspirations, for self-determination of formerly\n exploited peoples' might fit the case. Aggression is, by definition,\n an activity carried on only by those who have inherited the mantle of\n Colonial Imperialism.\"\n\n\n \"Imperialism! Why, you Aga Kagans have been the most notorious\n planet-grabbers in Sector history, you—you—\"",
"\"Come to the point,\" the Aga Kaga cut in. \"You're here to lodge a\n complaint that I'm invading territories to which someone else lays\n claim, is that it?\" He smiled broadly, offered dope-sticks and lit one.\n \"Well, I've been expecting a call. After all, it's what you gentlemen\n are paid for. Cheers.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency has a lucid way of putting things,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Call me Stanley,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"The other routine is just to\n please some of the old fools—I mean the more conservative members\n of my government. They're still gnawing their beards and kicking\n themselves because their ancestors dropped science in favor of alchemy\n and got themselves stranded in a cultural dead end. This charade is\n supposed to prove they were right all along. However, I've no time\n to waste in neurotic compensations. I have places to go and deeds to\n accomplish.\"",
"\"You sound as though you'd brought off a coup,\" Georges said. \"From the\n expression on the whiskery one's face, we're in for trouble. What was\n he saying?\"\n\n\n \"Just a routine exchange of bluffs,\" Retief said. \"Now when we get\n there, remember to make your flattery sound like insults and your\n insults sound like flattery, and you'll be all right.\"\n\n\n \"These birds are armed. And they don't like strangers,\" Georges said.\n \"Maybe I should have boned up on their habits before I joined this\n expedition.\"\n\n\n \"Just stick to the plan,\" Retief said. \"And remember: a handful of luck\n is better than a camel-load of learning.\"\nThe air car followed the escort down a long slope to a dry river bed\n and across it, through a barren stretch of shifting sand to a green\n oasis set with canopies.",
"\"Very well, I concede the point.\" The Aga Kaga waved a hand at the\n serving maids. \"Depart, my dears. Attend me later. You too, Ralph.\n These are mere diplomats. They are men of words, not deeds.\"\n\n\n The bearded man glared and departed. The girls hurried after him.\n\n\n \"Now,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"Let's drop the wisdom of the ages and\n get down to the issues. Not that I don't admire your repertoire of\n platitudes. How do you remember them all?\"\n\n\n \"Diplomats and other liars require good memories,\" said Retief. \"But\n as you point out, small wisdom to small minds. I'm here to effect a\n settlement of certain differences between yourself and the planetary\n authorities. I have here a Note, which I'm conveying on behalf of the\n Sector Under-Secretary. With your permission, I'll read it.\"",
"\"So what are we going to do? Sit here and watch these goat-herders take\n over our farms and fisheries?\"\n\n\n \"Those goat-herders aren't all they seem. They've got a first-class\n modern navy.\"\n\n\n \"I've seen 'em. They camp in goat-skin tents, gallop around on\n animal-back, wear dresses down to their ankles—\"\n\n\n \"The 'goat-skin' tents are a high-polymer plastic, made in the same\n factory that turns out those long flowing bullet-proof robes you\n mention. The animals are just for show. Back home they use helis and\n ground cars of the most modern design.\"\n\n\n The Chef d'Regime chewed his cigar.\n\n\n \"Why the masquerade?\"\n\n\n \"Something to do with internal policies, I suppose.\"",
"\"Excellency,\" Retief said, \"I have the honor to present M. Georges\n Duror, Chef d'Regime of the Planetary government.\"\n\n\n \"Planetary government?\" The Aga Kaga spat grape seeds on the rug. \"My\n men have observed a few squatters along the shore. If they're in\n distress, I'll see about a distribution of goat-meat.\"\n\n\n \"It is the punishment of the envious to grieve at anothers' plenty,\"\n Retief said. \"No goat-meat will be required.\"\n\n\n \"Ralph told me you talk like a page out of Mustapha ben Abdallah Katib\n Jelebi,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"I know a few old sayings myself. For\n example, 'A Bedouin is only cheated once.'\"\n\n\n \"We have no such intentions, Excellency,\" Retief said. \"Is it not\n written, 'Have no faith in the Prince whose minister cheats you'?\"",
"\"It's pointless to resist,\" he said. \"We have you outgunned and\n outmanned. Your small nation has no chance against us. But we're\n prepared to be generous. You may continue to occupy such areas as we do\n not immediately require until such time as you're able to make other\n arrangements.\"\n\n\n \"And by the time we've got a crop growing out of what was bare rock,\n you'll be ready to move in,\" the Boyar Chef d'Regime snapped. \"But\n you'll find that we aren't alone!\"\n\"Quite alone,\" the Aga said. He nodded sagely. \"Yes, one need but read\n the lesson of history. The Corps Diplomatique will make expostulatory\n noises, but it will accept the\nfait accompli\n. You, my dear sir, are\n but a very small nibble. We won't make the mistake of excessive greed.\n We shall inch our way to empire—and those who stand in our way shall\n be dubbed warmongers.\"",
"\"Surely there's land enough on the world to afford space to both\n groups,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"A spirit of co-operation—\"\n\"The Boyars needed some co-operation sixty years ago,\" Retief said.\n \"They tried to get the Aga Kagans to join in and help them beat\n back some of the saurian wild life that liked to graze on people.\n The Corps didn't like the idea. They wanted to see an undisputed\n anti-Concordiatist enclave. The Aga Kagans didn't want to play, either.\n But now that the world is tamed, they're moving in.\"\n\n\n \"The exigencies of diplomacy require a flexible policy—\"\n\n\n \"I want a firm assurance of Corps support to take back to Flamme,\"\n Retief said. \"The Boyars are a little naive. They don't understand\n diplomatic triple-speak. They just want to hold onto the homes they've\n made out of a wasteland.\"",
"\"Don't worry. I'll keep the peace, if I have to start a war to do it.\"\nOn the broad verandah at Government House, Retief settled himself\n comfortably in a lounge chair. He accepted a tall glass from a\n white-jacketed waiter and regarded the flamboyant Flamme sunset, a\n gorgeous blaze of vermillion and purple that reflected from a still\n lake, tinged the broad lawn with color, silhouetted tall poplars among\n flower beds.\n\n\n \"You've done great things here in sixty years, Georges,\" said Retief.\n \"Not that natural geological processes wouldn't have produced the same\n results, given a couple of hundred million years.\"\n\n\n \"Don't belabor the point,\" the Boyar Chef d'Regime said. \"Since we seem\n to be on the verge of losing it.\"\n\n\n \"You're forgetting the Note.\"",
"A hundred yards away, a trio of brown-cloaked horsemen topped a rise,\n paused dramatically against the cloudless pale sky, then galloped\n down the slope toward the car, rifles bobbing at their backs, cloaks\n billowing out behind. Side by side they rode, through the brown-golden\n grain, cutting three narrow swaths that ran in a straight sweep from\n the ridge to the air-car where Retief and the Chef d'Regime hovered,\n waiting.\n\n\n Georges scrambled for the side of the car. \"Just wait 'til I get my\n hands on him!\"\n\n\n Retief pulled him back. \"Sit tight and look pleased, Georges. Never\n give the opposition a hint of your true feelings. Pretend you're a goat\n lover—and hand me one of your cigars.\"",
"\"I'm warning you, Retief!\" the Under-Secretary snapped, leaning\n forward, wattles quivering. \"Corps policy with regard to Flamme\n includes no inflammatory actions based on outmoded concepts. The Boyars\n will have to accommodate themselves to the situation!\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm afraid of,\" Retief said. \"They're not going to sit\n still and watch it happen. If I don't take back concrete evidence of\n Corps backing, we're going to have a nice hot little shooting war on\n our hands.\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary pushed out his lips and drummed his fingers on the\n desk.\n\n\n \"Confounded hot-heads,\" he muttered. \"Very well, Retief. I'll go along\n to the extent of a Note; but positively no further.\"\n\n\n \"A Note? I was thinking of something more like a squadron of Corps\n Peace Enforcers running through a few routine maneuvers off Flamme.\"",
"\"At first glance,\" Retief said, \"it looks as though the places are\n already occupied, and the deeds are illegal.\"\nThe Aga Kaga guffawed. \"For a diplomat, you speak plainly, Retief. Have\n another drink.\" He poured, eyeing Georges. \"What of M. Duror? How does\n he feel about it?\"\n\n\n Georges took a thoughtful swallow of whiskey. \"Not bad,\" he said. \"But\n not quite good enough to cover the odor of goats.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga snorted. \"I thought the goats were overdoing it a bit\n myself,\" he said. \"Still, the graybeards insisted. And I need their\n support.\"\n\n\n \"Also,\" Georges said distinctly, \"I think you're soft. You lie around\n letting women wait on you, while your betters are out doing an honest\n day's work.\"",
"The three horsemen pulled up in a churn of chaff and a clatter of\n pebbles. Georges coughed, batting a hand at the settling dust. Retief\n peeled the cigar unhurriedly, sniffed, at it and thumbed it alight. He\n drew at it, puffed out a cloud of smoke and glanced casually at the\n trio of Aga Kagan cavaliers.\n\n\n \"Peace be with you,\" he intoned in accent-free Kagan. \"May your shadows\n never grow less.\"\nThe leader of the three, a hawk-faced man with a heavy beard,\n unlimbered his rifle. He fingered it, frowning ferociously.\n\n\n \"Have no fear,\" Retief said, smiling graciously. \"He who comes as a\n guest enjoys perfect safety.\"\n\n\n A smooth-faced member of the threesome barked an oath and leveled his\n rifle at Retief.",
"\"So we sit tight and watch 'em take our world away from us. That's what\n I get for playing along with you, Retief. We should have clobbered\n these monkeys as soon as they set foot on our world.\"\n\n\n \"Slow down, I haven't finished yet. There's still the Note.\"\n\n\n \"I've got plenty of paper already. Rolls and rolls of it.\"\n\n\n \"Give diplomatic processes a chance,\" said Retief. \"The Note hasn't\n even been delivered yet. Who knows? We may get surprising results.\"\n\n\n \"If you expect me to supply a runner for the purpose, you're out of\n luck. From what I hear, he's likely to come back with his ears stuffed\n in his hip pocket.\"\n\n\n \"I'll deliver the Note personally,\" Retief said. \"I could use a couple\n of escorts—preferably strong-arm lads.\""
],
[
"\"To praise a man for what he does not possess is to make him appear\n foolish,\" Retief said. \"These are the lands of the Boyars. But enough\n of these pleasantries. We seek audience with your ruler.\"\n\n\n \"You may address me as 'Exalted One',\" the leader said. \"Now dismount\n from that steed of Shaitan.\"\n\n\n \"It is written, if you need anything from a dog, call him 'sir',\"\n Retief said. \"I must decline to impute canine ancestry to a guest. Now\n you may conduct us to your headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Enough of your insolence!\" The bearded man cocked his rifle. \"I could\n blow your heads off!\"\n\n\n \"The hen has feathers, but it does not fly,\" Retief said. \"We have\n asked for escort. A slave must be beaten with a stick; for a free man,\n a hint is enough.\"",
"\"Youth is the steed of folly,\" Retief said. \"Take care that the\n beardless one does not disgrace his house.\"\n\n\n The leader whirled on the youth and snarled an order. He lowered the\n rifle, muttering. Blackbeard turned back to Retief.\n\n\n \"Begone, interlopers,\" he said. \"You disturb the goats.\"\n\n\n \"Provision is not taken to the houses of the generous,\" Retief said.\n \"May the creatures dine well ere they move on.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! The goats of the Aga Kaga graze on the lands of the Aga Kaga.\"\n The leader edged his horse close, eyed Retief fiercely. \"We welcome no\n intruders on our lands.\"",
"Retief dribbled the ash from his cigar over the side of the car.\n\n\n \"Now I think we'd better be getting on,\" he said briskly. \"I've enjoyed\n our chat, but we do have business to attend to.\"\n\n\n The bearded leader laughed shortly. \"Does the condemned man beg for the\n axe?\" he enquired rhetorically. \"You shall visit the Aga Kaga, then.\n Move on! And make no attempt to escape, else my gun will speak you a\n brief farewell.\"\n\n\n The horsemen glowered, then, at a word from the leader, took positions\n around the car. Georges started the vehicle forward, following the\n leading rider. Retief leaned back and let out a long sigh.\n\n\n \"That was close,\" he said. \"I was about out of proverbs.\"",
"\"You mock me, pale one. I warn you—\"\n\n\n \"Only love makes me weep,\" Retief said. \"I laugh at hatred.\"\n\n\n \"Get out of the car!\"\n\n\n Retief puffed at his cigar, eyeing the Aga Kagan cheerfully. The youth\n in the rear moved forward, teeth bared.\n\n\n \"Never give in to the fool, lest he say, 'He fears me,'\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"I cannot restrain my men in the face of your insults,\" the bearded Aga\n Kagan roared. \"These hens of mine have feathers—and talons as well!\"\n\n\n \"When God would destroy an ant, he gives him wings,\" Retief said.\n \"Distress in misfortune is another misfortune.\"\n\n\n The bearded man's face grew purple.",
"The three horsemen pulled up in a churn of chaff and a clatter of\n pebbles. Georges coughed, batting a hand at the settling dust. Retief\n peeled the cigar unhurriedly, sniffed, at it and thumbed it alight. He\n drew at it, puffed out a cloud of smoke and glanced casually at the\n trio of Aga Kagan cavaliers.\n\n\n \"Peace be with you,\" he intoned in accent-free Kagan. \"May your shadows\n never grow less.\"\nThe leader of the three, a hawk-faced man with a heavy beard,\n unlimbered his rifle. He fingered it, frowning ferociously.\n\n\n \"Have no fear,\" Retief said, smiling graciously. \"He who comes as a\n guest enjoys perfect safety.\"\n\n\n A smooth-faced member of the threesome barked an oath and leveled his\n rifle at Retief.",
"\"Don't worry. I'll keep the peace, if I have to start a war to do it.\"\nOn the broad verandah at Government House, Retief settled himself\n comfortably in a lounge chair. He accepted a tall glass from a\n white-jacketed waiter and regarded the flamboyant Flamme sunset, a\n gorgeous blaze of vermillion and purple that reflected from a still\n lake, tinged the broad lawn with color, silhouetted tall poplars among\n flower beds.\n\n\n \"You've done great things here in sixty years, Georges,\" said Retief.\n \"Not that natural geological processes wouldn't have produced the same\n results, given a couple of hundred million years.\"\n\n\n \"Don't belabor the point,\" the Boyar Chef d'Regime said. \"Since we seem\n to be on the verge of losing it.\"\n\n\n \"You're forgetting the Note.\"",
"A hundred yards away, a trio of brown-cloaked horsemen topped a rise,\n paused dramatically against the cloudless pale sky, then galloped\n down the slope toward the car, rifles bobbing at their backs, cloaks\n billowing out behind. Side by side they rode, through the brown-golden\n grain, cutting three narrow swaths that ran in a straight sweep from\n the ridge to the air-car where Retief and the Chef d'Regime hovered,\n waiting.\n\n\n Georges scrambled for the side of the car. \"Just wait 'til I get my\n hands on him!\"\n\n\n Retief pulled him back. \"Sit tight and look pleased, Georges. Never\n give the opposition a hint of your true feelings. Pretend you're a goat\n lover—and hand me one of your cigars.\"",
"\"You sound as though you'd brought off a coup,\" Georges said. \"From the\n expression on the whiskery one's face, we're in for trouble. What was\n he saying?\"\n\n\n \"Just a routine exchange of bluffs,\" Retief said. \"Now when we get\n there, remember to make your flattery sound like insults and your\n insults sound like flattery, and you'll be all right.\"\n\n\n \"These birds are armed. And they don't like strangers,\" Georges said.\n \"Maybe I should have boned up on their habits before I joined this\n expedition.\"\n\n\n \"Just stick to the plan,\" Retief said. \"And remember: a handful of luck\n is better than a camel-load of learning.\"\nThe air car followed the escort down a long slope to a dry river bed\n and across it, through a barren stretch of shifting sand to a green\n oasis set with canopies.",
"\"At first glance,\" Retief said, \"it looks as though the places are\n already occupied, and the deeds are illegal.\"\nThe Aga Kaga guffawed. \"For a diplomat, you speak plainly, Retief. Have\n another drink.\" He poured, eyeing Georges. \"What of M. Duror? How does\n he feel about it?\"\n\n\n Georges took a thoughtful swallow of whiskey. \"Not bad,\" he said. \"But\n not quite good enough to cover the odor of goats.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga snorted. \"I thought the goats were overdoing it a bit\n myself,\" he said. \"Still, the graybeards insisted. And I need their\n support.\"\n\n\n \"Also,\" Georges said distinctly, \"I think you're soft. You lie around\n letting women wait on you, while your betters are out doing an honest\n day's work.\"",
"\"I see you're quite a student of history, Stanley,\" Retief said. \"I\n wonder if you recall the eventual fate of most of the would-be empire\n nibblers of the past?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, but they grew incautious. They went too far, too fast.\"\n\n\n \"The confounded impudence,\" Georges rasped. \"Tells us to our face what\n he has in mind!\"\n\n\n \"An ancient and honorable custom, from the time of\nMein Kampf\nand\n the\nCommunist Manifesto\nthrough the\nPorcelain Wall\nof Leung. Such\n declarations have a legendary quality. It's traditional that they're\n never taken at face value.\"\n\n\n \"But always,\" Retief said, \"there was a critical point at which the man\n on horseback could have been pulled from the saddle.\"",
"\"Out of the question. A stiffly worded Protest Note is the best I can\n do. That's final.\"\n\n\n Back in the corridor, Magnan turned to Retief. \"When will you learn\n not to argue with Under-Secretaries? One would think you actively\n disliked the idea of ever receiving a promotion. I was astonished\n at the Under-Secretary's restraint. Frankly, I was stunned when he\n actually agreed to a Note. I, of course, will have to draft it.\" Magnan\n pulled at his lower lip thoughtfully. \"Now, I wonder, should I view\n with deep concern an act of open aggression, or merely point out an\n apparent violation of technicalities....\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother,\" Retief said. \"I have a draft all ready to go.\"\n\n\n \"But how—?\"\n\n\n \"I had a feeling I'd get paper instead of action,\" Retief said. \"I\n thought I'd save a little time all around.\"",
"The Chef d'Regime frowned, blew out a cloud of smoke. \"I wasn't kidding\n about these Aga Kagans,\" he said. \"I hear they have some nasty habits.\n I don't want to see you operated on with the same knives they use to\n skin out the goats.\"\n\n\n \"I'd be against that myself. Still, the mail must go through.\"\n\n\n \"Strong-arm lads, eh? What have you got in mind, Retief?\"\n\n\n \"A little muscle in the background is an old diplomatic custom,\" Retief\n said.\n\n\n The Chef d'Regime stubbed out his cigar thoughtfully. \"I used to be a\n pretty fair elbow-wrestler myself,\" he said. \"Suppose I go along...?\"",
"\"Sorry,\" Retief said firmly. \"My hay-fever, you know.\"\n\n\n The reclining giant waved a hand languidly.\n\n\n \"Never mind the formalities,\" he said. \"Approach.\"\n\n\n Retief and Georges crossed the thick rugs. A cold draft blew toward\n them. The reclining man sneezed violently, wiped his nose on another\n silken scarf and held up a hand.\n\n\n \"Night and the horses and the desert know me,\" he said in resonant\n tones. \"Also the sword and the guest and paper and pen—\" He\n paused, wrinkled his nose and sneezed again. \"Turn off that damned\n air-conditioner,\" he snapped.\n\n\n He settled himself and motioned the bearded man to him. The two\n exchanged muted remarks. Then the bearded man stepped back, ducked his\n head and withdrew to the rear.",
"\"Excellency,\" Retief said, \"I have the honor to present M. Georges\n Duror, Chef d'Regime of the Planetary government.\"\n\n\n \"Planetary government?\" The Aga Kaga spat grape seeds on the rug. \"My\n men have observed a few squatters along the shore. If they're in\n distress, I'll see about a distribution of goat-meat.\"\n\n\n \"It is the punishment of the envious to grieve at anothers' plenty,\"\n Retief said. \"No goat-meat will be required.\"\n\n\n \"Ralph told me you talk like a page out of Mustapha ben Abdallah Katib\n Jelebi,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"I know a few old sayings myself. For\n example, 'A Bedouin is only cheated once.'\"\n\n\n \"We have no such intentions, Excellency,\" Retief said. \"Is it not\n written, 'Have no faith in the Prince whose minister cheats you'?\"",
"\"\nCould\nhave been,\" the Aga Kaga chuckled. He finished the grapes and\n began peeling an orange. \"But they never were. Hitler could have been\n stopped by the Czech Air Force in 1938; Stalin was at the mercy of the\n primitive atomics of the west in 1946; Leung was grossly over-extended\n at Rangoon. But the onus of that historic role could not be overcome.\n It has been the fate of your spiritual forebears to carve civilization\n from the wilderness and then, amid tearing of garments and the heaping\n of ashes of self-accusation on your own confused heads, to withdraw,\n leaving the spoils for local political opportunists and mob leaders,\n clothed in the mystical virtue of native birth. Have a banana.\"\n\n\n \"You're stretching your analogy a little too far,\" Retief said. \"You're\n banking on the inaction of the Corps. You could be wrong.\"",
"\"Very well, I concede the point.\" The Aga Kaga waved a hand at the\n serving maids. \"Depart, my dears. Attend me later. You too, Ralph.\n These are mere diplomats. They are men of words, not deeds.\"\n\n\n The bearded man glared and departed. The girls hurried after him.\n\n\n \"Now,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"Let's drop the wisdom of the ages and\n get down to the issues. Not that I don't admire your repertoire of\n platitudes. How do you remember them all?\"\n\n\n \"Diplomats and other liars require good memories,\" said Retief. \"But\n as you point out, small wisdom to small minds. I'm here to effect a\n settlement of certain differences between yourself and the planetary\n authorities. I have here a Note, which I'm conveying on behalf of the\n Sector Under-Secretary. With your permission, I'll read it.\"",
"\"Come to the point,\" the Aga Kaga cut in. \"You're here to lodge a\n complaint that I'm invading territories to which someone else lays\n claim, is that it?\" He smiled broadly, offered dope-sticks and lit one.\n \"Well, I've been expecting a call. After all, it's what you gentlemen\n are paid for. Cheers.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency has a lucid way of putting things,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Call me Stanley,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"The other routine is just to\n please some of the old fools—I mean the more conservative members\n of my government. They're still gnawing their beards and kicking\n themselves because their ancestors dropped science in favor of alchemy\n and got themselves stranded in a cultural dead end. This charade is\n supposed to prove they were right all along. However, I've no time\n to waste in neurotic compensations. I have places to go and deeds to\n accomplish.\"",
"\"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Why, ah, there were a number of dispatches,\" Deputy Under-Secretary\n Magnan put in. \"Unfortunately, this being end-of-the-fiscal-year time,\n we found ourselves quite inundated with reports. Reports, reports,\n reports—\"\n\n\n \"Not criticizing the reporting system, are you, Mr. Magnan?\" the\n Under-Secretary barked.\n\n\n \"Gracious, no,\" Magnan said. \"I love reports.\"\n\n\n \"It seems nobody's told the Aga Kagans about fiscal years,\" Retief\n said. \"They're going right ahead with their program of land-grabbing on\n Flamme. So far, I've persuaded the Boyars that this is a matter for the\n Corps, and not to take matters into their own hands.\"",
"A bearded goat eyed the Boyar Chef sardonically, jaw working. \"Look at\n that long-nosed son!\" The goat gave a derisive bleat and took another\n mouthful of ripe grain.\n\n\n \"Did you see that?\" Georges yelled. \"They've trained the son of a—\"\n\n\n \"Chin up, Georges,\" Retief said. \"We'll take up the goat problem along\n with the rest.\"\n\n\n \"I'll murder 'em!\"\n\n\n \"Hold it, Georges. Look over there.\"",
"THE DESERT AND THE STARS\nBY KEITH LAUMER\nThe Aga Kaga wanted peace—a\n\n piece of everything in sight!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, November 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"I'm not at all sure,\" Under-Secretary Sternwheeler said, \"that I fully\n understand the necessity for your ... ah ... absenting yourself from\n your post of duty, Mr. Retief. Surely this matter could have been dealt\n with in the usual way—assuming any action is necessary.\"\n\n\n \"I had a sharp attack of writer's cramp, Mr. Secretary,\" Retief said.\n \"So I thought I'd better come along in person—just to be sure I was\n positive of making my point.\""
],
[
"\"I've had some unhappy experiences with strangers,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n \"It is written in the sands that all strangers are kin. Still, he who\n visits rarely is a welcome guest. Be seated.\"\nIII\n\n\n Handmaidens brought cushions, giggled and fled. Retief and Georges\n settled themselves comfortably. The Aga Kaga eyed them in silence.\n\"We have come to bear tidings from the Corps Diplomatique\n Terrestrienne,\" Retief said solemnly. A perfumed slave girl offered\n grapes.\n\n\n \"Modest ignorance is better than boastful knowledge,\" the Aga Kaga\n said. \"What brings the CDT into the picture?\"\n\n\n \"The essay of the drunkard will be read in the tavern,\" Retief said.\n \"Whereas the words of kings....\"",
"\"Very well, I concede the point.\" The Aga Kaga waved a hand at the\n serving maids. \"Depart, my dears. Attend me later. You too, Ralph.\n These are mere diplomats. They are men of words, not deeds.\"\n\n\n The bearded man glared and departed. The girls hurried after him.\n\n\n \"Now,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"Let's drop the wisdom of the ages and\n get down to the issues. Not that I don't admire your repertoire of\n platitudes. How do you remember them all?\"\n\n\n \"Diplomats and other liars require good memories,\" said Retief. \"But\n as you point out, small wisdom to small minds. I'm here to effect a\n settlement of certain differences between yourself and the planetary\n authorities. I have here a Note, which I'm conveying on behalf of the\n Sector Under-Secretary. With your permission, I'll read it.\"",
"\"I shall know when to stop,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Stanley,\" Retief said, rising. \"Are we quite private here?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, perfectly so,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"None would dare to intrude in\n my council.\" He cocked an eyebrow at Retief. \"You have a proposal to\n make in confidence? But what of our dear friend Georges? One would not\n like to see him disillusioned.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about Georges. He's a realist, like you. He's prepared to\n deal in facts. Hard facts, in this case.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga nodded thoughtfully. \"What are you getting at?\"\n\n\n \"You're basing your plan of action on the certainty that the Corps will\n sit by, wringing its hands, while you embark on a career of planetary\n piracy.\"",
"\"Isn't it the custom?\" the Aga Kaga smiled complacently.\n\n\n \"I have news for you, Stanley. In this instance, neck-wringing seems\n more in order than hand-wringing.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga frowned. \"Your manner—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind our manners!\" Georges blurted, standing. \"We don't need any\n lessons from goat-herding land-thieves!\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga's face darkened. \"You dare to speak thus to me, pig of a\n muck-grubber!\"",
"\"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Why, ah, there were a number of dispatches,\" Deputy Under-Secretary\n Magnan put in. \"Unfortunately, this being end-of-the-fiscal-year time,\n we found ourselves quite inundated with reports. Reports, reports,\n reports—\"\n\n\n \"Not criticizing the reporting system, are you, Mr. Magnan?\" the\n Under-Secretary barked.\n\n\n \"Gracious, no,\" Magnan said. \"I love reports.\"\n\n\n \"It seems nobody's told the Aga Kagans about fiscal years,\" Retief\n said. \"They're going right ahead with their program of land-grabbing on\n Flamme. So far, I've persuaded the Boyars that this is a matter for the\n Corps, and not to take matters into their own hands.\"",
"\"A Note,\" Georges said, waving his cigar. \"What the purple polluted\n hell is a Note supposed to do? I've got Aga Kagan claim-jumpers camped\n in the middle of what used to be a fine stand of barley, cooking\n sheep's brains over dung fires not ten miles from Government House—and\n upwind at that.\"\n\n\n \"Say, if that's the same barley you distill your whiskey from, I'd\n call that a first-class atrocity.\"\n\n\n \"Retief, on your say-so, I've kept my boys on a short leash. They've\n put up with plenty. Last week, while you were away, these barbarians\n sailed that flotilla of armor-plated junks right through the middle of\n one of our best oyster breeding beds. It was all I could do to keep a\n bunch of our men from going out in private helis and blasting 'em out\n of the water.\"",
"The Under-Secretary nodded. \"Quite right. Carry on along the same\n lines. Now, if there's nothing further—\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Mr. Secretary,\" Magnan said, rising. \"We certainly\n appreciate your guidance.\"\n\n\n \"There is a little something further,\" said Retief, sitting solidly in\n his chair. \"What's the Corps going to do about the Aga Kagans?\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary turned a liverish eye on Retief. \"As Minister\n to Flamme, you should know that the function of a diplomatic\n representative is merely to ... what shall I say...?\"\n\n\n \"String them along?\" Magnan suggested.\n\n\n \"An unfortunate choice of phrase,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"However,\n it embodies certain realities of Galactic politics. The Corps must\n concern itself with matters of broad policy.\"",
"\"I'm warning you, Retief!\" the Under-Secretary snapped, leaning\n forward, wattles quivering. \"Corps policy with regard to Flamme\n includes no inflammatory actions based on outmoded concepts. The Boyars\n will have to accommodate themselves to the situation!\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm afraid of,\" Retief said. \"They're not going to sit\n still and watch it happen. If I don't take back concrete evidence of\n Corps backing, we're going to have a nice hot little shooting war on\n our hands.\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary pushed out his lips and drummed his fingers on the\n desk.\n\n\n \"Confounded hot-heads,\" he muttered. \"Very well, Retief. I'll go along\n to the extent of a Note; but positively no further.\"\n\n\n \"A Note? I was thinking of something more like a squadron of Corps\n Peace Enforcers running through a few routine maneuvers off Flamme.\"",
"The Aga Kaga looked startled. \"Soft? I can tie a knot in an iron bar\n as big as your thumb.\" He popped a grape into his mouth. \"As for the\n rest, your pious views about the virtues of hard labor are as childish\n as my advisors' faith in the advantages of primitive plumbing. As for\n myself, I am a realist. If two monkeys want the same banana, in the end\n one will have it, and the other will cry morality. The days of my years\n are numbered, praise be to God. While they last, I hope to eat well,\n hunt well, fight well and take my share of pleasure. I leave to others\n the arid satisfactions of self-denial and other perversions.\"\n\n\n \"You admit you're here to grab our land, then,\" Georges said. \"That's\n the damnedest piece of bare-faced aggression—\"",
"\"Go ahead.\" The Aga Kaga kicked a couple of cushions onto the floor,\n eased a bottle from under the couch and reached for glasses.\n\n\n \"The Under-Secretary for Sector Affairs presents his compliments to his\n Excellency, the Aga Kaga of the Aga Kaga, Primary Potentate, Hereditary\n Sheik, Emir of the—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes. Skip the titles.\"\n\n\n Retief flipped over two pages.",
"\"Come to the point,\" the Aga Kaga cut in. \"You're here to lodge a\n complaint that I'm invading territories to which someone else lays\n claim, is that it?\" He smiled broadly, offered dope-sticks and lit one.\n \"Well, I've been expecting a call. After all, it's what you gentlemen\n are paid for. Cheers.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency has a lucid way of putting things,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Call me Stanley,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"The other routine is just to\n please some of the old fools—I mean the more conservative members\n of my government. They're still gnawing their beards and kicking\n themselves because their ancestors dropped science in favor of alchemy\n and got themselves stranded in a cultural dead end. This charade is\n supposed to prove they were right all along. However, I've no time\n to waste in neurotic compensations. I have places to go and deeds to\n accomplish.\"",
"\"Call me Stanley.\" The Aga Kaga munched a grape. \"I merely face the\n realities of popular folk-lore. Let's be pragmatic; it's a matter of\n historical association. Some people can grab land and pass it off\n lightly as a moral duty; others are dubbed imperialist merely for\n holding onto their own. Unfair, you say. But that's life, my friends.\n And I shall continue to take every advantage of it.\"\n\n\n \"We'll fight you!\" Georges bellowed. He took another gulp of whiskey\n and slammed the glass down. \"You won't take this world without a\n struggle!\"\n\n\n \"Another?\" the Aga Kaga said, offering the bottle. Georges glowered as\n his glass was filled. The Aga Kaga held the glass up to the light.\n\n\n \"Excellent color, don't you agree?\" He turned his eyes on Georges.",
"\"That wouldn't have been good for the oysters, either.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I told 'em. I also said you'd be back here in a few days\n with something from Corps HQ. When I tell 'em all we've got is a piece\n of paper, that'll be the end. There's a strong vigilante organization\n here that's been outfitting for the last four weeks. If I hadn't held\n them back with assurances that the CDT would step in and take care of\n this invasion, they would have hit them before now.\"\n\"That would have been a mistake,\" said Retief. \"The Aga Kagans are\n tough customers. They're active on half a dozen worlds at the moment.\n They've been building up for this push for the last five years. A\n show of resistance by you Boyars without Corps backing would be an\n invitation to slaughter—with the excuse that you started it.\"",
"\"Out of the question. A stiffly worded Protest Note is the best I can\n do. That's final.\"\n\n\n Back in the corridor, Magnan turned to Retief. \"When will you learn\n not to argue with Under-Secretaries? One would think you actively\n disliked the idea of ever receiving a promotion. I was astonished\n at the Under-Secretary's restraint. Frankly, I was stunned when he\n actually agreed to a Note. I, of course, will have to draft it.\" Magnan\n pulled at his lower lip thoughtfully. \"Now, I wonder, should I view\n with deep concern an act of open aggression, or merely point out an\n apparent violation of technicalities....\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother,\" Retief said. \"I have a draft all ready to go.\"\n\n\n \"But how—?\"\n\n\n \"I had a feeling I'd get paper instead of action,\" Retief said. \"I\n thought I'd save a little time all around.\"",
"\"Excellency,\" Retief said, \"I have the honor to present M. Georges\n Duror, Chef d'Regime of the Planetary government.\"\n\n\n \"Planetary government?\" The Aga Kaga spat grape seeds on the rug. \"My\n men have observed a few squatters along the shore. If they're in\n distress, I'll see about a distribution of goat-meat.\"\n\n\n \"It is the punishment of the envious to grieve at anothers' plenty,\"\n Retief said. \"No goat-meat will be required.\"\n\n\n \"Ralph told me you talk like a page out of Mustapha ben Abdallah Katib\n Jelebi,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"I know a few old sayings myself. For\n example, 'A Bedouin is only cheated once.'\"\n\n\n \"We have no such intentions, Excellency,\" Retief said. \"Is it not\n written, 'Have no faith in the Prince whose minister cheats you'?\"",
"\"\nCould\nhave been,\" the Aga Kaga chuckled. He finished the grapes and\n began peeling an orange. \"But they never were. Hitler could have been\n stopped by the Czech Air Force in 1938; Stalin was at the mercy of the\n primitive atomics of the west in 1946; Leung was grossly over-extended\n at Rangoon. But the onus of that historic role could not be overcome.\n It has been the fate of your spiritual forebears to carve civilization\n from the wilderness and then, amid tearing of garments and the heaping\n of ashes of self-accusation on your own confused heads, to withdraw,\n leaving the spoils for local political opportunists and mob leaders,\n clothed in the mystical virtue of native birth. Have a banana.\"\n\n\n \"You're stretching your analogy a little too far,\" Retief said. \"You're\n banking on the inaction of the Corps. You could be wrong.\"",
"The three horsemen pulled up in a churn of chaff and a clatter of\n pebbles. Georges coughed, batting a hand at the settling dust. Retief\n peeled the cigar unhurriedly, sniffed, at it and thumbed it alight. He\n drew at it, puffed out a cloud of smoke and glanced casually at the\n trio of Aga Kagan cavaliers.\n\n\n \"Peace be with you,\" he intoned in accent-free Kagan. \"May your shadows\n never grow less.\"\nThe leader of the three, a hawk-faced man with a heavy beard,\n unlimbered his rifle. He fingered it, frowning ferociously.\n\n\n \"Have no fear,\" Retief said, smiling graciously. \"He who comes as a\n guest enjoys perfect safety.\"\n\n\n A smooth-faced member of the threesome barked an oath and leveled his\n rifle at Retief.",
"\"Ah, ah!\" The Aga Kaga held up a hand. \"Watch your vocabulary, my\n dear sir. I'm sure that 'justifiable yearnings for territorial\n self-realization' would be more appropriate to the situation. Or\n possibly 'legitimate aspirations, for self-determination of formerly\n exploited peoples' might fit the case. Aggression is, by definition,\n an activity carried on only by those who have inherited the mantle of\n Colonial Imperialism.\"\n\n\n \"Imperialism! Why, you Aga Kagans have been the most notorious\n planet-grabbers in Sector history, you—you—\"",
"The Chef d'Regime frowned, blew out a cloud of smoke. \"I wasn't kidding\n about these Aga Kagans,\" he said. \"I hear they have some nasty habits.\n I don't want to see you operated on with the same knives they use to\n skin out the goats.\"\n\n\n \"I'd be against that myself. Still, the mail must go through.\"\n\n\n \"Strong-arm lads, eh? What have you got in mind, Retief?\"\n\n\n \"A little muscle in the background is an old diplomatic custom,\" Retief\n said.\n\n\n The Chef d'Regime stubbed out his cigar thoughtfully. \"I used to be a\n pretty fair elbow-wrestler myself,\" he said. \"Suppose I go along...?\"",
"\"At times, your cynicism borders on impudence.\"\n\n\n \"At other times, it borders on disgust. Now, if you'll run the Note\n through for signature, I'll try to catch the six o'clock shuttle.\"\n\n\n \"Leaving so soon? There's an important reception tonight. Some of our\n biggest names will be there. An excellent opportunity for you to join\n in the diplomatic give-and-take.\"\n\n\n \"No, thanks. I want to get back to Flamme and join in something mild,\n like a dinosaur hunt.\"\n\n\n \"When you get there,\" said Magnan, \"I hope you'll make it quite clear\n that this matter is to be settled without violence.\""
],
[
"\"I shall know when to stop,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Stanley,\" Retief said, rising. \"Are we quite private here?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, perfectly so,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"None would dare to intrude in\n my council.\" He cocked an eyebrow at Retief. \"You have a proposal to\n make in confidence? But what of our dear friend Georges? One would not\n like to see him disillusioned.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about Georges. He's a realist, like you. He's prepared to\n deal in facts. Hard facts, in this case.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga nodded thoughtfully. \"What are you getting at?\"\n\n\n \"You're basing your plan of action on the certainty that the Corps will\n sit by, wringing its hands, while you embark on a career of planetary\n piracy.\"",
"\"Ah, ah!\" The Aga Kaga held up a hand. \"Watch your vocabulary, my\n dear sir. I'm sure that 'justifiable yearnings for territorial\n self-realization' would be more appropriate to the situation. Or\n possibly 'legitimate aspirations, for self-determination of formerly\n exploited peoples' might fit the case. Aggression is, by definition,\n an activity carried on only by those who have inherited the mantle of\n Colonial Imperialism.\"\n\n\n \"Imperialism! Why, you Aga Kagans have been the most notorious\n planet-grabbers in Sector history, you—you—\"",
"The Aga Kaga looked startled. \"Soft? I can tie a knot in an iron bar\n as big as your thumb.\" He popped a grape into his mouth. \"As for the\n rest, your pious views about the virtues of hard labor are as childish\n as my advisors' faith in the advantages of primitive plumbing. As for\n myself, I am a realist. If two monkeys want the same banana, in the end\n one will have it, and the other will cry morality. The days of my years\n are numbered, praise be to God. While they last, I hope to eat well,\n hunt well, fight well and take my share of pleasure. I leave to others\n the arid satisfactions of self-denial and other perversions.\"\n\n\n \"You admit you're here to grab our land, then,\" Georges said. \"That's\n the damnedest piece of bare-faced aggression—\"",
"\"Come to the point,\" the Aga Kaga cut in. \"You're here to lodge a\n complaint that I'm invading territories to which someone else lays\n claim, is that it?\" He smiled broadly, offered dope-sticks and lit one.\n \"Well, I've been expecting a call. After all, it's what you gentlemen\n are paid for. Cheers.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency has a lucid way of putting things,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Call me Stanley,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"The other routine is just to\n please some of the old fools—I mean the more conservative members\n of my government. They're still gnawing their beards and kicking\n themselves because their ancestors dropped science in favor of alchemy\n and got themselves stranded in a cultural dead end. This charade is\n supposed to prove they were right all along. However, I've no time\n to waste in neurotic compensations. I have places to go and deeds to\n accomplish.\"",
"\"I've had some unhappy experiences with strangers,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n \"It is written in the sands that all strangers are kin. Still, he who\n visits rarely is a welcome guest. Be seated.\"\nIII\n\n\n Handmaidens brought cushions, giggled and fled. Retief and Georges\n settled themselves comfortably. The Aga Kaga eyed them in silence.\n\"We have come to bear tidings from the Corps Diplomatique\n Terrestrienne,\" Retief said solemnly. A perfumed slave girl offered\n grapes.\n\n\n \"Modest ignorance is better than boastful knowledge,\" the Aga Kaga\n said. \"What brings the CDT into the picture?\"\n\n\n \"The essay of the drunkard will be read in the tavern,\" Retief said.\n \"Whereas the words of kings....\"",
"\"Very well, I concede the point.\" The Aga Kaga waved a hand at the\n serving maids. \"Depart, my dears. Attend me later. You too, Ralph.\n These are mere diplomats. They are men of words, not deeds.\"\n\n\n The bearded man glared and departed. The girls hurried after him.\n\n\n \"Now,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"Let's drop the wisdom of the ages and\n get down to the issues. Not that I don't admire your repertoire of\n platitudes. How do you remember them all?\"\n\n\n \"Diplomats and other liars require good memories,\" said Retief. \"But\n as you point out, small wisdom to small minds. I'm here to effect a\n settlement of certain differences between yourself and the planetary\n authorities. I have here a Note, which I'm conveying on behalf of the\n Sector Under-Secretary. With your permission, I'll read it.\"",
"\"Call me Stanley.\" The Aga Kaga munched a grape. \"I merely face the\n realities of popular folk-lore. Let's be pragmatic; it's a matter of\n historical association. Some people can grab land and pass it off\n lightly as a moral duty; others are dubbed imperialist merely for\n holding onto their own. Unfair, you say. But that's life, my friends.\n And I shall continue to take every advantage of it.\"\n\n\n \"We'll fight you!\" Georges bellowed. He took another gulp of whiskey\n and slammed the glass down. \"You won't take this world without a\n struggle!\"\n\n\n \"Another?\" the Aga Kaga said, offering the bottle. Georges glowered as\n his glass was filled. The Aga Kaga held the glass up to the light.\n\n\n \"Excellent color, don't you agree?\" He turned his eyes on Georges.",
"\"It's pointless to resist,\" he said. \"We have you outgunned and\n outmanned. Your small nation has no chance against us. But we're\n prepared to be generous. You may continue to occupy such areas as we do\n not immediately require until such time as you're able to make other\n arrangements.\"\n\n\n \"And by the time we've got a crop growing out of what was bare rock,\n you'll be ready to move in,\" the Boyar Chef d'Regime snapped. \"But\n you'll find that we aren't alone!\"\n\"Quite alone,\" the Aga said. He nodded sagely. \"Yes, one need but read\n the lesson of history. The Corps Diplomatique will make expostulatory\n noises, but it will accept the\nfait accompli\n. You, my dear sir, are\n but a very small nibble. We won't make the mistake of excessive greed.\n We shall inch our way to empire—and those who stand in our way shall\n be dubbed warmongers.\"",
"\"Excellency,\" Retief said, \"I have the honor to present M. Georges\n Duror, Chef d'Regime of the Planetary government.\"\n\n\n \"Planetary government?\" The Aga Kaga spat grape seeds on the rug. \"My\n men have observed a few squatters along the shore. If they're in\n distress, I'll see about a distribution of goat-meat.\"\n\n\n \"It is the punishment of the envious to grieve at anothers' plenty,\"\n Retief said. \"No goat-meat will be required.\"\n\n\n \"Ralph told me you talk like a page out of Mustapha ben Abdallah Katib\n Jelebi,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"I know a few old sayings myself. For\n example, 'A Bedouin is only cheated once.'\"\n\n\n \"We have no such intentions, Excellency,\" Retief said. \"Is it not\n written, 'Have no faith in the Prince whose minister cheats you'?\"",
"\"At first glance,\" Retief said, \"it looks as though the places are\n already occupied, and the deeds are illegal.\"\nThe Aga Kaga guffawed. \"For a diplomat, you speak plainly, Retief. Have\n another drink.\" He poured, eyeing Georges. \"What of M. Duror? How does\n he feel about it?\"\n\n\n Georges took a thoughtful swallow of whiskey. \"Not bad,\" he said. \"But\n not quite good enough to cover the odor of goats.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga snorted. \"I thought the goats were overdoing it a bit\n myself,\" he said. \"Still, the graybeards insisted. And I need their\n support.\"\n\n\n \"Also,\" Georges said distinctly, \"I think you're soft. You lie around\n letting women wait on you, while your betters are out doing an honest\n day's work.\"",
"The three horsemen pulled up in a churn of chaff and a clatter of\n pebbles. Georges coughed, batting a hand at the settling dust. Retief\n peeled the cigar unhurriedly, sniffed, at it and thumbed it alight. He\n drew at it, puffed out a cloud of smoke and glanced casually at the\n trio of Aga Kagan cavaliers.\n\n\n \"Peace be with you,\" he intoned in accent-free Kagan. \"May your shadows\n never grow less.\"\nThe leader of the three, a hawk-faced man with a heavy beard,\n unlimbered his rifle. He fingered it, frowning ferociously.\n\n\n \"Have no fear,\" Retief said, smiling graciously. \"He who comes as a\n guest enjoys perfect safety.\"\n\n\n A smooth-faced member of the threesome barked an oath and leveled his\n rifle at Retief.",
"\"Isn't it the custom?\" the Aga Kaga smiled complacently.\n\n\n \"I have news for you, Stanley. In this instance, neck-wringing seems\n more in order than hand-wringing.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga frowned. \"Your manner—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind our manners!\" Georges blurted, standing. \"We don't need any\n lessons from goat-herding land-thieves!\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga's face darkened. \"You dare to speak thus to me, pig of a\n muck-grubber!\"",
"\"You mock me, pale one. I warn you—\"\n\n\n \"Only love makes me weep,\" Retief said. \"I laugh at hatred.\"\n\n\n \"Get out of the car!\"\n\n\n Retief puffed at his cigar, eyeing the Aga Kagan cheerfully. The youth\n in the rear moved forward, teeth bared.\n\n\n \"Never give in to the fool, lest he say, 'He fears me,'\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"I cannot restrain my men in the face of your insults,\" the bearded Aga\n Kagan roared. \"These hens of mine have feathers—and talons as well!\"\n\n\n \"When God would destroy an ant, he gives him wings,\" Retief said.\n \"Distress in misfortune is another misfortune.\"\n\n\n The bearded man's face grew purple.",
"The Under-Secretary nodded. \"Quite right. Carry on along the same\n lines. Now, if there's nothing further—\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Mr. Secretary,\" Magnan said, rising. \"We certainly\n appreciate your guidance.\"\n\n\n \"There is a little something further,\" said Retief, sitting solidly in\n his chair. \"What's the Corps going to do about the Aga Kagans?\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary turned a liverish eye on Retief. \"As Minister\n to Flamme, you should know that the function of a diplomatic\n representative is merely to ... what shall I say...?\"\n\n\n \"String them along?\" Magnan suggested.\n\n\n \"An unfortunate choice of phrase,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"However,\n it embodies certain realities of Galactic politics. The Corps must\n concern itself with matters of broad policy.\"",
"\"Go ahead.\" The Aga Kaga kicked a couple of cushions onto the floor,\n eased a bottle from under the couch and reached for glasses.\n\n\n \"The Under-Secretary for Sector Affairs presents his compliments to his\n Excellency, the Aga Kaga of the Aga Kaga, Primary Potentate, Hereditary\n Sheik, Emir of the—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes. Skip the titles.\"\n\n\n Retief flipped over two pages.",
"\"Get out,\" Blackbeard ordered. The guards eyed the visitors, their\n drawn sabers catching sunlight. Retief and Georges stepped from the\n car onto rich rugs spread on the grass. They followed the ferocious\n gesture of the bearded man through the opening into a perfumed interior\n of luminous shadows. A heavy odor of incense hung in the air, and the\n strumming of stringed instruments laid a muted pattern of sound behind\n the decorations of gold and blue, silver and green. At the far end of\n the room, among a bevy of female slaves, a large and resplendently clad\n man with blue-black hair and a clean-shaven chin popped a grape into\n his mouth. He wiped his fingers negligently on a wisp of silk offered\n by a handmaiden, belched loudly and looked the callers over.\n\n\n Blackbeard cleared his throat. \"Down on your faces in the presence of\n the Exalted One, the Aga Kaga, ruler of East and West.\"",
"\"\nCould\nhave been,\" the Aga Kaga chuckled. He finished the grapes and\n began peeling an orange. \"But they never were. Hitler could have been\n stopped by the Czech Air Force in 1938; Stalin was at the mercy of the\n primitive atomics of the west in 1946; Leung was grossly over-extended\n at Rangoon. But the onus of that historic role could not be overcome.\n It has been the fate of your spiritual forebears to carve civilization\n from the wilderness and then, amid tearing of garments and the heaping\n of ashes of self-accusation on your own confused heads, to withdraw,\n leaving the spoils for local political opportunists and mob leaders,\n clothed in the mystical virtue of native birth. Have a banana.\"\n\n\n \"You're stretching your analogy a little too far,\" Retief said. \"You're\n banking on the inaction of the Corps. You could be wrong.\"",
"\"That wouldn't have been good for the oysters, either.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I told 'em. I also said you'd be back here in a few days\n with something from Corps HQ. When I tell 'em all we've got is a piece\n of paper, that'll be the end. There's a strong vigilante organization\n here that's been outfitting for the last four weeks. If I hadn't held\n them back with assurances that the CDT would step in and take care of\n this invasion, they would have hit them before now.\"\n\"That would have been a mistake,\" said Retief. \"The Aga Kagans are\n tough customers. They're active on half a dozen worlds at the moment.\n They've been building up for this push for the last five years. A\n show of resistance by you Boyars without Corps backing would be an\n invitation to slaughter—with the excuse that you started it.\"",
"THE DESERT AND THE STARS\nBY KEITH LAUMER\nThe Aga Kaga wanted peace—a\n\n piece of everything in sight!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, November 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"I'm not at all sure,\" Under-Secretary Sternwheeler said, \"that I fully\n understand the necessity for your ... ah ... absenting yourself from\n your post of duty, Mr. Retief. Surely this matter could have been dealt\n with in the usual way—assuming any action is necessary.\"\n\n\n \"I had a sharp attack of writer's cramp, Mr. Secretary,\" Retief said.\n \"So I thought I'd better come along in person—just to be sure I was\n positive of making my point.\"",
"\"Surely there's land enough on the world to afford space to both\n groups,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"A spirit of co-operation—\"\n\"The Boyars needed some co-operation sixty years ago,\" Retief said.\n \"They tried to get the Aga Kagans to join in and help them beat\n back some of the saurian wild life that liked to graze on people.\n The Corps didn't like the idea. They wanted to see an undisputed\n anti-Concordiatist enclave. The Aga Kagans didn't want to play, either.\n But now that the world is tamed, they're moving in.\"\n\n\n \"The exigencies of diplomacy require a flexible policy—\"\n\n\n \"I want a firm assurance of Corps support to take back to Flamme,\"\n Retief said. \"The Boyars are a little naive. They don't understand\n diplomatic triple-speak. They just want to hold onto the homes they've\n made out of a wasteland.\""
]
] |
valid
|
63936
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[
"When Westover was on the monster the first night remembering the speech, where was the man who gave the speech?",
"Why should Westover not kill the monster?",
"Where was the safest place to be on Earth?",
"What about the situation made Westover feel the most upset?",
"Why was Westover described as shrinking?",
"What was not a reason that Westover felt sick to his stomach?",
"Why did the monster stop crawling by day?",
"What saved Westover when the monster was getting ready to take off?",
"What did Westover find inside the monster?"
] |
[
[
"Close by",
"Far away in space",
"Far away on Earth",
"Dead"
],
[
"He needs it to destroy the earth",
"He needs it to travel to find other people",
"He needs it to save the human race",
"He needs it to find other monsters"
],
[
"On a mountain",
"On top of a monster",
"Where the monsters had already been",
"Where the monsters were headed"
],
[
"The thought of losing the people he cared about",
"The thought of dying",
"The thought of humanity falling at the hands of mindless creatures",
"The thought of starving to death"
],
[
"He was starving because the monsters ate all the food",
"He was afraid of encountering the monster",
"He was a cowardly person",
"He was tired from walking a long way"
],
[
"He had been fasting a long time",
"He felt revulsion at eating the monster",
"He had motion sickness from riding the monster",
"The monster's flesh had a bad taste"
],
[
"It was no longer hungry",
"It was ready to leave Earth",
"The sun was up",
"It was dead"
],
[
"A plane",
"His own scientific ideas",
"A man",
"A ship"
],
[
"His friend",
"Pockets of gas",
"Demolished earth",
"His death"
]
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1,
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2,
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[
"Then he sprang to his feet, gripping his hand-ax, and ran panting to\n the place where he had dug for food. His excavations tended to close\n and heal overnight; now he went to work with vicious strokes enlarging\n the latest one, hacking and tearing it deeper and deeper.\n\n\n He was almost hidden in the cavity when a shadow fell across him from\n behind. He whirled, for there could be no shadows on the monster's back.\n\n\n A man stood watching him calmly—an elderly man in rusty black\n clothing, leaning on a stick. The staff, the snowy beard, and something\n that smoldered behind the benign eyes, gave him the look of an ancient\n prophet.\n\n\n \"Who are you?\" asked Westover, breathlessly but almost without surprise.\n\n\n \"I am the Preacher,\" the old man said. \"The Lord hath sent me to save\n you. Arise, my son, and follow me.\"",
"Westover no longer saw the murky moonlight, the far faint glitter of\n the flood or the slope of the living mountain. He saw, as he had seen\n from a circling jet plane, an immense tree of smoke that rose and\n expanded under the noonday sun, creamy white above and black and oily\n below, and beneath the black cloud something that writhed and flowed\n sluggishly in a cyclopean death agony.\n\n\n That picture dissolved, and was replaced by the face of a man—one who\n might now be alive or dead, elsewhere in the chaos of a desolated\n planet. It was an ordinary face, roundish, spectacled, but etched now\n by tragedy; the voice that went with it was flat, unemotional, pedantic.",
"Westover sat for a space with head in hands, hearing the faint\n continuing murmurs from below. And he remembered the voices.\nHe had been hearing them again as he awoke—the distant muffled voices\n whose words he could not make out, not the small close ones that\n sometimes in the hot middays had spoken clearly in his ear and even\n called his name. The latter had to be, as he had vaguely accepted them\n even then, illusions—but the others—with his new clarity he was\n suddenly sure that they had been real.\n\n\n And a wild, white light of hope blazed in him, and he flung himself\n flat on the rough surface, beat on it with bare fists and shouted:\n \"Help! Here I am! Help!\"\n\n\n He paused to listen with fierce intentness, and heard nothing but the\n faint eructations deep inside the monster.",
"Westover hesitated. \"I'm not just imagining you?\" he appealed.\n \"Somebody else has really found the answer?\"\n\n\n The Preacher's brows knitted faintly, but then his look turned to\n benevolent understanding. \"You have been alone too long here. Come with\n me—I will take you to the Doctor.\"\n\n\n Westover was still not sure that the other was more than one of the\n powerful specters of childhood—the Preacher, the Doctor, no doubt the\n Teacher next—risen to rob him of his last shreds of sanity. But he\n nodded in childlike obedience, and followed.\n\n\n When, a few hundred yards nearer the monster's head, the other halted\n at a black rent in the rugose hide, the mouth of a burrow descending\n into utter blackness—Westover knew that both the Preacher and his own\n wild hope were real.",
"The monster on which Westover had been living as a parasite was\n generating gases within itself, preparing to leave the ravished Earth.\n That was the meaning of its gargantuan belly rumblings. And they meant\n further that he must finally leave it—now or never—or be borne aloft\n to die gasping in the stratosphere.\n\n\n Hurriedly the man scrambled to the highest eminence of the back and\n stood looking about; and what he saw brought him to the brink of\n despair. For all around lay blue water, waves dancing and glinting in\n the fresh breeze; and sniffing the air he recognized the salt tang\n of the sea. While he slept the monster had crept beyond the coast\n line, and lay now in what to it was shallow water—fifty or a hundred\n fathoms. Back the way it had come, a headland was visible, mockingly,\n hopelessly distant.",
"Then the impersonal will that had driven him implacably two days and\n nights without stopping came to his rescue. Westover plodded forward,\n pressed his shrinking body against the slimy, faintly warm surface of\n the monster's foot, and sought above him with upstretched hands—found\n holds, and began to climb with a strength he had not known was left in\n him.\n\n\n The moonlight's fading again was merciful as he climbed the sheer,\n slippery face of the foot; but he could hear the wash and chuckle of\n the flood below. His tired brain told him treacherously: \"I'm already\n asleep—this is a nightmare.\" Once, listening to that insidious voice,\n he slipped and for instants hung dizzily by his hands, and for some\n minutes after he had found a new foothold merely clung panting with\n pounding heart.",
"Some time after he had found courage to resume the climb, he dragged\n himself, gasping and quivering, to comparative safety on the broad\n shelf that marked the rim of the foot. Above him lay the great black\n steep that rose to the summit of the monster's humped back, a mountain\n to be climbed. Westover felt poignantly that his exhausted body could\n not make that ascent and face the long and dangerous descent beyond,\n which he had to make before dawn ... but not now ... not now....\nHe lay in a state between waking and dreaming, high on the monster's\n side; and it seemed that the colossal body moved, swelling and\n sighing—but he knew they did not breathe as backboned animals do.\n Westover had been one of the men who, in the days when humanity was\n still fighting, had accumulated quite a store of knowledge about the\n enemy—the enemy that was brainless and toolless, but that was simply\n too vast for human intelligence and weapons to defeat....",
"\"I stumbled onto it,\" Westover admitted. \"I was wandering across\n country—my plane crashed on the way back from that South American\n bug hunt dreamed up by somebody who'd been reading Wells'\nWar of the\n Worlds\n. I think my pilot went nuts; you could see too much of the\n destruction from up there.... But I got out in one piece and started\n walking—looking for some place with people and facilities that could\n try out my method of killing the monsters. I thought—I still think—I\n had a sure-fire way to do that—but I didn't realize then that it was\n too late to think of killing them off.\"\n\n\n Sutton nodded thoughtfully. \"It was too late—or too early, perhaps.\n We'll have to talk that over.\"\n\n\n Westover finished the brief account of his coming to dwell on the\n monster's back. The other grinned happily.\n\n\n \"You began with the practice, where I worked out the theory first.\"",
"Westover's mind was beginning to function again; it was as though the\n cessation of the rock and sway had exorcised the lethargy that had lain\n upon him. He knew now that he had been almost insane for the time he\n had passed here, touched by the madness that takes hermits and men lost\n in deserts or oceans. And his was a stranger solitude than any of those.",
"He could stay where he was unharmed, of course. On the monster's back,\n of all places, he had nothing to fear from it or from others of its\n kind. But he knew with desperate clarity that by nightfall, when the\n beast became still once more, exhaustion and growing hunger would have\n made him unable to descend. As he lay where he had fallen, he felt that\n weakness creeping over him, no longer held in check by the will that\n had kept him doggedly plodding forward.",
"Thus began for him a weird existence—the life of a parasite, of a flea\n on a dog. The monster crawled by day and rested by night; strengthened,\n the man could have left it then, but somehow night after night he did\n not. It wasn't, he argued with himself sometimes in the days when he\n lay torpidly drowsing, lulled by the long sway, arms over his head to\n protect him from the sun's baking, merely that he was chained to the\n only source of food he knew in all the world—not just that he was\n developing a flea's psychology. He was a man and a scientist, and he\n was conducting an experiment.... His life on the monster's back was\n proving something, something of vast importance for man, the extinct\n animal—but for increasingly longer periods of time he could not\n remember what it was....",
"For a man like Westover, who had been a scientist, it was not the\n prospect of death that was most crushing, but the death blow to his\n human pride, the star-storming pride of mind and will—defeated by\n sheer bulk and mindless hunger.\n\n\n Near the crest of the monster's back, he stumbled and fell hands and\n knees on the shagreen-roughness of the skin; at first he thought only\n that an attack of dizziness had made him fall, then he realized that\n the surface beneath him had shifted. Unmistakably even in the misty\n dawn-light, the hills and valleys of the rugose back were changing\n shape, as the vast protoplasmic mass below crawled, flowed beneath its\n integument. In slow peristaltic motion the waves marched eastward,\n toward the monster's head.",
"There came a morning, though, when he remembered.\nThus began for him a weird existence—the life of a parasite, of a flea on a dog.\nHe woke with the sun's warmth on his body and the realization of\n something amiss trickling through his head. It was a little while\n before he recognized the wrongness, and when he did he sat bolt upright.\n\n\n The sun was already up, and the monster should have begun once more its\n steady, ravenous march to the east. But there was no motion; the great\n living expanse lay still around him. He wondered wildly if it was dead.\n\n\n Presently, though, he felt a faint shuddering and lift beneath his\n feet, and heard far stifled mutterings and sighs.",
"He sat up, eyes searching the sky for a sign to tell him how long he\n had slept. Low on the western horizon he found the faint glow that told\n of the moon's setting; and in the east a stronger light was already\n struggling through the clouds and mist, becoming every moment less\n tenuous and illusory, more the bitter reality of the breaking day.\n\n\n Even as Westover began frantically climbing, out of that lightening\n sky the hopelessness of his effort pressed down on him. With dawn the\n monster would begin to move, to crawl eastward impelled by the same dim\n phototropic urge which must guide these things out of the interstellar\n depths to Sun-type stars. All of them had crept endlessly eastward\n around the Earth, gutting the continents and churning the sea bottoms,\n and by now whatever was left of human civilization must be starving\n beyond the Arctic circle, or aboard ships at sea. The hordes that\n still lived and wandered over the once populous fertile lands, like\n this—would not live long.",
"Then, as he knew it must, a light glimmered ahead, the sinus widened,\n and Westover climbed to his feet and stood, weak-kneed still, staring\n at a chamber carved in the veritable belly of Leviathan. The floor\n underfoot was firm, as was the wall his shaking fingers tested.\n Dazzled, he saw tools leaning against the walls, spades, crowbars,\n axes, and a half-dozen people, men and women in rough grimy clothing,\n who stood watching him with lively interest.\n\n\n The Preacher stood beside him, breathing hard and mopping his forehead.\n But he brushed aside the deferential offers of the others: \"No—I will\n take him to the Doctor myself. All of you must hurry now to close the\n shaft.\"",
"Westover stood motionless in the blackness; how long, he did not know.\n He was hardly aware of the water that covered his feet, crept over his\n ankles, and swirled halfway to his knees. Only the emergence of the\n moon through a rift of the cloud blanket brought him awake; its dim\n light gleamed all around on a great sheet of water, unbroken save for\n scattered black hummocks—crests of knolls like that on which he stood,\n all soon to be hidden by the rising flood.\n\n\n For a moment he knew despair. The way back was impassable, and the way\n ahead was blocked by the titanic enemy.",
"\"Down here. Into the belly of Leviathan,\" said the old man solemnly,\n and Westover nodded this time with alacrity.\nThe crawling descent through the twisting, Stygian burrow had much\n that ought to belong to a journey into Hell.... More than that, no\n demonologist's imagination could have conceived without experiencing\n the sheer horror of the yielding beslimed walls that seemed every\n moment squeezing in to trap them unspeakably. The air was warm and\n rank with the familiar heavy sweetish odor of the monster's colorless\n blood....",
"There was another tunnel to be crawled through, but that one was\n firm-walled as the room they left behind. They emerged into a larger\n cavern, that like the first was lit—only now did the miracle of it\n obtrude itself in his dazed mind—by fluorescent tubes, and filled with\n equipment that gleamed glass and metal. Over an apparatus with many\n fluid-dripping trays, like an air-conditioning device, bent a lone man.\n\n\n \"Is it working?\" inquired the Preacher.\n\n\n \"It's working,\" the other answered without looking up from the\n adjustment he was making. Bubbles were rising in the fluid that filled\n the trays, rising and bursting, rising and bursting with a curiously\n fascinating monotony. The subtly tense attitudes of the two initiates\n told Westover better than words that there was something hugely\n important in the success of whatever magic was producing those bubbles.",
"\"Man is a highly mobile species, so our direct casualties of this\n invasion have been very light and will continue to be. But when the\n monsters have finished with Earth, there will be no vegetation left\n for man's food, no houses, no cities, none of the fixed installations\n of civilization, and the end will be far more terrible than if we were\n all devoured by the monsters.\"\nWestover awoke, feeling himself bathed by the cold sweat of\n nightmare—then he realized that a misty rain had wetted his face and\n sogged his clothes. That, and the sleep he had had, refreshed him and\n made his mind clearer than it had been for days, and he remembered that\n he could not sleep but had to go on, searching with a hope that would\n not die for some miraculously spared refuge where civilization and\n science might yet exist, where there would be the means to realize his\n idea for stopping the monsters.",
"Fingers shaking, he unhitched the light ax from his belt and began to\n hack with feverish industry at the monster's crusted hide.\n\n\n The scaly, weathered epidermis seemed immeasurably thick. But at last\n he had chopped through it, reached the softer protoplasm beneath.\n Clawing and hewing in the hole he had made, he tore out heavy slabs of\n the monster's flesh.\n\n\n A ripple that did not belong to the crawling motion ran over the\n thing's surface round about. Westover laughed wildly with a sudden\n sense of power. He, the insignificant human mite, had made the\n miles-long beast twitch like a flea-bitten dog."
],
[
"Some time after he had found courage to resume the climb, he dragged\n himself, gasping and quivering, to comparative safety on the broad\n shelf that marked the rim of the foot. Above him lay the great black\n steep that rose to the summit of the monster's humped back, a mountain\n to be climbed. Westover felt poignantly that his exhausted body could\n not make that ascent and face the long and dangerous descent beyond,\n which he had to make before dawn ... but not now ... not now....\nHe lay in a state between waking and dreaming, high on the monster's\n side; and it seemed that the colossal body moved, swelling and\n sighing—but he knew they did not breathe as backboned animals do.\n Westover had been one of the men who, in the days when humanity was\n still fighting, had accumulated quite a store of knowledge about the\n enemy—the enemy that was brainless and toolless, but that was simply\n too vast for human intelligence and weapons to defeat....",
"Then the impersonal will that had driven him implacably two days and\n nights without stopping came to his rescue. Westover plodded forward,\n pressed his shrinking body against the slimy, faintly warm surface of\n the monster's foot, and sought above him with upstretched hands—found\n holds, and began to climb with a strength he had not known was left in\n him.\n\n\n The moonlight's fading again was merciful as he climbed the sheer,\n slippery face of the foot; but he could hear the wash and chuckle of\n the flood below. His tired brain told him treacherously: \"I'm already\n asleep—this is a nightmare.\" Once, listening to that insidious voice,\n he slipped and for instants hung dizzily by his hands, and for some\n minutes after he had found a new foothold merely clung panting with\n pounding heart.",
"The monster on which Westover had been living as a parasite was\n generating gases within itself, preparing to leave the ravished Earth.\n That was the meaning of its gargantuan belly rumblings. And they meant\n further that he must finally leave it—now or never—or be borne aloft\n to die gasping in the stratosphere.\n\n\n Hurriedly the man scrambled to the highest eminence of the back and\n stood looking about; and what he saw brought him to the brink of\n despair. For all around lay blue water, waves dancing and glinting in\n the fresh breeze; and sniffing the air he recognized the salt tang\n of the sea. While he slept the monster had crept beyond the coast\n line, and lay now in what to it was shallow water—fifty or a hundred\n fathoms. Back the way it had come, a headland was visible, mockingly,\n hopelessly distant.",
"Then he sprang to his feet, gripping his hand-ax, and ran panting to\n the place where he had dug for food. His excavations tended to close\n and heal overnight; now he went to work with vicious strokes enlarging\n the latest one, hacking and tearing it deeper and deeper.\n\n\n He was almost hidden in the cavity when a shadow fell across him from\n behind. He whirled, for there could be no shadows on the monster's back.\n\n\n A man stood watching him calmly—an elderly man in rusty black\n clothing, leaning on a stick. The staff, the snowy beard, and something\n that smoldered behind the benign eyes, gave him the look of an ancient\n prophet.\n\n\n \"Who are you?\" asked Westover, breathlessly but almost without surprise.\n\n\n \"I am the Preacher,\" the old man said. \"The Lord hath sent me to save\n you. Arise, my son, and follow me.\"",
"Westover hesitated. \"I'm not just imagining you?\" he appealed.\n \"Somebody else has really found the answer?\"\n\n\n The Preacher's brows knitted faintly, but then his look turned to\n benevolent understanding. \"You have been alone too long here. Come with\n me—I will take you to the Doctor.\"\n\n\n Westover was still not sure that the other was more than one of the\n powerful specters of childhood—the Preacher, the Doctor, no doubt the\n Teacher next—risen to rob him of his last shreds of sanity. But he\n nodded in childlike obedience, and followed.\n\n\n When, a few hundred yards nearer the monster's head, the other halted\n at a black rent in the rugose hide, the mouth of a burrow descending\n into utter blackness—Westover knew that both the Preacher and his own\n wild hope were real.",
"Fingers shaking, he unhitched the light ax from his belt and began to\n hack with feverish industry at the monster's crusted hide.\n\n\n The scaly, weathered epidermis seemed immeasurably thick. But at last\n he had chopped through it, reached the softer protoplasm beneath.\n Clawing and hewing in the hole he had made, he tore out heavy slabs of\n the monster's flesh.\n\n\n A ripple that did not belong to the crawling motion ran over the\n thing's surface round about. Westover laughed wildly with a sudden\n sense of power. He, the insignificant human mite, had made the\n miles-long beast twitch like a flea-bitten dog.",
"\"Amen,\" agreed Sutton. But the gaze he fixed on Westover was oddly\n troubled. \"Speaking of the future brings up the question of the idea\n you mentioned—your monster-killing scheme.\"\nWestover flexed his hands involuntarily, like one who has been too\n long enforcedly idle. In terse eager sentences he outlined for Sutton\n the plan that had burned in him during his bitter wandering over\n the face of the ruined land. It would be very easy to accomplish\n from an endoparasite's point of vantage, merely by isolating from\n the creature's blood over a long period enough of some potent\n secretion—hormone, enzyme or the like—to kill when suddenly\n reintroduced into the system. \"Originally I thought we could accomplish\n the same thing by synthesis—but this way will be simpler.\"\n\n\n \"Beautifully simple.\" Sutton smiled wryly. \"So much so that I wish\n you'd never thought of it.\"\n\n\n Westover stared. \"Why?\"",
"He could stay where he was unharmed, of course. On the monster's back,\n of all places, he had nothing to fear from it or from others of its\n kind. But he knew with desperate clarity that by nightfall, when the\n beast became still once more, exhaustion and growing hunger would have\n made him unable to descend. As he lay where he had fallen, he felt that\n weakness creeping over him, no longer held in check by the will that\n had kept him doggedly plodding forward.",
"For a man like Westover, who had been a scientist, it was not the\n prospect of death that was most crushing, but the death blow to his\n human pride, the star-storming pride of mind and will—defeated by\n sheer bulk and mindless hunger.\n\n\n Near the crest of the monster's back, he stumbled and fell hands and\n knees on the shagreen-roughness of the skin; at first he thought only\n that an attack of dizziness had made him fall, then he realized that\n the surface beneath him had shifted. Unmistakably even in the misty\n dawn-light, the hills and valleys of the rugose back were changing\n shape, as the vast protoplasmic mass below crawled, flowed beneath its\n integument. In slow peristaltic motion the waves marched eastward,\n toward the monster's head.",
"He sat up, eyes searching the sky for a sign to tell him how long he\n had slept. Low on the western horizon he found the faint glow that told\n of the moon's setting; and in the east a stronger light was already\n struggling through the clouds and mist, becoming every moment less\n tenuous and illusory, more the bitter reality of the breaking day.\n\n\n Even as Westover began frantically climbing, out of that lightening\n sky the hopelessness of his effort pressed down on him. With dawn the\n monster would begin to move, to crawl eastward impelled by the same dim\n phototropic urge which must guide these things out of the interstellar\n depths to Sun-type stars. All of them had crept endlessly eastward\n around the Earth, gutting the continents and churning the sea bottoms,\n and by now whatever was left of human civilization must be starving\n beyond the Arctic circle, or aboard ships at sea. The hordes that\n still lived and wandered over the once populous fertile lands, like\n this—would not live long.",
"Westover sat for a space with head in hands, hearing the faint\n continuing murmurs from below. And he remembered the voices.\nHe had been hearing them again as he awoke—the distant muffled voices\n whose words he could not make out, not the small close ones that\n sometimes in the hot middays had spoken clearly in his ear and even\n called his name. The latter had to be, as he had vaguely accepted them\n even then, illusions—but the others—with his new clarity he was\n suddenly sure that they had been real.\n\n\n And a wild, white light of hope blazed in him, and he flung himself\n flat on the rough surface, beat on it with bare fists and shouted:\n \"Help! Here I am! Help!\"\n\n\n He paused to listen with fierce intentness, and heard nothing but the\n faint eructations deep inside the monster.",
"Thus began for him a weird existence—the life of a parasite, of a flea\n on a dog. The monster crawled by day and rested by night; strengthened,\n the man could have left it then, but somehow night after night he did\n not. It wasn't, he argued with himself sometimes in the days when he\n lay torpidly drowsing, lulled by the long sway, arms over his head to\n protect him from the sun's baking, merely that he was chained to the\n only source of food he knew in all the world—not just that he was\n developing a flea's psychology. He was a man and a scientist, and he\n was conducting an experiment.... His life on the monster's back was\n proving something, something of vast importance for man, the extinct\n animal—but for increasingly longer periods of time he could not\n remember what it was....",
"\"I stumbled onto it,\" Westover admitted. \"I was wandering across\n country—my plane crashed on the way back from that South American\n bug hunt dreamed up by somebody who'd been reading Wells'\nWar of the\n Worlds\n. I think my pilot went nuts; you could see too much of the\n destruction from up there.... But I got out in one piece and started\n walking—looking for some place with people and facilities that could\n try out my method of killing the monsters. I thought—I still think—I\n had a sure-fire way to do that—but I didn't realize then that it was\n too late to think of killing them off.\"\n\n\n Sutton nodded thoughtfully. \"It was too late—or too early, perhaps.\n We'll have to talk that over.\"\n\n\n Westover finished the brief account of his coming to dwell on the\n monster's back. The other grinned happily.\n\n\n \"You began with the practice, where I worked out the theory first.\"",
"\"Man is a highly mobile species, so our direct casualties of this\n invasion have been very light and will continue to be. But when the\n monsters have finished with Earth, there will be no vegetation left\n for man's food, no houses, no cities, none of the fixed installations\n of civilization, and the end will be far more terrible than if we were\n all devoured by the monsters.\"\nWestover awoke, feeling himself bathed by the cold sweat of\n nightmare—then he realized that a misty rain had wetted his face and\n sogged his clothes. That, and the sleep he had had, refreshed him and\n made his mind clearer than it had been for days, and he remembered that\n he could not sleep but had to go on, searching with a hope that would\n not die for some miraculously spared refuge where civilization and\n science might yet exist, where there would be the means to realize his\n idea for stopping the monsters.",
"\"I haven't got so far with the theory,\" said Westover, \"but I think\n I've got the main outlines. Until the monsters came, man was a parasite\n on the face of the Earth. Fundamentally, parasitism—on the green\n plants and their by-products—was our way of life, as of all animals\n from the beginning. But the monsters absorbed into themselves all the\n plant food and even the organic material in the soil. So we have only\n one way out—to transfer our parasitism to the only remaining food\n source—the monsters themselves.\n\n\n \"The monsters almost defeated us, because of their two special\n adaptations of extreme size and ability to cross space. But man has\n always won the battle of adaptations before, because he could improvise\n new ones as the need arose. The greatest crisis humanity ever faced\n called for the most radical innovation in our way of life.\"",
"Again he lay half conscious, in a lethargy that unchecked must grow\n steadily deeper until death. Isolated thoughts floated through his\n head. It occurred to him that he was now ideally located to conduct\n the experiments necessary to prove his theory of how to destroy the\n monsters—if only someone had had the foresight to build a biological\n laboratory on the monster's back. Of course the rolling motion would\n create special problems of technique.... Idiocy.... Once more he seemed\n to glimpse Sutton's face, as the biologist calmly made that grisly\n report to the President's Committee on Extermination.... Sutton's\n prediction had been a hundred percent correct. The monsters' hunger\n knew no halt until they had absorbed into themselves all the organic",
"\"It is inhabitable?\" Westover's question reflected no doubt.\nSutton gestured at the bubbling device behind him. \"That thing is\n making air now, which we're going to need when the monster's in space.\n It was when we were still trying to find a poison for the beasts that I\n hit on the catalyst that makes their blood give up its oxygen—that's\n its blood flowing through the filters. We've got an electric generator\n running by tapping the monster's internal gas pressure. There are\n problems left before we'll be fully self-sufficient here—but the\n monster is so much like us in fundamental makeup that its body contains\n all the elements human life needs too.\"\n\n\n \"Then,\" Westover glanced appreciatively around, \"it looks like the main\n hazard is claustrophobia.\"",
"Westover stood motionless in the blackness; how long, he did not know.\n He was hardly aware of the water that covered his feet, crept over his\n ankles, and swirled halfway to his knees. Only the emergence of the\n moon through a rift of the cloud blanket brought him awake; its dim\n light gleamed all around on a great sheet of water, unbroken save for\n scattered black hummocks—crests of knolls like that on which he stood,\n all soon to be hidden by the rising flood.\n\n\n For a moment he knew despair. The way back was impassable, and the way\n ahead was blocked by the titanic enemy.",
"Westover bowed his head, but he had caught a curiously expectant glint\n in Sutton's eyes as he spoke. He thought, and his face lightened.\n \"Suppose we work out a way to record my idea, one that can't be\n deciphered by anyone unintelligent enough to be likely to misuse it. A\n riddle for our descendants—who should have use for it some day.\"\n\n\n At last Sutton smiled. \"That's better. You've thought it through to\n the end, I see.... This phase of our history won't last forever.\n Eventually, the monsters will come to another planet not too unlike\n Earth, because it's on such worlds they prey. A tapeworm can cross the\n Sahara desert in the intestine of a camel—\"",
"There came a morning, though, when he remembered.\nThus began for him a weird existence—the life of a parasite, of a flea on a dog.\nHe woke with the sun's warmth on his body and the realization of\n something amiss trickling through his head. It was a little while\n before he recognized the wrongness, and when he did he sat bolt upright.\n\n\n The sun was already up, and the monster should have begun once more its\n steady, ravenous march to the east. But there was no motion; the great\n living expanse lay still around him. He wondered wildly if it was dead.\n\n\n Presently, though, he felt a faint shuddering and lift beneath his\n feet, and heard far stifled mutterings and sighs."
],
[
"The monster on which Westover had been living as a parasite was\n generating gases within itself, preparing to leave the ravished Earth.\n That was the meaning of its gargantuan belly rumblings. And they meant\n further that he must finally leave it—now or never—or be borne aloft\n to die gasping in the stratosphere.\n\n\n Hurriedly the man scrambled to the highest eminence of the back and\n stood looking about; and what he saw brought him to the brink of\n despair. For all around lay blue water, waves dancing and glinting in\n the fresh breeze; and sniffing the air he recognized the salt tang\n of the sea. While he slept the monster had crept beyond the coast\n line, and lay now in what to it was shallow water—fifty or a hundred\n fathoms. Back the way it had come, a headland was visible, mockingly,\n hopelessly distant.",
"His voice was drowned in a vast hissing roar. An irresistible pressure\n distorted the walls of the chamber and scythed its occupants from their\n feet. Sutton staggered drunkenly almost erect, fought his way across\n the tilting floor to make sure of his precious apparatus. He turned\n back toward the others, bracing himself and shouting something; then,\n knowing his words lost in the thunder, gestured toward the Earth they\n were leaving, a half-regretful, half-triumphant farewell.",
"He could stay where he was unharmed, of course. On the monster's back,\n of all places, he had nothing to fear from it or from others of its\n kind. But he knew with desperate clarity that by nightfall, when the\n beast became still once more, exhaustion and growing hunger would have\n made him unable to descend. As he lay where he had fallen, he felt that\n weakness creeping over him, no longer held in check by the will that\n had kept him doggedly plodding forward.",
"\"Don't worry about a cave-in. We're surrounded by solid cystoid\n tissue. But,\" Sutton's voice took on a graver note, \"there may be\n other psychological dangers. I don't think all our people—there are\n fifty-one, fifty-two of us now—realize yet that this colony isn't just\n a temporary expedient. Human history hasn't had such a turning-point\n since men first started chipping stone. Spengler's\nMensch als\n Raubtier\n—if he ever existed—has to be replaced by the\nMensch als\n Schmarotzer\n, and the adjustment may come hard. We've got to plan\n for the rest of our lives—and our children's and our children's\n children's—as parasites inside this monster and whatever others we can\n manage to—infect—when they're clustered again in space.\"",
"\"Very well put,\" approved Sutton. \"Except that you make it sound easy.\n By the time I'd worked it out like that, things were already in\n such a turmoil that putting it into effect was the devil's own job.\n About the only ones I could find to help me were the Preacher and his\n people. They have the faith that moves mountains, that has made this\n self-moving mountain inhabitable.\"",
"Some time after he had found courage to resume the climb, he dragged\n himself, gasping and quivering, to comparative safety on the broad\n shelf that marked the rim of the foot. Above him lay the great black\n steep that rose to the summit of the monster's humped back, a mountain\n to be climbed. Westover felt poignantly that his exhausted body could\n not make that ascent and face the long and dangerous descent beyond,\n which he had to make before dawn ... but not now ... not now....\nHe lay in a state between waking and dreaming, high on the monster's\n side; and it seemed that the colossal body moved, swelling and\n sighing—but he knew they did not breathe as backboned animals do.\n Westover had been one of the men who, in the days when humanity was\n still fighting, had accumulated quite a store of knowledge about the\n enemy—the enemy that was brainless and toolless, but that was simply\n too vast for human intelligence and weapons to defeat....",
"Of course—the great beast would crawl into the sea, which would float\n its bloated bulk and enable it to accelerate and take flight. It would\n never have been able to lift itself into the air from the dry land.\n\n\n He should have foreseen that and made his escape in time. Now that\n he had solved the problem of human survival.... But the bright ocean\n laughed at him, sparkling away wave beyond rolling wave, and beyond\n that blue headland could be only a land made desert, where men become\n beasts fought crazily over the last morsels of food. He had lost track\n of the days he had been on the monster's back, but the rape of Earth\n must be finished now. He had no doubt that the things would depart\n as they had come into the Solar System—in that close, seemingly\n one-willed swarm that Earth's astronomers had at first taken for a\n comet. If this one was leaving, the rest no doubt were too.",
"Westover's mind was beginning to function again; it was as though the\n cessation of the rock and sway had exorcised the lethargy that had lain\n upon him. He knew now that he had been almost insane for the time he\n had passed here, touched by the madness that takes hermits and men lost\n in deserts or oceans. And his was a stranger solitude than any of those.",
"\"Man is a highly mobile species, so our direct casualties of this\n invasion have been very light and will continue to be. But when the\n monsters have finished with Earth, there will be no vegetation left\n for man's food, no houses, no cities, none of the fixed installations\n of civilization, and the end will be far more terrible than if we were\n all devoured by the monsters.\"\nWestover awoke, feeling himself bathed by the cold sweat of\n nightmare—then he realized that a misty rain had wetted his face and\n sogged his clothes. That, and the sleep he had had, refreshed him and\n made his mind clearer than it had been for days, and he remembered that\n he could not sleep but had to go on, searching with a hope that would\n not die for some miraculously spared refuge where civilization and\n science might yet exist, where there would be the means to realize his\n idea for stopping the monsters.",
"Westover hesitated. \"I'm not just imagining you?\" he appealed.\n \"Somebody else has really found the answer?\"\n\n\n The Preacher's brows knitted faintly, but then his look turned to\n benevolent understanding. \"You have been alone too long here. Come with\n me—I will take you to the Doctor.\"\n\n\n Westover was still not sure that the other was more than one of the\n powerful specters of childhood—the Preacher, the Doctor, no doubt the\n Teacher next—risen to rob him of his last shreds of sanity. But he\n nodded in childlike obedience, and followed.\n\n\n When, a few hundred yards nearer the monster's head, the other halted\n at a black rent in the rugose hide, the mouth of a burrow descending\n into utter blackness—Westover knew that both the Preacher and his own\n wild hope were real.",
"He sat up, eyes searching the sky for a sign to tell him how long he\n had slept. Low on the western horizon he found the faint glow that told\n of the moon's setting; and in the east a stronger light was already\n struggling through the clouds and mist, becoming every moment less\n tenuous and illusory, more the bitter reality of the breaking day.\n\n\n Even as Westover began frantically climbing, out of that lightening\n sky the hopelessness of his effort pressed down on him. With dawn the\n monster would begin to move, to crawl eastward impelled by the same dim\n phototropic urge which must guide these things out of the interstellar\n depths to Sun-type stars. All of them had crept endlessly eastward\n around the Earth, gutting the continents and churning the sea bottoms,\n and by now whatever was left of human civilization must be starving\n beyond the Arctic circle, or aboard ships at sea. The hordes that\n still lived and wandered over the once populous fertile lands, like\n this—would not live long.",
"Then he sprang to his feet, gripping his hand-ax, and ran panting to\n the place where he had dug for food. His excavations tended to close\n and heal overnight; now he went to work with vicious strokes enlarging\n the latest one, hacking and tearing it deeper and deeper.\n\n\n He was almost hidden in the cavity when a shadow fell across him from\n behind. He whirled, for there could be no shadows on the monster's back.\n\n\n A man stood watching him calmly—an elderly man in rusty black\n clothing, leaning on a stick. The staff, the snowy beard, and something\n that smoldered behind the benign eyes, gave him the look of an ancient\n prophet.\n\n\n \"Who are you?\" asked Westover, breathlessly but almost without surprise.\n\n\n \"I am the Preacher,\" the old man said. \"The Lord hath sent me to save\n you. Arise, my son, and follow me.\"",
"Westover sat for a space with head in hands, hearing the faint\n continuing murmurs from below. And he remembered the voices.\nHe had been hearing them again as he awoke—the distant muffled voices\n whose words he could not make out, not the small close ones that\n sometimes in the hot middays had spoken clearly in his ear and even\n called his name. The latter had to be, as he had vaguely accepted them\n even then, illusions—but the others—with his new clarity he was\n suddenly sure that they had been real.\n\n\n And a wild, white light of hope blazed in him, and he flung himself\n flat on the rough surface, beat on it with bare fists and shouted:\n \"Help! Here I am! Help!\"\n\n\n He paused to listen with fierce intentness, and heard nothing but the\n faint eructations deep inside the monster.",
"\"It is inhabitable?\" Westover's question reflected no doubt.\nSutton gestured at the bubbling device behind him. \"That thing is\n making air now, which we're going to need when the monster's in space.\n It was when we were still trying to find a poison for the beasts that I\n hit on the catalyst that makes their blood give up its oxygen—that's\n its blood flowing through the filters. We've got an electric generator\n running by tapping the monster's internal gas pressure. There are\n problems left before we'll be fully self-sufficient here—but the\n monster is so much like us in fundamental makeup that its body contains\n all the elements human life needs too.\"\n\n\n \"Then,\" Westover glanced appreciatively around, \"it looks like the main\n hazard is claustrophobia.\"",
"\"I stumbled onto it,\" Westover admitted. \"I was wandering across\n country—my plane crashed on the way back from that South American\n bug hunt dreamed up by somebody who'd been reading Wells'\nWar of the\n Worlds\n. I think my pilot went nuts; you could see too much of the\n destruction from up there.... But I got out in one piece and started\n walking—looking for some place with people and facilities that could\n try out my method of killing the monsters. I thought—I still think—I\n had a sure-fire way to do that—but I didn't realize then that it was\n too late to think of killing them off.\"\n\n\n Sutton nodded thoughtfully. \"It was too late—or too early, perhaps.\n We'll have to talk that over.\"\n\n\n Westover finished the brief account of his coming to dwell on the\n monster's back. The other grinned happily.\n\n\n \"You began with the practice, where I worked out the theory first.\"",
"Then, as he knew it must, a light glimmered ahead, the sinus widened,\n and Westover climbed to his feet and stood, weak-kneed still, staring\n at a chamber carved in the veritable belly of Leviathan. The floor\n underfoot was firm, as was the wall his shaking fingers tested.\n Dazzled, he saw tools leaning against the walls, spades, crowbars,\n axes, and a half-dozen people, men and women in rough grimy clothing,\n who stood watching him with lively interest.\n\n\n The Preacher stood beside him, breathing hard and mopping his forehead.\n But he brushed aside the deferential offers of the others: \"No—I will\n take him to the Doctor myself. All of you must hurry now to close the\n shaft.\"",
"Westover bowed his head, but he had caught a curiously expectant glint\n in Sutton's eyes as he spoke. He thought, and his face lightened.\n \"Suppose we work out a way to record my idea, one that can't be\n deciphered by anyone unintelligent enough to be likely to misuse it. A\n riddle for our descendants—who should have use for it some day.\"\n\n\n At last Sutton smiled. \"That's better. You've thought it through to\n the end, I see.... This phase of our history won't last forever.\n Eventually, the monsters will come to another planet not too unlike\n Earth, because it's on such worlds they prey. A tapeworm can cross the\n Sahara desert in the intestine of a camel—\"",
"The thaumaturge straightened, wiping his hands on his trousers as he\n turned with a satisfied grin on his round, spectacled face—then both\n he and Westover froze in dumbfounded recognition.\nSutton was first to recover. He said quietly, \"Welcome aboard the ark,\n Bill. You're just in time—I think we're about to hoist anchor.\" His\n quick eyes studied Westover's face, and he gestured toward a packing\n box against the wall opposite his apparatus. \"Sit down. You've been\n through the mill.\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Westover sat down dizzily. \"I've been aboard your ark\n for some time now, though. Only as an ectoparasite.\"\n\n\n \"It's high time you joined the endoparasites. Lucky you scratched\n around enough up there to create repercussions we could feel down here.\n You got the same idea, then?\"",
"Thus began for him a weird existence—the life of a parasite, of a flea\n on a dog. The monster crawled by day and rested by night; strengthened,\n the man could have left it then, but somehow night after night he did\n not. It wasn't, he argued with himself sometimes in the days when he\n lay torpidly drowsing, lulled by the long sway, arms over his head to\n protect him from the sun's baking, merely that he was chained to the\n only source of food he knew in all the world—not just that he was\n developing a flea's psychology. He was a man and a scientist, and he\n was conducting an experiment.... His life on the monster's back was\n proving something, something of vast importance for man, the extinct\n animal—but for increasingly longer periods of time he could not\n remember what it was....",
"There came a morning, though, when he remembered.\nThus began for him a weird existence—the life of a parasite, of a flea on a dog.\nHe woke with the sun's warmth on his body and the realization of\n something amiss trickling through his head. It was a little while\n before he recognized the wrongness, and when he did he sat bolt upright.\n\n\n The sun was already up, and the monster should have begun once more its\n steady, ravenous march to the east. But there was no motion; the great\n living expanse lay still around him. He wondered wildly if it was dead.\n\n\n Presently, though, he felt a faint shuddering and lift beneath his\n feet, and heard far stifled mutterings and sighs."
],
[
"Westover's mind was beginning to function again; it was as though the\n cessation of the rock and sway had exorcised the lethargy that had lain\n upon him. He knew now that he had been almost insane for the time he\n had passed here, touched by the madness that takes hermits and men lost\n in deserts or oceans. And his was a stranger solitude than any of those.",
"Westover sat for a space with head in hands, hearing the faint\n continuing murmurs from below. And he remembered the voices.\nHe had been hearing them again as he awoke—the distant muffled voices\n whose words he could not make out, not the small close ones that\n sometimes in the hot middays had spoken clearly in his ear and even\n called his name. The latter had to be, as he had vaguely accepted them\n even then, illusions—but the others—with his new clarity he was\n suddenly sure that they had been real.\n\n\n And a wild, white light of hope blazed in him, and he flung himself\n flat on the rough surface, beat on it with bare fists and shouted:\n \"Help! Here I am! Help!\"\n\n\n He paused to listen with fierce intentness, and heard nothing but the\n faint eructations deep inside the monster.",
"Westover no longer saw the murky moonlight, the far faint glitter of\n the flood or the slope of the living mountain. He saw, as he had seen\n from a circling jet plane, an immense tree of smoke that rose and\n expanded under the noonday sun, creamy white above and black and oily\n below, and beneath the black cloud something that writhed and flowed\n sluggishly in a cyclopean death agony.\n\n\n That picture dissolved, and was replaced by the face of a man—one who\n might now be alive or dead, elsewhere in the chaos of a desolated\n planet. It was an ordinary face, roundish, spectacled, but etched now\n by tragedy; the voice that went with it was flat, unemotional, pedantic.",
"Westover stood motionless in the blackness; how long, he did not know.\n He was hardly aware of the water that covered his feet, crept over his\n ankles, and swirled halfway to his knees. Only the emergence of the\n moon through a rift of the cloud blanket brought him awake; its dim\n light gleamed all around on a great sheet of water, unbroken save for\n scattered black hummocks—crests of knolls like that on which he stood,\n all soon to be hidden by the rising flood.\n\n\n For a moment he knew despair. The way back was impassable, and the way\n ahead was blocked by the titanic enemy.",
"The monster on which Westover had been living as a parasite was\n generating gases within itself, preparing to leave the ravished Earth.\n That was the meaning of its gargantuan belly rumblings. And they meant\n further that he must finally leave it—now or never—or be borne aloft\n to die gasping in the stratosphere.\n\n\n Hurriedly the man scrambled to the highest eminence of the back and\n stood looking about; and what he saw brought him to the brink of\n despair. For all around lay blue water, waves dancing and glinting in\n the fresh breeze; and sniffing the air he recognized the salt tang\n of the sea. While he slept the monster had crept beyond the coast\n line, and lay now in what to it was shallow water—fifty or a hundred\n fathoms. Back the way it had come, a headland was visible, mockingly,\n hopelessly distant.",
"\"Very well put,\" approved Sutton. \"Except that you make it sound easy.\n By the time I'd worked it out like that, things were already in\n such a turmoil that putting it into effect was the devil's own job.\n About the only ones I could find to help me were the Preacher and his\n people. They have the faith that moves mountains, that has made this\n self-moving mountain inhabitable.\"",
"Then the impersonal will that had driven him implacably two days and\n nights without stopping came to his rescue. Westover plodded forward,\n pressed his shrinking body against the slimy, faintly warm surface of\n the monster's foot, and sought above him with upstretched hands—found\n holds, and began to climb with a strength he had not known was left in\n him.\n\n\n The moonlight's fading again was merciful as he climbed the sheer,\n slippery face of the foot; but he could hear the wash and chuckle of\n the flood below. His tired brain told him treacherously: \"I'm already\n asleep—this is a nightmare.\" Once, listening to that insidious voice,\n he slipped and for instants hung dizzily by his hands, and for some\n minutes after he had found a new foothold merely clung panting with\n pounding heart.",
"Westover hesitated. \"I'm not just imagining you?\" he appealed.\n \"Somebody else has really found the answer?\"\n\n\n The Preacher's brows knitted faintly, but then his look turned to\n benevolent understanding. \"You have been alone too long here. Come with\n me—I will take you to the Doctor.\"\n\n\n Westover was still not sure that the other was more than one of the\n powerful specters of childhood—the Preacher, the Doctor, no doubt the\n Teacher next—risen to rob him of his last shreds of sanity. But he\n nodded in childlike obedience, and followed.\n\n\n When, a few hundred yards nearer the monster's head, the other halted\n at a black rent in the rugose hide, the mouth of a burrow descending\n into utter blackness—Westover knew that both the Preacher and his own\n wild hope were real.",
"Some time after he had found courage to resume the climb, he dragged\n himself, gasping and quivering, to comparative safety on the broad\n shelf that marked the rim of the foot. Above him lay the great black\n steep that rose to the summit of the monster's humped back, a mountain\n to be climbed. Westover felt poignantly that his exhausted body could\n not make that ascent and face the long and dangerous descent beyond,\n which he had to make before dawn ... but not now ... not now....\nHe lay in a state between waking and dreaming, high on the monster's\n side; and it seemed that the colossal body moved, swelling and\n sighing—but he knew they did not breathe as backboned animals do.\n Westover had been one of the men who, in the days when humanity was\n still fighting, had accumulated quite a store of knowledge about the\n enemy—the enemy that was brainless and toolless, but that was simply\n too vast for human intelligence and weapons to defeat....",
"The thaumaturge straightened, wiping his hands on his trousers as he\n turned with a satisfied grin on his round, spectacled face—then both\n he and Westover froze in dumbfounded recognition.\nSutton was first to recover. He said quietly, \"Welcome aboard the ark,\n Bill. You're just in time—I think we're about to hoist anchor.\" His\n quick eyes studied Westover's face, and he gestured toward a packing\n box against the wall opposite his apparatus. \"Sit down. You've been\n through the mill.\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Westover sat down dizzily. \"I've been aboard your ark\n for some time now, though. Only as an ectoparasite.\"\n\n\n \"It's high time you joined the endoparasites. Lucky you scratched\n around enough up there to create repercussions we could feel down here.\n You got the same idea, then?\"",
"material on the world which was their prey.... And men must starve, as\n he was starving now....\nWith a struggle Westover roused himself, first sitting up, then swaying\n to his feet, frowning with the effort to look sanely at the terrible\n inspiration that had come to him. The cloud blanket was breaking up,\n the sun already high, beating down on the naked moving plateau on which\n the man stood. The idea born in him seemed to stand that light, even to\n expand into hope.",
"He could stay where he was unharmed, of course. On the monster's back,\n of all places, he had nothing to fear from it or from others of its\n kind. But he knew with desperate clarity that by nightfall, when the\n beast became still once more, exhaustion and growing hunger would have\n made him unable to descend. As he lay where he had fallen, he felt that\n weakness creeping over him, no longer held in check by the will that\n had kept him doggedly plodding forward.",
"He sat up, eyes searching the sky for a sign to tell him how long he\n had slept. Low on the western horizon he found the faint glow that told\n of the moon's setting; and in the east a stronger light was already\n struggling through the clouds and mist, becoming every moment less\n tenuous and illusory, more the bitter reality of the breaking day.\n\n\n Even as Westover began frantically climbing, out of that lightening\n sky the hopelessness of his effort pressed down on him. With dawn the\n monster would begin to move, to crawl eastward impelled by the same dim\n phototropic urge which must guide these things out of the interstellar\n depths to Sun-type stars. All of them had crept endlessly eastward\n around the Earth, gutting the continents and churning the sea bottoms,\n and by now whatever was left of human civilization must be starving\n beyond the Arctic circle, or aboard ships at sea. The hordes that\n still lived and wandered over the once populous fertile lands, like\n this—would not live long.",
"His voice was drowned in a vast hissing roar. An irresistible pressure\n distorted the walls of the chamber and scythed its occupants from their\n feet. Sutton staggered drunkenly almost erect, fought his way across\n the tilting floor to make sure of his precious apparatus. He turned\n back toward the others, bracing himself and shouting something; then,\n knowing his words lost in the thunder, gestured toward the Earth they\n were leaving, a half-regretful, half-triumphant farewell.",
"For a man like Westover, who had been a scientist, it was not the\n prospect of death that was most crushing, but the death blow to his\n human pride, the star-storming pride of mind and will—defeated by\n sheer bulk and mindless hunger.\n\n\n Near the crest of the monster's back, he stumbled and fell hands and\n knees on the shagreen-roughness of the skin; at first he thought only\n that an attack of dizziness had made him fall, then he realized that\n the surface beneath him had shifted. Unmistakably even in the misty\n dawn-light, the hills and valleys of the rugose back were changing\n shape, as the vast protoplasmic mass below crawled, flowed beneath its\n integument. In slow peristaltic motion the waves marched eastward,\n toward the monster's head.",
"Then, as he knew it must, a light glimmered ahead, the sinus widened,\n and Westover climbed to his feet and stood, weak-kneed still, staring\n at a chamber carved in the veritable belly of Leviathan. The floor\n underfoot was firm, as was the wall his shaking fingers tested.\n Dazzled, he saw tools leaning against the walls, spades, crowbars,\n axes, and a half-dozen people, men and women in rough grimy clothing,\n who stood watching him with lively interest.\n\n\n The Preacher stood beside him, breathing hard and mopping his forehead.\n But he brushed aside the deferential offers of the others: \"No—I will\n take him to the Doctor myself. All of you must hurry now to close the\n shaft.\"",
"Then he sprang to his feet, gripping his hand-ax, and ran panting to\n the place where he had dug for food. His excavations tended to close\n and heal overnight; now he went to work with vicious strokes enlarging\n the latest one, hacking and tearing it deeper and deeper.\n\n\n He was almost hidden in the cavity when a shadow fell across him from\n behind. He whirled, for there could be no shadows on the monster's back.\n\n\n A man stood watching him calmly—an elderly man in rusty black\n clothing, leaning on a stick. The staff, the snowy beard, and something\n that smoldered behind the benign eyes, gave him the look of an ancient\n prophet.\n\n\n \"Who are you?\" asked Westover, breathlessly but almost without surprise.\n\n\n \"I am the Preacher,\" the old man said. \"The Lord hath sent me to save\n you. Arise, my son, and follow me.\"",
"There came a morning, though, when he remembered.\nThus began for him a weird existence—the life of a parasite, of a flea on a dog.\nHe woke with the sun's warmth on his body and the realization of\n something amiss trickling through his head. It was a little while\n before he recognized the wrongness, and when he did he sat bolt upright.\n\n\n The sun was already up, and the monster should have begun once more its\n steady, ravenous march to the east. But there was no motion; the great\n living expanse lay still around him. He wondered wildly if it was dead.\n\n\n Presently, though, he felt a faint shuddering and lift beneath his\n feet, and heard far stifled mutterings and sighs.",
"\"I stumbled onto it,\" Westover admitted. \"I was wandering across\n country—my plane crashed on the way back from that South American\n bug hunt dreamed up by somebody who'd been reading Wells'\nWar of the\n Worlds\n. I think my pilot went nuts; you could see too much of the\n destruction from up there.... But I got out in one piece and started\n walking—looking for some place with people and facilities that could\n try out my method of killing the monsters. I thought—I still think—I\n had a sure-fire way to do that—but I didn't realize then that it was\n too late to think of killing them off.\"\n\n\n Sutton nodded thoughtfully. \"It was too late—or too early, perhaps.\n We'll have to talk that over.\"\n\n\n Westover finished the brief account of his coming to dwell on the\n monster's back. The other grinned happily.\n\n\n \"You began with the practice, where I worked out the theory first.\"",
"Fingers shaking, he unhitched the light ax from his belt and began to\n hack with feverish industry at the monster's crusted hide.\n\n\n The scaly, weathered epidermis seemed immeasurably thick. But at last\n he had chopped through it, reached the softer protoplasm beneath.\n Clawing and hewing in the hole he had made, he tore out heavy slabs of\n the monster's flesh.\n\n\n A ripple that did not belong to the crawling motion ran over the\n thing's surface round about. Westover laughed wildly with a sudden\n sense of power. He, the insignificant human mite, had made the\n miles-long beast twitch like a flea-bitten dog."
],
[
"Westover's mind was beginning to function again; it was as though the\n cessation of the rock and sway had exorcised the lethargy that had lain\n upon him. He knew now that he had been almost insane for the time he\n had passed here, touched by the madness that takes hermits and men lost\n in deserts or oceans. And his was a stranger solitude than any of those.",
"Westover hesitated. \"I'm not just imagining you?\" he appealed.\n \"Somebody else has really found the answer?\"\n\n\n The Preacher's brows knitted faintly, but then his look turned to\n benevolent understanding. \"You have been alone too long here. Come with\n me—I will take you to the Doctor.\"\n\n\n Westover was still not sure that the other was more than one of the\n powerful specters of childhood—the Preacher, the Doctor, no doubt the\n Teacher next—risen to rob him of his last shreds of sanity. But he\n nodded in childlike obedience, and followed.\n\n\n When, a few hundred yards nearer the monster's head, the other halted\n at a black rent in the rugose hide, the mouth of a burrow descending\n into utter blackness—Westover knew that both the Preacher and his own\n wild hope were real.",
"Westover stood motionless in the blackness; how long, he did not know.\n He was hardly aware of the water that covered his feet, crept over his\n ankles, and swirled halfway to his knees. Only the emergence of the\n moon through a rift of the cloud blanket brought him awake; its dim\n light gleamed all around on a great sheet of water, unbroken save for\n scattered black hummocks—crests of knolls like that on which he stood,\n all soon to be hidden by the rising flood.\n\n\n For a moment he knew despair. The way back was impassable, and the way\n ahead was blocked by the titanic enemy.",
"Westover no longer saw the murky moonlight, the far faint glitter of\n the flood or the slope of the living mountain. He saw, as he had seen\n from a circling jet plane, an immense tree of smoke that rose and\n expanded under the noonday sun, creamy white above and black and oily\n below, and beneath the black cloud something that writhed and flowed\n sluggishly in a cyclopean death agony.\n\n\n That picture dissolved, and was replaced by the face of a man—one who\n might now be alive or dead, elsewhere in the chaos of a desolated\n planet. It was an ordinary face, roundish, spectacled, but etched now\n by tragedy; the voice that went with it was flat, unemotional, pedantic.",
"Westover sat for a space with head in hands, hearing the faint\n continuing murmurs from below. And he remembered the voices.\nHe had been hearing them again as he awoke—the distant muffled voices\n whose words he could not make out, not the small close ones that\n sometimes in the hot middays had spoken clearly in his ear and even\n called his name. The latter had to be, as he had vaguely accepted them\n even then, illusions—but the others—with his new clarity he was\n suddenly sure that they had been real.\n\n\n And a wild, white light of hope blazed in him, and he flung himself\n flat on the rough surface, beat on it with bare fists and shouted:\n \"Help! Here I am! Help!\"\n\n\n He paused to listen with fierce intentness, and heard nothing but the\n faint eructations deep inside the monster.",
"Then the impersonal will that had driven him implacably two days and\n nights without stopping came to his rescue. Westover plodded forward,\n pressed his shrinking body against the slimy, faintly warm surface of\n the monster's foot, and sought above him with upstretched hands—found\n holds, and began to climb with a strength he had not known was left in\n him.\n\n\n The moonlight's fading again was merciful as he climbed the sheer,\n slippery face of the foot; but he could hear the wash and chuckle of\n the flood below. His tired brain told him treacherously: \"I'm already\n asleep—this is a nightmare.\" Once, listening to that insidious voice,\n he slipped and for instants hung dizzily by his hands, and for some\n minutes after he had found a new foothold merely clung panting with\n pounding heart.",
"Then, as he knew it must, a light glimmered ahead, the sinus widened,\n and Westover climbed to his feet and stood, weak-kneed still, staring\n at a chamber carved in the veritable belly of Leviathan. The floor\n underfoot was firm, as was the wall his shaking fingers tested.\n Dazzled, he saw tools leaning against the walls, spades, crowbars,\n axes, and a half-dozen people, men and women in rough grimy clothing,\n who stood watching him with lively interest.\n\n\n The Preacher stood beside him, breathing hard and mopping his forehead.\n But he brushed aside the deferential offers of the others: \"No—I will\n take him to the Doctor myself. All of you must hurry now to close the\n shaft.\"",
"Some time after he had found courage to resume the climb, he dragged\n himself, gasping and quivering, to comparative safety on the broad\n shelf that marked the rim of the foot. Above him lay the great black\n steep that rose to the summit of the monster's humped back, a mountain\n to be climbed. Westover felt poignantly that his exhausted body could\n not make that ascent and face the long and dangerous descent beyond,\n which he had to make before dawn ... but not now ... not now....\nHe lay in a state between waking and dreaming, high on the monster's\n side; and it seemed that the colossal body moved, swelling and\n sighing—but he knew they did not breathe as backboned animals do.\n Westover had been one of the men who, in the days when humanity was\n still fighting, had accumulated quite a store of knowledge about the\n enemy—the enemy that was brainless and toolless, but that was simply\n too vast for human intelligence and weapons to defeat....",
"For a man like Westover, who had been a scientist, it was not the\n prospect of death that was most crushing, but the death blow to his\n human pride, the star-storming pride of mind and will—defeated by\n sheer bulk and mindless hunger.\n\n\n Near the crest of the monster's back, he stumbled and fell hands and\n knees on the shagreen-roughness of the skin; at first he thought only\n that an attack of dizziness had made him fall, then he realized that\n the surface beneath him had shifted. Unmistakably even in the misty\n dawn-light, the hills and valleys of the rugose back were changing\n shape, as the vast protoplasmic mass below crawled, flowed beneath its\n integument. In slow peristaltic motion the waves marched eastward,\n toward the monster's head.",
"Then he sprang to his feet, gripping his hand-ax, and ran panting to\n the place where he had dug for food. His excavations tended to close\n and heal overnight; now he went to work with vicious strokes enlarging\n the latest one, hacking and tearing it deeper and deeper.\n\n\n He was almost hidden in the cavity when a shadow fell across him from\n behind. He whirled, for there could be no shadows on the monster's back.\n\n\n A man stood watching him calmly—an elderly man in rusty black\n clothing, leaning on a stick. The staff, the snowy beard, and something\n that smoldered behind the benign eyes, gave him the look of an ancient\n prophet.\n\n\n \"Who are you?\" asked Westover, breathlessly but almost without surprise.\n\n\n \"I am the Preacher,\" the old man said. \"The Lord hath sent me to save\n you. Arise, my son, and follow me.\"",
"The monster on which Westover had been living as a parasite was\n generating gases within itself, preparing to leave the ravished Earth.\n That was the meaning of its gargantuan belly rumblings. And they meant\n further that he must finally leave it—now or never—or be borne aloft\n to die gasping in the stratosphere.\n\n\n Hurriedly the man scrambled to the highest eminence of the back and\n stood looking about; and what he saw brought him to the brink of\n despair. For all around lay blue water, waves dancing and glinting in\n the fresh breeze; and sniffing the air he recognized the salt tang\n of the sea. While he slept the monster had crept beyond the coast\n line, and lay now in what to it was shallow water—fifty or a hundred\n fathoms. Back the way it had come, a headland was visible, mockingly,\n hopelessly distant.",
"Fingers shaking, he unhitched the light ax from his belt and began to\n hack with feverish industry at the monster's crusted hide.\n\n\n The scaly, weathered epidermis seemed immeasurably thick. But at last\n he had chopped through it, reached the softer protoplasm beneath.\n Clawing and hewing in the hole he had made, he tore out heavy slabs of\n the monster's flesh.\n\n\n A ripple that did not belong to the crawling motion ran over the\n thing's surface round about. Westover laughed wildly with a sudden\n sense of power. He, the insignificant human mite, had made the\n miles-long beast twitch like a flea-bitten dog.",
"\"Down here. Into the belly of Leviathan,\" said the old man solemnly,\n and Westover nodded this time with alacrity.\nThe crawling descent through the twisting, Stygian burrow had much\n that ought to belong to a journey into Hell.... More than that, no\n demonologist's imagination could have conceived without experiencing\n the sheer horror of the yielding beslimed walls that seemed every\n moment squeezing in to trap them unspeakably. The air was warm and\n rank with the familiar heavy sweetish odor of the monster's colorless\n blood....",
"material on the world which was their prey.... And men must starve, as\n he was starving now....\nWith a struggle Westover roused himself, first sitting up, then swaying\n to his feet, frowning with the effort to look sanely at the terrible\n inspiration that had come to him. The cloud blanket was breaking up,\n the sun already high, beating down on the naked moving plateau on which\n the man stood. The idea born in him seemed to stand that light, even to\n expand into hope.",
"He sat up, eyes searching the sky for a sign to tell him how long he\n had slept. Low on the western horizon he found the faint glow that told\n of the moon's setting; and in the east a stronger light was already\n struggling through the clouds and mist, becoming every moment less\n tenuous and illusory, more the bitter reality of the breaking day.\n\n\n Even as Westover began frantically climbing, out of that lightening\n sky the hopelessness of his effort pressed down on him. With dawn the\n monster would begin to move, to crawl eastward impelled by the same dim\n phototropic urge which must guide these things out of the interstellar\n depths to Sun-type stars. All of them had crept endlessly eastward\n around the Earth, gutting the continents and churning the sea bottoms,\n and by now whatever was left of human civilization must be starving\n beyond the Arctic circle, or aboard ships at sea. The hordes that\n still lived and wandered over the once populous fertile lands, like\n this—would not live long.",
"\"Describing your plan, you sounded almost ready to put it into effect\n on the spot.\"\n\n\n \"No! Of course I realize—Well, I see what you mean—I think.\" Westover\n was crestfallen.\n\n\n Sutton smiled faintly.\n\n\n \"I think you do, Bill. To survive, we've got to be\ngood\nparasites.\n That means before all, for the coming generations, that we keep our\n numbers down. A good parasite doesn't destroy or even overtax its host.\n We don't want to follow the sorry example of such unsuccessful species\n as the bugs of bubonic plague or typhoid; we'll do better to model\n ourselves on the humble tapeworm.",
"The thaumaturge straightened, wiping his hands on his trousers as he\n turned with a satisfied grin on his round, spectacled face—then both\n he and Westover froze in dumbfounded recognition.\nSutton was first to recover. He said quietly, \"Welcome aboard the ark,\n Bill. You're just in time—I think we're about to hoist anchor.\" His\n quick eyes studied Westover's face, and he gestured toward a packing\n box against the wall opposite his apparatus. \"Sit down. You've been\n through the mill.\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Westover sat down dizzily. \"I've been aboard your ark\n for some time now, though. Only as an ectoparasite.\"\n\n\n \"It's high time you joined the endoparasites. Lucky you scratched\n around enough up there to create repercussions we could feel down here.\n You got the same idea, then?\"",
"\"I stumbled onto it,\" Westover admitted. \"I was wandering across\n country—my plane crashed on the way back from that South American\n bug hunt dreamed up by somebody who'd been reading Wells'\nWar of the\n Worlds\n. I think my pilot went nuts; you could see too much of the\n destruction from up there.... But I got out in one piece and started\n walking—looking for some place with people and facilities that could\n try out my method of killing the monsters. I thought—I still think—I\n had a sure-fire way to do that—but I didn't realize then that it was\n too late to think of killing them off.\"\n\n\n Sutton nodded thoughtfully. \"It was too late—or too early, perhaps.\n We'll have to talk that over.\"\n\n\n Westover finished the brief account of his coming to dwell on the\n monster's back. The other grinned happily.\n\n\n \"You began with the practice, where I worked out the theory first.\"",
"There was another tunnel to be crawled through, but that one was\n firm-walled as the room they left behind. They emerged into a larger\n cavern, that like the first was lit—only now did the miracle of it\n obtrude itself in his dazed mind—by fluorescent tubes, and filled with\n equipment that gleamed glass and metal. Over an apparatus with many\n fluid-dripping trays, like an air-conditioning device, bent a lone man.\n\n\n \"Is it working?\" inquired the Preacher.\n\n\n \"It's working,\" the other answered without looking up from the\n adjustment he was making. Bubbles were rising in the fluid that filled\n the trays, rising and bursting, rising and bursting with a curiously\n fascinating monotony. The subtly tense attitudes of the two initiates\n told Westover better than words that there was something hugely\n important in the success of whatever magic was producing those bubbles.",
"He could stay where he was unharmed, of course. On the monster's back,\n of all places, he had nothing to fear from it or from others of its\n kind. But he knew with desperate clarity that by nightfall, when the\n beast became still once more, exhaustion and growing hunger would have\n made him unable to descend. As he lay where he had fallen, he felt that\n weakness creeping over him, no longer held in check by the will that\n had kept him doggedly plodding forward."
],
[
"Westover's mind was beginning to function again; it was as though the\n cessation of the rock and sway had exorcised the lethargy that had lain\n upon him. He knew now that he had been almost insane for the time he\n had passed here, touched by the madness that takes hermits and men lost\n in deserts or oceans. And his was a stranger solitude than any of those.",
"Westover sat for a space with head in hands, hearing the faint\n continuing murmurs from below. And he remembered the voices.\nHe had been hearing them again as he awoke—the distant muffled voices\n whose words he could not make out, not the small close ones that\n sometimes in the hot middays had spoken clearly in his ear and even\n called his name. The latter had to be, as he had vaguely accepted them\n even then, illusions—but the others—with his new clarity he was\n suddenly sure that they had been real.\n\n\n And a wild, white light of hope blazed in him, and he flung himself\n flat on the rough surface, beat on it with bare fists and shouted:\n \"Help! Here I am! Help!\"\n\n\n He paused to listen with fierce intentness, and heard nothing but the\n faint eructations deep inside the monster.",
"Westover no longer saw the murky moonlight, the far faint glitter of\n the flood or the slope of the living mountain. He saw, as he had seen\n from a circling jet plane, an immense tree of smoke that rose and\n expanded under the noonday sun, creamy white above and black and oily\n below, and beneath the black cloud something that writhed and flowed\n sluggishly in a cyclopean death agony.\n\n\n That picture dissolved, and was replaced by the face of a man—one who\n might now be alive or dead, elsewhere in the chaos of a desolated\n planet. It was an ordinary face, roundish, spectacled, but etched now\n by tragedy; the voice that went with it was flat, unemotional, pedantic.",
"Westover hesitated. \"I'm not just imagining you?\" he appealed.\n \"Somebody else has really found the answer?\"\n\n\n The Preacher's brows knitted faintly, but then his look turned to\n benevolent understanding. \"You have been alone too long here. Come with\n me—I will take you to the Doctor.\"\n\n\n Westover was still not sure that the other was more than one of the\n powerful specters of childhood—the Preacher, the Doctor, no doubt the\n Teacher next—risen to rob him of his last shreds of sanity. But he\n nodded in childlike obedience, and followed.\n\n\n When, a few hundred yards nearer the monster's head, the other halted\n at a black rent in the rugose hide, the mouth of a burrow descending\n into utter blackness—Westover knew that both the Preacher and his own\n wild hope were real.",
"The monster on which Westover had been living as a parasite was\n generating gases within itself, preparing to leave the ravished Earth.\n That was the meaning of its gargantuan belly rumblings. And they meant\n further that he must finally leave it—now or never—or be borne aloft\n to die gasping in the stratosphere.\n\n\n Hurriedly the man scrambled to the highest eminence of the back and\n stood looking about; and what he saw brought him to the brink of\n despair. For all around lay blue water, waves dancing and glinting in\n the fresh breeze; and sniffing the air he recognized the salt tang\n of the sea. While he slept the monster had crept beyond the coast\n line, and lay now in what to it was shallow water—fifty or a hundred\n fathoms. Back the way it had come, a headland was visible, mockingly,\n hopelessly distant.",
"Westover stood motionless in the blackness; how long, he did not know.\n He was hardly aware of the water that covered his feet, crept over his\n ankles, and swirled halfway to his knees. Only the emergence of the\n moon through a rift of the cloud blanket brought him awake; its dim\n light gleamed all around on a great sheet of water, unbroken save for\n scattered black hummocks—crests of knolls like that on which he stood,\n all soon to be hidden by the rising flood.\n\n\n For a moment he knew despair. The way back was impassable, and the way\n ahead was blocked by the titanic enemy.",
"Then the impersonal will that had driven him implacably two days and\n nights without stopping came to his rescue. Westover plodded forward,\n pressed his shrinking body against the slimy, faintly warm surface of\n the monster's foot, and sought above him with upstretched hands—found\n holds, and began to climb with a strength he had not known was left in\n him.\n\n\n The moonlight's fading again was merciful as he climbed the sheer,\n slippery face of the foot; but he could hear the wash and chuckle of\n the flood below. His tired brain told him treacherously: \"I'm already\n asleep—this is a nightmare.\" Once, listening to that insidious voice,\n he slipped and for instants hung dizzily by his hands, and for some\n minutes after he had found a new foothold merely clung panting with\n pounding heart.",
"Then, as he knew it must, a light glimmered ahead, the sinus widened,\n and Westover climbed to his feet and stood, weak-kneed still, staring\n at a chamber carved in the veritable belly of Leviathan. The floor\n underfoot was firm, as was the wall his shaking fingers tested.\n Dazzled, he saw tools leaning against the walls, spades, crowbars,\n axes, and a half-dozen people, men and women in rough grimy clothing,\n who stood watching him with lively interest.\n\n\n The Preacher stood beside him, breathing hard and mopping his forehead.\n But he brushed aside the deferential offers of the others: \"No—I will\n take him to the Doctor myself. All of you must hurry now to close the\n shaft.\"",
"Some time after he had found courage to resume the climb, he dragged\n himself, gasping and quivering, to comparative safety on the broad\n shelf that marked the rim of the foot. Above him lay the great black\n steep that rose to the summit of the monster's humped back, a mountain\n to be climbed. Westover felt poignantly that his exhausted body could\n not make that ascent and face the long and dangerous descent beyond,\n which he had to make before dawn ... but not now ... not now....\nHe lay in a state between waking and dreaming, high on the monster's\n side; and it seemed that the colossal body moved, swelling and\n sighing—but he knew they did not breathe as backboned animals do.\n Westover had been one of the men who, in the days when humanity was\n still fighting, had accumulated quite a store of knowledge about the\n enemy—the enemy that was brainless and toolless, but that was simply\n too vast for human intelligence and weapons to defeat....",
"For a man like Westover, who had been a scientist, it was not the\n prospect of death that was most crushing, but the death blow to his\n human pride, the star-storming pride of mind and will—defeated by\n sheer bulk and mindless hunger.\n\n\n Near the crest of the monster's back, he stumbled and fell hands and\n knees on the shagreen-roughness of the skin; at first he thought only\n that an attack of dizziness had made him fall, then he realized that\n the surface beneath him had shifted. Unmistakably even in the misty\n dawn-light, the hills and valleys of the rugose back were changing\n shape, as the vast protoplasmic mass below crawled, flowed beneath its\n integument. In slow peristaltic motion the waves marched eastward,\n toward the monster's head.",
"Then he sprang to his feet, gripping his hand-ax, and ran panting to\n the place where he had dug for food. His excavations tended to close\n and heal overnight; now he went to work with vicious strokes enlarging\n the latest one, hacking and tearing it deeper and deeper.\n\n\n He was almost hidden in the cavity when a shadow fell across him from\n behind. He whirled, for there could be no shadows on the monster's back.\n\n\n A man stood watching him calmly—an elderly man in rusty black\n clothing, leaning on a stick. The staff, the snowy beard, and something\n that smoldered behind the benign eyes, gave him the look of an ancient\n prophet.\n\n\n \"Who are you?\" asked Westover, breathlessly but almost without surprise.\n\n\n \"I am the Preacher,\" the old man said. \"The Lord hath sent me to save\n you. Arise, my son, and follow me.\"",
"The thaumaturge straightened, wiping his hands on his trousers as he\n turned with a satisfied grin on his round, spectacled face—then both\n he and Westover froze in dumbfounded recognition.\nSutton was first to recover. He said quietly, \"Welcome aboard the ark,\n Bill. You're just in time—I think we're about to hoist anchor.\" His\n quick eyes studied Westover's face, and he gestured toward a packing\n box against the wall opposite his apparatus. \"Sit down. You've been\n through the mill.\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Westover sat down dizzily. \"I've been aboard your ark\n for some time now, though. Only as an ectoparasite.\"\n\n\n \"It's high time you joined the endoparasites. Lucky you scratched\n around enough up there to create repercussions we could feel down here.\n You got the same idea, then?\"",
"\"Amen,\" agreed Sutton. But the gaze he fixed on Westover was oddly\n troubled. \"Speaking of the future brings up the question of the idea\n you mentioned—your monster-killing scheme.\"\nWestover flexed his hands involuntarily, like one who has been too\n long enforcedly idle. In terse eager sentences he outlined for Sutton\n the plan that had burned in him during his bitter wandering over\n the face of the ruined land. It would be very easy to accomplish\n from an endoparasite's point of vantage, merely by isolating from\n the creature's blood over a long period enough of some potent\n secretion—hormone, enzyme or the like—to kill when suddenly\n reintroduced into the system. \"Originally I thought we could accomplish\n the same thing by synthesis—but this way will be simpler.\"\n\n\n \"Beautifully simple.\" Sutton smiled wryly. \"So much so that I wish\n you'd never thought of it.\"\n\n\n Westover stared. \"Why?\"",
"He could stay where he was unharmed, of course. On the monster's back,\n of all places, he had nothing to fear from it or from others of its\n kind. But he knew with desperate clarity that by nightfall, when the\n beast became still once more, exhaustion and growing hunger would have\n made him unable to descend. As he lay where he had fallen, he felt that\n weakness creeping over him, no longer held in check by the will that\n had kept him doggedly plodding forward.",
"He sat up, eyes searching the sky for a sign to tell him how long he\n had slept. Low on the western horizon he found the faint glow that told\n of the moon's setting; and in the east a stronger light was already\n struggling through the clouds and mist, becoming every moment less\n tenuous and illusory, more the bitter reality of the breaking day.\n\n\n Even as Westover began frantically climbing, out of that lightening\n sky the hopelessness of his effort pressed down on him. With dawn the\n monster would begin to move, to crawl eastward impelled by the same dim\n phototropic urge which must guide these things out of the interstellar\n depths to Sun-type stars. All of them had crept endlessly eastward\n around the Earth, gutting the continents and churning the sea bottoms,\n and by now whatever was left of human civilization must be starving\n beyond the Arctic circle, or aboard ships at sea. The hordes that\n still lived and wandered over the once populous fertile lands, like\n this—would not live long.",
"material on the world which was their prey.... And men must starve, as\n he was starving now....\nWith a struggle Westover roused himself, first sitting up, then swaying\n to his feet, frowning with the effort to look sanely at the terrible\n inspiration that had come to him. The cloud blanket was breaking up,\n the sun already high, beating down on the naked moving plateau on which\n the man stood. The idea born in him seemed to stand that light, even to\n expand into hope.",
"There came a morning, though, when he remembered.\nThus began for him a weird existence—the life of a parasite, of a flea on a dog.\nHe woke with the sun's warmth on his body and the realization of\n something amiss trickling through his head. It was a little while\n before he recognized the wrongness, and when he did he sat bolt upright.\n\n\n The sun was already up, and the monster should have begun once more its\n steady, ravenous march to the east. But there was no motion; the great\n living expanse lay still around him. He wondered wildly if it was dead.\n\n\n Presently, though, he felt a faint shuddering and lift beneath his\n feet, and heard far stifled mutterings and sighs.",
"\"Down here. Into the belly of Leviathan,\" said the old man solemnly,\n and Westover nodded this time with alacrity.\nThe crawling descent through the twisting, Stygian burrow had much\n that ought to belong to a journey into Hell.... More than that, no\n demonologist's imagination could have conceived without experiencing\n the sheer horror of the yielding beslimed walls that seemed every\n moment squeezing in to trap them unspeakably. The air was warm and\n rank with the familiar heavy sweetish odor of the monster's colorless\n blood....",
"\"I stumbled onto it,\" Westover admitted. \"I was wandering across\n country—my plane crashed on the way back from that South American\n bug hunt dreamed up by somebody who'd been reading Wells'\nWar of the\n Worlds\n. I think my pilot went nuts; you could see too much of the\n destruction from up there.... But I got out in one piece and started\n walking—looking for some place with people and facilities that could\n try out my method of killing the monsters. I thought—I still think—I\n had a sure-fire way to do that—but I didn't realize then that it was\n too late to think of killing them off.\"\n\n\n Sutton nodded thoughtfully. \"It was too late—or too early, perhaps.\n We'll have to talk that over.\"\n\n\n Westover finished the brief account of his coming to dwell on the\n monster's back. The other grinned happily.\n\n\n \"You began with the practice, where I worked out the theory first.\"",
"Thus began for him a weird existence—the life of a parasite, of a flea\n on a dog. The monster crawled by day and rested by night; strengthened,\n the man could have left it then, but somehow night after night he did\n not. It wasn't, he argued with himself sometimes in the days when he\n lay torpidly drowsing, lulled by the long sway, arms over his head to\n protect him from the sun's baking, merely that he was chained to the\n only source of food he knew in all the world—not just that he was\n developing a flea's psychology. He was a man and a scientist, and he\n was conducting an experiment.... His life on the monster's back was\n proving something, something of vast importance for man, the extinct\n animal—but for increasingly longer periods of time he could not\n remember what it was...."
],
[
"Thus began for him a weird existence—the life of a parasite, of a flea\n on a dog. The monster crawled by day and rested by night; strengthened,\n the man could have left it then, but somehow night after night he did\n not. It wasn't, he argued with himself sometimes in the days when he\n lay torpidly drowsing, lulled by the long sway, arms over his head to\n protect him from the sun's baking, merely that he was chained to the\n only source of food he knew in all the world—not just that he was\n developing a flea's psychology. He was a man and a scientist, and he\n was conducting an experiment.... His life on the monster's back was\n proving something, something of vast importance for man, the extinct\n animal—but for increasingly longer periods of time he could not\n remember what it was....",
"He could stay where he was unharmed, of course. On the monster's back,\n of all places, he had nothing to fear from it or from others of its\n kind. But he knew with desperate clarity that by nightfall, when the\n beast became still once more, exhaustion and growing hunger would have\n made him unable to descend. As he lay where he had fallen, he felt that\n weakness creeping over him, no longer held in check by the will that\n had kept him doggedly plodding forward.",
"Then the impersonal will that had driven him implacably two days and\n nights without stopping came to his rescue. Westover plodded forward,\n pressed his shrinking body against the slimy, faintly warm surface of\n the monster's foot, and sought above him with upstretched hands—found\n holds, and began to climb with a strength he had not known was left in\n him.\n\n\n The moonlight's fading again was merciful as he climbed the sheer,\n slippery face of the foot; but he could hear the wash and chuckle of\n the flood below. His tired brain told him treacherously: \"I'm already\n asleep—this is a nightmare.\" Once, listening to that insidious voice,\n he slipped and for instants hung dizzily by his hands, and for some\n minutes after he had found a new foothold merely clung panting with\n pounding heart.",
"There came a morning, though, when he remembered.\nThus began for him a weird existence—the life of a parasite, of a flea on a dog.\nHe woke with the sun's warmth on his body and the realization of\n something amiss trickling through his head. It was a little while\n before he recognized the wrongness, and when he did he sat bolt upright.\n\n\n The sun was already up, and the monster should have begun once more its\n steady, ravenous march to the east. But there was no motion; the great\n living expanse lay still around him. He wondered wildly if it was dead.\n\n\n Presently, though, he felt a faint shuddering and lift beneath his\n feet, and heard far stifled mutterings and sighs.",
"He sat up, eyes searching the sky for a sign to tell him how long he\n had slept. Low on the western horizon he found the faint glow that told\n of the moon's setting; and in the east a stronger light was already\n struggling through the clouds and mist, becoming every moment less\n tenuous and illusory, more the bitter reality of the breaking day.\n\n\n Even as Westover began frantically climbing, out of that lightening\n sky the hopelessness of his effort pressed down on him. With dawn the\n monster would begin to move, to crawl eastward impelled by the same dim\n phototropic urge which must guide these things out of the interstellar\n depths to Sun-type stars. All of them had crept endlessly eastward\n around the Earth, gutting the continents and churning the sea bottoms,\n and by now whatever was left of human civilization must be starving\n beyond the Arctic circle, or aboard ships at sea. The hordes that\n still lived and wandered over the once populous fertile lands, like\n this—would not live long.",
"Some time after he had found courage to resume the climb, he dragged\n himself, gasping and quivering, to comparative safety on the broad\n shelf that marked the rim of the foot. Above him lay the great black\n steep that rose to the summit of the monster's humped back, a mountain\n to be climbed. Westover felt poignantly that his exhausted body could\n not make that ascent and face the long and dangerous descent beyond,\n which he had to make before dawn ... but not now ... not now....\nHe lay in a state between waking and dreaming, high on the monster's\n side; and it seemed that the colossal body moved, swelling and\n sighing—but he knew they did not breathe as backboned animals do.\n Westover had been one of the men who, in the days when humanity was\n still fighting, had accumulated quite a store of knowledge about the\n enemy—the enemy that was brainless and toolless, but that was simply\n too vast for human intelligence and weapons to defeat....",
"Then he sprang to his feet, gripping his hand-ax, and ran panting to\n the place where he had dug for food. His excavations tended to close\n and heal overnight; now he went to work with vicious strokes enlarging\n the latest one, hacking and tearing it deeper and deeper.\n\n\n He was almost hidden in the cavity when a shadow fell across him from\n behind. He whirled, for there could be no shadows on the monster's back.\n\n\n A man stood watching him calmly—an elderly man in rusty black\n clothing, leaning on a stick. The staff, the snowy beard, and something\n that smoldered behind the benign eyes, gave him the look of an ancient\n prophet.\n\n\n \"Who are you?\" asked Westover, breathlessly but almost without surprise.\n\n\n \"I am the Preacher,\" the old man said. \"The Lord hath sent me to save\n you. Arise, my son, and follow me.\"",
"For a man like Westover, who had been a scientist, it was not the\n prospect of death that was most crushing, but the death blow to his\n human pride, the star-storming pride of mind and will—defeated by\n sheer bulk and mindless hunger.\n\n\n Near the crest of the monster's back, he stumbled and fell hands and\n knees on the shagreen-roughness of the skin; at first he thought only\n that an attack of dizziness had made him fall, then he realized that\n the surface beneath him had shifted. Unmistakably even in the misty\n dawn-light, the hills and valleys of the rugose back were changing\n shape, as the vast protoplasmic mass below crawled, flowed beneath its\n integument. In slow peristaltic motion the waves marched eastward,\n toward the monster's head.",
"Westover hesitated. \"I'm not just imagining you?\" he appealed.\n \"Somebody else has really found the answer?\"\n\n\n The Preacher's brows knitted faintly, but then his look turned to\n benevolent understanding. \"You have been alone too long here. Come with\n me—I will take you to the Doctor.\"\n\n\n Westover was still not sure that the other was more than one of the\n powerful specters of childhood—the Preacher, the Doctor, no doubt the\n Teacher next—risen to rob him of his last shreds of sanity. But he\n nodded in childlike obedience, and followed.\n\n\n When, a few hundred yards nearer the monster's head, the other halted\n at a black rent in the rugose hide, the mouth of a burrow descending\n into utter blackness—Westover knew that both the Preacher and his own\n wild hope were real.",
"The monster on which Westover had been living as a parasite was\n generating gases within itself, preparing to leave the ravished Earth.\n That was the meaning of its gargantuan belly rumblings. And they meant\n further that he must finally leave it—now or never—or be borne aloft\n to die gasping in the stratosphere.\n\n\n Hurriedly the man scrambled to the highest eminence of the back and\n stood looking about; and what he saw brought him to the brink of\n despair. For all around lay blue water, waves dancing and glinting in\n the fresh breeze; and sniffing the air he recognized the salt tang\n of the sea. While he slept the monster had crept beyond the coast\n line, and lay now in what to it was shallow water—fifty or a hundred\n fathoms. Back the way it had come, a headland was visible, mockingly,\n hopelessly distant.",
"His matches were dry in their water-proof case; he made a smoldering\n fire from the loose fibrous scale of the monster's back, and half an\n hour later was replete. Either the long fast, or involuntary revulsion,\n or perhaps merely the motion of the creature brought on nausea, but he\n fought it sternly back and succeeded in keeping his strange meal down.\n Then he was tormented by thirst. It was some time, though, before he\n could bring himself to drink the colorless fluid that had collected in\n the wound he had inflicted on the monster.",
"Again he lay half conscious, in a lethargy that unchecked must grow\n steadily deeper until death. Isolated thoughts floated through his\n head. It occurred to him that he was now ideally located to conduct\n the experiments necessary to prove his theory of how to destroy the\n monsters—if only someone had had the foresight to build a biological\n laboratory on the monster's back. Of course the rolling motion would\n create special problems of technique.... Idiocy.... Once more he seemed\n to glimpse Sutton's face, as the biologist calmly made that grisly\n report to the President's Committee on Extermination.... Sutton's\n prediction had been a hundred percent correct. The monsters' hunger\n knew no halt until they had absorbed into themselves all the organic",
"He recoiled as if seared, and retreated, slithering in the muck. For\n moments his mind was full of dark formless panic; then he took a firm\n hold on himself and tried to comprehend the situation.\n\n\n Nothing was distinguishable beyond a few yards, but his mind's eye\n could see the rest—the immense slug-like shape that extended in\n ponderous repose across the river valley, its head and tail spilling\n over the hills on either side, five miles apart. The beast was\n quiescent until morning—sleeping, if such things slept.\n\n\n And that explained the flood; the monster's body had formed an\n unbreakable dam behind which the river had been steadily piling up in\n those first hours of night; if it did not move until dawn, the level\n would be far higher then.",
"Fingers shaking, he unhitched the light ax from his belt and began to\n hack with feverish industry at the monster's crusted hide.\n\n\n The scaly, weathered epidermis seemed immeasurably thick. But at last\n he had chopped through it, reached the softer protoplasm beneath.\n Clawing and hewing in the hole he had made, he tore out heavy slabs of\n the monster's flesh.\n\n\n A ripple that did not belong to the crawling motion ran over the\n thing's surface round about. Westover laughed wildly with a sudden\n sense of power. He, the insignificant human mite, had made the\n miles-long beast twitch like a flea-bitten dog.",
"Westover sat for a space with head in hands, hearing the faint\n continuing murmurs from below. And he remembered the voices.\nHe had been hearing them again as he awoke—the distant muffled voices\n whose words he could not make out, not the small close ones that\n sometimes in the hot middays had spoken clearly in his ear and even\n called his name. The latter had to be, as he had vaguely accepted them\n even then, illusions—but the others—with his new clarity he was\n suddenly sure that they had been real.\n\n\n And a wild, white light of hope blazed in him, and he flung himself\n flat on the rough surface, beat on it with bare fists and shouted:\n \"Help! Here I am! Help!\"\n\n\n He paused to listen with fierce intentness, and heard nothing but the\n faint eructations deep inside the monster.",
"Westover's mind was beginning to function again; it was as though the\n cessation of the rock and sway had exorcised the lethargy that had lain\n upon him. He knew now that he had been almost insane for the time he\n had passed here, touched by the madness that takes hermits and men lost\n in deserts or oceans. And his was a stranger solitude than any of those.",
"Of course—the great beast would crawl into the sea, which would float\n its bloated bulk and enable it to accelerate and take flight. It would\n never have been able to lift itself into the air from the dry land.\n\n\n He should have foreseen that and made his escape in time. Now that\n he had solved the problem of human survival.... But the bright ocean\n laughed at him, sparkling away wave beyond rolling wave, and beyond\n that blue headland could be only a land made desert, where men become\n beasts fought crazily over the last morsels of food. He had lost track\n of the days he had been on the monster's back, but the rape of Earth\n must be finished now. He had no doubt that the things would depart\n as they had come into the Solar System—in that close, seemingly\n one-willed swarm that Earth's astronomers had at first taken for a\n comet. If this one was leaving, the rest no doubt were too.",
"\"Man is a highly mobile species, so our direct casualties of this\n invasion have been very light and will continue to be. But when the\n monsters have finished with Earth, there will be no vegetation left\n for man's food, no houses, no cities, none of the fixed installations\n of civilization, and the end will be far more terrible than if we were\n all devoured by the monsters.\"\nWestover awoke, feeling himself bathed by the cold sweat of\n nightmare—then he realized that a misty rain had wetted his face and\n sogged his clothes. That, and the sleep he had had, refreshed him and\n made his mind clearer than it had been for days, and he remembered that\n he could not sleep but had to go on, searching with a hope that would\n not die for some miraculously spared refuge where civilization and\n science might yet exist, where there would be the means to realize his\n idea for stopping the monsters.",
"The analogy was pat; like a flea, he had lodged on a larger animal and\n was about to nourish himself from it. The slabs of flesh he had cut off\n were gray and unappetizing, but he knew from the studies he had helped\n Sutton make that the monsters, extraterrestrial though they were, were\n in the basic chemistry of proteins, fats and carbohydrates one with man\n or the amoeba, and therefore might be—food.",
"\"I stumbled onto it,\" Westover admitted. \"I was wandering across\n country—my plane crashed on the way back from that South American\n bug hunt dreamed up by somebody who'd been reading Wells'\nWar of the\n Worlds\n. I think my pilot went nuts; you could see too much of the\n destruction from up there.... But I got out in one piece and started\n walking—looking for some place with people and facilities that could\n try out my method of killing the monsters. I thought—I still think—I\n had a sure-fire way to do that—but I didn't realize then that it was\n too late to think of killing them off.\"\n\n\n Sutton nodded thoughtfully. \"It was too late—or too early, perhaps.\n We'll have to talk that over.\"\n\n\n Westover finished the brief account of his coming to dwell on the\n monster's back. The other grinned happily.\n\n\n \"You began with the practice, where I worked out the theory first.\""
],
[
"Then the impersonal will that had driven him implacably two days and\n nights without stopping came to his rescue. Westover plodded forward,\n pressed his shrinking body against the slimy, faintly warm surface of\n the monster's foot, and sought above him with upstretched hands—found\n holds, and began to climb with a strength he had not known was left in\n him.\n\n\n The moonlight's fading again was merciful as he climbed the sheer,\n slippery face of the foot; but he could hear the wash and chuckle of\n the flood below. His tired brain told him treacherously: \"I'm already\n asleep—this is a nightmare.\" Once, listening to that insidious voice,\n he slipped and for instants hung dizzily by his hands, and for some\n minutes after he had found a new foothold merely clung panting with\n pounding heart.",
"The monster on which Westover had been living as a parasite was\n generating gases within itself, preparing to leave the ravished Earth.\n That was the meaning of its gargantuan belly rumblings. And they meant\n further that he must finally leave it—now or never—or be borne aloft\n to die gasping in the stratosphere.\n\n\n Hurriedly the man scrambled to the highest eminence of the back and\n stood looking about; and what he saw brought him to the brink of\n despair. For all around lay blue water, waves dancing and glinting in\n the fresh breeze; and sniffing the air he recognized the salt tang\n of the sea. While he slept the monster had crept beyond the coast\n line, and lay now in what to it was shallow water—fifty or a hundred\n fathoms. Back the way it had come, a headland was visible, mockingly,\n hopelessly distant.",
"Then he sprang to his feet, gripping his hand-ax, and ran panting to\n the place where he had dug for food. His excavations tended to close\n and heal overnight; now he went to work with vicious strokes enlarging\n the latest one, hacking and tearing it deeper and deeper.\n\n\n He was almost hidden in the cavity when a shadow fell across him from\n behind. He whirled, for there could be no shadows on the monster's back.\n\n\n A man stood watching him calmly—an elderly man in rusty black\n clothing, leaning on a stick. The staff, the snowy beard, and something\n that smoldered behind the benign eyes, gave him the look of an ancient\n prophet.\n\n\n \"Who are you?\" asked Westover, breathlessly but almost without surprise.\n\n\n \"I am the Preacher,\" the old man said. \"The Lord hath sent me to save\n you. Arise, my son, and follow me.\"",
"Westover hesitated. \"I'm not just imagining you?\" he appealed.\n \"Somebody else has really found the answer?\"\n\n\n The Preacher's brows knitted faintly, but then his look turned to\n benevolent understanding. \"You have been alone too long here. Come with\n me—I will take you to the Doctor.\"\n\n\n Westover was still not sure that the other was more than one of the\n powerful specters of childhood—the Preacher, the Doctor, no doubt the\n Teacher next—risen to rob him of his last shreds of sanity. But he\n nodded in childlike obedience, and followed.\n\n\n When, a few hundred yards nearer the monster's head, the other halted\n at a black rent in the rugose hide, the mouth of a burrow descending\n into utter blackness—Westover knew that both the Preacher and his own\n wild hope were real.",
"Some time after he had found courage to resume the climb, he dragged\n himself, gasping and quivering, to comparative safety on the broad\n shelf that marked the rim of the foot. Above him lay the great black\n steep that rose to the summit of the monster's humped back, a mountain\n to be climbed. Westover felt poignantly that his exhausted body could\n not make that ascent and face the long and dangerous descent beyond,\n which he had to make before dawn ... but not now ... not now....\nHe lay in a state between waking and dreaming, high on the monster's\n side; and it seemed that the colossal body moved, swelling and\n sighing—but he knew they did not breathe as backboned animals do.\n Westover had been one of the men who, in the days when humanity was\n still fighting, had accumulated quite a store of knowledge about the\n enemy—the enemy that was brainless and toolless, but that was simply\n too vast for human intelligence and weapons to defeat....",
"Westover sat for a space with head in hands, hearing the faint\n continuing murmurs from below. And he remembered the voices.\nHe had been hearing them again as he awoke—the distant muffled voices\n whose words he could not make out, not the small close ones that\n sometimes in the hot middays had spoken clearly in his ear and even\n called his name. The latter had to be, as he had vaguely accepted them\n even then, illusions—but the others—with his new clarity he was\n suddenly sure that they had been real.\n\n\n And a wild, white light of hope blazed in him, and he flung himself\n flat on the rough surface, beat on it with bare fists and shouted:\n \"Help! Here I am! Help!\"\n\n\n He paused to listen with fierce intentness, and heard nothing but the\n faint eructations deep inside the monster.",
"He could stay where he was unharmed, of course. On the monster's back,\n of all places, he had nothing to fear from it or from others of its\n kind. But he knew with desperate clarity that by nightfall, when the\n beast became still once more, exhaustion and growing hunger would have\n made him unable to descend. As he lay where he had fallen, he felt that\n weakness creeping over him, no longer held in check by the will that\n had kept him doggedly plodding forward.",
"\"I stumbled onto it,\" Westover admitted. \"I was wandering across\n country—my plane crashed on the way back from that South American\n bug hunt dreamed up by somebody who'd been reading Wells'\nWar of the\n Worlds\n. I think my pilot went nuts; you could see too much of the\n destruction from up there.... But I got out in one piece and started\n walking—looking for some place with people and facilities that could\n try out my method of killing the monsters. I thought—I still think—I\n had a sure-fire way to do that—but I didn't realize then that it was\n too late to think of killing them off.\"\n\n\n Sutton nodded thoughtfully. \"It was too late—or too early, perhaps.\n We'll have to talk that over.\"\n\n\n Westover finished the brief account of his coming to dwell on the\n monster's back. The other grinned happily.\n\n\n \"You began with the practice, where I worked out the theory first.\"",
"Fingers shaking, he unhitched the light ax from his belt and began to\n hack with feverish industry at the monster's crusted hide.\n\n\n The scaly, weathered epidermis seemed immeasurably thick. But at last\n he had chopped through it, reached the softer protoplasm beneath.\n Clawing and hewing in the hole he had made, he tore out heavy slabs of\n the monster's flesh.\n\n\n A ripple that did not belong to the crawling motion ran over the\n thing's surface round about. Westover laughed wildly with a sudden\n sense of power. He, the insignificant human mite, had made the\n miles-long beast twitch like a flea-bitten dog.",
"Westover's mind was beginning to function again; it was as though the\n cessation of the rock and sway had exorcised the lethargy that had lain\n upon him. He knew now that he had been almost insane for the time he\n had passed here, touched by the madness that takes hermits and men lost\n in deserts or oceans. And his was a stranger solitude than any of those.",
"He sat up, eyes searching the sky for a sign to tell him how long he\n had slept. Low on the western horizon he found the faint glow that told\n of the moon's setting; and in the east a stronger light was already\n struggling through the clouds and mist, becoming every moment less\n tenuous and illusory, more the bitter reality of the breaking day.\n\n\n Even as Westover began frantically climbing, out of that lightening\n sky the hopelessness of his effort pressed down on him. With dawn the\n monster would begin to move, to crawl eastward impelled by the same dim\n phototropic urge which must guide these things out of the interstellar\n depths to Sun-type stars. All of them had crept endlessly eastward\n around the Earth, gutting the continents and churning the sea bottoms,\n and by now whatever was left of human civilization must be starving\n beyond the Arctic circle, or aboard ships at sea. The hordes that\n still lived and wandered over the once populous fertile lands, like\n this—would not live long.",
"For a man like Westover, who had been a scientist, it was not the\n prospect of death that was most crushing, but the death blow to his\n human pride, the star-storming pride of mind and will—defeated by\n sheer bulk and mindless hunger.\n\n\n Near the crest of the monster's back, he stumbled and fell hands and\n knees on the shagreen-roughness of the skin; at first he thought only\n that an attack of dizziness had made him fall, then he realized that\n the surface beneath him had shifted. Unmistakably even in the misty\n dawn-light, the hills and valleys of the rugose back were changing\n shape, as the vast protoplasmic mass below crawled, flowed beneath its\n integument. In slow peristaltic motion the waves marched eastward,\n toward the monster's head.",
"Westover stood motionless in the blackness; how long, he did not know.\n He was hardly aware of the water that covered his feet, crept over his\n ankles, and swirled halfway to his knees. Only the emergence of the\n moon through a rift of the cloud blanket brought him awake; its dim\n light gleamed all around on a great sheet of water, unbroken save for\n scattered black hummocks—crests of knolls like that on which he stood,\n all soon to be hidden by the rising flood.\n\n\n For a moment he knew despair. The way back was impassable, and the way\n ahead was blocked by the titanic enemy.",
"\"It is inhabitable?\" Westover's question reflected no doubt.\nSutton gestured at the bubbling device behind him. \"That thing is\n making air now, which we're going to need when the monster's in space.\n It was when we were still trying to find a poison for the beasts that I\n hit on the catalyst that makes their blood give up its oxygen—that's\n its blood flowing through the filters. We've got an electric generator\n running by tapping the monster's internal gas pressure. There are\n problems left before we'll be fully self-sufficient here—but the\n monster is so much like us in fundamental makeup that its body contains\n all the elements human life needs too.\"\n\n\n \"Then,\" Westover glanced appreciatively around, \"it looks like the main\n hazard is claustrophobia.\"",
"Thus began for him a weird existence—the life of a parasite, of a flea\n on a dog. The monster crawled by day and rested by night; strengthened,\n the man could have left it then, but somehow night after night he did\n not. It wasn't, he argued with himself sometimes in the days when he\n lay torpidly drowsing, lulled by the long sway, arms over his head to\n protect him from the sun's baking, merely that he was chained to the\n only source of food he knew in all the world—not just that he was\n developing a flea's psychology. He was a man and a scientist, and he\n was conducting an experiment.... His life on the monster's back was\n proving something, something of vast importance for man, the extinct\n animal—but for increasingly longer periods of time he could not\n remember what it was....",
"\"Man is a highly mobile species, so our direct casualties of this\n invasion have been very light and will continue to be. But when the\n monsters have finished with Earth, there will be no vegetation left\n for man's food, no houses, no cities, none of the fixed installations\n of civilization, and the end will be far more terrible than if we were\n all devoured by the monsters.\"\nWestover awoke, feeling himself bathed by the cold sweat of\n nightmare—then he realized that a misty rain had wetted his face and\n sogged his clothes. That, and the sleep he had had, refreshed him and\n made his mind clearer than it had been for days, and he remembered that\n he could not sleep but had to go on, searching with a hope that would\n not die for some miraculously spared refuge where civilization and\n science might yet exist, where there would be the means to realize his\n idea for stopping the monsters.",
"\"I haven't got so far with the theory,\" said Westover, \"but I think\n I've got the main outlines. Until the monsters came, man was a parasite\n on the face of the Earth. Fundamentally, parasitism—on the green\n plants and their by-products—was our way of life, as of all animals\n from the beginning. But the monsters absorbed into themselves all the\n plant food and even the organic material in the soil. So we have only\n one way out—to transfer our parasitism to the only remaining food\n source—the monsters themselves.\n\n\n \"The monsters almost defeated us, because of their two special\n adaptations of extreme size and ability to cross space. But man has\n always won the battle of adaptations before, because he could improvise\n new ones as the need arose. The greatest crisis humanity ever faced\n called for the most radical innovation in our way of life.\"",
"Then, as he knew it must, a light glimmered ahead, the sinus widened,\n and Westover climbed to his feet and stood, weak-kneed still, staring\n at a chamber carved in the veritable belly of Leviathan. The floor\n underfoot was firm, as was the wall his shaking fingers tested.\n Dazzled, he saw tools leaning against the walls, spades, crowbars,\n axes, and a half-dozen people, men and women in rough grimy clothing,\n who stood watching him with lively interest.\n\n\n The Preacher stood beside him, breathing hard and mopping his forehead.\n But he brushed aside the deferential offers of the others: \"No—I will\n take him to the Doctor myself. All of you must hurry now to close the\n shaft.\"",
"Westover no longer saw the murky moonlight, the far faint glitter of\n the flood or the slope of the living mountain. He saw, as he had seen\n from a circling jet plane, an immense tree of smoke that rose and\n expanded under the noonday sun, creamy white above and black and oily\n below, and beneath the black cloud something that writhed and flowed\n sluggishly in a cyclopean death agony.\n\n\n That picture dissolved, and was replaced by the face of a man—one who\n might now be alive or dead, elsewhere in the chaos of a desolated\n planet. It was an ordinary face, roundish, spectacled, but etched now\n by tragedy; the voice that went with it was flat, unemotional, pedantic.",
"The thaumaturge straightened, wiping his hands on his trousers as he\n turned with a satisfied grin on his round, spectacled face—then both\n he and Westover froze in dumbfounded recognition.\nSutton was first to recover. He said quietly, \"Welcome aboard the ark,\n Bill. You're just in time—I think we're about to hoist anchor.\" His\n quick eyes studied Westover's face, and he gestured toward a packing\n box against the wall opposite his apparatus. \"Sit down. You've been\n through the mill.\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Westover sat down dizzily. \"I've been aboard your ark\n for some time now, though. Only as an ectoparasite.\"\n\n\n \"It's high time you joined the endoparasites. Lucky you scratched\n around enough up there to create repercussions we could feel down here.\n You got the same idea, then?\""
],
[
"Westover hesitated. \"I'm not just imagining you?\" he appealed.\n \"Somebody else has really found the answer?\"\n\n\n The Preacher's brows knitted faintly, but then his look turned to\n benevolent understanding. \"You have been alone too long here. Come with\n me—I will take you to the Doctor.\"\n\n\n Westover was still not sure that the other was more than one of the\n powerful specters of childhood—the Preacher, the Doctor, no doubt the\n Teacher next—risen to rob him of his last shreds of sanity. But he\n nodded in childlike obedience, and followed.\n\n\n When, a few hundred yards nearer the monster's head, the other halted\n at a black rent in the rugose hide, the mouth of a burrow descending\n into utter blackness—Westover knew that both the Preacher and his own\n wild hope were real.",
"Some time after he had found courage to resume the climb, he dragged\n himself, gasping and quivering, to comparative safety on the broad\n shelf that marked the rim of the foot. Above him lay the great black\n steep that rose to the summit of the monster's humped back, a mountain\n to be climbed. Westover felt poignantly that his exhausted body could\n not make that ascent and face the long and dangerous descent beyond,\n which he had to make before dawn ... but not now ... not now....\nHe lay in a state between waking and dreaming, high on the monster's\n side; and it seemed that the colossal body moved, swelling and\n sighing—but he knew they did not breathe as backboned animals do.\n Westover had been one of the men who, in the days when humanity was\n still fighting, had accumulated quite a store of knowledge about the\n enemy—the enemy that was brainless and toolless, but that was simply\n too vast for human intelligence and weapons to defeat....",
"Then the impersonal will that had driven him implacably two days and\n nights without stopping came to his rescue. Westover plodded forward,\n pressed his shrinking body against the slimy, faintly warm surface of\n the monster's foot, and sought above him with upstretched hands—found\n holds, and began to climb with a strength he had not known was left in\n him.\n\n\n The moonlight's fading again was merciful as he climbed the sheer,\n slippery face of the foot; but he could hear the wash and chuckle of\n the flood below. His tired brain told him treacherously: \"I'm already\n asleep—this is a nightmare.\" Once, listening to that insidious voice,\n he slipped and for instants hung dizzily by his hands, and for some\n minutes after he had found a new foothold merely clung panting with\n pounding heart.",
"Westover sat for a space with head in hands, hearing the faint\n continuing murmurs from below. And he remembered the voices.\nHe had been hearing them again as he awoke—the distant muffled voices\n whose words he could not make out, not the small close ones that\n sometimes in the hot middays had spoken clearly in his ear and even\n called his name. The latter had to be, as he had vaguely accepted them\n even then, illusions—but the others—with his new clarity he was\n suddenly sure that they had been real.\n\n\n And a wild, white light of hope blazed in him, and he flung himself\n flat on the rough surface, beat on it with bare fists and shouted:\n \"Help! Here I am! Help!\"\n\n\n He paused to listen with fierce intentness, and heard nothing but the\n faint eructations deep inside the monster.",
"The monster on which Westover had been living as a parasite was\n generating gases within itself, preparing to leave the ravished Earth.\n That was the meaning of its gargantuan belly rumblings. And they meant\n further that he must finally leave it—now or never—or be borne aloft\n to die gasping in the stratosphere.\n\n\n Hurriedly the man scrambled to the highest eminence of the back and\n stood looking about; and what he saw brought him to the brink of\n despair. For all around lay blue water, waves dancing and glinting in\n the fresh breeze; and sniffing the air he recognized the salt tang\n of the sea. While he slept the monster had crept beyond the coast\n line, and lay now in what to it was shallow water—fifty or a hundred\n fathoms. Back the way it had come, a headland was visible, mockingly,\n hopelessly distant.",
"\"Down here. Into the belly of Leviathan,\" said the old man solemnly,\n and Westover nodded this time with alacrity.\nThe crawling descent through the twisting, Stygian burrow had much\n that ought to belong to a journey into Hell.... More than that, no\n demonologist's imagination could have conceived without experiencing\n the sheer horror of the yielding beslimed walls that seemed every\n moment squeezing in to trap them unspeakably. The air was warm and\n rank with the familiar heavy sweetish odor of the monster's colorless\n blood....",
"Then he sprang to his feet, gripping his hand-ax, and ran panting to\n the place where he had dug for food. His excavations tended to close\n and heal overnight; now he went to work with vicious strokes enlarging\n the latest one, hacking and tearing it deeper and deeper.\n\n\n He was almost hidden in the cavity when a shadow fell across him from\n behind. He whirled, for there could be no shadows on the monster's back.\n\n\n A man stood watching him calmly—an elderly man in rusty black\n clothing, leaning on a stick. The staff, the snowy beard, and something\n that smoldered behind the benign eyes, gave him the look of an ancient\n prophet.\n\n\n \"Who are you?\" asked Westover, breathlessly but almost without surprise.\n\n\n \"I am the Preacher,\" the old man said. \"The Lord hath sent me to save\n you. Arise, my son, and follow me.\"",
"\"It is inhabitable?\" Westover's question reflected no doubt.\nSutton gestured at the bubbling device behind him. \"That thing is\n making air now, which we're going to need when the monster's in space.\n It was when we were still trying to find a poison for the beasts that I\n hit on the catalyst that makes their blood give up its oxygen—that's\n its blood flowing through the filters. We've got an electric generator\n running by tapping the monster's internal gas pressure. There are\n problems left before we'll be fully self-sufficient here—but the\n monster is so much like us in fundamental makeup that its body contains\n all the elements human life needs too.\"\n\n\n \"Then,\" Westover glanced appreciatively around, \"it looks like the main\n hazard is claustrophobia.\"",
"Fingers shaking, he unhitched the light ax from his belt and began to\n hack with feverish industry at the monster's crusted hide.\n\n\n The scaly, weathered epidermis seemed immeasurably thick. But at last\n he had chopped through it, reached the softer protoplasm beneath.\n Clawing and hewing in the hole he had made, he tore out heavy slabs of\n the monster's flesh.\n\n\n A ripple that did not belong to the crawling motion ran over the\n thing's surface round about. Westover laughed wildly with a sudden\n sense of power. He, the insignificant human mite, had made the\n miles-long beast twitch like a flea-bitten dog.",
"For a man like Westover, who had been a scientist, it was not the\n prospect of death that was most crushing, but the death blow to his\n human pride, the star-storming pride of mind and will—defeated by\n sheer bulk and mindless hunger.\n\n\n Near the crest of the monster's back, he stumbled and fell hands and\n knees on the shagreen-roughness of the skin; at first he thought only\n that an attack of dizziness had made him fall, then he realized that\n the surface beneath him had shifted. Unmistakably even in the misty\n dawn-light, the hills and valleys of the rugose back were changing\n shape, as the vast protoplasmic mass below crawled, flowed beneath its\n integument. In slow peristaltic motion the waves marched eastward,\n toward the monster's head.",
"Then, as he knew it must, a light glimmered ahead, the sinus widened,\n and Westover climbed to his feet and stood, weak-kneed still, staring\n at a chamber carved in the veritable belly of Leviathan. The floor\n underfoot was firm, as was the wall his shaking fingers tested.\n Dazzled, he saw tools leaning against the walls, spades, crowbars,\n axes, and a half-dozen people, men and women in rough grimy clothing,\n who stood watching him with lively interest.\n\n\n The Preacher stood beside him, breathing hard and mopping his forehead.\n But he brushed aside the deferential offers of the others: \"No—I will\n take him to the Doctor myself. All of you must hurry now to close the\n shaft.\"",
"\"I stumbled onto it,\" Westover admitted. \"I was wandering across\n country—my plane crashed on the way back from that South American\n bug hunt dreamed up by somebody who'd been reading Wells'\nWar of the\n Worlds\n. I think my pilot went nuts; you could see too much of the\n destruction from up there.... But I got out in one piece and started\n walking—looking for some place with people and facilities that could\n try out my method of killing the monsters. I thought—I still think—I\n had a sure-fire way to do that—but I didn't realize then that it was\n too late to think of killing them off.\"\n\n\n Sutton nodded thoughtfully. \"It was too late—or too early, perhaps.\n We'll have to talk that over.\"\n\n\n Westover finished the brief account of his coming to dwell on the\n monster's back. The other grinned happily.\n\n\n \"You began with the practice, where I worked out the theory first.\"",
"Westover's mind was beginning to function again; it was as though the\n cessation of the rock and sway had exorcised the lethargy that had lain\n upon him. He knew now that he had been almost insane for the time he\n had passed here, touched by the madness that takes hermits and men lost\n in deserts or oceans. And his was a stranger solitude than any of those.",
"He sat up, eyes searching the sky for a sign to tell him how long he\n had slept. Low on the western horizon he found the faint glow that told\n of the moon's setting; and in the east a stronger light was already\n struggling through the clouds and mist, becoming every moment less\n tenuous and illusory, more the bitter reality of the breaking day.\n\n\n Even as Westover began frantically climbing, out of that lightening\n sky the hopelessness of his effort pressed down on him. With dawn the\n monster would begin to move, to crawl eastward impelled by the same dim\n phototropic urge which must guide these things out of the interstellar\n depths to Sun-type stars. All of them had crept endlessly eastward\n around the Earth, gutting the continents and churning the sea bottoms,\n and by now whatever was left of human civilization must be starving\n beyond the Arctic circle, or aboard ships at sea. The hordes that\n still lived and wandered over the once populous fertile lands, like\n this—would not live long.",
"\"Amen,\" agreed Sutton. But the gaze he fixed on Westover was oddly\n troubled. \"Speaking of the future brings up the question of the idea\n you mentioned—your monster-killing scheme.\"\nWestover flexed his hands involuntarily, like one who has been too\n long enforcedly idle. In terse eager sentences he outlined for Sutton\n the plan that had burned in him during his bitter wandering over\n the face of the ruined land. It would be very easy to accomplish\n from an endoparasite's point of vantage, merely by isolating from\n the creature's blood over a long period enough of some potent\n secretion—hormone, enzyme or the like—to kill when suddenly\n reintroduced into the system. \"Originally I thought we could accomplish\n the same thing by synthesis—but this way will be simpler.\"\n\n\n \"Beautifully simple.\" Sutton smiled wryly. \"So much so that I wish\n you'd never thought of it.\"\n\n\n Westover stared. \"Why?\"",
"Again he lay half conscious, in a lethargy that unchecked must grow\n steadily deeper until death. Isolated thoughts floated through his\n head. It occurred to him that he was now ideally located to conduct\n the experiments necessary to prove his theory of how to destroy the\n monsters—if only someone had had the foresight to build a biological\n laboratory on the monster's back. Of course the rolling motion would\n create special problems of technique.... Idiocy.... Once more he seemed\n to glimpse Sutton's face, as the biologist calmly made that grisly\n report to the President's Committee on Extermination.... Sutton's\n prediction had been a hundred percent correct. The monsters' hunger\n knew no halt until they had absorbed into themselves all the organic",
"There was another tunnel to be crawled through, but that one was\n firm-walled as the room they left behind. They emerged into a larger\n cavern, that like the first was lit—only now did the miracle of it\n obtrude itself in his dazed mind—by fluorescent tubes, and filled with\n equipment that gleamed glass and metal. Over an apparatus with many\n fluid-dripping trays, like an air-conditioning device, bent a lone man.\n\n\n \"Is it working?\" inquired the Preacher.\n\n\n \"It's working,\" the other answered without looking up from the\n adjustment he was making. Bubbles were rising in the fluid that filled\n the trays, rising and bursting, rising and bursting with a curiously\n fascinating monotony. The subtly tense attitudes of the two initiates\n told Westover better than words that there was something hugely\n important in the success of whatever magic was producing those bubbles.",
"He could stay where he was unharmed, of course. On the monster's back,\n of all places, he had nothing to fear from it or from others of its\n kind. But he knew with desperate clarity that by nightfall, when the\n beast became still once more, exhaustion and growing hunger would have\n made him unable to descend. As he lay where he had fallen, he felt that\n weakness creeping over him, no longer held in check by the will that\n had kept him doggedly plodding forward.",
"\"I haven't got so far with the theory,\" said Westover, \"but I think\n I've got the main outlines. Until the monsters came, man was a parasite\n on the face of the Earth. Fundamentally, parasitism—on the green\n plants and their by-products—was our way of life, as of all animals\n from the beginning. But the monsters absorbed into themselves all the\n plant food and even the organic material in the soil. So we have only\n one way out—to transfer our parasitism to the only remaining food\n source—the monsters themselves.\n\n\n \"The monsters almost defeated us, because of their two special\n adaptations of extreme size and ability to cross space. But man has\n always won the battle of adaptations before, because he could improvise\n new ones as the need arose. The greatest crisis humanity ever faced\n called for the most radical innovation in our way of life.\"",
"Westover no longer saw the murky moonlight, the far faint glitter of\n the flood or the slope of the living mountain. He saw, as he had seen\n from a circling jet plane, an immense tree of smoke that rose and\n expanded under the noonday sun, creamy white above and black and oily\n below, and beneath the black cloud something that writhed and flowed\n sluggishly in a cyclopean death agony.\n\n\n That picture dissolved, and was replaced by the face of a man—one who\n might now be alive or dead, elsewhere in the chaos of a desolated\n planet. It was an ordinary face, roundish, spectacled, but etched now\n by tragedy; the voice that went with it was flat, unemotional, pedantic."
]
] |
valid
|
63130
|
[
"Of the following descriptions, which best describe Meek?",
"What is the overall tone of the article?",
"Which of the following does not happen in the article?",
"Of the following options, who might enjoy this story the most?",
"What would happen if Meek didn't meet Gus?",
"What is the narrative point of having Meek meet the mechanic?",
"Which of the following is not a technology included in this story?",
"What is a hidden talent that Meek has?",
"Why are the bugs in this story special?"
] |
[
[
"nosy and cautious",
"confident and handsome",
"funny and charismatic",
"clumsy and inexperienced"
],
[
"Peaceful",
"Scary",
"Intense",
"Lighthearted"
],
[
"Meek tries a new game",
"Meek talks to a mechanic",
"Meek is confused by new things",
"Meek asks questions about space travel"
],
[
"A sci-fi nerd who wants to learn more about the space travel of a character's universe",
"A sci-fi nerd who enjoys learning about customs and games that take place in outer space",
"A gaming nerd who loves to learn about new games they can play",
"A sci-fi nerd who loves to learn about the government operations/structures of a story they're reading"
],
[
"He probably would not get the chance to play space polo",
"He probably wouldn't have traveled in space",
"He probably wouldn't want to stay on Saturn much longer",
"He probably would have made more friends"
],
[
"So Meek can fix the fleet of vehicles",
"So Meek can make a good friend",
"So Meek can learn about Gus and eventually meet him",
"So Meek can meet some of the locals"
],
[
"Interstellar shipping infrastructure",
"Games in outer space",
"Highly advanced space travel",
"Time warping"
],
[
"he's able to juggle",
"he's a really good chef",
"he's good at record keeping",
"he can fly aircrafts well"
],
[
"they can speak multiple languages",
"they're able to paralyze people",
"they're able to sing",
"they have a different ability that makes them special"
]
] |
[
4,
4,
4,
2,
1,
3,
4,
4,
4
] |
[
1,
1,
1,
0,
1,
1,
0,
0,
0
] |
[
[
"\"You are the gentleman who can fix things?\" he asked the mechanic.\nThe mechanic stared. Here was no hell-for-leather freighter pilot, no\n be-whiskered roamer of the outer orbits. Meek's hair was white and\n stuck out in uncombed tufts in a dozen directions. His skin was pale.\n His blue eyes looked watery behind the thick lenses that rode his nose.\n Even the bulky spacesuit failed to hide his stooped shoulders and\n slight frame.\n\n\n The mechanic said nothing.\n\n\n Meek tried again. \"I saw the sign. It said you could fix anything. So\n I....\"\n\n\n The mechanic shook himself.\n\n\n \"Sure,\" he agreed, still slightly dazed. \"Sure I can fix you up. What\n you got?\"\n\n\n He swung his feet off the desk.",
"\"My opinion, sir,\" said Oliver Meek, \"seldom amounts to much.\"\n\n\n \"All we want to know,\" Gus told him, \"is what you think of space polo.\"\n\n\n \"Space polo,\" declared Meek, \"is a noble game. It requires expert\n piloting, a fine sense of timing and....\"\n\n\n \"There, you see!\" whooped Gus, triumphantly.\n\n\n \"I saw a game once,\" Meek volunteered.\n\n\n \"Swell,\" bellowed Gus. \"We'll have you coach our team.\"\n\n\n \"But,\" protested Meek, \"but ... but.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Mr. Hamilton,\" exulted Miss Perkins, \"you are so wonderful. You\n think of everything.\"\n\n\n \"Hamilton!\" squeaked Meek.",
"Mr. Meek Plays Polo\nBy CLIFFORD D. SIMAK\nMr. Meek was having his troubles. First, the\neducated\nbugs worried him; then the\n\n welfare worker tried to stop the Ring Rats' feud\n\n by enlisting his aid. And now, he was a drafted\n\n space-polo player—a fortune bet on his ability\n\n at a game he had never played in his cloistered life.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"\"Sure,\" said Gus. \"Old Gus Hamilton. Grow the finest dog-gone radiation\n moss you ever clapped your eyes on.\"\n\n\n \"Then you're the gentleman who has bugs,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"Now, look here,\" warned Gus, \"you watch what you say or I'll hang one\n on you.\"\n\n\n \"He means your rock bugs,\" Moe explained, hastily.\n\n\n \"Oh, them,\" said Gus.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Meek, \"I'm interested in them. I'd like to see them.\"",
"Behind him Saturn filled a tenth of the sky, a yellow, lemon-tinged\n ball, streaked here and there with faint crimson lines and blotched\n with angry, bright green patches.\n\n\n To right and left glinted the whirling, twisting, tumbling rocks that\n made up the Inner Ring, while arcing above the horizon opposed to\n Saturn were the spangled glistening rainbows of the other rings.\n\n\n \"Like dewdrops in the black of space,\" Meek mumbled to himself. But he\n immediately felt ashamed of himself for growing poetic. This sector of\n space, he knew, was not in the least poetic. It was hard and savage and\n as he thought about that, he hitched up his gun belt and struck out\n with a firmer tread that almost upset him. After that, he tried to\n think of nothing except keeping his two feet under him.",
"\"I haven't got a navigator,\" Meek said, quietly.\n\n\n The mechanic stared at him, eyes popping. \"You mean you brought it in\n alone? No one with you?\"\n\n\n Meek gulped and nodded. \"Dead reckoning,\" he said.\n\n\n The mechanic glowed with sudden admiration. \"I don't know who you are,\n mister,\" he declared, \"but whoever you are, you're the best damn pilot\n that ever took to space.\"\n\n\n \"Really I'm not,\" said Meek. \"I haven't done much piloting, you see. Up\n until just a while ago, I never had left Earth. Bookkeeper for Lunar\n Exports.\"\n\n\n \"Bookkeeper!\" yelped the mechanic. \"How come a bookkeeper can handle a\n ship like that?\"\n\n\n \"I learned it,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"You learned it?\"",
"\"See them,\" said Gus. \"Mister, you can have them if you want them.\n Drove me out of house and home, they did. They're dippy over metal. Any\n kind of metal, but alloys especially. Eat the stuff. They'll tromp you\n to death heading for a spaceship. Got so I had to move over to another\n rock to live. Tried to fight it out with them, but they whipped me pure\n and simple. Moved out and let them have the place after they started to\n eat my shack right out from underneath my feet.\"\n\n\n Meek looked crestfallen.\n\n\n \"Can't get near them, then,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Sure you can,\" said Gus. \"Why not?\"\n\n\n \"Well, a spacesuit's metal and....\"",
"And because Earth needed the moss to cure a dozen maladies and because\n it would grow nowhere else but here on the Inner Ring, men squatted\n on the crazy swirl of spacial boulders that made up the ring. Men\n like Hamilton, living on rocks that bucked and heaved along their\n orbits like chips riding the crest of a raging flood. Men who endured\n loneliness, dared death when crunching orbits intersected or, when\n rickety spacecraft flared, who went mad with nothing to do, with the\n mockery of space before them.\n\n\n Meek shrugged his shoulders, almost upsetting himself.\nThe bugs had started the game and Meek craned forward cautiously,\n watching eagerly, stylus poised above the notebook.\n\n\n Crawling clumsily, the tiny insect-like creatures moved about, solemnly\n popping in and out of holes.",
"A bit bewildered, but determined not to show it, Meek swung away from\n the sign-post and gravely regarded the settlement. On the chart it was\n indicated by a fairly sizeable dot, but that was merely a matter of\n comparison. Out Saturn-way even the tiniest outpost assumes importance\n far beyond its size.\n\n\n The slab of rock was no more than five miles across, perhaps even\n less. Here in its approximate center, were two buildings, both of\n almost identical construction, semi-spherical and metal. Out here, Meek\n realized, shelter was the thing. Architecture merely for architecture's\n sake was still a long way off.\n\n\n One of the buildings was the repair shop which the sign advertised.\n The other, according to the crudely painted legend smeared above its\n entrance lock, was the\nSaturn Inn\n.\n\n\n The rest of the rock was landing field, pure and simple. Blasters had\n leveled off the humps and irregularities so spaceships could sit down.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe sign read:\nAtomic Motors Repaired. Busted\n \nPlates Patched Up. Rocket Tubes\n \nRelined. Wheeze In, Whiz Out!\nIt added, as an afterthought, in shaky, inexpert lettering:\nWe Fix Anything.\nMr. Oliver Meek stared owlishly at the sign, which hung from an arm\n attached to a metal standard sunk in solid rock. A second sign was\n wired to the standard just below the metal arm, but its legend was\n faint, almost illegible. Meek blinked at it through thick-lensed\n spectacles, finally deciphered its scrawl:\nAsk About Educated Bugs.",
"Reaching the repair shop's entrance lock, he braced himself solidly to\n keep his balance, reached out and pressed a buzzer. Swiftly the lock\n spun outward and a moment later Meek had passed through the entrance\n vault and stepped into the office.\n\n\n A dungareed mechanic sat tilted in a chair against a wall, feet on the\n desk, a greasy cap pushed back on his head.\n\n\n Meek stamped his feet gratefully, pleased at feeling Earth gravity\n under him again. He lifted the hinged helmet of his suit back on his\n shoulders.",
"\"Got that all fixed up,\" said Gus. \"You come back with me and I'll let\n you have a pair of stilts.\"\n\n\n \"Stilts?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Wooden stilts. Them danged fool bugs don't know what wood is.\n Seem to be scared of it, sort of. You can walk right among them if you\n want to, long as you're walking on the stilts.\"\n\n\n Meek gulped. He could imagine what stilt walking would be like in a\n place where gravity was no more than the faintest whisper.\nIII\n\n\n The bugs had dug a new set of holes, much after the manner of a Chinese\n checker board, and now were settling down into their respective places\n preparatory to the start of another game.",
"\"That would be awful,\" agreed Meek.\n\n\n \"Wouldn't it, though,\" declared Gus.\n\n\n Meek squinted his eyes and pounced on the floor, scrabbling on hands\n and knees after a scurrying thing that twinkled in the lamplight.\n\n\n \"Got him,\" yelped Meek, scooping the shining mote up in his hand.\n\n\n Gus inched the lid of the wooden box open. Meek rose and popped the bug\n inside.\n\n\n \"That makes twenty-eight of them,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"I told you,\" Gus accused him, \"that we hadn't got them all. You better\n take another good look at your suit. The danged things burrow right\n into solid metal and pull the hole in after them, seems like. Sneakiest\n cusses in the whole dang system. Just like chiggers back on Earth.\"",
"He pawed and kicked at space, but still floated down, course unchanged.\n He struck and bounced, struck and bounced again.\n\n\n On the fourth bounce he managed to hook his fingers around a tiny\n projection of the surface. Fighting desperately, he regained his feet.\n\n\n Something scurried across the face of his helmet and he lifted his hand\n before him. It was covered with the bugs.\n\n\n Fumbling desperately, he snapped on the rocket motor of his suit, shot\n out into space, heading for the rock where the lights from the ports of\n Hamilton's shack blinked with the weaving of the rock.\n\n\n Oliver Meek shut his eyes and groaned.\n\n\n \"Gus will give me hell for this,\" he told himself.\nGus shook the small wooden box thoughtfully, listening to the frantic\n scurrying within it.",
"For a mile or more across the flat surface of the rock that was Gus\n Hamilton's moss garden, ran a string of such game-boards, each one\n different, each one having served as the scene of a now-completed game.\n\n\n Oliver Meek cautiously wedged his stilts into two pitted pockets of\n rock, eased himself slowly and warily against the face of a knob of\n stone that jutted from the surface.\n\n\n Even in his youth, Meek remembered, he never had been any great shakes\n on stilts. Here, on this bucking, weaving rock, with slick surfaces and\n practically no gravity, a man had to be an expert to handle them. Meek\n knew now he was no expert. A half-dozen dents in his space armor was\n ample proof of that.",
"\"Stranger,\" declared the mechanic, solemnly, \"there ain't nothing\n about them bugs that make sense. Gus' rock is the only one they're on.\n Gus thinks maybe the rock don't even belong to the Solar system. Thinks\n maybe it's a hunk of stone from some other solar system. Figures maybe\n it crossed space somehow and was captured by Saturn, sucked into the\n Ring. That would explain why it's the only one that has the bugs. They\n come along with it, see.\"\n\n\n \"This Gus Hamilton,\" said Meek. \"I'd like to see him. Where could I\n find him?\"",
"\"Oh, them,\" said the mechanic. \"They belong to Gus Hamilton. Maybe\n belong ain't the right word because they were on the rock before Gus\n took over. Anyhow, Gus is mighty proud of them, although at times they\n sure run him ragged. First year they almost drove him loopy trying to\n figure out what kind of game they were playing.\"\n\n\n \"Game?\" asked Meek, wondering if he was being hoaxed.\n\n\n \"Sure, game. Like checkers. Only it ain't. Not chess, neither. Even\n worse than that. Bugs dig themselves a batch of holes, then choose up\n sides and play for hours. About the time Gus would think he had it\n figured out, they'd change the rules and throw him off again.\"\n\n\n \"That doesn't make sense,\" protested Meek.",
"\"Go over to the\nInn\nand wait around,\" advised the mechanic. \"He'll\n come in sooner or later. Drops around regular, except when his\n rheumatism bothers him, to pick up a bundle of papers. Subscribes to a\n daily paper, he does. Only man out here that does any reading. But all\n he reads is the sports section. Nuts about sports, Gus is.\"\nII\n\n\n Moe, bartender at Saturn Inn, leaned his elbow on the bar and braced\n his chin in an outspread palm. His face wore a melancholy, hang-dog\n look. Moe liked things fairly peaceable, but now he saw trouble coming\n in big batches.\n\n\n \"Lady,\" he declared mournfully, \"you sure picked yourself a job. The\n boys around here don't take to being uplifted and improved. They ain't\n worth it, either. Just ring-rats, that's all they are.\"",
"Comfortably braced against the upjutting of stone, Meek dug into the\n pouch of his space gear, brought out a notebook and stylus. Flipping\n the pages, he stared, frowning, at the diagrams that covered them.\n\n\n None of the diagrams made sense. They showed the patterns of three\n other boards and the moves that had been made by the bugs in playing\n out the game. Apparently, in each case, the game had been finished.\n Which, Meek knew, should have meant that some solution had been\n reached, some point won, some advantage gained.\n\n\n But so far as Meek could see from study of the diagrams there was not\n even a purpose or a problem, let alone a solution or a point.\n\n\n The whole thing was squirrely. But, Meek told himself, it fitted in.\n The whole Saturnian system was wacky. The rings, for example. Debris of\n a moon smashed up by Saturn's pull? Sweepings of space? No one knew.",
"Two ships now were on the field, pulled up close against the repair\n shop. One, Meek noticed, belonged to the Solar Health and Welfare\n Department, the other to the Galactic Pharmaceutical Corporation.\n The Galactic ship was a freighter, ponderous and slow. It was here,\n Meek knew, to take on a cargo of radiation moss. But the other was a\n puzzler. Meek wrinkled his brow and blinked his eyes, trying to figure\n out what a welfare ship would be doing in this remote corner of the\n Solar System.\n\n\n Slowly and carefully, Meek clumped toward the squat repair shop. Once\n or twice he stumbled, hoping fervently he wouldn't get the feet of his\n cumbersome spacesuit all tangled up. The gravity was slight, next to\n non-existent, and one who wasn't used to it had to take things easy and\n remember where he was."
],
[
"\"My opinion, sir,\" said Oliver Meek, \"seldom amounts to much.\"\n\n\n \"All we want to know,\" Gus told him, \"is what you think of space polo.\"\n\n\n \"Space polo,\" declared Meek, \"is a noble game. It requires expert\n piloting, a fine sense of timing and....\"\n\n\n \"There, you see!\" whooped Gus, triumphantly.\n\n\n \"I saw a game once,\" Meek volunteered.\n\n\n \"Swell,\" bellowed Gus. \"We'll have you coach our team.\"\n\n\n \"But,\" protested Meek, \"but ... but.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Mr. Hamilton,\" exulted Miss Perkins, \"you are so wonderful. You\n think of everything.\"\n\n\n \"Hamilton!\" squeaked Meek.",
"\"Go over to the\nInn\nand wait around,\" advised the mechanic. \"He'll\n come in sooner or later. Drops around regular, except when his\n rheumatism bothers him, to pick up a bundle of papers. Subscribes to a\n daily paper, he does. Only man out here that does any reading. But all\n he reads is the sports section. Nuts about sports, Gus is.\"\nII\n\n\n Moe, bartender at Saturn Inn, leaned his elbow on the bar and braced\n his chin in an outspread palm. His face wore a melancholy, hang-dog\n look. Moe liked things fairly peaceable, but now he saw trouble coming\n in big batches.\n\n\n \"Lady,\" he declared mournfully, \"you sure picked yourself a job. The\n boys around here don't take to being uplifted and improved. They ain't\n worth it, either. Just ring-rats, that's all they are.\"",
"\"But they could fight with something besides guns,\" said the welfare\n lady, a-smirk with righteousness. \"That's why I'm here. To try to get\n them to turn their natural feelings of rivalry into less deadly and\n disturbing channels. Direct their energies into other activities.\"\n\n\n \"Like what?\" asked Moe, fearing the worst.\n\n\n \"Athletic events,\" said Miss Perkins.\n\n\n \"Tin shinny, maybe,\" suggested Moe, trying to be sarcastic.\n\n\n She missed the sarcasm. \"Or spelling contests,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Them fellow can't spell,\" insisted Moe.\n\n\n \"Games of some sort, then. Competitive games.\"\n\n\n \"Now you're talking,\" Moe enthused. \"They take to games. Seven-toed\n Pete with the deuces wild.\"",
"\"By rights,\" he declared, judiciously, \"I should take this over and\n dump it in Bud's ship. Get even with him for swiping my injector.\"\n\n\n \"But you got the injector back,\" Meek pointed out.\n\n\n \"Oh, sure, I got it back,\" admitted Gus. \"But it wasn't orthodox, it\n wasn't. Just getting your property back ain't getting even. I never did\n have a chance to smack Bud in the snoot the way I should of smacked\n him. Moe talked me into it. He was the one that had the idea the\n welfare lady should go over and talk to Bud. She must of laid it on\n thick, too, about how we should settle down and behave ourselves and\n all that. Otherwise Bud never would have given her that injector.\"\n\n\n He shook his head dolefully. \"This here Ring ain't ever going to be\n the same again. If we don't watch out, we'll find ourselves being\n polite to one another.\"",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe sign read:\nAtomic Motors Repaired. Busted\n \nPlates Patched Up. Rocket Tubes\n \nRelined. Wheeze In, Whiz Out!\nIt added, as an afterthought, in shaky, inexpert lettering:\nWe Fix Anything.\nMr. Oliver Meek stared owlishly at the sign, which hung from an arm\n attached to a metal standard sunk in solid rock. A second sign was\n wired to the standard just below the metal arm, but its legend was\n faint, almost illegible. Meek blinked at it through thick-lensed\n spectacles, finally deciphered its scrawl:\nAsk About Educated Bugs.",
"\"There's something in what she says,\" defended Moe. \"You ring-rats been\n ripping up space for a long time now. Time you growed up and settled\n down. You're aiming on going over right now and pulverizing Bud. It\n won't do you any good.\"\n\n\n \"I'll get a heap of satisfaction out of it,\" insisted Gus. \"And,\n besides, I'll get my injector back. Might even take a few things off\n Bud's ship. Some of the parts on mine are wearing kind of thin.\"\n\n\n Gus took another drink, glowering at Miss Perkins.\n\n\n \"So the government sent you out to make us respectable,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Merely to help you, Mr. Hamilton,\" she declared. \"To turn your hatreds\n into healthy competition.\"",
"\"That would be awful,\" agreed Meek.\n\n\n \"Wouldn't it, though,\" declared Gus.\n\n\n Meek squinted his eyes and pounced on the floor, scrabbling on hands\n and knees after a scurrying thing that twinkled in the lamplight.\n\n\n \"Got him,\" yelped Meek, scooping the shining mote up in his hand.\n\n\n Gus inched the lid of the wooden box open. Meek rose and popped the bug\n inside.\n\n\n \"That makes twenty-eight of them,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"I told you,\" Gus accused him, \"that we hadn't got them all. You better\n take another good look at your suit. The danged things burrow right\n into solid metal and pull the hole in after them, seems like. Sneakiest\n cusses in the whole dang system. Just like chiggers back on Earth.\"",
"\"And that ain't all,\" said Moe, warming to the subject. \"Those crates\n you guys got wouldn't last out the first chukker. Most of them would\n just naturally fall apart the first sharp turn they made. You can't\n play polo in ships tied up with haywire. Those broomsticks you\n ring-rats ride around on are so used to second rate fuel they'd split\n wide open first squirt of high test stuff you gave them.\"\n\n\n The inner locks grated open and a man stepped through into the room.\n\n\n \"You're prejudiced,\" Gus told Moe. \"You just don't like space polo,\n that is all. You ain't got no blueblood in you. We'll leave it up to\n this man here. We'll ask his opinion of it.\"\n\n\n The man flipped back his helmet, revealing a head thatched by white\n hair and dominated by a pair of outsize spectacles.",
"Henrietta Perkins, representative for the public health and welfare\n department of the Solar government, shuddered at his suggestion of\n anything so low it didn't yearn for betterment.\n\n\n \"But those terrible feuds,\" she protested. \"Fighting just because they\n live in different parts of the Ring. It's natural they might feel some\n rivalry, but all this killing! Surely they don't enjoy getting killed.\"\n\n\n \"Sure they enjoy it,\" declared Moe. \"Not being killed, maybe ...\n although they're willing to take a chance on that. Not many of them\n get killed, in fact. Just a few that get sort of careless. But even if\n some of them are killed, you can't go messing around with that feud\n of theirs. If them boys out in sectors Twenty-Three and Thirty-Seven\n didn't have their feud they'd plain die of boredom. They just got to\n have somebody to fight with. They been fighting, off and on, for years.\"",
"Behind him Saturn filled a tenth of the sky, a yellow, lemon-tinged\n ball, streaked here and there with faint crimson lines and blotched\n with angry, bright green patches.\n\n\n To right and left glinted the whirling, twisting, tumbling rocks that\n made up the Inner Ring, while arcing above the horizon opposed to\n Saturn were the spangled glistening rainbows of the other rings.\n\n\n \"Like dewdrops in the black of space,\" Meek mumbled to himself. But he\n immediately felt ashamed of himself for growing poetic. This sector of\n space, he knew, was not in the least poetic. It was hard and savage and\n as he thought about that, he hitched up his gun belt and struck out\n with a firmer tread that almost upset him. After that, he tried to\n think of nothing except keeping his two feet under him.",
"\"The sporting event, ladies and gentlemen, that is being talked up and\n down the streets of Earth tonight, is one that will be played here\n in our own Saturnian system. A space polo game. To be played by two\n unknown, pick-up, amateur teams down in the Inner Ring. Most of the\n men have never played polo before. Few if any of them have even seen a\n game. There may have been some of them who didn't, at first, know what\n it was.",
"Moe looked alarmed. \"Miss Perkins,\" he warned, \"don't let him talk you\n into it.\"\n\n\n \"You shut your trap,\" snapped Gus. \"She wants us to play games, don't\n she. Well, polo is a game. A nice, respectable game. Played in the best\n society.\"\n\n\n \"It wouldn't be no nice, respectable game the way you fellows would\n play it,\" predicted Moe. \"It would turn into mass murder. Wouldn't be\n one of you who wouldn't be planning on getting even with someone else,\n once you got him in the open.\"\n\n\n Miss Perkins gasped. \"Why, I'm sure they wouldn't!\"\n\n\n \"Of course we wouldn't,\" declared Gus, solemn as an owl.",
"\"Sure,\" said Gus. \"Old Gus Hamilton. Grow the finest dog-gone radiation\n moss you ever clapped your eyes on.\"\n\n\n \"Then you're the gentleman who has bugs,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"Now, look here,\" warned Gus, \"you watch what you say or I'll hang one\n on you.\"\n\n\n \"He means your rock bugs,\" Moe explained, hastily.\n\n\n \"Oh, them,\" said Gus.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Meek, \"I'm interested in them. I'd like to see them.\"",
"\"But they're going to play it. The men who ride those bucking rocks\n that make up the Inner Ring will go out into space in their rickety\n ships and fight it out. And ladies and gentlemen, when I say fight it\n out, I really mean fight it out. For the game, it seems, will be a sort\n of tournament, the final battle in a feud that has been going on in\n the Ring for years. No one knows what started the feud. It has gotten\n so it really doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is that when\n men from sector Twenty-three meet those from sector Thirty-seven, the\n feud is taken up again. But that is at an end now. In a few days the\n feud will be played out to its bitter end when the ships from the Inner\n Ring go out into space to play that most dangerous of all sports, space\n polo. For the outcome of that game will decide, forever, the supremacy\n of one of the two sectors.\"",
"Comfortably braced against the upjutting of stone, Meek dug into the\n pouch of his space gear, brought out a notebook and stylus. Flipping\n the pages, he stared, frowning, at the diagrams that covered them.\n\n\n None of the diagrams made sense. They showed the patterns of three\n other boards and the moves that had been made by the bugs in playing\n out the game. Apparently, in each case, the game had been finished.\n Which, Meek knew, should have meant that some solution had been\n reached, some point won, some advantage gained.\n\n\n But so far as Meek could see from study of the diagrams there was not\n even a purpose or a problem, let alone a solution or a point.\n\n\n The whole thing was squirrely. But, Meek told himself, it fitted in.\n The whole Saturnian system was wacky. The rings, for example. Debris of\n a moon smashed up by Saturn's pull? Sweepings of space? No one knew.",
"The inner door of the entrance lock grated open and a spacesuited\n figure limped into the room. The spacesuit visor snapped up and a brush\n of grey whiskers spouted into view.\n\n\n It was Gus Hamilton.\n\n\n He glared at Moe. \"What in tarnation is all this foolishness?\" he\n demanded. \"Got your message, I did, and here I am. But it better be\n important.\"\n\n\n He hobbled to the bar. Moe reached for a bottle and shoved it toward\n him, keeping out of reach.\n\n\n \"Have some trouble?\" he asked, trying to be casual.",
"\"Got that all fixed up,\" said Gus. \"You come back with me and I'll let\n you have a pair of stilts.\"\n\n\n \"Stilts?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Wooden stilts. Them danged fool bugs don't know what wood is.\n Seem to be scared of it, sort of. You can walk right among them if you\n want to, long as you're walking on the stilts.\"\n\n\n Meek gulped. He could imagine what stilt walking would be like in a\n place where gravity was no more than the faintest whisper.\nIII\n\n\n The bugs had dug a new set of holes, much after the manner of a Chinese\n checker board, and now were settling down into their respective places\n preparatory to the start of another game.",
"\"She's from the government,\" said Moe.\n\n\n \"Revenuer?\"\n\n\n \"Nope. From the welfare outfit. Aims to help you fellows out. Says\n there ain't no sense in you boys in Twenty-three all the time fighting\n with the gang from Thirty-seven.\"\n\n\n Gus stared in disbelief.\n\n\n Moe tried to be helpful. \"She wants you to play games.\"\n\n\n Gus strangled on his drink, clawed for air, wiped his eyes.\n\n\n \"So that's why you asked me over here. Another of your danged peace\n parleys. Come and talk things over, you said. So I came.\"",
"And because Earth needed the moss to cure a dozen maladies and because\n it would grow nowhere else but here on the Inner Ring, men squatted\n on the crazy swirl of spacial boulders that made up the ring. Men\n like Hamilton, living on rocks that bucked and heaved along their\n orbits like chips riding the crest of a raging flood. Men who endured\n loneliness, dared death when crunching orbits intersected or, when\n rickety spacecraft flared, who went mad with nothing to do, with the\n mockery of space before them.\n\n\n Meek shrugged his shoulders, almost upsetting himself.\nThe bugs had started the game and Meek craned forward cautiously,\n watching eagerly, stylus poised above the notebook.\n\n\n Crawling clumsily, the tiny insect-like creatures moved about, solemnly\n popping in and out of holes.",
"\"Sure, from a book. I saved my money and I studied. I always wanted to\n see the Solar System and here I am.\"\n\n\n Dazedly, the mechanic took off his greasy cap, laid it carefully on the\n desk, reached out for a spacesuit that hung from a wall hook.\n\n\n \"Afraid this job might take a while,\" he said. \"Especially if we have\n to wait for parts. Have to get them in from Titan City. Why don't you\n go over to the\nInn\n. Tell Moe I sent you. They'll treat you right.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" said Meek, \"but there's something else I'm wondering\n about. There was another sign out there. Something about educated bugs.\""
],
[
"\"But they could fight with something besides guns,\" said the welfare\n lady, a-smirk with righteousness. \"That's why I'm here. To try to get\n them to turn their natural feelings of rivalry into less deadly and\n disturbing channels. Direct their energies into other activities.\"\n\n\n \"Like what?\" asked Moe, fearing the worst.\n\n\n \"Athletic events,\" said Miss Perkins.\n\n\n \"Tin shinny, maybe,\" suggested Moe, trying to be sarcastic.\n\n\n She missed the sarcasm. \"Or spelling contests,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Them fellow can't spell,\" insisted Moe.\n\n\n \"Games of some sort, then. Competitive games.\"\n\n\n \"Now you're talking,\" Moe enthused. \"They take to games. Seven-toed\n Pete with the deuces wild.\"",
"\"My opinion, sir,\" said Oliver Meek, \"seldom amounts to much.\"\n\n\n \"All we want to know,\" Gus told him, \"is what you think of space polo.\"\n\n\n \"Space polo,\" declared Meek, \"is a noble game. It requires expert\n piloting, a fine sense of timing and....\"\n\n\n \"There, you see!\" whooped Gus, triumphantly.\n\n\n \"I saw a game once,\" Meek volunteered.\n\n\n \"Swell,\" bellowed Gus. \"We'll have you coach our team.\"\n\n\n \"But,\" protested Meek, \"but ... but.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Mr. Hamilton,\" exulted Miss Perkins, \"you are so wonderful. You\n think of everything.\"\n\n\n \"Hamilton!\" squeaked Meek.",
"\"She's from the government,\" said Moe.\n\n\n \"Revenuer?\"\n\n\n \"Nope. From the welfare outfit. Aims to help you fellows out. Says\n there ain't no sense in you boys in Twenty-three all the time fighting\n with the gang from Thirty-seven.\"\n\n\n Gus stared in disbelief.\n\n\n Moe tried to be helpful. \"She wants you to play games.\"\n\n\n Gus strangled on his drink, clawed for air, wiped his eyes.\n\n\n \"So that's why you asked me over here. Another of your danged peace\n parleys. Come and talk things over, you said. So I came.\"",
"\"Go over to the\nInn\nand wait around,\" advised the mechanic. \"He'll\n come in sooner or later. Drops around regular, except when his\n rheumatism bothers him, to pick up a bundle of papers. Subscribes to a\n daily paper, he does. Only man out here that does any reading. But all\n he reads is the sports section. Nuts about sports, Gus is.\"\nII\n\n\n Moe, bartender at Saturn Inn, leaned his elbow on the bar and braced\n his chin in an outspread palm. His face wore a melancholy, hang-dog\n look. Moe liked things fairly peaceable, but now he saw trouble coming\n in big batches.\n\n\n \"Lady,\" he declared mournfully, \"you sure picked yourself a job. The\n boys around here don't take to being uplifted and improved. They ain't\n worth it, either. Just ring-rats, that's all they are.\"",
"\"Oh, them,\" said the mechanic. \"They belong to Gus Hamilton. Maybe\n belong ain't the right word because they were on the rock before Gus\n took over. Anyhow, Gus is mighty proud of them, although at times they\n sure run him ragged. First year they almost drove him loopy trying to\n figure out what kind of game they were playing.\"\n\n\n \"Game?\" asked Meek, wondering if he was being hoaxed.\n\n\n \"Sure, game. Like checkers. Only it ain't. Not chess, neither. Even\n worse than that. Bugs dig themselves a batch of holes, then choose up\n sides and play for hours. About the time Gus would think he had it\n figured out, they'd change the rules and throw him off again.\"\n\n\n \"That doesn't make sense,\" protested Meek.",
"\"That would be awful,\" agreed Meek.\n\n\n \"Wouldn't it, though,\" declared Gus.\n\n\n Meek squinted his eyes and pounced on the floor, scrabbling on hands\n and knees after a scurrying thing that twinkled in the lamplight.\n\n\n \"Got him,\" yelped Meek, scooping the shining mote up in his hand.\n\n\n Gus inched the lid of the wooden box open. Meek rose and popped the bug\n inside.\n\n\n \"That makes twenty-eight of them,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"I told you,\" Gus accused him, \"that we hadn't got them all. You better\n take another good look at your suit. The danged things burrow right\n into solid metal and pull the hole in after them, seems like. Sneakiest\n cusses in the whole dang system. Just like chiggers back on Earth.\"",
"\"There's something in what she says,\" defended Moe. \"You ring-rats been\n ripping up space for a long time now. Time you growed up and settled\n down. You're aiming on going over right now and pulverizing Bud. It\n won't do you any good.\"\n\n\n \"I'll get a heap of satisfaction out of it,\" insisted Gus. \"And,\n besides, I'll get my injector back. Might even take a few things off\n Bud's ship. Some of the parts on mine are wearing kind of thin.\"\n\n\n Gus took another drink, glowering at Miss Perkins.\n\n\n \"So the government sent you out to make us respectable,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Merely to help you, Mr. Hamilton,\" she declared. \"To turn your hatreds\n into healthy competition.\"",
"A mathematical problem!\n\n\n His breath gurgled in his throat.\n\n\n He knew it now! He should have known it all the time. But the mechanic\n had talked about the bugs playing games and so had Hamilton. That had\n thrown him off.\n\n\n Games! Those bugs weren't playing any game. They were solving\n mathematical equations!\n\n\n Meek leaned forward to watch, forgetting where he was. One of the\n stilts slipped out of position and Meek felt himself start to fall. He\n dropped the notebook and frantically clawed at empty space.\n\n\n The other stilt went, then, and Meek found himself floating slowly\n downward, gravity weak but inexorable. His struggle to retain his\n balance had flung him forward, away from the face of the rock and he\n was falling directly over the board on which the bugs were arrayed.",
"\"And that ain't all,\" said Moe, warming to the subject. \"Those crates\n you guys got wouldn't last out the first chukker. Most of them would\n just naturally fall apart the first sharp turn they made. You can't\n play polo in ships tied up with haywire. Those broomsticks you\n ring-rats ride around on are so used to second rate fuel they'd split\n wide open first squirt of high test stuff you gave them.\"\n\n\n The inner locks grated open and a man stepped through into the room.\n\n\n \"You're prejudiced,\" Gus told Moe. \"You just don't like space polo,\n that is all. You ain't got no blueblood in you. We'll leave it up to\n this man here. We'll ask his opinion of it.\"\n\n\n The man flipped back his helmet, revealing a head thatched by white\n hair and dominated by a pair of outsize spectacles.",
"Moe looked alarmed. \"Miss Perkins,\" he warned, \"don't let him talk you\n into it.\"\n\n\n \"You shut your trap,\" snapped Gus. \"She wants us to play games, don't\n she. Well, polo is a game. A nice, respectable game. Played in the best\n society.\"\n\n\n \"It wouldn't be no nice, respectable game the way you fellows would\n play it,\" predicted Moe. \"It would turn into mass murder. Wouldn't be\n one of you who wouldn't be planning on getting even with someone else,\n once you got him in the open.\"\n\n\n Miss Perkins gasped. \"Why, I'm sure they wouldn't!\"\n\n\n \"Of course we wouldn't,\" declared Gus, solemn as an owl.",
"\"Stranger,\" declared the mechanic, solemnly, \"there ain't nothing\n about them bugs that make sense. Gus' rock is the only one they're on.\n Gus thinks maybe the rock don't even belong to the Solar system. Thinks\n maybe it's a hunk of stone from some other solar system. Figures maybe\n it crossed space somehow and was captured by Saturn, sucked into the\n Ring. That would explain why it's the only one that has the bugs. They\n come along with it, see.\"\n\n\n \"This Gus Hamilton,\" said Meek. \"I'd like to see him. Where could I\n find him?\"",
"He pawed and kicked at space, but still floated down, course unchanged.\n He struck and bounced, struck and bounced again.\n\n\n On the fourth bounce he managed to hook his fingers around a tiny\n projection of the surface. Fighting desperately, he regained his feet.\n\n\n Something scurried across the face of his helmet and he lifted his hand\n before him. It was covered with the bugs.\n\n\n Fumbling desperately, he snapped on the rocket motor of his suit, shot\n out into space, heading for the rock where the lights from the ports of\n Hamilton's shack blinked with the weaving of the rock.\n\n\n Oliver Meek shut his eyes and groaned.\n\n\n \"Gus will give me hell for this,\" he told himself.\nGus shook the small wooden box thoughtfully, listening to the frantic\n scurrying within it.",
"\"The sporting event, ladies and gentlemen, that is being talked up and\n down the streets of Earth tonight, is one that will be played here\n in our own Saturnian system. A space polo game. To be played by two\n unknown, pick-up, amateur teams down in the Inner Ring. Most of the\n men have never played polo before. Few if any of them have even seen a\n game. There may have been some of them who didn't, at first, know what\n it was.",
"\"Chiggers,\" Meek told him, \"burrow into a person to lay eggs.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe these things do, too,\" Gus contended.\n\n\n The radio on the mantel blared a warning signal, automatically tuning\n in on one of the regular newscasts from Titan City out on Saturn's\n biggest moon.\n\n\n The syrupy, chamber of commerce voice of the announcer was shaky with\n excitement and pride.\n\n\n \"Next week,\" he said, \"the annual Martian-Earth football game will be\n played at Greater New York on Earth. But in the Earth's newspapers\n tonight another story has pushed even that famous classic of the\n sporting world down into secondary place.\"\n\n\n He paused and took a deep breath and his voice practically yodeled with\n delight.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe sign read:\nAtomic Motors Repaired. Busted\n \nPlates Patched Up. Rocket Tubes\n \nRelined. Wheeze In, Whiz Out!\nIt added, as an afterthought, in shaky, inexpert lettering:\nWe Fix Anything.\nMr. Oliver Meek stared owlishly at the sign, which hung from an arm\n attached to a metal standard sunk in solid rock. A second sign was\n wired to the standard just below the metal arm, but its legend was\n faint, almost illegible. Meek blinked at it through thick-lensed\n spectacles, finally deciphered its scrawl:\nAsk About Educated Bugs.",
"\"Sure,\" said Gus. \"Old Gus Hamilton. Grow the finest dog-gone radiation\n moss you ever clapped your eyes on.\"\n\n\n \"Then you're the gentleman who has bugs,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"Now, look here,\" warned Gus, \"you watch what you say or I'll hang one\n on you.\"\n\n\n \"He means your rock bugs,\" Moe explained, hastily.\n\n\n \"Oh, them,\" said Gus.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Meek, \"I'm interested in them. I'd like to see them.\"",
"Comfortably braced against the upjutting of stone, Meek dug into the\n pouch of his space gear, brought out a notebook and stylus. Flipping\n the pages, he stared, frowning, at the diagrams that covered them.\n\n\n None of the diagrams made sense. They showed the patterns of three\n other boards and the moves that had been made by the bugs in playing\n out the game. Apparently, in each case, the game had been finished.\n Which, Meek knew, should have meant that some solution had been\n reached, some point won, some advantage gained.\n\n\n But so far as Meek could see from study of the diagrams there was not\n even a purpose or a problem, let alone a solution or a point.\n\n\n The whole thing was squirrely. But, Meek told himself, it fitted in.\n The whole Saturnian system was wacky. The rings, for example. Debris of\n a moon smashed up by Saturn's pull? Sweepings of space? No one knew.",
"\"Games, eh?\" said Gus. \"Maybe you got something, after all. Maybe we\n could fix up some kind of game....\"\n\n\n \"Forget it, Gus,\" warned Moe. \"If you're thinking of energy guns at\n fifty paces, it's out. Miss Perkins won't stand for anything like that.\"\nGus wiped his whiskers and looked hurt. \"Nothing of the sort,\" he\n denied. \"Dang it, you must think I ain't got no sportsmanship at all. I\n was thinking of a real sport. A game they play back on Earth and Mars.\n Read about it in my papers. Follow the teams, I do. Always wanted to\n see a game, but never did.\"\n\n\n Miss Perkins beamed. \"What game is it, Mr. Hamilton?\"\n\n\n \"Space polo,\" said Gus.\n\n\n \"Why, how wonderful,\" simpered Miss Perkins. \"And you boys have the\n spaceships to play it with.\"",
"\"By rights,\" he declared, judiciously, \"I should take this over and\n dump it in Bud's ship. Get even with him for swiping my injector.\"\n\n\n \"But you got the injector back,\" Meek pointed out.\n\n\n \"Oh, sure, I got it back,\" admitted Gus. \"But it wasn't orthodox, it\n wasn't. Just getting your property back ain't getting even. I never did\n have a chance to smack Bud in the snoot the way I should of smacked\n him. Moe talked me into it. He was the one that had the idea the\n welfare lady should go over and talk to Bud. She must of laid it on\n thick, too, about how we should settle down and behave ourselves and\n all that. Otherwise Bud never would have given her that injector.\"\n\n\n He shook his head dolefully. \"This here Ring ain't ever going to be\n the same again. If we don't watch out, we'll find ourselves being\n polite to one another.\"",
"\"Got that all fixed up,\" said Gus. \"You come back with me and I'll let\n you have a pair of stilts.\"\n\n\n \"Stilts?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Wooden stilts. Them danged fool bugs don't know what wood is.\n Seem to be scared of it, sort of. You can walk right among them if you\n want to, long as you're walking on the stilts.\"\n\n\n Meek gulped. He could imagine what stilt walking would be like in a\n place where gravity was no more than the faintest whisper.\nIII\n\n\n The bugs had dug a new set of holes, much after the manner of a Chinese\n checker board, and now were settling down into their respective places\n preparatory to the start of another game."
],
[
"\"Go over to the\nInn\nand wait around,\" advised the mechanic. \"He'll\n come in sooner or later. Drops around regular, except when his\n rheumatism bothers him, to pick up a bundle of papers. Subscribes to a\n daily paper, he does. Only man out here that does any reading. But all\n he reads is the sports section. Nuts about sports, Gus is.\"\nII\n\n\n Moe, bartender at Saturn Inn, leaned his elbow on the bar and braced\n his chin in an outspread palm. His face wore a melancholy, hang-dog\n look. Moe liked things fairly peaceable, but now he saw trouble coming\n in big batches.\n\n\n \"Lady,\" he declared mournfully, \"you sure picked yourself a job. The\n boys around here don't take to being uplifted and improved. They ain't\n worth it, either. Just ring-rats, that's all they are.\"",
"Henrietta Perkins, representative for the public health and welfare\n department of the Solar government, shuddered at his suggestion of\n anything so low it didn't yearn for betterment.\n\n\n \"But those terrible feuds,\" she protested. \"Fighting just because they\n live in different parts of the Ring. It's natural they might feel some\n rivalry, but all this killing! Surely they don't enjoy getting killed.\"\n\n\n \"Sure they enjoy it,\" declared Moe. \"Not being killed, maybe ...\n although they're willing to take a chance on that. Not many of them\n get killed, in fact. Just a few that get sort of careless. But even if\n some of them are killed, you can't go messing around with that feud\n of theirs. If them boys out in sectors Twenty-Three and Thirty-Seven\n didn't have their feud they'd plain die of boredom. They just got to\n have somebody to fight with. They been fighting, off and on, for years.\"",
"\"My opinion, sir,\" said Oliver Meek, \"seldom amounts to much.\"\n\n\n \"All we want to know,\" Gus told him, \"is what you think of space polo.\"\n\n\n \"Space polo,\" declared Meek, \"is a noble game. It requires expert\n piloting, a fine sense of timing and....\"\n\n\n \"There, you see!\" whooped Gus, triumphantly.\n\n\n \"I saw a game once,\" Meek volunteered.\n\n\n \"Swell,\" bellowed Gus. \"We'll have you coach our team.\"\n\n\n \"But,\" protested Meek, \"but ... but.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Mr. Hamilton,\" exulted Miss Perkins, \"you are so wonderful. You\n think of everything.\"\n\n\n \"Hamilton!\" squeaked Meek.",
"\"But they could fight with something besides guns,\" said the welfare\n lady, a-smirk with righteousness. \"That's why I'm here. To try to get\n them to turn their natural feelings of rivalry into less deadly and\n disturbing channels. Direct their energies into other activities.\"\n\n\n \"Like what?\" asked Moe, fearing the worst.\n\n\n \"Athletic events,\" said Miss Perkins.\n\n\n \"Tin shinny, maybe,\" suggested Moe, trying to be sarcastic.\n\n\n She missed the sarcasm. \"Or spelling contests,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Them fellow can't spell,\" insisted Moe.\n\n\n \"Games of some sort, then. Competitive games.\"\n\n\n \"Now you're talking,\" Moe enthused. \"They take to games. Seven-toed\n Pete with the deuces wild.\"",
"\"Got that all fixed up,\" said Gus. \"You come back with me and I'll let\n you have a pair of stilts.\"\n\n\n \"Stilts?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Wooden stilts. Them danged fool bugs don't know what wood is.\n Seem to be scared of it, sort of. You can walk right among them if you\n want to, long as you're walking on the stilts.\"\n\n\n Meek gulped. He could imagine what stilt walking would be like in a\n place where gravity was no more than the faintest whisper.\nIII\n\n\n The bugs had dug a new set of holes, much after the manner of a Chinese\n checker board, and now were settling down into their respective places\n preparatory to the start of another game.",
"\"Sure, from a book. I saved my money and I studied. I always wanted to\n see the Solar System and here I am.\"\n\n\n Dazedly, the mechanic took off his greasy cap, laid it carefully on the\n desk, reached out for a spacesuit that hung from a wall hook.\n\n\n \"Afraid this job might take a while,\" he said. \"Especially if we have\n to wait for parts. Have to get them in from Titan City. Why don't you\n go over to the\nInn\n. Tell Moe I sent you. They'll treat you right.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" said Meek, \"but there's something else I'm wondering\n about. There was another sign out there. Something about educated bugs.\"",
"\"Sure,\" said Gus. \"Old Gus Hamilton. Grow the finest dog-gone radiation\n moss you ever clapped your eyes on.\"\n\n\n \"Then you're the gentleman who has bugs,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"Now, look here,\" warned Gus, \"you watch what you say or I'll hang one\n on you.\"\n\n\n \"He means your rock bugs,\" Moe explained, hastily.\n\n\n \"Oh, them,\" said Gus.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Meek, \"I'm interested in them. I'd like to see them.\"",
"\"That would be awful,\" agreed Meek.\n\n\n \"Wouldn't it, though,\" declared Gus.\n\n\n Meek squinted his eyes and pounced on the floor, scrabbling on hands\n and knees after a scurrying thing that twinkled in the lamplight.\n\n\n \"Got him,\" yelped Meek, scooping the shining mote up in his hand.\n\n\n Gus inched the lid of the wooden box open. Meek rose and popped the bug\n inside.\n\n\n \"That makes twenty-eight of them,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"I told you,\" Gus accused him, \"that we hadn't got them all. You better\n take another good look at your suit. The danged things burrow right\n into solid metal and pull the hole in after them, seems like. Sneakiest\n cusses in the whole dang system. Just like chiggers back on Earth.\"",
"\"And that ain't all,\" said Moe, warming to the subject. \"Those crates\n you guys got wouldn't last out the first chukker. Most of them would\n just naturally fall apart the first sharp turn they made. You can't\n play polo in ships tied up with haywire. Those broomsticks you\n ring-rats ride around on are so used to second rate fuel they'd split\n wide open first squirt of high test stuff you gave them.\"\n\n\n The inner locks grated open and a man stepped through into the room.\n\n\n \"You're prejudiced,\" Gus told Moe. \"You just don't like space polo,\n that is all. You ain't got no blueblood in you. We'll leave it up to\n this man here. We'll ask his opinion of it.\"\n\n\n The man flipped back his helmet, revealing a head thatched by white\n hair and dominated by a pair of outsize spectacles.",
"And because Earth needed the moss to cure a dozen maladies and because\n it would grow nowhere else but here on the Inner Ring, men squatted\n on the crazy swirl of spacial boulders that made up the ring. Men\n like Hamilton, living on rocks that bucked and heaved along their\n orbits like chips riding the crest of a raging flood. Men who endured\n loneliness, dared death when crunching orbits intersected or, when\n rickety spacecraft flared, who went mad with nothing to do, with the\n mockery of space before them.\n\n\n Meek shrugged his shoulders, almost upsetting himself.\nThe bugs had started the game and Meek craned forward cautiously,\n watching eagerly, stylus poised above the notebook.\n\n\n Crawling clumsily, the tiny insect-like creatures moved about, solemnly\n popping in and out of holes.",
"\"Oh, them,\" said the mechanic. \"They belong to Gus Hamilton. Maybe\n belong ain't the right word because they were on the rock before Gus\n took over. Anyhow, Gus is mighty proud of them, although at times they\n sure run him ragged. First year they almost drove him loopy trying to\n figure out what kind of game they were playing.\"\n\n\n \"Game?\" asked Meek, wondering if he was being hoaxed.\n\n\n \"Sure, game. Like checkers. Only it ain't. Not chess, neither. Even\n worse than that. Bugs dig themselves a batch of holes, then choose up\n sides and play for hours. About the time Gus would think he had it\n figured out, they'd change the rules and throw him off again.\"\n\n\n \"That doesn't make sense,\" protested Meek.",
"He pawed and kicked at space, but still floated down, course unchanged.\n He struck and bounced, struck and bounced again.\n\n\n On the fourth bounce he managed to hook his fingers around a tiny\n projection of the surface. Fighting desperately, he regained his feet.\n\n\n Something scurried across the face of his helmet and he lifted his hand\n before him. It was covered with the bugs.\n\n\n Fumbling desperately, he snapped on the rocket motor of his suit, shot\n out into space, heading for the rock where the lights from the ports of\n Hamilton's shack blinked with the weaving of the rock.\n\n\n Oliver Meek shut his eyes and groaned.\n\n\n \"Gus will give me hell for this,\" he told himself.\nGus shook the small wooden box thoughtfully, listening to the frantic\n scurrying within it.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe sign read:\nAtomic Motors Repaired. Busted\n \nPlates Patched Up. Rocket Tubes\n \nRelined. Wheeze In, Whiz Out!\nIt added, as an afterthought, in shaky, inexpert lettering:\nWe Fix Anything.\nMr. Oliver Meek stared owlishly at the sign, which hung from an arm\n attached to a metal standard sunk in solid rock. A second sign was\n wired to the standard just below the metal arm, but its legend was\n faint, almost illegible. Meek blinked at it through thick-lensed\n spectacles, finally deciphered its scrawl:\nAsk About Educated Bugs.",
"\"She's from the government,\" said Moe.\n\n\n \"Revenuer?\"\n\n\n \"Nope. From the welfare outfit. Aims to help you fellows out. Says\n there ain't no sense in you boys in Twenty-three all the time fighting\n with the gang from Thirty-seven.\"\n\n\n Gus stared in disbelief.\n\n\n Moe tried to be helpful. \"She wants you to play games.\"\n\n\n Gus strangled on his drink, clawed for air, wiped his eyes.\n\n\n \"So that's why you asked me over here. Another of your danged peace\n parleys. Come and talk things over, you said. So I came.\"",
"\"You are the gentleman who can fix things?\" he asked the mechanic.\nThe mechanic stared. Here was no hell-for-leather freighter pilot, no\n be-whiskered roamer of the outer orbits. Meek's hair was white and\n stuck out in uncombed tufts in a dozen directions. His skin was pale.\n His blue eyes looked watery behind the thick lenses that rode his nose.\n Even the bulky spacesuit failed to hide his stooped shoulders and\n slight frame.\n\n\n The mechanic said nothing.\n\n\n Meek tried again. \"I saw the sign. It said you could fix anything. So\n I....\"\n\n\n The mechanic shook himself.\n\n\n \"Sure,\" he agreed, still slightly dazed. \"Sure I can fix you up. What\n you got?\"\n\n\n He swung his feet off the desk.",
"A mathematical problem!\n\n\n His breath gurgled in his throat.\n\n\n He knew it now! He should have known it all the time. But the mechanic\n had talked about the bugs playing games and so had Hamilton. That had\n thrown him off.\n\n\n Games! Those bugs weren't playing any game. They were solving\n mathematical equations!\n\n\n Meek leaned forward to watch, forgetting where he was. One of the\n stilts slipped out of position and Meek felt himself start to fall. He\n dropped the notebook and frantically clawed at empty space.\n\n\n The other stilt went, then, and Meek found himself floating slowly\n downward, gravity weak but inexorable. His struggle to retain his\n balance had flung him forward, away from the face of the rock and he\n was falling directly over the board on which the bugs were arrayed.",
"\"Games, eh?\" said Gus. \"Maybe you got something, after all. Maybe we\n could fix up some kind of game....\"\n\n\n \"Forget it, Gus,\" warned Moe. \"If you're thinking of energy guns at\n fifty paces, it's out. Miss Perkins won't stand for anything like that.\"\nGus wiped his whiskers and looked hurt. \"Nothing of the sort,\" he\n denied. \"Dang it, you must think I ain't got no sportsmanship at all. I\n was thinking of a real sport. A game they play back on Earth and Mars.\n Read about it in my papers. Follow the teams, I do. Always wanted to\n see a game, but never did.\"\n\n\n Miss Perkins beamed. \"What game is it, Mr. Hamilton?\"\n\n\n \"Space polo,\" said Gus.\n\n\n \"Why, how wonderful,\" simpered Miss Perkins. \"And you boys have the\n spaceships to play it with.\"",
"\"There's something in what she says,\" defended Moe. \"You ring-rats been\n ripping up space for a long time now. Time you growed up and settled\n down. You're aiming on going over right now and pulverizing Bud. It\n won't do you any good.\"\n\n\n \"I'll get a heap of satisfaction out of it,\" insisted Gus. \"And,\n besides, I'll get my injector back. Might even take a few things off\n Bud's ship. Some of the parts on mine are wearing kind of thin.\"\n\n\n Gus took another drink, glowering at Miss Perkins.\n\n\n \"So the government sent you out to make us respectable,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Merely to help you, Mr. Hamilton,\" she declared. \"To turn your hatreds\n into healthy competition.\"",
"Moe looked alarmed. \"Miss Perkins,\" he warned, \"don't let him talk you\n into it.\"\n\n\n \"You shut your trap,\" snapped Gus. \"She wants us to play games, don't\n she. Well, polo is a game. A nice, respectable game. Played in the best\n society.\"\n\n\n \"It wouldn't be no nice, respectable game the way you fellows would\n play it,\" predicted Moe. \"It would turn into mass murder. Wouldn't be\n one of you who wouldn't be planning on getting even with someone else,\n once you got him in the open.\"\n\n\n Miss Perkins gasped. \"Why, I'm sure they wouldn't!\"\n\n\n \"Of course we wouldn't,\" declared Gus, solemn as an owl.",
"\"But they're going to play it. The men who ride those bucking rocks\n that make up the Inner Ring will go out into space in their rickety\n ships and fight it out. And ladies and gentlemen, when I say fight it\n out, I really mean fight it out. For the game, it seems, will be a sort\n of tournament, the final battle in a feud that has been going on in\n the Ring for years. No one knows what started the feud. It has gotten\n so it really doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is that when\n men from sector Twenty-three meet those from sector Thirty-seven, the\n feud is taken up again. But that is at an end now. In a few days the\n feud will be played out to its bitter end when the ships from the Inner\n Ring go out into space to play that most dangerous of all sports, space\n polo. For the outcome of that game will decide, forever, the supremacy\n of one of the two sectors.\""
],
[
"\"Stranger,\" declared the mechanic, solemnly, \"there ain't nothing\n about them bugs that make sense. Gus' rock is the only one they're on.\n Gus thinks maybe the rock don't even belong to the Solar system. Thinks\n maybe it's a hunk of stone from some other solar system. Figures maybe\n it crossed space somehow and was captured by Saturn, sucked into the\n Ring. That would explain why it's the only one that has the bugs. They\n come along with it, see.\"\n\n\n \"This Gus Hamilton,\" said Meek. \"I'd like to see him. Where could I\n find him?\"",
"\"See them,\" said Gus. \"Mister, you can have them if you want them.\n Drove me out of house and home, they did. They're dippy over metal. Any\n kind of metal, but alloys especially. Eat the stuff. They'll tromp you\n to death heading for a spaceship. Got so I had to move over to another\n rock to live. Tried to fight it out with them, but they whipped me pure\n and simple. Moved out and let them have the place after they started to\n eat my shack right out from underneath my feet.\"\n\n\n Meek looked crestfallen.\n\n\n \"Can't get near them, then,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Sure you can,\" said Gus. \"Why not?\"\n\n\n \"Well, a spacesuit's metal and....\"",
"\"Sure,\" said Gus. \"Old Gus Hamilton. Grow the finest dog-gone radiation\n moss you ever clapped your eyes on.\"\n\n\n \"Then you're the gentleman who has bugs,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"Now, look here,\" warned Gus, \"you watch what you say or I'll hang one\n on you.\"\n\n\n \"He means your rock bugs,\" Moe explained, hastily.\n\n\n \"Oh, them,\" said Gus.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Meek, \"I'm interested in them. I'd like to see them.\"",
"\"Got that all fixed up,\" said Gus. \"You come back with me and I'll let\n you have a pair of stilts.\"\n\n\n \"Stilts?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Wooden stilts. Them danged fool bugs don't know what wood is.\n Seem to be scared of it, sort of. You can walk right among them if you\n want to, long as you're walking on the stilts.\"\n\n\n Meek gulped. He could imagine what stilt walking would be like in a\n place where gravity was no more than the faintest whisper.\nIII\n\n\n The bugs had dug a new set of holes, much after the manner of a Chinese\n checker board, and now were settling down into their respective places\n preparatory to the start of another game.",
"\"Go over to the\nInn\nand wait around,\" advised the mechanic. \"He'll\n come in sooner or later. Drops around regular, except when his\n rheumatism bothers him, to pick up a bundle of papers. Subscribes to a\n daily paper, he does. Only man out here that does any reading. But all\n he reads is the sports section. Nuts about sports, Gus is.\"\nII\n\n\n Moe, bartender at Saturn Inn, leaned his elbow on the bar and braced\n his chin in an outspread palm. His face wore a melancholy, hang-dog\n look. Moe liked things fairly peaceable, but now he saw trouble coming\n in big batches.\n\n\n \"Lady,\" he declared mournfully, \"you sure picked yourself a job. The\n boys around here don't take to being uplifted and improved. They ain't\n worth it, either. Just ring-rats, that's all they are.\"",
"\"By rights,\" he declared, judiciously, \"I should take this over and\n dump it in Bud's ship. Get even with him for swiping my injector.\"\n\n\n \"But you got the injector back,\" Meek pointed out.\n\n\n \"Oh, sure, I got it back,\" admitted Gus. \"But it wasn't orthodox, it\n wasn't. Just getting your property back ain't getting even. I never did\n have a chance to smack Bud in the snoot the way I should of smacked\n him. Moe talked me into it. He was the one that had the idea the\n welfare lady should go over and talk to Bud. She must of laid it on\n thick, too, about how we should settle down and behave ourselves and\n all that. Otherwise Bud never would have given her that injector.\"\n\n\n He shook his head dolefully. \"This here Ring ain't ever going to be\n the same again. If we don't watch out, we'll find ourselves being\n polite to one another.\"",
"Moe looked alarmed. \"Miss Perkins,\" he warned, \"don't let him talk you\n into it.\"\n\n\n \"You shut your trap,\" snapped Gus. \"She wants us to play games, don't\n she. Well, polo is a game. A nice, respectable game. Played in the best\n society.\"\n\n\n \"It wouldn't be no nice, respectable game the way you fellows would\n play it,\" predicted Moe. \"It would turn into mass murder. Wouldn't be\n one of you who wouldn't be planning on getting even with someone else,\n once you got him in the open.\"\n\n\n Miss Perkins gasped. \"Why, I'm sure they wouldn't!\"\n\n\n \"Of course we wouldn't,\" declared Gus, solemn as an owl.",
"\"My opinion, sir,\" said Oliver Meek, \"seldom amounts to much.\"\n\n\n \"All we want to know,\" Gus told him, \"is what you think of space polo.\"\n\n\n \"Space polo,\" declared Meek, \"is a noble game. It requires expert\n piloting, a fine sense of timing and....\"\n\n\n \"There, you see!\" whooped Gus, triumphantly.\n\n\n \"I saw a game once,\" Meek volunteered.\n\n\n \"Swell,\" bellowed Gus. \"We'll have you coach our team.\"\n\n\n \"But,\" protested Meek, \"but ... but.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Mr. Hamilton,\" exulted Miss Perkins, \"you are so wonderful. You\n think of everything.\"\n\n\n \"Hamilton!\" squeaked Meek.",
"\"That would be awful,\" agreed Meek.\n\n\n \"Wouldn't it, though,\" declared Gus.\n\n\n Meek squinted his eyes and pounced on the floor, scrabbling on hands\n and knees after a scurrying thing that twinkled in the lamplight.\n\n\n \"Got him,\" yelped Meek, scooping the shining mote up in his hand.\n\n\n Gus inched the lid of the wooden box open. Meek rose and popped the bug\n inside.\n\n\n \"That makes twenty-eight of them,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"I told you,\" Gus accused him, \"that we hadn't got them all. You better\n take another good look at your suit. The danged things burrow right\n into solid metal and pull the hole in after them, seems like. Sneakiest\n cusses in the whole dang system. Just like chiggers back on Earth.\"",
"\"Oh, them,\" said the mechanic. \"They belong to Gus Hamilton. Maybe\n belong ain't the right word because they were on the rock before Gus\n took over. Anyhow, Gus is mighty proud of them, although at times they\n sure run him ragged. First year they almost drove him loopy trying to\n figure out what kind of game they were playing.\"\n\n\n \"Game?\" asked Meek, wondering if he was being hoaxed.\n\n\n \"Sure, game. Like checkers. Only it ain't. Not chess, neither. Even\n worse than that. Bugs dig themselves a batch of holes, then choose up\n sides and play for hours. About the time Gus would think he had it\n figured out, they'd change the rules and throw him off again.\"\n\n\n \"That doesn't make sense,\" protested Meek.",
"He pawed and kicked at space, but still floated down, course unchanged.\n He struck and bounced, struck and bounced again.\n\n\n On the fourth bounce he managed to hook his fingers around a tiny\n projection of the surface. Fighting desperately, he regained his feet.\n\n\n Something scurried across the face of his helmet and he lifted his hand\n before him. It was covered with the bugs.\n\n\n Fumbling desperately, he snapped on the rocket motor of his suit, shot\n out into space, heading for the rock where the lights from the ports of\n Hamilton's shack blinked with the weaving of the rock.\n\n\n Oliver Meek shut his eyes and groaned.\n\n\n \"Gus will give me hell for this,\" he told himself.\nGus shook the small wooden box thoughtfully, listening to the frantic\n scurrying within it.",
"\"I haven't got a navigator,\" Meek said, quietly.\n\n\n The mechanic stared at him, eyes popping. \"You mean you brought it in\n alone? No one with you?\"\n\n\n Meek gulped and nodded. \"Dead reckoning,\" he said.\n\n\n The mechanic glowed with sudden admiration. \"I don't know who you are,\n mister,\" he declared, \"but whoever you are, you're the best damn pilot\n that ever took to space.\"\n\n\n \"Really I'm not,\" said Meek. \"I haven't done much piloting, you see. Up\n until just a while ago, I never had left Earth. Bookkeeper for Lunar\n Exports.\"\n\n\n \"Bookkeeper!\" yelped the mechanic. \"How come a bookkeeper can handle a\n ship like that?\"\n\n\n \"I learned it,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"You learned it?\"",
"\"You are the gentleman who can fix things?\" he asked the mechanic.\nThe mechanic stared. Here was no hell-for-leather freighter pilot, no\n be-whiskered roamer of the outer orbits. Meek's hair was white and\n stuck out in uncombed tufts in a dozen directions. His skin was pale.\n His blue eyes looked watery behind the thick lenses that rode his nose.\n Even the bulky spacesuit failed to hide his stooped shoulders and\n slight frame.\n\n\n The mechanic said nothing.\n\n\n Meek tried again. \"I saw the sign. It said you could fix anything. So\n I....\"\n\n\n The mechanic shook himself.\n\n\n \"Sure,\" he agreed, still slightly dazed. \"Sure I can fix you up. What\n you got?\"\n\n\n He swung his feet off the desk.",
"The inner door of the entrance lock grated open and a spacesuited\n figure limped into the room. The spacesuit visor snapped up and a brush\n of grey whiskers spouted into view.\n\n\n It was Gus Hamilton.\n\n\n He glared at Moe. \"What in tarnation is all this foolishness?\" he\n demanded. \"Got your message, I did, and here I am. But it better be\n important.\"\n\n\n He hobbled to the bar. Moe reached for a bottle and shoved it toward\n him, keeping out of reach.\n\n\n \"Have some trouble?\" he asked, trying to be casual.",
"\"But they could fight with something besides guns,\" said the welfare\n lady, a-smirk with righteousness. \"That's why I'm here. To try to get\n them to turn their natural feelings of rivalry into less deadly and\n disturbing channels. Direct their energies into other activities.\"\n\n\n \"Like what?\" asked Moe, fearing the worst.\n\n\n \"Athletic events,\" said Miss Perkins.\n\n\n \"Tin shinny, maybe,\" suggested Moe, trying to be sarcastic.\n\n\n She missed the sarcasm. \"Or spelling contests,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Them fellow can't spell,\" insisted Moe.\n\n\n \"Games of some sort, then. Competitive games.\"\n\n\n \"Now you're talking,\" Moe enthused. \"They take to games. Seven-toed\n Pete with the deuces wild.\"",
"Reaching the repair shop's entrance lock, he braced himself solidly to\n keep his balance, reached out and pressed a buzzer. Swiftly the lock\n spun outward and a moment later Meek had passed through the entrance\n vault and stepped into the office.\n\n\n A dungareed mechanic sat tilted in a chair against a wall, feet on the\n desk, a greasy cap pushed back on his head.\n\n\n Meek stamped his feet gratefully, pleased at feeling Earth gravity\n under him again. He lifted the hinged helmet of his suit back on his\n shoulders.",
"Mr. Meek Plays Polo\nBy CLIFFORD D. SIMAK\nMr. Meek was having his troubles. First, the\neducated\nbugs worried him; then the\n\n welfare worker tried to stop the Ring Rats' feud\n\n by enlisting his aid. And now, he was a drafted\n\n space-polo player—a fortune bet on his ability\n\n at a game he had never played in his cloistered life.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"For a mile or more across the flat surface of the rock that was Gus\n Hamilton's moss garden, ran a string of such game-boards, each one\n different, each one having served as the scene of a now-completed game.\n\n\n Oliver Meek cautiously wedged his stilts into two pitted pockets of\n rock, eased himself slowly and warily against the face of a knob of\n stone that jutted from the surface.\n\n\n Even in his youth, Meek remembered, he never had been any great shakes\n on stilts. Here, on this bucking, weaving rock, with slick surfaces and\n practically no gravity, a man had to be an expert to handle them. Meek\n knew now he was no expert. A half-dozen dents in his space armor was\n ample proof of that.",
"\"Trouble! Hell, yes!\" blustered Gus. \"But I ain't the only one that's\n going to have trouble. Somebody sneaked over and stole the injector out\n of my space crate. Had to borrow Hank's to get over here. But I know\n who it was. There ain't but one other ring-rat got a rocket my injector\n will fit.\"\n\n\n \"Bud Craney,\" said Moe. It was no secret. Every man in the two sectors\n of the Ring knew just exactly what kind of spacecraft the other had.\n\n\n \"That's right,\" said Gus, \"and I'm fixing to go over into Thirty-seven\n and yank Bud up by the roots.\"\n\n\n He took a jolt of liquor. \"Yes, sir, I sure aim to crucify him.\"\n\n\n His eyes lighted on Miss Henrietta Perkins.\n\n\n \"Visitor?\" he asked.",
"\"She's from the government,\" said Moe.\n\n\n \"Revenuer?\"\n\n\n \"Nope. From the welfare outfit. Aims to help you fellows out. Says\n there ain't no sense in you boys in Twenty-three all the time fighting\n with the gang from Thirty-seven.\"\n\n\n Gus stared in disbelief.\n\n\n Moe tried to be helpful. \"She wants you to play games.\"\n\n\n Gus strangled on his drink, clawed for air, wiped his eyes.\n\n\n \"So that's why you asked me over here. Another of your danged peace\n parleys. Come and talk things over, you said. So I came.\""
],
[
"\"You are the gentleman who can fix things?\" he asked the mechanic.\nThe mechanic stared. Here was no hell-for-leather freighter pilot, no\n be-whiskered roamer of the outer orbits. Meek's hair was white and\n stuck out in uncombed tufts in a dozen directions. His skin was pale.\n His blue eyes looked watery behind the thick lenses that rode his nose.\n Even the bulky spacesuit failed to hide his stooped shoulders and\n slight frame.\n\n\n The mechanic said nothing.\n\n\n Meek tried again. \"I saw the sign. It said you could fix anything. So\n I....\"\n\n\n The mechanic shook himself.\n\n\n \"Sure,\" he agreed, still slightly dazed. \"Sure I can fix you up. What\n you got?\"\n\n\n He swung his feet off the desk.",
"\"Stranger,\" declared the mechanic, solemnly, \"there ain't nothing\n about them bugs that make sense. Gus' rock is the only one they're on.\n Gus thinks maybe the rock don't even belong to the Solar system. Thinks\n maybe it's a hunk of stone from some other solar system. Figures maybe\n it crossed space somehow and was captured by Saturn, sucked into the\n Ring. That would explain why it's the only one that has the bugs. They\n come along with it, see.\"\n\n\n \"This Gus Hamilton,\" said Meek. \"I'd like to see him. Where could I\n find him?\"",
"Reaching the repair shop's entrance lock, he braced himself solidly to\n keep his balance, reached out and pressed a buzzer. Swiftly the lock\n spun outward and a moment later Meek had passed through the entrance\n vault and stepped into the office.\n\n\n A dungareed mechanic sat tilted in a chair against a wall, feet on the\n desk, a greasy cap pushed back on his head.\n\n\n Meek stamped his feet gratefully, pleased at feeling Earth gravity\n under him again. He lifted the hinged helmet of his suit back on his\n shoulders.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe sign read:\nAtomic Motors Repaired. Busted\n \nPlates Patched Up. Rocket Tubes\n \nRelined. Wheeze In, Whiz Out!\nIt added, as an afterthought, in shaky, inexpert lettering:\nWe Fix Anything.\nMr. Oliver Meek stared owlishly at the sign, which hung from an arm\n attached to a metal standard sunk in solid rock. A second sign was\n wired to the standard just below the metal arm, but its legend was\n faint, almost illegible. Meek blinked at it through thick-lensed\n spectacles, finally deciphered its scrawl:\nAsk About Educated Bugs.",
"\"Go over to the\nInn\nand wait around,\" advised the mechanic. \"He'll\n come in sooner or later. Drops around regular, except when his\n rheumatism bothers him, to pick up a bundle of papers. Subscribes to a\n daily paper, he does. Only man out here that does any reading. But all\n he reads is the sports section. Nuts about sports, Gus is.\"\nII\n\n\n Moe, bartender at Saturn Inn, leaned his elbow on the bar and braced\n his chin in an outspread palm. His face wore a melancholy, hang-dog\n look. Moe liked things fairly peaceable, but now he saw trouble coming\n in big batches.\n\n\n \"Lady,\" he declared mournfully, \"you sure picked yourself a job. The\n boys around here don't take to being uplifted and improved. They ain't\n worth it, either. Just ring-rats, that's all they are.\"",
"\"I haven't got a navigator,\" Meek said, quietly.\n\n\n The mechanic stared at him, eyes popping. \"You mean you brought it in\n alone? No one with you?\"\n\n\n Meek gulped and nodded. \"Dead reckoning,\" he said.\n\n\n The mechanic glowed with sudden admiration. \"I don't know who you are,\n mister,\" he declared, \"but whoever you are, you're the best damn pilot\n that ever took to space.\"\n\n\n \"Really I'm not,\" said Meek. \"I haven't done much piloting, you see. Up\n until just a while ago, I never had left Earth. Bookkeeper for Lunar\n Exports.\"\n\n\n \"Bookkeeper!\" yelped the mechanic. \"How come a bookkeeper can handle a\n ship like that?\"\n\n\n \"I learned it,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"You learned it?\"",
"Mr. Meek Plays Polo\nBy CLIFFORD D. SIMAK\nMr. Meek was having his troubles. First, the\neducated\nbugs worried him; then the\n\n welfare worker tried to stop the Ring Rats' feud\n\n by enlisting his aid. And now, he was a drafted\n\n space-polo player—a fortune bet on his ability\n\n at a game he had never played in his cloistered life.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"\"My opinion, sir,\" said Oliver Meek, \"seldom amounts to much.\"\n\n\n \"All we want to know,\" Gus told him, \"is what you think of space polo.\"\n\n\n \"Space polo,\" declared Meek, \"is a noble game. It requires expert\n piloting, a fine sense of timing and....\"\n\n\n \"There, you see!\" whooped Gus, triumphantly.\n\n\n \"I saw a game once,\" Meek volunteered.\n\n\n \"Swell,\" bellowed Gus. \"We'll have you coach our team.\"\n\n\n \"But,\" protested Meek, \"but ... but.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Mr. Hamilton,\" exulted Miss Perkins, \"you are so wonderful. You\n think of everything.\"\n\n\n \"Hamilton!\" squeaked Meek.",
"\"By rights,\" he declared, judiciously, \"I should take this over and\n dump it in Bud's ship. Get even with him for swiping my injector.\"\n\n\n \"But you got the injector back,\" Meek pointed out.\n\n\n \"Oh, sure, I got it back,\" admitted Gus. \"But it wasn't orthodox, it\n wasn't. Just getting your property back ain't getting even. I never did\n have a chance to smack Bud in the snoot the way I should of smacked\n him. Moe talked me into it. He was the one that had the idea the\n welfare lady should go over and talk to Bud. She must of laid it on\n thick, too, about how we should settle down and behave ourselves and\n all that. Otherwise Bud never would have given her that injector.\"\n\n\n He shook his head dolefully. \"This here Ring ain't ever going to be\n the same again. If we don't watch out, we'll find ourselves being\n polite to one another.\"",
"\"See them,\" said Gus. \"Mister, you can have them if you want them.\n Drove me out of house and home, they did. They're dippy over metal. Any\n kind of metal, but alloys especially. Eat the stuff. They'll tromp you\n to death heading for a spaceship. Got so I had to move over to another\n rock to live. Tried to fight it out with them, but they whipped me pure\n and simple. Moved out and let them have the place after they started to\n eat my shack right out from underneath my feet.\"\n\n\n Meek looked crestfallen.\n\n\n \"Can't get near them, then,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Sure you can,\" said Gus. \"Why not?\"\n\n\n \"Well, a spacesuit's metal and....\"",
"Comfortably braced against the upjutting of stone, Meek dug into the\n pouch of his space gear, brought out a notebook and stylus. Flipping\n the pages, he stared, frowning, at the diagrams that covered them.\n\n\n None of the diagrams made sense. They showed the patterns of three\n other boards and the moves that had been made by the bugs in playing\n out the game. Apparently, in each case, the game had been finished.\n Which, Meek knew, should have meant that some solution had been\n reached, some point won, some advantage gained.\n\n\n But so far as Meek could see from study of the diagrams there was not\n even a purpose or a problem, let alone a solution or a point.\n\n\n The whole thing was squirrely. But, Meek told himself, it fitted in.\n The whole Saturnian system was wacky. The rings, for example. Debris of\n a moon smashed up by Saturn's pull? Sweepings of space? No one knew.",
"\"Sure, from a book. I saved my money and I studied. I always wanted to\n see the Solar System and here I am.\"\n\n\n Dazedly, the mechanic took off his greasy cap, laid it carefully on the\n desk, reached out for a spacesuit that hung from a wall hook.\n\n\n \"Afraid this job might take a while,\" he said. \"Especially if we have\n to wait for parts. Have to get them in from Titan City. Why don't you\n go over to the\nInn\n. Tell Moe I sent you. They'll treat you right.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" said Meek, \"but there's something else I'm wondering\n about. There was another sign out there. Something about educated bugs.\"",
"\"Sure,\" said Gus. \"Old Gus Hamilton. Grow the finest dog-gone radiation\n moss you ever clapped your eyes on.\"\n\n\n \"Then you're the gentleman who has bugs,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"Now, look here,\" warned Gus, \"you watch what you say or I'll hang one\n on you.\"\n\n\n \"He means your rock bugs,\" Moe explained, hastily.\n\n\n \"Oh, them,\" said Gus.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Meek, \"I'm interested in them. I'd like to see them.\"",
"A bit bewildered, but determined not to show it, Meek swung away from\n the sign-post and gravely regarded the settlement. On the chart it was\n indicated by a fairly sizeable dot, but that was merely a matter of\n comparison. Out Saturn-way even the tiniest outpost assumes importance\n far beyond its size.\n\n\n The slab of rock was no more than five miles across, perhaps even\n less. Here in its approximate center, were two buildings, both of\n almost identical construction, semi-spherical and metal. Out here, Meek\n realized, shelter was the thing. Architecture merely for architecture's\n sake was still a long way off.\n\n\n One of the buildings was the repair shop which the sign advertised.\n The other, according to the crudely painted legend smeared above its\n entrance lock, was the\nSaturn Inn\n.\n\n\n The rest of the rock was landing field, pure and simple. Blasters had\n leveled off the humps and irregularities so spaceships could sit down.",
"\"Oh, them,\" said the mechanic. \"They belong to Gus Hamilton. Maybe\n belong ain't the right word because they were on the rock before Gus\n took over. Anyhow, Gus is mighty proud of them, although at times they\n sure run him ragged. First year they almost drove him loopy trying to\n figure out what kind of game they were playing.\"\n\n\n \"Game?\" asked Meek, wondering if he was being hoaxed.\n\n\n \"Sure, game. Like checkers. Only it ain't. Not chess, neither. Even\n worse than that. Bugs dig themselves a batch of holes, then choose up\n sides and play for hours. About the time Gus would think he had it\n figured out, they'd change the rules and throw him off again.\"\n\n\n \"That doesn't make sense,\" protested Meek.",
"And because Earth needed the moss to cure a dozen maladies and because\n it would grow nowhere else but here on the Inner Ring, men squatted\n on the crazy swirl of spacial boulders that made up the ring. Men\n like Hamilton, living on rocks that bucked and heaved along their\n orbits like chips riding the crest of a raging flood. Men who endured\n loneliness, dared death when crunching orbits intersected or, when\n rickety spacecraft flared, who went mad with nothing to do, with the\n mockery of space before them.\n\n\n Meek shrugged his shoulders, almost upsetting himself.\nThe bugs had started the game and Meek craned forward cautiously,\n watching eagerly, stylus poised above the notebook.\n\n\n Crawling clumsily, the tiny insect-like creatures moved about, solemnly\n popping in and out of holes.",
"\"Got that all fixed up,\" said Gus. \"You come back with me and I'll let\n you have a pair of stilts.\"\n\n\n \"Stilts?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Wooden stilts. Them danged fool bugs don't know what wood is.\n Seem to be scared of it, sort of. You can walk right among them if you\n want to, long as you're walking on the stilts.\"\n\n\n Meek gulped. He could imagine what stilt walking would be like in a\n place where gravity was no more than the faintest whisper.\nIII\n\n\n The bugs had dug a new set of holes, much after the manner of a Chinese\n checker board, and now were settling down into their respective places\n preparatory to the start of another game.",
"He pawed and kicked at space, but still floated down, course unchanged.\n He struck and bounced, struck and bounced again.\n\n\n On the fourth bounce he managed to hook his fingers around a tiny\n projection of the surface. Fighting desperately, he regained his feet.\n\n\n Something scurried across the face of his helmet and he lifted his hand\n before him. It was covered with the bugs.\n\n\n Fumbling desperately, he snapped on the rocket motor of his suit, shot\n out into space, heading for the rock where the lights from the ports of\n Hamilton's shack blinked with the weaving of the rock.\n\n\n Oliver Meek shut his eyes and groaned.\n\n\n \"Gus will give me hell for this,\" he told himself.\nGus shook the small wooden box thoughtfully, listening to the frantic\n scurrying within it.",
"\"That would be awful,\" agreed Meek.\n\n\n \"Wouldn't it, though,\" declared Gus.\n\n\n Meek squinted his eyes and pounced on the floor, scrabbling on hands\n and knees after a scurrying thing that twinkled in the lamplight.\n\n\n \"Got him,\" yelped Meek, scooping the shining mote up in his hand.\n\n\n Gus inched the lid of the wooden box open. Meek rose and popped the bug\n inside.\n\n\n \"That makes twenty-eight of them,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"I told you,\" Gus accused him, \"that we hadn't got them all. You better\n take another good look at your suit. The danged things burrow right\n into solid metal and pull the hole in after them, seems like. Sneakiest\n cusses in the whole dang system. Just like chiggers back on Earth.\"",
"\"I ran into a swarm of pebbles,\" Meek confessed. \"Not much more than\n dust, really, but the screen couldn't stop it all.\"\n\n\n He fumbled his hands self-consciously. \"Awkward of me,\" he said.\n\n\n \"It happens to the best of them,\" the mechanic consoled. \"Saturn sweeps\n in clouds of the stuff. Thicker than hell when you reach the Rings.\n Lots of ships pull in with punctures. Won't take no time.\"\n\n\n Meek cleared his throat uneasily. \"I'm afraid it's more than a\n puncture. A pebble got into the instruments. Washed out some of them.\"\n\n\n The mechanic clucked sympathetically. \"You're lucky. Tough job to\n bring in a ship without all the instruments. Must have a honey of a\n navigator.\""
],
[
"\"Games, eh?\" said Gus. \"Maybe you got something, after all. Maybe we\n could fix up some kind of game....\"\n\n\n \"Forget it, Gus,\" warned Moe. \"If you're thinking of energy guns at\n fifty paces, it's out. Miss Perkins won't stand for anything like that.\"\nGus wiped his whiskers and looked hurt. \"Nothing of the sort,\" he\n denied. \"Dang it, you must think I ain't got no sportsmanship at all. I\n was thinking of a real sport. A game they play back on Earth and Mars.\n Read about it in my papers. Follow the teams, I do. Always wanted to\n see a game, but never did.\"\n\n\n Miss Perkins beamed. \"What game is it, Mr. Hamilton?\"\n\n\n \"Space polo,\" said Gus.\n\n\n \"Why, how wonderful,\" simpered Miss Perkins. \"And you boys have the\n spaceships to play it with.\"",
"\"That would be awful,\" agreed Meek.\n\n\n \"Wouldn't it, though,\" declared Gus.\n\n\n Meek squinted his eyes and pounced on the floor, scrabbling on hands\n and knees after a scurrying thing that twinkled in the lamplight.\n\n\n \"Got him,\" yelped Meek, scooping the shining mote up in his hand.\n\n\n Gus inched the lid of the wooden box open. Meek rose and popped the bug\n inside.\n\n\n \"That makes twenty-eight of them,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"I told you,\" Gus accused him, \"that we hadn't got them all. You better\n take another good look at your suit. The danged things burrow right\n into solid metal and pull the hole in after them, seems like. Sneakiest\n cusses in the whole dang system. Just like chiggers back on Earth.\"",
"He pawed and kicked at space, but still floated down, course unchanged.\n He struck and bounced, struck and bounced again.\n\n\n On the fourth bounce he managed to hook his fingers around a tiny\n projection of the surface. Fighting desperately, he regained his feet.\n\n\n Something scurried across the face of his helmet and he lifted his hand\n before him. It was covered with the bugs.\n\n\n Fumbling desperately, he snapped on the rocket motor of his suit, shot\n out into space, heading for the rock where the lights from the ports of\n Hamilton's shack blinked with the weaving of the rock.\n\n\n Oliver Meek shut his eyes and groaned.\n\n\n \"Gus will give me hell for this,\" he told himself.\nGus shook the small wooden box thoughtfully, listening to the frantic\n scurrying within it.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe sign read:\nAtomic Motors Repaired. Busted\n \nPlates Patched Up. Rocket Tubes\n \nRelined. Wheeze In, Whiz Out!\nIt added, as an afterthought, in shaky, inexpert lettering:\nWe Fix Anything.\nMr. Oliver Meek stared owlishly at the sign, which hung from an arm\n attached to a metal standard sunk in solid rock. A second sign was\n wired to the standard just below the metal arm, but its legend was\n faint, almost illegible. Meek blinked at it through thick-lensed\n spectacles, finally deciphered its scrawl:\nAsk About Educated Bugs.",
"\"I ran into a swarm of pebbles,\" Meek confessed. \"Not much more than\n dust, really, but the screen couldn't stop it all.\"\n\n\n He fumbled his hands self-consciously. \"Awkward of me,\" he said.\n\n\n \"It happens to the best of them,\" the mechanic consoled. \"Saturn sweeps\n in clouds of the stuff. Thicker than hell when you reach the Rings.\n Lots of ships pull in with punctures. Won't take no time.\"\n\n\n Meek cleared his throat uneasily. \"I'm afraid it's more than a\n puncture. A pebble got into the instruments. Washed out some of them.\"\n\n\n The mechanic clucked sympathetically. \"You're lucky. Tough job to\n bring in a ship without all the instruments. Must have a honey of a\n navigator.\"",
"Reaching the repair shop's entrance lock, he braced himself solidly to\n keep his balance, reached out and pressed a buzzer. Swiftly the lock\n spun outward and a moment later Meek had passed through the entrance\n vault and stepped into the office.\n\n\n A dungareed mechanic sat tilted in a chair against a wall, feet on the\n desk, a greasy cap pushed back on his head.\n\n\n Meek stamped his feet gratefully, pleased at feeling Earth gravity\n under him again. He lifted the hinged helmet of his suit back on his\n shoulders.",
"\"See them,\" said Gus. \"Mister, you can have them if you want them.\n Drove me out of house and home, they did. They're dippy over metal. Any\n kind of metal, but alloys especially. Eat the stuff. They'll tromp you\n to death heading for a spaceship. Got so I had to move over to another\n rock to live. Tried to fight it out with them, but they whipped me pure\n and simple. Moved out and let them have the place after they started to\n eat my shack right out from underneath my feet.\"\n\n\n Meek looked crestfallen.\n\n\n \"Can't get near them, then,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Sure you can,\" said Gus. \"Why not?\"\n\n\n \"Well, a spacesuit's metal and....\"",
"\"And that ain't all,\" said Moe, warming to the subject. \"Those crates\n you guys got wouldn't last out the first chukker. Most of them would\n just naturally fall apart the first sharp turn they made. You can't\n play polo in ships tied up with haywire. Those broomsticks you\n ring-rats ride around on are so used to second rate fuel they'd split\n wide open first squirt of high test stuff you gave them.\"\n\n\n The inner locks grated open and a man stepped through into the room.\n\n\n \"You're prejudiced,\" Gus told Moe. \"You just don't like space polo,\n that is all. You ain't got no blueblood in you. We'll leave it up to\n this man here. We'll ask his opinion of it.\"\n\n\n The man flipped back his helmet, revealing a head thatched by white\n hair and dominated by a pair of outsize spectacles.",
"Two ships now were on the field, pulled up close against the repair\n shop. One, Meek noticed, belonged to the Solar Health and Welfare\n Department, the other to the Galactic Pharmaceutical Corporation.\n The Galactic ship was a freighter, ponderous and slow. It was here,\n Meek knew, to take on a cargo of radiation moss. But the other was a\n puzzler. Meek wrinkled his brow and blinked his eyes, trying to figure\n out what a welfare ship would be doing in this remote corner of the\n Solar System.\n\n\n Slowly and carefully, Meek clumped toward the squat repair shop. Once\n or twice he stumbled, hoping fervently he wouldn't get the feet of his\n cumbersome spacesuit all tangled up. The gravity was slight, next to\n non-existent, and one who wasn't used to it had to take things easy and\n remember where he was.",
"Comfortably braced against the upjutting of stone, Meek dug into the\n pouch of his space gear, brought out a notebook and stylus. Flipping\n the pages, he stared, frowning, at the diagrams that covered them.\n\n\n None of the diagrams made sense. They showed the patterns of three\n other boards and the moves that had been made by the bugs in playing\n out the game. Apparently, in each case, the game had been finished.\n Which, Meek knew, should have meant that some solution had been\n reached, some point won, some advantage gained.\n\n\n But so far as Meek could see from study of the diagrams there was not\n even a purpose or a problem, let alone a solution or a point.\n\n\n The whole thing was squirrely. But, Meek told himself, it fitted in.\n The whole Saturnian system was wacky. The rings, for example. Debris of\n a moon smashed up by Saturn's pull? Sweepings of space? No one knew.",
"And because Earth needed the moss to cure a dozen maladies and because\n it would grow nowhere else but here on the Inner Ring, men squatted\n on the crazy swirl of spacial boulders that made up the ring. Men\n like Hamilton, living on rocks that bucked and heaved along their\n orbits like chips riding the crest of a raging flood. Men who endured\n loneliness, dared death when crunching orbits intersected or, when\n rickety spacecraft flared, who went mad with nothing to do, with the\n mockery of space before them.\n\n\n Meek shrugged his shoulders, almost upsetting himself.\nThe bugs had started the game and Meek craned forward cautiously,\n watching eagerly, stylus poised above the notebook.\n\n\n Crawling clumsily, the tiny insect-like creatures moved about, solemnly\n popping in and out of holes.",
"\"Stranger,\" declared the mechanic, solemnly, \"there ain't nothing\n about them bugs that make sense. Gus' rock is the only one they're on.\n Gus thinks maybe the rock don't even belong to the Solar system. Thinks\n maybe it's a hunk of stone from some other solar system. Figures maybe\n it crossed space somehow and was captured by Saturn, sucked into the\n Ring. That would explain why it's the only one that has the bugs. They\n come along with it, see.\"\n\n\n \"This Gus Hamilton,\" said Meek. \"I'd like to see him. Where could I\n find him?\"",
"The inner door of the entrance lock grated open and a spacesuited\n figure limped into the room. The spacesuit visor snapped up and a brush\n of grey whiskers spouted into view.\n\n\n It was Gus Hamilton.\n\n\n He glared at Moe. \"What in tarnation is all this foolishness?\" he\n demanded. \"Got your message, I did, and here I am. But it better be\n important.\"\n\n\n He hobbled to the bar. Moe reached for a bottle and shoved it toward\n him, keeping out of reach.\n\n\n \"Have some trouble?\" he asked, trying to be casual.",
"\"You are the gentleman who can fix things?\" he asked the mechanic.\nThe mechanic stared. Here was no hell-for-leather freighter pilot, no\n be-whiskered roamer of the outer orbits. Meek's hair was white and\n stuck out in uncombed tufts in a dozen directions. His skin was pale.\n His blue eyes looked watery behind the thick lenses that rode his nose.\n Even the bulky spacesuit failed to hide his stooped shoulders and\n slight frame.\n\n\n The mechanic said nothing.\n\n\n Meek tried again. \"I saw the sign. It said you could fix anything. So\n I....\"\n\n\n The mechanic shook himself.\n\n\n \"Sure,\" he agreed, still slightly dazed. \"Sure I can fix you up. What\n you got?\"\n\n\n He swung his feet off the desk.",
"A mathematical problem!\n\n\n His breath gurgled in his throat.\n\n\n He knew it now! He should have known it all the time. But the mechanic\n had talked about the bugs playing games and so had Hamilton. That had\n thrown him off.\n\n\n Games! Those bugs weren't playing any game. They were solving\n mathematical equations!\n\n\n Meek leaned forward to watch, forgetting where he was. One of the\n stilts slipped out of position and Meek felt himself start to fall. He\n dropped the notebook and frantically clawed at empty space.\n\n\n The other stilt went, then, and Meek found himself floating slowly\n downward, gravity weak but inexorable. His struggle to retain his\n balance had flung him forward, away from the face of the rock and he\n was falling directly over the board on which the bugs were arrayed.",
"For a mile or more across the flat surface of the rock that was Gus\n Hamilton's moss garden, ran a string of such game-boards, each one\n different, each one having served as the scene of a now-completed game.\n\n\n Oliver Meek cautiously wedged his stilts into two pitted pockets of\n rock, eased himself slowly and warily against the face of a knob of\n stone that jutted from the surface.\n\n\n Even in his youth, Meek remembered, he never had been any great shakes\n on stilts. Here, on this bucking, weaving rock, with slick surfaces and\n practically no gravity, a man had to be an expert to handle them. Meek\n knew now he was no expert. A half-dozen dents in his space armor was\n ample proof of that.",
"\"Got that all fixed up,\" said Gus. \"You come back with me and I'll let\n you have a pair of stilts.\"\n\n\n \"Stilts?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Wooden stilts. Them danged fool bugs don't know what wood is.\n Seem to be scared of it, sort of. You can walk right among them if you\n want to, long as you're walking on the stilts.\"\n\n\n Meek gulped. He could imagine what stilt walking would be like in a\n place where gravity was no more than the faintest whisper.\nIII\n\n\n The bugs had dug a new set of holes, much after the manner of a Chinese\n checker board, and now were settling down into their respective places\n preparatory to the start of another game.",
"\"The sporting event, ladies and gentlemen, that is being talked up and\n down the streets of Earth tonight, is one that will be played here\n in our own Saturnian system. A space polo game. To be played by two\n unknown, pick-up, amateur teams down in the Inner Ring. Most of the\n men have never played polo before. Few if any of them have even seen a\n game. There may have been some of them who didn't, at first, know what\n it was.",
"\"Trouble! Hell, yes!\" blustered Gus. \"But I ain't the only one that's\n going to have trouble. Somebody sneaked over and stole the injector out\n of my space crate. Had to borrow Hank's to get over here. But I know\n who it was. There ain't but one other ring-rat got a rocket my injector\n will fit.\"\n\n\n \"Bud Craney,\" said Moe. It was no secret. Every man in the two sectors\n of the Ring knew just exactly what kind of spacecraft the other had.\n\n\n \"That's right,\" said Gus, \"and I'm fixing to go over into Thirty-seven\n and yank Bud up by the roots.\"\n\n\n He took a jolt of liquor. \"Yes, sir, I sure aim to crucify him.\"\n\n\n His eyes lighted on Miss Henrietta Perkins.\n\n\n \"Visitor?\" he asked.",
"\"But they're going to play it. The men who ride those bucking rocks\n that make up the Inner Ring will go out into space in their rickety\n ships and fight it out. And ladies and gentlemen, when I say fight it\n out, I really mean fight it out. For the game, it seems, will be a sort\n of tournament, the final battle in a feud that has been going on in\n the Ring for years. No one knows what started the feud. It has gotten\n so it really doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is that when\n men from sector Twenty-three meet those from sector Thirty-seven, the\n feud is taken up again. But that is at an end now. In a few days the\n feud will be played out to its bitter end when the ships from the Inner\n Ring go out into space to play that most dangerous of all sports, space\n polo. For the outcome of that game will decide, forever, the supremacy\n of one of the two sectors.\""
],
[
"Mr. Meek Plays Polo\nBy CLIFFORD D. SIMAK\nMr. Meek was having his troubles. First, the\neducated\nbugs worried him; then the\n\n welfare worker tried to stop the Ring Rats' feud\n\n by enlisting his aid. And now, he was a drafted\n\n space-polo player—a fortune bet on his ability\n\n at a game he had never played in his cloistered life.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"\"I haven't got a navigator,\" Meek said, quietly.\n\n\n The mechanic stared at him, eyes popping. \"You mean you brought it in\n alone? No one with you?\"\n\n\n Meek gulped and nodded. \"Dead reckoning,\" he said.\n\n\n The mechanic glowed with sudden admiration. \"I don't know who you are,\n mister,\" he declared, \"but whoever you are, you're the best damn pilot\n that ever took to space.\"\n\n\n \"Really I'm not,\" said Meek. \"I haven't done much piloting, you see. Up\n until just a while ago, I never had left Earth. Bookkeeper for Lunar\n Exports.\"\n\n\n \"Bookkeeper!\" yelped the mechanic. \"How come a bookkeeper can handle a\n ship like that?\"\n\n\n \"I learned it,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"You learned it?\"",
"\"My opinion, sir,\" said Oliver Meek, \"seldom amounts to much.\"\n\n\n \"All we want to know,\" Gus told him, \"is what you think of space polo.\"\n\n\n \"Space polo,\" declared Meek, \"is a noble game. It requires expert\n piloting, a fine sense of timing and....\"\n\n\n \"There, you see!\" whooped Gus, triumphantly.\n\n\n \"I saw a game once,\" Meek volunteered.\n\n\n \"Swell,\" bellowed Gus. \"We'll have you coach our team.\"\n\n\n \"But,\" protested Meek, \"but ... but.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Mr. Hamilton,\" exulted Miss Perkins, \"you are so wonderful. You\n think of everything.\"\n\n\n \"Hamilton!\" squeaked Meek.",
"\"You are the gentleman who can fix things?\" he asked the mechanic.\nThe mechanic stared. Here was no hell-for-leather freighter pilot, no\n be-whiskered roamer of the outer orbits. Meek's hair was white and\n stuck out in uncombed tufts in a dozen directions. His skin was pale.\n His blue eyes looked watery behind the thick lenses that rode his nose.\n Even the bulky spacesuit failed to hide his stooped shoulders and\n slight frame.\n\n\n The mechanic said nothing.\n\n\n Meek tried again. \"I saw the sign. It said you could fix anything. So\n I....\"\n\n\n The mechanic shook himself.\n\n\n \"Sure,\" he agreed, still slightly dazed. \"Sure I can fix you up. What\n you got?\"\n\n\n He swung his feet off the desk.",
"\"Sure,\" said Gus. \"Old Gus Hamilton. Grow the finest dog-gone radiation\n moss you ever clapped your eyes on.\"\n\n\n \"Then you're the gentleman who has bugs,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"Now, look here,\" warned Gus, \"you watch what you say or I'll hang one\n on you.\"\n\n\n \"He means your rock bugs,\" Moe explained, hastily.\n\n\n \"Oh, them,\" said Gus.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Meek, \"I'm interested in them. I'd like to see them.\"",
"\"Oh, them,\" said the mechanic. \"They belong to Gus Hamilton. Maybe\n belong ain't the right word because they were on the rock before Gus\n took over. Anyhow, Gus is mighty proud of them, although at times they\n sure run him ragged. First year they almost drove him loopy trying to\n figure out what kind of game they were playing.\"\n\n\n \"Game?\" asked Meek, wondering if he was being hoaxed.\n\n\n \"Sure, game. Like checkers. Only it ain't. Not chess, neither. Even\n worse than that. Bugs dig themselves a batch of holes, then choose up\n sides and play for hours. About the time Gus would think he had it\n figured out, they'd change the rules and throw him off again.\"\n\n\n \"That doesn't make sense,\" protested Meek.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe sign read:\nAtomic Motors Repaired. Busted\n \nPlates Patched Up. Rocket Tubes\n \nRelined. Wheeze In, Whiz Out!\nIt added, as an afterthought, in shaky, inexpert lettering:\nWe Fix Anything.\nMr. Oliver Meek stared owlishly at the sign, which hung from an arm\n attached to a metal standard sunk in solid rock. A second sign was\n wired to the standard just below the metal arm, but its legend was\n faint, almost illegible. Meek blinked at it through thick-lensed\n spectacles, finally deciphered its scrawl:\nAsk About Educated Bugs.",
"\"Got that all fixed up,\" said Gus. \"You come back with me and I'll let\n you have a pair of stilts.\"\n\n\n \"Stilts?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Wooden stilts. Them danged fool bugs don't know what wood is.\n Seem to be scared of it, sort of. You can walk right among them if you\n want to, long as you're walking on the stilts.\"\n\n\n Meek gulped. He could imagine what stilt walking would be like in a\n place where gravity was no more than the faintest whisper.\nIII\n\n\n The bugs had dug a new set of holes, much after the manner of a Chinese\n checker board, and now were settling down into their respective places\n preparatory to the start of another game.",
"\"But they could fight with something besides guns,\" said the welfare\n lady, a-smirk with righteousness. \"That's why I'm here. To try to get\n them to turn their natural feelings of rivalry into less deadly and\n disturbing channels. Direct their energies into other activities.\"\n\n\n \"Like what?\" asked Moe, fearing the worst.\n\n\n \"Athletic events,\" said Miss Perkins.\n\n\n \"Tin shinny, maybe,\" suggested Moe, trying to be sarcastic.\n\n\n She missed the sarcasm. \"Or spelling contests,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Them fellow can't spell,\" insisted Moe.\n\n\n \"Games of some sort, then. Competitive games.\"\n\n\n \"Now you're talking,\" Moe enthused. \"They take to games. Seven-toed\n Pete with the deuces wild.\"",
"Reaching the repair shop's entrance lock, he braced himself solidly to\n keep his balance, reached out and pressed a buzzer. Swiftly the lock\n spun outward and a moment later Meek had passed through the entrance\n vault and stepped into the office.\n\n\n A dungareed mechanic sat tilted in a chair against a wall, feet on the\n desk, a greasy cap pushed back on his head.\n\n\n Meek stamped his feet gratefully, pleased at feeling Earth gravity\n under him again. He lifted the hinged helmet of his suit back on his\n shoulders.",
"Comfortably braced against the upjutting of stone, Meek dug into the\n pouch of his space gear, brought out a notebook and stylus. Flipping\n the pages, he stared, frowning, at the diagrams that covered them.\n\n\n None of the diagrams made sense. They showed the patterns of three\n other boards and the moves that had been made by the bugs in playing\n out the game. Apparently, in each case, the game had been finished.\n Which, Meek knew, should have meant that some solution had been\n reached, some point won, some advantage gained.\n\n\n But so far as Meek could see from study of the diagrams there was not\n even a purpose or a problem, let alone a solution or a point.\n\n\n The whole thing was squirrely. But, Meek told himself, it fitted in.\n The whole Saturnian system was wacky. The rings, for example. Debris of\n a moon smashed up by Saturn's pull? Sweepings of space? No one knew.",
"\"Stranger,\" declared the mechanic, solemnly, \"there ain't nothing\n about them bugs that make sense. Gus' rock is the only one they're on.\n Gus thinks maybe the rock don't even belong to the Solar system. Thinks\n maybe it's a hunk of stone from some other solar system. Figures maybe\n it crossed space somehow and was captured by Saturn, sucked into the\n Ring. That would explain why it's the only one that has the bugs. They\n come along with it, see.\"\n\n\n \"This Gus Hamilton,\" said Meek. \"I'd like to see him. Where could I\n find him?\"",
"Behind him Saturn filled a tenth of the sky, a yellow, lemon-tinged\n ball, streaked here and there with faint crimson lines and blotched\n with angry, bright green patches.\n\n\n To right and left glinted the whirling, twisting, tumbling rocks that\n made up the Inner Ring, while arcing above the horizon opposed to\n Saturn were the spangled glistening rainbows of the other rings.\n\n\n \"Like dewdrops in the black of space,\" Meek mumbled to himself. But he\n immediately felt ashamed of himself for growing poetic. This sector of\n space, he knew, was not in the least poetic. It was hard and savage and\n as he thought about that, he hitched up his gun belt and struck out\n with a firmer tread that almost upset him. After that, he tried to\n think of nothing except keeping his two feet under him.",
"\"That would be awful,\" agreed Meek.\n\n\n \"Wouldn't it, though,\" declared Gus.\n\n\n Meek squinted his eyes and pounced on the floor, scrabbling on hands\n and knees after a scurrying thing that twinkled in the lamplight.\n\n\n \"Got him,\" yelped Meek, scooping the shining mote up in his hand.\n\n\n Gus inched the lid of the wooden box open. Meek rose and popped the bug\n inside.\n\n\n \"That makes twenty-eight of them,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"I told you,\" Gus accused him, \"that we hadn't got them all. You better\n take another good look at your suit. The danged things burrow right\n into solid metal and pull the hole in after them, seems like. Sneakiest\n cusses in the whole dang system. Just like chiggers back on Earth.\"",
"\"See them,\" said Gus. \"Mister, you can have them if you want them.\n Drove me out of house and home, they did. They're dippy over metal. Any\n kind of metal, but alloys especially. Eat the stuff. They'll tromp you\n to death heading for a spaceship. Got so I had to move over to another\n rock to live. Tried to fight it out with them, but they whipped me pure\n and simple. Moved out and let them have the place after they started to\n eat my shack right out from underneath my feet.\"\n\n\n Meek looked crestfallen.\n\n\n \"Can't get near them, then,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Sure you can,\" said Gus. \"Why not?\"\n\n\n \"Well, a spacesuit's metal and....\"",
"And because Earth needed the moss to cure a dozen maladies and because\n it would grow nowhere else but here on the Inner Ring, men squatted\n on the crazy swirl of spacial boulders that made up the ring. Men\n like Hamilton, living on rocks that bucked and heaved along their\n orbits like chips riding the crest of a raging flood. Men who endured\n loneliness, dared death when crunching orbits intersected or, when\n rickety spacecraft flared, who went mad with nothing to do, with the\n mockery of space before them.\n\n\n Meek shrugged his shoulders, almost upsetting himself.\nThe bugs had started the game and Meek craned forward cautiously,\n watching eagerly, stylus poised above the notebook.\n\n\n Crawling clumsily, the tiny insect-like creatures moved about, solemnly\n popping in and out of holes.",
"For a mile or more across the flat surface of the rock that was Gus\n Hamilton's moss garden, ran a string of such game-boards, each one\n different, each one having served as the scene of a now-completed game.\n\n\n Oliver Meek cautiously wedged his stilts into two pitted pockets of\n rock, eased himself slowly and warily against the face of a knob of\n stone that jutted from the surface.\n\n\n Even in his youth, Meek remembered, he never had been any great shakes\n on stilts. Here, on this bucking, weaving rock, with slick surfaces and\n practically no gravity, a man had to be an expert to handle them. Meek\n knew now he was no expert. A half-dozen dents in his space armor was\n ample proof of that.",
"If there were opposing sides ... and if it were a game, there'd have\n to be ... they didn't seem to alternate the moves. Although, Meek\n admitted, certain rules and conditions which he had failed to note or\n recognize, might determine the number and order of moves allowed each\n side.\n\n\n Suddenly there was confusion on the board. For a moment a half-dozen of\n the bugs raced madly about, as if seeking the proper hole to occupy.\n Then, as suddenly, all movement had ceased. And in another moment, they\n were on the move again, orderly again, but retracing their movements,\n going back several plays beyond the point of confusion.\n\n\n Just as one would do when one made a mistake working a mathematical\n problem ... going back to the point of error and going on again from\n there.\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be....\" Mr. Meek said.\n\n\n Meek stiffened and the stylus floated out of his hand, settled softly\n on the rock below.",
"\"Sure, from a book. I saved my money and I studied. I always wanted to\n see the Solar System and here I am.\"\n\n\n Dazedly, the mechanic took off his greasy cap, laid it carefully on the\n desk, reached out for a spacesuit that hung from a wall hook.\n\n\n \"Afraid this job might take a while,\" he said. \"Especially if we have\n to wait for parts. Have to get them in from Titan City. Why don't you\n go over to the\nInn\n. Tell Moe I sent you. They'll treat you right.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" said Meek, \"but there's something else I'm wondering\n about. There was another sign out there. Something about educated bugs.\"",
"\"I ran into a swarm of pebbles,\" Meek confessed. \"Not much more than\n dust, really, but the screen couldn't stop it all.\"\n\n\n He fumbled his hands self-consciously. \"Awkward of me,\" he said.\n\n\n \"It happens to the best of them,\" the mechanic consoled. \"Saturn sweeps\n in clouds of the stuff. Thicker than hell when you reach the Rings.\n Lots of ships pull in with punctures. Won't take no time.\"\n\n\n Meek cleared his throat uneasily. \"I'm afraid it's more than a\n puncture. A pebble got into the instruments. Washed out some of them.\"\n\n\n The mechanic clucked sympathetically. \"You're lucky. Tough job to\n bring in a ship without all the instruments. Must have a honey of a\n navigator.\""
],
[
"\"Oh, them,\" said the mechanic. \"They belong to Gus Hamilton. Maybe\n belong ain't the right word because they were on the rock before Gus\n took over. Anyhow, Gus is mighty proud of them, although at times they\n sure run him ragged. First year they almost drove him loopy trying to\n figure out what kind of game they were playing.\"\n\n\n \"Game?\" asked Meek, wondering if he was being hoaxed.\n\n\n \"Sure, game. Like checkers. Only it ain't. Not chess, neither. Even\n worse than that. Bugs dig themselves a batch of holes, then choose up\n sides and play for hours. About the time Gus would think he had it\n figured out, they'd change the rules and throw him off again.\"\n\n\n \"That doesn't make sense,\" protested Meek.",
"\"Got that all fixed up,\" said Gus. \"You come back with me and I'll let\n you have a pair of stilts.\"\n\n\n \"Stilts?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Wooden stilts. Them danged fool bugs don't know what wood is.\n Seem to be scared of it, sort of. You can walk right among them if you\n want to, long as you're walking on the stilts.\"\n\n\n Meek gulped. He could imagine what stilt walking would be like in a\n place where gravity was no more than the faintest whisper.\nIII\n\n\n The bugs had dug a new set of holes, much after the manner of a Chinese\n checker board, and now were settling down into their respective places\n preparatory to the start of another game.",
"\"That would be awful,\" agreed Meek.\n\n\n \"Wouldn't it, though,\" declared Gus.\n\n\n Meek squinted his eyes and pounced on the floor, scrabbling on hands\n and knees after a scurrying thing that twinkled in the lamplight.\n\n\n \"Got him,\" yelped Meek, scooping the shining mote up in his hand.\n\n\n Gus inched the lid of the wooden box open. Meek rose and popped the bug\n inside.\n\n\n \"That makes twenty-eight of them,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"I told you,\" Gus accused him, \"that we hadn't got them all. You better\n take another good look at your suit. The danged things burrow right\n into solid metal and pull the hole in after them, seems like. Sneakiest\n cusses in the whole dang system. Just like chiggers back on Earth.\"",
"He pawed and kicked at space, but still floated down, course unchanged.\n He struck and bounced, struck and bounced again.\n\n\n On the fourth bounce he managed to hook his fingers around a tiny\n projection of the surface. Fighting desperately, he regained his feet.\n\n\n Something scurried across the face of his helmet and he lifted his hand\n before him. It was covered with the bugs.\n\n\n Fumbling desperately, he snapped on the rocket motor of his suit, shot\n out into space, heading for the rock where the lights from the ports of\n Hamilton's shack blinked with the weaving of the rock.\n\n\n Oliver Meek shut his eyes and groaned.\n\n\n \"Gus will give me hell for this,\" he told himself.\nGus shook the small wooden box thoughtfully, listening to the frantic\n scurrying within it.",
"\"Sure,\" said Gus. \"Old Gus Hamilton. Grow the finest dog-gone radiation\n moss you ever clapped your eyes on.\"\n\n\n \"Then you're the gentleman who has bugs,\" said Meek.\n\n\n \"Now, look here,\" warned Gus, \"you watch what you say or I'll hang one\n on you.\"\n\n\n \"He means your rock bugs,\" Moe explained, hastily.\n\n\n \"Oh, them,\" said Gus.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Meek, \"I'm interested in them. I'd like to see them.\"",
"And because Earth needed the moss to cure a dozen maladies and because\n it would grow nowhere else but here on the Inner Ring, men squatted\n on the crazy swirl of spacial boulders that made up the ring. Men\n like Hamilton, living on rocks that bucked and heaved along their\n orbits like chips riding the crest of a raging flood. Men who endured\n loneliness, dared death when crunching orbits intersected or, when\n rickety spacecraft flared, who went mad with nothing to do, with the\n mockery of space before them.\n\n\n Meek shrugged his shoulders, almost upsetting himself.\nThe bugs had started the game and Meek craned forward cautiously,\n watching eagerly, stylus poised above the notebook.\n\n\n Crawling clumsily, the tiny insect-like creatures moved about, solemnly\n popping in and out of holes.",
"A mathematical problem!\n\n\n His breath gurgled in his throat.\n\n\n He knew it now! He should have known it all the time. But the mechanic\n had talked about the bugs playing games and so had Hamilton. That had\n thrown him off.\n\n\n Games! Those bugs weren't playing any game. They were solving\n mathematical equations!\n\n\n Meek leaned forward to watch, forgetting where he was. One of the\n stilts slipped out of position and Meek felt himself start to fall. He\n dropped the notebook and frantically clawed at empty space.\n\n\n The other stilt went, then, and Meek found himself floating slowly\n downward, gravity weak but inexorable. His struggle to retain his\n balance had flung him forward, away from the face of the rock and he\n was falling directly over the board on which the bugs were arrayed.",
"If there were opposing sides ... and if it were a game, there'd have\n to be ... they didn't seem to alternate the moves. Although, Meek\n admitted, certain rules and conditions which he had failed to note or\n recognize, might determine the number and order of moves allowed each\n side.\n\n\n Suddenly there was confusion on the board. For a moment a half-dozen of\n the bugs raced madly about, as if seeking the proper hole to occupy.\n Then, as suddenly, all movement had ceased. And in another moment, they\n were on the move again, orderly again, but retracing their movements,\n going back several plays beyond the point of confusion.\n\n\n Just as one would do when one made a mistake working a mathematical\n problem ... going back to the point of error and going on again from\n there.\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be....\" Mr. Meek said.\n\n\n Meek stiffened and the stylus floated out of his hand, settled softly\n on the rock below.",
"\"Stranger,\" declared the mechanic, solemnly, \"there ain't nothing\n about them bugs that make sense. Gus' rock is the only one they're on.\n Gus thinks maybe the rock don't even belong to the Solar system. Thinks\n maybe it's a hunk of stone from some other solar system. Figures maybe\n it crossed space somehow and was captured by Saturn, sucked into the\n Ring. That would explain why it's the only one that has the bugs. They\n come along with it, see.\"\n\n\n \"This Gus Hamilton,\" said Meek. \"I'd like to see him. Where could I\n find him?\"",
"\"Chiggers,\" Meek told him, \"burrow into a person to lay eggs.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe these things do, too,\" Gus contended.\n\n\n The radio on the mantel blared a warning signal, automatically tuning\n in on one of the regular newscasts from Titan City out on Saturn's\n biggest moon.\n\n\n The syrupy, chamber of commerce voice of the announcer was shaky with\n excitement and pride.\n\n\n \"Next week,\" he said, \"the annual Martian-Earth football game will be\n played at Greater New York on Earth. But in the Earth's newspapers\n tonight another story has pushed even that famous classic of the\n sporting world down into secondary place.\"\n\n\n He paused and took a deep breath and his voice practically yodeled with\n delight.",
"\"Sure, from a book. I saved my money and I studied. I always wanted to\n see the Solar System and here I am.\"\n\n\n Dazedly, the mechanic took off his greasy cap, laid it carefully on the\n desk, reached out for a spacesuit that hung from a wall hook.\n\n\n \"Afraid this job might take a while,\" he said. \"Especially if we have\n to wait for parts. Have to get them in from Titan City. Why don't you\n go over to the\nInn\n. Tell Moe I sent you. They'll treat you right.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" said Meek, \"but there's something else I'm wondering\n about. There was another sign out there. Something about educated bugs.\"",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe sign read:\nAtomic Motors Repaired. Busted\n \nPlates Patched Up. Rocket Tubes\n \nRelined. Wheeze In, Whiz Out!\nIt added, as an afterthought, in shaky, inexpert lettering:\nWe Fix Anything.\nMr. Oliver Meek stared owlishly at the sign, which hung from an arm\n attached to a metal standard sunk in solid rock. A second sign was\n wired to the standard just below the metal arm, but its legend was\n faint, almost illegible. Meek blinked at it through thick-lensed\n spectacles, finally deciphered its scrawl:\nAsk About Educated Bugs.",
"\"See them,\" said Gus. \"Mister, you can have them if you want them.\n Drove me out of house and home, they did. They're dippy over metal. Any\n kind of metal, but alloys especially. Eat the stuff. They'll tromp you\n to death heading for a spaceship. Got so I had to move over to another\n rock to live. Tried to fight it out with them, but they whipped me pure\n and simple. Moved out and let them have the place after they started to\n eat my shack right out from underneath my feet.\"\n\n\n Meek looked crestfallen.\n\n\n \"Can't get near them, then,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Sure you can,\" said Gus. \"Why not?\"\n\n\n \"Well, a spacesuit's metal and....\"",
"Comfortably braced against the upjutting of stone, Meek dug into the\n pouch of his space gear, brought out a notebook and stylus. Flipping\n the pages, he stared, frowning, at the diagrams that covered them.\n\n\n None of the diagrams made sense. They showed the patterns of three\n other boards and the moves that had been made by the bugs in playing\n out the game. Apparently, in each case, the game had been finished.\n Which, Meek knew, should have meant that some solution had been\n reached, some point won, some advantage gained.\n\n\n But so far as Meek could see from study of the diagrams there was not\n even a purpose or a problem, let alone a solution or a point.\n\n\n The whole thing was squirrely. But, Meek told himself, it fitted in.\n The whole Saturnian system was wacky. The rings, for example. Debris of\n a moon smashed up by Saturn's pull? Sweepings of space? No one knew.",
"\"And that ain't all,\" said Moe, warming to the subject. \"Those crates\n you guys got wouldn't last out the first chukker. Most of them would\n just naturally fall apart the first sharp turn they made. You can't\n play polo in ships tied up with haywire. Those broomsticks you\n ring-rats ride around on are so used to second rate fuel they'd split\n wide open first squirt of high test stuff you gave them.\"\n\n\n The inner locks grated open and a man stepped through into the room.\n\n\n \"You're prejudiced,\" Gus told Moe. \"You just don't like space polo,\n that is all. You ain't got no blueblood in you. We'll leave it up to\n this man here. We'll ask his opinion of it.\"\n\n\n The man flipped back his helmet, revealing a head thatched by white\n hair and dominated by a pair of outsize spectacles.",
"\"But they're going to play it. The men who ride those bucking rocks\n that make up the Inner Ring will go out into space in their rickety\n ships and fight it out. And ladies and gentlemen, when I say fight it\n out, I really mean fight it out. For the game, it seems, will be a sort\n of tournament, the final battle in a feud that has been going on in\n the Ring for years. No one knows what started the feud. It has gotten\n so it really doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is that when\n men from sector Twenty-three meet those from sector Thirty-seven, the\n feud is taken up again. But that is at an end now. In a few days the\n feud will be played out to its bitter end when the ships from the Inner\n Ring go out into space to play that most dangerous of all sports, space\n polo. For the outcome of that game will decide, forever, the supremacy\n of one of the two sectors.\"",
"Mr. Meek Plays Polo\nBy CLIFFORD D. SIMAK\nMr. Meek was having his troubles. First, the\neducated\nbugs worried him; then the\n\n welfare worker tried to stop the Ring Rats' feud\n\n by enlisting his aid. And now, he was a drafted\n\n space-polo player—a fortune bet on his ability\n\n at a game he had never played in his cloistered life.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"\"You are the gentleman who can fix things?\" he asked the mechanic.\nThe mechanic stared. Here was no hell-for-leather freighter pilot, no\n be-whiskered roamer of the outer orbits. Meek's hair was white and\n stuck out in uncombed tufts in a dozen directions. His skin was pale.\n His blue eyes looked watery behind the thick lenses that rode his nose.\n Even the bulky spacesuit failed to hide his stooped shoulders and\n slight frame.\n\n\n The mechanic said nothing.\n\n\n Meek tried again. \"I saw the sign. It said you could fix anything. So\n I....\"\n\n\n The mechanic shook himself.\n\n\n \"Sure,\" he agreed, still slightly dazed. \"Sure I can fix you up. What\n you got?\"\n\n\n He swung his feet off the desk.",
"\"Games, eh?\" said Gus. \"Maybe you got something, after all. Maybe we\n could fix up some kind of game....\"\n\n\n \"Forget it, Gus,\" warned Moe. \"If you're thinking of energy guns at\n fifty paces, it's out. Miss Perkins won't stand for anything like that.\"\nGus wiped his whiskers and looked hurt. \"Nothing of the sort,\" he\n denied. \"Dang it, you must think I ain't got no sportsmanship at all. I\n was thinking of a real sport. A game they play back on Earth and Mars.\n Read about it in my papers. Follow the teams, I do. Always wanted to\n see a game, but never did.\"\n\n\n Miss Perkins beamed. \"What game is it, Mr. Hamilton?\"\n\n\n \"Space polo,\" said Gus.\n\n\n \"Why, how wonderful,\" simpered Miss Perkins. \"And you boys have the\n spaceships to play it with.\"",
"\"The sporting event, ladies and gentlemen, that is being talked up and\n down the streets of Earth tonight, is one that will be played here\n in our own Saturnian system. A space polo game. To be played by two\n unknown, pick-up, amateur teams down in the Inner Ring. Most of the\n men have never played polo before. Few if any of them have even seen a\n game. There may have been some of them who didn't, at first, know what\n it was."
]
] |
valid
|
51126
|
[
"How many titles does Zen have? Choose the one best answer.",
"Which best describes Zen's powers?",
"Why did the physicist and anthropologist travel to Uxen?",
"Why did the king offer the scientists a palace and servants?",
"Why was the king not a dictator the way his dad had been?",
"What best describes the princess?",
"What does the word squuch mean?",
"Which of the following was not one of Zen's duties as a god?",
"Why did the princess have trouble completing her duties as a servant?"
] |
[
[
"More than eight",
"More than five",
"More than ten",
"More than a dozen"
],
[
"He can only mentally or visibly show up when incense is burned",
"He can only visibly travel and is never present only mentally",
"He can mentally travel any time but can only visibly show up when incense is burned",
"He can mentally and visibly show up anywhere he wants any time"
],
[
"Because they needed a quiet place for research",
"Because they wanted to study Zen",
"Because they wanted to work on nuclear warfare research",
"Because science was banned on Earth"
],
[
"He had to do whatever Earth men told him to",
"He wanted Zen to be able to help with their research",
"He wanted to spy on their research",
"He knew they were religious men"
],
[
"The presence of people from Earth forced him to be more civilized against his will",
"He didn't like the way his dad had been such a barbarian",
"He was only the second king the people had ever had",
"He was too young to be strict"
],
[
"She was beautiful and strongwilled, but not smart",
"She was beautiful, smart, and submissive",
"She was beautiful, smart, and strongwilled",
"She was beautiful and submissive, but not smart"
],
[
"It is an honorable term for people",
"It is a term for foreigners",
"It is a degrading term for people",
"It is a term for scientists"
],
[
"Transporting objects",
"helping with any request that was accompanied by incense",
"helping the people of Uxen for thousands of years",
"garbage collection"
],
[
"She did not want to work for the men",
"Zen refused to help her",
"She did not know how to read",
"She had never cooked Earth food before"
]
] |
[
4,
3,
2,
3,
1,
3,
3,
2,
4
] |
[
0,
1,
1,
1,
1,
0,
0,
1,
1
] |
[
[
"\"We are all equal before Zen,\" Guj said sententiously, making the high\n xa.\n\n\n \"Praise Zen,\" Uxlu and Iximi chanted perfunctorily, bowing low.\n\n\n Iximi, still angry, ordered Guj—who was also high priest—to start\n services. Kindling the incense in the hajen, he began the chant.\n\n\n Of course it was his holiday, but Zen couldn't resist the appeal of\n the incense. Besides he was there anyway, so it was really no trouble,\nno trouble\n, he thought, greedily sniffing the delicious aroma,\nat\n all\n. He materialized a head with seven nostrils so that he was able to\n inhale the incense in one delectable gulp. Then, \"No prayers answered\n on Thursday,\" he said, and disappeared. That would show them!",
"\"Your Will is mine, All-Wise One. And I think You had best materialize\n a few pair of arms as well as Your August and Awe-inspiring\n Countenance, for there is much work to be done.\"\nSince the partitions were thin, Zen and the princess could hear most of\n the conversation in the main room. \"... First thing to do,\" Kendrick's\n voice remarked, \"is find out whether we're permitted to attend one\n of their religious ceremonies, where Zen is said to manifest himself\n actually and not, it is contended, just symbolically....\"\n\n\n \"The stove is here, Almighty,\" the princess suggested, \"not against the\n door where you are pressing Your Divine Ear.\"\n\n\n \"Shhh. What I hear is fraught with import for the future of the planet.\n Moolai Uxen.\"\n\n\n \"Moolai Uxen,\" the princess replied automatically.",
"Making the secular xa, he left the royal pair. Outside, his voice could\n be heard bellowing in the anteroom, \"Has any one of you squuch seen my\n pliers?\"\n\n\n \"There is no need for worry, Venerated Ancestor,\" the princess assured\n the monarch. \"All-Helpful Zen will aid me with my tasks.\"",
"Zen the Erudite was particularly fond of her, for she had been his best\n student in Advanced Theology. She was, moreover, an ardent patriot and\n leader of the underground Moolai (free) Uxen movement, with which Zen\n was more or less in sympathy, since he felt Uxen belonged to him and\n not to the Earthlings. After all, he had been there first.\n\n\n \"\nLet\nourselves be conquered!\" Her father's voice rose to a squeak.\n \"\nLet\nourselves! Nobody asked us—we\nwere\nconquered.\"\n\n\n \"True, but we could at least have essayed our strength against the\n conquerors instead of capitulating like yioch. We could have fought to\n the last man!\"\n\n\n \"A woman is always ready to fight to the last man,\" Guj commented.\n\n\n \"Did you hear that, ancient and revered parent! He called me, a\n princess of the blood, a—a woman!\"",
"\"We don't have Zen teleport animate objects,\" the prime minister\n explained affably. \"Or even inanimate ones if they are fragile.\n For He tends to lose His Temper sometimes when He feels that He is\n overworked—\"\nFeels, indeed!\nZen said to himself—\"and throws things\n about. We cannot reprove Him for His misbehavior. After all, a god is a\n god.\"",
"\"Er—yes. Merely having My Bit of Fun, you know.\" He hastily inspected\n the exterior of the alleged foods. \"There appear to be legends\n inscribed upon the containers. Perchance, were we to read them, they\n might give a clue as to their contents.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Omniscent One,\" the princess exclaimed, \"truly You are Wise and\n Sapient indeed, and it is I who was the fool to have doubted for so\n much as an instant.\"\n\n\n \"Oh you doubted, did you?\" Terrible Zen frowned terribly. \"Well, see\n that it doesn't happen again.\" He had no intention of losing his divine\n authority at this stage of the game.",
"Zen reluctantly conceded to himself that he would have to investigate\n this situation further, if he wanted to retain his reputation for\n omniscience. Sometimes, in an occasional moment of self-doubt, he\n wondered if he weren't too much of a perfectionist, but then he\n rejected the thought as self-sacrilege.\n\n\n Zen dutifully intensified the beam of awareness and returned it to the\n audience chamber where the two strange Earthmen who had come on the\n ship were being ushered into the presence of the king by none other\n than Guj, the venerable prime minister himself.\n\n\n \"Gentlemen,\" Guj beamed, his long white beard vibrating in an excess of\n hospitality, \"His Gracious Majesty will be delighted to receive you at\n once.\"\n\n\n And crossing his wrists in the secular xa, he led the way to where Uxlu\n the Fifteenth was seated in full regalia upon his imposing golden,\n gem-encrusted throne.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nElected a god, Zen the Omnipotent longed\n \nfor supernatural powers—for he was also\n \nZen the All-Put-Upon, a galactic sucker!\nZen the Terrible lay quiescent in the secret retreat which housed his\n corporeal being, all the aspects of his personality wallowing in the\n luxury of a day off. How glad he was that he'd had the forethought to\n stipulate a weekly holiday for himself when first this godhood had\n been thrust upon him, hundreds of centuries before. He'd accepted the\n perquisites of divinity with pleasure then. It was some little time\n before he discovered its drawbacks, and by then it was too late; he had\n become the established church.",
"\"Yes, yes, of course I've heard about him,\" Kendrick said, trembling\n with hardly repressed excitement.\nWhat a correct attitude!\nZen thought.\nOne rarely finds such\n religious respect among foreigners.\n\"In fact, I've heard a great deal about him and I should like to know\n even more!\" Kendrick spoke almost reverently.\n\n\n \"He\nis\nan extremely interesting divinity,\" the king replied\n complacently. \"And if your robot cannot teleport or requires a hand\n with the heavy work, do not hesitate to call on Zen the Accommodating.\n We'll detail a priest to summon—\"\n\n\n \"The robot manages very well all by itself, thank you,\" Kendrick said\n quickly.\nIn his hideaway, the material body of Zen breathed a vast multiple sigh\n of relief. He was getting to like these Earthmen more and more by the\n minute.\n\n\n \"Might I inquire,\" the king asked, \"into the nature of your researches?\"",
"When the two scientists had gone, Iximi emerged from behind a\n bright-colored tapestry depicting Zen in seven hundred and fifty-three\n of his Attributes.\n\n\n \"The younger one is not at all bad-looking,\" she commented, patting her\n hair into place. \"I do like big blond men. Perhaps my task will not be\n as unpleasant as I fancied.\"\n\n\n Guj stroked his beard. \"How do you know the Earthlings will select\nyou\n, Your Highness? Many other maids will be auctioned off at the\n same time.\"\n\n\n The princess stiffened angrily. \"They'll pick me or they'll never leave\n Uxen alive and you, Your Excellency, would not outlive them.\"\nAlthough it meant he had to overwork the other aspects of his multiple\n personality, Zen kept one free so that the next day he could join\n the Earthmen—in spirit, that was—on their excursion in search of a\n menial.",
"\"A robot is a mechanical man who does all our housework,\" Hammond, more\n courteous than his superior, explained. Zen wondered how he could ever\n have felt a moment's uneasiness concerning these wonderful strangers.\n\n\n \"Zen will be interested to hear of this,\" the prime minister said\n cannily. He and the king nodded at one another.\n\n\n \"\nWho\ndid you say?\" Kendrick asked eagerly.\n\n\n \"Zen the Terrible,\" the king repeated, \"Zen the All-Powerful, Zen the\n Encyclopedic. Surely you have heard of him?\" he asked in some surprise.\n \"He's Uxen's own particular, personal and private god, exclusive to our\n planet.\"",
"\"All right,\" Kendrick agreed gloomily. \"We'll try one of the natives.\"\nSo the next day, still attended by the Unseen Presence of Zen, they\n sought audience with the prime minister.\n\n\n \"Welcome, Earthmen, to the humble apartments of His Majesty's most\n unimportant subject,\" Guj greeted them, making a very small xa as he\n led them into the largest reception room.\n\n\n Kendrick absently ran his finger over the undercarving of a small gold\n table. \"Look, no dust,\" he whispered. \"Must have excellent help here.\"\n\n\n Zen couldn't help preening just a bit. At least he did his work well;\n no one could gainsay that.\n\n\n \"Your desire,\" Guj went on, apparently anxious to get to the point, \"is\n my command. Would you like a rojh of dancing girls to perform before\n you or—?\"",
"\"Drat Zen and his days off!\" The princess was in a fury. \"Very well,\n we'll manage without Zen the Spiteful. Now, precisely what is troubling\n you, worthy and undeservedly Honored Parent?\"\n\n\n \"Those two scientists who arrived from Earth. Didn't you meet them\n when you came in?\"\n\n\n \"No, Respected Father,\" she said, sitting on the arm of the throne. \"I\n must have just missed them. What are they like?\"\nHe told her what they were like in terms not even a monarch should use\n before his daughter. \"And these squuch,\" he concluded, \"are undoubtedly\n working on a secret weapon. If we had it, we could free Uxen.\"\n\n\n \"Moolai Uxen!\" the princess shouted, standing up. \"My friends, must we\n continue to submit to the yoke of the tyrant? Arise. Smite the....\"\n\n\n \"Anyone,\" said Guj, \"can make a speech.\"",
"The older scientist gave a stiff bow. \"I am an anthropologist. My\n name is Kendrick, Professor Alpheus Kendrick. My assistant, Dr. Peter\n Hammond—\" he indicated the tall young man with him—\"is a physicist.\"\nThe king and the prime minister conferred together in whispers. Zen\n wished he could join them, but he couldn't materialize on that plane\n without incense, and he preferred his subjects not to know that he\n could be invisibly present, especially on his day off. Of course, his\n Immaterial Omnipresence was a part of the accepted dogma, but there is\n a big difference between accepting a concept on a basis of faith or of\n proven fact.\n\n\n \"Curious researches,\" the king said, emerging from the conference,\n \"that require both physics\nand\nanthropology.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Kendrick. \"They are rather involved at that.\" Peter Hammond\n shuffled his feet.",
"Far away in his arcane retreat, the divinity groaned to himself.\nAnother aspect of Zen's personality followed the two Earthmen as they\n left the palace to supervise the erection of their prefab by the crew\n of the spaceship in one of the Royal Parks. A vast crowd of Uxenach\n gathered to watch the novelty, and among them there presently appeared\n a sinister-looking old man with a red beard, whom Zen the Pansophic had\n no difficulty in recognizing as the prime minister, heavily disguised.\n Of course it would have been no trouble for Zen to carry out Guj's\n mission for him, but he believed in self-help—especially on Thursdays.\n\n\n \"You certainly fixed us up fine!\" Hammond muttered disrespectfully to\n the professor. \"You should've told the king we were inventing a vacuum\n cleaner or something. Now they'll just be more curious than ever....\n And I still don't see why you refused the priest. Seems to me he'd be\n just what you needed.\"",
"\"Researches, eh?\" the king repeated with warm interest. \"Are you\n perhaps scientists?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Your Majesty.\" Every one of Zen's perceptors quivered\n expectantly. Earth science was banned on Uxen, with the result that its\n acquisition had become the golden dream of every Uxena, including, of\n course, their god.",
"All the aspects of his personality rested ... save one, that is. And\n that one, stretching out an impalpable tendril of curiosity, brought\n back to his total consciousness the news that a spaceship from Earth\n had arrived when no ship from Earth was due.\nSo what?\nthe total consciousness asked lazily of itself.\nProbably\n they have a large out-of-season order for hajench. My hajench going to\n provide salad bowls for barbarians!\nWhen, twenty years previously, the Earthmen had come back to their\n colony on Uxen after a lapse of thousands of years, Zen had been\n hopeful that they would take some of the Divine Work off his hands.\n After all, since it was they who had originally established the",
"\"And you wouldn't have got me either, if the Minister of Science didn't\n have it in for me!\" Peter said irately. \"I'm far too good for this\n piddling little job, and you know it. If it weren't for envy in high\n places—\"\n\n\n \"Better watch out,\" the professor warned, \"or the Minister might decide\n you're too good for science altogether, and you'll be switched to a\n position more in keeping with your talents—say, as a Refuse Removal\n Agent.\"\nAnd what is wrong with the honored art of Refuse Removal?\nZen\n wondered. There were a lot of mystifying things about these Earthmen.\nThe scientists' quaint little edifice was finally set up, and the\n spaceship took its departure. It was only then that the Earthmen\n discovered that something they called cigarettes couldn't be found in\n the welter of packages, and that the robot wouldn't cook dinner or, in\n fact, do anything.\nGood old Guj\n, Zen thought.",
"colony, it should be their responsibility. But it seemed that all\n humans, not merely the Uxenach, were irresponsible. The Earthmen were\n interested only in trade and tribute. They even refused to believe in\n the existence of Zen, an attitude which he found extremely irritating\n to his ego.\nTrue, Uxen prospered commercially to a mild extent after their return,\n for the local ceramics that had been developed in the long interval\n found wide acceptance throughout the Galaxy, particularly the low bowls\n which had hitherto been used only for burning incense before Zen the\n Formidable.",
"Uxlu himself, Zen admitted grudgingly, was an imposing sight to anyone\n who didn't know the old yio. The years—for he was a scant decade\n younger than Guj—had merely lent dignity to his handsome features, and\n he was still tall and upright.\n\n\n \"Welcome, Earthlings, to Uxen,\" King Uxlu said in the sonorous tones of\n the practiced public speaker. \"If there is aught we can do to advance\n your comfort whilst you sojourn on our little planet, you have but to\n speak.\"\nHe did not, Zen noted with approval, rashly promise that requests\n would necessarily be granted. Which was fine, because the god well\n knew who the carrier out of requests would be—Zen the Almighty, the\n All-Powerful, the All-Put-Upon....\n\n\n \"Thank you, Your Majesty,\" the older of the two scientists said. \"We\n merely seek a retired spot in which to conduct our researches.\""
],
[
"\"Your Will is mine, All-Wise One. And I think You had best materialize\n a few pair of arms as well as Your August and Awe-inspiring\n Countenance, for there is much work to be done.\"\nSince the partitions were thin, Zen and the princess could hear most of\n the conversation in the main room. \"... First thing to do,\" Kendrick's\n voice remarked, \"is find out whether we're permitted to attend one\n of their religious ceremonies, where Zen is said to manifest himself\n actually and not, it is contended, just symbolically....\"\n\n\n \"The stove is here, Almighty,\" the princess suggested, \"not against the\n door where you are pressing Your Divine Ear.\"\n\n\n \"Shhh. What I hear is fraught with import for the future of the planet.\n Moolai Uxen.\"\n\n\n \"Moolai Uxen,\" the princess replied automatically.",
"\"We are all equal before Zen,\" Guj said sententiously, making the high\n xa.\n\n\n \"Praise Zen,\" Uxlu and Iximi chanted perfunctorily, bowing low.\n\n\n Iximi, still angry, ordered Guj—who was also high priest—to start\n services. Kindling the incense in the hajen, he began the chant.\n\n\n Of course it was his holiday, but Zen couldn't resist the appeal of\n the incense. Besides he was there anyway, so it was really no trouble,\nno trouble\n, he thought, greedily sniffing the delicious aroma,\nat\n all\n. He materialized a head with seven nostrils so that he was able to\n inhale the incense in one delectable gulp. Then, \"No prayers answered\n on Thursday,\" he said, and disappeared. That would show them!",
"\"We don't have Zen teleport animate objects,\" the prime minister\n explained affably. \"Or even inanimate ones if they are fragile.\n For He tends to lose His Temper sometimes when He feels that He is\n overworked—\"\nFeels, indeed!\nZen said to himself—\"and throws things\n about. We cannot reprove Him for His misbehavior. After all, a god is a\n god.\"",
"Zen the Erudite was particularly fond of her, for she had been his best\n student in Advanced Theology. She was, moreover, an ardent patriot and\n leader of the underground Moolai (free) Uxen movement, with which Zen\n was more or less in sympathy, since he felt Uxen belonged to him and\n not to the Earthlings. After all, he had been there first.\n\n\n \"\nLet\nourselves be conquered!\" Her father's voice rose to a squeak.\n \"\nLet\nourselves! Nobody asked us—we\nwere\nconquered.\"\n\n\n \"True, but we could at least have essayed our strength against the\n conquerors instead of capitulating like yioch. We could have fought to\n the last man!\"\n\n\n \"A woman is always ready to fight to the last man,\" Guj commented.\n\n\n \"Did you hear that, ancient and revered parent! He called me, a\n princess of the blood, a—a woman!\"",
"Making the secular xa, he left the royal pair. Outside, his voice could\n be heard bellowing in the anteroom, \"Has any one of you squuch seen my\n pliers?\"\n\n\n \"There is no need for worry, Venerated Ancestor,\" the princess assured\n the monarch. \"All-Helpful Zen will aid me with my tasks.\"",
"\"Er—yes. Merely having My Bit of Fun, you know.\" He hastily inspected\n the exterior of the alleged foods. \"There appear to be legends\n inscribed upon the containers. Perchance, were we to read them, they\n might give a clue as to their contents.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Omniscent One,\" the princess exclaimed, \"truly You are Wise and\n Sapient indeed, and it is I who was the fool to have doubted for so\n much as an instant.\"\n\n\n \"Oh you doubted, did you?\" Terrible Zen frowned terribly. \"Well, see\n that it doesn't happen again.\" He had no intention of losing his divine\n authority at this stage of the game.",
"\"A robot is a mechanical man who does all our housework,\" Hammond, more\n courteous than his superior, explained. Zen wondered how he could ever\n have felt a moment's uneasiness concerning these wonderful strangers.\n\n\n \"Zen will be interested to hear of this,\" the prime minister said\n cannily. He and the king nodded at one another.\n\n\n \"\nWho\ndid you say?\" Kendrick asked eagerly.\n\n\n \"Zen the Terrible,\" the king repeated, \"Zen the All-Powerful, Zen the\n Encyclopedic. Surely you have heard of him?\" he asked in some surprise.\n \"He's Uxen's own particular, personal and private god, exclusive to our\n planet.\"",
"\"Yes, yes, of course I've heard about him,\" Kendrick said, trembling\n with hardly repressed excitement.\nWhat a correct attitude!\nZen thought.\nOne rarely finds such\n religious respect among foreigners.\n\"In fact, I've heard a great deal about him and I should like to know\n even more!\" Kendrick spoke almost reverently.\n\n\n \"He\nis\nan extremely interesting divinity,\" the king replied\n complacently. \"And if your robot cannot teleport or requires a hand\n with the heavy work, do not hesitate to call on Zen the Accommodating.\n We'll detail a priest to summon—\"\n\n\n \"The robot manages very well all by itself, thank you,\" Kendrick said\n quickly.\nIn his hideaway, the material body of Zen breathed a vast multiple sigh\n of relief. He was getting to like these Earthmen more and more by the\n minute.\n\n\n \"Might I inquire,\" the king asked, \"into the nature of your researches?\"",
"\"Drat Zen and his days off!\" The princess was in a fury. \"Very well,\n we'll manage without Zen the Spiteful. Now, precisely what is troubling\n you, worthy and undeservedly Honored Parent?\"\n\n\n \"Those two scientists who arrived from Earth. Didn't you meet them\n when you came in?\"\n\n\n \"No, Respected Father,\" she said, sitting on the arm of the throne. \"I\n must have just missed them. What are they like?\"\nHe told her what they were like in terms not even a monarch should use\n before his daughter. \"And these squuch,\" he concluded, \"are undoubtedly\n working on a secret weapon. If we had it, we could free Uxen.\"\n\n\n \"Moolai Uxen!\" the princess shouted, standing up. \"My friends, must we\n continue to submit to the yoke of the tyrant? Arise. Smite the....\"\n\n\n \"Anyone,\" said Guj, \"can make a speech.\"",
"The older scientist gave a stiff bow. \"I am an anthropologist. My\n name is Kendrick, Professor Alpheus Kendrick. My assistant, Dr. Peter\n Hammond—\" he indicated the tall young man with him—\"is a physicist.\"\nThe king and the prime minister conferred together in whispers. Zen\n wished he could join them, but he couldn't materialize on that plane\n without incense, and he preferred his subjects not to know that he\n could be invisibly present, especially on his day off. Of course, his\n Immaterial Omnipresence was a part of the accepted dogma, but there is\n a big difference between accepting a concept on a basis of faith or of\n proven fact.\n\n\n \"Curious researches,\" the king said, emerging from the conference,\n \"that require both physics\nand\nanthropology.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Kendrick. \"They are rather involved at that.\" Peter Hammond\n shuffled his feet.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nElected a god, Zen the Omnipotent longed\n \nfor supernatural powers—for he was also\n \nZen the All-Put-Upon, a galactic sucker!\nZen the Terrible lay quiescent in the secret retreat which housed his\n corporeal being, all the aspects of his personality wallowing in the\n luxury of a day off. How glad he was that he'd had the forethought to\n stipulate a weekly holiday for himself when first this godhood had\n been thrust upon him, hundreds of centuries before. He'd accepted the\n perquisites of divinity with pleasure then. It was some little time\n before he discovered its drawbacks, and by then it was too late; he had\n become the established church.",
"\"Speed,\" said Kendrick, \"is the curse of modern civilization. Be glad\n you still retain some of the old-fashioned graces here on Uxen. You\n see,\" he whispered to his assistant, \"a clear case of magico-religious\n culture-freezing, resulting in a static society unable to advance\n itself, comes of its implicit reliance upon the powers of an omnipotent\n deity.\"\n\n\n Zen took some time to figure this out.\nBut that's right!\nhe\n concluded, in surprise.\n\n\n \"I thought your god teleported things?\" Peter asked Guj. \"How come he\n doesn't teleport you around, if you're in such a hurry to go places?\"\n\n\n Kendrick glared at him. \"Please remember that I'm the anthropologist,\"\n he hissed. \"You have got to know how to describe the Transcendental\n Personality with the proper respect.\"",
"Zen reluctantly conceded to himself that he would have to investigate\n this situation further, if he wanted to retain his reputation for\n omniscience. Sometimes, in an occasional moment of self-doubt, he\n wondered if he weren't too much of a perfectionist, but then he\n rejected the thought as self-sacrilege.\n\n\n Zen dutifully intensified the beam of awareness and returned it to the\n audience chamber where the two strange Earthmen who had come on the\n ship were being ushered into the presence of the king by none other\n than Guj, the venerable prime minister himself.\n\n\n \"Gentlemen,\" Guj beamed, his long white beard vibrating in an excess of\n hospitality, \"His Gracious Majesty will be delighted to receive you at\n once.\"\n\n\n And crossing his wrists in the secular xa, he led the way to where Uxlu\n the Fifteenth was seated in full regalia upon his imposing golden,\n gem-encrusted throne.",
"Far away in his arcane retreat, the divinity groaned to himself.\nAnother aspect of Zen's personality followed the two Earthmen as they\n left the palace to supervise the erection of their prefab by the crew\n of the spaceship in one of the Royal Parks. A vast crowd of Uxenach\n gathered to watch the novelty, and among them there presently appeared\n a sinister-looking old man with a red beard, whom Zen the Pansophic had\n no difficulty in recognizing as the prime minister, heavily disguised.\n Of course it would have been no trouble for Zen to carry out Guj's\n mission for him, but he believed in self-help—especially on Thursdays.\n\n\n \"You certainly fixed us up fine!\" Hammond muttered disrespectfully to\n the professor. \"You should've told the king we were inventing a vacuum\n cleaner or something. Now they'll just be more curious than ever....\n And I still don't see why you refused the priest. Seems to me he'd be\n just what you needed.\"",
"\"Researches, eh?\" the king repeated with warm interest. \"Are you\n perhaps scientists?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Your Majesty.\" Every one of Zen's perceptors quivered\n expectantly. Earth science was banned on Uxen, with the result that its\n acquisition had become the golden dream of every Uxena, including, of\n course, their god.",
"When the two scientists had gone, Iximi emerged from behind a\n bright-colored tapestry depicting Zen in seven hundred and fifty-three\n of his Attributes.\n\n\n \"The younger one is not at all bad-looking,\" she commented, patting her\n hair into place. \"I do like big blond men. Perhaps my task will not be\n as unpleasant as I fancied.\"\n\n\n Guj stroked his beard. \"How do you know the Earthlings will select\nyou\n, Your Highness? Many other maids will be auctioned off at the\n same time.\"\n\n\n The princess stiffened angrily. \"They'll pick me or they'll never leave\n Uxen alive and you, Your Excellency, would not outlive them.\"\nAlthough it meant he had to overwork the other aspects of his multiple\n personality, Zen kept one free so that the next day he could join\n the Earthmen—in spirit, that was—on their excursion in search of a\n menial.",
"\"All right,\" Kendrick agreed gloomily. \"We'll try one of the natives.\"\nSo the next day, still attended by the Unseen Presence of Zen, they\n sought audience with the prime minister.\n\n\n \"Welcome, Earthmen, to the humble apartments of His Majesty's most\n unimportant subject,\" Guj greeted them, making a very small xa as he\n led them into the largest reception room.\n\n\n Kendrick absently ran his finger over the undercarving of a small gold\n table. \"Look, no dust,\" he whispered. \"Must have excellent help here.\"\n\n\n Zen couldn't help preening just a bit. At least he did his work well;\n no one could gainsay that.\n\n\n \"Your desire,\" Guj went on, apparently anxious to get to the point, \"is\n my command. Would you like a rojh of dancing girls to perform before\n you or—?\"",
"All the aspects of his personality rested ... save one, that is. And\n that one, stretching out an impalpable tendril of curiosity, brought\n back to his total consciousness the news that a spaceship from Earth\n had arrived when no ship from Earth was due.\nSo what?\nthe total consciousness asked lazily of itself.\nProbably\n they have a large out-of-season order for hajench. My hajench going to\n provide salad bowls for barbarians!\nWhen, twenty years previously, the Earthmen had come back to their\n colony on Uxen after a lapse of thousands of years, Zen had been\n hopeful that they would take some of the Divine Work off his hands.\n After all, since it was they who had originally established the",
"Iximi closed the door, got out her portable altar—all members of the\n royal family were qualified members of the priesthood, though they\n seldom practiced—and in a low voice, for the door and walls were\n thin, summoned Zen the All-Capable.\n\n\n The god sighed as he materialized his head. \"I might have known you\n would require Me. What is your will, oh Most Fair?\"\n\n\n \"I have been ordered to prepare the strangers' midday repast, oh\n Puissant One, and I know not what to do with all this ukh, which they\n assure me is their food.\" And she pointed scornfully to the cans and\n jars and packages.\n\n\n \"How should\nI\nknow then?\" Zen asked unguardedly.\n\n\n The princess looked at him. \"Surely Zen the All-Knowing jests?\"",
"colony, it should be their responsibility. But it seemed that all\n humans, not merely the Uxenach, were irresponsible. The Earthmen were\n interested only in trade and tribute. They even refused to believe in\n the existence of Zen, an attitude which he found extremely irritating\n to his ego.\nTrue, Uxen prospered commercially to a mild extent after their return,\n for the local ceramics that had been developed in the long interval\n found wide acceptance throughout the Galaxy, particularly the low bowls\n which had hitherto been used only for burning incense before Zen the\n Formidable."
],
[
"\"Yes, and the first to catch on to why we're here. We mustn't\n antagonize the natives; these closed groups are so apt to resent any\n investigation into their mythos.\"\n\n\n \"If it's all mythical, why do you need a scientist then?\"\n\n\n \"A physical scientist, you mean,\" Kendrick said austerely. \"For\n anthropology is a science, too, you know.\"\n\n\n Peter snorted.\n\n\n \"Some Earthmen claim actually to have seen these alleged\n manifestations,\" Kendrick went on to explain, \"in which case there must\n be some kind of mechanical trickery involved—which is where you come\n in. Of course I would have preferred an engineer to help me, but you\n were all I could get from the government.\"",
"\"Speed,\" said Kendrick, \"is the curse of modern civilization. Be glad\n you still retain some of the old-fashioned graces here on Uxen. You\n see,\" he whispered to his assistant, \"a clear case of magico-religious\n culture-freezing, resulting in a static society unable to advance\n itself, comes of its implicit reliance upon the powers of an omnipotent\n deity.\"\n\n\n Zen took some time to figure this out.\nBut that's right!\nhe\n concluded, in surprise.\n\n\n \"I thought your god teleported things?\" Peter asked Guj. \"How come he\n doesn't teleport you around, if you're in such a hurry to go places?\"\n\n\n Kendrick glared at him. \"Please remember that I'm the anthropologist,\"\n he hissed. \"You have got to know how to describe the Transcendental\n Personality with the proper respect.\"",
"The older scientist gave a stiff bow. \"I am an anthropologist. My\n name is Kendrick, Professor Alpheus Kendrick. My assistant, Dr. Peter\n Hammond—\" he indicated the tall young man with him—\"is a physicist.\"\nThe king and the prime minister conferred together in whispers. Zen\n wished he could join them, but he couldn't materialize on that plane\n without incense, and he preferred his subjects not to know that he\n could be invisibly present, especially on his day off. Of course, his\n Immaterial Omnipresence was a part of the accepted dogma, but there is\n a big difference between accepting a concept on a basis of faith or of\n proven fact.\n\n\n \"Curious researches,\" the king said, emerging from the conference,\n \"that require both physics\nand\nanthropology.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Kendrick. \"They are rather involved at that.\" Peter Hammond\n shuffled his feet.",
"\"Researches, eh?\" the king repeated with warm interest. \"Are you\n perhaps scientists?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Your Majesty.\" Every one of Zen's perceptors quivered\n expectantly. Earth science was banned on Uxen, with the result that its\n acquisition had become the golden dream of every Uxena, including, of\n course, their god.",
"When the two scientists had gone, Iximi emerged from behind a\n bright-colored tapestry depicting Zen in seven hundred and fifty-three\n of his Attributes.\n\n\n \"The younger one is not at all bad-looking,\" she commented, patting her\n hair into place. \"I do like big blond men. Perhaps my task will not be\n as unpleasant as I fancied.\"\n\n\n Guj stroked his beard. \"How do you know the Earthlings will select\nyou\n, Your Highness? Many other maids will be auctioned off at the\n same time.\"\n\n\n The princess stiffened angrily. \"They'll pick me or they'll never leave\n Uxen alive and you, Your Excellency, would not outlive them.\"\nAlthough it meant he had to overwork the other aspects of his multiple\n personality, Zen kept one free so that the next day he could join\n the Earthmen—in spirit, that was—on their excursion in search of a\n menial.",
"Uxlu himself, Zen admitted grudgingly, was an imposing sight to anyone\n who didn't know the old yio. The years—for he was a scant decade\n younger than Guj—had merely lent dignity to his handsome features, and\n he was still tall and upright.\n\n\n \"Welcome, Earthlings, to Uxen,\" King Uxlu said in the sonorous tones of\n the practiced public speaker. \"If there is aught we can do to advance\n your comfort whilst you sojourn on our little planet, you have but to\n speak.\"\nHe did not, Zen noted with approval, rashly promise that requests\n would necessarily be granted. Which was fine, because the god well\n knew who the carrier out of requests would be—Zen the Almighty, the\n All-Powerful, the All-Put-Upon....\n\n\n \"Thank you, Your Majesty,\" the older of the two scientists said. \"We\n merely seek a retired spot in which to conduct our researches.\"",
"Far away in his arcane retreat, the divinity groaned to himself.\nAnother aspect of Zen's personality followed the two Earthmen as they\n left the palace to supervise the erection of their prefab by the crew\n of the spaceship in one of the Royal Parks. A vast crowd of Uxenach\n gathered to watch the novelty, and among them there presently appeared\n a sinister-looking old man with a red beard, whom Zen the Pansophic had\n no difficulty in recognizing as the prime minister, heavily disguised.\n Of course it would have been no trouble for Zen to carry out Guj's\n mission for him, but he believed in self-help—especially on Thursdays.\n\n\n \"You certainly fixed us up fine!\" Hammond muttered disrespectfully to\n the professor. \"You should've told the king we were inventing a vacuum\n cleaner or something. Now they'll just be more curious than ever....\n And I still don't see why you refused the priest. Seems to me he'd be\n just what you needed.\"",
"\"An investigation of the prevalent nuclear ritual beliefs on Uxen in\n relation to the over-all matrix of social culture, and we really must\n get along and see to the unloading of the ship. Good-by, Your\n Majesty ... Your Excellency.\" And Kendrick dragged his protesting aide\n off.\n\n\n \"If only,\" said the king, \"I were still an absolute monarch, I would\n teach these Earthlings some manners.\" His face grew wistful. \"Well I\n remember how my father would have those who crossed him torn apart by\n wild skwitch.\"",
"\"If, as an anthropologist, you are interested in local folkways,\n Professor,\" Guj remarked graciously, as he and the scientists piled\n into a scarlet, boat-shaped vehicle, \"you will find much to attract\n your attention in this quaint little planet of ours.\"\n\n\n \"Are the eyes painted on front of the car to ward off demons?\" Kendrick\n asked.\n\n\n \"Car? Oh, you mean the yio!\" Guj patted the forepart of the vehicle.\n It purred and fluttered long eyelashes. \"We breed an especially bouncy\n strain with seats; they're so much more comfortable, you know.\"\n\n\n \"You mean this is a\nlive\nanimal?\"\n\n\n Guj nodded apologetically. \"Of course it does not go very fast. Now if\n we had the atomic power drive, such as your spaceships have—\"\n\n\n \"You'd shoot right off into space,\" Hammond assured him.",
"\"If you did have the Earthlings torn apart by wild skwitch, Sire,\" Guj\n pointed out, \"then you would certainly never be able to obtain any\n information from them.\"\nUxlu sighed. \"I would merely have them torn apart a little—just enough\n so that they would answer a few civil questions.\" He sighed again.\n \"And, supposing they did happen to—er—pass on, in the process, think\n of the tremendous lift to my ego. But nobody thinks of the king's ego\n any more these days.\"\n\n\n No, things were not what they had been since the time the planet had\n been retrieved by the Earthlings. They had not communicated with Uxen\n for so many hundreds of years, they had explained, because, after a\n more than ordinarily disastrous war, they had lost the secret of space\n travel for centuries.",
"Zen the Erudite was particularly fond of her, for she had been his best\n student in Advanced Theology. She was, moreover, an ardent patriot and\n leader of the underground Moolai (free) Uxen movement, with which Zen\n was more or less in sympathy, since he felt Uxen belonged to him and\n not to the Earthlings. After all, he had been there first.\n\n\n \"\nLet\nourselves be conquered!\" Her father's voice rose to a squeak.\n \"\nLet\nourselves! Nobody asked us—we\nwere\nconquered.\"\n\n\n \"True, but we could at least have essayed our strength against the\n conquerors instead of capitulating like yioch. We could have fought to\n the last man!\"\n\n\n \"A woman is always ready to fight to the last man,\" Guj commented.\n\n\n \"Did you hear that, ancient and revered parent! He called me, a\n princess of the blood, a—a woman!\"",
"\"Must be a new secret atomic weapon they're working on,\" Uxlu decided.\n \"Why else should they come to such a remote corner of the Galaxy? And\n you will recall that the older one—Kendrick—said something about\n nuclear beliefs. If only we could discover what it is, secure it for\n ourselves, perhaps we could defeat the Earthmen, drive them away—\" he\n sighed for the third time that morning—\"and rule the planet ourselves.\"\nJust then the crown princess Iximi entered the throne room. Iximi\n really lived up to her title of Most Fair and Exalted, for centuries\n of selective breeding under which the kings of Uxen had seized the\n loveliest women of the planet for their wives had resulted in an\n outstanding pulchritude. Her hair was as golden as the ripe fruit that\n bent the boughs of the iolo tree, and her eyes were bluer than the uriz\n stones on the belt girdling her slender waist. Reproductions of the\n famous portrait of her which hung in the great hall of the palace were\n very popular on calendars.",
"\"My father grieves,\" she observed, making the secular xa. \"Pray tell\n your unworthy daughter what sorrow racks your noble bosom.\"\n\n\n \"Uxen is a backwash,\" her father mourned. \"A planet forgotten, while\n the rest of the Galaxy goes by. Our ego has reached its nadir.\"\n\n\n \"Why did you let yourself be conquered?\" the princess retorted\n scornfully. \"Ah, had I been old enough to speak then, matters would be\n very different today!\" Although she seemed too beautiful to be endowed\n with brains, Iximi had been graduated from the Royal University with\n high honors.",
"\"Perhaps some of our technicians might be of assistance to you,\" the\n king suggested. \"They may not have your science, but they are very\n adept with their hands....\"\n\n\n \"Our researches are rather limited in scope,\" Kendrick assured him. \"We\n can do everything needful quite adequately ourselves. All we need is a\n place in which to do it.\"\n\n\n \"You shall have our own second-best palace,\" the king said graciously.\n \"It has both hot and cold water laid on, as well as central heating.\"\n\n\n \"We've brought along our own collapsible laboratory-dwelling,\" Kendrick\n explained. \"We just want a spot to set it up.\"\n\n\n Uxlu sighed. \"The royal parks are at your disposal. You will\n undoubtedly require servants?\"\n\n\n \"We have a robot, thanks.\"",
"colony, it should be their responsibility. But it seemed that all\n humans, not merely the Uxenach, were irresponsible. The Earthmen were\n interested only in trade and tribute. They even refused to believe in\n the existence of Zen, an attitude which he found extremely irritating\n to his ego.\nTrue, Uxen prospered commercially to a mild extent after their return,\n for the local ceramics that had been developed in the long interval\n found wide acceptance throughout the Galaxy, particularly the low bowls\n which had hitherto been used only for burning incense before Zen the\n Formidable.",
"\"Drat Zen and his days off!\" The princess was in a fury. \"Very well,\n we'll manage without Zen the Spiteful. Now, precisely what is troubling\n you, worthy and undeservedly Honored Parent?\"\n\n\n \"Those two scientists who arrived from Earth. Didn't you meet them\n when you came in?\"\n\n\n \"No, Respected Father,\" she said, sitting on the arm of the throne. \"I\n must have just missed them. What are they like?\"\nHe told her what they were like in terms not even a monarch should use\n before his daughter. \"And these squuch,\" he concluded, \"are undoubtedly\n working on a secret weapon. If we had it, we could free Uxen.\"\n\n\n \"Moolai Uxen!\" the princess shouted, standing up. \"My friends, must we\n continue to submit to the yoke of the tyrant? Arise. Smite the....\"\n\n\n \"Anyone,\" said Guj, \"can make a speech.\"",
"Zen reluctantly conceded to himself that he would have to investigate\n this situation further, if he wanted to retain his reputation for\n omniscience. Sometimes, in an occasional moment of self-doubt, he\n wondered if he weren't too much of a perfectionist, but then he\n rejected the thought as self-sacrilege.\n\n\n Zen dutifully intensified the beam of awareness and returned it to the\n audience chamber where the two strange Earthmen who had come on the\n ship were being ushered into the presence of the king by none other\n than Guj, the venerable prime minister himself.\n\n\n \"Gentlemen,\" Guj beamed, his long white beard vibrating in an excess of\n hospitality, \"His Gracious Majesty will be delighted to receive you at\n once.\"\n\n\n And crossing his wrists in the secular xa, he led the way to where Uxlu\n the Fifteenth was seated in full regalia upon his imposing golden,\n gem-encrusted throne.",
"All the aspects of his personality rested ... save one, that is. And\n that one, stretching out an impalpable tendril of curiosity, brought\n back to his total consciousness the news that a spaceship from Earth\n had arrived when no ship from Earth was due.\nSo what?\nthe total consciousness asked lazily of itself.\nProbably\n they have a large out-of-season order for hajench. My hajench going to\n provide salad bowls for barbarians!\nWhen, twenty years previously, the Earthmen had come back to their\n colony on Uxen after a lapse of thousands of years, Zen had been\n hopeful that they would take some of the Divine Work off his hands.\n After all, since it was they who had originally established the",
"Now, wanting to make amends for those long years of neglect, they\n immediately provided that the Earth language and the Earth income tax\n become mandatory upon Uxen. The language was taught by recordings.\n Since the Uxenach were a highly intelligent people, they had all\n learned it quickly and forgotten most of their native tongue except for\n a few untranslatable concepts.",
"The princess sat on the steps of the throne and pondered. \"Obviously we\n must introduce a spy into their household to learn their science and\n turn it to our advantage.\"\n\n\n \"They are very careful, those Earthlings,\" Guj informed her\n superciliously. \"It is obvious that they do not intend to let any of us\n come near them.\"\n\n\n The princess gave a knowing smile. \"But they undoubtedly will need at\n least one menial to care for their dwelling. I shall be that menial. I,\n Iximi, will so demean myself for the sake of my planet! Moolai Uxen!\"\n\n\n \"You cannot do it, Iximi,\" her father said, distressed. \"You must not\n defile yourself so. I will not hear of it!\""
],
[
"\"Perhaps some of our technicians might be of assistance to you,\" the\n king suggested. \"They may not have your science, but they are very\n adept with their hands....\"\n\n\n \"Our researches are rather limited in scope,\" Kendrick assured him. \"We\n can do everything needful quite adequately ourselves. All we need is a\n place in which to do it.\"\n\n\n \"You shall have our own second-best palace,\" the king said graciously.\n \"It has both hot and cold water laid on, as well as central heating.\"\n\n\n \"We've brought along our own collapsible laboratory-dwelling,\" Kendrick\n explained. \"We just want a spot to set it up.\"\n\n\n Uxlu sighed. \"The royal parks are at your disposal. You will\n undoubtedly require servants?\"\n\n\n \"We have a robot, thanks.\"",
"\"Researches, eh?\" the king repeated with warm interest. \"Are you\n perhaps scientists?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Your Majesty.\" Every one of Zen's perceptors quivered\n expectantly. Earth science was banned on Uxen, with the result that its\n acquisition had become the golden dream of every Uxena, including, of\n course, their god.",
"The older scientist gave a stiff bow. \"I am an anthropologist. My\n name is Kendrick, Professor Alpheus Kendrick. My assistant, Dr. Peter\n Hammond—\" he indicated the tall young man with him—\"is a physicist.\"\nThe king and the prime minister conferred together in whispers. Zen\n wished he could join them, but he couldn't materialize on that plane\n without incense, and he preferred his subjects not to know that he\n could be invisibly present, especially on his day off. Of course, his\n Immaterial Omnipresence was a part of the accepted dogma, but there is\n a big difference between accepting a concept on a basis of faith or of\n proven fact.\n\n\n \"Curious researches,\" the king said, emerging from the conference,\n \"that require both physics\nand\nanthropology.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Kendrick. \"They are rather involved at that.\" Peter Hammond\n shuffled his feet.",
"Guj cleared his throat. \"Sirs, I wish you joy.\" He made the secular xa.\n \"Should you ever be in need again, do not hesitate to get in touch with\n me at the palace.\" And, climbing into the yio, he was off.\nThe others entered the small dwelling. \"That little trip certainly gave\n me an appetite,\" Kendrick said, rubbing his hands together. \"Iximi, you\n had better start lunch right away. This is the kitchen.\"\n\n\n Iximi gazed around the cubicle with disfavor. \"Truly it is not much,\"\n she observed. \"However, masters, if you will leave me, I shall endeavor\n to do my poor best.\"\n\n\n \"Let me show you—\" Peter began, but Kendrick interrupted.\n\n\n \"Leave the girl alone, Hammond. She must be able to cook, if she's a\n professional servant. We've wasted the whole morning as it is; maybe we\n can get something done before lunch.\"",
"Uxlu himself, Zen admitted grudgingly, was an imposing sight to anyone\n who didn't know the old yio. The years—for he was a scant decade\n younger than Guj—had merely lent dignity to his handsome features, and\n he was still tall and upright.\n\n\n \"Welcome, Earthlings, to Uxen,\" King Uxlu said in the sonorous tones of\n the practiced public speaker. \"If there is aught we can do to advance\n your comfort whilst you sojourn on our little planet, you have but to\n speak.\"\nHe did not, Zen noted with approval, rashly promise that requests\n would necessarily be granted. Which was fine, because the god well\n knew who the carrier out of requests would be—Zen the Almighty, the\n All-Powerful, the All-Put-Upon....\n\n\n \"Thank you, Your Majesty,\" the older of the two scientists said. \"We\n merely seek a retired spot in which to conduct our researches.\"",
"\"And besides,\" Guj interposed, \"they will need no servants. All their\n housework is to be done by their robot—a mechanical man that performs\n all menial duties. And you, Your Royal Highness, could not plausibly\n disguise yourself as a machine.\"\n\n\n \"No-o-o-o, I expect not.\" The princess hugged the rosy knees\n revealed by her brief tunic and thought aloud, \"But ... just ...\n supposing ... something ... went wrong with the robot.... They do\n not possess another?\"\n\n\n \"They referred only to one, Highness,\" Guj replied reluctantly. \"But\n they may have the parts with which to construct another.\"\n\n\n \"Nonetheless, it is well worth the attempt,\" the princess declared.\n \"You will cast a spell on the robot, Guj, so that it stops.\"\n\n\n He sighed. \"Very well, Your Highness; I suppose I could manage that!\"",
"\"Yes, yes, of course I've heard about him,\" Kendrick said, trembling\n with hardly repressed excitement.\nWhat a correct attitude!\nZen thought.\nOne rarely finds such\n religious respect among foreigners.\n\"In fact, I've heard a great deal about him and I should like to know\n even more!\" Kendrick spoke almost reverently.\n\n\n \"He\nis\nan extremely interesting divinity,\" the king replied\n complacently. \"And if your robot cannot teleport or requires a hand\n with the heavy work, do not hesitate to call on Zen the Accommodating.\n We'll detail a priest to summon—\"\n\n\n \"The robot manages very well all by itself, thank you,\" Kendrick said\n quickly.\nIn his hideaway, the material body of Zen breathed a vast multiple sigh\n of relief. He was getting to like these Earthmen more and more by the\n minute.\n\n\n \"Might I inquire,\" the king asked, \"into the nature of your researches?\"",
"Far away in his arcane retreat, the divinity groaned to himself.\nAnother aspect of Zen's personality followed the two Earthmen as they\n left the palace to supervise the erection of their prefab by the crew\n of the spaceship in one of the Royal Parks. A vast crowd of Uxenach\n gathered to watch the novelty, and among them there presently appeared\n a sinister-looking old man with a red beard, whom Zen the Pansophic had\n no difficulty in recognizing as the prime minister, heavily disguised.\n Of course it would have been no trouble for Zen to carry out Guj's\n mission for him, but he believed in self-help—especially on Thursdays.\n\n\n \"You certainly fixed us up fine!\" Hammond muttered disrespectfully to\n the professor. \"You should've told the king we were inventing a vacuum\n cleaner or something. Now they'll just be more curious than ever....\n And I still don't see why you refused the priest. Seems to me he'd be\n just what you needed.\"",
"Zen reluctantly conceded to himself that he would have to investigate\n this situation further, if he wanted to retain his reputation for\n omniscience. Sometimes, in an occasional moment of self-doubt, he\n wondered if he weren't too much of a perfectionist, but then he\n rejected the thought as self-sacrilege.\n\n\n Zen dutifully intensified the beam of awareness and returned it to the\n audience chamber where the two strange Earthmen who had come on the\n ship were being ushered into the presence of the king by none other\n than Guj, the venerable prime minister himself.\n\n\n \"Gentlemen,\" Guj beamed, his long white beard vibrating in an excess of\n hospitality, \"His Gracious Majesty will be delighted to receive you at\n once.\"\n\n\n And crossing his wrists in the secular xa, he led the way to where Uxlu\n the Fifteenth was seated in full regalia upon his imposing golden,\n gem-encrusted throne.",
"\"Drat Zen and his days off!\" The princess was in a fury. \"Very well,\n we'll manage without Zen the Spiteful. Now, precisely what is troubling\n you, worthy and undeservedly Honored Parent?\"\n\n\n \"Those two scientists who arrived from Earth. Didn't you meet them\n when you came in?\"\n\n\n \"No, Respected Father,\" she said, sitting on the arm of the throne. \"I\n must have just missed them. What are they like?\"\nHe told her what they were like in terms not even a monarch should use\n before his daughter. \"And these squuch,\" he concluded, \"are undoubtedly\n working on a secret weapon. If we had it, we could free Uxen.\"\n\n\n \"Moolai Uxen!\" the princess shouted, standing up. \"My friends, must we\n continue to submit to the yoke of the tyrant? Arise. Smite the....\"\n\n\n \"Anyone,\" said Guj, \"can make a speech.\"",
"\"The king said something yesterday about servants being available,\"\n Kendrick interrupted. \"And our robot seems to have broken down. Could\n you tell us where we could get someone to do our housework?\"\n\n\n An expression of vivid pleasure illuminated the prime minister's\n venerable countenance. \"By fortunate chance, gentlemen, a small lot of\n maids is to be auctioned off at a village very near the Imperial City\n tomorrow. I should be delighted to escort you there personally.\"\n\n\n \"Auctioned?\" Kendrick repeated. \"You mean they\nsell\nservants here?\"\n\n\n Guj raised his snowy eyebrows. \"Sold? Certainly not; they are leased\n for two years apiece. After all, if you have no lease, what guarantee\n do you have that your servants will stay after you have trained them?\n None whatsoever.\"",
"\"A robot is a mechanical man who does all our housework,\" Hammond, more\n courteous than his superior, explained. Zen wondered how he could ever\n have felt a moment's uneasiness concerning these wonderful strangers.\n\n\n \"Zen will be interested to hear of this,\" the prime minister said\n cannily. He and the king nodded at one another.\n\n\n \"\nWho\ndid you say?\" Kendrick asked eagerly.\n\n\n \"Zen the Terrible,\" the king repeated, \"Zen the All-Powerful, Zen the\n Encyclopedic. Surely you have heard of him?\" he asked in some surprise.\n \"He's Uxen's own particular, personal and private god, exclusive to our\n planet.\"",
"\"All right,\" Kendrick agreed gloomily. \"We'll try one of the natives.\"\nSo the next day, still attended by the Unseen Presence of Zen, they\n sought audience with the prime minister.\n\n\n \"Welcome, Earthmen, to the humble apartments of His Majesty's most\n unimportant subject,\" Guj greeted them, making a very small xa as he\n led them into the largest reception room.\n\n\n Kendrick absently ran his finger over the undercarving of a small gold\n table. \"Look, no dust,\" he whispered. \"Must have excellent help here.\"\n\n\n Zen couldn't help preening just a bit. At least he did his work well;\n no one could gainsay that.\n\n\n \"Your desire,\" Guj went on, apparently anxious to get to the point, \"is\n my command. Would you like a rojh of dancing girls to perform before\n you or—?\"",
"Making the secular xa, he left the royal pair. Outside, his voice could\n be heard bellowing in the anteroom, \"Has any one of you squuch seen my\n pliers?\"\n\n\n \"There is no need for worry, Venerated Ancestor,\" the princess assured\n the monarch. \"All-Helpful Zen will aid me with my tasks.\"",
"The princess sat on the steps of the throne and pondered. \"Obviously we\n must introduce a spy into their household to learn their science and\n turn it to our advantage.\"\n\n\n \"They are very careful, those Earthlings,\" Guj informed her\n superciliously. \"It is obvious that they do not intend to let any of us\n come near them.\"\n\n\n The princess gave a knowing smile. \"But they undoubtedly will need at\n least one menial to care for their dwelling. I shall be that menial. I,\n Iximi, will so demean myself for the sake of my planet! Moolai Uxen!\"\n\n\n \"You cannot do it, Iximi,\" her father said, distressed. \"You must not\n defile yourself so. I will not hear of it!\"",
"\"If you did have the Earthlings torn apart by wild skwitch, Sire,\" Guj\n pointed out, \"then you would certainly never be able to obtain any\n information from them.\"\nUxlu sighed. \"I would merely have them torn apart a little—just enough\n so that they would answer a few civil questions.\" He sighed again.\n \"And, supposing they did happen to—er—pass on, in the process, think\n of the tremendous lift to my ego. But nobody thinks of the king's ego\n any more these days.\"\n\n\n No, things were not what they had been since the time the planet had\n been retrieved by the Earthlings. They had not communicated with Uxen\n for so many hundreds of years, they had explained, because, after a\n more than ordinarily disastrous war, they had lost the secret of space\n travel for centuries.",
"\"An investigation of the prevalent nuclear ritual beliefs on Uxen in\n relation to the over-all matrix of social culture, and we really must\n get along and see to the unloading of the ship. Good-by, Your\n Majesty ... Your Excellency.\" And Kendrick dragged his protesting aide\n off.\n\n\n \"If only,\" said the king, \"I were still an absolute monarch, I would\n teach these Earthlings some manners.\" His face grew wistful. \"Well I\n remember how my father would have those who crossed him torn apart by\n wild skwitch.\"",
"When the two scientists had gone, Iximi emerged from behind a\n bright-colored tapestry depicting Zen in seven hundred and fifty-three\n of his Attributes.\n\n\n \"The younger one is not at all bad-looking,\" she commented, patting her\n hair into place. \"I do like big blond men. Perhaps my task will not be\n as unpleasant as I fancied.\"\n\n\n Guj stroked his beard. \"How do you know the Earthlings will select\nyou\n, Your Highness? Many other maids will be auctioned off at the\n same time.\"\n\n\n The princess stiffened angrily. \"They'll pick me or they'll never leave\n Uxen alive and you, Your Excellency, would not outlive them.\"\nAlthough it meant he had to overwork the other aspects of his multiple\n personality, Zen kept one free so that the next day he could join\n the Earthmen—in spirit, that was—on their excursion in search of a\n menial.",
"\"Your Will is mine, All-Wise One. And I think You had best materialize\n a few pair of arms as well as Your August and Awe-inspiring\n Countenance, for there is much work to be done.\"\nSince the partitions were thin, Zen and the princess could hear most of\n the conversation in the main room. \"... First thing to do,\" Kendrick's\n voice remarked, \"is find out whether we're permitted to attend one\n of their religious ceremonies, where Zen is said to manifest himself\n actually and not, it is contended, just symbolically....\"\n\n\n \"The stove is here, Almighty,\" the princess suggested, \"not against the\n door where you are pressing Your Divine Ear.\"\n\n\n \"Shhh. What I hear is fraught with import for the future of the planet.\n Moolai Uxen.\"\n\n\n \"Moolai Uxen,\" the princess replied automatically.",
"\"I can't figure out what's gone wrong,\" Peter complained, as he\n finished putting the mechanical man together again. \"Everything seems\n to be all right, and yet the damned thing won't function.\"\n\n\n \"Looks as if we'll have to do the housework ourselves, confound it!\"\n\n\n \"Uh-uh,\" Peter said. \"You can, but not me. The Earth government put me\n under your orders so far as this project is concerned, sir, but I'm not\n supposed to do anything degrading, sir, and menial work is classified\n as just that, sir, so—\"\n\n\n \"All right, all\nright\n!\" Kendrick said. \"Though it seems to me if\nI'm\nwilling to do it,\nyou\nshould have no objection.\"\n\n\n \"It's your project, sir. I gathered from the king, though,\" Peter\n added more helpfully, \"that some of the natives still do menial labor\n themselves.\""
],
[
"\"An investigation of the prevalent nuclear ritual beliefs on Uxen in\n relation to the over-all matrix of social culture, and we really must\n get along and see to the unloading of the ship. Good-by, Your\n Majesty ... Your Excellency.\" And Kendrick dragged his protesting aide\n off.\n\n\n \"If only,\" said the king, \"I were still an absolute monarch, I would\n teach these Earthlings some manners.\" His face grew wistful. \"Well I\n remember how my father would have those who crossed him torn apart by\n wild skwitch.\"",
"\"Researches, eh?\" the king repeated with warm interest. \"Are you\n perhaps scientists?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Your Majesty.\" Every one of Zen's perceptors quivered\n expectantly. Earth science was banned on Uxen, with the result that its\n acquisition had become the golden dream of every Uxena, including, of\n course, their god.",
"\"If you did have the Earthlings torn apart by wild skwitch, Sire,\" Guj\n pointed out, \"then you would certainly never be able to obtain any\n information from them.\"\nUxlu sighed. \"I would merely have them torn apart a little—just enough\n so that they would answer a few civil questions.\" He sighed again.\n \"And, supposing they did happen to—er—pass on, in the process, think\n of the tremendous lift to my ego. But nobody thinks of the king's ego\n any more these days.\"\n\n\n No, things were not what they had been since the time the planet had\n been retrieved by the Earthlings. They had not communicated with Uxen\n for so many hundreds of years, they had explained, because, after a\n more than ordinarily disastrous war, they had lost the secret of space\n travel for centuries.",
"\"A robot is a mechanical man who does all our housework,\" Hammond, more\n courteous than his superior, explained. Zen wondered how he could ever\n have felt a moment's uneasiness concerning these wonderful strangers.\n\n\n \"Zen will be interested to hear of this,\" the prime minister said\n cannily. He and the king nodded at one another.\n\n\n \"\nWho\ndid you say?\" Kendrick asked eagerly.\n\n\n \"Zen the Terrible,\" the king repeated, \"Zen the All-Powerful, Zen the\n Encyclopedic. Surely you have heard of him?\" he asked in some surprise.\n \"He's Uxen's own particular, personal and private god, exclusive to our\n planet.\"",
"The older scientist gave a stiff bow. \"I am an anthropologist. My\n name is Kendrick, Professor Alpheus Kendrick. My assistant, Dr. Peter\n Hammond—\" he indicated the tall young man with him—\"is a physicist.\"\nThe king and the prime minister conferred together in whispers. Zen\n wished he could join them, but he couldn't materialize on that plane\n without incense, and he preferred his subjects not to know that he\n could be invisibly present, especially on his day off. Of course, his\n Immaterial Omnipresence was a part of the accepted dogma, but there is\n a big difference between accepting a concept on a basis of faith or of\n proven fact.\n\n\n \"Curious researches,\" the king said, emerging from the conference,\n \"that require both physics\nand\nanthropology.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Kendrick. \"They are rather involved at that.\" Peter Hammond\n shuffled his feet.",
"Far away in his arcane retreat, the divinity groaned to himself.\nAnother aspect of Zen's personality followed the two Earthmen as they\n left the palace to supervise the erection of their prefab by the crew\n of the spaceship in one of the Royal Parks. A vast crowd of Uxenach\n gathered to watch the novelty, and among them there presently appeared\n a sinister-looking old man with a red beard, whom Zen the Pansophic had\n no difficulty in recognizing as the prime minister, heavily disguised.\n Of course it would have been no trouble for Zen to carry out Guj's\n mission for him, but he believed in self-help—especially on Thursdays.\n\n\n \"You certainly fixed us up fine!\" Hammond muttered disrespectfully to\n the professor. \"You should've told the king we were inventing a vacuum\n cleaner or something. Now they'll just be more curious than ever....\n And I still don't see why you refused the priest. Seems to me he'd be\n just what you needed.\"",
"Zen reluctantly conceded to himself that he would have to investigate\n this situation further, if he wanted to retain his reputation for\n omniscience. Sometimes, in an occasional moment of self-doubt, he\n wondered if he weren't too much of a perfectionist, but then he\n rejected the thought as self-sacrilege.\n\n\n Zen dutifully intensified the beam of awareness and returned it to the\n audience chamber where the two strange Earthmen who had come on the\n ship were being ushered into the presence of the king by none other\n than Guj, the venerable prime minister himself.\n\n\n \"Gentlemen,\" Guj beamed, his long white beard vibrating in an excess of\n hospitality, \"His Gracious Majesty will be delighted to receive you at\n once.\"\n\n\n And crossing his wrists in the secular xa, he led the way to where Uxlu\n the Fifteenth was seated in full regalia upon his imposing golden,\n gem-encrusted throne.",
"\"Er—yes. Merely having My Bit of Fun, you know.\" He hastily inspected\n the exterior of the alleged foods. \"There appear to be legends\n inscribed upon the containers. Perchance, were we to read them, they\n might give a clue as to their contents.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Omniscent One,\" the princess exclaimed, \"truly You are Wise and\n Sapient indeed, and it is I who was the fool to have doubted for so\n much as an instant.\"\n\n\n \"Oh you doubted, did you?\" Terrible Zen frowned terribly. \"Well, see\n that it doesn't happen again.\" He had no intention of losing his divine\n authority at this stage of the game.",
"Zen the Erudite was particularly fond of her, for she had been his best\n student in Advanced Theology. She was, moreover, an ardent patriot and\n leader of the underground Moolai (free) Uxen movement, with which Zen\n was more or less in sympathy, since he felt Uxen belonged to him and\n not to the Earthlings. After all, he had been there first.\n\n\n \"\nLet\nourselves be conquered!\" Her father's voice rose to a squeak.\n \"\nLet\nourselves! Nobody asked us—we\nwere\nconquered.\"\n\n\n \"True, but we could at least have essayed our strength against the\n conquerors instead of capitulating like yioch. We could have fought to\n the last man!\"\n\n\n \"A woman is always ready to fight to the last man,\" Guj commented.\n\n\n \"Did you hear that, ancient and revered parent! He called me, a\n princess of the blood, a—a woman!\"",
"\"Yes, yes, of course I've heard about him,\" Kendrick said, trembling\n with hardly repressed excitement.\nWhat a correct attitude!\nZen thought.\nOne rarely finds such\n religious respect among foreigners.\n\"In fact, I've heard a great deal about him and I should like to know\n even more!\" Kendrick spoke almost reverently.\n\n\n \"He\nis\nan extremely interesting divinity,\" the king replied\n complacently. \"And if your robot cannot teleport or requires a hand\n with the heavy work, do not hesitate to call on Zen the Accommodating.\n We'll detail a priest to summon—\"\n\n\n \"The robot manages very well all by itself, thank you,\" Kendrick said\n quickly.\nIn his hideaway, the material body of Zen breathed a vast multiple sigh\n of relief. He was getting to like these Earthmen more and more by the\n minute.\n\n\n \"Might I inquire,\" the king asked, \"into the nature of your researches?\"",
"\"Your Will is mine, All-Wise One. And I think You had best materialize\n a few pair of arms as well as Your August and Awe-inspiring\n Countenance, for there is much work to be done.\"\nSince the partitions were thin, Zen and the princess could hear most of\n the conversation in the main room. \"... First thing to do,\" Kendrick's\n voice remarked, \"is find out whether we're permitted to attend one\n of their religious ceremonies, where Zen is said to manifest himself\n actually and not, it is contended, just symbolically....\"\n\n\n \"The stove is here, Almighty,\" the princess suggested, \"not against the\n door where you are pressing Your Divine Ear.\"\n\n\n \"Shhh. What I hear is fraught with import for the future of the planet.\n Moolai Uxen.\"\n\n\n \"Moolai Uxen,\" the princess replied automatically.",
"Making the secular xa, he left the royal pair. Outside, his voice could\n be heard bellowing in the anteroom, \"Has any one of you squuch seen my\n pliers?\"\n\n\n \"There is no need for worry, Venerated Ancestor,\" the princess assured\n the monarch. \"All-Helpful Zen will aid me with my tasks.\"",
"\"My father grieves,\" she observed, making the secular xa. \"Pray tell\n your unworthy daughter what sorrow racks your noble bosom.\"\n\n\n \"Uxen is a backwash,\" her father mourned. \"A planet forgotten, while\n the rest of the Galaxy goes by. Our ego has reached its nadir.\"\n\n\n \"Why did you let yourself be conquered?\" the princess retorted\n scornfully. \"Ah, had I been old enough to speak then, matters would be\n very different today!\" Although she seemed too beautiful to be endowed\n with brains, Iximi had been graduated from the Royal University with\n high honors.",
"\"The king said something yesterday about servants being available,\"\n Kendrick interrupted. \"And our robot seems to have broken down. Could\n you tell us where we could get someone to do our housework?\"\n\n\n An expression of vivid pleasure illuminated the prime minister's\n venerable countenance. \"By fortunate chance, gentlemen, a small lot of\n maids is to be auctioned off at a village very near the Imperial City\n tomorrow. I should be delighted to escort you there personally.\"\n\n\n \"Auctioned?\" Kendrick repeated. \"You mean they\nsell\nservants here?\"\n\n\n Guj raised his snowy eyebrows. \"Sold? Certainly not; they are leased\n for two years apiece. After all, if you have no lease, what guarantee\n do you have that your servants will stay after you have trained them?\n None whatsoever.\"",
"\"Perhaps some of our technicians might be of assistance to you,\" the\n king suggested. \"They may not have your science, but they are very\n adept with their hands....\"\n\n\n \"Our researches are rather limited in scope,\" Kendrick assured him. \"We\n can do everything needful quite adequately ourselves. All we need is a\n place in which to do it.\"\n\n\n \"You shall have our own second-best palace,\" the king said graciously.\n \"It has both hot and cold water laid on, as well as central heating.\"\n\n\n \"We've brought along our own collapsible laboratory-dwelling,\" Kendrick\n explained. \"We just want a spot to set it up.\"\n\n\n Uxlu sighed. \"The royal parks are at your disposal. You will\n undoubtedly require servants?\"\n\n\n \"We have a robot, thanks.\"",
"\"Drat Zen and his days off!\" The princess was in a fury. \"Very well,\n we'll manage without Zen the Spiteful. Now, precisely what is troubling\n you, worthy and undeservedly Honored Parent?\"\n\n\n \"Those two scientists who arrived from Earth. Didn't you meet them\n when you came in?\"\n\n\n \"No, Respected Father,\" she said, sitting on the arm of the throne. \"I\n must have just missed them. What are they like?\"\nHe told her what they were like in terms not even a monarch should use\n before his daughter. \"And these squuch,\" he concluded, \"are undoubtedly\n working on a secret weapon. If we had it, we could free Uxen.\"\n\n\n \"Moolai Uxen!\" the princess shouted, standing up. \"My friends, must we\n continue to submit to the yoke of the tyrant? Arise. Smite the....\"\n\n\n \"Anyone,\" said Guj, \"can make a speech.\"",
"Uxlu himself, Zen admitted grudgingly, was an imposing sight to anyone\n who didn't know the old yio. The years—for he was a scant decade\n younger than Guj—had merely lent dignity to his handsome features, and\n he was still tall and upright.\n\n\n \"Welcome, Earthlings, to Uxen,\" King Uxlu said in the sonorous tones of\n the practiced public speaker. \"If there is aught we can do to advance\n your comfort whilst you sojourn on our little planet, you have but to\n speak.\"\nHe did not, Zen noted with approval, rashly promise that requests\n would necessarily be granted. Which was fine, because the god well\n knew who the carrier out of requests would be—Zen the Almighty, the\n All-Powerful, the All-Put-Upon....\n\n\n \"Thank you, Your Majesty,\" the older of the two scientists said. \"We\n merely seek a retired spot in which to conduct our researches.\"",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nElected a god, Zen the Omnipotent longed\n \nfor supernatural powers—for he was also\n \nZen the All-Put-Upon, a galactic sucker!\nZen the Terrible lay quiescent in the secret retreat which housed his\n corporeal being, all the aspects of his personality wallowing in the\n luxury of a day off. How glad he was that he'd had the forethought to\n stipulate a weekly holiday for himself when first this godhood had\n been thrust upon him, hundreds of centuries before. He'd accepted the\n perquisites of divinity with pleasure then. It was some little time\n before he discovered its drawbacks, and by then it was too late; he had\n become the established church.",
"\"Speed,\" said Kendrick, \"is the curse of modern civilization. Be glad\n you still retain some of the old-fashioned graces here on Uxen. You\n see,\" he whispered to his assistant, \"a clear case of magico-religious\n culture-freezing, resulting in a static society unable to advance\n itself, comes of its implicit reliance upon the powers of an omnipotent\n deity.\"\n\n\n Zen took some time to figure this out.\nBut that's right!\nhe\n concluded, in surprise.\n\n\n \"I thought your god teleported things?\" Peter asked Guj. \"How come he\n doesn't teleport you around, if you're in such a hurry to go places?\"\n\n\n Kendrick glared at him. \"Please remember that I'm the anthropologist,\"\n he hissed. \"You have got to know how to describe the Transcendental\n Personality with the proper respect.\"",
"\"We don't have Zen teleport animate objects,\" the prime minister\n explained affably. \"Or even inanimate ones if they are fragile.\n For He tends to lose His Temper sometimes when He feels that He is\n overworked—\"\nFeels, indeed!\nZen said to himself—\"and throws things\n about. We cannot reprove Him for His misbehavior. After all, a god is a\n god.\""
],
[
"Zen the Erudite was particularly fond of her, for she had been his best\n student in Advanced Theology. She was, moreover, an ardent patriot and\n leader of the underground Moolai (free) Uxen movement, with which Zen\n was more or less in sympathy, since he felt Uxen belonged to him and\n not to the Earthlings. After all, he had been there first.\n\n\n \"\nLet\nourselves be conquered!\" Her father's voice rose to a squeak.\n \"\nLet\nourselves! Nobody asked us—we\nwere\nconquered.\"\n\n\n \"True, but we could at least have essayed our strength against the\n conquerors instead of capitulating like yioch. We could have fought to\n the last man!\"\n\n\n \"A woman is always ready to fight to the last man,\" Guj commented.\n\n\n \"Did you hear that, ancient and revered parent! He called me, a\n princess of the blood, a—a woman!\"",
"The princess gave him a dazzling smile. \"Moolai Uxen! We must not allow\n the beautiful Uxulk tongue to fall into desuetude. Bring back our\n lovely language!\"\n\n\n Guj gestured desperately. She tossed her head, but stopped.\n\n\n \"Please, Kendrick,\" Peter begged, \"we've got to buy that one!\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not. You can see she's a troublemaker. Do you speak Earth?\"\n the professor demanded of the maid he had chosen.\n\n\n \"No speak,\" she replied.\n\n\n Peter tugged at his superior's sleeve. \"That one speaks Earth.\"\n\n\n Kendrick shook him off. \"Do you speak Earth?\" he demanded of the second\n oldest and ugliest. She shook her head. The others went through the\n same procedure.",
"Making the secular xa, he left the royal pair. Outside, his voice could\n be heard bellowing in the anteroom, \"Has any one of you squuch seen my\n pliers?\"\n\n\n \"There is no need for worry, Venerated Ancestor,\" the princess assured\n the monarch. \"All-Helpful Zen will aid me with my tasks.\"",
"\"My father grieves,\" she observed, making the secular xa. \"Pray tell\n your unworthy daughter what sorrow racks your noble bosom.\"\n\n\n \"Uxen is a backwash,\" her father mourned. \"A planet forgotten, while\n the rest of the Galaxy goes by. Our ego has reached its nadir.\"\n\n\n \"Why did you let yourself be conquered?\" the princess retorted\n scornfully. \"Ah, had I been old enough to speak then, matters would be\n very different today!\" Although she seemed too beautiful to be endowed\n with brains, Iximi had been graduated from the Royal University with\n high honors.",
"\"And besides,\" Guj interposed, \"they will need no servants. All their\n housework is to be done by their robot—a mechanical man that performs\n all menial duties. And you, Your Royal Highness, could not plausibly\n disguise yourself as a machine.\"\n\n\n \"No-o-o-o, I expect not.\" The princess hugged the rosy knees\n revealed by her brief tunic and thought aloud, \"But ... just ...\n supposing ... something ... went wrong with the robot.... They do\n not possess another?\"\n\n\n \"They referred only to one, Highness,\" Guj replied reluctantly. \"But\n they may have the parts with which to construct another.\"\n\n\n \"Nonetheless, it is well worth the attempt,\" the princess declared.\n \"You will cast a spell on the robot, Guj, so that it stops.\"\n\n\n He sighed. \"Very well, Your Highness; I suppose I could manage that!\"",
"\"The apparent irreverence,\" Kendrick explained in an undertone,\n \"undoubtedly signifies that he is dealing with ancillary or, perhaps,\n peripheral religious beliefs. I must make a note of them.\" He did so.\nBy the time the royal yio had arrived at the village where the\n planetary auctions for domestics were held, the maids were already\n arranged in a row on the platform. Most were depressingly plain\n creatures and dressed in thick sacklike tunics. Among them, the\n graceful form of Iximi was conspicuous, clad in a garment similar in\n cut but fashioned of translucent gauze almost as blue as her eyes.",
"The Princess and the Physicist\nBy EVELYN E. SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by KOSSIN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction June 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"\"Er—yes. Merely having My Bit of Fun, you know.\" He hastily inspected\n the exterior of the alleged foods. \"There appear to be legends\n inscribed upon the containers. Perchance, were we to read them, they\n might give a clue as to their contents.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Omniscent One,\" the princess exclaimed, \"truly You are Wise and\n Sapient indeed, and it is I who was the fool to have doubted for so\n much as an instant.\"\n\n\n \"Oh you doubted, did you?\" Terrible Zen frowned terribly. \"Well, see\n that it doesn't happen again.\" He had no intention of losing his divine\n authority at this stage of the game.",
"\"Your Will is mine, All-Wise One. And I think You had best materialize\n a few pair of arms as well as Your August and Awe-inspiring\n Countenance, for there is much work to be done.\"\nSince the partitions were thin, Zen and the princess could hear most of\n the conversation in the main room. \"... First thing to do,\" Kendrick's\n voice remarked, \"is find out whether we're permitted to attend one\n of their religious ceremonies, where Zen is said to manifest himself\n actually and not, it is contended, just symbolically....\"\n\n\n \"The stove is here, Almighty,\" the princess suggested, \"not against the\n door where you are pressing Your Divine Ear.\"\n\n\n \"Shhh. What I hear is fraught with import for the future of the planet.\n Moolai Uxen.\"\n\n\n \"Moolai Uxen,\" the princess replied automatically.",
"When the two scientists had gone, Iximi emerged from behind a\n bright-colored tapestry depicting Zen in seven hundred and fifty-three\n of his Attributes.\n\n\n \"The younger one is not at all bad-looking,\" she commented, patting her\n hair into place. \"I do like big blond men. Perhaps my task will not be\n as unpleasant as I fancied.\"\n\n\n Guj stroked his beard. \"How do you know the Earthlings will select\nyou\n, Your Highness? Many other maids will be auctioned off at the\n same time.\"\n\n\n The princess stiffened angrily. \"They'll pick me or they'll never leave\n Uxen alive and you, Your Excellency, would not outlive them.\"\nAlthough it meant he had to overwork the other aspects of his multiple\n personality, Zen kept one free so that the next day he could join\n the Earthmen—in spirit, that was—on their excursion in search of a\n menial.",
"The princess sat on the steps of the throne and pondered. \"Obviously we\n must introduce a spy into their household to learn their science and\n turn it to our advantage.\"\n\n\n \"They are very careful, those Earthlings,\" Guj informed her\n superciliously. \"It is obvious that they do not intend to let any of us\n come near them.\"\n\n\n The princess gave a knowing smile. \"But they undoubtedly will need at\n least one menial to care for their dwelling. I shall be that menial. I,\n Iximi, will so demean myself for the sake of my planet! Moolai Uxen!\"\n\n\n \"You cannot do it, Iximi,\" her father said, distressed. \"You must not\n defile yourself so. I will not hear of it!\"",
"\"Drat Zen and his days off!\" The princess was in a fury. \"Very well,\n we'll manage without Zen the Spiteful. Now, precisely what is troubling\n you, worthy and undeservedly Honored Parent?\"\n\n\n \"Those two scientists who arrived from Earth. Didn't you meet them\n when you came in?\"\n\n\n \"No, Respected Father,\" she said, sitting on the arm of the throne. \"I\n must have just missed them. What are they like?\"\nHe told her what they were like in terms not even a monarch should use\n before his daughter. \"And these squuch,\" he concluded, \"are undoubtedly\n working on a secret weapon. If we had it, we could free Uxen.\"\n\n\n \"Moolai Uxen!\" the princess shouted, standing up. \"My friends, must we\n continue to submit to the yoke of the tyrant? Arise. Smite the....\"\n\n\n \"Anyone,\" said Guj, \"can make a speech.\"",
"\"Must be a new secret atomic weapon they're working on,\" Uxlu decided.\n \"Why else should they come to such a remote corner of the Galaxy? And\n you will recall that the older one—Kendrick—said something about\n nuclear beliefs. If only we could discover what it is, secure it for\n ourselves, perhaps we could defeat the Earthmen, drive them away—\" he\n sighed for the third time that morning—\"and rule the planet ourselves.\"\nJust then the crown princess Iximi entered the throne room. Iximi\n really lived up to her title of Most Fair and Exalted, for centuries\n of selective breeding under which the kings of Uxen had seized the\n loveliest women of the planet for their wives had resulted in an\n outstanding pulchritude. Her hair was as golden as the ripe fruit that\n bent the boughs of the iolo tree, and her eyes were bluer than the uriz\n stones on the belt girdling her slender waist. Reproductions of the\n famous portrait of her which hung in the great hall of the palace were\n very popular on calendars.",
"Iximi closed the door, got out her portable altar—all members of the\n royal family were qualified members of the priesthood, though they\n seldom practiced—and in a low voice, for the door and walls were\n thin, summoned Zen the All-Capable.\n\n\n The god sighed as he materialized his head. \"I might have known you\n would require Me. What is your will, oh Most Fair?\"\n\n\n \"I have been ordered to prepare the strangers' midday repast, oh\n Puissant One, and I know not what to do with all this ukh, which they\n assure me is their food.\" And she pointed scornfully to the cans and\n jars and packages.\n\n\n \"How should\nI\nknow then?\" Zen asked unguardedly.\n\n\n The princess looked at him. \"Surely Zen the All-Knowing jests?\"",
"\"It looks,\" Peter said, grinning, \"as if we'll have to take mine.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so,\" Kendrick agreed gloomily, \"but somehow I feel no good\n will come of this.\"\n\n\n Zen wondered whether Earthmen had powers of precognition.\n\n\n No one bid against them, so they took a two-year lease on the crown\n princess for the very reasonable price of a hundred credits, and drove\n her home with them.\n\n\n Iximi gazed at the little prefab with disfavor. \"But why are we halting\n outside this gluu hutch, masters?\"",
"Peter straightened his tie and assumed a much more cheerful expression.\n \"Let's rent\nthat one\n!\" he exclaimed, pointing to the princess.\n\"Nonsense!\" Kendrick told him. \"In the first place, she is obviously\n the most expensive model. Secondly, she would be too distracting\n for you. And, finally, a pretty girl is never as good a worker as a\n plain.... We'll take that one.\" The professor pointed to the dumpiest\n and oldest of the women. \"How much should I offer to start, Your\n Excellency? No sense beginning the bidding too high. We Earthmen aren't\n made of money, in spite of what the rest of the Galaxy seems to think.\"\n\n\n \"A hundred credits is standard,\" Guj murmured. \"However, sir, there is\n one problem—have you considered how you are going to communicate with\n your maid?\"\n\n\n \"Communicate? Are they mutes?\"",
"Guj cleared his throat. \"Sirs, I wish you joy.\" He made the secular xa.\n \"Should you ever be in need again, do not hesitate to get in touch with\n me at the palace.\" And, climbing into the yio, he was off.\nThe others entered the small dwelling. \"That little trip certainly gave\n me an appetite,\" Kendrick said, rubbing his hands together. \"Iximi, you\n had better start lunch right away. This is the kitchen.\"\n\n\n Iximi gazed around the cubicle with disfavor. \"Truly it is not much,\"\n she observed. \"However, masters, if you will leave me, I shall endeavor\n to do my poor best.\"\n\n\n \"Let me show you—\" Peter began, but Kendrick interrupted.\n\n\n \"Leave the girl alone, Hammond. She must be able to cook, if she's a\n professional servant. We've wasted the whole morning as it is; maybe we\n can get something done before lunch.\"",
"Far away in his arcane retreat, the divinity groaned to himself.\nAnother aspect of Zen's personality followed the two Earthmen as they\n left the palace to supervise the erection of their prefab by the crew\n of the spaceship in one of the Royal Parks. A vast crowd of Uxenach\n gathered to watch the novelty, and among them there presently appeared\n a sinister-looking old man with a red beard, whom Zen the Pansophic had\n no difficulty in recognizing as the prime minister, heavily disguised.\n Of course it would have been no trouble for Zen to carry out Guj's\n mission for him, but he believed in self-help—especially on Thursdays.\n\n\n \"You certainly fixed us up fine!\" Hammond muttered disrespectfully to\n the professor. \"You should've told the king we were inventing a vacuum\n cleaner or something. Now they'll just be more curious than ever....\n And I still don't see why you refused the priest. Seems to me he'd be\n just what you needed.\"",
"The older scientist gave a stiff bow. \"I am an anthropologist. My\n name is Kendrick, Professor Alpheus Kendrick. My assistant, Dr. Peter\n Hammond—\" he indicated the tall young man with him—\"is a physicist.\"\nThe king and the prime minister conferred together in whispers. Zen\n wished he could join them, but he couldn't materialize on that plane\n without incense, and he preferred his subjects not to know that he\n could be invisibly present, especially on his day off. Of course, his\n Immaterial Omnipresence was a part of the accepted dogma, but there is\n a big difference between accepting a concept on a basis of faith or of\n proven fact.\n\n\n \"Curious researches,\" the king said, emerging from the conference,\n \"that require both physics\nand\nanthropology.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Kendrick. \"They are rather involved at that.\" Peter Hammond\n shuffled his feet.",
"\"The king said something yesterday about servants being available,\"\n Kendrick interrupted. \"And our robot seems to have broken down. Could\n you tell us where we could get someone to do our housework?\"\n\n\n An expression of vivid pleasure illuminated the prime minister's\n venerable countenance. \"By fortunate chance, gentlemen, a small lot of\n maids is to be auctioned off at a village very near the Imperial City\n tomorrow. I should be delighted to escort you there personally.\"\n\n\n \"Auctioned?\" Kendrick repeated. \"You mean they\nsell\nservants here?\"\n\n\n Guj raised his snowy eyebrows. \"Sold? Certainly not; they are leased\n for two years apiece. After all, if you have no lease, what guarantee\n do you have that your servants will stay after you have trained them?\n None whatsoever.\""
],
[
"Making the secular xa, he left the royal pair. Outside, his voice could\n be heard bellowing in the anteroom, \"Has any one of you squuch seen my\n pliers?\"\n\n\n \"There is no need for worry, Venerated Ancestor,\" the princess assured\n the monarch. \"All-Helpful Zen will aid me with my tasks.\"",
"\"An investigation of the prevalent nuclear ritual beliefs on Uxen in\n relation to the over-all matrix of social culture, and we really must\n get along and see to the unloading of the ship. Good-by, Your\n Majesty ... Your Excellency.\" And Kendrick dragged his protesting aide\n off.\n\n\n \"If only,\" said the king, \"I were still an absolute monarch, I would\n teach these Earthlings some manners.\" His face grew wistful. \"Well I\n remember how my father would have those who crossed him torn apart by\n wild skwitch.\"",
"\"Drat Zen and his days off!\" The princess was in a fury. \"Very well,\n we'll manage without Zen the Spiteful. Now, precisely what is troubling\n you, worthy and undeservedly Honored Parent?\"\n\n\n \"Those two scientists who arrived from Earth. Didn't you meet them\n when you came in?\"\n\n\n \"No, Respected Father,\" she said, sitting on the arm of the throne. \"I\n must have just missed them. What are they like?\"\nHe told her what they were like in terms not even a monarch should use\n before his daughter. \"And these squuch,\" he concluded, \"are undoubtedly\n working on a secret weapon. If we had it, we could free Uxen.\"\n\n\n \"Moolai Uxen!\" the princess shouted, standing up. \"My friends, must we\n continue to submit to the yoke of the tyrant? Arise. Smite the....\"\n\n\n \"Anyone,\" said Guj, \"can make a speech.\"",
"\"If you did have the Earthlings torn apart by wild skwitch, Sire,\" Guj\n pointed out, \"then you would certainly never be able to obtain any\n information from them.\"\nUxlu sighed. \"I would merely have them torn apart a little—just enough\n so that they would answer a few civil questions.\" He sighed again.\n \"And, supposing they did happen to—er—pass on, in the process, think\n of the tremendous lift to my ego. But nobody thinks of the king's ego\n any more these days.\"\n\n\n No, things were not what they had been since the time the planet had\n been retrieved by the Earthlings. They had not communicated with Uxen\n for so many hundreds of years, they had explained, because, after a\n more than ordinarily disastrous war, they had lost the secret of space\n travel for centuries.",
"Iximi closed the door, got out her portable altar—all members of the\n royal family were qualified members of the priesthood, though they\n seldom practiced—and in a low voice, for the door and walls were\n thin, summoned Zen the All-Capable.\n\n\n The god sighed as he materialized his head. \"I might have known you\n would require Me. What is your will, oh Most Fair?\"\n\n\n \"I have been ordered to prepare the strangers' midday repast, oh\n Puissant One, and I know not what to do with all this ukh, which they\n assure me is their food.\" And she pointed scornfully to the cans and\n jars and packages.\n\n\n \"How should\nI\nknow then?\" Zen asked unguardedly.\n\n\n The princess looked at him. \"Surely Zen the All-Knowing jests?\"",
"\"Er—yes. Merely having My Bit of Fun, you know.\" He hastily inspected\n the exterior of the alleged foods. \"There appear to be legends\n inscribed upon the containers. Perchance, were we to read them, they\n might give a clue as to their contents.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Omniscent One,\" the princess exclaimed, \"truly You are Wise and\n Sapient indeed, and it is I who was the fool to have doubted for so\n much as an instant.\"\n\n\n \"Oh you doubted, did you?\" Terrible Zen frowned terribly. \"Well, see\n that it doesn't happen again.\" He had no intention of losing his divine\n authority at this stage of the game.",
"\"Your Will is mine, All-Wise One. And I think You had best materialize\n a few pair of arms as well as Your August and Awe-inspiring\n Countenance, for there is much work to be done.\"\nSince the partitions were thin, Zen and the princess could hear most of\n the conversation in the main room. \"... First thing to do,\" Kendrick's\n voice remarked, \"is find out whether we're permitted to attend one\n of their religious ceremonies, where Zen is said to manifest himself\n actually and not, it is contended, just symbolically....\"\n\n\n \"The stove is here, Almighty,\" the princess suggested, \"not against the\n door where you are pressing Your Divine Ear.\"\n\n\n \"Shhh. What I hear is fraught with import for the future of the planet.\n Moolai Uxen.\"\n\n\n \"Moolai Uxen,\" the princess replied automatically.",
"Guj cleared his throat. \"Sirs, I wish you joy.\" He made the secular xa.\n \"Should you ever be in need again, do not hesitate to get in touch with\n me at the palace.\" And, climbing into the yio, he was off.\nThe others entered the small dwelling. \"That little trip certainly gave\n me an appetite,\" Kendrick said, rubbing his hands together. \"Iximi, you\n had better start lunch right away. This is the kitchen.\"\n\n\n Iximi gazed around the cubicle with disfavor. \"Truly it is not much,\"\n she observed. \"However, masters, if you will leave me, I shall endeavor\n to do my poor best.\"\n\n\n \"Let me show you—\" Peter began, but Kendrick interrupted.\n\n\n \"Leave the girl alone, Hammond. She must be able to cook, if she's a\n professional servant. We've wasted the whole morning as it is; maybe we\n can get something done before lunch.\"",
"\"Researches, eh?\" the king repeated with warm interest. \"Are you\n perhaps scientists?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Your Majesty.\" Every one of Zen's perceptors quivered\n expectantly. Earth science was banned on Uxen, with the result that its\n acquisition had become the golden dream of every Uxena, including, of\n course, their god.",
"The princess gave him a dazzling smile. \"Moolai Uxen! We must not allow\n the beautiful Uxulk tongue to fall into desuetude. Bring back our\n lovely language!\"\n\n\n Guj gestured desperately. She tossed her head, but stopped.\n\n\n \"Please, Kendrick,\" Peter begged, \"we've got to buy that one!\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not. You can see she's a troublemaker. Do you speak Earth?\"\n the professor demanded of the maid he had chosen.\n\n\n \"No speak,\" she replied.\n\n\n Peter tugged at his superior's sleeve. \"That one speaks Earth.\"\n\n\n Kendrick shook him off. \"Do you speak Earth?\" he demanded of the second\n oldest and ugliest. She shook her head. The others went through the\n same procedure.",
"\"My father grieves,\" she observed, making the secular xa. \"Pray tell\n your unworthy daughter what sorrow racks your noble bosom.\"\n\n\n \"Uxen is a backwash,\" her father mourned. \"A planet forgotten, while\n the rest of the Galaxy goes by. Our ego has reached its nadir.\"\n\n\n \"Why did you let yourself be conquered?\" the princess retorted\n scornfully. \"Ah, had I been old enough to speak then, matters would be\n very different today!\" Although she seemed too beautiful to be endowed\n with brains, Iximi had been graduated from the Royal University with\n high honors.",
"\"If, as an anthropologist, you are interested in local folkways,\n Professor,\" Guj remarked graciously, as he and the scientists piled\n into a scarlet, boat-shaped vehicle, \"you will find much to attract\n your attention in this quaint little planet of ours.\"\n\n\n \"Are the eyes painted on front of the car to ward off demons?\" Kendrick\n asked.\n\n\n \"Car? Oh, you mean the yio!\" Guj patted the forepart of the vehicle.\n It purred and fluttered long eyelashes. \"We breed an especially bouncy\n strain with seats; they're so much more comfortable, you know.\"\n\n\n \"You mean this is a\nlive\nanimal?\"\n\n\n Guj nodded apologetically. \"Of course it does not go very fast. Now if\n we had the atomic power drive, such as your spaceships have—\"\n\n\n \"You'd shoot right off into space,\" Hammond assured him.",
"\"No, but very few of these women speak Earth.\" A look of surprise\n flitted over the faces of the servants, vanishing as her royal highness\n glared at them.\n\n\n Kendrick pursed thin lips. \"I was under the impression that the Earth\n language was mandatory on Uxen.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, it is; it is, indeed!\" Guj said hastily. \"However, it is so\n hard to teach these backward peasants new ways.\" One of the backward\n peasants gave a loud sniff, which changed to a squeal as she was\n honored with a pinch from the hand of royalty. \"But you will not betray\n us? We are making rapid advances and before long we hope to make Earth\n universal.\"\n\n\n \"Of course we won't,\" Peter put in, before Kendrick had a chance to\n reply. \"What's more, I don't see why the Uxenians shouldn't be allowed\n to speak their own language.\"",
"Zen reluctantly conceded to himself that he would have to investigate\n this situation further, if he wanted to retain his reputation for\n omniscience. Sometimes, in an occasional moment of self-doubt, he\n wondered if he weren't too much of a perfectionist, but then he\n rejected the thought as self-sacrilege.\n\n\n Zen dutifully intensified the beam of awareness and returned it to the\n audience chamber where the two strange Earthmen who had come on the\n ship were being ushered into the presence of the king by none other\n than Guj, the venerable prime minister himself.\n\n\n \"Gentlemen,\" Guj beamed, his long white beard vibrating in an excess of\n hospitality, \"His Gracious Majesty will be delighted to receive you at\n once.\"\n\n\n And crossing his wrists in the secular xa, he led the way to where Uxlu\n the Fifteenth was seated in full regalia upon his imposing golden,\n gem-encrusted throne.",
"Zen the Erudite was particularly fond of her, for she had been his best\n student in Advanced Theology. She was, moreover, an ardent patriot and\n leader of the underground Moolai (free) Uxen movement, with which Zen\n was more or less in sympathy, since he felt Uxen belonged to him and\n not to the Earthlings. After all, he had been there first.\n\n\n \"\nLet\nourselves be conquered!\" Her father's voice rose to a squeak.\n \"\nLet\nourselves! Nobody asked us—we\nwere\nconquered.\"\n\n\n \"True, but we could at least have essayed our strength against the\n conquerors instead of capitulating like yioch. We could have fought to\n the last man!\"\n\n\n \"A woman is always ready to fight to the last man,\" Guj commented.\n\n\n \"Did you hear that, ancient and revered parent! He called me, a\n princess of the blood, a—a woman!\"",
"Far away in his arcane retreat, the divinity groaned to himself.\nAnother aspect of Zen's personality followed the two Earthmen as they\n left the palace to supervise the erection of their prefab by the crew\n of the spaceship in one of the Royal Parks. A vast crowd of Uxenach\n gathered to watch the novelty, and among them there presently appeared\n a sinister-looking old man with a red beard, whom Zen the Pansophic had\n no difficulty in recognizing as the prime minister, heavily disguised.\n Of course it would have been no trouble for Zen to carry out Guj's\n mission for him, but he believed in self-help—especially on Thursdays.\n\n\n \"You certainly fixed us up fine!\" Hammond muttered disrespectfully to\n the professor. \"You should've told the king we were inventing a vacuum\n cleaner or something. Now they'll just be more curious than ever....\n And I still don't see why you refused the priest. Seems to me he'd be\n just what you needed.\"",
"\"A robot is a mechanical man who does all our housework,\" Hammond, more\n courteous than his superior, explained. Zen wondered how he could ever\n have felt a moment's uneasiness concerning these wonderful strangers.\n\n\n \"Zen will be interested to hear of this,\" the prime minister said\n cannily. He and the king nodded at one another.\n\n\n \"\nWho\ndid you say?\" Kendrick asked eagerly.\n\n\n \"Zen the Terrible,\" the king repeated, \"Zen the All-Powerful, Zen the\n Encyclopedic. Surely you have heard of him?\" he asked in some surprise.\n \"He's Uxen's own particular, personal and private god, exclusive to our\n planet.\"",
"\"The apparent irreverence,\" Kendrick explained in an undertone,\n \"undoubtedly signifies that he is dealing with ancillary or, perhaps,\n peripheral religious beliefs. I must make a note of them.\" He did so.\nBy the time the royal yio had arrived at the village where the\n planetary auctions for domestics were held, the maids were already\n arranged in a row on the platform. Most were depressingly plain\n creatures and dressed in thick sacklike tunics. Among them, the\n graceful form of Iximi was conspicuous, clad in a garment similar in\n cut but fashioned of translucent gauze almost as blue as her eyes.",
"sweet-talking me into becoming a god and doing all their dirty work.\n I was happy here as the Only Inhabitant; why did I ever let those\n interlopers involve me in Theolatry? But I can't quit now. The Uxenach\n need Me ... and I need incense; I'm fettered by my own weakness. Still,\n I have the glimmerings of an idea....\n\"Oh, how much could a half-witted menial find out?\" Peter demanded.\n \"Remember, it's either a native servant, sir, or you do the housework\n yourself.\"",
"\"Must be a new secret atomic weapon they're working on,\" Uxlu decided.\n \"Why else should they come to such a remote corner of the Galaxy? And\n you will recall that the older one—Kendrick—said something about\n nuclear beliefs. If only we could discover what it is, secure it for\n ourselves, perhaps we could defeat the Earthmen, drive them away—\" he\n sighed for the third time that morning—\"and rule the planet ourselves.\"\nJust then the crown princess Iximi entered the throne room. Iximi\n really lived up to her title of Most Fair and Exalted, for centuries\n of selective breeding under which the kings of Uxen had seized the\n loveliest women of the planet for their wives had resulted in an\n outstanding pulchritude. Her hair was as golden as the ripe fruit that\n bent the boughs of the iolo tree, and her eyes were bluer than the uriz\n stones on the belt girdling her slender waist. Reproductions of the\n famous portrait of her which hung in the great hall of the palace were\n very popular on calendars."
],
[
"Making the secular xa, he left the royal pair. Outside, his voice could\n be heard bellowing in the anteroom, \"Has any one of you squuch seen my\n pliers?\"\n\n\n \"There is no need for worry, Venerated Ancestor,\" the princess assured\n the monarch. \"All-Helpful Zen will aid me with my tasks.\"",
"\"We are all equal before Zen,\" Guj said sententiously, making the high\n xa.\n\n\n \"Praise Zen,\" Uxlu and Iximi chanted perfunctorily, bowing low.\n\n\n Iximi, still angry, ordered Guj—who was also high priest—to start\n services. Kindling the incense in the hajen, he began the chant.\n\n\n Of course it was his holiday, but Zen couldn't resist the appeal of\n the incense. Besides he was there anyway, so it was really no trouble,\nno trouble\n, he thought, greedily sniffing the delicious aroma,\nat\n all\n. He materialized a head with seven nostrils so that he was able to\n inhale the incense in one delectable gulp. Then, \"No prayers answered\n on Thursday,\" he said, and disappeared. That would show them!",
"\"Your Will is mine, All-Wise One. And I think You had best materialize\n a few pair of arms as well as Your August and Awe-inspiring\n Countenance, for there is much work to be done.\"\nSince the partitions were thin, Zen and the princess could hear most of\n the conversation in the main room. \"... First thing to do,\" Kendrick's\n voice remarked, \"is find out whether we're permitted to attend one\n of their religious ceremonies, where Zen is said to manifest himself\n actually and not, it is contended, just symbolically....\"\n\n\n \"The stove is here, Almighty,\" the princess suggested, \"not against the\n door where you are pressing Your Divine Ear.\"\n\n\n \"Shhh. What I hear is fraught with import for the future of the planet.\n Moolai Uxen.\"\n\n\n \"Moolai Uxen,\" the princess replied automatically.",
"\"We don't have Zen teleport animate objects,\" the prime minister\n explained affably. \"Or even inanimate ones if they are fragile.\n For He tends to lose His Temper sometimes when He feels that He is\n overworked—\"\nFeels, indeed!\nZen said to himself—\"and throws things\n about. We cannot reprove Him for His misbehavior. After all, a god is a\n god.\"",
"Zen the Erudite was particularly fond of her, for she had been his best\n student in Advanced Theology. She was, moreover, an ardent patriot and\n leader of the underground Moolai (free) Uxen movement, with which Zen\n was more or less in sympathy, since he felt Uxen belonged to him and\n not to the Earthlings. After all, he had been there first.\n\n\n \"\nLet\nourselves be conquered!\" Her father's voice rose to a squeak.\n \"\nLet\nourselves! Nobody asked us—we\nwere\nconquered.\"\n\n\n \"True, but we could at least have essayed our strength against the\n conquerors instead of capitulating like yioch. We could have fought to\n the last man!\"\n\n\n \"A woman is always ready to fight to the last man,\" Guj commented.\n\n\n \"Did you hear that, ancient and revered parent! He called me, a\n princess of the blood, a—a woman!\"",
"Far away in his arcane retreat, the divinity groaned to himself.\nAnother aspect of Zen's personality followed the two Earthmen as they\n left the palace to supervise the erection of their prefab by the crew\n of the spaceship in one of the Royal Parks. A vast crowd of Uxenach\n gathered to watch the novelty, and among them there presently appeared\n a sinister-looking old man with a red beard, whom Zen the Pansophic had\n no difficulty in recognizing as the prime minister, heavily disguised.\n Of course it would have been no trouble for Zen to carry out Guj's\n mission for him, but he believed in self-help—especially on Thursdays.\n\n\n \"You certainly fixed us up fine!\" Hammond muttered disrespectfully to\n the professor. \"You should've told the king we were inventing a vacuum\n cleaner or something. Now they'll just be more curious than ever....\n And I still don't see why you refused the priest. Seems to me he'd be\n just what you needed.\"",
"\"All right,\" Kendrick agreed gloomily. \"We'll try one of the natives.\"\nSo the next day, still attended by the Unseen Presence of Zen, they\n sought audience with the prime minister.\n\n\n \"Welcome, Earthmen, to the humble apartments of His Majesty's most\n unimportant subject,\" Guj greeted them, making a very small xa as he\n led them into the largest reception room.\n\n\n Kendrick absently ran his finger over the undercarving of a small gold\n table. \"Look, no dust,\" he whispered. \"Must have excellent help here.\"\n\n\n Zen couldn't help preening just a bit. At least he did his work well;\n no one could gainsay that.\n\n\n \"Your desire,\" Guj went on, apparently anxious to get to the point, \"is\n my command. Would you like a rojh of dancing girls to perform before\n you or—?\"",
"\"Er—yes. Merely having My Bit of Fun, you know.\" He hastily inspected\n the exterior of the alleged foods. \"There appear to be legends\n inscribed upon the containers. Perchance, were we to read them, they\n might give a clue as to their contents.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Omniscent One,\" the princess exclaimed, \"truly You are Wise and\n Sapient indeed, and it is I who was the fool to have doubted for so\n much as an instant.\"\n\n\n \"Oh you doubted, did you?\" Terrible Zen frowned terribly. \"Well, see\n that it doesn't happen again.\" He had no intention of losing his divine\n authority at this stage of the game.",
"\"A robot is a mechanical man who does all our housework,\" Hammond, more\n courteous than his superior, explained. Zen wondered how he could ever\n have felt a moment's uneasiness concerning these wonderful strangers.\n\n\n \"Zen will be interested to hear of this,\" the prime minister said\n cannily. He and the king nodded at one another.\n\n\n \"\nWho\ndid you say?\" Kendrick asked eagerly.\n\n\n \"Zen the Terrible,\" the king repeated, \"Zen the All-Powerful, Zen the\n Encyclopedic. Surely you have heard of him?\" he asked in some surprise.\n \"He's Uxen's own particular, personal and private god, exclusive to our\n planet.\"",
"\"Drat Zen and his days off!\" The princess was in a fury. \"Very well,\n we'll manage without Zen the Spiteful. Now, precisely what is troubling\n you, worthy and undeservedly Honored Parent?\"\n\n\n \"Those two scientists who arrived from Earth. Didn't you meet them\n when you came in?\"\n\n\n \"No, Respected Father,\" she said, sitting on the arm of the throne. \"I\n must have just missed them. What are they like?\"\nHe told her what they were like in terms not even a monarch should use\n before his daughter. \"And these squuch,\" he concluded, \"are undoubtedly\n working on a secret weapon. If we had it, we could free Uxen.\"\n\n\n \"Moolai Uxen!\" the princess shouted, standing up. \"My friends, must we\n continue to submit to the yoke of the tyrant? Arise. Smite the....\"\n\n\n \"Anyone,\" said Guj, \"can make a speech.\"",
"colony, it should be their responsibility. But it seemed that all\n humans, not merely the Uxenach, were irresponsible. The Earthmen were\n interested only in trade and tribute. They even refused to believe in\n the existence of Zen, an attitude which he found extremely irritating\n to his ego.\nTrue, Uxen prospered commercially to a mild extent after their return,\n for the local ceramics that had been developed in the long interval\n found wide acceptance throughout the Galaxy, particularly the low bowls\n which had hitherto been used only for burning incense before Zen the\n Formidable.",
"When the two scientists had gone, Iximi emerged from behind a\n bright-colored tapestry depicting Zen in seven hundred and fifty-three\n of his Attributes.\n\n\n \"The younger one is not at all bad-looking,\" she commented, patting her\n hair into place. \"I do like big blond men. Perhaps my task will not be\n as unpleasant as I fancied.\"\n\n\n Guj stroked his beard. \"How do you know the Earthlings will select\nyou\n, Your Highness? Many other maids will be auctioned off at the\n same time.\"\n\n\n The princess stiffened angrily. \"They'll pick me or they'll never leave\n Uxen alive and you, Your Excellency, would not outlive them.\"\nAlthough it meant he had to overwork the other aspects of his multiple\n personality, Zen kept one free so that the next day he could join\n the Earthmen—in spirit, that was—on their excursion in search of a\n menial.",
"Zen reluctantly conceded to himself that he would have to investigate\n this situation further, if he wanted to retain his reputation for\n omniscience. Sometimes, in an occasional moment of self-doubt, he\n wondered if he weren't too much of a perfectionist, but then he\n rejected the thought as self-sacrilege.\n\n\n Zen dutifully intensified the beam of awareness and returned it to the\n audience chamber where the two strange Earthmen who had come on the\n ship were being ushered into the presence of the king by none other\n than Guj, the venerable prime minister himself.\n\n\n \"Gentlemen,\" Guj beamed, his long white beard vibrating in an excess of\n hospitality, \"His Gracious Majesty will be delighted to receive you at\n once.\"\n\n\n And crossing his wrists in the secular xa, he led the way to where Uxlu\n the Fifteenth was seated in full regalia upon his imposing golden,\n gem-encrusted throne.",
"\"And you wouldn't have got me either, if the Minister of Science didn't\n have it in for me!\" Peter said irately. \"I'm far too good for this\n piddling little job, and you know it. If it weren't for envy in high\n places—\"\n\n\n \"Better watch out,\" the professor warned, \"or the Minister might decide\n you're too good for science altogether, and you'll be switched to a\n position more in keeping with your talents—say, as a Refuse Removal\n Agent.\"\nAnd what is wrong with the honored art of Refuse Removal?\nZen\n wondered. There were a lot of mystifying things about these Earthmen.\nThe scientists' quaint little edifice was finally set up, and the\n spaceship took its departure. It was only then that the Earthmen\n discovered that something they called cigarettes couldn't be found in\n the welter of packages, and that the robot wouldn't cook dinner or, in\n fact, do anything.\nGood old Guj\n, Zen thought.",
"The older scientist gave a stiff bow. \"I am an anthropologist. My\n name is Kendrick, Professor Alpheus Kendrick. My assistant, Dr. Peter\n Hammond—\" he indicated the tall young man with him—\"is a physicist.\"\nThe king and the prime minister conferred together in whispers. Zen\n wished he could join them, but he couldn't materialize on that plane\n without incense, and he preferred his subjects not to know that he\n could be invisibly present, especially on his day off. Of course, his\n Immaterial Omnipresence was a part of the accepted dogma, but there is\n a big difference between accepting a concept on a basis of faith or of\n proven fact.\n\n\n \"Curious researches,\" the king said, emerging from the conference,\n \"that require both physics\nand\nanthropology.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Kendrick. \"They are rather involved at that.\" Peter Hammond\n shuffled his feet.",
"\"Yes, yes, of course I've heard about him,\" Kendrick said, trembling\n with hardly repressed excitement.\nWhat a correct attitude!\nZen thought.\nOne rarely finds such\n religious respect among foreigners.\n\"In fact, I've heard a great deal about him and I should like to know\n even more!\" Kendrick spoke almost reverently.\n\n\n \"He\nis\nan extremely interesting divinity,\" the king replied\n complacently. \"And if your robot cannot teleport or requires a hand\n with the heavy work, do not hesitate to call on Zen the Accommodating.\n We'll detail a priest to summon—\"\n\n\n \"The robot manages very well all by itself, thank you,\" Kendrick said\n quickly.\nIn his hideaway, the material body of Zen breathed a vast multiple sigh\n of relief. He was getting to like these Earthmen more and more by the\n minute.\n\n\n \"Might I inquire,\" the king asked, \"into the nature of your researches?\"",
"\"Researches, eh?\" the king repeated with warm interest. \"Are you\n perhaps scientists?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Your Majesty.\" Every one of Zen's perceptors quivered\n expectantly. Earth science was banned on Uxen, with the result that its\n acquisition had become the golden dream of every Uxena, including, of\n course, their god.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nElected a god, Zen the Omnipotent longed\n \nfor supernatural powers—for he was also\n \nZen the All-Put-Upon, a galactic sucker!\nZen the Terrible lay quiescent in the secret retreat which housed his\n corporeal being, all the aspects of his personality wallowing in the\n luxury of a day off. How glad he was that he'd had the forethought to\n stipulate a weekly holiday for himself when first this godhood had\n been thrust upon him, hundreds of centuries before. He'd accepted the\n perquisites of divinity with pleasure then. It was some little time\n before he discovered its drawbacks, and by then it was too late; he had\n become the established church.",
"All the aspects of his personality rested ... save one, that is. And\n that one, stretching out an impalpable tendril of curiosity, brought\n back to his total consciousness the news that a spaceship from Earth\n had arrived when no ship from Earth was due.\nSo what?\nthe total consciousness asked lazily of itself.\nProbably\n they have a large out-of-season order for hajench. My hajench going to\n provide salad bowls for barbarians!\nWhen, twenty years previously, the Earthmen had come back to their\n colony on Uxen after a lapse of thousands of years, Zen had been\n hopeful that they would take some of the Divine Work off his hands.\n After all, since it was they who had originally established the",
"\"How disgusting that there should still be a planet so backward that\n human beings should be forced to do humiliating tasks,\" Kendrick said.\nYou don't know the half of it, either\n, Zen thought, shocked all the\n way back to his physical being. It had never occurred to him that the\n functions of gods on other planets might be different than on Uxen ...\n unless the Earthlings failed to pay reverence to their own gods, which\n seemed unlikely in view of the respectful way with which Professor\n Kendrick had greeted the mention of Zen's Awe-Inspiring Name. Then\n Refuse Removal was not necessarily a divine prerogative.\nThose first colonists were very clever\n, Zen thought bitterly,"
],
[
"\"And besides,\" Guj interposed, \"they will need no servants. All their\n housework is to be done by their robot—a mechanical man that performs\n all menial duties. And you, Your Royal Highness, could not plausibly\n disguise yourself as a machine.\"\n\n\n \"No-o-o-o, I expect not.\" The princess hugged the rosy knees\n revealed by her brief tunic and thought aloud, \"But ... just ...\n supposing ... something ... went wrong with the robot.... They do\n not possess another?\"\n\n\n \"They referred only to one, Highness,\" Guj replied reluctantly. \"But\n they may have the parts with which to construct another.\"\n\n\n \"Nonetheless, it is well worth the attempt,\" the princess declared.\n \"You will cast a spell on the robot, Guj, so that it stops.\"\n\n\n He sighed. \"Very well, Your Highness; I suppose I could manage that!\"",
"Making the secular xa, he left the royal pair. Outside, his voice could\n be heard bellowing in the anteroom, \"Has any one of you squuch seen my\n pliers?\"\n\n\n \"There is no need for worry, Venerated Ancestor,\" the princess assured\n the monarch. \"All-Helpful Zen will aid me with my tasks.\"",
"Guj cleared his throat. \"Sirs, I wish you joy.\" He made the secular xa.\n \"Should you ever be in need again, do not hesitate to get in touch with\n me at the palace.\" And, climbing into the yio, he was off.\nThe others entered the small dwelling. \"That little trip certainly gave\n me an appetite,\" Kendrick said, rubbing his hands together. \"Iximi, you\n had better start lunch right away. This is the kitchen.\"\n\n\n Iximi gazed around the cubicle with disfavor. \"Truly it is not much,\"\n she observed. \"However, masters, if you will leave me, I shall endeavor\n to do my poor best.\"\n\n\n \"Let me show you—\" Peter began, but Kendrick interrupted.\n\n\n \"Leave the girl alone, Hammond. She must be able to cook, if she's a\n professional servant. We've wasted the whole morning as it is; maybe we\n can get something done before lunch.\"",
"When the two scientists had gone, Iximi emerged from behind a\n bright-colored tapestry depicting Zen in seven hundred and fifty-three\n of his Attributes.\n\n\n \"The younger one is not at all bad-looking,\" she commented, patting her\n hair into place. \"I do like big blond men. Perhaps my task will not be\n as unpleasant as I fancied.\"\n\n\n Guj stroked his beard. \"How do you know the Earthlings will select\nyou\n, Your Highness? Many other maids will be auctioned off at the\n same time.\"\n\n\n The princess stiffened angrily. \"They'll pick me or they'll never leave\n Uxen alive and you, Your Excellency, would not outlive them.\"\nAlthough it meant he had to overwork the other aspects of his multiple\n personality, Zen kept one free so that the next day he could join\n the Earthmen—in spirit, that was—on their excursion in search of a\n menial.",
"\"Your Will is mine, All-Wise One. And I think You had best materialize\n a few pair of arms as well as Your August and Awe-inspiring\n Countenance, for there is much work to be done.\"\nSince the partitions were thin, Zen and the princess could hear most of\n the conversation in the main room. \"... First thing to do,\" Kendrick's\n voice remarked, \"is find out whether we're permitted to attend one\n of their religious ceremonies, where Zen is said to manifest himself\n actually and not, it is contended, just symbolically....\"\n\n\n \"The stove is here, Almighty,\" the princess suggested, \"not against the\n door where you are pressing Your Divine Ear.\"\n\n\n \"Shhh. What I hear is fraught with import for the future of the planet.\n Moolai Uxen.\"\n\n\n \"Moolai Uxen,\" the princess replied automatically.",
"Iximi closed the door, got out her portable altar—all members of the\n royal family were qualified members of the priesthood, though they\n seldom practiced—and in a low voice, for the door and walls were\n thin, summoned Zen the All-Capable.\n\n\n The god sighed as he materialized his head. \"I might have known you\n would require Me. What is your will, oh Most Fair?\"\n\n\n \"I have been ordered to prepare the strangers' midday repast, oh\n Puissant One, and I know not what to do with all this ukh, which they\n assure me is their food.\" And she pointed scornfully to the cans and\n jars and packages.\n\n\n \"How should\nI\nknow then?\" Zen asked unguardedly.\n\n\n The princess looked at him. \"Surely Zen the All-Knowing jests?\"",
"The princess sat on the steps of the throne and pondered. \"Obviously we\n must introduce a spy into their household to learn their science and\n turn it to our advantage.\"\n\n\n \"They are very careful, those Earthlings,\" Guj informed her\n superciliously. \"It is obvious that they do not intend to let any of us\n come near them.\"\n\n\n The princess gave a knowing smile. \"But they undoubtedly will need at\n least one menial to care for their dwelling. I shall be that menial. I,\n Iximi, will so demean myself for the sake of my planet! Moolai Uxen!\"\n\n\n \"You cannot do it, Iximi,\" her father said, distressed. \"You must not\n defile yourself so. I will not hear of it!\"",
"\"Er—yes. Merely having My Bit of Fun, you know.\" He hastily inspected\n the exterior of the alleged foods. \"There appear to be legends\n inscribed upon the containers. Perchance, were we to read them, they\n might give a clue as to their contents.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Omniscent One,\" the princess exclaimed, \"truly You are Wise and\n Sapient indeed, and it is I who was the fool to have doubted for so\n much as an instant.\"\n\n\n \"Oh you doubted, did you?\" Terrible Zen frowned terribly. \"Well, see\n that it doesn't happen again.\" He had no intention of losing his divine\n authority at this stage of the game.",
"\"The apparent irreverence,\" Kendrick explained in an undertone,\n \"undoubtedly signifies that he is dealing with ancillary or, perhaps,\n peripheral religious beliefs. I must make a note of them.\" He did so.\nBy the time the royal yio had arrived at the village where the\n planetary auctions for domestics were held, the maids were already\n arranged in a row on the platform. Most were depressingly plain\n creatures and dressed in thick sacklike tunics. Among them, the\n graceful form of Iximi was conspicuous, clad in a garment similar in\n cut but fashioned of translucent gauze almost as blue as her eyes.",
"Zen the Erudite was particularly fond of her, for she had been his best\n student in Advanced Theology. She was, moreover, an ardent patriot and\n leader of the underground Moolai (free) Uxen movement, with which Zen\n was more or less in sympathy, since he felt Uxen belonged to him and\n not to the Earthlings. After all, he had been there first.\n\n\n \"\nLet\nourselves be conquered!\" Her father's voice rose to a squeak.\n \"\nLet\nourselves! Nobody asked us—we\nwere\nconquered.\"\n\n\n \"True, but we could at least have essayed our strength against the\n conquerors instead of capitulating like yioch. We could have fought to\n the last man!\"\n\n\n \"A woman is always ready to fight to the last man,\" Guj commented.\n\n\n \"Did you hear that, ancient and revered parent! He called me, a\n princess of the blood, a—a woman!\"",
"Far away in his arcane retreat, the divinity groaned to himself.\nAnother aspect of Zen's personality followed the two Earthmen as they\n left the palace to supervise the erection of their prefab by the crew\n of the spaceship in one of the Royal Parks. A vast crowd of Uxenach\n gathered to watch the novelty, and among them there presently appeared\n a sinister-looking old man with a red beard, whom Zen the Pansophic had\n no difficulty in recognizing as the prime minister, heavily disguised.\n Of course it would have been no trouble for Zen to carry out Guj's\n mission for him, but he believed in self-help—especially on Thursdays.\n\n\n \"You certainly fixed us up fine!\" Hammond muttered disrespectfully to\n the professor. \"You should've told the king we were inventing a vacuum\n cleaner or something. Now they'll just be more curious than ever....\n And I still don't see why you refused the priest. Seems to me he'd be\n just what you needed.\"",
"The princess gave him a dazzling smile. \"Moolai Uxen! We must not allow\n the beautiful Uxulk tongue to fall into desuetude. Bring back our\n lovely language!\"\n\n\n Guj gestured desperately. She tossed her head, but stopped.\n\n\n \"Please, Kendrick,\" Peter begged, \"we've got to buy that one!\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not. You can see she's a troublemaker. Do you speak Earth?\"\n the professor demanded of the maid he had chosen.\n\n\n \"No speak,\" she replied.\n\n\n Peter tugged at his superior's sleeve. \"That one speaks Earth.\"\n\n\n Kendrick shook him off. \"Do you speak Earth?\" he demanded of the second\n oldest and ugliest. She shook her head. The others went through the\n same procedure.",
"\"My father grieves,\" she observed, making the secular xa. \"Pray tell\n your unworthy daughter what sorrow racks your noble bosom.\"\n\n\n \"Uxen is a backwash,\" her father mourned. \"A planet forgotten, while\n the rest of the Galaxy goes by. Our ego has reached its nadir.\"\n\n\n \"Why did you let yourself be conquered?\" the princess retorted\n scornfully. \"Ah, had I been old enough to speak then, matters would be\n very different today!\" Although she seemed too beautiful to be endowed\n with brains, Iximi had been graduated from the Royal University with\n high honors.",
"\"The king said something yesterday about servants being available,\"\n Kendrick interrupted. \"And our robot seems to have broken down. Could\n you tell us where we could get someone to do our housework?\"\n\n\n An expression of vivid pleasure illuminated the prime minister's\n venerable countenance. \"By fortunate chance, gentlemen, a small lot of\n maids is to be auctioned off at a village very near the Imperial City\n tomorrow. I should be delighted to escort you there personally.\"\n\n\n \"Auctioned?\" Kendrick repeated. \"You mean they\nsell\nservants here?\"\n\n\n Guj raised his snowy eyebrows. \"Sold? Certainly not; they are leased\n for two years apiece. After all, if you have no lease, what guarantee\n do you have that your servants will stay after you have trained them?\n None whatsoever.\"",
"sweet-talking me into becoming a god and doing all their dirty work.\n I was happy here as the Only Inhabitant; why did I ever let those\n interlopers involve me in Theolatry? But I can't quit now. The Uxenach\n need Me ... and I need incense; I'm fettered by my own weakness. Still,\n I have the glimmerings of an idea....\n\"Oh, how much could a half-witted menial find out?\" Peter demanded.\n \"Remember, it's either a native servant, sir, or you do the housework\n yourself.\"",
"\"All right,\" Kendrick agreed gloomily. \"We'll try one of the natives.\"\nSo the next day, still attended by the Unseen Presence of Zen, they\n sought audience with the prime minister.\n\n\n \"Welcome, Earthmen, to the humble apartments of His Majesty's most\n unimportant subject,\" Guj greeted them, making a very small xa as he\n led them into the largest reception room.\n\n\n Kendrick absently ran his finger over the undercarving of a small gold\n table. \"Look, no dust,\" he whispered. \"Must have excellent help here.\"\n\n\n Zen couldn't help preening just a bit. At least he did his work well;\n no one could gainsay that.\n\n\n \"Your desire,\" Guj went on, apparently anxious to get to the point, \"is\n my command. Would you like a rojh of dancing girls to perform before\n you or—?\"",
"\"I can't figure out what's gone wrong,\" Peter complained, as he\n finished putting the mechanical man together again. \"Everything seems\n to be all right, and yet the damned thing won't function.\"\n\n\n \"Looks as if we'll have to do the housework ourselves, confound it!\"\n\n\n \"Uh-uh,\" Peter said. \"You can, but not me. The Earth government put me\n under your orders so far as this project is concerned, sir, but I'm not\n supposed to do anything degrading, sir, and menial work is classified\n as just that, sir, so—\"\n\n\n \"All right, all\nright\n!\" Kendrick said. \"Though it seems to me if\nI'm\nwilling to do it,\nyou\nshould have no objection.\"\n\n\n \"It's your project, sir. I gathered from the king, though,\" Peter\n added more helpfully, \"that some of the natives still do menial labor\n themselves.\"",
"\"Drat Zen and his days off!\" The princess was in a fury. \"Very well,\n we'll manage without Zen the Spiteful. Now, precisely what is troubling\n you, worthy and undeservedly Honored Parent?\"\n\n\n \"Those two scientists who arrived from Earth. Didn't you meet them\n when you came in?\"\n\n\n \"No, Respected Father,\" she said, sitting on the arm of the throne. \"I\n must have just missed them. What are they like?\"\nHe told her what they were like in terms not even a monarch should use\n before his daughter. \"And these squuch,\" he concluded, \"are undoubtedly\n working on a secret weapon. If we had it, we could free Uxen.\"\n\n\n \"Moolai Uxen!\" the princess shouted, standing up. \"My friends, must we\n continue to submit to the yoke of the tyrant? Arise. Smite the....\"\n\n\n \"Anyone,\" said Guj, \"can make a speech.\"",
"\"We are all equal before Zen,\" Guj said sententiously, making the high\n xa.\n\n\n \"Praise Zen,\" Uxlu and Iximi chanted perfunctorily, bowing low.\n\n\n Iximi, still angry, ordered Guj—who was also high priest—to start\n services. Kindling the incense in the hajen, he began the chant.\n\n\n Of course it was his holiday, but Zen couldn't resist the appeal of\n the incense. Besides he was there anyway, so it was really no trouble,\nno trouble\n, he thought, greedily sniffing the delicious aroma,\nat\n all\n. He materialized a head with seven nostrils so that he was able to\n inhale the incense in one delectable gulp. Then, \"No prayers answered\n on Thursday,\" he said, and disappeared. That would show them!",
"The older scientist gave a stiff bow. \"I am an anthropologist. My\n name is Kendrick, Professor Alpheus Kendrick. My assistant, Dr. Peter\n Hammond—\" he indicated the tall young man with him—\"is a physicist.\"\nThe king and the prime minister conferred together in whispers. Zen\n wished he could join them, but he couldn't materialize on that plane\n without incense, and he preferred his subjects not to know that he\n could be invisibly present, especially on his day off. Of course, his\n Immaterial Omnipresence was a part of the accepted dogma, but there is\n a big difference between accepting a concept on a basis of faith or of\n proven fact.\n\n\n \"Curious researches,\" the king said, emerging from the conference,\n \"that require both physics\nand\nanthropology.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Kendrick. \"They are rather involved at that.\" Peter Hammond\n shuffled his feet."
]
] |
valid
|
51687
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[
"How are the various Projects in the story related to each other?",
"What happened to Linda in the end?",
"What was the nature of the spy?",
"In what way did the spy intend to evade the Army?",
"What abilities does the spy appear to have?",
"Why did the spy enter the Project?",
"How many buildings has the spy breached the security of?",
"What was the commitment to be made with Linda most like?"
] |
[
[
"They are governed like states within a country",
"They are connected by underground corridors to avoid radiation at the surface",
"They are largely governed like separate countries",
"They are separate wings of the same humongous building"
],
[
"She went insane with worry",
"She left with her partner to explore the Outside",
"She broke off the engagement",
"Not possible to know"
],
[
"He insisted he wasn’t a spy but actually was",
"A scientist",
"A defector from a nearby Project",
"A person trying to escape the project"
],
[
"Disguised as a normal everyday person in the Project",
"Waiting until they thought they’d lost his trail",
"Wear a radiation blanket and hide in an outbound ore-sled",
"Lure the Army up to the top floors and then bolt to the bottom and run Outside"
],
[
"Mind reading and detection of others in the elevator shaft",
"Detection of others in the elevator shaft",
"Shape shifting",
"Invisibility and mind reading"
],
[
"He wanted to test human travel safety Outside",
"He was mounting a nuclear attack",
"He suspected they were going to attack his own Project",
"He wanted to gain information about the technologies in the Project"
],
[
"Two",
"None",
"One",
"Countless"
],
[
"Friends who look after each other’s apartments when the other is gone",
"Limited time partners with only two children allowed to control the population",
"Limited time committed partners",
"Lifetime partners with no children allowed"
]
] |
[
3,
4,
2,
2,
2,
1,
3,
3
] |
[
1,
0,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1
] |
[
[
"The rise of the Projects, according to Dr. Kilbillie, was the result of\n many many factors, but two of the most important were the population\n explosion and the Treaty of Oslo. The population explosion, of course,\n meant that there was continuously more and more people but never any\n more space. So that housing, in the historically short time of one\n century, made a complete transformation from horizontal expansion to\n vertical. Before 1900, the vast majority of human beings lived in\n tiny huts of from one to five stories. By 2000,\neverybody\nlived in\n Projects. From the very beginning, small attempts were made to make\n these Projects more than dwelling places. By mid-century, Projects\n (also called apartments and co-ops) already included restaurants,",
"shopping centers, baby-sitting services, dry cleaners and a host of\n other adjuncts. By the end of the century, the Projects were completely\n self-sufficient, with food grown hydroponically in the sub-basements,\n separate floors set aside for schools and churches and factories, robot\n ore-sleds capable of seeking out raw materials unavailable within the\n Projects themselves and so on. And all because of, among other things,\n the population explosion.",
"Until that moment, the state of siege in which we all lived had had\n no reality for me. The Project, after all, was self-sufficient and\n completely enclosed. No one ever left, no one ever entered. Under our\n roof, we were a nation, two hundred stories high. The ever-present\n threat of other projects had never been more for me—or for most other\n people either, I suspected—than occasional ore-sleds that didn't\n return, occasional spies shot down as they tried to sneak into the\n building, occasional spies of our own leaving the Project in tiny\n radiation-proof cars, hoping to get safely within another project and\n bring back news of any immediate threats and dangers that project might\n be planning for us. Most spies didn't return; most ore-sleds did. And\n within the Project life was full, the knowledge of external dangers\n merely lurking at the backs of our minds. After all, those external\n dangers had been no more than potential for decades, since what Dr.\n Kilbillie called the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War.",
"\"Ah hah!\" He sat forward, tensed, pointing the gun at me like a finger\n again. \"Now, then,\" he said. \"If you know it doesn't make any sense for\n this Project to attack any other project, then why in the world should\n you think\nthey\nmight see some advantage in attacking\nyou\n?\"\n\n\n I shook my head, dumbfounded. \"I can't answer a question like that,\" I\n said. \"How do I know what they're thinking?\"\n\n\n \"They're human beings, aren't they?\" he cried. \"Like you? Like me? Like\n all the other people in this mausoleum?\"\n\n\n \"Now, wait a minute—\"",
"Of course, they made up for this as best they could by using tactical\n atomic weapons all over the place. After the war almost the whole\n world was quite dangerously radioactive. Except for the Projects. Or\n at least those of them which had in time installed the force screens\n which had been invented on the very eve of battle, and which deflected\n radioactive particles.\n\n\n However, what with all of the\nother\ntreaties which were broken during\n the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War, by the time it was finished nobody\n was quite sure any more who was on whose side. That project over there\n on the horizon might be an ally. And then again it might not. Since\n they weren't sure either, it was risky to expose yourself in order to\n ask.",
"Well, according to Dr. Kilbillie (a walking library of unnecessary\n information), the Project had been built when there still had been such\n things as municipal governments (something to do with cities, which\n were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government\n had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which\n required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the\n city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them.\n\n\n And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after\n all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda's floor. At sixteen steps a\n flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps.\n\n\n Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could.\n If the door would open.",
"\"The radiation level,\" he went on, \"is way down. It's practically as\n low as it was before the Atom War. I don't know how long it's been\n that low, but I would guess about ten years, at the very least.\" He\n leaned forward again, urgent and serious. \"The world is safe out there\n now. Man can come back out of the cave again. He can start building\n the dreams again. And this time he can build better, because he has\n the horrible example of the recent past to guide him away from the\n pitfalls. There's no need any longer for the Projects.\"\n\n\n And that was like saying there's no need any longer for stomachs, but I\n didn't say so. I didn't say anything at all.",
"\"I'm a trained atomic engineer,\" he went on. \"In my project, I worked\n on the reactor. Theoretically, I believed that there was a chance the\n radiation Outside was lessening by now, though we had no idea exactly\n how much radiation had been released by the Atom War. But I wanted\n to test the theory, and the Commission wouldn't let me. They claimed\n public safety, but I knew better. If the Outside were safe and the\n Projects were no longer needed, then the Commission was out of a job,\n and they knew it.",
"\"No!\" he shouted. \"You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You\n think I'm a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I'm a spy. That\n fathead who turned me in thinks I'm a spy. But I'm\nnot\na spy, and I'm\n going to tell you what I am.\"\n\n\n I waited, looking as attentive as possible.\n\n\n \"I come,\" he said, \"from a Project about eighty miles north of here.\n I came here by foot, without any sort of radiation shield at all to\n protect me.\"\n\n\n The maniac was back. I didn't say a word. I didn't want to set off the\n violence that was so obviously in this lunatic.",
"Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that Linda's a perfectionist or a\n harridan or anything like that. Far from it. But she does have a\n fixation on that one subject of punctuality. The result of her job,\n of course. She was an ore-sled dispatcher. Ore-sleds, being robots,\n were invariably punctual. If an ore-sled didn't return on time, no one\n waited for it. They simply knew that it had been captured by some other\n Project and had blown itself up.",
"\"You bet it would,\" he said, with malicious glee. \"All right, if that's\n what\nyour\nspies are doing, and if\nI'm\na spy, then it follows that\n I'm doing the same thing, right?\"\n\n\n \"I don't follow you,\" I admitted.\n\n\n \"If I'm a spy,\" he said impatiently, \"then I'm supposed to look for\n indications of an attack by you people on my Project.\"\n\n\n I shrugged. \"If that's your job,\" I said, \"then that's your job.\"\n\n\n He got suddenly red-faced, and jumped to his feet. \"That's\nnot\nmy\n job, you blatant idiot!\" he shouted. \"I'm not a spy! If I\nwere\na spy,\nthen\nthat would be my job!\"\nThe maniac had returned, in full force. \"All right,\" I said hastily.\n \"All right, whatever you say.\"",
"He glowered at me a moment longer, then shouted, \"Bah!\" and dropped\n back into the chair.\n\n\n He breathed rather heavily for a while, glaring at the floor, then\n looked at me again. \"All right, listen. What if I were to tell you that\n I\nhad\nfound indications that you people were planning to attack my\n Project?\"\n\n\n I stared at him. \"That's impossible!\" I cried. \"We aren't planning to\n attack anybody! We just want to be left in peace!\"\n\n\n \"How do I know that?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"It's the truth! What would we want to attack anybody for?\"",
"She nodded solemnly. \"I'm terribly sorry, sir,\" she said. Then she\n glanced to her right, suddenly straightened up again, and said,\n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible.\" Click. Blank screen.\n\n\n For a minute or two, all I could do was sit and absorb what I'd been\n told. A spy in the elevator! A spy who had managed to work his way all\n the way up to the hundred forty-seventh floor before being unmasked!\n\n\n What in the world was the matter with the Army? If things were getting\n that lax, the Project was doomed, force-screen or no. Who knew how many\n more spies there were in the Project, still unsuspected?",
"I looked at him, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could\n leap at him before he could bring the gun up again. But he must have\n read my intentions on my face. He straightened, shaking his head. He\n said, \"Don't try it. I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill\n anybody, but I will if I have to. We'll just wait here together until\n the hue and cry passes us. Then I'll tie you up, so you won't be able\n to sic your Army on me too soon, and I'll leave. If you don't try any\n silly heroics, nothing will happen to you.\"\n\n\n \"You'll never get away,\" I told him. \"The whole Project is alerted.\"\n\n\n \"You let me worry about that,\" he said. He licked his lips. \"You got\n any chico coffee?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"\"If you say so,\" I replied stiffly. The Army claimed that we had\n adequate defense equipment. I chose to believe the Army over an enemy\n spy.\n\n\n \"Your people send out spies, too, don't they?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"Well, of course.\"\n\n\n \"And what are\nthey\nsupposed to spy on?\"\n\n\n \"Well—\" It was such a pointless question, it seemed silly to even\n answer it. \"They're supposed to look for indications of an attack by\n one of the other projects.\"\n\n\n \"And do they find any indications, ever?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know,\" I told him frostily. \"That would be classified\n information.\"",
"And the Treaty of Oslo.\n\n\n It seems there was a power-struggle between two sets of then-existing\n nations (they were something like Projects, only horizontal instead of\n vertical) and both sets were equipped with atomic weapons. The Treaty\n of Oslo began by stating that atomic war was unthinkable, and added\n that just in case anyone happened to think of it only\ntactical\natomic\n weapons could be used. No\nstrategic\natomic weapons. (A tactical\n weapon is something you use on the soldiers, and a strategic weapons is\n something you use on the folks at home.) Oddly enough, when somebody\n did think of the war, both sides adhered to the Treaty of Oslo, which\n meant that no Projects were bombed.",
"It only stopped me for a second. \"Disconnected? What do you mean\n disconnected? Elevators don't\nget\ndisconnected!\" I told her.\n\n\n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible,\" she rattled. My bellowing\n was bouncing off her like radiation off the Project force-screen.\n\n\n I changed tactics. First I inhaled, making a production out of it,\n giving myself a chance to calm down a bit. And then I asked, as\n rationally as you could please, \"Would you mind terribly telling me\nwhy\nthe elevator is disconnected?\"\n\n\n \"I-am-sorry-sir-but-that——\"\n\n\n \"Stop,\" I said. I said it quietly, too, but she stopped. I saw her\n looking at me. She hadn't done that before, she'd merely gazed blankly\n at her screen and parroted her responses.",
"Dr. Kilbillie—Intermediate Project History, when I was fifteen years\n old—had private names for every major war of the twentieth century.\n There was the Ignoble Nobleman's War, the Racial Non-Racial War, and\n the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War, known to the textbooks of course as\n World Wars One, Two, and Three.",
"\"Well—but why should there be any problem about getting him out?\"\n\n\n \"He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from\n outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims\n the elevator at them.\"\n\n\n That sounded impossible. \"He\naims\nthe elevator?\"\n\n\n \"He runs it up and down the shaft,\" she explained, \"trying to crush\n anybody who goes after him.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said. \"So it might take a while.\"\n\n\n She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could\n hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, \"They're\n afraid they'll have to starve him out.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\"",
"\"Of course not,\" I told him. I was on secure ground now, with Linda's\n information to guide me. \"All radiation is cleared from the sleds and\n their cargo before they're brought into the building.\"\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he said impatiently. \"But don't you ever check them\n before de-radiating them?\"\n\"No. Why should we?\"\n\n\n \"To find out how far the radiation level outside has dropped.\"\n\n\n \"For what? Who cares about that?\"\n\n\n He frowned bitterly. \"The same answer,\" he muttered, more to himself\n than to me. \"The same answer every time. You people have crawled into\n your caves and you're ready to stay in them forever.\"\n\n\n I looked around at my apartment. \"Rather a well-appointed cave,\" I told\n him."
],
[
"Well, of course, after working as an ore-sled dispatcher for three\n years, Linda quite naturally was a bit obsessed. I remember one time,\n shortly after we'd started dating, when I arrived at her place five\n minutes late and found her having hysterics. She thought I'd been\n killed. She couldn't visualize anything less than that keeping me from\n arriving at the designated moment. When I told her what actually had\n happened—I'd broken a shoe lace—she refused to speak to me for four\n days.",
"It was just one of those days. Everybody gets them. Days when you're\n lucky in you make it to nightfall with no bones broken.\n\n\n But of all times for it to happen! For literally months I'd been\n building my courage up. And finally, just today, I had made up my\n mind to do it—to propose to Linda. I'd called her second thing this\n morning—right after the egg yolk—and invited myself down to her\n place. \"Ten o'clock,\" she'd said, smiling sweetly at me out of the\n phone. She knew why I wanted to talk to her. And when Linda said ten\n o'clock, she meant ten o'clock.",
"Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that Linda's a perfectionist or a\n harridan or anything like that. Far from it. But she does have a\n fixation on that one subject of punctuality. The result of her job,\n of course. She was an ore-sled dispatcher. Ore-sleds, being robots,\n were invariably punctual. If an ore-sled didn't return on time, no one\n waited for it. They simply knew that it had been captured by some other\n Project and had blown itself up.",
"\"Of course not,\" I told him. I was on secure ground now, with Linda's\n information to guide me. \"All radiation is cleared from the sleds and\n their cargo before they're brought into the building.\"\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he said impatiently. \"But don't you ever check them\n before de-radiating them?\"\n\"No. Why should we?\"\n\n\n \"To find out how far the radiation level outside has dropped.\"\n\n\n \"For what? Who cares about that?\"\n\n\n He frowned bitterly. \"The same answer,\" he muttered, more to himself\n than to me. \"The same answer every time. You people have crawled into\n your caves and you're ready to stay in them forever.\"\n\n\n I looked around at my apartment. \"Rather a well-appointed cave,\" I told\n him.",
"And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking\n Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness\n was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it\n go at that.\nBut now there was a spy in the elevator.\n\n\n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how\n many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls\n were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the\n other side of them.\n\n\n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n\n\n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen.\n I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the\n elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda\n would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient\n reason for me to be late.",
"Well, according to Dr. Kilbillie (a walking library of unnecessary\n information), the Project had been built when there still had been such\n things as municipal governments (something to do with cities, which\n were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government\n had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which\n required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the\n city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them.\n\n\n And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after\n all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda's floor. At sixteen steps a\n flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps.\n\n\n Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could.\n If the door would open.",
"Ten more seconds, and still no elevator. I chose the second\n alternative, raced back down the hall, and thumbed my way into my\n apartment. I dialed Linda's number, and the screen lit up with white\n letters on black: PRIVACY DISCONNECTION.\n\n\n Of course! Linda expected me at any moment. And she knew what I wanted\n to say to her, so quite naturally she had disconnected the phone, to\n keep us from being interrupted.\n\n\n Frantic, I dashed from the apartment again, back down the hall to the\n elevator, and leaned on that blasted button with all my weight. Even if\n the elevator should arrive right now, I would still be almost a minute\n late.\n\n\n No matter. It didn't arrive.",
"So I rehearsed my various approaches, realizing that when the time\n came I would probably be so tongue-tied I'd be capable of no more\n than a blurted, \"Will you marry me?\" and I struggled with zippers and\n malfunctioning air-cons, and I managed somehow to leave the apartment\n at five minutes to ten.\n\n\n Linda lived down on the hundred fortieth floor, thirteen stories away.\n It never took more than two or three minutes to get to her place, so I\n was giving myself plenty of time.\n\n\n But then the elevator didn't come.\n\n\n I pushed the button, waited, and nothing happened. I couldn't\n understand it.",
"But now she was actually looking at\nme\n.\n\n\n I took advantage of the fact. Calmly, rationally, I said to her, \"I\n would like to tell you something, Miss. I would like to tell you just\n what you people have done to me by disconnecting the elevator. You have\n ruined my life.\"\n\n\n She blinked, open-mouthed. \"Ruined your life?\"\n\n\n \"Precisely.\" I found it necessary to inhale again, even more slowly\n than before. \"I was on my way,\" I explained, \"to propose to a girl whom\n I dearly love. In every way but one, she is the perfect woman. Do you\n understand me?\"\n\n\n She nodded, wide-eyed. I had stumbled on a romantic, though I was too\n preoccupied to notice it at the time.",
"\"Well—but why should there be any problem about getting him out?\"\n\n\n \"He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from\n outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims\n the elevator at them.\"\n\n\n That sounded impossible. \"He\naims\nthe elevator?\"\n\n\n \"He runs it up and down the shaft,\" she explained, \"trying to crush\n anybody who goes after him.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said. \"So it might take a while.\"\n\n\n She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could\n hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, \"They're\n afraid they'll have to starve him out.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\"",
"I had a Whimsical Approach: \"Honey, I see there's a nice little\n Non-P apartment available up on one seventy-three.\" And I had a\n Romantic Approach: \"Darling, I can't live without you at the moment.\n Temporarily, I'm madly in love with you. I want to share my life\n with you for a while. Will you be provisionally mine?\" I even had a\n Straightforward Approach: \"Linda, I'm going to be needing a wife for at\n least a year or two, and I can't think of anyone I would rather spend\n that time with than you.\"\n\n\n Actually, though I wouldn't even have admitted this to Linda, much less\n to anyone else, I loved her in more than a Non-P way. But even if we\n both had been genetically desirable (neither of us were) I knew that\n Linda relished her freedom and independence too much to ever contract\n for any kind of marriage other than Non-P—Non-Permanent, No Progeny.",
"\"I'll tell you this,\" he said belligerently. \"A lot longer than it\n took for him to turn around and go right back into the cave again.\" He\n started pacing the floor, waving the gun around in an agitated fashion\n as he talked. \"Is this the\nnatural\nlife of man? It is not. Is this\n even a\ndesirable\nlife for man? It is\ndefinitely\nnot.\" He spun back\n to face me, pointing the gun at me again, but this time he pointed\n it as though it were a finger, not a gun. \"Listen, you,\" he snapped.\n \"Man was progressing. For all his stupidities and excesses, he was\n growing up. His dreams were getting bigger and grander and better all",
"And so we went back up the stairs to one fifty-three, and stopped at\n the door. He stood close behind me, the gun pressed against my back,\n and grated in my ear, \"I'll have this gun in my pocket. If you make one\n false move I'll kill you. Now, we're going to your apartment. We're\n friends, just strolling along together. You got that?\"\n\n\n I nodded.\n\n\n \"All right. Let's go.\"\n\n\n We went. I have never in my life seen that long hall quite so empty as\n it was right then. No one came out of any of the apartments, no one\n emerged from any of the branch halls. We walked to my apartment. I\n thumbed the door open and we went inside.\n\n\n Once the door was closed behind us, he visibly relaxed, sagging against\n the door, his gun hand hanging limp at his side, a nervous smile\n playing across his lips.",
"And then the elevator didn't come.\nUntil then, I'd managed somehow to keep the day's minor disasters from\n ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg—I couldn't very\n well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment\n and I was hungry—and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that\n gaspingly transparent window—one hundred and fifty-three stories\n straight down to slag—I kept going over and over my prepared proposal\n speeches, trying to select the most effective one.",
"I looked at him, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could\n leap at him before he could bring the gun up again. But he must have\n read my intentions on my face. He straightened, shaking his head. He\n said, \"Don't try it. I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill\n anybody, but I will if I have to. We'll just wait here together until\n the hue and cry passes us. Then I'll tie you up, so you won't be able\n to sic your Army on me too soon, and I'll leave. If you don't try any\n silly heroics, nothing will happen to you.\"\n\n\n \"You'll never get away,\" I told him. \"The whole Project is alerted.\"\n\n\n \"You let me worry about that,\" he said. He licked his lips. \"You got\n any chico coffee?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"\"So what happened?\" he demanded, and immediately answered himself.\n \"I'll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make that first\n giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That's all it was, just a little\n hotfoot. So what did Man do? I'll tell you what he did. He turned\n around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his\n tail between his legs.\nThat's\nwhat he did!\"\n\n\n To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme\n understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by\n saying, \"Here's your coffee.\"\n\n\n \"Put it on the table,\" he said, switching instantly from raving maniac\n to watchful spy.\n\n\n I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the\n room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and\n suddenly said, \"What did they tell you I was? A spy?\"",
"I would have been in a howling rage anyway, but this impossibility\n piled on top of all the other annoyances and breakdowns of the day\n was just too much. I went into a frenzy, and kicked the elevator door\n three times before I realized I was hurting myself more than I was\n hurting the door. I limped back to the apartment, fuming, slammed the\n door behind me, grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of\n the Transit Staff. I dialed, prepared to register a complaint so loud\n they'd be able to hear me in sub-basement three.\n\n\n I got some more letters that spelled: BUSY.\nIt took three tries before I got through to a hurried-looking female\n receptionist \"My name is Rice!\" I bellowed. \"Edmund Rice! I live on the\n hundred and fifty-third floor! I just rang for the elevator and——\"\n\n\n \"The-elevator-is-disconnected.\" She said it very rapidly, as though she\n were growing very used to saying it.",
"\"In every way but one,\" I continued. \"She has one small imperfection,\n a fixation about punctuality. And I was supposed to meet her at ten\n o'clock.\nI'm late!\n\" I shook my fist at the screen. \"Do you realize\n what you've\ndone\n, disconnecting the elevator? Not only won't she\n marry me, she won't even\nspeak\nto me! Not now! Not after this!\"\n\n\n \"Sir,\" she said tremulously, \"please don't shout.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not shouting!\"\n\n\n \"Sir, I'm terribly sorry. I understand your—\"\n\n\n \"You\nunderstand\n?\" I trembled with speechless fury.",
"I thought fast. \"I'm an ore-sled dispatcher,\" I said. That was a lie,\n of course, but I'd heard enough about ore-sled dispatching from Linda\n to be able to maintain the fiction should he question me further about\n it.\n\n\n Actually, I was a gymnast instructor. The subjects I taught included\n wrestling, judo and karati—talents I would prefer to disclose to him\n in my own fashion, when the time came.\n\n\n He was quiet for a moment. \"What about radiation level on the\n ore-sleds?\"\n\n\n I had no idea what he was talking about, and admitted as much.\n\n\n \"When they come back,\" he said. \"How much radiation do they pick up?\n Don't you people ever test them?\"",
"\"Good,\" he said—just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from\n perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the\n opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending\n boots. The Army!\n\n\n But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He\n said, \"Where do you live?\"\n\n\n \"One fifty-three,\" I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man.\n I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions\n promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to\n either escape or capture him.\n\n\n \"All right,\" he whispered. \"Go on.\" He prodded me with the gun."
],
[
"\"Of course,\" I said.\n\n\n He grinned bitterly, with one side of his mouth. \"Of course. The damn\n fools! Spy! What do you suppose I'm going to spy on?\"\n\n\n He asked the question so violently and urgently that I knew I had to\n answer quickly and well, or the maniac would return. \"I—I wouldn't\n know, exactly,\" I stammered. \"Military equipment, I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"Military equipment?\nWhat\nmilitary equipment? Your Army is supplied\n with uniforms, whistles and hand guns, and that's about it.\"\n\n\n \"The defenses—\" I started.\n\n\n \"The defenses,\" he interrupted me, \"are non-existent. If you mean the\n rocket launchers on the roof, they're rusted through with age. And what\n other defenses are there? None.\"",
"He was rather short, perhaps three inches shorter than me, with a bony\n high-cheekboned face featuring deepset eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. He\n wore gray slacks and shirt, with brown slippers on his feet. He looked\n exactly like a spy ... which is to say that he\ndidn't\nlook like a\n spy, he looked overpoweringly ordinary. More than anything else, he\n reminded me of a rather taciturn milkman who used to make deliveries to\n my parents' apartment.\n\n\n His gaze darted this way and that. Then he motioned with his free hand\n at the descending stairs and whispered, \"Where do they go?\"\n\n\n I had to clear my throat before I could speak. \"All the way down,\" I\n said.",
"\"So what happened?\" he demanded, and immediately answered himself.\n \"I'll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make that first\n giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That's all it was, just a little\n hotfoot. So what did Man do? I'll tell you what he did. He turned\n around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his\n tail between his legs.\nThat's\nwhat he did!\"\n\n\n To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme\n understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by\n saying, \"Here's your coffee.\"\n\n\n \"Put it on the table,\" he said, switching instantly from raving maniac\n to watchful spy.\n\n\n I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the\n room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and\n suddenly said, \"What did they tell you I was? A spy?\"",
"And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking\n Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness\n was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it\n go at that.\nBut now there was a spy in the elevator.\n\n\n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how\n many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls\n were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the\n other side of them.\n\n\n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n\n\n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen.\n I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the\n elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda\n would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient\n reason for me to be late.",
"\"If you say so,\" I replied stiffly. The Army claimed that we had\n adequate defense equipment. I chose to believe the Army over an enemy\n spy.\n\n\n \"Your people send out spies, too, don't they?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"Well, of course.\"\n\n\n \"And what are\nthey\nsupposed to spy on?\"\n\n\n \"Well—\" It was such a pointless question, it seemed silly to even\n answer it. \"They're supposed to look for indications of an attack by\n one of the other projects.\"\n\n\n \"And do they find any indications, ever?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know,\" I told him frostily. \"That would be classified\n information.\"",
"\"You bet it would,\" he said, with malicious glee. \"All right, if that's\n what\nyour\nspies are doing, and if\nI'm\na spy, then it follows that\n I'm doing the same thing, right?\"\n\n\n \"I don't follow you,\" I admitted.\n\n\n \"If I'm a spy,\" he said impatiently, \"then I'm supposed to look for\n indications of an attack by you people on my Project.\"\n\n\n I shrugged. \"If that's your job,\" I said, \"then that's your job.\"\n\n\n He got suddenly red-faced, and jumped to his feet. \"That's\nnot\nmy\n job, you blatant idiot!\" he shouted. \"I'm not a spy! If I\nwere\na spy,\nthen\nthat would be my job!\"\nThe maniac had returned, in full force. \"All right,\" I said hastily.\n \"All right, whatever you say.\"",
"\"Good,\" he said—just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from\n perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the\n opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending\n boots. The Army!\n\n\n But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He\n said, \"Where do you live?\"\n\n\n \"One fifty-three,\" I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man.\n I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions\n promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to\n either escape or capture him.\n\n\n \"All right,\" he whispered. \"Go on.\" He prodded me with the gun.",
"She nodded solemnly. \"I'm terribly sorry, sir,\" she said. Then she\n glanced to her right, suddenly straightened up again, and said,\n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible.\" Click. Blank screen.\n\n\n For a minute or two, all I could do was sit and absorb what I'd been\n told. A spy in the elevator! A spy who had managed to work his way all\n the way up to the hundred forty-seventh floor before being unmasked!\n\n\n What in the world was the matter with the Army? If things were getting\n that lax, the Project was doomed, force-screen or no. Who knew how many\n more spies there were in the Project, still unsuspected?",
"the time. He was planning to tackle\nspace\n! The moon first, and then\n the planets, and finally the stars. The whole universe was out there,\n waiting to be plucked like an apple from a tank. And Man was reaching\n out for it.\" He glared as though daring me to doubt it.\nI decided that this man was doubly dangerous. Not only was he a spy,\n he was also a lunatic. So I had two reasons for humoring him. I nodded\n politely.",
"KEEP LOCKED\n\n\n I frowned, wondering immediately why this door wasn't being firmly\n guarded by at least a platoon of Army men. Half a dozen possible\n answers flashed through my mind. The more recent maps might simply\n have omitted this discarded and unnecessary door. It might be sealed\n shut on the other side. The Army might have caught the spy already.\n Somebody in authority might simply have goofed.\n\n\n As I stood there, pondering these possibilities, the door opened and\n the spy came out, waving a gun.\nIII\n\n\n He couldn't have been anyone else but the spy. The gun, in the first\n place. The fact that he looked harried and upset and terribly nervous,\n in the second place. And, of course, the fact that he came from the\n elevator shaft.",
"\"No!\" he shouted. \"You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You\n think I'm a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I'm a spy. That\n fathead who turned me in thinks I'm a spy. But I'm\nnot\na spy, and I'm\n going to tell you what I am.\"\n\n\n I waited, looking as attentive as possible.\n\n\n \"I come,\" he said, \"from a Project about eighty miles north of here.\n I came here by foot, without any sort of radiation shield at all to\n protect me.\"\n\n\n The maniac was back. I didn't say a word. I didn't want to set off the\n violence that was so obviously in this lunatic.",
"She looked all about her, and then leaned closer to the screen,\n revealing a cleavage that I was too distraught at the moment to pay\n any attention to. \"We're not supposed to give this information out,\n sir,\" she said, her voice low, \"but I'm going to tell you, so you'll\n understand why we had to do it. I think it's perfectly awful that it\n had to ruin things for you this way. But the fact of the matter is—\"\n she leaned even closer to the screen—\"there's a spy in the elevator.\"\nII\n\n\n It was my turn to be stunned.\n\n\n I just gaped at her. \"A—a what?\"\n\n\n \"A spy. He was discovered on the hundred forty-seventh floor, and\n managed to get into the elevator before the Army could catch him. He\n jammed it between floors. But the Army is doing everything it can think\n of to get him out.\"",
"Until that moment, the state of siege in which we all lived had had\n no reality for me. The Project, after all, was self-sufficient and\n completely enclosed. No one ever left, no one ever entered. Under our\n roof, we were a nation, two hundred stories high. The ever-present\n threat of other projects had never been more for me—or for most other\n people either, I suspected—than occasional ore-sleds that didn't\n return, occasional spies shot down as they tried to sneak into the\n building, occasional spies of our own leaving the Project in tiny\n radiation-proof cars, hoping to get safely within another project and\n bring back news of any immediate threats and dangers that project might\n be planning for us. Most spies didn't return; most ore-sleds did. And\n within the Project life was full, the knowledge of external dangers\n merely lurking at the backs of our minds. After all, those external\n dangers had been no more than potential for decades, since what Dr.\n Kilbillie called the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War.",
"THE SPY IN THE ELEVATOR\nBy DONALD E. WESTLAKE\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe was dangerously insane. He threatened\n \nto destroy everything that was noble and\n \ndecent—including my date with my girl!\nWhen the elevator didn't come, that just made the day perfect. A broken\n egg yolk, a stuck zipper, a feedback in the aircon exhaust, the window\n sticking at full transparency—well, I won't go through the whole sorry\n list. Suffice it to say that when the elevator didn't come, that put\n the roof on the city, as they say.",
"\"Make me a cup. And don't get any bright ideas about dousing me with\n boiling water.\"\n\n\n \"I only have my day's allotment,\" I protested. \"Just enough for two\n cups, lunch and dinner.\"\n\n\n \"Two cups is fine,\" he said. \"One for each of us.\"\nAnd now I had yet another grudge against this blasted spy. Which\n reminded me again of Linda. From the looks of things, I wasn't\never\ngoing to get to her place. By now she was probably in mourning for me\n and might even have the Sanitation Staff searching for my remains.\n\n\n As I made the chico, he asked me questions. My name first, and then,\n \"What do you do for a living?\"",
"He was still there. At least, the elevator was still out.\n\n\n I sagged against the wall, thinking dismal thoughts. Then I noticed the\n door to the right of the elevator. Through that door was the stairway.\n\n\n I hadn't paid any attention to it before. No one ever uses the stairs\n except adventurous young boys playing cops and robbers, running up and\n down from landing to landing. I myself hadn't set foot on a flight of\n stairs since I was twelve years old.\n\n\n Actually, the whole idea of stairs was ridiculous. We had elevators,\n didn't we? Usually, I mean, when they didn't contain spies. So what was\n the use of stairs?",
"I thought fast. \"I'm an ore-sled dispatcher,\" I said. That was a lie,\n of course, but I'd heard enough about ore-sled dispatching from Linda\n to be able to maintain the fiction should he question me further about\n it.\n\n\n Actually, I was a gymnast instructor. The subjects I taught included\n wrestling, judo and karati—talents I would prefer to disclose to him\n in my own fashion, when the time came.\n\n\n He was quiet for a moment. \"What about radiation level on the\n ore-sleds?\"\n\n\n I had no idea what he was talking about, and admitted as much.\n\n\n \"When they come back,\" he said. \"How much radiation do they pick up?\n Don't you people ever test them?\"",
"Of course, they made up for this as best they could by using tactical\n atomic weapons all over the place. After the war almost the whole\n world was quite dangerously radioactive. Except for the Projects. Or\n at least those of them which had in time installed the force screens\n which had been invented on the very eve of battle, and which deflected\n radioactive particles.\n\n\n However, what with all of the\nother\ntreaties which were broken during\n the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War, by the time it was finished nobody\n was quite sure any more who was on whose side. That project over there\n on the horizon might be an ally. And then again it might not. Since\n they weren't sure either, it was risky to expose yourself in order to\n ask.",
"He glowered at me a moment longer, then shouted, \"Bah!\" and dropped\n back into the chair.\n\n\n He breathed rather heavily for a while, glaring at the floor, then\n looked at me again. \"All right, listen. What if I were to tell you that\n I\nhad\nfound indications that you people were planning to attack my\n Project?\"\n\n\n I stared at him. \"That's impossible!\" I cried. \"We aren't planning to\n attack anybody! We just want to be left in peace!\"\n\n\n \"How do I know that?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"It's the truth! What would we want to attack anybody for?\"",
"I looked at him, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could\n leap at him before he could bring the gun up again. But he must have\n read my intentions on my face. He straightened, shaking his head. He\n said, \"Don't try it. I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill\n anybody, but I will if I have to. We'll just wait here together until\n the hue and cry passes us. Then I'll tie you up, so you won't be able\n to sic your Army on me too soon, and I'll leave. If you don't try any\n silly heroics, nothing will happen to you.\"\n\n\n \"You'll never get away,\" I told him. \"The whole Project is alerted.\"\n\n\n \"You let me worry about that,\" he said. He licked his lips. \"You got\n any chico coffee?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\""
],
[
"\"Of course,\" I said.\n\n\n He grinned bitterly, with one side of his mouth. \"Of course. The damn\n fools! Spy! What do you suppose I'm going to spy on?\"\n\n\n He asked the question so violently and urgently that I knew I had to\n answer quickly and well, or the maniac would return. \"I—I wouldn't\n know, exactly,\" I stammered. \"Military equipment, I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"Military equipment?\nWhat\nmilitary equipment? Your Army is supplied\n with uniforms, whistles and hand guns, and that's about it.\"\n\n\n \"The defenses—\" I started.\n\n\n \"The defenses,\" he interrupted me, \"are non-existent. If you mean the\n rocket launchers on the roof, they're rusted through with age. And what\n other defenses are there? None.\"",
"\"Good,\" he said—just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from\n perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the\n opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending\n boots. The Army!\n\n\n But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He\n said, \"Where do you live?\"\n\n\n \"One fifty-three,\" I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man.\n I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions\n promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to\n either escape or capture him.\n\n\n \"All right,\" he whispered. \"Go on.\" He prodded me with the gun.",
"And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking\n Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness\n was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it\n go at that.\nBut now there was a spy in the elevator.\n\n\n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how\n many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls\n were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the\n other side of them.\n\n\n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n\n\n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen.\n I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the\n elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda\n would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient\n reason for me to be late.",
"\"No!\" he shouted. \"You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You\n think I'm a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I'm a spy. That\n fathead who turned me in thinks I'm a spy. But I'm\nnot\na spy, and I'm\n going to tell you what I am.\"\n\n\n I waited, looking as attentive as possible.\n\n\n \"I come,\" he said, \"from a Project about eighty miles north of here.\n I came here by foot, without any sort of radiation shield at all to\n protect me.\"\n\n\n The maniac was back. I didn't say a word. I didn't want to set off the\n violence that was so obviously in this lunatic.",
"\"If you say so,\" I replied stiffly. The Army claimed that we had\n adequate defense equipment. I chose to believe the Army over an enemy\n spy.\n\n\n \"Your people send out spies, too, don't they?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"Well, of course.\"\n\n\n \"And what are\nthey\nsupposed to spy on?\"\n\n\n \"Well—\" It was such a pointless question, it seemed silly to even\n answer it. \"They're supposed to look for indications of an attack by\n one of the other projects.\"\n\n\n \"And do they find any indications, ever?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know,\" I told him frostily. \"That would be classified\n information.\"",
"KEEP LOCKED\n\n\n I frowned, wondering immediately why this door wasn't being firmly\n guarded by at least a platoon of Army men. Half a dozen possible\n answers flashed through my mind. The more recent maps might simply\n have omitted this discarded and unnecessary door. It might be sealed\n shut on the other side. The Army might have caught the spy already.\n Somebody in authority might simply have goofed.\n\n\n As I stood there, pondering these possibilities, the door opened and\n the spy came out, waving a gun.\nIII\n\n\n He couldn't have been anyone else but the spy. The gun, in the first\n place. The fact that he looked harried and upset and terribly nervous,\n in the second place. And, of course, the fact that he came from the\n elevator shaft.",
"I looked at him, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could\n leap at him before he could bring the gun up again. But he must have\n read my intentions on my face. He straightened, shaking his head. He\n said, \"Don't try it. I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill\n anybody, but I will if I have to. We'll just wait here together until\n the hue and cry passes us. Then I'll tie you up, so you won't be able\n to sic your Army on me too soon, and I'll leave. If you don't try any\n silly heroics, nothing will happen to you.\"\n\n\n \"You'll never get away,\" I told him. \"The whole Project is alerted.\"\n\n\n \"You let me worry about that,\" he said. He licked his lips. \"You got\n any chico coffee?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"He was rather short, perhaps three inches shorter than me, with a bony\n high-cheekboned face featuring deepset eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. He\n wore gray slacks and shirt, with brown slippers on his feet. He looked\n exactly like a spy ... which is to say that he\ndidn't\nlook like a\n spy, he looked overpoweringly ordinary. More than anything else, he\n reminded me of a rather taciturn milkman who used to make deliveries to\n my parents' apartment.\n\n\n His gaze darted this way and that. Then he motioned with his free hand\n at the descending stairs and whispered, \"Where do they go?\"\n\n\n I had to clear my throat before I could speak. \"All the way down,\" I\n said.",
"\"You bet it would,\" he said, with malicious glee. \"All right, if that's\n what\nyour\nspies are doing, and if\nI'm\na spy, then it follows that\n I'm doing the same thing, right?\"\n\n\n \"I don't follow you,\" I admitted.\n\n\n \"If I'm a spy,\" he said impatiently, \"then I'm supposed to look for\n indications of an attack by you people on my Project.\"\n\n\n I shrugged. \"If that's your job,\" I said, \"then that's your job.\"\n\n\n He got suddenly red-faced, and jumped to his feet. \"That's\nnot\nmy\n job, you blatant idiot!\" he shouted. \"I'm not a spy! If I\nwere\na spy,\nthen\nthat would be my job!\"\nThe maniac had returned, in full force. \"All right,\" I said hastily.\n \"All right, whatever you say.\"",
"\"So what happened?\" he demanded, and immediately answered himself.\n \"I'll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make that first\n giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That's all it was, just a little\n hotfoot. So what did Man do? I'll tell you what he did. He turned\n around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his\n tail between his legs.\nThat's\nwhat he did!\"\n\n\n To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme\n understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by\n saying, \"Here's your coffee.\"\n\n\n \"Put it on the table,\" he said, switching instantly from raving maniac\n to watchful spy.\n\n\n I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the\n room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and\n suddenly said, \"What did they tell you I was? A spy?\"",
"She nodded solemnly. \"I'm terribly sorry, sir,\" she said. Then she\n glanced to her right, suddenly straightened up again, and said,\n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible.\" Click. Blank screen.\n\n\n For a minute or two, all I could do was sit and absorb what I'd been\n told. A spy in the elevator! A spy who had managed to work his way all\n the way up to the hundred forty-seventh floor before being unmasked!\n\n\n What in the world was the matter with the Army? If things were getting\n that lax, the Project was doomed, force-screen or no. Who knew how many\n more spies there were in the Project, still unsuspected?",
"the time. He was planning to tackle\nspace\n! The moon first, and then\n the planets, and finally the stars. The whole universe was out there,\n waiting to be plucked like an apple from a tank. And Man was reaching\n out for it.\" He glared as though daring me to doubt it.\nI decided that this man was doubly dangerous. Not only was he a spy,\n he was also a lunatic. So I had two reasons for humoring him. I nodded\n politely.",
"She looked all about her, and then leaned closer to the screen,\n revealing a cleavage that I was too distraught at the moment to pay\n any attention to. \"We're not supposed to give this information out,\n sir,\" she said, her voice low, \"but I'm going to tell you, so you'll\n understand why we had to do it. I think it's perfectly awful that it\n had to ruin things for you this way. But the fact of the matter is—\"\n she leaned even closer to the screen—\"there's a spy in the elevator.\"\nII\n\n\n It was my turn to be stunned.\n\n\n I just gaped at her. \"A—a what?\"\n\n\n \"A spy. He was discovered on the hundred forty-seventh floor, and\n managed to get into the elevator before the Army could catch him. He\n jammed it between floors. But the Army is doing everything it can think\n of to get him out.\"",
"THE SPY IN THE ELEVATOR\nBy DONALD E. WESTLAKE\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe was dangerously insane. He threatened\n \nto destroy everything that was noble and\n \ndecent—including my date with my girl!\nWhen the elevator didn't come, that just made the day perfect. A broken\n egg yolk, a stuck zipper, a feedback in the aircon exhaust, the window\n sticking at full transparency—well, I won't go through the whole sorry\n list. Suffice it to say that when the elevator didn't come, that put\n the roof on the city, as they say.",
"He was still there. At least, the elevator was still out.\n\n\n I sagged against the wall, thinking dismal thoughts. Then I noticed the\n door to the right of the elevator. Through that door was the stairway.\n\n\n I hadn't paid any attention to it before. No one ever uses the stairs\n except adventurous young boys playing cops and robbers, running up and\n down from landing to landing. I myself hadn't set foot on a flight of\n stairs since I was twelve years old.\n\n\n Actually, the whole idea of stairs was ridiculous. We had elevators,\n didn't we? Usually, I mean, when they didn't contain spies. So what was\n the use of stairs?",
"Until that moment, the state of siege in which we all lived had had\n no reality for me. The Project, after all, was self-sufficient and\n completely enclosed. No one ever left, no one ever entered. Under our\n roof, we were a nation, two hundred stories high. The ever-present\n threat of other projects had never been more for me—or for most other\n people either, I suspected—than occasional ore-sleds that didn't\n return, occasional spies shot down as they tried to sneak into the\n building, occasional spies of our own leaving the Project in tiny\n radiation-proof cars, hoping to get safely within another project and\n bring back news of any immediate threats and dangers that project might\n be planning for us. Most spies didn't return; most ore-sleds did. And\n within the Project life was full, the knowledge of external dangers\n merely lurking at the backs of our minds. After all, those external\n dangers had been no more than potential for decades, since what Dr.\n Kilbillie called the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War.",
"\"I'll tell you this,\" he said belligerently. \"A lot longer than it\n took for him to turn around and go right back into the cave again.\" He\n started pacing the floor, waving the gun around in an agitated fashion\n as he talked. \"Is this the\nnatural\nlife of man? It is not. Is this\n even a\ndesirable\nlife for man? It is\ndefinitely\nnot.\" He spun back\n to face me, pointing the gun at me again, but this time he pointed\n it as though it were a finger, not a gun. \"Listen, you,\" he snapped.\n \"Man was progressing. For all his stupidities and excesses, he was\n growing up. His dreams were getting bigger and grander and better all",
"\"Make me a cup. And don't get any bright ideas about dousing me with\n boiling water.\"\n\n\n \"I only have my day's allotment,\" I protested. \"Just enough for two\n cups, lunch and dinner.\"\n\n\n \"Two cups is fine,\" he said. \"One for each of us.\"\nAnd now I had yet another grudge against this blasted spy. Which\n reminded me again of Linda. From the looks of things, I wasn't\never\ngoing to get to her place. By now she was probably in mourning for me\n and might even have the Sanitation Staff searching for my remains.\n\n\n As I made the chico, he asked me questions. My name first, and then,\n \"What do you do for a living?\"",
"He glowered at me a moment longer, then shouted, \"Bah!\" and dropped\n back into the chair.\n\n\n He breathed rather heavily for a while, glaring at the floor, then\n looked at me again. \"All right, listen. What if I were to tell you that\n I\nhad\nfound indications that you people were planning to attack my\n Project?\"\n\n\n I stared at him. \"That's impossible!\" I cried. \"We aren't planning to\n attack anybody! We just want to be left in peace!\"\n\n\n \"How do I know that?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"It's the truth! What would we want to attack anybody for?\"",
"\"Well—but why should there be any problem about getting him out?\"\n\n\n \"He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from\n outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims\n the elevator at them.\"\n\n\n That sounded impossible. \"He\naims\nthe elevator?\"\n\n\n \"He runs it up and down the shaft,\" she explained, \"trying to crush\n anybody who goes after him.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said. \"So it might take a while.\"\n\n\n She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could\n hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, \"They're\n afraid they'll have to starve him out.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\""
],
[
"He was rather short, perhaps three inches shorter than me, with a bony\n high-cheekboned face featuring deepset eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. He\n wore gray slacks and shirt, with brown slippers on his feet. He looked\n exactly like a spy ... which is to say that he\ndidn't\nlook like a\n spy, he looked overpoweringly ordinary. More than anything else, he\n reminded me of a rather taciturn milkman who used to make deliveries to\n my parents' apartment.\n\n\n His gaze darted this way and that. Then he motioned with his free hand\n at the descending stairs and whispered, \"Where do they go?\"\n\n\n I had to clear my throat before I could speak. \"All the way down,\" I\n said.",
"\"So what happened?\" he demanded, and immediately answered himself.\n \"I'll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make that first\n giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That's all it was, just a little\n hotfoot. So what did Man do? I'll tell you what he did. He turned\n around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his\n tail between his legs.\nThat's\nwhat he did!\"\n\n\n To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme\n understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by\n saying, \"Here's your coffee.\"\n\n\n \"Put it on the table,\" he said, switching instantly from raving maniac\n to watchful spy.\n\n\n I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the\n room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and\n suddenly said, \"What did they tell you I was? A spy?\"",
"\"Of course,\" I said.\n\n\n He grinned bitterly, with one side of his mouth. \"Of course. The damn\n fools! Spy! What do you suppose I'm going to spy on?\"\n\n\n He asked the question so violently and urgently that I knew I had to\n answer quickly and well, or the maniac would return. \"I—I wouldn't\n know, exactly,\" I stammered. \"Military equipment, I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"Military equipment?\nWhat\nmilitary equipment? Your Army is supplied\n with uniforms, whistles and hand guns, and that's about it.\"\n\n\n \"The defenses—\" I started.\n\n\n \"The defenses,\" he interrupted me, \"are non-existent. If you mean the\n rocket launchers on the roof, they're rusted through with age. And what\n other defenses are there? None.\"",
"\"You bet it would,\" he said, with malicious glee. \"All right, if that's\n what\nyour\nspies are doing, and if\nI'm\na spy, then it follows that\n I'm doing the same thing, right?\"\n\n\n \"I don't follow you,\" I admitted.\n\n\n \"If I'm a spy,\" he said impatiently, \"then I'm supposed to look for\n indications of an attack by you people on my Project.\"\n\n\n I shrugged. \"If that's your job,\" I said, \"then that's your job.\"\n\n\n He got suddenly red-faced, and jumped to his feet. \"That's\nnot\nmy\n job, you blatant idiot!\" he shouted. \"I'm not a spy! If I\nwere\na spy,\nthen\nthat would be my job!\"\nThe maniac had returned, in full force. \"All right,\" I said hastily.\n \"All right, whatever you say.\"",
"the time. He was planning to tackle\nspace\n! The moon first, and then\n the planets, and finally the stars. The whole universe was out there,\n waiting to be plucked like an apple from a tank. And Man was reaching\n out for it.\" He glared as though daring me to doubt it.\nI decided that this man was doubly dangerous. Not only was he a spy,\n he was also a lunatic. So I had two reasons for humoring him. I nodded\n politely.",
"\"If you say so,\" I replied stiffly. The Army claimed that we had\n adequate defense equipment. I chose to believe the Army over an enemy\n spy.\n\n\n \"Your people send out spies, too, don't they?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"Well, of course.\"\n\n\n \"And what are\nthey\nsupposed to spy on?\"\n\n\n \"Well—\" It was such a pointless question, it seemed silly to even\n answer it. \"They're supposed to look for indications of an attack by\n one of the other projects.\"\n\n\n \"And do they find any indications, ever?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know,\" I told him frostily. \"That would be classified\n information.\"",
"And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking\n Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness\n was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it\n go at that.\nBut now there was a spy in the elevator.\n\n\n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how\n many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls\n were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the\n other side of them.\n\n\n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n\n\n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen.\n I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the\n elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda\n would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient\n reason for me to be late.",
"KEEP LOCKED\n\n\n I frowned, wondering immediately why this door wasn't being firmly\n guarded by at least a platoon of Army men. Half a dozen possible\n answers flashed through my mind. The more recent maps might simply\n have omitted this discarded and unnecessary door. It might be sealed\n shut on the other side. The Army might have caught the spy already.\n Somebody in authority might simply have goofed.\n\n\n As I stood there, pondering these possibilities, the door opened and\n the spy came out, waving a gun.\nIII\n\n\n He couldn't have been anyone else but the spy. The gun, in the first\n place. The fact that he looked harried and upset and terribly nervous,\n in the second place. And, of course, the fact that he came from the\n elevator shaft.",
"\"Good,\" he said—just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from\n perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the\n opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending\n boots. The Army!\n\n\n But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He\n said, \"Where do you live?\"\n\n\n \"One fifty-three,\" I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man.\n I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions\n promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to\n either escape or capture him.\n\n\n \"All right,\" he whispered. \"Go on.\" He prodded me with the gun.",
"\"No!\" he shouted. \"You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You\n think I'm a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I'm a spy. That\n fathead who turned me in thinks I'm a spy. But I'm\nnot\na spy, and I'm\n going to tell you what I am.\"\n\n\n I waited, looking as attentive as possible.\n\n\n \"I come,\" he said, \"from a Project about eighty miles north of here.\n I came here by foot, without any sort of radiation shield at all to\n protect me.\"\n\n\n The maniac was back. I didn't say a word. I didn't want to set off the\n violence that was so obviously in this lunatic.",
"She looked all about her, and then leaned closer to the screen,\n revealing a cleavage that I was too distraught at the moment to pay\n any attention to. \"We're not supposed to give this information out,\n sir,\" she said, her voice low, \"but I'm going to tell you, so you'll\n understand why we had to do it. I think it's perfectly awful that it\n had to ruin things for you this way. But the fact of the matter is—\"\n she leaned even closer to the screen—\"there's a spy in the elevator.\"\nII\n\n\n It was my turn to be stunned.\n\n\n I just gaped at her. \"A—a what?\"\n\n\n \"A spy. He was discovered on the hundred forty-seventh floor, and\n managed to get into the elevator before the Army could catch him. He\n jammed it between floors. But the Army is doing everything it can think\n of to get him out.\"",
"She nodded solemnly. \"I'm terribly sorry, sir,\" she said. Then she\n glanced to her right, suddenly straightened up again, and said,\n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible.\" Click. Blank screen.\n\n\n For a minute or two, all I could do was sit and absorb what I'd been\n told. A spy in the elevator! A spy who had managed to work his way all\n the way up to the hundred forty-seventh floor before being unmasked!\n\n\n What in the world was the matter with the Army? If things were getting\n that lax, the Project was doomed, force-screen or no. Who knew how many\n more spies there were in the Project, still unsuspected?",
"\"Make me a cup. And don't get any bright ideas about dousing me with\n boiling water.\"\n\n\n \"I only have my day's allotment,\" I protested. \"Just enough for two\n cups, lunch and dinner.\"\n\n\n \"Two cups is fine,\" he said. \"One for each of us.\"\nAnd now I had yet another grudge against this blasted spy. Which\n reminded me again of Linda. From the looks of things, I wasn't\never\ngoing to get to her place. By now she was probably in mourning for me\n and might even have the Sanitation Staff searching for my remains.\n\n\n As I made the chico, he asked me questions. My name first, and then,\n \"What do you do for a living?\"",
"THE SPY IN THE ELEVATOR\nBy DONALD E. WESTLAKE\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe was dangerously insane. He threatened\n \nto destroy everything that was noble and\n \ndecent—including my date with my girl!\nWhen the elevator didn't come, that just made the day perfect. A broken\n egg yolk, a stuck zipper, a feedback in the aircon exhaust, the window\n sticking at full transparency—well, I won't go through the whole sorry\n list. Suffice it to say that when the elevator didn't come, that put\n the roof on the city, as they say.",
"I thought fast. \"I'm an ore-sled dispatcher,\" I said. That was a lie,\n of course, but I'd heard enough about ore-sled dispatching from Linda\n to be able to maintain the fiction should he question me further about\n it.\n\n\n Actually, I was a gymnast instructor. The subjects I taught included\n wrestling, judo and karati—talents I would prefer to disclose to him\n in my own fashion, when the time came.\n\n\n He was quiet for a moment. \"What about radiation level on the\n ore-sleds?\"\n\n\n I had no idea what he was talking about, and admitted as much.\n\n\n \"When they come back,\" he said. \"How much radiation do they pick up?\n Don't you people ever test them?\"",
"He was still there. At least, the elevator was still out.\n\n\n I sagged against the wall, thinking dismal thoughts. Then I noticed the\n door to the right of the elevator. Through that door was the stairway.\n\n\n I hadn't paid any attention to it before. No one ever uses the stairs\n except adventurous young boys playing cops and robbers, running up and\n down from landing to landing. I myself hadn't set foot on a flight of\n stairs since I was twelve years old.\n\n\n Actually, the whole idea of stairs was ridiculous. We had elevators,\n didn't we? Usually, I mean, when they didn't contain spies. So what was\n the use of stairs?",
"I looked at him, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could\n leap at him before he could bring the gun up again. But he must have\n read my intentions on my face. He straightened, shaking his head. He\n said, \"Don't try it. I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill\n anybody, but I will if I have to. We'll just wait here together until\n the hue and cry passes us. Then I'll tie you up, so you won't be able\n to sic your Army on me too soon, and I'll leave. If you don't try any\n silly heroics, nothing will happen to you.\"\n\n\n \"You'll never get away,\" I told him. \"The whole Project is alerted.\"\n\n\n \"You let me worry about that,\" he said. He licked his lips. \"You got\n any chico coffee?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"Looking back, I think he must have been just as startled as I when we\n came face to face like that. We formed a brief tableau, both of us\n open-mouthed and wide-eyed.\n\n\n Unfortunately, he recovered first.\n\n\n He closed the emergency door behind him, quickly but quietly. His gun\n stopped waving around and instead pointed directly at my middle. \"Don't\n move!\" he whispered harshly. \"Don't make a sound!\"\n\n\n I did exactly as I was told. I didn't move and I didn't make a sound.\n Which left me quite free to study him.",
"Until that moment, the state of siege in which we all lived had had\n no reality for me. The Project, after all, was self-sufficient and\n completely enclosed. No one ever left, no one ever entered. Under our\n roof, we were a nation, two hundred stories high. The ever-present\n threat of other projects had never been more for me—or for most other\n people either, I suspected—than occasional ore-sleds that didn't\n return, occasional spies shot down as they tried to sneak into the\n building, occasional spies of our own leaving the Project in tiny\n radiation-proof cars, hoping to get safely within another project and\n bring back news of any immediate threats and dangers that project might\n be planning for us. Most spies didn't return; most ore-sleds did. And\n within the Project life was full, the knowledge of external dangers\n merely lurking at the backs of our minds. After all, those external\n dangers had been no more than potential for decades, since what Dr.\n Kilbillie called the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War.",
"\"Well—but why should there be any problem about getting him out?\"\n\n\n \"He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from\n outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims\n the elevator at them.\"\n\n\n That sounded impossible. \"He\naims\nthe elevator?\"\n\n\n \"He runs it up and down the shaft,\" she explained, \"trying to crush\n anybody who goes after him.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said. \"So it might take a while.\"\n\n\n She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could\n hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, \"They're\n afraid they'll have to starve him out.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\""
],
[
"\"You bet it would,\" he said, with malicious glee. \"All right, if that's\n what\nyour\nspies are doing, and if\nI'm\na spy, then it follows that\n I'm doing the same thing, right?\"\n\n\n \"I don't follow you,\" I admitted.\n\n\n \"If I'm a spy,\" he said impatiently, \"then I'm supposed to look for\n indications of an attack by you people on my Project.\"\n\n\n I shrugged. \"If that's your job,\" I said, \"then that's your job.\"\n\n\n He got suddenly red-faced, and jumped to his feet. \"That's\nnot\nmy\n job, you blatant idiot!\" he shouted. \"I'm not a spy! If I\nwere\na spy,\nthen\nthat would be my job!\"\nThe maniac had returned, in full force. \"All right,\" I said hastily.\n \"All right, whatever you say.\"",
"\"No!\" he shouted. \"You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You\n think I'm a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I'm a spy. That\n fathead who turned me in thinks I'm a spy. But I'm\nnot\na spy, and I'm\n going to tell you what I am.\"\n\n\n I waited, looking as attentive as possible.\n\n\n \"I come,\" he said, \"from a Project about eighty miles north of here.\n I came here by foot, without any sort of radiation shield at all to\n protect me.\"\n\n\n The maniac was back. I didn't say a word. I didn't want to set off the\n violence that was so obviously in this lunatic.",
"Until that moment, the state of siege in which we all lived had had\n no reality for me. The Project, after all, was self-sufficient and\n completely enclosed. No one ever left, no one ever entered. Under our\n roof, we were a nation, two hundred stories high. The ever-present\n threat of other projects had never been more for me—or for most other\n people either, I suspected—than occasional ore-sleds that didn't\n return, occasional spies shot down as they tried to sneak into the\n building, occasional spies of our own leaving the Project in tiny\n radiation-proof cars, hoping to get safely within another project and\n bring back news of any immediate threats and dangers that project might\n be planning for us. Most spies didn't return; most ore-sleds did. And\n within the Project life was full, the knowledge of external dangers\n merely lurking at the backs of our minds. After all, those external\n dangers had been no more than potential for decades, since what Dr.\n Kilbillie called the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War.",
"She nodded solemnly. \"I'm terribly sorry, sir,\" she said. Then she\n glanced to her right, suddenly straightened up again, and said,\n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible.\" Click. Blank screen.\n\n\n For a minute or two, all I could do was sit and absorb what I'd been\n told. A spy in the elevator! A spy who had managed to work his way all\n the way up to the hundred forty-seventh floor before being unmasked!\n\n\n What in the world was the matter with the Army? If things were getting\n that lax, the Project was doomed, force-screen or no. Who knew how many\n more spies there were in the Project, still unsuspected?",
"\"Ah hah!\" He sat forward, tensed, pointing the gun at me like a finger\n again. \"Now, then,\" he said. \"If you know it doesn't make any sense for\n this Project to attack any other project, then why in the world should\n you think\nthey\nmight see some advantage in attacking\nyou\n?\"\n\n\n I shook my head, dumbfounded. \"I can't answer a question like that,\" I\n said. \"How do I know what they're thinking?\"\n\n\n \"They're human beings, aren't they?\" he cried. \"Like you? Like me? Like\n all the other people in this mausoleum?\"\n\n\n \"Now, wait a minute—\"",
"\"Of course,\" I said.\n\n\n He grinned bitterly, with one side of his mouth. \"Of course. The damn\n fools! Spy! What do you suppose I'm going to spy on?\"\n\n\n He asked the question so violently and urgently that I knew I had to\n answer quickly and well, or the maniac would return. \"I—I wouldn't\n know, exactly,\" I stammered. \"Military equipment, I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"Military equipment?\nWhat\nmilitary equipment? Your Army is supplied\n with uniforms, whistles and hand guns, and that's about it.\"\n\n\n \"The defenses—\" I started.\n\n\n \"The defenses,\" he interrupted me, \"are non-existent. If you mean the\n rocket launchers on the roof, they're rusted through with age. And what\n other defenses are there? None.\"",
"\"If you say so,\" I replied stiffly. The Army claimed that we had\n adequate defense equipment. I chose to believe the Army over an enemy\n spy.\n\n\n \"Your people send out spies, too, don't they?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"Well, of course.\"\n\n\n \"And what are\nthey\nsupposed to spy on?\"\n\n\n \"Well—\" It was such a pointless question, it seemed silly to even\n answer it. \"They're supposed to look for indications of an attack by\n one of the other projects.\"\n\n\n \"And do they find any indications, ever?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know,\" I told him frostily. \"That would be classified\n information.\"",
"\"I'm a trained atomic engineer,\" he went on. \"In my project, I worked\n on the reactor. Theoretically, I believed that there was a chance the\n radiation Outside was lessening by now, though we had no idea exactly\n how much radiation had been released by the Atom War. But I wanted\n to test the theory, and the Commission wouldn't let me. They claimed\n public safety, but I knew better. If the Outside were safe and the\n Projects were no longer needed, then the Commission was out of a job,\n and they knew it.",
"And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking\n Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness\n was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it\n go at that.\nBut now there was a spy in the elevator.\n\n\n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how\n many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls\n were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the\n other side of them.\n\n\n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n\n\n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen.\n I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the\n elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda\n would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient\n reason for me to be late.",
"the time. He was planning to tackle\nspace\n! The moon first, and then\n the planets, and finally the stars. The whole universe was out there,\n waiting to be plucked like an apple from a tank. And Man was reaching\n out for it.\" He glared as though daring me to doubt it.\nI decided that this man was doubly dangerous. Not only was he a spy,\n he was also a lunatic. So I had two reasons for humoring him. I nodded\n politely.",
"\"So what happened?\" he demanded, and immediately answered himself.\n \"I'll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make that first\n giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That's all it was, just a little\n hotfoot. So what did Man do? I'll tell you what he did. He turned\n around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his\n tail between his legs.\nThat's\nwhat he did!\"\n\n\n To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme\n understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by\n saying, \"Here's your coffee.\"\n\n\n \"Put it on the table,\" he said, switching instantly from raving maniac\n to watchful spy.\n\n\n I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the\n room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and\n suddenly said, \"What did they tell you I was? A spy?\"",
"He glowered at me a moment longer, then shouted, \"Bah!\" and dropped\n back into the chair.\n\n\n He breathed rather heavily for a while, glaring at the floor, then\n looked at me again. \"All right, listen. What if I were to tell you that\n I\nhad\nfound indications that you people were planning to attack my\n Project?\"\n\n\n I stared at him. \"That's impossible!\" I cried. \"We aren't planning to\n attack anybody! We just want to be left in peace!\"\n\n\n \"How do I know that?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"It's the truth! What would we want to attack anybody for?\"",
"KEEP LOCKED\n\n\n I frowned, wondering immediately why this door wasn't being firmly\n guarded by at least a platoon of Army men. Half a dozen possible\n answers flashed through my mind. The more recent maps might simply\n have omitted this discarded and unnecessary door. It might be sealed\n shut on the other side. The Army might have caught the spy already.\n Somebody in authority might simply have goofed.\n\n\n As I stood there, pondering these possibilities, the door opened and\n the spy came out, waving a gun.\nIII\n\n\n He couldn't have been anyone else but the spy. The gun, in the first\n place. The fact that he looked harried and upset and terribly nervous,\n in the second place. And, of course, the fact that he came from the\n elevator shaft.",
"Of course, they made up for this as best they could by using tactical\n atomic weapons all over the place. After the war almost the whole\n world was quite dangerously radioactive. Except for the Projects. Or\n at least those of them which had in time installed the force screens\n which had been invented on the very eve of battle, and which deflected\n radioactive particles.\n\n\n However, what with all of the\nother\ntreaties which were broken during\n the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War, by the time it was finished nobody\n was quite sure any more who was on whose side. That project over there\n on the horizon might be an ally. And then again it might not. Since\n they weren't sure either, it was risky to expose yourself in order to\n ask.",
"He was rather short, perhaps three inches shorter than me, with a bony\n high-cheekboned face featuring deepset eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. He\n wore gray slacks and shirt, with brown slippers on his feet. He looked\n exactly like a spy ... which is to say that he\ndidn't\nlook like a\n spy, he looked overpoweringly ordinary. More than anything else, he\n reminded me of a rather taciturn milkman who used to make deliveries to\n my parents' apartment.\n\n\n His gaze darted this way and that. Then he motioned with his free hand\n at the descending stairs and whispered, \"Where do they go?\"\n\n\n I had to clear my throat before I could speak. \"All the way down,\" I\n said.",
"I looked at him, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could\n leap at him before he could bring the gun up again. But he must have\n read my intentions on my face. He straightened, shaking his head. He\n said, \"Don't try it. I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill\n anybody, but I will if I have to. We'll just wait here together until\n the hue and cry passes us. Then I'll tie you up, so you won't be able\n to sic your Army on me too soon, and I'll leave. If you don't try any\n silly heroics, nothing will happen to you.\"\n\n\n \"You'll never get away,\" I told him. \"The whole Project is alerted.\"\n\n\n \"You let me worry about that,\" he said. He licked his lips. \"You got\n any chico coffee?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"Well, according to Dr. Kilbillie (a walking library of unnecessary\n information), the Project had been built when there still had been such\n things as municipal governments (something to do with cities, which\n were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government\n had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which\n required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the\n city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them.\n\n\n And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after\n all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda's floor. At sixteen steps a\n flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps.\n\n\n Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could.\n If the door would open.",
"\"The radiation level,\" he went on, \"is way down. It's practically as\n low as it was before the Atom War. I don't know how long it's been\n that low, but I would guess about ten years, at the very least.\" He\n leaned forward again, urgent and serious. \"The world is safe out there\n now. Man can come back out of the cave again. He can start building\n the dreams again. And this time he can build better, because he has\n the horrible example of the recent past to guide him away from the\n pitfalls. There's no need any longer for the Projects.\"\n\n\n And that was like saying there's no need any longer for stomachs, but I\n didn't say so. I didn't say anything at all.",
"\"Good,\" he said—just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from\n perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the\n opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending\n boots. The Army!\n\n\n But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He\n said, \"Where do you live?\"\n\n\n \"One fifty-three,\" I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man.\n I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions\n promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to\n either escape or capture him.\n\n\n \"All right,\" he whispered. \"Go on.\" He prodded me with the gun.",
"She looked all about her, and then leaned closer to the screen,\n revealing a cleavage that I was too distraught at the moment to pay\n any attention to. \"We're not supposed to give this information out,\n sir,\" she said, her voice low, \"but I'm going to tell you, so you'll\n understand why we had to do it. I think it's perfectly awful that it\n had to ruin things for you this way. But the fact of the matter is—\"\n she leaned even closer to the screen—\"there's a spy in the elevator.\"\nII\n\n\n It was my turn to be stunned.\n\n\n I just gaped at her. \"A—a what?\"\n\n\n \"A spy. He was discovered on the hundred forty-seventh floor, and\n managed to get into the elevator before the Army could catch him. He\n jammed it between floors. But the Army is doing everything it can think\n of to get him out.\""
],
[
"And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking\n Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness\n was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it\n go at that.\nBut now there was a spy in the elevator.\n\n\n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how\n many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls\n were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the\n other side of them.\n\n\n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n\n\n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen.\n I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the\n elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda\n would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient\n reason for me to be late.",
"\"Of course,\" I said.\n\n\n He grinned bitterly, with one side of his mouth. \"Of course. The damn\n fools! Spy! What do you suppose I'm going to spy on?\"\n\n\n He asked the question so violently and urgently that I knew I had to\n answer quickly and well, or the maniac would return. \"I—I wouldn't\n know, exactly,\" I stammered. \"Military equipment, I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"Military equipment?\nWhat\nmilitary equipment? Your Army is supplied\n with uniforms, whistles and hand guns, and that's about it.\"\n\n\n \"The defenses—\" I started.\n\n\n \"The defenses,\" he interrupted me, \"are non-existent. If you mean the\n rocket launchers on the roof, they're rusted through with age. And what\n other defenses are there? None.\"",
"He was rather short, perhaps three inches shorter than me, with a bony\n high-cheekboned face featuring deepset eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. He\n wore gray slacks and shirt, with brown slippers on his feet. He looked\n exactly like a spy ... which is to say that he\ndidn't\nlook like a\n spy, he looked overpoweringly ordinary. More than anything else, he\n reminded me of a rather taciturn milkman who used to make deliveries to\n my parents' apartment.\n\n\n His gaze darted this way and that. Then he motioned with his free hand\n at the descending stairs and whispered, \"Where do they go?\"\n\n\n I had to clear my throat before I could speak. \"All the way down,\" I\n said.",
"She nodded solemnly. \"I'm terribly sorry, sir,\" she said. Then she\n glanced to her right, suddenly straightened up again, and said,\n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible.\" Click. Blank screen.\n\n\n For a minute or two, all I could do was sit and absorb what I'd been\n told. A spy in the elevator! A spy who had managed to work his way all\n the way up to the hundred forty-seventh floor before being unmasked!\n\n\n What in the world was the matter with the Army? If things were getting\n that lax, the Project was doomed, force-screen or no. Who knew how many\n more spies there were in the Project, still unsuspected?",
"She looked all about her, and then leaned closer to the screen,\n revealing a cleavage that I was too distraught at the moment to pay\n any attention to. \"We're not supposed to give this information out,\n sir,\" she said, her voice low, \"but I'm going to tell you, so you'll\n understand why we had to do it. I think it's perfectly awful that it\n had to ruin things for you this way. But the fact of the matter is—\"\n she leaned even closer to the screen—\"there's a spy in the elevator.\"\nII\n\n\n It was my turn to be stunned.\n\n\n I just gaped at her. \"A—a what?\"\n\n\n \"A spy. He was discovered on the hundred forty-seventh floor, and\n managed to get into the elevator before the Army could catch him. He\n jammed it between floors. But the Army is doing everything it can think\n of to get him out.\"",
"\"Good,\" he said—just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from\n perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the\n opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending\n boots. The Army!\n\n\n But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He\n said, \"Where do you live?\"\n\n\n \"One fifty-three,\" I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man.\n I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions\n promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to\n either escape or capture him.\n\n\n \"All right,\" he whispered. \"Go on.\" He prodded me with the gun.",
"KEEP LOCKED\n\n\n I frowned, wondering immediately why this door wasn't being firmly\n guarded by at least a platoon of Army men. Half a dozen possible\n answers flashed through my mind. The more recent maps might simply\n have omitted this discarded and unnecessary door. It might be sealed\n shut on the other side. The Army might have caught the spy already.\n Somebody in authority might simply have goofed.\n\n\n As I stood there, pondering these possibilities, the door opened and\n the spy came out, waving a gun.\nIII\n\n\n He couldn't have been anyone else but the spy. The gun, in the first\n place. The fact that he looked harried and upset and terribly nervous,\n in the second place. And, of course, the fact that he came from the\n elevator shaft.",
"\"You bet it would,\" he said, with malicious glee. \"All right, if that's\n what\nyour\nspies are doing, and if\nI'm\na spy, then it follows that\n I'm doing the same thing, right?\"\n\n\n \"I don't follow you,\" I admitted.\n\n\n \"If I'm a spy,\" he said impatiently, \"then I'm supposed to look for\n indications of an attack by you people on my Project.\"\n\n\n I shrugged. \"If that's your job,\" I said, \"then that's your job.\"\n\n\n He got suddenly red-faced, and jumped to his feet. \"That's\nnot\nmy\n job, you blatant idiot!\" he shouted. \"I'm not a spy! If I\nwere\na spy,\nthen\nthat would be my job!\"\nThe maniac had returned, in full force. \"All right,\" I said hastily.\n \"All right, whatever you say.\"",
"\"If you say so,\" I replied stiffly. The Army claimed that we had\n adequate defense equipment. I chose to believe the Army over an enemy\n spy.\n\n\n \"Your people send out spies, too, don't they?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"Well, of course.\"\n\n\n \"And what are\nthey\nsupposed to spy on?\"\n\n\n \"Well—\" It was such a pointless question, it seemed silly to even\n answer it. \"They're supposed to look for indications of an attack by\n one of the other projects.\"\n\n\n \"And do they find any indications, ever?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know,\" I told him frostily. \"That would be classified\n information.\"",
"He was still there. At least, the elevator was still out.\n\n\n I sagged against the wall, thinking dismal thoughts. Then I noticed the\n door to the right of the elevator. Through that door was the stairway.\n\n\n I hadn't paid any attention to it before. No one ever uses the stairs\n except adventurous young boys playing cops and robbers, running up and\n down from landing to landing. I myself hadn't set foot on a flight of\n stairs since I was twelve years old.\n\n\n Actually, the whole idea of stairs was ridiculous. We had elevators,\n didn't we? Usually, I mean, when they didn't contain spies. So what was\n the use of stairs?",
"THE SPY IN THE ELEVATOR\nBy DONALD E. WESTLAKE\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe was dangerously insane. He threatened\n \nto destroy everything that was noble and\n \ndecent—including my date with my girl!\nWhen the elevator didn't come, that just made the day perfect. A broken\n egg yolk, a stuck zipper, a feedback in the aircon exhaust, the window\n sticking at full transparency—well, I won't go through the whole sorry\n list. Suffice it to say that when the elevator didn't come, that put\n the roof on the city, as they say.",
"\"So what happened?\" he demanded, and immediately answered himself.\n \"I'll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make that first\n giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That's all it was, just a little\n hotfoot. So what did Man do? I'll tell you what he did. He turned\n around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his\n tail between his legs.\nThat's\nwhat he did!\"\n\n\n To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme\n understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by\n saying, \"Here's your coffee.\"\n\n\n \"Put it on the table,\" he said, switching instantly from raving maniac\n to watchful spy.\n\n\n I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the\n room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and\n suddenly said, \"What did they tell you I was? A spy?\"",
"Until that moment, the state of siege in which we all lived had had\n no reality for me. The Project, after all, was self-sufficient and\n completely enclosed. No one ever left, no one ever entered. Under our\n roof, we were a nation, two hundred stories high. The ever-present\n threat of other projects had never been more for me—or for most other\n people either, I suspected—than occasional ore-sleds that didn't\n return, occasional spies shot down as they tried to sneak into the\n building, occasional spies of our own leaving the Project in tiny\n radiation-proof cars, hoping to get safely within another project and\n bring back news of any immediate threats and dangers that project might\n be planning for us. Most spies didn't return; most ore-sleds did. And\n within the Project life was full, the knowledge of external dangers\n merely lurking at the backs of our minds. After all, those external\n dangers had been no more than potential for decades, since what Dr.\n Kilbillie called the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War.",
"\"No!\" he shouted. \"You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You\n think I'm a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I'm a spy. That\n fathead who turned me in thinks I'm a spy. But I'm\nnot\na spy, and I'm\n going to tell you what I am.\"\n\n\n I waited, looking as attentive as possible.\n\n\n \"I come,\" he said, \"from a Project about eighty miles north of here.\n I came here by foot, without any sort of radiation shield at all to\n protect me.\"\n\n\n The maniac was back. I didn't say a word. I didn't want to set off the\n violence that was so obviously in this lunatic.",
"the time. He was planning to tackle\nspace\n! The moon first, and then\n the planets, and finally the stars. The whole universe was out there,\n waiting to be plucked like an apple from a tank. And Man was reaching\n out for it.\" He glared as though daring me to doubt it.\nI decided that this man was doubly dangerous. Not only was he a spy,\n he was also a lunatic. So I had two reasons for humoring him. I nodded\n politely.",
"Well, according to Dr. Kilbillie (a walking library of unnecessary\n information), the Project had been built when there still had been such\n things as municipal governments (something to do with cities, which\n were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government\n had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which\n required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the\n city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them.\n\n\n And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after\n all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda's floor. At sixteen steps a\n flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps.\n\n\n Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could.\n If the door would open.",
"And so we went back up the stairs to one fifty-three, and stopped at\n the door. He stood close behind me, the gun pressed against my back,\n and grated in my ear, \"I'll have this gun in my pocket. If you make one\n false move I'll kill you. Now, we're going to your apartment. We're\n friends, just strolling along together. You got that?\"\n\n\n I nodded.\n\n\n \"All right. Let's go.\"\n\n\n We went. I have never in my life seen that long hall quite so empty as\n it was right then. No one came out of any of the apartments, no one\n emerged from any of the branch halls. We walked to my apartment. I\n thumbed the door open and we went inside.\n\n\n Once the door was closed behind us, he visibly relaxed, sagging against\n the door, his gun hand hanging limp at his side, a nervous smile\n playing across his lips.",
"\"Of course not,\" I told him. I was on secure ground now, with Linda's\n information to guide me. \"All radiation is cleared from the sleds and\n their cargo before they're brought into the building.\"\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he said impatiently. \"But don't you ever check them\n before de-radiating them?\"\n\"No. Why should we?\"\n\n\n \"To find out how far the radiation level outside has dropped.\"\n\n\n \"For what? Who cares about that?\"\n\n\n He frowned bitterly. \"The same answer,\" he muttered, more to himself\n than to me. \"The same answer every time. You people have crawled into\n your caves and you're ready to stay in them forever.\"\n\n\n I looked around at my apartment. \"Rather a well-appointed cave,\" I told\n him.",
"It would, though reluctantly. Who knew how many years it had been since\n last this door had been opened? It squeaked and wailed and groaned and\n finally opened half way. I stepped through to the musty, dusty landing,\n took a deep breath, and started down. Eight steps and a landing, eight\n steps and a floor. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor.\n\n\n On the landing between one fifty and one forty-nine, there was a\n smallish door. I paused, looking curiously at it, and saw that at one\n time letters had been painted on it. The letters had long since flaked\n away, but they left a lighter residue of dust than that which covered\n the rest of the door. And so the words could still be read, if with\n difficulty.\n\n\n I read them. They said:\nEMERGENCY ENTRANCE\n\n ELEVATOR SHAFT\n\n AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL\n\n ONLY",
"\"Well—but why should there be any problem about getting him out?\"\n\n\n \"He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from\n outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims\n the elevator at them.\"\n\n\n That sounded impossible. \"He\naims\nthe elevator?\"\n\n\n \"He runs it up and down the shaft,\" she explained, \"trying to crush\n anybody who goes after him.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said. \"So it might take a while.\"\n\n\n She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could\n hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, \"They're\n afraid they'll have to starve him out.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\""
],
[
"Well, of course, after working as an ore-sled dispatcher for three\n years, Linda quite naturally was a bit obsessed. I remember one time,\n shortly after we'd started dating, when I arrived at her place five\n minutes late and found her having hysterics. She thought I'd been\n killed. She couldn't visualize anything less than that keeping me from\n arriving at the designated moment. When I told her what actually had\n happened—I'd broken a shoe lace—she refused to speak to me for four\n days.",
"I had a Whimsical Approach: \"Honey, I see there's a nice little\n Non-P apartment available up on one seventy-three.\" And I had a\n Romantic Approach: \"Darling, I can't live without you at the moment.\n Temporarily, I'm madly in love with you. I want to share my life\n with you for a while. Will you be provisionally mine?\" I even had a\n Straightforward Approach: \"Linda, I'm going to be needing a wife for at\n least a year or two, and I can't think of anyone I would rather spend\n that time with than you.\"\n\n\n Actually, though I wouldn't even have admitted this to Linda, much less\n to anyone else, I loved her in more than a Non-P way. But even if we\n both had been genetically desirable (neither of us were) I knew that\n Linda relished her freedom and independence too much to ever contract\n for any kind of marriage other than Non-P—Non-Permanent, No Progeny.",
"It was just one of those days. Everybody gets them. Days when you're\n lucky in you make it to nightfall with no bones broken.\n\n\n But of all times for it to happen! For literally months I'd been\n building my courage up. And finally, just today, I had made up my\n mind to do it—to propose to Linda. I'd called her second thing this\n morning—right after the egg yolk—and invited myself down to her\n place. \"Ten o'clock,\" she'd said, smiling sweetly at me out of the\n phone. She knew why I wanted to talk to her. And when Linda said ten\n o'clock, she meant ten o'clock.",
"Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that Linda's a perfectionist or a\n harridan or anything like that. Far from it. But she does have a\n fixation on that one subject of punctuality. The result of her job,\n of course. She was an ore-sled dispatcher. Ore-sleds, being robots,\n were invariably punctual. If an ore-sled didn't return on time, no one\n waited for it. They simply knew that it had been captured by some other\n Project and had blown itself up.",
"Well, according to Dr. Kilbillie (a walking library of unnecessary\n information), the Project had been built when there still had been such\n things as municipal governments (something to do with cities, which\n were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government\n had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which\n required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the\n city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them.\n\n\n And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after\n all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda's floor. At sixteen steps a\n flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps.\n\n\n Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could.\n If the door would open.",
"So I rehearsed my various approaches, realizing that when the time\n came I would probably be so tongue-tied I'd be capable of no more\n than a blurted, \"Will you marry me?\" and I struggled with zippers and\n malfunctioning air-cons, and I managed somehow to leave the apartment\n at five minutes to ten.\n\n\n Linda lived down on the hundred fortieth floor, thirteen stories away.\n It never took more than two or three minutes to get to her place, so I\n was giving myself plenty of time.\n\n\n But then the elevator didn't come.\n\n\n I pushed the button, waited, and nothing happened. I couldn't\n understand it.",
"And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking\n Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness\n was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it\n go at that.\nBut now there was a spy in the elevator.\n\n\n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how\n many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls\n were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the\n other side of them.\n\n\n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n\n\n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen.\n I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the\n elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda\n would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient\n reason for me to be late.",
"\"Of course not,\" I told him. I was on secure ground now, with Linda's\n information to guide me. \"All radiation is cleared from the sleds and\n their cargo before they're brought into the building.\"\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he said impatiently. \"But don't you ever check them\n before de-radiating them?\"\n\"No. Why should we?\"\n\n\n \"To find out how far the radiation level outside has dropped.\"\n\n\n \"For what? Who cares about that?\"\n\n\n He frowned bitterly. \"The same answer,\" he muttered, more to himself\n than to me. \"The same answer every time. You people have crawled into\n your caves and you're ready to stay in them forever.\"\n\n\n I looked around at my apartment. \"Rather a well-appointed cave,\" I told\n him.",
"Ten more seconds, and still no elevator. I chose the second\n alternative, raced back down the hall, and thumbed my way into my\n apartment. I dialed Linda's number, and the screen lit up with white\n letters on black: PRIVACY DISCONNECTION.\n\n\n Of course! Linda expected me at any moment. And she knew what I wanted\n to say to her, so quite naturally she had disconnected the phone, to\n keep us from being interrupted.\n\n\n Frantic, I dashed from the apartment again, back down the hall to the\n elevator, and leaned on that blasted button with all my weight. Even if\n the elevator should arrive right now, I would still be almost a minute\n late.\n\n\n No matter. It didn't arrive.",
"\"So what happened?\" he demanded, and immediately answered himself.\n \"I'll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make that first\n giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That's all it was, just a little\n hotfoot. So what did Man do? I'll tell you what he did. He turned\n around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his\n tail between his legs.\nThat's\nwhat he did!\"\n\n\n To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme\n understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by\n saying, \"Here's your coffee.\"\n\n\n \"Put it on the table,\" he said, switching instantly from raving maniac\n to watchful spy.\n\n\n I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the\n room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and\n suddenly said, \"What did they tell you I was? A spy?\"",
"But now she was actually looking at\nme\n.\n\n\n I took advantage of the fact. Calmly, rationally, I said to her, \"I\n would like to tell you something, Miss. I would like to tell you just\n what you people have done to me by disconnecting the elevator. You have\n ruined my life.\"\n\n\n She blinked, open-mouthed. \"Ruined your life?\"\n\n\n \"Precisely.\" I found it necessary to inhale again, even more slowly\n than before. \"I was on my way,\" I explained, \"to propose to a girl whom\n I dearly love. In every way but one, she is the perfect woman. Do you\n understand me?\"\n\n\n She nodded, wide-eyed. I had stumbled on a romantic, though I was too\n preoccupied to notice it at the time.",
"\"I'll tell you this,\" he said belligerently. \"A lot longer than it\n took for him to turn around and go right back into the cave again.\" He\n started pacing the floor, waving the gun around in an agitated fashion\n as he talked. \"Is this the\nnatural\nlife of man? It is not. Is this\n even a\ndesirable\nlife for man? It is\ndefinitely\nnot.\" He spun back\n to face me, pointing the gun at me again, but this time he pointed\n it as though it were a finger, not a gun. \"Listen, you,\" he snapped.\n \"Man was progressing. For all his stupidities and excesses, he was\n growing up. His dreams were getting bigger and grander and better all",
"\"Well—but why should there be any problem about getting him out?\"\n\n\n \"He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from\n outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims\n the elevator at them.\"\n\n\n That sounded impossible. \"He\naims\nthe elevator?\"\n\n\n \"He runs it up and down the shaft,\" she explained, \"trying to crush\n anybody who goes after him.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said. \"So it might take a while.\"\n\n\n She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could\n hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, \"They're\n afraid they'll have to starve him out.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\"",
"I thought fast. \"I'm an ore-sled dispatcher,\" I said. That was a lie,\n of course, but I'd heard enough about ore-sled dispatching from Linda\n to be able to maintain the fiction should he question me further about\n it.\n\n\n Actually, I was a gymnast instructor. The subjects I taught included\n wrestling, judo and karati—talents I would prefer to disclose to him\n in my own fashion, when the time came.\n\n\n He was quiet for a moment. \"What about radiation level on the\n ore-sleds?\"\n\n\n I had no idea what he was talking about, and admitted as much.\n\n\n \"When they come back,\" he said. \"How much radiation do they pick up?\n Don't you people ever test them?\"",
"And so we went back up the stairs to one fifty-three, and stopped at\n the door. He stood close behind me, the gun pressed against my back,\n and grated in my ear, \"I'll have this gun in my pocket. If you make one\n false move I'll kill you. Now, we're going to your apartment. We're\n friends, just strolling along together. You got that?\"\n\n\n I nodded.\n\n\n \"All right. Let's go.\"\n\n\n We went. I have never in my life seen that long hall quite so empty as\n it was right then. No one came out of any of the apartments, no one\n emerged from any of the branch halls. We walked to my apartment. I\n thumbed the door open and we went inside.\n\n\n Once the door was closed behind us, he visibly relaxed, sagging against\n the door, his gun hand hanging limp at his side, a nervous smile\n playing across his lips.",
"\"You bet it would,\" he said, with malicious glee. \"All right, if that's\n what\nyour\nspies are doing, and if\nI'm\na spy, then it follows that\n I'm doing the same thing, right?\"\n\n\n \"I don't follow you,\" I admitted.\n\n\n \"If I'm a spy,\" he said impatiently, \"then I'm supposed to look for\n indications of an attack by you people on my Project.\"\n\n\n I shrugged. \"If that's your job,\" I said, \"then that's your job.\"\n\n\n He got suddenly red-faced, and jumped to his feet. \"That's\nnot\nmy\n job, you blatant idiot!\" he shouted. \"I'm not a spy! If I\nwere\na spy,\nthen\nthat would be my job!\"\nThe maniac had returned, in full force. \"All right,\" I said hastily.\n \"All right, whatever you say.\"",
"I looked at him, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could\n leap at him before he could bring the gun up again. But he must have\n read my intentions on my face. He straightened, shaking his head. He\n said, \"Don't try it. I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill\n anybody, but I will if I have to. We'll just wait here together until\n the hue and cry passes us. Then I'll tie you up, so you won't be able\n to sic your Army on me too soon, and I'll leave. If you don't try any\n silly heroics, nothing will happen to you.\"\n\n\n \"You'll never get away,\" I told him. \"The whole Project is alerted.\"\n\n\n \"You let me worry about that,\" he said. He licked his lips. \"You got\n any chico coffee?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"\"Make me a cup. And don't get any bright ideas about dousing me with\n boiling water.\"\n\n\n \"I only have my day's allotment,\" I protested. \"Just enough for two\n cups, lunch and dinner.\"\n\n\n \"Two cups is fine,\" he said. \"One for each of us.\"\nAnd now I had yet another grudge against this blasted spy. Which\n reminded me again of Linda. From the looks of things, I wasn't\never\ngoing to get to her place. By now she was probably in mourning for me\n and might even have the Sanitation Staff searching for my remains.\n\n\n As I made the chico, he asked me questions. My name first, and then,\n \"What do you do for a living?\"",
"\"No!\" he shouted. \"You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You\n think I'm a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I'm a spy. That\n fathead who turned me in thinks I'm a spy. But I'm\nnot\na spy, and I'm\n going to tell you what I am.\"\n\n\n I waited, looking as attentive as possible.\n\n\n \"I come,\" he said, \"from a Project about eighty miles north of here.\n I came here by foot, without any sort of radiation shield at all to\n protect me.\"\n\n\n The maniac was back. I didn't say a word. I didn't want to set off the\n violence that was so obviously in this lunatic.",
"\"But a cave nevertheless.\" He leaned toward me, his eyes gleaming with\n a fanatical flame. \"Don't you ever wish to get Outside?\"\n\n\n Incredible! I nearly poured boiling water all over myself. \"Outside? Of\n course not!\"\n\n\n \"The same thing,\" he grumbled, \"over and over again. Always the same\n stupidity. Listen, you! Do you realize how long it took man to get out\n of the caves? The long slow painful creep of progress, for millennia,\n before he ever made that first step from the cave?\"\n\n\n \"I have no idea,\" I told him."
]
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20027
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[
"What is the plan for future experimentation?",
"How did the author feel about the various classifications of beer?",
"How many times was the lager experiment run?",
"What considerations (if any) did the author make on the amount of beer poured for each of the samples?",
"What was the author’s general finding about the true taste of the beers?",
"How was the best beer chosen?",
"What is the general tone that the author writes in?",
"What was the general set up of the experiment?",
"What was one thing that the experimenter noticed was different between the items they chose to test?",
"How did the author feel about their ability to detect differences between the test groups over the course of the study?"
] |
[
[
"The author has only one more experiment planned",
"The author plans to conduct 4 more experiments with different classes of beers",
"The author has completed all the experiments they intend on doing",
"The author will do two more experiments - another repeat of lager, and one with more expensive options"
],
[
"They thought microbreweries were just as likely to make all classes of beers since it have become so diversified",
"They felt a lot of microbreweries got into making lagers",
"They thought lagers would have more cheap brands included, whereas other classes not so much",
"They thought lagers were the worst of the beers"
],
[
"Once",
"Four times over the course of a month",
"Three times",
"Twice, on two consecutive Saturdays"
],
[
"They only wanted the testers to have one sip of each",
"They poured differing amounts baked on the color to make them all appear the same color when you looked down into the glass",
"They provided one type of beer at a time to the tasters so that it would be at its fullest carbonation when they tasted it",
"They provided enough beer for several sips, but not so much that consuming all of it would be problematic"
],
[
"The quality of the beers is closely linked to first impressions",
"The results were too varied to really make a general conclusion",
"A low cost beer was actually ranked the best overall",
"Low cost beers actually rate pretty well when people don’t know what they’re drinking"
],
[
"It was unanimous",
"It required a second test to decipher results",
"The was a close call, but the winning beer had one extra vote",
"The majority of participants chose the same exact beer as the winner"
],
[
"They are compassionate for the testers who are confused about how to run the experiment",
"They poke fun at the preferences of the participants based on their professions",
"They start off very confident about their own abilities, but learn by tasting that they actually aren’t any better than the rest of the testers",
"They take a serious, scientific approach because it’s mart of their market research profession"
],
[
"The tasters each brought their favorite beer and poured it into 10 different cups to be blindly dispersed to the rest of the participants",
"The tasters had a list of the names of the beers and had to assign them to cups labelled only with letters based on how they tasted",
"The tasters chose the best and worst out of a set of 5 beers, and the author ran statistics to come out with rankings",
"The tasters were completely blind to which beers were being used in the experiment"
],
[
"There were obvious color differences",
"There were obvious carbonation and color differences",
"There were differing sizes of the cans, making calculations more difficult",
"There was not enough of some of the types of beer, so they had to adjust along the way"
],
[
"At first they didn’t have confidence they could tell them apart",
"They wanted to participate in the tasting, but after they saw how difficult is was for the rest of the participants they withdrew",
"They couldn’t understand why the other tasters were struggling because it was so easy",
"They thought they had a good chance at choosing the correct beer for each sample, but when they got into tasting their confidence faded"
]
] |
[
1,
3,
1,
4,
4,
4,
2,
4,
1,
1
] |
[
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
0,
1,
0,
0,
1
] |
[
[
"3 Experimental procedure: Each taster sat down before an array of 10 plastic cups labeled A through J. The A-to-J",
"1 Philosophy : The experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the lager group. Lagers are the light-colored, relatively lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in the United States. Imported lagers include Foster's, Corona, and Heineken. Budweiser is a lager; so are Coors, Miller, most light beers, and most bargain-basement beers.",
"time limit for the tasting, apart from the two-hour limit in which we had reserved the conference room. One experimenter (the boss of most of the others there) rushed through his rankings in 10 minutes and gave the lowest overall scores.",
"lethal; also, they were just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no",
"The neat 6:3:2 mathematical relationship among the price groups should be noted. The high-end beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: \n\n High End \n\n Grolsch. Import lager (Holland). $1.67 per pint. (See an important .) Chosen for the test because of its beer-snob chic; also, one of my favorite beers. \n\n Heineken. Import lager (Holland). $1.53 per pint. (Sale price. List price was $1.71 per pint.) Chosen because it is America's long-standing most popular import.",
"coding scheme was the same for all tasters. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every sample: 30 ounces, or two and a half normal beers. Not",
"Beer snobs sneer at lagers, because they look so watery and because so many bad beers are in the group. But the lager test came first, for two reasons. One, lagers pose the only honest test of the ability to tell expensive from dirt-cheap beers. There are very few inexpensive nut brown ales, India pale ales, extra special bitters, or other fancy-pantsy, microbrew-style, nonlager drinks. So if you want to see whether people can taste a money difference among beers of the same type, you've got to go lager. Two, the ideal of public service requires lager coverage. This is what most people drink, so new findings about lager quality could do the greatest good for the greatest number. \n\n In the second stage of the experiment, held several weeks later, the same testers reassembled to try the fancier beers. The results of that tasting will be reported separately, once Microsoft's mighty Windows 2000-powered central computers have .",
"After tasting the beers, each taster rated beers A through J on the following standards: \n\n Overall quality points: Zero to 100, zero as undrinkable and 100 as dream beer. Purely subjective measure of how well each taster liked each beer. \n\n Price category: The tasters knew that each beer came from the expensive, medium, or cheap category--and they had to guess where A through J belonged. A rating of 3 was most expensive, 2 for average, 1 for cheap. \n\n Description: \"Amusing presumption,\" \"fresh on the palate,\" \"crap,\" etc. \n\n Best and Worst: Tasters chose one Best and one Worst from the \"flight\" (as they would call it if this were a wine test). \n\n When the session was over, results for each beer were collected in a grid like this:",
"2 Materials : Ten lagers were selected for testing, representing three distinct price-and-quality groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly all fall into one of three ranges: \n\n a) High end at $1.50 to $1.60 per pint. (\"Per pint\" was the unit-pricing measure at the Safeway in Bellevue, Wash., that was the standard supply source for the experiment. There are 4.5 pints per six pack, so the high-end price point is around $7 per six pack.) \n\n b) Middle at around 80 cents per pint, or under $4 per six pack. \n\n c) Low at 50 cents to 55 cents per pint, or under $3 per six pack.",
"I'm afraid we'll never know the answer to that exact question, since I'm not brave enough to expose my own taste to a real test. But I'm brave enough to expose my friends'. This summer, while working at Microsoft, I put out a call for volunteers for a \"science of beer\" experiment. Testing candidates had to meet two criteria: 1) they had to like beer; and 2) they had to think they knew the difference between mass products and high-end microbrews. \n\n Twelve tasters were selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A few were selected because they had been bosses in the Microsoft department where I worked. All were software managers or developers ; all were male, but I repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived abroad for enough years to speak haughtily about American macrobrews. Most tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they entered the laboratory (which mere moments before had been a Microsoft conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following lines:",
"The taster who took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest to the relative price of the beers. (This man grew up in Russia.) The experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test",
"3) Value for Money: the Taste-o-meter® . Since this experiment's real purpose was to find the connection between cost and taste, the next step was to adjust subjective preference points by objective cost. The Taste-o-meter rating for each beer was calculated by dividing its corrected average preference rating by its price per pint . If Beer X had ratings twice as high as Beer Y, but it cost three times as much, Beer Y would have the higher Taste-o-meter rating. When the 10 beers are reranked this way, the results are:",
"2. Overall preference points . This was a subtler and more illuminating look at similar trends. The beers were ranked on \"corrected average preference points\"--an average of the zero-to-100 points assigned by each taster, corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. The tasters used widely varying scales--one confining all beers to the range between zero and 30, another giving 67 as his lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such difficulties to provide these results:",
"The Safeway that supplied the beers didn't carry any true bargain-basement products, such as \"Red, White, and Blue,\" \"Old German,\" or the one with generic printing that just says \"Beer.\" The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its trademark wide-mouth bottles), off the list. They have the air of cheapness but actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per pint.",
"Don't serve Grolsch unless you know people will consider it exotic, or unless you've invited me. \n\n Apart from Sam Adams and Grolsch, the tasters really had trouble telling one beer from another . This conclusion is implicit in many of the findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the confident look of men-who-know-their-beer quickly turned to dismay and panic as they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. \n\n \n\n The evidence suggests other implications about specific beers. For instance, the comments about Coors Light are much less enthusiastic than the average-or-better numerical rankings. Most tasters paused to complain about it--\"fizzy and soapy\"--before giving it reasonable marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. Based on this study, rational consumers should:",
"To see all the grids for all the beers, click . \n\n 4 Data Analysis: The ratings led to four ways to assess the quality of the beers. \n\n 1. Best and Worst. Least scientific, yet clearest cut in its results. Eleven tasters named a favorite beer. Ten of them chose Sam Adams . The other one chose Busch , the cheapest of all beers in the sample. (The taster who made this choice advises Microsoft on what new features should go into the next version of Word.) Busch was the only beer to receive both a Best and a Worst vote. \n\n Bottom rankings were also clear. Of the 11 naming a Worst beer, five chose Grolsch , the most expensive beer in the survey. Results by best/worst preference:",
"Here again one costly beer-- Sam Adams --shows up well, while another, Grolsch , continues to struggle, but not as badly as the medium-price Miller Genuine Draft . Sam's success could reflect its quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a \"lager.\" It could also reflect that participants simply thought it was good. (Only one guessed it was Sam Adams.) As for Grolsch ... it is very strongly hopped, which can seem exotic if you know you're drinking a pricey import but simply bad if you don't. MGD overtook Grolsch in the race for the bottom because, while many people hated Grolsch, some actually liked it; no one liked MGD. There are some other important findings buried in the chart, but they're clearest if we move to ...",
"Booze You Can Use \n\n I love beer, but lately I've been wondering: Am I getting full value for my beer dollar? As I've stocked up on microbrews and fancy imports, I've told myself that their taste is deeper, richer, more complicated, more compelling--and therefore worth the 50 percent to 200 percent premium they command over cheap mass products or even mainstream Bud. And yet, I've started to wonder, is this just costly snobbery? If I didn't know what I was drinking, could I even tell whether it was something from Belgium, vs. something from Pabst?",
"We won't even speak of poor Grolsch or MGD any more. The story here is the amazing snob-power-per-dollar of Busch , closely followed by Schmidt's . A dollar spent on Busch gets you three times the impressiveness of a dollar spent in Grolsch, useful information when planning a party. Not everyone liked Busch--one called it \"crap\"; another, \"Water. LITE.\" But the magic of statistics lets us see the larger trends. \n\n 5 Conclusions . Further study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: \n\n \n\n One and only one beer truly survived the blind taste test. This is Sam Adams , which 10 tasters independently ranked \"best\" without knowing they were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but couldn't have known whether this was some trick off-brand sneaked into the test.)",
"4) Social Value for Money: the Snob-o-meter® . In addition to saying which beers they preferred, the tasters were asked to estimate whether the beers were expensive or not--in effect, to judge whether other people would like and be impressed by the beers. One taster perfectly understood the intention of this measure when he said, in comments about Beer B (Heineken), \"I don't like it, but I bet it's what the snobs buy.\" The Snob-o-meter rating for each beer is similar to the Taste-o-meter. You start with the \"group\" ranking--whether the tasters thought the beer belonged in Group 1 (cheap), 2, or 3--and then divide by the price per pint. The result tells you the social-mobility power of the beer--how impressive it will seem, relative to how much it costs. The Snob-o-meter rankings are:"
],
[
"After tasting the beers, each taster rated beers A through J on the following standards: \n\n Overall quality points: Zero to 100, zero as undrinkable and 100 as dream beer. Purely subjective measure of how well each taster liked each beer. \n\n Price category: The tasters knew that each beer came from the expensive, medium, or cheap category--and they had to guess where A through J belonged. A rating of 3 was most expensive, 2 for average, 1 for cheap. \n\n Description: \"Amusing presumption,\" \"fresh on the palate,\" \"crap,\" etc. \n\n Best and Worst: Tasters chose one Best and one Worst from the \"flight\" (as they would call it if this were a wine test). \n\n When the session was over, results for each beer were collected in a grid like this:",
"2. Overall preference points . This was a subtler and more illuminating look at similar trends. The beers were ranked on \"corrected average preference points\"--an average of the zero-to-100 points assigned by each taster, corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. The tasters used widely varying scales--one confining all beers to the range between zero and 30, another giving 67 as his lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such difficulties to provide these results:",
"The neat 6:3:2 mathematical relationship among the price groups should be noted. The high-end beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: \n\n High End \n\n Grolsch. Import lager (Holland). $1.67 per pint. (See an important .) Chosen for the test because of its beer-snob chic; also, one of my favorite beers. \n\n Heineken. Import lager (Holland). $1.53 per pint. (Sale price. List price was $1.71 per pint.) Chosen because it is America's long-standing most popular import.",
"Here again one costly beer-- Sam Adams --shows up well, while another, Grolsch , continues to struggle, but not as badly as the medium-price Miller Genuine Draft . Sam's success could reflect its quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a \"lager.\" It could also reflect that participants simply thought it was good. (Only one guessed it was Sam Adams.) As for Grolsch ... it is very strongly hopped, which can seem exotic if you know you're drinking a pricey import but simply bad if you don't. MGD overtook Grolsch in the race for the bottom because, while many people hated Grolsch, some actually liked it; no one liked MGD. There are some other important findings buried in the chart, but they're clearest if we move to ...",
"1 Philosophy : The experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the lager group. Lagers are the light-colored, relatively lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in the United States. Imported lagers include Foster's, Corona, and Heineken. Budweiser is a lager; so are Coors, Miller, most light beers, and most bargain-basement beers.",
"To see all the grids for all the beers, click . \n\n 4 Data Analysis: The ratings led to four ways to assess the quality of the beers. \n\n 1. Best and Worst. Least scientific, yet clearest cut in its results. Eleven tasters named a favorite beer. Ten of them chose Sam Adams . The other one chose Busch , the cheapest of all beers in the sample. (The taster who made this choice advises Microsoft on what new features should go into the next version of Word.) Busch was the only beer to receive both a Best and a Worst vote. \n\n Bottom rankings were also clear. Of the 11 naming a Worst beer, five chose Grolsch , the most expensive beer in the survey. Results by best/worst preference:",
"4) Social Value for Money: the Snob-o-meter® . In addition to saying which beers they preferred, the tasters were asked to estimate whether the beers were expensive or not--in effect, to judge whether other people would like and be impressed by the beers. One taster perfectly understood the intention of this measure when he said, in comments about Beer B (Heineken), \"I don't like it, but I bet it's what the snobs buy.\" The Snob-o-meter rating for each beer is similar to the Taste-o-meter. You start with the \"group\" ranking--whether the tasters thought the beer belonged in Group 1 (cheap), 2, or 3--and then divide by the price per pint. The result tells you the social-mobility power of the beer--how impressive it will seem, relative to how much it costs. The Snob-o-meter rankings are:",
"coding scheme was the same for all tasters. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every sample: 30 ounces, or two and a half normal beers. Not",
"Don't serve Grolsch unless you know people will consider it exotic, or unless you've invited me. \n\n Apart from Sam Adams and Grolsch, the tasters really had trouble telling one beer from another . This conclusion is implicit in many of the findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the confident look of men-who-know-their-beer quickly turned to dismay and panic as they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. \n\n \n\n The evidence suggests other implications about specific beers. For instance, the comments about Coors Light are much less enthusiastic than the average-or-better numerical rankings. Most tasters paused to complain about it--\"fizzy and soapy\"--before giving it reasonable marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. Based on this study, rational consumers should:",
"I'm afraid we'll never know the answer to that exact question, since I'm not brave enough to expose my own taste to a real test. But I'm brave enough to expose my friends'. This summer, while working at Microsoft, I put out a call for volunteers for a \"science of beer\" experiment. Testing candidates had to meet two criteria: 1) they had to like beer; and 2) they had to think they knew the difference between mass products and high-end microbrews. \n\n Twelve tasters were selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A few were selected because they had been bosses in the Microsoft department where I worked. All were software managers or developers ; all were male, but I repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived abroad for enough years to speak haughtily about American macrobrews. Most tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they entered the laboratory (which mere moments before had been a Microsoft conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following lines:",
"The taster who took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest to the relative price of the beers. (This man grew up in Russia.) The experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test",
"2 Materials : Ten lagers were selected for testing, representing three distinct price-and-quality groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly all fall into one of three ranges: \n\n a) High end at $1.50 to $1.60 per pint. (\"Per pint\" was the unit-pricing measure at the Safeway in Bellevue, Wash., that was the standard supply source for the experiment. There are 4.5 pints per six pack, so the high-end price point is around $7 per six pack.) \n\n b) Middle at around 80 cents per pint, or under $4 per six pack. \n\n c) Low at 50 cents to 55 cents per pint, or under $3 per six pack.",
"3) Value for Money: the Taste-o-meter® . Since this experiment's real purpose was to find the connection between cost and taste, the next step was to adjust subjective preference points by objective cost. The Taste-o-meter rating for each beer was calculated by dividing its corrected average preference rating by its price per pint . If Beer X had ratings twice as high as Beer Y, but it cost three times as much, Beer Y would have the higher Taste-o-meter rating. When the 10 beers are reranked this way, the results are:",
"Beer snobs sneer at lagers, because they look so watery and because so many bad beers are in the group. But the lager test came first, for two reasons. One, lagers pose the only honest test of the ability to tell expensive from dirt-cheap beers. There are very few inexpensive nut brown ales, India pale ales, extra special bitters, or other fancy-pantsy, microbrew-style, nonlager drinks. So if you want to see whether people can taste a money difference among beers of the same type, you've got to go lager. Two, the ideal of public service requires lager coverage. This is what most people drink, so new findings about lager quality could do the greatest good for the greatest number. \n\n In the second stage of the experiment, held several weeks later, the same testers reassembled to try the fancier beers. The results of that tasting will be reported separately, once Microsoft's mighty Windows 2000-powered central computers have .",
"We won't even speak of poor Grolsch or MGD any more. The story here is the amazing snob-power-per-dollar of Busch , closely followed by Schmidt's . A dollar spent on Busch gets you three times the impressiveness of a dollar spent in Grolsch, useful information when planning a party. Not everyone liked Busch--one called it \"crap\"; another, \"Water. LITE.\" But the magic of statistics lets us see the larger trends. \n\n 5 Conclusions . Further study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: \n\n \n\n One and only one beer truly survived the blind taste test. This is Sam Adams , which 10 tasters independently ranked \"best\" without knowing they were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but couldn't have known whether this was some trick off-brand sneaked into the test.)",
"The Safeway that supplied the beers didn't carry any true bargain-basement products, such as \"Red, White, and Blue,\" \"Old German,\" or the one with generic printing that just says \"Beer.\" The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its trademark wide-mouth bottles), off the list. They have the air of cheapness but actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per pint.",
"lethal; also, they were just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no",
"In a familiar pattern, we have Grolsch bringing up the rear, with less than one-quarter the Taste-o-meter power of Busch , the No. 1 value beer. The real news in this ranking is: the success of Busch ; the embarrassment of Heineken and Miller Genuine Draft , an expensive and a medium beer, respectively, which share the cellar with the hapless Grolsch ; and the nearly Busch-like value of Milwaukee's Best and Schmidt's . It is safe to say that none of our testers would have confessed respect for Busch, Milwaukee's Best, or Schmidt's before the contest began. But when they didn't know what they were drinking, they found these beers much closer in quality to \"best\" beers than the prices would indicate.",
"Booze You Can Use \n\n I love beer, but lately I've been wondering: Am I getting full value for my beer dollar? As I've stocked up on microbrews and fancy imports, I've told myself that their taste is deeper, richer, more complicated, more compelling--and therefore worth the 50 percent to 200 percent premium they command over cheap mass products or even mainstream Bud. And yet, I've started to wonder, is this just costly snobbery? If I didn't know what I was drinking, could I even tell whether it was something from Belgium, vs. something from Pabst?",
"1) Buy Sam Adams when they want an individual glass of lager to be as good as it can be. \n\n 2) Buy Busch at all other times, since it gives them the maximum taste and social influence per dollar invested. \n\n The detailed rankings and comments for all tasters on all beers may be found . \n\n Next installment: fancy beers ."
],
[
"1 Philosophy : The experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the lager group. Lagers are the light-colored, relatively lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in the United States. Imported lagers include Foster's, Corona, and Heineken. Budweiser is a lager; so are Coors, Miller, most light beers, and most bargain-basement beers.",
"3 Experimental procedure: Each taster sat down before an array of 10 plastic cups labeled A through J. The A-to-J",
"The neat 6:3:2 mathematical relationship among the price groups should be noted. The high-end beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: \n\n High End \n\n Grolsch. Import lager (Holland). $1.67 per pint. (See an important .) Chosen for the test because of its beer-snob chic; also, one of my favorite beers. \n\n Heineken. Import lager (Holland). $1.53 per pint. (Sale price. List price was $1.71 per pint.) Chosen because it is America's long-standing most popular import.",
"Beer snobs sneer at lagers, because they look so watery and because so many bad beers are in the group. But the lager test came first, for two reasons. One, lagers pose the only honest test of the ability to tell expensive from dirt-cheap beers. There are very few inexpensive nut brown ales, India pale ales, extra special bitters, or other fancy-pantsy, microbrew-style, nonlager drinks. So if you want to see whether people can taste a money difference among beers of the same type, you've got to go lager. Two, the ideal of public service requires lager coverage. This is what most people drink, so new findings about lager quality could do the greatest good for the greatest number. \n\n In the second stage of the experiment, held several weeks later, the same testers reassembled to try the fancier beers. The results of that tasting will be reported separately, once Microsoft's mighty Windows 2000-powered central computers have .",
"2 Materials : Ten lagers were selected for testing, representing three distinct price-and-quality groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly all fall into one of three ranges: \n\n a) High end at $1.50 to $1.60 per pint. (\"Per pint\" was the unit-pricing measure at the Safeway in Bellevue, Wash., that was the standard supply source for the experiment. There are 4.5 pints per six pack, so the high-end price point is around $7 per six pack.) \n\n b) Middle at around 80 cents per pint, or under $4 per six pack. \n\n c) Low at 50 cents to 55 cents per pint, or under $3 per six pack.",
"After tasting the beers, each taster rated beers A through J on the following standards: \n\n Overall quality points: Zero to 100, zero as undrinkable and 100 as dream beer. Purely subjective measure of how well each taster liked each beer. \n\n Price category: The tasters knew that each beer came from the expensive, medium, or cheap category--and they had to guess where A through J belonged. A rating of 3 was most expensive, 2 for average, 1 for cheap. \n\n Description: \"Amusing presumption,\" \"fresh on the palate,\" \"crap,\" etc. \n\n Best and Worst: Tasters chose one Best and one Worst from the \"flight\" (as they would call it if this were a wine test). \n\n When the session was over, results for each beer were collected in a grid like this:",
"coding scheme was the same for all tasters. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every sample: 30 ounces, or two and a half normal beers. Not",
"The taster who took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest to the relative price of the beers. (This man grew up in Russia.) The experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test",
"lethal; also, they were just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no",
"time limit for the tasting, apart from the two-hour limit in which we had reserved the conference room. One experimenter (the boss of most of the others there) rushed through his rankings in 10 minutes and gave the lowest overall scores.",
"I'm afraid we'll never know the answer to that exact question, since I'm not brave enough to expose my own taste to a real test. But I'm brave enough to expose my friends'. This summer, while working at Microsoft, I put out a call for volunteers for a \"science of beer\" experiment. Testing candidates had to meet two criteria: 1) they had to like beer; and 2) they had to think they knew the difference between mass products and high-end microbrews. \n\n Twelve tasters were selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A few were selected because they had been bosses in the Microsoft department where I worked. All were software managers or developers ; all were male, but I repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived abroad for enough years to speak haughtily about American macrobrews. Most tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they entered the laboratory (which mere moments before had been a Microsoft conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following lines:",
"Don't serve Grolsch unless you know people will consider it exotic, or unless you've invited me. \n\n Apart from Sam Adams and Grolsch, the tasters really had trouble telling one beer from another . This conclusion is implicit in many of the findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the confident look of men-who-know-their-beer quickly turned to dismay and panic as they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. \n\n \n\n The evidence suggests other implications about specific beers. For instance, the comments about Coors Light are much less enthusiastic than the average-or-better numerical rankings. Most tasters paused to complain about it--\"fizzy and soapy\"--before giving it reasonable marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. Based on this study, rational consumers should:",
"3) Value for Money: the Taste-o-meter® . Since this experiment's real purpose was to find the connection between cost and taste, the next step was to adjust subjective preference points by objective cost. The Taste-o-meter rating for each beer was calculated by dividing its corrected average preference rating by its price per pint . If Beer X had ratings twice as high as Beer Y, but it cost three times as much, Beer Y would have the higher Taste-o-meter rating. When the 10 beers are reranked this way, the results are:",
"2. Overall preference points . This was a subtler and more illuminating look at similar trends. The beers were ranked on \"corrected average preference points\"--an average of the zero-to-100 points assigned by each taster, corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. The tasters used widely varying scales--one confining all beers to the range between zero and 30, another giving 67 as his lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such difficulties to provide these results:",
"Here again one costly beer-- Sam Adams --shows up well, while another, Grolsch , continues to struggle, but not as badly as the medium-price Miller Genuine Draft . Sam's success could reflect its quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a \"lager.\" It could also reflect that participants simply thought it was good. (Only one guessed it was Sam Adams.) As for Grolsch ... it is very strongly hopped, which can seem exotic if you know you're drinking a pricey import but simply bad if you don't. MGD overtook Grolsch in the race for the bottom because, while many people hated Grolsch, some actually liked it; no one liked MGD. There are some other important findings buried in the chart, but they're clearest if we move to ...",
"To see all the grids for all the beers, click . \n\n 4 Data Analysis: The ratings led to four ways to assess the quality of the beers. \n\n 1. Best and Worst. Least scientific, yet clearest cut in its results. Eleven tasters named a favorite beer. Ten of them chose Sam Adams . The other one chose Busch , the cheapest of all beers in the sample. (The taster who made this choice advises Microsoft on what new features should go into the next version of Word.) Busch was the only beer to receive both a Best and a Worst vote. \n\n Bottom rankings were also clear. Of the 11 naming a Worst beer, five chose Grolsch , the most expensive beer in the survey. Results by best/worst preference:",
"The Safeway that supplied the beers didn't carry any true bargain-basement products, such as \"Red, White, and Blue,\" \"Old German,\" or the one with generic printing that just says \"Beer.\" The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its trademark wide-mouth bottles), off the list. They have the air of cheapness but actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per pint.",
"We won't even speak of poor Grolsch or MGD any more. The story here is the amazing snob-power-per-dollar of Busch , closely followed by Schmidt's . A dollar spent on Busch gets you three times the impressiveness of a dollar spent in Grolsch, useful information when planning a party. Not everyone liked Busch--one called it \"crap\"; another, \"Water. LITE.\" But the magic of statistics lets us see the larger trends. \n\n 5 Conclusions . Further study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: \n\n \n\n One and only one beer truly survived the blind taste test. This is Sam Adams , which 10 tasters independently ranked \"best\" without knowing they were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but couldn't have known whether this was some trick off-brand sneaked into the test.)",
"1) Buy Sam Adams when they want an individual glass of lager to be as good as it can be. \n\n 2) Buy Busch at all other times, since it gives them the maximum taste and social influence per dollar invested. \n\n The detailed rankings and comments for all tasters on all beers may be found . \n\n Next installment: fancy beers .",
"4) Social Value for Money: the Snob-o-meter® . In addition to saying which beers they preferred, the tasters were asked to estimate whether the beers were expensive or not--in effect, to judge whether other people would like and be impressed by the beers. One taster perfectly understood the intention of this measure when he said, in comments about Beer B (Heineken), \"I don't like it, but I bet it's what the snobs buy.\" The Snob-o-meter rating for each beer is similar to the Taste-o-meter. You start with the \"group\" ranking--whether the tasters thought the beer belonged in Group 1 (cheap), 2, or 3--and then divide by the price per pint. The result tells you the social-mobility power of the beer--how impressive it will seem, relative to how much it costs. The Snob-o-meter rankings are:"
],
[
"coding scheme was the same for all tasters. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every sample: 30 ounces, or two and a half normal beers. Not",
"After tasting the beers, each taster rated beers A through J on the following standards: \n\n Overall quality points: Zero to 100, zero as undrinkable and 100 as dream beer. Purely subjective measure of how well each taster liked each beer. \n\n Price category: The tasters knew that each beer came from the expensive, medium, or cheap category--and they had to guess where A through J belonged. A rating of 3 was most expensive, 2 for average, 1 for cheap. \n\n Description: \"Amusing presumption,\" \"fresh on the palate,\" \"crap,\" etc. \n\n Best and Worst: Tasters chose one Best and one Worst from the \"flight\" (as they would call it if this were a wine test). \n\n When the session was over, results for each beer were collected in a grid like this:",
"2 Materials : Ten lagers were selected for testing, representing three distinct price-and-quality groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly all fall into one of three ranges: \n\n a) High end at $1.50 to $1.60 per pint. (\"Per pint\" was the unit-pricing measure at the Safeway in Bellevue, Wash., that was the standard supply source for the experiment. There are 4.5 pints per six pack, so the high-end price point is around $7 per six pack.) \n\n b) Middle at around 80 cents per pint, or under $4 per six pack. \n\n c) Low at 50 cents to 55 cents per pint, or under $3 per six pack.",
"The neat 6:3:2 mathematical relationship among the price groups should be noted. The high-end beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: \n\n High End \n\n Grolsch. Import lager (Holland). $1.67 per pint. (See an important .) Chosen for the test because of its beer-snob chic; also, one of my favorite beers. \n\n Heineken. Import lager (Holland). $1.53 per pint. (Sale price. List price was $1.71 per pint.) Chosen because it is America's long-standing most popular import.",
"2. Overall preference points . This was a subtler and more illuminating look at similar trends. The beers were ranked on \"corrected average preference points\"--an average of the zero-to-100 points assigned by each taster, corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. The tasters used widely varying scales--one confining all beers to the range between zero and 30, another giving 67 as his lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such difficulties to provide these results:",
"I'm afraid we'll never know the answer to that exact question, since I'm not brave enough to expose my own taste to a real test. But I'm brave enough to expose my friends'. This summer, while working at Microsoft, I put out a call for volunteers for a \"science of beer\" experiment. Testing candidates had to meet two criteria: 1) they had to like beer; and 2) they had to think they knew the difference between mass products and high-end microbrews. \n\n Twelve tasters were selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A few were selected because they had been bosses in the Microsoft department where I worked. All were software managers or developers ; all were male, but I repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived abroad for enough years to speak haughtily about American macrobrews. Most tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they entered the laboratory (which mere moments before had been a Microsoft conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following lines:",
"lethal; also, they were just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no",
"To see all the grids for all the beers, click . \n\n 4 Data Analysis: The ratings led to four ways to assess the quality of the beers. \n\n 1. Best and Worst. Least scientific, yet clearest cut in its results. Eleven tasters named a favorite beer. Ten of them chose Sam Adams . The other one chose Busch , the cheapest of all beers in the sample. (The taster who made this choice advises Microsoft on what new features should go into the next version of Word.) Busch was the only beer to receive both a Best and a Worst vote. \n\n Bottom rankings were also clear. Of the 11 naming a Worst beer, five chose Grolsch , the most expensive beer in the survey. Results by best/worst preference:",
"1 Philosophy : The experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the lager group. Lagers are the light-colored, relatively lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in the United States. Imported lagers include Foster's, Corona, and Heineken. Budweiser is a lager; so are Coors, Miller, most light beers, and most bargain-basement beers.",
"The taster who took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest to the relative price of the beers. (This man grew up in Russia.) The experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test",
"3) Value for Money: the Taste-o-meter® . Since this experiment's real purpose was to find the connection between cost and taste, the next step was to adjust subjective preference points by objective cost. The Taste-o-meter rating for each beer was calculated by dividing its corrected average preference rating by its price per pint . If Beer X had ratings twice as high as Beer Y, but it cost three times as much, Beer Y would have the higher Taste-o-meter rating. When the 10 beers are reranked this way, the results are:",
"Don't serve Grolsch unless you know people will consider it exotic, or unless you've invited me. \n\n Apart from Sam Adams and Grolsch, the tasters really had trouble telling one beer from another . This conclusion is implicit in many of the findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the confident look of men-who-know-their-beer quickly turned to dismay and panic as they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. \n\n \n\n The evidence suggests other implications about specific beers. For instance, the comments about Coors Light are much less enthusiastic than the average-or-better numerical rankings. Most tasters paused to complain about it--\"fizzy and soapy\"--before giving it reasonable marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. Based on this study, rational consumers should:",
"Beer snobs sneer at lagers, because they look so watery and because so many bad beers are in the group. But the lager test came first, for two reasons. One, lagers pose the only honest test of the ability to tell expensive from dirt-cheap beers. There are very few inexpensive nut brown ales, India pale ales, extra special bitters, or other fancy-pantsy, microbrew-style, nonlager drinks. So if you want to see whether people can taste a money difference among beers of the same type, you've got to go lager. Two, the ideal of public service requires lager coverage. This is what most people drink, so new findings about lager quality could do the greatest good for the greatest number. \n\n In the second stage of the experiment, held several weeks later, the same testers reassembled to try the fancier beers. The results of that tasting will be reported separately, once Microsoft's mighty Windows 2000-powered central computers have .",
"3 Experimental procedure: Each taster sat down before an array of 10 plastic cups labeled A through J. The A-to-J",
"Here again one costly beer-- Sam Adams --shows up well, while another, Grolsch , continues to struggle, but not as badly as the medium-price Miller Genuine Draft . Sam's success could reflect its quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a \"lager.\" It could also reflect that participants simply thought it was good. (Only one guessed it was Sam Adams.) As for Grolsch ... it is very strongly hopped, which can seem exotic if you know you're drinking a pricey import but simply bad if you don't. MGD overtook Grolsch in the race for the bottom because, while many people hated Grolsch, some actually liked it; no one liked MGD. There are some other important findings buried in the chart, but they're clearest if we move to ...",
"We won't even speak of poor Grolsch or MGD any more. The story here is the amazing snob-power-per-dollar of Busch , closely followed by Schmidt's . A dollar spent on Busch gets you three times the impressiveness of a dollar spent in Grolsch, useful information when planning a party. Not everyone liked Busch--one called it \"crap\"; another, \"Water. LITE.\" But the magic of statistics lets us see the larger trends. \n\n 5 Conclusions . Further study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: \n\n \n\n One and only one beer truly survived the blind taste test. This is Sam Adams , which 10 tasters independently ranked \"best\" without knowing they were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but couldn't have known whether this was some trick off-brand sneaked into the test.)",
"The Safeway that supplied the beers didn't carry any true bargain-basement products, such as \"Red, White, and Blue,\" \"Old German,\" or the one with generic printing that just says \"Beer.\" The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its trademark wide-mouth bottles), off the list. They have the air of cheapness but actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per pint.",
"4) Social Value for Money: the Snob-o-meter® . In addition to saying which beers they preferred, the tasters were asked to estimate whether the beers were expensive or not--in effect, to judge whether other people would like and be impressed by the beers. One taster perfectly understood the intention of this measure when he said, in comments about Beer B (Heineken), \"I don't like it, but I bet it's what the snobs buy.\" The Snob-o-meter rating for each beer is similar to the Taste-o-meter. You start with the \"group\" ranking--whether the tasters thought the beer belonged in Group 1 (cheap), 2, or 3--and then divide by the price per pint. The result tells you the social-mobility power of the beer--how impressive it will seem, relative to how much it costs. The Snob-o-meter rankings are:",
"Booze You Can Use \n\n I love beer, but lately I've been wondering: Am I getting full value for my beer dollar? As I've stocked up on microbrews and fancy imports, I've told myself that their taste is deeper, richer, more complicated, more compelling--and therefore worth the 50 percent to 200 percent premium they command over cheap mass products or even mainstream Bud. And yet, I've started to wonder, is this just costly snobbery? If I didn't know what I was drinking, could I even tell whether it was something from Belgium, vs. something from Pabst?",
"In a familiar pattern, we have Grolsch bringing up the rear, with less than one-quarter the Taste-o-meter power of Busch , the No. 1 value beer. The real news in this ranking is: the success of Busch ; the embarrassment of Heineken and Miller Genuine Draft , an expensive and a medium beer, respectively, which share the cellar with the hapless Grolsch ; and the nearly Busch-like value of Milwaukee's Best and Schmidt's . It is safe to say that none of our testers would have confessed respect for Busch, Milwaukee's Best, or Schmidt's before the contest began. But when they didn't know what they were drinking, they found these beers much closer in quality to \"best\" beers than the prices would indicate."
],
[
"After tasting the beers, each taster rated beers A through J on the following standards: \n\n Overall quality points: Zero to 100, zero as undrinkable and 100 as dream beer. Purely subjective measure of how well each taster liked each beer. \n\n Price category: The tasters knew that each beer came from the expensive, medium, or cheap category--and they had to guess where A through J belonged. A rating of 3 was most expensive, 2 for average, 1 for cheap. \n\n Description: \"Amusing presumption,\" \"fresh on the palate,\" \"crap,\" etc. \n\n Best and Worst: Tasters chose one Best and one Worst from the \"flight\" (as they would call it if this were a wine test). \n\n When the session was over, results for each beer were collected in a grid like this:",
"2. Overall preference points . This was a subtler and more illuminating look at similar trends. The beers were ranked on \"corrected average preference points\"--an average of the zero-to-100 points assigned by each taster, corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. The tasters used widely varying scales--one confining all beers to the range between zero and 30, another giving 67 as his lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such difficulties to provide these results:",
"The taster who took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest to the relative price of the beers. (This man grew up in Russia.) The experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test",
"I'm afraid we'll never know the answer to that exact question, since I'm not brave enough to expose my own taste to a real test. But I'm brave enough to expose my friends'. This summer, while working at Microsoft, I put out a call for volunteers for a \"science of beer\" experiment. Testing candidates had to meet two criteria: 1) they had to like beer; and 2) they had to think they knew the difference between mass products and high-end microbrews. \n\n Twelve tasters were selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A few were selected because they had been bosses in the Microsoft department where I worked. All were software managers or developers ; all were male, but I repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived abroad for enough years to speak haughtily about American macrobrews. Most tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they entered the laboratory (which mere moments before had been a Microsoft conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following lines:",
"coding scheme was the same for all tasters. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every sample: 30 ounces, or two and a half normal beers. Not",
"3) Value for Money: the Taste-o-meter® . Since this experiment's real purpose was to find the connection between cost and taste, the next step was to adjust subjective preference points by objective cost. The Taste-o-meter rating for each beer was calculated by dividing its corrected average preference rating by its price per pint . If Beer X had ratings twice as high as Beer Y, but it cost three times as much, Beer Y would have the higher Taste-o-meter rating. When the 10 beers are reranked this way, the results are:",
"Here again one costly beer-- Sam Adams --shows up well, while another, Grolsch , continues to struggle, but not as badly as the medium-price Miller Genuine Draft . Sam's success could reflect its quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a \"lager.\" It could also reflect that participants simply thought it was good. (Only one guessed it was Sam Adams.) As for Grolsch ... it is very strongly hopped, which can seem exotic if you know you're drinking a pricey import but simply bad if you don't. MGD overtook Grolsch in the race for the bottom because, while many people hated Grolsch, some actually liked it; no one liked MGD. There are some other important findings buried in the chart, but they're clearest if we move to ...",
"In a familiar pattern, we have Grolsch bringing up the rear, with less than one-quarter the Taste-o-meter power of Busch , the No. 1 value beer. The real news in this ranking is: the success of Busch ; the embarrassment of Heineken and Miller Genuine Draft , an expensive and a medium beer, respectively, which share the cellar with the hapless Grolsch ; and the nearly Busch-like value of Milwaukee's Best and Schmidt's . It is safe to say that none of our testers would have confessed respect for Busch, Milwaukee's Best, or Schmidt's before the contest began. But when they didn't know what they were drinking, they found these beers much closer in quality to \"best\" beers than the prices would indicate.",
"To see all the grids for all the beers, click . \n\n 4 Data Analysis: The ratings led to four ways to assess the quality of the beers. \n\n 1. Best and Worst. Least scientific, yet clearest cut in its results. Eleven tasters named a favorite beer. Ten of them chose Sam Adams . The other one chose Busch , the cheapest of all beers in the sample. (The taster who made this choice advises Microsoft on what new features should go into the next version of Word.) Busch was the only beer to receive both a Best and a Worst vote. \n\n Bottom rankings were also clear. Of the 11 naming a Worst beer, five chose Grolsch , the most expensive beer in the survey. Results by best/worst preference:",
"Don't serve Grolsch unless you know people will consider it exotic, or unless you've invited me. \n\n Apart from Sam Adams and Grolsch, the tasters really had trouble telling one beer from another . This conclusion is implicit in many of the findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the confident look of men-who-know-their-beer quickly turned to dismay and panic as they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. \n\n \n\n The evidence suggests other implications about specific beers. For instance, the comments about Coors Light are much less enthusiastic than the average-or-better numerical rankings. Most tasters paused to complain about it--\"fizzy and soapy\"--before giving it reasonable marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. Based on this study, rational consumers should:",
"Beer snobs sneer at lagers, because they look so watery and because so many bad beers are in the group. But the lager test came first, for two reasons. One, lagers pose the only honest test of the ability to tell expensive from dirt-cheap beers. There are very few inexpensive nut brown ales, India pale ales, extra special bitters, or other fancy-pantsy, microbrew-style, nonlager drinks. So if you want to see whether people can taste a money difference among beers of the same type, you've got to go lager. Two, the ideal of public service requires lager coverage. This is what most people drink, so new findings about lager quality could do the greatest good for the greatest number. \n\n In the second stage of the experiment, held several weeks later, the same testers reassembled to try the fancier beers. The results of that tasting will be reported separately, once Microsoft's mighty Windows 2000-powered central computers have .",
"We won't even speak of poor Grolsch or MGD any more. The story here is the amazing snob-power-per-dollar of Busch , closely followed by Schmidt's . A dollar spent on Busch gets you three times the impressiveness of a dollar spent in Grolsch, useful information when planning a party. Not everyone liked Busch--one called it \"crap\"; another, \"Water. LITE.\" But the magic of statistics lets us see the larger trends. \n\n 5 Conclusions . Further study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: \n\n \n\n One and only one beer truly survived the blind taste test. This is Sam Adams , which 10 tasters independently ranked \"best\" without knowing they were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but couldn't have known whether this was some trick off-brand sneaked into the test.)",
"The neat 6:3:2 mathematical relationship among the price groups should be noted. The high-end beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: \n\n High End \n\n Grolsch. Import lager (Holland). $1.67 per pint. (See an important .) Chosen for the test because of its beer-snob chic; also, one of my favorite beers. \n\n Heineken. Import lager (Holland). $1.53 per pint. (Sale price. List price was $1.71 per pint.) Chosen because it is America's long-standing most popular import.",
"2 Materials : Ten lagers were selected for testing, representing three distinct price-and-quality groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly all fall into one of three ranges: \n\n a) High end at $1.50 to $1.60 per pint. (\"Per pint\" was the unit-pricing measure at the Safeway in Bellevue, Wash., that was the standard supply source for the experiment. There are 4.5 pints per six pack, so the high-end price point is around $7 per six pack.) \n\n b) Middle at around 80 cents per pint, or under $4 per six pack. \n\n c) Low at 50 cents to 55 cents per pint, or under $3 per six pack.",
"1 Philosophy : The experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the lager group. Lagers are the light-colored, relatively lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in the United States. Imported lagers include Foster's, Corona, and Heineken. Budweiser is a lager; so are Coors, Miller, most light beers, and most bargain-basement beers.",
"The Safeway that supplied the beers didn't carry any true bargain-basement products, such as \"Red, White, and Blue,\" \"Old German,\" or the one with generic printing that just says \"Beer.\" The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its trademark wide-mouth bottles), off the list. They have the air of cheapness but actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per pint.",
"lethal; also, they were just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no",
"3 Experimental procedure: Each taster sat down before an array of 10 plastic cups labeled A through J. The A-to-J",
"4) Social Value for Money: the Snob-o-meter® . In addition to saying which beers they preferred, the tasters were asked to estimate whether the beers were expensive or not--in effect, to judge whether other people would like and be impressed by the beers. One taster perfectly understood the intention of this measure when he said, in comments about Beer B (Heineken), \"I don't like it, but I bet it's what the snobs buy.\" The Snob-o-meter rating for each beer is similar to the Taste-o-meter. You start with the \"group\" ranking--whether the tasters thought the beer belonged in Group 1 (cheap), 2, or 3--and then divide by the price per pint. The result tells you the social-mobility power of the beer--how impressive it will seem, relative to how much it costs. The Snob-o-meter rankings are:",
"1) Buy Sam Adams when they want an individual glass of lager to be as good as it can be. \n\n 2) Buy Busch at all other times, since it gives them the maximum taste and social influence per dollar invested. \n\n The detailed rankings and comments for all tasters on all beers may be found . \n\n Next installment: fancy beers ."
],
[
"After tasting the beers, each taster rated beers A through J on the following standards: \n\n Overall quality points: Zero to 100, zero as undrinkable and 100 as dream beer. Purely subjective measure of how well each taster liked each beer. \n\n Price category: The tasters knew that each beer came from the expensive, medium, or cheap category--and they had to guess where A through J belonged. A rating of 3 was most expensive, 2 for average, 1 for cheap. \n\n Description: \"Amusing presumption,\" \"fresh on the palate,\" \"crap,\" etc. \n\n Best and Worst: Tasters chose one Best and one Worst from the \"flight\" (as they would call it if this were a wine test). \n\n When the session was over, results for each beer were collected in a grid like this:",
"2. Overall preference points . This was a subtler and more illuminating look at similar trends. The beers were ranked on \"corrected average preference points\"--an average of the zero-to-100 points assigned by each taster, corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. The tasters used widely varying scales--one confining all beers to the range between zero and 30, another giving 67 as his lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such difficulties to provide these results:",
"To see all the grids for all the beers, click . \n\n 4 Data Analysis: The ratings led to four ways to assess the quality of the beers. \n\n 1. Best and Worst. Least scientific, yet clearest cut in its results. Eleven tasters named a favorite beer. Ten of them chose Sam Adams . The other one chose Busch , the cheapest of all beers in the sample. (The taster who made this choice advises Microsoft on what new features should go into the next version of Word.) Busch was the only beer to receive both a Best and a Worst vote. \n\n Bottom rankings were also clear. Of the 11 naming a Worst beer, five chose Grolsch , the most expensive beer in the survey. Results by best/worst preference:",
"The taster who took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest to the relative price of the beers. (This man grew up in Russia.) The experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test",
"In a familiar pattern, we have Grolsch bringing up the rear, with less than one-quarter the Taste-o-meter power of Busch , the No. 1 value beer. The real news in this ranking is: the success of Busch ; the embarrassment of Heineken and Miller Genuine Draft , an expensive and a medium beer, respectively, which share the cellar with the hapless Grolsch ; and the nearly Busch-like value of Milwaukee's Best and Schmidt's . It is safe to say that none of our testers would have confessed respect for Busch, Milwaukee's Best, or Schmidt's before the contest began. But when they didn't know what they were drinking, they found these beers much closer in quality to \"best\" beers than the prices would indicate.",
"Here again one costly beer-- Sam Adams --shows up well, while another, Grolsch , continues to struggle, but not as badly as the medium-price Miller Genuine Draft . Sam's success could reflect its quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a \"lager.\" It could also reflect that participants simply thought it was good. (Only one guessed it was Sam Adams.) As for Grolsch ... it is very strongly hopped, which can seem exotic if you know you're drinking a pricey import but simply bad if you don't. MGD overtook Grolsch in the race for the bottom because, while many people hated Grolsch, some actually liked it; no one liked MGD. There are some other important findings buried in the chart, but they're clearest if we move to ...",
"We won't even speak of poor Grolsch or MGD any more. The story here is the amazing snob-power-per-dollar of Busch , closely followed by Schmidt's . A dollar spent on Busch gets you three times the impressiveness of a dollar spent in Grolsch, useful information when planning a party. Not everyone liked Busch--one called it \"crap\"; another, \"Water. LITE.\" But the magic of statistics lets us see the larger trends. \n\n 5 Conclusions . Further study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: \n\n \n\n One and only one beer truly survived the blind taste test. This is Sam Adams , which 10 tasters independently ranked \"best\" without knowing they were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but couldn't have known whether this was some trick off-brand sneaked into the test.)",
"The neat 6:3:2 mathematical relationship among the price groups should be noted. The high-end beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: \n\n High End \n\n Grolsch. Import lager (Holland). $1.67 per pint. (See an important .) Chosen for the test because of its beer-snob chic; also, one of my favorite beers. \n\n Heineken. Import lager (Holland). $1.53 per pint. (Sale price. List price was $1.71 per pint.) Chosen because it is America's long-standing most popular import.",
"2 Materials : Ten lagers were selected for testing, representing three distinct price-and-quality groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly all fall into one of three ranges: \n\n a) High end at $1.50 to $1.60 per pint. (\"Per pint\" was the unit-pricing measure at the Safeway in Bellevue, Wash., that was the standard supply source for the experiment. There are 4.5 pints per six pack, so the high-end price point is around $7 per six pack.) \n\n b) Middle at around 80 cents per pint, or under $4 per six pack. \n\n c) Low at 50 cents to 55 cents per pint, or under $3 per six pack.",
"3) Value for Money: the Taste-o-meter® . Since this experiment's real purpose was to find the connection between cost and taste, the next step was to adjust subjective preference points by objective cost. The Taste-o-meter rating for each beer was calculated by dividing its corrected average preference rating by its price per pint . If Beer X had ratings twice as high as Beer Y, but it cost three times as much, Beer Y would have the higher Taste-o-meter rating. When the 10 beers are reranked this way, the results are:",
"Don't serve Grolsch unless you know people will consider it exotic, or unless you've invited me. \n\n Apart from Sam Adams and Grolsch, the tasters really had trouble telling one beer from another . This conclusion is implicit in many of the findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the confident look of men-who-know-their-beer quickly turned to dismay and panic as they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. \n\n \n\n The evidence suggests other implications about specific beers. For instance, the comments about Coors Light are much less enthusiastic than the average-or-better numerical rankings. Most tasters paused to complain about it--\"fizzy and soapy\"--before giving it reasonable marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. Based on this study, rational consumers should:",
"lethal; also, they were just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no",
"The Safeway that supplied the beers didn't carry any true bargain-basement products, such as \"Red, White, and Blue,\" \"Old German,\" or the one with generic printing that just says \"Beer.\" The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its trademark wide-mouth bottles), off the list. They have the air of cheapness but actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per pint.",
"coding scheme was the same for all tasters. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every sample: 30 ounces, or two and a half normal beers. Not",
"1 Philosophy : The experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the lager group. Lagers are the light-colored, relatively lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in the United States. Imported lagers include Foster's, Corona, and Heineken. Budweiser is a lager; so are Coors, Miller, most light beers, and most bargain-basement beers.",
"I'm afraid we'll never know the answer to that exact question, since I'm not brave enough to expose my own taste to a real test. But I'm brave enough to expose my friends'. This summer, while working at Microsoft, I put out a call for volunteers for a \"science of beer\" experiment. Testing candidates had to meet two criteria: 1) they had to like beer; and 2) they had to think they knew the difference between mass products and high-end microbrews. \n\n Twelve tasters were selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A few were selected because they had been bosses in the Microsoft department where I worked. All were software managers or developers ; all were male, but I repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived abroad for enough years to speak haughtily about American macrobrews. Most tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they entered the laboratory (which mere moments before had been a Microsoft conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following lines:",
"4) Social Value for Money: the Snob-o-meter® . In addition to saying which beers they preferred, the tasters were asked to estimate whether the beers were expensive or not--in effect, to judge whether other people would like and be impressed by the beers. One taster perfectly understood the intention of this measure when he said, in comments about Beer B (Heineken), \"I don't like it, but I bet it's what the snobs buy.\" The Snob-o-meter rating for each beer is similar to the Taste-o-meter. You start with the \"group\" ranking--whether the tasters thought the beer belonged in Group 1 (cheap), 2, or 3--and then divide by the price per pint. The result tells you the social-mobility power of the beer--how impressive it will seem, relative to how much it costs. The Snob-o-meter rankings are:",
"Beer snobs sneer at lagers, because they look so watery and because so many bad beers are in the group. But the lager test came first, for two reasons. One, lagers pose the only honest test of the ability to tell expensive from dirt-cheap beers. There are very few inexpensive nut brown ales, India pale ales, extra special bitters, or other fancy-pantsy, microbrew-style, nonlager drinks. So if you want to see whether people can taste a money difference among beers of the same type, you've got to go lager. Two, the ideal of public service requires lager coverage. This is what most people drink, so new findings about lager quality could do the greatest good for the greatest number. \n\n In the second stage of the experiment, held several weeks later, the same testers reassembled to try the fancier beers. The results of that tasting will be reported separately, once Microsoft's mighty Windows 2000-powered central computers have .",
"1) Buy Sam Adams when they want an individual glass of lager to be as good as it can be. \n\n 2) Buy Busch at all other times, since it gives them the maximum taste and social influence per dollar invested. \n\n The detailed rankings and comments for all tasters on all beers may be found . \n\n Next installment: fancy beers .",
"Pete's Wicked Lager. National-scale \"microbrew.\" $1.11 per pint. (Deep-discount sale. List price $1.46 per pint.) Like the next one, this put us into the gray zone for a lager test. Few American \"microbreweries\" produce lagers of any sort. Pete's is called a lager but was visibly darker than, say, Bud. \n\n Samuel Adams Boston Lager. National macro-microbrew. $1.56 per pint. (That was list price. The following week it was on sale for $1.25 per pint, which would have made it do far better in the value rankings.) Calls itself America's Best Beer. Has dark orangey-amber color that was obviously different from all other lagers tested. \n\n Mid-Range \n\n Budweiser. $.84 per pint. (Sale. List price $.89 per pint.) Self-styled King of Beers."
],
[
"lethal; also, they were just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no",
"After tasting the beers, each taster rated beers A through J on the following standards: \n\n Overall quality points: Zero to 100, zero as undrinkable and 100 as dream beer. Purely subjective measure of how well each taster liked each beer. \n\n Price category: The tasters knew that each beer came from the expensive, medium, or cheap category--and they had to guess where A through J belonged. A rating of 3 was most expensive, 2 for average, 1 for cheap. \n\n Description: \"Amusing presumption,\" \"fresh on the palate,\" \"crap,\" etc. \n\n Best and Worst: Tasters chose one Best and one Worst from the \"flight\" (as they would call it if this were a wine test). \n\n When the session was over, results for each beer were collected in a grid like this:",
"3 Experimental procedure: Each taster sat down before an array of 10 plastic cups labeled A through J. The A-to-J",
"2. Overall preference points . This was a subtler and more illuminating look at similar trends. The beers were ranked on \"corrected average preference points\"--an average of the zero-to-100 points assigned by each taster, corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. The tasters used widely varying scales--one confining all beers to the range between zero and 30, another giving 67 as his lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such difficulties to provide these results:",
"The neat 6:3:2 mathematical relationship among the price groups should be noted. The high-end beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: \n\n High End \n\n Grolsch. Import lager (Holland). $1.67 per pint. (See an important .) Chosen for the test because of its beer-snob chic; also, one of my favorite beers. \n\n Heineken. Import lager (Holland). $1.53 per pint. (Sale price. List price was $1.71 per pint.) Chosen because it is America's long-standing most popular import.",
"coding scheme was the same for all tasters. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every sample: 30 ounces, or two and a half normal beers. Not",
"was over.",
"Don't serve Grolsch unless you know people will consider it exotic, or unless you've invited me. \n\n Apart from Sam Adams and Grolsch, the tasters really had trouble telling one beer from another . This conclusion is implicit in many of the findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the confident look of men-who-know-their-beer quickly turned to dismay and panic as they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. \n\n \n\n The evidence suggests other implications about specific beers. For instance, the comments about Coors Light are much less enthusiastic than the average-or-better numerical rankings. Most tasters paused to complain about it--\"fizzy and soapy\"--before giving it reasonable marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. Based on this study, rational consumers should:",
"The taster who took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest to the relative price of the beers. (This man grew up in Russia.) The experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test",
"2 Materials : Ten lagers were selected for testing, representing three distinct price-and-quality groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly all fall into one of three ranges: \n\n a) High end at $1.50 to $1.60 per pint. (\"Per pint\" was the unit-pricing measure at the Safeway in Bellevue, Wash., that was the standard supply source for the experiment. There are 4.5 pints per six pack, so the high-end price point is around $7 per six pack.) \n\n b) Middle at around 80 cents per pint, or under $4 per six pack. \n\n c) Low at 50 cents to 55 cents per pint, or under $3 per six pack.",
"time limit for the tasting, apart from the two-hour limit in which we had reserved the conference room. One experimenter (the boss of most of the others there) rushed through his rankings in 10 minutes and gave the lowest overall scores.",
"1 Philosophy : The experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the lager group. Lagers are the light-colored, relatively lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in the United States. Imported lagers include Foster's, Corona, and Heineken. Budweiser is a lager; so are Coors, Miller, most light beers, and most bargain-basement beers.",
"To see all the grids for all the beers, click . \n\n 4 Data Analysis: The ratings led to four ways to assess the quality of the beers. \n\n 1. Best and Worst. Least scientific, yet clearest cut in its results. Eleven tasters named a favorite beer. Ten of them chose Sam Adams . The other one chose Busch , the cheapest of all beers in the sample. (The taster who made this choice advises Microsoft on what new features should go into the next version of Word.) Busch was the only beer to receive both a Best and a Worst vote. \n\n Bottom rankings were also clear. Of the 11 naming a Worst beer, five chose Grolsch , the most expensive beer in the survey. Results by best/worst preference:",
"I'm afraid we'll never know the answer to that exact question, since I'm not brave enough to expose my own taste to a real test. But I'm brave enough to expose my friends'. This summer, while working at Microsoft, I put out a call for volunteers for a \"science of beer\" experiment. Testing candidates had to meet two criteria: 1) they had to like beer; and 2) they had to think they knew the difference between mass products and high-end microbrews. \n\n Twelve tasters were selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A few were selected because they had been bosses in the Microsoft department where I worked. All were software managers or developers ; all were male, but I repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived abroad for enough years to speak haughtily about American macrobrews. Most tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they entered the laboratory (which mere moments before had been a Microsoft conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following lines:",
"We won't even speak of poor Grolsch or MGD any more. The story here is the amazing snob-power-per-dollar of Busch , closely followed by Schmidt's . A dollar spent on Busch gets you three times the impressiveness of a dollar spent in Grolsch, useful information when planning a party. Not everyone liked Busch--one called it \"crap\"; another, \"Water. LITE.\" But the magic of statistics lets us see the larger trends. \n\n 5 Conclusions . Further study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: \n\n \n\n One and only one beer truly survived the blind taste test. This is Sam Adams , which 10 tasters independently ranked \"best\" without knowing they were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but couldn't have known whether this was some trick off-brand sneaked into the test.)",
"4) Social Value for Money: the Snob-o-meter® . In addition to saying which beers they preferred, the tasters were asked to estimate whether the beers were expensive or not--in effect, to judge whether other people would like and be impressed by the beers. One taster perfectly understood the intention of this measure when he said, in comments about Beer B (Heineken), \"I don't like it, but I bet it's what the snobs buy.\" The Snob-o-meter rating for each beer is similar to the Taste-o-meter. You start with the \"group\" ranking--whether the tasters thought the beer belonged in Group 1 (cheap), 2, or 3--and then divide by the price per pint. The result tells you the social-mobility power of the beer--how impressive it will seem, relative to how much it costs. The Snob-o-meter rankings are:",
"The Safeway that supplied the beers didn't carry any true bargain-basement products, such as \"Red, White, and Blue,\" \"Old German,\" or the one with generic printing that just says \"Beer.\" The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its trademark wide-mouth bottles), off the list. They have the air of cheapness but actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per pint.",
"3) Value for Money: the Taste-o-meter® . Since this experiment's real purpose was to find the connection between cost and taste, the next step was to adjust subjective preference points by objective cost. The Taste-o-meter rating for each beer was calculated by dividing its corrected average preference rating by its price per pint . If Beer X had ratings twice as high as Beer Y, but it cost three times as much, Beer Y would have the higher Taste-o-meter rating. When the 10 beers are reranked this way, the results are:",
"Here again one costly beer-- Sam Adams --shows up well, while another, Grolsch , continues to struggle, but not as badly as the medium-price Miller Genuine Draft . Sam's success could reflect its quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a \"lager.\" It could also reflect that participants simply thought it was good. (Only one guessed it was Sam Adams.) As for Grolsch ... it is very strongly hopped, which can seem exotic if you know you're drinking a pricey import but simply bad if you don't. MGD overtook Grolsch in the race for the bottom because, while many people hated Grolsch, some actually liked it; no one liked MGD. There are some other important findings buried in the chart, but they're clearest if we move to ...",
"Booze You Can Use \n\n I love beer, but lately I've been wondering: Am I getting full value for my beer dollar? As I've stocked up on microbrews and fancy imports, I've told myself that their taste is deeper, richer, more complicated, more compelling--and therefore worth the 50 percent to 200 percent premium they command over cheap mass products or even mainstream Bud. And yet, I've started to wonder, is this just costly snobbery? If I didn't know what I was drinking, could I even tell whether it was something from Belgium, vs. something from Pabst?"
],
[
"3 Experimental procedure: Each taster sat down before an array of 10 plastic cups labeled A through J. The A-to-J",
"time limit for the tasting, apart from the two-hour limit in which we had reserved the conference room. One experimenter (the boss of most of the others there) rushed through his rankings in 10 minutes and gave the lowest overall scores.",
"coding scheme was the same for all tasters. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every sample: 30 ounces, or two and a half normal beers. Not",
"1 Philosophy : The experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the lager group. Lagers are the light-colored, relatively lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in the United States. Imported lagers include Foster's, Corona, and Heineken. Budweiser is a lager; so are Coors, Miller, most light beers, and most bargain-basement beers.",
"After tasting the beers, each taster rated beers A through J on the following standards: \n\n Overall quality points: Zero to 100, zero as undrinkable and 100 as dream beer. Purely subjective measure of how well each taster liked each beer. \n\n Price category: The tasters knew that each beer came from the expensive, medium, or cheap category--and they had to guess where A through J belonged. A rating of 3 was most expensive, 2 for average, 1 for cheap. \n\n Description: \"Amusing presumption,\" \"fresh on the palate,\" \"crap,\" etc. \n\n Best and Worst: Tasters chose one Best and one Worst from the \"flight\" (as they would call it if this were a wine test). \n\n When the session was over, results for each beer were collected in a grid like this:",
"The neat 6:3:2 mathematical relationship among the price groups should be noted. The high-end beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: \n\n High End \n\n Grolsch. Import lager (Holland). $1.67 per pint. (See an important .) Chosen for the test because of its beer-snob chic; also, one of my favorite beers. \n\n Heineken. Import lager (Holland). $1.53 per pint. (Sale price. List price was $1.71 per pint.) Chosen because it is America's long-standing most popular import.",
"lethal; also, they were just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no",
"The taster who took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest to the relative price of the beers. (This man grew up in Russia.) The experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test",
"2 Materials : Ten lagers were selected for testing, representing three distinct price-and-quality groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly all fall into one of three ranges: \n\n a) High end at $1.50 to $1.60 per pint. (\"Per pint\" was the unit-pricing measure at the Safeway in Bellevue, Wash., that was the standard supply source for the experiment. There are 4.5 pints per six pack, so the high-end price point is around $7 per six pack.) \n\n b) Middle at around 80 cents per pint, or under $4 per six pack. \n\n c) Low at 50 cents to 55 cents per pint, or under $3 per six pack.",
"I'm afraid we'll never know the answer to that exact question, since I'm not brave enough to expose my own taste to a real test. But I'm brave enough to expose my friends'. This summer, while working at Microsoft, I put out a call for volunteers for a \"science of beer\" experiment. Testing candidates had to meet two criteria: 1) they had to like beer; and 2) they had to think they knew the difference between mass products and high-end microbrews. \n\n Twelve tasters were selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A few were selected because they had been bosses in the Microsoft department where I worked. All were software managers or developers ; all were male, but I repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived abroad for enough years to speak haughtily about American macrobrews. Most tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they entered the laboratory (which mere moments before had been a Microsoft conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following lines:",
"Beer snobs sneer at lagers, because they look so watery and because so many bad beers are in the group. But the lager test came first, for two reasons. One, lagers pose the only honest test of the ability to tell expensive from dirt-cheap beers. There are very few inexpensive nut brown ales, India pale ales, extra special bitters, or other fancy-pantsy, microbrew-style, nonlager drinks. So if you want to see whether people can taste a money difference among beers of the same type, you've got to go lager. Two, the ideal of public service requires lager coverage. This is what most people drink, so new findings about lager quality could do the greatest good for the greatest number. \n\n In the second stage of the experiment, held several weeks later, the same testers reassembled to try the fancier beers. The results of that tasting will be reported separately, once Microsoft's mighty Windows 2000-powered central computers have .",
"2. Overall preference points . This was a subtler and more illuminating look at similar trends. The beers were ranked on \"corrected average preference points\"--an average of the zero-to-100 points assigned by each taster, corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. The tasters used widely varying scales--one confining all beers to the range between zero and 30, another giving 67 as his lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such difficulties to provide these results:",
"The Safeway that supplied the beers didn't carry any true bargain-basement products, such as \"Red, White, and Blue,\" \"Old German,\" or the one with generic printing that just says \"Beer.\" The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its trademark wide-mouth bottles), off the list. They have the air of cheapness but actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per pint.",
"3) Value for Money: the Taste-o-meter® . Since this experiment's real purpose was to find the connection between cost and taste, the next step was to adjust subjective preference points by objective cost. The Taste-o-meter rating for each beer was calculated by dividing its corrected average preference rating by its price per pint . If Beer X had ratings twice as high as Beer Y, but it cost three times as much, Beer Y would have the higher Taste-o-meter rating. When the 10 beers are reranked this way, the results are:",
"To see all the grids for all the beers, click . \n\n 4 Data Analysis: The ratings led to four ways to assess the quality of the beers. \n\n 1. Best and Worst. Least scientific, yet clearest cut in its results. Eleven tasters named a favorite beer. Ten of them chose Sam Adams . The other one chose Busch , the cheapest of all beers in the sample. (The taster who made this choice advises Microsoft on what new features should go into the next version of Word.) Busch was the only beer to receive both a Best and a Worst vote. \n\n Bottom rankings were also clear. Of the 11 naming a Worst beer, five chose Grolsch , the most expensive beer in the survey. Results by best/worst preference:",
"Here again one costly beer-- Sam Adams --shows up well, while another, Grolsch , continues to struggle, but not as badly as the medium-price Miller Genuine Draft . Sam's success could reflect its quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a \"lager.\" It could also reflect that participants simply thought it was good. (Only one guessed it was Sam Adams.) As for Grolsch ... it is very strongly hopped, which can seem exotic if you know you're drinking a pricey import but simply bad if you don't. MGD overtook Grolsch in the race for the bottom because, while many people hated Grolsch, some actually liked it; no one liked MGD. There are some other important findings buried in the chart, but they're clearest if we move to ...",
"Don't serve Grolsch unless you know people will consider it exotic, or unless you've invited me. \n\n Apart from Sam Adams and Grolsch, the tasters really had trouble telling one beer from another . This conclusion is implicit in many of the findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the confident look of men-who-know-their-beer quickly turned to dismay and panic as they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. \n\n \n\n The evidence suggests other implications about specific beers. For instance, the comments about Coors Light are much less enthusiastic than the average-or-better numerical rankings. Most tasters paused to complain about it--\"fizzy and soapy\"--before giving it reasonable marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. Based on this study, rational consumers should:",
"was over.",
"We won't even speak of poor Grolsch or MGD any more. The story here is the amazing snob-power-per-dollar of Busch , closely followed by Schmidt's . A dollar spent on Busch gets you three times the impressiveness of a dollar spent in Grolsch, useful information when planning a party. Not everyone liked Busch--one called it \"crap\"; another, \"Water. LITE.\" But the magic of statistics lets us see the larger trends. \n\n 5 Conclusions . Further study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: \n\n \n\n One and only one beer truly survived the blind taste test. This is Sam Adams , which 10 tasters independently ranked \"best\" without knowing they were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but couldn't have known whether this was some trick off-brand sneaked into the test.)",
"4) Social Value for Money: the Snob-o-meter® . In addition to saying which beers they preferred, the tasters were asked to estimate whether the beers were expensive or not--in effect, to judge whether other people would like and be impressed by the beers. One taster perfectly understood the intention of this measure when he said, in comments about Beer B (Heineken), \"I don't like it, but I bet it's what the snobs buy.\" The Snob-o-meter rating for each beer is similar to the Taste-o-meter. You start with the \"group\" ranking--whether the tasters thought the beer belonged in Group 1 (cheap), 2, or 3--and then divide by the price per pint. The result tells you the social-mobility power of the beer--how impressive it will seem, relative to how much it costs. The Snob-o-meter rankings are:"
],
[
"3 Experimental procedure: Each taster sat down before an array of 10 plastic cups labeled A through J. The A-to-J",
"After tasting the beers, each taster rated beers A through J on the following standards: \n\n Overall quality points: Zero to 100, zero as undrinkable and 100 as dream beer. Purely subjective measure of how well each taster liked each beer. \n\n Price category: The tasters knew that each beer came from the expensive, medium, or cheap category--and they had to guess where A through J belonged. A rating of 3 was most expensive, 2 for average, 1 for cheap. \n\n Description: \"Amusing presumption,\" \"fresh on the palate,\" \"crap,\" etc. \n\n Best and Worst: Tasters chose one Best and one Worst from the \"flight\" (as they would call it if this were a wine test). \n\n When the session was over, results for each beer were collected in a grid like this:",
"The taster who took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest to the relative price of the beers. (This man grew up in Russia.) The experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test",
"2 Materials : Ten lagers were selected for testing, representing three distinct price-and-quality groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly all fall into one of three ranges: \n\n a) High end at $1.50 to $1.60 per pint. (\"Per pint\" was the unit-pricing measure at the Safeway in Bellevue, Wash., that was the standard supply source for the experiment. There are 4.5 pints per six pack, so the high-end price point is around $7 per six pack.) \n\n b) Middle at around 80 cents per pint, or under $4 per six pack. \n\n c) Low at 50 cents to 55 cents per pint, or under $3 per six pack.",
"The neat 6:3:2 mathematical relationship among the price groups should be noted. The high-end beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: \n\n High End \n\n Grolsch. Import lager (Holland). $1.67 per pint. (See an important .) Chosen for the test because of its beer-snob chic; also, one of my favorite beers. \n\n Heineken. Import lager (Holland). $1.53 per pint. (Sale price. List price was $1.71 per pint.) Chosen because it is America's long-standing most popular import.",
"lethal; also, they were just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no",
"coding scheme was the same for all tasters. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every sample: 30 ounces, or two and a half normal beers. Not",
"1 Philosophy : The experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the lager group. Lagers are the light-colored, relatively lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in the United States. Imported lagers include Foster's, Corona, and Heineken. Budweiser is a lager; so are Coors, Miller, most light beers, and most bargain-basement beers.",
"The Safeway that supplied the beers didn't carry any true bargain-basement products, such as \"Red, White, and Blue,\" \"Old German,\" or the one with generic printing that just says \"Beer.\" The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its trademark wide-mouth bottles), off the list. They have the air of cheapness but actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per pint.",
"time limit for the tasting, apart from the two-hour limit in which we had reserved the conference room. One experimenter (the boss of most of the others there) rushed through his rankings in 10 minutes and gave the lowest overall scores.",
"Beer snobs sneer at lagers, because they look so watery and because so many bad beers are in the group. But the lager test came first, for two reasons. One, lagers pose the only honest test of the ability to tell expensive from dirt-cheap beers. There are very few inexpensive nut brown ales, India pale ales, extra special bitters, or other fancy-pantsy, microbrew-style, nonlager drinks. So if you want to see whether people can taste a money difference among beers of the same type, you've got to go lager. Two, the ideal of public service requires lager coverage. This is what most people drink, so new findings about lager quality could do the greatest good for the greatest number. \n\n In the second stage of the experiment, held several weeks later, the same testers reassembled to try the fancier beers. The results of that tasting will be reported separately, once Microsoft's mighty Windows 2000-powered central computers have .",
"I'm afraid we'll never know the answer to that exact question, since I'm not brave enough to expose my own taste to a real test. But I'm brave enough to expose my friends'. This summer, while working at Microsoft, I put out a call for volunteers for a \"science of beer\" experiment. Testing candidates had to meet two criteria: 1) they had to like beer; and 2) they had to think they knew the difference between mass products and high-end microbrews. \n\n Twelve tasters were selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A few were selected because they had been bosses in the Microsoft department where I worked. All were software managers or developers ; all were male, but I repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived abroad for enough years to speak haughtily about American macrobrews. Most tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they entered the laboratory (which mere moments before had been a Microsoft conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following lines:",
"2. Overall preference points . This was a subtler and more illuminating look at similar trends. The beers were ranked on \"corrected average preference points\"--an average of the zero-to-100 points assigned by each taster, corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. The tasters used widely varying scales--one confining all beers to the range between zero and 30, another giving 67 as his lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such difficulties to provide these results:",
"Don't serve Grolsch unless you know people will consider it exotic, or unless you've invited me. \n\n Apart from Sam Adams and Grolsch, the tasters really had trouble telling one beer from another . This conclusion is implicit in many of the findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the confident look of men-who-know-their-beer quickly turned to dismay and panic as they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. \n\n \n\n The evidence suggests other implications about specific beers. For instance, the comments about Coors Light are much less enthusiastic than the average-or-better numerical rankings. Most tasters paused to complain about it--\"fizzy and soapy\"--before giving it reasonable marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. Based on this study, rational consumers should:",
"Here again one costly beer-- Sam Adams --shows up well, while another, Grolsch , continues to struggle, but not as badly as the medium-price Miller Genuine Draft . Sam's success could reflect its quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a \"lager.\" It could also reflect that participants simply thought it was good. (Only one guessed it was Sam Adams.) As for Grolsch ... it is very strongly hopped, which can seem exotic if you know you're drinking a pricey import but simply bad if you don't. MGD overtook Grolsch in the race for the bottom because, while many people hated Grolsch, some actually liked it; no one liked MGD. There are some other important findings buried in the chart, but they're clearest if we move to ...",
"To see all the grids for all the beers, click . \n\n 4 Data Analysis: The ratings led to four ways to assess the quality of the beers. \n\n 1. Best and Worst. Least scientific, yet clearest cut in its results. Eleven tasters named a favorite beer. Ten of them chose Sam Adams . The other one chose Busch , the cheapest of all beers in the sample. (The taster who made this choice advises Microsoft on what new features should go into the next version of Word.) Busch was the only beer to receive both a Best and a Worst vote. \n\n Bottom rankings were also clear. Of the 11 naming a Worst beer, five chose Grolsch , the most expensive beer in the survey. Results by best/worst preference:",
"3) Value for Money: the Taste-o-meter® . Since this experiment's real purpose was to find the connection between cost and taste, the next step was to adjust subjective preference points by objective cost. The Taste-o-meter rating for each beer was calculated by dividing its corrected average preference rating by its price per pint . If Beer X had ratings twice as high as Beer Y, but it cost three times as much, Beer Y would have the higher Taste-o-meter rating. When the 10 beers are reranked this way, the results are:",
"In a familiar pattern, we have Grolsch bringing up the rear, with less than one-quarter the Taste-o-meter power of Busch , the No. 1 value beer. The real news in this ranking is: the success of Busch ; the embarrassment of Heineken and Miller Genuine Draft , an expensive and a medium beer, respectively, which share the cellar with the hapless Grolsch ; and the nearly Busch-like value of Milwaukee's Best and Schmidt's . It is safe to say that none of our testers would have confessed respect for Busch, Milwaukee's Best, or Schmidt's before the contest began. But when they didn't know what they were drinking, they found these beers much closer in quality to \"best\" beers than the prices would indicate.",
"We won't even speak of poor Grolsch or MGD any more. The story here is the amazing snob-power-per-dollar of Busch , closely followed by Schmidt's . A dollar spent on Busch gets you three times the impressiveness of a dollar spent in Grolsch, useful information when planning a party. Not everyone liked Busch--one called it \"crap\"; another, \"Water. LITE.\" But the magic of statistics lets us see the larger trends. \n\n 5 Conclusions . Further study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: \n\n \n\n One and only one beer truly survived the blind taste test. This is Sam Adams , which 10 tasters independently ranked \"best\" without knowing they were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but couldn't have known whether this was some trick off-brand sneaked into the test.)",
"4) Social Value for Money: the Snob-o-meter® . In addition to saying which beers they preferred, the tasters were asked to estimate whether the beers were expensive or not--in effect, to judge whether other people would like and be impressed by the beers. One taster perfectly understood the intention of this measure when he said, in comments about Beer B (Heineken), \"I don't like it, but I bet it's what the snobs buy.\" The Snob-o-meter rating for each beer is similar to the Taste-o-meter. You start with the \"group\" ranking--whether the tasters thought the beer belonged in Group 1 (cheap), 2, or 3--and then divide by the price per pint. The result tells you the social-mobility power of the beer--how impressive it will seem, relative to how much it costs. The Snob-o-meter rankings are:"
],
[
"3 Experimental procedure: Each taster sat down before an array of 10 plastic cups labeled A through J. The A-to-J",
"The taster who took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest to the relative price of the beers. (This man grew up in Russia.) The experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test",
"After tasting the beers, each taster rated beers A through J on the following standards: \n\n Overall quality points: Zero to 100, zero as undrinkable and 100 as dream beer. Purely subjective measure of how well each taster liked each beer. \n\n Price category: The tasters knew that each beer came from the expensive, medium, or cheap category--and they had to guess where A through J belonged. A rating of 3 was most expensive, 2 for average, 1 for cheap. \n\n Description: \"Amusing presumption,\" \"fresh on the palate,\" \"crap,\" etc. \n\n Best and Worst: Tasters chose one Best and one Worst from the \"flight\" (as they would call it if this were a wine test). \n\n When the session was over, results for each beer were collected in a grid like this:",
"time limit for the tasting, apart from the two-hour limit in which we had reserved the conference room. One experimenter (the boss of most of the others there) rushed through his rankings in 10 minutes and gave the lowest overall scores.",
"coding scheme was the same for all tasters. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every sample: 30 ounces, or two and a half normal beers. Not",
"I'm afraid we'll never know the answer to that exact question, since I'm not brave enough to expose my own taste to a real test. But I'm brave enough to expose my friends'. This summer, while working at Microsoft, I put out a call for volunteers for a \"science of beer\" experiment. Testing candidates had to meet two criteria: 1) they had to like beer; and 2) they had to think they knew the difference between mass products and high-end microbrews. \n\n Twelve tasters were selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A few were selected because they had been bosses in the Microsoft department where I worked. All were software managers or developers ; all were male, but I repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived abroad for enough years to speak haughtily about American macrobrews. Most tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they entered the laboratory (which mere moments before had been a Microsoft conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following lines:",
"lethal; also, they were just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no",
"Beer snobs sneer at lagers, because they look so watery and because so many bad beers are in the group. But the lager test came first, for two reasons. One, lagers pose the only honest test of the ability to tell expensive from dirt-cheap beers. There are very few inexpensive nut brown ales, India pale ales, extra special bitters, or other fancy-pantsy, microbrew-style, nonlager drinks. So if you want to see whether people can taste a money difference among beers of the same type, you've got to go lager. Two, the ideal of public service requires lager coverage. This is what most people drink, so new findings about lager quality could do the greatest good for the greatest number. \n\n In the second stage of the experiment, held several weeks later, the same testers reassembled to try the fancier beers. The results of that tasting will be reported separately, once Microsoft's mighty Windows 2000-powered central computers have .",
"The neat 6:3:2 mathematical relationship among the price groups should be noted. The high-end beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: \n\n High End \n\n Grolsch. Import lager (Holland). $1.67 per pint. (See an important .) Chosen for the test because of its beer-snob chic; also, one of my favorite beers. \n\n Heineken. Import lager (Holland). $1.53 per pint. (Sale price. List price was $1.71 per pint.) Chosen because it is America's long-standing most popular import.",
"1 Philosophy : The experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the lager group. Lagers are the light-colored, relatively lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in the United States. Imported lagers include Foster's, Corona, and Heineken. Budweiser is a lager; so are Coors, Miller, most light beers, and most bargain-basement beers.",
"2 Materials : Ten lagers were selected for testing, representing three distinct price-and-quality groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly all fall into one of three ranges: \n\n a) High end at $1.50 to $1.60 per pint. (\"Per pint\" was the unit-pricing measure at the Safeway in Bellevue, Wash., that was the standard supply source for the experiment. There are 4.5 pints per six pack, so the high-end price point is around $7 per six pack.) \n\n b) Middle at around 80 cents per pint, or under $4 per six pack. \n\n c) Low at 50 cents to 55 cents per pint, or under $3 per six pack.",
"2. Overall preference points . This was a subtler and more illuminating look at similar trends. The beers were ranked on \"corrected average preference points\"--an average of the zero-to-100 points assigned by each taster, corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. The tasters used widely varying scales--one confining all beers to the range between zero and 30, another giving 67 as his lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such difficulties to provide these results:",
"Here again one costly beer-- Sam Adams --shows up well, while another, Grolsch , continues to struggle, but not as badly as the medium-price Miller Genuine Draft . Sam's success could reflect its quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a \"lager.\" It could also reflect that participants simply thought it was good. (Only one guessed it was Sam Adams.) As for Grolsch ... it is very strongly hopped, which can seem exotic if you know you're drinking a pricey import but simply bad if you don't. MGD overtook Grolsch in the race for the bottom because, while many people hated Grolsch, some actually liked it; no one liked MGD. There are some other important findings buried in the chart, but they're clearest if we move to ...",
"To see all the grids for all the beers, click . \n\n 4 Data Analysis: The ratings led to four ways to assess the quality of the beers. \n\n 1. Best and Worst. Least scientific, yet clearest cut in its results. Eleven tasters named a favorite beer. Ten of them chose Sam Adams . The other one chose Busch , the cheapest of all beers in the sample. (The taster who made this choice advises Microsoft on what new features should go into the next version of Word.) Busch was the only beer to receive both a Best and a Worst vote. \n\n Bottom rankings were also clear. Of the 11 naming a Worst beer, five chose Grolsch , the most expensive beer in the survey. Results by best/worst preference:",
"Don't serve Grolsch unless you know people will consider it exotic, or unless you've invited me. \n\n Apart from Sam Adams and Grolsch, the tasters really had trouble telling one beer from another . This conclusion is implicit in many of the findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the confident look of men-who-know-their-beer quickly turned to dismay and panic as they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. \n\n \n\n The evidence suggests other implications about specific beers. For instance, the comments about Coors Light are much less enthusiastic than the average-or-better numerical rankings. Most tasters paused to complain about it--\"fizzy and soapy\"--before giving it reasonable marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. Based on this study, rational consumers should:",
"We won't even speak of poor Grolsch or MGD any more. The story here is the amazing snob-power-per-dollar of Busch , closely followed by Schmidt's . A dollar spent on Busch gets you three times the impressiveness of a dollar spent in Grolsch, useful information when planning a party. Not everyone liked Busch--one called it \"crap\"; another, \"Water. LITE.\" But the magic of statistics lets us see the larger trends. \n\n 5 Conclusions . Further study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: \n\n \n\n One and only one beer truly survived the blind taste test. This is Sam Adams , which 10 tasters independently ranked \"best\" without knowing they were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but couldn't have known whether this was some trick off-brand sneaked into the test.)",
"3) Value for Money: the Taste-o-meter® . Since this experiment's real purpose was to find the connection between cost and taste, the next step was to adjust subjective preference points by objective cost. The Taste-o-meter rating for each beer was calculated by dividing its corrected average preference rating by its price per pint . If Beer X had ratings twice as high as Beer Y, but it cost three times as much, Beer Y would have the higher Taste-o-meter rating. When the 10 beers are reranked this way, the results are:",
"4) Social Value for Money: the Snob-o-meter® . In addition to saying which beers they preferred, the tasters were asked to estimate whether the beers were expensive or not--in effect, to judge whether other people would like and be impressed by the beers. One taster perfectly understood the intention of this measure when he said, in comments about Beer B (Heineken), \"I don't like it, but I bet it's what the snobs buy.\" The Snob-o-meter rating for each beer is similar to the Taste-o-meter. You start with the \"group\" ranking--whether the tasters thought the beer belonged in Group 1 (cheap), 2, or 3--and then divide by the price per pint. The result tells you the social-mobility power of the beer--how impressive it will seem, relative to how much it costs. The Snob-o-meter rankings are:",
"The Safeway that supplied the beers didn't carry any true bargain-basement products, such as \"Red, White, and Blue,\" \"Old German,\" or the one with generic printing that just says \"Beer.\" The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its trademark wide-mouth bottles), off the list. They have the air of cheapness but actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per pint.",
"Booze You Can Use \n\n I love beer, but lately I've been wondering: Am I getting full value for my beer dollar? As I've stocked up on microbrews and fancy imports, I've told myself that their taste is deeper, richer, more complicated, more compelling--and therefore worth the 50 percent to 200 percent premium they command over cheap mass products or even mainstream Bud. And yet, I've started to wonder, is this just costly snobbery? If I didn't know what I was drinking, could I even tell whether it was something from Belgium, vs. something from Pabst?"
]
] |
valid
|
22462
|
[
"What is Sylvia's relation to Paul?",
"What edge did the Americans have over the Reds in the air?",
"What is implied that happened to the American Moon station?",
"What is unorthodox about Coulter and Garrities' navigation?",
"Why did Paul think that \"these three minutes\" were the worst?",
"What was the ping sound that Coulter heard?",
"What was Paul's solution for not having to be in broadside battles anymore?",
"Why did Paul invite Kovacs to the cottage with Sylvia?"
] |
[
[
"She is his wife",
"She is a girl in a magazine",
"She is his girlfriend",
"She went to the Officers Ball with him once"
],
[
"Faster and more efficient ships",
"Rockets instead of guns",
"Stronger radar technology",
"More quantity of troops and ships"
],
[
"The Reds destroyed it",
"There was not enough funding to support it",
"It fell into a crater",
"It failed due to incompetence"
],
[
"They used experimental ships with the cockpit on gimbals",
"They used the Solter coordinates",
"They spoke to one-another more than usual",
"They used a simple up/down and clock system"
],
[
"The possibility of colliding with the enemy",
"The high amount of G-forces he experiences",
"The fact that he would run out of fuel after three minutes",
"The anticipation before firing on a target"
],
[
"An enemy bullet hitting his ship",
"The enemy ship barely scraping his",
"A command from Johnson, the navigator",
"His bullet hitting the enemy"
],
[
"Using more of an element of surprise",
"Firing on enemy ships from the ground",
"Sending younger pilots instead of him",
"Using rockets instead of traditional machine guns"
],
[
"So he wouldn't have to be alone with Sylvia",
"To surprise him with Marge and win his favor",
"To celebrate the victory during the battle",
"So he could try and win over Marge from Kovacs"
]
] |
[
3,
3,
1,
4,
4,
1,
4,
2
] |
[
1,
0,
0,
0,
0,
0,
1,
1
] |
[
[
"It was a ticklish job explaining\n about Kovacs, but when she understood\n that he just wanted to do a\n friend a favor, and she'd still have\n Paul all to herself, she calmed down.\n They made their arrangements quickly,\n and switched off.\n\n\n He hesitated a minute before he\n called Marge. She was quite a dish\n to give up. Once she'd seen him with\n Sylvia, he'd be strictly\npersona non\n grata\n—that was for sure. It was an\n unhappy thought. Well, maybe it was\n in a good cause. He shrugged and\n called her.\n\n\n She nearly cut him off when she\n first heard his request, but he did\n some fast talking. The idea of several\n days at the cottage intrigued her, and\n when he described how smitten\n Kovacs had been, she brightened up\n and agreed to come. He switched off,\n adjusted the drape of his genuine\n silk scarf, and stepped out of the\n booth.",
"They parked the helijet at Municipal\n Field and headed for the public\n PV booths, picking up a coterie of\n two dogs and five assorted children\n on the way. The kids followed quietly\n in their wake, ecstatic at the sight of\n their uniforms.\n\n\n Paul squared his shoulders, as befitted\n a hero, and tousled a couple of\n uncombed heads as they walked. The\n kids clustered around the booths, as\n Kovacs entered one to locate a hotel\n room, and Paul another, to call\n Sylvia.\n\n\n \"Honey, I've been so scared you\n weren't coming back. Where are you?\n When will I see you? Why didn't\n you write?...\" She sputtered to a\n stop as he held up both hands in\n defense.",
"Once he had his papers, he started\n to get excited about it. As he cleaned\n up his paper work and packed his\n musette, his hands were fumbling,\n and his mind was full of Sylvia.\nThe vastness of Muroc Base was as\n incredible as ever. Row on uncounted\n row of neat buildings, each resting at\n the top of its own hundred-yard\n deep elevator shaft. A pulsing, throbbing\n city, dedicated to the long slow\n struggle to get into space and stay\n there. The service crew eyed them\n with studied indifference, as they\n writhed out of the small hatch and\n stepped to the ground. They drew a\n helijet at operations, and headed immediately\n for Los Angeles.\n\n\n Kovacs had been impressed when\n Paul asked if he'd care to room together\n while they were on leave. He\n was quiet on the flight, as he had\n been on the way down, listening contentedly,\n while Paul talked combat\n and women with Bob Parandes, another\n pilot going on leave.",
"Paul remembered the time he had\n walked into the Muroc Base Officer's\n Club with Marge Halpern on his\n arm. The hunger that had lain undisguised\n on Kovacs' face the moment\n he first saw them. Marge was\n a striking blonde with a direct manner,\n who liked men, especially orbit\n station men. He hadn't thought about\n the incident since then, but the look\n in Kovacs' eyes kept coming back to\n him as he tried to read.\n\n\n He wasn't sure how he got there,\n or why, when he found himself walking\n into Colonel Silton's office to ask\n for the leave he'd passed up at his\n fiftieth mission. He'd considered taking\n it several times, but the thought\n of leaving the squadron, even for a\n couple of weeks, had made him feel\n guilty, as though he were quitting.",
"Guns spoke quietly to Johnson.\n \"Let me know when we kill his RV.\n Ah may get another shot at him.\"\n\n\n And Johnny answered, hurt,\n \"What do you think I'm doing down\n here—reading one of your magazines?\"\n\n\n Paul was struggling with hundred-pound\n arms, trying to focus the telescope\n that swiveled over the panel.\n As the field cleared, he could see that\n the plume was flaring unevenly, flickering\n red and orange along one side.\n Quietly and viciously, he was talking\n to himself. \"Blow! Blow!\"\nAnd she blew. Like a dirty ragged\n bit of fireworks, throwing tiny handfuls\n of sparks into the blackness.\n Something glowed red for a while,\n and slowly faded.\nThere, but for the grace of God....\nPaul shuddered in a confused\n mixture of relief and revulsion.",
"Kovacs and the kids were waiting.\n The armament officer had apparently\n been telling them of Paul's exploits.\n They glowed with admiration. The\n oldest boy, about eleven, had true\n worship in his eyes. He hesitated a\n moment, then asked gravely: \"Would\n you tell us how you kill a Red, sir?\"\n\n\n Paul eyed the time-honored weapon\n that dangled from the youngster's\n hand. He bent over and tapped it\n with his finger. His voice was warm\n and confiding, but his eyes were far\n away.",
"Coulter scanned the full arch of\n sky visible through the curving panels\n of the dome, thinking the turgid\n thoughts that always came when action\n was near. His chest was full of\n the familiar weakness—not fear exactly,\n but a tight, helpless feeling\n that grew and grew with the waiting.\n\n\n His eyes and hands were busy in\n the familiar procedure, readying the\n ship for combat, checking and re-checking\n the details that could mean\n life and death, but his mind watched\n disembodied, yearning back to earth.\n\n\n Sylvia always came back first. Inviting\n smile and outstretched hands.\n Nyloned knees, pink sweater, and\n that clinging, clinging white silk\n skirt. A whirling montage of laughing,\n challenging eyes and tossing sky-black\n hair and soft arms tightening\n around his neck.",
"Then Jean, cool and self-possessed\n and slightly disapproving,\n with warmth and humor peeping\n through from underneath when she\n smiled. A lazy, crinkly kind of smile,\n like Christmas lights going on one\n by one. He wished he'd acted more\n grown up that night they watched\n the rain dance at the pueblo. For the\n hundredth time, he went over what\n he remembered of their last date,\n seeing the gleam of her shoulder, and\n the angry disappointment in her eyes;\n hearing again his awkward apologies.\n She was a nice kid. Silently his mouth\n formed the words. \"You're a nice\n kid.\"\nI think she loves me. She was just\n mad because I got drunk.\nThe tension of approaching combat\n suddenly blended with the memory,\n welling up into a rush of tenderness\n and affection. He whispered her\n name, and suddenly he knew that if\n he got back he was going to ask her\n to marry him.",
"When he finished the letter, he\n opened the copy of \"Lady Chatterley's\n Lover\" he had borrowed from\n Rodriguez's limited but colorful library.\n He couldn't keep his mind on\n it. He kept thinking of the armament\n officer.\n\n\n Kovacs was a quiet, intelligent kid,\n devoted to his work. Coulter wasn't\n too intimate with him. He wasn't a\n spaceman, for one thing. One of those\n illogical but powerful distinctions\n that sub-divided the men of the station.\n And he was a little too polite to\n be easy company.",
"\"Right, cap'n.\"\nBut it was Paul who couldn't forget\n about it. All the rest of the way\n back to station, he kept seeing visions\n of a panel sliding aside in the nose\n of a sleek and gleaming ship, while\n a small rocket pushed its deadly snout\n forward, and then streaked off at\n tremendous acceleration.\n\n\n Interrogation was brief. The mission\n had turned up nothing new.\n Their kill made eight against seven\n for Doc Miller's crew, and they made\n sure Miller and the boys heard about\n it. They were lightheaded with the\n elation that followed a successful\n mission, swapping insults with the\n rest of the squadron, and reveling in\n the sheer contentment of being back\n safe.\n\n\n It wasn't until he got back to his\n stall, and started to write his father\n a long overdue letter, that he remembered\n he had heard Kovacs say he\n was going on leave.",
"until they were well into their run,\n but when he got started he'd made\n them look like slow motion, just the\n same. If he hadn't tried that harebrained\n sudden deceleration....\n Coulter shook his head at the memory.\n And on the last mission they'd\n been lucky to get a draw. Those boys\n were good shots.\n\"We're crossing his track, Paul.\n Turn to nine point five o'clock and\n hold 4 G's for thirty-two seconds,\n starting on the count ... five—four—three—two—one—go!\"\n He completed\n the operation in silence, remarking\n to himself how lucky he was\n to have Johnson. The boy loved a",
"Paul felt no surprise, only relief\n at having the trouble located. The\n reaction to the close call might not\n come till hours later. \"This kind of\n luck we can do without. Can you\n patch the holes?\"\n\n\n \"Ah can patch the one where it\n came in, but it musta been explodin'\n on the way out. There's a hole Ah\n could stick mah head through.\"\n\n\n \"That's a good idea.\" Johnson was\n not usually very witty, but this was\n one he couldn't resist.",
"\"O.K., let me know as soon as you\n have his course.\" Coulter squashed\n out his cigar and began his cockpit\n check, grinning without humor as he\n noticed that his breathing had deepened\n and his palms were moist on\n the controls. He looked down to\n make sure his radio was snug in its\n pocket on his leg; checked the thigh\n harness of his emergency rocket,\n wrapped in its thick belly pad; checked\n the paired tanks of oxygen behind\n him, hanging level from his shoulders\n into their niche in the \"cradle.\"\n He flipped his helmet closed, locked\n it, and opened it again. He tossed\n a sardonic salute at the photograph\n of a young lady who graced the side\n of the cockpit. \"Wish us luck, sugar.\"\n He pressed the mike button again.\n\n\n \"You got anything yet, Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"He's going our way, Paul. Have\n it exact in a minute.\"",
"\"Whoa, baby. One thing at a time.\n I'm at the airport. You'll see me tonight,\n and I'll tell you the rest then.\n That is, if you're free tonight. And\n tomorrow. And the day after, and\n the day after that. Are you free?\"\n\n\n Her hesitation was only momentary.\n \"Well, I was going out—with\n a girl friend. But she'll understand.\n What's up?\"\n\n\n He took a deep breath. \"I'd like\n to get out of the city for a few days,\n where we can take things easy and\n be away from the crowds. And there\n is another guy I'd like to bring\n along.\"\n\n\n \"We could take my helijet out to\n my dad's cottage at—\nWhat did you\n say?\n\"",
"He thought of his father, rocking\n on the porch of the Pennsylvania\n farm, pipe in his mouth, the weathered\n old face serene, as he puffed and\n listened to the radio beside him. He\n wished he'd written him last night,\n instead of joining the usual beer and\n bull session in the wardroom. He\n wished—. He wished.\n\n\n \"I've got him, Paul. He's got two\n point seven miles of RV on us. Take\n thirty degrees high on two point one\n o'clock for course to IP.\"\nAutomatically he turned the control\n wheel to the right and eased it\n back. The gyros recorded the turn to\n course.\n\n\n \"Hold 4 G's for one six five seconds,\n then coast two minutes for initial\n point five hundred miles on his\n tail.\"",
"Anyway, \"right side up\" tied in\n perfectly with the old \"clock\" system\n Garrity had dug out of those magazines\n he was always reading. Once\n they got used to it, it had turned out\n really handy. Old Doc Hoffman, his\n astrogation prof, would have turned\n purple if he'd ever dreamed they'd\n use such a conglomeration. But\n it worked. And when you were\n in a hurry, it worked in a hurry, and\n that was good enough for Coulter.\n He'd submitted a report on it to\n Colonel Silton.\n\n\n \"You've got him, Paul. We're\n dead on his tail, five hundred miles\n back, and matching velocity. Turn\n forty-two degrees right, and you're\n lined up right on him.\" Johnson was\n pleased with the job he'd done.",
"Mrs. RVS started to get jittery at\n about ten mps away from home, and\n above fifteen, she was trembling\n steadily. He didn't blame the old\n ladies for worrying. With one hour\n of fuel at 5 G's, you didn't fire a\n single squirt unless there was a good\n reason for it. Most of their time on\n a mission was spent free wheeling,\n in the anxiety-laden boredom that\n fighting men have always known.\nWish the Red was coming in across\n our course.\nIt would have taken less\n fuel, and the chase wouldn't have\n taken them so far out. But then\n they'd probably have been spotted,\n and lost the precious element of surprise.",
"They missed ramming by something\n around a hundred yards. The\n enemy ship flashed across his tail in\n a fraction of a second, already turned\n around and heading up its own track,\n yet it seemed to Paul he could make\n out every detail—the bright red star,\n even the tortured face of the pilot.\n Was there something lopsided in the\n shape of that rocket plume, or was\n he just imagining it in the blur of\n their passing? And did he hear a\nping\njust at that instant, feel the\n ship vibrate for a second?\n\n\n He continued the turn in the direction\n the automatics had started, bringing\n his nose around to watch the\n enemy's track. And as the shape of\n the plume told him the other ship\n was still heading back toward Earth,\n he brought the throttle back up to\n 12 G's, trying to overcome the lead\n his pass had given away.",
"Now, there were Reds around practically\n every mission.\nThirteen missions to go, after today.\nHe wondered if he'd quit at\n seventy-five. Deep inside him, the old\n pride and excitement were still\n strong. He still got a kick out of the\n way the girls looked at the silver\n rocket on his chest. But he didn't\n feel as lucky as he used to. Twenty-nine\n years old, and he was starting\n to feel like an old man. He pictured\n himself lecturing to a group of eager\n kids.\nHad a couple of close calls, those\n last two missions.\nThat Red had\n looked easy, the way he was wandering\n around. He hadn't spotted them",
"One hundred\n ninety-two eternal seconds of waiting,\n of deathly silence and deathly\n calm, feeling and hearing nothing\n but the slow pounding of their own\n heartbeats. Each time he got back, it\n faded away, and all he remembered\n was the excitement. But each time\n he went through it, it was worse. Just\n standing and waiting in the silence,\n praying they weren't spotted—staring\n at the unmoving firmament and\n knowing he was a projectile hurtling\n two miles each second straight at a\n clump of metal and flesh that was\n the enemy. Knowing the odds were\n twenty to one against their scoring\n a kill ... unless they ran into him."
],
[
"He blessed the advantage of better\n radar. In this crazy \"war,\" so like\n the dogfights of the first world war,\n the better than two hundred mile\n edge of American radar was more\n often than not the margin of victory.\n The American crews were a little\n sharper, a little better trained, but\n with their stripped down ships, and\n midget crewmen, with no personal\n safety equipment, the Reds could\n accelerate longer and faster, and go\n farther out. You had to get the jump\n on them, or it was just too bad.",
"Mrs. RVS started to get jittery at\n about ten mps away from home, and\n above fifteen, she was trembling\n steadily. He didn't blame the old\n ladies for worrying. With one hour\n of fuel at 5 G's, you didn't fire a\n single squirt unless there was a good\n reason for it. Most of their time on\n a mission was spent free wheeling,\n in the anxiety-laden boredom that\n fighting men have always known.\nWish the Red was coming in across\n our course.\nIt would have taken less\n fuel, and the chase wouldn't have\n taken them so far out. But then\n they'd probably have been spotted,\n and lost the precious element of surprise.",
"Now, there were Reds around practically\n every mission.\nThirteen missions to go, after today.\nHe wondered if he'd quit at\n seventy-five. Deep inside him, the old\n pride and excitement were still\n strong. He still got a kick out of the\n way the girls looked at the silver\n rocket on his chest. But he didn't\n feel as lucky as he used to. Twenty-nine\n years old, and he was starting\n to feel like an old man. He pictured\n himself lecturing to a group of eager\n kids.\nHad a couple of close calls, those\n last two missions.\nThat Red had\n looked easy, the way he was wandering\n around. He hadn't spotted them",
"He cut back to 4 G's, noting that\n RVS registered about a mile per\n second away from station, and suddenly\n became aware that the red light\n was on for loss of air. The cabin\n pressure gauge read zero, and his\n heart throbbed into his throat as he\n remembered that\npinging\nsound, just\n as they passed the enemy ship. He\n told Garrity to see if he could locate\n the loss, and any other damage, and\n was shortly startled by a low amazed\n whistle in his earphones.\n\n\n \"If Ah wasn't lookin' at it, Ah\n wouldn't believe it. Musta been one\n of his shells went right around the\n fuel tank and out again, without hittin'\n it. There's at least three inches of\n tank on a line between the holes! He\n musta been throwin' curves at us.\n Man, cap'n, this is our lucky day!\"",
"Coulter chuckled at the ad lib way\n they operated, remembering the\n courses, the tests, the procedures practiced\n until they could do them backwards\n blindfolded. When they tangled\n with a Red, the Solter co-ordinates\n went out the hatch. They navigated\n by the enemy. There were times\n during a fight when he had no more\n idea of his position than what the\n old ladies told him, and what he\n could see of the Sun, the Earth, and\n the Moon.",
"And meanwhile, the struggle was\n growing deadlier, month by month,\n each side groping for the stranglehold,\n looking for the edge that would\n give domination of space, or make\n all-out war a good risk. They hadn't\n found it yet, but it was getting bloodier\n out here all the time. For a while,\n it had been a supreme achievement\n just to get a ship out and back, but\n gradually, as the ships improved,\n there was a little margin left over for\n weapons. Back a year ago, the average\n patrol was nothing but a sightseeing\n tour. Not that there was much to see,\n when you'd been out a few times.",
"\"O.K., let me know as soon as you\n have his course.\" Coulter squashed\n out his cigar and began his cockpit\n check, grinning without humor as he\n noticed that his breathing had deepened\n and his palms were moist on\n the controls. He looked down to\n make sure his radio was snug in its\n pocket on his leg; checked the thigh\n harness of his emergency rocket,\n wrapped in its thick belly pad; checked\n the paired tanks of oxygen behind\n him, hanging level from his shoulders\n into their niche in the \"cradle.\"\n He flipped his helmet closed, locked\n it, and opened it again. He tossed\n a sardonic salute at the photograph\n of a young lady who graced the side\n of the cockpit. \"Wish us luck, sugar.\"\n He pressed the mike button again.\n\n\n \"You got anything yet, Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"He's going our way, Paul. Have\n it exact in a minute.\"",
"until they were well into their run,\n but when he got started he'd made\n them look like slow motion, just the\n same. If he hadn't tried that harebrained\n sudden deceleration....\n Coulter shook his head at the memory.\n And on the last mission they'd\n been lucky to get a draw. Those boys\n were good shots.\n\"We're crossing his track, Paul.\n Turn to nine point five o'clock and\n hold 4 G's for thirty-two seconds,\n starting on the count ... five—four—three—two—one—go!\"\n He completed\n the operation in silence, remarking\n to himself how lucky he was\n to have Johnson. The boy loved a",
"seconds, to break out just enough to\n clear him, praying that he won't\n break in the same direction.\nAnd to\n keep on going.\nFour minutes and thirty-four seconds\n to the break.\nSixty seconds at\n 5 G's; one hundred ninety-two seconds\n of free wheeling; and then, if\n they were lucky, the twenty-two frantic\n seconds they were out here for—throwing\n a few pounds of steel slugs\n out before them in one unbroken\n burst, groping out fifty miles into\n the darkness with steel and radar fingers\n to kill a duplicate of themselves.\nThis is the worst. These three minutes\n are the worst.",
"Kovacs and the kids were waiting.\n The armament officer had apparently\n been telling them of Paul's exploits.\n They glowed with admiration. The\n oldest boy, about eleven, had true\n worship in his eyes. He hesitated a\n moment, then asked gravely: \"Would\n you tell us how you kill a Red, sir?\"\n\n\n Paul eyed the time-honored weapon\n that dangled from the youngster's\n hand. He bent over and tapped it\n with his finger. His voice was warm\n and confiding, but his eyes were far\n away.",
"At eighty-five seconds, he corrected\n slightly to center the pip. The momentary\n hiss of the rockets was a\n relief. He heard the muffled yammering\n as Guns fired a short burst\n from the .30's standing out of their\n compartments around the sides of the\n ship. They were practically recoilless,\n but the burst drifted him forward\n against the cradle harness.",
"Coulter advanced the throttle to\n 5 G's. And with the hiss of power,\n SF 308 began the deadly, intricate,\n precarious maneuver called a combat\n pass—a maneuver inherited from the\n aerial dogfight—though it often turned\n into something more like the\n broadside duels of the old sailing\n ships—as the best and least suicidal\n method of killing a spaceship. To\n start on the enemy's tail, just out of\n his radar range. To come up his track\n at 2 mps relative velocity, firing six\n .30 caliber machine guns from fifty\n miles out. In the last three or four",
"He thought of his father, rocking\n on the porch of the Pennsylvania\n farm, pipe in his mouth, the weathered\n old face serene, as he puffed and\n listened to the radio beside him. He\n wished he'd written him last night,\n instead of joining the usual beer and\n bull session in the wardroom. He\n wished—. He wished.\n\n\n \"I've got him, Paul. He's got two\n point seven miles of RV on us. Take\n thirty degrees high on two point one\n o'clock for course to IP.\"\nAutomatically he turned the control\n wheel to the right and eased it\n back. The gyros recorded the turn to\n course.\n\n\n \"Hold 4 G's for one six five seconds,\n then coast two minutes for initial\n point five hundred miles on his\n tail.\"",
"And suddenly the waiting was\n over. The ship filled with vibration\n as Guns opened up.\nTwenty-five seconds\n to target.\nHis eyes flicked from\n the sightscreen to the sky ahead,\n looking for the telltale flare of rockets—ready\n to follow like a ferret.\nThere he is!\nAt eighteen miles\n from target, a tiny blue light flickered\n ahead. He forgot everything but the\n sightscreen, concentrating on keeping\n the pip dead center. The guns hammered\n on. It seemed they'd been firing\n for centuries. At ten-mile range,\n the combat radar kicked the automatics\n in, turning the ship ninety\n degrees to her course in one and a\n half seconds. He heard the lee side\n firing cut out, as Garrity hung on\n with two, then three guns.\n\n\n He held it as long as he could.\n Closer than he ever had before. At\n four miles he poured 12 G's for two\n seconds.",
"Guns' drawl broke into his reverie.\n \"Say, cap'n, Ah've been readin' in\n this magazine about a trick they used\n to use, called skip bombin'. They'd\n hang a bomb on the bottom of one\n of these airplanes, and fly along the\n ground, right at what they wanted\n to hit. Then they'd let the bomb go\n and get out of there, and the bomb\n would sail right on into the target.\n You s'pose we could fix this buggy\n up with an A bomb or an H bomb\n we could let go a few hundred miles\n out? Stick a proximity fuse on it, and\n a time fuse, too, in case we missed.\n Just sittin' half a mile apart and\n tradin' shots like we did on that last\n mission is kinda hard on mah nerves,\n and it's startin' to happen too often.\"",
"The second hand hit forty-five in\n its third cycle, and he stood loose in\n the cradle as the power died.\nSixty-two combat missions but the\n government says there's no war.\nHis\n mind wandered back over eight years\n in the service. Intelligence tests. Physical\n tests. Psychological tests. Six\n months of emotional adjustment in\n the screep. Primary training. Basic\n and advanced training. The pride and\n excitement of being chosen for space\n fighters. By the time he graduated,\n the United States and Russia each had\n several satellite stations operating, but\n in 1979, the United States had won\n the race for a permanent station on\n the Moon. What a grind it had been,\n bringing in the supplies.",
"They missed ramming by something\n around a hundred yards. The\n enemy ship flashed across his tail in\n a fraction of a second, already turned\n around and heading up its own track,\n yet it seemed to Paul he could make\n out every detail—the bright red star,\n even the tortured face of the pilot.\n Was there something lopsided in the\n shape of that rocket plume, or was\n he just imagining it in the blur of\n their passing? And did he hear a\nping\njust at that instant, feel the\n ship vibrate for a second?\n\n\n He continued the turn in the direction\n the automatics had started, bringing\n his nose around to watch the\n enemy's track. And as the shape of\n the plume told him the other ship\n was still heading back toward Earth,\n he brought the throttle back up to\n 12 G's, trying to overcome the lead\n his pass had given away.",
"Anyway, \"right side up\" tied in\n perfectly with the old \"clock\" system\n Garrity had dug out of those magazines\n he was always reading. Once\n they got used to it, it had turned out\n really handy. Old Doc Hoffman, his\n astrogation prof, would have turned\n purple if he'd ever dreamed they'd\n use such a conglomeration. But\n it worked. And when you were\n in a hurry, it worked in a hurry, and\n that was good enough for Coulter.\n He'd submitted a report on it to\n Colonel Silton.\n\n\n \"You've got him, Paul. We're\n dead on his tail, five hundred miles\n back, and matching velocity. Turn\n forty-two degrees right, and you're\n lined up right on him.\" Johnson was\n pleased with the job he'd done.",
"Anyway, he was just a space\n jockey, doing his job in this screwball\n fight out here in the empty reaches.\n Back on Earth, there was no war. The\n statesmen talked, held conferences,\n played international chess as ever.\n Neither side bothered the other's\n satellites, though naturally they were\n on permanent alert. There just wasn't\n going to be any Moon station for a\n while. Nobody knew what there\n might be on the Moon, but if one\n side couldn't have it, then the other\n side wasn't going to have it either.",
"Guns spoke quietly to Johnson.\n \"Let me know when we kill his RV.\n Ah may get another shot at him.\"\n\n\n And Johnny answered, hurt,\n \"What do you think I'm doing down\n here—reading one of your magazines?\"\n\n\n Paul was struggling with hundred-pound\n arms, trying to focus the telescope\n that swiveled over the panel.\n As the field cleared, he could see that\n the plume was flaring unevenly, flickering\n red and orange along one side.\n Quietly and viciously, he was talking\n to himself. \"Blow! Blow!\"\nAnd she blew. Like a dirty ragged\n bit of fireworks, throwing tiny handfuls\n of sparks into the blackness.\n Something glowed red for a while,\n and slowly faded.\nThere, but for the grace of God....\nPaul shuddered in a confused\n mixture of relief and revulsion."
],
[
"A year later the Moon station had\n \"blown up.\" No warning. No survivors.\n Just a brand-new medium-sized\n crater. And six months later,\n the new station, almost completed,\n went up again. The diplomats had\n buzzed like hornets, with accusations\n and threats, but nothing could be\n proven—there\nwere\nbombs stored at\n the station. The implication was clear\n enough. There wasn't going to be\n any Moon station until one government\n ruled Earth. Or until the United\n States and Russia figured out a way\n to get along with each other. And so\n far, getting along with Russia was\n like trying to get along with an\n octopus.\n\n\n Of course there were rumors that\n the psych warfare boys had some\n gimmick cooked up, to turn the\n U. S. S. R. upside down in a revolution,\n the next time power changed\n hands, but he'd been hearing that one\n for years. Still, with four new dictators\n over there in the last eleven\n years, there was always a chance.",
"Anyway, he was just a space\n jockey, doing his job in this screwball\n fight out here in the empty reaches.\n Back on Earth, there was no war. The\n statesmen talked, held conferences,\n played international chess as ever.\n Neither side bothered the other's\n satellites, though naturally they were\n on permanent alert. There just wasn't\n going to be any Moon station for a\n while. Nobody knew what there\n might be on the Moon, but if one\n side couldn't have it, then the other\n side wasn't going to have it either.",
"The second hand hit forty-five in\n its third cycle, and he stood loose in\n the cradle as the power died.\nSixty-two combat missions but the\n government says there's no war.\nHis\n mind wandered back over eight years\n in the service. Intelligence tests. Physical\n tests. Psychological tests. Six\n months of emotional adjustment in\n the screep. Primary training. Basic\n and advanced training. The pride and\n excitement of being chosen for space\n fighters. By the time he graduated,\n the United States and Russia each had\n several satellite stations operating, but\n in 1979, the United States had won\n the race for a permanent station on\n the Moon. What a grind it had been,\n bringing in the supplies.",
"\"Right, cap'n.\"\nBut it was Paul who couldn't forget\n about it. All the rest of the way\n back to station, he kept seeing visions\n of a panel sliding aside in the nose\n of a sleek and gleaming ship, while\n a small rocket pushed its deadly snout\n forward, and then streaked off at\n tremendous acceleration.\n\n\n Interrogation was brief. The mission\n had turned up nothing new.\n Their kill made eight against seven\n for Doc Miller's crew, and they made\n sure Miller and the boys heard about\n it. They were lightheaded with the\n elation that followed a successful\n mission, swapping insults with the\n rest of the squadron, and reveling in\n the sheer contentment of being back\n safe.\n\n\n It wasn't until he got back to his\n stall, and started to write his father\n a long overdue letter, that he remembered\n he had heard Kovacs say he\n was going on leave.",
"\"Never mind, Guns. A patch that\n big wouldn't be safe to hold air.\"\nThey were about eighty thousand\n miles out. He set course for Earth at\n about five and a half mps, which\n Johnson calculated to bring them in\n on the station on the \"going away\"\n side of its orbit, and settled back for\n the tedious two hours of free wheeling.\n For ten or fifteen minutes, the\n interphone crackled with the gregariousness\n born of recent peril, and\n gradually the ship fell silent as each\n man returned to his own private\n thoughts.\n\n\n Paul was wondering about the men\n on the other ship—whether any of\n them were still alive. Eighty thousand\n miles to fall. That was a little\n beyond the capacity of an emergency\n rocket—about 2 G's for sixty seconds—even\n if they had them. What a\n way to go home! He wondered what\n he'd do if it happened to him. Would\n he wait out his time, or just unlock\n his helmet.",
"He cut back to 4 G's, noting that\n RVS registered about a mile per\n second away from station, and suddenly\n became aware that the red light\n was on for loss of air. The cabin\n pressure gauge read zero, and his\n heart throbbed into his throat as he\n remembered that\npinging\nsound, just\n as they passed the enemy ship. He\n told Garrity to see if he could locate\n the loss, and any other damage, and\n was shortly startled by a low amazed\n whistle in his earphones.\n\n\n \"If Ah wasn't lookin' at it, Ah\n wouldn't believe it. Musta been one\n of his shells went right around the\n fuel tank and out again, without hittin'\n it. There's at least three inches of\n tank on a line between the holes! He\n musta been throwin' curves at us.\n Man, cap'n, this is our lucky day!\"",
"And meanwhile, the struggle was\n growing deadlier, month by month,\n each side groping for the stranglehold,\n looking for the edge that would\n give domination of space, or make\n all-out war a good risk. They hadn't\n found it yet, but it was getting bloodier\n out here all the time. For a while,\n it had been a supreme achievement\n just to get a ship out and back, but\n gradually, as the ships improved,\n there was a little margin left over for\n weapons. Back a year ago, the average\n patrol was nothing but a sightseeing\n tour. Not that there was much to see,\n when you'd been out a few times.",
"Paul remembered the time he had\n walked into the Muroc Base Officer's\n Club with Marge Halpern on his\n arm. The hunger that had lain undisguised\n on Kovacs' face the moment\n he first saw them. Marge was\n a striking blonde with a direct manner,\n who liked men, especially orbit\n station men. He hadn't thought about\n the incident since then, but the look\n in Kovacs' eyes kept coming back to\n him as he tried to read.\n\n\n He wasn't sure how he got there,\n or why, when he found himself walking\n into Colonel Silton's office to ask\n for the leave he'd passed up at his\n fiftieth mission. He'd considered taking\n it several times, but the thought\n of leaving the squadron, even for a\n couple of weeks, had made him feel\n guilty, as though he were quitting.",
"Now, there were Reds around practically\n every mission.\nThirteen missions to go, after today.\nHe wondered if he'd quit at\n seventy-five. Deep inside him, the old\n pride and excitement were still\n strong. He still got a kick out of the\n way the girls looked at the silver\n rocket on his chest. But he didn't\n feel as lucky as he used to. Twenty-nine\n years old, and he was starting\n to feel like an old man. He pictured\n himself lecturing to a group of eager\n kids.\nHad a couple of close calls, those\n last two missions.\nThat Red had\n looked easy, the way he was wandering\n around. He hadn't spotted them",
"Paul felt no surprise, only relief\n at having the trouble located. The\n reaction to the close call might not\n come till hours later. \"This kind of\n luck we can do without. Can you\n patch the holes?\"\n\n\n \"Ah can patch the one where it\n came in, but it musta been explodin'\n on the way out. There's a hole Ah\n could stick mah head through.\"\n\n\n \"That's a good idea.\" Johnson was\n not usually very witty, but this was\n one he couldn't resist.",
"Coulter chuckled at the ad lib way\n they operated, remembering the\n courses, the tests, the procedures practiced\n until they could do them backwards\n blindfolded. When they tangled\n with a Red, the Solter co-ordinates\n went out the hatch. They navigated\n by the enemy. There were times\n during a fight when he had no more\n idea of his position than what the\n old ladies told him, and what he\n could see of the Sun, the Earth, and\n the Moon.",
"Guns spoke quietly to Johnson.\n \"Let me know when we kill his RV.\n Ah may get another shot at him.\"\n\n\n And Johnny answered, hurt,\n \"What do you think I'm doing down\n here—reading one of your magazines?\"\n\n\n Paul was struggling with hundred-pound\n arms, trying to focus the telescope\n that swiveled over the panel.\n As the field cleared, he could see that\n the plume was flaring unevenly, flickering\n red and orange along one side.\n Quietly and viciously, he was talking\n to himself. \"Blow! Blow!\"\nAnd she blew. Like a dirty ragged\n bit of fireworks, throwing tiny handfuls\n of sparks into the blackness.\n Something glowed red for a while,\n and slowly faded.\nThere, but for the grace of God....\nPaul shuddered in a confused\n mixture of relief and revulsion.",
"\"Five, six feet, by maybe a foot.\n Weigh at least three hundred\n pounds.\"\n\n\n It was five minutes before Guns\n spoke again. \"Ah been thinkin',\n cap'n. With a little redecoratin', Ah\n think Ah could get a rocket that size\n in here with me. We could weld a\n rail to one of the gun mounts that\n would hold it up to five or six G's.\n Then after we got away from station,\n Ah could take it outside and mount\n it on the rail.\"",
"When he finished the letter, he\n opened the copy of \"Lady Chatterley's\n Lover\" he had borrowed from\n Rodriguez's limited but colorful library.\n He couldn't keep his mind on\n it. He kept thinking of the armament\n officer.\n\n\n Kovacs was a quiet, intelligent kid,\n devoted to his work. Coulter wasn't\n too intimate with him. He wasn't a\n spaceman, for one thing. One of those\n illogical but powerful distinctions\n that sub-divided the men of the station.\n And he was a little too polite to\n be easy company.",
"Once he had his papers, he started\n to get excited about it. As he cleaned\n up his paper work and packed his\n musette, his hands were fumbling,\n and his mind was full of Sylvia.\nThe vastness of Muroc Base was as\n incredible as ever. Row on uncounted\n row of neat buildings, each resting at\n the top of its own hundred-yard\n deep elevator shaft. A pulsing, throbbing\n city, dedicated to the long slow\n struggle to get into space and stay\n there. The service crew eyed them\n with studied indifference, as they\n writhed out of the small hatch and\n stepped to the ground. They drew a\n helijet at operations, and headed immediately\n for Los Angeles.\n\n\n Kovacs had been impressed when\n Paul asked if he'd care to room together\n while they were on leave. He\n was quiet on the flight, as he had\n been on the way down, listening contentedly,\n while Paul talked combat\n and women with Bob Parandes, another\n pilot going on leave.",
"\"O.K., let me know as soon as you\n have his course.\" Coulter squashed\n out his cigar and began his cockpit\n check, grinning without humor as he\n noticed that his breathing had deepened\n and his palms were moist on\n the controls. He looked down to\n make sure his radio was snug in its\n pocket on his leg; checked the thigh\n harness of his emergency rocket,\n wrapped in its thick belly pad; checked\n the paired tanks of oxygen behind\n him, hanging level from his shoulders\n into their niche in the \"cradle.\"\n He flipped his helmet closed, locked\n it, and opened it again. He tossed\n a sardonic salute at the photograph\n of a young lady who graced the side\n of the cockpit. \"Wish us luck, sugar.\"\n He pressed the mike button again.\n\n\n \"You got anything yet, Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"He's going our way, Paul. Have\n it exact in a minute.\"",
"At eighty-five seconds, he corrected\n slightly to center the pip. The momentary\n hiss of the rockets was a\n relief. He heard the muffled yammering\n as Guns fired a short burst\n from the .30's standing out of their\n compartments around the sides of the\n ship. They were practically recoilless,\n but the burst drifted him forward\n against the cradle harness.",
"\"Right, Johnny. One sixty-five,\n then two minutes.\" He set the timer,\n advanced the throttle to 4 G's, and\n stepped back an inch as the acceleration\n took him snugly into the cradle.\n The Return-To-Station-Fuel and Relative-Velocity-To-Station\n gauges did\n their usual double takes on a change\n of course, as the ship computer recorded\n the new information. He\n liked those two gauges—the two old\n ladies.\n\n\n Mrs. RSF kept track of how much\n more fuel they had than they needed\n to get home. When they were moving\n away from station, she dropped\n in alarmed little jumps, but when\n they were headed home, she inched\n along in serene contentment, or if\n they were coasting, sneaked triumphantly\n back up the dial.",
"Coulter watched the pip move into\n his sightscreen. It settled less than a\n degree off dead center. He made the\n final corrections in course, set the air\n pressure control to eight pounds, and\n locked his helmet.\n\n\n \"Nice job, Johnny. Let's button\n up. You with us, Guns?\"\n\n\n Garrity sounded lazy as a well-fed\n tiger. \"Ah'm with yew, cap'n.\"",
"Mrs. RVS started to get jittery at\n about ten mps away from home, and\n above fifteen, she was trembling\n steadily. He didn't blame the old\n ladies for worrying. With one hour\n of fuel at 5 G's, you didn't fire a\n single squirt unless there was a good\n reason for it. Most of their time on\n a mission was spent free wheeling,\n in the anxiety-laden boredom that\n fighting men have always known.\nWish the Red was coming in across\n our course.\nIt would have taken less\n fuel, and the chase wouldn't have\n taken them so far out. But then\n they'd probably have been spotted,\n and lost the precious element of surprise."
],
[
"Coulter chuckled at the ad lib way\n they operated, remembering the\n courses, the tests, the procedures practiced\n until they could do them backwards\n blindfolded. When they tangled\n with a Red, the Solter co-ordinates\n went out the hatch. They navigated\n by the enemy. There were times\n during a fight when he had no more\n idea of his position than what the\n old ladies told him, and what he\n could see of the Sun, the Earth, and\n the Moon.",
"Anyway, \"right side up\" tied in\n perfectly with the old \"clock\" system\n Garrity had dug out of those magazines\n he was always reading. Once\n they got used to it, it had turned out\n really handy. Old Doc Hoffman, his\n astrogation prof, would have turned\n purple if he'd ever dreamed they'd\n use such a conglomeration. But\n it worked. And when you were\n in a hurry, it worked in a hurry, and\n that was good enough for Coulter.\n He'd submitted a report on it to\n Colonel Silton.\n\n\n \"You've got him, Paul. We're\n dead on his tail, five hundred miles\n back, and matching velocity. Turn\n forty-two degrees right, and you're\n lined up right on him.\" Johnson was\n pleased with the job he'd done.",
"Coulter watched the pip move into\n his sightscreen. It settled less than a\n degree off dead center. He made the\n final corrections in course, set the air\n pressure control to eight pounds, and\n locked his helmet.\n\n\n \"Nice job, Johnny. Let's button\n up. You with us, Guns?\"\n\n\n Garrity sounded lazy as a well-fed\n tiger. \"Ah'm with yew, cap'n.\"",
"\"O.K., let me know as soon as you\n have his course.\" Coulter squashed\n out his cigar and began his cockpit\n check, grinning without humor as he\n noticed that his breathing had deepened\n and his palms were moist on\n the controls. He looked down to\n make sure his radio was snug in its\n pocket on his leg; checked the thigh\n harness of his emergency rocket,\n wrapped in its thick belly pad; checked\n the paired tanks of oxygen behind\n him, hanging level from his shoulders\n into their niche in the \"cradle.\"\n He flipped his helmet closed, locked\n it, and opened it again. He tossed\n a sardonic salute at the photograph\n of a young lady who graced the side\n of the cockpit. \"Wish us luck, sugar.\"\n He pressed the mike button again.\n\n\n \"You got anything yet, Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"He's going our way, Paul. Have\n it exact in a minute.\"",
"Coulter advanced the throttle to\n 5 G's. And with the hiss of power,\n SF 308 began the deadly, intricate,\n precarious maneuver called a combat\n pass—a maneuver inherited from the\n aerial dogfight—though it often turned\n into something more like the\n broadside duels of the old sailing\n ships—as the best and least suicidal\n method of killing a spaceship. To\n start on the enemy's tail, just out of\n his radar range. To come up his track\n at 2 mps relative velocity, firing six\n .30 caliber machine guns from fifty\n miles out. In the last three or four",
"And using \"right side up\" as a\n basis for navigation. He chuckled\n again. Still, the service had had to\n concede on \"right side up,\" in designing\n the ships, so there was something\n to be said for it. They hadn't\n been able to simulate gravity without\n fouling up the ships so they had\n to call the pilot's head \"up.\" There\n was something comforting about it.\n He'd driven a couple of the experimental\n jobs, one with the cockpit set\n on gimbals, and one where the whole\n ship rotated, and he hadn't cared for\n them at all. Felt disoriented, with\n something nagging at his mind all\n the time, as though the ships had\n been sabotaged. A couple of pilots\n had gone nuts in the \"spindizzy,\"\n and remembering his own feelings as\n he watched the sky go by, it was easy\n to understand.",
"until they were well into their run,\n but when he got started he'd made\n them look like slow motion, just the\n same. If he hadn't tried that harebrained\n sudden deceleration....\n Coulter shook his head at the memory.\n And on the last mission they'd\n been lucky to get a draw. Those boys\n were good shots.\n\"We're crossing his track, Paul.\n Turn to nine point five o'clock and\n hold 4 G's for thirty-two seconds,\n starting on the count ... five—four—three—two—one—go!\"\n He completed\n the operation in silence, remarking\n to himself how lucky he was\n to have Johnson. The boy loved a",
"chase. He navigated like a hungry\n hawk, though you had to admit his\n techniques were a bit irregular.",
"He cut back to 4 G's, noting that\n RVS registered about a mile per\n second away from station, and suddenly\n became aware that the red light\n was on for loss of air. The cabin\n pressure gauge read zero, and his\n heart throbbed into his throat as he\n remembered that\npinging\nsound, just\n as they passed the enemy ship. He\n told Garrity to see if he could locate\n the loss, and any other damage, and\n was shortly startled by a low amazed\n whistle in his earphones.\n\n\n \"If Ah wasn't lookin' at it, Ah\n wouldn't believe it. Musta been one\n of his shells went right around the\n fuel tank and out again, without hittin'\n it. There's at least three inches of\n tank on a line between the holes! He\n musta been throwin' curves at us.\n Man, cap'n, this is our lucky day!\"",
"And suddenly the waiting was\n over. The ship filled with vibration\n as Guns opened up.\nTwenty-five seconds\n to target.\nHis eyes flicked from\n the sightscreen to the sky ahead,\n looking for the telltale flare of rockets—ready\n to follow like a ferret.\nThere he is!\nAt eighteen miles\n from target, a tiny blue light flickered\n ahead. He forgot everything but the\n sightscreen, concentrating on keeping\n the pip dead center. The guns hammered\n on. It seemed they'd been firing\n for centuries. At ten-mile range,\n the combat radar kicked the automatics\n in, turning the ship ninety\n degrees to her course in one and a\n half seconds. He heard the lee side\n firing cut out, as Garrity hung on\n with two, then three guns.\n\n\n He held it as long as he could.\n Closer than he ever had before. At\n four miles he poured 12 G's for two\n seconds.",
"At eighty-five seconds, he corrected\n slightly to center the pip. The momentary\n hiss of the rockets was a\n relief. He heard the muffled yammering\n as Guns fired a short burst\n from the .30's standing out of their\n compartments around the sides of the\n ship. They were practically recoilless,\n but the burst drifted him forward\n against the cradle harness.",
"\"Right, Johnny. One sixty-five,\n then two minutes.\" He set the timer,\n advanced the throttle to 4 G's, and\n stepped back an inch as the acceleration\n took him snugly into the cradle.\n The Return-To-Station-Fuel and Relative-Velocity-To-Station\n gauges did\n their usual double takes on a change\n of course, as the ship computer recorded\n the new information. He\n liked those two gauges—the two old\n ladies.\n\n\n Mrs. RSF kept track of how much\n more fuel they had than they needed\n to get home. When they were moving\n away from station, she dropped\n in alarmed little jumps, but when\n they were headed home, she inched\n along in serene contentment, or if\n they were coasting, sneaked triumphantly\n back up the dial.",
"Mrs. RVS started to get jittery at\n about ten mps away from home, and\n above fifteen, she was trembling\n steadily. He didn't blame the old\n ladies for worrying. With one hour\n of fuel at 5 G's, you didn't fire a\n single squirt unless there was a good\n reason for it. Most of their time on\n a mission was spent free wheeling,\n in the anxiety-laden boredom that\n fighting men have always known.\nWish the Red was coming in across\n our course.\nIt would have taken less\n fuel, and the chase wouldn't have\n taken them so far out. But then\n they'd probably have been spotted,\n and lost the precious element of surprise.",
"seconds, to break out just enough to\n clear him, praying that he won't\n break in the same direction.\nAnd to\n keep on going.\nFour minutes and thirty-four seconds\n to the break.\nSixty seconds at\n 5 G's; one hundred ninety-two seconds\n of free wheeling; and then, if\n they were lucky, the twenty-two frantic\n seconds they were out here for—throwing\n a few pounds of steel slugs\n out before them in one unbroken\n burst, groping out fifty miles into\n the darkness with steel and radar fingers\n to kill a duplicate of themselves.\nThis is the worst. These three minutes\n are the worst.",
"He thought of his father, rocking\n on the porch of the Pennsylvania\n farm, pipe in his mouth, the weathered\n old face serene, as he puffed and\n listened to the radio beside him. He\n wished he'd written him last night,\n instead of joining the usual beer and\n bull session in the wardroom. He\n wished—. He wished.\n\n\n \"I've got him, Paul. He's got two\n point seven miles of RV on us. Take\n thirty degrees high on two point one\n o'clock for course to IP.\"\nAutomatically he turned the control\n wheel to the right and eased it\n back. The gyros recorded the turn to\n course.\n\n\n \"Hold 4 G's for one six five seconds,\n then coast two minutes for initial\n point five hundred miles on his\n tail.\"",
"Coulter scanned the full arch of\n sky visible through the curving panels\n of the dome, thinking the turgid\n thoughts that always came when action\n was near. His chest was full of\n the familiar weakness—not fear exactly,\n but a tight, helpless feeling\n that grew and grew with the waiting.\n\n\n His eyes and hands were busy in\n the familiar procedure, readying the\n ship for combat, checking and re-checking\n the details that could mean\n life and death, but his mind watched\n disembodied, yearning back to earth.\n\n\n Sylvia always came back first. Inviting\n smile and outstretched hands.\n Nyloned knees, pink sweater, and\n that clinging, clinging white silk\n skirt. A whirling montage of laughing,\n challenging eyes and tossing sky-black\n hair and soft arms tightening\n around his neck.",
"They missed ramming by something\n around a hundred yards. The\n enemy ship flashed across his tail in\n a fraction of a second, already turned\n around and heading up its own track,\n yet it seemed to Paul he could make\n out every detail—the bright red star,\n even the tortured face of the pilot.\n Was there something lopsided in the\n shape of that rocket plume, or was\n he just imagining it in the blur of\n their passing? And did he hear a\nping\njust at that instant, feel the\n ship vibrate for a second?\n\n\n He continued the turn in the direction\n the automatics had started, bringing\n his nose around to watch the\n enemy's track. And as the shape of\n the plume told him the other ship\n was still heading back toward Earth,\n he brought the throttle back up to\n 12 G's, trying to overcome the lead\n his pass had given away.",
"\"Forget it, lad. If they ever caught\n us pulling a trick like that, they'd\n have us on hydroponic duty for the\n next five years. They just don't want\n us playing around with bombs, till\n the experts get all the angles figured\n out, and build ships to handle them.\n And besides, who do you think will\n rig a bomb like that, without anybody\n finding out? And where do you think\n we'd get a bomb in the first place?\n They don't leave those things lying\n around. Kovacs watches them like a\n mother hen. I think he counts them\n twice a day.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry, cap'n. Ah just figured if\n you could get hold of a bomb, Ah\n know a few of the boys who could\n rig the thing up for us and keep\n their mouths shut.\"\n\n\n \"Well, forget about it. It's not a\n bad idea, but we haven't any bomb.\"",
"Guns' drawl broke into his reverie.\n \"Say, cap'n, Ah've been readin' in\n this magazine about a trick they used\n to use, called skip bombin'. They'd\n hang a bomb on the bottom of one\n of these airplanes, and fly along the\n ground, right at what they wanted\n to hit. Then they'd let the bomb go\n and get out of there, and the bomb\n would sail right on into the target.\n You s'pose we could fix this buggy\n up with an A bomb or an H bomb\n we could let go a few hundred miles\n out? Stick a proximity fuse on it, and\n a time fuse, too, in case we missed.\n Just sittin' half a mile apart and\n tradin' shots like we did on that last\n mission is kinda hard on mah nerves,\n and it's startin' to happen too often.\"",
"He blessed the advantage of better\n radar. In this crazy \"war,\" so like\n the dogfights of the first world war,\n the better than two hundred mile\n edge of American radar was more\n often than not the margin of victory.\n The American crews were a little\n sharper, a little better trained, but\n with their stripped down ships, and\n midget crewmen, with no personal\n safety equipment, the Reds could\n accelerate longer and faster, and go\n farther out. You had to get the jump\n on them, or it was just too bad."
],
[
"seconds, to break out just enough to\n clear him, praying that he won't\n break in the same direction.\nAnd to\n keep on going.\nFour minutes and thirty-four seconds\n to the break.\nSixty seconds at\n 5 G's; one hundred ninety-two seconds\n of free wheeling; and then, if\n they were lucky, the twenty-two frantic\n seconds they were out here for—throwing\n a few pounds of steel slugs\n out before them in one unbroken\n burst, groping out fifty miles into\n the darkness with steel and radar fingers\n to kill a duplicate of themselves.\nThis is the worst. These three minutes\n are the worst.",
"Kovacs and the kids were waiting.\n The armament officer had apparently\n been telling them of Paul's exploits.\n They glowed with admiration. The\n oldest boy, about eleven, had true\n worship in his eyes. He hesitated a\n moment, then asked gravely: \"Would\n you tell us how you kill a Red, sir?\"\n\n\n Paul eyed the time-honored weapon\n that dangled from the youngster's\n hand. He bent over and tapped it\n with his finger. His voice was warm\n and confiding, but his eyes were far\n away.",
"Paul remembered the time he had\n walked into the Muroc Base Officer's\n Club with Marge Halpern on his\n arm. The hunger that had lain undisguised\n on Kovacs' face the moment\n he first saw them. Marge was\n a striking blonde with a direct manner,\n who liked men, especially orbit\n station men. He hadn't thought about\n the incident since then, but the look\n in Kovacs' eyes kept coming back to\n him as he tried to read.\n\n\n He wasn't sure how he got there,\n or why, when he found himself walking\n into Colonel Silton's office to ask\n for the leave he'd passed up at his\n fiftieth mission. He'd considered taking\n it several times, but the thought\n of leaving the squadron, even for a\n couple of weeks, had made him feel\n guilty, as though he were quitting.",
"Guns spoke quietly to Johnson.\n \"Let me know when we kill his RV.\n Ah may get another shot at him.\"\n\n\n And Johnny answered, hurt,\n \"What do you think I'm doing down\n here—reading one of your magazines?\"\n\n\n Paul was struggling with hundred-pound\n arms, trying to focus the telescope\n that swiveled over the panel.\n As the field cleared, he could see that\n the plume was flaring unevenly, flickering\n red and orange along one side.\n Quietly and viciously, he was talking\n to himself. \"Blow! Blow!\"\nAnd she blew. Like a dirty ragged\n bit of fireworks, throwing tiny handfuls\n of sparks into the blackness.\n Something glowed red for a while,\n and slowly faded.\nThere, but for the grace of God....\nPaul shuddered in a confused\n mixture of relief and revulsion.",
"Paul felt no surprise, only relief\n at having the trouble located. The\n reaction to the close call might not\n come till hours later. \"This kind of\n luck we can do without. Can you\n patch the holes?\"\n\n\n \"Ah can patch the one where it\n came in, but it musta been explodin'\n on the way out. There's a hole Ah\n could stick mah head through.\"\n\n\n \"That's a good idea.\" Johnson was\n not usually very witty, but this was\n one he couldn't resist.",
"until they were well into their run,\n but when he got started he'd made\n them look like slow motion, just the\n same. If he hadn't tried that harebrained\n sudden deceleration....\n Coulter shook his head at the memory.\n And on the last mission they'd\n been lucky to get a draw. Those boys\n were good shots.\n\"We're crossing his track, Paul.\n Turn to nine point five o'clock and\n hold 4 G's for thirty-two seconds,\n starting on the count ... five—four—three—two—one—go!\"\n He completed\n the operation in silence, remarking\n to himself how lucky he was\n to have Johnson. The boy loved a",
"It was a ticklish job explaining\n about Kovacs, but when she understood\n that he just wanted to do a\n friend a favor, and she'd still have\n Paul all to herself, she calmed down.\n They made their arrangements quickly,\n and switched off.\n\n\n He hesitated a minute before he\n called Marge. She was quite a dish\n to give up. Once she'd seen him with\n Sylvia, he'd be strictly\npersona non\n grata\n—that was for sure. It was an\n unhappy thought. Well, maybe it was\n in a good cause. He shrugged and\n called her.\n\n\n She nearly cut him off when she\n first heard his request, but he did\n some fast talking. The idea of several\n days at the cottage intrigued her, and\n when he described how smitten\n Kovacs had been, she brightened up\n and agreed to come. He switched off,\n adjusted the drape of his genuine\n silk scarf, and stepped out of the\n booth.",
"One hundred\n ninety-two eternal seconds of waiting,\n of deathly silence and deathly\n calm, feeling and hearing nothing\n but the slow pounding of their own\n heartbeats. Each time he got back, it\n faded away, and all he remembered\n was the excitement. But each time\n he went through it, it was worse. Just\n standing and waiting in the silence,\n praying they weren't spotted—staring\n at the unmoving firmament and\n knowing he was a projectile hurtling\n two miles each second straight at a\n clump of metal and flesh that was\n the enemy. Knowing the odds were\n twenty to one against their scoring\n a kill ... unless they ran into him.",
"\"Right, cap'n.\"\nBut it was Paul who couldn't forget\n about it. All the rest of the way\n back to station, he kept seeing visions\n of a panel sliding aside in the nose\n of a sleek and gleaming ship, while\n a small rocket pushed its deadly snout\n forward, and then streaked off at\n tremendous acceleration.\n\n\n Interrogation was brief. The mission\n had turned up nothing new.\n Their kill made eight against seven\n for Doc Miller's crew, and they made\n sure Miller and the boys heard about\n it. They were lightheaded with the\n elation that followed a successful\n mission, swapping insults with the\n rest of the squadron, and reveling in\n the sheer contentment of being back\n safe.\n\n\n It wasn't until he got back to his\n stall, and started to write his father\n a long overdue letter, that he remembered\n he had heard Kovacs say he\n was going on leave.",
"He thought of his father, rocking\n on the porch of the Pennsylvania\n farm, pipe in his mouth, the weathered\n old face serene, as he puffed and\n listened to the radio beside him. He\n wished he'd written him last night,\n instead of joining the usual beer and\n bull session in the wardroom. He\n wished—. He wished.\n\n\n \"I've got him, Paul. He's got two\n point seven miles of RV on us. Take\n thirty degrees high on two point one\n o'clock for course to IP.\"\nAutomatically he turned the control\n wheel to the right and eased it\n back. The gyros recorded the turn to\n course.\n\n\n \"Hold 4 G's for one six five seconds,\n then coast two minutes for initial\n point five hundred miles on his\n tail.\"",
"At eighty-five seconds, he corrected\n slightly to center the pip. The momentary\n hiss of the rockets was a\n relief. He heard the muffled yammering\n as Guns fired a short burst\n from the .30's standing out of their\n compartments around the sides of the\n ship. They were practically recoilless,\n but the burst drifted him forward\n against the cradle harness.",
"\"O.K., let me know as soon as you\n have his course.\" Coulter squashed\n out his cigar and began his cockpit\n check, grinning without humor as he\n noticed that his breathing had deepened\n and his palms were moist on\n the controls. He looked down to\n make sure his radio was snug in its\n pocket on his leg; checked the thigh\n harness of his emergency rocket,\n wrapped in its thick belly pad; checked\n the paired tanks of oxygen behind\n him, hanging level from his shoulders\n into their niche in the \"cradle.\"\n He flipped his helmet closed, locked\n it, and opened it again. He tossed\n a sardonic salute at the photograph\n of a young lady who graced the side\n of the cockpit. \"Wish us luck, sugar.\"\n He pressed the mike button again.\n\n\n \"You got anything yet, Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"He's going our way, Paul. Have\n it exact in a minute.\"",
"They parked the helijet at Municipal\n Field and headed for the public\n PV booths, picking up a coterie of\n two dogs and five assorted children\n on the way. The kids followed quietly\n in their wake, ecstatic at the sight of\n their uniforms.\n\n\n Paul squared his shoulders, as befitted\n a hero, and tousled a couple of\n uncombed heads as they walked. The\n kids clustered around the booths, as\n Kovacs entered one to locate a hotel\n room, and Paul another, to call\n Sylvia.\n\n\n \"Honey, I've been so scared you\n weren't coming back. Where are you?\n When will I see you? Why didn't\n you write?...\" She sputtered to a\n stop as he held up both hands in\n defense.",
"Once he had his papers, he started\n to get excited about it. As he cleaned\n up his paper work and packed his\n musette, his hands were fumbling,\n and his mind was full of Sylvia.\nThe vastness of Muroc Base was as\n incredible as ever. Row on uncounted\n row of neat buildings, each resting at\n the top of its own hundred-yard\n deep elevator shaft. A pulsing, throbbing\n city, dedicated to the long slow\n struggle to get into space and stay\n there. The service crew eyed them\n with studied indifference, as they\n writhed out of the small hatch and\n stepped to the ground. They drew a\n helijet at operations, and headed immediately\n for Los Angeles.\n\n\n Kovacs had been impressed when\n Paul asked if he'd care to room together\n while they were on leave. He\n was quiet on the flight, as he had\n been on the way down, listening contentedly,\n while Paul talked combat\n and women with Bob Parandes, another\n pilot going on leave.",
"Mrs. RVS started to get jittery at\n about ten mps away from home, and\n above fifteen, she was trembling\n steadily. He didn't blame the old\n ladies for worrying. With one hour\n of fuel at 5 G's, you didn't fire a\n single squirt unless there was a good\n reason for it. Most of their time on\n a mission was spent free wheeling,\n in the anxiety-laden boredom that\n fighting men have always known.\nWish the Red was coming in across\n our course.\nIt would have taken less\n fuel, and the chase wouldn't have\n taken them so far out. But then\n they'd probably have been spotted,\n and lost the precious element of surprise.",
"The second hand hit forty-five in\n its third cycle, and he stood loose in\n the cradle as the power died.\nSixty-two combat missions but the\n government says there's no war.\nHis\n mind wandered back over eight years\n in the service. Intelligence tests. Physical\n tests. Psychological tests. Six\n months of emotional adjustment in\n the screep. Primary training. Basic\n and advanced training. The pride and\n excitement of being chosen for space\n fighters. By the time he graduated,\n the United States and Russia each had\n several satellite stations operating, but\n in 1979, the United States had won\n the race for a permanent station on\n the Moon. What a grind it had been,\n bringing in the supplies.",
"They missed ramming by something\n around a hundred yards. The\n enemy ship flashed across his tail in\n a fraction of a second, already turned\n around and heading up its own track,\n yet it seemed to Paul he could make\n out every detail—the bright red star,\n even the tortured face of the pilot.\n Was there something lopsided in the\n shape of that rocket plume, or was\n he just imagining it in the blur of\n their passing? And did he hear a\nping\njust at that instant, feel the\n ship vibrate for a second?\n\n\n He continued the turn in the direction\n the automatics had started, bringing\n his nose around to watch the\n enemy's track. And as the shape of\n the plume told him the other ship\n was still heading back toward Earth,\n he brought the throttle back up to\n 12 G's, trying to overcome the lead\n his pass had given away.",
"Now, there were Reds around practically\n every mission.\nThirteen missions to go, after today.\nHe wondered if he'd quit at\n seventy-five. Deep inside him, the old\n pride and excitement were still\n strong. He still got a kick out of the\n way the girls looked at the silver\n rocket on his chest. But he didn't\n feel as lucky as he used to. Twenty-nine\n years old, and he was starting\n to feel like an old man. He pictured\n himself lecturing to a group of eager\n kids.\nHad a couple of close calls, those\n last two missions.\nThat Red had\n looked easy, the way he was wandering\n around. He hadn't spotted them",
"\"Never mind, Guns. A patch that\n big wouldn't be safe to hold air.\"\nThey were about eighty thousand\n miles out. He set course for Earth at\n about five and a half mps, which\n Johnson calculated to bring them in\n on the station on the \"going away\"\n side of its orbit, and settled back for\n the tedious two hours of free wheeling.\n For ten or fifteen minutes, the\n interphone crackled with the gregariousness\n born of recent peril, and\n gradually the ship fell silent as each\n man returned to his own private\n thoughts.\n\n\n Paul was wondering about the men\n on the other ship—whether any of\n them were still alive. Eighty thousand\n miles to fall. That was a little\n beyond the capacity of an emergency\n rocket—about 2 G's for sixty seconds—even\n if they had them. What a\n way to go home! He wondered what\n he'd do if it happened to him. Would\n he wait out his time, or just unlock\n his helmet.",
"Anyway, \"right side up\" tied in\n perfectly with the old \"clock\" system\n Garrity had dug out of those magazines\n he was always reading. Once\n they got used to it, it had turned out\n really handy. Old Doc Hoffman, his\n astrogation prof, would have turned\n purple if he'd ever dreamed they'd\n use such a conglomeration. But\n it worked. And when you were\n in a hurry, it worked in a hurry, and\n that was good enough for Coulter.\n He'd submitted a report on it to\n Colonel Silton.\n\n\n \"You've got him, Paul. We're\n dead on his tail, five hundred miles\n back, and matching velocity. Turn\n forty-two degrees right, and you're\n lined up right on him.\" Johnson was\n pleased with the job he'd done."
],
[
"Coulter watched the pip move into\n his sightscreen. It settled less than a\n degree off dead center. He made the\n final corrections in course, set the air\n pressure control to eight pounds, and\n locked his helmet.\n\n\n \"Nice job, Johnny. Let's button\n up. You with us, Guns?\"\n\n\n Garrity sounded lazy as a well-fed\n tiger. \"Ah'm with yew, cap'n.\"",
"\"O.K., let me know as soon as you\n have his course.\" Coulter squashed\n out his cigar and began his cockpit\n check, grinning without humor as he\n noticed that his breathing had deepened\n and his palms were moist on\n the controls. He looked down to\n make sure his radio was snug in its\n pocket on his leg; checked the thigh\n harness of his emergency rocket,\n wrapped in its thick belly pad; checked\n the paired tanks of oxygen behind\n him, hanging level from his shoulders\n into their niche in the \"cradle.\"\n He flipped his helmet closed, locked\n it, and opened it again. He tossed\n a sardonic salute at the photograph\n of a young lady who graced the side\n of the cockpit. \"Wish us luck, sugar.\"\n He pressed the mike button again.\n\n\n \"You got anything yet, Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"He's going our way, Paul. Have\n it exact in a minute.\"",
"Coulter chuckled at the ad lib way\n they operated, remembering the\n courses, the tests, the procedures practiced\n until they could do them backwards\n blindfolded. When they tangled\n with a Red, the Solter co-ordinates\n went out the hatch. They navigated\n by the enemy. There were times\n during a fight when he had no more\n idea of his position than what the\n old ladies told him, and what he\n could see of the Sun, the Earth, and\n the Moon.",
"At eighty-five seconds, he corrected\n slightly to center the pip. The momentary\n hiss of the rockets was a\n relief. He heard the muffled yammering\n as Guns fired a short burst\n from the .30's standing out of their\n compartments around the sides of the\n ship. They were practically recoilless,\n but the burst drifted him forward\n against the cradle harness.",
"He cut back to 4 G's, noting that\n RVS registered about a mile per\n second away from station, and suddenly\n became aware that the red light\n was on for loss of air. The cabin\n pressure gauge read zero, and his\n heart throbbed into his throat as he\n remembered that\npinging\nsound, just\n as they passed the enemy ship. He\n told Garrity to see if he could locate\n the loss, and any other damage, and\n was shortly startled by a low amazed\n whistle in his earphones.\n\n\n \"If Ah wasn't lookin' at it, Ah\n wouldn't believe it. Musta been one\n of his shells went right around the\n fuel tank and out again, without hittin'\n it. There's at least three inches of\n tank on a line between the holes! He\n musta been throwin' curves at us.\n Man, cap'n, this is our lucky day!\"",
"until they were well into their run,\n but when he got started he'd made\n them look like slow motion, just the\n same. If he hadn't tried that harebrained\n sudden deceleration....\n Coulter shook his head at the memory.\n And on the last mission they'd\n been lucky to get a draw. Those boys\n were good shots.\n\"We're crossing his track, Paul.\n Turn to nine point five o'clock and\n hold 4 G's for thirty-two seconds,\n starting on the count ... five—four—three—two—one—go!\"\n He completed\n the operation in silence, remarking\n to himself how lucky he was\n to have Johnson. The boy loved a",
"Coulter advanced the throttle to\n 5 G's. And with the hiss of power,\n SF 308 began the deadly, intricate,\n precarious maneuver called a combat\n pass—a maneuver inherited from the\n aerial dogfight—though it often turned\n into something more like the\n broadside duels of the old sailing\n ships—as the best and least suicidal\n method of killing a spaceship. To\n start on the enemy's tail, just out of\n his radar range. To come up his track\n at 2 mps relative velocity, firing six\n .30 caliber machine guns from fifty\n miles out. In the last three or four",
"Coulter scanned the full arch of\n sky visible through the curving panels\n of the dome, thinking the turgid\n thoughts that always came when action\n was near. His chest was full of\n the familiar weakness—not fear exactly,\n but a tight, helpless feeling\n that grew and grew with the waiting.\n\n\n His eyes and hands were busy in\n the familiar procedure, readying the\n ship for combat, checking and re-checking\n the details that could mean\n life and death, but his mind watched\n disembodied, yearning back to earth.\n\n\n Sylvia always came back first. Inviting\n smile and outstretched hands.\n Nyloned knees, pink sweater, and\n that clinging, clinging white silk\n skirt. A whirling montage of laughing,\n challenging eyes and tossing sky-black\n hair and soft arms tightening\n around his neck.",
"Anyway, \"right side up\" tied in\n perfectly with the old \"clock\" system\n Garrity had dug out of those magazines\n he was always reading. Once\n they got used to it, it had turned out\n really handy. Old Doc Hoffman, his\n astrogation prof, would have turned\n purple if he'd ever dreamed they'd\n use such a conglomeration. But\n it worked. And when you were\n in a hurry, it worked in a hurry, and\n that was good enough for Coulter.\n He'd submitted a report on it to\n Colonel Silton.\n\n\n \"You've got him, Paul. We're\n dead on his tail, five hundred miles\n back, and matching velocity. Turn\n forty-two degrees right, and you're\n lined up right on him.\" Johnson was\n pleased with the job he'd done.",
"Kovacs and the kids were waiting.\n The armament officer had apparently\n been telling them of Paul's exploits.\n They glowed with admiration. The\n oldest boy, about eleven, had true\n worship in his eyes. He hesitated a\n moment, then asked gravely: \"Would\n you tell us how you kill a Red, sir?\"\n\n\n Paul eyed the time-honored weapon\n that dangled from the youngster's\n hand. He bent over and tapped it\n with his finger. His voice was warm\n and confiding, but his eyes were far\n away.",
"Paul felt no surprise, only relief\n at having the trouble located. The\n reaction to the close call might not\n come till hours later. \"This kind of\n luck we can do without. Can you\n patch the holes?\"\n\n\n \"Ah can patch the one where it\n came in, but it musta been explodin'\n on the way out. There's a hole Ah\n could stick mah head through.\"\n\n\n \"That's a good idea.\" Johnson was\n not usually very witty, but this was\n one he couldn't resist.",
"One hundred\n ninety-two eternal seconds of waiting,\n of deathly silence and deathly\n calm, feeling and hearing nothing\n but the slow pounding of their own\n heartbeats. Each time he got back, it\n faded away, and all he remembered\n was the excitement. But each time\n he went through it, it was worse. Just\n standing and waiting in the silence,\n praying they weren't spotted—staring\n at the unmoving firmament and\n knowing he was a projectile hurtling\n two miles each second straight at a\n clump of metal and flesh that was\n the enemy. Knowing the odds were\n twenty to one against their scoring\n a kill ... unless they ran into him.",
"Guns spoke quietly to Johnson.\n \"Let me know when we kill his RV.\n Ah may get another shot at him.\"\n\n\n And Johnny answered, hurt,\n \"What do you think I'm doing down\n here—reading one of your magazines?\"\n\n\n Paul was struggling with hundred-pound\n arms, trying to focus the telescope\n that swiveled over the panel.\n As the field cleared, he could see that\n the plume was flaring unevenly, flickering\n red and orange along one side.\n Quietly and viciously, he was talking\n to himself. \"Blow! Blow!\"\nAnd she blew. Like a dirty ragged\n bit of fireworks, throwing tiny handfuls\n of sparks into the blackness.\n Something glowed red for a while,\n and slowly faded.\nThere, but for the grace of God....\nPaul shuddered in a confused\n mixture of relief and revulsion.",
"Now, there were Reds around practically\n every mission.\nThirteen missions to go, after today.\nHe wondered if he'd quit at\n seventy-five. Deep inside him, the old\n pride and excitement were still\n strong. He still got a kick out of the\n way the girls looked at the silver\n rocket on his chest. But he didn't\n feel as lucky as he used to. Twenty-nine\n years old, and he was starting\n to feel like an old man. He pictured\n himself lecturing to a group of eager\n kids.\nHad a couple of close calls, those\n last two missions.\nThat Red had\n looked easy, the way he was wandering\n around. He hadn't spotted them",
"When he finished the letter, he\n opened the copy of \"Lady Chatterley's\n Lover\" he had borrowed from\n Rodriguez's limited but colorful library.\n He couldn't keep his mind on\n it. He kept thinking of the armament\n officer.\n\n\n Kovacs was a quiet, intelligent kid,\n devoted to his work. Coulter wasn't\n too intimate with him. He wasn't a\n spaceman, for one thing. One of those\n illogical but powerful distinctions\n that sub-divided the men of the station.\n And he was a little too polite to\n be easy company.",
"And suddenly the waiting was\n over. The ship filled with vibration\n as Guns opened up.\nTwenty-five seconds\n to target.\nHis eyes flicked from\n the sightscreen to the sky ahead,\n looking for the telltale flare of rockets—ready\n to follow like a ferret.\nThere he is!\nAt eighteen miles\n from target, a tiny blue light flickered\n ahead. He forgot everything but the\n sightscreen, concentrating on keeping\n the pip dead center. The guns hammered\n on. It seemed they'd been firing\n for centuries. At ten-mile range,\n the combat radar kicked the automatics\n in, turning the ship ninety\n degrees to her course in one and a\n half seconds. He heard the lee side\n firing cut out, as Garrity hung on\n with two, then three guns.\n\n\n He held it as long as he could.\n Closer than he ever had before. At\n four miles he poured 12 G's for two\n seconds.",
"\"Right, cap'n.\"\nBut it was Paul who couldn't forget\n about it. All the rest of the way\n back to station, he kept seeing visions\n of a panel sliding aside in the nose\n of a sleek and gleaming ship, while\n a small rocket pushed its deadly snout\n forward, and then streaked off at\n tremendous acceleration.\n\n\n Interrogation was brief. The mission\n had turned up nothing new.\n Their kill made eight against seven\n for Doc Miller's crew, and they made\n sure Miller and the boys heard about\n it. They were lightheaded with the\n elation that followed a successful\n mission, swapping insults with the\n rest of the squadron, and reveling in\n the sheer contentment of being back\n safe.\n\n\n It wasn't until he got back to his\n stall, and started to write his father\n a long overdue letter, that he remembered\n he had heard Kovacs say he\n was going on leave.",
"They missed ramming by something\n around a hundred yards. The\n enemy ship flashed across his tail in\n a fraction of a second, already turned\n around and heading up its own track,\n yet it seemed to Paul he could make\n out every detail—the bright red star,\n even the tortured face of the pilot.\n Was there something lopsided in the\n shape of that rocket plume, or was\n he just imagining it in the blur of\n their passing? And did he hear a\nping\njust at that instant, feel the\n ship vibrate for a second?\n\n\n He continued the turn in the direction\n the automatics had started, bringing\n his nose around to watch the\n enemy's track. And as the shape of\n the plume told him the other ship\n was still heading back toward Earth,\n he brought the throttle back up to\n 12 G's, trying to overcome the lead\n his pass had given away.",
"He thought of his father, rocking\n on the porch of the Pennsylvania\n farm, pipe in his mouth, the weathered\n old face serene, as he puffed and\n listened to the radio beside him. He\n wished he'd written him last night,\n instead of joining the usual beer and\n bull session in the wardroom. He\n wished—. He wished.\n\n\n \"I've got him, Paul. He's got two\n point seven miles of RV on us. Take\n thirty degrees high on two point one\n o'clock for course to IP.\"\nAutomatically he turned the control\n wheel to the right and eased it\n back. The gyros recorded the turn to\n course.\n\n\n \"Hold 4 G's for one six five seconds,\n then coast two minutes for initial\n point five hundred miles on his\n tail.\"",
"The second hand hit forty-five in\n its third cycle, and he stood loose in\n the cradle as the power died.\nSixty-two combat missions but the\n government says there's no war.\nHis\n mind wandered back over eight years\n in the service. Intelligence tests. Physical\n tests. Psychological tests. Six\n months of emotional adjustment in\n the screep. Primary training. Basic\n and advanced training. The pride and\n excitement of being chosen for space\n fighters. By the time he graduated,\n the United States and Russia each had\n several satellite stations operating, but\n in 1979, the United States had won\n the race for a permanent station on\n the Moon. What a grind it had been,\n bringing in the supplies."
],
[
"\"Right, cap'n.\"\nBut it was Paul who couldn't forget\n about it. All the rest of the way\n back to station, he kept seeing visions\n of a panel sliding aside in the nose\n of a sleek and gleaming ship, while\n a small rocket pushed its deadly snout\n forward, and then streaked off at\n tremendous acceleration.\n\n\n Interrogation was brief. The mission\n had turned up nothing new.\n Their kill made eight against seven\n for Doc Miller's crew, and they made\n sure Miller and the boys heard about\n it. They were lightheaded with the\n elation that followed a successful\n mission, swapping insults with the\n rest of the squadron, and reveling in\n the sheer contentment of being back\n safe.\n\n\n It wasn't until he got back to his\n stall, and started to write his father\n a long overdue letter, that he remembered\n he had heard Kovacs say he\n was going on leave.",
"Paul felt no surprise, only relief\n at having the trouble located. The\n reaction to the close call might not\n come till hours later. \"This kind of\n luck we can do without. Can you\n patch the holes?\"\n\n\n \"Ah can patch the one where it\n came in, but it musta been explodin'\n on the way out. There's a hole Ah\n could stick mah head through.\"\n\n\n \"That's a good idea.\" Johnson was\n not usually very witty, but this was\n one he couldn't resist.",
"\"Nice work if we could get it.\n I'm not crazy about those broadside\n battles myself. You'd think they'd\n have found something better than\n these thirty caliber popguns by now,\n but the odds say we've got to throw\n as many different chunks of iron as\n we can, to have a chance of hitting\n anything, and even then it's twenty\n to one against us. You wouldn't have\n one chance in a thousand of scoring\n a hit with a bomb at that distance,\n even if they didn't spot it and take\n off. What you'd need would be a\n rocket that could chase them, with\n the bomb for a head. And there's no\n way we could carry that size rocket,\n or fire it if we could. Some day these\n crates will come with men's rooms,\n and we'll have a place to carry something\n like that.\"\n\n\n \"How big would a rocket like that\n be?\"",
"They missed ramming by something\n around a hundred yards. The\n enemy ship flashed across his tail in\n a fraction of a second, already turned\n around and heading up its own track,\n yet it seemed to Paul he could make\n out every detail—the bright red star,\n even the tortured face of the pilot.\n Was there something lopsided in the\n shape of that rocket plume, or was\n he just imagining it in the blur of\n their passing? And did he hear a\nping\njust at that instant, feel the\n ship vibrate for a second?\n\n\n He continued the turn in the direction\n the automatics had started, bringing\n his nose around to watch the\n enemy's track. And as the shape of\n the plume told him the other ship\n was still heading back toward Earth,\n he brought the throttle back up to\n 12 G's, trying to overcome the lead\n his pass had given away.",
"Anyway, \"right side up\" tied in\n perfectly with the old \"clock\" system\n Garrity had dug out of those magazines\n he was always reading. Once\n they got used to it, it had turned out\n really handy. Old Doc Hoffman, his\n astrogation prof, would have turned\n purple if he'd ever dreamed they'd\n use such a conglomeration. But\n it worked. And when you were\n in a hurry, it worked in a hurry, and\n that was good enough for Coulter.\n He'd submitted a report on it to\n Colonel Silton.\n\n\n \"You've got him, Paul. We're\n dead on his tail, five hundred miles\n back, and matching velocity. Turn\n forty-two degrees right, and you're\n lined up right on him.\" Johnson was\n pleased with the job he'd done.",
"\"Forget it, lad. If they ever caught\n us pulling a trick like that, they'd\n have us on hydroponic duty for the\n next five years. They just don't want\n us playing around with bombs, till\n the experts get all the angles figured\n out, and build ships to handle them.\n And besides, who do you think will\n rig a bomb like that, without anybody\n finding out? And where do you think\n we'd get a bomb in the first place?\n They don't leave those things lying\n around. Kovacs watches them like a\n mother hen. I think he counts them\n twice a day.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry, cap'n. Ah just figured if\n you could get hold of a bomb, Ah\n know a few of the boys who could\n rig the thing up for us and keep\n their mouths shut.\"\n\n\n \"Well, forget about it. It's not a\n bad idea, but we haven't any bomb.\"",
"He cut back to 4 G's, noting that\n RVS registered about a mile per\n second away from station, and suddenly\n became aware that the red light\n was on for loss of air. The cabin\n pressure gauge read zero, and his\n heart throbbed into his throat as he\n remembered that\npinging\nsound, just\n as they passed the enemy ship. He\n told Garrity to see if he could locate\n the loss, and any other damage, and\n was shortly startled by a low amazed\n whistle in his earphones.\n\n\n \"If Ah wasn't lookin' at it, Ah\n wouldn't believe it. Musta been one\n of his shells went right around the\n fuel tank and out again, without hittin'\n it. There's at least three inches of\n tank on a line between the holes! He\n musta been throwin' curves at us.\n Man, cap'n, this is our lucky day!\"",
"Kovacs and the kids were waiting.\n The armament officer had apparently\n been telling them of Paul's exploits.\n They glowed with admiration. The\n oldest boy, about eleven, had true\n worship in his eyes. He hesitated a\n moment, then asked gravely: \"Would\n you tell us how you kill a Red, sir?\"\n\n\n Paul eyed the time-honored weapon\n that dangled from the youngster's\n hand. He bent over and tapped it\n with his finger. His voice was warm\n and confiding, but his eyes were far\n away.",
"And suddenly the waiting was\n over. The ship filled with vibration\n as Guns opened up.\nTwenty-five seconds\n to target.\nHis eyes flicked from\n the sightscreen to the sky ahead,\n looking for the telltale flare of rockets—ready\n to follow like a ferret.\nThere he is!\nAt eighteen miles\n from target, a tiny blue light flickered\n ahead. He forgot everything but the\n sightscreen, concentrating on keeping\n the pip dead center. The guns hammered\n on. It seemed they'd been firing\n for centuries. At ten-mile range,\n the combat radar kicked the automatics\n in, turning the ship ninety\n degrees to her course in one and a\n half seconds. He heard the lee side\n firing cut out, as Garrity hung on\n with two, then three guns.\n\n\n He held it as long as he could.\n Closer than he ever had before. At\n four miles he poured 12 G's for two\n seconds.",
"until they were well into their run,\n but when he got started he'd made\n them look like slow motion, just the\n same. If he hadn't tried that harebrained\n sudden deceleration....\n Coulter shook his head at the memory.\n And on the last mission they'd\n been lucky to get a draw. Those boys\n were good shots.\n\"We're crossing his track, Paul.\n Turn to nine point five o'clock and\n hold 4 G's for thirty-two seconds,\n starting on the count ... five—four—three—two—one—go!\"\n He completed\n the operation in silence, remarking\n to himself how lucky he was\n to have Johnson. The boy loved a",
"He thought of his father, rocking\n on the porch of the Pennsylvania\n farm, pipe in his mouth, the weathered\n old face serene, as he puffed and\n listened to the radio beside him. He\n wished he'd written him last night,\n instead of joining the usual beer and\n bull session in the wardroom. He\n wished—. He wished.\n\n\n \"I've got him, Paul. He's got two\n point seven miles of RV on us. Take\n thirty degrees high on two point one\n o'clock for course to IP.\"\nAutomatically he turned the control\n wheel to the right and eased it\n back. The gyros recorded the turn to\n course.\n\n\n \"Hold 4 G's for one six five seconds,\n then coast two minutes for initial\n point five hundred miles on his\n tail.\"",
"He blessed the advantage of better\n radar. In this crazy \"war,\" so like\n the dogfights of the first world war,\n the better than two hundred mile\n edge of American radar was more\n often than not the margin of victory.\n The American crews were a little\n sharper, a little better trained, but\n with their stripped down ships, and\n midget crewmen, with no personal\n safety equipment, the Reds could\n accelerate longer and faster, and go\n farther out. You had to get the jump\n on them, or it was just too bad.",
"Coulter chuckled at the ad lib way\n they operated, remembering the\n courses, the tests, the procedures practiced\n until they could do them backwards\n blindfolded. When they tangled\n with a Red, the Solter co-ordinates\n went out the hatch. They navigated\n by the enemy. There were times\n during a fight when he had no more\n idea of his position than what the\n old ladies told him, and what he\n could see of the Sun, the Earth, and\n the Moon.",
"Guns' drawl broke into his reverie.\n \"Say, cap'n, Ah've been readin' in\n this magazine about a trick they used\n to use, called skip bombin'. They'd\n hang a bomb on the bottom of one\n of these airplanes, and fly along the\n ground, right at what they wanted\n to hit. Then they'd let the bomb go\n and get out of there, and the bomb\n would sail right on into the target.\n You s'pose we could fix this buggy\n up with an A bomb or an H bomb\n we could let go a few hundred miles\n out? Stick a proximity fuse on it, and\n a time fuse, too, in case we missed.\n Just sittin' half a mile apart and\n tradin' shots like we did on that last\n mission is kinda hard on mah nerves,\n and it's startin' to happen too often.\"",
"Coulter advanced the throttle to\n 5 G's. And with the hiss of power,\n SF 308 began the deadly, intricate,\n precarious maneuver called a combat\n pass—a maneuver inherited from the\n aerial dogfight—though it often turned\n into something more like the\n broadside duels of the old sailing\n ships—as the best and least suicidal\n method of killing a spaceship. To\n start on the enemy's tail, just out of\n his radar range. To come up his track\n at 2 mps relative velocity, firing six\n .30 caliber machine guns from fifty\n miles out. In the last three or four",
"And using \"right side up\" as a\n basis for navigation. He chuckled\n again. Still, the service had had to\n concede on \"right side up,\" in designing\n the ships, so there was something\n to be said for it. They hadn't\n been able to simulate gravity without\n fouling up the ships so they had\n to call the pilot's head \"up.\" There\n was something comforting about it.\n He'd driven a couple of the experimental\n jobs, one with the cockpit set\n on gimbals, and one where the whole\n ship rotated, and he hadn't cared for\n them at all. Felt disoriented, with\n something nagging at his mind all\n the time, as though the ships had\n been sabotaged. A couple of pilots\n had gone nuts in the \"spindizzy,\"\n and remembering his own feelings as\n he watched the sky go by, it was easy\n to understand.",
"And meanwhile, the struggle was\n growing deadlier, month by month,\n each side groping for the stranglehold,\n looking for the edge that would\n give domination of space, or make\n all-out war a good risk. They hadn't\n found it yet, but it was getting bloodier\n out here all the time. For a while,\n it had been a supreme achievement\n just to get a ship out and back, but\n gradually, as the ships improved,\n there was a little margin left over for\n weapons. Back a year ago, the average\n patrol was nothing but a sightseeing\n tour. Not that there was much to see,\n when you'd been out a few times.",
"Paul remembered the time he had\n walked into the Muroc Base Officer's\n Club with Marge Halpern on his\n arm. The hunger that had lain undisguised\n on Kovacs' face the moment\n he first saw them. Marge was\n a striking blonde with a direct manner,\n who liked men, especially orbit\n station men. He hadn't thought about\n the incident since then, but the look\n in Kovacs' eyes kept coming back to\n him as he tried to read.\n\n\n He wasn't sure how he got there,\n or why, when he found himself walking\n into Colonel Silton's office to ask\n for the leave he'd passed up at his\n fiftieth mission. He'd considered taking\n it several times, but the thought\n of leaving the squadron, even for a\n couple of weeks, had made him feel\n guilty, as though he were quitting.",
"At eighty-five seconds, he corrected\n slightly to center the pip. The momentary\n hiss of the rockets was a\n relief. He heard the muffled yammering\n as Guns fired a short burst\n from the .30's standing out of their\n compartments around the sides of the\n ship. They were practically recoilless,\n but the burst drifted him forward\n against the cradle harness.",
"Mrs. RVS started to get jittery at\n about ten mps away from home, and\n above fifteen, she was trembling\n steadily. He didn't blame the old\n ladies for worrying. With one hour\n of fuel at 5 G's, you didn't fire a\n single squirt unless there was a good\n reason for it. Most of their time on\n a mission was spent free wheeling,\n in the anxiety-laden boredom that\n fighting men have always known.\nWish the Red was coming in across\n our course.\nIt would have taken less\n fuel, and the chase wouldn't have\n taken them so far out. But then\n they'd probably have been spotted,\n and lost the precious element of surprise."
],
[
"It was a ticklish job explaining\n about Kovacs, but when she understood\n that he just wanted to do a\n friend a favor, and she'd still have\n Paul all to herself, she calmed down.\n They made their arrangements quickly,\n and switched off.\n\n\n He hesitated a minute before he\n called Marge. She was quite a dish\n to give up. Once she'd seen him with\n Sylvia, he'd be strictly\npersona non\n grata\n—that was for sure. It was an\n unhappy thought. Well, maybe it was\n in a good cause. He shrugged and\n called her.\n\n\n She nearly cut him off when she\n first heard his request, but he did\n some fast talking. The idea of several\n days at the cottage intrigued her, and\n when he described how smitten\n Kovacs had been, she brightened up\n and agreed to come. He switched off,\n adjusted the drape of his genuine\n silk scarf, and stepped out of the\n booth.",
"Once he had his papers, he started\n to get excited about it. As he cleaned\n up his paper work and packed his\n musette, his hands were fumbling,\n and his mind was full of Sylvia.\nThe vastness of Muroc Base was as\n incredible as ever. Row on uncounted\n row of neat buildings, each resting at\n the top of its own hundred-yard\n deep elevator shaft. A pulsing, throbbing\n city, dedicated to the long slow\n struggle to get into space and stay\n there. The service crew eyed them\n with studied indifference, as they\n writhed out of the small hatch and\n stepped to the ground. They drew a\n helijet at operations, and headed immediately\n for Los Angeles.\n\n\n Kovacs had been impressed when\n Paul asked if he'd care to room together\n while they were on leave. He\n was quiet on the flight, as he had\n been on the way down, listening contentedly,\n while Paul talked combat\n and women with Bob Parandes, another\n pilot going on leave.",
"Paul remembered the time he had\n walked into the Muroc Base Officer's\n Club with Marge Halpern on his\n arm. The hunger that had lain undisguised\n on Kovacs' face the moment\n he first saw them. Marge was\n a striking blonde with a direct manner,\n who liked men, especially orbit\n station men. He hadn't thought about\n the incident since then, but the look\n in Kovacs' eyes kept coming back to\n him as he tried to read.\n\n\n He wasn't sure how he got there,\n or why, when he found himself walking\n into Colonel Silton's office to ask\n for the leave he'd passed up at his\n fiftieth mission. He'd considered taking\n it several times, but the thought\n of leaving the squadron, even for a\n couple of weeks, had made him feel\n guilty, as though he were quitting.",
"They parked the helijet at Municipal\n Field and headed for the public\n PV booths, picking up a coterie of\n two dogs and five assorted children\n on the way. The kids followed quietly\n in their wake, ecstatic at the sight of\n their uniforms.\n\n\n Paul squared his shoulders, as befitted\n a hero, and tousled a couple of\n uncombed heads as they walked. The\n kids clustered around the booths, as\n Kovacs entered one to locate a hotel\n room, and Paul another, to call\n Sylvia.\n\n\n \"Honey, I've been so scared you\n weren't coming back. Where are you?\n When will I see you? Why didn't\n you write?...\" She sputtered to a\n stop as he held up both hands in\n defense.",
"Kovacs and the kids were waiting.\n The armament officer had apparently\n been telling them of Paul's exploits.\n They glowed with admiration. The\n oldest boy, about eleven, had true\n worship in his eyes. He hesitated a\n moment, then asked gravely: \"Would\n you tell us how you kill a Red, sir?\"\n\n\n Paul eyed the time-honored weapon\n that dangled from the youngster's\n hand. He bent over and tapped it\n with his finger. His voice was warm\n and confiding, but his eyes were far\n away.",
"\"Whoa, baby. One thing at a time.\n I'm at the airport. You'll see me tonight,\n and I'll tell you the rest then.\n That is, if you're free tonight. And\n tomorrow. And the day after, and\n the day after that. Are you free?\"\n\n\n Her hesitation was only momentary.\n \"Well, I was going out—with\n a girl friend. But she'll understand.\n What's up?\"\n\n\n He took a deep breath. \"I'd like\n to get out of the city for a few days,\n where we can take things easy and\n be away from the crowds. And there\n is another guy I'd like to bring\n along.\"\n\n\n \"We could take my helijet out to\n my dad's cottage at—\nWhat did you\n say?\n\"",
"\"Right, cap'n.\"\nBut it was Paul who couldn't forget\n about it. All the rest of the way\n back to station, he kept seeing visions\n of a panel sliding aside in the nose\n of a sleek and gleaming ship, while\n a small rocket pushed its deadly snout\n forward, and then streaked off at\n tremendous acceleration.\n\n\n Interrogation was brief. The mission\n had turned up nothing new.\n Their kill made eight against seven\n for Doc Miller's crew, and they made\n sure Miller and the boys heard about\n it. They were lightheaded with the\n elation that followed a successful\n mission, swapping insults with the\n rest of the squadron, and reveling in\n the sheer contentment of being back\n safe.\n\n\n It wasn't until he got back to his\n stall, and started to write his father\n a long overdue letter, that he remembered\n he had heard Kovacs say he\n was going on leave.",
"When he finished the letter, he\n opened the copy of \"Lady Chatterley's\n Lover\" he had borrowed from\n Rodriguez's limited but colorful library.\n He couldn't keep his mind on\n it. He kept thinking of the armament\n officer.\n\n\n Kovacs was a quiet, intelligent kid,\n devoted to his work. Coulter wasn't\n too intimate with him. He wasn't a\n spaceman, for one thing. One of those\n illogical but powerful distinctions\n that sub-divided the men of the station.\n And he was a little too polite to\n be easy company.",
"Guns spoke quietly to Johnson.\n \"Let me know when we kill his RV.\n Ah may get another shot at him.\"\n\n\n And Johnny answered, hurt,\n \"What do you think I'm doing down\n here—reading one of your magazines?\"\n\n\n Paul was struggling with hundred-pound\n arms, trying to focus the telescope\n that swiveled over the panel.\n As the field cleared, he could see that\n the plume was flaring unevenly, flickering\n red and orange along one side.\n Quietly and viciously, he was talking\n to himself. \"Blow! Blow!\"\nAnd she blew. Like a dirty ragged\n bit of fireworks, throwing tiny handfuls\n of sparks into the blackness.\n Something glowed red for a while,\n and slowly faded.\nThere, but for the grace of God....\nPaul shuddered in a confused\n mixture of relief and revulsion.",
"Coulter scanned the full arch of\n sky visible through the curving panels\n of the dome, thinking the turgid\n thoughts that always came when action\n was near. His chest was full of\n the familiar weakness—not fear exactly,\n but a tight, helpless feeling\n that grew and grew with the waiting.\n\n\n His eyes and hands were busy in\n the familiar procedure, readying the\n ship for combat, checking and re-checking\n the details that could mean\n life and death, but his mind watched\n disembodied, yearning back to earth.\n\n\n Sylvia always came back first. Inviting\n smile and outstretched hands.\n Nyloned knees, pink sweater, and\n that clinging, clinging white silk\n skirt. A whirling montage of laughing,\n challenging eyes and tossing sky-black\n hair and soft arms tightening\n around his neck.",
"\"O.K., let me know as soon as you\n have his course.\" Coulter squashed\n out his cigar and began his cockpit\n check, grinning without humor as he\n noticed that his breathing had deepened\n and his palms were moist on\n the controls. He looked down to\n make sure his radio was snug in its\n pocket on his leg; checked the thigh\n harness of his emergency rocket,\n wrapped in its thick belly pad; checked\n the paired tanks of oxygen behind\n him, hanging level from his shoulders\n into their niche in the \"cradle.\"\n He flipped his helmet closed, locked\n it, and opened it again. He tossed\n a sardonic salute at the photograph\n of a young lady who graced the side\n of the cockpit. \"Wish us luck, sugar.\"\n He pressed the mike button again.\n\n\n \"You got anything yet, Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"He's going our way, Paul. Have\n it exact in a minute.\"",
"Paul felt no surprise, only relief\n at having the trouble located. The\n reaction to the close call might not\n come till hours later. \"This kind of\n luck we can do without. Can you\n patch the holes?\"\n\n\n \"Ah can patch the one where it\n came in, but it musta been explodin'\n on the way out. There's a hole Ah\n could stick mah head through.\"\n\n\n \"That's a good idea.\" Johnson was\n not usually very witty, but this was\n one he couldn't resist.",
"until they were well into their run,\n but when he got started he'd made\n them look like slow motion, just the\n same. If he hadn't tried that harebrained\n sudden deceleration....\n Coulter shook his head at the memory.\n And on the last mission they'd\n been lucky to get a draw. Those boys\n were good shots.\n\"We're crossing his track, Paul.\n Turn to nine point five o'clock and\n hold 4 G's for thirty-two seconds,\n starting on the count ... five—four—three—two—one—go!\"\n He completed\n the operation in silence, remarking\n to himself how lucky he was\n to have Johnson. The boy loved a",
"Then Jean, cool and self-possessed\n and slightly disapproving,\n with warmth and humor peeping\n through from underneath when she\n smiled. A lazy, crinkly kind of smile,\n like Christmas lights going on one\n by one. He wished he'd acted more\n grown up that night they watched\n the rain dance at the pueblo. For the\n hundredth time, he went over what\n he remembered of their last date,\n seeing the gleam of her shoulder, and\n the angry disappointment in her eyes;\n hearing again his awkward apologies.\n She was a nice kid. Silently his mouth\n formed the words. \"You're a nice\n kid.\"\nI think she loves me. She was just\n mad because I got drunk.\nThe tension of approaching combat\n suddenly blended with the memory,\n welling up into a rush of tenderness\n and affection. He whispered her\n name, and suddenly he knew that if\n he got back he was going to ask her\n to marry him.",
"He thought of his father, rocking\n on the porch of the Pennsylvania\n farm, pipe in his mouth, the weathered\n old face serene, as he puffed and\n listened to the radio beside him. He\n wished he'd written him last night,\n instead of joining the usual beer and\n bull session in the wardroom. He\n wished—. He wished.\n\n\n \"I've got him, Paul. He's got two\n point seven miles of RV on us. Take\n thirty degrees high on two point one\n o'clock for course to IP.\"\nAutomatically he turned the control\n wheel to the right and eased it\n back. The gyros recorded the turn to\n course.\n\n\n \"Hold 4 G's for one six five seconds,\n then coast two minutes for initial\n point five hundred miles on his\n tail.\"",
"Anyway, \"right side up\" tied in\n perfectly with the old \"clock\" system\n Garrity had dug out of those magazines\n he was always reading. Once\n they got used to it, it had turned out\n really handy. Old Doc Hoffman, his\n astrogation prof, would have turned\n purple if he'd ever dreamed they'd\n use such a conglomeration. But\n it worked. And when you were\n in a hurry, it worked in a hurry, and\n that was good enough for Coulter.\n He'd submitted a report on it to\n Colonel Silton.\n\n\n \"You've got him, Paul. We're\n dead on his tail, five hundred miles\n back, and matching velocity. Turn\n forty-two degrees right, and you're\n lined up right on him.\" Johnson was\n pleased with the job he'd done.",
"Mrs. RVS started to get jittery at\n about ten mps away from home, and\n above fifteen, she was trembling\n steadily. He didn't blame the old\n ladies for worrying. With one hour\n of fuel at 5 G's, you didn't fire a\n single squirt unless there was a good\n reason for it. Most of their time on\n a mission was spent free wheeling,\n in the anxiety-laden boredom that\n fighting men have always known.\nWish the Red was coming in across\n our course.\nIt would have taken less\n fuel, and the chase wouldn't have\n taken them so far out. But then\n they'd probably have been spotted,\n and lost the precious element of surprise.",
"Now, there were Reds around practically\n every mission.\nThirteen missions to go, after today.\nHe wondered if he'd quit at\n seventy-five. Deep inside him, the old\n pride and excitement were still\n strong. He still got a kick out of the\n way the girls looked at the silver\n rocket on his chest. But he didn't\n feel as lucky as he used to. Twenty-nine\n years old, and he was starting\n to feel like an old man. He pictured\n himself lecturing to a group of eager\n kids.\nHad a couple of close calls, those\n last two missions.\nThat Red had\n looked easy, the way he was wandering\n around. He hadn't spotted them",
"seconds, to break out just enough to\n clear him, praying that he won't\n break in the same direction.\nAnd to\n keep on going.\nFour minutes and thirty-four seconds\n to the break.\nSixty seconds at\n 5 G's; one hundred ninety-two seconds\n of free wheeling; and then, if\n they were lucky, the twenty-two frantic\n seconds they were out here for—throwing\n a few pounds of steel slugs\n out before them in one unbroken\n burst, groping out fifty miles into\n the darkness with steel and radar fingers\n to kill a duplicate of themselves.\nThis is the worst. These three minutes\n are the worst.",
"Coulter chuckled at the ad lib way\n they operated, remembering the\n courses, the tests, the procedures practiced\n until they could do them backwards\n blindfolded. When they tangled\n with a Red, the Solter co-ordinates\n went out the hatch. They navigated\n by the enemy. There were times\n during a fight when he had no more\n idea of his position than what the\n old ladies told him, and what he\n could see of the Sun, the Earth, and\n the Moon."
]
] |
valid
|
22958
|
[
"What did the Ludmilla drop?",
"What is the CIA?",
"How did the divers find what the object was?",
"Who put the bomb on the ship?",
"Why did they choose Mr. Braun to make the decision about the object?",
"Why is Braun at peace?",
"What is the name of the character telling the story?",
"Why does Braun sponsor beginning actresses?",
"Why didn't the city get evacuated?",
"What would have happened if Braun gave a different answer to his big question?"
] |
[
[
"Nothing",
"An egg",
"A live bomb",
"A dead bomb"
],
[
"We never learn",
"A civilian organization in charge of keeping the country safe",
"A government agency in charge of keeping the country safe",
"A group of people in charge of defusing bombs"
],
[
"They didn't find out",
"The unscrewed the top",
"They used ESP experiments",
"They used a Geiger Counter"
],
[
"People in Gdynia",
"Polish",
"Commies",
"The CIA"
],
[
"He was a good gambler",
"He was going to run for Congress",
"We do not get a reason",
"His family was in the city so it mattered more"
],
[
"He saved his family",
"He is free to run for Congress",
"He finally has a job",
"He gets to be valuable and respectable doing what he loves"
],
[
"Andy",
"Braun",
"Clark",
"Anderton"
],
[
"He wants to have a romantic connection with them.",
"His wife likes young talent.",
"He believes they will become famous and earn him money.",
"He is cursed with a conscience."
],
[
"The CIA members disagreed on what to do.",
"There was not enough time.",
"The chaos could have caused more damage.",
"There was no actual danger to civilians."
],
[
"The city would be destroyed.",
"He would have been out of a new job.",
"He would have lost his chance at Congress.",
"He would have gotten in trouble for gambling debt."
]
] |
[
4,
2,
2,
3,
1,
4,
1,
4,
4,
2
] |
[
0,
0,
0,
1,
0,
0,
0,
0,
1,
1
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[
[
"\"No, not exactly,\" I said. \"The\n enemy's responsible for the drop, all\n right. We got word last month from\n our man in Gdynia that they were\n going to do it, and that the bomb\n would be on board the\nLudmilla\n. As\n I say, it was too good an opportunity\n to miss. We wanted to find out just\n how long it would take us to figure\n out the nature of the bomb—which\n we didn't know in detail—after it\n was dropped here. So we had our\n people in Gdynia defuse the thing\n after it was put on board the ship,\n but otherwise leave it entirely alone.\n\n\n \"Actually, you see, your hunch was\n right on the button as far as it went.\n We didn't ask you whether or not\n that object was a live bomb. We\n asked whether it was a bomb or not.\n You said it was, and you were right.\"",
"All of which had nothing to do\n with why I was prowling around the\nLudmilla\n—or did it? I kept remembering\n Anderton's challenge: \"You\n can't take such a gamble. There are\n eight and a half million lives riding\n on it—\" That put it up into Braun's\n normal operating area, all right. The\n connection was still hazy, but on the\n grounds that any link might be useful,\n I phoned him.",
"\"The automatic compartment bulkheads\n on the\nLudmilla\nwere defective,\"\n he said. \"It seems that this\n egg was buried among a lot of other\n crates in the dump-cell of the\n hold—\"\n\n\n \"What's a dump cell?\"\n\n\n \"It's a sea lock for getting rid of\n dangerous cargo. The bottom of it\n opens right to Davy Jones. Standard\n fitting for ships carrying explosives,\n radioactives, anything that might act\n up unexpectedly.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said. \"Go ahead.\"",
"\"You passed your authority to us\n when you hired us,\" I pointed out.\n \"If you want to evacuate without our\n O.K., you'll have to fire us first. It'll\n take another hour to get that cleared\n from Washington—so you might as\n well give us the hour.\"\n\n\n He stared at me for a moment, his\n lips thinned. Then he picked up the\n phone again to order Joan's blood\n count, and I got out the door, fast.\nA reasonable man would have said\n that I found nothing useful on the\nLudmilla\n, except negative information.\n But the fact is that anything I\n found would have been a surprise to\n me; I went down looking for surprises.\n I found nothing but a faint\n trail to Abner Longmans Braun, most\n of which was fifteen years cold.",
"\"Well, there was a timer on the\n dump-cell floor, set to drop the egg\n when the ship came up the river.\n That worked fine, but the automatic\n bulkheads that are supposed to keep\n the rest of the ship from being flooded\n while the cell's open, didn't. At\n least they didn't do a thorough job.\n The\nLudmilla\nbegan to list and the\n captain yelled for help. When the\n Harbor Patrol found the dump-cell\n open, they called us in.\"\n\n\n \"I see.\" I thought about it a moment.\n \"In other words, you don't\n know whether the\nLudmilla\nreally\n laid an egg or not.\"",
"\"In other words, it's a dud,\" Joan\n said.\n\n\n \"That's right, a dud.\"\n\n\n Now, at last, Braun wiped his face,\n which was quite gray. \"I told you\n the truth,\" he said grimly. \"My\n hunches don't work on stuff like\n this.\"\n\n\n \"But they do,\" I said. \"I'm sorry\n we put you through the wringer—and\n you too, colonel—but we couldn't\n let an opportunity like this slip.\n It was too good a chance for us to\n test how our facilities would stand\n up in a real bomb-drop.\"\n\n\n \"A real drop?\" Anderton said.\n \"Are you trying to say that CIA\n staged this? You ought to be shot,\n the whole pack of you!\"",
"\"That's what I keep trying to explain\n to you, Dr. Harris. We don't\n know what she dropped and we\n haven't any way of finding out. It\n could be a bomb—it could be anything.\n We're sweating everybody on\n board the ship now, but it's my guess\n that none of them know anything;\n the whole procedure was designed to\n be automatic.\"\n\n\n \"All right, we'll take it,\" I said.\n \"You've got divers down?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, but—\"\n\n\n \"We'll worry about the buts from\n here on. Get us a direct line from\n your barge to the big board here so\n we can direct the work. Better get\n on over here yourself.\"",
"I nodded. He closed his eyes. An\n unexpected stab of pure fright went\n down my back. Without the eyes,\n Braun's face was a death mask.\n\n\n The water sounds and the irregular\n ticking of a Geiger counter\n seemed to spring out from the audio\n speaker, four times as loud as before.\n I could even hear the pen of\n the seismograph scribbling away, until\n I looked at the instrument and\n saw that Clark had stopped it, probably\n long ago.\n\n\n Droplets of sweat began to form\n along Braun's forehead and his upper\n lip. The handkerchief remained\n crushed in his hand.\n\n\n Anderton said, \"Of all the fool—\"",
"It was already open; Anderton had\n gone to work quickly and with decision\n once he was sure we were taking\n on the major question. The television\n screen lit, but nothing showed\n on it but murky light, striped with\n streamers of darkness slowly rising\n and falling. The audio went\ncloonck\n...\noing\n,\noing\n...\nbonk\n...\noing\n... Underwater noises, shapeless\n and characterless.\n\n\n \"Hello, out there in the harbor.\n This is CIA, Harris calling. Come in,\n please.\"\n\n\n \"Monig here,\" the audio said.\nBoink\n...\noing\n,\noing\n...\n\n\n \"Got anything yet?\"\n\n\n \"Not a thing, Dr. Harris,\" Monig\n said. \"You can't see three inches in\n front of your face down here—it's\n too silty. We've bumped into a couple\n of crates, but so far, no egg.\"",
"ONE-SHOT\nYou\n can do a great deal if\n you have enough data, and\n enough time to compute on it,\n by logical methods. But given\n the situation that neither data\n nor time is adequate, and an\n answer must be produced ...\n what do you do?\nBY JAMES BLISH\nIllustrated by van Dongen\n\n\n On the day that the Polish freighter\nLudmilla\nlaid an egg in New\n York harbor, Abner Longmans\n (\"One-Shot\") Braun was in the city\n going about his normal business,\n which was making another million\n dollars. As we found out later, almost\n nothing else was normal about\n that particular week end for Braun.\n For one thing, he had brought his\n family with him—a complete departure\n from routine—reflecting the unprecedentedly\n legitimate nature of\n the deals he was trying to make.\n From every point of view it was a\n bad week end for the CIA to mix\n into his affairs, but nobody had explained\n that to the master of the\nLudmilla\n.",
"The expression on Braun's face\n was exactly like the one he had worn\n while he had been searching for his\n decision—except that, since his eyes\n were open, I could see that it was\n directed at me. \"If this was the old\n days,\" he said in an ice-cold voice,\n \"I might of made the colonel's idea\n come true. I don't go for tricks like\n this, Andy.\"\n\n\n \"It was more than a trick,\" Clark\n put in. \"You'll remember we had\n a deadline on the test, Mr. Braun.\n Obviously, in a real drop we wouldn't\n have all the time in the world\n to figure out what kind of a thing\n had been dropped. If we had still\n failed to establish that when the\n deadline ran out, we would have\n had to allow evacuation of the city,\n with all the attendant risk that that\n was exactly what the enemy wanted\n us to do.\"\n\n\n \"So?\"",
"I called headquarters and sent a\n messenger to my apartment to look\n for one of those long-dusty blue folders\n with the legal-length sheets inside\n them, with orders to scorch it over\n to Braun without stopping to breathe\n more than once. Then I went back\n myself.\n\n\n The atmosphere had changed. Anderton\n was sitting by the big desk,\n clenching his fists and sweating; his\n whole posture telegraphed his controlled\n helplessness. Cheyney was\n bent over a seismograph, echo-sounding\n for the egg through the river\n bottom. If that even had a prayer of\n working, I knew, he'd have had the\n trains of the Hudson & Manhattan\n stopped; their rumbling course\n through their tubes would have\n blanked out any possible echo-pip\n from the egg.\n\n\n \"Wild goose chase?\" Joan said,\n scanning my face.",
"\"Mr. Braun, this is Joan Hadamard,\n Clark Cheyney, Colonel Anderton.\n I'll be quick because we need\n speed now. A Polish ship has dropped\n something out in the harbor.\n We don't know what it is. It may be\n a hell-bomb, or it may be just somebody's\n old laundry. Obviously we've\n got to find out which—and we want\n you to tell us.\"\n\n\n Braun's aristocratic eyebrows went\n up. \"Me? Hell, Andy, I don't know\n nothing about things like that. I'm\n surprised with you. I thought CIA\n had all the brains it needed—ain't\n you got machines to tell you answers\n like that?\"\n\n\n I pointed silently to Joan, who had\n gone back to work the moment the\n introductions were over. She was still\n on the mike to the divers. She was\n saying: \"What does it look like?\"",
"\"So we failed the test,\" I said. \"At\n one minute short of the deadline,\n Joan had the divers unscrew the cap.\n In a real drop that would have resulted\n in a detonation, if the bomb\n was real; we'd never risk it. That\n we did do it in the test was a concession\n of failure—an admission that\n our usual methods didn't come\n through for us in time.\n\n\n \"And that means that you were\n the only person who did come\n through, Mr. Braun. If a real bomb-drop\n ever comes, we're going to have\n to have you here, as an active part of\n our investigation. Your intuition for\n the one-shot gamble was the one\n thing that bailed us out this time.\n Next time it may save eight million\n lives.\"\n\n\n There was quite a long silence. All\n of us, Anderton included, watched\n Braun intently, but his impassive\n face failed to show any trace of how\n his thoughts were running.",
"Cheyney did not let go; instead,\n he looked inquiringly at Joan and\n said, \"One minute, Joan. You might\n as well go ahead.\"\n\n\n She nodded and spoke into the\n mike. \"Monig, unscrew the cap.\"\n\n\n \"Unscrew the cap?\" the audio\n squawked. \"But Dr. Hadamard, if\n that sets it off—\"\n\n\n \"It won't go off. That's the one\n thing you can be sure it won't do.\"\n\n\n \"What is this?\" Anderton demanded.\n \"And what's this deadline\n stuff, anyhow?\"\n\n\n \"The cap's off,\" Monig reported.\n \"We're getting plenty of radiation\n now. Just a minute— Yeah. Dr.\n Hadamard, it's a bomb, all right.\n But it hasn't got a fuse. Now how\n could they have made a fool mistake\n like that?\"",
"\"Let us do the guessing, Monig.\n All right, maybe it's got a clockwork\n fuse that didn't break with the impact.\n Or a gyroscopic fuse. Stick a\n stethoscope on it and see if you pick\n up a ticking or anything that sounds\n like a motor running.\"\nThere was a lag and I turned back\n to Braun. \"As you can see, we're\n stymied. This is a long shot, Mr.\n Braun. One throw of the dice—one\n show-down hand. We've got to have\n an expert call it for us—somebody\n with a record of hits on long shots.\n That's why I called you.\"\n\n\n \"It's no good,\" he said. He took\n off the Homburg, took his handkerchief\n from his breast pocket, and\n wiped the hatband. \"I can't do it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\"",
"\"And it's my guess that we're\n never going to get the answer by\n diving for it—not in time, anyhow.\n Remember when the Navy lost a\n barge-load of shells in the harbor,\n back in '52? They scrabbled for them\n for a year and never pulled up a one;\n they finally had to warn the public\n that if it found anything funny-looking\n along the shore it shouldn't bang\n said object, or shake it either. We're\n better equipped than the Navy was\n then—but we're working against a\n deadline.\"\n\n\n \"If you'd admitted that earlier,\"\n Anderton said hoarsely, \"we'd have\n half a million people out of the city\n by now. Maybe even a million.\"",
"\"It's just a lump of something,\n Dr. Hadamard. Can't even tell its\n shape—it's buried too deeply in the\n mud.\"\nCloonk\n...\nOing\n,\noing\n...\n\n\n \"Try the Geiger.\"\n\n\n \"We did. Nothing but background.\"\n\n\n \"Scintillation counter?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing, Dr. Hadamard. Could\n be it's shielded.\"",
"\"Hush!\" Joan said quietly.\nSlowly, Braun opened his eyes.\n \"All right,\" he said. \"You guys\n wanted it this way.\nI say it's a bomb.\n\"\n He stared at us for a moment more—and\n then, all at once, the Timkin\n bearing burst. Words poured out of\n it. \"Now you guys do something, do\n your job like I did mine—get my\n wife and kids out of there—empty\n the city—do something,\ndo something\n!\"\n\n\n Anderton was already grabbing\n for the phone. \"You're right, Mr.\n Braun. If it isn't already too late—\"\n\n\n Cheyney shot out a hand and\n caught Anderton's telephone arm by\n the wrist. \"Wait a minute,\" he said.\n\n\n \"What d'you mean, 'wait a minute'?\n Haven't you already shot\n enough time?\"",
"She had been right; within the\n year, Braun had announced the\n founding of an association for clearing\n the Detroit slum area where he\n had been born—the plainest kind of\n symbolic suicide:\nLet's not have any\n more Abner Longmans Brauns born\n down here\n. It depressed me to see it\n happen, for next on Joan's agenda\n for Braun was an entry into politics\n as a fighting liberal—a New Dealer\n twenty years too late. Since I'm mildly\n liberal myself when I'm off duty,\n I hated to think what Braun's career\n might tell me about my own motives,\n if I'd let it."
],
[
"I had better add here that we\n knew nothing about this until afterward;\n from the point of view of the\n storyteller, an organization like Civilian\n Intelligence Associates gets to\n all its facts backwards, entering the\n tale at the pay-off, working back to\n the hook, and winding up with a\n sheaf of background facts to feed\n into the computer for Next Time. It's\n rough on the various people who've\n tried to fictionalize what we do—particularly\n for the lazy examples of\n the breed, who come to us expecting\n that their plotting has already been\n done for them—but it's inherent in\n the way we operate, and there it is.",
"\"That I can't tell you over the\n phone. But it's the biggest gamble\n there ever was, and I think we need\n an expert. Can you come down to\n CIA's central headquarters right\n away?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, if it's that big. If it ain't,\n I got lots of business here, Andy.\n And I ain't going to be in town long.\n You're sure it's top stuff?\"\n\n\n \"My word on it.\"\n\n\n He was silent a moment. Then he\n said, \"Andy, send me your paper.\"\n\n\n \"The paper? Sure, but—\" Then I\n got it. I'd given him my word.\n \"You'll get it,\" I said. \"Thanks, Mr.\n Braun.\"",
"Certainly nobody at CIA so much\n as thought of Braun when the news\n first came through. Harry Anderton,\n the Harbor Defense chief, called us\n at 0830 Friday to take on the job of\n identifying the egg; this was when\n our records show us officially entering\n the affair, but, of course, Anderton\n had been keeping the wires to\n Washington steaming for an hour before\n that, getting authorization to\n spend some of his money on us (our\n clearance status was then and is now\n C&R—clean and routine).\n\n\n I was in the central office when\n the call came through, and had some\n difficulty in making out precisely\n what Anderton wanted of us. \"Slow\n down, Colonel Anderton, please,\" I\n begged him. \"Two or three seconds\n won't make that much difference.\n How did you find out about this egg\n in the first place?\"",
"\"In other words, it's a dud,\" Joan\n said.\n\n\n \"That's right, a dud.\"\n\n\n Now, at last, Braun wiped his face,\n which was quite gray. \"I told you\n the truth,\" he said grimly. \"My\n hunches don't work on stuff like\n this.\"\n\n\n \"But they do,\" I said. \"I'm sorry\n we put you through the wringer—and\n you too, colonel—but we couldn't\n let an opportunity like this slip.\n It was too good a chance for us to\n test how our facilities would stand\n up in a real bomb-drop.\"\n\n\n \"A real drop?\" Anderton said.\n \"Are you trying to say that CIA\n staged this? You ought to be shot,\n the whole pack of you!\"",
"\"Right.\" He sounded relieved.\n Official people have a lot of confidence\n in CIA; too much, in my estimation.\n Some day the job will come\n along that we can't handle, and then\n Washington will be kicking itself—or,\n more likely, some scapegoat—for\n having failed to develop a comparable\n government department.",
"\"Mr. Braun, this is Joan Hadamard,\n Clark Cheyney, Colonel Anderton.\n I'll be quick because we need\n speed now. A Polish ship has dropped\n something out in the harbor.\n We don't know what it is. It may be\n a hell-bomb, or it may be just somebody's\n old laundry. Obviously we've\n got to find out which—and we want\n you to tell us.\"\n\n\n Braun's aristocratic eyebrows went\n up. \"Me? Hell, Andy, I don't know\n nothing about things like that. I'm\n surprised with you. I thought CIA\n had all the brains it needed—ain't\n you got machines to tell you answers\n like that?\"\n\n\n I pointed silently to Joan, who had\n gone back to work the moment the\n introductions were over. She was still\n on the mike to the divers. She was\n saying: \"What does it look like?\"",
"He remembered me instantly; like\n most uneducated, power-driven men,\n he had a memory as good as any machine's.\n\n\n \"You never did send me that paper\n you was going to write,\" he said. His\n voice seemed absolutely unchanged,\n although he was in his seventies now.\n \"You promised you would.\"\n\n\n \"Kids don't keep their promises\n as well as they should,\" I said. \"But\n I've still got copies and I'll see to it\n that you get one, this time. Right\n now I need another favor—something\n right up your alley.\"\n\n\n \"CIA business?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I didn't know you knew I\n was with CIA.\"\n\n\n Braun chuckled. \"I still know a\n thing or two,\" he said. \"What's the\n angle?\"",
"It was already open; Anderton had\n gone to work quickly and with decision\n once he was sure we were taking\n on the major question. The television\n screen lit, but nothing showed\n on it but murky light, striped with\n streamers of darkness slowly rising\n and falling. The audio went\ncloonck\n...\noing\n,\noing\n...\nbonk\n...\noing\n... Underwater noises, shapeless\n and characterless.\n\n\n \"Hello, out there in the harbor.\n This is CIA, Harris calling. Come in,\n please.\"\n\n\n \"Monig here,\" the audio said.\nBoink\n...\noing\n,\noing\n...\n\n\n \"Got anything yet?\"\n\n\n \"Not a thing, Dr. Harris,\" Monig\n said. \"You can't see three inches in\n front of your face down here—it's\n too silty. We've bumped into a couple\n of crates, but so far, no egg.\"",
"said wasn't going to be reversed\n within the practicable lifetime of\n CIA.\nI buzzed for two staffers, and in\n five minutes got Clark Cheyney and\n Joan Hadamard, CIA's business manager\n and social science division chief\n respectively. The titles were almost\n solely for the benefit of the T/O—that\n is, Clark and Joan do serve in\n those capacities, but said service takes\n about two per cent of their capacities\n and their time. I shot them a couple\n of sentences of explanation, trusting\n them to pick up whatever else they\n needed from the tape, and checked\n the line to the divers' barge.",
"\"Hey,\" Anderton said, putting the\n phone down again. \"Are you going\n to duck out just like that? Remember,\n Dr. Harris, we've got to evacuate the\n city first of all! No matter whether\n it's a real egg or not—we can't take\n the chance on it's\nnot\nbeing an egg!\"\n\n\n \"Don't move a man until you get\n a go-ahead from CIA,\" I said. \"For\n all we know now, evacuating the city\n may be just what the enemy wants us\n to do—so they can grab it unharmed.\n Or they may want to start a panic\n for some other reason, any one of\n fifty possible reasons.\"\n\n\n \"You can't take such a gamble,\"\n he said grimly. \"There are eight and\n a half million lives riding on it. I\n can't let you do it.\"",
"Not that there was much prospect\n of Washington's doing that. Official\n thinking had been running in the\n other direction for years. The precedent\n was the Associated Universities\n organization which ran Brookhaven;\n CIA had been started the same way,\n by a loose corporation of universities\n and industries all of which had\n wanted to own an ULTIMAC and\n no one of which had had the money\n to buy one for itself. The Eisenhower\n administration, with its emphasis\n on private enterprise and concomitant\n reluctance to sink federal\n funds into projects of such size, had\n turned the two examples into a nice\n fat trend, which ULTIMAC herself",
"\"So we failed the test,\" I said. \"At\n one minute short of the deadline,\n Joan had the divers unscrew the cap.\n In a real drop that would have resulted\n in a detonation, if the bomb\n was real; we'd never risk it. That\n we did do it in the test was a concession\n of failure—an admission that\n our usual methods didn't come\n through for us in time.\n\n\n \"And that means that you were\n the only person who did come\n through, Mr. Braun. If a real bomb-drop\n ever comes, we're going to have\n to have you here, as an active part of\n our investigation. Your intuition for\n the one-shot gamble was the one\n thing that bailed us out this time.\n Next time it may save eight million\n lives.\"\n\n\n There was quite a long silence. All\n of us, Anderton included, watched\n Braun intently, but his impassive\n face failed to show any trace of how\n his thoughts were running.",
"\"No, not exactly,\" I said. \"The\n enemy's responsible for the drop, all\n right. We got word last month from\n our man in Gdynia that they were\n going to do it, and that the bomb\n would be on board the\nLudmilla\n. As\n I say, it was too good an opportunity\n to miss. We wanted to find out just\n how long it would take us to figure\n out the nature of the bomb—which\n we didn't know in detail—after it\n was dropped here. So we had our\n people in Gdynia defuse the thing\n after it was put on board the ship,\n but otherwise leave it entirely alone.\n\n\n \"Actually, you see, your hunch was\n right on the button as far as it went.\n We didn't ask you whether or not\n that object was a live bomb. We\n asked whether it was a bomb or not.\n You said it was, and you were right.\"",
"There'd been a time when I'd\n known Braun, briefly and to no\n profit to either of us. As an undergraduate\n majoring in social sciences,\n I'd taken on a term paper on the old\n International Longshoreman's Association,\n a racket-ridden union now\n formally extinct—although anyone\n who knew the signs could still pick\n up some traces on the docks. In those\n days, Braun had been the business\n manager of an insurance firm, the\n sole visible function of which had\n been to write policies for the ILA\n and its individual dock-wallopers.\n For some reason, he had been amused\n by the brash youngster who'd barged\n in on him and demanded the lowdown,\n and had shown me considerable\n lengths of ropes not normally\n in view of the public—nothing incriminating,\n but enough to give me\n a better insight into how the union\n operated than I had had any right to\n expect—or even suspect.",
"\"Not quite. I've got something, if\n I can just figure out what it is. Remember\n One-Shot Braun?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. What's he got to do with\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" I said. \"But I want\n to bring him in. I don't think we'll\n lick this project before deadline without\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What good is a professional\n gambler on a job like this? He'll just\n get in the way.\"\n\n\n I looked toward the television\n screen, which now showed an\n amorphous black mass, jutting up\n from a foundation of even deeper\n black. \"Is that operation getting you\n anywhere?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing's gotten us anywhere,\"\n Anderton interjected harshly. \"We\n don't even know if that's the egg—the\n whole area is littered with crates.\n Harris, you've got to let me get that\n alert out!\"",
"\"You passed your authority to us\n when you hired us,\" I pointed out.\n \"If you want to evacuate without our\n O.K., you'll have to fire us first. It'll\n take another hour to get that cleared\n from Washington—so you might as\n well give us the hour.\"\n\n\n He stared at me for a moment, his\n lips thinned. Then he picked up the\n phone again to order Joan's blood\n count, and I got out the door, fast.\nA reasonable man would have said\n that I found nothing useful on the\nLudmilla\n, except negative information.\n But the fact is that anything I\n found would have been a surprise to\n me; I went down looking for surprises.\n I found nothing but a faint\n trail to Abner Longmans Braun, most\n of which was fifteen years cold.",
"\"Hush!\" Joan said quietly.\nSlowly, Braun opened his eyes.\n \"All right,\" he said. \"You guys\n wanted it this way.\nI say it's a bomb.\n\"\n He stared at us for a moment more—and\n then, all at once, the Timkin\n bearing burst. Words poured out of\n it. \"Now you guys do something, do\n your job like I did mine—get my\n wife and kids out of there—empty\n the city—do something,\ndo something\n!\"\n\n\n Anderton was already grabbing\n for the phone. \"You're right, Mr.\n Braun. If it isn't already too late—\"\n\n\n Cheyney shot out a hand and\n caught Anderton's telephone arm by\n the wrist. \"Wait a minute,\" he said.\n\n\n \"What d'you mean, 'wait a minute'?\n Haven't you already shot\n enough time?\"",
"\"Clark, how's the time going?\"\n\n\n Cheyney consulted the stopwatch.\n \"Deadline in twenty-nine minutes,\"\n he said.\n\n\n \"All right, let's use those minutes.\n I'm beginning to see this thing\n a little clearer. Joan, what we've got\n here is a one-shot gamble; right?\"\n\n\n \"In effect,\" she said cautiously.",
"ONE-SHOT\nYou\n can do a great deal if\n you have enough data, and\n enough time to compute on it,\n by logical methods. But given\n the situation that neither data\n nor time is adequate, and an\n answer must be produced ...\n what do you do?\nBY JAMES BLISH\nIllustrated by van Dongen\n\n\n On the day that the Polish freighter\nLudmilla\nlaid an egg in New\n York harbor, Abner Longmans\n (\"One-Shot\") Braun was in the city\n going about his normal business,\n which was making another million\n dollars. As we found out later, almost\n nothing else was normal about\n that particular week end for Braun.\n For one thing, he had brought his\n family with him—a complete departure\n from routine—reflecting the unprecedentedly\n legitimate nature of\n the deals he was trying to make.\n From every point of view it was a\n bad week end for the CIA to mix\n into his affairs, but nobody had explained\n that to the master of the\nLudmilla\n.",
"\"That's what I keep trying to explain\n to you, Dr. Harris. We don't\n know what she dropped and we\n haven't any way of finding out. It\n could be a bomb—it could be anything.\n We're sweating everybody on\n board the ship now, but it's my guess\n that none of them know anything;\n the whole procedure was designed to\n be automatic.\"\n\n\n \"All right, we'll take it,\" I said.\n \"You've got divers down?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, but—\"\n\n\n \"We'll worry about the buts from\n here on. Get us a direct line from\n your barge to the big board here so\n we can direct the work. Better get\n on over here yourself.\""
],
[
"\"That's what I keep trying to explain\n to you, Dr. Harris. We don't\n know what she dropped and we\n haven't any way of finding out. It\n could be a bomb—it could be anything.\n We're sweating everybody on\n board the ship now, but it's my guess\n that none of them know anything;\n the whole procedure was designed to\n be automatic.\"\n\n\n \"All right, we'll take it,\" I said.\n \"You've got divers down?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, but—\"\n\n\n \"We'll worry about the buts from\n here on. Get us a direct line from\n your barge to the big board here so\n we can direct the work. Better get\n on over here yourself.\"",
"\"Mr. Braun, this is Joan Hadamard,\n Clark Cheyney, Colonel Anderton.\n I'll be quick because we need\n speed now. A Polish ship has dropped\n something out in the harbor.\n We don't know what it is. It may be\n a hell-bomb, or it may be just somebody's\n old laundry. Obviously we've\n got to find out which—and we want\n you to tell us.\"\n\n\n Braun's aristocratic eyebrows went\n up. \"Me? Hell, Andy, I don't know\n nothing about things like that. I'm\n surprised with you. I thought CIA\n had all the brains it needed—ain't\n you got machines to tell you answers\n like that?\"\n\n\n I pointed silently to Joan, who had\n gone back to work the moment the\n introductions were over. She was still\n on the mike to the divers. She was\n saying: \"What does it look like?\"",
"It was already open; Anderton had\n gone to work quickly and with decision\n once he was sure we were taking\n on the major question. The television\n screen lit, but nothing showed\n on it but murky light, striped with\n streamers of darkness slowly rising\n and falling. The audio went\ncloonck\n...\noing\n,\noing\n...\nbonk\n...\noing\n... Underwater noises, shapeless\n and characterless.\n\n\n \"Hello, out there in the harbor.\n This is CIA, Harris calling. Come in,\n please.\"\n\n\n \"Monig here,\" the audio said.\nBoink\n...\noing\n,\noing\n...\n\n\n \"Got anything yet?\"\n\n\n \"Not a thing, Dr. Harris,\" Monig\n said. \"You can't see three inches in\n front of your face down here—it's\n too silty. We've bumped into a couple\n of crates, but so far, no egg.\"",
"\"It's just a lump of something,\n Dr. Hadamard. Can't even tell its\n shape—it's buried too deeply in the\n mud.\"\nCloonk\n...\nOing\n,\noing\n...\n\n\n \"Try the Geiger.\"\n\n\n \"We did. Nothing but background.\"\n\n\n \"Scintillation counter?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing, Dr. Hadamard. Could\n be it's shielded.\"",
"\"No, not exactly,\" I said. \"The\n enemy's responsible for the drop, all\n right. We got word last month from\n our man in Gdynia that they were\n going to do it, and that the bomb\n would be on board the\nLudmilla\n. As\n I say, it was too good an opportunity\n to miss. We wanted to find out just\n how long it would take us to figure\n out the nature of the bomb—which\n we didn't know in detail—after it\n was dropped here. So we had our\n people in Gdynia defuse the thing\n after it was put on board the ship,\n but otherwise leave it entirely alone.\n\n\n \"Actually, you see, your hunch was\n right on the button as far as it went.\n We didn't ask you whether or not\n that object was a live bomb. We\n asked whether it was a bomb or not.\n You said it was, and you were right.\"",
"\"And it's my guess that we're\n never going to get the answer by\n diving for it—not in time, anyhow.\n Remember when the Navy lost a\n barge-load of shells in the harbor,\n back in '52? They scrabbled for them\n for a year and never pulled up a one;\n they finally had to warn the public\n that if it found anything funny-looking\n along the shore it shouldn't bang\n said object, or shake it either. We're\n better equipped than the Navy was\n then—but we're working against a\n deadline.\"\n\n\n \"If you'd admitted that earlier,\"\n Anderton said hoarsely, \"we'd have\n half a million people out of the city\n by now. Maybe even a million.\"",
"said wasn't going to be reversed\n within the practicable lifetime of\n CIA.\nI buzzed for two staffers, and in\n five minutes got Clark Cheyney and\n Joan Hadamard, CIA's business manager\n and social science division chief\n respectively. The titles were almost\n solely for the benefit of the T/O—that\n is, Clark and Joan do serve in\n those capacities, but said service takes\n about two per cent of their capacities\n and their time. I shot them a couple\n of sentences of explanation, trusting\n them to pick up whatever else they\n needed from the tape, and checked\n the line to the divers' barge.",
"\"Not quite. I've got something, if\n I can just figure out what it is. Remember\n One-Shot Braun?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. What's he got to do with\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" I said. \"But I want\n to bring him in. I don't think we'll\n lick this project before deadline without\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What good is a professional\n gambler on a job like this? He'll just\n get in the way.\"\n\n\n I looked toward the television\n screen, which now showed an\n amorphous black mass, jutting up\n from a foundation of even deeper\n black. \"Is that operation getting you\n anywhere?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing's gotten us anywhere,\"\n Anderton interjected harshly. \"We\n don't even know if that's the egg—the\n whole area is littered with crates.\n Harris, you've got to let me get that\n alert out!\"",
"\"The automatic compartment bulkheads\n on the\nLudmilla\nwere defective,\"\n he said. \"It seems that this\n egg was buried among a lot of other\n crates in the dump-cell of the\n hold—\"\n\n\n \"What's a dump cell?\"\n\n\n \"It's a sea lock for getting rid of\n dangerous cargo. The bottom of it\n opens right to Davy Jones. Standard\n fitting for ships carrying explosives,\n radioactives, anything that might act\n up unexpectedly.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said. \"Go ahead.\"",
"Certainly nobody at CIA so much\n as thought of Braun when the news\n first came through. Harry Anderton,\n the Harbor Defense chief, called us\n at 0830 Friday to take on the job of\n identifying the egg; this was when\n our records show us officially entering\n the affair, but, of course, Anderton\n had been keeping the wires to\n Washington steaming for an hour before\n that, getting authorization to\n spend some of his money on us (our\n clearance status was then and is now\n C&R—clean and routine).\n\n\n I was in the central office when\n the call came through, and had some\n difficulty in making out precisely\n what Anderton wanted of us. \"Slow\n down, Colonel Anderton, please,\" I\n begged him. \"Two or three seconds\n won't make that much difference.\n How did you find out about this egg\n in the first place?\"",
"\"Let us do the guessing, Monig.\n All right, maybe it's got a clockwork\n fuse that didn't break with the impact.\n Or a gyroscopic fuse. Stick a\n stethoscope on it and see if you pick\n up a ticking or anything that sounds\n like a motor running.\"\nThere was a lag and I turned back\n to Braun. \"As you can see, we're\n stymied. This is a long shot, Mr.\n Braun. One throw of the dice—one\n show-down hand. We've got to have\n an expert call it for us—somebody\n with a record of hits on long shots.\n That's why I called you.\"\n\n\n \"It's no good,\" he said. He took\n off the Homburg, took his handkerchief\n from his breast pocket, and\n wiped the hatband. \"I can't do it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\"",
"\"Well, there was a timer on the\n dump-cell floor, set to drop the egg\n when the ship came up the river.\n That worked fine, but the automatic\n bulkheads that are supposed to keep\n the rest of the ship from being flooded\n while the cell's open, didn't. At\n least they didn't do a thorough job.\n The\nLudmilla\nbegan to list and the\n captain yelled for help. When the\n Harbor Patrol found the dump-cell\n open, they called us in.\"\n\n\n \"I see.\" I thought about it a moment.\n \"In other words, you don't\n know whether the\nLudmilla\nreally\n laid an egg or not.\"",
"\"So we failed the test,\" I said. \"At\n one minute short of the deadline,\n Joan had the divers unscrew the cap.\n In a real drop that would have resulted\n in a detonation, if the bomb\n was real; we'd never risk it. That\n we did do it in the test was a concession\n of failure—an admission that\n our usual methods didn't come\n through for us in time.\n\n\n \"And that means that you were\n the only person who did come\n through, Mr. Braun. If a real bomb-drop\n ever comes, we're going to have\n to have you here, as an active part of\n our investigation. Your intuition for\n the one-shot gamble was the one\n thing that bailed us out this time.\n Next time it may save eight million\n lives.\"\n\n\n There was quite a long silence. All\n of us, Anderton included, watched\n Braun intently, but his impassive\n face failed to show any trace of how\n his thoughts were running.",
"\"In other words, it's a dud,\" Joan\n said.\n\n\n \"That's right, a dud.\"\n\n\n Now, at last, Braun wiped his face,\n which was quite gray. \"I told you\n the truth,\" he said grimly. \"My\n hunches don't work on stuff like\n this.\"\n\n\n \"But they do,\" I said. \"I'm sorry\n we put you through the wringer—and\n you too, colonel—but we couldn't\n let an opportunity like this slip.\n It was too good a chance for us to\n test how our facilities would stand\n up in a real bomb-drop.\"\n\n\n \"A real drop?\" Anderton said.\n \"Are you trying to say that CIA\n staged this? You ought to be shot,\n the whole pack of you!\"",
"I called headquarters and sent a\n messenger to my apartment to look\n for one of those long-dusty blue folders\n with the legal-length sheets inside\n them, with orders to scorch it over\n to Braun without stopping to breathe\n more than once. Then I went back\n myself.\n\n\n The atmosphere had changed. Anderton\n was sitting by the big desk,\n clenching his fists and sweating; his\n whole posture telegraphed his controlled\n helplessness. Cheyney was\n bent over a seismograph, echo-sounding\n for the egg through the river\n bottom. If that even had a prayer of\n working, I knew, he'd have had the\n trains of the Hudson & Manhattan\n stopped; their rumbling course\n through their tubes would have\n blanked out any possible echo-pip\n from the egg.\n\n\n \"Wild goose chase?\" Joan said,\n scanning my face.",
"\"Keep trying.\"\n\n\n Cheyney, looking even more like\n a bulldog than usual, was setting his\n stopwatch by one of the eight clocks\n on ULTIMAC's face. \"Want me to\n take the divers?\" he said.\n\n\n \"No, Clark, not yet. I'd rather\n have Joan do it for the moment.\" I\n passed the mike to her. \"You'd better\n run a probability series first.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\" He began feeding tape\n into the integrator's mouth. \"What's\n your angle, Peter?\"\n\n\n \"The ship. I want to see how heavily\n shielded that dump-cell is.\"",
"The expression on Braun's face\n was exactly like the one he had worn\n while he had been searching for his\n decision—except that, since his eyes\n were open, I could see that it was\n directed at me. \"If this was the old\n days,\" he said in an ice-cold voice,\n \"I might of made the colonel's idea\n come true. I don't go for tricks like\n this, Andy.\"\n\n\n \"It was more than a trick,\" Clark\n put in. \"You'll remember we had\n a deadline on the test, Mr. Braun.\n Obviously, in a real drop we wouldn't\n have all the time in the world\n to figure out what kind of a thing\n had been dropped. If we had still\n failed to establish that when the\n deadline ran out, we would have\n had to allow evacuation of the city,\n with all the attendant risk that that\n was exactly what the enemy wanted\n us to do.\"\n\n\n \"So?\"",
"Cheyney did not let go; instead,\n he looked inquiringly at Joan and\n said, \"One minute, Joan. You might\n as well go ahead.\"\n\n\n She nodded and spoke into the\n mike. \"Monig, unscrew the cap.\"\n\n\n \"Unscrew the cap?\" the audio\n squawked. \"But Dr. Hadamard, if\n that sets it off—\"\n\n\n \"It won't go off. That's the one\n thing you can be sure it won't do.\"\n\n\n \"What is this?\" Anderton demanded.\n \"And what's this deadline\n stuff, anyhow?\"\n\n\n \"The cap's off,\" Monig reported.\n \"We're getting plenty of radiation\n now. Just a minute— Yeah. Dr.\n Hadamard, it's a bomb, all right.\n But it hasn't got a fuse. Now how\n could they have made a fool mistake\n like that?\"",
"\"It isn't shielded at all,\" Anderton's\n voice said behind me. I hadn't\n heard him come in. \"But that doesn't\n prove anything. The egg might have\n carried sufficient shielding in itself.\n Or maybe the Commies didn't care\n whether the crew was exposed or not.\n Or maybe there isn't any egg.\"\n\n\n \"All that's possible,\" I admitted.\n \"But I want to see it, anyhow.\"\n\n\n \"Have you taken blood tests?\"\n Joan asked Anderton.\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Get the reports through to me,\n then. I want white-cell counts, differentials,\n platelet counts, hematocrit\n and sed rates on every man.\"\n\n\n Anderton picked up the phone and\n I took a firm hold on the doorknob.",
"\"Hush!\" Joan said quietly.\nSlowly, Braun opened his eyes.\n \"All right,\" he said. \"You guys\n wanted it this way.\nI say it's a bomb.\n\"\n He stared at us for a moment more—and\n then, all at once, the Timkin\n bearing burst. Words poured out of\n it. \"Now you guys do something, do\n your job like I did mine—get my\n wife and kids out of there—empty\n the city—do something,\ndo something\n!\"\n\n\n Anderton was already grabbing\n for the phone. \"You're right, Mr.\n Braun. If it isn't already too late—\"\n\n\n Cheyney shot out a hand and\n caught Anderton's telephone arm by\n the wrist. \"Wait a minute,\" he said.\n\n\n \"What d'you mean, 'wait a minute'?\n Haven't you already shot\n enough time?\""
],
[
"\"No, not exactly,\" I said. \"The\n enemy's responsible for the drop, all\n right. We got word last month from\n our man in Gdynia that they were\n going to do it, and that the bomb\n would be on board the\nLudmilla\n. As\n I say, it was too good an opportunity\n to miss. We wanted to find out just\n how long it would take us to figure\n out the nature of the bomb—which\n we didn't know in detail—after it\n was dropped here. So we had our\n people in Gdynia defuse the thing\n after it was put on board the ship,\n but otherwise leave it entirely alone.\n\n\n \"Actually, you see, your hunch was\n right on the button as far as it went.\n We didn't ask you whether or not\n that object was a live bomb. We\n asked whether it was a bomb or not.\n You said it was, and you were right.\"",
"\"That's what I keep trying to explain\n to you, Dr. Harris. We don't\n know what she dropped and we\n haven't any way of finding out. It\n could be a bomb—it could be anything.\n We're sweating everybody on\n board the ship now, but it's my guess\n that none of them know anything;\n the whole procedure was designed to\n be automatic.\"\n\n\n \"All right, we'll take it,\" I said.\n \"You've got divers down?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, but—\"\n\n\n \"We'll worry about the buts from\n here on. Get us a direct line from\n your barge to the big board here so\n we can direct the work. Better get\n on over here yourself.\"",
"\"In other words, it's a dud,\" Joan\n said.\n\n\n \"That's right, a dud.\"\n\n\n Now, at last, Braun wiped his face,\n which was quite gray. \"I told you\n the truth,\" he said grimly. \"My\n hunches don't work on stuff like\n this.\"\n\n\n \"But they do,\" I said. \"I'm sorry\n we put you through the wringer—and\n you too, colonel—but we couldn't\n let an opportunity like this slip.\n It was too good a chance for us to\n test how our facilities would stand\n up in a real bomb-drop.\"\n\n\n \"A real drop?\" Anderton said.\n \"Are you trying to say that CIA\n staged this? You ought to be shot,\n the whole pack of you!\"",
"Cheyney did not let go; instead,\n he looked inquiringly at Joan and\n said, \"One minute, Joan. You might\n as well go ahead.\"\n\n\n She nodded and spoke into the\n mike. \"Monig, unscrew the cap.\"\n\n\n \"Unscrew the cap?\" the audio\n squawked. \"But Dr. Hadamard, if\n that sets it off—\"\n\n\n \"It won't go off. That's the one\n thing you can be sure it won't do.\"\n\n\n \"What is this?\" Anderton demanded.\n \"And what's this deadline\n stuff, anyhow?\"\n\n\n \"The cap's off,\" Monig reported.\n \"We're getting plenty of radiation\n now. Just a minute— Yeah. Dr.\n Hadamard, it's a bomb, all right.\n But it hasn't got a fuse. Now how\n could they have made a fool mistake\n like that?\"",
"\"Ten minutes,\" Cheyney said.\n\n\n I looked up at Braun. He was\n frightened, and again I was surprised\n without having any right to\n be. I tried to keep at least my voice\n calm.\n\n\n \"Please try it anyhow, Mr. Braun—as\n a favor. It's already too late to\n do it any other way. And if you guess\n wrong, the outcome won't be any\n worse than if you don't try at all.\"\n\n\n \"My kids,\" he whispered. I don't\n think he knew that he was speaking\n aloud. I waited.\n\n\n Then his eyes seemed to come back\n to the present. \"All right,\" he said.\n \"I told you the truth, Andy. Remember\n that. So—is it a bomb or ain't it?\n That's what's up for grabs, right?\"",
"\"Hush!\" Joan said quietly.\nSlowly, Braun opened his eyes.\n \"All right,\" he said. \"You guys\n wanted it this way.\nI say it's a bomb.\n\"\n He stared at us for a moment more—and\n then, all at once, the Timkin\n bearing burst. Words poured out of\n it. \"Now you guys do something, do\n your job like I did mine—get my\n wife and kids out of there—empty\n the city—do something,\ndo something\n!\"\n\n\n Anderton was already grabbing\n for the phone. \"You're right, Mr.\n Braun. If it isn't already too late—\"\n\n\n Cheyney shot out a hand and\n caught Anderton's telephone arm by\n the wrist. \"Wait a minute,\" he said.\n\n\n \"What d'you mean, 'wait a minute'?\n Haven't you already shot\n enough time?\"",
"\"So we failed the test,\" I said. \"At\n one minute short of the deadline,\n Joan had the divers unscrew the cap.\n In a real drop that would have resulted\n in a detonation, if the bomb\n was real; we'd never risk it. That\n we did do it in the test was a concession\n of failure—an admission that\n our usual methods didn't come\n through for us in time.\n\n\n \"And that means that you were\n the only person who did come\n through, Mr. Braun. If a real bomb-drop\n ever comes, we're going to have\n to have you here, as an active part of\n our investigation. Your intuition for\n the one-shot gamble was the one\n thing that bailed us out this time.\n Next time it may save eight million\n lives.\"\n\n\n There was quite a long silence. All\n of us, Anderton included, watched\n Braun intently, but his impassive\n face failed to show any trace of how\n his thoughts were running.",
"\"Mr. Braun, this is Joan Hadamard,\n Clark Cheyney, Colonel Anderton.\n I'll be quick because we need\n speed now. A Polish ship has dropped\n something out in the harbor.\n We don't know what it is. It may be\n a hell-bomb, or it may be just somebody's\n old laundry. Obviously we've\n got to find out which—and we want\n you to tell us.\"\n\n\n Braun's aristocratic eyebrows went\n up. \"Me? Hell, Andy, I don't know\n nothing about things like that. I'm\n surprised with you. I thought CIA\n had all the brains it needed—ain't\n you got machines to tell you answers\n like that?\"\n\n\n I pointed silently to Joan, who had\n gone back to work the moment the\n introductions were over. She was still\n on the mike to the divers. She was\n saying: \"What does it look like?\"",
"\"Let us do the guessing, Monig.\n All right, maybe it's got a clockwork\n fuse that didn't break with the impact.\n Or a gyroscopic fuse. Stick a\n stethoscope on it and see if you pick\n up a ticking or anything that sounds\n like a motor running.\"\nThere was a lag and I turned back\n to Braun. \"As you can see, we're\n stymied. This is a long shot, Mr.\n Braun. One throw of the dice—one\n show-down hand. We've got to have\n an expert call it for us—somebody\n with a record of hits on long shots.\n That's why I called you.\"\n\n\n \"It's no good,\" he said. He took\n off the Homburg, took his handkerchief\n from his breast pocket, and\n wiped the hatband. \"I can't do it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\"",
"\"Well, there was a timer on the\n dump-cell floor, set to drop the egg\n when the ship came up the river.\n That worked fine, but the automatic\n bulkheads that are supposed to keep\n the rest of the ship from being flooded\n while the cell's open, didn't. At\n least they didn't do a thorough job.\n The\nLudmilla\nbegan to list and the\n captain yelled for help. When the\n Harbor Patrol found the dump-cell\n open, they called us in.\"\n\n\n \"I see.\" I thought about it a moment.\n \"In other words, you don't\n know whether the\nLudmilla\nreally\n laid an egg or not.\"",
"\"The automatic compartment bulkheads\n on the\nLudmilla\nwere defective,\"\n he said. \"It seems that this\n egg was buried among a lot of other\n crates in the dump-cell of the\n hold—\"\n\n\n \"What's a dump cell?\"\n\n\n \"It's a sea lock for getting rid of\n dangerous cargo. The bottom of it\n opens right to Davy Jones. Standard\n fitting for ships carrying explosives,\n radioactives, anything that might act\n up unexpectedly.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said. \"Go ahead.\"",
"It was already open; Anderton had\n gone to work quickly and with decision\n once he was sure we were taking\n on the major question. The television\n screen lit, but nothing showed\n on it but murky light, striped with\n streamers of darkness slowly rising\n and falling. The audio went\ncloonck\n...\noing\n,\noing\n...\nbonk\n...\noing\n... Underwater noises, shapeless\n and characterless.\n\n\n \"Hello, out there in the harbor.\n This is CIA, Harris calling. Come in,\n please.\"\n\n\n \"Monig here,\" the audio said.\nBoink\n...\noing\n,\noing\n...\n\n\n \"Got anything yet?\"\n\n\n \"Not a thing, Dr. Harris,\" Monig\n said. \"You can't see three inches in\n front of your face down here—it's\n too silty. We've bumped into a couple\n of crates, but so far, no egg.\"",
"The expression on Braun's face\n was exactly like the one he had worn\n while he had been searching for his\n decision—except that, since his eyes\n were open, I could see that it was\n directed at me. \"If this was the old\n days,\" he said in an ice-cold voice,\n \"I might of made the colonel's idea\n come true. I don't go for tricks like\n this, Andy.\"\n\n\n \"It was more than a trick,\" Clark\n put in. \"You'll remember we had\n a deadline on the test, Mr. Braun.\n Obviously, in a real drop we wouldn't\n have all the time in the world\n to figure out what kind of a thing\n had been dropped. If we had still\n failed to establish that when the\n deadline ran out, we would have\n had to allow evacuation of the city,\n with all the attendant risk that that\n was exactly what the enemy wanted\n us to do.\"\n\n\n \"So?\"",
"\"You passed your authority to us\n when you hired us,\" I pointed out.\n \"If you want to evacuate without our\n O.K., you'll have to fire us first. It'll\n take another hour to get that cleared\n from Washington—so you might as\n well give us the hour.\"\n\n\n He stared at me for a moment, his\n lips thinned. Then he picked up the\n phone again to order Joan's blood\n count, and I got out the door, fast.\nA reasonable man would have said\n that I found nothing useful on the\nLudmilla\n, except negative information.\n But the fact is that anything I\n found would have been a surprise to\n me; I went down looking for surprises.\n I found nothing but a faint\n trail to Abner Longmans Braun, most\n of which was fifteen years cold.",
"\"And it's my guess that we're\n never going to get the answer by\n diving for it—not in time, anyhow.\n Remember when the Navy lost a\n barge-load of shells in the harbor,\n back in '52? They scrabbled for them\n for a year and never pulled up a one;\n they finally had to warn the public\n that if it found anything funny-looking\n along the shore it shouldn't bang\n said object, or shake it either. We're\n better equipped than the Navy was\n then—but we're working against a\n deadline.\"\n\n\n \"If you'd admitted that earlier,\"\n Anderton said hoarsely, \"we'd have\n half a million people out of the city\n by now. Maybe even a million.\"",
"Certainly nobody at CIA so much\n as thought of Braun when the news\n first came through. Harry Anderton,\n the Harbor Defense chief, called us\n at 0830 Friday to take on the job of\n identifying the egg; this was when\n our records show us officially entering\n the affair, but, of course, Anderton\n had been keeping the wires to\n Washington steaming for an hour before\n that, getting authorization to\n spend some of his money on us (our\n clearance status was then and is now\n C&R—clean and routine).\n\n\n I was in the central office when\n the call came through, and had some\n difficulty in making out precisely\n what Anderton wanted of us. \"Slow\n down, Colonel Anderton, please,\" I\n begged him. \"Two or three seconds\n won't make that much difference.\n How did you find out about this egg\n in the first place?\"",
"\"Not quite. I've got something, if\n I can just figure out what it is. Remember\n One-Shot Braun?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. What's he got to do with\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" I said. \"But I want\n to bring him in. I don't think we'll\n lick this project before deadline without\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What good is a professional\n gambler on a job like this? He'll just\n get in the way.\"\n\n\n I looked toward the television\n screen, which now showed an\n amorphous black mass, jutting up\n from a foundation of even deeper\n black. \"Is that operation getting you\n anywhere?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing's gotten us anywhere,\"\n Anderton interjected harshly. \"We\n don't even know if that's the egg—the\n whole area is littered with crates.\n Harris, you've got to let me get that\n alert out!\"",
"I nodded. He closed his eyes. An\n unexpected stab of pure fright went\n down my back. Without the eyes,\n Braun's face was a death mask.\n\n\n The water sounds and the irregular\n ticking of a Geiger counter\n seemed to spring out from the audio\n speaker, four times as loud as before.\n I could even hear the pen of\n the seismograph scribbling away, until\n I looked at the instrument and\n saw that Clark had stopped it, probably\n long ago.\n\n\n Droplets of sweat began to form\n along Braun's forehead and his upper\n lip. The handkerchief remained\n crushed in his hand.\n\n\n Anderton said, \"Of all the fool—\"",
"\"Hey,\" Anderton said, putting the\n phone down again. \"Are you going\n to duck out just like that? Remember,\n Dr. Harris, we've got to evacuate the\n city first of all! No matter whether\n it's a real egg or not—we can't take\n the chance on it's\nnot\nbeing an egg!\"\n\n\n \"Don't move a man until you get\n a go-ahead from CIA,\" I said. \"For\n all we know now, evacuating the city\n may be just what the enemy wants us\n to do—so they can grab it unharmed.\n Or they may want to start a panic\n for some other reason, any one of\n fifty possible reasons.\"\n\n\n \"You can't take such a gamble,\"\n he said grimly. \"There are eight and\n a half million lives riding on it. I\n can't let you do it.\"",
"\"It isn't shielded at all,\" Anderton's\n voice said behind me. I hadn't\n heard him come in. \"But that doesn't\n prove anything. The egg might have\n carried sufficient shielding in itself.\n Or maybe the Commies didn't care\n whether the crew was exposed or not.\n Or maybe there isn't any egg.\"\n\n\n \"All that's possible,\" I admitted.\n \"But I want to see it, anyhow.\"\n\n\n \"Have you taken blood tests?\"\n Joan asked Anderton.\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Get the reports through to me,\n then. I want white-cell counts, differentials,\n platelet counts, hematocrit\n and sed rates on every man.\"\n\n\n Anderton picked up the phone and\n I took a firm hold on the doorknob."
],
[
"The expression on Braun's face\n was exactly like the one he had worn\n while he had been searching for his\n decision—except that, since his eyes\n were open, I could see that it was\n directed at me. \"If this was the old\n days,\" he said in an ice-cold voice,\n \"I might of made the colonel's idea\n come true. I don't go for tricks like\n this, Andy.\"\n\n\n \"It was more than a trick,\" Clark\n put in. \"You'll remember we had\n a deadline on the test, Mr. Braun.\n Obviously, in a real drop we wouldn't\n have all the time in the world\n to figure out what kind of a thing\n had been dropped. If we had still\n failed to establish that when the\n deadline ran out, we would have\n had to allow evacuation of the city,\n with all the attendant risk that that\n was exactly what the enemy wanted\n us to do.\"\n\n\n \"So?\"",
"\"So we failed the test,\" I said. \"At\n one minute short of the deadline,\n Joan had the divers unscrew the cap.\n In a real drop that would have resulted\n in a detonation, if the bomb\n was real; we'd never risk it. That\n we did do it in the test was a concession\n of failure—an admission that\n our usual methods didn't come\n through for us in time.\n\n\n \"And that means that you were\n the only person who did come\n through, Mr. Braun. If a real bomb-drop\n ever comes, we're going to have\n to have you here, as an active part of\n our investigation. Your intuition for\n the one-shot gamble was the one\n thing that bailed us out this time.\n Next time it may save eight million\n lives.\"\n\n\n There was quite a long silence. All\n of us, Anderton included, watched\n Braun intently, but his impassive\n face failed to show any trace of how\n his thoughts were running.",
"\"Not quite. I've got something, if\n I can just figure out what it is. Remember\n One-Shot Braun?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. What's he got to do with\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" I said. \"But I want\n to bring him in. I don't think we'll\n lick this project before deadline without\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What good is a professional\n gambler on a job like this? He'll just\n get in the way.\"\n\n\n I looked toward the television\n screen, which now showed an\n amorphous black mass, jutting up\n from a foundation of even deeper\n black. \"Is that operation getting you\n anywhere?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing's gotten us anywhere,\"\n Anderton interjected harshly. \"We\n don't even know if that's the egg—the\n whole area is littered with crates.\n Harris, you've got to let me get that\n alert out!\"",
"\"Let us do the guessing, Monig.\n All right, maybe it's got a clockwork\n fuse that didn't break with the impact.\n Or a gyroscopic fuse. Stick a\n stethoscope on it and see if you pick\n up a ticking or anything that sounds\n like a motor running.\"\nThere was a lag and I turned back\n to Braun. \"As you can see, we're\n stymied. This is a long shot, Mr.\n Braun. One throw of the dice—one\n show-down hand. We've got to have\n an expert call it for us—somebody\n with a record of hits on long shots.\n That's why I called you.\"\n\n\n \"It's no good,\" he said. He took\n off the Homburg, took his handkerchief\n from his breast pocket, and\n wiped the hatband. \"I can't do it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\"",
"\"Mr. Braun, this is Joan Hadamard,\n Clark Cheyney, Colonel Anderton.\n I'll be quick because we need\n speed now. A Polish ship has dropped\n something out in the harbor.\n We don't know what it is. It may be\n a hell-bomb, or it may be just somebody's\n old laundry. Obviously we've\n got to find out which—and we want\n you to tell us.\"\n\n\n Braun's aristocratic eyebrows went\n up. \"Me? Hell, Andy, I don't know\n nothing about things like that. I'm\n surprised with you. I thought CIA\n had all the brains it needed—ain't\n you got machines to tell you answers\n like that?\"\n\n\n I pointed silently to Joan, who had\n gone back to work the moment the\n introductions were over. She was still\n on the mike to the divers. She was\n saying: \"What does it look like?\"",
"\"Ten minutes,\" Cheyney said.\n\n\n I looked up at Braun. He was\n frightened, and again I was surprised\n without having any right to\n be. I tried to keep at least my voice\n calm.\n\n\n \"Please try it anyhow, Mr. Braun—as\n a favor. It's already too late to\n do it any other way. And if you guess\n wrong, the outcome won't be any\n worse than if you don't try at all.\"\n\n\n \"My kids,\" he whispered. I don't\n think he knew that he was speaking\n aloud. I waited.\n\n\n Then his eyes seemed to come back\n to the present. \"All right,\" he said.\n \"I told you the truth, Andy. Remember\n that. So—is it a bomb or ain't it?\n That's what's up for grabs, right?\"",
"\"It ain't my\nkind\nof thing,\" he\n said. \"Look, I never in my life run\n odds on anything that made any difference.\n But this makes a difference.\n If I guess wrong—\"\n\n\n \"Then we're all dead ducks. But\n why should you guess wrong? Your\n hunches have been working for sixty\n years now.\"\n\n\n Braun wiped his face. \"No. You\n don't get it. I wish you'd listen to\n me. Look, my wife and my kids are\n in the city. It ain't only my life, it's\n theirs, too. That's what I care about.\n That's why it's no good. On things\n that matter to me,\nmy hunches don't\n work\n.\"\n\n\n I was stunned, and so, I could see,\n were Joan and Cheyney. I suppose I\n should have guessed it, but it had\n never occurred to me.",
"\"We haven't given up yet, colonel.\n The point is this, Joan: what\n we need is an inspired guess. Get\n anything from the prob series, Clark?\n I thought not. On a one-shot gamble\n of this kind, the 'laws' of chance are\n no good at all. For that matter, the\n so-called ESP experiments showed us\n long ago that even the way we construct\n random tables is full of holes—and\n that a man with a feeling for\n the essence of a gamble can make a\n monkey out of chance almost at will.\n\n\n \"And if there ever was such a\n man, Braun is it. That's why I asked\n him to come down here. I want him\n to look at that lump on the screen\n and—play a hunch.\"",
"He remembered me instantly; like\n most uneducated, power-driven men,\n he had a memory as good as any machine's.\n\n\n \"You never did send me that paper\n you was going to write,\" he said. His\n voice seemed absolutely unchanged,\n although he was in his seventies now.\n \"You promised you would.\"\n\n\n \"Kids don't keep their promises\n as well as they should,\" I said. \"But\n I've still got copies and I'll see to it\n that you get one, this time. Right\n now I need another favor—something\n right up your alley.\"\n\n\n \"CIA business?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I didn't know you knew I\n was with CIA.\"\n\n\n Braun chuckled. \"I still know a\n thing or two,\" he said. \"What's the\n angle?\"",
"\"Hush!\" Joan said quietly.\nSlowly, Braun opened his eyes.\n \"All right,\" he said. \"You guys\n wanted it this way.\nI say it's a bomb.\n\"\n He stared at us for a moment more—and\n then, all at once, the Timkin\n bearing burst. Words poured out of\n it. \"Now you guys do something, do\n your job like I did mine—get my\n wife and kids out of there—empty\n the city—do something,\ndo something\n!\"\n\n\n Anderton was already grabbing\n for the phone. \"You're right, Mr.\n Braun. If it isn't already too late—\"\n\n\n Cheyney shot out a hand and\n caught Anderton's telephone arm by\n the wrist. \"Wait a minute,\" he said.\n\n\n \"What d'you mean, 'wait a minute'?\n Haven't you already shot\n enough time?\"",
"\"In other words, it's a dud,\" Joan\n said.\n\n\n \"That's right, a dud.\"\n\n\n Now, at last, Braun wiped his face,\n which was quite gray. \"I told you\n the truth,\" he said grimly. \"My\n hunches don't work on stuff like\n this.\"\n\n\n \"But they do,\" I said. \"I'm sorry\n we put you through the wringer—and\n you too, colonel—but we couldn't\n let an opportunity like this slip.\n It was too good a chance for us to\n test how our facilities would stand\n up in a real bomb-drop.\"\n\n\n \"A real drop?\" Anderton said.\n \"Are you trying to say that CIA\n staged this? You ought to be shot,\n the whole pack of you!\"",
"Certainly nobody at CIA so much\n as thought of Braun when the news\n first came through. Harry Anderton,\n the Harbor Defense chief, called us\n at 0830 Friday to take on the job of\n identifying the egg; this was when\n our records show us officially entering\n the affair, but, of course, Anderton\n had been keeping the wires to\n Washington steaming for an hour before\n that, getting authorization to\n spend some of his money on us (our\n clearance status was then and is now\n C&R—clean and routine).\n\n\n I was in the central office when\n the call came through, and had some\n difficulty in making out precisely\n what Anderton wanted of us. \"Slow\n down, Colonel Anderton, please,\" I\n begged him. \"Two or three seconds\n won't make that much difference.\n How did you find out about this egg\n in the first place?\"",
"\"You're out of your mind,\" Anderton\n said.\nA decorous knock spared me the\n trouble of having to deny, affirm or\n ignore the judgment. It was Braun;\n the messenger had been fast, and\n the gambler hadn't bothered to read\n what a college student had thought\n of him fifteen years ago. He came\n forward and held out his hand, while\n the others looked him over frankly.",
"He was impressive, all right. It\n would have been hard for a stranger\n to believe that he was aiming at respectability;\n to the eye, he was already\n there. He was tall and spare,\n and walked perfectly erect, not without\n spring despite his age. His clothing\n was as far from that of a\n gambler as you could have taken it\n by design: a black double-breasted\n suit with a thin vertical stripe, a gray\n silk tie with a pearl stickpin just\n barely large enough to be visible at\n all, a black Homburg; all perfectly\n fitted, all worn with proper casualness—one\n might almost say a formal\n casualness. It was only when he\n opened his mouth that One-Shot\n Braun was in the suit with him.\n\n\n \"I come over as soon as your runner\n got to me,\" he said. \"What's the\n pitch, Andy?\"",
"I nodded. He closed his eyes. An\n unexpected stab of pure fright went\n down my back. Without the eyes,\n Braun's face was a death mask.\n\n\n The water sounds and the irregular\n ticking of a Geiger counter\n seemed to spring out from the audio\n speaker, four times as loud as before.\n I could even hear the pen of\n the seismograph scribbling away, until\n I looked at the instrument and\n saw that Clark had stopped it, probably\n long ago.\n\n\n Droplets of sweat began to form\n along Braun's forehead and his upper\n lip. The handkerchief remained\n crushed in his hand.\n\n\n Anderton said, \"Of all the fool—\"",
"\"You passed your authority to us\n when you hired us,\" I pointed out.\n \"If you want to evacuate without our\n O.K., you'll have to fire us first. It'll\n take another hour to get that cleared\n from Washington—so you might as\n well give us the hour.\"\n\n\n He stared at me for a moment, his\n lips thinned. Then he picked up the\n phone again to order Joan's blood\n count, and I got out the door, fast.\nA reasonable man would have said\n that I found nothing useful on the\nLudmilla\n, except negative information.\n But the fact is that anything I\n found would have been a surprise to\n me; I went down looking for surprises.\n I found nothing but a faint\n trail to Abner Longmans Braun, most\n of which was fifteen years cold.",
"There'd been a time when I'd\n known Braun, briefly and to no\n profit to either of us. As an undergraduate\n majoring in social sciences,\n I'd taken on a term paper on the old\n International Longshoreman's Association,\n a racket-ridden union now\n formally extinct—although anyone\n who knew the signs could still pick\n up some traces on the docks. In those\n days, Braun had been the business\n manager of an insurance firm, the\n sole visible function of which had\n been to write policies for the ILA\n and its individual dock-wallopers.\n For some reason, he had been amused\n by the brash youngster who'd barged\n in on him and demanded the lowdown,\n and had shown me considerable\n lengths of ropes not normally\n in view of the public—nothing incriminating,\n but enough to give me\n a better insight into how the union\n operated than I had had any right to\n expect—or even suspect.",
"Joan had been following his career,\n too, not because she had ever met\n him, but because for her he was a\n type study in the evolution of what\n she called \"the extra-legal ego.\"\n \"With personalities like that, respectability\n is a disease,\" she told me.\n \"There's always an almost-open conflict\n between the desire to be powerful\n and the desire to be accepted;\n your ordinary criminal is a moral imbecile,\n but people like Braun are\n damned with a conscience, and sooner\n or later they crack trying to appease\n it.\"\n\n\n \"I'd sooner try to crack a Timkin\n bearing,\" I said. \"Braun's ten-point\n steel all the way through.\"",
"She had been right; within the\n year, Braun had announced the\n founding of an association for clearing\n the Detroit slum area where he\n had been born—the plainest kind of\n symbolic suicide:\nLet's not have any\n more Abner Longmans Brauns born\n down here\n. It depressed me to see it\n happen, for next on Joan's agenda\n for Braun was an entry into politics\n as a fighting liberal—a New Dealer\n twenty years too late. Since I'm mildly\n liberal myself when I'm off duty,\n I hated to think what Braun's career\n might tell me about my own motives,\n if I'd let it.",
"\"No, not exactly,\" I said. \"The\n enemy's responsible for the drop, all\n right. We got word last month from\n our man in Gdynia that they were\n going to do it, and that the bomb\n would be on board the\nLudmilla\n. As\n I say, it was too good an opportunity\n to miss. We wanted to find out just\n how long it would take us to figure\n out the nature of the bomb—which\n we didn't know in detail—after it\n was dropped here. So we had our\n people in Gdynia defuse the thing\n after it was put on board the ship,\n but otherwise leave it entirely alone.\n\n\n \"Actually, you see, your hunch was\n right on the button as far as it went.\n We didn't ask you whether or not\n that object was a live bomb. We\n asked whether it was a bomb or not.\n You said it was, and you were right.\""
],
[
"\"So we failed the test,\" I said. \"At\n one minute short of the deadline,\n Joan had the divers unscrew the cap.\n In a real drop that would have resulted\n in a detonation, if the bomb\n was real; we'd never risk it. That\n we did do it in the test was a concession\n of failure—an admission that\n our usual methods didn't come\n through for us in time.\n\n\n \"And that means that you were\n the only person who did come\n through, Mr. Braun. If a real bomb-drop\n ever comes, we're going to have\n to have you here, as an active part of\n our investigation. Your intuition for\n the one-shot gamble was the one\n thing that bailed us out this time.\n Next time it may save eight million\n lives.\"\n\n\n There was quite a long silence. All\n of us, Anderton included, watched\n Braun intently, but his impassive\n face failed to show any trace of how\n his thoughts were running.",
"The expression on Braun's face\n was exactly like the one he had worn\n while he had been searching for his\n decision—except that, since his eyes\n were open, I could see that it was\n directed at me. \"If this was the old\n days,\" he said in an ice-cold voice,\n \"I might of made the colonel's idea\n come true. I don't go for tricks like\n this, Andy.\"\n\n\n \"It was more than a trick,\" Clark\n put in. \"You'll remember we had\n a deadline on the test, Mr. Braun.\n Obviously, in a real drop we wouldn't\n have all the time in the world\n to figure out what kind of a thing\n had been dropped. If we had still\n failed to establish that when the\n deadline ran out, we would have\n had to allow evacuation of the city,\n with all the attendant risk that that\n was exactly what the enemy wanted\n us to do.\"\n\n\n \"So?\"",
"I nodded. He closed his eyes. An\n unexpected stab of pure fright went\n down my back. Without the eyes,\n Braun's face was a death mask.\n\n\n The water sounds and the irregular\n ticking of a Geiger counter\n seemed to spring out from the audio\n speaker, four times as loud as before.\n I could even hear the pen of\n the seismograph scribbling away, until\n I looked at the instrument and\n saw that Clark had stopped it, probably\n long ago.\n\n\n Droplets of sweat began to form\n along Braun's forehead and his upper\n lip. The handkerchief remained\n crushed in his hand.\n\n\n Anderton said, \"Of all the fool—\"",
"Joan had been following his career,\n too, not because she had ever met\n him, but because for her he was a\n type study in the evolution of what\n she called \"the extra-legal ego.\"\n \"With personalities like that, respectability\n is a disease,\" she told me.\n \"There's always an almost-open conflict\n between the desire to be powerful\n and the desire to be accepted;\n your ordinary criminal is a moral imbecile,\n but people like Braun are\n damned with a conscience, and sooner\n or later they crack trying to appease\n it.\"\n\n\n \"I'd sooner try to crack a Timkin\n bearing,\" I said. \"Braun's ten-point\n steel all the way through.\"",
"He remembered me instantly; like\n most uneducated, power-driven men,\n he had a memory as good as any machine's.\n\n\n \"You never did send me that paper\n you was going to write,\" he said. His\n voice seemed absolutely unchanged,\n although he was in his seventies now.\n \"You promised you would.\"\n\n\n \"Kids don't keep their promises\n as well as they should,\" I said. \"But\n I've still got copies and I'll see to it\n that you get one, this time. Right\n now I need another favor—something\n right up your alley.\"\n\n\n \"CIA business?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I didn't know you knew I\n was with CIA.\"\n\n\n Braun chuckled. \"I still know a\n thing or two,\" he said. \"What's the\n angle?\"",
"There'd been a time when I'd\n known Braun, briefly and to no\n profit to either of us. As an undergraduate\n majoring in social sciences,\n I'd taken on a term paper on the old\n International Longshoreman's Association,\n a racket-ridden union now\n formally extinct—although anyone\n who knew the signs could still pick\n up some traces on the docks. In those\n days, Braun had been the business\n manager of an insurance firm, the\n sole visible function of which had\n been to write policies for the ILA\n and its individual dock-wallopers.\n For some reason, he had been amused\n by the brash youngster who'd barged\n in on him and demanded the lowdown,\n and had shown me considerable\n lengths of ropes not normally\n in view of the public—nothing incriminating,\n but enough to give me\n a better insight into how the union\n operated than I had had any right to\n expect—or even suspect.",
"\"It ain't my\nkind\nof thing,\" he\n said. \"Look, I never in my life run\n odds on anything that made any difference.\n But this makes a difference.\n If I guess wrong—\"\n\n\n \"Then we're all dead ducks. But\n why should you guess wrong? Your\n hunches have been working for sixty\n years now.\"\n\n\n Braun wiped his face. \"No. You\n don't get it. I wish you'd listen to\n me. Look, my wife and my kids are\n in the city. It ain't only my life, it's\n theirs, too. That's what I care about.\n That's why it's no good. On things\n that matter to me,\nmy hunches don't\n work\n.\"\n\n\n I was stunned, and so, I could see,\n were Joan and Cheyney. I suppose I\n should have guessed it, but it had\n never occurred to me.",
"She had been right; within the\n year, Braun had announced the\n founding of an association for clearing\n the Detroit slum area where he\n had been born—the plainest kind of\n symbolic suicide:\nLet's not have any\n more Abner Longmans Brauns born\n down here\n. It depressed me to see it\n happen, for next on Joan's agenda\n for Braun was an entry into politics\n as a fighting liberal—a New Dealer\n twenty years too late. Since I'm mildly\n liberal myself when I'm off duty,\n I hated to think what Braun's career\n might tell me about my own motives,\n if I'd let it.",
"\"Hush!\" Joan said quietly.\nSlowly, Braun opened his eyes.\n \"All right,\" he said. \"You guys\n wanted it this way.\nI say it's a bomb.\n\"\n He stared at us for a moment more—and\n then, all at once, the Timkin\n bearing burst. Words poured out of\n it. \"Now you guys do something, do\n your job like I did mine—get my\n wife and kids out of there—empty\n the city—do something,\ndo something\n!\"\n\n\n Anderton was already grabbing\n for the phone. \"You're right, Mr.\n Braun. If it isn't already too late—\"\n\n\n Cheyney shot out a hand and\n caught Anderton's telephone arm by\n the wrist. \"Wait a minute,\" he said.\n\n\n \"What d'you mean, 'wait a minute'?\n Haven't you already shot\n enough time?\"",
"He was impressive, all right. It\n would have been hard for a stranger\n to believe that he was aiming at respectability;\n to the eye, he was already\n there. He was tall and spare,\n and walked perfectly erect, not without\n spring despite his age. His clothing\n was as far from that of a\n gambler as you could have taken it\n by design: a black double-breasted\n suit with a thin vertical stripe, a gray\n silk tie with a pearl stickpin just\n barely large enough to be visible at\n all, a black Homburg; all perfectly\n fitted, all worn with proper casualness—one\n might almost say a formal\n casualness. It was only when he\n opened his mouth that One-Shot\n Braun was in the suit with him.\n\n\n \"I come over as soon as your runner\n got to me,\" he said. \"What's the\n pitch, Andy?\"",
"\"In other words, it's a dud,\" Joan\n said.\n\n\n \"That's right, a dud.\"\n\n\n Now, at last, Braun wiped his face,\n which was quite gray. \"I told you\n the truth,\" he said grimly. \"My\n hunches don't work on stuff like\n this.\"\n\n\n \"But they do,\" I said. \"I'm sorry\n we put you through the wringer—and\n you too, colonel—but we couldn't\n let an opportunity like this slip.\n It was too good a chance for us to\n test how our facilities would stand\n up in a real bomb-drop.\"\n\n\n \"A real drop?\" Anderton said.\n \"Are you trying to say that CIA\n staged this? You ought to be shot,\n the whole pack of you!\"",
"Hence I was surprised to hear\n somebody on the docks remark that\n Braun was in the city over the week\n end. It would never have occurred\n to me that he still interested himself\n in the waterfront, for he'd gone respectable\n with a vengeance. He was\n still a professional gambler, and according\n to what he had told the\n Congressional Investigating Committee\n last year, took in thirty to fifty\n thousand dollars a year at it, but his\n gambles were no longer concentrated\n on horses, the numbers, or shady insurance\n deals. Nowadays what he did\n was called investment—mostly in real\n estate; realtors knew him well as the\n man who had\nalmost\nbought the Empire\n State Building. (The\nalmost\nin\n the equation stands for the moment\n when the shoestring broke.)",
"\"You're out of your mind,\" Anderton\n said.\nA decorous knock spared me the\n trouble of having to deny, affirm or\n ignore the judgment. It was Braun;\n the messenger had been fast, and\n the gambler hadn't bothered to read\n what a college student had thought\n of him fifteen years ago. He came\n forward and held out his hand, while\n the others looked him over frankly.",
"\"Ten minutes,\" Cheyney said.\n\n\n I looked up at Braun. He was\n frightened, and again I was surprised\n without having any right to\n be. I tried to keep at least my voice\n calm.\n\n\n \"Please try it anyhow, Mr. Braun—as\n a favor. It's already too late to\n do it any other way. And if you guess\n wrong, the outcome won't be any\n worse than if you don't try at all.\"\n\n\n \"My kids,\" he whispered. I don't\n think he knew that he was speaking\n aloud. I waited.\n\n\n Then his eyes seemed to come back\n to the present. \"All right,\" he said.\n \"I told you the truth, Andy. Remember\n that. So—is it a bomb or ain't it?\n That's what's up for grabs, right?\"",
"When he did speak at last, what\n he said must have seemed insanely\n irrelevant to Anderton, and maybe\n to Cheyney too. And perhaps it\n meant nothing more to Joan than\n the final clinical note in a case history.\n\n\n \"It's funny,\" he said, \"I was\n thinking of running for Congress\n next year from my district. But maybe\n this is more important.\"\n\n\n It was, I believe, the sigh of a man\n at peace with himself.\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAstounding Science Fiction\nAugust\n 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"\"Not quite. I've got something, if\n I can just figure out what it is. Remember\n One-Shot Braun?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. What's he got to do with\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" I said. \"But I want\n to bring him in. I don't think we'll\n lick this project before deadline without\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What good is a professional\n gambler on a job like this? He'll just\n get in the way.\"\n\n\n I looked toward the television\n screen, which now showed an\n amorphous black mass, jutting up\n from a foundation of even deeper\n black. \"Is that operation getting you\n anywhere?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing's gotten us anywhere,\"\n Anderton interjected harshly. \"We\n don't even know if that's the egg—the\n whole area is littered with crates.\n Harris, you've got to let me get that\n alert out!\"",
"\"Let us do the guessing, Monig.\n All right, maybe it's got a clockwork\n fuse that didn't break with the impact.\n Or a gyroscopic fuse. Stick a\n stethoscope on it and see if you pick\n up a ticking or anything that sounds\n like a motor running.\"\nThere was a lag and I turned back\n to Braun. \"As you can see, we're\n stymied. This is a long shot, Mr.\n Braun. One throw of the dice—one\n show-down hand. We've got to have\n an expert call it for us—somebody\n with a record of hits on long shots.\n That's why I called you.\"\n\n\n \"It's no good,\" he said. He took\n off the Homburg, took his handkerchief\n from his breast pocket, and\n wiped the hatband. \"I can't do it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\"",
"I called headquarters and sent a\n messenger to my apartment to look\n for one of those long-dusty blue folders\n with the legal-length sheets inside\n them, with orders to scorch it over\n to Braun without stopping to breathe\n more than once. Then I went back\n myself.\n\n\n The atmosphere had changed. Anderton\n was sitting by the big desk,\n clenching his fists and sweating; his\n whole posture telegraphed his controlled\n helplessness. Cheyney was\n bent over a seismograph, echo-sounding\n for the egg through the river\n bottom. If that even had a prayer of\n working, I knew, he'd have had the\n trains of the Hudson & Manhattan\n stopped; their rumbling course\n through their tubes would have\n blanked out any possible echo-pip\n from the egg.\n\n\n \"Wild goose chase?\" Joan said,\n scanning my face.",
"\"We haven't given up yet, colonel.\n The point is this, Joan: what\n we need is an inspired guess. Get\n anything from the prob series, Clark?\n I thought not. On a one-shot gamble\n of this kind, the 'laws' of chance are\n no good at all. For that matter, the\n so-called ESP experiments showed us\n long ago that even the way we construct\n random tables is full of holes—and\n that a man with a feeling for\n the essence of a gamble can make a\n monkey out of chance almost at will.\n\n\n \"And if there ever was such a\n man, Braun is it. That's why I asked\n him to come down here. I want him\n to look at that lump on the screen\n and—play a hunch.\"",
"\"You passed your authority to us\n when you hired us,\" I pointed out.\n \"If you want to evacuate without our\n O.K., you'll have to fire us first. It'll\n take another hour to get that cleared\n from Washington—so you might as\n well give us the hour.\"\n\n\n He stared at me for a moment, his\n lips thinned. Then he picked up the\n phone again to order Joan's blood\n count, and I got out the door, fast.\nA reasonable man would have said\n that I found nothing useful on the\nLudmilla\n, except negative information.\n But the fact is that anything I\n found would have been a surprise to\n me; I went down looking for surprises.\n I found nothing but a faint\n trail to Abner Longmans Braun, most\n of which was fifteen years cold."
],
[
"I had better add here that we\n knew nothing about this until afterward;\n from the point of view of the\n storyteller, an organization like Civilian\n Intelligence Associates gets to\n all its facts backwards, entering the\n tale at the pay-off, working back to\n the hook, and winding up with a\n sheaf of background facts to feed\n into the computer for Next Time. It's\n rough on the various people who've\n tried to fictionalize what we do—particularly\n for the lazy examples of\n the breed, who come to us expecting\n that their plotting has already been\n done for them—but it's inherent in\n the way we operate, and there it is.",
"\"It ain't my\nkind\nof thing,\" he\n said. \"Look, I never in my life run\n odds on anything that made any difference.\n But this makes a difference.\n If I guess wrong—\"\n\n\n \"Then we're all dead ducks. But\n why should you guess wrong? Your\n hunches have been working for sixty\n years now.\"\n\n\n Braun wiped his face. \"No. You\n don't get it. I wish you'd listen to\n me. Look, my wife and my kids are\n in the city. It ain't only my life, it's\n theirs, too. That's what I care about.\n That's why it's no good. On things\n that matter to me,\nmy hunches don't\n work\n.\"\n\n\n I was stunned, and so, I could see,\n were Joan and Cheyney. I suppose I\n should have guessed it, but it had\n never occurred to me.",
"He remembered me instantly; like\n most uneducated, power-driven men,\n he had a memory as good as any machine's.\n\n\n \"You never did send me that paper\n you was going to write,\" he said. His\n voice seemed absolutely unchanged,\n although he was in his seventies now.\n \"You promised you would.\"\n\n\n \"Kids don't keep their promises\n as well as they should,\" I said. \"But\n I've still got copies and I'll see to it\n that you get one, this time. Right\n now I need another favor—something\n right up your alley.\"\n\n\n \"CIA business?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I didn't know you knew I\n was with CIA.\"\n\n\n Braun chuckled. \"I still know a\n thing or two,\" he said. \"What's the\n angle?\"",
"\"So we failed the test,\" I said. \"At\n one minute short of the deadline,\n Joan had the divers unscrew the cap.\n In a real drop that would have resulted\n in a detonation, if the bomb\n was real; we'd never risk it. That\n we did do it in the test was a concession\n of failure—an admission that\n our usual methods didn't come\n through for us in time.\n\n\n \"And that means that you were\n the only person who did come\n through, Mr. Braun. If a real bomb-drop\n ever comes, we're going to have\n to have you here, as an active part of\n our investigation. Your intuition for\n the one-shot gamble was the one\n thing that bailed us out this time.\n Next time it may save eight million\n lives.\"\n\n\n There was quite a long silence. All\n of us, Anderton included, watched\n Braun intently, but his impassive\n face failed to show any trace of how\n his thoughts were running.",
"He was impressive, all right. It\n would have been hard for a stranger\n to believe that he was aiming at respectability;\n to the eye, he was already\n there. He was tall and spare,\n and walked perfectly erect, not without\n spring despite his age. His clothing\n was as far from that of a\n gambler as you could have taken it\n by design: a black double-breasted\n suit with a thin vertical stripe, a gray\n silk tie with a pearl stickpin just\n barely large enough to be visible at\n all, a black Homburg; all perfectly\n fitted, all worn with proper casualness—one\n might almost say a formal\n casualness. It was only when he\n opened his mouth that One-Shot\n Braun was in the suit with him.\n\n\n \"I come over as soon as your runner\n got to me,\" he said. \"What's the\n pitch, Andy?\"",
"I nodded. He closed his eyes. An\n unexpected stab of pure fright went\n down my back. Without the eyes,\n Braun's face was a death mask.\n\n\n The water sounds and the irregular\n ticking of a Geiger counter\n seemed to spring out from the audio\n speaker, four times as loud as before.\n I could even hear the pen of\n the seismograph scribbling away, until\n I looked at the instrument and\n saw that Clark had stopped it, probably\n long ago.\n\n\n Droplets of sweat began to form\n along Braun's forehead and his upper\n lip. The handkerchief remained\n crushed in his hand.\n\n\n Anderton said, \"Of all the fool—\"",
"\"That I can't tell you over the\n phone. But it's the biggest gamble\n there ever was, and I think we need\n an expert. Can you come down to\n CIA's central headquarters right\n away?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, if it's that big. If it ain't,\n I got lots of business here, Andy.\n And I ain't going to be in town long.\n You're sure it's top stuff?\"\n\n\n \"My word on it.\"\n\n\n He was silent a moment. Then he\n said, \"Andy, send me your paper.\"\n\n\n \"The paper? Sure, but—\" Then I\n got it. I'd given him my word.\n \"You'll get it,\" I said. \"Thanks, Mr.\n Braun.\"",
"It was already open; Anderton had\n gone to work quickly and with decision\n once he was sure we were taking\n on the major question. The television\n screen lit, but nothing showed\n on it but murky light, striped with\n streamers of darkness slowly rising\n and falling. The audio went\ncloonck\n...\noing\n,\noing\n...\nbonk\n...\noing\n... Underwater noises, shapeless\n and characterless.\n\n\n \"Hello, out there in the harbor.\n This is CIA, Harris calling. Come in,\n please.\"\n\n\n \"Monig here,\" the audio said.\nBoink\n...\noing\n,\noing\n...\n\n\n \"Got anything yet?\"\n\n\n \"Not a thing, Dr. Harris,\" Monig\n said. \"You can't see three inches in\n front of your face down here—it's\n too silty. We've bumped into a couple\n of crates, but so far, no egg.\"",
"\"Ten minutes,\" Cheyney said.\n\n\n I looked up at Braun. He was\n frightened, and again I was surprised\n without having any right to\n be. I tried to keep at least my voice\n calm.\n\n\n \"Please try it anyhow, Mr. Braun—as\n a favor. It's already too late to\n do it any other way. And if you guess\n wrong, the outcome won't be any\n worse than if you don't try at all.\"\n\n\n \"My kids,\" he whispered. I don't\n think he knew that he was speaking\n aloud. I waited.\n\n\n Then his eyes seemed to come back\n to the present. \"All right,\" he said.\n \"I told you the truth, Andy. Remember\n that. So—is it a bomb or ain't it?\n That's what's up for grabs, right?\"",
"\"You're out of your mind,\" Anderton\n said.\nA decorous knock spared me the\n trouble of having to deny, affirm or\n ignore the judgment. It was Braun;\n the messenger had been fast, and\n the gambler hadn't bothered to read\n what a college student had thought\n of him fifteen years ago. He came\n forward and held out his hand, while\n the others looked him over frankly.",
"Joan had been following his career,\n too, not because she had ever met\n him, but because for her he was a\n type study in the evolution of what\n she called \"the extra-legal ego.\"\n \"With personalities like that, respectability\n is a disease,\" she told me.\n \"There's always an almost-open conflict\n between the desire to be powerful\n and the desire to be accepted;\n your ordinary criminal is a moral imbecile,\n but people like Braun are\n damned with a conscience, and sooner\n or later they crack trying to appease\n it.\"\n\n\n \"I'd sooner try to crack a Timkin\n bearing,\" I said. \"Braun's ten-point\n steel all the way through.\"",
"\"Hush!\" Joan said quietly.\nSlowly, Braun opened his eyes.\n \"All right,\" he said. \"You guys\n wanted it this way.\nI say it's a bomb.\n\"\n He stared at us for a moment more—and\n then, all at once, the Timkin\n bearing burst. Words poured out of\n it. \"Now you guys do something, do\n your job like I did mine—get my\n wife and kids out of there—empty\n the city—do something,\ndo something\n!\"\n\n\n Anderton was already grabbing\n for the phone. \"You're right, Mr.\n Braun. If it isn't already too late—\"\n\n\n Cheyney shot out a hand and\n caught Anderton's telephone arm by\n the wrist. \"Wait a minute,\" he said.\n\n\n \"What d'you mean, 'wait a minute'?\n Haven't you already shot\n enough time?\"",
"Hence I was surprised to hear\n somebody on the docks remark that\n Braun was in the city over the week\n end. It would never have occurred\n to me that he still interested himself\n in the waterfront, for he'd gone respectable\n with a vengeance. He was\n still a professional gambler, and according\n to what he had told the\n Congressional Investigating Committee\n last year, took in thirty to fifty\n thousand dollars a year at it, but his\n gambles were no longer concentrated\n on horses, the numbers, or shady insurance\n deals. Nowadays what he did\n was called investment—mostly in real\n estate; realtors knew him well as the\n man who had\nalmost\nbought the Empire\n State Building. (The\nalmost\nin\n the equation stands for the moment\n when the shoestring broke.)",
"There'd been a time when I'd\n known Braun, briefly and to no\n profit to either of us. As an undergraduate\n majoring in social sciences,\n I'd taken on a term paper on the old\n International Longshoreman's Association,\n a racket-ridden union now\n formally extinct—although anyone\n who knew the signs could still pick\n up some traces on the docks. In those\n days, Braun had been the business\n manager of an insurance firm, the\n sole visible function of which had\n been to write policies for the ILA\n and its individual dock-wallopers.\n For some reason, he had been amused\n by the brash youngster who'd barged\n in on him and demanded the lowdown,\n and had shown me considerable\n lengths of ropes not normally\n in view of the public—nothing incriminating,\n but enough to give me\n a better insight into how the union\n operated than I had had any right to\n expect—or even suspect.",
"I called headquarters and sent a\n messenger to my apartment to look\n for one of those long-dusty blue folders\n with the legal-length sheets inside\n them, with orders to scorch it over\n to Braun without stopping to breathe\n more than once. Then I went back\n myself.\n\n\n The atmosphere had changed. Anderton\n was sitting by the big desk,\n clenching his fists and sweating; his\n whole posture telegraphed his controlled\n helplessness. Cheyney was\n bent over a seismograph, echo-sounding\n for the egg through the river\n bottom. If that even had a prayer of\n working, I knew, he'd have had the\n trains of the Hudson & Manhattan\n stopped; their rumbling course\n through their tubes would have\n blanked out any possible echo-pip\n from the egg.\n\n\n \"Wild goose chase?\" Joan said,\n scanning my face.",
"\"Don't you believe it. The symptoms\n are showing all over him. Now\n he's backing Broadway plays, sponsoring\n beginning actresses, joining\n playwrights' groups—he's the only\n member of Buskin and Brush who's\n never written a play, acted in one, or\n so much as pulled the rope to raise\n the curtain.\"\n\n\n \"That's investment,\" I said.\n \"That's his business.\"",
"\"In other words, it's a dud,\" Joan\n said.\n\n\n \"That's right, a dud.\"\n\n\n Now, at last, Braun wiped his face,\n which was quite gray. \"I told you\n the truth,\" he said grimly. \"My\n hunches don't work on stuff like\n this.\"\n\n\n \"But they do,\" I said. \"I'm sorry\n we put you through the wringer—and\n you too, colonel—but we couldn't\n let an opportunity like this slip.\n It was too good a chance for us to\n test how our facilities would stand\n up in a real bomb-drop.\"\n\n\n \"A real drop?\" Anderton said.\n \"Are you trying to say that CIA\n staged this? You ought to be shot,\n the whole pack of you!\"",
"\"Mr. Braun, this is Joan Hadamard,\n Clark Cheyney, Colonel Anderton.\n I'll be quick because we need\n speed now. A Polish ship has dropped\n something out in the harbor.\n We don't know what it is. It may be\n a hell-bomb, or it may be just somebody's\n old laundry. Obviously we've\n got to find out which—and we want\n you to tell us.\"\n\n\n Braun's aristocratic eyebrows went\n up. \"Me? Hell, Andy, I don't know\n nothing about things like that. I'm\n surprised with you. I thought CIA\n had all the brains it needed—ain't\n you got machines to tell you answers\n like that?\"\n\n\n I pointed silently to Joan, who had\n gone back to work the moment the\n introductions were over. She was still\n on the mike to the divers. She was\n saying: \"What does it look like?\"",
"\"Not quite. I've got something, if\n I can just figure out what it is. Remember\n One-Shot Braun?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. What's he got to do with\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" I said. \"But I want\n to bring him in. I don't think we'll\n lick this project before deadline without\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What good is a professional\n gambler on a job like this? He'll just\n get in the way.\"\n\n\n I looked toward the television\n screen, which now showed an\n amorphous black mass, jutting up\n from a foundation of even deeper\n black. \"Is that operation getting you\n anywhere?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing's gotten us anywhere,\"\n Anderton interjected harshly. \"We\n don't even know if that's the egg—the\n whole area is littered with crates.\n Harris, you've got to let me get that\n alert out!\"",
"\"The automatic compartment bulkheads\n on the\nLudmilla\nwere defective,\"\n he said. \"It seems that this\n egg was buried among a lot of other\n crates in the dump-cell of the\n hold—\"\n\n\n \"What's a dump cell?\"\n\n\n \"It's a sea lock for getting rid of\n dangerous cargo. The bottom of it\n opens right to Davy Jones. Standard\n fitting for ships carrying explosives,\n radioactives, anything that might act\n up unexpectedly.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" I said. \"Go ahead.\""
],
[
"\"Don't you believe it. The symptoms\n are showing all over him. Now\n he's backing Broadway plays, sponsoring\n beginning actresses, joining\n playwrights' groups—he's the only\n member of Buskin and Brush who's\n never written a play, acted in one, or\n so much as pulled the rope to raise\n the curtain.\"\n\n\n \"That's investment,\" I said.\n \"That's his business.\"",
"She had been right; within the\n year, Braun had announced the\n founding of an association for clearing\n the Detroit slum area where he\n had been born—the plainest kind of\n symbolic suicide:\nLet's not have any\n more Abner Longmans Brauns born\n down here\n. It depressed me to see it\n happen, for next on Joan's agenda\n for Braun was an entry into politics\n as a fighting liberal—a New Dealer\n twenty years too late. Since I'm mildly\n liberal myself when I'm off duty,\n I hated to think what Braun's career\n might tell me about my own motives,\n if I'd let it.",
"Joan had been following his career,\n too, not because she had ever met\n him, but because for her he was a\n type study in the evolution of what\n she called \"the extra-legal ego.\"\n \"With personalities like that, respectability\n is a disease,\" she told me.\n \"There's always an almost-open conflict\n between the desire to be powerful\n and the desire to be accepted;\n your ordinary criminal is a moral imbecile,\n but people like Braun are\n damned with a conscience, and sooner\n or later they crack trying to appease\n it.\"\n\n\n \"I'd sooner try to crack a Timkin\n bearing,\" I said. \"Braun's ten-point\n steel all the way through.\"",
"\"Peter, you're only looking at the\n surface. His real investments almost\n never fail. But the plays he backs\nalways\ndo. They have to; he's sinking\n money in them to appease his conscience,\n and if they were to succeed it\n would double his guilt instead of\n salving it. It's the same way with the\n young actresses. He's not sexually\n interested in them—his type never is,\n because living a rigidly orthodox\n family life is part of the effort towards\n respectability. He's backing\n them to 'pay his debt to society'—in\n other words, they're talismans to\n keep him out of jail.\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't seem like a very satisfactory\n substitute.\"\n\n\n \"Of course it isn't,\" Joan had said.\n \"The next thing he'll do is go in for\n direct public service—giving money\n to hospitals or something like that.\n You watch.\"",
"There'd been a time when I'd\n known Braun, briefly and to no\n profit to either of us. As an undergraduate\n majoring in social sciences,\n I'd taken on a term paper on the old\n International Longshoreman's Association,\n a racket-ridden union now\n formally extinct—although anyone\n who knew the signs could still pick\n up some traces on the docks. In those\n days, Braun had been the business\n manager of an insurance firm, the\n sole visible function of which had\n been to write policies for the ILA\n and its individual dock-wallopers.\n For some reason, he had been amused\n by the brash youngster who'd barged\n in on him and demanded the lowdown,\n and had shown me considerable\n lengths of ropes not normally\n in view of the public—nothing incriminating,\n but enough to give me\n a better insight into how the union\n operated than I had had any right to\n expect—or even suspect.",
"\"So we failed the test,\" I said. \"At\n one minute short of the deadline,\n Joan had the divers unscrew the cap.\n In a real drop that would have resulted\n in a detonation, if the bomb\n was real; we'd never risk it. That\n we did do it in the test was a concession\n of failure—an admission that\n our usual methods didn't come\n through for us in time.\n\n\n \"And that means that you were\n the only person who did come\n through, Mr. Braun. If a real bomb-drop\n ever comes, we're going to have\n to have you here, as an active part of\n our investigation. Your intuition for\n the one-shot gamble was the one\n thing that bailed us out this time.\n Next time it may save eight million\n lives.\"\n\n\n There was quite a long silence. All\n of us, Anderton included, watched\n Braun intently, but his impassive\n face failed to show any trace of how\n his thoughts were running.",
"Hence I was surprised to hear\n somebody on the docks remark that\n Braun was in the city over the week\n end. It would never have occurred\n to me that he still interested himself\n in the waterfront, for he'd gone respectable\n with a vengeance. He was\n still a professional gambler, and according\n to what he had told the\n Congressional Investigating Committee\n last year, took in thirty to fifty\n thousand dollars a year at it, but his\n gambles were no longer concentrated\n on horses, the numbers, or shady insurance\n deals. Nowadays what he did\n was called investment—mostly in real\n estate; realtors knew him well as the\n man who had\nalmost\nbought the Empire\n State Building. (The\nalmost\nin\n the equation stands for the moment\n when the shoestring broke.)",
"He remembered me instantly; like\n most uneducated, power-driven men,\n he had a memory as good as any machine's.\n\n\n \"You never did send me that paper\n you was going to write,\" he said. His\n voice seemed absolutely unchanged,\n although he was in his seventies now.\n \"You promised you would.\"\n\n\n \"Kids don't keep their promises\n as well as they should,\" I said. \"But\n I've still got copies and I'll see to it\n that you get one, this time. Right\n now I need another favor—something\n right up your alley.\"\n\n\n \"CIA business?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I didn't know you knew I\n was with CIA.\"\n\n\n Braun chuckled. \"I still know a\n thing or two,\" he said. \"What's the\n angle?\"",
"\"We haven't given up yet, colonel.\n The point is this, Joan: what\n we need is an inspired guess. Get\n anything from the prob series, Clark?\n I thought not. On a one-shot gamble\n of this kind, the 'laws' of chance are\n no good at all. For that matter, the\n so-called ESP experiments showed us\n long ago that even the way we construct\n random tables is full of holes—and\n that a man with a feeling for\n the essence of a gamble can make a\n monkey out of chance almost at will.\n\n\n \"And if there ever was such a\n man, Braun is it. That's why I asked\n him to come down here. I want him\n to look at that lump on the screen\n and—play a hunch.\"",
"\"It ain't my\nkind\nof thing,\" he\n said. \"Look, I never in my life run\n odds on anything that made any difference.\n But this makes a difference.\n If I guess wrong—\"\n\n\n \"Then we're all dead ducks. But\n why should you guess wrong? Your\n hunches have been working for sixty\n years now.\"\n\n\n Braun wiped his face. \"No. You\n don't get it. I wish you'd listen to\n me. Look, my wife and my kids are\n in the city. It ain't only my life, it's\n theirs, too. That's what I care about.\n That's why it's no good. On things\n that matter to me,\nmy hunches don't\n work\n.\"\n\n\n I was stunned, and so, I could see,\n were Joan and Cheyney. I suppose I\n should have guessed it, but it had\n never occurred to me.",
"\"Not quite. I've got something, if\n I can just figure out what it is. Remember\n One-Shot Braun?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. What's he got to do with\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" I said. \"But I want\n to bring him in. I don't think we'll\n lick this project before deadline without\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What good is a professional\n gambler on a job like this? He'll just\n get in the way.\"\n\n\n I looked toward the television\n screen, which now showed an\n amorphous black mass, jutting up\n from a foundation of even deeper\n black. \"Is that operation getting you\n anywhere?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing's gotten us anywhere,\"\n Anderton interjected harshly. \"We\n don't even know if that's the egg—the\n whole area is littered with crates.\n Harris, you've got to let me get that\n alert out!\"",
"\"In other words, it's a dud,\" Joan\n said.\n\n\n \"That's right, a dud.\"\n\n\n Now, at last, Braun wiped his face,\n which was quite gray. \"I told you\n the truth,\" he said grimly. \"My\n hunches don't work on stuff like\n this.\"\n\n\n \"But they do,\" I said. \"I'm sorry\n we put you through the wringer—and\n you too, colonel—but we couldn't\n let an opportunity like this slip.\n It was too good a chance for us to\n test how our facilities would stand\n up in a real bomb-drop.\"\n\n\n \"A real drop?\" Anderton said.\n \"Are you trying to say that CIA\n staged this? You ought to be shot,\n the whole pack of you!\"",
"\"Mr. Braun, this is Joan Hadamard,\n Clark Cheyney, Colonel Anderton.\n I'll be quick because we need\n speed now. A Polish ship has dropped\n something out in the harbor.\n We don't know what it is. It may be\n a hell-bomb, or it may be just somebody's\n old laundry. Obviously we've\n got to find out which—and we want\n you to tell us.\"\n\n\n Braun's aristocratic eyebrows went\n up. \"Me? Hell, Andy, I don't know\n nothing about things like that. I'm\n surprised with you. I thought CIA\n had all the brains it needed—ain't\n you got machines to tell you answers\n like that?\"\n\n\n I pointed silently to Joan, who had\n gone back to work the moment the\n introductions were over. She was still\n on the mike to the divers. She was\n saying: \"What does it look like?\"",
"All of which had nothing to do\n with why I was prowling around the\nLudmilla\n—or did it? I kept remembering\n Anderton's challenge: \"You\n can't take such a gamble. There are\n eight and a half million lives riding\n on it—\" That put it up into Braun's\n normal operating area, all right. The\n connection was still hazy, but on the\n grounds that any link might be useful,\n I phoned him.",
"The expression on Braun's face\n was exactly like the one he had worn\n while he had been searching for his\n decision—except that, since his eyes\n were open, I could see that it was\n directed at me. \"If this was the old\n days,\" he said in an ice-cold voice,\n \"I might of made the colonel's idea\n come true. I don't go for tricks like\n this, Andy.\"\n\n\n \"It was more than a trick,\" Clark\n put in. \"You'll remember we had\n a deadline on the test, Mr. Braun.\n Obviously, in a real drop we wouldn't\n have all the time in the world\n to figure out what kind of a thing\n had been dropped. If we had still\n failed to establish that when the\n deadline ran out, we would have\n had to allow evacuation of the city,\n with all the attendant risk that that\n was exactly what the enemy wanted\n us to do.\"\n\n\n \"So?\"",
"\"You're out of your mind,\" Anderton\n said.\nA decorous knock spared me the\n trouble of having to deny, affirm or\n ignore the judgment. It was Braun;\n the messenger had been fast, and\n the gambler hadn't bothered to read\n what a college student had thought\n of him fifteen years ago. He came\n forward and held out his hand, while\n the others looked him over frankly.",
"He was impressive, all right. It\n would have been hard for a stranger\n to believe that he was aiming at respectability;\n to the eye, he was already\n there. He was tall and spare,\n and walked perfectly erect, not without\n spring despite his age. His clothing\n was as far from that of a\n gambler as you could have taken it\n by design: a black double-breasted\n suit with a thin vertical stripe, a gray\n silk tie with a pearl stickpin just\n barely large enough to be visible at\n all, a black Homburg; all perfectly\n fitted, all worn with proper casualness—one\n might almost say a formal\n casualness. It was only when he\n opened his mouth that One-Shot\n Braun was in the suit with him.\n\n\n \"I come over as soon as your runner\n got to me,\" he said. \"What's the\n pitch, Andy?\"",
"\"Let us do the guessing, Monig.\n All right, maybe it's got a clockwork\n fuse that didn't break with the impact.\n Or a gyroscopic fuse. Stick a\n stethoscope on it and see if you pick\n up a ticking or anything that sounds\n like a motor running.\"\nThere was a lag and I turned back\n to Braun. \"As you can see, we're\n stymied. This is a long shot, Mr.\n Braun. One throw of the dice—one\n show-down hand. We've got to have\n an expert call it for us—somebody\n with a record of hits on long shots.\n That's why I called you.\"\n\n\n \"It's no good,\" he said. He took\n off the Homburg, took his handkerchief\n from his breast pocket, and\n wiped the hatband. \"I can't do it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\"",
"I nodded. He closed his eyes. An\n unexpected stab of pure fright went\n down my back. Without the eyes,\n Braun's face was a death mask.\n\n\n The water sounds and the irregular\n ticking of a Geiger counter\n seemed to spring out from the audio\n speaker, four times as loud as before.\n I could even hear the pen of\n the seismograph scribbling away, until\n I looked at the instrument and\n saw that Clark had stopped it, probably\n long ago.\n\n\n Droplets of sweat began to form\n along Braun's forehead and his upper\n lip. The handkerchief remained\n crushed in his hand.\n\n\n Anderton said, \"Of all the fool—\"",
"\"Hush!\" Joan said quietly.\nSlowly, Braun opened his eyes.\n \"All right,\" he said. \"You guys\n wanted it this way.\nI say it's a bomb.\n\"\n He stared at us for a moment more—and\n then, all at once, the Timkin\n bearing burst. Words poured out of\n it. \"Now you guys do something, do\n your job like I did mine—get my\n wife and kids out of there—empty\n the city—do something,\ndo something\n!\"\n\n\n Anderton was already grabbing\n for the phone. \"You're right, Mr.\n Braun. If it isn't already too late—\"\n\n\n Cheyney shot out a hand and\n caught Anderton's telephone arm by\n the wrist. \"Wait a minute,\" he said.\n\n\n \"What d'you mean, 'wait a minute'?\n Haven't you already shot\n enough time?\""
],
[
"\"Hey,\" Anderton said, putting the\n phone down again. \"Are you going\n to duck out just like that? Remember,\n Dr. Harris, we've got to evacuate the\n city first of all! No matter whether\n it's a real egg or not—we can't take\n the chance on it's\nnot\nbeing an egg!\"\n\n\n \"Don't move a man until you get\n a go-ahead from CIA,\" I said. \"For\n all we know now, evacuating the city\n may be just what the enemy wants us\n to do—so they can grab it unharmed.\n Or they may want to start a panic\n for some other reason, any one of\n fifty possible reasons.\"\n\n\n \"You can't take such a gamble,\"\n he said grimly. \"There are eight and\n a half million lives riding on it. I\n can't let you do it.\"",
"\"And it's my guess that we're\n never going to get the answer by\n diving for it—not in time, anyhow.\n Remember when the Navy lost a\n barge-load of shells in the harbor,\n back in '52? They scrabbled for them\n for a year and never pulled up a one;\n they finally had to warn the public\n that if it found anything funny-looking\n along the shore it shouldn't bang\n said object, or shake it either. We're\n better equipped than the Navy was\n then—but we're working against a\n deadline.\"\n\n\n \"If you'd admitted that earlier,\"\n Anderton said hoarsely, \"we'd have\n half a million people out of the city\n by now. Maybe even a million.\"",
"\"Hush!\" Joan said quietly.\nSlowly, Braun opened his eyes.\n \"All right,\" he said. \"You guys\n wanted it this way.\nI say it's a bomb.\n\"\n He stared at us for a moment more—and\n then, all at once, the Timkin\n bearing burst. Words poured out of\n it. \"Now you guys do something, do\n your job like I did mine—get my\n wife and kids out of there—empty\n the city—do something,\ndo something\n!\"\n\n\n Anderton was already grabbing\n for the phone. \"You're right, Mr.\n Braun. If it isn't already too late—\"\n\n\n Cheyney shot out a hand and\n caught Anderton's telephone arm by\n the wrist. \"Wait a minute,\" he said.\n\n\n \"What d'you mean, 'wait a minute'?\n Haven't you already shot\n enough time?\"",
"The expression on Braun's face\n was exactly like the one he had worn\n while he had been searching for his\n decision—except that, since his eyes\n were open, I could see that it was\n directed at me. \"If this was the old\n days,\" he said in an ice-cold voice,\n \"I might of made the colonel's idea\n come true. I don't go for tricks like\n this, Andy.\"\n\n\n \"It was more than a trick,\" Clark\n put in. \"You'll remember we had\n a deadline on the test, Mr. Braun.\n Obviously, in a real drop we wouldn't\n have all the time in the world\n to figure out what kind of a thing\n had been dropped. If we had still\n failed to establish that when the\n deadline ran out, we would have\n had to allow evacuation of the city,\n with all the attendant risk that that\n was exactly what the enemy wanted\n us to do.\"\n\n\n \"So?\"",
"\"You passed your authority to us\n when you hired us,\" I pointed out.\n \"If you want to evacuate without our\n O.K., you'll have to fire us first. It'll\n take another hour to get that cleared\n from Washington—so you might as\n well give us the hour.\"\n\n\n He stared at me for a moment, his\n lips thinned. Then he picked up the\n phone again to order Joan's blood\n count, and I got out the door, fast.\nA reasonable man would have said\n that I found nothing useful on the\nLudmilla\n, except negative information.\n But the fact is that anything I\n found would have been a surprise to\n me; I went down looking for surprises.\n I found nothing but a faint\n trail to Abner Longmans Braun, most\n of which was fifteen years cold.",
"\"It ain't my\nkind\nof thing,\" he\n said. \"Look, I never in my life run\n odds on anything that made any difference.\n But this makes a difference.\n If I guess wrong—\"\n\n\n \"Then we're all dead ducks. But\n why should you guess wrong? Your\n hunches have been working for sixty\n years now.\"\n\n\n Braun wiped his face. \"No. You\n don't get it. I wish you'd listen to\n me. Look, my wife and my kids are\n in the city. It ain't only my life, it's\n theirs, too. That's what I care about.\n That's why it's no good. On things\n that matter to me,\nmy hunches don't\n work\n.\"\n\n\n I was stunned, and so, I could see,\n were Joan and Cheyney. I suppose I\n should have guessed it, but it had\n never occurred to me.",
"\"In other words, it's a dud,\" Joan\n said.\n\n\n \"That's right, a dud.\"\n\n\n Now, at last, Braun wiped his face,\n which was quite gray. \"I told you\n the truth,\" he said grimly. \"My\n hunches don't work on stuff like\n this.\"\n\n\n \"But they do,\" I said. \"I'm sorry\n we put you through the wringer—and\n you too, colonel—but we couldn't\n let an opportunity like this slip.\n It was too good a chance for us to\n test how our facilities would stand\n up in a real bomb-drop.\"\n\n\n \"A real drop?\" Anderton said.\n \"Are you trying to say that CIA\n staged this? You ought to be shot,\n the whole pack of you!\"",
"Cheyney did not let go; instead,\n he looked inquiringly at Joan and\n said, \"One minute, Joan. You might\n as well go ahead.\"\n\n\n She nodded and spoke into the\n mike. \"Monig, unscrew the cap.\"\n\n\n \"Unscrew the cap?\" the audio\n squawked. \"But Dr. Hadamard, if\n that sets it off—\"\n\n\n \"It won't go off. That's the one\n thing you can be sure it won't do.\"\n\n\n \"What is this?\" Anderton demanded.\n \"And what's this deadline\n stuff, anyhow?\"\n\n\n \"The cap's off,\" Monig reported.\n \"We're getting plenty of radiation\n now. Just a minute— Yeah. Dr.\n Hadamard, it's a bomb, all right.\n But it hasn't got a fuse. Now how\n could they have made a fool mistake\n like that?\"",
"\"No, not exactly,\" I said. \"The\n enemy's responsible for the drop, all\n right. We got word last month from\n our man in Gdynia that they were\n going to do it, and that the bomb\n would be on board the\nLudmilla\n. As\n I say, it was too good an opportunity\n to miss. We wanted to find out just\n how long it would take us to figure\n out the nature of the bomb—which\n we didn't know in detail—after it\n was dropped here. So we had our\n people in Gdynia defuse the thing\n after it was put on board the ship,\n but otherwise leave it entirely alone.\n\n\n \"Actually, you see, your hunch was\n right on the button as far as it went.\n We didn't ask you whether or not\n that object was a live bomb. We\n asked whether it was a bomb or not.\n You said it was, and you were right.\"",
"\"So we failed the test,\" I said. \"At\n one minute short of the deadline,\n Joan had the divers unscrew the cap.\n In a real drop that would have resulted\n in a detonation, if the bomb\n was real; we'd never risk it. That\n we did do it in the test was a concession\n of failure—an admission that\n our usual methods didn't come\n through for us in time.\n\n\n \"And that means that you were\n the only person who did come\n through, Mr. Braun. If a real bomb-drop\n ever comes, we're going to have\n to have you here, as an active part of\n our investigation. Your intuition for\n the one-shot gamble was the one\n thing that bailed us out this time.\n Next time it may save eight million\n lives.\"\n\n\n There was quite a long silence. All\n of us, Anderton included, watched\n Braun intently, but his impassive\n face failed to show any trace of how\n his thoughts were running.",
"I called headquarters and sent a\n messenger to my apartment to look\n for one of those long-dusty blue folders\n with the legal-length sheets inside\n them, with orders to scorch it over\n to Braun without stopping to breathe\n more than once. Then I went back\n myself.\n\n\n The atmosphere had changed. Anderton\n was sitting by the big desk,\n clenching his fists and sweating; his\n whole posture telegraphed his controlled\n helplessness. Cheyney was\n bent over a seismograph, echo-sounding\n for the egg through the river\n bottom. If that even had a prayer of\n working, I knew, he'd have had the\n trains of the Hudson & Manhattan\n stopped; their rumbling course\n through their tubes would have\n blanked out any possible echo-pip\n from the egg.\n\n\n \"Wild goose chase?\" Joan said,\n scanning my face.",
"\"Ten minutes,\" Cheyney said.\n\n\n I looked up at Braun. He was\n frightened, and again I was surprised\n without having any right to\n be. I tried to keep at least my voice\n calm.\n\n\n \"Please try it anyhow, Mr. Braun—as\n a favor. It's already too late to\n do it any other way. And if you guess\n wrong, the outcome won't be any\n worse than if you don't try at all.\"\n\n\n \"My kids,\" he whispered. I don't\n think he knew that he was speaking\n aloud. I waited.\n\n\n Then his eyes seemed to come back\n to the present. \"All right,\" he said.\n \"I told you the truth, Andy. Remember\n that. So—is it a bomb or ain't it?\n That's what's up for grabs, right?\"",
"\"Well, there was a timer on the\n dump-cell floor, set to drop the egg\n when the ship came up the river.\n That worked fine, but the automatic\n bulkheads that are supposed to keep\n the rest of the ship from being flooded\n while the cell's open, didn't. At\n least they didn't do a thorough job.\n The\nLudmilla\nbegan to list and the\n captain yelled for help. When the\n Harbor Patrol found the dump-cell\n open, they called us in.\"\n\n\n \"I see.\" I thought about it a moment.\n \"In other words, you don't\n know whether the\nLudmilla\nreally\n laid an egg or not.\"",
"Certainly nobody at CIA so much\n as thought of Braun when the news\n first came through. Harry Anderton,\n the Harbor Defense chief, called us\n at 0830 Friday to take on the job of\n identifying the egg; this was when\n our records show us officially entering\n the affair, but, of course, Anderton\n had been keeping the wires to\n Washington steaming for an hour before\n that, getting authorization to\n spend some of his money on us (our\n clearance status was then and is now\n C&R—clean and routine).\n\n\n I was in the central office when\n the call came through, and had some\n difficulty in making out precisely\n what Anderton wanted of us. \"Slow\n down, Colonel Anderton, please,\" I\n begged him. \"Two or three seconds\n won't make that much difference.\n How did you find out about this egg\n in the first place?\"",
"All of which had nothing to do\n with why I was prowling around the\nLudmilla\n—or did it? I kept remembering\n Anderton's challenge: \"You\n can't take such a gamble. There are\n eight and a half million lives riding\n on it—\" That put it up into Braun's\n normal operating area, all right. The\n connection was still hazy, but on the\n grounds that any link might be useful,\n I phoned him.",
"\"That's what I keep trying to explain\n to you, Dr. Harris. We don't\n know what she dropped and we\n haven't any way of finding out. It\n could be a bomb—it could be anything.\n We're sweating everybody on\n board the ship now, but it's my guess\n that none of them know anything;\n the whole procedure was designed to\n be automatic.\"\n\n\n \"All right, we'll take it,\" I said.\n \"You've got divers down?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, but—\"\n\n\n \"We'll worry about the buts from\n here on. Get us a direct line from\n your barge to the big board here so\n we can direct the work. Better get\n on over here yourself.\"",
"\"Let us do the guessing, Monig.\n All right, maybe it's got a clockwork\n fuse that didn't break with the impact.\n Or a gyroscopic fuse. Stick a\n stethoscope on it and see if you pick\n up a ticking or anything that sounds\n like a motor running.\"\nThere was a lag and I turned back\n to Braun. \"As you can see, we're\n stymied. This is a long shot, Mr.\n Braun. One throw of the dice—one\n show-down hand. We've got to have\n an expert call it for us—somebody\n with a record of hits on long shots.\n That's why I called you.\"\n\n\n \"It's no good,\" he said. He took\n off the Homburg, took his handkerchief\n from his breast pocket, and\n wiped the hatband. \"I can't do it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\"",
"\"Not quite. I've got something, if\n I can just figure out what it is. Remember\n One-Shot Braun?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. What's he got to do with\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" I said. \"But I want\n to bring him in. I don't think we'll\n lick this project before deadline without\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What good is a professional\n gambler on a job like this? He'll just\n get in the way.\"\n\n\n I looked toward the television\n screen, which now showed an\n amorphous black mass, jutting up\n from a foundation of even deeper\n black. \"Is that operation getting you\n anywhere?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing's gotten us anywhere,\"\n Anderton interjected harshly. \"We\n don't even know if that's the egg—the\n whole area is littered with crates.\n Harris, you've got to let me get that\n alert out!\"",
"It was already open; Anderton had\n gone to work quickly and with decision\n once he was sure we were taking\n on the major question. The television\n screen lit, but nothing showed\n on it but murky light, striped with\n streamers of darkness slowly rising\n and falling. The audio went\ncloonck\n...\noing\n,\noing\n...\nbonk\n...\noing\n... Underwater noises, shapeless\n and characterless.\n\n\n \"Hello, out there in the harbor.\n This is CIA, Harris calling. Come in,\n please.\"\n\n\n \"Monig here,\" the audio said.\nBoink\n...\noing\n,\noing\n...\n\n\n \"Got anything yet?\"\n\n\n \"Not a thing, Dr. Harris,\" Monig\n said. \"You can't see three inches in\n front of your face down here—it's\n too silty. We've bumped into a couple\n of crates, but so far, no egg.\"",
"I nodded. He closed his eyes. An\n unexpected stab of pure fright went\n down my back. Without the eyes,\n Braun's face was a death mask.\n\n\n The water sounds and the irregular\n ticking of a Geiger counter\n seemed to spring out from the audio\n speaker, four times as loud as before.\n I could even hear the pen of\n the seismograph scribbling away, until\n I looked at the instrument and\n saw that Clark had stopped it, probably\n long ago.\n\n\n Droplets of sweat began to form\n along Braun's forehead and his upper\n lip. The handkerchief remained\n crushed in his hand.\n\n\n Anderton said, \"Of all the fool—\""
],
[
"\"So we failed the test,\" I said. \"At\n one minute short of the deadline,\n Joan had the divers unscrew the cap.\n In a real drop that would have resulted\n in a detonation, if the bomb\n was real; we'd never risk it. That\n we did do it in the test was a concession\n of failure—an admission that\n our usual methods didn't come\n through for us in time.\n\n\n \"And that means that you were\n the only person who did come\n through, Mr. Braun. If a real bomb-drop\n ever comes, we're going to have\n to have you here, as an active part of\n our investigation. Your intuition for\n the one-shot gamble was the one\n thing that bailed us out this time.\n Next time it may save eight million\n lives.\"\n\n\n There was quite a long silence. All\n of us, Anderton included, watched\n Braun intently, but his impassive\n face failed to show any trace of how\n his thoughts were running.",
"The expression on Braun's face\n was exactly like the one he had worn\n while he had been searching for his\n decision—except that, since his eyes\n were open, I could see that it was\n directed at me. \"If this was the old\n days,\" he said in an ice-cold voice,\n \"I might of made the colonel's idea\n come true. I don't go for tricks like\n this, Andy.\"\n\n\n \"It was more than a trick,\" Clark\n put in. \"You'll remember we had\n a deadline on the test, Mr. Braun.\n Obviously, in a real drop we wouldn't\n have all the time in the world\n to figure out what kind of a thing\n had been dropped. If we had still\n failed to establish that when the\n deadline ran out, we would have\n had to allow evacuation of the city,\n with all the attendant risk that that\n was exactly what the enemy wanted\n us to do.\"\n\n\n \"So?\"",
"\"It ain't my\nkind\nof thing,\" he\n said. \"Look, I never in my life run\n odds on anything that made any difference.\n But this makes a difference.\n If I guess wrong—\"\n\n\n \"Then we're all dead ducks. But\n why should you guess wrong? Your\n hunches have been working for sixty\n years now.\"\n\n\n Braun wiped his face. \"No. You\n don't get it. I wish you'd listen to\n me. Look, my wife and my kids are\n in the city. It ain't only my life, it's\n theirs, too. That's what I care about.\n That's why it's no good. On things\n that matter to me,\nmy hunches don't\n work\n.\"\n\n\n I was stunned, and so, I could see,\n were Joan and Cheyney. I suppose I\n should have guessed it, but it had\n never occurred to me.",
"\"Ten minutes,\" Cheyney said.\n\n\n I looked up at Braun. He was\n frightened, and again I was surprised\n without having any right to\n be. I tried to keep at least my voice\n calm.\n\n\n \"Please try it anyhow, Mr. Braun—as\n a favor. It's already too late to\n do it any other way. And if you guess\n wrong, the outcome won't be any\n worse than if you don't try at all.\"\n\n\n \"My kids,\" he whispered. I don't\n think he knew that he was speaking\n aloud. I waited.\n\n\n Then his eyes seemed to come back\n to the present. \"All right,\" he said.\n \"I told you the truth, Andy. Remember\n that. So—is it a bomb or ain't it?\n That's what's up for grabs, right?\"",
"\"Hush!\" Joan said quietly.\nSlowly, Braun opened his eyes.\n \"All right,\" he said. \"You guys\n wanted it this way.\nI say it's a bomb.\n\"\n He stared at us for a moment more—and\n then, all at once, the Timkin\n bearing burst. Words poured out of\n it. \"Now you guys do something, do\n your job like I did mine—get my\n wife and kids out of there—empty\n the city—do something,\ndo something\n!\"\n\n\n Anderton was already grabbing\n for the phone. \"You're right, Mr.\n Braun. If it isn't already too late—\"\n\n\n Cheyney shot out a hand and\n caught Anderton's telephone arm by\n the wrist. \"Wait a minute,\" he said.\n\n\n \"What d'you mean, 'wait a minute'?\n Haven't you already shot\n enough time?\"",
"He remembered me instantly; like\n most uneducated, power-driven men,\n he had a memory as good as any machine's.\n\n\n \"You never did send me that paper\n you was going to write,\" he said. His\n voice seemed absolutely unchanged,\n although he was in his seventies now.\n \"You promised you would.\"\n\n\n \"Kids don't keep their promises\n as well as they should,\" I said. \"But\n I've still got copies and I'll see to it\n that you get one, this time. Right\n now I need another favor—something\n right up your alley.\"\n\n\n \"CIA business?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. I didn't know you knew I\n was with CIA.\"\n\n\n Braun chuckled. \"I still know a\n thing or two,\" he said. \"What's the\n angle?\"",
"\"In other words, it's a dud,\" Joan\n said.\n\n\n \"That's right, a dud.\"\n\n\n Now, at last, Braun wiped his face,\n which was quite gray. \"I told you\n the truth,\" he said grimly. \"My\n hunches don't work on stuff like\n this.\"\n\n\n \"But they do,\" I said. \"I'm sorry\n we put you through the wringer—and\n you too, colonel—but we couldn't\n let an opportunity like this slip.\n It was too good a chance for us to\n test how our facilities would stand\n up in a real bomb-drop.\"\n\n\n \"A real drop?\" Anderton said.\n \"Are you trying to say that CIA\n staged this? You ought to be shot,\n the whole pack of you!\"",
"I nodded. He closed his eyes. An\n unexpected stab of pure fright went\n down my back. Without the eyes,\n Braun's face was a death mask.\n\n\n The water sounds and the irregular\n ticking of a Geiger counter\n seemed to spring out from the audio\n speaker, four times as loud as before.\n I could even hear the pen of\n the seismograph scribbling away, until\n I looked at the instrument and\n saw that Clark had stopped it, probably\n long ago.\n\n\n Droplets of sweat began to form\n along Braun's forehead and his upper\n lip. The handkerchief remained\n crushed in his hand.\n\n\n Anderton said, \"Of all the fool—\"",
"All of which had nothing to do\n with why I was prowling around the\nLudmilla\n—or did it? I kept remembering\n Anderton's challenge: \"You\n can't take such a gamble. There are\n eight and a half million lives riding\n on it—\" That put it up into Braun's\n normal operating area, all right. The\n connection was still hazy, but on the\n grounds that any link might be useful,\n I phoned him.",
"\"We haven't given up yet, colonel.\n The point is this, Joan: what\n we need is an inspired guess. Get\n anything from the prob series, Clark?\n I thought not. On a one-shot gamble\n of this kind, the 'laws' of chance are\n no good at all. For that matter, the\n so-called ESP experiments showed us\n long ago that even the way we construct\n random tables is full of holes—and\n that a man with a feeling for\n the essence of a gamble can make a\n monkey out of chance almost at will.\n\n\n \"And if there ever was such a\n man, Braun is it. That's why I asked\n him to come down here. I want him\n to look at that lump on the screen\n and—play a hunch.\"",
"Joan had been following his career,\n too, not because she had ever met\n him, but because for her he was a\n type study in the evolution of what\n she called \"the extra-legal ego.\"\n \"With personalities like that, respectability\n is a disease,\" she told me.\n \"There's always an almost-open conflict\n between the desire to be powerful\n and the desire to be accepted;\n your ordinary criminal is a moral imbecile,\n but people like Braun are\n damned with a conscience, and sooner\n or later they crack trying to appease\n it.\"\n\n\n \"I'd sooner try to crack a Timkin\n bearing,\" I said. \"Braun's ten-point\n steel all the way through.\"",
"There'd been a time when I'd\n known Braun, briefly and to no\n profit to either of us. As an undergraduate\n majoring in social sciences,\n I'd taken on a term paper on the old\n International Longshoreman's Association,\n a racket-ridden union now\n formally extinct—although anyone\n who knew the signs could still pick\n up some traces on the docks. In those\n days, Braun had been the business\n manager of an insurance firm, the\n sole visible function of which had\n been to write policies for the ILA\n and its individual dock-wallopers.\n For some reason, he had been amused\n by the brash youngster who'd barged\n in on him and demanded the lowdown,\n and had shown me considerable\n lengths of ropes not normally\n in view of the public—nothing incriminating,\n but enough to give me\n a better insight into how the union\n operated than I had had any right to\n expect—or even suspect.",
"She had been right; within the\n year, Braun had announced the\n founding of an association for clearing\n the Detroit slum area where he\n had been born—the plainest kind of\n symbolic suicide:\nLet's not have any\n more Abner Longmans Brauns born\n down here\n. It depressed me to see it\n happen, for next on Joan's agenda\n for Braun was an entry into politics\n as a fighting liberal—a New Dealer\n twenty years too late. Since I'm mildly\n liberal myself when I'm off duty,\n I hated to think what Braun's career\n might tell me about my own motives,\n if I'd let it.",
"\"Mr. Braun, this is Joan Hadamard,\n Clark Cheyney, Colonel Anderton.\n I'll be quick because we need\n speed now. A Polish ship has dropped\n something out in the harbor.\n We don't know what it is. It may be\n a hell-bomb, or it may be just somebody's\n old laundry. Obviously we've\n got to find out which—and we want\n you to tell us.\"\n\n\n Braun's aristocratic eyebrows went\n up. \"Me? Hell, Andy, I don't know\n nothing about things like that. I'm\n surprised with you. I thought CIA\n had all the brains it needed—ain't\n you got machines to tell you answers\n like that?\"\n\n\n I pointed silently to Joan, who had\n gone back to work the moment the\n introductions were over. She was still\n on the mike to the divers. She was\n saying: \"What does it look like?\"",
"\"Not quite. I've got something, if\n I can just figure out what it is. Remember\n One-Shot Braun?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. What's he got to do with\n it?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing,\" I said. \"But I want\n to bring him in. I don't think we'll\n lick this project before deadline without\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What good is a professional\n gambler on a job like this? He'll just\n get in the way.\"\n\n\n I looked toward the television\n screen, which now showed an\n amorphous black mass, jutting up\n from a foundation of even deeper\n black. \"Is that operation getting you\n anywhere?\"\n\n\n \"Nothing's gotten us anywhere,\"\n Anderton interjected harshly. \"We\n don't even know if that's the egg—the\n whole area is littered with crates.\n Harris, you've got to let me get that\n alert out!\"",
"He was impressive, all right. It\n would have been hard for a stranger\n to believe that he was aiming at respectability;\n to the eye, he was already\n there. He was tall and spare,\n and walked perfectly erect, not without\n spring despite his age. His clothing\n was as far from that of a\n gambler as you could have taken it\n by design: a black double-breasted\n suit with a thin vertical stripe, a gray\n silk tie with a pearl stickpin just\n barely large enough to be visible at\n all, a black Homburg; all perfectly\n fitted, all worn with proper casualness—one\n might almost say a formal\n casualness. It was only when he\n opened his mouth that One-Shot\n Braun was in the suit with him.\n\n\n \"I come over as soon as your runner\n got to me,\" he said. \"What's the\n pitch, Andy?\"",
"\"Let us do the guessing, Monig.\n All right, maybe it's got a clockwork\n fuse that didn't break with the impact.\n Or a gyroscopic fuse. Stick a\n stethoscope on it and see if you pick\n up a ticking or anything that sounds\n like a motor running.\"\nThere was a lag and I turned back\n to Braun. \"As you can see, we're\n stymied. This is a long shot, Mr.\n Braun. One throw of the dice—one\n show-down hand. We've got to have\n an expert call it for us—somebody\n with a record of hits on long shots.\n That's why I called you.\"\n\n\n \"It's no good,\" he said. He took\n off the Homburg, took his handkerchief\n from his breast pocket, and\n wiped the hatband. \"I can't do it.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\"",
"Hence I was surprised to hear\n somebody on the docks remark that\n Braun was in the city over the week\n end. It would never have occurred\n to me that he still interested himself\n in the waterfront, for he'd gone respectable\n with a vengeance. He was\n still a professional gambler, and according\n to what he had told the\n Congressional Investigating Committee\n last year, took in thirty to fifty\n thousand dollars a year at it, but his\n gambles were no longer concentrated\n on horses, the numbers, or shady insurance\n deals. Nowadays what he did\n was called investment—mostly in real\n estate; realtors knew him well as the\n man who had\nalmost\nbought the Empire\n State Building. (The\nalmost\nin\n the equation stands for the moment\n when the shoestring broke.)",
"ONE-SHOT\nYou\n can do a great deal if\n you have enough data, and\n enough time to compute on it,\n by logical methods. But given\n the situation that neither data\n nor time is adequate, and an\n answer must be produced ...\n what do you do?\nBY JAMES BLISH\nIllustrated by van Dongen\n\n\n On the day that the Polish freighter\nLudmilla\nlaid an egg in New\n York harbor, Abner Longmans\n (\"One-Shot\") Braun was in the city\n going about his normal business,\n which was making another million\n dollars. As we found out later, almost\n nothing else was normal about\n that particular week end for Braun.\n For one thing, he had brought his\n family with him—a complete departure\n from routine—reflecting the unprecedentedly\n legitimate nature of\n the deals he was trying to make.\n From every point of view it was a\n bad week end for the CIA to mix\n into his affairs, but nobody had explained\n that to the master of the\nLudmilla\n.",
"I called headquarters and sent a\n messenger to my apartment to look\n for one of those long-dusty blue folders\n with the legal-length sheets inside\n them, with orders to scorch it over\n to Braun without stopping to breathe\n more than once. Then I went back\n myself.\n\n\n The atmosphere had changed. Anderton\n was sitting by the big desk,\n clenching his fists and sweating; his\n whole posture telegraphed his controlled\n helplessness. Cheyney was\n bent over a seismograph, echo-sounding\n for the egg through the river\n bottom. If that even had a prayer of\n working, I knew, he'd have had the\n trains of the Hudson & Manhattan\n stopped; their rumbling course\n through their tubes would have\n blanked out any possible echo-pip\n from the egg.\n\n\n \"Wild goose chase?\" Joan said,\n scanning my face."
]
] |
valid
|
24290
|
[
"Why were the Grdznth so polite?",
"Where are the Grdznth from?",
"How do the Grdznth view humans?",
"What did the PR men cause?",
"Which of the following is the best theme for this story?",
"Which of the following best describes Pete?"
] |
[
[
"They don't want to upset anyone",
"They were afraid of humans",
"It is part of their culture",
"They need time to pass without causing trouble"
],
[
"A different ",
"Florida",
"A parallel universe",
"Another planet"
],
[
"Disregard",
"Empathy",
"Thankful",
"Respect"
],
[
"The end of the human race",
"Empathy for the Grdznth",
"A solution to senator Stokes' problem",
"All answers are correct"
],
[
"Aliens are dangerous",
"Public Relations is manipulative",
"Don't trust someone just because they're polite",
"Ugly things are evil"
],
[
"Anxious",
"Bold",
"Tired",
"Confident"
]
] |
[
4,
3,
1,
4,
3,
4
] |
[
1,
0,
1,
0,
1,
1
] |
[
[
"\"Yes, I know. And the Grdznth are getting worse by the\n hour. They're coming through in battalions—a thousand a day!\n The more Grdznth come through, the more they act as though\n they own the place. Not nasty or anything—it's that infernal\n politeness that people hate most, I think. Can't get them mad,\n can't get them into a fight, but they do anything they please,\n and go anywhere they please, and if the people don't like it,\n the Grdznth just go right ahead anyway.\"\n\n\n Pete pulled at his lip. \"Any violence?\"",
"Determined movements to expel the Grdznth faltered, trembled\n with indecision. The Grdznth were ugly, they frightened\n little children, they\nwere\na trifle overbearing in their insufferable\n stubborn politeness—but in a civilized world you just\n couldn't turn expectant mothers out in the rain.\n\n\n Not even expectant Grdznth mothers.\n\n\n By the second week the blast was going at full tilt.\n\n\n In the Public Relations Bureau building, machines worked\n on into the night. As questionnaires came back, spot candid\n films and street-corner interview tapes ran through the projectors\n on a twenty-four-hour schedule. Tommy Heinz grew\n thinner and thinner, while Pete nursed sharp post-prandial\n stomach pains.",
"\"Not at all.\" Pete tossed his briefcase on the floor. At a\n distance the huge beast had looked like a nightmare combination\n of large alligator and small tyrannosaurus. Now, at\n close range Pete could see that the \"scales\" were actually tiny\n wrinkles of satiny green fur. He knew, of course, that the\n Grdznth were mammals—\"docile, peace-loving mammals,\"\n Tommy's PR-blasts had declared emphatically—but with one\n of them sitting about a foot away Pete had to fight down a\n wave of horror and revulsion.\n\n\n The creature was most incredibly ugly. Great yellow pouches\n hung down below flat reptilian eyes, and a double row of long\n curved teeth glittered sharply. In spite of himself Pete gripped\n the seat as the Grdznth breathed at him wetly through damp\n nostrils.\n\n\n \"Misgauged?\" said Pete.",
"The Grdznth nodded sadly. \"It's horrible of me, but I just\n can't help it. I\nalways\nmisgauge. Last time it was the chancel\n of St. John's Cathedral. I nearly stampeded morning prayer—\"\n He paused to catch his breath. \"What an effort. The energy\n barrier, you know. Frightfully hard to make the jump.\" He\n broke off sharply, staring out the window. \"Dear me! Are we\n going\neast\n?\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid so, friend.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, dear. I wanted\nFlorida\n.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you seem to have drifted through into the wrong\n airplane,\" said Pete. \"Why Florida?\"\n\n\n The Grdznth looked at him reproachfully. \"The Wives, of\n course. The climate is so much better, and they mustn't be\n disturbed, you know.\"",
"The passengers within earshot stiffened, glaring at Pete.\n The fat lady was whispering indignantly to her seat companion.\n Junior had half emerged from his mother's collar; he was busy\n sticking out his tongue at the Grdznth.\n\n\n The creature shifted uneasily. \"Really, I think—perhaps\n Florida would be better.\"\n\n\n \"Going to try it again right now? Don't rush off,\" said Pete.\n\n\n \"Oh, I don't mean to rush. It's been lovely, but—\" Already\n the Grdznth was beginning to fade out.\n\n\n \"Try four miles down and a thousand miles southeast,\" said\n Pete.",
"Tommy gave him a long look. \"So far we've kept it out of\n the papers, but there have been some incidents. Didn't hurt\n the Grdznth a bit—they have personal protective force fields\n around them, a little point they didn't bother to tell us about.\n Anybody who tries anything fancy gets thrown like a bolt of\n lightning hit him. Rumors are getting wild—people saying\n they can't be killed, that they're just moving in to stay.\"\n\n\n Pete nodded slowly. \"Are they?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew. I mean, for sure. The psych-docs say no.\n The Grdznth agreed to leave at a specified time, and something\n in their cultural background makes them stick strictly to their\n agreements. But that's just what the psych-docs think, and\n they've been known to be wrong.\"\n\n\n \"And the appointed time?\"",
"\"Sit down and shut up,\" said Pete. \"If there's one thing the\n man in the street reveres, my friend, it's motherhood. We've\n got several hundred thousand pregnant Grdznth just waiting\n for all the little Grdznth to arrive, and nobody's given them a\n side glance.\" He turned to Tommy. \"Get some copywriters\n down here. Get a Grdznth obstetrician or two. We're going to\n put together a PR-blast that will twang the people's heart-strings\n like a billion harps.\"\n\n\n The color was back in Tommy's cheeks, and the senator was\n forgotten as a dozen intercom switches began snapping. \"We'll\n need TV hookups, and plenty of newscast space,\" he said\n eagerly. \"Maybe a few photographs—do you suppose maybe\nbaby\nGrdznth are lovable?\"",
"\"Of course,\" said Pete. \"In their condition. I'd forgotten.\"\n\n\n \"And I'm told that things have been somewhat unpleasant\n in the East just now,\" said the Grdznth.\n\n\n Pete thought of Tommy, red-faced and frantic, beating off\n hordes of indignant citizens. \"So I hear,\" he said. \"How many\n more of you are coming through?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, not many, not many at all. Only the Wives—half a\n million or so—and their spouses, of course.\" The creature\n clicked his talons nervously. \"We haven't much more time, you\n know. Only a few more weeks, a few months at the most. If\n we couldn't have stopped over here, I just don't know\nwhat\nwe'd have done.\"\n\n\n \"Think nothing of it,\" said Pete indulgently. \"It's been great\n having you.\"",
"The Grdznth sitting on the stool looked regretfully from the\n cosmetician to the Public Relations men. \"I say—I\nam\nsorry....\" His coarse voice trailed off as he peeled a long\n strip of cake makeup off his satiny green face.\n\n\n Pete Greenwood stared at the cosmetician sobbing in the\n chair. \"What's eating\nhim\n?\"\n\n\n \"Professional pride,\" said Tommy. \"He can take twenty\n years off the face of any woman in Hollywood. But he's not\n getting to first base with Gorgeous over there. This is only one\n thing we've tried,\" he added as they moved on down the corridor.\n \"You should see the field reports. We've tried selling the\n advances Earth will have, the wealth, the power. No dice. The\n man on the street reads our PR-blasts, and then looks up to see\n one of the nasty things staring over his shoulder at the newspaper.\"",
"Charlie tipped an imaginary hat toward the Grdznth. \"Spike\n cracked it,\" he said. \"Spike is a sort of Grdznth genius.\" He\n tossed the coffee cup over his shoulder and it ricochetted in\n graceful slow motion against the far wall. \"Now why don't\n you go away, too?\"\n\n\n Tommy turned purple. \"We've got five months,\" he said\n hoarsely. \"Do you hear me? If they aren't going to have their\n babies in five months, we're dead men.\"",
"\"Just one hitch,\" said Tommy. \"The girls can't gestate in\n that climate, at least not until they've been there long enough\n to get their glands adjusted. Seems we have just the right climate\n here for gestating Grdznth, even better than at home.\n So they came begging for permission to stop here, on the way\n through, to rest and parturiate.\"\n\n\n \"So Earth becomes a glorified incubator.\" Pete got to his\n feet thoughtfully. \"This is all very touching,\" he said, \"but\n it just doesn't wash. If the Grdznth are so unpopular with the\n masses, why did we let them in here in the first place?\" He\n looked narrowly at Tommy. \"To be very blunt, what's the\n parking fee?\"",
"Turning back to Pete, Tommy rubbed his hands eagerly.\n \"It's starting to sell, boy. I don't know how strong or how\n good, but it's starting to sell! With the tolerance levels to tell\n us how long we can expect this program to quiet things down,\n we can give Charlie a deadline to crack his differential factor,\n or it's the ax for Charlie.\" He chuckled to himself, and paced\n the room in an overflow of nervous energy. \"I can see it now.\n Open shafts instead of elevators. A quick hop to Honolulu for\n an afternoon on the beach, and back in time for supper. A\n hundred miles to the gallon for the Sunday driver. When\n people begin\nseeing\nwhat the Grdznth are giving us, they'll\n welcome them with open arms.\"\n\n\n \"Hmmm,\" said Pete.",
"\"It'll sell,\" Pete said. \"The question is: for how long?\"\nThe planning revealed the mark of genius. Nothing\n sudden, harsh, or crude—but slowly, in a radio comment here\n or a newspaper story there, the emphasis began to shift from\n Grdznth in general to Grdznth as mothers. A Rutgers professor\n found his TV discussion on \"Motherhood as an Experience\"\n suddenly shifted from 6:30 Monday evening to 10:30 Saturday\n night. Copy rolled by the ream from Tommy's office, refined\n copy, hypersensitively edited copy, finding its way into the\n light of day through devious channels.\n\n\n Three days later a Grdznth miscarriage threatened, and\n was averted. It was only a page 4 item, but it was a beginning.",
"\"Apparently. Nobody knows how they predicted it, but they\n did. Spotted it coming several years ago, so they've been romping\n through parallel after parallel trying to find one they can\n migrate to. They found one, sort of a desperation choice. It's\n cold and arid and full of impassable mountain chains. With an\n uphill fight they can make it support a fraction of their population.\"\n\n\n Tommy shook his head helplessly. \"They picked a very sensible\n system for getting a good strong Grdznth population on\n the new parallel as fast as possible. The males were picked for\n brains, education, ability and adaptability; the females were\n chosen largely according to how pregnant they were.\"\n\n\n Pete grinned. \"Grdznth in utero. There's something poetic\n about it.\"",
"\"Do something! You think I'm a magician? I can just make\n them vanish? What do you want me to do?\"\n\n\n The senator raised his eyebrows. \"You needn't shout, Mr.\n Heinz. I'm not the least interested in\nwhat\nyou do. My interest\n is focused completely on a collection of five thousand letters,\n telegrams, and visiphone calls I've received in the past three\n days alone. My constituents, Mr. Heinz, are making themselves\n clear. If the Grdznth do not go, I go.\"\n\n\n \"That would never do, of course,\" murmured Pete.\n\n\n The senator gave Pete a cold, clinical look. \"Who is this\n person?\" he asked Tommy.\n\n\n \"An assistant on the job,\" Tommy said quickly. \"A very\n excellent PR-man.\"\n\n\n The senator sniffed audibly. \"Full of ideas, no doubt.\"",
"Two rows down a small boy let out a muffled howl and\n tried to bury himself in his mother's coat collar. An indignant\n wail arose from the fat lady. Someone behind Pete groaned\n aloud and quickly retired behind a newspaper.\n\n\n The creature coughed apologetically. \"Terribly sorry,\" he\n said in a coarse rumble. \"So difficult to control, you know.\n Terribly sorry....\" His voice trailed off as he lumbered down\n the aisle toward the empty seat next to Pete.\n\n\n The fat lady gasped, and an angry murmur ran up and down\n the cabin. \"Sit down,\" Pete said to the creature. \"Relax. Cheerful\n reception these days, eh?\"\n\n\n \"You don't mind?\" said the creature.",
"\"They probably look like salamanders,\" said Pete. \"But tell\n the people anything you want. If we're going to get across the\n sanctity of Grdznth motherhood, my friend, anything goes.\"\n\n\n \"It's genius,\" chortled Tommy. \"Sheer genius.\"\n\n\n \"If it sells,\" the senator added, dubiously.",
"\"Any day now. Maybe any minute.\" Charlie spread his\n hands helplessly. \"Oh, it won't be bad at all. Spike here was\n telling me. Mean temperature in only 39 below zero, lots of\n good clean snow, thousands of nice jagged mountain peaks.\n A lovely place, really. Just a little too cold for Grdznth. They\n thought Earth was much nicer.\"\n\n\n \"For them,\" whispered Tommy.\n\n\n \"For them,\" Charlie said.\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from \"Tiger by the Tail and Other Science\n Fiction Stories by Alan E. Nourse\" and was first published in\nGalaxy\nOctober 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor\n spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"\"We'll also know the time-differential,\" said Tommy hopefully,\n \"and how long the Grdznth gestation period will be.\"\n\n\n \"It's a fair exchange,\" said Charlie. \"We keep them until the\n girls have their babies. They teach us the ABC's of space,\n mass and dimension.\"\n\n\n Pete nodded. \"That is, if you can make the people put up\n with them for another six months or so.\"\n\n\n Tommy sighed. \"In a word—yes. So far we've gotten nowhere\n at a thousand miles an hour.\"\n\"I can't do it!\" the cosmetician wailed, hurling himself\n down on a chair and burying his face in his hands. \"I've failed.\n Failed!\"",
"\"That's right,\" said Pete. \"\nNothing\nis what we're hearing\n from Charlie. We've got no transmatter, no null-G, no power,\n nothing except a whole lot of Grdznth and more coming\n through just as fast as they can. I'm beginning to wonder what\n the Grdznth\nare\ngiving us.\"\n\n\n \"Well, they can't gestate forever.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not, but I still have a burning desire to talk to\n Charlie. Something tells me they're going to be gestating a\n little too long.\"\n\n\n They put through the call, but Charlie wasn't answering.\n \"Sorry,\" the operator said. \"Nobody's gotten through there for\n three days.\"\n\n\n \"Three days?\" cried Tommy. \"What's wrong? Is he dead?\"\n\n\n \"Couldn't be. They burned out two more machines yesterday,\"\n said the operator. \"Killed the switchboard for twenty\n minutes.\""
],
[
"\"Yes, I know. And the Grdznth are getting worse by the\n hour. They're coming through in battalions—a thousand a day!\n The more Grdznth come through, the more they act as though\n they own the place. Not nasty or anything—it's that infernal\n politeness that people hate most, I think. Can't get them mad,\n can't get them into a fight, but they do anything they please,\n and go anywhere they please, and if the people don't like it,\n the Grdznth just go right ahead anyway.\"\n\n\n Pete pulled at his lip. \"Any violence?\"",
"The Grdznth nodded sadly. \"It's horrible of me, but I just\n can't help it. I\nalways\nmisgauge. Last time it was the chancel\n of St. John's Cathedral. I nearly stampeded morning prayer—\"\n He paused to catch his breath. \"What an effort. The energy\n barrier, you know. Frightfully hard to make the jump.\" He\n broke off sharply, staring out the window. \"Dear me! Are we\n going\neast\n?\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid so, friend.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, dear. I wanted\nFlorida\n.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you seem to have drifted through into the wrong\n airplane,\" said Pete. \"Why Florida?\"\n\n\n The Grdznth looked at him reproachfully. \"The Wives, of\n course. The climate is so much better, and they mustn't be\n disturbed, you know.\"",
"Determined movements to expel the Grdznth faltered, trembled\n with indecision. The Grdznth were ugly, they frightened\n little children, they\nwere\na trifle overbearing in their insufferable\n stubborn politeness—but in a civilized world you just\n couldn't turn expectant mothers out in the rain.\n\n\n Not even expectant Grdznth mothers.\n\n\n By the second week the blast was going at full tilt.\n\n\n In the Public Relations Bureau building, machines worked\n on into the night. As questionnaires came back, spot candid\n films and street-corner interview tapes ran through the projectors\n on a twenty-four-hour schedule. Tommy Heinz grew\n thinner and thinner, while Pete nursed sharp post-prandial\n stomach pains.",
"The passengers within earshot stiffened, glaring at Pete.\n The fat lady was whispering indignantly to her seat companion.\n Junior had half emerged from his mother's collar; he was busy\n sticking out his tongue at the Grdznth.\n\n\n The creature shifted uneasily. \"Really, I think—perhaps\n Florida would be better.\"\n\n\n \"Going to try it again right now? Don't rush off,\" said Pete.\n\n\n \"Oh, I don't mean to rush. It's been lovely, but—\" Already\n the Grdznth was beginning to fade out.\n\n\n \"Try four miles down and a thousand miles southeast,\" said\n Pete.",
"Tommy gave him a long look. \"So far we've kept it out of\n the papers, but there have been some incidents. Didn't hurt\n the Grdznth a bit—they have personal protective force fields\n around them, a little point they didn't bother to tell us about.\n Anybody who tries anything fancy gets thrown like a bolt of\n lightning hit him. Rumors are getting wild—people saying\n they can't be killed, that they're just moving in to stay.\"\n\n\n Pete nodded slowly. \"Are they?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew. I mean, for sure. The psych-docs say no.\n The Grdznth agreed to leave at a specified time, and something\n in their cultural background makes them stick strictly to their\n agreements. But that's just what the psych-docs think, and\n they've been known to be wrong.\"\n\n\n \"And the appointed time?\"",
"\"Apparently. Nobody knows how they predicted it, but they\n did. Spotted it coming several years ago, so they've been romping\n through parallel after parallel trying to find one they can\n migrate to. They found one, sort of a desperation choice. It's\n cold and arid and full of impassable mountain chains. With an\n uphill fight they can make it support a fraction of their population.\"\n\n\n Tommy shook his head helplessly. \"They picked a very sensible\n system for getting a good strong Grdznth population on\n the new parallel as fast as possible. The males were picked for\n brains, education, ability and adaptability; the females were\n chosen largely according to how pregnant they were.\"\n\n\n Pete grinned. \"Grdznth in utero. There's something poetic\n about it.\"",
"\"Not at all.\" Pete tossed his briefcase on the floor. At a\n distance the huge beast had looked like a nightmare combination\n of large alligator and small tyrannosaurus. Now, at\n close range Pete could see that the \"scales\" were actually tiny\n wrinkles of satiny green fur. He knew, of course, that the\n Grdznth were mammals—\"docile, peace-loving mammals,\"\n Tommy's PR-blasts had declared emphatically—but with one\n of them sitting about a foot away Pete had to fight down a\n wave of horror and revulsion.\n\n\n The creature was most incredibly ugly. Great yellow pouches\n hung down below flat reptilian eyes, and a double row of long\n curved teeth glittered sharply. In spite of himself Pete gripped\n the seat as the Grdznth breathed at him wetly through damp\n nostrils.\n\n\n \"Misgauged?\" said Pete.",
"Charlie tipped an imaginary hat toward the Grdznth. \"Spike\n cracked it,\" he said. \"Spike is a sort of Grdznth genius.\" He\n tossed the coffee cup over his shoulder and it ricochetted in\n graceful slow motion against the far wall. \"Now why don't\n you go away, too?\"\n\n\n Tommy turned purple. \"We've got five months,\" he said\n hoarsely. \"Do you hear me? If they aren't going to have their\n babies in five months, we're dead men.\"",
"\"Sit down and shut up,\" said Pete. \"If there's one thing the\n man in the street reveres, my friend, it's motherhood. We've\n got several hundred thousand pregnant Grdznth just waiting\n for all the little Grdznth to arrive, and nobody's given them a\n side glance.\" He turned to Tommy. \"Get some copywriters\n down here. Get a Grdznth obstetrician or two. We're going to\n put together a PR-blast that will twang the people's heart-strings\n like a billion harps.\"\n\n\n The color was back in Tommy's cheeks, and the senator was\n forgotten as a dozen intercom switches began snapping. \"We'll\n need TV hookups, and plenty of newscast space,\" he said\n eagerly. \"Maybe a few photographs—do you suppose maybe\nbaby\nGrdznth are lovable?\"",
"The Grdznth sitting on the stool looked regretfully from the\n cosmetician to the Public Relations men. \"I say—I\nam\nsorry....\" His coarse voice trailed off as he peeled a long\n strip of cake makeup off his satiny green face.\n\n\n Pete Greenwood stared at the cosmetician sobbing in the\n chair. \"What's eating\nhim\n?\"\n\n\n \"Professional pride,\" said Tommy. \"He can take twenty\n years off the face of any woman in Hollywood. But he's not\n getting to first base with Gorgeous over there. This is only one\n thing we've tried,\" he added as they moved on down the corridor.\n \"You should see the field reports. We've tried selling the\n advances Earth will have, the wealth, the power. No dice. The\n man on the street reads our PR-blasts, and then looks up to see\n one of the nasty things staring over his shoulder at the newspaper.\"",
"\"Just one hitch,\" said Tommy. \"The girls can't gestate in\n that climate, at least not until they've been there long enough\n to get their glands adjusted. Seems we have just the right climate\n here for gestating Grdznth, even better than at home.\n So they came begging for permission to stop here, on the way\n through, to rest and parturiate.\"\n\n\n \"So Earth becomes a glorified incubator.\" Pete got to his\n feet thoughtfully. \"This is all very touching,\" he said, \"but\n it just doesn't wash. If the Grdznth are so unpopular with the\n masses, why did we let them in here in the first place?\" He\n looked narrowly at Tommy. \"To be very blunt, what's the\n parking fee?\"",
"\"Of course,\" said Pete. \"In their condition. I'd forgotten.\"\n\n\n \"And I'm told that things have been somewhat unpleasant\n in the East just now,\" said the Grdznth.\n\n\n Pete thought of Tommy, red-faced and frantic, beating off\n hordes of indignant citizens. \"So I hear,\" he said. \"How many\n more of you are coming through?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, not many, not many at all. Only the Wives—half a\n million or so—and their spouses, of course.\" The creature\n clicked his talons nervously. \"We haven't much more time, you\n know. Only a few more weeks, a few months at the most. If\n we couldn't have stopped over here, I just don't know\nwhat\nwe'd have done.\"\n\n\n \"Think nothing of it,\" said Pete indulgently. \"It's been great\n having you.\"",
"\"It'll sell,\" Pete said. \"The question is: for how long?\"\nThe planning revealed the mark of genius. Nothing\n sudden, harsh, or crude—but slowly, in a radio comment here\n or a newspaper story there, the emphasis began to shift from\n Grdznth in general to Grdznth as mothers. A Rutgers professor\n found his TV discussion on \"Motherhood as an Experience\"\n suddenly shifted from 6:30 Monday evening to 10:30 Saturday\n night. Copy rolled by the ream from Tommy's office, refined\n copy, hypersensitively edited copy, finding its way into the\n light of day through devious channels.\n\n\n Three days later a Grdznth miscarriage threatened, and\n was averted. It was only a page 4 item, but it was a beginning.",
"Charlie chuckled. \"Five months, he says. We figured the\n babies to come in about three months—right, Spike? Not that\n it'll make much difference to us.\" Charlie sank slowly down to\n the desk. He wasn't laughing any more. \"We're never going to\n see any Grdznth babies. It's going to be a little too cold for\n that. The energy factor,\" he mumbled. \"Nobody thought of\n that except in passing. Should have, though, long ago. Two\n completely independent universes, obviously two energy systems.\n Incompatible. We were dealing with mass, space and\n dimension—but the energy differential was the important one.\"\n\n\n \"What about the energy?\"",
"\"Do something! You think I'm a magician? I can just make\n them vanish? What do you want me to do?\"\n\n\n The senator raised his eyebrows. \"You needn't shout, Mr.\n Heinz. I'm not the least interested in\nwhat\nyou do. My interest\n is focused completely on a collection of five thousand letters,\n telegrams, and visiphone calls I've received in the past three\n days alone. My constituents, Mr. Heinz, are making themselves\n clear. If the Grdznth do not go, I go.\"\n\n\n \"That would never do, of course,\" murmured Pete.\n\n\n The senator gave Pete a cold, clinical look. \"Who is this\n person?\" he asked Tommy.\n\n\n \"An assistant on the job,\" Tommy said quickly. \"A very\n excellent PR-man.\"\n\n\n The senator sniffed audibly. \"Full of ideas, no doubt.\"",
"\"Plenty,\" said Tommy heavily. \"That's the trouble, you\n see. The fee is so high, Earth just can't afford to lose it. Charlie\n Karns'll tell you why.\"\nCharlie Karns from Math Section was an intense skeleton of\n a man with a long jaw and a long white coat drooping over his\n shoulders like a shroud. In his arms he clutched a small black\n box.\n\n\n \"It's the parallel universe business, of course,\" he said to\n Pete, with Tommy beaming over his shoulder. \"The Grdznth\n can cross through. They've been able to do it for a long time.\n According to our figuring, this must involve complete control\n of mass, space and dimension, all three. And time comes into\n one of the three—we aren't sure which.\"",
"\"We'll also know the time-differential,\" said Tommy hopefully,\n \"and how long the Grdznth gestation period will be.\"\n\n\n \"It's a fair exchange,\" said Charlie. \"We keep them until the\n girls have their babies. They teach us the ABC's of space,\n mass and dimension.\"\n\n\n Pete nodded. \"That is, if you can make the people put up\n with them for another six months or so.\"\n\n\n Tommy sighed. \"In a word—yes. So far we've gotten nowhere\n at a thousand miles an hour.\"\n\"I can't do it!\" the cosmetician wailed, hurling himself\n down on a chair and burying his face in his hands. \"I've failed.\n Failed!\"",
"\"Any day now. Maybe any minute.\" Charlie spread his\n hands helplessly. \"Oh, it won't be bad at all. Spike here was\n telling me. Mean temperature in only 39 below zero, lots of\n good clean snow, thousands of nice jagged mountain peaks.\n A lovely place, really. Just a little too cold for Grdznth. They\n thought Earth was much nicer.\"\n\n\n \"For them,\" whispered Tommy.\n\n\n \"For them,\" Charlie said.\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from \"Tiger by the Tail and Other Science\n Fiction Stories by Alan E. Nourse\" and was first published in\nGalaxy\nOctober 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor\n spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"\"That's right,\" said Pete. \"\nNothing\nis what we're hearing\n from Charlie. We've got no transmatter, no null-G, no power,\n nothing except a whole lot of Grdznth and more coming\n through just as fast as they can. I'm beginning to wonder what\n the Grdznth\nare\ngiving us.\"\n\n\n \"Well, they can't gestate forever.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not, but I still have a burning desire to talk to\n Charlie. Something tells me they're going to be gestating a\n little too long.\"\n\n\n They put through the call, but Charlie wasn't answering.\n \"Sorry,\" the operator said. \"Nobody's gotten through there for\n three days.\"\n\n\n \"Three days?\" cried Tommy. \"What's wrong? Is he dead?\"\n\n\n \"Couldn't be. They burned out two more machines yesterday,\"\n said the operator. \"Killed the switchboard for twenty\n minutes.\"",
"\"They probably look like salamanders,\" said Pete. \"But tell\n the people anything you want. If we're going to get across the\n sanctity of Grdznth motherhood, my friend, anything goes.\"\n\n\n \"It's genius,\" chortled Tommy. \"Sheer genius.\"\n\n\n \"If it sells,\" the senator added, dubiously."
],
[
"\"Yes, I know. And the Grdznth are getting worse by the\n hour. They're coming through in battalions—a thousand a day!\n The more Grdznth come through, the more they act as though\n they own the place. Not nasty or anything—it's that infernal\n politeness that people hate most, I think. Can't get them mad,\n can't get them into a fight, but they do anything they please,\n and go anywhere they please, and if the people don't like it,\n the Grdznth just go right ahead anyway.\"\n\n\n Pete pulled at his lip. \"Any violence?\"",
"\"Not at all.\" Pete tossed his briefcase on the floor. At a\n distance the huge beast had looked like a nightmare combination\n of large alligator and small tyrannosaurus. Now, at\n close range Pete could see that the \"scales\" were actually tiny\n wrinkles of satiny green fur. He knew, of course, that the\n Grdznth were mammals—\"docile, peace-loving mammals,\"\n Tommy's PR-blasts had declared emphatically—but with one\n of them sitting about a foot away Pete had to fight down a\n wave of horror and revulsion.\n\n\n The creature was most incredibly ugly. Great yellow pouches\n hung down below flat reptilian eyes, and a double row of long\n curved teeth glittered sharply. In spite of himself Pete gripped\n the seat as the Grdznth breathed at him wetly through damp\n nostrils.\n\n\n \"Misgauged?\" said Pete.",
"The Grdznth sitting on the stool looked regretfully from the\n cosmetician to the Public Relations men. \"I say—I\nam\nsorry....\" His coarse voice trailed off as he peeled a long\n strip of cake makeup off his satiny green face.\n\n\n Pete Greenwood stared at the cosmetician sobbing in the\n chair. \"What's eating\nhim\n?\"\n\n\n \"Professional pride,\" said Tommy. \"He can take twenty\n years off the face of any woman in Hollywood. But he's not\n getting to first base with Gorgeous over there. This is only one\n thing we've tried,\" he added as they moved on down the corridor.\n \"You should see the field reports. We've tried selling the\n advances Earth will have, the wealth, the power. No dice. The\n man on the street reads our PR-blasts, and then looks up to see\n one of the nasty things staring over his shoulder at the newspaper.\"",
"Tommy gave him a long look. \"So far we've kept it out of\n the papers, but there have been some incidents. Didn't hurt\n the Grdznth a bit—they have personal protective force fields\n around them, a little point they didn't bother to tell us about.\n Anybody who tries anything fancy gets thrown like a bolt of\n lightning hit him. Rumors are getting wild—people saying\n they can't be killed, that they're just moving in to stay.\"\n\n\n Pete nodded slowly. \"Are they?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew. I mean, for sure. The psych-docs say no.\n The Grdznth agreed to leave at a specified time, and something\n in their cultural background makes them stick strictly to their\n agreements. But that's just what the psych-docs think, and\n they've been known to be wrong.\"\n\n\n \"And the appointed time?\"",
"The Grdznth nodded sadly. \"It's horrible of me, but I just\n can't help it. I\nalways\nmisgauge. Last time it was the chancel\n of St. John's Cathedral. I nearly stampeded morning prayer—\"\n He paused to catch his breath. \"What an effort. The energy\n barrier, you know. Frightfully hard to make the jump.\" He\n broke off sharply, staring out the window. \"Dear me! Are we\n going\neast\n?\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid so, friend.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, dear. I wanted\nFlorida\n.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you seem to have drifted through into the wrong\n airplane,\" said Pete. \"Why Florida?\"\n\n\n The Grdznth looked at him reproachfully. \"The Wives, of\n course. The climate is so much better, and they mustn't be\n disturbed, you know.\"",
"Determined movements to expel the Grdznth faltered, trembled\n with indecision. The Grdznth were ugly, they frightened\n little children, they\nwere\na trifle overbearing in their insufferable\n stubborn politeness—but in a civilized world you just\n couldn't turn expectant mothers out in the rain.\n\n\n Not even expectant Grdznth mothers.\n\n\n By the second week the blast was going at full tilt.\n\n\n In the Public Relations Bureau building, machines worked\n on into the night. As questionnaires came back, spot candid\n films and street-corner interview tapes ran through the projectors\n on a twenty-four-hour schedule. Tommy Heinz grew\n thinner and thinner, while Pete nursed sharp post-prandial\n stomach pains.",
"\"Just one hitch,\" said Tommy. \"The girls can't gestate in\n that climate, at least not until they've been there long enough\n to get their glands adjusted. Seems we have just the right climate\n here for gestating Grdznth, even better than at home.\n So they came begging for permission to stop here, on the way\n through, to rest and parturiate.\"\n\n\n \"So Earth becomes a glorified incubator.\" Pete got to his\n feet thoughtfully. \"This is all very touching,\" he said, \"but\n it just doesn't wash. If the Grdznth are so unpopular with the\n masses, why did we let them in here in the first place?\" He\n looked narrowly at Tommy. \"To be very blunt, what's the\n parking fee?\"",
"\"Sit down and shut up,\" said Pete. \"If there's one thing the\n man in the street reveres, my friend, it's motherhood. We've\n got several hundred thousand pregnant Grdznth just waiting\n for all the little Grdznth to arrive, and nobody's given them a\n side glance.\" He turned to Tommy. \"Get some copywriters\n down here. Get a Grdznth obstetrician or two. We're going to\n put together a PR-blast that will twang the people's heart-strings\n like a billion harps.\"\n\n\n The color was back in Tommy's cheeks, and the senator was\n forgotten as a dozen intercom switches began snapping. \"We'll\n need TV hookups, and plenty of newscast space,\" he said\n eagerly. \"Maybe a few photographs—do you suppose maybe\nbaby\nGrdznth are lovable?\"",
"\"Of course,\" said Pete. \"In their condition. I'd forgotten.\"\n\n\n \"And I'm told that things have been somewhat unpleasant\n in the East just now,\" said the Grdznth.\n\n\n Pete thought of Tommy, red-faced and frantic, beating off\n hordes of indignant citizens. \"So I hear,\" he said. \"How many\n more of you are coming through?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, not many, not many at all. Only the Wives—half a\n million or so—and their spouses, of course.\" The creature\n clicked his talons nervously. \"We haven't much more time, you\n know. Only a few more weeks, a few months at the most. If\n we couldn't have stopped over here, I just don't know\nwhat\nwe'd have done.\"\n\n\n \"Think nothing of it,\" said Pete indulgently. \"It's been great\n having you.\"",
"\"Apparently. Nobody knows how they predicted it, but they\n did. Spotted it coming several years ago, so they've been romping\n through parallel after parallel trying to find one they can\n migrate to. They found one, sort of a desperation choice. It's\n cold and arid and full of impassable mountain chains. With an\n uphill fight they can make it support a fraction of their population.\"\n\n\n Tommy shook his head helplessly. \"They picked a very sensible\n system for getting a good strong Grdznth population on\n the new parallel as fast as possible. The males were picked for\n brains, education, ability and adaptability; the females were\n chosen largely according to how pregnant they were.\"\n\n\n Pete grinned. \"Grdznth in utero. There's something poetic\n about it.\"",
"\"We'll also know the time-differential,\" said Tommy hopefully,\n \"and how long the Grdznth gestation period will be.\"\n\n\n \"It's a fair exchange,\" said Charlie. \"We keep them until the\n girls have their babies. They teach us the ABC's of space,\n mass and dimension.\"\n\n\n Pete nodded. \"That is, if you can make the people put up\n with them for another six months or so.\"\n\n\n Tommy sighed. \"In a word—yes. So far we've gotten nowhere\n at a thousand miles an hour.\"\n\"I can't do it!\" the cosmetician wailed, hurling himself\n down on a chair and burying his face in his hands. \"I've failed.\n Failed!\"",
"Charlie chuckled. \"Five months, he says. We figured the\n babies to come in about three months—right, Spike? Not that\n it'll make much difference to us.\" Charlie sank slowly down to\n the desk. He wasn't laughing any more. \"We're never going to\n see any Grdznth babies. It's going to be a little too cold for\n that. The energy factor,\" he mumbled. \"Nobody thought of\n that except in passing. Should have, though, long ago. Two\n completely independent universes, obviously two energy systems.\n Incompatible. We were dealing with mass, space and\n dimension—but the energy differential was the important one.\"\n\n\n \"What about the energy?\"",
"\"Plenty,\" said Tommy heavily. \"That's the trouble, you\n see. The fee is so high, Earth just can't afford to lose it. Charlie\n Karns'll tell you why.\"\nCharlie Karns from Math Section was an intense skeleton of\n a man with a long jaw and a long white coat drooping over his\n shoulders like a shroud. In his arms he clutched a small black\n box.\n\n\n \"It's the parallel universe business, of course,\" he said to\n Pete, with Tommy beaming over his shoulder. \"The Grdznth\n can cross through. They've been able to do it for a long time.\n According to our figuring, this must involve complete control\n of mass, space and dimension, all three. And time comes into\n one of the three—we aren't sure which.\"",
"Charlie tipped an imaginary hat toward the Grdznth. \"Spike\n cracked it,\" he said. \"Spike is a sort of Grdznth genius.\" He\n tossed the coffee cup over his shoulder and it ricochetted in\n graceful slow motion against the far wall. \"Now why don't\n you go away, too?\"\n\n\n Tommy turned purple. \"We've got five months,\" he said\n hoarsely. \"Do you hear me? If they aren't going to have their\n babies in five months, we're dead men.\"",
"The passengers within earshot stiffened, glaring at Pete.\n The fat lady was whispering indignantly to her seat companion.\n Junior had half emerged from his mother's collar; he was busy\n sticking out his tongue at the Grdznth.\n\n\n The creature shifted uneasily. \"Really, I think—perhaps\n Florida would be better.\"\n\n\n \"Going to try it again right now? Don't rush off,\" said Pete.\n\n\n \"Oh, I don't mean to rush. It's been lovely, but—\" Already\n the Grdznth was beginning to fade out.\n\n\n \"Try four miles down and a thousand miles southeast,\" said\n Pete.",
"Turning back to Pete, Tommy rubbed his hands eagerly.\n \"It's starting to sell, boy. I don't know how strong or how\n good, but it's starting to sell! With the tolerance levels to tell\n us how long we can expect this program to quiet things down,\n we can give Charlie a deadline to crack his differential factor,\n or it's the ax for Charlie.\" He chuckled to himself, and paced\n the room in an overflow of nervous energy. \"I can see it now.\n Open shafts instead of elevators. A quick hop to Honolulu for\n an afternoon on the beach, and back in time for supper. A\n hundred miles to the gallon for the Sunday driver. When\n people begin\nseeing\nwhat the Grdznth are giving us, they'll\n welcome them with open arms.\"\n\n\n \"Hmmm,\" said Pete.",
"\"That's right,\" said Pete. \"\nNothing\nis what we're hearing\n from Charlie. We've got no transmatter, no null-G, no power,\n nothing except a whole lot of Grdznth and more coming\n through just as fast as they can. I'm beginning to wonder what\n the Grdznth\nare\ngiving us.\"\n\n\n \"Well, they can't gestate forever.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not, but I still have a burning desire to talk to\n Charlie. Something tells me they're going to be gestating a\n little too long.\"\n\n\n They put through the call, but Charlie wasn't answering.\n \"Sorry,\" the operator said. \"Nobody's gotten through there for\n three days.\"\n\n\n \"Three days?\" cried Tommy. \"What's wrong? Is he dead?\"\n\n\n \"Couldn't be. They burned out two more machines yesterday,\"\n said the operator. \"Killed the switchboard for twenty\n minutes.\"",
"\"Any day now. Maybe any minute.\" Charlie spread his\n hands helplessly. \"Oh, it won't be bad at all. Spike here was\n telling me. Mean temperature in only 39 below zero, lots of\n good clean snow, thousands of nice jagged mountain peaks.\n A lovely place, really. Just a little too cold for Grdznth. They\n thought Earth was much nicer.\"\n\n\n \"For them,\" whispered Tommy.\n\n\n \"For them,\" Charlie said.\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from \"Tiger by the Tail and Other Science\n Fiction Stories by Alan E. Nourse\" and was first published in\nGalaxy\nOctober 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor\n spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"\"They probably look like salamanders,\" said Pete. \"But tell\n the people anything you want. If we're going to get across the\n sanctity of Grdznth motherhood, my friend, anything goes.\"\n\n\n \"It's genius,\" chortled Tommy. \"Sheer genius.\"\n\n\n \"If it sells,\" the senator added, dubiously.",
"\"Well, why won't they? The people just didn't trust us, that\n was all. What does the man in the street know about transmatters?\n Nothing. But give him one, and then try to take it\n away.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure,\" said Pete. \"It sounds great. Just a little bit\ntoo\ngreat.\"\n\n\n Tommy blinked at him. \"Too great? Are you crazy?\"\n\n\n \"Not crazy. Just getting nervous.\" Pete jammed his hands\n into his pockets. \"Do you realize where\nwe're\nstanding in this\n thing? We're out on a limb—way out. We're fighting for time—time\n for Charlie and his gang to crack the puzzle, time for\n the Grdznth girls to gestate. But what are we hearing from\n Charlie?\"\n\n\n \"Pete, Charlie can't just—\""
],
[
"Determined movements to expel the Grdznth faltered, trembled\n with indecision. The Grdznth were ugly, they frightened\n little children, they\nwere\na trifle overbearing in their insufferable\n stubborn politeness—but in a civilized world you just\n couldn't turn expectant mothers out in the rain.\n\n\n Not even expectant Grdznth mothers.\n\n\n By the second week the blast was going at full tilt.\n\n\n In the Public Relations Bureau building, machines worked\n on into the night. As questionnaires came back, spot candid\n films and street-corner interview tapes ran through the projectors\n on a twenty-four-hour schedule. Tommy Heinz grew\n thinner and thinner, while Pete nursed sharp post-prandial\n stomach pains.",
"The senator didn't seem to like being forgotten. He walked\n into the office, looked disdainfully at the PR-men, and sank to\n the edge of a chair, leaning on his umbrella.\n\n\n \"You have just lost your job,\" he said to Tommy, with an\n icy edge to his voice. \"You may not have heard about it yet,\n but you can take my word for it. I personally will be delighted\n to make the necessary arrangements, but I doubt if I'll need to.\n There are at least a hundred senators in Washington who are\n ready to press for your dismissal, Mr. Heinz—and there's\n been some off-the-record talk about a lynching. Nothing official,\n of course.\"\n\n\n \"Senator—\"\n\n\n \"Senator be hanged! We want somebody in this office who\n can manage to\ndo\nsomething.\"",
"The creature gave him a toothy smile, nodded once, and\n grew more indistinct. In another five seconds the seat was quite\n empty. Pete leaned back, grinning to himself as the angry\n rumble rose around him like a wave. He was a Public Relations\n man to the core—but right now he was off duty. He\n chuckled to himself, and the passengers avoided him like the\n plague all the way to New Philly.\n\n\n But as he walked down the gangway to hail a cab, he wasn't\n smiling so much. He was wondering just how high Tommy was\n hanging him, this time.\nThe lobby of the Public Relations Bureau was swarming like\n an upturned anthill when Pete disembarked from the taxi. He\n could almost smell the desperate tension of the place. He\n fought his way past scurrying clerks and preoccupied poll-takers\n toward the executive elevators in the rear.",
"\"Sit down and shut up,\" said Pete. \"If there's one thing the\n man in the street reveres, my friend, it's motherhood. We've\n got several hundred thousand pregnant Grdznth just waiting\n for all the little Grdznth to arrive, and nobody's given them a\n side glance.\" He turned to Tommy. \"Get some copywriters\n down here. Get a Grdznth obstetrician or two. We're going to\n put together a PR-blast that will twang the people's heart-strings\n like a billion harps.\"\n\n\n The color was back in Tommy's cheeks, and the senator was\n forgotten as a dozen intercom switches began snapping. \"We'll\n need TV hookups, and plenty of newscast space,\" he said\n eagerly. \"Maybe a few photographs—do you suppose maybe\nbaby\nGrdznth are lovable?\"",
"\"Brimming,\" said Pete. \"Enough ideas to get your constituents\n off your neck for a while, at least.\"\n\n\n \"Indeed.\"\n\n\n \"Indeed,\" said Pete. \"Tommy, how fast can you get a PR-blast\n to penetrate? How much medium do you control?\"\n\n\n \"Plenty,\" Tommy gulped.\n\n\n \"And how fast can you sample response and analyze it?\"\n\n\n \"We can have prelims six hours after the PR-blast. Pete,\n if you have an idea, tell us!\"",
"The Grdznth sitting on the stool looked regretfully from the\n cosmetician to the Public Relations men. \"I say—I\nam\nsorry....\" His coarse voice trailed off as he peeled a long\n strip of cake makeup off his satiny green face.\n\n\n Pete Greenwood stared at the cosmetician sobbing in the\n chair. \"What's eating\nhim\n?\"\n\n\n \"Professional pride,\" said Tommy. \"He can take twenty\n years off the face of any woman in Hollywood. But he's not\n getting to first base with Gorgeous over there. This is only one\n thing we've tried,\" he added as they moved on down the corridor.\n \"You should see the field reports. We've tried selling the\n advances Earth will have, the wealth, the power. No dice. The\n man on the street reads our PR-blasts, and then looks up to see\n one of the nasty things staring over his shoulder at the newspaper.\"",
"\"It'll sell,\" Pete said. \"The question is: for how long?\"\nThe planning revealed the mark of genius. Nothing\n sudden, harsh, or crude—but slowly, in a radio comment here\n or a newspaper story there, the emphasis began to shift from\n Grdznth in general to Grdznth as mothers. A Rutgers professor\n found his TV discussion on \"Motherhood as an Experience\"\n suddenly shifted from 6:30 Monday evening to 10:30 Saturday\n night. Copy rolled by the ream from Tommy's office, refined\n copy, hypersensitively edited copy, finding its way into the\n light of day through devious channels.\n\n\n Three days later a Grdznth miscarriage threatened, and\n was averted. It was only a page 4 item, but it was a beginning.",
"\"Do something! You think I'm a magician? I can just make\n them vanish? What do you want me to do?\"\n\n\n The senator raised his eyebrows. \"You needn't shout, Mr.\n Heinz. I'm not the least interested in\nwhat\nyou do. My interest\n is focused completely on a collection of five thousand letters,\n telegrams, and visiphone calls I've received in the past three\n days alone. My constituents, Mr. Heinz, are making themselves\n clear. If the Grdznth do not go, I go.\"\n\n\n \"That would never do, of course,\" murmured Pete.\n\n\n The senator gave Pete a cold, clinical look. \"Who is this\n person?\" he asked Tommy.\n\n\n \"An assistant on the job,\" Tommy said quickly. \"A very\n excellent PR-man.\"\n\n\n The senator sniffed audibly. \"Full of ideas, no doubt.\"",
"\"Why don't people\nrespond\n?\" Tommy asked plaintively on\n the morning the third week started. \"Haven't they got any\n feelings? The blast is washing over them like a wave and there\n they sit!\" He punched the private wire to Analysis for the\n fourth time that morning. He got a man with a hag-ridden look\n in his eye. \"How soon?\"\n\n\n \"You want yesterday's rushes?\"\n\n\n \"What do you think I want? Any sign of a lag?\"\n\n\n \"Not a hint. Last night's panel drew like a magnet. The\n D-Date tag you suggested has them by the nose.\"\n\n\n \"How about the President's talk?\"\n\n\n The man from Analysis grinned. \"He should be campaigning.\"",
"Not that he didn't like Tommy. Tommy was a good PR-man,\n as PR-men go. He just didn't know his own depth. PRoblem\n in a beady Grdznth eye! What Tommy needed right now was\n a Bazooka Battalion, not a PR-man. Pete settled back in\n the Eastbound Rocketjet with a sigh of resignation.\n\n\n He was just dozing off when the fat lady up the aisle let out\n a scream. A huge reptilian head had materialized out of nowhere\n and was hanging in air, peering about uncertainly. A\n scaly green body followed, four feet away, complete with long\n razor talons, heavy hind legs, and a whiplash tail with a needle\n at the end. For a moment the creature floated upside down, legs\n thrashing. Then the head and body joined, executed a horizontal\n pirouette, and settled gently to the floor like an eight-foot\n circus balloon.",
"PRoblem\nby Alan E. Nourse\nThe\n letter came down the slot too early that morning to be\n the regular mail run. Pete Greenwood eyed the New Philly\n photocancel with a dreadful premonition. The letter said:\n\n\n Peter:\n\n Can you come East chop-chop, urgent?\n\n Grdznth problem getting to be a PRoblem, need\n\n expert icebox salesman to get gators out of hair fast.\n\n Yes? Math boys hot on this, citizens not so hot.\n\n Please come.\nTommy\n\n\n Pete tossed the letter down the gulper with a sigh. He had\n lost a bet to himself because it had come three days later than\n he expected, but it had come all the same, just as it always did\n when Tommy Heinz got himself into a hole.",
"\"Ulcers,\" said Tommy. \"City traffic isn't enough of a mess\n as it is. And they don't\ndo\nanything about it. They apologize\n profusely, but they keep coming through.\" The two started\n on for the office. \"Things are getting to the breaking point.\n The people are wearing thin from sheer annoyance—to say\n nothing of the nightmares the kids are having, and the trouble\n with women fainting.\"\n\n\n The signal light on Tommy's desk was flashing scarlet. He\n dropped into a chair with a sigh and flipped a switch. \"Okay,\n what is it now?\"\n\n\n \"Just another senator,\" said a furious male voice. \"Mr.\n Heinz, my arthritis is beginning to win this fight. Are you\n going to see me now, or aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, come right in!\" Tommy turned white. \"Senator\n Stokes,\" he muttered. \"I'd completely forgotten—\"",
"On the newly finished seventeenth floor, he found Tommy\n Heinz pacing the corridor like an expectant young father.\n Tommy had lost weight since Pete had last seen him. His\n ruddy face was paler, his hair thin and ragged as though\n chunks had been torn out from time to time. He saw Pete\n step off the elevator, and ran forward with open arms. \"I\n thought you'd never get here!\" he groaned. \"When you didn't\n call, I was afraid you'd let me down.\"\n\n\n \"Me?\" said Pete. \"I'd never let down a pal.\"",
"The sarcasm didn't dent Tommy. He led Pete through the\n ante-room into the plush director's office, bouncing about excitedly,\n his words tumbling out like a waterfall. He looked as\n though one gentle shove might send him yodeling down Market\n Street in his underdrawers. \"Hold it,\" said Pete. \"Relax,\n I'm not going to leave for a while yet. Your girl screamed\n something about a senator as we came in. Did you hear her?\"\n\n\n Tommy gave a violent start. \"Senator! Oh, dear.\" He flipped\n a desk switch. \"What senator is that?\"\n\n\n \"Senator Stokes,\" the girl said wearily. \"He had an appointment.\n He's ready to have you fired.\"\n\n\n \"All I need now is a senator,\" Tommy said. \"What does he\n want?\"\n\n\n \"Guess,\" said the girl.",
"\"They probably look like salamanders,\" said Pete. \"But tell\n the people anything you want. If we're going to get across the\n sanctity of Grdznth motherhood, my friend, anything goes.\"\n\n\n \"It's genius,\" chortled Tommy. \"Sheer genius.\"\n\n\n \"If it sells,\" the senator added, dubiously.",
"Turning back to Pete, Tommy rubbed his hands eagerly.\n \"It's starting to sell, boy. I don't know how strong or how\n good, but it's starting to sell! With the tolerance levels to tell\n us how long we can expect this program to quiet things down,\n we can give Charlie a deadline to crack his differential factor,\n or it's the ax for Charlie.\" He chuckled to himself, and paced\n the room in an overflow of nervous energy. \"I can see it now.\n Open shafts instead of elevators. A quick hop to Honolulu for\n an afternoon on the beach, and back in time for supper. A\n hundred miles to the gallon for the Sunday driver. When\n people begin\nseeing\nwhat the Grdznth are giving us, they'll\n welcome them with open arms.\"\n\n\n \"Hmmm,\" said Pete.",
"Pete stood up, facing the senator. \"Everything else has been\n tried, but it seems to me one important factor has been missed.\n One that will take your constituents by the ears.\" He looked\n at Tommy pityingly. \"You've tried to make them lovable, but\n they aren't lovable. They aren't even passably attractive.\n There's one thing they\nare\nthough, at least half of them.\"\n\n\n Tommy's jaw sagged. \"Pregnant,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Now see here,\" said the senator. \"If you're trying to make\n a fool out of me to my face—\"",
"\"Get him on the wire,\" Tommy said. \"That's orders.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. But first they want you in Analysis.\"\n\n\n Analysis was a shambles. Paper and tape piled knee-deep\n on the floor. The machines clattered wildly, coughing out\n reams of paper to be gulped up by other machines. In a corner\n office they found the Analysis man, pale but jubilant.\n\n\n \"The Program,\" Tommy said. \"How's it going?\"\n\n\n \"You can count on the people staying happy for at least\n another five months.\" Analysis hesitated an instant. \"If they\n see some baby Grdznth at the end of it all.\"\n\n\n There was dead silence in the room. \"Baby Grdznth,\"\n Tommy said finally.\n\n\n \"That's what I said. That's what the people are buying.\n That's what they'd better get.\"",
"\"Well, why won't they? The people just didn't trust us, that\n was all. What does the man in the street know about transmatters?\n Nothing. But give him one, and then try to take it\n away.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure,\" said Pete. \"It sounds great. Just a little bit\ntoo\ngreat.\"\n\n\n Tommy blinked at him. \"Too great? Are you crazy?\"\n\n\n \"Not crazy. Just getting nervous.\" Pete jammed his hands\n into his pockets. \"Do you realize where\nwe're\nstanding in this\n thing? We're out on a limb—way out. We're fighting for time—time\n for Charlie and his gang to crack the puzzle, time for\n the Grdznth girls to gestate. But what are we hearing from\n Charlie?\"\n\n\n \"Pete, Charlie can't just—\"",
"Two rows down a small boy let out a muffled howl and\n tried to bury himself in his mother's coat collar. An indignant\n wail arose from the fat lady. Someone behind Pete groaned\n aloud and quickly retired behind a newspaper.\n\n\n The creature coughed apologetically. \"Terribly sorry,\" he\n said in a coarse rumble. \"So difficult to control, you know.\n Terribly sorry....\" His voice trailed off as he lumbered down\n the aisle toward the empty seat next to Pete.\n\n\n The fat lady gasped, and an angry murmur ran up and down\n the cabin. \"Sit down,\" Pete said to the creature. \"Relax. Cheerful\n reception these days, eh?\"\n\n\n \"You don't mind?\" said the creature."
],
[
"Pete stood up, facing the senator. \"Everything else has been\n tried, but it seems to me one important factor has been missed.\n One that will take your constituents by the ears.\" He looked\n at Tommy pityingly. \"You've tried to make them lovable, but\n they aren't lovable. They aren't even passably attractive.\n There's one thing they\nare\nthough, at least half of them.\"\n\n\n Tommy's jaw sagged. \"Pregnant,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Now see here,\" said the senator. \"If you're trying to make\n a fool out of me to my face—\"",
"Determined movements to expel the Grdznth faltered, trembled\n with indecision. The Grdznth were ugly, they frightened\n little children, they\nwere\na trifle overbearing in their insufferable\n stubborn politeness—but in a civilized world you just\n couldn't turn expectant mothers out in the rain.\n\n\n Not even expectant Grdznth mothers.\n\n\n By the second week the blast was going at full tilt.\n\n\n In the Public Relations Bureau building, machines worked\n on into the night. As questionnaires came back, spot candid\n films and street-corner interview tapes ran through the projectors\n on a twenty-four-hour schedule. Tommy Heinz grew\n thinner and thinner, while Pete nursed sharp post-prandial\n stomach pains.",
"\"Get him on the wire,\" Tommy said. \"That's orders.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. But first they want you in Analysis.\"\n\n\n Analysis was a shambles. Paper and tape piled knee-deep\n on the floor. The machines clattered wildly, coughing out\n reams of paper to be gulped up by other machines. In a corner\n office they found the Analysis man, pale but jubilant.\n\n\n \"The Program,\" Tommy said. \"How's it going?\"\n\n\n \"You can count on the people staying happy for at least\n another five months.\" Analysis hesitated an instant. \"If they\n see some baby Grdznth at the end of it all.\"\n\n\n There was dead silence in the room. \"Baby Grdznth,\"\n Tommy said finally.\n\n\n \"That's what I said. That's what the people are buying.\n That's what they'd better get.\"",
"\"Sit down and shut up,\" said Pete. \"If there's one thing the\n man in the street reveres, my friend, it's motherhood. We've\n got several hundred thousand pregnant Grdznth just waiting\n for all the little Grdznth to arrive, and nobody's given them a\n side glance.\" He turned to Tommy. \"Get some copywriters\n down here. Get a Grdznth obstetrician or two. We're going to\n put together a PR-blast that will twang the people's heart-strings\n like a billion harps.\"\n\n\n The color was back in Tommy's cheeks, and the senator was\n forgotten as a dozen intercom switches began snapping. \"We'll\n need TV hookups, and plenty of newscast space,\" he said\n eagerly. \"Maybe a few photographs—do you suppose maybe\nbaby\nGrdznth are lovable?\"",
"The creature gave him a toothy smile, nodded once, and\n grew more indistinct. In another five seconds the seat was quite\n empty. Pete leaned back, grinning to himself as the angry\n rumble rose around him like a wave. He was a Public Relations\n man to the core—but right now he was off duty. He\n chuckled to himself, and the passengers avoided him like the\n plague all the way to New Philly.\n\n\n But as he walked down the gangway to hail a cab, he wasn't\n smiling so much. He was wondering just how high Tommy was\n hanging him, this time.\nThe lobby of the Public Relations Bureau was swarming like\n an upturned anthill when Pete disembarked from the taxi. He\n could almost smell the desperate tension of the place. He\n fought his way past scurrying clerks and preoccupied poll-takers\n toward the executive elevators in the rear.",
"\"Oh. That's what I was afraid of. Can you keep him there?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\" said the girl. \"He's growing roots.\n They swept around him last night, and dusted him off this\n morning. His appointment was for\nyesterday\n, remember?\"\n\n\n \"Remember! Of course I remember. Senator Stokes—something\n about a riot in Boston.\" He started to flip the switch,\n then added, \"See if you can get Charlie down here with his\n giz.\"\n\n\n He turned back to Pete with a frantic light in his eye. \"Good\n old Pete. Just in time. Just. Eleventh-hour reprieve. Have a\n drink, have a cigar—do you want my job? It's yours. Just\n speak up.\"\n\n\n \"I fail to see,\" said Pete, \"just why you had to drag me\n all the way from L.A. to have a cigar. I've got work to do.\"",
"\"It'll sell,\" Pete said. \"The question is: for how long?\"\nThe planning revealed the mark of genius. Nothing\n sudden, harsh, or crude—but slowly, in a radio comment here\n or a newspaper story there, the emphasis began to shift from\n Grdznth in general to Grdznth as mothers. A Rutgers professor\n found his TV discussion on \"Motherhood as an Experience\"\n suddenly shifted from 6:30 Monday evening to 10:30 Saturday\n night. Copy rolled by the ream from Tommy's office, refined\n copy, hypersensitively edited copy, finding its way into the\n light of day through devious channels.\n\n\n Three days later a Grdznth miscarriage threatened, and\n was averted. It was only a page 4 item, but it was a beginning.",
"The Grdznth nodded sadly. \"It's horrible of me, but I just\n can't help it. I\nalways\nmisgauge. Last time it was the chancel\n of St. John's Cathedral. I nearly stampeded morning prayer—\"\n He paused to catch his breath. \"What an effort. The energy\n barrier, you know. Frightfully hard to make the jump.\" He\n broke off sharply, staring out the window. \"Dear me! Are we\n going\neast\n?\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid so, friend.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, dear. I wanted\nFlorida\n.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you seem to have drifted through into the wrong\n airplane,\" said Pete. \"Why Florida?\"\n\n\n The Grdznth looked at him reproachfully. \"The Wives, of\n course. The climate is so much better, and they mustn't be\n disturbed, you know.\"",
"Two rows down a small boy let out a muffled howl and\n tried to bury himself in his mother's coat collar. An indignant\n wail arose from the fat lady. Someone behind Pete groaned\n aloud and quickly retired behind a newspaper.\n\n\n The creature coughed apologetically. \"Terribly sorry,\" he\n said in a coarse rumble. \"So difficult to control, you know.\n Terribly sorry....\" His voice trailed off as he lumbered down\n the aisle toward the empty seat next to Pete.\n\n\n The fat lady gasped, and an angry murmur ran up and down\n the cabin. \"Sit down,\" Pete said to the creature. \"Relax. Cheerful\n reception these days, eh?\"\n\n\n \"You don't mind?\" said the creature.",
"The passengers within earshot stiffened, glaring at Pete.\n The fat lady was whispering indignantly to her seat companion.\n Junior had half emerged from his mother's collar; he was busy\n sticking out his tongue at the Grdznth.\n\n\n The creature shifted uneasily. \"Really, I think—perhaps\n Florida would be better.\"\n\n\n \"Going to try it again right now? Don't rush off,\" said Pete.\n\n\n \"Oh, I don't mean to rush. It's been lovely, but—\" Already\n the Grdznth was beginning to fade out.\n\n\n \"Try four miles down and a thousand miles southeast,\" said\n Pete.",
"The Grdznth sitting on the stool looked regretfully from the\n cosmetician to the Public Relations men. \"I say—I\nam\nsorry....\" His coarse voice trailed off as he peeled a long\n strip of cake makeup off his satiny green face.\n\n\n Pete Greenwood stared at the cosmetician sobbing in the\n chair. \"What's eating\nhim\n?\"\n\n\n \"Professional pride,\" said Tommy. \"He can take twenty\n years off the face of any woman in Hollywood. But he's not\n getting to first base with Gorgeous over there. This is only one\n thing we've tried,\" he added as they moved on down the corridor.\n \"You should see the field reports. We've tried selling the\n advances Earth will have, the wealth, the power. No dice. The\n man on the street reads our PR-blasts, and then looks up to see\n one of the nasty things staring over his shoulder at the newspaper.\"",
"\"Why don't people\nrespond\n?\" Tommy asked plaintively on\n the morning the third week started. \"Haven't they got any\n feelings? The blast is washing over them like a wave and there\n they sit!\" He punched the private wire to Analysis for the\n fourth time that morning. He got a man with a hag-ridden look\n in his eye. \"How soon?\"\n\n\n \"You want yesterday's rushes?\"\n\n\n \"What do you think I want? Any sign of a lag?\"\n\n\n \"Not a hint. Last night's panel drew like a magnet. The\n D-Date tag you suggested has them by the nose.\"\n\n\n \"How about the President's talk?\"\n\n\n The man from Analysis grinned. \"He should be campaigning.\"",
"\"They probably look like salamanders,\" said Pete. \"But tell\n the people anything you want. If we're going to get across the\n sanctity of Grdznth motherhood, my friend, anything goes.\"\n\n\n \"It's genius,\" chortled Tommy. \"Sheer genius.\"\n\n\n \"If it sells,\" the senator added, dubiously.",
"\"Selling movies, right?\" said Tommy.\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n \"To people who don't want to buy them, right?\"\n\n\n \"In a manner of speaking,\" said Pete testily.\n\n\n \"Exactly,\" said Tommy. \"Considering some of the movies\n you've been selling, you should be able to sell anything to\n anybody, any time, at any price.\"\n\n\n \"Please. Movies are getting Better by the Day.\"",
"\"Ulcers,\" said Tommy. \"City traffic isn't enough of a mess\n as it is. And they don't\ndo\nanything about it. They apologize\n profusely, but they keep coming through.\" The two started\n on for the office. \"Things are getting to the breaking point.\n The people are wearing thin from sheer annoyance—to say\n nothing of the nightmares the kids are having, and the trouble\n with women fainting.\"\n\n\n The signal light on Tommy's desk was flashing scarlet. He\n dropped into a chair with a sigh and flipped a switch. \"Okay,\n what is it now?\"\n\n\n \"Just another senator,\" said a furious male voice. \"Mr.\n Heinz, my arthritis is beginning to win this fight. Are you\n going to see me now, or aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, come right in!\" Tommy turned white. \"Senator\n Stokes,\" he muttered. \"I'd completely forgotten—\"",
"\"So you can't make them beautiful,\" said Pete. \"Can't you\n make them cute?\"\n\n\n \"With those teeth? Those eyes? Ugh.\"\n\n\n \"How about the 'jolly company' approach?\"\n\n\n \"Tried it. There's nothing jolly about them. They pop out\n of nowhere, anywhere. In church, in bedrooms, in rush-hour\n traffic through Lincoln Tunnel—look!\"\n\n\n Pete peered out the window at the traffic jam below. Cars\n were snarled up for blocks on either side of the intersection.\n A squad of traffic cops were converging angrily on the center\n of the mess, where a stream of green reptilian figures seemed\n to be popping out of the street and lumbering through the\n jammed autos like General Sherman tanks.",
"The mathematician set the black box on the desk top and\n released the lid. Like a jack-in-the-box, two small white plastic\n spheres popped out and began chasing each other about in\n the air six inches above the box. Presently a third sphere rose\n up from the box and joined the fun.\n\n\n Pete watched it with his jaw sagging until his head began to\n spin. \"No wires?\"\n\n\n \"\nStrictly\nno wires,\" said Charlie glumly. \"No nothing.\" He\n closed the box with a click. \"This is one of their children's toys,\n and theoretically, it can't work. Among other things, it takes\n null-gravity to operate.\"\n\n\n Pete sat down, rubbing his chin. \"Yes,\" he said. \"I'm beginning\n to see. They're teaching you this?\"",
"Tommy swallowed hard. \"And if it happens to be six\n months?\"\n\n\n Analysis drew a finger across his throat.\n\n\n Tommy and Pete looked at each other, and Tommy's hands\n were shaking. \"I think,\" he said, \"we'd better find Charlie\n Karns right now.\"\nMath Section was like a tomb. The machines were silent.\n In the office at the end of the room they found an unshaven\n Charlie gulping a cup of coffee with a very smug-looking\n Grdznth. The coffee pot was floating gently about six feet\n above the desk. So were the Grdznth and Charlie.\n\n\n \"Charlie!\" Tommy howled. \"We've been trying to get you\n for hours! The operator—\"\n\n\n \"I know, I know.\" Charlie waved a hand disjointedly. \"I\n told her to go away. I told the rest of the crew to go away, too.\"\n\n\n \"Then you cracked the differential?\"",
"Tommy mopped his forehead with his shirtsleeve. \"Okay.\n Now listen: we need a special run on all response data we have\n for tolerance levels. Got that? How soon can we have it?\"\n\n\n Analysis shook his head. \"We could only make a guess with\n the data so far.\"\n\n\n \"Fine,\" said Tommy. \"Make a guess.\"\n\n\n \"Give us three hours,\" said Analysis.\n\n\n \"You've got thirty minutes. Get going.\"",
"On the newly finished seventeenth floor, he found Tommy\n Heinz pacing the corridor like an expectant young father.\n Tommy had lost weight since Pete had last seen him. His\n ruddy face was paler, his hair thin and ragged as though\n chunks had been torn out from time to time. He saw Pete\n step off the elevator, and ran forward with open arms. \"I\n thought you'd never get here!\" he groaned. \"When you didn't\n call, I was afraid you'd let me down.\"\n\n\n \"Me?\" said Pete. \"I'd never let down a pal.\""
],
[
"On the newly finished seventeenth floor, he found Tommy\n Heinz pacing the corridor like an expectant young father.\n Tommy had lost weight since Pete had last seen him. His\n ruddy face was paler, his hair thin and ragged as though\n chunks had been torn out from time to time. He saw Pete\n step off the elevator, and ran forward with open arms. \"I\n thought you'd never get here!\" he groaned. \"When you didn't\n call, I was afraid you'd let me down.\"\n\n\n \"Me?\" said Pete. \"I'd never let down a pal.\"",
"Pete stood up, facing the senator. \"Everything else has been\n tried, but it seems to me one important factor has been missed.\n One that will take your constituents by the ears.\" He looked\n at Tommy pityingly. \"You've tried to make them lovable, but\n they aren't lovable. They aren't even passably attractive.\n There's one thing they\nare\nthough, at least half of them.\"\n\n\n Tommy's jaw sagged. \"Pregnant,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Now see here,\" said the senator. \"If you're trying to make\n a fool out of me to my face—\"",
"\"Not at all.\" Pete tossed his briefcase on the floor. At a\n distance the huge beast had looked like a nightmare combination\n of large alligator and small tyrannosaurus. Now, at\n close range Pete could see that the \"scales\" were actually tiny\n wrinkles of satiny green fur. He knew, of course, that the\n Grdznth were mammals—\"docile, peace-loving mammals,\"\n Tommy's PR-blasts had declared emphatically—but with one\n of them sitting about a foot away Pete had to fight down a\n wave of horror and revulsion.\n\n\n The creature was most incredibly ugly. Great yellow pouches\n hung down below flat reptilian eyes, and a double row of long\n curved teeth glittered sharply. In spite of himself Pete gripped\n the seat as the Grdznth breathed at him wetly through damp\n nostrils.\n\n\n \"Misgauged?\" said Pete.",
"Turning back to Pete, Tommy rubbed his hands eagerly.\n \"It's starting to sell, boy. I don't know how strong or how\n good, but it's starting to sell! With the tolerance levels to tell\n us how long we can expect this program to quiet things down,\n we can give Charlie a deadline to crack his differential factor,\n or it's the ax for Charlie.\" He chuckled to himself, and paced\n the room in an overflow of nervous energy. \"I can see it now.\n Open shafts instead of elevators. A quick hop to Honolulu for\n an afternoon on the beach, and back in time for supper. A\n hundred miles to the gallon for the Sunday driver. When\n people begin\nseeing\nwhat the Grdznth are giving us, they'll\n welcome them with open arms.\"\n\n\n \"Hmmm,\" said Pete.",
"\"Oh. That's what I was afraid of. Can you keep him there?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\" said the girl. \"He's growing roots.\n They swept around him last night, and dusted him off this\n morning. His appointment was for\nyesterday\n, remember?\"\n\n\n \"Remember! Of course I remember. Senator Stokes—something\n about a riot in Boston.\" He started to flip the switch,\n then added, \"See if you can get Charlie down here with his\n giz.\"\n\n\n He turned back to Pete with a frantic light in his eye. \"Good\n old Pete. Just in time. Just. Eleventh-hour reprieve. Have a\n drink, have a cigar—do you want my job? It's yours. Just\n speak up.\"\n\n\n \"I fail to see,\" said Pete, \"just why you had to drag me\n all the way from L.A. to have a cigar. I've got work to do.\"",
"The passengers within earshot stiffened, glaring at Pete.\n The fat lady was whispering indignantly to her seat companion.\n Junior had half emerged from his mother's collar; he was busy\n sticking out his tongue at the Grdznth.\n\n\n The creature shifted uneasily. \"Really, I think—perhaps\n Florida would be better.\"\n\n\n \"Going to try it again right now? Don't rush off,\" said Pete.\n\n\n \"Oh, I don't mean to rush. It's been lovely, but—\" Already\n the Grdznth was beginning to fade out.\n\n\n \"Try four miles down and a thousand miles southeast,\" said\n Pete.",
"Two rows down a small boy let out a muffled howl and\n tried to bury himself in his mother's coat collar. An indignant\n wail arose from the fat lady. Someone behind Pete groaned\n aloud and quickly retired behind a newspaper.\n\n\n The creature coughed apologetically. \"Terribly sorry,\" he\n said in a coarse rumble. \"So difficult to control, you know.\n Terribly sorry....\" His voice trailed off as he lumbered down\n the aisle toward the empty seat next to Pete.\n\n\n The fat lady gasped, and an angry murmur ran up and down\n the cabin. \"Sit down,\" Pete said to the creature. \"Relax. Cheerful\n reception these days, eh?\"\n\n\n \"You don't mind?\" said the creature.",
"The sarcasm didn't dent Tommy. He led Pete through the\n ante-room into the plush director's office, bouncing about excitedly,\n his words tumbling out like a waterfall. He looked as\n though one gentle shove might send him yodeling down Market\n Street in his underdrawers. \"Hold it,\" said Pete. \"Relax,\n I'm not going to leave for a while yet. Your girl screamed\n something about a senator as we came in. Did you hear her?\"\n\n\n Tommy gave a violent start. \"Senator! Oh, dear.\" He flipped\n a desk switch. \"What senator is that?\"\n\n\n \"Senator Stokes,\" the girl said wearily. \"He had an appointment.\n He's ready to have you fired.\"\n\n\n \"All I need now is a senator,\" Tommy said. \"What does he\n want?\"\n\n\n \"Guess,\" said the girl.",
"The creature gave him a toothy smile, nodded once, and\n grew more indistinct. In another five seconds the seat was quite\n empty. Pete leaned back, grinning to himself as the angry\n rumble rose around him like a wave. He was a Public Relations\n man to the core—but right now he was off duty. He\n chuckled to himself, and the passengers avoided him like the\n plague all the way to New Philly.\n\n\n But as he walked down the gangway to hail a cab, he wasn't\n smiling so much. He was wondering just how high Tommy was\n hanging him, this time.\nThe lobby of the Public Relations Bureau was swarming like\n an upturned anthill when Pete disembarked from the taxi. He\n could almost smell the desperate tension of the place. He\n fought his way past scurrying clerks and preoccupied poll-takers\n toward the executive elevators in the rear.",
"\"Of course,\" said Pete. \"In their condition. I'd forgotten.\"\n\n\n \"And I'm told that things have been somewhat unpleasant\n in the East just now,\" said the Grdznth.\n\n\n Pete thought of Tommy, red-faced and frantic, beating off\n hordes of indignant citizens. \"So I hear,\" he said. \"How many\n more of you are coming through?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, not many, not many at all. Only the Wives—half a\n million or so—and their spouses, of course.\" The creature\n clicked his talons nervously. \"We haven't much more time, you\n know. Only a few more weeks, a few months at the most. If\n we couldn't have stopped over here, I just don't know\nwhat\nwe'd have done.\"\n\n\n \"Think nothing of it,\" said Pete indulgently. \"It's been great\n having you.\"",
"\"Selling movies, right?\" said Tommy.\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n \"To people who don't want to buy them, right?\"\n\n\n \"In a manner of speaking,\" said Pete testily.\n\n\n \"Exactly,\" said Tommy. \"Considering some of the movies\n you've been selling, you should be able to sell anything to\n anybody, any time, at any price.\"\n\n\n \"Please. Movies are getting Better by the Day.\"",
"\"Sit down and shut up,\" said Pete. \"If there's one thing the\n man in the street reveres, my friend, it's motherhood. We've\n got several hundred thousand pregnant Grdznth just waiting\n for all the little Grdznth to arrive, and nobody's given them a\n side glance.\" He turned to Tommy. \"Get some copywriters\n down here. Get a Grdznth obstetrician or two. We're going to\n put together a PR-blast that will twang the people's heart-strings\n like a billion harps.\"\n\n\n The color was back in Tommy's cheeks, and the senator was\n forgotten as a dozen intercom switches began snapping. \"We'll\n need TV hookups, and plenty of newscast space,\" he said\n eagerly. \"Maybe a few photographs—do you suppose maybe\nbaby\nGrdznth are lovable?\"",
"Not that he didn't like Tommy. Tommy was a good PR-man,\n as PR-men go. He just didn't know his own depth. PRoblem\n in a beady Grdznth eye! What Tommy needed right now was\n a Bazooka Battalion, not a PR-man. Pete settled back in\n the Eastbound Rocketjet with a sigh of resignation.\n\n\n He was just dozing off when the fat lady up the aisle let out\n a scream. A huge reptilian head had materialized out of nowhere\n and was hanging in air, peering about uncertainly. A\n scaly green body followed, four feet away, complete with long\n razor talons, heavy hind legs, and a whiplash tail with a needle\n at the end. For a moment the creature floated upside down, legs\n thrashing. Then the head and body joined, executed a horizontal\n pirouette, and settled gently to the floor like an eight-foot\n circus balloon.",
"\"Do something! You think I'm a magician? I can just make\n them vanish? What do you want me to do?\"\n\n\n The senator raised his eyebrows. \"You needn't shout, Mr.\n Heinz. I'm not the least interested in\nwhat\nyou do. My interest\n is focused completely on a collection of five thousand letters,\n telegrams, and visiphone calls I've received in the past three\n days alone. My constituents, Mr. Heinz, are making themselves\n clear. If the Grdznth do not go, I go.\"\n\n\n \"That would never do, of course,\" murmured Pete.\n\n\n The senator gave Pete a cold, clinical look. \"Who is this\n person?\" he asked Tommy.\n\n\n \"An assistant on the job,\" Tommy said quickly. \"A very\n excellent PR-man.\"\n\n\n The senator sniffed audibly. \"Full of ideas, no doubt.\"",
"\"They probably look like salamanders,\" said Pete. \"But tell\n the people anything you want. If we're going to get across the\n sanctity of Grdznth motherhood, my friend, anything goes.\"\n\n\n \"It's genius,\" chortled Tommy. \"Sheer genius.\"\n\n\n \"If it sells,\" the senator added, dubiously.",
"\"Brimming,\" said Pete. \"Enough ideas to get your constituents\n off your neck for a while, at least.\"\n\n\n \"Indeed.\"\n\n\n \"Indeed,\" said Pete. \"Tommy, how fast can you get a PR-blast\n to penetrate? How much medium do you control?\"\n\n\n \"Plenty,\" Tommy gulped.\n\n\n \"And how fast can you sample response and analyze it?\"\n\n\n \"We can have prelims six hours after the PR-blast. Pete,\n if you have an idea, tell us!\"",
"\"Yes, I know. And the Grdznth are getting worse by the\n hour. They're coming through in battalions—a thousand a day!\n The more Grdznth come through, the more they act as though\n they own the place. Not nasty or anything—it's that infernal\n politeness that people hate most, I think. Can't get them mad,\n can't get them into a fight, but they do anything they please,\n and go anywhere they please, and if the people don't like it,\n the Grdznth just go right ahead anyway.\"\n\n\n Pete pulled at his lip. \"Any violence?\"",
"\"Well, why won't they? The people just didn't trust us, that\n was all. What does the man in the street know about transmatters?\n Nothing. But give him one, and then try to take it\n away.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure,\" said Pete. \"It sounds great. Just a little bit\ntoo\ngreat.\"\n\n\n Tommy blinked at him. \"Too great? Are you crazy?\"\n\n\n \"Not crazy. Just getting nervous.\" Pete jammed his hands\n into his pockets. \"Do you realize where\nwe're\nstanding in this\n thing? We're out on a limb—way out. We're fighting for time—time\n for Charlie and his gang to crack the puzzle, time for\n the Grdznth girls to gestate. But what are we hearing from\n Charlie?\"\n\n\n \"Pete, Charlie can't just—\"",
"\"So you can't make them beautiful,\" said Pete. \"Can't you\n make them cute?\"\n\n\n \"With those teeth? Those eyes? Ugh.\"\n\n\n \"How about the 'jolly company' approach?\"\n\n\n \"Tried it. There's nothing jolly about them. They pop out\n of nowhere, anywhere. In church, in bedrooms, in rush-hour\n traffic through Lincoln Tunnel—look!\"\n\n\n Pete peered out the window at the traffic jam below. Cars\n were snarled up for blocks on either side of the intersection.\n A squad of traffic cops were converging angrily on the center\n of the mess, where a stream of green reptilian figures seemed\n to be popping out of the street and lumbering through the\n jammed autos like General Sherman tanks.",
"The Grdznth nodded sadly. \"It's horrible of me, but I just\n can't help it. I\nalways\nmisgauge. Last time it was the chancel\n of St. John's Cathedral. I nearly stampeded morning prayer—\"\n He paused to catch his breath. \"What an effort. The energy\n barrier, you know. Frightfully hard to make the jump.\" He\n broke off sharply, staring out the window. \"Dear me! Are we\n going\neast\n?\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid so, friend.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, dear. I wanted\nFlorida\n.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you seem to have drifted through into the wrong\n airplane,\" said Pete. \"Why Florida?\"\n\n\n The Grdznth looked at him reproachfully. \"The Wives, of\n course. The climate is so much better, and they mustn't be\n disturbed, you know.\""
]
] |
test
|
63836
|
[
"Morley laments the loss of a \"normal\" existence. He feels he is the only person to blame for his current predicament. What explanation does he seem to settle on for the decision that has put him in the position he is currently in?",
"Morley and Madsen contrast",
"The fact that Morley compares the situation he finds himself in with either waking Madsen or land the ship below to Scylla and Charybdis lets the reader know that ",
"How can Morely be described?",
"Morely is best known for what type of knowledge?",
"While it is evident that Madsen and Morely are not fond of one another, how do they deal with it differently?",
"What are the duos only hopes for survival?",
"When faced with a serious situation, Morely's brain becomes",
"Of the two main characters, who changes the most throughout the story and why?"
] |
[
[
"He was forced by his parents to leave his home.",
"He felt compelled to follow in the footsteps of other family members. ",
"He was following a girl.",
"He went through a spell where he was not behaving like himself, and he took the plunge."
],
[
"In attitude.",
"All of the above",
"In appearance.",
"In intelligence level."
],
[
"Madsen does not like to be woken from his naps.",
"Morley is weak in many ways, and he shows it right away.",
"The landing is something that Morely wants to do on his own to prove himself as a competent pilot.",
"Morley doesn't know which of the two options is going to be more uncomfortable to deal with."
],
[
"He is just above average intelligence, and he enjoys letting others be in charge in any given situation.",
"He enjoys showing everyone he is smarter than them.",
"He is a brave young man and misses his family.",
"He has a lot of initiative, and he is proud of his work."
],
[
"General knowledge that will always come in helpful in a pinch.",
"He is simply \"books smart\" with no knowledge of anything in the \"real world.\"",
"He typically knows more than he lets on about all subjects, but he cannot let others know.",
"Useless information that doesn't always serve as helpful."
],
[
"Morely is not bothered by Madsen at all.",
"Madsen is not bothered by Morely at all.",
"Morely is very boisterous about his disdain for Madsen.",
"Madsen is very boisterous about his disdain for Morely."
],
[
"None of the above are threats.",
"They must make it to the Distress Depots.",
"Both A and B.",
"They must survive the dangerous wildlife."
],
[
"Useless. He cannot function under pressure.",
"Reliant on others to help him come up with ideas.",
"There is no change. He is a very static character.",
"Almost like a computer where he can remember exactly what he learned."
],
[
"Madsen changes the most because he actually begins to show human kindness towards Morley, and he starts to care about him.",
"Morely changes the most because he allows his depth of knowledge to put the two in a very precarious situation.",
"Morely changes the most because he becomes courageous, and he takes charge of the situation.",
"Madsen changes the most because he becomes very fearful of the situation, and he lets it show."
]
] |
[
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-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
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[
"He went on, but Morley heard no more. The prospect unnerved him. He\n was terrified at the idea of changing a safe subordinate position for\n that of an active partner, however temporary the arrangement might be.\n At the drawing, his hunch of impending misery proved all too real. He\n wound up facing the prospect of a stay on the frozen hell of Phoebe,\n scouring the miniature mountains for Japori crystals, with Madsen,\n MADSEN! for his only companion.\nA week later the Solarian teetered down to a landing at Port Ulysses.\n With various expressions of profane and unbounded delight from her\n crew, she was turned over to the stevedores and the maintenance gang.\n Thereafter, at intervals, the thirty foot space boats took off for\n Mimas, Tethys, Dione, or whatever waystop the lottery had decreed.\n Madsen and Morley left on the fourth 'night,' with Phoebe hardly a\n week's run from them at ten miles a second.",
"Satellites, Inc., had done as well as possible with the raw material\n known as Morley, Vincent, No. 4628. His psychograph indicated a born\n subordinate, with a normal I.Q., reasonably stable and trustworthy\n though below average in initiative. They didn't inform him of this,\n or the fact that they had analyzed the neurosis which had driven\n him to the spaceline, and which had created by that very action the\n therapeutic aid he needed. Many spacemen had similar case histories.\n\n\n It was those who fought the compulsion who sometimes turned down dark\n pathways of the mind.",
"Morley swung himself into the pilot's seat, too numb with humiliation\n to answer. Almost an hour passed before he started the regulation\n checkup required by the Space Code of any ship passing within one\n hundred thousand miles of a planet or major satellite. Every guardian\n needle stood in its normal place with one exception. The craft had been\n running on the port fuel tanks, depleting them to the point where it\n seemed wise to trim ship. Morley opened the valve, touched the fuel\n pump switch and waited, nothing happened. He watched the needles\n incredulously. The pump—? He jabbed the switch, once, twice. Nothing.",
"Morley flushed, and fumbled miserably for a reasonable excuse. There\n was a gleam of contempt in Madsen's eyes, but he spoke again more\n quietly. \"I'm going to eat and catch up on some sack time. We'll be\n right on top of Japetus in short order. It's a known fact that the moon\n won't move over if you fly at it, so you better wake me up to handle\n the compensating!\" He disappeared into the tiny galley, but his words\n were still audible. \"It's an awful long walk back, chum, if anybody\n pulls a bull.\"",
"He could not explain the obscure compulsion that sparked his little\n personal rebellion.\n\n\n He didn't know, or need to know that other generations of Morleys had\n fought in revolutions, or sailed in square riggers, or clawed gold from\n mountainsides. When he went to the spaceline, the puzzlement of his few\n friends was profound, but hardly more so than his own. And now, after\n almost a year of upheaval and change, he was piloting a spaceboat along\n an involute curve ending on the surface of Saturn's eighth moon. And he\n was still puzzled.",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIt was comfortably cool in the functional, little control room, but\n Morley was sweating, gently and steadily. His palms were wet, and the\n thin thoughtful face, shining in the glow of the instrument panel\n light, was wrinkled in an agony of concentration and doubt. He was\n trying to choose between the Scylla of waking Madsen with a corollary\n of biting contempt involved, and the Charybdis of attempting to land\n single handed on Japetus, less than five hundred miles below. Neither\n course was appealing.\n\n\n For the hundredth time he pondered miserably over the sad condition\n of what had been a reasonably well ordered existence. The worst of\n it was that he had only himself to blame, and he knew it. No one had\n forced him to leave a comfortable, if poorly paid position with General\n Plastics, and fill out an employment card at Satellites, Inc.",
"If a man can be said to slink without changing his position, Morley\n slunk. Madsen continued, double fortissimo.\n\n\n \"A kid of ten knows enough to keep a gun clean, but you, Mr.—Mr.\n Unabridged Webster in the flesh—\"\n\n\n He stopped, temporarily out of breath. Morley regarded him abjectly,\n and suddenly Madsen began to feel a little ashamed. After all, the\n fellow had figured out that business about the meridian.\n\n\n \"No use in having any post mortems,\" he said, with fine logic. \"Throw\n that junk away. It's that much less to carry, anyway.\"\n\n\n Two hours later, they plodded wearily through the last of the swamp\n onto higher ground. The two haggard, muddied figures that threw\n themselves on the dry soil to rest bore little resemblance to the men\n who had parachuted from Spaceboat 6 seventy-two hours before.",
"\"Of course, this is somewhat different. If we don't get out by\n ourselves, whoever finds us need only say, 'X marks the spot.'\"\n\n\n Morley didn't bother answering. No comment was necessary. He knew as\n well as Madsen that whatever margin of safety they possessed had been\n shaved to the vanishing point.\nThey made twenty miles in a forced march, slept, ate, and then traveled\n again. The stunted forest grew thinner, and occasionally they crossed\n open spaces acres in extent. Twice they saw, in the distance, animals\n resembling terrestrial deer, and on the second occasion Morley tried\n a fruitless shot. They slept and ate again, and now the last of the\n rations were gone. They went on.",
"Madsen was at the controls. Without a single spoken word on the\n subject, he was automatically the captain, and Morley, the crew. The\n situation crystallized twenty-four hours out of Port Ulysses. Morley\n was poring over the Ephemeris prior to taking his watch at the controls\n when he became aware that Madsen, red faced and breathing heavily, was\n peering over his shoulder.\n\n\n Morley stiffened in alarm. \"Is anything—\" He quailed under Madsen's\n glare.\n\n\n \"Not yet, but there's liable to be if you don't smarten up.\" The\n Norwegian's blunt forefinger stabbed at the page Morley had been\n studying. \"Phoebe, Mister, happens to be Saturn's NINTH moon. Get it?\n You can count, can't you?\"",
"He was fairly popular with the crew, except for a big Norwegian from\n New York, named Olaf Madsen. Madsen was a chunky, hard bitten veteran\n of the spaceways. Round faced, deceptively soft spoken, he had a\n penchant for practical jokes, and a flair for biting sarcasm which\n found full expression in the presence of any first tripper. He made\n the life of any apprentice miserable, and finished the last two weeks\n of one trip in the brig for panicking an entire crew by painting his\n face to resemble the onset of Martian blue fever. Morley considered him\n an oaf, and he considered Morley a human filing cabinet with a weak\n stomach.\n\n\n A little notice on the bulletin board was Morley's first inkling that\n his safe, secure routine was on the verge of mutating into something\n frighteningly unpredictable.",
"He leaned forward and rapped the starboard gauge with his knuckles,\n sharply. The needle swung from Full to Empty. Morley felt faint as\n realization hit him. The starboard gauge had stuck at Full, and had\n been unreported. The tank had not been serviced in port, owing to\n the faulty reading and a mechanic's carelessness. They had about two\n hours fuel. Even to Morley, it was obvious that there was one thing\n only to do—land on Japetus, looming up larger in the view-plate with\n each passing moment. He checked the distance rapidly, punched the\n calculator, and put the ship in the designated orbit. He wanted to\n handle the landing himself, but the thought of the final few ticklish\n moments chilled him. So did the thought of waking Madsen, and asking\n him to take over.",
"\"Well, Mastermind, any suggestions that might help us? Any little\n pearls of wisdom from the great brain?\"\n\n\n \"Just one,\" Morley answered. \"Head for the Equator, and—\"\n\n\n \"And try to find a D.D. Correct. If we last that long. Let's salvage\n what we can out of this junk and shove off.\"\n\n\n Morley cleared his throat diffidently. \"There are a few pieces of\n equipment we should take along, for—er—emergencies—\" His voice\n trailed off miserably under Madsen's basilisk stare.\n\n\n \"Listen, Morley, once and for all. We're lugging essentials and that's\n all. Any extra weight is out.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen—\"",
"The slope on which they rested was tufted with small bushes. One\n particular type with narrow dark green leaves bore clusters of fruit\n like small plums, which Madsen eyed speculatively.\n\n\n \"Do we risk it?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Might as well.\"\n\n\n Morley was completely unaware that he had just accepted the\n responsibility for making a decision.\n\n\n \"We can't afford not to risk it,\" he said, adding, with little show of\n enthusiasm, \"I'll be the guinea pig.\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy, chum,\" Madsen countered. \"We'll match for it.\"",
"\"I think I'd run,\" said Morley simply. \"It was pretty dull at General\n Plastic but at least the comptometers weren't man-eating.\"\n\n\n Madsen blinked, and seeming to find expression difficult, forbore to\n answer.\n\n\n They ate, and relaxed on the soft sod, lulled almost into a feeling\n of security. Not being foolhardy, however, they slept in six hour\n shifts. Morley stood the first watch, and slept the second. When he\n awoke, Madsen was tensely examining a ration tin. Jarred into instant\n alertness by a feeling of urgency and alarm, Morley leaped to his feet.\n\n\n \"Something wrong?\"\n\n\n Without answering, Madsen handed him the tin. It was pockmarked with\n inch wide patches of metallic gray fungus, from several of which liquid\n was seeping. There was a sharp odor of decay.",
"Madsen was hastily dumping the contents of the knapsacks on the ground.\n Morley joined him, and both men commenced scraping the clinging gray\n patches from the tins. All but three were perforated and ruined.\n\n\n \"We'll at least be traveling light from now on,\" Madsen said. \"Any idea\n what this stuff is?\"\n\n\n \"Some of that lichen, or whatever it is, was around the scene of the\n crash,\" Morley answered. \"The stuff must have an affinity for tin;\n probably secretes some acid that dissolves it. Only trouble is, it goes\n through thin steel too.\"\n\n\n Madsen commenced repacking their effects.\n\n\n \"From now on, laddie, keep your eyes peeled for game, and if you see\n any, use that rifle. If we don't knock down some meat, and soon, we\n aren't going to make it. Might as well realize it right now.\"",
"Morley was staring sunward, with thoughtful eyes. \"Yes, there is,\" he\n said quietly.\n\n\n Madsen's jaw dropped. \"Give,\" he said.\n\n\n \"We both forgot something we know perfectly well. Notice the sun? It\n hasn't moved perceptibly since we landed. Japetus doesn't revolve on\n its axis.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Two things. One, no night, since we're on the sunward side. The sun\n will move from side to side in the sky, reaching its lateral limits\n when Japetus is in quadrature in regard to Saturn. If we were here for\n a month, we'd see Saturn rise, make a full arc through the sky, and\n set. Let's hope for a shorter stay.\"\n\n\n \"Go on,\" said Madsen, and suddenly there was nothing patronizing or\n scornful in his voice.",
"\"We'll be camping right here for a while, looks like. Try to get some\n sleep if it slacks off any. You'll be okay in a while.\"\n\n\n His doubts were hidden, and Morley thanked him with his eyes.",
"Madsen was white but composed. \"We can slow her down but we can't land\n her. Get suits while I take over. We'll ride as far as we can, and\n walk the rest of the way.\" He fought with the controls, as Morley,\n still bemused, obeyed. At twenty-five hundred feet they bailed out,\n and floating down seconds later, watched Spaceboat 6 crash into a low\n wooded hill. And when they landed, and inspected the wreckage, it was\n some minutes before either spoke.\n\n\n It was obvious at a glance that Spaceboat 6 was ready for the boneyard,\n had there been one around. The ship, under the few automatic controls\n that were still functioning, had sliced in at a thirty degree angle,\n ploughed a short distance through a growth of slim, poplar-like trees,\n and then crumpled completely against an outcropping granite ledge.\n Finally Morley gulped audibly, and Madsen laughed.",
"Morley admitted his ignorance, vaguely annoyed at the fact that for\n once he was the humble seeker for information, and someone else was\n being professorial.\n\n\n Oscar grinned. \"And you studied astrogation! Well, when Saturn and\n Earth line up with the Sun, it takes three hundred and seventy eight\n days before they get in the same position again. So if we got back to\n Earth's orbit in six months, we'd still have about a hundred and eighty\n millions of miles to go, because Earth would be on Sol's other side at\n that time, in superior conjunction to Uranus.\"\n\n\n Morley digested this, while Oscar basked in the light of his own\n knowledge, enjoying himself hugely.\n\n\n \"And the trips, Oscar?\"",
"\"Two. We came in over the Pole almost exactly at inferior conjunction.\n Right?\"\n\n\n \"I think I get it.\" Madsen answered slowly.\n\n\n For a moment Morley was silent. He could almost smell the dingy\n classroom in Port Chicago, almost see the words on the examination\n paper in front of him. The paragraph leaped out, limned sharply in his\n mind. \"Section 4, Subhead A, Solar Space Code. The initial Distress\n Depot on any satellite shall be situated, when practical, on the\n Prime Meridian. For the purposes of this act, the Prime Meridian of a\n satellite shall be the meridian that bisects the Sun when the Satellite\n is in inferior conjunction. Quarter mile belts shall be burned fifty\n miles to the North, South, East, and West as guides. Radio beacons will\n operate, unless impracticable due to atmospheric conditions, or other\n reasons.\""
],
[
"Madsen was at the controls. Without a single spoken word on the\n subject, he was automatically the captain, and Morley, the crew. The\n situation crystallized twenty-four hours out of Port Ulysses. Morley\n was poring over the Ephemeris prior to taking his watch at the controls\n when he became aware that Madsen, red faced and breathing heavily, was\n peering over his shoulder.\n\n\n Morley stiffened in alarm. \"Is anything—\" He quailed under Madsen's\n glare.\n\n\n \"Not yet, but there's liable to be if you don't smarten up.\" The\n Norwegian's blunt forefinger stabbed at the page Morley had been\n studying. \"Phoebe, Mister, happens to be Saturn's NINTH moon. Get it?\n You can count, can't you?\"",
"Madsen looked up from the tin of coffee concentrate he was opening.\n \"Hasn't anyone ever tried to win an argument by poking you one in the\n snoot?\"\n\n\n \"Once or twice.\" Morley was almost apologetic. \"But I learned judo a\n few years ago, just for the hell of it, so I didn't get hurt much.\"\n\n\n \"You're a whiz with the sabre, no doubt?\" said Madsen dryly.\n\n\n \"No, I tried swordplay for a while, but gave it up. It's a little too,\n er—primitive for my tastes.\"\n\n\n \"Primitive!\" Madsen glanced around at the alien scene and nearly\n choked. \"I'm crossing my fingers, but what would you do if some\n carnivore, or a gang of those spiders suddenly appeared and started for\n us with evil intentions?\"",
"If a man can be said to slink without changing his position, Morley\n slunk. Madsen continued, double fortissimo.\n\n\n \"A kid of ten knows enough to keep a gun clean, but you, Mr.—Mr.\n Unabridged Webster in the flesh—\"\n\n\n He stopped, temporarily out of breath. Morley regarded him abjectly,\n and suddenly Madsen began to feel a little ashamed. After all, the\n fellow had figured out that business about the meridian.\n\n\n \"No use in having any post mortems,\" he said, with fine logic. \"Throw\n that junk away. It's that much less to carry, anyway.\"\n\n\n Two hours later, they plodded wearily through the last of the swamp\n onto higher ground. The two haggard, muddied figures that threw\n themselves on the dry soil to rest bore little resemblance to the men\n who had parachuted from Spaceboat 6 seventy-two hours before.",
"Madsen was white but composed. \"We can slow her down but we can't land\n her. Get suits while I take over. We'll ride as far as we can, and\n walk the rest of the way.\" He fought with the controls, as Morley,\n still bemused, obeyed. At twenty-five hundred feet they bailed out,\n and floating down seconds later, watched Spaceboat 6 crash into a low\n wooded hill. And when they landed, and inspected the wreckage, it was\n some minutes before either spoke.\n\n\n It was obvious at a glance that Spaceboat 6 was ready for the boneyard,\n had there been one around. The ship, under the few automatic controls\n that were still functioning, had sliced in at a thirty degree angle,\n ploughed a short distance through a growth of slim, poplar-like trees,\n and then crumpled completely against an outcropping granite ledge.\n Finally Morley gulped audibly, and Madsen laughed.",
"He went on, but Morley heard no more. The prospect unnerved him. He\n was terrified at the idea of changing a safe subordinate position for\n that of an active partner, however temporary the arrangement might be.\n At the drawing, his hunch of impending misery proved all too real. He\n wound up facing the prospect of a stay on the frozen hell of Phoebe,\n scouring the miniature mountains for Japori crystals, with Madsen,\n MADSEN! for his only companion.\nA week later the Solarian teetered down to a landing at Port Ulysses.\n With various expressions of profane and unbounded delight from her\n crew, she was turned over to the stevedores and the maintenance gang.\n Thereafter, at intervals, the thirty foot space boats took off for\n Mimas, Tethys, Dione, or whatever waystop the lottery had decreed.\n Madsen and Morley left on the fourth 'night,' with Phoebe hardly a\n week's run from them at ten miles a second.",
"Morley flushed, and fumbled miserably for a reasonable excuse. There\n was a gleam of contempt in Madsen's eyes, but he spoke again more\n quietly. \"I'm going to eat and catch up on some sack time. We'll be\n right on top of Japetus in short order. It's a known fact that the moon\n won't move over if you fly at it, so you better wake me up to handle\n the compensating!\" He disappeared into the tiny galley, but his words\n were still audible. \"It's an awful long walk back, chum, if anybody\n pulls a bull.\"",
"Madsen was grinning now. \"What beats me is how you remember all that\n junk. I'd go nuts if I tried to clutter up my mind with a bunch of\n useless data. Alabama!\"\n\n\n \"I don't have to try to remember things,\" Morley said thoughtfully. \"If\n I read or hear something that seems the least bit curious or unusual,\n it just sticks. And sometimes it's useful.\"\n\n\n \"Such as?\"\n\n\n \"Well, remember when Storybook ran a mile last year in 1.29? He was\n the first to break 1.30. Some joe that knew a lot about horses gave me\n an argument in a bar about the first horse to break 1.40. He bet me\n ten credits it was Man o' War. I knew it was Ten Broeck, and I got an\n almanac and proved it.\"",
"The slope on which they rested was tufted with small bushes. One\n particular type with narrow dark green leaves bore clusters of fruit\n like small plums, which Madsen eyed speculatively.\n\n\n \"Do we risk it?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Might as well.\"\n\n\n Morley was completely unaware that he had just accepted the\n responsibility for making a decision.\n\n\n \"We can't afford not to risk it,\" he said, adding, with little show of\n enthusiasm, \"I'll be the guinea pig.\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy, chum,\" Madsen countered. \"We'll match for it.\"",
"\"Of course, this is somewhat different. If we don't get out by\n ourselves, whoever finds us need only say, 'X marks the spot.'\"\n\n\n Morley didn't bother answering. No comment was necessary. He knew as\n well as Madsen that whatever margin of safety they possessed had been\n shaved to the vanishing point.\nThey made twenty miles in a forced march, slept, ate, and then traveled\n again. The stunted forest grew thinner, and occasionally they crossed\n open spaces acres in extent. Twice they saw, in the distance, animals\n resembling terrestrial deer, and on the second occasion Morley tried\n a fruitless shot. They slept and ate again, and now the last of the\n rations were gone. They went on.",
"Madsen was hastily dumping the contents of the knapsacks on the ground.\n Morley joined him, and both men commenced scraping the clinging gray\n patches from the tins. All but three were perforated and ruined.\n\n\n \"We'll at least be traveling light from now on,\" Madsen said. \"Any idea\n what this stuff is?\"\n\n\n \"Some of that lichen, or whatever it is, was around the scene of the\n crash,\" Morley answered. \"The stuff must have an affinity for tin;\n probably secretes some acid that dissolves it. Only trouble is, it goes\n through thin steel too.\"\n\n\n Madsen commenced repacking their effects.\n\n\n \"From now on, laddie, keep your eyes peeled for game, and if you see\n any, use that rifle. If we don't knock down some meat, and soon, we\n aren't going to make it. Might as well realize it right now.\"",
"\"Phoebe!\" Madsen laughed. \"I remember, back in '89—\" He stopped\n abruptly at a rattling from the ledge. A green, little lizard-like\n creature was scrambling frantically over the granite, while hot in\n pursuit were three—spiders? Black, they were, a black like living\n velvet, and incredibly fast as they closed in, beady stalked eyes\n fastened on their prey. They were deliberately herding the desperate\n lizard toward a cleft in the rock. As the creature leaped into the\n opening, another spider dove at it from the recess. The others closed\n in. There was a hopeless hissing, a vicious clicking of mandibles. The\n struggle subsided. Once again the day was silent. Madsen holstered the\n blaster he had drawn and looked whitely at Morley.\n\n\n \"Pleasant pets,\" he grunted.",
"Less than three hours after the crash, the two men shouldered their\n burdens, took a bearing to determine their course, and headed into the\n south.\nIn a matter of minutes Spaceboat 6 was out of sight. With Madsen\n leading, they threaded their way through the scant undergrowth.\n Underfoot the dry, broad-bladed grass rustled through a morning that\n had no beginning or end. Farther away were other and less easily\n explained rustlings, and once both men froze as a half-dozen of what\n looked like baby dragons arrowed past within yards of them.\n\n\n \"Formation flying, like ducks,\" muttered Morley, watching from the\n corner of his eye.",
"He was fairly popular with the crew, except for a big Norwegian from\n New York, named Olaf Madsen. Madsen was a chunky, hard bitten veteran\n of the spaceways. Round faced, deceptively soft spoken, he had a\n penchant for practical jokes, and a flair for biting sarcasm which\n found full expression in the presence of any first tripper. He made\n the life of any apprentice miserable, and finished the last two weeks\n of one trip in the brig for panicking an entire crew by painting his\n face to resemble the onset of Martian blue fever. Morley considered him\n an oaf, and he considered Morley a human filing cabinet with a weak\n stomach.\n\n\n A little notice on the bulletin board was Morley's first inkling that\n his safe, secure routine was on the verge of mutating into something\n frighteningly unpredictable.",
"\"I think I'd run,\" said Morley simply. \"It was pretty dull at General\n Plastic but at least the comptometers weren't man-eating.\"\n\n\n Madsen blinked, and seeming to find expression difficult, forbore to\n answer.\n\n\n They ate, and relaxed on the soft sod, lulled almost into a feeling\n of security. Not being foolhardy, however, they slept in six hour\n shifts. Morley stood the first watch, and slept the second. When he\n awoke, Madsen was tensely examining a ration tin. Jarred into instant\n alertness by a feeling of urgency and alarm, Morley leaped to his feet.\n\n\n \"Something wrong?\"\n\n\n Without answering, Madsen handed him the tin. It was pockmarked with\n inch wide patches of metallic gray fungus, from several of which liquid\n was seeping. There was a sharp odor of decay.",
"Morley was staring sunward, with thoughtful eyes. \"Yes, there is,\" he\n said quietly.\n\n\n Madsen's jaw dropped. \"Give,\" he said.\n\n\n \"We both forgot something we know perfectly well. Notice the sun? It\n hasn't moved perceptibly since we landed. Japetus doesn't revolve on\n its axis.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Two things. One, no night, since we're on the sunward side. The sun\n will move from side to side in the sky, reaching its lateral limits\n when Japetus is in quadrature in regard to Saturn. If we were here for\n a month, we'd see Saturn rise, make a full arc through the sky, and\n set. Let's hope for a shorter stay.\"\n\n\n \"Go on,\" said Madsen, and suddenly there was nothing patronizing or\n scornful in his voice.",
"And it was then, at the intersection of two courses formed by an\n infinity of variables, that two objects arrived in the same millisecond\n of time. Eight ounces of nickel iron smashed into the stern of\n Spaceboat 6, ripped a path of ruin through her entire length, and went\n out through the two inch glass of her bow, before Morley could turn\n his head. He was aware, in a strange dream-like way, of actuating\n the midships airtight door, of the hiss of air as the little aneroid\n automatically opened valves to compensate for the drop in pressure, and\n of Madsen leaping into the control room and slapping a Johnson patch\n over the hole in the bow.",
"Madsen ignored the interruption, and cut loose with one last broadside.\n \"Save your breath. It's bad enough being saddled with a useless little\n squirt like you, without being made into a pack mule unnecessarily.\"\nII\n\n\n He climbed into a gaping hole in the bow. Morley followed, humiliated\n but still thinking hard. Catalogue it, he told himself. Remember\n everything. The Distress Depots, or D.D.'s, as spacemen called them,\n were studded on every frontier world, usually on the Equator. They\n contained two small spacecraft plus ample supplies of food, medicine,\n and tools. When wrecked, get to a D.D. and live. It was that simple.",
"Both men whirled at a sudden crashing on their left. Something like a\n large splay footed kangaroo broke cover, and went loping away, clearing\n the fern tops at every bound. In one motion Morley whipped up the\n rifle and fired. There was an earsplitting report, the leaper kept\n right on going, under forced draught, and the two castaways stared in\n consternation at a rifle that resembled a bundle of metallic macaroni\n more than it did a firearm.\n\n\n Madsen spoke first. \"You probably got some mud in the barrel when we\n stopped last time,\" he accused. \"Look at us now.\"\n\n\n Morley started to mumble an apology, but Madsen cut him short. \"Look at\n us now,\" he repeated, with all stops out. \"It was bad before, now it's\n practically hopeless. Our only long range gun! What do we do now if we\n do find game—dig pits for it?\"",
"\"Well, Mastermind, any suggestions that might help us? Any little\n pearls of wisdom from the great brain?\"\n\n\n \"Just one,\" Morley answered. \"Head for the Equator, and—\"\n\n\n \"And try to find a D.D. Correct. If we last that long. Let's salvage\n what we can out of this junk and shove off.\"\n\n\n Morley cleared his throat diffidently. \"There are a few pieces of\n equipment we should take along, for—er—emergencies—\" His voice\n trailed off miserably under Madsen's basilisk stare.\n\n\n \"Listen, Morley, once and for all. We're lugging essentials and that's\n all. Any extra weight is out.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen—\"",
"Both men had discarded their space suits, were dressed in the gray\n work clothes of Satellites, Inc. Equipment was easily divided. Each\n had a blaster, and a wrist compass-chronometer. Radio was useless on\n Japetus, and the little headsets were ruthlessly jettisoned. The flat\n tins of emergency food concentrate were stowed in two knapsacks. Madsen\n took charge of the sextant, and Morley carried a lightweight repeating\n rifle for possible game that might be out of blaster range. Canteens,\n a pocket first-aid kit, and a small heliograph, were the final items,\n except for several articles which Morley unobtrusively stowed away\n about his person."
],
[
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIt was comfortably cool in the functional, little control room, but\n Morley was sweating, gently and steadily. His palms were wet, and the\n thin thoughtful face, shining in the glow of the instrument panel\n light, was wrinkled in an agony of concentration and doubt. He was\n trying to choose between the Scylla of waking Madsen with a corollary\n of biting contempt involved, and the Charybdis of attempting to land\n single handed on Japetus, less than five hundred miles below. Neither\n course was appealing.\n\n\n For the hundredth time he pondered miserably over the sad condition\n of what had been a reasonably well ordered existence. The worst of\n it was that he had only himself to blame, and he knew it. No one had\n forced him to leave a comfortable, if poorly paid position with General\n Plastics, and fill out an employment card at Satellites, Inc.",
"Madsen was at the controls. Without a single spoken word on the\n subject, he was automatically the captain, and Morley, the crew. The\n situation crystallized twenty-four hours out of Port Ulysses. Morley\n was poring over the Ephemeris prior to taking his watch at the controls\n when he became aware that Madsen, red faced and breathing heavily, was\n peering over his shoulder.\n\n\n Morley stiffened in alarm. \"Is anything—\" He quailed under Madsen's\n glare.\n\n\n \"Not yet, but there's liable to be if you don't smarten up.\" The\n Norwegian's blunt forefinger stabbed at the page Morley had been\n studying. \"Phoebe, Mister, happens to be Saturn's NINTH moon. Get it?\n You can count, can't you?\"",
"He went on, but Morley heard no more. The prospect unnerved him. He\n was terrified at the idea of changing a safe subordinate position for\n that of an active partner, however temporary the arrangement might be.\n At the drawing, his hunch of impending misery proved all too real. He\n wound up facing the prospect of a stay on the frozen hell of Phoebe,\n scouring the miniature mountains for Japori crystals, with Madsen,\n MADSEN! for his only companion.\nA week later the Solarian teetered down to a landing at Port Ulysses.\n With various expressions of profane and unbounded delight from her\n crew, she was turned over to the stevedores and the maintenance gang.\n Thereafter, at intervals, the thirty foot space boats took off for\n Mimas, Tethys, Dione, or whatever waystop the lottery had decreed.\n Madsen and Morley left on the fourth 'night,' with Phoebe hardly a\n week's run from them at ten miles a second.",
"Morley flushed, and fumbled miserably for a reasonable excuse. There\n was a gleam of contempt in Madsen's eyes, but he spoke again more\n quietly. \"I'm going to eat and catch up on some sack time. We'll be\n right on top of Japetus in short order. It's a known fact that the moon\n won't move over if you fly at it, so you better wake me up to handle\n the compensating!\" He disappeared into the tiny galley, but his words\n were still audible. \"It's an awful long walk back, chum, if anybody\n pulls a bull.\"",
"He leaned forward and rapped the starboard gauge with his knuckles,\n sharply. The needle swung from Full to Empty. Morley felt faint as\n realization hit him. The starboard gauge had stuck at Full, and had\n been unreported. The tank had not been serviced in port, owing to\n the faulty reading and a mechanic's carelessness. They had about two\n hours fuel. Even to Morley, it was obvious that there was one thing\n only to do—land on Japetus, looming up larger in the view-plate with\n each passing moment. He checked the distance rapidly, punched the\n calculator, and put the ship in the designated orbit. He wanted to\n handle the landing himself, but the thought of the final few ticklish\n moments chilled him. So did the thought of waking Madsen, and asking\n him to take over.",
"Straight toward the zenith the ship rises, trailing fire. Faster yet,\n hurling herself upward, under full power, through the last threads of\n atmosphere. Upward and onward, out past Roches limit, out where gravity\n dwindles toward zero, into the empyrean where the shades of dead\n spacemen cruise the cosmos in their phantom craft, spaceborne in the\n night.\n\n\n After he had recovered from the pangs of his initial attack of space\n nausea, Morley enjoyed himself. He had one minor social asset, a\n retentive mind, well stocked with general information. If the two\n apprentices got involved in an argument over the identity of the\n highest peak in America, Morley was the inevitable arbiter. He could\n with equal facility name the author of a recent best seller, or inform\n you that a young seal was a cub, a young hare, a leveret, and a young\n swan, a cygnet.",
"And it was then, at the intersection of two courses formed by an\n infinity of variables, that two objects arrived in the same millisecond\n of time. Eight ounces of nickel iron smashed into the stern of\n Spaceboat 6, ripped a path of ruin through her entire length, and went\n out through the two inch glass of her bow, before Morley could turn\n his head. He was aware, in a strange dream-like way, of actuating\n the midships airtight door, of the hiss of air as the little aneroid\n automatically opened valves to compensate for the drop in pressure, and\n of Madsen leaping into the control room and slapping a Johnson patch\n over the hole in the bow.",
"Madsen was white but composed. \"We can slow her down but we can't land\n her. Get suits while I take over. We'll ride as far as we can, and\n walk the rest of the way.\" He fought with the controls, as Morley,\n still bemused, obeyed. At twenty-five hundred feet they bailed out,\n and floating down seconds later, watched Spaceboat 6 crash into a low\n wooded hill. And when they landed, and inspected the wreckage, it was\n some minutes before either spoke.\n\n\n It was obvious at a glance that Spaceboat 6 was ready for the boneyard,\n had there been one around. The ship, under the few automatic controls\n that were still functioning, had sliced in at a thirty degree angle,\n ploughed a short distance through a growth of slim, poplar-like trees,\n and then crumpled completely against an outcropping granite ledge.\n Finally Morley gulped audibly, and Madsen laughed.",
"\"Of course, this is somewhat different. If we don't get out by\n ourselves, whoever finds us need only say, 'X marks the spot.'\"\n\n\n Morley didn't bother answering. No comment was necessary. He knew as\n well as Madsen that whatever margin of safety they possessed had been\n shaved to the vanishing point.\nThey made twenty miles in a forced march, slept, ate, and then traveled\n again. The stunted forest grew thinner, and occasionally they crossed\n open spaces acres in extent. Twice they saw, in the distance, animals\n resembling terrestrial deer, and on the second occasion Morley tried\n a fruitless shot. They slept and ate again, and now the last of the\n rations were gone. They went on.",
"\"Well, Mastermind, any suggestions that might help us? Any little\n pearls of wisdom from the great brain?\"\n\n\n \"Just one,\" Morley answered. \"Head for the Equator, and—\"\n\n\n \"And try to find a D.D. Correct. If we last that long. Let's salvage\n what we can out of this junk and shove off.\"\n\n\n Morley cleared his throat diffidently. \"There are a few pieces of\n equipment we should take along, for—er—emergencies—\" His voice\n trailed off miserably under Madsen's basilisk stare.\n\n\n \"Listen, Morley, once and for all. We're lugging essentials and that's\n all. Any extra weight is out.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen—\"",
"Morley was staring sunward, with thoughtful eyes. \"Yes, there is,\" he\n said quietly.\n\n\n Madsen's jaw dropped. \"Give,\" he said.\n\n\n \"We both forgot something we know perfectly well. Notice the sun? It\n hasn't moved perceptibly since we landed. Japetus doesn't revolve on\n its axis.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Two things. One, no night, since we're on the sunward side. The sun\n will move from side to side in the sky, reaching its lateral limits\n when Japetus is in quadrature in regard to Saturn. If we were here for\n a month, we'd see Saturn rise, make a full arc through the sky, and\n set. Let's hope for a shorter stay.\"\n\n\n \"Go on,\" said Madsen, and suddenly there was nothing patronizing or\n scornful in his voice.",
"Madsen ignored the interruption, and cut loose with one last broadside.\n \"Save your breath. It's bad enough being saddled with a useless little\n squirt like you, without being made into a pack mule unnecessarily.\"\nII\n\n\n He climbed into a gaping hole in the bow. Morley followed, humiliated\n but still thinking hard. Catalogue it, he told himself. Remember\n everything. The Distress Depots, or D.D.'s, as spacemen called them,\n were studded on every frontier world, usually on the Equator. They\n contained two small spacecraft plus ample supplies of food, medicine,\n and tools. When wrecked, get to a D.D. and live. It was that simple.",
"\"Were you ever wrecked before, Madsen?\"\n\n\n \"Once, on Venus. Cartographic expedition.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\"\n\n\n \"Tubes blew and we made a forced landing. Wound up sitting in the\n middle of a pile of highgrade scrap.\"\n\n\n \"What did you do then?\"\n\n\n Madsen shouldered his knapsack and smiled condescendingly.\n\n\n \"Not a thing, Mr. Fix-it. We didn't have to. Since I seem to have\n accidentally stumbled on something new and strange to you, add this to\n your files. It's usual on cartographic trips of any length, for one\n ship to go out, while another stays at a temporary base, and keeps in\n constant directional radio contact. If anything happens, they come\n a-running. Makes it fine for us uninformed common people.\"\n\n\n \"Oh.\"",
"He was fairly popular with the crew, except for a big Norwegian from\n New York, named Olaf Madsen. Madsen was a chunky, hard bitten veteran\n of the spaceways. Round faced, deceptively soft spoken, he had a\n penchant for practical jokes, and a flair for biting sarcasm which\n found full expression in the presence of any first tripper. He made\n the life of any apprentice miserable, and finished the last two weeks\n of one trip in the brig for panicking an entire crew by painting his\n face to resemble the onset of Martian blue fever. Morley considered him\n an oaf, and he considered Morley a human filing cabinet with a weak\n stomach.\n\n\n A little notice on the bulletin board was Morley's first inkling that\n his safe, secure routine was on the verge of mutating into something\n frighteningly unpredictable.",
"Less than three hours after the crash, the two men shouldered their\n burdens, took a bearing to determine their course, and headed into the\n south.\nIn a matter of minutes Spaceboat 6 was out of sight. With Madsen\n leading, they threaded their way through the scant undergrowth.\n Underfoot the dry, broad-bladed grass rustled through a morning that\n had no beginning or end. Farther away were other and less easily\n explained rustlings, and once both men froze as a half-dozen of what\n looked like baby dragons arrowed past within yards of them.\n\n\n \"Formation flying, like ducks,\" muttered Morley, watching from the\n corner of his eye.",
"If a man can be said to slink without changing his position, Morley\n slunk. Madsen continued, double fortissimo.\n\n\n \"A kid of ten knows enough to keep a gun clean, but you, Mr.—Mr.\n Unabridged Webster in the flesh—\"\n\n\n He stopped, temporarily out of breath. Morley regarded him abjectly,\n and suddenly Madsen began to feel a little ashamed. After all, the\n fellow had figured out that business about the meridian.\n\n\n \"No use in having any post mortems,\" he said, with fine logic. \"Throw\n that junk away. It's that much less to carry, anyway.\"\n\n\n Two hours later, they plodded wearily through the last of the swamp\n onto higher ground. The two haggard, muddied figures that threw\n themselves on the dry soil to rest bore little resemblance to the men\n who had parachuted from Spaceboat 6 seventy-two hours before.",
"\"Poisonous and carnivorous, too,\" said Morley, shakingly. \"I remember\n reading that Valdez dissected one when he first landed here twenty\n years ago. One of his crew was bitten, and died in less than five\n minutes.\"\n\n\n Madsen was thoughtful. \"We could stand a little briefing on the local\n flora and fauna, but palaver won't get us to the Equator. And that\n little stock treatise entitled 'Physical Attributes of Phoebe' is worse\n than useless. Lucky the sextant is O.K., we can at least check our\n latitude. There's just one flaw.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"Which way do we go when we hit the line? The D.D.'s are spaced ninety\n degrees apart. We might be within a hundred miles of one. If we head\n the wrong way, we'd have three or four hundred miles to go. There's no\n method of figuring our longitude.\"",
"\"I think I'd run,\" said Morley simply. \"It was pretty dull at General\n Plastic but at least the comptometers weren't man-eating.\"\n\n\n Madsen blinked, and seeming to find expression difficult, forbore to\n answer.\n\n\n They ate, and relaxed on the soft sod, lulled almost into a feeling\n of security. Not being foolhardy, however, they slept in six hour\n shifts. Morley stood the first watch, and slept the second. When he\n awoke, Madsen was tensely examining a ration tin. Jarred into instant\n alertness by a feeling of urgency and alarm, Morley leaped to his feet.\n\n\n \"Something wrong?\"\n\n\n Without answering, Madsen handed him the tin. It was pockmarked with\n inch wide patches of metallic gray fungus, from several of which liquid\n was seeping. There was a sharp odor of decay.",
"When the whispering of scaled wings had died away, the castaways\n resumed their steady plodding into the south. Twice they crossed small\n fresh water brooks, providing a welcome opportunity to drink their\n fill, and replenish the canteens. The going was easy, since the footing\n was in fairly dense soil, and the scrub was not so thick as to provide\n any difficulties. After eight hours of nearly continuous travel, they\n reached the banks of a third stream. Here Madsen stopped, and dropped\n his knapsack to the ground.\n\n\n \"Campsite,\" he grunted.\n\n\n \"Alabama,\" Morley murmured.\n\n\n Madsen goggled. \"Are you delirious? What do you mean—Alabama?\"\n\n\n Morley laughed sheepishly. \"Alabama means 'Here we rest,' I said it\n without thinking.\"",
"\"Two. We came in over the Pole almost exactly at inferior conjunction.\n Right?\"\n\n\n \"I think I get it.\" Madsen answered slowly.\n\n\n For a moment Morley was silent. He could almost smell the dingy\n classroom in Port Chicago, almost see the words on the examination\n paper in front of him. The paragraph leaped out, limned sharply in his\n mind. \"Section 4, Subhead A, Solar Space Code. The initial Distress\n Depot on any satellite shall be situated, when practical, on the\n Prime Meridian. For the purposes of this act, the Prime Meridian of a\n satellite shall be the meridian that bisects the Sun when the Satellite\n is in inferior conjunction. Quarter mile belts shall be burned fifty\n miles to the North, South, East, and West as guides. Radio beacons will\n operate, unless impracticable due to atmospheric conditions, or other\n reasons.\""
],
[
"Straight toward the zenith the ship rises, trailing fire. Faster yet,\n hurling herself upward, under full power, through the last threads of\n atmosphere. Upward and onward, out past Roches limit, out where gravity\n dwindles toward zero, into the empyrean where the shades of dead\n spacemen cruise the cosmos in their phantom craft, spaceborne in the\n night.\n\n\n After he had recovered from the pangs of his initial attack of space\n nausea, Morley enjoyed himself. He had one minor social asset, a\n retentive mind, well stocked with general information. If the two\n apprentices got involved in an argument over the identity of the\n highest peak in America, Morley was the inevitable arbiter. He could\n with equal facility name the author of a recent best seller, or inform\n you that a young seal was a cub, a young hare, a leveret, and a young\n swan, a cygnet.",
"He went on, but Morley heard no more. The prospect unnerved him. He\n was terrified at the idea of changing a safe subordinate position for\n that of an active partner, however temporary the arrangement might be.\n At the drawing, his hunch of impending misery proved all too real. He\n wound up facing the prospect of a stay on the frozen hell of Phoebe,\n scouring the miniature mountains for Japori crystals, with Madsen,\n MADSEN! for his only companion.\nA week later the Solarian teetered down to a landing at Port Ulysses.\n With various expressions of profane and unbounded delight from her\n crew, she was turned over to the stevedores and the maintenance gang.\n Thereafter, at intervals, the thirty foot space boats took off for\n Mimas, Tethys, Dione, or whatever waystop the lottery had decreed.\n Madsen and Morley left on the fourth 'night,' with Phoebe hardly a\n week's run from them at ten miles a second.",
"If a man can be said to slink without changing his position, Morley\n slunk. Madsen continued, double fortissimo.\n\n\n \"A kid of ten knows enough to keep a gun clean, but you, Mr.—Mr.\n Unabridged Webster in the flesh—\"\n\n\n He stopped, temporarily out of breath. Morley regarded him abjectly,\n and suddenly Madsen began to feel a little ashamed. After all, the\n fellow had figured out that business about the meridian.\n\n\n \"No use in having any post mortems,\" he said, with fine logic. \"Throw\n that junk away. It's that much less to carry, anyway.\"\n\n\n Two hours later, they plodded wearily through the last of the swamp\n onto higher ground. The two haggard, muddied figures that threw\n themselves on the dry soil to rest bore little resemblance to the men\n who had parachuted from Spaceboat 6 seventy-two hours before.",
"Morley flushed, and fumbled miserably for a reasonable excuse. There\n was a gleam of contempt in Madsen's eyes, but he spoke again more\n quietly. \"I'm going to eat and catch up on some sack time. We'll be\n right on top of Japetus in short order. It's a known fact that the moon\n won't move over if you fly at it, so you better wake me up to handle\n the compensating!\" He disappeared into the tiny galley, but his words\n were still audible. \"It's an awful long walk back, chum, if anybody\n pulls a bull.\"",
"\"We'll be camping right here for a while, looks like. Try to get some\n sleep if it slacks off any. You'll be okay in a while.\"\n\n\n His doubts were hidden, and Morley thanked him with his eyes.",
"MORLEY'S WEAPON\nBy D. W. BAREFOOT\nOut of the far reaches of the universe sped\n \nthe meteor swarm, cosmic question marks destined\n \nfor annihilation in the sun. But one, approximately\n \nhalf a pound of frozen destruction, had a\n \nrendezvous near Japetus with Spaceboat 6.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories March 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"He was fairly popular with the crew, except for a big Norwegian from\n New York, named Olaf Madsen. Madsen was a chunky, hard bitten veteran\n of the spaceways. Round faced, deceptively soft spoken, he had a\n penchant for practical jokes, and a flair for biting sarcasm which\n found full expression in the presence of any first tripper. He made\n the life of any apprentice miserable, and finished the last two weeks\n of one trip in the brig for panicking an entire crew by painting his\n face to resemble the onset of Martian blue fever. Morley considered him\n an oaf, and he considered Morley a human filing cabinet with a weak\n stomach.\n\n\n A little notice on the bulletin board was Morley's first inkling that\n his safe, secure routine was on the verge of mutating into something\n frighteningly unpredictable.",
"Madsen was at the controls. Without a single spoken word on the\n subject, he was automatically the captain, and Morley, the crew. The\n situation crystallized twenty-four hours out of Port Ulysses. Morley\n was poring over the Ephemeris prior to taking his watch at the controls\n when he became aware that Madsen, red faced and breathing heavily, was\n peering over his shoulder.\n\n\n Morley stiffened in alarm. \"Is anything—\" He quailed under Madsen's\n glare.\n\n\n \"Not yet, but there's liable to be if you don't smarten up.\" The\n Norwegian's blunt forefinger stabbed at the page Morley had been\n studying. \"Phoebe, Mister, happens to be Saturn's NINTH moon. Get it?\n You can count, can't you?\"",
"Madsen looked up from the tin of coffee concentrate he was opening.\n \"Hasn't anyone ever tried to win an argument by poking you one in the\n snoot?\"\n\n\n \"Once or twice.\" Morley was almost apologetic. \"But I learned judo a\n few years ago, just for the hell of it, so I didn't get hurt much.\"\n\n\n \"You're a whiz with the sabre, no doubt?\" said Madsen dryly.\n\n\n \"No, I tried swordplay for a while, but gave it up. It's a little too,\n er—primitive for my tastes.\"\n\n\n \"Primitive!\" Madsen glanced around at the alien scene and nearly\n choked. \"I'm crossing my fingers, but what would you do if some\n carnivore, or a gang of those spiders suddenly appeared and started for\n us with evil intentions?\"",
"Madsen was grinning now. \"What beats me is how you remember all that\n junk. I'd go nuts if I tried to clutter up my mind with a bunch of\n useless data. Alabama!\"\n\n\n \"I don't have to try to remember things,\" Morley said thoughtfully. \"If\n I read or hear something that seems the least bit curious or unusual,\n it just sticks. And sometimes it's useful.\"\n\n\n \"Such as?\"\n\n\n \"Well, remember when Storybook ran a mile last year in 1.29? He was\n the first to break 1.30. Some joe that knew a lot about horses gave me\n an argument in a bar about the first horse to break 1.40. He bet me\n ten credits it was Man o' War. I knew it was Ten Broeck, and I got an\n almanac and proved it.\"",
"Satellites, Inc., had done as well as possible with the raw material\n known as Morley, Vincent, No. 4628. His psychograph indicated a born\n subordinate, with a normal I.Q., reasonably stable and trustworthy\n though below average in initiative. They didn't inform him of this,\n or the fact that they had analyzed the neurosis which had driven\n him to the spaceline, and which had created by that very action the\n therapeutic aid he needed. Many spacemen had similar case histories.\n\n\n It was those who fought the compulsion who sometimes turned down dark\n pathways of the mind.",
"\"Of course, this is somewhat different. If we don't get out by\n ourselves, whoever finds us need only say, 'X marks the spot.'\"\n\n\n Morley didn't bother answering. No comment was necessary. He knew as\n well as Madsen that whatever margin of safety they possessed had been\n shaved to the vanishing point.\nThey made twenty miles in a forced march, slept, ate, and then traveled\n again. The stunted forest grew thinner, and occasionally they crossed\n open spaces acres in extent. Twice they saw, in the distance, animals\n resembling terrestrial deer, and on the second occasion Morley tried\n a fruitless shot. They slept and ate again, and now the last of the\n rations were gone. They went on.",
"Morley admitted his ignorance, vaguely annoyed at the fact that for\n once he was the humble seeker for information, and someone else was\n being professorial.\n\n\n Oscar grinned. \"And you studied astrogation! Well, when Saturn and\n Earth line up with the Sun, it takes three hundred and seventy eight\n days before they get in the same position again. So if we got back to\n Earth's orbit in six months, we'd still have about a hundred and eighty\n millions of miles to go, because Earth would be on Sol's other side at\n that time, in superior conjunction to Uranus.\"\n\n\n Morley digested this, while Oscar basked in the light of his own\n knowledge, enjoying himself hugely.\n\n\n \"And the trips, Oscar?\"",
"As they made southing, the dull sun crept higher in the sky by\n infinitesimal degrees. Now the going became tougher. Patches of evil\n looking muskeg began to appear in the scrub, and the stunted trees\n themselves gradually gave way to six foot ferns. There were occasional\n signs that some creature had been foraging on the lush growth. When\n they found fresh tracks in the soft footing, Morley unlimbered the\n rifle, and the two men trod more softly. By that time either would have\n cheerfully made a meal on one of the miniature flying dragons, alive\n and kicking, and the thought of a juicy steak from some local herbivore\n was as soul stirring as the sight of Mecca to a true believer.",
"\"I think I'd run,\" said Morley simply. \"It was pretty dull at General\n Plastic but at least the comptometers weren't man-eating.\"\n\n\n Madsen blinked, and seeming to find expression difficult, forbore to\n answer.\n\n\n They ate, and relaxed on the soft sod, lulled almost into a feeling\n of security. Not being foolhardy, however, they slept in six hour\n shifts. Morley stood the first watch, and slept the second. When he\n awoke, Madsen was tensely examining a ration tin. Jarred into instant\n alertness by a feeling of urgency and alarm, Morley leaped to his feet.\n\n\n \"Something wrong?\"\n\n\n Without answering, Madsen handed him the tin. It was pockmarked with\n inch wide patches of metallic gray fungus, from several of which liquid\n was seeping. There was a sharp odor of decay.",
"Morley was staring sunward, with thoughtful eyes. \"Yes, there is,\" he\n said quietly.\n\n\n Madsen's jaw dropped. \"Give,\" he said.\n\n\n \"We both forgot something we know perfectly well. Notice the sun? It\n hasn't moved perceptibly since we landed. Japetus doesn't revolve on\n its axis.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Two things. One, no night, since we're on the sunward side. The sun\n will move from side to side in the sky, reaching its lateral limits\n when Japetus is in quadrature in regard to Saturn. If we were here for\n a month, we'd see Saturn rise, make a full arc through the sky, and\n set. Let's hope for a shorter stay.\"\n\n\n \"Go on,\" said Madsen, and suddenly there was nothing patronizing or\n scornful in his voice.",
"The slope on which they rested was tufted with small bushes. One\n particular type with narrow dark green leaves bore clusters of fruit\n like small plums, which Madsen eyed speculatively.\n\n\n \"Do we risk it?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Might as well.\"\n\n\n Morley was completely unaware that he had just accepted the\n responsibility for making a decision.\n\n\n \"We can't afford not to risk it,\" he said, adding, with little show of\n enthusiasm, \"I'll be the guinea pig.\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy, chum,\" Madsen countered. \"We'll match for it.\"",
"\"Well, Mastermind, any suggestions that might help us? Any little\n pearls of wisdom from the great brain?\"\n\n\n \"Just one,\" Morley answered. \"Head for the Equator, and—\"\n\n\n \"And try to find a D.D. Correct. If we last that long. Let's salvage\n what we can out of this junk and shove off.\"\n\n\n Morley cleared his throat diffidently. \"There are a few pieces of\n equipment we should take along, for—er—emergencies—\" His voice\n trailed off miserably under Madsen's basilisk stare.\n\n\n \"Listen, Morley, once and for all. We're lugging essentials and that's\n all. Any extra weight is out.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen—\"",
"Morley swung himself into the pilot's seat, too numb with humiliation\n to answer. Almost an hour passed before he started the regulation\n checkup required by the Space Code of any ship passing within one\n hundred thousand miles of a planet or major satellite. Every guardian\n needle stood in its normal place with one exception. The craft had been\n running on the port fuel tanks, depleting them to the point where it\n seemed wise to trim ship. Morley opened the valve, touched the fuel\n pump switch and waited, nothing happened. He watched the needles\n incredulously. The pump—? He jabbed the switch, once, twice. Nothing.",
"Madsen was white but composed. \"We can slow her down but we can't land\n her. Get suits while I take over. We'll ride as far as we can, and\n walk the rest of the way.\" He fought with the controls, as Morley,\n still bemused, obeyed. At twenty-five hundred feet they bailed out,\n and floating down seconds later, watched Spaceboat 6 crash into a low\n wooded hill. And when they landed, and inspected the wreckage, it was\n some minutes before either spoke.\n\n\n It was obvious at a glance that Spaceboat 6 was ready for the boneyard,\n had there been one around. The ship, under the few automatic controls\n that were still functioning, had sliced in at a thirty degree angle,\n ploughed a short distance through a growth of slim, poplar-like trees,\n and then crumpled completely against an outcropping granite ledge.\n Finally Morley gulped audibly, and Madsen laughed."
],
[
"Straight toward the zenith the ship rises, trailing fire. Faster yet,\n hurling herself upward, under full power, through the last threads of\n atmosphere. Upward and onward, out past Roches limit, out where gravity\n dwindles toward zero, into the empyrean where the shades of dead\n spacemen cruise the cosmos in their phantom craft, spaceborne in the\n night.\n\n\n After he had recovered from the pangs of his initial attack of space\n nausea, Morley enjoyed himself. He had one minor social asset, a\n retentive mind, well stocked with general information. If the two\n apprentices got involved in an argument over the identity of the\n highest peak in America, Morley was the inevitable arbiter. He could\n with equal facility name the author of a recent best seller, or inform\n you that a young seal was a cub, a young hare, a leveret, and a young\n swan, a cygnet.",
"Madsen was grinning now. \"What beats me is how you remember all that\n junk. I'd go nuts if I tried to clutter up my mind with a bunch of\n useless data. Alabama!\"\n\n\n \"I don't have to try to remember things,\" Morley said thoughtfully. \"If\n I read or hear something that seems the least bit curious or unusual,\n it just sticks. And sometimes it's useful.\"\n\n\n \"Such as?\"\n\n\n \"Well, remember when Storybook ran a mile last year in 1.29? He was\n the first to break 1.30. Some joe that knew a lot about horses gave me\n an argument in a bar about the first horse to break 1.40. He bet me\n ten credits it was Man o' War. I knew it was Ten Broeck, and I got an\n almanac and proved it.\"",
"MORLEY'S WEAPON\nBy D. W. BAREFOOT\nOut of the far reaches of the universe sped\n \nthe meteor swarm, cosmic question marks destined\n \nfor annihilation in the sun. But one, approximately\n \nhalf a pound of frozen destruction, had a\n \nrendezvous near Japetus with Spaceboat 6.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories March 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"Morley admitted his ignorance, vaguely annoyed at the fact that for\n once he was the humble seeker for information, and someone else was\n being professorial.\n\n\n Oscar grinned. \"And you studied astrogation! Well, when Saturn and\n Earth line up with the Sun, it takes three hundred and seventy eight\n days before they get in the same position again. So if we got back to\n Earth's orbit in six months, we'd still have about a hundred and eighty\n millions of miles to go, because Earth would be on Sol's other side at\n that time, in superior conjunction to Uranus.\"\n\n\n Morley digested this, while Oscar basked in the light of his own\n knowledge, enjoying himself hugely.\n\n\n \"And the trips, Oscar?\"",
"Satellites, Inc., had done as well as possible with the raw material\n known as Morley, Vincent, No. 4628. His psychograph indicated a born\n subordinate, with a normal I.Q., reasonably stable and trustworthy\n though below average in initiative. They didn't inform him of this,\n or the fact that they had analyzed the neurosis which had driven\n him to the spaceline, and which had created by that very action the\n therapeutic aid he needed. Many spacemen had similar case histories.\n\n\n It was those who fought the compulsion who sometimes turned down dark\n pathways of the mind.",
"Morley flushed, and fumbled miserably for a reasonable excuse. There\n was a gleam of contempt in Madsen's eyes, but he spoke again more\n quietly. \"I'm going to eat and catch up on some sack time. We'll be\n right on top of Japetus in short order. It's a known fact that the moon\n won't move over if you fly at it, so you better wake me up to handle\n the compensating!\" He disappeared into the tiny galley, but his words\n were still audible. \"It's an awful long walk back, chum, if anybody\n pulls a bull.\"",
"If a man can be said to slink without changing his position, Morley\n slunk. Madsen continued, double fortissimo.\n\n\n \"A kid of ten knows enough to keep a gun clean, but you, Mr.—Mr.\n Unabridged Webster in the flesh—\"\n\n\n He stopped, temporarily out of breath. Morley regarded him abjectly,\n and suddenly Madsen began to feel a little ashamed. After all, the\n fellow had figured out that business about the meridian.\n\n\n \"No use in having any post mortems,\" he said, with fine logic. \"Throw\n that junk away. It's that much less to carry, anyway.\"\n\n\n Two hours later, they plodded wearily through the last of the swamp\n onto higher ground. The two haggard, muddied figures that threw\n themselves on the dry soil to rest bore little resemblance to the men\n who had parachuted from Spaceboat 6 seventy-two hours before.",
"Madsen was at the controls. Without a single spoken word on the\n subject, he was automatically the captain, and Morley, the crew. The\n situation crystallized twenty-four hours out of Port Ulysses. Morley\n was poring over the Ephemeris prior to taking his watch at the controls\n when he became aware that Madsen, red faced and breathing heavily, was\n peering over his shoulder.\n\n\n Morley stiffened in alarm. \"Is anything—\" He quailed under Madsen's\n glare.\n\n\n \"Not yet, but there's liable to be if you don't smarten up.\" The\n Norwegian's blunt forefinger stabbed at the page Morley had been\n studying. \"Phoebe, Mister, happens to be Saturn's NINTH moon. Get it?\n You can count, can't you?\"",
"He went on, but Morley heard no more. The prospect unnerved him. He\n was terrified at the idea of changing a safe subordinate position for\n that of an active partner, however temporary the arrangement might be.\n At the drawing, his hunch of impending misery proved all too real. He\n wound up facing the prospect of a stay on the frozen hell of Phoebe,\n scouring the miniature mountains for Japori crystals, with Madsen,\n MADSEN! for his only companion.\nA week later the Solarian teetered down to a landing at Port Ulysses.\n With various expressions of profane and unbounded delight from her\n crew, she was turned over to the stevedores and the maintenance gang.\n Thereafter, at intervals, the thirty foot space boats took off for\n Mimas, Tethys, Dione, or whatever waystop the lottery had decreed.\n Madsen and Morley left on the fourth 'night,' with Phoebe hardly a\n week's run from them at ten miles a second.",
"He could not explain the obscure compulsion that sparked his little\n personal rebellion.\n\n\n He didn't know, or need to know that other generations of Morleys had\n fought in revolutions, or sailed in square riggers, or clawed gold from\n mountainsides. When he went to the spaceline, the puzzlement of his few\n friends was profound, but hardly more so than his own. And now, after\n almost a year of upheaval and change, he was piloting a spaceboat along\n an involute curve ending on the surface of Saturn's eighth moon. And he\n was still puzzled.",
"He was fairly popular with the crew, except for a big Norwegian from\n New York, named Olaf Madsen. Madsen was a chunky, hard bitten veteran\n of the spaceways. Round faced, deceptively soft spoken, he had a\n penchant for practical jokes, and a flair for biting sarcasm which\n found full expression in the presence of any first tripper. He made\n the life of any apprentice miserable, and finished the last two weeks\n of one trip in the brig for panicking an entire crew by painting his\n face to resemble the onset of Martian blue fever. Morley considered him\n an oaf, and he considered Morley a human filing cabinet with a weak\n stomach.\n\n\n A little notice on the bulletin board was Morley's first inkling that\n his safe, secure routine was on the verge of mutating into something\n frighteningly unpredictable.",
"Morley was staring sunward, with thoughtful eyes. \"Yes, there is,\" he\n said quietly.\n\n\n Madsen's jaw dropped. \"Give,\" he said.\n\n\n \"We both forgot something we know perfectly well. Notice the sun? It\n hasn't moved perceptibly since we landed. Japetus doesn't revolve on\n its axis.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Two things. One, no night, since we're on the sunward side. The sun\n will move from side to side in the sky, reaching its lateral limits\n when Japetus is in quadrature in regard to Saturn. If we were here for\n a month, we'd see Saturn rise, make a full arc through the sky, and\n set. Let's hope for a shorter stay.\"\n\n\n \"Go on,\" said Madsen, and suddenly there was nothing patronizing or\n scornful in his voice.",
"\"Of course, this is somewhat different. If we don't get out by\n ourselves, whoever finds us need only say, 'X marks the spot.'\"\n\n\n Morley didn't bother answering. No comment was necessary. He knew as\n well as Madsen that whatever margin of safety they possessed had been\n shaved to the vanishing point.\nThey made twenty miles in a forced march, slept, ate, and then traveled\n again. The stunted forest grew thinner, and occasionally they crossed\n open spaces acres in extent. Twice they saw, in the distance, animals\n resembling terrestrial deer, and on the second occasion Morley tried\n a fruitless shot. They slept and ate again, and now the last of the\n rations were gone. They went on.",
"\"Well, Mastermind, any suggestions that might help us? Any little\n pearls of wisdom from the great brain?\"\n\n\n \"Just one,\" Morley answered. \"Head for the Equator, and—\"\n\n\n \"And try to find a D.D. Correct. If we last that long. Let's salvage\n what we can out of this junk and shove off.\"\n\n\n Morley cleared his throat diffidently. \"There are a few pieces of\n equipment we should take along, for—er—emergencies—\" His voice\n trailed off miserably under Madsen's basilisk stare.\n\n\n \"Listen, Morley, once and for all. We're lugging essentials and that's\n all. Any extra weight is out.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen—\"",
"Madsen looked up from the tin of coffee concentrate he was opening.\n \"Hasn't anyone ever tried to win an argument by poking you one in the\n snoot?\"\n\n\n \"Once or twice.\" Morley was almost apologetic. \"But I learned judo a\n few years ago, just for the hell of it, so I didn't get hurt much.\"\n\n\n \"You're a whiz with the sabre, no doubt?\" said Madsen dryly.\n\n\n \"No, I tried swordplay for a while, but gave it up. It's a little too,\n er—primitive for my tastes.\"\n\n\n \"Primitive!\" Madsen glanced around at the alien scene and nearly\n choked. \"I'm crossing my fingers, but what would you do if some\n carnivore, or a gang of those spiders suddenly appeared and started for\n us with evil intentions?\"",
"Morley swung himself into the pilot's seat, too numb with humiliation\n to answer. Almost an hour passed before he started the regulation\n checkup required by the Space Code of any ship passing within one\n hundred thousand miles of a planet or major satellite. Every guardian\n needle stood in its normal place with one exception. The craft had been\n running on the port fuel tanks, depleting them to the point where it\n seemed wise to trim ship. Morley opened the valve, touched the fuel\n pump switch and waited, nothing happened. He watched the needles\n incredulously. The pump—? He jabbed the switch, once, twice. Nothing.",
"\"We'll be camping right here for a while, looks like. Try to get some\n sleep if it slacks off any. You'll be okay in a while.\"\n\n\n His doubts were hidden, and Morley thanked him with his eyes.",
"He leaned forward and rapped the starboard gauge with his knuckles,\n sharply. The needle swung from Full to Empty. Morley felt faint as\n realization hit him. The starboard gauge had stuck at Full, and had\n been unreported. The tank had not been serviced in port, owing to\n the faulty reading and a mechanic's carelessness. They had about two\n hours fuel. Even to Morley, it was obvious that there was one thing\n only to do—land on Japetus, looming up larger in the view-plate with\n each passing moment. He checked the distance rapidly, punched the\n calculator, and put the ship in the designated orbit. He wanted to\n handle the landing himself, but the thought of the final few ticklish\n moments chilled him. So did the thought of waking Madsen, and asking\n him to take over.",
"The slope on which they rested was tufted with small bushes. One\n particular type with narrow dark green leaves bore clusters of fruit\n like small plums, which Madsen eyed speculatively.\n\n\n \"Do we risk it?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Might as well.\"\n\n\n Morley was completely unaware that he had just accepted the\n responsibility for making a decision.\n\n\n \"We can't afford not to risk it,\" he said, adding, with little show of\n enthusiasm, \"I'll be the guinea pig.\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy, chum,\" Madsen countered. \"We'll match for it.\"",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIt was comfortably cool in the functional, little control room, but\n Morley was sweating, gently and steadily. His palms were wet, and the\n thin thoughtful face, shining in the glow of the instrument panel\n light, was wrinkled in an agony of concentration and doubt. He was\n trying to choose between the Scylla of waking Madsen with a corollary\n of biting contempt involved, and the Charybdis of attempting to land\n single handed on Japetus, less than five hundred miles below. Neither\n course was appealing.\n\n\n For the hundredth time he pondered miserably over the sad condition\n of what had been a reasonably well ordered existence. The worst of\n it was that he had only himself to blame, and he knew it. No one had\n forced him to leave a comfortable, if poorly paid position with General\n Plastics, and fill out an employment card at Satellites, Inc."
],
[
"Madsen was at the controls. Without a single spoken word on the\n subject, he was automatically the captain, and Morley, the crew. The\n situation crystallized twenty-four hours out of Port Ulysses. Morley\n was poring over the Ephemeris prior to taking his watch at the controls\n when he became aware that Madsen, red faced and breathing heavily, was\n peering over his shoulder.\n\n\n Morley stiffened in alarm. \"Is anything—\" He quailed under Madsen's\n glare.\n\n\n \"Not yet, but there's liable to be if you don't smarten up.\" The\n Norwegian's blunt forefinger stabbed at the page Morley had been\n studying. \"Phoebe, Mister, happens to be Saturn's NINTH moon. Get it?\n You can count, can't you?\"",
"Madsen looked up from the tin of coffee concentrate he was opening.\n \"Hasn't anyone ever tried to win an argument by poking you one in the\n snoot?\"\n\n\n \"Once or twice.\" Morley was almost apologetic. \"But I learned judo a\n few years ago, just for the hell of it, so I didn't get hurt much.\"\n\n\n \"You're a whiz with the sabre, no doubt?\" said Madsen dryly.\n\n\n \"No, I tried swordplay for a while, but gave it up. It's a little too,\n er—primitive for my tastes.\"\n\n\n \"Primitive!\" Madsen glanced around at the alien scene and nearly\n choked. \"I'm crossing my fingers, but what would you do if some\n carnivore, or a gang of those spiders suddenly appeared and started for\n us with evil intentions?\"",
"Madsen was white but composed. \"We can slow her down but we can't land\n her. Get suits while I take over. We'll ride as far as we can, and\n walk the rest of the way.\" He fought with the controls, as Morley,\n still bemused, obeyed. At twenty-five hundred feet they bailed out,\n and floating down seconds later, watched Spaceboat 6 crash into a low\n wooded hill. And when they landed, and inspected the wreckage, it was\n some minutes before either spoke.\n\n\n It was obvious at a glance that Spaceboat 6 was ready for the boneyard,\n had there been one around. The ship, under the few automatic controls\n that were still functioning, had sliced in at a thirty degree angle,\n ploughed a short distance through a growth of slim, poplar-like trees,\n and then crumpled completely against an outcropping granite ledge.\n Finally Morley gulped audibly, and Madsen laughed.",
"He was fairly popular with the crew, except for a big Norwegian from\n New York, named Olaf Madsen. Madsen was a chunky, hard bitten veteran\n of the spaceways. Round faced, deceptively soft spoken, he had a\n penchant for practical jokes, and a flair for biting sarcasm which\n found full expression in the presence of any first tripper. He made\n the life of any apprentice miserable, and finished the last two weeks\n of one trip in the brig for panicking an entire crew by painting his\n face to resemble the onset of Martian blue fever. Morley considered him\n an oaf, and he considered Morley a human filing cabinet with a weak\n stomach.\n\n\n A little notice on the bulletin board was Morley's first inkling that\n his safe, secure routine was on the verge of mutating into something\n frighteningly unpredictable.",
"He went on, but Morley heard no more. The prospect unnerved him. He\n was terrified at the idea of changing a safe subordinate position for\n that of an active partner, however temporary the arrangement might be.\n At the drawing, his hunch of impending misery proved all too real. He\n wound up facing the prospect of a stay on the frozen hell of Phoebe,\n scouring the miniature mountains for Japori crystals, with Madsen,\n MADSEN! for his only companion.\nA week later the Solarian teetered down to a landing at Port Ulysses.\n With various expressions of profane and unbounded delight from her\n crew, she was turned over to the stevedores and the maintenance gang.\n Thereafter, at intervals, the thirty foot space boats took off for\n Mimas, Tethys, Dione, or whatever waystop the lottery had decreed.\n Madsen and Morley left on the fourth 'night,' with Phoebe hardly a\n week's run from them at ten miles a second.",
"Morley flushed, and fumbled miserably for a reasonable excuse. There\n was a gleam of contempt in Madsen's eyes, but he spoke again more\n quietly. \"I'm going to eat and catch up on some sack time. We'll be\n right on top of Japetus in short order. It's a known fact that the moon\n won't move over if you fly at it, so you better wake me up to handle\n the compensating!\" He disappeared into the tiny galley, but his words\n were still audible. \"It's an awful long walk back, chum, if anybody\n pulls a bull.\"",
"Less than three hours after the crash, the two men shouldered their\n burdens, took a bearing to determine their course, and headed into the\n south.\nIn a matter of minutes Spaceboat 6 was out of sight. With Madsen\n leading, they threaded their way through the scant undergrowth.\n Underfoot the dry, broad-bladed grass rustled through a morning that\n had no beginning or end. Farther away were other and less easily\n explained rustlings, and once both men froze as a half-dozen of what\n looked like baby dragons arrowed past within yards of them.\n\n\n \"Formation flying, like ducks,\" muttered Morley, watching from the\n corner of his eye.",
"Madsen was hastily dumping the contents of the knapsacks on the ground.\n Morley joined him, and both men commenced scraping the clinging gray\n patches from the tins. All but three were perforated and ruined.\n\n\n \"We'll at least be traveling light from now on,\" Madsen said. \"Any idea\n what this stuff is?\"\n\n\n \"Some of that lichen, or whatever it is, was around the scene of the\n crash,\" Morley answered. \"The stuff must have an affinity for tin;\n probably secretes some acid that dissolves it. Only trouble is, it goes\n through thin steel too.\"\n\n\n Madsen commenced repacking their effects.\n\n\n \"From now on, laddie, keep your eyes peeled for game, and if you see\n any, use that rifle. If we don't knock down some meat, and soon, we\n aren't going to make it. Might as well realize it right now.\"",
"If a man can be said to slink without changing his position, Morley\n slunk. Madsen continued, double fortissimo.\n\n\n \"A kid of ten knows enough to keep a gun clean, but you, Mr.—Mr.\n Unabridged Webster in the flesh—\"\n\n\n He stopped, temporarily out of breath. Morley regarded him abjectly,\n and suddenly Madsen began to feel a little ashamed. After all, the\n fellow had figured out that business about the meridian.\n\n\n \"No use in having any post mortems,\" he said, with fine logic. \"Throw\n that junk away. It's that much less to carry, anyway.\"\n\n\n Two hours later, they plodded wearily through the last of the swamp\n onto higher ground. The two haggard, muddied figures that threw\n themselves on the dry soil to rest bore little resemblance to the men\n who had parachuted from Spaceboat 6 seventy-two hours before.",
"\"Of course, this is somewhat different. If we don't get out by\n ourselves, whoever finds us need only say, 'X marks the spot.'\"\n\n\n Morley didn't bother answering. No comment was necessary. He knew as\n well as Madsen that whatever margin of safety they possessed had been\n shaved to the vanishing point.\nThey made twenty miles in a forced march, slept, ate, and then traveled\n again. The stunted forest grew thinner, and occasionally they crossed\n open spaces acres in extent. Twice they saw, in the distance, animals\n resembling terrestrial deer, and on the second occasion Morley tried\n a fruitless shot. They slept and ate again, and now the last of the\n rations were gone. They went on.",
"Madsen was grinning now. \"What beats me is how you remember all that\n junk. I'd go nuts if I tried to clutter up my mind with a bunch of\n useless data. Alabama!\"\n\n\n \"I don't have to try to remember things,\" Morley said thoughtfully. \"If\n I read or hear something that seems the least bit curious or unusual,\n it just sticks. And sometimes it's useful.\"\n\n\n \"Such as?\"\n\n\n \"Well, remember when Storybook ran a mile last year in 1.29? He was\n the first to break 1.30. Some joe that knew a lot about horses gave me\n an argument in a bar about the first horse to break 1.40. He bet me\n ten credits it was Man o' War. I knew it was Ten Broeck, and I got an\n almanac and proved it.\"",
"The slope on which they rested was tufted with small bushes. One\n particular type with narrow dark green leaves bore clusters of fruit\n like small plums, which Madsen eyed speculatively.\n\n\n \"Do we risk it?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Might as well.\"\n\n\n Morley was completely unaware that he had just accepted the\n responsibility for making a decision.\n\n\n \"We can't afford not to risk it,\" he said, adding, with little show of\n enthusiasm, \"I'll be the guinea pig.\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy, chum,\" Madsen countered. \"We'll match for it.\"",
"\"Phoebe!\" Madsen laughed. \"I remember, back in '89—\" He stopped\n abruptly at a rattling from the ledge. A green, little lizard-like\n creature was scrambling frantically over the granite, while hot in\n pursuit were three—spiders? Black, they were, a black like living\n velvet, and incredibly fast as they closed in, beady stalked eyes\n fastened on their prey. They were deliberately herding the desperate\n lizard toward a cleft in the rock. As the creature leaped into the\n opening, another spider dove at it from the recess. The others closed\n in. There was a hopeless hissing, a vicious clicking of mandibles. The\n struggle subsided. Once again the day was silent. Madsen holstered the\n blaster he had drawn and looked whitely at Morley.\n\n\n \"Pleasant pets,\" he grunted.",
"Both men whirled at a sudden crashing on their left. Something like a\n large splay footed kangaroo broke cover, and went loping away, clearing\n the fern tops at every bound. In one motion Morley whipped up the\n rifle and fired. There was an earsplitting report, the leaper kept\n right on going, under forced draught, and the two castaways stared in\n consternation at a rifle that resembled a bundle of metallic macaroni\n more than it did a firearm.\n\n\n Madsen spoke first. \"You probably got some mud in the barrel when we\n stopped last time,\" he accused. \"Look at us now.\"\n\n\n Morley started to mumble an apology, but Madsen cut him short. \"Look at\n us now,\" he repeated, with all stops out. \"It was bad before, now it's\n practically hopeless. Our only long range gun! What do we do now if we\n do find game—dig pits for it?\"",
"\"I think I'd run,\" said Morley simply. \"It was pretty dull at General\n Plastic but at least the comptometers weren't man-eating.\"\n\n\n Madsen blinked, and seeming to find expression difficult, forbore to\n answer.\n\n\n They ate, and relaxed on the soft sod, lulled almost into a feeling\n of security. Not being foolhardy, however, they slept in six hour\n shifts. Morley stood the first watch, and slept the second. When he\n awoke, Madsen was tensely examining a ration tin. Jarred into instant\n alertness by a feeling of urgency and alarm, Morley leaped to his feet.\n\n\n \"Something wrong?\"\n\n\n Without answering, Madsen handed him the tin. It was pockmarked with\n inch wide patches of metallic gray fungus, from several of which liquid\n was seeping. There was a sharp odor of decay.",
"Madsen ignored the interruption, and cut loose with one last broadside.\n \"Save your breath. It's bad enough being saddled with a useless little\n squirt like you, without being made into a pack mule unnecessarily.\"\nII\n\n\n He climbed into a gaping hole in the bow. Morley followed, humiliated\n but still thinking hard. Catalogue it, he told himself. Remember\n everything. The Distress Depots, or D.D.'s, as spacemen called them,\n were studded on every frontier world, usually on the Equator. They\n contained two small spacecraft plus ample supplies of food, medicine,\n and tools. When wrecked, get to a D.D. and live. It was that simple.",
"Both men had discarded their space suits, were dressed in the gray\n work clothes of Satellites, Inc. Equipment was easily divided. Each\n had a blaster, and a wrist compass-chronometer. Radio was useless on\n Japetus, and the little headsets were ruthlessly jettisoned. The flat\n tins of emergency food concentrate were stowed in two knapsacks. Madsen\n took charge of the sextant, and Morley carried a lightweight repeating\n rifle for possible game that might be out of blaster range. Canteens,\n a pocket first-aid kit, and a small heliograph, were the final items,\n except for several articles which Morley unobtrusively stowed away\n about his person.",
"\"Well, Mastermind, any suggestions that might help us? Any little\n pearls of wisdom from the great brain?\"\n\n\n \"Just one,\" Morley answered. \"Head for the Equator, and—\"\n\n\n \"And try to find a D.D. Correct. If we last that long. Let's salvage\n what we can out of this junk and shove off.\"\n\n\n Morley cleared his throat diffidently. \"There are a few pieces of\n equipment we should take along, for—er—emergencies—\" His voice\n trailed off miserably under Madsen's basilisk stare.\n\n\n \"Listen, Morley, once and for all. We're lugging essentials and that's\n all. Any extra weight is out.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen—\"",
"Morley was staring sunward, with thoughtful eyes. \"Yes, there is,\" he\n said quietly.\n\n\n Madsen's jaw dropped. \"Give,\" he said.\n\n\n \"We both forgot something we know perfectly well. Notice the sun? It\n hasn't moved perceptibly since we landed. Japetus doesn't revolve on\n its axis.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Two things. One, no night, since we're on the sunward side. The sun\n will move from side to side in the sky, reaching its lateral limits\n when Japetus is in quadrature in regard to Saturn. If we were here for\n a month, we'd see Saturn rise, make a full arc through the sky, and\n set. Let's hope for a shorter stay.\"\n\n\n \"Go on,\" said Madsen, and suddenly there was nothing patronizing or\n scornful in his voice.",
"And it was then, at the intersection of two courses formed by an\n infinity of variables, that two objects arrived in the same millisecond\n of time. Eight ounces of nickel iron smashed into the stern of\n Spaceboat 6, ripped a path of ruin through her entire length, and went\n out through the two inch glass of her bow, before Morley could turn\n his head. He was aware, in a strange dream-like way, of actuating\n the midships airtight door, of the hiss of air as the little aneroid\n automatically opened valves to compensate for the drop in pressure, and\n of Madsen leaping into the control room and slapping a Johnson patch\n over the hole in the bow."
],
[
"Less than three hours after the crash, the two men shouldered their\n burdens, took a bearing to determine their course, and headed into the\n south.\nIn a matter of minutes Spaceboat 6 was out of sight. With Madsen\n leading, they threaded their way through the scant undergrowth.\n Underfoot the dry, broad-bladed grass rustled through a morning that\n had no beginning or end. Farther away were other and less easily\n explained rustlings, and once both men froze as a half-dozen of what\n looked like baby dragons arrowed past within yards of them.\n\n\n \"Formation flying, like ducks,\" muttered Morley, watching from the\n corner of his eye.",
"\"Of course, this is somewhat different. If we don't get out by\n ourselves, whoever finds us need only say, 'X marks the spot.'\"\n\n\n Morley didn't bother answering. No comment was necessary. He knew as\n well as Madsen that whatever margin of safety they possessed had been\n shaved to the vanishing point.\nThey made twenty miles in a forced march, slept, ate, and then traveled\n again. The stunted forest grew thinner, and occasionally they crossed\n open spaces acres in extent. Twice they saw, in the distance, animals\n resembling terrestrial deer, and on the second occasion Morley tried\n a fruitless shot. They slept and ate again, and now the last of the\n rations were gone. They went on.",
"\"Well, Mastermind, any suggestions that might help us? Any little\n pearls of wisdom from the great brain?\"\n\n\n \"Just one,\" Morley answered. \"Head for the Equator, and—\"\n\n\n \"And try to find a D.D. Correct. If we last that long. Let's salvage\n what we can out of this junk and shove off.\"\n\n\n Morley cleared his throat diffidently. \"There are a few pieces of\n equipment we should take along, for—er—emergencies—\" His voice\n trailed off miserably under Madsen's basilisk stare.\n\n\n \"Listen, Morley, once and for all. We're lugging essentials and that's\n all. Any extra weight is out.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen—\"",
"Madsen was hastily dumping the contents of the knapsacks on the ground.\n Morley joined him, and both men commenced scraping the clinging gray\n patches from the tins. All but three were perforated and ruined.\n\n\n \"We'll at least be traveling light from now on,\" Madsen said. \"Any idea\n what this stuff is?\"\n\n\n \"Some of that lichen, or whatever it is, was around the scene of the\n crash,\" Morley answered. \"The stuff must have an affinity for tin;\n probably secretes some acid that dissolves it. Only trouble is, it goes\n through thin steel too.\"\n\n\n Madsen commenced repacking their effects.\n\n\n \"From now on, laddie, keep your eyes peeled for game, and if you see\n any, use that rifle. If we don't knock down some meat, and soon, we\n aren't going to make it. Might as well realize it right now.\"",
"\"I think I'd run,\" said Morley simply. \"It was pretty dull at General\n Plastic but at least the comptometers weren't man-eating.\"\n\n\n Madsen blinked, and seeming to find expression difficult, forbore to\n answer.\n\n\n They ate, and relaxed on the soft sod, lulled almost into a feeling\n of security. Not being foolhardy, however, they slept in six hour\n shifts. Morley stood the first watch, and slept the second. When he\n awoke, Madsen was tensely examining a ration tin. Jarred into instant\n alertness by a feeling of urgency and alarm, Morley leaped to his feet.\n\n\n \"Something wrong?\"\n\n\n Without answering, Madsen handed him the tin. It was pockmarked with\n inch wide patches of metallic gray fungus, from several of which liquid\n was seeping. There was a sharp odor of decay.",
"As they made southing, the dull sun crept higher in the sky by\n infinitesimal degrees. Now the going became tougher. Patches of evil\n looking muskeg began to appear in the scrub, and the stunted trees\n themselves gradually gave way to six foot ferns. There were occasional\n signs that some creature had been foraging on the lush growth. When\n they found fresh tracks in the soft footing, Morley unlimbered the\n rifle, and the two men trod more softly. By that time either would have\n cheerfully made a meal on one of the miniature flying dragons, alive\n and kicking, and the thought of a juicy steak from some local herbivore\n was as soul stirring as the sight of Mecca to a true believer.",
"Madsen was white but composed. \"We can slow her down but we can't land\n her. Get suits while I take over. We'll ride as far as we can, and\n walk the rest of the way.\" He fought with the controls, as Morley,\n still bemused, obeyed. At twenty-five hundred feet they bailed out,\n and floating down seconds later, watched Spaceboat 6 crash into a low\n wooded hill. And when they landed, and inspected the wreckage, it was\n some minutes before either spoke.\n\n\n It was obvious at a glance that Spaceboat 6 was ready for the boneyard,\n had there been one around. The ship, under the few automatic controls\n that were still functioning, had sliced in at a thirty degree angle,\n ploughed a short distance through a growth of slim, poplar-like trees,\n and then crumpled completely against an outcropping granite ledge.\n Finally Morley gulped audibly, and Madsen laughed.",
"The slope on which they rested was tufted with small bushes. One\n particular type with narrow dark green leaves bore clusters of fruit\n like small plums, which Madsen eyed speculatively.\n\n\n \"Do we risk it?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Might as well.\"\n\n\n Morley was completely unaware that he had just accepted the\n responsibility for making a decision.\n\n\n \"We can't afford not to risk it,\" he said, adding, with little show of\n enthusiasm, \"I'll be the guinea pig.\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy, chum,\" Madsen countered. \"We'll match for it.\"",
"Both men had discarded their space suits, were dressed in the gray\n work clothes of Satellites, Inc. Equipment was easily divided. Each\n had a blaster, and a wrist compass-chronometer. Radio was useless on\n Japetus, and the little headsets were ruthlessly jettisoned. The flat\n tins of emergency food concentrate were stowed in two knapsacks. Madsen\n took charge of the sextant, and Morley carried a lightweight repeating\n rifle for possible game that might be out of blaster range. Canteens,\n a pocket first-aid kit, and a small heliograph, were the final items,\n except for several articles which Morley unobtrusively stowed away\n about his person.",
"Madsen looked up from the tin of coffee concentrate he was opening.\n \"Hasn't anyone ever tried to win an argument by poking you one in the\n snoot?\"\n\n\n \"Once or twice.\" Morley was almost apologetic. \"But I learned judo a\n few years ago, just for the hell of it, so I didn't get hurt much.\"\n\n\n \"You're a whiz with the sabre, no doubt?\" said Madsen dryly.\n\n\n \"No, I tried swordplay for a while, but gave it up. It's a little too,\n er—primitive for my tastes.\"\n\n\n \"Primitive!\" Madsen glanced around at the alien scene and nearly\n choked. \"I'm crossing my fingers, but what would you do if some\n carnivore, or a gang of those spiders suddenly appeared and started for\n us with evil intentions?\"",
"Both men whirled at a sudden crashing on their left. Something like a\n large splay footed kangaroo broke cover, and went loping away, clearing\n the fern tops at every bound. In one motion Morley whipped up the\n rifle and fired. There was an earsplitting report, the leaper kept\n right on going, under forced draught, and the two castaways stared in\n consternation at a rifle that resembled a bundle of metallic macaroni\n more than it did a firearm.\n\n\n Madsen spoke first. \"You probably got some mud in the barrel when we\n stopped last time,\" he accused. \"Look at us now.\"\n\n\n Morley started to mumble an apology, but Madsen cut him short. \"Look at\n us now,\" he repeated, with all stops out. \"It was bad before, now it's\n practically hopeless. Our only long range gun! What do we do now if we\n do find game—dig pits for it?\"",
"And it was then, at the intersection of two courses formed by an\n infinity of variables, that two objects arrived in the same millisecond\n of time. Eight ounces of nickel iron smashed into the stern of\n Spaceboat 6, ripped a path of ruin through her entire length, and went\n out through the two inch glass of her bow, before Morley could turn\n his head. He was aware, in a strange dream-like way, of actuating\n the midships airtight door, of the hiss of air as the little aneroid\n automatically opened valves to compensate for the drop in pressure, and\n of Madsen leaping into the control room and slapping a Johnson patch\n over the hole in the bow.",
"Madsen ignored the interruption, and cut loose with one last broadside.\n \"Save your breath. It's bad enough being saddled with a useless little\n squirt like you, without being made into a pack mule unnecessarily.\"\nII\n\n\n He climbed into a gaping hole in the bow. Morley followed, humiliated\n but still thinking hard. Catalogue it, he told himself. Remember\n everything. The Distress Depots, or D.D.'s, as spacemen called them,\n were studded on every frontier world, usually on the Equator. They\n contained two small spacecraft plus ample supplies of food, medicine,\n and tools. When wrecked, get to a D.D. and live. It was that simple.",
"When the whispering of scaled wings had died away, the castaways\n resumed their steady plodding into the south. Twice they crossed small\n fresh water brooks, providing a welcome opportunity to drink their\n fill, and replenish the canteens. The going was easy, since the footing\n was in fairly dense soil, and the scrub was not so thick as to provide\n any difficulties. After eight hours of nearly continuous travel, they\n reached the banks of a third stream. Here Madsen stopped, and dropped\n his knapsack to the ground.\n\n\n \"Campsite,\" he grunted.\n\n\n \"Alabama,\" Morley murmured.\n\n\n Madsen goggled. \"Are you delirious? What do you mean—Alabama?\"\n\n\n Morley laughed sheepishly. \"Alabama means 'Here we rest,' I said it\n without thinking.\"",
"He leaned forward and rapped the starboard gauge with his knuckles,\n sharply. The needle swung from Full to Empty. Morley felt faint as\n realization hit him. The starboard gauge had stuck at Full, and had\n been unreported. The tank had not been serviced in port, owing to\n the faulty reading and a mechanic's carelessness. They had about two\n hours fuel. Even to Morley, it was obvious that there was one thing\n only to do—land on Japetus, looming up larger in the view-plate with\n each passing moment. He checked the distance rapidly, punched the\n calculator, and put the ship in the designated orbit. He wanted to\n handle the landing himself, but the thought of the final few ticklish\n moments chilled him. So did the thought of waking Madsen, and asking\n him to take over.",
"\"Were you ever wrecked before, Madsen?\"\n\n\n \"Once, on Venus. Cartographic expedition.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\"\n\n\n \"Tubes blew and we made a forced landing. Wound up sitting in the\n middle of a pile of highgrade scrap.\"\n\n\n \"What did you do then?\"\n\n\n Madsen shouldered his knapsack and smiled condescendingly.\n\n\n \"Not a thing, Mr. Fix-it. We didn't have to. Since I seem to have\n accidentally stumbled on something new and strange to you, add this to\n your files. It's usual on cartographic trips of any length, for one\n ship to go out, while another stays at a temporary base, and keeps in\n constant directional radio contact. If anything happens, they come\n a-running. Makes it fine for us uninformed common people.\"\n\n\n \"Oh.\"",
"\"We'll be camping right here for a while, looks like. Try to get some\n sleep if it slacks off any. You'll be okay in a while.\"\n\n\n His doubts were hidden, and Morley thanked him with his eyes.",
"If a man can be said to slink without changing his position, Morley\n slunk. Madsen continued, double fortissimo.\n\n\n \"A kid of ten knows enough to keep a gun clean, but you, Mr.—Mr.\n Unabridged Webster in the flesh—\"\n\n\n He stopped, temporarily out of breath. Morley regarded him abjectly,\n and suddenly Madsen began to feel a little ashamed. After all, the\n fellow had figured out that business about the meridian.\n\n\n \"No use in having any post mortems,\" he said, with fine logic. \"Throw\n that junk away. It's that much less to carry, anyway.\"\n\n\n Two hours later, they plodded wearily through the last of the swamp\n onto higher ground. The two haggard, muddied figures that threw\n themselves on the dry soil to rest bore little resemblance to the men\n who had parachuted from Spaceboat 6 seventy-two hours before.",
"He went on, but Morley heard no more. The prospect unnerved him. He\n was terrified at the idea of changing a safe subordinate position for\n that of an active partner, however temporary the arrangement might be.\n At the drawing, his hunch of impending misery proved all too real. He\n wound up facing the prospect of a stay on the frozen hell of Phoebe,\n scouring the miniature mountains for Japori crystals, with Madsen,\n MADSEN! for his only companion.\nA week later the Solarian teetered down to a landing at Port Ulysses.\n With various expressions of profane and unbounded delight from her\n crew, she was turned over to the stevedores and the maintenance gang.\n Thereafter, at intervals, the thirty foot space boats took off for\n Mimas, Tethys, Dione, or whatever waystop the lottery had decreed.\n Madsen and Morley left on the fourth 'night,' with Phoebe hardly a\n week's run from them at ten miles a second.",
"\"We're on, or practically on the Prime Meridian right now,\" said\n Madsen. \"A trek due South should hit D.D. No. 1 square on the nose.\n Right?\"\n\n\n \"Right. Two or three hundred miles to go. We might make it in two\n weeks.\"\n\n\n Madsen squinted at the stationary disk of Sol, hanging in the sky.\n \"Let's load up and get started. The sooner we're on our way, the\n better.\""
],
[
"\"Well, Mastermind, any suggestions that might help us? Any little\n pearls of wisdom from the great brain?\"\n\n\n \"Just one,\" Morley answered. \"Head for the Equator, and—\"\n\n\n \"And try to find a D.D. Correct. If we last that long. Let's salvage\n what we can out of this junk and shove off.\"\n\n\n Morley cleared his throat diffidently. \"There are a few pieces of\n equipment we should take along, for—er—emergencies—\" His voice\n trailed off miserably under Madsen's basilisk stare.\n\n\n \"Listen, Morley, once and for all. We're lugging essentials and that's\n all. Any extra weight is out.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen—\"",
"\"I think I'd run,\" said Morley simply. \"It was pretty dull at General\n Plastic but at least the comptometers weren't man-eating.\"\n\n\n Madsen blinked, and seeming to find expression difficult, forbore to\n answer.\n\n\n They ate, and relaxed on the soft sod, lulled almost into a feeling\n of security. Not being foolhardy, however, they slept in six hour\n shifts. Morley stood the first watch, and slept the second. When he\n awoke, Madsen was tensely examining a ration tin. Jarred into instant\n alertness by a feeling of urgency and alarm, Morley leaped to his feet.\n\n\n \"Something wrong?\"\n\n\n Without answering, Madsen handed him the tin. It was pockmarked with\n inch wide patches of metallic gray fungus, from several of which liquid\n was seeping. There was a sharp odor of decay.",
"Madsen was grinning now. \"What beats me is how you remember all that\n junk. I'd go nuts if I tried to clutter up my mind with a bunch of\n useless data. Alabama!\"\n\n\n \"I don't have to try to remember things,\" Morley said thoughtfully. \"If\n I read or hear something that seems the least bit curious or unusual,\n it just sticks. And sometimes it's useful.\"\n\n\n \"Such as?\"\n\n\n \"Well, remember when Storybook ran a mile last year in 1.29? He was\n the first to break 1.30. Some joe that knew a lot about horses gave me\n an argument in a bar about the first horse to break 1.40. He bet me\n ten credits it was Man o' War. I knew it was Ten Broeck, and I got an\n almanac and proved it.\"",
"Straight toward the zenith the ship rises, trailing fire. Faster yet,\n hurling herself upward, under full power, through the last threads of\n atmosphere. Upward and onward, out past Roches limit, out where gravity\n dwindles toward zero, into the empyrean where the shades of dead\n spacemen cruise the cosmos in their phantom craft, spaceborne in the\n night.\n\n\n After he had recovered from the pangs of his initial attack of space\n nausea, Morley enjoyed himself. He had one minor social asset, a\n retentive mind, well stocked with general information. If the two\n apprentices got involved in an argument over the identity of the\n highest peak in America, Morley was the inevitable arbiter. He could\n with equal facility name the author of a recent best seller, or inform\n you that a young seal was a cub, a young hare, a leveret, and a young\n swan, a cygnet.",
"Morley flushed, and fumbled miserably for a reasonable excuse. There\n was a gleam of contempt in Madsen's eyes, but he spoke again more\n quietly. \"I'm going to eat and catch up on some sack time. We'll be\n right on top of Japetus in short order. It's a known fact that the moon\n won't move over if you fly at it, so you better wake me up to handle\n the compensating!\" He disappeared into the tiny galley, but his words\n were still audible. \"It's an awful long walk back, chum, if anybody\n pulls a bull.\"",
"Satellites, Inc., had done as well as possible with the raw material\n known as Morley, Vincent, No. 4628. His psychograph indicated a born\n subordinate, with a normal I.Q., reasonably stable and trustworthy\n though below average in initiative. They didn't inform him of this,\n or the fact that they had analyzed the neurosis which had driven\n him to the spaceline, and which had created by that very action the\n therapeutic aid he needed. Many spacemen had similar case histories.\n\n\n It was those who fought the compulsion who sometimes turned down dark\n pathways of the mind.",
"If a man can be said to slink without changing his position, Morley\n slunk. Madsen continued, double fortissimo.\n\n\n \"A kid of ten knows enough to keep a gun clean, but you, Mr.—Mr.\n Unabridged Webster in the flesh—\"\n\n\n He stopped, temporarily out of breath. Morley regarded him abjectly,\n and suddenly Madsen began to feel a little ashamed. After all, the\n fellow had figured out that business about the meridian.\n\n\n \"No use in having any post mortems,\" he said, with fine logic. \"Throw\n that junk away. It's that much less to carry, anyway.\"\n\n\n Two hours later, they plodded wearily through the last of the swamp\n onto higher ground. The two haggard, muddied figures that threw\n themselves on the dry soil to rest bore little resemblance to the men\n who had parachuted from Spaceboat 6 seventy-two hours before.",
"And it was then, at the intersection of two courses formed by an\n infinity of variables, that two objects arrived in the same millisecond\n of time. Eight ounces of nickel iron smashed into the stern of\n Spaceboat 6, ripped a path of ruin through her entire length, and went\n out through the two inch glass of her bow, before Morley could turn\n his head. He was aware, in a strange dream-like way, of actuating\n the midships airtight door, of the hiss of air as the little aneroid\n automatically opened valves to compensate for the drop in pressure, and\n of Madsen leaping into the control room and slapping a Johnson patch\n over the hole in the bow.",
"Morley swung himself into the pilot's seat, too numb with humiliation\n to answer. Almost an hour passed before he started the regulation\n checkup required by the Space Code of any ship passing within one\n hundred thousand miles of a planet or major satellite. Every guardian\n needle stood in its normal place with one exception. The craft had been\n running on the port fuel tanks, depleting them to the point where it\n seemed wise to trim ship. Morley opened the valve, touched the fuel\n pump switch and waited, nothing happened. He watched the needles\n incredulously. The pump—? He jabbed the switch, once, twice. Nothing.",
"He went on, but Morley heard no more. The prospect unnerved him. He\n was terrified at the idea of changing a safe subordinate position for\n that of an active partner, however temporary the arrangement might be.\n At the drawing, his hunch of impending misery proved all too real. He\n wound up facing the prospect of a stay on the frozen hell of Phoebe,\n scouring the miniature mountains for Japori crystals, with Madsen,\n MADSEN! for his only companion.\nA week later the Solarian teetered down to a landing at Port Ulysses.\n With various expressions of profane and unbounded delight from her\n crew, she was turned over to the stevedores and the maintenance gang.\n Thereafter, at intervals, the thirty foot space boats took off for\n Mimas, Tethys, Dione, or whatever waystop the lottery had decreed.\n Madsen and Morley left on the fourth 'night,' with Phoebe hardly a\n week's run from them at ten miles a second.",
"MORLEY'S WEAPON\nBy D. W. BAREFOOT\nOut of the far reaches of the universe sped\n \nthe meteor swarm, cosmic question marks destined\n \nfor annihilation in the sun. But one, approximately\n \nhalf a pound of frozen destruction, had a\n \nrendezvous near Japetus with Spaceboat 6.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories March 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that",
"\"Of course, this is somewhat different. If we don't get out by\n ourselves, whoever finds us need only say, 'X marks the spot.'\"\n\n\n Morley didn't bother answering. No comment was necessary. He knew as\n well as Madsen that whatever margin of safety they possessed had been\n shaved to the vanishing point.\nThey made twenty miles in a forced march, slept, ate, and then traveled\n again. The stunted forest grew thinner, and occasionally they crossed\n open spaces acres in extent. Twice they saw, in the distance, animals\n resembling terrestrial deer, and on the second occasion Morley tried\n a fruitless shot. They slept and ate again, and now the last of the\n rations were gone. They went on.",
"Madsen looked up from the tin of coffee concentrate he was opening.\n \"Hasn't anyone ever tried to win an argument by poking you one in the\n snoot?\"\n\n\n \"Once or twice.\" Morley was almost apologetic. \"But I learned judo a\n few years ago, just for the hell of it, so I didn't get hurt much.\"\n\n\n \"You're a whiz with the sabre, no doubt?\" said Madsen dryly.\n\n\n \"No, I tried swordplay for a while, but gave it up. It's a little too,\n er—primitive for my tastes.\"\n\n\n \"Primitive!\" Madsen glanced around at the alien scene and nearly\n choked. \"I'm crossing my fingers, but what would you do if some\n carnivore, or a gang of those spiders suddenly appeared and started for\n us with evil intentions?\"",
"He was fairly popular with the crew, except for a big Norwegian from\n New York, named Olaf Madsen. Madsen was a chunky, hard bitten veteran\n of the spaceways. Round faced, deceptively soft spoken, he had a\n penchant for practical jokes, and a flair for biting sarcasm which\n found full expression in the presence of any first tripper. He made\n the life of any apprentice miserable, and finished the last two weeks\n of one trip in the brig for panicking an entire crew by painting his\n face to resemble the onset of Martian blue fever. Morley considered him\n an oaf, and he considered Morley a human filing cabinet with a weak\n stomach.\n\n\n A little notice on the bulletin board was Morley's first inkling that\n his safe, secure routine was on the verge of mutating into something\n frighteningly unpredictable.",
"Morley was staring sunward, with thoughtful eyes. \"Yes, there is,\" he\n said quietly.\n\n\n Madsen's jaw dropped. \"Give,\" he said.\n\n\n \"We both forgot something we know perfectly well. Notice the sun? It\n hasn't moved perceptibly since we landed. Japetus doesn't revolve on\n its axis.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Two things. One, no night, since we're on the sunward side. The sun\n will move from side to side in the sky, reaching its lateral limits\n when Japetus is in quadrature in regard to Saturn. If we were here for\n a month, we'd see Saturn rise, make a full arc through the sky, and\n set. Let's hope for a shorter stay.\"\n\n\n \"Go on,\" said Madsen, and suddenly there was nothing patronizing or\n scornful in his voice.",
"Madsen was at the controls. Without a single spoken word on the\n subject, he was automatically the captain, and Morley, the crew. The\n situation crystallized twenty-four hours out of Port Ulysses. Morley\n was poring over the Ephemeris prior to taking his watch at the controls\n when he became aware that Madsen, red faced and breathing heavily, was\n peering over his shoulder.\n\n\n Morley stiffened in alarm. \"Is anything—\" He quailed under Madsen's\n glare.\n\n\n \"Not yet, but there's liable to be if you don't smarten up.\" The\n Norwegian's blunt forefinger stabbed at the page Morley had been\n studying. \"Phoebe, Mister, happens to be Saturn's NINTH moon. Get it?\n You can count, can't you?\"",
"He leaned forward and rapped the starboard gauge with his knuckles,\n sharply. The needle swung from Full to Empty. Morley felt faint as\n realization hit him. The starboard gauge had stuck at Full, and had\n been unreported. The tank had not been serviced in port, owing to\n the faulty reading and a mechanic's carelessness. They had about two\n hours fuel. Even to Morley, it was obvious that there was one thing\n only to do—land on Japetus, looming up larger in the view-plate with\n each passing moment. He checked the distance rapidly, punched the\n calculator, and put the ship in the designated orbit. He wanted to\n handle the landing himself, but the thought of the final few ticklish\n moments chilled him. So did the thought of waking Madsen, and asking\n him to take over.",
"Both men whirled at a sudden crashing on their left. Something like a\n large splay footed kangaroo broke cover, and went loping away, clearing\n the fern tops at every bound. In one motion Morley whipped up the\n rifle and fired. There was an earsplitting report, the leaper kept\n right on going, under forced draught, and the two castaways stared in\n consternation at a rifle that resembled a bundle of metallic macaroni\n more than it did a firearm.\n\n\n Madsen spoke first. \"You probably got some mud in the barrel when we\n stopped last time,\" he accused. \"Look at us now.\"\n\n\n Morley started to mumble an apology, but Madsen cut him short. \"Look at\n us now,\" he repeated, with all stops out. \"It was bad before, now it's\n practically hopeless. Our only long range gun! What do we do now if we\n do find game—dig pits for it?\"",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIt was comfortably cool in the functional, little control room, but\n Morley was sweating, gently and steadily. His palms were wet, and the\n thin thoughtful face, shining in the glow of the instrument panel\n light, was wrinkled in an agony of concentration and doubt. He was\n trying to choose between the Scylla of waking Madsen with a corollary\n of biting contempt involved, and the Charybdis of attempting to land\n single handed on Japetus, less than five hundred miles below. Neither\n course was appealing.\n\n\n For the hundredth time he pondered miserably over the sad condition\n of what had been a reasonably well ordered existence. The worst of\n it was that he had only himself to blame, and he knew it. No one had\n forced him to leave a comfortable, if poorly paid position with General\n Plastics, and fill out an employment card at Satellites, Inc.",
"\"We'll be camping right here for a while, looks like. Try to get some\n sleep if it slacks off any. You'll be okay in a while.\"\n\n\n His doubts were hidden, and Morley thanked him with his eyes."
],
[
"\"Of course, this is somewhat different. If we don't get out by\n ourselves, whoever finds us need only say, 'X marks the spot.'\"\n\n\n Morley didn't bother answering. No comment was necessary. He knew as\n well as Madsen that whatever margin of safety they possessed had been\n shaved to the vanishing point.\nThey made twenty miles in a forced march, slept, ate, and then traveled\n again. The stunted forest grew thinner, and occasionally they crossed\n open spaces acres in extent. Twice they saw, in the distance, animals\n resembling terrestrial deer, and on the second occasion Morley tried\n a fruitless shot. They slept and ate again, and now the last of the\n rations were gone. They went on.",
"If a man can be said to slink without changing his position, Morley\n slunk. Madsen continued, double fortissimo.\n\n\n \"A kid of ten knows enough to keep a gun clean, but you, Mr.—Mr.\n Unabridged Webster in the flesh—\"\n\n\n He stopped, temporarily out of breath. Morley regarded him abjectly,\n and suddenly Madsen began to feel a little ashamed. After all, the\n fellow had figured out that business about the meridian.\n\n\n \"No use in having any post mortems,\" he said, with fine logic. \"Throw\n that junk away. It's that much less to carry, anyway.\"\n\n\n Two hours later, they plodded wearily through the last of the swamp\n onto higher ground. The two haggard, muddied figures that threw\n themselves on the dry soil to rest bore little resemblance to the men\n who had parachuted from Spaceboat 6 seventy-two hours before.",
"Madsen was at the controls. Without a single spoken word on the\n subject, he was automatically the captain, and Morley, the crew. The\n situation crystallized twenty-four hours out of Port Ulysses. Morley\n was poring over the Ephemeris prior to taking his watch at the controls\n when he became aware that Madsen, red faced and breathing heavily, was\n peering over his shoulder.\n\n\n Morley stiffened in alarm. \"Is anything—\" He quailed under Madsen's\n glare.\n\n\n \"Not yet, but there's liable to be if you don't smarten up.\" The\n Norwegian's blunt forefinger stabbed at the page Morley had been\n studying. \"Phoebe, Mister, happens to be Saturn's NINTH moon. Get it?\n You can count, can't you?\"",
"And it was then, at the intersection of two courses formed by an\n infinity of variables, that two objects arrived in the same millisecond\n of time. Eight ounces of nickel iron smashed into the stern of\n Spaceboat 6, ripped a path of ruin through her entire length, and went\n out through the two inch glass of her bow, before Morley could turn\n his head. He was aware, in a strange dream-like way, of actuating\n the midships airtight door, of the hiss of air as the little aneroid\n automatically opened valves to compensate for the drop in pressure, and\n of Madsen leaping into the control room and slapping a Johnson patch\n over the hole in the bow.",
"Straight toward the zenith the ship rises, trailing fire. Faster yet,\n hurling herself upward, under full power, through the last threads of\n atmosphere. Upward and onward, out past Roches limit, out where gravity\n dwindles toward zero, into the empyrean where the shades of dead\n spacemen cruise the cosmos in their phantom craft, spaceborne in the\n night.\n\n\n After he had recovered from the pangs of his initial attack of space\n nausea, Morley enjoyed himself. He had one minor social asset, a\n retentive mind, well stocked with general information. If the two\n apprentices got involved in an argument over the identity of the\n highest peak in America, Morley was the inevitable arbiter. He could\n with equal facility name the author of a recent best seller, or inform\n you that a young seal was a cub, a young hare, a leveret, and a young\n swan, a cygnet.",
"He went on, but Morley heard no more. The prospect unnerved him. He\n was terrified at the idea of changing a safe subordinate position for\n that of an active partner, however temporary the arrangement might be.\n At the drawing, his hunch of impending misery proved all too real. He\n wound up facing the prospect of a stay on the frozen hell of Phoebe,\n scouring the miniature mountains for Japori crystals, with Madsen,\n MADSEN! for his only companion.\nA week later the Solarian teetered down to a landing at Port Ulysses.\n With various expressions of profane and unbounded delight from her\n crew, she was turned over to the stevedores and the maintenance gang.\n Thereafter, at intervals, the thirty foot space boats took off for\n Mimas, Tethys, Dione, or whatever waystop the lottery had decreed.\n Madsen and Morley left on the fourth 'night,' with Phoebe hardly a\n week's run from them at ten miles a second.",
"Madsen was white but composed. \"We can slow her down but we can't land\n her. Get suits while I take over. We'll ride as far as we can, and\n walk the rest of the way.\" He fought with the controls, as Morley,\n still bemused, obeyed. At twenty-five hundred feet they bailed out,\n and floating down seconds later, watched Spaceboat 6 crash into a low\n wooded hill. And when they landed, and inspected the wreckage, it was\n some minutes before either spoke.\n\n\n It was obvious at a glance that Spaceboat 6 was ready for the boneyard,\n had there been one around. The ship, under the few automatic controls\n that were still functioning, had sliced in at a thirty degree angle,\n ploughed a short distance through a growth of slim, poplar-like trees,\n and then crumpled completely against an outcropping granite ledge.\n Finally Morley gulped audibly, and Madsen laughed.",
"As they made southing, the dull sun crept higher in the sky by\n infinitesimal degrees. Now the going became tougher. Patches of evil\n looking muskeg began to appear in the scrub, and the stunted trees\n themselves gradually gave way to six foot ferns. There were occasional\n signs that some creature had been foraging on the lush growth. When\n they found fresh tracks in the soft footing, Morley unlimbered the\n rifle, and the two men trod more softly. By that time either would have\n cheerfully made a meal on one of the miniature flying dragons, alive\n and kicking, and the thought of a juicy steak from some local herbivore\n was as soul stirring as the sight of Mecca to a true believer.",
"Less than three hours after the crash, the two men shouldered their\n burdens, took a bearing to determine their course, and headed into the\n south.\nIn a matter of minutes Spaceboat 6 was out of sight. With Madsen\n leading, they threaded their way through the scant undergrowth.\n Underfoot the dry, broad-bladed grass rustled through a morning that\n had no beginning or end. Farther away were other and less easily\n explained rustlings, and once both men froze as a half-dozen of what\n looked like baby dragons arrowed past within yards of them.\n\n\n \"Formation flying, like ducks,\" muttered Morley, watching from the\n corner of his eye.",
"Satellites, Inc., had done as well as possible with the raw material\n known as Morley, Vincent, No. 4628. His psychograph indicated a born\n subordinate, with a normal I.Q., reasonably stable and trustworthy\n though below average in initiative. They didn't inform him of this,\n or the fact that they had analyzed the neurosis which had driven\n him to the spaceline, and which had created by that very action the\n therapeutic aid he needed. Many spacemen had similar case histories.\n\n\n It was those who fought the compulsion who sometimes turned down dark\n pathways of the mind.",
"\"I think I'd run,\" said Morley simply. \"It was pretty dull at General\n Plastic but at least the comptometers weren't man-eating.\"\n\n\n Madsen blinked, and seeming to find expression difficult, forbore to\n answer.\n\n\n They ate, and relaxed on the soft sod, lulled almost into a feeling\n of security. Not being foolhardy, however, they slept in six hour\n shifts. Morley stood the first watch, and slept the second. When he\n awoke, Madsen was tensely examining a ration tin. Jarred into instant\n alertness by a feeling of urgency and alarm, Morley leaped to his feet.\n\n\n \"Something wrong?\"\n\n\n Without answering, Madsen handed him the tin. It was pockmarked with\n inch wide patches of metallic gray fungus, from several of which liquid\n was seeping. There was a sharp odor of decay.",
"He was fairly popular with the crew, except for a big Norwegian from\n New York, named Olaf Madsen. Madsen was a chunky, hard bitten veteran\n of the spaceways. Round faced, deceptively soft spoken, he had a\n penchant for practical jokes, and a flair for biting sarcasm which\n found full expression in the presence of any first tripper. He made\n the life of any apprentice miserable, and finished the last two weeks\n of one trip in the brig for panicking an entire crew by painting his\n face to resemble the onset of Martian blue fever. Morley considered him\n an oaf, and he considered Morley a human filing cabinet with a weak\n stomach.\n\n\n A little notice on the bulletin board was Morley's first inkling that\n his safe, secure routine was on the verge of mutating into something\n frighteningly unpredictable.",
"Madsen looked up from the tin of coffee concentrate he was opening.\n \"Hasn't anyone ever tried to win an argument by poking you one in the\n snoot?\"\n\n\n \"Once or twice.\" Morley was almost apologetic. \"But I learned judo a\n few years ago, just for the hell of it, so I didn't get hurt much.\"\n\n\n \"You're a whiz with the sabre, no doubt?\" said Madsen dryly.\n\n\n \"No, I tried swordplay for a while, but gave it up. It's a little too,\n er—primitive for my tastes.\"\n\n\n \"Primitive!\" Madsen glanced around at the alien scene and nearly\n choked. \"I'm crossing my fingers, but what would you do if some\n carnivore, or a gang of those spiders suddenly appeared and started for\n us with evil intentions?\"",
"Both men whirled at a sudden crashing on their left. Something like a\n large splay footed kangaroo broke cover, and went loping away, clearing\n the fern tops at every bound. In one motion Morley whipped up the\n rifle and fired. There was an earsplitting report, the leaper kept\n right on going, under forced draught, and the two castaways stared in\n consternation at a rifle that resembled a bundle of metallic macaroni\n more than it did a firearm.\n\n\n Madsen spoke first. \"You probably got some mud in the barrel when we\n stopped last time,\" he accused. \"Look at us now.\"\n\n\n Morley started to mumble an apology, but Madsen cut him short. \"Look at\n us now,\" he repeated, with all stops out. \"It was bad before, now it's\n practically hopeless. Our only long range gun! What do we do now if we\n do find game—dig pits for it?\"",
"He could not explain the obscure compulsion that sparked his little\n personal rebellion.\n\n\n He didn't know, or need to know that other generations of Morleys had\n fought in revolutions, or sailed in square riggers, or clawed gold from\n mountainsides. When he went to the spaceline, the puzzlement of his few\n friends was profound, but hardly more so than his own. And now, after\n almost a year of upheaval and change, he was piloting a spaceboat along\n an involute curve ending on the surface of Saturn's eighth moon. And he\n was still puzzled.",
"The slope on which they rested was tufted with small bushes. One\n particular type with narrow dark green leaves bore clusters of fruit\n like small plums, which Madsen eyed speculatively.\n\n\n \"Do we risk it?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Might as well.\"\n\n\n Morley was completely unaware that he had just accepted the\n responsibility for making a decision.\n\n\n \"We can't afford not to risk it,\" he said, adding, with little show of\n enthusiasm, \"I'll be the guinea pig.\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy, chum,\" Madsen countered. \"We'll match for it.\"",
"When the whispering of scaled wings had died away, the castaways\n resumed their steady plodding into the south. Twice they crossed small\n fresh water brooks, providing a welcome opportunity to drink their\n fill, and replenish the canteens. The going was easy, since the footing\n was in fairly dense soil, and the scrub was not so thick as to provide\n any difficulties. After eight hours of nearly continuous travel, they\n reached the banks of a third stream. Here Madsen stopped, and dropped\n his knapsack to the ground.\n\n\n \"Campsite,\" he grunted.\n\n\n \"Alabama,\" Morley murmured.\n\n\n Madsen goggled. \"Are you delirious? What do you mean—Alabama?\"\n\n\n Morley laughed sheepishly. \"Alabama means 'Here we rest,' I said it\n without thinking.\"",
"Madsen was hastily dumping the contents of the knapsacks on the ground.\n Morley joined him, and both men commenced scraping the clinging gray\n patches from the tins. All but three were perforated and ruined.\n\n\n \"We'll at least be traveling light from now on,\" Madsen said. \"Any idea\n what this stuff is?\"\n\n\n \"Some of that lichen, or whatever it is, was around the scene of the\n crash,\" Morley answered. \"The stuff must have an affinity for tin;\n probably secretes some acid that dissolves it. Only trouble is, it goes\n through thin steel too.\"\n\n\n Madsen commenced repacking their effects.\n\n\n \"From now on, laddie, keep your eyes peeled for game, and if you see\n any, use that rifle. If we don't knock down some meat, and soon, we\n aren't going to make it. Might as well realize it right now.\"",
"\"Well, Mastermind, any suggestions that might help us? Any little\n pearls of wisdom from the great brain?\"\n\n\n \"Just one,\" Morley answered. \"Head for the Equator, and—\"\n\n\n \"And try to find a D.D. Correct. If we last that long. Let's salvage\n what we can out of this junk and shove off.\"\n\n\n Morley cleared his throat diffidently. \"There are a few pieces of\n equipment we should take along, for—er—emergencies—\" His voice\n trailed off miserably under Madsen's basilisk stare.\n\n\n \"Listen, Morley, once and for all. We're lugging essentials and that's\n all. Any extra weight is out.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen—\"",
"Morley was staring sunward, with thoughtful eyes. \"Yes, there is,\" he\n said quietly.\n\n\n Madsen's jaw dropped. \"Give,\" he said.\n\n\n \"We both forgot something we know perfectly well. Notice the sun? It\n hasn't moved perceptibly since we landed. Japetus doesn't revolve on\n its axis.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Two things. One, no night, since we're on the sunward side. The sun\n will move from side to side in the sky, reaching its lateral limits\n when Japetus is in quadrature in regard to Saturn. If we were here for\n a month, we'd see Saturn rise, make a full arc through the sky, and\n set. Let's hope for a shorter stay.\"\n\n\n \"Go on,\" said Madsen, and suddenly there was nothing patronizing or\n scornful in his voice."
]
] |
test
|
40968
|
[
"In what part of Marty’s childhood house does the initial conversation between Marty and his father take place?",
"What was the result of Mr. Isherwood’s interactions with Marty in the opening scene?",
"The story describes a flight that Marty went on, accompanied by his girlfriend. What phrase best describes Marty’s behavior during this flight?",
"How does Marty feel about Nan?",
"What does Marty’s dad say in answer to Marge’s question about Marty’s destination when he got on the bus, that foreshadows events at the end of the story?",
"What casually-mentioned, unhealthy habit does Marty have that is highly unlikely in a current day astronaut?",
"Which choice below best describes what Marty was willing to give up to achieve his life’s ambition?",
"Where were Marty’s start and end point for his space flight?",
"What similarities do we see between Marty and his father in the story?",
"Did Marty’s answer to his questions satisfy Mackenzie?"
] |
[
[
"The kitchen",
"The living room",
"The front porch",
"Marty's bedroom"
],
[
"After taking the bus to town, Marty realized he needed go home and finish school in order to accomplish his goals.",
"Marty ran away from home and lost contact with his family for the rest of his life.",
"Marty’s mother had a gigantic fight with Marty’s dad, and they ended up getting a divorce.",
"Marty’s father realized how much Marty’s dreams meant to him and decided to support his ambition to be a rocket pilot."
],
[
"He was a daredevil obsessed with taking chances. ",
"He was focused on the science that could be gained on each flight, instead of Nan's feelings.",
"He was a careful flyer who didn’t take chances.",
"He was showing off to Nan."
],
[
"She's ok until something better comes along.",
"He likes her, but he likes flying more.",
"He loves her so much that he is willing to give up flying.",
"He is only interested in getting sex on demand."
],
[
"He says, with hatred, that Marty will come to a bad end.",
"He says, with admiration, that Marty may end up on the Moon. ",
"He says, scornfully, that perhaps he is going to the Moon.",
"He says, with sadness, that Marty will come around and understand the need to have a solid trade when he is more mature."
],
[
"He is a workaholic",
"A single-minded focus on flying rockets",
"Smoking",
"Constantly drumming his fingers on the table"
],
[
"Everything.",
"A relationship with his parents.",
"Having children.",
"Smoking."
],
[
"The flight started on Earth and ended up on a space station.",
"The flight started on Earth and ended up on the Moon.",
"The flight started on the Moon and ended up on Earth.",
"The flight started on a space station and ended up on the Moon."
],
[
"Both fall short of their ultimate dreams, but still find happiness.",
"Both enjoy relaxing over the Sunday papers.",
"Both are completely irresponsible.",
"Both have personalities that are full of anger, expressed or otherwise."
],
[
"Mackenzie cleared Marty to fly.",
"Mackenzie thought Marty was completely unstable and sent him to a mental institution.",
"Mackenzie thought that Marty was in good mental condition for a short trip, but not the long one that had been planned.",
"Mackenzie knew that Marty was lying about being OK and grounded him."
]
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"\"\nMarty!\n\" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed\n to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost\n ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n\n\n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she\n came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against\n the sides of her housedress.\n\n\n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his\n son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the\n street. \"\nCome back here!\n\" he shouted. \"A\nrocket\npilot,\" he cursed\n under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket\n pilot!\"",
"His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and\n hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard\n that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor\n with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n\n\n \"A\nrocket\npilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet\n parlor. \"A ro—\noh, no!\n—a rocket\npilot\n!\"\n\n\n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips\n fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the\n tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked\n out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch.\n He stopped there, hesitating a little.",
"Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years\n ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now\n on throwing himself away to the sky.\n\n\n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the\n press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a\n technician.\n\n\n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he\n mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his\n shoulder.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't\n see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as\n rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away\n the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.",
"Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n \"But—isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd\n things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet!\nCome\n back here, you idiot!\n\" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his\n clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n\n\n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm\nsure\n!\"\n\n\n \"But, where's he going?\"\n\n\n \"\nStop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me?\nMarty?\"\n\n\n \"\nHoward!\nStop acting like a child and\ntalk\nto me! Where is that boy\n going?\"",
"Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer,\n anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank\n with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set.\n The\nNavion\nwent up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as\n it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n\n\n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased,\n and no air to rock the wings—there were no wings. His face lost all\n expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his\n nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on\n the wheel. \"Up!\"\n\n\n The\nNavion\nbroke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened\n closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n\n\n \"Marty!\"",
"Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a\n fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve\n hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd—that fool psychiatrist hadn't\n seemed to take up that much of his time.\n\n\n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he\n lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that\n nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was\n going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing\n in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster,\n as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\nISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n\n\n \"But\neverybody\nfills out an application,\" she protested.",
"And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came\n and got her.\n\"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\nThey always begin that way\n, Isherwood thought. The standard medical\n opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything\n he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as\n he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder\n of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen\n hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n\n\n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The\n realization disquieted him a little.\n\n\n \"Think you'll make it?\"",
"Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned\n away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he\n told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n \"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n\n\n\n\n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of\n age at seventeen.\nTHE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not\n interested in working for a degree.\"",
"\"\nLow?\nCall\nthis\nlow?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and\n you'll\nreally\nget an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the\n wheel forward, and the\nNavion\ndipped its nose in a shallow dive,\n flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the\n chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the\n protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a\n dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n\n\n \"Marty!\"",
"MacKenzie's face passed no judgements—he simply hunched in his chair,\n seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his\n stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man—only\n a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired\n strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n\n\n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations.\n This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous—red-letter\n dangerous—because of it.\n\n\n \"No family.\"\n\n\n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was\n making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to\n worry about them.\"\n\n\n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought.\n MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression—but it still\n passed no judgements.",
"\"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n\n\n\n\n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with\n a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\nHE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings\n around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of\n the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and\n in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and\n huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And\n he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands\n moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an\n impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the\n personnel bunker with him.",
"\"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n\n\n \"About normal.\"\n\n\n \"No wife—no steady girl.\"\n\n\n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n\n\n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung\n toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed\n between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n\n\n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his\n temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n\n\n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst\n was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed\n genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go,\n all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and\n drives.\"",
"... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known.\n He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the\n aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands.\n Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare\n you—?\" he asked gently.\n\n\n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n\n\n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n\"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain\n a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew,\n my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten\n years ago. I\ncan't\nget married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week?\n You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only\n smart thing to do is wait a while.\"",
"Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt\n the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and\n feet were very cold.\n\n\n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n\n\n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk\n looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He\n sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n\n\n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n\n\n\n\n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the\n control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and\n began to brake for a landing.",
"Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying\n to say.\nWhy\ndo you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't\n you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained\n pilot.\"\n\n\n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense\n from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he\n relaxed—more—he slumped—and something began to die in his face, and\n the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would\n not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the\n almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.",
"\"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the\n cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure.\n Bring him on.\"\n\n\n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's—uh—he's in the next room. Okay to ask him\n in right now?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight\n Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\nMacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special\n attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the\n questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could\n see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the\n man's lapel.\n\n\n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\"\n MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.",
"Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\"\n he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get\n around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need\n is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week—no picnic, no pleasures of\n the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any\n laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again.\n Then, you can do anything you want to—as long as it doesn't look like\n the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n\n\n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose—\" he began, but Ish\n interrupted him.\n\n\n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace\n to go. We're built for it. People have to have—but what am I telling\nyou\nfor. If you don't know, who does?\"",
"\"No. I've\ngot\na job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half\n hour.\n\n\n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll\nonly\nread the literature I've\n given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have\n been cancelled.\"\n\n\n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this\n nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n\n\n \"But\nnobody\ngoes back.\"",
"\"Goddam it, I don't know what kind of place this is, but—\" He stopped\n at the Receptionist's wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The\n reception desk was solid enough. There were IN and OUT and HOLD baskets\n on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary\n about it. But the room—a big room, he realized—seemed to fade out at\n the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too....\n\n\n \"Let's see your back!\" he rapped out, his voice high.\n\n\n She sighed in exasperation. \"If you'd read the\nliterature\n...\" She\n swiveled her chair slowly.\n\n\n \"No wings,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Of course not!\" she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her\n forehead without his telling her to. \"No horns, either.\"\n\n\n \"Streamlined, huh?\" he said bitterly.",
"Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him—anger, and more\n fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n \"You through with me?\"\n\n\n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a\n parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the\n psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc.\n They did put\nsome\nlearning in my head at college, you know. Therapy,\n hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\""
],
[
"\"\nMarty!\n\" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed\n to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost\n ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n\n\n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she\n came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against\n the sides of her housedress.\n\n\n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his\n son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the\n street. \"\nCome back here!\n\" he shouted. \"A\nrocket\npilot,\" he cursed\n under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket\n pilot!\"",
"Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n \"But—isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd\n things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet!\nCome\n back here, you idiot!\n\" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his\n clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n\n\n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm\nsure\n!\"\n\n\n \"But, where's he going?\"\n\n\n \"\nStop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me?\nMarty?\"\n\n\n \"\nHoward!\nStop acting like a child and\ntalk\nto me! Where is that boy\n going?\"",
"\"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n\n\n \"About normal.\"\n\n\n \"No wife—no steady girl.\"\n\n\n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n\n\n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung\n toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed\n between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n\n\n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his\n temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n\n\n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst\n was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed\n genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go,\n all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and\n drives.\"",
"And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came\n and got her.\n\"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\nThey always begin that way\n, Isherwood thought. The standard medical\n opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything\n he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as\n he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder\n of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen\n hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n\n\n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The\n realization disquieted him a little.\n\n\n \"Think you'll make it?\"",
"Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned\n away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he\n told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n \"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n\n\n\n\n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of\n age at seventeen.\nTHE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not\n interested in working for a degree.\"",
"Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years\n ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now\n on throwing himself away to the sky.\n\n\n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the\n press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a\n technician.\n\n\n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he\n mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his\n shoulder.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't\n see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as\n rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away\n the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.",
"The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\"\n he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next\n man.\n\n\n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and\n softly quoted: \n \"Though I go bare, take ye no care,\n I am nothing a-cold;\n I stuff my skin so full within\n Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the\n unfamiliar.\n\n\n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a\n poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n\n\n \"Oh.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.",
"Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a\n fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve\n hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd—that fool psychiatrist hadn't\n seemed to take up that much of his time.\n\n\n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he\n lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that\n nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was\n going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing\n in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster,\n as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\nISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n\n\n \"But\neverybody\nfills out an application,\" she protested.",
"Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that\n Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav—they\n won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in\n themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n\n\n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a\n snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n\n\n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at\n his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't\n convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give\n up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's\n go get some beer.\"",
"Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk\n button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way\n the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\nTHE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across\n the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n\n\n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm\nvery\nglad to\n meet you!\"\n\n\n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short\n shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n\n\n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the\n Receptionist said from behind her desk.",
"Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer,\n anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank\n with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set.\n The\nNavion\nwent up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as\n it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n\n\n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased,\n and no air to rock the wings—there were no wings. His face lost all\n expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his\n nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on\n the wheel. \"Up!\"\n\n\n The\nNavion\nbroke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened\n closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n\n\n \"Marty!\"",
"Ish nodded.\n\n\n \"How's that?\"\n\n\n The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said \"Yes\" for the\n recorder's benefit.\n\n\n \"Odd jobs, first of all?\"\n\n\n \"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After\n I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops.\"\n\n\n \"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Ahuh.\"\n\n\n \"Took some of your pay in flying lessons.\"\n\n\n \"Right.\"",
"Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him—anger, and more\n fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n \"You through with me?\"\n\n\n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a\n parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the\n psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc.\n They did put\nsome\nlearning in my head at college, you know. Therapy,\n hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"",
"Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\"\n he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get\n around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need\n is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week—no picnic, no pleasures of\n the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any\n laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again.\n Then, you can do anything you want to—as long as it doesn't look like\n the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n\n\n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose—\" he began, but Ish\n interrupted him.\n\n\n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace\n to go. We're built for it. People have to have—but what am I telling\nyou\nfor. If you don't know, who does?\"",
"The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n\n\n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n\n\n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the\n preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to\n buckle down to it. Oh, he—shucks?—the Receptionist wasn't such a bad\n girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n\n\n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n\n\n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back\n to the Personnel Manager.\n\n\n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got—\" He stopped to\n look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the\n beast right now.\"",
"\"But—\" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow\n pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc\n of black flecks. \"Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off the\n basket. This program is just like the others you've followed for nine\n semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just about\n every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going\n to keep this up?\"\n\n\n \"I'm signed up for Astronomy 101,\" Isherwood pointed out.\n\n\n The faculty advisor snorted. \"A snap course. A breather, after you've\n studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish?\n Scared of liberal arts?\"",
"MacKenzie's face passed no judgements—he simply hunched in his chair,\n seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his\n stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man—only\n a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired\n strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n\n\n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations.\n This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous—red-letter\n dangerous—because of it.\n\n\n \"No family.\"\n\n\n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was\n making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to\n worry about them.\"\n\n\n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought.\n MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression—but it still\n passed no judgements.",
"\"\nLow?\nCall\nthis\nlow?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and\n you'll\nreally\nget an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the\n wheel forward, and the\nNavion\ndipped its nose in a shallow dive,\n flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the\n chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the\n protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a\n dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n\n\n \"Marty!\"",
"Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's\n not my racket.\"\n\n\n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n \"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n\n\n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n\n\n \"But\nwhat\n, for Pete's sake? What\nis\nthis crazy specialty that blinds\n you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n\n\n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it\n was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n\n\n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't\n it?\"",
"His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and\n hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard\n that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor\n with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n\n\n \"A\nrocket\npilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet\n parlor. \"A ro—\noh, no!\n—a rocket\npilot\n!\"\n\n\n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips\n fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the\n tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked\n out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch.\n He stopped there, hesitating a little."
],
[
"Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer,\n anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank\n with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set.\n The\nNavion\nwent up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as\n it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n\n\n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased,\n and no air to rock the wings—there were no wings. His face lost all\n expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his\n nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on\n the wheel. \"Up!\"\n\n\n The\nNavion\nbroke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened\n closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n\n\n \"Marty!\"",
"\"\nMarty!\n\" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed\n to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost\n ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n\n\n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she\n came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against\n the sides of her housedress.\n\n\n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his\n son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the\n street. \"\nCome back here!\n\" he shouted. \"A\nrocket\npilot,\" he cursed\n under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket\n pilot!\"",
"Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years\n ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now\n on throwing himself away to the sky.\n\n\n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the\n press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a\n technician.\n\n\n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he\n mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his\n shoulder.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't\n see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as\n rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away\n the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.",
"... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known.\n He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the\n aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands.\n Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare\n you—?\" he asked gently.\n\n\n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n\n\n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n\"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain\n a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew,\n my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten\n years ago. I\ncan't\nget married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week?\n You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only\n smart thing to do is wait a while.\"",
"\"\nLow?\nCall\nthis\nlow?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and\n you'll\nreally\nget an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the\n wheel forward, and the\nNavion\ndipped its nose in a shallow dive,\n flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the\n chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the\n protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a\n dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n\n\n \"Marty!\"",
"\"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\nTHE\nNAVION\ntook a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked\n upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette\n girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish\n laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that\n sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and\n corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n\n\n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n \"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n\n\n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly\n this low,\" she said, half-frightened.",
"His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and\n hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard\n that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor\n with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n\n\n \"A\nrocket\npilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet\n parlor. \"A ro—\noh, no!\n—a rocket\npilot\n!\"\n\n\n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips\n fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the\n tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked\n out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch.\n He stopped there, hesitating a little.",
"And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came\n and got her.\n\"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\nThey always begin that way\n, Isherwood thought. The standard medical\n opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything\n he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as\n he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder\n of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen\n hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n\n\n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The\n realization disquieted him a little.\n\n\n \"Think you'll make it?\"",
"\"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is\n a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any\n plant in the States—Douglas, North American, Boeing—\nany\nof them—and\n pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as\n good as said so. After that—\" His voice had regained some of its former\n animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've\n told you all this before.\"\n\n\n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to\n her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's\n that\nrocket\npilot business again....\"",
"Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n \"But—isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd\n things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet!\nCome\n back here, you idiot!\n\" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his\n clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n\n\n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm\nsure\n!\"\n\n\n \"But, where's he going?\"\n\n\n \"\nStop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me?\nMarty?\"\n\n\n \"\nHoward!\nStop acting like a child and\ntalk\nto me! Where is that boy\n going?\"",
"\"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n\n\n \"About normal.\"\n\n\n \"No wife—no steady girl.\"\n\n\n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n\n\n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung\n toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed\n between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n\n\n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his\n temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n\n\n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst\n was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed\n genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go,\n all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and\n drives.\"",
"Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that\nrocket\npilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm\n the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and\n fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math\n than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like\n brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of\nColliers\n, and I—\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged\n again.\n\n\n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job,\n and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a\n long time.\"\n\n\n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there\naren't\nany\n man-carrying rockets.\"",
"\"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n\n\n\n\n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with\n a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\nHE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings\n around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of\n the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and\n in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and\n huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And\n he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands\n moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an\n impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the\n personnel bunker with him.",
"Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual\n response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n\n\n \"Uh-\nhuh\n.\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n \"Look—you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n\n\n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he\n said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they\n wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n\n\n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The\n Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force\n insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them.\n After all, it's\ntheir\nbeast.\"",
"Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned\n away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he\n told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n \"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n\n\n\n\n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of\n age at seventeen.\nTHE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not\n interested in working for a degree.\"",
"\"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You\n trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n\n\n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the\n shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to\n stop him.\n\n\n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to\n break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose\n candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.",
"Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a\n fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve\n hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd—that fool psychiatrist hadn't\n seemed to take up that much of his time.\n\n\n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he\n lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that\n nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was\n going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing\n in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster,\n as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\nISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n\n\n \"But\neverybody\nfills out an application,\" she protested.",
"\"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \"\nRocket!\nCall that pile\n of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n \"Who cares about the bloody\nmachines\n! If I thought roller-skating\n would get me there, I would have gone to work in a\nrink\nwhen I was\n seventeen! It's\ngetting there\nthat counts! Who gives a good goddam\nhow\nit's done, or what with!\"",
"Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying\n to say.\nWhy\ndo you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't\n you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained\n pilot.\"\n\n\n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense\n from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he\n relaxed—more—he slumped—and something began to die in his face, and\n the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would\n not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the\n almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.",
"The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n\n\n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n\n\n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the\n preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to\n buckle down to it. Oh, he—shucks?—the Receptionist wasn't such a bad\n girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n\n\n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n\n\n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back\n to the Personnel Manager.\n\n\n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got—\" He stopped to\n look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the\n beast right now.\""
],
[
"Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years\n ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now\n on throwing himself away to the sky.\n\n\n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the\n press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a\n technician.\n\n\n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he\n mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his\n shoulder.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't\n see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as\n rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away\n the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.",
"Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying\n to say.\nWhy\ndo you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't\n you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained\n pilot.\"\n\n\n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense\n from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he\n relaxed—more—he slumped—and something began to die in his face, and\n the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would\n not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the\n almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.",
"Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk\n button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way\n the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\nTHE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across\n the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n\n\n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm\nvery\nglad to\n meet you!\"\n\n\n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short\n shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n\n\n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the\n Receptionist said from behind her desk.",
"\"\nMarty!\n\" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed\n to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost\n ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n\n\n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she\n came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against\n the sides of her housedress.\n\n\n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his\n son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the\n street. \"\nCome back here!\n\" he shouted. \"A\nrocket\npilot,\" he cursed\n under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket\n pilot!\"",
"Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer,\n anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank\n with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set.\n The\nNavion\nwent up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as\n it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n\n\n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased,\n and no air to rock the wings—there were no wings. His face lost all\n expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his\n nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on\n the wheel. \"Up!\"\n\n\n The\nNavion\nbroke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened\n closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n\n\n \"Marty!\"",
"Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n \"But—isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd\n things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet!\nCome\n back here, you idiot!\n\" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his\n clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n\n\n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm\nsure\n!\"\n\n\n \"But, where's he going?\"\n\n\n \"\nStop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me?\nMarty?\"\n\n\n \"\nHoward!\nStop acting like a child and\ntalk\nto me! Where is that boy\n going?\"",
"... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known.\n He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the\n aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands.\n Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare\n you—?\" he asked gently.\n\n\n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n\n\n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n\"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain\n a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew,\n my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten\n years ago. I\ncan't\nget married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week?\n You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only\n smart thing to do is wait a while.\"",
"\"\nLow?\nCall\nthis\nlow?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and\n you'll\nreally\nget an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the\n wheel forward, and the\nNavion\ndipped its nose in a shallow dive,\n flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the\n chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the\n protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a\n dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n\n\n \"Marty!\"",
"Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a\n fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve\n hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd—that fool psychiatrist hadn't\n seemed to take up that much of his time.\n\n\n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he\n lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that\n nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was\n going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing\n in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster,\n as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\nISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n\n\n \"But\neverybody\nfills out an application,\" she protested.",
"Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that\nrocket\npilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm\n the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and\n fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math\n than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like\n brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of\nColliers\n, and I—\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged\n again.\n\n\n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job,\n and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a\n long time.\"\n\n\n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there\naren't\nany\n man-carrying rockets.\"",
"\"Uh-huh.\" Ish waved to the bartender for refills.\nTHE\nNAVION\ntook a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked\n upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette\n girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish\n laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that\n sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and\n corrected with a tilt of the wheel.\n\n\n \"Relax, Nan,\" he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter.\n \"It's only air; nasty old air.\"\n\n\n The girl patted her short hair back into place. \"I wish you wouldn't fly\n this low,\" she said, half-frightened.",
"\"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You\n trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n\n\n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the\n shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to\n stop him.\n\n\n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to\n break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose\n candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.",
"\"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is\n a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any\n plant in the States—Douglas, North American, Boeing—\nany\nof them—and\n pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as\n good as said so. After that—\" His voice had regained some of its former\n animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've\n told you all this before.\"\n\n\n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to\n her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's\n that\nrocket\npilot business again....\"",
"\"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n\n\n \"About normal.\"\n\n\n \"No wife—no steady girl.\"\n\n\n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n\n\n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung\n toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed\n between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n\n\n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his\n temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n\n\n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst\n was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed\n genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go,\n all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and\n drives.\"",
"And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came\n and got her.\n\"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\nThey always begin that way\n, Isherwood thought. The standard medical\n opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything\n he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as\n he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder\n of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen\n hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n\n\n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The\n realization disquieted him a little.\n\n\n \"Think you'll make it?\"",
"\"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n\n\n\n\n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with\n a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\nHE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings\n around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of\n the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and\n in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and\n huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And\n he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands\n moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an\n impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the\n personnel bunker with him.",
"Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned\n away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he\n told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n \"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n\n\n\n\n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of\n age at seventeen.\nTHE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not\n interested in working for a degree.\"",
"His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and\n hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard\n that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor\n with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n\n\n \"A\nrocket\npilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet\n parlor. \"A ro—\noh, no!\n—a rocket\npilot\n!\"\n\n\n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips\n fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the\n tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked\n out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch.\n He stopped there, hesitating a little.",
"\"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \"\nRocket!\nCall that pile\n of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n \"Who cares about the bloody\nmachines\n! If I thought roller-skating\n would get me there, I would have gone to work in a\nrink\nwhen I was\n seventeen! It's\ngetting there\nthat counts! Who gives a good goddam\nhow\nit's done, or what with!\"",
"\"It's a little different for everybody,\" she said with unexpected\n gentleness. \"It would have to be, wouldn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I guess so,\" he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe,\n and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six\n hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.\n\n\n \"Who do I see?\"\n\n\n She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. \"See?\"\n\n\n \"About getting out of here! Come on, come on,\" he barked, snapping his\n fingers impatiently. \"I haven't got much time.\"\n\n\n She smiled sweetly. \"Oh, but you do.\"\n\n\n \"Can it! Who's your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come\n on!\" His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm\n with the purpose that drove him."
],
[
"Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n \"But—isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd\n things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet!\nCome\n back here, you idiot!\n\" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his\n clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n\n\n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm\nsure\n!\"\n\n\n \"But, where's he going?\"\n\n\n \"\nStop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me?\nMarty?\"\n\n\n \"\nHoward!\nStop acting like a child and\ntalk\nto me! Where is that boy\n going?\"",
"\"\nMarty!\n\" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed\n to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost\n ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n\n\n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she\n came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against\n the sides of her housedress.\n\n\n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his\n son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the\n street. \"\nCome back here!\n\" he shouted. \"A\nrocket\npilot,\" he cursed\n under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket\n pilot!\"",
"His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and\n hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard\n that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor\n with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n\n\n \"A\nrocket\npilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet\n parlor. \"A ro—\noh, no!\n—a rocket\npilot\n!\"\n\n\n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips\n fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the\n tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked\n out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch.\n He stopped there, hesitating a little.",
"Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years\n ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now\n on throwing himself away to the sky.\n\n\n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the\n press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a\n technician.\n\n\n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he\n mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his\n shoulder.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't\n see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as\n rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away\n the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.",
"Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a\n fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve\n hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd—that fool psychiatrist hadn't\n seemed to take up that much of his time.\n\n\n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he\n lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that\n nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was\n going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing\n in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster,\n as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\nISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n\n\n \"But\neverybody\nfills out an application,\" she protested.",
"Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned\n away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he\n told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n \"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n\n\n\n\n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of\n age at seventeen.\nTHE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not\n interested in working for a degree.\"",
"Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying\n to say.\nWhy\ndo you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't\n you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained\n pilot.\"\n\n\n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense\n from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he\n relaxed—more—he slumped—and something began to die in his face, and\n the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would\n not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the\n almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.",
"\"No. I've\ngot\na job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half\n hour.\n\n\n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll\nonly\nread the literature I've\n given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have\n been cancelled.\"\n\n\n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this\n nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n\n\n \"But\nnobody\ngoes back.\"",
"Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\"\n he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get\n around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need\n is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week—no picnic, no pleasures of\n the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any\n laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again.\n Then, you can do anything you want to—as long as it doesn't look like\n the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n\n\n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose—\" he began, but Ish\n interrupted him.\n\n\n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace\n to go. We're built for it. People have to have—but what am I telling\nyou\nfor. If you don't know, who does?\"",
"\"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n\n\n \"About normal.\"\n\n\n \"No wife—no steady girl.\"\n\n\n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n\n\n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung\n toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed\n between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n\n\n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his\n temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n\n\n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst\n was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed\n genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go,\n all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and\n drives.\"",
"Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer,\n anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank\n with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set.\n The\nNavion\nwent up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as\n it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n\n\n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased,\n and no air to rock the wings—there were no wings. His face lost all\n expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his\n nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on\n the wheel. \"Up!\"\n\n\n The\nNavion\nbroke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened\n closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n\n\n \"Marty!\"",
"Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual\n response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n\n\n \"Uh-\nhuh\n.\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n \"Look—you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n\n\n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he\n said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they\n wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n\n\n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The\n Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force\n insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them.\n After all, it's\ntheir\nbeast.\"",
"MacKenzie's face passed no judgements—he simply hunched in his chair,\n seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his\n stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man—only\n a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired\n strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n\n\n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations.\n This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous—red-letter\n dangerous—because of it.\n\n\n \"No family.\"\n\n\n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was\n making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to\n worry about them.\"\n\n\n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought.\n MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression—but it still\n passed no judgements.",
"And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came\n and got her.\n\"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\nThey always begin that way\n, Isherwood thought. The standard medical\n opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything\n he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as\n he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder\n of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen\n hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n\n\n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The\n realization disquieted him a little.\n\n\n \"Think you'll make it?\"",
"\"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n\n\n\n\n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with\n a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\nHE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings\n around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of\n the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and\n in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and\n huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And\n he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands\n moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an\n impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the\n personnel bunker with him.",
"... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known.\n He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the\n aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands.\n Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare\n you—?\" he asked gently.\n\n\n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n\n\n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n\"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain\n a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew,\n my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten\n years ago. I\ncan't\nget married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week?\n You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only\n smart thing to do is wait a while.\"",
"\"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is\n a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any\n plant in the States—Douglas, North American, Boeing—\nany\nof them—and\n pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as\n good as said so. After that—\" His voice had regained some of its former\n animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've\n told you all this before.\"\n\n\n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to\n her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's\n that\nrocket\npilot business again....\"",
"Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that\nrocket\npilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm\n the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and\n fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math\n than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like\n brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of\nColliers\n, and I—\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged\n again.\n\n\n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job,\n and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a\n long time.\"\n\n\n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there\naren't\nany\n man-carrying rockets.\"",
"He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left\n any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n\n\n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw\n spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He\n could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking\n crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station\n was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it\n all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n\n\n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press\n representatives out of his way.\nMacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his\n stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled\n a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his\n bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.",
"\"\nLow?\nCall\nthis\nlow?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and\n you'll\nreally\nget an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the\n wheel forward, and the\nNavion\ndipped its nose in a shallow dive,\n flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the\n chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the\n protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a\n dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n\n\n \"Marty!\""
],
[
"\"\nMarty!\n\" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed\n to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost\n ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n\n\n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she\n came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against\n the sides of her housedress.\n\n\n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his\n son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the\n street. \"\nCome back here!\n\" he shouted. \"A\nrocket\npilot,\" he cursed\n under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket\n pilot!\"",
"Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years\n ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now\n on throwing himself away to the sky.\n\n\n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the\n press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a\n technician.\n\n\n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he\n mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his\n shoulder.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't\n see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as\n rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away\n the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.",
"And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came\n and got her.\n\"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\nThey always begin that way\n, Isherwood thought. The standard medical\n opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything\n he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as\n he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder\n of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen\n hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n\n\n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The\n realization disquieted him a little.\n\n\n \"Think you'll make it?\"",
"\"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n\n\n\n\n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with\n a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\nHE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings\n around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of\n the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and\n in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and\n huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And\n he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands\n moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an\n impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the\n personnel bunker with him.",
"\"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the\n cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure.\n Bring him on.\"\n\n\n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's—uh—he's in the next room. Okay to ask him\n in right now?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight\n Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\nMacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special\n attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the\n questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could\n see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the\n man's lapel.\n\n\n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\"\n MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.",
"Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt\n the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and\n feet were very cold.\n\n\n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n\n\n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk\n looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He\n sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n\n\n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n\n\n\n\n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the\n control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and\n began to brake for a landing.",
"Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned\n away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he\n told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n \"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n\n\n\n\n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of\n age at seventeen.\nTHE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not\n interested in working for a degree.\"",
"Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n \"But—isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd\n things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet!\nCome\n back here, you idiot!\n\" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his\n clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n\n\n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm\nsure\n!\"\n\n\n \"But, where's he going?\"\n\n\n \"\nStop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me?\nMarty?\"\n\n\n \"\nHoward!\nStop acting like a child and\ntalk\nto me! Where is that boy\n going?\"",
"Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a\n fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve\n hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd—that fool psychiatrist hadn't\n seemed to take up that much of his time.\n\n\n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he\n lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that\n nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was\n going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing\n in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster,\n as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\nISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n\n\n \"But\neverybody\nfills out an application,\" she protested.",
"Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that\nrocket\npilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm\n the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and\n fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math\n than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like\n brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of\nColliers\n, and I—\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged\n again.\n\n\n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job,\n and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a\n long time.\"\n\n\n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there\naren't\nany\n man-carrying rockets.\"",
"\"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You\n trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n\n\n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the\n shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to\n stop him.\n\n\n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to\n break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose\n candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.",
"He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left\n any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n\n\n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw\n spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He\n could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking\n crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station\n was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it\n all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n\n\n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press\n representatives out of his way.\nMacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his\n stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled\n a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his\n bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.",
"His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and\n hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard\n that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor\n with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n\n\n \"A\nrocket\npilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet\n parlor. \"A ro—\noh, no!\n—a rocket\npilot\n!\"\n\n\n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips\n fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the\n tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked\n out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch.\n He stopped there, hesitating a little.",
"Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by\n cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice.\n The unblinking stars filled the night.\n\n\n He looked around him. The Moon was silent—quiet, patient, waiting.\n Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large\n enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had\n waited.\n\n\n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the\n ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It\n was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the\n years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed\n the\nNavion\nat, that day over the Everglades.\n\n\n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n\n\n The Personnel Manager sighed.",
"\"Ish.\"\n\n\n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n\n\n Ish grunted.\n\n\n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n\n\n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to\n explain. \"You were the best there was—but you'd done something to\n yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family.\n You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were\n a rocket pilot—nothing else. You've never read an adult book that\n wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident.\n You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no\n props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong.\nWe couldn't take\n the chance, Ish!\n\"",
"\"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is\n a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any\n plant in the States—Douglas, North American, Boeing—\nany\nof them—and\n pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as\n good as said so. After that—\" His voice had regained some of its former\n animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've\n told you all this before.\"\n\n\n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to\n her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's\n that\nrocket\npilot business again....\"",
"The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n\n\n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n\n\n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the\n preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to\n buckle down to it. Oh, he—shucks?—the Receptionist wasn't such a bad\n girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n\n\n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n\n\n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back\n to the Personnel Manager.\n\n\n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got—\" He stopped to\n look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the\n beast right now.\"",
"\"So?\"\n\n\n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have\n forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n\n\n He remembered the time with the\nNavion\n, and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n\n\n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know\n what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came\n through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took\n all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday\n trip.\"\n\n\n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n\n\n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that\n comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and\n you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"",
"Isherwood shook his head. \"Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that\n Astronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav—they\n won't be talking about stars as check points, but as things in\n themselves.\" Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.\n\n\n The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. \"Still a\n snap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?\"\n\n\n Isherwood almost winced. \"Call it a hobby,\" he said. He looked down at\n his watch. \"Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven't\n convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give\n up, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let's\n go get some beer.\"",
"Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer,\n anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank\n with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set.\n The\nNavion\nwent up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as\n it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n\n\n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased,\n and no air to rock the wings—there were no wings. His face lost all\n expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his\n nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on\n the wheel. \"Up!\"\n\n\n The\nNavion\nbroke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened\n closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n\n\n \"Marty!\""
],
[
"Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years\n ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now\n on throwing himself away to the sky.\n\n\n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the\n press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a\n technician.\n\n\n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he\n mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his\n shoulder.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't\n see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as\n rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away\n the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.",
"\"\nMarty!\n\" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed\n to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost\n ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n\n\n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she\n came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against\n the sides of her housedress.\n\n\n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his\n son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the\n street. \"\nCome back here!\n\" he shouted. \"A\nrocket\npilot,\" he cursed\n under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket\n pilot!\"",
"He had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket to\n\n the moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himself\n\n before....\nDESIRE NO MORE\nby Algis Budrys\n(\nillustrated by Milton Luros\n)\n\"\nDesire no more than to thy lot may fall....\n\"\n—Chaucer\nTHE SMALL young man looked at his father, and shook his head.\n\n\n \"But you've\ngot\nto learn a trade,\" his father said, exasperated. \"I\n can't afford to send you to college; you know that.\"\n\n\n \"I've got a trade,\" he answered.\n\n\n His father smiled thinly. \"What?\" he asked patronizingly.\n\n\n \"I'm a rocket pilot,\" the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin of\n his cheeks.",
"His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and\n hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard\n that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor\n with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n\n\n \"A\nrocket\npilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet\n parlor. \"A ro—\noh, no!\n—a rocket\npilot\n!\"\n\n\n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips\n fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the\n tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked\n out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch.\n He stopped there, hesitating a little.",
"Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying\n to say.\nWhy\ndo you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't\n you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained\n pilot.\"\n\n\n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense\n from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he\n relaxed—more—he slumped—and something began to die in his face, and\n the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would\n not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the\n almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.",
"Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a\n fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve\n hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd—that fool psychiatrist hadn't\n seemed to take up that much of his time.\n\n\n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he\n lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that\n nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was\n going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing\n in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster,\n as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\nISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n\n\n \"But\neverybody\nfills out an application,\" she protested.",
"Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned\n away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he\n told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n \"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n\n\n\n\n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of\n age at seventeen.\nTHE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not\n interested in working for a degree.\"",
"\"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n\n\n\n\n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with\n a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\nHE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings\n around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of\n the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and\n in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and\n huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And\n he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands\n moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an\n impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the\n personnel bunker with him.",
"Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer,\n anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank\n with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set.\n The\nNavion\nwent up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as\n it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n\n\n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased,\n and no air to rock the wings—there were no wings. His face lost all\n expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his\n nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on\n the wheel. \"Up!\"\n\n\n The\nNavion\nbroke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened\n closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n\n\n \"Marty!\"",
"\"Ish.\"\n\n\n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n\n\n Ish grunted.\n\n\n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n\n\n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to\n explain. \"You were the best there was—but you'd done something to\n yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family.\n You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were\n a rocket pilot—nothing else. You've never read an adult book that\n wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident.\n You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no\n props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong.\nWe couldn't take\n the chance, Ish!\n\"",
"Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\"\n he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get\n around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need\n is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week—no picnic, no pleasures of\n the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any\n laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again.\n Then, you can do anything you want to—as long as it doesn't look like\n the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n\n\n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose—\" he began, but Ish\n interrupted him.\n\n\n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace\n to go. We're built for it. People have to have—but what am I telling\nyou\nfor. If you don't know, who does?\"",
"Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's\n not my racket.\"\n\n\n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n \"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n\n\n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n\n\n \"But\nwhat\n, for Pete's sake? What\nis\nthis crazy specialty that blinds\n you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n\n\n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it\n was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n\n\n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't\n it?\"",
"\"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is\n a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any\n plant in the States—Douglas, North American, Boeing—\nany\nof them—and\n pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as\n good as said so. After that—\" His voice had regained some of its former\n animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've\n told you all this before.\"\n\n\n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to\n her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's\n that\nrocket\npilot business again....\"",
"... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known.\n He sighed, the breath whispering through his parting teeth, and the\n aircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands.\n Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. \"Scare\n you—?\" he asked gently.\n\n\n She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.\n\n\n \"Me too,\" he said. \"Lost my head. Sorry.\"\n\"LOOK,\" HE told the girl, \"You got any idea of what it costs to maintain\n a racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground crew,\n my trailer, and that scrummy old Ryan that should have been salvaged ten\n years ago. I\ncan't\nget married. Suppose I crack the Foo next week?\n You're dead broke, a widow, and with a funeral to pay for. The only\n smart thing to do is wait a while.\"",
"Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n \"But—isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd\n things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet!\nCome\n back here, you idiot!\n\" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his\n clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n\n\n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm\nsure\n!\"\n\n\n \"But, where's he going?\"\n\n\n \"\nStop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me?\nMarty?\"\n\n\n \"\nHoward!\nStop acting like a child and\ntalk\nto me! Where is that boy\n going?\"",
"\"No. I've\ngot\na job,\" he said as he had been saying for the last half\n hour.\n\n\n The Receptionist sighed. \"If you'll\nonly\nread the literature I've\n given you, you'll understand that all your previous commitments have\n been cancelled.\"\n\n\n \"Look, Honey, I've seen company poop sheets before. Now, let's cut this\n nonsense. I've got to get back.\"\n\n\n \"But\nnobody\ngoes back.\"",
"\"Do you know how much red tape you'd have to cut?\"\n\n\n Ish shook his head. \"I don't want to sound nasty, but that's your\n problem.\"\n\n\n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Look—you feel you've got a job\n unfinished. Or, anyway, that's the way you'd put it. But, let's face\n it—that's not really what's galling you. It's not really the job, is\n it? It's just that you think you've been cheated out of what you devoted\n your life to.\"",
"\"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You\n trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n\n\n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the\n shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to\n stop him.\n\n\n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to\n break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose\n candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.",
"\"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n\n\n \"About normal.\"\n\n\n \"No wife—no steady girl.\"\n\n\n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n\n\n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung\n toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed\n between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n\n\n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his\n temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n\n\n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst\n was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed\n genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go,\n all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and\n drives.\"",
"He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left\n any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n\n\n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw\n spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He\n could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking\n crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station\n was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it\n all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n\n\n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press\n representatives out of his way.\nMacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his\n stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled\n a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his\n bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead."
],
[
"\"\nMarty!\n\" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed\n to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost\n ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n\n\n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she\n came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against\n the sides of her housedress.\n\n\n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his\n son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the\n street. \"\nCome back here!\n\" he shouted. \"A\nrocket\npilot,\" he cursed\n under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket\n pilot!\"",
"Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years\n ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now\n on throwing himself away to the sky.\n\n\n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the\n press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a\n technician.\n\n\n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he\n mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his\n shoulder.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't\n see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as\n rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away\n the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.",
"Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n \"But—isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd\n things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet!\nCome\n back here, you idiot!\n\" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his\n clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n\n\n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm\nsure\n!\"\n\n\n \"But, where's he going?\"\n\n\n \"\nStop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me?\nMarty?\"\n\n\n \"\nHoward!\nStop acting like a child and\ntalk\nto me! Where is that boy\n going?\"",
"Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt\n the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and\n feet were very cold.\n\n\n \"Come on, Ish,\" the Crew Chief said.\n\n\n \"All right,\" he mumbled. \"Okay. I'm up.\" He sat on the edge of his bunk\n looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He\n sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.\n\n\n Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.\n\n\n\n\n The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the\n control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and\n began to brake for a landing.",
"Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by\n cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice.\n The unblinking stars filled the night.\n\n\n He looked around him. The Moon was silent—quiet, patient, waiting.\n Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large\n enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had\n waited.\n\n\n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the\n ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It\n was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the\n years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed\n the\nNavion\nat, that day over the Everglades.\n\n\n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n\n\n The Personnel Manager sighed.",
"\"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n\n\n\n\n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with\n a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\nHE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings\n around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of\n the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and\n in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and\n huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And\n he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands\n moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an\n impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the\n personnel bunker with him.",
"He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left\n any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n\n\n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw\n spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He\n could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking\n crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station\n was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it\n all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n\n\n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press\n representatives out of his way.\nMacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his\n stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled\n a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his\n bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.",
"\"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You\n trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n\n\n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the\n shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to\n stop him.\n\n\n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to\n break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose\n candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.",
"Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned\n away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he\n told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n \"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n\n\n\n\n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of\n age at seventeen.\nTHE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not\n interested in working for a degree.\"",
"Somehow, his wrist was out of her encircling fingers. \"It's always 'that\nrocket\npilot business,'\" he said, mimicking her voice. \"Damn it, I'm\n the only trained rocket pilot in the world! I weigh a hundred and\n fifteen pounds, I'm five feet tall, and I know more navigation and math\n than anybody the Air Force or Navy have! I can use words like\n brennschluss and mass-ratio without running over to a copy of\nColliers\n, and I—\" He stopped himself, half-smiled, and shrugged\n again.\n\n\n \"I guess I was kidding myself. After the Cup, there'll be the test job,\n and after that, there'll be the rockets. You would have had to wait a\n long time.\"\n\n\n All she could think of to say was, \"But, Darling, there\naren't\nany\n man-carrying rockets.\"",
"Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer,\n anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank\n with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set.\n The\nNavion\nwent up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as\n it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n\n\n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased,\n and no air to rock the wings—there were no wings. His face lost all\n expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his\n nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on\n the wheel. \"Up!\"\n\n\n The\nNavion\nbroke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened\n closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n\n\n \"Marty!\"",
"\"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \"\nRocket!\nCall that pile\n of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n \"Who cares about the bloody\nmachines\n! If I thought roller-skating\n would get me there, I would have gone to work in a\nrink\nwhen I was\n seventeen! It's\ngetting there\nthat counts! Who gives a good goddam\nhow\nit's done, or what with!\"",
"\"Ish.\"\n\n\n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n\n\n Ish grunted.\n\n\n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n\n\n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to\n explain. \"You were the best there was—but you'd done something to\n yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family.\n You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were\n a rocket pilot—nothing else. You've never read an adult book that\n wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident.\n You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no\n props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong.\nWe couldn't take\n the chance, Ish!\n\"",
"The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n\n\n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n\n\n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the\n preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to\n buckle down to it. Oh, he—shucks?—the Receptionist wasn't such a bad\n girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n\n\n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n\n\n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back\n to the Personnel Manager.\n\n\n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got—\" He stopped to\n look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the\n beast right now.\"",
"The Personnel Manager smiled. \"I was about to say something.\"\n\n\n Ish stopped, abashed. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\n He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. \"You've got\n to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it\n were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether\n you want to stay, after all.\"\n\n\n \"How long's it going to take?\" Ish flushed under the memory of having\n actually begged for something.\n\n\n \"Not long,\" the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at\n the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were\n suddenly standing.\n\n\n \"Earth,\" the Personnel Manager said.",
"His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and\n hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard\n that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor\n with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n\n\n \"A\nrocket\npilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet\n parlor. \"A ro—\noh, no!\n—a rocket\npilot\n!\"\n\n\n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips\n fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the\n tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked\n out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch.\n He stopped there, hesitating a little.",
"\"Don't you see,\" Ish said, \"It\ncan't\nbe the same. I didn't push the\n beast up here. There wasn't any\nfeel\nto it. There wasn't any sound of\n rockets.\"\n\n\n The Personnel Manager sighed again. \"There wouldn't be, you know. Taking\n off from the Station, landing here—vacuum.\"\n\n\n Ish shook his head. \"There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody\n else to hear—and, maybe, maybe there\nwould\nbe. There'd be people,\n back on Earth, who'd hear it.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his\n eyes were shining a little.\n\"ISH! HEY, Ish, wake up, will you!\" There was a hand on his shoulder.\n \"Will you get a\nload\nof this guy!\" the voice said to someone else. \"An\n hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead.\"",
"Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a\n fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve\n hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd—that fool psychiatrist hadn't\n seemed to take up that much of his time.\n\n\n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he\n lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that\n nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was\n going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing\n in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster,\n as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\nISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n\n\n \"But\neverybody\nfills out an application,\" she protested.",
"\"Yeah.\nNow get out before I kill you.\n\"\n\n\n\n\n He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again—he\n died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world\n mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really\n died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an\n observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and\n purposeless eyes.\nTRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:\nObvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.\nThis etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.",
"\"I'm a good bit more than a trained pilot,\" he said quietly. \"The Foo Is\n a means to an end. After I win the Vandenberg Cup, I can walk into any\n plant in the States—Douglas, North American, Boeing—\nany\nof them—and\n pick up the Chief Test Pilot's job for the asking. A few of them have as\n good as said so. After that—\" His voice had regained some of its former\n animation from this new source. Now he broke off, and shrugged. \"I've\n told you all this before.\"\n\n\n The girl reached up, as if the physical touch could bring him back to\n her, and put her fingers around his wrist. \"Darling!\" she said. \"If it's\n that\nrocket\npilot business again....\""
],
[
"\"\nMarty!\n\" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed\n to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost\n ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n\n\n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she\n came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against\n the sides of her housedress.\n\n\n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his\n son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the\n street. \"\nCome back here!\n\" he shouted. \"A\nrocket\npilot,\" he cursed\n under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket\n pilot!\"",
"His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate and\n hate. \"Yeah,\" he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard\n that the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floor\n with an unnoticed stiff rustle.\n\n\n \"A\nrocket\npilot!\" His father's derision hooted through the quiet\n parlor. \"A ro—\noh, no!\n—a rocket\npilot\n!\"\n\n\n The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lips\n fell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the\n tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked\n out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch.\n He stopped there, hesitating a little.",
"Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years\n ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now\n on throwing himself away to the sky.\n\n\n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the\n press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a\n technician.\n\n\n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he\n mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his\n shoulder.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't\n see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as\n rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away\n the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.",
"Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n \"But—isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd\n things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet!\nCome\n back here, you idiot!\n\" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his\n clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n\n\n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm\nsure\n!\"\n\n\n \"But, where's he going?\"\n\n\n \"\nStop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me?\nMarty?\"\n\n\n \"\nHoward!\nStop acting like a child and\ntalk\nto me! Where is that boy\n going?\"",
"Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned\n away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he\n told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n \"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n\n\n\n\n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of\n age at seventeen.\nTHE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not\n interested in working for a degree.\"",
"Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a\n fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve\n hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd—that fool psychiatrist hadn't\n seemed to take up that much of his time.\n\n\n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he\n lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that\n nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was\n going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing\n in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster,\n as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\nISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n\n\n \"But\neverybody\nfills out an application,\" she protested.",
"MacKenzie's face passed no judgements—he simply hunched in his chair,\n seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his\n stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man—only\n a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired\n strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n\n\n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations.\n This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous—red-letter\n dangerous—because of it.\n\n\n \"No family.\"\n\n\n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was\n making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to\n worry about them.\"\n\n\n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought.\n MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression—but it still\n passed no judgements.",
"\"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n\n\n \"About normal.\"\n\n\n \"No wife—no steady girl.\"\n\n\n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n\n\n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung\n toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed\n between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n\n\n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his\n temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n\n\n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst\n was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed\n genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go,\n all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and\n drives.\"",
"Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer,\n anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank\n with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set.\n The\nNavion\nwent up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as\n it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n\n\n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased,\n and no air to rock the wings—there were no wings. His face lost all\n expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his\n nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on\n the wheel. \"Up!\"\n\n\n The\nNavion\nbroke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened\n closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n\n\n \"Marty!\"",
"Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying\n to say.\nWhy\ndo you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't\n you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained\n pilot.\"\n\n\n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense\n from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he\n relaxed—more—he slumped—and something began to die in his face, and\n the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would\n not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the\n almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.",
"\"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n\n\n\n\n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with\n a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\nHE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings\n around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of\n the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and\n in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and\n huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And\n he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands\n moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an\n impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the\n personnel bunker with him.",
"Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk\n button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way\n the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\nTHE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across\n the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n\n\n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm\nvery\nglad to\n meet you!\"\n\n\n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short\n shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n\n\n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the\n Receptionist said from behind her desk.",
"And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came\n and got her.\n\"SIT DOWN, Ish,\" the Flight Surgeon said.\nThey always begin that way\n, Isherwood thought. The standard medical\n opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything\n he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as\n he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder\n of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen\n hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n \"How's it?\" the FS asked.\n\n\n Ish grinned and shrugged. \"All right.\" But he didn't usually grin. The\n realization disquieted him a little.\n\n\n \"Think you'll make it?\"",
"He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left\n any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n\n\n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw\n spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He\n could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking\n crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station\n was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it\n all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n\n\n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press\n representatives out of his way.\nMacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his\n stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled\n a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his\n bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.",
"Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. \"Don't put words in my mouth!\"\n he snapped. \"Just get me back, and we'll split hairs about it when I get\n around this way again.\" Suddenly, he found himself pleading. \"All I need\n is a week,\" he said. \"It'll be a rough week—no picnic, no pleasures of\n the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won't be breaking any\n laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again.\n Then, you can do anything you want to—as long as it doesn't look like\n the trip's responsible, of course.\"\n\n\n The Personnel Manager hesitated. \"Suppose—\" he began, but Ish\n interrupted him.\n\n\n \"Look, they need it, down there. They've got to have a target, someplace\n to go. We're built for it. People have to have—but what am I telling\nyou\nfor. If you don't know, who does?\"",
"\"\nLow?\nCall\nthis\nlow?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and\n you'll\nreally\nget an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the\n wheel forward, and the\nNavion\ndipped its nose in a shallow dive,\n flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the\n chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the\n protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a\n dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n\n\n \"Marty!\"",
"\"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You\n trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!\"\n\n\n He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the\n shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to\n stop him.\n\n\n Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to\n break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose\n candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.",
"Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. \"Sorry, Dave, but no. It's\n not my racket.\"\n\n\n The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass.\n \"Strictly a specialist, huh?\"\n\n\n Ish nodded. \"Call it that.\"\n\n\n \"But\nwhat\n, for Pete's sake? What\nis\nthis crazy specialty that blinds\n you to all the fine things that man has done?\"\n\n\n Ish took a swallow of his beer. \"Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say it\n was the finest thing that man has ever done.\"\n\n\n The advisor's lips twisted in derision. \"That's pretty fanatical, isn't\n it?\"",
"Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by\n cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice.\n The unblinking stars filled the night.\n\n\n He looked around him. The Moon was silent—quiet, patient, waiting.\n Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large\n enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had\n waited.\n\n\n Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the\n ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It\n was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the\n years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed\n the\nNavion\nat, that day over the Everglades.\n\n\n \"It's not the same,\" he said.\n\n\n The Personnel Manager sighed.",
"The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. \"Crazy,\"\n he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next\n man.\n\n\n The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and\n softly quoted: \n \"Though I go bare, take ye no care,\n I am nothing a-cold;\n I stuff my skin so full within\n Of jolly good ale and old.\"\n\n\n \"Huh?\" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the\n unfamiliar.\n\n\n The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. \"It's a\n poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.\"\n\n\n \"Oh.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you give a damn?\" the advisor asked, with some peevishness."
],
[
"MacKenzie's face passed no judgements—he simply hunched in his chair,\n seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his\n stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man—only\n a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired\n strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.\n\n\n Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations.\n This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous—red-letter\n dangerous—because of it.\n\n\n \"No family.\"\n\n\n Ish shrugged. \"Not that I know of. Cut out at seventeen. My father was\n making good money. He had a pension plan, insurance policies. No need to\n worry about them.\"\n\n\n Ish knew the normal reaction a statement like that should have brought.\n MacKenzie's face did not go into a blank of repression—but it still\n passed no judgements.",
"\"How's things between you and the opposite sex?\"\n\n\n \"About normal.\"\n\n\n \"No wife—no steady girl.\"\n\n\n \"Not a very good idea, in my racket.\"\n\n\n MacKenzie grunted. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in his chair, and swung\n toward Ish. His lean arm shot out, and his index finger was aimed\n between Isherwood's eyes. \"You can't go!\"\n\n\n Ish was on his feet, his fists clenched, the blood throbbing in his\n temple veins. \"What!\" he roared.\n\n\n MacKenzie seemed to collapse in his chair. The brief commanding burst\n was over, and his face was apologetic, \"Sorry,\" he said. He seemed\n genuinely abashed. \"Shotgun therapy. Works best, sometimes. You can go,\n all right; I just wanted to get a fast check on your reactions and\n drives.\"",
"Nan could see that. Four years ago, he had been different. Four years\n ago, if she had only known the right words, he wouldn't be so intent now\n on throwing himself away to the sky.\n\n\n She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the\n press section and ran over to him. \"Marty!\" She brushed past a\n technician.\n\n\n He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. \"Well, Nan!\" he\n mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his\n shoulder.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Marty,\" she said in a rush. \"I didn't understand. I couldn't\n see how much it all meant.\" Her face was flushed, and she spoke as\n rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away\n the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.",
"Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual\n response-pattern. \"Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out.\"\n\n\n \"Uh-\nhuh\n.\" The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth.\n \"Look—you want to talk to a man for a while?\"\n\n\n \"What man?\" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he\n said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they\n wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.\n\n\n \"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket.\" The\n Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. \"Air Force\n insisted on it, as a matter of fact,\" he said. \"Can't really blame them.\n After all, it's\ntheir\nbeast.\"",
"Ish could feel the anger that still ran through him—anger, and more\n fear than he wanted to admit. \"I'm due at a briefing,\" he said tautly.\n \"You through with me?\"\n\n\n MacKenzie nodded, still embarrassed. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\n Ish ignored the man's obvious feelings. He stopped at the door to send a\n parting stroke at the thing that had frightened him. \"Big gun in the\n psychiatry racket, huh? Well, your professional lingo's slipping, Doc.\n They did put\nsome\nlearning in my head at college, you know. Therapy,\n hell! Testing maybe, but you sure didn't do anything to help me!\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" MacKenzie said softly. \"I wish I did.\"",
"Ish slammed the door behind him. He stood in the corridor, jamming a\n fresh cigarette in his mouth. He threw a glance at his watch. Twelve\n hours, twenty-two minutes, and four days to go.\n\n\n Damn! He was late for the briefing. Odd—that fool psychiatrist hadn't\n seemed to take up that much of his time.\n\n\n He shrugged. What difference did it make? As he strode down the hall, he\n lost his momentary puzzlement under the flood of realization that\n nothing could stop him now, that the last hurdle was beaten. He was\n going. He was going, and if there were faint echoes of \"Marty!\" ringing\n in the dark background of his mind, they only served to push him faster,\n as they always had. Nothing but death could stop him now.\nISH LOOKED up bitterly at the Receptionist. \"No,\" he said.\n\n\n \"But\neverybody\nfills out an application,\" she protested.",
"\"So?\"\n\n\n \"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have\n forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.\"\n\n\n He remembered the time with the\nNavion\n, and nodded. \"I might have.\"\n\n\n \"I hypnotized you,\" MacKenzie said. \"You were never dead. I don't know\n what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came\n through, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It took\n all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday\n trip.\"\n\n\n \"I said it was easy,\" Ish said.\n\n\n \"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that\n comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and\n you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?\"",
"He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left\n any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.\n\n\n He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw\n spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He\n could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking\n crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station\n was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it\n all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.\n\n\n \"It was easy,\" he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press\n representatives out of his way.\nMacKENZIE was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his\n stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled\n a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his\n bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.",
"\"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?\" Ish lit the\n cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. \"Sure.\n Bring him on.\"\n\n\n The FS smiled. \"Good. He's—uh—he's in the next room. Okay to ask him\n in right now?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight\n Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.\nMacKENZIE didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special\n attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the\n questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could\n see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the\n man's lapel.\n\n\n \"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?\"\n MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.",
"\"That's not my fault,\" he said, and walked away from her.\n\n\n\n\n A week later, he took his stripped-down F-110 across the last line with\n a scream like that of a hawk that brings its prey safely to its nest.\nHE BROUGHT the Mark VII out of her orbit after two days of running rings\n around the spinning Earth, and the world loved him. He climbed out of\n the crackling, pinging ship, bearded and dirty, with oil on his face and\n in his hair, with food stains all over his whipcord, red-eyed, and\n huskily quiet as he said his few words into the network microphones. And\n he was not satisfied. There was no peace in his eyes, and his hands\n moved even more sharply in their expressive gestures as he gave an\n impromptu report to the technicians who were walking back to the\n personnel bunker with him.",
"\"\nMarty!\n\" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed\n to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost\n ran as he got down the porch stairs.\n\n\n \"What is it, Howard?\" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as she\n came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against\n the sides of her housedress.\n\n\n \"Crazy kid,\" Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his\n son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the\n street. \"\nCome back here!\n\" he shouted. \"A\nrocket\npilot,\" he cursed\n under his breath. \"What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocket\n pilot!\"",
"Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown.\n \"But—isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very odd\n things in high schools these days, but it seems to me....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet!\nCome\n back here, you idiot!\n\" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his\n clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.\n\n\n \"Are you sure, Howard?\" his wife asked faintly.\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm\nsure\n!\"\n\n\n \"But, where's he going?\"\n\n\n \"\nStop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me?\nMarty?\"\n\n\n \"\nHoward!\nStop acting like a child and\ntalk\nto me! Where is that boy\n going?\"",
"\"Ish.\"\n\n\n It was MacKenzie, bending over him.\n\n\n Ish grunted.\n\n\n \"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there.\"\n\n\n He was past emotions. \"Yeah?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't take the chance.\" MacKenzie was trying desperately to\n explain. \"You were the best there was—but you'd done something to\n yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family.\n You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were\n a rocket pilot—nothing else. You've never read an adult book that\n wasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident.\n You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no\n props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong.\nWe couldn't take\n the chance, Ish!\n\"",
"Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer,\n anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank\n with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set.\n The\nNavion\nwent up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as\n it could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.\n\n\n And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased,\n and no air to rock the wings—there were no wings. His face lost all\n expression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under his\n nose. \"Up,\" he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked on\n the wheel. \"Up!\"\n\n\n The\nNavion\nbroke through the cloud, kept going. \"Up.\" If he listened\n closely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...\n\n\n \"Marty!\"",
"Nan's eyes clouded, and her lips trembled. \"That's what I've been trying\n to say.\nWhy\ndo you have to win the Vandenberg Cup next week? Why can't\n you sell the Foo and go into some kind of business? You're a trained\n pilot.\"\n\n\n He had been standing in front of her with his body unconsciously tense\n from the strain of trying to make her understand. Now he\n relaxed—more—he slumped—and something began to die in his face, and\n the first faint lines crept in to show that after it had died, it would\n not return to life, but would fossilize, leaving his features in the\n almost unreadable mask that the newspapers would come to know.",
"The Personnel Manager frowned. \"Um. Yes. Well, that's not unprecedented.\"\n\n\n \"But hardly usual,\" he added.\n\n\n Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the\n preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to\n buckle down to it. Oh, he—shucks?—the Receptionist wasn't such a bad\n girl, either. He smiled at her. \"Sorry I lost my head,\" he said.\n\n\n She smiled back. \"It happens.\"\n\n\n He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back\n to the Personnel Manager.\n\n\n \"Now. Let's get this thing straightened out. I've got—\" He stopped to\n look at his watch. \"Six hours and a few minutes. They're fueling the\n beast right now.\"",
"Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned\n away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. \"I don't know,\" he\n told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs.\n \"Maybe, the moon,\" he told her sarcastically.\n\n\n\n\n Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11\", had come of\n age at seventeen.\nTHE SMALL man looked at his faculty advisor. \"No,\" he said. \"I am not\n interested in working for a degree.\"",
"\"\nLow?\nCall\nthis\nlow?\" Ish teased. \"Here. Let's drop it a little, and\n you'll\nreally\nget an idea of how fast we're going.\" He nudged the\n wheel forward, and the\nNavion\ndipped its nose in a shallow dive,\n flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the\n chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the\n protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a\n dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.\n\n\n \"Marty!\"",
"Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk\n button. \"I'll call the Personnel Manager.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way\n the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.\nTHE PERSONNEL Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across\n the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.\n\n\n \"Martin Isherwood!\" he exclaimed enthusiastically. \"I'm\nvery\nglad to\n meet you!\"\n\n\n \"I'll bet,\" Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager's hand a short\n shake. \"I've got other ideas. I want out.\"\n\n\n \"That's all he's been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,\" the\n Receptionist said from behind her desk.",
"\"Rocket!\" he shouted into her terrified face. \"\nRocket!\nCall that pile\n of tin a rocket?\" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm.\n \"Who cares about the bloody\nmachines\n! If I thought roller-skating\n would get me there, I would have gone to work in a\nrink\nwhen I was\n seventeen! It's\ngetting there\nthat counts! Who gives a good goddam\nhow\nit's done, or what with!\""
]
] |
test
|
49901
|
[
"In the passage, what is the best definition for incongruity?",
"The static that the characters heard over the radio suggest:",
"This excerpt \"The end of the line, he grunted.\nAs though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened soundlessly\" suggests",
"Why did the alien's not gather humans on Earth instead of waiting?",
"Why is the title of the passage \"The Snare?\"",
"When the voice spoke to the characters about \"My masters have no animosity toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\" Why should they believed?",
"Why is the quote \"Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours\" significant in the passage?",
"What makes the machine in the passage unique?",
"What was significant about the ending?"
] |
[
[
"Jagged, rough",
"Out of place",
"Beautiful",
"Smooth, shiny"
],
[
"The aliens were blocking communication",
"The ship had flown into space",
"Something had occurred at Lunar City",
"The metal of the ship blocked communications "
],
[
"Their ordeal was just beginning",
"Kane knew how to open the door",
"Communications had just went out",
"Kane was lying about their situation"
],
[
"N/A",
"The aliens wanted to study humans after they had reached a technological standard",
"Purely coincidental that the ship was on the moon",
"Waiting on the moon would assure no conflict would take place"
],
[
"Humans were caught in the ship very similar to a snare trap",
"Closely sounding to scare, which is how all the characters felt on the ship",
"It describes the sounds that were heard over the communication lines",
"No meaning behind the title"
],
[
"They should not believe them as they were kidnapped",
"The aliens have not lied to them before",
"The compartments of recreation and food suggest they are compassionate",
"The aliens are aggressive and the humans should be cautious"
],
[
"Implies that humans are still not civilized",
"Its a violent example to be used in their situation",
"Implies that aliens will murder the humans",
"No significance"
],
[
"The machine was created by an alien civilization",
"It can only use language",
"Not unique",
"It was programmed to be non-violent"
],
[
"The machine was lying",
"No significance",
"Every problem has a solution",
"Kane was almost killed"
]
] |
[
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1
] |
[
0,
0,
0,
1,
0,
0,
1,
1,
0
] |
[
[
"The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained\n motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering\n voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\nStrange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving\n hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense\n of\nalienness\n. It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation.\n Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that\n it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a\n year, but the Moon was vast and the\nMare Serenitatis\ncovered three\n hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n\n\n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n\n\n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves?\n If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"",
"\"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of\n making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n\n\n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n\n\n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this\n ship, I'd build it with a\nconscience\nso it'd do its best at all\n times.\"\n\n\n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm\n getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged\n while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been\n present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.",
"At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and\n discussed our predicament.\n\n\n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed\n his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out!\n Every problem has a solution!\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"What?\"",
"\"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n\n\n \"Do you?\"\n\n\n \"Let's.\"\n\n\n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned\n to help Miller.\n\n\n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert\n mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help\n him as he stepped into the passageway.\n\n\n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette\n against the star-studded sky.\n\n\n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped\n with pain when he struck the ground. \"\nSomething\npushed me!\"\n\n\n \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through\n the passage....",
"The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them.\n The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and\n bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening\n the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes\n and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n\"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n\n\n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my\n fingers.\n\n\n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n\n\n I tasted a small piece.\n\n\n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n\n\n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n\n\n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.",
"\"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you\n on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n \"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I\n had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or\n cooperate with me.\"\n\n\n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n\n\n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in\n a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that\n this problem has a solution.\"\n\n\n I grunted my disgust.",
"\"\nOur\nmachines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch\n buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic\n brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it\n even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a\n thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered\n such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last\n night figuring—\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you\n don't know—\"\n\n\n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n\n\n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick\n fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.",
"They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by\n one removed their own helmets.\nAt the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat\n on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was\n a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of\n metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited\n easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n\n\n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n\n\n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened\n soundlessly.\n\n\n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n\n\n The door closed behind him.\n\n\n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"",
"A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken\n by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and\n flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n\n\n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the\n opening.\n\n\n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening\n to give him as much light as possible.\n\n\n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something!\n It\nmust\nbe an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the\n walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n\n\n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features\n struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the\n alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She\n hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.",
"... and struck an invisible solid wall.\nMy eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a\n recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with\n the absence of starlight.\n\n\n \"\nWhat happened?\n\"\n\n\n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a\n brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n\n\n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The\n ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the\n smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n\n\n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and\n instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.",
"My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's\n wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that\n few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\nFor several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a\n distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n\n\n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost\n choked.\n\n\n \"Whiskey!\"\n\n\n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to\n create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n\n\n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger\n than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n\n\n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at\n the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere.\n He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised\n knuckles.",
"The Snare\nBy RICHARD R. SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by WEISS\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright\n\n on this publication was renewed.]\nIt's easy to find a solution when there is one—the trick is to do it\n if there is none!\nI glanced at the path we had made across the\nMare Serenitatis\n. The\n Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because,\n as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth\n layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered\n across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands\n of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above.\n Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity\n like none I had ever felt.",
"\"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the\n aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put\n a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion\n because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n\n\n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and\n question us. Right?\"\n\n\n \"Right.\"\n\n\n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n\n\n \"What remark?\"\n\n\n \"It said, '\nMy\nmasters will be displeased with\nme\nif you arrive in a\n damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\nI assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of\n what he was driving at and I told him so.",
"\"\nDoes\nevery problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some\n problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our\n civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape.\n Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A\n murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an\n entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours\n is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned\n few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds\n to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I\n don't think we have a chance.\"",
"We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit\n cigarettes and waited.\n\n\n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n\n\n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was\n excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n\n\n She sat next to Verana.\n\n\n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n\n\n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing\n a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared\n silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect.\n Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice—\"\n\n\n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.",
"\"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to\n your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us\n to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission\n later.\"\n\n\n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go.\n A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning\n even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n\n\n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n\n\n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n\n\n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n\n\n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.",
"Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit.\n Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the\n brilliant flame against the metal.\n\n\n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's\n steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n\n\n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it\n be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n\n\n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The\n notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say\nsteel\nbecause it's\nsimilar\nto steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that,\n on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even\n a wind to disturb its surface. It's\nat least\nseveral thousand years\n old.\"\nWe slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane\n shouted, \"Look!\"",
"For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the\n preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them.\n The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of\n other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means\n of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse\n themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as\n that: a walk on the Moon.\n\n\n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock\n formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien\n ship.\n\n\n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's\n perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible\n situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\nI took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our\n steps.",
"We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors\n opened soundlessly.\n\n\n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n\n\n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the\n ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n\n\n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n\n\n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n\n\n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing\n thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four\n chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each\n chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting\n column.\n\n\n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a\n trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are\n food!\"",
"Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the\n corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n\n\n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through\n the doorway.\n\n\n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles\n frozen by shock.\n\n\n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n\n\n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the\n other doors that lined the hall.\n\n\n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n\n\n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly."
],
[
"\"I'll phone Lunar City.\" My fingers fumbled at the radio controls and\n trembled beneath the thick gloves.\n\n\n I turned the dials that would connect my radio with Lunar City....\n\n\n Static grated against my ear drums.\nStatic!\nI listened to the harsh, erratic sound and my voice was weak by\n comparison: \"Calling Lunar City.\"\n\n\n \"Static!\" Kane echoed my thoughts. His frown made deep clefts between\n his eyebrows. \"There's no static between inter-lunar radio!\"\n\n\n Verana's voice was small and frightened. \"That sounds like the static\n we hear over the bigger radios when we broadcast to Earth.\"\n\n\n \"It does,\" Marie agreed.",
"\"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over\nour\nradio, unless—\"\n Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of\n white—\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n\n\n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to\n speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n\n\n I deactivated my radio.\n\n\n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow\n corridor beyond.\n\n\n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press\n against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the\n pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on\n our bodies.\n\n\n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the\n open door.\n\n\n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed\n next and I was the last.",
"They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by\n one removed their own helmets.\nAt the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat\n on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was\n a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of\n metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited\n easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n\n\n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n\n\n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened\n soundlessly.\n\n\n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n\n\n The door closed behind him.\n\n\n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"",
"Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door\n that had imprisoned us.\n\n\n \"Miller!\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n\n\n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There\n were no visible recesses or controls.\n\n\n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a\n rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened\n breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong;\n Miller's was faltering and weak.\n\n\n \"Miller, get help!\"\n\n\n \"I'll—\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n\n\n \"What happened to him?\"",
"... and struck an invisible solid wall.\nMy eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a\n recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with\n the absence of starlight.\n\n\n \"\nWhat happened?\n\"\n\n\n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a\n brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n\n\n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The\n ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the\n smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n\n\n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and\n instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.",
"\"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n \"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the\n Moon!\"\n\n\n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible\n source and seemed to fill the room.\nVerana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's\n mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n\n\n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n \"Where are you?\nWho\nare you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n\n\n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n\n\n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted\n phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.",
"We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit\n cigarettes and waited.\n\n\n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n\n\n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was\n excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n\n\n She sat next to Verana.\n\n\n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n\n\n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing\n a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared\n silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect.\n Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice—\"\n\n\n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.",
"Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit.\n Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the\n brilliant flame against the metal.\n\n\n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's\n steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n\n\n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it\n be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n\n\n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The\n notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say\nsteel\nbecause it's\nsimilar\nto steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that,\n on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even\n a wind to disturb its surface. It's\nat least\nseveral thousand years\n old.\"\nWe slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane\n shouted, \"Look!\"",
"\"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to\n hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was\n the\noddest\nfeeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in\n a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt\nsomething\nsearch my mind and gather information. I could actually\nfeel\nit search my memories!\"\n\n\n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n\n\n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It\n seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched\n for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\nKane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n \"\nDo you know where we are?\n\" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens\n got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're\n guinea pigs!\"",
"Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the\n corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n\n\n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through\n the doorway.\n\n\n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles\n frozen by shock.\n\n\n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n\n\n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the\n other doors that lined the hall.\n\n\n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n\n\n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.",
"\"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly\n remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated\n extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She\n was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they\n explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their\n zoo!\"\n\n\n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.",
"\"No,\" the machine admitted.\n\n\n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill\nall of us\n!\"\n\n\n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n\n\n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway\n thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only\n tightened as I struggled.\n\n\n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you\n failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't\n bring them proof of your failure.\"\n\n\n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as\n it struggled with the problem.",
"We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were\n featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were\n the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n\n\n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was\n unyielding.\n\n\n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small\n amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously.\n It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I\n increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed\n my helmet.\n\n\n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in\n this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits\n later.\"",
"My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's\n wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that\n few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\nFor several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a\n distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n\n\n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost\n choked.\n\n\n \"Whiskey!\"\n\n\n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to\n create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n\n\n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger\n than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n\n\n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at\n the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere.\n He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised\n knuckles.",
"\"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n\n\n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to\n force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms.\n The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were\n the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or\n hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\nSix rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had\n been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work\n on.\n\n\n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that\n opened into the corridor.\n\n\n After intensive searching, we realized there was\nno way\nto damage the\n ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n\n\n We gave up.\n\n\n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to\n the \"kitchen.\"",
"\"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be\n beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n\n\n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached\n for the radio controls on my suit.\n\n\n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves.\n If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we\n discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n\n\n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet\n it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of\n an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for\n ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for\n prestige and wealth.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I conceded.",
"\"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n\n\n \"Do you?\"\n\n\n \"Let's.\"\n\n\n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned\n to help Miller.\n\n\n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert\n mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help\n him as he stepped into the passageway.\n\n\n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette\n against the star-studded sky.\n\n\n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped\n with pain when he struck the ground. \"\nSomething\npushed me!\"\n\n\n \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through\n the passage....",
"\"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the\n aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put\n a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion\n because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n\n\n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and\n question us. Right?\"\n\n\n \"Right.\"\n\n\n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n\n\n \"What remark?\"\n\n\n \"It said, '\nMy\nmasters will be displeased with\nme\nif you arrive in a\n damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\nI assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of\n what he was driving at and I told him so.",
"\"\nOur\nmachines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch\n buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic\n brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it\n even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a\n thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered\n such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last\n night figuring—\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you\n don't know—\"\n\n\n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n\n\n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick\n fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.",
"A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken\n by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and\n flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n\n\n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the\n opening.\n\n\n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening\n to give him as much light as possible.\n\n\n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something!\n It\nmust\nbe an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the\n walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n\n\n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features\n struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the\n alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She\n hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage."
],
[
"They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by\n one removed their own helmets.\nAt the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat\n on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was\n a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of\n metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited\n easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n\n\n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n\n\n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened\n soundlessly.\n\n\n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n\n\n The door closed behind him.\n\n\n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"",
"\"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you\n on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n \"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I\n had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or\n cooperate with me.\"\n\n\n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n\n\n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in\n a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that\n this problem has a solution.\"\n\n\n I grunted my disgust.",
"Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door\n that had imprisoned us.\n\n\n \"Miller!\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n\n\n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There\n were no visible recesses or controls.\n\n\n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a\n rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened\n breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong;\n Miller's was faltering and weak.\n\n\n \"Miller, get help!\"\n\n\n \"I'll—\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n\n\n \"What happened to him?\"",
"\"No,\" the machine admitted.\n\n\n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill\nall of us\n!\"\n\n\n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n\n\n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway\n thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only\n tightened as I struggled.\n\n\n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you\n failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't\n bring them proof of your failure.\"\n\n\n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as\n it struggled with the problem.",
"Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the\n corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n\n\n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through\n the doorway.\n\n\n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles\n frozen by shock.\n\n\n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n\n\n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the\n other doors that lined the hall.\n\n\n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n\n\n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.",
"\"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n\n\n \"Do you?\"\n\n\n \"Let's.\"\n\n\n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned\n to help Miller.\n\n\n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert\n mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help\n him as he stepped into the passageway.\n\n\n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette\n against the star-studded sky.\n\n\n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped\n with pain when he struck the ground. \"\nSomething\npushed me!\"\n\n\n \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through\n the passage....",
"We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors\n opened soundlessly.\n\n\n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n\n\n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the\n ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n\n\n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n\n\n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n\n\n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing\n thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four\n chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each\n chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting\n column.\n\n\n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a\n trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are\n food!\"",
"... and struck an invisible solid wall.\nMy eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a\n recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with\n the absence of starlight.\n\n\n \"\nWhat happened?\n\"\n\n\n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a\n brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n\n\n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The\n ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the\n smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n\n\n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and\n instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.",
"\"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of\n making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n\n\n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n\n\n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this\n ship, I'd build it with a\nconscience\nso it'd do its best at all\n times.\"\n\n\n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm\n getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged\n while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been\n present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.",
"\"\nOur\nmachines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch\n buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic\n brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it\n even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a\n thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered\n such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last\n night figuring—\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you\n don't know—\"\n\n\n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n\n\n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick\n fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.",
"I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were\n functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen\n asleep a few hours before.\n\n\n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was\n bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us,\n Marie was secured to another chair.\n\n\n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he\n appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled\n and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n\n\n \"Awake, huh?\"\n\n\n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were\n red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she\n looked at him.",
"\"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over\nour\nradio, unless—\"\n Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of\n white—\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n\n\n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to\n speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n\n\n I deactivated my radio.\n\n\n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow\n corridor beyond.\n\n\n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press\n against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the\n pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on\n our bodies.\n\n\n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the\n open door.\n\n\n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed\n next and I was the last.",
"\"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the\n aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put\n a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion\n because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n\n\n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and\n question us. Right?\"\n\n\n \"Right.\"\n\n\n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n\n\n \"What remark?\"\n\n\n \"It said, '\nMy\nmasters will be displeased with\nme\nif you arrive in a\n damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\nI assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of\n what he was driving at and I told him so.",
"At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and\n discussed our predicament.\n\n\n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed\n his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out!\n Every problem has a solution!\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"What?\"",
"\"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to\n your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us\n to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission\n later.\"\n\n\n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go.\n A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning\n even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n\n\n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n\n\n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n\n\n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n\n\n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.",
"We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were\n featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were\n the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n\n\n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was\n unyielding.\n\n\n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small\n amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously.\n It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I\n increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed\n my helmet.\n\n\n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in\n this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits\n later.\"",
"We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit\n cigarettes and waited.\n\n\n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n\n\n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was\n excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n\n\n She sat next to Verana.\n\n\n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n\n\n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing\n a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared\n silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect.\n Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice—\"\n\n\n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.",
"My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's\n wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that\n few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\nFor several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a\n distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n\n\n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost\n choked.\n\n\n \"Whiskey!\"\n\n\n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to\n create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n\n\n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger\n than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n\n\n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at\n the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere.\n He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised\n knuckles.",
"\"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n\n\n \"Watch!\"\n\n\n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n\n\n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n\n\n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n\n\n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n\n\n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return\n to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\nThe machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to\n interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had\n said it had no way to control our actions!\n\n\n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you\n return with dead specimens!\"",
"A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken\n by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and\n flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n\n\n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the\n opening.\n\n\n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening\n to give him as much light as possible.\n\n\n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something!\n It\nmust\nbe an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the\n walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n\n\n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features\n struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the\n alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She\n hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage."
],
[
"\"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to\n hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was\n the\noddest\nfeeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in\n a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt\nsomething\nsearch my mind and gather information. I could actually\nfeel\nit search my memories!\"\n\n\n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n\n\n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It\n seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched\n for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\nKane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n \"\nDo you know where we are?\n\" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens\n got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're\n guinea pigs!\"",
"\"What are your—your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked\n anxiously.\n\n\n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine\n you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like\n when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on\n your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity\n toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n\n\n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship\n and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food,\n oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to\n prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n\n\n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll\n find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"",
"\"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the\n aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put\n a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion\n because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n\n\n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and\n question us. Right?\"\n\n\n \"Right.\"\n\n\n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n\n\n \"What remark?\"\n\n\n \"It said, '\nMy\nmasters will be displeased with\nme\nif you arrive in a\n damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\nI assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of\n what he was driving at and I told him so.",
"\"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly\n remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated\n extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She\n was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they\n explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their\n zoo!\"\n\n\n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.",
"\"No,\" the machine admitted.\n\n\n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill\nall of us\n!\"\n\n\n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n\n\n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway\n thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only\n tightened as I struggled.\n\n\n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you\n failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't\n bring them proof of your failure.\"\n\n\n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as\n it struggled with the problem.",
"\"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n\n\n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to\n force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms.\n The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were\n the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or\n hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\nSix rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had\n been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work\n on.\n\n\n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that\n opened into the corridor.\n\n\n After intensive searching, we realized there was\nno way\nto damage the\n ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n\n\n We gave up.\n\n\n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to\n the \"kitchen.\"",
"He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This\n ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago,\n they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living\n in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like\n when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a\n sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made\n spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship\n and enter it—\nlike rabbits in a snare!\n\"\n\n\n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n\n\n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep\n us there while they study us.\"\n\n\n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.",
"For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the\n preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them.\n The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of\n other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means\n of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse\n themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as\n that: a walk on the Moon.\n\n\n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock\n formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien\n ship.\n\n\n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's\n perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible\n situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\nI took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our\n steps.",
"Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit.\n Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the\n brilliant flame against the metal.\n\n\n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's\n steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n\n\n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it\n be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n\n\n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The\n notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say\nsteel\nbecause it's\nsimilar\nto steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that,\n on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even\n a wind to disturb its surface. It's\nat least\nseveral thousand years\n old.\"\nWe slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane\n shouted, \"Look!\"",
"Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years\n could think of one!\n\n\n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had\n foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented\n the wheel. That thought awed me—somehow they had analyzed our brains\n thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments\n would be.\n\n\n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they\n hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were\n curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the\n Moon.\n\n\n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't\n help thinking,\nAnd to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem\n impossibly clever\n.\n\n\n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\nWhen I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.",
"\"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned\n months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n\n\n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the\n terror inside her.\n\n\n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be\n interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n\n\n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A\n race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves?\n Dissection is primitive. They won't\nhave to\ndissect us in order to\n study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"",
"My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's\n wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that\n few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\nFor several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a\n distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n\n\n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost\n choked.\n\n\n \"Whiskey!\"\n\n\n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to\n create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n\n\n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger\n than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n\n\n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at\n the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere.\n He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised\n knuckles.",
"\"Perhaps we'd better look at the other rooms,\" I told her.\nThe next room we examined was obviously for recreation. Containers were\n filled with dozens of strange games and books of instructions in the\n form of simple drawings. The games were foreign, but designed in such a\n fashion that they would be interesting to Earthmen.\n\n\n Two of the rooms were sleeping quarters. The floors were covered with a\n spongy substance and the lights were dim and soothing.\n\n\n Another room contained a small bathing pool, running water,\n waste-disposal units and yellow cakes of soap.\n\n\n The last room was an observatory. The ceiling and an entire wall were\n transparent. Outside, the stars shone clearly for a few seconds, then\n disappeared for an equal time, only to reappear in a different position.\n\n\n \"Hyper-space drive,\" Verana whispered softly. She was fascinated by\n the movement of the stars. For years, our scientists had sought a\n hyperspatial drive to conquer the stars.",
"\"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n \"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the\n Moon!\"\n\n\n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible\n source and seemed to fill the room.\nVerana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's\n mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n\n\n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n \"Where are you?\nWho\nare you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n\n\n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n\n\n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted\n phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.",
"\"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be\n beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n\n\n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached\n for the radio controls on my suit.\n\n\n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves.\n If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we\n discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n\n\n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet\n it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of\n an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for\n ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for\n prestige and wealth.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I conceded.",
"We walked slowly, examining the strange construction. The walls were\n featureless but still seemed alien. At various places on the walls were\n the outlines of doors without handles or locks.\n\n\n Kane pressed his shoulder against a door and shoved. The door was\n unyielding.\n\n\n I manipulated the air-vent controls of my spacesuit, allowed a small\n amount of the corridor's air into my helmet and inhaled cautiously.\n It smelled all right. I waited and nothing happened. Gradually, I\n increased the intake, turned off the oxygenating machines and removed\n my helmet.\n\n\n \"Shut off your oxy,\" I suggested. \"We might as well breathe the air in\n this place and save our supply. We may need the oxygen in our suits\n later.\"",
"\"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n\n\n \"Watch!\"\n\n\n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n\n\n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n\n\n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n\n\n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n\n\n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return\n to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\nThe machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to\n interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had\n said it had no way to control our actions!\n\n\n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you\n return with dead specimens!\"",
"A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken\n by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and\n flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n\n\n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the\n opening.\n\n\n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening\n to give him as much light as possible.\n\n\n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something!\n It\nmust\nbe an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the\n walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n\n\n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features\n struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the\n alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She\n hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.",
"\"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you\n on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n \"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I\n had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or\n cooperate with me.\"\n\n\n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n\n\n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in\n a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that\n this problem has a solution.\"\n\n\n I grunted my disgust.",
"\"\nOur\nmachines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch\n buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic\n brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it\n even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a\n thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered\n such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last\n night figuring—\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you\n don't know—\"\n\n\n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n\n\n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick\n fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath."
],
[
"The Snare\nBy RICHARD R. SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by WEISS\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright\n\n on this publication was renewed.]\nIt's easy to find a solution when there is one—the trick is to do it\n if there is none!\nI glanced at the path we had made across the\nMare Serenitatis\n. The\n Latin translated as \"the Sea of Serenity.\" It was well named because,\n as far as the eye could see in every direction, there was a smooth\n layer of pumice that resembled the surface of a calm sea. Scattered\n across the quiet sea of virgin Moon dust were occasional islands\n of rock that jutted abruptly toward the infinity of stars above.\n Considering everything, our surroundings conveyed a sense of serenity\n like none I had ever felt.",
"\"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the\n aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put\n a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion\n because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n\n\n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and\n question us. Right?\"\n\n\n \"Right.\"\n\n\n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n\n\n \"What remark?\"\n\n\n \"It said, '\nMy\nmasters will be displeased with\nme\nif you arrive in a\n damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\nI assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of\n what he was driving at and I told him so.",
"At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and\n discussed our predicament.\n\n\n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed\n his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out!\n Every problem has a solution!\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"What?\"",
"\"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you\n on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n \"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I\n had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or\n cooperate with me.\"\n\n\n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n\n\n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in\n a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that\n this problem has a solution.\"\n\n\n I grunted my disgust.",
"I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were\n functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen\n asleep a few hours before.\n\n\n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was\n bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us,\n Marie was secured to another chair.\n\n\n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he\n appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled\n and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n\n\n \"Awake, huh?\"\n\n\n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were\n red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she\n looked at him.",
"He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This\n ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago,\n they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living\n in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like\n when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a\n sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made\n spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship\n and enter it—\nlike rabbits in a snare!\n\"\n\n\n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n\n\n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep\n us there while they study us.\"\n\n\n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.",
"\"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n\n\n \"Do you?\"\n\n\n \"Let's.\"\n\n\n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned\n to help Miller.\n\n\n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert\n mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help\n him as he stepped into the passageway.\n\n\n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette\n against the star-studded sky.\n\n\n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped\n with pain when he struck the ground. \"\nSomething\npushed me!\"\n\n\n \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through\n the passage....",
"... and struck an invisible solid wall.\nMy eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a\n recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with\n the absence of starlight.\n\n\n \"\nWhat happened?\n\"\n\n\n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a\n brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n\n\n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The\n ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the\n smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n\n\n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and\n instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.",
"\"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n\n\n \"\nWhy?\n\" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n\n\n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged\n condition.\"\n\n\n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n \"Shtop me, then!\"\n\n\n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you\n other than use of your language.\"\n\n\n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n\n\n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and\n stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n\n\n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at\n the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools\n or weapons.",
"A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken\n by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and\n flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n\n\n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the\n opening.\n\n\n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening\n to give him as much light as possible.\n\n\n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something!\n It\nmust\nbe an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the\n walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n\n\n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features\n struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the\n alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She\n hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.",
"\"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n\n\n \"Watch!\"\n\n\n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n\n\n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n\n\n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n\n\n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n\n\n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return\n to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\nThe machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to\n interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had\n said it had no way to control our actions!\n\n\n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you\n return with dead specimens!\"",
"They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by\n one removed their own helmets.\nAt the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat\n on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was\n a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of\n metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited\n easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n\n\n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n\n\n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened\n soundlessly.\n\n\n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n\n\n The door closed behind him.\n\n\n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"",
"Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door\n that had imprisoned us.\n\n\n \"Miller!\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n\n\n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There\n were no visible recesses or controls.\n\n\n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a\n rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened\n breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong;\n Miller's was faltering and weak.\n\n\n \"Miller, get help!\"\n\n\n \"I'll—\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n\n\n \"What happened to him?\"",
"\"No,\" the machine admitted.\n\n\n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill\nall of us\n!\"\n\n\n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n\n\n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway\n thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only\n tightened as I struggled.\n\n\n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you\n failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't\n bring them proof of your failure.\"\n\n\n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as\n it struggled with the problem.",
"Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the\n corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n\n\n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through\n the doorway.\n\n\n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles\n frozen by shock.\n\n\n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n\n\n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the\n other doors that lined the hall.\n\n\n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n\n\n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.",
"\"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly\n remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated\n extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She\n was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they\n explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their\n zoo!\"\n\n\n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.",
"For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the\n preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them.\n The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of\n other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means\n of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse\n themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as\n that: a walk on the Moon.\n\n\n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock\n formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien\n ship.\n\n\n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's\n perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible\n situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\nI took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our\n steps.",
"\"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over\nour\nradio, unless—\"\n Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of\n white—\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n\n\n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to\n speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n\n\n I deactivated my radio.\n\n\n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow\n corridor beyond.\n\n\n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press\n against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the\n pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on\n our bodies.\n\n\n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the\n open door.\n\n\n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed\n next and I was the last.",
"Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years\n could think of one!\n\n\n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had\n foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented\n the wheel. That thought awed me—somehow they had analyzed our brains\n thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments\n would be.\n\n\n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they\n hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were\n curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the\n Moon.\n\n\n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't\n help thinking,\nAnd to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem\n impossibly clever\n.\n\n\n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\nWhen I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.",
"\"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned\n months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n\n\n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the\n terror inside her.\n\n\n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be\n interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n\n\n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A\n race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves?\n Dissection is primitive. They won't\nhave to\ndissect us in order to\n study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\""
],
[
"\"What are your—your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked\n anxiously.\n\n\n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine\n you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like\n when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on\n your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity\n toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n\n\n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship\n and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food,\n oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to\n prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n\n\n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll\n find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"",
"\"Yes. Well, this voice said not to worry and that it wasn't going to\n hurt me. It said it only wanted to learn something about us. It was\n the\noddest\nfeeling! All the time, this voice kept talking to me in\n a nice way and made me feel at ease ... and at the same time, I felt\nsomething\nsearch my mind and gather information. I could actually\nfeel\nit search my memories!\"\n\n\n \"What memories?\" I inquired.\n\n\n She frowned with concentration. \"Memories of high school mostly. It\n seemed interested in English and history classes. And then it searched\n for memories of our customs and lives in general....\"\nKane stalked into the room at that moment, his face red with anger.\n \"\nDo you know where we are?\n\" he demanded. \"When those damned aliens\n got me in that room, they explained what this is all about. We're\n guinea pigs!\"",
"\"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the\n aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put\n a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion\n because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n\n\n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and\n question us. Right?\"\n\n\n \"Right.\"\n\n\n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n\n\n \"What remark?\"\n\n\n \"It said, '\nMy\nmasters will be displeased with\nme\nif you arrive in a\n damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\nI assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of\n what he was driving at and I told him so.",
"\"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n\n\n \"\nWhy?\n\" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n\n\n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged\n condition.\"\n\n\n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n \"Shtop me, then!\"\n\n\n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you\n other than use of your language.\"\n\n\n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n\n\n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and\n stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n\n\n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at\n the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools\n or weapons.",
"My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's\n wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that\n few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\nFor several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a\n distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n\n\n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost\n choked.\n\n\n \"Whiskey!\"\n\n\n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to\n create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n\n\n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger\n than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n\n\n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at\n the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere.\n He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised\n knuckles.",
"\"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n \"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the\n Moon!\"\n\n\n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible\n source and seemed to fill the room.\nVerana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's\n mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n\n\n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n \"Where are you?\nWho\nare you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n\n\n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n\n\n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted\n phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.",
"\"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n\n\n \"Watch!\"\n\n\n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n\n\n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n\n\n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n\n\n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n\n\n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return\n to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\nThe machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to\n interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had\n said it had no way to control our actions!\n\n\n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you\n return with dead specimens!\"",
"\"No,\" the machine admitted.\n\n\n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill\nall of us\n!\"\n\n\n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n\n\n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway\n thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only\n tightened as I struggled.\n\n\n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you\n failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't\n bring them proof of your failure.\"\n\n\n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as\n it struggled with the problem.",
"\"Did they use telepathy to explain?\" Verana asked. I suddenly\n remembered that she was a member of a club that investigated\n extra-sensory perception with the hope of learning how it operated. She\n was probably sorry she hadn't been contacted telepathically.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Kane replied. \"I saw all sorts of mental pictures and they\n explained what they did to us. Those damned aliens want us for their\n zoo!\"\n\n\n \"Start at the beginning,\" I suggested.",
"... and struck an invisible solid wall.\nMy eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a\n recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with\n the absence of starlight.\n\n\n \"\nWhat happened?\n\"\n\n\n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a\n brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n\n\n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The\n ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the\n smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n\n\n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and\n instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.",
"We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit\n cigarettes and waited.\n\n\n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n\n\n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was\n excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n\n\n She sat next to Verana.\n\n\n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n\n\n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing\n a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared\n silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect.\n Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice—\"\n\n\n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.",
"\"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to\n your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us\n to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission\n later.\"\n\n\n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go.\n A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning\n even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n\n\n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n\n\n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n\n\n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n\n\n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.",
"Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years\n could think of one!\n\n\n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had\n foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented\n the wheel. That thought awed me—somehow they had analyzed our brains\n thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments\n would be.\n\n\n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they\n hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were\n curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the\n Moon.\n\n\n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't\n help thinking,\nAnd to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem\n impossibly clever\n.\n\n\n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\nWhen I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.",
"He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This\n ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago,\n they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living\n in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like\n when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a\n sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made\n spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship\n and enter it—\nlike rabbits in a snare!\n\"\n\n\n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n\n\n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep\n us there while they study us.\"\n\n\n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.",
"\"Six months. We'll be bottled up in this crate for six whole damned\n months! And when we get there, we'll be prisoners!\"\n\n\n Marie's hypnotic spell was fading and once more her face showed the\n terror inside her.\n\n\n \"Don't feel so bad,\" I told Kane. \"It could be worse. It should be\n interesting to see an alien race. We'll have our wives with us—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they'll dissect us!\" Marie gasped.\n\n\n Verana scoffed. \"A race intelligent enough to build a ship like this? A\n race that was traveling between the stars when we were living in caves?\n Dissection is primitive. They won't\nhave to\ndissect us in order to\n study us. They'll have more advanced methods.\"",
"Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the\n corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n\n\n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through\n the doorway.\n\n\n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles\n frozen by shock.\n\n\n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n\n\n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the\n other doors that lined the hall.\n\n\n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n\n\n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.",
"They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by\n one removed their own helmets.\nAt the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat\n on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was\n a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of\n metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited\n easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n\n\n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n\n\n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened\n soundlessly.\n\n\n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n\n\n The door closed behind him.\n\n\n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"",
"We had walked not more than two yards when the rest of the doors\n opened soundlessly.\n\n\n Verana's hand flew to her mouth to stifle a gasp.\n\n\n Six doors were now open. The only two that remained closed were the\n ones that the Kanes had unwillingly entered.\n\n\n This time, no invisible hand thrust us into any of the rooms.\n\n\n I entered the nearest one. Verana followed hesitantly.\n\n\n The walls of the large room were lined with shelves containing\n thousands of variously colored boxes and bottles. A table and four\n chairs were located in the center of the green, plasticlike floor. Each\n chair had no back, only a curving platform with a single supporting\n column.\n\n\n \"Ed!\" I joined Verana on the other side of the room. She pointed a\n trembling finger at some crude drawings. \"The things in this room are\n food!\"",
"For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the\n preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them.\n The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of\n other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means\n of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse\n themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as\n that: a walk on the Moon.\n\n\n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock\n formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien\n ship.\n\n\n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's\n perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible\n situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\nI took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our\n steps.",
"\"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n\n\n \"Do you?\"\n\n\n \"Let's.\"\n\n\n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned\n to help Miller.\n\n\n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert\n mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help\n him as he stepped into the passageway.\n\n\n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette\n against the star-studded sky.\n\n\n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped\n with pain when he struck the ground. \"\nSomething\npushed me!\"\n\n\n \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through\n the passage...."
],
[
"\"\nDoes\nevery problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some\n problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our\n civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape.\n Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A\n murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an\n entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours\n is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned\n few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds\n to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I\n don't think we have a chance.\"",
"At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and\n discussed our predicament.\n\n\n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed\n his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out!\n Every problem has a solution!\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"What?\"",
"\"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you\n on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n \"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I\n had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or\n cooperate with me.\"\n\n\n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n\n\n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in\n a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that\n this problem has a solution.\"\n\n\n I grunted my disgust.",
"\"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to\n your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us\n to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission\n later.\"\n\n\n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go.\n A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning\n even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n\n\n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n\n\n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n\n\n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n\n\n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.",
"\"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the\n aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put\n a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion\n because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n\n\n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and\n question us. Right?\"\n\n\n \"Right.\"\n\n\n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n\n\n \"What remark?\"\n\n\n \"It said, '\nMy\nmasters will be displeased with\nme\nif you arrive in a\n damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\nI assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of\n what he was driving at and I told him so.",
"Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door\n that had imprisoned us.\n\n\n \"Miller!\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n\n\n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There\n were no visible recesses or controls.\n\n\n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a\n rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened\n breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong;\n Miller's was faltering and weak.\n\n\n \"Miller, get help!\"\n\n\n \"I'll—\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n\n\n \"What happened to him?\"",
"\"\nOur\nmachines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch\n buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic\n brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it\n even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a\n thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered\n such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last\n night figuring—\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you\n don't know—\"\n\n\n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n\n\n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick\n fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.",
"\"No,\" the machine admitted.\n\n\n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill\nall of us\n!\"\n\n\n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n\n\n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway\n thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only\n tightened as I struggled.\n\n\n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you\n failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't\n bring them proof of your failure.\"\n\n\n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as\n it struggled with the problem.",
"\"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of\n making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n\n\n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n\n\n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this\n ship, I'd build it with a\nconscience\nso it'd do its best at all\n times.\"\n\n\n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm\n getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged\n while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been\n present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.",
"They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by\n one removed their own helmets.\nAt the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat\n on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was\n a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of\n metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited\n easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n\n\n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n\n\n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened\n soundlessly.\n\n\n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n\n\n The door closed behind him.\n\n\n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"",
"\"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n\n\n \"Watch!\"\n\n\n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n\n\n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n\n\n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n\n\n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n\n\n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return\n to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\nThe machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to\n interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had\n said it had no way to control our actions!\n\n\n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you\n return with dead specimens!\"",
"\"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n\n\n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to\n force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms.\n The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were\n the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or\n hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\nSix rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had\n been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work\n on.\n\n\n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that\n opened into the corridor.\n\n\n After intensive searching, we realized there was\nno way\nto damage the\n ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n\n\n We gave up.\n\n\n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to\n the \"kitchen.\"",
"\"If it's a perfect sphere,\" Miller suggested, \"most of it must be\n beneath the Moon's surface.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe it isn't a sphere,\" my wife said. \"Maybe this is all of it.\"\n\n\n \"Let's call Lunar City and tell the authorities about it.\" I reached\n for the radio controls on my suit.\n\n\n Kane grabbed my arm. \"No. Let's find out whatever we can by ourselves.\n If we tell the authorities, they'll order us to leave it alone. If we\n discover something really important, we'll be famous!\"\n\n\n I lowered my arm. His outburst seemed faintly childish to me. And yet\n it carried a good measure of common sense. If we discovered proof of\n an alien race, we would indeed be famous. The more we discovered for\n ourselves, the more famous we'd be. Fame was practically a synonym for\n prestige and wealth.\n\n\n \"All right,\" I conceded.",
"My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's\n wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that\n few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\nFor several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a\n distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n\n\n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost\n choked.\n\n\n \"Whiskey!\"\n\n\n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to\n create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n\n\n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger\n than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n\n\n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at\n the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere.\n He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised\n knuckles.",
"\"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n\n\n \"\nWhy?\n\" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n\n\n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged\n condition.\"\n\n\n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n \"Shtop me, then!\"\n\n\n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you\n other than use of your language.\"\n\n\n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n\n\n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and\n stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n\n\n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at\n the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools\n or weapons.",
"For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the\n preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them.\n The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of\n other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means\n of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse\n themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as\n that: a walk on the Moon.\n\n\n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock\n formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien\n ship.\n\n\n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's\n perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible\n situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\nI took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our\n steps.",
"\"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n\n\n \"Do you?\"\n\n\n \"Let's.\"\n\n\n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned\n to help Miller.\n\n\n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert\n mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help\n him as he stepped into the passageway.\n\n\n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette\n against the star-studded sky.\n\n\n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped\n with pain when he struck the ground. \"\nSomething\npushed me!\"\n\n\n \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through\n the passage....",
"\"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over\nour\nradio, unless—\"\n Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of\n white—\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n\n\n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to\n speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n\n\n I deactivated my radio.\n\n\n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow\n corridor beyond.\n\n\n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press\n against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the\n pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on\n our bodies.\n\n\n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the\n open door.\n\n\n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed\n next and I was the last.",
"He flashed an angry glance at me, but seemed to calm somewhat. \"This\n ship was made by a race from another galaxy. Thousands of years ago,\n they came to Earth in their spaceships when men were primitives living\n in caves. They wanted to know what our civilization would be like\n when we developed space flight. So they put this ship on the Moon as a\n sort of booby-trap. They put it there with the idea that when we made\n spaceships and went to the Moon, sooner or later, we'd find the ship\n and enter it—\nlike rabbits in a snare!\n\"\n\n\n \"And now the booby-trap is on its way home,\" I guessed.\n\n\n \"Yeah, this ship is taking us to their planet and they're going to keep\n us there while they study us.\"\n\n\n \"How long will the trip take?\" I asked.",
"I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were\n functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen\n asleep a few hours before.\n\n\n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was\n bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us,\n Marie was secured to another chair.\n\n\n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he\n appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled\n and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n\n\n \"Awake, huh?\"\n\n\n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were\n red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she\n looked at him."
],
[
"\"\nOur\nmachines always do their best,\" he argued, \"because we punch\n buttons and they respond in predetermined patterns. But the electronic\n brain in this ship isn't automatic. It makes decisions and I'll bet it\n even has to decide how much energy and time to put into each process!\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n He shrugged muscular shoulders. \"So this ship is operated by a\n thinking, conscientious machine. It's the first time I've encountered\n such a machine, but I think I know what will happen. I spent hours last\n night figuring—\"\n\n\n \"What are you talking about?\" I interrupted. \"Are you so drunk that you\n don't know—\"\n\n\n \"I'll show you, Ed.\"\n\n\n He walked around the table and stood behind my chair. I felt his thick\n fingers around my throat and smelled the alcohol on his breath.",
"\"Can you see me, machine?\" he asked the empty air.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" the electronic brain replied.\n\n\n \"Watch!\"\n\n\n Kane tightened his fingers around my throat.\n\n\n Verana and Marie screamed shrilly.\n\n\n My head seemed to swell like a balloon; my throat gurgled painfully.\n\n\n \"Please stop,\" the machine pleaded.\n\n\n \"What will your masters think of you if I kill all of us? You'll return\n to them with a cargo of dead people!\"\nThe machine didn't answer. I waited for the electronic brain to\n interfere and, with a cold knot in my stomach, realized the machine had\n said it had no way to control our actions!\n\n\n \"Your purpose won't be fulfilled, will it?\" Kane demanded. \"Not if you\n return with dead specimens!\"",
"\"Please don't hurt yourself,\" the machine pleaded.\n\n\n \"\nWhy?\n\" Kane screamed at the ceiling. \"Why should you care?\"\n\n\n \"My masters will be displeased with me if you arrive in a damaged\n condition.\"\n\n\n Kane banged his head against a bulkhead; an ugly bruise formed rapidly.\n \"Shtop me, then!\"\n\n\n \"I can't. My masters created no way for me to restrain or contact you\n other than use of your language.\"\n\n\n It took fully fifteen minutes to drag Kane to his sleeping compartment.\n\n\n After I left Kane in his wife's care, I went to the adjoining room and\n stretched out on the soft floor beside Verana.\n\n\n I tried to think of some solution. We were locked in an alien ship at\n the start of a six months' journey to a strange planet. We had no tools\n or weapons.",
"\"Ed,\" he said, \"if you could build an electronic brain capable of\n making decisions, how would you build it?\"\n\n\n \"Hell, I don't know,\" I confessed.\n\n\n \"Well, if I could build an electronic brain like the one running this\n ship, I'd build it with a\nconscience\nso it'd do its best at all\n times.\"\n\n\n \"Machines always do their best,\" I argued. \"Come on, untie us. I'm\n getting a crick in my back!\" I didn't like the idea of being slugged\n while asleep. If Kane had been sober and if his wife hadn't been\n present, I would have let him know exactly what I thought of him.",
"My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's\n wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that\n few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\nFor several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a\n distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n\n\n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost\n choked.\n\n\n \"Whiskey!\"\n\n\n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to\n create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n\n\n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger\n than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n\n\n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at\n the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere.\n He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised\n knuckles.",
"... and struck an invisible solid wall.\nMy eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a\n recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with\n the absence of starlight.\n\n\n \"\nWhat happened?\n\"\n\n\n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a\n brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n\n\n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The\n ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the\n smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n\n\n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and\n instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.",
"They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by\n one removed their own helmets.\nAt the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat\n on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was\n a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of\n metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited\n easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n\n\n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n\n\n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened\n soundlessly.\n\n\n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n\n\n The door closed behind him.\n\n\n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"",
"\"No,\" the machine admitted.\n\n\n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill\nall of us\n!\"\n\n\n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n\n\n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway\n thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only\n tightened as I struggled.\n\n\n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you\n failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't\n bring them proof of your failure.\"\n\n\n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as\n it struggled with the problem.",
"\"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the\n aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put\n a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion\n because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n\n\n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and\n question us. Right?\"\n\n\n \"Right.\"\n\n\n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n\n\n \"What remark?\"\n\n\n \"It said, '\nMy\nmasters will be displeased with\nme\nif you arrive in a\n damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\nI assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of\n what he was driving at and I told him so.",
"Solution? I doubted if two dozen geniuses working steadily for years\n could think of one!\n\n\n I wondered what the alien race was like. Intelligent, surely: They had\n foreseen our conquest of space flight when we hadn't even invented\n the wheel. That thought awed me—somehow they had analyzed our brains\n thousands of years ago and calculated what our future accomplishments\n would be.\n\n\n They had been able to predict our scientific development, but they\n hadn't been able to tell how our civilization would develop. They were\n curious, so they had left an enormously elaborate piece of bait on the\n Moon.\n\n\n The aliens were incredibly more advanced than ourselves. I couldn't\n help thinking,\nAnd to a rabbit in a snare, mankind must seem\n impossibly clever\n.\n\n\n I decided to ask the machine about its makers in the \"morning.\"\nWhen I awoke, my head was throbbing painfully.",
"Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit.\n Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the\n brilliant flame against the metal.\n\n\n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's\n steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n\n\n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it\n be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n\n\n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The\n notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say\nsteel\nbecause it's\nsimilar\nto steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that,\n on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even\n a wind to disturb its surface. It's\nat least\nseveral thousand years\n old.\"\nWe slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane\n shouted, \"Look!\"",
"\"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to\n your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us\n to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission\n later.\"\n\n\n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go.\n A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning\n even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n\n\n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n\n\n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n\n\n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n\n\n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.",
"The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained\n motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering\n voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\nStrange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving\n hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense\n of\nalienness\n. It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation.\n Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that\n it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a\n year, but the Moon was vast and the\nMare Serenitatis\ncovered three\n hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n\n\n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n\n\n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves?\n If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"",
"A few feet above the ground, the structure's smooth surface was broken\n by a circular opening that yawned invitingly. Kane ran ahead and\n flashed his head-lamp into the dark recess.\n\n\n \"There's a small room inside,\" he told us, and climbed through the\n opening.\n\n\n We waited outside and focused our lamps through the five-foot opening\n to give him as much light as possible.\n\n\n \"Come on in, Marie,\" he called to his wife. \"This is really something!\n It\nmust\nbe an alien race. There's all kinds of weird drawings on the\n walls and gadgets that look like controls for something....\"\n\n\n Briefly, my lamp flickered over Marie's pale face. Her features\n struggled with two conflicting emotions: She was frightened by the\n alienness of the thing and yet she wanted to be with her husband. She\n hesitated momentarily, then climbed through the passage.",
"\"What are your—your masters going to do with us?\" Marie asked\n anxiously.\n\n\n \"You won't be harmed. My masters merely wish to question and examine\n you. Thousands of years ago, they wondered what your race would be like\n when it developed to the space-flight stage. They left this ship on\n your Moon only because they were curious. My masters have no animosity\n toward your race, only compassion and curiosity.\"\n\n\n I remembered the way antigravity rays had shoved Miller from the ship\n and asked the machine, \"Why didn't you let our fifth member board the\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"The trip to my makers' planet will take six months. There are food,\n oxygen and living facilities for four only of your race. I had to\n prevent the fifth from entering the ship.\"\n\n\n \"Come on,\" Kane ordered. \"We'll search this ship room by room and we'll\n find some way to make it take us back to Earth.\"",
"Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the\n corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n\n\n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through\n the doorway.\n\n\n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles\n frozen by shock.\n\n\n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n\n\n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the\n other doors that lined the hall.\n\n\n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n\n\n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly.",
"\"Maybe we can reach the ship's controls somehow,\" Kane said excitedly.\n \"We've got to try to change the ship's course and get back to the\n Moon!\"\n\n\n \"It's impossible. Don't waste your time.\" The voice had no visible\n source and seemed to fill the room.\nVerana snapped her fingers. \"So that's why the aliens read Marie's\n mind! They wanted to learn our language so they could talk to us!\"\n\n\n Kane whirled in a complete circle, glaring at each of the four walls.\n \"Where are you?\nWho\nare you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm located in a part of the ship you can't reach. I'm a machine.\"\n\n\n \"Is anyone else aboard besides ourselves?\"\n\n\n \"No. I control the ship.\" Although the voice spoke without stilted\n phrases, the tone was cold and mechanical.",
"The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them.\n The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and\n bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening\n the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes\n and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n\"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n\n\n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my\n fingers.\n\n\n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n\n\n I tasted a small piece.\n\n\n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n\n\n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n\n\n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.",
"Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door\n that had imprisoned us.\n\n\n \"Miller!\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n\n\n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There\n were no visible recesses or controls.\n\n\n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a\n rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened\n breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong;\n Miller's was faltering and weak.\n\n\n \"Miller, get help!\"\n\n\n \"I'll—\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n\n\n \"What happened to him?\"",
"At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and\n discussed our predicament.\n\n\n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed\n his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out!\n Every problem has a solution!\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"What?\""
],
[
"They saw that I had removed my helmet and was still alive and one by\n one removed their own helmets.\nAt the end of the corridor, Kane stopped before a blank wall. The sweat\n on his face glistened dully; his chest rose and fell rapidly. Kane was\n a pilot and one of the prerequisites for the job of guiding tons of\n metal between Earth and the Moon was a good set of nerves. Kane excited\n easily, his temper was fiery, but his nerves were like steel.\n\n\n \"The end of the line,\" he grunted.\n\n\n As though to disprove the statement, a door on his right side opened\n soundlessly.\n\n\n He went through the doorway as if shoved violently by an invisible hand.\n\n\n The door closed behind him.\n\n\n Marie threw herself at the door and beat at the metal. \"Harry!\"",
"\"No,\" the machine admitted.\n\n\n \"If you don't take us back to the Moon,\" Kane threatened, \"I'll kill\nall of us\n!\"\n\n\n The alien electronic brain was silent.\n\n\n By this time, I couldn't see and Kane's voice was a hollow, faraway\n thing that rang in my ears. I tugged at my bindings, but they only\n tightened as I struggled.\n\n\n \"If you take us back to the Moon, your masters will never know you\n failed in your mission. They won't know you failed because you won't\n bring them proof of your failure.\"\n\n\n My fading consciousness tried to envision the alien mechanical brain as\n it struggled with the problem.",
"\"Look at it this way,\" Kane persisted. \"If you carry our corpses to\n your masters, all your efforts will have been useless. If you return us\n to the Moon alive, you'll still have a chance to carry out your mission\n later.\"\n\n\n A long silence followed. Verana and Marie screamed at Kane to let go.\n A soft darkness seemed to fill the room, blurring everything, drowning\n even their shrieks in strangling blackness.\n\n\n \"You win,\" the machine conceded. \"I'll return the ship to the Moon.\"\n\n\n Kane released his grip on my throat.\n\n\n \"See?\" he asked. \"Didn't I tell you every problem has a solution?\"\n\n\n I didn't answer. I was too busy enjoying breathing again.",
"\"Obvious, isn't it? While all of you were asleep, I conked each of you\n on the head, dragged you in here and tied you up.\" He smiled crookedly.\n \"It's amazing the things a person can do when he's pickled. I'm sorry I\n had to be so rough, but I have a plan and I knew you wouldn't agree or\n cooperate with me.\"\n\n\n \"What's your plan?\" I asked.\n\n\n He grinned wryly and crinkled bloodshot eyes. \"I don't want to live in\n a zoo on an alien planet. I want to go home and prove my theory that\n this problem has a solution.\"\n\n\n I grunted my disgust.",
"I opened my eyes and blinked several times to make sure they were\n functioning properly. I wasn't in the compartment where I had fallen\n asleep a few hours before.\n\n\n I was tied to one of the chairs in the \"kitchen.\" Beside me, Verana was\n bound to a chair by strips of cloth from her skirt, and across from us,\n Marie was secured to another chair.\n\n\n Kane staggered into the room. Although he was visibly drunk, he\n appeared more sober than the night before. His dark hair was rumpled\n and his face was flushed, but his eyes gleamed with a growing alertness.\n\n\n \"Awake, huh?\"\n\n\n \"What have you done, Harry?\" his wife screamed at him. Her eyes were\n red with tears and her lips twisted in an expression of shame when she\n looked at him.",
"For several minutes, we remained motionless and silent. I recalled the\n preceding events of the day, searched for a sense of normality in them.\n The Kanes, Miller, Verana and I lived in Lunar City with hundreds of\n other people. Mankind had inhabited the Moon for over a year. Means\n of recreation were scarce. Many people explored the place to amuse\n themselves. After supper, we had decided to take a walk. As simple as\n that: a walk on the Moon.\n\n\n We had expected only the familiar craters, chasms and weird rock\n formations. A twist of fate and here we were: imprisoned in an alien\n ship.\n\n\n My legs quivered with fatigue, my heart throbbed heavily, Verana's\n perfume dizzied me. No, it wasn't a dream. Despite our incredible\n situation, there was no sensation of unreality.\nI took Verana's hand and led her down the long corridor, retracing our\n steps.",
"My resignation annoyed him. Each of us had reacted differently: Kane's\n wife was frightened, Verana was calm because of an inner serenity that\n few people have, I was resigned and Kane was angry.\nFor several minutes, we sampled the different foods. Every one had a\n distinctive flavor, comparable to that of a fruit or vegetable on Earth.\n\n\n Kane lifted a brown bottle to his lips, took a huge gulp and almost\n choked.\n\n\n \"Whiskey!\"\n\n\n \"My masters realized your race would develop intoxicants and tried to\n create a comparable one,\" the machine explained.\n\n\n I selected a brown bottle and sampled the liquid. \"A little stronger\n than our own,\" I informed the machine.\n\n\n We drank until Kane was staggering about the room, shouting insults at\n the alien race and the mechanical voice that seemed to be everywhere.\n He beat his fist against a wall until blood trickled from bruised\n knuckles.",
"\"It's useless,\" the ship warned us.\n\n\n For five hours, we minutely examined every room. We had no tools to\n force our way through solid metal walls to the engine or control rooms.\n The only things in the ship that could be lifted and carried about were\n the containers of food and alien games. None were sufficiently heavy or\n hard enough to put even a scratch in the heavy metal.\nSix rooms were open to our use. The two rooms in which the Kanes had\n been imprisoned were locked and there were no controls or locks to work\n on.\n\n\n The rooms that we could enter were without doors, except the ones that\n opened into the corridor.\n\n\n After intensive searching, we realized there was\nno way\nto damage the\n ship or reach any section other than our allotted space.\n\n\n We gave up.\n\n\n The women went to the sleeping compartments to rest and Kane I went to\n the \"kitchen.\"",
"\"\nDoes\nevery problem have a solution? I don't believe it. Some\n problems are too great. Take the problem of a murderer in our\n civilization: John Doe has killed someone and his problem is to escape.\n Primarily, a murderer's problem is the same principle as ours. A\n murderer has to outwit an entire civilization. We have to outwit an\n entire civilization that was hundreds of times more advanced than ours\n is now when we were clubbing animals and eating the meat raw. Damned\n few criminals get away these days, even though they've got such crowds\n to lose themselves in. All we have is a ship that we can't control. I\n don't think we have a chance.\"",
"Kane brushed past me and beat his gloved fists against the metal door\n that had imprisoned us.\n\n\n \"Miller!\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"See if you can get this thing open from the outside.\"\n\n\n I knelt before the door and explored its surface with my fingers. There\n were no visible recesses or controls.\n\n\n Over the intercom network, everyone's breath mingled and formed a\n rough, harsh sound. I could discern the women's quick, frightened\n breaths that were almost sobs. Kane's breath was deep and strong;\n Miller's was faltering and weak.\n\n\n \"Miller, get help!\"\n\n\n \"I'll—\" The sound of his breathing ceased. We listened intently.\n\n\n \"What happened to him?\"",
"\"But we wouldn't have that kind of static over\nour\nradio, unless—\"\n Verana's eyes widened until the pupils were surrounded by circles of\n white—\"unless we were in outer space!\"\n\n\n We stared at the metal door that had imprisoned us, afraid even to\n speak of our fantastic suspicion.\n\n\n I deactivated my radio.\n\n\n Marie screamed as an inner door opened to disclose a long, narrow\n corridor beyond.\n\n\n Simultaneous with the opening of the second door, I felt air press\n against my spacesuit. Before, our suits had been puffed outward by the\n pressure of air inside. Now our spacesuits were slack and dangling on\n our bodies.\n\n\n We looked at each other and then at the inviting corridor beyond the\n open door.\n\n\n We went single file, first Kane, then his wife Marie. Verana followed\n next and I was the last.",
"\"You want to go in?\" my wife asked.\n\n\n \"Do you?\"\n\n\n \"Let's.\"\n\n\n I helped Verana through the opening, climbed through myself and turned\n to help Miller.\n\n\n Miller was sixty years old. He was an excellent mineralogist, alert\n mentally, but with a body that was almost feeble. I reached out to help\n him as he stepped into the passageway.\n\n\n For a brief second, he was framed in the opening, a dark silhouette\n against the star-studded sky.\n\n\n The next second, he was thrown twenty yards into the air. He gasped\n with pain when he struck the ground. \"\nSomething\npushed me!\"\n\n\n \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n He had fallen on a spot beyond our angle of vision. I started through\n the passage....",
"The drawings were so simple that anyone could have understood them.\n The first drawing portrayed a naked man and woman removing boxes and\n bottles from the shelves. The second picture showed the couple opening\n the containers. The third showed the man eating from one of the boxes\n and the woman drinking from a bottle.\n\"Let's see how it tastes,\" I said.\n\n\n I selected an orange-colored box. The lid dissolved at the touch of my\n fingers.\n\n\n The only contents were small cubes of a soft orange substance.\n\n\n I tasted a small piece.\n\n\n \"Chocolate! Just like chocolate!\"\n\n\n Verana chose a nearby bottle and drank some of the bluish liquid.\n\n\n \"Milk!\" she exclaimed.",
"Miller stepped forward, moving slowly in the bulk of his spacesuit.\n Deliberately, he removed a small torch from his side and pressed the\n brilliant flame against the metal.\n\n\n A few minutes later, the elderly mineralogist gave his opinion: \"It's\n steel ... made thousands of years ago.\"\n\n\n Someone gasped over the intercom, \"Thousands of years! But wouldn't it\n be in worse shape than this if it was that old?\"\n\n\n Miller pointed at the small cut his torch had made in the metal. The\n notch was only a quarter of an inch deep. \"I say\nsteel\nbecause it's\nsimilar\nto steel. Actually, it's a much stronger alloy. Besides that,\n on the Moon, there's been no water or atmosphere to rust it. Not even\n a wind to disturb its surface. It's\nat least\nseveral thousand years\n old.\"\nWe slowly circled the alien structure. Several minutes later, Kane\n shouted, \"Look!\"",
"... and struck an invisible solid wall.\nMy eyes were on the circular opening. A metal panel emerged from a\n recess on one side and slid across the passage. The room darkened with\n the absence of starlight.\n\n\n \"\nWhat happened?\n\"\n\n\n \"The door to this damned place closed,\" I explained.\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"\n\n\n Before we could recover from the shock, the room filled with a\n brilliant glare. We turned off our lamps.\n\n\n The room was approximately twelve feet long and nine feet wide. The\n ceiling was only a few inches above our heads and when I looked at the\n smooth, hard metal, I felt as if I were trapped in some alien vault.\n\n\n The walls of the room were covered with strange drawings and\n instruments. Here and there, kaleidoscopic lights pulsed rhythmically.",
"At random, we sampled the variously colored boxes and bottles and\n discussed our predicament.\n\n\n \"Trapped,\" Kane said angrily. \"Trapped in a steel prison.\" He slammed\n his fist against the table top. \"But there must be a way to get out!\n Every problem has a solution!\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"What?\"",
"We selected a comfortable chair facing the transparent wall, lit\n cigarettes and waited.\n\n\n A few minutes later, Marie entered the room.\n\n\n I noticed with some surprise that her face was calm. If she was\n excited, her actions didn't betray it.\n\n\n She sat next to Verana.\n\n\n \"What happened?\" my wife asked.\n\n\n Marie crossed her legs and began in a rambling manner as if discussing\n a new recipe, \"That was really a surprise, wasn't it? I was scared\n silly, at first. That room was dark and I didn't know what to expect.\n Something touched my head and I heard a telepathic voice—\"\n\n\n \"Telepathic?\" Verana interrupted.",
"\"The solution is simple,\" he said. \"We're in a trap so strong that the\n aliens didn't establish any means to control our actions. When men put\n a lion in a strong cage, they don't worry about controlling the lion\n because the lion can't get out. We're in the same basic situation.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\" Verana queried in a sarcastic tone.\n\n\n \"The aliens want us transported to their planet so they can examine and\n question us. Right?\"\n\n\n \"Right.\"\n\n\n \"Ed, remember that remark the machine made last night?\"\n\n\n \"What remark?\"\n\n\n \"It said, '\nMy\nmasters will be displeased with\nme\nif you arrive in a\n damaged condition.' What does that indicate to you?\"\nI assumed a baffled expression. I didn't have the slightest idea of\n what he was driving at and I told him so.",
"The incongruity was so awesome that for several minutes, we remained\n motionless and quiet. Miller broke the silence with his quavering\n voice, \"Strange someone didn't notice it before.\"\nStrange? The object rose a quarter of a mile above us, a huge, curving\n hulk of smooth metal. It was featureless and yet conveyed a sense\n of\nalienness\n. It was alien and yet it wasn't a natural formation.\n Something had made the thing, whatever it was. But was it strange that\n it hadn't been noticed before? Men had lived on the Moon for over a\n year, but the Moon was vast and the\nMare Serenitatis\ncovered three\n hundred and forty thousand square miles.\n\n\n \"What is it?\" Marie asked breathlessly.\n\n\n Her husband grunted his bafflement. \"Who knows? But see how it curves?\n If it's a perfect sphere, it must be at least two miles in diameter!\"",
"Verana rushed to her side. Another door on the opposite side of the\n corridor opened silently. The door was behind them; they didn't notice.\n\n\n Before I could warn them, Marie floated across the corridor, through\n the doorway.\n\n\n Verana and I stared at the darkness beyond the opening, our muscles\n frozen by shock.\n\n\n The door closed behind Marie's screaming, struggling form.\n\n\n Verana's face was white with fear. Apprehensively, she glanced at the\n other doors that lined the hall.\n\n\n I put my arms around her, held her close.\n\n\n \"Antigravity machines, force rays,\" I suggested worriedly."
]
] |
test
|
48513
|
[
"What is the summary of this passage?",
"Why is the definition of a human being necessary?",
"What traits best describe Oak?",
"What scientific concept/technology is NOT discussed in the passage?",
"What is the relationship like between Brock and Oak?",
"How would you describe the structure of this passage?",
"What is a potential moral of this passage?",
"What does the relationship like between Oak and Ravenhurst?"
] |
[
[
"A guy travels the galaxy doing his job",
"A guy travels the galaxy in search of the definition of what it means to be a human being",
"Someone travels Earth, in search of the definition of what it means to be a human being",
"Someone travels the galaxy, in need of work"
],
[
"For intergalactic law regarding human restrictions",
"For robotic programming instructions",
"So a robotic army knows who to kill",
"For intergalactic law regarding who can operate spaceships"
],
[
"Honest and generous",
"Smug and suave",
"Deceitful and cruel",
"Likable and open"
],
[
"Protective suits",
"The space-time continuum",
"Gravity",
"Artificial intelligence"
],
[
"They are enemies",
"They're coworkers that don't get along well",
"They are friendly with each other",
"They don't like each other"
],
[
"Oak visits one individual and makes a business deal, then he meets with a family member and they talk about that deal",
"Oak visits three different individuals and makes business deals with them",
"Oak visits two different individuals and makes business deals with them, then he meets with a family member and they talk about those deals",
"Oak visits two different individuals and makes business deals with them"
],
[
"Being open in relationships with others is important",
"Being careful in social interaction can lead to benefits",
"Being careful with one's words social interaction can lead to anxiety and worsened relationships",
"Being empathetic and genuine in conversation with others is important"
],
[
"Ravenhurst rightfully looks down on Oak a bit",
"Ravenhurst has been Oak's friend for a long time, they have great respect for each other",
"Ravenhurst has been Oak's boss for a long time, they have great respect for each other",
"Oak looks down on Ravenhurst a bit"
]
] |
[
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1
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[
1,
0,
0,
0,
0,
1,
1,
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[
"\"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of\n his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman\n is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall\n welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to\n subside.\"\n\n\n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding\n his own touch of color to the room.",
"I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back\n the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think\n you'd win.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your\n own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would\n hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n\n\n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial\n business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains.\n Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to\n personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n\n\n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the\n point,\" I told him.",
"I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go\n on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\nBrock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n \"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and\n ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't\n supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security\n Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n\n\n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock\n opened up with his troubles.\n\n\n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant\n because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.",
"\"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may\n render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n\n\n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud\n and clear. It's a deal.\"\n\n\n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal'\n involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for\n friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n\n\n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts\n and figures.\"\n\n\n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"",
"And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal\n triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost\n nothing, he'd really have blown up.\nTen minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring,\n rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of\n Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted\n sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on\n a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the\n magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the\n nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I\n was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself\n against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker\n beacon on my way to Ceres.",
"As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\"\n for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how\n important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\nWhen I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down\n on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron\n of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own\n perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats,\n sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a\n broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me\n and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you\n can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until\n you hit the next beacon station.",
"He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and\n sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again\n did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come\n in.\n\n\n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n\n\n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping\n my voice level.\n\n\n [5]\n\n\n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your\n action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of\n heavy linseed oil.\n\n\n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When\n I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have\n inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent\n sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"",
"\"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him\n that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational\n dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going\n to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that\n means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n\n\n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting\n it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she\n sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n\n\n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me\n what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been\n unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an\n irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"",
"I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point\n in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n\n\n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a\n planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter\n per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have\n to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low\n as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting\n right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to\n make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all\n over the place.\n\n\n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to\n fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.",
"\"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of\n Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation,\n which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of\n business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of\n precious metals.\n\n\n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell\n around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we\n can't stand any hell—or sabotage—around this planetoid just now!\"\n\n\n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd\n pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was\n Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not\n Thurston's agents.\"",
"\"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n\n\n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very\n slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n\n\n \"\nBut\n,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work\nwith\nyou.\"\n\n\n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n\n\n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already\n working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because\nyou're\nworking for\n Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both\n working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we\n co-operate.",
"\"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being'\n unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that\n it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would\n prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the\n single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n\n\n \"Now, it appears that\nyou\n, Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to\n McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n\n\n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best\n expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had\n explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire\n and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up\n what had really happened.\nMy sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that\n you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"",
"\"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n\n\n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By\n definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions\n follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n\n\n [19]\n\n\n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union\n suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was\n a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor\n seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were\n shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other\n colors.",
"I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one\n gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming\n ordeal with McGuire.\n\n\n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my\n business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says:\nDANIEL\n OAK, Confidential Expediter\n; I'm hired to help other people Get Things\n Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a\n spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the\n business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but\n collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted\n to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important\n than Shalimar Ravenhurst.",
"\"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n\n\n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again—understandably enough, I\n think.\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n\n\n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding\n work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first\n six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at\n me.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to\n be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the\n fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his\n hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further\n attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"",
"\"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through\n your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that\n your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n\n\n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation\n of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the\n point.\"\n\n\n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell\n me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by\n unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after\n activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth\n be considered its ... ah ... master.",
"I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by\n Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n\n\n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the\n inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n\n\n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his\n scarred, battered face.\n\n\n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said,\n shaking his extended hand.\n\n\n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n\n\n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath\n and some sleep.\"\n\n\n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want\n a drink?\"\n\n\n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"",
"\"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go\n to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n\n\n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of\n that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on\n the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other\n spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and\n very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am\ncertain\nthat the robot ship is the\n answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake\n of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of\n McGuire!\"\nWhat's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody\n, I quoted\n to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that\n Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.",
"\"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n\n\n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could\n offer you—\"\n\n\n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons.\n In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working\n for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it\n would be unethical for me to take the job.\n\n\n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a\n certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my\n services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except\n in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a\n lawyer when it's a charity case.",
"\"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of\n anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes\n time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and\n make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of\n the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other\n words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is\n precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n\n\n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me\n because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on\n the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position\n as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts\n might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and\n Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely."
],
[
"\"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being'\n unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that\n it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would\n prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the\n single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n\n\n \"Now, it appears that\nyou\n, Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to\n McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n\n\n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best\n expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had\n explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire\n and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up\n what had really happened.\nMy sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that\n you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"",
"[15]\nThird Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except\n when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\nNobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining\n the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot\n can encompass the concept.\n\n\n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly\n narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\"\n are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries,\n illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's\n only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the\n only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging\n the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n\n\n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a\n traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.",
"If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult\n to define a\nresponsible\nhuman being. One, in other words, who can\n be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be\n relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n\n\n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another\n tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members\n of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one\n responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only\n from that person.\"",
"As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\"\n for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how\n important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\nWhen I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down\n on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron\n of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own\n perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats,\n sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a\n broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me\n and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you\n can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until\n you hit the next beacon station.",
"\"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through\n your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that\n your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n\n\n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation\n of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the\n point.\"\n\n\n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell\n me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by\n unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after\n activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth\n be considered its ... ah ... master.",
"With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists\n attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first\n six went insane.\n\n\n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\"\n the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more\n valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot\n brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would\n be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you,\n depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous\n as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if\n not more so.\n\n\n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was\n impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.",
"ANALOG SCIENCE FACT · SCIENCE FICTION\nSpaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge—but no wisdom. He was\n smart—but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to\n ask questions too profound for any philosopher—questions like \"Who are\n you?\"\nBy RANDALL GARRETT\nI'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called\n Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar\n Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it\n came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could\n make anyone dislike him without trying.\n\n\n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk,\n his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass\n and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n\n\n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"",
"\"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n\n\n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again—understandably enough, I\n think.\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n\n\n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding\n work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first\n six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at\n me.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to\n be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the\n fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his\n hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further\n attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"",
"But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be\n necessary to give orders—\nfast\n! And that means verbal orders, orders\n that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by\n microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a\n teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n\n\n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has\n to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n\n\n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\nFor more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's\n famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\nFirst Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow\n harm to come to a human being.\nSecond Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except\n when such orders conflict with the First Law\n.",
"\"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him\n my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be\n a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I\n knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n\n\n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They\n realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but\n they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely\n draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can\n this bias be eliminated.\"\n\n\n \"Then why don't they do that?\"",
"I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point\n in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n\n\n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a\n planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter\n per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have\n to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low\n as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting\n right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to\n make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all\n over the place.\n\n\n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to\n fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.",
"\"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of\n anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes\n time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and\n make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of\n the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other\n words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is\n precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n\n\n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me\n because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on\n the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position\n as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts\n might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and\n Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.",
"McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in\n command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he\nwas\nthe spacecraft, since it\n served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves\n the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a\n top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge\n of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per\n second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths\n were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n\n\n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them\n having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be\n somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans\n aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.",
"I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by\n Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n\n\n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the\n inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n\n\n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his\n scarred, battered face.\n\n\n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said,\n shaking his extended hand.\n\n\n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n\n\n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath\n and some sleep.\"\n\n\n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want\n a drink?\"\n\n\n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"",
"\"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go\n to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n\n\n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of\n that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on\n the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other\n spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and\n very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am\ncertain\nthat the robot ship is the\n answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake\n of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of\n McGuire!\"\nWhat's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody\n, I quoted\n to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that\n Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.",
"I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go\n on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\nBrock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n \"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and\n ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't\n supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security\n Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n\n\n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock\n opened up with his troubles.\n\n\n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant\n because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.",
"\"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may\n render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n\n\n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud\n and clear. It's a deal.\"\n\n\n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal'\n involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for\n friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n\n\n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts\n and figures.\"\n\n\n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"",
"\"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n\n\n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very\n slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n\n\n \"\nBut\n,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work\nwith\nyou.\"\n\n\n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n\n\n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already\n working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because\nyou're\nworking for\n Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both\n working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we\n co-operate.",
"\"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of\n his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman\n is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall\n welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to\n subside.\"\n\n\n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding\n his own touch of color to the room.",
"A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of\n Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt.\n You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you\n did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle\n that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might\n have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels\n inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are\n places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away\n from his vac suit."
],
[
"\"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of\n his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman\n is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall\n welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to\n subside.\"\n\n\n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding\n his own touch of color to the room.",
"I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go\n on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\nBrock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n \"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and\n ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't\n supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security\n Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n\n\n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock\n opened up with his troubles.\n\n\n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant\n because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.",
"He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and\n sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again\n did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come\n in.\n\n\n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n\n\n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping\n my voice level.\n\n\n [5]\n\n\n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your\n action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of\n heavy linseed oil.\n\n\n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When\n I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have\n inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent\n sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"",
"I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back\n the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think\n you'd win.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your\n own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would\n hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n\n\n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial\n business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains.\n Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to\n personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n\n\n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the\n point,\" I told him.",
"As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\"\n for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how\n important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\nWhen I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down\n on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron\n of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own\n perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats,\n sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a\n broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me\n and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you\n can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until\n you hit the next beacon station.",
"He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His\n onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly\n into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I\n can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have\n to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from\n operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want\n you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he\n doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n\n\n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"",
"\"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the\n robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to\n be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can\n be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n\n\n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n\n\n \"I don't deny it.\"\n\n\n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be\n charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't\n want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8\n is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n\n\n \"How much?\"",
"\"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being'\n unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that\n it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would\n prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the\n single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n\n\n \"Now, it appears that\nyou\n, Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to\n McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n\n\n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best\n expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had\n explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire\n and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up\n what had really happened.\nMy sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that\n you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"",
"I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by\n Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n\n\n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the\n inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n\n\n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his\n scarred, battered face.\n\n\n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said,\n shaking his extended hand.\n\n\n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n\n\n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath\n and some sleep.\"\n\n\n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want\n a drink?\"\n\n\n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"",
"\"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go\n to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n\n\n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of\n that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on\n the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other\n spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and\n very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am\ncertain\nthat the robot ship is the\n answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake\n of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of\n McGuire!\"\nWhat's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody\n, I quoted\n to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that\n Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.",
"ANALOG SCIENCE FACT · SCIENCE FICTION\nSpaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge—but no wisdom. He was\n smart—but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to\n ask questions too profound for any philosopher—questions like \"Who are\n you?\"\nBy RANDALL GARRETT\nI'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called\n Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar\n Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it\n came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could\n make anyone dislike him without trying.\n\n\n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk,\n his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass\n and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n\n\n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"",
"\"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him\n that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational\n dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going\n to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that\n means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n\n\n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting\n it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she\n sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n\n\n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me\n what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been\n unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an\n irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"",
"\"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may\n render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n\n\n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud\n and clear. It's a deal.\"\n\n\n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal'\n involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for\n friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n\n\n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts\n and figures.\"\n\n\n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"",
"I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point\n in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n\n\n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a\n planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter\n per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have\n to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low\n as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting\n right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to\n make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all\n over the place.\n\n\n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to\n fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.",
"I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one\n gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming\n ordeal with McGuire.\n\n\n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my\n business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says:\nDANIEL\n OAK, Confidential Expediter\n; I'm hired to help other people Get Things\n Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a\n spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the\n business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but\n collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted\n to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important\n than Shalimar Ravenhurst.",
"\"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n\n\n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By\n definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions\n follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n\n\n [19]\n\n\n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union\n suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was\n a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor\n seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were\n shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other\n colors.",
"With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists\n attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first\n six went insane.\n\n\n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\"\n the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more\n valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot\n brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would\n be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you,\n depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous\n as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if\n not more so.\n\n\n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was\n impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.",
"\"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n\n\n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could\n offer you—\"\n\n\n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons.\n In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working\n for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it\n would be unethical for me to take the job.\n\n\n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a\n certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my\n services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except\n in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a\n lawyer when it's a charity case.",
"\"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n\n\n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again—understandably enough, I\n think.\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n\n\n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding\n work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first\n six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at\n me.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to\n be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the\n fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his\n hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further\n attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"",
"\"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through\n your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that\n your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n\n\n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation\n of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the\n point.\"\n\n\n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell\n me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by\n unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after\n activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth\n be considered its ... ah ... master."
],
[
"\"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n\n\n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again—understandably enough, I\n think.\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n\n\n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding\n work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first\n six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at\n me.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to\n be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the\n fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his\n hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further\n attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"",
"Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice.\n He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges\n touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a\n head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at\n work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action\n on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The\n negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time\n you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and\n throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n\n\n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at\n it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and\n neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.",
"But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be\n necessary to give orders—\nfast\n! And that means verbal orders, orders\n that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by\n microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a\n teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.\n\n\n That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has\n to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.\n\n\n And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.\nFor more than a century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's\n famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.\nFirst Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow\n harm to come to a human being.\nSecond Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except\n when such orders conflict with the First Law\n.",
"ANALOG SCIENCE FACT · SCIENCE FICTION\nSpaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge—but no wisdom. He was\n smart—but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to\n ask questions too profound for any philosopher—questions like \"Who are\n you?\"\nBy RANDALL GARRETT\nI'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called\n Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar\n Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it\n came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could\n make anyone dislike him without trying.\n\n\n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk,\n his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass\n and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n\n\n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"",
"A crowd wearing skin-tight cover-alls might shock the gentle people of\n Midwich-on-the-Moor, England, but they are normal dress in the Belt.\n You can't climb into a vac suit with bulky clothing on, and, if you\n did, you'd hate yourself within an hour, with a curse for every wrinkle\n that chafed your skin. And, in the Belt, you never know when you might\n have to get into a vac suit fast. In a \"safe\" area like the tunnels\n inside Ceres, there isn't much chance of losing air, but there are\n places where no one but a fool would ever be more than ten seconds away\n from his vac suit.",
"McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in\n command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he\nwas\nthe spacecraft, since it\n served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves\n the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a\n top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge\n of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per\n second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths\n were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n\n\n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them\n having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be\n somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans\n aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.",
"As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\"\n for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how\n important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\nWhen I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down\n on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron\n of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own\n perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats,\n sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a\n broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me\n and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you\n can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until\n you hit the next beacon station.",
"The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of\n McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the\n traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable\n as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables\n and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given\n orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving\n and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot.\n And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders\n that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician.\n Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to\n repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care\n of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the\n malfunctioning of an individual automobile.",
"For obvious economical reasons, it it impracticable to use full-sized\n spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial\n engine and the few necessities of life—air, some water, and a very\n little food—still costs more than a Rolls-Royce\n [11]\n automobile does on\n Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation in\n the Belt.\n\n\n They can't be used for any great distances because a man can't stay\n in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to\n hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your\naverage\nvelocity\n doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating\n and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the\n neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.",
"I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point\n in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n\n\n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a\n planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter\n per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have\n to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low\n as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting\n right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to\n make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all\n over the place.\n\n\n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to\n fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.",
"[15]\nThird Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except\n when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\nNobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining\n the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot\n can encompass the concept.\n\n\n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly\n narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\"\n are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries,\n illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's\n only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the\n only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging\n the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n\n\n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a\n traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.",
"\"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of\n anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes\n time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and\n make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of\n the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other\n words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is\n precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n\n\n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me\n because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on\n the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position\n as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts\n might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and\n Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.",
"With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists\n attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first\n six went insane.\n\n\n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\"\n the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more\n valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot\n brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would\n be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you,\n depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous\n as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if\n not more so.\n\n\n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was\n impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.",
"I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one\n gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming\n ordeal with McGuire.\n\n\n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my\n business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says:\nDANIEL\n OAK, Confidential Expediter\n; I'm hired to help other people Get Things\n Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a\n spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the\n business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but\n collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted\n to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important\n than Shalimar Ravenhurst.",
"\"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go\n to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n\n\n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of\n that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on\n the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other\n spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and\n very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am\ncertain\nthat the robot ship is the\n answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake\n of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of\n McGuire!\"\nWhat's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody\n, I quoted\n to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that\n Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.",
"\"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being'\n unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that\n it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would\n prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the\n single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n\n\n \"Now, it appears that\nyou\n, Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to\n McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n\n\n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best\n expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had\n explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire\n and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up\n what had really happened.\nMy sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that\n you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"",
"\"Your robotocists can change that,\" I said. This time, I was giving him\n my version of \"genuine\" innocence.\n [7]\n A man has to be a good actor to be\n a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I\n knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.\n\n\n He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. \"No, they cannot. They\n realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but\n they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely\n draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can\n this bias be eliminated.\"\n\n\n \"Then why don't they do that?\"",
"\"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of\n his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman\n is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall\n welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to\n subside.\"\n\n\n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding\n his own touch of color to the room.",
"If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult\n to define a\nresponsible\nhuman being. One, in other words, who can\n be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be\n relied upon not to drive the robot insane.\n\n\n The robotocists at Viking Spacecraft had decided to take another\n tack. \"Very well,\" they'd said, \"if we can't define all the members\n of a group, we can certainly define an individual. We'll pick one\n responsible person and build McGuire so that he will take orders only\n from that person.\"",
"I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go\n on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\nBrock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n \"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and\n ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't\n supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security\n Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n\n\n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock\n opened up with his troubles.\n\n\n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant\n because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant."
],
[
"I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go\n on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\nBrock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n \"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and\n ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't\n supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security\n Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n\n\n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock\n opened up with his troubles.\n\n\n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant\n because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.",
"\"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of\n his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman\n is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall\n welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to\n subside.\"\n\n\n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding\n his own touch of color to the room.",
"I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by\n Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n\n\n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the\n inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n\n\n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his\n scarred, battered face.\n\n\n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said,\n shaking his extended hand.\n\n\n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n\n\n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath\n and some sleep.\"\n\n\n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want\n a drink?\"\n\n\n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"",
"I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back\n the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think\n you'd win.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your\n own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would\n hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n\n\n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial\n business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains.\n Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to\n personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n\n\n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the\n point,\" I told him.",
"He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His\n onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly\n into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I\n can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have\n to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from\n operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want\n you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he\n doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n\n\n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"",
"He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and\n sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again\n did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come\n in.\n\n\n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n\n\n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping\n my voice level.\n\n\n [5]\n\n\n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your\n action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of\n heavy linseed oil.\n\n\n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When\n I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have\n inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent\n sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"",
"\"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n\n\n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could\n offer you—\"\n\n\n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons.\n In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working\n for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it\n would be unethical for me to take the job.\n\n\n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a\n certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my\n services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except\n in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a\n lawyer when it's a charity case.",
"\"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the\n robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to\n be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can\n be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n\n\n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n\n\n \"I don't deny it.\"\n\n\n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be\n charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't\n want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8\n is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n\n\n \"How much?\"",
"\"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being'\n unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that\n it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would\n prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the\n single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n\n\n \"Now, it appears that\nyou\n, Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to\n McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n\n\n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best\n expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had\n explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire\n and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up\n what had really happened.\nMy sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that\n you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"",
"As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\"\n for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how\n important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\nWhen I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down\n on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron\n of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own\n perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats,\n sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a\n broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me\n and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you\n can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until\n you hit the next beacon station.",
"\"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him\n that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational\n dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going\n to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that\n means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n\n\n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting\n it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she\n sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n\n\n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me\n what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been\n unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an\n irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"",
"\"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go\n to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n\n\n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of\n that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on\n the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other\n spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and\n very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am\ncertain\nthat the robot ship is the\n answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake\n of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of\n McGuire!\"\nWhat's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody\n, I quoted\n to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that\n Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.",
"\"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may\n render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n\n\n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud\n and clear. It's a deal.\"\n\n\n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal'\n involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for\n friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n\n\n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts\n and figures.\"\n\n\n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"",
"\"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n\n\n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By\n definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions\n follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n\n\n [19]\n\n\n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union\n suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was\n a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor\n seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were\n shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other\n colors.",
"\"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n\n\n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very\n slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n\n\n \"\nBut\n,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work\nwith\nyou.\"\n\n\n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n\n\n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already\n working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because\nyou're\nworking for\n Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both\n working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we\n co-operate.",
"ANALOG SCIENCE FACT · SCIENCE FICTION\nSpaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge—but no wisdom. He was\n smart—but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to\n ask questions too profound for any philosopher—questions like \"Who are\n you?\"\nBy RANDALL GARRETT\nI'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called\n Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar\n Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it\n came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could\n make anyone dislike him without trying.\n\n\n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk,\n his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass\n and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n\n\n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"",
"\"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of\n Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation,\n which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of\n business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of\n precious metals.\n\n\n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell\n around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we\n can't stand any hell—or sabotage—around this planetoid just now!\"\n\n\n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd\n pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was\n Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not\n Thurston's agents.\"",
"I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one\n gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming\n ordeal with McGuire.\n\n\n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my\n business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says:\nDANIEL\n OAK, Confidential Expediter\n; I'm hired to help other people Get Things\n Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a\n spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the\n business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but\n collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted\n to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important\n than Shalimar Ravenhurst.",
"\"Perfectly true,\" he said agreeably. \"We managed to block any attempts\n of sabotage by other company agents, even though it looked as though we\n hadn't for a while.\" He chuckled wryly. \"We went all out to keep the\n McGuires safe, and all the time the boss' daughter was giving them the\n works.\" Then he looked sharply at me. \"I covered that, of course. No\n one in the Security Guard but me knows that Jack was responsible.\"\n\n\n \"Good. But what about the Thurston and Baedecker agents, then?\"\n\n\n He took a hefty slug of his drink. \"They're around, all right. We have\n our eyes on the ones we know, but those outfits are as sharp as we\n are, and they may have a few agents here on Ceres that we know nothing\n about.\"\n\n\n \"So? What does this have to do with me?\"",
"I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point\n in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n\n\n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a\n planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter\n per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have\n to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low\n as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting\n right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to\n make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all\n over the place.\n\n\n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to\n fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it."
],
[
"\"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of\n his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman\n is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall\n welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to\n subside.\"\n\n\n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding\n his own touch of color to the room.",
"I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go\n on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\nBrock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n \"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and\n ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't\n supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security\n Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n\n\n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock\n opened up with his troubles.\n\n\n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant\n because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.",
"I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back\n the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think\n you'd win.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your\n own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would\n hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n\n\n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial\n business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains.\n Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to\n personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n\n\n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the\n point,\" I told him.",
"I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point\n in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n\n\n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a\n planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter\n per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have\n to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low\n as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting\n right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to\n make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all\n over the place.\n\n\n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to\n fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.",
"\"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n\n\n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very\n slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n\n\n \"\nBut\n,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work\nwith\nyou.\"\n\n\n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n\n\n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already\n working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because\nyou're\nworking for\n Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both\n working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we\n co-operate.",
"\"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through\n your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that\n your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n\n\n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation\n of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the\n point.\"\n\n\n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell\n me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by\n unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after\n activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth\n be considered its ... ah ... master.",
"I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by\n Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n\n\n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the\n inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n\n\n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his\n scarred, battered face.\n\n\n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said,\n shaking his extended hand.\n\n\n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n\n\n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath\n and some sleep.\"\n\n\n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want\n a drink?\"\n\n\n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"",
"As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\"\n for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how\n important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\nWhen I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down\n on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron\n of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own\n perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats,\n sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a\n broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me\n and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you\n can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until\n you hit the next beacon station.",
"\"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may\n render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n\n\n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud\n and clear. It's a deal.\"\n\n\n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal'\n involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for\n friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n\n\n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts\n and figures.\"\n\n\n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"",
"\"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being'\n unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that\n it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would\n prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the\n single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n\n\n \"Now, it appears that\nyou\n, Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to\n McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n\n\n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best\n expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had\n explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire\n and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up\n what had really happened.\nMy sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that\n you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"",
"He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and\n sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again\n did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come\n in.\n\n\n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n\n\n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping\n my voice level.\n\n\n [5]\n\n\n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your\n action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of\n heavy linseed oil.\n\n\n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When\n I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have\n inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent\n sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"",
"And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal\n triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost\n nothing, he'd really have blown up.\nTen minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring,\n rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of\n Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted\n sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on\n a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the\n magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the\n nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I\n was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself\n against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker\n beacon on my way to Ceres.",
"\"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n\n\n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By\n definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions\n follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n\n\n [19]\n\n\n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union\n suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was\n a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor\n seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were\n shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other\n colors.",
"Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice.\n He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges\n touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a\n head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at\n work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action\n on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The\n negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time\n you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and\n throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n\n\n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at\n it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and\n neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.",
"With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists\n attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first\n six went insane.\n\n\n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\"\n the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more\n valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot\n brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would\n be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you,\n depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous\n as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if\n not more so.\n\n\n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was\n impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.",
"\"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n\n\n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again—understandably enough, I\n think.\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n\n\n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding\n work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first\n six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at\n me.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to\n be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the\n fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his\n hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further\n attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"",
"\"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of\n anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes\n time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and\n make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of\n the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other\n words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is\n precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n\n\n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me\n because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on\n the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position\n as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts\n might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and\n Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.",
"I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one\n gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming\n ordeal with McGuire.\n\n\n Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my\n business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says:\nDANIEL\n OAK, Confidential Expediter\n; I'm hired to help other people Get Things\n Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a\n spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the\n business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but\n collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted\n to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important\n than Shalimar Ravenhurst.",
"\"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to\n build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs\n in it.\"\n\n\n He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: \"I will\n do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one\n each six months for three years after the first successful commercial\n ship is built by Viking.\"\n\n\n \"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording,\" I said, \"but it's a\n deal. Is there anything else?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel.\"",
"\"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him\n that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational\n dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going\n to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that\n means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n\n\n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting\n it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she\n sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n\n\n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me\n what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been\n unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an\n irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\""
],
[
"\"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of\n his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman\n is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall\n welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to\n subside.\"\n\n\n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding\n his own touch of color to the room.",
"I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back\n the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think\n you'd win.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your\n own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would\n hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n\n\n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial\n business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains.\n Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to\n personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n\n\n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the\n point,\" I told him.",
"\"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n\n\n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very\n slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n\n\n \"\nBut\n,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work\nwith\nyou.\"\n\n\n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n\n\n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already\n working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because\nyou're\nworking for\n Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both\n working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we\n co-operate.",
"I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go\n on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\nBrock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n \"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and\n ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't\n supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security\n Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n\n\n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock\n opened up with his troubles.\n\n\n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant\n because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.",
"\"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may\n render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n\n\n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud\n and clear. It's a deal.\"\n\n\n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal'\n involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for\n friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n\n\n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts\n and figures.\"\n\n\n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"",
"I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point\n in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n\n\n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a\n planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter\n per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have\n to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low\n as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting\n right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to\n make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all\n over the place.\n\n\n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to\n fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.",
"\"But,\" I went on, \"hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you\n [8]\n money?\"\n\n\n \"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again—understandably enough, I\n think.\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly. It's mutual.\"\n\n\n He ignored me. \"I even considered going through with the rebuilding\n work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first\n six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either.\" He scowled at\n me.\n\n\n \"It seems,\" he went on, \"that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to\n be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the\n fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his\n hull, and he has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further\n attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes.\"",
"\"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through\n your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that\n your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage.\"\n\n\n \"My honor and ethics are in fine shape,\" I said, \"but my interpretation\n of the concepts might not be quite\n [6]\n the same as yours. Get to the\n point.\"\n\n\n He took another sip of Madeira. \"The robotocists at Viking tell\n me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by\n unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after\n activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth\n be considered its ... ah ... master.",
"\"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n\n\n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could\n offer you—\"\n\n\n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons.\n In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working\n for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it\n would be unethical for me to take the job.\n\n\n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a\n certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my\n services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except\n in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a\n lawyer when it's a charity case.",
"\"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being'\n unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that\n it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would\n prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the\n single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n\n\n \"Now, it appears that\nyou\n, Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to\n McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n\n\n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best\n expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had\n explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire\n and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up\n what had really happened.\nMy sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that\n you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"",
"\"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go\n to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n\n\n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of\n that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on\n the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other\n spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and\n very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am\ncertain\nthat the robot ship is the\n answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake\n of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of\n McGuire!\"\nWhat's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody\n, I quoted\n to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that\n Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.",
"\"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him\n that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational\n dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going\n to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that\n means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n\n\n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting\n it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she\n sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n\n\n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me\n what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been\n unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an\n irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"",
"With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists\n attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first\n six went insane.\n\n\n If one human being says \"jump left,\" and another says \"jump right,\"\n the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more\n valid order. Feed enough confusing and conflicting data into a robot\n brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would\n be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you,\n depending\n [16]\n on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous\n as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if\n not more so.\n\n\n So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was\n impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.",
"As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\"\n for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how\n important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\nWhen I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down\n on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron\n of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own\n perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats,\n sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a\n broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me\n and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you\n can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until\n you hit the next beacon station.",
"\"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of\n anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes\n time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and\n make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of\n the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other\n words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is\n precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n\n\n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me\n because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on\n the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position\n as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts\n might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and\n Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.",
"[15]\nThird Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except\n when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.\nNobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining\n the term \"human being\" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot\n can encompass the concept.\n\n\n A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly\n narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, \"human beings\"\n are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries,\n illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's\n only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the\n only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging\n the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.\n\n\n And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a\n traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.",
"And, on that gladsome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal\n triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost\n nothing, he'd really have blown up.\nTen minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring,\n rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of\n Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted\n sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on\n a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the\n magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the\n nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I\n was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself\n against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker\n beacon on my way to Ceres.",
"Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice.\n He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges\n touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a\n head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at\n work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action\n on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The\n negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time\n you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and\n throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n\n\n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at\n it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and\n neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.",
"McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in\n command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he\nwas\nthe spacecraft, since it\n served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves\n the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a\n top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge\n of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per\n second. Nor\n [14]\n did he have a set, unmoving highway as his path; his paths\n were variable and led through the emptiness of space.\n\n\n Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them\n having to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be\n somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans\n aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.",
"ANALOG SCIENCE FACT · SCIENCE FICTION\nSpaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge—but no wisdom. He was\n smart—but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to\n ask questions too profound for any philosopher—questions like \"Who are\n you?\"\nBy RANDALL GARRETT\nI'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called\n Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar\n Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it\n came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could\n make anyone dislike him without trying.\n\n\n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk,\n his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass\n and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n\n\n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\""
],
[
"I just continued to keep my voice calm. \"If you are trying to get back\n the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think\n you'd win.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Oak,\" he said heavily, \"I am not a fool, regardless of what your\n own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would\n hardly offer to pay you another one.\"\n\n\n I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial\n business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains.\n Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to\n personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.\n\n\n \"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the\n point,\" I told him.",
"He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and\n sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again\n did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come\n in.\n\n\n \"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble.\"\n\n\n \"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst,\" I said, keeping\n my voice level.\n\n\n [5]\n\n\n \"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your\n action than we had at first supposed.\" His voice had the texture of\n heavy linseed oil.\n\n\n He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When\n I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. \"I fear that you have\n inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent\n sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract.\"",
"\"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak,\" he said. And the soft oiliness\n [10]\n of\n his voice was the oil of vitriol. \"Your compassion for your fellowman\n is a facet of your personality that I had not seen before. I shall\n welcome the opportunity to relax and allow my blood pressure to\n subside.\"\n\n\n I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding\n his own touch of color to the room.",
"\"I am. Ravenhurst is sore at you personally because you showed him\n that Jack was responsible for the McGuire sabotage. It's an irrational\n dislike, and I am not going to let it interfere with my job. I'm going\n to protect Ravenhurst's interests to the best of my ability, and that\n means that I'll use the best of other people's abilities if I can.\"\n\n\n I grinned at him. \"The last I heard, you were sore at me for blatting\n it all over Ceres that Jaqueline Ravenhurst was missing, when she\n sneaked aboard McGuire.\"\n\n\n He nodded perfunctorily. \"I was. I still think you should have told me\n what you were up to. But you did it, and you got results that I'd been\n unable to get. I'm not going to let a momentary pique hang on as an\n irrational dislike. I like to think I have more sense than that.\"",
"He put his drink on the table. \"Oak, I want you to help me.\" His\n onyx-brown eyes, only a shade darker than his skin, looked directly\n into my own. \"I know it isn't part of your assignment, and you know I\n can't afford to pay you anything near what you're worth. It will have\n to come out of my\n [22]\n pocket because I couldn't possibly justify it from\n operating funds. Ravenhurst specifically told me that he doesn't want\n you messing around with the espionage and sabotage problem because he\n doesn't like your methods of operation.\"\n\n\n \"And you're going to go against his orders?\"",
"\"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the\n robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to\n be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can\n be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak.\"\n\n\n \"In other words, I've got you over a barrel.\"\n\n\n \"I don't deny it.\"\n\n\n \"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be\n charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't\n want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8\n is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus.\"\n\n\n \"How much?\"",
"\"No, colonel, I'm afraid I couldn't\n [25]\n possibly work for you.\"\n\n\n He thought that over for a long time. Finally, he nodded his head very\n slowly. \"I see. Yeah, I get your point.\" He scowled down at his drink.\n\n\n \"\nBut\n,\" I said, \"it would be a pleasure\n [26]\n to work\nwith\nyou.\"\n\n\n He looked up quickly. \"How's that?\"\n\n\n \"Well, let's look at it this way: You can't hire me because I'm already\n working for Ravenhurst; I can't hire\n [27]\n you because\nyou're\nworking for\n Ravenhurst. But since we may need each other, and since we're both\n working for Ravenhurst, there would be no conflict of interest if we\n co-operate.",
"\"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being'\n unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that\n it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would\n prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the\n single individual were careful in giving orders himself.\n\n\n \"Now, it appears that\nyou\n, Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to\n McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?\"\n\n\n \"Is that question purely rhetorical,\" I asked him, putting on my best\n expression of innocent interest. \"Or are you losing your memory?\" I had\n explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire\n and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up\n what had really happened.\nMy sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. \"Rhetorical. It follows that\n you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey.\"",
"\"I can't say that I blame him,\" I said. \"What do you want me to do? Go\n to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?\"\n\n\n \"It is too late for that, Mr. Oak. Viking cannot stand any more of\n that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on\n the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other\n spacecraft company in the System.\" He looked suddenly very grim and\n very determined. \"Mr. Oak, I am\ncertain\nthat the robot ship is the\n answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake\n of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of\n McGuire!\"\nWhat's good for General Bull-moose is good for everybody\n, I quoted\n to myself. I'd have said it out loud,\n [9]\n but I was fairly certain that\n Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.",
"I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point\n in my getting nasty until he did. \"Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will.\"\n\n\n He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a\n planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter\n per second squared. It moves slowly, like ropy molasses, but you have\n to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low\n as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting\n right out of the glass\n [4]\n again. The momentum it builds up is enough to\n make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all\n over the place.\n\n\n Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to\n fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.",
"\"Thurston's outfit is trying to oust Ravenhurst from the managership of\n Viking and take over the job. Baedecker Metals & Mining Corporation,\n which is managed by Baedecker himself, wants to force Viking out of\n business so that BM&M can take over Ceres for large-scale processing of\n precious metals.\n\n\n \"Between the two of 'em, they're raising all sorts of minor hell\n around\n [21]\n here, and it's liable to become major hell at any time. And we\n can't stand any hell—or sabotage—around this planetoid just now!\"\n\n\n \"Now wait a minute,\" I said, still playing ignorant, \"I thought we'd\n pretty well established that the 'sabotage' of the McGuire series was\n Jack Ravenhurst's fault. She was the one who was driving them nuts, not\n Thurston's agents.\"",
"\"My treat,\" he said. \"Come on.\"\n\n\n I followed him out and down a ladder to a corridor that led north. By\n definition, any asteroid spins toward the east, and all directions\n follow from that, regardless of which way the axis may point.\n\n\n [19]\n\n\n Colonel Harrington Brock was dressed in the black-and-gold \"union\n suit\" that was the uniform of Ravenhurst's Security Guard. My own was\n a tasteful green, but some of the other people in the public corridor\n seemed to go for more flashiness; besides silver and gold, there were\n shocking pinks and violent mauves, with stripes and blazes of other\n colors.",
"\"Thanks.\" There wasn't much else I could say.\n\n\n \"Now, I've got a little dough put away; it's not much, but I could\n offer you—\"\n\n\n I shook my head, cutting him off. \"Nope. Sorry, Brock. For two reasons.\n In the first place, there would be a conflict of interest. I'm working\n for Ravenhurst, and if he doesn't want\n [23]\n me to work for you, then it\n would be unethical for me to take the job.\n\n\n \"In the second place, my fees are standardized. Oh, I can allow a\n certain amount of fluctuation, but I'm not a physician or a lawyer; my\n services are\n [24]\n not necessary to the survival of the individual, except\n in very rare cases, and those cases are generally arranged through a\n lawyer when it's a charity case.",
"ANALOG SCIENCE FACT · SCIENCE FICTION\nSpaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge—but no wisdom. He was\n smart—but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to\n ask questions too profound for any philosopher—questions like \"Who are\n you?\"\nBy RANDALL GARRETT\nI'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called\n Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar\n Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it\n came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could\n make anyone dislike him without trying.\n\n\n When I entered the office, he was\n [3]\n sitting behind his mahogany desk,\n his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass\n and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said:\n\n\n \"Sit down, Mr. Oak. Will you have some Madeira?\"",
"Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice.\n He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges\n touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a\n head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at\n work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action\n on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The\n negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time\n you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and\n throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.\n\n\n I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at\n it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and\n neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.",
"I'll just leave that problem in the hands of the psychologists, and go\n on wearing my immodestly quiet solid-color union suits.\nBrock pushed open the inch-thick metal door beneath a sign that said\n \"O'Banion's Bar,\" and I followed him in. We sat down at a table and\n ordered drinks when the waiter bustled over. A cop in uniform isn't\n supposed to drink, but Brock figures that the head of the Security\n Guard ought to be able to get away with a breach of his own rules.\n\n\n We had our drinks in front of us and our cigarettes lit before Brock\n opened up with his troubles.\n\n\n \"Oak,\" he said, \"I wanted to intercept you before you went to the plant\n because I want you to know that there may be trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah? What kind?\" Sometimes it's a pain to play ignorant.",
"I parked my flitterboat in the space that had been assigned to me by\n Landing Control, and went over to the nearest air-lock dome.\n\n\n After I'd cycled through and had shucked my vac suit, I went into the\n inner room to find Colonel Brock waiting for me.\n\n\n \"Have a good trip, Oak?\" he asked, trying to put a smile on his\n scarred, battered face.\n\n\n \"I got here alive, if that makes it a good flitterboat trip,\" I said,\n shaking his extended hand.\n\n\n \"That's the definition of a good trip,\" he told me.\n\n\n \"Then the question was superfluous. Seriously, what I need is a bath\n and some sleep.\"\n\n\n \"You'll get that, but first let's go somewhere where we can talk. Want\n a drink?\"\n\n\n \"I could use one, I guess. Your treat?\"",
"\"Or, to put it another way, I can't take money for any service I may\n render you, but you can pay off in services. Am I coming through?\"\n\n\n His broad smile made the scars on his face fold in and deepen. \"Loud\n and clear. It's a deal.\"\n\n\n I held up a hand, palm toward him. \"Ah, ah, ah! There's no 'deal'\n involved. We're just old buddies helping each other. This is for\n friendship, not business. I scratch your back; you scratch mine. Fair?\"\n\n\n \"Fair. Come on down to my office; I want to give you a headful of facts\n and figures.\"\n\n\n \"Will do. Let me finish my guzzle.\"",
"\"There are two very good reasons,\" he said. And there was a shade of\n anger in his tone. \"In the first place, that sort of operation takes\n time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and\n make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of\n the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other\n words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is\n precisely the thing I hired you to prevent.\"\n\n\n \"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst.\" He'd hired me\n because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on\n the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position\n as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts\n might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and\n Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.",
"As it turned out, I was that person. Just substitute \"Daniel Oak\"\n for \"human being\" in the First and Second Laws, and you'll see how\n important I was to a certain spaceship named McGuire.\nWhen I finally caught the beam from Ceres and set my flitterboat down\n on the huge landing field that had been carved from the nickel-iron\n of the asteroid with a focused sun beam, I was itchy with my own\n perspiration and groggy tired. I don't like riding in flitterboats,\n sitting on a\n [17]\n bucket seat, astride the drive tube, like a witch on a\n broomstick, with nothing but a near-invisible transite hull between me\n and the stars, all cooped up in a vac suit. Unlike driving a car, you\n can't pull a flitterboat over and take a nap; you have to wait until\n you hit the next beacon station."
]
] |
test
|
51449
|
[
"Why did Nob believe Drak would make a good general?",
"Why is Thrang arrested, and what happens to him?",
"Why did General Drak decide to attack the city of Kys?",
"What was Nob's position, and why was he selected for it?",
"Why was the Chief of Security worried about the spy situation on Mala?",
"Why was General Drak confused about the message from Allani?",
"Why does Jusa dislike her position as Empress?",
"According to Nob, what function does propaganda play in war?"
] |
[
[
"His experience managing a hardware store qualified him for the position.",
"He had previously held a position with the Supreme Command.",
"He felt Drak's style and appearance reminded him of a general.",
"He liked that Drak had never heard of a general before."
],
[
"The Secret Policeman informs Thrang he is asserting his power to randomly arrest people without cause. Thrang is taken away and killed.",
"He has incited the zipper salesman to betray his country by becoming a spy, so the Secret Police escort him away to his martyrdom.",
"The Secret Policeman arrests Thrang using his arbitrary police powers. The Storm Troopers take Thrang to prison.",
"The Secret Police and Storm Troopers arrest Thrang for reporting the spy, and they take him away and kill him."
],
[
"One of his hardware store employees tells him there is a resident there that refuses to pay off his debt to the store.",
"He flips a coin, and the heads-up represents attacking Kys.",
"He decides completely randomly.",
"He pushed a button, which indicated for him which city to destroy."
],
[
"He was Prime Minister of the Dictatorship--a position he was selected for because he looked wicked.",
"He was the Power Behind the Throne--a position he had been selected for due to his ability to placate royalty.",
"He was Prime Minister of the Dictatorship--a position he was selected for due to his close proximity to the Empress.",
"He was the Power Behind the Throne--a position he was selected for thanks to his close friendship with General Drak."
],
[
"There were no spies for him to monitor, and spies were essential in keeping the war machine going.",
"His department was losing morale because of their inability to apprehend spies.",
"He was concerned about the zipper salesman and his ability to supply data for enemy propaganda.",
"There were too many spies for his inexperienced department to handle."
],
[
"He could not determine if the message had been sent from his enemies or allies.",
"He could not properly translate the message because he had failed to learn the code.",
"The message was contradicted by what he had read in Smogget's \"Leadership.\"",
"The code the messenger had used was incorrect."
],
[
"Because she is not able to keep the pearls that Nob brings her.",
"She is young and inexperienced and feels ill-qualified to take on such a challenging role.",
"She didn't appreciate the contradictions she was asked to embody, and she felt her position had cost her friends.",
"She didn't dislike it necessarily. She both hated it and loved it because representing the people was a complex position to be in."
],
[
"It promotes the authority of the dictatorship.",
"It creates a further division between the warring parties.",
"It provides people with very important facts, which they can then use to make the right decision.",
"Propaganda unites people against a specific evil."
]
] |
[
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1
] |
[
0,
1,
0,
1,
1,
0,
0,
0
] |
[
[
"But aside from the location of his hardware store, Drak had other\n qualifications for leadership. For one thing, he looked like an Earth\n general and this had loomed large in Nob's eyes. Drak was over six feet\n tall, strongly built, solidly muscled. His eyes were gray, deep-set and\n fierce; his nose was aquiline; his mouth was firm because he usually\n held nails in it when he was out on a repair job.\n\n\n In his uniform, Drak looked every inch a general; as a matter of fact,\n he looked like several generals, for his cap came from the Earth-Mars\n war of '82, his tunic was a relic of the D'eereli Campaign, his belt\n was in the style of the Third Empire, his pants were a replica of the\n Southern Star Front, while his shoes reminded one of the hectic days of\n the Fanzani Rebellion.",
"\"You may be right,\" he agreed. \"I'll try to get some back.\"\n\n\n He rubbed his eyes tiredly. Everything had happened so quickly!\nJust a week ago, Nob had walked into his store and inquired, \"Drak, how\n would you like to be a general?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Drak had confessed honestly. \"What is it and why do we\n need one?\"\n\n\n \"War starting,\" Nob said. \"You've heard of war, haven't you? Earth\n idea,\nvery\nEarthly. I'll explain later how it works. What do you say?\"\n\n\n \"All right. But do you really think I'm the right type?\"\n\n\n \"Absolutely. Besides, your hardware store is perfectly situated for the\n Supreme Command Post.\"",
"\"Think he'll get it?\" one asked.\n\n\n \"Not a chance,\" the other answered.\n\n\n Drak glared them into silence, then returned to the argument. \"Will\n you please attempt to understand my position?\" he said hoarsely. \"You\n put me in command. At my orders, the Armies of the Dictatorship move\n against the Allied Democracies. All the other generals obey me.\nMe!\nCorrect?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a point,\" one soldier said.\n\n\n \"He'll never get it,\" the other replied.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you two!\" Drak roared. \"Nob, aren't I right? It's the Earthly\n way, Nob. Authority must be recognized!\"",
"But at least all his clothes were soldiers' clothes. His honor\n guard had to piece out their uniforms with personal articles. They\n had complained bitterly about the injustice of this, and had come\n close to deserting. But Drak, after some hasty reading in Smogget's\nLeadership\n, told them about the Terran doctrine of the Privileges of\n Rank.\n\n\n In front of him now was a report from the Allani Battle Front. He\n wasn't sure what it said, since it was coded and he had neglected to\n write down the code. Was it ENEMY REPULSED US WITH HEAVY LOSSES or\n should it read US REPULSED ENEMY WITH HEAVY LOSSES?\n\n\n He wished he knew. It made quite a difference.\n\n\n The door burst open and a young corporal rushed in. \"Hey, General, take\n a look out the window!\"",
"In point of fact, however, Nob was a mild, near-sighted, well-meaning\n little man, a lawyer by occupation, known throughout Mala for his\n prize rose gardens and his collection of Earth stamps. In spite of a\n temperamental handicap, he didn't find his new job too difficult. The\n Earth books were there and Nob simply interpreted them as literally as\n possible. Whenever a problem came up, Nob thought: how would they solve\n it on Earth? Then he would do the same, or as near the same as possible.\n\n\n But dealing with the Empress presented problems of a unique nature.\n Nob couldn't find a book entitled\nWays and Means of Placating\n Royalty\n. If such a book were obtainable, Nob would have paid any price\n for it.\n\n\n He took a deep breath, knocked and opened the door into the Royal\n Chambers.",
"\"You aren't allowed to. The book,\nMilitary Leadership\n, specifically\n states that a Supreme Commander never resigns during hostilities. An\n Earthman would find the very thought inconceivable.\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" Drak furiously slammed down the telephone.\n\n\n The two soldiers exchanged winks.\n\n\n \"At attention, you two,\" Drak said. \"You're supposed to be honor\n guards. Why can't you act like honor guards?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got weapons,\" one of the soldiers pointed out.\n\n\n \"Can't be helped. I sent what we had to the front.\"\n\n\n \"But we need them here,\" the soldier said earnestly. \"It's bad for\n morale, us not having weapons, and morale is vital for victory.\"\n\n\n Drak hated to be lectured, but he had to accept textbook truth when it\n was quoted at him.",
"Drak started to rise, then reconsidered. Rules were rules.\n\n\n \"Hey, what?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"Forgot,\" the corporal said. \"Hey,\nsir\n, take a look out the window,\n huh?\"\n\n\n \"Much better.\" Drak walked to the window and saw, in the distance, a\n mass of ascending black smoke.\n\n\n \"City of Chando,\" the corporal said proudly. \"Boy, we smacked it today!\n Saturation bombing for ten hours. They can't use it for anything but a\n gravel pit now!\"\n\n\n \"Sir,\" Drak reminded.\n\n\n \"Sir. The planes are fueled up and waiting. What shall we flatten next,\n huh, sir?\"",
"Instantly he ducked. A vase shattered against the wall behind him. Not\n so good, he thought, calculating the distance by which it had missed\n him. The Empress Jusa's aim was improving.\n\"Nob, you dirty swine!\" the Empress shrieked.\n\n\n \"At your service, Majesty,\" Nob answered, bowing low.\n\n\n \"Where are the pearls, you insolent dolt?\"\n\n\n \"Here, Majesty,\" Nob said, handing over the package. \"It strained the\n exchequer, buying them for you. The Minister of the Treasury threatened\n to desert to the enemy. He may still. The people are muttering about\n extravagance in high places. But the pearls are yours, Majesty.\"\n\n\n \"Of course.\" Jusa opened the package and looked at the lustrous gems.\n \"Can I keep them?\" she asked, in a very small voice.\n\n\n \"Of course not.\"",
"\"Let me see....\" General Drak examined a wall map upon which the\n important enemy cities were circled in red. There were Alis and Dryn,\n Kys and Mos and Dlettre. Drak could think of no reason for leveling one\n more than another. After a moment's thought, he pushed a button on his\n desk.\n\n\n \"Yeah?\" asked a voice over the loudspeaker.\n\n\n \"Which one, Ingif?\"\n\n\n \"Kys, of course,\" said the cracked voice of his old hardware store\n assistant. \"Fellow over there owes us money and won't pay up.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks, Ingif.\" Drak turned to the corporal. \"Go to it, soldier!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\"\n\n\n The corporal hurried out.",
"\"At once!\"\n\n\n \"But we might come out inside a star or—\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Beliakoff said, his voice filled with righteousness, \"simply\n cannot be helped. We must return at once to Mala!\"\nGeneral Drak, Commander of the Forces of the Empress, Wearer of the\n Gold Star of Mala, sat at his desk in the Supreme Command Post, which\n had recently been converted from a hardware store. He was engaged in a\n fiery argument over the telephone with Nob, the Empress's right-hand\n man.\n\n\n \"But damn it all,\" General Drak shouted, \"I must have it! I am the\n Supreme Commander, the General of All the Armies of the Dictatorship!\n Doesn't that mean anything?\"\n\n\n \"Not under the circumstances,\" Nob answered.\n\n\n Two soldiers, standing guard in the General's quarters, listened\n interestedly.",
"\"Good. Now there are some problems of state which you must decide upon.\n Prisoners of war, for one thing. We have several possible means for\n disposing of them. First, we could—\"\n\n\n \"You take care of it.\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Nob chided. \"Mustn't shirk your duty.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not. I am simply being arbitrary and dictatorial.\nYou\nsolve it,\n pig. And bring me diamonds.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Excellency,\" Nob said, bowing low. \"Diamonds. But the people—\"\n\n\n \"I love the people. But to hell with them!\" she cried, fire in her eyes.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine,\" Nob said, and bowed his way out of the room.",
"\"I just hope we'll be in time to salvage something,\" Beliakoff said,\n watching as their freighter plowed its way through the sea of space\n toward the unchanging stars.\nWith evident nervousness, Nob walked down a long, dim corridor toward\n the imperial chambers, carrying a small package in both hands. The\n Prime Minister of the Dictatorship was a small bald man with a great\n bulging forehead and small, glittering black eyes, made smaller by\n steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked the very incarnation of an evil\n genius, which was why he had been chosen as the Power Behind the Throne.",
"He reached his home and his wife kissed him on the cheek. \"Hard day at\n the palace, dear?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Quite hard,\" Nob said. \"Lots of work for after supper.\"\n\n\n \"It just isn't fair,\" complained his wife. She was a plump, pleasant\n little person and she worried continually about her husband's health.\n \"They shouldn't make you work so hard.\"\n\n\n \"But of course they should!\" said Nob, a little astonished. \"Don't\n you remember what I told you? All the books say that during a war, a\n Prime Minister is a harried, harassed individual, weighed down by the\n enormous burden of state, unable to relax, tense with the numerous\n strains of high office.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't fair,\" his wife repeated.\n\n\n \"No one said it was. But it's extremely Earthlike.\"",
"General Drak turned back to the reports on his desk, trying again to\n puzzle out what had happened at Allani. Repulsed Us? Us Repulsed? How\n should it read?\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" Drak said resignedly. \"In the long run, I don't suppose it\n really makes much difference.\"\nMiles away, in no man's land, stood a bunker of reinforced concrete and\n steel. Within the bunker were two men. They sat on opposite sides of\n a plain wooden table and their faces were stern and impassive. Beside\n each man was a pad and pencil. Upon each pad were marks.\n\n\n Upon the table between them was a coin.\n\n\n \"Your toss,\" said the man on the right.\n\n\n The man on the left picked up the coin. \"Call it.\"\n\n\n \"Heads.\"\n\n\n It came up heads.",
"\"I see,\" she said dubiously. \"Well, this other paper is from General\n Heglm of Security. He asks what you are doing about the spy situation.\n He says it's very serious.\"\n\n\n \"I had forgotten about that. He's right, it's reached a crisis point.\"\n He put the paper in his pocket. \"I'm going to take care of that\n personally, first thing in the morning.\"\n\n\n In the last few hours, his wife had made no less than eight Major\n Policy Decisions, twenty Codifications, eight Unifications, and three\n Clarifications. Nob didn't bother to read them over. He trusted his\n wife's good judgment and common sense.",
"He went to bed that night with the feeling of a job well done. And\n before he fell asleep, he figured out exactly what he would do about\n the spy situation.\nThe next morning, Nob's orders went out by all means of communication.\n The results were gratifyingly swift, since the people of the\n dictatorship were completely behind the war and dutifully loved and\n hated their Empress, in whose name the order was signed.\n\n\n A typical scene took place in the clubcar of the Char-Xil express. The\n occupants of the car, twenty-three commuting businessmen, sealed the\n doors as soon as they received Nob's order. The best-read among them, a\n salesman by the name of Thrang, was elected spokesman for the group.\n\n\n \"Boys,\" said Thrang, \"I guess I don't have to tell you anything about\n the importance of this order. We all know what war is by now, don't we?\"\n\n\n \"We sure do!\"",
"\"I'm sorry,\" Nob said. \"Extremely sorry. Personally, I sympathize with\n you. But the\nBook of Terran Rank Equivalents\nis quite specific. Seven\n shoulder stars are the most—the absolute most—that any general can\n wear. I absolutely cannot allow you to wear eight.\"\n\n\n \"But you gave Frix seven! And he's just Unit General!\"\n\n\n \"That was before we understood the rules completely. We thought there\n was no limit to the number of stars we could give and Frix was sulky.\n I'm sorry, General, you'll just have to be satisfied with seven.\"\n\n\n \"Take one away from Frix, then.\"\n\n\n \"Can't. He'll resign.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I resign.\"",
"\"It isn't possible,\" Nob said. \"We need guns, tanks, planes. Therefore\n you sell your jewelry. There are many Terran precedents.\"\n\n\n \"But why did I have to insist upon the pearls in the first place?\" Jusa\n asked.\n\n\n \"I explained! As Empress, you must be flighty, must possess a whim of\n iron, must have no regard for anyone else's feelings, must lust for\n expensive baubles.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Jusa said.\n\n\n \"All right, what?\"\n\n\n \"All right, swine.\"\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Nob said. \"You're learning, Jusa, you really are. If\n you could just fluctuate your moods more consistently—\"\n\n\n \"I really will try,\" promised the Empress. \"I'll learn, Nob. You'll be\n proud of me yet.\"",
"Jusa stood for a few moments in thought, then picked up a vase and\n shattered it on the floor. She made a mental note to order several\n dozen more.\n\n\n Then she flung herself upon the royal couch and began to weep bitterly.\n\n\n She was quite a young Empress and she had the feeling of being in\n beyond her depth. The problems of the war and of royalty had completely\n ended her social life.\n\n\n She resented it; any girl would.\nNob, meanwhile, left the palace and went home in his armored car.\n The car had been ordered to protect him against assassins, who,\n according to the Earth books, aimed a good deal of their plots at\n Prime Ministers. Nob could see no reason for this, since if he weren't\n Prime Minister, any one of a thousand men could do the job with equal\n efficiency. But he supposed it had a certain symbolic meaning.",
"His wife shrugged her shoulders. \"Well, of course, if it's Earthlike,\n it must be right. Come eat supper, dear.\"\nAfter eating, Nob attacked his mounds of paperwork. But soon he was\n yawning and his eyes burned. He turned to his wife, who was just\n finishing the dishes.\n\n\n \"My dear,\" he said, \"do you suppose you could help me?\"\n\n\n \"Is it proper?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Oh, absolutely. The books state that the Prime Minister's wife tries\n in every way possible to relieve her husband of the burden of power.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I'll be happy to try.\" She sat down in front of the\n great pile of papers. \"But, dear, I don't know anything about these\n matters.\"\n\n\n \"Rely on instinct,\" Nob answered, yawning. \"That's what I do.\""
],
[
"Head held high, Thrang marched proudly to his destiny.\nThe whole of Mala took to war with a will. Soon books began to appear\n on the stalls:\nWar and You\nfor the masses,\nThe Erotic Release of\n War\nfor the elite,\nThe Inherent Will to Destroy\nfor philosophers,\n and\nWar and Civilization\nfor scholars. Volumes of personal\n experiences sold well. Among them was an account of daring sabotage by\n a former zipper salesman, and the dramatic story of the Martyrdom of\n Thrang.\n\n\n War eliminated a thousand old institutions and unburdened the people of\n the heavy hand of tradition. War demonstrated clearly that everything\n was as temporary as a match-flash except Art and Man, because cities,\n buildings, parks, vehicles, hills, museums, monuments were as whispers\n of dust after the bombers had gone.",
"He felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. He turned. The Secret Policeman\n had been joined by two tall men in slouch hats and dark glasses. They\n wore badges that said\nStorm Troopers\n.\n\n\n \"You're under arrest,\" said the Secret Policeman.\n\n\n \"Why? What have I done?\"\n\n\n \"Not a thing, as far as we know,\" said a Storm Trooper. \"Not a single\n solitary thing. That's why we're arresting you.\"\n\n\n \"Arbitrary police powers,\" the Secret Policeman explained. \"Suspension\n of search warrants and habeas corpus. Invasion of privacy. War, you\n know. Come along quietly, sir. You have a special and very important\n part to play in the war effort.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"You have been arbitrarily selected as Martyr,\" said the Secret\n Policeman.",
"By then, the train had arrived at the station. The doors were unsealed,\n allowing the commuters to leave for their jobs. Thrang watched the\n zipper salesman depart, then hurried into the crowd. In a moment, he\n found a tall man wearing a slouch hat and dark glasses. On his lapel\n was a silver badge which read\nSecret Police\n.\n\n\n \"See that man?\" Thrang asked, pointing to the zipper salesman.\n\n\n \"You bet,\" the Secret Policeman said.\n\n\n \"He's a spy! A dirty spy! Quick, after him!\"\n\n\n \"He's being watched,\" said the Secret Policeman laconically.\n\n\n \"I just wanted to make sure,\" Thrang said, and started to walk off.",
"He went to bed that night with the feeling of a job well done. And\n before he fell asleep, he figured out exactly what he would do about\n the spy situation.\nThe next morning, Nob's orders went out by all means of communication.\n The results were gratifyingly swift, since the people of the\n dictatorship were completely behind the war and dutifully loved and\n hated their Empress, in whose name the order was signed.\n\n\n A typical scene took place in the clubcar of the Char-Xil express. The\n occupants of the car, twenty-three commuting businessmen, sealed the\n doors as soon as they received Nob's order. The best-read among them, a\n salesman by the name of Thrang, was elected spokesman for the group.\n\n\n \"Boys,\" said Thrang, \"I guess I don't have to tell you anything about\n the importance of this order. We all know what war is by now, don't we?\"\n\n\n \"We sure do!\"",
"\"War is hell!\"\n\n\n \"The war that the enemy thrust on us!\"\n\n\n \"The war to start all wars!\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Thrang said. \"And I guess we've all felt the pinch\n since the war started. Eh, boys?\"\n\n\n \"I've done my part,\" said a man named Draxil. \"When the Prime Minister\n called for a cigarette shortage, I dumped twenty carloads of tobacco in\n the Hunto River. Now we got cigarette rationing!\"\n\n\n \"That's the spirit,\" Thrang said. \"I know for a fact that others among\n you have done the same with sugar, canned goods, butter, meat and a\n hundred items. Everything's rationed now; everyone feels the pinch.\n But, boys, there's still more we have to do. Now a spy situation has\n come up and it calls for quick action.\"",
"\"Now to work. Boys, I'm calling for volunteers. Who'll be a spy?\"\n\n\n No one responded.\n\n\n \"Really now!\" said Thrang. \"That's no attitude to take. Come on, some\n of you must be harboring treasonous thoughts. Don't be ashamed of it.\n Remember, it takes all kinds to make a war.\"\n\n\n Little Herg, a zipper salesman from Xcoth, cleared his throat. \"I have\n a cousin who's Minister of War for the Allies.\"\n\n\n \"An excellent motive for subversion!\" Thrang cried.\n\n\n \"I rather thought it was,\" the zipper salesman said, pleased. \"Yes, I\n believe I can handle the job.\"\n\n\n \"Splendid!\" Thrang said.",
"\"They serve a vital purpose,\" Thrang explained. \"All the books agree\n on this. Spies keep a country alert, on its toes, eternally vigilant.\n Through sabotage, they cut down on arms production, which otherwise\n would grow absurdly large, since it has priority over everything else.\n They supply Security with subjects for Interrogation, Confession,\n Brainwashing and Re-indoctrination. This in turn supplies data for\n the enemy propaganda machine, which in turn supplies material for our\n counter-propaganda machine.\"\nDraxil looked awed. \"I didn't know it was so complicated.\"\n\n\n \"That's the beauty of the Earth War,\" Thrang said. \"Stupendous yet\n delicate complications, completely interrelated. Leave out one\n seemingly unimportant detail and the whole structure collapses.\"\n\n\n \"Those Terrans!\" Draxil said, shaking his head in admiration.",
"In point of fact, however, Nob was a mild, near-sighted, well-meaning\n little man, a lawyer by occupation, known throughout Mala for his\n prize rose gardens and his collection of Earth stamps. In spite of a\n temperamental handicap, he didn't find his new job too difficult. The\n Earth books were there and Nob simply interpreted them as literally as\n possible. Whenever a problem came up, Nob thought: how would they solve\n it on Earth? Then he would do the same, or as near the same as possible.\n\n\n But dealing with the Empress presented problems of a unique nature.\n Nob couldn't find a book entitled\nWays and Means of Placating\n Royalty\n. If such a book were obtainable, Nob would have paid any price\n for it.\n\n\n He took a deep breath, knocked and opened the door into the Royal\n Chambers.",
"Instantly he ducked. A vase shattered against the wall behind him. Not\n so good, he thought, calculating the distance by which it had missed\n him. The Empress Jusa's aim was improving.\n\"Nob, you dirty swine!\" the Empress shrieked.\n\n\n \"At your service, Majesty,\" Nob answered, bowing low.\n\n\n \"Where are the pearls, you insolent dolt?\"\n\n\n \"Here, Majesty,\" Nob said, handing over the package. \"It strained the\n exchequer, buying them for you. The Minister of the Treasury threatened\n to desert to the enemy. He may still. The people are muttering about\n extravagance in high places. But the pearls are yours, Majesty.\"\n\n\n \"Of course.\" Jusa opened the package and looked at the lustrous gems.\n \"Can I keep them?\" she asked, in a very small voice.\n\n\n \"Of course not.\"",
"War, the Malans agreed, was certainly one of the cleverest of Earth\n institutions and as educational as it was entertaining.\n\"Nope,\" Beliakoff was saying, \"you wouldn't like Ran-hachi Prison, not\n one little bit. It's on Mercury, you know, in the twilight zone. You\n blister by day and you freeze by night. Only two men have escaped from\n Ran-hachi in the last hundred years, and one of them figured his curve\n wrong and flipped into Sol.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other one?\" Kelly asked, perspiring lightly.\n\n\n \"His gyros fused. He was bound straight for the Coal Sack. Take him\n a couple of thousand years to get there, at his speed,\" Beliakoff\n finished dreamily. \"No, Johnny, you wouldn't like Ran-hachi.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, okay,\" Kelly said. \"The death penalty would be better.\"",
"\"But they wouldn't start a war just because they've got some books on\n it, and know that Earth people do it, and—yeah, I guess they would.\"\n Quickly he set the dials. \"You're right, buddy. We have an absolute\n moral obligation to return and straighten out that mess.\"\n\n\n \"I knew you'd see it that way,\" Beliakoff said approvingly. \"And\n there is the additional fact that the Galactic Council could hold\n us responsible for any deaths traceable to the books. It could mean\n Ran-hachi Prison for a hundred years or so.\"\n\n\n \"Why didn't you say that in the first place?\" Kelly flipped the kissoff\n switch. The ship came out in normal space. Fortunately, there was no\n sun or planet in its path.\n\n\n \"Hang on,\" Kelly said, \"we're going where we're going in a great big\n rush!\"",
"\"Think he'll get it?\" one asked.\n\n\n \"Not a chance,\" the other answered.\n\n\n Drak glared them into silence, then returned to the argument. \"Will\n you please attempt to understand my position?\" he said hoarsely. \"You\n put me in command. At my orders, the Armies of the Dictatorship move\n against the Allied Democracies. All the other generals obey me.\nMe!\nCorrect?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a point,\" one soldier said.\n\n\n \"He'll never get it,\" the other replied.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you two!\" Drak roared. \"Nob, aren't I right? It's the Earthly\n way, Nob. Authority must be recognized!\"",
"\"You aren't allowed to. The book,\nMilitary Leadership\n, specifically\n states that a Supreme Commander never resigns during hostilities. An\n Earthman would find the very thought inconceivable.\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" Drak furiously slammed down the telephone.\n\n\n The two soldiers exchanged winks.\n\n\n \"At attention, you two,\" Drak said. \"You're supposed to be honor\n guards. Why can't you act like honor guards?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got weapons,\" one of the soldiers pointed out.\n\n\n \"Can't be helped. I sent what we had to the front.\"\n\n\n \"But we need them here,\" the soldier said earnestly. \"It's bad for\n morale, us not having weapons, and morale is vital for victory.\"\n\n\n Drak hated to be lectured, but he had to accept textbook truth when it\n was quoted at him.",
"But at least all his clothes were soldiers' clothes. His honor\n guard had to piece out their uniforms with personal articles. They\n had complained bitterly about the injustice of this, and had come\n close to deserting. But Drak, after some hasty reading in Smogget's\nLeadership\n, told them about the Terran doctrine of the Privileges of\n Rank.\n\n\n In front of him now was a report from the Allani Battle Front. He\n wasn't sure what it said, since it was coded and he had neglected to\n write down the code. Was it ENEMY REPULSED US WITH HEAVY LOSSES or\n should it read US REPULSED ENEMY WITH HEAVY LOSSES?\n\n\n He wished he knew. It made quite a difference.\n\n\n The door burst open and a young corporal rushed in. \"Hey, General, take\n a look out the window!\"",
"\"Good. Now there are some problems of state which you must decide upon.\n Prisoners of war, for one thing. We have several possible means for\n disposing of them. First, we could—\"\n\n\n \"You take care of it.\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Nob chided. \"Mustn't shirk your duty.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not. I am simply being arbitrary and dictatorial.\nYou\nsolve it,\n pig. And bring me diamonds.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Excellency,\" Nob said, bowing low. \"Diamonds. But the people—\"\n\n\n \"I love the people. But to hell with them!\" she cried, fire in her eyes.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine,\" Nob said, and bowed his way out of the room.",
"Jusa stood for a few moments in thought, then picked up a vase and\n shattered it on the floor. She made a mental note to order several\n dozen more.\n\n\n Then she flung herself upon the royal couch and began to weep bitterly.\n\n\n She was quite a young Empress and she had the feeling of being in\n beyond her depth. The problems of the war and of royalty had completely\n ended her social life.\n\n\n She resented it; any girl would.\nNob, meanwhile, left the palace and went home in his armored car.\n The car had been ordered to protect him against assassins, who,\n according to the Earth books, aimed a good deal of their plots at\n Prime Ministers. Nob could see no reason for this, since if he weren't\n Prime Minister, any one of a thousand men could do the job with equal\n efficiency. But he supposed it had a certain symbolic meaning.",
"\"I just hope we'll be in time to salvage something,\" Beliakoff said,\n watching as their freighter plowed its way through the sea of space\n toward the unchanging stars.\nWith evident nervousness, Nob walked down a long, dim corridor toward\n the imperial chambers, carrying a small package in both hands. The\n Prime Minister of the Dictatorship was a small bald man with a great\n bulging forehead and small, glittering black eyes, made smaller by\n steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked the very incarnation of an evil\n genius, which was why he had been chosen as the Power Behind the Throne.",
"\"Hm? Did you find a way of speeding them up?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Gave them Kyne's old dog-eared books. They're crazy about books.\n Really hustled for them.\"\n\n\n Beliakoff said nothing for several seconds, but his long, sallow face\n became pale. \"You what?\"\n\n\n \"Gave 'em the books. Don't worry,\" Kelly said quickly. \"Kyne gave them\n to me before they hauled him away.\"\n\n\n \"You gave the\nwarfare books\nto the people on Mala?\"\n\"You mean I shouldn't have? Why not? What's wrong with Mala?\"\n\n\n \"Plenty.\" Beliakoff grimly did some quick figuring. \"It'll be a year,\n their time, when we can get back. Kelly, take us out of hyperspace!\"\n\n\n \"Now?\" Kelly gasped. \"Here?\"",
"\"Haven't we done enough?\" groaned a clothing-store owner.\n\n\n \"It's never enough! In time of war, Earth people give till it\n hurts—then give some more! They know that no sacrifice is too much,\n that nothing counts but the proper prosecution of the war.\"\n\n\n The clothing-store owner nodded vehemently. \"If it's Earthly, it's good\n enough for me. So what can we do about this spy situation?\"\n\n\n \"That is for us to decide here and now,\" Thrang said. \"According to the\n Prime Minister, our dictatorship cannot boast a single act of espionage\n or sabotage done to it since the beginning of the war. The Chief of\n Security is alarmed. It's his job to keep all spies under surveillance.\n Since there are none, his department has lost all morale, which, in\n turn, affects the other departments.\"\n\n\n \"Do we really need spies?\"",
"\"They give that only as a measure of extreme clemency,\" Beliakoff said\n with gloomy Slavic satisfaction.\n\n\n \"Enough! We'll straighten out Mala.\" There was more hope than\n conviction in Kelly's voice. \"Thar she lies, off to starboard.\"\n\n\n Mala was a tiny blue and brown sphere, suddenly growing larger in their\n screens.\n\n\n Their radio blared on the emergency channel.\n\n\n Kelly swore. \"That's the Galactic patrol boat from Azolith. What's he\n doing here?\"\n\n\n \"Blockade,\" said Beliakoff. \"Standard practice to quarantine a planet\n at war. We can't touch down legally until the war's declared over.\"\n\n\n \"Nuts. We're going down.\" Kelly touched the controls and the freighter\n began to descend into the interdicted area."
],
[
"\"Let me see....\" General Drak examined a wall map upon which the\n important enemy cities were circled in red. There were Alis and Dryn,\n Kys and Mos and Dlettre. Drak could think of no reason for leveling one\n more than another. After a moment's thought, he pushed a button on his\n desk.\n\n\n \"Yeah?\" asked a voice over the loudspeaker.\n\n\n \"Which one, Ingif?\"\n\n\n \"Kys, of course,\" said the cracked voice of his old hardware store\n assistant. \"Fellow over there owes us money and won't pay up.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks, Ingif.\" Drak turned to the corporal. \"Go to it, soldier!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\"\n\n\n The corporal hurried out.",
"\"You may be right,\" he agreed. \"I'll try to get some back.\"\n\n\n He rubbed his eyes tiredly. Everything had happened so quickly!\nJust a week ago, Nob had walked into his store and inquired, \"Drak, how\n would you like to be a general?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Drak had confessed honestly. \"What is it and why do we\n need one?\"\n\n\n \"War starting,\" Nob said. \"You've heard of war, haven't you? Earth\n idea,\nvery\nEarthly. I'll explain later how it works. What do you say?\"\n\n\n \"All right. But do you really think I'm the right type?\"\n\n\n \"Absolutely. Besides, your hardware store is perfectly situated for the\n Supreme Command Post.\"",
"Drak started to rise, then reconsidered. Rules were rules.\n\n\n \"Hey, what?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"Forgot,\" the corporal said. \"Hey,\nsir\n, take a look out the window,\n huh?\"\n\n\n \"Much better.\" Drak walked to the window and saw, in the distance, a\n mass of ascending black smoke.\n\n\n \"City of Chando,\" the corporal said proudly. \"Boy, we smacked it today!\n Saturation bombing for ten hours. They can't use it for anything but a\n gravel pit now!\"\n\n\n \"Sir,\" Drak reminded.\n\n\n \"Sir. The planes are fueled up and waiting. What shall we flatten next,\n huh, sir?\"",
"But at least all his clothes were soldiers' clothes. His honor\n guard had to piece out their uniforms with personal articles. They\n had complained bitterly about the injustice of this, and had come\n close to deserting. But Drak, after some hasty reading in Smogget's\nLeadership\n, told them about the Terran doctrine of the Privileges of\n Rank.\n\n\n In front of him now was a report from the Allani Battle Front. He\n wasn't sure what it said, since it was coded and he had neglected to\n write down the code. Was it ENEMY REPULSED US WITH HEAVY LOSSES or\n should it read US REPULSED ENEMY WITH HEAVY LOSSES?\n\n\n He wished he knew. It made quite a difference.\n\n\n The door burst open and a young corporal rushed in. \"Hey, General, take\n a look out the window!\"",
"But aside from the location of his hardware store, Drak had other\n qualifications for leadership. For one thing, he looked like an Earth\n general and this had loomed large in Nob's eyes. Drak was over six feet\n tall, strongly built, solidly muscled. His eyes were gray, deep-set and\n fierce; his nose was aquiline; his mouth was firm because he usually\n held nails in it when he was out on a repair job.\n\n\n In his uniform, Drak looked every inch a general; as a matter of fact,\n he looked like several generals, for his cap came from the Earth-Mars\n war of '82, his tunic was a relic of the D'eereli Campaign, his belt\n was in the style of the Third Empire, his pants were a replica of the\n Southern Star Front, while his shoes reminded one of the hectic days of\n the Fanzani Rebellion.",
"\"Think he'll get it?\" one asked.\n\n\n \"Not a chance,\" the other answered.\n\n\n Drak glared them into silence, then returned to the argument. \"Will\n you please attempt to understand my position?\" he said hoarsely. \"You\n put me in command. At my orders, the Armies of the Dictatorship move\n against the Allied Democracies. All the other generals obey me.\nMe!\nCorrect?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a point,\" one soldier said.\n\n\n \"He'll never get it,\" the other replied.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you two!\" Drak roared. \"Nob, aren't I right? It's the Earthly\n way, Nob. Authority must be recognized!\"",
"\"You aren't allowed to. The book,\nMilitary Leadership\n, specifically\n states that a Supreme Commander never resigns during hostilities. An\n Earthman would find the very thought inconceivable.\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" Drak furiously slammed down the telephone.\n\n\n The two soldiers exchanged winks.\n\n\n \"At attention, you two,\" Drak said. \"You're supposed to be honor\n guards. Why can't you act like honor guards?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got weapons,\" one of the soldiers pointed out.\n\n\n \"Can't be helped. I sent what we had to the front.\"\n\n\n \"But we need them here,\" the soldier said earnestly. \"It's bad for\n morale, us not having weapons, and morale is vital for victory.\"\n\n\n Drak hated to be lectured, but he had to accept textbook truth when it\n was quoted at him.",
"\"At once!\"\n\n\n \"But we might come out inside a star or—\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Beliakoff said, his voice filled with righteousness, \"simply\n cannot be helped. We must return at once to Mala!\"\nGeneral Drak, Commander of the Forces of the Empress, Wearer of the\n Gold Star of Mala, sat at his desk in the Supreme Command Post, which\n had recently been converted from a hardware store. He was engaged in a\n fiery argument over the telephone with Nob, the Empress's right-hand\n man.\n\n\n \"But damn it all,\" General Drak shouted, \"I must have it! I am the\n Supreme Commander, the General of All the Armies of the Dictatorship!\n Doesn't that mean anything?\"\n\n\n \"Not under the circumstances,\" Nob answered.\n\n\n Two soldiers, standing guard in the General's quarters, listened\n interestedly.",
"General Drak turned back to the reports on his desk, trying again to\n puzzle out what had happened at Allani. Repulsed Us? Us Repulsed? How\n should it read?\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" Drak said resignedly. \"In the long run, I don't suppose it\n really makes much difference.\"\nMiles away, in no man's land, stood a bunker of reinforced concrete and\n steel. Within the bunker were two men. They sat on opposite sides of\n a plain wooden table and their faces were stern and impassive. Beside\n each man was a pad and pencil. Upon each pad were marks.\n\n\n Upon the table between them was a coin.\n\n\n \"Your toss,\" said the man on the right.\n\n\n The man on the left picked up the coin. \"Call it.\"\n\n\n \"Heads.\"\n\n\n It came up heads.",
"\"Hm? Did you find a way of speeding them up?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Gave them Kyne's old dog-eared books. They're crazy about books.\n Really hustled for them.\"\n\n\n Beliakoff said nothing for several seconds, but his long, sallow face\n became pale. \"You what?\"\n\n\n \"Gave 'em the books. Don't worry,\" Kelly said quickly. \"Kyne gave them\n to me before they hauled him away.\"\n\n\n \"You gave the\nwarfare books\nto the people on Mala?\"\n\"You mean I shouldn't have? Why not? What's wrong with Mala?\"\n\n\n \"Plenty.\" Beliakoff grimly did some quick figuring. \"It'll be a year,\n their time, when we can get back. Kelly, take us out of hyperspace!\"\n\n\n \"Now?\" Kelly gasped. \"Here?\"",
"\"Poor devil, Kyne,\" Beliakoff sighed.\n\n\n \"A paranoid,\" Kelly diagnosed. \"Did he ever tell you about the plot to\n keep him out of the Luna Military Academy?\"\n\n\n \"He never talked to me much.\"\n\n\n \"That's because you're a cold, distant, unsympathetic type,\" Kelly\n said, with a complacent smile. \"Me, he told everything. He applied to\n Luna every year. Studied all the textbooks on military organization,\n land tactics, sea tactics, space strategy, histories of warfare.\n Crammed his cabin with that junk. Knew it inside out. Fantastic memory!\"\n\n\n \"Why didn't he get in?\"",
"\"War is hell!\"\n\n\n \"The war that the enemy thrust on us!\"\n\n\n \"The war to start all wars!\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Thrang said. \"And I guess we've all felt the pinch\n since the war started. Eh, boys?\"\n\n\n \"I've done my part,\" said a man named Draxil. \"When the Prime Minister\n called for a cigarette shortage, I dumped twenty carloads of tobacco in\n the Hunto River. Now we got cigarette rationing!\"\n\n\n \"That's the spirit,\" Thrang said. \"I know for a fact that others among\n you have done the same with sugar, canned goods, butter, meat and a\n hundred items. Everything's rationed now; everyone feels the pinch.\n But, boys, there's still more we have to do. Now a spy situation has\n come up and it calls for quick action.\"",
"\"I just hope we'll be in time to salvage something,\" Beliakoff said,\n watching as their freighter plowed its way through the sea of space\n toward the unchanging stars.\nWith evident nervousness, Nob walked down a long, dim corridor toward\n the imperial chambers, carrying a small package in both hands. The\n Prime Minister of the Dictatorship was a small bald man with a great\n bulging forehead and small, glittering black eyes, made smaller by\n steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked the very incarnation of an evil\n genius, which was why he had been chosen as the Power Behind the Throne.",
"Instantly he ducked. A vase shattered against the wall behind him. Not\n so good, he thought, calculating the distance by which it had missed\n him. The Empress Jusa's aim was improving.\n\"Nob, you dirty swine!\" the Empress shrieked.\n\n\n \"At your service, Majesty,\" Nob answered, bowing low.\n\n\n \"Where are the pearls, you insolent dolt?\"\n\n\n \"Here, Majesty,\" Nob said, handing over the package. \"It strained the\n exchequer, buying them for you. The Minister of the Treasury threatened\n to desert to the enemy. He may still. The people are muttering about\n extravagance in high places. But the pearls are yours, Majesty.\"\n\n\n \"Of course.\" Jusa opened the package and looked at the lustrous gems.\n \"Can I keep them?\" she asked, in a very small voice.\n\n\n \"Of course not.\"",
"Head held high, Thrang marched proudly to his destiny.\nThe whole of Mala took to war with a will. Soon books began to appear\n on the stalls:\nWar and You\nfor the masses,\nThe Erotic Release of\n War\nfor the elite,\nThe Inherent Will to Destroy\nfor philosophers,\n and\nWar and Civilization\nfor scholars. Volumes of personal\n experiences sold well. Among them was an account of daring sabotage by\n a former zipper salesman, and the dramatic story of the Martyrdom of\n Thrang.\n\n\n War eliminated a thousand old institutions and unburdened the people of\n the heavy hand of tradition. War demonstrated clearly that everything\n was as temporary as a match-flash except Art and Man, because cities,\n buildings, parks, vehicles, hills, museums, monuments were as whispers\n of dust after the bombers had gone.",
"\"They serve a vital purpose,\" Thrang explained. \"All the books agree\n on this. Spies keep a country alert, on its toes, eternally vigilant.\n Through sabotage, they cut down on arms production, which otherwise\n would grow absurdly large, since it has priority over everything else.\n They supply Security with subjects for Interrogation, Confession,\n Brainwashing and Re-indoctrination. This in turn supplies data for\n the enemy propaganda machine, which in turn supplies material for our\n counter-propaganda machine.\"\nDraxil looked awed. \"I didn't know it was so complicated.\"\n\n\n \"That's the beauty of the Earth War,\" Thrang said. \"Stupendous yet\n delicate complications, completely interrelated. Leave out one\n seemingly unimportant detail and the whole structure collapses.\"\n\n\n \"Those Terrans!\" Draxil said, shaking his head in admiration.",
"\"But they wouldn't start a war just because they've got some books on\n it, and know that Earth people do it, and—yeah, I guess they would.\"\n Quickly he set the dials. \"You're right, buddy. We have an absolute\n moral obligation to return and straighten out that mess.\"\n\n\n \"I knew you'd see it that way,\" Beliakoff said approvingly. \"And\n there is the additional fact that the Galactic Council could hold\n us responsible for any deaths traceable to the books. It could mean\n Ran-hachi Prison for a hundred years or so.\"\n\n\n \"Why didn't you say that in the first place?\" Kelly flipped the kissoff\n switch. The ship came out in normal space. Fortunately, there was no\n sun or planet in its path.\n\n\n \"Hang on,\" Kelly said, \"we're going where we're going in a great big\n rush!\"",
"\"It isn't possible,\" Nob said. \"We need guns, tanks, planes. Therefore\n you sell your jewelry. There are many Terran precedents.\"\n\n\n \"But why did I have to insist upon the pearls in the first place?\" Jusa\n asked.\n\n\n \"I explained! As Empress, you must be flighty, must possess a whim of\n iron, must have no regard for anyone else's feelings, must lust for\n expensive baubles.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Jusa said.\n\n\n \"All right, what?\"\n\n\n \"All right, swine.\"\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Nob said. \"You're learning, Jusa, you really are. If\n you could just fluctuate your moods more consistently—\"\n\n\n \"I really will try,\" promised the Empress. \"I'll learn, Nob. You'll be\n proud of me yet.\"",
"\"They give that only as a measure of extreme clemency,\" Beliakoff said\n with gloomy Slavic satisfaction.\n\n\n \"Enough! We'll straighten out Mala.\" There was more hope than\n conviction in Kelly's voice. \"Thar she lies, off to starboard.\"\n\n\n Mala was a tiny blue and brown sphere, suddenly growing larger in their\n screens.\n\n\n Their radio blared on the emergency channel.\n\n\n Kelly swore. \"That's the Galactic patrol boat from Azolith. What's he\n doing here?\"\n\n\n \"Blockade,\" said Beliakoff. \"Standard practice to quarantine a planet\n at war. We can't touch down legally until the war's declared over.\"\n\n\n \"Nuts. We're going down.\" Kelly touched the controls and the freighter\n began to descend into the interdicted area.",
"\"Now to work. Boys, I'm calling for volunteers. Who'll be a spy?\"\n\n\n No one responded.\n\n\n \"Really now!\" said Thrang. \"That's no attitude to take. Come on, some\n of you must be harboring treasonous thoughts. Don't be ashamed of it.\n Remember, it takes all kinds to make a war.\"\n\n\n Little Herg, a zipper salesman from Xcoth, cleared his throat. \"I have\n a cousin who's Minister of War for the Allies.\"\n\n\n \"An excellent motive for subversion!\" Thrang cried.\n\n\n \"I rather thought it was,\" the zipper salesman said, pleased. \"Yes, I\n believe I can handle the job.\"\n\n\n \"Splendid!\" Thrang said."
],
[
"In point of fact, however, Nob was a mild, near-sighted, well-meaning\n little man, a lawyer by occupation, known throughout Mala for his\n prize rose gardens and his collection of Earth stamps. In spite of a\n temperamental handicap, he didn't find his new job too difficult. The\n Earth books were there and Nob simply interpreted them as literally as\n possible. Whenever a problem came up, Nob thought: how would they solve\n it on Earth? Then he would do the same, or as near the same as possible.\n\n\n But dealing with the Empress presented problems of a unique nature.\n Nob couldn't find a book entitled\nWays and Means of Placating\n Royalty\n. If such a book were obtainable, Nob would have paid any price\n for it.\n\n\n He took a deep breath, knocked and opened the door into the Royal\n Chambers.",
"He went to bed that night with the feeling of a job well done. And\n before he fell asleep, he figured out exactly what he would do about\n the spy situation.\nThe next morning, Nob's orders went out by all means of communication.\n The results were gratifyingly swift, since the people of the\n dictatorship were completely behind the war and dutifully loved and\n hated their Empress, in whose name the order was signed.\n\n\n A typical scene took place in the clubcar of the Char-Xil express. The\n occupants of the car, twenty-three commuting businessmen, sealed the\n doors as soon as they received Nob's order. The best-read among them, a\n salesman by the name of Thrang, was elected spokesman for the group.\n\n\n \"Boys,\" said Thrang, \"I guess I don't have to tell you anything about\n the importance of this order. We all know what war is by now, don't we?\"\n\n\n \"We sure do!\"",
"But aside from the location of his hardware store, Drak had other\n qualifications for leadership. For one thing, he looked like an Earth\n general and this had loomed large in Nob's eyes. Drak was over six feet\n tall, strongly built, solidly muscled. His eyes were gray, deep-set and\n fierce; his nose was aquiline; his mouth was firm because he usually\n held nails in it when he was out on a repair job.\n\n\n In his uniform, Drak looked every inch a general; as a matter of fact,\n he looked like several generals, for his cap came from the Earth-Mars\n war of '82, his tunic was a relic of the D'eereli Campaign, his belt\n was in the style of the Third Empire, his pants were a replica of the\n Southern Star Front, while his shoes reminded one of the hectic days of\n the Fanzani Rebellion.",
"He reached his home and his wife kissed him on the cheek. \"Hard day at\n the palace, dear?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Quite hard,\" Nob said. \"Lots of work for after supper.\"\n\n\n \"It just isn't fair,\" complained his wife. She was a plump, pleasant\n little person and she worried continually about her husband's health.\n \"They shouldn't make you work so hard.\"\n\n\n \"But of course they should!\" said Nob, a little astonished. \"Don't\n you remember what I told you? All the books say that during a war, a\n Prime Minister is a harried, harassed individual, weighed down by the\n enormous burden of state, unable to relax, tense with the numerous\n strains of high office.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't fair,\" his wife repeated.\n\n\n \"No one said it was. But it's extremely Earthlike.\"",
"Instantly he ducked. A vase shattered against the wall behind him. Not\n so good, he thought, calculating the distance by which it had missed\n him. The Empress Jusa's aim was improving.\n\"Nob, you dirty swine!\" the Empress shrieked.\n\n\n \"At your service, Majesty,\" Nob answered, bowing low.\n\n\n \"Where are the pearls, you insolent dolt?\"\n\n\n \"Here, Majesty,\" Nob said, handing over the package. \"It strained the\n exchequer, buying them for you. The Minister of the Treasury threatened\n to desert to the enemy. He may still. The people are muttering about\n extravagance in high places. But the pearls are yours, Majesty.\"\n\n\n \"Of course.\" Jusa opened the package and looked at the lustrous gems.\n \"Can I keep them?\" she asked, in a very small voice.\n\n\n \"Of course not.\"",
"\"You may be right,\" he agreed. \"I'll try to get some back.\"\n\n\n He rubbed his eyes tiredly. Everything had happened so quickly!\nJust a week ago, Nob had walked into his store and inquired, \"Drak, how\n would you like to be a general?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Drak had confessed honestly. \"What is it and why do we\n need one?\"\n\n\n \"War starting,\" Nob said. \"You've heard of war, haven't you? Earth\n idea,\nvery\nEarthly. I'll explain later how it works. What do you say?\"\n\n\n \"All right. But do you really think I'm the right type?\"\n\n\n \"Absolutely. Besides, your hardware store is perfectly situated for the\n Supreme Command Post.\"",
"\"Think he'll get it?\" one asked.\n\n\n \"Not a chance,\" the other answered.\n\n\n Drak glared them into silence, then returned to the argument. \"Will\n you please attempt to understand my position?\" he said hoarsely. \"You\n put me in command. At my orders, the Armies of the Dictatorship move\n against the Allied Democracies. All the other generals obey me.\nMe!\nCorrect?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a point,\" one soldier said.\n\n\n \"He'll never get it,\" the other replied.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you two!\" Drak roared. \"Nob, aren't I right? It's the Earthly\n way, Nob. Authority must be recognized!\"",
"Jusa stood for a few moments in thought, then picked up a vase and\n shattered it on the floor. She made a mental note to order several\n dozen more.\n\n\n Then she flung herself upon the royal couch and began to weep bitterly.\n\n\n She was quite a young Empress and she had the feeling of being in\n beyond her depth. The problems of the war and of royalty had completely\n ended her social life.\n\n\n She resented it; any girl would.\nNob, meanwhile, left the palace and went home in his armored car.\n The car had been ordered to protect him against assassins, who,\n according to the Earth books, aimed a good deal of their plots at\n Prime Ministers. Nob could see no reason for this, since if he weren't\n Prime Minister, any one of a thousand men could do the job with equal\n efficiency. But he supposed it had a certain symbolic meaning.",
"\"Good. Now there are some problems of state which you must decide upon.\n Prisoners of war, for one thing. We have several possible means for\n disposing of them. First, we could—\"\n\n\n \"You take care of it.\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Nob chided. \"Mustn't shirk your duty.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not. I am simply being arbitrary and dictatorial.\nYou\nsolve it,\n pig. And bring me diamonds.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Excellency,\" Nob said, bowing low. \"Diamonds. But the people—\"\n\n\n \"I love the people. But to hell with them!\" she cried, fire in her eyes.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine,\" Nob said, and bowed his way out of the room.",
"\"I just hope we'll be in time to salvage something,\" Beliakoff said,\n watching as their freighter plowed its way through the sea of space\n toward the unchanging stars.\nWith evident nervousness, Nob walked down a long, dim corridor toward\n the imperial chambers, carrying a small package in both hands. The\n Prime Minister of the Dictatorship was a small bald man with a great\n bulging forehead and small, glittering black eyes, made smaller by\n steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked the very incarnation of an evil\n genius, which was why he had been chosen as the Power Behind the Throne.",
"His wife shrugged her shoulders. \"Well, of course, if it's Earthlike,\n it must be right. Come eat supper, dear.\"\nAfter eating, Nob attacked his mounds of paperwork. But soon he was\n yawning and his eyes burned. He turned to his wife, who was just\n finishing the dishes.\n\n\n \"My dear,\" he said, \"do you suppose you could help me?\"\n\n\n \"Is it proper?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Oh, absolutely. The books state that the Prime Minister's wife tries\n in every way possible to relieve her husband of the burden of power.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I'll be happy to try.\" She sat down in front of the\n great pile of papers. \"But, dear, I don't know anything about these\n matters.\"\n\n\n \"Rely on instinct,\" Nob answered, yawning. \"That's what I do.\"",
"\"Now to work. Boys, I'm calling for volunteers. Who'll be a spy?\"\n\n\n No one responded.\n\n\n \"Really now!\" said Thrang. \"That's no attitude to take. Come on, some\n of you must be harboring treasonous thoughts. Don't be ashamed of it.\n Remember, it takes all kinds to make a war.\"\n\n\n Little Herg, a zipper salesman from Xcoth, cleared his throat. \"I have\n a cousin who's Minister of War for the Allies.\"\n\n\n \"An excellent motive for subversion!\" Thrang cried.\n\n\n \"I rather thought it was,\" the zipper salesman said, pleased. \"Yes, I\n believe I can handle the job.\"\n\n\n \"Splendid!\" Thrang said.",
"\"I see,\" she said dubiously. \"Well, this other paper is from General\n Heglm of Security. He asks what you are doing about the spy situation.\n He says it's very serious.\"\n\n\n \"I had forgotten about that. He's right, it's reached a crisis point.\"\n He put the paper in his pocket. \"I'm going to take care of that\n personally, first thing in the morning.\"\n\n\n In the last few hours, his wife had made no less than eight Major\n Policy Decisions, twenty Codifications, eight Unifications, and three\n Clarifications. Nob didn't bother to read them over. He trusted his\n wife's good judgment and common sense.",
"\"It isn't possible,\" Nob said. \"We need guns, tanks, planes. Therefore\n you sell your jewelry. There are many Terran precedents.\"\n\n\n \"But why did I have to insist upon the pearls in the first place?\" Jusa\n asked.\n\n\n \"I explained! As Empress, you must be flighty, must possess a whim of\n iron, must have no regard for anyone else's feelings, must lust for\n expensive baubles.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Jusa said.\n\n\n \"All right, what?\"\n\n\n \"All right, swine.\"\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Nob said. \"You're learning, Jusa, you really are. If\n you could just fluctuate your moods more consistently—\"\n\n\n \"I really will try,\" promised the Empress. \"I'll learn, Nob. You'll be\n proud of me yet.\"",
"He felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. He turned. The Secret Policeman\n had been joined by two tall men in slouch hats and dark glasses. They\n wore badges that said\nStorm Troopers\n.\n\n\n \"You're under arrest,\" said the Secret Policeman.\n\n\n \"Why? What have I done?\"\n\n\n \"Not a thing, as far as we know,\" said a Storm Trooper. \"Not a single\n solitary thing. That's why we're arresting you.\"\n\n\n \"Arbitrary police powers,\" the Secret Policeman explained. \"Suspension\n of search warrants and habeas corpus. Invasion of privacy. War, you\n know. Come along quietly, sir. You have a special and very important\n part to play in the war effort.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"You have been arbitrarily selected as Martyr,\" said the Secret\n Policeman.",
"By then, the train had arrived at the station. The doors were unsealed,\n allowing the commuters to leave for their jobs. Thrang watched the\n zipper salesman depart, then hurried into the crowd. In a moment, he\n found a tall man wearing a slouch hat and dark glasses. On his lapel\n was a silver badge which read\nSecret Police\n.\n\n\n \"See that man?\" Thrang asked, pointing to the zipper salesman.\n\n\n \"You bet,\" the Secret Policeman said.\n\n\n \"He's a spy! A dirty spy! Quick, after him!\"\n\n\n \"He's being watched,\" said the Secret Policeman laconically.\n\n\n \"I just wanted to make sure,\" Thrang said, and started to walk off.",
"\"I'm sorry,\" Nob said. \"Extremely sorry. Personally, I sympathize with\n you. But the\nBook of Terran Rank Equivalents\nis quite specific. Seven\n shoulder stars are the most—the absolute most—that any general can\n wear. I absolutely cannot allow you to wear eight.\"\n\n\n \"But you gave Frix seven! And he's just Unit General!\"\n\n\n \"That was before we understood the rules completely. We thought there\n was no limit to the number of stars we could give and Frix was sulky.\n I'm sorry, General, you'll just have to be satisfied with seven.\"\n\n\n \"Take one away from Frix, then.\"\n\n\n \"Can't. He'll resign.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I resign.\"",
"Head held high, Thrang marched proudly to his destiny.\nThe whole of Mala took to war with a will. Soon books began to appear\n on the stalls:\nWar and You\nfor the masses,\nThe Erotic Release of\n War\nfor the elite,\nThe Inherent Will to Destroy\nfor philosophers,\n and\nWar and Civilization\nfor scholars. Volumes of personal\n experiences sold well. Among them was an account of daring sabotage by\n a former zipper salesman, and the dramatic story of the Martyrdom of\n Thrang.\n\n\n War eliminated a thousand old institutions and unburdened the people of\n the heavy hand of tradition. War demonstrated clearly that everything\n was as temporary as a match-flash except Art and Man, because cities,\n buildings, parks, vehicles, hills, museums, monuments were as whispers\n of dust after the bombers had gone.",
"Flattered by the importance of her task, she set to work with a will.\n\n\n Several hours later, she awakened her husband, who was slumbering on\n the couch.\n\n\n \"I've got them all finished except these,\" she said. \"In this one, I'm\n afraid I don't understand that word.\"\n\n\n Nob glanced at the paper. \"Oh, propaganda. That means giving the people\n the facts, whether true or false. It's very important in any war.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why.\"\n\n\n \"It's obvious. To have a genuine Earth-style war, you need ideological\n differences. That's why we chose a dictatorship and the other continent\n chose a democracy. The job of propaganda is to keep us different.\"",
"But at least all his clothes were soldiers' clothes. His honor\n guard had to piece out their uniforms with personal articles. They\n had complained bitterly about the injustice of this, and had come\n close to deserting. But Drak, after some hasty reading in Smogget's\nLeadership\n, told them about the Terran doctrine of the Privileges of\n Rank.\n\n\n In front of him now was a report from the Allani Battle Front. He\n wasn't sure what it said, since it was coded and he had neglected to\n write down the code. Was it ENEMY REPULSED US WITH HEAVY LOSSES or\n should it read US REPULSED ENEMY WITH HEAVY LOSSES?\n\n\n He wished he knew. It made quite a difference.\n\n\n The door burst open and a young corporal rushed in. \"Hey, General, take\n a look out the window!\""
],
[
"\"Hm? Did you find a way of speeding them up?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Gave them Kyne's old dog-eared books. They're crazy about books.\n Really hustled for them.\"\n\n\n Beliakoff said nothing for several seconds, but his long, sallow face\n became pale. \"You what?\"\n\n\n \"Gave 'em the books. Don't worry,\" Kelly said quickly. \"Kyne gave them\n to me before they hauled him away.\"\n\n\n \"You gave the\nwarfare books\nto the people on Mala?\"\n\"You mean I shouldn't have? Why not? What's wrong with Mala?\"\n\n\n \"Plenty.\" Beliakoff grimly did some quick figuring. \"It'll be a year,\n their time, when we can get back. Kelly, take us out of hyperspace!\"\n\n\n \"Now?\" Kelly gasped. \"Here?\"",
"\"Haven't we done enough?\" groaned a clothing-store owner.\n\n\n \"It's never enough! In time of war, Earth people give till it\n hurts—then give some more! They know that no sacrifice is too much,\n that nothing counts but the proper prosecution of the war.\"\n\n\n The clothing-store owner nodded vehemently. \"If it's Earthly, it's good\n enough for me. So what can we do about this spy situation?\"\n\n\n \"That is for us to decide here and now,\" Thrang said. \"According to the\n Prime Minister, our dictatorship cannot boast a single act of espionage\n or sabotage done to it since the beginning of the war. The Chief of\n Security is alarmed. It's his job to keep all spies under surveillance.\n Since there are none, his department has lost all morale, which, in\n turn, affects the other departments.\"\n\n\n \"Do we really need spies?\"",
"\"Of course they will. But in the meantime, the results can be\n devastating. They always are when a primitive race tries to ape the\n culture of a more advanced people. Look at what happened to the South\n Sea Islanders. All they picked up was the worst of French, British and\n American culture. You hardly see any more South Sea Islanders, do you?\n Same with the American Indians, with the Hottentots, and plenty of\n others.\"\n\n\n \"I still think you're making too much of a fuss about it,\" Kelly\n said. \"All right, I gave them a lot of books on warfare and political\n organization. So what? What in blazes can they do with them?\"\n\n\n \"The Malans,\" Beliakoff said grimly, \"have never had a war.\"\n\n\n Kelly gulped. \"Never?\"\n\n\n \"Never. They're a completely cooperative society. Or were, before they\n started reading those warfare books.\"",
"He went to bed that night with the feeling of a job well done. And\n before he fell asleep, he figured out exactly what he would do about\n the spy situation.\nThe next morning, Nob's orders went out by all means of communication.\n The results were gratifyingly swift, since the people of the\n dictatorship were completely behind the war and dutifully loved and\n hated their Empress, in whose name the order was signed.\n\n\n A typical scene took place in the clubcar of the Char-Xil express. The\n occupants of the car, twenty-three commuting businessmen, sealed the\n doors as soon as they received Nob's order. The best-read among them, a\n salesman by the name of Thrang, was elected spokesman for the group.\n\n\n \"Boys,\" said Thrang, \"I guess I don't have to tell you anything about\n the importance of this order. We all know what war is by now, don't we?\"\n\n\n \"We sure do!\"",
"In point of fact, however, Nob was a mild, near-sighted, well-meaning\n little man, a lawyer by occupation, known throughout Mala for his\n prize rose gardens and his collection of Earth stamps. In spite of a\n temperamental handicap, he didn't find his new job too difficult. The\n Earth books were there and Nob simply interpreted them as literally as\n possible. Whenever a problem came up, Nob thought: how would they solve\n it on Earth? Then he would do the same, or as near the same as possible.\n\n\n But dealing with the Empress presented problems of a unique nature.\n Nob couldn't find a book entitled\nWays and Means of Placating\n Royalty\n. If such a book were obtainable, Nob would have paid any price\n for it.\n\n\n He took a deep breath, knocked and opened the door into the Royal\n Chambers.",
"\"They serve a vital purpose,\" Thrang explained. \"All the books agree\n on this. Spies keep a country alert, on its toes, eternally vigilant.\n Through sabotage, they cut down on arms production, which otherwise\n would grow absurdly large, since it has priority over everything else.\n They supply Security with subjects for Interrogation, Confession,\n Brainwashing and Re-indoctrination. This in turn supplies data for\n the enemy propaganda machine, which in turn supplies material for our\n counter-propaganda machine.\"\nDraxil looked awed. \"I didn't know it was so complicated.\"\n\n\n \"That's the beauty of the Earth War,\" Thrang said. \"Stupendous yet\n delicate complications, completely interrelated. Leave out one\n seemingly unimportant detail and the whole structure collapses.\"\n\n\n \"Those Terrans!\" Draxil said, shaking his head in admiration.",
"\"Not at all. Mala is a mirror culture. They consider Earth and its ways\n to be absolute perfection. They copy everything of Earth's they can\n find.\"\n\n\n \"Seems like a good idea. We\nhave\ngot a real good culture.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, but we developed into it. The Malans simply copy what they see,\n with no underlying tradition or rationale. Since they don't know why\n they're doing any particular thing, they can easily misinterpret it,\n warp it into something harmful.\"\n\n\n \"They'll learn,\" Kelly said.",
"War, the Malans agreed, was certainly one of the cleverest of Earth\n institutions and as educational as it was entertaining.\n\"Nope,\" Beliakoff was saying, \"you wouldn't like Ran-hachi Prison, not\n one little bit. It's on Mercury, you know, in the twilight zone. You\n blister by day and you freeze by night. Only two men have escaped from\n Ran-hachi in the last hundred years, and one of them figured his curve\n wrong and flipped into Sol.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other one?\" Kelly asked, perspiring lightly.\n\n\n \"His gyros fused. He was bound straight for the Coal Sack. Take him\n a couple of thousand years to get there, at his speed,\" Beliakoff\n finished dreamily. \"No, Johnny, you wouldn't like Ran-hachi.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, okay,\" Kelly said. \"The death penalty would be better.\"",
"\"Damn,\" said the flipper, passing the coin across the table and\n standing up.\n\n\n The other man smiled faintly, but said nothing.\nKelly reached for the kissoff switch, then hesitated. \"Look, Igor,\" he\n said, \"do we have to come out now, without charts? It gets risky, you\n know. How can we tell what's out there in normal space?\"\n\n\n \"It is a risk we have to take,\" Beliakoff said stonily.\n\n\n \"But why? What's wrong with the people of Mala having those books?\n Believe me, there's nothing dirty in them.\"\n\n\n \"Look,\" Beliakoff said patiently, \"you know that Mala is a\n semi-restricted planet. Limited trading is allowed under control\n conditions. No articles are allowed on the planet except those on the\n approved list.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Kelly said vaguely. \"Silly sort of rule.\"",
"\"They give that only as a measure of extreme clemency,\" Beliakoff said\n with gloomy Slavic satisfaction.\n\n\n \"Enough! We'll straighten out Mala.\" There was more hope than\n conviction in Kelly's voice. \"Thar she lies, off to starboard.\"\n\n\n Mala was a tiny blue and brown sphere, suddenly growing larger in their\n screens.\n\n\n Their radio blared on the emergency channel.\n\n\n Kelly swore. \"That's the Galactic patrol boat from Azolith. What's he\n doing here?\"\n\n\n \"Blockade,\" said Beliakoff. \"Standard practice to quarantine a planet\n at war. We can't touch down legally until the war's declared over.\"\n\n\n \"Nuts. We're going down.\" Kelly touched the controls and the freighter\n began to descend into the interdicted area.",
"\"I see,\" she said dubiously. \"Well, this other paper is from General\n Heglm of Security. He asks what you are doing about the spy situation.\n He says it's very serious.\"\n\n\n \"I had forgotten about that. He's right, it's reached a crisis point.\"\n He put the paper in his pocket. \"I'm going to take care of that\n personally, first thing in the morning.\"\n\n\n In the last few hours, his wife had made no less than eight Major\n Policy Decisions, twenty Codifications, eight Unifications, and three\n Clarifications. Nob didn't bother to read them over. He trusted his\n wife's good judgment and common sense.",
"By then, the train had arrived at the station. The doors were unsealed,\n allowing the commuters to leave for their jobs. Thrang watched the\n zipper salesman depart, then hurried into the crowd. In a moment, he\n found a tall man wearing a slouch hat and dark glasses. On his lapel\n was a silver badge which read\nSecret Police\n.\n\n\n \"See that man?\" Thrang asked, pointing to the zipper salesman.\n\n\n \"You bet,\" the Secret Policeman said.\n\n\n \"He's a spy! A dirty spy! Quick, after him!\"\n\n\n \"He's being watched,\" said the Secret Policeman laconically.\n\n\n \"I just wanted to make sure,\" Thrang said, and started to walk off.",
"\"At once!\"\n\n\n \"But we might come out inside a star or—\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Beliakoff said, his voice filled with righteousness, \"simply\n cannot be helped. We must return at once to Mala!\"\nGeneral Drak, Commander of the Forces of the Empress, Wearer of the\n Gold Star of Mala, sat at his desk in the Supreme Command Post, which\n had recently been converted from a hardware store. He was engaged in a\n fiery argument over the telephone with Nob, the Empress's right-hand\n man.\n\n\n \"But damn it all,\" General Drak shouted, \"I must have it! I am the\n Supreme Commander, the General of All the Armies of the Dictatorship!\n Doesn't that mean anything?\"\n\n\n \"Not under the circumstances,\" Nob answered.\n\n\n Two soldiers, standing guard in the General's quarters, listened\n interestedly.",
"\"War is hell!\"\n\n\n \"The war that the enemy thrust on us!\"\n\n\n \"The war to start all wars!\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Thrang said. \"And I guess we've all felt the pinch\n since the war started. Eh, boys?\"\n\n\n \"I've done my part,\" said a man named Draxil. \"When the Prime Minister\n called for a cigarette shortage, I dumped twenty carloads of tobacco in\n the Hunto River. Now we got cigarette rationing!\"\n\n\n \"That's the spirit,\" Thrang said. \"I know for a fact that others among\n you have done the same with sugar, canned goods, butter, meat and a\n hundred items. Everything's rationed now; everyone feels the pinch.\n But, boys, there's still more we have to do. Now a spy situation has\n come up and it calls for quick action.\"",
"\"I didn't think so,\" Jusa said sadly. She had been just another Malan\n girl, but had been chosen as Empress on the basis of her looks, which\n were heartbreakingly lovely. It was axiomatic that an Empress should be\n heartbreakingly lovely. The Malans had seen enough Earth films to know\n that.\n\n\n But an Empress should also be cold, calculating, cruel, as well as\n gracious, headstrong and generous to a fault. She should care nothing\n for her people, while, simultaneously, all she cared for was the\n people. She should act in a manner calculated to make her subjects love\n her in spite of and because of herself.\nJusa was a girl of considerable intelligence and she wanted to be as\n Earthly as the next. But the contradictions in her role baffled her.\n\n\n \"Can't I keep them just for a little while?\" she pleaded, holding a\n single pearl up to the light.",
"\"Now to work. Boys, I'm calling for volunteers. Who'll be a spy?\"\n\n\n No one responded.\n\n\n \"Really now!\" said Thrang. \"That's no attitude to take. Come on, some\n of you must be harboring treasonous thoughts. Don't be ashamed of it.\n Remember, it takes all kinds to make a war.\"\n\n\n Little Herg, a zipper salesman from Xcoth, cleared his throat. \"I have\n a cousin who's Minister of War for the Allies.\"\n\n\n \"An excellent motive for subversion!\" Thrang cried.\n\n\n \"I rather thought it was,\" the zipper salesman said, pleased. \"Yes, I\n believe I can handle the job.\"\n\n\n \"Splendid!\" Thrang said.",
"\"I just hope we'll be in time to salvage something,\" Beliakoff said,\n watching as their freighter plowed its way through the sea of space\n toward the unchanging stars.\nWith evident nervousness, Nob walked down a long, dim corridor toward\n the imperial chambers, carrying a small package in both hands. The\n Prime Minister of the Dictatorship was a small bald man with a great\n bulging forehead and small, glittering black eyes, made smaller by\n steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked the very incarnation of an evil\n genius, which was why he had been chosen as the Power Behind the Throne.",
"\"Poor devil, Kyne,\" Beliakoff sighed.\n\n\n \"A paranoid,\" Kelly diagnosed. \"Did he ever tell you about the plot to\n keep him out of the Luna Military Academy?\"\n\n\n \"He never talked to me much.\"\n\n\n \"That's because you're a cold, distant, unsympathetic type,\" Kelly\n said, with a complacent smile. \"Me, he told everything. He applied to\n Luna every year. Studied all the textbooks on military organization,\n land tactics, sea tactics, space strategy, histories of warfare.\n Crammed his cabin with that junk. Knew it inside out. Fantastic memory!\"\n\n\n \"Why didn't he get in?\"",
"\"But they wouldn't start a war just because they've got some books on\n it, and know that Earth people do it, and—yeah, I guess they would.\"\n Quickly he set the dials. \"You're right, buddy. We have an absolute\n moral obligation to return and straighten out that mess.\"\n\n\n \"I knew you'd see it that way,\" Beliakoff said approvingly. \"And\n there is the additional fact that the Galactic Council could hold\n us responsible for any deaths traceable to the books. It could mean\n Ran-hachi Prison for a hundred years or so.\"\n\n\n \"Why didn't you say that in the first place?\" Kelly flipped the kissoff\n switch. The ship came out in normal space. Fortunately, there was no\n sun or planet in its path.\n\n\n \"Hang on,\" Kelly said, \"we're going where we're going in a great big\n rush!\"",
"\"Hemophilia. He couldn't pass the physical. He thought they were\n plotting against him. Still, I'm grateful for the chance at a little\n astrogation.\" With the barest hint of a smile, Kelly said, \"I\n understand it's possible to bring a ship sidewise through the Slot at\n Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Please don't try,\" Beliakoff begged, shuddering. \"I knew we should\n have waited for Kyne's replacement at Mala.\"\n\n\n \"We'd still be there, with a cargo of kvash turning sour.\"\n\n\n \"I was afraid it would sour anyhow,\" Beliakoff said, with a worrier's\n knack for finding trouble. \"Mala is the slowest loading port this side\n of the Rift. I must admit, however, they didn't do badly this time.\"\n\n\n \"Noticed that, did you?\" Kelly asked."
],
[
"But at least all his clothes were soldiers' clothes. His honor\n guard had to piece out their uniforms with personal articles. They\n had complained bitterly about the injustice of this, and had come\n close to deserting. But Drak, after some hasty reading in Smogget's\nLeadership\n, told them about the Terran doctrine of the Privileges of\n Rank.\n\n\n In front of him now was a report from the Allani Battle Front. He\n wasn't sure what it said, since it was coded and he had neglected to\n write down the code. Was it ENEMY REPULSED US WITH HEAVY LOSSES or\n should it read US REPULSED ENEMY WITH HEAVY LOSSES?\n\n\n He wished he knew. It made quite a difference.\n\n\n The door burst open and a young corporal rushed in. \"Hey, General, take\n a look out the window!\"",
"General Drak turned back to the reports on his desk, trying again to\n puzzle out what had happened at Allani. Repulsed Us? Us Repulsed? How\n should it read?\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" Drak said resignedly. \"In the long run, I don't suppose it\n really makes much difference.\"\nMiles away, in no man's land, stood a bunker of reinforced concrete and\n steel. Within the bunker were two men. They sat on opposite sides of\n a plain wooden table and their faces were stern and impassive. Beside\n each man was a pad and pencil. Upon each pad were marks.\n\n\n Upon the table between them was a coin.\n\n\n \"Your toss,\" said the man on the right.\n\n\n The man on the left picked up the coin. \"Call it.\"\n\n\n \"Heads.\"\n\n\n It came up heads.",
"\"Think he'll get it?\" one asked.\n\n\n \"Not a chance,\" the other answered.\n\n\n Drak glared them into silence, then returned to the argument. \"Will\n you please attempt to understand my position?\" he said hoarsely. \"You\n put me in command. At my orders, the Armies of the Dictatorship move\n against the Allied Democracies. All the other generals obey me.\nMe!\nCorrect?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a point,\" one soldier said.\n\n\n \"He'll never get it,\" the other replied.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you two!\" Drak roared. \"Nob, aren't I right? It's the Earthly\n way, Nob. Authority must be recognized!\"",
"\"You may be right,\" he agreed. \"I'll try to get some back.\"\n\n\n He rubbed his eyes tiredly. Everything had happened so quickly!\nJust a week ago, Nob had walked into his store and inquired, \"Drak, how\n would you like to be a general?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Drak had confessed honestly. \"What is it and why do we\n need one?\"\n\n\n \"War starting,\" Nob said. \"You've heard of war, haven't you? Earth\n idea,\nvery\nEarthly. I'll explain later how it works. What do you say?\"\n\n\n \"All right. But do you really think I'm the right type?\"\n\n\n \"Absolutely. Besides, your hardware store is perfectly situated for the\n Supreme Command Post.\"",
"\"You aren't allowed to. The book,\nMilitary Leadership\n, specifically\n states that a Supreme Commander never resigns during hostilities. An\n Earthman would find the very thought inconceivable.\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" Drak furiously slammed down the telephone.\n\n\n The two soldiers exchanged winks.\n\n\n \"At attention, you two,\" Drak said. \"You're supposed to be honor\n guards. Why can't you act like honor guards?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got weapons,\" one of the soldiers pointed out.\n\n\n \"Can't be helped. I sent what we had to the front.\"\n\n\n \"But we need them here,\" the soldier said earnestly. \"It's bad for\n morale, us not having weapons, and morale is vital for victory.\"\n\n\n Drak hated to be lectured, but he had to accept textbook truth when it\n was quoted at him.",
"\"Let me see....\" General Drak examined a wall map upon which the\n important enemy cities were circled in red. There were Alis and Dryn,\n Kys and Mos and Dlettre. Drak could think of no reason for leveling one\n more than another. After a moment's thought, he pushed a button on his\n desk.\n\n\n \"Yeah?\" asked a voice over the loudspeaker.\n\n\n \"Which one, Ingif?\"\n\n\n \"Kys, of course,\" said the cracked voice of his old hardware store\n assistant. \"Fellow over there owes us money and won't pay up.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks, Ingif.\" Drak turned to the corporal. \"Go to it, soldier!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\"\n\n\n The corporal hurried out.",
"But aside from the location of his hardware store, Drak had other\n qualifications for leadership. For one thing, he looked like an Earth\n general and this had loomed large in Nob's eyes. Drak was over six feet\n tall, strongly built, solidly muscled. His eyes were gray, deep-set and\n fierce; his nose was aquiline; his mouth was firm because he usually\n held nails in it when he was out on a repair job.\n\n\n In his uniform, Drak looked every inch a general; as a matter of fact,\n he looked like several generals, for his cap came from the Earth-Mars\n war of '82, his tunic was a relic of the D'eereli Campaign, his belt\n was in the style of the Third Empire, his pants were a replica of the\n Southern Star Front, while his shoes reminded one of the hectic days of\n the Fanzani Rebellion.",
"\"At once!\"\n\n\n \"But we might come out inside a star or—\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Beliakoff said, his voice filled with righteousness, \"simply\n cannot be helped. We must return at once to Mala!\"\nGeneral Drak, Commander of the Forces of the Empress, Wearer of the\n Gold Star of Mala, sat at his desk in the Supreme Command Post, which\n had recently been converted from a hardware store. He was engaged in a\n fiery argument over the telephone with Nob, the Empress's right-hand\n man.\n\n\n \"But damn it all,\" General Drak shouted, \"I must have it! I am the\n Supreme Commander, the General of All the Armies of the Dictatorship!\n Doesn't that mean anything?\"\n\n\n \"Not under the circumstances,\" Nob answered.\n\n\n Two soldiers, standing guard in the General's quarters, listened\n interestedly.",
"Drak started to rise, then reconsidered. Rules were rules.\n\n\n \"Hey, what?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"Forgot,\" the corporal said. \"Hey,\nsir\n, take a look out the window,\n huh?\"\n\n\n \"Much better.\" Drak walked to the window and saw, in the distance, a\n mass of ascending black smoke.\n\n\n \"City of Chando,\" the corporal said proudly. \"Boy, we smacked it today!\n Saturation bombing for ten hours. They can't use it for anything but a\n gravel pit now!\"\n\n\n \"Sir,\" Drak reminded.\n\n\n \"Sir. The planes are fueled up and waiting. What shall we flatten next,\n huh, sir?\"",
"\"I see,\" she said dubiously. \"Well, this other paper is from General\n Heglm of Security. He asks what you are doing about the spy situation.\n He says it's very serious.\"\n\n\n \"I had forgotten about that. He's right, it's reached a crisis point.\"\n He put the paper in his pocket. \"I'm going to take care of that\n personally, first thing in the morning.\"\n\n\n In the last few hours, his wife had made no less than eight Major\n Policy Decisions, twenty Codifications, eight Unifications, and three\n Clarifications. Nob didn't bother to read them over. He trusted his\n wife's good judgment and common sense.",
"Jusa stood for a few moments in thought, then picked up a vase and\n shattered it on the floor. She made a mental note to order several\n dozen more.\n\n\n Then she flung herself upon the royal couch and began to weep bitterly.\n\n\n She was quite a young Empress and she had the feeling of being in\n beyond her depth. The problems of the war and of royalty had completely\n ended her social life.\n\n\n She resented it; any girl would.\nNob, meanwhile, left the palace and went home in his armored car.\n The car had been ordered to protect him against assassins, who,\n according to the Earth books, aimed a good deal of their plots at\n Prime Ministers. Nob could see no reason for this, since if he weren't\n Prime Minister, any one of a thousand men could do the job with equal\n efficiency. But he supposed it had a certain symbolic meaning.",
"\"War is hell!\"\n\n\n \"The war that the enemy thrust on us!\"\n\n\n \"The war to start all wars!\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Thrang said. \"And I guess we've all felt the pinch\n since the war started. Eh, boys?\"\n\n\n \"I've done my part,\" said a man named Draxil. \"When the Prime Minister\n called for a cigarette shortage, I dumped twenty carloads of tobacco in\n the Hunto River. Now we got cigarette rationing!\"\n\n\n \"That's the spirit,\" Thrang said. \"I know for a fact that others among\n you have done the same with sugar, canned goods, butter, meat and a\n hundred items. Everything's rationed now; everyone feels the pinch.\n But, boys, there's still more we have to do. Now a spy situation has\n come up and it calls for quick action.\"",
"\"I'm sorry,\" Nob said. \"Extremely sorry. Personally, I sympathize with\n you. But the\nBook of Terran Rank Equivalents\nis quite specific. Seven\n shoulder stars are the most—the absolute most—that any general can\n wear. I absolutely cannot allow you to wear eight.\"\n\n\n \"But you gave Frix seven! And he's just Unit General!\"\n\n\n \"That was before we understood the rules completely. We thought there\n was no limit to the number of stars we could give and Frix was sulky.\n I'm sorry, General, you'll just have to be satisfied with seven.\"\n\n\n \"Take one away from Frix, then.\"\n\n\n \"Can't. He'll resign.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I resign.\"",
"\"I didn't think so,\" Jusa said sadly. She had been just another Malan\n girl, but had been chosen as Empress on the basis of her looks, which\n were heartbreakingly lovely. It was axiomatic that an Empress should be\n heartbreakingly lovely. The Malans had seen enough Earth films to know\n that.\n\n\n But an Empress should also be cold, calculating, cruel, as well as\n gracious, headstrong and generous to a fault. She should care nothing\n for her people, while, simultaneously, all she cared for was the\n people. She should act in a manner calculated to make her subjects love\n her in spite of and because of herself.\nJusa was a girl of considerable intelligence and she wanted to be as\n Earthly as the next. But the contradictions in her role baffled her.\n\n\n \"Can't I keep them just for a little while?\" she pleaded, holding a\n single pearl up to the light.",
"In point of fact, however, Nob was a mild, near-sighted, well-meaning\n little man, a lawyer by occupation, known throughout Mala for his\n prize rose gardens and his collection of Earth stamps. In spite of a\n temperamental handicap, he didn't find his new job too difficult. The\n Earth books were there and Nob simply interpreted them as literally as\n possible. Whenever a problem came up, Nob thought: how would they solve\n it on Earth? Then he would do the same, or as near the same as possible.\n\n\n But dealing with the Empress presented problems of a unique nature.\n Nob couldn't find a book entitled\nWays and Means of Placating\n Royalty\n. If such a book were obtainable, Nob would have paid any price\n for it.\n\n\n He took a deep breath, knocked and opened the door into the Royal\n Chambers.",
"He went to bed that night with the feeling of a job well done. And\n before he fell asleep, he figured out exactly what he would do about\n the spy situation.\nThe next morning, Nob's orders went out by all means of communication.\n The results were gratifyingly swift, since the people of the\n dictatorship were completely behind the war and dutifully loved and\n hated their Empress, in whose name the order was signed.\n\n\n A typical scene took place in the clubcar of the Char-Xil express. The\n occupants of the car, twenty-three commuting businessmen, sealed the\n doors as soon as they received Nob's order. The best-read among them, a\n salesman by the name of Thrang, was elected spokesman for the group.\n\n\n \"Boys,\" said Thrang, \"I guess I don't have to tell you anything about\n the importance of this order. We all know what war is by now, don't we?\"\n\n\n \"We sure do!\"",
"\"I just hope we'll be in time to salvage something,\" Beliakoff said,\n watching as their freighter plowed its way through the sea of space\n toward the unchanging stars.\nWith evident nervousness, Nob walked down a long, dim corridor toward\n the imperial chambers, carrying a small package in both hands. The\n Prime Minister of the Dictatorship was a small bald man with a great\n bulging forehead and small, glittering black eyes, made smaller by\n steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked the very incarnation of an evil\n genius, which was why he had been chosen as the Power Behind the Throne.",
"Flattered by the importance of her task, she set to work with a will.\n\n\n Several hours later, she awakened her husband, who was slumbering on\n the couch.\n\n\n \"I've got them all finished except these,\" she said. \"In this one, I'm\n afraid I don't understand that word.\"\n\n\n Nob glanced at the paper. \"Oh, propaganda. That means giving the people\n the facts, whether true or false. It's very important in any war.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why.\"\n\n\n \"It's obvious. To have a genuine Earth-style war, you need ideological\n differences. That's why we chose a dictatorship and the other continent\n chose a democracy. The job of propaganda is to keep us different.\"",
"\"It isn't possible,\" Nob said. \"We need guns, tanks, planes. Therefore\n you sell your jewelry. There are many Terran precedents.\"\n\n\n \"But why did I have to insist upon the pearls in the first place?\" Jusa\n asked.\n\n\n \"I explained! As Empress, you must be flighty, must possess a whim of\n iron, must have no regard for anyone else's feelings, must lust for\n expensive baubles.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Jusa said.\n\n\n \"All right, what?\"\n\n\n \"All right, swine.\"\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Nob said. \"You're learning, Jusa, you really are. If\n you could just fluctuate your moods more consistently—\"\n\n\n \"I really will try,\" promised the Empress. \"I'll learn, Nob. You'll be\n proud of me yet.\"",
"\"Hm? Did you find a way of speeding them up?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Gave them Kyne's old dog-eared books. They're crazy about books.\n Really hustled for them.\"\n\n\n Beliakoff said nothing for several seconds, but his long, sallow face\n became pale. \"You what?\"\n\n\n \"Gave 'em the books. Don't worry,\" Kelly said quickly. \"Kyne gave them\n to me before they hauled him away.\"\n\n\n \"You gave the\nwarfare books\nto the people on Mala?\"\n\"You mean I shouldn't have? Why not? What's wrong with Mala?\"\n\n\n \"Plenty.\" Beliakoff grimly did some quick figuring. \"It'll be a year,\n their time, when we can get back. Kelly, take us out of hyperspace!\"\n\n\n \"Now?\" Kelly gasped. \"Here?\""
],
[
"Jusa stood for a few moments in thought, then picked up a vase and\n shattered it on the floor. She made a mental note to order several\n dozen more.\n\n\n Then she flung herself upon the royal couch and began to weep bitterly.\n\n\n She was quite a young Empress and she had the feeling of being in\n beyond her depth. The problems of the war and of royalty had completely\n ended her social life.\n\n\n She resented it; any girl would.\nNob, meanwhile, left the palace and went home in his armored car.\n The car had been ordered to protect him against assassins, who,\n according to the Earth books, aimed a good deal of their plots at\n Prime Ministers. Nob could see no reason for this, since if he weren't\n Prime Minister, any one of a thousand men could do the job with equal\n efficiency. But he supposed it had a certain symbolic meaning.",
"\"I didn't think so,\" Jusa said sadly. She had been just another Malan\n girl, but had been chosen as Empress on the basis of her looks, which\n were heartbreakingly lovely. It was axiomatic that an Empress should be\n heartbreakingly lovely. The Malans had seen enough Earth films to know\n that.\n\n\n But an Empress should also be cold, calculating, cruel, as well as\n gracious, headstrong and generous to a fault. She should care nothing\n for her people, while, simultaneously, all she cared for was the\n people. She should act in a manner calculated to make her subjects love\n her in spite of and because of herself.\nJusa was a girl of considerable intelligence and she wanted to be as\n Earthly as the next. But the contradictions in her role baffled her.\n\n\n \"Can't I keep them just for a little while?\" she pleaded, holding a\n single pearl up to the light.",
"Instantly he ducked. A vase shattered against the wall behind him. Not\n so good, he thought, calculating the distance by which it had missed\n him. The Empress Jusa's aim was improving.\n\"Nob, you dirty swine!\" the Empress shrieked.\n\n\n \"At your service, Majesty,\" Nob answered, bowing low.\n\n\n \"Where are the pearls, you insolent dolt?\"\n\n\n \"Here, Majesty,\" Nob said, handing over the package. \"It strained the\n exchequer, buying them for you. The Minister of the Treasury threatened\n to desert to the enemy. He may still. The people are muttering about\n extravagance in high places. But the pearls are yours, Majesty.\"\n\n\n \"Of course.\" Jusa opened the package and looked at the lustrous gems.\n \"Can I keep them?\" she asked, in a very small voice.\n\n\n \"Of course not.\"",
"\"It isn't possible,\" Nob said. \"We need guns, tanks, planes. Therefore\n you sell your jewelry. There are many Terran precedents.\"\n\n\n \"But why did I have to insist upon the pearls in the first place?\" Jusa\n asked.\n\n\n \"I explained! As Empress, you must be flighty, must possess a whim of\n iron, must have no regard for anyone else's feelings, must lust for\n expensive baubles.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Jusa said.\n\n\n \"All right, what?\"\n\n\n \"All right, swine.\"\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Nob said. \"You're learning, Jusa, you really are. If\n you could just fluctuate your moods more consistently—\"\n\n\n \"I really will try,\" promised the Empress. \"I'll learn, Nob. You'll be\n proud of me yet.\"",
"In point of fact, however, Nob was a mild, near-sighted, well-meaning\n little man, a lawyer by occupation, known throughout Mala for his\n prize rose gardens and his collection of Earth stamps. In spite of a\n temperamental handicap, he didn't find his new job too difficult. The\n Earth books were there and Nob simply interpreted them as literally as\n possible. Whenever a problem came up, Nob thought: how would they solve\n it on Earth? Then he would do the same, or as near the same as possible.\n\n\n But dealing with the Empress presented problems of a unique nature.\n Nob couldn't find a book entitled\nWays and Means of Placating\n Royalty\n. If such a book were obtainable, Nob would have paid any price\n for it.\n\n\n He took a deep breath, knocked and opened the door into the Royal\n Chambers.",
"\"I see,\" she said dubiously. \"Well, this other paper is from General\n Heglm of Security. He asks what you are doing about the spy situation.\n He says it's very serious.\"\n\n\n \"I had forgotten about that. He's right, it's reached a crisis point.\"\n He put the paper in his pocket. \"I'm going to take care of that\n personally, first thing in the morning.\"\n\n\n In the last few hours, his wife had made no less than eight Major\n Policy Decisions, twenty Codifications, eight Unifications, and three\n Clarifications. Nob didn't bother to read them over. He trusted his\n wife's good judgment and common sense.",
"His wife shrugged her shoulders. \"Well, of course, if it's Earthlike,\n it must be right. Come eat supper, dear.\"\nAfter eating, Nob attacked his mounds of paperwork. But soon he was\n yawning and his eyes burned. He turned to his wife, who was just\n finishing the dishes.\n\n\n \"My dear,\" he said, \"do you suppose you could help me?\"\n\n\n \"Is it proper?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Oh, absolutely. The books state that the Prime Minister's wife tries\n in every way possible to relieve her husband of the burden of power.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I'll be happy to try.\" She sat down in front of the\n great pile of papers. \"But, dear, I don't know anything about these\n matters.\"\n\n\n \"Rely on instinct,\" Nob answered, yawning. \"That's what I do.\"",
"He reached his home and his wife kissed him on the cheek. \"Hard day at\n the palace, dear?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Quite hard,\" Nob said. \"Lots of work for after supper.\"\n\n\n \"It just isn't fair,\" complained his wife. She was a plump, pleasant\n little person and she worried continually about her husband's health.\n \"They shouldn't make you work so hard.\"\n\n\n \"But of course they should!\" said Nob, a little astonished. \"Don't\n you remember what I told you? All the books say that during a war, a\n Prime Minister is a harried, harassed individual, weighed down by the\n enormous burden of state, unable to relax, tense with the numerous\n strains of high office.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't fair,\" his wife repeated.\n\n\n \"No one said it was. But it's extremely Earthlike.\"",
"\"Good. Now there are some problems of state which you must decide upon.\n Prisoners of war, for one thing. We have several possible means for\n disposing of them. First, we could—\"\n\n\n \"You take care of it.\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Nob chided. \"Mustn't shirk your duty.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not. I am simply being arbitrary and dictatorial.\nYou\nsolve it,\n pig. And bring me diamonds.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Excellency,\" Nob said, bowing low. \"Diamonds. But the people—\"\n\n\n \"I love the people. But to hell with them!\" she cried, fire in her eyes.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine,\" Nob said, and bowed his way out of the room.",
"\"You aren't allowed to. The book,\nMilitary Leadership\n, specifically\n states that a Supreme Commander never resigns during hostilities. An\n Earthman would find the very thought inconceivable.\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" Drak furiously slammed down the telephone.\n\n\n The two soldiers exchanged winks.\n\n\n \"At attention, you two,\" Drak said. \"You're supposed to be honor\n guards. Why can't you act like honor guards?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got weapons,\" one of the soldiers pointed out.\n\n\n \"Can't be helped. I sent what we had to the front.\"\n\n\n \"But we need them here,\" the soldier said earnestly. \"It's bad for\n morale, us not having weapons, and morale is vital for victory.\"\n\n\n Drak hated to be lectured, but he had to accept textbook truth when it\n was quoted at him.",
"\"At once!\"\n\n\n \"But we might come out inside a star or—\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Beliakoff said, his voice filled with righteousness, \"simply\n cannot be helped. We must return at once to Mala!\"\nGeneral Drak, Commander of the Forces of the Empress, Wearer of the\n Gold Star of Mala, sat at his desk in the Supreme Command Post, which\n had recently been converted from a hardware store. He was engaged in a\n fiery argument over the telephone with Nob, the Empress's right-hand\n man.\n\n\n \"But damn it all,\" General Drak shouted, \"I must have it! I am the\n Supreme Commander, the General of All the Armies of the Dictatorship!\n Doesn't that mean anything?\"\n\n\n \"Not under the circumstances,\" Nob answered.\n\n\n Two soldiers, standing guard in the General's quarters, listened\n interestedly.",
"Flattered by the importance of her task, she set to work with a will.\n\n\n Several hours later, she awakened her husband, who was slumbering on\n the couch.\n\n\n \"I've got them all finished except these,\" she said. \"In this one, I'm\n afraid I don't understand that word.\"\n\n\n Nob glanced at the paper. \"Oh, propaganda. That means giving the people\n the facts, whether true or false. It's very important in any war.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why.\"\n\n\n \"It's obvious. To have a genuine Earth-style war, you need ideological\n differences. That's why we chose a dictatorship and the other continent\n chose a democracy. The job of propaganda is to keep us different.\"",
"He went to bed that night with the feeling of a job well done. And\n before he fell asleep, he figured out exactly what he would do about\n the spy situation.\nThe next morning, Nob's orders went out by all means of communication.\n The results were gratifyingly swift, since the people of the\n dictatorship were completely behind the war and dutifully loved and\n hated their Empress, in whose name the order was signed.\n\n\n A typical scene took place in the clubcar of the Char-Xil express. The\n occupants of the car, twenty-three commuting businessmen, sealed the\n doors as soon as they received Nob's order. The best-read among them, a\n salesman by the name of Thrang, was elected spokesman for the group.\n\n\n \"Boys,\" said Thrang, \"I guess I don't have to tell you anything about\n the importance of this order. We all know what war is by now, don't we?\"\n\n\n \"We sure do!\"",
"Head held high, Thrang marched proudly to his destiny.\nThe whole of Mala took to war with a will. Soon books began to appear\n on the stalls:\nWar and You\nfor the masses,\nThe Erotic Release of\n War\nfor the elite,\nThe Inherent Will to Destroy\nfor philosophers,\n and\nWar and Civilization\nfor scholars. Volumes of personal\n experiences sold well. Among them was an account of daring sabotage by\n a former zipper salesman, and the dramatic story of the Martyrdom of\n Thrang.\n\n\n War eliminated a thousand old institutions and unburdened the people of\n the heavy hand of tradition. War demonstrated clearly that everything\n was as temporary as a match-flash except Art and Man, because cities,\n buildings, parks, vehicles, hills, museums, monuments were as whispers\n of dust after the bombers had gone.",
"\"I just hope we'll be in time to salvage something,\" Beliakoff said,\n watching as their freighter plowed its way through the sea of space\n toward the unchanging stars.\nWith evident nervousness, Nob walked down a long, dim corridor toward\n the imperial chambers, carrying a small package in both hands. The\n Prime Minister of the Dictatorship was a small bald man with a great\n bulging forehead and small, glittering black eyes, made smaller by\n steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked the very incarnation of an evil\n genius, which was why he had been chosen as the Power Behind the Throne.",
"But at least all his clothes were soldiers' clothes. His honor\n guard had to piece out their uniforms with personal articles. They\n had complained bitterly about the injustice of this, and had come\n close to deserting. But Drak, after some hasty reading in Smogget's\nLeadership\n, told them about the Terran doctrine of the Privileges of\n Rank.\n\n\n In front of him now was a report from the Allani Battle Front. He\n wasn't sure what it said, since it was coded and he had neglected to\n write down the code. Was it ENEMY REPULSED US WITH HEAVY LOSSES or\n should it read US REPULSED ENEMY WITH HEAVY LOSSES?\n\n\n He wished he knew. It made quite a difference.\n\n\n The door burst open and a young corporal rushed in. \"Hey, General, take\n a look out the window!\"",
"\"I'm sorry,\" Nob said. \"Extremely sorry. Personally, I sympathize with\n you. But the\nBook of Terran Rank Equivalents\nis quite specific. Seven\n shoulder stars are the most—the absolute most—that any general can\n wear. I absolutely cannot allow you to wear eight.\"\n\n\n \"But you gave Frix seven! And he's just Unit General!\"\n\n\n \"That was before we understood the rules completely. We thought there\n was no limit to the number of stars we could give and Frix was sulky.\n I'm sorry, General, you'll just have to be satisfied with seven.\"\n\n\n \"Take one away from Frix, then.\"\n\n\n \"Can't. He'll resign.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I resign.\"",
"\"Think he'll get it?\" one asked.\n\n\n \"Not a chance,\" the other answered.\n\n\n Drak glared them into silence, then returned to the argument. \"Will\n you please attempt to understand my position?\" he said hoarsely. \"You\n put me in command. At my orders, the Armies of the Dictatorship move\n against the Allied Democracies. All the other generals obey me.\nMe!\nCorrect?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a point,\" one soldier said.\n\n\n \"He'll never get it,\" the other replied.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you two!\" Drak roared. \"Nob, aren't I right? It's the Earthly\n way, Nob. Authority must be recognized!\"",
"\"Not at all. Mala is a mirror culture. They consider Earth and its ways\n to be absolute perfection. They copy everything of Earth's they can\n find.\"\n\n\n \"Seems like a good idea. We\nhave\ngot a real good culture.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, but we developed into it. The Malans simply copy what they see,\n with no underlying tradition or rationale. Since they don't know why\n they're doing any particular thing, they can easily misinterpret it,\n warp it into something harmful.\"\n\n\n \"They'll learn,\" Kelly said.",
"\"Hm? Did you find a way of speeding them up?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Gave them Kyne's old dog-eared books. They're crazy about books.\n Really hustled for them.\"\n\n\n Beliakoff said nothing for several seconds, but his long, sallow face\n became pale. \"You what?\"\n\n\n \"Gave 'em the books. Don't worry,\" Kelly said quickly. \"Kyne gave them\n to me before they hauled him away.\"\n\n\n \"You gave the\nwarfare books\nto the people on Mala?\"\n\"You mean I shouldn't have? Why not? What's wrong with Mala?\"\n\n\n \"Plenty.\" Beliakoff grimly did some quick figuring. \"It'll be a year,\n their time, when we can get back. Kelly, take us out of hyperspace!\"\n\n\n \"Now?\" Kelly gasped. \"Here?\""
],
[
"Flattered by the importance of her task, she set to work with a will.\n\n\n Several hours later, she awakened her husband, who was slumbering on\n the couch.\n\n\n \"I've got them all finished except these,\" she said. \"In this one, I'm\n afraid I don't understand that word.\"\n\n\n Nob glanced at the paper. \"Oh, propaganda. That means giving the people\n the facts, whether true or false. It's very important in any war.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why.\"\n\n\n \"It's obvious. To have a genuine Earth-style war, you need ideological\n differences. That's why we chose a dictatorship and the other continent\n chose a democracy. The job of propaganda is to keep us different.\"",
"He reached his home and his wife kissed him on the cheek. \"Hard day at\n the palace, dear?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Quite hard,\" Nob said. \"Lots of work for after supper.\"\n\n\n \"It just isn't fair,\" complained his wife. She was a plump, pleasant\n little person and she worried continually about her husband's health.\n \"They shouldn't make you work so hard.\"\n\n\n \"But of course they should!\" said Nob, a little astonished. \"Don't\n you remember what I told you? All the books say that during a war, a\n Prime Minister is a harried, harassed individual, weighed down by the\n enormous burden of state, unable to relax, tense with the numerous\n strains of high office.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't fair,\" his wife repeated.\n\n\n \"No one said it was. But it's extremely Earthlike.\"",
"\"They serve a vital purpose,\" Thrang explained. \"All the books agree\n on this. Spies keep a country alert, on its toes, eternally vigilant.\n Through sabotage, they cut down on arms production, which otherwise\n would grow absurdly large, since it has priority over everything else.\n They supply Security with subjects for Interrogation, Confession,\n Brainwashing and Re-indoctrination. This in turn supplies data for\n the enemy propaganda machine, which in turn supplies material for our\n counter-propaganda machine.\"\nDraxil looked awed. \"I didn't know it was so complicated.\"\n\n\n \"That's the beauty of the Earth War,\" Thrang said. \"Stupendous yet\n delicate complications, completely interrelated. Leave out one\n seemingly unimportant detail and the whole structure collapses.\"\n\n\n \"Those Terrans!\" Draxil said, shaking his head in admiration.",
"Head held high, Thrang marched proudly to his destiny.\nThe whole of Mala took to war with a will. Soon books began to appear\n on the stalls:\nWar and You\nfor the masses,\nThe Erotic Release of\n War\nfor the elite,\nThe Inherent Will to Destroy\nfor philosophers,\n and\nWar and Civilization\nfor scholars. Volumes of personal\n experiences sold well. Among them was an account of daring sabotage by\n a former zipper salesman, and the dramatic story of the Martyrdom of\n Thrang.\n\n\n War eliminated a thousand old institutions and unburdened the people of\n the heavy hand of tradition. War demonstrated clearly that everything\n was as temporary as a match-flash except Art and Man, because cities,\n buildings, parks, vehicles, hills, museums, monuments were as whispers\n of dust after the bombers had gone.",
"He went to bed that night with the feeling of a job well done. And\n before he fell asleep, he figured out exactly what he would do about\n the spy situation.\nThe next morning, Nob's orders went out by all means of communication.\n The results were gratifyingly swift, since the people of the\n dictatorship were completely behind the war and dutifully loved and\n hated their Empress, in whose name the order was signed.\n\n\n A typical scene took place in the clubcar of the Char-Xil express. The\n occupants of the car, twenty-three commuting businessmen, sealed the\n doors as soon as they received Nob's order. The best-read among them, a\n salesman by the name of Thrang, was elected spokesman for the group.\n\n\n \"Boys,\" said Thrang, \"I guess I don't have to tell you anything about\n the importance of this order. We all know what war is by now, don't we?\"\n\n\n \"We sure do!\"",
"Jusa stood for a few moments in thought, then picked up a vase and\n shattered it on the floor. She made a mental note to order several\n dozen more.\n\n\n Then she flung herself upon the royal couch and began to weep bitterly.\n\n\n She was quite a young Empress and she had the feeling of being in\n beyond her depth. The problems of the war and of royalty had completely\n ended her social life.\n\n\n She resented it; any girl would.\nNob, meanwhile, left the palace and went home in his armored car.\n The car had been ordered to protect him against assassins, who,\n according to the Earth books, aimed a good deal of their plots at\n Prime Ministers. Nob could see no reason for this, since if he weren't\n Prime Minister, any one of a thousand men could do the job with equal\n efficiency. But he supposed it had a certain symbolic meaning.",
"Among the proletariat, the prevailing opinion was voiced by Zun, who\n was quoted as saying at a war plant party, \"Well, there ain't nothin'\n in the stores I can buy. But I never made so much money in my life!\"\n\n\n In the universities, professors boned up on the subject in order to fit\n themselves for Chairs of War that were sure to be endowed. All they had\n to do was wait until the recent crop of war profiteers were taxed into\n becoming philanthropists, or driven to it by the sense of guilt that\n the books assured them they would feel.\n\n\n Armies grew. Soldiers learned to paint, salute, curse, appreciate home\n cooking, play poker, and fit themselves in every way for the post-war\n civilian life. They broadened themselves with travel and got a welcome\n vacation from home and hearth.",
"In point of fact, however, Nob was a mild, near-sighted, well-meaning\n little man, a lawyer by occupation, known throughout Mala for his\n prize rose gardens and his collection of Earth stamps. In spite of a\n temperamental handicap, he didn't find his new job too difficult. The\n Earth books were there and Nob simply interpreted them as literally as\n possible. Whenever a problem came up, Nob thought: how would they solve\n it on Earth? Then he would do the same, or as near the same as possible.\n\n\n But dealing with the Empress presented problems of a unique nature.\n Nob couldn't find a book entitled\nWays and Means of Placating\n Royalty\n. If such a book were obtainable, Nob would have paid any price\n for it.\n\n\n He took a deep breath, knocked and opened the door into the Royal\n Chambers.",
"\"Good. Now there are some problems of state which you must decide upon.\n Prisoners of war, for one thing. We have several possible means for\n disposing of them. First, we could—\"\n\n\n \"You take care of it.\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Nob chided. \"Mustn't shirk your duty.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not. I am simply being arbitrary and dictatorial.\nYou\nsolve it,\n pig. And bring me diamonds.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Excellency,\" Nob said, bowing low. \"Diamonds. But the people—\"\n\n\n \"I love the people. But to hell with them!\" she cried, fire in her eyes.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine,\" Nob said, and bowed his way out of the room.",
"\"War is hell!\"\n\n\n \"The war that the enemy thrust on us!\"\n\n\n \"The war to start all wars!\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Thrang said. \"And I guess we've all felt the pinch\n since the war started. Eh, boys?\"\n\n\n \"I've done my part,\" said a man named Draxil. \"When the Prime Minister\n called for a cigarette shortage, I dumped twenty carloads of tobacco in\n the Hunto River. Now we got cigarette rationing!\"\n\n\n \"That's the spirit,\" Thrang said. \"I know for a fact that others among\n you have done the same with sugar, canned goods, butter, meat and a\n hundred items. Everything's rationed now; everyone feels the pinch.\n But, boys, there's still more we have to do. Now a spy situation has\n come up and it calls for quick action.\"",
"Instantly he ducked. A vase shattered against the wall behind him. Not\n so good, he thought, calculating the distance by which it had missed\n him. The Empress Jusa's aim was improving.\n\"Nob, you dirty swine!\" the Empress shrieked.\n\n\n \"At your service, Majesty,\" Nob answered, bowing low.\n\n\n \"Where are the pearls, you insolent dolt?\"\n\n\n \"Here, Majesty,\" Nob said, handing over the package. \"It strained the\n exchequer, buying them for you. The Minister of the Treasury threatened\n to desert to the enemy. He may still. The people are muttering about\n extravagance in high places. But the pearls are yours, Majesty.\"\n\n\n \"Of course.\" Jusa opened the package and looked at the lustrous gems.\n \"Can I keep them?\" she asked, in a very small voice.\n\n\n \"Of course not.\"",
"\"Think he'll get it?\" one asked.\n\n\n \"Not a chance,\" the other answered.\n\n\n Drak glared them into silence, then returned to the argument. \"Will\n you please attempt to understand my position?\" he said hoarsely. \"You\n put me in command. At my orders, the Armies of the Dictatorship move\n against the Allied Democracies. All the other generals obey me.\nMe!\nCorrect?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a point,\" one soldier said.\n\n\n \"He'll never get it,\" the other replied.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you two!\" Drak roared. \"Nob, aren't I right? It's the Earthly\n way, Nob. Authority must be recognized!\"",
"He felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. He turned. The Secret Policeman\n had been joined by two tall men in slouch hats and dark glasses. They\n wore badges that said\nStorm Troopers\n.\n\n\n \"You're under arrest,\" said the Secret Policeman.\n\n\n \"Why? What have I done?\"\n\n\n \"Not a thing, as far as we know,\" said a Storm Trooper. \"Not a single\n solitary thing. That's why we're arresting you.\"\n\n\n \"Arbitrary police powers,\" the Secret Policeman explained. \"Suspension\n of search warrants and habeas corpus. Invasion of privacy. War, you\n know. Come along quietly, sir. You have a special and very important\n part to play in the war effort.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"You have been arbitrarily selected as Martyr,\" said the Secret\n Policeman.",
"\"Now to work. Boys, I'm calling for volunteers. Who'll be a spy?\"\n\n\n No one responded.\n\n\n \"Really now!\" said Thrang. \"That's no attitude to take. Come on, some\n of you must be harboring treasonous thoughts. Don't be ashamed of it.\n Remember, it takes all kinds to make a war.\"\n\n\n Little Herg, a zipper salesman from Xcoth, cleared his throat. \"I have\n a cousin who's Minister of War for the Allies.\"\n\n\n \"An excellent motive for subversion!\" Thrang cried.\n\n\n \"I rather thought it was,\" the zipper salesman said, pleased. \"Yes, I\n believe I can handle the job.\"\n\n\n \"Splendid!\" Thrang said.",
"\"It isn't possible,\" Nob said. \"We need guns, tanks, planes. Therefore\n you sell your jewelry. There are many Terran precedents.\"\n\n\n \"But why did I have to insist upon the pearls in the first place?\" Jusa\n asked.\n\n\n \"I explained! As Empress, you must be flighty, must possess a whim of\n iron, must have no regard for anyone else's feelings, must lust for\n expensive baubles.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Jusa said.\n\n\n \"All right, what?\"\n\n\n \"All right, swine.\"\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Nob said. \"You're learning, Jusa, you really are. If\n you could just fluctuate your moods more consistently—\"\n\n\n \"I really will try,\" promised the Empress. \"I'll learn, Nob. You'll be\n proud of me yet.\"",
"\"You may be right,\" he agreed. \"I'll try to get some back.\"\n\n\n He rubbed his eyes tiredly. Everything had happened so quickly!\nJust a week ago, Nob had walked into his store and inquired, \"Drak, how\n would you like to be a general?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Drak had confessed honestly. \"What is it and why do we\n need one?\"\n\n\n \"War starting,\" Nob said. \"You've heard of war, haven't you? Earth\n idea,\nvery\nEarthly. I'll explain later how it works. What do you say?\"\n\n\n \"All right. But do you really think I'm the right type?\"\n\n\n \"Absolutely. Besides, your hardware store is perfectly situated for the\n Supreme Command Post.\"",
"His wife shrugged her shoulders. \"Well, of course, if it's Earthlike,\n it must be right. Come eat supper, dear.\"\nAfter eating, Nob attacked his mounds of paperwork. But soon he was\n yawning and his eyes burned. He turned to his wife, who was just\n finishing the dishes.\n\n\n \"My dear,\" he said, \"do you suppose you could help me?\"\n\n\n \"Is it proper?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Oh, absolutely. The books state that the Prime Minister's wife tries\n in every way possible to relieve her husband of the burden of power.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I'll be happy to try.\" She sat down in front of the\n great pile of papers. \"But, dear, I don't know anything about these\n matters.\"\n\n\n \"Rely on instinct,\" Nob answered, yawning. \"That's what I do.\"",
"\"I just hope we'll be in time to salvage something,\" Beliakoff said,\n watching as their freighter plowed its way through the sea of space\n toward the unchanging stars.\nWith evident nervousness, Nob walked down a long, dim corridor toward\n the imperial chambers, carrying a small package in both hands. The\n Prime Minister of the Dictatorship was a small bald man with a great\n bulging forehead and small, glittering black eyes, made smaller by\n steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked the very incarnation of an evil\n genius, which was why he had been chosen as the Power Behind the Throne.",
"\"Of course they will. But in the meantime, the results can be\n devastating. They always are when a primitive race tries to ape the\n culture of a more advanced people. Look at what happened to the South\n Sea Islanders. All they picked up was the worst of French, British and\n American culture. You hardly see any more South Sea Islanders, do you?\n Same with the American Indians, with the Hottentots, and plenty of\n others.\"\n\n\n \"I still think you're making too much of a fuss about it,\" Kelly\n said. \"All right, I gave them a lot of books on warfare and political\n organization. So what? What in blazes can they do with them?\"\n\n\n \"The Malans,\" Beliakoff said grimly, \"have never had a war.\"\n\n\n Kelly gulped. \"Never?\"\n\n\n \"Never. They're a completely cooperative society. Or were, before they\n started reading those warfare books.\"",
"War, the Malans agreed, was certainly one of the cleverest of Earth\n institutions and as educational as it was entertaining.\n\"Nope,\" Beliakoff was saying, \"you wouldn't like Ran-hachi Prison, not\n one little bit. It's on Mercury, you know, in the twilight zone. You\n blister by day and you freeze by night. Only two men have escaped from\n Ran-hachi in the last hundred years, and one of them figured his curve\n wrong and flipped into Sol.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other one?\" Kelly asked, perspiring lightly.\n\n\n \"His gyros fused. He was bound straight for the Coal Sack. Take him\n a couple of thousand years to get there, at his speed,\" Beliakoff\n finished dreamily. \"No, Johnny, you wouldn't like Ran-hachi.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, okay,\" Kelly said. \"The death penalty would be better.\""
]
] |
test
|
51662
|
[
"How does the world that Harry live in seem to operate, initially?",
"What, generally, does Harry seem to discover as the story progresses?",
"What finally confirms Harry's suspicions? ",
"Why does Harry \"want to be take care of\" when he's apprehended?",
"What is the terror that plagues Harry?",
"What happens to Harry at the end of the story?",
"What seems to be a core idea of the story?",
"What was the doctor's last test?",
"Why are there so many limitations on the lives of the people living in this story? "
] |
[
[
"It's a world where everyone seems to be losing their memory. Harry can't remember key parts about his business, and Edna repeats the same things on a weekly basis. ",
"It operates largely the same way ours does. It just seems different because of the sickness that Harry has. ",
"It's a world where people are left to their own devices. Supplies are left at the house, farmers get paid not to grow crops, etc. ",
"It's a world with heavy government involvement, where there are regulations on near everything that is affecting every day life. "
],
[
"He really is sick in the head, and losing his mind. ",
"The government is more involved in their lives than he had realized. ",
"His views of the world have been warped by a tragedy. ",
"What he remembers is true, and the world is different than it had been. "
],
[
"Being sent to the Doctor. It confirms his suspicions that he might truly be sick. ",
"Being apprehended by the townsfolks. It confirms to him that the people are unwell. ",
"Finding so may changes in his environment. They all added up to the bigger picture. ",
"Finding the ocean. It's the one thing that truly was never there, and completely out of place. "
],
[
"He's completely lost his mind, and not thinking clearly. ",
"He's resigned to what's happened to him. ",
"He wants confirmation of what he's discovered, and his own memories. ",
"He wants to find out what happens to people who are taken away. "
],
[
"The same as the start as it is in the end - the terror that comes with truth. ",
"The terror of not knowing. Harry will never truly know if he is sane or not. ",
"The terror of forgetting himself, and the way his world was. ",
"The terror of losing his son, and not remembering. "
],
[
"He forgets all that happens, and goes back to life as it was. ",
"He pretends to forget everything, because he is scared of the consequences if he doesn't.",
"He takes the treatment, allowing himself to forget all he learned. ",
"He pretends to forget everything, for the sake of living in happy ignorance. "
],
[
"The need to know the truth supersedes anything else. ",
"A national disaster could result in a similar event happening. ",
"The government is capable of completely reshaping the world, if they choose it. ",
"\"Ignorance is bliss.\" Sometimes, you're better off not knowing the truth. "
],
[
"To see that Harry truly forgot what he learned, and that the treatment was a success. ",
"It wasn't a test - he says it was to cover up the comment he made about the ark. ",
"To see if Harry could truly play the role of an unknowing person. ",
"To test Harry's intelligence, and see if he truly understood the situation. "
],
[
"Their supplies are simply dwindling - the area can't support the population. ",
"The war has made it so people have to ration everything, and be mindful of what they use. ",
"There is limited resources in the new world, and the Doctor is doing his best to manage that. ",
"There is limited resources in the new world, and the government doesn't want people to realize that. "
]
] |
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"The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the\n switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so\n many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone\n knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps\n the whole world is dead—except for us.\"\n\n\n Harry stared at him.\n\"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just\n three of us—myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should\n have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and\n where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"",
"\"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run\n a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but\n how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The\n people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me\n more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone\n else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to\n reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have\n known they would.\"\n\n\n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n\n\n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in\n the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because\n I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the\n catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to\n survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.",
"He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned\n toward Plum.\n\n\n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he\n said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr.\n We have so very few now....\"\n\n\n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n\n\n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n\n\n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He\n opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went\n around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away.\n Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him,\n walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen\n or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of\n doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in\n at least three places that he could see, and at the far end—a good two\n hundred yards away—a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster\n walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital,\n or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he\n didn't see or hear people.\n\n\n He did hear\nsomething\n; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came\n along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down\n somewhere.\nThey went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless\n room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there,\n putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred\n years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.",
"He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n\n\n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n\n\n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet\n cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n\n\n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n\n\n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He\n looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a\n bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road\n was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over\n from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty.\n Once there'd been cars, people....\n\n\n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't\n help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.",
"He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went\n upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them,\n and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was\n glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n\n\n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were\n sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd\n gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply\n bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the\n book of directions.\"\n\n\n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked\n about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n\n\n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book\n next week.\"\n\n\n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.",
"Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in\n change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n\n\n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive\n you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n\n\n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations\n and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n\n\n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n\n\n Harry walked to the door.\n\n\n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n\n\n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n\n\n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"",
"\"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that\n the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on\n kindergarten book.\"\n\n\n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting\n high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because\n he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing\n and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\nThey ate in the kitchen. They talked—or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt\n did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n\n\n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the\n door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about\n Doctor Hamming.\n\n\n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n \"Harry, please see the doctor.\"",
"He choked and stopped.\n\n\n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his\n brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and\n remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to\n check south and east; on\nall\nsides if that fence continued to curve\n inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.",
"\"No! I want to talk to someone\nsane\n! You and Petey and I—we're all\n insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land,\n any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded\n by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know\n nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand?\n I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most\n were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway.\n Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later.\n I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of\n the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave",
"He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with\n the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let\n them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his\n scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he\n would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so\n as to know whether or not he was insane.\n\n\n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n\n\n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the\n insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n\n\n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"",
"He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the\n patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and\n took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and\n clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still,\n different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n\n\n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen—he'd had twelve\n pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four—behind the house to where the\n half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime\n later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some.\n Pick up rest?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n\n\n She disappeared.",
"Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been\n worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought\n maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n\n\n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill\n a pig!\"",
"\"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n\n\n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected\n one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or\n sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n\n\n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n\n\n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little\n treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n\n\n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain\n again.\n\n\n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"",
"\"Am I going to jail?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Where then?\"\n\n\n \"The doctor's place.\"\n\n\n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm.\n Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know\n about it—or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n\n\n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the\n path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.",
"\"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward,\n and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the\n stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and\n saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there\n and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right)\n and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was\n wrong. The windows were wrong.\n\n\n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\nEdna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to\n the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the\n pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right.\n They had only a dozen or so now.\n\n\n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?",
"And this wasn't Iowa.\nThe explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to\n save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and\n there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people\n left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had\n come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife\n and his two sons....\nSuddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the\n greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the\n switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he\n got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and\n came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only\n one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n\n\n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.",
"His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went\n sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another\n fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by\n three feet of barbed-wire—five separate strands. What in the world had\n Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n\n\n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way.\n He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but\n fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back.\n Yes, there\nwas\na slight inward curve.\n\n\n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured\n the best way to get to the other side.",
"He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had\n ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it\n into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A\n television program guide.\n\n\n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n\n\n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only\n one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to\n her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing\n last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n\n\n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark\n Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"",
"She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n\n\n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part\n of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n\n\n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her\n eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n\n\n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he\n remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n\n\n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just\n for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could—\""
],
[
"He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n\n\n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n\n\n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet\n cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n\n\n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n\n\n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He\n looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a\n bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road\n was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over\n from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty.\n Once there'd been cars, people....\n\n\n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't\n help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.",
"He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went\n upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them,\n and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was\n glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n\n\n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were\n sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd\n gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply\n bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the\n book of directions.\"\n\n\n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked\n about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n\n\n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book\n next week.\"\n\n\n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.",
"The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the\n switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so\n many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone\n knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps\n the whole world is dead—except for us.\"\n\n\n Harry stared at him.\n\"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just\n three of us—myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should\n have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and\n where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"",
"He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with\n the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let\n them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his\n scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he\n would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so\n as to know whether or not he was insane.\n\n\n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n\n\n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the\n insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n\n\n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"",
"He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned\n toward Plum.\n\n\n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he\n said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr.\n We have so very few now....\"\n\n\n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n\n\n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n\n\n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He\n opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went\n around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away.\n Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him,\n walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"\"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that\n the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on\n kindergarten book.\"\n\n\n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting\n high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because\n he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing\n and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\nThey ate in the kitchen. They talked—or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt\n did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n\n\n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the\n door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about\n Doctor Hamming.\n\n\n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n \"Harry, please see the doctor.\"",
"Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been\n worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought\n maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n\n\n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill\n a pig!\"",
"\"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n\n\n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected\n one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or\n sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n\n\n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n\n\n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little\n treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n\n\n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain\n again.\n\n\n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"",
"\"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run\n a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but\n how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The\n people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me\n more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone\n else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to\n reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have\n known they would.\"\n\n\n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n\n\n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in\n the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because\n I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the\n catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to\n survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.",
"He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the\n patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and\n took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and\n clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still,\n different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n\n\n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen—he'd had twelve\n pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four—behind the house to where the\n half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime\n later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some.\n Pick up rest?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n\n\n She disappeared.",
"Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in\n change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n\n\n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive\n you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n\n\n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations\n and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n\n\n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n\n\n Harry walked to the door.\n\n\n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n\n\n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n\n\n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"",
"\"No! I want to talk to someone\nsane\n! You and Petey and I—we're all\n insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land,\n any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded\n by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know\n nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand?\n I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most\n were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway.\n Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later.\n I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of\n the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave",
"Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came\n down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to\n her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they\n were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing\n him again.\n\n\n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n\n\n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in\n town....\nTown!\nHe should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east,\n to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him\n right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find\n out what was happening.\n\n\n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until\n she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.",
"\"Am I going to jail?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Where then?\"\n\n\n \"The doctor's place.\"\n\n\n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm.\n Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know\n about it—or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n\n\n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the\n path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.",
"His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went\n sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another\n fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by\n three feet of barbed-wire—five separate strands. What in the world had\n Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n\n\n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way.\n He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but\n fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back.\n Yes, there\nwas\na slight inward curve.\n\n\n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured\n the best way to get to the other side.",
"He choked and stopped.\n\n\n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his\n brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and\n remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to\n check south and east; on\nall\nsides if that fence continued to curve\n inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.",
"When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen\n or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of\n doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in\n at least three places that he could see, and at the far end—a good two\n hundred yards away—a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster\n walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital,\n or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he\n didn't see or hear people.\n\n\n He did hear\nsomething\n; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came\n along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down\n somewhere.\nThey went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless\n room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there,\n putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred\n years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.",
"He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had\n ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it\n into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A\n television program guide.\n\n\n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n\n\n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only\n one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to\n her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing\n last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n\n\n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark\n Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"",
"Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were\n moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his\n mind. And sometimes—like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching\n the first hint of light touch the windows—he began sweating with fear.\n A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was\n based on nothing.\n\n\n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were\n chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except\n that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only\n a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields\n remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to\n waste....\nDavie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing\n stronger each day from helping out after school.\nHe turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"",
"The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they\n used to say back when he was a kid.\nIt took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got\n over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed\n beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand.\n He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n\n\n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He\n listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure\n he was heading in the right direction.\n\n\n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n\n\n Flooring!\n\n\n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and\n glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a\n sick laugh, so he stopped it."
],
[
"He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with\n the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let\n them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his\n scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he\n would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so\n as to know whether or not he was insane.\n\n\n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n\n\n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the\n insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n\n\n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"",
"He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned\n toward Plum.\n\n\n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he\n said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr.\n We have so very few now....\"\n\n\n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n\n\n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n\n\n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He\n opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went\n around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away.\n Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him,\n walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went\n upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them,\n and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was\n glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n\n\n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were\n sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd\n gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply\n bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the\n book of directions.\"\n\n\n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked\n about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n\n\n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book\n next week.\"\n\n\n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.",
"\"Am I going to jail?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Where then?\"\n\n\n \"The doctor's place.\"\n\n\n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm.\n Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know\n about it—or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n\n\n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the\n path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.",
"\"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that\n the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on\n kindergarten book.\"\n\n\n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting\n high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because\n he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing\n and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\nThey ate in the kitchen. They talked—or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt\n did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n\n\n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the\n door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about\n Doctor Hamming.\n\n\n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n \"Harry, please see the doctor.\"",
"Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in\n change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n\n\n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive\n you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n\n\n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations\n and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n\n\n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n\n\n Harry walked to the door.\n\n\n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n\n\n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n\n\n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"",
"He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n\n\n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n\n\n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet\n cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n\n\n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n\n\n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He\n looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a\n bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road\n was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over\n from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty.\n Once there'd been cars, people....\n\n\n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't\n help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.",
"\"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run\n a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but\n how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The\n people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me\n more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone\n else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to\n reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have\n known they would.\"\n\n\n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n\n\n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in\n the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because\n I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the\n catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to\n survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.",
"\"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n\n\n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected\n one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or\n sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n\n\n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n\n\n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little\n treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n\n\n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain\n again.\n\n\n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"",
"The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the\n switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so\n many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone\n knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps\n the whole world is dead—except for us.\"\n\n\n Harry stared at him.\n\"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just\n three of us—myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should\n have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and\n where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"",
"Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been\n worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought\n maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n\n\n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill\n a pig!\"",
"\"No! I want to talk to someone\nsane\n! You and Petey and I—we're all\n insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land,\n any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded\n by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know\n nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand?\n I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most\n were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway.\n Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later.\n I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of\n the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave",
"His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went\n sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another\n fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by\n three feet of barbed-wire—five separate strands. What in the world had\n Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n\n\n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way.\n He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but\n fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back.\n Yes, there\nwas\na slight inward curve.\n\n\n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured\n the best way to get to the other side.",
"Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came\n down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to\n her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they\n were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing\n him again.\n\n\n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n\n\n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in\n town....\nTown!\nHe should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east,\n to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him\n right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find\n out what was happening.\n\n\n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until\n she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.",
"He choked and stopped.\n\n\n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his\n brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and\n remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to\n check south and east; on\nall\nsides if that fence continued to curve\n inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.",
"He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the\n patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and\n took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and\n clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still,\n different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n\n\n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen—he'd had twelve\n pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four—behind the house to where the\n half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime\n later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some.\n Pick up rest?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n\n\n She disappeared.",
"When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen\n or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of\n doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in\n at least three places that he could see, and at the far end—a good two\n hundred yards away—a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster\n walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital,\n or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he\n didn't see or hear people.\n\n\n He did hear\nsomething\n; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came\n along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down\n somewhere.\nThey went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless\n room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there,\n putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred\n years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.",
"Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were\n moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his\n mind. And sometimes—like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching\n the first hint of light touch the windows—he began sweating with fear.\n A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was\n based on nothing.\n\n\n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were\n chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except\n that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only\n a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields\n remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to\n waste....\nDavie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing\n stronger each day from helping out after school.\nHe turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"",
"The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they\n used to say back when he was a kid.\nIt took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got\n over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed\n beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand.\n He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n\n\n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He\n listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure\n he was heading in the right direction.\n\n\n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n\n\n Flooring!\n\n\n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and\n glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a\n sick laugh, so he stopped it.",
"And this wasn't Iowa.\nThe explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to\n save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and\n there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people\n left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had\n come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife\n and his two sons....\nSuddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the\n greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the\n switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he\n got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and\n came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only\n one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n\n\n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered."
],
[
"He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned\n toward Plum.\n\n\n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he\n said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr.\n We have so very few now....\"\n\n\n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n\n\n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n\n\n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He\n opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went\n around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away.\n Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him,\n walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n\n\n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n\n\n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet\n cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n\n\n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n\n\n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He\n looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a\n bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road\n was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over\n from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty.\n Once there'd been cars, people....\n\n\n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't\n help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.",
"\"No! I want to talk to someone\nsane\n! You and Petey and I—we're all\n insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land,\n any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded\n by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know\n nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand?\n I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most\n were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway.\n Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later.\n I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of\n the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave",
"He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with\n the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let\n them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his\n scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he\n would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so\n as to know whether or not he was insane.\n\n\n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n\n\n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the\n insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n\n\n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"",
"Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been\n worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought\n maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n\n\n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill\n a pig!\"",
"\"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n\n\n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected\n one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or\n sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n\n\n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n\n\n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little\n treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n\n\n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain\n again.\n\n\n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"",
"\"Am I going to jail?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Where then?\"\n\n\n \"The doctor's place.\"\n\n\n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm.\n Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know\n about it—or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n\n\n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the\n path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.",
"\"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run\n a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but\n how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The\n people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me\n more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone\n else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to\n reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have\n known they would.\"\n\n\n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n\n\n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in\n the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because\n I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the\n catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to\n survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.",
"He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went\n upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them,\n and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was\n glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n\n\n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were\n sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd\n gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply\n bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the\n book of directions.\"\n\n\n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked\n about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n\n\n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book\n next week.\"\n\n\n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.",
"The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the\n switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so\n many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone\n knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps\n the whole world is dead—except for us.\"\n\n\n Harry stared at him.\n\"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just\n three of us—myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should\n have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and\n where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"",
"\"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that\n the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on\n kindergarten book.\"\n\n\n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting\n high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because\n he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing\n and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\nThey ate in the kitchen. They talked—or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt\n did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n\n\n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the\n door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about\n Doctor Hamming.\n\n\n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n \"Harry, please see the doctor.\"",
"He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the\n patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and\n took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and\n clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still,\n different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n\n\n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen—he'd had twelve\n pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four—behind the house to where the\n half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime\n later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some.\n Pick up rest?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n\n\n She disappeared.",
"Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came\n down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to\n her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they\n were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing\n him again.\n\n\n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n\n\n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in\n town....\nTown!\nHe should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east,\n to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him\n right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find\n out what was happening.\n\n\n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until\n she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.",
"When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen\n or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of\n doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in\n at least three places that he could see, and at the far end—a good two\n hundred yards away—a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster\n walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital,\n or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he\n didn't see or hear people.\n\n\n He did hear\nsomething\n; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came\n along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down\n somewhere.\nThey went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless\n room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there,\n putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred\n years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.",
"Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in\n change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n\n\n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive\n you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n\n\n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations\n and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n\n\n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n\n\n Harry walked to the door.\n\n\n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n\n\n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n\n\n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"",
"He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with\n a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his\n clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood,\n and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming\n in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth\n sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and\n shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and\n went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet\n strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw\n it—a car.\nA car!\nIt was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at\n all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined,\n tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations,\n Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"",
"Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were\n moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his\n mind. And sometimes—like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching\n the first hint of light touch the windows—he began sweating with fear.\n A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was\n based on nothing.\n\n\n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were\n chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except\n that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only\n a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields\n remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to\n waste....\nDavie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing\n stronger each day from helping out after school.\nHe turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"",
"He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a\n dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last\n night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all\n the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a\n son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they\nhad\nhad a son, and he'd\n died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\nHe went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen,\n Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate.\n Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\"\n he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock\n for his own table!\"\n\n\n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of\n multi-pro.\"",
"He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked.\n More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound\n growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had\n before in Cultwait County.\nHis entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to\n a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat.\n He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under\n the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the\n moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n\n\n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised\n damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n\n\n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly,\n until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him,\n and shut his eyes and mind to everything.",
"She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n\n\n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part\n of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n\n\n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her\n eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n\n\n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he\n remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n\n\n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just\n for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could—\""
],
[
"He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned\n toward Plum.\n\n\n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he\n said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr.\n We have so very few now....\"\n\n\n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n\n\n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n\n\n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He\n opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went\n around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away.\n Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him,\n walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went\n upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them,\n and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was\n glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n\n\n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were\n sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd\n gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply\n bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the\n book of directions.\"\n\n\n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked\n about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n\n\n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book\n next week.\"\n\n\n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.",
"He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with\n the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let\n them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his\n scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he\n would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so\n as to know whether or not he was insane.\n\n\n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n\n\n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the\n insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n\n\n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"",
"His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went\n sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another\n fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by\n three feet of barbed-wire—five separate strands. What in the world had\n Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n\n\n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way.\n He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but\n fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back.\n Yes, there\nwas\na slight inward curve.\n\n\n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured\n the best way to get to the other side.",
"\"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n\n\n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected\n one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or\n sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n\n\n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n\n\n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little\n treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n\n\n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain\n again.\n\n\n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"",
"He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n\n\n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n\n\n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet\n cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n\n\n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n\n\n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He\n looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a\n bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road\n was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over\n from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty.\n Once there'd been cars, people....\n\n\n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't\n help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.",
"The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the\n switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so\n many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone\n knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps\n the whole world is dead—except for us.\"\n\n\n Harry stared at him.\n\"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just\n three of us—myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should\n have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and\n where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"",
"Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came\n down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to\n her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they\n were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing\n him again.\n\n\n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n\n\n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in\n town....\nTown!\nHe should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east,\n to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him\n right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find\n out what was happening.\n\n\n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until\n she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.",
"\"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run\n a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but\n how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The\n people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me\n more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone\n else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to\n reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have\n known they would.\"\n\n\n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n\n\n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in\n the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because\n I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the\n catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to\n survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.",
"Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been\n worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought\n maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n\n\n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill\n a pig!\"",
"When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen\n or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of\n doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in\n at least three places that he could see, and at the far end—a good two\n hundred yards away—a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster\n walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital,\n or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he\n didn't see or hear people.\n\n\n He did hear\nsomething\n; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came\n along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down\n somewhere.\nThey went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless\n room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there,\n putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred\n years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.",
"Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were\n moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his\n mind. And sometimes—like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching\n the first hint of light touch the windows—he began sweating with fear.\n A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was\n based on nothing.\n\n\n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were\n chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except\n that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only\n a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields\n remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to\n waste....\nDavie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing\n stronger each day from helping out after school.\nHe turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"",
"And this wasn't Iowa.\nThe explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to\n save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and\n there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people\n left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had\n come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife\n and his two sons....\nSuddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the\n greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the\n switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he\n got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and\n came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only\n one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n\n\n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.",
"He choked and stopped.\n\n\n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his\n brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and\n remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to\n check south and east; on\nall\nsides if that fence continued to curve\n inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.",
"\"Am I going to jail?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Where then?\"\n\n\n \"The doctor's place.\"\n\n\n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm.\n Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know\n about it—or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n\n\n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the\n path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.",
"\"No! I want to talk to someone\nsane\n! You and Petey and I—we're all\n insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land,\n any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded\n by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know\n nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand?\n I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most\n were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway.\n Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later.\n I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of\n the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave",
"\"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that\n the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on\n kindergarten book.\"\n\n\n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting\n high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because\n he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing\n and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\nThey ate in the kitchen. They talked—or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt\n did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n\n\n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the\n door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about\n Doctor Hamming.\n\n\n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n \"Harry, please see the doctor.\"",
"He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked.\n More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound\n growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had\n before in Cultwait County.\nHis entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to\n a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat.\n He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under\n the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the\n moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n\n\n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised\n damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n\n\n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly,\n until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him,\n and shut his eyes and mind to everything.",
"Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in\n change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n\n\n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive\n you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n\n\n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations\n and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n\n\n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n\n\n Harry walked to the door.\n\n\n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n\n\n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n\n\n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"",
"His headache was back, worse now than it had ever been. His entire\n head throbbed, and he leaned forward and put his cheek against Plum's\n mane. The mare whinnied uneasily, but he kicked her sides and she moved\n forward. He lay there, just wanting to go somewhere, just wanting to\n leave his headache and confusion behind."
],
[
"He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned\n toward Plum.\n\n\n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he\n said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr.\n We have so very few now....\"\n\n\n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n\n\n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n\n\n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He\n opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went\n around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away.\n Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him,\n walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n\n\n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n\n\n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet\n cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n\n\n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n\n\n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He\n looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a\n bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road\n was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over\n from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty.\n Once there'd been cars, people....\n\n\n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't\n help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.",
"Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in\n change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n\n\n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive\n you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n\n\n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations\n and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n\n\n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n\n\n Harry walked to the door.\n\n\n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n\n\n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n\n\n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"",
"The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the\n switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so\n many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone\n knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps\n the whole world is dead—except for us.\"\n\n\n Harry stared at him.\n\"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just\n three of us—myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should\n have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and\n where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"",
"He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with\n the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let\n them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his\n scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he\n would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so\n as to know whether or not he was insane.\n\n\n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n\n\n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the\n insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n\n\n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"",
"Harry went home. He told Edna he felt just great! She said she'd been\n worried when an officer found Plum wandering on the road; she thought\n maybe Harry had gone off somewhere and broken travel regulations.\n\n\n \"Me?\" he exclaimed, amazed. \"Break travel regulations? I'd as soon kill\n a pig!\"",
"\"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run\n a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but\n how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The\n people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me\n more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone\n else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to\n reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have\n known they would.\"\n\n\n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n\n\n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in\n the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because\n I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the\n catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to\n survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.",
"\"Am I going to jail?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Where then?\"\n\n\n \"The doctor's place.\"\n\n\n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm.\n Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know\n about it—or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n\n\n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the\n path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.",
"\"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that\n the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on\n kindergarten book.\"\n\n\n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting\n high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because\n he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing\n and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\nThey ate in the kitchen. They talked—or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt\n did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n\n\n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the\n door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about\n Doctor Hamming.\n\n\n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n \"Harry, please see the doctor.\"",
"\"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n\n\n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected\n one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or\n sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n\n\n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n\n\n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little\n treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n\n\n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain\n again.\n\n\n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"",
"He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went\n upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them,\n and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was\n glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n\n\n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were\n sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd\n gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply\n bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the\n book of directions.\"\n\n\n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked\n about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n\n\n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book\n next week.\"\n\n\n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.",
"Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came\n down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to\n her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they\n were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing\n him again.\n\n\n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n\n\n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in\n town....\nTown!\nHe should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east,\n to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him\n right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find\n out what was happening.\n\n\n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until\n she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.",
"\"No! I want to talk to someone\nsane\n! You and Petey and I—we're all\n insane, you know. Three years now, playing God, waiting for some land,\n any land, to become habitable. And knowing everything, and surrounded\n by people who are sane only because I made sure they would know\n nothing.\" He stepped forward, glaring at Harry. \"Now do you understand?\n I went across the country, picking up a few of the few left alive. Most\n were farmers, and even where some weren't I picked the farmers anyway.\n Because farmers are what we'll need, and all the rest can evolve later.\n I put you and the others, eighty-six all told, from every section of\n the country, on my world, the only uncontaminated land left. I gave",
"His head weighed an agonized ton. He put it down again. Plum went\n sedately forward. After a while she stopped. Harry looked up. Another\n fence. And what a fence! About ten feet of heavy steel mesh, topped by\n three feet of barbed-wire—five separate strands. What in the world had\n Sam Pangborn been thinking of to put up a monster like this?\n\n\n He looked around. The gate should be further west. He rode that way.\n He found no gate. He turned back, heading east. No gate. Nothing but\n fence. And wasn't the fence gradually curving inward? He looked back.\n Yes, there\nwas\na slight inward curve.\n\n\n He dismounted and tied Plum to the fence, then stepped back and figured\n the best way to get to the other side.",
"He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the\n patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and\n took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and\n clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still,\n different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n\n\n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen—he'd had twelve\n pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four—behind the house to where the\n half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime\n later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some.\n Pick up rest?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n\n\n She disappeared.",
"He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with\n a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his\n clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood,\n and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming\n in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth\n sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and\n shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and\n went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet\n strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw\n it—a car.\nA car!\nIt was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at\n all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined,\n tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations,\n Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"",
"He choked and stopped.\n\n\n Stan ran across the room to the switch. Harry watched him, and his\n brain struggled with an impossible concept. He heard the engines and\n remembered the ocean on two sides; on four sides had he bothered to\n check south and east; on\nall\nsides if that fence continued to curve\n inward. Ocean, and there was no ocean in Iowa.",
"And this wasn't Iowa.\nThe explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to\n save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and\n there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people\n left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had\n come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife\n and his two sons....\nSuddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the\n greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the\n switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he\n got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and\n came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only\n one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n\n\n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.",
"you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we\n don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big\n crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all,\nsanity\n! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace\n and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"",
"The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they\n used to say back when he was a kid.\nIt took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got\n over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed\n beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand.\n He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n\n\n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He\n listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure\n he was heading in the right direction.\n\n\n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n\n\n Flooring!\n\n\n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and\n glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a\n sick laugh, so he stopped it."
],
[
"And this wasn't Iowa.\nThe explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to\n save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and\n there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people\n left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had\n come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife\n and his two sons....\nSuddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the\n greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the\n switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he\n got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and\n came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only\n one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n\n\n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.",
"He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the\n patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and\n took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and\n clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still,\n different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n\n\n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen—he'd had twelve\n pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four—behind the house to where the\n half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime\n later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some.\n Pick up rest?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n\n\n She disappeared.",
"Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came\n down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to\n her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they\n were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing\n him again.\n\n\n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n\n\n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in\n town....\nTown!\nHe should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east,\n to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him\n right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find\n out what was happening.\n\n\n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until\n she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.",
"The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the\n switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so\n many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone\n knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps\n the whole world is dead—except for us.\"\n\n\n Harry stared at him.\n\"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just\n three of us—myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should\n have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and\n where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"",
"He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went\n upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them,\n and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was\n glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n\n\n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were\n sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd\n gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply\n bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the\n book of directions.\"\n\n\n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked\n about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n\n\n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book\n next week.\"\n\n\n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.",
"He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside\n of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn\n floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that\n was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he\n leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward\n staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the\n way I had my barn....\"\n\n\n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless\n panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it\nwas\nhis barn!",
"\"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward,\n and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the\n stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and\n saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there\n and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right)\n and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was\n wrong. The windows were wrong.\n\n\n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\nEdna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to\n the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the\n pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right.\n They had only a dozen or so now.\n\n\n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?",
"Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were\n moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his\n mind. And sometimes—like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching\n the first hint of light touch the windows—he began sweating with fear.\n A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was\n based on nothing.\n\n\n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were\n chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except\n that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only\n a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields\n remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to\n waste....\nDavie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing\n stronger each day from helping out after school.\nHe turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"",
"\"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run\n a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but\n how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The\n people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me\n more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone\n else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to\n reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have\n known they would.\"\n\n\n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n\n\n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in\n the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because\n I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the\n catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to\n survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.",
"you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we\n don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big\n crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all,\nsanity\n! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace\n and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"",
"When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen\n or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of\n doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in\n at least three places that he could see, and at the far end—a good two\n hundred yards away—a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster\n walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital,\n or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he\n didn't see or hear people.\n\n\n He did hear\nsomething\n; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came\n along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down\n somewhere.\nThey went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless\n room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there,\n putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred\n years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.",
"\"Pete's all right, Dad. Just leading a horse back to Burr's farm.\"\n\n\n The old man sighed. \"I didn't know what form it would take. I expected\n one or two cases, but I couldn't predict whether it would be gradual or\n sudden, whether or not it would lead to violence.\"\n\n\n \"No violence, Dad.\"\n\n\n \"Fine, Stan.\" He looked at Harry. \"I'm going to give you a little\n treatment, Mr. Burr. It'll settle your nerves and make everything....\"\n\n\n \"What happened to Davie?\" Harry asked, things pushing at his brain\n again.\n\n\n Stan helped him up. \"Just step this way, Mr. Burr.\"",
"The best way, the only way, was to claw, clutch and clamber, as they\n used to say back when he was a kid.\nIt took some doing. He tore his shirt on the barbed wire, but he got\n over and began walking, straight ahead, due north. The earth changed\n beneath his feet. He stooped and touched it. Sand. Hard-packed sand.\n He'd never seen the like of it in this county.\n\n\n He walked on. A sound came to him; a rising-falling whisper. He\n listened to it, and looked up every so often at the sky, to make sure\n he was heading in the right direction.\n\n\n And the sand ended. His shoes plunked over flooring.\n\n\n Flooring!\n\n\n He knelt to make sure, and his hand felt wooden planks. He rose, and\n glanced up to see if he was still outdoors. Then he laughed. It was a\n sick laugh, so he stopped it.",
"He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a\n dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last\n night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all\n the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a\n son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they\nhad\nhad a son, and he'd\n died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\nHe went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen,\n Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate.\n Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\"\n he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock\n for his own table!\"\n\n\n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of\n multi-pro.\"",
"He got up. \"I'm going out. I might even sleep out!\"\n\n\n \"But why, Harry, why?\"\n\n\n He couldn't stand to see her crying. He went to her, kissed her wet\n cheek, spoke more softly. \"It'll do me good, like when I was a kid.\"\n\n\n \"If you say so, Harry.\"\n\n\n He left quickly. He went outside and across the yard to the road. He\n looked up it and down it, to the north and to the south. It was a\n bright night with moon and stars, but he saw nothing, no one. The road\n was empty. It was always empty, except when Walt and Gloria walked over\n from their place a mile or so south. But once it hadn't been empty.\n Once there'd been cars, people....\n\n\n He had to do something. Just sitting and looking at the sky wouldn't\n help him. He had to go somewhere, see someone.",
"\"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that\n the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on\n kindergarten book.\"\n\n\n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting\n high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because\n he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing\n and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\nThey ate in the kitchen. They talked—or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt\n did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n\n\n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the\n door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about\n Doctor Hamming.\n\n\n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n \"Harry, please see the doctor.\"",
"Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in\n change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n\n\n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive\n you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n\n\n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations\n and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n\n\n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n\n\n Harry walked to the door.\n\n\n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n\n\n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n\n\n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"",
"He took another step. His shoes sounded against the wood. He walked.\n More wood. Wood that went on, as the sand had. And the roaring sound\n growing louder. And the air changing, smelling like air never had\n before in Cultwait County.\nHis entire body trembled. His mind trembled too. He walked, and came to\n a waist-high metal railing, and made a tiny sound deep in his throat.\n He looked out over water, endless water rolling in endless waves under\n the night sky. Crashing water, topped with reflected silver from the\n moon. Pounding water, filling the air with spray.\n\n\n He put out his hands and grasped the railing. It was wet. He raised\n damp fingers to his mouth. Salt.\n\n\n He stepped back, back, and turned and ran. He ran wildly, blindly,\n until he could run no more. Then he fell, feeling the sand beneath him,\n and shut his eyes and mind to everything.",
"He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned\n toward Plum.\n\n\n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he\n said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr.\n We have so very few now....\"\n\n\n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n\n\n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n\n\n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He\n opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went\n around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away.\n Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him,\n walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately—a long time\n lately?\nThe ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by\n flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where\n there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where\n that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons.\n And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of\n Crossville. And after that....\nHe was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here\n he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could\n it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to\n forget things he'd known all his life?"
],
[
"Harry gave him a five-dollar bill. The doctor gave him two singles in\n change. \"That's certainly reasonable enough,\" Harry said.\n\n\n The doctor nodded. \"There's a police officer in the hall. He'll drive\n you home so there won't be any trouble with the travel regulations.\"\n\n\n Harry said, \"Thanks. Think we'll ever see the end of travel regulations\n and rationing and all the rest of the emergency?\"\n\n\n \"You will, Mr. Burr.\"\n\n\n Harry walked to the door.\n\n\n \"We're on an ark,\" the doctor said.\n\n\n Harry turned around, smiling. \"What?\"\n\n\n \"A test, Mr. Burr. You passed it. Goodbye.\"",
"\"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that\n the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on\n kindergarten book.\"\n\n\n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting\n high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because\n he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing\n and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\nThey ate in the kitchen. They talked—or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt\n did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n\n\n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the\n door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about\n Doctor Hamming.\n\n\n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n \"Harry, please see the doctor.\"",
"\"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run\n a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but\n how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The\n people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me\n more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone\n else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to\n reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have\n known they would.\"\n\n\n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n\n\n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in\n the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because\n I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the\n catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to\n survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.",
"And this wasn't Iowa.\nThe explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to\n save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and\n there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people\n left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had\n come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife\n and his two sons....\nSuddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the\n greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the\n switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he\n got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and\n came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only\n one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n\n\n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.",
"He didn't resist. He went through the second door into the room with\n the big chair. He sat down and let them strap his arms and legs and let\n them lower the metal thing over his head. He felt needles pierce his\n scalp and the back of his neck. He let them do what they wanted; he\n would let them kill him if they wanted. All he asked was one answer so\n as to know whether or not he was insane.\n\n\n \"What happened to my son Davie?\"\n\n\n The old man walked across the room and examined what looked like the\n insides of a dozen big radios. He turned, his hand on a switch.\n\n\n \"Please,\" Harry whispered. \"Just tell me about my son.\"",
"\"You stop that! You stop that right now, and for good! I don't want to\n hear no more about doctors. I get laid up, I'll call one. And it won't\n be that Hamming who I ain't never seen in my life! It'll be Timkins,\n who took care'n us and brought our son into the world and....\"\n\n\n She began to cry, and he realized he'd said something crazy again. They\n had no son, never had a son. And Timkins—he'd died and they'd gone to\n his funeral. Or so Edna said.\n\n\n He himself just couldn't remember it.",
"\"Am I going to jail?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Where then?\"\n\n\n \"The doctor's place.\"\n\n\n They stopped in front of the new house two miles past Dugan's farm.\n Except he'd never seen it before. Or had he? Everyone seemed to know\n about it—or was everyone only Edna and the Shanks?\n\n\n He got out of the car. The officer took his arm and led him up the\n path. Harry noticed that the new house was big.",
"The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the\n switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so\n many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone\n knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps\n the whole world is dead—except for us.\"\n\n\n Harry stared at him.\n\"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just\n three of us—myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should\n have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and\n where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"",
"When they came inside, he knew it wasn't like any house he'd ever seen\n or heard of. There was this long central passageway, and dozens of\n doors branched off it on both sides, and stairways went down from it in\n at least three places that he could see, and at the far end—a good two\n hundred yards away—a big ramp led upward. And it was all gray plaster\n walls and dull black floors and cold white lighting, like a hospital,\n or a modern factory, or maybe a government building. Except that he\n didn't see or hear people.\n\n\n He did hear\nsomething\n; a low, rumbling noise. The further they came\n along the hall, the louder the rumbling grew. It seemed to be deep down\n somewhere.\nThey went through one of the doors on the right, into a windowless\n room. A thin little man with bald head and frameless glasses was there,\n putting on a white coat. His veiny hands shook. He looked a hundred\n years old. \"Where's Petey?\" he asked.",
"He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the\n patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and\n took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and\n clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still,\n different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n\n\n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen—he'd had twelve\n pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four—behind the house to where the\n half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime\n later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some.\n Pick up rest?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n\n\n She disappeared.",
"BREAKDOWN\nBy HERBERT D. KASTLE\n\n\n Illustrated by COWLES\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine June 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe didn't know exactly when it had started, but it had been going on\n for weeks. Edna begged him to see the doctor living in that new house\n two miles past Dugan's farm, but he refused. He point-blank refused to\n admit he was sick\nthat\nway—in the head!",
"Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came\n down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to\n her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they\n were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing\n him again.\n\n\n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n\n\n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in\n town....\nTown!\nHe should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east,\n to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him\n right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find\n out what was happening.\n\n\n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until\n she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.",
"He milked and curried and fed and cleaned, and still was done inside\n of two hours. Then he walked slowly, head down, across the hay-strewn\n floor. He stopped, put out his hand as if to find a pole or beam that\n was too familiar to require raising his eyes, and almost fell as he\n leaned in that direction. Regaining his balance after a sideward\n staggering shuffle, he looked around, startled. \"Why, this ain't the\n way I had my barn....\"\n\n\n He heard his own voice, and stopped. He fought the flash of senseless\n panic. Of course this was the way he'd had his barn built, because it\nwas\nhis barn!",
"She cleared her throat, mumbled, \"Huh? What happened to who?\"\n\n\n \"I said, what....\" But then it slipped away. Davie? No, that was part\n of a dream he'd had last week. He and Edna had no children.\n\n\n He felt the fear again, and got up fast to escape it. Edna opened her\n eyes as soon as his weight left the bed. \"Like hotcakes for breakfast?\"\n\n\n \"Eggs,\" he said. \"Bacon.\" And then, seeing her face change, he\n remembered. \"Course,\" he muttered. \"Can't have bacon. Rationed.\"\n\n\n She was fully awake now. \"If you'd only go see Dr. Hamming, Harry. Just\n for a checkup. Or let me call him so he could—\"",
"He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went\n upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them,\n and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was\n glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n\n\n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were\n sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd\n gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply\n bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the\n book of directions.\"\n\n\n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked\n about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n\n\n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book\n next week.\"\n\n\n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.",
"He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a\n dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last\n night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all\n the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a\n son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they\nhad\nhad a son, and he'd\n died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\nHe went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen,\n Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate.\n Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\"\n he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock\n for his own table!\"\n\n\n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of\n multi-pro.\"",
"He nodded. He wanted to. He wanted to be taken care of. He turned\n toward Plum.\n\n\n The other officer was walking around the horse. \"Rode her hard,\" he\n said, and he sounded real worried. \"Shouldn't have done that, Mr. Burr.\n We have so very few now....\"\n\n\n The officer holding Harry's arm said, \"Pete.\"\n\n\n The officer examining Plum said, \"It won't make any difference in a\n while.\"\n\n\n Harry looked at both of them, and felt sharp, personal fear.\n\n\n \"Take the horse back to his farm,\" the officer holding Harry said. He\n opened the door of the little car and pushed Harry inside. He went\n around to the driver's side and got behind the wheel and drove away.\n Harry looked back. Pete was leading Plum after them; not riding him,\n walking him. \"He sure must like horses,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Yes.\"",
"\"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward,\n and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the\n stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and\n saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there\n and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right)\n and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was\n wrong. The windows were wrong.\n\n\n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\nEdna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to\n the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the\n pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right.\n They had only a dozen or so now.\n\n\n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?",
"He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with\n a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his\n clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood,\n and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming\n in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth\n sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and\n shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and\n went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet\n strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw\n it—a car.\nA car!\nIt was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at\n all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined,\n tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations,\n Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"",
"He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should\n a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start\n losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n\n\n He was at the supply bin—like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with\n a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines\n and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and\n they left it—or whatever they allowed you—with a bill. You paid the\n bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt\n and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some\n money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn.\n It came out just about even."
],
[
"you back your old lives. I couldn't give you big crops because we\n don't need big crops. We would only exhaust our limited soil with big\n crops. But I gave you vegetable gardens and livestock and, best of all,\nsanity\n! I wiped the insane moments from your minds. I gave you peace\n and consigned myself, my sons, my own wife....\"",
"He went on toward the road, his head beginning to throb. Why should\n a man his age, hardly sick at all since he was a kid, suddenly start\n losing hold this way? Edna was worried. The Shanks had noticed it too.\n\n\n He was at the supply bin—like an old-fashioned wood bin; a box with\n a sloping flap lid. Deliveries of food and clothing and home medicines\n and other things were left here. You wrote down what you needed, and\n they left it—or whatever they allowed you—with a bill. You paid the\n bill by leaving money in the bin, and the next week you found a receipt\n and your new stuff and your new bill. And almost always you found some\n money from the government, for not planting wheat or not planting corn.\n It came out just about even.",
"The doctor blinked behind his glasses, and then his hand left the\n switch. \"Dead,\" he said, his voice a rustling of dried leaves. \"Like so\n many millions of others. Dead, when the bombs fell. Dead, as everyone\n knew they would be and no one did anything to prevent. Dead. Perhaps\n the whole world is dead—except for us.\"\n\n\n Harry stared at him.\n\"I can't take the time to explain it all. I have too much to do. Just\n three of us—myself and my two sons. My wife lost her mind. I should\n have helped her as I'm helping you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Harry said. \"I remember people, and things, and\n where are they now? Dead? People can die, but farms, cities....\"",
"He went to the bed and sat down beside her. \"Sorry. That was just a\n dream I had. I'm still half asleep this morning. Couldn't fall off last\n night, not till real late. Guess I'm a little nervous, what with all\n the new regulations and not working regular. I never meant we had a\n son.\" He waited then, hoping she'd say they\nhad\nhad a son, and he'd\n died or gone away. But of course she didn't.\nHe went to the bathroom and washed. By the time he came to the kitchen,\n Edna had hotcakes on a plate and coffee in a cup. He sat down and ate.\n Part way through the meal, he paused. \"Got an awful craving for meat,\"\n he said. \"Goddam those rations! Man can't even butcher his own stock\n for his own table!\"\n\n\n \"We're having meat for lunch,\" she said placatingly. \"Nice cut of\n multi-pro.\"",
"He rubbed his hard hands together and said aloud, \"Get down to the\n patch. Them tomatoes need fertilizer for tang.\" He walked outside and\n took a deep breath. Air was different, wasn't it? Sweet and pure and\n clean, like country air always was and always would be; but still,\n different somehow. Maybe sharper. Or was sharp the word? Maybe....\n\n\n He went quickly across the yard, past the pig-pen—he'd had twelve\n pigs, hadn't he? Now he had four—behind the house to where the\n half-acre truck farm lay greening in the sun. He got to work. Sometime\n later, Edna called to him. \"Delivery last night, Harry. I took some.\n Pick up rest?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he shouted.\n\n\n She disappeared.",
"He went to the barn and looked for his saddle. There was no saddle. But\n he'd had one hanging right behind the door. Or had he?\n\n\n He threw a blanket over Plum, the big mare, and tied it with a piece of\n wash line. He used another piece for a bridle, since he couldn't find\n that either, and didn't bother making a bit. He mounted, and Plum moved\n out of the barn and onto the road. He headed north, toward town.\n\n\n Then he realized he couldn't go along the road this way. He'd be\n reported. Breaking travel regulations was a serious offense. He didn't\n know what they did to you, but it wasn't anything easy like a fine.\n\n\n He cut into an unfenced, unplanted field.",
"\"I haven't the time,\" the doctor repeated, voice rising. \"I have to run\n a world. Three of us, to run a world! I built it as best I could, but\n how large could I make it? The money. The years and years of work. The\n people calling me insane when they found out ... but a few giving me\n more money, and the work going on. And those few caught like everyone\n else, unprepared when the holocaust started, unprepared and unable to\n reach my world. So they died. As I knew they would. As they should have\n known they would.\"\n\n\n Harry felt the rumbling beneath him. Engines?\n\n\n \"You survived,\" the doctor said. \"Your wife. A few hundred others in\n the rural areas. One other family in your area. I survived because\n I lived for survival, like a mole deep in the earth, expecting the\n catastrophe every minute. I survived because I gave up living to\n survive.\" He laughed, high and thin.",
"He hauled out a sack of flour, half the amount of sugar Edna had\n ordered, some dried fruit, a new Homekit Medicine Shelf. He carried it\n into the house, and noticed a slip of paper pinned to the sugar bag. A\n television program guide.\n\n\n Edna hustled over excitedly. \"Anything good on this week, Harry?\"\n\n\n He looked down the listings, and frowned. \"All old movies. Still only\n one channel. Still only from nine to eleven at night.\" He gave it to\n her, turned away; then stopped and waited. He'd said the same thing\n last week. And she had said the films were all new to her.\n\n\n She said it now. \"Why Harry, I've never seen this movie with Clark\n Gable. Nor the comedy with Red Skeleton. Nor the other five neither.\"",
"He walked slowly back to the house. As he came into the front yard,\n moving toward the road and the supply bin, something occurred to him.\nThe car.\nHe hadn't seen the old Chevvy in ... how long? It'd be nice\n to take a ride to town, see a movie, maybe have a few beers.\n\n\n No. It was against the travel regulations. He couldn't go further than\n Walt and Gloria Shanks' place. They couldn't go further than his. And\n the gas rationing. Besides, he'd sold the car, hadn't he? Because it\n was no use to him lying in the tractor shed.\nHe whirled, staring out across the fields to his left. Why, the tractor\n shed had stood just fifty feet from the house!\n\n\n No, he'd torn it down. The tractor was in town, being overhauled and\n all. He was leaving it there until he had use for it.",
"Much later, he got up and went to the fence and climbed it. He came\n down on the other side and looked around and saw Plum. He walked to\n her, mounted her, sat still. The thoughts, or dreams, or whatever they\n were which had been torturing him these past few weeks began torturing\n him again.\n\n\n It was getting light. His head was splitting.\n\n\n Davie. His son Davie. Fourteen years old. Going to high school in\n town....\nTown!\nHe should've gone there in the first place! He would ride east,\n to the road, then head south, back toward home. That would bring him\n right down Main Street. Regulations or not, he'd talk to people, find\n out what was happening.\n\n\n He kicked Plum's sides. The mare began to move. He kept kicking until\n she broke into a brisk canter. He held on with hands and legs.",
"\"Multi-pro,\" he scoffed. \"God knows what's in it. Like spam put through\n a grinder a hundred times and then baked into slabs. Can't hardly taste\n any meat there.\"\n\n\n \"Well, we got no choice. Country's on emergency rations. The current\n crisis, you know.\"\n\n\n The way she said it irritated him. Like it was Scripture; like no one\n could question one word of it without being damned to Hell. He finished\n quickly and without speaking went on out to the barn.",
"Or had they died somehow? A rough winter? Disease?\n\n\n He stood in the yard, a tall, husky man with pale brown hair and a face\n that had once been long, lean and strong and was now only long and\n lean. He blinked gray eyes and tried hard to remember, then turned and\n went to the house. Edna was soaking dishes in the sink, according to\n regulations—one sinkful of dishwater a day. And one tub of bath water\n twice a week.\n\n\n She was looking at him. He realized his anger and confusion must be\n showing. He managed a smile. \"You remember how much we got for our\n livestock, Edna?\"\n\n\n \"Same as everyone else,\" she said. \"Government agents paid flat rates.\"",
"And this wasn't Iowa.\nThe explosions had ripped the world, and he'd tried to get to town to\n save Davie, and there'd been no town and there'd been no people and\n there'd been only death and poison in the air and even those few people\n left had begun to die, and then the truck with the huge trailer had\n come, the gleaming trailer with the little man and his trembling wife\n and his two sons....\nSuddenly, he understood. And understanding brought not peace but the\n greatest terror he'd ever known. He screamed, \"We're on....\" but the\n switch was thrown and there was no more speech. For an hour. Then he\n got out of the chair and said, \"Sure glad I took my wife's advice and\n came to see you, Doctor Hamming. I feel better already, and after only\n one.... What do you call these treatments?\"\n\n\n \"Diathermy,\" the little doctor muttered.",
"He reached the Shanks' place, and passed it at a trot. Then he was\n beyond their boundaries and breaking regulations again. He stayed on\n the road. He went by a small house and saw colored folks in the yard.\n There'd been no colored folks here. There'd been Eli Bergen and his\n family and his mother, in a bigger, newer house. The colored folks\n heard Plum's hooves and looked up and stared. Then a man raised his\n voice. \"Mistah, you breakin' regulations! Mistah, the police gonnah get\n you!\"\nHe rode on. He came to another house, neat and white, with three\n children playing on a grassy lawn. They saw him and ran inside. A\n moment later, adult voices yelled after him:\n\n\n \"You theah! Stop!\"\n\n\n \"Call the sheriff! He's headin' foah Piney Woods!\"\n\n\n There was no place called Piney Woods in this county.",
"\"I'm gonna lie down,\" he said flatly. He turned and stepped forward,\n and found himself facing the stove. Not the door to the hall; the\n stove. \"But the door....\" he began. He cut himself short. He turned and\n saw the door a few feet to the left, beside the table. He went there\n and out and up the stairs (they too had moved; they too weren't right)\n and into the bedroom and lay down. The bedroom was wrong. The bed was\n wrong. The windows were wrong.\n\n\n The world was wrong! Lord, the whole damned world was wrong!\nEdna didn't wake him, so they had a late lunch. Then he went back to\n the barn and let the four cows and four sheep and two horses into the\n pastures. Then he checked to see that Edna had fed the chickens right.\n They had only a dozen or so now.\n\n\n When had he sold the rest? And when had he sold his other livestock?",
"Why hadn't he seen the Pangborns and Elvertons lately—a long time\n lately?\nThe ocean. He'd seen the ocean. Not a reservoir or lake made by\n flooding and by damming, but salt water and enormous. An ocean, where\n there could be no ocean. The Pangborns and Elvertons had been where\n that ocean was now. And after the Elvertons had come the Dobsons.\n And after them the new plastics plant. And after that the city of\n Crossville. And after that....\nHe was passing his own farm. He hadn't come through town, and yet here\n he was at his own farm. Could he have forgotten where town was? Could\n it be north of his home, not south? Could a man get so confused as to\n forget things he'd known all his life?",
"He rode on. He never did come to town. He came to a ten-foot fence with\n a three-foot barbed-wire extension. He got off Plum and ripped his\n clothing climbing. He walked over hard-packed sand, and then wood,\n and came to a low metal railing. He looked out at the ocean, gleaming\n in bright sunlight, surging and seething endlessly. He felt the earth\n sway beneath him. He staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees, and\n shook his head like a fighter hit too many times. Then he got up and\n went back to the fence and heard a sound. It was a familiar sound, yet\n strange too. He shaded his eyes against the climbing sun. Then he saw\n it—a car.\nA car!\nIt was one of those tiny foreign jobs that run on practically no gas at\n all. It stopped beside him and two men got out. Young men with lined,\n tired faces; they wore policemen's uniforms. \"You broke regulations,\n Mr. Burr. You'll have to come with us.\"",
"He remembered then, or thought he did. The headache was back. He went\n upstairs and slept again, but this time he had dreams, many of them,\n and all confused and all frightening. He was glad to get up. And he was\n glad to hear Walt and Gloria talking to Edna downstairs.\n\n\n He washed his face, combed his hair and went down. Walt and Gloria were\n sitting on the sofa, Edna in the blue armchair. Walt was saying he'd\n gotten the new TV picture tube he'd ordered. \"Found it in the supply\n bin this morning. Spent the whole day installing it according to the\n book of directions.\"\n\n\n Harry said hi and they all said hi and he sat down and they talked\n about TV and gardens and livestock. Then Harry said, \"How's Penny?\"\n\n\n \"Fine,\" Gloria answered. \"I'm starting her on the kindergarten book\n next week.\"\n\n\n \"She's five already?\" Harry asked.",
"Of course, a man could grow forgetful. He had to admit there were\n moments when he had all sorts of mixed-up memories and thoughts in his\n mind. And sometimes—like right now, lying in bed beside Edna, watching\n the first hint of light touch the windows—he began sweating with fear.\n A horrible, gut-wrenching fear, all the more horrible because it was\n based on nothing.\n\n\n The chicken-run came alive; the barn followed minutes later. There were\n chores to do, the same chores he'd done all his forty-one years. Except\n that now, with the new regulations about wheat and corn, he had only\n a vegetable patch to farm. Sure, he got paid for letting the fields\n remain empty. But it just didn't seem right, all that land going to\n waste....\nDavie. Blond hair and a round, tanned face and strong arms growing\n stronger each day from helping out after school.\nHe turned and shook Edna. \"What happened to Davie?\"",
"\"Almost six,\" Walt said. \"Emergency Education Regulations state that\n the child should be five years nine months old before embarking on\n kindergarten book.\"\n\n\n \"And Frances?\" Harry asked. \"Your oldest? She must be starting\n high....\" He stopped, because they were all staring at him, and because\n he couldn't remember Frances clearly. \"Just a joke,\" he said, laughing\n and rising. \"Let's eat. I'm starved.\"\nThey ate in the kitchen. They talked—or rather Edna, Gloria and Walt\n did. Harry nodded and said uh-huh and used his mouth for chewing.\n\n\n Walt and Gloria went home at ten-fifteen. They said goodbye at the\n door and Harry walked away. He heard Gloria whispering something about\n Doctor Hamming.\n\n\n He was sitting in the living room when Edna came in. She was crying.\n \"Harry, please see the doctor.\""
]
] |
test
|
20035
|
[
"How many movies are reviewed in this article?",
"How many actors appeared in more than one of the movies reviewed, and in how many did they appear?",
"Which movie does the reviewer like best?",
"What is the author's primary criticism of Angela's Ashes?",
"What is the movie \"Man on the Moon\" about?",
"What actors does the author single out for expressions of his particular admiration?",
"Why does the author say that the movie \"Magnolia\" could have been entitled \"Meanwhile,\" instead?",
"What does the director of Magnolia do that shows he views his fellow workers as family?",
"What seems to be one of the author's chief complaint about \"The Talented Mr. Ripley\" ?",
"What specific issue does the author have with the accuracy of \"Man on the Moon\" ?"
] |
[
[
"One",
"Four",
"Two",
"Three"
],
[
"None of the actors appeared in more than one movie, however, two of the movies were based on stories by the same author.",
"One actor appeared in more than one of the reviewed movies, appearing in all of them.",
"One actor appeared in more than one of the reviewed movies, appearing in two of them.",
"Two actors appeared in more than one of the reviewed movies, each appearing in three of them."
],
[
"The reviewer didn't have anything good to say about any of the four movies.",
"The comments he makes point to Magnolia as the only movie of the four that he found worthwhile.",
"The reviewer liked The Talented Mr. Ripley best because of the good job done by director Anthony Minghella.",
"The reviewer liked all four movies equally."
],
[
"It dwells too much on the tragic details of the book.",
"No coherent story is presented, just a bunch of disconnected scenes.",
"Too many of the book's details were twisted to turn it into a movie with commercial potential.",
"Emily Watson is no good at projecting her emotions."
],
[
"It is a biographical movie about Larry Flynt,",
"It is a biographical movie about the sidekicks that Johnny Carson had on his show over the years.",
"It is a more or less biographical movie about Andy Kaufman.",
"It is a biographical picture about Jim Carrey, whose stage name was Andy Kaufman."
],
[
"Frank McCourt and Tom Cruise.",
"Jim Carrey and Anthony Minghella.",
"The entire cast of Magnolia except for Tom Cruise.",
"Jim Carrey and John Reilly."
],
[
"Because everything happens while the one old patriarch is dying.",
"Because the story jumps around between so many subplots.",
"Because there actually was a movie called \"Meanwhile,\" and the plot of \"Magnolia\" was very similar.",
"Because he gave up trying to follow the plot and \"meanwhile,\" he wrote his review of the movie."
],
[
"He got the whole cast together at his home once a week for a catered dinner, because some of the cast were not that well paid.",
"He made sure that actors worked out any conflicts among them before the shooting started so that they would feel safe with each other.",
"He had very strict policies on actors dating each other during filming. It was not allowed, and this was to make sure that less famous actors were not bullied by the more prominent, powerful ones.",
"He creates a role for a friend who worked in one of his previous movies."
],
[
"He didn't think Gwyneth Paltrow belonged in the movie at all.",
"He thinks that Jude Law was an unfortunate choice as a co-star, because he only has one expression, a sort of leering smile.",
"He thinks the movie would have come off better played as a comedy.",
"He doesn't like Matt Damon in the starring role because he doesn't like his looks."
],
[
"In the movie, Kaufman is shown as getting sick at the pinnacle of his career, while in reality, his star had already faded by that time.",
"Jim Carrey puts a sense of anger into the Kaufman character that really wasn't there.",
"Kaufman was never in the same class as Mozart, but the screenwriters fluff the story to make him seem like a giant in his field.",
"The movie makes Kaufman seem like just another small-time Mafia asset."
]
] |
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-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1
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[
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1,
1,
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0,
1,
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0
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[
[
"OK, you could spend three hours snickering at Anderson's \"What the World Needs Now Is Aimee Mann\" metaphysic. But his vision cuts deeper than a lot of folky bathos. His characters have been screwed up by their families, so when he turns around and makes a case for family as the ultimate salvation, he doesn't seem simple-minded. He's saying the diaspora is understandable--but that it's also killing people. At the point where these people could actually start dying of aloneness, he goes metaphorical. He goes biblical. He goes nuts. He has sort of prepared us with weather reports and the recurrence of numerals suggesting an Old Testament chapter and verse. But nothing could prepare us for the full-scale, surreal, gross-out deluge that's the picture's splattery climax. For the second time, he dynamites his own movie. And for the second time I forgave him almost everything.",
"of stories that nourished his poet's instincts. I worried that the movie, directed by Alan Parker, would miss McCourt's voice and dwell too much on the tragic details. But what happens is the opposite: McCourt narrates the film, and it",
"stereo: \"You've been doing some drugs today?\" After 10 minutes, it isn't clear whether this dweebish flatfoot is interrogating her or trying to ask for a date--or whether he even knows. Meanwhile ( Magnolia could have been titled Meanwhile",
"breezily wide-eyed biopics. Their Horatio Alger tone is the joke, but it's not a joke that director Milos Forman seems to be in on. Forman tells one, deadly serious story: A reckless individualist is slowly crushed by society. It",
"What's the connection among these people? Some of the links are familial, others merely circumstantial. But everyone and their dad are having a really lousy day. At the peak of their collective loneliness, the cokehead daughter puts on a plaintive Aimee Mann song, the chorus of which goes: \"It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ Till you wise up.\" She moves her lips and the director cuts to all the characters in all the movie's other strands as they all move their lips to the same universal refrain: \"It's not going to stop …\" The wife in the car sings. The aging quiz kid on the barstool sings. The cop searching for his lost gun sings. I thought, \"Please don't make the guy in the coma sing, or I'm going to be hysterical\"--but yup, the guy in the coma sings, too. At that point, I had an interesting reaction to Magnolia : I laughed at it and forgave it almost everything.",
"What clinches Anderson's case for family is how beautifully he works with his surrogate clan. Many of the actors show up from his Hard Eight (1997) and Boogie Nights (1997), and he's so eager to get Luis Guzman into the film, despite the lack of a role, that he makes him a game-show contestant named \"Luis Guzman.\" He's like a parent who can't stop adopting kids. Anderson knows what actors live to do: fall apart. He puts their characters' backs against the wall, then gives them speeches full of free associations and Freudian slips, so that they're suddenly exposed--and terrified by their nakedness. By the end of the first hour of Magnolia , the whole cast is unraveling. By the end of the second, they've unraveled so much that they've burst into song. Anderson must have needed that bonkers third-hour climax because there was nowhere to go short of spontaneous combustion.",
"turns into a lifeless slide show. There's no flow, no connective tissue between episodes. After the 80 th teensy scene goes by, you realize the movie isn't just botched: It doesn't even exist. Emily Watson suffers prettily, but whatever",
"As in their Ed Wood (1994) and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski take marginal or plain cruddy characters and stick them in the middle of",
"meshed with McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) but seemed odd with Mozart ( Amadeus , 1984) and disastrous with Valmont ( Valmont , 1989). With Andy Kaufman, it seems not so much wrong",
"Anthony Minghella ( The English Patient , 1996) has adapted The Talented Mr. Ripley from a thriller by Patricia Highsmith, and it's a gorgeously creepy piece of movie-making. The Old World luxury--even the Old World rot--is double-edged, subtly mocking its bantamweight New World protagonist. The light that bronzes everyone else burns poor, pasty Ripley. We watch him having the time of his life, but there's no question of his ever fitting in with Dickie, his willowy girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), or even their fat, to-the-manner-born pal Freddie Miles (a hilarious Philip Seymour Hoffman)--he's too tense, too hungry, too incomplete. When Ripley is by himself onscreen, there's nothing going on.",
"The title card of The Talented Mr. Ripley is a stroke of genius. Adjectives flash before the words Mr. Ripley , with \"talented\" an imperfect substitute for about 30 other possibilities, including \"confused.\" Actually, I think confused (or vulnerable or desperate) would have been a more appropriate choice. As played by Matt Damon, this Ripley's chief talent is for licking his lips and looking clammily out of place. Dispatched to the south of Italy by a magnate named Greenleaf seeking the return of his wastrel son Dickie (Jude Law), the working-class Ripley has to pretend he's an old Princeton classmate. But nothing in Damon's demeanor remotely suggests the Ivy League. Beside the smooth, caramel-colored Law, even his pale little muscles seem like poseurs.",
"The reason to see Man on the Moon is Jim Carrey. It's not just that he does the Kaufman routines with the kind of hungry gleam that makes you think he's \"channeling\" the dead comedian. It's that he knows what it's like to walk the high wire and bomb. He knows what it's like to lose control of his aggression: It happened to him in The Cable Guy (1996), maybe his real Andy Kaufman film. I bet that what Carrey saw from inside Kaufman's head would be more illuminating than anything in the movie. He's not just a man in the moon: He generates his own light.",
"The actors are great--all of them. It seems unfair to single anyone out, but I loved Reilly's unsettling combination of sweetness and prudery--unsettling because he's just the kind of earnest, by-the-book cop whose wheels move too slowly in a crisis. Between tantrums, Julianne Moore opens and closes her mouth like a fish that's slowly suffocating at the bottom of a boat. And who would have expected a real performance from Tom Cruise? Anderson takes everything fake in Cruise's acting--the face-pulling, the too-quick smile--and turns it into the character's own shtick, so that when the mask is pulled off you get a startling glimpse of the rage and fear under the pose. Elsewhere, Anderson uses Mamet actors and Mamety diction, but he's the Anti-Mamet. He makes his actors feel so safe--so loved--that they seem to be competing to see who can shed the most skin.",
"patriarch is dying. No, hold on, this is a three-hour movie: Two patriarchs are dying. Rich geezer Jason Robards is slipping in and out of a coma on a bed with an oxygen tube up his nose while his minky",
"Along with many Americans, I first caught Andy Kaufman on the Tonight Show in the mid-'70s. He sat next to Johnny Carson and in his helium-pitched \"foreign man\" voice told jokes without punch lines (\"Her cooking ees so bad--ees terrible\") and did non-impressionistic impressions; then he got up and launched into the most electrifying Elvis Presley takeoff I've ever seen. Without that final flourish of virtuosity, the shtick would have been just weird. With it, Kaufman signaled that his comedy was about more than untranscendent ineptitude: It was about wondrously fucking with your head.",
"night, since a female TV journalist (April Grace) has uncovered the history he has determinedly concealed and is eating through his mask of machismo on camera. \"We may be through with the past,\" says someone, \"but the past isn't through",
"not at home on planet Earth.) The narrator says his dad was a helluva storyteller, but the man on screen doesn't say so much as \"Once upon a time …\" Has anyone involved in this disaster ever heard a real story?",
"dying man's estranged son (Tom Cruise), who gives inspirational lectures in which men are exhorted to \"turn women into sperm receptacles\" and to leave behind their \"unmanly\" pasts. The son gets a double dose of his unmanly past this",
", the comedian got sick at the point where he needed to reinvent himself to keep from sinking into obscurity. The filmmakers reverse the trajectory (and the actual chronology of Kaufman's career), so that he seems to achieve a magical",
"The Masked and the Unmasked \n\n Paul Thomas Anderson's"
],
[
"meshed with McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) but seemed odd with Mozart ( Amadeus , 1984) and disastrous with Valmont ( Valmont , 1989). With Andy Kaufman, it seems not so much wrong",
"The actors are great--all of them. It seems unfair to single anyone out, but I loved Reilly's unsettling combination of sweetness and prudery--unsettling because he's just the kind of earnest, by-the-book cop whose wheels move too slowly in a crisis. Between tantrums, Julianne Moore opens and closes her mouth like a fish that's slowly suffocating at the bottom of a boat. And who would have expected a real performance from Tom Cruise? Anderson takes everything fake in Cruise's acting--the face-pulling, the too-quick smile--and turns it into the character's own shtick, so that when the mask is pulled off you get a startling glimpse of the rage and fear under the pose. Elsewhere, Anderson uses Mamet actors and Mamety diction, but he's the Anti-Mamet. He makes his actors feel so safe--so loved--that they seem to be competing to see who can shed the most skin.",
"What clinches Anderson's case for family is how beautifully he works with his surrogate clan. Many of the actors show up from his Hard Eight (1997) and Boogie Nights (1997), and he's so eager to get Luis Guzman into the film, despite the lack of a role, that he makes him a game-show contestant named \"Luis Guzman.\" He's like a parent who can't stop adopting kids. Anderson knows what actors live to do: fall apart. He puts their characters' backs against the wall, then gives them speeches full of free associations and Freudian slips, so that they're suddenly exposed--and terrified by their nakedness. By the end of the first hour of Magnolia , the whole cast is unraveling. By the end of the second, they've unraveled so much that they've burst into song. Anderson must have needed that bonkers third-hour climax because there was nowhere to go short of spontaneous combustion.",
"What's the connection among these people? Some of the links are familial, others merely circumstantial. But everyone and their dad are having a really lousy day. At the peak of their collective loneliness, the cokehead daughter puts on a plaintive Aimee Mann song, the chorus of which goes: \"It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ Till you wise up.\" She moves her lips and the director cuts to all the characters in all the movie's other strands as they all move their lips to the same universal refrain: \"It's not going to stop …\" The wife in the car sings. The aging quiz kid on the barstool sings. The cop searching for his lost gun sings. I thought, \"Please don't make the guy in the coma sing, or I'm going to be hysterical\"--but yup, the guy in the coma sings, too. At that point, I had an interesting reaction to Magnolia : I laughed at it and forgave it almost everything.",
"As in their Ed Wood (1994) and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski take marginal or plain cruddy characters and stick them in the middle of",
"patriarch is dying. No, hold on, this is a three-hour movie: Two patriarchs are dying. Rich geezer Jason Robards is slipping in and out of a coma on a bed with an oxygen tube up his nose while his minky",
"Anthony Minghella ( The English Patient , 1996) has adapted The Talented Mr. Ripley from a thriller by Patricia Highsmith, and it's a gorgeously creepy piece of movie-making. The Old World luxury--even the Old World rot--is double-edged, subtly mocking its bantamweight New World protagonist. The light that bronzes everyone else burns poor, pasty Ripley. We watch him having the time of his life, but there's no question of his ever fitting in with Dickie, his willowy girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), or even their fat, to-the-manner-born pal Freddie Miles (a hilarious Philip Seymour Hoffman)--he's too tense, too hungry, too incomplete. When Ripley is by himself onscreen, there's nothing going on.",
"The reason to see Man on the Moon is Jim Carrey. It's not just that he does the Kaufman routines with the kind of hungry gleam that makes you think he's \"channeling\" the dead comedian. It's that he knows what it's like to walk the high wire and bomb. He knows what it's like to lose control of his aggression: It happened to him in The Cable Guy (1996), maybe his real Andy Kaufman film. I bet that what Carrey saw from inside Kaufman's head would be more illuminating than anything in the movie. He's not just a man in the moon: He generates his own light.",
"turns into a lifeless slide show. There's no flow, no connective tissue between episodes. After the 80 th teensy scene goes by, you realize the movie isn't just botched: It doesn't even exist. Emily Watson suffers prettily, but whatever",
"The title card of The Talented Mr. Ripley is a stroke of genius. Adjectives flash before the words Mr. Ripley , with \"talented\" an imperfect substitute for about 30 other possibilities, including \"confused.\" Actually, I think confused (or vulnerable or desperate) would have been a more appropriate choice. As played by Matt Damon, this Ripley's chief talent is for licking his lips and looking clammily out of place. Dispatched to the south of Italy by a magnate named Greenleaf seeking the return of his wastrel son Dickie (Jude Law), the working-class Ripley has to pretend he's an old Princeton classmate. But nothing in Damon's demeanor remotely suggests the Ivy League. Beside the smooth, caramel-colored Law, even his pale little muscles seem like poseurs.",
", the comedian got sick at the point where he needed to reinvent himself to keep from sinking into obscurity. The filmmakers reverse the trajectory (and the actual chronology of Kaufman's career), so that he seems to achieve a magical",
"The second dying paterfamilias is Philip Baker Hall as the host of a quiz show for bright kids. He bursts in on his estranged daughter (Melora Walters) with news of his imminent",
"young wife (Julianne Moore) acts out her despair at losing an old man she thought she'd married for his money. The geezer's nurse (Philip Seymour Hoffman) listens to his semi-coherent monologues then decides to get in touch with the",
"), an aging ex-quiz-kid celebrity (William H. Macy) gets fired from his job and goes looking for the love he never had, while a contemporary quiz-kid celebrity (Jeremy Blackman) tries to make his father (Michael Bowen) understand that",
"OK, you could spend three hours snickering at Anderson's \"What the World Needs Now Is Aimee Mann\" metaphysic. But his vision cuts deeper than a lot of folky bathos. His characters have been screwed up by their families, so when he turns around and makes a case for family as the ultimate salvation, he doesn't seem simple-minded. He's saying the diaspora is understandable--but that it's also killing people. At the point where these people could actually start dying of aloneness, he goes metaphorical. He goes biblical. He goes nuts. He has sort of prepared us with weather reports and the recurrence of numerals suggesting an Old Testament chapter and verse. But nothing could prepare us for the full-scale, surreal, gross-out deluge that's the picture's splattery climax. For the second time, he dynamites his own movie. And for the second time I forgave him almost everything.",
"stereo: \"You've been doing some drugs today?\" After 10 minutes, it isn't clear whether this dweebish flatfoot is interrogating her or trying to ask for a date--or whether he even knows. Meanwhile ( Magnolia could have been titled Meanwhile",
"of stories that nourished his poet's instincts. I worried that the movie, directed by Alan Parker, would miss McCourt's voice and dwell too much on the tragic details. But what happens is the opposite: McCourt narrates the film, and it",
"breezily wide-eyed biopics. Their Horatio Alger tone is the joke, but it's not a joke that director Milos Forman seems to be in on. Forman tells one, deadly serious story: A reckless individualist is slowly crushed by society. It",
"The Masked and the Unmasked \n\n Paul Thomas Anderson's",
"Along with many Americans, I first caught Andy Kaufman on the Tonight Show in the mid-'70s. He sat next to Johnny Carson and in his helium-pitched \"foreign man\" voice told jokes without punch lines (\"Her cooking ees so bad--ees terrible\") and did non-impressionistic impressions; then he got up and launched into the most electrifying Elvis Presley takeoff I've ever seen. Without that final flourish of virtuosity, the shtick would have been just weird. With it, Kaufman signaled that his comedy was about more than untranscendent ineptitude: It was about wondrously fucking with your head."
],
[
"of stories that nourished his poet's instincts. I worried that the movie, directed by Alan Parker, would miss McCourt's voice and dwell too much on the tragic details. But what happens is the opposite: McCourt narrates the film, and it",
"Anthony Minghella ( The English Patient , 1996) has adapted The Talented Mr. Ripley from a thriller by Patricia Highsmith, and it's a gorgeously creepy piece of movie-making. The Old World luxury--even the Old World rot--is double-edged, subtly mocking its bantamweight New World protagonist. The light that bronzes everyone else burns poor, pasty Ripley. We watch him having the time of his life, but there's no question of his ever fitting in with Dickie, his willowy girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), or even their fat, to-the-manner-born pal Freddie Miles (a hilarious Philip Seymour Hoffman)--he's too tense, too hungry, too incomplete. When Ripley is by himself onscreen, there's nothing going on.",
"OK, you could spend three hours snickering at Anderson's \"What the World Needs Now Is Aimee Mann\" metaphysic. But his vision cuts deeper than a lot of folky bathos. His characters have been screwed up by their families, so when he turns around and makes a case for family as the ultimate salvation, he doesn't seem simple-minded. He's saying the diaspora is understandable--but that it's also killing people. At the point where these people could actually start dying of aloneness, he goes metaphorical. He goes biblical. He goes nuts. He has sort of prepared us with weather reports and the recurrence of numerals suggesting an Old Testament chapter and verse. But nothing could prepare us for the full-scale, surreal, gross-out deluge that's the picture's splattery climax. For the second time, he dynamites his own movie. And for the second time I forgave him almost everything.",
"The actors are great--all of them. It seems unfair to single anyone out, but I loved Reilly's unsettling combination of sweetness and prudery--unsettling because he's just the kind of earnest, by-the-book cop whose wheels move too slowly in a crisis. Between tantrums, Julianne Moore opens and closes her mouth like a fish that's slowly suffocating at the bottom of a boat. And who would have expected a real performance from Tom Cruise? Anderson takes everything fake in Cruise's acting--the face-pulling, the too-quick smile--and turns it into the character's own shtick, so that when the mask is pulled off you get a startling glimpse of the rage and fear under the pose. Elsewhere, Anderson uses Mamet actors and Mamety diction, but he's the Anti-Mamet. He makes his actors feel so safe--so loved--that they seem to be competing to see who can shed the most skin.",
"The reason to see Man on the Moon is Jim Carrey. It's not just that he does the Kaufman routines with the kind of hungry gleam that makes you think he's \"channeling\" the dead comedian. It's that he knows what it's like to walk the high wire and bomb. He knows what it's like to lose control of his aggression: It happened to him in The Cable Guy (1996), maybe his real Andy Kaufman film. I bet that what Carrey saw from inside Kaufman's head would be more illuminating than anything in the movie. He's not just a man in the moon: He generates his own light.",
"breezily wide-eyed biopics. Their Horatio Alger tone is the joke, but it's not a joke that director Milos Forman seems to be in on. Forman tells one, deadly serious story: A reckless individualist is slowly crushed by society. It",
"As in their Ed Wood (1994) and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski take marginal or plain cruddy characters and stick them in the middle of",
"The title card of The Talented Mr. Ripley is a stroke of genius. Adjectives flash before the words Mr. Ripley , with \"talented\" an imperfect substitute for about 30 other possibilities, including \"confused.\" Actually, I think confused (or vulnerable or desperate) would have been a more appropriate choice. As played by Matt Damon, this Ripley's chief talent is for licking his lips and looking clammily out of place. Dispatched to the south of Italy by a magnate named Greenleaf seeking the return of his wastrel son Dickie (Jude Law), the working-class Ripley has to pretend he's an old Princeton classmate. But nothing in Damon's demeanor remotely suggests the Ivy League. Beside the smooth, caramel-colored Law, even his pale little muscles seem like poseurs.",
"meshed with McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) but seemed odd with Mozart ( Amadeus , 1984) and disastrous with Valmont ( Valmont , 1989). With Andy Kaufman, it seems not so much wrong",
"What clinches Anderson's case for family is how beautifully he works with his surrogate clan. Many of the actors show up from his Hard Eight (1997) and Boogie Nights (1997), and he's so eager to get Luis Guzman into the film, despite the lack of a role, that he makes him a game-show contestant named \"Luis Guzman.\" He's like a parent who can't stop adopting kids. Anderson knows what actors live to do: fall apart. He puts their characters' backs against the wall, then gives them speeches full of free associations and Freudian slips, so that they're suddenly exposed--and terrified by their nakedness. By the end of the first hour of Magnolia , the whole cast is unraveling. By the end of the second, they've unraveled so much that they've burst into song. Anderson must have needed that bonkers third-hour climax because there was nowhere to go short of spontaneous combustion.",
"Minghella is a thoughtful man and a snazzy craftsman, but by the end of Ripley , I wasn't sure what had attracted him to this material. What does a vaguely masochistic humanist",
"What's the connection among these people? Some of the links are familial, others merely circumstantial. But everyone and their dad are having a really lousy day. At the peak of their collective loneliness, the cokehead daughter puts on a plaintive Aimee Mann song, the chorus of which goes: \"It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ Till you wise up.\" She moves her lips and the director cuts to all the characters in all the movie's other strands as they all move their lips to the same universal refrain: \"It's not going to stop …\" The wife in the car sings. The aging quiz kid on the barstool sings. The cop searching for his lost gun sings. I thought, \"Please don't make the guy in the coma sing, or I'm going to be hysterical\"--but yup, the guy in the coma sings, too. At that point, I had an interesting reaction to Magnolia : I laughed at it and forgave it almost everything.",
"patriarch is dying. No, hold on, this is a three-hour movie: Two patriarchs are dying. Rich geezer Jason Robards is slipping in and out of a coma on a bed with an oxygen tube up his nose while his minky",
"turns into a lifeless slide show. There's no flow, no connective tissue between episodes. After the 80 th teensy scene goes by, you realize the movie isn't just botched: It doesn't even exist. Emily Watson suffers prettily, but whatever",
", the comedian got sick at the point where he needed to reinvent himself to keep from sinking into obscurity. The filmmakers reverse the trajectory (and the actual chronology of Kaufman's career), so that he seems to achieve a magical",
"Along with many Americans, I first caught Andy Kaufman on the Tonight Show in the mid-'70s. He sat next to Johnny Carson and in his helium-pitched \"foreign man\" voice told jokes without punch lines (\"Her cooking ees so bad--ees terrible\") and did non-impressionistic impressions; then he got up and launched into the most electrifying Elvis Presley takeoff I've ever seen. Without that final flourish of virtuosity, the shtick would have been just weird. With it, Kaufman signaled that his comedy was about more than untranscendent ineptitude: It was about wondrously fucking with your head.",
"Jude Law act him off the screen. He isn't allowed to feel a moment's glee at seizing what these rich boobs have denied him. Minghella comes up with a bleakly sincere ending that's the opposite of what this ironic",
"not at home on planet Earth.) The narrator says his dad was a helluva storyteller, but the man on screen doesn't say so much as \"Once upon a time …\" Has anyone involved in this disaster ever heard a real story?",
"and the bad fun is watching him do anything to keep from accepting the swinish Dickie's view of him as an eternal loser. Damon's Ripley is an eternal loser, an anti-chameleon, and so conscientiously dreary that he lets",
"stereo: \"You've been doing some drugs today?\" After 10 minutes, it isn't clear whether this dweebish flatfoot is interrogating her or trying to ask for a date--or whether he even knows. Meanwhile ( Magnolia could have been titled Meanwhile"
],
[
"Anyone who reads Angela's Ashes",
"is torn down the middle--appalled by the misery and deaths of small children and yet exhilarated, even turned on, by the cadences of Frank McCourt. His alcoholic father starved him of real food but filled his head with the kind",
"of stories that nourished his poet's instincts. I worried that the movie, directed by Alan Parker, would miss McCourt's voice and dwell too much on the tragic details. But what happens is the opposite: McCourt narrates the film, and it",
"she's thinking stays in her head, and Robert Carlyle is so mopily present that you don't have a clue why such an earnest fellow would drink so many lives away. (The horror of the father McCourt describes is that he's",
"synthesis of warmth and aggression--and then gets cut down at his prime. That's not just bogus; it's false to the conflicts that ate Kaufman alive.",
"OK, you could spend three hours snickering at Anderson's \"What the World Needs Now Is Aimee Mann\" metaphysic. But his vision cuts deeper than a lot of folky bathos. His characters have been screwed up by their families, so when he turns around and makes a case for family as the ultimate salvation, he doesn't seem simple-minded. He's saying the diaspora is understandable--but that it's also killing people. At the point where these people could actually start dying of aloneness, he goes metaphorical. He goes biblical. He goes nuts. He has sort of prepared us with weather reports and the recurrence of numerals suggesting an Old Testament chapter and verse. But nothing could prepare us for the full-scale, surreal, gross-out deluge that's the picture's splattery climax. For the second time, he dynamites his own movie. And for the second time I forgave him almost everything.",
"little melodrama needs. He's trying to inflate it into tragedy, where Highsmith's setups are too cold and shallow to be tragic. The old biddy herself would have thought this ending stinks.",
"breezily wide-eyed biopics. Their Horatio Alger tone is the joke, but it's not a joke that director Milos Forman seems to be in on. Forman tells one, deadly serious story: A reckless individualist is slowly crushed by society. It",
"as beside the point. Where did the rage in Kaufman come from, and at what point did it kill the comedy? More important: Did Kaufman himself consider some of his experiments failures, or had his aesthetic finally become so punk/pro-wrestling",
"and the bad fun is watching him do anything to keep from accepting the swinish Dickie's view of him as an eternal loser. Damon's Ripley is an eternal loser, an anti-chameleon, and so conscientiously dreary that he lets",
"What's the connection among these people? Some of the links are familial, others merely circumstantial. But everyone and their dad are having a really lousy day. At the peak of their collective loneliness, the cokehead daughter puts on a plaintive Aimee Mann song, the chorus of which goes: \"It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ Till you wise up.\" She moves her lips and the director cuts to all the characters in all the movie's other strands as they all move their lips to the same universal refrain: \"It's not going to stop …\" The wife in the car sings. The aging quiz kid on the barstool sings. The cop searching for his lost gun sings. I thought, \"Please don't make the guy in the coma sing, or I'm going to be hysterical\"--but yup, the guy in the coma sings, too. At that point, I had an interesting reaction to Magnolia : I laughed at it and forgave it almost everything.",
"not at home on planet Earth.) The narrator says his dad was a helluva storyteller, but the man on screen doesn't say so much as \"Once upon a time …\" Has anyone involved in this disaster ever heard a real story?",
"Minghella is a thoughtful man and a snazzy craftsman, but by the end of Ripley , I wasn't sure what had attracted him to this material. What does a vaguely masochistic humanist",
"Jude Law act him off the screen. He isn't allowed to feel a moment's glee at seizing what these rich boobs have denied him. Minghella comes up with a bleakly sincere ending that's the opposite of what this ironic",
"As in their Ed Wood (1994) and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski take marginal or plain cruddy characters and stick them in the middle of",
"night, since a female TV journalist (April Grace) has uncovered the history he has determinedly concealed and is eating through his mask of machismo on camera. \"We may be through with the past,\" says someone, \"but the past isn't through",
"The actors are great--all of them. It seems unfair to single anyone out, but I loved Reilly's unsettling combination of sweetness and prudery--unsettling because he's just the kind of earnest, by-the-book cop whose wheels move too slowly in a crisis. Between tantrums, Julianne Moore opens and closes her mouth like a fish that's slowly suffocating at the bottom of a boat. And who would have expected a real performance from Tom Cruise? Anderson takes everything fake in Cruise's acting--the face-pulling, the too-quick smile--and turns it into the character's own shtick, so that when the mask is pulled off you get a startling glimpse of the rage and fear under the pose. Elsewhere, Anderson uses Mamet actors and Mamety diction, but he's the Anti-Mamet. He makes his actors feel so safe--so loved--that they seem to be competing to see who can shed the most skin.",
", the comedian got sick at the point where he needed to reinvent himself to keep from sinking into obscurity. The filmmakers reverse the trajectory (and the actual chronology of Kaufman's career), so that he seems to achieve a magical",
"dying man's estranged son (Tom Cruise), who gives inspirational lectures in which men are exhorted to \"turn women into sperm receptacles\" and to leave behind their \"unmanly\" pasts. The son gets a double dose of his unmanly past this",
"The title card of The Talented Mr. Ripley is a stroke of genius. Adjectives flash before the words Mr. Ripley , with \"talented\" an imperfect substitute for about 30 other possibilities, including \"confused.\" Actually, I think confused (or vulnerable or desperate) would have been a more appropriate choice. As played by Matt Damon, this Ripley's chief talent is for licking his lips and looking clammily out of place. Dispatched to the south of Italy by a magnate named Greenleaf seeking the return of his wastrel son Dickie (Jude Law), the working-class Ripley has to pretend he's an old Princeton classmate. But nothing in Damon's demeanor remotely suggests the Ivy League. Beside the smooth, caramel-colored Law, even his pale little muscles seem like poseurs."
],
[
"The reason to see Man on the Moon is Jim Carrey. It's not just that he does the Kaufman routines with the kind of hungry gleam that makes you think he's \"channeling\" the dead comedian. It's that he knows what it's like to walk the high wire and bomb. He knows what it's like to lose control of his aggression: It happened to him in The Cable Guy (1996), maybe his real Andy Kaufman film. I bet that what Carrey saw from inside Kaufman's head would be more illuminating than anything in the movie. He's not just a man in the moon: He generates his own light.",
", the comedian got sick at the point where he needed to reinvent himself to keep from sinking into obscurity. The filmmakers reverse the trajectory (and the actual chronology of Kaufman's career), so that he seems to achieve a magical",
"That whole act is reproduced in the funny, frustrating Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon , but not on the Tonight Show . Kaufman (Jim Carrey) does it onstage at a tiny club. We don't know where it came from or what the thinking was behind it. He brings down the house (lots of shots of people smiling and laughing), then goes out for a drink with a potential manager (Danny DeVito), who tells him, \"You're insane--but you might also be brilliant.\" That's about as close to analysis as the picture gets.",
"breezily wide-eyed biopics. Their Horatio Alger tone is the joke, but it's not a joke that director Milos Forman seems to be in on. Forman tells one, deadly serious story: A reckless individualist is slowly crushed by society. It",
"Along with many Americans, I first caught Andy Kaufman on the Tonight Show in the mid-'70s. He sat next to Johnny Carson and in his helium-pitched \"foreign man\" voice told jokes without punch lines (\"Her cooking ees so bad--ees terrible\") and did non-impressionistic impressions; then he got up and launched into the most electrifying Elvis Presley takeoff I've ever seen. Without that final flourish of virtuosity, the shtick would have been just weird. With it, Kaufman signaled that his comedy was about more than untranscendent ineptitude: It was about wondrously fucking with your head.",
"As in their Ed Wood (1994) and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski take marginal or plain cruddy characters and stick them in the middle of",
"What's the connection among these people? Some of the links are familial, others merely circumstantial. But everyone and their dad are having a really lousy day. At the peak of their collective loneliness, the cokehead daughter puts on a plaintive Aimee Mann song, the chorus of which goes: \"It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ Till you wise up.\" She moves her lips and the director cuts to all the characters in all the movie's other strands as they all move their lips to the same universal refrain: \"It's not going to stop …\" The wife in the car sings. The aging quiz kid on the barstool sings. The cop searching for his lost gun sings. I thought, \"Please don't make the guy in the coma sing, or I'm going to be hysterical\"--but yup, the guy in the coma sings, too. At that point, I had an interesting reaction to Magnolia : I laughed at it and forgave it almost everything.",
"OK, you could spend three hours snickering at Anderson's \"What the World Needs Now Is Aimee Mann\" metaphysic. But his vision cuts deeper than a lot of folky bathos. His characters have been screwed up by their families, so when he turns around and makes a case for family as the ultimate salvation, he doesn't seem simple-minded. He's saying the diaspora is understandable--but that it's also killing people. At the point where these people could actually start dying of aloneness, he goes metaphorical. He goes biblical. He goes nuts. He has sort of prepared us with weather reports and the recurrence of numerals suggesting an Old Testament chapter and verse. But nothing could prepare us for the full-scale, surreal, gross-out deluge that's the picture's splattery climax. For the second time, he dynamites his own movie. And for the second time I forgave him almost everything.",
"What clinches Anderson's case for family is how beautifully he works with his surrogate clan. Many of the actors show up from his Hard Eight (1997) and Boogie Nights (1997), and he's so eager to get Luis Guzman into the film, despite the lack of a role, that he makes him a game-show contestant named \"Luis Guzman.\" He's like a parent who can't stop adopting kids. Anderson knows what actors live to do: fall apart. He puts their characters' backs against the wall, then gives them speeches full of free associations and Freudian slips, so that they're suddenly exposed--and terrified by their nakedness. By the end of the first hour of Magnolia , the whole cast is unraveling. By the end of the second, they've unraveled so much that they've burst into song. Anderson must have needed that bonkers third-hour climax because there was nowhere to go short of spontaneous combustion.",
"The actors are great--all of them. It seems unfair to single anyone out, but I loved Reilly's unsettling combination of sweetness and prudery--unsettling because he's just the kind of earnest, by-the-book cop whose wheels move too slowly in a crisis. Between tantrums, Julianne Moore opens and closes her mouth like a fish that's slowly suffocating at the bottom of a boat. And who would have expected a real performance from Tom Cruise? Anderson takes everything fake in Cruise's acting--the face-pulling, the too-quick smile--and turns it into the character's own shtick, so that when the mask is pulled off you get a startling glimpse of the rage and fear under the pose. Elsewhere, Anderson uses Mamet actors and Mamety diction, but he's the Anti-Mamet. He makes his actors feel so safe--so loved--that they seem to be competing to see who can shed the most skin.",
"meshed with McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) but seemed odd with Mozart ( Amadeus , 1984) and disastrous with Valmont ( Valmont , 1989). With Andy Kaufman, it seems not so much wrong",
"not at home on planet Earth.) The narrator says his dad was a helluva storyteller, but the man on screen doesn't say so much as \"Once upon a time …\" Has anyone involved in this disaster ever heard a real story?",
"dying man's estranged son (Tom Cruise), who gives inspirational lectures in which men are exhorted to \"turn women into sperm receptacles\" and to leave behind their \"unmanly\" pasts. The son gets a double dose of his unmanly past this",
"), an aging ex-quiz-kid celebrity (William H. Macy) gets fired from his job and goes looking for the love he never had, while a contemporary quiz-kid celebrity (Jeremy Blackman) tries to make his father (Michael Bowen) understand that",
"demise, but the addled girl for some reason (three guesses) won't have anything to do with him. His visit sends her into a cocaine-snorting frenzy, which is interrupted by a policeman (John C. Reilly) checking out her deafening",
"of stories that nourished his poet's instincts. I worried that the movie, directed by Alan Parker, would miss McCourt's voice and dwell too much on the tragic details. But what happens is the opposite: McCourt narrates the film, and it",
"Jude Law act him off the screen. He isn't allowed to feel a moment's glee at seizing what these rich boobs have denied him. Minghella comes up with a bleakly sincere ending that's the opposite of what this ironic",
"patriarch is dying. No, hold on, this is a three-hour movie: Two patriarchs are dying. Rich geezer Jason Robards is slipping in and out of a coma on a bed with an oxygen tube up his nose while his minky",
"young wife (Julianne Moore) acts out her despair at losing an old man she thought she'd married for his money. The geezer's nurse (Philip Seymour Hoffman) listens to his semi-coherent monologues then decides to get in touch with the",
"Anthony Minghella ( The English Patient , 1996) has adapted The Talented Mr. Ripley from a thriller by Patricia Highsmith, and it's a gorgeously creepy piece of movie-making. The Old World luxury--even the Old World rot--is double-edged, subtly mocking its bantamweight New World protagonist. The light that bronzes everyone else burns poor, pasty Ripley. We watch him having the time of his life, but there's no question of his ever fitting in with Dickie, his willowy girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), or even their fat, to-the-manner-born pal Freddie Miles (a hilarious Philip Seymour Hoffman)--he's too tense, too hungry, too incomplete. When Ripley is by himself onscreen, there's nothing going on."
],
[
"The actors are great--all of them. It seems unfair to single anyone out, but I loved Reilly's unsettling combination of sweetness and prudery--unsettling because he's just the kind of earnest, by-the-book cop whose wheels move too slowly in a crisis. Between tantrums, Julianne Moore opens and closes her mouth like a fish that's slowly suffocating at the bottom of a boat. And who would have expected a real performance from Tom Cruise? Anderson takes everything fake in Cruise's acting--the face-pulling, the too-quick smile--and turns it into the character's own shtick, so that when the mask is pulled off you get a startling glimpse of the rage and fear under the pose. Elsewhere, Anderson uses Mamet actors and Mamety diction, but he's the Anti-Mamet. He makes his actors feel so safe--so loved--that they seem to be competing to see who can shed the most skin.",
"of stories that nourished his poet's instincts. I worried that the movie, directed by Alan Parker, would miss McCourt's voice and dwell too much on the tragic details. But what happens is the opposite: McCourt narrates the film, and it",
"The reason to see Man on the Moon is Jim Carrey. It's not just that he does the Kaufman routines with the kind of hungry gleam that makes you think he's \"channeling\" the dead comedian. It's that he knows what it's like to walk the high wire and bomb. He knows what it's like to lose control of his aggression: It happened to him in The Cable Guy (1996), maybe his real Andy Kaufman film. I bet that what Carrey saw from inside Kaufman's head would be more illuminating than anything in the movie. He's not just a man in the moon: He generates his own light.",
"What clinches Anderson's case for family is how beautifully he works with his surrogate clan. Many of the actors show up from his Hard Eight (1997) and Boogie Nights (1997), and he's so eager to get Luis Guzman into the film, despite the lack of a role, that he makes him a game-show contestant named \"Luis Guzman.\" He's like a parent who can't stop adopting kids. Anderson knows what actors live to do: fall apart. He puts their characters' backs against the wall, then gives them speeches full of free associations and Freudian slips, so that they're suddenly exposed--and terrified by their nakedness. By the end of the first hour of Magnolia , the whole cast is unraveling. By the end of the second, they've unraveled so much that they've burst into song. Anderson must have needed that bonkers third-hour climax because there was nowhere to go short of spontaneous combustion.",
"The title card of The Talented Mr. Ripley is a stroke of genius. Adjectives flash before the words Mr. Ripley , with \"talented\" an imperfect substitute for about 30 other possibilities, including \"confused.\" Actually, I think confused (or vulnerable or desperate) would have been a more appropriate choice. As played by Matt Damon, this Ripley's chief talent is for licking his lips and looking clammily out of place. Dispatched to the south of Italy by a magnate named Greenleaf seeking the return of his wastrel son Dickie (Jude Law), the working-class Ripley has to pretend he's an old Princeton classmate. But nothing in Damon's demeanor remotely suggests the Ivy League. Beside the smooth, caramel-colored Law, even his pale little muscles seem like poseurs.",
"Anthony Minghella ( The English Patient , 1996) has adapted The Talented Mr. Ripley from a thriller by Patricia Highsmith, and it's a gorgeously creepy piece of movie-making. The Old World luxury--even the Old World rot--is double-edged, subtly mocking its bantamweight New World protagonist. The light that bronzes everyone else burns poor, pasty Ripley. We watch him having the time of his life, but there's no question of his ever fitting in with Dickie, his willowy girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), or even their fat, to-the-manner-born pal Freddie Miles (a hilarious Philip Seymour Hoffman)--he's too tense, too hungry, too incomplete. When Ripley is by himself onscreen, there's nothing going on.",
"meshed with McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) but seemed odd with Mozart ( Amadeus , 1984) and disastrous with Valmont ( Valmont , 1989). With Andy Kaufman, it seems not so much wrong",
"is torn down the middle--appalled by the misery and deaths of small children and yet exhilarated, even turned on, by the cadences of Frank McCourt. His alcoholic father starved him of real food but filled his head with the kind",
"Jude Law act him off the screen. He isn't allowed to feel a moment's glee at seizing what these rich boobs have denied him. Minghella comes up with a bleakly sincere ending that's the opposite of what this ironic",
"and the bad fun is watching him do anything to keep from accepting the swinish Dickie's view of him as an eternal loser. Damon's Ripley is an eternal loser, an anti-chameleon, and so conscientiously dreary that he lets",
"Along with many Americans, I first caught Andy Kaufman on the Tonight Show in the mid-'70s. He sat next to Johnny Carson and in his helium-pitched \"foreign man\" voice told jokes without punch lines (\"Her cooking ees so bad--ees terrible\") and did non-impressionistic impressions; then he got up and launched into the most electrifying Elvis Presley takeoff I've ever seen. Without that final flourish of virtuosity, the shtick would have been just weird. With it, Kaufman signaled that his comedy was about more than untranscendent ineptitude: It was about wondrously fucking with your head.",
"she's thinking stays in her head, and Robert Carlyle is so mopily present that you don't have a clue why such an earnest fellow would drink so many lives away. (The horror of the father McCourt describes is that he's",
"What's the connection among these people? Some of the links are familial, others merely circumstantial. But everyone and their dad are having a really lousy day. At the peak of their collective loneliness, the cokehead daughter puts on a plaintive Aimee Mann song, the chorus of which goes: \"It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ Till you wise up.\" She moves her lips and the director cuts to all the characters in all the movie's other strands as they all move their lips to the same universal refrain: \"It's not going to stop …\" The wife in the car sings. The aging quiz kid on the barstool sings. The cop searching for his lost gun sings. I thought, \"Please don't make the guy in the coma sing, or I'm going to be hysterical\"--but yup, the guy in the coma sings, too. At that point, I had an interesting reaction to Magnolia : I laughed at it and forgave it almost everything.",
"As in their Ed Wood (1994) and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski take marginal or plain cruddy characters and stick them in the middle of",
"breezily wide-eyed biopics. Their Horatio Alger tone is the joke, but it's not a joke that director Milos Forman seems to be in on. Forman tells one, deadly serious story: A reckless individualist is slowly crushed by society. It",
"Anyone who reads Angela's Ashes",
"young wife (Julianne Moore) acts out her despair at losing an old man she thought she'd married for his money. The geezer's nurse (Philip Seymour Hoffman) listens to his semi-coherent monologues then decides to get in touch with the",
"), an aging ex-quiz-kid celebrity (William H. Macy) gets fired from his job and goes looking for the love he never had, while a contemporary quiz-kid celebrity (Jeremy Blackman) tries to make his father (Michael Bowen) understand that",
"turns into a lifeless slide show. There's no flow, no connective tissue between episodes. After the 80 th teensy scene goes by, you realize the movie isn't just botched: It doesn't even exist. Emily Watson suffers prettily, but whatever",
"OK, you could spend three hours snickering at Anderson's \"What the World Needs Now Is Aimee Mann\" metaphysic. But his vision cuts deeper than a lot of folky bathos. His characters have been screwed up by their families, so when he turns around and makes a case for family as the ultimate salvation, he doesn't seem simple-minded. He's saying the diaspora is understandable--but that it's also killing people. At the point where these people could actually start dying of aloneness, he goes metaphorical. He goes biblical. He goes nuts. He has sort of prepared us with weather reports and the recurrence of numerals suggesting an Old Testament chapter and verse. But nothing could prepare us for the full-scale, surreal, gross-out deluge that's the picture's splattery climax. For the second time, he dynamites his own movie. And for the second time I forgave him almost everything."
],
[
"stereo: \"You've been doing some drugs today?\" After 10 minutes, it isn't clear whether this dweebish flatfoot is interrogating her or trying to ask for a date--or whether he even knows. Meanwhile ( Magnolia could have been titled Meanwhile",
"What's the connection among these people? Some of the links are familial, others merely circumstantial. But everyone and their dad are having a really lousy day. At the peak of their collective loneliness, the cokehead daughter puts on a plaintive Aimee Mann song, the chorus of which goes: \"It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ Till you wise up.\" She moves her lips and the director cuts to all the characters in all the movie's other strands as they all move their lips to the same universal refrain: \"It's not going to stop …\" The wife in the car sings. The aging quiz kid on the barstool sings. The cop searching for his lost gun sings. I thought, \"Please don't make the guy in the coma sing, or I'm going to be hysterical\"--but yup, the guy in the coma sings, too. At that point, I had an interesting reaction to Magnolia : I laughed at it and forgave it almost everything.",
"What clinches Anderson's case for family is how beautifully he works with his surrogate clan. Many of the actors show up from his Hard Eight (1997) and Boogie Nights (1997), and he's so eager to get Luis Guzman into the film, despite the lack of a role, that he makes him a game-show contestant named \"Luis Guzman.\" He's like a parent who can't stop adopting kids. Anderson knows what actors live to do: fall apart. He puts their characters' backs against the wall, then gives them speeches full of free associations and Freudian slips, so that they're suddenly exposed--and terrified by their nakedness. By the end of the first hour of Magnolia , the whole cast is unraveling. By the end of the second, they've unraveled so much that they've burst into song. Anderson must have needed that bonkers third-hour climax because there was nowhere to go short of spontaneous combustion.",
"OK, you could spend three hours snickering at Anderson's \"What the World Needs Now Is Aimee Mann\" metaphysic. But his vision cuts deeper than a lot of folky bathos. His characters have been screwed up by their families, so when he turns around and makes a case for family as the ultimate salvation, he doesn't seem simple-minded. He's saying the diaspora is understandable--but that it's also killing people. At the point where these people could actually start dying of aloneness, he goes metaphorical. He goes biblical. He goes nuts. He has sort of prepared us with weather reports and the recurrence of numerals suggesting an Old Testament chapter and verse. But nothing could prepare us for the full-scale, surreal, gross-out deluge that's the picture's splattery climax. For the second time, he dynamites his own movie. And for the second time I forgave him almost everything.",
"of stories that nourished his poet's instincts. I worried that the movie, directed by Alan Parker, would miss McCourt's voice and dwell too much on the tragic details. But what happens is the opposite: McCourt narrates the film, and it",
"Magnolia takes place on a dark night of the soul in the City of Angels. A",
"The title card of The Talented Mr. Ripley is a stroke of genius. Adjectives flash before the words Mr. Ripley , with \"talented\" an imperfect substitute for about 30 other possibilities, including \"confused.\" Actually, I think confused (or vulnerable or desperate) would have been a more appropriate choice. As played by Matt Damon, this Ripley's chief talent is for licking his lips and looking clammily out of place. Dispatched to the south of Italy by a magnate named Greenleaf seeking the return of his wastrel son Dickie (Jude Law), the working-class Ripley has to pretend he's an old Princeton classmate. But nothing in Damon's demeanor remotely suggests the Ivy League. Beside the smooth, caramel-colored Law, even his pale little muscles seem like poseurs.",
", the comedian got sick at the point where he needed to reinvent himself to keep from sinking into obscurity. The filmmakers reverse the trajectory (and the actual chronology of Kaufman's career), so that he seems to achieve a magical",
"The actors are great--all of them. It seems unfair to single anyone out, but I loved Reilly's unsettling combination of sweetness and prudery--unsettling because he's just the kind of earnest, by-the-book cop whose wheels move too slowly in a crisis. Between tantrums, Julianne Moore opens and closes her mouth like a fish that's slowly suffocating at the bottom of a boat. And who would have expected a real performance from Tom Cruise? Anderson takes everything fake in Cruise's acting--the face-pulling, the too-quick smile--and turns it into the character's own shtick, so that when the mask is pulled off you get a startling glimpse of the rage and fear under the pose. Elsewhere, Anderson uses Mamet actors and Mamety diction, but he's the Anti-Mamet. He makes his actors feel so safe--so loved--that they seem to be competing to see who can shed the most skin.",
"The Masked and the Unmasked \n\n Paul Thomas Anderson's",
"Anthony Minghella ( The English Patient , 1996) has adapted The Talented Mr. Ripley from a thriller by Patricia Highsmith, and it's a gorgeously creepy piece of movie-making. The Old World luxury--even the Old World rot--is double-edged, subtly mocking its bantamweight New World protagonist. The light that bronzes everyone else burns poor, pasty Ripley. We watch him having the time of his life, but there's no question of his ever fitting in with Dickie, his willowy girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), or even their fat, to-the-manner-born pal Freddie Miles (a hilarious Philip Seymour Hoffman)--he's too tense, too hungry, too incomplete. When Ripley is by himself onscreen, there's nothing going on.",
"patriarch is dying. No, hold on, this is a three-hour movie: Two patriarchs are dying. Rich geezer Jason Robards is slipping in and out of a coma on a bed with an oxygen tube up his nose while his minky",
"turns into a lifeless slide show. There's no flow, no connective tissue between episodes. After the 80 th teensy scene goes by, you realize the movie isn't just botched: It doesn't even exist. Emily Watson suffers prettily, but whatever",
"As in their Ed Wood (1994) and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski take marginal or plain cruddy characters and stick them in the middle of",
"Along with many Americans, I first caught Andy Kaufman on the Tonight Show in the mid-'70s. He sat next to Johnny Carson and in his helium-pitched \"foreign man\" voice told jokes without punch lines (\"Her cooking ees so bad--ees terrible\") and did non-impressionistic impressions; then he got up and launched into the most electrifying Elvis Presley takeoff I've ever seen. Without that final flourish of virtuosity, the shtick would have been just weird. With it, Kaufman signaled that his comedy was about more than untranscendent ineptitude: It was about wondrously fucking with your head.",
"night, since a female TV journalist (April Grace) has uncovered the history he has determinedly concealed and is eating through his mask of machismo on camera. \"We may be through with the past,\" says someone, \"but the past isn't through",
"dying man's estranged son (Tom Cruise), who gives inspirational lectures in which men are exhorted to \"turn women into sperm receptacles\" and to leave behind their \"unmanly\" pasts. The son gets a double dose of his unmanly past this",
"Jude Law act him off the screen. He isn't allowed to feel a moment's glee at seizing what these rich boobs have denied him. Minghella comes up with a bleakly sincere ending that's the opposite of what this ironic",
"breezily wide-eyed biopics. Their Horatio Alger tone is the joke, but it's not a joke that director Milos Forman seems to be in on. Forman tells one, deadly serious story: A reckless individualist is slowly crushed by society. It",
"not at home on planet Earth.) The narrator says his dad was a helluva storyteller, but the man on screen doesn't say so much as \"Once upon a time …\" Has anyone involved in this disaster ever heard a real story?"
],
[
"What clinches Anderson's case for family is how beautifully he works with his surrogate clan. Many of the actors show up from his Hard Eight (1997) and Boogie Nights (1997), and he's so eager to get Luis Guzman into the film, despite the lack of a role, that he makes him a game-show contestant named \"Luis Guzman.\" He's like a parent who can't stop adopting kids. Anderson knows what actors live to do: fall apart. He puts their characters' backs against the wall, then gives them speeches full of free associations and Freudian slips, so that they're suddenly exposed--and terrified by their nakedness. By the end of the first hour of Magnolia , the whole cast is unraveling. By the end of the second, they've unraveled so much that they've burst into song. Anderson must have needed that bonkers third-hour climax because there was nowhere to go short of spontaneous combustion.",
"What's the connection among these people? Some of the links are familial, others merely circumstantial. But everyone and their dad are having a really lousy day. At the peak of their collective loneliness, the cokehead daughter puts on a plaintive Aimee Mann song, the chorus of which goes: \"It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ Till you wise up.\" She moves her lips and the director cuts to all the characters in all the movie's other strands as they all move their lips to the same universal refrain: \"It's not going to stop …\" The wife in the car sings. The aging quiz kid on the barstool sings. The cop searching for his lost gun sings. I thought, \"Please don't make the guy in the coma sing, or I'm going to be hysterical\"--but yup, the guy in the coma sings, too. At that point, I had an interesting reaction to Magnolia : I laughed at it and forgave it almost everything.",
"OK, you could spend three hours snickering at Anderson's \"What the World Needs Now Is Aimee Mann\" metaphysic. But his vision cuts deeper than a lot of folky bathos. His characters have been screwed up by their families, so when he turns around and makes a case for family as the ultimate salvation, he doesn't seem simple-minded. He's saying the diaspora is understandable--but that it's also killing people. At the point where these people could actually start dying of aloneness, he goes metaphorical. He goes biblical. He goes nuts. He has sort of prepared us with weather reports and the recurrence of numerals suggesting an Old Testament chapter and verse. But nothing could prepare us for the full-scale, surreal, gross-out deluge that's the picture's splattery climax. For the second time, he dynamites his own movie. And for the second time I forgave him almost everything.",
"The actors are great--all of them. It seems unfair to single anyone out, but I loved Reilly's unsettling combination of sweetness and prudery--unsettling because he's just the kind of earnest, by-the-book cop whose wheels move too slowly in a crisis. Between tantrums, Julianne Moore opens and closes her mouth like a fish that's slowly suffocating at the bottom of a boat. And who would have expected a real performance from Tom Cruise? Anderson takes everything fake in Cruise's acting--the face-pulling, the too-quick smile--and turns it into the character's own shtick, so that when the mask is pulled off you get a startling glimpse of the rage and fear under the pose. Elsewhere, Anderson uses Mamet actors and Mamety diction, but he's the Anti-Mamet. He makes his actors feel so safe--so loved--that they seem to be competing to see who can shed the most skin.",
"The second dying paterfamilias is Philip Baker Hall as the host of a quiz show for bright kids. He bursts in on his estranged daughter (Melora Walters) with news of his imminent",
"Magnolia takes place on a dark night of the soul in the City of Angels. A",
"stereo: \"You've been doing some drugs today?\" After 10 minutes, it isn't clear whether this dweebish flatfoot is interrogating her or trying to ask for a date--or whether he even knows. Meanwhile ( Magnolia could have been titled Meanwhile",
"patriarch is dying. No, hold on, this is a three-hour movie: Two patriarchs are dying. Rich geezer Jason Robards is slipping in and out of a coma on a bed with an oxygen tube up his nose while his minky",
"breezily wide-eyed biopics. Their Horatio Alger tone is the joke, but it's not a joke that director Milos Forman seems to be in on. Forman tells one, deadly serious story: A reckless individualist is slowly crushed by society. It",
"), an aging ex-quiz-kid celebrity (William H. Macy) gets fired from his job and goes looking for the love he never had, while a contemporary quiz-kid celebrity (Jeremy Blackman) tries to make his father (Michael Bowen) understand that",
"dying man's estranged son (Tom Cruise), who gives inspirational lectures in which men are exhorted to \"turn women into sperm receptacles\" and to leave behind their \"unmanly\" pasts. The son gets a double dose of his unmanly past this",
"of stories that nourished his poet's instincts. I worried that the movie, directed by Alan Parker, would miss McCourt's voice and dwell too much on the tragic details. But what happens is the opposite: McCourt narrates the film, and it",
"The Masked and the Unmasked \n\n Paul Thomas Anderson's",
", the comedian got sick at the point where he needed to reinvent himself to keep from sinking into obscurity. The filmmakers reverse the trajectory (and the actual chronology of Kaufman's career), so that he seems to achieve a magical",
"young wife (Julianne Moore) acts out her despair at losing an old man she thought she'd married for his money. The geezer's nurse (Philip Seymour Hoffman) listens to his semi-coherent monologues then decides to get in touch with the",
"The reason to see Man on the Moon is Jim Carrey. It's not just that he does the Kaufman routines with the kind of hungry gleam that makes you think he's \"channeling\" the dead comedian. It's that he knows what it's like to walk the high wire and bomb. He knows what it's like to lose control of his aggression: It happened to him in The Cable Guy (1996), maybe his real Andy Kaufman film. I bet that what Carrey saw from inside Kaufman's head would be more illuminating than anything in the movie. He's not just a man in the moon: He generates his own light.",
"The title card of The Talented Mr. Ripley is a stroke of genius. Adjectives flash before the words Mr. Ripley , with \"talented\" an imperfect substitute for about 30 other possibilities, including \"confused.\" Actually, I think confused (or vulnerable or desperate) would have been a more appropriate choice. As played by Matt Damon, this Ripley's chief talent is for licking his lips and looking clammily out of place. Dispatched to the south of Italy by a magnate named Greenleaf seeking the return of his wastrel son Dickie (Jude Law), the working-class Ripley has to pretend he's an old Princeton classmate. But nothing in Damon's demeanor remotely suggests the Ivy League. Beside the smooth, caramel-colored Law, even his pale little muscles seem like poseurs.",
"not at home on planet Earth.) The narrator says his dad was a helluva storyteller, but the man on screen doesn't say so much as \"Once upon a time …\" Has anyone involved in this disaster ever heard a real story?",
"As in their Ed Wood (1994) and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski take marginal or plain cruddy characters and stick them in the middle of",
"demise, but the addled girl for some reason (three guesses) won't have anything to do with him. His visit sends her into a cocaine-snorting frenzy, which is interrupted by a policeman (John C. Reilly) checking out her deafening"
],
[
"The title card of The Talented Mr. Ripley is a stroke of genius. Adjectives flash before the words Mr. Ripley , with \"talented\" an imperfect substitute for about 30 other possibilities, including \"confused.\" Actually, I think confused (or vulnerable or desperate) would have been a more appropriate choice. As played by Matt Damon, this Ripley's chief talent is for licking his lips and looking clammily out of place. Dispatched to the south of Italy by a magnate named Greenleaf seeking the return of his wastrel son Dickie (Jude Law), the working-class Ripley has to pretend he's an old Princeton classmate. But nothing in Damon's demeanor remotely suggests the Ivy League. Beside the smooth, caramel-colored Law, even his pale little muscles seem like poseurs.",
"Anthony Minghella ( The English Patient , 1996) has adapted The Talented Mr. Ripley from a thriller by Patricia Highsmith, and it's a gorgeously creepy piece of movie-making. The Old World luxury--even the Old World rot--is double-edged, subtly mocking its bantamweight New World protagonist. The light that bronzes everyone else burns poor, pasty Ripley. We watch him having the time of his life, but there's no question of his ever fitting in with Dickie, his willowy girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), or even their fat, to-the-manner-born pal Freddie Miles (a hilarious Philip Seymour Hoffman)--he's too tense, too hungry, too incomplete. When Ripley is by himself onscreen, there's nothing going on.",
"see in Patricia Highsmith? The novel's Ripley (and the Ripley of René Clément's 1960 Purple Noon , Alain Delon) isn't so palpably out of his depth. With a bit of polish he can pass for a playboy,",
"and the bad fun is watching him do anything to keep from accepting the swinish Dickie's view of him as an eternal loser. Damon's Ripley is an eternal loser, an anti-chameleon, and so conscientiously dreary that he lets",
"Minghella is a thoughtful man and a snazzy craftsman, but by the end of Ripley , I wasn't sure what had attracted him to this material. What does a vaguely masochistic humanist",
"little melodrama needs. He's trying to inflate it into tragedy, where Highsmith's setups are too cold and shallow to be tragic. The old biddy herself would have thought this ending stinks.",
"Jude Law act him off the screen. He isn't allowed to feel a moment's glee at seizing what these rich boobs have denied him. Minghella comes up with a bleakly sincere ending that's the opposite of what this ironic",
"breezily wide-eyed biopics. Their Horatio Alger tone is the joke, but it's not a joke that director Milos Forman seems to be in on. Forman tells one, deadly serious story: A reckless individualist is slowly crushed by society. It",
"she's thinking stays in her head, and Robert Carlyle is so mopily present that you don't have a clue why such an earnest fellow would drink so many lives away. (The horror of the father McCourt describes is that he's",
"synthesis of warmth and aggression--and then gets cut down at his prime. That's not just bogus; it's false to the conflicts that ate Kaufman alive.",
"Along with many Americans, I first caught Andy Kaufman on the Tonight Show in the mid-'70s. He sat next to Johnny Carson and in his helium-pitched \"foreign man\" voice told jokes without punch lines (\"Her cooking ees so bad--ees terrible\") and did non-impressionistic impressions; then he got up and launched into the most electrifying Elvis Presley takeoff I've ever seen. Without that final flourish of virtuosity, the shtick would have been just weird. With it, Kaufman signaled that his comedy was about more than untranscendent ineptitude: It was about wondrously fucking with your head.",
"The actors are great--all of them. It seems unfair to single anyone out, but I loved Reilly's unsettling combination of sweetness and prudery--unsettling because he's just the kind of earnest, by-the-book cop whose wheels move too slowly in a crisis. Between tantrums, Julianne Moore opens and closes her mouth like a fish that's slowly suffocating at the bottom of a boat. And who would have expected a real performance from Tom Cruise? Anderson takes everything fake in Cruise's acting--the face-pulling, the too-quick smile--and turns it into the character's own shtick, so that when the mask is pulled off you get a startling glimpse of the rage and fear under the pose. Elsewhere, Anderson uses Mamet actors and Mamety diction, but he's the Anti-Mamet. He makes his actors feel so safe--so loved--that they seem to be competing to see who can shed the most skin.",
"not at home on planet Earth.) The narrator says his dad was a helluva storyteller, but the man on screen doesn't say so much as \"Once upon a time …\" Has anyone involved in this disaster ever heard a real story?",
"is torn down the middle--appalled by the misery and deaths of small children and yet exhilarated, even turned on, by the cadences of Frank McCourt. His alcoholic father starved him of real food but filled his head with the kind",
"OK, you could spend three hours snickering at Anderson's \"What the World Needs Now Is Aimee Mann\" metaphysic. But his vision cuts deeper than a lot of folky bathos. His characters have been screwed up by their families, so when he turns around and makes a case for family as the ultimate salvation, he doesn't seem simple-minded. He's saying the diaspora is understandable--but that it's also killing people. At the point where these people could actually start dying of aloneness, he goes metaphorical. He goes biblical. He goes nuts. He has sort of prepared us with weather reports and the recurrence of numerals suggesting an Old Testament chapter and verse. But nothing could prepare us for the full-scale, surreal, gross-out deluge that's the picture's splattery climax. For the second time, he dynamites his own movie. And for the second time I forgave him almost everything.",
"night, since a female TV journalist (April Grace) has uncovered the history he has determinedly concealed and is eating through his mask of machismo on camera. \"We may be through with the past,\" says someone, \"but the past isn't through",
"What's the connection among these people? Some of the links are familial, others merely circumstantial. But everyone and their dad are having a really lousy day. At the peak of their collective loneliness, the cokehead daughter puts on a plaintive Aimee Mann song, the chorus of which goes: \"It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ Till you wise up.\" She moves her lips and the director cuts to all the characters in all the movie's other strands as they all move their lips to the same universal refrain: \"It's not going to stop …\" The wife in the car sings. The aging quiz kid on the barstool sings. The cop searching for his lost gun sings. I thought, \"Please don't make the guy in the coma sing, or I'm going to be hysterical\"--but yup, the guy in the coma sings, too. At that point, I had an interesting reaction to Magnolia : I laughed at it and forgave it almost everything.",
"of stories that nourished his poet's instincts. I worried that the movie, directed by Alan Parker, would miss McCourt's voice and dwell too much on the tragic details. But what happens is the opposite: McCourt narrates the film, and it",
"dying man's estranged son (Tom Cruise), who gives inspirational lectures in which men are exhorted to \"turn women into sperm receptacles\" and to leave behind their \"unmanly\" pasts. The son gets a double dose of his unmanly past this",
"young wife (Julianne Moore) acts out her despair at losing an old man she thought she'd married for his money. The geezer's nurse (Philip Seymour Hoffman) listens to his semi-coherent monologues then decides to get in touch with the"
],
[
"The reason to see Man on the Moon is Jim Carrey. It's not just that he does the Kaufman routines with the kind of hungry gleam that makes you think he's \"channeling\" the dead comedian. It's that he knows what it's like to walk the high wire and bomb. He knows what it's like to lose control of his aggression: It happened to him in The Cable Guy (1996), maybe his real Andy Kaufman film. I bet that what Carrey saw from inside Kaufman's head would be more illuminating than anything in the movie. He's not just a man in the moon: He generates his own light.",
"That whole act is reproduced in the funny, frustrating Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon , but not on the Tonight Show . Kaufman (Jim Carrey) does it onstage at a tiny club. We don't know where it came from or what the thinking was behind it. He brings down the house (lots of shots of people smiling and laughing), then goes out for a drink with a potential manager (Danny DeVito), who tells him, \"You're insane--but you might also be brilliant.\" That's about as close to analysis as the picture gets.",
"not at home on planet Earth.) The narrator says his dad was a helluva storyteller, but the man on screen doesn't say so much as \"Once upon a time …\" Has anyone involved in this disaster ever heard a real story?",
"breezily wide-eyed biopics. Their Horatio Alger tone is the joke, but it's not a joke that director Milos Forman seems to be in on. Forman tells one, deadly serious story: A reckless individualist is slowly crushed by society. It",
"Along with many Americans, I first caught Andy Kaufman on the Tonight Show in the mid-'70s. He sat next to Johnny Carson and in his helium-pitched \"foreign man\" voice told jokes without punch lines (\"Her cooking ees so bad--ees terrible\") and did non-impressionistic impressions; then he got up and launched into the most electrifying Elvis Presley takeoff I've ever seen. Without that final flourish of virtuosity, the shtick would have been just weird. With it, Kaufman signaled that his comedy was about more than untranscendent ineptitude: It was about wondrously fucking with your head.",
"meshed with McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) but seemed odd with Mozart ( Amadeus , 1984) and disastrous with Valmont ( Valmont , 1989). With Andy Kaufman, it seems not so much wrong",
", the comedian got sick at the point where he needed to reinvent himself to keep from sinking into obscurity. The filmmakers reverse the trajectory (and the actual chronology of Kaufman's career), so that he seems to achieve a magical",
"OK, you could spend three hours snickering at Anderson's \"What the World Needs Now Is Aimee Mann\" metaphysic. But his vision cuts deeper than a lot of folky bathos. His characters have been screwed up by their families, so when he turns around and makes a case for family as the ultimate salvation, he doesn't seem simple-minded. He's saying the diaspora is understandable--but that it's also killing people. At the point where these people could actually start dying of aloneness, he goes metaphorical. He goes biblical. He goes nuts. He has sort of prepared us with weather reports and the recurrence of numerals suggesting an Old Testament chapter and verse. But nothing could prepare us for the full-scale, surreal, gross-out deluge that's the picture's splattery climax. For the second time, he dynamites his own movie. And for the second time I forgave him almost everything.",
"synthesis of warmth and aggression--and then gets cut down at his prime. That's not just bogus; it's false to the conflicts that ate Kaufman alive.",
"As in their Ed Wood (1994) and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski take marginal or plain cruddy characters and stick them in the middle of",
"night, since a female TV journalist (April Grace) has uncovered the history he has determinedly concealed and is eating through his mask of machismo on camera. \"We may be through with the past,\" says someone, \"but the past isn't through",
"of stories that nourished his poet's instincts. I worried that the movie, directed by Alan Parker, would miss McCourt's voice and dwell too much on the tragic details. But what happens is the opposite: McCourt narrates the film, and it",
"The actors are great--all of them. It seems unfair to single anyone out, but I loved Reilly's unsettling combination of sweetness and prudery--unsettling because he's just the kind of earnest, by-the-book cop whose wheels move too slowly in a crisis. Between tantrums, Julianne Moore opens and closes her mouth like a fish that's slowly suffocating at the bottom of a boat. And who would have expected a real performance from Tom Cruise? Anderson takes everything fake in Cruise's acting--the face-pulling, the too-quick smile--and turns it into the character's own shtick, so that when the mask is pulled off you get a startling glimpse of the rage and fear under the pose. Elsewhere, Anderson uses Mamet actors and Mamety diction, but he's the Anti-Mamet. He makes his actors feel so safe--so loved--that they seem to be competing to see who can shed the most skin.",
"What's the connection among these people? Some of the links are familial, others merely circumstantial. But everyone and their dad are having a really lousy day. At the peak of their collective loneliness, the cokehead daughter puts on a plaintive Aimee Mann song, the chorus of which goes: \"It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ It's not going to stop/ Till you wise up.\" She moves her lips and the director cuts to all the characters in all the movie's other strands as they all move their lips to the same universal refrain: \"It's not going to stop …\" The wife in the car sings. The aging quiz kid on the barstool sings. The cop searching for his lost gun sings. I thought, \"Please don't make the guy in the coma sing, or I'm going to be hysterical\"--but yup, the guy in the coma sings, too. At that point, I had an interesting reaction to Magnolia : I laughed at it and forgave it almost everything.",
"as beside the point. Where did the rage in Kaufman come from, and at what point did it kill the comedy? More important: Did Kaufman himself consider some of his experiments failures, or had his aesthetic finally become so punk/pro-wrestling",
"is torn down the middle--appalled by the misery and deaths of small children and yet exhilarated, even turned on, by the cadences of Frank McCourt. His alcoholic father starved him of real food but filled his head with the kind",
"dying man's estranged son (Tom Cruise), who gives inspirational lectures in which men are exhorted to \"turn women into sperm receptacles\" and to leave behind their \"unmanly\" pasts. The son gets a double dose of his unmanly past this",
"What clinches Anderson's case for family is how beautifully he works with his surrogate clan. Many of the actors show up from his Hard Eight (1997) and Boogie Nights (1997), and he's so eager to get Luis Guzman into the film, despite the lack of a role, that he makes him a game-show contestant named \"Luis Guzman.\" He's like a parent who can't stop adopting kids. Anderson knows what actors live to do: fall apart. He puts their characters' backs against the wall, then gives them speeches full of free associations and Freudian slips, so that they're suddenly exposed--and terrified by their nakedness. By the end of the first hour of Magnolia , the whole cast is unraveling. By the end of the second, they've unraveled so much that they've burst into song. Anderson must have needed that bonkers third-hour climax because there was nowhere to go short of spontaneous combustion.",
"Jude Law act him off the screen. He isn't allowed to feel a moment's glee at seizing what these rich boobs have denied him. Minghella comes up with a bleakly sincere ending that's the opposite of what this ironic",
"stereo: \"You've been doing some drugs today?\" After 10 minutes, it isn't clear whether this dweebish flatfoot is interrogating her or trying to ask for a date--or whether he even knows. Meanwhile ( Magnolia could have been titled Meanwhile"
]
] |
test
|
50566
|
[
"When the story opens, Mike kills an eagle, which is perplexing to his brother. As the story progresses, what insight is given into is possible motivation?",
"What did Mike's employers blame for the explosion?",
"What was the official report given in terms of the explosion and Mike's injuries?",
"Why does might not believe that electricity didn't have anything to do with the reason he ended up in the hospital.6",
"What was one of the side effects that Mike \"suffered from\" due to his injury?",
"What proof does Mike offer Andy to show him that he is not crazy about his current relationship with electricity?",
"When Mike receives the final electric shock in the cabin, what seems to happen?",
"When he awakens, what has happened to Mike?",
"When Rhys tried to explain to Mike what has occurred, what does Mike try to cling to?",
"Who does Adric's brother blame for Adric's actions?"
] |
[
[
"His bout with electricity has completely messed up his thought process and ability to reason.",
"His instinct to kill the bird stems from his life in the other universe.",
"He wants to do everything he can to upset his brother because his brother is the cause of all of Mike's issues.",
"He knows that eagles are going to cause the end of society as we know it."
],
[
"They blamed an electrical storm.",
"Mike's inability to perform his job.",
"Another country's spies had booby-trapped the area and caused the explosion.",
"Mike's lack of sleep - he had been awake for several days at the time of the explosion."
],
[
"He tried to kill himself by electrocuting himself.",
"He was the victim of a foreign attack.",
"He was struck by lightning.",
"He was attacked so because a competitor attempted to get secrets from him, and when Mike refused to give them the information, they hurt him."
],
[
"He knows the truth behind his injury.",
"The amount of electricity they claimed he was exposed to would have killed, not injured, him.",
"He healed far too quickly for his injury to have been brought about by electricity.",
"Electricity would not have caused him to be branded."
],
[
"He knows things now that he didn't know before, and he never had the opportunity to learn them.",
"He was unable to walk.",
"He has amnesia.",
"He now believes that there is a conspiracy in the works, and they will eventually kill him."
],
[
"He shows Andy what happens when he touches the radio.",
"He powers the electricity for the entire house with his mind.",
"He lights up a lightbulb with just his finger.",
"He kills another eagle with electricity that he shoots from his hands."
],
[
"He becomes super-powered.",
"He becomes completely insane and dangerous.",
"He dies because of the amount of electricity that shocked him, but he comes back to life somehow.",
"He makes contact with someone from a different universe or time."
],
[
"He realized that he has killed Andy.",
"He is in the middle of nowhere, and he doesn't know how he got there or how to get back home.",
"He appears to be in a parallel universe.",
"The government is experimenting on him."
],
[
"His identity as a human.",
"His identity as an American.",
"His identity as Mike.",
"His identity as Adric."
],
[
"He blames Adric because he will do anything for Karamy.",
"He blames Andy for not stopping Mike.",
"He blames himself for not stopping Adric.",
"He blames Mike because the power he has over electric has somehow managed to split the universe."
]
] |
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[
"I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I\n was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird\n blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, \"What happened?\"\n\n\n My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling\n wrathfully. \"You tell\nme\nwhat happened! Mike, what in the devil\n were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack\n a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped\n out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with\n your knife! You must be clean crazy!\"",
"A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"",
"I turned to Andy, knee-deep in the icy stream beside me. \"There's your\n eagle. Probably smells that cougar I shot yesterday.\" I started to reel\n in my line, knowing what my brother's next move would be. \"Get the\n camera, and we'll try for a picture.\"\n\n\n We crouched together in the underbrush, watching, as the big bird\n of prey wheeled down in a slow spiral toward the dead cougar. Andy\n was trembling with excitement, the camera poised against his chest,\n his eyes glued in the image-finder. \"Golly—\" he whispered, almost\n prayerfully, \"six foot wing spread—maybe more—\"\n\n\n The bird screamed again, warily, head cocked into the wind. We were to\n leeward; the scent of the carrion masked our enemy smell from him. The\n eagle failed to scent or to see us, swooping down and dropping on the\n cougar's head. Andy's camera clicked twice. The eagle thrust in its\n beak—",
"I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.",
"I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken\n pieces of Andy's cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with\n it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in\n the living hell had I done a thing like that? I'd warned Andy time\n and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency\n of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I\n didn't wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than\n half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally\n promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles,\n carefully stowed them, cleaned our day's catch. It was dark before I",
"\"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"",
"The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"",
"Evarin snorted. \"Except where Karamy is concerned, you never were. What\n is that to me? I have everything I need. The Dreamer gives me good\n hunting and slaves enough to do my bidding. For the rest, I am the\n Toymaker. I need little. But you—\" his voice leaped with contempt,\n \"you ride time at Karamy's bidding—and your Dreamer walks—waiting the\n coming of his power that he may destroy us all one day!\"\n\n\n I stared somberly at Evarin, standing still near the door. The words\n seemed to wake an almost personal shame in me. The boy watched and his\n face lost some of his bitterness. He said more quietly, \"The falcon\n flown cannot be recalled. I came only to tell you that you are free.\"\n He turned, shrugging his thin shoulders, and walked to the window. \"As\n I say, if you call that freedom.\"",
"Left alone, I flung myself down on the high bed, stubbornly\n concentrating on Mike Kenscott, shutting out the vague blurred mystery\n in my mind that was Adric impinging on consciousness. I was not Adric.\n I would\nnot\nbe. I dared not go to the window and look out at the\n terrifying two suns, even to see the reassurance of the familiar Sierra\n Madre skyline. A homesick terror was hurting in me.\n\n\n But persistently the Adric memories came, a guilty feeling of a\n shirked duty, and a frightened face—a real face, not a blurred\n nothingness—beneath Gamine's blue veils. Memories of strange hunts and\n a big bird on the pommel of a high saddle. A bird hooded like a falcon,\n in crimson.",
"I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.\n The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the\n States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to\n Andy. \"They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something\n funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments\n they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.\n Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't\n make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or\n whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances\n after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when\n we came down here—\" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions",
"My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses.\n There was nothing wrong with the radio. \"Mike. What did you do to it?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew,\" I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button\n again.\n\n\n Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.\n\n\n I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily\n backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the\n \"Fate\" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.\n\n\n \"You'd better let it alone!\" Andy said shakily.",
"started for the cabin; I could hear the hum of the electric dynamo I'd\n rigged up and see the electric light across the dusk of the Sierras. A\n smell of bacon greeted me as I crossed into the glare of the unshielded\n bulb. Andy was standing at the cookstove, his back stubbornly to me. He\n did not turn.",
"\"Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—\" My brother's\n eyes watched me, uneasy. \"Mike, you're kidding—\"\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" I said. \"That energy just drains into me, and nothing\n happens. I'm immune.\" I shrugged, rose and walked across to the\n radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the\n disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on.\n \"I'll show you,\" I told him.\n\n\n The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the\n speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.\n\n\n \"Turn it up—\" Andy said uneasily.\n\n\n My hand twiddled the dial. \"It's already up.\"",
"together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A\n tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. \"It started up again\n the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following\n me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the\n lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and\n blew out five fuses trying to change one.\"",
"Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when\n I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the\n hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had\n made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it\n shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves\n are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of\n lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical\n current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded\n the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my\n body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit\n suicide—but I hadn't.",
"Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a\n government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I\n never finished it, there's no point in going into details; it's enough\n to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I'd\n built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set\n of magnetic coils that wouldn't wind properly. When the thing blew up\n I hadn't had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason. I\n was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and\n this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions\n that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they\n thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn't blame them. I\n would have liked to think so.",
"The Major told me all I needed to know, the day before I took the plane\n to Alaska. His scowl said more than his words, and they said plenty.\n \"I'd let it alone, Kenscott. No sense stirring up more trouble. We\n can't bother with side alleys, anyhow. Next time you monkey with it,\n you might get your head blown off, not just a dose of stray voltage\n out of the blue. We've done everything but stand on our heads trying\n to find out where that spare energy came from—and where it went. But\n we've marked that whole line of research\nclosed\n, Kenscott. If I\n were you, I'd keep my mouth shut about it.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a message from Mars,\" I suggested unsmiling, and he didn't\n think that was funny either. But there was relief on his face as I left\n the office and went to clean out my drawer.",
"I swore, slamming down the window. I was going to bed. Andy was right.\n Either I was crazy or there was something wrong; in any case, sitting\n here wouldn't help. If it didn't let up, I'd take the first train home\n and see a good electrician—or a psychiatrist. But right now, I was\n going to hit the sack.\n\n\n My hand went out automatically and switched the light off.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" I thought incredulously. I'd shorted the dynamo again. The\n radio stopped as if the whole orchestra had dropped dead; every light\n in the cabin winked swiftly out, but my hand on the switch crackled\n with a phosphorescent glow as the entire house current poured into my\n body. I tingled with weird shock; I heard my own teeth chattering.\n\n\n And something snapped wide open in my brain. I heard, suddenly, an\n excited voice, shouting.",
"I was lying on a narrow, high bed in a room filled with doors and bars.\n I could see the edge of a carved mirror set in a frame, and the top\n of a chest of some kind. On a bench at the edge of my field of vision\n there were two figures sitting. One was the old grey man, hunched\n wearily beneath his robe, wearing robes like a Tibetan Lama's, somber\n black, and a peaked hood of grey. The other was a slimmer younger\n figure, swathed in silken silvery veiling, with a thin opacity where\n the face should have been, and a sort of opalescent shine of flesh\n through the silvery-sapphire silks. The figure was that of a boy or a\n slim immature girl; it sat erect, motionless, and for a long time I",
"\"I can't stop now!\" I said violently. \"I'm on the track of\n something—and if I stop I'll never find it!\"\n\n\n \"Must be real important,\" Andy said sourly, \"if it makes you act like\n bughouse bait.\"\n\n\n I shrugged without answering. We'd been over that before. I'd known\n it when they threw me out of the government lab, just after the big\n blowup. I thought, angrily. I'm heading for another one, but I don't\n care.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Andy,\" I told him. \"You don't know what happened down there.\n Now that the war's over, it's no military secret, and I'll tell you\n what happened.\"\n\n\n I paused, swallowing down the coffee, not knowing that it scalded my\n mouth. \"That is—I will if I can.\""
],
[
"Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a\n government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I\n never finished it, there's no point in going into details; it's enough\n to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I'd\n built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set\n of magnetic coils that wouldn't wind properly. When the thing blew up\n I hadn't had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason. I\n was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and\n this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions\n that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they\n thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn't blame them. I\n would have liked to think so.",
"\"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"",
"Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when\n I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the\n hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had\n made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it\n shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves\n are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of\n lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical\n current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded\n the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my\n body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit\n suicide—but I hadn't.",
"I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.",
"The Major told me all I needed to know, the day before I took the plane\n to Alaska. His scowl said more than his words, and they said plenty.\n \"I'd let it alone, Kenscott. No sense stirring up more trouble. We\n can't bother with side alleys, anyhow. Next time you monkey with it,\n you might get your head blown off, not just a dose of stray voltage\n out of the blue. We've done everything but stand on our heads trying\n to find out where that spare energy came from—and where it went. But\n we've marked that whole line of research\nclosed\n, Kenscott. If I\n were you, I'd keep my mouth shut about it.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a message from Mars,\" I suggested unsmiling, and he didn't\n think that was funny either. But there was relief on his face as I left\n the office and went to clean out my drawer.",
"I knew the lab hadn't been struck by lightning. The Major knew it\n too; I found that out the day I reported back to work. All the time\n we talked, his big pen moved in stubby circles across the page of his\n log-book, and he talked without raising his head to look at me.\n\n\n \"I know all that, Kenscott. No electrical storms reported in the\n vicinity; no radio disturbance within a thousand miles. But—\" his jaw\n grew stubborn, \"the lab was wrecked and you were hurt. We've got to\n have something for the record.\"\n\n\n I could understand all that. What I resented was the way they treated\n me after I went back to work. They transferred me to another division\n and another line of work. They turned down my request to follow up\n those nontypical waves. My private notes were ripped out of my notebook\n while I was at lunch and I never saw them again. And as soon as they\n could, they shipped me to Fairbanks, Alaska, and that was the end of\n that.",
"I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I\n was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird\n blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, \"What happened?\"\n\n\n My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling\n wrathfully. \"You tell\nme\nwhat happened! Mike, what in the devil\n were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack\n a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped\n out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with\n your knife! You must be clean crazy!\"",
"\"I can't stop now!\" I said violently. \"I'm on the track of\n something—and if I stop I'll never find it!\"\n\n\n \"Must be real important,\" Andy said sourly, \"if it makes you act like\n bughouse bait.\"\n\n\n I shrugged without answering. We'd been over that before. I'd known\n it when they threw me out of the government lab, just after the big\n blowup. I thought, angrily. I'm heading for another one, but I don't\n care.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Andy,\" I told him. \"You don't know what happened down there.\n Now that the war's over, it's no military secret, and I'll tell you\n what happened.\"\n\n\n I paused, swallowing down the coffee, not knowing that it scalded my\n mouth. \"That is—I will if I can.\"",
"A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"",
"It started one day in the lab with a shadow on the sun and an elusive\n short circuit that gave me shock after shock until I was jittery. By\n the time I had it fixed, the oscillator had gone out of control. I got\n a series of low-frequency waves that were like nothing I'd ever seen\n before. Then there was something like a voice speaking out of a very\n old, jerry-built amateur radio set. Except that there wasn't a receiver\n in the lab, and no one else had heard it. I wasn't sure myself, because\n right then every instrument in the place went haywire and five minutes\n later, part of the ceiling hit the floor and the floor went up through\n the roof. They found me, they say, lying half-crushed under a beam, and\n I woke up eighteen hours later in a hospital with four cracked ribs,\n and a feeling as if I'd had a lot of voltage poured into me. It went in\n the report that I'd been struck by lightning.",
"I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.\n The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the\n States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to\n Andy. \"They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something\n funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments\n they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.\n Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't\n make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or\n whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances\n after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when\n we came down here—\" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions",
"The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"",
"\"Try another station;\" the kid insisted stubbornly. I pushed all the\n buttons in succession; the static crackled and buzzed, the panel\n light flickered on and off in little cryptic flashes. I sighed. \"And\n reception was perfect at noon,\" I told him, \"You were listening to the\n news.\" I took my hand away again. \"I don't want to blow the thing up.\"\n\n\n Andy came over and switched the button back on. The little panel light\n glowed steadily, and the mellow voice of Milton Cross filled the\n room ... \"now conduct the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra in the Fifth\n or 'Fate' symphony of Ludwig von Beethoven ...\" the noise of mixed\n applause, and then the majestic chords of the symphony, thundering\n through the rooms of the cabin.\n\n\n \"Ta-da-da-dumm——Ta-da-da-DUMM!\"",
"\"Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—\" My brother's\n eyes watched me, uneasy. \"Mike, you're kidding—\"\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" I said. \"That energy just drains into me, and nothing\n happens. I'm immune.\" I shrugged, rose and walked across to the\n radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the\n disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on.\n \"I'll show you,\" I told him.\n\n\n The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the\n speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.\n\n\n \"Turn it up—\" Andy said uneasily.\n\n\n My hand twiddled the dial. \"It's already up.\"",
"My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses.\n There was nothing wrong with the radio. \"Mike. What did you do to it?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew,\" I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button\n again.\n\n\n Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.\n\n\n I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily\n backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the\n \"Fate\" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.\n\n\n \"You'd better let it alone!\" Andy said shakily.",
"I swore, slamming down the window. I was going to bed. Andy was right.\n Either I was crazy or there was something wrong; in any case, sitting\n here wouldn't help. If it didn't let up, I'd take the first train home\n and see a good electrician—or a psychiatrist. But right now, I was\n going to hit the sack.\n\n\n My hand went out automatically and switched the light off.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" I thought incredulously. I'd shorted the dynamo again. The\n radio stopped as if the whole orchestra had dropped dead; every light\n in the cabin winked swiftly out, but my hand on the switch crackled\n with a phosphorescent glow as the entire house current poured into my\n body. I tingled with weird shock; I heard my own teeth chattering.\n\n\n And something snapped wide open in my brain. I heard, suddenly, an\n excited voice, shouting.",
"I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken\n pieces of Andy's cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with\n it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in\n the living hell had I done a thing like that? I'd warned Andy time\n and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency\n of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I\n didn't wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than\n half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally\n promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles,\n carefully stowed them, cleaned our day's catch. It was dark before I",
"started for the cabin; I could hear the hum of the electric dynamo I'd\n rigged up and see the electric light across the dusk of the Sierras. A\n smell of bacon greeted me as I crossed into the glare of the unshielded\n bulb. Andy was standing at the cookstove, his back stubbornly to me. He\n did not turn.",
"The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to\n identity. \"Adric—\" I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it?\n Wasn't it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are\n four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls\n is the chemming of twilp—\nstop that!\nMike Kenscott. Summer\n 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head\n in my hands. \"I'm crazy. Or you are. Or we're both sane and this\n monkey-business is all real.\"",
"together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A\n tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. \"It started up again\n the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following\n me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the\n lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and\n blew out five fuses trying to change one.\""
],
[
"Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when\n I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the\n hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had\n made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it\n shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves\n are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of\n lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical\n current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded\n the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my\n body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit\n suicide—but I hadn't.",
"I knew the lab hadn't been struck by lightning. The Major knew it\n too; I found that out the day I reported back to work. All the time\n we talked, his big pen moved in stubby circles across the page of his\n log-book, and he talked without raising his head to look at me.\n\n\n \"I know all that, Kenscott. No electrical storms reported in the\n vicinity; no radio disturbance within a thousand miles. But—\" his jaw\n grew stubborn, \"the lab was wrecked and you were hurt. We've got to\n have something for the record.\"\n\n\n I could understand all that. What I resented was the way they treated\n me after I went back to work. They transferred me to another division\n and another line of work. They turned down my request to follow up\n those nontypical waves. My private notes were ripped out of my notebook\n while I was at lunch and I never saw them again. And as soon as they\n could, they shipped me to Fairbanks, Alaska, and that was the end of\n that.",
"It started one day in the lab with a shadow on the sun and an elusive\n short circuit that gave me shock after shock until I was jittery. By\n the time I had it fixed, the oscillator had gone out of control. I got\n a series of low-frequency waves that were like nothing I'd ever seen\n before. Then there was something like a voice speaking out of a very\n old, jerry-built amateur radio set. Except that there wasn't a receiver\n in the lab, and no one else had heard it. I wasn't sure myself, because\n right then every instrument in the place went haywire and five minutes\n later, part of the ceiling hit the floor and the floor went up through\n the roof. They found me, they say, lying half-crushed under a beam, and\n I woke up eighteen hours later in a hospital with four cracked ribs,\n and a feeling as if I'd had a lot of voltage poured into me. It went in\n the report that I'd been struck by lightning.",
"I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.",
"\"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"",
"Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a\n government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I\n never finished it, there's no point in going into details; it's enough\n to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I'd\n built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set\n of magnetic coils that wouldn't wind properly. When the thing blew up\n I hadn't had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason. I\n was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and\n this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions\n that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they\n thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn't blame them. I\n would have liked to think so.",
"The Major told me all I needed to know, the day before I took the plane\n to Alaska. His scowl said more than his words, and they said plenty.\n \"I'd let it alone, Kenscott. No sense stirring up more trouble. We\n can't bother with side alleys, anyhow. Next time you monkey with it,\n you might get your head blown off, not just a dose of stray voltage\n out of the blue. We've done everything but stand on our heads trying\n to find out where that spare energy came from—and where it went. But\n we've marked that whole line of research\nclosed\n, Kenscott. If I\n were you, I'd keep my mouth shut about it.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a message from Mars,\" I suggested unsmiling, and he didn't\n think that was funny either. But there was relief on his face as I left\n the office and went to clean out my drawer.",
"A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"",
"I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.\n The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the\n States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to\n Andy. \"They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something\n funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments\n they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.\n Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't\n make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or\n whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances\n after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when\n we came down here—\" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions",
"I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I\n was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird\n blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, \"What happened?\"\n\n\n My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling\n wrathfully. \"You tell\nme\nwhat happened! Mike, what in the devil\n were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack\n a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped\n out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with\n your knife! You must be clean crazy!\"",
"\"I can't stop now!\" I said violently. \"I'm on the track of\n something—and if I stop I'll never find it!\"\n\n\n \"Must be real important,\" Andy said sourly, \"if it makes you act like\n bughouse bait.\"\n\n\n I shrugged without answering. We'd been over that before. I'd known\n it when they threw me out of the government lab, just after the big\n blowup. I thought, angrily. I'm heading for another one, but I don't\n care.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Andy,\" I told him. \"You don't know what happened down there.\n Now that the war's over, it's no military secret, and I'll tell you\n what happened.\"\n\n\n I paused, swallowing down the coffee, not knowing that it scalded my\n mouth. \"That is—I will if I can.\"",
"The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"",
"It took me a long time to get well. The ribs healed fast—faster\n than the doctor liked. I didn't mind the hospital part, except\n that I couldn't walk without shaking, or light a cigarette without\n burning myself, for months. The thing I minded was what I remembered\nbefore\nI woke up. Delirium; that was what they told me. But\n the\nkind\nand\ntype\nof scars on my body didn't ring true.\n Electricity—even freak lightning—doesn't make that kind of burns. And\n my corner of the world doesn't make a habit of branding people.\n\n\n But before I could show the scars to anybody outside the hospital, they\n were gone. Not healed; just gone. I remembered the look on the medic's\n face when I showed him the place where the scars had been. He didn't\n think I was crazy; he thought\nhe\nwas.",
"I swore, slamming down the window. I was going to bed. Andy was right.\n Either I was crazy or there was something wrong; in any case, sitting\n here wouldn't help. If it didn't let up, I'd take the first train home\n and see a good electrician—or a psychiatrist. But right now, I was\n going to hit the sack.\n\n\n My hand went out automatically and switched the light off.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" I thought incredulously. I'd shorted the dynamo again. The\n radio stopped as if the whole orchestra had dropped dead; every light\n in the cabin winked swiftly out, but my hand on the switch crackled\n with a phosphorescent glow as the entire house current poured into my\n body. I tingled with weird shock; I heard my own teeth chattering.\n\n\n And something snapped wide open in my brain. I heard, suddenly, an\n excited voice, shouting.",
"\"Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—\" My brother's\n eyes watched me, uneasy. \"Mike, you're kidding—\"\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" I said. \"That energy just drains into me, and nothing\n happens. I'm immune.\" I shrugged, rose and walked across to the\n radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the\n disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on.\n \"I'll show you,\" I told him.\n\n\n The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the\n speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.\n\n\n \"Turn it up—\" Andy said uneasily.\n\n\n My hand twiddled the dial. \"It's already up.\"",
"together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A\n tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. \"It started up again\n the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following\n me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the\n lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and\n blew out five fuses trying to change one.\"",
"\"Try another station;\" the kid insisted stubbornly. I pushed all the\n buttons in succession; the static crackled and buzzed, the panel\n light flickered on and off in little cryptic flashes. I sighed. \"And\n reception was perfect at noon,\" I told him, \"You were listening to the\n news.\" I took my hand away again. \"I don't want to blow the thing up.\"\n\n\n Andy came over and switched the button back on. The little panel light\n glowed steadily, and the mellow voice of Milton Cross filled the\n room ... \"now conduct the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra in the Fifth\n or 'Fate' symphony of Ludwig von Beethoven ...\" the noise of mixed\n applause, and then the majestic chords of the symphony, thundering\n through the rooms of the cabin.\n\n\n \"Ta-da-da-dumm——Ta-da-da-DUMM!\"",
"The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to\n identity. \"Adric—\" I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it?\n Wasn't it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are\n four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls\n is the chemming of twilp—\nstop that!\nMike Kenscott. Summer\n 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head\n in my hands. \"I'm crazy. Or you are. Or we're both sane and this\n monkey-business is all real.\"",
"My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses.\n There was nothing wrong with the radio. \"Mike. What did you do to it?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew,\" I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button\n again.\n\n\n Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.\n\n\n I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily\n backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the\n \"Fate\" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.\n\n\n \"You'd better let it alone!\" Andy said shakily.",
"I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken\n pieces of Andy's cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with\n it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in\n the living hell had I done a thing like that? I'd warned Andy time\n and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency\n of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I\n didn't wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than\n half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally\n promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles,\n carefully stowed them, cleaned our day's catch. It was dark before I"
],
[
"Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when\n I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the\n hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had\n made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it\n shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves\n are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of\n lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical\n current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded\n the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my\n body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit\n suicide—but I hadn't.",
"together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A\n tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. \"It started up again\n the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following\n me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the\n lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and\n blew out five fuses trying to change one.\"",
"It took me a long time to get well. The ribs healed fast—faster\n than the doctor liked. I didn't mind the hospital part, except\n that I couldn't walk without shaking, or light a cigarette without\n burning myself, for months. The thing I minded was what I remembered\nbefore\nI woke up. Delirium; that was what they told me. But\n the\nkind\nand\ntype\nof scars on my body didn't ring true.\n Electricity—even freak lightning—doesn't make that kind of burns. And\n my corner of the world doesn't make a habit of branding people.\n\n\n But before I could show the scars to anybody outside the hospital, they\n were gone. Not healed; just gone. I remembered the look on the medic's\n face when I showed him the place where the scars had been. He didn't\n think I was crazy; he thought\nhe\nwas.",
"I swore, slamming down the window. I was going to bed. Andy was right.\n Either I was crazy or there was something wrong; in any case, sitting\n here wouldn't help. If it didn't let up, I'd take the first train home\n and see a good electrician—or a psychiatrist. But right now, I was\n going to hit the sack.\n\n\n My hand went out automatically and switched the light off.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" I thought incredulously. I'd shorted the dynamo again. The\n radio stopped as if the whole orchestra had dropped dead; every light\n in the cabin winked swiftly out, but my hand on the switch crackled\n with a phosphorescent glow as the entire house current poured into my\n body. I tingled with weird shock; I heard my own teeth chattering.\n\n\n And something snapped wide open in my brain. I heard, suddenly, an\n excited voice, shouting.",
"Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a\n government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I\n never finished it, there's no point in going into details; it's enough\n to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I'd\n built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set\n of magnetic coils that wouldn't wind properly. When the thing blew up\n I hadn't had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason. I\n was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and\n this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions\n that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they\n thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn't blame them. I\n would have liked to think so.",
"It started one day in the lab with a shadow on the sun and an elusive\n short circuit that gave me shock after shock until I was jittery. By\n the time I had it fixed, the oscillator had gone out of control. I got\n a series of low-frequency waves that were like nothing I'd ever seen\n before. Then there was something like a voice speaking out of a very\n old, jerry-built amateur radio set. Except that there wasn't a receiver\n in the lab, and no one else had heard it. I wasn't sure myself, because\n right then every instrument in the place went haywire and five minutes\n later, part of the ceiling hit the floor and the floor went up through\n the roof. They found me, they say, lying half-crushed under a beam, and\n I woke up eighteen hours later in a hospital with four cracked ribs,\n and a feeling as if I'd had a lot of voltage poured into me. It went in\n the report that I'd been struck by lightning.",
"I knew the lab hadn't been struck by lightning. The Major knew it\n too; I found that out the day I reported back to work. All the time\n we talked, his big pen moved in stubby circles across the page of his\n log-book, and he talked without raising his head to look at me.\n\n\n \"I know all that, Kenscott. No electrical storms reported in the\n vicinity; no radio disturbance within a thousand miles. But—\" his jaw\n grew stubborn, \"the lab was wrecked and you were hurt. We've got to\n have something for the record.\"\n\n\n I could understand all that. What I resented was the way they treated\n me after I went back to work. They transferred me to another division\n and another line of work. They turned down my request to follow up\n those nontypical waves. My private notes were ripped out of my notebook\n while I was at lunch and I never saw them again. And as soon as they\n could, they shipped me to Fairbanks, Alaska, and that was the end of\n that.",
"The Major told me all I needed to know, the day before I took the plane\n to Alaska. His scowl said more than his words, and they said plenty.\n \"I'd let it alone, Kenscott. No sense stirring up more trouble. We\n can't bother with side alleys, anyhow. Next time you monkey with it,\n you might get your head blown off, not just a dose of stray voltage\n out of the blue. We've done everything but stand on our heads trying\n to find out where that spare energy came from—and where it went. But\n we've marked that whole line of research\nclosed\n, Kenscott. If I\n were you, I'd keep my mouth shut about it.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a message from Mars,\" I suggested unsmiling, and he didn't\n think that was funny either. But there was relief on his face as I left\n the office and went to clean out my drawer.",
"started for the cabin; I could hear the hum of the electric dynamo I'd\n rigged up and see the electric light across the dusk of the Sierras. A\n smell of bacon greeted me as I crossed into the glare of the unshielded\n bulb. Andy was standing at the cookstove, his back stubbornly to me. He\n did not turn.",
"\"Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—\" My brother's\n eyes watched me, uneasy. \"Mike, you're kidding—\"\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" I said. \"That energy just drains into me, and nothing\n happens. I'm immune.\" I shrugged, rose and walked across to the\n radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the\n disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on.\n \"I'll show you,\" I told him.\n\n\n The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the\n speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.\n\n\n \"Turn it up—\" Andy said uneasily.\n\n\n My hand twiddled the dial. \"It's already up.\"",
"I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.\n The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the\n States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to\n Andy. \"They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something\n funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments\n they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.\n Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't\n make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or\n whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances\n after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when\n we came down here—\" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions",
"\"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"",
"studied it, curious, between half-opened lids. But when I blinked, it\n rose and passed through one of the multitudinous doors; at once a soft\n sibilance of draperies announced return. I sat up, getting my feet to\n the floor, or almost there; the bed was higher than a hospital bed. The\n blue-robe held a handled mug, like a baby's drinking-cup, at me. I took\n it in my hand hesitated—",
"The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"",
"My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses.\n There was nothing wrong with the radio. \"Mike. What did you do to it?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew,\" I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button\n again.\n\n\n Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.\n\n\n I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily\n backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the\n \"Fate\" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.\n\n\n \"You'd better let it alone!\" Andy said shakily.",
"A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"",
"I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.",
"\"I can't stop now!\" I said violently. \"I'm on the track of\n something—and if I stop I'll never find it!\"\n\n\n \"Must be real important,\" Andy said sourly, \"if it makes you act like\n bughouse bait.\"\n\n\n I shrugged without answering. We'd been over that before. I'd known\n it when they threw me out of the government lab, just after the big\n blowup. I thought, angrily. I'm heading for another one, but I don't\n care.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Andy,\" I told him. \"You don't know what happened down there.\n Now that the war's over, it's no military secret, and I'll tell you\n what happened.\"\n\n\n I paused, swallowing down the coffee, not knowing that it scalded my\n mouth. \"That is—I will if I can.\"",
"\"Try another station;\" the kid insisted stubbornly. I pushed all the\n buttons in succession; the static crackled and buzzed, the panel\n light flickered on and off in little cryptic flashes. I sighed. \"And\n reception was perfect at noon,\" I told him, \"You were listening to the\n news.\" I took my hand away again. \"I don't want to blow the thing up.\"\n\n\n Andy came over and switched the button back on. The little panel light\n glowed steadily, and the mellow voice of Milton Cross filled the\n room ... \"now conduct the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra in the Fifth\n or 'Fate' symphony of Ludwig von Beethoven ...\" the noise of mixed\n applause, and then the majestic chords of the symphony, thundering\n through the rooms of the cabin.\n\n\n \"Ta-da-da-dumm——Ta-da-da-DUMM!\"",
"The tiredness seemed part of Rhys voice. \"Adric,\" he said wearily. \"Try\n to remember.\" He shrugged his lean shoulders. \"You are in your own\n Tower. And you have been under restraint again. I am sorry.\" His voice\n sounded futile. I felt prickling shivers run down my backbone. In spite\n of the weird surroundings, the phrase \"under restraint\" had struck\n home. I was a lunatic in an asylum.\n\n\n The blue-robed one cut in in that smooth, sexless, faint-sarcastic\n voice. \"While Karamy holds the amnesia-ray, Rhys, you will be\n explaining it to him a dozen times a cycle. He will never be of use\n to us again. This time Karamy won. Adric; try to remember. You are at\n home, in Narabedla.\""
],
[
"I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.",
"\"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"",
"The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"",
"A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"",
"Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when\n I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the\n hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had\n made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it\n shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves\n are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of\n lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical\n current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded\n the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my\n body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit\n suicide—but I hadn't.",
"I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.\n The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the\n States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to\n Andy. \"They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something\n funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments\n they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.\n Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't\n make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or\n whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances\n after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when\n we came down here—\" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions",
"It took me a long time to get well. The ribs healed fast—faster\n than the doctor liked. I didn't mind the hospital part, except\n that I couldn't walk without shaking, or light a cigarette without\n burning myself, for months. The thing I minded was what I remembered\nbefore\nI woke up. Delirium; that was what they told me. But\n the\nkind\nand\ntype\nof scars on my body didn't ring true.\n Electricity—even freak lightning—doesn't make that kind of burns. And\n my corner of the world doesn't make a habit of branding people.\n\n\n But before I could show the scars to anybody outside the hospital, they\n were gone. Not healed; just gone. I remembered the look on the medic's\n face when I showed him the place where the scars had been. He didn't\n think I was crazy; he thought\nhe\nwas.",
"Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a\n government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I\n never finished it, there's no point in going into details; it's enough\n to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I'd\n built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set\n of magnetic coils that wouldn't wind properly. When the thing blew up\n I hadn't had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason. I\n was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and\n this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions\n that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they\n thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn't blame them. I\n would have liked to think so.",
"\"Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—\" My brother's\n eyes watched me, uneasy. \"Mike, you're kidding—\"\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" I said. \"That energy just drains into me, and nothing\n happens. I'm immune.\" I shrugged, rose and walked across to the\n radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the\n disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on.\n \"I'll show you,\" I told him.\n\n\n The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the\n speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.\n\n\n \"Turn it up—\" Andy said uneasily.\n\n\n My hand twiddled the dial. \"It's already up.\"",
"I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I\n was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird\n blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, \"What happened?\"\n\n\n My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling\n wrathfully. \"You tell\nme\nwhat happened! Mike, what in the devil\n were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack\n a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped\n out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with\n your knife! You must be clean crazy!\"",
"I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken\n pieces of Andy's cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with\n it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in\n the living hell had I done a thing like that? I'd warned Andy time\n and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency\n of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I\n didn't wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than\n half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally\n promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles,\n carefully stowed them, cleaned our day's catch. It was dark before I",
"It started one day in the lab with a shadow on the sun and an elusive\n short circuit that gave me shock after shock until I was jittery. By\n the time I had it fixed, the oscillator had gone out of control. I got\n a series of low-frequency waves that were like nothing I'd ever seen\n before. Then there was something like a voice speaking out of a very\n old, jerry-built amateur radio set. Except that there wasn't a receiver\n in the lab, and no one else had heard it. I wasn't sure myself, because\n right then every instrument in the place went haywire and five minutes\n later, part of the ceiling hit the floor and the floor went up through\n the roof. They found me, they say, lying half-crushed under a beam, and\n I woke up eighteen hours later in a hospital with four cracked ribs,\n and a feeling as if I'd had a lot of voltage poured into me. It went in\n the report that I'd been struck by lightning.",
"\"I can't stop now!\" I said violently. \"I'm on the track of\n something—and if I stop I'll never find it!\"\n\n\n \"Must be real important,\" Andy said sourly, \"if it makes you act like\n bughouse bait.\"\n\n\n I shrugged without answering. We'd been over that before. I'd known\n it when they threw me out of the government lab, just after the big\n blowup. I thought, angrily. I'm heading for another one, but I don't\n care.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Andy,\" I told him. \"You don't know what happened down there.\n Now that the war's over, it's no military secret, and I'll tell you\n what happened.\"\n\n\n I paused, swallowing down the coffee, not knowing that it scalded my\n mouth. \"That is—I will if I can.\"",
"together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A\n tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. \"It started up again\n the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following\n me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the\n lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and\n blew out five fuses trying to change one.\"",
"Left alone, I flung myself down on the high bed, stubbornly\n concentrating on Mike Kenscott, shutting out the vague blurred mystery\n in my mind that was Adric impinging on consciousness. I was not Adric.\n I would\nnot\nbe. I dared not go to the window and look out at the\n terrifying two suns, even to see the reassurance of the familiar Sierra\n Madre skyline. A homesick terror was hurting in me.\n\n\n But persistently the Adric memories came, a guilty feeling of a\n shirked duty, and a frightened face—a real face, not a blurred\n nothingness—beneath Gamine's blue veils. Memories of strange hunts and\n a big bird on the pommel of a high saddle. A bird hooded like a falcon,\n in crimson.",
"Consciousness of dress made me remember the—nightshirt—I still wore.\n Moving swiftly, without conscious thought, I went to a door and slid\n it open; pulled out some garments and dressed in them. Every garment\n in the closet was the same color; deep-hued crimson. I glanced in the\n mirror and a phrase Gamine had used broke the surface of my mind like\n a leaping fish. \"Lord of the Crimson Tower.\" Well, I looked it. There\n had been knives and swords in the closet; I took out one to look at it,\n and before I realized what I was doing I had belted it across my hip. I\n stared, decided to let it remain. It looked all right with the rest of\n the costume. It felt right, too. Another door folded back noiselessly\n and a man stood looking at me.",
"The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to\n identity. \"Adric—\" I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it?\n Wasn't it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are\n four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls\n is the chemming of twilp—\nstop that!\nMike Kenscott. Summer\n 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head\n in my hands. \"I'm crazy. Or you are. Or we're both sane and this\n monkey-business is all real.\"",
"studied it, curious, between half-opened lids. But when I blinked, it\n rose and passed through one of the multitudinous doors; at once a soft\n sibilance of draperies announced return. I sat up, getting my feet to\n the floor, or almost there; the bed was higher than a hospital bed. The\n blue-robe held a handled mug, like a baby's drinking-cup, at me. I took\n it in my hand hesitated—",
"\"Neither drug nor poison,\" said the blue-robe mockingly, and the voice\n was as noncommittal as the veiled body; a sexless voice, soft alto, a\n woman's or a boy's. \"Drink and be glad it is none of Karamy's brewing.\"\n\n\n I tasted the liquid in the mug; it had an indeterminate greenish look\n and a faint pungent taste I could not identify, although it reminded me\n variously of anise and garlic. It seemed to remove the last traces of\n shock. I handed the cup back empty and looked sharply at the old man in\n the Lama costume.",
"My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses.\n There was nothing wrong with the radio. \"Mike. What did you do to it?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew,\" I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button\n again.\n\n\n Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.\n\n\n I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily\n backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the\n \"Fate\" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.\n\n\n \"You'd better let it alone!\" Andy said shakily."
],
[
"\"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"",
"Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when\n I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the\n hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had\n made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it\n shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves\n are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of\n lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical\n current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded\n the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my\n body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit\n suicide—but I hadn't.",
"I swore, slamming down the window. I was going to bed. Andy was right.\n Either I was crazy or there was something wrong; in any case, sitting\n here wouldn't help. If it didn't let up, I'd take the first train home\n and see a good electrician—or a psychiatrist. But right now, I was\n going to hit the sack.\n\n\n My hand went out automatically and switched the light off.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" I thought incredulously. I'd shorted the dynamo again. The\n radio stopped as if the whole orchestra had dropped dead; every light\n in the cabin winked swiftly out, but my hand on the switch crackled\n with a phosphorescent glow as the entire house current poured into my\n body. I tingled with weird shock; I heard my own teeth chattering.\n\n\n And something snapped wide open in my brain. I heard, suddenly, an\n excited voice, shouting.",
"I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.",
"together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A\n tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. \"It started up again\n the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following\n me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the\n lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and\n blew out five fuses trying to change one.\"",
"\"Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—\" My brother's\n eyes watched me, uneasy. \"Mike, you're kidding—\"\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" I said. \"That energy just drains into me, and nothing\n happens. I'm immune.\" I shrugged, rose and walked across to the\n radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the\n disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on.\n \"I'll show you,\" I told him.\n\n\n The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the\n speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.\n\n\n \"Turn it up—\" Andy said uneasily.\n\n\n My hand twiddled the dial. \"It's already up.\"",
"started for the cabin; I could hear the hum of the electric dynamo I'd\n rigged up and see the electric light across the dusk of the Sierras. A\n smell of bacon greeted me as I crossed into the glare of the unshielded\n bulb. Andy was standing at the cookstove, his back stubbornly to me. He\n did not turn.",
"A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"",
"My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses.\n There was nothing wrong with the radio. \"Mike. What did you do to it?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew,\" I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button\n again.\n\n\n Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.\n\n\n I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily\n backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the\n \"Fate\" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.\n\n\n \"You'd better let it alone!\" Andy said shakily.",
"The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"",
"I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken\n pieces of Andy's cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with\n it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in\n the living hell had I done a thing like that? I'd warned Andy time\n and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency\n of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I\n didn't wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than\n half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally\n promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles,\n carefully stowed them, cleaned our day's catch. It was dark before I",
"It started one day in the lab with a shadow on the sun and an elusive\n short circuit that gave me shock after shock until I was jittery. By\n the time I had it fixed, the oscillator had gone out of control. I got\n a series of low-frequency waves that were like nothing I'd ever seen\n before. Then there was something like a voice speaking out of a very\n old, jerry-built amateur radio set. Except that there wasn't a receiver\n in the lab, and no one else had heard it. I wasn't sure myself, because\n right then every instrument in the place went haywire and five minutes\n later, part of the ceiling hit the floor and the floor went up through\n the roof. They found me, they say, lying half-crushed under a beam, and\n I woke up eighteen hours later in a hospital with four cracked ribs,\n and a feeling as if I'd had a lot of voltage poured into me. It went in\n the report that I'd been struck by lightning.",
"Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a\n government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I\n never finished it, there's no point in going into details; it's enough\n to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I'd\n built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set\n of magnetic coils that wouldn't wind properly. When the thing blew up\n I hadn't had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason. I\n was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and\n this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions\n that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they\n thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn't blame them. I\n would have liked to think so.",
"The Major told me all I needed to know, the day before I took the plane\n to Alaska. His scowl said more than his words, and they said plenty.\n \"I'd let it alone, Kenscott. No sense stirring up more trouble. We\n can't bother with side alleys, anyhow. Next time you monkey with it,\n you might get your head blown off, not just a dose of stray voltage\n out of the blue. We've done everything but stand on our heads trying\n to find out where that spare energy came from—and where it went. But\n we've marked that whole line of research\nclosed\n, Kenscott. If I\n were you, I'd keep my mouth shut about it.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a message from Mars,\" I suggested unsmiling, and he didn't\n think that was funny either. But there was relief on his face as I left\n the office and went to clean out my drawer.",
"I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.\n The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the\n States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to\n Andy. \"They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something\n funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments\n they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.\n Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't\n make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or\n whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances\n after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when\n we came down here—\" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions",
"\"I can't stop now!\" I said violently. \"I'm on the track of\n something—and if I stop I'll never find it!\"\n\n\n \"Must be real important,\" Andy said sourly, \"if it makes you act like\n bughouse bait.\"\n\n\n I shrugged without answering. We'd been over that before. I'd known\n it when they threw me out of the government lab, just after the big\n blowup. I thought, angrily. I'm heading for another one, but I don't\n care.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Andy,\" I told him. \"You don't know what happened down there.\n Now that the war's over, it's no military secret, and I'll tell you\n what happened.\"\n\n\n I paused, swallowing down the coffee, not knowing that it scalded my\n mouth. \"That is—I will if I can.\"",
"The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to\n identity. \"Adric—\" I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it?\n Wasn't it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are\n four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls\n is the chemming of twilp—\nstop that!\nMike Kenscott. Summer\n 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head\n in my hands. \"I'm crazy. Or you are. Or we're both sane and this\n monkey-business is all real.\"",
"It took me a long time to get well. The ribs healed fast—faster\n than the doctor liked. I didn't mind the hospital part, except\n that I couldn't walk without shaking, or light a cigarette without\n burning myself, for months. The thing I minded was what I remembered\nbefore\nI woke up. Delirium; that was what they told me. But\n the\nkind\nand\ntype\nof scars on my body didn't ring true.\n Electricity—even freak lightning—doesn't make that kind of burns. And\n my corner of the world doesn't make a habit of branding people.\n\n\n But before I could show the scars to anybody outside the hospital, they\n were gone. Not healed; just gone. I remembered the look on the medic's\n face when I showed him the place where the scars had been. He didn't\n think I was crazy; he thought\nhe\nwas.",
"\"Try another station;\" the kid insisted stubbornly. I pushed all the\n buttons in succession; the static crackled and buzzed, the panel\n light flickered on and off in little cryptic flashes. I sighed. \"And\n reception was perfect at noon,\" I told him, \"You were listening to the\n news.\" I took my hand away again. \"I don't want to blow the thing up.\"\n\n\n Andy came over and switched the button back on. The little panel light\n glowed steadily, and the mellow voice of Milton Cross filled the\n room ... \"now conduct the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra in the Fifth\n or 'Fate' symphony of Ludwig von Beethoven ...\" the noise of mixed\n applause, and then the majestic chords of the symphony, thundering\n through the rooms of the cabin.\n\n\n \"Ta-da-da-dumm——Ta-da-da-DUMM!\"",
"I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I\n was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird\n blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, \"What happened?\"\n\n\n My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling\n wrathfully. \"You tell\nme\nwhat happened! Mike, what in the devil\n were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack\n a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped\n out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with\n your knife! You must be clean crazy!\""
],
[
"I swore, slamming down the window. I was going to bed. Andy was right.\n Either I was crazy or there was something wrong; in any case, sitting\n here wouldn't help. If it didn't let up, I'd take the first train home\n and see a good electrician—or a psychiatrist. But right now, I was\n going to hit the sack.\n\n\n My hand went out automatically and switched the light off.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" I thought incredulously. I'd shorted the dynamo again. The\n radio stopped as if the whole orchestra had dropped dead; every light\n in the cabin winked swiftly out, but my hand on the switch crackled\n with a phosphorescent glow as the entire house current poured into my\n body. I tingled with weird shock; I heard my own teeth chattering.\n\n\n And something snapped wide open in my brain. I heard, suddenly, an\n excited voice, shouting.",
"together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A\n tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. \"It started up again\n the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following\n me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the\n lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and\n blew out five fuses trying to change one.\"",
"I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.",
"\"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"",
"Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when\n I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the\n hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had\n made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it\n shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves\n are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of\n lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical\n current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded\n the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my\n body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit\n suicide—but I hadn't.",
"started for the cabin; I could hear the hum of the electric dynamo I'd\n rigged up and see the electric light across the dusk of the Sierras. A\n smell of bacon greeted me as I crossed into the glare of the unshielded\n bulb. Andy was standing at the cookstove, his back stubbornly to me. He\n did not turn.",
"It started one day in the lab with a shadow on the sun and an elusive\n short circuit that gave me shock after shock until I was jittery. By\n the time I had it fixed, the oscillator had gone out of control. I got\n a series of low-frequency waves that were like nothing I'd ever seen\n before. Then there was something like a voice speaking out of a very\n old, jerry-built amateur radio set. Except that there wasn't a receiver\n in the lab, and no one else had heard it. I wasn't sure myself, because\n right then every instrument in the place went haywire and five minutes\n later, part of the ceiling hit the floor and the floor went up through\n the roof. They found me, they say, lying half-crushed under a beam, and\n I woke up eighteen hours later in a hospital with four cracked ribs,\n and a feeling as if I'd had a lot of voltage poured into me. It went in\n the report that I'd been struck by lightning.",
"My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses.\n There was nothing wrong with the radio. \"Mike. What did you do to it?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew,\" I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button\n again.\n\n\n Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.\n\n\n I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily\n backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the\n \"Fate\" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.\n\n\n \"You'd better let it alone!\" Andy said shakily.",
"A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"",
"\"Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—\" My brother's\n eyes watched me, uneasy. \"Mike, you're kidding—\"\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" I said. \"That energy just drains into me, and nothing\n happens. I'm immune.\" I shrugged, rose and walked across to the\n radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the\n disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on.\n \"I'll show you,\" I told him.\n\n\n The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the\n speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.\n\n\n \"Turn it up—\" Andy said uneasily.\n\n\n My hand twiddled the dial. \"It's already up.\"",
"The Major told me all I needed to know, the day before I took the plane\n to Alaska. His scowl said more than his words, and they said plenty.\n \"I'd let it alone, Kenscott. No sense stirring up more trouble. We\n can't bother with side alleys, anyhow. Next time you monkey with it,\n you might get your head blown off, not just a dose of stray voltage\n out of the blue. We've done everything but stand on our heads trying\n to find out where that spare energy came from—and where it went. But\n we've marked that whole line of research\nclosed\n, Kenscott. If I\n were you, I'd keep my mouth shut about it.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a message from Mars,\" I suggested unsmiling, and he didn't\n think that was funny either. But there was relief on his face as I left\n the office and went to clean out my drawer.",
"I knew the lab hadn't been struck by lightning. The Major knew it\n too; I found that out the day I reported back to work. All the time\n we talked, his big pen moved in stubby circles across the page of his\n log-book, and he talked without raising his head to look at me.\n\n\n \"I know all that, Kenscott. No electrical storms reported in the\n vicinity; no radio disturbance within a thousand miles. But—\" his jaw\n grew stubborn, \"the lab was wrecked and you were hurt. We've got to\n have something for the record.\"\n\n\n I could understand all that. What I resented was the way they treated\n me after I went back to work. They transferred me to another division\n and another line of work. They turned down my request to follow up\n those nontypical waves. My private notes were ripped out of my notebook\n while I was at lunch and I never saw them again. And as soon as they\n could, they shipped me to Fairbanks, Alaska, and that was the end of\n that.",
"I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.\n The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the\n States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to\n Andy. \"They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something\n funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments\n they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.\n Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't\n make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or\n whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances\n after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when\n we came down here—\" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions",
"The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"",
"\"Try another station;\" the kid insisted stubbornly. I pushed all the\n buttons in succession; the static crackled and buzzed, the panel\n light flickered on and off in little cryptic flashes. I sighed. \"And\n reception was perfect at noon,\" I told him, \"You were listening to the\n news.\" I took my hand away again. \"I don't want to blow the thing up.\"\n\n\n Andy came over and switched the button back on. The little panel light\n glowed steadily, and the mellow voice of Milton Cross filled the\n room ... \"now conduct the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra in the Fifth\n or 'Fate' symphony of Ludwig von Beethoven ...\" the noise of mixed\n applause, and then the majestic chords of the symphony, thundering\n through the rooms of the cabin.\n\n\n \"Ta-da-da-dumm——Ta-da-da-DUMM!\"",
"Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a\n government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I\n never finished it, there's no point in going into details; it's enough\n to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I'd\n built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set\n of magnetic coils that wouldn't wind properly. When the thing blew up\n I hadn't had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason. I\n was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and\n this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions\n that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they\n thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn't blame them. I\n would have liked to think so.",
"I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I\n was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird\n blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, \"What happened?\"\n\n\n My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling\n wrathfully. \"You tell\nme\nwhat happened! Mike, what in the devil\n were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack\n a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped\n out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with\n your knife! You must be clean crazy!\"",
"My feet struck hard flooring. I wrenched back to consciousness with a\n jolt. Winds blew coldly in my face; the cabin walls had been flung back\n to the high-lying stars. I was standing at a barred window at the very\n pinnacle of a tall tower, in the lap of a weird blueness that arched\n flickeringly in the night. I caught a glimpse of a startled face, a\n lean tired old face beneath a peaked hood, in the moment before my\n knees gave way and I fell, striking my head against the bars of the\n window.",
"It took me a long time to get well. The ribs healed fast—faster\n than the doctor liked. I didn't mind the hospital part, except\n that I couldn't walk without shaking, or light a cigarette without\n burning myself, for months. The thing I minded was what I remembered\nbefore\nI woke up. Delirium; that was what they told me. But\n the\nkind\nand\ntype\nof scars on my body didn't ring true.\n Electricity—even freak lightning—doesn't make that kind of burns. And\n my corner of the world doesn't make a habit of branding people.\n\n\n But before I could show the scars to anybody outside the hospital, they\n were gone. Not healed; just gone. I remembered the look on the medic's\n face when I showed him the place where the scars had been. He didn't\n think I was crazy; he thought\nhe\nwas.",
"The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to\n identity. \"Adric—\" I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it?\n Wasn't it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are\n four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls\n is the chemming of twilp—\nstop that!\nMike Kenscott. Summer\n 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head\n in my hands. \"I'm crazy. Or you are. Or we're both sane and this\n monkey-business is all real.\""
],
[
"I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.",
"The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"",
"\"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"",
"A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"",
"I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I\n was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird\n blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, \"What happened?\"\n\n\n My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling\n wrathfully. \"You tell\nme\nwhat happened! Mike, what in the devil\n were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack\n a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped\n out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with\n your knife! You must be clean crazy!\"",
"Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when\n I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the\n hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had\n made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it\n shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves\n are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of\n lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical\n current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded\n the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my\n body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit\n suicide—but I hadn't.",
"together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A\n tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. \"It started up again\n the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following\n me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the\n lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and\n blew out five fuses trying to change one.\"",
"It took me a long time to get well. The ribs healed fast—faster\n than the doctor liked. I didn't mind the hospital part, except\n that I couldn't walk without shaking, or light a cigarette without\n burning myself, for months. The thing I minded was what I remembered\nbefore\nI woke up. Delirium; that was what they told me. But\n the\nkind\nand\ntype\nof scars on my body didn't ring true.\n Electricity—even freak lightning—doesn't make that kind of burns. And\n my corner of the world doesn't make a habit of branding people.\n\n\n But before I could show the scars to anybody outside the hospital, they\n were gone. Not healed; just gone. I remembered the look on the medic's\n face when I showed him the place where the scars had been. He didn't\n think I was crazy; he thought\nhe\nwas.",
"\"Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—\" My brother's\n eyes watched me, uneasy. \"Mike, you're kidding—\"\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" I said. \"That energy just drains into me, and nothing\n happens. I'm immune.\" I shrugged, rose and walked across to the\n radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the\n disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on.\n \"I'll show you,\" I told him.\n\n\n The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the\n speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.\n\n\n \"Turn it up—\" Andy said uneasily.\n\n\n My hand twiddled the dial. \"It's already up.\"",
"I swore, slamming down the window. I was going to bed. Andy was right.\n Either I was crazy or there was something wrong; in any case, sitting\n here wouldn't help. If it didn't let up, I'd take the first train home\n and see a good electrician—or a psychiatrist. But right now, I was\n going to hit the sack.\n\n\n My hand went out automatically and switched the light off.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" I thought incredulously. I'd shorted the dynamo again. The\n radio stopped as if the whole orchestra had dropped dead; every light\n in the cabin winked swiftly out, but my hand on the switch crackled\n with a phosphorescent glow as the entire house current poured into my\n body. I tingled with weird shock; I heard my own teeth chattering.\n\n\n And something snapped wide open in my brain. I heard, suddenly, an\n excited voice, shouting.",
"I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken\n pieces of Andy's cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with\n it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in\n the living hell had I done a thing like that? I'd warned Andy time\n and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency\n of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I\n didn't wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than\n half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally\n promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles,\n carefully stowed them, cleaned our day's catch. It was dark before I",
"Consciousness of dress made me remember the—nightshirt—I still wore.\n Moving swiftly, without conscious thought, I went to a door and slid\n it open; pulled out some garments and dressed in them. Every garment\n in the closet was the same color; deep-hued crimson. I glanced in the\n mirror and a phrase Gamine had used broke the surface of my mind like\n a leaping fish. \"Lord of the Crimson Tower.\" Well, I looked it. There\n had been knives and swords in the closet; I took out one to look at it,\n and before I realized what I was doing I had belted it across my hip. I\n stared, decided to let it remain. It looked all right with the rest of\n the costume. It felt right, too. Another door folded back noiselessly\n and a man stood looking at me.",
"I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.\n The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the\n States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to\n Andy. \"They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something\n funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments\n they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.\n Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't\n make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or\n whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances\n after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when\n we came down here—\" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions",
"My feet struck hard flooring. I wrenched back to consciousness with a\n jolt. Winds blew coldly in my face; the cabin walls had been flung back\n to the high-lying stars. I was standing at a barred window at the very\n pinnacle of a tall tower, in the lap of a weird blueness that arched\n flickeringly in the night. I caught a glimpse of a startled face, a\n lean tired old face beneath a peaked hood, in the moment before my\n knees gave way and I fell, striking my head against the bars of the\n window.",
"studied it, curious, between half-opened lids. But when I blinked, it\n rose and passed through one of the multitudinous doors; at once a soft\n sibilance of draperies announced return. I sat up, getting my feet to\n the floor, or almost there; the bed was higher than a hospital bed. The\n blue-robe held a handled mug, like a baby's drinking-cup, at me. I took\n it in my hand hesitated—",
"Gamine moved impatiently. \"Oh, very well. You are Adric of Narabedla;\n and if you are sane again, Lord of the Crimson Tower. I am Gamine.\"\n The swathed shoulders moved a little. \"You don't remember? I am a\n spell-singer.\"\n\n\n I jerked my elbow toward the window. \"Those are my own mountains out\n there,\" I said roughly. \"I'm not Adric, whoever he is. My name's Mike\n Kenscott, and your hanky-panky doesn't impress me. Take off that veil\n and let me see your face.\"",
"The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to\n identity. \"Adric—\" I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it?\n Wasn't it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are\n four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls\n is the chemming of twilp—\nstop that!\nMike Kenscott. Summer\n 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head\n in my hands. \"I'm crazy. Or you are. Or we're both sane and this\n monkey-business is all real.\"",
"\"You're—Rhys?\" I said. \"Where in hell have I gotten to?\" At least,\n that's what I meant to say. Imagine my surprise when I found myself\n asking—in a language I'd never heard, but understood perfectly—\"To\n which of the domains of Zandru have I been consigned now?\" At the same\n moment I became conscious of what I was wearing. It seemed to be an\n old-fashioned nightshirt, chopped off at the loins, deep crimson in\n color. \"Red flannels yet!\" I thought with a gulp of dismay. I checked\n my impulse to get out of bed. Who could act sane in a red nightshirt?\n\n\n \"You might have the decency to explain where I am,\" I said. \"If you\n know.\"",
"My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses.\n There was nothing wrong with the radio. \"Mike. What did you do to it?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew,\" I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button\n again.\n\n\n Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.\n\n\n I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily\n backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the\n \"Fate\" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.\n\n\n \"You'd better let it alone!\" Andy said shakily.",
"It started one day in the lab with a shadow on the sun and an elusive\n short circuit that gave me shock after shock until I was jittery. By\n the time I had it fixed, the oscillator had gone out of control. I got\n a series of low-frequency waves that were like nothing I'd ever seen\n before. Then there was something like a voice speaking out of a very\n old, jerry-built amateur radio set. Except that there wasn't a receiver\n in the lab, and no one else had heard it. I wasn't sure myself, because\n right then every instrument in the place went haywire and five minutes\n later, part of the ceiling hit the floor and the floor went up through\n the roof. They found me, they say, lying half-crushed under a beam, and\n I woke up eighteen hours later in a hospital with four cracked ribs,\n and a feeling as if I'd had a lot of voltage poured into me. It went in\n the report that I'd been struck by lightning."
],
[
"I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.",
"\"You're—Rhys?\" I said. \"Where in hell have I gotten to?\" At least,\n that's what I meant to say. Imagine my surprise when I found myself\n asking—in a language I'd never heard, but understood perfectly—\"To\n which of the domains of Zandru have I been consigned now?\" At the same\n moment I became conscious of what I was wearing. It seemed to be an\n old-fashioned nightshirt, chopped off at the loins, deep crimson in\n color. \"Red flannels yet!\" I thought with a gulp of dismay. I checked\n my impulse to get out of bed. Who could act sane in a red nightshirt?\n\n\n \"You might have the decency to explain where I am,\" I said. \"If you\n know.\"",
"The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to\n identity. \"Adric—\" I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it?\n Wasn't it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are\n four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls\n is the chemming of twilp—\nstop that!\nMike Kenscott. Summer\n 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head\n in my hands. \"I'm crazy. Or you are. Or we're both sane and this\n monkey-business is all real.\"",
"The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"",
"\"It is real,\" said Rhys, compassion in his tired face. \"He has been\n very far on the Time Ellipse, Gamine. Adric, try to understand. This\n was Karamy's work. She sent you out on a time line, far, very far into\n the past. Into a time when the Earth was different—she hoped you would\n come back changed, or mad.\" His eyes brooded. \"I think she succeeded.\n Gamine, I have long outstayed my leave. I must return to my own\n tower—or die. Will you explain?\"\n\n\n \"I will.\" A hint of emotion flickered in the voice of Gamine. \"Go,\n Master.\"\n\n\n Rhys left the room, through one of the doors. Gamine turned impatiently\n to me again. \"We waste time this way. Fool, look at yourself!\"",
"The tiredness seemed part of Rhys voice. \"Adric,\" he said wearily. \"Try\n to remember.\" He shrugged his lean shoulders. \"You are in your own\n Tower. And you have been under restraint again. I am sorry.\" His voice\n sounded futile. I felt prickling shivers run down my backbone. In spite\n of the weird surroundings, the phrase \"under restraint\" had struck\n home. I was a lunatic in an asylum.\n\n\n The blue-robed one cut in in that smooth, sexless, faint-sarcastic\n voice. \"While Karamy holds the amnesia-ray, Rhys, you will be\n explaining it to him a dozen times a cycle. He will never be of use\n to us again. This time Karamy won. Adric; try to remember. You are at\n home, in Narabedla.\"",
"\"Gamine—\" the second voice stopped. After a long time, \"You are old,\n and a fool, Rhys,\" it said. \"What is Gamine to me?\"\n\n\n Bodiless, blind, I drifted and swayed and swung in the sound of the\n voices. The humming, like a million high-tension wires, sang around\n me and I felt myself cradled in the pull of a great magnet that\n held me suspended surely on nothingness and drew me down into the\n field of some force beneath. Far below me the voices faded. I swung\n free—fell—plunged downward in sickening motion, head over heels, into\n the abyss....",
"\"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"",
"A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"",
"I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I\n was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird\n blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, \"What happened?\"\n\n\n My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling\n wrathfully. \"You tell\nme\nwhat happened! Mike, what in the devil\n were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack\n a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped\n out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with\n your knife! You must be clean crazy!\"",
"I shook my head. Nightshirt or no nightshirt, I'd face this on my feet.\n I walked to Rhys; put my clenched hands on his shoulders. \"Explain\n this! Who am I supposed to be? You called me Adric. I'm no more Adric\n than you are!\"\n\n\n \"Adric, you are not amusing!\" The blue-robe's voice was edged with\n anger. \"Use what intelligence you have left! You have had enough\nsharig\nantidote to cure a\ntharl\n. Now. Who are you?\"",
"\"I wish you meant that—\" a mournfulness breathed in the soft\n contralto. A sudden fury blazed up in me from nowhere. \"And what right\n have you to pry for that old fool Rhys? Get back to your own place,\n then, spell-singer—\" I broke off, appalled. What was I saying? Worse,\n what did I mean by it? Gamine turned. The sexless voice was coldly\n amused. \"Adric spoke then. Whoever sits in the seat of your soul, you\n are the same—and past redemption!\" The robes whispered sibilantly on\n the floor as Gamine moved to the door. \"Karamy is welcome to her slave!\"\n\n\n The door slammed.",
"\"Rhys!\nRhys!\nThat is the man!\"\nCHAPTER TWO\n\n Rainbow City\n\"\nYou are mad\n,\" said the man with the tired voice.\n\n\n I was drifting. I was swaying, bodiless, over a huge abyss of caverned\n space; chasmed, immense, limitless. Vaguely, through a sleeping\n distance, I heard two voices. This one was old and very tired.\n\n\n \"You are mad. They will know. Narayan will know.\"\n\n\n \"Narayan is a fool,\" said the second voice.\n\n\n \"Narayan is the Dreamer,\" the tired voice said. \"He is the Dreamer, and\n where the Dreamer walks he will know. But have it your way. I am very\n old and it does not matter. I give you this power, freely—to spare\n you. But Gamine—\"",
"I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.\n The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the\n States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to\n Andy. \"They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something\n funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments\n they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.\n Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't\n make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or\n whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances\n after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when\n we came down here—\" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions",
"Left alone, I flung myself down on the high bed, stubbornly\n concentrating on Mike Kenscott, shutting out the vague blurred mystery\n in my mind that was Adric impinging on consciousness. I was not Adric.\n I would\nnot\nbe. I dared not go to the window and look out at the\n terrifying two suns, even to see the reassurance of the familiar Sierra\n Madre skyline. A homesick terror was hurting in me.\n\n\n But persistently the Adric memories came, a guilty feeling of a\n shirked duty, and a frightened face—a real face, not a blurred\n nothingness—beneath Gamine's blue veils. Memories of strange hunts and\n a big bird on the pommel of a high saddle. A bird hooded like a falcon,\n in crimson.",
"Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when\n I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the\n hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had\n made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it\n shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves\n are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of\n lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical\n current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded\n the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my\n body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit\n suicide—but I hadn't.",
"My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses.\n There was nothing wrong with the radio. \"Mike. What did you do to it?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew,\" I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button\n again.\n\n\n Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.\n\n\n I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily\n backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the\n \"Fate\" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.\n\n\n \"You'd better let it alone!\" Andy said shakily.",
"together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A\n tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. \"It started up again\n the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following\n me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the\n lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and\n blew out five fuses trying to change one.\"",
"I swore, slamming down the window. I was going to bed. Andy was right.\n Either I was crazy or there was something wrong; in any case, sitting\n here wouldn't help. If it didn't let up, I'd take the first train home\n and see a good electrician—or a psychiatrist. But right now, I was\n going to hit the sack.\n\n\n My hand went out automatically and switched the light off.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" I thought incredulously. I'd shorted the dynamo again. The\n radio stopped as if the whole orchestra had dropped dead; every light\n in the cabin winked swiftly out, but my hand on the switch crackled\n with a phosphorescent glow as the entire house current poured into my\n body. I tingled with weird shock; I heard my own teeth chattering.\n\n\n And something snapped wide open in my brain. I heard, suddenly, an\n excited voice, shouting.",
"\"Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—\" My brother's\n eyes watched me, uneasy. \"Mike, you're kidding—\"\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" I said. \"That energy just drains into me, and nothing\n happens. I'm immune.\" I shrugged, rose and walked across to the\n radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the\n disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on.\n \"I'll show you,\" I told him.\n\n\n The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the\n speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.\n\n\n \"Turn it up—\" Andy said uneasily.\n\n\n My hand twiddled the dial. \"It's already up.\""
],
[
"\"It is real,\" said Rhys, compassion in his tired face. \"He has been\n very far on the Time Ellipse, Gamine. Adric, try to understand. This\n was Karamy's work. She sent you out on a time line, far, very far into\n the past. Into a time when the Earth was different—she hoped you would\n come back changed, or mad.\" His eyes brooded. \"I think she succeeded.\n Gamine, I have long outstayed my leave. I must return to my own\n tower—or die. Will you explain?\"\n\n\n \"I will.\" A hint of emotion flickered in the voice of Gamine. \"Go,\n Master.\"\n\n\n Rhys left the room, through one of the doors. Gamine turned impatiently\n to me again. \"We waste time this way. Fool, look at yourself!\"",
"The tiredness seemed part of Rhys voice. \"Adric,\" he said wearily. \"Try\n to remember.\" He shrugged his lean shoulders. \"You are in your own\n Tower. And you have been under restraint again. I am sorry.\" His voice\n sounded futile. I felt prickling shivers run down my backbone. In spite\n of the weird surroundings, the phrase \"under restraint\" had struck\n home. I was a lunatic in an asylum.\n\n\n The blue-robed one cut in in that smooth, sexless, faint-sarcastic\n voice. \"While Karamy holds the amnesia-ray, Rhys, you will be\n explaining it to him a dozen times a cycle. He will never be of use\n to us again. This time Karamy won. Adric; try to remember. You are at\n home, in Narabedla.\"",
"Wrath—Adric's wrath—boiled up in me; but Evarin moved lithely\n backward. \"I am not Gamine,\" he warned. \"And I will not be served like\n Gamine has been served. Take care.\"\n\n\n \"Take care yourself,\" I muttered, knowing little else I could have\n said. Evarin drew back thin lips. \"Why? You have been sent out on the\n Time Ellipse till you are only a shadow of yourself. But all this is\n beside the point. Karamy says you are to be freed, so the seals are off\n all the doors, and the Crimson Tower is no longer a prison to you. Come\n and go as you please. Karamy—\" his lips formed a sneer. \"If you call\nthat\nfreedom!\"\n\n\n I said slowly, \"You think I'm not crazy?\"",
"\"I wish you meant that—\" a mournfulness breathed in the soft\n contralto. A sudden fury blazed up in me from nowhere. \"And what right\n have you to pry for that old fool Rhys? Get back to your own place,\n then, spell-singer—\" I broke off, appalled. What was I saying? Worse,\n what did I mean by it? Gamine turned. The sexless voice was coldly\n amused. \"Adric spoke then. Whoever sits in the seat of your soul, you\n are the same—and past redemption!\" The robes whispered sibilantly on\n the floor as Gamine moved to the door. \"Karamy is welcome to her slave!\"\n\n\n The door slammed.",
"He was young and would have been handsome in an effeminate way if his\n face had not been so arrogant. Lean, somehow catlike, it was easy to\n determine that he was akin to Adric, or me, even before the automatic\n habit of memory fitted name and identity to him. \"Evarin,\" I said,\n warily.\n\n\n He came forward, moving so softly that for an uneasy moment I wondered\n if he had pads like a cat's on his feet. He wore deep green from head\n to foot, similar to the crimson garments that clothed me. His face had\n a flickering, as if he could at a moment's notice raise a barrier of\n invisibility like Gamine's about himself. He didn't look as human as I.\n\n\n \"I have seen Gamine,\" he said. \"She says you are awake, and as sane as\n you ever were. We of Narabedla are not so strong that we can afford to\n waste even a broken tool like you.\"",
"I shook my head. Nightshirt or no nightshirt, I'd face this on my feet.\n I walked to Rhys; put my clenched hands on his shoulders. \"Explain\n this! Who am I supposed to be? You called me Adric. I'm no more Adric\n than you are!\"\n\n\n \"Adric, you are not amusing!\" The blue-robe's voice was edged with\n anger. \"Use what intelligence you have left! You have had enough\nsharig\nantidote to cure a\ntharl\n. Now. Who are you?\"",
"The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to\n identity. \"Adric—\" I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it?\n Wasn't it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are\n four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls\n is the chemming of twilp—\nstop that!\nMike Kenscott. Summer\n 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head\n in my hands. \"I'm crazy. Or you are. Or we're both sane and this\n monkey-business is all real.\"",
"Left alone, I flung myself down on the high bed, stubbornly\n concentrating on Mike Kenscott, shutting out the vague blurred mystery\n in my mind that was Adric impinging on consciousness. I was not Adric.\n I would\nnot\nbe. I dared not go to the window and look out at the\n terrifying two suns, even to see the reassurance of the familiar Sierra\n Madre skyline. A homesick terror was hurting in me.\n\n\n But persistently the Adric memories came, a guilty feeling of a\n shirked duty, and a frightened face—a real face, not a blurred\n nothingness—beneath Gamine's blue veils. Memories of strange hunts and\n a big bird on the pommel of a high saddle. A bird hooded like a falcon,\n in crimson.",
"The exultation faded from Gamine's voice imperceptibly. \"Never mind. It\n is improbable in any case. No, Adric; not really travelling. You were\n only sent out on the Time Ellipse, till you contacted some one in that\n other Time. Perhaps you stayed in contact with his mind so long that\n you think you are he?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not Adric—\" I raged. \"Adric sent me here—\"\n\n\n I saw the blurring around Gamine's invisible features twitch in a\n headshake. \"It's never been proven that two minds can be interchanged\n like that. Adric's body. Adric's brain. The brain convolutions, the\n memory centers, the habit patterns—you'd still be Adric. The idea that\n you are someone else is only an illusion of your conscious mind. It\n will wear off.\"\n\n\n I shook my head, puzzled. \"I still don't believe it. Where am I?\"",
"Gamine moved impatiently. \"Oh, very well. You are Adric of Narabedla;\n and if you are sane again, Lord of the Crimson Tower. I am Gamine.\"\n The swathed shoulders moved a little. \"You don't remember? I am a\n spell-singer.\"\n\n\n I jerked my elbow toward the window. \"Those are my own mountains out\n there,\" I said roughly. \"I'm not Adric, whoever he is. My name's Mike\n Kenscott, and your hanky-panky doesn't impress me. Take off that veil\n and let me see your face.\"",
"It was proof enough for me. I turned desperately to Gamine behind me.\n \"Where have I gotten, to? Where—\nwhen\nam I? Two suns—those\n mountains—\"\n\n\n The change in Gamine's voice was swift; the veiled face lifted\n questioningly to mine. What I had thought a veil was not that; it\n seemed to be more like a shimmering screen wrapped around the features\n so that Gamine was faceless, an invisible person with substance but\n no apprehensible characteristics. Yes, it was like that; as if there\n was an invisible person wearing the curious silken draperies. But the\n invisible flesh was solid enough. Hands like cold steel gripped my\n shoulders. \"You have been back? Back to the days before the second sun?\n Adric, tell me; did Earth truly have but one sun?\"\n\n\n \"Wait—\" I begged. \"You mean I've travelled in time?\"",
"I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I\n was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird\n blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, \"What happened?\"\n\n\n My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling\n wrathfully. \"You tell\nme\nwhat happened! Mike, what in the devil\n were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack\n a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped\n out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with\n your knife! You must be clean crazy!\"",
"Somewhere on the Time Ellipse Mike Kenscott became Adric;\n\n and the only way to return to his own identity was to find\n\n the Keep of the Dreamer, and loose the terrible\nFALCONS of NARABEDLA\nBy Marion Zimmer Bradley\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds\n\n May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nContents\nCHAPTER ONE\n\n Voltage—from Nowhere!\nSomewhere on the crags above us I heard a big bird scream.",
"My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses.\n There was nothing wrong with the radio. \"Mike. What did you do to it?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew,\" I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button\n again.\n\n\n Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.\n\n\n I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily\n backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the\n \"Fate\" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.\n\n\n \"You'd better let it alone!\" Andy said shakily.",
"Evarin snorted. \"Except where Karamy is concerned, you never were. What\n is that to me? I have everything I need. The Dreamer gives me good\n hunting and slaves enough to do my bidding. For the rest, I am the\n Toymaker. I need little. But you—\" his voice leaped with contempt,\n \"you ride time at Karamy's bidding—and your Dreamer walks—waiting the\n coming of his power that he may destroy us all one day!\"\n\n\n I stared somberly at Evarin, standing still near the door. The words\n seemed to wake an almost personal shame in me. The boy watched and his\n face lost some of his bitterness. He said more quietly, \"The falcon\n flown cannot be recalled. I came only to tell you that you are free.\"\n He turned, shrugging his thin shoulders, and walked to the window. \"As\n I say, if you call that freedom.\"",
"I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.",
"The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"",
"Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when\n I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the\n hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had\n made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it\n shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves\n are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of\n lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical\n current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded\n the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my\n body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit\n suicide—but I hadn't.",
"\"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"",
"A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\""
]
] |
test
|
25629
|
[
"Why did the chief make Preston a postman? ",
"Why did Preston feel shame during his first mission as a postman? ",
"Why did Preston continuously hit his ships controls during the encounter with the pirates?",
"How was Preston able to avoid the space pirates?",
"Why was Preston not able to directly land at the dome on Ganymede?",
"Why were the citizens in the dome of Ganymede unable to contact outsides and warn them of the situation? ",
"How was Preston able to get into the dome on Ganymede? ",
"Why were the citizens of Ganymede reluctant to open the airlock for Preston? ",
"How did the citizens of Ganymede thank Preston? ",
"How did Preston’s attitude about his new position change throughout the story? "
] |
[
[
"Preston had reached retirement age and the chief wanted him to have an easy job",
"Preston had angered the chief ",
"Preston was bad at being a patrol man ",
"Preston was experienced and being a postman was more difficult than expected "
],
[
"He had failed to deliver the mail and complete his mission",
"He was being escorted by two of his former patrolman colleagues ",
"He navigated the convoy directly into the path of pirates",
"He was responsible for the deaths of his former patrolman partners "
],
[
"His weapons were malfunctioning ",
"He was used to having weapons to fire as a former patrolmen ",
"He was trying to contact his convoy but the connection was blocked ",
"He was trying to increase his speed and run away from the pirates "
],
[
"He outran the pirate using his superior piloting skills ",
"He destroyed the pirates ships using his extra fuel canister ",
"His escorts sacrificed themselves so that he could escape",
"He used his training as a patrolman and destroyed there ships"
],
[
"The dome had been blocked by local wildlife ",
"He was being pursued by space pirates",
"He was not able to make contact with the local population",
"Preston’s ship was running out of fuel"
],
[
"All of the citizens of Ganymede had perished ",
"Their radio transmitter had been destroyed",
"They were purposefully hiding from the space pirates ",
"They were too far away from anyone to contact them"
],
[
"He snuck in using the distraction of the ice worms surrounding the dome ",
"He blazed a path through the local wildlife using his spare fuel reserves",
"He convinced the citizens to let him in despite their blockade ",
"He was not able to enter the dome on Ganymede"
],
[
"They did not want to receive the mail that Preston had ",
"They did not think his plan would work ",
"They thought Preston might be a space pirate ",
"All of the citizens were incapacitated "
],
[
"They allowed Preston to enter the dome",
"They threw Preston a party ",
"They provided Preston with supplies for his return trip",
"Preston would not allow them to thank him?"
],
[
"He realized it was a difficult and honorable job ",
"He realized it was an incredibly easy job ",
"He realized that he was not qualified to be doing the job ",
"He realized that the job was simply a temporary position"
]
] |
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-1,
-1,
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[
"Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"",
"Suddenly, Preston felt a\n hand on his shoulder. He\n looked up and saw a man in\n the trim gray of a Patrolman's\n uniform.\n\n\n \"What do you want,\n Dawes?\"\n\n\n \"Chief's been looking for\n you, Preston. It's time for\n you to get going on your run.\"\n\n\n Preston scowled. \"Time to\n go deliver the mail, eh?\" He\n spat. \"Don't they have anything\n better to do with good\n spacemen than make letter\n carriers out of them?\"\nThe other man shook his\n head. \"You won't get anywhere\n grousing about it,\n Preston. Your papers don't\n specify which branch you're\n assigned to, and if they want\n to make you carry the mail—that's\n it.\" His voice became\n suddenly gentle. \"Come on,\n Pres. One last drink, and\n then let's go. You don't want\n to spoil a good record, do\n you?\"",
"\"No,\" Preston said reflectively.\n He gulped his drink\n and stood up. \"Okay. I'm\n ready. Neither snow nor rain\n shall stay me from my appointed\n rounds, or however\n the damned thing goes.\"\n\n\n \"That's a smart attitude,\n Preston. Come on—I'll walk\n you over to Administration.\"\nSavagely, Preston ripped\n away the hand that the other\n had put around his shoulders.\n \"I can get there myself. At\n least give me credit for that!\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Dawes said, shrugging.\n \"Well—good luck,\n Preston.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Thanks. Thanks\n real lots.\"\n\n\n He pushed his way past the\n man in Space Grays and\n shouldered past a couple of\n barflies as he left. He pushed\n open the door of the bar and\n stood outside for a moment.",
"He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"",
"The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"",
"\"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"",
"\"Cheers,\" Preston said,\n and yanked the blast-lever.\n The ship jolted upward, and\n for a second he felt a little\n of the old thrill—until he remembered.\n\n\n He took the ship out in\n space, saw the blackness in\n the viewplate. The radio\n crackled.\n\n\n \"Come in, Postal Ship.\n Come in, Postal Ship.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in. What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"We're your convoy,\" a\n hard voice said. \"Patrol Ship\n 08756, Lieutenant Mellors,\n above you. Down at three\n o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732,\n Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll\n take you through the Pirate\n Belt.\"",
"\"But you can't come down!\n How will you leave your\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\"\n Preston said calmly.\n\n\n \"We have to worry! We\n don't dare open the Dome,\n with those creatures outside.\n You\ncan't\ncome down, Postal\n Ship.\"\n\n\n \"You want your mail or\n don't you?\"\n\n\n The colonist paused.\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, then,\" Preston said.\n \"Shut up and give me landing\n coordinates!\"\n\n\n There was a pause, and\n then the figures started coming\n over. Preston jotted them\n down on a scratch-pad.",
"\"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.",
"Consider the poor mailman of the future. To \"sleet and snow\n and dead of night\"—things that must not keep him from his\n appointed rounds—will be added, sub-zero void, meteors, and\n planets that won't stay put. Maybe he'll decide that for six\n cents an ounce it just ain't worth it.\nPOSTMARK\n\n GANYMEDE\nBy\n\n ROBERT\n\n SILVERBERG\n\"I'm\n washed up,\" Preston\n growled bitterly. \"They\n made a postman out of me.\n Me—a postman!\"\n\n\n He crumpled the assignment\n memo into a small, hard\n ball and hurled it at the\n bristly image of himself in\n the bar mirror. He hadn't\n shaved in three days—which\n was how long it had been\n since he had been notified of\n his removal from Space Patrol\n Service and his transfer\n to Postal Delivery.",
"\"Hero?\" Preston shrugged.\n \"All I did was deliver the\n mail. It's all in a day's work,\n you know. The mail's got to\n get through!\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Stories\nSeptember 1957.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"\"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.",
"And the mindless iceworms\n came, marching toward the\n fire, being consumed, as still\n others devoured the bodies of\n the dead and dying.\n\n\n Preston looked away and\n concentrated on the business\n of finding a place to land the\n ship.\nThe holocaust still raged as\n he leaped down from the catwalk\n of the ship, clutching\n one of the heavy mail sacks,\n and struggled through the\n melting snows to the airlock.\n\n\n He grinned. The airlock\n was open.\n\n\n Arms grabbed him, pulled\n him through. Someone opened\n his helmet.\n\n\n \"Great job, Postman!\"\n\n\n \"There are two more mail sacks,\"\n Preston said. \"Get\n men out after them.\"",
"Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"",
"It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"",
"Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them.",
"It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.",
"He made computations,\n checked his controls, figured\n orbits. Anything to keep from\n having to talk to his two ex-Patrolmates\n or from having\n to think about the humiliating\n job he was on. Anything to—\n\"\nPirates! Moving up at two\n o'clock!\n\"\n\n\n Preston came awake. He\n picked off the location of the\n pirate ships—there were two\n of them, coming up out of the\n asteroid belt. Small, deadly,\n compact, they orbited toward\n him.\n\n\n He pounded the instrument\n panel in impotent rage, looking\n for the guns that weren't\n there.\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Pres,\" came\n Mellors' voice. \"We'll take\n care of them for you.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Preston said bitterly.\n He watched as the pirate\n ships approached, longing\n to trade places with the\n men in the Patrol ships above\n and below him.",
"His scratch-pad began to\n fill with notations.\nFuel storage—\nEscape velocity—\nMargin of error—\nSafety factor—\nFinally he looked up. He\n had computed exactly how\n much spare fuel he had, how\n much he could afford to\n waste. It was a small figure—too\n small, perhaps.\n\n\n He turned to the radio.\n \"Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Where are you, Postal\n Ship?\"\n\n\n \"I'm in a tight orbit about\n a hundred miles up,\" Preston\n said. \"Give me the figures on\n the circumference of your\n Dome, Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Seven miles,\" the colonist\n said. \"What are you planning\n to do?\"",
"Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\""
],
[
"\"No,\" Preston said reflectively.\n He gulped his drink\n and stood up. \"Okay. I'm\n ready. Neither snow nor rain\n shall stay me from my appointed\n rounds, or however\n the damned thing goes.\"\n\n\n \"That's a smart attitude,\n Preston. Come on—I'll walk\n you over to Administration.\"\nSavagely, Preston ripped\n away the hand that the other\n had put around his shoulders.\n \"I can get there myself. At\n least give me credit for that!\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Dawes said, shrugging.\n \"Well—good luck,\n Preston.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Thanks. Thanks\n real lots.\"\n\n\n He pushed his way past the\n man in Space Grays and\n shouldered past a couple of\n barflies as he left. He pushed\n open the door of the bar and\n stood outside for a moment.",
"Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"",
"Suddenly, Preston felt a\n hand on his shoulder. He\n looked up and saw a man in\n the trim gray of a Patrolman's\n uniform.\n\n\n \"What do you want,\n Dawes?\"\n\n\n \"Chief's been looking for\n you, Preston. It's time for\n you to get going on your run.\"\n\n\n Preston scowled. \"Time to\n go deliver the mail, eh?\" He\n spat. \"Don't they have anything\n better to do with good\n spacemen than make letter\n carriers out of them?\"\nThe other man shook his\n head. \"You won't get anywhere\n grousing about it,\n Preston. Your papers don't\n specify which branch you're\n assigned to, and if they want\n to make you carry the mail—that's\n it.\" His voice became\n suddenly gentle. \"Come on,\n Pres. One last drink, and\n then let's go. You don't want\n to spoil a good record, do\n you?\"",
"The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"",
"He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"",
"\"Cheers,\" Preston said,\n and yanked the blast-lever.\n The ship jolted upward, and\n for a second he felt a little\n of the old thrill—until he remembered.\n\n\n He took the ship out in\n space, saw the blackness in\n the viewplate. The radio\n crackled.\n\n\n \"Come in, Postal Ship.\n Come in, Postal Ship.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in. What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"We're your convoy,\" a\n hard voice said. \"Patrol Ship\n 08756, Lieutenant Mellors,\n above you. Down at three\n o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732,\n Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll\n take you through the Pirate\n Belt.\"",
"\"Hero?\" Preston shrugged.\n \"All I did was deliver the\n mail. It's all in a day's work,\n you know. The mail's got to\n get through!\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Stories\nSeptember 1957.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"\"But you can't come down!\n How will you leave your\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\"\n Preston said calmly.\n\n\n \"We have to worry! We\n don't dare open the Dome,\n with those creatures outside.\n You\ncan't\ncome down, Postal\n Ship.\"\n\n\n \"You want your mail or\n don't you?\"\n\n\n The colonist paused.\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, then,\" Preston said.\n \"Shut up and give me landing\n coordinates!\"\n\n\n There was a pause, and\n then the figures started coming\n over. Preston jotted them\n down on a scratch-pad.",
"\"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.",
"And the mindless iceworms\n came, marching toward the\n fire, being consumed, as still\n others devoured the bodies of\n the dead and dying.\n\n\n Preston looked away and\n concentrated on the business\n of finding a place to land the\n ship.\nThe holocaust still raged as\n he leaped down from the catwalk\n of the ship, clutching\n one of the heavy mail sacks,\n and struggled through the\n melting snows to the airlock.\n\n\n He grinned. The airlock\n was open.\n\n\n Arms grabbed him, pulled\n him through. Someone opened\n his helmet.\n\n\n \"Great job, Postman!\"\n\n\n \"There are two more mail sacks,\"\n Preston said. \"Get\n men out after them.\"",
"\"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"",
"Consider the poor mailman of the future. To \"sleet and snow\n and dead of night\"—things that must not keep him from his\n appointed rounds—will be added, sub-zero void, meteors, and\n planets that won't stay put. Maybe he'll decide that for six\n cents an ounce it just ain't worth it.\nPOSTMARK\n\n GANYMEDE\nBy\n\n ROBERT\n\n SILVERBERG\n\"I'm\n washed up,\" Preston\n growled bitterly. \"They\n made a postman out of me.\n Me—a postman!\"\n\n\n He crumpled the assignment\n memo into a small, hard\n ball and hurled it at the\n bristly image of himself in\n the bar mirror. He hadn't\n shaved in three days—which\n was how long it had been\n since he had been notified of\n his removal from Space Patrol\n Service and his transfer\n to Postal Delivery.",
"Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"",
"It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"",
"He made computations,\n checked his controls, figured\n orbits. Anything to keep from\n having to talk to his two ex-Patrolmates\n or from having\n to think about the humiliating\n job he was on. Anything to—\n\"\nPirates! Moving up at two\n o'clock!\n\"\n\n\n Preston came awake. He\n picked off the location of the\n pirate ships—there were two\n of them, coming up out of the\n asteroid belt. Small, deadly,\n compact, they orbited toward\n him.\n\n\n He pounded the instrument\n panel in impotent rage, looking\n for the guns that weren't\n there.\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Pres,\" came\n Mellors' voice. \"We'll take\n care of them for you.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Preston said bitterly.\n He watched as the pirate\n ships approached, longing\n to trade places with the\n men in the Patrol ships above\n and below him.",
"\"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.",
"Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"",
"Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them.",
"His scratch-pad began to\n fill with notations.\nFuel storage—\nEscape velocity—\nMargin of error—\nSafety factor—\nFinally he looked up. He\n had computed exactly how\n much spare fuel he had, how\n much he could afford to\n waste. It was a small figure—too\n small, perhaps.\n\n\n He turned to the radio.\n \"Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Where are you, Postal\n Ship?\"\n\n\n \"I'm in a tight orbit about\n a hundred miles up,\" Preston\n said. \"Give me the figures on\n the circumference of your\n Dome, Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Seven miles,\" the colonist\n said. \"What are you planning\n to do?\"",
"It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through."
],
[
"He made computations,\n checked his controls, figured\n orbits. Anything to keep from\n having to talk to his two ex-Patrolmates\n or from having\n to think about the humiliating\n job he was on. Anything to—\n\"\nPirates! Moving up at two\n o'clock!\n\"\n\n\n Preston came awake. He\n picked off the location of the\n pirate ships—there were two\n of them, coming up out of the\n asteroid belt. Small, deadly,\n compact, they orbited toward\n him.\n\n\n He pounded the instrument\n panel in impotent rage, looking\n for the guns that weren't\n there.\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Pres,\" came\n Mellors' voice. \"We'll take\n care of them for you.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Preston said bitterly.\n He watched as the pirate\n ships approached, longing\n to trade places with the\n men in the Patrol ships above\n and below him.",
"\"Cheers,\" Preston said,\n and yanked the blast-lever.\n The ship jolted upward, and\n for a second he felt a little\n of the old thrill—until he remembered.\n\n\n He took the ship out in\n space, saw the blackness in\n the viewplate. The radio\n crackled.\n\n\n \"Come in, Postal Ship.\n Come in, Postal Ship.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in. What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"We're your convoy,\" a\n hard voice said. \"Patrol Ship\n 08756, Lieutenant Mellors,\n above you. Down at three\n o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732,\n Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll\n take you through the Pirate\n Belt.\"",
"Suddenly a bright spear of\n flame lashed out across space\n and the hull of Gunderson's\n ship glowed cherry red. \"I'm\n okay,\" Gunderson reported\n immediately. \"Screens took\n the charge.\"\n\n\n Preston gripped his controls\n and threw the ship into\n a plunging dive that dropped\n it back behind the protection\n of both Patrol ships. He saw\n Gunderson and Mellors converge\n on one of the pirates.\n Two blue beams licked out,\n and the pirate ship exploded.\n\n\n But then the second pirate\n swooped down in an unexpected\n dive. \"Look out!\"\n Preston yelled helplessly—but\n it was too late. Beams ripped\n into the hull of Mellors' ship,\n and a dark fissure line opened\n down the side of the ship.\n Preston smashed his hand\n against the control panel.\n Better to die in an honest\n dogfight than to live this\n way!",
"It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.",
"\"No,\" Preston said reflectively.\n He gulped his drink\n and stood up. \"Okay. I'm\n ready. Neither snow nor rain\n shall stay me from my appointed\n rounds, or however\n the damned thing goes.\"\n\n\n \"That's a smart attitude,\n Preston. Come on—I'll walk\n you over to Administration.\"\nSavagely, Preston ripped\n away the hand that the other\n had put around his shoulders.\n \"I can get there myself. At\n least give me credit for that!\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Dawes said, shrugging.\n \"Well—good luck,\n Preston.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Thanks. Thanks\n real lots.\"\n\n\n He pushed his way past the\n man in Space Grays and\n shouldered past a couple of\n barflies as he left. He pushed\n open the door of the bar and\n stood outside for a moment.",
"He centered the ship as\n well as he could on the Dome\n below and threw it into automatic\n pilot. Jumping from\n the control panel, he ran back\n toward the gun turret and slammed\n shut the plexilite screen.\n Its outer wall opened and the\n fuel-tank went tumbling outward\n and down. He returned\n to his control-panel seat and\n looked at the viewscreen. He\n smiled.\n\n\n The fuel-tank was lying\n near the Dome—right in the\n middle of the nest of iceworms.\n The fuel was leaking\n from the puncture.\n\n\n The iceworms writhed in\n from all sides.\n\n\n \"Now!\" Preston said grimly.\n\n\n The ship roared down, jets\n blasting. The fire licked out,\n heated the ground, melted\n snow—ignited the fuel-tank!\n A gigantic flame blazed up,\n reflected harshly off the\n snows of Ganymede.",
"Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"",
"\"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.",
"\"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.",
"It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"",
"\"But you can't come down!\n How will you leave your\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\"\n Preston said calmly.\n\n\n \"We have to worry! We\n don't dare open the Dome,\n with those creatures outside.\n You\ncan't\ncome down, Postal\n Ship.\"\n\n\n \"You want your mail or\n don't you?\"\n\n\n The colonist paused.\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, then,\" Preston said.\n \"Shut up and give me landing\n coordinates!\"\n\n\n There was a pause, and\n then the figures started coming\n over. Preston jotted them\n down on a scratch-pad.",
"Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"",
"The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"",
"Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"",
"Suddenly, Preston felt a\n hand on his shoulder. He\n looked up and saw a man in\n the trim gray of a Patrolman's\n uniform.\n\n\n \"What do you want,\n Dawes?\"\n\n\n \"Chief's been looking for\n you, Preston. It's time for\n you to get going on your run.\"\n\n\n Preston scowled. \"Time to\n go deliver the mail, eh?\" He\n spat. \"Don't they have anything\n better to do with good\n spacemen than make letter\n carriers out of them?\"\nThe other man shook his\n head. \"You won't get anywhere\n grousing about it,\n Preston. Your papers don't\n specify which branch you're\n assigned to, and if they want\n to make you carry the mail—that's\n it.\" His voice became\n suddenly gentle. \"Come on,\n Pres. One last drink, and\n then let's go. You don't want\n to spoil a good record, do\n you?\"",
"\"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"",
"Getting up, he clambered\n over the mail sacks and\n headed toward the rear of the\n ship, hunting for the auxiliary\n fuel-tanks.\n\n\n Working rapidly, he lugged\n one out and strapped it into\n an empty gun turret, making\n sure he could get it loose\n again when he'd need it.\n\n\n He wiped away sweat and\n checked the angle at which\n the fuel-tank would face the\n ground when he came down\n for a landing. Satisfied, he\n knocked a hole in the side of\n the fuel-tank.\n\n\n \"Okay, Ganymede,\" he radioed.\n \"I'm coming down.\"\n\n\n He blasted loose from the\n tight orbit and rocked the\n ship down on manual. The\n forbidding surface of Ganymede\n grew closer and closer.\n Now he could see the iceworms\n plainly.",
"He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"",
"And the mindless iceworms\n came, marching toward the\n fire, being consumed, as still\n others devoured the bodies of\n the dead and dying.\n\n\n Preston looked away and\n concentrated on the business\n of finding a place to land the\n ship.\nThe holocaust still raged as\n he leaped down from the catwalk\n of the ship, clutching\n one of the heavy mail sacks,\n and struggled through the\n melting snows to the airlock.\n\n\n He grinned. The airlock\n was open.\n\n\n Arms grabbed him, pulled\n him through. Someone opened\n his helmet.\n\n\n \"Great job, Postman!\"\n\n\n \"There are two more mail sacks,\"\n Preston said. \"Get\n men out after them.\"",
"Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them."
],
[
"\"Cheers,\" Preston said,\n and yanked the blast-lever.\n The ship jolted upward, and\n for a second he felt a little\n of the old thrill—until he remembered.\n\n\n He took the ship out in\n space, saw the blackness in\n the viewplate. The radio\n crackled.\n\n\n \"Come in, Postal Ship.\n Come in, Postal Ship.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in. What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"We're your convoy,\" a\n hard voice said. \"Patrol Ship\n 08756, Lieutenant Mellors,\n above you. Down at three\n o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732,\n Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll\n take you through the Pirate\n Belt.\"",
"It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.",
"He made computations,\n checked his controls, figured\n orbits. Anything to keep from\n having to talk to his two ex-Patrolmates\n or from having\n to think about the humiliating\n job he was on. Anything to—\n\"\nPirates! Moving up at two\n o'clock!\n\"\n\n\n Preston came awake. He\n picked off the location of the\n pirate ships—there were two\n of them, coming up out of the\n asteroid belt. Small, deadly,\n compact, they orbited toward\n him.\n\n\n He pounded the instrument\n panel in impotent rage, looking\n for the guns that weren't\n there.\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Pres,\" came\n Mellors' voice. \"We'll take\n care of them for you.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Preston said bitterly.\n He watched as the pirate\n ships approached, longing\n to trade places with the\n men in the Patrol ships above\n and below him.",
"Suddenly a bright spear of\n flame lashed out across space\n and the hull of Gunderson's\n ship glowed cherry red. \"I'm\n okay,\" Gunderson reported\n immediately. \"Screens took\n the charge.\"\n\n\n Preston gripped his controls\n and threw the ship into\n a plunging dive that dropped\n it back behind the protection\n of both Patrol ships. He saw\n Gunderson and Mellors converge\n on one of the pirates.\n Two blue beams licked out,\n and the pirate ship exploded.\n\n\n But then the second pirate\n swooped down in an unexpected\n dive. \"Look out!\"\n Preston yelled helplessly—but\n it was too late. Beams ripped\n into the hull of Mellors' ship,\n and a dark fissure line opened\n down the side of the ship.\n Preston smashed his hand\n against the control panel.\n Better to die in an honest\n dogfight than to live this\n way!",
"The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"",
"\"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.",
"He centered the ship as\n well as he could on the Dome\n below and threw it into automatic\n pilot. Jumping from\n the control panel, he ran back\n toward the gun turret and slammed\n shut the plexilite screen.\n Its outer wall opened and the\n fuel-tank went tumbling outward\n and down. He returned\n to his control-panel seat and\n looked at the viewscreen. He\n smiled.\n\n\n The fuel-tank was lying\n near the Dome—right in the\n middle of the nest of iceworms.\n The fuel was leaking\n from the puncture.\n\n\n The iceworms writhed in\n from all sides.\n\n\n \"Now!\" Preston said grimly.\n\n\n The ship roared down, jets\n blasting. The fire licked out,\n heated the ground, melted\n snow—ignited the fuel-tank!\n A gigantic flame blazed up,\n reflected harshly off the\n snows of Ganymede.",
"Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"",
"\"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.",
"\"But you can't come down!\n How will you leave your\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\"\n Preston said calmly.\n\n\n \"We have to worry! We\n don't dare open the Dome,\n with those creatures outside.\n You\ncan't\ncome down, Postal\n Ship.\"\n\n\n \"You want your mail or\n don't you?\"\n\n\n The colonist paused.\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, then,\" Preston said.\n \"Shut up and give me landing\n coordinates!\"\n\n\n There was a pause, and\n then the figures started coming\n over. Preston jotted them\n down on a scratch-pad.",
"Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"",
"He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"",
"\"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"",
"\"No,\" Preston said reflectively.\n He gulped his drink\n and stood up. \"Okay. I'm\n ready. Neither snow nor rain\n shall stay me from my appointed\n rounds, or however\n the damned thing goes.\"\n\n\n \"That's a smart attitude,\n Preston. Come on—I'll walk\n you over to Administration.\"\nSavagely, Preston ripped\n away the hand that the other\n had put around his shoulders.\n \"I can get there myself. At\n least give me credit for that!\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Dawes said, shrugging.\n \"Well—good luck,\n Preston.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Thanks. Thanks\n real lots.\"\n\n\n He pushed his way past the\n man in Space Grays and\n shouldered past a couple of\n barflies as he left. He pushed\n open the door of the bar and\n stood outside for a moment.",
"It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"",
"Suddenly, Preston felt a\n hand on his shoulder. He\n looked up and saw a man in\n the trim gray of a Patrolman's\n uniform.\n\n\n \"What do you want,\n Dawes?\"\n\n\n \"Chief's been looking for\n you, Preston. It's time for\n you to get going on your run.\"\n\n\n Preston scowled. \"Time to\n go deliver the mail, eh?\" He\n spat. \"Don't they have anything\n better to do with good\n spacemen than make letter\n carriers out of them?\"\nThe other man shook his\n head. \"You won't get anywhere\n grousing about it,\n Preston. Your papers don't\n specify which branch you're\n assigned to, and if they want\n to make you carry the mail—that's\n it.\" His voice became\n suddenly gentle. \"Come on,\n Pres. One last drink, and\n then let's go. You don't want\n to spoil a good record, do\n you?\"",
"Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them.",
"Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"",
"His scratch-pad began to\n fill with notations.\nFuel storage—\nEscape velocity—\nMargin of error—\nSafety factor—\nFinally he looked up. He\n had computed exactly how\n much spare fuel he had, how\n much he could afford to\n waste. It was a small figure—too\n small, perhaps.\n\n\n He turned to the radio.\n \"Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Where are you, Postal\n Ship?\"\n\n\n \"I'm in a tight orbit about\n a hundred miles up,\" Preston\n said. \"Give me the figures on\n the circumference of your\n Dome, Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Seven miles,\" the colonist\n said. \"What are you planning\n to do?\"",
"Getting up, he clambered\n over the mail sacks and\n headed toward the rear of the\n ship, hunting for the auxiliary\n fuel-tanks.\n\n\n Working rapidly, he lugged\n one out and strapped it into\n an empty gun turret, making\n sure he could get it loose\n again when he'd need it.\n\n\n He wiped away sweat and\n checked the angle at which\n the fuel-tank would face the\n ground when he came down\n for a landing. Satisfied, he\n knocked a hole in the side of\n the fuel-tank.\n\n\n \"Okay, Ganymede,\" he radioed.\n \"I'm coming down.\"\n\n\n He blasted loose from the\n tight orbit and rocked the\n ship down on manual. The\n forbidding surface of Ganymede\n grew closer and closer.\n Now he could see the iceworms\n plainly."
],
[
"He centered the ship as\n well as he could on the Dome\n below and threw it into automatic\n pilot. Jumping from\n the control panel, he ran back\n toward the gun turret and slammed\n shut the plexilite screen.\n Its outer wall opened and the\n fuel-tank went tumbling outward\n and down. He returned\n to his control-panel seat and\n looked at the viewscreen. He\n smiled.\n\n\n The fuel-tank was lying\n near the Dome—right in the\n middle of the nest of iceworms.\n The fuel was leaking\n from the puncture.\n\n\n The iceworms writhed in\n from all sides.\n\n\n \"Now!\" Preston said grimly.\n\n\n The ship roared down, jets\n blasting. The fire licked out,\n heated the ground, melted\n snow—ignited the fuel-tank!\n A gigantic flame blazed up,\n reflected harshly off the\n snows of Ganymede.",
"Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"",
"\"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.",
"Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them.",
"\"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"",
"His scratch-pad began to\n fill with notations.\nFuel storage—\nEscape velocity—\nMargin of error—\nSafety factor—\nFinally he looked up. He\n had computed exactly how\n much spare fuel he had, how\n much he could afford to\n waste. It was a small figure—too\n small, perhaps.\n\n\n He turned to the radio.\n \"Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Where are you, Postal\n Ship?\"\n\n\n \"I'm in a tight orbit about\n a hundred miles up,\" Preston\n said. \"Give me the figures on\n the circumference of your\n Dome, Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Seven miles,\" the colonist\n said. \"What are you planning\n to do?\"",
"Getting up, he clambered\n over the mail sacks and\n headed toward the rear of the\n ship, hunting for the auxiliary\n fuel-tanks.\n\n\n Working rapidly, he lugged\n one out and strapped it into\n an empty gun turret, making\n sure he could get it loose\n again when he'd need it.\n\n\n He wiped away sweat and\n checked the angle at which\n the fuel-tank would face the\n ground when he came down\n for a landing. Satisfied, he\n knocked a hole in the side of\n the fuel-tank.\n\n\n \"Okay, Ganymede,\" he radioed.\n \"I'm coming down.\"\n\n\n He blasted loose from the\n tight orbit and rocked the\n ship down on manual. The\n forbidding surface of Ganymede\n grew closer and closer.\n Now he could see the iceworms\n plainly.",
"\"But you can't come down!\n How will you leave your\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\"\n Preston said calmly.\n\n\n \"We have to worry! We\n don't dare open the Dome,\n with those creatures outside.\n You\ncan't\ncome down, Postal\n Ship.\"\n\n\n \"You want your mail or\n don't you?\"\n\n\n The colonist paused.\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, then,\" Preston said.\n \"Shut up and give me landing\n coordinates!\"\n\n\n There was a pause, and\n then the figures started coming\n over. Preston jotted them\n down on a scratch-pad.",
"\"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.",
"It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"",
"Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"",
"\"This is Ganymede,\" a\n tense voice said. \"We've got\n trouble down here. Who are\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Mail ship,\" Preston said.\n \"From Earth. What's going\n on?\"\n\n\n There was the sound of\n voices whispering somewhere\n near the microphone. Finally:\n \"Hello, Mail Ship?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah?\"\n\n\n \"You're going to have to\n turn back to Earth, fellow.\n You can't land here. It's\n rough on us, missing a mail\n trip, but—\"\n\n\n Preston said impatiently,\n \"Why can't I land? What the\n devil's going on down there?\"\n\n\n \"We've been invaded,\" the\n tired voice said. \"The colony's\n been completely surrounded\n by iceworms.\"\n\n\n \"Iceworms?\"",
"He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"",
"It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.",
"The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"",
"Consider the poor mailman of the future. To \"sleet and snow\n and dead of night\"—things that must not keep him from his\n appointed rounds—will be added, sub-zero void, meteors, and\n planets that won't stay put. Maybe he'll decide that for six\n cents an ounce it just ain't worth it.\nPOSTMARK\n\n GANYMEDE\nBy\n\n ROBERT\n\n SILVERBERG\n\"I'm\n washed up,\" Preston\n growled bitterly. \"They\n made a postman out of me.\n Me—a postman!\"\n\n\n He crumpled the assignment\n memo into a small, hard\n ball and hurled it at the\n bristly image of himself in\n the bar mirror. He hadn't\n shaved in three days—which\n was how long it had been\n since he had been notified of\n his removal from Space Patrol\n Service and his transfer\n to Postal Delivery.",
"\"The local native life,\" the\n colonist explained. \"They're\n about thirty feet long, a foot\n wide, and mostly mouth.\n There's a ring of them about\n a hundred yards wide surrounding\n the Dome. They can't get in and\n we can't get out—and we can't figure\n out any possible approach for\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty,\" Preston said.\n \"But why didn't the things\n bother you while you were\n building your Dome?\"\n\n\n \"Apparently they have a\n very long hibernation-cycle.\n We've only been here two\n years, you know. The iceworms\n must all have been\n asleep when we came. But\n they came swarming out of\n the ice by the hundreds last\n month.\"\n\n\n \"How come Earth doesn't\n know?\"",
"Suddenly, Preston felt a\n hand on his shoulder. He\n looked up and saw a man in\n the trim gray of a Patrolman's\n uniform.\n\n\n \"What do you want,\n Dawes?\"\n\n\n \"Chief's been looking for\n you, Preston. It's time for\n you to get going on your run.\"\n\n\n Preston scowled. \"Time to\n go deliver the mail, eh?\" He\n spat. \"Don't they have anything\n better to do with good\n spacemen than make letter\n carriers out of them?\"\nThe other man shook his\n head. \"You won't get anywhere\n grousing about it,\n Preston. Your papers don't\n specify which branch you're\n assigned to, and if they want\n to make you carry the mail—that's\n it.\" His voice became\n suddenly gentle. \"Come on,\n Pres. One last drink, and\n then let's go. You don't want\n to spoil a good record, do\n you?\"",
"Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"",
"\"No,\" Preston said reflectively.\n He gulped his drink\n and stood up. \"Okay. I'm\n ready. Neither snow nor rain\n shall stay me from my appointed\n rounds, or however\n the damned thing goes.\"\n\n\n \"That's a smart attitude,\n Preston. Come on—I'll walk\n you over to Administration.\"\nSavagely, Preston ripped\n away the hand that the other\n had put around his shoulders.\n \"I can get there myself. At\n least give me credit for that!\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Dawes said, shrugging.\n \"Well—good luck,\n Preston.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Thanks. Thanks\n real lots.\"\n\n\n He pushed his way past the\n man in Space Grays and\n shouldered past a couple of\n barflies as he left. He pushed\n open the door of the bar and\n stood outside for a moment."
],
[
"Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them.",
"\"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"",
"He centered the ship as\n well as he could on the Dome\n below and threw it into automatic\n pilot. Jumping from\n the control panel, he ran back\n toward the gun turret and slammed\n shut the plexilite screen.\n Its outer wall opened and the\n fuel-tank went tumbling outward\n and down. He returned\n to his control-panel seat and\n looked at the viewscreen. He\n smiled.\n\n\n The fuel-tank was lying\n near the Dome—right in the\n middle of the nest of iceworms.\n The fuel was leaking\n from the puncture.\n\n\n The iceworms writhed in\n from all sides.\n\n\n \"Now!\" Preston said grimly.\n\n\n The ship roared down, jets\n blasting. The fire licked out,\n heated the ground, melted\n snow—ignited the fuel-tank!\n A gigantic flame blazed up,\n reflected harshly off the\n snows of Ganymede.",
"His scratch-pad began to\n fill with notations.\nFuel storage—\nEscape velocity—\nMargin of error—\nSafety factor—\nFinally he looked up. He\n had computed exactly how\n much spare fuel he had, how\n much he could afford to\n waste. It was a small figure—too\n small, perhaps.\n\n\n He turned to the radio.\n \"Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Where are you, Postal\n Ship?\"\n\n\n \"I'm in a tight orbit about\n a hundred miles up,\" Preston\n said. \"Give me the figures on\n the circumference of your\n Dome, Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Seven miles,\" the colonist\n said. \"What are you planning\n to do?\"",
"Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"",
"Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"",
"\"This is Ganymede,\" a\n tense voice said. \"We've got\n trouble down here. Who are\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Mail ship,\" Preston said.\n \"From Earth. What's going\n on?\"\n\n\n There was the sound of\n voices whispering somewhere\n near the microphone. Finally:\n \"Hello, Mail Ship?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah?\"\n\n\n \"You're going to have to\n turn back to Earth, fellow.\n You can't land here. It's\n rough on us, missing a mail\n trip, but—\"\n\n\n Preston said impatiently,\n \"Why can't I land? What the\n devil's going on down there?\"\n\n\n \"We've been invaded,\" the\n tired voice said. \"The colony's\n been completely surrounded\n by iceworms.\"\n\n\n \"Iceworms?\"",
"\"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.",
"Getting up, he clambered\n over the mail sacks and\n headed toward the rear of the\n ship, hunting for the auxiliary\n fuel-tanks.\n\n\n Working rapidly, he lugged\n one out and strapped it into\n an empty gun turret, making\n sure he could get it loose\n again when he'd need it.\n\n\n He wiped away sweat and\n checked the angle at which\n the fuel-tank would face the\n ground when he came down\n for a landing. Satisfied, he\n knocked a hole in the side of\n the fuel-tank.\n\n\n \"Okay, Ganymede,\" he radioed.\n \"I'm coming down.\"\n\n\n He blasted loose from the\n tight orbit and rocked the\n ship down on manual. The\n forbidding surface of Ganymede\n grew closer and closer.\n Now he could see the iceworms\n plainly.",
"It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"",
"\"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.",
"\"But you can't come down!\n How will you leave your\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\"\n Preston said calmly.\n\n\n \"We have to worry! We\n don't dare open the Dome,\n with those creatures outside.\n You\ncan't\ncome down, Postal\n Ship.\"\n\n\n \"You want your mail or\n don't you?\"\n\n\n The colonist paused.\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, then,\" Preston said.\n \"Shut up and give me landing\n coordinates!\"\n\n\n There was a pause, and\n then the figures started coming\n over. Preston jotted them\n down on a scratch-pad.",
"\"The local native life,\" the\n colonist explained. \"They're\n about thirty feet long, a foot\n wide, and mostly mouth.\n There's a ring of them about\n a hundred yards wide surrounding\n the Dome. They can't get in and\n we can't get out—and we can't figure\n out any possible approach for\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty,\" Preston said.\n \"But why didn't the things\n bother you while you were\n building your Dome?\"\n\n\n \"Apparently they have a\n very long hibernation-cycle.\n We've only been here two\n years, you know. The iceworms\n must all have been\n asleep when we came. But\n they came swarming out of\n the ice by the hundreds last\n month.\"\n\n\n \"How come Earth doesn't\n know?\"",
"It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.",
"Consider the poor mailman of the future. To \"sleet and snow\n and dead of night\"—things that must not keep him from his\n appointed rounds—will be added, sub-zero void, meteors, and\n planets that won't stay put. Maybe he'll decide that for six\n cents an ounce it just ain't worth it.\nPOSTMARK\n\n GANYMEDE\nBy\n\n ROBERT\n\n SILVERBERG\n\"I'm\n washed up,\" Preston\n growled bitterly. \"They\n made a postman out of me.\n Me—a postman!\"\n\n\n He crumpled the assignment\n memo into a small, hard\n ball and hurled it at the\n bristly image of himself in\n the bar mirror. He hadn't\n shaved in three days—which\n was how long it had been\n since he had been notified of\n his removal from Space Patrol\n Service and his transfer\n to Postal Delivery.",
"Suddenly a bright spear of\n flame lashed out across space\n and the hull of Gunderson's\n ship glowed cherry red. \"I'm\n okay,\" Gunderson reported\n immediately. \"Screens took\n the charge.\"\n\n\n Preston gripped his controls\n and threw the ship into\n a plunging dive that dropped\n it back behind the protection\n of both Patrol ships. He saw\n Gunderson and Mellors converge\n on one of the pirates.\n Two blue beams licked out,\n and the pirate ship exploded.\n\n\n But then the second pirate\n swooped down in an unexpected\n dive. \"Look out!\"\n Preston yelled helplessly—but\n it was too late. Beams ripped\n into the hull of Mellors' ship,\n and a dark fissure line opened\n down the side of the ship.\n Preston smashed his hand\n against the control panel.\n Better to die in an honest\n dogfight than to live this\n way!",
"He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"",
"The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"",
"\"Cheers,\" Preston said,\n and yanked the blast-lever.\n The ship jolted upward, and\n for a second he felt a little\n of the old thrill—until he remembered.\n\n\n He took the ship out in\n space, saw the blackness in\n the viewplate. The radio\n crackled.\n\n\n \"Come in, Postal Ship.\n Come in, Postal Ship.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in. What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"We're your convoy,\" a\n hard voice said. \"Patrol Ship\n 08756, Lieutenant Mellors,\n above you. Down at three\n o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732,\n Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll\n take you through the Pirate\n Belt.\"",
"Suddenly, Preston felt a\n hand on his shoulder. He\n looked up and saw a man in\n the trim gray of a Patrolman's\n uniform.\n\n\n \"What do you want,\n Dawes?\"\n\n\n \"Chief's been looking for\n you, Preston. It's time for\n you to get going on your run.\"\n\n\n Preston scowled. \"Time to\n go deliver the mail, eh?\" He\n spat. \"Don't they have anything\n better to do with good\n spacemen than make letter\n carriers out of them?\"\nThe other man shook his\n head. \"You won't get anywhere\n grousing about it,\n Preston. Your papers don't\n specify which branch you're\n assigned to, and if they want\n to make you carry the mail—that's\n it.\" His voice became\n suddenly gentle. \"Come on,\n Pres. One last drink, and\n then let's go. You don't want\n to spoil a good record, do\n you?\""
],
[
"He centered the ship as\n well as he could on the Dome\n below and threw it into automatic\n pilot. Jumping from\n the control panel, he ran back\n toward the gun turret and slammed\n shut the plexilite screen.\n Its outer wall opened and the\n fuel-tank went tumbling outward\n and down. He returned\n to his control-panel seat and\n looked at the viewscreen. He\n smiled.\n\n\n The fuel-tank was lying\n near the Dome—right in the\n middle of the nest of iceworms.\n The fuel was leaking\n from the puncture.\n\n\n The iceworms writhed in\n from all sides.\n\n\n \"Now!\" Preston said grimly.\n\n\n The ship roared down, jets\n blasting. The fire licked out,\n heated the ground, melted\n snow—ignited the fuel-tank!\n A gigantic flame blazed up,\n reflected harshly off the\n snows of Ganymede.",
"Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"",
"Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them.",
"\"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"",
"\"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.",
"His scratch-pad began to\n fill with notations.\nFuel storage—\nEscape velocity—\nMargin of error—\nSafety factor—\nFinally he looked up. He\n had computed exactly how\n much spare fuel he had, how\n much he could afford to\n waste. It was a small figure—too\n small, perhaps.\n\n\n He turned to the radio.\n \"Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Where are you, Postal\n Ship?\"\n\n\n \"I'm in a tight orbit about\n a hundred miles up,\" Preston\n said. \"Give me the figures on\n the circumference of your\n Dome, Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Seven miles,\" the colonist\n said. \"What are you planning\n to do?\"",
"\"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.",
"\"But you can't come down!\n How will you leave your\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\"\n Preston said calmly.\n\n\n \"We have to worry! We\n don't dare open the Dome,\n with those creatures outside.\n You\ncan't\ncome down, Postal\n Ship.\"\n\n\n \"You want your mail or\n don't you?\"\n\n\n The colonist paused.\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, then,\" Preston said.\n \"Shut up and give me landing\n coordinates!\"\n\n\n There was a pause, and\n then the figures started coming\n over. Preston jotted them\n down on a scratch-pad.",
"He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"",
"The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"",
"It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"",
"Getting up, he clambered\n over the mail sacks and\n headed toward the rear of the\n ship, hunting for the auxiliary\n fuel-tanks.\n\n\n Working rapidly, he lugged\n one out and strapped it into\n an empty gun turret, making\n sure he could get it loose\n again when he'd need it.\n\n\n He wiped away sweat and\n checked the angle at which\n the fuel-tank would face the\n ground when he came down\n for a landing. Satisfied, he\n knocked a hole in the side of\n the fuel-tank.\n\n\n \"Okay, Ganymede,\" he radioed.\n \"I'm coming down.\"\n\n\n He blasted loose from the\n tight orbit and rocked the\n ship down on manual. The\n forbidding surface of Ganymede\n grew closer and closer.\n Now he could see the iceworms\n plainly.",
"Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"",
"\"No,\" Preston said reflectively.\n He gulped his drink\n and stood up. \"Okay. I'm\n ready. Neither snow nor rain\n shall stay me from my appointed\n rounds, or however\n the damned thing goes.\"\n\n\n \"That's a smart attitude,\n Preston. Come on—I'll walk\n you over to Administration.\"\nSavagely, Preston ripped\n away the hand that the other\n had put around his shoulders.\n \"I can get there myself. At\n least give me credit for that!\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Dawes said, shrugging.\n \"Well—good luck,\n Preston.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Thanks. Thanks\n real lots.\"\n\n\n He pushed his way past the\n man in Space Grays and\n shouldered past a couple of\n barflies as he left. He pushed\n open the door of the bar and\n stood outside for a moment.",
"Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"",
"It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.",
"Suddenly, Preston felt a\n hand on his shoulder. He\n looked up and saw a man in\n the trim gray of a Patrolman's\n uniform.\n\n\n \"What do you want,\n Dawes?\"\n\n\n \"Chief's been looking for\n you, Preston. It's time for\n you to get going on your run.\"\n\n\n Preston scowled. \"Time to\n go deliver the mail, eh?\" He\n spat. \"Don't they have anything\n better to do with good\n spacemen than make letter\n carriers out of them?\"\nThe other man shook his\n head. \"You won't get anywhere\n grousing about it,\n Preston. Your papers don't\n specify which branch you're\n assigned to, and if they want\n to make you carry the mail—that's\n it.\" His voice became\n suddenly gentle. \"Come on,\n Pres. One last drink, and\n then let's go. You don't want\n to spoil a good record, do\n you?\"",
"\"This is Ganymede,\" a\n tense voice said. \"We've got\n trouble down here. Who are\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Mail ship,\" Preston said.\n \"From Earth. What's going\n on?\"\n\n\n There was the sound of\n voices whispering somewhere\n near the microphone. Finally:\n \"Hello, Mail Ship?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah?\"\n\n\n \"You're going to have to\n turn back to Earth, fellow.\n You can't land here. It's\n rough on us, missing a mail\n trip, but—\"\n\n\n Preston said impatiently,\n \"Why can't I land? What the\n devil's going on down there?\"\n\n\n \"We've been invaded,\" the\n tired voice said. \"The colony's\n been completely surrounded\n by iceworms.\"\n\n\n \"Iceworms?\"",
"\"Cheers,\" Preston said,\n and yanked the blast-lever.\n The ship jolted upward, and\n for a second he felt a little\n of the old thrill—until he remembered.\n\n\n He took the ship out in\n space, saw the blackness in\n the viewplate. The radio\n crackled.\n\n\n \"Come in, Postal Ship.\n Come in, Postal Ship.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in. What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"We're your convoy,\" a\n hard voice said. \"Patrol Ship\n 08756, Lieutenant Mellors,\n above you. Down at three\n o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732,\n Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll\n take you through the Pirate\n Belt.\"",
"\"The local native life,\" the\n colonist explained. \"They're\n about thirty feet long, a foot\n wide, and mostly mouth.\n There's a ring of them about\n a hundred yards wide surrounding\n the Dome. They can't get in and\n we can't get out—and we can't figure\n out any possible approach for\n you.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty,\" Preston said.\n \"But why didn't the things\n bother you while you were\n building your Dome?\"\n\n\n \"Apparently they have a\n very long hibernation-cycle.\n We've only been here two\n years, you know. The iceworms\n must all have been\n asleep when we came. But\n they came swarming out of\n the ice by the hundreds last\n month.\"\n\n\n \"How come Earth doesn't\n know?\""
],
[
"Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them.",
"He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"",
"\"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"",
"\"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.",
"He centered the ship as\n well as he could on the Dome\n below and threw it into automatic\n pilot. Jumping from\n the control panel, he ran back\n toward the gun turret and slammed\n shut the plexilite screen.\n Its outer wall opened and the\n fuel-tank went tumbling outward\n and down. He returned\n to his control-panel seat and\n looked at the viewscreen. He\n smiled.\n\n\n The fuel-tank was lying\n near the Dome—right in the\n middle of the nest of iceworms.\n The fuel was leaking\n from the puncture.\n\n\n The iceworms writhed in\n from all sides.\n\n\n \"Now!\" Preston said grimly.\n\n\n The ship roared down, jets\n blasting. The fire licked out,\n heated the ground, melted\n snow—ignited the fuel-tank!\n A gigantic flame blazed up,\n reflected harshly off the\n snows of Ganymede.",
"Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"",
"Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"",
"\"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.",
"It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"",
"His scratch-pad began to\n fill with notations.\nFuel storage—\nEscape velocity—\nMargin of error—\nSafety factor—\nFinally he looked up. He\n had computed exactly how\n much spare fuel he had, how\n much he could afford to\n waste. It was a small figure—too\n small, perhaps.\n\n\n He turned to the radio.\n \"Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Where are you, Postal\n Ship?\"\n\n\n \"I'm in a tight orbit about\n a hundred miles up,\" Preston\n said. \"Give me the figures on\n the circumference of your\n Dome, Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Seven miles,\" the colonist\n said. \"What are you planning\n to do?\"",
"The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"",
"\"No,\" Preston said reflectively.\n He gulped his drink\n and stood up. \"Okay. I'm\n ready. Neither snow nor rain\n shall stay me from my appointed\n rounds, or however\n the damned thing goes.\"\n\n\n \"That's a smart attitude,\n Preston. Come on—I'll walk\n you over to Administration.\"\nSavagely, Preston ripped\n away the hand that the other\n had put around his shoulders.\n \"I can get there myself. At\n least give me credit for that!\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Dawes said, shrugging.\n \"Well—good luck,\n Preston.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Thanks. Thanks\n real lots.\"\n\n\n He pushed his way past the\n man in Space Grays and\n shouldered past a couple of\n barflies as he left. He pushed\n open the door of the bar and\n stood outside for a moment.",
"\"But you can't come down!\n How will you leave your\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\"\n Preston said calmly.\n\n\n \"We have to worry! We\n don't dare open the Dome,\n with those creatures outside.\n You\ncan't\ncome down, Postal\n Ship.\"\n\n\n \"You want your mail or\n don't you?\"\n\n\n The colonist paused.\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, then,\" Preston said.\n \"Shut up and give me landing\n coordinates!\"\n\n\n There was a pause, and\n then the figures started coming\n over. Preston jotted them\n down on a scratch-pad.",
"Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"",
"\"This is Ganymede,\" a\n tense voice said. \"We've got\n trouble down here. Who are\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Mail ship,\" Preston said.\n \"From Earth. What's going\n on?\"\n\n\n There was the sound of\n voices whispering somewhere\n near the microphone. Finally:\n \"Hello, Mail Ship?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah?\"\n\n\n \"You're going to have to\n turn back to Earth, fellow.\n You can't land here. It's\n rough on us, missing a mail\n trip, but—\"\n\n\n Preston said impatiently,\n \"Why can't I land? What the\n devil's going on down there?\"\n\n\n \"We've been invaded,\" the\n tired voice said. \"The colony's\n been completely surrounded\n by iceworms.\"\n\n\n \"Iceworms?\"",
"It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.",
"Suddenly, Preston felt a\n hand on his shoulder. He\n looked up and saw a man in\n the trim gray of a Patrolman's\n uniform.\n\n\n \"What do you want,\n Dawes?\"\n\n\n \"Chief's been looking for\n you, Preston. It's time for\n you to get going on your run.\"\n\n\n Preston scowled. \"Time to\n go deliver the mail, eh?\" He\n spat. \"Don't they have anything\n better to do with good\n spacemen than make letter\n carriers out of them?\"\nThe other man shook his\n head. \"You won't get anywhere\n grousing about it,\n Preston. Your papers don't\n specify which branch you're\n assigned to, and if they want\n to make you carry the mail—that's\n it.\" His voice became\n suddenly gentle. \"Come on,\n Pres. One last drink, and\n then let's go. You don't want\n to spoil a good record, do\n you?\"",
"He made computations,\n checked his controls, figured\n orbits. Anything to keep from\n having to talk to his two ex-Patrolmates\n or from having\n to think about the humiliating\n job he was on. Anything to—\n\"\nPirates! Moving up at two\n o'clock!\n\"\n\n\n Preston came awake. He\n picked off the location of the\n pirate ships—there were two\n of them, coming up out of the\n asteroid belt. Small, deadly,\n compact, they orbited toward\n him.\n\n\n He pounded the instrument\n panel in impotent rage, looking\n for the guns that weren't\n there.\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Pres,\" came\n Mellors' voice. \"We'll take\n care of them for you.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Preston said bitterly.\n He watched as the pirate\n ships approached, longing\n to trade places with the\n men in the Patrol ships above\n and below him.",
"\"Cheers,\" Preston said,\n and yanked the blast-lever.\n The ship jolted upward, and\n for a second he felt a little\n of the old thrill—until he remembered.\n\n\n He took the ship out in\n space, saw the blackness in\n the viewplate. The radio\n crackled.\n\n\n \"Come in, Postal Ship.\n Come in, Postal Ship.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in. What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"We're your convoy,\" a\n hard voice said. \"Patrol Ship\n 08756, Lieutenant Mellors,\n above you. Down at three\n o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732,\n Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll\n take you through the Pirate\n Belt.\"",
"Getting up, he clambered\n over the mail sacks and\n headed toward the rear of the\n ship, hunting for the auxiliary\n fuel-tanks.\n\n\n Working rapidly, he lugged\n one out and strapped it into\n an empty gun turret, making\n sure he could get it loose\n again when he'd need it.\n\n\n He wiped away sweat and\n checked the angle at which\n the fuel-tank would face the\n ground when he came down\n for a landing. Satisfied, he\n knocked a hole in the side of\n the fuel-tank.\n\n\n \"Okay, Ganymede,\" he radioed.\n \"I'm coming down.\"\n\n\n He blasted loose from the\n tight orbit and rocked the\n ship down on manual. The\n forbidding surface of Ganymede\n grew closer and closer.\n Now he could see the iceworms\n plainly."
],
[
"He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"",
"The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"",
"He centered the ship as\n well as he could on the Dome\n below and threw it into automatic\n pilot. Jumping from\n the control panel, he ran back\n toward the gun turret and slammed\n shut the plexilite screen.\n Its outer wall opened and the\n fuel-tank went tumbling outward\n and down. He returned\n to his control-panel seat and\n looked at the viewscreen. He\n smiled.\n\n\n The fuel-tank was lying\n near the Dome—right in the\n middle of the nest of iceworms.\n The fuel was leaking\n from the puncture.\n\n\n The iceworms writhed in\n from all sides.\n\n\n \"Now!\" Preston said grimly.\n\n\n The ship roared down, jets\n blasting. The fire licked out,\n heated the ground, melted\n snow—ignited the fuel-tank!\n A gigantic flame blazed up,\n reflected harshly off the\n snows of Ganymede.",
"\"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.",
"\"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.",
"Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"",
"It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.",
"\"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"",
"It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"",
"Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"",
"Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"",
"\"No,\" Preston said reflectively.\n He gulped his drink\n and stood up. \"Okay. I'm\n ready. Neither snow nor rain\n shall stay me from my appointed\n rounds, or however\n the damned thing goes.\"\n\n\n \"That's a smart attitude,\n Preston. Come on—I'll walk\n you over to Administration.\"\nSavagely, Preston ripped\n away the hand that the other\n had put around his shoulders.\n \"I can get there myself. At\n least give me credit for that!\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Dawes said, shrugging.\n \"Well—good luck,\n Preston.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Thanks. Thanks\n real lots.\"\n\n\n He pushed his way past the\n man in Space Grays and\n shouldered past a couple of\n barflies as he left. He pushed\n open the door of the bar and\n stood outside for a moment.",
"His scratch-pad began to\n fill with notations.\nFuel storage—\nEscape velocity—\nMargin of error—\nSafety factor—\nFinally he looked up. He\n had computed exactly how\n much spare fuel he had, how\n much he could afford to\n waste. It was a small figure—too\n small, perhaps.\n\n\n He turned to the radio.\n \"Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Where are you, Postal\n Ship?\"\n\n\n \"I'm in a tight orbit about\n a hundred miles up,\" Preston\n said. \"Give me the figures on\n the circumference of your\n Dome, Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Seven miles,\" the colonist\n said. \"What are you planning\n to do?\"",
"Suddenly, Preston felt a\n hand on his shoulder. He\n looked up and saw a man in\n the trim gray of a Patrolman's\n uniform.\n\n\n \"What do you want,\n Dawes?\"\n\n\n \"Chief's been looking for\n you, Preston. It's time for\n you to get going on your run.\"\n\n\n Preston scowled. \"Time to\n go deliver the mail, eh?\" He\n spat. \"Don't they have anything\n better to do with good\n spacemen than make letter\n carriers out of them?\"\nThe other man shook his\n head. \"You won't get anywhere\n grousing about it,\n Preston. Your papers don't\n specify which branch you're\n assigned to, and if they want\n to make you carry the mail—that's\n it.\" His voice became\n suddenly gentle. \"Come on,\n Pres. One last drink, and\n then let's go. You don't want\n to spoil a good record, do\n you?\"",
"Consider the poor mailman of the future. To \"sleet and snow\n and dead of night\"—things that must not keep him from his\n appointed rounds—will be added, sub-zero void, meteors, and\n planets that won't stay put. Maybe he'll decide that for six\n cents an ounce it just ain't worth it.\nPOSTMARK\n\n GANYMEDE\nBy\n\n ROBERT\n\n SILVERBERG\n\"I'm\n washed up,\" Preston\n growled bitterly. \"They\n made a postman out of me.\n Me—a postman!\"\n\n\n He crumpled the assignment\n memo into a small, hard\n ball and hurled it at the\n bristly image of himself in\n the bar mirror. He hadn't\n shaved in three days—which\n was how long it had been\n since he had been notified of\n his removal from Space Patrol\n Service and his transfer\n to Postal Delivery.",
"\"This is Ganymede,\" a\n tense voice said. \"We've got\n trouble down here. Who are\n you?\"\n\n\n \"Mail ship,\" Preston said.\n \"From Earth. What's going\n on?\"\n\n\n There was the sound of\n voices whispering somewhere\n near the microphone. Finally:\n \"Hello, Mail Ship?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah?\"\n\n\n \"You're going to have to\n turn back to Earth, fellow.\n You can't land here. It's\n rough on us, missing a mail\n trip, but—\"\n\n\n Preston said impatiently,\n \"Why can't I land? What the\n devil's going on down there?\"\n\n\n \"We've been invaded,\" the\n tired voice said. \"The colony's\n been completely surrounded\n by iceworms.\"\n\n\n \"Iceworms?\"",
"\"Cheers,\" Preston said,\n and yanked the blast-lever.\n The ship jolted upward, and\n for a second he felt a little\n of the old thrill—until he remembered.\n\n\n He took the ship out in\n space, saw the blackness in\n the viewplate. The radio\n crackled.\n\n\n \"Come in, Postal Ship.\n Come in, Postal Ship.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in. What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"We're your convoy,\" a\n hard voice said. \"Patrol Ship\n 08756, Lieutenant Mellors,\n above you. Down at three\n o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732,\n Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll\n take you through the Pirate\n Belt.\"",
"Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them.",
"Getting up, he clambered\n over the mail sacks and\n headed toward the rear of the\n ship, hunting for the auxiliary\n fuel-tanks.\n\n\n Working rapidly, he lugged\n one out and strapped it into\n an empty gun turret, making\n sure he could get it loose\n again when he'd need it.\n\n\n He wiped away sweat and\n checked the angle at which\n the fuel-tank would face the\n ground when he came down\n for a landing. Satisfied, he\n knocked a hole in the side of\n the fuel-tank.\n\n\n \"Okay, Ganymede,\" he radioed.\n \"I'm coming down.\"\n\n\n He blasted loose from the\n tight orbit and rocked the\n ship down on manual. The\n forbidding surface of Ganymede\n grew closer and closer.\n Now he could see the iceworms\n plainly.",
"Suddenly a bright spear of\n flame lashed out across space\n and the hull of Gunderson's\n ship glowed cherry red. \"I'm\n okay,\" Gunderson reported\n immediately. \"Screens took\n the charge.\"\n\n\n Preston gripped his controls\n and threw the ship into\n a plunging dive that dropped\n it back behind the protection\n of both Patrol ships. He saw\n Gunderson and Mellors converge\n on one of the pirates.\n Two blue beams licked out,\n and the pirate ship exploded.\n\n\n But then the second pirate\n swooped down in an unexpected\n dive. \"Look out!\"\n Preston yelled helplessly—but\n it was too late. Beams ripped\n into the hull of Mellors' ship,\n and a dark fissure line opened\n down the side of the ship.\n Preston smashed his hand\n against the control panel.\n Better to die in an honest\n dogfight than to live this\n way!"
],
[
"\"No,\" Preston said reflectively.\n He gulped his drink\n and stood up. \"Okay. I'm\n ready. Neither snow nor rain\n shall stay me from my appointed\n rounds, or however\n the damned thing goes.\"\n\n\n \"That's a smart attitude,\n Preston. Come on—I'll walk\n you over to Administration.\"\nSavagely, Preston ripped\n away the hand that the other\n had put around his shoulders.\n \"I can get there myself. At\n least give me credit for that!\"\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Dawes said, shrugging.\n \"Well—good luck,\n Preston.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Thanks. Thanks\n real lots.\"\n\n\n He pushed his way past the\n man in Space Grays and\n shouldered past a couple of\n barflies as he left. He pushed\n open the door of the bar and\n stood outside for a moment.",
"Suddenly, Preston felt a\n hand on his shoulder. He\n looked up and saw a man in\n the trim gray of a Patrolman's\n uniform.\n\n\n \"What do you want,\n Dawes?\"\n\n\n \"Chief's been looking for\n you, Preston. It's time for\n you to get going on your run.\"\n\n\n Preston scowled. \"Time to\n go deliver the mail, eh?\" He\n spat. \"Don't they have anything\n better to do with good\n spacemen than make letter\n carriers out of them?\"\nThe other man shook his\n head. \"You won't get anywhere\n grousing about it,\n Preston. Your papers don't\n specify which branch you're\n assigned to, and if they want\n to make you carry the mail—that's\n it.\" His voice became\n suddenly gentle. \"Come on,\n Pres. One last drink, and\n then let's go. You don't want\n to spoil a good record, do\n you?\"",
"Preston felt his face go hot\n with shame. Mellors! Gunderson!\n They would stick two of\n his old sidekicks on the job\n of guarding him.\n\n\n \"Please acknowledge,\" Mellors\n said.\n\"The iceworms were not expecting any mail—just the mailman.\"\nPreston paused. Then:\n \"Postal Ship 1872, Lieutenant\n Preston aboard. I acknowledge\n message.\"\n\n\n There was a stunned silence.\n \"\nPreston?\nHal Preston?\"\n\n\n \"The one and only,\" Preston\n said.\n\n\n \"What are you doing on a\n Postal ship?\" Mellors asked.\n\n\n \"Why don't you ask the\n Chief that? He's the one who\n yanked me out of the Patrol\n and put me here.\"",
"He turned away, smiling to\n himself. Maybe the Chief\nhad\nknown what he was doing\n when he took an experienced\n Patrol man and dumped him\n into Postal. Delivering the\n mail to Ganymede had been\n more hazardous than fighting\n off half a dozen space pirates.\nI guess I was wrong\n, Preston\n thought.\nThis is no snap job\n for old men.\nPreoccupied, he started out\n through the airlock. The man\n in charge caught his arm.\n \"Say, we don't even know\n your name! Here you are a\n hero, and—\"",
"The man in charge gestured\n to two young colonists,\n who donned spacesuits and\n dashed through the airlock.\n Preston watched as they\n raced to the ship, climbed in,\n and returned a few moments\n later with the mail sacks.\n\n\n \"You've got it all,\" Preston\n said. \"I'm checking out. I'll\n get word to the Patrol to get\n here and clean up that mess\n for you.\"\n\n\n \"How can we thank you?\"\n the official-looking man asked.\n\n\n \"No need to,\" Preston said\n casually. \"I had to get that\n mail down here some way,\n didn't I?\"",
"He made computations,\n checked his controls, figured\n orbits. Anything to keep from\n having to talk to his two ex-Patrolmates\n or from having\n to think about the humiliating\n job he was on. Anything to—\n\"\nPirates! Moving up at two\n o'clock!\n\"\n\n\n Preston came awake. He\n picked off the location of the\n pirate ships—there were two\n of them, coming up out of the\n asteroid belt. Small, deadly,\n compact, they orbited toward\n him.\n\n\n He pounded the instrument\n panel in impotent rage, looking\n for the guns that weren't\n there.\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Pres,\" came\n Mellors' voice. \"We'll take\n care of them for you.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Preston said bitterly.\n He watched as the pirate\n ships approached, longing\n to trade places with the\n men in the Patrol ships above\n and below him.",
"\"Cheers,\" Preston said,\n and yanked the blast-lever.\n The ship jolted upward, and\n for a second he felt a little\n of the old thrill—until he remembered.\n\n\n He took the ship out in\n space, saw the blackness in\n the viewplate. The radio\n crackled.\n\n\n \"Come in, Postal Ship.\n Come in, Postal Ship.\"\n\n\n \"I'm in. What do you\n want?\"\n\n\n \"We're your convoy,\" a\n hard voice said. \"Patrol Ship\n 08756, Lieutenant Mellors,\n above you. Down at three\n o'clock, Patrol Ship 10732,\n Lieutenant Gunderson. We'll\n take you through the Pirate\n Belt.\"",
"\"The antenna for our long-range\n transmitter was outside\n the Dome. One of the\n worms came by and chewed\n the antenna right off. All\n we've got left is this short-range\n thing we're using and\n it's no good more than ten\n thousand miles from here.\n You're the first one who's\n been this close since it happened.\"\n\n\n \"I get it.\" Preston closed\n his eyes for a second, trying\n to think things out.\nThe Colony was under\n blockade by hostile alien life,\n thereby making it impossible\n for him to deliver the mail.\n Okay. If he'd been a regular\n member of the Postal Service,\n he'd have given it up as a\n bad job and gone back to\n Earth to report the difficulty.\nBut I'm not going back.\n I'll be the best damned mailman\n they've got.\n\"Give me a landing orbit\n anyway, Ganymede.\"",
"\"Hero?\" Preston shrugged.\n \"All I did was deliver the\n mail. It's all in a day's work,\n you know. The mail's got to\n get through!\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Stories\nSeptember 1957.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"Preston didn't answer. He\n broke contact and scribbled\n some more figures. Seven\n miles of iceworms, eh? That\n was too much to handle. He\n had planned on dropping\n flaming fuel on them and\n burning them out, but he\n couldn't do it that way.\n\n\n He'd have to try a different\n tactic.\n\n\n Down below, he could see\n the blue-white ammonia ice\n that was the frozen atmosphere\n of Ganymede. Shimmering\n gently amid the whiteness was the\n transparent yellow of the Dome\n beneath whose curved walls\n lived the Ganymede Colony.\n Even forewarned, Preston\n shuddered. Surrounding the\n Dome was a living, writhing\n belt of giant worms.\n\n\n \"Lovely,\" he said. \"Just\n lovely.\"",
"\"Okay, I've got them. Now\n sit tight and wait.\" He\n glanced contemptuously at\n the three mail-pouches behind\n him, grinned, and started\n setting up the orbit.\nMailman, am I? I'll show\n them!\nHe brought the Postal Ship\n down with all the skill of his\n years in the Patrol, spiralling\n in around the big satellite of\n Jupiter as cautiously and as\n precisely as if he were zeroing\n in on a pirate lair in the\n asteroid belt. In its own way,\n this was as dangerous, perhaps\n even more so.\n\n\n Preston guided the ship\n into an ever-narrowing orbit,\n which he stabilized about a\n hundred miles over the surface\n of Ganymede. As his\n ship swung around the\n moon's poles in its tight orbit,\n he began to figure some fuel\n computations.",
"And the mindless iceworms\n came, marching toward the\n fire, being consumed, as still\n others devoured the bodies of\n the dead and dying.\n\n\n Preston looked away and\n concentrated on the business\n of finding a place to land the\n ship.\nThe holocaust still raged as\n he leaped down from the catwalk\n of the ship, clutching\n one of the heavy mail sacks,\n and struggled through the\n melting snows to the airlock.\n\n\n He grinned. The airlock\n was open.\n\n\n Arms grabbed him, pulled\n him through. Someone opened\n his helmet.\n\n\n \"Great job, Postman!\"\n\n\n \"There are two more mail sacks,\"\n Preston said. \"Get\n men out after them.\"",
"It was near midnight, and\n the sky over Nome Spaceport\n was bright with stars. Preston's\n trained eye picked out\n Mars, Jupiter, Uranus. There\n they were—waiting. But he\n would spend the rest of his\n days ferrying letters on the\n Ganymede run.\n\n\n He sucked in the cold night\n air of summertime Alaska\n and squared his shoulders.\nTwo hours later, Preston\n sat at the controls of a one-man\n patrol ship just as he\n had in the old days. Only the\n control panel was bare where\n the firing studs for the heavy\n guns was found in regular\n patrol ships. And in the cargo\n hold instead of crates of\n spare ammo there were three\n bulging sacks of mail destined\n for the colony on Ganymede.\nSlight difference\n, Preston\n thought, as he set up his\n blasting pattern.\n\n\n \"Okay, Preston,\" came the\n voice from the tower. \"You've\n got clearance.\"",
"\"Can you beat that?\" Gunderson\n asked incredulously.\n \"Hal Preston, on a Postal\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Incredible, isn't it?\"\n Preston asked bitterly. \"You\n can't believe your ears. Well,\n you better believe it, because\n here I am.\"\n\n\n \"Must be some clerical\n error,\" Gunderson said.\n\n\n \"Let's change the subject,\"\n Preston snapped.\n\n\n They were silent for a few\n moments, as the three ships—two\n armed, one loaded with\n mail for Ganymede—streaked\n outward away from Earth.\n Manipulating his controls\n with the ease of long experience,\n Preston guided the ship\n smoothly toward the gleaming\n bulk of far-off Jupiter.\n Even at this distance, he\n could see five or six bright\n pips surrounding the huge\n planet. There was Callisto,\n and—ah—there was Ganymede.",
"\"But you can't come down!\n How will you leave your\n ship?\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about that,\"\n Preston said calmly.\n\n\n \"We have to worry! We\n don't dare open the Dome,\n with those creatures outside.\n You\ncan't\ncome down, Postal\n Ship.\"\n\n\n \"You want your mail or\n don't you?\"\n\n\n The colonist paused.\n \"Well—\"\n\n\n \"Okay, then,\" Preston said.\n \"Shut up and give me landing\n coordinates!\"\n\n\n There was a pause, and\n then the figures started coming\n over. Preston jotted them\n down on a scratch-pad.",
"It was one against one,\n now—Gunderson against the\n pirate. Preston dropped back\n again to take advantage of\n the Patrol ship's protection.\n\n\n \"I'm going to try a diversionary\n tactic,\" Gunderson\n said on untappable tight-beam.\n \"Get ready to cut under\n and streak for Ganymede\n with all you got.\"\n\n\n \"Check.\"\n\n\n Preston watched as the\n tactic got under way. Gunderson's\n ship traveled in a long,\n looping spiral that drew the\n pirate into the upper quadrant\n of space. His path free,\n Preston guided his ship under\n the other two and toward unobstructed\n freedom. As he\n looked back, he saw Gunderson\n steaming for the pirate\n on a sure collision orbit.\n\n\n He turned away. The score\n was two Patrolmen dead, two\n ships wrecked—but the mails\n would get through.",
"Shaking his head, Preston\n leaned forward over his control\n board and headed on toward\n Ganymede.\nThe blue-white, frozen\n moon hung beneath him.\n Preston snapped on the radio.\n\n\n \"Ganymede Colony? Come\n in, please. This is your Postal\n Ship.\" The words tasted sour\n in his mouth.\n\n\n There was silence for a\n second. \"Come in, Ganymede,\"\n Preston repeated impatiently—and\n then the\n sound of a distress signal cut\n across his audio pickup.\n\n\n It was coming on wide\n beam from the satellite below—and\n they had cut out all receiving\n facilities in an attempt\n to step up their transmitter.\n Preston reached for\n the wide-beam stud, pressed\n it.\n\n\n \"Okay, I pick up your signal,\n Ganymede. Come in,\n now!\"",
"He centered the ship as\n well as he could on the Dome\n below and threw it into automatic\n pilot. Jumping from\n the control panel, he ran back\n toward the gun turret and slammed\n shut the plexilite screen.\n Its outer wall opened and the\n fuel-tank went tumbling outward\n and down. He returned\n to his control-panel seat and\n looked at the viewscreen. He\n smiled.\n\n\n The fuel-tank was lying\n near the Dome—right in the\n middle of the nest of iceworms.\n The fuel was leaking\n from the puncture.\n\n\n The iceworms writhed in\n from all sides.\n\n\n \"Now!\" Preston said grimly.\n\n\n The ship roared down, jets\n blasting. The fire licked out,\n heated the ground, melted\n snow—ignited the fuel-tank!\n A gigantic flame blazed up,\n reflected harshly off the\n snows of Ganymede.",
"His scratch-pad began to\n fill with notations.\nFuel storage—\nEscape velocity—\nMargin of error—\nSafety factor—\nFinally he looked up. He\n had computed exactly how\n much spare fuel he had, how\n much he could afford to\n waste. It was a small figure—too\n small, perhaps.\n\n\n He turned to the radio.\n \"Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Where are you, Postal\n Ship?\"\n\n\n \"I'm in a tight orbit about\n a hundred miles up,\" Preston\n said. \"Give me the figures on\n the circumference of your\n Dome, Ganymede?\"\n\n\n \"Seven miles,\" the colonist\n said. \"What are you planning\n to do?\"",
"Hideous, thick creatures,\n lying coiled in masses around\n the Dome. Preston checked\n his spacesuit, making sure it\n was sealed. The instruments\n told him he was a bare ten\n miles above Ganymede now.\n One more swing around the\n poles would do it.\n\n\n He peered out as the Dome\n came below and once again\n snapped on the radio.\n\"I'm going to come down\n and burn a path through\n those worms of yours. Watch\n me carefully, and jump to it\n when you see me land. I want\n that airlock open, or else.\"\n\n\n \"But—\"\n\n\n \"No buts!\"\n\n\n He was right overhead\n now. Just one ordinary-type\n gun would solve the whole\n problem, he thought. But\n Postal Ships didn't get guns.\n They weren't supposed to\n need them."
]
] |
test
|
99908
|
[
"What problem did the New Towns solve?",
"What is the author’s attitude toward New Towns?",
"When were New Towns built in England?",
"What makes New Towns different from other towns?",
"Who were New Towns created for?",
"What was appealing about the New Towns?",
"According to the author, what went wrong with the New Towns?",
"What is the overall argument the author is making?",
"The author points out some criticism of the New Towns. Which is NOT a drawback the author writes about?",
"According to the author, were New Towns successful?"
] |
[
[
"Decaying infrastructure of old British cities. ",
"Cultural conflict between rural and urban areas. ",
"A lack of nature in urban areas. ",
"Affordable housing"
],
[
"The author thinks New Towns were good for the upper class. ",
"The author thinks New Towns divided the country. ",
"The author thinks New Towns were a failure. ",
"The author thinks New Towns were more successful than they are given credit for. "
],
[
"20 years ago",
"The end of the 19th century",
"After World War II",
"The Industrial Revolution"
],
[
"In New Towns, the upper class, middle class, and working class live side by side. ",
"Everything is planned and built at the same time. ",
"New Towns include historical landmarks that are preserved by law. ",
"New Towns don’t have crime. "
],
[
"The upper class",
"The middle class",
"The working class",
"Architects"
],
[
"All of the houses looked the same. ",
"They were self-sufficient, quaint communities. ",
"They had a thriving art scene. ",
"They had intricate, traditional architecture."
],
[
"People did not move to the New Towns. ",
"They were built too close to major cities.",
"They did not have enough green space. ",
"They were executed poorly."
],
[
"England should invest into making more, better New Towns. ",
"England should improve transportation between New Towns and major cities.",
"England should not invest more money into New Towns.",
"England’s New Towns are better than towns in other European countries. "
],
[
"Strong urban communities were broken apart. ",
"New Towns did not offer the walkability of the city; it was necessary to own a car in a New Town. ",
"The construction took too long, leaving residents without necessary amenities. ",
"The housing developments were too cookie-cutter, with no character. "
],
[
"Yes, because people who live in them are proud of their towns. ",
"Some were successful and some were not.",
"No, because the infrastructure is faulty. ",
"Yes, because England no longer has a housing problem. "
]
] |
[
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1,
-1
] |
[
1,
0,
0,
0,
0,
0,
0,
0,
1,
0
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[
[
"In John Grindrod's groundbreaking (pardon the pun) book Concretopia, he says New Towns \"sit alongside the creation of the welfare state, the NHS and the post-war revolution in education as monuments to a nation's desire to move on, not just from the destruction of the war years, but from the inequalities and squalor inherited from the Industrial Revolution.\" \n\n Mike Althorpe of Karakusevic Carson Architects, agrees: \"I think the New Towns project in the UK was much more successful than people give it credit for… It's one of the greatest modern movements of people and the biggest built project in our history; and its legacy is one of architectural bravery, optimism and a sincere belief in the idea and the qualities of 'place'. These were not mere housing estates, they were intentional communities with great thought given over to what makes a town.\"",
"The sprawling exurban council estates, like Chelmsley Wood on Birmingham's outskirts, faced challenges with a lack of infrastructure, jobs, amenities and transport. There was also psychological isolation from the geographic and social communities that previously bound together urban working-class life. In her book Estates, Lynsey Hanley paints pictures of estates like this as if they were flawed works of cubism. \n\n The expanded towns like King's Lynn, Haverhill and Thetford were never fully comfortable with their double lives as market towns and an overspill zone for Cockneys. But the fully planned New Towns were attempts to make a whole place with all the facilities, factories, shopping and bus links so essential to any functioning city – even if it did sometimes take too long for these to arrive. Milton Keynes didn't get a hospital for 13 years.",
"Christopher Smith's forthcoming film, New Town Utopia, focuses on Basildon. \"New Towns were a grand ambition that could still work,\" he says. \"But for the first wave of new towns, the execution was flawed. These were places created for the working classes, but designed by the middle and upper classes. They also faced a number of negative external forces, including globalisation, Thatcher's Right to Buy policy, and a lack of care and attention.\"\nThe current UK government recently put its weight behind more New Towns in places like Essex and Cheshire. \"We've been campaigning for a new generation of garden cities,\" says Lock. \"It's one of the solutions of the housing crisis – but the renewal of existing cities is too. We need to learn the lessons from garden cities and post-war New Towns.\"",
"It was only after the second world war ended that a gutsy modernism bloomed. The New Towns of this era sat alongside the radical municipal socialism exemplified by existing cities like Sheffield, London and Newcastle, which built swathes of housing and other civic amenities in the electric post-war period of progress. Around the globe, planners and architects were getting to make their mark, from Chorweiler to Chandigarh to Brasilia, new cities rose. Top of the list in Britain was providing working people with high quality, affordable housing in healthy surroundings. The 1946 New Towns Act was a way to make things happen by creating an all-powerful development corporation in each of the towns, allowing building to get going quickly.",
"Just like starting over: when Britain (briefly) fell in love with New Towns\n\"Modern girls and modern boys: it's tremendous!\" So goes the sunny reflection of the eponymous hero in Bill Forsyth's 1981 film Gregory's Girl, as he surveys the playing fields, comprehensive schools and spaghetti plate of dual carriageways in Cumbernauld, a mid-20th-century Scottish 'New Town'. Gregory and his friends playfully mock the town, but their youthful affection for Cumbernauld shines through; it neatly encapsulates the optimism these places were all about: doing things differently, doing them better. \n\n New Towns were sometimes sublime and surely strange; but more of a success than the popular consensus gave them credit for. These weren't just council estates, but whole functioning places with jobs, shops and services.",
"\"Amazing people were involved in Harlow, Cumbernauld and Peterlee,\" points out Catherine Croft of the Twentieth Century Society. Architects like John Madin at Telford, Frederick Gibberd at Harlow, Geoffrey Jellicoe at Hemel Hempstead deploying a complete vision. This was about top-down, total design; men smoking pipes in committee rooms and deciding what was best for women and children. There's no better depiction of this than in Catherine O'Flynn's bravura novel The News Where You Are, where the harassed architect (that she's very careful to point out\nisn't\nMadin) pores over his beautiful scale model of a Midlands New Town populated with miniature plastic people lacking faces.",
"It could be a challenge. Aside from the sheer effort of planning a whole new town there was occasional dissent from those who feared the concreting over of the countryside. And some councils – notably Glasgow – wanted to keep their population (in this case a Labour-voting population) within city limits. Occasionally residents and businesses needed a little gentle convincing to relocate: witness the bonkers space pop 7\" single, Energy in Northampton, which Northampton Development Agency commissioned to sell the town; and the proto-Gregory's Girl social realism of Living at Thamesmead. Milton Keynes had the charming red balloon TV ad and, more bizarrely, Cliff Richard rollerskating through the shopping centre.",
"Today Bournville feels quaint, especially if you compare it to the later, more radical New Town of Redditch, a mere six stops down the Midlands' Cross-City Line. Bournville was the brainchild of the Cadburys, and its bucolic buildings and tree-lined streets led towards the garden cities movement at the start of the 20th century. With Bournville and the garden cities we see a key touchstone that would also be echoed in the later New Towns project: the idea that the city was broken and escape was the answer. That sentiment endured beyond the end of the \"dark satanic mills\" era. Arguably it's only really been in the last 20 years that the city, the British city at least – other European nations typically had a milder view towards their cities – has come to be seen as the answer rather the question.",
"Each UK New Town has its own character. Cumbernauld’s infamous town centre megastructure has been called Britain's ugliest building, but it was intended as a radical and revolutionary attempt to get all of the town's services – library, shops, bookies, hotel, car park, bus station and penthouse flats – into one space station-like building. \"I tried to take some American friends to Cumbernauld [town centre] and they refused to get out of the car!\" says Catherine Croft. \"That's unusually urban and intimidating; in general there is a calm softness to our New Town design.\"",
"Perhaps now we're truly recognising some of that value because, as archetypal New Towns like Milton Keynes and Harlow celebrate milestone birthdays this year (fiftieth and seventieth respectively), the UK government has floated a new generation of New Towns that could once again change the face of Britain.\nMost cities we live in haven't been planned at all, they're the product of hundreds or thousands of years of architectural accretions. Most cities are ultimately exercises in speculative pissing in the wind: developers develop, architects design, but none of it is woven together and thought through from scratch. It's planning on the most piecemeal scale.",
"Yet what's remarkable is that all this got done, all this got built, and often very quickly. The timescales compare with the ridiculously quick builds we see in China and the Arabian Gulf today. Opposition was won over and people did move in – and they often liked New Towns, and the modernist architecture that underpinned them. Mike Althorpe grew up surrounded by Scots in Corby who came south for steel jobs. \"The structure that impacted me most was the 1972 town centre and bus station,\" he says now. \"As a kid I loved running up and down the cantilevered stairs onto balconies to wind my mum up! It had the town's only (broken) escalator, which took you deep into a dark underworld where the smell of diesel bus fumes and chip fat was intoxicating; and a big National Express sign announced 'Book here for Scotland'. It had a fantastically urban quality.\"",
"The question will be: can we fully commit to building a concrete future? The 20th-century New Towns embraced innovation in housing, public realm and transport design. The New Towns of today can do that too – look at Vauban, the ecologically-rigorous New Town on the outskirts of Freiburg in Germany with all kinds of green innovations. The danger with Britain's potential new New Towns is that they simply become overblown dormitory suburbs for the middle managers of Cambridge, Manchester and London: commuter towns with cut-price architecture and planning, rather than truly viable and thriving towns. However, with architects and planners at the tiller instead of just property developers, and with technical innovations such as communications connectivity, futuristic transportation and that all-elusive sense of 'place' front and centre, the new New Towns could offer the 21st century something truly unique.",
"Harlow, with its gardens and Moore sculptures, embodies this softness in its 70th year. But Ballard called the low rise suburbs with house, garden and car in the drive – so typical of New Towns – \"the death of the soul\". And he lived in a suburb. \n\n It could all have been more dramatic: Geoffrey Jellicoe's Motopia in Slough envisaged a city with roads on the roof, while unbuilt proposals for Hook in Hampshire look like a jet-propelled version of quasi-New Town Thamesmead. Hubert de Cronin Hastings, longtime honcho of the Architectural Review, dreamt up Civilia in the 1960s. He wanted to stack Moshe Safdie-esque residential superblocks, Tuscan piazzas and boating lakes (all New Town plans had their marina) on top of an old quarry outside Nuneaton and stick a million people in a kind of retro-futurist Arezzo on the Anker.",
"Civilia didn't make it and what did at that exact time was completely antagonistic to it: low-rise, low density Milton Keynes. This \"Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire\", according to John Grindrod, is filled with Mies van der Rohe-apeing minimalism and houses by a welter of starchitects like Norman Foster and Ralph Erskine. It continues to look forward, with trials of driverless cars on its ample roads. \n\n Katy Lock, the Town and Country Planning Association's New Towns expert, talks eloquently about her own upbringing in Milton Keynes. Crucially, she mentions \"people being consciously part of the story. People had chosen to move [to New Towns]. Like with Stevenage earlier, where people had bought into the story of an inside bathroom and a new job.\"",
"JG Ballard said he wrote about the future because he believed it would be better than the past. This is the very essence of town planning: that creating something new, something that works better than what went before, can mould superior worlds. But in an infamous section of Robert Hughes's masterful BBC art series The Shock of the New, this fierce Aussie decried Brasilia as \"a ceremonial slum\" and Paris's Peripherique New Towns as dead ends. He urged urban planners to shut up because we all need a bit of (his words) \"shit\" around us in the cities artists and the rest of us live in: like Paris, New York and London.",
"\"I love the high-profile public art,\" says Croft, \"especially the murals, and would like to see more of that today. As well as the main set pieces, some of the low-key housing developments deserve to be more cherished.\" \n\n Surrounded by the highest quality council housing and landscaping, Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee, for instance, has every right to be as high up on a visitor's itinerary as Durham Cathedral.\nIn the public consciousness, everything from the edge estate to the expanded town to the full New Town has become conflated: we see council houses surrounded by trees and are not always sure if it's an estate or a New Town. Frequently these associations are negative.",
"But not all. Mohenjo-daro might have been the first planned city, appearing 4,500 years ago in what is now Pakistan. Alexandria was planned. And Renaissance Italy boasted the star-shaped Palmanova. But these were the enlightened exceptions, and in Britain it was mainly the kind of hotchpotch best illustrated by the Shambles in York: quaint, but a bloody mess. \n\n It was towards the end of the 19th century that modern and urban change came to Britain. Tenements and slums were the rule in most large towns of the era. A number of enlightened capitalists planned their own towns, toy communities almost; but such innovative plans were rare. Schoolchildren today are taught about Titus Salt's dry settlement of Saltaire and the model village that started it all, Bournville. But we make a show of these places and the characters who bequeathed them to make us feel better as a country – to play up our successes rather than our failures.",
"And as the 20th-century New Towns around the world hit middle age, they've often settled into being quietly successful: just look at Australia's spirited capital, Canberra, or the way Milton Keynes has matured to nurture a sense of pride in its inhabitants. Architecture is our gift to future generations; building whole cities supersizes this impulse. It's an urge that will, in various forms, forever linger.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"However the garden cities like Letchworth were more of a dream than a reality, an exercise in placemaking reverie; and like Bournville as much of a fantasy as Middle Earth. Tolkein saw Bournville as a child. These towns were visions of an idealised Britain, a pre-industrial, anti-industrial one. This line of thinking continues in the oddball planned suburb of Poundbury, which appears as one of those miniature model villages (but one with a Waitrose, of course). Strangeness wasn't far from all these places. Jonathan Meades picked up on the multitude of cults that infected the garden cities: teetotallers, vegetarians, religious dissenters, political radicals."
],
[
"\"Amazing people were involved in Harlow, Cumbernauld and Peterlee,\" points out Catherine Croft of the Twentieth Century Society. Architects like John Madin at Telford, Frederick Gibberd at Harlow, Geoffrey Jellicoe at Hemel Hempstead deploying a complete vision. This was about top-down, total design; men smoking pipes in committee rooms and deciding what was best for women and children. There's no better depiction of this than in Catherine O'Flynn's bravura novel The News Where You Are, where the harassed architect (that she's very careful to point out\nisn't\nMadin) pores over his beautiful scale model of a Midlands New Town populated with miniature plastic people lacking faces.",
"In John Grindrod's groundbreaking (pardon the pun) book Concretopia, he says New Towns \"sit alongside the creation of the welfare state, the NHS and the post-war revolution in education as monuments to a nation's desire to move on, not just from the destruction of the war years, but from the inequalities and squalor inherited from the Industrial Revolution.\" \n\n Mike Althorpe of Karakusevic Carson Architects, agrees: \"I think the New Towns project in the UK was much more successful than people give it credit for… It's one of the greatest modern movements of people and the biggest built project in our history; and its legacy is one of architectural bravery, optimism and a sincere belief in the idea and the qualities of 'place'. These were not mere housing estates, they were intentional communities with great thought given over to what makes a town.\"",
"Each UK New Town has its own character. Cumbernauld’s infamous town centre megastructure has been called Britain's ugliest building, but it was intended as a radical and revolutionary attempt to get all of the town's services – library, shops, bookies, hotel, car park, bus station and penthouse flats – into one space station-like building. \"I tried to take some American friends to Cumbernauld [town centre] and they refused to get out of the car!\" says Catherine Croft. \"That's unusually urban and intimidating; in general there is a calm softness to our New Town design.\"",
"Just like starting over: when Britain (briefly) fell in love with New Towns\n\"Modern girls and modern boys: it's tremendous!\" So goes the sunny reflection of the eponymous hero in Bill Forsyth's 1981 film Gregory's Girl, as he surveys the playing fields, comprehensive schools and spaghetti plate of dual carriageways in Cumbernauld, a mid-20th-century Scottish 'New Town'. Gregory and his friends playfully mock the town, but their youthful affection for Cumbernauld shines through; it neatly encapsulates the optimism these places were all about: doing things differently, doing them better. \n\n New Towns were sometimes sublime and surely strange; but more of a success than the popular consensus gave them credit for. These weren't just council estates, but whole functioning places with jobs, shops and services.",
"Harlow, with its gardens and Moore sculptures, embodies this softness in its 70th year. But Ballard called the low rise suburbs with house, garden and car in the drive – so typical of New Towns – \"the death of the soul\". And he lived in a suburb. \n\n It could all have been more dramatic: Geoffrey Jellicoe's Motopia in Slough envisaged a city with roads on the roof, while unbuilt proposals for Hook in Hampshire look like a jet-propelled version of quasi-New Town Thamesmead. Hubert de Cronin Hastings, longtime honcho of the Architectural Review, dreamt up Civilia in the 1960s. He wanted to stack Moshe Safdie-esque residential superblocks, Tuscan piazzas and boating lakes (all New Town plans had their marina) on top of an old quarry outside Nuneaton and stick a million people in a kind of retro-futurist Arezzo on the Anker.",
"Yet what's remarkable is that all this got done, all this got built, and often very quickly. The timescales compare with the ridiculously quick builds we see in China and the Arabian Gulf today. Opposition was won over and people did move in – and they often liked New Towns, and the modernist architecture that underpinned them. Mike Althorpe grew up surrounded by Scots in Corby who came south for steel jobs. \"The structure that impacted me most was the 1972 town centre and bus station,\" he says now. \"As a kid I loved running up and down the cantilevered stairs onto balconies to wind my mum up! It had the town's only (broken) escalator, which took you deep into a dark underworld where the smell of diesel bus fumes and chip fat was intoxicating; and a big National Express sign announced 'Book here for Scotland'. It had a fantastically urban quality.\"",
"Today Bournville feels quaint, especially if you compare it to the later, more radical New Town of Redditch, a mere six stops down the Midlands' Cross-City Line. Bournville was the brainchild of the Cadburys, and its bucolic buildings and tree-lined streets led towards the garden cities movement at the start of the 20th century. With Bournville and the garden cities we see a key touchstone that would also be echoed in the later New Towns project: the idea that the city was broken and escape was the answer. That sentiment endured beyond the end of the \"dark satanic mills\" era. Arguably it's only really been in the last 20 years that the city, the British city at least – other European nations typically had a milder view towards their cities – has come to be seen as the answer rather the question.",
"The sprawling exurban council estates, like Chelmsley Wood on Birmingham's outskirts, faced challenges with a lack of infrastructure, jobs, amenities and transport. There was also psychological isolation from the geographic and social communities that previously bound together urban working-class life. In her book Estates, Lynsey Hanley paints pictures of estates like this as if they were flawed works of cubism. \n\n The expanded towns like King's Lynn, Haverhill and Thetford were never fully comfortable with their double lives as market towns and an overspill zone for Cockneys. But the fully planned New Towns were attempts to make a whole place with all the facilities, factories, shopping and bus links so essential to any functioning city – even if it did sometimes take too long for these to arrive. Milton Keynes didn't get a hospital for 13 years.",
"Civilia didn't make it and what did at that exact time was completely antagonistic to it: low-rise, low density Milton Keynes. This \"Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire\", according to John Grindrod, is filled with Mies van der Rohe-apeing minimalism and houses by a welter of starchitects like Norman Foster and Ralph Erskine. It continues to look forward, with trials of driverless cars on its ample roads. \n\n Katy Lock, the Town and Country Planning Association's New Towns expert, talks eloquently about her own upbringing in Milton Keynes. Crucially, she mentions \"people being consciously part of the story. People had chosen to move [to New Towns]. Like with Stevenage earlier, where people had bought into the story of an inside bathroom and a new job.\"",
"Christopher Smith's forthcoming film, New Town Utopia, focuses on Basildon. \"New Towns were a grand ambition that could still work,\" he says. \"But for the first wave of new towns, the execution was flawed. These were places created for the working classes, but designed by the middle and upper classes. They also faced a number of negative external forces, including globalisation, Thatcher's Right to Buy policy, and a lack of care and attention.\"\nThe current UK government recently put its weight behind more New Towns in places like Essex and Cheshire. \"We've been campaigning for a new generation of garden cities,\" says Lock. \"It's one of the solutions of the housing crisis – but the renewal of existing cities is too. We need to learn the lessons from garden cities and post-war New Towns.\"",
"Perhaps now we're truly recognising some of that value because, as archetypal New Towns like Milton Keynes and Harlow celebrate milestone birthdays this year (fiftieth and seventieth respectively), the UK government has floated a new generation of New Towns that could once again change the face of Britain.\nMost cities we live in haven't been planned at all, they're the product of hundreds or thousands of years of architectural accretions. Most cities are ultimately exercises in speculative pissing in the wind: developers develop, architects design, but none of it is woven together and thought through from scratch. It's planning on the most piecemeal scale.",
"JG Ballard said he wrote about the future because he believed it would be better than the past. This is the very essence of town planning: that creating something new, something that works better than what went before, can mould superior worlds. But in an infamous section of Robert Hughes's masterful BBC art series The Shock of the New, this fierce Aussie decried Brasilia as \"a ceremonial slum\" and Paris's Peripherique New Towns as dead ends. He urged urban planners to shut up because we all need a bit of (his words) \"shit\" around us in the cities artists and the rest of us live in: like Paris, New York and London.",
"\"I love the high-profile public art,\" says Croft, \"especially the murals, and would like to see more of that today. As well as the main set pieces, some of the low-key housing developments deserve to be more cherished.\" \n\n Surrounded by the highest quality council housing and landscaping, Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee, for instance, has every right to be as high up on a visitor's itinerary as Durham Cathedral.\nIn the public consciousness, everything from the edge estate to the expanded town to the full New Town has become conflated: we see council houses surrounded by trees and are not always sure if it's an estate or a New Town. Frequently these associations are negative.",
"It was only after the second world war ended that a gutsy modernism bloomed. The New Towns of this era sat alongside the radical municipal socialism exemplified by existing cities like Sheffield, London and Newcastle, which built swathes of housing and other civic amenities in the electric post-war period of progress. Around the globe, planners and architects were getting to make their mark, from Chorweiler to Chandigarh to Brasilia, new cities rose. Top of the list in Britain was providing working people with high quality, affordable housing in healthy surroundings. The 1946 New Towns Act was a way to make things happen by creating an all-powerful development corporation in each of the towns, allowing building to get going quickly.",
"It could be a challenge. Aside from the sheer effort of planning a whole new town there was occasional dissent from those who feared the concreting over of the countryside. And some councils – notably Glasgow – wanted to keep their population (in this case a Labour-voting population) within city limits. Occasionally residents and businesses needed a little gentle convincing to relocate: witness the bonkers space pop 7\" single, Energy in Northampton, which Northampton Development Agency commissioned to sell the town; and the proto-Gregory's Girl social realism of Living at Thamesmead. Milton Keynes had the charming red balloon TV ad and, more bizarrely, Cliff Richard rollerskating through the shopping centre.",
"The question will be: can we fully commit to building a concrete future? The 20th-century New Towns embraced innovation in housing, public realm and transport design. The New Towns of today can do that too – look at Vauban, the ecologically-rigorous New Town on the outskirts of Freiburg in Germany with all kinds of green innovations. The danger with Britain's potential new New Towns is that they simply become overblown dormitory suburbs for the middle managers of Cambridge, Manchester and London: commuter towns with cut-price architecture and planning, rather than truly viable and thriving towns. However, with architects and planners at the tiller instead of just property developers, and with technical innovations such as communications connectivity, futuristic transportation and that all-elusive sense of 'place' front and centre, the new New Towns could offer the 21st century something truly unique.",
"And as the 20th-century New Towns around the world hit middle age, they've often settled into being quietly successful: just look at Australia's spirited capital, Canberra, or the way Milton Keynes has matured to nurture a sense of pride in its inhabitants. Architecture is our gift to future generations; building whole cities supersizes this impulse. It's an urge that will, in various forms, forever linger.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"However the garden cities like Letchworth were more of a dream than a reality, an exercise in placemaking reverie; and like Bournville as much of a fantasy as Middle Earth. Tolkein saw Bournville as a child. These towns were visions of an idealised Britain, a pre-industrial, anti-industrial one. This line of thinking continues in the oddball planned suburb of Poundbury, which appears as one of those miniature model villages (but one with a Waitrose, of course). Strangeness wasn't far from all these places. Jonathan Meades picked up on the multitude of cults that infected the garden cities: teetotallers, vegetarians, religious dissenters, political radicals.",
"But not all. Mohenjo-daro might have been the first planned city, appearing 4,500 years ago in what is now Pakistan. Alexandria was planned. And Renaissance Italy boasted the star-shaped Palmanova. But these were the enlightened exceptions, and in Britain it was mainly the kind of hotchpotch best illustrated by the Shambles in York: quaint, but a bloody mess. \n\n It was towards the end of the 19th century that modern and urban change came to Britain. Tenements and slums were the rule in most large towns of the era. A number of enlightened capitalists planned their own towns, toy communities almost; but such innovative plans were rare. Schoolchildren today are taught about Titus Salt's dry settlement of Saltaire and the model village that started it all, Bournville. But we make a show of these places and the characters who bequeathed them to make us feel better as a country – to play up our successes rather than our failures."
],
[
"It was only after the second world war ended that a gutsy modernism bloomed. The New Towns of this era sat alongside the radical municipal socialism exemplified by existing cities like Sheffield, London and Newcastle, which built swathes of housing and other civic amenities in the electric post-war period of progress. Around the globe, planners and architects were getting to make their mark, from Chorweiler to Chandigarh to Brasilia, new cities rose. Top of the list in Britain was providing working people with high quality, affordable housing in healthy surroundings. The 1946 New Towns Act was a way to make things happen by creating an all-powerful development corporation in each of the towns, allowing building to get going quickly.",
"In John Grindrod's groundbreaking (pardon the pun) book Concretopia, he says New Towns \"sit alongside the creation of the welfare state, the NHS and the post-war revolution in education as monuments to a nation's desire to move on, not just from the destruction of the war years, but from the inequalities and squalor inherited from the Industrial Revolution.\" \n\n Mike Althorpe of Karakusevic Carson Architects, agrees: \"I think the New Towns project in the UK was much more successful than people give it credit for… It's one of the greatest modern movements of people and the biggest built project in our history; and its legacy is one of architectural bravery, optimism and a sincere belief in the idea and the qualities of 'place'. These were not mere housing estates, they were intentional communities with great thought given over to what makes a town.\"",
"Just like starting over: when Britain (briefly) fell in love with New Towns\n\"Modern girls and modern boys: it's tremendous!\" So goes the sunny reflection of the eponymous hero in Bill Forsyth's 1981 film Gregory's Girl, as he surveys the playing fields, comprehensive schools and spaghetti plate of dual carriageways in Cumbernauld, a mid-20th-century Scottish 'New Town'. Gregory and his friends playfully mock the town, but their youthful affection for Cumbernauld shines through; it neatly encapsulates the optimism these places were all about: doing things differently, doing them better. \n\n New Towns were sometimes sublime and surely strange; but more of a success than the popular consensus gave them credit for. These weren't just council estates, but whole functioning places with jobs, shops and services.",
"\"Amazing people were involved in Harlow, Cumbernauld and Peterlee,\" points out Catherine Croft of the Twentieth Century Society. Architects like John Madin at Telford, Frederick Gibberd at Harlow, Geoffrey Jellicoe at Hemel Hempstead deploying a complete vision. This was about top-down, total design; men smoking pipes in committee rooms and deciding what was best for women and children. There's no better depiction of this than in Catherine O'Flynn's bravura novel The News Where You Are, where the harassed architect (that she's very careful to point out\nisn't\nMadin) pores over his beautiful scale model of a Midlands New Town populated with miniature plastic people lacking faces.",
"Yet what's remarkable is that all this got done, all this got built, and often very quickly. The timescales compare with the ridiculously quick builds we see in China and the Arabian Gulf today. Opposition was won over and people did move in – and they often liked New Towns, and the modernist architecture that underpinned them. Mike Althorpe grew up surrounded by Scots in Corby who came south for steel jobs. \"The structure that impacted me most was the 1972 town centre and bus station,\" he says now. \"As a kid I loved running up and down the cantilevered stairs onto balconies to wind my mum up! It had the town's only (broken) escalator, which took you deep into a dark underworld where the smell of diesel bus fumes and chip fat was intoxicating; and a big National Express sign announced 'Book here for Scotland'. It had a fantastically urban quality.\"",
"Christopher Smith's forthcoming film, New Town Utopia, focuses on Basildon. \"New Towns were a grand ambition that could still work,\" he says. \"But for the first wave of new towns, the execution was flawed. These were places created for the working classes, but designed by the middle and upper classes. They also faced a number of negative external forces, including globalisation, Thatcher's Right to Buy policy, and a lack of care and attention.\"\nThe current UK government recently put its weight behind more New Towns in places like Essex and Cheshire. \"We've been campaigning for a new generation of garden cities,\" says Lock. \"It's one of the solutions of the housing crisis – but the renewal of existing cities is too. We need to learn the lessons from garden cities and post-war New Towns.\"",
"Today Bournville feels quaint, especially if you compare it to the later, more radical New Town of Redditch, a mere six stops down the Midlands' Cross-City Line. Bournville was the brainchild of the Cadburys, and its bucolic buildings and tree-lined streets led towards the garden cities movement at the start of the 20th century. With Bournville and the garden cities we see a key touchstone that would also be echoed in the later New Towns project: the idea that the city was broken and escape was the answer. That sentiment endured beyond the end of the \"dark satanic mills\" era. Arguably it's only really been in the last 20 years that the city, the British city at least – other European nations typically had a milder view towards their cities – has come to be seen as the answer rather the question.",
"The sprawling exurban council estates, like Chelmsley Wood on Birmingham's outskirts, faced challenges with a lack of infrastructure, jobs, amenities and transport. There was also psychological isolation from the geographic and social communities that previously bound together urban working-class life. In her book Estates, Lynsey Hanley paints pictures of estates like this as if they were flawed works of cubism. \n\n The expanded towns like King's Lynn, Haverhill and Thetford were never fully comfortable with their double lives as market towns and an overspill zone for Cockneys. But the fully planned New Towns were attempts to make a whole place with all the facilities, factories, shopping and bus links so essential to any functioning city – even if it did sometimes take too long for these to arrive. Milton Keynes didn't get a hospital for 13 years.",
"Each UK New Town has its own character. Cumbernauld’s infamous town centre megastructure has been called Britain's ugliest building, but it was intended as a radical and revolutionary attempt to get all of the town's services – library, shops, bookies, hotel, car park, bus station and penthouse flats – into one space station-like building. \"I tried to take some American friends to Cumbernauld [town centre] and they refused to get out of the car!\" says Catherine Croft. \"That's unusually urban and intimidating; in general there is a calm softness to our New Town design.\"",
"Harlow, with its gardens and Moore sculptures, embodies this softness in its 70th year. But Ballard called the low rise suburbs with house, garden and car in the drive – so typical of New Towns – \"the death of the soul\". And he lived in a suburb. \n\n It could all have been more dramatic: Geoffrey Jellicoe's Motopia in Slough envisaged a city with roads on the roof, while unbuilt proposals for Hook in Hampshire look like a jet-propelled version of quasi-New Town Thamesmead. Hubert de Cronin Hastings, longtime honcho of the Architectural Review, dreamt up Civilia in the 1960s. He wanted to stack Moshe Safdie-esque residential superblocks, Tuscan piazzas and boating lakes (all New Town plans had their marina) on top of an old quarry outside Nuneaton and stick a million people in a kind of retro-futurist Arezzo on the Anker.",
"Perhaps now we're truly recognising some of that value because, as archetypal New Towns like Milton Keynes and Harlow celebrate milestone birthdays this year (fiftieth and seventieth respectively), the UK government has floated a new generation of New Towns that could once again change the face of Britain.\nMost cities we live in haven't been planned at all, they're the product of hundreds or thousands of years of architectural accretions. Most cities are ultimately exercises in speculative pissing in the wind: developers develop, architects design, but none of it is woven together and thought through from scratch. It's planning on the most piecemeal scale.",
"It could be a challenge. Aside from the sheer effort of planning a whole new town there was occasional dissent from those who feared the concreting over of the countryside. And some councils – notably Glasgow – wanted to keep their population (in this case a Labour-voting population) within city limits. Occasionally residents and businesses needed a little gentle convincing to relocate: witness the bonkers space pop 7\" single, Energy in Northampton, which Northampton Development Agency commissioned to sell the town; and the proto-Gregory's Girl social realism of Living at Thamesmead. Milton Keynes had the charming red balloon TV ad and, more bizarrely, Cliff Richard rollerskating through the shopping centre.",
"The question will be: can we fully commit to building a concrete future? The 20th-century New Towns embraced innovation in housing, public realm and transport design. The New Towns of today can do that too – look at Vauban, the ecologically-rigorous New Town on the outskirts of Freiburg in Germany with all kinds of green innovations. The danger with Britain's potential new New Towns is that they simply become overblown dormitory suburbs for the middle managers of Cambridge, Manchester and London: commuter towns with cut-price architecture and planning, rather than truly viable and thriving towns. However, with architects and planners at the tiller instead of just property developers, and with technical innovations such as communications connectivity, futuristic transportation and that all-elusive sense of 'place' front and centre, the new New Towns could offer the 21st century something truly unique.",
"Civilia didn't make it and what did at that exact time was completely antagonistic to it: low-rise, low density Milton Keynes. This \"Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire\", according to John Grindrod, is filled with Mies van der Rohe-apeing minimalism and houses by a welter of starchitects like Norman Foster and Ralph Erskine. It continues to look forward, with trials of driverless cars on its ample roads. \n\n Katy Lock, the Town and Country Planning Association's New Towns expert, talks eloquently about her own upbringing in Milton Keynes. Crucially, she mentions \"people being consciously part of the story. People had chosen to move [to New Towns]. Like with Stevenage earlier, where people had bought into the story of an inside bathroom and a new job.\"",
"However the garden cities like Letchworth were more of a dream than a reality, an exercise in placemaking reverie; and like Bournville as much of a fantasy as Middle Earth. Tolkein saw Bournville as a child. These towns were visions of an idealised Britain, a pre-industrial, anti-industrial one. This line of thinking continues in the oddball planned suburb of Poundbury, which appears as one of those miniature model villages (but one with a Waitrose, of course). Strangeness wasn't far from all these places. Jonathan Meades picked up on the multitude of cults that infected the garden cities: teetotallers, vegetarians, religious dissenters, political radicals.",
"\"I love the high-profile public art,\" says Croft, \"especially the murals, and would like to see more of that today. As well as the main set pieces, some of the low-key housing developments deserve to be more cherished.\" \n\n Surrounded by the highest quality council housing and landscaping, Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee, for instance, has every right to be as high up on a visitor's itinerary as Durham Cathedral.\nIn the public consciousness, everything from the edge estate to the expanded town to the full New Town has become conflated: we see council houses surrounded by trees and are not always sure if it's an estate or a New Town. Frequently these associations are negative.",
"JG Ballard said he wrote about the future because he believed it would be better than the past. This is the very essence of town planning: that creating something new, something that works better than what went before, can mould superior worlds. But in an infamous section of Robert Hughes's masterful BBC art series The Shock of the New, this fierce Aussie decried Brasilia as \"a ceremonial slum\" and Paris's Peripherique New Towns as dead ends. He urged urban planners to shut up because we all need a bit of (his words) \"shit\" around us in the cities artists and the rest of us live in: like Paris, New York and London.",
"But not all. Mohenjo-daro might have been the first planned city, appearing 4,500 years ago in what is now Pakistan. Alexandria was planned. And Renaissance Italy boasted the star-shaped Palmanova. But these were the enlightened exceptions, and in Britain it was mainly the kind of hotchpotch best illustrated by the Shambles in York: quaint, but a bloody mess. \n\n It was towards the end of the 19th century that modern and urban change came to Britain. Tenements and slums were the rule in most large towns of the era. A number of enlightened capitalists planned their own towns, toy communities almost; but such innovative plans were rare. Schoolchildren today are taught about Titus Salt's dry settlement of Saltaire and the model village that started it all, Bournville. But we make a show of these places and the characters who bequeathed them to make us feel better as a country – to play up our successes rather than our failures.",
"And as the 20th-century New Towns around the world hit middle age, they've often settled into being quietly successful: just look at Australia's spirited capital, Canberra, or the way Milton Keynes has matured to nurture a sense of pride in its inhabitants. Architecture is our gift to future generations; building whole cities supersizes this impulse. It's an urge that will, in various forms, forever linger.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article."
],
[
"Each UK New Town has its own character. Cumbernauld’s infamous town centre megastructure has been called Britain's ugliest building, but it was intended as a radical and revolutionary attempt to get all of the town's services – library, shops, bookies, hotel, car park, bus station and penthouse flats – into one space station-like building. \"I tried to take some American friends to Cumbernauld [town centre] and they refused to get out of the car!\" says Catherine Croft. \"That's unusually urban and intimidating; in general there is a calm softness to our New Town design.\"",
"In John Grindrod's groundbreaking (pardon the pun) book Concretopia, he says New Towns \"sit alongside the creation of the welfare state, the NHS and the post-war revolution in education as monuments to a nation's desire to move on, not just from the destruction of the war years, but from the inequalities and squalor inherited from the Industrial Revolution.\" \n\n Mike Althorpe of Karakusevic Carson Architects, agrees: \"I think the New Towns project in the UK was much more successful than people give it credit for… It's one of the greatest modern movements of people and the biggest built project in our history; and its legacy is one of architectural bravery, optimism and a sincere belief in the idea and the qualities of 'place'. These were not mere housing estates, they were intentional communities with great thought given over to what makes a town.\"",
"Perhaps now we're truly recognising some of that value because, as archetypal New Towns like Milton Keynes and Harlow celebrate milestone birthdays this year (fiftieth and seventieth respectively), the UK government has floated a new generation of New Towns that could once again change the face of Britain.\nMost cities we live in haven't been planned at all, they're the product of hundreds or thousands of years of architectural accretions. Most cities are ultimately exercises in speculative pissing in the wind: developers develop, architects design, but none of it is woven together and thought through from scratch. It's planning on the most piecemeal scale.",
"\"Amazing people were involved in Harlow, Cumbernauld and Peterlee,\" points out Catherine Croft of the Twentieth Century Society. Architects like John Madin at Telford, Frederick Gibberd at Harlow, Geoffrey Jellicoe at Hemel Hempstead deploying a complete vision. This was about top-down, total design; men smoking pipes in committee rooms and deciding what was best for women and children. There's no better depiction of this than in Catherine O'Flynn's bravura novel The News Where You Are, where the harassed architect (that she's very careful to point out\nisn't\nMadin) pores over his beautiful scale model of a Midlands New Town populated with miniature plastic people lacking faces.",
"It was only after the second world war ended that a gutsy modernism bloomed. The New Towns of this era sat alongside the radical municipal socialism exemplified by existing cities like Sheffield, London and Newcastle, which built swathes of housing and other civic amenities in the electric post-war period of progress. Around the globe, planners and architects were getting to make their mark, from Chorweiler to Chandigarh to Brasilia, new cities rose. Top of the list in Britain was providing working people with high quality, affordable housing in healthy surroundings. The 1946 New Towns Act was a way to make things happen by creating an all-powerful development corporation in each of the towns, allowing building to get going quickly.",
"Just like starting over: when Britain (briefly) fell in love with New Towns\n\"Modern girls and modern boys: it's tremendous!\" So goes the sunny reflection of the eponymous hero in Bill Forsyth's 1981 film Gregory's Girl, as he surveys the playing fields, comprehensive schools and spaghetti plate of dual carriageways in Cumbernauld, a mid-20th-century Scottish 'New Town'. Gregory and his friends playfully mock the town, but their youthful affection for Cumbernauld shines through; it neatly encapsulates the optimism these places were all about: doing things differently, doing them better. \n\n New Towns were sometimes sublime and surely strange; but more of a success than the popular consensus gave them credit for. These weren't just council estates, but whole functioning places with jobs, shops and services.",
"The question will be: can we fully commit to building a concrete future? The 20th-century New Towns embraced innovation in housing, public realm and transport design. The New Towns of today can do that too – look at Vauban, the ecologically-rigorous New Town on the outskirts of Freiburg in Germany with all kinds of green innovations. The danger with Britain's potential new New Towns is that they simply become overblown dormitory suburbs for the middle managers of Cambridge, Manchester and London: commuter towns with cut-price architecture and planning, rather than truly viable and thriving towns. However, with architects and planners at the tiller instead of just property developers, and with technical innovations such as communications connectivity, futuristic transportation and that all-elusive sense of 'place' front and centre, the new New Towns could offer the 21st century something truly unique.",
"Today Bournville feels quaint, especially if you compare it to the later, more radical New Town of Redditch, a mere six stops down the Midlands' Cross-City Line. Bournville was the brainchild of the Cadburys, and its bucolic buildings and tree-lined streets led towards the garden cities movement at the start of the 20th century. With Bournville and the garden cities we see a key touchstone that would also be echoed in the later New Towns project: the idea that the city was broken and escape was the answer. That sentiment endured beyond the end of the \"dark satanic mills\" era. Arguably it's only really been in the last 20 years that the city, the British city at least – other European nations typically had a milder view towards their cities – has come to be seen as the answer rather the question.",
"The sprawling exurban council estates, like Chelmsley Wood on Birmingham's outskirts, faced challenges with a lack of infrastructure, jobs, amenities and transport. There was also psychological isolation from the geographic and social communities that previously bound together urban working-class life. In her book Estates, Lynsey Hanley paints pictures of estates like this as if they were flawed works of cubism. \n\n The expanded towns like King's Lynn, Haverhill and Thetford were never fully comfortable with their double lives as market towns and an overspill zone for Cockneys. But the fully planned New Towns were attempts to make a whole place with all the facilities, factories, shopping and bus links so essential to any functioning city – even if it did sometimes take too long for these to arrive. Milton Keynes didn't get a hospital for 13 years.",
"Yet what's remarkable is that all this got done, all this got built, and often very quickly. The timescales compare with the ridiculously quick builds we see in China and the Arabian Gulf today. Opposition was won over and people did move in – and they often liked New Towns, and the modernist architecture that underpinned them. Mike Althorpe grew up surrounded by Scots in Corby who came south for steel jobs. \"The structure that impacted me most was the 1972 town centre and bus station,\" he says now. \"As a kid I loved running up and down the cantilevered stairs onto balconies to wind my mum up! It had the town's only (broken) escalator, which took you deep into a dark underworld where the smell of diesel bus fumes and chip fat was intoxicating; and a big National Express sign announced 'Book here for Scotland'. It had a fantastically urban quality.\"",
"Civilia didn't make it and what did at that exact time was completely antagonistic to it: low-rise, low density Milton Keynes. This \"Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire\", according to John Grindrod, is filled with Mies van der Rohe-apeing minimalism and houses by a welter of starchitects like Norman Foster and Ralph Erskine. It continues to look forward, with trials of driverless cars on its ample roads. \n\n Katy Lock, the Town and Country Planning Association's New Towns expert, talks eloquently about her own upbringing in Milton Keynes. Crucially, she mentions \"people being consciously part of the story. People had chosen to move [to New Towns]. Like with Stevenage earlier, where people had bought into the story of an inside bathroom and a new job.\"",
"Harlow, with its gardens and Moore sculptures, embodies this softness in its 70th year. But Ballard called the low rise suburbs with house, garden and car in the drive – so typical of New Towns – \"the death of the soul\". And he lived in a suburb. \n\n It could all have been more dramatic: Geoffrey Jellicoe's Motopia in Slough envisaged a city with roads on the roof, while unbuilt proposals for Hook in Hampshire look like a jet-propelled version of quasi-New Town Thamesmead. Hubert de Cronin Hastings, longtime honcho of the Architectural Review, dreamt up Civilia in the 1960s. He wanted to stack Moshe Safdie-esque residential superblocks, Tuscan piazzas and boating lakes (all New Town plans had their marina) on top of an old quarry outside Nuneaton and stick a million people in a kind of retro-futurist Arezzo on the Anker.",
"It could be a challenge. Aside from the sheer effort of planning a whole new town there was occasional dissent from those who feared the concreting over of the countryside. And some councils – notably Glasgow – wanted to keep their population (in this case a Labour-voting population) within city limits. Occasionally residents and businesses needed a little gentle convincing to relocate: witness the bonkers space pop 7\" single, Energy in Northampton, which Northampton Development Agency commissioned to sell the town; and the proto-Gregory's Girl social realism of Living at Thamesmead. Milton Keynes had the charming red balloon TV ad and, more bizarrely, Cliff Richard rollerskating through the shopping centre.",
"JG Ballard said he wrote about the future because he believed it would be better than the past. This is the very essence of town planning: that creating something new, something that works better than what went before, can mould superior worlds. But in an infamous section of Robert Hughes's masterful BBC art series The Shock of the New, this fierce Aussie decried Brasilia as \"a ceremonial slum\" and Paris's Peripherique New Towns as dead ends. He urged urban planners to shut up because we all need a bit of (his words) \"shit\" around us in the cities artists and the rest of us live in: like Paris, New York and London.",
"Christopher Smith's forthcoming film, New Town Utopia, focuses on Basildon. \"New Towns were a grand ambition that could still work,\" he says. \"But for the first wave of new towns, the execution was flawed. These were places created for the working classes, but designed by the middle and upper classes. They also faced a number of negative external forces, including globalisation, Thatcher's Right to Buy policy, and a lack of care and attention.\"\nThe current UK government recently put its weight behind more New Towns in places like Essex and Cheshire. \"We've been campaigning for a new generation of garden cities,\" says Lock. \"It's one of the solutions of the housing crisis – but the renewal of existing cities is too. We need to learn the lessons from garden cities and post-war New Towns.\"",
"\"I love the high-profile public art,\" says Croft, \"especially the murals, and would like to see more of that today. As well as the main set pieces, some of the low-key housing developments deserve to be more cherished.\" \n\n Surrounded by the highest quality council housing and landscaping, Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee, for instance, has every right to be as high up on a visitor's itinerary as Durham Cathedral.\nIn the public consciousness, everything from the edge estate to the expanded town to the full New Town has become conflated: we see council houses surrounded by trees and are not always sure if it's an estate or a New Town. Frequently these associations are negative.",
"However the garden cities like Letchworth were more of a dream than a reality, an exercise in placemaking reverie; and like Bournville as much of a fantasy as Middle Earth. Tolkein saw Bournville as a child. These towns were visions of an idealised Britain, a pre-industrial, anti-industrial one. This line of thinking continues in the oddball planned suburb of Poundbury, which appears as one of those miniature model villages (but one with a Waitrose, of course). Strangeness wasn't far from all these places. Jonathan Meades picked up on the multitude of cults that infected the garden cities: teetotallers, vegetarians, religious dissenters, political radicals.",
"And as the 20th-century New Towns around the world hit middle age, they've often settled into being quietly successful: just look at Australia's spirited capital, Canberra, or the way Milton Keynes has matured to nurture a sense of pride in its inhabitants. Architecture is our gift to future generations; building whole cities supersizes this impulse. It's an urge that will, in various forms, forever linger.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"But not all. Mohenjo-daro might have been the first planned city, appearing 4,500 years ago in what is now Pakistan. Alexandria was planned. And Renaissance Italy boasted the star-shaped Palmanova. But these were the enlightened exceptions, and in Britain it was mainly the kind of hotchpotch best illustrated by the Shambles in York: quaint, but a bloody mess. \n\n It was towards the end of the 19th century that modern and urban change came to Britain. Tenements and slums were the rule in most large towns of the era. A number of enlightened capitalists planned their own towns, toy communities almost; but such innovative plans were rare. Schoolchildren today are taught about Titus Salt's dry settlement of Saltaire and the model village that started it all, Bournville. But we make a show of these places and the characters who bequeathed them to make us feel better as a country – to play up our successes rather than our failures."
],
[
"In John Grindrod's groundbreaking (pardon the pun) book Concretopia, he says New Towns \"sit alongside the creation of the welfare state, the NHS and the post-war revolution in education as monuments to a nation's desire to move on, not just from the destruction of the war years, but from the inequalities and squalor inherited from the Industrial Revolution.\" \n\n Mike Althorpe of Karakusevic Carson Architects, agrees: \"I think the New Towns project in the UK was much more successful than people give it credit for… It's one of the greatest modern movements of people and the biggest built project in our history; and its legacy is one of architectural bravery, optimism and a sincere belief in the idea and the qualities of 'place'. These were not mere housing estates, they were intentional communities with great thought given over to what makes a town.\"",
"It was only after the second world war ended that a gutsy modernism bloomed. The New Towns of this era sat alongside the radical municipal socialism exemplified by existing cities like Sheffield, London and Newcastle, which built swathes of housing and other civic amenities in the electric post-war period of progress. Around the globe, planners and architects were getting to make their mark, from Chorweiler to Chandigarh to Brasilia, new cities rose. Top of the list in Britain was providing working people with high quality, affordable housing in healthy surroundings. The 1946 New Towns Act was a way to make things happen by creating an all-powerful development corporation in each of the towns, allowing building to get going quickly.",
"\"Amazing people were involved in Harlow, Cumbernauld and Peterlee,\" points out Catherine Croft of the Twentieth Century Society. Architects like John Madin at Telford, Frederick Gibberd at Harlow, Geoffrey Jellicoe at Hemel Hempstead deploying a complete vision. This was about top-down, total design; men smoking pipes in committee rooms and deciding what was best for women and children. There's no better depiction of this than in Catherine O'Flynn's bravura novel The News Where You Are, where the harassed architect (that she's very careful to point out\nisn't\nMadin) pores over his beautiful scale model of a Midlands New Town populated with miniature plastic people lacking faces.",
"Christopher Smith's forthcoming film, New Town Utopia, focuses on Basildon. \"New Towns were a grand ambition that could still work,\" he says. \"But for the first wave of new towns, the execution was flawed. These were places created for the working classes, but designed by the middle and upper classes. They also faced a number of negative external forces, including globalisation, Thatcher's Right to Buy policy, and a lack of care and attention.\"\nThe current UK government recently put its weight behind more New Towns in places like Essex and Cheshire. \"We've been campaigning for a new generation of garden cities,\" says Lock. \"It's one of the solutions of the housing crisis – but the renewal of existing cities is too. We need to learn the lessons from garden cities and post-war New Towns.\"",
"Just like starting over: when Britain (briefly) fell in love with New Towns\n\"Modern girls and modern boys: it's tremendous!\" So goes the sunny reflection of the eponymous hero in Bill Forsyth's 1981 film Gregory's Girl, as he surveys the playing fields, comprehensive schools and spaghetti plate of dual carriageways in Cumbernauld, a mid-20th-century Scottish 'New Town'. Gregory and his friends playfully mock the town, but their youthful affection for Cumbernauld shines through; it neatly encapsulates the optimism these places were all about: doing things differently, doing them better. \n\n New Towns were sometimes sublime and surely strange; but more of a success than the popular consensus gave them credit for. These weren't just council estates, but whole functioning places with jobs, shops and services.",
"It could be a challenge. Aside from the sheer effort of planning a whole new town there was occasional dissent from those who feared the concreting over of the countryside. And some councils – notably Glasgow – wanted to keep their population (in this case a Labour-voting population) within city limits. Occasionally residents and businesses needed a little gentle convincing to relocate: witness the bonkers space pop 7\" single, Energy in Northampton, which Northampton Development Agency commissioned to sell the town; and the proto-Gregory's Girl social realism of Living at Thamesmead. Milton Keynes had the charming red balloon TV ad and, more bizarrely, Cliff Richard rollerskating through the shopping centre.",
"Today Bournville feels quaint, especially if you compare it to the later, more radical New Town of Redditch, a mere six stops down the Midlands' Cross-City Line. Bournville was the brainchild of the Cadburys, and its bucolic buildings and tree-lined streets led towards the garden cities movement at the start of the 20th century. With Bournville and the garden cities we see a key touchstone that would also be echoed in the later New Towns project: the idea that the city was broken and escape was the answer. That sentiment endured beyond the end of the \"dark satanic mills\" era. Arguably it's only really been in the last 20 years that the city, the British city at least – other European nations typically had a milder view towards their cities – has come to be seen as the answer rather the question.",
"Each UK New Town has its own character. Cumbernauld’s infamous town centre megastructure has been called Britain's ugliest building, but it was intended as a radical and revolutionary attempt to get all of the town's services – library, shops, bookies, hotel, car park, bus station and penthouse flats – into one space station-like building. \"I tried to take some American friends to Cumbernauld [town centre] and they refused to get out of the car!\" says Catherine Croft. \"That's unusually urban and intimidating; in general there is a calm softness to our New Town design.\"",
"The sprawling exurban council estates, like Chelmsley Wood on Birmingham's outskirts, faced challenges with a lack of infrastructure, jobs, amenities and transport. There was also psychological isolation from the geographic and social communities that previously bound together urban working-class life. In her book Estates, Lynsey Hanley paints pictures of estates like this as if they were flawed works of cubism. \n\n The expanded towns like King's Lynn, Haverhill and Thetford were never fully comfortable with their double lives as market towns and an overspill zone for Cockneys. But the fully planned New Towns were attempts to make a whole place with all the facilities, factories, shopping and bus links so essential to any functioning city – even if it did sometimes take too long for these to arrive. Milton Keynes didn't get a hospital for 13 years.",
"Yet what's remarkable is that all this got done, all this got built, and often very quickly. The timescales compare with the ridiculously quick builds we see in China and the Arabian Gulf today. Opposition was won over and people did move in – and they often liked New Towns, and the modernist architecture that underpinned them. Mike Althorpe grew up surrounded by Scots in Corby who came south for steel jobs. \"The structure that impacted me most was the 1972 town centre and bus station,\" he says now. \"As a kid I loved running up and down the cantilevered stairs onto balconies to wind my mum up! It had the town's only (broken) escalator, which took you deep into a dark underworld where the smell of diesel bus fumes and chip fat was intoxicating; and a big National Express sign announced 'Book here for Scotland'. It had a fantastically urban quality.\"",
"Perhaps now we're truly recognising some of that value because, as archetypal New Towns like Milton Keynes and Harlow celebrate milestone birthdays this year (fiftieth and seventieth respectively), the UK government has floated a new generation of New Towns that could once again change the face of Britain.\nMost cities we live in haven't been planned at all, they're the product of hundreds or thousands of years of architectural accretions. Most cities are ultimately exercises in speculative pissing in the wind: developers develop, architects design, but none of it is woven together and thought through from scratch. It's planning on the most piecemeal scale.",
"Civilia didn't make it and what did at that exact time was completely antagonistic to it: low-rise, low density Milton Keynes. This \"Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire\", according to John Grindrod, is filled with Mies van der Rohe-apeing minimalism and houses by a welter of starchitects like Norman Foster and Ralph Erskine. It continues to look forward, with trials of driverless cars on its ample roads. \n\n Katy Lock, the Town and Country Planning Association's New Towns expert, talks eloquently about her own upbringing in Milton Keynes. Crucially, she mentions \"people being consciously part of the story. People had chosen to move [to New Towns]. Like with Stevenage earlier, where people had bought into the story of an inside bathroom and a new job.\"",
"The question will be: can we fully commit to building a concrete future? The 20th-century New Towns embraced innovation in housing, public realm and transport design. The New Towns of today can do that too – look at Vauban, the ecologically-rigorous New Town on the outskirts of Freiburg in Germany with all kinds of green innovations. The danger with Britain's potential new New Towns is that they simply become overblown dormitory suburbs for the middle managers of Cambridge, Manchester and London: commuter towns with cut-price architecture and planning, rather than truly viable and thriving towns. However, with architects and planners at the tiller instead of just property developers, and with technical innovations such as communications connectivity, futuristic transportation and that all-elusive sense of 'place' front and centre, the new New Towns could offer the 21st century something truly unique.",
"Harlow, with its gardens and Moore sculptures, embodies this softness in its 70th year. But Ballard called the low rise suburbs with house, garden and car in the drive – so typical of New Towns – \"the death of the soul\". And he lived in a suburb. \n\n It could all have been more dramatic: Geoffrey Jellicoe's Motopia in Slough envisaged a city with roads on the roof, while unbuilt proposals for Hook in Hampshire look like a jet-propelled version of quasi-New Town Thamesmead. Hubert de Cronin Hastings, longtime honcho of the Architectural Review, dreamt up Civilia in the 1960s. He wanted to stack Moshe Safdie-esque residential superblocks, Tuscan piazzas and boating lakes (all New Town plans had their marina) on top of an old quarry outside Nuneaton and stick a million people in a kind of retro-futurist Arezzo on the Anker.",
"JG Ballard said he wrote about the future because he believed it would be better than the past. This is the very essence of town planning: that creating something new, something that works better than what went before, can mould superior worlds. But in an infamous section of Robert Hughes's masterful BBC art series The Shock of the New, this fierce Aussie decried Brasilia as \"a ceremonial slum\" and Paris's Peripherique New Towns as dead ends. He urged urban planners to shut up because we all need a bit of (his words) \"shit\" around us in the cities artists and the rest of us live in: like Paris, New York and London.",
"However the garden cities like Letchworth were more of a dream than a reality, an exercise in placemaking reverie; and like Bournville as much of a fantasy as Middle Earth. Tolkein saw Bournville as a child. These towns were visions of an idealised Britain, a pre-industrial, anti-industrial one. This line of thinking continues in the oddball planned suburb of Poundbury, which appears as one of those miniature model villages (but one with a Waitrose, of course). Strangeness wasn't far from all these places. Jonathan Meades picked up on the multitude of cults that infected the garden cities: teetotallers, vegetarians, religious dissenters, political radicals.",
"\"I love the high-profile public art,\" says Croft, \"especially the murals, and would like to see more of that today. As well as the main set pieces, some of the low-key housing developments deserve to be more cherished.\" \n\n Surrounded by the highest quality council housing and landscaping, Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee, for instance, has every right to be as high up on a visitor's itinerary as Durham Cathedral.\nIn the public consciousness, everything from the edge estate to the expanded town to the full New Town has become conflated: we see council houses surrounded by trees and are not always sure if it's an estate or a New Town. Frequently these associations are negative.",
"And as the 20th-century New Towns around the world hit middle age, they've often settled into being quietly successful: just look at Australia's spirited capital, Canberra, or the way Milton Keynes has matured to nurture a sense of pride in its inhabitants. Architecture is our gift to future generations; building whole cities supersizes this impulse. It's an urge that will, in various forms, forever linger.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"But not all. Mohenjo-daro might have been the first planned city, appearing 4,500 years ago in what is now Pakistan. Alexandria was planned. And Renaissance Italy boasted the star-shaped Palmanova. But these were the enlightened exceptions, and in Britain it was mainly the kind of hotchpotch best illustrated by the Shambles in York: quaint, but a bloody mess. \n\n It was towards the end of the 19th century that modern and urban change came to Britain. Tenements and slums were the rule in most large towns of the era. A number of enlightened capitalists planned their own towns, toy communities almost; but such innovative plans were rare. Schoolchildren today are taught about Titus Salt's dry settlement of Saltaire and the model village that started it all, Bournville. But we make a show of these places and the characters who bequeathed them to make us feel better as a country – to play up our successes rather than our failures."
],
[
"In John Grindrod's groundbreaking (pardon the pun) book Concretopia, he says New Towns \"sit alongside the creation of the welfare state, the NHS and the post-war revolution in education as monuments to a nation's desire to move on, not just from the destruction of the war years, but from the inequalities and squalor inherited from the Industrial Revolution.\" \n\n Mike Althorpe of Karakusevic Carson Architects, agrees: \"I think the New Towns project in the UK was much more successful than people give it credit for… It's one of the greatest modern movements of people and the biggest built project in our history; and its legacy is one of architectural bravery, optimism and a sincere belief in the idea and the qualities of 'place'. These were not mere housing estates, they were intentional communities with great thought given over to what makes a town.\"",
"Yet what's remarkable is that all this got done, all this got built, and often very quickly. The timescales compare with the ridiculously quick builds we see in China and the Arabian Gulf today. Opposition was won over and people did move in – and they often liked New Towns, and the modernist architecture that underpinned them. Mike Althorpe grew up surrounded by Scots in Corby who came south for steel jobs. \"The structure that impacted me most was the 1972 town centre and bus station,\" he says now. \"As a kid I loved running up and down the cantilevered stairs onto balconies to wind my mum up! It had the town's only (broken) escalator, which took you deep into a dark underworld where the smell of diesel bus fumes and chip fat was intoxicating; and a big National Express sign announced 'Book here for Scotland'. It had a fantastically urban quality.\"",
"Just like starting over: when Britain (briefly) fell in love with New Towns\n\"Modern girls and modern boys: it's tremendous!\" So goes the sunny reflection of the eponymous hero in Bill Forsyth's 1981 film Gregory's Girl, as he surveys the playing fields, comprehensive schools and spaghetti plate of dual carriageways in Cumbernauld, a mid-20th-century Scottish 'New Town'. Gregory and his friends playfully mock the town, but their youthful affection for Cumbernauld shines through; it neatly encapsulates the optimism these places were all about: doing things differently, doing them better. \n\n New Towns were sometimes sublime and surely strange; but more of a success than the popular consensus gave them credit for. These weren't just council estates, but whole functioning places with jobs, shops and services.",
"It was only after the second world war ended that a gutsy modernism bloomed. The New Towns of this era sat alongside the radical municipal socialism exemplified by existing cities like Sheffield, London and Newcastle, which built swathes of housing and other civic amenities in the electric post-war period of progress. Around the globe, planners and architects were getting to make their mark, from Chorweiler to Chandigarh to Brasilia, new cities rose. Top of the list in Britain was providing working people with high quality, affordable housing in healthy surroundings. The 1946 New Towns Act was a way to make things happen by creating an all-powerful development corporation in each of the towns, allowing building to get going quickly.",
"\"Amazing people were involved in Harlow, Cumbernauld and Peterlee,\" points out Catherine Croft of the Twentieth Century Society. Architects like John Madin at Telford, Frederick Gibberd at Harlow, Geoffrey Jellicoe at Hemel Hempstead deploying a complete vision. This was about top-down, total design; men smoking pipes in committee rooms and deciding what was best for women and children. There's no better depiction of this than in Catherine O'Flynn's bravura novel The News Where You Are, where the harassed architect (that she's very careful to point out\nisn't\nMadin) pores over his beautiful scale model of a Midlands New Town populated with miniature plastic people lacking faces.",
"It could be a challenge. Aside from the sheer effort of planning a whole new town there was occasional dissent from those who feared the concreting over of the countryside. And some councils – notably Glasgow – wanted to keep their population (in this case a Labour-voting population) within city limits. Occasionally residents and businesses needed a little gentle convincing to relocate: witness the bonkers space pop 7\" single, Energy in Northampton, which Northampton Development Agency commissioned to sell the town; and the proto-Gregory's Girl social realism of Living at Thamesmead. Milton Keynes had the charming red balloon TV ad and, more bizarrely, Cliff Richard rollerskating through the shopping centre.",
"Civilia didn't make it and what did at that exact time was completely antagonistic to it: low-rise, low density Milton Keynes. This \"Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire\", according to John Grindrod, is filled with Mies van der Rohe-apeing minimalism and houses by a welter of starchitects like Norman Foster and Ralph Erskine. It continues to look forward, with trials of driverless cars on its ample roads. \n\n Katy Lock, the Town and Country Planning Association's New Towns expert, talks eloquently about her own upbringing in Milton Keynes. Crucially, she mentions \"people being consciously part of the story. People had chosen to move [to New Towns]. Like with Stevenage earlier, where people had bought into the story of an inside bathroom and a new job.\"",
"Each UK New Town has its own character. Cumbernauld’s infamous town centre megastructure has been called Britain's ugliest building, but it was intended as a radical and revolutionary attempt to get all of the town's services – library, shops, bookies, hotel, car park, bus station and penthouse flats – into one space station-like building. \"I tried to take some American friends to Cumbernauld [town centre] and they refused to get out of the car!\" says Catherine Croft. \"That's unusually urban and intimidating; in general there is a calm softness to our New Town design.\"",
"The sprawling exurban council estates, like Chelmsley Wood on Birmingham's outskirts, faced challenges with a lack of infrastructure, jobs, amenities and transport. There was also psychological isolation from the geographic and social communities that previously bound together urban working-class life. In her book Estates, Lynsey Hanley paints pictures of estates like this as if they were flawed works of cubism. \n\n The expanded towns like King's Lynn, Haverhill and Thetford were never fully comfortable with their double lives as market towns and an overspill zone for Cockneys. But the fully planned New Towns were attempts to make a whole place with all the facilities, factories, shopping and bus links so essential to any functioning city – even if it did sometimes take too long for these to arrive. Milton Keynes didn't get a hospital for 13 years.",
"Harlow, with its gardens and Moore sculptures, embodies this softness in its 70th year. But Ballard called the low rise suburbs with house, garden and car in the drive – so typical of New Towns – \"the death of the soul\". And he lived in a suburb. \n\n It could all have been more dramatic: Geoffrey Jellicoe's Motopia in Slough envisaged a city with roads on the roof, while unbuilt proposals for Hook in Hampshire look like a jet-propelled version of quasi-New Town Thamesmead. Hubert de Cronin Hastings, longtime honcho of the Architectural Review, dreamt up Civilia in the 1960s. He wanted to stack Moshe Safdie-esque residential superblocks, Tuscan piazzas and boating lakes (all New Town plans had their marina) on top of an old quarry outside Nuneaton and stick a million people in a kind of retro-futurist Arezzo on the Anker.",
"Today Bournville feels quaint, especially if you compare it to the later, more radical New Town of Redditch, a mere six stops down the Midlands' Cross-City Line. Bournville was the brainchild of the Cadburys, and its bucolic buildings and tree-lined streets led towards the garden cities movement at the start of the 20th century. With Bournville and the garden cities we see a key touchstone that would also be echoed in the later New Towns project: the idea that the city was broken and escape was the answer. That sentiment endured beyond the end of the \"dark satanic mills\" era. Arguably it's only really been in the last 20 years that the city, the British city at least – other European nations typically had a milder view towards their cities – has come to be seen as the answer rather the question.",
"Christopher Smith's forthcoming film, New Town Utopia, focuses on Basildon. \"New Towns were a grand ambition that could still work,\" he says. \"But for the first wave of new towns, the execution was flawed. These were places created for the working classes, but designed by the middle and upper classes. They also faced a number of negative external forces, including globalisation, Thatcher's Right to Buy policy, and a lack of care and attention.\"\nThe current UK government recently put its weight behind more New Towns in places like Essex and Cheshire. \"We've been campaigning for a new generation of garden cities,\" says Lock. \"It's one of the solutions of the housing crisis – but the renewal of existing cities is too. We need to learn the lessons from garden cities and post-war New Towns.\"",
"The question will be: can we fully commit to building a concrete future? The 20th-century New Towns embraced innovation in housing, public realm and transport design. The New Towns of today can do that too – look at Vauban, the ecologically-rigorous New Town on the outskirts of Freiburg in Germany with all kinds of green innovations. The danger with Britain's potential new New Towns is that they simply become overblown dormitory suburbs for the middle managers of Cambridge, Manchester and London: commuter towns with cut-price architecture and planning, rather than truly viable and thriving towns. However, with architects and planners at the tiller instead of just property developers, and with technical innovations such as communications connectivity, futuristic transportation and that all-elusive sense of 'place' front and centre, the new New Towns could offer the 21st century something truly unique.",
"Perhaps now we're truly recognising some of that value because, as archetypal New Towns like Milton Keynes and Harlow celebrate milestone birthdays this year (fiftieth and seventieth respectively), the UK government has floated a new generation of New Towns that could once again change the face of Britain.\nMost cities we live in haven't been planned at all, they're the product of hundreds or thousands of years of architectural accretions. Most cities are ultimately exercises in speculative pissing in the wind: developers develop, architects design, but none of it is woven together and thought through from scratch. It's planning on the most piecemeal scale.",
"\"I love the high-profile public art,\" says Croft, \"especially the murals, and would like to see more of that today. As well as the main set pieces, some of the low-key housing developments deserve to be more cherished.\" \n\n Surrounded by the highest quality council housing and landscaping, Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee, for instance, has every right to be as high up on a visitor's itinerary as Durham Cathedral.\nIn the public consciousness, everything from the edge estate to the expanded town to the full New Town has become conflated: we see council houses surrounded by trees and are not always sure if it's an estate or a New Town. Frequently these associations are negative.",
"JG Ballard said he wrote about the future because he believed it would be better than the past. This is the very essence of town planning: that creating something new, something that works better than what went before, can mould superior worlds. But in an infamous section of Robert Hughes's masterful BBC art series The Shock of the New, this fierce Aussie decried Brasilia as \"a ceremonial slum\" and Paris's Peripherique New Towns as dead ends. He urged urban planners to shut up because we all need a bit of (his words) \"shit\" around us in the cities artists and the rest of us live in: like Paris, New York and London.",
"And as the 20th-century New Towns around the world hit middle age, they've often settled into being quietly successful: just look at Australia's spirited capital, Canberra, or the way Milton Keynes has matured to nurture a sense of pride in its inhabitants. Architecture is our gift to future generations; building whole cities supersizes this impulse. It's an urge that will, in various forms, forever linger.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"However the garden cities like Letchworth were more of a dream than a reality, an exercise in placemaking reverie; and like Bournville as much of a fantasy as Middle Earth. Tolkein saw Bournville as a child. These towns were visions of an idealised Britain, a pre-industrial, anti-industrial one. This line of thinking continues in the oddball planned suburb of Poundbury, which appears as one of those miniature model villages (but one with a Waitrose, of course). Strangeness wasn't far from all these places. Jonathan Meades picked up on the multitude of cults that infected the garden cities: teetotallers, vegetarians, religious dissenters, political radicals.",
"But not all. Mohenjo-daro might have been the first planned city, appearing 4,500 years ago in what is now Pakistan. Alexandria was planned. And Renaissance Italy boasted the star-shaped Palmanova. But these were the enlightened exceptions, and in Britain it was mainly the kind of hotchpotch best illustrated by the Shambles in York: quaint, but a bloody mess. \n\n It was towards the end of the 19th century that modern and urban change came to Britain. Tenements and slums were the rule in most large towns of the era. A number of enlightened capitalists planned their own towns, toy communities almost; but such innovative plans were rare. Schoolchildren today are taught about Titus Salt's dry settlement of Saltaire and the model village that started it all, Bournville. But we make a show of these places and the characters who bequeathed them to make us feel better as a country – to play up our successes rather than our failures."
],
[
"Christopher Smith's forthcoming film, New Town Utopia, focuses on Basildon. \"New Towns were a grand ambition that could still work,\" he says. \"But for the first wave of new towns, the execution was flawed. These were places created for the working classes, but designed by the middle and upper classes. They also faced a number of negative external forces, including globalisation, Thatcher's Right to Buy policy, and a lack of care and attention.\"\nThe current UK government recently put its weight behind more New Towns in places like Essex and Cheshire. \"We've been campaigning for a new generation of garden cities,\" says Lock. \"It's one of the solutions of the housing crisis – but the renewal of existing cities is too. We need to learn the lessons from garden cities and post-war New Towns.\"",
"In John Grindrod's groundbreaking (pardon the pun) book Concretopia, he says New Towns \"sit alongside the creation of the welfare state, the NHS and the post-war revolution in education as monuments to a nation's desire to move on, not just from the destruction of the war years, but from the inequalities and squalor inherited from the Industrial Revolution.\" \n\n Mike Althorpe of Karakusevic Carson Architects, agrees: \"I think the New Towns project in the UK was much more successful than people give it credit for… It's one of the greatest modern movements of people and the biggest built project in our history; and its legacy is one of architectural bravery, optimism and a sincere belief in the idea and the qualities of 'place'. These were not mere housing estates, they were intentional communities with great thought given over to what makes a town.\"",
"\"Amazing people were involved in Harlow, Cumbernauld and Peterlee,\" points out Catherine Croft of the Twentieth Century Society. Architects like John Madin at Telford, Frederick Gibberd at Harlow, Geoffrey Jellicoe at Hemel Hempstead deploying a complete vision. This was about top-down, total design; men smoking pipes in committee rooms and deciding what was best for women and children. There's no better depiction of this than in Catherine O'Flynn's bravura novel The News Where You Are, where the harassed architect (that she's very careful to point out\nisn't\nMadin) pores over his beautiful scale model of a Midlands New Town populated with miniature plastic people lacking faces.",
"Each UK New Town has its own character. Cumbernauld’s infamous town centre megastructure has been called Britain's ugliest building, but it was intended as a radical and revolutionary attempt to get all of the town's services – library, shops, bookies, hotel, car park, bus station and penthouse flats – into one space station-like building. \"I tried to take some American friends to Cumbernauld [town centre] and they refused to get out of the car!\" says Catherine Croft. \"That's unusually urban and intimidating; in general there is a calm softness to our New Town design.\"",
"Just like starting over: when Britain (briefly) fell in love with New Towns\n\"Modern girls and modern boys: it's tremendous!\" So goes the sunny reflection of the eponymous hero in Bill Forsyth's 1981 film Gregory's Girl, as he surveys the playing fields, comprehensive schools and spaghetti plate of dual carriageways in Cumbernauld, a mid-20th-century Scottish 'New Town'. Gregory and his friends playfully mock the town, but their youthful affection for Cumbernauld shines through; it neatly encapsulates the optimism these places were all about: doing things differently, doing them better. \n\n New Towns were sometimes sublime and surely strange; but more of a success than the popular consensus gave them credit for. These weren't just council estates, but whole functioning places with jobs, shops and services.",
"The sprawling exurban council estates, like Chelmsley Wood on Birmingham's outskirts, faced challenges with a lack of infrastructure, jobs, amenities and transport. There was also psychological isolation from the geographic and social communities that previously bound together urban working-class life. In her book Estates, Lynsey Hanley paints pictures of estates like this as if they were flawed works of cubism. \n\n The expanded towns like King's Lynn, Haverhill and Thetford were never fully comfortable with their double lives as market towns and an overspill zone for Cockneys. But the fully planned New Towns were attempts to make a whole place with all the facilities, factories, shopping and bus links so essential to any functioning city – even if it did sometimes take too long for these to arrive. Milton Keynes didn't get a hospital for 13 years.",
"Civilia didn't make it and what did at that exact time was completely antagonistic to it: low-rise, low density Milton Keynes. This \"Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire\", according to John Grindrod, is filled with Mies van der Rohe-apeing minimalism and houses by a welter of starchitects like Norman Foster and Ralph Erskine. It continues to look forward, with trials of driverless cars on its ample roads. \n\n Katy Lock, the Town and Country Planning Association's New Towns expert, talks eloquently about her own upbringing in Milton Keynes. Crucially, she mentions \"people being consciously part of the story. People had chosen to move [to New Towns]. Like with Stevenage earlier, where people had bought into the story of an inside bathroom and a new job.\"",
"Harlow, with its gardens and Moore sculptures, embodies this softness in its 70th year. But Ballard called the low rise suburbs with house, garden and car in the drive – so typical of New Towns – \"the death of the soul\". And he lived in a suburb. \n\n It could all have been more dramatic: Geoffrey Jellicoe's Motopia in Slough envisaged a city with roads on the roof, while unbuilt proposals for Hook in Hampshire look like a jet-propelled version of quasi-New Town Thamesmead. Hubert de Cronin Hastings, longtime honcho of the Architectural Review, dreamt up Civilia in the 1960s. He wanted to stack Moshe Safdie-esque residential superblocks, Tuscan piazzas and boating lakes (all New Town plans had their marina) on top of an old quarry outside Nuneaton and stick a million people in a kind of retro-futurist Arezzo on the Anker.",
"JG Ballard said he wrote about the future because he believed it would be better than the past. This is the very essence of town planning: that creating something new, something that works better than what went before, can mould superior worlds. But in an infamous section of Robert Hughes's masterful BBC art series The Shock of the New, this fierce Aussie decried Brasilia as \"a ceremonial slum\" and Paris's Peripherique New Towns as dead ends. He urged urban planners to shut up because we all need a bit of (his words) \"shit\" around us in the cities artists and the rest of us live in: like Paris, New York and London.",
"Yet what's remarkable is that all this got done, all this got built, and often very quickly. The timescales compare with the ridiculously quick builds we see in China and the Arabian Gulf today. Opposition was won over and people did move in – and they often liked New Towns, and the modernist architecture that underpinned them. Mike Althorpe grew up surrounded by Scots in Corby who came south for steel jobs. \"The structure that impacted me most was the 1972 town centre and bus station,\" he says now. \"As a kid I loved running up and down the cantilevered stairs onto balconies to wind my mum up! It had the town's only (broken) escalator, which took you deep into a dark underworld where the smell of diesel bus fumes and chip fat was intoxicating; and a big National Express sign announced 'Book here for Scotland'. It had a fantastically urban quality.\"",
"It was only after the second world war ended that a gutsy modernism bloomed. The New Towns of this era sat alongside the radical municipal socialism exemplified by existing cities like Sheffield, London and Newcastle, which built swathes of housing and other civic amenities in the electric post-war period of progress. Around the globe, planners and architects were getting to make their mark, from Chorweiler to Chandigarh to Brasilia, new cities rose. Top of the list in Britain was providing working people with high quality, affordable housing in healthy surroundings. The 1946 New Towns Act was a way to make things happen by creating an all-powerful development corporation in each of the towns, allowing building to get going quickly.",
"Perhaps now we're truly recognising some of that value because, as archetypal New Towns like Milton Keynes and Harlow celebrate milestone birthdays this year (fiftieth and seventieth respectively), the UK government has floated a new generation of New Towns that could once again change the face of Britain.\nMost cities we live in haven't been planned at all, they're the product of hundreds or thousands of years of architectural accretions. Most cities are ultimately exercises in speculative pissing in the wind: developers develop, architects design, but none of it is woven together and thought through from scratch. It's planning on the most piecemeal scale.",
"Today Bournville feels quaint, especially if you compare it to the later, more radical New Town of Redditch, a mere six stops down the Midlands' Cross-City Line. Bournville was the brainchild of the Cadburys, and its bucolic buildings and tree-lined streets led towards the garden cities movement at the start of the 20th century. With Bournville and the garden cities we see a key touchstone that would also be echoed in the later New Towns project: the idea that the city was broken and escape was the answer. That sentiment endured beyond the end of the \"dark satanic mills\" era. Arguably it's only really been in the last 20 years that the city, the British city at least – other European nations typically had a milder view towards their cities – has come to be seen as the answer rather the question.",
"The question will be: can we fully commit to building a concrete future? The 20th-century New Towns embraced innovation in housing, public realm and transport design. The New Towns of today can do that too – look at Vauban, the ecologically-rigorous New Town on the outskirts of Freiburg in Germany with all kinds of green innovations. The danger with Britain's potential new New Towns is that they simply become overblown dormitory suburbs for the middle managers of Cambridge, Manchester and London: commuter towns with cut-price architecture and planning, rather than truly viable and thriving towns. However, with architects and planners at the tiller instead of just property developers, and with technical innovations such as communications connectivity, futuristic transportation and that all-elusive sense of 'place' front and centre, the new New Towns could offer the 21st century something truly unique.",
"It could be a challenge. Aside from the sheer effort of planning a whole new town there was occasional dissent from those who feared the concreting over of the countryside. And some councils – notably Glasgow – wanted to keep their population (in this case a Labour-voting population) within city limits. Occasionally residents and businesses needed a little gentle convincing to relocate: witness the bonkers space pop 7\" single, Energy in Northampton, which Northampton Development Agency commissioned to sell the town; and the proto-Gregory's Girl social realism of Living at Thamesmead. Milton Keynes had the charming red balloon TV ad and, more bizarrely, Cliff Richard rollerskating through the shopping centre.",
"\"I love the high-profile public art,\" says Croft, \"especially the murals, and would like to see more of that today. As well as the main set pieces, some of the low-key housing developments deserve to be more cherished.\" \n\n Surrounded by the highest quality council housing and landscaping, Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee, for instance, has every right to be as high up on a visitor's itinerary as Durham Cathedral.\nIn the public consciousness, everything from the edge estate to the expanded town to the full New Town has become conflated: we see council houses surrounded by trees and are not always sure if it's an estate or a New Town. Frequently these associations are negative.",
"And as the 20th-century New Towns around the world hit middle age, they've often settled into being quietly successful: just look at Australia's spirited capital, Canberra, or the way Milton Keynes has matured to nurture a sense of pride in its inhabitants. Architecture is our gift to future generations; building whole cities supersizes this impulse. It's an urge that will, in various forms, forever linger.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"However the garden cities like Letchworth were more of a dream than a reality, an exercise in placemaking reverie; and like Bournville as much of a fantasy as Middle Earth. Tolkein saw Bournville as a child. These towns were visions of an idealised Britain, a pre-industrial, anti-industrial one. This line of thinking continues in the oddball planned suburb of Poundbury, which appears as one of those miniature model villages (but one with a Waitrose, of course). Strangeness wasn't far from all these places. Jonathan Meades picked up on the multitude of cults that infected the garden cities: teetotallers, vegetarians, religious dissenters, political radicals.",
"But not all. Mohenjo-daro might have been the first planned city, appearing 4,500 years ago in what is now Pakistan. Alexandria was planned. And Renaissance Italy boasted the star-shaped Palmanova. But these were the enlightened exceptions, and in Britain it was mainly the kind of hotchpotch best illustrated by the Shambles in York: quaint, but a bloody mess. \n\n It was towards the end of the 19th century that modern and urban change came to Britain. Tenements and slums were the rule in most large towns of the era. A number of enlightened capitalists planned their own towns, toy communities almost; but such innovative plans were rare. Schoolchildren today are taught about Titus Salt's dry settlement of Saltaire and the model village that started it all, Bournville. But we make a show of these places and the characters who bequeathed them to make us feel better as a country – to play up our successes rather than our failures."
],
[
"JG Ballard said he wrote about the future because he believed it would be better than the past. This is the very essence of town planning: that creating something new, something that works better than what went before, can mould superior worlds. But in an infamous section of Robert Hughes's masterful BBC art series The Shock of the New, this fierce Aussie decried Brasilia as \"a ceremonial slum\" and Paris's Peripherique New Towns as dead ends. He urged urban planners to shut up because we all need a bit of (his words) \"shit\" around us in the cities artists and the rest of us live in: like Paris, New York and London.",
"\"Amazing people were involved in Harlow, Cumbernauld and Peterlee,\" points out Catherine Croft of the Twentieth Century Society. Architects like John Madin at Telford, Frederick Gibberd at Harlow, Geoffrey Jellicoe at Hemel Hempstead deploying a complete vision. This was about top-down, total design; men smoking pipes in committee rooms and deciding what was best for women and children. There's no better depiction of this than in Catherine O'Flynn's bravura novel The News Where You Are, where the harassed architect (that she's very careful to point out\nisn't\nMadin) pores over his beautiful scale model of a Midlands New Town populated with miniature plastic people lacking faces.",
"Civilia didn't make it and what did at that exact time was completely antagonistic to it: low-rise, low density Milton Keynes. This \"Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire\", according to John Grindrod, is filled with Mies van der Rohe-apeing minimalism and houses by a welter of starchitects like Norman Foster and Ralph Erskine. It continues to look forward, with trials of driverless cars on its ample roads. \n\n Katy Lock, the Town and Country Planning Association's New Towns expert, talks eloquently about her own upbringing in Milton Keynes. Crucially, she mentions \"people being consciously part of the story. People had chosen to move [to New Towns]. Like with Stevenage earlier, where people had bought into the story of an inside bathroom and a new job.\"",
"The sprawling exurban council estates, like Chelmsley Wood on Birmingham's outskirts, faced challenges with a lack of infrastructure, jobs, amenities and transport. There was also psychological isolation from the geographic and social communities that previously bound together urban working-class life. In her book Estates, Lynsey Hanley paints pictures of estates like this as if they were flawed works of cubism. \n\n The expanded towns like King's Lynn, Haverhill and Thetford were never fully comfortable with their double lives as market towns and an overspill zone for Cockneys. But the fully planned New Towns were attempts to make a whole place with all the facilities, factories, shopping and bus links so essential to any functioning city – even if it did sometimes take too long for these to arrive. Milton Keynes didn't get a hospital for 13 years.",
"But not all. Mohenjo-daro might have been the first planned city, appearing 4,500 years ago in what is now Pakistan. Alexandria was planned. And Renaissance Italy boasted the star-shaped Palmanova. But these were the enlightened exceptions, and in Britain it was mainly the kind of hotchpotch best illustrated by the Shambles in York: quaint, but a bloody mess. \n\n It was towards the end of the 19th century that modern and urban change came to Britain. Tenements and slums were the rule in most large towns of the era. A number of enlightened capitalists planned their own towns, toy communities almost; but such innovative plans were rare. Schoolchildren today are taught about Titus Salt's dry settlement of Saltaire and the model village that started it all, Bournville. But we make a show of these places and the characters who bequeathed them to make us feel better as a country – to play up our successes rather than our failures.",
"Harlow, with its gardens and Moore sculptures, embodies this softness in its 70th year. But Ballard called the low rise suburbs with house, garden and car in the drive – so typical of New Towns – \"the death of the soul\". And he lived in a suburb. \n\n It could all have been more dramatic: Geoffrey Jellicoe's Motopia in Slough envisaged a city with roads on the roof, while unbuilt proposals for Hook in Hampshire look like a jet-propelled version of quasi-New Town Thamesmead. Hubert de Cronin Hastings, longtime honcho of the Architectural Review, dreamt up Civilia in the 1960s. He wanted to stack Moshe Safdie-esque residential superblocks, Tuscan piazzas and boating lakes (all New Town plans had their marina) on top of an old quarry outside Nuneaton and stick a million people in a kind of retro-futurist Arezzo on the Anker.",
"In John Grindrod's groundbreaking (pardon the pun) book Concretopia, he says New Towns \"sit alongside the creation of the welfare state, the NHS and the post-war revolution in education as monuments to a nation's desire to move on, not just from the destruction of the war years, but from the inequalities and squalor inherited from the Industrial Revolution.\" \n\n Mike Althorpe of Karakusevic Carson Architects, agrees: \"I think the New Towns project in the UK was much more successful than people give it credit for… It's one of the greatest modern movements of people and the biggest built project in our history; and its legacy is one of architectural bravery, optimism and a sincere belief in the idea and the qualities of 'place'. These were not mere housing estates, they were intentional communities with great thought given over to what makes a town.\"",
"Today Bournville feels quaint, especially if you compare it to the later, more radical New Town of Redditch, a mere six stops down the Midlands' Cross-City Line. Bournville was the brainchild of the Cadburys, and its bucolic buildings and tree-lined streets led towards the garden cities movement at the start of the 20th century. With Bournville and the garden cities we see a key touchstone that would also be echoed in the later New Towns project: the idea that the city was broken and escape was the answer. That sentiment endured beyond the end of the \"dark satanic mills\" era. Arguably it's only really been in the last 20 years that the city, the British city at least – other European nations typically had a milder view towards their cities – has come to be seen as the answer rather the question.",
"However the garden cities like Letchworth were more of a dream than a reality, an exercise in placemaking reverie; and like Bournville as much of a fantasy as Middle Earth. Tolkein saw Bournville as a child. These towns were visions of an idealised Britain, a pre-industrial, anti-industrial one. This line of thinking continues in the oddball planned suburb of Poundbury, which appears as one of those miniature model villages (but one with a Waitrose, of course). Strangeness wasn't far from all these places. Jonathan Meades picked up on the multitude of cults that infected the garden cities: teetotallers, vegetarians, religious dissenters, political radicals.",
"Christopher Smith's forthcoming film, New Town Utopia, focuses on Basildon. \"New Towns were a grand ambition that could still work,\" he says. \"But for the first wave of new towns, the execution was flawed. These were places created for the working classes, but designed by the middle and upper classes. They also faced a number of negative external forces, including globalisation, Thatcher's Right to Buy policy, and a lack of care and attention.\"\nThe current UK government recently put its weight behind more New Towns in places like Essex and Cheshire. \"We've been campaigning for a new generation of garden cities,\" says Lock. \"It's one of the solutions of the housing crisis – but the renewal of existing cities is too. We need to learn the lessons from garden cities and post-war New Towns.\"",
"Perhaps now we're truly recognising some of that value because, as archetypal New Towns like Milton Keynes and Harlow celebrate milestone birthdays this year (fiftieth and seventieth respectively), the UK government has floated a new generation of New Towns that could once again change the face of Britain.\nMost cities we live in haven't been planned at all, they're the product of hundreds or thousands of years of architectural accretions. Most cities are ultimately exercises in speculative pissing in the wind: developers develop, architects design, but none of it is woven together and thought through from scratch. It's planning on the most piecemeal scale.",
"Each UK New Town has its own character. Cumbernauld’s infamous town centre megastructure has been called Britain's ugliest building, but it was intended as a radical and revolutionary attempt to get all of the town's services – library, shops, bookies, hotel, car park, bus station and penthouse flats – into one space station-like building. \"I tried to take some American friends to Cumbernauld [town centre] and they refused to get out of the car!\" says Catherine Croft. \"That's unusually urban and intimidating; in general there is a calm softness to our New Town design.\"",
"Yet what's remarkable is that all this got done, all this got built, and often very quickly. The timescales compare with the ridiculously quick builds we see in China and the Arabian Gulf today. Opposition was won over and people did move in – and they often liked New Towns, and the modernist architecture that underpinned them. Mike Althorpe grew up surrounded by Scots in Corby who came south for steel jobs. \"The structure that impacted me most was the 1972 town centre and bus station,\" he says now. \"As a kid I loved running up and down the cantilevered stairs onto balconies to wind my mum up! It had the town's only (broken) escalator, which took you deep into a dark underworld where the smell of diesel bus fumes and chip fat was intoxicating; and a big National Express sign announced 'Book here for Scotland'. It had a fantastically urban quality.\"",
"Just like starting over: when Britain (briefly) fell in love with New Towns\n\"Modern girls and modern boys: it's tremendous!\" So goes the sunny reflection of the eponymous hero in Bill Forsyth's 1981 film Gregory's Girl, as he surveys the playing fields, comprehensive schools and spaghetti plate of dual carriageways in Cumbernauld, a mid-20th-century Scottish 'New Town'. Gregory and his friends playfully mock the town, but their youthful affection for Cumbernauld shines through; it neatly encapsulates the optimism these places were all about: doing things differently, doing them better. \n\n New Towns were sometimes sublime and surely strange; but more of a success than the popular consensus gave them credit for. These weren't just council estates, but whole functioning places with jobs, shops and services.",
"And as the 20th-century New Towns around the world hit middle age, they've often settled into being quietly successful: just look at Australia's spirited capital, Canberra, or the way Milton Keynes has matured to nurture a sense of pride in its inhabitants. Architecture is our gift to future generations; building whole cities supersizes this impulse. It's an urge that will, in various forms, forever linger.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"\"I love the high-profile public art,\" says Croft, \"especially the murals, and would like to see more of that today. As well as the main set pieces, some of the low-key housing developments deserve to be more cherished.\" \n\n Surrounded by the highest quality council housing and landscaping, Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee, for instance, has every right to be as high up on a visitor's itinerary as Durham Cathedral.\nIn the public consciousness, everything from the edge estate to the expanded town to the full New Town has become conflated: we see council houses surrounded by trees and are not always sure if it's an estate or a New Town. Frequently these associations are negative.",
"It was only after the second world war ended that a gutsy modernism bloomed. The New Towns of this era sat alongside the radical municipal socialism exemplified by existing cities like Sheffield, London and Newcastle, which built swathes of housing and other civic amenities in the electric post-war period of progress. Around the globe, planners and architects were getting to make their mark, from Chorweiler to Chandigarh to Brasilia, new cities rose. Top of the list in Britain was providing working people with high quality, affordable housing in healthy surroundings. The 1946 New Towns Act was a way to make things happen by creating an all-powerful development corporation in each of the towns, allowing building to get going quickly.",
"It could be a challenge. Aside from the sheer effort of planning a whole new town there was occasional dissent from those who feared the concreting over of the countryside. And some councils – notably Glasgow – wanted to keep their population (in this case a Labour-voting population) within city limits. Occasionally residents and businesses needed a little gentle convincing to relocate: witness the bonkers space pop 7\" single, Energy in Northampton, which Northampton Development Agency commissioned to sell the town; and the proto-Gregory's Girl social realism of Living at Thamesmead. Milton Keynes had the charming red balloon TV ad and, more bizarrely, Cliff Richard rollerskating through the shopping centre.",
"The question will be: can we fully commit to building a concrete future? The 20th-century New Towns embraced innovation in housing, public realm and transport design. The New Towns of today can do that too – look at Vauban, the ecologically-rigorous New Town on the outskirts of Freiburg in Germany with all kinds of green innovations. The danger with Britain's potential new New Towns is that they simply become overblown dormitory suburbs for the middle managers of Cambridge, Manchester and London: commuter towns with cut-price architecture and planning, rather than truly viable and thriving towns. However, with architects and planners at the tiller instead of just property developers, and with technical innovations such as communications connectivity, futuristic transportation and that all-elusive sense of 'place' front and centre, the new New Towns could offer the 21st century something truly unique."
],
[
"In John Grindrod's groundbreaking (pardon the pun) book Concretopia, he says New Towns \"sit alongside the creation of the welfare state, the NHS and the post-war revolution in education as monuments to a nation's desire to move on, not just from the destruction of the war years, but from the inequalities and squalor inherited from the Industrial Revolution.\" \n\n Mike Althorpe of Karakusevic Carson Architects, agrees: \"I think the New Towns project in the UK was much more successful than people give it credit for… It's one of the greatest modern movements of people and the biggest built project in our history; and its legacy is one of architectural bravery, optimism and a sincere belief in the idea and the qualities of 'place'. These were not mere housing estates, they were intentional communities with great thought given over to what makes a town.\"",
"The sprawling exurban council estates, like Chelmsley Wood on Birmingham's outskirts, faced challenges with a lack of infrastructure, jobs, amenities and transport. There was also psychological isolation from the geographic and social communities that previously bound together urban working-class life. In her book Estates, Lynsey Hanley paints pictures of estates like this as if they were flawed works of cubism. \n\n The expanded towns like King's Lynn, Haverhill and Thetford were never fully comfortable with their double lives as market towns and an overspill zone for Cockneys. But the fully planned New Towns were attempts to make a whole place with all the facilities, factories, shopping and bus links so essential to any functioning city – even if it did sometimes take too long for these to arrive. Milton Keynes didn't get a hospital for 13 years.",
"Each UK New Town has its own character. Cumbernauld’s infamous town centre megastructure has been called Britain's ugliest building, but it was intended as a radical and revolutionary attempt to get all of the town's services – library, shops, bookies, hotel, car park, bus station and penthouse flats – into one space station-like building. \"I tried to take some American friends to Cumbernauld [town centre] and they refused to get out of the car!\" says Catherine Croft. \"That's unusually urban and intimidating; in general there is a calm softness to our New Town design.\"",
"\"Amazing people were involved in Harlow, Cumbernauld and Peterlee,\" points out Catherine Croft of the Twentieth Century Society. Architects like John Madin at Telford, Frederick Gibberd at Harlow, Geoffrey Jellicoe at Hemel Hempstead deploying a complete vision. This was about top-down, total design; men smoking pipes in committee rooms and deciding what was best for women and children. There's no better depiction of this than in Catherine O'Flynn's bravura novel The News Where You Are, where the harassed architect (that she's very careful to point out\nisn't\nMadin) pores over his beautiful scale model of a Midlands New Town populated with miniature plastic people lacking faces.",
"Just like starting over: when Britain (briefly) fell in love with New Towns\n\"Modern girls and modern boys: it's tremendous!\" So goes the sunny reflection of the eponymous hero in Bill Forsyth's 1981 film Gregory's Girl, as he surveys the playing fields, comprehensive schools and spaghetti plate of dual carriageways in Cumbernauld, a mid-20th-century Scottish 'New Town'. Gregory and his friends playfully mock the town, but their youthful affection for Cumbernauld shines through; it neatly encapsulates the optimism these places were all about: doing things differently, doing them better. \n\n New Towns were sometimes sublime and surely strange; but more of a success than the popular consensus gave them credit for. These weren't just council estates, but whole functioning places with jobs, shops and services.",
"Christopher Smith's forthcoming film, New Town Utopia, focuses on Basildon. \"New Towns were a grand ambition that could still work,\" he says. \"But for the first wave of new towns, the execution was flawed. These were places created for the working classes, but designed by the middle and upper classes. They also faced a number of negative external forces, including globalisation, Thatcher's Right to Buy policy, and a lack of care and attention.\"\nThe current UK government recently put its weight behind more New Towns in places like Essex and Cheshire. \"We've been campaigning for a new generation of garden cities,\" says Lock. \"It's one of the solutions of the housing crisis – but the renewal of existing cities is too. We need to learn the lessons from garden cities and post-war New Towns.\"",
"Civilia didn't make it and what did at that exact time was completely antagonistic to it: low-rise, low density Milton Keynes. This \"Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire\", according to John Grindrod, is filled with Mies van der Rohe-apeing minimalism and houses by a welter of starchitects like Norman Foster and Ralph Erskine. It continues to look forward, with trials of driverless cars on its ample roads. \n\n Katy Lock, the Town and Country Planning Association's New Towns expert, talks eloquently about her own upbringing in Milton Keynes. Crucially, she mentions \"people being consciously part of the story. People had chosen to move [to New Towns]. Like with Stevenage earlier, where people had bought into the story of an inside bathroom and a new job.\"",
"Yet what's remarkable is that all this got done, all this got built, and often very quickly. The timescales compare with the ridiculously quick builds we see in China and the Arabian Gulf today. Opposition was won over and people did move in – and they often liked New Towns, and the modernist architecture that underpinned them. Mike Althorpe grew up surrounded by Scots in Corby who came south for steel jobs. \"The structure that impacted me most was the 1972 town centre and bus station,\" he says now. \"As a kid I loved running up and down the cantilevered stairs onto balconies to wind my mum up! It had the town's only (broken) escalator, which took you deep into a dark underworld where the smell of diesel bus fumes and chip fat was intoxicating; and a big National Express sign announced 'Book here for Scotland'. It had a fantastically urban quality.\"",
"Perhaps now we're truly recognising some of that value because, as archetypal New Towns like Milton Keynes and Harlow celebrate milestone birthdays this year (fiftieth and seventieth respectively), the UK government has floated a new generation of New Towns that could once again change the face of Britain.\nMost cities we live in haven't been planned at all, they're the product of hundreds or thousands of years of architectural accretions. Most cities are ultimately exercises in speculative pissing in the wind: developers develop, architects design, but none of it is woven together and thought through from scratch. It's planning on the most piecemeal scale.",
"\"I love the high-profile public art,\" says Croft, \"especially the murals, and would like to see more of that today. As well as the main set pieces, some of the low-key housing developments deserve to be more cherished.\" \n\n Surrounded by the highest quality council housing and landscaping, Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee, for instance, has every right to be as high up on a visitor's itinerary as Durham Cathedral.\nIn the public consciousness, everything from the edge estate to the expanded town to the full New Town has become conflated: we see council houses surrounded by trees and are not always sure if it's an estate or a New Town. Frequently these associations are negative.",
"It could be a challenge. Aside from the sheer effort of planning a whole new town there was occasional dissent from those who feared the concreting over of the countryside. And some councils – notably Glasgow – wanted to keep their population (in this case a Labour-voting population) within city limits. Occasionally residents and businesses needed a little gentle convincing to relocate: witness the bonkers space pop 7\" single, Energy in Northampton, which Northampton Development Agency commissioned to sell the town; and the proto-Gregory's Girl social realism of Living at Thamesmead. Milton Keynes had the charming red balloon TV ad and, more bizarrely, Cliff Richard rollerskating through the shopping centre.",
"The question will be: can we fully commit to building a concrete future? The 20th-century New Towns embraced innovation in housing, public realm and transport design. The New Towns of today can do that too – look at Vauban, the ecologically-rigorous New Town on the outskirts of Freiburg in Germany with all kinds of green innovations. The danger with Britain's potential new New Towns is that they simply become overblown dormitory suburbs for the middle managers of Cambridge, Manchester and London: commuter towns with cut-price architecture and planning, rather than truly viable and thriving towns. However, with architects and planners at the tiller instead of just property developers, and with technical innovations such as communications connectivity, futuristic transportation and that all-elusive sense of 'place' front and centre, the new New Towns could offer the 21st century something truly unique.",
"Harlow, with its gardens and Moore sculptures, embodies this softness in its 70th year. But Ballard called the low rise suburbs with house, garden and car in the drive – so typical of New Towns – \"the death of the soul\". And he lived in a suburb. \n\n It could all have been more dramatic: Geoffrey Jellicoe's Motopia in Slough envisaged a city with roads on the roof, while unbuilt proposals for Hook in Hampshire look like a jet-propelled version of quasi-New Town Thamesmead. Hubert de Cronin Hastings, longtime honcho of the Architectural Review, dreamt up Civilia in the 1960s. He wanted to stack Moshe Safdie-esque residential superblocks, Tuscan piazzas and boating lakes (all New Town plans had their marina) on top of an old quarry outside Nuneaton and stick a million people in a kind of retro-futurist Arezzo on the Anker.",
"JG Ballard said he wrote about the future because he believed it would be better than the past. This is the very essence of town planning: that creating something new, something that works better than what went before, can mould superior worlds. But in an infamous section of Robert Hughes's masterful BBC art series The Shock of the New, this fierce Aussie decried Brasilia as \"a ceremonial slum\" and Paris's Peripherique New Towns as dead ends. He urged urban planners to shut up because we all need a bit of (his words) \"shit\" around us in the cities artists and the rest of us live in: like Paris, New York and London.",
"It was only after the second world war ended that a gutsy modernism bloomed. The New Towns of this era sat alongside the radical municipal socialism exemplified by existing cities like Sheffield, London and Newcastle, which built swathes of housing and other civic amenities in the electric post-war period of progress. Around the globe, planners and architects were getting to make their mark, from Chorweiler to Chandigarh to Brasilia, new cities rose. Top of the list in Britain was providing working people with high quality, affordable housing in healthy surroundings. The 1946 New Towns Act was a way to make things happen by creating an all-powerful development corporation in each of the towns, allowing building to get going quickly.",
"Today Bournville feels quaint, especially if you compare it to the later, more radical New Town of Redditch, a mere six stops down the Midlands' Cross-City Line. Bournville was the brainchild of the Cadburys, and its bucolic buildings and tree-lined streets led towards the garden cities movement at the start of the 20th century. With Bournville and the garden cities we see a key touchstone that would also be echoed in the later New Towns project: the idea that the city was broken and escape was the answer. That sentiment endured beyond the end of the \"dark satanic mills\" era. Arguably it's only really been in the last 20 years that the city, the British city at least – other European nations typically had a milder view towards their cities – has come to be seen as the answer rather the question.",
"And as the 20th-century New Towns around the world hit middle age, they've often settled into being quietly successful: just look at Australia's spirited capital, Canberra, or the way Milton Keynes has matured to nurture a sense of pride in its inhabitants. Architecture is our gift to future generations; building whole cities supersizes this impulse. It's an urge that will, in various forms, forever linger.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"But not all. Mohenjo-daro might have been the first planned city, appearing 4,500 years ago in what is now Pakistan. Alexandria was planned. And Renaissance Italy boasted the star-shaped Palmanova. But these were the enlightened exceptions, and in Britain it was mainly the kind of hotchpotch best illustrated by the Shambles in York: quaint, but a bloody mess. \n\n It was towards the end of the 19th century that modern and urban change came to Britain. Tenements and slums were the rule in most large towns of the era. A number of enlightened capitalists planned their own towns, toy communities almost; but such innovative plans were rare. Schoolchildren today are taught about Titus Salt's dry settlement of Saltaire and the model village that started it all, Bournville. But we make a show of these places and the characters who bequeathed them to make us feel better as a country – to play up our successes rather than our failures.",
"However the garden cities like Letchworth were more of a dream than a reality, an exercise in placemaking reverie; and like Bournville as much of a fantasy as Middle Earth. Tolkein saw Bournville as a child. These towns were visions of an idealised Britain, a pre-industrial, anti-industrial one. This line of thinking continues in the oddball planned suburb of Poundbury, which appears as one of those miniature model villages (but one with a Waitrose, of course). Strangeness wasn't far from all these places. Jonathan Meades picked up on the multitude of cults that infected the garden cities: teetotallers, vegetarians, religious dissenters, political radicals."
],
[
"In John Grindrod's groundbreaking (pardon the pun) book Concretopia, he says New Towns \"sit alongside the creation of the welfare state, the NHS and the post-war revolution in education as monuments to a nation's desire to move on, not just from the destruction of the war years, but from the inequalities and squalor inherited from the Industrial Revolution.\" \n\n Mike Althorpe of Karakusevic Carson Architects, agrees: \"I think the New Towns project in the UK was much more successful than people give it credit for… It's one of the greatest modern movements of people and the biggest built project in our history; and its legacy is one of architectural bravery, optimism and a sincere belief in the idea and the qualities of 'place'. These were not mere housing estates, they were intentional communities with great thought given over to what makes a town.\"",
"Just like starting over: when Britain (briefly) fell in love with New Towns\n\"Modern girls and modern boys: it's tremendous!\" So goes the sunny reflection of the eponymous hero in Bill Forsyth's 1981 film Gregory's Girl, as he surveys the playing fields, comprehensive schools and spaghetti plate of dual carriageways in Cumbernauld, a mid-20th-century Scottish 'New Town'. Gregory and his friends playfully mock the town, but their youthful affection for Cumbernauld shines through; it neatly encapsulates the optimism these places were all about: doing things differently, doing them better. \n\n New Towns were sometimes sublime and surely strange; but more of a success than the popular consensus gave them credit for. These weren't just council estates, but whole functioning places with jobs, shops and services.",
"Christopher Smith's forthcoming film, New Town Utopia, focuses on Basildon. \"New Towns were a grand ambition that could still work,\" he says. \"But for the first wave of new towns, the execution was flawed. These were places created for the working classes, but designed by the middle and upper classes. They also faced a number of negative external forces, including globalisation, Thatcher's Right to Buy policy, and a lack of care and attention.\"\nThe current UK government recently put its weight behind more New Towns in places like Essex and Cheshire. \"We've been campaigning for a new generation of garden cities,\" says Lock. \"It's one of the solutions of the housing crisis – but the renewal of existing cities is too. We need to learn the lessons from garden cities and post-war New Towns.\"",
"\"Amazing people were involved in Harlow, Cumbernauld and Peterlee,\" points out Catherine Croft of the Twentieth Century Society. Architects like John Madin at Telford, Frederick Gibberd at Harlow, Geoffrey Jellicoe at Hemel Hempstead deploying a complete vision. This was about top-down, total design; men smoking pipes in committee rooms and deciding what was best for women and children. There's no better depiction of this than in Catherine O'Flynn's bravura novel The News Where You Are, where the harassed architect (that she's very careful to point out\nisn't\nMadin) pores over his beautiful scale model of a Midlands New Town populated with miniature plastic people lacking faces.",
"Civilia didn't make it and what did at that exact time was completely antagonistic to it: low-rise, low density Milton Keynes. This \"Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire\", according to John Grindrod, is filled with Mies van der Rohe-apeing minimalism and houses by a welter of starchitects like Norman Foster and Ralph Erskine. It continues to look forward, with trials of driverless cars on its ample roads. \n\n Katy Lock, the Town and Country Planning Association's New Towns expert, talks eloquently about her own upbringing in Milton Keynes. Crucially, she mentions \"people being consciously part of the story. People had chosen to move [to New Towns]. Like with Stevenage earlier, where people had bought into the story of an inside bathroom and a new job.\"",
"Each UK New Town has its own character. Cumbernauld’s infamous town centre megastructure has been called Britain's ugliest building, but it was intended as a radical and revolutionary attempt to get all of the town's services – library, shops, bookies, hotel, car park, bus station and penthouse flats – into one space station-like building. \"I tried to take some American friends to Cumbernauld [town centre] and they refused to get out of the car!\" says Catherine Croft. \"That's unusually urban and intimidating; in general there is a calm softness to our New Town design.\"",
"It was only after the second world war ended that a gutsy modernism bloomed. The New Towns of this era sat alongside the radical municipal socialism exemplified by existing cities like Sheffield, London and Newcastle, which built swathes of housing and other civic amenities in the electric post-war period of progress. Around the globe, planners and architects were getting to make their mark, from Chorweiler to Chandigarh to Brasilia, new cities rose. Top of the list in Britain was providing working people with high quality, affordable housing in healthy surroundings. The 1946 New Towns Act was a way to make things happen by creating an all-powerful development corporation in each of the towns, allowing building to get going quickly.",
"The sprawling exurban council estates, like Chelmsley Wood on Birmingham's outskirts, faced challenges with a lack of infrastructure, jobs, amenities and transport. There was also psychological isolation from the geographic and social communities that previously bound together urban working-class life. In her book Estates, Lynsey Hanley paints pictures of estates like this as if they were flawed works of cubism. \n\n The expanded towns like King's Lynn, Haverhill and Thetford were never fully comfortable with their double lives as market towns and an overspill zone for Cockneys. But the fully planned New Towns were attempts to make a whole place with all the facilities, factories, shopping and bus links so essential to any functioning city – even if it did sometimes take too long for these to arrive. Milton Keynes didn't get a hospital for 13 years.",
"Yet what's remarkable is that all this got done, all this got built, and often very quickly. The timescales compare with the ridiculously quick builds we see in China and the Arabian Gulf today. Opposition was won over and people did move in – and they often liked New Towns, and the modernist architecture that underpinned them. Mike Althorpe grew up surrounded by Scots in Corby who came south for steel jobs. \"The structure that impacted me most was the 1972 town centre and bus station,\" he says now. \"As a kid I loved running up and down the cantilevered stairs onto balconies to wind my mum up! It had the town's only (broken) escalator, which took you deep into a dark underworld where the smell of diesel bus fumes and chip fat was intoxicating; and a big National Express sign announced 'Book here for Scotland'. It had a fantastically urban quality.\"",
"Perhaps now we're truly recognising some of that value because, as archetypal New Towns like Milton Keynes and Harlow celebrate milestone birthdays this year (fiftieth and seventieth respectively), the UK government has floated a new generation of New Towns that could once again change the face of Britain.\nMost cities we live in haven't been planned at all, they're the product of hundreds or thousands of years of architectural accretions. Most cities are ultimately exercises in speculative pissing in the wind: developers develop, architects design, but none of it is woven together and thought through from scratch. It's planning on the most piecemeal scale.",
"Harlow, with its gardens and Moore sculptures, embodies this softness in its 70th year. But Ballard called the low rise suburbs with house, garden and car in the drive – so typical of New Towns – \"the death of the soul\". And he lived in a suburb. \n\n It could all have been more dramatic: Geoffrey Jellicoe's Motopia in Slough envisaged a city with roads on the roof, while unbuilt proposals for Hook in Hampshire look like a jet-propelled version of quasi-New Town Thamesmead. Hubert de Cronin Hastings, longtime honcho of the Architectural Review, dreamt up Civilia in the 1960s. He wanted to stack Moshe Safdie-esque residential superblocks, Tuscan piazzas and boating lakes (all New Town plans had their marina) on top of an old quarry outside Nuneaton and stick a million people in a kind of retro-futurist Arezzo on the Anker.",
"Today Bournville feels quaint, especially if you compare it to the later, more radical New Town of Redditch, a mere six stops down the Midlands' Cross-City Line. Bournville was the brainchild of the Cadburys, and its bucolic buildings and tree-lined streets led towards the garden cities movement at the start of the 20th century. With Bournville and the garden cities we see a key touchstone that would also be echoed in the later New Towns project: the idea that the city was broken and escape was the answer. That sentiment endured beyond the end of the \"dark satanic mills\" era. Arguably it's only really been in the last 20 years that the city, the British city at least – other European nations typically had a milder view towards their cities – has come to be seen as the answer rather the question.",
"It could be a challenge. Aside from the sheer effort of planning a whole new town there was occasional dissent from those who feared the concreting over of the countryside. And some councils – notably Glasgow – wanted to keep their population (in this case a Labour-voting population) within city limits. Occasionally residents and businesses needed a little gentle convincing to relocate: witness the bonkers space pop 7\" single, Energy in Northampton, which Northampton Development Agency commissioned to sell the town; and the proto-Gregory's Girl social realism of Living at Thamesmead. Milton Keynes had the charming red balloon TV ad and, more bizarrely, Cliff Richard rollerskating through the shopping centre.",
"The question will be: can we fully commit to building a concrete future? The 20th-century New Towns embraced innovation in housing, public realm and transport design. The New Towns of today can do that too – look at Vauban, the ecologically-rigorous New Town on the outskirts of Freiburg in Germany with all kinds of green innovations. The danger with Britain's potential new New Towns is that they simply become overblown dormitory suburbs for the middle managers of Cambridge, Manchester and London: commuter towns with cut-price architecture and planning, rather than truly viable and thriving towns. However, with architects and planners at the tiller instead of just property developers, and with technical innovations such as communications connectivity, futuristic transportation and that all-elusive sense of 'place' front and centre, the new New Towns could offer the 21st century something truly unique.",
"JG Ballard said he wrote about the future because he believed it would be better than the past. This is the very essence of town planning: that creating something new, something that works better than what went before, can mould superior worlds. But in an infamous section of Robert Hughes's masterful BBC art series The Shock of the New, this fierce Aussie decried Brasilia as \"a ceremonial slum\" and Paris's Peripherique New Towns as dead ends. He urged urban planners to shut up because we all need a bit of (his words) \"shit\" around us in the cities artists and the rest of us live in: like Paris, New York and London.",
"And as the 20th-century New Towns around the world hit middle age, they've often settled into being quietly successful: just look at Australia's spirited capital, Canberra, or the way Milton Keynes has matured to nurture a sense of pride in its inhabitants. Architecture is our gift to future generations; building whole cities supersizes this impulse. It's an urge that will, in various forms, forever linger.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"\"I love the high-profile public art,\" says Croft, \"especially the murals, and would like to see more of that today. As well as the main set pieces, some of the low-key housing developments deserve to be more cherished.\" \n\n Surrounded by the highest quality council housing and landscaping, Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee, for instance, has every right to be as high up on a visitor's itinerary as Durham Cathedral.\nIn the public consciousness, everything from the edge estate to the expanded town to the full New Town has become conflated: we see council houses surrounded by trees and are not always sure if it's an estate or a New Town. Frequently these associations are negative.",
"However the garden cities like Letchworth were more of a dream than a reality, an exercise in placemaking reverie; and like Bournville as much of a fantasy as Middle Earth. Tolkein saw Bournville as a child. These towns were visions of an idealised Britain, a pre-industrial, anti-industrial one. This line of thinking continues in the oddball planned suburb of Poundbury, which appears as one of those miniature model villages (but one with a Waitrose, of course). Strangeness wasn't far from all these places. Jonathan Meades picked up on the multitude of cults that infected the garden cities: teetotallers, vegetarians, religious dissenters, political radicals.",
"But not all. Mohenjo-daro might have been the first planned city, appearing 4,500 years ago in what is now Pakistan. Alexandria was planned. And Renaissance Italy boasted the star-shaped Palmanova. But these were the enlightened exceptions, and in Britain it was mainly the kind of hotchpotch best illustrated by the Shambles in York: quaint, but a bloody mess. \n\n It was towards the end of the 19th century that modern and urban change came to Britain. Tenements and slums were the rule in most large towns of the era. A number of enlightened capitalists planned their own towns, toy communities almost; but such innovative plans were rare. Schoolchildren today are taught about Titus Salt's dry settlement of Saltaire and the model village that started it all, Bournville. But we make a show of these places and the characters who bequeathed them to make us feel better as a country – to play up our successes rather than our failures."
]
] |
train
|
62349
|
[
"What was special or impressive about Gertrude?",
"Why was Gertrude continuously screaming?",
"How were Jig and Bucky attacked by the Vapor snakes?",
"Why did the crew mind that the cave-cat had kittens?",
"What did the Nahali people do in side-shows as their talent?",
"Why was Kapper in such a state of disbelief when Bucky and Jig found him?",
"What did Jig and Bucky promise Kapper?",
"Why did Jig and Bucky rarely come in through the front door?",
"Why was the Circus is danger of closing?"
] |
[
[
"Her outrageous temperment",
"She was an extreme rarity.",
"Her extraordinary size and young age",
"She was exceptionally talented"
],
[
"She was cramped in a much too small space. ",
"She missed her family. ",
"She was near starving.",
"She was desperate for a mate"
],
[
"They had been released by someone on purpose",
"Bucky had released them while inebriated",
"They had gone into the wrong enclosure. ",
"They had escaped their tanks in search of food."
],
[
"They didn't perform well while they were small. ",
"They were too dangerous to keep onboard",
"They had no food for more mouths to feed",
"One had only four legs"
],
[
"Performed with the dangerous Vapor snakes",
"Performed tricks with the electric power the held in their bodies",
"Swallowed electricty and performed with currents",
"Their appearance alone was their performance, as they had triangular mouths and scaled hides"
],
[
"He was frantically searching for the male Cansin he had found",
"He had lost all his animals and was desperate to find them ",
"He had been attacked by the Vapor snakes",
"He was being poisoned."
],
[
"That they would find a way to save the Circus",
"That they would be able to save him",
"That they would take the cansin back.",
"That they would not make the deal with Beamish"
],
[
"They wanted to avoid the screams of Gertrude",
"They wanted to avoid the debt collectors",
"They preferred the back entrance as to be closer to the action",
"They wanted to avoid the Vapor snakes"
],
[
"They lacked impressive skills now that more of their kind had surfaced.",
"They were out of money and out of options. ",
"They were no longer able to manage the lot of animals they had acquired. ",
"They were too inebriated to be coherent. "
]
] |
[
2,
4,
1,
4,
2,
4,
3,
2,
2
] |
[
1,
1,
0,
0,
0,
1,
0,
1,
1
] |
[
[
"She was also much younger, but I didn't go into that. Gertrude may be\n a little creaky, but she's still pretty impressive. I only hoped she\n wouldn't die on us, because without her we'd have a sicker-looking\n circus than even I could stand.\n\n\n Beamish looked impressed. \"A\ncansin\n. Well, well! The mystery\n surrounding the origin and species of the\ncansin\nis a fascinating\n subject. The extreme rarity of the animal....\"\n\n\n We were getting off the subject. I said tactfully, \"We'd have to have\n at least a hundred U.C.'s.\"\n\n\n It was twice what we had any right to ask. I was prepared to dicker.\n Beamish looked at me with that innocent dead pan. For a fraction of a\n second I thought I saw something back of his round blue eyes, and my\n stomach jumped like it was shot. Beamish smiled sweetly.",
"He looked at me like he was thinking it wouldn't take much timber to\n fit me for a coffin. \"Okay! But Gertrude's unhappy. She's lonesome,\n see? And if she don't get happier pretty soon I ain't sure your tin-pot\n ship'll hold her.\"\n\n\n He pulled the curtains to and departed. Bucky Shannon groaned. Beamish\n cleared his throat and said, rather stiffly,\n\n\n \"Gertrude?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. She's kind of temperamental.\" Bucky took a quick drink. I\n finished for him.\n\n\n \"She's the star attraction of our show, Mr. Beamish. A real blue-swamp\n Venusian\ncansin\n. The only other one on the Triangle belongs to Savitt\n Brothers, and she's much smaller than Gertrude.\"",
"I wouldn't know, of course, but Gertrude looks to me like she got stuck\n some place between a dinosaur and a grizzly bear, with maybe a little\n bird blood thrown in. Anyway, she's big.\n\n\n I couldn't help feeling sorry for her. She was crouched in the cage\n with her hands—yeah, hands—hanging over her knees and her snaky head\n sunk into her shoulders, looking out. Just looking. Not at anything.\n Her eyes were way back in deep horny pits, like cold green fire.\n\n\n The lantern light was yellow on her blue-black skin, but it made the\n mane, or crest, of coarse wide scales that ran from between her eyes\n clear down to her flat, short tail, burn all colors. She looked like\n old Mother Misery herself, from way back before time began.\n\n\n Gow said softly, \"She wants a mate. And somebody better get her one.\"",
"It had been quiet. Now every brute in the place let go at the same\n time. My stomach turned clear over. I called Gertrude every name I\n could think of, and I couldn't hear myself doing it. Presently a great\n metallic clash nearly burst my eardrums, and the beasts shut up. Gow\n had them nicely conditioned to that gong.\nBut they didn't quiet down. Not really. They were uneasy. You can feel\n them inside you when they're uneasy. I think that's why I'm scared of\n them. They make me feel like I'm not human as I thought—like I wanted\n to put my back-hair up and snarl. Yeah. They were uneasy that night,\n all of a sudden....\n\n\n Gow glared at us as we came up into the lantern light. \"She's gettin'\n worse,\" he said. \"She's lonesome.\"",
"It was Gow, our zoo-man—a big, ugly son-of-a-gun from a Terran\n colony on Mercury. I was there once. Gow looks a lot like the\n scenery—scowling, unapproachable, and tough. His hands, holding the\n curtains apart, had thick black hair on them and were not much larger\n than the hams of a Venusian swamp-rhino.\n\n\n He said, \"Boss, Gertrude's actin' up again.\"\n\n\n \"Gertrude be blowed,\" growled Bucky. \"Can't you see I'm busy?\"\n\n\n Gow's black eyes were unpleasant. \"I'm tellin' you, Boss, Gertrude\n ain't happy. She ain't had the right food. If something....\"\n\n\n I said, \"That'll all be taken care of, Gow. Run along now.\"",
"Bucky Shannon sniffled again. I said irritably, \"Be reasonable, Gow!\n Nobody's ever seen a male\ncansin\n. There may not even be any.\"\n\n\n Gertrude screamed again. She didn't move, not even to raise her head.\n The sadness just built up inside her until it had to come out. That\n close, the screech was deafening, and it turned me all limp and cold\n inside. The loneliness, the sheer stark, simple pain....\n\n\n Bucky Shannon began to cry. I snarled, \"You'll have to snap her out of\n this, Gow. She's driving the rest of 'em nuts.\"\n\n\n He hammered on his gong, and things quieted down again. Gow stood\n looking out over the tank, sniffing a little, like a hound. Then he\n turned to Gertrude.",
"Bucky Shannon regarded them possessively, wiping blood from his nose.\n \"They're good guys, Jig. Swell people. They stuck by me, and I've\n rewarded them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure,\" rather sourly. Bucky hiccoughed.\n\n\n \"Let's go see Gertrude.\"\n\n\n I didn't want to see Gertrude. I never got over feeling funny going\n into the brute tank, especially at night or out in space. I'm a city\n guy, myself. The smell and sound of wildness gives me goose bumps. But\n Bucky was looking stubborn, so I shrugged.\n\n\n \"Okay. But just for a minute. Then we go beddy-bye.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal, Jif. Bes' li'l' guy inna worl'....\"",
"Bucky Shannon lurched against me suddenly. I choked back a yell, and\n then wiped the sweat off my forehead and cursed. The scream came again.\n A high, ragged, whistling screech like nothing this side of hell,\n ripping through the musty darkness. Gertrude, on the wailing wall.",
"The fight had just put the topper on him. I was afraid he'd fall down\n the ladder and break his neck. That's why I went along. If I hadn't....\n Oh, well, what's a few nightmares among friends?\n\n\n It was dark down there in the tank. Way off at the other end, there was\n a dim glow. Gow was evidently holding Gertrude's hand. We started down\n the long passageway between the rows of cages and glassed-in tanks and\n compression units.\n\n\n Our footsteps sounded loud and empty on the iron floor. I wasn't\n near as happy as Shannon, and my skin began to crawl a little. It's\n the smell, I think; rank and sour and wild. And the sound of them,\n breathing and rustling in the dark, with the patient hatred walled\n around them as strong as the cage bars.",
"\"That's tough,\" said Bucky Shannon. His grey-green eyes looked like an\n owl's. He swayed slightly. \"That's sure tough.\" He sniffled.\n\n\n I looked at Gertrude. Her cage is the biggest and strongest in the tank\n and even so she looked as though she could break it open just taking a\n deep breath. I don't know if you've ever seen a\ncansin\n. There's only\n two of them on the Triangle. If you haven't, nothing I can say will\n make much difference.\n\n\n They're what the brain gang calls an \"end of evolution.\" Seems old\n Dame Nature had an idea that didn't jell. The\ncansins\nwere pretty\n successful for a while, it seems, but something gummed up the works and\n now there's only a few left, way in the deep-swamp country, where even\n the Venusians hardly ever go. Living fossils.",
"\"I saved her life,\" he said. \"When we bought her out of Hanak's wreck\n and everybody thought she was too hurt to live, I saved her. I know\n her. I can do things with her. But this time....\"\n\n\n He shrugged. He was huge and tough and ugly, and his voice was like a\n woman's talking about a sick child.\n\n\n \"This time,\" he said, \"I ain't sure.\"\n\n\n \"Well for Pete's sake, do what you can. We got a charter, and we need\n her.\" I took Shannon's arm. \"Come to bed, Bucky darlin'.\"\n\n\n He draped himself over my shoulder and we went off. Gow didn't look at\n us. Bucky sobbed.",
"\"You were right, Jig,\" he mumbled. \"Circus is no good. I know it. But\n it's all I got. I love it, Jig. Unnerstan' me? Like Gow there with\n Gertrude. She's ugly and no good, but he loves her. I love....\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure,\" I told him. \"Stop crying down my neck.\"\n\n\n We were a long way from the light, then. The cages and tanks loomed\n high and black over us. It was still. The secret, uneasy motion all\n around us and the scruffing of our feet only made it stiller.\n\n\n Bucky was almost asleep on me. I started to slap him. And then the mist\n rose up out of the darkness in little lazy coils, sparkling faintly\n with blue, cold fire.\n\n\n I yelled, \"Gow! Gow, the Vapor snakes! Gow—for God's sake!\"",
"\"A blue one, Jig. A morgue if I ever saw one!\"\n\n\n I snarled, \"What do you want, with this lousy dog-and-pony show!\" and\n went out. He followed. The gang was converging on the lock, but they\n weren't happy. You get so you can feel those things. The steamy Venus\n heat was already sneaking into the ship.\n\n\n While we passed the hatchway to the brute tank, I could hear Gertrude,\n screaming.\nThe canvasmen were busy setting up the annex, slopping and cursing in\n the mud. The paste brigade was heading for the shacks. Shannon and I\n stood with the hot rain running off our slickers, looking.",
"I said, \"Skip it. The next time, just don't trip me up, that's all!\"\n\n\n We had a nasty trip to Venus. Gertrude kept the brute tank on edge,\n and Gow, on the rare occasions he came up for air, went around looking\n like a disaster hoping to happen. To make it worse, Zurt the Jovian\n strong-man got hurt during the take-off, and the Mercurian cave-cat had\n kittens.\n\n\n Nobody would have minded that, only one of 'em had only four legs. It\n lived just long enough to scare that bunch of superstitious dopes out\n of their pants. Circus people are funny that way.",
"\"It's no more plastered than you are.\" I was sore because he'd been a\n lot quicker grabbing the pitcher. \"The Greatest Show in Space. Phooey!\n I've wet-nursed Shannon's Imperial Circus around the Triangle for\n eleven years, and I know. It's lousy, it's mangy, it's broken-down!\n Nothing works, from the ship to the roustabouts. In short, it stinks!\"\n\n\n I must have had the pitcher oftener than I thought. Nobody insults\n Buckhalter Shannon's Imperial Circus to Buckhalter Shannon's face\n unless he's tired and wants a long rest in a comfy fracture-frame.",
"I started to run, back along the passageway. Bucky weighed on me, limp\n and heavy. The noise burst suddenly in a deafening hell of moans and\n roars and shrieks, packed in tight by the metal walls, and above it all\n I could hear Gertrude's lonely, whistling scream.\n\n\n I thought, \"\nSomebody's down here. Somebody let 'em out. Somebody wants\n to kill us!\n\" I tried to yell again. It strangled in my throat. I\n sobbed, and the sweat was thick and cold on me.\n\n\n One of Bucky's dragging, stumbling feet got between mine. We fell. I\n rolled on top of him, covering his face, and buried my own face in the\n hollow of his shoulder.\n\n\n The first snake touched me. It was like a live wire, sliding along the\n back of my neck. I screamed. It came down along my cheek, hunting my\n mouth. There were more of them, burning me through my clothes.",
"I was thinking about Kapper, then, and I didn't pay much attention. I\n only caught a glimpse of the man's face as he straightened up. I didn't\n realize until later that he looked familiar.\n\n\n We got Kapper inside the shack. It turned out to be a cheap bar, with a\n couple of curtained booths at the back. We got him into one and pulled\n the curtain in a lot of curious faces. Kapper dragged hard on the\n cigarette. The man that gave it to him was gone.\n\n\n Bucky said gently, \"Okay, Sam. Relax. What's the trouble?\"\nKapper tried to straighten up. He hadn't shaved. The lean hard lines\n of his face had gone slack and his eyes were bloodshot. He was covered\n with mud, and his mouth twitched like a sick old man's.\n\n\n He said thickly, \"I found it. I said I'd do it, and I did. I found it\n and brought it out.\"",
"Bucky had relaxed. His grey-green eyes began to gleam. He started to\n speak, and I kicked him again.\n\n\n \"That would be expensive, Mister Beamish,\" I said. \"We'd have to cancel\n several engagements....\"\n\n\n He looked at me. I was lying, and he knew it. But he said,\n\n\n \"I quite understand that. I would be prepared....\"\n\n\n The curtains were yanked back suddenly. Beamish shut up. Bucky and I\n glared at the head and shoulders poking in between the drapes.",
"I heard a noise behind me and looked around. Ahra the Nahali woman was\n standing in the mud with her arms up and her head thrown back, and her\n triangular mouth open like a thirsty dog. She didn't have anything on\n but her blue-green, hard scaled hide, and she was chuckling. It didn't\n sound nice.\n\n\n You find a lot of Nahali people in side-shows, doing tricks with\n the electric power they carry in their own bodies. They're Venusian\n middle-swampers, they're not human, and they never forget it.\n\n\n Ahra opened her slitted red eyes and looked at me and laughed with\n white reptilian teeth.\n\n\n \"Death,\" she whispered. \"Death and trouble. The jungle tells me. I can\n smell it in the swamp wind.\"",
"I reached across Bucky suddenly and jerked the curtain back. Beamish\n was standing there. Beamish, bent over, with his ear cocked. Kapper\n made a harsh strangling noise and fell across the table.\n\n\n Beamish never changed expression. He didn't move while Bucky felt\n Kapper's pulse. Bucky didn't need to say anything. We knew.\n\n\n \"Heart?\" said Beamish finally.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Bucky. He looked as bad as I felt. \"Poor Sam.\"\n\n\n I looked at the cigarette stub smoldering on the table. I looked at\n Beamish with his round dead baby face. I climbed over Shannon and\n pushed Beamish suddenly down into his lap.\n\n\n \"Keep this guy here till I get back,\" I said."
],
[
"Bucky Shannon lurched against me suddenly. I choked back a yell, and\n then wiped the sweat off my forehead and cursed. The scream came again.\n A high, ragged, whistling screech like nothing this side of hell,\n ripping through the musty darkness. Gertrude, on the wailing wall.",
"It had been quiet. Now every brute in the place let go at the same\n time. My stomach turned clear over. I called Gertrude every name I\n could think of, and I couldn't hear myself doing it. Presently a great\n metallic clash nearly burst my eardrums, and the beasts shut up. Gow\n had them nicely conditioned to that gong.\nBut they didn't quiet down. Not really. They were uneasy. You can feel\n them inside you when they're uneasy. I think that's why I'm scared of\n them. They make me feel like I'm not human as I thought—like I wanted\n to put my back-hair up and snarl. Yeah. They were uneasy that night,\n all of a sudden....\n\n\n Gow glared at us as we came up into the lantern light. \"She's gettin'\n worse,\" he said. \"She's lonesome.\"",
"Bucky Shannon sniffled again. I said irritably, \"Be reasonable, Gow!\n Nobody's ever seen a male\ncansin\n. There may not even be any.\"\n\n\n Gertrude screamed again. She didn't move, not even to raise her head.\n The sadness just built up inside her until it had to come out. That\n close, the screech was deafening, and it turned me all limp and cold\n inside. The loneliness, the sheer stark, simple pain....\n\n\n Bucky Shannon began to cry. I snarled, \"You'll have to snap her out of\n this, Gow. She's driving the rest of 'em nuts.\"\n\n\n He hammered on his gong, and things quieted down again. Gow stood\n looking out over the tank, sniffing a little, like a hound. Then he\n turned to Gertrude.",
"I started to run, back along the passageway. Bucky weighed on me, limp\n and heavy. The noise burst suddenly in a deafening hell of moans and\n roars and shrieks, packed in tight by the metal walls, and above it all\n I could hear Gertrude's lonely, whistling scream.\n\n\n I thought, \"\nSomebody's down here. Somebody let 'em out. Somebody wants\n to kill us!\n\" I tried to yell again. It strangled in my throat. I\n sobbed, and the sweat was thick and cold on me.\n\n\n One of Bucky's dragging, stumbling feet got between mine. We fell. I\n rolled on top of him, covering his face, and buried my own face in the\n hollow of his shoulder.\n\n\n The first snake touched me. It was like a live wire, sliding along the\n back of my neck. I screamed. It came down along my cheek, hunting my\n mouth. There were more of them, burning me through my clothes.",
"The fight had just put the topper on him. I was afraid he'd fall down\n the ladder and break his neck. That's why I went along. If I hadn't....\n Oh, well, what's a few nightmares among friends?\n\n\n It was dark down there in the tank. Way off at the other end, there was\n a dim glow. Gow was evidently holding Gertrude's hand. We started down\n the long passageway between the rows of cages and glassed-in tanks and\n compression units.\n\n\n Our footsteps sounded loud and empty on the iron floor. I wasn't\n near as happy as Shannon, and my skin began to crawl a little. It's\n the smell, I think; rank and sour and wild. And the sound of them,\n breathing and rustling in the dark, with the patient hatred walled\n around them as strong as the cage bars.",
"It was Gow, our zoo-man—a big, ugly son-of-a-gun from a Terran\n colony on Mercury. I was there once. Gow looks a lot like the\n scenery—scowling, unapproachable, and tough. His hands, holding the\n curtains apart, had thick black hair on them and were not much larger\n than the hams of a Venusian swamp-rhino.\n\n\n He said, \"Boss, Gertrude's actin' up again.\"\n\n\n \"Gertrude be blowed,\" growled Bucky. \"Can't you see I'm busy?\"\n\n\n Gow's black eyes were unpleasant. \"I'm tellin' you, Boss, Gertrude\n ain't happy. She ain't had the right food. If something....\"\n\n\n I said, \"That'll all be taken care of, Gow. Run along now.\"",
"I wouldn't know, of course, but Gertrude looks to me like she got stuck\n some place between a dinosaur and a grizzly bear, with maybe a little\n bird blood thrown in. Anyway, she's big.\n\n\n I couldn't help feeling sorry for her. She was crouched in the cage\n with her hands—yeah, hands—hanging over her knees and her snaky head\n sunk into her shoulders, looking out. Just looking. Not at anything.\n Her eyes were way back in deep horny pits, like cold green fire.\n\n\n The lantern light was yellow on her blue-black skin, but it made the\n mane, or crest, of coarse wide scales that ran from between her eyes\n clear down to her flat, short tail, burn all colors. She looked like\n old Mother Misery herself, from way back before time began.\n\n\n Gow said softly, \"She wants a mate. And somebody better get her one.\"",
"I reached across Bucky suddenly and jerked the curtain back. Beamish\n was standing there. Beamish, bent over, with his ear cocked. Kapper\n made a harsh strangling noise and fell across the table.\n\n\n Beamish never changed expression. He didn't move while Bucky felt\n Kapper's pulse. Bucky didn't need to say anything. We knew.\n\n\n \"Heart?\" said Beamish finally.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Bucky. He looked as bad as I felt. \"Poor Sam.\"\n\n\n I looked at the cigarette stub smoldering on the table. I looked at\n Beamish with his round dead baby face. I climbed over Shannon and\n pushed Beamish suddenly down into his lap.\n\n\n \"Keep this guy here till I get back,\" I said.",
"\"A blue one, Jig. A morgue if I ever saw one!\"\n\n\n I snarled, \"What do you want, with this lousy dog-and-pony show!\" and\n went out. He followed. The gang was converging on the lock, but they\n weren't happy. You get so you can feel those things. The steamy Venus\n heat was already sneaking into the ship.\n\n\n While we passed the hatchway to the brute tank, I could hear Gertrude,\n screaming.\nThe canvasmen were busy setting up the annex, slopping and cursing in\n the mud. The paste brigade was heading for the shacks. Shannon and I\n stood with the hot rain running off our slickers, looking.",
"\"You were right, Jig,\" he mumbled. \"Circus is no good. I know it. But\n it's all I got. I love it, Jig. Unnerstan' me? Like Gow there with\n Gertrude. She's ugly and no good, but he loves her. I love....\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure,\" I told him. \"Stop crying down my neck.\"\n\n\n We were a long way from the light, then. The cages and tanks loomed\n high and black over us. It was still. The secret, uneasy motion all\n around us and the scruffing of our feet only made it stiller.\n\n\n Bucky was almost asleep on me. I started to slap him. And then the mist\n rose up out of the darkness in little lazy coils, sparkling faintly\n with blue, cold fire.\n\n\n I yelled, \"Gow! Gow, the Vapor snakes! Gow—for God's sake!\"",
"He looked at me like he was thinking it wouldn't take much timber to\n fit me for a coffin. \"Okay! But Gertrude's unhappy. She's lonesome,\n see? And if she don't get happier pretty soon I ain't sure your tin-pot\n ship'll hold her.\"\n\n\n He pulled the curtains to and departed. Bucky Shannon groaned. Beamish\n cleared his throat and said, rather stiffly,\n\n\n \"Gertrude?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. She's kind of temperamental.\" Bucky took a quick drink. I\n finished for him.\n\n\n \"She's the star attraction of our show, Mr. Beamish. A real blue-swamp\n Venusian\ncansin\n. The only other one on the Triangle belongs to Savitt\n Brothers, and she's much smaller than Gertrude.\"",
"She was also much younger, but I didn't go into that. Gertrude may be\n a little creaky, but she's still pretty impressive. I only hoped she\n wouldn't die on us, because without her we'd have a sicker-looking\n circus than even I could stand.\n\n\n Beamish looked impressed. \"A\ncansin\n. Well, well! The mystery\n surrounding the origin and species of the\ncansin\nis a fascinating\n subject. The extreme rarity of the animal....\"\n\n\n We were getting off the subject. I said tactfully, \"We'd have to have\n at least a hundred U.C.'s.\"\n\n\n It was twice what we had any right to ask. I was prepared to dicker.\n Beamish looked at me with that innocent dead pan. For a fraction of a\n second I thought I saw something back of his round blue eyes, and my\n stomach jumped like it was shot. Beamish smiled sweetly.",
"Bucky Shannon regarded them possessively, wiping blood from his nose.\n \"They're good guys, Jig. Swell people. They stuck by me, and I've\n rewarded them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure,\" rather sourly. Bucky hiccoughed.\n\n\n \"Let's go see Gertrude.\"\n\n\n I didn't want to see Gertrude. I never got over feeling funny going\n into the brute tank, especially at night or out in space. I'm a city\n guy, myself. The smell and sound of wildness gives me goose bumps. But\n Bucky was looking stubborn, so I shrugged.\n\n\n \"Okay. But just for a minute. Then we go beddy-bye.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal, Jif. Bes' li'l' guy inna worl'....\"",
"\"I saved her life,\" he said. \"When we bought her out of Hanak's wreck\n and everybody thought she was too hurt to live, I saved her. I know\n her. I can do things with her. But this time....\"\n\n\n He shrugged. He was huge and tough and ugly, and his voice was like a\n woman's talking about a sick child.\n\n\n \"This time,\" he said, \"I ain't sure.\"\n\n\n \"Well for Pete's sake, do what you can. We got a charter, and we need\n her.\" I took Shannon's arm. \"Come to bed, Bucky darlin'.\"\n\n\n He draped himself over my shoulder and we went off. Gow didn't look at\n us. Bucky sobbed.",
"I said, \"Yeah,\" and pushed him away and got up. I almost fell down\n a couple of times, but presently I made it to the mirror over the\n washstand—I was in my own cell—and I saw what Kanza meant. The damned\n snakes had done a good job. I looked like I was upholstered in Scotch\n plaid. I felt sick.\n\n\n Bucky Shannon opened the door. He looked white and grim, and there was\n a big burn across his neck. He said:\n\n\n \"Beamish is here with his lawyer.\"\n\n\n I picked up my shirt. \"Right with you.\"\n\n\n Kanza went out, still giggling. Bucky closed the door.\n\n\n \"Jig,\" he said, \"those vapor worms were all right when we went in.\n Somebody followed us down and let them out. On purpose.\"",
"The cigarette stub fell out of his mouth. He didn't notice it. \"Help\n me,\" he said simply. \"I'm scared.\" His mouth drooled.\n\n\n \"I got it hidden. They want to find out, but I won't tell 'em. It's\n got to go back. Back where I found it. I tried to take it, but they\n wouldn't let me, and I was afraid they'd find it....\"\n\n\n He reached suddenly and grabbed the edge of the table. \"I don't know\n how they found out about it, but they did. I've got to get it back.\n I've got to....\"\n\n\n Bucky looked at me. Kapper was blue around the mouth. I was scared,\n suddenly. I said, \"Get what back where?\"",
"Bucky had relaxed. His grey-green eyes began to gleam. He started to\n speak, and I kicked him again.\n\n\n \"That would be expensive, Mister Beamish,\" I said. \"We'd have to cancel\n several engagements....\"\n\n\n He looked at me. I was lying, and he knew it. But he said,\n\n\n \"I quite understand that. I would be prepared....\"\n\n\n The curtains were yanked back suddenly. Beamish shut up. Bucky and I\n glared at the head and shoulders poking in between the drapes.",
"I was thinking about Kapper, then, and I didn't pay much attention. I\n only caught a glimpse of the man's face as he straightened up. I didn't\n realize until later that he looked familiar.\n\n\n We got Kapper inside the shack. It turned out to be a cheap bar, with a\n couple of curtained booths at the back. We got him into one and pulled\n the curtain in a lot of curious faces. Kapper dragged hard on the\n cigarette. The man that gave it to him was gone.\n\n\n Bucky said gently, \"Okay, Sam. Relax. What's the trouble?\"\nKapper tried to straighten up. He hadn't shaved. The lean hard lines\n of his face had gone slack and his eyes were bloodshot. He was covered\n with mud, and his mouth twitched like a sick old man's.\n\n\n He said thickly, \"I found it. I said I'd do it, and I did. I found it\n and brought it out.\"",
"\"It's no more plastered than you are.\" I was sore because he'd been a\n lot quicker grabbing the pitcher. \"The Greatest Show in Space. Phooey!\n I've wet-nursed Shannon's Imperial Circus around the Triangle for\n eleven years, and I know. It's lousy, it's mangy, it's broken-down!\n Nothing works, from the ship to the roustabouts. In short, it stinks!\"\n\n\n I must have had the pitcher oftener than I thought. Nobody insults\n Buckhalter Shannon's Imperial Circus to Buckhalter Shannon's face\n unless he's tired and wants a long rest in a comfy fracture-frame.",
"The hot rain sluiced over her. She shivered, and the pale skin under\n her jaw pulsed like a toad's, and her eyes were red.\n\n\n \"The deep swamps are angry,\" she whispered. \"Something has been taken.\n They are angry, and I smell death in the wind!\"\n\n\n She turned away, laughing, and I cursed her, and my stomach was tight\n and cold. Bucky said,\n\n\n \"Let's eat if they have a bar in this dump.\"\n\n\n We weren't half way across the mud puddle that passed as a landing\n field when a man came out of a shack on the edge of the settlement. We\n could see him plainly, because he was off to one side of the crowd.\n\n\n He fell on his knees in the mud, making noises. It took him three or\n four tries to get our names out clear enough to understand."
],
[
"\"You were right, Jig,\" he mumbled. \"Circus is no good. I know it. But\n it's all I got. I love it, Jig. Unnerstan' me? Like Gow there with\n Gertrude. She's ugly and no good, but he loves her. I love....\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure,\" I told him. \"Stop crying down my neck.\"\n\n\n We were a long way from the light, then. The cages and tanks loomed\n high and black over us. It was still. The secret, uneasy motion all\n around us and the scruffing of our feet only made it stiller.\n\n\n Bucky was almost asleep on me. I started to slap him. And then the mist\n rose up out of the darkness in little lazy coils, sparkling faintly\n with blue, cold fire.\n\n\n I yelled, \"Gow! Gow, the Vapor snakes! Gow—for God's sake!\"",
"I said, \"Yeah,\" and pushed him away and got up. I almost fell down\n a couple of times, but presently I made it to the mirror over the\n washstand—I was in my own cell—and I saw what Kanza meant. The damned\n snakes had done a good job. I looked like I was upholstered in Scotch\n plaid. I felt sick.\n\n\n Bucky Shannon opened the door. He looked white and grim, and there was\n a big burn across his neck. He said:\n\n\n \"Beamish is here with his lawyer.\"\n\n\n I picked up my shirt. \"Right with you.\"\n\n\n Kanza went out, still giggling. Bucky closed the door.\n\n\n \"Jig,\" he said, \"those vapor worms were all right when we went in.\n Somebody followed us down and let them out. On purpose.\"",
"I started to run, back along the passageway. Bucky weighed on me, limp\n and heavy. The noise burst suddenly in a deafening hell of moans and\n roars and shrieks, packed in tight by the metal walls, and above it all\n I could hear Gertrude's lonely, whistling scream.\n\n\n I thought, \"\nSomebody's down here. Somebody let 'em out. Somebody wants\n to kill us!\n\" I tried to yell again. It strangled in my throat. I\n sobbed, and the sweat was thick and cold on me.\n\n\n One of Bucky's dragging, stumbling feet got between mine. We fell. I\n rolled on top of him, covering his face, and buried my own face in the\n hollow of his shoulder.\n\n\n The first snake touched me. It was like a live wire, sliding along the\n back of my neck. I screamed. It came down along my cheek, hunting my\n mouth. There were more of them, burning me through my clothes.",
"Bucky said, \"Jig—it's Sam Kapper.\"\n\n\n We started to run. The crowd, mostly big unshaken miners, wheeled\n around to see what was happening. People began to close in on the man\n who crawled and whimpered in the mud.\n\n\n Sam Kapper was a hunter, supplying animals to zoos and circuses and\n carnivals. He'd given us good deals a couple of times, when we weren't\n too broke, and we were pretty friendly.\n\n\n I hadn't seen him for three seasons. I remembered him as a bronzed,\n hard-bitten guy, lean and tough as a twist of tung wire. I felt sick,\n looking down at him.\n\n\n Bucky started to help him up. Kapper was crying, and he jerked all over\n like animals I've seen that were scared to death. Some guy leaned over\n and put a cigarette in his mouth and lighted it for him.",
"Bucky moaned and kicked under me. I remember hanging on and thinking,\n \"This is it. This is it, and oh God, I'm scared!\"\n\n\n Then I went out.\nII\n\n\n Kanza the Martian croaker, was bending over me when I woke up. His\n little brown face was crinkled with laughter. He'd lost most of his\n teeth, and he gummed\nthak\n-weed. It smelt.\n\n\n \"You pretty, Mis' Jig,\" he giggled. \"You funny like hell.\"\n\n\n He slapped some cold greasy stuff on my face. It hurt. I cursed him and\n said, \"Where's Shannon? How is he?\"\n\n\n \"Mis' Bucky okay. You save life. You big hero, Mis' Jig. Mis' Gow come\n nickuhtime get snakes. You hero. Haw! You funny like hell!\"",
"Bucky Shannon regarded them possessively, wiping blood from his nose.\n \"They're good guys, Jig. Swell people. They stuck by me, and I've\n rewarded them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure,\" rather sourly. Bucky hiccoughed.\n\n\n \"Let's go see Gertrude.\"\n\n\n I didn't want to see Gertrude. I never got over feeling funny going\n into the brute tank, especially at night or out in space. I'm a city\n guy, myself. The smell and sound of wildness gives me goose bumps. But\n Bucky was looking stubborn, so I shrugged.\n\n\n \"Okay. But just for a minute. Then we go beddy-bye.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal, Jif. Bes' li'l' guy inna worl'....\"",
"Bucky Shannon sniffled again. I said irritably, \"Be reasonable, Gow!\n Nobody's ever seen a male\ncansin\n. There may not even be any.\"\n\n\n Gertrude screamed again. She didn't move, not even to raise her head.\n The sadness just built up inside her until it had to come out. That\n close, the screech was deafening, and it turned me all limp and cold\n inside. The loneliness, the sheer stark, simple pain....\n\n\n Bucky Shannon began to cry. I snarled, \"You'll have to snap her out of\n this, Gow. She's driving the rest of 'em nuts.\"\n\n\n He hammered on his gong, and things quieted down again. Gow stood\n looking out over the tank, sniffing a little, like a hound. Then he\n turned to Gertrude.",
"Bucky Shannon lurched against me suddenly. I choked back a yell, and\n then wiped the sweat off my forehead and cursed. The scream came again.\n A high, ragged, whistling screech like nothing this side of hell,\n ripping through the musty darkness. Gertrude, on the wailing wall.",
"\"A blue one, Jig. A morgue if I ever saw one!\"\n\n\n I snarled, \"What do you want, with this lousy dog-and-pony show!\" and\n went out. He followed. The gang was converging on the lock, but they\n weren't happy. You get so you can feel those things. The steamy Venus\n heat was already sneaking into the ship.\n\n\n While we passed the hatchway to the brute tank, I could hear Gertrude,\n screaming.\nThe canvasmen were busy setting up the annex, slopping and cursing in\n the mud. The paste brigade was heading for the shacks. Shannon and I\n stood with the hot rain running off our slickers, looking.",
"The little guy looked at me. He hadn't turned a hair. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \"Money. Quite a lot of it. Would you gentlemen permit me to join you?\"\n\n\n Bucky Shannon got up. He grinned his pleasantest grin. \"Delighted. I'm\n Shannon. This is Jig Bentley, my business manager.\" He looked down at\n the table. \"I'm sorry about that. Mistaken identity.\"\n\n\n The little guy smiled. He did it with his lips. The rest of his face\n stayed placid and babyish, almost transparent. I realized with a start\n that it wasn't transparent at all. It was the most complete dead-pan I\n ever met, and you couldn't see into those innocent blue eyes any more\n than you could see through sheet metal.",
"I felt cold, suddenly, between the shoulders. Somebody scraped a chair\n back. It sounded like he'd ripped the floor open, it was so quiet. I\n got my brassies on, and my hands were sweating. Bucky Shannon sighed,\n and let his fist start traveling, a long, deceptive arc.\n\n\n Then I saw what the little guy was holding in his hand.\n\n\n I yelled and knocked the table over into Bucky. It made a lot of noise.\n It knocked him sideways and down, and the little dark men jumped up,\n quivering and showing their teeth. The Martian girl screamed.\n\n\n Bucky heaved the table off his lap and cursed me. \"What's eating you,\n Jig? I'm not going to hurt him.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" I said. \"Look what he's got there. Money!\"",
"I hurt all over. I growled, \"With that brain, son, you should go far.\n Nobody saw anything, of course?\" Bucky shook his head.\n\n\n \"Question is, Jig, who wants to kill us, and why?\"\n\n\n \"Beamish. He realizes he's been gypped.\"\n\n\n \"One hundred U.C.'s,\" said Bucky softly, \"for a few lousy swampedge\n mining camps. It stinks, Jig. You think we should back out?\"\n\n\n I shrugged. \"You're the boss man. I'm only the guy that beats off the\n creditors.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Bucky said reflectively. \"And I hear starvation isn't a\n comfortable death. Okay, Jig. Let's go sign.\" He put his hand on the\n latch and looked at my feet. \"And—uh—Jig, I....\"",
"The hot rain sluiced over her. She shivered, and the pale skin under\n her jaw pulsed like a toad's, and her eyes were red.\n\n\n \"The deep swamps are angry,\" she whispered. \"Something has been taken.\n They are angry, and I smell death in the wind!\"\n\n\n She turned away, laughing, and I cursed her, and my stomach was tight\n and cold. Bucky said,\n\n\n \"Let's eat if they have a bar in this dump.\"\n\n\n We weren't half way across the mud puddle that passed as a landing\n field when a man came out of a shack on the edge of the settlement. We\n could see him plainly, because he was off to one side of the crowd.\n\n\n He fell on his knees in the mud, making noises. It took him three or\n four tries to get our names out clear enough to understand.",
"I reached across Bucky suddenly and jerked the curtain back. Beamish\n was standing there. Beamish, bent over, with his ear cocked. Kapper\n made a harsh strangling noise and fell across the table.\n\n\n Beamish never changed expression. He didn't move while Bucky felt\n Kapper's pulse. Bucky didn't need to say anything. We knew.\n\n\n \"Heart?\" said Beamish finally.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Bucky. He looked as bad as I felt. \"Poor Sam.\"\n\n\n I looked at the cigarette stub smoldering on the table. I looked at\n Beamish with his round dead baby face. I climbed over Shannon and\n pushed Beamish suddenly down into his lap.\n\n\n \"Keep this guy here till I get back,\" I said.",
"Bucky had relaxed. His grey-green eyes began to gleam. He started to\n speak, and I kicked him again.\n\n\n \"That would be expensive, Mister Beamish,\" I said. \"We'd have to cancel\n several engagements....\"\n\n\n He looked at me. I was lying, and he knew it. But he said,\n\n\n \"I quite understand that. I would be prepared....\"\n\n\n The curtains were yanked back suddenly. Beamish shut up. Bucky and I\n glared at the head and shoulders poking in between the drapes.",
"Bucky got up. \"I'll get a doctor,\" he said. \"Stick with him.\" Kapper\n grabbed his wrist. Kapper's nails were blue and the cords in his hands\n stood out like guy wires.\n\n\n \"Don't leave me. Got to tell you—where it is. Got to take it back.\n Promise you'll take it back.\" He gasped and struggled over his\n breathing.\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Bucky. \"Sure, well take it back. What is it?\"\n\n\n Kapper's face was horrible. I felt sick, listening to him fight for\n air. I wanted to go for a doctor anyway, but somehow I knew it was no\n use. Kapper whispered,\n\n\n \"\nCansin\n. Male. Only one. You don't know...! Take him back.\"\n\n\n \"Where is it, Sam?\"",
"The fight had just put the topper on him. I was afraid he'd fall down\n the ladder and break his neck. That's why I went along. If I hadn't....\n Oh, well, what's a few nightmares among friends?\n\n\n It was dark down there in the tank. Way off at the other end, there was\n a dim glow. Gow was evidently holding Gertrude's hand. We started down\n the long passageway between the rows of cages and glassed-in tanks and\n compression units.\n\n\n Our footsteps sounded loud and empty on the iron floor. I wasn't\n near as happy as Shannon, and my skin began to crawl a little. It's\n the smell, I think; rank and sour and wild. And the sound of them,\n breathing and rustling in the dark, with the patient hatred walled\n around them as strong as the cage bars.",
"\"That's tough,\" said Bucky Shannon. His grey-green eyes looked like an\n owl's. He swayed slightly. \"That's sure tough.\" He sniffled.\n\n\n I looked at Gertrude. Her cage is the biggest and strongest in the tank\n and even so she looked as though she could break it open just taking a\n deep breath. I don't know if you've ever seen a\ncansin\n. There's only\n two of them on the Triangle. If you haven't, nothing I can say will\n make much difference.\n\n\n They're what the brain gang calls an \"end of evolution.\" Seems old\n Dame Nature had an idea that didn't jell. The\ncansins\nwere pretty\n successful for a while, it seems, but something gummed up the works and\n now there's only a few left, way in the deep-swamp country, where even\n the Venusians hardly ever go. Living fossils.",
"It was Gow, our zoo-man—a big, ugly son-of-a-gun from a Terran\n colony on Mercury. I was there once. Gow looks a lot like the\n scenery—scowling, unapproachable, and tough. His hands, holding the\n curtains apart, had thick black hair on them and were not much larger\n than the hams of a Venusian swamp-rhino.\n\n\n He said, \"Boss, Gertrude's actin' up again.\"\n\n\n \"Gertrude be blowed,\" growled Bucky. \"Can't you see I'm busy?\"\n\n\n Gow's black eyes were unpleasant. \"I'm tellin' you, Boss, Gertrude\n ain't happy. She ain't had the right food. If something....\"\n\n\n I said, \"That'll all be taken care of, Gow. Run along now.\"",
"I was thinking about Kapper, then, and I didn't pay much attention. I\n only caught a glimpse of the man's face as he straightened up. I didn't\n realize until later that he looked familiar.\n\n\n We got Kapper inside the shack. It turned out to be a cheap bar, with a\n couple of curtained booths at the back. We got him into one and pulled\n the curtain in a lot of curious faces. Kapper dragged hard on the\n cigarette. The man that gave it to him was gone.\n\n\n Bucky said gently, \"Okay, Sam. Relax. What's the trouble?\"\nKapper tried to straighten up. He hadn't shaved. The lean hard lines\n of his face had gone slack and his eyes were bloodshot. He was covered\n with mud, and his mouth twitched like a sick old man's.\n\n\n He said thickly, \"I found it. I said I'd do it, and I did. I found it\n and brought it out.\""
],
[
"It had been quiet. Now every brute in the place let go at the same\n time. My stomach turned clear over. I called Gertrude every name I\n could think of, and I couldn't hear myself doing it. Presently a great\n metallic clash nearly burst my eardrums, and the beasts shut up. Gow\n had them nicely conditioned to that gong.\nBut they didn't quiet down. Not really. They were uneasy. You can feel\n them inside you when they're uneasy. I think that's why I'm scared of\n them. They make me feel like I'm not human as I thought—like I wanted\n to put my back-hair up and snarl. Yeah. They were uneasy that night,\n all of a sudden....\n\n\n Gow glared at us as we came up into the lantern light. \"She's gettin'\n worse,\" he said. \"She's lonesome.\"",
"It was Gow, our zoo-man—a big, ugly son-of-a-gun from a Terran\n colony on Mercury. I was there once. Gow looks a lot like the\n scenery—scowling, unapproachable, and tough. His hands, holding the\n curtains apart, had thick black hair on them and were not much larger\n than the hams of a Venusian swamp-rhino.\n\n\n He said, \"Boss, Gertrude's actin' up again.\"\n\n\n \"Gertrude be blowed,\" growled Bucky. \"Can't you see I'm busy?\"\n\n\n Gow's black eyes were unpleasant. \"I'm tellin' you, Boss, Gertrude\n ain't happy. She ain't had the right food. If something....\"\n\n\n I said, \"That'll all be taken care of, Gow. Run along now.\"",
"The fight had just put the topper on him. I was afraid he'd fall down\n the ladder and break his neck. That's why I went along. If I hadn't....\n Oh, well, what's a few nightmares among friends?\n\n\n It was dark down there in the tank. Way off at the other end, there was\n a dim glow. Gow was evidently holding Gertrude's hand. We started down\n the long passageway between the rows of cages and glassed-in tanks and\n compression units.\n\n\n Our footsteps sounded loud and empty on the iron floor. I wasn't\n near as happy as Shannon, and my skin began to crawl a little. It's\n the smell, I think; rank and sour and wild. And the sound of them,\n breathing and rustling in the dark, with the patient hatred walled\n around them as strong as the cage bars.",
"I said, \"Skip it. The next time, just don't trip me up, that's all!\"\n\n\n We had a nasty trip to Venus. Gertrude kept the brute tank on edge,\n and Gow, on the rare occasions he came up for air, went around looking\n like a disaster hoping to happen. To make it worse, Zurt the Jovian\n strong-man got hurt during the take-off, and the Mercurian cave-cat had\n kittens.\n\n\n Nobody would have minded that, only one of 'em had only four legs. It\n lived just long enough to scare that bunch of superstitious dopes out\n of their pants. Circus people are funny that way.",
"Bucky Shannon sniffled again. I said irritably, \"Be reasonable, Gow!\n Nobody's ever seen a male\ncansin\n. There may not even be any.\"\n\n\n Gertrude screamed again. She didn't move, not even to raise her head.\n The sadness just built up inside her until it had to come out. That\n close, the screech was deafening, and it turned me all limp and cold\n inside. The loneliness, the sheer stark, simple pain....\n\n\n Bucky Shannon began to cry. I snarled, \"You'll have to snap her out of\n this, Gow. She's driving the rest of 'em nuts.\"\n\n\n He hammered on his gong, and things quieted down again. Gow stood\n looking out over the tank, sniffing a little, like a hound. Then he\n turned to Gertrude.",
"Bucky Shannon regarded them possessively, wiping blood from his nose.\n \"They're good guys, Jig. Swell people. They stuck by me, and I've\n rewarded them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure,\" rather sourly. Bucky hiccoughed.\n\n\n \"Let's go see Gertrude.\"\n\n\n I didn't want to see Gertrude. I never got over feeling funny going\n into the brute tank, especially at night or out in space. I'm a city\n guy, myself. The smell and sound of wildness gives me goose bumps. But\n Bucky was looking stubborn, so I shrugged.\n\n\n \"Okay. But just for a minute. Then we go beddy-bye.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal, Jif. Bes' li'l' guy inna worl'....\"",
"He looked at me like he was thinking it wouldn't take much timber to\n fit me for a coffin. \"Okay! But Gertrude's unhappy. She's lonesome,\n see? And if she don't get happier pretty soon I ain't sure your tin-pot\n ship'll hold her.\"\n\n\n He pulled the curtains to and departed. Bucky Shannon groaned. Beamish\n cleared his throat and said, rather stiffly,\n\n\n \"Gertrude?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. She's kind of temperamental.\" Bucky took a quick drink. I\n finished for him.\n\n\n \"She's the star attraction of our show, Mr. Beamish. A real blue-swamp\n Venusian\ncansin\n. The only other one on the Triangle belongs to Savitt\n Brothers, and she's much smaller than Gertrude.\"",
"I wouldn't know, of course, but Gertrude looks to me like she got stuck\n some place between a dinosaur and a grizzly bear, with maybe a little\n bird blood thrown in. Anyway, she's big.\n\n\n I couldn't help feeling sorry for her. She was crouched in the cage\n with her hands—yeah, hands—hanging over her knees and her snaky head\n sunk into her shoulders, looking out. Just looking. Not at anything.\n Her eyes were way back in deep horny pits, like cold green fire.\n\n\n The lantern light was yellow on her blue-black skin, but it made the\n mane, or crest, of coarse wide scales that ran from between her eyes\n clear down to her flat, short tail, burn all colors. She looked like\n old Mother Misery herself, from way back before time began.\n\n\n Gow said softly, \"She wants a mate. And somebody better get her one.\"",
"\"You were right, Jig,\" he mumbled. \"Circus is no good. I know it. But\n it's all I got. I love it, Jig. Unnerstan' me? Like Gow there with\n Gertrude. She's ugly and no good, but he loves her. I love....\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure,\" I told him. \"Stop crying down my neck.\"\n\n\n We were a long way from the light, then. The cages and tanks loomed\n high and black over us. It was still. The secret, uneasy motion all\n around us and the scruffing of our feet only made it stiller.\n\n\n Bucky was almost asleep on me. I started to slap him. And then the mist\n rose up out of the darkness in little lazy coils, sparkling faintly\n with blue, cold fire.\n\n\n I yelled, \"Gow! Gow, the Vapor snakes! Gow—for God's sake!\"",
"\"That's tough,\" said Bucky Shannon. His grey-green eyes looked like an\n owl's. He swayed slightly. \"That's sure tough.\" He sniffled.\n\n\n I looked at Gertrude. Her cage is the biggest and strongest in the tank\n and even so she looked as though she could break it open just taking a\n deep breath. I don't know if you've ever seen a\ncansin\n. There's only\n two of them on the Triangle. If you haven't, nothing I can say will\n make much difference.\n\n\n They're what the brain gang calls an \"end of evolution.\" Seems old\n Dame Nature had an idea that didn't jell. The\ncansins\nwere pretty\n successful for a while, it seems, but something gummed up the works and\n now there's only a few left, way in the deep-swamp country, where even\n the Venusians hardly ever go. Living fossils.",
"\"A blue one, Jig. A morgue if I ever saw one!\"\n\n\n I snarled, \"What do you want, with this lousy dog-and-pony show!\" and\n went out. He followed. The gang was converging on the lock, but they\n weren't happy. You get so you can feel those things. The steamy Venus\n heat was already sneaking into the ship.\n\n\n While we passed the hatchway to the brute tank, I could hear Gertrude,\n screaming.\nThe canvasmen were busy setting up the annex, slopping and cursing in\n the mud. The paste brigade was heading for the shacks. Shannon and I\n stood with the hot rain running off our slickers, looking.",
"She was also much younger, but I didn't go into that. Gertrude may be\n a little creaky, but she's still pretty impressive. I only hoped she\n wouldn't die on us, because without her we'd have a sicker-looking\n circus than even I could stand.\n\n\n Beamish looked impressed. \"A\ncansin\n. Well, well! The mystery\n surrounding the origin and species of the\ncansin\nis a fascinating\n subject. The extreme rarity of the animal....\"\n\n\n We were getting off the subject. I said tactfully, \"We'd have to have\n at least a hundred U.C.'s.\"\n\n\n It was twice what we had any right to ask. I was prepared to dicker.\n Beamish looked at me with that innocent dead pan. For a fraction of a\n second I thought I saw something back of his round blue eyes, and my\n stomach jumped like it was shot. Beamish smiled sweetly.",
"\"It's no more plastered than you are.\" I was sore because he'd been a\n lot quicker grabbing the pitcher. \"The Greatest Show in Space. Phooey!\n I've wet-nursed Shannon's Imperial Circus around the Triangle for\n eleven years, and I know. It's lousy, it's mangy, it's broken-down!\n Nothing works, from the ship to the roustabouts. In short, it stinks!\"\n\n\n I must have had the pitcher oftener than I thought. Nobody insults\n Buckhalter Shannon's Imperial Circus to Buckhalter Shannon's face\n unless he's tired and wants a long rest in a comfy fracture-frame.",
"Bucky said, \"Jig—it's Sam Kapper.\"\n\n\n We started to run. The crowd, mostly big unshaken miners, wheeled\n around to see what was happening. People began to close in on the man\n who crawled and whimpered in the mud.\n\n\n Sam Kapper was a hunter, supplying animals to zoos and circuses and\n carnivals. He'd given us good deals a couple of times, when we weren't\n too broke, and we were pretty friendly.\n\n\n I hadn't seen him for three seasons. I remembered him as a bronzed,\n hard-bitten guy, lean and tough as a twist of tung wire. I felt sick,\n looking down at him.\n\n\n Bucky started to help him up. Kapper was crying, and he jerked all over\n like animals I've seen that were scared to death. Some guy leaned over\n and put a cigarette in his mouth and lighted it for him.",
"I was thinking about Kapper, then, and I didn't pay much attention. I\n only caught a glimpse of the man's face as he straightened up. I didn't\n realize until later that he looked familiar.\n\n\n We got Kapper inside the shack. It turned out to be a cheap bar, with a\n couple of curtained booths at the back. We got him into one and pulled\n the curtain in a lot of curious faces. Kapper dragged hard on the\n cigarette. The man that gave it to him was gone.\n\n\n Bucky said gently, \"Okay, Sam. Relax. What's the trouble?\"\nKapper tried to straighten up. He hadn't shaved. The lean hard lines\n of his face had gone slack and his eyes were bloodshot. He was covered\n with mud, and his mouth twitched like a sick old man's.\n\n\n He said thickly, \"I found it. I said I'd do it, and I did. I found it\n and brought it out.\"",
"\"Yeah.\"\n\n\n \"It may be crooked.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. And he may be screwball and on the level. For Pete's sake!\" I\n yelled. \"You want to sit here till we all dry up and blow away?\"\n\n\n Shannon looked at me, kind of funny. He looked at the bulge in my tunic\n where the roll was. He raked back his thick light hair.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" he said. \"I hope there'll be enough left to bribe the jury.\" He\n poked his head outside. \"Hey, boy! More\nthildatum\n!\"\nIt was pretty late when we got back to the broken-down spaceport where\n Shannon's Imperial Circus was crouching beneath its attachments. Late\n as it was, they were waiting for us. About twenty of them, sitting\n around and smoking and looking very ugly.",
"\"I saved her life,\" he said. \"When we bought her out of Hanak's wreck\n and everybody thought she was too hurt to live, I saved her. I know\n her. I can do things with her. But this time....\"\n\n\n He shrugged. He was huge and tough and ugly, and his voice was like a\n woman's talking about a sick child.\n\n\n \"This time,\" he said, \"I ain't sure.\"\n\n\n \"Well for Pete's sake, do what you can. We got a charter, and we need\n her.\" I took Shannon's arm. \"Come to bed, Bucky darlin'.\"\n\n\n He draped himself over my shoulder and we went off. Gow didn't look at\n us. Bucky sobbed.",
"It was awfully lonesome out there, with the desert cold and restless\n under the two moons. There's a smell to Mars, like something dead and\n dried long past decay, but still waiting. An unhappy smell. The blown\n red dust gritted in my teeth.\n\n\n Bucky Shannon walked out into the glare of the light at the entrance to\n the roped-off space around the main lock. He was pretty steady on his\n feet. He waved and said, \"Hiya, boys.\"\n\n\n They got up off the steps, and the packing cases, and came toward us. I\n grinned and got into my brassies. We felt we owed those boys a lot more\n than money. It grates on a man's pride to have to sneak in and out of\n his own property through the sewage lock. This was the first time in\n weeks we'd come in at the front door.",
"Shannon and I did a little quiet sleuthing, but it was a waste of time.\n Anybody in the gang might have let those electric worms out on us. It\n didn't help any to know that somebody, maybe the guy next to you at\n dinner, was busy thinking ways to kill you. By the time we hit Venus, I\n was ready to do a Brodie out the refuse chute.\n\n\n Shannon set the crate down on the edge of Nahru, the first stop on our\n itinerary. I stood beside him, looking out the ports at the scenery. It\n was Venus, all right. Blue mud and thick green jungle and rain, and a\n bunch of ratty-looking plastic shacks huddling together in the middle\n of it. Men in slickers were coming out for a look.\n\n\n I saw Beamish's sleek yacht parked on a cradle over to the left, and\n our router's runabout beside it. Bucky Shannon groaned.",
"I felt cold, suddenly, between the shoulders. Somebody scraped a chair\n back. It sounded like he'd ripped the floor open, it was so quiet. I\n got my brassies on, and my hands were sweating. Bucky Shannon sighed,\n and let his fist start traveling, a long, deceptive arc.\n\n\n Then I saw what the little guy was holding in his hand.\n\n\n I yelled and knocked the table over into Bucky. It made a lot of noise.\n It knocked him sideways and down, and the little dark men jumped up,\n quivering and showing their teeth. The Martian girl screamed.\n\n\n Bucky heaved the table off his lap and cursed me. \"What's eating you,\n Jig? I'm not going to hurt him.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" I said. \"Look what he's got there. Money!\""
],
[
"I heard a noise behind me and looked around. Ahra the Nahali woman was\n standing in the mud with her arms up and her head thrown back, and her\n triangular mouth open like a thirsty dog. She didn't have anything on\n but her blue-green, hard scaled hide, and she was chuckling. It didn't\n sound nice.\n\n\n You find a lot of Nahali people in side-shows, doing tricks with\n the electric power they carry in their own bodies. They're Venusian\n middle-swampers, they're not human, and they never forget it.\n\n\n Ahra opened her slitted red eyes and looked at me and laughed with\n white reptilian teeth.\n\n\n \"Death,\" she whispered. \"Death and trouble. The jungle tells me. I can\n smell it in the swamp wind.\"",
"\"You were right, Jig,\" he mumbled. \"Circus is no good. I know it. But\n it's all I got. I love it, Jig. Unnerstan' me? Like Gow there with\n Gertrude. She's ugly and no good, but he loves her. I love....\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure,\" I told him. \"Stop crying down my neck.\"\n\n\n We were a long way from the light, then. The cages and tanks loomed\n high and black over us. It was still. The secret, uneasy motion all\n around us and the scruffing of our feet only made it stiller.\n\n\n Bucky was almost asleep on me. I started to slap him. And then the mist\n rose up out of the darkness in little lazy coils, sparkling faintly\n with blue, cold fire.\n\n\n I yelled, \"Gow! Gow, the Vapor snakes! Gow—for God's sake!\"",
"I didn't like him. I didn't like him at all. But he had money. I said,\n \"Howdy. Let's go find a booth. These Marshies make me nervous, looking\n like hungry cats at a mouse-hole.\"\n\n\n The little guy nodded. \"Excellent idea. My name is Beamish. Simon\n Beamish. I wish to—ah—charter your circus.\"\nI looked at Bucky. He looked hungrier than the Marshies did. We didn't\n say anything until we got Beamish into a curtained booth with a fresh\n pitcher of\nthil\non the table. Then I cleared my throat.\n\n\n \"What exactly did you have in mind, Mr. Beamish?\"\n\n\n Beamish sipped his drink, made a polite face, and put it down. \"I have\n independent means, gentlemen. It has always been my desire to lighten\n the burden of life for those less fortunate....\"",
"\"Yeah.\"\n\n\n \"It may be crooked.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. And he may be screwball and on the level. For Pete's sake!\" I\n yelled. \"You want to sit here till we all dry up and blow away?\"\n\n\n Shannon looked at me, kind of funny. He looked at the bulge in my tunic\n where the roll was. He raked back his thick light hair.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" he said. \"I hope there'll be enough left to bribe the jury.\" He\n poked his head outside. \"Hey, boy! More\nthildatum\n!\"\nIt was pretty late when we got back to the broken-down spaceport where\n Shannon's Imperial Circus was crouching beneath its attachments. Late\n as it was, they were waiting for us. About twenty of them, sitting\n around and smoking and looking very ugly.",
"Bucky said, \"Jig—it's Sam Kapper.\"\n\n\n We started to run. The crowd, mostly big unshaken miners, wheeled\n around to see what was happening. People began to close in on the man\n who crawled and whimpered in the mud.\n\n\n Sam Kapper was a hunter, supplying animals to zoos and circuses and\n carnivals. He'd given us good deals a couple of times, when we weren't\n too broke, and we were pretty friendly.\n\n\n I hadn't seen him for three seasons. I remembered him as a bronzed,\n hard-bitten guy, lean and tough as a twist of tung wire. I felt sick,\n looking down at him.\n\n\n Bucky started to help him up. Kapper was crying, and he jerked all over\n like animals I've seen that were scared to death. Some guy leaned over\n and put a cigarette in his mouth and lighted it for him.",
"He looked at me like he was thinking it wouldn't take much timber to\n fit me for a coffin. \"Okay! But Gertrude's unhappy. She's lonesome,\n see? And if she don't get happier pretty soon I ain't sure your tin-pot\n ship'll hold her.\"\n\n\n He pulled the curtains to and departed. Bucky Shannon groaned. Beamish\n cleared his throat and said, rather stiffly,\n\n\n \"Gertrude?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. She's kind of temperamental.\" Bucky took a quick drink. I\n finished for him.\n\n\n \"She's the star attraction of our show, Mr. Beamish. A real blue-swamp\n Venusian\ncansin\n. The only other one on the Triangle belongs to Savitt\n Brothers, and she's much smaller than Gertrude.\"",
"Bucky Shannon regarded them possessively, wiping blood from his nose.\n \"They're good guys, Jig. Swell people. They stuck by me, and I've\n rewarded them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure,\" rather sourly. Bucky hiccoughed.\n\n\n \"Let's go see Gertrude.\"\n\n\n I didn't want to see Gertrude. I never got over feeling funny going\n into the brute tank, especially at night or out in space. I'm a city\n guy, myself. The smell and sound of wildness gives me goose bumps. But\n Bucky was looking stubborn, so I shrugged.\n\n\n \"Okay. But just for a minute. Then we go beddy-bye.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal, Jif. Bes' li'l' guy inna worl'....\"",
"I waved the money in their faces. That stopped them. Very solemnly,\n Bucky and I checked the bills, paid them, and pocketed the receipts.\n Bucky yawned and stretched sleepily.\n\n\n \"Now?\" he said.\n\n\n \"Now,\" I said.\n\n\n We had a lot of fun. Some of the boys inside the ship came out to join\n in. We raised a lot of dust and nobody got killed, quite. We all went\n home happy. They had their money, and we had their blood.\n\n\n The news was all over the ship before we got inside. The freaks and the\n green girl from Tethys who could roll herself like a hoop, and Zurt the\n muscle man from Jupiter, and all the other assorted geeks and kinkers\n and joeys that make up the usual corny carnie were doing nip-ups in the\n passageways and drooling over the thought of steer and toppings.",
"It was Gow, our zoo-man—a big, ugly son-of-a-gun from a Terran\n colony on Mercury. I was there once. Gow looks a lot like the\n scenery—scowling, unapproachable, and tough. His hands, holding the\n curtains apart, had thick black hair on them and were not much larger\n than the hams of a Venusian swamp-rhino.\n\n\n He said, \"Boss, Gertrude's actin' up again.\"\n\n\n \"Gertrude be blowed,\" growled Bucky. \"Can't you see I'm busy?\"\n\n\n Gow's black eyes were unpleasant. \"I'm tellin' you, Boss, Gertrude\n ain't happy. She ain't had the right food. If something....\"\n\n\n I said, \"That'll all be taken care of, Gow. Run along now.\"",
"Bucky Shannon sniffled again. I said irritably, \"Be reasonable, Gow!\n Nobody's ever seen a male\ncansin\n. There may not even be any.\"\n\n\n Gertrude screamed again. She didn't move, not even to raise her head.\n The sadness just built up inside her until it had to come out. That\n close, the screech was deafening, and it turned me all limp and cold\n inside. The loneliness, the sheer stark, simple pain....\n\n\n Bucky Shannon began to cry. I snarled, \"You'll have to snap her out of\n this, Gow. She's driving the rest of 'em nuts.\"\n\n\n He hammered on his gong, and things quieted down again. Gow stood\n looking out over the tank, sniffing a little, like a hound. Then he\n turned to Gertrude.",
"It had been quiet. Now every brute in the place let go at the same\n time. My stomach turned clear over. I called Gertrude every name I\n could think of, and I couldn't hear myself doing it. Presently a great\n metallic clash nearly burst my eardrums, and the beasts shut up. Gow\n had them nicely conditioned to that gong.\nBut they didn't quiet down. Not really. They were uneasy. You can feel\n them inside you when they're uneasy. I think that's why I'm scared of\n them. They make me feel like I'm not human as I thought—like I wanted\n to put my back-hair up and snarl. Yeah. They were uneasy that night,\n all of a sudden....\n\n\n Gow glared at us as we came up into the lantern light. \"She's gettin'\n worse,\" he said. \"She's lonesome.\"",
"She was also much younger, but I didn't go into that. Gertrude may be\n a little creaky, but she's still pretty impressive. I only hoped she\n wouldn't die on us, because without her we'd have a sicker-looking\n circus than even I could stand.\n\n\n Beamish looked impressed. \"A\ncansin\n. Well, well! The mystery\n surrounding the origin and species of the\ncansin\nis a fascinating\n subject. The extreme rarity of the animal....\"\n\n\n We were getting off the subject. I said tactfully, \"We'd have to have\n at least a hundred U.C.'s.\"\n\n\n It was twice what we had any right to ask. I was prepared to dicker.\n Beamish looked at me with that innocent dead pan. For a fraction of a\n second I thought I saw something back of his round blue eyes, and my\n stomach jumped like it was shot. Beamish smiled sweetly.",
"Bucky got red around the ears. \"Just a minute,\" he murmured, and\n started to get up. I kicked him under the table.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you lug. Let Mister Beamish finish.\"\n\n\n He sat down, looking like a mean dog waiting for the postman. Beamish\n ignored him. He went on, quietly,\n\n\n \"I have always held that entertainment, of the right sort, is the most\n valuable aid humanity can have in its search for the alleviation of\n toil and boredom....\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure, sure. But what was your idea?\"\n\n\n \"There are many towns along the Venusian frontiers where no\n entertainment of the—\nproper\nsort has been available. I propose to\n remedy that. I propose to charter your circus, Mister Shannon, to make\n a tour of several settlements along the Tehara Belt.\"",
"\"It's no more plastered than you are.\" I was sore because he'd been a\n lot quicker grabbing the pitcher. \"The Greatest Show in Space. Phooey!\n I've wet-nursed Shannon's Imperial Circus around the Triangle for\n eleven years, and I know. It's lousy, it's mangy, it's broken-down!\n Nothing works, from the ship to the roustabouts. In short, it stinks!\"\n\n\n I must have had the pitcher oftener than I thought. Nobody insults\n Buckhalter Shannon's Imperial Circus to Buckhalter Shannon's face\n unless he's tired and wants a long rest in a comfy fracture-frame.",
"The fight had just put the topper on him. I was afraid he'd fall down\n the ladder and break his neck. That's why I went along. If I hadn't....\n Oh, well, what's a few nightmares among friends?\n\n\n It was dark down there in the tank. Way off at the other end, there was\n a dim glow. Gow was evidently holding Gertrude's hand. We started down\n the long passageway between the rows of cages and glassed-in tanks and\n compression units.\n\n\n Our footsteps sounded loud and empty on the iron floor. I wasn't\n near as happy as Shannon, and my skin began to crawl a little. It's\n the smell, I think; rank and sour and wild. And the sound of them,\n breathing and rustling in the dark, with the patient hatred walled\n around them as strong as the cage bars.",
"\"That's tough,\" said Bucky Shannon. His grey-green eyes looked like an\n owl's. He swayed slightly. \"That's sure tough.\" He sniffled.\n\n\n I looked at Gertrude. Her cage is the biggest and strongest in the tank\n and even so she looked as though she could break it open just taking a\n deep breath. I don't know if you've ever seen a\ncansin\n. There's only\n two of them on the Triangle. If you haven't, nothing I can say will\n make much difference.\n\n\n They're what the brain gang calls an \"end of evolution.\" Seems old\n Dame Nature had an idea that didn't jell. The\ncansins\nwere pretty\n successful for a while, it seems, but something gummed up the works and\n now there's only a few left, way in the deep-swamp country, where even\n the Venusians hardly ever go. Living fossils.",
"I said, \"Skip it. The next time, just don't trip me up, that's all!\"\n\n\n We had a nasty trip to Venus. Gertrude kept the brute tank on edge,\n and Gow, on the rare occasions he came up for air, went around looking\n like a disaster hoping to happen. To make it worse, Zurt the Jovian\n strong-man got hurt during the take-off, and the Mercurian cave-cat had\n kittens.\n\n\n Nobody would have minded that, only one of 'em had only four legs. It\n lived just long enough to scare that bunch of superstitious dopes out\n of their pants. Circus people are funny that way.",
"The hot rain sluiced over her. She shivered, and the pale skin under\n her jaw pulsed like a toad's, and her eyes were red.\n\n\n \"The deep swamps are angry,\" she whispered. \"Something has been taken.\n They are angry, and I smell death in the wind!\"\n\n\n She turned away, laughing, and I cursed her, and my stomach was tight\n and cold. Bucky said,\n\n\n \"Let's eat if they have a bar in this dump.\"\n\n\n We weren't half way across the mud puddle that passed as a landing\n field when a man came out of a shack on the edge of the settlement. We\n could see him plainly, because he was off to one side of the crowd.\n\n\n He fell on his knees in the mud, making noises. It took him three or\n four tries to get our names out clear enough to understand.",
"I wouldn't know, of course, but Gertrude looks to me like she got stuck\n some place between a dinosaur and a grizzly bear, with maybe a little\n bird blood thrown in. Anyway, she's big.\n\n\n I couldn't help feeling sorry for her. She was crouched in the cage\n with her hands—yeah, hands—hanging over her knees and her snaky head\n sunk into her shoulders, looking out. Just looking. Not at anything.\n Her eyes were way back in deep horny pits, like cold green fire.\n\n\n The lantern light was yellow on her blue-black skin, but it made the\n mane, or crest, of coarse wide scales that ran from between her eyes\n clear down to her flat, short tail, burn all colors. She looked like\n old Mother Misery herself, from way back before time began.\n\n\n Gow said softly, \"She wants a mate. And somebody better get her one.\"",
"Bucky Shannon lurched against me suddenly. I choked back a yell, and\n then wiped the sweat off my forehead and cursed. The scream came again.\n A high, ragged, whistling screech like nothing this side of hell,\n ripping through the musty darkness. Gertrude, on the wailing wall."
],
[
"Bucky said, \"Jig—it's Sam Kapper.\"\n\n\n We started to run. The crowd, mostly big unshaken miners, wheeled\n around to see what was happening. People began to close in on the man\n who crawled and whimpered in the mud.\n\n\n Sam Kapper was a hunter, supplying animals to zoos and circuses and\n carnivals. He'd given us good deals a couple of times, when we weren't\n too broke, and we were pretty friendly.\n\n\n I hadn't seen him for three seasons. I remembered him as a bronzed,\n hard-bitten guy, lean and tough as a twist of tung wire. I felt sick,\n looking down at him.\n\n\n Bucky started to help him up. Kapper was crying, and he jerked all over\n like animals I've seen that were scared to death. Some guy leaned over\n and put a cigarette in his mouth and lighted it for him.",
"I was thinking about Kapper, then, and I didn't pay much attention. I\n only caught a glimpse of the man's face as he straightened up. I didn't\n realize until later that he looked familiar.\n\n\n We got Kapper inside the shack. It turned out to be a cheap bar, with a\n couple of curtained booths at the back. We got him into one and pulled\n the curtain in a lot of curious faces. Kapper dragged hard on the\n cigarette. The man that gave it to him was gone.\n\n\n Bucky said gently, \"Okay, Sam. Relax. What's the trouble?\"\nKapper tried to straighten up. He hadn't shaved. The lean hard lines\n of his face had gone slack and his eyes were bloodshot. He was covered\n with mud, and his mouth twitched like a sick old man's.\n\n\n He said thickly, \"I found it. I said I'd do it, and I did. I found it\n and brought it out.\"",
"I reached across Bucky suddenly and jerked the curtain back. Beamish\n was standing there. Beamish, bent over, with his ear cocked. Kapper\n made a harsh strangling noise and fell across the table.\n\n\n Beamish never changed expression. He didn't move while Bucky felt\n Kapper's pulse. Bucky didn't need to say anything. We knew.\n\n\n \"Heart?\" said Beamish finally.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Bucky. He looked as bad as I felt. \"Poor Sam.\"\n\n\n I looked at the cigarette stub smoldering on the table. I looked at\n Beamish with his round dead baby face. I climbed over Shannon and\n pushed Beamish suddenly down into his lap.\n\n\n \"Keep this guy here till I get back,\" I said.",
"Bucky got up. \"I'll get a doctor,\" he said. \"Stick with him.\" Kapper\n grabbed his wrist. Kapper's nails were blue and the cords in his hands\n stood out like guy wires.\n\n\n \"Don't leave me. Got to tell you—where it is. Got to take it back.\n Promise you'll take it back.\" He gasped and struggled over his\n breathing.\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Bucky. \"Sure, well take it back. What is it?\"\n\n\n Kapper's face was horrible. I felt sick, listening to him fight for\n air. I wanted to go for a doctor anyway, but somehow I knew it was no\n use. Kapper whispered,\n\n\n \"\nCansin\n. Male. Only one. You don't know...! Take him back.\"\n\n\n \"Where is it, Sam?\"",
"The cigarette stub fell out of his mouth. He didn't notice it. \"Help\n me,\" he said simply. \"I'm scared.\" His mouth drooled.\n\n\n \"I got it hidden. They want to find out, but I won't tell 'em. It's\n got to go back. Back where I found it. I tried to take it, but they\n wouldn't let me, and I was afraid they'd find it....\"\n\n\n He reached suddenly and grabbed the edge of the table. \"I don't know\n how they found out about it, but they did. I've got to get it back.\n I've got to....\"\n\n\n Bucky looked at me. Kapper was blue around the mouth. I was scared,\n suddenly. I said, \"Get what back where?\"",
"Bucky moaned and kicked under me. I remember hanging on and thinking,\n \"This is it. This is it, and oh God, I'm scared!\"\n\n\n Then I went out.\nII\n\n\n Kanza the Martian croaker, was bending over me when I woke up. His\n little brown face was crinkled with laughter. He'd lost most of his\n teeth, and he gummed\nthak\n-weed. It smelt.\n\n\n \"You pretty, Mis' Jig,\" he giggled. \"You funny like hell.\"\n\n\n He slapped some cold greasy stuff on my face. It hurt. I cursed him and\n said, \"Where's Shannon? How is he?\"\n\n\n \"Mis' Bucky okay. You save life. You big hero, Mis' Jig. Mis' Gow come\n nickuhtime get snakes. You hero. Haw! You funny like hell!\"",
"Bucky Shannon regarded them possessively, wiping blood from his nose.\n \"They're good guys, Jig. Swell people. They stuck by me, and I've\n rewarded them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure,\" rather sourly. Bucky hiccoughed.\n\n\n \"Let's go see Gertrude.\"\n\n\n I didn't want to see Gertrude. I never got over feeling funny going\n into the brute tank, especially at night or out in space. I'm a city\n guy, myself. The smell and sound of wildness gives me goose bumps. But\n Bucky was looking stubborn, so I shrugged.\n\n\n \"Okay. But just for a minute. Then we go beddy-bye.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal, Jif. Bes' li'l' guy inna worl'....\"",
"I said, \"Yeah,\" and pushed him away and got up. I almost fell down\n a couple of times, but presently I made it to the mirror over the\n washstand—I was in my own cell—and I saw what Kanza meant. The damned\n snakes had done a good job. I looked like I was upholstered in Scotch\n plaid. I felt sick.\n\n\n Bucky Shannon opened the door. He looked white and grim, and there was\n a big burn across his neck. He said:\n\n\n \"Beamish is here with his lawyer.\"\n\n\n I picked up my shirt. \"Right with you.\"\n\n\n Kanza went out, still giggling. Bucky closed the door.\n\n\n \"Jig,\" he said, \"those vapor worms were all right when we went in.\n Somebody followed us down and let them out. On purpose.\"",
"\"You were right, Jig,\" he mumbled. \"Circus is no good. I know it. But\n it's all I got. I love it, Jig. Unnerstan' me? Like Gow there with\n Gertrude. She's ugly and no good, but he loves her. I love....\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure,\" I told him. \"Stop crying down my neck.\"\n\n\n We were a long way from the light, then. The cages and tanks loomed\n high and black over us. It was still. The secret, uneasy motion all\n around us and the scruffing of our feet only made it stiller.\n\n\n Bucky was almost asleep on me. I started to slap him. And then the mist\n rose up out of the darkness in little lazy coils, sparkling faintly\n with blue, cold fire.\n\n\n I yelled, \"Gow! Gow, the Vapor snakes! Gow—for God's sake!\"",
"I felt cold, suddenly, between the shoulders. Somebody scraped a chair\n back. It sounded like he'd ripped the floor open, it was so quiet. I\n got my brassies on, and my hands were sweating. Bucky Shannon sighed,\n and let his fist start traveling, a long, deceptive arc.\n\n\n Then I saw what the little guy was holding in his hand.\n\n\n I yelled and knocked the table over into Bucky. It made a lot of noise.\n It knocked him sideways and down, and the little dark men jumped up,\n quivering and showing their teeth. The Martian girl screamed.\n\n\n Bucky heaved the table off his lap and cursed me. \"What's eating you,\n Jig? I'm not going to hurt him.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" I said. \"Look what he's got there. Money!\"",
"The little guy looked at me. He hadn't turned a hair. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \"Money. Quite a lot of it. Would you gentlemen permit me to join you?\"\n\n\n Bucky Shannon got up. He grinned his pleasantest grin. \"Delighted. I'm\n Shannon. This is Jig Bentley, my business manager.\" He looked down at\n the table. \"I'm sorry about that. Mistaken identity.\"\n\n\n The little guy smiled. He did it with his lips. The rest of his face\n stayed placid and babyish, almost transparent. I realized with a start\n that it wasn't transparent at all. It was the most complete dead-pan I\n ever met, and you couldn't see into those innocent blue eyes any more\n than you could see through sheet metal.",
"\"I saved her life,\" he said. \"When we bought her out of Hanak's wreck\n and everybody thought she was too hurt to live, I saved her. I know\n her. I can do things with her. But this time....\"\n\n\n He shrugged. He was huge and tough and ugly, and his voice was like a\n woman's talking about a sick child.\n\n\n \"This time,\" he said, \"I ain't sure.\"\n\n\n \"Well for Pete's sake, do what you can. We got a charter, and we need\n her.\" I took Shannon's arm. \"Come to bed, Bucky darlin'.\"\n\n\n He draped himself over my shoulder and we went off. Gow didn't look at\n us. Bucky sobbed.",
"Bucky had relaxed. His grey-green eyes began to gleam. He started to\n speak, and I kicked him again.\n\n\n \"That would be expensive, Mister Beamish,\" I said. \"We'd have to cancel\n several engagements....\"\n\n\n He looked at me. I was lying, and he knew it. But he said,\n\n\n \"I quite understand that. I would be prepared....\"\n\n\n The curtains were yanked back suddenly. Beamish shut up. Bucky and I\n glared at the head and shoulders poking in between the drapes.",
"Bucky Shannon sniffled again. I said irritably, \"Be reasonable, Gow!\n Nobody's ever seen a male\ncansin\n. There may not even be any.\"\n\n\n Gertrude screamed again. She didn't move, not even to raise her head.\n The sadness just built up inside her until it had to come out. That\n close, the screech was deafening, and it turned me all limp and cold\n inside. The loneliness, the sheer stark, simple pain....\n\n\n Bucky Shannon began to cry. I snarled, \"You'll have to snap her out of\n this, Gow. She's driving the rest of 'em nuts.\"\n\n\n He hammered on his gong, and things quieted down again. Gow stood\n looking out over the tank, sniffing a little, like a hound. Then he\n turned to Gertrude.",
"I hurt all over. I growled, \"With that brain, son, you should go far.\n Nobody saw anything, of course?\" Bucky shook his head.\n\n\n \"Question is, Jig, who wants to kill us, and why?\"\n\n\n \"Beamish. He realizes he's been gypped.\"\n\n\n \"One hundred U.C.'s,\" said Bucky softly, \"for a few lousy swampedge\n mining camps. It stinks, Jig. You think we should back out?\"\n\n\n I shrugged. \"You're the boss man. I'm only the guy that beats off the\n creditors.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Bucky said reflectively. \"And I hear starvation isn't a\n comfortable death. Okay, Jig. Let's go sign.\" He put his hand on the\n latch and looked at my feet. \"And—uh—Jig, I....\"",
"Bucky Shannon lurched against me suddenly. I choked back a yell, and\n then wiped the sweat off my forehead and cursed. The scream came again.\n A high, ragged, whistling screech like nothing this side of hell,\n ripping through the musty darkness. Gertrude, on the wailing wall.",
"\"That guy we brought in,\" I said. \"He sure has a skinful. Passed out\n cold. What's he been spiking his drinks with?\"\n\n\n \"\nSelak\n,\" said a voice in my ear. \"As if you didn't know.\"\n\n\n I turned. The man who had given Kapper the cigarette was standing\n behind me. And I remembered him, then.",
"Shannon got up. He got up slowly. I had plenty of time to see his\n grey-green eyes get sleepy, and hear the quarter-Earth-blood Martian\n girl wailing about love over by the battered piano, and watch the\n slanting cat-eyes of the little dark people at the tables swing round\n toward us, pleased and kind of hungry.\n\n\n I had plenty of time to think how I only weigh one-thirty-seven to\n Shannon's one-seventy-five, and how I'm not as young as I used to be.\n\n\n I said, \"Bucky. Hold on, fella. I....\"\n\n\n Somebody said, \"Excuse me, gentlemen. Is one of you Mister Buckhalter\n Shannon?\"\n\n\n Shannon put his hands down on his belt. He closed his eyes and smiled\n pleasantly and said, very gently:\n\n\n \"Would you be collecting for the feed bill, or the fuel?\"",
"I started to run, back along the passageway. Bucky weighed on me, limp\n and heavy. The noise burst suddenly in a deafening hell of moans and\n roars and shrieks, packed in tight by the metal walls, and above it all\n I could hear Gertrude's lonely, whistling scream.\n\n\n I thought, \"\nSomebody's down here. Somebody let 'em out. Somebody wants\n to kill us!\n\" I tried to yell again. It strangled in my throat. I\n sobbed, and the sweat was thick and cold on me.\n\n\n One of Bucky's dragging, stumbling feet got between mine. We fell. I\n rolled on top of him, covering his face, and buried my own face in the\n hollow of his shoulder.\n\n\n The first snake touched me. It was like a live wire, sliding along the\n back of my neck. I screamed. It came down along my cheek, hunting my\n mouth. There were more of them, burning me through my clothes.",
"\"It's no more plastered than you are.\" I was sore because he'd been a\n lot quicker grabbing the pitcher. \"The Greatest Show in Space. Phooey!\n I've wet-nursed Shannon's Imperial Circus around the Triangle for\n eleven years, and I know. It's lousy, it's mangy, it's broken-down!\n Nothing works, from the ship to the roustabouts. In short, it stinks!\"\n\n\n I must have had the pitcher oftener than I thought. Nobody insults\n Buckhalter Shannon's Imperial Circus to Buckhalter Shannon's face\n unless he's tired and wants a long rest in a comfy fracture-frame."
],
[
"Bucky said, \"Jig—it's Sam Kapper.\"\n\n\n We started to run. The crowd, mostly big unshaken miners, wheeled\n around to see what was happening. People began to close in on the man\n who crawled and whimpered in the mud.\n\n\n Sam Kapper was a hunter, supplying animals to zoos and circuses and\n carnivals. He'd given us good deals a couple of times, when we weren't\n too broke, and we were pretty friendly.\n\n\n I hadn't seen him for three seasons. I remembered him as a bronzed,\n hard-bitten guy, lean and tough as a twist of tung wire. I felt sick,\n looking down at him.\n\n\n Bucky started to help him up. Kapper was crying, and he jerked all over\n like animals I've seen that were scared to death. Some guy leaned over\n and put a cigarette in his mouth and lighted it for him.",
"I was thinking about Kapper, then, and I didn't pay much attention. I\n only caught a glimpse of the man's face as he straightened up. I didn't\n realize until later that he looked familiar.\n\n\n We got Kapper inside the shack. It turned out to be a cheap bar, with a\n couple of curtained booths at the back. We got him into one and pulled\n the curtain in a lot of curious faces. Kapper dragged hard on the\n cigarette. The man that gave it to him was gone.\n\n\n Bucky said gently, \"Okay, Sam. Relax. What's the trouble?\"\nKapper tried to straighten up. He hadn't shaved. The lean hard lines\n of his face had gone slack and his eyes were bloodshot. He was covered\n with mud, and his mouth twitched like a sick old man's.\n\n\n He said thickly, \"I found it. I said I'd do it, and I did. I found it\n and brought it out.\"",
"Bucky got up. \"I'll get a doctor,\" he said. \"Stick with him.\" Kapper\n grabbed his wrist. Kapper's nails were blue and the cords in his hands\n stood out like guy wires.\n\n\n \"Don't leave me. Got to tell you—where it is. Got to take it back.\n Promise you'll take it back.\" He gasped and struggled over his\n breathing.\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Bucky. \"Sure, well take it back. What is it?\"\n\n\n Kapper's face was horrible. I felt sick, listening to him fight for\n air. I wanted to go for a doctor anyway, but somehow I knew it was no\n use. Kapper whispered,\n\n\n \"\nCansin\n. Male. Only one. You don't know...! Take him back.\"\n\n\n \"Where is it, Sam?\"",
"Bucky Shannon regarded them possessively, wiping blood from his nose.\n \"They're good guys, Jig. Swell people. They stuck by me, and I've\n rewarded them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure,\" rather sourly. Bucky hiccoughed.\n\n\n \"Let's go see Gertrude.\"\n\n\n I didn't want to see Gertrude. I never got over feeling funny going\n into the brute tank, especially at night or out in space. I'm a city\n guy, myself. The smell and sound of wildness gives me goose bumps. But\n Bucky was looking stubborn, so I shrugged.\n\n\n \"Okay. But just for a minute. Then we go beddy-bye.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal, Jif. Bes' li'l' guy inna worl'....\"",
"The cigarette stub fell out of his mouth. He didn't notice it. \"Help\n me,\" he said simply. \"I'm scared.\" His mouth drooled.\n\n\n \"I got it hidden. They want to find out, but I won't tell 'em. It's\n got to go back. Back where I found it. I tried to take it, but they\n wouldn't let me, and I was afraid they'd find it....\"\n\n\n He reached suddenly and grabbed the edge of the table. \"I don't know\n how they found out about it, but they did. I've got to get it back.\n I've got to....\"\n\n\n Bucky looked at me. Kapper was blue around the mouth. I was scared,\n suddenly. I said, \"Get what back where?\"",
"I reached across Bucky suddenly and jerked the curtain back. Beamish\n was standing there. Beamish, bent over, with his ear cocked. Kapper\n made a harsh strangling noise and fell across the table.\n\n\n Beamish never changed expression. He didn't move while Bucky felt\n Kapper's pulse. Bucky didn't need to say anything. We knew.\n\n\n \"Heart?\" said Beamish finally.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Bucky. He looked as bad as I felt. \"Poor Sam.\"\n\n\n I looked at the cigarette stub smoldering on the table. I looked at\n Beamish with his round dead baby face. I climbed over Shannon and\n pushed Beamish suddenly down into his lap.\n\n\n \"Keep this guy here till I get back,\" I said.",
"\"You were right, Jig,\" he mumbled. \"Circus is no good. I know it. But\n it's all I got. I love it, Jig. Unnerstan' me? Like Gow there with\n Gertrude. She's ugly and no good, but he loves her. I love....\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure,\" I told him. \"Stop crying down my neck.\"\n\n\n We were a long way from the light, then. The cages and tanks loomed\n high and black over us. It was still. The secret, uneasy motion all\n around us and the scruffing of our feet only made it stiller.\n\n\n Bucky was almost asleep on me. I started to slap him. And then the mist\n rose up out of the darkness in little lazy coils, sparkling faintly\n with blue, cold fire.\n\n\n I yelled, \"Gow! Gow, the Vapor snakes! Gow—for God's sake!\"",
"The little guy looked at me. He hadn't turned a hair. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \"Money. Quite a lot of it. Would you gentlemen permit me to join you?\"\n\n\n Bucky Shannon got up. He grinned his pleasantest grin. \"Delighted. I'm\n Shannon. This is Jig Bentley, my business manager.\" He looked down at\n the table. \"I'm sorry about that. Mistaken identity.\"\n\n\n The little guy smiled. He did it with his lips. The rest of his face\n stayed placid and babyish, almost transparent. I realized with a start\n that it wasn't transparent at all. It was the most complete dead-pan I\n ever met, and you couldn't see into those innocent blue eyes any more\n than you could see through sheet metal.",
"I said, \"Yeah,\" and pushed him away and got up. I almost fell down\n a couple of times, but presently I made it to the mirror over the\n washstand—I was in my own cell—and I saw what Kanza meant. The damned\n snakes had done a good job. I looked like I was upholstered in Scotch\n plaid. I felt sick.\n\n\n Bucky Shannon opened the door. He looked white and grim, and there was\n a big burn across his neck. He said:\n\n\n \"Beamish is here with his lawyer.\"\n\n\n I picked up my shirt. \"Right with you.\"\n\n\n Kanza went out, still giggling. Bucky closed the door.\n\n\n \"Jig,\" he said, \"those vapor worms were all right when we went in.\n Somebody followed us down and let them out. On purpose.\"",
"Bucky moaned and kicked under me. I remember hanging on and thinking,\n \"This is it. This is it, and oh God, I'm scared!\"\n\n\n Then I went out.\nII\n\n\n Kanza the Martian croaker, was bending over me when I woke up. His\n little brown face was crinkled with laughter. He'd lost most of his\n teeth, and he gummed\nthak\n-weed. It smelt.\n\n\n \"You pretty, Mis' Jig,\" he giggled. \"You funny like hell.\"\n\n\n He slapped some cold greasy stuff on my face. It hurt. I cursed him and\n said, \"Where's Shannon? How is he?\"\n\n\n \"Mis' Bucky okay. You save life. You big hero, Mis' Jig. Mis' Gow come\n nickuhtime get snakes. You hero. Haw! You funny like hell!\"",
"I hurt all over. I growled, \"With that brain, son, you should go far.\n Nobody saw anything, of course?\" Bucky shook his head.\n\n\n \"Question is, Jig, who wants to kill us, and why?\"\n\n\n \"Beamish. He realizes he's been gypped.\"\n\n\n \"One hundred U.C.'s,\" said Bucky softly, \"for a few lousy swampedge\n mining camps. It stinks, Jig. You think we should back out?\"\n\n\n I shrugged. \"You're the boss man. I'm only the guy that beats off the\n creditors.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Bucky said reflectively. \"And I hear starvation isn't a\n comfortable death. Okay, Jig. Let's go sign.\" He put his hand on the\n latch and looked at my feet. \"And—uh—Jig, I....\"",
"Bucky had relaxed. His grey-green eyes began to gleam. He started to\n speak, and I kicked him again.\n\n\n \"That would be expensive, Mister Beamish,\" I said. \"We'd have to cancel\n several engagements....\"\n\n\n He looked at me. I was lying, and he knew it. But he said,\n\n\n \"I quite understand that. I would be prepared....\"\n\n\n The curtains were yanked back suddenly. Beamish shut up. Bucky and I\n glared at the head and shoulders poking in between the drapes.",
"\"I saved her life,\" he said. \"When we bought her out of Hanak's wreck\n and everybody thought she was too hurt to live, I saved her. I know\n her. I can do things with her. But this time....\"\n\n\n He shrugged. He was huge and tough and ugly, and his voice was like a\n woman's talking about a sick child.\n\n\n \"This time,\" he said, \"I ain't sure.\"\n\n\n \"Well for Pete's sake, do what you can. We got a charter, and we need\n her.\" I took Shannon's arm. \"Come to bed, Bucky darlin'.\"\n\n\n He draped himself over my shoulder and we went off. Gow didn't look at\n us. Bucky sobbed.",
"I felt cold, suddenly, between the shoulders. Somebody scraped a chair\n back. It sounded like he'd ripped the floor open, it was so quiet. I\n got my brassies on, and my hands were sweating. Bucky Shannon sighed,\n and let his fist start traveling, a long, deceptive arc.\n\n\n Then I saw what the little guy was holding in his hand.\n\n\n I yelled and knocked the table over into Bucky. It made a lot of noise.\n It knocked him sideways and down, and the little dark men jumped up,\n quivering and showing their teeth. The Martian girl screamed.\n\n\n Bucky heaved the table off his lap and cursed me. \"What's eating you,\n Jig? I'm not going to hurt him.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" I said. \"Look what he's got there. Money!\"",
"\"That guy we brought in,\" I said. \"He sure has a skinful. Passed out\n cold. What's he been spiking his drinks with?\"\n\n\n \"\nSelak\n,\" said a voice in my ear. \"As if you didn't know.\"\n\n\n I turned. The man who had given Kapper the cigarette was standing\n behind me. And I remembered him, then.",
"I waved the money in their faces. That stopped them. Very solemnly,\n Bucky and I checked the bills, paid them, and pocketed the receipts.\n Bucky yawned and stretched sleepily.\n\n\n \"Now?\" he said.\n\n\n \"Now,\" I said.\n\n\n We had a lot of fun. Some of the boys inside the ship came out to join\n in. We raised a lot of dust and nobody got killed, quite. We all went\n home happy. They had their money, and we had their blood.\n\n\n The news was all over the ship before we got inside. The freaks and the\n green girl from Tethys who could roll herself like a hoop, and Zurt the\n muscle man from Jupiter, and all the other assorted geeks and kinkers\n and joeys that make up the usual corny carnie were doing nip-ups in the\n passageways and drooling over the thought of steer and toppings.",
"I shot a glance at the newcomer. He'd saved me from a beating, even if\n he was a lousy bill-collecter; and I felt sorry for him. Bucky Shannon\n settled his shoulders and hips like a dancer.\n\n\n The stranger was a little guy. He even made me look big. He was dressed\n in dark-green synthesilk, very conservative. There was a powdering of\n grey in his hair and his skin was pink, soft, and shaved painfully\n clean. He had the kind of a face that nice maiden-ladies will trust\n with their last dime. I looked for his strong-arm squad.\n\n\n There didn't seem to be any. The little guy looked at Shannon with pale\n blue eyes like a baby, and his voice was softer than Bucky's.\n\n\n He said, \"I don't think you understand.\"",
"\"Yeah.\"\n\n\n \"It may be crooked.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. And he may be screwball and on the level. For Pete's sake!\" I\n yelled. \"You want to sit here till we all dry up and blow away?\"\n\n\n Shannon looked at me, kind of funny. He looked at the bulge in my tunic\n where the roll was. He raked back his thick light hair.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" he said. \"I hope there'll be enough left to bribe the jury.\" He\n poked his head outside. \"Hey, boy! More\nthildatum\n!\"\nIt was pretty late when we got back to the broken-down spaceport where\n Shannon's Imperial Circus was crouching beneath its attachments. Late\n as it was, they were waiting for us. About twenty of them, sitting\n around and smoking and looking very ugly.",
"Bucky got red around the ears. \"Just a minute,\" he murmured, and\n started to get up. I kicked him under the table.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you lug. Let Mister Beamish finish.\"\n\n\n He sat down, looking like a mean dog waiting for the postman. Beamish\n ignored him. He went on, quietly,\n\n\n \"I have always held that entertainment, of the right sort, is the most\n valuable aid humanity can have in its search for the alleviation of\n toil and boredom....\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure, sure. But what was your idea?\"\n\n\n \"There are many towns along the Venusian frontiers where no\n entertainment of the—\nproper\nsort has been available. I propose to\n remedy that. I propose to charter your circus, Mister Shannon, to make\n a tour of several settlements along the Tehara Belt.\"",
"Shannon got up. He got up slowly. I had plenty of time to see his\n grey-green eyes get sleepy, and hear the quarter-Earth-blood Martian\n girl wailing about love over by the battered piano, and watch the\n slanting cat-eyes of the little dark people at the tables swing round\n toward us, pleased and kind of hungry.\n\n\n I had plenty of time to think how I only weigh one-thirty-seven to\n Shannon's one-seventy-five, and how I'm not as young as I used to be.\n\n\n I said, \"Bucky. Hold on, fella. I....\"\n\n\n Somebody said, \"Excuse me, gentlemen. Is one of you Mister Buckhalter\n Shannon?\"\n\n\n Shannon put his hands down on his belt. He closed his eyes and smiled\n pleasantly and said, very gently:\n\n\n \"Would you be collecting for the feed bill, or the fuel?\""
],
[
"Bucky Shannon regarded them possessively, wiping blood from his nose.\n \"They're good guys, Jig. Swell people. They stuck by me, and I've\n rewarded them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure,\" rather sourly. Bucky hiccoughed.\n\n\n \"Let's go see Gertrude.\"\n\n\n I didn't want to see Gertrude. I never got over feeling funny going\n into the brute tank, especially at night or out in space. I'm a city\n guy, myself. The smell and sound of wildness gives me goose bumps. But\n Bucky was looking stubborn, so I shrugged.\n\n\n \"Okay. But just for a minute. Then we go beddy-bye.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal, Jif. Bes' li'l' guy inna worl'....\"",
"The little guy looked at me. He hadn't turned a hair. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \"Money. Quite a lot of it. Would you gentlemen permit me to join you?\"\n\n\n Bucky Shannon got up. He grinned his pleasantest grin. \"Delighted. I'm\n Shannon. This is Jig Bentley, my business manager.\" He looked down at\n the table. \"I'm sorry about that. Mistaken identity.\"\n\n\n The little guy smiled. He did it with his lips. The rest of his face\n stayed placid and babyish, almost transparent. I realized with a start\n that it wasn't transparent at all. It was the most complete dead-pan I\n ever met, and you couldn't see into those innocent blue eyes any more\n than you could see through sheet metal.",
"Bucky said, \"Jig—it's Sam Kapper.\"\n\n\n We started to run. The crowd, mostly big unshaken miners, wheeled\n around to see what was happening. People began to close in on the man\n who crawled and whimpered in the mud.\n\n\n Sam Kapper was a hunter, supplying animals to zoos and circuses and\n carnivals. He'd given us good deals a couple of times, when we weren't\n too broke, and we were pretty friendly.\n\n\n I hadn't seen him for three seasons. I remembered him as a bronzed,\n hard-bitten guy, lean and tough as a twist of tung wire. I felt sick,\n looking down at him.\n\n\n Bucky started to help him up. Kapper was crying, and he jerked all over\n like animals I've seen that were scared to death. Some guy leaned over\n and put a cigarette in his mouth and lighted it for him.",
"\"You were right, Jig,\" he mumbled. \"Circus is no good. I know it. But\n it's all I got. I love it, Jig. Unnerstan' me? Like Gow there with\n Gertrude. She's ugly and no good, but he loves her. I love....\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure,\" I told him. \"Stop crying down my neck.\"\n\n\n We were a long way from the light, then. The cages and tanks loomed\n high and black over us. It was still. The secret, uneasy motion all\n around us and the scruffing of our feet only made it stiller.\n\n\n Bucky was almost asleep on me. I started to slap him. And then the mist\n rose up out of the darkness in little lazy coils, sparkling faintly\n with blue, cold fire.\n\n\n I yelled, \"Gow! Gow, the Vapor snakes! Gow—for God's sake!\"",
"Bucky had relaxed. His grey-green eyes began to gleam. He started to\n speak, and I kicked him again.\n\n\n \"That would be expensive, Mister Beamish,\" I said. \"We'd have to cancel\n several engagements....\"\n\n\n He looked at me. I was lying, and he knew it. But he said,\n\n\n \"I quite understand that. I would be prepared....\"\n\n\n The curtains were yanked back suddenly. Beamish shut up. Bucky and I\n glared at the head and shoulders poking in between the drapes.",
"I reached across Bucky suddenly and jerked the curtain back. Beamish\n was standing there. Beamish, bent over, with his ear cocked. Kapper\n made a harsh strangling noise and fell across the table.\n\n\n Beamish never changed expression. He didn't move while Bucky felt\n Kapper's pulse. Bucky didn't need to say anything. We knew.\n\n\n \"Heart?\" said Beamish finally.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Bucky. He looked as bad as I felt. \"Poor Sam.\"\n\n\n I looked at the cigarette stub smoldering on the table. I looked at\n Beamish with his round dead baby face. I climbed over Shannon and\n pushed Beamish suddenly down into his lap.\n\n\n \"Keep this guy here till I get back,\" I said.",
"It was awfully lonesome out there, with the desert cold and restless\n under the two moons. There's a smell to Mars, like something dead and\n dried long past decay, but still waiting. An unhappy smell. The blown\n red dust gritted in my teeth.\n\n\n Bucky Shannon walked out into the glare of the light at the entrance to\n the roped-off space around the main lock. He was pretty steady on his\n feet. He waved and said, \"Hiya, boys.\"\n\n\n They got up off the steps, and the packing cases, and came toward us. I\n grinned and got into my brassies. We felt we owed those boys a lot more\n than money. It grates on a man's pride to have to sneak in and out of\n his own property through the sewage lock. This was the first time in\n weeks we'd come in at the front door.",
"I said, \"Yeah,\" and pushed him away and got up. I almost fell down\n a couple of times, but presently I made it to the mirror over the\n washstand—I was in my own cell—and I saw what Kanza meant. The damned\n snakes had done a good job. I looked like I was upholstered in Scotch\n plaid. I felt sick.\n\n\n Bucky Shannon opened the door. He looked white and grim, and there was\n a big burn across his neck. He said:\n\n\n \"Beamish is here with his lawyer.\"\n\n\n I picked up my shirt. \"Right with you.\"\n\n\n Kanza went out, still giggling. Bucky closed the door.\n\n\n \"Jig,\" he said, \"those vapor worms were all right when we went in.\n Somebody followed us down and let them out. On purpose.\"",
"Bucky moaned and kicked under me. I remember hanging on and thinking,\n \"This is it. This is it, and oh God, I'm scared!\"\n\n\n Then I went out.\nII\n\n\n Kanza the Martian croaker, was bending over me when I woke up. His\n little brown face was crinkled with laughter. He'd lost most of his\n teeth, and he gummed\nthak\n-weed. It smelt.\n\n\n \"You pretty, Mis' Jig,\" he giggled. \"You funny like hell.\"\n\n\n He slapped some cold greasy stuff on my face. It hurt. I cursed him and\n said, \"Where's Shannon? How is he?\"\n\n\n \"Mis' Bucky okay. You save life. You big hero, Mis' Jig. Mis' Gow come\n nickuhtime get snakes. You hero. Haw! You funny like hell!\"",
"Bucky Shannon lurched against me suddenly. I choked back a yell, and\n then wiped the sweat off my forehead and cursed. The scream came again.\n A high, ragged, whistling screech like nothing this side of hell,\n ripping through the musty darkness. Gertrude, on the wailing wall.",
"I felt cold, suddenly, between the shoulders. Somebody scraped a chair\n back. It sounded like he'd ripped the floor open, it was so quiet. I\n got my brassies on, and my hands were sweating. Bucky Shannon sighed,\n and let his fist start traveling, a long, deceptive arc.\n\n\n Then I saw what the little guy was holding in his hand.\n\n\n I yelled and knocked the table over into Bucky. It made a lot of noise.\n It knocked him sideways and down, and the little dark men jumped up,\n quivering and showing their teeth. The Martian girl screamed.\n\n\n Bucky heaved the table off his lap and cursed me. \"What's eating you,\n Jig? I'm not going to hurt him.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" I said. \"Look what he's got there. Money!\"",
"I hurt all over. I growled, \"With that brain, son, you should go far.\n Nobody saw anything, of course?\" Bucky shook his head.\n\n\n \"Question is, Jig, who wants to kill us, and why?\"\n\n\n \"Beamish. He realizes he's been gypped.\"\n\n\n \"One hundred U.C.'s,\" said Bucky softly, \"for a few lousy swampedge\n mining camps. It stinks, Jig. You think we should back out?\"\n\n\n I shrugged. \"You're the boss man. I'm only the guy that beats off the\n creditors.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Bucky said reflectively. \"And I hear starvation isn't a\n comfortable death. Okay, Jig. Let's go sign.\" He put his hand on the\n latch and looked at my feet. \"And—uh—Jig, I....\"",
"I was thinking about Kapper, then, and I didn't pay much attention. I\n only caught a glimpse of the man's face as he straightened up. I didn't\n realize until later that he looked familiar.\n\n\n We got Kapper inside the shack. It turned out to be a cheap bar, with a\n couple of curtained booths at the back. We got him into one and pulled\n the curtain in a lot of curious faces. Kapper dragged hard on the\n cigarette. The man that gave it to him was gone.\n\n\n Bucky said gently, \"Okay, Sam. Relax. What's the trouble?\"\nKapper tried to straighten up. He hadn't shaved. The lean hard lines\n of his face had gone slack and his eyes were bloodshot. He was covered\n with mud, and his mouth twitched like a sick old man's.\n\n\n He said thickly, \"I found it. I said I'd do it, and I did. I found it\n and brought it out.\"",
"\"A blue one, Jig. A morgue if I ever saw one!\"\n\n\n I snarled, \"What do you want, with this lousy dog-and-pony show!\" and\n went out. He followed. The gang was converging on the lock, but they\n weren't happy. You get so you can feel those things. The steamy Venus\n heat was already sneaking into the ship.\n\n\n While we passed the hatchway to the brute tank, I could hear Gertrude,\n screaming.\nThe canvasmen were busy setting up the annex, slopping and cursing in\n the mud. The paste brigade was heading for the shacks. Shannon and I\n stood with the hot rain running off our slickers, looking.",
"Bucky Shannon sniffled again. I said irritably, \"Be reasonable, Gow!\n Nobody's ever seen a male\ncansin\n. There may not even be any.\"\n\n\n Gertrude screamed again. She didn't move, not even to raise her head.\n The sadness just built up inside her until it had to come out. That\n close, the screech was deafening, and it turned me all limp and cold\n inside. The loneliness, the sheer stark, simple pain....\n\n\n Bucky Shannon began to cry. I snarled, \"You'll have to snap her out of\n this, Gow. She's driving the rest of 'em nuts.\"\n\n\n He hammered on his gong, and things quieted down again. Gow stood\n looking out over the tank, sniffing a little, like a hound. Then he\n turned to Gertrude.",
"Bucky got up. \"I'll get a doctor,\" he said. \"Stick with him.\" Kapper\n grabbed his wrist. Kapper's nails were blue and the cords in his hands\n stood out like guy wires.\n\n\n \"Don't leave me. Got to tell you—where it is. Got to take it back.\n Promise you'll take it back.\" He gasped and struggled over his\n breathing.\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Bucky. \"Sure, well take it back. What is it?\"\n\n\n Kapper's face was horrible. I felt sick, listening to him fight for\n air. I wanted to go for a doctor anyway, but somehow I knew it was no\n use. Kapper whispered,\n\n\n \"\nCansin\n. Male. Only one. You don't know...! Take him back.\"\n\n\n \"Where is it, Sam?\"",
"I started to run, back along the passageway. Bucky weighed on me, limp\n and heavy. The noise burst suddenly in a deafening hell of moans and\n roars and shrieks, packed in tight by the metal walls, and above it all\n I could hear Gertrude's lonely, whistling scream.\n\n\n I thought, \"\nSomebody's down here. Somebody let 'em out. Somebody wants\n to kill us!\n\" I tried to yell again. It strangled in my throat. I\n sobbed, and the sweat was thick and cold on me.\n\n\n One of Bucky's dragging, stumbling feet got between mine. We fell. I\n rolled on top of him, covering his face, and buried my own face in the\n hollow of his shoulder.\n\n\n The first snake touched me. It was like a live wire, sliding along the\n back of my neck. I screamed. It came down along my cheek, hunting my\n mouth. There were more of them, burning me through my clothes.",
"\"I saved her life,\" he said. \"When we bought her out of Hanak's wreck\n and everybody thought she was too hurt to live, I saved her. I know\n her. I can do things with her. But this time....\"\n\n\n He shrugged. He was huge and tough and ugly, and his voice was like a\n woman's talking about a sick child.\n\n\n \"This time,\" he said, \"I ain't sure.\"\n\n\n \"Well for Pete's sake, do what you can. We got a charter, and we need\n her.\" I took Shannon's arm. \"Come to bed, Bucky darlin'.\"\n\n\n He draped himself over my shoulder and we went off. Gow didn't look at\n us. Bucky sobbed.",
"I shot a glance at the newcomer. He'd saved me from a beating, even if\n he was a lousy bill-collecter; and I felt sorry for him. Bucky Shannon\n settled his shoulders and hips like a dancer.\n\n\n The stranger was a little guy. He even made me look big. He was dressed\n in dark-green synthesilk, very conservative. There was a powdering of\n grey in his hair and his skin was pink, soft, and shaved painfully\n clean. He had the kind of a face that nice maiden-ladies will trust\n with their last dime. I looked for his strong-arm squad.\n\n\n There didn't seem to be any. The little guy looked at Shannon with pale\n blue eyes like a baby, and his voice was softer than Bucky's.\n\n\n He said, \"I don't think you understand.\"",
"Bucky got red around the ears. \"Just a minute,\" he murmured, and\n started to get up. I kicked him under the table.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you lug. Let Mister Beamish finish.\"\n\n\n He sat down, looking like a mean dog waiting for the postman. Beamish\n ignored him. He went on, quietly,\n\n\n \"I have always held that entertainment, of the right sort, is the most\n valuable aid humanity can have in its search for the alleviation of\n toil and boredom....\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure, sure. But what was your idea?\"\n\n\n \"There are many towns along the Venusian frontiers where no\n entertainment of the—\nproper\nsort has been available. I propose to\n remedy that. I propose to charter your circus, Mister Shannon, to make\n a tour of several settlements along the Tehara Belt.\""
],
[
"\"You were right, Jig,\" he mumbled. \"Circus is no good. I know it. But\n it's all I got. I love it, Jig. Unnerstan' me? Like Gow there with\n Gertrude. She's ugly and no good, but he loves her. I love....\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure,\" I told him. \"Stop crying down my neck.\"\n\n\n We were a long way from the light, then. The cages and tanks loomed\n high and black over us. It was still. The secret, uneasy motion all\n around us and the scruffing of our feet only made it stiller.\n\n\n Bucky was almost asleep on me. I started to slap him. And then the mist\n rose up out of the darkness in little lazy coils, sparkling faintly\n with blue, cold fire.\n\n\n I yelled, \"Gow! Gow, the Vapor snakes! Gow—for God's sake!\"",
"I didn't like him. I didn't like him at all. But he had money. I said,\n \"Howdy. Let's go find a booth. These Marshies make me nervous, looking\n like hungry cats at a mouse-hole.\"\n\n\n The little guy nodded. \"Excellent idea. My name is Beamish. Simon\n Beamish. I wish to—ah—charter your circus.\"\nI looked at Bucky. He looked hungrier than the Marshies did. We didn't\n say anything until we got Beamish into a curtained booth with a fresh\n pitcher of\nthil\non the table. Then I cleared my throat.\n\n\n \"What exactly did you have in mind, Mr. Beamish?\"\n\n\n Beamish sipped his drink, made a polite face, and put it down. \"I have\n independent means, gentlemen. It has always been my desire to lighten\n the burden of life for those less fortunate....\"",
"the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nBucky Shannon leaned forward across the little hexagonal table. He\n knocked over the pitcher of\nthil\n, but it didn't matter. The pitcher\n was empty. He jabbed me in the breastbone with his forefinger, not\n very hard. Not hard enough to jar the ribs clean loose, just enough to\n spring them.\n\n\n \"We,\" he said, \"are broke. We are finished, through. Washed up and\n down the drain.\" He added, as an afterthought, \"Destitute.\"\n\n\n I looked at him. I said sourly, \"You're kidding!\"\n\n\n \"Kidding.\" Shannon put his elbows on the table and peered at me through\n a curtain of very blond hair that was trying hard to be red. \"He says\n I'm kidding! With Shannon's Imperial Circus, the Greatest Show in\n Space, plastered so thick with attachments....\"",
"Bucky got red around the ears. \"Just a minute,\" he murmured, and\n started to get up. I kicked him under the table.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you lug. Let Mister Beamish finish.\"\n\n\n He sat down, looking like a mean dog waiting for the postman. Beamish\n ignored him. He went on, quietly,\n\n\n \"I have always held that entertainment, of the right sort, is the most\n valuable aid humanity can have in its search for the alleviation of\n toil and boredom....\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure, sure. But what was your idea?\"\n\n\n \"There are many towns along the Venusian frontiers where no\n entertainment of the—\nproper\nsort has been available. I propose to\n remedy that. I propose to charter your circus, Mister Shannon, to make\n a tour of several settlements along the Tehara Belt.\"",
"\"It's no more plastered than you are.\" I was sore because he'd been a\n lot quicker grabbing the pitcher. \"The Greatest Show in Space. Phooey!\n I've wet-nursed Shannon's Imperial Circus around the Triangle for\n eleven years, and I know. It's lousy, it's mangy, it's broken-down!\n Nothing works, from the ship to the roustabouts. In short, it stinks!\"\n\n\n I must have had the pitcher oftener than I thought. Nobody insults\n Buckhalter Shannon's Imperial Circus to Buckhalter Shannon's face\n unless he's tired and wants a long rest in a comfy fracture-frame.",
"She was also much younger, but I didn't go into that. Gertrude may be\n a little creaky, but she's still pretty impressive. I only hoped she\n wouldn't die on us, because without her we'd have a sicker-looking\n circus than even I could stand.\n\n\n Beamish looked impressed. \"A\ncansin\n. Well, well! The mystery\n surrounding the origin and species of the\ncansin\nis a fascinating\n subject. The extreme rarity of the animal....\"\n\n\n We were getting off the subject. I said tactfully, \"We'd have to have\n at least a hundred U.C.'s.\"\n\n\n It was twice what we had any right to ask. I was prepared to dicker.\n Beamish looked at me with that innocent dead pan. For a fraction of a\n second I thought I saw something back of his round blue eyes, and my\n stomach jumped like it was shot. Beamish smiled sweetly.",
"\"Yeah.\"\n\n\n \"It may be crooked.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. And he may be screwball and on the level. For Pete's sake!\" I\n yelled. \"You want to sit here till we all dry up and blow away?\"\n\n\n Shannon looked at me, kind of funny. He looked at the bulge in my tunic\n where the roll was. He raked back his thick light hair.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" he said. \"I hope there'll be enough left to bribe the jury.\" He\n poked his head outside. \"Hey, boy! More\nthildatum\n!\"\nIt was pretty late when we got back to the broken-down spaceport where\n Shannon's Imperial Circus was crouching beneath its attachments. Late\n as it was, they were waiting for us. About twenty of them, sitting\n around and smoking and looking very ugly.",
"It had been quiet. Now every brute in the place let go at the same\n time. My stomach turned clear over. I called Gertrude every name I\n could think of, and I couldn't hear myself doing it. Presently a great\n metallic clash nearly burst my eardrums, and the beasts shut up. Gow\n had them nicely conditioned to that gong.\nBut they didn't quiet down. Not really. They were uneasy. You can feel\n them inside you when they're uneasy. I think that's why I'm scared of\n them. They make me feel like I'm not human as I thought—like I wanted\n to put my back-hair up and snarl. Yeah. They were uneasy that night,\n all of a sudden....\n\n\n Gow glared at us as we came up into the lantern light. \"She's gettin'\n worse,\" he said. \"She's lonesome.\"",
"He looked at me like he was thinking it wouldn't take much timber to\n fit me for a coffin. \"Okay! But Gertrude's unhappy. She's lonesome,\n see? And if she don't get happier pretty soon I ain't sure your tin-pot\n ship'll hold her.\"\n\n\n He pulled the curtains to and departed. Bucky Shannon groaned. Beamish\n cleared his throat and said, rather stiffly,\n\n\n \"Gertrude?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. She's kind of temperamental.\" Bucky took a quick drink. I\n finished for him.\n\n\n \"She's the star attraction of our show, Mr. Beamish. A real blue-swamp\n Venusian\ncansin\n. The only other one on the Triangle belongs to Savitt\n Brothers, and she's much smaller than Gertrude.\"",
"It was Gow, our zoo-man—a big, ugly son-of-a-gun from a Terran\n colony on Mercury. I was there once. Gow looks a lot like the\n scenery—scowling, unapproachable, and tough. His hands, holding the\n curtains apart, had thick black hair on them and were not much larger\n than the hams of a Venusian swamp-rhino.\n\n\n He said, \"Boss, Gertrude's actin' up again.\"\n\n\n \"Gertrude be blowed,\" growled Bucky. \"Can't you see I'm busy?\"\n\n\n Gow's black eyes were unpleasant. \"I'm tellin' you, Boss, Gertrude\n ain't happy. She ain't had the right food. If something....\"\n\n\n I said, \"That'll all be taken care of, Gow. Run along now.\"",
"I said, \"Skip it. The next time, just don't trip me up, that's all!\"\n\n\n We had a nasty trip to Venus. Gertrude kept the brute tank on edge,\n and Gow, on the rare occasions he came up for air, went around looking\n like a disaster hoping to happen. To make it worse, Zurt the Jovian\n strong-man got hurt during the take-off, and the Mercurian cave-cat had\n kittens.\n\n\n Nobody would have minded that, only one of 'em had only four legs. It\n lived just long enough to scare that bunch of superstitious dopes out\n of their pants. Circus people are funny that way.",
"I waved the money in their faces. That stopped them. Very solemnly,\n Bucky and I checked the bills, paid them, and pocketed the receipts.\n Bucky yawned and stretched sleepily.\n\n\n \"Now?\" he said.\n\n\n \"Now,\" I said.\n\n\n We had a lot of fun. Some of the boys inside the ship came out to join\n in. We raised a lot of dust and nobody got killed, quite. We all went\n home happy. They had their money, and we had their blood.\n\n\n The news was all over the ship before we got inside. The freaks and the\n green girl from Tethys who could roll herself like a hoop, and Zurt the\n muscle man from Jupiter, and all the other assorted geeks and kinkers\n and joeys that make up the usual corny carnie were doing nip-ups in the\n passageways and drooling over the thought of steer and toppings.",
"Bucky said, \"Jig—it's Sam Kapper.\"\n\n\n We started to run. The crowd, mostly big unshaken miners, wheeled\n around to see what was happening. People began to close in on the man\n who crawled and whimpered in the mud.\n\n\n Sam Kapper was a hunter, supplying animals to zoos and circuses and\n carnivals. He'd given us good deals a couple of times, when we weren't\n too broke, and we were pretty friendly.\n\n\n I hadn't seen him for three seasons. I remembered him as a bronzed,\n hard-bitten guy, lean and tough as a twist of tung wire. I felt sick,\n looking down at him.\n\n\n Bucky started to help him up. Kapper was crying, and he jerked all over\n like animals I've seen that were scared to death. Some guy leaned over\n and put a cigarette in his mouth and lighted it for him.",
"The fight had just put the topper on him. I was afraid he'd fall down\n the ladder and break his neck. That's why I went along. If I hadn't....\n Oh, well, what's a few nightmares among friends?\n\n\n It was dark down there in the tank. Way off at the other end, there was\n a dim glow. Gow was evidently holding Gertrude's hand. We started down\n the long passageway between the rows of cages and glassed-in tanks and\n compression units.\n\n\n Our footsteps sounded loud and empty on the iron floor. I wasn't\n near as happy as Shannon, and my skin began to crawl a little. It's\n the smell, I think; rank and sour and wild. And the sound of them,\n breathing and rustling in the dark, with the patient hatred walled\n around them as strong as the cage bars.",
"\"That's tough,\" said Bucky Shannon. His grey-green eyes looked like an\n owl's. He swayed slightly. \"That's sure tough.\" He sniffled.\n\n\n I looked at Gertrude. Her cage is the biggest and strongest in the tank\n and even so she looked as though she could break it open just taking a\n deep breath. I don't know if you've ever seen a\ncansin\n. There's only\n two of them on the Triangle. If you haven't, nothing I can say will\n make much difference.\n\n\n They're what the brain gang calls an \"end of evolution.\" Seems old\n Dame Nature had an idea that didn't jell. The\ncansins\nwere pretty\n successful for a while, it seems, but something gummed up the works and\n now there's only a few left, way in the deep-swamp country, where even\n the Venusians hardly ever go. Living fossils.",
"Bucky Shannon regarded them possessively, wiping blood from his nose.\n \"They're good guys, Jig. Swell people. They stuck by me, and I've\n rewarded them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure,\" rather sourly. Bucky hiccoughed.\n\n\n \"Let's go see Gertrude.\"\n\n\n I didn't want to see Gertrude. I never got over feeling funny going\n into the brute tank, especially at night or out in space. I'm a city\n guy, myself. The smell and sound of wildness gives me goose bumps. But\n Bucky was looking stubborn, so I shrugged.\n\n\n \"Okay. But just for a minute. Then we go beddy-bye.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal, Jif. Bes' li'l' guy inna worl'....\"",
"Bucky had relaxed. His grey-green eyes began to gleam. He started to\n speak, and I kicked him again.\n\n\n \"That would be expensive, Mister Beamish,\" I said. \"We'd have to cancel\n several engagements....\"\n\n\n He looked at me. I was lying, and he knew it. But he said,\n\n\n \"I quite understand that. I would be prepared....\"\n\n\n The curtains were yanked back suddenly. Beamish shut up. Bucky and I\n glared at the head and shoulders poking in between the drapes.",
"I felt cold, suddenly, between the shoulders. Somebody scraped a chair\n back. It sounded like he'd ripped the floor open, it was so quiet. I\n got my brassies on, and my hands were sweating. Bucky Shannon sighed,\n and let his fist start traveling, a long, deceptive arc.\n\n\n Then I saw what the little guy was holding in his hand.\n\n\n I yelled and knocked the table over into Bucky. It made a lot of noise.\n It knocked him sideways and down, and the little dark men jumped up,\n quivering and showing their teeth. The Martian girl screamed.\n\n\n Bucky heaved the table off his lap and cursed me. \"What's eating you,\n Jig? I'm not going to hurt him.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" I said. \"Look what he's got there. Money!\"",
"\"A blue one, Jig. A morgue if I ever saw one!\"\n\n\n I snarled, \"What do you want, with this lousy dog-and-pony show!\" and\n went out. He followed. The gang was converging on the lock, but they\n weren't happy. You get so you can feel those things. The steamy Venus\n heat was already sneaking into the ship.\n\n\n While we passed the hatchway to the brute tank, I could hear Gertrude,\n screaming.\nThe canvasmen were busy setting up the annex, slopping and cursing in\n the mud. The paste brigade was heading for the shacks. Shannon and I\n stood with the hot rain running off our slickers, looking.",
"Bucky Shannon sniffled again. I said irritably, \"Be reasonable, Gow!\n Nobody's ever seen a male\ncansin\n. There may not even be any.\"\n\n\n Gertrude screamed again. She didn't move, not even to raise her head.\n The sadness just built up inside her until it had to come out. That\n close, the screech was deafening, and it turned me all limp and cold\n inside. The loneliness, the sheer stark, simple pain....\n\n\n Bucky Shannon began to cry. I snarled, \"You'll have to snap her out of\n this, Gow. She's driving the rest of 'em nuts.\"\n\n\n He hammered on his gong, and things quieted down again. Gow stood\n looking out over the tank, sniffing a little, like a hound. Then he\n turned to Gertrude."
]
] |
train
|
63631
|
[
"What are the four hypotheses Charles has about how he might have survived the plague? ",
"What is the name of the song Charles plays on the phonograph? \n\n",
"What is the Bureau of Vital Statistics and what is its purpose? \n\n",
"Why isn’t Charles satisfied with the beautiful woman’s reason for having a romantic interest in him?",
"At which two ages does the Bureau of Vital Statistics scan a person’s brain?",
"What is implied about the beautiful woman when Charles leaves her apartment?",
"What was the last animal left on Earth after the mysterious plague began to spread?",
"What is the significance of the story’s title, “Phone Me in Central Park?”",
"What is the true cause of Earth’s “plague” and what is its purpose?",
"What is the true explanation for Charles being the last man on Earth? \n\n"
] |
[
[
"He’s too strange; he’s a prophet; the odds were against him; he got a vaccine \n\n",
"He’s a nice guy; pure chance; he’s a prophet; he received medical treatment. \n",
"He’s healthier than everybody; pure chance; he knows a good doctor; he wore a mask \n\n",
"He’s too normal to get it; pure chance; he’s a saint; immunity"
],
[
"The Land of the Dead \n\n",
"The Isle of the Dead",
"The Song of the Dead \n\n",
"The Night of the Dead \n"
],
[
"It holds a computer whose design is thought to be humanity’s greatest achievement. The computer keeps track of all humans, monitoring their health, their lifespan, and where they are on Earth. \n\n",
"It holds a computer whose design is thought to be humanity’s greatest achievement. The computer monitors whether certain countries are more susceptible to alien invasion.\n\n",
"It holds a computer whose design is thought to be humanity’s greatest achievement. The computer keeps track of what is happening on nearby planets. \n\n",
"It holds a computer that keeps track of how many people are currently infected by the plague—a technology thought to be humanity’s greatest achievement. \n\n"
],
[
"Due to their total immunity to the plague, Charles and the beautiful woman is are last people on Earth. She had no choice but to be with him.\n\n",
"Due to divine designation, Charles is deemed a prophet. She only wanted to be with him for his prophecy. ",
"Due to the plague that has wiped out all of humanity, Charles is the last man on Earth. She had no choice but to be with him. \n\n",
"Due to disease, Charles has become the last fertile man on Earth, among many living infertile. She had no choice but to be with him. \n\n"
],
[
"The first month of life and again at age 10 \n\n",
"At age 10 and again at age 20 \n\n",
"At age 10 and again before death \n\n",
"The first month of life and again before death\n\n"
],
[
"She is sleeping soundly, which means she’s unaware that Charles is sneaking out. \n\n",
"She is dead. \n\n",
"She is more in love with Charles than he is with her. \n",
"She is frustrated at Charles for being the last man on Earth. \n\n"
],
[
"Household pets \n\n",
"Rats",
"Humans",
"Locusts"
],
[
"Central Park is where the mass animals deaths were first noticed. \n\n",
"Central Park is where the aliens first attack. \n\n",
"Central Park is where Charlie digs a grave for the beautiful woman, writes her epitaph, and declares himself the last man on Earth. \n\n",
"Central Park is where Charlie builds his cave/grave, writes his epitaph, and eventually dies. \n\n"
],
[
"The plague was facilitated by aliens, described as invisible, ovular beings. Their purpose is to clear Earth of all life and start their own colony. \n\n",
"The plague’s true cause is never revealed. Just as Charles suspects at the time of his death, the fall of the human race is completely unreasonable and meaningless. \n\n",
"The plague was facilitated by aliens, described as invisible, ovular beings. Their purpose is to exterminate all of Earth’s life in order to start their own planetary garden.\n",
"The plague was facilitated by aliens, described as invisible, ovular beings. Their purpose is to move from planet to planet exterminating living systems. \n\n"
],
[
"The invisible aliens exterminated people according to chance and probability. Charles just so happened to be killed last. \n",
"The invisible aliens exterminated people in alphabetical order, according to the the Bureau of Vital Statistics index. Charles happens to be last on the list, with the last name Zzyzst. \n\n",
"The invisible aliens exterminated people according to how normal they were. Charles just so happened to be the most normal human alive.\n\n",
"The invisible aliens exterminated people in the order of a foretold prophecy. Because he was a prophet, Charles was killed last. \n\n"
]
] |
[
4,
2,
1,
3,
1,
2,
3,
4,
4,
2
] |
[
1,
0,
0,
0,
0,
0,
0,
0,
1,
1
] |
[
[
"Charles was hungry. He got up and started for one of the restaurants\n near the park. Later on, when there was more time, he'd find a piece\n of granite and move it to the plot. He could spend his free time\n carving on it, copying the inscription. He would make it into a real\n shrine; maybe he would practice up a bit and try to carve a statue to\n go with the stone.\n\n\n Somehow, though, since things were ready and it didn't make too much\n difference, it seemed to Charles that he'd probably have a long time\n to wait. \"Maybe it's just a disease, and I'm immune. I was immune to\n smallpox. The vaccination never took. That's probably it.\"",
"What about—?\nChance. That was it! The laws of probability, the bell-shaped curve,\n normal distribution, rectilinear regression. More people per square\n foot in New York than elsewhere. The first person who died was from New\n York, so the last person who gave way to the disease should come from\n here too. Spin the wheel; throw the dice; toss the coin.\n\n\n So simple to explain by the laws of chance. No need for any underlying\n assumptions about good and evil, no need for teleological arguments\n concerning cause and effect. Simply explain it by chance. Somebody had\n to be the last to go and that was—\n\n\n \"No,\" Charles said, standing up in the quiet of the spring evening.\n \"No, chance won't do it. No man can reckon with chance. The mind\n rejects such things. There must be something beyond mere accident.\n There must be!\"\n\n\n He sighed slowly.",
"Charles struggled to end his body's disorganized responses, to\n channelize all his energy into one direction. His mind came back into\n action. He set up his goal; everything else seemed irrelevant: he had\n to get back to the park, to his hermit's cave, to his long, narrow\n home. He couldn't die until then.\n\n\n Ten minutes.\n\n\n He was allotted ten minutes before the end.\n\n\n It could have been ten years or ten seconds, for now objective time\n meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of measuring seconds and\n minutes. It was a matter of forgetting time and measuring space.\n\n\n He concentrated on the grave; he forced his body to become an unwilling\n machine. While he could, he walked, forcing himself on. When his legs\n gave way, he crawled. When his knees buckled, he rolled. When his\n stomach protested, he vomited. It made no difference.",
"But thinking about \"why\" didn't answer the question itself, Charles\n thought. He looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in Central\n Park, alone except for a few stray corpses. But the park was fairly\n free of bodies.\n\n\n \"You've got about ten minutes warning,\" he said to himself. \"I guess\n that most people wanted to die inside of something—inside of anything.\n Not out in the unprotected open.\"\n\n\n The silence was like a weight hanging around his neck. Not an insect\n noise, not the chirp of a bird, not the sound of a car nor the scream\n of a plane. Not even a breeze to whisper among the leaves, he thought.\n Civilization equals life equals noise. Silence equals....\n\n\n Why. His mind kept returning to the question. Of all the people on\n earth, me. The last. Why me?",
"Charles refused to think. Machines, especially half-broken machines, do\n not think; they only work. Sweating, straining, bleeding, retching, he\n pushed himself towards his goal, trying to add one final touch of grace\n and custom to the rude irrationalness of it all.\n\n\n His eyes gave out a few feet from the pit. He felt his way towards it.\n Convulsions shook his body like a cat shakes a captive mouse. He humped\n his body forward between the seizures, hands outstretched, searching\n for the grave.\n\n\n And then he was upon it. One arm reached out for grass, and clutched\n bare space instead.\n\n\n He was home.\n\n\n He gathered energy from his final reservoirs of strength for one final\n movement that would throw him headlong into the shallow grave. He\n tensed his muscles, pulled his limbs up under him and started to roll\n into the hole.",
"The tantalizing thought of \"why\" puzzled its way back into his mind.\n But it seemed less pressing now that he had almost come to the\n conclusion that he would live for a long time. Later, in a few days\n perhaps, he would think about it. In a little while he'd have plenty of\n opportunity for hunting down the answer. This seemed good to him, for\n now he thought he almost had the answer, if there were an answer. He\n thought he had seen the solution peering out at him from the recesses\n of his mind, and he didn't like the expression on its face. Better to\n forget.\nCharles reached the broad boulevard. There was a large cafe just across\n from him, its front window caved in by a large truck. He stumbled and\n almost fell as he stepped from the curb.\n\n\n \"Look at me, nervous as a cat.\"\n\n\n He was trembling noticeably as he started across the street.",
"\"I've got to find out,\" Charles told himself. He meant it, of course,\n but in a sense he was afraid—afraid that his trip to the Bureau might\n give him an answer he didn't dare listen to. \"But I've got to try.\" He\n walked on down the bloody street.\n\n\n Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's\n crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of\n a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every\n human on earth.\n\n\n Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by\n means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for\n man what no ordinary census could have. The machine knew who was alive,\n who was dead, and where everybody was.",
"A thought teased at him. Charles looked at the woman again and decided\n that she still looked beautiful in spite of the harshness of the\n room's lighting. He touched buttons by the edge of the bed and the\n illumination quieted to a soft glow, wrapping her in a radiant halo.\n Charles smiled wanly and got up. He stood by the bed looking at her.\n\n\n \"I could have fallen in love with you once. A year ago, perhaps, or\n longer. But not now. Not now.\" He turned away and walked to the window.\n \"Now the world is dead. The whole world is dead.\"\n\n\n New York lay quietly below him. It was the hour of indecision when\n day has not quite made up its mind to leave and night has not yet\n attacked in force. The streetlights were already on, making geometric\n patterns through the dusk of Central Park. Some of the billboards were\n shining, their relays activated by darkness-sensitized solenoids. A\n reddish-orange pallor hung from the sky.",
"\"I—\" He started to say something, to think something. But some hidden\n part of his mind clamped down, obscuring the thought, rejecting the\n concept.\n\n\n The tremor turned to a shake before he reached the far curb, and the\n first burst of wild pain came as he laid his shoulder against the door\n to the restaurant. This was the way the plague began, but—His mind\n quickly repressed the idea. It couldn't be the plague. He was immune!\n\n\n Another burst of pulsating, shattering pain crashed through his body,\n tearing down the defenses of his mind, putting an end of his thoughts\n of immunity. Colors flared before his eyes, a persistent, irresistible\n susurrus flooded his ears.\n\n\n He wanted to protest, but there was no one to listen to him. He\n appealed to every divinity he knew, all the time knowing it would be\n useless. His body, out of his voluntary control, tried to run off in\n all directions at once.",
"\"\nMaybe I'm not the last!\n\"\n\n\n The thought struck him with suddenness, promisingly, edged with\n swelling comfort to fill his emptiness.\n\n\n Charles got up slowly, noticing for the first time that his fingers\n were badly cut. He wrapped a handkerchief around them and forgot them.\n He had to know—he had to find out.\nAs he turned to leave, he noticed again the woman lying in radiant\n state upon the bed. He walked to her side and leaned over, kissing her\n gently on the forehead. As he straightened up, his leg caught against\n her arm, pushing it slightly. The woman's arm slipped from its position\n and dangled from the edge of the bed like a crazy pendulum. Charles\n picked it up and folded it across her now cold breasts. He started\n to pull the sheet over her nude form, then stopped, smiling at his\n conventionality. After all, it didn't make any difference now.",
"Instantly the thought struck him with paralyzing devastation. The\n answer to it all poked its face out from the recesses of his mind and\n sapped the last bit of his energy, corroding his nerves and dying\n muscles. Now he knew, and the knowing was the end of it.\n\n\n He collapsed at the edge of the pit. Only one arm hung loosely down\n into it, swinging senseless in the air, pointing accusingly at the\n empty coffin.\n\n\n The world will end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the\n last man's anguished cry at the unreasonableness of it all.\n\n\n Charles screamed.\nThe large, invisible, ovular being that hung suspended over the Empire\n State Building rested from its exertion. Soon it was approached by\n another of its kind.\n\n\n \"It is finished?\" asked the second.\n\n\n \"Yes. Just now. I am resting.\"",
"A gust of wind from the outside breezed through the shattered opening,\n attacking his olfactory patch with the retching smell of decaying\n flesh. Charles ignored it. Even smells had lost their customary\n meanings.\n\n\n He felt the rage build up inside again, tearing at his viscera. His\n stomach clenched up like an angry fist.\n\n\n \"But I don't want to be the last man alive!\" he shouted. \"I don't know\n what to do! I don't know where to go, how to act! I just don't know—\"\n\n\n A paroxysm of sobbing shook his body. Trembling, he dropped to his\n knees, his head against the cold firmness of the sill, his hands\n clutched tightly around the jagged edges of the window pane. In spite\n of the sharp pain that raced through his system, in spite of the\n bright, warm, red stream that trickled down his face, he knelt by the\n window for several minutes.",
"\"Why, it was just yesterday (or was it the day before?) that ten of\n us, at least, met here to check the figures. There were lots of us\n alive then.\" Including the blond young woman who had died just this\n afternoon....\n\n\n Charles stopped talking and forced his eyes upwards. Peripheral vision\n caught first the vague outlines of the lower part of the map. His eyes\n continued to move, slowly, reluctantly. They caught the over-all relief\n of Greater New York City—and then concentrated on the single, shining\n dot at the very heart of the map—and he understood.\n\n\n His eyes stabbed quickly for the counter above the screen.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n He gasped.\n\n\n The counter read\none\n.\n\n\n Charles was by himself, the last person alive in all of New York City.",
"He stopped. For even as he spoke, the light winked out! The counter\n clicked again.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n Alone.\n\n\n Alone!\n\n\n Charles screamed.\n\n\n The bottom dropped out from under him!\nWhy?\n\n\n Such a simple question, but in those three letters lay the essence of\n human nature. Why. The drive of curiosity. Stronger, in a way, than\n the so-called \"basic\" drives: hunger, thirst, sex, shelter, warmth,\n companionship, elimination. Certainly more decisive in the history of\n the race. Man began to think, to differentiate himself from the other\n animals, when he first asked the question: \"Why?\"",
"Once a year the Bureau issued The Index, an exact accounting of Earth's\n four billion inhabitants. Four billion names and addresses, compressed\n into microprint, a tremendous achievement even for the \"Proud Era.\"\n In all of his life, Charles had never once glanced at The Index.\n The average person had little necessity to do so since the Bureau\n information service would answer questions free of charge at any time.\n\n\n Reaching the gigantic building, Charles pushed aside the body of a\n young man and walked into the main foyer. Passing behind once-guarded\n doors, he entered the giant computer room and paused in admiration.\nOnly once, before the plague, had he seen the interior of this room.\n But he still remembered it and he still recalled the powerful emotional\n experience it had been those many years ago.",
"It had been very pleasant that afternoon. She had given of herself\n freely, warmly, and Charles had accepted. But then he had known\n that she would. It was not him, it was the circumstances. Under the\n circumstances, she would have given herself to any man—\n\n\n \"Why did it have to be her—or me? Why should it have to happen to\n anybody! Why!\"\nShe would have given herself to any man—\nHis thoughts beat a rapid crescendo, activating emotions, stimulating\n sensations of angry rage. He wanted to cry, to weep angry tears of\n protest.\n\n\n To any man, WHO HAPPENED TO BE THE LAST MAN ON EARTH!\n\n\n Charles picked up a heavy book end off the table and crashed it through\n the thick pane of window glass.",
"He began to tremble violently. The silence of the room began to press\n quickly in on him. His frantic fingers searched for the computer\n controls.\n\n\n New York State. One.\n\n\n The entire United States. One.\n\n\n The western hemisphere, including islands.\n\n\n (Was that a point of light in Brazil? No. Just a ghost image).\n\n\n One.\n\n\n The Pacific area, Asia, Australia, Asia Minor, Russia and the Near\n East, Africa and then Europe.\n\n\n England!\n\n\n There was a light in England! Someone else still lived! The counter\n clicked forward.\n\n\n Two!\n\n\n His trembling stopped. He breathed again.\n\n\n \"Of course. London was at least as populous as New York City before the\n plague. It's only logical that—\"",
"Average, that's what he was. Height: 5'11\". Weight: 165. Age: 32.\n Status: Married, once upon a time.\n\n\n The Norm, with no significant departures, all down the line. Church\n member, but not a good one. Could that be it? Could the most normal be\n the most perfect? Had he led the best of all possible lives? Was that\n it? Had God, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, spared his life, saved\n him, singled him out because he was most nearly a saint, most nearly\n Christ-like, most nearly....\n\n\n Lies—His mind snapped back to reality. He half smiled. Saint? Christ?\n The Second Coming?\n\n\n He was no saint.\n\n\n Charles sighed.",
"\"So now I'm a hermit, whether or not I like it,\" he said in derision to\n the gravel path as he walked along it. \"A hermit in the midst of a city\n of millions of—No, I forgot. There aren't any more people, are there?\"\n It was hard to realize, even now. \"A hermit, alone—and I haven't even\n got a cave....\"\n\n\n Charles stopped walking suddenly. No cave, he thought. No place to\n sleep out the long one, no place to rest while time came to change\n things around and make them for the better. No place to hide.\n\n\n And suddenly it was the most important thing in life to him to find his\n \"cave.\"",
"He smiled. Strange, but now he wanted very much to go on living,\n alone or not. There were things he could do, ways to keep occupied.\n He wouldn't mind it so much. But he wanted more and more desperately\n with each passing second to retain his foothold on the tenuous path of\n physical existence."
],
[
"The phonograph was near the door. On sudden impulse he switched it\n on, turned the volume up full, and in grim jest left it playing\n Rachmaninoff's\nIsle of the Dead\non full automatic. The music haunted\n him down the hall to the elevator that he had to run himself.\n\n\n The lobby was littered with debris, human and otherwise. Charles\n ignored it. The street that led towards the Bureau of Vital Statistics\n was a mess of desolate carnage. Charles overlooked it. Shop fronts\n smashed, stores looted, gyro-cars wrecked, proud buildings defaced.\n\n\n \"That was it,\" he said to himself. \"Pride. We called this the 'Proud\n Era.' Everything was better and bigger and nicer to have. Buildings\n were taller, men were healthier, most of the problems of humanity\n seemed licked, or nearly so. It was a time of free power, each small\n unit of population, each section of town operating on perpetual,\n ever-lasting, automatic atomic piles.",
"Charles refused to think. Machines, especially half-broken machines, do\n not think; they only work. Sweating, straining, bleeding, retching, he\n pushed himself towards his goal, trying to add one final touch of grace\n and custom to the rude irrationalness of it all.\n\n\n His eyes gave out a few feet from the pit. He felt his way towards it.\n Convulsions shook his body like a cat shakes a captive mouse. He humped\n his body forward between the seizures, hands outstretched, searching\n for the grave.\n\n\n And then he was upon it. One arm reached out for grass, and clutched\n bare space instead.\n\n\n He was home.\n\n\n He gathered energy from his final reservoirs of strength for one final\n movement that would throw him headlong into the shallow grave. He\n tensed his muscles, pulled his limbs up under him and started to roll\n into the hole.",
"Charles was hungry. He got up and started for one of the restaurants\n near the park. Later on, when there was more time, he'd find a piece\n of granite and move it to the plot. He could spend his free time\n carving on it, copying the inscription. He would make it into a real\n shrine; maybe he would practice up a bit and try to carve a statue to\n go with the stone.\n\n\n Somehow, though, since things were ready and it didn't make too much\n difference, it seemed to Charles that he'd probably have a long time\n to wait. \"Maybe it's just a disease, and I'm immune. I was immune to\n smallpox. The vaccination never took. That's probably it.\"",
"A thought teased at him. Charles looked at the woman again and decided\n that she still looked beautiful in spite of the harshness of the\n room's lighting. He touched buttons by the edge of the bed and the\n illumination quieted to a soft glow, wrapping her in a radiant halo.\n Charles smiled wanly and got up. He stood by the bed looking at her.\n\n\n \"I could have fallen in love with you once. A year ago, perhaps, or\n longer. But not now. Not now.\" He turned away and walked to the window.\n \"Now the world is dead. The whole world is dead.\"\n\n\n New York lay quietly below him. It was the hour of indecision when\n day has not quite made up its mind to leave and night has not yet\n attacked in force. The streetlights were already on, making geometric\n patterns through the dusk of Central Park. Some of the billboards were\n shining, their relays activated by darkness-sensitized solenoids. A\n reddish-orange pallor hung from the sky.",
"\"\nMaybe I'm not the last!\n\"\n\n\n The thought struck him with suddenness, promisingly, edged with\n swelling comfort to fill his emptiness.\n\n\n Charles got up slowly, noticing for the first time that his fingers\n were badly cut. He wrapped a handkerchief around them and forgot them.\n He had to know—he had to find out.\nAs he turned to leave, he noticed again the woman lying in radiant\n state upon the bed. He walked to her side and leaned over, kissing her\n gently on the forehead. As he straightened up, his leg caught against\n her arm, pushing it slightly. The woman's arm slipped from its position\n and dangled from the edge of the bed like a crazy pendulum. Charles\n picked it up and folded it across her now cold breasts. He started\n to pull the sheet over her nude form, then stopped, smiling at his\n conventionality. After all, it didn't make any difference now.",
"Charles struggled to end his body's disorganized responses, to\n channelize all his energy into one direction. His mind came back into\n action. He set up his goal; everything else seemed irrelevant: he had\n to get back to the park, to his hermit's cave, to his long, narrow\n home. He couldn't die until then.\n\n\n Ten minutes.\n\n\n He was allotted ten minutes before the end.\n\n\n It could have been ten years or ten seconds, for now objective time\n meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of measuring seconds and\n minutes. It was a matter of forgetting time and measuring space.\n\n\n He concentrated on the grave; he forced his body to become an unwilling\n machine. While he could, he walked, forcing himself on. When his legs\n gave way, he crawled. When his knees buckled, he rolled. When his\n stomach protested, he vomited. It made no difference.",
"\"Phone Me in Central Park\"\nBy JAMES McCONNELL\nThere should be an epitaph for every\n\n man, big or little, but a really grand\n\n and special one for Loner Charlie.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nCharles turned over on his side to look at her. She lay quietly in the\n other bed, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was blonde to\n perfection, exquisitely shaped, and the rich promise of her body was\n exposed to his view.\n\n\n \"Why?\" he thought as he looked at her. \"Why did it have to happen like\n this?\"",
"The tantalizing thought of \"why\" puzzled its way back into his mind.\n But it seemed less pressing now that he had almost come to the\n conclusion that he would live for a long time. Later, in a few days\n perhaps, he would think about it. In a little while he'd have plenty of\n opportunity for hunting down the answer. This seemed good to him, for\n now he thought he almost had the answer, if there were an answer. He\n thought he had seen the solution peering out at him from the recesses\n of his mind, and he didn't like the expression on its face. Better to\n forget.\nCharles reached the broad boulevard. There was a large cafe just across\n from him, its front window caved in by a large truck. He stumbled and\n almost fell as he stepped from the curb.\n\n\n \"Look at me, nervous as a cat.\"\n\n\n He was trembling noticeably as he started across the street.",
"It had been very pleasant that afternoon. She had given of herself\n freely, warmly, and Charles had accepted. But then he had known\n that she would. It was not him, it was the circumstances. Under the\n circumstances, she would have given herself to any man—\n\n\n \"Why did it have to be her—or me? Why should it have to happen to\n anybody! Why!\"\nShe would have given herself to any man—\nHis thoughts beat a rapid crescendo, activating emotions, stimulating\n sensations of angry rage. He wanted to cry, to weep angry tears of\n protest.\n\n\n To any man, WHO HAPPENED TO BE THE LAST MAN ON EARTH!\n\n\n Charles picked up a heavy book end off the table and crashed it through\n the thick pane of window glass.",
"Here another page crept in between the cracks of a pier on the\n riverfront, dropping gently to the caressing eddies of the water (read\n the names: Smith, Smitha, Smitj).\n\n\n And here two pages danced down into Central Park, pirouetted,\n promenaded, and finally came to rest against a propped-up piece of\n metal (read the names: Whit, Whita, Whitacomb).\n\n\n It was not until the dusty morning sun stirred up the breezes that they\n fluttered down into the shallow hole beneath, unnoticed. The writing on\n the metal, until then partially obscured by the papers, became legible:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH—\n\n CHARLES J. ZZYZST\n\n GO TO HELL!",
"\"So now I'm a hermit, whether or not I like it,\" he said in derision to\n the gravel path as he walked along it. \"A hermit in the midst of a city\n of millions of—No, I forgot. There aren't any more people, are there?\"\n It was hard to realize, even now. \"A hermit, alone—and I haven't even\n got a cave....\"\n\n\n Charles stopped walking suddenly. No cave, he thought. No place to\n sleep out the long one, no place to rest while time came to change\n things around and make them for the better. No place to hide.\n\n\n And suddenly it was the most important thing in life to him to find his\n \"cave.\"",
"Instantly the thought struck him with paralyzing devastation. The\n answer to it all poked its face out from the recesses of his mind and\n sapped the last bit of his energy, corroding his nerves and dying\n muscles. Now he knew, and the knowing was the end of it.\n\n\n He collapsed at the edge of the pit. Only one arm hung loosely down\n into it, swinging senseless in the air, pointing accusingly at the\n empty coffin.\n\n\n The world will end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the\n last man's anguished cry at the unreasonableness of it all.\n\n\n Charles screamed.\nThe large, invisible, ovular being that hung suspended over the Empire\n State Building rested from its exertion. Soon it was approached by\n another of its kind.\n\n\n \"It is finished?\" asked the second.\n\n\n \"Yes. Just now. I am resting.\"",
"He stopped. For even as he spoke, the light winked out! The counter\n clicked again.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n Alone.\n\n\n Alone!\n\n\n Charles screamed.\n\n\n The bottom dropped out from under him!\nWhy?\n\n\n Such a simple question, but in those three letters lay the essence of\n human nature. Why. The drive of curiosity. Stronger, in a way, than\n the so-called \"basic\" drives: hunger, thirst, sex, shelter, warmth,\n companionship, elimination. Certainly more decisive in the history of\n the race. Man began to think, to differentiate himself from the other\n animals, when he first asked the question: \"Why?\"",
"What about—?\nChance. That was it! The laws of probability, the bell-shaped curve,\n normal distribution, rectilinear regression. More people per square\n foot in New York than elsewhere. The first person who died was from New\n York, so the last person who gave way to the disease should come from\n here too. Spin the wheel; throw the dice; toss the coin.\n\n\n So simple to explain by the laws of chance. No need for any underlying\n assumptions about good and evil, no need for teleological arguments\n concerning cause and effect. Simply explain it by chance. Somebody had\n to be the last to go and that was—\n\n\n \"No,\" Charles said, standing up in the quiet of the spring evening.\n \"No, chance won't do it. No man can reckon with chance. The mind\n rejects such things. There must be something beyond mere accident.\n There must be!\"\n\n\n He sighed slowly.",
"But thinking about \"why\" didn't answer the question itself, Charles\n thought. He looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in Central\n Park, alone except for a few stray corpses. But the park was fairly\n free of bodies.\n\n\n \"You've got about ten minutes warning,\" he said to himself. \"I guess\n that most people wanted to die inside of something—inside of anything.\n Not out in the unprotected open.\"\n\n\n The silence was like a weight hanging around his neck. Not an insect\n noise, not the chirp of a bird, not the sound of a car nor the scream\n of a plane. Not even a breeze to whisper among the leaves, he thought.\n Civilization equals life equals noise. Silence equals....\n\n\n Why. His mind kept returning to the question. Of all the people on\n earth, me. The last. Why me?",
"\"I've got to find out,\" Charles told himself. He meant it, of course,\n but in a sense he was afraid—afraid that his trip to the Bureau might\n give him an answer he didn't dare listen to. \"But I've got to try.\" He\n walked on down the bloody street.\n\n\n Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's\n crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of\n a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every\n human on earth.\n\n\n Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by\n means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for\n man what no ordinary census could have. The machine knew who was alive,\n who was dead, and where everybody was.",
"A gust of wind from the outside breezed through the shattered opening,\n attacking his olfactory patch with the retching smell of decaying\n flesh. Charles ignored it. Even smells had lost their customary\n meanings.\n\n\n He felt the rage build up inside again, tearing at his viscera. His\n stomach clenched up like an angry fist.\n\n\n \"But I don't want to be the last man alive!\" he shouted. \"I don't know\n what to do! I don't know where to go, how to act! I just don't know—\"\n\n\n A paroxysm of sobbing shook his body. Trembling, he dropped to his\n knees, his head against the cold firmness of the sill, his hands\n clutched tightly around the jagged edges of the window pane. In spite\n of the sharp pain that raced through his system, in spite of the\n bright, warm, red stream that trickled down his face, he knelt by the\n window for several minutes.",
"A sheet of metal, bent double, served for the monument proper. A nearby\n tool shed yielded up a can of paint and a brush. By the glow of one of\n the streetlights Charles worked out the inscription.\n\n\n \"It ought to be something impressive,\" he thought out loud. \"Something\n fitting the occasion.\"\n\n\n What did one say on these situations? There was so little chance to\n practice up for things like this. But it ought to be good, it ought to\n be proper.\n\n\n \"'In this now hallowed corner of the planet Earth—' No. That sounds\n too ... too....\"\n\n\n Make it simple, he thought. And he finally wrote:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH\n\n\n Yes. That was it. Simple. Let whoever came afterwards figure out the\n rest. Let them decide. He smiled and finished the painting.",
"\"You can't take it with you, you know. They don't allow souvenirs.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"All right, all right. You're so good, see if you can compute the\n scatter probability.\"\n\n\n The first being moved imperceptably and the heavy plastoid binding of\n the book disappeared. The thousands of pages dropped softly, caught\n at the wind like hungry sails, separated, and pulled by the fingers of\n gravity, went their disparate ways.\nHere a page scuttled into a broken window of the Chrysler Building\n (read the names: Aabat, Aabbs, Aabbt).\n\n\n Here a page landed upright on the head of one of the library lions\n and sloughed softly to the ground (read the names: Looman, Loomana,\n Loomanabsky).",
"It took him almost an hour to find the proper tools, and better than\n two hours more of hard, nighttime work to get the hole dug to his\n satisfaction. It took almost three hours to find the right sort of\n casket, durable but not too heavy for one man to handle. He carted it\n out to a grassy plot close to the center of the park where the grave\n was. He let the coffin down slowly into the depression, then piled up\n loose dirt on the sloping sides of the hole so that the rain would wash\n it down over him.\n\n\n \"I can't very well bury myself,\" he said. \"I guess it will rain after\n I'm gone.\" He looked carefully down at the metallic container.\n\n\n Wait now. There was something wrong, something missing. It was—oh,\n yes, he caught it. It was the stone. There wasn't any stone to go at\n the head of the grave. \"I'll have to fix that.\""
],
[
"\"I've got to find out,\" Charles told himself. He meant it, of course,\n but in a sense he was afraid—afraid that his trip to the Bureau might\n give him an answer he didn't dare listen to. \"But I've got to try.\" He\n walked on down the bloody street.\n\n\n Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's\n crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of\n a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every\n human on earth.\n\n\n Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by\n means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for\n man what no ordinary census could have. The machine knew who was alive,\n who was dead, and where everybody was.",
"Once a year the Bureau issued The Index, an exact accounting of Earth's\n four billion inhabitants. Four billion names and addresses, compressed\n into microprint, a tremendous achievement even for the \"Proud Era.\"\n In all of his life, Charles had never once glanced at The Index.\n The average person had little necessity to do so since the Bureau\n information service would answer questions free of charge at any time.\n\n\n Reaching the gigantic building, Charles pushed aside the body of a\n young man and walked into the main foyer. Passing behind once-guarded\n doors, he entered the giant computer room and paused in admiration.\nOnly once, before the plague, had he seen the interior of this room.\n But he still remembered it and he still recalled the powerful emotional\n experience it had been those many years ago.",
"All children had to have a brain-wave recording made by the Bureau\n during the first month of their life. And again at the age of 10 each\n child returned to the Bureau for a recheck. It was for this latter\n recording that Charles had come to the Bureau some twenty-two years\n before and a friendly guard had let him peep briefly into the computer\n room. The impression of intense activity, of organized confusion, of\n mechanical wonder had remained with him the rest of his life.\n\n\n \"So different now,\" he thought, surveying the room. \"Now it's empty, so\n empty.\" The machine seemed to reflect the stillness, the very deadness\n of the world. The silence became unbearable.\n\n\n Charles walked to the master control panel. With newly acquired\n dexterity he switched the computer screens on and watched them glow\n to life. All around the world sensitive receiving stations pulsed to\n activity, sending out searching fingers, hunting for elusive patterns\n of neutral energy, mapping and tabulating the results.",
"The phonograph was near the door. On sudden impulse he switched it\n on, turned the volume up full, and in grim jest left it playing\n Rachmaninoff's\nIsle of the Dead\non full automatic. The music haunted\n him down the hall to the elevator that he had to run himself.\n\n\n The lobby was littered with debris, human and otherwise. Charles\n ignored it. The street that led towards the Bureau of Vital Statistics\n was a mess of desolate carnage. Charles overlooked it. Shop fronts\n smashed, stores looted, gyro-cars wrecked, proud buildings defaced.\n\n\n \"That was it,\" he said to himself. \"Pride. We called this the 'Proud\n Era.' Everything was better and bigger and nicer to have. Buildings\n were taller, men were healthier, most of the problems of humanity\n seemed licked, or nearly so. It was a time of free power, each small\n unit of population, each section of town operating on perpetual,\n ever-lasting, automatic atomic piles.",
"\"Why, it was just yesterday (or was it the day before?) that ten of\n us, at least, met here to check the figures. There were lots of us\n alive then.\" Including the blond young woman who had died just this\n afternoon....\n\n\n Charles stopped talking and forced his eyes upwards. Peripheral vision\n caught first the vague outlines of the lower part of the map. His eyes\n continued to move, slowly, reluctantly. They caught the over-all relief\n of Greater New York City—and then concentrated on the single, shining\n dot at the very heart of the map—and he understood.\n\n\n His eyes stabbed quickly for the counter above the screen.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n He gasped.\n\n\n The counter read\none\n.\n\n\n Charles was by himself, the last person alive in all of New York City.",
"Here another page crept in between the cracks of a pier on the\n riverfront, dropping gently to the caressing eddies of the water (read\n the names: Smith, Smitha, Smitj).\n\n\n And here two pages danced down into Central Park, pirouetted,\n promenaded, and finally came to rest against a propped-up piece of\n metal (read the names: Whit, Whita, Whitacomb).\n\n\n It was not until the dusty morning sun stirred up the breezes that they\n fluttered down into the shallow hole beneath, unnoticed. The writing on\n the metal, until then partially obscured by the papers, became legible:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH—\n\n CHARLES J. ZZYZST\n\n GO TO HELL!",
"Charles was hungry. He got up and started for one of the restaurants\n near the park. Later on, when there was more time, he'd find a piece\n of granite and move it to the plot. He could spend his free time\n carving on it, copying the inscription. He would make it into a real\n shrine; maybe he would practice up a bit and try to carve a statue to\n go with the stone.\n\n\n Somehow, though, since things were ready and it didn't make too much\n difference, it seemed to Charles that he'd probably have a long time\n to wait. \"Maybe it's just a disease, and I'm immune. I was immune to\n smallpox. The vaccination never took. That's probably it.\"",
"He began to tremble violently. The silence of the room began to press\n quickly in on him. His frantic fingers searched for the computer\n controls.\n\n\n New York State. One.\n\n\n The entire United States. One.\n\n\n The western hemisphere, including islands.\n\n\n (Was that a point of light in Brazil? No. Just a ghost image).\n\n\n One.\n\n\n The Pacific area, Asia, Australia, Asia Minor, Russia and the Near\n East, Africa and then Europe.\n\n\n England!\n\n\n There was a light in England! Someone else still lived! The counter\n clicked forward.\n\n\n Two!\n\n\n His trembling stopped. He breathed again.\n\n\n \"Of course. London was at least as populous as New York City before the\n plague. It's only logical that—\"",
"What about—?\nChance. That was it! The laws of probability, the bell-shaped curve,\n normal distribution, rectilinear regression. More people per square\n foot in New York than elsewhere. The first person who died was from New\n York, so the last person who gave way to the disease should come from\n here too. Spin the wheel; throw the dice; toss the coin.\n\n\n So simple to explain by the laws of chance. No need for any underlying\n assumptions about good and evil, no need for teleological arguments\n concerning cause and effect. Simply explain it by chance. Somebody had\n to be the last to go and that was—\n\n\n \"No,\" Charles said, standing up in the quiet of the spring evening.\n \"No, chance won't do it. No man can reckon with chance. The mind\n rejects such things. There must be something beyond mere accident.\n There must be!\"\n\n\n He sighed slowly.",
"The main computer screen dominated one wall of the room. Other smaller\n screens clustered around it. On these screens could be graphed the\n population of any and every part of the globe. An illuminated counter\n immediately above it would give the numerical strength of the area\n being sampled while the screen would show population density by\n individual pinpoints of light that merged to form brightness patterns.\n\n\n \"I'll try New York first,\" he said to himself, knowing that he was a\n coward, afraid to check the whole world from the start. \"I'll start\n with New York and work up.\"\n\n\n Charles activated the switches that would flash a schematic map of New\n York on the screen. \"There's bound to be somebody else left here. After\n all, there were at least twenty of us just a couple of days ago.\" And\n one of them, a beautiful woman, had invited him up to her apartment,\n not because she liked him, but because....\n\n\n The main screen focused itself, the patterns shifting into a\n recognizable perceptual image.",
"Average, that's what he was. Height: 5'11\". Weight: 165. Age: 32.\n Status: Married, once upon a time.\n\n\n The Norm, with no significant departures, all down the line. Church\n member, but not a good one. Could that be it? Could the most normal be\n the most perfect? Had he led the best of all possible lives? Was that\n it? Had God, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, spared his life, saved\n him, singled him out because he was most nearly a saint, most nearly\n Christ-like, most nearly....\n\n\n Lies—His mind snapped back to reality. He half smiled. Saint? Christ?\n The Second Coming?\n\n\n He was no saint.\n\n\n Charles sighed.",
"Instantly the thought struck him with paralyzing devastation. The\n answer to it all poked its face out from the recesses of his mind and\n sapped the last bit of his energy, corroding his nerves and dying\n muscles. Now he knew, and the knowing was the end of it.\n\n\n He collapsed at the edge of the pit. Only one arm hung loosely down\n into it, swinging senseless in the air, pointing accusingly at the\n empty coffin.\n\n\n The world will end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the\n last man's anguished cry at the unreasonableness of it all.\n\n\n Charles screamed.\nThe large, invisible, ovular being that hung suspended over the Empire\n State Building rested from its exertion. Soon it was approached by\n another of its kind.\n\n\n \"It is finished?\" asked the second.\n\n\n \"Yes. Just now. I am resting.\"",
"\"You can't take it with you, you know. They don't allow souvenirs.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"All right, all right. You're so good, see if you can compute the\n scatter probability.\"\n\n\n The first being moved imperceptably and the heavy plastoid binding of\n the book disappeared. The thousands of pages dropped softly, caught\n at the wind like hungry sails, separated, and pulled by the fingers of\n gravity, went their disparate ways.\nHere a page scuttled into a broken window of the Chrysler Building\n (read the names: Aabat, Aabbs, Aabbt).\n\n\n Here a page landed upright on the head of one of the library lions\n and sloughed softly to the ground (read the names: Looman, Loomana,\n Loomanabsky).",
"A thought teased at him. Charles looked at the woman again and decided\n that she still looked beautiful in spite of the harshness of the\n room's lighting. He touched buttons by the edge of the bed and the\n illumination quieted to a soft glow, wrapping her in a radiant halo.\n Charles smiled wanly and got up. He stood by the bed looking at her.\n\n\n \"I could have fallen in love with you once. A year ago, perhaps, or\n longer. But not now. Not now.\" He turned away and walked to the window.\n \"Now the world is dead. The whole world is dead.\"\n\n\n New York lay quietly below him. It was the hour of indecision when\n day has not quite made up its mind to leave and night has not yet\n attacked in force. The streetlights were already on, making geometric\n patterns through the dusk of Central Park. Some of the billboards were\n shining, their relays activated by darkness-sensitized solenoids. A\n reddish-orange pallor hung from the sky.",
"\"\nMaybe I'm not the last!\n\"\n\n\n The thought struck him with suddenness, promisingly, edged with\n swelling comfort to fill his emptiness.\n\n\n Charles got up slowly, noticing for the first time that his fingers\n were badly cut. He wrapped a handkerchief around them and forgot them.\n He had to know—he had to find out.\nAs he turned to leave, he noticed again the woman lying in radiant\n state upon the bed. He walked to her side and leaned over, kissing her\n gently on the forehead. As he straightened up, his leg caught against\n her arm, pushing it slightly. The woman's arm slipped from its position\n and dangled from the edge of the bed like a crazy pendulum. Charles\n picked it up and folded it across her now cold breasts. He started\n to pull the sheet over her nude form, then stopped, smiling at his\n conventionality. After all, it didn't make any difference now.",
"\"We were free. We seemed, almost, to have accomplished something. The\n world was running well. No wonder we called it the 'Proud Era.' Life\n was fun, just a bowl of cherries, until....\"\n\n\n Two years ago the animals had started dying. Strangely enough the\n rats had gone first, to anybody's notice. Sales of poison dropped,\n scientific laboratories chained to a perpetual rodent-cycle began to\n complain bitterly.\n\n\n Then the lovers who hunted out and haunted the lonely lanes through the\n countryside began to remark that the locusts were late that year. The\n Southern states joyously reported that mosquito control was working to\n an unprecedented degree. The largest cotton crop ever was forecast and\n rumors from Mexico had it that no one had died from scorpion bite in\n several weeks.",
"It took him almost an hour to find the proper tools, and better than\n two hours more of hard, nighttime work to get the hole dug to his\n satisfaction. It took almost three hours to find the right sort of\n casket, durable but not too heavy for one man to handle. He carted it\n out to a grassy plot close to the center of the park where the grave\n was. He let the coffin down slowly into the depression, then piled up\n loose dirt on the sloping sides of the hole so that the rain would wash\n it down over him.\n\n\n \"I can't very well bury myself,\" he said. \"I guess it will rain after\n I'm gone.\" He looked carefully down at the metallic container.\n\n\n Wait now. There was something wrong, something missing. It was—oh,\n yes, he caught it. It was the stone. There wasn't any stone to go at\n the head of the grave. \"I'll have to fix that.\"",
"But thinking about \"why\" didn't answer the question itself, Charles\n thought. He looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in Central\n Park, alone except for a few stray corpses. But the park was fairly\n free of bodies.\n\n\n \"You've got about ten minutes warning,\" he said to himself. \"I guess\n that most people wanted to die inside of something—inside of anything.\n Not out in the unprotected open.\"\n\n\n The silence was like a weight hanging around his neck. Not an insect\n noise, not the chirp of a bird, not the sound of a car nor the scream\n of a plane. Not even a breeze to whisper among the leaves, he thought.\n Civilization equals life equals noise. Silence equals....\n\n\n Why. His mind kept returning to the question. Of all the people on\n earth, me. The last. Why me?",
"Charles struggled to end his body's disorganized responses, to\n channelize all his energy into one direction. His mind came back into\n action. He set up his goal; everything else seemed irrelevant: he had\n to get back to the park, to his hermit's cave, to his long, narrow\n home. He couldn't die until then.\n\n\n Ten minutes.\n\n\n He was allotted ten minutes before the end.\n\n\n It could have been ten years or ten seconds, for now objective time\n meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of measuring seconds and\n minutes. It was a matter of forgetting time and measuring space.\n\n\n He concentrated on the grave; he forced his body to become an unwilling\n machine. While he could, he walked, forcing himself on. When his legs\n gave way, he crawled. When his knees buckled, he rolled. When his\n stomach protested, he vomited. It made no difference.",
"The tantalizing thought of \"why\" puzzled its way back into his mind.\n But it seemed less pressing now that he had almost come to the\n conclusion that he would live for a long time. Later, in a few days\n perhaps, he would think about it. In a little while he'd have plenty of\n opportunity for hunting down the answer. This seemed good to him, for\n now he thought he almost had the answer, if there were an answer. He\n thought he had seen the solution peering out at him from the recesses\n of his mind, and he didn't like the expression on its face. Better to\n forget.\nCharles reached the broad boulevard. There was a large cafe just across\n from him, its front window caved in by a large truck. He stumbled and\n almost fell as he stepped from the curb.\n\n\n \"Look at me, nervous as a cat.\"\n\n\n He was trembling noticeably as he started across the street."
],
[
"A thought teased at him. Charles looked at the woman again and decided\n that she still looked beautiful in spite of the harshness of the\n room's lighting. He touched buttons by the edge of the bed and the\n illumination quieted to a soft glow, wrapping her in a radiant halo.\n Charles smiled wanly and got up. He stood by the bed looking at her.\n\n\n \"I could have fallen in love with you once. A year ago, perhaps, or\n longer. But not now. Not now.\" He turned away and walked to the window.\n \"Now the world is dead. The whole world is dead.\"\n\n\n New York lay quietly below him. It was the hour of indecision when\n day has not quite made up its mind to leave and night has not yet\n attacked in force. The streetlights were already on, making geometric\n patterns through the dusk of Central Park. Some of the billboards were\n shining, their relays activated by darkness-sensitized solenoids. A\n reddish-orange pallor hung from the sky.",
"It had been very pleasant that afternoon. She had given of herself\n freely, warmly, and Charles had accepted. But then he had known\n that she would. It was not him, it was the circumstances. Under the\n circumstances, she would have given herself to any man—\n\n\n \"Why did it have to be her—or me? Why should it have to happen to\n anybody! Why!\"\nShe would have given herself to any man—\nHis thoughts beat a rapid crescendo, activating emotions, stimulating\n sensations of angry rage. He wanted to cry, to weep angry tears of\n protest.\n\n\n To any man, WHO HAPPENED TO BE THE LAST MAN ON EARTH!\n\n\n Charles picked up a heavy book end off the table and crashed it through\n the thick pane of window glass.",
"\"\nMaybe I'm not the last!\n\"\n\n\n The thought struck him with suddenness, promisingly, edged with\n swelling comfort to fill his emptiness.\n\n\n Charles got up slowly, noticing for the first time that his fingers\n were badly cut. He wrapped a handkerchief around them and forgot them.\n He had to know—he had to find out.\nAs he turned to leave, he noticed again the woman lying in radiant\n state upon the bed. He walked to her side and leaned over, kissing her\n gently on the forehead. As he straightened up, his leg caught against\n her arm, pushing it slightly. The woman's arm slipped from its position\n and dangled from the edge of the bed like a crazy pendulum. Charles\n picked it up and folded it across her now cold breasts. He started\n to pull the sheet over her nude form, then stopped, smiling at his\n conventionality. After all, it didn't make any difference now.",
"What about—?\nChance. That was it! The laws of probability, the bell-shaped curve,\n normal distribution, rectilinear regression. More people per square\n foot in New York than elsewhere. The first person who died was from New\n York, so the last person who gave way to the disease should come from\n here too. Spin the wheel; throw the dice; toss the coin.\n\n\n So simple to explain by the laws of chance. No need for any underlying\n assumptions about good and evil, no need for teleological arguments\n concerning cause and effect. Simply explain it by chance. Somebody had\n to be the last to go and that was—\n\n\n \"No,\" Charles said, standing up in the quiet of the spring evening.\n \"No, chance won't do it. No man can reckon with chance. The mind\n rejects such things. There must be something beyond mere accident.\n There must be!\"\n\n\n He sighed slowly.",
"The whole thing was still like a dream to him, and as yet he couldn't\n decide whether it was a good or a bad dream. A year ago she had been\n unattainable, a face to conjure with in erotic dreams, far beyond his\n ken. A year ago she had been a public idol, the most popular actress of\n the day. And he had been a nobody, full of a nobody's idle hopes and\n schemes.\n\n\n And now he was lying in the bed next to hers in her swank Manhattan\n apartment in the most exclusive hotel in town. The unrealness of the\n situation overwhelmed him. His mind was a picture of confused thoughts.\n Meanings and answers to his questions slithered out of his reach.\n\n\n \"God,\" he said. It was not an exclamation, nor yet an expletive. It was\n a mere statement of fact.",
"Charles was hungry. He got up and started for one of the restaurants\n near the park. Later on, when there was more time, he'd find a piece\n of granite and move it to the plot. He could spend his free time\n carving on it, copying the inscription. He would make it into a real\n shrine; maybe he would practice up a bit and try to carve a statue to\n go with the stone.\n\n\n Somehow, though, since things were ready and it didn't make too much\n difference, it seemed to Charles that he'd probably have a long time\n to wait. \"Maybe it's just a disease, and I'm immune. I was immune to\n smallpox. The vaccination never took. That's probably it.\"",
"\"Phone Me in Central Park\"\nBy JAMES McCONNELL\nThere should be an epitaph for every\n\n man, big or little, but a really grand\n\n and special one for Loner Charlie.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nCharles turned over on his side to look at her. She lay quietly in the\n other bed, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was blonde to\n perfection, exquisitely shaped, and the rich promise of her body was\n exposed to his view.\n\n\n \"Why?\" he thought as he looked at her. \"Why did it have to happen like\n this?\"",
"The tantalizing thought of \"why\" puzzled its way back into his mind.\n But it seemed less pressing now that he had almost come to the\n conclusion that he would live for a long time. Later, in a few days\n perhaps, he would think about it. In a little while he'd have plenty of\n opportunity for hunting down the answer. This seemed good to him, for\n now he thought he almost had the answer, if there were an answer. He\n thought he had seen the solution peering out at him from the recesses\n of his mind, and he didn't like the expression on its face. Better to\n forget.\nCharles reached the broad boulevard. There was a large cafe just across\n from him, its front window caved in by a large truck. He stumbled and\n almost fell as he stepped from the curb.\n\n\n \"Look at me, nervous as a cat.\"\n\n\n He was trembling noticeably as he started across the street.",
"Charles refused to think. Machines, especially half-broken machines, do\n not think; they only work. Sweating, straining, bleeding, retching, he\n pushed himself towards his goal, trying to add one final touch of grace\n and custom to the rude irrationalness of it all.\n\n\n His eyes gave out a few feet from the pit. He felt his way towards it.\n Convulsions shook his body like a cat shakes a captive mouse. He humped\n his body forward between the seizures, hands outstretched, searching\n for the grave.\n\n\n And then he was upon it. One arm reached out for grass, and clutched\n bare space instead.\n\n\n He was home.\n\n\n He gathered energy from his final reservoirs of strength for one final\n movement that would throw him headlong into the shallow grave. He\n tensed his muscles, pulled his limbs up under him and started to roll\n into the hole.",
"He stopped. For even as he spoke, the light winked out! The counter\n clicked again.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n Alone.\n\n\n Alone!\n\n\n Charles screamed.\n\n\n The bottom dropped out from under him!\nWhy?\n\n\n Such a simple question, but in those three letters lay the essence of\n human nature. Why. The drive of curiosity. Stronger, in a way, than\n the so-called \"basic\" drives: hunger, thirst, sex, shelter, warmth,\n companionship, elimination. Certainly more decisive in the history of\n the race. Man began to think, to differentiate himself from the other\n animals, when he first asked the question: \"Why?\"",
"But thinking about \"why\" didn't answer the question itself, Charles\n thought. He looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in Central\n Park, alone except for a few stray corpses. But the park was fairly\n free of bodies.\n\n\n \"You've got about ten minutes warning,\" he said to himself. \"I guess\n that most people wanted to die inside of something—inside of anything.\n Not out in the unprotected open.\"\n\n\n The silence was like a weight hanging around his neck. Not an insect\n noise, not the chirp of a bird, not the sound of a car nor the scream\n of a plane. Not even a breeze to whisper among the leaves, he thought.\n Civilization equals life equals noise. Silence equals....\n\n\n Why. His mind kept returning to the question. Of all the people on\n earth, me. The last. Why me?",
"\"So now I'm a hermit, whether or not I like it,\" he said in derision to\n the gravel path as he walked along it. \"A hermit in the midst of a city\n of millions of—No, I forgot. There aren't any more people, are there?\"\n It was hard to realize, even now. \"A hermit, alone—and I haven't even\n got a cave....\"\n\n\n Charles stopped walking suddenly. No cave, he thought. No place to\n sleep out the long one, no place to rest while time came to change\n things around and make them for the better. No place to hide.\n\n\n And suddenly it was the most important thing in life to him to find his\n \"cave.\"",
"Average, that's what he was. Height: 5'11\". Weight: 165. Age: 32.\n Status: Married, once upon a time.\n\n\n The Norm, with no significant departures, all down the line. Church\n member, but not a good one. Could that be it? Could the most normal be\n the most perfect? Had he led the best of all possible lives? Was that\n it? Had God, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, spared his life, saved\n him, singled him out because he was most nearly a saint, most nearly\n Christ-like, most nearly....\n\n\n Lies—His mind snapped back to reality. He half smiled. Saint? Christ?\n The Second Coming?\n\n\n He was no saint.\n\n\n Charles sighed.",
"Charles struggled to end his body's disorganized responses, to\n channelize all his energy into one direction. His mind came back into\n action. He set up his goal; everything else seemed irrelevant: he had\n to get back to the park, to his hermit's cave, to his long, narrow\n home. He couldn't die until then.\n\n\n Ten minutes.\n\n\n He was allotted ten minutes before the end.\n\n\n It could have been ten years or ten seconds, for now objective time\n meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of measuring seconds and\n minutes. It was a matter of forgetting time and measuring space.\n\n\n He concentrated on the grave; he forced his body to become an unwilling\n machine. While he could, he walked, forcing himself on. When his legs\n gave way, he crawled. When his knees buckled, he rolled. When his\n stomach protested, he vomited. It made no difference.",
"Instantly the thought struck him with paralyzing devastation. The\n answer to it all poked its face out from the recesses of his mind and\n sapped the last bit of his energy, corroding his nerves and dying\n muscles. Now he knew, and the knowing was the end of it.\n\n\n He collapsed at the edge of the pit. Only one arm hung loosely down\n into it, swinging senseless in the air, pointing accusingly at the\n empty coffin.\n\n\n The world will end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the\n last man's anguished cry at the unreasonableness of it all.\n\n\n Charles screamed.\nThe large, invisible, ovular being that hung suspended over the Empire\n State Building rested from its exertion. Soon it was approached by\n another of its kind.\n\n\n \"It is finished?\" asked the second.\n\n\n \"Yes. Just now. I am resting.\"",
"The phonograph was near the door. On sudden impulse he switched it\n on, turned the volume up full, and in grim jest left it playing\n Rachmaninoff's\nIsle of the Dead\non full automatic. The music haunted\n him down the hall to the elevator that he had to run himself.\n\n\n The lobby was littered with debris, human and otherwise. Charles\n ignored it. The street that led towards the Bureau of Vital Statistics\n was a mess of desolate carnage. Charles overlooked it. Shop fronts\n smashed, stores looted, gyro-cars wrecked, proud buildings defaced.\n\n\n \"That was it,\" he said to himself. \"Pride. We called this the 'Proud\n Era.' Everything was better and bigger and nicer to have. Buildings\n were taller, men were healthier, most of the problems of humanity\n seemed licked, or nearly so. It was a time of free power, each small\n unit of population, each section of town operating on perpetual,\n ever-lasting, automatic atomic piles.",
"\"I can feel the emptiness of it.\"\n\n\n \"It was very good. Where were you?\"\n\n\n \"On the next planet out. No beauty to it at all; no system. How was\n yours?\"\n\n\n \"Beautiful,\" said the first. \"It went according to the strictest\n semantic relationship following the purest mathematical principles.\n They made it easy for me.\"\n\n\n \"Good.\"\n\n\n \"Well, where to now?\"\n\n\n \"There's another system about four thoughts away. We're due there soon.\"\n\n\n \"All right. Let's go.\"\n\n\n \"What's that you have there?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, this?\" replied the first. \"It's a higher neural order compendium\n the Things here made up. It's what I used.\"",
"\"I've got to find out,\" Charles told himself. He meant it, of course,\n but in a sense he was afraid—afraid that his trip to the Bureau might\n give him an answer he didn't dare listen to. \"But I've got to try.\" He\n walked on down the bloody street.\n\n\n Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's\n crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of\n a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every\n human on earth.\n\n\n Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by\n means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for\n man what no ordinary census could have. The machine knew who was alive,\n who was dead, and where everybody was.",
"He smiled. Strange, but now he wanted very much to go on living,\n alone or not. There were things he could do, ways to keep occupied.\n He wouldn't mind it so much. But he wanted more and more desperately\n with each passing second to retain his foothold on the tenuous path of\n physical existence.",
"Here another page crept in between the cracks of a pier on the\n riverfront, dropping gently to the caressing eddies of the water (read\n the names: Smith, Smitha, Smitj).\n\n\n And here two pages danced down into Central Park, pirouetted,\n promenaded, and finally came to rest against a propped-up piece of\n metal (read the names: Whit, Whita, Whitacomb).\n\n\n It was not until the dusty morning sun stirred up the breezes that they\n fluttered down into the shallow hole beneath, unnoticed. The writing on\n the metal, until then partially obscured by the papers, became legible:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH—\n\n CHARLES J. ZZYZST\n\n GO TO HELL!"
],
[
"All children had to have a brain-wave recording made by the Bureau\n during the first month of their life. And again at the age of 10 each\n child returned to the Bureau for a recheck. It was for this latter\n recording that Charles had come to the Bureau some twenty-two years\n before and a friendly guard had let him peep briefly into the computer\n room. The impression of intense activity, of organized confusion, of\n mechanical wonder had remained with him the rest of his life.\n\n\n \"So different now,\" he thought, surveying the room. \"Now it's empty, so\n empty.\" The machine seemed to reflect the stillness, the very deadness\n of the world. The silence became unbearable.\n\n\n Charles walked to the master control panel. With newly acquired\n dexterity he switched the computer screens on and watched them glow\n to life. All around the world sensitive receiving stations pulsed to\n activity, sending out searching fingers, hunting for elusive patterns\n of neutral energy, mapping and tabulating the results.",
"\"I've got to find out,\" Charles told himself. He meant it, of course,\n but in a sense he was afraid—afraid that his trip to the Bureau might\n give him an answer he didn't dare listen to. \"But I've got to try.\" He\n walked on down the bloody street.\n\n\n Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's\n crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of\n a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every\n human on earth.\n\n\n Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by\n means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for\n man what no ordinary census could have. The machine knew who was alive,\n who was dead, and where everybody was.",
"Once a year the Bureau issued The Index, an exact accounting of Earth's\n four billion inhabitants. Four billion names and addresses, compressed\n into microprint, a tremendous achievement even for the \"Proud Era.\"\n In all of his life, Charles had never once glanced at The Index.\n The average person had little necessity to do so since the Bureau\n information service would answer questions free of charge at any time.\n\n\n Reaching the gigantic building, Charles pushed aside the body of a\n young man and walked into the main foyer. Passing behind once-guarded\n doors, he entered the giant computer room and paused in admiration.\nOnly once, before the plague, had he seen the interior of this room.\n But he still remembered it and he still recalled the powerful emotional\n experience it had been those many years ago.",
"\"You can't take it with you, you know. They don't allow souvenirs.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"All right, all right. You're so good, see if you can compute the\n scatter probability.\"\n\n\n The first being moved imperceptably and the heavy plastoid binding of\n the book disappeared. The thousands of pages dropped softly, caught\n at the wind like hungry sails, separated, and pulled by the fingers of\n gravity, went their disparate ways.\nHere a page scuttled into a broken window of the Chrysler Building\n (read the names: Aabat, Aabbs, Aabbt).\n\n\n Here a page landed upright on the head of one of the library lions\n and sloughed softly to the ground (read the names: Looman, Loomana,\n Loomanabsky).",
"The main computer screen dominated one wall of the room. Other smaller\n screens clustered around it. On these screens could be graphed the\n population of any and every part of the globe. An illuminated counter\n immediately above it would give the numerical strength of the area\n being sampled while the screen would show population density by\n individual pinpoints of light that merged to form brightness patterns.\n\n\n \"I'll try New York first,\" he said to himself, knowing that he was a\n coward, afraid to check the whole world from the start. \"I'll start\n with New York and work up.\"\n\n\n Charles activated the switches that would flash a schematic map of New\n York on the screen. \"There's bound to be somebody else left here. After\n all, there were at least twenty of us just a couple of days ago.\" And\n one of them, a beautiful woman, had invited him up to her apartment,\n not because she liked him, but because....\n\n\n The main screen focused itself, the patterns shifting into a\n recognizable perceptual image.",
"He began to tremble violently. The silence of the room began to press\n quickly in on him. His frantic fingers searched for the computer\n controls.\n\n\n New York State. One.\n\n\n The entire United States. One.\n\n\n The western hemisphere, including islands.\n\n\n (Was that a point of light in Brazil? No. Just a ghost image).\n\n\n One.\n\n\n The Pacific area, Asia, Australia, Asia Minor, Russia and the Near\n East, Africa and then Europe.\n\n\n England!\n\n\n There was a light in England! Someone else still lived! The counter\n clicked forward.\n\n\n Two!\n\n\n His trembling stopped. He breathed again.\n\n\n \"Of course. London was at least as populous as New York City before the\n plague. It's only logical that—\"",
"The phonograph was near the door. On sudden impulse he switched it\n on, turned the volume up full, and in grim jest left it playing\n Rachmaninoff's\nIsle of the Dead\non full automatic. The music haunted\n him down the hall to the elevator that he had to run himself.\n\n\n The lobby was littered with debris, human and otherwise. Charles\n ignored it. The street that led towards the Bureau of Vital Statistics\n was a mess of desolate carnage. Charles overlooked it. Shop fronts\n smashed, stores looted, gyro-cars wrecked, proud buildings defaced.\n\n\n \"That was it,\" he said to himself. \"Pride. We called this the 'Proud\n Era.' Everything was better and bigger and nicer to have. Buildings\n were taller, men were healthier, most of the problems of humanity\n seemed licked, or nearly so. It was a time of free power, each small\n unit of population, each section of town operating on perpetual,\n ever-lasting, automatic atomic piles.",
"\"Why, it was just yesterday (or was it the day before?) that ten of\n us, at least, met here to check the figures. There were lots of us\n alive then.\" Including the blond young woman who had died just this\n afternoon....\n\n\n Charles stopped talking and forced his eyes upwards. Peripheral vision\n caught first the vague outlines of the lower part of the map. His eyes\n continued to move, slowly, reluctantly. They caught the over-all relief\n of Greater New York City—and then concentrated on the single, shining\n dot at the very heart of the map—and he understood.\n\n\n His eyes stabbed quickly for the counter above the screen.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n He gasped.\n\n\n The counter read\none\n.\n\n\n Charles was by himself, the last person alive in all of New York City.",
"Here another page crept in between the cracks of a pier on the\n riverfront, dropping gently to the caressing eddies of the water (read\n the names: Smith, Smitha, Smitj).\n\n\n And here two pages danced down into Central Park, pirouetted,\n promenaded, and finally came to rest against a propped-up piece of\n metal (read the names: Whit, Whita, Whitacomb).\n\n\n It was not until the dusty morning sun stirred up the breezes that they\n fluttered down into the shallow hole beneath, unnoticed. The writing on\n the metal, until then partially obscured by the papers, became legible:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH—\n\n CHARLES J. ZZYZST\n\n GO TO HELL!",
"Average, that's what he was. Height: 5'11\". Weight: 165. Age: 32.\n Status: Married, once upon a time.\n\n\n The Norm, with no significant departures, all down the line. Church\n member, but not a good one. Could that be it? Could the most normal be\n the most perfect? Had he led the best of all possible lives? Was that\n it? Had God, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, spared his life, saved\n him, singled him out because he was most nearly a saint, most nearly\n Christ-like, most nearly....\n\n\n Lies—His mind snapped back to reality. He half smiled. Saint? Christ?\n The Second Coming?\n\n\n He was no saint.\n\n\n Charles sighed.",
"\"We were free. We seemed, almost, to have accomplished something. The\n world was running well. No wonder we called it the 'Proud Era.' Life\n was fun, just a bowl of cherries, until....\"\n\n\n Two years ago the animals had started dying. Strangely enough the\n rats had gone first, to anybody's notice. Sales of poison dropped,\n scientific laboratories chained to a perpetual rodent-cycle began to\n complain bitterly.\n\n\n Then the lovers who hunted out and haunted the lonely lanes through the\n countryside began to remark that the locusts were late that year. The\n Southern states joyously reported that mosquito control was working to\n an unprecedented degree. The largest cotton crop ever was forecast and\n rumors from Mexico had it that no one had died from scorpion bite in\n several weeks.",
"A thought teased at him. Charles looked at the woman again and decided\n that she still looked beautiful in spite of the harshness of the\n room's lighting. He touched buttons by the edge of the bed and the\n illumination quieted to a soft glow, wrapping her in a radiant halo.\n Charles smiled wanly and got up. He stood by the bed looking at her.\n\n\n \"I could have fallen in love with you once. A year ago, perhaps, or\n longer. But not now. Not now.\" He turned away and walked to the window.\n \"Now the world is dead. The whole world is dead.\"\n\n\n New York lay quietly below him. It was the hour of indecision when\n day has not quite made up its mind to leave and night has not yet\n attacked in force. The streetlights were already on, making geometric\n patterns through the dusk of Central Park. Some of the billboards were\n shining, their relays activated by darkness-sensitized solenoids. A\n reddish-orange pallor hung from the sky.",
"Charles struggled to end his body's disorganized responses, to\n channelize all his energy into one direction. His mind came back into\n action. He set up his goal; everything else seemed irrelevant: he had\n to get back to the park, to his hermit's cave, to his long, narrow\n home. He couldn't die until then.\n\n\n Ten minutes.\n\n\n He was allotted ten minutes before the end.\n\n\n It could have been ten years or ten seconds, for now objective time\n meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of measuring seconds and\n minutes. It was a matter of forgetting time and measuring space.\n\n\n He concentrated on the grave; he forced his body to become an unwilling\n machine. While he could, he walked, forcing himself on. When his legs\n gave way, he crawled. When his knees buckled, he rolled. When his\n stomach protested, he vomited. It made no difference.",
"Charles was hungry. He got up and started for one of the restaurants\n near the park. Later on, when there was more time, he'd find a piece\n of granite and move it to the plot. He could spend his free time\n carving on it, copying the inscription. He would make it into a real\n shrine; maybe he would practice up a bit and try to carve a statue to\n go with the stone.\n\n\n Somehow, though, since things were ready and it didn't make too much\n difference, it seemed to Charles that he'd probably have a long time\n to wait. \"Maybe it's just a disease, and I'm immune. I was immune to\n smallpox. The vaccination never took. That's probably it.\"",
"Instantly the thought struck him with paralyzing devastation. The\n answer to it all poked its face out from the recesses of his mind and\n sapped the last bit of his energy, corroding his nerves and dying\n muscles. Now he knew, and the knowing was the end of it.\n\n\n He collapsed at the edge of the pit. Only one arm hung loosely down\n into it, swinging senseless in the air, pointing accusingly at the\n empty coffin.\n\n\n The world will end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the\n last man's anguished cry at the unreasonableness of it all.\n\n\n Charles screamed.\nThe large, invisible, ovular being that hung suspended over the Empire\n State Building rested from its exertion. Soon it was approached by\n another of its kind.\n\n\n \"It is finished?\" asked the second.\n\n\n \"Yes. Just now. I am resting.\"",
"Charles refused to think. Machines, especially half-broken machines, do\n not think; they only work. Sweating, straining, bleeding, retching, he\n pushed himself towards his goal, trying to add one final touch of grace\n and custom to the rude irrationalness of it all.\n\n\n His eyes gave out a few feet from the pit. He felt his way towards it.\n Convulsions shook his body like a cat shakes a captive mouse. He humped\n his body forward between the seizures, hands outstretched, searching\n for the grave.\n\n\n And then he was upon it. One arm reached out for grass, and clutched\n bare space instead.\n\n\n He was home.\n\n\n He gathered energy from his final reservoirs of strength for one final\n movement that would throw him headlong into the shallow grave. He\n tensed his muscles, pulled his limbs up under him and started to roll\n into the hole.",
"What about—?\nChance. That was it! The laws of probability, the bell-shaped curve,\n normal distribution, rectilinear regression. More people per square\n foot in New York than elsewhere. The first person who died was from New\n York, so the last person who gave way to the disease should come from\n here too. Spin the wheel; throw the dice; toss the coin.\n\n\n So simple to explain by the laws of chance. No need for any underlying\n assumptions about good and evil, no need for teleological arguments\n concerning cause and effect. Simply explain it by chance. Somebody had\n to be the last to go and that was—\n\n\n \"No,\" Charles said, standing up in the quiet of the spring evening.\n \"No, chance won't do it. No man can reckon with chance. The mind\n rejects such things. There must be something beyond mere accident.\n There must be!\"\n\n\n He sighed slowly.",
"But thinking about \"why\" didn't answer the question itself, Charles\n thought. He looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in Central\n Park, alone except for a few stray corpses. But the park was fairly\n free of bodies.\n\n\n \"You've got about ten minutes warning,\" he said to himself. \"I guess\n that most people wanted to die inside of something—inside of anything.\n Not out in the unprotected open.\"\n\n\n The silence was like a weight hanging around his neck. Not an insect\n noise, not the chirp of a bird, not the sound of a car nor the scream\n of a plane. Not even a breeze to whisper among the leaves, he thought.\n Civilization equals life equals noise. Silence equals....\n\n\n Why. His mind kept returning to the question. Of all the people on\n earth, me. The last. Why me?",
"\"I—\" He started to say something, to think something. But some hidden\n part of his mind clamped down, obscuring the thought, rejecting the\n concept.\n\n\n The tremor turned to a shake before he reached the far curb, and the\n first burst of wild pain came as he laid his shoulder against the door\n to the restaurant. This was the way the plague began, but—His mind\n quickly repressed the idea. It couldn't be the plague. He was immune!\n\n\n Another burst of pulsating, shattering pain crashed through his body,\n tearing down the defenses of his mind, putting an end of his thoughts\n of immunity. Colors flared before his eyes, a persistent, irresistible\n susurrus flooded his ears.\n\n\n He wanted to protest, but there was no one to listen to him. He\n appealed to every divinity he knew, all the time knowing it would be\n useless. His body, out of his voluntary control, tried to run off in\n all directions at once.",
"\"I can feel the emptiness of it.\"\n\n\n \"It was very good. Where were you?\"\n\n\n \"On the next planet out. No beauty to it at all; no system. How was\n yours?\"\n\n\n \"Beautiful,\" said the first. \"It went according to the strictest\n semantic relationship following the purest mathematical principles.\n They made it easy for me.\"\n\n\n \"Good.\"\n\n\n \"Well, where to now?\"\n\n\n \"There's another system about four thoughts away. We're due there soon.\"\n\n\n \"All right. Let's go.\"\n\n\n \"What's that you have there?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, this?\" replied the first. \"It's a higher neural order compendium\n the Things here made up. It's what I used.\""
],
[
"A thought teased at him. Charles looked at the woman again and decided\n that she still looked beautiful in spite of the harshness of the\n room's lighting. He touched buttons by the edge of the bed and the\n illumination quieted to a soft glow, wrapping her in a radiant halo.\n Charles smiled wanly and got up. He stood by the bed looking at her.\n\n\n \"I could have fallen in love with you once. A year ago, perhaps, or\n longer. But not now. Not now.\" He turned away and walked to the window.\n \"Now the world is dead. The whole world is dead.\"\n\n\n New York lay quietly below him. It was the hour of indecision when\n day has not quite made up its mind to leave and night has not yet\n attacked in force. The streetlights were already on, making geometric\n patterns through the dusk of Central Park. Some of the billboards were\n shining, their relays activated by darkness-sensitized solenoids. A\n reddish-orange pallor hung from the sky.",
"\"\nMaybe I'm not the last!\n\"\n\n\n The thought struck him with suddenness, promisingly, edged with\n swelling comfort to fill his emptiness.\n\n\n Charles got up slowly, noticing for the first time that his fingers\n were badly cut. He wrapped a handkerchief around them and forgot them.\n He had to know—he had to find out.\nAs he turned to leave, he noticed again the woman lying in radiant\n state upon the bed. He walked to her side and leaned over, kissing her\n gently on the forehead. As he straightened up, his leg caught against\n her arm, pushing it slightly. The woman's arm slipped from its position\n and dangled from the edge of the bed like a crazy pendulum. Charles\n picked it up and folded it across her now cold breasts. He started\n to pull the sheet over her nude form, then stopped, smiling at his\n conventionality. After all, it didn't make any difference now.",
"It had been very pleasant that afternoon. She had given of herself\n freely, warmly, and Charles had accepted. But then he had known\n that she would. It was not him, it was the circumstances. Under the\n circumstances, she would have given herself to any man—\n\n\n \"Why did it have to be her—or me? Why should it have to happen to\n anybody! Why!\"\nShe would have given herself to any man—\nHis thoughts beat a rapid crescendo, activating emotions, stimulating\n sensations of angry rage. He wanted to cry, to weep angry tears of\n protest.\n\n\n To any man, WHO HAPPENED TO BE THE LAST MAN ON EARTH!\n\n\n Charles picked up a heavy book end off the table and crashed it through\n the thick pane of window glass.",
"Charles was hungry. He got up and started for one of the restaurants\n near the park. Later on, when there was more time, he'd find a piece\n of granite and move it to the plot. He could spend his free time\n carving on it, copying the inscription. He would make it into a real\n shrine; maybe he would practice up a bit and try to carve a statue to\n go with the stone.\n\n\n Somehow, though, since things were ready and it didn't make too much\n difference, it seemed to Charles that he'd probably have a long time\n to wait. \"Maybe it's just a disease, and I'm immune. I was immune to\n smallpox. The vaccination never took. That's probably it.\"",
"\"So now I'm a hermit, whether or not I like it,\" he said in derision to\n the gravel path as he walked along it. \"A hermit in the midst of a city\n of millions of—No, I forgot. There aren't any more people, are there?\"\n It was hard to realize, even now. \"A hermit, alone—and I haven't even\n got a cave....\"\n\n\n Charles stopped walking suddenly. No cave, he thought. No place to\n sleep out the long one, no place to rest while time came to change\n things around and make them for the better. No place to hide.\n\n\n And suddenly it was the most important thing in life to him to find his\n \"cave.\"",
"Charles struggled to end his body's disorganized responses, to\n channelize all his energy into one direction. His mind came back into\n action. He set up his goal; everything else seemed irrelevant: he had\n to get back to the park, to his hermit's cave, to his long, narrow\n home. He couldn't die until then.\n\n\n Ten minutes.\n\n\n He was allotted ten minutes before the end.\n\n\n It could have been ten years or ten seconds, for now objective time\n meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of measuring seconds and\n minutes. It was a matter of forgetting time and measuring space.\n\n\n He concentrated on the grave; he forced his body to become an unwilling\n machine. While he could, he walked, forcing himself on. When his legs\n gave way, he crawled. When his knees buckled, he rolled. When his\n stomach protested, he vomited. It made no difference.",
"Charles refused to think. Machines, especially half-broken machines, do\n not think; they only work. Sweating, straining, bleeding, retching, he\n pushed himself towards his goal, trying to add one final touch of grace\n and custom to the rude irrationalness of it all.\n\n\n His eyes gave out a few feet from the pit. He felt his way towards it.\n Convulsions shook his body like a cat shakes a captive mouse. He humped\n his body forward between the seizures, hands outstretched, searching\n for the grave.\n\n\n And then he was upon it. One arm reached out for grass, and clutched\n bare space instead.\n\n\n He was home.\n\n\n He gathered energy from his final reservoirs of strength for one final\n movement that would throw him headlong into the shallow grave. He\n tensed his muscles, pulled his limbs up under him and started to roll\n into the hole.",
"The whole thing was still like a dream to him, and as yet he couldn't\n decide whether it was a good or a bad dream. A year ago she had been\n unattainable, a face to conjure with in erotic dreams, far beyond his\n ken. A year ago she had been a public idol, the most popular actress of\n the day. And he had been a nobody, full of a nobody's idle hopes and\n schemes.\n\n\n And now he was lying in the bed next to hers in her swank Manhattan\n apartment in the most exclusive hotel in town. The unrealness of the\n situation overwhelmed him. His mind was a picture of confused thoughts.\n Meanings and answers to his questions slithered out of his reach.\n\n\n \"God,\" he said. It was not an exclamation, nor yet an expletive. It was\n a mere statement of fact.",
"The tantalizing thought of \"why\" puzzled its way back into his mind.\n But it seemed less pressing now that he had almost come to the\n conclusion that he would live for a long time. Later, in a few days\n perhaps, he would think about it. In a little while he'd have plenty of\n opportunity for hunting down the answer. This seemed good to him, for\n now he thought he almost had the answer, if there were an answer. He\n thought he had seen the solution peering out at him from the recesses\n of his mind, and he didn't like the expression on its face. Better to\n forget.\nCharles reached the broad boulevard. There was a large cafe just across\n from him, its front window caved in by a large truck. He stumbled and\n almost fell as he stepped from the curb.\n\n\n \"Look at me, nervous as a cat.\"\n\n\n He was trembling noticeably as he started across the street.",
"The phonograph was near the door. On sudden impulse he switched it\n on, turned the volume up full, and in grim jest left it playing\n Rachmaninoff's\nIsle of the Dead\non full automatic. The music haunted\n him down the hall to the elevator that he had to run himself.\n\n\n The lobby was littered with debris, human and otherwise. Charles\n ignored it. The street that led towards the Bureau of Vital Statistics\n was a mess of desolate carnage. Charles overlooked it. Shop fronts\n smashed, stores looted, gyro-cars wrecked, proud buildings defaced.\n\n\n \"That was it,\" he said to himself. \"Pride. We called this the 'Proud\n Era.' Everything was better and bigger and nicer to have. Buildings\n were taller, men were healthier, most of the problems of humanity\n seemed licked, or nearly so. It was a time of free power, each small\n unit of population, each section of town operating on perpetual,\n ever-lasting, automatic atomic piles.",
"\"Phone Me in Central Park\"\nBy JAMES McCONNELL\nThere should be an epitaph for every\n\n man, big or little, but a really grand\n\n and special one for Loner Charlie.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nCharles turned over on his side to look at her. She lay quietly in the\n other bed, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was blonde to\n perfection, exquisitely shaped, and the rich promise of her body was\n exposed to his view.\n\n\n \"Why?\" he thought as he looked at her. \"Why did it have to happen like\n this?\"",
"What about—?\nChance. That was it! The laws of probability, the bell-shaped curve,\n normal distribution, rectilinear regression. More people per square\n foot in New York than elsewhere. The first person who died was from New\n York, so the last person who gave way to the disease should come from\n here too. Spin the wheel; throw the dice; toss the coin.\n\n\n So simple to explain by the laws of chance. No need for any underlying\n assumptions about good and evil, no need for teleological arguments\n concerning cause and effect. Simply explain it by chance. Somebody had\n to be the last to go and that was—\n\n\n \"No,\" Charles said, standing up in the quiet of the spring evening.\n \"No, chance won't do it. No man can reckon with chance. The mind\n rejects such things. There must be something beyond mere accident.\n There must be!\"\n\n\n He sighed slowly.",
"Instantly the thought struck him with paralyzing devastation. The\n answer to it all poked its face out from the recesses of his mind and\n sapped the last bit of his energy, corroding his nerves and dying\n muscles. Now he knew, and the knowing was the end of it.\n\n\n He collapsed at the edge of the pit. Only one arm hung loosely down\n into it, swinging senseless in the air, pointing accusingly at the\n empty coffin.\n\n\n The world will end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the\n last man's anguished cry at the unreasonableness of it all.\n\n\n Charles screamed.\nThe large, invisible, ovular being that hung suspended over the Empire\n State Building rested from its exertion. Soon it was approached by\n another of its kind.\n\n\n \"It is finished?\" asked the second.\n\n\n \"Yes. Just now. I am resting.\"",
"He stopped. For even as he spoke, the light winked out! The counter\n clicked again.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n Alone.\n\n\n Alone!\n\n\n Charles screamed.\n\n\n The bottom dropped out from under him!\nWhy?\n\n\n Such a simple question, but in those three letters lay the essence of\n human nature. Why. The drive of curiosity. Stronger, in a way, than\n the so-called \"basic\" drives: hunger, thirst, sex, shelter, warmth,\n companionship, elimination. Certainly more decisive in the history of\n the race. Man began to think, to differentiate himself from the other\n animals, when he first asked the question: \"Why?\"",
"\"Why, it was just yesterday (or was it the day before?) that ten of\n us, at least, met here to check the figures. There were lots of us\n alive then.\" Including the blond young woman who had died just this\n afternoon....\n\n\n Charles stopped talking and forced his eyes upwards. Peripheral vision\n caught first the vague outlines of the lower part of the map. His eyes\n continued to move, slowly, reluctantly. They caught the over-all relief\n of Greater New York City—and then concentrated on the single, shining\n dot at the very heart of the map—and he understood.\n\n\n His eyes stabbed quickly for the counter above the screen.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n He gasped.\n\n\n The counter read\none\n.\n\n\n Charles was by himself, the last person alive in all of New York City.",
"\"You can't take it with you, you know. They don't allow souvenirs.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"All right, all right. You're so good, see if you can compute the\n scatter probability.\"\n\n\n The first being moved imperceptably and the heavy plastoid binding of\n the book disappeared. The thousands of pages dropped softly, caught\n at the wind like hungry sails, separated, and pulled by the fingers of\n gravity, went their disparate ways.\nHere a page scuttled into a broken window of the Chrysler Building\n (read the names: Aabat, Aabbs, Aabbt).\n\n\n Here a page landed upright on the head of one of the library lions\n and sloughed softly to the ground (read the names: Looman, Loomana,\n Loomanabsky).",
"But thinking about \"why\" didn't answer the question itself, Charles\n thought. He looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in Central\n Park, alone except for a few stray corpses. But the park was fairly\n free of bodies.\n\n\n \"You've got about ten minutes warning,\" he said to himself. \"I guess\n that most people wanted to die inside of something—inside of anything.\n Not out in the unprotected open.\"\n\n\n The silence was like a weight hanging around his neck. Not an insect\n noise, not the chirp of a bird, not the sound of a car nor the scream\n of a plane. Not even a breeze to whisper among the leaves, he thought.\n Civilization equals life equals noise. Silence equals....\n\n\n Why. His mind kept returning to the question. Of all the people on\n earth, me. The last. Why me?",
"Here another page crept in between the cracks of a pier on the\n riverfront, dropping gently to the caressing eddies of the water (read\n the names: Smith, Smitha, Smitj).\n\n\n And here two pages danced down into Central Park, pirouetted,\n promenaded, and finally came to rest against a propped-up piece of\n metal (read the names: Whit, Whita, Whitacomb).\n\n\n It was not until the dusty morning sun stirred up the breezes that they\n fluttered down into the shallow hole beneath, unnoticed. The writing on\n the metal, until then partially obscured by the papers, became legible:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH—\n\n CHARLES J. ZZYZST\n\n GO TO HELL!",
"\"I've got to find out,\" Charles told himself. He meant it, of course,\n but in a sense he was afraid—afraid that his trip to the Bureau might\n give him an answer he didn't dare listen to. \"But I've got to try.\" He\n walked on down the bloody street.\n\n\n Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's\n crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of\n a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every\n human on earth.\n\n\n Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by\n means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for\n man what no ordinary census could have. The machine knew who was alive,\n who was dead, and where everybody was.",
"A gust of wind from the outside breezed through the shattered opening,\n attacking his olfactory patch with the retching smell of decaying\n flesh. Charles ignored it. Even smells had lost their customary\n meanings.\n\n\n He felt the rage build up inside again, tearing at his viscera. His\n stomach clenched up like an angry fist.\n\n\n \"But I don't want to be the last man alive!\" he shouted. \"I don't know\n what to do! I don't know where to go, how to act! I just don't know—\"\n\n\n A paroxysm of sobbing shook his body. Trembling, he dropped to his\n knees, his head against the cold firmness of the sill, his hands\n clutched tightly around the jagged edges of the window pane. In spite\n of the sharp pain that raced through his system, in spite of the\n bright, warm, red stream that trickled down his face, he knelt by the\n window for several minutes."
],
[
"A month later the meat animals, the birds and the household pets\n began dropping as rapidly as the flies which had dropped earlier.\n Congress was called into special session, as were all of the national\n governments around the world. The U.N. met at emergency sessions to\n cope with the situation. The president of the world-wide Society for\n the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals committed suicide.\n\n\n Within a year it was obvious to everyone that man was the only animal\n left on earth.\n\n\n The panic which had begun with the death of the animals was quieted\n somewhat by the fact that humans seemed immune to the pandemic. But the\n lakes full of dead fish caused a great stink and residents along the\n coasts began to move inland. Sales of perfumes and deodorants soared.\n\n\n Then just one year ago, the first human became infected with the\n strange malady. Within six months, half of the world's population was\n gone. Less than a month ago no more than a few thousand people remained\n in New York. And now....",
"\"We were free. We seemed, almost, to have accomplished something. The\n world was running well. No wonder we called it the 'Proud Era.' Life\n was fun, just a bowl of cherries, until....\"\n\n\n Two years ago the animals had started dying. Strangely enough the\n rats had gone first, to anybody's notice. Sales of poison dropped,\n scientific laboratories chained to a perpetual rodent-cycle began to\n complain bitterly.\n\n\n Then the lovers who hunted out and haunted the lonely lanes through the\n countryside began to remark that the locusts were late that year. The\n Southern states joyously reported that mosquito control was working to\n an unprecedented degree. The largest cotton crop ever was forecast and\n rumors from Mexico had it that no one had died from scorpion bite in\n several weeks.",
"He began to tremble violently. The silence of the room began to press\n quickly in on him. His frantic fingers searched for the computer\n controls.\n\n\n New York State. One.\n\n\n The entire United States. One.\n\n\n The western hemisphere, including islands.\n\n\n (Was that a point of light in Brazil? No. Just a ghost image).\n\n\n One.\n\n\n The Pacific area, Asia, Australia, Asia Minor, Russia and the Near\n East, Africa and then Europe.\n\n\n England!\n\n\n There was a light in England! Someone else still lived! The counter\n clicked forward.\n\n\n Two!\n\n\n His trembling stopped. He breathed again.\n\n\n \"Of course. London was at least as populous as New York City before the\n plague. It's only logical that—\"",
"But thinking about \"why\" didn't answer the question itself, Charles\n thought. He looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in Central\n Park, alone except for a few stray corpses. But the park was fairly\n free of bodies.\n\n\n \"You've got about ten minutes warning,\" he said to himself. \"I guess\n that most people wanted to die inside of something—inside of anything.\n Not out in the unprotected open.\"\n\n\n The silence was like a weight hanging around his neck. Not an insect\n noise, not the chirp of a bird, not the sound of a car nor the scream\n of a plane. Not even a breeze to whisper among the leaves, he thought.\n Civilization equals life equals noise. Silence equals....\n\n\n Why. His mind kept returning to the question. Of all the people on\n earth, me. The last. Why me?",
"\"I've got to find out,\" Charles told himself. He meant it, of course,\n but in a sense he was afraid—afraid that his trip to the Bureau might\n give him an answer he didn't dare listen to. \"But I've got to try.\" He\n walked on down the bloody street.\n\n\n Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's\n crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of\n a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every\n human on earth.\n\n\n Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by\n means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for\n man what no ordinary census could have. The machine knew who was alive,\n who was dead, and where everybody was.",
"\"Why, it was just yesterday (or was it the day before?) that ten of\n us, at least, met here to check the figures. There were lots of us\n alive then.\" Including the blond young woman who had died just this\n afternoon....\n\n\n Charles stopped talking and forced his eyes upwards. Peripheral vision\n caught first the vague outlines of the lower part of the map. His eyes\n continued to move, slowly, reluctantly. They caught the over-all relief\n of Greater New York City—and then concentrated on the single, shining\n dot at the very heart of the map—and he understood.\n\n\n His eyes stabbed quickly for the counter above the screen.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n He gasped.\n\n\n The counter read\none\n.\n\n\n Charles was by himself, the last person alive in all of New York City.",
"Here another page crept in between the cracks of a pier on the\n riverfront, dropping gently to the caressing eddies of the water (read\n the names: Smith, Smitha, Smitj).\n\n\n And here two pages danced down into Central Park, pirouetted,\n promenaded, and finally came to rest against a propped-up piece of\n metal (read the names: Whit, Whita, Whitacomb).\n\n\n It was not until the dusty morning sun stirred up the breezes that they\n fluttered down into the shallow hole beneath, unnoticed. The writing on\n the metal, until then partially obscured by the papers, became legible:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH—\n\n CHARLES J. ZZYZST\n\n GO TO HELL!",
"A gust of wind from the outside breezed through the shattered opening,\n attacking his olfactory patch with the retching smell of decaying\n flesh. Charles ignored it. Even smells had lost their customary\n meanings.\n\n\n He felt the rage build up inside again, tearing at his viscera. His\n stomach clenched up like an angry fist.\n\n\n \"But I don't want to be the last man alive!\" he shouted. \"I don't know\n what to do! I don't know where to go, how to act! I just don't know—\"\n\n\n A paroxysm of sobbing shook his body. Trembling, he dropped to his\n knees, his head against the cold firmness of the sill, his hands\n clutched tightly around the jagged edges of the window pane. In spite\n of the sharp pain that raced through his system, in spite of the\n bright, warm, red stream that trickled down his face, he knelt by the\n window for several minutes.",
"Instantly the thought struck him with paralyzing devastation. The\n answer to it all poked its face out from the recesses of his mind and\n sapped the last bit of his energy, corroding his nerves and dying\n muscles. Now he knew, and the knowing was the end of it.\n\n\n He collapsed at the edge of the pit. Only one arm hung loosely down\n into it, swinging senseless in the air, pointing accusingly at the\n empty coffin.\n\n\n The world will end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the\n last man's anguished cry at the unreasonableness of it all.\n\n\n Charles screamed.\nThe large, invisible, ovular being that hung suspended over the Empire\n State Building rested from its exertion. Soon it was approached by\n another of its kind.\n\n\n \"It is finished?\" asked the second.\n\n\n \"Yes. Just now. I am resting.\"",
"\"I—\" He started to say something, to think something. But some hidden\n part of his mind clamped down, obscuring the thought, rejecting the\n concept.\n\n\n The tremor turned to a shake before he reached the far curb, and the\n first burst of wild pain came as he laid his shoulder against the door\n to the restaurant. This was the way the plague began, but—His mind\n quickly repressed the idea. It couldn't be the plague. He was immune!\n\n\n Another burst of pulsating, shattering pain crashed through his body,\n tearing down the defenses of his mind, putting an end of his thoughts\n of immunity. Colors flared before his eyes, a persistent, irresistible\n susurrus flooded his ears.\n\n\n He wanted to protest, but there was no one to listen to him. He\n appealed to every divinity he knew, all the time knowing it would be\n useless. His body, out of his voluntary control, tried to run off in\n all directions at once.",
"A sheet of metal, bent double, served for the monument proper. A nearby\n tool shed yielded up a can of paint and a brush. By the glow of one of\n the streetlights Charles worked out the inscription.\n\n\n \"It ought to be something impressive,\" he thought out loud. \"Something\n fitting the occasion.\"\n\n\n What did one say on these situations? There was so little chance to\n practice up for things like this. But it ought to be good, it ought to\n be proper.\n\n\n \"'In this now hallowed corner of the planet Earth—' No. That sounds\n too ... too....\"\n\n\n Make it simple, he thought. And he finally wrote:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH\n\n\n Yes. That was it. Simple. Let whoever came afterwards figure out the\n rest. Let them decide. He smiled and finished the painting.",
"What about—?\nChance. That was it! The laws of probability, the bell-shaped curve,\n normal distribution, rectilinear regression. More people per square\n foot in New York than elsewhere. The first person who died was from New\n York, so the last person who gave way to the disease should come from\n here too. Spin the wheel; throw the dice; toss the coin.\n\n\n So simple to explain by the laws of chance. No need for any underlying\n assumptions about good and evil, no need for teleological arguments\n concerning cause and effect. Simply explain it by chance. Somebody had\n to be the last to go and that was—\n\n\n \"No,\" Charles said, standing up in the quiet of the spring evening.\n \"No, chance won't do it. No man can reckon with chance. The mind\n rejects such things. There must be something beyond mere accident.\n There must be!\"\n\n\n He sighed slowly.",
"It had been very pleasant that afternoon. She had given of herself\n freely, warmly, and Charles had accepted. But then he had known\n that she would. It was not him, it was the circumstances. Under the\n circumstances, she would have given herself to any man—\n\n\n \"Why did it have to be her—or me? Why should it have to happen to\n anybody! Why!\"\nShe would have given herself to any man—\nHis thoughts beat a rapid crescendo, activating emotions, stimulating\n sensations of angry rage. He wanted to cry, to weep angry tears of\n protest.\n\n\n To any man, WHO HAPPENED TO BE THE LAST MAN ON EARTH!\n\n\n Charles picked up a heavy book end off the table and crashed it through\n the thick pane of window glass.",
"Once a year the Bureau issued The Index, an exact accounting of Earth's\n four billion inhabitants. Four billion names and addresses, compressed\n into microprint, a tremendous achievement even for the \"Proud Era.\"\n In all of his life, Charles had never once glanced at The Index.\n The average person had little necessity to do so since the Bureau\n information service would answer questions free of charge at any time.\n\n\n Reaching the gigantic building, Charles pushed aside the body of a\n young man and walked into the main foyer. Passing behind once-guarded\n doors, he entered the giant computer room and paused in admiration.\nOnly once, before the plague, had he seen the interior of this room.\n But he still remembered it and he still recalled the powerful emotional\n experience it had been those many years ago.",
"\"\nMaybe I'm not the last!\n\"\n\n\n The thought struck him with suddenness, promisingly, edged with\n swelling comfort to fill his emptiness.\n\n\n Charles got up slowly, noticing for the first time that his fingers\n were badly cut. He wrapped a handkerchief around them and forgot them.\n He had to know—he had to find out.\nAs he turned to leave, he noticed again the woman lying in radiant\n state upon the bed. He walked to her side and leaned over, kissing her\n gently on the forehead. As he straightened up, his leg caught against\n her arm, pushing it slightly. The woman's arm slipped from its position\n and dangled from the edge of the bed like a crazy pendulum. Charles\n picked it up and folded it across her now cold breasts. He started\n to pull the sheet over her nude form, then stopped, smiling at his\n conventionality. After all, it didn't make any difference now.",
"Charles struggled to end his body's disorganized responses, to\n channelize all his energy into one direction. His mind came back into\n action. He set up his goal; everything else seemed irrelevant: he had\n to get back to the park, to his hermit's cave, to his long, narrow\n home. He couldn't die until then.\n\n\n Ten minutes.\n\n\n He was allotted ten minutes before the end.\n\n\n It could have been ten years or ten seconds, for now objective time\n meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of measuring seconds and\n minutes. It was a matter of forgetting time and measuring space.\n\n\n He concentrated on the grave; he forced his body to become an unwilling\n machine. While he could, he walked, forcing himself on. When his legs\n gave way, he crawled. When his knees buckled, he rolled. When his\n stomach protested, he vomited. It made no difference.",
"The main computer screen dominated one wall of the room. Other smaller\n screens clustered around it. On these screens could be graphed the\n population of any and every part of the globe. An illuminated counter\n immediately above it would give the numerical strength of the area\n being sampled while the screen would show population density by\n individual pinpoints of light that merged to form brightness patterns.\n\n\n \"I'll try New York first,\" he said to himself, knowing that he was a\n coward, afraid to check the whole world from the start. \"I'll start\n with New York and work up.\"\n\n\n Charles activated the switches that would flash a schematic map of New\n York on the screen. \"There's bound to be somebody else left here. After\n all, there were at least twenty of us just a couple of days ago.\" And\n one of them, a beautiful woman, had invited him up to her apartment,\n not because she liked him, but because....\n\n\n The main screen focused itself, the patterns shifting into a\n recognizable perceptual image.",
"Charles refused to think. Machines, especially half-broken machines, do\n not think; they only work. Sweating, straining, bleeding, retching, he\n pushed himself towards his goal, trying to add one final touch of grace\n and custom to the rude irrationalness of it all.\n\n\n His eyes gave out a few feet from the pit. He felt his way towards it.\n Convulsions shook his body like a cat shakes a captive mouse. He humped\n his body forward between the seizures, hands outstretched, searching\n for the grave.\n\n\n And then he was upon it. One arm reached out for grass, and clutched\n bare space instead.\n\n\n He was home.\n\n\n He gathered energy from his final reservoirs of strength for one final\n movement that would throw him headlong into the shallow grave. He\n tensed his muscles, pulled his limbs up under him and started to roll\n into the hole.",
"Charles was hungry. He got up and started for one of the restaurants\n near the park. Later on, when there was more time, he'd find a piece\n of granite and move it to the plot. He could spend his free time\n carving on it, copying the inscription. He would make it into a real\n shrine; maybe he would practice up a bit and try to carve a statue to\n go with the stone.\n\n\n Somehow, though, since things were ready and it didn't make too much\n difference, it seemed to Charles that he'd probably have a long time\n to wait. \"Maybe it's just a disease, and I'm immune. I was immune to\n smallpox. The vaccination never took. That's probably it.\"",
"It took him almost an hour to find the proper tools, and better than\n two hours more of hard, nighttime work to get the hole dug to his\n satisfaction. It took almost three hours to find the right sort of\n casket, durable but not too heavy for one man to handle. He carted it\n out to a grassy plot close to the center of the park where the grave\n was. He let the coffin down slowly into the depression, then piled up\n loose dirt on the sloping sides of the hole so that the rain would wash\n it down over him.\n\n\n \"I can't very well bury myself,\" he said. \"I guess it will rain after\n I'm gone.\" He looked carefully down at the metallic container.\n\n\n Wait now. There was something wrong, something missing. It was—oh,\n yes, he caught it. It was the stone. There wasn't any stone to go at\n the head of the grave. \"I'll have to fix that.\""
],
[
"\"Phone Me in Central Park\"\nBy JAMES McCONNELL\nThere should be an epitaph for every\n\n man, big or little, but a really grand\n\n and special one for Loner Charlie.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nCharles turned over on his side to look at her. She lay quietly in the\n other bed, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was blonde to\n perfection, exquisitely shaped, and the rich promise of her body was\n exposed to his view.\n\n\n \"Why?\" he thought as he looked at her. \"Why did it have to happen like\n this?\"",
"A thought teased at him. Charles looked at the woman again and decided\n that she still looked beautiful in spite of the harshness of the\n room's lighting. He touched buttons by the edge of the bed and the\n illumination quieted to a soft glow, wrapping her in a radiant halo.\n Charles smiled wanly and got up. He stood by the bed looking at her.\n\n\n \"I could have fallen in love with you once. A year ago, perhaps, or\n longer. But not now. Not now.\" He turned away and walked to the window.\n \"Now the world is dead. The whole world is dead.\"\n\n\n New York lay quietly below him. It was the hour of indecision when\n day has not quite made up its mind to leave and night has not yet\n attacked in force. The streetlights were already on, making geometric\n patterns through the dusk of Central Park. Some of the billboards were\n shining, their relays activated by darkness-sensitized solenoids. A\n reddish-orange pallor hung from the sky.",
"Here another page crept in between the cracks of a pier on the\n riverfront, dropping gently to the caressing eddies of the water (read\n the names: Smith, Smitha, Smitj).\n\n\n And here two pages danced down into Central Park, pirouetted,\n promenaded, and finally came to rest against a propped-up piece of\n metal (read the names: Whit, Whita, Whitacomb).\n\n\n It was not until the dusty morning sun stirred up the breezes that they\n fluttered down into the shallow hole beneath, unnoticed. The writing on\n the metal, until then partially obscured by the papers, became legible:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH—\n\n CHARLES J. ZZYZST\n\n GO TO HELL!",
"But thinking about \"why\" didn't answer the question itself, Charles\n thought. He looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in Central\n Park, alone except for a few stray corpses. But the park was fairly\n free of bodies.\n\n\n \"You've got about ten minutes warning,\" he said to himself. \"I guess\n that most people wanted to die inside of something—inside of anything.\n Not out in the unprotected open.\"\n\n\n The silence was like a weight hanging around his neck. Not an insect\n noise, not the chirp of a bird, not the sound of a car nor the scream\n of a plane. Not even a breeze to whisper among the leaves, he thought.\n Civilization equals life equals noise. Silence equals....\n\n\n Why. His mind kept returning to the question. Of all the people on\n earth, me. The last. Why me?",
"Charles was hungry. He got up and started for one of the restaurants\n near the park. Later on, when there was more time, he'd find a piece\n of granite and move it to the plot. He could spend his free time\n carving on it, copying the inscription. He would make it into a real\n shrine; maybe he would practice up a bit and try to carve a statue to\n go with the stone.\n\n\n Somehow, though, since things were ready and it didn't make too much\n difference, it seemed to Charles that he'd probably have a long time\n to wait. \"Maybe it's just a disease, and I'm immune. I was immune to\n smallpox. The vaccination never took. That's probably it.\"",
"It took him almost an hour to find the proper tools, and better than\n two hours more of hard, nighttime work to get the hole dug to his\n satisfaction. It took almost three hours to find the right sort of\n casket, durable but not too heavy for one man to handle. He carted it\n out to a grassy plot close to the center of the park where the grave\n was. He let the coffin down slowly into the depression, then piled up\n loose dirt on the sloping sides of the hole so that the rain would wash\n it down over him.\n\n\n \"I can't very well bury myself,\" he said. \"I guess it will rain after\n I'm gone.\" He looked carefully down at the metallic container.\n\n\n Wait now. There was something wrong, something missing. It was—oh,\n yes, he caught it. It was the stone. There wasn't any stone to go at\n the head of the grave. \"I'll have to fix that.\"",
"Charles struggled to end his body's disorganized responses, to\n channelize all his energy into one direction. His mind came back into\n action. He set up his goal; everything else seemed irrelevant: he had\n to get back to the park, to his hermit's cave, to his long, narrow\n home. He couldn't die until then.\n\n\n Ten minutes.\n\n\n He was allotted ten minutes before the end.\n\n\n It could have been ten years or ten seconds, for now objective time\n meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of measuring seconds and\n minutes. It was a matter of forgetting time and measuring space.\n\n\n He concentrated on the grave; he forced his body to become an unwilling\n machine. While he could, he walked, forcing himself on. When his legs\n gave way, he crawled. When his knees buckled, he rolled. When his\n stomach protested, he vomited. It made no difference.",
"\"You can't take it with you, you know. They don't allow souvenirs.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"All right, all right. You're so good, see if you can compute the\n scatter probability.\"\n\n\n The first being moved imperceptably and the heavy plastoid binding of\n the book disappeared. The thousands of pages dropped softly, caught\n at the wind like hungry sails, separated, and pulled by the fingers of\n gravity, went their disparate ways.\nHere a page scuttled into a broken window of the Chrysler Building\n (read the names: Aabat, Aabbs, Aabbt).\n\n\n Here a page landed upright on the head of one of the library lions\n and sloughed softly to the ground (read the names: Looman, Loomana,\n Loomanabsky).",
"\"\nMaybe I'm not the last!\n\"\n\n\n The thought struck him with suddenness, promisingly, edged with\n swelling comfort to fill his emptiness.\n\n\n Charles got up slowly, noticing for the first time that his fingers\n were badly cut. He wrapped a handkerchief around them and forgot them.\n He had to know—he had to find out.\nAs he turned to leave, he noticed again the woman lying in radiant\n state upon the bed. He walked to her side and leaned over, kissing her\n gently on the forehead. As he straightened up, his leg caught against\n her arm, pushing it slightly. The woman's arm slipped from its position\n and dangled from the edge of the bed like a crazy pendulum. Charles\n picked it up and folded it across her now cold breasts. He started\n to pull the sheet over her nude form, then stopped, smiling at his\n conventionality. After all, it didn't make any difference now.",
"The phonograph was near the door. On sudden impulse he switched it\n on, turned the volume up full, and in grim jest left it playing\n Rachmaninoff's\nIsle of the Dead\non full automatic. The music haunted\n him down the hall to the elevator that he had to run himself.\n\n\n The lobby was littered with debris, human and otherwise. Charles\n ignored it. The street that led towards the Bureau of Vital Statistics\n was a mess of desolate carnage. Charles overlooked it. Shop fronts\n smashed, stores looted, gyro-cars wrecked, proud buildings defaced.\n\n\n \"That was it,\" he said to himself. \"Pride. We called this the 'Proud\n Era.' Everything was better and bigger and nicer to have. Buildings\n were taller, men were healthier, most of the problems of humanity\n seemed licked, or nearly so. It was a time of free power, each small\n unit of population, each section of town operating on perpetual,\n ever-lasting, automatic atomic piles.",
"The whole thing was still like a dream to him, and as yet he couldn't\n decide whether it was a good or a bad dream. A year ago she had been\n unattainable, a face to conjure with in erotic dreams, far beyond his\n ken. A year ago she had been a public idol, the most popular actress of\n the day. And he had been a nobody, full of a nobody's idle hopes and\n schemes.\n\n\n And now he was lying in the bed next to hers in her swank Manhattan\n apartment in the most exclusive hotel in town. The unrealness of the\n situation overwhelmed him. His mind was a picture of confused thoughts.\n Meanings and answers to his questions slithered out of his reach.\n\n\n \"God,\" he said. It was not an exclamation, nor yet an expletive. It was\n a mere statement of fact.",
"\"So now I'm a hermit, whether or not I like it,\" he said in derision to\n the gravel path as he walked along it. \"A hermit in the midst of a city\n of millions of—No, I forgot. There aren't any more people, are there?\"\n It was hard to realize, even now. \"A hermit, alone—and I haven't even\n got a cave....\"\n\n\n Charles stopped walking suddenly. No cave, he thought. No place to\n sleep out the long one, no place to rest while time came to change\n things around and make them for the better. No place to hide.\n\n\n And suddenly it was the most important thing in life to him to find his\n \"cave.\"",
"\"Why, it was just yesterday (or was it the day before?) that ten of\n us, at least, met here to check the figures. There were lots of us\n alive then.\" Including the blond young woman who had died just this\n afternoon....\n\n\n Charles stopped talking and forced his eyes upwards. Peripheral vision\n caught first the vague outlines of the lower part of the map. His eyes\n continued to move, slowly, reluctantly. They caught the over-all relief\n of Greater New York City—and then concentrated on the single, shining\n dot at the very heart of the map—and he understood.\n\n\n His eyes stabbed quickly for the counter above the screen.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n He gasped.\n\n\n The counter read\none\n.\n\n\n Charles was by himself, the last person alive in all of New York City.",
"Instantly the thought struck him with paralyzing devastation. The\n answer to it all poked its face out from the recesses of his mind and\n sapped the last bit of his energy, corroding his nerves and dying\n muscles. Now he knew, and the knowing was the end of it.\n\n\n He collapsed at the edge of the pit. Only one arm hung loosely down\n into it, swinging senseless in the air, pointing accusingly at the\n empty coffin.\n\n\n The world will end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the\n last man's anguished cry at the unreasonableness of it all.\n\n\n Charles screamed.\nThe large, invisible, ovular being that hung suspended over the Empire\n State Building rested from its exertion. Soon it was approached by\n another of its kind.\n\n\n \"It is finished?\" asked the second.\n\n\n \"Yes. Just now. I am resting.\"",
"The tantalizing thought of \"why\" puzzled its way back into his mind.\n But it seemed less pressing now that he had almost come to the\n conclusion that he would live for a long time. Later, in a few days\n perhaps, he would think about it. In a little while he'd have plenty of\n opportunity for hunting down the answer. This seemed good to him, for\n now he thought he almost had the answer, if there were an answer. He\n thought he had seen the solution peering out at him from the recesses\n of his mind, and he didn't like the expression on its face. Better to\n forget.\nCharles reached the broad boulevard. There was a large cafe just across\n from him, its front window caved in by a large truck. He stumbled and\n almost fell as he stepped from the curb.\n\n\n \"Look at me, nervous as a cat.\"\n\n\n He was trembling noticeably as he started across the street.",
"What about—?\nChance. That was it! The laws of probability, the bell-shaped curve,\n normal distribution, rectilinear regression. More people per square\n foot in New York than elsewhere. The first person who died was from New\n York, so the last person who gave way to the disease should come from\n here too. Spin the wheel; throw the dice; toss the coin.\n\n\n So simple to explain by the laws of chance. No need for any underlying\n assumptions about good and evil, no need for teleological arguments\n concerning cause and effect. Simply explain it by chance. Somebody had\n to be the last to go and that was—\n\n\n \"No,\" Charles said, standing up in the quiet of the spring evening.\n \"No, chance won't do it. No man can reckon with chance. The mind\n rejects such things. There must be something beyond mere accident.\n There must be!\"\n\n\n He sighed slowly.",
"\"I've got to find out,\" Charles told himself. He meant it, of course,\n but in a sense he was afraid—afraid that his trip to the Bureau might\n give him an answer he didn't dare listen to. \"But I've got to try.\" He\n walked on down the bloody street.\n\n\n Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's\n crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of\n a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every\n human on earth.\n\n\n Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by\n means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for\n man what no ordinary census could have. The machine knew who was alive,\n who was dead, and where everybody was.",
"Charles refused to think. Machines, especially half-broken machines, do\n not think; they only work. Sweating, straining, bleeding, retching, he\n pushed himself towards his goal, trying to add one final touch of grace\n and custom to the rude irrationalness of it all.\n\n\n His eyes gave out a few feet from the pit. He felt his way towards it.\n Convulsions shook his body like a cat shakes a captive mouse. He humped\n his body forward between the seizures, hands outstretched, searching\n for the grave.\n\n\n And then he was upon it. One arm reached out for grass, and clutched\n bare space instead.\n\n\n He was home.\n\n\n He gathered energy from his final reservoirs of strength for one final\n movement that would throw him headlong into the shallow grave. He\n tensed his muscles, pulled his limbs up under him and started to roll\n into the hole.",
"It had been very pleasant that afternoon. She had given of herself\n freely, warmly, and Charles had accepted. But then he had known\n that she would. It was not him, it was the circumstances. Under the\n circumstances, she would have given herself to any man—\n\n\n \"Why did it have to be her—or me? Why should it have to happen to\n anybody! Why!\"\nShe would have given herself to any man—\nHis thoughts beat a rapid crescendo, activating emotions, stimulating\n sensations of angry rage. He wanted to cry, to weep angry tears of\n protest.\n\n\n To any man, WHO HAPPENED TO BE THE LAST MAN ON EARTH!\n\n\n Charles picked up a heavy book end off the table and crashed it through\n the thick pane of window glass.",
"He stopped. For even as he spoke, the light winked out! The counter\n clicked again.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n Alone.\n\n\n Alone!\n\n\n Charles screamed.\n\n\n The bottom dropped out from under him!\nWhy?\n\n\n Such a simple question, but in those three letters lay the essence of\n human nature. Why. The drive of curiosity. Stronger, in a way, than\n the so-called \"basic\" drives: hunger, thirst, sex, shelter, warmth,\n companionship, elimination. Certainly more decisive in the history of\n the race. Man began to think, to differentiate himself from the other\n animals, when he first asked the question: \"Why?\""
],
[
"Instantly the thought struck him with paralyzing devastation. The\n answer to it all poked its face out from the recesses of his mind and\n sapped the last bit of his energy, corroding his nerves and dying\n muscles. Now he knew, and the knowing was the end of it.\n\n\n He collapsed at the edge of the pit. Only one arm hung loosely down\n into it, swinging senseless in the air, pointing accusingly at the\n empty coffin.\n\n\n The world will end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the\n last man's anguished cry at the unreasonableness of it all.\n\n\n Charles screamed.\nThe large, invisible, ovular being that hung suspended over the Empire\n State Building rested from its exertion. Soon it was approached by\n another of its kind.\n\n\n \"It is finished?\" asked the second.\n\n\n \"Yes. Just now. I am resting.\"",
"\"We were free. We seemed, almost, to have accomplished something. The\n world was running well. No wonder we called it the 'Proud Era.' Life\n was fun, just a bowl of cherries, until....\"\n\n\n Two years ago the animals had started dying. Strangely enough the\n rats had gone first, to anybody's notice. Sales of poison dropped,\n scientific laboratories chained to a perpetual rodent-cycle began to\n complain bitterly.\n\n\n Then the lovers who hunted out and haunted the lonely lanes through the\n countryside began to remark that the locusts were late that year. The\n Southern states joyously reported that mosquito control was working to\n an unprecedented degree. The largest cotton crop ever was forecast and\n rumors from Mexico had it that no one had died from scorpion bite in\n several weeks.",
"A month later the meat animals, the birds and the household pets\n began dropping as rapidly as the flies which had dropped earlier.\n Congress was called into special session, as were all of the national\n governments around the world. The U.N. met at emergency sessions to\n cope with the situation. The president of the world-wide Society for\n the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals committed suicide.\n\n\n Within a year it was obvious to everyone that man was the only animal\n left on earth.\n\n\n The panic which had begun with the death of the animals was quieted\n somewhat by the fact that humans seemed immune to the pandemic. But the\n lakes full of dead fish caused a great stink and residents along the\n coasts began to move inland. Sales of perfumes and deodorants soared.\n\n\n Then just one year ago, the first human became infected with the\n strange malady. Within six months, half of the world's population was\n gone. Less than a month ago no more than a few thousand people remained\n in New York. And now....",
"\"I've got to find out,\" Charles told himself. He meant it, of course,\n but in a sense he was afraid—afraid that his trip to the Bureau might\n give him an answer he didn't dare listen to. \"But I've got to try.\" He\n walked on down the bloody street.\n\n\n Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's\n crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of\n a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every\n human on earth.\n\n\n Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by\n means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for\n man what no ordinary census could have. The machine knew who was alive,\n who was dead, and where everybody was.",
"But thinking about \"why\" didn't answer the question itself, Charles\n thought. He looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in Central\n Park, alone except for a few stray corpses. But the park was fairly\n free of bodies.\n\n\n \"You've got about ten minutes warning,\" he said to himself. \"I guess\n that most people wanted to die inside of something—inside of anything.\n Not out in the unprotected open.\"\n\n\n The silence was like a weight hanging around his neck. Not an insect\n noise, not the chirp of a bird, not the sound of a car nor the scream\n of a plane. Not even a breeze to whisper among the leaves, he thought.\n Civilization equals life equals noise. Silence equals....\n\n\n Why. His mind kept returning to the question. Of all the people on\n earth, me. The last. Why me?",
"\"I—\" He started to say something, to think something. But some hidden\n part of his mind clamped down, obscuring the thought, rejecting the\n concept.\n\n\n The tremor turned to a shake before he reached the far curb, and the\n first burst of wild pain came as he laid his shoulder against the door\n to the restaurant. This was the way the plague began, but—His mind\n quickly repressed the idea. It couldn't be the plague. He was immune!\n\n\n Another burst of pulsating, shattering pain crashed through his body,\n tearing down the defenses of his mind, putting an end of his thoughts\n of immunity. Colors flared before his eyes, a persistent, irresistible\n susurrus flooded his ears.\n\n\n He wanted to protest, but there was no one to listen to him. He\n appealed to every divinity he knew, all the time knowing it would be\n useless. His body, out of his voluntary control, tried to run off in\n all directions at once.",
"What about—?\nChance. That was it! The laws of probability, the bell-shaped curve,\n normal distribution, rectilinear regression. More people per square\n foot in New York than elsewhere. The first person who died was from New\n York, so the last person who gave way to the disease should come from\n here too. Spin the wheel; throw the dice; toss the coin.\n\n\n So simple to explain by the laws of chance. No need for any underlying\n assumptions about good and evil, no need for teleological arguments\n concerning cause and effect. Simply explain it by chance. Somebody had\n to be the last to go and that was—\n\n\n \"No,\" Charles said, standing up in the quiet of the spring evening.\n \"No, chance won't do it. No man can reckon with chance. The mind\n rejects such things. There must be something beyond mere accident.\n There must be!\"\n\n\n He sighed slowly.",
"Once a year the Bureau issued The Index, an exact accounting of Earth's\n four billion inhabitants. Four billion names and addresses, compressed\n into microprint, a tremendous achievement even for the \"Proud Era.\"\n In all of his life, Charles had never once glanced at The Index.\n The average person had little necessity to do so since the Bureau\n information service would answer questions free of charge at any time.\n\n\n Reaching the gigantic building, Charles pushed aside the body of a\n young man and walked into the main foyer. Passing behind once-guarded\n doors, he entered the giant computer room and paused in admiration.\nOnly once, before the plague, had he seen the interior of this room.\n But he still remembered it and he still recalled the powerful emotional\n experience it had been those many years ago.",
"He began to tremble violently. The silence of the room began to press\n quickly in on him. His frantic fingers searched for the computer\n controls.\n\n\n New York State. One.\n\n\n The entire United States. One.\n\n\n The western hemisphere, including islands.\n\n\n (Was that a point of light in Brazil? No. Just a ghost image).\n\n\n One.\n\n\n The Pacific area, Asia, Australia, Asia Minor, Russia and the Near\n East, Africa and then Europe.\n\n\n England!\n\n\n There was a light in England! Someone else still lived! The counter\n clicked forward.\n\n\n Two!\n\n\n His trembling stopped. He breathed again.\n\n\n \"Of course. London was at least as populous as New York City before the\n plague. It's only logical that—\"",
"Charles refused to think. Machines, especially half-broken machines, do\n not think; they only work. Sweating, straining, bleeding, retching, he\n pushed himself towards his goal, trying to add one final touch of grace\n and custom to the rude irrationalness of it all.\n\n\n His eyes gave out a few feet from the pit. He felt his way towards it.\n Convulsions shook his body like a cat shakes a captive mouse. He humped\n his body forward between the seizures, hands outstretched, searching\n for the grave.\n\n\n And then he was upon it. One arm reached out for grass, and clutched\n bare space instead.\n\n\n He was home.\n\n\n He gathered energy from his final reservoirs of strength for one final\n movement that would throw him headlong into the shallow grave. He\n tensed his muscles, pulled his limbs up under him and started to roll\n into the hole.",
"It had been very pleasant that afternoon. She had given of herself\n freely, warmly, and Charles had accepted. But then he had known\n that she would. It was not him, it was the circumstances. Under the\n circumstances, she would have given herself to any man—\n\n\n \"Why did it have to be her—or me? Why should it have to happen to\n anybody! Why!\"\nShe would have given herself to any man—\nHis thoughts beat a rapid crescendo, activating emotions, stimulating\n sensations of angry rage. He wanted to cry, to weep angry tears of\n protest.\n\n\n To any man, WHO HAPPENED TO BE THE LAST MAN ON EARTH!\n\n\n Charles picked up a heavy book end off the table and crashed it through\n the thick pane of window glass.",
"Charles struggled to end his body's disorganized responses, to\n channelize all his energy into one direction. His mind came back into\n action. He set up his goal; everything else seemed irrelevant: he had\n to get back to the park, to his hermit's cave, to his long, narrow\n home. He couldn't die until then.\n\n\n Ten minutes.\n\n\n He was allotted ten minutes before the end.\n\n\n It could have been ten years or ten seconds, for now objective time\n meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of measuring seconds and\n minutes. It was a matter of forgetting time and measuring space.\n\n\n He concentrated on the grave; he forced his body to become an unwilling\n machine. While he could, he walked, forcing himself on. When his legs\n gave way, he crawled. When his knees buckled, he rolled. When his\n stomach protested, he vomited. It made no difference.",
"Here another page crept in between the cracks of a pier on the\n riverfront, dropping gently to the caressing eddies of the water (read\n the names: Smith, Smitha, Smitj).\n\n\n And here two pages danced down into Central Park, pirouetted,\n promenaded, and finally came to rest against a propped-up piece of\n metal (read the names: Whit, Whita, Whitacomb).\n\n\n It was not until the dusty morning sun stirred up the breezes that they\n fluttered down into the shallow hole beneath, unnoticed. The writing on\n the metal, until then partially obscured by the papers, became legible:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH—\n\n CHARLES J. ZZYZST\n\n GO TO HELL!",
"A sheet of metal, bent double, served for the monument proper. A nearby\n tool shed yielded up a can of paint and a brush. By the glow of one of\n the streetlights Charles worked out the inscription.\n\n\n \"It ought to be something impressive,\" he thought out loud. \"Something\n fitting the occasion.\"\n\n\n What did one say on these situations? There was so little chance to\n practice up for things like this. But it ought to be good, it ought to\n be proper.\n\n\n \"'In this now hallowed corner of the planet Earth—' No. That sounds\n too ... too....\"\n\n\n Make it simple, he thought. And he finally wrote:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH\n\n\n Yes. That was it. Simple. Let whoever came afterwards figure out the\n rest. Let them decide. He smiled and finished the painting.",
"A thought teased at him. Charles looked at the woman again and decided\n that she still looked beautiful in spite of the harshness of the\n room's lighting. He touched buttons by the edge of the bed and the\n illumination quieted to a soft glow, wrapping her in a radiant halo.\n Charles smiled wanly and got up. He stood by the bed looking at her.\n\n\n \"I could have fallen in love with you once. A year ago, perhaps, or\n longer. But not now. Not now.\" He turned away and walked to the window.\n \"Now the world is dead. The whole world is dead.\"\n\n\n New York lay quietly below him. It was the hour of indecision when\n day has not quite made up its mind to leave and night has not yet\n attacked in force. The streetlights were already on, making geometric\n patterns through the dusk of Central Park. Some of the billboards were\n shining, their relays activated by darkness-sensitized solenoids. A\n reddish-orange pallor hung from the sky.",
"\"You can't take it with you, you know. They don't allow souvenirs.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"All right, all right. You're so good, see if you can compute the\n scatter probability.\"\n\n\n The first being moved imperceptably and the heavy plastoid binding of\n the book disappeared. The thousands of pages dropped softly, caught\n at the wind like hungry sails, separated, and pulled by the fingers of\n gravity, went their disparate ways.\nHere a page scuttled into a broken window of the Chrysler Building\n (read the names: Aabat, Aabbs, Aabbt).\n\n\n Here a page landed upright on the head of one of the library lions\n and sloughed softly to the ground (read the names: Looman, Loomana,\n Loomanabsky).",
"He stopped. For even as he spoke, the light winked out! The counter\n clicked again.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n Alone.\n\n\n Alone!\n\n\n Charles screamed.\n\n\n The bottom dropped out from under him!\nWhy?\n\n\n Such a simple question, but in those three letters lay the essence of\n human nature. Why. The drive of curiosity. Stronger, in a way, than\n the so-called \"basic\" drives: hunger, thirst, sex, shelter, warmth,\n companionship, elimination. Certainly more decisive in the history of\n the race. Man began to think, to differentiate himself from the other\n animals, when he first asked the question: \"Why?\"",
"\"Why, it was just yesterday (or was it the day before?) that ten of\n us, at least, met here to check the figures. There were lots of us\n alive then.\" Including the blond young woman who had died just this\n afternoon....\n\n\n Charles stopped talking and forced his eyes upwards. Peripheral vision\n caught first the vague outlines of the lower part of the map. His eyes\n continued to move, slowly, reluctantly. They caught the over-all relief\n of Greater New York City—and then concentrated on the single, shining\n dot at the very heart of the map—and he understood.\n\n\n His eyes stabbed quickly for the counter above the screen.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n He gasped.\n\n\n The counter read\none\n.\n\n\n Charles was by himself, the last person alive in all of New York City.",
"\"I can feel the emptiness of it.\"\n\n\n \"It was very good. Where were you?\"\n\n\n \"On the next planet out. No beauty to it at all; no system. How was\n yours?\"\n\n\n \"Beautiful,\" said the first. \"It went according to the strictest\n semantic relationship following the purest mathematical principles.\n They made it easy for me.\"\n\n\n \"Good.\"\n\n\n \"Well, where to now?\"\n\n\n \"There's another system about four thoughts away. We're due there soon.\"\n\n\n \"All right. Let's go.\"\n\n\n \"What's that you have there?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, this?\" replied the first. \"It's a higher neural order compendium\n the Things here made up. It's what I used.\"",
"The phonograph was near the door. On sudden impulse he switched it\n on, turned the volume up full, and in grim jest left it playing\n Rachmaninoff's\nIsle of the Dead\non full automatic. The music haunted\n him down the hall to the elevator that he had to run himself.\n\n\n The lobby was littered with debris, human and otherwise. Charles\n ignored it. The street that led towards the Bureau of Vital Statistics\n was a mess of desolate carnage. Charles overlooked it. Shop fronts\n smashed, stores looted, gyro-cars wrecked, proud buildings defaced.\n\n\n \"That was it,\" he said to himself. \"Pride. We called this the 'Proud\n Era.' Everything was better and bigger and nicer to have. Buildings\n were taller, men were healthier, most of the problems of humanity\n seemed licked, or nearly so. It was a time of free power, each small\n unit of population, each section of town operating on perpetual,\n ever-lasting, automatic atomic piles."
],
[
"But thinking about \"why\" didn't answer the question itself, Charles\n thought. He looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in Central\n Park, alone except for a few stray corpses. But the park was fairly\n free of bodies.\n\n\n \"You've got about ten minutes warning,\" he said to himself. \"I guess\n that most people wanted to die inside of something—inside of anything.\n Not out in the unprotected open.\"\n\n\n The silence was like a weight hanging around his neck. Not an insect\n noise, not the chirp of a bird, not the sound of a car nor the scream\n of a plane. Not even a breeze to whisper among the leaves, he thought.\n Civilization equals life equals noise. Silence equals....\n\n\n Why. His mind kept returning to the question. Of all the people on\n earth, me. The last. Why me?",
"Instantly the thought struck him with paralyzing devastation. The\n answer to it all poked its face out from the recesses of his mind and\n sapped the last bit of his energy, corroding his nerves and dying\n muscles. Now he knew, and the knowing was the end of it.\n\n\n He collapsed at the edge of the pit. Only one arm hung loosely down\n into it, swinging senseless in the air, pointing accusingly at the\n empty coffin.\n\n\n The world will end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the\n last man's anguished cry at the unreasonableness of it all.\n\n\n Charles screamed.\nThe large, invisible, ovular being that hung suspended over the Empire\n State Building rested from its exertion. Soon it was approached by\n another of its kind.\n\n\n \"It is finished?\" asked the second.\n\n\n \"Yes. Just now. I am resting.\"",
"\"Why, it was just yesterday (or was it the day before?) that ten of\n us, at least, met here to check the figures. There were lots of us\n alive then.\" Including the blond young woman who had died just this\n afternoon....\n\n\n Charles stopped talking and forced his eyes upwards. Peripheral vision\n caught first the vague outlines of the lower part of the map. His eyes\n continued to move, slowly, reluctantly. They caught the over-all relief\n of Greater New York City—and then concentrated on the single, shining\n dot at the very heart of the map—and he understood.\n\n\n His eyes stabbed quickly for the counter above the screen.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n He gasped.\n\n\n The counter read\none\n.\n\n\n Charles was by himself, the last person alive in all of New York City.",
"\"\nMaybe I'm not the last!\n\"\n\n\n The thought struck him with suddenness, promisingly, edged with\n swelling comfort to fill his emptiness.\n\n\n Charles got up slowly, noticing for the first time that his fingers\n were badly cut. He wrapped a handkerchief around them and forgot them.\n He had to know—he had to find out.\nAs he turned to leave, he noticed again the woman lying in radiant\n state upon the bed. He walked to her side and leaned over, kissing her\n gently on the forehead. As he straightened up, his leg caught against\n her arm, pushing it slightly. The woman's arm slipped from its position\n and dangled from the edge of the bed like a crazy pendulum. Charles\n picked it up and folded it across her now cold breasts. He started\n to pull the sheet over her nude form, then stopped, smiling at his\n conventionality. After all, it didn't make any difference now.",
"What about—?\nChance. That was it! The laws of probability, the bell-shaped curve,\n normal distribution, rectilinear regression. More people per square\n foot in New York than elsewhere. The first person who died was from New\n York, so the last person who gave way to the disease should come from\n here too. Spin the wheel; throw the dice; toss the coin.\n\n\n So simple to explain by the laws of chance. No need for any underlying\n assumptions about good and evil, no need for teleological arguments\n concerning cause and effect. Simply explain it by chance. Somebody had\n to be the last to go and that was—\n\n\n \"No,\" Charles said, standing up in the quiet of the spring evening.\n \"No, chance won't do it. No man can reckon with chance. The mind\n rejects such things. There must be something beyond mere accident.\n There must be!\"\n\n\n He sighed slowly.",
"It had been very pleasant that afternoon. She had given of herself\n freely, warmly, and Charles had accepted. But then he had known\n that she would. It was not him, it was the circumstances. Under the\n circumstances, she would have given herself to any man—\n\n\n \"Why did it have to be her—or me? Why should it have to happen to\n anybody! Why!\"\nShe would have given herself to any man—\nHis thoughts beat a rapid crescendo, activating emotions, stimulating\n sensations of angry rage. He wanted to cry, to weep angry tears of\n protest.\n\n\n To any man, WHO HAPPENED TO BE THE LAST MAN ON EARTH!\n\n\n Charles picked up a heavy book end off the table and crashed it through\n the thick pane of window glass.",
"A gust of wind from the outside breezed through the shattered opening,\n attacking his olfactory patch with the retching smell of decaying\n flesh. Charles ignored it. Even smells had lost their customary\n meanings.\n\n\n He felt the rage build up inside again, tearing at his viscera. His\n stomach clenched up like an angry fist.\n\n\n \"But I don't want to be the last man alive!\" he shouted. \"I don't know\n what to do! I don't know where to go, how to act! I just don't know—\"\n\n\n A paroxysm of sobbing shook his body. Trembling, he dropped to his\n knees, his head against the cold firmness of the sill, his hands\n clutched tightly around the jagged edges of the window pane. In spite\n of the sharp pain that raced through his system, in spite of the\n bright, warm, red stream that trickled down his face, he knelt by the\n window for several minutes.",
"A sheet of metal, bent double, served for the monument proper. A nearby\n tool shed yielded up a can of paint and a brush. By the glow of one of\n the streetlights Charles worked out the inscription.\n\n\n \"It ought to be something impressive,\" he thought out loud. \"Something\n fitting the occasion.\"\n\n\n What did one say on these situations? There was so little chance to\n practice up for things like this. But it ought to be good, it ought to\n be proper.\n\n\n \"'In this now hallowed corner of the planet Earth—' No. That sounds\n too ... too....\"\n\n\n Make it simple, he thought. And he finally wrote:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH\n\n\n Yes. That was it. Simple. Let whoever came afterwards figure out the\n rest. Let them decide. He smiled and finished the painting.",
"Charles refused to think. Machines, especially half-broken machines, do\n not think; they only work. Sweating, straining, bleeding, retching, he\n pushed himself towards his goal, trying to add one final touch of grace\n and custom to the rude irrationalness of it all.\n\n\n His eyes gave out a few feet from the pit. He felt his way towards it.\n Convulsions shook his body like a cat shakes a captive mouse. He humped\n his body forward between the seizures, hands outstretched, searching\n for the grave.\n\n\n And then he was upon it. One arm reached out for grass, and clutched\n bare space instead.\n\n\n He was home.\n\n\n He gathered energy from his final reservoirs of strength for one final\n movement that would throw him headlong into the shallow grave. He\n tensed his muscles, pulled his limbs up under him and started to roll\n into the hole.",
"He began to tremble violently. The silence of the room began to press\n quickly in on him. His frantic fingers searched for the computer\n controls.\n\n\n New York State. One.\n\n\n The entire United States. One.\n\n\n The western hemisphere, including islands.\n\n\n (Was that a point of light in Brazil? No. Just a ghost image).\n\n\n One.\n\n\n The Pacific area, Asia, Australia, Asia Minor, Russia and the Near\n East, Africa and then Europe.\n\n\n England!\n\n\n There was a light in England! Someone else still lived! The counter\n clicked forward.\n\n\n Two!\n\n\n His trembling stopped. He breathed again.\n\n\n \"Of course. London was at least as populous as New York City before the\n plague. It's only logical that—\"",
"He stopped. For even as he spoke, the light winked out! The counter\n clicked again.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n Alone.\n\n\n Alone!\n\n\n Charles screamed.\n\n\n The bottom dropped out from under him!\nWhy?\n\n\n Such a simple question, but in those three letters lay the essence of\n human nature. Why. The drive of curiosity. Stronger, in a way, than\n the so-called \"basic\" drives: hunger, thirst, sex, shelter, warmth,\n companionship, elimination. Certainly more decisive in the history of\n the race. Man began to think, to differentiate himself from the other\n animals, when he first asked the question: \"Why?\"",
"A thought teased at him. Charles looked at the woman again and decided\n that she still looked beautiful in spite of the harshness of the\n room's lighting. He touched buttons by the edge of the bed and the\n illumination quieted to a soft glow, wrapping her in a radiant halo.\n Charles smiled wanly and got up. He stood by the bed looking at her.\n\n\n \"I could have fallen in love with you once. A year ago, perhaps, or\n longer. But not now. Not now.\" He turned away and walked to the window.\n \"Now the world is dead. The whole world is dead.\"\n\n\n New York lay quietly below him. It was the hour of indecision when\n day has not quite made up its mind to leave and night has not yet\n attacked in force. The streetlights were already on, making geometric\n patterns through the dusk of Central Park. Some of the billboards were\n shining, their relays activated by darkness-sensitized solenoids. A\n reddish-orange pallor hung from the sky.",
"\"I've got to find out,\" Charles told himself. He meant it, of course,\n but in a sense he was afraid—afraid that his trip to the Bureau might\n give him an answer he didn't dare listen to. \"But I've got to try.\" He\n walked on down the bloody street.\n\n\n Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's\n crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of\n a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every\n human on earth.\n\n\n Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by\n means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for\n man what no ordinary census could have. The machine knew who was alive,\n who was dead, and where everybody was.",
"Here another page crept in between the cracks of a pier on the\n riverfront, dropping gently to the caressing eddies of the water (read\n the names: Smith, Smitha, Smitj).\n\n\n And here two pages danced down into Central Park, pirouetted,\n promenaded, and finally came to rest against a propped-up piece of\n metal (read the names: Whit, Whita, Whitacomb).\n\n\n It was not until the dusty morning sun stirred up the breezes that they\n fluttered down into the shallow hole beneath, unnoticed. The writing on\n the metal, until then partially obscured by the papers, became legible:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH—\n\n CHARLES J. ZZYZST\n\n GO TO HELL!",
"Charles struggled to end his body's disorganized responses, to\n channelize all his energy into one direction. His mind came back into\n action. He set up his goal; everything else seemed irrelevant: he had\n to get back to the park, to his hermit's cave, to his long, narrow\n home. He couldn't die until then.\n\n\n Ten minutes.\n\n\n He was allotted ten minutes before the end.\n\n\n It could have been ten years or ten seconds, for now objective time\n meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of measuring seconds and\n minutes. It was a matter of forgetting time and measuring space.\n\n\n He concentrated on the grave; he forced his body to become an unwilling\n machine. While he could, he walked, forcing himself on. When his legs\n gave way, he crawled. When his knees buckled, he rolled. When his\n stomach protested, he vomited. It made no difference.",
"A month later the meat animals, the birds and the household pets\n began dropping as rapidly as the flies which had dropped earlier.\n Congress was called into special session, as were all of the national\n governments around the world. The U.N. met at emergency sessions to\n cope with the situation. The president of the world-wide Society for\n the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals committed suicide.\n\n\n Within a year it was obvious to everyone that man was the only animal\n left on earth.\n\n\n The panic which had begun with the death of the animals was quieted\n somewhat by the fact that humans seemed immune to the pandemic. But the\n lakes full of dead fish caused a great stink and residents along the\n coasts began to move inland. Sales of perfumes and deodorants soared.\n\n\n Then just one year ago, the first human became infected with the\n strange malady. Within six months, half of the world's population was\n gone. Less than a month ago no more than a few thousand people remained\n in New York. And now....",
"\"So now I'm a hermit, whether or not I like it,\" he said in derision to\n the gravel path as he walked along it. \"A hermit in the midst of a city\n of millions of—No, I forgot. There aren't any more people, are there?\"\n It was hard to realize, even now. \"A hermit, alone—and I haven't even\n got a cave....\"\n\n\n Charles stopped walking suddenly. No cave, he thought. No place to\n sleep out the long one, no place to rest while time came to change\n things around and make them for the better. No place to hide.\n\n\n And suddenly it was the most important thing in life to him to find his\n \"cave.\"",
"Charles was hungry. He got up and started for one of the restaurants\n near the park. Later on, when there was more time, he'd find a piece\n of granite and move it to the plot. He could spend his free time\n carving on it, copying the inscription. He would make it into a real\n shrine; maybe he would practice up a bit and try to carve a statue to\n go with the stone.\n\n\n Somehow, though, since things were ready and it didn't make too much\n difference, it seemed to Charles that he'd probably have a long time\n to wait. \"Maybe it's just a disease, and I'm immune. I was immune to\n smallpox. The vaccination never took. That's probably it.\"",
"The phonograph was near the door. On sudden impulse he switched it\n on, turned the volume up full, and in grim jest left it playing\n Rachmaninoff's\nIsle of the Dead\non full automatic. The music haunted\n him down the hall to the elevator that he had to run himself.\n\n\n The lobby was littered with debris, human and otherwise. Charles\n ignored it. The street that led towards the Bureau of Vital Statistics\n was a mess of desolate carnage. Charles overlooked it. Shop fronts\n smashed, stores looted, gyro-cars wrecked, proud buildings defaced.\n\n\n \"That was it,\" he said to himself. \"Pride. We called this the 'Proud\n Era.' Everything was better and bigger and nicer to have. Buildings\n were taller, men were healthier, most of the problems of humanity\n seemed licked, or nearly so. It was a time of free power, each small\n unit of population, each section of town operating on perpetual,\n ever-lasting, automatic atomic piles.",
"The tantalizing thought of \"why\" puzzled its way back into his mind.\n But it seemed less pressing now that he had almost come to the\n conclusion that he would live for a long time. Later, in a few days\n perhaps, he would think about it. In a little while he'd have plenty of\n opportunity for hunting down the answer. This seemed good to him, for\n now he thought he almost had the answer, if there were an answer. He\n thought he had seen the solution peering out at him from the recesses\n of his mind, and he didn't like the expression on its face. Better to\n forget.\nCharles reached the broad boulevard. There was a large cafe just across\n from him, its front window caved in by a large truck. He stumbled and\n almost fell as he stepped from the curb.\n\n\n \"Look at me, nervous as a cat.\"\n\n\n He was trembling noticeably as he started across the street."
]
] |
train
|
63398
|
[
"How many caves had Garmon and Rolf traveled through before their crash?",
"After realizing his situation after the crash, why did Rolf laugh?",
"What was Rolf looking for when he set off around the wall of the pit?",
"What was the special power held by Altha?",
"Why was Altha away from the other Hairy People of her kind?",
"Why was there fear for the wind shifting around the Hairy People?",
"Why would the Furry Ones not follow Rolf and the others when the retreated?",
"What was the outlaw weapon loaded with?"
] |
[
[
"thirty seven",
"forty seven",
"thirty",
"forty"
],
[
"He was facing certain death",
"His laughter was caused from the thick air",
"He was satisfied with their journey.",
"He was happy to be away from Garmon"
],
[
"Garmon",
"Light",
"Food",
"Other survivors"
],
[
"She could see in the dark.",
"She could see into other's minds. ",
"She feared nothing.",
"She could see into the future."
],
[
"The outlaws had turned the others against her.",
"She had left their group in fear of attacks.",
"The outlaws had stolen her. ",
"She had been lost from their group and never reconnected."
],
[
"They wind would block the mind reading abilties of the Hairy People.",
"The wind would cause explosions.",
"The wind would spread the hair from the Hairy People and block vision.",
"The wind would spread the scent of the Earthmen and cause an attack"
],
[
"They had lost too many to continue fighting.",
"They were warned not to by Altha. ",
"They feared the Ancients.",
"They knew they were losing the battle."
],
[
"a drum of fuselage",
"a drum of poisoned shrapnel",
"a drum of poisoned bullets",
"a drum of poisoned needles"
]
] |
[
1,
1,
2,
2,
1,
4,
3,
4
] |
[
0,
0,
0,
0,
1,
0,
0,
0
] |
[
[
"The ship struck; split open like a rotten squash, and Rolf felt himself\n being flung far outward through thick blackness. For an eternity it\n seemed he hung in the darkness before something smashed the breath and\n feeling from his nerveless body. With a last glimmer of sanity he knew\n that he lay crushed against a rocky wall.\nMuch later Rolf groaned with the pain of bruised muscles and tried to\n rise. To his amazement he could move all his limbs. Carefully he came\n to his knees and so to his feet. Not a bone was broken, unless the\n sharp breathlessness that strained at his chest meant cracked ribs.\n\n\n There was light in the narrow pit in which he found himself, light and\n heat from the yet-glowing debris of the rocket flyer. The outlaws had\n blasted the crashed ship, his practiced eyes told him, and Garmon Nash\n must have died in the wreckage. He was alone in the waterless trap of a\n deep crevice.",
"Sisko Rolf's stocky body was a blur of motion as he cut the rocket\n jets, doused the twin searchlights, and switched over to the audio\n beams that served so well on the surface when blind flying was in\n order. But here in the cavern world, thirty-seventh in the linked\n series of vast caves that underlie the waterless wastes of Mars, the\n reflected waves of sound were of little value. Distances were far too\n cramped—disaster might loom but a few hundred feet away.\n\n\n \"Trapped us neatly,\" Rolf said through clenched teeth. \"Tolled into\n their underground hideout by that water-runner we tried to capture. We\n can't escape, that's certain. They know these caverns better than....\n We'll down some of them, though.\"",
"The outlaw was game. His fists slammed back at Rolf, and his knees\n jolted upward toward the patrolman's vulnerable middle. But Rolf\n bored in, his own knotted hands pumping, and his trained body weaving\n instinctively aside from the crippling blows aimed at his body. For a\n moment they fought, coughing and choking from the thickening pall of\n smoke, and then the fingers of the outlaw clamped around Rolf's throat\n and squeezed hard.\n\n\n The patrolman was weary; the wreck in the upper cavern and the long\n trek afterward through the dark tunnels had sapped his strength, and\n now he felt victory slipping from his grasp.\n\n\n He felt something soft bump against his legs, legs so far below that he\n could hardly realize that they were his, and then he was falling with\n the relentless fingers still about his throat. As from a great distant\n he heard a cry of pain and the blessed air gulped into his raw throat.\n His eyes cleared.",
"In the fading glow of the super-heated metal the vertical walls above\n mocked him. There could be no ascent from this natural prison-pit, and\n even if there were he could never hope to reach the surface forty miles\n and more overhead. The floors of the thirty-seven caves through which\n they had so carefully jetted were a splintered, creviced series of\n canyon-like wastes, and as he ascended the rarefied atmosphere of the\n higher levels would spell death.\n\n\n Rolf laughed. Without a pressure mask on the surface of Mars an\n Earthman was licked. Without water and food certain death grinned in\n his face, for beyond the sand-buried entrance to these lost equatorial\n caves there were no pressure domes for hundreds of miles. Here at\n least the air was thick enough to support life, and somewhere nearby\n the outlaws who smuggled their precious contraband water into the\n water-starved domes of North Mars lay hidden.",
"Rolf swung the lax controls over hard as the bursts of fire revealed a\n looming barrier of stone dead ahead, and then he felt the tough skin\n of the flyer crumple inward. The cabin seemed to telescope about him.\n In a slow sort of wonder Rolf felt the scrape of rock against metal,\n and then the screeching of air through the myriad rents in the cabin's\n meralloy walls grew to a mad whining wail.\n\n\n Down plunged the battered ship, downward ever downward. Somehow Rolf\n found the strength to wrap his fingers around the control levers and\n snap on a quick burst from the landing rockets. Their mad speed checked\n momentarily, but the nose of the vertically plunging ship dissolved\n into an inferno of flame.",
"The bald scientist slung his bow over his head and one shoulder and\n went bounding away along a shadowy crevice that plunged raggedly into\n the heart of the Barrier. Rolf blasted another spurt of explosive\n needles at the Furry Ones and followed.\nDarkness thickened as they penetrated into the maze of the Barrier's\n shattered heart. An unseen furry shape sprang upon Rolf's shoulders\n and as he sank to his knees he felt hot saliva drip like acid upon his\n neck. His fist sent the attacker's bulk smashing against the rocky\n floor before fangs or claws could rip at his tender flesh, and he heard\n a choked snarl that ended convulsively in silence.\n\n\n Bat-winged blobs of life dragged wet leathery hide across his face, and\n beneath his feet slimy wriggling things crushed into quivering pulp.\n Then there was faint light again, and the high-vaulted roof of a rock\n dungeon rose above him.",
"\"Sure.\" Rolf nodded. \"Lost in equatorial wastelands—uh, about twenty\n years ago—2053, I believe.\"\n\n\n \"Only we were not lost on the surface,\" explained Tanner, his booming\n voice much too powerful for his reedy body, \"Wayne Stark was searching\n for the lost seas of Mars. Traced them underground. Found them too.\" He\n paused to look nervously out across the blasted wasteland.\n\n\n \"We ran out of fuel here on Lomihi,\" he finished, \"with the vanished\n surface waters of Mars less than four miles beneath us.\"\n\n\n Rolf followed the direction of the other's pale blue eyes. Overhead now\n hung the bottom of the cavern. An almost circular island of pale yellow\n lifted above the restless dark waters of a vast sea. Rolf realized with\n a wrench of sudden fear that they actually hung head downward like\n flies walking across a ceiling.",
"And something that felt like a mountain smashed into his back. He was\n crushed downward, breathless, his eyes glimpsing briefly the soiled\n greenish trousers of his attacker as they locked on either side of\n his neck, and then blackness engulfed him as a mighty sledge battered\n endlessly at his skull.\nThis sledge was hammering relentlessly as Rolf sensed his first\n glimmer of returning light. There were two sledges, one of them that\n he identified as the hammering of blood in his throbbing temples, and\n the other the measured blasting pulse of rocket jets. He opened his\n eyes slowly to find himself staring at the fine-crusted metal plates\n of a flyer's deck. His nose was grinding into the oily muck that only\n undisciplined men would have permitted to accumulate.",
"He guided the frail wing toward the shattered badlands where the girl\n had taken shelter, noting as he did so that the rocket flyer had landed\n near its center in a narrow strip of rocky gulch. A sudden thought made\n him grin. He drove directly toward the grounded ship. With this rocket\n flyer he could escape from Lomihi, return through the thirty-seven\n caverns to the upper world, and give to thirsty Mars the gift of\n limitless water again.\nA man stood on guard just outside the flyer's oval door. Rolf lined up\n his expoder and his jaw tensed. He guided the tiny soarer closer with\n one hand. If he could crash the glider into the guard, well and good.\n There would be no explosion of expoder needles to warn the fellow's\n comrades. But if the outlaw saw him Rolf knew that he would be the\n first to fire—his was the element of surprise.",
"The young patrolman unzippered his jacket pocket and felt for the\n emergency concentrate bars that were standard equipment. Half of the\n oval bar he crushed between his teeth, and when the concentrated energy\n flooded into his muscles he set off around the irregular wall of the\n pit.\n\n\n He found the opening less than ten paces from the starting point, an\n empty cavity higher than a man and half as wide. The glow from the\n gutted ship was failing and he felt for the solar torch that hugged\n flatly against his hip. He uncapped the torch and the miniature sun\n glowed redly from its lensed prison to reveal the rocky corridor\n stretching out ahead.\nLight! How many hours later it was when the first faint glow of white\n light reached his eyes Rolf did not know—it had seemed an eternity of\n endless plodding along that smooth-floored descending tunnel.",
"A hundred yards from the base of the rocky wall his feet scraped\n through black dust, and he came to a stop. Deftly Rolf nested the\n spinners again in their pack before he set out toward the heaped-up\n mass of stone blocks that was the wall.\n\n\n Ten steps he took before an excited voice called out shrilly from the\n rocks ahead. Rolf's slitted gray eyes narrowed yet more and his hand\n dropped to the compact expoder machine-gun holstered at his hip. There\n was the movement of a dark shape behind the screen of vines and ragged\n bushes.\n\n\n \"Down, Altha,\" a deeper voice rumbled from above, \"it's one of the\n Enemy.\"\n\n\n The voice had spoken in English! Rolf took a step forward eagerly and\n then doubt made his feet falter. There were Earthmen as well as Frogs\n among the outlaws. This mysterious world that floated above the cavern\n floor might be their headquarters.",
"His eyes went searching out, out into undreamed distance. For miles\n below him there was nothing but emptiness, and for miles before him\n there was that same glowing vacancy. Above the cavern's roof soared\n majestically upward; he could see the narrow dark slit through which\n his feet had betrayed him, and he realized that he had fallen through\n the vaulted rocky dome of this fantastic abyss.\n\n\n It was then, even as he snapped the release of his spinner and the\n nested blades spun free overhead, that he saw the slowly turning bulk\n of the cloud-swathed world, a tiny five mile green ball of a planet!",
"They halted, clustered about their leader. Giffa snarled quick orders\n at them, her chisel-teeth clicking savagely. The column swung out into\n the wasteland toward the nearest sunken valleys of the Hairy People.\n Rolf and Mark Tanner came to their feet.",
"\"The outlaws may capture,\" warned Tanner. \"They have taken over the\n canyons of Gur and Norpar, remember.\"\n\n\n \"I will take the glider.\" Altha was on her feet, her body crouched\n over to take advantage of the sheltering shrubs. She threaded her way\n swiftly back along a rocky corridor in the face of the Barrier toward\n the ruins of ancient Aryk.\n\n\n Tanner shrugged his shoulders. \"What can I do? Altha has the blood\n of the Hairy People in her veins. She will warn them even though the\n outlaws have turned her people against her.\"\n\n\n Rolf watched the column of barbarically clad warriors file out upon the\n barren desert and swing to the right along the base of the Barrier.\n Spear tips and bared swords glinted dully.\n\n\n \"They will pass within a few feet!\" he hissed.",
"A score of feet lay between them, and suddenly the outlaw whirled\n about. Rolf pressed the firing button; the expoder clicked over once\n and the trimmer key jammed, and the doughy-faced Venusian swung up his\n own long-barreled expoder!\n\n\n Rolf snapped his weapon overhand at the Frog's hairless skull. The\n fish-bellied alien ducked but his expoder swung off the target\n momentarily. In that instant Rolf launched himself from the open\n framework of the slowly diving glider, full upon the Venusian.\n\n\n They went down, Rolf swinging his fist like a hammer. He felt the Frog\n go limp and he loosed a relieved whistle. Now with a rocket flyer and\n the guard's rifle expoder in his grasp the problem of escape from\n the inner caverns was solved. He would rescue the girl, stop at the\n Forbidden City for Mark Tanner, and blast off for the upper crust forty\n miles and more overhead.",
"Cautiously his head twisted until he could look forward toward the\n controls. The bound body of Altha Stark faced him, and he saw her lips\n twist into a brief smile of recognition. She shook her head and frowned\n as he moved his arm. But Rolf had learned that his limbs were not\n bound—apparently the outlaws had considered him out of the blasting\n for the moment.\n\n\n By degrees Rolf worked his arm down to his belt where his solar torch\n was hooked. His fingers made careful adjustments within the inset base\n of the torch, pushing a lever here and adjusting a tension screw there.\n\n\n The ship bumped gently as it landed and the thrum of rockets ceased.\n The cabin shifted with the weight of bodies moving from their seats.\n Rolf heard voices from a distance and the answering triumphant bawling\n of his two captors. The moment had come. He turned the cap of the solar\n torch away from his body and freed it.",
"He saw Altha's bound body and head. Her jaws were clamped upon the\n arm of the outlaw and even as he fought for more of the reeking smoky\n air of the cabin he saw the man's clenched fist batter at her face.\n Rolf swung, all the weight of his stocky body behind the blow, and the\n outlaw thudded limply against the opposite wall of the little cabin.\n\n\n No time to ask the girl if she were injured. The patrolman flung\n himself into the spongy control chair's cushions and sent the ship\n rocketing skyward. Behind him the thin film of surface oil no longer\n burned and the conditioning unit was clearing the air.\n\n\n \"Patrolman,\" the girl's voice was beside him. \"We're safe!\"\n\n\n \"Everything bongo?\" Rolf wanted to know.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" she smiled crookedly.",
"\"Glad of that.\" Rolf felt the warmth of her body so close beside him. A\n sudden strange restlessness came with the near contact.\n\n\n Altha smiled shyly and winced with pain. \"Do you know,\" she said, \"even\n yet I do not know your name.\"\n\n\n Rolf grinned up at her. \"Need to?\" he asked.\n\n\n The girl's eyes widened. A responsive spark blazed in them. \"Handier\n than calling you\nShorty\nall the time,\" she quipped.\n\n\n Then they were over the Barrier and Rolf saw the last of the beaten\n Furry Ones racing back across the great wall toward the Plains of\n Nyd. He nosed the captured ship down toward the ruined plaza of\n the Forbidden City. Once Mark Tanner was aboard they would blast\n surfaceward with their thrilling news that all Mars could have water in\n plenty again.",
"A green bulge showed around the polished fuselage and Rolf pressed his\n captured weapon's firing button. A roar of pain came from the wounded\n man, and he saw an outflung arm upon the rocky ground that clenched\n tightly twice and relaxed to move no more. The outlaw weapon must have\n been loaded with a drum of poisoned needles, the expoder needles had\n not blasted a vital spot in the man's body.\n\n\n The odds were evening, he thought triumphantly. There might be another\n outlaw somewhere out there in the badlands, but no more than that. The\n flyer was built to accommodate no more than five passengers and four\n was the usual number. He shifted his expoder to cover the opposite end\n of the ship's squatty fuselage.",
"The older man's eyes were hot. He jerked at Rolf's hands and then\n suddenly thought better of it. \"You're right,\" he agreed. \"Help her if\n you can. Your weapon is our only hope now.\"\n\n\n Rolf pushed up and outward with all the strength of his weary muscles.\n The glider knifed forward with that first swift impetus, and drove out\n over the Barrier. The Furry Ones were struggling insect shapes below\n him, and he saw with a thrill that larger bodied warriors, whose bodies\n glinted with a dull bronze, were attacking them from the burnt-out\n wastelands. The Hairy People had come to battle the invaders."
],
[
"The ship struck; split open like a rotten squash, and Rolf felt himself\n being flung far outward through thick blackness. For an eternity it\n seemed he hung in the darkness before something smashed the breath and\n feeling from his nerveless body. With a last glimmer of sanity he knew\n that he lay crushed against a rocky wall.\nMuch later Rolf groaned with the pain of bruised muscles and tried to\n rise. To his amazement he could move all his limbs. Carefully he came\n to his knees and so to his feet. Not a bone was broken, unless the\n sharp breathlessness that strained at his chest meant cracked ribs.\n\n\n There was light in the narrow pit in which he found himself, light and\n heat from the yet-glowing debris of the rocket flyer. The outlaws had\n blasted the crashed ship, his practiced eyes told him, and Garmon Nash\n must have died in the wreckage. He was alone in the waterless trap of a\n deep crevice.",
"And something that felt like a mountain smashed into his back. He was\n crushed downward, breathless, his eyes glimpsing briefly the soiled\n greenish trousers of his attacker as they locked on either side of\n his neck, and then blackness engulfed him as a mighty sledge battered\n endlessly at his skull.\nThis sledge was hammering relentlessly as Rolf sensed his first\n glimmer of returning light. There were two sledges, one of them that\n he identified as the hammering of blood in his throbbing temples, and\n the other the measured blasting pulse of rocket jets. He opened his\n eyes slowly to find himself staring at the fine-crusted metal plates\n of a flyer's deck. His nose was grinding into the oily muck that only\n undisciplined men would have permitted to accumulate.",
"Rolf swung the lax controls over hard as the bursts of fire revealed a\n looming barrier of stone dead ahead, and then he felt the tough skin\n of the flyer crumple inward. The cabin seemed to telescope about him.\n In a slow sort of wonder Rolf felt the scrape of rock against metal,\n and then the screeching of air through the myriad rents in the cabin's\n meralloy walls grew to a mad whining wail.\n\n\n Down plunged the battered ship, downward ever downward. Somehow Rolf\n found the strength to wrap his fingers around the control levers and\n snap on a quick burst from the landing rockets. Their mad speed checked\n momentarily, but the nose of the vertically plunging ship dissolved\n into an inferno of flame.",
"The older man's eyes were hot. He jerked at Rolf's hands and then\n suddenly thought better of it. \"You're right,\" he agreed. \"Help her if\n you can. Your weapon is our only hope now.\"\n\n\n Rolf pushed up and outward with all the strength of his weary muscles.\n The glider knifed forward with that first swift impetus, and drove out\n over the Barrier. The Furry Ones were struggling insect shapes below\n him, and he saw with a thrill that larger bodied warriors, whose bodies\n glinted with a dull bronze, were attacking them from the burnt-out\n wastelands. The Hairy People had come to battle the invaders.",
"Rolf snorted. \"Shorty,\" he said disgustedly as they landed, but his arm\n went out toward the girl's red-haired slimness, and curved around it.",
"The outlaw was game. His fists slammed back at Rolf, and his knees\n jolted upward toward the patrolman's vulnerable middle. But Rolf\n bored in, his own knotted hands pumping, and his trained body weaving\n instinctively aside from the crippling blows aimed at his body. For a\n moment they fought, coughing and choking from the thickening pall of\n smoke, and then the fingers of the outlaw clamped around Rolf's throat\n and squeezed hard.\n\n\n The patrolman was weary; the wreck in the upper cavern and the long\n trek afterward through the dark tunnels had sapped his strength, and\n now he felt victory slipping from his grasp.\n\n\n He felt something soft bump against his legs, legs so far below that he\n could hardly realize that they were his, and then he was falling with\n the relentless fingers still about his throat. As from a great distant\n he heard a cry of pain and the blessed air gulped into his raw throat.\n His eyes cleared.",
"He saw Altha's bound body and head. Her jaws were clamped upon the\n arm of the outlaw and even as he fought for more of the reeking smoky\n air of the cabin he saw the man's clenched fist batter at her face.\n Rolf swung, all the weight of his stocky body behind the blow, and the\n outlaw thudded limply against the opposite wall of the little cabin.\n\n\n No time to ask the girl if she were injured. The patrolman flung\n himself into the spongy control chair's cushions and sent the ship\n rocketing skyward. Behind him the thin film of surface oil no longer\n burned and the conditioning unit was clearing the air.\n\n\n \"Patrolman,\" the girl's voice was beside him. \"We're safe!\"\n\n\n \"Everything bongo?\" Rolf wanted to know.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" she smiled crookedly.",
"Cautiously his head twisted until he could look forward toward the\n controls. The bound body of Altha Stark faced him, and he saw her lips\n twist into a brief smile of recognition. She shook her head and frowned\n as he moved his arm. But Rolf had learned that his limbs were not\n bound—apparently the outlaws had considered him out of the blasting\n for the moment.\n\n\n By degrees Rolf worked his arm down to his belt where his solar torch\n was hooked. His fingers made careful adjustments within the inset base\n of the torch, pushing a lever here and adjusting a tension screw there.\n\n\n The ship bumped gently as it landed and the thrum of rockets ceased.\n The cabin shifted with the weight of bodies moving from their seats.\n Rolf heard voices from a distance and the answering triumphant bawling\n of his two captors. The moment had come. He turned the cap of the solar\n torch away from his body and freed it.",
"\"Glad of that.\" Rolf felt the warmth of her body so close beside him. A\n sudden strange restlessness came with the near contact.\n\n\n Altha smiled shyly and winced with pain. \"Do you know,\" she said, \"even\n yet I do not know your name.\"\n\n\n Rolf grinned up at her. \"Need to?\" he asked.\n\n\n The girl's eyes widened. A responsive spark blazed in them. \"Handier\n than calling you\nShorty\nall the time,\" she quipped.\n\n\n Then they were over the Barrier and Rolf saw the last of the beaten\n Furry Ones racing back across the great wall toward the Plains of\n Nyd. He nosed the captured ship down toward the ruined plaza of\n the Forbidden City. Once Mark Tanner was aboard they would blast\n surfaceward with their thrilling news that all Mars could have water in\n plenty again.",
"Heat blasted at his body as the stepped-up output of the torch made the\n oily floor flame. He lay unmoving while the thick smoke rolled over him.\n\n\n \"Fire!\" There was panic in the outlaw's voice. Rolf came to his knees\n in the blanketing fog and looked forward.\n\n\n One of the men flung himself out the door, but the other reached\n for the extinguisher close at hand. His thoughts were on the oily\n smoke; not on the prisoners, and so the impact of Rolf's horizontally\n propelled body drove the breath from his lungs before his hand could\n drop to his belted expoder.",
"He guided the frail wing toward the shattered badlands where the girl\n had taken shelter, noting as he did so that the rocket flyer had landed\n near its center in a narrow strip of rocky gulch. A sudden thought made\n him grin. He drove directly toward the grounded ship. With this rocket\n flyer he could escape from Lomihi, return through the thirty-seven\n caverns to the upper world, and give to thirsty Mars the gift of\n limitless water again.\nA man stood on guard just outside the flyer's oval door. Rolf lined up\n his expoder and his jaw tensed. He guided the tiny soarer closer with\n one hand. If he could crash the glider into the guard, well and good.\n There would be no explosion of expoder needles to warn the fellow's\n comrades. But if the outlaw saw him Rolf knew that he would be the\n first to fire—his was the element of surprise.",
"His eyes went searching out, out into undreamed distance. For miles\n below him there was nothing but emptiness, and for miles before him\n there was that same glowing vacancy. Above the cavern's roof soared\n majestically upward; he could see the narrow dark slit through which\n his feet had betrayed him, and he realized that he had fallen through\n the vaulted rocky dome of this fantastic abyss.\n\n\n It was then, even as he snapped the release of his spinner and the\n nested blades spun free overhead, that he saw the slowly turning bulk\n of the cloud-swathed world, a tiny five mile green ball of a planet!",
"The weird globe was divided equally into hemispheres, and as the tiny\n world turned between its confining columns a green, lake-dotted half\n alternated with a blasted, splintered black waste of rocky desert. As\n the spinner dropped him slowly down into the vast emptiness of the\n great shining gulf, Rolf could see that a broad band of stone divided\n the green fertile plains and forests from the desolate desert wastes of\n the other half. Toward this barrier the spinner bore him, and Rolf was\n content to let it move in that direction—from the heights of the wall\n he could scout out the country beyond.",
"A green bulge showed around the polished fuselage and Rolf pressed his\n captured weapon's firing button. A roar of pain came from the wounded\n man, and he saw an outflung arm upon the rocky ground that clenched\n tightly twice and relaxed to move no more. The outlaw weapon must have\n been loaded with a drum of poisoned needles, the expoder needles had\n not blasted a vital spot in the man's body.\n\n\n The odds were evening, he thought triumphantly. There might be another\n outlaw somewhere out there in the badlands, but no more than that. The\n flyer was built to accommodate no more than five passengers and four\n was the usual number. He shifted his expoder to cover the opposite end\n of the ship's squatty fuselage.",
"In the fading glow of the super-heated metal the vertical walls above\n mocked him. There could be no ascent from this natural prison-pit, and\n even if there were he could never hope to reach the surface forty miles\n and more overhead. The floors of the thirty-seven caves through which\n they had so carefully jetted were a splintered, creviced series of\n canyon-like wastes, and as he ascended the rarefied atmosphere of the\n higher levels would spell death.\n\n\n Rolf laughed. Without a pressure mask on the surface of Mars an\n Earthman was licked. Without water and food certain death grinned in\n his face, for beyond the sand-buried entrance to these lost equatorial\n caves there were no pressure domes for hundreds of miles. Here at\n least the air was thick enough to support life, and somewhere nearby\n the outlaws who smuggled their precious contraband water into the\n water-starved domes of North Mars lay hidden.",
"They halted, clustered about their leader. Giffa snarled quick orders\n at them, her chisel-teeth clicking savagely. The column swung out into\n the wasteland toward the nearest sunken valleys of the Hairy People.\n Rolf and Mark Tanner came to their feet.",
"Sisko Rolf's stocky body was a blur of motion as he cut the rocket\n jets, doused the twin searchlights, and switched over to the audio\n beams that served so well on the surface when blind flying was in\n order. But here in the cavern world, thirty-seventh in the linked\n series of vast caves that underlie the waterless wastes of Mars, the\n reflected waves of sound were of little value. Distances were far too\n cramped—disaster might loom but a few hundred feet away.\n\n\n \"Trapped us neatly,\" Rolf said through clenched teeth. \"Tolled into\n their underground hideout by that water-runner we tried to capture. We\n can't escape, that's certain. They know these caverns better than....\n We'll down some of them, though.\"",
"A hundred yards from the base of the rocky wall his feet scraped\n through black dust, and he came to a stop. Deftly Rolf nested the\n spinners again in their pack before he set out toward the heaped-up\n mass of stone blocks that was the wall.\n\n\n Ten steps he took before an excited voice called out shrilly from the\n rocks ahead. Rolf's slitted gray eyes narrowed yet more and his hand\n dropped to the compact expoder machine-gun holstered at his hip. There\n was the movement of a dark shape behind the screen of vines and ragged\n bushes.\n\n\n \"Down, Altha,\" a deeper voice rumbled from above, \"it's one of the\n Enemy.\"\n\n\n The voice had spoken in English! Rolf took a step forward eagerly and\n then doubt made his feet falter. There were Earthmen as well as Frogs\n among the outlaws. This mysterious world that floated above the cavern\n floor might be their headquarters.",
"Rolf laughed. \"Like the pleasure globes of the wealthy on Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Right.\" Tanner kept his eyes on the enlarging winged shape of Altha's\n flyer as he spoke. \"Later, when the nations of Mars began draining off\n the seas and hoarding them in their underground caverns, Lomihi became\n a fortress for the few thousand aristocrats and slaves who escaped the\n surface wars.\n\n\n \"The Hairy People were the rulers,\" he went on, \"and the Furry Ones\n were their slaves. In the revolt that eventually split Lomihi into two\n warring races this city, Aryk, was destroyed by a strange vegetable\n blight and the ancient knowledge was lost to both races.\"\n\n\n \"But,\" Rolf frowned thoughtfully, \"what keeps Lomihi from crashing into\n the island? Surely the two columns at either end cannot support it?\"",
"The bald scientist slung his bow over his head and one shoulder and\n went bounding away along a shadowy crevice that plunged raggedly into\n the heart of the Barrier. Rolf blasted another spurt of explosive\n needles at the Furry Ones and followed.\nDarkness thickened as they penetrated into the maze of the Barrier's\n shattered heart. An unseen furry shape sprang upon Rolf's shoulders\n and as he sank to his knees he felt hot saliva drip like acid upon his\n neck. His fist sent the attacker's bulk smashing against the rocky\n floor before fangs or claws could rip at his tender flesh, and he heard\n a choked snarl that ended convulsively in silence.\n\n\n Bat-winged blobs of life dragged wet leathery hide across his face, and\n beneath his feet slimy wriggling things crushed into quivering pulp.\n Then there was faint light again, and the high-vaulted roof of a rock\n dungeon rose above him."
],
[
"The ship struck; split open like a rotten squash, and Rolf felt himself\n being flung far outward through thick blackness. For an eternity it\n seemed he hung in the darkness before something smashed the breath and\n feeling from his nerveless body. With a last glimmer of sanity he knew\n that he lay crushed against a rocky wall.\nMuch later Rolf groaned with the pain of bruised muscles and tried to\n rise. To his amazement he could move all his limbs. Carefully he came\n to his knees and so to his feet. Not a bone was broken, unless the\n sharp breathlessness that strained at his chest meant cracked ribs.\n\n\n There was light in the narrow pit in which he found himself, light and\n heat from the yet-glowing debris of the rocket flyer. The outlaws had\n blasted the crashed ship, his practiced eyes told him, and Garmon Nash\n must have died in the wreckage. He was alone in the waterless trap of a\n deep crevice.",
"The outlaw was game. His fists slammed back at Rolf, and his knees\n jolted upward toward the patrolman's vulnerable middle. But Rolf\n bored in, his own knotted hands pumping, and his trained body weaving\n instinctively aside from the crippling blows aimed at his body. For a\n moment they fought, coughing and choking from the thickening pall of\n smoke, and then the fingers of the outlaw clamped around Rolf's throat\n and squeezed hard.\n\n\n The patrolman was weary; the wreck in the upper cavern and the long\n trek afterward through the dark tunnels had sapped his strength, and\n now he felt victory slipping from his grasp.\n\n\n He felt something soft bump against his legs, legs so far below that he\n could hardly realize that they were his, and then he was falling with\n the relentless fingers still about his throat. As from a great distant\n he heard a cry of pain and the blessed air gulped into his raw throat.\n His eyes cleared.",
"The wall expanded as he came nearer to the pygmy planet. The spinner\n had slowed its speed; it seemed to Rolf that he must be falling free\n in space for a time, but the feeble gravity of the tiny world tugged\n at him more strongly as he neared the wall. And the barrier became a\n jumbled mass of roughly-dressed stone slabs, from whose earth-filled\n crevices sprouted green life.\n\n\n So slowly was the spinner dropping that the blackened desolation of the\n other hemisphere came sliding up beneath his boots. He looked down into\n great gashes in the blackness of the desert and saw there the green of\n sunken oases and watered canyons. He drifted slowly toward the opposite\n loom of the mysterious wall with a swift wind off the desert behind him.",
"A hundred yards from the base of the rocky wall his feet scraped\n through black dust, and he came to a stop. Deftly Rolf nested the\n spinners again in their pack before he set out toward the heaped-up\n mass of stone blocks that was the wall.\n\n\n Ten steps he took before an excited voice called out shrilly from the\n rocks ahead. Rolf's slitted gray eyes narrowed yet more and his hand\n dropped to the compact expoder machine-gun holstered at his hip. There\n was the movement of a dark shape behind the screen of vines and ragged\n bushes.\n\n\n \"Down, Altha,\" a deeper voice rumbled from above, \"it's one of the\n Enemy.\"\n\n\n The voice had spoken in English! Rolf took a step forward eagerly and\n then doubt made his feet falter. There were Earthmen as well as Frogs\n among the outlaws. This mysterious world that floated above the cavern\n floor might be their headquarters.",
"The weird globe was divided equally into hemispheres, and as the tiny\n world turned between its confining columns a green, lake-dotted half\n alternated with a blasted, splintered black waste of rocky desert. As\n the spinner dropped him slowly down into the vast emptiness of the\n great shining gulf, Rolf could see that a broad band of stone divided\n the green fertile plains and forests from the desolate desert wastes of\n the other half. Toward this barrier the spinner bore him, and Rolf was\n content to let it move in that direction—from the heights of the wall\n he could scout out the country beyond.",
"They halted, clustered about their leader. Giffa snarled quick orders\n at them, her chisel-teeth clicking savagely. The column swung out into\n the wasteland toward the nearest sunken valleys of the Hairy People.\n Rolf and Mark Tanner came to their feet.",
"The bald scientist slung his bow over his head and one shoulder and\n went bounding away along a shadowy crevice that plunged raggedly into\n the heart of the Barrier. Rolf blasted another spurt of explosive\n needles at the Furry Ones and followed.\nDarkness thickened as they penetrated into the maze of the Barrier's\n shattered heart. An unseen furry shape sprang upon Rolf's shoulders\n and as he sank to his knees he felt hot saliva drip like acid upon his\n neck. His fist sent the attacker's bulk smashing against the rocky\n floor before fangs or claws could rip at his tender flesh, and he heard\n a choked snarl that ended convulsively in silence.\n\n\n Bat-winged blobs of life dragged wet leathery hide across his face, and\n beneath his feet slimy wriggling things crushed into quivering pulp.\n Then there was faint light again, and the high-vaulted roof of a rock\n dungeon rose above him.",
"The older man's eyes were hot. He jerked at Rolf's hands and then\n suddenly thought better of it. \"You're right,\" he agreed. \"Help her if\n you can. Your weapon is our only hope now.\"\n\n\n Rolf pushed up and outward with all the strength of his weary muscles.\n The glider knifed forward with that first swift impetus, and drove out\n over the Barrier. The Furry Ones were struggling insect shapes below\n him, and he saw with a thrill that larger bodied warriors, whose bodies\n glinted with a dull bronze, were attacking them from the burnt-out\n wastelands. The Hairy People had come to battle the invaders.",
"The young patrolman unzippered his jacket pocket and felt for the\n emergency concentrate bars that were standard equipment. Half of the\n oval bar he crushed between his teeth, and when the concentrated energy\n flooded into his muscles he set off around the irregular wall of the\n pit.\n\n\n He found the opening less than ten paces from the starting point, an\n empty cavity higher than a man and half as wide. The glow from the\n gutted ship was failing and he felt for the solar torch that hugged\n flatly against his hip. He uncapped the torch and the miniature sun\n glowed redly from its lensed prison to reveal the rocky corridor\n stretching out ahead.\nLight! How many hours later it was when the first faint glow of white\n light reached his eyes Rolf did not know—it had seemed an eternity of\n endless plodding along that smooth-floored descending tunnel.",
"His eyes went searching out, out into undreamed distance. For miles\n below him there was nothing but emptiness, and for miles before him\n there was that same glowing vacancy. Above the cavern's roof soared\n majestically upward; he could see the narrow dark slit through which\n his feet had betrayed him, and he realized that he had fallen through\n the vaulted rocky dome of this fantastic abyss.\n\n\n It was then, even as he snapped the release of his spinner and the\n nested blades spun free overhead, that he saw the slowly turning bulk\n of the cloud-swathed world, a tiny five mile green ball of a planet!",
"And something that felt like a mountain smashed into his back. He was\n crushed downward, breathless, his eyes glimpsing briefly the soiled\n greenish trousers of his attacker as they locked on either side of\n his neck, and then blackness engulfed him as a mighty sledge battered\n endlessly at his skull.\nThis sledge was hammering relentlessly as Rolf sensed his first\n glimmer of returning light. There were two sledges, one of them that\n he identified as the hammering of blood in his throbbing temples, and\n the other the measured blasting pulse of rocket jets. He opened his\n eyes slowly to find himself staring at the fine-crusted metal plates\n of a flyer's deck. His nose was grinding into the oily muck that only\n undisciplined men would have permitted to accumulate.",
"Rolf swung the lax controls over hard as the bursts of fire revealed a\n looming barrier of stone dead ahead, and then he felt the tough skin\n of the flyer crumple inward. The cabin seemed to telescope about him.\n In a slow sort of wonder Rolf felt the scrape of rock against metal,\n and then the screeching of air through the myriad rents in the cabin's\n meralloy walls grew to a mad whining wail.\n\n\n Down plunged the battered ship, downward ever downward. Somehow Rolf\n found the strength to wrap his fingers around the control levers and\n snap on a quick burst from the landing rockets. Their mad speed checked\n momentarily, but the nose of the vertically plunging ship dissolved\n into an inferno of flame.",
"Heat blasted at his body as the stepped-up output of the torch made the\n oily floor flame. He lay unmoving while the thick smoke rolled over him.\n\n\n \"Fire!\" There was panic in the outlaw's voice. Rolf came to his knees\n in the blanketing fog and looked forward.\n\n\n One of the men flung himself out the door, but the other reached\n for the extinguisher close at hand. His thoughts were on the oily\n smoke; not on the prisoners, and so the impact of Rolf's horizontally\n propelled body drove the breath from his lungs before his hand could\n drop to his belted expoder.",
"Rolf snorted. \"Shorty,\" he said disgustedly as they landed, but his arm\n went out toward the girl's red-haired slimness, and curved around it.",
"In the fading glow of the super-heated metal the vertical walls above\n mocked him. There could be no ascent from this natural prison-pit, and\n even if there were he could never hope to reach the surface forty miles\n and more overhead. The floors of the thirty-seven caves through which\n they had so carefully jetted were a splintered, creviced series of\n canyon-like wastes, and as he ascended the rarefied atmosphere of the\n higher levels would spell death.\n\n\n Rolf laughed. Without a pressure mask on the surface of Mars an\n Earthman was licked. Without water and food certain death grinned in\n his face, for beyond the sand-buried entrance to these lost equatorial\n caves there were no pressure domes for hundreds of miles. Here at\n least the air was thick enough to support life, and somewhere nearby\n the outlaws who smuggled their precious contraband water into the\n water-starved domes of North Mars lay hidden.",
"Sisko Rolf's stocky body was a blur of motion as he cut the rocket\n jets, doused the twin searchlights, and switched over to the audio\n beams that served so well on the surface when blind flying was in\n order. But here in the cavern world, thirty-seventh in the linked\n series of vast caves that underlie the waterless wastes of Mars, the\n reflected waves of sound were of little value. Distances were far too\n cramped—disaster might loom but a few hundred feet away.\n\n\n \"Trapped us neatly,\" Rolf said through clenched teeth. \"Tolled into\n their underground hideout by that water-runner we tried to capture. We\n can't escape, that's certain. They know these caverns better than....\n We'll down some of them, though.\"",
"\"Glad of that.\" Rolf felt the warmth of her body so close beside him. A\n sudden strange restlessness came with the near contact.\n\n\n Altha smiled shyly and winced with pain. \"Do you know,\" she said, \"even\n yet I do not know your name.\"\n\n\n Rolf grinned up at her. \"Need to?\" he asked.\n\n\n The girl's eyes widened. A responsive spark blazed in them. \"Handier\n than calling you\nShorty\nall the time,\" she quipped.\n\n\n Then they were over the Barrier and Rolf saw the last of the beaten\n Furry Ones racing back across the great wall toward the Plains of\n Nyd. He nosed the captured ship down toward the ruined plaza of\n the Forbidden City. Once Mark Tanner was aboard they would blast\n surfaceward with their thrilling news that all Mars could have water in\n plenty again.",
"Cautiously his head twisted until he could look forward toward the\n controls. The bound body of Altha Stark faced him, and he saw her lips\n twist into a brief smile of recognition. She shook her head and frowned\n as he moved his arm. But Rolf had learned that his limbs were not\n bound—apparently the outlaws had considered him out of the blasting\n for the moment.\n\n\n By degrees Rolf worked his arm down to his belt where his solar torch\n was hooked. His fingers made careful adjustments within the inset base\n of the torch, pushing a lever here and adjusting a tension screw there.\n\n\n The ship bumped gently as it landed and the thrum of rockets ceased.\n The cabin shifted with the weight of bodies moving from their seats.\n Rolf heard voices from a distance and the answering triumphant bawling\n of his two captors. The moment had come. He turned the cap of the solar\n torch away from his body and freed it.",
"He guided the frail wing toward the shattered badlands where the girl\n had taken shelter, noting as he did so that the rocket flyer had landed\n near its center in a narrow strip of rocky gulch. A sudden thought made\n him grin. He drove directly toward the grounded ship. With this rocket\n flyer he could escape from Lomihi, return through the thirty-seven\n caverns to the upper world, and give to thirsty Mars the gift of\n limitless water again.\nA man stood on guard just outside the flyer's oval door. Rolf lined up\n his expoder and his jaw tensed. He guided the tiny soarer closer with\n one hand. If he could crash the glider into the guard, well and good.\n There would be no explosion of expoder needles to warn the fellow's\n comrades. But if the outlaw saw him Rolf knew that he would be the\n first to fire—his was the element of surprise.",
"\"The island is the answer,\" said Tanner. \"Somehow it blocks the force\n of gravity—shields Lomihi from....\" He caught his breath suddenly.\n\n\n \"The outlaws!\" he cried. \"They're after Altha.\"\n\n\n Rolf caught a glimpse of a sleek rocket flyer diving upon Altha's frail\n wing. He saw the girl go gliding steeply down toward a ragged jumble\n of volcanic spurs and pits and disappear from view. He turned to see\n the old man pushing another crudely constructed glider toward the outer\n wall of the rock chamber.\n\n\n Tanner tugged at a silvery metal bar inset into the stone wall. A\n section of the wall swung slowly inward. Rolf sprang to his side.\n\n\n \"Let me follow,\" he said. \"I can fly a glider, and I have my expoder.\""
],
[
"An elongated pencil-ray of a man bounced nervously out to her side.\n \"Altha,\" he scolded, scrubbing at his reddened bald skull with a\n long-fingered hand, \"why do you never listen to me? I promised your\n father I'd look after you.\" He hitched at his tattered skin robe.\n\n\n The girl laughed, a low liquid sound that made Rolf's heart pump\n faster. \"This Mark Tanner of mine,\" she explained to the patrolman,\n \"is always afraid for me. He does not remember that I can see into the\n minds of others.\"\n\n\n She smiled again as Rolf's face slowly reddened. \"Do not be ashamed,\"\n she said. \"I am not angry that you think I am—well, not too\n unattractive.\"",
"\"See!\" Tanner's voice was muted. \"Giffa, Queen of the Furry Ones!\"\n\n\n Borne on a carved and polished litter of ebon-hued wood and yellowed\n bone lolled the hideous queen of that advancing horde. Gaunt of body\n she was, her scarred gray-furred hide hanging loose upon her breastless\n frame. One eye was gone but the other gleamed, black and beady, from\n her narrow earless skull. And the skulls of rodents and men alike\n linked together into ghastly festoons about her heavy, short-legged\n litter.\n\n\n Men bore the litter, eight broad-shouldered red-haired men whose arms\n had been cut off at the shoulders and whose naked backs bore the weals\n of countless lashes. Their bodies, like that of Altha, were covered\n with a silky coat of reddish hair.",
"He saw Altha's bound body and head. Her jaws were clamped upon the\n arm of the outlaw and even as he fought for more of the reeking smoky\n air of the cabin he saw the man's clenched fist batter at her face.\n Rolf swung, all the weight of his stocky body behind the blow, and the\n outlaw thudded limply against the opposite wall of the little cabin.\n\n\n No time to ask the girl if she were injured. The patrolman flung\n himself into the spongy control chair's cushions and sent the ship\n rocketing skyward. Behind him the thin film of surface oil no longer\n burned and the conditioning unit was clearing the air.\n\n\n \"Patrolman,\" the girl's voice was beside him. \"We're safe!\"\n\n\n \"Everything bongo?\" Rolf wanted to know.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" she smiled crookedly.",
"\"The outlaws may capture,\" warned Tanner. \"They have taken over the\n canyons of Gur and Norpar, remember.\"\n\n\n \"I will take the glider.\" Altha was on her feet, her body crouched\n over to take advantage of the sheltering shrubs. She threaded her way\n swiftly back along a rocky corridor in the face of the Barrier toward\n the ruins of ancient Aryk.\n\n\n Tanner shrugged his shoulders. \"What can I do? Altha has the blood\n of the Hairy People in her veins. She will warn them even though the\n outlaws have turned her people against her.\"\n\n\n Rolf watched the column of barbarically clad warriors file out upon the\n barren desert and swing to the right along the base of the Barrier.\n Spear tips and bared swords glinted dully.\n\n\n \"They will pass within a few feet!\" he hissed.",
"Rolf threw up the mental block that was the inheritance from his\n grueling years of training on Earth Base. His instructors there\n had known that a few gifted mortals possess the power of a limited\n telepathy, and the secrets of the Planet Patrol must be guarded.\n\n\n \"That is better, perhaps.\" The girl's face was demure. \"And now perhaps\n you will visit us in the safety of the vaults of ancient Aryk.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" said the tall man as Rolf sprang easily from the ground to\n their side. \"I'm always forgetting the mind-reading abilities of the\n Hairy People.\"\n\n\n \"She one of them?\" Rolf's voice was low, but he saw Altha's lip twitch.\n\n\n \"Mother was.\" Mark Tanner's voice was louder. \"Father was Wayne Stark.\n Famous explorer you know. I was his assistant.\"",
"Rolf raised his expoder, red anger clouding his eyes as he saw these\n maimed beasts of burden, but the hand of Mark Tanner pressed down\n firmly across his arm. The older man shook his head.\n\n\n \"Not yet,\" he said. \"When Altha has warned the Hairy People we can cut\n off their retreat. After they have passed I will arouse the Outcasts\n who live here upon the Barrier. Though their blood is that of the two\n races mingled they hate the Furry Ones.\"\n\n\n A shadow passed over their hiding place. The Furry Amazons too saw the\n indistinct darkness and looked up. High overhead drifted the narrow\n winged shape of a glider, and the warrior women shrieked their hatred.\n Gone now was their chance for a surprise attack on the isolated canyons\n of the Hairy People.",
"\"The island is the answer,\" said Tanner. \"Somehow it blocks the force\n of gravity—shields Lomihi from....\" He caught his breath suddenly.\n\n\n \"The outlaws!\" he cried. \"They're after Altha.\"\n\n\n Rolf caught a glimpse of a sleek rocket flyer diving upon Altha's frail\n wing. He saw the girl go gliding steeply down toward a ragged jumble\n of volcanic spurs and pits and disappear from view. He turned to see\n the old man pushing another crudely constructed glider toward the outer\n wall of the rock chamber.\n\n\n Tanner tugged at a silvery metal bar inset into the stone wall. A\n section of the wall swung slowly inward. Rolf sprang to his side.\n\n\n \"Let me follow,\" he said. \"I can fly a glider, and I have my expoder.\"",
"Rolf laughed. \"Like the pleasure globes of the wealthy on Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Right.\" Tanner kept his eyes on the enlarging winged shape of Altha's\n flyer as he spoke. \"Later, when the nations of Mars began draining off\n the seas and hoarding them in their underground caverns, Lomihi became\n a fortress for the few thousand aristocrats and slaves who escaped the\n surface wars.\n\n\n \"The Hairy People were the rulers,\" he went on, \"and the Furry Ones\n were their slaves. In the revolt that eventually split Lomihi into two\n warring races this city, Aryk, was destroyed by a strange vegetable\n blight and the ancient knowledge was lost to both races.\"\n\n\n \"But,\" Rolf frowned thoughtfully, \"what keeps Lomihi from crashing into\n the island? Surely the two columns at either end cannot support it?\"",
"Cautiously his head twisted until he could look forward toward the\n controls. The bound body of Altha Stark faced him, and he saw her lips\n twist into a brief smile of recognition. She shook her head and frowned\n as he moved his arm. But Rolf had learned that his limbs were not\n bound—apparently the outlaws had considered him out of the blasting\n for the moment.\n\n\n By degrees Rolf worked his arm down to his belt where his solar torch\n was hooked. His fingers made careful adjustments within the inset base\n of the torch, pushing a lever here and adjusting a tension screw there.\n\n\n The ship bumped gently as it landed and the thrum of rockets ceased.\n The cabin shifted with the weight of bodies moving from their seats.\n Rolf heard voices from a distance and the answering triumphant bawling\n of his two captors. The moment had come. He turned the cap of the solar\n torch away from his body and freed it.",
"\"Glad of that.\" Rolf felt the warmth of her body so close beside him. A\n sudden strange restlessness came with the near contact.\n\n\n Altha smiled shyly and winced with pain. \"Do you know,\" she said, \"even\n yet I do not know your name.\"\n\n\n Rolf grinned up at her. \"Need to?\" he asked.\n\n\n The girl's eyes widened. A responsive spark blazed in them. \"Handier\n than calling you\nShorty\nall the time,\" she quipped.\n\n\n Then they were over the Barrier and Rolf saw the last of the beaten\n Furry Ones racing back across the great wall toward the Plains of\n Nyd. He nosed the captured ship down toward the ruined plaza of\n the Forbidden City. Once Mark Tanner was aboard they would blast\n surfaceward with their thrilling news that all Mars could have water in\n plenty again.",
"\"Mark!\" The girl's voice was tense. Rolf felt her arm tug at his sleeve\n and he dropped beside her in the shelter of a clump of coarse-leaved\n gray bushes. \"The Furry Women attack!\"\nA hundred paces away Rolf made the dark shapes of armed warriors as\n they filed downward from the Barrier into the blackened desolation of\n the desert half of Lomihi.\n\n\n \"Enemies?\" he whispered to Mark Tanner hoarsely.\n\n\n \"Right.\" The older man was slipping the stout bowstring into its\n notched recess on the upper end of his long bow. \"They cross the\n Barrier from the fertile plains of Nyd to raid the Hairy People. They\n take them for slaves.\"\n\n\n \"I must warn them.\" Altha's lips thinned and her brown-flecked eyes\n flamed.",
"Mark Tanner was peering out a slitted embrasure that overlooked the\n desolate land of the Hairy People.\n\n\n Tanner's finger pointed. \"Altha!\" Rolf saw the graceful wings of the\n glider riding the thermals back toward the Barrier. \"She had warned the\n Hairy People, and now she returns.\"\n\n\n \"The weasel heads won't follow us here?\" asked Rolf.\n\n\n Tanner laughed. \"Hardly. They fear the spirits of the Ancients too much\n for that. They believe the invisible powers will drink their souls.\"\n\n\n \"Then how about telling me about this hanging world?\"\n\n\n \"Simply the whim of an ancient Martian ruler. As I have learned from\n the inscriptions and metal tablets here in Aryk he could not conquer\n all of Mars so he created a world that would be all his own.\"",
"\"Right.\" Tanner's fingers bit into Rolf's arm. \"Pray that the wind does\n not shift, their nostrils are sensitive as those of the weasels they\n resemble.\"\n\n\n Rolf's eyes slitted. There was something vaguely unhuman about those\n gracefully marching figures. He wondered what Tanner had meant by\n calling them weasels, wondered until they came closer.\n\n\n Then he knew. Above half naked feminine bodies, sinuous and supple\n as the undulating coils of a serpent, rose the snaky ditigrade head\n of a weasel-brute! Their necks were long and wide, merging into\n the gray-furred muscles of their narrow bodies until they seemed\n utterly shoulderless, and beneath their furry pelts the ripples of\n smooth-flowing muscles played rhythmically. There was a stench, a musky\n penetrating scent that made the flesh of his body crawl.",
"\"But, Mark,\" the voice that was now unmistakably feminine argued, \"he\n wears the uniform of a patrolman.\"\n\n\n \"May be a trick.\" The deep voice was doubtful. \"You know their leader,\n Cannon, wanted you. This may be a trick to join the Outcasts and\n kidnap you.\"\n\n\n The girl's voice was merry. \"Come on Spider-legs,\" she said.\nRolf found himself staring, open-mouthed, at the sleek-limbed vision\n that parted the bushes and came toward him. A beautiful woman she was,\n with the long burnished copper of her hair down around her waist, but\n beneath the meager shortness of the skin tunic he saw that her firm\n flesh was covered with a fine reddish coat of hair. Even her face was\n sleek and gleaming with its coppery covering of down.\n\n\n \"Hello, patrol-a-man,\" she said shyly.",
"They halted, clustered about their leader. Giffa snarled quick orders\n at them, her chisel-teeth clicking savagely. The column swung out into\n the wasteland toward the nearest sunken valleys of the Hairy People.\n Rolf and Mark Tanner came to their feet.",
"A hundred yards from the base of the rocky wall his feet scraped\n through black dust, and he came to a stop. Deftly Rolf nested the\n spinners again in their pack before he set out toward the heaped-up\n mass of stone blocks that was the wall.\n\n\n Ten steps he took before an excited voice called out shrilly from the\n rocks ahead. Rolf's slitted gray eyes narrowed yet more and his hand\n dropped to the compact expoder machine-gun holstered at his hip. There\n was the movement of a dark shape behind the screen of vines and ragged\n bushes.\n\n\n \"Down, Altha,\" a deeper voice rumbled from above, \"it's one of the\n Enemy.\"\n\n\n The voice had spoken in English! Rolf took a step forward eagerly and\n then doubt made his feet falter. There were Earthmen as well as Frogs\n among the outlaws. This mysterious world that floated above the cavern\n floor might be their headquarters.",
"The ship struck; split open like a rotten squash, and Rolf felt himself\n being flung far outward through thick blackness. For an eternity it\n seemed he hung in the darkness before something smashed the breath and\n feeling from his nerveless body. With a last glimmer of sanity he knew\n that he lay crushed against a rocky wall.\nMuch later Rolf groaned with the pain of bruised muscles and tried to\n rise. To his amazement he could move all his limbs. Carefully he came\n to his knees and so to his feet. Not a bone was broken, unless the\n sharp breathlessness that strained at his chest meant cracked ribs.\n\n\n There was light in the narrow pit in which he found himself, light and\n heat from the yet-glowing debris of the rocket flyer. The outlaws had\n blasted the crashed ship, his practiced eyes told him, and Garmon Nash\n must have died in the wreckage. He was alone in the waterless trap of a\n deep crevice.",
"He knelt over the prostrate Venusian, using his belt and a strip torn\n from his greenish tunic to bind the unconscious man. The knots were\n not too tight, the man could free himself in the course of a few hours.\n He shrugged his shoulders wearily and started to get up.\n\n\n A foot scraped on stone behind him. He spun on bent knees and flung\n himself fifty feet to the further side of the narrow gulch with the\n same movement. Expoder needles splintered the rocks about him as he\n dropped behind a sheltering rocky ledge, and he caught a glimpse of two\n green-clad men dragging the bronze-haired body of the girl he had come\n to save into the shelter of the flyer.",
"The older man's eyes were hot. He jerked at Rolf's hands and then\n suddenly thought better of it. \"You're right,\" he agreed. \"Help her if\n you can. Your weapon is our only hope now.\"\n\n\n Rolf pushed up and outward with all the strength of his weary muscles.\n The glider knifed forward with that first swift impetus, and drove out\n over the Barrier. The Furry Ones were struggling insect shapes below\n him, and he saw with a thrill that larger bodied warriors, whose bodies\n glinted with a dull bronze, were attacking them from the burnt-out\n wastelands. The Hairy People had come to battle the invaders.",
"His eyes went searching out, out into undreamed distance. For miles\n below him there was nothing but emptiness, and for miles before him\n there was that same glowing vacancy. Above the cavern's roof soared\n majestically upward; he could see the narrow dark slit through which\n his feet had betrayed him, and he realized that he had fallen through\n the vaulted rocky dome of this fantastic abyss.\n\n\n It was then, even as he snapped the release of his spinner and the\n nested blades spun free overhead, that he saw the slowly turning bulk\n of the cloud-swathed world, a tiny five mile green ball of a planet!"
],
[
"\"See!\" Tanner's voice was muted. \"Giffa, Queen of the Furry Ones!\"\n\n\n Borne on a carved and polished litter of ebon-hued wood and yellowed\n bone lolled the hideous queen of that advancing horde. Gaunt of body\n she was, her scarred gray-furred hide hanging loose upon her breastless\n frame. One eye was gone but the other gleamed, black and beady, from\n her narrow earless skull. And the skulls of rodents and men alike\n linked together into ghastly festoons about her heavy, short-legged\n litter.\n\n\n Men bore the litter, eight broad-shouldered red-haired men whose arms\n had been cut off at the shoulders and whose naked backs bore the weals\n of countless lashes. Their bodies, like that of Altha, were covered\n with a silky coat of reddish hair.",
"Rolf raised his expoder, red anger clouding his eyes as he saw these\n maimed beasts of burden, but the hand of Mark Tanner pressed down\n firmly across his arm. The older man shook his head.\n\n\n \"Not yet,\" he said. \"When Altha has warned the Hairy People we can cut\n off their retreat. After they have passed I will arouse the Outcasts\n who live here upon the Barrier. Though their blood is that of the two\n races mingled they hate the Furry Ones.\"\n\n\n A shadow passed over their hiding place. The Furry Amazons too saw the\n indistinct darkness and looked up. High overhead drifted the narrow\n winged shape of a glider, and the warrior women shrieked their hatred.\n Gone now was their chance for a surprise attack on the isolated canyons\n of the Hairy People.",
"\"The outlaws may capture,\" warned Tanner. \"They have taken over the\n canyons of Gur and Norpar, remember.\"\n\n\n \"I will take the glider.\" Altha was on her feet, her body crouched\n over to take advantage of the sheltering shrubs. She threaded her way\n swiftly back along a rocky corridor in the face of the Barrier toward\n the ruins of ancient Aryk.\n\n\n Tanner shrugged his shoulders. \"What can I do? Altha has the blood\n of the Hairy People in her veins. She will warn them even though the\n outlaws have turned her people against her.\"\n\n\n Rolf watched the column of barbarically clad warriors file out upon the\n barren desert and swing to the right along the base of the Barrier.\n Spear tips and bared swords glinted dully.\n\n\n \"They will pass within a few feet!\" he hissed.",
"\"Mark!\" The girl's voice was tense. Rolf felt her arm tug at his sleeve\n and he dropped beside her in the shelter of a clump of coarse-leaved\n gray bushes. \"The Furry Women attack!\"\nA hundred paces away Rolf made the dark shapes of armed warriors as\n they filed downward from the Barrier into the blackened desolation of\n the desert half of Lomihi.\n\n\n \"Enemies?\" he whispered to Mark Tanner hoarsely.\n\n\n \"Right.\" The older man was slipping the stout bowstring into its\n notched recess on the upper end of his long bow. \"They cross the\n Barrier from the fertile plains of Nyd to raid the Hairy People. They\n take them for slaves.\"\n\n\n \"I must warn them.\" Altha's lips thinned and her brown-flecked eyes\n flamed.",
"Rolf threw up the mental block that was the inheritance from his\n grueling years of training on Earth Base. His instructors there\n had known that a few gifted mortals possess the power of a limited\n telepathy, and the secrets of the Planet Patrol must be guarded.\n\n\n \"That is better, perhaps.\" The girl's face was demure. \"And now perhaps\n you will visit us in the safety of the vaults of ancient Aryk.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" said the tall man as Rolf sprang easily from the ground to\n their side. \"I'm always forgetting the mind-reading abilities of the\n Hairy People.\"\n\n\n \"She one of them?\" Rolf's voice was low, but he saw Altha's lip twitch.\n\n\n \"Mother was.\" Mark Tanner's voice was louder. \"Father was Wayne Stark.\n Famous explorer you know. I was his assistant.\"",
"An elongated pencil-ray of a man bounced nervously out to her side.\n \"Altha,\" he scolded, scrubbing at his reddened bald skull with a\n long-fingered hand, \"why do you never listen to me? I promised your\n father I'd look after you.\" He hitched at his tattered skin robe.\n\n\n The girl laughed, a low liquid sound that made Rolf's heart pump\n faster. \"This Mark Tanner of mine,\" she explained to the patrolman,\n \"is always afraid for me. He does not remember that I can see into the\n minds of others.\"\n\n\n She smiled again as Rolf's face slowly reddened. \"Do not be ashamed,\"\n she said. \"I am not angry that you think I am—well, not too\n unattractive.\"",
"\"But, Mark,\" the voice that was now unmistakably feminine argued, \"he\n wears the uniform of a patrolman.\"\n\n\n \"May be a trick.\" The deep voice was doubtful. \"You know their leader,\n Cannon, wanted you. This may be a trick to join the Outcasts and\n kidnap you.\"\n\n\n The girl's voice was merry. \"Come on Spider-legs,\" she said.\nRolf found himself staring, open-mouthed, at the sleek-limbed vision\n that parted the bushes and came toward him. A beautiful woman she was,\n with the long burnished copper of her hair down around her waist, but\n beneath the meager shortness of the skin tunic he saw that her firm\n flesh was covered with a fine reddish coat of hair. Even her face was\n sleek and gleaming with its coppery covering of down.\n\n\n \"Hello, patrol-a-man,\" she said shyly.",
"They halted, clustered about their leader. Giffa snarled quick orders\n at them, her chisel-teeth clicking savagely. The column swung out into\n the wasteland toward the nearest sunken valleys of the Hairy People.\n Rolf and Mark Tanner came to their feet.",
"Mark Tanner was peering out a slitted embrasure that overlooked the\n desolate land of the Hairy People.\n\n\n Tanner's finger pointed. \"Altha!\" Rolf saw the graceful wings of the\n glider riding the thermals back toward the Barrier. \"She had warned the\n Hairy People, and now she returns.\"\n\n\n \"The weasel heads won't follow us here?\" asked Rolf.\n\n\n Tanner laughed. \"Hardly. They fear the spirits of the Ancients too much\n for that. They believe the invisible powers will drink their souls.\"\n\n\n \"Then how about telling me about this hanging world?\"\n\n\n \"Simply the whim of an ancient Martian ruler. As I have learned from\n the inscriptions and metal tablets here in Aryk he could not conquer\n all of Mars so he created a world that would be all his own.\"",
"He saw Altha's bound body and head. Her jaws were clamped upon the\n arm of the outlaw and even as he fought for more of the reeking smoky\n air of the cabin he saw the man's clenched fist batter at her face.\n Rolf swung, all the weight of his stocky body behind the blow, and the\n outlaw thudded limply against the opposite wall of the little cabin.\n\n\n No time to ask the girl if she were injured. The patrolman flung\n himself into the spongy control chair's cushions and sent the ship\n rocketing skyward. Behind him the thin film of surface oil no longer\n burned and the conditioning unit was clearing the air.\n\n\n \"Patrolman,\" the girl's voice was beside him. \"We're safe!\"\n\n\n \"Everything bongo?\" Rolf wanted to know.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" she smiled crookedly.",
"\"Right.\" Tanner's fingers bit into Rolf's arm. \"Pray that the wind does\n not shift, their nostrils are sensitive as those of the weasels they\n resemble.\"\n\n\n Rolf's eyes slitted. There was something vaguely unhuman about those\n gracefully marching figures. He wondered what Tanner had meant by\n calling them weasels, wondered until they came closer.\n\n\n Then he knew. Above half naked feminine bodies, sinuous and supple\n as the undulating coils of a serpent, rose the snaky ditigrade head\n of a weasel-brute! Their necks were long and wide, merging into\n the gray-furred muscles of their narrow bodies until they seemed\n utterly shoulderless, and beneath their furry pelts the ripples of\n smooth-flowing muscles played rhythmically. There was a stench, a musky\n penetrating scent that made the flesh of his body crawl.",
"Rolf laughed. \"Like the pleasure globes of the wealthy on Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Right.\" Tanner kept his eyes on the enlarging winged shape of Altha's\n flyer as he spoke. \"Later, when the nations of Mars began draining off\n the seas and hoarding them in their underground caverns, Lomihi became\n a fortress for the few thousand aristocrats and slaves who escaped the\n surface wars.\n\n\n \"The Hairy People were the rulers,\" he went on, \"and the Furry Ones\n were their slaves. In the revolt that eventually split Lomihi into two\n warring races this city, Aryk, was destroyed by a strange vegetable\n blight and the ancient knowledge was lost to both races.\"\n\n\n \"But,\" Rolf frowned thoughtfully, \"what keeps Lomihi from crashing into\n the island? Surely the two columns at either end cannot support it?\"",
"The bald scientist slung his bow over his head and one shoulder and\n went bounding away along a shadowy crevice that plunged raggedly into\n the heart of the Barrier. Rolf blasted another spurt of explosive\n needles at the Furry Ones and followed.\nDarkness thickened as they penetrated into the maze of the Barrier's\n shattered heart. An unseen furry shape sprang upon Rolf's shoulders\n and as he sank to his knees he felt hot saliva drip like acid upon his\n neck. His fist sent the attacker's bulk smashing against the rocky\n floor before fangs or claws could rip at his tender flesh, and he heard\n a choked snarl that ended convulsively in silence.\n\n\n Bat-winged blobs of life dragged wet leathery hide across his face, and\n beneath his feet slimy wriggling things crushed into quivering pulp.\n Then there was faint light again, and the high-vaulted roof of a rock\n dungeon rose above him.",
"The older man's eyes were hot. He jerked at Rolf's hands and then\n suddenly thought better of it. \"You're right,\" he agreed. \"Help her if\n you can. Your weapon is our only hope now.\"\n\n\n Rolf pushed up and outward with all the strength of his weary muscles.\n The glider knifed forward with that first swift impetus, and drove out\n over the Barrier. The Furry Ones were struggling insect shapes below\n him, and he saw with a thrill that larger bodied warriors, whose bodies\n glinted with a dull bronze, were attacking them from the burnt-out\n wastelands. The Hairy People had come to battle the invaders.",
"\"Glad of that.\" Rolf felt the warmth of her body so close beside him. A\n sudden strange restlessness came with the near contact.\n\n\n Altha smiled shyly and winced with pain. \"Do you know,\" she said, \"even\n yet I do not know your name.\"\n\n\n Rolf grinned up at her. \"Need to?\" he asked.\n\n\n The girl's eyes widened. A responsive spark blazed in them. \"Handier\n than calling you\nShorty\nall the time,\" she quipped.\n\n\n Then they were over the Barrier and Rolf saw the last of the beaten\n Furry Ones racing back across the great wall toward the Plains of\n Nyd. He nosed the captured ship down toward the ruined plaza of\n the Forbidden City. Once Mark Tanner was aboard they would blast\n surfaceward with their thrilling news that all Mars could have water in\n plenty again.",
"Abruptly, then, the wind veered. From behind the two Earthmen it came,\n bearing the scent of their bodies out to the sensitive nostrils of the\n beast-women. Again the column turned. They glimpsed the two men and a\n hideous scrawling battle-cry burst from their throats.\nRolf's expoder rattled briefly like a high-speed sewing machine as he\n flicked its muzzle back and forth along the ranks of attacking Furry\n Ones. Dozens of the hideous weasel creatures fell as the needles of\n explosive blasted them but hundreds more were swarming over their\n fallen sisters. Mark Tanner's bow twanged again and again as he drove\n arrows at the bloodthirsty warrior women. But the Furry Ones ran\n fearlessly into that rain of death.\nThe expoder hammered in Rolf's heavy fist.\nTanner smashed an elbow into Rolf's side. \"Retreat!\" he gasped.",
"\"The island is the answer,\" said Tanner. \"Somehow it blocks the force\n of gravity—shields Lomihi from....\" He caught his breath suddenly.\n\n\n \"The outlaws!\" he cried. \"They're after Altha.\"\n\n\n Rolf caught a glimpse of a sleek rocket flyer diving upon Altha's frail\n wing. He saw the girl go gliding steeply down toward a ragged jumble\n of volcanic spurs and pits and disappear from view. He turned to see\n the old man pushing another crudely constructed glider toward the outer\n wall of the rock chamber.\n\n\n Tanner tugged at a silvery metal bar inset into the stone wall. A\n section of the wall swung slowly inward. Rolf sprang to his side.\n\n\n \"Let me follow,\" he said. \"I can fly a glider, and I have my expoder.\"",
"A hundred yards from the base of the rocky wall his feet scraped\n through black dust, and he came to a stop. Deftly Rolf nested the\n spinners again in their pack before he set out toward the heaped-up\n mass of stone blocks that was the wall.\n\n\n Ten steps he took before an excited voice called out shrilly from the\n rocks ahead. Rolf's slitted gray eyes narrowed yet more and his hand\n dropped to the compact expoder machine-gun holstered at his hip. There\n was the movement of a dark shape behind the screen of vines and ragged\n bushes.\n\n\n \"Down, Altha,\" a deeper voice rumbled from above, \"it's one of the\n Enemy.\"\n\n\n The voice had spoken in English! Rolf took a step forward eagerly and\n then doubt made his feet falter. There were Earthmen as well as Frogs\n among the outlaws. This mysterious world that floated above the cavern\n floor might be their headquarters.",
"THE HAIRY ONES\nby BASIL WELLS\nMarooned on a world within a world, aided\n\n by a slim girl and an old warrior, Patrolman\n\n Sisko Rolf was fighting his greatest\n\n battle—to bring life to dying Mars.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Winter 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"The outlaw ships are attacking!\" Old Garmon Nash's harsh voice snapped\n like a thunderclap in the cramped rocket flyer's cabin. \"Five or six of\n them. Cut the searchlights!\"",
"Cautiously his head twisted until he could look forward toward the\n controls. The bound body of Altha Stark faced him, and he saw her lips\n twist into a brief smile of recognition. She shook her head and frowned\n as he moved his arm. But Rolf had learned that his limbs were not\n bound—apparently the outlaws had considered him out of the blasting\n for the moment.\n\n\n By degrees Rolf worked his arm down to his belt where his solar torch\n was hooked. His fingers made careful adjustments within the inset base\n of the torch, pushing a lever here and adjusting a tension screw there.\n\n\n The ship bumped gently as it landed and the thrum of rockets ceased.\n The cabin shifted with the weight of bodies moving from their seats.\n Rolf heard voices from a distance and the answering triumphant bawling\n of his two captors. The moment had come. He turned the cap of the solar\n torch away from his body and freed it."
],
[
"\"Right.\" Tanner's fingers bit into Rolf's arm. \"Pray that the wind does\n not shift, their nostrils are sensitive as those of the weasels they\n resemble.\"\n\n\n Rolf's eyes slitted. There was something vaguely unhuman about those\n gracefully marching figures. He wondered what Tanner had meant by\n calling them weasels, wondered until they came closer.\n\n\n Then he knew. Above half naked feminine bodies, sinuous and supple\n as the undulating coils of a serpent, rose the snaky ditigrade head\n of a weasel-brute! Their necks were long and wide, merging into\n the gray-furred muscles of their narrow bodies until they seemed\n utterly shoulderless, and beneath their furry pelts the ripples of\n smooth-flowing muscles played rhythmically. There was a stench, a musky\n penetrating scent that made the flesh of his body crawl.",
"They halted, clustered about their leader. Giffa snarled quick orders\n at them, her chisel-teeth clicking savagely. The column swung out into\n the wasteland toward the nearest sunken valleys of the Hairy People.\n Rolf and Mark Tanner came to their feet.",
"\"The outlaws may capture,\" warned Tanner. \"They have taken over the\n canyons of Gur and Norpar, remember.\"\n\n\n \"I will take the glider.\" Altha was on her feet, her body crouched\n over to take advantage of the sheltering shrubs. She threaded her way\n swiftly back along a rocky corridor in the face of the Barrier toward\n the ruins of ancient Aryk.\n\n\n Tanner shrugged his shoulders. \"What can I do? Altha has the blood\n of the Hairy People in her veins. She will warn them even though the\n outlaws have turned her people against her.\"\n\n\n Rolf watched the column of barbarically clad warriors file out upon the\n barren desert and swing to the right along the base of the Barrier.\n Spear tips and bared swords glinted dully.\n\n\n \"They will pass within a few feet!\" he hissed.",
"Rolf raised his expoder, red anger clouding his eyes as he saw these\n maimed beasts of burden, but the hand of Mark Tanner pressed down\n firmly across his arm. The older man shook his head.\n\n\n \"Not yet,\" he said. \"When Altha has warned the Hairy People we can cut\n off their retreat. After they have passed I will arouse the Outcasts\n who live here upon the Barrier. Though their blood is that of the two\n races mingled they hate the Furry Ones.\"\n\n\n A shadow passed over their hiding place. The Furry Amazons too saw the\n indistinct darkness and looked up. High overhead drifted the narrow\n winged shape of a glider, and the warrior women shrieked their hatred.\n Gone now was their chance for a surprise attack on the isolated canyons\n of the Hairy People.",
"Mark Tanner was peering out a slitted embrasure that overlooked the\n desolate land of the Hairy People.\n\n\n Tanner's finger pointed. \"Altha!\" Rolf saw the graceful wings of the\n glider riding the thermals back toward the Barrier. \"She had warned the\n Hairy People, and now she returns.\"\n\n\n \"The weasel heads won't follow us here?\" asked Rolf.\n\n\n Tanner laughed. \"Hardly. They fear the spirits of the Ancients too much\n for that. They believe the invisible powers will drink their souls.\"\n\n\n \"Then how about telling me about this hanging world?\"\n\n\n \"Simply the whim of an ancient Martian ruler. As I have learned from\n the inscriptions and metal tablets here in Aryk he could not conquer\n all of Mars so he created a world that would be all his own.\"",
"\"See!\" Tanner's voice was muted. \"Giffa, Queen of the Furry Ones!\"\n\n\n Borne on a carved and polished litter of ebon-hued wood and yellowed\n bone lolled the hideous queen of that advancing horde. Gaunt of body\n she was, her scarred gray-furred hide hanging loose upon her breastless\n frame. One eye was gone but the other gleamed, black and beady, from\n her narrow earless skull. And the skulls of rodents and men alike\n linked together into ghastly festoons about her heavy, short-legged\n litter.\n\n\n Men bore the litter, eight broad-shouldered red-haired men whose arms\n had been cut off at the shoulders and whose naked backs bore the weals\n of countless lashes. Their bodies, like that of Altha, were covered\n with a silky coat of reddish hair.",
"\"Mark!\" The girl's voice was tense. Rolf felt her arm tug at his sleeve\n and he dropped beside her in the shelter of a clump of coarse-leaved\n gray bushes. \"The Furry Women attack!\"\nA hundred paces away Rolf made the dark shapes of armed warriors as\n they filed downward from the Barrier into the blackened desolation of\n the desert half of Lomihi.\n\n\n \"Enemies?\" he whispered to Mark Tanner hoarsely.\n\n\n \"Right.\" The older man was slipping the stout bowstring into its\n notched recess on the upper end of his long bow. \"They cross the\n Barrier from the fertile plains of Nyd to raid the Hairy People. They\n take them for slaves.\"\n\n\n \"I must warn them.\" Altha's lips thinned and her brown-flecked eyes\n flamed.",
"Abruptly, then, the wind veered. From behind the two Earthmen it came,\n bearing the scent of their bodies out to the sensitive nostrils of the\n beast-women. Again the column turned. They glimpsed the two men and a\n hideous scrawling battle-cry burst from their throats.\nRolf's expoder rattled briefly like a high-speed sewing machine as he\n flicked its muzzle back and forth along the ranks of attacking Furry\n Ones. Dozens of the hideous weasel creatures fell as the needles of\n explosive blasted them but hundreds more were swarming over their\n fallen sisters. Mark Tanner's bow twanged again and again as he drove\n arrows at the bloodthirsty warrior women. But the Furry Ones ran\n fearlessly into that rain of death.\nThe expoder hammered in Rolf's heavy fist.\nTanner smashed an elbow into Rolf's side. \"Retreat!\" he gasped.",
"The older man's eyes were hot. He jerked at Rolf's hands and then\n suddenly thought better of it. \"You're right,\" he agreed. \"Help her if\n you can. Your weapon is our only hope now.\"\n\n\n Rolf pushed up and outward with all the strength of his weary muscles.\n The glider knifed forward with that first swift impetus, and drove out\n over the Barrier. The Furry Ones were struggling insect shapes below\n him, and he saw with a thrill that larger bodied warriors, whose bodies\n glinted with a dull bronze, were attacking them from the burnt-out\n wastelands. The Hairy People had come to battle the invaders.",
"The bald scientist slung his bow over his head and one shoulder and\n went bounding away along a shadowy crevice that plunged raggedly into\n the heart of the Barrier. Rolf blasted another spurt of explosive\n needles at the Furry Ones and followed.\nDarkness thickened as they penetrated into the maze of the Barrier's\n shattered heart. An unseen furry shape sprang upon Rolf's shoulders\n and as he sank to his knees he felt hot saliva drip like acid upon his\n neck. His fist sent the attacker's bulk smashing against the rocky\n floor before fangs or claws could rip at his tender flesh, and he heard\n a choked snarl that ended convulsively in silence.\n\n\n Bat-winged blobs of life dragged wet leathery hide across his face, and\n beneath his feet slimy wriggling things crushed into quivering pulp.\n Then there was faint light again, and the high-vaulted roof of a rock\n dungeon rose above him.",
"Rolf threw up the mental block that was the inheritance from his\n grueling years of training on Earth Base. His instructors there\n had known that a few gifted mortals possess the power of a limited\n telepathy, and the secrets of the Planet Patrol must be guarded.\n\n\n \"That is better, perhaps.\" The girl's face was demure. \"And now perhaps\n you will visit us in the safety of the vaults of ancient Aryk.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" said the tall man as Rolf sprang easily from the ground to\n their side. \"I'm always forgetting the mind-reading abilities of the\n Hairy People.\"\n\n\n \"She one of them?\" Rolf's voice was low, but he saw Altha's lip twitch.\n\n\n \"Mother was.\" Mark Tanner's voice was louder. \"Father was Wayne Stark.\n Famous explorer you know. I was his assistant.\"",
"\"But, Mark,\" the voice that was now unmistakably feminine argued, \"he\n wears the uniform of a patrolman.\"\n\n\n \"May be a trick.\" The deep voice was doubtful. \"You know their leader,\n Cannon, wanted you. This may be a trick to join the Outcasts and\n kidnap you.\"\n\n\n The girl's voice was merry. \"Come on Spider-legs,\" she said.\nRolf found himself staring, open-mouthed, at the sleek-limbed vision\n that parted the bushes and came toward him. A beautiful woman she was,\n with the long burnished copper of her hair down around her waist, but\n beneath the meager shortness of the skin tunic he saw that her firm\n flesh was covered with a fine reddish coat of hair. Even her face was\n sleek and gleaming with its coppery covering of down.\n\n\n \"Hello, patrol-a-man,\" she said shyly.",
"An elongated pencil-ray of a man bounced nervously out to her side.\n \"Altha,\" he scolded, scrubbing at his reddened bald skull with a\n long-fingered hand, \"why do you never listen to me? I promised your\n father I'd look after you.\" He hitched at his tattered skin robe.\n\n\n The girl laughed, a low liquid sound that made Rolf's heart pump\n faster. \"This Mark Tanner of mine,\" she explained to the patrolman,\n \"is always afraid for me. He does not remember that I can see into the\n minds of others.\"\n\n\n She smiled again as Rolf's face slowly reddened. \"Do not be ashamed,\"\n she said. \"I am not angry that you think I am—well, not too\n unattractive.\"",
"Rolf laughed. \"Like the pleasure globes of the wealthy on Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Right.\" Tanner kept his eyes on the enlarging winged shape of Altha's\n flyer as he spoke. \"Later, when the nations of Mars began draining off\n the seas and hoarding them in their underground caverns, Lomihi became\n a fortress for the few thousand aristocrats and slaves who escaped the\n surface wars.\n\n\n \"The Hairy People were the rulers,\" he went on, \"and the Furry Ones\n were their slaves. In the revolt that eventually split Lomihi into two\n warring races this city, Aryk, was destroyed by a strange vegetable\n blight and the ancient knowledge was lost to both races.\"\n\n\n \"But,\" Rolf frowned thoughtfully, \"what keeps Lomihi from crashing into\n the island? Surely the two columns at either end cannot support it?\"",
"The weird globe was divided equally into hemispheres, and as the tiny\n world turned between its confining columns a green, lake-dotted half\n alternated with a blasted, splintered black waste of rocky desert. As\n the spinner dropped him slowly down into the vast emptiness of the\n great shining gulf, Rolf could see that a broad band of stone divided\n the green fertile plains and forests from the desolate desert wastes of\n the other half. Toward this barrier the spinner bore him, and Rolf was\n content to let it move in that direction—from the heights of the wall\n he could scout out the country beyond.",
"\"Glad of that.\" Rolf felt the warmth of her body so close beside him. A\n sudden strange restlessness came with the near contact.\n\n\n Altha smiled shyly and winced with pain. \"Do you know,\" she said, \"even\n yet I do not know your name.\"\n\n\n Rolf grinned up at her. \"Need to?\" he asked.\n\n\n The girl's eyes widened. A responsive spark blazed in them. \"Handier\n than calling you\nShorty\nall the time,\" she quipped.\n\n\n Then they were over the Barrier and Rolf saw the last of the beaten\n Furry Ones racing back across the great wall toward the Plains of\n Nyd. He nosed the captured ship down toward the ruined plaza of\n the Forbidden City. Once Mark Tanner was aboard they would blast\n surfaceward with their thrilling news that all Mars could have water in\n plenty again.",
"Rolf snorted. \"Shorty,\" he said disgustedly as they landed, but his arm\n went out toward the girl's red-haired slimness, and curved around it.",
"His eyes went searching out, out into undreamed distance. For miles\n below him there was nothing but emptiness, and for miles before him\n there was that same glowing vacancy. Above the cavern's roof soared\n majestically upward; he could see the narrow dark slit through which\n his feet had betrayed him, and he realized that he had fallen through\n the vaulted rocky dome of this fantastic abyss.\n\n\n It was then, even as he snapped the release of his spinner and the\n nested blades spun free overhead, that he saw the slowly turning bulk\n of the cloud-swathed world, a tiny five mile green ball of a planet!",
"A hundred yards from the base of the rocky wall his feet scraped\n through black dust, and he came to a stop. Deftly Rolf nested the\n spinners again in their pack before he set out toward the heaped-up\n mass of stone blocks that was the wall.\n\n\n Ten steps he took before an excited voice called out shrilly from the\n rocks ahead. Rolf's slitted gray eyes narrowed yet more and his hand\n dropped to the compact expoder machine-gun holstered at his hip. There\n was the movement of a dark shape behind the screen of vines and ragged\n bushes.\n\n\n \"Down, Altha,\" a deeper voice rumbled from above, \"it's one of the\n Enemy.\"\n\n\n The voice had spoken in English! Rolf took a step forward eagerly and\n then doubt made his feet falter. There were Earthmen as well as Frogs\n among the outlaws. This mysterious world that floated above the cavern\n floor might be their headquarters.",
"The wall expanded as he came nearer to the pygmy planet. The spinner\n had slowed its speed; it seemed to Rolf that he must be falling free\n in space for a time, but the feeble gravity of the tiny world tugged\n at him more strongly as he neared the wall. And the barrier became a\n jumbled mass of roughly-dressed stone slabs, from whose earth-filled\n crevices sprouted green life.\n\n\n So slowly was the spinner dropping that the blackened desolation of the\n other hemisphere came sliding up beneath his boots. He looked down into\n great gashes in the blackness of the desert and saw there the green of\n sunken oases and watered canyons. He drifted slowly toward the opposite\n loom of the mysterious wall with a swift wind off the desert behind him."
],
[
"The older man's eyes were hot. He jerked at Rolf's hands and then\n suddenly thought better of it. \"You're right,\" he agreed. \"Help her if\n you can. Your weapon is our only hope now.\"\n\n\n Rolf pushed up and outward with all the strength of his weary muscles.\n The glider knifed forward with that first swift impetus, and drove out\n over the Barrier. The Furry Ones were struggling insect shapes below\n him, and he saw with a thrill that larger bodied warriors, whose bodies\n glinted with a dull bronze, were attacking them from the burnt-out\n wastelands. The Hairy People had come to battle the invaders.",
"Abruptly, then, the wind veered. From behind the two Earthmen it came,\n bearing the scent of their bodies out to the sensitive nostrils of the\n beast-women. Again the column turned. They glimpsed the two men and a\n hideous scrawling battle-cry burst from their throats.\nRolf's expoder rattled briefly like a high-speed sewing machine as he\n flicked its muzzle back and forth along the ranks of attacking Furry\n Ones. Dozens of the hideous weasel creatures fell as the needles of\n explosive blasted them but hundreds more were swarming over their\n fallen sisters. Mark Tanner's bow twanged again and again as he drove\n arrows at the bloodthirsty warrior women. But the Furry Ones ran\n fearlessly into that rain of death.\nThe expoder hammered in Rolf's heavy fist.\nTanner smashed an elbow into Rolf's side. \"Retreat!\" he gasped.",
"They halted, clustered about their leader. Giffa snarled quick orders\n at them, her chisel-teeth clicking savagely. The column swung out into\n the wasteland toward the nearest sunken valleys of the Hairy People.\n Rolf and Mark Tanner came to their feet.",
"Rolf raised his expoder, red anger clouding his eyes as he saw these\n maimed beasts of burden, but the hand of Mark Tanner pressed down\n firmly across his arm. The older man shook his head.\n\n\n \"Not yet,\" he said. \"When Altha has warned the Hairy People we can cut\n off their retreat. After they have passed I will arouse the Outcasts\n who live here upon the Barrier. Though their blood is that of the two\n races mingled they hate the Furry Ones.\"\n\n\n A shadow passed over their hiding place. The Furry Amazons too saw the\n indistinct darkness and looked up. High overhead drifted the narrow\n winged shape of a glider, and the warrior women shrieked their hatred.\n Gone now was their chance for a surprise attack on the isolated canyons\n of the Hairy People.",
"The bald scientist slung his bow over his head and one shoulder and\n went bounding away along a shadowy crevice that plunged raggedly into\n the heart of the Barrier. Rolf blasted another spurt of explosive\n needles at the Furry Ones and followed.\nDarkness thickened as they penetrated into the maze of the Barrier's\n shattered heart. An unseen furry shape sprang upon Rolf's shoulders\n and as he sank to his knees he felt hot saliva drip like acid upon his\n neck. His fist sent the attacker's bulk smashing against the rocky\n floor before fangs or claws could rip at his tender flesh, and he heard\n a choked snarl that ended convulsively in silence.\n\n\n Bat-winged blobs of life dragged wet leathery hide across his face, and\n beneath his feet slimy wriggling things crushed into quivering pulp.\n Then there was faint light again, and the high-vaulted roof of a rock\n dungeon rose above him.",
"\"Right.\" Tanner's fingers bit into Rolf's arm. \"Pray that the wind does\n not shift, their nostrils are sensitive as those of the weasels they\n resemble.\"\n\n\n Rolf's eyes slitted. There was something vaguely unhuman about those\n gracefully marching figures. He wondered what Tanner had meant by\n calling them weasels, wondered until they came closer.\n\n\n Then he knew. Above half naked feminine bodies, sinuous and supple\n as the undulating coils of a serpent, rose the snaky ditigrade head\n of a weasel-brute! Their necks were long and wide, merging into\n the gray-furred muscles of their narrow bodies until they seemed\n utterly shoulderless, and beneath their furry pelts the ripples of\n smooth-flowing muscles played rhythmically. There was a stench, a musky\n penetrating scent that made the flesh of his body crawl.",
"\"See!\" Tanner's voice was muted. \"Giffa, Queen of the Furry Ones!\"\n\n\n Borne on a carved and polished litter of ebon-hued wood and yellowed\n bone lolled the hideous queen of that advancing horde. Gaunt of body\n she was, her scarred gray-furred hide hanging loose upon her breastless\n frame. One eye was gone but the other gleamed, black and beady, from\n her narrow earless skull. And the skulls of rodents and men alike\n linked together into ghastly festoons about her heavy, short-legged\n litter.\n\n\n Men bore the litter, eight broad-shouldered red-haired men whose arms\n had been cut off at the shoulders and whose naked backs bore the weals\n of countless lashes. Their bodies, like that of Altha, were covered\n with a silky coat of reddish hair.",
"\"Mark!\" The girl's voice was tense. Rolf felt her arm tug at his sleeve\n and he dropped beside her in the shelter of a clump of coarse-leaved\n gray bushes. \"The Furry Women attack!\"\nA hundred paces away Rolf made the dark shapes of armed warriors as\n they filed downward from the Barrier into the blackened desolation of\n the desert half of Lomihi.\n\n\n \"Enemies?\" he whispered to Mark Tanner hoarsely.\n\n\n \"Right.\" The older man was slipping the stout bowstring into its\n notched recess on the upper end of his long bow. \"They cross the\n Barrier from the fertile plains of Nyd to raid the Hairy People. They\n take them for slaves.\"\n\n\n \"I must warn them.\" Altha's lips thinned and her brown-flecked eyes\n flamed.",
"The Furry Amazons swarmed up over the lower terraces of rocks, their\n snaky heads thrust forward and their swords slashing. The two Earthmen\n bounded up and backward to the next jumbled layer of giant blocks\n behind them, their powerful earthly muscles negating Lomihi's feeble\n gravity. Spears showered thick about them and then they dropped behind\n the sheltering bulk of a rough square boulder.\n\n\n \"Now where?\" Rolf snapped another burst of expoder needles at the furry\n attackers as he asked.\n\n\n \"To the vaults beneath the Forbidden City,\" Mark Tanner cried. \"None\n but the Outcasts and we two have entered the streets of deserted Aryk.\"",
"\"Glad of that.\" Rolf felt the warmth of her body so close beside him. A\n sudden strange restlessness came with the near contact.\n\n\n Altha smiled shyly and winced with pain. \"Do you know,\" she said, \"even\n yet I do not know your name.\"\n\n\n Rolf grinned up at her. \"Need to?\" he asked.\n\n\n The girl's eyes widened. A responsive spark blazed in them. \"Handier\n than calling you\nShorty\nall the time,\" she quipped.\n\n\n Then they were over the Barrier and Rolf saw the last of the beaten\n Furry Ones racing back across the great wall toward the Plains of\n Nyd. He nosed the captured ship down toward the ruined plaza of\n the Forbidden City. Once Mark Tanner was aboard they would blast\n surfaceward with their thrilling news that all Mars could have water in\n plenty again.",
"\"The outlaws may capture,\" warned Tanner. \"They have taken over the\n canyons of Gur and Norpar, remember.\"\n\n\n \"I will take the glider.\" Altha was on her feet, her body crouched\n over to take advantage of the sheltering shrubs. She threaded her way\n swiftly back along a rocky corridor in the face of the Barrier toward\n the ruins of ancient Aryk.\n\n\n Tanner shrugged his shoulders. \"What can I do? Altha has the blood\n of the Hairy People in her veins. She will warn them even though the\n outlaws have turned her people against her.\"\n\n\n Rolf watched the column of barbarically clad warriors file out upon the\n barren desert and swing to the right along the base of the Barrier.\n Spear tips and bared swords glinted dully.\n\n\n \"They will pass within a few feet!\" he hissed.",
"\"But, Mark,\" the voice that was now unmistakably feminine argued, \"he\n wears the uniform of a patrolman.\"\n\n\n \"May be a trick.\" The deep voice was doubtful. \"You know their leader,\n Cannon, wanted you. This may be a trick to join the Outcasts and\n kidnap you.\"\n\n\n The girl's voice was merry. \"Come on Spider-legs,\" she said.\nRolf found himself staring, open-mouthed, at the sleek-limbed vision\n that parted the bushes and came toward him. A beautiful woman she was,\n with the long burnished copper of her hair down around her waist, but\n beneath the meager shortness of the skin tunic he saw that her firm\n flesh was covered with a fine reddish coat of hair. Even her face was\n sleek and gleaming with its coppery covering of down.\n\n\n \"Hello, patrol-a-man,\" she said shyly.",
"The outlaw was game. His fists slammed back at Rolf, and his knees\n jolted upward toward the patrolman's vulnerable middle. But Rolf\n bored in, his own knotted hands pumping, and his trained body weaving\n instinctively aside from the crippling blows aimed at his body. For a\n moment they fought, coughing and choking from the thickening pall of\n smoke, and then the fingers of the outlaw clamped around Rolf's throat\n and squeezed hard.\n\n\n The patrolman was weary; the wreck in the upper cavern and the long\n trek afterward through the dark tunnels had sapped his strength, and\n now he felt victory slipping from his grasp.\n\n\n He felt something soft bump against his legs, legs so far below that he\n could hardly realize that they were his, and then he was falling with\n the relentless fingers still about his throat. As from a great distant\n he heard a cry of pain and the blessed air gulped into his raw throat.\n His eyes cleared.",
"A hundred yards from the base of the rocky wall his feet scraped\n through black dust, and he came to a stop. Deftly Rolf nested the\n spinners again in their pack before he set out toward the heaped-up\n mass of stone blocks that was the wall.\n\n\n Ten steps he took before an excited voice called out shrilly from the\n rocks ahead. Rolf's slitted gray eyes narrowed yet more and his hand\n dropped to the compact expoder machine-gun holstered at his hip. There\n was the movement of a dark shape behind the screen of vines and ragged\n bushes.\n\n\n \"Down, Altha,\" a deeper voice rumbled from above, \"it's one of the\n Enemy.\"\n\n\n The voice had spoken in English! Rolf took a step forward eagerly and\n then doubt made his feet falter. There were Earthmen as well as Frogs\n among the outlaws. This mysterious world that floated above the cavern\n floor might be their headquarters.",
"Rolf snorted. \"Shorty,\" he said disgustedly as they landed, but his arm\n went out toward the girl's red-haired slimness, and curved around it.",
"And something that felt like a mountain smashed into his back. He was\n crushed downward, breathless, his eyes glimpsing briefly the soiled\n greenish trousers of his attacker as they locked on either side of\n his neck, and then blackness engulfed him as a mighty sledge battered\n endlessly at his skull.\nThis sledge was hammering relentlessly as Rolf sensed his first\n glimmer of returning light. There were two sledges, one of them that\n he identified as the hammering of blood in his throbbing temples, and\n the other the measured blasting pulse of rocket jets. He opened his\n eyes slowly to find himself staring at the fine-crusted metal plates\n of a flyer's deck. His nose was grinding into the oily muck that only\n undisciplined men would have permitted to accumulate.",
"The ship struck; split open like a rotten squash, and Rolf felt himself\n being flung far outward through thick blackness. For an eternity it\n seemed he hung in the darkness before something smashed the breath and\n feeling from his nerveless body. With a last glimmer of sanity he knew\n that he lay crushed against a rocky wall.\nMuch later Rolf groaned with the pain of bruised muscles and tried to\n rise. To his amazement he could move all his limbs. Carefully he came\n to his knees and so to his feet. Not a bone was broken, unless the\n sharp breathlessness that strained at his chest meant cracked ribs.\n\n\n There was light in the narrow pit in which he found himself, light and\n heat from the yet-glowing debris of the rocket flyer. The outlaws had\n blasted the crashed ship, his practiced eyes told him, and Garmon Nash\n must have died in the wreckage. He was alone in the waterless trap of a\n deep crevice.",
"Sisko Rolf's stocky body was a blur of motion as he cut the rocket\n jets, doused the twin searchlights, and switched over to the audio\n beams that served so well on the surface when blind flying was in\n order. But here in the cavern world, thirty-seventh in the linked\n series of vast caves that underlie the waterless wastes of Mars, the\n reflected waves of sound were of little value. Distances were far too\n cramped—disaster might loom but a few hundred feet away.\n\n\n \"Trapped us neatly,\" Rolf said through clenched teeth. \"Tolled into\n their underground hideout by that water-runner we tried to capture. We\n can't escape, that's certain. They know these caverns better than....\n We'll down some of them, though.\"",
"Rolf swung the lax controls over hard as the bursts of fire revealed a\n looming barrier of stone dead ahead, and then he felt the tough skin\n of the flyer crumple inward. The cabin seemed to telescope about him.\n In a slow sort of wonder Rolf felt the scrape of rock against metal,\n and then the screeching of air through the myriad rents in the cabin's\n meralloy walls grew to a mad whining wail.\n\n\n Down plunged the battered ship, downward ever downward. Somehow Rolf\n found the strength to wrap his fingers around the control levers and\n snap on a quick burst from the landing rockets. Their mad speed checked\n momentarily, but the nose of the vertically plunging ship dissolved\n into an inferno of flame.",
"A green bulge showed around the polished fuselage and Rolf pressed his\n captured weapon's firing button. A roar of pain came from the wounded\n man, and he saw an outflung arm upon the rocky ground that clenched\n tightly twice and relaxed to move no more. The outlaw weapon must have\n been loaded with a drum of poisoned needles, the expoder needles had\n not blasted a vital spot in the man's body.\n\n\n The odds were evening, he thought triumphantly. There might be another\n outlaw somewhere out there in the badlands, but no more than that. The\n flyer was built to accommodate no more than five passengers and four\n was the usual number. He shifted his expoder to cover the opposite end\n of the ship's squatty fuselage."
],
[
"A green bulge showed around the polished fuselage and Rolf pressed his\n captured weapon's firing button. A roar of pain came from the wounded\n man, and he saw an outflung arm upon the rocky ground that clenched\n tightly twice and relaxed to move no more. The outlaw weapon must have\n been loaded with a drum of poisoned needles, the expoder needles had\n not blasted a vital spot in the man's body.\n\n\n The odds were evening, he thought triumphantly. There might be another\n outlaw somewhere out there in the badlands, but no more than that. The\n flyer was built to accommodate no more than five passengers and four\n was the usual number. He shifted his expoder to cover the opposite end\n of the ship's squatty fuselage.",
"The outlaw was game. His fists slammed back at Rolf, and his knees\n jolted upward toward the patrolman's vulnerable middle. But Rolf\n bored in, his own knotted hands pumping, and his trained body weaving\n instinctively aside from the crippling blows aimed at his body. For a\n moment they fought, coughing and choking from the thickening pall of\n smoke, and then the fingers of the outlaw clamped around Rolf's throat\n and squeezed hard.\n\n\n The patrolman was weary; the wreck in the upper cavern and the long\n trek afterward through the dark tunnels had sapped his strength, and\n now he felt victory slipping from his grasp.\n\n\n He felt something soft bump against his legs, legs so far below that he\n could hardly realize that they were his, and then he was falling with\n the relentless fingers still about his throat. As from a great distant\n he heard a cry of pain and the blessed air gulped into his raw throat.\n His eyes cleared.",
"Heat blasted at his body as the stepped-up output of the torch made the\n oily floor flame. He lay unmoving while the thick smoke rolled over him.\n\n\n \"Fire!\" There was panic in the outlaw's voice. Rolf came to his knees\n in the blanketing fog and looked forward.\n\n\n One of the men flung himself out the door, but the other reached\n for the extinguisher close at hand. His thoughts were on the oily\n smoke; not on the prisoners, and so the impact of Rolf's horizontally\n propelled body drove the breath from his lungs before his hand could\n drop to his belted expoder.",
"Cautiously his head twisted until he could look forward toward the\n controls. The bound body of Altha Stark faced him, and he saw her lips\n twist into a brief smile of recognition. She shook her head and frowned\n as he moved his arm. But Rolf had learned that his limbs were not\n bound—apparently the outlaws had considered him out of the blasting\n for the moment.\n\n\n By degrees Rolf worked his arm down to his belt where his solar torch\n was hooked. His fingers made careful adjustments within the inset base\n of the torch, pushing a lever here and adjusting a tension screw there.\n\n\n The ship bumped gently as it landed and the thrum of rockets ceased.\n The cabin shifted with the weight of bodies moving from their seats.\n Rolf heard voices from a distance and the answering triumphant bawling\n of his two captors. The moment had come. He turned the cap of the solar\n torch away from his body and freed it.",
"He saw Altha's bound body and head. Her jaws were clamped upon the\n arm of the outlaw and even as he fought for more of the reeking smoky\n air of the cabin he saw the man's clenched fist batter at her face.\n Rolf swung, all the weight of his stocky body behind the blow, and the\n outlaw thudded limply against the opposite wall of the little cabin.\n\n\n No time to ask the girl if she were injured. The patrolman flung\n himself into the spongy control chair's cushions and sent the ship\n rocketing skyward. Behind him the thin film of surface oil no longer\n burned and the conditioning unit was clearing the air.\n\n\n \"Patrolman,\" the girl's voice was beside him. \"We're safe!\"\n\n\n \"Everything bongo?\" Rolf wanted to know.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" she smiled crookedly.",
"He guided the frail wing toward the shattered badlands where the girl\n had taken shelter, noting as he did so that the rocket flyer had landed\n near its center in a narrow strip of rocky gulch. A sudden thought made\n him grin. He drove directly toward the grounded ship. With this rocket\n flyer he could escape from Lomihi, return through the thirty-seven\n caverns to the upper world, and give to thirsty Mars the gift of\n limitless water again.\nA man stood on guard just outside the flyer's oval door. Rolf lined up\n his expoder and his jaw tensed. He guided the tiny soarer closer with\n one hand. If he could crash the glider into the guard, well and good.\n There would be no explosion of expoder needles to warn the fellow's\n comrades. But if the outlaw saw him Rolf knew that he would be the\n first to fire—his was the element of surprise.",
"A score of feet lay between them, and suddenly the outlaw whirled\n about. Rolf pressed the firing button; the expoder clicked over once\n and the trimmer key jammed, and the doughy-faced Venusian swung up his\n own long-barreled expoder!\n\n\n Rolf snapped his weapon overhand at the Frog's hairless skull. The\n fish-bellied alien ducked but his expoder swung off the target\n momentarily. In that instant Rolf launched himself from the open\n framework of the slowly diving glider, full upon the Venusian.\n\n\n They went down, Rolf swinging his fist like a hammer. He felt the Frog\n go limp and he loosed a relieved whistle. Now with a rocket flyer and\n the guard's rifle expoder in his grasp the problem of escape from\n the inner caverns was solved. He would rescue the girl, stop at the\n Forbidden City for Mark Tanner, and blast off for the upper crust forty\n miles and more overhead.",
"\"The outlaws may capture,\" warned Tanner. \"They have taken over the\n canyons of Gur and Norpar, remember.\"\n\n\n \"I will take the glider.\" Altha was on her feet, her body crouched\n over to take advantage of the sheltering shrubs. She threaded her way\n swiftly back along a rocky corridor in the face of the Barrier toward\n the ruins of ancient Aryk.\n\n\n Tanner shrugged his shoulders. \"What can I do? Altha has the blood\n of the Hairy People in her veins. She will warn them even though the\n outlaws have turned her people against her.\"\n\n\n Rolf watched the column of barbarically clad warriors file out upon the\n barren desert and swing to the right along the base of the Barrier.\n Spear tips and bared swords glinted dully.\n\n\n \"They will pass within a few feet!\" he hissed.",
"The older man's eyes were hot. He jerked at Rolf's hands and then\n suddenly thought better of it. \"You're right,\" he agreed. \"Help her if\n you can. Your weapon is our only hope now.\"\n\n\n Rolf pushed up and outward with all the strength of his weary muscles.\n The glider knifed forward with that first swift impetus, and drove out\n over the Barrier. The Furry Ones were struggling insect shapes below\n him, and he saw with a thrill that larger bodied warriors, whose bodies\n glinted with a dull bronze, were attacking them from the burnt-out\n wastelands. The Hairy People had come to battle the invaders.",
"And something that felt like a mountain smashed into his back. He was\n crushed downward, breathless, his eyes glimpsing briefly the soiled\n greenish trousers of his attacker as they locked on either side of\n his neck, and then blackness engulfed him as a mighty sledge battered\n endlessly at his skull.\nThis sledge was hammering relentlessly as Rolf sensed his first\n glimmer of returning light. There were two sledges, one of them that\n he identified as the hammering of blood in his throbbing temples, and\n the other the measured blasting pulse of rocket jets. He opened his\n eyes slowly to find himself staring at the fine-crusted metal plates\n of a flyer's deck. His nose was grinding into the oily muck that only\n undisciplined men would have permitted to accumulate.",
"Rolf raised his expoder, red anger clouding his eyes as he saw these\n maimed beasts of burden, but the hand of Mark Tanner pressed down\n firmly across his arm. The older man shook his head.\n\n\n \"Not yet,\" he said. \"When Altha has warned the Hairy People we can cut\n off their retreat. After they have passed I will arouse the Outcasts\n who live here upon the Barrier. Though their blood is that of the two\n races mingled they hate the Furry Ones.\"\n\n\n A shadow passed over their hiding place. The Furry Amazons too saw the\n indistinct darkness and looked up. High overhead drifted the narrow\n winged shape of a glider, and the warrior women shrieked their hatred.\n Gone now was their chance for a surprise attack on the isolated canyons\n of the Hairy People.",
"A hundred yards from the base of the rocky wall his feet scraped\n through black dust, and he came to a stop. Deftly Rolf nested the\n spinners again in their pack before he set out toward the heaped-up\n mass of stone blocks that was the wall.\n\n\n Ten steps he took before an excited voice called out shrilly from the\n rocks ahead. Rolf's slitted gray eyes narrowed yet more and his hand\n dropped to the compact expoder machine-gun holstered at his hip. There\n was the movement of a dark shape behind the screen of vines and ragged\n bushes.\n\n\n \"Down, Altha,\" a deeper voice rumbled from above, \"it's one of the\n Enemy.\"\n\n\n The voice had spoken in English! Rolf took a step forward eagerly and\n then doubt made his feet falter. There were Earthmen as well as Frogs\n among the outlaws. This mysterious world that floated above the cavern\n floor might be their headquarters.",
"\"Right!\" That was old Garmon Nash, his fellow patrolman aboard the\n Planet Patrol ship as he swung the deadly slimness of his rocket\n blast's barrel around to center on the fiery jets that betrayed the\n approaching outlaw flyers.\n\n\n Three times he fired the gun, the rocket projectiles blasting off with\n their invisible preliminary jets of gas, and three times an enemy craft\n flared up into an intolerable torch of flame before they realized the\n patrol ship had fired upon them. Then a barrage of enemy rocket shells\n exploded into life above and before them.",
"\"The island is the answer,\" said Tanner. \"Somehow it blocks the force\n of gravity—shields Lomihi from....\" He caught his breath suddenly.\n\n\n \"The outlaws!\" he cried. \"They're after Altha.\"\n\n\n Rolf caught a glimpse of a sleek rocket flyer diving upon Altha's frail\n wing. He saw the girl go gliding steeply down toward a ragged jumble\n of volcanic spurs and pits and disappear from view. He turned to see\n the old man pushing another crudely constructed glider toward the outer\n wall of the rock chamber.\n\n\n Tanner tugged at a silvery metal bar inset into the stone wall. A\n section of the wall swung slowly inward. Rolf sprang to his side.\n\n\n \"Let me follow,\" he said. \"I can fly a glider, and I have my expoder.\"",
"Abruptly, then, the wind veered. From behind the two Earthmen it came,\n bearing the scent of their bodies out to the sensitive nostrils of the\n beast-women. Again the column turned. They glimpsed the two men and a\n hideous scrawling battle-cry burst from their throats.\nRolf's expoder rattled briefly like a high-speed sewing machine as he\n flicked its muzzle back and forth along the ranks of attacking Furry\n Ones. Dozens of the hideous weasel creatures fell as the needles of\n explosive blasted them but hundreds more were swarming over their\n fallen sisters. Mark Tanner's bow twanged again and again as he drove\n arrows at the bloodthirsty warrior women. But the Furry Ones ran\n fearlessly into that rain of death.\nThe expoder hammered in Rolf's heavy fist.\nTanner smashed an elbow into Rolf's side. \"Retreat!\" he gasped.",
"The Furry Amazons swarmed up over the lower terraces of rocks, their\n snaky heads thrust forward and their swords slashing. The two Earthmen\n bounded up and backward to the next jumbled layer of giant blocks\n behind them, their powerful earthly muscles negating Lomihi's feeble\n gravity. Spears showered thick about them and then they dropped behind\n the sheltering bulk of a rough square boulder.\n\n\n \"Now where?\" Rolf snapped another burst of expoder needles at the furry\n attackers as he asked.\n\n\n \"To the vaults beneath the Forbidden City,\" Mark Tanner cried. \"None\n but the Outcasts and we two have entered the streets of deserted Aryk.\"",
"The ship struck; split open like a rotten squash, and Rolf felt himself\n being flung far outward through thick blackness. For an eternity it\n seemed he hung in the darkness before something smashed the breath and\n feeling from his nerveless body. With a last glimmer of sanity he knew\n that he lay crushed against a rocky wall.\nMuch later Rolf groaned with the pain of bruised muscles and tried to\n rise. To his amazement he could move all his limbs. Carefully he came\n to his knees and so to his feet. Not a bone was broken, unless the\n sharp breathlessness that strained at his chest meant cracked ribs.\n\n\n There was light in the narrow pit in which he found himself, light and\n heat from the yet-glowing debris of the rocket flyer. The outlaws had\n blasted the crashed ship, his practiced eyes told him, and Garmon Nash\n must have died in the wreckage. He was alone in the waterless trap of a\n deep crevice.",
"\"But, Mark,\" the voice that was now unmistakably feminine argued, \"he\n wears the uniform of a patrolman.\"\n\n\n \"May be a trick.\" The deep voice was doubtful. \"You know their leader,\n Cannon, wanted you. This may be a trick to join the Outcasts and\n kidnap you.\"\n\n\n The girl's voice was merry. \"Come on Spider-legs,\" she said.\nRolf found himself staring, open-mouthed, at the sleek-limbed vision\n that parted the bushes and came toward him. A beautiful woman she was,\n with the long burnished copper of her hair down around her waist, but\n beneath the meager shortness of the skin tunic he saw that her firm\n flesh was covered with a fine reddish coat of hair. Even her face was\n sleek and gleaming with its coppery covering of down.\n\n\n \"Hello, patrol-a-man,\" she said shyly.",
"His eyes went searching out, out into undreamed distance. For miles\n below him there was nothing but emptiness, and for miles before him\n there was that same glowing vacancy. Above the cavern's roof soared\n majestically upward; he could see the narrow dark slit through which\n his feet had betrayed him, and he realized that he had fallen through\n the vaulted rocky dome of this fantastic abyss.\n\n\n It was then, even as he snapped the release of his spinner and the\n nested blades spun free overhead, that he saw the slowly turning bulk\n of the cloud-swathed world, a tiny five mile green ball of a planet!",
"They halted, clustered about their leader. Giffa snarled quick orders\n at them, her chisel-teeth clicking savagely. The column swung out into\n the wasteland toward the nearest sunken valleys of the Hairy People.\n Rolf and Mark Tanner came to their feet."
]
] |
train
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61213
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[
"What is Sandra reporting on? \n",
"What role does Doc play in conjunction with Sandra? \n",
"What is the significance of the players’ names? \n",
"How does Sandra meet the chess players? \n",
"Who is putting on the chess tournament? Why?\n",
"What is the significance of Sandra persuading her paper into letting her write human interest stories? How does this affect the text’s composition?\n",
"Which mode of exposition affects the story’s plot?\n",
"According to the story, which famous writers have written about chess in the past? \n"
] |
[
[
"A chess tournament where the old master, Krakatower, will be present. \n",
"A chess-playing machine that is able to beat humans. \n",
"A chess tournament where many chess masters will be present.\n",
"A chess tournament where for the very first time a machine will be taught to play.\n"
],
[
"He explains to Sandra that living human personality is key for beating the machine. \n",
"He shows Sandra around the tournament. \n",
"He explains to Sandra how the chess machine works and what the significance of each human chess player is. \n",
"He explains the history of chess scandals to Sandra. \n"
],
[
"The players’ names correspond with which countries won World War II \n",
"The players’ names represent how chess rivals reflect political rivals. \n",
"The players’ names signify the level of competence each chess master has, with American names being the most competent.\n",
"The players’ names correspond with what country has the most chess mastery, with Russian names hold the utmost interest.\n"
],
[
"Doc explains that she can use her tournament program to meet whichever player she wishes. \n",
"Doc tells her their chess history and introduces her to them as they pass by. \n",
"She uses her female charm to interest each player in an interview.\n",
"She interviews each player in accordance with who Doc is friends with, save for Dr. Krakatower. \n"
],
[
"WBM—to test the efficacy of their machine. \n",
"Dr. Krakatower—to beat WBM’s chess ma Co own once and for all. \n",
"WBM—to being down Russia’s chess mastery. \n",
"WBM—to test the accuracy of their chess machine’s emotional programming. \n"
],
[
"The human interest stories—i.e., Sandra’s interviews—provide the story’s central irony. The fact that humans cannot defeat the machine shows that the real interest is not human, but robotic.\n",
"The human interest stories provide a structure for the story to sit on. As she watches each player challenge the machine, it becomes more and more apparent that human personality cannot win. \n",
"-The human interest stories provide a structure for the story to sit on. As Doc introduces her to each chess player, their backstories help to unpack the significance of the chess tournament. \n",
"The human interest stories—i.e., Sandra’s interviews—provide a red herring for the story’s central goal, which is to hide the fact of Dr. Krakatower’s ability to beat the WBM machine. \n"
],
[
"The story uses the Doc character to help paint a portrait of what Sandra cannot understand. Namely, the world of chess. \n",
"The story uses the chess player characters to help paint a portrait of what Sandra cannot understand. Namely, chess. \n",
"The story uses Doc to hide the presence of Dr. Krakatower, the Frenchman responsible for defeating the WBM machines. \n",
"The story uses the machine’s astonishing capabilities to distract from the true interest of the story: the human intellect’s ability to conquer computers. \n"
],
[
"Doc and Sandra. \n",
"Ambrose Bierce and Edgar Allen Poe. \n",
"Sandra and Dr. Krakatower. \n",
"Edgar Allen Poe and Sandra. \n"
]
] |
[
2,
3,
4,
2,
1,
3,
1,
2
] |
[
0,
0,
1,
0,
0,
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[
[
"While Doc chattered happily on about chess-playing robots and chess\n stories, Sandra found herself thinking about him. A writer of some sort\n evidently and a terrific chess buff. Perhaps he was an actual medical\n doctor. She'd read something about two or three coming over with the\n Russian squad. But Doc certainly didn't sound like a Soviet citizen.\n\n\n He was older than she'd first assumed. She could see that now that\n she was listening to him less and looking at him more. Tired, too.\n Only his dark-circled eyes shone with unquenchable youth. A useful old\n guy, whoever he was. An hour ago she'd been sure she was going to muff\n this assignment completely and now she had it laid out cold. For the\n umpteenth time in her career Sandra shied away from the guilty thought\n that she wasn't a writer at all or even a reporter, she just used\n dime-a-dozen female attractiveness to rope a susceptible man (young,\n old, American, Russian) and pick his brain....",
"Sandra looked with quickening interest at the console of the Machine—a\n bank of keys and some half-dozen panels of rows and rows of tiny\n telltale lights, all dark at the moment. A thick red velvet cord on\n little brass standards ran around the Machine at a distance of about\n ten feet. Inside the cord were only a few gray-smocked men. Two of\n them had just laid a black cable to the nearest chess table and were\n attaching it to the Siamese clock.\n\n\n Sandra tried to think of a being who always checked everything, but\n only within limits beyond which his thoughts never ventured, and who\n never made a mistake....\n\n\n \"Miss Grayling! May I present to you Igor Jandorf.\"\n\n\n She turned back quickly with a smile and a nod.\n\n\n \"I should tell you, Igor,\" Doc continued, \"that Miss Grayling\n represents a large and influential Midwestern newspaper. Perhaps you\n have a message for her readers.\"",
"It was a small sprightly elderly man who looked like a somewhat\n thinned down Peter Lorre—there was that same impression of the happy\n Slavic elf. What was left of his white hair was cut very short,\n making a silvery nap. His pince-nez had quite thick lenses. But in\n sharp contrast to the somberly clad men around them, he was wearing\n a pearl-gray suit of almost exactly the same shade as Sandra's—a\n circumstance that created for her the illusion that they were fellow\n conspirators.\n\n\n \"Hey, wait a minute,\" she protested just the same. He had already taken\n her arm and was piloting her toward the nearest flight of low wide\n stairs. \"How did you know I wanted a drink?\"\n\n\n \"I could see that mademoiselle was having difficulty swallowing,\" he\n replied, keeping them moving. \"Pardon me for feasting my eyes on your\n lovely throat.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't suppose they'd serve drinks here.\"",
"\"Have you studied the scores of the match between Moon Base and\n Circum-Terra?\"\n\n\n \"Not worth the trouble. The play was feeble. Barely Expert Rating.\"\n\n\n Sandra's chief difficulty was that she knew absolutely nothing about\n the game of chess—a point that she had slid over in conferring with\n the powers at the\nSpace Mirror\n, but that now had begun to weigh on\n her. How wonderful it would be, she dreamed, to walk out this minute,\n find a quiet bar and get pie-eyed in an evil, ladylike way.\n\"Perhaps mademoiselle would welcome a drink?\"\n\n\n \"You're durn tootin' she would!\" Sandra replied in a rush, and then\n looked down apprehensively at the person who had read her thoughts.",
"\"Oh yes,\" Sandra assured him, \"but there are some other questions I\n very much want to ask you, Mr. Jandorf.\"\n\n\n \"I am sorry, Miss Grayling, but I must clear my mind now. In ten\n minutes they start the clocks.\"\n\n\n While Sandra arranged for an interview with Jandorf after the day's\n playing session, Doc reordered his coffee.\n\n\n \"One expects it of Jandorf,\" he explained to Sandra with a philosophic\n shrug when the shock-headed man was gone. \"At least he didn't take your\n wine-and-seltzer. Or did he? One tip I have for you: don't call a chess\n master Mister, call him Master. They all eat it up.\"\n\n\n \"Gee, Doc, I don't know how to thank you for everything. I hope I\n haven't offended Mis—Master Jandorf so that he doesn't—\"",
"\"Anyway there\nare\nan awful lot of Russians in the tournament,\"\n Sandra said, consulting her program. \"Four out of ten have USSR after\n them. And Bela Grabo, Hungary—that's a satellite. And Sherevsky and\n Krakatower are Russian-sounding names.\"",
"\"But of course.\" They were already mounting the stairs. \"What would\n chess be without coffee or schnapps?\"\n\n\n \"Okay, lead on,\" Sandra said. \"You're the doctor.\"\n\n\n \"Doctor?\" He smiled widely. \"You know, I like being called that.\"\n\n\n \"Then the name is yours as long as you want it—Doc.\"\nMeanwhile the happy little man had edged them into the first of a small\n cluster of tables, where a dark-suited jabbering trio was just rising.\n He snapped his fingers and hissed through his teeth. A white-aproned\n waiter materialized.\n\n\n \"For myself black coffee,\" he said. \"For mademoiselle rhine wine and\n seltzer?\"\n\n\n \"That'd go fine.\" Sandra leaned back. \"Confidentially, Doc, I was\n having trouble swallowing ... well, just about everything here.\"",
"\"Don't worry about that. Wild horses couldn't keep Jandorf away from a\n press interview. You know, his rapid-transit challenge was cunning.\n That's a minor variety of chess where each player gets only ten seconds\n to make a move. Which I don't suppose would give the Machine time to\n look three moves ahead. Chess players would say that the Machine has a\n very slow sight of the board. This tournament is being played at the\n usual international rate of 15 moves an hour, and—\"\n\n\n \"Is that why they've got all those crazy clocks?\" Sandra interrupted.",
"\"Willie!\" Doc said with some asperity. \"Miss Grayling is a journalist.\n She would like to have a statement from you as to how you will play\n against the Machine.\"\nAngler grinned and shook his head sadly. \"Poor old Machine,\" he said.\n \"I don't know why they take so much trouble polishing up that pile of\n tin just so that I can give it a hit in the head. I got a hatful of\n moves it'll burn out all its tubes trying to answer. And if it gets too\n fresh, how about you and me giving its low-temperature section the\n hotfoot, Savvy? The money WBM's putting up is okay, though. That first\n prize will just fit the big hole in my bank account.\"\n\n\n \"I know you haven't the time now, Master Angler,\" Sandra said rapidly,\n \"but if after the playing session you could grant me—\"",
"\"Sorry, babe,\" Angler broke in with a wave of dismissal. \"I'm dated up\n for two months in advance. Waiter! I'm here, not there!\" And he went\n charging off.\n\n\n Doc and Sandra looked at each other and smiled.\n\n\n \"Chess masters aren't exactly humble people, are they?\" she said.\n\n\n Doc's smile became tinged with sad understanding. \"You must excuse\n them, though,\" he said. \"They really get so little recognition or\n recompense. This tournament is an exception. And it takes a great deal\n of ego to play greatly.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so. So World Business Machines is responsible for this\n tournament?\"\n\n\n \"Correct. Their advertising department is interested in the prestige.\n They want to score a point over their great rival.\"\n\n\n \"But if the Machine plays badly it will be a black eye for them,\"\n Sandra pointed out.",
"Sandra asked, \"What about Grabo and Krakatower?\"\nDoc gave a short scornful laugh. \"Krakatower! Don't pay any attention\n to\nhim\n. A senile has-been, it's a scandal he's been allowed to play\n in this tournament! He must have pulled all sorts of strings. Told them\n that his lifelong services to chess had won him the honor and that they\n had to have a member of the so-called Old Guard. Maybe he even got down\n on his knees and cried—and all the time his eyes on that expense money\n and the last-place consolation prize! Yet dreaming schizophrenically\n of beating them all! Please, don't get me started on Dirty Old\n Krakatower.\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy, Doc. He sounds like he would make an interesting\n article? Can you point him out to me?\"",
"Simon Great smiled thinly. \"Sorry,\" he said, \"But I am making no\n predictions and we are giving out no advance information on the\n programming of the Machine. As you know, I have had to fight the\n Players' Committee tooth and nail on all sorts of points about that\n and they have won most of them. I am not permitted to re-program the\n Machine at adjournments—only between games (I did insist on that and\n get it!) And if the Machine breaks down during a game, its clock keeps\n running on it. My men are permitted to make repairs—if they can work\n fast enough.\"\n\n\n \"That makes it very tough on you,\" Sandra put in. \"The Machine isn't\n allowed any weaknesses.\"\n\n\n Great nodded soberly. \"And now I must go. They've almost finished the\n count-down, as one of my technicians keeps on calling it. Very pleased\n to have met you, Miss Grayling—I'll check with our PR man on that\n interview. Be seeing you, Savvy.\"",
"\"Wait.\" He lifted a finger. \"I think I know what you're going to ask.\n You want to know why, if the Machine works at all, it doesn't work\n perfectly, so that it always wins and there is no contest. Right?\"\n\n\n Sandra grinned and nodded. Doc's ability to interpret her mind was as\n comforting as the bubbly, mildly astringent mixture she was sipping.\n\n\n He removed his pince-nez, massaged the bridge of his nose and replaced\n them.",
"She realized suddenly that the whole hall had become very quiet.\n\n\n Doc was the only person still talking and people were again looking at\n them disapprovingly. All five wallboards were lit up and the changed\n position of a few pieces showed that opening moves had been made on\n four of them, including the Machine's. The central space between\n the tiers of seats was completely clear now, except for one man\n hurrying across it in their direction with the rapid yet quiet, almost\n tip-toe walk that seemed to mark all the officials.\nLike morticians'\n assistants\n, she thought. He rapidly mounted the stairs and halted at\n the top to look around searchingly. His gaze lighted on their table,\n his eyebrows went up, and he made a beeline for Doc. Sandra wondered if\n she should warn him that he was about to be shushed.\n\n\n The official laid a hand on Doc's shoulder. \"Sir!\" he said agitatedly.\n \"Do you realize that they've started your clock, Dr. Krakatower?\"",
"\"Did the Machine beat him?\" Sandra asked.\nDoc shrugged. \"The scores weren't released. It was very hush-hush.\n But about your idea, Miss Grayling—did you ever read about Maelzel's\n famous chess-playing automaton of the 19th Century? That one too was\n supposed to work by machinery (cogs and gears, not electricity) but\n actually it had a man hidden inside it—your Edgar Poe exposed the\n fraud in a famous article. In\nmy\nstory I think the chess robot will\n break down while it is being demonstrated to a millionaire purchaser\n and the young inventor will have to win its game for it to cover up\n and swing the deal. Only the millionaire's daughter, who is really a",
"There were signs featuring largely mysterious combinations of letters:\n FIDE, WBM, USCF, USSF, USSR and UNESCO. Sandra felt fairly sure about\n the last three.\n\n\n The many clocks, bedside table size, would have struck a familiar\n note except that they had little red flags and wheels sprinkled over\n their faces and they were all in pairs, two clocks to a case. That\n Siamese-twin clocks should be essential to a chess tournament struck\n Sandra as a particularly maddening circumstance.\nHer last assignment had been to interview the pilot pair riding the\n first American manned circum-lunar satellite—and the five alternate\n pairs who hadn't made the flight. This tournament hall seemed to Sandra\n much further out of the world.\n\n\n Overheard scraps of conversation in reasonably intelligible English\n were not particularly helpful. Samples:",
"He nodded. \"You are not the first to be shocked and horrified by\n chess,\" he assured her. \"It is a curse of the intellect. It is a game\n for lunatics—or else it creates them. But what brings a sane and\n beautiful young lady to this 64-square madhouse?\"\n\n\n Sandra briefly told him her story and her predicament. By the time they\n were served, Doc had absorbed the one and assessed the other.\n\n\n \"You have one great advantage,\" he told her. \"You know nothing\n whatsoever of chess—so you will be able to write about it\n understandably for your readers.\" He swallowed half his demitasse and\n smacked his lips. \"As for the Machine—you\ndo\nknow, I suppose, that\n it is not a humanoid metal robot, walking about clanking and squeaking\n like a late medieval knight in armor?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Doc, but....\" Sandra found difficulty in phrasing the question.",
"\"Exactly!\" Doc beamed at her approvingly. \"The Machine\nis\nlike a\n man. A rather peculiar and not exactly pleasant man. A man who always\n abides by sound principles, who is utterly incapable of flights of\n genius, but who never makes a mistake. You see, you are finding human\n interest already, even in the Machine.\"\n\n\n Sandra nodded. \"Does a human chess player—a grandmaster, I mean—ever\n look eight moves ahead in a game?\"",
"The tiers of seats were filled now and the central space almost clear.\n Officials were shooing off a few knots of lingerers. Several of the\n grandmasters, including all four Russians, were seated at their tables.\n Press and company cameras were flashing. The four smaller wallboards\n lit up with the pieces in the opening position—white for White and red\n for Black. Simon Great stepped over the red velvet cord and more flash\n bulbs went off.\n\n\n \"You know, Doc,\" Sandra said, \"I'm a dog to suggest this, but what\n if this whole thing were a big fake? What if Simon Great were really\n playing the Machine's moves? There would surely be some way for his\n electricians to rig—\"\n\n\n Doc laughed happily—and so loudly that some people at the adjoining\n tables frowned.",
"A stocky, bull-faced man with a great bristling shock of black,\n gray-flecked hair had halted abruptly by their table. He bent over Doc\n and began to whisper explosively in a guttural foreign tongue.\nSandra's gaze traveled beyond the balustrade. Now that she could look\n down at it, the central hall seemed less confusedly crowded. In the\n middle, toward the far end, were five small tables spaced rather widely\n apart and with a chessboard and men and one of the Siamese clocks set\n out on each. To either side of the hall were tiers of temporary seats,\n about half of them occupied. There were at least as many more people\n still wandering about.\n\n\n On the far wall was a big electric scoreboard and also, above the\n corresponding tables, five large dully glassy chessboards, the White\n squares in light gray, the Black squares in dark.\n\n\n One of the five wall chessboards was considerably larger than the other\n four—the one above the Machine."
],
[
"While Doc chattered happily on about chess-playing robots and chess\n stories, Sandra found herself thinking about him. A writer of some sort\n evidently and a terrific chess buff. Perhaps he was an actual medical\n doctor. She'd read something about two or three coming over with the\n Russian squad. But Doc certainly didn't sound like a Soviet citizen.\n\n\n He was older than she'd first assumed. She could see that now that\n she was listening to him less and looking at him more. Tired, too.\n Only his dark-circled eyes shone with unquenchable youth. A useful old\n guy, whoever he was. An hour ago she'd been sure she was going to muff\n this assignment completely and now she had it laid out cold. For the\n umpteenth time in her career Sandra shied away from the guilty thought\n that she wasn't a writer at all or even a reporter, she just used\n dime-a-dozen female attractiveness to rope a susceptible man (young,\n old, American, Russian) and pick his brain....",
"\"Exactly!\" Doc beamed at her approvingly. \"The Machine\nis\nlike a\n man. A rather peculiar and not exactly pleasant man. A man who always\n abides by sound principles, who is utterly incapable of flights of\n genius, but who never makes a mistake. You see, you are finding human\n interest already, even in the Machine.\"\n\n\n Sandra nodded. \"Does a human chess player—a grandmaster, I mean—ever\n look eight moves ahead in a game?\"",
"Sandra looked with quickening interest at the console of the Machine—a\n bank of keys and some half-dozen panels of rows and rows of tiny\n telltale lights, all dark at the moment. A thick red velvet cord on\n little brass standards ran around the Machine at a distance of about\n ten feet. Inside the cord were only a few gray-smocked men. Two of\n them had just laid a black cable to the nearest chess table and were\n attaching it to the Siamese clock.\n\n\n Sandra tried to think of a being who always checked everything, but\n only within limits beyond which his thoughts never ventured, and who\n never made a mistake....\n\n\n \"Miss Grayling! May I present to you Igor Jandorf.\"\n\n\n She turned back quickly with a smile and a nod.\n\n\n \"I should tell you, Igor,\" Doc continued, \"that Miss Grayling\n represents a large and influential Midwestern newspaper. Perhaps you\n have a message for her readers.\"",
"\"But of course.\" They were already mounting the stairs. \"What would\n chess be without coffee or schnapps?\"\n\n\n \"Okay, lead on,\" Sandra said. \"You're the doctor.\"\n\n\n \"Doctor?\" He smiled widely. \"You know, I like being called that.\"\n\n\n \"Then the name is yours as long as you want it—Doc.\"\nMeanwhile the happy little man had edged them into the first of a small\n cluster of tables, where a dark-suited jabbering trio was just rising.\n He snapped his fingers and hissed through his teeth. A white-aproned\n waiter materialized.\n\n\n \"For myself black coffee,\" he said. \"For mademoiselle rhine wine and\n seltzer?\"\n\n\n \"That'd go fine.\" Sandra leaned back. \"Confidentially, Doc, I was\n having trouble swallowing ... well, just about everything here.\"",
"He nodded. \"You are not the first to be shocked and horrified by\n chess,\" he assured her. \"It is a curse of the intellect. It is a game\n for lunatics—or else it creates them. But what brings a sane and\n beautiful young lady to this 64-square madhouse?\"\n\n\n Sandra briefly told him her story and her predicament. By the time they\n were served, Doc had absorbed the one and assessed the other.\n\n\n \"You have one great advantage,\" he told her. \"You know nothing\n whatsoever of chess—so you will be able to write about it\n understandably for your readers.\" He swallowed half his demitasse and\n smacked his lips. \"As for the Machine—you\ndo\nknow, I suppose, that\n it is not a humanoid metal robot, walking about clanking and squeaking\n like a late medieval knight in armor?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Doc, but....\" Sandra found difficulty in phrasing the question.",
"\"Sorry, babe,\" Angler broke in with a wave of dismissal. \"I'm dated up\n for two months in advance. Waiter! I'm here, not there!\" And he went\n charging off.\n\n\n Doc and Sandra looked at each other and smiled.\n\n\n \"Chess masters aren't exactly humble people, are they?\" she said.\n\n\n Doc's smile became tinged with sad understanding. \"You must excuse\n them, though,\" he said. \"They really get so little recognition or\n recompense. This tournament is an exception. And it takes a great deal\n of ego to play greatly.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so. So World Business Machines is responsible for this\n tournament?\"\n\n\n \"Correct. Their advertising department is interested in the prestige.\n They want to score a point over their great rival.\"\n\n\n \"But if the Machine plays badly it will be a black eye for them,\"\n Sandra pointed out.",
"\"Wait.\" He lifted a finger. \"I think I know what you're going to ask.\n You want to know why, if the Machine works at all, it doesn't work\n perfectly, so that it always wins and there is no contest. Right?\"\n\n\n Sandra grinned and nodded. Doc's ability to interpret her mind was as\n comforting as the bubbly, mildly astringent mixture she was sipping.\n\n\n He removed his pince-nez, massaged the bridge of his nose and replaced\n them.",
"\"Oh yes,\" Sandra assured him, \"but there are some other questions I\n very much want to ask you, Mr. Jandorf.\"\n\n\n \"I am sorry, Miss Grayling, but I must clear my mind now. In ten\n minutes they start the clocks.\"\n\n\n While Sandra arranged for an interview with Jandorf after the day's\n playing session, Doc reordered his coffee.\n\n\n \"One expects it of Jandorf,\" he explained to Sandra with a philosophic\n shrug when the shock-headed man was gone. \"At least he didn't take your\n wine-and-seltzer. Or did he? One tip I have for you: don't call a chess\n master Mister, call him Master. They all eat it up.\"\n\n\n \"Gee, Doc, I don't know how to thank you for everything. I hope I\n haven't offended Mis—Master Jandorf so that he doesn't—\"",
"The tiers of seats were filled now and the central space almost clear.\n Officials were shooing off a few knots of lingerers. Several of the\n grandmasters, including all four Russians, were seated at their tables.\n Press and company cameras were flashing. The four smaller wallboards\n lit up with the pieces in the opening position—white for White and red\n for Black. Simon Great stepped over the red velvet cord and more flash\n bulbs went off.\n\n\n \"You know, Doc,\" Sandra said, \"I'm a dog to suggest this, but what\n if this whole thing were a big fake? What if Simon Great were really\n playing the Machine's moves? There would surely be some way for his\n electricians to rig—\"\n\n\n Doc laughed happily—and so loudly that some people at the adjoining\n tables frowned.",
"Doc frowned. \"True, in a sense.\nThey\nmust feel very sure.... Here\n they are now.\"\nFour men were crossing the center of the hall, which was clearing,\n toward the tables at the other end. Doubtless they just happened to be\n going two by two in close formation, but it gave Sandra the feeling of\n a phalanx.\n\n\n \"The first two are Lysmov and Votbinnik,\" Doc told her. \"It isn't often\n that you see the current champion of the world—Votbinnik—and an\n ex-champion arm in arm. There are two other persons in the tournament\n who have held that honor—Jal and Vanderhoef the director, way back.\"\n\n\n \"Will whoever wins this tournament become champion?\"\n\n\n \"Oh no. That's decided by two-player matches—a very long\n business—after elimination tournaments between leading contenders.\n This tournament is a round robin: each player plays one game with every\n other player. That means nine rounds.\"",
"Sandra asked, \"What about Grabo and Krakatower?\"\nDoc gave a short scornful laugh. \"Krakatower! Don't pay any attention\n to\nhim\n. A senile has-been, it's a scandal he's been allowed to play\n in this tournament! He must have pulled all sorts of strings. Told them\n that his lifelong services to chess had won him the honor and that they\n had to have a member of the so-called Old Guard. Maybe he even got down\n on his knees and cried—and all the time his eyes on that expense money\n and the last-place consolation prize! Yet dreaming schizophrenically\n of beating them all! Please, don't get me started on Dirty Old\n Krakatower.\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy, Doc. He sounds like he would make an interesting\n article? Can you point him out to me?\"",
"She realized suddenly that the whole hall had become very quiet.\n\n\n Doc was the only person still talking and people were again looking at\n them disapprovingly. All five wallboards were lit up and the changed\n position of a few pieces showed that opening moves had been made on\n four of them, including the Machine's. The central space between\n the tiers of seats was completely clear now, except for one man\n hurrying across it in their direction with the rapid yet quiet, almost\n tip-toe walk that seemed to mark all the officials.\nLike morticians'\n assistants\n, she thought. He rapidly mounted the stairs and halted at\n the top to look around searchingly. His gaze lighted on their table,\n his eyebrows went up, and he made a beeline for Doc. Sandra wondered if\n she should warn him that he was about to be shushed.\n\n\n The official laid a hand on Doc's shoulder. \"Sir!\" he said agitatedly.\n \"Do you realize that they've started your clock, Dr. Krakatower?\"",
"\"By no means. That was the trouble with some of the early chess-playing\n machines—they were programmed by scientists. No, Simon Great is a\n psychologist who at one time was a leading contender for the world's\n chess championship. I think WBM was surprisingly shrewd to pick him\n for the programming job. Let me tell you—No, better yet—\"\n\n\n Doc shot to his feet, stretched an arm on high and called out sharply,\n \"Simon!\"\n\n\n A man some four tables away waved back and a moment later came over.\n\n\n \"What is it, Savilly?\" he asked. \"There's hardly any time, you know.\"\nThe newcomer was of middle height, compact of figure and feature, with\n graying hair cut short and combed sharply back.\n\n\n Doc spoke his piece for Sandra.",
"\"Willie!\" Doc said with some asperity. \"Miss Grayling is a journalist.\n She would like to have a statement from you as to how you will play\n against the Machine.\"\nAngler grinned and shook his head sadly. \"Poor old Machine,\" he said.\n \"I don't know why they take so much trouble polishing up that pile of\n tin just so that I can give it a hit in the head. I got a hatful of\n moves it'll burn out all its tubes trying to answer. And if it gets too\n fresh, how about you and me giving its low-temperature section the\n hotfoot, Savvy? The money WBM's putting up is okay, though. That first\n prize will just fit the big hole in my bank account.\"\n\n\n \"I know you haven't the time now, Master Angler,\" Sandra said rapidly,\n \"but if after the playing session you could grant me—\"",
"\"Gosh, I don't know. Say, Doc, is it really true that Master Jandorf\n has played 50 games at once blindfolded? I can't believe that.\"\n\"Of course not!\" Doc assured her. \"It was only 49 and he lost two of\n those and drew five. Jandorf always exaggerates. It's in his blood.\"\n\n\n \"He's one of the Russians, isn't he?\" Sandra asked. \"Igor?\"\n\n\n Doc chuckled. \"Not exactly,\" he said gently. \"He is originally a Pole\n and now he has Argentinian citizenship. You have a program, don't you?\"\n\n\n Sandra started to hunt through her pocketbook, but just then two lists\n of names lit up on the big electric scoreboard.\nTHE PLAYERS\nWilliam Angler, USA\n\n Bela Grabo, Hungary\n\n Ivan Jal, USSR\n\n Igor Jandorf, Argentina",
"A stocky, bull-faced man with a great bristling shock of black,\n gray-flecked hair had halted abruptly by their table. He bent over Doc\n and began to whisper explosively in a guttural foreign tongue.\nSandra's gaze traveled beyond the balustrade. Now that she could look\n down at it, the central hall seemed less confusedly crowded. In the\n middle, toward the far end, were five small tables spaced rather widely\n apart and with a chessboard and men and one of the Siamese clocks set\n out on each. To either side of the hall were tiers of temporary seats,\n about half of them occupied. There were at least as many more people\n still wandering about.\n\n\n On the far wall was a big electric scoreboard and also, above the\n corresponding tables, five large dully glassy chessboards, the White\n squares in light gray, the Black squares in dark.\n\n\n One of the five wall chessboards was considerably larger than the other\n four—the one above the Machine.",
"\"Did the Machine beat him?\" Sandra asked.\nDoc shrugged. \"The scores weren't released. It was very hush-hush.\n But about your idea, Miss Grayling—did you ever read about Maelzel's\n famous chess-playing automaton of the 19th Century? That one too was\n supposed to work by machinery (cogs and gears, not electricity) but\n actually it had a man hidden inside it—your Edgar Poe exposed the\n fraud in a famous article. In\nmy\nstory I think the chess robot will\n break down while it is being demonstrated to a millionaire purchaser\n and the young inventor will have to win its game for it to cover up\n and swing the deal. Only the millionaire's daughter, who is really a",
"\"You can tell him by his long white beard with coffee stains. I don't\n see it anywhere, though. Perhaps he's shaved it off for the occasion.\n It would be like that antique womanizer to develop senile delusions of\n youthfulness.\"\n\n\n \"And Grabo?\" Sandra pressed, suppressing a smile at the intensity of\n Doc's animosity.\n\n\n Doc's eyes grew thoughtful. \"About Bela Grabo (why are three out of\n four Hungarians named Bela?) I will tell you only this: That he is a\n very brilliant player and that the Machine is very lucky to have drawn\n him as its first opponent.\"\n\n\n He would not amplify his statement. Sandra studied the Scoreboard again.\n\n\n \"This Simon Great who's down as programming the Machine. He's a famous\n physicist, I suppose?\"",
"It was a small sprightly elderly man who looked like a somewhat\n thinned down Peter Lorre—there was that same impression of the happy\n Slavic elf. What was left of his white hair was cut very short,\n making a silvery nap. His pince-nez had quite thick lenses. But in\n sharp contrast to the somberly clad men around them, he was wearing\n a pearl-gray suit of almost exactly the same shade as Sandra's—a\n circumstance that created for her the illusion that they were fellow\n conspirators.\n\n\n \"Hey, wait a minute,\" she protested just the same. He had already taken\n her arm and was piloting her toward the nearest flight of low wide\n stairs. \"How did you know I wanted a drink?\"\n\n\n \"I could see that mademoiselle was having difficulty swallowing,\" he\n replied, keeping them moving. \"Pardon me for feasting my eyes on your\n lovely throat.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't suppose they'd serve drinks here.\"",
"\"The proportion of Soviet to American entries in the tournament\n represents pretty fairly the general difference in playing strength\n between the two countries,\" Doc said judiciously. \"Chess mastery\n moves from land to land with the years. Way back it was the Moslems\n and the Hindus and Persians. Then Italy and Spain. A little over a\n hundred years ago it was France and England. Then Germany, Austria\n and the New World. Now it's Russia—including of course the Russians\n who have run away from Russia. But don't think there aren't a lot of\n good Anglo-Saxon types who are masters of the first water. In fact,\n there are a lot of them here around us, though perhaps you don't\n think so. It's just that if you play a lot of chess you get to looking\n Russian. Once it probably made you look Italian. Do you see that short\n bald-headed man?\"\n\n\n \"You mean the one facing the Machine and talking to Jandorf?\""
],
[
"\"Gosh, I don't know. Say, Doc, is it really true that Master Jandorf\n has played 50 games at once blindfolded? I can't believe that.\"\n\"Of course not!\" Doc assured her. \"It was only 49 and he lost two of\n those and drew five. Jandorf always exaggerates. It's in his blood.\"\n\n\n \"He's one of the Russians, isn't he?\" Sandra asked. \"Igor?\"\n\n\n Doc chuckled. \"Not exactly,\" he said gently. \"He is originally a Pole\n and now he has Argentinian citizenship. You have a program, don't you?\"\n\n\n Sandra started to hunt through her pocketbook, but just then two lists\n of names lit up on the big electric scoreboard.\nTHE PLAYERS\nWilliam Angler, USA\n\n Bela Grabo, Hungary\n\n Ivan Jal, USSR\n\n Igor Jandorf, Argentina",
"Dr. S. Krakatower, France\n\n Vassily Lysmov, USSR\n\n The Machine, USA (programmed by Simon Great)\n\n Maxim Serek, USSR\n\n Moses Sherevsky, USA\n\n Mikhail Votbinnik, USSR\nTournament Director\n: Dr. Jan Vanderhoef\nFIRST ROUND PAIRINGS\nSherevsky vs. Serek\n\n Jal vs. Angler\n\n Jandorf vs. Votbinnik\n\n Lysmov vs. Krakatower\n\n Grabo vs. Machine\n\n\n \"Cripes, Doc, they all sound like they were Russians,\" Sandra said\n after a bit. \"Except this Willie Angler. Oh, he's the boy wonder,\n isn't he?\"",
"\"You can tell him by his long white beard with coffee stains. I don't\n see it anywhere, though. Perhaps he's shaved it off for the occasion.\n It would be like that antique womanizer to develop senile delusions of\n youthfulness.\"\n\n\n \"And Grabo?\" Sandra pressed, suppressing a smile at the intensity of\n Doc's animosity.\n\n\n Doc's eyes grew thoughtful. \"About Bela Grabo (why are three out of\n four Hungarians named Bela?) I will tell you only this: That he is a\n very brilliant player and that the Machine is very lucky to have drawn\n him as its first opponent.\"\n\n\n He would not amplify his statement. Sandra studied the Scoreboard again.\n\n\n \"This Simon Great who's down as programming the Machine. He's a famous\n physicist, I suppose?\"",
"\"Sorry, babe,\" Angler broke in with a wave of dismissal. \"I'm dated up\n for two months in advance. Waiter! I'm here, not there!\" And he went\n charging off.\n\n\n Doc and Sandra looked at each other and smiled.\n\n\n \"Chess masters aren't exactly humble people, are they?\" she said.\n\n\n Doc's smile became tinged with sad understanding. \"You must excuse\n them, though,\" he said. \"They really get so little recognition or\n recompense. This tournament is an exception. And it takes a great deal\n of ego to play greatly.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so. So World Business Machines is responsible for this\n tournament?\"\n\n\n \"Correct. Their advertising department is interested in the prestige.\n They want to score a point over their great rival.\"\n\n\n \"But if the Machine plays badly it will be a black eye for them,\"\n Sandra pointed out.",
"\"Anyway there\nare\nan awful lot of Russians in the tournament,\"\n Sandra said, consulting her program. \"Four out of ten have USSR after\n them. And Bela Grabo, Hungary—that's a satellite. And Sherevsky and\n Krakatower are Russian-sounding names.\"",
"Doc frowned. \"True, in a sense.\nThey\nmust feel very sure.... Here\n they are now.\"\nFour men were crossing the center of the hall, which was clearing,\n toward the tables at the other end. Doubtless they just happened to be\n going two by two in close formation, but it gave Sandra the feeling of\n a phalanx.\n\n\n \"The first two are Lysmov and Votbinnik,\" Doc told her. \"It isn't often\n that you see the current champion of the world—Votbinnik—and an\n ex-champion arm in arm. There are two other persons in the tournament\n who have held that honor—Jal and Vanderhoef the director, way back.\"\n\n\n \"Will whoever wins this tournament become champion?\"\n\n\n \"Oh no. That's decided by two-player matches—a very long\n business—after elimination tournaments between leading contenders.\n This tournament is a round robin: each player plays one game with every\n other player. That means nine rounds.\"",
"There were signs featuring largely mysterious combinations of letters:\n FIDE, WBM, USCF, USSF, USSR and UNESCO. Sandra felt fairly sure about\n the last three.\n\n\n The many clocks, bedside table size, would have struck a familiar\n note except that they had little red flags and wheels sprinkled over\n their faces and they were all in pairs, two clocks to a case. That\n Siamese-twin clocks should be essential to a chess tournament struck\n Sandra as a particularly maddening circumstance.\nHer last assignment had been to interview the pilot pair riding the\n first American manned circum-lunar satellite—and the five alternate\n pairs who hadn't made the flight. This tournament hall seemed to Sandra\n much further out of the world.\n\n\n Overheard scraps of conversation in reasonably intelligible English\n were not particularly helpful. Samples:",
"\"The proportion of Soviet to American entries in the tournament\n represents pretty fairly the general difference in playing strength\n between the two countries,\" Doc said judiciously. \"Chess mastery\n moves from land to land with the years. Way back it was the Moslems\n and the Hindus and Persians. Then Italy and Spain. A little over a\n hundred years ago it was France and England. Then Germany, Austria\n and the New World. Now it's Russia—including of course the Russians\n who have run away from Russia. But don't think there aren't a lot of\n good Anglo-Saxon types who are masters of the first water. In fact,\n there are a lot of them here around us, though perhaps you don't\n think so. It's just that if you play a lot of chess you get to looking\n Russian. Once it probably made you look Italian. Do you see that short\n bald-headed man?\"\n\n\n \"You mean the one facing the Machine and talking to Jandorf?\"",
"A stocky, bull-faced man with a great bristling shock of black,\n gray-flecked hair had halted abruptly by their table. He bent over Doc\n and began to whisper explosively in a guttural foreign tongue.\nSandra's gaze traveled beyond the balustrade. Now that she could look\n down at it, the central hall seemed less confusedly crowded. In the\n middle, toward the far end, were five small tables spaced rather widely\n apart and with a chessboard and men and one of the Siamese clocks set\n out on each. To either side of the hall were tiers of temporary seats,\n about half of them occupied. There were at least as many more people\n still wandering about.\n\n\n On the far wall was a big electric scoreboard and also, above the\n corresponding tables, five large dully glassy chessboards, the White\n squares in light gray, the Black squares in dark.\n\n\n One of the five wall chessboards was considerably larger than the other\n four—the one above the Machine.",
"Sandra asked, \"What about Grabo and Krakatower?\"\nDoc gave a short scornful laugh. \"Krakatower! Don't pay any attention\n to\nhim\n. A senile has-been, it's a scandal he's been allowed to play\n in this tournament! He must have pulled all sorts of strings. Told them\n that his lifelong services to chess had won him the honor and that they\n had to have a member of the so-called Old Guard. Maybe he even got down\n on his knees and cried—and all the time his eyes on that expense money\n and the last-place consolation prize! Yet dreaming schizophrenically\n of beating them all! Please, don't get me started on Dirty Old\n Krakatower.\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy, Doc. He sounds like he would make an interesting\n article? Can you point him out to me?\"",
"The tiers of seats were filled now and the central space almost clear.\n Officials were shooing off a few knots of lingerers. Several of the\n grandmasters, including all four Russians, were seated at their tables.\n Press and company cameras were flashing. The four smaller wallboards\n lit up with the pieces in the opening position—white for White and red\n for Black. Simon Great stepped over the red velvet cord and more flash\n bulbs went off.\n\n\n \"You know, Doc,\" Sandra said, \"I'm a dog to suggest this, but what\n if this whole thing were a big fake? What if Simon Great were really\n playing the Machine's moves? There would surely be some way for his\n electricians to rig—\"\n\n\n Doc laughed happily—and so loudly that some people at the adjoining\n tables frowned.",
"\"Yes. Now that's one with a lot of human interest. Moses Sherevsky.\n Been champion of the United States many times. A very strict Orthodox\n Jew. Can't play chess on Fridays or on Saturdays before sundown.\" He\n chuckled. \"Why, there's even a story going around that one rabbi told\n Sherevsky it would be unlawful for him to play against the Machine\n because it is technically a\ngolem\n—the clay Frankenstein's monster of\n Hebrew legend.\"",
"Not that there weren't enough humans around, it was the interest that\n was in doubt. The large hall was crammed with energetic dark-suited\n men of whom a disproportionately large number were bald, wore glasses,\n were faintly untidy and indefinably shabby, had Slavic or Scandinavian\n features, and talked foreign languages.\n\n\n They yakked interminably. The only ones who didn't were scurrying\n individuals with the eager-zombie look of officials.\n\n\n Chess sets were everywhere—big ones on tables, still bigger\n diagram-type electric ones on walls, small peg-in sets dragged from\n side pockets and manipulated rapidly as part of the conversational\n ritual and still smaller folding sets in which the pieces were the tiny\n magnetized disks used for playing in free-fall.",
"Simon Great smiled thinly. \"Sorry,\" he said, \"But I am making no\n predictions and we are giving out no advance information on the\n programming of the Machine. As you know, I have had to fight the\n Players' Committee tooth and nail on all sorts of points about that\n and they have won most of them. I am not permitted to re-program the\n Machine at adjournments—only between games (I did insist on that and\n get it!) And if the Machine breaks down during a game, its clock keeps\n running on it. My men are permitted to make repairs—if they can work\n fast enough.\"\n\n\n \"That makes it very tough on you,\" Sandra put in. \"The Machine isn't\n allowed any weaknesses.\"\n\n\n Great nodded soberly. \"And now I must go. They've almost finished the\n count-down, as one of my technicians keeps on calling it. Very pleased\n to have met you, Miss Grayling—I'll check with our PR man on that\n interview. Be seeing you, Savvy.\"",
"She realized suddenly that the whole hall had become very quiet.\n\n\n Doc was the only person still talking and people were again looking at\n them disapprovingly. All five wallboards were lit up and the changed\n position of a few pieces showed that opening moves had been made on\n four of them, including the Machine's. The central space between\n the tiers of seats was completely clear now, except for one man\n hurrying across it in their direction with the rapid yet quiet, almost\n tip-toe walk that seemed to mark all the officials.\nLike morticians'\n assistants\n, she thought. He rapidly mounted the stairs and halted at\n the top to look around searchingly. His gaze lighted on their table,\n his eyebrows went up, and he made a beeline for Doc. Sandra wondered if\n she should warn him that he was about to be shushed.\n\n\n The official laid a hand on Doc's shoulder. \"Sir!\" he said agitatedly.\n \"Do you realize that they've started your clock, Dr. Krakatower?\"",
"Doc nodded. \"Not such a boy any longer, though. He's.... Well, speak of\n the Devil's children.... Miss Grayling, I have the honor of presenting\n to you the only grandmaster ever to have been ex-chess-champion of the\n United States while still technically a minor—Master William Augustus\n Angler.\"\n\n\n A tall, sharply-dressed young man with a hatchet face pressed the old\n man back into his chair.\n\n\n \"How are you, Savvy, old boy old boy?\" he demanded. \"Still chasing the\n girls, I see.\"\n\n\n \"Please, Willie, get off me.\"\n\n\n \"Can't take it, huh?\" Angler straightened up somewhat. \"Hey waiter!\n Where's that chocolate malt? I don't want it\nnext\nyear. About that\nex-\n, though. I was swindled, Savvy. I was robbed.\"",
"\"Oh yes,\" Sandra assured him, \"but there are some other questions I\n very much want to ask you, Mr. Jandorf.\"\n\n\n \"I am sorry, Miss Grayling, but I must clear my mind now. In ten\n minutes they start the clocks.\"\n\n\n While Sandra arranged for an interview with Jandorf after the day's\n playing session, Doc reordered his coffee.\n\n\n \"One expects it of Jandorf,\" he explained to Sandra with a philosophic\n shrug when the shock-headed man was gone. \"At least he didn't take your\n wine-and-seltzer. Or did he? One tip I have for you: don't call a chess\n master Mister, call him Master. They all eat it up.\"\n\n\n \"Gee, Doc, I don't know how to thank you for everything. I hope I\n haven't offended Mis—Master Jandorf so that he doesn't—\"",
"\"By no means. That was the trouble with some of the early chess-playing\n machines—they were programmed by scientists. No, Simon Great is a\n psychologist who at one time was a leading contender for the world's\n chess championship. I think WBM was surprisingly shrewd to pick him\n for the programming job. Let me tell you—No, better yet—\"\n\n\n Doc shot to his feet, stretched an arm on high and called out sharply,\n \"Simon!\"\n\n\n A man some four tables away waved back and a moment later came over.\n\n\n \"What is it, Savilly?\" he asked. \"There's hardly any time, you know.\"\nThe newcomer was of middle height, compact of figure and feature, with\n graying hair cut short and combed sharply back.\n\n\n Doc spoke his piece for Sandra.",
"The shock-headed man's eyes flashed. \"I most certainly do!\" At that\n moment the waiter arrived with a second coffee and wine-and-seltzer.\n Jandorf seized Doc's new demitasse, drained it, set it back on the tray\n with a flourish and drew himself up.\n\"Tell your readers, Miss Grayling,\" he proclaimed, fiercely arching his\n eyebrows at her and actually slapping his chest, \"that I, Igor Jandorf,\n will defeat the Machine by the living force of my human personality!\n Already I have offered to play it an informal game blindfold—I, who\n have played 50 blindfold games simultaneously! Its owners refuse me. I\n have challenged it also to a few games of rapid-transit—an offer no",
"\"Willie!\" Doc said with some asperity. \"Miss Grayling is a journalist.\n She would like to have a statement from you as to how you will play\n against the Machine.\"\nAngler grinned and shook his head sadly. \"Poor old Machine,\" he said.\n \"I don't know why they take so much trouble polishing up that pile of\n tin just so that I can give it a hit in the head. I got a hatful of\n moves it'll burn out all its tubes trying to answer. And if it gets too\n fresh, how about you and me giving its low-temperature section the\n hotfoot, Savvy? The money WBM's putting up is okay, though. That first\n prize will just fit the big hole in my bank account.\"\n\n\n \"I know you haven't the time now, Master Angler,\" Sandra said rapidly,\n \"but if after the playing session you could grant me—\""
],
[
"\"Gosh, I don't know. Say, Doc, is it really true that Master Jandorf\n has played 50 games at once blindfolded? I can't believe that.\"\n\"Of course not!\" Doc assured her. \"It was only 49 and he lost two of\n those and drew five. Jandorf always exaggerates. It's in his blood.\"\n\n\n \"He's one of the Russians, isn't he?\" Sandra asked. \"Igor?\"\n\n\n Doc chuckled. \"Not exactly,\" he said gently. \"He is originally a Pole\n and now he has Argentinian citizenship. You have a program, don't you?\"\n\n\n Sandra started to hunt through her pocketbook, but just then two lists\n of names lit up on the big electric scoreboard.\nTHE PLAYERS\nWilliam Angler, USA\n\n Bela Grabo, Hungary\n\n Ivan Jal, USSR\n\n Igor Jandorf, Argentina",
"A stocky, bull-faced man with a great bristling shock of black,\n gray-flecked hair had halted abruptly by their table. He bent over Doc\n and began to whisper explosively in a guttural foreign tongue.\nSandra's gaze traveled beyond the balustrade. Now that she could look\n down at it, the central hall seemed less confusedly crowded. In the\n middle, toward the far end, were five small tables spaced rather widely\n apart and with a chessboard and men and one of the Siamese clocks set\n out on each. To either side of the hall were tiers of temporary seats,\n about half of them occupied. There were at least as many more people\n still wandering about.\n\n\n On the far wall was a big electric scoreboard and also, above the\n corresponding tables, five large dully glassy chessboards, the White\n squares in light gray, the Black squares in dark.\n\n\n One of the five wall chessboards was considerably larger than the other\n four—the one above the Machine.",
"\"Oh yes,\" Sandra assured him, \"but there are some other questions I\n very much want to ask you, Mr. Jandorf.\"\n\n\n \"I am sorry, Miss Grayling, but I must clear my mind now. In ten\n minutes they start the clocks.\"\n\n\n While Sandra arranged for an interview with Jandorf after the day's\n playing session, Doc reordered his coffee.\n\n\n \"One expects it of Jandorf,\" he explained to Sandra with a philosophic\n shrug when the shock-headed man was gone. \"At least he didn't take your\n wine-and-seltzer. Or did he? One tip I have for you: don't call a chess\n master Mister, call him Master. They all eat it up.\"\n\n\n \"Gee, Doc, I don't know how to thank you for everything. I hope I\n haven't offended Mis—Master Jandorf so that he doesn't—\"",
"While Doc chattered happily on about chess-playing robots and chess\n stories, Sandra found herself thinking about him. A writer of some sort\n evidently and a terrific chess buff. Perhaps he was an actual medical\n doctor. She'd read something about two or three coming over with the\n Russian squad. But Doc certainly didn't sound like a Soviet citizen.\n\n\n He was older than she'd first assumed. She could see that now that\n she was listening to him less and looking at him more. Tired, too.\n Only his dark-circled eyes shone with unquenchable youth. A useful old\n guy, whoever he was. An hour ago she'd been sure she was going to muff\n this assignment completely and now she had it laid out cold. For the\n umpteenth time in her career Sandra shied away from the guilty thought\n that she wasn't a writer at all or even a reporter, she just used\n dime-a-dozen female attractiveness to rope a susceptible man (young,\n old, American, Russian) and pick his brain....",
"\"Sorry, babe,\" Angler broke in with a wave of dismissal. \"I'm dated up\n for two months in advance. Waiter! I'm here, not there!\" And he went\n charging off.\n\n\n Doc and Sandra looked at each other and smiled.\n\n\n \"Chess masters aren't exactly humble people, are they?\" she said.\n\n\n Doc's smile became tinged with sad understanding. \"You must excuse\n them, though,\" he said. \"They really get so little recognition or\n recompense. This tournament is an exception. And it takes a great deal\n of ego to play greatly.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so. So World Business Machines is responsible for this\n tournament?\"\n\n\n \"Correct. Their advertising department is interested in the prestige.\n They want to score a point over their great rival.\"\n\n\n \"But if the Machine plays badly it will be a black eye for them,\"\n Sandra pointed out.",
"He nodded. \"You are not the first to be shocked and horrified by\n chess,\" he assured her. \"It is a curse of the intellect. It is a game\n for lunatics—or else it creates them. But what brings a sane and\n beautiful young lady to this 64-square madhouse?\"\n\n\n Sandra briefly told him her story and her predicament. By the time they\n were served, Doc had absorbed the one and assessed the other.\n\n\n \"You have one great advantage,\" he told her. \"You know nothing\n whatsoever of chess—so you will be able to write about it\n understandably for your readers.\" He swallowed half his demitasse and\n smacked his lips. \"As for the Machine—you\ndo\nknow, I suppose, that\n it is not a humanoid metal robot, walking about clanking and squeaking\n like a late medieval knight in armor?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Doc, but....\" Sandra found difficulty in phrasing the question.",
"Sandra asked, \"What about Grabo and Krakatower?\"\nDoc gave a short scornful laugh. \"Krakatower! Don't pay any attention\n to\nhim\n. A senile has-been, it's a scandal he's been allowed to play\n in this tournament! He must have pulled all sorts of strings. Told them\n that his lifelong services to chess had won him the honor and that they\n had to have a member of the so-called Old Guard. Maybe he even got down\n on his knees and cried—and all the time his eyes on that expense money\n and the last-place consolation prize! Yet dreaming schizophrenically\n of beating them all! Please, don't get me started on Dirty Old\n Krakatower.\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy, Doc. He sounds like he would make an interesting\n article? Can you point him out to me?\"",
"\"Have you studied the scores of the match between Moon Base and\n Circum-Terra?\"\n\n\n \"Not worth the trouble. The play was feeble. Barely Expert Rating.\"\n\n\n Sandra's chief difficulty was that she knew absolutely nothing about\n the game of chess—a point that she had slid over in conferring with\n the powers at the\nSpace Mirror\n, but that now had begun to weigh on\n her. How wonderful it would be, she dreamed, to walk out this minute,\n find a quiet bar and get pie-eyed in an evil, ladylike way.\n\"Perhaps mademoiselle would welcome a drink?\"\n\n\n \"You're durn tootin' she would!\" Sandra replied in a rush, and then\n looked down apprehensively at the person who had read her thoughts.",
"Sandra looked with quickening interest at the console of the Machine—a\n bank of keys and some half-dozen panels of rows and rows of tiny\n telltale lights, all dark at the moment. A thick red velvet cord on\n little brass standards ran around the Machine at a distance of about\n ten feet. Inside the cord were only a few gray-smocked men. Two of\n them had just laid a black cable to the nearest chess table and were\n attaching it to the Siamese clock.\n\n\n Sandra tried to think of a being who always checked everything, but\n only within limits beyond which his thoughts never ventured, and who\n never made a mistake....\n\n\n \"Miss Grayling! May I present to you Igor Jandorf.\"\n\n\n She turned back quickly with a smile and a nod.\n\n\n \"I should tell you, Igor,\" Doc continued, \"that Miss Grayling\n represents a large and influential Midwestern newspaper. Perhaps you\n have a message for her readers.\"",
"Doc frowned. \"True, in a sense.\nThey\nmust feel very sure.... Here\n they are now.\"\nFour men were crossing the center of the hall, which was clearing,\n toward the tables at the other end. Doubtless they just happened to be\n going two by two in close formation, but it gave Sandra the feeling of\n a phalanx.\n\n\n \"The first two are Lysmov and Votbinnik,\" Doc told her. \"It isn't often\n that you see the current champion of the world—Votbinnik—and an\n ex-champion arm in arm. There are two other persons in the tournament\n who have held that honor—Jal and Vanderhoef the director, way back.\"\n\n\n \"Will whoever wins this tournament become champion?\"\n\n\n \"Oh no. That's decided by two-player matches—a very long\n business—after elimination tournaments between leading contenders.\n This tournament is a round robin: each player plays one game with every\n other player. That means nine rounds.\"",
"\"The proportion of Soviet to American entries in the tournament\n represents pretty fairly the general difference in playing strength\n between the two countries,\" Doc said judiciously. \"Chess mastery\n moves from land to land with the years. Way back it was the Moslems\n and the Hindus and Persians. Then Italy and Spain. A little over a\n hundred years ago it was France and England. Then Germany, Austria\n and the New World. Now it's Russia—including of course the Russians\n who have run away from Russia. But don't think there aren't a lot of\n good Anglo-Saxon types who are masters of the first water. In fact,\n there are a lot of them here around us, though perhaps you don't\n think so. It's just that if you play a lot of chess you get to looking\n Russian. Once it probably made you look Italian. Do you see that short\n bald-headed man?\"\n\n\n \"You mean the one facing the Machine and talking to Jandorf?\"",
"\"But of course.\" They were already mounting the stairs. \"What would\n chess be without coffee or schnapps?\"\n\n\n \"Okay, lead on,\" Sandra said. \"You're the doctor.\"\n\n\n \"Doctor?\" He smiled widely. \"You know, I like being called that.\"\n\n\n \"Then the name is yours as long as you want it—Doc.\"\nMeanwhile the happy little man had edged them into the first of a small\n cluster of tables, where a dark-suited jabbering trio was just rising.\n He snapped his fingers and hissed through his teeth. A white-aproned\n waiter materialized.\n\n\n \"For myself black coffee,\" he said. \"For mademoiselle rhine wine and\n seltzer?\"\n\n\n \"That'd go fine.\" Sandra leaned back. \"Confidentially, Doc, I was\n having trouble swallowing ... well, just about everything here.\"",
"\"Anyway there\nare\nan awful lot of Russians in the tournament,\"\n Sandra said, consulting her program. \"Four out of ten have USSR after\n them. And Bela Grabo, Hungary—that's a satellite. And Sherevsky and\n Krakatower are Russian-sounding names.\"",
"Not that there weren't enough humans around, it was the interest that\n was in doubt. The large hall was crammed with energetic dark-suited\n men of whom a disproportionately large number were bald, wore glasses,\n were faintly untidy and indefinably shabby, had Slavic or Scandinavian\n features, and talked foreign languages.\n\n\n They yakked interminably. The only ones who didn't were scurrying\n individuals with the eager-zombie look of officials.\n\n\n Chess sets were everywhere—big ones on tables, still bigger\n diagram-type electric ones on walls, small peg-in sets dragged from\n side pockets and manipulated rapidly as part of the conversational\n ritual and still smaller folding sets in which the pieces were the tiny\n magnetized disks used for playing in free-fall.",
"There were signs featuring largely mysterious combinations of letters:\n FIDE, WBM, USCF, USSF, USSR and UNESCO. Sandra felt fairly sure about\n the last three.\n\n\n The many clocks, bedside table size, would have struck a familiar\n note except that they had little red flags and wheels sprinkled over\n their faces and they were all in pairs, two clocks to a case. That\n Siamese-twin clocks should be essential to a chess tournament struck\n Sandra as a particularly maddening circumstance.\nHer last assignment had been to interview the pilot pair riding the\n first American manned circum-lunar satellite—and the five alternate\n pairs who hadn't made the flight. This tournament hall seemed to Sandra\n much further out of the world.\n\n\n Overheard scraps of conversation in reasonably intelligible English\n were not particularly helpful. Samples:",
"\"Exactly!\" Doc beamed at her approvingly. \"The Machine\nis\nlike a\n man. A rather peculiar and not exactly pleasant man. A man who always\n abides by sound principles, who is utterly incapable of flights of\n genius, but who never makes a mistake. You see, you are finding human\n interest already, even in the Machine.\"\n\n\n Sandra nodded. \"Does a human chess player—a grandmaster, I mean—ever\n look eight moves ahead in a game?\"",
"The tiers of seats were filled now and the central space almost clear.\n Officials were shooing off a few knots of lingerers. Several of the\n grandmasters, including all four Russians, were seated at their tables.\n Press and company cameras were flashing. The four smaller wallboards\n lit up with the pieces in the opening position—white for White and red\n for Black. Simon Great stepped over the red velvet cord and more flash\n bulbs went off.\n\n\n \"You know, Doc,\" Sandra said, \"I'm a dog to suggest this, but what\n if this whole thing were a big fake? What if Simon Great were really\n playing the Machine's moves? There would surely be some way for his\n electricians to rig—\"\n\n\n Doc laughed happily—and so loudly that some people at the adjoining\n tables frowned.",
"\"Don't worry about that. Wild horses couldn't keep Jandorf away from a\n press interview. You know, his rapid-transit challenge was cunning.\n That's a minor variety of chess where each player gets only ten seconds\n to make a move. Which I don't suppose would give the Machine time to\n look three moves ahead. Chess players would say that the Machine has a\n very slow sight of the board. This tournament is being played at the\n usual international rate of 15 moves an hour, and—\"\n\n\n \"Is that why they've got all those crazy clocks?\" Sandra interrupted.",
"\"You can tell him by his long white beard with coffee stains. I don't\n see it anywhere, though. Perhaps he's shaved it off for the occasion.\n It would be like that antique womanizer to develop senile delusions of\n youthfulness.\"\n\n\n \"And Grabo?\" Sandra pressed, suppressing a smile at the intensity of\n Doc's animosity.\n\n\n Doc's eyes grew thoughtful. \"About Bela Grabo (why are three out of\n four Hungarians named Bela?) I will tell you only this: That he is a\n very brilliant player and that the Machine is very lucky to have drawn\n him as its first opponent.\"\n\n\n He would not amplify his statement. Sandra studied the Scoreboard again.\n\n\n \"This Simon Great who's down as programming the Machine. He's a famous\n physicist, I suppose?\"",
"It was a small sprightly elderly man who looked like a somewhat\n thinned down Peter Lorre—there was that same impression of the happy\n Slavic elf. What was left of his white hair was cut very short,\n making a silvery nap. His pince-nez had quite thick lenses. But in\n sharp contrast to the somberly clad men around them, he was wearing\n a pearl-gray suit of almost exactly the same shade as Sandra's—a\n circumstance that created for her the illusion that they were fellow\n conspirators.\n\n\n \"Hey, wait a minute,\" she protested just the same. He had already taken\n her arm and was piloting her toward the nearest flight of low wide\n stairs. \"How did you know I wanted a drink?\"\n\n\n \"I could see that mademoiselle was having difficulty swallowing,\" he\n replied, keeping them moving. \"Pardon me for feasting my eyes on your\n lovely throat.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't suppose they'd serve drinks here.\""
],
[
"\"Sorry, babe,\" Angler broke in with a wave of dismissal. \"I'm dated up\n for two months in advance. Waiter! I'm here, not there!\" And he went\n charging off.\n\n\n Doc and Sandra looked at each other and smiled.\n\n\n \"Chess masters aren't exactly humble people, are they?\" she said.\n\n\n Doc's smile became tinged with sad understanding. \"You must excuse\n them, though,\" he said. \"They really get so little recognition or\n recompense. This tournament is an exception. And it takes a great deal\n of ego to play greatly.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so. So World Business Machines is responsible for this\n tournament?\"\n\n\n \"Correct. Their advertising department is interested in the prestige.\n They want to score a point over their great rival.\"\n\n\n \"But if the Machine plays badly it will be a black eye for them,\"\n Sandra pointed out.",
"A stocky, bull-faced man with a great bristling shock of black,\n gray-flecked hair had halted abruptly by their table. He bent over Doc\n and began to whisper explosively in a guttural foreign tongue.\nSandra's gaze traveled beyond the balustrade. Now that she could look\n down at it, the central hall seemed less confusedly crowded. In the\n middle, toward the far end, were five small tables spaced rather widely\n apart and with a chessboard and men and one of the Siamese clocks set\n out on each. To either side of the hall were tiers of temporary seats,\n about half of them occupied. There were at least as many more people\n still wandering about.\n\n\n On the far wall was a big electric scoreboard and also, above the\n corresponding tables, five large dully glassy chessboards, the White\n squares in light gray, the Black squares in dark.\n\n\n One of the five wall chessboards was considerably larger than the other\n four—the one above the Machine.",
"\"True,\" Doc agreed thoughtfully. \"WBM must feel very sure.... It's\n the prize money they've put up, of course, that's brought the world's\n greatest players here. Otherwise half of them would be holding off\n in the best temperamental-artist style. For chess players the prize\n money is fabulous—$35,000, with $15,000 for first place, and all\n expenses paid for all players. There's never been anything like it.\n Soviet Russia is the only country that has ever supported and rewarded\n her best chess players at all adequately. I think the Russian players\n are here because UNESCO and FIDE (that's\nFederation Internationale\n des Echecs\n—the international chess organization) are also backing\n the tournament. And perhaps because the Kremlin is hungry for a little\n prestige now that its space program is sagging.\"\n\n\n \"But if a Russian doesn't take first place it will be a black eye for\n them.\"",
"\"The proportion of Soviet to American entries in the tournament\n represents pretty fairly the general difference in playing strength\n between the two countries,\" Doc said judiciously. \"Chess mastery\n moves from land to land with the years. Way back it was the Moslems\n and the Hindus and Persians. Then Italy and Spain. A little over a\n hundred years ago it was France and England. Then Germany, Austria\n and the New World. Now it's Russia—including of course the Russians\n who have run away from Russia. But don't think there aren't a lot of\n good Anglo-Saxon types who are masters of the first water. In fact,\n there are a lot of them here around us, though perhaps you don't\n think so. It's just that if you play a lot of chess you get to looking\n Russian. Once it probably made you look Italian. Do you see that short\n bald-headed man?\"\n\n\n \"You mean the one facing the Machine and talking to Jandorf?\"",
"Not that there weren't enough humans around, it was the interest that\n was in doubt. The large hall was crammed with energetic dark-suited\n men of whom a disproportionately large number were bald, wore glasses,\n were faintly untidy and indefinably shabby, had Slavic or Scandinavian\n features, and talked foreign languages.\n\n\n They yakked interminably. The only ones who didn't were scurrying\n individuals with the eager-zombie look of officials.\n\n\n Chess sets were everywhere—big ones on tables, still bigger\n diagram-type electric ones on walls, small peg-in sets dragged from\n side pockets and manipulated rapidly as part of the conversational\n ritual and still smaller folding sets in which the pieces were the tiny\n magnetized disks used for playing in free-fall.",
"Doc frowned. \"True, in a sense.\nThey\nmust feel very sure.... Here\n they are now.\"\nFour men were crossing the center of the hall, which was clearing,\n toward the tables at the other end. Doubtless they just happened to be\n going two by two in close formation, but it gave Sandra the feeling of\n a phalanx.\n\n\n \"The first two are Lysmov and Votbinnik,\" Doc told her. \"It isn't often\n that you see the current champion of the world—Votbinnik—and an\n ex-champion arm in arm. There are two other persons in the tournament\n who have held that honor—Jal and Vanderhoef the director, way back.\"\n\n\n \"Will whoever wins this tournament become champion?\"\n\n\n \"Oh no. That's decided by two-player matches—a very long\n business—after elimination tournaments between leading contenders.\n This tournament is a round robin: each player plays one game with every\n other player. That means nine rounds.\"",
"There were signs featuring largely mysterious combinations of letters:\n FIDE, WBM, USCF, USSF, USSR and UNESCO. Sandra felt fairly sure about\n the last three.\n\n\n The many clocks, bedside table size, would have struck a familiar\n note except that they had little red flags and wheels sprinkled over\n their faces and they were all in pairs, two clocks to a case. That\n Siamese-twin clocks should be essential to a chess tournament struck\n Sandra as a particularly maddening circumstance.\nHer last assignment had been to interview the pilot pair riding the\n first American manned circum-lunar satellite—and the five alternate\n pairs who hadn't made the flight. This tournament hall seemed to Sandra\n much further out of the world.\n\n\n Overheard scraps of conversation in reasonably intelligible English\n were not particularly helpful. Samples:",
"\"Gosh, I don't know. Say, Doc, is it really true that Master Jandorf\n has played 50 games at once blindfolded? I can't believe that.\"\n\"Of course not!\" Doc assured her. \"It was only 49 and he lost two of\n those and drew five. Jandorf always exaggerates. It's in his blood.\"\n\n\n \"He's one of the Russians, isn't he?\" Sandra asked. \"Igor?\"\n\n\n Doc chuckled. \"Not exactly,\" he said gently. \"He is originally a Pole\n and now he has Argentinian citizenship. You have a program, don't you?\"\n\n\n Sandra started to hunt through her pocketbook, but just then two lists\n of names lit up on the big electric scoreboard.\nTHE PLAYERS\nWilliam Angler, USA\n\n Bela Grabo, Hungary\n\n Ivan Jal, USSR\n\n Igor Jandorf, Argentina",
"\"Miss Grayling, that is a wonderful idea! I will probably steal it for\n a short story. I still manage to write and place a few in England.\n No, I do not think that is at all likely. WBM would never risk such\n a fraud. Great is completely out of practice for actual tournament\n play, though not for chess-thinking. The difference in style between\n a computer and a man would be evident to any expert. Great's own style\n is remembered and would be recognized—though, come to think of it, his\n style was often described as being machinelike....\" For a moment Doc's\n eyes became thoughtful. Then he smiled again. \"But no, the idea is\n impossible. Vanderhoef as Tournament Director has played two or three\n games with the Machine to assure himself that it operates legitimately\n and has grandmaster skill.\"",
"Sandra asked, \"What about Grabo and Krakatower?\"\nDoc gave a short scornful laugh. \"Krakatower! Don't pay any attention\n to\nhim\n. A senile has-been, it's a scandal he's been allowed to play\n in this tournament! He must have pulled all sorts of strings. Told them\n that his lifelong services to chess had won him the honor and that they\n had to have a member of the so-called Old Guard. Maybe he even got down\n on his knees and cried—and all the time his eyes on that expense money\n and the last-place consolation prize! Yet dreaming schizophrenically\n of beating them all! Please, don't get me started on Dirty Old\n Krakatower.\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy, Doc. He sounds like he would make an interesting\n article? Can you point him out to me?\"",
"The tiers of seats were filled now and the central space almost clear.\n Officials were shooing off a few knots of lingerers. Several of the\n grandmasters, including all four Russians, were seated at their tables.\n Press and company cameras were flashing. The four smaller wallboards\n lit up with the pieces in the opening position—white for White and red\n for Black. Simon Great stepped over the red velvet cord and more flash\n bulbs went off.\n\n\n \"You know, Doc,\" Sandra said, \"I'm a dog to suggest this, but what\n if this whole thing were a big fake? What if Simon Great were really\n playing the Machine's moves? There would surely be some way for his\n electricians to rig—\"\n\n\n Doc laughed happily—and so loudly that some people at the adjoining\n tables frowned.",
"\"Don't worry about that. Wild horses couldn't keep Jandorf away from a\n press interview. You know, his rapid-transit challenge was cunning.\n That's a minor variety of chess where each player gets only ten seconds\n to make a move. Which I don't suppose would give the Machine time to\n look three moves ahead. Chess players would say that the Machine has a\n very slow sight of the board. This tournament is being played at the\n usual international rate of 15 moves an hour, and—\"\n\n\n \"Is that why they've got all those crazy clocks?\" Sandra interrupted.",
"Dr. S. Krakatower, France\n\n Vassily Lysmov, USSR\n\n The Machine, USA (programmed by Simon Great)\n\n Maxim Serek, USSR\n\n Moses Sherevsky, USA\n\n Mikhail Votbinnik, USSR\nTournament Director\n: Dr. Jan Vanderhoef\nFIRST ROUND PAIRINGS\nSherevsky vs. Serek\n\n Jal vs. Angler\n\n Jandorf vs. Votbinnik\n\n Lysmov vs. Krakatower\n\n Grabo vs. Machine\n\n\n \"Cripes, Doc, they all sound like they were Russians,\" Sandra said\n after a bit. \"Except this Willie Angler. Oh, he's the boy wonder,\n isn't he?\"",
"\"Oh, yes. Chess clocks measure the time each player takes in making his\n moves. When a player makes a move he presses a button that shuts his\n clock off and turns his opponent's on. If a player uses too much time,\n he loses as surely as if he were checkmated. Now since the Machine\n will almost certainly be programmed to take an equal amount of time\n on successive moves, a rate of 15 moves an hour means it will have 4\n minutes a move—and it will need every second of them! Incidentally\n it was typical Jandorf bravado to make a point of a blindfold\n challenge—just as if the Machine weren't playing blindfold itself. Or\nis\nthe Machine blindfold? How do you think of it?\"",
"She realized suddenly that the whole hall had become very quiet.\n\n\n Doc was the only person still talking and people were again looking at\n them disapprovingly. All five wallboards were lit up and the changed\n position of a few pieces showed that opening moves had been made on\n four of them, including the Machine's. The central space between\n the tiers of seats was completely clear now, except for one man\n hurrying across it in their direction with the rapid yet quiet, almost\n tip-toe walk that seemed to mark all the officials.\nLike morticians'\n assistants\n, she thought. He rapidly mounted the stairs and halted at\n the top to look around searchingly. His gaze lighted on their table,\n his eyebrows went up, and he made a beeline for Doc. Sandra wondered if\n she should warn him that he was about to be shushed.\n\n\n The official laid a hand on Doc's shoulder. \"Sir!\" he said agitatedly.\n \"Do you realize that they've started your clock, Dr. Krakatower?\"",
"\"Oh yes,\" Sandra assured him, \"but there are some other questions I\n very much want to ask you, Mr. Jandorf.\"\n\n\n \"I am sorry, Miss Grayling, but I must clear my mind now. In ten\n minutes they start the clocks.\"\n\n\n While Sandra arranged for an interview with Jandorf after the day's\n playing session, Doc reordered his coffee.\n\n\n \"One expects it of Jandorf,\" he explained to Sandra with a philosophic\n shrug when the shock-headed man was gone. \"At least he didn't take your\n wine-and-seltzer. Or did he? One tip I have for you: don't call a chess\n master Mister, call him Master. They all eat it up.\"\n\n\n \"Gee, Doc, I don't know how to thank you for everything. I hope I\n haven't offended Mis—Master Jandorf so that he doesn't—\"",
"The shock-headed man's eyes flashed. \"I most certainly do!\" At that\n moment the waiter arrived with a second coffee and wine-and-seltzer.\n Jandorf seized Doc's new demitasse, drained it, set it back on the tray\n with a flourish and drew himself up.\n\"Tell your readers, Miss Grayling,\" he proclaimed, fiercely arching his\n eyebrows at her and actually slapping his chest, \"that I, Igor Jandorf,\n will defeat the Machine by the living force of my human personality!\n Already I have offered to play it an informal game blindfold—I, who\n have played 50 blindfold games simultaneously! Its owners refuse me. I\n have challenged it also to a few games of rapid-transit—an offer no",
"\"Anyway there\nare\nan awful lot of Russians in the tournament,\"\n Sandra said, consulting her program. \"Four out of ten have USSR after\n them. And Bela Grabo, Hungary—that's a satellite. And Sherevsky and\n Krakatower are Russian-sounding names.\"",
"Sandra looked with quickening interest at the console of the Machine—a\n bank of keys and some half-dozen panels of rows and rows of tiny\n telltale lights, all dark at the moment. A thick red velvet cord on\n little brass standards ran around the Machine at a distance of about\n ten feet. Inside the cord were only a few gray-smocked men. Two of\n them had just laid a black cable to the nearest chess table and were\n attaching it to the Siamese clock.\n\n\n Sandra tried to think of a being who always checked everything, but\n only within limits beyond which his thoughts never ventured, and who\n never made a mistake....\n\n\n \"Miss Grayling! May I present to you Igor Jandorf.\"\n\n\n She turned back quickly with a smile and a nod.\n\n\n \"I should tell you, Igor,\" Doc continued, \"that Miss Grayling\n represents a large and influential Midwestern newspaper. Perhaps you\n have a message for her readers.\"",
"He nodded. \"You are not the first to be shocked and horrified by\n chess,\" he assured her. \"It is a curse of the intellect. It is a game\n for lunatics—or else it creates them. But what brings a sane and\n beautiful young lady to this 64-square madhouse?\"\n\n\n Sandra briefly told him her story and her predicament. By the time they\n were served, Doc had absorbed the one and assessed the other.\n\n\n \"You have one great advantage,\" he told her. \"You know nothing\n whatsoever of chess—so you will be able to write about it\n understandably for your readers.\" He swallowed half his demitasse and\n smacked his lips. \"As for the Machine—you\ndo\nknow, I suppose, that\n it is not a humanoid metal robot, walking about clanking and squeaking\n like a late medieval knight in armor?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Doc, but....\" Sandra found difficulty in phrasing the question."
],
[
"While Doc chattered happily on about chess-playing robots and chess\n stories, Sandra found herself thinking about him. A writer of some sort\n evidently and a terrific chess buff. Perhaps he was an actual medical\n doctor. She'd read something about two or three coming over with the\n Russian squad. But Doc certainly didn't sound like a Soviet citizen.\n\n\n He was older than she'd first assumed. She could see that now that\n she was listening to him less and looking at him more. Tired, too.\n Only his dark-circled eyes shone with unquenchable youth. A useful old\n guy, whoever he was. An hour ago she'd been sure she was going to muff\n this assignment completely and now she had it laid out cold. For the\n umpteenth time in her career Sandra shied away from the guilty thought\n that she wasn't a writer at all or even a reporter, she just used\n dime-a-dozen female attractiveness to rope a susceptible man (young,\n old, American, Russian) and pick his brain....",
"Sandra looked with quickening interest at the console of the Machine—a\n bank of keys and some half-dozen panels of rows and rows of tiny\n telltale lights, all dark at the moment. A thick red velvet cord on\n little brass standards ran around the Machine at a distance of about\n ten feet. Inside the cord were only a few gray-smocked men. Two of\n them had just laid a black cable to the nearest chess table and were\n attaching it to the Siamese clock.\n\n\n Sandra tried to think of a being who always checked everything, but\n only within limits beyond which his thoughts never ventured, and who\n never made a mistake....\n\n\n \"Miss Grayling! May I present to you Igor Jandorf.\"\n\n\n She turned back quickly with a smile and a nod.\n\n\n \"I should tell you, Igor,\" Doc continued, \"that Miss Grayling\n represents a large and influential Midwestern newspaper. Perhaps you\n have a message for her readers.\"",
"\"Exactly!\" Doc beamed at her approvingly. \"The Machine\nis\nlike a\n man. A rather peculiar and not exactly pleasant man. A man who always\n abides by sound principles, who is utterly incapable of flights of\n genius, but who never makes a mistake. You see, you are finding human\n interest already, even in the Machine.\"\n\n\n Sandra nodded. \"Does a human chess player—a grandmaster, I mean—ever\n look eight moves ahead in a game?\"",
"\"Did the Machine beat him?\" Sandra asked.\nDoc shrugged. \"The scores weren't released. It was very hush-hush.\n But about your idea, Miss Grayling—did you ever read about Maelzel's\n famous chess-playing automaton of the 19th Century? That one too was\n supposed to work by machinery (cogs and gears, not electricity) but\n actually it had a man hidden inside it—your Edgar Poe exposed the\n fraud in a famous article. In\nmy\nstory I think the chess robot will\n break down while it is being demonstrated to a millionaire purchaser\n and the young inventor will have to win its game for it to cover up\n and swing the deal. Only the millionaire's daughter, who is really a",
"\"But of course.\" They were already mounting the stairs. \"What would\n chess be without coffee or schnapps?\"\n\n\n \"Okay, lead on,\" Sandra said. \"You're the doctor.\"\n\n\n \"Doctor?\" He smiled widely. \"You know, I like being called that.\"\n\n\n \"Then the name is yours as long as you want it—Doc.\"\nMeanwhile the happy little man had edged them into the first of a small\n cluster of tables, where a dark-suited jabbering trio was just rising.\n He snapped his fingers and hissed through his teeth. A white-aproned\n waiter materialized.\n\n\n \"For myself black coffee,\" he said. \"For mademoiselle rhine wine and\n seltzer?\"\n\n\n \"That'd go fine.\" Sandra leaned back. \"Confidentially, Doc, I was\n having trouble swallowing ... well, just about everything here.\"",
"\"Oh yes,\" Sandra assured him, \"but there are some other questions I\n very much want to ask you, Mr. Jandorf.\"\n\n\n \"I am sorry, Miss Grayling, but I must clear my mind now. In ten\n minutes they start the clocks.\"\n\n\n While Sandra arranged for an interview with Jandorf after the day's\n playing session, Doc reordered his coffee.\n\n\n \"One expects it of Jandorf,\" he explained to Sandra with a philosophic\n shrug when the shock-headed man was gone. \"At least he didn't take your\n wine-and-seltzer. Or did he? One tip I have for you: don't call a chess\n master Mister, call him Master. They all eat it up.\"\n\n\n \"Gee, Doc, I don't know how to thank you for everything. I hope I\n haven't offended Mis—Master Jandorf so that he doesn't—\"",
"\"Have you studied the scores of the match between Moon Base and\n Circum-Terra?\"\n\n\n \"Not worth the trouble. The play was feeble. Barely Expert Rating.\"\n\n\n Sandra's chief difficulty was that she knew absolutely nothing about\n the game of chess—a point that she had slid over in conferring with\n the powers at the\nSpace Mirror\n, but that now had begun to weigh on\n her. How wonderful it would be, she dreamed, to walk out this minute,\n find a quiet bar and get pie-eyed in an evil, ladylike way.\n\"Perhaps mademoiselle would welcome a drink?\"\n\n\n \"You're durn tootin' she would!\" Sandra replied in a rush, and then\n looked down apprehensively at the person who had read her thoughts.",
"\"Wait.\" He lifted a finger. \"I think I know what you're going to ask.\n You want to know why, if the Machine works at all, it doesn't work\n perfectly, so that it always wins and there is no contest. Right?\"\n\n\n Sandra grinned and nodded. Doc's ability to interpret her mind was as\n comforting as the bubbly, mildly astringent mixture she was sipping.\n\n\n He removed his pince-nez, massaged the bridge of his nose and replaced\n them.",
"\"Willie!\" Doc said with some asperity. \"Miss Grayling is a journalist.\n She would like to have a statement from you as to how you will play\n against the Machine.\"\nAngler grinned and shook his head sadly. \"Poor old Machine,\" he said.\n \"I don't know why they take so much trouble polishing up that pile of\n tin just so that I can give it a hit in the head. I got a hatful of\n moves it'll burn out all its tubes trying to answer. And if it gets too\n fresh, how about you and me giving its low-temperature section the\n hotfoot, Savvy? The money WBM's putting up is okay, though. That first\n prize will just fit the big hole in my bank account.\"\n\n\n \"I know you haven't the time now, Master Angler,\" Sandra said rapidly,\n \"but if after the playing session you could grant me—\"",
"It was a small sprightly elderly man who looked like a somewhat\n thinned down Peter Lorre—there was that same impression of the happy\n Slavic elf. What was left of his white hair was cut very short,\n making a silvery nap. His pince-nez had quite thick lenses. But in\n sharp contrast to the somberly clad men around them, he was wearing\n a pearl-gray suit of almost exactly the same shade as Sandra's—a\n circumstance that created for her the illusion that they were fellow\n conspirators.\n\n\n \"Hey, wait a minute,\" she protested just the same. He had already taken\n her arm and was piloting her toward the nearest flight of low wide\n stairs. \"How did you know I wanted a drink?\"\n\n\n \"I could see that mademoiselle was having difficulty swallowing,\" he\n replied, keeping them moving. \"Pardon me for feasting my eyes on your\n lovely throat.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't suppose they'd serve drinks here.\"",
"He nodded. \"You are not the first to be shocked and horrified by\n chess,\" he assured her. \"It is a curse of the intellect. It is a game\n for lunatics—or else it creates them. But what brings a sane and\n beautiful young lady to this 64-square madhouse?\"\n\n\n Sandra briefly told him her story and her predicament. By the time they\n were served, Doc had absorbed the one and assessed the other.\n\n\n \"You have one great advantage,\" he told her. \"You know nothing\n whatsoever of chess—so you will be able to write about it\n understandably for your readers.\" He swallowed half his demitasse and\n smacked his lips. \"As for the Machine—you\ndo\nknow, I suppose, that\n it is not a humanoid metal robot, walking about clanking and squeaking\n like a late medieval knight in armor?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Doc, but....\" Sandra found difficulty in phrasing the question.",
"\"Sorry, babe,\" Angler broke in with a wave of dismissal. \"I'm dated up\n for two months in advance. Waiter! I'm here, not there!\" And he went\n charging off.\n\n\n Doc and Sandra looked at each other and smiled.\n\n\n \"Chess masters aren't exactly humble people, are they?\" she said.\n\n\n Doc's smile became tinged with sad understanding. \"You must excuse\n them, though,\" he said. \"They really get so little recognition or\n recompense. This tournament is an exception. And it takes a great deal\n of ego to play greatly.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so. So World Business Machines is responsible for this\n tournament?\"\n\n\n \"Correct. Their advertising department is interested in the prestige.\n They want to score a point over their great rival.\"\n\n\n \"But if the Machine plays badly it will be a black eye for them,\"\n Sandra pointed out.",
"The shock-headed man's eyes flashed. \"I most certainly do!\" At that\n moment the waiter arrived with a second coffee and wine-and-seltzer.\n Jandorf seized Doc's new demitasse, drained it, set it back on the tray\n with a flourish and drew himself up.\n\"Tell your readers, Miss Grayling,\" he proclaimed, fiercely arching his\n eyebrows at her and actually slapping his chest, \"that I, Igor Jandorf,\n will defeat the Machine by the living force of my human personality!\n Already I have offered to play it an informal game blindfold—I, who\n have played 50 blindfold games simultaneously! Its owners refuse me. I\n have challenged it also to a few games of rapid-transit—an offer no",
"\"Don't worry about that. Wild horses couldn't keep Jandorf away from a\n press interview. You know, his rapid-transit challenge was cunning.\n That's a minor variety of chess where each player gets only ten seconds\n to make a move. Which I don't suppose would give the Machine time to\n look three moves ahead. Chess players would say that the Machine has a\n very slow sight of the board. This tournament is being played at the\n usual international rate of 15 moves an hour, and—\"\n\n\n \"Is that why they've got all those crazy clocks?\" Sandra interrupted.",
"THE 64-SQUARE MADHOUSE\nby FRITZ LEIBER\nThe machine was not perfect. It\n\n could be tricked. It could make\n\n mistakes. And—it could learn!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nSilently, so as not to shock anyone with illusions about well dressed\n young women, Sandra Lea Grayling cursed the day she had persuaded the\nChicago Space Mirror\nthat there would be all sorts of human interest\n stories to be picked up at the first international grandmaster chess\n tournament in which an electronic computing machine was entered.",
"Simon Great smiled thinly. \"Sorry,\" he said, \"But I am making no\n predictions and we are giving out no advance information on the\n programming of the Machine. As you know, I have had to fight the\n Players' Committee tooth and nail on all sorts of points about that\n and they have won most of them. I am not permitted to re-program the\n Machine at adjournments—only between games (I did insist on that and\n get it!) And if the Machine breaks down during a game, its clock keeps\n running on it. My men are permitted to make repairs—if they can work\n fast enough.\"\n\n\n \"That makes it very tough on you,\" Sandra put in. \"The Machine isn't\n allowed any weaknesses.\"\n\n\n Great nodded soberly. \"And now I must go. They've almost finished the\n count-down, as one of my technicians keeps on calling it. Very pleased\n to have met you, Miss Grayling—I'll check with our PR man on that\n interview. Be seeing you, Savvy.\"",
"\"If you had,\" he said, \"a billion computers all as fast as the Machine,\n it would take them all the time there ever will be in the universe just\n to play through all the possible games of chess, not to mention the\n time needed to classify those games into branching families of wins for\n White, wins for Black and draws, and the additional time required to\n trace out chains of key-moves leading always to wins. So the Machine\n can't play chess like God. What the Machine can do is examine all the\n likely lines of play for about eight moves ahead—that is, four moves\n each for White and Black—and then decide which is the best move on the\n basis of capturing enemy pieces, working toward checkmate, establishing\n a powerful central position and so on.\"\n\"That sounds like the way a man would play a game,\" Sandra observed.\n \"Look ahead a little way and try to make a plan. You know, like getting\n out trumps in bridge or setting up a finesse.\"",
"Sandra asked, \"What about Grabo and Krakatower?\"\nDoc gave a short scornful laugh. \"Krakatower! Don't pay any attention\n to\nhim\n. A senile has-been, it's a scandal he's been allowed to play\n in this tournament! He must have pulled all sorts of strings. Told them\n that his lifelong services to chess had won him the honor and that they\n had to have a member of the so-called Old Guard. Maybe he even got down\n on his knees and cried—and all the time his eyes on that expense money\n and the last-place consolation prize! Yet dreaming schizophrenically\n of beating them all! Please, don't get me started on Dirty Old\n Krakatower.\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy, Doc. He sounds like he would make an interesting\n article? Can you point him out to me?\"",
"\"A million times as fast as the first machine, you say, Doc? And yet it\n only sees twice as many moves ahead?\" Sandra objected.\n\n\n \"There is a geometrical progression involved there,\" he told her\n with a smile. \"Believe me, eight moves ahead is a lot of moves when\n you remember that the Machine is errorlessly examining every one of\n thousands of variations. Flesh-and-blood chess masters have lost games\n by blunders they could have avoided by looking only one or two moves\n ahead. The Machine will make no such oversights. Once again, you see,\n you have the human factor, in this case working for the Machine.\"\n\n\n \"Savilly, I have been looking allplace for you!\"",
"A stocky, bull-faced man with a great bristling shock of black,\n gray-flecked hair had halted abruptly by their table. He bent over Doc\n and began to whisper explosively in a guttural foreign tongue.\nSandra's gaze traveled beyond the balustrade. Now that she could look\n down at it, the central hall seemed less confusedly crowded. In the\n middle, toward the far end, were five small tables spaced rather widely\n apart and with a chessboard and men and one of the Siamese clocks set\n out on each. To either side of the hall were tiers of temporary seats,\n about half of them occupied. There were at least as many more people\n still wandering about.\n\n\n On the far wall was a big electric scoreboard and also, above the\n corresponding tables, five large dully glassy chessboards, the White\n squares in light gray, the Black squares in dark.\n\n\n One of the five wall chessboards was considerably larger than the other\n four—the one above the Machine."
],
[
"\"Did the Machine beat him?\" Sandra asked.\nDoc shrugged. \"The scores weren't released. It was very hush-hush.\n But about your idea, Miss Grayling—did you ever read about Maelzel's\n famous chess-playing automaton of the 19th Century? That one too was\n supposed to work by machinery (cogs and gears, not electricity) but\n actually it had a man hidden inside it—your Edgar Poe exposed the\n fraud in a famous article. In\nmy\nstory I think the chess robot will\n break down while it is being demonstrated to a millionaire purchaser\n and the young inventor will have to win its game for it to cover up\n and swing the deal. Only the millionaire's daughter, who is really a",
"\"Exactly!\" Doc beamed at her approvingly. \"The Machine\nis\nlike a\n man. A rather peculiar and not exactly pleasant man. A man who always\n abides by sound principles, who is utterly incapable of flights of\n genius, but who never makes a mistake. You see, you are finding human\n interest already, even in the Machine.\"\n\n\n Sandra nodded. \"Does a human chess player—a grandmaster, I mean—ever\n look eight moves ahead in a game?\"",
"\"But of course.\" They were already mounting the stairs. \"What would\n chess be without coffee or schnapps?\"\n\n\n \"Okay, lead on,\" Sandra said. \"You're the doctor.\"\n\n\n \"Doctor?\" He smiled widely. \"You know, I like being called that.\"\n\n\n \"Then the name is yours as long as you want it—Doc.\"\nMeanwhile the happy little man had edged them into the first of a small\n cluster of tables, where a dark-suited jabbering trio was just rising.\n He snapped his fingers and hissed through his teeth. A white-aproned\n waiter materialized.\n\n\n \"For myself black coffee,\" he said. \"For mademoiselle rhine wine and\n seltzer?\"\n\n\n \"That'd go fine.\" Sandra leaned back. \"Confidentially, Doc, I was\n having trouble swallowing ... well, just about everything here.\"",
"Sandra looked with quickening interest at the console of the Machine—a\n bank of keys and some half-dozen panels of rows and rows of tiny\n telltale lights, all dark at the moment. A thick red velvet cord on\n little brass standards ran around the Machine at a distance of about\n ten feet. Inside the cord were only a few gray-smocked men. Two of\n them had just laid a black cable to the nearest chess table and were\n attaching it to the Siamese clock.\n\n\n Sandra tried to think of a being who always checked everything, but\n only within limits beyond which his thoughts never ventured, and who\n never made a mistake....\n\n\n \"Miss Grayling! May I present to you Igor Jandorf.\"\n\n\n She turned back quickly with a smile and a nod.\n\n\n \"I should tell you, Igor,\" Doc continued, \"that Miss Grayling\n represents a large and influential Midwestern newspaper. Perhaps you\n have a message for her readers.\"",
"It was a small sprightly elderly man who looked like a somewhat\n thinned down Peter Lorre—there was that same impression of the happy\n Slavic elf. What was left of his white hair was cut very short,\n making a silvery nap. His pince-nez had quite thick lenses. But in\n sharp contrast to the somberly clad men around them, he was wearing\n a pearl-gray suit of almost exactly the same shade as Sandra's—a\n circumstance that created for her the illusion that they were fellow\n conspirators.\n\n\n \"Hey, wait a minute,\" she protested just the same. He had already taken\n her arm and was piloting her toward the nearest flight of low wide\n stairs. \"How did you know I wanted a drink?\"\n\n\n \"I could see that mademoiselle was having difficulty swallowing,\" he\n replied, keeping them moving. \"Pardon me for feasting my eyes on your\n lovely throat.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't suppose they'd serve drinks here.\"",
"While Doc chattered happily on about chess-playing robots and chess\n stories, Sandra found herself thinking about him. A writer of some sort\n evidently and a terrific chess buff. Perhaps he was an actual medical\n doctor. She'd read something about two or three coming over with the\n Russian squad. But Doc certainly didn't sound like a Soviet citizen.\n\n\n He was older than she'd first assumed. She could see that now that\n she was listening to him less and looking at him more. Tired, too.\n Only his dark-circled eyes shone with unquenchable youth. A useful old\n guy, whoever he was. An hour ago she'd been sure she was going to muff\n this assignment completely and now she had it laid out cold. For the\n umpteenth time in her career Sandra shied away from the guilty thought\n that she wasn't a writer at all or even a reporter, she just used\n dime-a-dozen female attractiveness to rope a susceptible man (young,\n old, American, Russian) and pick his brain....",
"\"The proportion of Soviet to American entries in the tournament\n represents pretty fairly the general difference in playing strength\n between the two countries,\" Doc said judiciously. \"Chess mastery\n moves from land to land with the years. Way back it was the Moslems\n and the Hindus and Persians. Then Italy and Spain. A little over a\n hundred years ago it was France and England. Then Germany, Austria\n and the New World. Now it's Russia—including of course the Russians\n who have run away from Russia. But don't think there aren't a lot of\n good Anglo-Saxon types who are masters of the first water. In fact,\n there are a lot of them here around us, though perhaps you don't\n think so. It's just that if you play a lot of chess you get to looking\n Russian. Once it probably made you look Italian. Do you see that short\n bald-headed man?\"\n\n\n \"You mean the one facing the Machine and talking to Jandorf?\"",
"A stocky, bull-faced man with a great bristling shock of black,\n gray-flecked hair had halted abruptly by their table. He bent over Doc\n and began to whisper explosively in a guttural foreign tongue.\nSandra's gaze traveled beyond the balustrade. Now that she could look\n down at it, the central hall seemed less confusedly crowded. In the\n middle, toward the far end, were five small tables spaced rather widely\n apart and with a chessboard and men and one of the Siamese clocks set\n out on each. To either side of the hall were tiers of temporary seats,\n about half of them occupied. There were at least as many more people\n still wandering about.\n\n\n On the far wall was a big electric scoreboard and also, above the\n corresponding tables, five large dully glassy chessboards, the White\n squares in light gray, the Black squares in dark.\n\n\n One of the five wall chessboards was considerably larger than the other\n four—the one above the Machine.",
"The shock-headed man's eyes flashed. \"I most certainly do!\" At that\n moment the waiter arrived with a second coffee and wine-and-seltzer.\n Jandorf seized Doc's new demitasse, drained it, set it back on the tray\n with a flourish and drew himself up.\n\"Tell your readers, Miss Grayling,\" he proclaimed, fiercely arching his\n eyebrows at her and actually slapping his chest, \"that I, Igor Jandorf,\n will defeat the Machine by the living force of my human personality!\n Already I have offered to play it an informal game blindfold—I, who\n have played 50 blindfold games simultaneously! Its owners refuse me. I\n have challenged it also to a few games of rapid-transit—an offer no",
"Doc nodded. \"Not such a boy any longer, though. He's.... Well, speak of\n the Devil's children.... Miss Grayling, I have the honor of presenting\n to you the only grandmaster ever to have been ex-chess-champion of the\n United States while still technically a minor—Master William Augustus\n Angler.\"\n\n\n A tall, sharply-dressed young man with a hatchet face pressed the old\n man back into his chair.\n\n\n \"How are you, Savvy, old boy old boy?\" he demanded. \"Still chasing the\n girls, I see.\"\n\n\n \"Please, Willie, get off me.\"\n\n\n \"Can't take it, huh?\" Angler straightened up somewhat. \"Hey waiter!\n Where's that chocolate malt? I don't want it\nnext\nyear. About that\nex-\n, though. I was swindled, Savvy. I was robbed.\"",
"\"If you had,\" he said, \"a billion computers all as fast as the Machine,\n it would take them all the time there ever will be in the universe just\n to play through all the possible games of chess, not to mention the\n time needed to classify those games into branching families of wins for\n White, wins for Black and draws, and the additional time required to\n trace out chains of key-moves leading always to wins. So the Machine\n can't play chess like God. What the Machine can do is examine all the\n likely lines of play for about eight moves ahead—that is, four moves\n each for White and Black—and then decide which is the best move on the\n basis of capturing enemy pieces, working toward checkmate, establishing\n a powerful central position and so on.\"\n\"That sounds like the way a man would play a game,\" Sandra observed.\n \"Look ahead a little way and try to make a plan. You know, like getting\n out trumps in bridge or setting up a finesse.\"",
"\"Wait.\" He lifted a finger. \"I think I know what you're going to ask.\n You want to know why, if the Machine works at all, it doesn't work\n perfectly, so that it always wins and there is no contest. Right?\"\n\n\n Sandra grinned and nodded. Doc's ability to interpret her mind was as\n comforting as the bubbly, mildly astringent mixture she was sipping.\n\n\n He removed his pince-nez, massaged the bridge of his nose and replaced\n them.",
"\"Oh, yes. Chess clocks measure the time each player takes in making his\n moves. When a player makes a move he presses a button that shuts his\n clock off and turns his opponent's on. If a player uses too much time,\n he loses as surely as if he were checkmated. Now since the Machine\n will almost certainly be programmed to take an equal amount of time\n on successive moves, a rate of 15 moves an hour means it will have 4\n minutes a move—and it will need every second of them! Incidentally\n it was typical Jandorf bravado to make a point of a blindfold\n challenge—just as if the Machine weren't playing blindfold itself. Or\nis\nthe Machine blindfold? How do you think of it?\"",
"He nodded. \"You are not the first to be shocked and horrified by\n chess,\" he assured her. \"It is a curse of the intellect. It is a game\n for lunatics—or else it creates them. But what brings a sane and\n beautiful young lady to this 64-square madhouse?\"\n\n\n Sandra briefly told him her story and her predicament. By the time they\n were served, Doc had absorbed the one and assessed the other.\n\n\n \"You have one great advantage,\" he told her. \"You know nothing\n whatsoever of chess—so you will be able to write about it\n understandably for your readers.\" He swallowed half his demitasse and\n smacked his lips. \"As for the Machine—you\ndo\nknow, I suppose, that\n it is not a humanoid metal robot, walking about clanking and squeaking\n like a late medieval knight in armor?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Doc, but....\" Sandra found difficulty in phrasing the question.",
"better player than either of them ... yes, yes! Your Ambrose Bierce\n too wrote a story about a chess-playing robot of the clickety-clank-grr\n kind who murdered his creator, crushing him like an iron grizzly bear\n when the man won a game from him. Tell me, Miss Grayling, do you find\n yourself imagining this Machine putting out angry tendrils to strangle\n its opponents, or beaming rays of death and hypnotism at them? I can\n imagine....\"",
"\"Indeed yes! The programming is the crux of the problem of the\n chess-playing computer. The first practical model, reported by\n Bernstein and Roberts of IBM in 1958 and which looked four moves\n ahead, was programmed so that it had a greedy worried tendency to grab\n at enemy pieces and to retreat its own whenever they were attacked. It\n had a personality like that of a certain kind of chess-playing dub—a\n dull-brained woodpusher afraid to take the slightest risk of losing\n material—but a dub who could almost always beat an utter novice.\n The WBM machine here in the hall operates about a million times as\n fast. Don't ask me how, I'm no physicist, but it depends on the new\n transistors and something they call hypervelocity, which in turn\n depends on keeping parts of the Machine at a temperature near absolute\n zero. However, the result is that the Machine can see eight moves ahead\n and is capable of being programmed much more craftily.\"",
"\"Miss Grayling, that is a wonderful idea! I will probably steal it for\n a short story. I still manage to write and place a few in England.\n No, I do not think that is at all likely. WBM would never risk such\n a fraud. Great is completely out of practice for actual tournament\n play, though not for chess-thinking. The difference in style between\n a computer and a man would be evident to any expert. Great's own style\n is remembered and would be recognized—though, come to think of it, his\n style was often described as being machinelike....\" For a moment Doc's\n eyes became thoughtful. Then he smiled again. \"But no, the idea is\n impossible. Vanderhoef as Tournament Director has played two or three\n games with the Machine to assure himself that it operates legitimately\n and has grandmaster skill.\"",
"\"Don't worry about that. Wild horses couldn't keep Jandorf away from a\n press interview. You know, his rapid-transit challenge was cunning.\n That's a minor variety of chess where each player gets only ten seconds\n to make a move. Which I don't suppose would give the Machine time to\n look three moves ahead. Chess players would say that the Machine has a\n very slow sight of the board. This tournament is being played at the\n usual international rate of 15 moves an hour, and—\"\n\n\n \"Is that why they've got all those crazy clocks?\" Sandra interrupted.",
"\"Have you studied the scores of the match between Moon Base and\n Circum-Terra?\"\n\n\n \"Not worth the trouble. The play was feeble. Barely Expert Rating.\"\n\n\n Sandra's chief difficulty was that she knew absolutely nothing about\n the game of chess—a point that she had slid over in conferring with\n the powers at the\nSpace Mirror\n, but that now had begun to weigh on\n her. How wonderful it would be, she dreamed, to walk out this minute,\n find a quiet bar and get pie-eyed in an evil, ladylike way.\n\"Perhaps mademoiselle would welcome a drink?\"\n\n\n \"You're durn tootin' she would!\" Sandra replied in a rush, and then\n looked down apprehensively at the person who had read her thoughts.",
"\"Sorry, babe,\" Angler broke in with a wave of dismissal. \"I'm dated up\n for two months in advance. Waiter! I'm here, not there!\" And he went\n charging off.\n\n\n Doc and Sandra looked at each other and smiled.\n\n\n \"Chess masters aren't exactly humble people, are they?\" she said.\n\n\n Doc's smile became tinged with sad understanding. \"You must excuse\n them, though,\" he said. \"They really get so little recognition or\n recompense. This tournament is an exception. And it takes a great deal\n of ego to play greatly.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so. So World Business Machines is responsible for this\n tournament?\"\n\n\n \"Correct. Their advertising department is interested in the prestige.\n They want to score a point over their great rival.\"\n\n\n \"But if the Machine plays badly it will be a black eye for them,\"\n Sandra pointed out."
],
[
"\"Gosh, I don't know. Say, Doc, is it really true that Master Jandorf\n has played 50 games at once blindfolded? I can't believe that.\"\n\"Of course not!\" Doc assured her. \"It was only 49 and he lost two of\n those and drew five. Jandorf always exaggerates. It's in his blood.\"\n\n\n \"He's one of the Russians, isn't he?\" Sandra asked. \"Igor?\"\n\n\n Doc chuckled. \"Not exactly,\" he said gently. \"He is originally a Pole\n and now he has Argentinian citizenship. You have a program, don't you?\"\n\n\n Sandra started to hunt through her pocketbook, but just then two lists\n of names lit up on the big electric scoreboard.\nTHE PLAYERS\nWilliam Angler, USA\n\n Bela Grabo, Hungary\n\n Ivan Jal, USSR\n\n Igor Jandorf, Argentina",
"\"The proportion of Soviet to American entries in the tournament\n represents pretty fairly the general difference in playing strength\n between the two countries,\" Doc said judiciously. \"Chess mastery\n moves from land to land with the years. Way back it was the Moslems\n and the Hindus and Persians. Then Italy and Spain. A little over a\n hundred years ago it was France and England. Then Germany, Austria\n and the New World. Now it's Russia—including of course the Russians\n who have run away from Russia. But don't think there aren't a lot of\n good Anglo-Saxon types who are masters of the first water. In fact,\n there are a lot of them here around us, though perhaps you don't\n think so. It's just that if you play a lot of chess you get to looking\n Russian. Once it probably made you look Italian. Do you see that short\n bald-headed man?\"\n\n\n \"You mean the one facing the Machine and talking to Jandorf?\"",
"\"Yes. Now that's one with a lot of human interest. Moses Sherevsky.\n Been champion of the United States many times. A very strict Orthodox\n Jew. Can't play chess on Fridays or on Saturdays before sundown.\" He\n chuckled. \"Why, there's even a story going around that one rabbi told\n Sherevsky it would be unlawful for him to play against the Machine\n because it is technically a\ngolem\n—the clay Frankenstein's monster of\n Hebrew legend.\"",
"He nodded. \"You are not the first to be shocked and horrified by\n chess,\" he assured her. \"It is a curse of the intellect. It is a game\n for lunatics—or else it creates them. But what brings a sane and\n beautiful young lady to this 64-square madhouse?\"\n\n\n Sandra briefly told him her story and her predicament. By the time they\n were served, Doc had absorbed the one and assessed the other.\n\n\n \"You have one great advantage,\" he told her. \"You know nothing\n whatsoever of chess—so you will be able to write about it\n understandably for your readers.\" He swallowed half his demitasse and\n smacked his lips. \"As for the Machine—you\ndo\nknow, I suppose, that\n it is not a humanoid metal robot, walking about clanking and squeaking\n like a late medieval knight in armor?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Doc, but....\" Sandra found difficulty in phrasing the question.",
"\"Sorry, babe,\" Angler broke in with a wave of dismissal. \"I'm dated up\n for two months in advance. Waiter! I'm here, not there!\" And he went\n charging off.\n\n\n Doc and Sandra looked at each other and smiled.\n\n\n \"Chess masters aren't exactly humble people, are they?\" she said.\n\n\n Doc's smile became tinged with sad understanding. \"You must excuse\n them, though,\" he said. \"They really get so little recognition or\n recompense. This tournament is an exception. And it takes a great deal\n of ego to play greatly.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose so. So World Business Machines is responsible for this\n tournament?\"\n\n\n \"Correct. Their advertising department is interested in the prestige.\n They want to score a point over their great rival.\"\n\n\n \"But if the Machine plays badly it will be a black eye for them,\"\n Sandra pointed out.",
"\"Miss Grayling, that is a wonderful idea! I will probably steal it for\n a short story. I still manage to write and place a few in England.\n No, I do not think that is at all likely. WBM would never risk such\n a fraud. Great is completely out of practice for actual tournament\n play, though not for chess-thinking. The difference in style between\n a computer and a man would be evident to any expert. Great's own style\n is remembered and would be recognized—though, come to think of it, his\n style was often described as being machinelike....\" For a moment Doc's\n eyes became thoughtful. Then he smiled again. \"But no, the idea is\n impossible. Vanderhoef as Tournament Director has played two or three\n games with the Machine to assure himself that it operates legitimately\n and has grandmaster skill.\"",
"Not that there weren't enough humans around, it was the interest that\n was in doubt. The large hall was crammed with energetic dark-suited\n men of whom a disproportionately large number were bald, wore glasses,\n were faintly untidy and indefinably shabby, had Slavic or Scandinavian\n features, and talked foreign languages.\n\n\n They yakked interminably. The only ones who didn't were scurrying\n individuals with the eager-zombie look of officials.\n\n\n Chess sets were everywhere—big ones on tables, still bigger\n diagram-type electric ones on walls, small peg-in sets dragged from\n side pockets and manipulated rapidly as part of the conversational\n ritual and still smaller folding sets in which the pieces were the tiny\n magnetized disks used for playing in free-fall.",
"Sandra asked, \"What about Grabo and Krakatower?\"\nDoc gave a short scornful laugh. \"Krakatower! Don't pay any attention\n to\nhim\n. A senile has-been, it's a scandal he's been allowed to play\n in this tournament! He must have pulled all sorts of strings. Told them\n that his lifelong services to chess had won him the honor and that they\n had to have a member of the so-called Old Guard. Maybe he even got down\n on his knees and cried—and all the time his eyes on that expense money\n and the last-place consolation prize! Yet dreaming schizophrenically\n of beating them all! Please, don't get me started on Dirty Old\n Krakatower.\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy, Doc. He sounds like he would make an interesting\n article? Can you point him out to me?\"",
"A stocky, bull-faced man with a great bristling shock of black,\n gray-flecked hair had halted abruptly by their table. He bent over Doc\n and began to whisper explosively in a guttural foreign tongue.\nSandra's gaze traveled beyond the balustrade. Now that she could look\n down at it, the central hall seemed less confusedly crowded. In the\n middle, toward the far end, were five small tables spaced rather widely\n apart and with a chessboard and men and one of the Siamese clocks set\n out on each. To either side of the hall were tiers of temporary seats,\n about half of them occupied. There were at least as many more people\n still wandering about.\n\n\n On the far wall was a big electric scoreboard and also, above the\n corresponding tables, five large dully glassy chessboards, the White\n squares in light gray, the Black squares in dark.\n\n\n One of the five wall chessboards was considerably larger than the other\n four—the one above the Machine.",
"\"Did the Machine beat him?\" Sandra asked.\nDoc shrugged. \"The scores weren't released. It was very hush-hush.\n But about your idea, Miss Grayling—did you ever read about Maelzel's\n famous chess-playing automaton of the 19th Century? That one too was\n supposed to work by machinery (cogs and gears, not electricity) but\n actually it had a man hidden inside it—your Edgar Poe exposed the\n fraud in a famous article. In\nmy\nstory I think the chess robot will\n break down while it is being demonstrated to a millionaire purchaser\n and the young inventor will have to win its game for it to cover up\n and swing the deal. Only the millionaire's daughter, who is really a",
"Dr. S. Krakatower, France\n\n Vassily Lysmov, USSR\n\n The Machine, USA (programmed by Simon Great)\n\n Maxim Serek, USSR\n\n Moses Sherevsky, USA\n\n Mikhail Votbinnik, USSR\nTournament Director\n: Dr. Jan Vanderhoef\nFIRST ROUND PAIRINGS\nSherevsky vs. Serek\n\n Jal vs. Angler\n\n Jandorf vs. Votbinnik\n\n Lysmov vs. Krakatower\n\n Grabo vs. Machine\n\n\n \"Cripes, Doc, they all sound like they were Russians,\" Sandra said\n after a bit. \"Except this Willie Angler. Oh, he's the boy wonder,\n isn't he?\"",
"better player than either of them ... yes, yes! Your Ambrose Bierce\n too wrote a story about a chess-playing robot of the clickety-clank-grr\n kind who murdered his creator, crushing him like an iron grizzly bear\n when the man won a game from him. Tell me, Miss Grayling, do you find\n yourself imagining this Machine putting out angry tendrils to strangle\n its opponents, or beaming rays of death and hypnotism at them? I can\n imagine....\"",
"There were signs featuring largely mysterious combinations of letters:\n FIDE, WBM, USCF, USSF, USSR and UNESCO. Sandra felt fairly sure about\n the last three.\n\n\n The many clocks, bedside table size, would have struck a familiar\n note except that they had little red flags and wheels sprinkled over\n their faces and they were all in pairs, two clocks to a case. That\n Siamese-twin clocks should be essential to a chess tournament struck\n Sandra as a particularly maddening circumstance.\nHer last assignment had been to interview the pilot pair riding the\n first American manned circum-lunar satellite—and the five alternate\n pairs who hadn't made the flight. This tournament hall seemed to Sandra\n much further out of the world.\n\n\n Overheard scraps of conversation in reasonably intelligible English\n were not particularly helpful. Samples:",
"\"They say the Machine has been programmed to play nothing but pure\n Barcza System and Indian Defenses—and the Dragon Formation if anyone\n pushes the King Pawn.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! In that case....\"\n\n\n \"The Russians have come with ten trunkfuls of prepared variations and\n they'll gang up on the Machine at adjournments. What can one New Jersey\n computer do against four Russian grandmasters?\"\n\n\n \"I heard the Russians have been programmed—with hypnotic cramming and\n somno-briefing. Votbinnik had a nervous breakdown.\"\n\n\n \"Why, the Machine hasn't even a\nHaupturnier\nor an intercollegiate\n won. It'll over its head be playing.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but maybe like Capa at San Sebastian or Morphy or Willie Angler\n at New York. The Russians will look like potzers.\"",
"\"By no means. That was the trouble with some of the early chess-playing\n machines—they were programmed by scientists. No, Simon Great is a\n psychologist who at one time was a leading contender for the world's\n chess championship. I think WBM was surprisingly shrewd to pick him\n for the programming job. Let me tell you—No, better yet—\"\n\n\n Doc shot to his feet, stretched an arm on high and called out sharply,\n \"Simon!\"\n\n\n A man some four tables away waved back and a moment later came over.\n\n\n \"What is it, Savilly?\" he asked. \"There's hardly any time, you know.\"\nThe newcomer was of middle height, compact of figure and feature, with\n graying hair cut short and combed sharply back.\n\n\n Doc spoke his piece for Sandra.",
"\"Oh yes,\" Sandra assured him, \"but there are some other questions I\n very much want to ask you, Mr. Jandorf.\"\n\n\n \"I am sorry, Miss Grayling, but I must clear my mind now. In ten\n minutes they start the clocks.\"\n\n\n While Sandra arranged for an interview with Jandorf after the day's\n playing session, Doc reordered his coffee.\n\n\n \"One expects it of Jandorf,\" he explained to Sandra with a philosophic\n shrug when the shock-headed man was gone. \"At least he didn't take your\n wine-and-seltzer. Or did he? One tip I have for you: don't call a chess\n master Mister, call him Master. They all eat it up.\"\n\n\n \"Gee, Doc, I don't know how to thank you for everything. I hope I\n haven't offended Mis—Master Jandorf so that he doesn't—\"",
"\"Oh, yes. Chess clocks measure the time each player takes in making his\n moves. When a player makes a move he presses a button that shuts his\n clock off and turns his opponent's on. If a player uses too much time,\n he loses as surely as if he were checkmated. Now since the Machine\n will almost certainly be programmed to take an equal amount of time\n on successive moves, a rate of 15 moves an hour means it will have 4\n minutes a move—and it will need every second of them! Incidentally\n it was typical Jandorf bravado to make a point of a blindfold\n challenge—just as if the Machine weren't playing blindfold itself. Or\nis\nthe Machine blindfold? How do you think of it?\"",
"\"You can tell him by his long white beard with coffee stains. I don't\n see it anywhere, though. Perhaps he's shaved it off for the occasion.\n It would be like that antique womanizer to develop senile delusions of\n youthfulness.\"\n\n\n \"And Grabo?\" Sandra pressed, suppressing a smile at the intensity of\n Doc's animosity.\n\n\n Doc's eyes grew thoughtful. \"About Bela Grabo (why are three out of\n four Hungarians named Bela?) I will tell you only this: That he is a\n very brilliant player and that the Machine is very lucky to have drawn\n him as its first opponent.\"\n\n\n He would not amplify his statement. Sandra studied the Scoreboard again.\n\n\n \"This Simon Great who's down as programming the Machine. He's a famous\n physicist, I suppose?\"",
"The shock-headed man's eyes flashed. \"I most certainly do!\" At that\n moment the waiter arrived with a second coffee and wine-and-seltzer.\n Jandorf seized Doc's new demitasse, drained it, set it back on the tray\n with a flourish and drew himself up.\n\"Tell your readers, Miss Grayling,\" he proclaimed, fiercely arching his\n eyebrows at her and actually slapping his chest, \"that I, Igor Jandorf,\n will defeat the Machine by the living force of my human personality!\n Already I have offered to play it an informal game blindfold—I, who\n have played 50 blindfold games simultaneously! Its owners refuse me. I\n have challenged it also to a few games of rapid-transit—an offer no",
"Doc nodded. \"Not such a boy any longer, though. He's.... Well, speak of\n the Devil's children.... Miss Grayling, I have the honor of presenting\n to you the only grandmaster ever to have been ex-chess-champion of the\n United States while still technically a minor—Master William Augustus\n Angler.\"\n\n\n A tall, sharply-dressed young man with a hatchet face pressed the old\n man back into his chair.\n\n\n \"How are you, Savvy, old boy old boy?\" he demanded. \"Still chasing the\n girls, I see.\"\n\n\n \"Please, Willie, get off me.\"\n\n\n \"Can't take it, huh?\" Angler straightened up somewhat. \"Hey waiter!\n Where's that chocolate malt? I don't want it\nnext\nyear. About that\nex-\n, though. I was swindled, Savvy. I was robbed.\""
]
] |
train
|
51053
|
[
"Which term best describes how the author characterizes the home in the beginning of the story? ",
"What is the dynamic between Tennant and Dana?",
"Which relationship best describes the dynamic between the prisoners and the figures controlling them?",
"Why does Roger speculate there are more females than males in the fourth dimension environment?",
"The humans in the fourth dimension acquire all of the following remarkable abilities EXCEPT for:",
"Why does Roger allude to Tristan and Isolde when confronting his wife and Cass Gordon?",
"What is the central theme of the story?",
"What does Roger respect about the captors?"
] |
[
[
"neoclassical",
"industrial",
"eclectic",
"gothic"
],
[
"They are professional colleagues",
"They are former romantic partners",
"They are captives in a forced relationship",
"They are co-conspirators in a plot to kidnap humans"
],
[
"The prisoners are being groomed to serve as future collaborators in an intergalactic sex trafficking stint, carried out through the fourth dimension.",
"The prisoners serve as entertainment for the figures, who seem to have made a game out of snatching up humans and manipulating their thoughts and behaviors.",
"The prisoners have committed some sort of Earthly crime, and their punishment -- in order to avoid the death penalty -- is to spend a sentence in a labor camp operated by the figures.",
"The prisoners have volunteered to be part of the figures' experiment for a specific time period, under the agreement that they will be returned to Earth in the condition they left it."
],
[
"Roger believes that the ones controlling the environment are running a breeding program to raise children who will eventually grow up to be body snatchers.",
"The ones controlling the environment have a more challenging time bringing males through the fourth dimension.",
"The ones controlling the environment are overwhelmingly male, heterosexual, and desirous of sex with women.",
"Roger does not make any kind of guess as to why he is in the minority among the women of his \"harem.\""
],
[
"teleportation",
"pulse manipulation",
"thought transference",
"superhuman strength"
],
[
"He knows that Cass Gordon and his wife will both be transported to the fourth dimension.",
"He knows that his wife will ultimately choose him over Cass Gordon.",
"He knows that Cass Gordon and his wife will never get to be together.",
"He knows that his wife will ultimately choose Cass Gordon over him."
],
[
"In undesirable circumstances, it is best to remain guarded on the inside, but to display an agreeable, obedient, and non-threatening countenance.",
"Be careful what you worship -- be it vanity, reputation, or money -- because if you make it the center of your world, you will always feel inadequate.",
"All relationships are ultimately temporal due to three dimensional time and space -- it is only through the fourth dimension that true love can be achieved.",
"Experimenting with living creatures -- regardless if it is for entertainment or research -- is unethical, and humans may one day find themselves as subjects."
],
[
"They are adept at concealing themselves on Earth",
"They represent the pinnacle of human evolution",
"They have treated the captives with compassion",
"They are bold enough to hunt humans in their own habitat"
]
] |
[
3,
3,
2,
2,
4,
4,
4,
4
] |
[
1,
0,
1,
0,
1,
1,
1,
1
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"She shook her head and fright made twin stoplights of the rouge on her\n cheeks as she shut the door behind him. He went into the living room,\n directly to the long silver cigarette box on the coffee table. It was\n proof of homecoming to fill his lungs with smoke he could\nsmell\n. He\n took another drag, saw the maid still in the doorway, staring.\n\n\n \"There's no need for fright,\" he told her. \"I believe I still own this\n house.\" Then, \"When do you expect Mrs. Tennant?\"\n\n\n \"She just called. She's on her way home from the club.\"\n\n\n Still looking frightened, she departed for the rear of the house.\n Tennant stared after her puzzledly until the kitchen door swung shut\n behind her. The club? What club?",
"They walked toward the house.\nIt didn't look like a prison—or a cage. Within the dome of the\n barrier, it looked more like a well-kept if bizarre little country\n estate. There was clipped lawn, a scattering of trees, even a clear\n little brook that chattered unending annoyance at the small stones\n which impeded its flow.\n\n\n But the lawn was not of grass—it was of a bright green substance that\n might have been cellophane but wasn't, and it sprouted from a fabric\n that might have been canvas but was something else. The trees looked\n like trees, only their trunks were bark all the way through—except\n that it was not bark. The brook was practically water, but the small\n stones over which it flowed were of no earthly mineral.",
"had a lease that could be broken—\nRoger Tennant, crossing the lawn, could see two of the three wings\n of the house, which radiated spoke-like from its heptagonal central\n portion. The wing on the left was white, with slim square pillars,\n reminiscent of scores of movie sets of the Deep South. That on the\n right was sundeck solar-house living-machine modern, something like a\n montage of shoeboxes. The wing hidden by the rest of the house was, he\n knew, spired, gabled and multicolored, like an ancient building in\n pre-Hitler Cracow.\nDana was lying under a tree near the door, stretched out on a sort\n of deck chair with her eyes closed. She wore a golden gown, long and\n close-fitting and slit up the leg like the gown of a Chinese woman.\n Above it her comely face was sullen beneath its sleek cocoon of auburn\n hair.",
"They entered the house, which had no roof, continued to move beneath a\n sky that glowed with light which did not come from a sun or moon. It\n might have been a well-kept if bizarre little country estate, but it\n wasn't. It was a prison, a cage.\n\n\n The other two women were sitting in the heptagonal central hall.\n Eudalia, who had borne twin girls recently, was lying back, newly thin\n and dark of skin and hair, smoking a scentless cigarette. A tall woman,\n thirtyish, she wore a sort of shimmering green strapless evening gown.\n Tennant wondered how she maintained it in place, for despite her recent\n double motherhood, she was almost flat of bosom. He asked her how she\n was feeling.\n\n\n \"Okay, I guess,\" she said. \"The way they manage it, there's nothing\n to it.\" She had a flat, potentially raucous voice. Eudalia had been\n a female foreman in a garment-cutting shop before being captured and\n brought through.",
"It arrived before the meal, materializing against one of the seven\n walls of the roofless chamber. It was a large cabinet on slender\n straight legs that resembled dark polished wood. Tennant went to it,\n opened a hingeless door and pushed a knob on the inner surface. At once\n the air was hideous with the acerate harmony of a singing commercial....\n\n... so go soak your head,\nbe it gold, brown or red,\nin Any-tone Shampoo!\n\n A disc jockey's buoyant tones cut in quickly as the final\nooooo\nfaded. \"This is Grady Martin, your old night-owl, coming to you with\n your requests over Station WZZX, Manhattan. Here's a wire from Theresa\n McManus and the girls in the family entrance of Conaghan's Bar and\n Grill on West....\"",
"He realized, shocked and scared, that his thoughts of escape had\n slipped past his mental censor, and he waited apprehensively for Opal\n to strike. Nothing happened and he warily relaxed. Opal wasn't tapping\n his thoughts. Because he felt sure of his captive ... or because he\n couldn't on Earth?\n\n\n It was like being let out of a cage. Tennant grinned at the bookcase;\n the ebony-and-ivory elephants that Agatha had never liked were gone,\n but he'd get them back or another pair. The credenza had been replaced\n by a huge and ugly television console. That, he resolved, would go down\n in the cellar rumpus room, where its bleached modernity wouldn't clash\n with the casual antiquity of the living room.",
"\"And it's not yours,\" insisted Eudalia. \"Don't let them make you think\n it is.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try not to,\" he said and stopped, realizing the family party was\n over. He had felt the inner tug of command, said good-by to the women\n and returned to his smaller compound within its own barrier dome.\n\n\n Then came the invisible aura of strain in the air, the shimmering\n illusion of heat that was not heat, that was prelude to his\n teleportation ... if that were the word. It was neither pleasant nor\n unpleasant; it\nwas\n, that was all.\n\n\n He called it the training hall, not because it looked like a training\n hall but because that was its function. It didn't actually look like\n anything save some half-nourished dream a surrealist might have\n discarded as too nightmarish for belief.",
"The front door was flung open and his diaphragm tightened at the\n remembered sound of Agatha's throaty laugh ... and tightened further\n when it was followed by a deeper rumbling laugh. Sudden fear made the\n cigarette shake in his fingers.\n\n\n \"... Don't be such a stuffed-shirt, darling.\" Agatha's mocking\n sweetness rang alarm-gongs in Tennant's memory. \"Charley wasn't making\n a grab for\nme\n. He'd had one too many and only wanted a little fun.\n Really, darling, you seem to think that a girl....\"\n\n\n Her voice faded out as she saw Tennant standing there. She was wearing\n a white strapless gown, had a blue-red-and-gold Mandarin jacket slung\n hussar-fashion over her left shoulder. She looked even sleeker, better\n groomed, more assured than his memory of her.",
"\"Were you ever in a big-game hunter's trophy room?\" Tennant asked\n quietly. \"Or in a Museum of Natural History? A zoo? A naturalist's lab?\n Or even, maybe, photographed as a baby on a bear-skin rug?\"\n\n\n \"I was,\" said Olga. \"But that's not the same thing.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" he agreed. \"In the one instance,\nwe're\nthe hunters,\n the breeders, the trophy collectors. In the other\"—he shrugged—\"we're\n the trophies.\"\nThere was a long silence. They finished eating and then Dana stood up\n and said, \"I'm going out on the lawn for a while.\" She unzipped her\n golden gown, stepped out of it to reveal a pair of tartan shorts that\n matched his, and a narrow halter.",
"He shrugged, returned to the feeling of comfort that came from being\n back here, about to see Agatha again, hold her close in no more than a\n few minutes. And stay, his mind began to add eagerly, but he pushed the\n thought down where Opal could not detect it.\n\n\n He took another deep, lung-filling drag on his cigarette, looked around\n the room that was so important a part of his life. The three women back\n there would be in a ghastly spot. He felt like a heel for wanting to\n leave them there, then knew that he would try somehow to get them out.\n Not, of course, anything that would endanger his remaining with Agatha;\n the only way his captors would get him back would be as a taxidermist's\n specimen.",
"Tennant watched the girls as a sweet-voiced crooner began to ply\n an unfamiliar love lyric to a melody whose similarity to a thousand\n predecessors doomed it to instant success.\n\n\n Olga sat up straight, her pale blue eyes round with utter disbelief.\n She looked at the radio, at Tennant, at the other two women, then back\n at the machine. She murmured something in Polish that was inaudible,\n but her expression showed that it must have been wistful.\n\n\n Eudalia grinned at Tennant and, rising, did a sort of tap dance to the\n music, then whirled back into her chair, green dress ashimmer, and sank\n into it just to listen.\n\n\n Dana stood almost in the center of the room, carmine-tipped fingers\n clasped beneath the swell of her breasts. She might have been listening\n to Brahms or Debussy. Her eyes glowed with the salty brilliance of\n emotion and she was almost beautiful.",
"Tennant's meat looked like steak, it felt like steak, but, lacking the\n aroma of steak, it was almost tasteless. This was so with all of their\n foods, with their cigarettes, with everything in their prison—or their\n cage. Their captors were utterly without a human conception of smell,\n living, apparently, in a world without odor at all.\n\n\n Dana said suddenly, \"I named the boy Tom, after somebody I hate almost\n as much as I hate you.\"\n\n\n Eudalia laid down her fork with a clatter and regarded Dana\n disapprovingly. \"Why take it out on Rog?\" she asked bluntly. \"He didn't\n ask to come here any more than we did. He's got a wife back home. Maybe\n you want him to fall in love with you? Maybe you're jealous because\n he doesn't? Well, maybe he can't! And maybe it wouldn't work, the way\n things are arranged here.\"",
"\"Good,\" he said. \"Glad to hear it.\" He felt oddly embarrassed. He\n turned to Olga, broad, blonde and curiously vital, who sat perfectly\n still, regarding him over the pregnant swell of her dirndl-clad waist.\n Olga had been a waitress in a mining town hash-house near Scranton.\n\n\n Tennant wanted to put an encouraging hand on her shoulder, to say\n something that might cheer her up, for she was by far the youngest of\n the three female captives, barely nineteen. But with the eyes of the\n other two, especially Dana, upon him, he could not.\n\n\n \"I guess I wasn't cut out to be a Turk,\" he said. \"I don't feel at ease\n in a harem, even when it's supposedly my own.\"\n\n\n \"You're not doing so badly,\" Dana replied acidly.",
"\"You thought those up while we ate,\" he said. It annoyed him to be\n copied, though he did not know why. She laughed at him silently, tossed\n her auburn hair back from her face and went out of the roofless house,\n holding the gold dress casually over her bare arm.\n\n\n Eudalia took him to the nursery. He was irritated now in another,\n angrier way. The infants, protected by cellophane-like coverlets, were\n asleep.\n\n\n \"They never cry,\" the thin woman told him. \"But they grow—God, how\n they grow!\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Tennant, fighting down his anger. He kissed her, held\n her close, although neither of them felt desire at the moment. Their\n captors had seen to that; it wasn't Eudalia's turn. Tennant said, \"I\n wish I could do something about this. I hate seeing Dana so bitter and\n Olga so scared. It isn't their fault.\"",
"\"We may be in the eleventh for all I know,\" he told her. \"But I'll\n settle for the fourth—a fourth dimension in space, if that makes\n scientific sense, because we don't seem to have moved in time. I wasn't\n sure of that, though, till we got the radio.\"\n\n\n \"Why haven't they brought more of us through?\" Eudalia asked, tamping\n out ashes in a tray that might have been silver.\n\n\n \"I'm not sure,\" he said thoughtfully. \"I think it's hard for them. They\n have a hell of a time bringing anyone through alive, and lately they\n haven't brought anyone through—not alive.\"\n\n\n \"Why do they do it—the other way, I mean?\" asked Dana.\n\n\n Tennant shrugged. \"I don't know. I've been thinking about it. I suppose\n it's because they're pretty human.\"",
"\"Lay off—he can't help it,\" said Eudalia unexpectedly. \"He doesn't\n like it any better than we do.\"\n\n\n \"But he doesn't have to—have them,\" objected Olga. She had a trace of\n Polish accent that was not unpleasant. In fact, Tennant thought, only\n her laughter was unpleasant, a shrill, uncontrolled burst of staccato\n sound that jarred him to his heels. Olga had not laughed of late,\n however. She was too frightened.\n\"Let's get the meal ordered,\" said Dana and they were all silent,\n thinking of what they wanted to eat but would not enjoy when it came.\n Tennant finished with his order, then got busy with his surprise.",
"Waiting, Tennant tried not to think of his wife, of the fact that he\n hadn't seen her in—was it more than a year and a half on Earth? He\n could have controlled his heartbeat with one of his new powers, but\n that might have made Opal suspicious. He should be somewhat excited.\n He allowed himself to be, though he obscured the reasons. He was going\n to see his wife again ... and maybe he could trick his way into not\n returning.\nThe maid who opened the door for him was new, although her eyes were\n old. But she recognized him and stood aside to let him enter. There\n must, he thought, still be pictures of him around. He wondered how\n Agatha could afford a servant.\n\n\n \"Is Mrs. Tennant in?\" he asked.",
"Agatha would complain, naturally, but his being back would make up for\n any amount of furniture shifting. He imagined her standing close to\n him, her lovely face lifted to be kissed, and his heart lurched like an\n adolescent's. This hunger was real, not implanted. Everything would be\n real ... his love for her, the food he ate, the things he touched, his\n house, his life....\nYour wife and a man are approaching the house.\nThe thought message from Opal crumbled his illusion of freedom. He sank\n down in a chair, trying to refuse to listen to the rest of the command:\nYou are to bring the man through the gateway with you. We want another\n live male.\nTennant shook his head, stiff and defiant in his chair. The punishment,\n when it came, was more humiliating than a slap across a dog's snout.\n Opal had been too interested in the next lab specimen to bother about\n his thoughts—that was why he had been free to think of escape.",
"Tennant closed his eyes, willed himself to the front window. Now that\n he had mastered teleportation, it was incredible how much easier it was\n in his own world. He had covered the two miles from the gateway to the\n house in a mere seven jumps, the distance to the window in an instant.\n But there was no pleasure in it, only a confirmation of his captor's\n power over him.\n\n\n He was not free of them. He understood all too well what they wanted\n him to do; he was to play the Judas goat ... or rather the Judas ram,\n leading another victim to the fourth-dimensional pen.\n\n\n Grim, he watched the swoop of headlights in the driveway and returned\n to the coffee table, lit a fresh cigarette.",
"As in all of this strange universe, excepting the dome-cages in\n which the captives were held, the training hall followed no rules of\n three-dimensional space. One wall looked normal for perhaps a third of\n its length, then it simply wasn't for a bit. It came back farther on\n at an impossible angle. Yet, walking along it, touching it, it felt\n perfectly smooth and continuously straight.\n\n\n The opposite wall resembled a diagonal cross-section of an asymmetrical\n dumbbell—that was the closest Tennant could come to it in words. And\n it, too, felt straight. The floor looked like crystal smashed by some\n cosmic impact, yet it had reason. He\nknew\nthis even though no reason\n was apparent to his three-dimensional vision. The ceiling, where he\n could see it, was beyond description."
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[
"\"Don't flatter yourself,\" she replied angrily. She sat up, pushed\n back her hair, got to her feet a trifle awkwardly because of the\n tight-fitting tubular gown. \"If I could do anything about it....\"\n\n\n \"But you can't,\" he told her. \"They're too clever.\"\n\n\n \"Is this crop rotation or did you send for me?\" she asked cynically.\n \"If you did, I wish you hadn't. You haven't asked about your son.\"\n\n\n \"I don't even want to think about him,\" said Tennant. \"Let's get\n on with it.\" He could sense the restless stirring of the woman\n within Dana, just as he could feel the stirring toward her within\n himself—desire that both of them loathed because it was implanted\n within them by their captors.",
"\"Were you ever in a big-game hunter's trophy room?\" Tennant asked\n quietly. \"Or in a Museum of Natural History? A zoo? A naturalist's lab?\n Or even, maybe, photographed as a baby on a bear-skin rug?\"\n\n\n \"I was,\" said Olga. \"But that's not the same thing.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" he agreed. \"In the one instance,\nwe're\nthe hunters,\n the breeders, the trophy collectors. In the other\"—he shrugged—\"we're\n the trophies.\"\nThere was a long silence. They finished eating and then Dana stood up\n and said, \"I'm going out on the lawn for a while.\" She unzipped her\n golden gown, stepped out of it to reveal a pair of tartan shorts that\n matched his, and a narrow halter.",
"Tennant's meat looked like steak, it felt like steak, but, lacking the\n aroma of steak, it was almost tasteless. This was so with all of their\n foods, with their cigarettes, with everything in their prison—or their\n cage. Their captors were utterly without a human conception of smell,\n living, apparently, in a world without odor at all.\n\n\n Dana said suddenly, \"I named the boy Tom, after somebody I hate almost\n as much as I hate you.\"\n\n\n Eudalia laid down her fork with a clatter and regarded Dana\n disapprovingly. \"Why take it out on Rog?\" she asked bluntly. \"He didn't\n ask to come here any more than we did. He's got a wife back home. Maybe\n you want him to fall in love with you? Maybe you're jealous because\n he doesn't? Well, maybe he can't! And maybe it wouldn't work, the way\n things are arranged here.\"",
"She opened her eyes at his approach and regarded him with nothing like\n favor. Involuntarily he glanced down at the tartan shorts that were his\n only garment to make sure that they were on properly. They were. He had\n thought them up in a moment of utter boredom and they were extremely\n comfortable. However, the near-Buchanan tartan did not crease or even\n wrinkle when he moved. Their captors had no idea of how a woven design\n should behave.\n\n\n \"Waiting for me?\" Tennant asked the girl.\n\n\n She said, \"I'd rather be dead. Maybe I am. Maybe we're all dead and\n this is Hell.\"\n\n\n He stood over her and looked down until she turned away her reddening\n face. He said, \"So it's going to be you again, Dana. You'll be the\n first to come back for a second run.\"",
"had a lease that could be broken—\nRoger Tennant, crossing the lawn, could see two of the three wings\n of the house, which radiated spoke-like from its heptagonal central\n portion. The wing on the left was white, with slim square pillars,\n reminiscent of scores of movie sets of the Deep South. That on the\n right was sundeck solar-house living-machine modern, something like a\n montage of shoeboxes. The wing hidden by the rest of the house was, he\n knew, spired, gabled and multicolored, like an ancient building in\n pre-Hitler Cracow.\nDana was lying under a tree near the door, stretched out on a sort\n of deck chair with her eyes closed. She wore a golden gown, long and\n close-fitting and slit up the leg like the gown of a Chinese woman.\n Above it her comely face was sullen beneath its sleek cocoon of auburn\n hair.",
"\"Good,\" he said. \"Glad to hear it.\" He felt oddly embarrassed. He\n turned to Olga, broad, blonde and curiously vital, who sat perfectly\n still, regarding him over the pregnant swell of her dirndl-clad waist.\n Olga had been a waitress in a mining town hash-house near Scranton.\n\n\n Tennant wanted to put an encouraging hand on her shoulder, to say\n something that might cheer her up, for she was by far the youngest of\n the three female captives, barely nineteen. But with the eyes of the\n other two, especially Dana, upon him, he could not.\n\n\n \"I guess I wasn't cut out to be a Turk,\" he said. \"I don't feel at ease\n in a harem, even when it's supposedly my own.\"\n\n\n \"You're not doing so badly,\" Dana replied acidly.",
"\"Thanks, Eudalia,\" said Tennant. \"I think I can defend myself. But\n she's right, Dana. We're as helpless as—laboratory animals. They have\n the means to make us do whatever they want.\"\n\n\n \"Rog,\" said Dana, looking suddenly scared, \"I'm sorry I snapped at you.\n I know it's not your fault. I'm—\nchanging\n.\"\n\n\n He shook his head. \"No, Dana, you're not changing. You're adapting. We\n all are. We seem to be in a universe of different properties as well as\n different dimensions. We're adjusting. I can do a thing or two myself\n that seem absolutely impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Are we really in the fourth dimension?\" Dana asked. Of the three of\n them, she alone had more than a high-school education.",
"\"We may be in the eleventh for all I know,\" he told her. \"But I'll\n settle for the fourth—a fourth dimension in space, if that makes\n scientific sense, because we don't seem to have moved in time. I wasn't\n sure of that, though, till we got the radio.\"\n\n\n \"Why haven't they brought more of us through?\" Eudalia asked, tamping\n out ashes in a tray that might have been silver.\n\n\n \"I'm not sure,\" he said thoughtfully. \"I think it's hard for them. They\n have a hell of a time bringing anyone through alive, and lately they\n haven't brought anyone through—not alive.\"\n\n\n \"Why do they do it—the other way, I mean?\" asked Dana.\n\n\n Tennant shrugged. \"I don't know. I've been thinking about it. I suppose\n it's because they're pretty human.\"",
"Some days later, the training routine was broken. He felt a sudden stir\n of near-sick excitement as he received the thought:\nNow you are ready. We are going through at last.\nOpal was nervous, so much so that he revealed more than he intended.\n Or perhaps that was his intent; Tennant could never be sure. They were\n going through to Tennant's own dimension. He wondered briefly just what\n his role was to be.\n\n\n He had little time to speculate before Opal seemed to envelop him.\n There was the blurring wrench of forced teleportation and they were in\n another room, a room which ended in a huge irregular passage that might\n have been the interior of a giant concertina—or an old-fashioned kodak.\n\n\n He stood before a kidney-shaped object over whose jagged surface\n colors played constantly. From Opal's thoughts it appeared to be some\n sort of ultradimensional television set, but to Tennant it was as\n incomprehensible as an oil painting to an animal.",
"Tennant watched the girls as a sweet-voiced crooner began to ply\n an unfamiliar love lyric to a melody whose similarity to a thousand\n predecessors doomed it to instant success.\n\n\n Olga sat up straight, her pale blue eyes round with utter disbelief.\n She looked at the radio, at Tennant, at the other two women, then back\n at the machine. She murmured something in Polish that was inaudible,\n but her expression showed that it must have been wistful.\n\n\n Eudalia grinned at Tennant and, rising, did a sort of tap dance to the\n music, then whirled back into her chair, green dress ashimmer, and sank\n into it just to listen.\n\n\n Dana stood almost in the center of the room, carmine-tipped fingers\n clasped beneath the swell of her breasts. She might have been listening\n to Brahms or Debussy. Her eyes glowed with the salty brilliance of\n emotion and she was almost beautiful.",
"\"\nRog!\n\" she cried softly when the music stopped. \"A radio and WZZX! Is\n it—are they—real?\"\n\n\n \"As real as you or I,\" he told her. \"It took quite a bit of doing,\n getting them to put a set together. And I wasn't sure that radio would\n get through. TV doesn't seem to. Somehow it brings things closer....\"\n\n\n Olga got up quite suddenly, went to the machine and, after frowning at\n it for a moment, tuned in another station from which a Polish-speaking\n announcer was followed by polka music. She leaned against the wall,\n resting one smooth forearm on the top of the machine. Her eyes closed\n and she swayed a little in time to the polka beat.\nTennant caught Dana looking at him and there was near approval in her\n expression—approval that faded quickly as soon as she caught his gaze\n upon her. The food arrived then and they sat down at the round table to\n eat it.",
"He realized, shocked and scared, that his thoughts of escape had\n slipped past his mental censor, and he waited apprehensively for Opal\n to strike. Nothing happened and he warily relaxed. Opal wasn't tapping\n his thoughts. Because he felt sure of his captive ... or because he\n couldn't on Earth?\n\n\n It was like being let out of a cage. Tennant grinned at the bookcase;\n the ebony-and-ivory elephants that Agatha had never liked were gone,\n but he'd get them back or another pair. The credenza had been replaced\n by a huge and ugly television console. That, he resolved, would go down\n in the cellar rumpus room, where its bleached modernity wouldn't clash\n with the casual antiquity of the living room.",
"\"You thought those up while we ate,\" he said. It annoyed him to be\n copied, though he did not know why. She laughed at him silently, tossed\n her auburn hair back from her face and went out of the roofless house,\n holding the gold dress casually over her bare arm.\n\n\n Eudalia took him to the nursery. He was irritated now in another,\n angrier way. The infants, protected by cellophane-like coverlets, were\n asleep.\n\n\n \"They never cry,\" the thin woman told him. \"But they grow—God, how\n they grow!\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Tennant, fighting down his anger. He kissed her, held\n her close, although neither of them felt desire at the moment. Their\n captors had seen to that; it wasn't Eudalia's turn. Tennant said, \"I\n wish I could do something about this. I hate seeing Dana so bitter and\n Olga so scared. It isn't their fault.\"",
"The front door was flung open and his diaphragm tightened at the\n remembered sound of Agatha's throaty laugh ... and tightened further\n when it was followed by a deeper rumbling laugh. Sudden fear made the\n cigarette shake in his fingers.\n\n\n \"... Don't be such a stuffed-shirt, darling.\" Agatha's mocking\n sweetness rang alarm-gongs in Tennant's memory. \"Charley wasn't making\n a grab for\nme\n. He'd had one too many and only wanted a little fun.\n Really, darling, you seem to think that a girl....\"\n\n\n Her voice faded out as she saw Tennant standing there. She was wearing\n a white strapless gown, had a blue-red-and-gold Mandarin jacket slung\n hussar-fashion over her left shoulder. She looked even sleeker, better\n groomed, more assured than his memory of her.",
"Waiting, Tennant tried not to think of his wife, of the fact that he\n hadn't seen her in—was it more than a year and a half on Earth? He\n could have controlled his heartbeat with one of his new powers, but\n that might have made Opal suspicious. He should be somewhat excited.\n He allowed himself to be, though he obscured the reasons. He was going\n to see his wife again ... and maybe he could trick his way into not\n returning.\nThe maid who opened the door for him was new, although her eyes were\n old. But she recognized him and stood aside to let him enter. There\n must, he thought, still be pictures of him around. He wondered how\n Agatha could afford a servant.\n\n\n \"Is Mrs. Tennant in?\" he asked.",
"Agatha would complain, naturally, but his being back would make up for\n any amount of furniture shifting. He imagined her standing close to\n him, her lovely face lifted to be kissed, and his heart lurched like an\n adolescent's. This hunger was real, not implanted. Everything would be\n real ... his love for her, the food he ate, the things he touched, his\n house, his life....\nYour wife and a man are approaching the house.\nThe thought message from Opal crumbled his illusion of freedom. He sank\n down in a chair, trying to refuse to listen to the rest of the command:\nYou are to bring the man through the gateway with you. We want another\n live male.\nTennant shook his head, stiff and defiant in his chair. The punishment,\n when it came, was more humiliating than a slap across a dog's snout.\n Opal had been too interested in the next lab specimen to bother about\n his thoughts—that was why he had been free to think of escape.",
"The captor Tennant called\nOpal\ncame in through a far corner of\n the ceiling. He—if it was a he—was not large, although this,\n Tennant knew, meant nothing; Opal might extend thousands of yards in\n some unseen direction. He had no regular shape and much of him was\n iridescent and shot with constantly changing colors. Hence the name\n Opal.\n\n\n Communication was telepathic. Tennant could have yodeled or yelled\n or sung\nMississippi Mud\nand Opal would have shown no reaction. Yet\n Tennant suspected that the captors could hear somewhere along the\n auditory scale, just as perhaps they could smell, although not in any\n human sense.\nYou will approach without use of your appendages.\nThe command was as clear as if it had been spoken aloud. Tennant took a\n deep breath. He thought of the space beside Opal. It took about three\n seconds and he was there, having spanned a distance of some ninety\n feet. He was getting good at it.",
"\"I'm no stuffed-shirt and you know it.\" Cass' tone was peevish. \"But\n your idea of fun, Agatha, is pretty damn....\"\n\n\n It was his turn to freeze. Unbelieving, Tennant studied his successor.\n Cass Gordon—the\nman\n, the ex-halfback whose bulk was beginning to get\n out of hand, but whose inherent aggressive grace had not yet deserted\n him. The\nman\n, that was all—unless one threw in the little black\n mustache and the smooth salesman's manner.\n\n\n \"You know, Cass,\" Tennant said quietly, \"I never for a moment dreamed\n it would be you.\"\n\n\n \"\nRoger!\n\" Agatha found her voice. \"You're\nalive\n!\"",
"They entered the house, which had no roof, continued to move beneath a\n sky that glowed with light which did not come from a sun or moon. It\n might have been a well-kept if bizarre little country estate, but it\n wasn't. It was a prison, a cage.\n\n\n The other two women were sitting in the heptagonal central hall.\n Eudalia, who had borne twin girls recently, was lying back, newly thin\n and dark of skin and hair, smoking a scentless cigarette. A tall woman,\n thirtyish, she wore a sort of shimmering green strapless evening gown.\n Tennant wondered how she maintained it in place, for despite her recent\n double motherhood, she was almost flat of bosom. He asked her how she\n was feeling.\n\n\n \"Okay, I guess,\" she said. \"The way they manage it, there's nothing\n to it.\" She had a flat, potentially raucous voice. Eudalia had been\n a female foreman in a garment-cutting shop before being captured and\n brought through.",
"\"Lay off—he can't help it,\" said Eudalia unexpectedly. \"He doesn't\n like it any better than we do.\"\n\n\n \"But he doesn't have to—have them,\" objected Olga. She had a trace of\n Polish accent that was not unpleasant. In fact, Tennant thought, only\n her laughter was unpleasant, a shrill, uncontrolled burst of staccato\n sound that jarred him to his heels. Olga had not laughed of late,\n however. She was too frightened.\n\"Let's get the meal ordered,\" said Dana and they were all silent,\n thinking of what they wanted to eat but would not enjoy when it came.\n Tennant finished with his order, then got busy with his surprise."
],
[
"\"Don't flatter yourself,\" she replied angrily. She sat up, pushed\n back her hair, got to her feet a trifle awkwardly because of the\n tight-fitting tubular gown. \"If I could do anything about it....\"\n\n\n \"But you can't,\" he told her. \"They're too clever.\"\n\n\n \"Is this crop rotation or did you send for me?\" she asked cynically.\n \"If you did, I wish you hadn't. You haven't asked about your son.\"\n\n\n \"I don't even want to think about him,\" said Tennant. \"Let's get\n on with it.\" He could sense the restless stirring of the woman\n within Dana, just as he could feel the stirring toward her within\n himself—desire that both of them loathed because it was implanted\n within them by their captors.",
"They entered the house, which had no roof, continued to move beneath a\n sky that glowed with light which did not come from a sun or moon. It\n might have been a well-kept if bizarre little country estate, but it\n wasn't. It was a prison, a cage.\n\n\n The other two women were sitting in the heptagonal central hall.\n Eudalia, who had borne twin girls recently, was lying back, newly thin\n and dark of skin and hair, smoking a scentless cigarette. A tall woman,\n thirtyish, she wore a sort of shimmering green strapless evening gown.\n Tennant wondered how she maintained it in place, for despite her recent\n double motherhood, she was almost flat of bosom. He asked her how she\n was feeling.\n\n\n \"Okay, I guess,\" she said. \"The way they manage it, there's nothing\n to it.\" She had a flat, potentially raucous voice. Eudalia had been\n a female foreman in a garment-cutting shop before being captured and\n brought through.",
"Tennant's meat looked like steak, it felt like steak, but, lacking the\n aroma of steak, it was almost tasteless. This was so with all of their\n foods, with their cigarettes, with everything in their prison—or their\n cage. Their captors were utterly without a human conception of smell,\n living, apparently, in a world without odor at all.\n\n\n Dana said suddenly, \"I named the boy Tom, after somebody I hate almost\n as much as I hate you.\"\n\n\n Eudalia laid down her fork with a clatter and regarded Dana\n disapprovingly. \"Why take it out on Rog?\" she asked bluntly. \"He didn't\n ask to come here any more than we did. He's got a wife back home. Maybe\n you want him to fall in love with you? Maybe you're jealous because\n he doesn't? Well, maybe he can't! And maybe it wouldn't work, the way\n things are arranged here.\"",
"Dog does trick, he thought.\nHe went through the entire routine at Opal's bidding. When at last\n he was allowed to relax, he wondered, not for the first time, if he\n weren't mastering some of the alleged Guru arts. At once he felt\n probing investigation. Opal, like the rest of the captors, was as\n curious as a cat—or a human being.\nTennant sat against a wall, drenched with sweat. There would be endless\n repetition before his workout was done. On Earth, dogs were said to be\n intellectually two-dimensional creatures. He wondered if they felt this\n helpless futility when their masters taught them to heel, to point, to\n retrieve.",
"They walked toward the house.\nIt didn't look like a prison—or a cage. Within the dome of the\n barrier, it looked more like a well-kept if bizarre little country\n estate. There was clipped lawn, a scattering of trees, even a clear\n little brook that chattered unending annoyance at the small stones\n which impeded its flow.\n\n\n But the lawn was not of grass—it was of a bright green substance that\n might have been cellophane but wasn't, and it sprouted from a fabric\n that might have been canvas but was something else. The trees looked\n like trees, only their trunks were bark all the way through—except\n that it was not bark. The brook was practically water, but the small\n stones over which it flowed were of no earthly mineral.",
"The captor Tennant called\nOpal\ncame in through a far corner of\n the ceiling. He—if it was a he—was not large, although this,\n Tennant knew, meant nothing; Opal might extend thousands of yards in\n some unseen direction. He had no regular shape and much of him was\n iridescent and shot with constantly changing colors. Hence the name\n Opal.\n\n\n Communication was telepathic. Tennant could have yodeled or yelled\n or sung\nMississippi Mud\nand Opal would have shown no reaction. Yet\n Tennant suspected that the captors could hear somewhere along the\n auditory scale, just as perhaps they could smell, although not in any\n human sense.\nYou will approach without use of your appendages.\nThe command was as clear as if it had been spoken aloud. Tennant took a\n deep breath. He thought of the space beside Opal. It took about three\n seconds and he was there, having spanned a distance of some ninety\n feet. He was getting good at it.",
"\"You thought those up while we ate,\" he said. It annoyed him to be\n copied, though he did not know why. She laughed at him silently, tossed\n her auburn hair back from her face and went out of the roofless house,\n holding the gold dress casually over her bare arm.\n\n\n Eudalia took him to the nursery. He was irritated now in another,\n angrier way. The infants, protected by cellophane-like coverlets, were\n asleep.\n\n\n \"They never cry,\" the thin woman told him. \"But they grow—God, how\n they grow!\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Tennant, fighting down his anger. He kissed her, held\n her close, although neither of them felt desire at the moment. Their\n captors had seen to that; it wasn't Eudalia's turn. Tennant said, \"I\n wish I could do something about this. I hate seeing Dana so bitter and\n Olga so scared. It isn't their fault.\"",
"\"Good,\" he said. \"Glad to hear it.\" He felt oddly embarrassed. He\n turned to Olga, broad, blonde and curiously vital, who sat perfectly\n still, regarding him over the pregnant swell of her dirndl-clad waist.\n Olga had been a waitress in a mining town hash-house near Scranton.\n\n\n Tennant wanted to put an encouraging hand on her shoulder, to say\n something that might cheer her up, for she was by far the youngest of\n the three female captives, barely nineteen. But with the eyes of the\n other two, especially Dana, upon him, he could not.\n\n\n \"I guess I wasn't cut out to be a Turk,\" he said. \"I don't feel at ease\n in a harem, even when it's supposedly my own.\"\n\n\n \"You're not doing so badly,\" Dana replied acidly.",
"\"Were you ever in a big-game hunter's trophy room?\" Tennant asked\n quietly. \"Or in a Museum of Natural History? A zoo? A naturalist's lab?\n Or even, maybe, photographed as a baby on a bear-skin rug?\"\n\n\n \"I was,\" said Olga. \"But that's not the same thing.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" he agreed. \"In the one instance,\nwe're\nthe hunters,\n the breeders, the trophy collectors. In the other\"—he shrugged—\"we're\n the trophies.\"\nThere was a long silence. They finished eating and then Dana stood up\n and said, \"I'm going out on the lawn for a while.\" She unzipped her\n golden gown, stepped out of it to reveal a pair of tartan shorts that\n matched his, and a narrow halter.",
"As in all of this strange universe, excepting the dome-cages in\n which the captives were held, the training hall followed no rules of\n three-dimensional space. One wall looked normal for perhaps a third of\n its length, then it simply wasn't for a bit. It came back farther on\n at an impossible angle. Yet, walking along it, touching it, it felt\n perfectly smooth and continuously straight.\n\n\n The opposite wall resembled a diagonal cross-section of an asymmetrical\n dumbbell—that was the closest Tennant could come to it in words. And\n it, too, felt straight. The floor looked like crystal smashed by some\n cosmic impact, yet it had reason. He\nknew\nthis even though no reason\n was apparent to his three-dimensional vision. The ceiling, where he\n could see it, was beyond description.",
"He realized, shocked and scared, that his thoughts of escape had\n slipped past his mental censor, and he waited apprehensively for Opal\n to strike. Nothing happened and he warily relaxed. Opal wasn't tapping\n his thoughts. Because he felt sure of his captive ... or because he\n couldn't on Earth?\n\n\n It was like being let out of a cage. Tennant grinned at the bookcase;\n the ebony-and-ivory elephants that Agatha had never liked were gone,\n but he'd get them back or another pair. The credenza had been replaced\n by a huge and ugly television console. That, he resolved, would go down\n in the cellar rumpus room, where its bleached modernity wouldn't clash\n with the casual antiquity of the living room.",
"Tennant closed his eyes, willed himself to the front window. Now that\n he had mastered teleportation, it was incredible how much easier it was\n in his own world. He had covered the two miles from the gateway to the\n house in a mere seven jumps, the distance to the window in an instant.\n But there was no pleasure in it, only a confirmation of his captor's\n power over him.\n\n\n He was not free of them. He understood all too well what they wanted\n him to do; he was to play the Judas goat ... or rather the Judas ram,\n leading another victim to the fourth-dimensional pen.\n\n\n Grim, he watched the swoop of headlights in the driveway and returned\n to the coffee table, lit a fresh cigarette.",
"\"And it's not yours,\" insisted Eudalia. \"Don't let them make you think\n it is.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try not to,\" he said and stopped, realizing the family party was\n over. He had felt the inner tug of command, said good-by to the women\n and returned to his smaller compound within its own barrier dome.\n\n\n Then came the invisible aura of strain in the air, the shimmering\n illusion of heat that was not heat, that was prelude to his\n teleportation ... if that were the word. It was neither pleasant nor\n unpleasant; it\nwas\n, that was all.\n\n\n He called it the training hall, not because it looked like a training\n hall but because that was its function. It didn't actually look like\n anything save some half-nourished dream a surrealist might have\n discarded as too nightmarish for belief.",
"She opened her eyes at his approach and regarded him with nothing like\n favor. Involuntarily he glanced down at the tartan shorts that were his\n only garment to make sure that they were on properly. They were. He had\n thought them up in a moment of utter boredom and they were extremely\n comfortable. However, the near-Buchanan tartan did not crease or even\n wrinkle when he moved. Their captors had no idea of how a woven design\n should behave.\n\n\n \"Waiting for me?\" Tennant asked the girl.\n\n\n She said, \"I'd rather be dead. Maybe I am. Maybe we're all dead and\n this is Hell.\"\n\n\n He stood over her and looked down until she turned away her reddening\n face. He said, \"So it's going to be you again, Dana. You'll be the\n first to come back for a second run.\"",
"Agatha would complain, naturally, but his being back would make up for\n any amount of furniture shifting. He imagined her standing close to\n him, her lovely face lifted to be kissed, and his heart lurched like an\n adolescent's. This hunger was real, not implanted. Everything would be\n real ... his love for her, the food he ate, the things he touched, his\n house, his life....\nYour wife and a man are approaching the house.\nThe thought message from Opal crumbled his illusion of freedom. He sank\n down in a chair, trying to refuse to listen to the rest of the command:\nYou are to bring the man through the gateway with you. We want another\n live male.\nTennant shook his head, stiff and defiant in his chair. The punishment,\n when it came, was more humiliating than a slap across a dog's snout.\n Opal had been too interested in the next lab specimen to bother about\n his thoughts—that was why he had been free to think of escape.",
"\"We may be in the eleventh for all I know,\" he told her. \"But I'll\n settle for the fourth—a fourth dimension in space, if that makes\n scientific sense, because we don't seem to have moved in time. I wasn't\n sure of that, though, till we got the radio.\"\n\n\n \"Why haven't they brought more of us through?\" Eudalia asked, tamping\n out ashes in a tray that might have been silver.\n\n\n \"I'm not sure,\" he said thoughtfully. \"I think it's hard for them. They\n have a hell of a time bringing anyone through alive, and lately they\n haven't brought anyone through—not alive.\"\n\n\n \"Why do they do it—the other way, I mean?\" asked Dana.\n\n\n Tennant shrugged. \"I don't know. I've been thinking about it. I suppose\n it's because they're pretty human.\"",
"Some days later, the training routine was broken. He felt a sudden stir\n of near-sick excitement as he received the thought:\nNow you are ready. We are going through at last.\nOpal was nervous, so much so that he revealed more than he intended.\n Or perhaps that was his intent; Tennant could never be sure. They were\n going through to Tennant's own dimension. He wondered briefly just what\n his role was to be.\n\n\n He had little time to speculate before Opal seemed to envelop him.\n There was the blurring wrench of forced teleportation and they were in\n another room, a room which ended in a huge irregular passage that might\n have been the interior of a giant concertina—or an old-fashioned kodak.\n\n\n He stood before a kidney-shaped object over whose jagged surface\n colors played constantly. From Opal's thoughts it appeared to be some\n sort of ultradimensional television set, but to Tennant it was as\n incomprehensible as an oil painting to an animal.",
"Surprisingly there had been a definite fear reaction. As nearly as he\n could understand, it had been like asking an African pygmy, armed with\n a blowgun, to set up shop in the midst of a herd of wild elephants. It\n simply wasn't feasible—and furthermore he derived an impression of the\n tenuosity as well as the immovability of the gateway itself.\n\n\n They could be hurt, even killed by humans in a three-dimensional world.\n How? Tennant did not know. Perhaps as a man can cut finger or even\n throat on the edge of a near-two-dimensional piece of paper. It took\n valor for them to hunt men in the world of men. In that fact lay a key\n to their character—if such utterly alien creatures could be said to\n have character.",
"Tennant knew now why he was the only male human the captors had been\n able to take alive. Apparently, thanks to the rain-slick road, he had\n run the sedan into a tree at the foot of the hill beyond the river. He\n had been sitting there, unconscious, ripe fruit on their doorstep. They\n had simply picked him up.\n\n\n Otherwise, apparently, men were next to impossible for them to capture.\n All they could do was kill them and bring back their heads and hides\n as trophies. With women it was different—perhaps the captors' weapons,\n whatever they were, worked more efficiently on females. A difference in\n body chemistry or psychology, perhaps.\n\n\n More than once, during his long training with Opal, Tennant had sent\n questing thoughts toward his captor, asking why they didn't simply set\n up the gateway in some town or city and take as many humans as they\n wanted.",
"\"\nHuman!\n\" Dana was outraged. \"Do you call it human to—\"\n\n\n \"Hold on,\" he said. \"They pass through their gateway to Earth at\n considerable danger and, probably, expense of some kind. Some of them\n don't come back. They kill those of us who put up a fight. Those who\n don't—or can't—they bring back with them. Live or dead, we're just\n laboratory specimens.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" Eudalia conceded doubtfully. Then her eyes blazed. \"But the\n things they do—stuffing people, mounting their heads, keeping them on\n display in their—their whatever they live in. You call that human,\n Rog?\""
],
[
"\"Thanks, Eudalia,\" said Tennant. \"I think I can defend myself. But\n she's right, Dana. We're as helpless as—laboratory animals. They have\n the means to make us do whatever they want.\"\n\n\n \"Rog,\" said Dana, looking suddenly scared, \"I'm sorry I snapped at you.\n I know it's not your fault. I'm—\nchanging\n.\"\n\n\n He shook his head. \"No, Dana, you're not changing. You're adapting. We\n all are. We seem to be in a universe of different properties as well as\n different dimensions. We're adjusting. I can do a thing or two myself\n that seem absolutely impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Are we really in the fourth dimension?\" Dana asked. Of the three of\n them, she alone had more than a high-school education.",
"\"We may be in the eleventh for all I know,\" he told her. \"But I'll\n settle for the fourth—a fourth dimension in space, if that makes\n scientific sense, because we don't seem to have moved in time. I wasn't\n sure of that, though, till we got the radio.\"\n\n\n \"Why haven't they brought more of us through?\" Eudalia asked, tamping\n out ashes in a tray that might have been silver.\n\n\n \"I'm not sure,\" he said thoughtfully. \"I think it's hard for them. They\n have a hell of a time bringing anyone through alive, and lately they\n haven't brought anyone through—not alive.\"\n\n\n \"Why do they do it—the other way, I mean?\" asked Dana.\n\n\n Tennant shrugged. \"I don't know. I've been thinking about it. I suppose\n it's because they're pretty human.\"",
"As in all of this strange universe, excepting the dome-cages in\n which the captives were held, the training hall followed no rules of\n three-dimensional space. One wall looked normal for perhaps a third of\n its length, then it simply wasn't for a bit. It came back farther on\n at an impossible angle. Yet, walking along it, touching it, it felt\n perfectly smooth and continuously straight.\n\n\n The opposite wall resembled a diagonal cross-section of an asymmetrical\n dumbbell—that was the closest Tennant could come to it in words. And\n it, too, felt straight. The floor looked like crystal smashed by some\n cosmic impact, yet it had reason. He\nknew\nthis even though no reason\n was apparent to his three-dimensional vision. The ceiling, where he\n could see it, was beyond description.",
"Surprisingly there had been a definite fear reaction. As nearly as he\n could understand, it had been like asking an African pygmy, armed with\n a blowgun, to set up shop in the midst of a herd of wild elephants. It\n simply wasn't feasible—and furthermore he derived an impression of the\n tenuosity as well as the immovability of the gateway itself.\n\n\n They could be hurt, even killed by humans in a three-dimensional world.\n How? Tennant did not know. Perhaps as a man can cut finger or even\n throat on the edge of a near-two-dimensional piece of paper. It took\n valor for them to hunt men in the world of men. In that fact lay a key\n to their character—if such utterly alien creatures could be said to\n have character.",
"Tennant knew now why he was the only male human the captors had been\n able to take alive. Apparently, thanks to the rain-slick road, he had\n run the sedan into a tree at the foot of the hill beyond the river. He\n had been sitting there, unconscious, ripe fruit on their doorstep. They\n had simply picked him up.\n\n\n Otherwise, apparently, men were next to impossible for them to capture.\n All they could do was kill them and bring back their heads and hides\n as trophies. With women it was different—perhaps the captors' weapons,\n whatever they were, worked more efficiently on females. A difference in\n body chemistry or psychology, perhaps.\n\n\n More than once, during his long training with Opal, Tennant had sent\n questing thoughts toward his captor, asking why they didn't simply set\n up the gateway in some town or city and take as many humans as they\n wanted.",
"Tennant's meat looked like steak, it felt like steak, but, lacking the\n aroma of steak, it was almost tasteless. This was so with all of their\n foods, with their cigarettes, with everything in their prison—or their\n cage. Their captors were utterly without a human conception of smell,\n living, apparently, in a world without odor at all.\n\n\n Dana said suddenly, \"I named the boy Tom, after somebody I hate almost\n as much as I hate you.\"\n\n\n Eudalia laid down her fork with a clatter and regarded Dana\n disapprovingly. \"Why take it out on Rog?\" she asked bluntly. \"He didn't\n ask to come here any more than we did. He's got a wife back home. Maybe\n you want him to fall in love with you? Maybe you're jealous because\n he doesn't? Well, maybe he can't! And maybe it wouldn't work, the way\n things are arranged here.\"",
"They entered the house, which had no roof, continued to move beneath a\n sky that glowed with light which did not come from a sun or moon. It\n might have been a well-kept if bizarre little country estate, but it\n wasn't. It was a prison, a cage.\n\n\n The other two women were sitting in the heptagonal central hall.\n Eudalia, who had borne twin girls recently, was lying back, newly thin\n and dark of skin and hair, smoking a scentless cigarette. A tall woman,\n thirtyish, she wore a sort of shimmering green strapless evening gown.\n Tennant wondered how she maintained it in place, for despite her recent\n double motherhood, she was almost flat of bosom. He asked her how she\n was feeling.\n\n\n \"Okay, I guess,\" she said. \"The way they manage it, there's nothing\n to it.\" She had a flat, potentially raucous voice. Eudalia had been\n a female foreman in a garment-cutting shop before being captured and\n brought through.",
"Some days later, the training routine was broken. He felt a sudden stir\n of near-sick excitement as he received the thought:\nNow you are ready. We are going through at last.\nOpal was nervous, so much so that he revealed more than he intended.\n Or perhaps that was his intent; Tennant could never be sure. They were\n going through to Tennant's own dimension. He wondered briefly just what\n his role was to be.\n\n\n He had little time to speculate before Opal seemed to envelop him.\n There was the blurring wrench of forced teleportation and they were in\n another room, a room which ended in a huge irregular passage that might\n have been the interior of a giant concertina—or an old-fashioned kodak.\n\n\n He stood before a kidney-shaped object over whose jagged surface\n colors played constantly. From Opal's thoughts it appeared to be some\n sort of ultradimensional television set, but to Tennant it was as\n incomprehensible as an oil painting to an animal.",
"\"Were you ever in a big-game hunter's trophy room?\" Tennant asked\n quietly. \"Or in a Museum of Natural History? A zoo? A naturalist's lab?\n Or even, maybe, photographed as a baby on a bear-skin rug?\"\n\n\n \"I was,\" said Olga. \"But that's not the same thing.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" he agreed. \"In the one instance,\nwe're\nthe hunters,\n the breeders, the trophy collectors. In the other\"—he shrugged—\"we're\n the trophies.\"\nThere was a long silence. They finished eating and then Dana stood up\n and said, \"I'm going out on the lawn for a while.\" She unzipped her\n golden gown, stepped out of it to reveal a pair of tartan shorts that\n matched his, and a narrow halter.",
"Tennant closed his eyes, willed himself to the front window. Now that\n he had mastered teleportation, it was incredible how much easier it was\n in his own world. He had covered the two miles from the gateway to the\n house in a mere seven jumps, the distance to the window in an instant.\n But there was no pleasure in it, only a confirmation of his captor's\n power over him.\n\n\n He was not free of them. He understood all too well what they wanted\n him to do; he was to play the Judas goat ... or rather the Judas ram,\n leading another victim to the fourth-dimensional pen.\n\n\n Grim, he watched the swoop of headlights in the driveway and returned\n to the coffee table, lit a fresh cigarette.",
"The captor Tennant called\nOpal\ncame in through a far corner of\n the ceiling. He—if it was a he—was not large, although this,\n Tennant knew, meant nothing; Opal might extend thousands of yards in\n some unseen direction. He had no regular shape and much of him was\n iridescent and shot with constantly changing colors. Hence the name\n Opal.\n\n\n Communication was telepathic. Tennant could have yodeled or yelled\n or sung\nMississippi Mud\nand Opal would have shown no reaction. Yet\n Tennant suspected that the captors could hear somewhere along the\n auditory scale, just as perhaps they could smell, although not in any\n human sense.\nYou will approach without use of your appendages.\nThe command was as clear as if it had been spoken aloud. Tennant took a\n deep breath. He thought of the space beside Opal. It took about three\n seconds and he was there, having spanned a distance of some ninety\n feet. He was getting good at it.",
"\"You thought those up while we ate,\" he said. It annoyed him to be\n copied, though he did not know why. She laughed at him silently, tossed\n her auburn hair back from her face and went out of the roofless house,\n holding the gold dress casually over her bare arm.\n\n\n Eudalia took him to the nursery. He was irritated now in another,\n angrier way. The infants, protected by cellophane-like coverlets, were\n asleep.\n\n\n \"They never cry,\" the thin woman told him. \"But they grow—God, how\n they grow!\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Tennant, fighting down his anger. He kissed her, held\n her close, although neither of them felt desire at the moment. Their\n captors had seen to that; it wasn't Eudalia's turn. Tennant said, \"I\n wish I could do something about this. I hate seeing Dana so bitter and\n Olga so scared. It isn't their fault.\"",
"\"And it's not yours,\" insisted Eudalia. \"Don't let them make you think\n it is.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try not to,\" he said and stopped, realizing the family party was\n over. He had felt the inner tug of command, said good-by to the women\n and returned to his smaller compound within its own barrier dome.\n\n\n Then came the invisible aura of strain in the air, the shimmering\n illusion of heat that was not heat, that was prelude to his\n teleportation ... if that were the word. It was neither pleasant nor\n unpleasant; it\nwas\n, that was all.\n\n\n He called it the training hall, not because it looked like a training\n hall but because that was its function. It didn't actually look like\n anything save some half-nourished dream a surrealist might have\n discarded as too nightmarish for belief.",
"Agatha would complain, naturally, but his being back would make up for\n any amount of furniture shifting. He imagined her standing close to\n him, her lovely face lifted to be kissed, and his heart lurched like an\n adolescent's. This hunger was real, not implanted. Everything would be\n real ... his love for her, the food he ate, the things he touched, his\n house, his life....\nYour wife and a man are approaching the house.\nThe thought message from Opal crumbled his illusion of freedom. He sank\n down in a chair, trying to refuse to listen to the rest of the command:\nYou are to bring the man through the gateway with you. We want another\n live male.\nTennant shook his head, stiff and defiant in his chair. The punishment,\n when it came, was more humiliating than a slap across a dog's snout.\n Opal had been too interested in the next lab specimen to bother about\n his thoughts—that was why he had been free to think of escape.",
"\"Don't flatter yourself,\" she replied angrily. She sat up, pushed\n back her hair, got to her feet a trifle awkwardly because of the\n tight-fitting tubular gown. \"If I could do anything about it....\"\n\n\n \"But you can't,\" he told her. \"They're too clever.\"\n\n\n \"Is this crop rotation or did you send for me?\" she asked cynically.\n \"If you did, I wish you hadn't. You haven't asked about your son.\"\n\n\n \"I don't even want to think about him,\" said Tennant. \"Let's get\n on with it.\" He could sense the restless stirring of the woman\n within Dana, just as he could feel the stirring toward her within\n himself—desire that both of them loathed because it was implanted\n within them by their captors.",
"He realized, shocked and scared, that his thoughts of escape had\n slipped past his mental censor, and he waited apprehensively for Opal\n to strike. Nothing happened and he warily relaxed. Opal wasn't tapping\n his thoughts. Because he felt sure of his captive ... or because he\n couldn't on Earth?\n\n\n It was like being let out of a cage. Tennant grinned at the bookcase;\n the ebony-and-ivory elephants that Agatha had never liked were gone,\n but he'd get them back or another pair. The credenza had been replaced\n by a huge and ugly television console. That, he resolved, would go down\n in the cellar rumpus room, where its bleached modernity wouldn't clash\n with the casual antiquity of the living room.",
"Dog does trick, he thought.\nHe went through the entire routine at Opal's bidding. When at last\n he was allowed to relax, he wondered, not for the first time, if he\n weren't mastering some of the alleged Guru arts. At once he felt\n probing investigation. Opal, like the rest of the captors, was as\n curious as a cat—or a human being.\nTennant sat against a wall, drenched with sweat. There would be endless\n repetition before his workout was done. On Earth, dogs were said to be\n intellectually two-dimensional creatures. He wondered if they felt this\n helpless futility when their masters taught them to heel, to point, to\n retrieve.",
"\"\nHuman!\n\" Dana was outraged. \"Do you call it human to—\"\n\n\n \"Hold on,\" he said. \"They pass through their gateway to Earth at\n considerable danger and, probably, expense of some kind. Some of them\n don't come back. They kill those of us who put up a fight. Those who\n don't—or can't—they bring back with them. Live or dead, we're just\n laboratory specimens.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" Eudalia conceded doubtfully. Then her eyes blazed. \"But the\n things they do—stuffing people, mounting their heads, keeping them on\n display in their—their whatever they live in. You call that human,\n Rog?\"",
"\"I'm no stuffed-shirt and you know it.\" Cass' tone was peevish. \"But\n your idea of fun, Agatha, is pretty damn....\"\n\n\n It was his turn to freeze. Unbelieving, Tennant studied his successor.\n Cass Gordon—the\nman\n, the ex-halfback whose bulk was beginning to get\n out of hand, but whose inherent aggressive grace had not yet deserted\n him. The\nman\n, that was all—unless one threw in the little black\n mustache and the smooth salesman's manner.\n\n\n \"You know, Cass,\" Tennant said quietly, \"I never for a moment dreamed\n it would be you.\"\n\n\n \"\nRoger!\n\" Agatha found her voice. \"You're\nalive\n!\"",
"They walked toward the house.\nIt didn't look like a prison—or a cage. Within the dome of the\n barrier, it looked more like a well-kept if bizarre little country\n estate. There was clipped lawn, a scattering of trees, even a clear\n little brook that chattered unending annoyance at the small stones\n which impeded its flow.\n\n\n But the lawn was not of grass—it was of a bright green substance that\n might have been cellophane but wasn't, and it sprouted from a fabric\n that might have been canvas but was something else. The trees looked\n like trees, only their trunks were bark all the way through—except\n that it was not bark. The brook was practically water, but the small\n stones over which it flowed were of no earthly mineral."
],
[
"\"Thanks, Eudalia,\" said Tennant. \"I think I can defend myself. But\n she's right, Dana. We're as helpless as—laboratory animals. They have\n the means to make us do whatever they want.\"\n\n\n \"Rog,\" said Dana, looking suddenly scared, \"I'm sorry I snapped at you.\n I know it's not your fault. I'm—\nchanging\n.\"\n\n\n He shook his head. \"No, Dana, you're not changing. You're adapting. We\n all are. We seem to be in a universe of different properties as well as\n different dimensions. We're adjusting. I can do a thing or two myself\n that seem absolutely impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Are we really in the fourth dimension?\" Dana asked. Of the three of\n them, she alone had more than a high-school education.",
"\"We may be in the eleventh for all I know,\" he told her. \"But I'll\n settle for the fourth—a fourth dimension in space, if that makes\n scientific sense, because we don't seem to have moved in time. I wasn't\n sure of that, though, till we got the radio.\"\n\n\n \"Why haven't they brought more of us through?\" Eudalia asked, tamping\n out ashes in a tray that might have been silver.\n\n\n \"I'm not sure,\" he said thoughtfully. \"I think it's hard for them. They\n have a hell of a time bringing anyone through alive, and lately they\n haven't brought anyone through—not alive.\"\n\n\n \"Why do they do it—the other way, I mean?\" asked Dana.\n\n\n Tennant shrugged. \"I don't know. I've been thinking about it. I suppose\n it's because they're pretty human.\"",
"Surprisingly there had been a definite fear reaction. As nearly as he\n could understand, it had been like asking an African pygmy, armed with\n a blowgun, to set up shop in the midst of a herd of wild elephants. It\n simply wasn't feasible—and furthermore he derived an impression of the\n tenuosity as well as the immovability of the gateway itself.\n\n\n They could be hurt, even killed by humans in a three-dimensional world.\n How? Tennant did not know. Perhaps as a man can cut finger or even\n throat on the edge of a near-two-dimensional piece of paper. It took\n valor for them to hunt men in the world of men. In that fact lay a key\n to their character—if such utterly alien creatures could be said to\n have character.",
"As in all of this strange universe, excepting the dome-cages in\n which the captives were held, the training hall followed no rules of\n three-dimensional space. One wall looked normal for perhaps a third of\n its length, then it simply wasn't for a bit. It came back farther on\n at an impossible angle. Yet, walking along it, touching it, it felt\n perfectly smooth and continuously straight.\n\n\n The opposite wall resembled a diagonal cross-section of an asymmetrical\n dumbbell—that was the closest Tennant could come to it in words. And\n it, too, felt straight. The floor looked like crystal smashed by some\n cosmic impact, yet it had reason. He\nknew\nthis even though no reason\n was apparent to his three-dimensional vision. The ceiling, where he\n could see it, was beyond description.",
"The captor Tennant called\nOpal\ncame in through a far corner of\n the ceiling. He—if it was a he—was not large, although this,\n Tennant knew, meant nothing; Opal might extend thousands of yards in\n some unseen direction. He had no regular shape and much of him was\n iridescent and shot with constantly changing colors. Hence the name\n Opal.\n\n\n Communication was telepathic. Tennant could have yodeled or yelled\n or sung\nMississippi Mud\nand Opal would have shown no reaction. Yet\n Tennant suspected that the captors could hear somewhere along the\n auditory scale, just as perhaps they could smell, although not in any\n human sense.\nYou will approach without use of your appendages.\nThe command was as clear as if it had been spoken aloud. Tennant took a\n deep breath. He thought of the space beside Opal. It took about three\n seconds and he was there, having spanned a distance of some ninety\n feet. He was getting good at it.",
"Some days later, the training routine was broken. He felt a sudden stir\n of near-sick excitement as he received the thought:\nNow you are ready. We are going through at last.\nOpal was nervous, so much so that he revealed more than he intended.\n Or perhaps that was his intent; Tennant could never be sure. They were\n going through to Tennant's own dimension. He wondered briefly just what\n his role was to be.\n\n\n He had little time to speculate before Opal seemed to envelop him.\n There was the blurring wrench of forced teleportation and they were in\n another room, a room which ended in a huge irregular passage that might\n have been the interior of a giant concertina—or an old-fashioned kodak.\n\n\n He stood before a kidney-shaped object over whose jagged surface\n colors played constantly. From Opal's thoughts it appeared to be some\n sort of ultradimensional television set, but to Tennant it was as\n incomprehensible as an oil painting to an animal.",
"Tennant closed his eyes, willed himself to the front window. Now that\n he had mastered teleportation, it was incredible how much easier it was\n in his own world. He had covered the two miles from the gateway to the\n house in a mere seven jumps, the distance to the window in an instant.\n But there was no pleasure in it, only a confirmation of his captor's\n power over him.\n\n\n He was not free of them. He understood all too well what they wanted\n him to do; he was to play the Judas goat ... or rather the Judas ram,\n leading another victim to the fourth-dimensional pen.\n\n\n Grim, he watched the swoop of headlights in the driveway and returned\n to the coffee table, lit a fresh cigarette.",
"Dog does trick, he thought.\nHe went through the entire routine at Opal's bidding. When at last\n he was allowed to relax, he wondered, not for the first time, if he\n weren't mastering some of the alleged Guru arts. At once he felt\n probing investigation. Opal, like the rest of the captors, was as\n curious as a cat—or a human being.\nTennant sat against a wall, drenched with sweat. There would be endless\n repetition before his workout was done. On Earth, dogs were said to be\n intellectually two-dimensional creatures. He wondered if they felt this\n helpless futility when their masters taught them to heel, to point, to\n retrieve.",
"\"And it's not yours,\" insisted Eudalia. \"Don't let them make you think\n it is.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try not to,\" he said and stopped, realizing the family party was\n over. He had felt the inner tug of command, said good-by to the women\n and returned to his smaller compound within its own barrier dome.\n\n\n Then came the invisible aura of strain in the air, the shimmering\n illusion of heat that was not heat, that was prelude to his\n teleportation ... if that were the word. It was neither pleasant nor\n unpleasant; it\nwas\n, that was all.\n\n\n He called it the training hall, not because it looked like a training\n hall but because that was its function. It didn't actually look like\n anything save some half-nourished dream a surrealist might have\n discarded as too nightmarish for belief.",
"\"\nHuman!\n\" Dana was outraged. \"Do you call it human to—\"\n\n\n \"Hold on,\" he said. \"They pass through their gateway to Earth at\n considerable danger and, probably, expense of some kind. Some of them\n don't come back. They kill those of us who put up a fight. Those who\n don't—or can't—they bring back with them. Live or dead, we're just\n laboratory specimens.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" Eudalia conceded doubtfully. Then her eyes blazed. \"But the\n things they do—stuffing people, mounting their heads, keeping them on\n display in their—their whatever they live in. You call that human,\n Rog?\"",
"He realized, shocked and scared, that his thoughts of escape had\n slipped past his mental censor, and he waited apprehensively for Opal\n to strike. Nothing happened and he warily relaxed. Opal wasn't tapping\n his thoughts. Because he felt sure of his captive ... or because he\n couldn't on Earth?\n\n\n It was like being let out of a cage. Tennant grinned at the bookcase;\n the ebony-and-ivory elephants that Agatha had never liked were gone,\n but he'd get them back or another pair. The credenza had been replaced\n by a huge and ugly television console. That, he resolved, would go down\n in the cellar rumpus room, where its bleached modernity wouldn't clash\n with the casual antiquity of the living room.",
"Tennant's meat looked like steak, it felt like steak, but, lacking the\n aroma of steak, it was almost tasteless. This was so with all of their\n foods, with their cigarettes, with everything in their prison—or their\n cage. Their captors were utterly without a human conception of smell,\n living, apparently, in a world without odor at all.\n\n\n Dana said suddenly, \"I named the boy Tom, after somebody I hate almost\n as much as I hate you.\"\n\n\n Eudalia laid down her fork with a clatter and regarded Dana\n disapprovingly. \"Why take it out on Rog?\" she asked bluntly. \"He didn't\n ask to come here any more than we did. He's got a wife back home. Maybe\n you want him to fall in love with you? Maybe you're jealous because\n he doesn't? Well, maybe he can't! And maybe it wouldn't work, the way\n things are arranged here.\"",
"Tennant knew now why he was the only male human the captors had been\n able to take alive. Apparently, thanks to the rain-slick road, he had\n run the sedan into a tree at the foot of the hill beyond the river. He\n had been sitting there, unconscious, ripe fruit on their doorstep. They\n had simply picked him up.\n\n\n Otherwise, apparently, men were next to impossible for them to capture.\n All they could do was kill them and bring back their heads and hides\n as trophies. With women it was different—perhaps the captors' weapons,\n whatever they were, worked more efficiently on females. A difference in\n body chemistry or psychology, perhaps.\n\n\n More than once, during his long training with Opal, Tennant had sent\n questing thoughts toward his captor, asking why they didn't simply set\n up the gateway in some town or city and take as many humans as they\n wanted.",
"\"You thought those up while we ate,\" he said. It annoyed him to be\n copied, though he did not know why. She laughed at him silently, tossed\n her auburn hair back from her face and went out of the roofless house,\n holding the gold dress casually over her bare arm.\n\n\n Eudalia took him to the nursery. He was irritated now in another,\n angrier way. The infants, protected by cellophane-like coverlets, were\n asleep.\n\n\n \"They never cry,\" the thin woman told him. \"But they grow—God, how\n they grow!\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Tennant, fighting down his anger. He kissed her, held\n her close, although neither of them felt desire at the moment. Their\n captors had seen to that; it wasn't Eudalia's turn. Tennant said, \"I\n wish I could do something about this. I hate seeing Dana so bitter and\n Olga so scared. It isn't their fault.\"",
"Opal was annoyed that Tennant could make nothing of it. Then came the\n thought:\nWhat cover must your body have not to be conspicuous?\nTennant wondered, cynically, what would happen if he were to demand\n a costume of mediaeval motley, complete with Pied Piper's flute. He\n received quick reproof that made his head ring as from a blow.\n\n\n He asked Opal where and when they were going, was informed that\n he would soon emerge on Earth where he had left it. That told him\n everything but the date and season. Opal, like the rest of the captors,\n seemed to have no understanding of time in a human sense.",
"\"Were you ever in a big-game hunter's trophy room?\" Tennant asked\n quietly. \"Or in a Museum of Natural History? A zoo? A naturalist's lab?\n Or even, maybe, photographed as a baby on a bear-skin rug?\"\n\n\n \"I was,\" said Olga. \"But that's not the same thing.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" he agreed. \"In the one instance,\nwe're\nthe hunters,\n the breeders, the trophy collectors. In the other\"—he shrugged—\"we're\n the trophies.\"\nThere was a long silence. They finished eating and then Dana stood up\n and said, \"I'm going out on the lawn for a while.\" She unzipped her\n golden gown, stepped out of it to reveal a pair of tartan shorts that\n matched his, and a narrow halter.",
"\"Don't flatter yourself,\" she replied angrily. She sat up, pushed\n back her hair, got to her feet a trifle awkwardly because of the\n tight-fitting tubular gown. \"If I could do anything about it....\"\n\n\n \"But you can't,\" he told her. \"They're too clever.\"\n\n\n \"Is this crop rotation or did you send for me?\" she asked cynically.\n \"If you did, I wish you hadn't. You haven't asked about your son.\"\n\n\n \"I don't even want to think about him,\" said Tennant. \"Let's get\n on with it.\" He could sense the restless stirring of the woman\n within Dana, just as he could feel the stirring toward her within\n himself—desire that both of them loathed because it was implanted\n within them by their captors.",
"They walked toward the house.\nIt didn't look like a prison—or a cage. Within the dome of the\n barrier, it looked more like a well-kept if bizarre little country\n estate. There was clipped lawn, a scattering of trees, even a clear\n little brook that chattered unending annoyance at the small stones\n which impeded its flow.\n\n\n But the lawn was not of grass—it was of a bright green substance that\n might have been cellophane but wasn't, and it sprouted from a fabric\n that might have been canvas but was something else. The trees looked\n like trees, only their trunks were bark all the way through—except\n that it was not bark. The brook was practically water, but the small\n stones over which it flowed were of no earthly mineral.",
"Agatha would complain, naturally, but his being back would make up for\n any amount of furniture shifting. He imagined her standing close to\n him, her lovely face lifted to be kissed, and his heart lurched like an\n adolescent's. This hunger was real, not implanted. Everything would be\n real ... his love for her, the food he ate, the things he touched, his\n house, his life....\nYour wife and a man are approaching the house.\nThe thought message from Opal crumbled his illusion of freedom. He sank\n down in a chair, trying to refuse to listen to the rest of the command:\nYou are to bring the man through the gateway with you. We want another\n live male.\nTennant shook his head, stiff and defiant in his chair. The punishment,\n when it came, was more humiliating than a slap across a dog's snout.\n Opal had been too interested in the next lab specimen to bother about\n his thoughts—that was why he had been free to think of escape.",
"They entered the house, which had no roof, continued to move beneath a\n sky that glowed with light which did not come from a sun or moon. It\n might have been a well-kept if bizarre little country estate, but it\n wasn't. It was a prison, a cage.\n\n\n The other two women were sitting in the heptagonal central hall.\n Eudalia, who had borne twin girls recently, was lying back, newly thin\n and dark of skin and hair, smoking a scentless cigarette. A tall woman,\n thirtyish, she wore a sort of shimmering green strapless evening gown.\n Tennant wondered how she maintained it in place, for despite her recent\n double motherhood, she was almost flat of bosom. He asked her how she\n was feeling.\n\n\n \"Okay, I guess,\" she said. \"The way they manage it, there's nothing\n to it.\" She had a flat, potentially raucous voice. Eudalia had been\n a female foreman in a garment-cutting shop before being captured and\n brought through."
],
[
"\"Tristan and Isolde,\" said Tennant, grinning almost happily. \"Well,\n I've had my little say. Now I'm off again. Cass, would you give me a\n lift? I have a conveyance of sorts a couple of miles down the road.\"\nHe needed no telepathic powers to read the thoughts around him then. He\n heard Agatha's quick intake of breath, saw the split-second look she\n exchanged with Cass. He turned away, knowing that she was imploring her\n lover to do something,\nanything\n, as long as it was safe.\n\n\n Deliberately, Tennant poured himself a second drink. This might be\n easier and pleasanter than he had expected. They deserved some of the\n suffering he had had and there was a chance that they might get it.",
"\"Roger,\" repeated Tennant viciously. He felt sick with disgust. Maybe\n he should have expected a triangle, but somehow he hadn't. And here\n it was, with all of them going through their paces like a trio of\n tent-show actors. He said, \"For God's sake, sit down.\"\n\n\n Agatha did so hesitantly. Her huge dark eyes, invariably clear\n and limpid no matter how much she had drunk, flickered toward him\n furtively. She said defensively, \"I had detectives looking for you for\n six months. Where have you been, Rog? Smashing up the car like that\n and—disappearing! I've been out of my mind.\"",
"\"In a way,\" he replied unemotionally. \"Sorry if I've worried you,\n Agatha, but my life has been rather—indefinite, since I—left.\"\n\n\n He was standing no more than four inches from this woman he had desired\n desperately for six years, and he no longer wanted her. He was acutely\n conscious of her perfume. It wrapped them both like an exotic blanket,\n and it repelled him. He studied the firm clear flesh of her cheek and\n chin, the arch of nostril, the carmine fullness of lower lip, the\n swell of bosom above low-cut gown. And he no longer wanted any of it or\n of her. Cass Gordon—\n\n\n It didn't have to be anybody at all. For it to be Cass Gordon was\n revolting.\n\n\n \"Rog,\" she said and her voice trembled, \"what are we going to do? What\n do you\nwant\nto do?\"",
"\"Were you ever in a big-game hunter's trophy room?\" Tennant asked\n quietly. \"Or in a Museum of Natural History? A zoo? A naturalist's lab?\n Or even, maybe, photographed as a baby on a bear-skin rug?\"\n\n\n \"I was,\" said Olga. \"But that's not the same thing.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" he agreed. \"In the one instance,\nwe're\nthe hunters,\n the breeders, the trophy collectors. In the other\"—he shrugged—\"we're\n the trophies.\"\nThere was a long silence. They finished eating and then Dana stood up\n and said, \"I'm going out on the lawn for a while.\" She unzipped her\n golden gown, stepped out of it to reveal a pair of tartan shorts that\n matched his, and a narrow halter.",
"\"I'm no stuffed-shirt and you know it.\" Cass' tone was peevish. \"But\n your idea of fun, Agatha, is pretty damn....\"\n\n\n It was his turn to freeze. Unbelieving, Tennant studied his successor.\n Cass Gordon—the\nman\n, the ex-halfback whose bulk was beginning to get\n out of hand, but whose inherent aggressive grace had not yet deserted\n him. The\nman\n, that was all—unless one threw in the little black\n mustache and the smooth salesman's manner.\n\n\n \"You know, Cass,\" Tennant said quietly, \"I never for a moment dreamed\n it would be you.\"\n\n\n \"\nRoger!\n\" Agatha found her voice. \"You're\nalive\n!\"",
"Tennant watched the girls as a sweet-voiced crooner began to ply\n an unfamiliar love lyric to a melody whose similarity to a thousand\n predecessors doomed it to instant success.\n\n\n Olga sat up straight, her pale blue eyes round with utter disbelief.\n She looked at the radio, at Tennant, at the other two women, then back\n at the machine. She murmured something in Polish that was inaudible,\n but her expression showed that it must have been wistful.\n\n\n Eudalia grinned at Tennant and, rising, did a sort of tap dance to the\n music, then whirled back into her chair, green dress ashimmer, and sank\n into it just to listen.\n\n\n Dana stood almost in the center of the room, carmine-tipped fingers\n clasped beneath the swell of her breasts. She might have been listening\n to Brahms or Debussy. Her eyes glowed with the salty brilliance of\n emotion and she was almost beautiful.",
"had a lease that could be broken—\nRoger Tennant, crossing the lawn, could see two of the three wings\n of the house, which radiated spoke-like from its heptagonal central\n portion. The wing on the left was white, with slim square pillars,\n reminiscent of scores of movie sets of the Deep South. That on the\n right was sundeck solar-house living-machine modern, something like a\n montage of shoeboxes. The wing hidden by the rest of the house was, he\n knew, spired, gabled and multicolored, like an ancient building in\n pre-Hitler Cracow.\nDana was lying under a tree near the door, stretched out on a sort\n of deck chair with her eyes closed. She wore a golden gown, long and\n close-fitting and slit up the leg like the gown of a Chinese woman.\n Above it her comely face was sullen beneath its sleek cocoon of auburn\n hair.",
"\"Don't flatter yourself,\" she replied angrily. She sat up, pushed\n back her hair, got to her feet a trifle awkwardly because of the\n tight-fitting tubular gown. \"If I could do anything about it....\"\n\n\n \"But you can't,\" he told her. \"They're too clever.\"\n\n\n \"Is this crop rotation or did you send for me?\" she asked cynically.\n \"If you did, I wish you hadn't. You haven't asked about your son.\"\n\n\n \"I don't even want to think about him,\" said Tennant. \"Let's get\n on with it.\" He could sense the restless stirring of the woman\n within Dana, just as he could feel the stirring toward her within\n himself—desire that both of them loathed because it was implanted\n within them by their captors.",
"He shrugged, returned to the feeling of comfort that came from being\n back here, about to see Agatha again, hold her close in no more than a\n few minutes. And stay, his mind began to add eagerly, but he pushed the\n thought down where Opal could not detect it.\n\n\n He took another deep, lung-filling drag on his cigarette, looked around\n the room that was so important a part of his life. The three women back\n there would be in a ghastly spot. He felt like a heel for wanting to\n leave them there, then knew that he would try somehow to get them out.\n Not, of course, anything that would endanger his remaining with Agatha;\n the only way his captors would get him back would be as a taxidermist's\n specimen.",
"Tennant's meat looked like steak, it felt like steak, but, lacking the\n aroma of steak, it was almost tasteless. This was so with all of their\n foods, with their cigarettes, with everything in their prison—or their\n cage. Their captors were utterly without a human conception of smell,\n living, apparently, in a world without odor at all.\n\n\n Dana said suddenly, \"I named the boy Tom, after somebody I hate almost\n as much as I hate you.\"\n\n\n Eudalia laid down her fork with a clatter and regarded Dana\n disapprovingly. \"Why take it out on Rog?\" she asked bluntly. \"He didn't\n ask to come here any more than we did. He's got a wife back home. Maybe\n you want him to fall in love with you? Maybe you're jealous because\n he doesn't? Well, maybe he can't! And maybe it wouldn't work, the way\n things are arranged here.\"",
"\"\nRog!\n\" she cried softly when the music stopped. \"A radio and WZZX! Is\n it—are they—real?\"\n\n\n \"As real as you or I,\" he told her. \"It took quite a bit of doing,\n getting them to put a set together. And I wasn't sure that radio would\n get through. TV doesn't seem to. Somehow it brings things closer....\"\n\n\n Olga got up quite suddenly, went to the machine and, after frowning at\n it for a moment, tuned in another station from which a Polish-speaking\n announcer was followed by polka music. She leaned against the wall,\n resting one smooth forearm on the top of the machine. Her eyes closed\n and she swayed a little in time to the polka beat.\nTennant caught Dana looking at him and there was near approval in her\n expression—approval that faded quickly as soon as she caught his gaze\n upon her. The food arrived then and they sat down at the round table to\n eat it.",
"The front door was flung open and his diaphragm tightened at the\n remembered sound of Agatha's throaty laugh ... and tightened further\n when it was followed by a deeper rumbling laugh. Sudden fear made the\n cigarette shake in his fingers.\n\n\n \"... Don't be such a stuffed-shirt, darling.\" Agatha's mocking\n sweetness rang alarm-gongs in Tennant's memory. \"Charley wasn't making\n a grab for\nme\n. He'd had one too many and only wanted a little fun.\n Really, darling, you seem to think that a girl....\"\n\n\n Her voice faded out as she saw Tennant standing there. She was wearing\n a white strapless gown, had a blue-red-and-gold Mandarin jacket slung\n hussar-fashion over her left shoulder. She looked even sleeker, better\n groomed, more assured than his memory of her.",
"\"Decent of you,\" said Tennant. He got up, crossed to the cabinet that\n served as a bar. It was fully equipped—with more expensive liquor, he\n noticed, than he had ever been able to afford. He poured a drink of\n brandy, waited for the others to fill their glasses.\nAgatha looked at him over the rim of hers. \"Tell us, Rog. We have a\n right to know. I do, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"One question first,\" he said. \"What about those killings? Have there\n been any lately?\"\n\n\n \"Not for over a year,\" Cass told him. \"They never did get the devil who\n skinned those bodies and removed the heads.\"\n\n\n So, Tennant thought, they hadn't used the gateway. Not since they had\n brought the four of them through, not since they had begun to train him\n for his Judas ram duties.\n\n\n Agatha was asking him if he had been abroad.",
"He lit a cigarette, inhaled. \"Relax. I'm not planning revenge. After\n this evening, I plan to vanish for good. Of course, Agatha, that\n offers you a minor nuisance. You will have to wait six years to marry\n Cass—seven years if the maid who let me in tonight talks. That's the\n law, isn't it, Cass? You probably had it all figured out.\"\n\n\n \"You bastard,\" said Cass. \"You dirty bastard! You know what a wait like\n that could do to us.\"",
"Take her back? He smiled ironically; she wouldn't know what that meant.\n It would serve her right, but maybe there was another way.\n\n\n \"I don't know about you,\" he said, \"but I suspect we're in the same\n boat. I also have other interests.\"\n\n\n \"You louse!\" said Cass Gordon, arching rib cage and nostrils. \"If you\n try to make trouble for Agatha, I can promise....\"\n\n\n \"\nWhat\ncan you promise?\" demanded Tennant. When Gordon's onset\n subsided in mumbles, he added, \"Actually, I don't think I'm capable of\n making more than a fraction of the trouble for either of you that you\n both are qualified to make for yourselves.\"",
"She opened her eyes at his approach and regarded him with nothing like\n favor. Involuntarily he glanced down at the tartan shorts that were his\n only garment to make sure that they were on properly. They were. He had\n thought them up in a moment of utter boredom and they were extremely\n comfortable. However, the near-Buchanan tartan did not crease or even\n wrinkle when he moved. Their captors had no idea of how a woven design\n should behave.\n\n\n \"Waiting for me?\" Tennant asked the girl.\n\n\n She said, \"I'd rather be dead. Maybe I am. Maybe we're all dead and\n this is Hell.\"\n\n\n He stood over her and looked down until she turned away her reddening\n face. He said, \"So it's going to be you again, Dana. You'll be the\n first to come back for a second run.\"",
"\"You thought those up while we ate,\" he said. It annoyed him to be\n copied, though he did not know why. She laughed at him silently, tossed\n her auburn hair back from her face and went out of the roofless house,\n holding the gold dress casually over her bare arm.\n\n\n Eudalia took him to the nursery. He was irritated now in another,\n angrier way. The infants, protected by cellophane-like coverlets, were\n asleep.\n\n\n \"They never cry,\" the thin woman told him. \"But they grow—God, how\n they grow!\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Tennant, fighting down his anger. He kissed her, held\n her close, although neither of them felt desire at the moment. Their\n captors had seen to that; it wasn't Eudalia's turn. Tennant said, \"I\n wish I could do something about this. I hate seeing Dana so bitter and\n Olga so scared. It isn't their fault.\"",
"\"Sorry,\" said Tennant. \"I've had my troubles, too.\" Agatha was scared\n stiff—of him. Probably with reason. He looked again at Cass Gordon and\n found that he suddenly didn't care. She couldn't say it was loneliness.\n Women have waited longer than eighteen months. He would have if his\n captors had let him.\n\n\n \"Where in hell\nhave\nyou been, Rog?\" Gordon's tone was almost\n parental. \"I don't suppose it's news to you, but there was a lot of\n suspicion directed your way while that crazy killer was operating\n around here. Agatha and I managed to clear you.\"",
"\"Good,\" he said. \"Glad to hear it.\" He felt oddly embarrassed. He\n turned to Olga, broad, blonde and curiously vital, who sat perfectly\n still, regarding him over the pregnant swell of her dirndl-clad waist.\n Olga had been a waitress in a mining town hash-house near Scranton.\n\n\n Tennant wanted to put an encouraging hand on her shoulder, to say\n something that might cheer her up, for she was by far the youngest of\n the three female captives, barely nineteen. But with the eyes of the\n other two, especially Dana, upon him, he could not.\n\n\n \"I guess I wasn't cut out to be a Turk,\" he said. \"I don't feel at ease\n in a harem, even when it's supposedly my own.\"\n\n\n \"You're not doing so badly,\" Dana replied acidly.",
"She shook her head and fright made twin stoplights of the rouge on her\n cheeks as she shut the door behind him. He went into the living room,\n directly to the long silver cigarette box on the coffee table. It was\n proof of homecoming to fill his lungs with smoke he could\nsmell\n. He\n took another drag, saw the maid still in the doorway, staring.\n\n\n \"There's no need for fright,\" he told her. \"I believe I still own this\n house.\" Then, \"When do you expect Mrs. Tennant?\"\n\n\n \"She just called. She's on her way home from the club.\"\n\n\n Still looking frightened, she departed for the rear of the house.\n Tennant stared after her puzzledly until the kitchen door swung shut\n behind her. The club? What club?"
],
[
"\"Were you ever in a big-game hunter's trophy room?\" Tennant asked\n quietly. \"Or in a Museum of Natural History? A zoo? A naturalist's lab?\n Or even, maybe, photographed as a baby on a bear-skin rug?\"\n\n\n \"I was,\" said Olga. \"But that's not the same thing.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" he agreed. \"In the one instance,\nwe're\nthe hunters,\n the breeders, the trophy collectors. In the other\"—he shrugged—\"we're\n the trophies.\"\nThere was a long silence. They finished eating and then Dana stood up\n and said, \"I'm going out on the lawn for a while.\" She unzipped her\n golden gown, stepped out of it to reveal a pair of tartan shorts that\n matched his, and a narrow halter.",
"\"You thought those up while we ate,\" he said. It annoyed him to be\n copied, though he did not know why. She laughed at him silently, tossed\n her auburn hair back from her face and went out of the roofless house,\n holding the gold dress casually over her bare arm.\n\n\n Eudalia took him to the nursery. He was irritated now in another,\n angrier way. The infants, protected by cellophane-like coverlets, were\n asleep.\n\n\n \"They never cry,\" the thin woman told him. \"But they grow—God, how\n they grow!\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Tennant, fighting down his anger. He kissed her, held\n her close, although neither of them felt desire at the moment. Their\n captors had seen to that; it wasn't Eudalia's turn. Tennant said, \"I\n wish I could do something about this. I hate seeing Dana so bitter and\n Olga so scared. It isn't their fault.\"",
"Tennant's meat looked like steak, it felt like steak, but, lacking the\n aroma of steak, it was almost tasteless. This was so with all of their\n foods, with their cigarettes, with everything in their prison—or their\n cage. Their captors were utterly without a human conception of smell,\n living, apparently, in a world without odor at all.\n\n\n Dana said suddenly, \"I named the boy Tom, after somebody I hate almost\n as much as I hate you.\"\n\n\n Eudalia laid down her fork with a clatter and regarded Dana\n disapprovingly. \"Why take it out on Rog?\" she asked bluntly. \"He didn't\n ask to come here any more than we did. He's got a wife back home. Maybe\n you want him to fall in love with you? Maybe you're jealous because\n he doesn't? Well, maybe he can't! And maybe it wouldn't work, the way\n things are arranged here.\"",
"\"Don't flatter yourself,\" she replied angrily. She sat up, pushed\n back her hair, got to her feet a trifle awkwardly because of the\n tight-fitting tubular gown. \"If I could do anything about it....\"\n\n\n \"But you can't,\" he told her. \"They're too clever.\"\n\n\n \"Is this crop rotation or did you send for me?\" she asked cynically.\n \"If you did, I wish you hadn't. You haven't asked about your son.\"\n\n\n \"I don't even want to think about him,\" said Tennant. \"Let's get\n on with it.\" He could sense the restless stirring of the woman\n within Dana, just as he could feel the stirring toward her within\n himself—desire that both of them loathed because it was implanted\n within them by their captors.",
"They entered the house, which had no roof, continued to move beneath a\n sky that glowed with light which did not come from a sun or moon. It\n might have been a well-kept if bizarre little country estate, but it\n wasn't. It was a prison, a cage.\n\n\n The other two women were sitting in the heptagonal central hall.\n Eudalia, who had borne twin girls recently, was lying back, newly thin\n and dark of skin and hair, smoking a scentless cigarette. A tall woman,\n thirtyish, she wore a sort of shimmering green strapless evening gown.\n Tennant wondered how she maintained it in place, for despite her recent\n double motherhood, she was almost flat of bosom. He asked her how she\n was feeling.\n\n\n \"Okay, I guess,\" she said. \"The way they manage it, there's nothing\n to it.\" She had a flat, potentially raucous voice. Eudalia had been\n a female foreman in a garment-cutting shop before being captured and\n brought through.",
"\"We may be in the eleventh for all I know,\" he told her. \"But I'll\n settle for the fourth—a fourth dimension in space, if that makes\n scientific sense, because we don't seem to have moved in time. I wasn't\n sure of that, though, till we got the radio.\"\n\n\n \"Why haven't they brought more of us through?\" Eudalia asked, tamping\n out ashes in a tray that might have been silver.\n\n\n \"I'm not sure,\" he said thoughtfully. \"I think it's hard for them. They\n have a hell of a time bringing anyone through alive, and lately they\n haven't brought anyone through—not alive.\"\n\n\n \"Why do they do it—the other way, I mean?\" asked Dana.\n\n\n Tennant shrugged. \"I don't know. I've been thinking about it. I suppose\n it's because they're pretty human.\"",
"It arrived before the meal, materializing against one of the seven\n walls of the roofless chamber. It was a large cabinet on slender\n straight legs that resembled dark polished wood. Tennant went to it,\n opened a hingeless door and pushed a knob on the inner surface. At once\n the air was hideous with the acerate harmony of a singing commercial....\n\n... so go soak your head,\nbe it gold, brown or red,\nin Any-tone Shampoo!\n\n A disc jockey's buoyant tones cut in quickly as the final\nooooo\nfaded. \"This is Grady Martin, your old night-owl, coming to you with\n your requests over Station WZZX, Manhattan. Here's a wire from Theresa\n McManus and the girls in the family entrance of Conaghan's Bar and\n Grill on West....\"",
"\"And it's not yours,\" insisted Eudalia. \"Don't let them make you think\n it is.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try not to,\" he said and stopped, realizing the family party was\n over. He had felt the inner tug of command, said good-by to the women\n and returned to his smaller compound within its own barrier dome.\n\n\n Then came the invisible aura of strain in the air, the shimmering\n illusion of heat that was not heat, that was prelude to his\n teleportation ... if that were the word. It was neither pleasant nor\n unpleasant; it\nwas\n, that was all.\n\n\n He called it the training hall, not because it looked like a training\n hall but because that was its function. It didn't actually look like\n anything save some half-nourished dream a surrealist might have\n discarded as too nightmarish for belief.",
"He shrugged, returned to the feeling of comfort that came from being\n back here, about to see Agatha again, hold her close in no more than a\n few minutes. And stay, his mind began to add eagerly, but he pushed the\n thought down where Opal could not detect it.\n\n\n He took another deep, lung-filling drag on his cigarette, looked around\n the room that was so important a part of his life. The three women back\n there would be in a ghastly spot. He felt like a heel for wanting to\n leave them there, then knew that he would try somehow to get them out.\n Not, of course, anything that would endanger his remaining with Agatha;\n the only way his captors would get him back would be as a taxidermist's\n specimen.",
"They walked toward the house.\nIt didn't look like a prison—or a cage. Within the dome of the\n barrier, it looked more like a well-kept if bizarre little country\n estate. There was clipped lawn, a scattering of trees, even a clear\n little brook that chattered unending annoyance at the small stones\n which impeded its flow.\n\n\n But the lawn was not of grass—it was of a bright green substance that\n might have been cellophane but wasn't, and it sprouted from a fabric\n that might have been canvas but was something else. The trees looked\n like trees, only their trunks were bark all the way through—except\n that it was not bark. The brook was practically water, but the small\n stones over which it flowed were of no earthly mineral.",
"He realized, shocked and scared, that his thoughts of escape had\n slipped past his mental censor, and he waited apprehensively for Opal\n to strike. Nothing happened and he warily relaxed. Opal wasn't tapping\n his thoughts. Because he felt sure of his captive ... or because he\n couldn't on Earth?\n\n\n It was like being let out of a cage. Tennant grinned at the bookcase;\n the ebony-and-ivory elephants that Agatha had never liked were gone,\n but he'd get them back or another pair. The credenza had been replaced\n by a huge and ugly television console. That, he resolved, would go down\n in the cellar rumpus room, where its bleached modernity wouldn't clash\n with the casual antiquity of the living room.",
"She shook her head and fright made twin stoplights of the rouge on her\n cheeks as she shut the door behind him. He went into the living room,\n directly to the long silver cigarette box on the coffee table. It was\n proof of homecoming to fill his lungs with smoke he could\nsmell\n. He\n took another drag, saw the maid still in the doorway, staring.\n\n\n \"There's no need for fright,\" he told her. \"I believe I still own this\n house.\" Then, \"When do you expect Mrs. Tennant?\"\n\n\n \"She just called. She's on her way home from the club.\"\n\n\n Still looking frightened, she departed for the rear of the house.\n Tennant stared after her puzzledly until the kitchen door swung shut\n behind her. The club? What club?",
"Agatha would complain, naturally, but his being back would make up for\n any amount of furniture shifting. He imagined her standing close to\n him, her lovely face lifted to be kissed, and his heart lurched like an\n adolescent's. This hunger was real, not implanted. Everything would be\n real ... his love for her, the food he ate, the things he touched, his\n house, his life....\nYour wife and a man are approaching the house.\nThe thought message from Opal crumbled his illusion of freedom. He sank\n down in a chair, trying to refuse to listen to the rest of the command:\nYou are to bring the man through the gateway with you. We want another\n live male.\nTennant shook his head, stiff and defiant in his chair. The punishment,\n when it came, was more humiliating than a slap across a dog's snout.\n Opal had been too interested in the next lab specimen to bother about\n his thoughts—that was why he had been free to think of escape.",
"She opened her eyes at his approach and regarded him with nothing like\n favor. Involuntarily he glanced down at the tartan shorts that were his\n only garment to make sure that they were on properly. They were. He had\n thought them up in a moment of utter boredom and they were extremely\n comfortable. However, the near-Buchanan tartan did not crease or even\n wrinkle when he moved. Their captors had no idea of how a woven design\n should behave.\n\n\n \"Waiting for me?\" Tennant asked the girl.\n\n\n She said, \"I'd rather be dead. Maybe I am. Maybe we're all dead and\n this is Hell.\"\n\n\n He stood over her and looked down until she turned away her reddening\n face. He said, \"So it's going to be you again, Dana. You'll be the\n first to come back for a second run.\"",
"The front door was flung open and his diaphragm tightened at the\n remembered sound of Agatha's throaty laugh ... and tightened further\n when it was followed by a deeper rumbling laugh. Sudden fear made the\n cigarette shake in his fingers.\n\n\n \"... Don't be such a stuffed-shirt, darling.\" Agatha's mocking\n sweetness rang alarm-gongs in Tennant's memory. \"Charley wasn't making\n a grab for\nme\n. He'd had one too many and only wanted a little fun.\n Really, darling, you seem to think that a girl....\"\n\n\n Her voice faded out as she saw Tennant standing there. She was wearing\n a white strapless gown, had a blue-red-and-gold Mandarin jacket slung\n hussar-fashion over her left shoulder. She looked even sleeker, better\n groomed, more assured than his memory of her.",
"\"Lay off—he can't help it,\" said Eudalia unexpectedly. \"He doesn't\n like it any better than we do.\"\n\n\n \"But he doesn't have to—have them,\" objected Olga. She had a trace of\n Polish accent that was not unpleasant. In fact, Tennant thought, only\n her laughter was unpleasant, a shrill, uncontrolled burst of staccato\n sound that jarred him to his heels. Olga had not laughed of late,\n however. She was too frightened.\n\"Let's get the meal ordered,\" said Dana and they were all silent,\n thinking of what they wanted to eat but would not enjoy when it came.\n Tennant finished with his order, then got busy with his surprise.",
"\"Good,\" he said. \"Glad to hear it.\" He felt oddly embarrassed. He\n turned to Olga, broad, blonde and curiously vital, who sat perfectly\n still, regarding him over the pregnant swell of her dirndl-clad waist.\n Olga had been a waitress in a mining town hash-house near Scranton.\n\n\n Tennant wanted to put an encouraging hand on her shoulder, to say\n something that might cheer her up, for she was by far the youngest of\n the three female captives, barely nineteen. But with the eyes of the\n other two, especially Dana, upon him, he could not.\n\n\n \"I guess I wasn't cut out to be a Turk,\" he said. \"I don't feel at ease\n in a harem, even when it's supposedly my own.\"\n\n\n \"You're not doing so badly,\" Dana replied acidly.",
"Dog does trick, he thought.\nHe went through the entire routine at Opal's bidding. When at last\n he was allowed to relax, he wondered, not for the first time, if he\n weren't mastering some of the alleged Guru arts. At once he felt\n probing investigation. Opal, like the rest of the captors, was as\n curious as a cat—or a human being.\nTennant sat against a wall, drenched with sweat. There would be endless\n repetition before his workout was done. On Earth, dogs were said to be\n intellectually two-dimensional creatures. He wondered if they felt this\n helpless futility when their masters taught them to heel, to point, to\n retrieve.",
"\"In a way,\" he replied unemotionally. \"Sorry if I've worried you,\n Agatha, but my life has been rather—indefinite, since I—left.\"\n\n\n He was standing no more than four inches from this woman he had desired\n desperately for six years, and he no longer wanted her. He was acutely\n conscious of her perfume. It wrapped them both like an exotic blanket,\n and it repelled him. He studied the firm clear flesh of her cheek and\n chin, the arch of nostril, the carmine fullness of lower lip, the\n swell of bosom above low-cut gown. And he no longer wanted any of it or\n of her. Cass Gordon—\n\n\n It didn't have to be anybody at all. For it to be Cass Gordon was\n revolting.\n\n\n \"Rog,\" she said and her voice trembled, \"what are we going to do? What\n do you\nwant\nto do?\"",
"had a lease that could be broken—\nRoger Tennant, crossing the lawn, could see two of the three wings\n of the house, which radiated spoke-like from its heptagonal central\n portion. The wing on the left was white, with slim square pillars,\n reminiscent of scores of movie sets of the Deep South. That on the\n right was sundeck solar-house living-machine modern, something like a\n montage of shoeboxes. The wing hidden by the rest of the house was, he\n knew, spired, gabled and multicolored, like an ancient building in\n pre-Hitler Cracow.\nDana was lying under a tree near the door, stretched out on a sort\n of deck chair with her eyes closed. She wore a golden gown, long and\n close-fitting and slit up the leg like the gown of a Chinese woman.\n Above it her comely face was sullen beneath its sleek cocoon of auburn\n hair."
],
[
"He shrugged, returned to the feeling of comfort that came from being\n back here, about to see Agatha again, hold her close in no more than a\n few minutes. And stay, his mind began to add eagerly, but he pushed the\n thought down where Opal could not detect it.\n\n\n He took another deep, lung-filling drag on his cigarette, looked around\n the room that was so important a part of his life. The three women back\n there would be in a ghastly spot. He felt like a heel for wanting to\n leave them there, then knew that he would try somehow to get them out.\n Not, of course, anything that would endanger his remaining with Agatha;\n the only way his captors would get him back would be as a taxidermist's\n specimen.",
"\"Good,\" he said. \"Glad to hear it.\" He felt oddly embarrassed. He\n turned to Olga, broad, blonde and curiously vital, who sat perfectly\n still, regarding him over the pregnant swell of her dirndl-clad waist.\n Olga had been a waitress in a mining town hash-house near Scranton.\n\n\n Tennant wanted to put an encouraging hand on her shoulder, to say\n something that might cheer her up, for she was by far the youngest of\n the three female captives, barely nineteen. But with the eyes of the\n other two, especially Dana, upon him, he could not.\n\n\n \"I guess I wasn't cut out to be a Turk,\" he said. \"I don't feel at ease\n in a harem, even when it's supposedly my own.\"\n\n\n \"You're not doing so badly,\" Dana replied acidly.",
"\"You thought those up while we ate,\" he said. It annoyed him to be\n copied, though he did not know why. She laughed at him silently, tossed\n her auburn hair back from her face and went out of the roofless house,\n holding the gold dress casually over her bare arm.\n\n\n Eudalia took him to the nursery. He was irritated now in another,\n angrier way. The infants, protected by cellophane-like coverlets, were\n asleep.\n\n\n \"They never cry,\" the thin woman told him. \"But they grow—God, how\n they grow!\"\n\n\n \"Good,\" said Tennant, fighting down his anger. He kissed her, held\n her close, although neither of them felt desire at the moment. Their\n captors had seen to that; it wasn't Eudalia's turn. Tennant said, \"I\n wish I could do something about this. I hate seeing Dana so bitter and\n Olga so scared. It isn't their fault.\"",
"Tennant's meat looked like steak, it felt like steak, but, lacking the\n aroma of steak, it was almost tasteless. This was so with all of their\n foods, with their cigarettes, with everything in their prison—or their\n cage. Their captors were utterly without a human conception of smell,\n living, apparently, in a world without odor at all.\n\n\n Dana said suddenly, \"I named the boy Tom, after somebody I hate almost\n as much as I hate you.\"\n\n\n Eudalia laid down her fork with a clatter and regarded Dana\n disapprovingly. \"Why take it out on Rog?\" she asked bluntly. \"He didn't\n ask to come here any more than we did. He's got a wife back home. Maybe\n you want him to fall in love with you? Maybe you're jealous because\n he doesn't? Well, maybe he can't! And maybe it wouldn't work, the way\n things are arranged here.\"",
"Tennant knew now why he was the only male human the captors had been\n able to take alive. Apparently, thanks to the rain-slick road, he had\n run the sedan into a tree at the foot of the hill beyond the river. He\n had been sitting there, unconscious, ripe fruit on their doorstep. They\n had simply picked him up.\n\n\n Otherwise, apparently, men were next to impossible for them to capture.\n All they could do was kill them and bring back their heads and hides\n as trophies. With women it was different—perhaps the captors' weapons,\n whatever they were, worked more efficiently on females. A difference in\n body chemistry or psychology, perhaps.\n\n\n More than once, during his long training with Opal, Tennant had sent\n questing thoughts toward his captor, asking why they didn't simply set\n up the gateway in some town or city and take as many humans as they\n wanted.",
"They entered the house, which had no roof, continued to move beneath a\n sky that glowed with light which did not come from a sun or moon. It\n might have been a well-kept if bizarre little country estate, but it\n wasn't. It was a prison, a cage.\n\n\n The other two women were sitting in the heptagonal central hall.\n Eudalia, who had borne twin girls recently, was lying back, newly thin\n and dark of skin and hair, smoking a scentless cigarette. A tall woman,\n thirtyish, she wore a sort of shimmering green strapless evening gown.\n Tennant wondered how she maintained it in place, for despite her recent\n double motherhood, she was almost flat of bosom. He asked her how she\n was feeling.\n\n\n \"Okay, I guess,\" she said. \"The way they manage it, there's nothing\n to it.\" She had a flat, potentially raucous voice. Eudalia had been\n a female foreman in a garment-cutting shop before being captured and\n brought through.",
"\"Don't flatter yourself,\" she replied angrily. She sat up, pushed\n back her hair, got to her feet a trifle awkwardly because of the\n tight-fitting tubular gown. \"If I could do anything about it....\"\n\n\n \"But you can't,\" he told her. \"They're too clever.\"\n\n\n \"Is this crop rotation or did you send for me?\" she asked cynically.\n \"If you did, I wish you hadn't. You haven't asked about your son.\"\n\n\n \"I don't even want to think about him,\" said Tennant. \"Let's get\n on with it.\" He could sense the restless stirring of the woman\n within Dana, just as he could feel the stirring toward her within\n himself—desire that both of them loathed because it was implanted\n within them by their captors.",
"\"Roger,\" repeated Tennant viciously. He felt sick with disgust. Maybe\n he should have expected a triangle, but somehow he hadn't. And here\n it was, with all of them going through their paces like a trio of\n tent-show actors. He said, \"For God's sake, sit down.\"\n\n\n Agatha did so hesitantly. Her huge dark eyes, invariably clear\n and limpid no matter how much she had drunk, flickered toward him\n furtively. She said defensively, \"I had detectives looking for you for\n six months. Where have you been, Rog? Smashing up the car like that\n and—disappearing! I've been out of my mind.\"",
"The captor Tennant called\nOpal\ncame in through a far corner of\n the ceiling. He—if it was a he—was not large, although this,\n Tennant knew, meant nothing; Opal might extend thousands of yards in\n some unseen direction. He had no regular shape and much of him was\n iridescent and shot with constantly changing colors. Hence the name\n Opal.\n\n\n Communication was telepathic. Tennant could have yodeled or yelled\n or sung\nMississippi Mud\nand Opal would have shown no reaction. Yet\n Tennant suspected that the captors could hear somewhere along the\n auditory scale, just as perhaps they could smell, although not in any\n human sense.\nYou will approach without use of your appendages.\nThe command was as clear as if it had been spoken aloud. Tennant took a\n deep breath. He thought of the space beside Opal. It took about three\n seconds and he was there, having spanned a distance of some ninety\n feet. He was getting good at it.",
"She opened her eyes at his approach and regarded him with nothing like\n favor. Involuntarily he glanced down at the tartan shorts that were his\n only garment to make sure that they were on properly. They were. He had\n thought them up in a moment of utter boredom and they were extremely\n comfortable. However, the near-Buchanan tartan did not crease or even\n wrinkle when he moved. Their captors had no idea of how a woven design\n should behave.\n\n\n \"Waiting for me?\" Tennant asked the girl.\n\n\n She said, \"I'd rather be dead. Maybe I am. Maybe we're all dead and\n this is Hell.\"\n\n\n He stood over her and looked down until she turned away her reddening\n face. He said, \"So it's going to be you again, Dana. You'll be the\n first to come back for a second run.\"",
"Surprisingly there had been a definite fear reaction. As nearly as he\n could understand, it had been like asking an African pygmy, armed with\n a blowgun, to set up shop in the midst of a herd of wild elephants. It\n simply wasn't feasible—and furthermore he derived an impression of the\n tenuosity as well as the immovability of the gateway itself.\n\n\n They could be hurt, even killed by humans in a three-dimensional world.\n How? Tennant did not know. Perhaps as a man can cut finger or even\n throat on the edge of a near-two-dimensional piece of paper. It took\n valor for them to hunt men in the world of men. In that fact lay a key\n to their character—if such utterly alien creatures could be said to\n have character.",
"He realized, shocked and scared, that his thoughts of escape had\n slipped past his mental censor, and he waited apprehensively for Opal\n to strike. Nothing happened and he warily relaxed. Opal wasn't tapping\n his thoughts. Because he felt sure of his captive ... or because he\n couldn't on Earth?\n\n\n It was like being let out of a cage. Tennant grinned at the bookcase;\n the ebony-and-ivory elephants that Agatha had never liked were gone,\n but he'd get them back or another pair. The credenza had been replaced\n by a huge and ugly television console. That, he resolved, would go down\n in the cellar rumpus room, where its bleached modernity wouldn't clash\n with the casual antiquity of the living room.",
"Dog does trick, he thought.\nHe went through the entire routine at Opal's bidding. When at last\n he was allowed to relax, he wondered, not for the first time, if he\n weren't mastering some of the alleged Guru arts. At once he felt\n probing investigation. Opal, like the rest of the captors, was as\n curious as a cat—or a human being.\nTennant sat against a wall, drenched with sweat. There would be endless\n repetition before his workout was done. On Earth, dogs were said to be\n intellectually two-dimensional creatures. He wondered if they felt this\n helpless futility when their masters taught them to heel, to point, to\n retrieve.",
"\"\nRog!\n\" she cried softly when the music stopped. \"A radio and WZZX! Is\n it—are they—real?\"\n\n\n \"As real as you or I,\" he told her. \"It took quite a bit of doing,\n getting them to put a set together. And I wasn't sure that radio would\n get through. TV doesn't seem to. Somehow it brings things closer....\"\n\n\n Olga got up quite suddenly, went to the machine and, after frowning at\n it for a moment, tuned in another station from which a Polish-speaking\n announcer was followed by polka music. She leaned against the wall,\n resting one smooth forearm on the top of the machine. Her eyes closed\n and she swayed a little in time to the polka beat.\nTennant caught Dana looking at him and there was near approval in her\n expression—approval that faded quickly as soon as she caught his gaze\n upon her. The food arrived then and they sat down at the round table to\n eat it.",
"\"I'm no stuffed-shirt and you know it.\" Cass' tone was peevish. \"But\n your idea of fun, Agatha, is pretty damn....\"\n\n\n It was his turn to freeze. Unbelieving, Tennant studied his successor.\n Cass Gordon—the\nman\n, the ex-halfback whose bulk was beginning to get\n out of hand, but whose inherent aggressive grace had not yet deserted\n him. The\nman\n, that was all—unless one threw in the little black\n mustache and the smooth salesman's manner.\n\n\n \"You know, Cass,\" Tennant said quietly, \"I never for a moment dreamed\n it would be you.\"\n\n\n \"\nRoger!\n\" Agatha found her voice. \"You're\nalive\n!\"",
"Tennant closed his eyes, willed himself to the front window. Now that\n he had mastered teleportation, it was incredible how much easier it was\n in his own world. He had covered the two miles from the gateway to the\n house in a mere seven jumps, the distance to the window in an instant.\n But there was no pleasure in it, only a confirmation of his captor's\n power over him.\n\n\n He was not free of them. He understood all too well what they wanted\n him to do; he was to play the Judas goat ... or rather the Judas ram,\n leading another victim to the fourth-dimensional pen.\n\n\n Grim, he watched the swoop of headlights in the driveway and returned\n to the coffee table, lit a fresh cigarette.",
"\"Sorry,\" said Tennant. \"I've had my troubles, too.\" Agatha was scared\n stiff—of him. Probably with reason. He looked again at Cass Gordon and\n found that he suddenly didn't care. She couldn't say it was loneliness.\n Women have waited longer than eighteen months. He would have if his\n captors had let him.\n\n\n \"Where in hell\nhave\nyou been, Rog?\" Gordon's tone was almost\n parental. \"I don't suppose it's news to you, but there was a lot of\n suspicion directed your way while that crazy killer was operating\n around here. Agatha and I managed to clear you.\"",
"\"\nHuman!\n\" Dana was outraged. \"Do you call it human to—\"\n\n\n \"Hold on,\" he said. \"They pass through their gateway to Earth at\n considerable danger and, probably, expense of some kind. Some of them\n don't come back. They kill those of us who put up a fight. Those who\n don't—or can't—they bring back with them. Live or dead, we're just\n laboratory specimens.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" Eudalia conceded doubtfully. Then her eyes blazed. \"But the\n things they do—stuffing people, mounting their heads, keeping them on\n display in their—their whatever they live in. You call that human,\n Rog?\"",
"\"Were you ever in a big-game hunter's trophy room?\" Tennant asked\n quietly. \"Or in a Museum of Natural History? A zoo? A naturalist's lab?\n Or even, maybe, photographed as a baby on a bear-skin rug?\"\n\n\n \"I was,\" said Olga. \"But that's not the same thing.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" he agreed. \"In the one instance,\nwe're\nthe hunters,\n the breeders, the trophy collectors. In the other\"—he shrugged—\"we're\n the trophies.\"\nThere was a long silence. They finished eating and then Dana stood up\n and said, \"I'm going out on the lawn for a while.\" She unzipped her\n golden gown, stepped out of it to reveal a pair of tartan shorts that\n matched his, and a narrow halter.",
"\"Decent of you,\" said Tennant. He got up, crossed to the cabinet that\n served as a bar. It was fully equipped—with more expensive liquor, he\n noticed, than he had ever been able to afford. He poured a drink of\n brandy, waited for the others to fill their glasses.\nAgatha looked at him over the rim of hers. \"Tell us, Rog. We have a\n right to know. I do, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"One question first,\" he said. \"What about those killings? Have there\n been any lately?\"\n\n\n \"Not for over a year,\" Cass told him. \"They never did get the devil who\n skinned those bodies and removed the heads.\"\n\n\n So, Tennant thought, they hadn't used the gateway. Not since they had\n brought the four of them through, not since they had begun to train him\n for his Judas ram duties.\n\n\n Agatha was asking him if he had been abroad."
]
] |
train
|
49165
|
[
"What is the Brightside?",
"Why does Baron think there was something wrong with Claney's filters?",
"How does Claney feel about Mikuta?",
"What happened to Wyatt and Carpenter?",
"What was Sanderson studying?",
"What does Baron think was one of the mistakes Claney's team made?",
"What is the twilight zone?",
"Why doesn't the Major want McIvers to scout ahead?",
"What is the Red Lion?"
] |
[
[
"The Brightside is the side of Mercury that constantly faces the sun.",
"The Brightside is the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus.",
"The Brightside is the name of the passage on the Andean mountains of Venus.",
"The Brightside is the name of the crossing the climbers are going to climb."
],
[
"Claney's face is extremely sunburned.",
"Claney's face is twisted and brown.",
"Claney's face is covered in scars.",
"Claney's face is covered in cancerous tumors."
],
[
"Claney likes Mikuta. He can trust Mikuta.",
"Claney doesn't like Mikuta. Mikuta makes too many mistakes.",
"Claney likes Mikuta, but Mikuta makes too many mistakes.",
"Claney doesn't like Mikuta. He can't trust Mikuta."
],
[
"They died when a rock slide crushed their vehicle while they were attempting the Brightside Crossing.",
"They crossed the Brightside at aphelion.",
"They disappeared after their ship set off for Mercury. They were on a mission to cross the Brightside.",
"They disappeared when they attempted to cross the Brightside at perihelion."
],
[
"The Brightside ",
"The Darkside",
"The twilight zone",
"The Sun"
],
[
"Trying to cross on foot",
"Using suits with fiberglass lining",
"Not counting on the Bugs for protection",
"Asking McIvers to be on the team"
],
[
"The place at the end of the Brightside Crossing.",
"A lab where they study the Sun.",
"The place between Brightside and Darkside.",
"A lab where they study Mercury."
],
[
"The Major thinks McIvers is up to something. The Major wants McIvers close, so he can keep an eye on him.",
"The Major thinks it's safer if they stay together.",
"The Major doesn't want McIvers to steal the glory by completing the crossing first.",
"The Major doesn't want to be responsible if McIvers dies."
],
[
"A gentlemen's club",
"A restaurant",
"A club for explorers and adventurers",
"A bar"
]
] |
[
1,
4,
1,
1,
4,
4,
3,
2,
3
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[
1,
0,
0,
1,
1,
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[
[
"Brightside",
"do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross\n the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.”\n“Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.”\nClaney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You\n can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in\n both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting.\n It was the\nplanet\nthat whipped us, that and the\nSun\n. They’ll\n whip you, too, if you try it.”\n“Never,” said Baron.\n“Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said.\nI’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as\n I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when",
"localized.\nBut there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as\n well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric\n flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases\n had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside\n millennia ago—but there was CO\n 2\n , and nitrogen, and traces of\n other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur\n vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide.\nThe atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it\n condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson\n to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on\n Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage",
"of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that\n hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in\n the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the\n middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were\n two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the\n fiberglass helmets.\nThis was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on\ntheir\nBrightside Crossing.\nOn the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change.\n It looked the same, but every now and then it\nfelt\ndifferent.\n On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest\n from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch;",
"planning to attempt the Brightside.”\nBaron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read\n telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going\n to make a Brightside Crossing.”\n“At perihelion?”\n“Of course. When else?”\nThe grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment\n without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re\n not going to make the Crossing.”\n“Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded.\n“The name is Claney,” said the stranger.\nThere was a silence. Then: “Claney?\nPeter\nClaney?”\n“That’s right.”",
"before.\nTwilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside,\n of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked\n Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could\n hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On\n Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion\n and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent\n installation with a human crew could survive at either\n extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between\n Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival\n temperatures.\nSanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone\n is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to",
"attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the\n story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need\ndetails\n. Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you\n miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a\n finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma?\n Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve\n got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make\n it across where your attempt failed—”\n“You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney.\n“Of course we want to know. We\nhave\nto know.”\n“It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t",
"That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest\n place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the\n surface of the Sun itself.\nIt would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned\n just\nhow\nhellish and they never came back to tell about it. It\n was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody\n would cross it.\nI wanted to be along.\nThe Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the\n obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a\n rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s\n crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed\n the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years",
"Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082,\n I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then\n I was heartbroken when they just disappeared.\nI know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without\n proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface\n conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made\n a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a\n terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the\n Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my\n blood, sure as death.\nBut it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever\n know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American.",
"I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t\n too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil,\n isn’t he?”\n“Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the\n line? We’ll need plenty of both.”\n“Have you ever worked with him?” I asked.\n“No. Are you worried?”\n“Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.”\nThe Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about\n McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the\n trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to\n do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list.\n “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need",
"heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and\n drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four\n days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense\n about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make\n a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If\n a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then,\nnobody’s\ngot\n Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.”\nI’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider\n it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury\n turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around\n the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in.",
"fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of\n the Twilight Lab.\nI moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the\n Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires\n taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them,\n Stone dragged the sledges.\nEven at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on\n the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic\n ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for\n the first twenty miles.\nI kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out\n the track the early research teams had made out into the edge\n of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s",
"tried it had been cruelly punished, but the land was still there,\n so it had to be crossed. Not the easy way. It had to be crossed\n the hardest way possible: overland, through anything the land\n could throw up to us, at the most difficult time possible.\nYet we knew that even the land might have been conquered\n before, except for that Sun. We’d fought absolute cold before\n and won. We’d never fought heat like this and won. The only\n worse heat in the Solar System was the surface of the Sun\n itself.\nBrightside was worth trying for. We would get it or it would\n get us. That was the bargain.\nI learned a lot about Mercury those first few driving periods.\n The gorge petered out after a hundred miles and we moved",
"to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says\n we should leave in three days.”\nTwo days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t\n say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We\n spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as\n they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so\n far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They\n showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and\n that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline\n of our course.\n“This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around\n the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But\n these to the south and west\ncould\nbe active. Seismograph",
"He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were\n driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin\n with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route\n now and then, never far, but a little further each time.\nJack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with\n each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but\n I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive\n enough myself; I just managed to hide it better.\nAnd every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in\n the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare\n filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached\n constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the",
"tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse\n down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface\n shifting.”\nStone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant\n surface activity.”\nThe Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no\n doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the\n Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of\n less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could\n find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—”\nIt seemed that the more we considered the problem, the\n further we got from a solution. We knew there were active\n volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though\n surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and",
"60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that\n much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun\n for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet\n to wheel around.\nThe Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something\n about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab\n to make final preparations.\nSanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said\n so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week\n briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had\n arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier.\n Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson\n had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside\n was like.",
"I told him one-thirty-five.\n“That much!” he said. “Well, there can’t be much fat on\n you, at any rate. How do you take heat?”\n“You should know,” I said. “Venus was no icebox.”\n“No, I mean\nreal\nheat.”\nThen I began to get it. “You’re planning a trip.”\n“That’s right. A hot trip.” He grinned at me. “Might be\n dangerous, too.”\n“What trip?”\n“Brightside of Mercury,” the Major said.\nI whistled cautiously. “At aphelion?”\nHe threw his head back. “Why try a Crossing at aphelion?\n What have you done then? Four thousand miles of butcherous",
"McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he\n gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.”\n“Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff.\n We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together.\n Got that?”\nMcIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and\n we nodded, too.\n“All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight,\n let’s go.”\nIt was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll\n never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a\n break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the\n first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and",
"can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts\n down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work\n reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column.\n I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the\n area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws.\n Then—”\n“No dice,” the Major broke in.\n“But why not? We could save ourselves days!”\n“I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When\n we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That\n means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any\n climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man\n alone—any time, any place.”"
],
[
"And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing\n something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about.\nEvidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his\n arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were\n running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening,\n Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was\n set for an early departure after we got some rest.\n“And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling\n the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.”\nPeter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?”\n“Of course.”\nClaney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around\n them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place",
"attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the\n story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need\ndetails\n. Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you\n miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a\n finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma?\n Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve\n got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make\n it across where your attempt failed—”\n“You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney.\n“Of course we want to know. We\nhave\nto know.”\n“It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t",
"Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger\n gone. “Great balls of fire, man—\nwhere have you been hiding?\nWe’ve been trying to contact you for months!”\n“I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the\n whole idea.”\n“Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My\n friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking.\n Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His\n fingers were trembling.\nPeter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you\n want to hear.”\n“But you’ve\ngot\nto. You’re the only man on Earth who’s",
"planning to attempt the Brightside.”\nBaron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read\n telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going\n to make a Brightside Crossing.”\n“At perihelion?”\n“Of course. When else?”\nThe grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment\n without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re\n not going to make the Crossing.”\n“Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded.\n“The name is Claney,” said the stranger.\nThere was a silence. Then: “Claney?\nPeter\nClaney?”\n“That’s right.”",
"like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most\n reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t\n our big problem right then.\nEquipment\nworried us first and\nroute\nnext.”\nBaron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you\n have?”\n“The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each\n one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid\n the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit\n and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every\n eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting\n surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And\n we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between",
"the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at\n 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders\n if the suits failed somewhere.”\n“How about the Bugs?”\n“They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on\n them too much for protection.”\n“You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?”\n“We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility\n and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of\n forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant\n that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air\n between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like\n water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of",
"do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross\n the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.”\n“Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.”\nClaney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You\n can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in\n both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting.\n It was the\nplanet\nthat whipped us, that and the\nSun\n. They’ll\n whip you, too, if you try it.”\n“Never,” said Baron.\n“Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said.\nI’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as\n I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when",
"vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over\n near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped\n the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron\n returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and\n waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time\n without justifying it.\nPresently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat\n down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held\n no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but\n he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and\n forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still\n healing.\nThe stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re",
"Crossing\nby Alan E. Nourse\nJAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had\n a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He\n had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there\n were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman\n had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand\n pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no\n name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by\n eight.”\nNow Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring\n about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the\n Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in\n number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew",
"end of an eight-hour trek.\nBut it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the\n penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven\n down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our\n route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we\n heard a sharp cry through our earphones.\nI wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and\n spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the\n top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down\n the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand\n horrible pictures racing through our minds....\nWe found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge\n and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck",
"sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.”\nBaron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass\n as he set it down on the tablecloth.\n“Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?”\n“Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right.\n We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m\n getting to that.”\nHe settled back in his chair and continued.\nWe jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast\n with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we\n could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit\n Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest",
"like it.\nOne error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking\n much about the others. I was worried about\nme\n, plenty\n worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me.\n It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the\n thought out of my mind.\nIt was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in\n the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a\n broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding\n back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on\n solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze\n rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw",
"can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts\n down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work\n reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column.\n I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the\n area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws.\n Then—”\n“No dice,” the Major broke in.\n“But why not? We could save ourselves days!”\n“I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When\n we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That\n means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any\n climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man\n alone—any time, any place.”",
"He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were\n driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin\n with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route\n now and then, never far, but a little further each time.\nJack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with\n each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but\n I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive\n enough myself; I just managed to hide it better.\nAnd every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in\n the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare\n filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached\n constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the",
"ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous\n surface for the Bug’s pillow tires.\nI learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the\n sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it\n from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to\n a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with\n light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more\n until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It\n was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly,\n at first.\nToo smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to\n think so, too.\nMcIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves.",
"I gunned my motor and nothing happened.\nI could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs,\n thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as\n the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the\n wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the\n tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for\n all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten\n lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash.\nI picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into\n an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous.\n I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed\n McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for\n the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t",
"some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our\n equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing\n and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson.\n We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models,\n with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in,\n and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges.\nThe Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he\n said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?”\n“Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know.\n“He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name\n for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve\n probably heard of him.”",
"that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final\n analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way\n we would find out what was happening where was to be there.\nFinally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight\n rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and\n I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus\n in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset\n about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and\n he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited.\nHe was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely\n gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed,\n sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness.",
"Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but\n he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join\n this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for\n exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed\n him around like a puppy.\nIt didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting\n in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re\n liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can\n ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had\n borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and\n equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check\n and test.\nWe dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and",
"at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would\n taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers\n for one ice-cold bottle of beer.\nAfter a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at\n the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made\n Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden.\n Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge,\n with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled\n with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous\n gases.\nIt was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but\n the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one\n had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had"
],
[
"Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but\n he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join\n this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for\n exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed\n him around like a puppy.\nIt didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting\n in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re\n liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can\n ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had\n borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and\n equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check\n and test.\nWe dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and",
"some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our\n equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing\n and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson.\n We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models,\n with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in,\n and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges.\nThe Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he\n said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?”\n“Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know.\n“He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name\n for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve\n probably heard of him.”",
"Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082,\n I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then\n I was heartbroken when they just disappeared.\nI know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without\n proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface\n conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made\n a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a\n terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the\n Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my\n blood, sure as death.\nBut it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever\n know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American.",
"And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing\n something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about.\nEvidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his\n arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were\n running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening,\n Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was\n set for an early departure after we got some rest.\n“And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling\n the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.”\nPeter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?”\n“Of course.”\nClaney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around\n them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place",
"McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he\n gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.”\n“Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff.\n We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together.\n Got that?”\nMcIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and\n we nodded, too.\n“All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight,\n let’s go.”\nIt was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll\n never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a\n break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the\n first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and",
"Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger\n gone. “Great balls of fire, man—\nwhere have you been hiding?\nWe’ve been trying to contact you for months!”\n“I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the\n whole idea.”\n“Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My\n friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking.\n Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His\n fingers were trembling.\nPeter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you\n want to hear.”\n“But you’ve\ngot\nto. You’re the only man on Earth who’s",
"Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down\n to the frame and wheels.”\nMcIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the\nadvance\nwork.\n You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to\n pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?”\n He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of\n a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up\n ahead?”\n“That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said\n sharply.\n“Charts! I’m talking about\ndetail\nwork. We don’t need to\n worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you",
"like it.\nOne error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking\n much about the others. I was worried about\nme\n, plenty\n worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me.\n It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the\n thought out of my mind.\nIt was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in\n the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a\n broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding\n back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on\n solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze\n rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw",
"can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts\n down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work\n reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column.\n I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the\n area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws.\n Then—”\n“No dice,” the Major broke in.\n“But why not? We could save ourselves days!”\n“I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When\n we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That\n means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any\n climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man\n alone—any time, any place.”",
"planning to attempt the Brightside.”\nBaron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read\n telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going\n to make a Brightside Crossing.”\n“At perihelion?”\n“Of course. When else?”\nThe grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment\n without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re\n not going to make the Crossing.”\n“Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded.\n“The name is Claney,” said the stranger.\nThere was a silence. Then: “Claney?\nPeter\nClaney?”\n“That’s right.”",
"that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final\n analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way\n we would find out what was happening where was to be there.\nFinally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight\n rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and\n I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus\n in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset\n about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and\n he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited.\nHe was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely\n gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed,\n sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness.",
"like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most\n reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t\n our big problem right then.\nEquipment\nworried us first and\nroute\nnext.”\nBaron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you\n have?”\n“The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each\n one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid\n the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit\n and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every\n eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting\n surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And\n we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between",
"do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross\n the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.”\n“Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.”\nClaney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You\n can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in\n both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting.\n It was the\nplanet\nthat whipped us, that and the\nSun\n. They’ll\n whip you, too, if you try it.”\n“Never,” said Baron.\n“Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said.\nI’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as\n I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when",
"end of an eight-hour trek.\nBut it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the\n penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven\n down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our\n route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we\n heard a sharp cry through our earphones.\nI wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and\n spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the\n top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down\n the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand\n horrible pictures racing through our minds....\nWe found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge\n and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck",
"vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over\n near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped\n the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron\n returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and\n waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time\n without justifying it.\nPresently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat\n down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held\n no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but\n he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and\n forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still\n healing.\nThe stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re",
"at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would\n taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers\n for one ice-cold bottle of beer.\nAfter a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at\n the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made\n Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden.\n Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge,\n with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled\n with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous\n gases.\nIt was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but\n the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one\n had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had",
"take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.”\nThe Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that,\n Jack?”\nStone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—”\nMcIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It\n doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does\n it make any difference?”\n“I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank\n Peter along with me. Right?”\n“Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going\n to do the advance scouting?”\n“It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead\n Bug light as possible.”",
"I gunned my motor and nothing happened.\nI could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs,\n thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as\n the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the\n wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the\n tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for\n all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten\n lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash.\nI picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into\n an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous.\n I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed\n McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for\n the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t",
"He was a major in the Interplanetary Service\n for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up\n his commission.\nHe was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days,\n did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for\n the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five\n years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring\n since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan\n Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later.\nI’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool,\n the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further\n ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight\n place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck,",
"He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were\n driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin\n with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route\n now and then, never far, but a little further each time.\nJack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with\n each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but\n I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive\n enough myself; I just managed to hide it better.\nAnd every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in\n the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare\n filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached\n constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the"
],
[
"of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that\n hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in\n the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the\n middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were\n two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the\n fiberglass helmets.\nThis was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on\ntheir\nBrightside Crossing.\nOn the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change.\n It looked the same, but every now and then it\nfelt\ndifferent.\n On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest\n from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch;",
"Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082,\n I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then\n I was heartbroken when they just disappeared.\nI know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without\n proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface\n conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made\n a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a\n terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the\n Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my\n blood, sure as death.\nBut it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever\n know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American.",
"end of an eight-hour trek.\nBut it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the\n penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven\n down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our\n route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we\n heard a sharp cry through our earphones.\nI wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and\n spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the\n top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down\n the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand\n horrible pictures racing through our minds....\nWe found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge\n and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck",
"at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would\n taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers\n for one ice-cold bottle of beer.\nAfter a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at\n the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made\n Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden.\n Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge,\n with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled\n with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous\n gases.\nIt was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but\n the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one\n had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had",
"And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing\n something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about.\nEvidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his\n arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were\n running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening,\n Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was\n set for an early departure after we got some rest.\n“And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling\n the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.”\nPeter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?”\n“Of course.”\nClaney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around\n them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place",
"He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were\n driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin\n with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route\n now and then, never far, but a little further each time.\nJack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with\n each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but\n I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive\n enough myself; I just managed to hide it better.\nAnd every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in\n the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare\n filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached\n constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the",
"like it.\nOne error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking\n much about the others. I was worried about\nme\n, plenty\n worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me.\n It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the\n thought out of my mind.\nIt was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in\n the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a\n broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding\n back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on\n solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze\n rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw",
"I gunned my motor and nothing happened.\nI could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs,\n thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as\n the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the\n wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the\n tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for\n all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten\n lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash.\nI picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into\n an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous.\n I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed\n McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for\n the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t",
"ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous\n surface for the Bug’s pillow tires.\nI learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the\n sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it\n from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to\n a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with\n light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more\n until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It\n was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly,\n at first.\nToo smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to\n think so, too.\nMcIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves.",
"McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he\n gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.”\n“Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff.\n We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together.\n Got that?”\nMcIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and\n we nodded, too.\n“All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight,\n let’s go.”\nIt was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll\n never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a\n break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the\n first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and",
"a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond\n a deep crack.\nI let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug\n forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved\n fifty yards to the left, then back to the right.\nThere was only one place that looked like a possible crossing;\n a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across\n a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could\n feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the\n ledge shift over a few feet.",
"that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final\n analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way\n we would find out what was happening where was to be there.\nFinally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight\n rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and\n I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus\n in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset\n about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and\n he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited.\nHe was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely\n gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed,\n sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness.",
"He was a major in the Interplanetary Service\n for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up\n his commission.\nHe was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days,\n did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for\n the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five\n years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring\n since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan\n Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later.\nI’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool,\n the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further\n ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight\n place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck,",
"some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our\n equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing\n and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson.\n We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models,\n with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in,\n and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges.\nThe Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he\n said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?”\n“Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know.\n“He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name\n for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve\n probably heard of him.”",
"take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.”\nThe Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that,\n Jack?”\nStone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—”\nMcIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It\n doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does\n it make any difference?”\n“I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank\n Peter along with me. Right?”\n“Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going\n to do the advance scouting?”\n“It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead\n Bug light as possible.”",
"Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but\n he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join\n this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for\n exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed\n him around like a puppy.\nIt didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting\n in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re\n liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can\n ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had\n borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and\n equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check\n and test.\nWe dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and",
"attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the\n story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need\ndetails\n. Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you\n miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a\n finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma?\n Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve\n got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make\n it across where your attempt failed—”\n“You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney.\n“Of course we want to know. We\nhave\nto know.”\n“It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t",
"can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts\n down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work\n reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column.\n I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the\n area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws.\n Then—”\n“No dice,” the Major broke in.\n“But why not? We could save ourselves days!”\n“I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When\n we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That\n means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any\n climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man\n alone—any time, any place.”",
"Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger\n gone. “Great balls of fire, man—\nwhere have you been hiding?\nWe’ve been trying to contact you for months!”\n“I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the\n whole idea.”\n“Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My\n friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking.\n Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His\n fingers were trembling.\nPeter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you\n want to hear.”\n“But you’ve\ngot\nto. You’re the only man on Earth who’s",
"fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of\n the Twilight Lab.\nI moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the\n Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires\n taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them,\n Stone dragged the sledges.\nEven at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on\n the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic\n ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for\n the first twenty miles.\nI kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out\n the track the early research teams had made out into the edge\n of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s"
],
[
"some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our\n equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing\n and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson.\n We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models,\n with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in,\n and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges.\nThe Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he\n said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?”\n“Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know.\n“He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name\n for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve\n probably heard of him.”",
"60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that\n much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun\n for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet\n to wheel around.\nThe Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something\n about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab\n to make final preparations.\nSanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said\n so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week\n briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had\n arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier.\n Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson\n had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside\n was like.",
"to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says\n we should leave in three days.”\nTwo days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t\n say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We\n spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as\n they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so\n far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They\n showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and\n that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline\n of our course.\n“This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around\n the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But\n these to the south and west\ncould\nbe active. Seismograph",
"And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing\n something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about.\nEvidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his\n arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were\n running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening,\n Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was\n set for an early departure after we got some rest.\n“And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling\n the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.”\nPeter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?”\n“Of course.”\nClaney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around\n them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place",
"before.\nTwilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside,\n of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked\n Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could\n hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On\n Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion\n and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent\n installation with a human crew could survive at either\n extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between\n Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival\n temperatures.\nSanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone\n is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to",
"Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082,\n I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then\n I was heartbroken when they just disappeared.\nI know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without\n proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface\n conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made\n a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a\n terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the\n Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my\n blood, sure as death.\nBut it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever\n know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American.",
"Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but\n he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join\n this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for\n exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed\n him around like a puppy.\nIt didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting\n in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re\n liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can\n ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had\n borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and\n equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check\n and test.\nWe dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and",
"with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind\n of personality that could take a crew of wild men and\n make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand\n miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him.\nHe contacted me in New York and he was very casual at\n first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about\n old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d\n been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury,\n and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the\n year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since\n Venus and what my plans were.\n“No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?”\nHe looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?”",
"McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he\n gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.”\n“Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff.\n We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together.\n Got that?”\nMcIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and\n we nodded, too.\n“All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight,\n let’s go.”\nIt was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll\n never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a\n break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the\n first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and",
"approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of\n the planet at the hottest it ever gets.\nThe Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon\n when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day\n that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the\n surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job\n was only half done—we would still have to travel another\n two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson\n was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship,\n approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off.\nThat was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those\n seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter\n what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and",
"fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of\n the Twilight Lab.\nI moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the\n Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires\n taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them,\n Stone dragged the sledges.\nEven at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on\n the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic\n ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for\n the first twenty miles.\nI kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out\n the track the early research teams had made out into the edge\n of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s",
"localized.\nBut there were problems of atmosphere on Brightside, as\n well. There was an atmosphere and a constant atmospheric\n flow from Brightside to Darkside. Not much—the lighter gases\n had reached escape velocity and disappeared from Brightside\n millennia ago—but there was CO\n 2\n , and nitrogen, and traces of\n other heavier gases. There was also an abundance of sulfur\n vapor, as well as carbon disulfide and sulfur dioxide.\nThe atmospheric tide moved toward the Darkside, where it\n condensed, carrying enough volcanic ash with it for Sanderson\n to estimate the depth and nature of the surface upheavals on\n Brightside from his samplings. The trick was to find a passage",
"that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final\n analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way\n we would find out what was happening where was to be there.\nFinally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight\n rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and\n I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus\n in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset\n about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and\n he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited.\nHe was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely\n gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed,\n sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness.",
"ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous\n surface for the Bug’s pillow tires.\nI learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the\n sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it\n from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to\n a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with\n light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more\n until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It\n was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly,\n at first.\nToo smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to\n think so, too.\nMcIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves.",
"He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were\n driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin\n with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route\n now and then, never far, but a little further each time.\nJack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with\n each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but\n I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive\n enough myself; I just managed to hide it better.\nAnd every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in\n the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare\n filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached\n constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the",
"He was a major in the Interplanetary Service\n for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up\n his commission.\nHe was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days,\n did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for\n the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five\n years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring\n since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan\n Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later.\nI’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool,\n the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further\n ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight\n place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck,",
"at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would\n taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers\n for one ice-cold bottle of beer.\nAfter a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at\n the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made\n Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden.\n Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge,\n with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled\n with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous\n gases.\nIt was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but\n the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one\n had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had",
"vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over\n near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped\n the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron\n returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and\n waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time\n without justifying it.\nPresently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat\n down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held\n no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but\n he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and\n forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still\n healing.\nThe stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re",
"tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse\n down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface\n shifting.”\nStone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant\n surface activity.”\nThe Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no\n doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the\n Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of\n less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could\n find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—”\nIt seemed that the more we considered the problem, the\n further we got from a solution. We knew there were active\n volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though\n surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and",
"Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger\n gone. “Great balls of fire, man—\nwhere have you been hiding?\nWe’ve been trying to contact you for months!”\n“I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the\n whole idea.”\n“Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My\n friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking.\n Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His\n fingers were trembling.\nPeter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you\n want to hear.”\n“But you’ve\ngot\nto. You’re the only man on Earth who’s"
],
[
"And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing\n something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about.\nEvidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his\n arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were\n running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening,\n Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was\n set for an early departure after we got some rest.\n“And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling\n the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.”\nPeter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?”\n“Of course.”\nClaney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around\n them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place",
"Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger\n gone. “Great balls of fire, man—\nwhere have you been hiding?\nWe’ve been trying to contact you for months!”\n“I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the\n whole idea.”\n“Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My\n friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking.\n Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His\n fingers were trembling.\nPeter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you\n want to hear.”\n“But you’ve\ngot\nto. You’re the only man on Earth who’s",
"planning to attempt the Brightside.”\nBaron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read\n telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going\n to make a Brightside Crossing.”\n“At perihelion?”\n“Of course. When else?”\nThe grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment\n without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re\n not going to make the Crossing.”\n“Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded.\n“The name is Claney,” said the stranger.\nThere was a silence. Then: “Claney?\nPeter\nClaney?”\n“That’s right.”",
"attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the\n story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need\ndetails\n. Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you\n miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a\n finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma?\n Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve\n got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make\n it across where your attempt failed—”\n“You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney.\n“Of course we want to know. We\nhave\nto know.”\n“It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t",
"do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross\n the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.”\n“Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.”\nClaney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You\n can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in\n both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting.\n It was the\nplanet\nthat whipped us, that and the\nSun\n. They’ll\n whip you, too, if you try it.”\n“Never,” said Baron.\n“Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said.\nI’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as\n I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when",
"like this, and some of the best wouldn’t seem to be the most\n reliable at first glance. Anyway, personality problems weren’t\n our big problem right then.\nEquipment\nworried us first and\nroute\nnext.”\nBaron nodded in agreement. “What kind of suits did you\n have?”\n“The best insulating suits ever made,” said Claney. “Each\n one had an inner lining of a fiberglass modification, to avoid\n the clumsiness of asbestos, and carried the refrigerating unit\n and oxygen storage which we recharged from the sledges every\n eight hours. Outer layer carried a monomolecular chrome reflecting\n surface that made us glitter like Christmas trees. And\n we had a half-inch dead-air space under positive pressure between",
"can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts\n down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work\n reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column.\n I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the\n area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws.\n Then—”\n“No dice,” the Major broke in.\n“But why not? We could save ourselves days!”\n“I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When\n we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That\n means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any\n climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man\n alone—any time, any place.”",
"like it.\nOne error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking\n much about the others. I was worried about\nme\n, plenty\n worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me.\n It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the\n thought out of my mind.\nIt was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in\n the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a\n broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding\n back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on\n solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze\n rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw",
"end of an eight-hour trek.\nBut it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the\n penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven\n down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our\n route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we\n heard a sharp cry through our earphones.\nI wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and\n spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the\n top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down\n the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand\n horrible pictures racing through our minds....\nWe found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge\n and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck",
"vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over\n near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped\n the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron\n returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and\n waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time\n without justifying it.\nPresently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat\n down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held\n no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but\n he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and\n forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still\n healing.\nThe stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re",
"that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final\n analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way\n we would find out what was happening where was to be there.\nFinally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight\n rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and\n I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus\n in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset\n about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and\n he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited.\nHe was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely\n gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed,\n sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness.",
"the two layers. Warning thermocouples, of course—at\n 770 degrees, it wouldn’t take much time to fry us to cinders\n if the suits failed somewhere.”\n“How about the Bugs?”\n“They were insulated, too, but we weren’t counting on\n them too much for protection.”\n“You weren’t!” Baron exclaimed. “Why not?”\n“We’d be in and out of them too much. They gave us mobility\n and storage, but we knew we’d have to do a lot of\n forward work on foot.” Claney smiled bitterly. “Which meant\n that we had an inch of fiberglass and a half-inch of dead air\n between us and a surface temperature where lead flowed like\n water and zinc was almost at melting point and the pools of",
"Crossing\nby Alan E. Nourse\nJAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had\n a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He\n had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there\n were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman\n had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand\n pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no\n name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by\n eight.”\nNow Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring\n about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the\n Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in\n number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew",
"sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.”\nBaron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass\n as he set it down on the tablecloth.\n“Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?”\n“Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right.\n We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m\n getting to that.”\nHe settled back in his chair and continued.\nWe jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast\n with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we\n could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit\n Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest",
"I gunned my motor and nothing happened.\nI could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs,\n thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as\n the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the\n wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the\n tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for\n all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten\n lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash.\nI picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into\n an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous.\n I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed\n McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for\n the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t",
"Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but\n he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join\n this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for\n exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed\n him around like a puppy.\nIt didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting\n in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re\n liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can\n ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had\n borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and\n equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check\n and test.\nWe dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and",
"McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he\n gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.”\n“Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff.\n We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together.\n Got that?”\nMcIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and\n we nodded, too.\n“All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight,\n let’s go.”\nIt was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll\n never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a\n break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the\n first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and",
"some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our\n equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing\n and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson.\n We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models,\n with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in,\n and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges.\nThe Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he\n said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?”\n“Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know.\n“He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name\n for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve\n probably heard of him.”",
"take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.”\nThe Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that,\n Jack?”\nStone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—”\nMcIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It\n doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does\n it make any difference?”\n“I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank\n Peter along with me. Right?”\n“Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going\n to do the advance scouting?”\n“It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead\n Bug light as possible.”",
"ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous\n surface for the Bug’s pillow tires.\nI learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the\n sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it\n from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to\n a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with\n light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more\n until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It\n was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly,\n at first.\nToo smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to\n think so, too.\nMcIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves."
],
[
"before.\nTwilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside,\n of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked\n Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could\n hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On\n Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion\n and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent\n installation with a human crew could survive at either\n extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between\n Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival\n temperatures.\nSanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone\n is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to",
"That makes the Brightside of Mercury at perihelion the hottest\n place in the Solar System, with one single exception: the\n surface of the Sun itself.\nIt would be a hellish trek. Only a few men had ever learned\n just\nhow\nhellish and they never came back to tell about it. It\n was a real hell’s Crossing, but someday, I thought, somebody\n would cross it.\nI wanted to be along.\nThe Twilight Lab, near the northern pole of Mercury, was the\n obvious jumping-off place. The setup there wasn’t very extensive—a\n rocket landing, the labs and quarters for Sanderson’s\n crew sunk deep into the crust, and the tower that housed\n the Solar ’scope that Sanderson had built up there ten years",
"approach to the Sun—which made Center the hottest part of\n the planet at the hottest it ever gets.\nThe Sun was already huge and yellow over the horizon\n when we started, twice the size it appears on Earth. Every day\n that Sun would grow bigger and whiter, and every day the\n surface would get hotter. But once we reached Center, the job\n was only half done—we would still have to travel another\n two thousand miles to the opposite twilight zone. Sanderson\n was to meet us on the other side in the Laboratory’s scout ship,\n approximately sixty days from the time we jumped off.\nThat was the plan, in outline. It was up to us to cross those\n seventy miles a day, no matter how hot it became, no matter\n what terrain we had to cross. Detours would be dangerous and",
"do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross\n the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.”\n“Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.”\nClaney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You\n can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in\n both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting.\n It was the\nplanet\nthat whipped us, that and the\nSun\n. They’ll\n whip you, too, if you try it.”\n“Never,” said Baron.\n“Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said.\nI’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as\n I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when",
"Wyatt and Carpenter made the last attempt—that was in 2082,\n I think. I followed the news stories like a tri-V serial and then\n I was heartbroken when they just disappeared.\nI know now that they were a pair of idiots, starting off without\n proper equipment, with practically no knowledge of surface\n conditions, without any charts—they couldn’t have made\n a hundred miles—but I didn’t know that then and it was a\n terrible tragedy. After that, I followed Sanderson’s work in the\n Twilight Lab up there and began to get Brightside into my\n blood, sure as death.\nBut it was Mikuta’s idea to attempt a Crossing. Did you ever\n know Tom Mikuta? I don’t suppose you did. No, not Japanese—Polish-American.",
"fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of\n the Twilight Lab.\nI moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the\n Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires\n taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them,\n Stone dragged the sledges.\nEven at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on\n the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic\n ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for\n the first twenty miles.\nI kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out\n the track the early research teams had made out into the edge\n of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s",
"of a Bug; an old-fashioned half-track model of the sort that\n hadn’t been in use for years. It was wedged tight in a cut in\n the rock, an axle broken, its casing split wide open up the\n middle, half-buried in a rock slide. A dozen feet away were\n two insulated suits with white bones gleaming through the\n fiberglass helmets.\nThis was as far as Wyatt and Carpenter had gotten on\ntheir\nBrightside Crossing.\nOn the fifth driving period out, the terrain began to change.\n It looked the same, but every now and then it\nfelt\ndifferent.\n On two occasions I felt my wheels spin, with a howl of protest\n from my engine. Then, quite suddenly, the Bug gave a lurch;",
"He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were\n driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin\n with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route\n now and then, never far, but a little further each time.\nJack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with\n each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but\n I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive\n enough myself; I just managed to hide it better.\nAnd every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in\n the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare\n filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached\n constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the",
"sulfur in the shadows were boiling like oatmeal over a campfire.”\nBaron licked his lips. His fingers stroked the cool, wet glass\n as he set it down on the tablecloth.\n“Go on,” he said tautly. “You started on schedule?”\n“Oh, yes,” said Claney, “we started on schedule, all right.\n We just didn’t quite end on schedule, that was all. But I’m\n getting to that.”\nHe settled back in his chair and continued.\nWe jumped off from Twilight on a course due southeast\n with thirty days to make it to the Center of Brightside. If we\n could cross an average of seventy miles a day, we could hit\n Center exactly at perihelion, the point of Mercury’s closest",
"Crossing\nby Alan E. Nourse\nJAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had\n a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He\n had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there\n were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman\n had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand\n pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no\n name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by\n eight.”\nNow Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring\n about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the\n Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in\n number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew",
"vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over\n near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped\n the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron\n returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and\n waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time\n without justifying it.\nPresently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat\n down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held\n no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but\n he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and\n forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still\n healing.\nThe stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re",
"heat, just to have some joker come along, use your data and\n drum you out of the glory by crossing at perihelion forty-four\n days later? No, thanks. I want the Brightside without any nonsense\n about it.” He leaned across me eagerly. “I want to make\n a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface. If\n a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then,\nnobody’s\ngot\n Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.”\nI’d thought of it a thousand times and never dared consider\n it. Nobody had, since Wyatt and Carpenter disappeared. Mercury\n turns on its axis in the same time that it wheels around\n the Sun, which means that the Brightside is always facing in.",
"a sharp cut ahead where the surface dropped six feet beyond\n a deep crack.\nI let out a shout to halt the others; then I edged my Bug\n forward, peering at the cleft. It was deep and wide. I moved\n fifty yards to the left, then back to the right.\nThere was only one place that looked like a possible crossing;\n a long, narrow ledge of gray stuff that lay down across\n a section of the fault like a ramp. Even as I watched it, I could\n feel the surface crust under the Bug trembling and saw the\n ledge shift over a few feet.",
"at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would\n taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers\n for one ice-cold bottle of beer.\nAfter a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at\n the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made\n Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden.\n Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge,\n with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled\n with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous\n gases.\nIt was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but\n the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one\n had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had",
"attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the\n story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need\ndetails\n. Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you\n miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a\n finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma?\n Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve\n got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make\n it across where your attempt failed—”\n“You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney.\n“Of course we want to know. We\nhave\nto know.”\n“It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t",
"with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind\n of personality that could take a crew of wild men and\n make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand\n miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him.\nHe contacted me in New York and he was very casual at\n first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about\n old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d\n been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury,\n and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the\n year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since\n Venus and what my plans were.\n“No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?”\nHe looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?”",
"that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final\n analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way\n we would find out what was happening where was to be there.\nFinally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight\n rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and\n I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus\n in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset\n about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and\n he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited.\nHe was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely\n gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed,\n sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness.",
"I gunned my motor and nothing happened.\nI could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs,\n thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as\n the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the\n wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the\n tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for\n all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten\n lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash.\nI picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into\n an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous.\n I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed\n McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for\n the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t",
"ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous\n surface for the Bug’s pillow tires.\nI learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the\n sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it\n from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to\n a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with\n light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more\n until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It\n was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly,\n at first.\nToo smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to\n think so, too.\nMcIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves.",
"little outpost observatory and the tracks stopped. We\n were in virgin territory and already the Sun was beginning to\n bite.\nWe didn’t\nfeel\nthe heat so much those first days out. We\nsaw\nit. The refrig units kept our skins at a nice comfortable seventy-five\n degrees Fahrenheit inside our suits, but our eyes watched\n that glaring Sun and the baked yellow rocks going past, and\n some nerve pathways got twisted up, somehow. We poured\n sweat as if we were in a superheated furnace.\nWe drove eight hours and slept five. When a sleep period\n came due, we pulled the Bugs together into a square, threw up\n a light aluminum sun-shield and lay out in the dust and rocks."
],
[
"take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.”\nThe Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that,\n Jack?”\nStone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—”\nMcIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It\n doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does\n it make any difference?”\n“I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank\n Peter along with me. Right?”\n“Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going\n to do the advance scouting?”\n“It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead\n Bug light as possible.”",
"I’d heard plenty of stories about Ted McIvers and I wasn’t\n too happy to hear that he was joining us. “Kind of a daredevil,\n isn’t he?”\n“Maybe. He’s lucky and skillful. Where do you draw the\n line? We’ll need plenty of both.”\n“Have you ever worked with him?” I asked.\n“No. Are you worried?”\n“Not exactly. But Brightside is no place to count on luck.”\nThe Major laughed. “I don’t think we need to worry about\n McIvers. We understood each other when I talked up the\n trip to him and we’re going to need each other too much to\n do any fooling around.” He turned back to the supply list.\n “Meanwhile, let’s get this stuff listed and packed. We’ll need",
"some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our\n equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing\n and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson.\n We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models,\n with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in,\n and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges.\nThe Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he\n said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?”\n“Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know.\n“He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name\n for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve\n probably heard of him.”",
"that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final\n analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way\n we would find out what was happening where was to be there.\nFinally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight\n rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and\n I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus\n in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset\n about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and\n he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited.\nHe was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely\n gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed,\n sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness.",
"end of an eight-hour trek.\nBut it took one of those side trips of McIvers’ to deliver the\n penultimate blow to our already fraying nerves. He had driven\n down a side-branch of a long canyon running off west of our\n route and was almost out of sight in a cloud of ash when we\n heard a sharp cry through our earphones.\nI wheeled my Bug around with my heart in my throat and\n spotted him through the binocs, waving frantically from the\n top of his machine. The Major and I took off, lumbering down\n the gulch after him as fast as the Bugs could go, with a thousand\n horrible pictures racing through our minds....\nWe found him standing stock-still, pointing down the gorge\n and, for once, he didn’t have anything to say. It was the wreck",
"I gunned my motor and nothing happened.\nI could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs,\n thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as\n the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the\n wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the\n tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for\n all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten\n lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash.\nI picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into\n an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous.\n I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed\n McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for\n the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t",
"can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts\n down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work\n reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column.\n I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the\n area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws.\n Then—”\n“No dice,” the Major broke in.\n“But why not? We could save ourselves days!”\n“I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When\n we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That\n means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any\n climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man\n alone—any time, any place.”",
"And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing\n something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about.\nEvidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his\n arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were\n running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening,\n Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was\n set for an early departure after we got some rest.\n“And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling\n the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.”\nPeter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?”\n“Of course.”\nClaney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around\n them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place",
"Mikuta nodded. “That’s right. Peter’s Bug is stripped down\n to the frame and wheels.”\nMcIvers shook his head. “No, I mean the\nadvance\nwork.\n You need somebody out ahead—four or five miles, at least—to\n pick up the big flaws and active surface changes, don’t you?”\n He stared at the Major. “I mean, how can we tell what sort of\n a hole we may be moving into, unless we have a scout up\n ahead?”\n“That’s what we have the charts for,” the Major said\n sharply.\n“Charts! I’m talking about\ndetail\nwork. We don’t need to\n worry about the major topography. It’s the little faults you",
"McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he\n gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.”\n“Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff.\n We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together.\n Got that?”\nMcIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and\n we nodded, too.\n“All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight,\n let’s go.”\nIt was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll\n never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a\n break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the\n first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and",
"time-consuming. Delays could cost us our lives. We all knew\n that.\nThe Major briefed us on details an hour before we left.\n “Peter, you’ll take the lead Bug, the small one we stripped\n down for you. Stone and I will flank you on either side, giving\n you a hundred-yard lead. McIvers, you’ll have the job of\n dragging the sledges, so we’ll have to direct your course pretty\n closely. Peter’s job is to pick the passage at any given point.\n If there’s any doubt of safe passage, we’ll all explore ahead\n on foot before we risk the Bugs. Got that?”\nMcIvers and Stone exchanged glances. McIvers said: “Jack\n and I were planning to change around. We figured he could",
"to cut weight sharply and our time is short. Sanderson says\n we should leave in three days.”\nTwo days later, McIvers hadn’t arrived. The Major didn’t\n say much about it. Stone was getting edgy and so was I. We\n spent the second day studying charts of the Brightside, such as\n they were. The best available were pretty poor, taken from so\n far out that the detail dissolved into blurs on blow-up. They\n showed the biggest ranges of peaks and craters and faults, and\n that was all. Still, we could use them to plan a broad outline\n of our course.\n“This range here,” the Major said as we crowded around\n the board, “is largely inactive, according to Sanderson. But\n these to the south and west\ncould\nbe active. Seismograph",
"like it.\nOne error in judgment could sink us all, but I wasn’t thinking\n much about the others. I was worried about\nme\n, plenty\n worried. I kept thinking, better McIvers should go than me.\n It wasn’t healthy thinking and I knew it, but I couldn’t get the\n thought out of my mind.\nIt was a grueling eight hours and we slept poorly. Back in\n the Bug again, we moved still more slowly—edging out on a\n broad flat plateau, dodging a network of gaping surface cracks—winding\n back and forth in an effort to keep the machines on\n solid rock. I couldn’t see far ahead, because of the yellow haze\n rising from the cracks, so I was almost on top of it when I saw",
"at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would\n taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers\n for one ice-cold bottle of beer.\nAfter a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at\n the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made\n Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden.\n Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge,\n with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled\n with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous\n gases.\nIt was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but\n the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one\n had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had",
"ash, filling crevices and declivities—offering a soft, treacherous\n surface for the Bug’s pillow tires.\nI learned to read the ground, to tell a covered fault by the\n sag of the dust; I learned to spot a passable crack, and tell it\n from an impassable cut. Time after time the Bugs ground to\n a halt while we explored a passage on foot, tied together with\n light copper cable, digging, advancing, digging some more\n until we were sure the surface would carry the machines. It\n was cruel work; we slept in exhaustion. But it went smoothly,\n at first.\nToo smoothly, it seemed to me, and the others seemed to\n think so, too.\nMcIvers’ restlessness was beginning to grate on our nerves.",
"fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of\n the Twilight Lab.\nI moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the\n Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires\n taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them,\n Stone dragged the sledges.\nEven at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on\n the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic\n ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for\n the first twenty miles.\nI kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out\n the track the early research teams had made out into the edge\n of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s",
"He was a major in the Interplanetary Service\n for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up\n his commission.\nHe was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days,\n did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for\n the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five\n years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring\n since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan\n Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later.\nI’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool,\n the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further\n ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight\n place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck,",
"Stone was a youngster—hardly twenty-five, I’d say—but\n he’d been with the Major at Vulcan and had begged to join\n this trek. I had a funny feeling that Jack really didn’t care for\n exploring too much, but he thought Mikuta was God, followed\n him around like a puppy.\nIt didn’t matter to me as long as he knew what he was getting\n in for. You don’t go asking people in this game why they do it—they’re\n liable to get awfully uneasy and none of them can\n ever give you an answer that makes sense. Anyway, Stone had\n borrowed three men from the Lab, and had the supplies and\n equipment all lined up when we got there, ready to check\n and test.\nWe dug right in. With plenty of funds—tri-V money and",
"with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind\n of personality that could take a crew of wild men and\n make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand\n miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him.\nHe contacted me in New York and he was very casual at\n first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about\n old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d\n been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury,\n and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the\n year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since\n Venus and what my plans were.\n“No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?”\nHe looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?”",
"tracings suggest a lot of activity in that region, getting worse\n down toward the equator—not only volcanic, but sub-surface\n shifting.”\nStone nodded. “Sanderson told me there was probably constant\n surface activity.”\nThe Major shrugged. “Well, it’s treacherous, there’s no\n doubt of it. But the only way to avoid it is to travel over the\n Pole, which would lose us days and offer us no guarantee of\n less activity to the west. Now we might avoid some if we could\n find a pass through this range and cut sharp east—”\nIt seemed that the more we considered the problem, the\n further we got from a solution. We knew there were active\n volcanoes on the Brightside—even on the Darkside, though\n surface activity there was pretty much slowed down and"
],
[
"Crossing\nby Alan E. Nourse\nJAMES BARON was not pleased to hear that he had had\n a visitor when he reached the Red Lion that evening. He\n had no stomach for mysteries, vast or trifling, and there\n were pressing things to think about at this time. Yet the doorman\n had flagged him as he came in from the street: “A thousand\n pardons, Mr. Baron. The gentleman—he would leave no\n name. He said you’d want to see him. He will be back by\n eight.”\nNow Baron drummed his fingers on the table top, staring\n about the quiet lounge. Street trade was discouraged at the\n Red Lion, gently but persuasively; the patrons were few in\n number. Across to the right was a group that Baron knew",
"And he never stood still; he was always moving, always doing\n something with his hands, or talking, or pacing about.\nEvidently the Major decided not to press the issue of his\n arrival. There was still work to do, and an hour later we were\n running the final tests on the pressure suits. That evening,\n Stone and McIvers were thick as thieves, and everything was\n set for an early departure after we got some rest.\n“And that,” said Baron, finishing his drink and signaling\n the waiter for another pair, “was your first big mistake.”\nPeter Claney raised his eyebrows. “McIvers?”\n“Of course.”\nClaney shrugged, glanced at the small quiet tables around\n them. “There are lots of bizarre personalities around a place",
"Baron’s eyes were wide with excitement, all trace of anger\n gone. “Great balls of fire, man—\nwhere have you been hiding?\nWe’ve been trying to contact you for months!”\n“I know. I was hoping you’d quit looking and chuck the\n whole idea.”\n“Quit looking!” Baron bent forward over the table. “My\n friend, we’d given up hope, but we’ve never quit looking.\n Here, have a drink. There’s so much you can tell us.” His\n fingers were trembling.\nPeter Claney shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything you\n want to hear.”\n“But you’ve\ngot\nto. You’re the only man on Earth who’s",
"with no judgment. The Major had both. He also had the kind\n of personality that could take a crew of wild men and\n make them work like a well-oiled machine across a thousand\n miles of Venus jungle. I liked him and I trusted him.\nHe contacted me in New York and he was very casual at\n first. We spent an evening here at the Red Lion, talking about\n old times; he told me about the Vulcan business, and how he’d\n been out to see Sanderson and the Twilight Lab on Mercury,\n and how he preferred a hot trek to a cold one any day of the\n year—and then he wanted to know what I’d been doing since\n Venus and what my plans were.\n“No particular plans,” I told him. “Why?”\nHe looked me over. “How much do you weigh, Peter?”",
"vaguely—Andean climbers, or at least two of them were. Over\n near the door he recognized old Balmer, who had mapped\n the first passage to the core of Vulcan Crater on Venus. Baron\n returned his smile with a nod. Then he settled back and\n waited impatiently for the intruder who demanded his time\n without justifying it.\nPresently a small, grizzled man crossed the room and sat\n down at Baron’s table. He was short and wiry. His face held\n no key to his age—he might have been thirty or a thousand—but\n he looked weary and immensely ugly. His cheeks and\n forehead were twisted and brown, with scars that were still\n healing.\nThe stranger said, “I’m glad you waited. I’ve heard you’re",
"McIvers stared at him, his cheeks an angry red. Finally he\n gave a sullen nod. “Okay. If you say so.”\n“Well, I say so and I mean it. I don’t want any fancy stuff.\n We’re going to hit Center together, and finish the Crossing together.\n Got that?”\nMcIvers nodded. Mikuta then looked at Stone and me and\n we nodded, too.\n“All right,” he said slowly. “Now that we’ve got it straight,\n let’s go.”\nIt was hot. If I forget everything else about that trek, I’ll\n never forget that huge yellow Sun glaring down, without a\n break, hotter and hotter with every mile. We knew that the\n first few days would be the easiest and we were rested and",
"do it and neither can you. No human beings will ever cross\n the Brightside alive, not if they try for centuries.”\n“Nonsense,” Baron declared. “We will.”\nClaney shrugged. “I was there. I know what I’m saying. You\n can blame the equipment or the men—there were flaws in\n both quarters—but we just didn’t know what we were fighting.\n It was the\nplanet\nthat whipped us, that and the\nSun\n. They’ll\n whip you, too, if you try it.”\n“Never,” said Baron.\n“Let me tell you,” Peter Claney said.\nI’d been interested in the Brightside for almost as long as\n I can remember (Claney said). I guess I was about ten when",
"at each other. Then McIvers would say how good a beer would\n taste, and off we’d go. We’d have murdered our grandmothers\n for one ice-cold bottle of beer.\nAfter a few driving periods, I began to get my bearings at\n the wheel. We were moving down into desolation that made\n Earth’s old Death Valley look like a Japanese rose garden.\n Huge sun-baked cracks opened up in the floor of the gorge,\n with black cliffs jutting up on either side; the air was filled\n with a barely visible yellowish mist of sulfur and sulfurous\n gases.\nIt was a hot, barren hole, no place for any man to go, but\n the challenge was so powerful you could almost feel it. No one\n had ever crossed this land before and escaped. Those who had",
"He talked too much, while we were resting or while we were\n driving; wisecracks, witticisms, unfunny jokes that wore thin\n with repetition. He took to making side trips from the route\n now and then, never far, but a little further each time.\nJack Stone reacted quite the opposite; he grew quieter with\n each stop, more reserved and apprehensive. I didn’t like it, but\n I figured that it would pass off after a while. I was apprehensive\n enough myself; I just managed to hide it better.\nAnd every mile the Sun got bigger and whiter and higher in\n the sky and hotter. Without our ultra-violet screens and glare\n filters we would have been blinded; as it was our eyes ached\n constantly and the skin on our faces itched and tingled at the",
"that avoided those upheavals as far as possible. But in the final\n analysis, we were barely scraping the surface. The only way\n we would find out what was happening where was to be there.\nFinally, on the third day, McIvers blew in on a freight\n rocket from Venus. He’d missed the ship that the Major and\n I had taken by a few hours, and had conned his way to Venus\n in hopes of getting a hop from there. He didn’t seem too upset\n about it, as though this were his usual way of doing things and\n he couldn’t see why everyone should get so excited.\nHe was a tall, rangy man with long, wavy hair prematurely\n gray, and the sort of eyes that looked like a climber’s—half-closed,\n sleepy, almost indolent, but capable of abrupt alertness.",
"He was a major in the Interplanetary Service\n for some years and hung onto the title after he gave up\n his commission.\nHe was with Armstrong on Mars during his Service days,\n did a good deal of the original mapping and surveying for\n the Colony there. I first met him on Venus; we spent five\n years together up there doing some of the nastiest exploring\n since the Matto Grasso. Then he made the attempt on Vulcan\n Crater that paved the way for Balmer a few years later.\nI’d always liked the Major—he was big and quiet and cool,\n the sort of guy who always had things figured a little further\n ahead than anyone else and always knew what to do in a tight\n place. Too many men in this game are all nerve and luck,",
"fresh when we started down the long ragged gorge southeast of\n the Twilight Lab.\nI moved out first; back over my shoulder, I could see the\n Major and McIvers crawling out behind me, their pillow tires\n taking the rugged floor of the gorge smoothly. Behind them,\n Stone dragged the sledges.\nEven at only 30 per cent Earth gravity they were a strain on\n the big tractor, until the ski-blades bit into the fluffy volcanic\n ash blanketing the valley. We even had a path to follow for\n the first twenty miles.\nI kept my eyes pasted to the big polaroid binocs, picking out\n the track the early research teams had made out into the edge\n of Brightside. But in a couple of hours we rumbled past Sanderson’s",
"planning to attempt the Brightside.”\nBaron stared at the man for a moment. “I see you can read\n telecasts,” he said coldly. “The news was correct. We are going\n to make a Brightside Crossing.”\n“At perihelion?”\n“Of course. When else?”\nThe grizzled man searched Baron’s face for a moment\n without expression. Then he said slowly, “No, I’m afraid you’re\n not going to make the Crossing.”\n“Say, who are you, if you don’t mind?” Baron demanded.\n“The name is Claney,” said the stranger.\nThere was a silence. Then: “Claney?\nPeter\nClaney?”\n“That’s right.”",
"attempted a Brightside Crossing and lived through it! And the\n story you cleared for the news—it was nothing. We need\ndetails\n. Where did your equipment fall down? Where did you\n miscalculate? What were the trouble spots?” Baron jabbed a\n finger at Claney’s face. “That, for instance—epithelioma?\n Why? What was wrong with your glass? Your filters? We’ve\n got to know those things. If you can tell us, we can make\n it across where your attempt failed—”\n“You want to know why we failed?” asked Claney.\n“Of course we want to know. We\nhave\nto know.”\n“It’s simple. We failed because it can’t be done. We couldn’t",
"can’t see on the pictures that can kill us.” He tossed the charts\n down excitedly. “Look, let me take a Bug out ahead and work\n reconnaissance, keep five, maybe ten miles ahead of the column.\n I can stay on good solid ground, of course, but scan the\n area closely and radio back to Peter where to avoid the flaws.\n Then—”\n“No dice,” the Major broke in.\n“But why not? We could save ourselves days!”\n“I don’t care what we could save. We stay together. When\n we get to the Center, I want live men along with me. That\n means we stay within easy sight of each other at all times. Any\n climber knows that everybody is safer in a party than one man\n alone—any time, any place.”",
"some government cash the Major had talked his way around—our\n equipment was new and good. Mikuta had done the designing\n and testing himself, with a big assist from Sanderson.\n We had four Bugs, three of them the light pillow-tire models,\n with special lead-cooled cut-in engines when the heat set in,\n and one heavy-duty tractor model for pulling the sledges.\nThe Major went over them like a kid at the circus. Then he\n said, “Have you heard anything from McIvers?”\n“Who’s he?” Stone wanted to know.\n“He’ll be joining us. He’s a good man—got quite a name\n for climbing, back home.” The Major turned to me. “You’ve\n probably heard of him.”",
"I gunned my motor and nothing happened.\nI could see the dull gray stuff seeping up around the hubs,\n thick and tenacious, splattering around in steaming gobs as\n the wheels spun. I knew what had happened the moment the\n wheels gave and, a few minutes later, they chained me to the\n tractor and dragged me back out of the mire. It looked for\n all the world like thick gray mud, but it was a pit of molten\n lead, steaming under a soft layer of concealing ash.\nI picked my way more cautiously then. We were getting into\n an area of recent surface activity; the surface was really treacherous.\n I caught myself wishing that the Major had okayed\n McIvers’ scheme for an advanced scout; more dangerous for\n the individual, maybe, but I was driving blind now and I didn’t",
"take the sledges. That would give me a little more mobility.”\nThe Major looked up sharply at Stone. “Do you buy that,\n Jack?”\nStone shrugged. “I don’t mind. Mac wanted—”\nMcIvers made an impatient gesture with his hands. “It\n doesn’t matter. I just feel better when I’m on the move. Does\n it make any difference?”\n“I guess it doesn’t,” said the Major. “Then you’ll flank\n Peter along with me. Right?”\n“Sure, sure.” McIvers pulled at his lower lip. “Who’s going\n to do the advance scouting?”\n“It sounds like I am,” I cut in. “We want to keep the lead\n Bug light as possible.”",
"60 degrees with the libration. The Solar ’scope could take that\n much change and they’d get good clear observation of the Sun\n for about seventy out of the eighty-eight days it takes the planet\n to wheel around.\nThe Major was counting on Sanderson knowing something\n about Mercury as well as the Sun when we camped at the Lab\n to make final preparations.\nSanderson did. He thought we’d lost our minds and he said\n so, but he gave us all the help he could. He spent a week\n briefing Jack Stone, the third member of our party, who had\n arrived with the supplies and equipment a few days earlier.\n Poor Jack met us at the rocket landing almost bawling, Sanderson\n had given him such a gloomy picture of what Brightside\n was like.",
"before.\nTwilight Lab wasn’t particularly interested in the Brightside,\n of course—the Sun was Sanderson’s baby and he’d picked\n Mercury as the closest chunk of rock to the Sun that could\n hold his observatory. He’d chosen a good location, too. On\n Mercury, the Brightside temperature hits 770° F. at perihelion\n and the Darkside runs pretty constant at -410° F. No permanent\n installation with a human crew could survive at either\n extreme. But with Mercury’s wobble, the twilight zone between\n Brightside and Darkside offers something closer to survival\n temperatures.\nSanderson built the Lab up near the pole, where the zone\n is about five miles wide, so the temperature only varies 50 to"
]
] |
train
|
51609
|
[
"Why was Humphrey being pick-pocketed so much?",
"Why was Humphrey being observed?",
"What is the relationship between Lanfierre and MacBride?",
"Why did Humphrey decorate with a moon, neon roses, and music?",
"What wouldn't be something Humphrey would want from his life?",
"Which doesn't describe Mrs. Deshazaway?",
"Who would want to fix the mistake made in the story?",
"What is unlikely to happen next?",
"What lesson couldn't be gleaned from this story?"
] |
[
[
"to plant information necessary to arrest him",
"it's a typical behavior in this city",
"people typically pick-pocket him because he's distracted",
"for Lanfierre to get to know Humphrey's personality better"
],
[
"he didn't act like he was expected to",
"to make sure he wasn't a danger to society",
"he was to be observed before he was allowed to be married",
"he was suspected of committing crimes"
],
[
"Lanfierre is training in MacBride",
"MacBride is Lanfierre's superior",
"they are partners working on the case",
"Lanfierre is the aberration expert, and MacBride is a cop"
],
[
"to give Mrs. Deshazaway something that looked like her past",
"to seduce Mrs. Deshazaway",
"he was trying to decorate his home uniquely",
"these were items he had read about from the past"
],
[
"to experience real weather",
"a family",
"a promotion from his job",
"to escape the dome"
],
[
"she cares about Humphrey",
"she was enthusiastic and passionate",
"she cares about what her neighbors think",
"she doesn't believe in love"
],
[
"MacBride wouldn't go into the house with Lanfierre",
"Humphrey would not create the wind maker in his house",
"Lanfierre would listen to MacBride in Humphrey's house",
"Agnes wouldn't give Humphrey a condition for marriage"
],
[
"Agnes and Humphrey will leave the dome",
"the government will rethink some of the dome's policies",
"Humphrey's house will fall apart",
"the dome will be repaired"
],
[
"no matter how much you strive for perfection, there will always be something preventing it",
"work on your dreams until they become a reality",
"history tends to repeat itself",
"love can accomplish many things"
]
] |
[
4,
1,
4,
2,
3,
4,
3,
2,
3
] |
[
1,
1,
0,
0,
0,
0,
1,
1,
1
] |
[
[
"It should have been difficult. Under the circumstances it was a\n masterpiece of pocket picking. What made it possible was Humphrey\n Fownes' abstraction; he was an uncommonly preoccupied individual. He\n was strolling along a quiet residential avenue: small private houses,\n one after another, a place of little traffic and minimum distractions.\n But he was thinking about weather, which was an unusual subject to\n begin with for a person living in a domed city. He was thinking so\n deeply about it that it never occurred to him that entirely too many\n people were bumping into him. He was thinking about Optimum Dome\n Conditions (a crisp 59 degrees, a mildly dessicated 47%) when a bogus\n postman, who pretended to be reading a postal card, jostled him. In the",
"confusion of spilled letters and apologies from both sides, the postman\n rifled Fownes's handkerchief and inside jacket pockets.\nHe was still thinking about temperature and humidity when a pretty girl\n happened along with something in her eye. They collided. She got his\n right and left jacket pockets. It was much too much for coincidence.\n The sidewalk was wide enough to allow four people to pass at one time.\n He should surely have become suspicious when two men engaged in a\n heated argument came along. In the ensuing contretemps they emptied his\n rear pants pockets, got his wristwatch and restored the contents of the\nhandkerchief pocket. It all went off very smoothly, like a game of put\n and take—the sole difference being that Humphrey Fownes had no idea he\n was playing.",
"A FALL OF GLASS\nBy STANLEY R. LEE\n\n\n Illustrated by DILLON\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1960.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe weatherman was always right:\n \nTemperature, 59; humidity, 47%;\n \noccasional light showers—but of what?\nThe pockets of Mr. Humphrey Fownes were being picked outrageously.\n\n\n It was a splendid day. The temperature was a crisp 59 degrees, the\n humidity a mildly dessicated 47%. The sun was a flaming orange ball in\n a cloudless blue sky.\n\n\n His pockets were picked eleven times.",
"Humphrey Fownes' preoccupation finally came to an end when he was one\n block away from his house. It was then that he realized something\n unusual must have occurred. An orange patrol car of the security police\n was parked at his front door. And something else was happening too.\n\n\n His house was dancing.\n\n\n It was disconcerting, and at the same time enchanting, to watch one's\n residence frisking about on its foundation. It was such a strange sight\n that for the moment he didn't give a thought to what might be causing\n it. But when he stepped gingerly onto the porch, which was doing its\n own independent gavotte, he reached for the doorknob with an immense\n curiosity.\n\n\n The door flung itself open and knocked him back off the porch.",
"Humphrey Fownes strode through the puffs of falling glass still\n intrigued by a temperature that was always 59 degrees, by a humidity\n that was always 47%, by weather that was always Optimum. It was this\n rather than skill that enabled the police to maintain such a tight\n surveillance on him, a surveillance that went to the extent of getting\n his fingerprints off the postman's bag, and which photographed, X-rayed\n and chemically analyzed the contents of his pockets before returning\n them. Two blocks away from his home a careless housewife spilled a\n five-pound bag of flour as he was passing. It was really plaster of\n Paris. He left his shoe prints, stride measurement, height, weight and\n handedness behind.\n\n\n By the time Fownes reached his front door an entire dossier complete\n with photographs had been prepared and was being read by two men in an\n orange patrol car parked down the street.\nLanfierre had undoubtedly been affected by his job.",
"Sitting behind the wheel of the orange car, he watched Humphrey Fownes\n approach with a distinct feeling of admiration, although it was an\n odd, objective kind of admiration, clinical in nature. It was similar\n to that of a pathologist observing for the first time a new and\n particularly virulent strain of pneumococcus under his microscope.\n\n\n Lanfierre's job was to ferret out aberration. It couldn't be tolerated\n within the confines of a dome. Conformity had become more than a social\n force; it was a physical necessity. And, after years of working at it,\n Lanfierre had become an admirer of eccentricity. He came to see that\n genuine quirks were rare and, as time went on, due partly to his own\n small efforts, rarer.\n\n\n Fownes was a masterpiece of queerness. He was utterly inexplicable.\n Lanfierre was almost proud of Humphrey Fownes.",
"\"And the\nwater\n,\" Lanfierre said. \"The\nwater\nhe uses! He could be\n the thirstiest and cleanest man in the city. He could have a whole\n family of thirsty and clean kids, and he\nstill\nwouldn't need all that\n water.\"\n\n\n The lieutenant had picked up the dossier. He thumbed through the pages\n now in amazement. \"Where do you get a guy like this?\" he asked. \"Did\n you see what he carries in his pockets?\"\n\n\n \"And compasses won't work on this street.\"\n\n\n The lieutenant lit a cigarette and sighed.\n\n\n He usually sighed when making the decision to raid a dwelling. It\n expressed his weariness and distaste for people who went off and got\n neurotic when they could be enjoying a happy, normal existence. There\n was something implacable about his sighs.",
"He still didn't see the orange car parked down the street.\n\"Men are too perishable,\" Mrs. Deshazaway said over dinner. \"For all\n practical purposes I'm never going to marry again. All my husbands die.\"\n\n\n \"Would you pass the beets, please?\" Humphrey Fownes said.\n\n\n She handed him a platter of steaming red beets. \"And don't look at me\n that way,\" she said. \"I'm\nnot\ngoing to marry you and if you want\n reasons I'll give you four of them. Andrew. Curt. Norman. And Alphonse.\"",
"Dialectically out in left field, Humphrey Fownes waited for a lull\n in the ensuing discussion and then politely inquired how it might be\n arranged for him to get out.\n\n\n \"Out?\" the leader said, frowning. \"Out? Out where?\"\n\n\n \"Outside the dome.\"\n\n\n \"Oh. All in good time, my friend. One day we shall all pick up and\n leave.\"\n\n\n \"And that day I'll await impatiently,\" Fownes replied with marvelous\n tact, \"because it will be lonely out there for the two of us. My future\n wife and I have to leave\nnow\n.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. Ridiculous! You have to be prepared for the Open Country.\n You can't just up and leave, it would be suicide, Fownes. And\n dialectically very poor.\"",
"\"Help!\" Lieutenant MacBride called.\n\n\n Standing in the doorway with his wet hair plastered down on his\n dripping scalp, the wind roaring about him, the piano rumbling in the\n distance like thunder, Humphrey Fownes suddenly saw it all very clearly.\n\n\n \"\nWinds\n,\" he said in a whisper.\n\n\n \"What's happening?\" MacBride yelled, crouching behind the sofa.\n\n\n \"\nMarch\nwinds,\" he said.\n\n\n \"What?!\"\n\n\n \"April showers!\"",
"\"Then you\nhave\ndiscussed preparations, the practical necessities of\n life in the Open Country. Food, clothing, a weapon perhaps? What else?\n Have I left anything out?\"\n\n\n The leader sighed. \"The gentleman wants to know if he's left anything\n out,\" he said to the group.\n\n\n Fownes looked around at them, at some dozen pained expressions.\n\n\n \"Tell the man what he's forgotten,\" the leader said, walking to the far\n window and turning his back quite pointedly on them.\n\n\n Everyone spoke at the same moment. \"\nA sound foreign policy\n,\" they all\n said, it being almost too obvious for words.\nOn his way out the librarian shouted at him: \"\nA Tale of a Tub\n,\n thirty-five years overdue!\" She was calculating the fine as he closed\n the door.",
"He went downstairs to watch out the living room window. This was\n important; the window had a really fixed attitude about air currents.\n The neon roses bent and tinkled against each other as the wind rose and\n the moon shook a trifle as it whispered\nCuddle Up a Little Closer\n.",
"Lanfierre sat stiffly behind the wheel, affronted. The cynical MacBride\n couldn't really appreciate fine aberrations. In some ways MacBride\n was a barbarian. Lanfierre had held out on Fownes for months. He\n had even contrived to engage him in conversation once, a pleasantly\n absurd, irrational little chat that titillated him for weeks. It was\n only with the greatest reluctance that he finally mentioned Fownes\n to MacBride. After years of searching for differences Lanfierre had\n seen how extraordinarily repetitious people were, echoes really, dimly\n resounding echoes, each believing itself whole and separate. They spoke\n in an incessant chatter of cliches, and their actions were unbelievably\n trite.\n\n\n Then a fine robust freak came along and the others—the echoes—refused\n to believe it. The lieutenant was probably on the point of suggesting a\n vacation.\n\n\n \"Why don't you take a vacation?\" Lieutenant MacBride suggested.",
"\"He'll be coming out soon,\" Lanfierre said. \"He eats supper next door\n with a widow. Then he goes to the library. Always the same. Supper at\n the widow's next door and then the library.\"\n\n\n MacBride's eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. \"The library?\" he\n said. \"Is he in with that bunch?\"\n\n\n Lanfierre nodded.\n\n\n \"Should be very interesting,\" MacBride said slowly.\n\n\n \"I can't wait to see what he's got in there,\" Lanfierre murmured,\n watching the house with a consuming interest.",
"\"Tight as a kite,\" he thought, satisfied. He continued on toward the\n closet at the foot of the stairs and then stopped again. Was that\n right? No,\nsnug as a hug in a rug\n. He went on, thinking:\nThe old\n devils.\nThe downstairs closet was like a great watch case, a profusion of\n wheels surrounding the Master Mechanism, which was a miniature see-saw\n that went back and forth 365-1/4 times an hour. The wheels had a\n curious stateliness about them. They were all quite old, salvaged from\n grandfather's clocks and music boxes and they went around in graceful\n circles at the rate of 30 and 31 times an hour ... although there\n was one slightly eccentric cam that vacillated between 28 and 29. He\n watched as they spun and flashed in the darkness, and then set them for\n seven o'clock in the evening, April seventh, any year.\n\n\n Outside, the domed city vanished.",
"They sat there smoking in silence and every now and then their eyes\n widened as the house danced a new step.\nFownes stopped on the porch to brush the plaster of paris off his\n shoes. He hadn't seen the patrol car and this intense preoccupation\n of his was also responsible for the dancing house—he simply hadn't\n noticed. There was a certain amount of vibration, of course. He\n had a bootleg pipe connected into the dome blower system, and the\n high-pressure air caused some buffeting against the thin walls of the\n house. At least, he called it buffeting; he'd never thought to watch\n from outside.\n\n\n He went in and threw his jacket on the sofa, there being no room\n left in the closets. Crossing the living room he stopped to twist a\n draw-pull.\n\n\n Every window slammed shut.",
"He could hear her moving about and then felt her hands on his\n shoulders. \"And what about those\nvery\nelaborate plans you've been\n making to seduce me?\"\n\n\n Fownes froze with three asparagus hanging from his fork.\n\n\n \"Don't you think\nthey'll\nfind out?\nI\nfound out and you can bet\nthey\nwill. It's my fault, I guess. I talk too much. And I don't\n always tell the truth. To be completely honest with you, Mr. Fownes, it\n wasn't the old customs at all standing between us, it was air. I can't\n have another man die on me, it's bad for my self-esteem. And now you've\n gone and done something good and criminal, something peculiar.\"\nFownes put his fork down. \"Dear Mrs. Deshazaway,\" he started to say.",
"Recruiting Lieutenant MacBride from behind his sofa, the men carefully\n edged out of the house and forced the front door shut.\n\n\n The wind died. The fog dispersed. They stood dripping in the Optimum\n Dome Conditions of the bright avenue.\n\n\n \"I never figured on\nthis\n,\" Lanfierre said, shaking his head.\n\n\n With the front door closed the wind quickly built up inside the house.\n They could see the furnishing whirl past the windows. The house did a\n wild, elated jig.\n\n\n \"What kind of a place\nis\nthis?\" MacBride said, his courage beginning\n to return. He took out his notebook but it was a soggy mess. He tossed\n it away.\n\n\n \"Sure, he was\ndifferent\n,\" Lanfierre murmured. \"I knew that much.\"",
"Fownes smiled weakly and looked again at the dust jacket. The twister\n was unquestionably a meteorological phenomenon. It spun ominously, like\n a malevolent top, and coursed the countryside destructively, carrying\n a Dorothy to an Oz. He couldn't help wondering if twisters did anything\n to feminine pulses, if they could possibly be a part of a moonlit\n night, with cocktails and roses. He absently stuffed the dust jacket\n in his pocket and went on into the other rooms, the librarian mumbling\n after him: \"Edna Murdoch Featherstone, April 21, 1991,\" as though\n reading inscriptions on a tombstone.\nThe Movement met in what had been the children's room, where unpaid\n ladies of the afternoon had once upon a time read stories to other\n people's offspring. The members sat around at the miniature tables\n looking oddly like giants fled from their fairy tales, protesting.",
"\"A twister,\" she replied quickly. \"Now listen to\nthis\n. Seven years\n later on March 21, 1986, Ella Marshall Davidson took out the same book.\n What do you make of\nthat\n?\"\n\n\n \"I'd say,\" Humphrey Fownes said, \"that he ... that he recommended it\n to her, that one day they met in the street and he told her about\n this book and then they ... they went to the library together and she\n borrowed it and eventually, why eventually they got married.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! They were brother and sister!\" the librarian shouted in her\n parched voice, her old buckram eyes laughing with cunning."
],
[
"Sitting behind the wheel of the orange car, he watched Humphrey Fownes\n approach with a distinct feeling of admiration, although it was an\n odd, objective kind of admiration, clinical in nature. It was similar\n to that of a pathologist observing for the first time a new and\n particularly virulent strain of pneumococcus under his microscope.\n\n\n Lanfierre's job was to ferret out aberration. It couldn't be tolerated\n within the confines of a dome. Conformity had become more than a social\n force; it was a physical necessity. And, after years of working at it,\n Lanfierre had become an admirer of eccentricity. He came to see that\n genuine quirks were rare and, as time went on, due partly to his own\n small efforts, rarer.\n\n\n Fownes was a masterpiece of queerness. He was utterly inexplicable.\n Lanfierre was almost proud of Humphrey Fownes.",
"Humphrey Fownes strode through the puffs of falling glass still\n intrigued by a temperature that was always 59 degrees, by a humidity\n that was always 47%, by weather that was always Optimum. It was this\n rather than skill that enabled the police to maintain such a tight\n surveillance on him, a surveillance that went to the extent of getting\n his fingerprints off the postman's bag, and which photographed, X-rayed\n and chemically analyzed the contents of his pockets before returning\n them. Two blocks away from his home a careless housewife spilled a\n five-pound bag of flour as he was passing. It was really plaster of\n Paris. He left his shoe prints, stride measurement, height, weight and\n handedness behind.\n\n\n By the time Fownes reached his front door an entire dossier complete\n with photographs had been prepared and was being read by two men in an\n orange patrol car parked down the street.\nLanfierre had undoubtedly been affected by his job.",
"Humphrey Fownes' preoccupation finally came to an end when he was one\n block away from his house. It was then that he realized something\n unusual must have occurred. An orange patrol car of the security police\n was parked at his front door. And something else was happening too.\n\n\n His house was dancing.\n\n\n It was disconcerting, and at the same time enchanting, to watch one's\n residence frisking about on its foundation. It was such a strange sight\n that for the moment he didn't give a thought to what might be causing\n it. But when he stepped gingerly onto the porch, which was doing its\n own independent gavotte, he reached for the doorknob with an immense\n curiosity.\n\n\n The door flung itself open and knocked him back off the porch.",
"It should have been difficult. Under the circumstances it was a\n masterpiece of pocket picking. What made it possible was Humphrey\n Fownes' abstraction; he was an uncommonly preoccupied individual. He\n was strolling along a quiet residential avenue: small private houses,\n one after another, a place of little traffic and minimum distractions.\n But he was thinking about weather, which was an unusual subject to\n begin with for a person living in a domed city. He was thinking so\n deeply about it that it never occurred to him that entirely too many\n people were bumping into him. He was thinking about Optimum Dome\n Conditions (a crisp 59 degrees, a mildly dessicated 47%) when a bogus\n postman, who pretended to be reading a postal card, jostled him. In the",
"\"He'll be coming out soon,\" Lanfierre said. \"He eats supper next door\n with a widow. Then he goes to the library. Always the same. Supper at\n the widow's next door and then the library.\"\n\n\n MacBride's eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. \"The library?\" he\n said. \"Is he in with that bunch?\"\n\n\n Lanfierre nodded.\n\n\n \"Should be very interesting,\" MacBride said slowly.\n\n\n \"I can't wait to see what he's got in there,\" Lanfierre murmured,\n watching the house with a consuming interest.",
"He still didn't see the orange car parked down the street.\n\"Men are too perishable,\" Mrs. Deshazaway said over dinner. \"For all\n practical purposes I'm never going to marry again. All my husbands die.\"\n\n\n \"Would you pass the beets, please?\" Humphrey Fownes said.\n\n\n She handed him a platter of steaming red beets. \"And don't look at me\n that way,\" she said. \"I'm\nnot\ngoing to marry you and if you want\n reasons I'll give you four of them. Andrew. Curt. Norman. And Alphonse.\"",
"confusion of spilled letters and apologies from both sides, the postman\n rifled Fownes's handkerchief and inside jacket pockets.\nHe was still thinking about temperature and humidity when a pretty girl\n happened along with something in her eye. They collided. She got his\n right and left jacket pockets. It was much too much for coincidence.\n The sidewalk was wide enough to allow four people to pass at one time.\n He should surely have become suspicious when two men engaged in a\n heated argument came along. In the ensuing contretemps they emptied his\n rear pants pockets, got his wristwatch and restored the contents of the\nhandkerchief pocket. It all went off very smoothly, like a game of put\n and take—the sole difference being that Humphrey Fownes had no idea he\n was playing.",
"\"A twister,\" she replied quickly. \"Now listen to\nthis\n. Seven years\n later on March 21, 1986, Ella Marshall Davidson took out the same book.\n What do you make of\nthat\n?\"\n\n\n \"I'd say,\" Humphrey Fownes said, \"that he ... that he recommended it\n to her, that one day they met in the street and he told her about\n this book and then they ... they went to the library together and she\n borrowed it and eventually, why eventually they got married.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! They were brother and sister!\" the librarian shouted in her\n parched voice, her old buckram eyes laughing with cunning.",
"They sat there smoking in silence and every now and then their eyes\n widened as the house danced a new step.\nFownes stopped on the porch to brush the plaster of paris off his\n shoes. He hadn't seen the patrol car and this intense preoccupation\n of his was also responsible for the dancing house—he simply hadn't\n noticed. There was a certain amount of vibration, of course. He\n had a bootleg pipe connected into the dome blower system, and the\n high-pressure air caused some buffeting against the thin walls of the\n house. At least, he called it buffeting; he'd never thought to watch\n from outside.\n\n\n He went in and threw his jacket on the sofa, there being no room\n left in the closets. Crossing the living room he stopped to twist a\n draw-pull.\n\n\n Every window slammed shut.",
"\"And the\nwater\n,\" Lanfierre said. \"The\nwater\nhe uses! He could be\n the thirstiest and cleanest man in the city. He could have a whole\n family of thirsty and clean kids, and he\nstill\nwouldn't need all that\n water.\"\n\n\n The lieutenant had picked up the dossier. He thumbed through the pages\n now in amazement. \"Where do you get a guy like this?\" he asked. \"Did\n you see what he carries in his pockets?\"\n\n\n \"And compasses won't work on this street.\"\n\n\n The lieutenant lit a cigarette and sighed.\n\n\n He usually sighed when making the decision to raid a dwelling. It\n expressed his weariness and distaste for people who went off and got\n neurotic when they could be enjoying a happy, normal existence. There\n was something implacable about his sighs.",
"\"Help!\" Lieutenant MacBride called.\n\n\n Standing in the doorway with his wet hair plastered down on his\n dripping scalp, the wind roaring about him, the piano rumbling in the\n distance like thunder, Humphrey Fownes suddenly saw it all very clearly.\n\n\n \"\nWinds\n,\" he said in a whisper.\n\n\n \"What's happening?\" MacBride yelled, crouching behind the sofa.\n\n\n \"\nMarch\nwinds,\" he said.\n\n\n \"What?!\"\n\n\n \"April showers!\"",
"He went downstairs to watch out the living room window. This was\n important; the window had a really fixed attitude about air currents.\n The neon roses bent and tinkled against each other as the wind rose and\n the moon shook a trifle as it whispered\nCuddle Up a Little Closer\n.",
"Dialectically out in left field, Humphrey Fownes waited for a lull\n in the ensuing discussion and then politely inquired how it might be\n arranged for him to get out.\n\n\n \"Out?\" the leader said, frowning. \"Out? Out where?\"\n\n\n \"Outside the dome.\"\n\n\n \"Oh. All in good time, my friend. One day we shall all pick up and\n leave.\"\n\n\n \"And that day I'll await impatiently,\" Fownes replied with marvelous\n tact, \"because it will be lonely out there for the two of us. My future\n wife and I have to leave\nnow\n.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. Ridiculous! You have to be prepared for the Open Country.\n You can't just up and leave, it would be suicide, Fownes. And\n dialectically very poor.\"",
"\"\nMy.\n\" Mrs. Deshazaway rose, paced slowly to the window and then came\n back to the table, standing directly over Fownes. \"If you can get us\n outside the dome,\" she said, \"out where a man stays\nwarm\nlong enough\n for his wife to get to know him ... if you can do that, Mr. Fownes ...\n you may call me Agnes.\"\nWhen Humphrey Fownes stepped out of the widow's house, there was a\n look of such intense abstraction on his features that Lanfierre felt a\n wistful desire to get out of the car and walk along with the man. It\n would be such a\ndeliciously\ninsane experience. (\"April has thirty\n days,\" Fownes mumbled, passing them, \"because thirty is the largest\n number such that all smaller numbers not having a common divisor\n with it are\nprimes\n.\" MacBride frowned and added it to the dossier.\n Lanfierre sighed.)",
"Lanfierre sat stiffly behind the wheel, affronted. The cynical MacBride\n couldn't really appreciate fine aberrations. In some ways MacBride\n was a barbarian. Lanfierre had held out on Fownes for months. He\n had even contrived to engage him in conversation once, a pleasantly\n absurd, irrational little chat that titillated him for weeks. It was\n only with the greatest reluctance that he finally mentioned Fownes\n to MacBride. After years of searching for differences Lanfierre had\n seen how extraordinarily repetitious people were, echoes really, dimly\n resounding echoes, each believing itself whole and separate. They spoke\n in an incessant chatter of cliches, and their actions were unbelievably\n trite.\n\n\n Then a fine robust freak came along and the others—the echoes—refused\n to believe it. The lieutenant was probably on the point of suggesting a\n vacation.\n\n\n \"Why don't you take a vacation?\" Lieutenant MacBride suggested.",
"A FALL OF GLASS\nBy STANLEY R. LEE\n\n\n Illustrated by DILLON\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1960.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe weatherman was always right:\n \nTemperature, 59; humidity, 47%;\n \noccasional light showers—but of what?\nThe pockets of Mr. Humphrey Fownes were being picked outrageously.\n\n\n It was a splendid day. The temperature was a crisp 59 degrees, the\n humidity a mildly dessicated 47%. The sun was a flaming orange ball in\n a cloudless blue sky.\n\n\n His pockets were picked eleven times.",
"\"I'll tell you something else,\" Lanfierre went on. \"The\nwindows\nall\n close at the same time. You'll be watching and all of a sudden every\n single window in the place will drop to its sill.\" Lanfierre leaned\n back in the seat, his eyes still on the house. \"Sometimes I think\n there's a whole crowd of people in there waiting for a signal—as if\n they all had something important to say but had to close the windows\n first so no one could hear. Why else close the windows in a domed city?\n And then as soon as the place is buttoned up they all explode into\n conversation—and that's why the house shakes.\"\n\n\n MacBride whistled.\n\n\n \"No, I don't need a vacation.\"\n\n\n A falling piece of glass dissolved into a puff of gossamer against the\n windshield. Lanfierre started and bumped his knee on the steering wheel.",
"\"Sometimes his house\nshakes\n,\" Lanfierre said.\n\n\n \"House shakes,\" Lieutenant MacBride wrote in his notebook. Then he\n stopped and frowned. He reread what he'd just written.\n\n\n \"You heard right. The house\nshakes\n,\" Lanfierre said, savoring it.\n\n\n MacBride looked at the Fownes house through the magnifying glass of\n the windshield. \"Like from ...\nside to side\n?\" he asked in a somewhat\n patronizing tone of voice.\n\n\n \"And up and down.\"\n\n\n MacBride returned the notebook to the breast pocket of his orange\n uniform. \"Go on,\" he said, amused. \"It sounds interesting.\" He tossed\n the dossier carelessly on the back seat.",
"Recruiting Lieutenant MacBride from behind his sofa, the men carefully\n edged out of the house and forced the front door shut.\n\n\n The wind died. The fog dispersed. They stood dripping in the Optimum\n Dome Conditions of the bright avenue.\n\n\n \"I never figured on\nthis\n,\" Lanfierre said, shaking his head.\n\n\n With the front door closed the wind quickly built up inside the house.\n They could see the furnishing whirl past the windows. The house did a\n wild, elated jig.\n\n\n \"What kind of a place\nis\nthis?\" MacBride said, his courage beginning\n to return. He took out his notebook but it was a soggy mess. He tossed\n it away.\n\n\n \"Sure, he was\ndifferent\n,\" Lanfierre murmured. \"I knew that much.\"",
"He watched with folded arms, considering how he would start.\nMy dear\n Mrs. Deshazaway.\nToo formal. They'd be looking out at the romantic\n garden; time to be a bit forward.\nMy very dear Mrs. Deshazaway.\nNo.\n Contrived. How about a simple,\nDear Mrs. Deshazaway\n. That might be\n it.\nI was wondering, seeing as how it's so late, if you wouldn't\n rather stay over instead of going home....\nPreoccupied, he hadn't noticed the winds building up, didn't hear the\n shaking and rattling of the pipes. There were attic pipes connected\n to wall pipes and wall pipes connected to cellar pipes, and they made\n one gigantic skeleton that began to rattle its bones and dance as\n high-pressure air from the dome blower rushed in, slowly opening the\n Studebaker valve wider and wider...."
],
[
"Lanfierre sat stiffly behind the wheel, affronted. The cynical MacBride\n couldn't really appreciate fine aberrations. In some ways MacBride\n was a barbarian. Lanfierre had held out on Fownes for months. He\n had even contrived to engage him in conversation once, a pleasantly\n absurd, irrational little chat that titillated him for weeks. It was\n only with the greatest reluctance that he finally mentioned Fownes\n to MacBride. After years of searching for differences Lanfierre had\n seen how extraordinarily repetitious people were, echoes really, dimly\n resounding echoes, each believing itself whole and separate. They spoke\n in an incessant chatter of cliches, and their actions were unbelievably\n trite.\n\n\n Then a fine robust freak came along and the others—the echoes—refused\n to believe it. The lieutenant was probably on the point of suggesting a\n vacation.\n\n\n \"Why don't you take a vacation?\" Lieutenant MacBride suggested.",
"\"He'll be coming out soon,\" Lanfierre said. \"He eats supper next door\n with a widow. Then he goes to the library. Always the same. Supper at\n the widow's next door and then the library.\"\n\n\n MacBride's eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. \"The library?\" he\n said. \"Is he in with that bunch?\"\n\n\n Lanfierre nodded.\n\n\n \"Should be very interesting,\" MacBride said slowly.\n\n\n \"I can't wait to see what he's got in there,\" Lanfierre murmured,\n watching the house with a consuming interest.",
"Recruiting Lieutenant MacBride from behind his sofa, the men carefully\n edged out of the house and forced the front door shut.\n\n\n The wind died. The fog dispersed. They stood dripping in the Optimum\n Dome Conditions of the bright avenue.\n\n\n \"I never figured on\nthis\n,\" Lanfierre said, shaking his head.\n\n\n With the front door closed the wind quickly built up inside the house.\n They could see the furnishing whirl past the windows. The house did a\n wild, elated jig.\n\n\n \"What kind of a place\nis\nthis?\" MacBride said, his courage beginning\n to return. He took out his notebook but it was a soggy mess. He tossed\n it away.\n\n\n \"Sure, he was\ndifferent\n,\" Lanfierre murmured. \"I knew that much.\"",
"\"Sometimes his house\nshakes\n,\" Lanfierre said.\n\n\n \"House shakes,\" Lieutenant MacBride wrote in his notebook. Then he\n stopped and frowned. He reread what he'd just written.\n\n\n \"You heard right. The house\nshakes\n,\" Lanfierre said, savoring it.\n\n\n MacBride looked at the Fownes house through the magnifying glass of\n the windshield. \"Like from ...\nside to side\n?\" he asked in a somewhat\n patronizing tone of voice.\n\n\n \"And up and down.\"\n\n\n MacBride returned the notebook to the breast pocket of his orange\n uniform. \"Go on,\" he said, amused. \"It sounds interesting.\" He tossed\n the dossier carelessly on the back seat.",
"\"I'll tell you something else,\" Lanfierre went on. \"The\nwindows\nall\n close at the same time. You'll be watching and all of a sudden every\n single window in the place will drop to its sill.\" Lanfierre leaned\n back in the seat, his eyes still on the house. \"Sometimes I think\n there's a whole crowd of people in there waiting for a signal—as if\n they all had something important to say but had to close the windows\n first so no one could hear. Why else close the windows in a domed city?\n And then as soon as the place is buttoned up they all explode into\n conversation—and that's why the house shakes.\"\n\n\n MacBride whistled.\n\n\n \"No, I don't need a vacation.\"\n\n\n A falling piece of glass dissolved into a puff of gossamer against the\n windshield. Lanfierre started and bumped his knee on the steering wheel.",
"\"No, you don't need a rest,\" MacBride said. \"You're starting to see\n flying houses, hear loud babbling voices. You've got winds in your\n brain, Lanfierre, breezes of fatigue, zephyrs of irrationality—\"\n\n\n At that moment, all at once, every last window in the house slammed\n shut.\n\n\n The street was deserted and quiet, not a movement, not a sound.\n MacBride and Lanfierre both leaned forward, as if waiting for the\n ghostly babble of voices to commence.\n\n\n The house began to shake.\n\n\n It rocked from side to side, it pitched forward and back, it yawed and\n dipped and twisted, straining at the mooring of its foundation. The\n house could have been preparing to take off and sail down the....\n\n\n MacBride looked at Lanfierre and Lanfierre looked at MacBride and then\n they both looked back at the dancing house.",
"Humphrey Fownes strode through the puffs of falling glass still\n intrigued by a temperature that was always 59 degrees, by a humidity\n that was always 47%, by weather that was always Optimum. It was this\n rather than skill that enabled the police to maintain such a tight\n surveillance on him, a surveillance that went to the extent of getting\n his fingerprints off the postman's bag, and which photographed, X-rayed\n and chemically analyzed the contents of his pockets before returning\n them. Two blocks away from his home a careless housewife spilled a\n five-pound bag of flour as he was passing. It was really plaster of\n Paris. He left his shoe prints, stride measurement, height, weight and\n handedness behind.\n\n\n By the time Fownes reached his front door an entire dossier complete\n with photographs had been prepared and was being read by two men in an\n orange patrol car parked down the street.\nLanfierre had undoubtedly been affected by his job.",
"\"It's like this, MacBride. Do you know what a wind is? A breeze? A\n zephyr?\"\n\n\n \"I've heard some.\"\n\n\n \"They say there are mountain-tops where winds blow all the time. Strong\n winds, MacBride. Winds like you and I can't imagine. And if there was\n a house sitting on such a mountain and if winds\ndid\nblow, it would\n shake exactly the way that one does. Sometimes I get the feeling the\n whole place is going to slide off its foundation and go sailing down\n the avenue.\"\nLieutenant MacBride pursed his lips.",
"Sitting behind the wheel of the orange car, he watched Humphrey Fownes\n approach with a distinct feeling of admiration, although it was an\n odd, objective kind of admiration, clinical in nature. It was similar\n to that of a pathologist observing for the first time a new and\n particularly virulent strain of pneumococcus under his microscope.\n\n\n Lanfierre's job was to ferret out aberration. It couldn't be tolerated\n within the confines of a dome. Conformity had become more than a social\n force; it was a physical necessity. And, after years of working at it,\n Lanfierre had become an admirer of eccentricity. He came to see that\n genuine quirks were rare and, as time went on, due partly to his own\n small efforts, rarer.\n\n\n Fownes was a masterpiece of queerness. He was utterly inexplicable.\n Lanfierre was almost proud of Humphrey Fownes.",
"\"And the\nwater\n,\" Lanfierre said. \"The\nwater\nhe uses! He could be\n the thirstiest and cleanest man in the city. He could have a whole\n family of thirsty and clean kids, and he\nstill\nwouldn't need all that\n water.\"\n\n\n The lieutenant had picked up the dossier. He thumbed through the pages\n now in amazement. \"Where do you get a guy like this?\" he asked. \"Did\n you see what he carries in his pockets?\"\n\n\n \"And compasses won't work on this street.\"\n\n\n The lieutenant lit a cigarette and sighed.\n\n\n He usually sighed when making the decision to raid a dwelling. It\n expressed his weariness and distaste for people who went off and got\n neurotic when they could be enjoying a happy, normal existence. There\n was something implacable about his sighs.",
"\"\nMy.\n\" Mrs. Deshazaway rose, paced slowly to the window and then came\n back to the table, standing directly over Fownes. \"If you can get us\n outside the dome,\" she said, \"out where a man stays\nwarm\nlong enough\n for his wife to get to know him ... if you can do that, Mr. Fownes ...\n you may call me Agnes.\"\nWhen Humphrey Fownes stepped out of the widow's house, there was a\n look of such intense abstraction on his features that Lanfierre felt a\n wistful desire to get out of the car and walk along with the man. It\n would be such a\ndeliciously\ninsane experience. (\"April has thirty\n days,\" Fownes mumbled, passing them, \"because thirty is the largest\n number such that all smaller numbers not having a common divisor\n with it are\nprimes\n.\" MacBride frowned and added it to the dossier.\n Lanfierre sighed.)",
"When he heard this Fownes plunged into the house and fought his way\n up the stairs. He found Lanfierre standing outside the bedroom with a\n wheel in his hand.\n\"What have I done?\" Lanfierre asked in the monotone of shock.\n\n\n Fownes took the wheel. It was off a 1995 Studebaker.\n\n\n \"I'm not sure what's going to come of this,\" he said to Lanfierre with\n an astonishing amount of objectivity, \"but the entire dome air supply\n is now coming through my bedroom.\"\n\n\n The wind screamed.\n\n\n \"Is there something I can turn?\" Lanfierre asked.\n\n\n \"Not any more there isn't.\"\n\n\n They started down the stairs carefully, but the wind caught them and\n they quickly reached the bottom in a wet heap.",
"\"Help!\" Lieutenant MacBride called.\n\n\n Standing in the doorway with his wet hair plastered down on his\n dripping scalp, the wind roaring about him, the piano rumbling in the\n distance like thunder, Humphrey Fownes suddenly saw it all very clearly.\n\n\n \"\nWinds\n,\" he said in a whisper.\n\n\n \"What's happening?\" MacBride yelled, crouching behind the sofa.\n\n\n \"\nMarch\nwinds,\" he said.\n\n\n \"What?!\"\n\n\n \"April showers!\"",
"\"And of course when they do find out and they ask you why, Mr. Fownes,\n you'll tell them. No, no heroics, please! When they ask a man a\n question he always answers and you will too. You'll tell them I wanted\n to be courted and when they hear that they'll be around to ask\nme\na\n few questions. You see, we're both a bit queer.\"\n\n\n \"I hadn't thought of that,\" Fownes said quietly.\n\n\n \"Oh, it doesn't really matter. I'll join Andrew, Curt, Norman—\"\n\n\n \"That won't be necessary,\" Fownes said with unusual force. \"With all\n due respect to Andrew, Curt, Norman and Alphonse, I might as well state\n here and now I have other plans for you, Mrs. Deshazaway.\"\n\n\n \"But my dear Mr. Fownes,\" she said, leaning across the table. \"We're\n lost, you and I.\"",
"The winds roared for a moment and then MacBride's lost voice emerged\n from the blackness of the living room. \"These are\nnot\nOptimum Dome\n Conditions!\" the voice wailed. \"The temperature is\nnot\n59 degrees.\n The humidity is\nnot\n47%!\"\nFownes held his face up to let the rain fall on it. \"Moonlight!\" he\n shouted. \"Roses! My\nsoul\nfor a cocktail for two!\" He grasped the\n doorway to keep from being blown out of the house.\n\n\n \"Are you going to make it stop or aren't you!\" MacBride yelled.\n\n\n \"You'll have to tell me what you did first!\"\n\n\n \"I\ntold\nhim not to touch that wheel! Lanfierre. He's in the upstairs\n bedroom!\"",
"The twister roared and moved out of the bedroom, out over the rear of\n the house toward the side of the dome. \"It says here,\" Fownes shouted\n over the roaring, \"that Dorothy traveled from Kansas to Oz in a twister\n and that ... and that Oz is a wonderful and mysterious land\nbeyond the\n confines of everyday living\n.\"\n\n\n MacBride's eyes and mouth were great zeros.\n\n\n \"Is there something I can turn?\" Lanfierre asked.\n\n\n Huge chunks of glass began to fall around them.\n\n\n \"Fownes!\" MacBride shouted. \"This is a direct order! Make it go back!\"\n\n\n But Fownes had already begun to run on toward the next house, dodging\n mountainous puffs of glass as he went. \"Mrs. Deshazaway!\" he shouted.\n \"Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Deshazaway!\"",
"He could hear her moving about and then felt her hands on his\n shoulders. \"And what about those\nvery\nelaborate plans you've been\n making to seduce me?\"\n\n\n Fownes froze with three asparagus hanging from his fork.\n\n\n \"Don't you think\nthey'll\nfind out?\nI\nfound out and you can bet\nthey\nwill. It's my fault, I guess. I talk too much. And I don't\n always tell the truth. To be completely honest with you, Mr. Fownes, it\n wasn't the old customs at all standing between us, it was air. I can't\n have another man die on me, it's bad for my self-esteem. And now you've\n gone and done something good and criminal, something peculiar.\"\nFownes put his fork down. \"Dear Mrs. Deshazaway,\" he started to say.",
"The widow was a passionate woman. She did everything\n passionately—talking, cooking, dressing. Her beets were passionately\n red. Her clothes rustled and her high heels clicked and her jewelry\n tinkled. She was possessed by an uncontrollable dynamism. Fownes had\n never known anyone like her. \"You forgot to put salt on the potatoes,\"\n she said passionately, then went on as calmly as it was possible for\n her to be, to explain why she couldn't marry him. \"Do you have any\n idea what people are saying? They're all saying I'm a cannibal! I rob\n my husbands of their life force and when they're empty I carry their\n bodies outside on my way to the justice of the peace.\"\n\n\n \"As long as there are people,\" he said philosophically, \"there'll be\n talk.\"",
"When the roof blew off they weren't really surprised. With a certain\n amount of equanimity they watched it lift off almost gracefully,\n standing on end for a moment before toppling to the ground. It was\n strangely slow motion, as was the black twirling cloud that now rose\n out of the master bedroom, spewing shorts and socks and cases every\n which way.\n\n\n \"\nNow\nwhat?\" MacBride said, thoroughly exasperated, as this strange\n black cloud began to accelerate, whirling about like some malevolent\n top....\nHumphrey Fownes took out the dust jacket he'd found in the library. He\n held it up and carefully compared the spinning cloud in his bedroom\n with the illustration. The cloud rose and spun, assuming the identical\n shape of the illustration.\n\n\n \"It's a twister,\" he said softly. \"A Kansas twister!\"\n\n\n \"What,\" MacBride asked, his bravado slipping away again, \"what ... is a\n twister?\"",
"They sat there smoking in silence and every now and then their eyes\n widened as the house danced a new step.\nFownes stopped on the porch to brush the plaster of paris off his\n shoes. He hadn't seen the patrol car and this intense preoccupation\n of his was also responsible for the dancing house—he simply hadn't\n noticed. There was a certain amount of vibration, of course. He\n had a bootleg pipe connected into the dome blower system, and the\n high-pressure air caused some buffeting against the thin walls of the\n house. At least, he called it buffeting; he'd never thought to watch\n from outside.\n\n\n He went in and threw his jacket on the sofa, there being no room\n left in the closets. Crossing the living room he stopped to twist a\n draw-pull.\n\n\n Every window slammed shut."
],
[
"Moonlight, he thought, and roses. Satisfactory.\nAnd cocktails for\n two.\nBlast, he'd never be able to figure that one out! He watched as\n the moon played,\nOh, You Beautiful Doll\nand the neon roses flashed\n slowly from red to violet, then went back to the closet and turned on\n the scent. The house began to smell like an immensely concentrated rose\n as the moon shifted to\nPeople Will Say We're In Love\n.\nHe rubbed his chin critically. It\nseemed\nall right. A dreamy sunset,\n an enchanted moon, flowers, scent.",
"He went downstairs to watch out the living room window. This was\n important; the window had a really fixed attitude about air currents.\n The neon roses bent and tinkled against each other as the wind rose and\n the moon shook a trifle as it whispered\nCuddle Up a Little Closer\n.",
"It was replaced by an illusion. Or, as Fownes hoped it might appear,\n the illusion of the domed city vanished and was replaced by a more\n satisfactory, and, for his specific purpose, more functional, illusion.\n Looking through the window he saw only a garden.\n\n\n Instead of an orange sun at perpetual high noon, there was a red sun\n setting brilliantly, marred only by an occasional arcover which left\n the smell of ozone in the air. There was also a gigantic moon. It hid a\n huge area of sky, and it sang. The sun and moon both looked down upon a\n garden that was itself scintillant, composed largely of neon roses.",
"The neon roses thrashed about, extinguishing each other. The red sun\n shot off a mass of sparks and then quickly sank out of sight. The moon\n fell on the garden and rolled ponderously along, crooning\nWhen the\n Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day\n.\n\n\n The shaking house finally woke him up. He scrambled upstairs to the\n Studebaker wheel and shut it off.\n\n\n At the window again, he sighed. Repairs were in order. And it wasn't\n the first time the winds got out of line.\n\n\n Why didn't she marry him and save all this bother? He shut it all down\n and went out the front door, wondering about the rhyme of the months,\n about stately August and eccentric February and romantic April. April.\n Its days were thirty and it followed September.\nAnd all the rest have\n thirty-one.\nWhat a strange people, the ancients!",
"\"Help!\" Lieutenant MacBride called.\n\n\n Standing in the doorway with his wet hair plastered down on his\n dripping scalp, the wind roaring about him, the piano rumbling in the\n distance like thunder, Humphrey Fownes suddenly saw it all very clearly.\n\n\n \"\nWinds\n,\" he said in a whisper.\n\n\n \"What's happening?\" MacBride yelled, crouching behind the sofa.\n\n\n \"\nMarch\nwinds,\" he said.\n\n\n \"What?!\"\n\n\n \"April showers!\"",
"They were all purely speculative of course. He had no idea how a rose\n really smelled—or looked for that matter. Not to mention a moon. But\n then, neither did the widow. He'd have to be confident, assertive.\nInsist\non it. I tell you, my dear, this is a genuine realistic\n romantic moon. Now, does it do anything to your pulse? Do you feel icy\n fingers marching up and down your spine?\n\n\n His own spine didn't seem to be affected. But then he hadn't read that\n book on ancient mores and courtship customs.\n\n\n How really odd the ancients were. Seduction seemed to be an incredibly\n long and drawn-out process, accompanied by a considerable amount\n of falsification. Communication seemed virtually impossible. \"No\"\n meant any number of things, depending on the tone of voice and the\n circumstances. It could mean yes, it could mean ask me again later on\n this evening.",
"He went up the stairs to the bedroom closet and tried the rain-maker,\n thinking roguishly:\nThou shalt not inundate.\nThe risks he was taking!\n A shower fell gently on the garden and a male chorus began to chant\nSinging in the Rain\n. Undiminished, the yellow moon and the red sun\n continued to be brilliant, although the sun occasionally arced over and\n demolished several of the neon roses.\n\n\n The last wheel in the bedroom closet was a rather elegant steering\n wheel from an old 1995 Studebaker. This was on the bootleg pipe; he\n gingerly turned it.\n\n\n Far below in the cellar there was a rumble and then the soft whistle of\n winds came to him.",
"Humphrey Fownes' preoccupation finally came to an end when he was one\n block away from his house. It was then that he realized something\n unusual must have occurred. An orange patrol car of the security police\n was parked at his front door. And something else was happening too.\n\n\n His house was dancing.\n\n\n It was disconcerting, and at the same time enchanting, to watch one's\n residence frisking about on its foundation. It was such a strange sight\n that for the moment he didn't give a thought to what might be causing\n it. But when he stepped gingerly onto the porch, which was doing its\n own independent gavotte, he reached for the doorknob with an immense\n curiosity.\n\n\n The door flung itself open and knocked him back off the porch.",
"Sitting behind the wheel of the orange car, he watched Humphrey Fownes\n approach with a distinct feeling of admiration, although it was an\n odd, objective kind of admiration, clinical in nature. It was similar\n to that of a pathologist observing for the first time a new and\n particularly virulent strain of pneumococcus under his microscope.\n\n\n Lanfierre's job was to ferret out aberration. It couldn't be tolerated\n within the confines of a dome. Conformity had become more than a social\n force; it was a physical necessity. And, after years of working at it,\n Lanfierre had become an admirer of eccentricity. He came to see that\n genuine quirks were rare and, as time went on, due partly to his own\n small efforts, rarer.\n\n\n Fownes was a masterpiece of queerness. He was utterly inexplicable.\n Lanfierre was almost proud of Humphrey Fownes.",
"They sat there smoking in silence and every now and then their eyes\n widened as the house danced a new step.\nFownes stopped on the porch to brush the plaster of paris off his\n shoes. He hadn't seen the patrol car and this intense preoccupation\n of his was also responsible for the dancing house—he simply hadn't\n noticed. There was a certain amount of vibration, of course. He\n had a bootleg pipe connected into the dome blower system, and the\n high-pressure air caused some buffeting against the thin walls of the\n house. At least, he called it buffeting; he'd never thought to watch\n from outside.\n\n\n He went in and threw his jacket on the sofa, there being no room\n left in the closets. Crossing the living room he stopped to twist a\n draw-pull.\n\n\n Every window slammed shut.",
"\"I see.\"\n\n\n \"\nAnd\n,\" Mr. Fownes added, his voice a honeyed whisper, \"they say\n that somewhere out in the space and the roses and the moonlight,\n the sleeping equinox yawns and rises because on a certain day it's\nvernal\nand that's when it roams the Open Country where geigers no\n longer scintillate.\"",
"It should have been difficult. Under the circumstances it was a\n masterpiece of pocket picking. What made it possible was Humphrey\n Fownes' abstraction; he was an uncommonly preoccupied individual. He\n was strolling along a quiet residential avenue: small private houses,\n one after another, a place of little traffic and minimum distractions.\n But he was thinking about weather, which was an unusual subject to\n begin with for a person living in a domed city. He was thinking so\n deeply about it that it never occurred to him that entirely too many\n people were bumping into him. He was thinking about Optimum Dome\n Conditions (a crisp 59 degrees, a mildly dessicated 47%) when a bogus\n postman, who pretended to be reading a postal card, jostled him. In the",
"He still didn't see the orange car parked down the street.\n\"Men are too perishable,\" Mrs. Deshazaway said over dinner. \"For all\n practical purposes I'm never going to marry again. All my husbands die.\"\n\n\n \"Would you pass the beets, please?\" Humphrey Fownes said.\n\n\n She handed him a platter of steaming red beets. \"And don't look at me\n that way,\" she said. \"I'm\nnot\ngoing to marry you and if you want\n reasons I'll give you four of them. Andrew. Curt. Norman. And Alphonse.\"",
"He watched with folded arms, considering how he would start.\nMy dear\n Mrs. Deshazaway.\nToo formal. They'd be looking out at the romantic\n garden; time to be a bit forward.\nMy very dear Mrs. Deshazaway.\nNo.\n Contrived. How about a simple,\nDear Mrs. Deshazaway\n. That might be\n it.\nI was wondering, seeing as how it's so late, if you wouldn't\n rather stay over instead of going home....\nPreoccupied, he hadn't noticed the winds building up, didn't hear the\n shaking and rattling of the pipes. There were attic pipes connected\n to wall pipes and wall pipes connected to cellar pipes, and they made\n one gigantic skeleton that began to rattle its bones and dance as\n high-pressure air from the dome blower rushed in, slowly opening the\n Studebaker valve wider and wider....",
"Humphrey Fownes strode through the puffs of falling glass still\n intrigued by a temperature that was always 59 degrees, by a humidity\n that was always 47%, by weather that was always Optimum. It was this\n rather than skill that enabled the police to maintain such a tight\n surveillance on him, a surveillance that went to the extent of getting\n his fingerprints off the postman's bag, and which photographed, X-rayed\n and chemically analyzed the contents of his pockets before returning\n them. Two blocks away from his home a careless housewife spilled a\n five-pound bag of flour as he was passing. It was really plaster of\n Paris. He left his shoe prints, stride measurement, height, weight and\n handedness behind.\n\n\n By the time Fownes reached his front door an entire dossier complete\n with photographs had been prepared and was being read by two men in an\n orange patrol car parked down the street.\nLanfierre had undoubtedly been affected by his job.",
"Fownes smiled weakly and looked again at the dust jacket. The twister\n was unquestionably a meteorological phenomenon. It spun ominously, like\n a malevolent top, and coursed the countryside destructively, carrying\n a Dorothy to an Oz. He couldn't help wondering if twisters did anything\n to feminine pulses, if they could possibly be a part of a moonlit\n night, with cocktails and roses. He absently stuffed the dust jacket\n in his pocket and went on into the other rooms, the librarian mumbling\n after him: \"Edna Murdoch Featherstone, April 21, 1991,\" as though\n reading inscriptions on a tombstone.\nThe Movement met in what had been the children's room, where unpaid\n ladies of the afternoon had once upon a time read stories to other\n people's offspring. The members sat around at the miniature tables\n looking oddly like giants fled from their fairy tales, protesting.",
"The winds roared for a moment and then MacBride's lost voice emerged\n from the blackness of the living room. \"These are\nnot\nOptimum Dome\n Conditions!\" the voice wailed. \"The temperature is\nnot\n59 degrees.\n The humidity is\nnot\n47%!\"\nFownes held his face up to let the rain fall on it. \"Moonlight!\" he\n shouted. \"Roses! My\nsoul\nfor a cocktail for two!\" He grasped the\n doorway to keep from being blown out of the house.\n\n\n \"Are you going to make it stop or aren't you!\" MacBride yelled.\n\n\n \"You'll have to tell me what you did first!\"\n\n\n \"I\ntold\nhim not to touch that wheel! Lanfierre. He's in the upstairs\n bedroom!\"",
"\"Tight as a kite,\" he thought, satisfied. He continued on toward the\n closet at the foot of the stairs and then stopped again. Was that\n right? No,\nsnug as a hug in a rug\n. He went on, thinking:\nThe old\n devils.\nThe downstairs closet was like a great watch case, a profusion of\n wheels surrounding the Master Mechanism, which was a miniature see-saw\n that went back and forth 365-1/4 times an hour. The wheels had a\n curious stateliness about them. They were all quite old, salvaged from\n grandfather's clocks and music boxes and they went around in graceful\n circles at the rate of 30 and 31 times an hour ... although there\n was one slightly eccentric cam that vacillated between 28 and 29. He\n watched as they spun and flashed in the darkness, and then set them for\n seven o'clock in the evening, April seventh, any year.\n\n\n Outside, the domed city vanished.",
"A FALL OF GLASS\nBy STANLEY R. LEE\n\n\n Illustrated by DILLON\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1960.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe weatherman was always right:\n \nTemperature, 59; humidity, 47%;\n \noccasional light showers—but of what?\nThe pockets of Mr. Humphrey Fownes were being picked outrageously.\n\n\n It was a splendid day. The temperature was a crisp 59 degrees, the\n humidity a mildly dessicated 47%. The sun was a flaming orange ball in\n a cloudless blue sky.\n\n\n His pockets were picked eleven times.",
"There was an occasional tinkle of falling glass.\n\n\n It fell on the streets and houses, making small geysers of shiny mist,\n hitting with a gentle musical sound, like the ephemeral droppings of\n a celesta. It was precipitation peculiar to a dome: feather-light\n fragments showering harmlessly on the city from time to time. Dome\n weevils, their metal arms reaching out with molten glass, roamed the\n huge casserole, ceaselessly patching and repairing."
],
[
"Sitting behind the wheel of the orange car, he watched Humphrey Fownes\n approach with a distinct feeling of admiration, although it was an\n odd, objective kind of admiration, clinical in nature. It was similar\n to that of a pathologist observing for the first time a new and\n particularly virulent strain of pneumococcus under his microscope.\n\n\n Lanfierre's job was to ferret out aberration. It couldn't be tolerated\n within the confines of a dome. Conformity had become more than a social\n force; it was a physical necessity. And, after years of working at it,\n Lanfierre had become an admirer of eccentricity. He came to see that\n genuine quirks were rare and, as time went on, due partly to his own\n small efforts, rarer.\n\n\n Fownes was a masterpiece of queerness. He was utterly inexplicable.\n Lanfierre was almost proud of Humphrey Fownes.",
"He still didn't see the orange car parked down the street.\n\"Men are too perishable,\" Mrs. Deshazaway said over dinner. \"For all\n practical purposes I'm never going to marry again. All my husbands die.\"\n\n\n \"Would you pass the beets, please?\" Humphrey Fownes said.\n\n\n She handed him a platter of steaming red beets. \"And don't look at me\n that way,\" she said. \"I'm\nnot\ngoing to marry you and if you want\n reasons I'll give you four of them. Andrew. Curt. Norman. And Alphonse.\"",
"Humphrey Fownes strode through the puffs of falling glass still\n intrigued by a temperature that was always 59 degrees, by a humidity\n that was always 47%, by weather that was always Optimum. It was this\n rather than skill that enabled the police to maintain such a tight\n surveillance on him, a surveillance that went to the extent of getting\n his fingerprints off the postman's bag, and which photographed, X-rayed\n and chemically analyzed the contents of his pockets before returning\n them. Two blocks away from his home a careless housewife spilled a\n five-pound bag of flour as he was passing. It was really plaster of\n Paris. He left his shoe prints, stride measurement, height, weight and\n handedness behind.\n\n\n By the time Fownes reached his front door an entire dossier complete\n with photographs had been prepared and was being read by two men in an\n orange patrol car parked down the street.\nLanfierre had undoubtedly been affected by his job.",
"Humphrey Fownes' preoccupation finally came to an end when he was one\n block away from his house. It was then that he realized something\n unusual must have occurred. An orange patrol car of the security police\n was parked at his front door. And something else was happening too.\n\n\n His house was dancing.\n\n\n It was disconcerting, and at the same time enchanting, to watch one's\n residence frisking about on its foundation. It was such a strange sight\n that for the moment he didn't give a thought to what might be causing\n it. But when he stepped gingerly onto the porch, which was doing its\n own independent gavotte, he reached for the doorknob with an immense\n curiosity.\n\n\n The door flung itself open and knocked him back off the porch.",
"Dialectically out in left field, Humphrey Fownes waited for a lull\n in the ensuing discussion and then politely inquired how it might be\n arranged for him to get out.\n\n\n \"Out?\" the leader said, frowning. \"Out? Out where?\"\n\n\n \"Outside the dome.\"\n\n\n \"Oh. All in good time, my friend. One day we shall all pick up and\n leave.\"\n\n\n \"And that day I'll await impatiently,\" Fownes replied with marvelous\n tact, \"because it will be lonely out there for the two of us. My future\n wife and I have to leave\nnow\n.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. Ridiculous! You have to be prepared for the Open Country.\n You can't just up and leave, it would be suicide, Fownes. And\n dialectically very poor.\"",
"It should have been difficult. Under the circumstances it was a\n masterpiece of pocket picking. What made it possible was Humphrey\n Fownes' abstraction; he was an uncommonly preoccupied individual. He\n was strolling along a quiet residential avenue: small private houses,\n one after another, a place of little traffic and minimum distractions.\n But he was thinking about weather, which was an unusual subject to\n begin with for a person living in a domed city. He was thinking so\n deeply about it that it never occurred to him that entirely too many\n people were bumping into him. He was thinking about Optimum Dome\n Conditions (a crisp 59 degrees, a mildly dessicated 47%) when a bogus\n postman, who pretended to be reading a postal card, jostled him. In the",
"\"Then you\nhave\ndiscussed preparations, the practical necessities of\n life in the Open Country. Food, clothing, a weapon perhaps? What else?\n Have I left anything out?\"\n\n\n The leader sighed. \"The gentleman wants to know if he's left anything\n out,\" he said to the group.\n\n\n Fownes looked around at them, at some dozen pained expressions.\n\n\n \"Tell the man what he's forgotten,\" the leader said, walking to the far\n window and turning his back quite pointedly on them.\n\n\n Everyone spoke at the same moment. \"\nA sound foreign policy\n,\" they all\n said, it being almost too obvious for words.\nOn his way out the librarian shouted at him: \"\nA Tale of a Tub\n,\n thirty-five years overdue!\" She was calculating the fine as he closed\n the door.",
"Lanfierre sat stiffly behind the wheel, affronted. The cynical MacBride\n couldn't really appreciate fine aberrations. In some ways MacBride\n was a barbarian. Lanfierre had held out on Fownes for months. He\n had even contrived to engage him in conversation once, a pleasantly\n absurd, irrational little chat that titillated him for weeks. It was\n only with the greatest reluctance that he finally mentioned Fownes\n to MacBride. After years of searching for differences Lanfierre had\n seen how extraordinarily repetitious people were, echoes really, dimly\n resounding echoes, each believing itself whole and separate. They spoke\n in an incessant chatter of cliches, and their actions were unbelievably\n trite.\n\n\n Then a fine robust freak came along and the others—the echoes—refused\n to believe it. The lieutenant was probably on the point of suggesting a\n vacation.\n\n\n \"Why don't you take a vacation?\" Lieutenant MacBride suggested.",
"\"Help!\" Lieutenant MacBride called.\n\n\n Standing in the doorway with his wet hair plastered down on his\n dripping scalp, the wind roaring about him, the piano rumbling in the\n distance like thunder, Humphrey Fownes suddenly saw it all very clearly.\n\n\n \"\nWinds\n,\" he said in a whisper.\n\n\n \"What's happening?\" MacBride yelled, crouching behind the sofa.\n\n\n \"\nMarch\nwinds,\" he said.\n\n\n \"What?!\"\n\n\n \"April showers!\"",
"\"And the\nwater\n,\" Lanfierre said. \"The\nwater\nhe uses! He could be\n the thirstiest and cleanest man in the city. He could have a whole\n family of thirsty and clean kids, and he\nstill\nwouldn't need all that\n water.\"\n\n\n The lieutenant had picked up the dossier. He thumbed through the pages\n now in amazement. \"Where do you get a guy like this?\" he asked. \"Did\n you see what he carries in his pockets?\"\n\n\n \"And compasses won't work on this street.\"\n\n\n The lieutenant lit a cigarette and sighed.\n\n\n He usually sighed when making the decision to raid a dwelling. It\n expressed his weariness and distaste for people who went off and got\n neurotic when they could be enjoying a happy, normal existence. There\n was something implacable about his sighs.",
"\"\nMy.\n\" Mrs. Deshazaway rose, paced slowly to the window and then came\n back to the table, standing directly over Fownes. \"If you can get us\n outside the dome,\" she said, \"out where a man stays\nwarm\nlong enough\n for his wife to get to know him ... if you can do that, Mr. Fownes ...\n you may call me Agnes.\"\nWhen Humphrey Fownes stepped out of the widow's house, there was a\n look of such intense abstraction on his features that Lanfierre felt a\n wistful desire to get out of the car and walk along with the man. It\n would be such a\ndeliciously\ninsane experience. (\"April has thirty\n days,\" Fownes mumbled, passing them, \"because thirty is the largest\n number such that all smaller numbers not having a common divisor\n with it are\nprimes\n.\" MacBride frowned and added it to the dossier.\n Lanfierre sighed.)",
"\"But it's the air! Why don't they talk about that? The air is stale,\n I'm positive. It's not nourishing. The air is stale and Andrew, Curt,\n Norman and Alphonse couldn't stand it. Poor Alphonse. He was never so\n healthy as on the day he was born. From then on things got steadily\n worse for him.\"\n\n\n \"I don't seem to mind the air.\"\n\n\n She threw up her hands. \"You'd be the worst of the lot!\" She left the\n table, rustling and tinkling about the room. \"I can just hear them. Try\n some of the asparagus.\nFive.\nThat's what they'd say. That woman did\n it again. And the plain fact is I don't want you on my record.\"\n\n\n \"Really,\" Fownes protested. \"I feel splendid. Never better.\"",
"confusion of spilled letters and apologies from both sides, the postman\n rifled Fownes's handkerchief and inside jacket pockets.\nHe was still thinking about temperature and humidity when a pretty girl\n happened along with something in her eye. They collided. She got his\n right and left jacket pockets. It was much too much for coincidence.\n The sidewalk was wide enough to allow four people to pass at one time.\n He should surely have become suspicious when two men engaged in a\n heated argument came along. In the ensuing contretemps they emptied his\n rear pants pockets, got his wristwatch and restored the contents of the\nhandkerchief pocket. It all went off very smoothly, like a game of put\n and take—the sole difference being that Humphrey Fownes had no idea he\n was playing.",
"\"It's like this, MacBride. Do you know what a wind is? A breeze? A\n zephyr?\"\n\n\n \"I've heard some.\"\n\n\n \"They say there are mountain-tops where winds blow all the time. Strong\n winds, MacBride. Winds like you and I can't imagine. And if there was\n a house sitting on such a mountain and if winds\ndid\nblow, it would\n shake exactly the way that one does. Sometimes I get the feeling the\n whole place is going to slide off its foundation and go sailing down\n the avenue.\"\nLieutenant MacBride pursed his lips.",
"The widow was a passionate woman. She did everything\n passionately—talking, cooking, dressing. Her beets were passionately\n red. Her clothes rustled and her high heels clicked and her jewelry\n tinkled. She was possessed by an uncontrollable dynamism. Fownes had\n never known anyone like her. \"You forgot to put salt on the potatoes,\"\n she said passionately, then went on as calmly as it was possible for\n her to be, to explain why she couldn't marry him. \"Do you have any\n idea what people are saying? They're all saying I'm a cannibal! I rob\n my husbands of their life force and when they're empty I carry their\n bodies outside on my way to the justice of the peace.\"\n\n\n \"As long as there are people,\" he said philosophically, \"there'll be\n talk.\"",
"Moonlight, he thought, and roses. Satisfactory.\nAnd cocktails for\n two.\nBlast, he'd never be able to figure that one out! He watched as\n the moon played,\nOh, You Beautiful Doll\nand the neon roses flashed\n slowly from red to violet, then went back to the closet and turned on\n the scent. The house began to smell like an immensely concentrated rose\n as the moon shifted to\nPeople Will Say We're In Love\n.\nHe rubbed his chin critically. It\nseemed\nall right. A dreamy sunset,\n an enchanted moon, flowers, scent.",
"He went downstairs to watch out the living room window. This was\n important; the window had a really fixed attitude about air currents.\n The neon roses bent and tinkled against each other as the wind rose and\n the moon shook a trifle as it whispered\nCuddle Up a Little Closer\n.",
"He could hear her moving about and then felt her hands on his\n shoulders. \"And what about those\nvery\nelaborate plans you've been\n making to seduce me?\"\n\n\n Fownes froze with three asparagus hanging from his fork.\n\n\n \"Don't you think\nthey'll\nfind out?\nI\nfound out and you can bet\nthey\nwill. It's my fault, I guess. I talk too much. And I don't\n always tell the truth. To be completely honest with you, Mr. Fownes, it\n wasn't the old customs at all standing between us, it was air. I can't\n have another man die on me, it's bad for my self-esteem. And now you've\n gone and done something good and criminal, something peculiar.\"\nFownes put his fork down. \"Dear Mrs. Deshazaway,\" he started to say.",
"\"And of course when they do find out and they ask you why, Mr. Fownes,\n you'll tell them. No, no heroics, please! When they ask a man a\n question he always answers and you will too. You'll tell them I wanted\n to be courted and when they hear that they'll be around to ask\nme\na\n few questions. You see, we're both a bit queer.\"\n\n\n \"I hadn't thought of that,\" Fownes said quietly.\n\n\n \"Oh, it doesn't really matter. I'll join Andrew, Curt, Norman—\"\n\n\n \"That won't be necessary,\" Fownes said with unusual force. \"With all\n due respect to Andrew, Curt, Norman and Alphonse, I might as well state\n here and now I have other plans for you, Mrs. Deshazaway.\"\n\n\n \"But my dear Mr. Fownes,\" she said, leaning across the table. \"We're\n lost, you and I.\"",
"Recruiting Lieutenant MacBride from behind his sofa, the men carefully\n edged out of the house and forced the front door shut.\n\n\n The wind died. The fog dispersed. They stood dripping in the Optimum\n Dome Conditions of the bright avenue.\n\n\n \"I never figured on\nthis\n,\" Lanfierre said, shaking his head.\n\n\n With the front door closed the wind quickly built up inside the house.\n They could see the furnishing whirl past the windows. The house did a\n wild, elated jig.\n\n\n \"What kind of a place\nis\nthis?\" MacBride said, his courage beginning\n to return. He took out his notebook but it was a soggy mess. He tossed\n it away.\n\n\n \"Sure, he was\ndifferent\n,\" Lanfierre murmured. \"I knew that much.\""
],
[
"He could hear her moving about and then felt her hands on his\n shoulders. \"And what about those\nvery\nelaborate plans you've been\n making to seduce me?\"\n\n\n Fownes froze with three asparagus hanging from his fork.\n\n\n \"Don't you think\nthey'll\nfind out?\nI\nfound out and you can bet\nthey\nwill. It's my fault, I guess. I talk too much. And I don't\n always tell the truth. To be completely honest with you, Mr. Fownes, it\n wasn't the old customs at all standing between us, it was air. I can't\n have another man die on me, it's bad for my self-esteem. And now you've\n gone and done something good and criminal, something peculiar.\"\nFownes put his fork down. \"Dear Mrs. Deshazaway,\" he started to say.",
"He still didn't see the orange car parked down the street.\n\"Men are too perishable,\" Mrs. Deshazaway said over dinner. \"For all\n practical purposes I'm never going to marry again. All my husbands die.\"\n\n\n \"Would you pass the beets, please?\" Humphrey Fownes said.\n\n\n She handed him a platter of steaming red beets. \"And don't look at me\n that way,\" she said. \"I'm\nnot\ngoing to marry you and if you want\n reasons I'll give you four of them. Andrew. Curt. Norman. And Alphonse.\"",
"\"And of course when they do find out and they ask you why, Mr. Fownes,\n you'll tell them. No, no heroics, please! When they ask a man a\n question he always answers and you will too. You'll tell them I wanted\n to be courted and when they hear that they'll be around to ask\nme\na\n few questions. You see, we're both a bit queer.\"\n\n\n \"I hadn't thought of that,\" Fownes said quietly.\n\n\n \"Oh, it doesn't really matter. I'll join Andrew, Curt, Norman—\"\n\n\n \"That won't be necessary,\" Fownes said with unusual force. \"With all\n due respect to Andrew, Curt, Norman and Alphonse, I might as well state\n here and now I have other plans for you, Mrs. Deshazaway.\"\n\n\n \"But my dear Mr. Fownes,\" she said, leaning across the table. \"We're\n lost, you and I.\"",
"He watched with folded arms, considering how he would start.\nMy dear\n Mrs. Deshazaway.\nToo formal. They'd be looking out at the romantic\n garden; time to be a bit forward.\nMy very dear Mrs. Deshazaway.\nNo.\n Contrived. How about a simple,\nDear Mrs. Deshazaway\n. That might be\n it.\nI was wondering, seeing as how it's so late, if you wouldn't\n rather stay over instead of going home....\nPreoccupied, he hadn't noticed the winds building up, didn't hear the\n shaking and rattling of the pipes. There were attic pipes connected\n to wall pipes and wall pipes connected to cellar pipes, and they made\n one gigantic skeleton that began to rattle its bones and dance as\n high-pressure air from the dome blower rushed in, slowly opening the\n Studebaker valve wider and wider....",
"\"\nMy.\n\" Mrs. Deshazaway rose, paced slowly to the window and then came\n back to the table, standing directly over Fownes. \"If you can get us\n outside the dome,\" she said, \"out where a man stays\nwarm\nlong enough\n for his wife to get to know him ... if you can do that, Mr. Fownes ...\n you may call me Agnes.\"\nWhen Humphrey Fownes stepped out of the widow's house, there was a\n look of such intense abstraction on his features that Lanfierre felt a\n wistful desire to get out of the car and walk along with the man. It\n would be such a\ndeliciously\ninsane experience. (\"April has thirty\n days,\" Fownes mumbled, passing them, \"because thirty is the largest\n number such that all smaller numbers not having a common divisor\n with it are\nprimes\n.\" MacBride frowned and added it to the dossier.\n Lanfierre sighed.)",
"The widow was a passionate woman. She did everything\n passionately—talking, cooking, dressing. Her beets were passionately\n red. Her clothes rustled and her high heels clicked and her jewelry\n tinkled. She was possessed by an uncontrollable dynamism. Fownes had\n never known anyone like her. \"You forgot to put salt on the potatoes,\"\n she said passionately, then went on as calmly as it was possible for\n her to be, to explain why she couldn't marry him. \"Do you have any\n idea what people are saying? They're all saying I'm a cannibal! I rob\n my husbands of their life force and when they're empty I carry their\n bodies outside on my way to the justice of the peace.\"\n\n\n \"As long as there are people,\" he said philosophically, \"there'll be\n talk.\"",
"\"But it's the air! Why don't they talk about that? The air is stale,\n I'm positive. It's not nourishing. The air is stale and Andrew, Curt,\n Norman and Alphonse couldn't stand it. Poor Alphonse. He was never so\n healthy as on the day he was born. From then on things got steadily\n worse for him.\"\n\n\n \"I don't seem to mind the air.\"\n\n\n She threw up her hands. \"You'd be the worst of the lot!\" She left the\n table, rustling and tinkling about the room. \"I can just hear them. Try\n some of the asparagus.\nFive.\nThat's what they'd say. That woman did\n it again. And the plain fact is I don't want you on my record.\"\n\n\n \"Really,\" Fownes protested. \"I feel splendid. Never better.\"",
"The dome weevils were going berserk trying to keep up with the\n precipitation. They whirred back and forth at frightful speed, then,\n emptied of molten glass, rushed to the Trough which they quickly\n emptied and then rushed about empty-handed. \"Yoo-hoo!\" he yelled,\n running. The artificial sun vanished behind the mushrooming twister.\n Optimum temperature collapsed. \"Mrs. Deshazaway!\nAgnes\n, will you\n marry me? Yoo-hoo!\"\n\n\n Lanfierre and Lieutenant MacBride leaned against their car and waited,\n dazed.\n\n\n There was quite a large fall of glass.",
"\"Not if we could leave the dome,\" Fownes said quietly.\n\n\n \"That's impossible! How?\"\n\n\n In no hurry, now that he had the widow's complete attention, Fownes\n leaned across the table and whispered: \"Fresh air, Mrs. Deshazaway?\n Space? Miles and miles of space where the real-estate monopoly has\n no control whatever? Where the\nwind\nblows across\nprairies\n; or is\n it the other way around? No matter. How would you like\nthat\n, Mrs.\n Deshazaway?\"\n\n\n Breathing somewhat faster than usual, the widow rested her chin on her\n two hands. \"Pray continue,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Endless vistas of moonlight and roses? April showers, Mrs. Deshazaway.\n And June, which as you may know follows directly upon April and is\n supposed to be the month of brides, of marrying. June also lies beyond\n the dome.\"",
"He went downstairs to watch out the living room window. This was\n important; the window had a really fixed attitude about air currents.\n The neon roses bent and tinkled against each other as the wind rose and\n the moon shook a trifle as it whispered\nCuddle Up a Little Closer\n.",
"The twister roared and moved out of the bedroom, out over the rear of\n the house toward the side of the dome. \"It says here,\" Fownes shouted\n over the roaring, \"that Dorothy traveled from Kansas to Oz in a twister\n and that ... and that Oz is a wonderful and mysterious land\nbeyond the\n confines of everyday living\n.\"\n\n\n MacBride's eyes and mouth were great zeros.\n\n\n \"Is there something I can turn?\" Lanfierre asked.\n\n\n Huge chunks of glass began to fall around them.\n\n\n \"Fownes!\" MacBride shouted. \"This is a direct order! Make it go back!\"\n\n\n But Fownes had already begun to run on toward the next house, dodging\n mountainous puffs of glass as he went. \"Mrs. Deshazaway!\" he shouted.\n \"Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Deshazaway!\"",
"\"It's like this, MacBride. Do you know what a wind is? A breeze? A\n zephyr?\"\n\n\n \"I've heard some.\"\n\n\n \"They say there are mountain-tops where winds blow all the time. Strong\n winds, MacBride. Winds like you and I can't imagine. And if there was\n a house sitting on such a mountain and if winds\ndid\nblow, it would\n shake exactly the way that one does. Sometimes I get the feeling the\n whole place is going to slide off its foundation and go sailing down\n the avenue.\"\nLieutenant MacBride pursed his lips.",
"They sat there smoking in silence and every now and then their eyes\n widened as the house danced a new step.\nFownes stopped on the porch to brush the plaster of paris off his\n shoes. He hadn't seen the patrol car and this intense preoccupation\n of his was also responsible for the dancing house—he simply hadn't\n noticed. There was a certain amount of vibration, of course. He\n had a bootleg pipe connected into the dome blower system, and the\n high-pressure air caused some buffeting against the thin walls of the\n house. At least, he called it buffeting; he'd never thought to watch\n from outside.\n\n\n He went in and threw his jacket on the sofa, there being no room\n left in the closets. Crossing the living room he stopped to twist a\n draw-pull.\n\n\n Every window slammed shut.",
"Humphrey Fownes strode through the puffs of falling glass still\n intrigued by a temperature that was always 59 degrees, by a humidity\n that was always 47%, by weather that was always Optimum. It was this\n rather than skill that enabled the police to maintain such a tight\n surveillance on him, a surveillance that went to the extent of getting\n his fingerprints off the postman's bag, and which photographed, X-rayed\n and chemically analyzed the contents of his pockets before returning\n them. Two blocks away from his home a careless housewife spilled a\n five-pound bag of flour as he was passing. It was really plaster of\n Paris. He left his shoe prints, stride measurement, height, weight and\n handedness behind.\n\n\n By the time Fownes reached his front door an entire dossier complete\n with photographs had been prepared and was being read by two men in an\n orange patrol car parked down the street.\nLanfierre had undoubtedly been affected by his job.",
"Moonlight, he thought, and roses. Satisfactory.\nAnd cocktails for\n two.\nBlast, he'd never be able to figure that one out! He watched as\n the moon played,\nOh, You Beautiful Doll\nand the neon roses flashed\n slowly from red to violet, then went back to the closet and turned on\n the scent. The house began to smell like an immensely concentrated rose\n as the moon shifted to\nPeople Will Say We're In Love\n.\nHe rubbed his chin critically. It\nseemed\nall right. A dreamy sunset,\n an enchanted moon, flowers, scent.",
"\"Sometimes his house\nshakes\n,\" Lanfierre said.\n\n\n \"House shakes,\" Lieutenant MacBride wrote in his notebook. Then he\n stopped and frowned. He reread what he'd just written.\n\n\n \"You heard right. The house\nshakes\n,\" Lanfierre said, savoring it.\n\n\n MacBride looked at the Fownes house through the magnifying glass of\n the windshield. \"Like from ...\nside to side\n?\" he asked in a somewhat\n patronizing tone of voice.\n\n\n \"And up and down.\"\n\n\n MacBride returned the notebook to the breast pocket of his orange\n uniform. \"Go on,\" he said, amused. \"It sounds interesting.\" He tossed\n the dossier carelessly on the back seat.",
"\"And the\nwater\n,\" Lanfierre said. \"The\nwater\nhe uses! He could be\n the thirstiest and cleanest man in the city. He could have a whole\n family of thirsty and clean kids, and he\nstill\nwouldn't need all that\n water.\"\n\n\n The lieutenant had picked up the dossier. He thumbed through the pages\n now in amazement. \"Where do you get a guy like this?\" he asked. \"Did\n you see what he carries in his pockets?\"\n\n\n \"And compasses won't work on this street.\"\n\n\n The lieutenant lit a cigarette and sighed.\n\n\n He usually sighed when making the decision to raid a dwelling. It\n expressed his weariness and distaste for people who went off and got\n neurotic when they could be enjoying a happy, normal existence. There\n was something implacable about his sighs.",
"From a prone position on his miniscule front lawn, Fownes watched as\n his favorite easy chair sailed out of the living room on a blast of\n cold air and went pinwheeling down the avenue in the bright sunshine. A\n wild wind and a thick fog poured out of the house. It brought chairs,\n suits, small tables, lamps trailing their cords, ashtrays, sofa\n cushions. The house was emptying itself fiercely, as if disgorging an\n old, spoiled meal. From deep inside he could hear the rumble of his\n ancient upright piano as it rolled ponderously from room to room.\n\n\n He stood up; a wet wind swept over him, whipping at his face, toying\n with his hair. It was a whistling in his ears, and a tingle on his\n cheeks. He got hit by a shoe.\n\n\n As he forced his way back to the doorway needles of rain played over\n his face and he heard a voice cry out from somewhere in the living room.",
"\"I see.\"\n\n\n \"\nAnd\n,\" Mr. Fownes added, his voice a honeyed whisper, \"they say\n that somewhere out in the space and the roses and the moonlight,\n the sleeping equinox yawns and rises because on a certain day it's\nvernal\nand that's when it roams the Open Country where geigers no\n longer scintillate.\"",
"Sitting behind the wheel of the orange car, he watched Humphrey Fownes\n approach with a distinct feeling of admiration, although it was an\n odd, objective kind of admiration, clinical in nature. It was similar\n to that of a pathologist observing for the first time a new and\n particularly virulent strain of pneumococcus under his microscope.\n\n\n Lanfierre's job was to ferret out aberration. It couldn't be tolerated\n within the confines of a dome. Conformity had become more than a social\n force; it was a physical necessity. And, after years of working at it,\n Lanfierre had become an admirer of eccentricity. He came to see that\n genuine quirks were rare and, as time went on, due partly to his own\n small efforts, rarer.\n\n\n Fownes was a masterpiece of queerness. He was utterly inexplicable.\n Lanfierre was almost proud of Humphrey Fownes."
],
[
"\"And of course when they do find out and they ask you why, Mr. Fownes,\n you'll tell them. No, no heroics, please! When they ask a man a\n question he always answers and you will too. You'll tell them I wanted\n to be courted and when they hear that they'll be around to ask\nme\na\n few questions. You see, we're both a bit queer.\"\n\n\n \"I hadn't thought of that,\" Fownes said quietly.\n\n\n \"Oh, it doesn't really matter. I'll join Andrew, Curt, Norman—\"\n\n\n \"That won't be necessary,\" Fownes said with unusual force. \"With all\n due respect to Andrew, Curt, Norman and Alphonse, I might as well state\n here and now I have other plans for you, Mrs. Deshazaway.\"\n\n\n \"But my dear Mr. Fownes,\" she said, leaning across the table. \"We're\n lost, you and I.\"",
"He could hear her moving about and then felt her hands on his\n shoulders. \"And what about those\nvery\nelaborate plans you've been\n making to seduce me?\"\n\n\n Fownes froze with three asparagus hanging from his fork.\n\n\n \"Don't you think\nthey'll\nfind out?\nI\nfound out and you can bet\nthey\nwill. It's my fault, I guess. I talk too much. And I don't\n always tell the truth. To be completely honest with you, Mr. Fownes, it\n wasn't the old customs at all standing between us, it was air. I can't\n have another man die on me, it's bad for my self-esteem. And now you've\n gone and done something good and criminal, something peculiar.\"\nFownes put his fork down. \"Dear Mrs. Deshazaway,\" he started to say.",
"\"A twister,\" she replied quickly. \"Now listen to\nthis\n. Seven years\n later on March 21, 1986, Ella Marshall Davidson took out the same book.\n What do you make of\nthat\n?\"\n\n\n \"I'd say,\" Humphrey Fownes said, \"that he ... that he recommended it\n to her, that one day they met in the street and he told her about\n this book and then they ... they went to the library together and she\n borrowed it and eventually, why eventually they got married.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! They were brother and sister!\" the librarian shouted in her\n parched voice, her old buckram eyes laughing with cunning.",
"When he heard this Fownes plunged into the house and fought his way\n up the stairs. He found Lanfierre standing outside the bedroom with a\n wheel in his hand.\n\"What have I done?\" Lanfierre asked in the monotone of shock.\n\n\n Fownes took the wheel. It was off a 1995 Studebaker.\n\n\n \"I'm not sure what's going to come of this,\" he said to Lanfierre with\n an astonishing amount of objectivity, \"but the entire dome air supply\n is now coming through my bedroom.\"\n\n\n The wind screamed.\n\n\n \"Is there something I can turn?\" Lanfierre asked.\n\n\n \"Not any more there isn't.\"\n\n\n They started down the stairs carefully, but the wind caught them and\n they quickly reached the bottom in a wet heap.",
"Lanfierre sat stiffly behind the wheel, affronted. The cynical MacBride\n couldn't really appreciate fine aberrations. In some ways MacBride\n was a barbarian. Lanfierre had held out on Fownes for months. He\n had even contrived to engage him in conversation once, a pleasantly\n absurd, irrational little chat that titillated him for weeks. It was\n only with the greatest reluctance that he finally mentioned Fownes\n to MacBride. After years of searching for differences Lanfierre had\n seen how extraordinarily repetitious people were, echoes really, dimly\n resounding echoes, each believing itself whole and separate. They spoke\n in an incessant chatter of cliches, and their actions were unbelievably\n trite.\n\n\n Then a fine robust freak came along and the others—the echoes—refused\n to believe it. The lieutenant was probably on the point of suggesting a\n vacation.\n\n\n \"Why don't you take a vacation?\" Lieutenant MacBride suggested.",
"\"But it's the air! Why don't they talk about that? The air is stale,\n I'm positive. It's not nourishing. The air is stale and Andrew, Curt,\n Norman and Alphonse couldn't stand it. Poor Alphonse. He was never so\n healthy as on the day he was born. From then on things got steadily\n worse for him.\"\n\n\n \"I don't seem to mind the air.\"\n\n\n She threw up her hands. \"You'd be the worst of the lot!\" She left the\n table, rustling and tinkling about the room. \"I can just hear them. Try\n some of the asparagus.\nFive.\nThat's what they'd say. That woman did\n it again. And the plain fact is I don't want you on my record.\"\n\n\n \"Really,\" Fownes protested. \"I feel splendid. Never better.\"",
"The widow was a passionate woman. She did everything\n passionately—talking, cooking, dressing. Her beets were passionately\n red. Her clothes rustled and her high heels clicked and her jewelry\n tinkled. She was possessed by an uncontrollable dynamism. Fownes had\n never known anyone like her. \"You forgot to put salt on the potatoes,\"\n she said passionately, then went on as calmly as it was possible for\n her to be, to explain why she couldn't marry him. \"Do you have any\n idea what people are saying? They're all saying I'm a cannibal! I rob\n my husbands of their life force and when they're empty I carry their\n bodies outside on my way to the justice of the peace.\"\n\n\n \"As long as there are people,\" he said philosophically, \"there'll be\n talk.\"",
"He watched with folded arms, considering how he would start.\nMy dear\n Mrs. Deshazaway.\nToo formal. They'd be looking out at the romantic\n garden; time to be a bit forward.\nMy very dear Mrs. Deshazaway.\nNo.\n Contrived. How about a simple,\nDear Mrs. Deshazaway\n. That might be\n it.\nI was wondering, seeing as how it's so late, if you wouldn't\n rather stay over instead of going home....\nPreoccupied, he hadn't noticed the winds building up, didn't hear the\n shaking and rattling of the pipes. There were attic pipes connected\n to wall pipes and wall pipes connected to cellar pipes, and they made\n one gigantic skeleton that began to rattle its bones and dance as\n high-pressure air from the dome blower rushed in, slowly opening the\n Studebaker valve wider and wider....",
"He still didn't see the orange car parked down the street.\n\"Men are too perishable,\" Mrs. Deshazaway said over dinner. \"For all\n practical purposes I'm never going to marry again. All my husbands die.\"\n\n\n \"Would you pass the beets, please?\" Humphrey Fownes said.\n\n\n She handed him a platter of steaming red beets. \"And don't look at me\n that way,\" she said. \"I'm\nnot\ngoing to marry you and if you want\n reasons I'll give you four of them. Andrew. Curt. Norman. And Alphonse.\"",
"Recruiting Lieutenant MacBride from behind his sofa, the men carefully\n edged out of the house and forced the front door shut.\n\n\n The wind died. The fog dispersed. They stood dripping in the Optimum\n Dome Conditions of the bright avenue.\n\n\n \"I never figured on\nthis\n,\" Lanfierre said, shaking his head.\n\n\n With the front door closed the wind quickly built up inside the house.\n They could see the furnishing whirl past the windows. The house did a\n wild, elated jig.\n\n\n \"What kind of a place\nis\nthis?\" MacBride said, his courage beginning\n to return. He took out his notebook but it was a soggy mess. He tossed\n it away.\n\n\n \"Sure, he was\ndifferent\n,\" Lanfierre murmured. \"I knew that much.\"",
"\"No, you don't need a rest,\" MacBride said. \"You're starting to see\n flying houses, hear loud babbling voices. You've got winds in your\n brain, Lanfierre, breezes of fatigue, zephyrs of irrationality—\"\n\n\n At that moment, all at once, every last window in the house slammed\n shut.\n\n\n The street was deserted and quiet, not a movement, not a sound.\n MacBride and Lanfierre both leaned forward, as if waiting for the\n ghostly babble of voices to commence.\n\n\n The house began to shake.\n\n\n It rocked from side to side, it pitched forward and back, it yawed and\n dipped and twisted, straining at the mooring of its foundation. The\n house could have been preparing to take off and sail down the....\n\n\n MacBride looked at Lanfierre and Lanfierre looked at MacBride and then\n they both looked back at the dancing house.",
"He went downstairs to watch out the living room window. This was\n important; the window had a really fixed attitude about air currents.\n The neon roses bent and tinkled against each other as the wind rose and\n the moon shook a trifle as it whispered\nCuddle Up a Little Closer\n.",
"\"And the\nwater\n,\" Lanfierre said. \"The\nwater\nhe uses! He could be\n the thirstiest and cleanest man in the city. He could have a whole\n family of thirsty and clean kids, and he\nstill\nwouldn't need all that\n water.\"\n\n\n The lieutenant had picked up the dossier. He thumbed through the pages\n now in amazement. \"Where do you get a guy like this?\" he asked. \"Did\n you see what he carries in his pockets?\"\n\n\n \"And compasses won't work on this street.\"\n\n\n The lieutenant lit a cigarette and sighed.\n\n\n He usually sighed when making the decision to raid a dwelling. It\n expressed his weariness and distaste for people who went off and got\n neurotic when they could be enjoying a happy, normal existence. There\n was something implacable about his sighs.",
"The neon roses thrashed about, extinguishing each other. The red sun\n shot off a mass of sparks and then quickly sank out of sight. The moon\n fell on the garden and rolled ponderously along, crooning\nWhen the\n Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day\n.\n\n\n The shaking house finally woke him up. He scrambled upstairs to the\n Studebaker wheel and shut it off.\n\n\n At the window again, he sighed. Repairs were in order. And it wasn't\n the first time the winds got out of line.\n\n\n Why didn't she marry him and save all this bother? He shut it all down\n and went out the front door, wondering about the rhyme of the months,\n about stately August and eccentric February and romantic April. April.\n Its days were thirty and it followed September.\nAnd all the rest have\n thirty-one.\nWhat a strange people, the ancients!",
"\"Then you\nhave\ndiscussed preparations, the practical necessities of\n life in the Open Country. Food, clothing, a weapon perhaps? What else?\n Have I left anything out?\"\n\n\n The leader sighed. \"The gentleman wants to know if he's left anything\n out,\" he said to the group.\n\n\n Fownes looked around at them, at some dozen pained expressions.\n\n\n \"Tell the man what he's forgotten,\" the leader said, walking to the far\n window and turning his back quite pointedly on them.\n\n\n Everyone spoke at the same moment. \"\nA sound foreign policy\n,\" they all\n said, it being almost too obvious for words.\nOn his way out the librarian shouted at him: \"\nA Tale of a Tub\n,\n thirty-five years overdue!\" She was calculating the fine as he closed\n the door.",
"Fownes smiled weakly and looked again at the dust jacket. The twister\n was unquestionably a meteorological phenomenon. It spun ominously, like\n a malevolent top, and coursed the countryside destructively, carrying\n a Dorothy to an Oz. He couldn't help wondering if twisters did anything\n to feminine pulses, if they could possibly be a part of a moonlit\n night, with cocktails and roses. He absently stuffed the dust jacket\n in his pocket and went on into the other rooms, the librarian mumbling\n after him: \"Edna Murdoch Featherstone, April 21, 1991,\" as though\n reading inscriptions on a tombstone.\nThe Movement met in what had been the children's room, where unpaid\n ladies of the afternoon had once upon a time read stories to other\n people's offspring. The members sat around at the miniature tables\n looking oddly like giants fled from their fairy tales, protesting.",
"Moonlight, he thought, and roses. Satisfactory.\nAnd cocktails for\n two.\nBlast, he'd never be able to figure that one out! He watched as\n the moon played,\nOh, You Beautiful Doll\nand the neon roses flashed\n slowly from red to violet, then went back to the closet and turned on\n the scent. The house began to smell like an immensely concentrated rose\n as the moon shifted to\nPeople Will Say We're In Love\n.\nHe rubbed his chin critically. It\nseemed\nall right. A dreamy sunset,\n an enchanted moon, flowers, scent.",
"He went up the stairs to the bedroom closet and tried the rain-maker,\n thinking roguishly:\nThou shalt not inundate.\nThe risks he was taking!\n A shower fell gently on the garden and a male chorus began to chant\nSinging in the Rain\n. Undiminished, the yellow moon and the red sun\n continued to be brilliant, although the sun occasionally arced over and\n demolished several of the neon roses.\n\n\n The last wheel in the bedroom closet was a rather elegant steering\n wheel from an old 1995 Studebaker. This was on the bootleg pipe; he\n gingerly turned it.\n\n\n Far below in the cellar there was a rumble and then the soft whistle of\n winds came to him.",
"\"It's like this, MacBride. Do you know what a wind is? A breeze? A\n zephyr?\"\n\n\n \"I've heard some.\"\n\n\n \"They say there are mountain-tops where winds blow all the time. Strong\n winds, MacBride. Winds like you and I can't imagine. And if there was\n a house sitting on such a mountain and if winds\ndid\nblow, it would\n shake exactly the way that one does. Sometimes I get the feeling the\n whole place is going to slide off its foundation and go sailing down\n the avenue.\"\nLieutenant MacBride pursed his lips.",
"The dome weevils were going berserk trying to keep up with the\n precipitation. They whirred back and forth at frightful speed, then,\n emptied of molten glass, rushed to the Trough which they quickly\n emptied and then rushed about empty-handed. \"Yoo-hoo!\" he yelled,\n running. The artificial sun vanished behind the mushrooming twister.\n Optimum temperature collapsed. \"Mrs. Deshazaway!\nAgnes\n, will you\n marry me? Yoo-hoo!\"\n\n\n Lanfierre and Lieutenant MacBride leaned against their car and waited,\n dazed.\n\n\n There was quite a large fall of glass."
],
[
"\"He'll be coming out soon,\" Lanfierre said. \"He eats supper next door\n with a widow. Then he goes to the library. Always the same. Supper at\n the widow's next door and then the library.\"\n\n\n MacBride's eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. \"The library?\" he\n said. \"Is he in with that bunch?\"\n\n\n Lanfierre nodded.\n\n\n \"Should be very interesting,\" MacBride said slowly.\n\n\n \"I can't wait to see what he's got in there,\" Lanfierre murmured,\n watching the house with a consuming interest.",
"He could hear her moving about and then felt her hands on his\n shoulders. \"And what about those\nvery\nelaborate plans you've been\n making to seduce me?\"\n\n\n Fownes froze with three asparagus hanging from his fork.\n\n\n \"Don't you think\nthey'll\nfind out?\nI\nfound out and you can bet\nthey\nwill. It's my fault, I guess. I talk too much. And I don't\n always tell the truth. To be completely honest with you, Mr. Fownes, it\n wasn't the old customs at all standing between us, it was air. I can't\n have another man die on me, it's bad for my self-esteem. And now you've\n gone and done something good and criminal, something peculiar.\"\nFownes put his fork down. \"Dear Mrs. Deshazaway,\" he started to say.",
"When he heard this Fownes plunged into the house and fought his way\n up the stairs. He found Lanfierre standing outside the bedroom with a\n wheel in his hand.\n\"What have I done?\" Lanfierre asked in the monotone of shock.\n\n\n Fownes took the wheel. It was off a 1995 Studebaker.\n\n\n \"I'm not sure what's going to come of this,\" he said to Lanfierre with\n an astonishing amount of objectivity, \"but the entire dome air supply\n is now coming through my bedroom.\"\n\n\n The wind screamed.\n\n\n \"Is there something I can turn?\" Lanfierre asked.\n\n\n \"Not any more there isn't.\"\n\n\n They started down the stairs carefully, but the wind caught them and\n they quickly reached the bottom in a wet heap.",
"\"And of course when they do find out and they ask you why, Mr. Fownes,\n you'll tell them. No, no heroics, please! When they ask a man a\n question he always answers and you will too. You'll tell them I wanted\n to be courted and when they hear that they'll be around to ask\nme\na\n few questions. You see, we're both a bit queer.\"\n\n\n \"I hadn't thought of that,\" Fownes said quietly.\n\n\n \"Oh, it doesn't really matter. I'll join Andrew, Curt, Norman—\"\n\n\n \"That won't be necessary,\" Fownes said with unusual force. \"With all\n due respect to Andrew, Curt, Norman and Alphonse, I might as well state\n here and now I have other plans for you, Mrs. Deshazaway.\"\n\n\n \"But my dear Mr. Fownes,\" she said, leaning across the table. \"We're\n lost, you and I.\"",
"Lanfierre sat stiffly behind the wheel, affronted. The cynical MacBride\n couldn't really appreciate fine aberrations. In some ways MacBride\n was a barbarian. Lanfierre had held out on Fownes for months. He\n had even contrived to engage him in conversation once, a pleasantly\n absurd, irrational little chat that titillated him for weeks. It was\n only with the greatest reluctance that he finally mentioned Fownes\n to MacBride. After years of searching for differences Lanfierre had\n seen how extraordinarily repetitious people were, echoes really, dimly\n resounding echoes, each believing itself whole and separate. They spoke\n in an incessant chatter of cliches, and their actions were unbelievably\n trite.\n\n\n Then a fine robust freak came along and the others—the echoes—refused\n to believe it. The lieutenant was probably on the point of suggesting a\n vacation.\n\n\n \"Why don't you take a vacation?\" Lieutenant MacBride suggested.",
"He still didn't see the orange car parked down the street.\n\"Men are too perishable,\" Mrs. Deshazaway said over dinner. \"For all\n practical purposes I'm never going to marry again. All my husbands die.\"\n\n\n \"Would you pass the beets, please?\" Humphrey Fownes said.\n\n\n She handed him a platter of steaming red beets. \"And don't look at me\n that way,\" she said. \"I'm\nnot\ngoing to marry you and if you want\n reasons I'll give you four of them. Andrew. Curt. Norman. And Alphonse.\"",
"\"No, you don't need a rest,\" MacBride said. \"You're starting to see\n flying houses, hear loud babbling voices. You've got winds in your\n brain, Lanfierre, breezes of fatigue, zephyrs of irrationality—\"\n\n\n At that moment, all at once, every last window in the house slammed\n shut.\n\n\n The street was deserted and quiet, not a movement, not a sound.\n MacBride and Lanfierre both leaned forward, as if waiting for the\n ghostly babble of voices to commence.\n\n\n The house began to shake.\n\n\n It rocked from side to side, it pitched forward and back, it yawed and\n dipped and twisted, straining at the mooring of its foundation. The\n house could have been preparing to take off and sail down the....\n\n\n MacBride looked at Lanfierre and Lanfierre looked at MacBride and then\n they both looked back at the dancing house.",
"Recruiting Lieutenant MacBride from behind his sofa, the men carefully\n edged out of the house and forced the front door shut.\n\n\n The wind died. The fog dispersed. They stood dripping in the Optimum\n Dome Conditions of the bright avenue.\n\n\n \"I never figured on\nthis\n,\" Lanfierre said, shaking his head.\n\n\n With the front door closed the wind quickly built up inside the house.\n They could see the furnishing whirl past the windows. The house did a\n wild, elated jig.\n\n\n \"What kind of a place\nis\nthis?\" MacBride said, his courage beginning\n to return. He took out his notebook but it was a soggy mess. He tossed\n it away.\n\n\n \"Sure, he was\ndifferent\n,\" Lanfierre murmured. \"I knew that much.\"",
"He watched with folded arms, considering how he would start.\nMy dear\n Mrs. Deshazaway.\nToo formal. They'd be looking out at the romantic\n garden; time to be a bit forward.\nMy very dear Mrs. Deshazaway.\nNo.\n Contrived. How about a simple,\nDear Mrs. Deshazaway\n. That might be\n it.\nI was wondering, seeing as how it's so late, if you wouldn't\n rather stay over instead of going home....\nPreoccupied, he hadn't noticed the winds building up, didn't hear the\n shaking and rattling of the pipes. There were attic pipes connected\n to wall pipes and wall pipes connected to cellar pipes, and they made\n one gigantic skeleton that began to rattle its bones and dance as\n high-pressure air from the dome blower rushed in, slowly opening the\n Studebaker valve wider and wider....",
"It should have been difficult. Under the circumstances it was a\n masterpiece of pocket picking. What made it possible was Humphrey\n Fownes' abstraction; he was an uncommonly preoccupied individual. He\n was strolling along a quiet residential avenue: small private houses,\n one after another, a place of little traffic and minimum distractions.\n But he was thinking about weather, which was an unusual subject to\n begin with for a person living in a domed city. He was thinking so\n deeply about it that it never occurred to him that entirely too many\n people were bumping into him. He was thinking about Optimum Dome\n Conditions (a crisp 59 degrees, a mildly dessicated 47%) when a bogus\n postman, who pretended to be reading a postal card, jostled him. In the",
"\"And the\nwater\n,\" Lanfierre said. \"The\nwater\nhe uses! He could be\n the thirstiest and cleanest man in the city. He could have a whole\n family of thirsty and clean kids, and he\nstill\nwouldn't need all that\n water.\"\n\n\n The lieutenant had picked up the dossier. He thumbed through the pages\n now in amazement. \"Where do you get a guy like this?\" he asked. \"Did\n you see what he carries in his pockets?\"\n\n\n \"And compasses won't work on this street.\"\n\n\n The lieutenant lit a cigarette and sighed.\n\n\n He usually sighed when making the decision to raid a dwelling. It\n expressed his weariness and distaste for people who went off and got\n neurotic when they could be enjoying a happy, normal existence. There\n was something implacable about his sighs.",
"Humphrey Fownes' preoccupation finally came to an end when he was one\n block away from his house. It was then that he realized something\n unusual must have occurred. An orange patrol car of the security police\n was parked at his front door. And something else was happening too.\n\n\n His house was dancing.\n\n\n It was disconcerting, and at the same time enchanting, to watch one's\n residence frisking about on its foundation. It was such a strange sight\n that for the moment he didn't give a thought to what might be causing\n it. But when he stepped gingerly onto the porch, which was doing its\n own independent gavotte, he reached for the doorknob with an immense\n curiosity.\n\n\n The door flung itself open and knocked him back off the porch.",
"\"It's like this, MacBride. Do you know what a wind is? A breeze? A\n zephyr?\"\n\n\n \"I've heard some.\"\n\n\n \"They say there are mountain-tops where winds blow all the time. Strong\n winds, MacBride. Winds like you and I can't imagine. And if there was\n a house sitting on such a mountain and if winds\ndid\nblow, it would\n shake exactly the way that one does. Sometimes I get the feeling the\n whole place is going to slide off its foundation and go sailing down\n the avenue.\"\nLieutenant MacBride pursed his lips.",
"They sat there smoking in silence and every now and then their eyes\n widened as the house danced a new step.\nFownes stopped on the porch to brush the plaster of paris off his\n shoes. He hadn't seen the patrol car and this intense preoccupation\n of his was also responsible for the dancing house—he simply hadn't\n noticed. There was a certain amount of vibration, of course. He\n had a bootleg pipe connected into the dome blower system, and the\n high-pressure air caused some buffeting against the thin walls of the\n house. At least, he called it buffeting; he'd never thought to watch\n from outside.\n\n\n He went in and threw his jacket on the sofa, there being no room\n left in the closets. Crossing the living room he stopped to twist a\n draw-pull.\n\n\n Every window slammed shut.",
"\"Help!\" Lieutenant MacBride called.\n\n\n Standing in the doorway with his wet hair plastered down on his\n dripping scalp, the wind roaring about him, the piano rumbling in the\n distance like thunder, Humphrey Fownes suddenly saw it all very clearly.\n\n\n \"\nWinds\n,\" he said in a whisper.\n\n\n \"What's happening?\" MacBride yelled, crouching behind the sofa.\n\n\n \"\nMarch\nwinds,\" he said.\n\n\n \"What?!\"\n\n\n \"April showers!\"",
"Dialectically out in left field, Humphrey Fownes waited for a lull\n in the ensuing discussion and then politely inquired how it might be\n arranged for him to get out.\n\n\n \"Out?\" the leader said, frowning. \"Out? Out where?\"\n\n\n \"Outside the dome.\"\n\n\n \"Oh. All in good time, my friend. One day we shall all pick up and\n leave.\"\n\n\n \"And that day I'll await impatiently,\" Fownes replied with marvelous\n tact, \"because it will be lonely out there for the two of us. My future\n wife and I have to leave\nnow\n.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. Ridiculous! You have to be prepared for the Open Country.\n You can't just up and leave, it would be suicide, Fownes. And\n dialectically very poor.\"",
"He went downstairs to watch out the living room window. This was\n important; the window had a really fixed attitude about air currents.\n The neon roses bent and tinkled against each other as the wind rose and\n the moon shook a trifle as it whispered\nCuddle Up a Little Closer\n.",
"\"But it's the air! Why don't they talk about that? The air is stale,\n I'm positive. It's not nourishing. The air is stale and Andrew, Curt,\n Norman and Alphonse couldn't stand it. Poor Alphonse. He was never so\n healthy as on the day he was born. From then on things got steadily\n worse for him.\"\n\n\n \"I don't seem to mind the air.\"\n\n\n She threw up her hands. \"You'd be the worst of the lot!\" She left the\n table, rustling and tinkling about the room. \"I can just hear them. Try\n some of the asparagus.\nFive.\nThat's what they'd say. That woman did\n it again. And the plain fact is I don't want you on my record.\"\n\n\n \"Really,\" Fownes protested. \"I feel splendid. Never better.\"",
"The dome weevils were going berserk trying to keep up with the\n precipitation. They whirred back and forth at frightful speed, then,\n emptied of molten glass, rushed to the Trough which they quickly\n emptied and then rushed about empty-handed. \"Yoo-hoo!\" he yelled,\n running. The artificial sun vanished behind the mushrooming twister.\n Optimum temperature collapsed. \"Mrs. Deshazaway!\nAgnes\n, will you\n marry me? Yoo-hoo!\"\n\n\n Lanfierre and Lieutenant MacBride leaned against their car and waited,\n dazed.\n\n\n There was quite a large fall of glass.",
"\"A twister,\" she replied quickly. \"Now listen to\nthis\n. Seven years\n later on March 21, 1986, Ella Marshall Davidson took out the same book.\n What do you make of\nthat\n?\"\n\n\n \"I'd say,\" Humphrey Fownes said, \"that he ... that he recommended it\n to her, that one day they met in the street and he told her about\n this book and then they ... they went to the library together and she\n borrowed it and eventually, why eventually they got married.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! They were brother and sister!\" the librarian shouted in her\n parched voice, her old buckram eyes laughing with cunning."
],
[
"The widow was a passionate woman. She did everything\n passionately—talking, cooking, dressing. Her beets were passionately\n red. Her clothes rustled and her high heels clicked and her jewelry\n tinkled. She was possessed by an uncontrollable dynamism. Fownes had\n never known anyone like her. \"You forgot to put salt on the potatoes,\"\n she said passionately, then went on as calmly as it was possible for\n her to be, to explain why she couldn't marry him. \"Do you have any\n idea what people are saying? They're all saying I'm a cannibal! I rob\n my husbands of their life force and when they're empty I carry their\n bodies outside on my way to the justice of the peace.\"\n\n\n \"As long as there are people,\" he said philosophically, \"there'll be\n talk.\"",
"\"Then you\nhave\ndiscussed preparations, the practical necessities of\n life in the Open Country. Food, clothing, a weapon perhaps? What else?\n Have I left anything out?\"\n\n\n The leader sighed. \"The gentleman wants to know if he's left anything\n out,\" he said to the group.\n\n\n Fownes looked around at them, at some dozen pained expressions.\n\n\n \"Tell the man what he's forgotten,\" the leader said, walking to the far\n window and turning his back quite pointedly on them.\n\n\n Everyone spoke at the same moment. \"\nA sound foreign policy\n,\" they all\n said, it being almost too obvious for words.\nOn his way out the librarian shouted at him: \"\nA Tale of a Tub\n,\n thirty-five years overdue!\" She was calculating the fine as he closed\n the door.",
"\"And the\nwater\n,\" Lanfierre said. \"The\nwater\nhe uses! He could be\n the thirstiest and cleanest man in the city. He could have a whole\n family of thirsty and clean kids, and he\nstill\nwouldn't need all that\n water.\"\n\n\n The lieutenant had picked up the dossier. He thumbed through the pages\n now in amazement. \"Where do you get a guy like this?\" he asked. \"Did\n you see what he carries in his pockets?\"\n\n\n \"And compasses won't work on this street.\"\n\n\n The lieutenant lit a cigarette and sighed.\n\n\n He usually sighed when making the decision to raid a dwelling. It\n expressed his weariness and distaste for people who went off and got\n neurotic when they could be enjoying a happy, normal existence. There\n was something implacable about his sighs.",
"He still didn't see the orange car parked down the street.\n\"Men are too perishable,\" Mrs. Deshazaway said over dinner. \"For all\n practical purposes I'm never going to marry again. All my husbands die.\"\n\n\n \"Would you pass the beets, please?\" Humphrey Fownes said.\n\n\n She handed him a platter of steaming red beets. \"And don't look at me\n that way,\" she said. \"I'm\nnot\ngoing to marry you and if you want\n reasons I'll give you four of them. Andrew. Curt. Norman. And Alphonse.\"",
"\"A twister,\" she replied quickly. \"Now listen to\nthis\n. Seven years\n later on March 21, 1986, Ella Marshall Davidson took out the same book.\n What do you make of\nthat\n?\"\n\n\n \"I'd say,\" Humphrey Fownes said, \"that he ... that he recommended it\n to her, that one day they met in the street and he told her about\n this book and then they ... they went to the library together and she\n borrowed it and eventually, why eventually they got married.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! They were brother and sister!\" the librarian shouted in her\n parched voice, her old buckram eyes laughing with cunning.",
"\"But it's the air! Why don't they talk about that? The air is stale,\n I'm positive. It's not nourishing. The air is stale and Andrew, Curt,\n Norman and Alphonse couldn't stand it. Poor Alphonse. He was never so\n healthy as on the day he was born. From then on things got steadily\n worse for him.\"\n\n\n \"I don't seem to mind the air.\"\n\n\n She threw up her hands. \"You'd be the worst of the lot!\" She left the\n table, rustling and tinkling about the room. \"I can just hear them. Try\n some of the asparagus.\nFive.\nThat's what they'd say. That woman did\n it again. And the plain fact is I don't want you on my record.\"\n\n\n \"Really,\" Fownes protested. \"I feel splendid. Never better.\"",
"He could hear her moving about and then felt her hands on his\n shoulders. \"And what about those\nvery\nelaborate plans you've been\n making to seduce me?\"\n\n\n Fownes froze with three asparagus hanging from his fork.\n\n\n \"Don't you think\nthey'll\nfind out?\nI\nfound out and you can bet\nthey\nwill. It's my fault, I guess. I talk too much. And I don't\n always tell the truth. To be completely honest with you, Mr. Fownes, it\n wasn't the old customs at all standing between us, it was air. I can't\n have another man die on me, it's bad for my self-esteem. And now you've\n gone and done something good and criminal, something peculiar.\"\nFownes put his fork down. \"Dear Mrs. Deshazaway,\" he started to say.",
"\"And of course when they do find out and they ask you why, Mr. Fownes,\n you'll tell them. No, no heroics, please! When they ask a man a\n question he always answers and you will too. You'll tell them I wanted\n to be courted and when they hear that they'll be around to ask\nme\na\n few questions. You see, we're both a bit queer.\"\n\n\n \"I hadn't thought of that,\" Fownes said quietly.\n\n\n \"Oh, it doesn't really matter. I'll join Andrew, Curt, Norman—\"\n\n\n \"That won't be necessary,\" Fownes said with unusual force. \"With all\n due respect to Andrew, Curt, Norman and Alphonse, I might as well state\n here and now I have other plans for you, Mrs. Deshazaway.\"\n\n\n \"But my dear Mr. Fownes,\" she said, leaning across the table. \"We're\n lost, you and I.\"",
"Lanfierre sat stiffly behind the wheel, affronted. The cynical MacBride\n couldn't really appreciate fine aberrations. In some ways MacBride\n was a barbarian. Lanfierre had held out on Fownes for months. He\n had even contrived to engage him in conversation once, a pleasantly\n absurd, irrational little chat that titillated him for weeks. It was\n only with the greatest reluctance that he finally mentioned Fownes\n to MacBride. After years of searching for differences Lanfierre had\n seen how extraordinarily repetitious people were, echoes really, dimly\n resounding echoes, each believing itself whole and separate. They spoke\n in an incessant chatter of cliches, and their actions were unbelievably\n trite.\n\n\n Then a fine robust freak came along and the others—the echoes—refused\n to believe it. The lieutenant was probably on the point of suggesting a\n vacation.\n\n\n \"Why don't you take a vacation?\" Lieutenant MacBride suggested.",
"Humphrey Fownes strode through the puffs of falling glass still\n intrigued by a temperature that was always 59 degrees, by a humidity\n that was always 47%, by weather that was always Optimum. It was this\n rather than skill that enabled the police to maintain such a tight\n surveillance on him, a surveillance that went to the extent of getting\n his fingerprints off the postman's bag, and which photographed, X-rayed\n and chemically analyzed the contents of his pockets before returning\n them. Two blocks away from his home a careless housewife spilled a\n five-pound bag of flour as he was passing. It was really plaster of\n Paris. He left his shoe prints, stride measurement, height, weight and\n handedness behind.\n\n\n By the time Fownes reached his front door an entire dossier complete\n with photographs had been prepared and was being read by two men in an\n orange patrol car parked down the street.\nLanfierre had undoubtedly been affected by his job.",
"When he heard this Fownes plunged into the house and fought his way\n up the stairs. He found Lanfierre standing outside the bedroom with a\n wheel in his hand.\n\"What have I done?\" Lanfierre asked in the monotone of shock.\n\n\n Fownes took the wheel. It was off a 1995 Studebaker.\n\n\n \"I'm not sure what's going to come of this,\" he said to Lanfierre with\n an astonishing amount of objectivity, \"but the entire dome air supply\n is now coming through my bedroom.\"\n\n\n The wind screamed.\n\n\n \"Is there something I can turn?\" Lanfierre asked.\n\n\n \"Not any more there isn't.\"\n\n\n They started down the stairs carefully, but the wind caught them and\n they quickly reached the bottom in a wet heap.",
"He watched with folded arms, considering how he would start.\nMy dear\n Mrs. Deshazaway.\nToo formal. They'd be looking out at the romantic\n garden; time to be a bit forward.\nMy very dear Mrs. Deshazaway.\nNo.\n Contrived. How about a simple,\nDear Mrs. Deshazaway\n. That might be\n it.\nI was wondering, seeing as how it's so late, if you wouldn't\n rather stay over instead of going home....\nPreoccupied, he hadn't noticed the winds building up, didn't hear the\n shaking and rattling of the pipes. There were attic pipes connected\n to wall pipes and wall pipes connected to cellar pipes, and they made\n one gigantic skeleton that began to rattle its bones and dance as\n high-pressure air from the dome blower rushed in, slowly opening the\n Studebaker valve wider and wider....",
"It should have been difficult. Under the circumstances it was a\n masterpiece of pocket picking. What made it possible was Humphrey\n Fownes' abstraction; he was an uncommonly preoccupied individual. He\n was strolling along a quiet residential avenue: small private houses,\n one after another, a place of little traffic and minimum distractions.\n But he was thinking about weather, which was an unusual subject to\n begin with for a person living in a domed city. He was thinking so\n deeply about it that it never occurred to him that entirely too many\n people were bumping into him. He was thinking about Optimum Dome\n Conditions (a crisp 59 degrees, a mildly dessicated 47%) when a bogus\n postman, who pretended to be reading a postal card, jostled him. In the",
"Recruiting Lieutenant MacBride from behind his sofa, the men carefully\n edged out of the house and forced the front door shut.\n\n\n The wind died. The fog dispersed. They stood dripping in the Optimum\n Dome Conditions of the bright avenue.\n\n\n \"I never figured on\nthis\n,\" Lanfierre said, shaking his head.\n\n\n With the front door closed the wind quickly built up inside the house.\n They could see the furnishing whirl past the windows. The house did a\n wild, elated jig.\n\n\n \"What kind of a place\nis\nthis?\" MacBride said, his courage beginning\n to return. He took out his notebook but it was a soggy mess. He tossed\n it away.\n\n\n \"Sure, he was\ndifferent\n,\" Lanfierre murmured. \"I knew that much.\"",
"He went downstairs to watch out the living room window. This was\n important; the window had a really fixed attitude about air currents.\n The neon roses bent and tinkled against each other as the wind rose and\n the moon shook a trifle as it whispered\nCuddle Up a Little Closer\n.",
"They were all purely speculative of course. He had no idea how a rose\n really smelled—or looked for that matter. Not to mention a moon. But\n then, neither did the widow. He'd have to be confident, assertive.\nInsist\non it. I tell you, my dear, this is a genuine realistic\n romantic moon. Now, does it do anything to your pulse? Do you feel icy\n fingers marching up and down your spine?\n\n\n His own spine didn't seem to be affected. But then he hadn't read that\n book on ancient mores and courtship customs.\n\n\n How really odd the ancients were. Seduction seemed to be an incredibly\n long and drawn-out process, accompanied by a considerable amount\n of falsification. Communication seemed virtually impossible. \"No\"\n meant any number of things, depending on the tone of voice and the\n circumstances. It could mean yes, it could mean ask me again later on\n this evening.",
"\"No, you don't need a rest,\" MacBride said. \"You're starting to see\n flying houses, hear loud babbling voices. You've got winds in your\n brain, Lanfierre, breezes of fatigue, zephyrs of irrationality—\"\n\n\n At that moment, all at once, every last window in the house slammed\n shut.\n\n\n The street was deserted and quiet, not a movement, not a sound.\n MacBride and Lanfierre both leaned forward, as if waiting for the\n ghostly babble of voices to commence.\n\n\n The house began to shake.\n\n\n It rocked from side to side, it pitched forward and back, it yawed and\n dipped and twisted, straining at the mooring of its foundation. The\n house could have been preparing to take off and sail down the....\n\n\n MacBride looked at Lanfierre and Lanfierre looked at MacBride and then\n they both looked back at the dancing house.",
"He went up the stairs to the bedroom closet and tried the rain-maker,\n thinking roguishly:\nThou shalt not inundate.\nThe risks he was taking!\n A shower fell gently on the garden and a male chorus began to chant\nSinging in the Rain\n. Undiminished, the yellow moon and the red sun\n continued to be brilliant, although the sun occasionally arced over and\n demolished several of the neon roses.\n\n\n The last wheel in the bedroom closet was a rather elegant steering\n wheel from an old 1995 Studebaker. This was on the bootleg pipe; he\n gingerly turned it.\n\n\n Far below in the cellar there was a rumble and then the soft whistle of\n winds came to him.",
"Dialectically out in left field, Humphrey Fownes waited for a lull\n in the ensuing discussion and then politely inquired how it might be\n arranged for him to get out.\n\n\n \"Out?\" the leader said, frowning. \"Out? Out where?\"\n\n\n \"Outside the dome.\"\n\n\n \"Oh. All in good time, my friend. One day we shall all pick up and\n leave.\"\n\n\n \"And that day I'll await impatiently,\" Fownes replied with marvelous\n tact, \"because it will be lonely out there for the two of us. My future\n wife and I have to leave\nnow\n.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense. Ridiculous! You have to be prepared for the Open Country.\n You can't just up and leave, it would be suicide, Fownes. And\n dialectically very poor.\"",
"The neon roses thrashed about, extinguishing each other. The red sun\n shot off a mass of sparks and then quickly sank out of sight. The moon\n fell on the garden and rolled ponderously along, crooning\nWhen the\n Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day\n.\n\n\n The shaking house finally woke him up. He scrambled upstairs to the\n Studebaker wheel and shut it off.\n\n\n At the window again, he sighed. Repairs were in order. And it wasn't\n the first time the winds got out of line.\n\n\n Why didn't she marry him and save all this bother? He shut it all down\n and went out the front door, wondering about the rhyme of the months,\n about stately August and eccentric February and romantic April. April.\n Its days were thirty and it followed September.\nAnd all the rest have\n thirty-one.\nWhat a strange people, the ancients!"
]
] |
train
|
20074
|
[
"Why has UFC moved to smaller locations over the course of its history?",
"Why does modern UFC not have stories to follow?",
"Which of these things contributed most to the lowered audience for UFC?",
"What motivated Sen. John McCain to push back against UFC?",
"How was the start of UFC a learning experience?",
"What is the point of the discussion of boxing gloves?",
"What could have spurred the American Medical Association recommending a ban against UFC?",
"How was the imposition of weight classes probably recieved by fans?",
"What was likely the biggest impact of the lawsuits against the UFC?"
] |
[
[
"Over time, popularity decreased enough that these are the only places fights can happen",
"This way, UFC fits in with public perception driven by movies like Fight Club, which is more true to its roots",
"The fans are dedicated to their small local stadiums prefer to not have matches televised",
"It is now illegal to have UFC matches in large stadiums for safety reasons"
],
[
"It is televised less often, and the more popular components of the sport are no longer around",
"The rules constantly change, so the story starts over every new season\t",
"It was a more compelling story without the new gloves and ropes instead of chains--it's too flashy now, and the fans like the raw people\t",
"The fighters who were around when UFC first became popular were dedicated to their characters, but the contemporary fighters didn't care about this aspect of the sport\t"
],
[
"The better fighters were too expensive, so when they moved abroad the fanbase fell through",
"The scoring system defeated the purpose of the no-holds-barred sport which made it less exciting to watch",
"Other sports became more popular, and UFC ended up as another fad, leaving the fighters to return to their original combat sports",
"Misconceptions about the safety of the sport drove political spats that kicked UFC out of the spotlight"
],
[
"He was a bigger fan of boxing and thought UFC was taking the spotlight",
"He thought UFC seemed more violent than other sports and was disgusted enough to revolt",
"He had pressure from the television networks to take UFC off the air because it was too violent",
"He thought all combat sports were dangerous and couldn't stand to see all of the violence televised"
],
[
"The fighters learned the hard way that not restricting to one combat type was too dangerous",
"It turned out that new types of combat sports are not favored on network TV, and there was not enough of a following for it to ever be popular",
"Assumptions about which fighting styles would be most beneficial in the real world were challenged",
"It turned out that the octagonal style of the ring was much harder to fight in than the square of a boxing ring"
],
[
"Boxing gloves should have been incorporated into UFC much earlier, because it would have been a familiar component for prospective fans to latch onto",
"Boxing gloves exemplify the types of misunderstandings about UFC that drove its biggest naysayers",
"The boxing gloves are an important aesthetic choice, and having an accessory unique to a sport makes it easier to garner a fan base",
"It was important to understand how dangerous boxing is, which could be why many boxers moved to UFC over time"
],
[
"There was general political pressure to disfavor the sport, independent of its safety",
"The \"up close and personal\" style of fighting meant that fighters were much more prone to catching sickness from each other, compared to boxing and other sports",
"Private money that could have been going to scientific research was being moved to UFC advertisements, and they wanted to change the discussion",
"Too many people had been seriously injured, so once someone was killed, something had to be done"
],
[
"It was upsetting because it made the matches end much more quickly, decreasing entertainment value",
"They were never officially imposed, because they went against the original motivation for UFC to begin with",
"They thought it was safer to even the odds, so even though it was less surprising, the fans went with it",
"It was one of many things that decreased the appeal of UFC over time"
],
[
"Being in a legal battle doesn't look good, and it made the fans distrust the organizations promoting UFC",
"The cost of the lawsuits drained the resources of the promoters so they didn't have the money for ads, fighters, and venues",
"The lawsuits took up so much time that fights were delayed long past when the fans were willing to wait until",
"The UFC's lawyers were tied up in TV network disputes, and were too busy to guarantee good contracts for the fighters"
]
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1,
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[
"But logic has not served the UFC well. Where McCain led, a prudish nation followed. George Will opined against UFC. The American Medical Association recommended a ban. New York state outlawed ultimate fighting, as did other states. The Nevada Athletic Commission refused to sanction UFC bouts, barring the UFC from the lucrative casino market. (One public TV station refused a UFC sponsorship ad. The only other organization the station ever rejected was the Ku Klux Klan.) Lawsuits blocked or delayed UFC events all over the country, forcing the promoters to spend millions in legal fees. The UFC was exiled from mega-arenas to ever-smaller venues in ever more out-of-the-way states: Louisiana, Iowa, and Alabama. The match I attended in October 1997 was held in the parking lot of a small Mississippi casino.",
"None of this soothed the cable operators, who have kept UFC off the air. The pay-per-view audience has plunged from 300,000 per show to 15,000. UFC can no longer afford its best fighters: Some are fighting overseas. Others, notably Ken Shamrock (Frank's brother), have become pro wrestlers. Fights have deteriorated. UFC is limping along, but it has been reduced to scheduling events in Japan and Brazil. \n\n \"Sports fans want to grow with the sport,\" says former UFC fighter David Beneteau. \"They want to recognize the athletes. They want to see the same fighters come back. When you compare UFC now to what it was, the fighters are not the same, the rules are not the same. The fans have no story to follow.\"",
"In the past two years, an increasingly desperate UFC has been trying to assuage its critics. The competition, which had been gradually adding safety rules since the first fight, imposed even more. It institued rounds and a \"10-point must\" scoring system. It banned head butts and groin strikes. You can no longer kick a downed man or elbow someone in the back of the head. Fighters are required to wear thin martial arts gloves (a purely cosmetic change). The UFC imposed weight classes, ending the David-and-Goliath mismatches that made early fights so compelling.",
"UFC began in 1993 as a locker-room fantasy. What would happen if a kickboxer fought a wrestler? A karate champion fought a sumo champion? Promoters built an octagonal chain-link cage, invited eight top martial artists, and set them loose in no-holds-barred, bare-knuckles fights. \"There are no rules!\" bragged an early press release. Contestants would fight till \"knockout, submission, doctor's intervention, or death.\" UFC allowed, even promoted, all notions of bad sportsmanship: kicking a man when he's down, hitting him in the groin, choking. Four-hundred-pound men were sent into the Octagon to maul guys half their size. Only biting and eye-gouging were forbidden.",
"Even as it disappears from public view, ultimate fighting is returning to its roots. Away from the scrutiny of the major media, state legislators, and McCain, kids are still learning mixed martial-arts techniques, and small-time promoters are quietly staging events. You can see Kage Kombat competitions at Dancing Waters nightclub in San Pedro, Calif. You can watch the Warrior's Challenge at a small Indian casino outside Sacramento. Texans compete in Houston's Dungal All Styles Fighting Championship. Tribal casinos in Northern Idaho are hosting small Pankration tournaments. The Extreme Fighting Challenge is popular in Iowa. The money is low; the crowds are small; and there's not a TV camera in sight. Ultimate fighting should have become boxing. Instead it has gone underground. It has become Fight Club.",
"The cable TV industry struck the fatal blow. In early 1997, McCain became chairman of the commerce committee, which oversees the cable industry. In April 1997, the president of the National Cable Television Association warned that UFC broadcasts could jeopardize the cable industry's influence in Washington. Time Warner, TCI, Request, Cablevision Systems, Viewer's Choice, and other major operators stopped airing UFC events, saying they were too violent for children. Never mind that 1) UFC only aired on pay-per-view, so children could not see it unless their parents paid for it; and 2) the same cable outfits carried boxing matches, R and NC-17 movies, and professional wrestling shows far more violent than UFC. The UFC's \"addressable audience\"--the potential number of PPV subscribers--shrank from 35 million at its peak to 7.5 million today.",
"UFC's promoters predicted that it would supplant boxing as America's martial art. Instead, it fell apart. The collapse began in 1996, when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., saw a UFC tape. McCain, a lifelong boxing fan, was horrified at the ground fighting, kicks, and head butts. It was \"barbaric,\" he said. It was \"not a sport.\" He sent letters to all 50 governors asking them to ban ultimate fighting. The outcry against \"human cockfighting\" became a crusade, and like many crusades, it was founded on misunderstanding. \n\n UFC fell victim to cultural determinism about what a fight is. In countries such as Brazil and Japan, where no-holds-barred fighting has a long history, it is popular and uncontroversial. But Americans adhere to the Marquis of Queensbury rules. A fight consists of an exchange of upper-body blows that halts when one fighter falls.",
"The gimmick entranced thousands of people (well, men). What happens when a 620-pound sumo champion fights a 200-pound kickboxer? Answer: The kickboxer knocks him silly in 35 seconds. They tuned in for bloodshed--\"the damage,\" as fans like to call it. UFC fights could be horrifying. Tank Abbott, an ill-tempered, 270-pound street fighter, knocks out hapless opponent John Matua in 15 seconds. Then, before the ref can intervene, Abbott belts the unconscious Matua in the head, sending him into a fit, limbs quivering uncontrollably, blood spurting from his mouth. Abbott, naturally, became a cult hero and won a guest spot on Friends . (Matua walked out of the ring.) Soon, UFC was selling out huge arenas and drawing 300,000 pay-per-view subscribers for its quarterly competitions.",
"\"It was a very cheap way for the cable companies to portray themselves as anti-violence. It did not cost them much and it made them look good in Washington,\" says Carol Klenfner, spokeswoman for UFC's parent company, SEG. \n\n The ultimate fighting industry did little to help its own cause. The UFC promoted itself less as a serious sport than as a circus of carnage. Its early ads emphasized extreme fighting's potential for death. UFC folks accused McCain, without any evidence, of opposing the sport as a favor to campaign contributors. Extreme fighting was tarnished when fighters from the other ultimate fighting operation, the now-defunct Battlecade, were arrested for violating Canadian prizefighting laws when they fought on an Indian reservation outside Montreal.",
"Fight Clubbed \n\n Fight Club , a movie about a fictional organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp, has provoked more than its share of media hand-wringing, particularly diatribes about Hollywood's infatuation with violence and Faludi-esque ruminations about the emasculated American male. Fight Club , however, has not sparked an iota of interest in a real organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp: the Ultimate Fighting Championship. UFC's flameout from national sensation to total irrelevance is a tragedy of American sports, a cautionary tale of prudishness, heavy-handed politics, and cultural myopia.",
"Similarly, the chain-link fence surrounding the octagon looks grotesque. Critics have demanded that UFC install ropes instead. But ropes are a major cause of death and injury in boxing: Fighters hyperextend their necks when they are punched against the ropes, because nothing stops their heads from snapping back. The chain-link fence prevents hyperextension. \n\n When I tell people I'm an ultimate fighting fan, they invariably respond: \"Don't people get killed all the time doing that?\" But no one has ever been killed at the UFC--though boxers are killed every year. No one has even been seriously injured at the UFC. On the rare occasions when a bout has ended with a bloody knockout, the loser has always walked out of the ring.",
"UFC's caged matches revolutionized the idea of fighting. Nursed on boxing and Hollywood, Americans imagine fights as choreography, a dance of elegant combinations, roundhouse kicks, clean knockouts. The UFC punctured this. Boxers floundered. Experts in striking martial arts such as karate and tae kwon do, who fancied themselves the world's greatest fighters, found themselves pretzeled by jujitsu masters, who pulled them to the ground and slowly choked or leg-locked them. \"UFC immediately debunked a lot of myths of fighting, of boxing, karate, kung fu. It showed the reality of what works in an actual fight,\" says Dave Meltzer, editor of Wrestling Observer .",
"Instead of being carnivals of gore, UFC fights looked strangely like ... sex. Almost all fights ended on the ground, one man mounting the other in missionary position, the pair of them wiggling mysteriously along the canvas for five, 10, even 30 minutes. There were few spectacular knockouts. The referee--yes, there was always a referee--stopped many bouts, and in most others, fighters \"tapped out,\" surrendering to mild-looking but agonizing chokes and joint locks. It was not barbarism. It was science.",
"Any blood sport can be barbaric, whether it's boxing or wrestling or ultimate fighting. It is impossible to draw a bright line between ultimate fighting and boxing. If anything, ultimate fighting is safer and less cruel than America's blood sport. For example, critics pilloried ultimate fighting because competitors fought with bare knuckles: To a nation accustomed to boxing gloves, this seemed revolting, an invitation to brain damage. But it's just the reverse: The purpose of boxing gloves is not to cushion the head but to shield the knuckles. Without gloves, a boxer would break his hands after a couple of punches to the skull. That's why ultimate fighters won't throw multiple skull punches. As a result, they avoid the concussive head wounds that kill boxers--and the long-term neurological damage that cripples them.",
"But a subtle sport was emerging from the gimmicks and carnage. My passion for ultimate fighting (which is also called \"extreme\" or \"no-holds-barred\" fighting) began when I saw the finals of UFC IV. Royce Gracie, a 180-pound Brazilian jujitsu specialist, was matched against a 275-pound beast named Dan Severn, one of the top heavyweight wrestlers in the world and a national champion many times over. In 30 seconds, Severn had grabbed Gracie, flung him to the canvas, and mounted him. For the next 15 minutes, Severn pummeled and elbowed and head-butted the smaller man. Gracie's face grew drawn, and he squirmed wildly to avoid Severn's bombardment. Then, all of sudden, Gracie, still lying on his back, saw an opening, wrapped his arms and legs around Severn like a python and choked the giant into submission.",
"The UFC spawned a new breed of \"mixed martial artists.\" World-class wrestlers learned to kickbox. Champion kickboxers learned to grapple. (The karate experts learned to stay home.) They became, without doubt, the best fighters in the world. (Click for more about the fighters.) Mike Tyson wouldn't last 30 seconds in an ultimate fighting match. When Olympic gold medal wrestler Kevin Jackson came to the UFC, a fighter named Frank Shamrock KO'd him with a submission hold in 16 seconds. Ultimate fighting schools began sprouting up all over the country, replacing the stylized gestures of the Eastern martial arts with techniques that actually work.",
"But this does not impress boxing fans, who are the most vigorous opponents of extreme fighting. McCain sat ringside at a boxing match where a fighter was killed. When I asked him to explain the moral distinction between boxing and ultimate fighting, he exploded at me, \"If you can't see the moral distinction, then we have nothing to talk about!\" Then he cut our interview short and stormed out of his office."
],
[
"None of this soothed the cable operators, who have kept UFC off the air. The pay-per-view audience has plunged from 300,000 per show to 15,000. UFC can no longer afford its best fighters: Some are fighting overseas. Others, notably Ken Shamrock (Frank's brother), have become pro wrestlers. Fights have deteriorated. UFC is limping along, but it has been reduced to scheduling events in Japan and Brazil. \n\n \"Sports fans want to grow with the sport,\" says former UFC fighter David Beneteau. \"They want to recognize the athletes. They want to see the same fighters come back. When you compare UFC now to what it was, the fighters are not the same, the rules are not the same. The fans have no story to follow.\"",
"In the past two years, an increasingly desperate UFC has been trying to assuage its critics. The competition, which had been gradually adding safety rules since the first fight, imposed even more. It institued rounds and a \"10-point must\" scoring system. It banned head butts and groin strikes. You can no longer kick a downed man or elbow someone in the back of the head. Fighters are required to wear thin martial arts gloves (a purely cosmetic change). The UFC imposed weight classes, ending the David-and-Goliath mismatches that made early fights so compelling.",
"UFC began in 1993 as a locker-room fantasy. What would happen if a kickboxer fought a wrestler? A karate champion fought a sumo champion? Promoters built an octagonal chain-link cage, invited eight top martial artists, and set them loose in no-holds-barred, bare-knuckles fights. \"There are no rules!\" bragged an early press release. Contestants would fight till \"knockout, submission, doctor's intervention, or death.\" UFC allowed, even promoted, all notions of bad sportsmanship: kicking a man when he's down, hitting him in the groin, choking. Four-hundred-pound men were sent into the Octagon to maul guys half their size. Only biting and eye-gouging were forbidden.",
"UFC's promoters predicted that it would supplant boxing as America's martial art. Instead, it fell apart. The collapse began in 1996, when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., saw a UFC tape. McCain, a lifelong boxing fan, was horrified at the ground fighting, kicks, and head butts. It was \"barbaric,\" he said. It was \"not a sport.\" He sent letters to all 50 governors asking them to ban ultimate fighting. The outcry against \"human cockfighting\" became a crusade, and like many crusades, it was founded on misunderstanding. \n\n UFC fell victim to cultural determinism about what a fight is. In countries such as Brazil and Japan, where no-holds-barred fighting has a long history, it is popular and uncontroversial. But Americans adhere to the Marquis of Queensbury rules. A fight consists of an exchange of upper-body blows that halts when one fighter falls.",
"The gimmick entranced thousands of people (well, men). What happens when a 620-pound sumo champion fights a 200-pound kickboxer? Answer: The kickboxer knocks him silly in 35 seconds. They tuned in for bloodshed--\"the damage,\" as fans like to call it. UFC fights could be horrifying. Tank Abbott, an ill-tempered, 270-pound street fighter, knocks out hapless opponent John Matua in 15 seconds. Then, before the ref can intervene, Abbott belts the unconscious Matua in the head, sending him into a fit, limbs quivering uncontrollably, blood spurting from his mouth. Abbott, naturally, became a cult hero and won a guest spot on Friends . (Matua walked out of the ring.) Soon, UFC was selling out huge arenas and drawing 300,000 pay-per-view subscribers for its quarterly competitions.",
"Fight Clubbed \n\n Fight Club , a movie about a fictional organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp, has provoked more than its share of media hand-wringing, particularly diatribes about Hollywood's infatuation with violence and Faludi-esque ruminations about the emasculated American male. Fight Club , however, has not sparked an iota of interest in a real organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp: the Ultimate Fighting Championship. UFC's flameout from national sensation to total irrelevance is a tragedy of American sports, a cautionary tale of prudishness, heavy-handed politics, and cultural myopia.",
"UFC's caged matches revolutionized the idea of fighting. Nursed on boxing and Hollywood, Americans imagine fights as choreography, a dance of elegant combinations, roundhouse kicks, clean knockouts. The UFC punctured this. Boxers floundered. Experts in striking martial arts such as karate and tae kwon do, who fancied themselves the world's greatest fighters, found themselves pretzeled by jujitsu masters, who pulled them to the ground and slowly choked or leg-locked them. \"UFC immediately debunked a lot of myths of fighting, of boxing, karate, kung fu. It showed the reality of what works in an actual fight,\" says Dave Meltzer, editor of Wrestling Observer .",
"Instead of being carnivals of gore, UFC fights looked strangely like ... sex. Almost all fights ended on the ground, one man mounting the other in missionary position, the pair of them wiggling mysteriously along the canvas for five, 10, even 30 minutes. There were few spectacular knockouts. The referee--yes, there was always a referee--stopped many bouts, and in most others, fighters \"tapped out,\" surrendering to mild-looking but agonizing chokes and joint locks. It was not barbarism. It was science.",
"But logic has not served the UFC well. Where McCain led, a prudish nation followed. George Will opined against UFC. The American Medical Association recommended a ban. New York state outlawed ultimate fighting, as did other states. The Nevada Athletic Commission refused to sanction UFC bouts, barring the UFC from the lucrative casino market. (One public TV station refused a UFC sponsorship ad. The only other organization the station ever rejected was the Ku Klux Klan.) Lawsuits blocked or delayed UFC events all over the country, forcing the promoters to spend millions in legal fees. The UFC was exiled from mega-arenas to ever-smaller venues in ever more out-of-the-way states: Louisiana, Iowa, and Alabama. The match I attended in October 1997 was held in the parking lot of a small Mississippi casino.",
"But this does not impress boxing fans, who are the most vigorous opponents of extreme fighting. McCain sat ringside at a boxing match where a fighter was killed. When I asked him to explain the moral distinction between boxing and ultimate fighting, he exploded at me, \"If you can't see the moral distinction, then we have nothing to talk about!\" Then he cut our interview short and stormed out of his office.",
"Similarly, the chain-link fence surrounding the octagon looks grotesque. Critics have demanded that UFC install ropes instead. But ropes are a major cause of death and injury in boxing: Fighters hyperextend their necks when they are punched against the ropes, because nothing stops their heads from snapping back. The chain-link fence prevents hyperextension. \n\n When I tell people I'm an ultimate fighting fan, they invariably respond: \"Don't people get killed all the time doing that?\" But no one has ever been killed at the UFC--though boxers are killed every year. No one has even been seriously injured at the UFC. On the rare occasions when a bout has ended with a bloody knockout, the loser has always walked out of the ring.",
"Any blood sport can be barbaric, whether it's boxing or wrestling or ultimate fighting. It is impossible to draw a bright line between ultimate fighting and boxing. If anything, ultimate fighting is safer and less cruel than America's blood sport. For example, critics pilloried ultimate fighting because competitors fought with bare knuckles: To a nation accustomed to boxing gloves, this seemed revolting, an invitation to brain damage. But it's just the reverse: The purpose of boxing gloves is not to cushion the head but to shield the knuckles. Without gloves, a boxer would break his hands after a couple of punches to the skull. That's why ultimate fighters won't throw multiple skull punches. As a result, they avoid the concussive head wounds that kill boxers--and the long-term neurological damage that cripples them.",
"Even as it disappears from public view, ultimate fighting is returning to its roots. Away from the scrutiny of the major media, state legislators, and McCain, kids are still learning mixed martial-arts techniques, and small-time promoters are quietly staging events. You can see Kage Kombat competitions at Dancing Waters nightclub in San Pedro, Calif. You can watch the Warrior's Challenge at a small Indian casino outside Sacramento. Texans compete in Houston's Dungal All Styles Fighting Championship. Tribal casinos in Northern Idaho are hosting small Pankration tournaments. The Extreme Fighting Challenge is popular in Iowa. The money is low; the crowds are small; and there's not a TV camera in sight. Ultimate fighting should have become boxing. Instead it has gone underground. It has become Fight Club.",
"The UFC spawned a new breed of \"mixed martial artists.\" World-class wrestlers learned to kickbox. Champion kickboxers learned to grapple. (The karate experts learned to stay home.) They became, without doubt, the best fighters in the world. (Click for more about the fighters.) Mike Tyson wouldn't last 30 seconds in an ultimate fighting match. When Olympic gold medal wrestler Kevin Jackson came to the UFC, a fighter named Frank Shamrock KO'd him with a submission hold in 16 seconds. Ultimate fighting schools began sprouting up all over the country, replacing the stylized gestures of the Eastern martial arts with techniques that actually work.",
"But a subtle sport was emerging from the gimmicks and carnage. My passion for ultimate fighting (which is also called \"extreme\" or \"no-holds-barred\" fighting) began when I saw the finals of UFC IV. Royce Gracie, a 180-pound Brazilian jujitsu specialist, was matched against a 275-pound beast named Dan Severn, one of the top heavyweight wrestlers in the world and a national champion many times over. In 30 seconds, Severn had grabbed Gracie, flung him to the canvas, and mounted him. For the next 15 minutes, Severn pummeled and elbowed and head-butted the smaller man. Gracie's face grew drawn, and he squirmed wildly to avoid Severn's bombardment. Then, all of sudden, Gracie, still lying on his back, saw an opening, wrapped his arms and legs around Severn like a python and choked the giant into submission.",
"\"It was a very cheap way for the cable companies to portray themselves as anti-violence. It did not cost them much and it made them look good in Washington,\" says Carol Klenfner, spokeswoman for UFC's parent company, SEG. \n\n The ultimate fighting industry did little to help its own cause. The UFC promoted itself less as a serious sport than as a circus of carnage. Its early ads emphasized extreme fighting's potential for death. UFC folks accused McCain, without any evidence, of opposing the sport as a favor to campaign contributors. Extreme fighting was tarnished when fighters from the other ultimate fighting operation, the now-defunct Battlecade, were arrested for violating Canadian prizefighting laws when they fought on an Indian reservation outside Montreal.",
"The cable TV industry struck the fatal blow. In early 1997, McCain became chairman of the commerce committee, which oversees the cable industry. In April 1997, the president of the National Cable Television Association warned that UFC broadcasts could jeopardize the cable industry's influence in Washington. Time Warner, TCI, Request, Cablevision Systems, Viewer's Choice, and other major operators stopped airing UFC events, saying they were too violent for children. Never mind that 1) UFC only aired on pay-per-view, so children could not see it unless their parents paid for it; and 2) the same cable outfits carried boxing matches, R and NC-17 movies, and professional wrestling shows far more violent than UFC. The UFC's \"addressable audience\"--the potential number of PPV subscribers--shrank from 35 million at its peak to 7.5 million today."
],
[
"None of this soothed the cable operators, who have kept UFC off the air. The pay-per-view audience has plunged from 300,000 per show to 15,000. UFC can no longer afford its best fighters: Some are fighting overseas. Others, notably Ken Shamrock (Frank's brother), have become pro wrestlers. Fights have deteriorated. UFC is limping along, but it has been reduced to scheduling events in Japan and Brazil. \n\n \"Sports fans want to grow with the sport,\" says former UFC fighter David Beneteau. \"They want to recognize the athletes. They want to see the same fighters come back. When you compare UFC now to what it was, the fighters are not the same, the rules are not the same. The fans have no story to follow.\"",
"The cable TV industry struck the fatal blow. In early 1997, McCain became chairman of the commerce committee, which oversees the cable industry. In April 1997, the president of the National Cable Television Association warned that UFC broadcasts could jeopardize the cable industry's influence in Washington. Time Warner, TCI, Request, Cablevision Systems, Viewer's Choice, and other major operators stopped airing UFC events, saying they were too violent for children. Never mind that 1) UFC only aired on pay-per-view, so children could not see it unless their parents paid for it; and 2) the same cable outfits carried boxing matches, R and NC-17 movies, and professional wrestling shows far more violent than UFC. The UFC's \"addressable audience\"--the potential number of PPV subscribers--shrank from 35 million at its peak to 7.5 million today.",
"In the past two years, an increasingly desperate UFC has been trying to assuage its critics. The competition, which had been gradually adding safety rules since the first fight, imposed even more. It institued rounds and a \"10-point must\" scoring system. It banned head butts and groin strikes. You can no longer kick a downed man or elbow someone in the back of the head. Fighters are required to wear thin martial arts gloves (a purely cosmetic change). The UFC imposed weight classes, ending the David-and-Goliath mismatches that made early fights so compelling.",
"UFC's promoters predicted that it would supplant boxing as America's martial art. Instead, it fell apart. The collapse began in 1996, when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., saw a UFC tape. McCain, a lifelong boxing fan, was horrified at the ground fighting, kicks, and head butts. It was \"barbaric,\" he said. It was \"not a sport.\" He sent letters to all 50 governors asking them to ban ultimate fighting. The outcry against \"human cockfighting\" became a crusade, and like many crusades, it was founded on misunderstanding. \n\n UFC fell victim to cultural determinism about what a fight is. In countries such as Brazil and Japan, where no-holds-barred fighting has a long history, it is popular and uncontroversial. But Americans adhere to the Marquis of Queensbury rules. A fight consists of an exchange of upper-body blows that halts when one fighter falls.",
"The gimmick entranced thousands of people (well, men). What happens when a 620-pound sumo champion fights a 200-pound kickboxer? Answer: The kickboxer knocks him silly in 35 seconds. They tuned in for bloodshed--\"the damage,\" as fans like to call it. UFC fights could be horrifying. Tank Abbott, an ill-tempered, 270-pound street fighter, knocks out hapless opponent John Matua in 15 seconds. Then, before the ref can intervene, Abbott belts the unconscious Matua in the head, sending him into a fit, limbs quivering uncontrollably, blood spurting from his mouth. Abbott, naturally, became a cult hero and won a guest spot on Friends . (Matua walked out of the ring.) Soon, UFC was selling out huge arenas and drawing 300,000 pay-per-view subscribers for its quarterly competitions.",
"But logic has not served the UFC well. Where McCain led, a prudish nation followed. George Will opined against UFC. The American Medical Association recommended a ban. New York state outlawed ultimate fighting, as did other states. The Nevada Athletic Commission refused to sanction UFC bouts, barring the UFC from the lucrative casino market. (One public TV station refused a UFC sponsorship ad. The only other organization the station ever rejected was the Ku Klux Klan.) Lawsuits blocked or delayed UFC events all over the country, forcing the promoters to spend millions in legal fees. The UFC was exiled from mega-arenas to ever-smaller venues in ever more out-of-the-way states: Louisiana, Iowa, and Alabama. The match I attended in October 1997 was held in the parking lot of a small Mississippi casino.",
"UFC began in 1993 as a locker-room fantasy. What would happen if a kickboxer fought a wrestler? A karate champion fought a sumo champion? Promoters built an octagonal chain-link cage, invited eight top martial artists, and set them loose in no-holds-barred, bare-knuckles fights. \"There are no rules!\" bragged an early press release. Contestants would fight till \"knockout, submission, doctor's intervention, or death.\" UFC allowed, even promoted, all notions of bad sportsmanship: kicking a man when he's down, hitting him in the groin, choking. Four-hundred-pound men were sent into the Octagon to maul guys half their size. Only biting and eye-gouging were forbidden.",
"UFC's caged matches revolutionized the idea of fighting. Nursed on boxing and Hollywood, Americans imagine fights as choreography, a dance of elegant combinations, roundhouse kicks, clean knockouts. The UFC punctured this. Boxers floundered. Experts in striking martial arts such as karate and tae kwon do, who fancied themselves the world's greatest fighters, found themselves pretzeled by jujitsu masters, who pulled them to the ground and slowly choked or leg-locked them. \"UFC immediately debunked a lot of myths of fighting, of boxing, karate, kung fu. It showed the reality of what works in an actual fight,\" says Dave Meltzer, editor of Wrestling Observer .",
"\"It was a very cheap way for the cable companies to portray themselves as anti-violence. It did not cost them much and it made them look good in Washington,\" says Carol Klenfner, spokeswoman for UFC's parent company, SEG. \n\n The ultimate fighting industry did little to help its own cause. The UFC promoted itself less as a serious sport than as a circus of carnage. Its early ads emphasized extreme fighting's potential for death. UFC folks accused McCain, without any evidence, of opposing the sport as a favor to campaign contributors. Extreme fighting was tarnished when fighters from the other ultimate fighting operation, the now-defunct Battlecade, were arrested for violating Canadian prizefighting laws when they fought on an Indian reservation outside Montreal.",
"Fight Clubbed \n\n Fight Club , a movie about a fictional organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp, has provoked more than its share of media hand-wringing, particularly diatribes about Hollywood's infatuation with violence and Faludi-esque ruminations about the emasculated American male. Fight Club , however, has not sparked an iota of interest in a real organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp: the Ultimate Fighting Championship. UFC's flameout from national sensation to total irrelevance is a tragedy of American sports, a cautionary tale of prudishness, heavy-handed politics, and cultural myopia.",
"Instead of being carnivals of gore, UFC fights looked strangely like ... sex. Almost all fights ended on the ground, one man mounting the other in missionary position, the pair of them wiggling mysteriously along the canvas for five, 10, even 30 minutes. There were few spectacular knockouts. The referee--yes, there was always a referee--stopped many bouts, and in most others, fighters \"tapped out,\" surrendering to mild-looking but agonizing chokes and joint locks. It was not barbarism. It was science.",
"But this does not impress boxing fans, who are the most vigorous opponents of extreme fighting. McCain sat ringside at a boxing match where a fighter was killed. When I asked him to explain the moral distinction between boxing and ultimate fighting, he exploded at me, \"If you can't see the moral distinction, then we have nothing to talk about!\" Then he cut our interview short and stormed out of his office.",
"Even as it disappears from public view, ultimate fighting is returning to its roots. Away from the scrutiny of the major media, state legislators, and McCain, kids are still learning mixed martial-arts techniques, and small-time promoters are quietly staging events. You can see Kage Kombat competitions at Dancing Waters nightclub in San Pedro, Calif. You can watch the Warrior's Challenge at a small Indian casino outside Sacramento. Texans compete in Houston's Dungal All Styles Fighting Championship. Tribal casinos in Northern Idaho are hosting small Pankration tournaments. The Extreme Fighting Challenge is popular in Iowa. The money is low; the crowds are small; and there's not a TV camera in sight. Ultimate fighting should have become boxing. Instead it has gone underground. It has become Fight Club.",
"Any blood sport can be barbaric, whether it's boxing or wrestling or ultimate fighting. It is impossible to draw a bright line between ultimate fighting and boxing. If anything, ultimate fighting is safer and less cruel than America's blood sport. For example, critics pilloried ultimate fighting because competitors fought with bare knuckles: To a nation accustomed to boxing gloves, this seemed revolting, an invitation to brain damage. But it's just the reverse: The purpose of boxing gloves is not to cushion the head but to shield the knuckles. Without gloves, a boxer would break his hands after a couple of punches to the skull. That's why ultimate fighters won't throw multiple skull punches. As a result, they avoid the concussive head wounds that kill boxers--and the long-term neurological damage that cripples them.",
"Similarly, the chain-link fence surrounding the octagon looks grotesque. Critics have demanded that UFC install ropes instead. But ropes are a major cause of death and injury in boxing: Fighters hyperextend their necks when they are punched against the ropes, because nothing stops their heads from snapping back. The chain-link fence prevents hyperextension. \n\n When I tell people I'm an ultimate fighting fan, they invariably respond: \"Don't people get killed all the time doing that?\" But no one has ever been killed at the UFC--though boxers are killed every year. No one has even been seriously injured at the UFC. On the rare occasions when a bout has ended with a bloody knockout, the loser has always walked out of the ring.",
"But a subtle sport was emerging from the gimmicks and carnage. My passion for ultimate fighting (which is also called \"extreme\" or \"no-holds-barred\" fighting) began when I saw the finals of UFC IV. Royce Gracie, a 180-pound Brazilian jujitsu specialist, was matched against a 275-pound beast named Dan Severn, one of the top heavyweight wrestlers in the world and a national champion many times over. In 30 seconds, Severn had grabbed Gracie, flung him to the canvas, and mounted him. For the next 15 minutes, Severn pummeled and elbowed and head-butted the smaller man. Gracie's face grew drawn, and he squirmed wildly to avoid Severn's bombardment. Then, all of sudden, Gracie, still lying on his back, saw an opening, wrapped his arms and legs around Severn like a python and choked the giant into submission.",
"The UFC spawned a new breed of \"mixed martial artists.\" World-class wrestlers learned to kickbox. Champion kickboxers learned to grapple. (The karate experts learned to stay home.) They became, without doubt, the best fighters in the world. (Click for more about the fighters.) Mike Tyson wouldn't last 30 seconds in an ultimate fighting match. When Olympic gold medal wrestler Kevin Jackson came to the UFC, a fighter named Frank Shamrock KO'd him with a submission hold in 16 seconds. Ultimate fighting schools began sprouting up all over the country, replacing the stylized gestures of the Eastern martial arts with techniques that actually work."
],
[
"UFC's promoters predicted that it would supplant boxing as America's martial art. Instead, it fell apart. The collapse began in 1996, when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., saw a UFC tape. McCain, a lifelong boxing fan, was horrified at the ground fighting, kicks, and head butts. It was \"barbaric,\" he said. It was \"not a sport.\" He sent letters to all 50 governors asking them to ban ultimate fighting. The outcry against \"human cockfighting\" became a crusade, and like many crusades, it was founded on misunderstanding. \n\n UFC fell victim to cultural determinism about what a fight is. In countries such as Brazil and Japan, where no-holds-barred fighting has a long history, it is popular and uncontroversial. But Americans adhere to the Marquis of Queensbury rules. A fight consists of an exchange of upper-body blows that halts when one fighter falls.",
"But this does not impress boxing fans, who are the most vigorous opponents of extreme fighting. McCain sat ringside at a boxing match where a fighter was killed. When I asked him to explain the moral distinction between boxing and ultimate fighting, he exploded at me, \"If you can't see the moral distinction, then we have nothing to talk about!\" Then he cut our interview short and stormed out of his office.",
"\"It was a very cheap way for the cable companies to portray themselves as anti-violence. It did not cost them much and it made them look good in Washington,\" says Carol Klenfner, spokeswoman for UFC's parent company, SEG. \n\n The ultimate fighting industry did little to help its own cause. The UFC promoted itself less as a serious sport than as a circus of carnage. Its early ads emphasized extreme fighting's potential for death. UFC folks accused McCain, without any evidence, of opposing the sport as a favor to campaign contributors. Extreme fighting was tarnished when fighters from the other ultimate fighting operation, the now-defunct Battlecade, were arrested for violating Canadian prizefighting laws when they fought on an Indian reservation outside Montreal.",
"But logic has not served the UFC well. Where McCain led, a prudish nation followed. George Will opined against UFC. The American Medical Association recommended a ban. New York state outlawed ultimate fighting, as did other states. The Nevada Athletic Commission refused to sanction UFC bouts, barring the UFC from the lucrative casino market. (One public TV station refused a UFC sponsorship ad. The only other organization the station ever rejected was the Ku Klux Klan.) Lawsuits blocked or delayed UFC events all over the country, forcing the promoters to spend millions in legal fees. The UFC was exiled from mega-arenas to ever-smaller venues in ever more out-of-the-way states: Louisiana, Iowa, and Alabama. The match I attended in October 1997 was held in the parking lot of a small Mississippi casino.",
"The cable TV industry struck the fatal blow. In early 1997, McCain became chairman of the commerce committee, which oversees the cable industry. In April 1997, the president of the National Cable Television Association warned that UFC broadcasts could jeopardize the cable industry's influence in Washington. Time Warner, TCI, Request, Cablevision Systems, Viewer's Choice, and other major operators stopped airing UFC events, saying they were too violent for children. Never mind that 1) UFC only aired on pay-per-view, so children could not see it unless their parents paid for it; and 2) the same cable outfits carried boxing matches, R and NC-17 movies, and professional wrestling shows far more violent than UFC. The UFC's \"addressable audience\"--the potential number of PPV subscribers--shrank from 35 million at its peak to 7.5 million today.",
"UFC began in 1993 as a locker-room fantasy. What would happen if a kickboxer fought a wrestler? A karate champion fought a sumo champion? Promoters built an octagonal chain-link cage, invited eight top martial artists, and set them loose in no-holds-barred, bare-knuckles fights. \"There are no rules!\" bragged an early press release. Contestants would fight till \"knockout, submission, doctor's intervention, or death.\" UFC allowed, even promoted, all notions of bad sportsmanship: kicking a man when he's down, hitting him in the groin, choking. Four-hundred-pound men were sent into the Octagon to maul guys half their size. Only biting and eye-gouging were forbidden.",
"In the past two years, an increasingly desperate UFC has been trying to assuage its critics. The competition, which had been gradually adding safety rules since the first fight, imposed even more. It institued rounds and a \"10-point must\" scoring system. It banned head butts and groin strikes. You can no longer kick a downed man or elbow someone in the back of the head. Fighters are required to wear thin martial arts gloves (a purely cosmetic change). The UFC imposed weight classes, ending the David-and-Goliath mismatches that made early fights so compelling.",
"The gimmick entranced thousands of people (well, men). What happens when a 620-pound sumo champion fights a 200-pound kickboxer? Answer: The kickboxer knocks him silly in 35 seconds. They tuned in for bloodshed--\"the damage,\" as fans like to call it. UFC fights could be horrifying. Tank Abbott, an ill-tempered, 270-pound street fighter, knocks out hapless opponent John Matua in 15 seconds. Then, before the ref can intervene, Abbott belts the unconscious Matua in the head, sending him into a fit, limbs quivering uncontrollably, blood spurting from his mouth. Abbott, naturally, became a cult hero and won a guest spot on Friends . (Matua walked out of the ring.) Soon, UFC was selling out huge arenas and drawing 300,000 pay-per-view subscribers for its quarterly competitions.",
"Even as it disappears from public view, ultimate fighting is returning to its roots. Away from the scrutiny of the major media, state legislators, and McCain, kids are still learning mixed martial-arts techniques, and small-time promoters are quietly staging events. You can see Kage Kombat competitions at Dancing Waters nightclub in San Pedro, Calif. You can watch the Warrior's Challenge at a small Indian casino outside Sacramento. Texans compete in Houston's Dungal All Styles Fighting Championship. Tribal casinos in Northern Idaho are hosting small Pankration tournaments. The Extreme Fighting Challenge is popular in Iowa. The money is low; the crowds are small; and there's not a TV camera in sight. Ultimate fighting should have become boxing. Instead it has gone underground. It has become Fight Club.",
"Fight Clubbed \n\n Fight Club , a movie about a fictional organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp, has provoked more than its share of media hand-wringing, particularly diatribes about Hollywood's infatuation with violence and Faludi-esque ruminations about the emasculated American male. Fight Club , however, has not sparked an iota of interest in a real organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp: the Ultimate Fighting Championship. UFC's flameout from national sensation to total irrelevance is a tragedy of American sports, a cautionary tale of prudishness, heavy-handed politics, and cultural myopia.",
"Any blood sport can be barbaric, whether it's boxing or wrestling or ultimate fighting. It is impossible to draw a bright line between ultimate fighting and boxing. If anything, ultimate fighting is safer and less cruel than America's blood sport. For example, critics pilloried ultimate fighting because competitors fought with bare knuckles: To a nation accustomed to boxing gloves, this seemed revolting, an invitation to brain damage. But it's just the reverse: The purpose of boxing gloves is not to cushion the head but to shield the knuckles. Without gloves, a boxer would break his hands after a couple of punches to the skull. That's why ultimate fighters won't throw multiple skull punches. As a result, they avoid the concussive head wounds that kill boxers--and the long-term neurological damage that cripples them.",
"None of this soothed the cable operators, who have kept UFC off the air. The pay-per-view audience has plunged from 300,000 per show to 15,000. UFC can no longer afford its best fighters: Some are fighting overseas. Others, notably Ken Shamrock (Frank's brother), have become pro wrestlers. Fights have deteriorated. UFC is limping along, but it has been reduced to scheduling events in Japan and Brazil. \n\n \"Sports fans want to grow with the sport,\" says former UFC fighter David Beneteau. \"They want to recognize the athletes. They want to see the same fighters come back. When you compare UFC now to what it was, the fighters are not the same, the rules are not the same. The fans have no story to follow.\"",
"UFC's caged matches revolutionized the idea of fighting. Nursed on boxing and Hollywood, Americans imagine fights as choreography, a dance of elegant combinations, roundhouse kicks, clean knockouts. The UFC punctured this. Boxers floundered. Experts in striking martial arts such as karate and tae kwon do, who fancied themselves the world's greatest fighters, found themselves pretzeled by jujitsu masters, who pulled them to the ground and slowly choked or leg-locked them. \"UFC immediately debunked a lot of myths of fighting, of boxing, karate, kung fu. It showed the reality of what works in an actual fight,\" says Dave Meltzer, editor of Wrestling Observer .",
"Instead of being carnivals of gore, UFC fights looked strangely like ... sex. Almost all fights ended on the ground, one man mounting the other in missionary position, the pair of them wiggling mysteriously along the canvas for five, 10, even 30 minutes. There were few spectacular knockouts. The referee--yes, there was always a referee--stopped many bouts, and in most others, fighters \"tapped out,\" surrendering to mild-looking but agonizing chokes and joint locks. It was not barbarism. It was science.",
"But a subtle sport was emerging from the gimmicks and carnage. My passion for ultimate fighting (which is also called \"extreme\" or \"no-holds-barred\" fighting) began when I saw the finals of UFC IV. Royce Gracie, a 180-pound Brazilian jujitsu specialist, was matched against a 275-pound beast named Dan Severn, one of the top heavyweight wrestlers in the world and a national champion many times over. In 30 seconds, Severn had grabbed Gracie, flung him to the canvas, and mounted him. For the next 15 minutes, Severn pummeled and elbowed and head-butted the smaller man. Gracie's face grew drawn, and he squirmed wildly to avoid Severn's bombardment. Then, all of sudden, Gracie, still lying on his back, saw an opening, wrapped his arms and legs around Severn like a python and choked the giant into submission.",
"Similarly, the chain-link fence surrounding the octagon looks grotesque. Critics have demanded that UFC install ropes instead. But ropes are a major cause of death and injury in boxing: Fighters hyperextend their necks when they are punched against the ropes, because nothing stops their heads from snapping back. The chain-link fence prevents hyperextension. \n\n When I tell people I'm an ultimate fighting fan, they invariably respond: \"Don't people get killed all the time doing that?\" But no one has ever been killed at the UFC--though boxers are killed every year. No one has even been seriously injured at the UFC. On the rare occasions when a bout has ended with a bloody knockout, the loser has always walked out of the ring.",
"The UFC spawned a new breed of \"mixed martial artists.\" World-class wrestlers learned to kickbox. Champion kickboxers learned to grapple. (The karate experts learned to stay home.) They became, without doubt, the best fighters in the world. (Click for more about the fighters.) Mike Tyson wouldn't last 30 seconds in an ultimate fighting match. When Olympic gold medal wrestler Kevin Jackson came to the UFC, a fighter named Frank Shamrock KO'd him with a submission hold in 16 seconds. Ultimate fighting schools began sprouting up all over the country, replacing the stylized gestures of the Eastern martial arts with techniques that actually work."
],
[
"UFC began in 1993 as a locker-room fantasy. What would happen if a kickboxer fought a wrestler? A karate champion fought a sumo champion? Promoters built an octagonal chain-link cage, invited eight top martial artists, and set them loose in no-holds-barred, bare-knuckles fights. \"There are no rules!\" bragged an early press release. Contestants would fight till \"knockout, submission, doctor's intervention, or death.\" UFC allowed, even promoted, all notions of bad sportsmanship: kicking a man when he's down, hitting him in the groin, choking. Four-hundred-pound men were sent into the Octagon to maul guys half their size. Only biting and eye-gouging were forbidden.",
"UFC's caged matches revolutionized the idea of fighting. Nursed on boxing and Hollywood, Americans imagine fights as choreography, a dance of elegant combinations, roundhouse kicks, clean knockouts. The UFC punctured this. Boxers floundered. Experts in striking martial arts such as karate and tae kwon do, who fancied themselves the world's greatest fighters, found themselves pretzeled by jujitsu masters, who pulled them to the ground and slowly choked or leg-locked them. \"UFC immediately debunked a lot of myths of fighting, of boxing, karate, kung fu. It showed the reality of what works in an actual fight,\" says Dave Meltzer, editor of Wrestling Observer .",
"Instead of being carnivals of gore, UFC fights looked strangely like ... sex. Almost all fights ended on the ground, one man mounting the other in missionary position, the pair of them wiggling mysteriously along the canvas for five, 10, even 30 minutes. There were few spectacular knockouts. The referee--yes, there was always a referee--stopped many bouts, and in most others, fighters \"tapped out,\" surrendering to mild-looking but agonizing chokes and joint locks. It was not barbarism. It was science.",
"The UFC spawned a new breed of \"mixed martial artists.\" World-class wrestlers learned to kickbox. Champion kickboxers learned to grapple. (The karate experts learned to stay home.) They became, without doubt, the best fighters in the world. (Click for more about the fighters.) Mike Tyson wouldn't last 30 seconds in an ultimate fighting match. When Olympic gold medal wrestler Kevin Jackson came to the UFC, a fighter named Frank Shamrock KO'd him with a submission hold in 16 seconds. Ultimate fighting schools began sprouting up all over the country, replacing the stylized gestures of the Eastern martial arts with techniques that actually work.",
"The gimmick entranced thousands of people (well, men). What happens when a 620-pound sumo champion fights a 200-pound kickboxer? Answer: The kickboxer knocks him silly in 35 seconds. They tuned in for bloodshed--\"the damage,\" as fans like to call it. UFC fights could be horrifying. Tank Abbott, an ill-tempered, 270-pound street fighter, knocks out hapless opponent John Matua in 15 seconds. Then, before the ref can intervene, Abbott belts the unconscious Matua in the head, sending him into a fit, limbs quivering uncontrollably, blood spurting from his mouth. Abbott, naturally, became a cult hero and won a guest spot on Friends . (Matua walked out of the ring.) Soon, UFC was selling out huge arenas and drawing 300,000 pay-per-view subscribers for its quarterly competitions.",
"In the past two years, an increasingly desperate UFC has been trying to assuage its critics. The competition, which had been gradually adding safety rules since the first fight, imposed even more. It institued rounds and a \"10-point must\" scoring system. It banned head butts and groin strikes. You can no longer kick a downed man or elbow someone in the back of the head. Fighters are required to wear thin martial arts gloves (a purely cosmetic change). The UFC imposed weight classes, ending the David-and-Goliath mismatches that made early fights so compelling.",
"But a subtle sport was emerging from the gimmicks and carnage. My passion for ultimate fighting (which is also called \"extreme\" or \"no-holds-barred\" fighting) began when I saw the finals of UFC IV. Royce Gracie, a 180-pound Brazilian jujitsu specialist, was matched against a 275-pound beast named Dan Severn, one of the top heavyweight wrestlers in the world and a national champion many times over. In 30 seconds, Severn had grabbed Gracie, flung him to the canvas, and mounted him. For the next 15 minutes, Severn pummeled and elbowed and head-butted the smaller man. Gracie's face grew drawn, and he squirmed wildly to avoid Severn's bombardment. Then, all of sudden, Gracie, still lying on his back, saw an opening, wrapped his arms and legs around Severn like a python and choked the giant into submission.",
"But logic has not served the UFC well. Where McCain led, a prudish nation followed. George Will opined against UFC. The American Medical Association recommended a ban. New York state outlawed ultimate fighting, as did other states. The Nevada Athletic Commission refused to sanction UFC bouts, barring the UFC from the lucrative casino market. (One public TV station refused a UFC sponsorship ad. The only other organization the station ever rejected was the Ku Klux Klan.) Lawsuits blocked or delayed UFC events all over the country, forcing the promoters to spend millions in legal fees. The UFC was exiled from mega-arenas to ever-smaller venues in ever more out-of-the-way states: Louisiana, Iowa, and Alabama. The match I attended in October 1997 was held in the parking lot of a small Mississippi casino.",
"UFC's promoters predicted that it would supplant boxing as America's martial art. Instead, it fell apart. The collapse began in 1996, when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., saw a UFC tape. McCain, a lifelong boxing fan, was horrified at the ground fighting, kicks, and head butts. It was \"barbaric,\" he said. It was \"not a sport.\" He sent letters to all 50 governors asking them to ban ultimate fighting. The outcry against \"human cockfighting\" became a crusade, and like many crusades, it was founded on misunderstanding. \n\n UFC fell victim to cultural determinism about what a fight is. In countries such as Brazil and Japan, where no-holds-barred fighting has a long history, it is popular and uncontroversial. But Americans adhere to the Marquis of Queensbury rules. A fight consists of an exchange of upper-body blows that halts when one fighter falls.",
"Fight Clubbed \n\n Fight Club , a movie about a fictional organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp, has provoked more than its share of media hand-wringing, particularly diatribes about Hollywood's infatuation with violence and Faludi-esque ruminations about the emasculated American male. Fight Club , however, has not sparked an iota of interest in a real organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp: the Ultimate Fighting Championship. UFC's flameout from national sensation to total irrelevance is a tragedy of American sports, a cautionary tale of prudishness, heavy-handed politics, and cultural myopia.",
"None of this soothed the cable operators, who have kept UFC off the air. The pay-per-view audience has plunged from 300,000 per show to 15,000. UFC can no longer afford its best fighters: Some are fighting overseas. Others, notably Ken Shamrock (Frank's brother), have become pro wrestlers. Fights have deteriorated. UFC is limping along, but it has been reduced to scheduling events in Japan and Brazil. \n\n \"Sports fans want to grow with the sport,\" says former UFC fighter David Beneteau. \"They want to recognize the athletes. They want to see the same fighters come back. When you compare UFC now to what it was, the fighters are not the same, the rules are not the same. The fans have no story to follow.\"",
"\"It was a very cheap way for the cable companies to portray themselves as anti-violence. It did not cost them much and it made them look good in Washington,\" says Carol Klenfner, spokeswoman for UFC's parent company, SEG. \n\n The ultimate fighting industry did little to help its own cause. The UFC promoted itself less as a serious sport than as a circus of carnage. Its early ads emphasized extreme fighting's potential for death. UFC folks accused McCain, without any evidence, of opposing the sport as a favor to campaign contributors. Extreme fighting was tarnished when fighters from the other ultimate fighting operation, the now-defunct Battlecade, were arrested for violating Canadian prizefighting laws when they fought on an Indian reservation outside Montreal.",
"Even as it disappears from public view, ultimate fighting is returning to its roots. Away from the scrutiny of the major media, state legislators, and McCain, kids are still learning mixed martial-arts techniques, and small-time promoters are quietly staging events. You can see Kage Kombat competitions at Dancing Waters nightclub in San Pedro, Calif. You can watch the Warrior's Challenge at a small Indian casino outside Sacramento. Texans compete in Houston's Dungal All Styles Fighting Championship. Tribal casinos in Northern Idaho are hosting small Pankration tournaments. The Extreme Fighting Challenge is popular in Iowa. The money is low; the crowds are small; and there's not a TV camera in sight. Ultimate fighting should have become boxing. Instead it has gone underground. It has become Fight Club.",
"Similarly, the chain-link fence surrounding the octagon looks grotesque. Critics have demanded that UFC install ropes instead. But ropes are a major cause of death and injury in boxing: Fighters hyperextend their necks when they are punched against the ropes, because nothing stops their heads from snapping back. The chain-link fence prevents hyperextension. \n\n When I tell people I'm an ultimate fighting fan, they invariably respond: \"Don't people get killed all the time doing that?\" But no one has ever been killed at the UFC--though boxers are killed every year. No one has even been seriously injured at the UFC. On the rare occasions when a bout has ended with a bloody knockout, the loser has always walked out of the ring.",
"Any blood sport can be barbaric, whether it's boxing or wrestling or ultimate fighting. It is impossible to draw a bright line between ultimate fighting and boxing. If anything, ultimate fighting is safer and less cruel than America's blood sport. For example, critics pilloried ultimate fighting because competitors fought with bare knuckles: To a nation accustomed to boxing gloves, this seemed revolting, an invitation to brain damage. But it's just the reverse: The purpose of boxing gloves is not to cushion the head but to shield the knuckles. Without gloves, a boxer would break his hands after a couple of punches to the skull. That's why ultimate fighters won't throw multiple skull punches. As a result, they avoid the concussive head wounds that kill boxers--and the long-term neurological damage that cripples them.",
"But this does not impress boxing fans, who are the most vigorous opponents of extreme fighting. McCain sat ringside at a boxing match where a fighter was killed. When I asked him to explain the moral distinction between boxing and ultimate fighting, he exploded at me, \"If you can't see the moral distinction, then we have nothing to talk about!\" Then he cut our interview short and stormed out of his office.",
"The cable TV industry struck the fatal blow. In early 1997, McCain became chairman of the commerce committee, which oversees the cable industry. In April 1997, the president of the National Cable Television Association warned that UFC broadcasts could jeopardize the cable industry's influence in Washington. Time Warner, TCI, Request, Cablevision Systems, Viewer's Choice, and other major operators stopped airing UFC events, saying they were too violent for children. Never mind that 1) UFC only aired on pay-per-view, so children could not see it unless their parents paid for it; and 2) the same cable outfits carried boxing matches, R and NC-17 movies, and professional wrestling shows far more violent than UFC. The UFC's \"addressable audience\"--the potential number of PPV subscribers--shrank from 35 million at its peak to 7.5 million today."
],
[
"Any blood sport can be barbaric, whether it's boxing or wrestling or ultimate fighting. It is impossible to draw a bright line between ultimate fighting and boxing. If anything, ultimate fighting is safer and less cruel than America's blood sport. For example, critics pilloried ultimate fighting because competitors fought with bare knuckles: To a nation accustomed to boxing gloves, this seemed revolting, an invitation to brain damage. But it's just the reverse: The purpose of boxing gloves is not to cushion the head but to shield the knuckles. Without gloves, a boxer would break his hands after a couple of punches to the skull. That's why ultimate fighters won't throw multiple skull punches. As a result, they avoid the concussive head wounds that kill boxers--and the long-term neurological damage that cripples them.",
"But this does not impress boxing fans, who are the most vigorous opponents of extreme fighting. McCain sat ringside at a boxing match where a fighter was killed. When I asked him to explain the moral distinction between boxing and ultimate fighting, he exploded at me, \"If you can't see the moral distinction, then we have nothing to talk about!\" Then he cut our interview short and stormed out of his office.",
"In the past two years, an increasingly desperate UFC has been trying to assuage its critics. The competition, which had been gradually adding safety rules since the first fight, imposed even more. It institued rounds and a \"10-point must\" scoring system. It banned head butts and groin strikes. You can no longer kick a downed man or elbow someone in the back of the head. Fighters are required to wear thin martial arts gloves (a purely cosmetic change). The UFC imposed weight classes, ending the David-and-Goliath mismatches that made early fights so compelling.",
"Fight Clubbed \n\n Fight Club , a movie about a fictional organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp, has provoked more than its share of media hand-wringing, particularly diatribes about Hollywood's infatuation with violence and Faludi-esque ruminations about the emasculated American male. Fight Club , however, has not sparked an iota of interest in a real organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp: the Ultimate Fighting Championship. UFC's flameout from national sensation to total irrelevance is a tragedy of American sports, a cautionary tale of prudishness, heavy-handed politics, and cultural myopia.",
"Similarly, the chain-link fence surrounding the octagon looks grotesque. Critics have demanded that UFC install ropes instead. But ropes are a major cause of death and injury in boxing: Fighters hyperextend their necks when they are punched against the ropes, because nothing stops their heads from snapping back. The chain-link fence prevents hyperextension. \n\n When I tell people I'm an ultimate fighting fan, they invariably respond: \"Don't people get killed all the time doing that?\" But no one has ever been killed at the UFC--though boxers are killed every year. No one has even been seriously injured at the UFC. On the rare occasions when a bout has ended with a bloody knockout, the loser has always walked out of the ring.",
"UFC's promoters predicted that it would supplant boxing as America's martial art. Instead, it fell apart. The collapse began in 1996, when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., saw a UFC tape. McCain, a lifelong boxing fan, was horrified at the ground fighting, kicks, and head butts. It was \"barbaric,\" he said. It was \"not a sport.\" He sent letters to all 50 governors asking them to ban ultimate fighting. The outcry against \"human cockfighting\" became a crusade, and like many crusades, it was founded on misunderstanding. \n\n UFC fell victim to cultural determinism about what a fight is. In countries such as Brazil and Japan, where no-holds-barred fighting has a long history, it is popular and uncontroversial. But Americans adhere to the Marquis of Queensbury rules. A fight consists of an exchange of upper-body blows that halts when one fighter falls.",
"Instead of being carnivals of gore, UFC fights looked strangely like ... sex. Almost all fights ended on the ground, one man mounting the other in missionary position, the pair of them wiggling mysteriously along the canvas for five, 10, even 30 minutes. There were few spectacular knockouts. The referee--yes, there was always a referee--stopped many bouts, and in most others, fighters \"tapped out,\" surrendering to mild-looking but agonizing chokes and joint locks. It was not barbarism. It was science.",
"But a subtle sport was emerging from the gimmicks and carnage. My passion for ultimate fighting (which is also called \"extreme\" or \"no-holds-barred\" fighting) began when I saw the finals of UFC IV. Royce Gracie, a 180-pound Brazilian jujitsu specialist, was matched against a 275-pound beast named Dan Severn, one of the top heavyweight wrestlers in the world and a national champion many times over. In 30 seconds, Severn had grabbed Gracie, flung him to the canvas, and mounted him. For the next 15 minutes, Severn pummeled and elbowed and head-butted the smaller man. Gracie's face grew drawn, and he squirmed wildly to avoid Severn's bombardment. Then, all of sudden, Gracie, still lying on his back, saw an opening, wrapped his arms and legs around Severn like a python and choked the giant into submission.",
"Even as it disappears from public view, ultimate fighting is returning to its roots. Away from the scrutiny of the major media, state legislators, and McCain, kids are still learning mixed martial-arts techniques, and small-time promoters are quietly staging events. You can see Kage Kombat competitions at Dancing Waters nightclub in San Pedro, Calif. You can watch the Warrior's Challenge at a small Indian casino outside Sacramento. Texans compete in Houston's Dungal All Styles Fighting Championship. Tribal casinos in Northern Idaho are hosting small Pankration tournaments. The Extreme Fighting Challenge is popular in Iowa. The money is low; the crowds are small; and there's not a TV camera in sight. Ultimate fighting should have become boxing. Instead it has gone underground. It has become Fight Club.",
"UFC's caged matches revolutionized the idea of fighting. Nursed on boxing and Hollywood, Americans imagine fights as choreography, a dance of elegant combinations, roundhouse kicks, clean knockouts. The UFC punctured this. Boxers floundered. Experts in striking martial arts such as karate and tae kwon do, who fancied themselves the world's greatest fighters, found themselves pretzeled by jujitsu masters, who pulled them to the ground and slowly choked or leg-locked them. \"UFC immediately debunked a lot of myths of fighting, of boxing, karate, kung fu. It showed the reality of what works in an actual fight,\" says Dave Meltzer, editor of Wrestling Observer .",
"The gimmick entranced thousands of people (well, men). What happens when a 620-pound sumo champion fights a 200-pound kickboxer? Answer: The kickboxer knocks him silly in 35 seconds. They tuned in for bloodshed--\"the damage,\" as fans like to call it. UFC fights could be horrifying. Tank Abbott, an ill-tempered, 270-pound street fighter, knocks out hapless opponent John Matua in 15 seconds. Then, before the ref can intervene, Abbott belts the unconscious Matua in the head, sending him into a fit, limbs quivering uncontrollably, blood spurting from his mouth. Abbott, naturally, became a cult hero and won a guest spot on Friends . (Matua walked out of the ring.) Soon, UFC was selling out huge arenas and drawing 300,000 pay-per-view subscribers for its quarterly competitions.",
"UFC began in 1993 as a locker-room fantasy. What would happen if a kickboxer fought a wrestler? A karate champion fought a sumo champion? Promoters built an octagonal chain-link cage, invited eight top martial artists, and set them loose in no-holds-barred, bare-knuckles fights. \"There are no rules!\" bragged an early press release. Contestants would fight till \"knockout, submission, doctor's intervention, or death.\" UFC allowed, even promoted, all notions of bad sportsmanship: kicking a man when he's down, hitting him in the groin, choking. Four-hundred-pound men were sent into the Octagon to maul guys half their size. Only biting and eye-gouging were forbidden.",
"\"It was a very cheap way for the cable companies to portray themselves as anti-violence. It did not cost them much and it made them look good in Washington,\" says Carol Klenfner, spokeswoman for UFC's parent company, SEG. \n\n The ultimate fighting industry did little to help its own cause. The UFC promoted itself less as a serious sport than as a circus of carnage. Its early ads emphasized extreme fighting's potential for death. UFC folks accused McCain, without any evidence, of opposing the sport as a favor to campaign contributors. Extreme fighting was tarnished when fighters from the other ultimate fighting operation, the now-defunct Battlecade, were arrested for violating Canadian prizefighting laws when they fought on an Indian reservation outside Montreal.",
"But logic has not served the UFC well. Where McCain led, a prudish nation followed. George Will opined against UFC. The American Medical Association recommended a ban. New York state outlawed ultimate fighting, as did other states. The Nevada Athletic Commission refused to sanction UFC bouts, barring the UFC from the lucrative casino market. (One public TV station refused a UFC sponsorship ad. The only other organization the station ever rejected was the Ku Klux Klan.) Lawsuits blocked or delayed UFC events all over the country, forcing the promoters to spend millions in legal fees. The UFC was exiled from mega-arenas to ever-smaller venues in ever more out-of-the-way states: Louisiana, Iowa, and Alabama. The match I attended in October 1997 was held in the parking lot of a small Mississippi casino.",
"The UFC spawned a new breed of \"mixed martial artists.\" World-class wrestlers learned to kickbox. Champion kickboxers learned to grapple. (The karate experts learned to stay home.) They became, without doubt, the best fighters in the world. (Click for more about the fighters.) Mike Tyson wouldn't last 30 seconds in an ultimate fighting match. When Olympic gold medal wrestler Kevin Jackson came to the UFC, a fighter named Frank Shamrock KO'd him with a submission hold in 16 seconds. Ultimate fighting schools began sprouting up all over the country, replacing the stylized gestures of the Eastern martial arts with techniques that actually work.",
"None of this soothed the cable operators, who have kept UFC off the air. The pay-per-view audience has plunged from 300,000 per show to 15,000. UFC can no longer afford its best fighters: Some are fighting overseas. Others, notably Ken Shamrock (Frank's brother), have become pro wrestlers. Fights have deteriorated. UFC is limping along, but it has been reduced to scheduling events in Japan and Brazil. \n\n \"Sports fans want to grow with the sport,\" says former UFC fighter David Beneteau. \"They want to recognize the athletes. They want to see the same fighters come back. When you compare UFC now to what it was, the fighters are not the same, the rules are not the same. The fans have no story to follow.\"",
"The cable TV industry struck the fatal blow. In early 1997, McCain became chairman of the commerce committee, which oversees the cable industry. In April 1997, the president of the National Cable Television Association warned that UFC broadcasts could jeopardize the cable industry's influence in Washington. Time Warner, TCI, Request, Cablevision Systems, Viewer's Choice, and other major operators stopped airing UFC events, saying they were too violent for children. Never mind that 1) UFC only aired on pay-per-view, so children could not see it unless their parents paid for it; and 2) the same cable outfits carried boxing matches, R and NC-17 movies, and professional wrestling shows far more violent than UFC. The UFC's \"addressable audience\"--the potential number of PPV subscribers--shrank from 35 million at its peak to 7.5 million today."
],
[
"But logic has not served the UFC well. Where McCain led, a prudish nation followed. George Will opined against UFC. The American Medical Association recommended a ban. New York state outlawed ultimate fighting, as did other states. The Nevada Athletic Commission refused to sanction UFC bouts, barring the UFC from the lucrative casino market. (One public TV station refused a UFC sponsorship ad. The only other organization the station ever rejected was the Ku Klux Klan.) Lawsuits blocked or delayed UFC events all over the country, forcing the promoters to spend millions in legal fees. The UFC was exiled from mega-arenas to ever-smaller venues in ever more out-of-the-way states: Louisiana, Iowa, and Alabama. The match I attended in October 1997 was held in the parking lot of a small Mississippi casino.",
"UFC's promoters predicted that it would supplant boxing as America's martial art. Instead, it fell apart. The collapse began in 1996, when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., saw a UFC tape. McCain, a lifelong boxing fan, was horrified at the ground fighting, kicks, and head butts. It was \"barbaric,\" he said. It was \"not a sport.\" He sent letters to all 50 governors asking them to ban ultimate fighting. The outcry against \"human cockfighting\" became a crusade, and like many crusades, it was founded on misunderstanding. \n\n UFC fell victim to cultural determinism about what a fight is. In countries such as Brazil and Japan, where no-holds-barred fighting has a long history, it is popular and uncontroversial. But Americans adhere to the Marquis of Queensbury rules. A fight consists of an exchange of upper-body blows that halts when one fighter falls.",
"Any blood sport can be barbaric, whether it's boxing or wrestling or ultimate fighting. It is impossible to draw a bright line between ultimate fighting and boxing. If anything, ultimate fighting is safer and less cruel than America's blood sport. For example, critics pilloried ultimate fighting because competitors fought with bare knuckles: To a nation accustomed to boxing gloves, this seemed revolting, an invitation to brain damage. But it's just the reverse: The purpose of boxing gloves is not to cushion the head but to shield the knuckles. Without gloves, a boxer would break his hands after a couple of punches to the skull. That's why ultimate fighters won't throw multiple skull punches. As a result, they avoid the concussive head wounds that kill boxers--and the long-term neurological damage that cripples them.",
"In the past two years, an increasingly desperate UFC has been trying to assuage its critics. The competition, which had been gradually adding safety rules since the first fight, imposed even more. It institued rounds and a \"10-point must\" scoring system. It banned head butts and groin strikes. You can no longer kick a downed man or elbow someone in the back of the head. Fighters are required to wear thin martial arts gloves (a purely cosmetic change). The UFC imposed weight classes, ending the David-and-Goliath mismatches that made early fights so compelling.",
"UFC began in 1993 as a locker-room fantasy. What would happen if a kickboxer fought a wrestler? A karate champion fought a sumo champion? Promoters built an octagonal chain-link cage, invited eight top martial artists, and set them loose in no-holds-barred, bare-knuckles fights. \"There are no rules!\" bragged an early press release. Contestants would fight till \"knockout, submission, doctor's intervention, or death.\" UFC allowed, even promoted, all notions of bad sportsmanship: kicking a man when he's down, hitting him in the groin, choking. Four-hundred-pound men were sent into the Octagon to maul guys half their size. Only biting and eye-gouging were forbidden.",
"Fight Clubbed \n\n Fight Club , a movie about a fictional organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp, has provoked more than its share of media hand-wringing, particularly diatribes about Hollywood's infatuation with violence and Faludi-esque ruminations about the emasculated American male. Fight Club , however, has not sparked an iota of interest in a real organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp: the Ultimate Fighting Championship. UFC's flameout from national sensation to total irrelevance is a tragedy of American sports, a cautionary tale of prudishness, heavy-handed politics, and cultural myopia.",
"But this does not impress boxing fans, who are the most vigorous opponents of extreme fighting. McCain sat ringside at a boxing match where a fighter was killed. When I asked him to explain the moral distinction between boxing and ultimate fighting, he exploded at me, \"If you can't see the moral distinction, then we have nothing to talk about!\" Then he cut our interview short and stormed out of his office.",
"\"It was a very cheap way for the cable companies to portray themselves as anti-violence. It did not cost them much and it made them look good in Washington,\" says Carol Klenfner, spokeswoman for UFC's parent company, SEG. \n\n The ultimate fighting industry did little to help its own cause. The UFC promoted itself less as a serious sport than as a circus of carnage. Its early ads emphasized extreme fighting's potential for death. UFC folks accused McCain, without any evidence, of opposing the sport as a favor to campaign contributors. Extreme fighting was tarnished when fighters from the other ultimate fighting operation, the now-defunct Battlecade, were arrested for violating Canadian prizefighting laws when they fought on an Indian reservation outside Montreal.",
"The gimmick entranced thousands of people (well, men). What happens when a 620-pound sumo champion fights a 200-pound kickboxer? Answer: The kickboxer knocks him silly in 35 seconds. They tuned in for bloodshed--\"the damage,\" as fans like to call it. UFC fights could be horrifying. Tank Abbott, an ill-tempered, 270-pound street fighter, knocks out hapless opponent John Matua in 15 seconds. Then, before the ref can intervene, Abbott belts the unconscious Matua in the head, sending him into a fit, limbs quivering uncontrollably, blood spurting from his mouth. Abbott, naturally, became a cult hero and won a guest spot on Friends . (Matua walked out of the ring.) Soon, UFC was selling out huge arenas and drawing 300,000 pay-per-view subscribers for its quarterly competitions.",
"UFC's caged matches revolutionized the idea of fighting. Nursed on boxing and Hollywood, Americans imagine fights as choreography, a dance of elegant combinations, roundhouse kicks, clean knockouts. The UFC punctured this. Boxers floundered. Experts in striking martial arts such as karate and tae kwon do, who fancied themselves the world's greatest fighters, found themselves pretzeled by jujitsu masters, who pulled them to the ground and slowly choked or leg-locked them. \"UFC immediately debunked a lot of myths of fighting, of boxing, karate, kung fu. It showed the reality of what works in an actual fight,\" says Dave Meltzer, editor of Wrestling Observer .",
"The cable TV industry struck the fatal blow. In early 1997, McCain became chairman of the commerce committee, which oversees the cable industry. In April 1997, the president of the National Cable Television Association warned that UFC broadcasts could jeopardize the cable industry's influence in Washington. Time Warner, TCI, Request, Cablevision Systems, Viewer's Choice, and other major operators stopped airing UFC events, saying they were too violent for children. Never mind that 1) UFC only aired on pay-per-view, so children could not see it unless their parents paid for it; and 2) the same cable outfits carried boxing matches, R and NC-17 movies, and professional wrestling shows far more violent than UFC. The UFC's \"addressable audience\"--the potential number of PPV subscribers--shrank from 35 million at its peak to 7.5 million today.",
"Instead of being carnivals of gore, UFC fights looked strangely like ... sex. Almost all fights ended on the ground, one man mounting the other in missionary position, the pair of them wiggling mysteriously along the canvas for five, 10, even 30 minutes. There were few spectacular knockouts. The referee--yes, there was always a referee--stopped many bouts, and in most others, fighters \"tapped out,\" surrendering to mild-looking but agonizing chokes and joint locks. It was not barbarism. It was science.",
"Similarly, the chain-link fence surrounding the octagon looks grotesque. Critics have demanded that UFC install ropes instead. But ropes are a major cause of death and injury in boxing: Fighters hyperextend their necks when they are punched against the ropes, because nothing stops their heads from snapping back. The chain-link fence prevents hyperextension. \n\n When I tell people I'm an ultimate fighting fan, they invariably respond: \"Don't people get killed all the time doing that?\" But no one has ever been killed at the UFC--though boxers are killed every year. No one has even been seriously injured at the UFC. On the rare occasions when a bout has ended with a bloody knockout, the loser has always walked out of the ring.",
"Even as it disappears from public view, ultimate fighting is returning to its roots. Away from the scrutiny of the major media, state legislators, and McCain, kids are still learning mixed martial-arts techniques, and small-time promoters are quietly staging events. You can see Kage Kombat competitions at Dancing Waters nightclub in San Pedro, Calif. You can watch the Warrior's Challenge at a small Indian casino outside Sacramento. Texans compete in Houston's Dungal All Styles Fighting Championship. Tribal casinos in Northern Idaho are hosting small Pankration tournaments. The Extreme Fighting Challenge is popular in Iowa. The money is low; the crowds are small; and there's not a TV camera in sight. Ultimate fighting should have become boxing. Instead it has gone underground. It has become Fight Club.",
"The UFC spawned a new breed of \"mixed martial artists.\" World-class wrestlers learned to kickbox. Champion kickboxers learned to grapple. (The karate experts learned to stay home.) They became, without doubt, the best fighters in the world. (Click for more about the fighters.) Mike Tyson wouldn't last 30 seconds in an ultimate fighting match. When Olympic gold medal wrestler Kevin Jackson came to the UFC, a fighter named Frank Shamrock KO'd him with a submission hold in 16 seconds. Ultimate fighting schools began sprouting up all over the country, replacing the stylized gestures of the Eastern martial arts with techniques that actually work.",
"But a subtle sport was emerging from the gimmicks and carnage. My passion for ultimate fighting (which is also called \"extreme\" or \"no-holds-barred\" fighting) began when I saw the finals of UFC IV. Royce Gracie, a 180-pound Brazilian jujitsu specialist, was matched against a 275-pound beast named Dan Severn, one of the top heavyweight wrestlers in the world and a national champion many times over. In 30 seconds, Severn had grabbed Gracie, flung him to the canvas, and mounted him. For the next 15 minutes, Severn pummeled and elbowed and head-butted the smaller man. Gracie's face grew drawn, and he squirmed wildly to avoid Severn's bombardment. Then, all of sudden, Gracie, still lying on his back, saw an opening, wrapped his arms and legs around Severn like a python and choked the giant into submission.",
"None of this soothed the cable operators, who have kept UFC off the air. The pay-per-view audience has plunged from 300,000 per show to 15,000. UFC can no longer afford its best fighters: Some are fighting overseas. Others, notably Ken Shamrock (Frank's brother), have become pro wrestlers. Fights have deteriorated. UFC is limping along, but it has been reduced to scheduling events in Japan and Brazil. \n\n \"Sports fans want to grow with the sport,\" says former UFC fighter David Beneteau. \"They want to recognize the athletes. They want to see the same fighters come back. When you compare UFC now to what it was, the fighters are not the same, the rules are not the same. The fans have no story to follow.\""
],
[
"In the past two years, an increasingly desperate UFC has been trying to assuage its critics. The competition, which had been gradually adding safety rules since the first fight, imposed even more. It institued rounds and a \"10-point must\" scoring system. It banned head butts and groin strikes. You can no longer kick a downed man or elbow someone in the back of the head. Fighters are required to wear thin martial arts gloves (a purely cosmetic change). The UFC imposed weight classes, ending the David-and-Goliath mismatches that made early fights so compelling.",
"The gimmick entranced thousands of people (well, men). What happens when a 620-pound sumo champion fights a 200-pound kickboxer? Answer: The kickboxer knocks him silly in 35 seconds. They tuned in for bloodshed--\"the damage,\" as fans like to call it. UFC fights could be horrifying. Tank Abbott, an ill-tempered, 270-pound street fighter, knocks out hapless opponent John Matua in 15 seconds. Then, before the ref can intervene, Abbott belts the unconscious Matua in the head, sending him into a fit, limbs quivering uncontrollably, blood spurting from his mouth. Abbott, naturally, became a cult hero and won a guest spot on Friends . (Matua walked out of the ring.) Soon, UFC was selling out huge arenas and drawing 300,000 pay-per-view subscribers for its quarterly competitions.",
"But this does not impress boxing fans, who are the most vigorous opponents of extreme fighting. McCain sat ringside at a boxing match where a fighter was killed. When I asked him to explain the moral distinction between boxing and ultimate fighting, he exploded at me, \"If you can't see the moral distinction, then we have nothing to talk about!\" Then he cut our interview short and stormed out of his office.",
"UFC began in 1993 as a locker-room fantasy. What would happen if a kickboxer fought a wrestler? A karate champion fought a sumo champion? Promoters built an octagonal chain-link cage, invited eight top martial artists, and set them loose in no-holds-barred, bare-knuckles fights. \"There are no rules!\" bragged an early press release. Contestants would fight till \"knockout, submission, doctor's intervention, or death.\" UFC allowed, even promoted, all notions of bad sportsmanship: kicking a man when he's down, hitting him in the groin, choking. Four-hundred-pound men were sent into the Octagon to maul guys half their size. Only biting and eye-gouging were forbidden.",
"UFC's promoters predicted that it would supplant boxing as America's martial art. Instead, it fell apart. The collapse began in 1996, when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., saw a UFC tape. McCain, a lifelong boxing fan, was horrified at the ground fighting, kicks, and head butts. It was \"barbaric,\" he said. It was \"not a sport.\" He sent letters to all 50 governors asking them to ban ultimate fighting. The outcry against \"human cockfighting\" became a crusade, and like many crusades, it was founded on misunderstanding. \n\n UFC fell victim to cultural determinism about what a fight is. In countries such as Brazil and Japan, where no-holds-barred fighting has a long history, it is popular and uncontroversial. But Americans adhere to the Marquis of Queensbury rules. A fight consists of an exchange of upper-body blows that halts when one fighter falls.",
"Any blood sport can be barbaric, whether it's boxing or wrestling or ultimate fighting. It is impossible to draw a bright line between ultimate fighting and boxing. If anything, ultimate fighting is safer and less cruel than America's blood sport. For example, critics pilloried ultimate fighting because competitors fought with bare knuckles: To a nation accustomed to boxing gloves, this seemed revolting, an invitation to brain damage. But it's just the reverse: The purpose of boxing gloves is not to cushion the head but to shield the knuckles. Without gloves, a boxer would break his hands after a couple of punches to the skull. That's why ultimate fighters won't throw multiple skull punches. As a result, they avoid the concussive head wounds that kill boxers--and the long-term neurological damage that cripples them.",
"UFC's caged matches revolutionized the idea of fighting. Nursed on boxing and Hollywood, Americans imagine fights as choreography, a dance of elegant combinations, roundhouse kicks, clean knockouts. The UFC punctured this. Boxers floundered. Experts in striking martial arts such as karate and tae kwon do, who fancied themselves the world's greatest fighters, found themselves pretzeled by jujitsu masters, who pulled them to the ground and slowly choked or leg-locked them. \"UFC immediately debunked a lot of myths of fighting, of boxing, karate, kung fu. It showed the reality of what works in an actual fight,\" says Dave Meltzer, editor of Wrestling Observer .",
"But a subtle sport was emerging from the gimmicks and carnage. My passion for ultimate fighting (which is also called \"extreme\" or \"no-holds-barred\" fighting) began when I saw the finals of UFC IV. Royce Gracie, a 180-pound Brazilian jujitsu specialist, was matched against a 275-pound beast named Dan Severn, one of the top heavyweight wrestlers in the world and a national champion many times over. In 30 seconds, Severn had grabbed Gracie, flung him to the canvas, and mounted him. For the next 15 minutes, Severn pummeled and elbowed and head-butted the smaller man. Gracie's face grew drawn, and he squirmed wildly to avoid Severn's bombardment. Then, all of sudden, Gracie, still lying on his back, saw an opening, wrapped his arms and legs around Severn like a python and choked the giant into submission.",
"Similarly, the chain-link fence surrounding the octagon looks grotesque. Critics have demanded that UFC install ropes instead. But ropes are a major cause of death and injury in boxing: Fighters hyperextend their necks when they are punched against the ropes, because nothing stops their heads from snapping back. The chain-link fence prevents hyperextension. \n\n When I tell people I'm an ultimate fighting fan, they invariably respond: \"Don't people get killed all the time doing that?\" But no one has ever been killed at the UFC--though boxers are killed every year. No one has even been seriously injured at the UFC. On the rare occasions when a bout has ended with a bloody knockout, the loser has always walked out of the ring.",
"But logic has not served the UFC well. Where McCain led, a prudish nation followed. George Will opined against UFC. The American Medical Association recommended a ban. New York state outlawed ultimate fighting, as did other states. The Nevada Athletic Commission refused to sanction UFC bouts, barring the UFC from the lucrative casino market. (One public TV station refused a UFC sponsorship ad. The only other organization the station ever rejected was the Ku Klux Klan.) Lawsuits blocked or delayed UFC events all over the country, forcing the promoters to spend millions in legal fees. The UFC was exiled from mega-arenas to ever-smaller venues in ever more out-of-the-way states: Louisiana, Iowa, and Alabama. The match I attended in October 1997 was held in the parking lot of a small Mississippi casino.",
"None of this soothed the cable operators, who have kept UFC off the air. The pay-per-view audience has plunged from 300,000 per show to 15,000. UFC can no longer afford its best fighters: Some are fighting overseas. Others, notably Ken Shamrock (Frank's brother), have become pro wrestlers. Fights have deteriorated. UFC is limping along, but it has been reduced to scheduling events in Japan and Brazil. \n\n \"Sports fans want to grow with the sport,\" says former UFC fighter David Beneteau. \"They want to recognize the athletes. They want to see the same fighters come back. When you compare UFC now to what it was, the fighters are not the same, the rules are not the same. The fans have no story to follow.\"",
"Instead of being carnivals of gore, UFC fights looked strangely like ... sex. Almost all fights ended on the ground, one man mounting the other in missionary position, the pair of them wiggling mysteriously along the canvas for five, 10, even 30 minutes. There were few spectacular knockouts. The referee--yes, there was always a referee--stopped many bouts, and in most others, fighters \"tapped out,\" surrendering to mild-looking but agonizing chokes and joint locks. It was not barbarism. It was science.",
"Fight Clubbed \n\n Fight Club , a movie about a fictional organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp, has provoked more than its share of media hand-wringing, particularly diatribes about Hollywood's infatuation with violence and Faludi-esque ruminations about the emasculated American male. Fight Club , however, has not sparked an iota of interest in a real organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp: the Ultimate Fighting Championship. UFC's flameout from national sensation to total irrelevance is a tragedy of American sports, a cautionary tale of prudishness, heavy-handed politics, and cultural myopia.",
"\"It was a very cheap way for the cable companies to portray themselves as anti-violence. It did not cost them much and it made them look good in Washington,\" says Carol Klenfner, spokeswoman for UFC's parent company, SEG. \n\n The ultimate fighting industry did little to help its own cause. The UFC promoted itself less as a serious sport than as a circus of carnage. Its early ads emphasized extreme fighting's potential for death. UFC folks accused McCain, without any evidence, of opposing the sport as a favor to campaign contributors. Extreme fighting was tarnished when fighters from the other ultimate fighting operation, the now-defunct Battlecade, were arrested for violating Canadian prizefighting laws when they fought on an Indian reservation outside Montreal.",
"The UFC spawned a new breed of \"mixed martial artists.\" World-class wrestlers learned to kickbox. Champion kickboxers learned to grapple. (The karate experts learned to stay home.) They became, without doubt, the best fighters in the world. (Click for more about the fighters.) Mike Tyson wouldn't last 30 seconds in an ultimate fighting match. When Olympic gold medal wrestler Kevin Jackson came to the UFC, a fighter named Frank Shamrock KO'd him with a submission hold in 16 seconds. Ultimate fighting schools began sprouting up all over the country, replacing the stylized gestures of the Eastern martial arts with techniques that actually work.",
"Even as it disappears from public view, ultimate fighting is returning to its roots. Away from the scrutiny of the major media, state legislators, and McCain, kids are still learning mixed martial-arts techniques, and small-time promoters are quietly staging events. You can see Kage Kombat competitions at Dancing Waters nightclub in San Pedro, Calif. You can watch the Warrior's Challenge at a small Indian casino outside Sacramento. Texans compete in Houston's Dungal All Styles Fighting Championship. Tribal casinos in Northern Idaho are hosting small Pankration tournaments. The Extreme Fighting Challenge is popular in Iowa. The money is low; the crowds are small; and there's not a TV camera in sight. Ultimate fighting should have become boxing. Instead it has gone underground. It has become Fight Club.",
"The cable TV industry struck the fatal blow. In early 1997, McCain became chairman of the commerce committee, which oversees the cable industry. In April 1997, the president of the National Cable Television Association warned that UFC broadcasts could jeopardize the cable industry's influence in Washington. Time Warner, TCI, Request, Cablevision Systems, Viewer's Choice, and other major operators stopped airing UFC events, saying they were too violent for children. Never mind that 1) UFC only aired on pay-per-view, so children could not see it unless their parents paid for it; and 2) the same cable outfits carried boxing matches, R and NC-17 movies, and professional wrestling shows far more violent than UFC. The UFC's \"addressable audience\"--the potential number of PPV subscribers--shrank from 35 million at its peak to 7.5 million today."
],
[
"But logic has not served the UFC well. Where McCain led, a prudish nation followed. George Will opined against UFC. The American Medical Association recommended a ban. New York state outlawed ultimate fighting, as did other states. The Nevada Athletic Commission refused to sanction UFC bouts, barring the UFC from the lucrative casino market. (One public TV station refused a UFC sponsorship ad. The only other organization the station ever rejected was the Ku Klux Klan.) Lawsuits blocked or delayed UFC events all over the country, forcing the promoters to spend millions in legal fees. The UFC was exiled from mega-arenas to ever-smaller venues in ever more out-of-the-way states: Louisiana, Iowa, and Alabama. The match I attended in October 1997 was held in the parking lot of a small Mississippi casino.",
"In the past two years, an increasingly desperate UFC has been trying to assuage its critics. The competition, which had been gradually adding safety rules since the first fight, imposed even more. It institued rounds and a \"10-point must\" scoring system. It banned head butts and groin strikes. You can no longer kick a downed man or elbow someone in the back of the head. Fighters are required to wear thin martial arts gloves (a purely cosmetic change). The UFC imposed weight classes, ending the David-and-Goliath mismatches that made early fights so compelling.",
"UFC began in 1993 as a locker-room fantasy. What would happen if a kickboxer fought a wrestler? A karate champion fought a sumo champion? Promoters built an octagonal chain-link cage, invited eight top martial artists, and set them loose in no-holds-barred, bare-knuckles fights. \"There are no rules!\" bragged an early press release. Contestants would fight till \"knockout, submission, doctor's intervention, or death.\" UFC allowed, even promoted, all notions of bad sportsmanship: kicking a man when he's down, hitting him in the groin, choking. Four-hundred-pound men were sent into the Octagon to maul guys half their size. Only biting and eye-gouging were forbidden.",
"\"It was a very cheap way for the cable companies to portray themselves as anti-violence. It did not cost them much and it made them look good in Washington,\" says Carol Klenfner, spokeswoman for UFC's parent company, SEG. \n\n The ultimate fighting industry did little to help its own cause. The UFC promoted itself less as a serious sport than as a circus of carnage. Its early ads emphasized extreme fighting's potential for death. UFC folks accused McCain, without any evidence, of opposing the sport as a favor to campaign contributors. Extreme fighting was tarnished when fighters from the other ultimate fighting operation, the now-defunct Battlecade, were arrested for violating Canadian prizefighting laws when they fought on an Indian reservation outside Montreal.",
"UFC's promoters predicted that it would supplant boxing as America's martial art. Instead, it fell apart. The collapse began in 1996, when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., saw a UFC tape. McCain, a lifelong boxing fan, was horrified at the ground fighting, kicks, and head butts. It was \"barbaric,\" he said. It was \"not a sport.\" He sent letters to all 50 governors asking them to ban ultimate fighting. The outcry against \"human cockfighting\" became a crusade, and like many crusades, it was founded on misunderstanding. \n\n UFC fell victim to cultural determinism about what a fight is. In countries such as Brazil and Japan, where no-holds-barred fighting has a long history, it is popular and uncontroversial. But Americans adhere to the Marquis of Queensbury rules. A fight consists of an exchange of upper-body blows that halts when one fighter falls.",
"The gimmick entranced thousands of people (well, men). What happens when a 620-pound sumo champion fights a 200-pound kickboxer? Answer: The kickboxer knocks him silly in 35 seconds. They tuned in for bloodshed--\"the damage,\" as fans like to call it. UFC fights could be horrifying. Tank Abbott, an ill-tempered, 270-pound street fighter, knocks out hapless opponent John Matua in 15 seconds. Then, before the ref can intervene, Abbott belts the unconscious Matua in the head, sending him into a fit, limbs quivering uncontrollably, blood spurting from his mouth. Abbott, naturally, became a cult hero and won a guest spot on Friends . (Matua walked out of the ring.) Soon, UFC was selling out huge arenas and drawing 300,000 pay-per-view subscribers for its quarterly competitions.",
"UFC's caged matches revolutionized the idea of fighting. Nursed on boxing and Hollywood, Americans imagine fights as choreography, a dance of elegant combinations, roundhouse kicks, clean knockouts. The UFC punctured this. Boxers floundered. Experts in striking martial arts such as karate and tae kwon do, who fancied themselves the world's greatest fighters, found themselves pretzeled by jujitsu masters, who pulled them to the ground and slowly choked or leg-locked them. \"UFC immediately debunked a lot of myths of fighting, of boxing, karate, kung fu. It showed the reality of what works in an actual fight,\" says Dave Meltzer, editor of Wrestling Observer .",
"The cable TV industry struck the fatal blow. In early 1997, McCain became chairman of the commerce committee, which oversees the cable industry. In April 1997, the president of the National Cable Television Association warned that UFC broadcasts could jeopardize the cable industry's influence in Washington. Time Warner, TCI, Request, Cablevision Systems, Viewer's Choice, and other major operators stopped airing UFC events, saying they were too violent for children. Never mind that 1) UFC only aired on pay-per-view, so children could not see it unless their parents paid for it; and 2) the same cable outfits carried boxing matches, R and NC-17 movies, and professional wrestling shows far more violent than UFC. The UFC's \"addressable audience\"--the potential number of PPV subscribers--shrank from 35 million at its peak to 7.5 million today.",
"None of this soothed the cable operators, who have kept UFC off the air. The pay-per-view audience has plunged from 300,000 per show to 15,000. UFC can no longer afford its best fighters: Some are fighting overseas. Others, notably Ken Shamrock (Frank's brother), have become pro wrestlers. Fights have deteriorated. UFC is limping along, but it has been reduced to scheduling events in Japan and Brazil. \n\n \"Sports fans want to grow with the sport,\" says former UFC fighter David Beneteau. \"They want to recognize the athletes. They want to see the same fighters come back. When you compare UFC now to what it was, the fighters are not the same, the rules are not the same. The fans have no story to follow.\"",
"Instead of being carnivals of gore, UFC fights looked strangely like ... sex. Almost all fights ended on the ground, one man mounting the other in missionary position, the pair of them wiggling mysteriously along the canvas for five, 10, even 30 minutes. There were few spectacular knockouts. The referee--yes, there was always a referee--stopped many bouts, and in most others, fighters \"tapped out,\" surrendering to mild-looking but agonizing chokes and joint locks. It was not barbarism. It was science.",
"Even as it disappears from public view, ultimate fighting is returning to its roots. Away from the scrutiny of the major media, state legislators, and McCain, kids are still learning mixed martial-arts techniques, and small-time promoters are quietly staging events. You can see Kage Kombat competitions at Dancing Waters nightclub in San Pedro, Calif. You can watch the Warrior's Challenge at a small Indian casino outside Sacramento. Texans compete in Houston's Dungal All Styles Fighting Championship. Tribal casinos in Northern Idaho are hosting small Pankration tournaments. The Extreme Fighting Challenge is popular in Iowa. The money is low; the crowds are small; and there's not a TV camera in sight. Ultimate fighting should have become boxing. Instead it has gone underground. It has become Fight Club.",
"Any blood sport can be barbaric, whether it's boxing or wrestling or ultimate fighting. It is impossible to draw a bright line between ultimate fighting and boxing. If anything, ultimate fighting is safer and less cruel than America's blood sport. For example, critics pilloried ultimate fighting because competitors fought with bare knuckles: To a nation accustomed to boxing gloves, this seemed revolting, an invitation to brain damage. But it's just the reverse: The purpose of boxing gloves is not to cushion the head but to shield the knuckles. Without gloves, a boxer would break his hands after a couple of punches to the skull. That's why ultimate fighters won't throw multiple skull punches. As a result, they avoid the concussive head wounds that kill boxers--and the long-term neurological damage that cripples them.",
"The UFC spawned a new breed of \"mixed martial artists.\" World-class wrestlers learned to kickbox. Champion kickboxers learned to grapple. (The karate experts learned to stay home.) They became, without doubt, the best fighters in the world. (Click for more about the fighters.) Mike Tyson wouldn't last 30 seconds in an ultimate fighting match. When Olympic gold medal wrestler Kevin Jackson came to the UFC, a fighter named Frank Shamrock KO'd him with a submission hold in 16 seconds. Ultimate fighting schools began sprouting up all over the country, replacing the stylized gestures of the Eastern martial arts with techniques that actually work.",
"Fight Clubbed \n\n Fight Club , a movie about a fictional organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp, has provoked more than its share of media hand-wringing, particularly diatribes about Hollywood's infatuation with violence and Faludi-esque ruminations about the emasculated American male. Fight Club , however, has not sparked an iota of interest in a real organization of men who strip down and beat each other to pulp: the Ultimate Fighting Championship. UFC's flameout from national sensation to total irrelevance is a tragedy of American sports, a cautionary tale of prudishness, heavy-handed politics, and cultural myopia.",
"But this does not impress boxing fans, who are the most vigorous opponents of extreme fighting. McCain sat ringside at a boxing match where a fighter was killed. When I asked him to explain the moral distinction between boxing and ultimate fighting, he exploded at me, \"If you can't see the moral distinction, then we have nothing to talk about!\" Then he cut our interview short and stormed out of his office.",
"But a subtle sport was emerging from the gimmicks and carnage. My passion for ultimate fighting (which is also called \"extreme\" or \"no-holds-barred\" fighting) began when I saw the finals of UFC IV. Royce Gracie, a 180-pound Brazilian jujitsu specialist, was matched against a 275-pound beast named Dan Severn, one of the top heavyweight wrestlers in the world and a national champion many times over. In 30 seconds, Severn had grabbed Gracie, flung him to the canvas, and mounted him. For the next 15 minutes, Severn pummeled and elbowed and head-butted the smaller man. Gracie's face grew drawn, and he squirmed wildly to avoid Severn's bombardment. Then, all of sudden, Gracie, still lying on his back, saw an opening, wrapped his arms and legs around Severn like a python and choked the giant into submission.",
"Similarly, the chain-link fence surrounding the octagon looks grotesque. Critics have demanded that UFC install ropes instead. But ropes are a major cause of death and injury in boxing: Fighters hyperextend their necks when they are punched against the ropes, because nothing stops their heads from snapping back. The chain-link fence prevents hyperextension. \n\n When I tell people I'm an ultimate fighting fan, they invariably respond: \"Don't people get killed all the time doing that?\" But no one has ever been killed at the UFC--though boxers are killed every year. No one has even been seriously injured at the UFC. On the rare occasions when a bout has ended with a bloody knockout, the loser has always walked out of the ring."
]
] |
train
|
23942
|
[
"Why is the lack of hotel space important for Simon's story?",
"What is the goal of the story that Simon tells Mr. Oyster?",
"What does Simon think about the possibility of time travel?",
"Why does Mr. Oyster want to hire Simon and Betty?",
"Why is Simon so unenthusiastic when the client shows up at the beginning of the story?",
"What is Simon referring to when he says \"now it comes\" to Betty during their discussion at the beginning of the story?",
"Why does Simon look for aspirin as soon as he gets to his office?",
"What would've happened if Simon had said yes to the job at the end of the story?",
"Why did Simon's new friend not give him an aspirin when Simon asked for one?"
] |
[
[
"It made him cut his trip short without finding any time travelers.",
"Simon would have to learn how to time travel in order to keep his bag from being stolen.",
"It set the stage for him to encounter an alien's home for himself.",
"It meant he would find a number of unsavory characters as he tried to find somewhere to sleep."
],
[
"Simon wanted to show that he had spent a lot of time thinking about encounters with time travelers.",
"He wanted to explain why the trip would not be successful if he went to Germany.",
"He wanted to mock his prospective client for his ideas about time travel.",
"He wanted to prove that Oktoberfest was the wrong place to look for time travelers."
],
[
"He thinks it's possible, but finds it ridiculous that Oktoberfest would be the place to find it.",
"He hopes that it's real, and spends a lot of time thinking about how to avoid a paradox.",
"He knows that it's real, but thinks that its secret will be kept in the future.",
"He thinks it's incredibly stupid and not worth considering."
],
[
"He thinks the time traveler will have the secret to never-ending youth.",
"He wants to know the secret of time travel and they are the best investigators around.",
"He wants to make sure his family's wealth continues in the future.",
"He wants to find out a secret for political reasons."
],
[
"He knows Mr. Oyster's reputation, and does not want to get involved in his affairs.",
"He knows he cannot accomplish what Mr. Oyster is asking, and knows he will have to turn him away.",
"He only takes on easy cases that he knows will pay the bills.",
"He has too much of a headache to deal with the new client."
],
[
"He knows his headache is about to get worse.",
"The client he is expecting is about to show up.",
"He is used to complaints about Betty's salary.",
"He is expecting the usual argument with Betty about her job."
],
[
"He is experiencing caffeine withdrawal and did not have time to stop for coffee.",
"We never learn the cause of the headache, we only know that it is severe.",
"He has a hangover from attending a festival.",
"He was out drinking with some friends the night before, and has a hangover."
],
[
"He would have returned right back to the office soon after he left for the airport, but with a worse hangover.",
"He would have stayed at home and pretended to travel to Germany for the sake of his client.",
"He would have gone to Germany for the 16-day festival and looked for time travelers.",
"He would have brought Betty with him to Germany to help him find time travelers."
],
[
"He had run out of aspirin and did not know how to help.",
"The friend thought Simon needed to deal with his headache like a man.",
"He needed to knock him out to go back to the festival so that Simon would not know what had happened.",
"He gave him a different medicine instead that he thought would work better."
]
] |
[
3,
2,
3,
1,
2,
2,
3,
1,
3
] |
[
0,
1,
1,
0,
1,
1,
0,
0,
1
] |
[
[
"\"Out of the question,\" Simon\n said.\n\n\n \"But\nwhy\n?\" Betty wailed.\n\n\n \"Just for laughs,\" Simon told the\n two of them sourly, \"suppose I tell\n you a funny story. It goes like\n this:\"\nI got a thousand dollars from Mr.\n Oyster (Simon began) in the way\n of an advance, and leaving him with\n Betty who was making out a receipt,\n I hustled back to the apartment and\n packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation\n anyway, this was a natural. On\n the way to Idlewild I stopped off at\n the Germany Information Offices for\n some tourist literature.\n\n\n It takes roughly three and a half\n hours to get to Gander from Idlewild.\n I spent the time planning the\n fun I was going to have.",
"Simon put in a word. \"The usual\n explanation, Betty, is that they can't\n afford to allow the space-time continuum\n track to be altered. If, say, a\n time traveler returned to a period of\n twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler,\n then all subsequent history would be\n changed. In that case, the time traveler\n himself might never be born. They\n have to tread mighty carefully.\"\n\n\n Mr. Oyster was pleased. \"I didn't\n expect you to be so well informed\n on the subject, young man.\"\n\n\n Simon shrugged and fumbled\n again with the aspirin bottle.\nMr. Oyster went on. \"I've been\n considering the matter for some time\n and—\"\n\n\n Simon held up a hand. \"There's\n no use prolonging this. As I understand\n it, you're an elderly gentleman\n with a considerable fortune and you\n realize that thus far nobody has succeeded\n in taking it with him.\"",
"\"Excellent. Do you believe in time\n travel?\"\n\n\n Simon said nothing. Across the\n room, where she had resumed her\n seat, Betty cleared her throat. When\n Simon continued to say nothing she\n ventured, \"Time travel is impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, why?\"\n\n\n Betty looked to her boss for assistance.\n None was forthcoming. There\n ought to be some very quick, positive,\n definite answer. She said, \"Well,\n for one thing, paradox. Suppose you\n had a time machine and traveled back\n a hundred years or so and killed your\n own great-grandfather. Then how\n could you ever be born?\"\n\n\n \"Confound it if I know,\" the little\n fellow growled. \"How?\"\n\n\n Simon said, \"Let's get to the point,\n what you wanted to see me about.\"",
"\"This morning,\" I said weakly.\n\n\n While Betty stared at me as though\n it was\nme\nthat needed candling by a\n head shrinker preparatory to being\n sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished\n in my pocket for my wallet, counted\n the contents and winced at the\n pathetic remains of the thousand.\n I said pleadingly, \"Betty, listen,\n how long ago did I go out that door—on\n the way to the airport?\"\n\n\n \"You've been acting sick all morning.\n You went out that door about\n ten minutes ago, were gone about\n three minutes, and then came back.\"\n\"See here,\" Mr. Oyster said (interrupting\n Simon's story), \"did you\n say this was supposed to be amusing,\n young man? I don't find it so. In\n fact, I believe I am being ridiculed.\"",
"\"That's quite a gadget,\" I groaned.\n \"If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd\n appreciate it.\"\n\n\n Arth was sitting on the edge of\n the bed holding his bald head in his\n hands. \"I remember now,\" he sorrowed.\n \"You didn't have a hotel.\n What a stupidity. I'll be phased.\n Phased all the way down.\"\n\n\n \"You haven't got a handful of\n aspirin, have you?\" I asked him.\n\n\n \"Just a minute,\" Arth said, staggering\n erect and heading for what\n undoubtedly was a bathroom. \"Stay\n where you are. Don't move. Don't\n touch anything.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" I told him plaintively.\n \"I'm clean. I won't mess up the\n place. All I've got is a hangover, not\n lice.\"",
"Simon shrugged, put one hand to\n his forehead and said, \"That's only\n the first chapter. There are two\n more.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not interested in more,\" Mr.\n Oyster said. \"I suppose your point\n was to show me how ridiculous the\n whole idea actually is. Very well,\n you've done it. Confound it. However,\n I suppose your time, even when\n spent in this manner, has some value.\n Here is fifty dollars. And good day,\n sir!\"\n\n\n He slammed the door after him\n as he left.\n\n\n Simon winced at the noise, took\n the aspirin bottle from its drawer,\n took two, washed them down with\n water from the desk carafe.",
"Betty looked at him admiringly.\n Came to her feet, crossed over and\n took up the fifty dollars. \"Week's\n wages,\" she said. \"I suppose that's\n one way of taking care of a crackpot.\n But I'm surprised you didn't\n take his money and enjoy that vacation\n you've been yearning about.\"\n\n\n \"I did,\" Simon groaned. \"Three\n times.\"\n\n\n Betty stared at him. \"You mean—\"\n\n\n Simon nodded, miserably.\n\n\n She said, \"But\nSimon\n. Fifty thousand\n dollars bonus. If that story was\n true, you should have gone back\n again to Munich. If there was one\n time traveler, there might have\n been—\"",
"\"I keep telling you,\" Simon said\n bitterly, \"I went back there three\n times. There were hundreds of them.\n Probably thousands.\" He took a deep\n breath. \"Listen, we're just going to\n have to forget about it. They're not\n going to stand for the space-time\n continuum track being altered. If\n something comes up that looks like\n it might result in the track being\n changed, they set you right back at\n the beginning and let things start—for\n you—all over again. They just\n can't allow anything to come back\n from the future and change the\n past.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" Betty was suddenly\n furious at him, \"you've given up!\n Why this is the biggest thing— Why\n the fifty thousand dollars is nothing.\n The future! Just think!\"",
"\"There's supposed to be considerable\n nourishment in beer.\"\n\n\n That made sense. I yelled, \"\nFräulein!\n Zwei neu bier!\n\"\nSomewhere along in here the fog\n rolled in. When it rolled out again,\n I found myself closing one eye the\n better to read the lettering on my\n earthenware mug. It read Augustinerbräu.\n Somehow we'd evidently\n navigated from one tent to another.\n\n\n Arth was saying, \"Where's your\n hotel?\"\n\n\n That seemed like a good question.\n I thought about it for a while. Finally\n I said, \"Haven't got one. Town's\n jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof.\n I don't think we'll ever make\n it, Arth. How many we got to\n go?\"\n\n\n \"Lost track,\" Arth said. \"You can\n come home with me.\"",
"At the Bahnhof they could do me\n no good. There were no hotel rooms\n available in Munich. The head was\n getting worse by the minute. The\n fact that they'd somehow managed\n to lose my bag didn't help. I worked\n on that project for at least a couple\n of hours. Not only wasn't the bag\n at the luggage checking station, but\n the attendant there evidently couldn't\n make heads nor tails of the check\n receipt. He didn't speak English and\n my high school German was inadequate,\n especially accompanied by a\n blockbusting hangover.\n\n\n I didn't get anywhere tearing my\n hair and complaining from one end\n of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew\n a blank on the bag.",
"Simon was shaking his head. \"Not\n interested.\"\n\n\n As soon as Betty had got her jaw\n back into place, she glared unbelievingly\n at him.\n\n\n Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself.\n \"See here, young man, I realize\n this isn't an ordinary assignment,\n however, as I said, I am willing to\n risk a considerable portion of my\n fortune—\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Simon said. \"Can't be\n done.\"\n\n\n \"A hundred dollars a day plus expenses,\"\n Mr. Oyster said quietly. \"I\n like the fact that you already seem\n to have some interest and knowledge\n of the matter. I liked the way you\n knew my name when I walked in the\n door; my picture doesn't appear often\n in the papers.\"\n\n\n \"No go,\" Simon said, a sad quality\n in his voice.\n\n\n \"A fifty thousand dollar bonus if\n you bring me a time traveler.\"",
"\"Hm-m-m. But before providing\n vacations it'd be nice if Providence\n turned up a missing jewel deal, say.\n Something where you could deduce\n that actually the ruby ring had gone\n down the drain and was caught in the\n elbow. Something that would net\n about fifty dollars.\"\n\n\n Simon said, mournful of tone,\n \"Fifty dollars? Why not make it five\n hundred?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not selfish,\" Betty said. \"All\n I want is enough to pay me this\n week's salary.\"\n\n\n \"Money,\" Simon said. \"When you\n took this job you said it was the romance\n that appealed to you.\"\n\n\n \"Hm-m-m. I didn't know most\n sleuthing amounted to snooping\n around department stores to check on\n the clerks knocking down.\"\n\n\n Simon said, enigmatically, \"Now\n it comes.\"\nThere was a knock.",
"Betty bounced up with Olympic\n agility and had the door swinging\n wide before the knocking was quite\n completed.\n\n\n He was old, little and had bug\n eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His\n suit was cut in the style of yesteryear\n but when a suit costs two or\n three hundred dollars you still retain\n caste whatever the styling.\n\n\n Simon said unenthusiastically,\n \"Good morning, Mr. Oyster.\" He indicated\n the client's chair. \"Sit down,\n sir.\"\n\n\n The client fussed himself with\n Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed\n Simon, said finally, \"You know\n my name, that's pretty good. Never\n saw you before in my life. Stop fussing\n with me, young lady. Your ad\n in the phone book says you'll investigate\n anything.\"\n\n\n \"Anything,\" Simon said. \"Only\n one exception.\"",
"The trip back was as uninteresting\n as the one over. As the hangover began\n to wear off—a little—I was almost\n sorry I hadn't been able to stay.\n If I'd only been able to get a room I\nwould\nhave stayed, I told myself.\n\n\n From Idlewild, I came directly to\n the office rather than going to my\n apartment. I figured I might as well\n check in with Betty.\n\n\n I opened the door and there I\n found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair\n he had been occupying four—or was\n it five—days before when I'd left.\n I'd lost track of the time.",
"\"Then you'll realize that there are\n a dozen explanations of the paradoxes\n of time travel. Every writer in\n the field worth his salt has explained\n them away. But to get on. It's my\n contention that within a century or\n so man will have solved the problems\n of immortality and eternal youth, and\n it's also my suspicion that he will\n eventually be able to travel in time.\n So convinced am I of these possibilities\n that I am willing to gamble a\n portion of my fortune to investigate\n the presence in our era of such time\n travelers.\"\n\n\n Simon seemed incapable of carrying\n the ball this morning, so Betty\n said, \"But ... Mr. Oyster, if the\n future has developed time travel why\n don't we ever meet such travelers?\"",
"\"All right,\" Simon said. \"We'll accept\n it. The\nOktoberfest\nis one whale\n of a wingding.\"\n\"Well,\" the old boy pursued, into\n his subject now, \"that's where they'd\n be, places like the\nOktoberfest\n. For\n one thing, a time traveler wouldn't\n be conspicuous. At a festival like this\n somebody with a strange accent, or\n who didn't know exactly how to wear\n his clothes correctly, or was off the\n ordinary in any of a dozen other\n ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could\n be a four-armed space traveler from\n Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous\n at the\nOktoberfest\n. People\n would figure they had D.T.'s.\"\n\n\n \"But why would a time traveler\n want to go to a—\" Betty began.",
"Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to\n their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then\n nodded.\n\n\n Simon said, \"You want to hire me\n to find a time traveler and in some\n manner or other—any manner will\n do—exhort from him the secret of\n eternal life and youth, which you figure\n the future will have discovered.\n You're willing to pony up a part of\n this fortune of yours, if I can deliver\n a bona fide time traveler.\"\n\n\n \"Right!\"\n\n\n Betty had been looking from one\n to the other. Now she said, plaintively,\n \"But where are you going to find\n one of these characters—especially if\n they're interested in keeping hid?\"\n\n\n The old boy was the center again.\n \"I told you I'd been considering it\n for some time. The\nOktoberfest\n,\n that's where they'd be!\" He seemed\n elated.",
"Something, somewhere, was\n wrong. But I didn't care. I finished\n my\nmass\nand then remembered. \"I've\n got to get my bag. Oh, my head.\n Where did we spend last night?\"\n\n\n Arth said, and his voice sounded\n cautious, \"At my hotel, don't you remember?\"\n\n\n \"Not very well,\" I admitted. \"I\n feel lousy. I must have dimmed out.\n I've got to go to the Bahnhof and\n get my luggage.\"\n\n\n Arth didn't put up an argument\n on that. We said good-by and I could\n feel him watching after me as I pushed\n through the tables on the way\n out.",
"And those millions of gallons of\n beer, the hundreds of thousands of\n chickens, the herds of oxen. Who\n ponied up all the money for such expenditures?\n How could the average\n German, with his twenty-five dollars\n a week salary?\n\n\n In Munich there was no hotel\n space available. I went to the Bahnhof\n where they have a hotel service\n and applied. They put my name\n down, pocketed the husky bribe,\n showed me where I could check my\n bag, told me they'd do what they\n could, and to report back in a few\n hours.\n\n\n I had another suspicious twinge.\n If five million people attended this\n beer bout, how were they accommodated?",
"He looked at me, closing one eye\n to focus better. \"Oh,\" he said. \"Well,\n 2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque.\"\n\n\n \"New Albuquerque? Where's\n that?\"\n\n\n Arth thought about it. Took another\n long pull at the beer. \"Right\n across the way from old Albuquerque,\"\n he said finally. \"Maybe we\n ought to be getting on to the\n Pschorrbräu tent.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe we ought to eat something\n first,\" I said. \"I'm beginning to feel\n this. We could get some of that barbecued\n ox.\"\n\n\n Arth closed his eyes in pain.\n \"Vegetarian,\" he said. \"Couldn't possibly\n eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh.\"\n\n\n \"Well, we need some nourishment,\"\n I said."
],
[
"Simon shrugged, put one hand to\n his forehead and said, \"That's only\n the first chapter. There are two\n more.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not interested in more,\" Mr.\n Oyster said. \"I suppose your point\n was to show me how ridiculous the\n whole idea actually is. Very well,\n you've done it. Confound it. However,\n I suppose your time, even when\n spent in this manner, has some value.\n Here is fifty dollars. And good day,\n sir!\"\n\n\n He slammed the door after him\n as he left.\n\n\n Simon winced at the noise, took\n the aspirin bottle from its drawer,\n took two, washed them down with\n water from the desk carafe.",
"\"Out of the question,\" Simon\n said.\n\n\n \"But\nwhy\n?\" Betty wailed.\n\n\n \"Just for laughs,\" Simon told the\n two of them sourly, \"suppose I tell\n you a funny story. It goes like\n this:\"\nI got a thousand dollars from Mr.\n Oyster (Simon began) in the way\n of an advance, and leaving him with\n Betty who was making out a receipt,\n I hustled back to the apartment and\n packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation\n anyway, this was a natural. On\n the way to Idlewild I stopped off at\n the Germany Information Offices for\n some tourist literature.\n\n\n It takes roughly three and a half\n hours to get to Gander from Idlewild.\n I spent the time planning the\n fun I was going to have.",
"\"This morning,\" I said weakly.\n\n\n While Betty stared at me as though\n it was\nme\nthat needed candling by a\n head shrinker preparatory to being\n sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished\n in my pocket for my wallet, counted\n the contents and winced at the\n pathetic remains of the thousand.\n I said pleadingly, \"Betty, listen,\n how long ago did I go out that door—on\n the way to the airport?\"\n\n\n \"You've been acting sick all morning.\n You went out that door about\n ten minutes ago, were gone about\n three minutes, and then came back.\"\n\"See here,\" Mr. Oyster said (interrupting\n Simon's story), \"did you\n say this was supposed to be amusing,\n young man? I don't find it so. In\n fact, I believe I am being ridiculed.\"",
"Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to\n their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then\n nodded.\n\n\n Simon said, \"You want to hire me\n to find a time traveler and in some\n manner or other—any manner will\n do—exhort from him the secret of\n eternal life and youth, which you figure\n the future will have discovered.\n You're willing to pony up a part of\n this fortune of yours, if I can deliver\n a bona fide time traveler.\"\n\n\n \"Right!\"\n\n\n Betty had been looking from one\n to the other. Now she said, plaintively,\n \"But where are you going to find\n one of these characters—especially if\n they're interested in keeping hid?\"\n\n\n The old boy was the center again.\n \"I told you I'd been considering it\n for some time. The\nOktoberfest\n,\n that's where they'd be!\" He seemed\n elated.",
"Simon put in a word. \"The usual\n explanation, Betty, is that they can't\n afford to allow the space-time continuum\n track to be altered. If, say, a\n time traveler returned to a period of\n twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler,\n then all subsequent history would be\n changed. In that case, the time traveler\n himself might never be born. They\n have to tread mighty carefully.\"\n\n\n Mr. Oyster was pleased. \"I didn't\n expect you to be so well informed\n on the subject, young man.\"\n\n\n Simon shrugged and fumbled\n again with the aspirin bottle.\nMr. Oyster went on. \"I've been\n considering the matter for some time\n and—\"\n\n\n Simon held up a hand. \"There's\n no use prolonging this. As I understand\n it, you're an elderly gentleman\n with a considerable fortune and you\n realize that thus far nobody has succeeded\n in taking it with him.\"",
"Simon was shaking his head. \"Not\n interested.\"\n\n\n As soon as Betty had got her jaw\n back into place, she glared unbelievingly\n at him.\n\n\n Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself.\n \"See here, young man, I realize\n this isn't an ordinary assignment,\n however, as I said, I am willing to\n risk a considerable portion of my\n fortune—\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Simon said. \"Can't be\n done.\"\n\n\n \"A hundred dollars a day plus expenses,\"\n Mr. Oyster said quietly. \"I\n like the fact that you already seem\n to have some interest and knowledge\n of the matter. I liked the way you\n knew my name when I walked in the\n door; my picture doesn't appear often\n in the papers.\"\n\n\n \"No go,\" Simon said, a sad quality\n in his voice.\n\n\n \"A fifty thousand dollar bonus if\n you bring me a time traveler.\"",
"Betty bounced up with Olympic\n agility and had the door swinging\n wide before the knocking was quite\n completed.\n\n\n He was old, little and had bug\n eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His\n suit was cut in the style of yesteryear\n but when a suit costs two or\n three hundred dollars you still retain\n caste whatever the styling.\n\n\n Simon said unenthusiastically,\n \"Good morning, Mr. Oyster.\" He indicated\n the client's chair. \"Sit down,\n sir.\"\n\n\n The client fussed himself with\n Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed\n Simon, said finally, \"You know\n my name, that's pretty good. Never\n saw you before in my life. Stop fussing\n with me, young lady. Your ad\n in the phone book says you'll investigate\n anything.\"\n\n\n \"Anything,\" Simon said. \"Only\n one exception.\"",
"I said to him, \"Glad you're here,\n sir. I can report. Ah, what was it\n you came for? Impatient to hear if\n I'd had any results?\" My mind was\n spinning like a whirling dervish in\n a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of\n his money and had nothing I could\n think of to show for it; nothing but\n the last stages of a grand-daddy\n hangover.\n\n\n \"Came for?\" Mr. Oyster snorted.\n \"I'm merely waiting for your girl to\n make out my receipt. I thought you\n had already left.\"\n\n\n \"You'll miss your plane,\" Betty\n said.\n\n\n There was suddenly a double dip\n of ice cream in my stomach. I walked\n over to my desk and looked down at\n the calendar.",
"\"Then you'll realize that there are\n a dozen explanations of the paradoxes\n of time travel. Every writer in\n the field worth his salt has explained\n them away. But to get on. It's my\n contention that within a century or\n so man will have solved the problems\n of immortality and eternal youth, and\n it's also my suspicion that he will\n eventually be able to travel in time.\n So convinced am I of these possibilities\n that I am willing to gamble a\n portion of my fortune to investigate\n the presence in our era of such time\n travelers.\"\n\n\n Simon seemed incapable of carrying\n the ball this morning, so Betty\n said, \"But ... Mr. Oyster, if the\n future has developed time travel why\n don't we ever meet such travelers?\"",
"\"Excellent. Do you believe in time\n travel?\"\n\n\n Simon said nothing. Across the\n room, where she had resumed her\n seat, Betty cleared her throat. When\n Simon continued to say nothing she\n ventured, \"Time travel is impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, why?\"\n\n\n Betty looked to her boss for assistance.\n None was forthcoming. There\n ought to be some very quick, positive,\n definite answer. She said, \"Well,\n for one thing, paradox. Suppose you\n had a time machine and traveled back\n a hundred years or so and killed your\n own great-grandfather. Then how\n could you ever be born?\"\n\n\n \"Confound it if I know,\" the little\n fellow growled. \"How?\"\n\n\n Simon said, \"Let's get to the point,\n what you wanted to see me about.\"",
"Mr. Oyster was saying something\n to the effect that if I didn't leave today,\n it would have to be tomorrow,\n that he hadn't ponied up that thousand\n dollars advance for anything\n less than immediate service. Stuffing\n his receipt in his wallet, he fussed\n his way out the door.\n\n\n I said to Betty hopefully, \"I suppose\n you haven't changed this calendar\n since I left.\"\n\n\n Betty said, \"What's the matter\n with you? You look funny. How did\n your clothes get so mussed? You tore\n the top sheet off that calendar yourself,\n not half an hour ago, just before\n this marble-missing client came\n in.\" She added, irrelevantly, \"Time\n travelers yet.\"\n\n\n I tried just once more. \"Uh, when\n did you first see this Mr. Oyster?\"\n\n\n \"Never saw him before in my\n life,\" she said. \"Not until he came\n in this morning.\"",
"Betty looked at him admiringly.\n Came to her feet, crossed over and\n took up the fifty dollars. \"Week's\n wages,\" she said. \"I suppose that's\n one way of taking care of a crackpot.\n But I'm surprised you didn't\n take his money and enjoy that vacation\n you've been yearning about.\"\n\n\n \"I did,\" Simon groaned. \"Three\n times.\"\n\n\n Betty stared at him. \"You mean—\"\n\n\n Simon nodded, miserably.\n\n\n She said, \"But\nSimon\n. Fifty thousand\n dollars bonus. If that story was\n true, you should have gone back\n again to Munich. If there was one\n time traveler, there might have\n been—\"",
"The trip back was as uninteresting\n as the one over. As the hangover began\n to wear off—a little—I was almost\n sorry I hadn't been able to stay.\n If I'd only been able to get a room I\nwould\nhave stayed, I told myself.\n\n\n From Idlewild, I came directly to\n the office rather than going to my\n apartment. I figured I might as well\n check in with Betty.\n\n\n I opened the door and there I\n found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair\n he had been occupying four—or was\n it five—days before when I'd left.\n I'd lost track of the time.",
"\"I keep telling you,\" Simon said\n bitterly, \"I went back there three\n times. There were hundreds of them.\n Probably thousands.\" He took a deep\n breath. \"Listen, we're just going to\n have to forget about it. They're not\n going to stand for the space-time\n continuum track being altered. If\n something comes up that looks like\n it might result in the track being\n changed, they set you right back at\n the beginning and let things start—for\n you—all over again. They just\n can't allow anything to come back\n from the future and change the\n past.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" Betty was suddenly\n furious at him, \"you've given up!\n Why this is the biggest thing— Why\n the fifty thousand dollars is nothing.\n The future! Just think!\"",
"\"Hm-m-m. But before providing\n vacations it'd be nice if Providence\n turned up a missing jewel deal, say.\n Something where you could deduce\n that actually the ruby ring had gone\n down the drain and was caught in the\n elbow. Something that would net\n about fifty dollars.\"\n\n\n Simon said, mournful of tone,\n \"Fifty dollars? Why not make it five\n hundred?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not selfish,\" Betty said. \"All\n I want is enough to pay me this\n week's salary.\"\n\n\n \"Money,\" Simon said. \"When you\n took this job you said it was the romance\n that appealed to you.\"\n\n\n \"Hm-m-m. I didn't know most\n sleuthing amounted to snooping\n around department stores to check on\n the clerks knocking down.\"\n\n\n Simon said, enigmatically, \"Now\n it comes.\"\nThere was a knock.",
"He looked at me, closing one eye\n to focus better. \"Oh,\" he said. \"Well,\n 2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque.\"\n\n\n \"New Albuquerque? Where's\n that?\"\n\n\n Arth thought about it. Took another\n long pull at the beer. \"Right\n across the way from old Albuquerque,\"\n he said finally. \"Maybe we\n ought to be getting on to the\n Pschorrbräu tent.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe we ought to eat something\n first,\" I said. \"I'm beginning to feel\n this. We could get some of that barbecued\n ox.\"\n\n\n Arth closed his eyes in pain.\n \"Vegetarian,\" he said. \"Couldn't possibly\n eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh.\"\n\n\n \"Well, we need some nourishment,\"\n I said.",
"\"Next is the Hofbräu,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Next what?\" Baldy's conversation\n didn't seem to hang together very\n well.\n\n\n \"My pilgrimage,\" he told me. \"All\n my life I've been wanting to go back\n to an\nOktoberfest\nand sample every\n one of the seven brands of the best\n beer the world has ever known. I'm\n only as far as Löwenbräu. I'm afraid\n I'll never make it.\"\n\n\n I finished my\nmass\n. \"I'll help\n you,\" I told him. \"Very noble endeavor.\n Name is Simon.\"\n\n\n \"Arth,\" he said. \"How could you\n help?\"\n\n\n \"I'm still fresh—comparatively.\n I'll navigate you around. There are\n seven beer tents. How many have you\n got through, so far?\"",
"\"Why not! What better opportunity\n to study a people than when they\n are in their cups? If\nyou\ncould go\n back a few thousand years, the things\n you would wish to see would be a\n Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites\n of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's\n orgies. You wouldn't want to wander\n up and down the streets of, say,\n Athens while nothing was going on,\n particularly when you might be revealed\n as a suspicious character not\n being able to speak the language, not\n knowing how to wear the clothes and\n not familiar with the city's layout.\"\n He took a deep breath. \"No ma'am,\n you'd have to stick to some great\n event, both for the sake of actual\n interest and for protection against being\n unmasked.\"\n\n\n The old boy wound it up. \"Well,\n that's the story. What are your rates?\n The\nOktoberfest\nstarts on Friday and\n continues for sixteen days. You can\n take the plane to Munich, spend a\n week there and—\"",
"\"All right,\" Simon said. \"We'll accept\n it. The\nOktoberfest\nis one whale\n of a wingding.\"\n\"Well,\" the old boy pursued, into\n his subject now, \"that's where they'd\n be, places like the\nOktoberfest\n. For\n one thing, a time traveler wouldn't\n be conspicuous. At a festival like this\n somebody with a strange accent, or\n who didn't know exactly how to wear\n his clothes correctly, or was off the\n ordinary in any of a dozen other\n ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could\n be a four-armed space traveler from\n Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous\n at the\nOktoberfest\n. People\n would figure they had D.T.'s.\"\n\n\n \"But why would a time traveler\n want to go to a—\" Betty began.",
"\"I want to hire you to hunt me up\n some time travelers,\" the old boy\n said.\n\n\n Betty was too far in now to maintain\n her proper role of silent secretary.\n \"Time travelers,\" she said, not\n very intelligently.\n\n\n The potential client sat more erect,\n obviously with intent to hold the\n floor for a time. He removed the\n pince-nez glasses and pointed them\n at Betty. He said, \"Have you read\n much science fiction, Miss?\"\n\n\n \"Some,\" Betty admitted."
],
[
"\"Excellent. Do you believe in time\n travel?\"\n\n\n Simon said nothing. Across the\n room, where she had resumed her\n seat, Betty cleared her throat. When\n Simon continued to say nothing she\n ventured, \"Time travel is impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, why?\"\n\n\n Betty looked to her boss for assistance.\n None was forthcoming. There\n ought to be some very quick, positive,\n definite answer. She said, \"Well,\n for one thing, paradox. Suppose you\n had a time machine and traveled back\n a hundred years or so and killed your\n own great-grandfather. Then how\n could you ever be born?\"\n\n\n \"Confound it if I know,\" the little\n fellow growled. \"How?\"\n\n\n Simon said, \"Let's get to the point,\n what you wanted to see me about.\"",
"Simon put in a word. \"The usual\n explanation, Betty, is that they can't\n afford to allow the space-time continuum\n track to be altered. If, say, a\n time traveler returned to a period of\n twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler,\n then all subsequent history would be\n changed. In that case, the time traveler\n himself might never be born. They\n have to tread mighty carefully.\"\n\n\n Mr. Oyster was pleased. \"I didn't\n expect you to be so well informed\n on the subject, young man.\"\n\n\n Simon shrugged and fumbled\n again with the aspirin bottle.\nMr. Oyster went on. \"I've been\n considering the matter for some time\n and—\"\n\n\n Simon held up a hand. \"There's\n no use prolonging this. As I understand\n it, you're an elderly gentleman\n with a considerable fortune and you\n realize that thus far nobody has succeeded\n in taking it with him.\"",
"\"Then you'll realize that there are\n a dozen explanations of the paradoxes\n of time travel. Every writer in\n the field worth his salt has explained\n them away. But to get on. It's my\n contention that within a century or\n so man will have solved the problems\n of immortality and eternal youth, and\n it's also my suspicion that he will\n eventually be able to travel in time.\n So convinced am I of these possibilities\n that I am willing to gamble a\n portion of my fortune to investigate\n the presence in our era of such time\n travelers.\"\n\n\n Simon seemed incapable of carrying\n the ball this morning, so Betty\n said, \"But ... Mr. Oyster, if the\n future has developed time travel why\n don't we ever meet such travelers?\"",
"\"I keep telling you,\" Simon said\n bitterly, \"I went back there three\n times. There were hundreds of them.\n Probably thousands.\" He took a deep\n breath. \"Listen, we're just going to\n have to forget about it. They're not\n going to stand for the space-time\n continuum track being altered. If\n something comes up that looks like\n it might result in the track being\n changed, they set you right back at\n the beginning and let things start—for\n you—all over again. They just\n can't allow anything to come back\n from the future and change the\n past.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" Betty was suddenly\n furious at him, \"you've given up!\n Why this is the biggest thing— Why\n the fifty thousand dollars is nothing.\n The future! Just think!\"",
"Simon was shaking his head. \"Not\n interested.\"\n\n\n As soon as Betty had got her jaw\n back into place, she glared unbelievingly\n at him.\n\n\n Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself.\n \"See here, young man, I realize\n this isn't an ordinary assignment,\n however, as I said, I am willing to\n risk a considerable portion of my\n fortune—\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Simon said. \"Can't be\n done.\"\n\n\n \"A hundred dollars a day plus expenses,\"\n Mr. Oyster said quietly. \"I\n like the fact that you already seem\n to have some interest and knowledge\n of the matter. I liked the way you\n knew my name when I walked in the\n door; my picture doesn't appear often\n in the papers.\"\n\n\n \"No go,\" Simon said, a sad quality\n in his voice.\n\n\n \"A fifty thousand dollar bonus if\n you bring me a time traveler.\"",
"Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to\n their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then\n nodded.\n\n\n Simon said, \"You want to hire me\n to find a time traveler and in some\n manner or other—any manner will\n do—exhort from him the secret of\n eternal life and youth, which you figure\n the future will have discovered.\n You're willing to pony up a part of\n this fortune of yours, if I can deliver\n a bona fide time traveler.\"\n\n\n \"Right!\"\n\n\n Betty had been looking from one\n to the other. Now she said, plaintively,\n \"But where are you going to find\n one of these characters—especially if\n they're interested in keeping hid?\"\n\n\n The old boy was the center again.\n \"I told you I'd been considering it\n for some time. The\nOktoberfest\n,\n that's where they'd be!\" He seemed\n elated.",
"Betty looked at him admiringly.\n Came to her feet, crossed over and\n took up the fifty dollars. \"Week's\n wages,\" she said. \"I suppose that's\n one way of taking care of a crackpot.\n But I'm surprised you didn't\n take his money and enjoy that vacation\n you've been yearning about.\"\n\n\n \"I did,\" Simon groaned. \"Three\n times.\"\n\n\n Betty stared at him. \"You mean—\"\n\n\n Simon nodded, miserably.\n\n\n She said, \"But\nSimon\n. Fifty thousand\n dollars bonus. If that story was\n true, you should have gone back\n again to Munich. If there was one\n time traveler, there might have\n been—\"",
"\"All right,\" Simon said. \"We'll accept\n it. The\nOktoberfest\nis one whale\n of a wingding.\"\n\"Well,\" the old boy pursued, into\n his subject now, \"that's where they'd\n be, places like the\nOktoberfest\n. For\n one thing, a time traveler wouldn't\n be conspicuous. At a festival like this\n somebody with a strange accent, or\n who didn't know exactly how to wear\n his clothes correctly, or was off the\n ordinary in any of a dozen other\n ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could\n be a four-armed space traveler from\n Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous\n at the\nOktoberfest\n. People\n would figure they had D.T.'s.\"\n\n\n \"But why would a time traveler\n want to go to a—\" Betty began.",
"\"This morning,\" I said weakly.\n\n\n While Betty stared at me as though\n it was\nme\nthat needed candling by a\n head shrinker preparatory to being\n sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished\n in my pocket for my wallet, counted\n the contents and winced at the\n pathetic remains of the thousand.\n I said pleadingly, \"Betty, listen,\n how long ago did I go out that door—on\n the way to the airport?\"\n\n\n \"You've been acting sick all morning.\n You went out that door about\n ten minutes ago, were gone about\n three minutes, and then came back.\"\n\"See here,\" Mr. Oyster said (interrupting\n Simon's story), \"did you\n say this was supposed to be amusing,\n young man? I don't find it so. In\n fact, I believe I am being ridiculed.\"",
"\"Out of the question,\" Simon\n said.\n\n\n \"But\nwhy\n?\" Betty wailed.\n\n\n \"Just for laughs,\" Simon told the\n two of them sourly, \"suppose I tell\n you a funny story. It goes like\n this:\"\nI got a thousand dollars from Mr.\n Oyster (Simon began) in the way\n of an advance, and leaving him with\n Betty who was making out a receipt,\n I hustled back to the apartment and\n packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation\n anyway, this was a natural. On\n the way to Idlewild I stopped off at\n the Germany Information Offices for\n some tourist literature.\n\n\n It takes roughly three and a half\n hours to get to Gander from Idlewild.\n I spent the time planning the\n fun I was going to have.",
"Simon said wearily, \"There's just\n one thing you can bring back with\n you from the future, a hangover compounded\n of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu.\n What's more you can pile\n one on top of the other, and another\n on top of that!\"\n\n\n He shuddered. \"If you think I'm\n going to take another crack at this\n merry-go-round and pile a fourth\n hangover on the three I'm already\n nursing, all at once, you can think\n again.\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAstounding Science Fiction\nJune\n 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"Simon shrugged, put one hand to\n his forehead and said, \"That's only\n the first chapter. There are two\n more.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not interested in more,\" Mr.\n Oyster said. \"I suppose your point\n was to show me how ridiculous the\n whole idea actually is. Very well,\n you've done it. Confound it. However,\n I suppose your time, even when\n spent in this manner, has some value.\n Here is fifty dollars. And good day,\n sir!\"\n\n\n He slammed the door after him\n as he left.\n\n\n Simon winced at the noise, took\n the aspirin bottle from its drawer,\n took two, washed them down with\n water from the desk carafe.",
"Mr. Oyster was saying something\n to the effect that if I didn't leave today,\n it would have to be tomorrow,\n that he hadn't ponied up that thousand\n dollars advance for anything\n less than immediate service. Stuffing\n his receipt in his wallet, he fussed\n his way out the door.\n\n\n I said to Betty hopefully, \"I suppose\n you haven't changed this calendar\n since I left.\"\n\n\n Betty said, \"What's the matter\n with you? You look funny. How did\n your clothes get so mussed? You tore\n the top sheet off that calendar yourself,\n not half an hour ago, just before\n this marble-missing client came\n in.\" She added, irrelevantly, \"Time\n travelers yet.\"\n\n\n I tried just once more. \"Uh, when\n did you first see this Mr. Oyster?\"\n\n\n \"Never saw him before in my\n life,\" she said. \"Not until he came\n in this morning.\"",
"\"I want to hire you to hunt me up\n some time travelers,\" the old boy\n said.\n\n\n Betty was too far in now to maintain\n her proper role of silent secretary.\n \"Time travelers,\" she said, not\n very intelligently.\n\n\n The potential client sat more erect,\n obviously with intent to hold the\n floor for a time. He removed the\n pince-nez glasses and pointed them\n at Betty. He said, \"Have you read\n much science fiction, Miss?\"\n\n\n \"Some,\" Betty admitted.",
"It takes roughly seven and a half\n hours from Gander to Shannon and\n I spent that time dreaming up material\n I could put into my reports to\n Mr. Oyster. I was going to have to\n give him some kind of report for his\n money. Time travel yet! What a\n laugh!\n\n\n Between Shannon and Munich a\n faint suspicion began to simmer in\n my mind. These statistics I read on\n the\nOktoberfest\nin the Munich tourist\n pamphlets. Five million people\n attended annually.\n\n\n Where did five million people\n come from to attend an overgrown\n festival in comparatively remote\n Southern Germany? The tourist season\n is over before September 21st,\n first day of the gigantic beer bust.\n Nor could the Germans account for\n any such number. Munich itself has\n a population of less than a million,\n counting children.",
"UNBORN\n\n TOMORROW\nBY MACK REYNOLDS\nUnfortunately\n, there was only\n one thing he could bring back\n from the wonderful future ...\n and though he didn't want to\n ... nevertheless he did....\nIllustrated by Freas\n\n\n Betty\n looked up from\n her magazine. She said\n mildly, \"You're late.\"\n\n\n \"Don't yell at me, I\n feel awful,\" Simon told\n her. He sat down at his desk, passed\n his tongue over his teeth in distaste,\n groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the\n aspirin bottle.\n\n\n He looked over at Betty and said,\n almost as though reciting, \"What I\n need is a vacation.\"\n\n\n \"What,\" Betty said, \"are you going\n to use for money?\"\n\n\n \"Providence,\" Simon told her\n whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle,\n \"will provide.\"",
"Betty and Simon waited.",
"\"Why not! What better opportunity\n to study a people than when they\n are in their cups? If\nyou\ncould go\n back a few thousand years, the things\n you would wish to see would be a\n Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites\n of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's\n orgies. You wouldn't want to wander\n up and down the streets of, say,\n Athens while nothing was going on,\n particularly when you might be revealed\n as a suspicious character not\n being able to speak the language, not\n knowing how to wear the clothes and\n not familiar with the city's layout.\"\n He took a deep breath. \"No ma'am,\n you'd have to stick to some great\n event, both for the sake of actual\n interest and for protection against being\n unmasked.\"\n\n\n The old boy wound it up. \"Well,\n that's the story. What are your rates?\n The\nOktoberfest\nstarts on Friday and\n continues for sixteen days. You can\n take the plane to Munich, spend a\n week there and—\"",
"\"Hm-m-m. But before providing\n vacations it'd be nice if Providence\n turned up a missing jewel deal, say.\n Something where you could deduce\n that actually the ruby ring had gone\n down the drain and was caught in the\n elbow. Something that would net\n about fifty dollars.\"\n\n\n Simon said, mournful of tone,\n \"Fifty dollars? Why not make it five\n hundred?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not selfish,\" Betty said. \"All\n I want is enough to pay me this\n week's salary.\"\n\n\n \"Money,\" Simon said. \"When you\n took this job you said it was the romance\n that appealed to you.\"\n\n\n \"Hm-m-m. I didn't know most\n sleuthing amounted to snooping\n around department stores to check on\n the clerks knocking down.\"\n\n\n Simon said, enigmatically, \"Now\n it comes.\"\nThere was a knock.",
"Betty bounced up with Olympic\n agility and had the door swinging\n wide before the knocking was quite\n completed.\n\n\n He was old, little and had bug\n eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His\n suit was cut in the style of yesteryear\n but when a suit costs two or\n three hundred dollars you still retain\n caste whatever the styling.\n\n\n Simon said unenthusiastically,\n \"Good morning, Mr. Oyster.\" He indicated\n the client's chair. \"Sit down,\n sir.\"\n\n\n The client fussed himself with\n Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed\n Simon, said finally, \"You know\n my name, that's pretty good. Never\n saw you before in my life. Stop fussing\n with me, young lady. Your ad\n in the phone book says you'll investigate\n anything.\"\n\n\n \"Anything,\" Simon said. \"Only\n one exception.\""
],
[
"Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to\n their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then\n nodded.\n\n\n Simon said, \"You want to hire me\n to find a time traveler and in some\n manner or other—any manner will\n do—exhort from him the secret of\n eternal life and youth, which you figure\n the future will have discovered.\n You're willing to pony up a part of\n this fortune of yours, if I can deliver\n a bona fide time traveler.\"\n\n\n \"Right!\"\n\n\n Betty had been looking from one\n to the other. Now she said, plaintively,\n \"But where are you going to find\n one of these characters—especially if\n they're interested in keeping hid?\"\n\n\n The old boy was the center again.\n \"I told you I'd been considering it\n for some time. The\nOktoberfest\n,\n that's where they'd be!\" He seemed\n elated.",
"Betty bounced up with Olympic\n agility and had the door swinging\n wide before the knocking was quite\n completed.\n\n\n He was old, little and had bug\n eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His\n suit was cut in the style of yesteryear\n but when a suit costs two or\n three hundred dollars you still retain\n caste whatever the styling.\n\n\n Simon said unenthusiastically,\n \"Good morning, Mr. Oyster.\" He indicated\n the client's chair. \"Sit down,\n sir.\"\n\n\n The client fussed himself with\n Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed\n Simon, said finally, \"You know\n my name, that's pretty good. Never\n saw you before in my life. Stop fussing\n with me, young lady. Your ad\n in the phone book says you'll investigate\n anything.\"\n\n\n \"Anything,\" Simon said. \"Only\n one exception.\"",
"Simon was shaking his head. \"Not\n interested.\"\n\n\n As soon as Betty had got her jaw\n back into place, she glared unbelievingly\n at him.\n\n\n Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself.\n \"See here, young man, I realize\n this isn't an ordinary assignment,\n however, as I said, I am willing to\n risk a considerable portion of my\n fortune—\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Simon said. \"Can't be\n done.\"\n\n\n \"A hundred dollars a day plus expenses,\"\n Mr. Oyster said quietly. \"I\n like the fact that you already seem\n to have some interest and knowledge\n of the matter. I liked the way you\n knew my name when I walked in the\n door; my picture doesn't appear often\n in the papers.\"\n\n\n \"No go,\" Simon said, a sad quality\n in his voice.\n\n\n \"A fifty thousand dollar bonus if\n you bring me a time traveler.\"",
"\"Out of the question,\" Simon\n said.\n\n\n \"But\nwhy\n?\" Betty wailed.\n\n\n \"Just for laughs,\" Simon told the\n two of them sourly, \"suppose I tell\n you a funny story. It goes like\n this:\"\nI got a thousand dollars from Mr.\n Oyster (Simon began) in the way\n of an advance, and leaving him with\n Betty who was making out a receipt,\n I hustled back to the apartment and\n packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation\n anyway, this was a natural. On\n the way to Idlewild I stopped off at\n the Germany Information Offices for\n some tourist literature.\n\n\n It takes roughly three and a half\n hours to get to Gander from Idlewild.\n I spent the time planning the\n fun I was going to have.",
"Simon put in a word. \"The usual\n explanation, Betty, is that they can't\n afford to allow the space-time continuum\n track to be altered. If, say, a\n time traveler returned to a period of\n twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler,\n then all subsequent history would be\n changed. In that case, the time traveler\n himself might never be born. They\n have to tread mighty carefully.\"\n\n\n Mr. Oyster was pleased. \"I didn't\n expect you to be so well informed\n on the subject, young man.\"\n\n\n Simon shrugged and fumbled\n again with the aspirin bottle.\nMr. Oyster went on. \"I've been\n considering the matter for some time\n and—\"\n\n\n Simon held up a hand. \"There's\n no use prolonging this. As I understand\n it, you're an elderly gentleman\n with a considerable fortune and you\n realize that thus far nobody has succeeded\n in taking it with him.\"",
"Simon shrugged, put one hand to\n his forehead and said, \"That's only\n the first chapter. There are two\n more.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not interested in more,\" Mr.\n Oyster said. \"I suppose your point\n was to show me how ridiculous the\n whole idea actually is. Very well,\n you've done it. Confound it. However,\n I suppose your time, even when\n spent in this manner, has some value.\n Here is fifty dollars. And good day,\n sir!\"\n\n\n He slammed the door after him\n as he left.\n\n\n Simon winced at the noise, took\n the aspirin bottle from its drawer,\n took two, washed them down with\n water from the desk carafe.",
"\"This morning,\" I said weakly.\n\n\n While Betty stared at me as though\n it was\nme\nthat needed candling by a\n head shrinker preparatory to being\n sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished\n in my pocket for my wallet, counted\n the contents and winced at the\n pathetic remains of the thousand.\n I said pleadingly, \"Betty, listen,\n how long ago did I go out that door—on\n the way to the airport?\"\n\n\n \"You've been acting sick all morning.\n You went out that door about\n ten minutes ago, were gone about\n three minutes, and then came back.\"\n\"See here,\" Mr. Oyster said (interrupting\n Simon's story), \"did you\n say this was supposed to be amusing,\n young man? I don't find it so. In\n fact, I believe I am being ridiculed.\"",
"\"Hm-m-m. But before providing\n vacations it'd be nice if Providence\n turned up a missing jewel deal, say.\n Something where you could deduce\n that actually the ruby ring had gone\n down the drain and was caught in the\n elbow. Something that would net\n about fifty dollars.\"\n\n\n Simon said, mournful of tone,\n \"Fifty dollars? Why not make it five\n hundred?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not selfish,\" Betty said. \"All\n I want is enough to pay me this\n week's salary.\"\n\n\n \"Money,\" Simon said. \"When you\n took this job you said it was the romance\n that appealed to you.\"\n\n\n \"Hm-m-m. I didn't know most\n sleuthing amounted to snooping\n around department stores to check on\n the clerks knocking down.\"\n\n\n Simon said, enigmatically, \"Now\n it comes.\"\nThere was a knock.",
"I said to him, \"Glad you're here,\n sir. I can report. Ah, what was it\n you came for? Impatient to hear if\n I'd had any results?\" My mind was\n spinning like a whirling dervish in\n a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of\n his money and had nothing I could\n think of to show for it; nothing but\n the last stages of a grand-daddy\n hangover.\n\n\n \"Came for?\" Mr. Oyster snorted.\n \"I'm merely waiting for your girl to\n make out my receipt. I thought you\n had already left.\"\n\n\n \"You'll miss your plane,\" Betty\n said.\n\n\n There was suddenly a double dip\n of ice cream in my stomach. I walked\n over to my desk and looked down at\n the calendar.",
"\"Then you'll realize that there are\n a dozen explanations of the paradoxes\n of time travel. Every writer in\n the field worth his salt has explained\n them away. But to get on. It's my\n contention that within a century or\n so man will have solved the problems\n of immortality and eternal youth, and\n it's also my suspicion that he will\n eventually be able to travel in time.\n So convinced am I of these possibilities\n that I am willing to gamble a\n portion of my fortune to investigate\n the presence in our era of such time\n travelers.\"\n\n\n Simon seemed incapable of carrying\n the ball this morning, so Betty\n said, \"But ... Mr. Oyster, if the\n future has developed time travel why\n don't we ever meet such travelers?\"",
"\"I want to hire you to hunt me up\n some time travelers,\" the old boy\n said.\n\n\n Betty was too far in now to maintain\n her proper role of silent secretary.\n \"Time travelers,\" she said, not\n very intelligently.\n\n\n The potential client sat more erect,\n obviously with intent to hold the\n floor for a time. He removed the\n pince-nez glasses and pointed them\n at Betty. He said, \"Have you read\n much science fiction, Miss?\"\n\n\n \"Some,\" Betty admitted.",
"Betty and Simon waited.",
"Betty looked at him admiringly.\n Came to her feet, crossed over and\n took up the fifty dollars. \"Week's\n wages,\" she said. \"I suppose that's\n one way of taking care of a crackpot.\n But I'm surprised you didn't\n take his money and enjoy that vacation\n you've been yearning about.\"\n\n\n \"I did,\" Simon groaned. \"Three\n times.\"\n\n\n Betty stared at him. \"You mean—\"\n\n\n Simon nodded, miserably.\n\n\n She said, \"But\nSimon\n. Fifty thousand\n dollars bonus. If that story was\n true, you should have gone back\n again to Munich. If there was one\n time traveler, there might have\n been—\"",
"Mr. Oyster was saying something\n to the effect that if I didn't leave today,\n it would have to be tomorrow,\n that he hadn't ponied up that thousand\n dollars advance for anything\n less than immediate service. Stuffing\n his receipt in his wallet, he fussed\n his way out the door.\n\n\n I said to Betty hopefully, \"I suppose\n you haven't changed this calendar\n since I left.\"\n\n\n Betty said, \"What's the matter\n with you? You look funny. How did\n your clothes get so mussed? You tore\n the top sheet off that calendar yourself,\n not half an hour ago, just before\n this marble-missing client came\n in.\" She added, irrelevantly, \"Time\n travelers yet.\"\n\n\n I tried just once more. \"Uh, when\n did you first see this Mr. Oyster?\"\n\n\n \"Never saw him before in my\n life,\" she said. \"Not until he came\n in this morning.\"",
"\"Excellent. Do you believe in time\n travel?\"\n\n\n Simon said nothing. Across the\n room, where she had resumed her\n seat, Betty cleared her throat. When\n Simon continued to say nothing she\n ventured, \"Time travel is impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, why?\"\n\n\n Betty looked to her boss for assistance.\n None was forthcoming. There\n ought to be some very quick, positive,\n definite answer. She said, \"Well,\n for one thing, paradox. Suppose you\n had a time machine and traveled back\n a hundred years or so and killed your\n own great-grandfather. Then how\n could you ever be born?\"\n\n\n \"Confound it if I know,\" the little\n fellow growled. \"How?\"\n\n\n Simon said, \"Let's get to the point,\n what you wanted to see me about.\"",
"The trip back was as uninteresting\n as the one over. As the hangover began\n to wear off—a little—I was almost\n sorry I hadn't been able to stay.\n If I'd only been able to get a room I\nwould\nhave stayed, I told myself.\n\n\n From Idlewild, I came directly to\n the office rather than going to my\n apartment. I figured I might as well\n check in with Betty.\n\n\n I opened the door and there I\n found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair\n he had been occupying four—or was\n it five—days before when I'd left.\n I'd lost track of the time.",
"\"All right,\" Simon said. \"We'll accept\n it. The\nOktoberfest\nis one whale\n of a wingding.\"\n\"Well,\" the old boy pursued, into\n his subject now, \"that's where they'd\n be, places like the\nOktoberfest\n. For\n one thing, a time traveler wouldn't\n be conspicuous. At a festival like this\n somebody with a strange accent, or\n who didn't know exactly how to wear\n his clothes correctly, or was off the\n ordinary in any of a dozen other\n ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could\n be a four-armed space traveler from\n Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous\n at the\nOktoberfest\n. People\n would figure they had D.T.'s.\"\n\n\n \"But why would a time traveler\n want to go to a—\" Betty began.",
"\"I keep telling you,\" Simon said\n bitterly, \"I went back there three\n times. There were hundreds of them.\n Probably thousands.\" He took a deep\n breath. \"Listen, we're just going to\n have to forget about it. They're not\n going to stand for the space-time\n continuum track being altered. If\n something comes up that looks like\n it might result in the track being\n changed, they set you right back at\n the beginning and let things start—for\n you—all over again. They just\n can't allow anything to come back\n from the future and change the\n past.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" Betty was suddenly\n furious at him, \"you've given up!\n Why this is the biggest thing— Why\n the fifty thousand dollars is nothing.\n The future! Just think!\"",
"\"Why not! What better opportunity\n to study a people than when they\n are in their cups? If\nyou\ncould go\n back a few thousand years, the things\n you would wish to see would be a\n Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites\n of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's\n orgies. You wouldn't want to wander\n up and down the streets of, say,\n Athens while nothing was going on,\n particularly when you might be revealed\n as a suspicious character not\n being able to speak the language, not\n knowing how to wear the clothes and\n not familiar with the city's layout.\"\n He took a deep breath. \"No ma'am,\n you'd have to stick to some great\n event, both for the sake of actual\n interest and for protection against being\n unmasked.\"\n\n\n The old boy wound it up. \"Well,\n that's the story. What are your rates?\n The\nOktoberfest\nstarts on Friday and\n continues for sixteen days. You can\n take the plane to Munich, spend a\n week there and—\"",
"UNBORN\n\n TOMORROW\nBY MACK REYNOLDS\nUnfortunately\n, there was only\n one thing he could bring back\n from the wonderful future ...\n and though he didn't want to\n ... nevertheless he did....\nIllustrated by Freas\n\n\n Betty\n looked up from\n her magazine. She said\n mildly, \"You're late.\"\n\n\n \"Don't yell at me, I\n feel awful,\" Simon told\n her. He sat down at his desk, passed\n his tongue over his teeth in distaste,\n groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the\n aspirin bottle.\n\n\n He looked over at Betty and said,\n almost as though reciting, \"What I\n need is a vacation.\"\n\n\n \"What,\" Betty said, \"are you going\n to use for money?\"\n\n\n \"Providence,\" Simon told her\n whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle,\n \"will provide.\""
],
[
"Betty bounced up with Olympic\n agility and had the door swinging\n wide before the knocking was quite\n completed.\n\n\n He was old, little and had bug\n eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His\n suit was cut in the style of yesteryear\n but when a suit costs two or\n three hundred dollars you still retain\n caste whatever the styling.\n\n\n Simon said unenthusiastically,\n \"Good morning, Mr. Oyster.\" He indicated\n the client's chair. \"Sit down,\n sir.\"\n\n\n The client fussed himself with\n Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed\n Simon, said finally, \"You know\n my name, that's pretty good. Never\n saw you before in my life. Stop fussing\n with me, young lady. Your ad\n in the phone book says you'll investigate\n anything.\"\n\n\n \"Anything,\" Simon said. \"Only\n one exception.\"",
"Simon shrugged, put one hand to\n his forehead and said, \"That's only\n the first chapter. There are two\n more.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not interested in more,\" Mr.\n Oyster said. \"I suppose your point\n was to show me how ridiculous the\n whole idea actually is. Very well,\n you've done it. Confound it. However,\n I suppose your time, even when\n spent in this manner, has some value.\n Here is fifty dollars. And good day,\n sir!\"\n\n\n He slammed the door after him\n as he left.\n\n\n Simon winced at the noise, took\n the aspirin bottle from its drawer,\n took two, washed them down with\n water from the desk carafe.",
"\"Out of the question,\" Simon\n said.\n\n\n \"But\nwhy\n?\" Betty wailed.\n\n\n \"Just for laughs,\" Simon told the\n two of them sourly, \"suppose I tell\n you a funny story. It goes like\n this:\"\nI got a thousand dollars from Mr.\n Oyster (Simon began) in the way\n of an advance, and leaving him with\n Betty who was making out a receipt,\n I hustled back to the apartment and\n packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation\n anyway, this was a natural. On\n the way to Idlewild I stopped off at\n the Germany Information Offices for\n some tourist literature.\n\n\n It takes roughly three and a half\n hours to get to Gander from Idlewild.\n I spent the time planning the\n fun I was going to have.",
"\"Hm-m-m. But before providing\n vacations it'd be nice if Providence\n turned up a missing jewel deal, say.\n Something where you could deduce\n that actually the ruby ring had gone\n down the drain and was caught in the\n elbow. Something that would net\n about fifty dollars.\"\n\n\n Simon said, mournful of tone,\n \"Fifty dollars? Why not make it five\n hundred?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not selfish,\" Betty said. \"All\n I want is enough to pay me this\n week's salary.\"\n\n\n \"Money,\" Simon said. \"When you\n took this job you said it was the romance\n that appealed to you.\"\n\n\n \"Hm-m-m. I didn't know most\n sleuthing amounted to snooping\n around department stores to check on\n the clerks knocking down.\"\n\n\n Simon said, enigmatically, \"Now\n it comes.\"\nThere was a knock.",
"Simon was shaking his head. \"Not\n interested.\"\n\n\n As soon as Betty had got her jaw\n back into place, she glared unbelievingly\n at him.\n\n\n Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself.\n \"See here, young man, I realize\n this isn't an ordinary assignment,\n however, as I said, I am willing to\n risk a considerable portion of my\n fortune—\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Simon said. \"Can't be\n done.\"\n\n\n \"A hundred dollars a day plus expenses,\"\n Mr. Oyster said quietly. \"I\n like the fact that you already seem\n to have some interest and knowledge\n of the matter. I liked the way you\n knew my name when I walked in the\n door; my picture doesn't appear often\n in the papers.\"\n\n\n \"No go,\" Simon said, a sad quality\n in his voice.\n\n\n \"A fifty thousand dollar bonus if\n you bring me a time traveler.\"",
"\"This morning,\" I said weakly.\n\n\n While Betty stared at me as though\n it was\nme\nthat needed candling by a\n head shrinker preparatory to being\n sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished\n in my pocket for my wallet, counted\n the contents and winced at the\n pathetic remains of the thousand.\n I said pleadingly, \"Betty, listen,\n how long ago did I go out that door—on\n the way to the airport?\"\n\n\n \"You've been acting sick all morning.\n You went out that door about\n ten minutes ago, were gone about\n three minutes, and then came back.\"\n\"See here,\" Mr. Oyster said (interrupting\n Simon's story), \"did you\n say this was supposed to be amusing,\n young man? I don't find it so. In\n fact, I believe I am being ridiculed.\"",
"I said to him, \"Glad you're here,\n sir. I can report. Ah, what was it\n you came for? Impatient to hear if\n I'd had any results?\" My mind was\n spinning like a whirling dervish in\n a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of\n his money and had nothing I could\n think of to show for it; nothing but\n the last stages of a grand-daddy\n hangover.\n\n\n \"Came for?\" Mr. Oyster snorted.\n \"I'm merely waiting for your girl to\n make out my receipt. I thought you\n had already left.\"\n\n\n \"You'll miss your plane,\" Betty\n said.\n\n\n There was suddenly a double dip\n of ice cream in my stomach. I walked\n over to my desk and looked down at\n the calendar.",
"\"Excellent. Do you believe in time\n travel?\"\n\n\n Simon said nothing. Across the\n room, where she had resumed her\n seat, Betty cleared her throat. When\n Simon continued to say nothing she\n ventured, \"Time travel is impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, why?\"\n\n\n Betty looked to her boss for assistance.\n None was forthcoming. There\n ought to be some very quick, positive,\n definite answer. She said, \"Well,\n for one thing, paradox. Suppose you\n had a time machine and traveled back\n a hundred years or so and killed your\n own great-grandfather. Then how\n could you ever be born?\"\n\n\n \"Confound it if I know,\" the little\n fellow growled. \"How?\"\n\n\n Simon said, \"Let's get to the point,\n what you wanted to see me about.\"",
"Simon put in a word. \"The usual\n explanation, Betty, is that they can't\n afford to allow the space-time continuum\n track to be altered. If, say, a\n time traveler returned to a period of\n twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler,\n then all subsequent history would be\n changed. In that case, the time traveler\n himself might never be born. They\n have to tread mighty carefully.\"\n\n\n Mr. Oyster was pleased. \"I didn't\n expect you to be so well informed\n on the subject, young man.\"\n\n\n Simon shrugged and fumbled\n again with the aspirin bottle.\nMr. Oyster went on. \"I've been\n considering the matter for some time\n and—\"\n\n\n Simon held up a hand. \"There's\n no use prolonging this. As I understand\n it, you're an elderly gentleman\n with a considerable fortune and you\n realize that thus far nobody has succeeded\n in taking it with him.\"",
"The trip back was as uninteresting\n as the one over. As the hangover began\n to wear off—a little—I was almost\n sorry I hadn't been able to stay.\n If I'd only been able to get a room I\nwould\nhave stayed, I told myself.\n\n\n From Idlewild, I came directly to\n the office rather than going to my\n apartment. I figured I might as well\n check in with Betty.\n\n\n I opened the door and there I\n found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair\n he had been occupying four—or was\n it five—days before when I'd left.\n I'd lost track of the time.",
"\"That's quite a gadget,\" I groaned.\n \"If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd\n appreciate it.\"\n\n\n Arth was sitting on the edge of\n the bed holding his bald head in his\n hands. \"I remember now,\" he sorrowed.\n \"You didn't have a hotel.\n What a stupidity. I'll be phased.\n Phased all the way down.\"\n\n\n \"You haven't got a handful of\n aspirin, have you?\" I asked him.\n\n\n \"Just a minute,\" Arth said, staggering\n erect and heading for what\n undoubtedly was a bathroom. \"Stay\n where you are. Don't move. Don't\n touch anything.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" I told him plaintively.\n \"I'm clean. I won't mess up the\n place. All I've got is a hangover, not\n lice.\"",
"Betty looked at him admiringly.\n Came to her feet, crossed over and\n took up the fifty dollars. \"Week's\n wages,\" she said. \"I suppose that's\n one way of taking care of a crackpot.\n But I'm surprised you didn't\n take his money and enjoy that vacation\n you've been yearning about.\"\n\n\n \"I did,\" Simon groaned. \"Three\n times.\"\n\n\n Betty stared at him. \"You mean—\"\n\n\n Simon nodded, miserably.\n\n\n She said, \"But\nSimon\n. Fifty thousand\n dollars bonus. If that story was\n true, you should have gone back\n again to Munich. If there was one\n time traveler, there might have\n been—\"",
"\"I want to hire you to hunt me up\n some time travelers,\" the old boy\n said.\n\n\n Betty was too far in now to maintain\n her proper role of silent secretary.\n \"Time travelers,\" she said, not\n very intelligently.\n\n\n The potential client sat more erect,\n obviously with intent to hold the\n floor for a time. He removed the\n pince-nez glasses and pointed them\n at Betty. He said, \"Have you read\n much science fiction, Miss?\"\n\n\n \"Some,\" Betty admitted.",
"Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to\n their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then\n nodded.\n\n\n Simon said, \"You want to hire me\n to find a time traveler and in some\n manner or other—any manner will\n do—exhort from him the secret of\n eternal life and youth, which you figure\n the future will have discovered.\n You're willing to pony up a part of\n this fortune of yours, if I can deliver\n a bona fide time traveler.\"\n\n\n \"Right!\"\n\n\n Betty had been looking from one\n to the other. Now she said, plaintively,\n \"But where are you going to find\n one of these characters—especially if\n they're interested in keeping hid?\"\n\n\n The old boy was the center again.\n \"I told you I'd been considering it\n for some time. The\nOktoberfest\n,\n that's where they'd be!\" He seemed\n elated.",
"\"Then you'll realize that there are\n a dozen explanations of the paradoxes\n of time travel. Every writer in\n the field worth his salt has explained\n them away. But to get on. It's my\n contention that within a century or\n so man will have solved the problems\n of immortality and eternal youth, and\n it's also my suspicion that he will\n eventually be able to travel in time.\n So convinced am I of these possibilities\n that I am willing to gamble a\n portion of my fortune to investigate\n the presence in our era of such time\n travelers.\"\n\n\n Simon seemed incapable of carrying\n the ball this morning, so Betty\n said, \"But ... Mr. Oyster, if the\n future has developed time travel why\n don't we ever meet such travelers?\"",
"UNBORN\n\n TOMORROW\nBY MACK REYNOLDS\nUnfortunately\n, there was only\n one thing he could bring back\n from the wonderful future ...\n and though he didn't want to\n ... nevertheless he did....\nIllustrated by Freas\n\n\n Betty\n looked up from\n her magazine. She said\n mildly, \"You're late.\"\n\n\n \"Don't yell at me, I\n feel awful,\" Simon told\n her. He sat down at his desk, passed\n his tongue over his teeth in distaste,\n groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the\n aspirin bottle.\n\n\n He looked over at Betty and said,\n almost as though reciting, \"What I\n need is a vacation.\"\n\n\n \"What,\" Betty said, \"are you going\n to use for money?\"\n\n\n \"Providence,\" Simon told her\n whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle,\n \"will provide.\"",
"Mr. Oyster was saying something\n to the effect that if I didn't leave today,\n it would have to be tomorrow,\n that he hadn't ponied up that thousand\n dollars advance for anything\n less than immediate service. Stuffing\n his receipt in his wallet, he fussed\n his way out the door.\n\n\n I said to Betty hopefully, \"I suppose\n you haven't changed this calendar\n since I left.\"\n\n\n Betty said, \"What's the matter\n with you? You look funny. How did\n your clothes get so mussed? You tore\n the top sheet off that calendar yourself,\n not half an hour ago, just before\n this marble-missing client came\n in.\" She added, irrelevantly, \"Time\n travelers yet.\"\n\n\n I tried just once more. \"Uh, when\n did you first see this Mr. Oyster?\"\n\n\n \"Never saw him before in my\n life,\" she said. \"Not until he came\n in this morning.\"",
"Betty and Simon waited.",
"\"Why not! What better opportunity\n to study a people than when they\n are in their cups? If\nyou\ncould go\n back a few thousand years, the things\n you would wish to see would be a\n Roman Triumph, perhaps the Rites\n of Dionysus, or one of Alexander's\n orgies. You wouldn't want to wander\n up and down the streets of, say,\n Athens while nothing was going on,\n particularly when you might be revealed\n as a suspicious character not\n being able to speak the language, not\n knowing how to wear the clothes and\n not familiar with the city's layout.\"\n He took a deep breath. \"No ma'am,\n you'd have to stick to some great\n event, both for the sake of actual\n interest and for protection against being\n unmasked.\"\n\n\n The old boy wound it up. \"Well,\n that's the story. What are your rates?\n The\nOktoberfest\nstarts on Friday and\n continues for sixteen days. You can\n take the plane to Munich, spend a\n week there and—\"",
"\"I keep telling you,\" Simon said\n bitterly, \"I went back there three\n times. There were hundreds of them.\n Probably thousands.\" He took a deep\n breath. \"Listen, we're just going to\n have to forget about it. They're not\n going to stand for the space-time\n continuum track being altered. If\n something comes up that looks like\n it might result in the track being\n changed, they set you right back at\n the beginning and let things start—for\n you—all over again. They just\n can't allow anything to come back\n from the future and change the\n past.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" Betty was suddenly\n furious at him, \"you've given up!\n Why this is the biggest thing— Why\n the fifty thousand dollars is nothing.\n The future! Just think!\""
],
[
"\"Out of the question,\" Simon\n said.\n\n\n \"But\nwhy\n?\" Betty wailed.\n\n\n \"Just for laughs,\" Simon told the\n two of them sourly, \"suppose I tell\n you a funny story. It goes like\n this:\"\nI got a thousand dollars from Mr.\n Oyster (Simon began) in the way\n of an advance, and leaving him with\n Betty who was making out a receipt,\n I hustled back to the apartment and\n packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation\n anyway, this was a natural. On\n the way to Idlewild I stopped off at\n the Germany Information Offices for\n some tourist literature.\n\n\n It takes roughly three and a half\n hours to get to Gander from Idlewild.\n I spent the time planning the\n fun I was going to have.",
"\"This morning,\" I said weakly.\n\n\n While Betty stared at me as though\n it was\nme\nthat needed candling by a\n head shrinker preparatory to being\n sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished\n in my pocket for my wallet, counted\n the contents and winced at the\n pathetic remains of the thousand.\n I said pleadingly, \"Betty, listen,\n how long ago did I go out that door—on\n the way to the airport?\"\n\n\n \"You've been acting sick all morning.\n You went out that door about\n ten minutes ago, were gone about\n three minutes, and then came back.\"\n\"See here,\" Mr. Oyster said (interrupting\n Simon's story), \"did you\n say this was supposed to be amusing,\n young man? I don't find it so. In\n fact, I believe I am being ridiculed.\"",
"\"Hm-m-m. But before providing\n vacations it'd be nice if Providence\n turned up a missing jewel deal, say.\n Something where you could deduce\n that actually the ruby ring had gone\n down the drain and was caught in the\n elbow. Something that would net\n about fifty dollars.\"\n\n\n Simon said, mournful of tone,\n \"Fifty dollars? Why not make it five\n hundred?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not selfish,\" Betty said. \"All\n I want is enough to pay me this\n week's salary.\"\n\n\n \"Money,\" Simon said. \"When you\n took this job you said it was the romance\n that appealed to you.\"\n\n\n \"Hm-m-m. I didn't know most\n sleuthing amounted to snooping\n around department stores to check on\n the clerks knocking down.\"\n\n\n Simon said, enigmatically, \"Now\n it comes.\"\nThere was a knock.",
"\"Excellent. Do you believe in time\n travel?\"\n\n\n Simon said nothing. Across the\n room, where she had resumed her\n seat, Betty cleared her throat. When\n Simon continued to say nothing she\n ventured, \"Time travel is impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, why?\"\n\n\n Betty looked to her boss for assistance.\n None was forthcoming. There\n ought to be some very quick, positive,\n definite answer. She said, \"Well,\n for one thing, paradox. Suppose you\n had a time machine and traveled back\n a hundred years or so and killed your\n own great-grandfather. Then how\n could you ever be born?\"\n\n\n \"Confound it if I know,\" the little\n fellow growled. \"How?\"\n\n\n Simon said, \"Let's get to the point,\n what you wanted to see me about.\"",
"Betty bounced up with Olympic\n agility and had the door swinging\n wide before the knocking was quite\n completed.\n\n\n He was old, little and had bug\n eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His\n suit was cut in the style of yesteryear\n but when a suit costs two or\n three hundred dollars you still retain\n caste whatever the styling.\n\n\n Simon said unenthusiastically,\n \"Good morning, Mr. Oyster.\" He indicated\n the client's chair. \"Sit down,\n sir.\"\n\n\n The client fussed himself with\n Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed\n Simon, said finally, \"You know\n my name, that's pretty good. Never\n saw you before in my life. Stop fussing\n with me, young lady. Your ad\n in the phone book says you'll investigate\n anything.\"\n\n\n \"Anything,\" Simon said. \"Only\n one exception.\"",
"Betty looked at him admiringly.\n Came to her feet, crossed over and\n took up the fifty dollars. \"Week's\n wages,\" she said. \"I suppose that's\n one way of taking care of a crackpot.\n But I'm surprised you didn't\n take his money and enjoy that vacation\n you've been yearning about.\"\n\n\n \"I did,\" Simon groaned. \"Three\n times.\"\n\n\n Betty stared at him. \"You mean—\"\n\n\n Simon nodded, miserably.\n\n\n She said, \"But\nSimon\n. Fifty thousand\n dollars bonus. If that story was\n true, you should have gone back\n again to Munich. If there was one\n time traveler, there might have\n been—\"",
"Simon put in a word. \"The usual\n explanation, Betty, is that they can't\n afford to allow the space-time continuum\n track to be altered. If, say, a\n time traveler returned to a period of\n twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler,\n then all subsequent history would be\n changed. In that case, the time traveler\n himself might never be born. They\n have to tread mighty carefully.\"\n\n\n Mr. Oyster was pleased. \"I didn't\n expect you to be so well informed\n on the subject, young man.\"\n\n\n Simon shrugged and fumbled\n again with the aspirin bottle.\nMr. Oyster went on. \"I've been\n considering the matter for some time\n and—\"\n\n\n Simon held up a hand. \"There's\n no use prolonging this. As I understand\n it, you're an elderly gentleman\n with a considerable fortune and you\n realize that thus far nobody has succeeded\n in taking it with him.\"",
"\"I keep telling you,\" Simon said\n bitterly, \"I went back there three\n times. There were hundreds of them.\n Probably thousands.\" He took a deep\n breath. \"Listen, we're just going to\n have to forget about it. They're not\n going to stand for the space-time\n continuum track being altered. If\n something comes up that looks like\n it might result in the track being\n changed, they set you right back at\n the beginning and let things start—for\n you—all over again. They just\n can't allow anything to come back\n from the future and change the\n past.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" Betty was suddenly\n furious at him, \"you've given up!\n Why this is the biggest thing— Why\n the fifty thousand dollars is nothing.\n The future! Just think!\"",
"\"Then you'll realize that there are\n a dozen explanations of the paradoxes\n of time travel. Every writer in\n the field worth his salt has explained\n them away. But to get on. It's my\n contention that within a century or\n so man will have solved the problems\n of immortality and eternal youth, and\n it's also my suspicion that he will\n eventually be able to travel in time.\n So convinced am I of these possibilities\n that I am willing to gamble a\n portion of my fortune to investigate\n the presence in our era of such time\n travelers.\"\n\n\n Simon seemed incapable of carrying\n the ball this morning, so Betty\n said, \"But ... Mr. Oyster, if the\n future has developed time travel why\n don't we ever meet such travelers?\"",
"I said to him, \"Glad you're here,\n sir. I can report. Ah, what was it\n you came for? Impatient to hear if\n I'd had any results?\" My mind was\n spinning like a whirling dervish in\n a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of\n his money and had nothing I could\n think of to show for it; nothing but\n the last stages of a grand-daddy\n hangover.\n\n\n \"Came for?\" Mr. Oyster snorted.\n \"I'm merely waiting for your girl to\n make out my receipt. I thought you\n had already left.\"\n\n\n \"You'll miss your plane,\" Betty\n said.\n\n\n There was suddenly a double dip\n of ice cream in my stomach. I walked\n over to my desk and looked down at\n the calendar.",
"Betty and Simon waited.",
"Simon was shaking his head. \"Not\n interested.\"\n\n\n As soon as Betty had got her jaw\n back into place, she glared unbelievingly\n at him.\n\n\n Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself.\n \"See here, young man, I realize\n this isn't an ordinary assignment,\n however, as I said, I am willing to\n risk a considerable portion of my\n fortune—\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Simon said. \"Can't be\n done.\"\n\n\n \"A hundred dollars a day plus expenses,\"\n Mr. Oyster said quietly. \"I\n like the fact that you already seem\n to have some interest and knowledge\n of the matter. I liked the way you\n knew my name when I walked in the\n door; my picture doesn't appear often\n in the papers.\"\n\n\n \"No go,\" Simon said, a sad quality\n in his voice.\n\n\n \"A fifty thousand dollar bonus if\n you bring me a time traveler.\"",
"Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to\n their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then\n nodded.\n\n\n Simon said, \"You want to hire me\n to find a time traveler and in some\n manner or other—any manner will\n do—exhort from him the secret of\n eternal life and youth, which you figure\n the future will have discovered.\n You're willing to pony up a part of\n this fortune of yours, if I can deliver\n a bona fide time traveler.\"\n\n\n \"Right!\"\n\n\n Betty had been looking from one\n to the other. Now she said, plaintively,\n \"But where are you going to find\n one of these characters—especially if\n they're interested in keeping hid?\"\n\n\n The old boy was the center again.\n \"I told you I'd been considering it\n for some time. The\nOktoberfest\n,\n that's where they'd be!\" He seemed\n elated.",
"Simon shrugged, put one hand to\n his forehead and said, \"That's only\n the first chapter. There are two\n more.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not interested in more,\" Mr.\n Oyster said. \"I suppose your point\n was to show me how ridiculous the\n whole idea actually is. Very well,\n you've done it. Confound it. However,\n I suppose your time, even when\n spent in this manner, has some value.\n Here is fifty dollars. And good day,\n sir!\"\n\n\n He slammed the door after him\n as he left.\n\n\n Simon winced at the noise, took\n the aspirin bottle from its drawer,\n took two, washed them down with\n water from the desk carafe.",
"\"I want to hire you to hunt me up\n some time travelers,\" the old boy\n said.\n\n\n Betty was too far in now to maintain\n her proper role of silent secretary.\n \"Time travelers,\" she said, not\n very intelligently.\n\n\n The potential client sat more erect,\n obviously with intent to hold the\n floor for a time. He removed the\n pince-nez glasses and pointed them\n at Betty. He said, \"Have you read\n much science fiction, Miss?\"\n\n\n \"Some,\" Betty admitted.",
"\"All right,\" Simon said. \"We'll accept\n it. The\nOktoberfest\nis one whale\n of a wingding.\"\n\"Well,\" the old boy pursued, into\n his subject now, \"that's where they'd\n be, places like the\nOktoberfest\n. For\n one thing, a time traveler wouldn't\n be conspicuous. At a festival like this\n somebody with a strange accent, or\n who didn't know exactly how to wear\n his clothes correctly, or was off the\n ordinary in any of a dozen other\n ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could\n be a four-armed space traveler from\n Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous\n at the\nOktoberfest\n. People\n would figure they had D.T.'s.\"\n\n\n \"But why would a time traveler\n want to go to a—\" Betty began.",
"The trip back was as uninteresting\n as the one over. As the hangover began\n to wear off—a little—I was almost\n sorry I hadn't been able to stay.\n If I'd only been able to get a room I\nwould\nhave stayed, I told myself.\n\n\n From Idlewild, I came directly to\n the office rather than going to my\n apartment. I figured I might as well\n check in with Betty.\n\n\n I opened the door and there I\n found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair\n he had been occupying four—or was\n it five—days before when I'd left.\n I'd lost track of the time.",
"UNBORN\n\n TOMORROW\nBY MACK REYNOLDS\nUnfortunately\n, there was only\n one thing he could bring back\n from the wonderful future ...\n and though he didn't want to\n ... nevertheless he did....\nIllustrated by Freas\n\n\n Betty\n looked up from\n her magazine. She said\n mildly, \"You're late.\"\n\n\n \"Don't yell at me, I\n feel awful,\" Simon told\n her. He sat down at his desk, passed\n his tongue over his teeth in distaste,\n groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the\n aspirin bottle.\n\n\n He looked over at Betty and said,\n almost as though reciting, \"What I\n need is a vacation.\"\n\n\n \"What,\" Betty said, \"are you going\n to use for money?\"\n\n\n \"Providence,\" Simon told her\n whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle,\n \"will provide.\"",
"Mr. Oyster was saying something\n to the effect that if I didn't leave today,\n it would have to be tomorrow,\n that he hadn't ponied up that thousand\n dollars advance for anything\n less than immediate service. Stuffing\n his receipt in his wallet, he fussed\n his way out the door.\n\n\n I said to Betty hopefully, \"I suppose\n you haven't changed this calendar\n since I left.\"\n\n\n Betty said, \"What's the matter\n with you? You look funny. How did\n your clothes get so mussed? You tore\n the top sheet off that calendar yourself,\n not half an hour ago, just before\n this marble-missing client came\n in.\" She added, irrelevantly, \"Time\n travelers yet.\"\n\n\n I tried just once more. \"Uh, when\n did you first see this Mr. Oyster?\"\n\n\n \"Never saw him before in my\n life,\" she said. \"Not until he came\n in this morning.\"",
"\"That's quite a gadget,\" I groaned.\n \"If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd\n appreciate it.\"\n\n\n Arth was sitting on the edge of\n the bed holding his bald head in his\n hands. \"I remember now,\" he sorrowed.\n \"You didn't have a hotel.\n What a stupidity. I'll be phased.\n Phased all the way down.\"\n\n\n \"You haven't got a handful of\n aspirin, have you?\" I asked him.\n\n\n \"Just a minute,\" Arth said, staggering\n erect and heading for what\n undoubtedly was a bathroom. \"Stay\n where you are. Don't move. Don't\n touch anything.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" I told him plaintively.\n \"I'm clean. I won't mess up the\n place. All I've got is a hangover, not\n lice.\""
],
[
"Simon shrugged, put one hand to\n his forehead and said, \"That's only\n the first chapter. There are two\n more.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not interested in more,\" Mr.\n Oyster said. \"I suppose your point\n was to show me how ridiculous the\n whole idea actually is. Very well,\n you've done it. Confound it. However,\n I suppose your time, even when\n spent in this manner, has some value.\n Here is fifty dollars. And good day,\n sir!\"\n\n\n He slammed the door after him\n as he left.\n\n\n Simon winced at the noise, took\n the aspirin bottle from its drawer,\n took two, washed them down with\n water from the desk carafe.",
"\"That's quite a gadget,\" I groaned.\n \"If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd\n appreciate it.\"\n\n\n Arth was sitting on the edge of\n the bed holding his bald head in his\n hands. \"I remember now,\" he sorrowed.\n \"You didn't have a hotel.\n What a stupidity. I'll be phased.\n Phased all the way down.\"\n\n\n \"You haven't got a handful of\n aspirin, have you?\" I asked him.\n\n\n \"Just a minute,\" Arth said, staggering\n erect and heading for what\n undoubtedly was a bathroom. \"Stay\n where you are. Don't move. Don't\n touch anything.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" I told him plaintively.\n \"I'm clean. I won't mess up the\n place. All I've got is a hangover, not\n lice.\"",
"Simon put in a word. \"The usual\n explanation, Betty, is that they can't\n afford to allow the space-time continuum\n track to be altered. If, say, a\n time traveler returned to a period of\n twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler,\n then all subsequent history would be\n changed. In that case, the time traveler\n himself might never be born. They\n have to tread mighty carefully.\"\n\n\n Mr. Oyster was pleased. \"I didn't\n expect you to be so well informed\n on the subject, young man.\"\n\n\n Simon shrugged and fumbled\n again with the aspirin bottle.\nMr. Oyster went on. \"I've been\n considering the matter for some time\n and—\"\n\n\n Simon held up a hand. \"There's\n no use prolonging this. As I understand\n it, you're an elderly gentleman\n with a considerable fortune and you\n realize that thus far nobody has succeeded\n in taking it with him.\"",
"\"This morning,\" I said weakly.\n\n\n While Betty stared at me as though\n it was\nme\nthat needed candling by a\n head shrinker preparatory to being\n sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished\n in my pocket for my wallet, counted\n the contents and winced at the\n pathetic remains of the thousand.\n I said pleadingly, \"Betty, listen,\n how long ago did I go out that door—on\n the way to the airport?\"\n\n\n \"You've been acting sick all morning.\n You went out that door about\n ten minutes ago, were gone about\n three minutes, and then came back.\"\n\"See here,\" Mr. Oyster said (interrupting\n Simon's story), \"did you\n say this was supposed to be amusing,\n young man? I don't find it so. In\n fact, I believe I am being ridiculed.\"",
"\"Out of the question,\" Simon\n said.\n\n\n \"But\nwhy\n?\" Betty wailed.\n\n\n \"Just for laughs,\" Simon told the\n two of them sourly, \"suppose I tell\n you a funny story. It goes like\n this:\"\nI got a thousand dollars from Mr.\n Oyster (Simon began) in the way\n of an advance, and leaving him with\n Betty who was making out a receipt,\n I hustled back to the apartment and\n packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation\n anyway, this was a natural. On\n the way to Idlewild I stopped off at\n the Germany Information Offices for\n some tourist literature.\n\n\n It takes roughly three and a half\n hours to get to Gander from Idlewild.\n I spent the time planning the\n fun I was going to have.",
"I said to him, \"Glad you're here,\n sir. I can report. Ah, what was it\n you came for? Impatient to hear if\n I'd had any results?\" My mind was\n spinning like a whirling dervish in\n a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of\n his money and had nothing I could\n think of to show for it; nothing but\n the last stages of a grand-daddy\n hangover.\n\n\n \"Came for?\" Mr. Oyster snorted.\n \"I'm merely waiting for your girl to\n make out my receipt. I thought you\n had already left.\"\n\n\n \"You'll miss your plane,\" Betty\n said.\n\n\n There was suddenly a double dip\n of ice cream in my stomach. I walked\n over to my desk and looked down at\n the calendar.",
"Arth was gone. He came back in\n two or three minutes, box of pills in\n hand. \"Here, take one of these.\"\n\n\n I took the pill, followed it with a\n glass of water.\nAnd went out like a light.\n\n\n Arth was shaking my arm. \"Want\n another\nmass\n?\"\n\n\n The band was blaring, and five\n thousand half-swacked voices were\n roaring accompaniment.\nIn Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!\nEins, Zwei, G'sufa!\nAt the\nG'sufa\neverybody upped\n with their king-size mugs and drank\n each other's health.\n\n\n My head was killing me. \"This is\n where I came in, or something,\" I\n groaned.\n\n\n Arth said, \"That was last night.\"\n He looked at me over the rim of his\n beer mug.",
"The trip back was as uninteresting\n as the one over. As the hangover began\n to wear off—a little—I was almost\n sorry I hadn't been able to stay.\n If I'd only been able to get a room I\nwould\nhave stayed, I told myself.\n\n\n From Idlewild, I came directly to\n the office rather than going to my\n apartment. I figured I might as well\n check in with Betty.\n\n\n I opened the door and there I\n found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair\n he had been occupying four—or was\n it five—days before when I'd left.\n I'd lost track of the time.",
"Betty bounced up with Olympic\n agility and had the door swinging\n wide before the knocking was quite\n completed.\n\n\n He was old, little and had bug\n eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His\n suit was cut in the style of yesteryear\n but when a suit costs two or\n three hundred dollars you still retain\n caste whatever the styling.\n\n\n Simon said unenthusiastically,\n \"Good morning, Mr. Oyster.\" He indicated\n the client's chair. \"Sit down,\n sir.\"\n\n\n The client fussed himself with\n Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed\n Simon, said finally, \"You know\n my name, that's pretty good. Never\n saw you before in my life. Stop fussing\n with me, young lady. Your ad\n in the phone book says you'll investigate\n anything.\"\n\n\n \"Anything,\" Simon said. \"Only\n one exception.\"",
"\"Hm-m-m. But before providing\n vacations it'd be nice if Providence\n turned up a missing jewel deal, say.\n Something where you could deduce\n that actually the ruby ring had gone\n down the drain and was caught in the\n elbow. Something that would net\n about fifty dollars.\"\n\n\n Simon said, mournful of tone,\n \"Fifty dollars? Why not make it five\n hundred?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not selfish,\" Betty said. \"All\n I want is enough to pay me this\n week's salary.\"\n\n\n \"Money,\" Simon said. \"When you\n took this job you said it was the romance\n that appealed to you.\"\n\n\n \"Hm-m-m. I didn't know most\n sleuthing amounted to snooping\n around department stores to check on\n the clerks knocking down.\"\n\n\n Simon said, enigmatically, \"Now\n it comes.\"\nThere was a knock.",
"Something, somewhere, was\n wrong. But I didn't care. I finished\n my\nmass\nand then remembered. \"I've\n got to get my bag. Oh, my head.\n Where did we spend last night?\"\n\n\n Arth said, and his voice sounded\n cautious, \"At my hotel, don't you remember?\"\n\n\n \"Not very well,\" I admitted. \"I\n feel lousy. I must have dimmed out.\n I've got to go to the Bahnhof and\n get my luggage.\"\n\n\n Arth didn't put up an argument\n on that. We said good-by and I could\n feel him watching after me as I pushed\n through the tables on the way\n out.",
"\"Excellent. Do you believe in time\n travel?\"\n\n\n Simon said nothing. Across the\n room, where she had resumed her\n seat, Betty cleared her throat. When\n Simon continued to say nothing she\n ventured, \"Time travel is impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, why?\"\n\n\n Betty looked to her boss for assistance.\n None was forthcoming. There\n ought to be some very quick, positive,\n definite answer. She said, \"Well,\n for one thing, paradox. Suppose you\n had a time machine and traveled back\n a hundred years or so and killed your\n own great-grandfather. Then how\n could you ever be born?\"\n\n\n \"Confound it if I know,\" the little\n fellow growled. \"How?\"\n\n\n Simon said, \"Let's get to the point,\n what you wanted to see me about.\"",
"UNBORN\n\n TOMORROW\nBY MACK REYNOLDS\nUnfortunately\n, there was only\n one thing he could bring back\n from the wonderful future ...\n and though he didn't want to\n ... nevertheless he did....\nIllustrated by Freas\n\n\n Betty\n looked up from\n her magazine. She said\n mildly, \"You're late.\"\n\n\n \"Don't yell at me, I\n feel awful,\" Simon told\n her. He sat down at his desk, passed\n his tongue over his teeth in distaste,\n groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the\n aspirin bottle.\n\n\n He looked over at Betty and said,\n almost as though reciting, \"What I\n need is a vacation.\"\n\n\n \"What,\" Betty said, \"are you going\n to use for money?\"\n\n\n \"Providence,\" Simon told her\n whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle,\n \"will provide.\"",
"He looked at me, closing one eye\n to focus better. \"Oh,\" he said. \"Well,\n 2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque.\"\n\n\n \"New Albuquerque? Where's\n that?\"\n\n\n Arth thought about it. Took another\n long pull at the beer. \"Right\n across the way from old Albuquerque,\"\n he said finally. \"Maybe we\n ought to be getting on to the\n Pschorrbräu tent.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe we ought to eat something\n first,\" I said. \"I'm beginning to feel\n this. We could get some of that barbecued\n ox.\"\n\n\n Arth closed his eyes in pain.\n \"Vegetarian,\" he said. \"Couldn't possibly\n eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh.\"\n\n\n \"Well, we need some nourishment,\"\n I said.",
"Betty looked at him admiringly.\n Came to her feet, crossed over and\n took up the fifty dollars. \"Week's\n wages,\" she said. \"I suppose that's\n one way of taking care of a crackpot.\n But I'm surprised you didn't\n take his money and enjoy that vacation\n you've been yearning about.\"\n\n\n \"I did,\" Simon groaned. \"Three\n times.\"\n\n\n Betty stared at him. \"You mean—\"\n\n\n Simon nodded, miserably.\n\n\n She said, \"But\nSimon\n. Fifty thousand\n dollars bonus. If that story was\n true, you should have gone back\n again to Munich. If there was one\n time traveler, there might have\n been—\"",
"Simon was shaking his head. \"Not\n interested.\"\n\n\n As soon as Betty had got her jaw\n back into place, she glared unbelievingly\n at him.\n\n\n Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself.\n \"See here, young man, I realize\n this isn't an ordinary assignment,\n however, as I said, I am willing to\n risk a considerable portion of my\n fortune—\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Simon said. \"Can't be\n done.\"\n\n\n \"A hundred dollars a day plus expenses,\"\n Mr. Oyster said quietly. \"I\n like the fact that you already seem\n to have some interest and knowledge\n of the matter. I liked the way you\n knew my name when I walked in the\n door; my picture doesn't appear often\n in the papers.\"\n\n\n \"No go,\" Simon said, a sad quality\n in his voice.\n\n\n \"A fifty thousand dollar bonus if\n you bring me a time traveler.\"",
"At the Bahnhof they could do me\n no good. There were no hotel rooms\n available in Munich. The head was\n getting worse by the minute. The\n fact that they'd somehow managed\n to lose my bag didn't help. I worked\n on that project for at least a couple\n of hours. Not only wasn't the bag\n at the luggage checking station, but\n the attendant there evidently couldn't\n make heads nor tails of the check\n receipt. He didn't speak English and\n my high school German was inadequate,\n especially accompanied by a\n blockbusting hangover.\n\n\n I didn't get anywhere tearing my\n hair and complaining from one end\n of the Bahnhof to the other. I drew\n a blank on the bag.",
"Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to\n their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then\n nodded.\n\n\n Simon said, \"You want to hire me\n to find a time traveler and in some\n manner or other—any manner will\n do—exhort from him the secret of\n eternal life and youth, which you figure\n the future will have discovered.\n You're willing to pony up a part of\n this fortune of yours, if I can deliver\n a bona fide time traveler.\"\n\n\n \"Right!\"\n\n\n Betty had been looking from one\n to the other. Now she said, plaintively,\n \"But where are you going to find\n one of these characters—especially if\n they're interested in keeping hid?\"\n\n\n The old boy was the center again.\n \"I told you I'd been considering it\n for some time. The\nOktoberfest\n,\n that's where they'd be!\" He seemed\n elated.",
"Simon said wearily, \"There's just\n one thing you can bring back with\n you from the future, a hangover compounded\n of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu.\n What's more you can pile\n one on top of the other, and another\n on top of that!\"\n\n\n He shuddered. \"If you think I'm\n going to take another crack at this\n merry-go-round and pile a fourth\n hangover on the three I'm already\n nursing, all at once, you can think\n again.\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAstounding Science Fiction\nJune\n 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"\"Then you'll realize that there are\n a dozen explanations of the paradoxes\n of time travel. Every writer in\n the field worth his salt has explained\n them away. But to get on. It's my\n contention that within a century or\n so man will have solved the problems\n of immortality and eternal youth, and\n it's also my suspicion that he will\n eventually be able to travel in time.\n So convinced am I of these possibilities\n that I am willing to gamble a\n portion of my fortune to investigate\n the presence in our era of such time\n travelers.\"\n\n\n Simon seemed incapable of carrying\n the ball this morning, so Betty\n said, \"But ... Mr. Oyster, if the\n future has developed time travel why\n don't we ever meet such travelers?\""
],
[
"\"Out of the question,\" Simon\n said.\n\n\n \"But\nwhy\n?\" Betty wailed.\n\n\n \"Just for laughs,\" Simon told the\n two of them sourly, \"suppose I tell\n you a funny story. It goes like\n this:\"\nI got a thousand dollars from Mr.\n Oyster (Simon began) in the way\n of an advance, and leaving him with\n Betty who was making out a receipt,\n I hustled back to the apartment and\n packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation\n anyway, this was a natural. On\n the way to Idlewild I stopped off at\n the Germany Information Offices for\n some tourist literature.\n\n\n It takes roughly three and a half\n hours to get to Gander from Idlewild.\n I spent the time planning the\n fun I was going to have.",
"Betty looked at him admiringly.\n Came to her feet, crossed over and\n took up the fifty dollars. \"Week's\n wages,\" she said. \"I suppose that's\n one way of taking care of a crackpot.\n But I'm surprised you didn't\n take his money and enjoy that vacation\n you've been yearning about.\"\n\n\n \"I did,\" Simon groaned. \"Three\n times.\"\n\n\n Betty stared at him. \"You mean—\"\n\n\n Simon nodded, miserably.\n\n\n She said, \"But\nSimon\n. Fifty thousand\n dollars bonus. If that story was\n true, you should have gone back\n again to Munich. If there was one\n time traveler, there might have\n been—\"",
"Simon shrugged, put one hand to\n his forehead and said, \"That's only\n the first chapter. There are two\n more.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not interested in more,\" Mr.\n Oyster said. \"I suppose your point\n was to show me how ridiculous the\n whole idea actually is. Very well,\n you've done it. Confound it. However,\n I suppose your time, even when\n spent in this manner, has some value.\n Here is fifty dollars. And good day,\n sir!\"\n\n\n He slammed the door after him\n as he left.\n\n\n Simon winced at the noise, took\n the aspirin bottle from its drawer,\n took two, washed them down with\n water from the desk carafe.",
"\"Excellent. Do you believe in time\n travel?\"\n\n\n Simon said nothing. Across the\n room, where she had resumed her\n seat, Betty cleared her throat. When\n Simon continued to say nothing she\n ventured, \"Time travel is impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, why?\"\n\n\n Betty looked to her boss for assistance.\n None was forthcoming. There\n ought to be some very quick, positive,\n definite answer. She said, \"Well,\n for one thing, paradox. Suppose you\n had a time machine and traveled back\n a hundred years or so and killed your\n own great-grandfather. Then how\n could you ever be born?\"\n\n\n \"Confound it if I know,\" the little\n fellow growled. \"How?\"\n\n\n Simon said, \"Let's get to the point,\n what you wanted to see me about.\"",
"Simon was shaking his head. \"Not\n interested.\"\n\n\n As soon as Betty had got her jaw\n back into place, she glared unbelievingly\n at him.\n\n\n Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself.\n \"See here, young man, I realize\n this isn't an ordinary assignment,\n however, as I said, I am willing to\n risk a considerable portion of my\n fortune—\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Simon said. \"Can't be\n done.\"\n\n\n \"A hundred dollars a day plus expenses,\"\n Mr. Oyster said quietly. \"I\n like the fact that you already seem\n to have some interest and knowledge\n of the matter. I liked the way you\n knew my name when I walked in the\n door; my picture doesn't appear often\n in the papers.\"\n\n\n \"No go,\" Simon said, a sad quality\n in his voice.\n\n\n \"A fifty thousand dollar bonus if\n you bring me a time traveler.\"",
"Simon put in a word. \"The usual\n explanation, Betty, is that they can't\n afford to allow the space-time continuum\n track to be altered. If, say, a\n time traveler returned to a period of\n twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler,\n then all subsequent history would be\n changed. In that case, the time traveler\n himself might never be born. They\n have to tread mighty carefully.\"\n\n\n Mr. Oyster was pleased. \"I didn't\n expect you to be so well informed\n on the subject, young man.\"\n\n\n Simon shrugged and fumbled\n again with the aspirin bottle.\nMr. Oyster went on. \"I've been\n considering the matter for some time\n and—\"\n\n\n Simon held up a hand. \"There's\n no use prolonging this. As I understand\n it, you're an elderly gentleman\n with a considerable fortune and you\n realize that thus far nobody has succeeded\n in taking it with him.\"",
"\"I keep telling you,\" Simon said\n bitterly, \"I went back there three\n times. There were hundreds of them.\n Probably thousands.\" He took a deep\n breath. \"Listen, we're just going to\n have to forget about it. They're not\n going to stand for the space-time\n continuum track being altered. If\n something comes up that looks like\n it might result in the track being\n changed, they set you right back at\n the beginning and let things start—for\n you—all over again. They just\n can't allow anything to come back\n from the future and change the\n past.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" Betty was suddenly\n furious at him, \"you've given up!\n Why this is the biggest thing— Why\n the fifty thousand dollars is nothing.\n The future! Just think!\"",
"\"This morning,\" I said weakly.\n\n\n While Betty stared at me as though\n it was\nme\nthat needed candling by a\n head shrinker preparatory to being\n sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished\n in my pocket for my wallet, counted\n the contents and winced at the\n pathetic remains of the thousand.\n I said pleadingly, \"Betty, listen,\n how long ago did I go out that door—on\n the way to the airport?\"\n\n\n \"You've been acting sick all morning.\n You went out that door about\n ten minutes ago, were gone about\n three minutes, and then came back.\"\n\"See here,\" Mr. Oyster said (interrupting\n Simon's story), \"did you\n say this was supposed to be amusing,\n young man? I don't find it so. In\n fact, I believe I am being ridiculed.\"",
"\"Hm-m-m. But before providing\n vacations it'd be nice if Providence\n turned up a missing jewel deal, say.\n Something where you could deduce\n that actually the ruby ring had gone\n down the drain and was caught in the\n elbow. Something that would net\n about fifty dollars.\"\n\n\n Simon said, mournful of tone,\n \"Fifty dollars? Why not make it five\n hundred?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not selfish,\" Betty said. \"All\n I want is enough to pay me this\n week's salary.\"\n\n\n \"Money,\" Simon said. \"When you\n took this job you said it was the romance\n that appealed to you.\"\n\n\n \"Hm-m-m. I didn't know most\n sleuthing amounted to snooping\n around department stores to check on\n the clerks knocking down.\"\n\n\n Simon said, enigmatically, \"Now\n it comes.\"\nThere was a knock.",
"Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to\n their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then\n nodded.\n\n\n Simon said, \"You want to hire me\n to find a time traveler and in some\n manner or other—any manner will\n do—exhort from him the secret of\n eternal life and youth, which you figure\n the future will have discovered.\n You're willing to pony up a part of\n this fortune of yours, if I can deliver\n a bona fide time traveler.\"\n\n\n \"Right!\"\n\n\n Betty had been looking from one\n to the other. Now she said, plaintively,\n \"But where are you going to find\n one of these characters—especially if\n they're interested in keeping hid?\"\n\n\n The old boy was the center again.\n \"I told you I'd been considering it\n for some time. The\nOktoberfest\n,\n that's where they'd be!\" He seemed\n elated.",
"Betty bounced up with Olympic\n agility and had the door swinging\n wide before the knocking was quite\n completed.\n\n\n He was old, little and had bug\n eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His\n suit was cut in the style of yesteryear\n but when a suit costs two or\n three hundred dollars you still retain\n caste whatever the styling.\n\n\n Simon said unenthusiastically,\n \"Good morning, Mr. Oyster.\" He indicated\n the client's chair. \"Sit down,\n sir.\"\n\n\n The client fussed himself with\n Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed\n Simon, said finally, \"You know\n my name, that's pretty good. Never\n saw you before in my life. Stop fussing\n with me, young lady. Your ad\n in the phone book says you'll investigate\n anything.\"\n\n\n \"Anything,\" Simon said. \"Only\n one exception.\"",
"\"Then you'll realize that there are\n a dozen explanations of the paradoxes\n of time travel. Every writer in\n the field worth his salt has explained\n them away. But to get on. It's my\n contention that within a century or\n so man will have solved the problems\n of immortality and eternal youth, and\n it's also my suspicion that he will\n eventually be able to travel in time.\n So convinced am I of these possibilities\n that I am willing to gamble a\n portion of my fortune to investigate\n the presence in our era of such time\n travelers.\"\n\n\n Simon seemed incapable of carrying\n the ball this morning, so Betty\n said, \"But ... Mr. Oyster, if the\n future has developed time travel why\n don't we ever meet such travelers?\"",
"The trip back was as uninteresting\n as the one over. As the hangover began\n to wear off—a little—I was almost\n sorry I hadn't been able to stay.\n If I'd only been able to get a room I\nwould\nhave stayed, I told myself.\n\n\n From Idlewild, I came directly to\n the office rather than going to my\n apartment. I figured I might as well\n check in with Betty.\n\n\n I opened the door and there I\n found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair\n he had been occupying four—or was\n it five—days before when I'd left.\n I'd lost track of the time.",
"I said to him, \"Glad you're here,\n sir. I can report. Ah, what was it\n you came for? Impatient to hear if\n I'd had any results?\" My mind was\n spinning like a whirling dervish in\n a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of\n his money and had nothing I could\n think of to show for it; nothing but\n the last stages of a grand-daddy\n hangover.\n\n\n \"Came for?\" Mr. Oyster snorted.\n \"I'm merely waiting for your girl to\n make out my receipt. I thought you\n had already left.\"\n\n\n \"You'll miss your plane,\" Betty\n said.\n\n\n There was suddenly a double dip\n of ice cream in my stomach. I walked\n over to my desk and looked down at\n the calendar.",
"Simon said wearily, \"There's just\n one thing you can bring back with\n you from the future, a hangover compounded\n of a gallon or so of Marzenbräu.\n What's more you can pile\n one on top of the other, and another\n on top of that!\"\n\n\n He shuddered. \"If you think I'm\n going to take another crack at this\n merry-go-round and pile a fourth\n hangover on the three I'm already\n nursing, all at once, you can think\n again.\"\nTHE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAstounding Science Fiction\nJune\n 1959. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.",
"\"All right,\" Simon said. \"We'll accept\n it. The\nOktoberfest\nis one whale\n of a wingding.\"\n\"Well,\" the old boy pursued, into\n his subject now, \"that's where they'd\n be, places like the\nOktoberfest\n. For\n one thing, a time traveler wouldn't\n be conspicuous. At a festival like this\n somebody with a strange accent, or\n who didn't know exactly how to wear\n his clothes correctly, or was off the\n ordinary in any of a dozen other\n ways, wouldn't be noticed. You could\n be a four-armed space traveler from\n Mars, and you still wouldn't be conspicuous\n at the\nOktoberfest\n. People\n would figure they had D.T.'s.\"\n\n\n \"But why would a time traveler\n want to go to a—\" Betty began.",
"Mr. Oyster was saying something\n to the effect that if I didn't leave today,\n it would have to be tomorrow,\n that he hadn't ponied up that thousand\n dollars advance for anything\n less than immediate service. Stuffing\n his receipt in his wallet, he fussed\n his way out the door.\n\n\n I said to Betty hopefully, \"I suppose\n you haven't changed this calendar\n since I left.\"\n\n\n Betty said, \"What's the matter\n with you? You look funny. How did\n your clothes get so mussed? You tore\n the top sheet off that calendar yourself,\n not half an hour ago, just before\n this marble-missing client came\n in.\" She added, irrelevantly, \"Time\n travelers yet.\"\n\n\n I tried just once more. \"Uh, when\n did you first see this Mr. Oyster?\"\n\n\n \"Never saw him before in my\n life,\" she said. \"Not until he came\n in this morning.\"",
"\"That's quite a gadget,\" I groaned.\n \"If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd\n appreciate it.\"\n\n\n Arth was sitting on the edge of\n the bed holding his bald head in his\n hands. \"I remember now,\" he sorrowed.\n \"You didn't have a hotel.\n What a stupidity. I'll be phased.\n Phased all the way down.\"\n\n\n \"You haven't got a handful of\n aspirin, have you?\" I asked him.\n\n\n \"Just a minute,\" Arth said, staggering\n erect and heading for what\n undoubtedly was a bathroom. \"Stay\n where you are. Don't move. Don't\n touch anything.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" I told him plaintively.\n \"I'm clean. I won't mess up the\n place. All I've got is a hangover, not\n lice.\"",
"\"I want to hire you to hunt me up\n some time travelers,\" the old boy\n said.\n\n\n Betty was too far in now to maintain\n her proper role of silent secretary.\n \"Time travelers,\" she said, not\n very intelligently.\n\n\n The potential client sat more erect,\n obviously with intent to hold the\n floor for a time. He removed the\n pince-nez glasses and pointed them\n at Betty. He said, \"Have you read\n much science fiction, Miss?\"\n\n\n \"Some,\" Betty admitted.",
"He looked at me, closing one eye\n to focus better. \"Oh,\" he said. \"Well,\n 2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque.\"\n\n\n \"New Albuquerque? Where's\n that?\"\n\n\n Arth thought about it. Took another\n long pull at the beer. \"Right\n across the way from old Albuquerque,\"\n he said finally. \"Maybe we\n ought to be getting on to the\n Pschorrbräu tent.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe we ought to eat something\n first,\" I said. \"I'm beginning to feel\n this. We could get some of that barbecued\n ox.\"\n\n\n Arth closed his eyes in pain.\n \"Vegetarian,\" he said. \"Couldn't possibly\n eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh.\"\n\n\n \"Well, we need some nourishment,\"\n I said."
],
[
"Simon shrugged, put one hand to\n his forehead and said, \"That's only\n the first chapter. There are two\n more.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not interested in more,\" Mr.\n Oyster said. \"I suppose your point\n was to show me how ridiculous the\n whole idea actually is. Very well,\n you've done it. Confound it. However,\n I suppose your time, even when\n spent in this manner, has some value.\n Here is fifty dollars. And good day,\n sir!\"\n\n\n He slammed the door after him\n as he left.\n\n\n Simon winced at the noise, took\n the aspirin bottle from its drawer,\n took two, washed them down with\n water from the desk carafe.",
"Simon put in a word. \"The usual\n explanation, Betty, is that they can't\n afford to allow the space-time continuum\n track to be altered. If, say, a\n time traveler returned to a period of\n twenty-five years ago and shot Hitler,\n then all subsequent history would be\n changed. In that case, the time traveler\n himself might never be born. They\n have to tread mighty carefully.\"\n\n\n Mr. Oyster was pleased. \"I didn't\n expect you to be so well informed\n on the subject, young man.\"\n\n\n Simon shrugged and fumbled\n again with the aspirin bottle.\nMr. Oyster went on. \"I've been\n considering the matter for some time\n and—\"\n\n\n Simon held up a hand. \"There's\n no use prolonging this. As I understand\n it, you're an elderly gentleman\n with a considerable fortune and you\n realize that thus far nobody has succeeded\n in taking it with him.\"",
"\"Out of the question,\" Simon\n said.\n\n\n \"But\nwhy\n?\" Betty wailed.\n\n\n \"Just for laughs,\" Simon told the\n two of them sourly, \"suppose I tell\n you a funny story. It goes like\n this:\"\nI got a thousand dollars from Mr.\n Oyster (Simon began) in the way\n of an advance, and leaving him with\n Betty who was making out a receipt,\n I hustled back to the apartment and\n packed a bag. Hell, I'd wanted a vacation\n anyway, this was a natural. On\n the way to Idlewild I stopped off at\n the Germany Information Offices for\n some tourist literature.\n\n\n It takes roughly three and a half\n hours to get to Gander from Idlewild.\n I spent the time planning the\n fun I was going to have.",
"\"That's quite a gadget,\" I groaned.\n \"If I didn't feel so lousy, I'd\n appreciate it.\"\n\n\n Arth was sitting on the edge of\n the bed holding his bald head in his\n hands. \"I remember now,\" he sorrowed.\n \"You didn't have a hotel.\n What a stupidity. I'll be phased.\n Phased all the way down.\"\n\n\n \"You haven't got a handful of\n aspirin, have you?\" I asked him.\n\n\n \"Just a minute,\" Arth said, staggering\n erect and heading for what\n undoubtedly was a bathroom. \"Stay\n where you are. Don't move. Don't\n touch anything.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" I told him plaintively.\n \"I'm clean. I won't mess up the\n place. All I've got is a hangover, not\n lice.\"",
"\"This morning,\" I said weakly.\n\n\n While Betty stared at me as though\n it was\nme\nthat needed candling by a\n head shrinker preparatory to being\n sent off to a pressure cooker, I fished\n in my pocket for my wallet, counted\n the contents and winced at the\n pathetic remains of the thousand.\n I said pleadingly, \"Betty, listen,\n how long ago did I go out that door—on\n the way to the airport?\"\n\n\n \"You've been acting sick all morning.\n You went out that door about\n ten minutes ago, were gone about\n three minutes, and then came back.\"\n\"See here,\" Mr. Oyster said (interrupting\n Simon's story), \"did you\n say this was supposed to be amusing,\n young man? I don't find it so. In\n fact, I believe I am being ridiculed.\"",
"Simon was shaking his head. \"Not\n interested.\"\n\n\n As soon as Betty had got her jaw\n back into place, she glared unbelievingly\n at him.\n\n\n Mr. Oyster was taken aback himself.\n \"See here, young man, I realize\n this isn't an ordinary assignment,\n however, as I said, I am willing to\n risk a considerable portion of my\n fortune—\"\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" Simon said. \"Can't be\n done.\"\n\n\n \"A hundred dollars a day plus expenses,\"\n Mr. Oyster said quietly. \"I\n like the fact that you already seem\n to have some interest and knowledge\n of the matter. I liked the way you\n knew my name when I walked in the\n door; my picture doesn't appear often\n in the papers.\"\n\n\n \"No go,\" Simon said, a sad quality\n in his voice.\n\n\n \"A fifty thousand dollar bonus if\n you bring me a time traveler.\"",
"Arth was gone. He came back in\n two or three minutes, box of pills in\n hand. \"Here, take one of these.\"\n\n\n I took the pill, followed it with a\n glass of water.\nAnd went out like a light.\n\n\n Arth was shaking my arm. \"Want\n another\nmass\n?\"\n\n\n The band was blaring, and five\n thousand half-swacked voices were\n roaring accompaniment.\nIn Muenchen steht ein Hofbräuhaus!\nEins, Zwei, G'sufa!\nAt the\nG'sufa\neverybody upped\n with their king-size mugs and drank\n each other's health.\n\n\n My head was killing me. \"This is\n where I came in, or something,\" I\n groaned.\n\n\n Arth said, \"That was last night.\"\n He looked at me over the rim of his\n beer mug.",
"\"Excellent. Do you believe in time\n travel?\"\n\n\n Simon said nothing. Across the\n room, where she had resumed her\n seat, Betty cleared her throat. When\n Simon continued to say nothing she\n ventured, \"Time travel is impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, why?\"\n\n\n Betty looked to her boss for assistance.\n None was forthcoming. There\n ought to be some very quick, positive,\n definite answer. She said, \"Well,\n for one thing, paradox. Suppose you\n had a time machine and traveled back\n a hundred years or so and killed your\n own great-grandfather. Then how\n could you ever be born?\"\n\n\n \"Confound it if I know,\" the little\n fellow growled. \"How?\"\n\n\n Simon said, \"Let's get to the point,\n what you wanted to see me about.\"",
"He looked at me, closing one eye\n to focus better. \"Oh,\" he said. \"Well,\n 2183 South Street, ah, New Albuquerque.\"\n\n\n \"New Albuquerque? Where's\n that?\"\n\n\n Arth thought about it. Took another\n long pull at the beer. \"Right\n across the way from old Albuquerque,\"\n he said finally. \"Maybe we\n ought to be getting on to the\n Pschorrbräu tent.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe we ought to eat something\n first,\" I said. \"I'm beginning to feel\n this. We could get some of that barbecued\n ox.\"\n\n\n Arth closed his eyes in pain.\n \"Vegetarian,\" he said. \"Couldn't possibly\n eat meat. Barbarous. Ugh.\"\n\n\n \"Well, we need some nourishment,\"\n I said.",
"Betty looked at him admiringly.\n Came to her feet, crossed over and\n took up the fifty dollars. \"Week's\n wages,\" she said. \"I suppose that's\n one way of taking care of a crackpot.\n But I'm surprised you didn't\n take his money and enjoy that vacation\n you've been yearning about.\"\n\n\n \"I did,\" Simon groaned. \"Three\n times.\"\n\n\n Betty stared at him. \"You mean—\"\n\n\n Simon nodded, miserably.\n\n\n She said, \"But\nSimon\n. Fifty thousand\n dollars bonus. If that story was\n true, you should have gone back\n again to Munich. If there was one\n time traveler, there might have\n been—\"",
"Betty bounced up with Olympic\n agility and had the door swinging\n wide before the knocking was quite\n completed.\n\n\n He was old, little and had bug\n eyes behind pince-nez glasses. His\n suit was cut in the style of yesteryear\n but when a suit costs two or\n three hundred dollars you still retain\n caste whatever the styling.\n\n\n Simon said unenthusiastically,\n \"Good morning, Mr. Oyster.\" He indicated\n the client's chair. \"Sit down,\n sir.\"\n\n\n The client fussed himself with\n Betty's assistance into the seat, bug-eyed\n Simon, said finally, \"You know\n my name, that's pretty good. Never\n saw you before in my life. Stop fussing\n with me, young lady. Your ad\n in the phone book says you'll investigate\n anything.\"\n\n\n \"Anything,\" Simon said. \"Only\n one exception.\"",
"I said to him, \"Glad you're here,\n sir. I can report. Ah, what was it\n you came for? Impatient to hear if\n I'd had any results?\" My mind was\n spinning like a whirling dervish in\n a revolving door. I'd spent a wad of\n his money and had nothing I could\n think of to show for it; nothing but\n the last stages of a grand-daddy\n hangover.\n\n\n \"Came for?\" Mr. Oyster snorted.\n \"I'm merely waiting for your girl to\n make out my receipt. I thought you\n had already left.\"\n\n\n \"You'll miss your plane,\" Betty\n said.\n\n\n There was suddenly a double dip\n of ice cream in my stomach. I walked\n over to my desk and looked down at\n the calendar.",
"Something, somewhere, was\n wrong. But I didn't care. I finished\n my\nmass\nand then remembered. \"I've\n got to get my bag. Oh, my head.\n Where did we spend last night?\"\n\n\n Arth said, and his voice sounded\n cautious, \"At my hotel, don't you remember?\"\n\n\n \"Not very well,\" I admitted. \"I\n feel lousy. I must have dimmed out.\n I've got to go to the Bahnhof and\n get my luggage.\"\n\n\n Arth didn't put up an argument\n on that. We said good-by and I could\n feel him watching after me as I pushed\n through the tables on the way\n out.",
"Mr. Oyster returned his glasses to\n their perch, bug-eyed Simon, but then\n nodded.\n\n\n Simon said, \"You want to hire me\n to find a time traveler and in some\n manner or other—any manner will\n do—exhort from him the secret of\n eternal life and youth, which you figure\n the future will have discovered.\n You're willing to pony up a part of\n this fortune of yours, if I can deliver\n a bona fide time traveler.\"\n\n\n \"Right!\"\n\n\n Betty had been looking from one\n to the other. Now she said, plaintively,\n \"But where are you going to find\n one of these characters—especially if\n they're interested in keeping hid?\"\n\n\n The old boy was the center again.\n \"I told you I'd been considering it\n for some time. The\nOktoberfest\n,\n that's where they'd be!\" He seemed\n elated.",
"\"Next is the Hofbräu,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Next what?\" Baldy's conversation\n didn't seem to hang together very\n well.\n\n\n \"My pilgrimage,\" he told me. \"All\n my life I've been wanting to go back\n to an\nOktoberfest\nand sample every\n one of the seven brands of the best\n beer the world has ever known. I'm\n only as far as Löwenbräu. I'm afraid\n I'll never make it.\"\n\n\n I finished my\nmass\n. \"I'll help\n you,\" I told him. \"Very noble endeavor.\n Name is Simon.\"\n\n\n \"Arth,\" he said. \"How could you\n help?\"\n\n\n \"I'm still fresh—comparatively.\n I'll navigate you around. There are\n seven beer tents. How many have you\n got through, so far?\"",
"The trip back was as uninteresting\n as the one over. As the hangover began\n to wear off—a little—I was almost\n sorry I hadn't been able to stay.\n If I'd only been able to get a room I\nwould\nhave stayed, I told myself.\n\n\n From Idlewild, I came directly to\n the office rather than going to my\n apartment. I figured I might as well\n check in with Betty.\n\n\n I opened the door and there I\n found Mr. Oyster sitting in the chair\n he had been occupying four—or was\n it five—days before when I'd left.\n I'd lost track of the time.",
"UNBORN\n\n TOMORROW\nBY MACK REYNOLDS\nUnfortunately\n, there was only\n one thing he could bring back\n from the wonderful future ...\n and though he didn't want to\n ... nevertheless he did....\nIllustrated by Freas\n\n\n Betty\n looked up from\n her magazine. She said\n mildly, \"You're late.\"\n\n\n \"Don't yell at me, I\n feel awful,\" Simon told\n her. He sat down at his desk, passed\n his tongue over his teeth in distaste,\n groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the\n aspirin bottle.\n\n\n He looked over at Betty and said,\n almost as though reciting, \"What I\n need is a vacation.\"\n\n\n \"What,\" Betty said, \"are you going\n to use for money?\"\n\n\n \"Providence,\" Simon told her\n whilst fiddling with the aspirin bottle,\n \"will provide.\"",
"\"I keep telling you,\" Simon said\n bitterly, \"I went back there three\n times. There were hundreds of them.\n Probably thousands.\" He took a deep\n breath. \"Listen, we're just going to\n have to forget about it. They're not\n going to stand for the space-time\n continuum track being altered. If\n something comes up that looks like\n it might result in the track being\n changed, they set you right back at\n the beginning and let things start—for\n you—all over again. They just\n can't allow anything to come back\n from the future and change the\n past.\"\n\n\n \"You mean,\" Betty was suddenly\n furious at him, \"you've given up!\n Why this is the biggest thing— Why\n the fifty thousand dollars is nothing.\n The future! Just think!\"",
"\"Then you'll realize that there are\n a dozen explanations of the paradoxes\n of time travel. Every writer in\n the field worth his salt has explained\n them away. But to get on. It's my\n contention that within a century or\n so man will have solved the problems\n of immortality and eternal youth, and\n it's also my suspicion that he will\n eventually be able to travel in time.\n So convinced am I of these possibilities\n that I am willing to gamble a\n portion of my fortune to investigate\n the presence in our era of such time\n travelers.\"\n\n\n Simon seemed incapable of carrying\n the ball this morning, so Betty\n said, \"But ... Mr. Oyster, if the\n future has developed time travel why\n don't we ever meet such travelers?\"",
"\"There's supposed to be considerable\n nourishment in beer.\"\n\n\n That made sense. I yelled, \"\nFräulein!\n Zwei neu bier!\n\"\nSomewhere along in here the fog\n rolled in. When it rolled out again,\n I found myself closing one eye the\n better to read the lettering on my\n earthenware mug. It read Augustinerbräu.\n Somehow we'd evidently\n navigated from one tent to another.\n\n\n Arth was saying, \"Where's your\n hotel?\"\n\n\n That seemed like a good question.\n I thought about it for a while. Finally\n I said, \"Haven't got one. Town's\n jam packed. Left my bag at the Bahnhof.\n I don't think we'll ever make\n it, Arth. How many we got to\n go?\"\n\n\n \"Lost track,\" Arth said. \"You can\n come home with me.\""
]
] |
train
|
24977
|
[
"How does Pembrook feel about Mary Ann?",
"Why does Pembrook shoot the man in the corner?",
"What is Puerto Pacifico?",
"What is wrong with the citizens of Puerto Pacifico?",
"How did Pembroke get to Puerto Pacifico?",
"Why do the cops shoot Spencer?",
"Why is the qualification interviewer under a glass dome?",
"What caused the explosion that sunk the Elena Mia?"
] |
[
[
"Pembrook is in love with Mary Ann.",
"Pembrook feels betrayed by Mary Ann because she was plotting to kill him.",
"At, first Mary Ann was a means to an end, but now Pembrook is in love with her.",
"Mary Ann is a means to an end for Pembrook."
],
[
"The man in the corner is one of the strangers.",
"The man in the corner is an android sent by alien masters to facilitate an invasion of Earth.",
"The man in the corner was an alien invader.",
"The man in the corner came to kill Pembrook."
],
[
"Puerto Pacifico is a training ground for the androids that the aliens are sending to prepare Earth for invasion.",
"Puerto Pacifico is a training ground for the android forces that are preparing to invade Earth.",
"Puerto Pacifico is a training ground for the aliens who will be replacing key humans on Earth in preparation for invasion.",
"Pembroke has died and Puerto Pacifico is his purgatory."
],
[
"The citizens of Puerto Pacifico are aliens, not humans.",
"The citizens of Puerto Pacifico are newly-awakened AI beings, trying to blend in with humanity.",
"The citizens of Puerto Pacifico don't realize they are dead.",
"The citizens of Puerto Pacifico are androids, not humans."
],
[
"Pembroke traveled to Puerto Pacifico on a ship called the Elena Mia.",
"Pembroke traveled to Puerto Pacifico on a Colombian ship called The Valparaiso.",
"Pembroke arrived in Puerto Pacifico on the lifeboat he used to escape the sinking ship.",
"The aliens placed Pembroke in Puerto Pacifico after destroying his ship."
],
[
"Spencer is not cooperating.",
"Spencer was on to them. He was about to expose their whole operation.",
"They thought Spencer was an android.",
"Spencer was speaking too brusquely to the three women in the bar."
],
[
"The interviewer is protecting themself from aliens.",
"The glass dome is to protect the interviewer from human contact.",
"The interviewer has a compromised immune system.",
"The interviewer is an alien, and it does not breathe oxygen."
],
[
"An alien craft fired on the Elena Mia from under the water.",
"A Colombian ship fired a torpedo on the Elena Mia, causing it to explode.",
"The Elena Mia ran into an iceberg. The ice pierced the ship's electronics causing an explosion.",
"The androids tampered with the Elena Mia's electronics causing an explosion."
]
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[
"\"In the first place,\" said Pembroke,\n \"you should be willing to\n fall in love with me even if it\n will eventually make you unhappy.\n How can you be the paramour\n type if you refuse to fall in\n love foolishly? And when you\n have fallen in love, you should be\n very loyal.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try,\" she said unsurely.\n \"What else?\"\n\n\n \"The other thing is that, as\n my mistress, you must never\n mention me to anyone. It would\n place me in great danger.\"\n\n\n \"I'll never tell anyone anything\n about you,\" she promised.\n\n\n \"Now try to love me,\" Pembroke\n said, drawing her into his\n arms and kissing with little\n pleasure the smooth, warm perfection\n of her tanned cheeks.\n \"Love me my sweet, beautiful,\n affectionate Mary Ann. My paramour.\"",
"After eating they danced for\n an hour, had a few more drinks,\n then went to Pembroke's room.\n He still knew nothing about her\n and had almost exhausted his\n critical capabilities, but not once\n had she become annoyed with\n him. She seemed to devour every\n factual point of imperfection\n about herself that Pembroke\n brought to her attention. And,\n fantastically enough, she actually\n appeared to have overcome every\n little imperfection he had been\n able to communicate to her.\n\n\n It was in the privacy of his\n room that Pembroke became\n aware of just how perfect, physically,\n Mary Ann was. Too perfect.\n No freckles or moles anywhere\n on the visible surface of\n her brown skin, which was more\n than a mere sampling. Furthermore,\n her face and body were\n meticulously symmetrical. And\n she seemed to be wholly ambidextrous.",
"Now Pembroke had himself to\n worry about. The first step was\n to enter smoothly into the new\n life he had planned. It wouldn't\n be so comfortable as the previous\n one, but should be considerably\n safer. He headed slowly for the\n \"old\" part of town, aging his\n clothes against buildings and\n fences as he walked. He had already\n torn the collar of the shirt\n and discarded his belt. By morning\n his beard would grow to\n blacken his face. And he would\n look weary and hungry and aimless.\n Only the last would be a deception.\nTwo weeks later Pembroke\n phoned Mary Ann. The police\n had accepted her story without\n even checking. And when, when\n would she be seeing him again?\n He had aroused her passion and\n no amount of long-distance love\n could requite it. Soon, he assured\n her, soon.\n\n\n \"Because, after all, you do owe\n me something,\" she added.",
"Now the ship had arrived and\n was to leave shortly. If there was\n any but the most superficial examination,\n Pembroke would no\n doubt be discovered and exterminated.\n But since no one seemed\n concerned about anything but his\n own speech and behavior, he assumed\n that they had all qualified\n in every other respect. The reason\n for transporting Earth People\n to this planet was, of course,\n to apply a corrective to any of\n the Pacificos' aberrant mannerisms\n or articulation. This was\n the polishing up phase.\nPembroke began hobbling toward\n the docks. Almost at once\n he found himself face to face\n with Mary Ann. She smiled happily\n when she recognized him.\nThat\nwas a good thing.\n\n\n \"It is a sign of poor breeding\n to smile at tramps,\" Pembroke\n admonished her in a whisper.\n \"Walk on ahead.\"",
"When she left the hotel at midnight,\n Pembroke was quite sure\n that she understood his plan and\n that she was irrevocably in love\n with him. Tomorrow might bring\n his death, but it might also ensure\n his escape. After forty-two\n years of searching for a passion,\n for a cause, for a loyalty, Frank\n Pembroke had at last found his.\n Earth and the human race that\n peopled it. And Mary Ann would\n help him to save it.\nThe next morning Pembroke\n talked to Valencia about hunting.\n He said that he planned to go\n shooting out on the desert which\n surrounded the city. Valencia\n told him that there were no living\n creatures anywhere but in\n the city. Pembroke said he was\n going out anyway.",
"\"Silly, you're real. You're not\n a type at all.\"\n\n\n \"Mary Ann, I love you very\n much,\" Pembroke murmured,\n gambling everything on this one\n throw. \"When you go to Earth\n I'll miss you terribly.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, but you'll be dead by\n then,\" she pouted. \"So I mustn't\n fall in love with you. I don't want\n to be miserable.\"\n\n\n \"If I pretended I was one of\n you, if I left on the boat with\n you, they'd let me go to Earth\n with you. Wouldn't they?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, I'm sure they would.\"\n\n\n \"Mary Ann, you have two\n other flaws I feel I should mention.\"\n\n\n \"Yes? Please tell me.\"",
"\"With so many beautiful\n women in Puerto Pacifico,\" said\n Pembroke probingly, \"I find it\n hard to understand why there are\n so few children.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, children are decorative,\n aren't they,\" said Mary Ann. \"I\n do wish there were more of\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Why not have a couple of\n your own?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Oh, they're only given to maternal\n types. I'd never get one.\n Anyway, I won't ever marry,\"\n she said. \"I'm the paramour\n type.\"\n\n\n It was obvious that the liquor\n had been having some effect.\n Either that, or she had a basic\n flaw of loquacity that no one else\n had discovered. Pembroke decided\n he would have to cover his\n tracks carefully.\n\n\n \"What type am I?\" he asked.",
"And that was bad because it\n sounded as if she had been giving\n some womanly thought to the situation.\n A little more of that and\n she might go to the police again,\n this time for vengeance.\n\n\n Twice during his wanderings\n Pembroke had seen the corpses\n of Earthmen being carted out of\n buildings. They had to be Earthmen\n because they bled. Mary Ann\n had admitted that she did not.\n There would be very few Earthmen\n left in Puerto Pacifico, and\n it would be simple enough to locate\n him if he were reported as\n being on the loose. There was\n no out but to do away with Mary\n Ann.",
"Pembroke came as close to being\n a professional adventurer as\n one can in these days of regimented\n travel, organized peril,\n and political restriction. He had\n made for himself a substantial\n fortune through speculation in a\n great variety of properties, real\n and otherwise. Life had given\n him much and demanded little,\n which was perhaps the reason\n for his restiveness.\nLoyalty to person or to people\n was a trait Pembroke had never\n recognized in himself, nor had it\n ever been expected of him. And\n yet he greatly envied those\n staunch patriots and lovers who\n could find it in themselves to\n elevate the glory and safety of\n others above that of themselves.",
"\"Tell me what's wrong with\n me,\" she went on urgently. \"I'm\n not good enough, am I? I mean,\n there's something wrong with\n the way I look or act. Isn't there?\n Please help me, please!\"\n\n\n \"You're not casual enough, for\n one thing,\" said Pembroke, deciding\n to play along with her for\n the moment. \"You're too tense.\n Also you're a bit knock-kneed,\n not that it matters. Is that what\n you wanted to hear?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes—I mean, I suppose\n so. I can try to be more casual.\n But I don't know what to do\n about my knees,\" she said wistfully,\n staring across at the\n smooth, tan limbs. \"Do you think\n I'm okay otherwise? I mean, as a\n whole I'm not so bad, am I? Oh,\n please tell me.\"",
"Making love to Mary Ann was\n something short of ecstasy. Not\n for any obvious reason, but because\n of subtle little factors that\n make a woman a woman. Mary\n Ann had no pulse. Mary Ann did\n not perspire. Mary Ann did not\n fatigue gradually but all at once.\n Mary Ann breathed regularly\n under all circumstances. Mary\n Ann talked and talked and talked.\n But then, Mary Ann was not\n a human being.",
"Pembroke heard the shots as\n he strolled casually out into the\n brightness of the hotel lobby.\n While he waited for the elevator,\n he saw them carrying the body\n into the street. How many others,\n he wondered, had gone out on\n their backs during their first day\n in Puerto Pacifico?\nPembroke shaved, showered,\n and put on the new suit and shirt\n he had bought. Then he took\n Mary Ann, the woman he had\n met on the beach, out to dinner.\n She would look magnificent even\n when fully clothed, he decided,\n and the pale chartreuse gown she\n wore hardly placed her in that\n category. Her conversation seemed\n considerably more normal\n after the other denizens of\n Puerto Pacifico Pembroke had\n listened to that afternoon.",
"\"You understand your mission,\n Newton?\" the voice asked. \"You\n are to establish yourself on\n Earth. In time you will receive\n instructions. Then you will attack.\n You will not see us, your\n masters, again until the atmosphere\n has been sufficiently chlorinated.\n In the meantime, serve\n us well.\"\n\n\n He stumbled out toward the\n docks, then looked about for\n Mary Ann. He saw her at last\n behind the ropes, her lovely face\n in tears.\n\n\n Then she saw him. Waving\n frantically, she called his name\n several times. Pembroke mingled\n with the crowd moving toward\n the ship, ignoring her. But still\n the woman persisted in her\n shouting.\n\n\n Sidling up to a well-dressed\n man-about-town type, Pembroke\n winked at him and snickered.\n\n\n \"You Frank?\" he asked.",
"On the sand he saw a number\n of sun bathers. One in particular,\n an attractive woman of about\n thirty, tossed back her long,\n chestnut locks and gazed up intently\n at Pembroke as he passed.\n Seldom had he enjoyed so ingenuous\n an invitation. He halted\n and stared down at her for a few\n moments.\n\n\n \"You are looking for someone?\"\n she inquired.\n\n\n \"Much of the time,\" said the\n man.\n\n\n \"Could it be me?\"\n\n\n \"It could be.\"\n\n\n \"Yet you seem unsure,\" she\n said.\n\n\n Pembroke smiled, uneasily.\n There was something not entirely\n normal about her conversation.\n Though the rest of her compensated\n for that.",
"\"Hell, no. But some poor\n punk's sure red in the face, I'll\n bet,\" the man-about-town said\n with a chuckle. \"Those high-strung\n paramour types always\n raising a ruckus. They never do\n pass the interview. Don't know\n why they even make 'em.\"\n\n\n Suddenly Mary Ann was quiet.\n\n\n \"Ambulance squad,\" Pembroke's\n companion explained.\n \"They'll take her off to the buggy\n house for a few days and bring\n her out fresh and ignorant as the\n day she was assembled. Don't\n know why they keep making 'em,\n as I say. But I guess there's a\n call for that type up there on\n Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I reckon there is at\n that,\" said Pembroke, snickering\n again as he moved away from the\n other. \"And why not? Hey?\n Why not?\"",
"Pembroke went right on hating\n himself, however, till the\n night he was deposited in a field\n outside of Ensenada, broke but\n happy, with two other itinerant\n types. They separated in San\n Diego, and it was not long before\n Pembroke was explaining to the\n police how he had drifted far\n from the scene of the sinking of\n the\nElena Mia\non a piece of\n wreckage, and had been picked\n up by a Chilean trawler. How he\n had then made his way, with\n much suffering, up the coast to\n California. Two days later, his\n identity established and his circumstances\n again solvent, he was\n headed for Los Angeles to begin\n his save-Earth campaign.\nNow, seated at his battered\n desk in the shabby rented office\n over Lemark's Liquors, Pembroke\n gazed without emotion at\n the two demolished Pacificos that\n lay sprawled one atop the other\n in the corner. His watch said\n one-fifteen. The man from the\n FBI should arrive soon.",
"Lacking such loyalties, Pembroke\n adapted quickly to the situation\n in which he found himself\n when he regained consciousness.\n He awoke in a small room in\n what appeared to be a typical\n modern American hotel. The wallet\n in his pocket contained exactly\n what it should, approximately\n three hundred dollars.\n His next thought was of food.\n He left the room and descended\n via the elevator to the restaurant.\n Here he observed that it\n was early afternoon. Ordering\n a full dinner, for he was unusually\n hungry, he began to study the\n others in the restaurant.\n\n\n Many of the faces seemed familiar;\n the crew of the ship,\n probably. He also recognized several\n of the passengers. However,\n he made no attempt to speak to\n them. After his meal, he bought\n a good corona and went for a\n walk. His situation could have\n been any small western American\n seacoast city. He heard the hiss\n of the ocean in the direction the\n afternoon sun was taking. In his\n full-gaited walk, he was soon approaching\n the beach.",
"\"How about talking it over at\n supper tonight?\" Pembroke proposed.\n \"Maybe with less distraction\n I'll have a better picture of\n you—as a whole.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that's very generous of\n you,\" the woman told him. She\n scribbled a name and an address\n on a small piece of paper and\n handed it to him. \"Any time\n after six,\" she said.\n\n\n Pembroke left the beach and\n walked through several small\n specialty shops. He tried to get\n the woman off his mind, but the\n oddness of her conversation continued\n to bother him. She was\n right about being different, but\n it was her concern about being\n different that made her so. How\n to explain\nthat\nto her?\nThen he saw the weird little\n glass statuette among the usual\n bric-a-brac. It rather resembled\n a ground hog, had seven fingers\n on each of its six limbs, and\n smiled up at him as he stared.",
"\"That's for sure,\" the boy said,\n walking away to wait on another\n customer. \"If you don't like the\n place, you've had it.\"\nPembroke returned to the\n hotel. Going to the bar, he recognized\n one of the\nElena Mia's\npaying\n passengers. He was a short,\n rectangular little man in his fifties\n named Spencer. He sat in a\n booth with three young women,\n all lovely, all effusive. The topic\n of the conversation turned out\n to be precisely what Pembroke\n had predicted.\n\n\n \"Well, Louisa, I'd say your\n only fault is the way you keep\n wigglin' your shoulders up 'n'\n down. Why'n'sha try holdin' 'em\n straight?\"\n\n\n \"I thought it made me look\n sexy,\" the redhead said petulantly.",
"By noon they had rented a\n jeep and were well away from\n the city. Pembroke and Mary\n Ann took turns firing at the paper\n targets they had purchased. At\n twilight they headed back to the\n city. On the outskirts, where the\n sand and soil were mixed and no\n footprints would be left, Pembroke\n hopped off. Mary Ann\n would go straight to the police\n and report that Pembroke had attacked\n her and that she had shot\n him. If necessary, she would conduct\n the authorities to the place\n where they had been target\n shooting, but would be unable to\n locate the spot where she had\n buried the body. Why had she\n buried it? Because at first she\n was not going to report the incident.\n She was frightened. It\n was not airtight, but there would\n probably be no further investigation.\n And they certainly would\n not prosecute Mary Ann for killing\n an Earthman."
],
[
"Pembroke heard the shots as\n he strolled casually out into the\n brightness of the hotel lobby.\n While he waited for the elevator,\n he saw them carrying the body\n into the street. How many others,\n he wondered, had gone out on\n their backs during their first day\n in Puerto Pacifico?\nPembroke shaved, showered,\n and put on the new suit and shirt\n he had bought. Then he took\n Mary Ann, the woman he had\n met on the beach, out to dinner.\n She would look magnificent even\n when fully clothed, he decided,\n and the pale chartreuse gown she\n wore hardly placed her in that\n category. Her conversation seemed\n considerably more normal\n after the other denizens of\n Puerto Pacifico Pembroke had\n listened to that afternoon.",
"And that was bad because it\n sounded as if she had been giving\n some womanly thought to the situation.\n A little more of that and\n she might go to the police again,\n this time for vengeance.\n\n\n Twice during his wanderings\n Pembroke had seen the corpses\n of Earthmen being carted out of\n buildings. They had to be Earthmen\n because they bled. Mary Ann\n had admitted that she did not.\n There would be very few Earthmen\n left in Puerto Pacifico, and\n it would be simple enough to locate\n him if he were reported as\n being on the loose. There was\n no out but to do away with Mary\n Ann.",
"When she left the hotel at midnight,\n Pembroke was quite sure\n that she understood his plan and\n that she was irrevocably in love\n with him. Tomorrow might bring\n his death, but it might also ensure\n his escape. After forty-two\n years of searching for a passion,\n for a cause, for a loyalty, Frank\n Pembroke had at last found his.\n Earth and the human race that\n peopled it. And Mary Ann would\n help him to save it.\nThe next morning Pembroke\n talked to Valencia about hunting.\n He said that he planned to go\n shooting out on the desert which\n surrounded the city. Valencia\n told him that there were no living\n creatures anywhere but in\n the city. Pembroke said he was\n going out anyway.",
"Pembroke went right on hating\n himself, however, till the\n night he was deposited in a field\n outside of Ensenada, broke but\n happy, with two other itinerant\n types. They separated in San\n Diego, and it was not long before\n Pembroke was explaining to the\n police how he had drifted far\n from the scene of the sinking of\n the\nElena Mia\non a piece of\n wreckage, and had been picked\n up by a Chilean trawler. How he\n had then made his way, with\n much suffering, up the coast to\n California. Two days later, his\n identity established and his circumstances\n again solvent, he was\n headed for Los Angeles to begin\n his save-Earth campaign.\nNow, seated at his battered\n desk in the shabby rented office\n over Lemark's Liquors, Pembroke\n gazed without emotion at\n the two demolished Pacificos that\n lay sprawled one atop the other\n in the corner. His watch said\n one-fifteen. The man from the\n FBI should arrive soon.",
"There were footsteps on the\n stairs for the third time that\n day. Not the brisk, efficient steps\n of a federal official, but the hesitant,\n self-conscious steps of a\n junior clerk type.\n\n\n Pembroke rose as the young\n man appeared at the door. His\n face was smooth, unpimpled,\n clean-shaven, without sweat on a\n warm summer afternoon.\n\n\n \"Are you Dr. Von Schubert?\"\n the newcomer asked, peering into\n the room. \"You see, I've got a\n problem—\"\n\n\n The four shots from Pembroke's\n pistol solved his problem\n effectively. Pembroke tossed his\n third victim onto the pile, then\n opened a can of lager, quaffing\n it appreciatively. Seating himself\n once more, he leaned back in\n the chair, both feet upon the\n desk.",
"Pembroke rose and started out\n of the bar. A policeman entered\n and walked directly to Spencer's\n table. Loitering at the juke box,\n Pembroke overheard the conversation.\n\n\n \"You Spencer?\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" said the fat\n man sullenly.\n\n\n \"What don't you like about\n me? The\ntruth\n, buddy.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, hell! Nothin' wrong\n with you at all, and nothin'll\n make me say there is,\" said Spencer.\n\n\n \"You're the guy, all right. Too\n bad, Mac,\" said the cop.",
"\"Also, there is a certain effeminateness\n in the way in which\n you speak,\" said Pembroke. \"Try\n to be a little more direct, a little\n more brusque. Speak in a monotone.\n It will make you more acceptable.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you so much,\" said the\n manager. \"There is much food\n for thought in what you have\n said, Mr. Pembroke. However,\n Mr. Spencer, your value has failed\n to prove itself. You have only\n yourself to blame. Cooperation is\n all we require of you.\"\n\n\n Valencia left. Spencer ordered\n another martini. Neither he nor\n Pembroke spoke for several minutes.\n\n\n \"Somebody's crazy around\n here,\" the fat man muttered\n after a few moments. \"Is it me,\n Frank?\"",
"Lacking such loyalties, Pembroke\n adapted quickly to the situation\n in which he found himself\n when he regained consciousness.\n He awoke in a small room in\n what appeared to be a typical\n modern American hotel. The wallet\n in his pocket contained exactly\n what it should, approximately\n three hundred dollars.\n His next thought was of food.\n He left the room and descended\n via the elevator to the restaurant.\n Here he observed that it\n was early afternoon. Ordering\n a full dinner, for he was unusually\n hungry, he began to study the\n others in the restaurant.\n\n\n Many of the faces seemed familiar;\n the crew of the ship,\n probably. He also recognized several\n of the passengers. However,\n he made no attempt to speak to\n them. After his meal, he bought\n a good corona and went for a\n walk. His situation could have\n been any small western American\n seacoast city. He heard the hiss\n of the ocean in the direction the\n afternoon sun was taking. In his\n full-gaited walk, he was soon approaching\n the beach.",
"Opening the desk drawer,\n which was almost empty, Pembroke\n removed an automatic pistol\n fitted with a silencer. Pointing\n it at the amazed customer, he\n fired four .22 caliber longs into\n the narrow chest. Then he made\n a telephone call and sat down to\n wait. He wondered how long it\n would be before his next client\n would arrive.\nThe series of events leading up\n to Pembroke's present occupation\n had commenced on a dismal,\n overcast evening in the South\n Pacific a year earlier. Bound for\n Sydney, two days out of Valparaiso,\n the Colombian tramp\n steamer\nElena Mia\nhad encountered\n a dense greenish fog which\n seemed vaguely redolent of citrus\n trees. Standing on the forward\n deck, Pembroke was one of the\n first to perceive the peculiar odor\n and to spot the immense gray\n hulk wallowing in the murky distance.",
"Now Pembroke had himself to\n worry about. The first step was\n to enter smoothly into the new\n life he had planned. It wouldn't\n be so comfortable as the previous\n one, but should be considerably\n safer. He headed slowly for the\n \"old\" part of town, aging his\n clothes against buildings and\n fences as he walked. He had already\n torn the collar of the shirt\n and discarded his belt. By morning\n his beard would grow to\n blacken his face. And he would\n look weary and hungry and aimless.\n Only the last would be a deception.\nTwo weeks later Pembroke\n phoned Mary Ann. The police\n had accepted her story without\n even checking. And when, when\n would she be seeing him again?\n He had aroused her passion and\n no amount of long-distance love\n could requite it. Soon, he assured\n her, soon.\n\n\n \"Because, after all, you do owe\n me something,\" she added.",
"Pembroke came as close to being\n a professional adventurer as\n one can in these days of regimented\n travel, organized peril,\n and political restriction. He had\n made for himself a substantial\n fortune through speculation in a\n great variety of properties, real\n and otherwise. Life had given\n him much and demanded little,\n which was perhaps the reason\n for his restiveness.\nLoyalty to person or to people\n was a trait Pembroke had never\n recognized in himself, nor had it\n ever been expected of him. And\n yet he greatly envied those\n staunch patriots and lovers who\n could find it in themselves to\n elevate the glory and safety of\n others above that of themselves.",
"By noon they had rented a\n jeep and were well away from\n the city. Pembroke and Mary\n Ann took turns firing at the paper\n targets they had purchased. At\n twilight they headed back to the\n city. On the outskirts, where the\n sand and soil were mixed and no\n footprints would be left, Pembroke\n hopped off. Mary Ann\n would go straight to the police\n and report that Pembroke had attacked\n her and that she had shot\n him. If necessary, she would conduct\n the authorities to the place\n where they had been target\n shooting, but would be unable to\n locate the spot where she had\n buried the body. Why had she\n buried it? Because at first she\n was not going to report the incident.\n She was frightened. It\n was not airtight, but there would\n probably be no further investigation.\n And they certainly would\n not prosecute Mary Ann for killing\n an Earthman.",
"\"No. You just don't belong\n here, in this particular place,\"\n said Pembroke thoughtfully.\n \"You're the wrong type. But they\n couldn't know that ahead of time.\n The way they operate it's a\n pretty hit-or-miss operation. But\n they don't care one bit about us,\n Spencer. Consider the men who\n went down with the ship. That\n was just part of the game.\"\n\n\n \"What the hell are you sayin'?\"\n asked Spencer in disbelief.\n \"You figure\nthey\nsunk the ship?\n Valencia and the waitress and\n the three babes? Ah, come on.\"\n\n\n \"It's what you think that will\n determine what you do, Spencer.\n I suggest you change your attitude;\n play along with them for a\n few days till the picture becomes\n a little clearer to you. We'll talk\n about it again then.\"",
"He would be out of business\n soon, once the FBI agent had got\n there. Pembroke was only in it to\n get the proof he would need to\n convince people of the truth of\n his tale. But in the meantime he\n allowed himself to admire the\n clipping of the newspaper ad he\n had run in all the Los Angeles\n papers for the past week. The\n little ad that had saved mankind\n from God-knew-what insidious\n menace. It read:\nARE YOU IMPERFECT?\nLET DR. VON SCHUBERT POINT OUT\n\n YOUR FLAWS\nIT IS HIS GOAL TO MAKE YOU THE",
"Now the ship had arrived and\n was to leave shortly. If there was\n any but the most superficial examination,\n Pembroke would no\n doubt be discovered and exterminated.\n But since no one seemed\n concerned about anything but his\n own speech and behavior, he assumed\n that they had all qualified\n in every other respect. The reason\n for transporting Earth People\n to this planet was, of course,\n to apply a corrective to any of\n the Pacificos' aberrant mannerisms\n or articulation. This was\n the polishing up phase.\nPembroke began hobbling toward\n the docks. Almost at once\n he found himself face to face\n with Mary Ann. She smiled happily\n when she recognized him.\nThat\nwas a good thing.\n\n\n \"It is a sign of poor breeding\n to smile at tramps,\" Pembroke\n admonished her in a whisper.\n \"Walk on ahead.\"",
"Pembroke headed for the\n beach. He knew she invariably\n went there in the afternoon. He\n loitered around the stalls where\n hot dogs and soft drinks were\n sold, leaning against a post in\n the hot sun, hat pulled down over\n his forehead. Then he noticed\n that people all about him were\n talking excitedly. They were discussing\n a ship. It was leaving\n that afternoon. Anyone who\n could pass the interview would\n be sent to Earth.\n\n\n Pembroke had visited the\n docks every day, without being\n able to learn when the great\n exodus would take place. Yet he\n was certain the first lap would be\n by water rather than by spaceship,\n since no one he had talked\n to in the city had ever heard of\n spaceships. In fact, they knew\n very little about their masters.",
"But the dolls had apparently\n lost interest in him. They got up\n one by one and walked out of the\n bar. Pembroke took his rum and\n tonic and moved over to Spencer's\n booth.\n\n\n \"Okay if I join you?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said the fat man.\n \"Wonder what the hell got into\n those babes?\"\n\n\n \"You said they were perfect.\n They know they're not. You've\n got to be rough with them in this\n town,\" said Pembroke. \"That's\n all they want from us.\"\n\n\n \"Mister, you've been doing\n some thinkin', I can see,\" said\n Spencer, peering at him suspiciously.\n \"Maybe you've figured\n out where we are.\"",
"\"In the first place,\" said Pembroke,\n \"you should be willing to\n fall in love with me even if it\n will eventually make you unhappy.\n How can you be the paramour\n type if you refuse to fall in\n love foolishly? And when you\n have fallen in love, you should be\n very loyal.\"\n\n\n \"I'll try,\" she said unsurely.\n \"What else?\"\n\n\n \"The other thing is that, as\n my mistress, you must never\n mention me to anyone. It would\n place me in great danger.\"\n\n\n \"I'll never tell anyone anything\n about you,\" she promised.\n\n\n \"Now try to love me,\" Pembroke\n said, drawing her into his\n arms and kissing with little\n pleasure the smooth, warm perfection\n of her tanned cheeks.\n \"Love me my sweet, beautiful,\n affectionate Mary Ann. My paramour.\"",
"\"That's for sure,\" the boy said,\n walking away to wait on another\n customer. \"If you don't like the\n place, you've had it.\"\nPembroke returned to the\n hotel. Going to the bar, he recognized\n one of the\nElena Mia's\npaying\n passengers. He was a short,\n rectangular little man in his fifties\n named Spencer. He sat in a\n booth with three young women,\n all lovely, all effusive. The topic\n of the conversation turned out\n to be precisely what Pembroke\n had predicted.\n\n\n \"Well, Louisa, I'd say your\n only fault is the way you keep\n wigglin' your shoulders up 'n'\n down. Why'n'sha try holdin' 'em\n straight?\"\n\n\n \"I thought it made me look\n sexy,\" the redhead said petulantly.",
"\"You understand your mission,\n Newton?\" the voice asked. \"You\n are to establish yourself on\n Earth. In time you will receive\n instructions. Then you will attack.\n You will not see us, your\n masters, again until the atmosphere\n has been sufficiently chlorinated.\n In the meantime, serve\n us well.\"\n\n\n He stumbled out toward the\n docks, then looked about for\n Mary Ann. He saw her at last\n behind the ropes, her lovely face\n in tears.\n\n\n Then she saw him. Waving\n frantically, she called his name\n several times. Pembroke mingled\n with the crowd moving toward\n the ship, ignoring her. But still\n the woman persisted in her\n shouting.\n\n\n Sidling up to a well-dressed\n man-about-town type, Pembroke\n winked at him and snickered.\n\n\n \"You Frank?\" he asked."
],
[
"\"Your bet's as good as mine,\"\n said Pembroke. \"It's not Wellington,\n and it's not Brisbane, and\n it's not Long Beach, and it's not\n Tahiti. There are a lot of places\n it's not. But where the hell it is,\n you tell me.\n\n\n \"And, by the way,\" he added,\n \"I hope you like it in Puerto\n Pacifico. Because there isn't any\n place to go from here and there\n isn't any way to get there if\n there were.\"\n\n\n \"Pardon me, gentlemen, but\n I'm Joe Valencia, manager of the\n hotel. I would be very grateful if\n you would give me a few minutes\n of honest criticism.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, no, not you, too,\" groaned\n Spencer. \"Look, Joe, what's\n the gag?\"",
"That was fine. At least he now\n knew where he was. But as he\n left the shop he began checking\n off every west coast state, city,\n town, and inlet. None, to the best\n of his knowledge, was called\n Puerto Pacifico.\n\n\n He headed for the nearest\n service station and asked for a\n map. The attendant gave him one\n which showed the city, but nothing\n beyond.\n\n\n \"Which way is it to San Francisco?\"\n asked Pembroke.\n\n\n \"That all depends on where\n you are,\" the boy returned.\n\n\n \"Okay, then where am I?\"\n\n\n \"Pardon me, there's a customer,\"\n the boy said. \"This is\n Puerto Pacifico.\"\n\n\n Pembroke watched him hurry\n off to service a car with a sense\n of having been given the runaround.\n To his surprise, the boy\n came back a few minutes later\n after servicing the automobile.",
"\"Don't try to go so fast and\n you won't fall down,\" suggested\n Pembroke. \"You're in too much\n of a hurry. Also those fake flowers\n on your blouse make you look\n frumpy.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'm supposed to look\n frumpy,\" the woman retorted.\n \"That's the type of person I am.\n But you can look frumpy and still\n walk natural, can't you? Everyone\n says you can.\"\n\n\n \"Well, they've got a point,\"\n said Pembroke. \"Incidentally,\n just where are we, anyway?\n What city is this?\"\n\n\n \"Puerto Pacifico,\" she told\n him. \"Isn't that a lovely name?\n It means peaceful port. In Spanish.\"",
"Pembroke heard the shots as\n he strolled casually out into the\n brightness of the hotel lobby.\n While he waited for the elevator,\n he saw them carrying the body\n into the street. How many others,\n he wondered, had gone out on\n their backs during their first day\n in Puerto Pacifico?\nPembroke shaved, showered,\n and put on the new suit and shirt\n he had bought. Then he took\n Mary Ann, the woman he had\n met on the beach, out to dinner.\n She would look magnificent even\n when fully clothed, he decided,\n and the pale chartreuse gown she\n wore hardly placed her in that\n category. Her conversation seemed\n considerably more normal\n after the other denizens of\n Puerto Pacifico Pembroke had\n listened to that afternoon.",
"\"With so many beautiful\n women in Puerto Pacifico,\" said\n Pembroke probingly, \"I find it\n hard to understand why there are\n so few children.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, children are decorative,\n aren't they,\" said Mary Ann. \"I\n do wish there were more of\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Why not have a couple of\n your own?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Oh, they're only given to maternal\n types. I'd never get one.\n Anyway, I won't ever marry,\"\n she said. \"I'm the paramour\n type.\"\n\n\n It was obvious that the liquor\n had been having some effect.\n Either that, or she had a basic\n flaw of loquacity that no one else\n had discovered. Pembroke decided\n he would have to cover his\n tracks carefully.\n\n\n \"What type am I?\" he asked.",
"He picked up Mary Ann at her\n apartment and together they\n went to a sporting goods store.\n As he guessed there was a goodly\n selection of firearms, despite the\n fact that there was nothing to\n hunt and only a single target\n range within the city. Everything,\n of course, had to be just\n like Earth. That, after all, was\n the purpose of Puerto Pacifico.",
"Pembroke went right on hating\n himself, however, till the\n night he was deposited in a field\n outside of Ensenada, broke but\n happy, with two other itinerant\n types. They separated in San\n Diego, and it was not long before\n Pembroke was explaining to the\n police how he had drifted far\n from the scene of the sinking of\n the\nElena Mia\non a piece of\n wreckage, and had been picked\n up by a Chilean trawler. How he\n had then made his way, with\n much suffering, up the coast to\n California. Two days later, his\n identity established and his circumstances\n again solvent, he was\n headed for Los Angeles to begin\n his save-Earth campaign.\nNow, seated at his battered\n desk in the shabby rented office\n over Lemark's Liquors, Pembroke\n gazed without emotion at\n the two demolished Pacificos that\n lay sprawled one atop the other\n in the corner. His watch said\n one-fifteen. The man from the\n FBI should arrive soon.",
"And that was bad because it\n sounded as if she had been giving\n some womanly thought to the situation.\n A little more of that and\n she might go to the police again,\n this time for vengeance.\n\n\n Twice during his wanderings\n Pembroke had seen the corpses\n of Earthmen being carted out of\n buildings. They had to be Earthmen\n because they bled. Mary Ann\n had admitted that she did not.\n There would be very few Earthmen\n left in Puerto Pacifico, and\n it would be simple enough to locate\n him if he were reported as\n being on the loose. There was\n no out but to do away with Mary\n Ann.",
"\"Sand.\"\n\n\n \"How about that way?\" he\n asked, pointing north. \"And that\n way?\" pointing south.\n\n\n \"More of the same.\"\n\n\n \"Any railroads?\"\n\n\n \"That we ain't got.\"\n\n\n \"Buses? Airlines?\"\n\n\n The kid shook his head.\n\n\n \"Some city.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, it's kinda isolated. A\n lot of ships dock here, though.\"\n\n\n \"All cargo ships, I'll bet. No\n passengers,\" said Pembroke.\n\n\n \"Right,\" said the attendant,\n giving with his perfect smile.\n\n\n \"No getting out of here, is\n there?\"",
"Lacking such loyalties, Pembroke\n adapted quickly to the situation\n in which he found himself\n when he regained consciousness.\n He awoke in a small room in\n what appeared to be a typical\n modern American hotel. The wallet\n in his pocket contained exactly\n what it should, approximately\n three hundred dollars.\n His next thought was of food.\n He left the room and descended\n via the elevator to the restaurant.\n Here he observed that it\n was early afternoon. Ordering\n a full dinner, for he was unusually\n hungry, he began to study the\n others in the restaurant.\n\n\n Many of the faces seemed familiar;\n the crew of the ship,\n probably. He also recognized several\n of the passengers. However,\n he made no attempt to speak to\n them. After his meal, he bought\n a good corona and went for a\n walk. His situation could have\n been any small western American\n seacoast city. He heard the hiss\n of the ocean in the direction the\n afternoon sun was taking. In his\n full-gaited walk, he was soon approaching\n the beach.",
"Now the ship had arrived and\n was to leave shortly. If there was\n any but the most superficial examination,\n Pembroke would no\n doubt be discovered and exterminated.\n But since no one seemed\n concerned about anything but his\n own speech and behavior, he assumed\n that they had all qualified\n in every other respect. The reason\n for transporting Earth People\n to this planet was, of course,\n to apply a corrective to any of\n the Pacificos' aberrant mannerisms\n or articulation. This was\n the polishing up phase.\nPembroke began hobbling toward\n the docks. Almost at once\n he found himself face to face\n with Mary Ann. She smiled happily\n when she recognized him.\nThat\nwas a good thing.\n\n\n \"It is a sign of poor breeding\n to smile at tramps,\" Pembroke\n admonished her in a whisper.\n \"Walk on ahead.\"",
"Opening the desk drawer,\n which was almost empty, Pembroke\n removed an automatic pistol\n fitted with a silencer. Pointing\n it at the amazed customer, he\n fired four .22 caliber longs into\n the narrow chest. Then he made\n a telephone call and sat down to\n wait. He wondered how long it\n would be before his next client\n would arrive.\nThe series of events leading up\n to Pembroke's present occupation\n had commenced on a dismal,\n overcast evening in the South\n Pacific a year earlier. Bound for\n Sydney, two days out of Valparaiso,\n the Colombian tramp\n steamer\nElena Mia\nhad encountered\n a dense greenish fog which\n seemed vaguely redolent of citrus\n trees. Standing on the forward\n deck, Pembroke was one of the\n first to perceive the peculiar odor\n and to spot the immense gray\n hulk wallowing in the murky distance.",
"But the dolls had apparently\n lost interest in him. They got up\n one by one and walked out of the\n bar. Pembroke took his rum and\n tonic and moved over to Spencer's\n booth.\n\n\n \"Okay if I join you?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said the fat man.\n \"Wonder what the hell got into\n those babes?\"\n\n\n \"You said they were perfect.\n They know they're not. You've\n got to be rough with them in this\n town,\" said Pembroke. \"That's\n all they want from us.\"\n\n\n \"Mister, you've been doing\n some thinkin', I can see,\" said\n Spencer, peering at him suspiciously.\n \"Maybe you've figured\n out where we are.\"",
"When she left the hotel at midnight,\n Pembroke was quite sure\n that she understood his plan and\n that she was irrevocably in love\n with him. Tomorrow might bring\n his death, but it might also ensure\n his escape. After forty-two\n years of searching for a passion,\n for a cause, for a loyalty, Frank\n Pembroke had at last found his.\n Earth and the human race that\n peopled it. And Mary Ann would\n help him to save it.\nThe next morning Pembroke\n talked to Valencia about hunting.\n He said that he planned to go\n shooting out on the desert which\n surrounded the city. Valencia\n told him that there were no living\n creatures anywhere but in\n the city. Pembroke said he was\n going out anyway.",
"\"Say, I've just figured out who\n you are,\" the youngster told him.\n \"I'd sure appreciate it if you'd\n give me a little help on my lingo.\n Also, you gas up the car first,\n then try to sell 'em the oil—right?\"\n\n\n \"Right,\" said Pembroke wearily.\n \"What's wrong with your\n lingo? Other than the fact that\n it's not colloquial enough.\"\n\n\n \"Not enough slang, huh? Well,\n I guess I'll have to concentrate\n on that. How about the smile?\"\n\n\n \"Perfect,\" Pembroke told him.\n\n\n \"Yeah?\" said the boy delightedly.\n \"Say, come back again,\n huh? I sure appreciate the help.\n Keep the map.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks. One more thing,\"\n Pembroke said. \"What's over\n that way—outside the city?\"",
"\"No. You just don't belong\n here, in this particular place,\"\n said Pembroke thoughtfully.\n \"You're the wrong type. But they\n couldn't know that ahead of time.\n The way they operate it's a\n pretty hit-or-miss operation. But\n they don't care one bit about us,\n Spencer. Consider the men who\n went down with the ship. That\n was just part of the game.\"\n\n\n \"What the hell are you sayin'?\"\n asked Spencer in disbelief.\n \"You figure\nthey\nsunk the ship?\n Valencia and the waitress and\n the three babes? Ah, come on.\"\n\n\n \"It's what you think that will\n determine what you do, Spencer.\n I suggest you change your attitude;\n play along with them for a\n few days till the picture becomes\n a little clearer to you. We'll talk\n about it again then.\"",
"\"That's for sure,\" the boy said,\n walking away to wait on another\n customer. \"If you don't like the\n place, you've had it.\"\nPembroke returned to the\n hotel. Going to the bar, he recognized\n one of the\nElena Mia's\npaying\n passengers. He was a short,\n rectangular little man in his fifties\n named Spencer. He sat in a\n booth with three young women,\n all lovely, all effusive. The topic\n of the conversation turned out\n to be precisely what Pembroke\n had predicted.\n\n\n \"Well, Louisa, I'd say your\n only fault is the way you keep\n wigglin' your shoulders up 'n'\n down. Why'n'sha try holdin' 'em\n straight?\"\n\n\n \"I thought it made me look\n sexy,\" the redhead said petulantly.",
"She obeyed. He followed. The\n crowd grew thicker. They neared\n the docks and Pembroke saw that\n there were now set up on the\n roped-off wharves small interviewing\n booths. When it was\n their turn, he and Mary Ann\n each went into separate ones.\n Pembroke found himself alone in\n the little room.\n\n\n Then he saw that there was\n another entity in his presence\n confined beneath a glass dome. It\n looked rather like a groundhog\n and had seven fingers on each of\n its six limbs. But it was larger\n and hairier than the glass one\n he had seen at the gift store.\n With four of its limbs it tapped\n on an intricate keyboard in front\n of it.\n\n\n \"What is your name?\" queried\n a metallic voice from a speaker\n on the wall.\n\n\n \"I'm Jerry Newton. Got no\n middle initial,\" Pembroke said in\n a surly voice.",
"Then the explosion had come,\n from far below the waterline,\n and the decks were awash with\n frantic crewmen, officers, and the\n handful of passengers. Only two\n lifeboats were launched before\n the\nElena Mia\nwent down. Pembroke\n was in the second. The\n roar of the sinking ship was the\n last thing he heard for some\n time.",
"Pembroke headed for the\n beach. He knew she invariably\n went there in the afternoon. He\n loitered around the stalls where\n hot dogs and soft drinks were\n sold, leaning against a post in\n the hot sun, hat pulled down over\n his forehead. Then he noticed\n that people all about him were\n talking excitedly. They were discussing\n a ship. It was leaving\n that afternoon. Anyone who\n could pass the interview would\n be sent to Earth.\n\n\n Pembroke had visited the\n docks every day, without being\n able to learn when the great\n exodus would take place. Yet he\n was certain the first lap would be\n by water rather than by spaceship,\n since no one he had talked\n to in the city had ever heard of\n spaceships. In fact, they knew\n very little about their masters."
],
[
"\"Your bet's as good as mine,\"\n said Pembroke. \"It's not Wellington,\n and it's not Brisbane, and\n it's not Long Beach, and it's not\n Tahiti. There are a lot of places\n it's not. But where the hell it is,\n you tell me.\n\n\n \"And, by the way,\" he added,\n \"I hope you like it in Puerto\n Pacifico. Because there isn't any\n place to go from here and there\n isn't any way to get there if\n there were.\"\n\n\n \"Pardon me, gentlemen, but\n I'm Joe Valencia, manager of the\n hotel. I would be very grateful if\n you would give me a few minutes\n of honest criticism.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, no, not you, too,\" groaned\n Spencer. \"Look, Joe, what's\n the gag?\"",
"That was fine. At least he now\n knew where he was. But as he\n left the shop he began checking\n off every west coast state, city,\n town, and inlet. None, to the best\n of his knowledge, was called\n Puerto Pacifico.\n\n\n He headed for the nearest\n service station and asked for a\n map. The attendant gave him one\n which showed the city, but nothing\n beyond.\n\n\n \"Which way is it to San Francisco?\"\n asked Pembroke.\n\n\n \"That all depends on where\n you are,\" the boy returned.\n\n\n \"Okay, then where am I?\"\n\n\n \"Pardon me, there's a customer,\"\n the boy said. \"This is\n Puerto Pacifico.\"\n\n\n Pembroke watched him hurry\n off to service a car with a sense\n of having been given the runaround.\n To his surprise, the boy\n came back a few minutes later\n after servicing the automobile.",
"\"Don't try to go so fast and\n you won't fall down,\" suggested\n Pembroke. \"You're in too much\n of a hurry. Also those fake flowers\n on your blouse make you look\n frumpy.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'm supposed to look\n frumpy,\" the woman retorted.\n \"That's the type of person I am.\n But you can look frumpy and still\n walk natural, can't you? Everyone\n says you can.\"\n\n\n \"Well, they've got a point,\"\n said Pembroke. \"Incidentally,\n just where are we, anyway?\n What city is this?\"\n\n\n \"Puerto Pacifico,\" she told\n him. \"Isn't that a lovely name?\n It means peaceful port. In Spanish.\"",
"Pembroke heard the shots as\n he strolled casually out into the\n brightness of the hotel lobby.\n While he waited for the elevator,\n he saw them carrying the body\n into the street. How many others,\n he wondered, had gone out on\n their backs during their first day\n in Puerto Pacifico?\nPembroke shaved, showered,\n and put on the new suit and shirt\n he had bought. Then he took\n Mary Ann, the woman he had\n met on the beach, out to dinner.\n She would look magnificent even\n when fully clothed, he decided,\n and the pale chartreuse gown she\n wore hardly placed her in that\n category. Her conversation seemed\n considerably more normal\n after the other denizens of\n Puerto Pacifico Pembroke had\n listened to that afternoon.",
"\"With so many beautiful\n women in Puerto Pacifico,\" said\n Pembroke probingly, \"I find it\n hard to understand why there are\n so few children.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, children are decorative,\n aren't they,\" said Mary Ann. \"I\n do wish there were more of\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Why not have a couple of\n your own?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Oh, they're only given to maternal\n types. I'd never get one.\n Anyway, I won't ever marry,\"\n she said. \"I'm the paramour\n type.\"\n\n\n It was obvious that the liquor\n had been having some effect.\n Either that, or she had a basic\n flaw of loquacity that no one else\n had discovered. Pembroke decided\n he would have to cover his\n tracks carefully.\n\n\n \"What type am I?\" he asked.",
"Now the ship had arrived and\n was to leave shortly. If there was\n any but the most superficial examination,\n Pembroke would no\n doubt be discovered and exterminated.\n But since no one seemed\n concerned about anything but his\n own speech and behavior, he assumed\n that they had all qualified\n in every other respect. The reason\n for transporting Earth People\n to this planet was, of course,\n to apply a corrective to any of\n the Pacificos' aberrant mannerisms\n or articulation. This was\n the polishing up phase.\nPembroke began hobbling toward\n the docks. Almost at once\n he found himself face to face\n with Mary Ann. She smiled happily\n when she recognized him.\nThat\nwas a good thing.\n\n\n \"It is a sign of poor breeding\n to smile at tramps,\" Pembroke\n admonished her in a whisper.\n \"Walk on ahead.\"",
"And that was bad because it\n sounded as if she had been giving\n some womanly thought to the situation.\n A little more of that and\n she might go to the police again,\n this time for vengeance.\n\n\n Twice during his wanderings\n Pembroke had seen the corpses\n of Earthmen being carted out of\n buildings. They had to be Earthmen\n because they bled. Mary Ann\n had admitted that she did not.\n There would be very few Earthmen\n left in Puerto Pacifico, and\n it would be simple enough to locate\n him if he were reported as\n being on the loose. There was\n no out but to do away with Mary\n Ann.",
"Pembroke went right on hating\n himself, however, till the\n night he was deposited in a field\n outside of Ensenada, broke but\n happy, with two other itinerant\n types. They separated in San\n Diego, and it was not long before\n Pembroke was explaining to the\n police how he had drifted far\n from the scene of the sinking of\n the\nElena Mia\non a piece of\n wreckage, and had been picked\n up by a Chilean trawler. How he\n had then made his way, with\n much suffering, up the coast to\n California. Two days later, his\n identity established and his circumstances\n again solvent, he was\n headed for Los Angeles to begin\n his save-Earth campaign.\nNow, seated at his battered\n desk in the shabby rented office\n over Lemark's Liquors, Pembroke\n gazed without emotion at\n the two demolished Pacificos that\n lay sprawled one atop the other\n in the corner. His watch said\n one-fifteen. The man from the\n FBI should arrive soon.",
"He picked up Mary Ann at her\n apartment and together they\n went to a sporting goods store.\n As he guessed there was a goodly\n selection of firearms, despite the\n fact that there was nothing to\n hunt and only a single target\n range within the city. Everything,\n of course, had to be just\n like Earth. That, after all, was\n the purpose of Puerto Pacifico.",
"But the dolls had apparently\n lost interest in him. They got up\n one by one and walked out of the\n bar. Pembroke took his rum and\n tonic and moved over to Spencer's\n booth.\n\n\n \"Okay if I join you?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said the fat man.\n \"Wonder what the hell got into\n those babes?\"\n\n\n \"You said they were perfect.\n They know they're not. You've\n got to be rough with them in this\n town,\" said Pembroke. \"That's\n all they want from us.\"\n\n\n \"Mister, you've been doing\n some thinkin', I can see,\" said\n Spencer, peering at him suspiciously.\n \"Maybe you've figured\n out where we are.\"",
"Lacking such loyalties, Pembroke\n adapted quickly to the situation\n in which he found himself\n when he regained consciousness.\n He awoke in a small room in\n what appeared to be a typical\n modern American hotel. The wallet\n in his pocket contained exactly\n what it should, approximately\n three hundred dollars.\n His next thought was of food.\n He left the room and descended\n via the elevator to the restaurant.\n Here he observed that it\n was early afternoon. Ordering\n a full dinner, for he was unusually\n hungry, he began to study the\n others in the restaurant.\n\n\n Many of the faces seemed familiar;\n the crew of the ship,\n probably. He also recognized several\n of the passengers. However,\n he made no attempt to speak to\n them. After his meal, he bought\n a good corona and went for a\n walk. His situation could have\n been any small western American\n seacoast city. He heard the hiss\n of the ocean in the direction the\n afternoon sun was taking. In his\n full-gaited walk, he was soon approaching\n the beach.",
"\"Sand.\"\n\n\n \"How about that way?\" he\n asked, pointing north. \"And that\n way?\" pointing south.\n\n\n \"More of the same.\"\n\n\n \"Any railroads?\"\n\n\n \"That we ain't got.\"\n\n\n \"Buses? Airlines?\"\n\n\n The kid shook his head.\n\n\n \"Some city.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, it's kinda isolated. A\n lot of ships dock here, though.\"\n\n\n \"All cargo ships, I'll bet. No\n passengers,\" said Pembroke.\n\n\n \"Right,\" said the attendant,\n giving with his perfect smile.\n\n\n \"No getting out of here, is\n there?\"",
"Opening the desk drawer,\n which was almost empty, Pembroke\n removed an automatic pistol\n fitted with a silencer. Pointing\n it at the amazed customer, he\n fired four .22 caliber longs into\n the narrow chest. Then he made\n a telephone call and sat down to\n wait. He wondered how long it\n would be before his next client\n would arrive.\nThe series of events leading up\n to Pembroke's present occupation\n had commenced on a dismal,\n overcast evening in the South\n Pacific a year earlier. Bound for\n Sydney, two days out of Valparaiso,\n the Colombian tramp\n steamer\nElena Mia\nhad encountered\n a dense greenish fog which\n seemed vaguely redolent of citrus\n trees. Standing on the forward\n deck, Pembroke was one of the\n first to perceive the peculiar odor\n and to spot the immense gray\n hulk wallowing in the murky distance.",
"THE PERFECTIONISTS\nBy ARNOLD CASTLE\nILLUSTRATED by SUMMERS\nIs there something wrong with you?\n Do you fail to fit in with your group?\n Nervous, anxious, ill-at-ease? Happy\n about it? Lucky you!\nFrank Pembroke\n sat behind\n the desk of his shabby\n little office over Lemark's Liquors\n in downtown Los Angeles and\n waited for his first customer. He\n had been in business for a week\n and as yet had had no callers.\n Therefore, it was with a mingled\n sense of excitement and satisfaction\n that he greeted the tall,\n dark, smooth-faced figure that\n came up the stairs and into the\n office shortly before noon.\n\n\n \"Good day, sir,\" said Pembroke\n with an amiable smile. \"I\n see my advertisement has interested\n you. Please stand in that\n corner for just a moment.\"",
"\"You are newcomers, Mr.\n Spencer,\" Valencia explained.\n \"You are therefore in an excellent\n position to point out our\n faults as you see them.\"\n\n\n \"Well, so what?\" demanded\n Spencer. \"I've got more important\n things to do than to worry\n about your troubles. You look\n okay to me.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Valencia,\" said Pembroke.\n \"I've noticed that you\n walk with a very slight limp. If\n you have a bad leg, I should\n think you would do better to develop\n a more pronounced limp.\n Otherwise, you may appear to\n be self-conscious about it.\"\nSpencer opened his mouth to\n protest, but saw with amazement\n that it was exactly this that\n Valencia was seeking. Pembroke\n was amused at his companion's\n reaction but observed that Spencer\n still failed to see the point.",
"He would be out of business\n soon, once the FBI agent had got\n there. Pembroke was only in it to\n get the proof he would need to\n convince people of the truth of\n his tale. But in the meantime he\n allowed himself to admire the\n clipping of the newspaper ad he\n had run in all the Los Angeles\n papers for the past week. The\n little ad that had saved mankind\n from God-knew-what insidious\n menace. It read:\nARE YOU IMPERFECT?\nLET DR. VON SCHUBERT POINT OUT\n\n YOUR FLAWS\nIT IS HIS GOAL TO MAKE YOU THE",
"After eating they danced for\n an hour, had a few more drinks,\n then went to Pembroke's room.\n He still knew nothing about her\n and had almost exhausted his\n critical capabilities, but not once\n had she become annoyed with\n him. She seemed to devour every\n factual point of imperfection\n about herself that Pembroke\n brought to her attention. And,\n fantastically enough, she actually\n appeared to have overcome every\n little imperfection he had been\n able to communicate to her.\n\n\n It was in the privacy of his\n room that Pembroke became\n aware of just how perfect, physically,\n Mary Ann was. Too perfect.\n No freckles or moles anywhere\n on the visible surface of\n her brown skin, which was more\n than a mere sampling. Furthermore,\n her face and body were\n meticulously symmetrical. And\n she seemed to be wholly ambidextrous.",
"\"Hell, no. But some poor\n punk's sure red in the face, I'll\n bet,\" the man-about-town said\n with a chuckle. \"Those high-strung\n paramour types always\n raising a ruckus. They never do\n pass the interview. Don't know\n why they even make 'em.\"\n\n\n Suddenly Mary Ann was quiet.\n\n\n \"Ambulance squad,\" Pembroke's\n companion explained.\n \"They'll take her off to the buggy\n house for a few days and bring\n her out fresh and ignorant as the\n day she was assembled. Don't\n know why they keep making 'em,\n as I say. But I guess there's a\n call for that type up there on\n Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I reckon there is at\n that,\" said Pembroke, snickering\n again as he moved away from the\n other. \"And why not? Hey?\n Why not?\"",
"When she left the hotel at midnight,\n Pembroke was quite sure\n that she understood his plan and\n that she was irrevocably in love\n with him. Tomorrow might bring\n his death, but it might also ensure\n his escape. After forty-two\n years of searching for a passion,\n for a cause, for a loyalty, Frank\n Pembroke had at last found his.\n Earth and the human race that\n peopled it. And Mary Ann would\n help him to save it.\nThe next morning Pembroke\n talked to Valencia about hunting.\n He said that he planned to go\n shooting out on the desert which\n surrounded the city. Valencia\n told him that there were no living\n creatures anywhere but in\n the city. Pembroke said he was\n going out anyway.",
"\"No. You just don't belong\n here, in this particular place,\"\n said Pembroke thoughtfully.\n \"You're the wrong type. But they\n couldn't know that ahead of time.\n The way they operate it's a\n pretty hit-or-miss operation. But\n they don't care one bit about us,\n Spencer. Consider the men who\n went down with the ship. That\n was just part of the game.\"\n\n\n \"What the hell are you sayin'?\"\n asked Spencer in disbelief.\n \"You figure\nthey\nsunk the ship?\n Valencia and the waitress and\n the three babes? Ah, come on.\"\n\n\n \"It's what you think that will\n determine what you do, Spencer.\n I suggest you change your attitude;\n play along with them for a\n few days till the picture becomes\n a little clearer to you. We'll talk\n about it again then.\""
],
[
"Pembroke heard the shots as\n he strolled casually out into the\n brightness of the hotel lobby.\n While he waited for the elevator,\n he saw them carrying the body\n into the street. How many others,\n he wondered, had gone out on\n their backs during their first day\n in Puerto Pacifico?\nPembroke shaved, showered,\n and put on the new suit and shirt\n he had bought. Then he took\n Mary Ann, the woman he had\n met on the beach, out to dinner.\n She would look magnificent even\n when fully clothed, he decided,\n and the pale chartreuse gown she\n wore hardly placed her in that\n category. Her conversation seemed\n considerably more normal\n after the other denizens of\n Puerto Pacifico Pembroke had\n listened to that afternoon.",
"\"Don't try to go so fast and\n you won't fall down,\" suggested\n Pembroke. \"You're in too much\n of a hurry. Also those fake flowers\n on your blouse make you look\n frumpy.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'm supposed to look\n frumpy,\" the woman retorted.\n \"That's the type of person I am.\n But you can look frumpy and still\n walk natural, can't you? Everyone\n says you can.\"\n\n\n \"Well, they've got a point,\"\n said Pembroke. \"Incidentally,\n just where are we, anyway?\n What city is this?\"\n\n\n \"Puerto Pacifico,\" she told\n him. \"Isn't that a lovely name?\n It means peaceful port. In Spanish.\"",
"That was fine. At least he now\n knew where he was. But as he\n left the shop he began checking\n off every west coast state, city,\n town, and inlet. None, to the best\n of his knowledge, was called\n Puerto Pacifico.\n\n\n He headed for the nearest\n service station and asked for a\n map. The attendant gave him one\n which showed the city, but nothing\n beyond.\n\n\n \"Which way is it to San Francisco?\"\n asked Pembroke.\n\n\n \"That all depends on where\n you are,\" the boy returned.\n\n\n \"Okay, then where am I?\"\n\n\n \"Pardon me, there's a customer,\"\n the boy said. \"This is\n Puerto Pacifico.\"\n\n\n Pembroke watched him hurry\n off to service a car with a sense\n of having been given the runaround.\n To his surprise, the boy\n came back a few minutes later\n after servicing the automobile.",
"\"Your bet's as good as mine,\"\n said Pembroke. \"It's not Wellington,\n and it's not Brisbane, and\n it's not Long Beach, and it's not\n Tahiti. There are a lot of places\n it's not. But where the hell it is,\n you tell me.\n\n\n \"And, by the way,\" he added,\n \"I hope you like it in Puerto\n Pacifico. Because there isn't any\n place to go from here and there\n isn't any way to get there if\n there were.\"\n\n\n \"Pardon me, gentlemen, but\n I'm Joe Valencia, manager of the\n hotel. I would be very grateful if\n you would give me a few minutes\n of honest criticism.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, no, not you, too,\" groaned\n Spencer. \"Look, Joe, what's\n the gag?\"",
"Pembroke went right on hating\n himself, however, till the\n night he was deposited in a field\n outside of Ensenada, broke but\n happy, with two other itinerant\n types. They separated in San\n Diego, and it was not long before\n Pembroke was explaining to the\n police how he had drifted far\n from the scene of the sinking of\n the\nElena Mia\non a piece of\n wreckage, and had been picked\n up by a Chilean trawler. How he\n had then made his way, with\n much suffering, up the coast to\n California. Two days later, his\n identity established and his circumstances\n again solvent, he was\n headed for Los Angeles to begin\n his save-Earth campaign.\nNow, seated at his battered\n desk in the shabby rented office\n over Lemark's Liquors, Pembroke\n gazed without emotion at\n the two demolished Pacificos that\n lay sprawled one atop the other\n in the corner. His watch said\n one-fifteen. The man from the\n FBI should arrive soon.",
"\"With so many beautiful\n women in Puerto Pacifico,\" said\n Pembroke probingly, \"I find it\n hard to understand why there are\n so few children.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, children are decorative,\n aren't they,\" said Mary Ann. \"I\n do wish there were more of\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Why not have a couple of\n your own?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Oh, they're only given to maternal\n types. I'd never get one.\n Anyway, I won't ever marry,\"\n she said. \"I'm the paramour\n type.\"\n\n\n It was obvious that the liquor\n had been having some effect.\n Either that, or she had a basic\n flaw of loquacity that no one else\n had discovered. Pembroke decided\n he would have to cover his\n tracks carefully.\n\n\n \"What type am I?\" he asked.",
"Pembroke came as close to being\n a professional adventurer as\n one can in these days of regimented\n travel, organized peril,\n and political restriction. He had\n made for himself a substantial\n fortune through speculation in a\n great variety of properties, real\n and otherwise. Life had given\n him much and demanded little,\n which was perhaps the reason\n for his restiveness.\nLoyalty to person or to people\n was a trait Pembroke had never\n recognized in himself, nor had it\n ever been expected of him. And\n yet he greatly envied those\n staunch patriots and lovers who\n could find it in themselves to\n elevate the glory and safety of\n others above that of themselves.",
"And that was bad because it\n sounded as if she had been giving\n some womanly thought to the situation.\n A little more of that and\n she might go to the police again,\n this time for vengeance.\n\n\n Twice during his wanderings\n Pembroke had seen the corpses\n of Earthmen being carted out of\n buildings. They had to be Earthmen\n because they bled. Mary Ann\n had admitted that she did not.\n There would be very few Earthmen\n left in Puerto Pacifico, and\n it would be simple enough to locate\n him if he were reported as\n being on the loose. There was\n no out but to do away with Mary\n Ann.",
"Now the ship had arrived and\n was to leave shortly. If there was\n any but the most superficial examination,\n Pembroke would no\n doubt be discovered and exterminated.\n But since no one seemed\n concerned about anything but his\n own speech and behavior, he assumed\n that they had all qualified\n in every other respect. The reason\n for transporting Earth People\n to this planet was, of course,\n to apply a corrective to any of\n the Pacificos' aberrant mannerisms\n or articulation. This was\n the polishing up phase.\nPembroke began hobbling toward\n the docks. Almost at once\n he found himself face to face\n with Mary Ann. She smiled happily\n when she recognized him.\nThat\nwas a good thing.\n\n\n \"It is a sign of poor breeding\n to smile at tramps,\" Pembroke\n admonished her in a whisper.\n \"Walk on ahead.\"",
"Lacking such loyalties, Pembroke\n adapted quickly to the situation\n in which he found himself\n when he regained consciousness.\n He awoke in a small room in\n what appeared to be a typical\n modern American hotel. The wallet\n in his pocket contained exactly\n what it should, approximately\n three hundred dollars.\n His next thought was of food.\n He left the room and descended\n via the elevator to the restaurant.\n Here he observed that it\n was early afternoon. Ordering\n a full dinner, for he was unusually\n hungry, he began to study the\n others in the restaurant.\n\n\n Many of the faces seemed familiar;\n the crew of the ship,\n probably. He also recognized several\n of the passengers. However,\n he made no attempt to speak to\n them. After his meal, he bought\n a good corona and went for a\n walk. His situation could have\n been any small western American\n seacoast city. He heard the hiss\n of the ocean in the direction the\n afternoon sun was taking. In his\n full-gaited walk, he was soon approaching\n the beach.",
"Pembroke headed for the\n beach. He knew she invariably\n went there in the afternoon. He\n loitered around the stalls where\n hot dogs and soft drinks were\n sold, leaning against a post in\n the hot sun, hat pulled down over\n his forehead. Then he noticed\n that people all about him were\n talking excitedly. They were discussing\n a ship. It was leaving\n that afternoon. Anyone who\n could pass the interview would\n be sent to Earth.\n\n\n Pembroke had visited the\n docks every day, without being\n able to learn when the great\n exodus would take place. Yet he\n was certain the first lap would be\n by water rather than by spaceship,\n since no one he had talked\n to in the city had ever heard of\n spaceships. In fact, they knew\n very little about their masters.",
"When she left the hotel at midnight,\n Pembroke was quite sure\n that she understood his plan and\n that she was irrevocably in love\n with him. Tomorrow might bring\n his death, but it might also ensure\n his escape. After forty-two\n years of searching for a passion,\n for a cause, for a loyalty, Frank\n Pembroke had at last found his.\n Earth and the human race that\n peopled it. And Mary Ann would\n help him to save it.\nThe next morning Pembroke\n talked to Valencia about hunting.\n He said that he planned to go\n shooting out on the desert which\n surrounded the city. Valencia\n told him that there were no living\n creatures anywhere but in\n the city. Pembroke said he was\n going out anyway.",
"\"Sand.\"\n\n\n \"How about that way?\" he\n asked, pointing north. \"And that\n way?\" pointing south.\n\n\n \"More of the same.\"\n\n\n \"Any railroads?\"\n\n\n \"That we ain't got.\"\n\n\n \"Buses? Airlines?\"\n\n\n The kid shook his head.\n\n\n \"Some city.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, it's kinda isolated. A\n lot of ships dock here, though.\"\n\n\n \"All cargo ships, I'll bet. No\n passengers,\" said Pembroke.\n\n\n \"Right,\" said the attendant,\n giving with his perfect smile.\n\n\n \"No getting out of here, is\n there?\"",
"Opening the desk drawer,\n which was almost empty, Pembroke\n removed an automatic pistol\n fitted with a silencer. Pointing\n it at the amazed customer, he\n fired four .22 caliber longs into\n the narrow chest. Then he made\n a telephone call and sat down to\n wait. He wondered how long it\n would be before his next client\n would arrive.\nThe series of events leading up\n to Pembroke's present occupation\n had commenced on a dismal,\n overcast evening in the South\n Pacific a year earlier. Bound for\n Sydney, two days out of Valparaiso,\n the Colombian tramp\n steamer\nElena Mia\nhad encountered\n a dense greenish fog which\n seemed vaguely redolent of citrus\n trees. Standing on the forward\n deck, Pembroke was one of the\n first to perceive the peculiar odor\n and to spot the immense gray\n hulk wallowing in the murky distance.",
"He picked up Mary Ann at her\n apartment and together they\n went to a sporting goods store.\n As he guessed there was a goodly\n selection of firearms, despite the\n fact that there was nothing to\n hunt and only a single target\n range within the city. Everything,\n of course, had to be just\n like Earth. That, after all, was\n the purpose of Puerto Pacifico.",
"\"No. You just don't belong\n here, in this particular place,\"\n said Pembroke thoughtfully.\n \"You're the wrong type. But they\n couldn't know that ahead of time.\n The way they operate it's a\n pretty hit-or-miss operation. But\n they don't care one bit about us,\n Spencer. Consider the men who\n went down with the ship. That\n was just part of the game.\"\n\n\n \"What the hell are you sayin'?\"\n asked Spencer in disbelief.\n \"You figure\nthey\nsunk the ship?\n Valencia and the waitress and\n the three babes? Ah, come on.\"\n\n\n \"It's what you think that will\n determine what you do, Spencer.\n I suggest you change your attitude;\n play along with them for a\n few days till the picture becomes\n a little clearer to you. We'll talk\n about it again then.\"",
"Then the explosion had come,\n from far below the waterline,\n and the decks were awash with\n frantic crewmen, officers, and the\n handful of passengers. Only two\n lifeboats were launched before\n the\nElena Mia\nwent down. Pembroke\n was in the second. The\n roar of the sinking ship was the\n last thing he heard for some\n time.",
"Now Pembroke had himself to\n worry about. The first step was\n to enter smoothly into the new\n life he had planned. It wouldn't\n be so comfortable as the previous\n one, but should be considerably\n safer. He headed slowly for the\n \"old\" part of town, aging his\n clothes against buildings and\n fences as he walked. He had already\n torn the collar of the shirt\n and discarded his belt. By morning\n his beard would grow to\n blacken his face. And he would\n look weary and hungry and aimless.\n Only the last would be a deception.\nTwo weeks later Pembroke\n phoned Mary Ann. The police\n had accepted her story without\n even checking. And when, when\n would she be seeing him again?\n He had aroused her passion and\n no amount of long-distance love\n could requite it. Soon, he assured\n her, soon.\n\n\n \"Because, after all, you do owe\n me something,\" she added.",
"\"That's for sure,\" the boy said,\n walking away to wait on another\n customer. \"If you don't like the\n place, you've had it.\"\nPembroke returned to the\n hotel. Going to the bar, he recognized\n one of the\nElena Mia's\npaying\n passengers. He was a short,\n rectangular little man in his fifties\n named Spencer. He sat in a\n booth with three young women,\n all lovely, all effusive. The topic\n of the conversation turned out\n to be precisely what Pembroke\n had predicted.\n\n\n \"Well, Louisa, I'd say your\n only fault is the way you keep\n wigglin' your shoulders up 'n'\n down. Why'n'sha try holdin' 'em\n straight?\"\n\n\n \"I thought it made me look\n sexy,\" the redhead said petulantly.",
"But the dolls had apparently\n lost interest in him. They got up\n one by one and walked out of the\n bar. Pembroke took his rum and\n tonic and moved over to Spencer's\n booth.\n\n\n \"Okay if I join you?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said the fat man.\n \"Wonder what the hell got into\n those babes?\"\n\n\n \"You said they were perfect.\n They know they're not. You've\n got to be rough with them in this\n town,\" said Pembroke. \"That's\n all they want from us.\"\n\n\n \"Mister, you've been doing\n some thinkin', I can see,\" said\n Spencer, peering at him suspiciously.\n \"Maybe you've figured\n out where we are.\""
],
[
"Pembroke rose and started out\n of the bar. A policeman entered\n and walked directly to Spencer's\n table. Loitering at the juke box,\n Pembroke overheard the conversation.\n\n\n \"You Spencer?\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" said the fat\n man sullenly.\n\n\n \"What don't you like about\n me? The\ntruth\n, buddy.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, hell! Nothin' wrong\n with you at all, and nothin'll\n make me say there is,\" said Spencer.\n\n\n \"You're the guy, all right. Too\n bad, Mac,\" said the cop.",
"\"No. You just don't belong\n here, in this particular place,\"\n said Pembroke thoughtfully.\n \"You're the wrong type. But they\n couldn't know that ahead of time.\n The way they operate it's a\n pretty hit-or-miss operation. But\n they don't care one bit about us,\n Spencer. Consider the men who\n went down with the ship. That\n was just part of the game.\"\n\n\n \"What the hell are you sayin'?\"\n asked Spencer in disbelief.\n \"You figure\nthey\nsunk the ship?\n Valencia and the waitress and\n the three babes? Ah, come on.\"\n\n\n \"It's what you think that will\n determine what you do, Spencer.\n I suggest you change your attitude;\n play along with them for a\n few days till the picture becomes\n a little clearer to you. We'll talk\n about it again then.\"",
"But the dolls had apparently\n lost interest in him. They got up\n one by one and walked out of the\n bar. Pembroke took his rum and\n tonic and moved over to Spencer's\n booth.\n\n\n \"Okay if I join you?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said the fat man.\n \"Wonder what the hell got into\n those babes?\"\n\n\n \"You said they were perfect.\n They know they're not. You've\n got to be rough with them in this\n town,\" said Pembroke. \"That's\n all they want from us.\"\n\n\n \"Mister, you've been doing\n some thinkin', I can see,\" said\n Spencer, peering at him suspiciously.\n \"Maybe you've figured\n out where we are.\"",
"\"Also, there is a certain effeminateness\n in the way in which\n you speak,\" said Pembroke. \"Try\n to be a little more direct, a little\n more brusque. Speak in a monotone.\n It will make you more acceptable.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you so much,\" said the\n manager. \"There is much food\n for thought in what you have\n said, Mr. Pembroke. However,\n Mr. Spencer, your value has failed\n to prove itself. You have only\n yourself to blame. Cooperation is\n all we require of you.\"\n\n\n Valencia left. Spencer ordered\n another martini. Neither he nor\n Pembroke spoke for several minutes.\n\n\n \"Somebody's crazy around\n here,\" the fat man muttered\n after a few moments. \"Is it me,\n Frank?\"",
"By noon they had rented a\n jeep and were well away from\n the city. Pembroke and Mary\n Ann took turns firing at the paper\n targets they had purchased. At\n twilight they headed back to the\n city. On the outskirts, where the\n sand and soil were mixed and no\n footprints would be left, Pembroke\n hopped off. Mary Ann\n would go straight to the police\n and report that Pembroke had attacked\n her and that she had shot\n him. If necessary, she would conduct\n the authorities to the place\n where they had been target\n shooting, but would be unable to\n locate the spot where she had\n buried the body. Why had she\n buried it? Because at first she\n was not going to report the incident.\n She was frightened. It\n was not airtight, but there would\n probably be no further investigation.\n And they certainly would\n not prosecute Mary Ann for killing\n an Earthman.",
"When she left the hotel at midnight,\n Pembroke was quite sure\n that she understood his plan and\n that she was irrevocably in love\n with him. Tomorrow might bring\n his death, but it might also ensure\n his escape. After forty-two\n years of searching for a passion,\n for a cause, for a loyalty, Frank\n Pembroke had at last found his.\n Earth and the human race that\n peopled it. And Mary Ann would\n help him to save it.\nThe next morning Pembroke\n talked to Valencia about hunting.\n He said that he planned to go\n shooting out on the desert which\n surrounded the city. Valencia\n told him that there were no living\n creatures anywhere but in\n the city. Pembroke said he was\n going out anyway.",
"And that was bad because it\n sounded as if she had been giving\n some womanly thought to the situation.\n A little more of that and\n she might go to the police again,\n this time for vengeance.\n\n\n Twice during his wanderings\n Pembroke had seen the corpses\n of Earthmen being carted out of\n buildings. They had to be Earthmen\n because they bled. Mary Ann\n had admitted that she did not.\n There would be very few Earthmen\n left in Puerto Pacifico, and\n it would be simple enough to locate\n him if he were reported as\n being on the loose. There was\n no out but to do away with Mary\n Ann.",
"There were footsteps on the\n stairs for the third time that\n day. Not the brisk, efficient steps\n of a federal official, but the hesitant,\n self-conscious steps of a\n junior clerk type.\n\n\n Pembroke rose as the young\n man appeared at the door. His\n face was smooth, unpimpled,\n clean-shaven, without sweat on a\n warm summer afternoon.\n\n\n \"Are you Dr. Von Schubert?\"\n the newcomer asked, peering into\n the room. \"You see, I've got a\n problem—\"\n\n\n The four shots from Pembroke's\n pistol solved his problem\n effectively. Pembroke tossed his\n third victim onto the pile, then\n opened a can of lager, quaffing\n it appreciatively. Seating himself\n once more, he leaned back in\n the chair, both feet upon the\n desk.",
"\"You are newcomers, Mr.\n Spencer,\" Valencia explained.\n \"You are therefore in an excellent\n position to point out our\n faults as you see them.\"\n\n\n \"Well, so what?\" demanded\n Spencer. \"I've got more important\n things to do than to worry\n about your troubles. You look\n okay to me.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Valencia,\" said Pembroke.\n \"I've noticed that you\n walk with a very slight limp. If\n you have a bad leg, I should\n think you would do better to develop\n a more pronounced limp.\n Otherwise, you may appear to\n be self-conscious about it.\"\nSpencer opened his mouth to\n protest, but saw with amazement\n that it was exactly this that\n Valencia was seeking. Pembroke\n was amused at his companion's\n reaction but observed that Spencer\n still failed to see the point.",
"\"Just be yourself, gal,\" Spencer\n drawled, jabbing her intimately\n with a fat elbow, \"and\n you'll qualify.\"\n\n\n \"Me, me,\" the blonde with a\n feather cut was insisting. \"What\n is wrong with me?\"\n\n\n \"You're perfect, sweetheart,\"\n he told her, taking her hand.\n\n\n \"Ah, come on,\" she pleaded.\n \"Everyone tells me I chew gum\n with my mouth open. Don't you\n hate that?\"\n\n\n \"Naw, that's part of your\n charm,\" Spencer assured her.\n\n\n \"How 'bout me, sugar,\" asked\n the girl with the coal black hair.\n\n\n \"Ah, you're perfect, too. You\n are all perfect. I've never seen\n such a collection of dolls as parade\n around this here city.\n C'mon, kids—how 'bout another\n round?\"",
"Pembroke went right on hating\n himself, however, till the\n night he was deposited in a field\n outside of Ensenada, broke but\n happy, with two other itinerant\n types. They separated in San\n Diego, and it was not long before\n Pembroke was explaining to the\n police how he had drifted far\n from the scene of the sinking of\n the\nElena Mia\non a piece of\n wreckage, and had been picked\n up by a Chilean trawler. How he\n had then made his way, with\n much suffering, up the coast to\n California. Two days later, his\n identity established and his circumstances\n again solvent, he was\n headed for Los Angeles to begin\n his save-Earth campaign.\nNow, seated at his battered\n desk in the shabby rented office\n over Lemark's Liquors, Pembroke\n gazed without emotion at\n the two demolished Pacificos that\n lay sprawled one atop the other\n in the corner. His watch said\n one-fifteen. The man from the\n FBI should arrive soon.",
"Pembroke heard the shots as\n he strolled casually out into the\n brightness of the hotel lobby.\n While he waited for the elevator,\n he saw them carrying the body\n into the street. How many others,\n he wondered, had gone out on\n their backs during their first day\n in Puerto Pacifico?\nPembroke shaved, showered,\n and put on the new suit and shirt\n he had bought. Then he took\n Mary Ann, the woman he had\n met on the beach, out to dinner.\n She would look magnificent even\n when fully clothed, he decided,\n and the pale chartreuse gown she\n wore hardly placed her in that\n category. Her conversation seemed\n considerably more normal\n after the other denizens of\n Puerto Pacifico Pembroke had\n listened to that afternoon.",
"\"That's for sure,\" the boy said,\n walking away to wait on another\n customer. \"If you don't like the\n place, you've had it.\"\nPembroke returned to the\n hotel. Going to the bar, he recognized\n one of the\nElena Mia's\npaying\n passengers. He was a short,\n rectangular little man in his fifties\n named Spencer. He sat in a\n booth with three young women,\n all lovely, all effusive. The topic\n of the conversation turned out\n to be precisely what Pembroke\n had predicted.\n\n\n \"Well, Louisa, I'd say your\n only fault is the way you keep\n wigglin' your shoulders up 'n'\n down. Why'n'sha try holdin' 'em\n straight?\"\n\n\n \"I thought it made me look\n sexy,\" the redhead said petulantly.",
"He picked up Mary Ann at her\n apartment and together they\n went to a sporting goods store.\n As he guessed there was a goodly\n selection of firearms, despite the\n fact that there was nothing to\n hunt and only a single target\n range within the city. Everything,\n of course, had to be just\n like Earth. That, after all, was\n the purpose of Puerto Pacifico.",
"He would be out of business\n soon, once the FBI agent had got\n there. Pembroke was only in it to\n get the proof he would need to\n convince people of the truth of\n his tale. But in the meantime he\n allowed himself to admire the\n clipping of the newspaper ad he\n had run in all the Los Angeles\n papers for the past week. The\n little ad that had saved mankind\n from God-knew-what insidious\n menace. It read:\nARE YOU IMPERFECT?\nLET DR. VON SCHUBERT POINT OUT\n\n YOUR FLAWS\nIT IS HIS GOAL TO MAKE YOU THE",
"\"Your bet's as good as mine,\"\n said Pembroke. \"It's not Wellington,\n and it's not Brisbane, and\n it's not Long Beach, and it's not\n Tahiti. There are a lot of places\n it's not. But where the hell it is,\n you tell me.\n\n\n \"And, by the way,\" he added,\n \"I hope you like it in Puerto\n Pacifico. Because there isn't any\n place to go from here and there\n isn't any way to get there if\n there were.\"\n\n\n \"Pardon me, gentlemen, but\n I'm Joe Valencia, manager of the\n hotel. I would be very grateful if\n you would give me a few minutes\n of honest criticism.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, no, not you, too,\" groaned\n Spencer. \"Look, Joe, what's\n the gag?\"",
"Now Pembroke had himself to\n worry about. The first step was\n to enter smoothly into the new\n life he had planned. It wouldn't\n be so comfortable as the previous\n one, but should be considerably\n safer. He headed slowly for the\n \"old\" part of town, aging his\n clothes against buildings and\n fences as he walked. He had already\n torn the collar of the shirt\n and discarded his belt. By morning\n his beard would grow to\n blacken his face. And he would\n look weary and hungry and aimless.\n Only the last would be a deception.\nTwo weeks later Pembroke\n phoned Mary Ann. The police\n had accepted her story without\n even checking. And when, when\n would she be seeing him again?\n He had aroused her passion and\n no amount of long-distance love\n could requite it. Soon, he assured\n her, soon.\n\n\n \"Because, after all, you do owe\n me something,\" she added.",
"Opening the desk drawer,\n which was almost empty, Pembroke\n removed an automatic pistol\n fitted with a silencer. Pointing\n it at the amazed customer, he\n fired four .22 caliber longs into\n the narrow chest. Then he made\n a telephone call and sat down to\n wait. He wondered how long it\n would be before his next client\n would arrive.\nThe series of events leading up\n to Pembroke's present occupation\n had commenced on a dismal,\n overcast evening in the South\n Pacific a year earlier. Bound for\n Sydney, two days out of Valparaiso,\n the Colombian tramp\n steamer\nElena Mia\nhad encountered\n a dense greenish fog which\n seemed vaguely redolent of citrus\n trees. Standing on the forward\n deck, Pembroke was one of the\n first to perceive the peculiar odor\n and to spot the immense gray\n hulk wallowing in the murky distance.",
"\"Hell, no. But some poor\n punk's sure red in the face, I'll\n bet,\" the man-about-town said\n with a chuckle. \"Those high-strung\n paramour types always\n raising a ruckus. They never do\n pass the interview. Don't know\n why they even make 'em.\"\n\n\n Suddenly Mary Ann was quiet.\n\n\n \"Ambulance squad,\" Pembroke's\n companion explained.\n \"They'll take her off to the buggy\n house for a few days and bring\n her out fresh and ignorant as the\n day she was assembled. Don't\n know why they keep making 'em,\n as I say. But I guess there's a\n call for that type up there on\n Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I reckon there is at\n that,\" said Pembroke, snickering\n again as he moved away from the\n other. \"And why not? Hey?\n Why not?\"",
"Now the ship had arrived and\n was to leave shortly. If there was\n any but the most superficial examination,\n Pembroke would no\n doubt be discovered and exterminated.\n But since no one seemed\n concerned about anything but his\n own speech and behavior, he assumed\n that they had all qualified\n in every other respect. The reason\n for transporting Earth People\n to this planet was, of course,\n to apply a corrective to any of\n the Pacificos' aberrant mannerisms\n or articulation. This was\n the polishing up phase.\nPembroke began hobbling toward\n the docks. Almost at once\n he found himself face to face\n with Mary Ann. She smiled happily\n when she recognized him.\nThat\nwas a good thing.\n\n\n \"It is a sign of poor breeding\n to smile at tramps,\" Pembroke\n admonished her in a whisper.\n \"Walk on ahead.\""
],
[
"She obeyed. He followed. The\n crowd grew thicker. They neared\n the docks and Pembroke saw that\n there were now set up on the\n roped-off wharves small interviewing\n booths. When it was\n their turn, he and Mary Ann\n each went into separate ones.\n Pembroke found himself alone in\n the little room.\n\n\n Then he saw that there was\n another entity in his presence\n confined beneath a glass dome. It\n looked rather like a groundhog\n and had seven fingers on each of\n its six limbs. But it was larger\n and hairier than the glass one\n he had seen at the gift store.\n With four of its limbs it tapped\n on an intricate keyboard in front\n of it.\n\n\n \"What is your name?\" queried\n a metallic voice from a speaker\n on the wall.\n\n\n \"I'm Jerry Newton. Got no\n middle initial,\" Pembroke said in\n a surly voice.",
"\"Just be yourself, gal,\" Spencer\n drawled, jabbing her intimately\n with a fat elbow, \"and\n you'll qualify.\"\n\n\n \"Me, me,\" the blonde with a\n feather cut was insisting. \"What\n is wrong with me?\"\n\n\n \"You're perfect, sweetheart,\"\n he told her, taking her hand.\n\n\n \"Ah, come on,\" she pleaded.\n \"Everyone tells me I chew gum\n with my mouth open. Don't you\n hate that?\"\n\n\n \"Naw, that's part of your\n charm,\" Spencer assured her.\n\n\n \"How 'bout me, sugar,\" asked\n the girl with the coal black hair.\n\n\n \"Ah, you're perfect, too. You\n are all perfect. I've never seen\n such a collection of dolls as parade\n around this here city.\n C'mon, kids—how 'bout another\n round?\"",
"\"Hell, no. But some poor\n punk's sure red in the face, I'll\n bet,\" the man-about-town said\n with a chuckle. \"Those high-strung\n paramour types always\n raising a ruckus. They never do\n pass the interview. Don't know\n why they even make 'em.\"\n\n\n Suddenly Mary Ann was quiet.\n\n\n \"Ambulance squad,\" Pembroke's\n companion explained.\n \"They'll take her off to the buggy\n house for a few days and bring\n her out fresh and ignorant as the\n day she was assembled. Don't\n know why they keep making 'em,\n as I say. But I guess there's a\n call for that type up there on\n Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I reckon there is at\n that,\" said Pembroke, snickering\n again as he moved away from the\n other. \"And why not? Hey?\n Why not?\"",
"Pembroke headed for the\n beach. He knew she invariably\n went there in the afternoon. He\n loitered around the stalls where\n hot dogs and soft drinks were\n sold, leaning against a post in\n the hot sun, hat pulled down over\n his forehead. Then he noticed\n that people all about him were\n talking excitedly. They were discussing\n a ship. It was leaving\n that afternoon. Anyone who\n could pass the interview would\n be sent to Earth.\n\n\n Pembroke had visited the\n docks every day, without being\n able to learn when the great\n exodus would take place. Yet he\n was certain the first lap would be\n by water rather than by spaceship,\n since no one he had talked\n to in the city had ever heard of\n spaceships. In fact, they knew\n very little about their masters.",
"\"Occupation?\"\n\n\n \"I work a lot o' trades. Fisherman,\n fruit picker, fightin' range\n fires, vineyards, car washer. Anything.\n You name it. Been out of\n work for a long time now,\n though. Goin' on five months.\n These here are hard times, no\n matter what they say.\"\n\n\n \"What do you think of the\n Chinese situation?\" the voice inquired.\n\n\n \"Which situation's 'at?\"\n\n\n \"Where's Seattle?\"\n\n\n \"Seattle? State o' Washington.\"\n\n\n And so it went for about five\n minutes. Then he was told he\n had qualified as a satisfactory\n surrogate for a mid-twentieth\n century American male, itinerant\n type.",
"Now the ship had arrived and\n was to leave shortly. If there was\n any but the most superficial examination,\n Pembroke would no\n doubt be discovered and exterminated.\n But since no one seemed\n concerned about anything but his\n own speech and behavior, he assumed\n that they had all qualified\n in every other respect. The reason\n for transporting Earth People\n to this planet was, of course,\n to apply a corrective to any of\n the Pacificos' aberrant mannerisms\n or articulation. This was\n the polishing up phase.\nPembroke began hobbling toward\n the docks. Almost at once\n he found himself face to face\n with Mary Ann. She smiled happily\n when she recognized him.\nThat\nwas a good thing.\n\n\n \"It is a sign of poor breeding\n to smile at tramps,\" Pembroke\n admonished her in a whisper.\n \"Walk on ahead.\"",
"\"How about talking it over at\n supper tonight?\" Pembroke proposed.\n \"Maybe with less distraction\n I'll have a better picture of\n you—as a whole.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that's very generous of\n you,\" the woman told him. She\n scribbled a name and an address\n on a small piece of paper and\n handed it to him. \"Any time\n after six,\" she said.\n\n\n Pembroke left the beach and\n walked through several small\n specialty shops. He tried to get\n the woman off his mind, but the\n oddness of her conversation continued\n to bother him. She was\n right about being different, but\n it was her concern about being\n different that made her so. How\n to explain\nthat\nto her?\nThen he saw the weird little\n glass statuette among the usual\n bric-a-brac. It rather resembled\n a ground hog, had seven fingers\n on each of its six limbs, and\n smiled up at him as he stared.",
"\"Can I help you, sir?\" a middle-aged\n saleswoman inquired.\n \"Oh, good heavens, whatever is\n that thing doing here?\"\n\n\n Pembroke watched with lifted\n eyebrows as the clerk whisked\n the bizarre statuette underneath\n the counter.\n\n\n \"What the hell was that?\"\n Pembroke demanded.\n\n\n \"Oh, you know—or don't you?\n Oh, my,\" she concluded, \"are you\n one of the—strangers?\"\n\n\n \"And if I were?\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'd certainly appreciate\n it if you'd tell me how I walk.\"\nShe came around in front of\n the counter and strutted back\n and forth a few times.\n\n\n \"They tell me I lean too far\n forward,\" she confided. \"But I\n should think you'd fall down if\n you didn't.\"",
"\"Also, there is a certain effeminateness\n in the way in which\n you speak,\" said Pembroke. \"Try\n to be a little more direct, a little\n more brusque. Speak in a monotone.\n It will make you more acceptable.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you so much,\" said the\n manager. \"There is much food\n for thought in what you have\n said, Mr. Pembroke. However,\n Mr. Spencer, your value has failed\n to prove itself. You have only\n yourself to blame. Cooperation is\n all we require of you.\"\n\n\n Valencia left. Spencer ordered\n another martini. Neither he nor\n Pembroke spoke for several minutes.\n\n\n \"Somebody's crazy around\n here,\" the fat man muttered\n after a few moments. \"Is it me,\n Frank?\"",
"He would be out of business\n soon, once the FBI agent had got\n there. Pembroke was only in it to\n get the proof he would need to\n convince people of the truth of\n his tale. But in the meantime he\n allowed himself to admire the\n clipping of the newspaper ad he\n had run in all the Los Angeles\n papers for the past week. The\n little ad that had saved mankind\n from God-knew-what insidious\n menace. It read:\nARE YOU IMPERFECT?\nLET DR. VON SCHUBERT POINT OUT\n\n YOUR FLAWS\nIT IS HIS GOAL TO MAKE YOU THE",
"After eating they danced for\n an hour, had a few more drinks,\n then went to Pembroke's room.\n He still knew nothing about her\n and had almost exhausted his\n critical capabilities, but not once\n had she become annoyed with\n him. She seemed to devour every\n factual point of imperfection\n about herself that Pembroke\n brought to her attention. And,\n fantastically enough, she actually\n appeared to have overcome every\n little imperfection he had been\n able to communicate to her.\n\n\n It was in the privacy of his\n room that Pembroke became\n aware of just how perfect, physically,\n Mary Ann was. Too perfect.\n No freckles or moles anywhere\n on the visible surface of\n her brown skin, which was more\n than a mere sampling. Furthermore,\n her face and body were\n meticulously symmetrical. And\n she seemed to be wholly ambidextrous.",
"\"You understand your mission,\n Newton?\" the voice asked. \"You\n are to establish yourself on\n Earth. In time you will receive\n instructions. Then you will attack.\n You will not see us, your\n masters, again until the atmosphere\n has been sufficiently chlorinated.\n In the meantime, serve\n us well.\"\n\n\n He stumbled out toward the\n docks, then looked about for\n Mary Ann. He saw her at last\n behind the ropes, her lovely face\n in tears.\n\n\n Then she saw him. Waving\n frantically, she called his name\n several times. Pembroke mingled\n with the crowd moving toward\n the ship, ignoring her. But still\n the woman persisted in her\n shouting.\n\n\n Sidling up to a well-dressed\n man-about-town type, Pembroke\n winked at him and snickered.\n\n\n \"You Frank?\" he asked.",
"There were footsteps on the\n stairs for the third time that\n day. Not the brisk, efficient steps\n of a federal official, but the hesitant,\n self-conscious steps of a\n junior clerk type.\n\n\n Pembroke rose as the young\n man appeared at the door. His\n face was smooth, unpimpled,\n clean-shaven, without sweat on a\n warm summer afternoon.\n\n\n \"Are you Dr. Von Schubert?\"\n the newcomer asked, peering into\n the room. \"You see, I've got a\n problem—\"\n\n\n The four shots from Pembroke's\n pistol solved his problem\n effectively. Pembroke tossed his\n third victim onto the pile, then\n opened a can of lager, quaffing\n it appreciatively. Seating himself\n once more, he leaned back in\n the chair, both feet upon the\n desk.",
"When she left the hotel at midnight,\n Pembroke was quite sure\n that she understood his plan and\n that she was irrevocably in love\n with him. Tomorrow might bring\n his death, but it might also ensure\n his escape. After forty-two\n years of searching for a passion,\n for a cause, for a loyalty, Frank\n Pembroke had at last found his.\n Earth and the human race that\n peopled it. And Mary Ann would\n help him to save it.\nThe next morning Pembroke\n talked to Valencia about hunting.\n He said that he planned to go\n shooting out on the desert which\n surrounded the city. Valencia\n told him that there were no living\n creatures anywhere but in\n the city. Pembroke said he was\n going out anyway.",
"THE PERFECTIONISTS\nBy ARNOLD CASTLE\nILLUSTRATED by SUMMERS\nIs there something wrong with you?\n Do you fail to fit in with your group?\n Nervous, anxious, ill-at-ease? Happy\n about it? Lucky you!\nFrank Pembroke\n sat behind\n the desk of his shabby\n little office over Lemark's Liquors\n in downtown Los Angeles and\n waited for his first customer. He\n had been in business for a week\n and as yet had had no callers.\n Therefore, it was with a mingled\n sense of excitement and satisfaction\n that he greeted the tall,\n dark, smooth-faced figure that\n came up the stairs and into the\n office shortly before noon.\n\n\n \"Good day, sir,\" said Pembroke\n with an amiable smile. \"I\n see my advertisement has interested\n you. Please stand in that\n corner for just a moment.\"",
"\"No. You just don't belong\n here, in this particular place,\"\n said Pembroke thoughtfully.\n \"You're the wrong type. But they\n couldn't know that ahead of time.\n The way they operate it's a\n pretty hit-or-miss operation. But\n they don't care one bit about us,\n Spencer. Consider the men who\n went down with the ship. That\n was just part of the game.\"\n\n\n \"What the hell are you sayin'?\"\n asked Spencer in disbelief.\n \"You figure\nthey\nsunk the ship?\n Valencia and the waitress and\n the three babes? Ah, come on.\"\n\n\n \"It's what you think that will\n determine what you do, Spencer.\n I suggest you change your attitude;\n play along with them for a\n few days till the picture becomes\n a little clearer to you. We'll talk\n about it again then.\"",
"\"You are newcomers, Mr.\n Spencer,\" Valencia explained.\n \"You are therefore in an excellent\n position to point out our\n faults as you see them.\"\n\n\n \"Well, so what?\" demanded\n Spencer. \"I've got more important\n things to do than to worry\n about your troubles. You look\n okay to me.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Valencia,\" said Pembroke.\n \"I've noticed that you\n walk with a very slight limp. If\n you have a bad leg, I should\n think you would do better to develop\n a more pronounced limp.\n Otherwise, you may appear to\n be self-conscious about it.\"\nSpencer opened his mouth to\n protest, but saw with amazement\n that it was exactly this that\n Valencia was seeking. Pembroke\n was amused at his companion's\n reaction but observed that Spencer\n still failed to see the point.",
"On the sand he saw a number\n of sun bathers. One in particular,\n an attractive woman of about\n thirty, tossed back her long,\n chestnut locks and gazed up intently\n at Pembroke as he passed.\n Seldom had he enjoyed so ingenuous\n an invitation. He halted\n and stared down at her for a few\n moments.\n\n\n \"You are looking for someone?\"\n she inquired.\n\n\n \"Much of the time,\" said the\n man.\n\n\n \"Could it be me?\"\n\n\n \"It could be.\"\n\n\n \"Yet you seem unsure,\" she\n said.\n\n\n Pembroke smiled, uneasily.\n There was something not entirely\n normal about her conversation.\n Though the rest of her compensated\n for that.",
"But the dolls had apparently\n lost interest in him. They got up\n one by one and walked out of the\n bar. Pembroke took his rum and\n tonic and moved over to Spencer's\n booth.\n\n\n \"Okay if I join you?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said the fat man.\n \"Wonder what the hell got into\n those babes?\"\n\n\n \"You said they were perfect.\n They know they're not. You've\n got to be rough with them in this\n town,\" said Pembroke. \"That's\n all they want from us.\"\n\n\n \"Mister, you've been doing\n some thinkin', I can see,\" said\n Spencer, peering at him suspiciously.\n \"Maybe you've figured\n out where we are.\"",
"Pembroke rose and started out\n of the bar. A policeman entered\n and walked directly to Spencer's\n table. Loitering at the juke box,\n Pembroke overheard the conversation.\n\n\n \"You Spencer?\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" said the fat\n man sullenly.\n\n\n \"What don't you like about\n me? The\ntruth\n, buddy.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, hell! Nothin' wrong\n with you at all, and nothin'll\n make me say there is,\" said Spencer.\n\n\n \"You're the guy, all right. Too\n bad, Mac,\" said the cop."
],
[
"Then the explosion had come,\n from far below the waterline,\n and the decks were awash with\n frantic crewmen, officers, and the\n handful of passengers. Only two\n lifeboats were launched before\n the\nElena Mia\nwent down. Pembroke\n was in the second. The\n roar of the sinking ship was the\n last thing he heard for some\n time.",
"Pembroke went right on hating\n himself, however, till the\n night he was deposited in a field\n outside of Ensenada, broke but\n happy, with two other itinerant\n types. They separated in San\n Diego, and it was not long before\n Pembroke was explaining to the\n police how he had drifted far\n from the scene of the sinking of\n the\nElena Mia\non a piece of\n wreckage, and had been picked\n up by a Chilean trawler. How he\n had then made his way, with\n much suffering, up the coast to\n California. Two days later, his\n identity established and his circumstances\n again solvent, he was\n headed for Los Angeles to begin\n his save-Earth campaign.\nNow, seated at his battered\n desk in the shabby rented office\n over Lemark's Liquors, Pembroke\n gazed without emotion at\n the two demolished Pacificos that\n lay sprawled one atop the other\n in the corner. His watch said\n one-fifteen. The man from the\n FBI should arrive soon.",
"\"No. You just don't belong\n here, in this particular place,\"\n said Pembroke thoughtfully.\n \"You're the wrong type. But they\n couldn't know that ahead of time.\n The way they operate it's a\n pretty hit-or-miss operation. But\n they don't care one bit about us,\n Spencer. Consider the men who\n went down with the ship. That\n was just part of the game.\"\n\n\n \"What the hell are you sayin'?\"\n asked Spencer in disbelief.\n \"You figure\nthey\nsunk the ship?\n Valencia and the waitress and\n the three babes? Ah, come on.\"\n\n\n \"It's what you think that will\n determine what you do, Spencer.\n I suggest you change your attitude;\n play along with them for a\n few days till the picture becomes\n a little clearer to you. We'll talk\n about it again then.\"",
"\"That's for sure,\" the boy said,\n walking away to wait on another\n customer. \"If you don't like the\n place, you've had it.\"\nPembroke returned to the\n hotel. Going to the bar, he recognized\n one of the\nElena Mia's\npaying\n passengers. He was a short,\n rectangular little man in his fifties\n named Spencer. He sat in a\n booth with three young women,\n all lovely, all effusive. The topic\n of the conversation turned out\n to be precisely what Pembroke\n had predicted.\n\n\n \"Well, Louisa, I'd say your\n only fault is the way you keep\n wigglin' your shoulders up 'n'\n down. Why'n'sha try holdin' 'em\n straight?\"\n\n\n \"I thought it made me look\n sexy,\" the redhead said petulantly.",
"Opening the desk drawer,\n which was almost empty, Pembroke\n removed an automatic pistol\n fitted with a silencer. Pointing\n it at the amazed customer, he\n fired four .22 caliber longs into\n the narrow chest. Then he made\n a telephone call and sat down to\n wait. He wondered how long it\n would be before his next client\n would arrive.\nThe series of events leading up\n to Pembroke's present occupation\n had commenced on a dismal,\n overcast evening in the South\n Pacific a year earlier. Bound for\n Sydney, two days out of Valparaiso,\n the Colombian tramp\n steamer\nElena Mia\nhad encountered\n a dense greenish fog which\n seemed vaguely redolent of citrus\n trees. Standing on the forward\n deck, Pembroke was one of the\n first to perceive the peculiar odor\n and to spot the immense gray\n hulk wallowing in the murky distance.",
"When she left the hotel at midnight,\n Pembroke was quite sure\n that she understood his plan and\n that she was irrevocably in love\n with him. Tomorrow might bring\n his death, but it might also ensure\n his escape. After forty-two\n years of searching for a passion,\n for a cause, for a loyalty, Frank\n Pembroke had at last found his.\n Earth and the human race that\n peopled it. And Mary Ann would\n help him to save it.\nThe next morning Pembroke\n talked to Valencia about hunting.\n He said that he planned to go\n shooting out on the desert which\n surrounded the city. Valencia\n told him that there were no living\n creatures anywhere but in\n the city. Pembroke said he was\n going out anyway.",
"And that was bad because it\n sounded as if she had been giving\n some womanly thought to the situation.\n A little more of that and\n she might go to the police again,\n this time for vengeance.\n\n\n Twice during his wanderings\n Pembroke had seen the corpses\n of Earthmen being carted out of\n buildings. They had to be Earthmen\n because they bled. Mary Ann\n had admitted that she did not.\n There would be very few Earthmen\n left in Puerto Pacifico, and\n it would be simple enough to locate\n him if he were reported as\n being on the loose. There was\n no out but to do away with Mary\n Ann.",
"\"You understand your mission,\n Newton?\" the voice asked. \"You\n are to establish yourself on\n Earth. In time you will receive\n instructions. Then you will attack.\n You will not see us, your\n masters, again until the atmosphere\n has been sufficiently chlorinated.\n In the meantime, serve\n us well.\"\n\n\n He stumbled out toward the\n docks, then looked about for\n Mary Ann. He saw her at last\n behind the ropes, her lovely face\n in tears.\n\n\n Then she saw him. Waving\n frantically, she called his name\n several times. Pembroke mingled\n with the crowd moving toward\n the ship, ignoring her. But still\n the woman persisted in her\n shouting.\n\n\n Sidling up to a well-dressed\n man-about-town type, Pembroke\n winked at him and snickered.\n\n\n \"You Frank?\" he asked.",
"Pembroke heard the shots as\n he strolled casually out into the\n brightness of the hotel lobby.\n While he waited for the elevator,\n he saw them carrying the body\n into the street. How many others,\n he wondered, had gone out on\n their backs during their first day\n in Puerto Pacifico?\nPembroke shaved, showered,\n and put on the new suit and shirt\n he had bought. Then he took\n Mary Ann, the woman he had\n met on the beach, out to dinner.\n She would look magnificent even\n when fully clothed, he decided,\n and the pale chartreuse gown she\n wore hardly placed her in that\n category. Her conversation seemed\n considerably more normal\n after the other denizens of\n Puerto Pacifico Pembroke had\n listened to that afternoon.",
"\"Your bet's as good as mine,\"\n said Pembroke. \"It's not Wellington,\n and it's not Brisbane, and\n it's not Long Beach, and it's not\n Tahiti. There are a lot of places\n it's not. But where the hell it is,\n you tell me.\n\n\n \"And, by the way,\" he added,\n \"I hope you like it in Puerto\n Pacifico. Because there isn't any\n place to go from here and there\n isn't any way to get there if\n there were.\"\n\n\n \"Pardon me, gentlemen, but\n I'm Joe Valencia, manager of the\n hotel. I would be very grateful if\n you would give me a few minutes\n of honest criticism.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, no, not you, too,\" groaned\n Spencer. \"Look, Joe, what's\n the gag?\"",
"Lacking such loyalties, Pembroke\n adapted quickly to the situation\n in which he found himself\n when he regained consciousness.\n He awoke in a small room in\n what appeared to be a typical\n modern American hotel. The wallet\n in his pocket contained exactly\n what it should, approximately\n three hundred dollars.\n His next thought was of food.\n He left the room and descended\n via the elevator to the restaurant.\n Here he observed that it\n was early afternoon. Ordering\n a full dinner, for he was unusually\n hungry, he began to study the\n others in the restaurant.\n\n\n Many of the faces seemed familiar;\n the crew of the ship,\n probably. He also recognized several\n of the passengers. However,\n he made no attempt to speak to\n them. After his meal, he bought\n a good corona and went for a\n walk. His situation could have\n been any small western American\n seacoast city. He heard the hiss\n of the ocean in the direction the\n afternoon sun was taking. In his\n full-gaited walk, he was soon approaching\n the beach.",
"Now the ship had arrived and\n was to leave shortly. If there was\n any but the most superficial examination,\n Pembroke would no\n doubt be discovered and exterminated.\n But since no one seemed\n concerned about anything but his\n own speech and behavior, he assumed\n that they had all qualified\n in every other respect. The reason\n for transporting Earth People\n to this planet was, of course,\n to apply a corrective to any of\n the Pacificos' aberrant mannerisms\n or articulation. This was\n the polishing up phase.\nPembroke began hobbling toward\n the docks. Almost at once\n he found himself face to face\n with Mary Ann. She smiled happily\n when she recognized him.\nThat\nwas a good thing.\n\n\n \"It is a sign of poor breeding\n to smile at tramps,\" Pembroke\n admonished her in a whisper.\n \"Walk on ahead.\"",
"\"Don't try to go so fast and\n you won't fall down,\" suggested\n Pembroke. \"You're in too much\n of a hurry. Also those fake flowers\n on your blouse make you look\n frumpy.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'm supposed to look\n frumpy,\" the woman retorted.\n \"That's the type of person I am.\n But you can look frumpy and still\n walk natural, can't you? Everyone\n says you can.\"\n\n\n \"Well, they've got a point,\"\n said Pembroke. \"Incidentally,\n just where are we, anyway?\n What city is this?\"\n\n\n \"Puerto Pacifico,\" she told\n him. \"Isn't that a lovely name?\n It means peaceful port. In Spanish.\"",
"Making love to Mary Ann was\n something short of ecstasy. Not\n for any obvious reason, but because\n of subtle little factors that\n make a woman a woman. Mary\n Ann had no pulse. Mary Ann did\n not perspire. Mary Ann did not\n fatigue gradually but all at once.\n Mary Ann breathed regularly\n under all circumstances. Mary\n Ann talked and talked and talked.\n But then, Mary Ann was not\n a human being.",
"But the dolls had apparently\n lost interest in him. They got up\n one by one and walked out of the\n bar. Pembroke took his rum and\n tonic and moved over to Spencer's\n booth.\n\n\n \"Okay if I join you?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said the fat man.\n \"Wonder what the hell got into\n those babes?\"\n\n\n \"You said they were perfect.\n They know they're not. You've\n got to be rough with them in this\n town,\" said Pembroke. \"That's\n all they want from us.\"\n\n\n \"Mister, you've been doing\n some thinkin', I can see,\" said\n Spencer, peering at him suspiciously.\n \"Maybe you've figured\n out where we are.\"",
"By noon they had rented a\n jeep and were well away from\n the city. Pembroke and Mary\n Ann took turns firing at the paper\n targets they had purchased. At\n twilight they headed back to the\n city. On the outskirts, where the\n sand and soil were mixed and no\n footprints would be left, Pembroke\n hopped off. Mary Ann\n would go straight to the police\n and report that Pembroke had attacked\n her and that she had shot\n him. If necessary, she would conduct\n the authorities to the place\n where they had been target\n shooting, but would be unable to\n locate the spot where she had\n buried the body. Why had she\n buried it? Because at first she\n was not going to report the incident.\n She was frightened. It\n was not airtight, but there would\n probably be no further investigation.\n And they certainly would\n not prosecute Mary Ann for killing\n an Earthman.",
"He would be out of business\n soon, once the FBI agent had got\n there. Pembroke was only in it to\n get the proof he would need to\n convince people of the truth of\n his tale. But in the meantime he\n allowed himself to admire the\n clipping of the newspaper ad he\n had run in all the Los Angeles\n papers for the past week. The\n little ad that had saved mankind\n from God-knew-what insidious\n menace. It read:\nARE YOU IMPERFECT?\nLET DR. VON SCHUBERT POINT OUT\n\n YOUR FLAWS\nIT IS HIS GOAL TO MAKE YOU THE",
"He picked up Mary Ann at her\n apartment and together they\n went to a sporting goods store.\n As he guessed there was a goodly\n selection of firearms, despite the\n fact that there was nothing to\n hunt and only a single target\n range within the city. Everything,\n of course, had to be just\n like Earth. That, after all, was\n the purpose of Puerto Pacifico.",
"She obeyed. He followed. The\n crowd grew thicker. They neared\n the docks and Pembroke saw that\n there were now set up on the\n roped-off wharves small interviewing\n booths. When it was\n their turn, he and Mary Ann\n each went into separate ones.\n Pembroke found himself alone in\n the little room.\n\n\n Then he saw that there was\n another entity in his presence\n confined beneath a glass dome. It\n looked rather like a groundhog\n and had seven fingers on each of\n its six limbs. But it was larger\n and hairier than the glass one\n he had seen at the gift store.\n With four of its limbs it tapped\n on an intricate keyboard in front\n of it.\n\n\n \"What is your name?\" queried\n a metallic voice from a speaker\n on the wall.\n\n\n \"I'm Jerry Newton. Got no\n middle initial,\" Pembroke said in\n a surly voice.",
"After eating they danced for\n an hour, had a few more drinks,\n then went to Pembroke's room.\n He still knew nothing about her\n and had almost exhausted his\n critical capabilities, but not once\n had she become annoyed with\n him. She seemed to devour every\n factual point of imperfection\n about herself that Pembroke\n brought to her attention. And,\n fantastically enough, she actually\n appeared to have overcome every\n little imperfection he had been\n able to communicate to her.\n\n\n It was in the privacy of his\n room that Pembroke became\n aware of just how perfect, physically,\n Mary Ann was. Too perfect.\n No freckles or moles anywhere\n on the visible surface of\n her brown skin, which was more\n than a mere sampling. Furthermore,\n her face and body were\n meticulously symmetrical. And\n she seemed to be wholly ambidextrous."
]
] |
train
|
99902
|
[
"What is the relationship like between Ed and Sheryl?",
"What is Sara's relationship with her mom?",
"What is the implication about getting TV networks through Facebook?",
"Why is Sara upset when her dad asks her to read the article about solar panels?",
"What is the immediate significance of Ed defending the ads on his Facebook?",
"How does Ed feel about the Super Bowl?",
"Which of these is true about the ad break?",
"How does Sara feel about the Chevrolet ad?",
"Which is the most likely method that the ads were personalized?",
"What is the primary significance of the final scene?"
] |
[
[
"Their relationship is tense as Ed will not get help when he needs it, but it is mostly cordial",
"They are fairly indifferent towards each other but interact more when there are other people around",
"They have a good relationship but do not like to watch the same TV, as Sheryl hates football",
"They are very tense and the only thing that brings them together is their daughter"
],
[
"Sara's mom doesn't trust Sara very much given the history Sara has with her dad",
"Sara's mom is endlessly proud of Sara even if this is tense in the rest of the family",
"Sara is worried she has disappointed her mom who is exhausted by being in the middle of a family fight",
"Sara does everything driven by a desire to make her mom proud, and she is praised in return"
],
[
"The channels would be customized by age group so Sara would not have anything she'd like to watch",
"There would only be a few channels because it was a basic package",
"There would not be much available to watch besides sports",
"The available media is conservative-leaning which meant Sara would not want to watch it"
],
[
"She is embarassed to admit she hasn't read up on the solar panels",
"There is an implication that she's not informed about the job she does every day",
"She was trying to avoid having phones out at the dinner table",
"She doesn't want it to come up that she blocked him on facebook"
],
[
"It shows how interested in guns he is",
"It shows his dedication to capitalism",
"It shows he has no idea how tailored the feed is ",
"It shows what kinds of things he looks up to purchase"
],
[
"He doesn't care for football but enjoys all of the celebration around it",
"He loves the ads even more than the game",
"He likes the football and the time he spends with his daughter",
"It is his favorite sporting event and he would never miss a football game"
],
[
"Sara's patience allows for some rebuilding of trust",
"It's ironic that Ed things ads about things that separate people will bring him and his daughter together",
"The family can agree that they all enjoy watching ads together even if other things are rough",
"It is the one chance daughter and father have to patch things up"
],
[
"She thinks it's a final chance to bond with her father",
"She is sorry she did not watch the whole ad before she reacted to it",
"She is upset at the glorification of the military",
"She is frustrated that it tokenized a Mexican family"
],
[
"The TV version is different from the streaming version people see on Twitter",
"Facebook is creating echo chambers of specific ways of thought for each user",
"Ed has a specific TV plan that allows him to see conservative-bent programming",
"The television network shows different videos in different regions"
],
[
"It shows that Sheryl is going to be okay in the end",
"It shows a subversion of expectations to add irony to the story",
"It shows that the media control runs deeper than the reader might have expected",
"It shows that Ed and Sara will really be able to settle their differences"
]
] |
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[
"\"Well I'm sure they'll be fine.\" She regrets the sarcasm as soon as she hears it in her own voice, but she still can't stop herself, like it's expected, like it's part of the routine. Part of their schtick. \"They just got to get themselves out there, huh Dad? Pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That's the American way, right?\" \n\n \"I'm glad you think this is funny, I really do. But what you New York types need to realise is-\" \n\n \"Ed!\" Mom had appeared in the doorway. \"Please! Both of you. No fighting today, please.\" \n\n \"Sheryl-\" \n\n \"No. I don't want to hear you two as much as disagreeing about anything today, unless it's about the game. And even then you'd better keep it civil. Otherwise you can both go hungry. Understand?\" \n\n Awkward pause.",
"\"Of course honey.\" \n\n Mom and Dad watch Sara leave the room, and then look at each other. \n\n \"Well.\" \n\n \"Well indeed.\" \n\n \"What did I tell you? You two just needed to spend some time together. Some quality time.\" \n\n \"I guess so. What did I ever do to deserve a woman as hot and as smart as you, huh Sheryl?\" \n\n Mom stands up and makes to leave the room, leaning down to kiss him as she passes. \"I ask myself that question every day.\"",
"\"No, it is. It's my fault. I got myself into thinking we can never agree on anything, that we can never see eye to eye. That we've got nothing in common anymore.\" She lifts her head to look up at him. \"But I know that's wrong. That I shouldn't assume things about you. That there's still things that can bring us together.\" \n\n He grins back at her. \"Like Super Bowl ads?\" \n\n She laughs. \"I guess. But you know what I mean, really.\" \n\n \"I know honey. And I'm sorry too. I didn't mean what I said earlier. I know you don't really hate this country.\" He gestures to the couch next to him. \"Why don't you sit down, huh? We can watch the rest of the game together.\" \n\n She straightens herself up, wipes her eyes. Suddenly feels a little self conscious. \"Sure. Let me just go freshen up first.\"",
"\"Yeah, well you know your father. Doesn't like to talk about it. Doesn't want to burden other people with his problems. Hates pity.\" She pauses, looks out the window into the yard. When she turns back to Sara her eyes are damp. \"This is why I was so excited about you coming back. Why he was so excited! I thought it'd take his mind of all this. He was so excited to see you. You know he loves watching the game with you, Sara.\" \n\n \"I know. I'm sorry I-\" \n\n \"And the ads! The Super Bowl ads! You know how much he loves watching the new ads with you. It's a stupid thing, sure, but he loves it. Talks about it all the time. It's like a tradition to him. That's why he got so upset over dinner when you got angry at his ads. It's something special he has with you, he doesn't want to lose it.\"",
"Mom smiles, walks over and kisses her on the forehead. \"It's OK honey. Don't feel bad. Just go. Just go sit in there with him and watch some TV. Please.\"\nIt's the second down on the Falcon's 60 yard line with 30 yards to cover, and the Lions need one touchdown to equalise. Sara and her Dad are sat in the front room, working their way through a family sized pack of Oreos, when the ad break starts.\nDawn. Red skies over the desert. A Chevrolet truck pulls up next to a large, trailer. Low shot next to the front tire, as a cowboy booted foot drops down from the door, disturbing dust.",
"Mom sighs, shoulders falling, looks at Sara directly. \"I'm sorry honey.\" She looks old, Sara thinks, watching a resigned tiredness flicker across her face in a way she'd not noticed before. Like she's exhausted by conflict, surrendered to it. \"Now, don't I get a hug?\" \n\n Sara smiles. They hold each other for a few long seconds, rubbing and squeezing each other as the Lyft silently backs itself out of the driveway. When they part it's Mom's hand that's on the bag's handle. \n\n Inside she unwraps herself from scarves and layers, the heat in the house almost a shock after the cold air. Michigan in February. Mom is already halfway up the stairs, bag in tow, headed for her room. \n\n \"Mom, just leave that and I'll…\" \n\n \"Your father's in the front room,\" she says, just before she disappears from view. \"Go say hi.\"",
"For a few seconds Sara is alone in the hallway, the smell of cooking meat coming from one doorway, the sound of rolling news from another. She shakes her head, kicks off shoes, tucks hair behind her ears. Braces herself.\nHe's sat in the living room, reclining in the Lazy Boy. He doesn't hear her enter - her socked feet silent on the pile carpet floor, his attention lost in the screen that fills most of the wall. Fox News. She braces herself again. \n\n \"Hey Dad.\" \n\n His head jerks to look at her. \"Hey! When did you get here?\" He starts to push himself up. \n\n \"Don't get up Dad, it's fine. Really.\" She takes a seat on the couch. \"I just got here, like two minutes ago.\" \n\n \"Good flight?\" \n\n \"Yeah. Fine. Y'know. Same as always.\"",
"And then everything changed. Suddenly there was rap music and nose rings, sneaking out of the house to see her friends and not wanting to go to church. Suddenly he was no longer this lovable bear-man that ruffled her hair and gave her candy and explained defensive plays to her, but this huge obelisk of injustice that just wanted to crush her high school life into dust. It was constant warfare; every opinion she had became a battle, every decision she made a conflict. Getting away to college gave her escape, but bred resentment too; he hated that she went to New York, even though NYU was a good school, and her decision to stay there after she finished made things even worse. And then politics got all crazy, weirder then ever, and it became impossible for them to talk without it erupting into fights almost instantly. It was bad enough when the smart, young guy she liked was president and Dad constantly spewed his hate for him at her, but somehow it got even worse when the old, racist, women hating war-starter he liked won. Twice.",
"\"Honey?\" \n\n Dad pauses the TV, looks up at her. It looks like he's been crying too. \"Sara?\" \n\n \"Did you - did you watch it?\" \n\n \"The Chevrolet ad?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"Yeah, we did.\" Embarrassed, he wipes a tear from his cheek. \"It was… it was very moving.\" \n\n She falls on him, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face in his chest. \"I'm sorry Dad. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be so mean-\" \n\n \"It's OK, honey. It really is.\" \n\n \"No, no it's not. We always fight. And I know that's mainly my fault-\" \n\n 'Well, now, c'mon-\"",
"He smiles back at her, nods knowingly. \n\n Their first words in nearly a year. Fine. So far. She relaxes. Of course it is. How bad could it be? \n\n \"I thought I was gonna come pick you up from the airport?\" \n\n \"Ah, no. I got a cab. I didn't want to bother you.\" \n\n \"Bother me? You think I'm too old and infirm to pick my own daughter up from the airport?\" \n\n \"No Dad, of course not.\"\nThe war spills out of Fox News, casualty figures scrolling across monochrome drone footage, attack helicopters circling over Caracas apartment blocks, pundits with bronzed skin and immaculate blond hair smiling from four-way split screens.\n\"So you just got a cab?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"How much did that cost?\"",
"\"Fine.\" \n\n \"Sorry Mom.\" \n\n Sara turns back to the TV, to watching the war, to trying to work out which one it is.\nIt had always been this way, ever since she was about thirteen. Up until then it just seemed like constant warmth, as though she didn't have any childhood concept of Dad apart from him getting home from work, then her sitting on his knee, eating cookies and watching football highlights until Mom came in and scolded them both for ruining their appetites before dinner.",
"So they didn't talk much now, barely online, never on the phone. Since her second year of school he'd never been to NYC to visit her. She came back when she could face it; sometimes for birthdays, sometimes for Thanksgiving. Maybe for Christmas. But somehow always, like now, for the Super Bowl. Like football was the one thing they still had, that one thing they could still sit in the same room together for. Shouting at players, screaming at the ref, laughing at the ads.\nDad is in the bathroom, and Sara has had enough of Fox and whichever war this is. She reaches over and grabs the remote from the arm of his chair, and tries to find something else to watch. The government had scrapped all the rules about how the internet worked, and for most people like her parents it had suddenly gotten a lot cheaper to get their TV through Facebook, so all she can find is\nFox, Breitbart News, Family Values TV, Info Wars, The Rebel, Glenn Beck, The Voice of America, America First, The Bible Today",
"\"No, just leave her,\" says Dad, gently, his eyes still fixed on the screen. \"Just let her go.\"\nOut in the kitchen Sara sits at the table and wants to scream. She's angry, mainly with herself. She should never have fucking come here. She should have known better. There was never any fucking way anything good was going to come from this. As much as Mom wants to romanticise things, to make them sound cute and adorable, the truth is shit with Dad has never been right since she was a teenager. Too much resentment, too much bad blood, too much control and rebellion. They hadn't agreed on anything - they hadn't managed to have a simple conversation that didn't descend into fighting - in 15 goddamn years, and no amount of eating cookies and watching fucking Super Bowl ads on the TV was going to fix that. \n\n She sighs, wipes a tear from her cheek. On autopilot she takes her phone from her pocket, feels its reassuring warmth in her hand, and swipes open Twitter.",
"Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and how we got here.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nSara finds herself in the front room, sobbing.",
"A little way away from the main group sits a small child, a girl. Maybe 8 years old. She is drawing shapes in the dust with a stick. She's drawn quite a bit it looks like, but from our angle we can't see what.\nCut to: drone footage. The pilot is watching the group. As he tracks away from the main party to where the girl is sat, the camera reveals what she has drawn.\nA large, child's rendition of the American flag.\nUnderneath it, it childlike handwriting, some words. 'I have a dream'\nText flashes across the screen. ALERT CANCELLED. ALL PATROLS: STAND DOWN\nCut to: the drone, banking and turning, flying away.\nCut to: exterior shot of the trailer. The still anonymous pilot exits, walks back towards his jeep.",
"There's a brief second, a fleeting moment, where Sara can bite her lip, let it go. She misses it. \"But I thought it was immigrants that are stealing people's jobs?\" \n\n \"You might think it's funny little lady, but let me tell you - you remember Kyle and Max, Bill Cooper's boys? Live up off Lafayette, past the Checkers?\" \n\n \"Nope.\" \n\n \"Well let me tell you,\" He shifts in the recliner, with some obvious pain and effort, to face her. \"Both of 'em lost their jobs just this last year. Both of 'em were truckers. Both of 'em been driving trucks since high school. Now the damn trucks are driving themselves and they're both out of work. And they got families to support. Kids.\"",
"and lots of hunting and sports channels she doesn't even recognise. It's signed in to her Dad's FB account, and the last thing she wants is to try and log in on hers before he gets back from the john. Yeah. There was no way that would end up with them keeping it civil.\nIn her pocket her phone vibrates, purrs against her skin, reminding her it's there, making sure she's not forgotten where her real friends are, that there's a world outside, beyond Dad and his TV. She takes it out and cradles it in her hands, the dark screen fleetingly reflecting back her face before it jumps awake at her very touch, opening up to bathe her in blue light, in comfort and warmth and the familiar. For the first time since she got home she feels herself relax.",
"He stabs at the screen, looks for a while, stabs again. Flips it over and hands it to her. \"Here. Read.\" \n\n Reluctantly, she takes it. His Facebook feed. Somewhere in the middle of it is the article, a very to the point CHINESE SOLAR PANELS CAUSE CANCER headline. But she can't even focus on it, because the rest of the screen is filled with distractions, looping videos and animated gifs, all adverts, and all for guns. Or security systems. Panic rooms. Back up power generators. Emergency rations. More guns. \n\n \"Jesus Christ Dad, these ads!\" \n\n \"No blasphemy at the dinner table, please honey\" says Mom. \n\n \"What about them?\"",
"\"Just… just look at them. They're terrifying. They're like… like adverts for the end of the world! You know they show you this stuff just to make you scared, right? Just to keep you paranoid.\" \n\n \"They show me this stuff because they've got products to sell. That's how the economy works. That's how we create jobs. Godammit Sara, are you telling me you hate\nadvertising\nnow? Do you just hate everything about America?\" \n\n Sara looks over to Mom, who looks like she's on the brink of tears. Suddenly she finds she's also lost the will to fight. Gently she closes the iPad and puts it down on the table, next to her plate. \n\n \"No, of course not Dad. Maybe I'll read this later, after the game.\"\nAfter dinner she helps Mom clean-up, the two of them loading the dishwasher in near silence. She's leaning against the counter, scrolling through Twitter on her phone, when Mom finally speaks.",
"Dinner is Mom's meatloaf, with gravy and mashed potatoes. Cornbread and broccoli. Every mouthful tastes like nostalgia, and Sara can feel herself being encompassed by a bubble, this barrier of warm air and long forgotten simplicity enveloping her body, protecting her from the confusion of the world outside."
],
[
"\"Sara!\" says Mom. \n\n \"No I'm sorry, I can't. I can't sit here and watch this… this bullshit. This propaganda.\" She storms out of the room. \n\n \"Sara!\" Mom makes to get up.",
"Mom sighs, shoulders falling, looks at Sara directly. \"I'm sorry honey.\" She looks old, Sara thinks, watching a resigned tiredness flicker across her face in a way she'd not noticed before. Like she's exhausted by conflict, surrendered to it. \"Now, don't I get a hug?\" \n\n Sara smiles. They hold each other for a few long seconds, rubbing and squeezing each other as the Lyft silently backs itself out of the driveway. When they part it's Mom's hand that's on the bag's handle. \n\n Inside she unwraps herself from scarves and layers, the heat in the house almost a shock after the cold air. Michigan in February. Mom is already halfway up the stairs, bag in tow, headed for her room. \n\n \"Mom, just leave that and I'll…\" \n\n \"Your father's in the front room,\" she says, just before she disappears from view. \"Go say hi.\"",
"Mom smiles, walks over and kisses her on the forehead. \"It's OK honey. Don't feel bad. Just go. Just go sit in there with him and watch some TV. Please.\"\nIt's the second down on the Falcon's 60 yard line with 30 yards to cover, and the Lions need one touchdown to equalise. Sara and her Dad are sat in the front room, working their way through a family sized pack of Oreos, when the ad break starts.\nDawn. Red skies over the desert. A Chevrolet truck pulls up next to a large, trailer. Low shot next to the front tire, as a cowboy booted foot drops down from the door, disturbing dust.",
"\"Fine.\" \n\n \"Sorry Mom.\" \n\n Sara turns back to the TV, to watching the war, to trying to work out which one it is.\nIt had always been this way, ever since she was about thirteen. Up until then it just seemed like constant warmth, as though she didn't have any childhood concept of Dad apart from him getting home from work, then her sitting on his knee, eating cookies and watching football highlights until Mom came in and scolded them both for ruining their appetites before dinner.",
"Dinner is Mom's meatloaf, with gravy and mashed potatoes. Cornbread and broccoli. Every mouthful tastes like nostalgia, and Sara can feel herself being encompassed by a bubble, this barrier of warm air and long forgotten simplicity enveloping her body, protecting her from the confusion of the world outside.",
"\"Of course honey.\" \n\n Mom and Dad watch Sara leave the room, and then look at each other. \n\n \"Well.\" \n\n \"Well indeed.\" \n\n \"What did I tell you? You two just needed to spend some time together. Some quality time.\" \n\n \"I guess so. What did I ever do to deserve a woman as hot and as smart as you, huh Sheryl?\" \n\n Mom stands up and makes to leave the room, leaning down to kiss him as she passes. \"I ask myself that question every day.\"",
"For a few seconds Sara is alone in the hallway, the smell of cooking meat coming from one doorway, the sound of rolling news from another. She shakes her head, kicks off shoes, tucks hair behind her ears. Braces herself.\nHe's sat in the living room, reclining in the Lazy Boy. He doesn't hear her enter - her socked feet silent on the pile carpet floor, his attention lost in the screen that fills most of the wall. Fox News. She braces herself again. \n\n \"Hey Dad.\" \n\n His head jerks to look at her. \"Hey! When did you get here?\" He starts to push himself up. \n\n \"Don't get up Dad, it's fine. Really.\" She takes a seat on the couch. \"I just got here, like two minutes ago.\" \n\n \"Good flight?\" \n\n \"Yeah. Fine. Y'know. Same as always.\"",
"\"No, just leave her,\" says Dad, gently, his eyes still fixed on the screen. \"Just let her go.\"\nOut in the kitchen Sara sits at the table and wants to scream. She's angry, mainly with herself. She should never have fucking come here. She should have known better. There was never any fucking way anything good was going to come from this. As much as Mom wants to romanticise things, to make them sound cute and adorable, the truth is shit with Dad has never been right since she was a teenager. Too much resentment, too much bad blood, too much control and rebellion. They hadn't agreed on anything - they hadn't managed to have a simple conversation that didn't descend into fighting - in 15 goddamn years, and no amount of eating cookies and watching fucking Super Bowl ads on the TV was going to fix that. \n\n She sighs, wipes a tear from her cheek. On autopilot she takes her phone from her pocket, feels its reassuring warmth in her hand, and swipes open Twitter.",
"Sara slips her phone into her pocket, genuine guilt. Feels like a spoiled kid. \"I didn't realise. I'm sorry.\"",
"\"Yeah, well you know your father. Doesn't like to talk about it. Doesn't want to burden other people with his problems. Hates pity.\" She pauses, looks out the window into the yard. When she turns back to Sara her eyes are damp. \"This is why I was so excited about you coming back. Why he was so excited! I thought it'd take his mind of all this. He was so excited to see you. You know he loves watching the game with you, Sara.\" \n\n \"I know. I'm sorry I-\" \n\n \"And the ads! The Super Bowl ads! You know how much he loves watching the new ads with you. It's a stupid thing, sure, but he loves it. Talks about it all the time. It's like a tradition to him. That's why he got so upset over dinner when you got angry at his ads. It's something special he has with you, he doesn't want to lose it.\"",
"\"Just… just look at them. They're terrifying. They're like… like adverts for the end of the world! You know they show you this stuff just to make you scared, right? Just to keep you paranoid.\" \n\n \"They show me this stuff because they've got products to sell. That's how the economy works. That's how we create jobs. Godammit Sara, are you telling me you hate\nadvertising\nnow? Do you just hate everything about America?\" \n\n Sara looks over to Mom, who looks like she's on the brink of tears. Suddenly she finds she's also lost the will to fight. Gently she closes the iPad and puts it down on the table, next to her plate. \n\n \"No, of course not Dad. Maybe I'll read this later, after the game.\"\nAfter dinner she helps Mom clean-up, the two of them loading the dishwasher in near silence. She's leaning against the counter, scrolling through Twitter on her phone, when Mom finally speaks.",
"Divided we stand\nSara lets the Lyft park itself in the drive, lets out a sigh, and tweets\nwish me luck\nplus some emojis before slipping her phone into a hoody pocket. Curtains twitch, and before she can get her bag out of the back Mom is there, right there next to her, their hands touching on the handle as they compete for control. \n\n \"It's OK Mom, I got it.\" \n\n \"You should have let us come pick you up.\" \n\n \"It's fine, there was no need. I didn't want to put any-\" \n\n \"But you shouldn't be wasting money, not with how much rent you pay and-\" \n\n Jesus. Not this already. \"Mom. I can afford a cab ride. I'm not\nthat\nmuch of a failure.\"",
"And then everything changed. Suddenly there was rap music and nose rings, sneaking out of the house to see her friends and not wanting to go to church. Suddenly he was no longer this lovable bear-man that ruffled her hair and gave her candy and explained defensive plays to her, but this huge obelisk of injustice that just wanted to crush her high school life into dust. It was constant warfare; every opinion she had became a battle, every decision she made a conflict. Getting away to college gave her escape, but bred resentment too; he hated that she went to New York, even though NYU was a good school, and her decision to stay there after she finished made things even worse. And then politics got all crazy, weirder then ever, and it became impossible for them to talk without it erupting into fights almost instantly. It was bad enough when the smart, young guy she liked was president and Dad constantly spewed his hate for him at her, but somehow it got even worse when the old, racist, women hating war-starter he liked won. Twice.",
"\"Well I'm sure they'll be fine.\" She regrets the sarcasm as soon as she hears it in her own voice, but she still can't stop herself, like it's expected, like it's part of the routine. Part of their schtick. \"They just got to get themselves out there, huh Dad? Pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That's the American way, right?\" \n\n \"I'm glad you think this is funny, I really do. But what you New York types need to realise is-\" \n\n \"Ed!\" Mom had appeared in the doorway. \"Please! Both of you. No fighting today, please.\" \n\n \"Sheryl-\" \n\n \"No. I don't want to hear you two as much as disagreeing about anything today, unless it's about the game. And even then you'd better keep it civil. Otherwise you can both go hungry. Understand?\" \n\n Awkward pause.",
"So they didn't talk much now, barely online, never on the phone. Since her second year of school he'd never been to NYC to visit her. She came back when she could face it; sometimes for birthdays, sometimes for Thanksgiving. Maybe for Christmas. But somehow always, like now, for the Super Bowl. Like football was the one thing they still had, that one thing they could still sit in the same room together for. Shouting at players, screaming at the ref, laughing at the ads.\nDad is in the bathroom, and Sara has had enough of Fox and whichever war this is. She reaches over and grabs the remote from the arm of his chair, and tries to find something else to watch. The government had scrapped all the rules about how the internet worked, and for most people like her parents it had suddenly gotten a lot cheaper to get their TV through Facebook, so all she can find is\nFox, Breitbart News, Family Values TV, Info Wars, The Rebel, Glenn Beck, The Voice of America, America First, The Bible Today",
"Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and how we got here.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nSara finds herself in the front room, sobbing.",
"There's a brief second, a fleeting moment, where Sara can bite her lip, let it go. She misses it. \"But I thought it was immigrants that are stealing people's jobs?\" \n\n \"You might think it's funny little lady, but let me tell you - you remember Kyle and Max, Bill Cooper's boys? Live up off Lafayette, past the Checkers?\" \n\n \"Nope.\" \n\n \"Well let me tell you,\" He shifts in the recliner, with some obvious pain and effort, to face her. \"Both of 'em lost their jobs just this last year. Both of 'em were truckers. Both of 'em been driving trucks since high school. Now the damn trucks are driving themselves and they're both out of work. And they got families to support. Kids.\"",
"Cut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\n\"Fuck this,\" says Sara, getting up from her seat.",
"\"Honey?\" \n\n Dad pauses the TV, looks up at her. It looks like he's been crying too. \"Sara?\" \n\n \"Did you - did you watch it?\" \n\n \"The Chevrolet ad?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"Yeah, we did.\" Embarrassed, he wipes a tear from his cheek. \"It was… it was very moving.\" \n\n She falls on him, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face in his chest. \"I'm sorry Dad. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be so mean-\" \n\n \"It's OK, honey. It really is.\" \n\n \"No, no it's not. We always fight. And I know that's mainly my fault-\" \n\n 'Well, now, c'mon-\"",
"\"You should go easy on your father, you know. He's worried about a lot of things.\" \n\n \"What things? Solar panel cancer?\" \n\n \"Don't joke Sara, I'm serious. There's a lot that bothers him. The state of the world. The future. All these damn wars.\" \n\n \"We're all worried about all that, Mom.\" \n\n \"He's worried about his health.\nI'm\nworried about his health. Probably more than he is.\" \n\n Sara looks up from her phone, genuine concern. \"Is he OK?\" \n\n \"I don't know. He won't go to the doctor. Hasn't been in months. He's worried about his insurance.\" \n\n \"I had no idea-\""
],
[
"So they didn't talk much now, barely online, never on the phone. Since her second year of school he'd never been to NYC to visit her. She came back when she could face it; sometimes for birthdays, sometimes for Thanksgiving. Maybe for Christmas. But somehow always, like now, for the Super Bowl. Like football was the one thing they still had, that one thing they could still sit in the same room together for. Shouting at players, screaming at the ref, laughing at the ads.\nDad is in the bathroom, and Sara has had enough of Fox and whichever war this is. She reaches over and grabs the remote from the arm of his chair, and tries to find something else to watch. The government had scrapped all the rules about how the internet worked, and for most people like her parents it had suddenly gotten a lot cheaper to get their TV through Facebook, so all she can find is\nFox, Breitbart News, Family Values TV, Info Wars, The Rebel, Glenn Beck, The Voice of America, America First, The Bible Today",
"and lots of hunting and sports channels she doesn't even recognise. It's signed in to her Dad's FB account, and the last thing she wants is to try and log in on hers before he gets back from the john. Yeah. There was no way that would end up with them keeping it civil.\nIn her pocket her phone vibrates, purrs against her skin, reminding her it's there, making sure she's not forgotten where her real friends are, that there's a world outside, beyond Dad and his TV. She takes it out and cradles it in her hands, the dark screen fleetingly reflecting back her face before it jumps awake at her very touch, opening up to bathe her in blue light, in comfort and warmth and the familiar. For the first time since she got home she feels herself relax.",
"Hastily she opens her FB TV app, pulls up the game. The ad is just finishing. She hits the 10-second rewind icon a couple of times, then leans the phone on its side against a ketchup bottle.\nCut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\nCut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are revealed to be a Mexican family, maybe two. Men, women, children. They look tired, hungry. They stop to rest, sipping the little water they have left from tattered plastic bottles.",
"He stabs at the screen, looks for a while, stabs again. Flips it over and hands it to her. \"Here. Read.\" \n\n Reluctantly, she takes it. His Facebook feed. Somewhere in the middle of it is the article, a very to the point CHINESE SOLAR PANELS CAUSE CANCER headline. But she can't even focus on it, because the rest of the screen is filled with distractions, looping videos and animated gifs, all adverts, and all for guns. Or security systems. Panic rooms. Back up power generators. Emergency rations. More guns. \n\n \"Jesus Christ Dad, these ads!\" \n\n \"No blasphemy at the dinner table, please honey\" says Mom. \n\n \"What about them?\"",
"\"Just… just look at them. They're terrifying. They're like… like adverts for the end of the world! You know they show you this stuff just to make you scared, right? Just to keep you paranoid.\" \n\n \"They show me this stuff because they've got products to sell. That's how the economy works. That's how we create jobs. Godammit Sara, are you telling me you hate\nadvertising\nnow? Do you just hate everything about America?\" \n\n Sara looks over to Mom, who looks like she's on the brink of tears. Suddenly she finds she's also lost the will to fight. Gently she closes the iPad and puts it down on the table, next to her plate. \n\n \"No, of course not Dad. Maybe I'll read this later, after the game.\"\nAfter dinner she helps Mom clean-up, the two of them loading the dishwasher in near silence. She's leaning against the counter, scrolling through Twitter on her phone, when Mom finally speaks.",
"Alone, seen only by the TV, Dad smiles to himself. He picks up the remote, but instead of hitting play, he finds himself hitting rewind.\nCut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\nCut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are all men. Dirty, scruffy, furtive. Like they mean business.They carry guns, pistols, and assault riffles. Bad hombres. One of them pulls open a bag, looks inside.\nCut to: close up of the inside of the bag. Inside are packets of white powder.",
"A little way away from the main group sits a small child, a girl. Maybe 8 years old. She is drawing shapes in the dust with a stick. She's drawn quite a bit it looks like, but from our angle we can't see what.\nCut to: drone footage. The pilot is watching the group. As he tracks away from the main party to where the girl is sat, the camera reveals what she has drawn.\nA large, child's rendition of the American flag.\nUnderneath it, it childlike handwriting, some words. 'I have a dream'\nText flashes across the screen. ALERT CANCELLED. ALL PATROLS: STAND DOWN\nCut to: the drone, banking and turning, flying away.\nCut to: exterior shot of the trailer. The still anonymous pilot exits, walks back towards his jeep.",
"Mom smiles, walks over and kisses her on the forehead. \"It's OK honey. Don't feel bad. Just go. Just go sit in there with him and watch some TV. Please.\"\nIt's the second down on the Falcon's 60 yard line with 30 yards to cover, and the Lions need one touchdown to equalise. Sara and her Dad are sat in the front room, working their way through a family sized pack of Oreos, when the ad break starts.\nDawn. Red skies over the desert. A Chevrolet truck pulls up next to a large, trailer. Low shot next to the front tire, as a cowboy booted foot drops down from the door, disturbing dust.",
"Everybody seems to be talking about the same thing.\nomg im crying\nholy shit that chevrolet ad /fire emoji\nthat was sooooo beautiful\nwho knew chevrolet were so woke\ni can't believe they did that, so amazing\nHang on, are they taking about the same ad?",
"\"No, just leave her,\" says Dad, gently, his eyes still fixed on the screen. \"Just let her go.\"\nOut in the kitchen Sara sits at the table and wants to scream. She's angry, mainly with herself. She should never have fucking come here. She should have known better. There was never any fucking way anything good was going to come from this. As much as Mom wants to romanticise things, to make them sound cute and adorable, the truth is shit with Dad has never been right since she was a teenager. Too much resentment, too much bad blood, too much control and rebellion. They hadn't agreed on anything - they hadn't managed to have a simple conversation that didn't descend into fighting - in 15 goddamn years, and no amount of eating cookies and watching fucking Super Bowl ads on the TV was going to fix that. \n\n She sighs, wipes a tear from her cheek. On autopilot she takes her phone from her pocket, feels its reassuring warmth in her hand, and swipes open Twitter.",
"Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and how we got here.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nSara finds herself in the front room, sobbing.",
"\"Well, I don't read the news and I don't know any science,\" says Mom, \"But I do know this: after they opened that solar farm up near Mary, within just a few years her and two of her neighbours had cancer. I mean I don't know anything for sure honey, but given the risk are you sure it's safe to be putting these panels on top of schools?\" \n\n \"There's no risk, Mom. None at all. Dad, I wish you'd stop believing everything you see on Facebook.\" \n\n \"Well, maybe you should read things yourself before passing judgement on them.\" He pushes himself up from his seat, steps away from the table. Sara sighs, thinking she's upset him that much that he's actually abandoning his dinner, but he stops to grab something off a nearby shelf. His iPad. He heads back and takes his seat again.\nOh, here we fucking go\nshe thinks to herself.",
"\"They do. The material they use to coat them reacts to sunlight, and produces an airborne carcinogen. It's based on a particular kind of rare earth. It's a bit like teflon. The Chinese have known about this for decades but have kept it covered up, because they-\" \n\n \"Dad, no. Just no. Trust me.\"\n\"-because they are the world's largest manufacturers of solar panels. But the research has been done. The scientific evidence is out there. Look it up.\" \n\n \"Look it up?\" Sara shakes her head, not knowing where to even start. \"Dad, who is telling you this stuff?\" \n\n \"No one is telling me it, Sara. I read it. It's in the news. I mean, really, I'm surprised you've not seen it. It was all over Facebook.\" \n\n \"Maybe on yours, but it's not all over my Facebook.\" She doesn't have the heart to tell him she muted him six months ago.",
"Cut to: internal shot of the trailer, darkness split by morning light through the opening door. The figure enters, flicks on lights. The room is full of equipment, computers. The figure takes a seat, puts on a headset, thumbs on screens. Rests their hands on two large joysticks on the desk.\nCut to: airfield, the desert. The distinctive silhouette of a Predator drone taxis across the screen, rising heat shimmering the air around it.\nCut to: interior of the trailer. The faceless figure works controls, the joysticks, touch screens.\nVoiceover: They say you need to get up pretty early to get past America's finest. But the truth is we never sleep.\nCut to: a uniformed guard on top of the border wall. He looks up and gives a salute to the drone as it soars above him, out and across the desert.",
"\"Sara!\" says Mom. \n\n \"No I'm sorry, I can't. I can't sit here and watch this… this bullshit. This propaganda.\" She storms out of the room. \n\n \"Sara!\" Mom makes to get up.",
"\"Yeah, well you know your father. Doesn't like to talk about it. Doesn't want to burden other people with his problems. Hates pity.\" She pauses, looks out the window into the yard. When she turns back to Sara her eyes are damp. \"This is why I was so excited about you coming back. Why he was so excited! I thought it'd take his mind of all this. He was so excited to see you. You know he loves watching the game with you, Sara.\" \n\n \"I know. I'm sorry I-\" \n\n \"And the ads! The Super Bowl ads! You know how much he loves watching the new ads with you. It's a stupid thing, sure, but he loves it. Talks about it all the time. It's like a tradition to him. That's why he got so upset over dinner when you got angry at his ads. It's something special he has with you, he doesn't want to lose it.\"",
"\"Honey?\" \n\n Dad pauses the TV, looks up at her. It looks like he's been crying too. \"Sara?\" \n\n \"Did you - did you watch it?\" \n\n \"The Chevrolet ad?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"Yeah, we did.\" Embarrassed, he wipes a tear from his cheek. \"It was… it was very moving.\" \n\n She falls on him, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face in his chest. \"I'm sorry Dad. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be so mean-\" \n\n \"It's OK, honey. It really is.\" \n\n \"No, no it's not. We always fight. And I know that's mainly my fault-\" \n\n 'Well, now, c'mon-\"",
"Divided we stand\nSara lets the Lyft park itself in the drive, lets out a sigh, and tweets\nwish me luck\nplus some emojis before slipping her phone into a hoody pocket. Curtains twitch, and before she can get her bag out of the back Mom is there, right there next to her, their hands touching on the handle as they compete for control. \n\n \"It's OK Mom, I got it.\" \n\n \"You should have let us come pick you up.\" \n\n \"It's fine, there was no need. I didn't want to put any-\" \n\n \"But you shouldn't be wasting money, not with how much rent you pay and-\" \n\n Jesus. Not this already. \"Mom. I can afford a cab ride. I'm not\nthat\nmuch of a failure.\"",
"There's a brief second, a fleeting moment, where Sara can bite her lip, let it go. She misses it. \"But I thought it was immigrants that are stealing people's jobs?\" \n\n \"You might think it's funny little lady, but let me tell you - you remember Kyle and Max, Bill Cooper's boys? Live up off Lafayette, past the Checkers?\" \n\n \"Nope.\" \n\n \"Well let me tell you,\" He shifts in the recliner, with some obvious pain and effort, to face her. \"Both of 'em lost their jobs just this last year. Both of 'em were truckers. Both of 'em been driving trucks since high school. Now the damn trucks are driving themselves and they're both out of work. And they got families to support. Kids.\"",
"\"Well I'm sure they'll be fine.\" She regrets the sarcasm as soon as she hears it in her own voice, but she still can't stop herself, like it's expected, like it's part of the routine. Part of their schtick. \"They just got to get themselves out there, huh Dad? Pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That's the American way, right?\" \n\n \"I'm glad you think this is funny, I really do. But what you New York types need to realise is-\" \n\n \"Ed!\" Mom had appeared in the doorway. \"Please! Both of you. No fighting today, please.\" \n\n \"Sheryl-\" \n\n \"No. I don't want to hear you two as much as disagreeing about anything today, unless it's about the game. And even then you'd better keep it civil. Otherwise you can both go hungry. Understand?\" \n\n Awkward pause."
],
[
"\"Well, I don't read the news and I don't know any science,\" says Mom, \"But I do know this: after they opened that solar farm up near Mary, within just a few years her and two of her neighbours had cancer. I mean I don't know anything for sure honey, but given the risk are you sure it's safe to be putting these panels on top of schools?\" \n\n \"There's no risk, Mom. None at all. Dad, I wish you'd stop believing everything you see on Facebook.\" \n\n \"Well, maybe you should read things yourself before passing judgement on them.\" He pushes himself up from his seat, steps away from the table. Sara sighs, thinking she's upset him that much that he's actually abandoning his dinner, but he stops to grab something off a nearby shelf. His iPad. He heads back and takes his seat again.\nOh, here we fucking go\nshe thinks to herself.",
"\"How's work, honey?\" Mom asks. \n\n \"Yeah, going OK.\" Sara works for a non-profit in Brooklyn that helps big organisations to transition to renewable energy. The pay is lousy but it feels important. \"We just got the last few schools in the city to agree to put solar panels on their roofs. Big deal for us. I've been working on them for the last two years.\" \n\n Mom says nothing, just looks down at her plate. \n\n Dad finishes chewing his mouthful, swallows, wipes his beard with a napkin. Sighs, barely controlled anger simmering behind his face. \"Solar panels cause cancer.\" \n\n Sara laughs, covering her mouth as she nearly chokes on chewed food. \"What? No they don't Dad.\"",
"Mom sighs, shoulders falling, looks at Sara directly. \"I'm sorry honey.\" She looks old, Sara thinks, watching a resigned tiredness flicker across her face in a way she'd not noticed before. Like she's exhausted by conflict, surrendered to it. \"Now, don't I get a hug?\" \n\n Sara smiles. They hold each other for a few long seconds, rubbing and squeezing each other as the Lyft silently backs itself out of the driveway. When they part it's Mom's hand that's on the bag's handle. \n\n Inside she unwraps herself from scarves and layers, the heat in the house almost a shock after the cold air. Michigan in February. Mom is already halfway up the stairs, bag in tow, headed for her room. \n\n \"Mom, just leave that and I'll…\" \n\n \"Your father's in the front room,\" she says, just before she disappears from view. \"Go say hi.\"",
"\"Just… just look at them. They're terrifying. They're like… like adverts for the end of the world! You know they show you this stuff just to make you scared, right? Just to keep you paranoid.\" \n\n \"They show me this stuff because they've got products to sell. That's how the economy works. That's how we create jobs. Godammit Sara, are you telling me you hate\nadvertising\nnow? Do you just hate everything about America?\" \n\n Sara looks over to Mom, who looks like she's on the brink of tears. Suddenly she finds she's also lost the will to fight. Gently she closes the iPad and puts it down on the table, next to her plate. \n\n \"No, of course not Dad. Maybe I'll read this later, after the game.\"\nAfter dinner she helps Mom clean-up, the two of them loading the dishwasher in near silence. She's leaning against the counter, scrolling through Twitter on her phone, when Mom finally speaks.",
"\"You should go easy on your father, you know. He's worried about a lot of things.\" \n\n \"What things? Solar panel cancer?\" \n\n \"Don't joke Sara, I'm serious. There's a lot that bothers him. The state of the world. The future. All these damn wars.\" \n\n \"We're all worried about all that, Mom.\" \n\n \"He's worried about his health.\nI'm\nworried about his health. Probably more than he is.\" \n\n Sara looks up from her phone, genuine concern. \"Is he OK?\" \n\n \"I don't know. He won't go to the doctor. Hasn't been in months. He's worried about his insurance.\" \n\n \"I had no idea-\"",
"\"They do. The material they use to coat them reacts to sunlight, and produces an airborne carcinogen. It's based on a particular kind of rare earth. It's a bit like teflon. The Chinese have known about this for decades but have kept it covered up, because they-\" \n\n \"Dad, no. Just no. Trust me.\"\n\"-because they are the world's largest manufacturers of solar panels. But the research has been done. The scientific evidence is out there. Look it up.\" \n\n \"Look it up?\" Sara shakes her head, not knowing where to even start. \"Dad, who is telling you this stuff?\" \n\n \"No one is telling me it, Sara. I read it. It's in the news. I mean, really, I'm surprised you've not seen it. It was all over Facebook.\" \n\n \"Maybe on yours, but it's not all over my Facebook.\" She doesn't have the heart to tell him she muted him six months ago.",
"For a few seconds Sara is alone in the hallway, the smell of cooking meat coming from one doorway, the sound of rolling news from another. She shakes her head, kicks off shoes, tucks hair behind her ears. Braces herself.\nHe's sat in the living room, reclining in the Lazy Boy. He doesn't hear her enter - her socked feet silent on the pile carpet floor, his attention lost in the screen that fills most of the wall. Fox News. She braces herself again. \n\n \"Hey Dad.\" \n\n His head jerks to look at her. \"Hey! When did you get here?\" He starts to push himself up. \n\n \"Don't get up Dad, it's fine. Really.\" She takes a seat on the couch. \"I just got here, like two minutes ago.\" \n\n \"Good flight?\" \n\n \"Yeah. Fine. Y'know. Same as always.\"",
"He stabs at the screen, looks for a while, stabs again. Flips it over and hands it to her. \"Here. Read.\" \n\n Reluctantly, she takes it. His Facebook feed. Somewhere in the middle of it is the article, a very to the point CHINESE SOLAR PANELS CAUSE CANCER headline. But she can't even focus on it, because the rest of the screen is filled with distractions, looping videos and animated gifs, all adverts, and all for guns. Or security systems. Panic rooms. Back up power generators. Emergency rations. More guns. \n\n \"Jesus Christ Dad, these ads!\" \n\n \"No blasphemy at the dinner table, please honey\" says Mom. \n\n \"What about them?\"",
"\"Sara!\" says Mom. \n\n \"No I'm sorry, I can't. I can't sit here and watch this… this bullshit. This propaganda.\" She storms out of the room. \n\n \"Sara!\" Mom makes to get up.",
"\"Yeah, well you know your father. Doesn't like to talk about it. Doesn't want to burden other people with his problems. Hates pity.\" She pauses, looks out the window into the yard. When she turns back to Sara her eyes are damp. \"This is why I was so excited about you coming back. Why he was so excited! I thought it'd take his mind of all this. He was so excited to see you. You know he loves watching the game with you, Sara.\" \n\n \"I know. I'm sorry I-\" \n\n \"And the ads! The Super Bowl ads! You know how much he loves watching the new ads with you. It's a stupid thing, sure, but he loves it. Talks about it all the time. It's like a tradition to him. That's why he got so upset over dinner when you got angry at his ads. It's something special he has with you, he doesn't want to lose it.\"",
"\"No, just leave her,\" says Dad, gently, his eyes still fixed on the screen. \"Just let her go.\"\nOut in the kitchen Sara sits at the table and wants to scream. She's angry, mainly with herself. She should never have fucking come here. She should have known better. There was never any fucking way anything good was going to come from this. As much as Mom wants to romanticise things, to make them sound cute and adorable, the truth is shit with Dad has never been right since she was a teenager. Too much resentment, too much bad blood, too much control and rebellion. They hadn't agreed on anything - they hadn't managed to have a simple conversation that didn't descend into fighting - in 15 goddamn years, and no amount of eating cookies and watching fucking Super Bowl ads on the TV was going to fix that. \n\n She sighs, wipes a tear from her cheek. On autopilot she takes her phone from her pocket, feels its reassuring warmth in her hand, and swipes open Twitter.",
"Mom smiles, walks over and kisses her on the forehead. \"It's OK honey. Don't feel bad. Just go. Just go sit in there with him and watch some TV. Please.\"\nIt's the second down on the Falcon's 60 yard line with 30 yards to cover, and the Lions need one touchdown to equalise. Sara and her Dad are sat in the front room, working their way through a family sized pack of Oreos, when the ad break starts.\nDawn. Red skies over the desert. A Chevrolet truck pulls up next to a large, trailer. Low shot next to the front tire, as a cowboy booted foot drops down from the door, disturbing dust.",
"So they didn't talk much now, barely online, never on the phone. Since her second year of school he'd never been to NYC to visit her. She came back when she could face it; sometimes for birthdays, sometimes for Thanksgiving. Maybe for Christmas. But somehow always, like now, for the Super Bowl. Like football was the one thing they still had, that one thing they could still sit in the same room together for. Shouting at players, screaming at the ref, laughing at the ads.\nDad is in the bathroom, and Sara has had enough of Fox and whichever war this is. She reaches over and grabs the remote from the arm of his chair, and tries to find something else to watch. The government had scrapped all the rules about how the internet worked, and for most people like her parents it had suddenly gotten a lot cheaper to get their TV through Facebook, so all she can find is\nFox, Breitbart News, Family Values TV, Info Wars, The Rebel, Glenn Beck, The Voice of America, America First, The Bible Today",
"\"Fine.\" \n\n \"Sorry Mom.\" \n\n Sara turns back to the TV, to watching the war, to trying to work out which one it is.\nIt had always been this way, ever since she was about thirteen. Up until then it just seemed like constant warmth, as though she didn't have any childhood concept of Dad apart from him getting home from work, then her sitting on his knee, eating cookies and watching football highlights until Mom came in and scolded them both for ruining their appetites before dinner.",
"He smiles back at her, nods knowingly. \n\n Their first words in nearly a year. Fine. So far. She relaxes. Of course it is. How bad could it be? \n\n \"I thought I was gonna come pick you up from the airport?\" \n\n \"Ah, no. I got a cab. I didn't want to bother you.\" \n\n \"Bother me? You think I'm too old and infirm to pick my own daughter up from the airport?\" \n\n \"No Dad, of course not.\"\nThe war spills out of Fox News, casualty figures scrolling across monochrome drone footage, attack helicopters circling over Caracas apartment blocks, pundits with bronzed skin and immaculate blond hair smiling from four-way split screens.\n\"So you just got a cab?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"How much did that cost?\"",
"There's a brief second, a fleeting moment, where Sara can bite her lip, let it go. She misses it. \"But I thought it was immigrants that are stealing people's jobs?\" \n\n \"You might think it's funny little lady, but let me tell you - you remember Kyle and Max, Bill Cooper's boys? Live up off Lafayette, past the Checkers?\" \n\n \"Nope.\" \n\n \"Well let me tell you,\" He shifts in the recliner, with some obvious pain and effort, to face her. \"Both of 'em lost their jobs just this last year. Both of 'em were truckers. Both of 'em been driving trucks since high school. Now the damn trucks are driving themselves and they're both out of work. And they got families to support. Kids.\"",
"\"Of course honey.\" \n\n Mom and Dad watch Sara leave the room, and then look at each other. \n\n \"Well.\" \n\n \"Well indeed.\" \n\n \"What did I tell you? You two just needed to spend some time together. Some quality time.\" \n\n \"I guess so. What did I ever do to deserve a woman as hot and as smart as you, huh Sheryl?\" \n\n Mom stands up and makes to leave the room, leaning down to kiss him as she passes. \"I ask myself that question every day.\"",
"Cut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\n\"Fuck this,\" says Sara, getting up from her seat.",
"Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and how we got here.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nSara finds herself in the front room, sobbing.",
"\"Well I'm sure they'll be fine.\" She regrets the sarcasm as soon as she hears it in her own voice, but she still can't stop herself, like it's expected, like it's part of the routine. Part of their schtick. \"They just got to get themselves out there, huh Dad? Pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That's the American way, right?\" \n\n \"I'm glad you think this is funny, I really do. But what you New York types need to realise is-\" \n\n \"Ed!\" Mom had appeared in the doorway. \"Please! Both of you. No fighting today, please.\" \n\n \"Sheryl-\" \n\n \"No. I don't want to hear you two as much as disagreeing about anything today, unless it's about the game. And even then you'd better keep it civil. Otherwise you can both go hungry. Understand?\" \n\n Awkward pause."
],
[
"He stabs at the screen, looks for a while, stabs again. Flips it over and hands it to her. \"Here. Read.\" \n\n Reluctantly, she takes it. His Facebook feed. Somewhere in the middle of it is the article, a very to the point CHINESE SOLAR PANELS CAUSE CANCER headline. But she can't even focus on it, because the rest of the screen is filled with distractions, looping videos and animated gifs, all adverts, and all for guns. Or security systems. Panic rooms. Back up power generators. Emergency rations. More guns. \n\n \"Jesus Christ Dad, these ads!\" \n\n \"No blasphemy at the dinner table, please honey\" says Mom. \n\n \"What about them?\"",
"Hastily she opens her FB TV app, pulls up the game. The ad is just finishing. She hits the 10-second rewind icon a couple of times, then leans the phone on its side against a ketchup bottle.\nCut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\nCut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are revealed to be a Mexican family, maybe two. Men, women, children. They look tired, hungry. They stop to rest, sipping the little water they have left from tattered plastic bottles.",
"\"Just… just look at them. They're terrifying. They're like… like adverts for the end of the world! You know they show you this stuff just to make you scared, right? Just to keep you paranoid.\" \n\n \"They show me this stuff because they've got products to sell. That's how the economy works. That's how we create jobs. Godammit Sara, are you telling me you hate\nadvertising\nnow? Do you just hate everything about America?\" \n\n Sara looks over to Mom, who looks like she's on the brink of tears. Suddenly she finds she's also lost the will to fight. Gently she closes the iPad and puts it down on the table, next to her plate. \n\n \"No, of course not Dad. Maybe I'll read this later, after the game.\"\nAfter dinner she helps Mom clean-up, the two of them loading the dishwasher in near silence. She's leaning against the counter, scrolling through Twitter on her phone, when Mom finally speaks.",
"\"Yeah, well you know your father. Doesn't like to talk about it. Doesn't want to burden other people with his problems. Hates pity.\" She pauses, looks out the window into the yard. When she turns back to Sara her eyes are damp. \"This is why I was so excited about you coming back. Why he was so excited! I thought it'd take his mind of all this. He was so excited to see you. You know he loves watching the game with you, Sara.\" \n\n \"I know. I'm sorry I-\" \n\n \"And the ads! The Super Bowl ads! You know how much he loves watching the new ads with you. It's a stupid thing, sure, but he loves it. Talks about it all the time. It's like a tradition to him. That's why he got so upset over dinner when you got angry at his ads. It's something special he has with you, he doesn't want to lose it.\"",
"So they didn't talk much now, barely online, never on the phone. Since her second year of school he'd never been to NYC to visit her. She came back when she could face it; sometimes for birthdays, sometimes for Thanksgiving. Maybe for Christmas. But somehow always, like now, for the Super Bowl. Like football was the one thing they still had, that one thing they could still sit in the same room together for. Shouting at players, screaming at the ref, laughing at the ads.\nDad is in the bathroom, and Sara has had enough of Fox and whichever war this is. She reaches over and grabs the remote from the arm of his chair, and tries to find something else to watch. The government had scrapped all the rules about how the internet worked, and for most people like her parents it had suddenly gotten a lot cheaper to get their TV through Facebook, so all she can find is\nFox, Breitbart News, Family Values TV, Info Wars, The Rebel, Glenn Beck, The Voice of America, America First, The Bible Today",
"and lots of hunting and sports channels she doesn't even recognise. It's signed in to her Dad's FB account, and the last thing she wants is to try and log in on hers before he gets back from the john. Yeah. There was no way that would end up with them keeping it civil.\nIn her pocket her phone vibrates, purrs against her skin, reminding her it's there, making sure she's not forgotten where her real friends are, that there's a world outside, beyond Dad and his TV. She takes it out and cradles it in her hands, the dark screen fleetingly reflecting back her face before it jumps awake at her very touch, opening up to bathe her in blue light, in comfort and warmth and the familiar. For the first time since she got home she feels herself relax.",
"\"No, it is. It's my fault. I got myself into thinking we can never agree on anything, that we can never see eye to eye. That we've got nothing in common anymore.\" She lifts her head to look up at him. \"But I know that's wrong. That I shouldn't assume things about you. That there's still things that can bring us together.\" \n\n He grins back at her. \"Like Super Bowl ads?\" \n\n She laughs. \"I guess. But you know what I mean, really.\" \n\n \"I know honey. And I'm sorry too. I didn't mean what I said earlier. I know you don't really hate this country.\" He gestures to the couch next to him. \"Why don't you sit down, huh? We can watch the rest of the game together.\" \n\n She straightens herself up, wipes her eyes. Suddenly feels a little self conscious. \"Sure. Let me just go freshen up first.\"",
"\"No, just leave her,\" says Dad, gently, his eyes still fixed on the screen. \"Just let her go.\"\nOut in the kitchen Sara sits at the table and wants to scream. She's angry, mainly with herself. She should never have fucking come here. She should have known better. There was never any fucking way anything good was going to come from this. As much as Mom wants to romanticise things, to make them sound cute and adorable, the truth is shit with Dad has never been right since she was a teenager. Too much resentment, too much bad blood, too much control and rebellion. They hadn't agreed on anything - they hadn't managed to have a simple conversation that didn't descend into fighting - in 15 goddamn years, and no amount of eating cookies and watching fucking Super Bowl ads on the TV was going to fix that. \n\n She sighs, wipes a tear from her cheek. On autopilot she takes her phone from her pocket, feels its reassuring warmth in her hand, and swipes open Twitter.",
"\"Honey?\" \n\n Dad pauses the TV, looks up at her. It looks like he's been crying too. \"Sara?\" \n\n \"Did you - did you watch it?\" \n\n \"The Chevrolet ad?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"Yeah, we did.\" Embarrassed, he wipes a tear from his cheek. \"It was… it was very moving.\" \n\n She falls on him, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face in his chest. \"I'm sorry Dad. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be so mean-\" \n\n \"It's OK, honey. It really is.\" \n\n \"No, no it's not. We always fight. And I know that's mainly my fault-\" \n\n 'Well, now, c'mon-\"",
"Mom smiles, walks over and kisses her on the forehead. \"It's OK honey. Don't feel bad. Just go. Just go sit in there with him and watch some TV. Please.\"\nIt's the second down on the Falcon's 60 yard line with 30 yards to cover, and the Lions need one touchdown to equalise. Sara and her Dad are sat in the front room, working their way through a family sized pack of Oreos, when the ad break starts.\nDawn. Red skies over the desert. A Chevrolet truck pulls up next to a large, trailer. Low shot next to the front tire, as a cowboy booted foot drops down from the door, disturbing dust.",
"A little way away from the main group sits a small child, a girl. Maybe 8 years old. She is drawing shapes in the dust with a stick. She's drawn quite a bit it looks like, but from our angle we can't see what.\nCut to: drone footage. The pilot is watching the group. As he tracks away from the main party to where the girl is sat, the camera reveals what she has drawn.\nA large, child's rendition of the American flag.\nUnderneath it, it childlike handwriting, some words. 'I have a dream'\nText flashes across the screen. ALERT CANCELLED. ALL PATROLS: STAND DOWN\nCut to: the drone, banking and turning, flying away.\nCut to: exterior shot of the trailer. The still anonymous pilot exits, walks back towards his jeep.",
"Everybody seems to be talking about the same thing.\nomg im crying\nholy shit that chevrolet ad /fire emoji\nthat was sooooo beautiful\nwho knew chevrolet were so woke\ni can't believe they did that, so amazing\nHang on, are they taking about the same ad?",
"Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and how we got here.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nSara finds herself in the front room, sobbing.",
"\"Well I'm sure they'll be fine.\" She regrets the sarcasm as soon as she hears it in her own voice, but she still can't stop herself, like it's expected, like it's part of the routine. Part of their schtick. \"They just got to get themselves out there, huh Dad? Pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That's the American way, right?\" \n\n \"I'm glad you think this is funny, I really do. But what you New York types need to realise is-\" \n\n \"Ed!\" Mom had appeared in the doorway. \"Please! Both of you. No fighting today, please.\" \n\n \"Sheryl-\" \n\n \"No. I don't want to hear you two as much as disagreeing about anything today, unless it's about the game. And even then you'd better keep it civil. Otherwise you can both go hungry. Understand?\" \n\n Awkward pause.",
"Cut to: exterior shot of the trailer. The still anonymous pilot exits, walks back towards his jeep.\nVoiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and what keeps us strong.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nDad wipes another team from his eye. \"I think we're going to be OK,\" he says to himself. \"I think we're going to be just fine.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"Alone, seen only by the TV, Dad smiles to himself. He picks up the remote, but instead of hitting play, he finds himself hitting rewind.\nCut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\nCut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are all men. Dirty, scruffy, furtive. Like they mean business.They carry guns, pistols, and assault riffles. Bad hombres. One of them pulls open a bag, looks inside.\nCut to: close up of the inside of the bag. Inside are packets of white powder.",
"\"Well, I don't read the news and I don't know any science,\" says Mom, \"But I do know this: after they opened that solar farm up near Mary, within just a few years her and two of her neighbours had cancer. I mean I don't know anything for sure honey, but given the risk are you sure it's safe to be putting these panels on top of schools?\" \n\n \"There's no risk, Mom. None at all. Dad, I wish you'd stop believing everything you see on Facebook.\" \n\n \"Well, maybe you should read things yourself before passing judgement on them.\" He pushes himself up from his seat, steps away from the table. Sara sighs, thinking she's upset him that much that he's actually abandoning his dinner, but he stops to grab something off a nearby shelf. His iPad. He heads back and takes his seat again.\nOh, here we fucking go\nshe thinks to herself.",
"\"Not much. Really. I can afford-\" \n\n \"Cabs are expensive. You shouldn't be wasting your money.\" \n\n \"It wasn't expensive. It wasn't a cab, it was a Lyft.\" \n\n \"One of those driverless things?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n Ad break. An elderly couple ride a tandem bicycle through a park, laughing and smiling in Instagram-perfect sunshine, as a calm, relaxing voice lists the potentially lethal side effects of a diabetes drug. \n\n Dad shakes his head. \"I don't know how you can use those things. I don't trust them.\" \n\n \"Dad, they're perfectly safe.\" \n\n \"That's not what I mean. They're stealing people's jobs.\"",
"Mom sighs, shoulders falling, looks at Sara directly. \"I'm sorry honey.\" She looks old, Sara thinks, watching a resigned tiredness flicker across her face in a way she'd not noticed before. Like she's exhausted by conflict, surrendered to it. \"Now, don't I get a hug?\" \n\n Sara smiles. They hold each other for a few long seconds, rubbing and squeezing each other as the Lyft silently backs itself out of the driveway. When they part it's Mom's hand that's on the bag's handle. \n\n Inside she unwraps herself from scarves and layers, the heat in the house almost a shock after the cold air. Michigan in February. Mom is already halfway up the stairs, bag in tow, headed for her room. \n\n \"Mom, just leave that and I'll…\" \n\n \"Your father's in the front room,\" she says, just before she disappears from view. \"Go say hi.\"",
"He smiles back at her, nods knowingly. \n\n Their first words in nearly a year. Fine. So far. She relaxes. Of course it is. How bad could it be? \n\n \"I thought I was gonna come pick you up from the airport?\" \n\n \"Ah, no. I got a cab. I didn't want to bother you.\" \n\n \"Bother me? You think I'm too old and infirm to pick my own daughter up from the airport?\" \n\n \"No Dad, of course not.\"\nThe war spills out of Fox News, casualty figures scrolling across monochrome drone footage, attack helicopters circling over Caracas apartment blocks, pundits with bronzed skin and immaculate blond hair smiling from four-way split screens.\n\"So you just got a cab?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"How much did that cost?\""
],
[
"\"Yeah, well you know your father. Doesn't like to talk about it. Doesn't want to burden other people with his problems. Hates pity.\" She pauses, looks out the window into the yard. When she turns back to Sara her eyes are damp. \"This is why I was so excited about you coming back. Why he was so excited! I thought it'd take his mind of all this. He was so excited to see you. You know he loves watching the game with you, Sara.\" \n\n \"I know. I'm sorry I-\" \n\n \"And the ads! The Super Bowl ads! You know how much he loves watching the new ads with you. It's a stupid thing, sure, but he loves it. Talks about it all the time. It's like a tradition to him. That's why he got so upset over dinner when you got angry at his ads. It's something special he has with you, he doesn't want to lose it.\"",
"\"No, it is. It's my fault. I got myself into thinking we can never agree on anything, that we can never see eye to eye. That we've got nothing in common anymore.\" She lifts her head to look up at him. \"But I know that's wrong. That I shouldn't assume things about you. That there's still things that can bring us together.\" \n\n He grins back at her. \"Like Super Bowl ads?\" \n\n She laughs. \"I guess. But you know what I mean, really.\" \n\n \"I know honey. And I'm sorry too. I didn't mean what I said earlier. I know you don't really hate this country.\" He gestures to the couch next to him. \"Why don't you sit down, huh? We can watch the rest of the game together.\" \n\n She straightens herself up, wipes her eyes. Suddenly feels a little self conscious. \"Sure. Let me just go freshen up first.\"",
"\"Well I'm sure they'll be fine.\" She regrets the sarcasm as soon as she hears it in her own voice, but she still can't stop herself, like it's expected, like it's part of the routine. Part of their schtick. \"They just got to get themselves out there, huh Dad? Pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That's the American way, right?\" \n\n \"I'm glad you think this is funny, I really do. But what you New York types need to realise is-\" \n\n \"Ed!\" Mom had appeared in the doorway. \"Please! Both of you. No fighting today, please.\" \n\n \"Sheryl-\" \n\n \"No. I don't want to hear you two as much as disagreeing about anything today, unless it's about the game. And even then you'd better keep it civil. Otherwise you can both go hungry. Understand?\" \n\n Awkward pause.",
"Mom smiles, walks over and kisses her on the forehead. \"It's OK honey. Don't feel bad. Just go. Just go sit in there with him and watch some TV. Please.\"\nIt's the second down on the Falcon's 60 yard line with 30 yards to cover, and the Lions need one touchdown to equalise. Sara and her Dad are sat in the front room, working their way through a family sized pack of Oreos, when the ad break starts.\nDawn. Red skies over the desert. A Chevrolet truck pulls up next to a large, trailer. Low shot next to the front tire, as a cowboy booted foot drops down from the door, disturbing dust.",
"So they didn't talk much now, barely online, never on the phone. Since her second year of school he'd never been to NYC to visit her. She came back when she could face it; sometimes for birthdays, sometimes for Thanksgiving. Maybe for Christmas. But somehow always, like now, for the Super Bowl. Like football was the one thing they still had, that one thing they could still sit in the same room together for. Shouting at players, screaming at the ref, laughing at the ads.\nDad is in the bathroom, and Sara has had enough of Fox and whichever war this is. She reaches over and grabs the remote from the arm of his chair, and tries to find something else to watch. The government had scrapped all the rules about how the internet worked, and for most people like her parents it had suddenly gotten a lot cheaper to get their TV through Facebook, so all she can find is\nFox, Breitbart News, Family Values TV, Info Wars, The Rebel, Glenn Beck, The Voice of America, America First, The Bible Today",
"\"No, just leave her,\" says Dad, gently, his eyes still fixed on the screen. \"Just let her go.\"\nOut in the kitchen Sara sits at the table and wants to scream. She's angry, mainly with herself. She should never have fucking come here. She should have known better. There was never any fucking way anything good was going to come from this. As much as Mom wants to romanticise things, to make them sound cute and adorable, the truth is shit with Dad has never been right since she was a teenager. Too much resentment, too much bad blood, too much control and rebellion. They hadn't agreed on anything - they hadn't managed to have a simple conversation that didn't descend into fighting - in 15 goddamn years, and no amount of eating cookies and watching fucking Super Bowl ads on the TV was going to fix that. \n\n She sighs, wipes a tear from her cheek. On autopilot she takes her phone from her pocket, feels its reassuring warmth in her hand, and swipes open Twitter.",
"\"Honey?\" \n\n Dad pauses the TV, looks up at her. It looks like he's been crying too. \"Sara?\" \n\n \"Did you - did you watch it?\" \n\n \"The Chevrolet ad?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"Yeah, we did.\" Embarrassed, he wipes a tear from his cheek. \"It was… it was very moving.\" \n\n She falls on him, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face in his chest. \"I'm sorry Dad. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be so mean-\" \n\n \"It's OK, honey. It really is.\" \n\n \"No, no it's not. We always fight. And I know that's mainly my fault-\" \n\n 'Well, now, c'mon-\"",
"For a few seconds Sara is alone in the hallway, the smell of cooking meat coming from one doorway, the sound of rolling news from another. She shakes her head, kicks off shoes, tucks hair behind her ears. Braces herself.\nHe's sat in the living room, reclining in the Lazy Boy. He doesn't hear her enter - her socked feet silent on the pile carpet floor, his attention lost in the screen that fills most of the wall. Fox News. She braces herself again. \n\n \"Hey Dad.\" \n\n His head jerks to look at her. \"Hey! When did you get here?\" He starts to push himself up. \n\n \"Don't get up Dad, it's fine. Really.\" She takes a seat on the couch. \"I just got here, like two minutes ago.\" \n\n \"Good flight?\" \n\n \"Yeah. Fine. Y'know. Same as always.\"",
"Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and how we got here.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nSara finds herself in the front room, sobbing.",
"Mom sighs, shoulders falling, looks at Sara directly. \"I'm sorry honey.\" She looks old, Sara thinks, watching a resigned tiredness flicker across her face in a way she'd not noticed before. Like she's exhausted by conflict, surrendered to it. \"Now, don't I get a hug?\" \n\n Sara smiles. They hold each other for a few long seconds, rubbing and squeezing each other as the Lyft silently backs itself out of the driveway. When they part it's Mom's hand that's on the bag's handle. \n\n Inside she unwraps herself from scarves and layers, the heat in the house almost a shock after the cold air. Michigan in February. Mom is already halfway up the stairs, bag in tow, headed for her room. \n\n \"Mom, just leave that and I'll…\" \n\n \"Your father's in the front room,\" she says, just before she disappears from view. \"Go say hi.\"",
"Cut to: exterior shot of the trailer. The still anonymous pilot exits, walks back towards his jeep.\nVoiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and what keeps us strong.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nDad wipes another team from his eye. \"I think we're going to be OK,\" he says to himself. \"I think we're going to be just fine.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"A little way away from the main group sits a small child, a girl. Maybe 8 years old. She is drawing shapes in the dust with a stick. She's drawn quite a bit it looks like, but from our angle we can't see what.\nCut to: drone footage. The pilot is watching the group. As he tracks away from the main party to where the girl is sat, the camera reveals what she has drawn.\nA large, child's rendition of the American flag.\nUnderneath it, it childlike handwriting, some words. 'I have a dream'\nText flashes across the screen. ALERT CANCELLED. ALL PATROLS: STAND DOWN\nCut to: the drone, banking and turning, flying away.\nCut to: exterior shot of the trailer. The still anonymous pilot exits, walks back towards his jeep.",
"\"Just… just look at them. They're terrifying. They're like… like adverts for the end of the world! You know they show you this stuff just to make you scared, right? Just to keep you paranoid.\" \n\n \"They show me this stuff because they've got products to sell. That's how the economy works. That's how we create jobs. Godammit Sara, are you telling me you hate\nadvertising\nnow? Do you just hate everything about America?\" \n\n Sara looks over to Mom, who looks like she's on the brink of tears. Suddenly she finds she's also lost the will to fight. Gently she closes the iPad and puts it down on the table, next to her plate. \n\n \"No, of course not Dad. Maybe I'll read this later, after the game.\"\nAfter dinner she helps Mom clean-up, the two of them loading the dishwasher in near silence. She's leaning against the counter, scrolling through Twitter on her phone, when Mom finally speaks.",
"\"Fine.\" \n\n \"Sorry Mom.\" \n\n Sara turns back to the TV, to watching the war, to trying to work out which one it is.\nIt had always been this way, ever since she was about thirteen. Up until then it just seemed like constant warmth, as though she didn't have any childhood concept of Dad apart from him getting home from work, then her sitting on his knee, eating cookies and watching football highlights until Mom came in and scolded them both for ruining their appetites before dinner.",
"Hastily she opens her FB TV app, pulls up the game. The ad is just finishing. She hits the 10-second rewind icon a couple of times, then leans the phone on its side against a ketchup bottle.\nCut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\nCut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are revealed to be a Mexican family, maybe two. Men, women, children. They look tired, hungry. They stop to rest, sipping the little water they have left from tattered plastic bottles.",
"Alone, seen only by the TV, Dad smiles to himself. He picks up the remote, but instead of hitting play, he finds himself hitting rewind.\nCut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\nCut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are all men. Dirty, scruffy, furtive. Like they mean business.They carry guns, pistols, and assault riffles. Bad hombres. One of them pulls open a bag, looks inside.\nCut to: close up of the inside of the bag. Inside are packets of white powder.",
"He smiles back at her, nods knowingly. \n\n Their first words in nearly a year. Fine. So far. She relaxes. Of course it is. How bad could it be? \n\n \"I thought I was gonna come pick you up from the airport?\" \n\n \"Ah, no. I got a cab. I didn't want to bother you.\" \n\n \"Bother me? You think I'm too old and infirm to pick my own daughter up from the airport?\" \n\n \"No Dad, of course not.\"\nThe war spills out of Fox News, casualty figures scrolling across monochrome drone footage, attack helicopters circling over Caracas apartment blocks, pundits with bronzed skin and immaculate blond hair smiling from four-way split screens.\n\"So you just got a cab?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"How much did that cost?\"",
"He stabs at the screen, looks for a while, stabs again. Flips it over and hands it to her. \"Here. Read.\" \n\n Reluctantly, she takes it. His Facebook feed. Somewhere in the middle of it is the article, a very to the point CHINESE SOLAR PANELS CAUSE CANCER headline. But she can't even focus on it, because the rest of the screen is filled with distractions, looping videos and animated gifs, all adverts, and all for guns. Or security systems. Panic rooms. Back up power generators. Emergency rations. More guns. \n\n \"Jesus Christ Dad, these ads!\" \n\n \"No blasphemy at the dinner table, please honey\" says Mom. \n\n \"What about them?\"",
"Dinner is Mom's meatloaf, with gravy and mashed potatoes. Cornbread and broccoli. Every mouthful tastes like nostalgia, and Sara can feel herself being encompassed by a bubble, this barrier of warm air and long forgotten simplicity enveloping her body, protecting her from the confusion of the world outside.",
"And then everything changed. Suddenly there was rap music and nose rings, sneaking out of the house to see her friends and not wanting to go to church. Suddenly he was no longer this lovable bear-man that ruffled her hair and gave her candy and explained defensive plays to her, but this huge obelisk of injustice that just wanted to crush her high school life into dust. It was constant warfare; every opinion she had became a battle, every decision she made a conflict. Getting away to college gave her escape, but bred resentment too; he hated that she went to New York, even though NYU was a good school, and her decision to stay there after she finished made things even worse. And then politics got all crazy, weirder then ever, and it became impossible for them to talk without it erupting into fights almost instantly. It was bad enough when the smart, young guy she liked was president and Dad constantly spewed his hate for him at her, but somehow it got even worse when the old, racist, women hating war-starter he liked won. Twice."
],
[
"Mom smiles, walks over and kisses her on the forehead. \"It's OK honey. Don't feel bad. Just go. Just go sit in there with him and watch some TV. Please.\"\nIt's the second down on the Falcon's 60 yard line with 30 yards to cover, and the Lions need one touchdown to equalise. Sara and her Dad are sat in the front room, working their way through a family sized pack of Oreos, when the ad break starts.\nDawn. Red skies over the desert. A Chevrolet truck pulls up next to a large, trailer. Low shot next to the front tire, as a cowboy booted foot drops down from the door, disturbing dust.",
"Hastily she opens her FB TV app, pulls up the game. The ad is just finishing. She hits the 10-second rewind icon a couple of times, then leans the phone on its side against a ketchup bottle.\nCut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\nCut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are revealed to be a Mexican family, maybe two. Men, women, children. They look tired, hungry. They stop to rest, sipping the little water they have left from tattered plastic bottles.",
"Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and how we got here.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nSara finds herself in the front room, sobbing.",
"\"Honey?\" \n\n Dad pauses the TV, looks up at her. It looks like he's been crying too. \"Sara?\" \n\n \"Did you - did you watch it?\" \n\n \"The Chevrolet ad?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"Yeah, we did.\" Embarrassed, he wipes a tear from his cheek. \"It was… it was very moving.\" \n\n She falls on him, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face in his chest. \"I'm sorry Dad. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be so mean-\" \n\n \"It's OK, honey. It really is.\" \n\n \"No, no it's not. We always fight. And I know that's mainly my fault-\" \n\n 'Well, now, c'mon-\"",
"\"Just… just look at them. They're terrifying. They're like… like adverts for the end of the world! You know they show you this stuff just to make you scared, right? Just to keep you paranoid.\" \n\n \"They show me this stuff because they've got products to sell. That's how the economy works. That's how we create jobs. Godammit Sara, are you telling me you hate\nadvertising\nnow? Do you just hate everything about America?\" \n\n Sara looks over to Mom, who looks like she's on the brink of tears. Suddenly she finds she's also lost the will to fight. Gently she closes the iPad and puts it down on the table, next to her plate. \n\n \"No, of course not Dad. Maybe I'll read this later, after the game.\"\nAfter dinner she helps Mom clean-up, the two of them loading the dishwasher in near silence. She's leaning against the counter, scrolling through Twitter on her phone, when Mom finally speaks.",
"\"Yeah, well you know your father. Doesn't like to talk about it. Doesn't want to burden other people with his problems. Hates pity.\" She pauses, looks out the window into the yard. When she turns back to Sara her eyes are damp. \"This is why I was so excited about you coming back. Why he was so excited! I thought it'd take his mind of all this. He was so excited to see you. You know he loves watching the game with you, Sara.\" \n\n \"I know. I'm sorry I-\" \n\n \"And the ads! The Super Bowl ads! You know how much he loves watching the new ads with you. It's a stupid thing, sure, but he loves it. Talks about it all the time. It's like a tradition to him. That's why he got so upset over dinner when you got angry at his ads. It's something special he has with you, he doesn't want to lose it.\"",
"Cut to: exterior shot of the trailer. The still anonymous pilot exits, walks back towards his jeep.\nVoiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and what keeps us strong.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nDad wipes another team from his eye. \"I think we're going to be OK,\" he says to himself. \"I think we're going to be just fine.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"He stabs at the screen, looks for a while, stabs again. Flips it over and hands it to her. \"Here. Read.\" \n\n Reluctantly, she takes it. His Facebook feed. Somewhere in the middle of it is the article, a very to the point CHINESE SOLAR PANELS CAUSE CANCER headline. But she can't even focus on it, because the rest of the screen is filled with distractions, looping videos and animated gifs, all adverts, and all for guns. Or security systems. Panic rooms. Back up power generators. Emergency rations. More guns. \n\n \"Jesus Christ Dad, these ads!\" \n\n \"No blasphemy at the dinner table, please honey\" says Mom. \n\n \"What about them?\"",
"\"No, it is. It's my fault. I got myself into thinking we can never agree on anything, that we can never see eye to eye. That we've got nothing in common anymore.\" She lifts her head to look up at him. \"But I know that's wrong. That I shouldn't assume things about you. That there's still things that can bring us together.\" \n\n He grins back at her. \"Like Super Bowl ads?\" \n\n She laughs. \"I guess. But you know what I mean, really.\" \n\n \"I know honey. And I'm sorry too. I didn't mean what I said earlier. I know you don't really hate this country.\" He gestures to the couch next to him. \"Why don't you sit down, huh? We can watch the rest of the game together.\" \n\n She straightens herself up, wipes her eyes. Suddenly feels a little self conscious. \"Sure. Let me just go freshen up first.\"",
"Everybody seems to be talking about the same thing.\nomg im crying\nholy shit that chevrolet ad /fire emoji\nthat was sooooo beautiful\nwho knew chevrolet were so woke\ni can't believe they did that, so amazing\nHang on, are they taking about the same ad?",
"Alone, seen only by the TV, Dad smiles to himself. He picks up the remote, but instead of hitting play, he finds himself hitting rewind.\nCut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\nCut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are all men. Dirty, scruffy, furtive. Like they mean business.They carry guns, pistols, and assault riffles. Bad hombres. One of them pulls open a bag, looks inside.\nCut to: close up of the inside of the bag. Inside are packets of white powder.",
"A little way away from the main group sits a small child, a girl. Maybe 8 years old. She is drawing shapes in the dust with a stick. She's drawn quite a bit it looks like, but from our angle we can't see what.\nCut to: drone footage. The pilot is watching the group. As he tracks away from the main party to where the girl is sat, the camera reveals what she has drawn.\nA large, child's rendition of the American flag.\nUnderneath it, it childlike handwriting, some words. 'I have a dream'\nText flashes across the screen. ALERT CANCELLED. ALL PATROLS: STAND DOWN\nCut to: the drone, banking and turning, flying away.\nCut to: exterior shot of the trailer. The still anonymous pilot exits, walks back towards his jeep.",
"\"No, just leave her,\" says Dad, gently, his eyes still fixed on the screen. \"Just let her go.\"\nOut in the kitchen Sara sits at the table and wants to scream. She's angry, mainly with herself. She should never have fucking come here. She should have known better. There was never any fucking way anything good was going to come from this. As much as Mom wants to romanticise things, to make them sound cute and adorable, the truth is shit with Dad has never been right since she was a teenager. Too much resentment, too much bad blood, too much control and rebellion. They hadn't agreed on anything - they hadn't managed to have a simple conversation that didn't descend into fighting - in 15 goddamn years, and no amount of eating cookies and watching fucking Super Bowl ads on the TV was going to fix that. \n\n She sighs, wipes a tear from her cheek. On autopilot she takes her phone from her pocket, feels its reassuring warmth in her hand, and swipes open Twitter.",
"So they didn't talk much now, barely online, never on the phone. Since her second year of school he'd never been to NYC to visit her. She came back when she could face it; sometimes for birthdays, sometimes for Thanksgiving. Maybe for Christmas. But somehow always, like now, for the Super Bowl. Like football was the one thing they still had, that one thing they could still sit in the same room together for. Shouting at players, screaming at the ref, laughing at the ads.\nDad is in the bathroom, and Sara has had enough of Fox and whichever war this is. She reaches over and grabs the remote from the arm of his chair, and tries to find something else to watch. The government had scrapped all the rules about how the internet worked, and for most people like her parents it had suddenly gotten a lot cheaper to get their TV through Facebook, so all she can find is\nFox, Breitbart News, Family Values TV, Info Wars, The Rebel, Glenn Beck, The Voice of America, America First, The Bible Today",
"\"Sara!\" says Mom. \n\n \"No I'm sorry, I can't. I can't sit here and watch this… this bullshit. This propaganda.\" She storms out of the room. \n\n \"Sara!\" Mom makes to get up.",
"For a few seconds Sara is alone in the hallway, the smell of cooking meat coming from one doorway, the sound of rolling news from another. She shakes her head, kicks off shoes, tucks hair behind her ears. Braces herself.\nHe's sat in the living room, reclining in the Lazy Boy. He doesn't hear her enter - her socked feet silent on the pile carpet floor, his attention lost in the screen that fills most of the wall. Fox News. She braces herself again. \n\n \"Hey Dad.\" \n\n His head jerks to look at her. \"Hey! When did you get here?\" He starts to push himself up. \n\n \"Don't get up Dad, it's fine. Really.\" She takes a seat on the couch. \"I just got here, like two minutes ago.\" \n\n \"Good flight?\" \n\n \"Yeah. Fine. Y'know. Same as always.\"",
"Suddenly, one of the party looks up, shouts something in Spanish. They all go to grab their guns.\nBut it's too late.\nFrom three different directions, three different Chevrolet jeeps appear, screeching to a halt, kicking up dust. From them jump Border Patrol agents and Minutemen militia, guns drawn and ready.\nThe gang of men don't even put up a fight. They know they're surrounded, they drop their weapons and pathetically raise their hands.\nAll except one. The guy with the bag full of drugs. He's got nothing to lose. He reaches for his rifle.\nCut to: Border Patrol agents, opening fire.\nText flashes across the screen. ALERT CANCELLED. THREAT NEUTRALISED.\nCut to: the drone, banking and turning, flying away.",
"\"Not much. Really. I can afford-\" \n\n \"Cabs are expensive. You shouldn't be wasting your money.\" \n\n \"It wasn't expensive. It wasn't a cab, it was a Lyft.\" \n\n \"One of those driverless things?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n Ad break. An elderly couple ride a tandem bicycle through a park, laughing and smiling in Instagram-perfect sunshine, as a calm, relaxing voice lists the potentially lethal side effects of a diabetes drug. \n\n Dad shakes his head. \"I don't know how you can use those things. I don't trust them.\" \n\n \"Dad, they're perfectly safe.\" \n\n \"That's not what I mean. They're stealing people's jobs.\"",
"Cut to: internal shot of the trailer, darkness split by morning light through the opening door. The figure enters, flicks on lights. The room is full of equipment, computers. The figure takes a seat, puts on a headset, thumbs on screens. Rests their hands on two large joysticks on the desk.\nCut to: airfield, the desert. The distinctive silhouette of a Predator drone taxis across the screen, rising heat shimmering the air around it.\nCut to: interior of the trailer. The faceless figure works controls, the joysticks, touch screens.\nVoiceover: They say you need to get up pretty early to get past America's finest. But the truth is we never sleep.\nCut to: a uniformed guard on top of the border wall. He looks up and gives a salute to the drone as it soars above him, out and across the desert.",
"and lots of hunting and sports channels she doesn't even recognise. It's signed in to her Dad's FB account, and the last thing she wants is to try and log in on hers before he gets back from the john. Yeah. There was no way that would end up with them keeping it civil.\nIn her pocket her phone vibrates, purrs against her skin, reminding her it's there, making sure she's not forgotten where her real friends are, that there's a world outside, beyond Dad and his TV. She takes it out and cradles it in her hands, the dark screen fleetingly reflecting back her face before it jumps awake at her very touch, opening up to bathe her in blue light, in comfort and warmth and the familiar. For the first time since she got home she feels herself relax."
],
[
"Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and how we got here.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nSara finds herself in the front room, sobbing.",
"\"Honey?\" \n\n Dad pauses the TV, looks up at her. It looks like he's been crying too. \"Sara?\" \n\n \"Did you - did you watch it?\" \n\n \"The Chevrolet ad?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"Yeah, we did.\" Embarrassed, he wipes a tear from his cheek. \"It was… it was very moving.\" \n\n She falls on him, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face in his chest. \"I'm sorry Dad. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be so mean-\" \n\n \"It's OK, honey. It really is.\" \n\n \"No, no it's not. We always fight. And I know that's mainly my fault-\" \n\n 'Well, now, c'mon-\"",
"Mom smiles, walks over and kisses her on the forehead. \"It's OK honey. Don't feel bad. Just go. Just go sit in there with him and watch some TV. Please.\"\nIt's the second down on the Falcon's 60 yard line with 30 yards to cover, and the Lions need one touchdown to equalise. Sara and her Dad are sat in the front room, working their way through a family sized pack of Oreos, when the ad break starts.\nDawn. Red skies over the desert. A Chevrolet truck pulls up next to a large, trailer. Low shot next to the front tire, as a cowboy booted foot drops down from the door, disturbing dust.",
"\"Just… just look at them. They're terrifying. They're like… like adverts for the end of the world! You know they show you this stuff just to make you scared, right? Just to keep you paranoid.\" \n\n \"They show me this stuff because they've got products to sell. That's how the economy works. That's how we create jobs. Godammit Sara, are you telling me you hate\nadvertising\nnow? Do you just hate everything about America?\" \n\n Sara looks over to Mom, who looks like she's on the brink of tears. Suddenly she finds she's also lost the will to fight. Gently she closes the iPad and puts it down on the table, next to her plate. \n\n \"No, of course not Dad. Maybe I'll read this later, after the game.\"\nAfter dinner she helps Mom clean-up, the two of them loading the dishwasher in near silence. She's leaning against the counter, scrolling through Twitter on her phone, when Mom finally speaks.",
"Cut to: exterior shot of the trailer. The still anonymous pilot exits, walks back towards his jeep.\nVoiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and what keeps us strong.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nDad wipes another team from his eye. \"I think we're going to be OK,\" he says to himself. \"I think we're going to be just fine.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"Everybody seems to be talking about the same thing.\nomg im crying\nholy shit that chevrolet ad /fire emoji\nthat was sooooo beautiful\nwho knew chevrolet were so woke\ni can't believe they did that, so amazing\nHang on, are they taking about the same ad?",
"\"Yeah, well you know your father. Doesn't like to talk about it. Doesn't want to burden other people with his problems. Hates pity.\" She pauses, looks out the window into the yard. When she turns back to Sara her eyes are damp. \"This is why I was so excited about you coming back. Why he was so excited! I thought it'd take his mind of all this. He was so excited to see you. You know he loves watching the game with you, Sara.\" \n\n \"I know. I'm sorry I-\" \n\n \"And the ads! The Super Bowl ads! You know how much he loves watching the new ads with you. It's a stupid thing, sure, but he loves it. Talks about it all the time. It's like a tradition to him. That's why he got so upset over dinner when you got angry at his ads. It's something special he has with you, he doesn't want to lose it.\"",
"There's a brief second, a fleeting moment, where Sara can bite her lip, let it go. She misses it. \"But I thought it was immigrants that are stealing people's jobs?\" \n\n \"You might think it's funny little lady, but let me tell you - you remember Kyle and Max, Bill Cooper's boys? Live up off Lafayette, past the Checkers?\" \n\n \"Nope.\" \n\n \"Well let me tell you,\" He shifts in the recliner, with some obvious pain and effort, to face her. \"Both of 'em lost their jobs just this last year. Both of 'em were truckers. Both of 'em been driving trucks since high school. Now the damn trucks are driving themselves and they're both out of work. And they got families to support. Kids.\"",
"\"Sara!\" says Mom. \n\n \"No I'm sorry, I can't. I can't sit here and watch this… this bullshit. This propaganda.\" She storms out of the room. \n\n \"Sara!\" Mom makes to get up.",
"\"No, just leave her,\" says Dad, gently, his eyes still fixed on the screen. \"Just let her go.\"\nOut in the kitchen Sara sits at the table and wants to scream. She's angry, mainly with herself. She should never have fucking come here. She should have known better. There was never any fucking way anything good was going to come from this. As much as Mom wants to romanticise things, to make them sound cute and adorable, the truth is shit with Dad has never been right since she was a teenager. Too much resentment, too much bad blood, too much control and rebellion. They hadn't agreed on anything - they hadn't managed to have a simple conversation that didn't descend into fighting - in 15 goddamn years, and no amount of eating cookies and watching fucking Super Bowl ads on the TV was going to fix that. \n\n She sighs, wipes a tear from her cheek. On autopilot she takes her phone from her pocket, feels its reassuring warmth in her hand, and swipes open Twitter.",
"For a few seconds Sara is alone in the hallway, the smell of cooking meat coming from one doorway, the sound of rolling news from another. She shakes her head, kicks off shoes, tucks hair behind her ears. Braces herself.\nHe's sat in the living room, reclining in the Lazy Boy. He doesn't hear her enter - her socked feet silent on the pile carpet floor, his attention lost in the screen that fills most of the wall. Fox News. She braces herself again. \n\n \"Hey Dad.\" \n\n His head jerks to look at her. \"Hey! When did you get here?\" He starts to push himself up. \n\n \"Don't get up Dad, it's fine. Really.\" She takes a seat on the couch. \"I just got here, like two minutes ago.\" \n\n \"Good flight?\" \n\n \"Yeah. Fine. Y'know. Same as always.\"",
"Mom sighs, shoulders falling, looks at Sara directly. \"I'm sorry honey.\" She looks old, Sara thinks, watching a resigned tiredness flicker across her face in a way she'd not noticed before. Like she's exhausted by conflict, surrendered to it. \"Now, don't I get a hug?\" \n\n Sara smiles. They hold each other for a few long seconds, rubbing and squeezing each other as the Lyft silently backs itself out of the driveway. When they part it's Mom's hand that's on the bag's handle. \n\n Inside she unwraps herself from scarves and layers, the heat in the house almost a shock after the cold air. Michigan in February. Mom is already halfway up the stairs, bag in tow, headed for her room. \n\n \"Mom, just leave that and I'll…\" \n\n \"Your father's in the front room,\" she says, just before she disappears from view. \"Go say hi.\"",
"Hastily she opens her FB TV app, pulls up the game. The ad is just finishing. She hits the 10-second rewind icon a couple of times, then leans the phone on its side against a ketchup bottle.\nCut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\nCut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are revealed to be a Mexican family, maybe two. Men, women, children. They look tired, hungry. They stop to rest, sipping the little water they have left from tattered plastic bottles.",
"So they didn't talk much now, barely online, never on the phone. Since her second year of school he'd never been to NYC to visit her. She came back when she could face it; sometimes for birthdays, sometimes for Thanksgiving. Maybe for Christmas. But somehow always, like now, for the Super Bowl. Like football was the one thing they still had, that one thing they could still sit in the same room together for. Shouting at players, screaming at the ref, laughing at the ads.\nDad is in the bathroom, and Sara has had enough of Fox and whichever war this is. She reaches over and grabs the remote from the arm of his chair, and tries to find something else to watch. The government had scrapped all the rules about how the internet worked, and for most people like her parents it had suddenly gotten a lot cheaper to get their TV through Facebook, so all she can find is\nFox, Breitbart News, Family Values TV, Info Wars, The Rebel, Glenn Beck, The Voice of America, America First, The Bible Today",
"He stabs at the screen, looks for a while, stabs again. Flips it over and hands it to her. \"Here. Read.\" \n\n Reluctantly, she takes it. His Facebook feed. Somewhere in the middle of it is the article, a very to the point CHINESE SOLAR PANELS CAUSE CANCER headline. But she can't even focus on it, because the rest of the screen is filled with distractions, looping videos and animated gifs, all adverts, and all for guns. Or security systems. Panic rooms. Back up power generators. Emergency rations. More guns. \n\n \"Jesus Christ Dad, these ads!\" \n\n \"No blasphemy at the dinner table, please honey\" says Mom. \n\n \"What about them?\"",
"Sara slips her phone into her pocket, genuine guilt. Feels like a spoiled kid. \"I didn't realise. I'm sorry.\"",
"A little way away from the main group sits a small child, a girl. Maybe 8 years old. She is drawing shapes in the dust with a stick. She's drawn quite a bit it looks like, but from our angle we can't see what.\nCut to: drone footage. The pilot is watching the group. As he tracks away from the main party to where the girl is sat, the camera reveals what she has drawn.\nA large, child's rendition of the American flag.\nUnderneath it, it childlike handwriting, some words. 'I have a dream'\nText flashes across the screen. ALERT CANCELLED. ALL PATROLS: STAND DOWN\nCut to: the drone, banking and turning, flying away.\nCut to: exterior shot of the trailer. The still anonymous pilot exits, walks back towards his jeep.",
"\"No, it is. It's my fault. I got myself into thinking we can never agree on anything, that we can never see eye to eye. That we've got nothing in common anymore.\" She lifts her head to look up at him. \"But I know that's wrong. That I shouldn't assume things about you. That there's still things that can bring us together.\" \n\n He grins back at her. \"Like Super Bowl ads?\" \n\n She laughs. \"I guess. But you know what I mean, really.\" \n\n \"I know honey. And I'm sorry too. I didn't mean what I said earlier. I know you don't really hate this country.\" He gestures to the couch next to him. \"Why don't you sit down, huh? We can watch the rest of the game together.\" \n\n She straightens herself up, wipes her eyes. Suddenly feels a little self conscious. \"Sure. Let me just go freshen up first.\"",
"\"Of course honey.\" \n\n Mom and Dad watch Sara leave the room, and then look at each other. \n\n \"Well.\" \n\n \"Well indeed.\" \n\n \"What did I tell you? You two just needed to spend some time together. Some quality time.\" \n\n \"I guess so. What did I ever do to deserve a woman as hot and as smart as you, huh Sheryl?\" \n\n Mom stands up and makes to leave the room, leaning down to kiss him as she passes. \"I ask myself that question every day.\"",
"Dinner is Mom's meatloaf, with gravy and mashed potatoes. Cornbread and broccoli. Every mouthful tastes like nostalgia, and Sara can feel herself being encompassed by a bubble, this barrier of warm air and long forgotten simplicity enveloping her body, protecting her from the confusion of the world outside."
],
[
"He stabs at the screen, looks for a while, stabs again. Flips it over and hands it to her. \"Here. Read.\" \n\n Reluctantly, she takes it. His Facebook feed. Somewhere in the middle of it is the article, a very to the point CHINESE SOLAR PANELS CAUSE CANCER headline. But she can't even focus on it, because the rest of the screen is filled with distractions, looping videos and animated gifs, all adverts, and all for guns. Or security systems. Panic rooms. Back up power generators. Emergency rations. More guns. \n\n \"Jesus Christ Dad, these ads!\" \n\n \"No blasphemy at the dinner table, please honey\" says Mom. \n\n \"What about them?\"",
"Hastily she opens her FB TV app, pulls up the game. The ad is just finishing. She hits the 10-second rewind icon a couple of times, then leans the phone on its side against a ketchup bottle.\nCut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\nCut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are revealed to be a Mexican family, maybe two. Men, women, children. They look tired, hungry. They stop to rest, sipping the little water they have left from tattered plastic bottles.",
"\"Just… just look at them. They're terrifying. They're like… like adverts for the end of the world! You know they show you this stuff just to make you scared, right? Just to keep you paranoid.\" \n\n \"They show me this stuff because they've got products to sell. That's how the economy works. That's how we create jobs. Godammit Sara, are you telling me you hate\nadvertising\nnow? Do you just hate everything about America?\" \n\n Sara looks over to Mom, who looks like she's on the brink of tears. Suddenly she finds she's also lost the will to fight. Gently she closes the iPad and puts it down on the table, next to her plate. \n\n \"No, of course not Dad. Maybe I'll read this later, after the game.\"\nAfter dinner she helps Mom clean-up, the two of them loading the dishwasher in near silence. She's leaning against the counter, scrolling through Twitter on her phone, when Mom finally speaks.",
"So they didn't talk much now, barely online, never on the phone. Since her second year of school he'd never been to NYC to visit her. She came back when she could face it; sometimes for birthdays, sometimes for Thanksgiving. Maybe for Christmas. But somehow always, like now, for the Super Bowl. Like football was the one thing they still had, that one thing they could still sit in the same room together for. Shouting at players, screaming at the ref, laughing at the ads.\nDad is in the bathroom, and Sara has had enough of Fox and whichever war this is. She reaches over and grabs the remote from the arm of his chair, and tries to find something else to watch. The government had scrapped all the rules about how the internet worked, and for most people like her parents it had suddenly gotten a lot cheaper to get their TV through Facebook, so all she can find is\nFox, Breitbart News, Family Values TV, Info Wars, The Rebel, Glenn Beck, The Voice of America, America First, The Bible Today",
"A little way away from the main group sits a small child, a girl. Maybe 8 years old. She is drawing shapes in the dust with a stick. She's drawn quite a bit it looks like, but from our angle we can't see what.\nCut to: drone footage. The pilot is watching the group. As he tracks away from the main party to where the girl is sat, the camera reveals what she has drawn.\nA large, child's rendition of the American flag.\nUnderneath it, it childlike handwriting, some words. 'I have a dream'\nText flashes across the screen. ALERT CANCELLED. ALL PATROLS: STAND DOWN\nCut to: the drone, banking and turning, flying away.\nCut to: exterior shot of the trailer. The still anonymous pilot exits, walks back towards his jeep.",
"Everybody seems to be talking about the same thing.\nomg im crying\nholy shit that chevrolet ad /fire emoji\nthat was sooooo beautiful\nwho knew chevrolet were so woke\ni can't believe they did that, so amazing\nHang on, are they taking about the same ad?",
"Cut to: exterior shot of the trailer. The still anonymous pilot exits, walks back towards his jeep.\nVoiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and what keeps us strong.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nDad wipes another team from his eye. \"I think we're going to be OK,\" he says to himself. \"I think we're going to be just fine.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"Alone, seen only by the TV, Dad smiles to himself. He picks up the remote, but instead of hitting play, he finds himself hitting rewind.\nCut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\nCut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are all men. Dirty, scruffy, furtive. Like they mean business.They carry guns, pistols, and assault riffles. Bad hombres. One of them pulls open a bag, looks inside.\nCut to: close up of the inside of the bag. Inside are packets of white powder.",
"\"Yeah, well you know your father. Doesn't like to talk about it. Doesn't want to burden other people with his problems. Hates pity.\" She pauses, looks out the window into the yard. When she turns back to Sara her eyes are damp. \"This is why I was so excited about you coming back. Why he was so excited! I thought it'd take his mind of all this. He was so excited to see you. You know he loves watching the game with you, Sara.\" \n\n \"I know. I'm sorry I-\" \n\n \"And the ads! The Super Bowl ads! You know how much he loves watching the new ads with you. It's a stupid thing, sure, but he loves it. Talks about it all the time. It's like a tradition to him. That's why he got so upset over dinner when you got angry at his ads. It's something special he has with you, he doesn't want to lose it.\"",
"Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and how we got here.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nSara finds herself in the front room, sobbing.",
"\"Honey?\" \n\n Dad pauses the TV, looks up at her. It looks like he's been crying too. \"Sara?\" \n\n \"Did you - did you watch it?\" \n\n \"The Chevrolet ad?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"Yeah, we did.\" Embarrassed, he wipes a tear from his cheek. \"It was… it was very moving.\" \n\n She falls on him, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face in his chest. \"I'm sorry Dad. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be so mean-\" \n\n \"It's OK, honey. It really is.\" \n\n \"No, no it's not. We always fight. And I know that's mainly my fault-\" \n\n 'Well, now, c'mon-\"",
"Mom smiles, walks over and kisses her on the forehead. \"It's OK honey. Don't feel bad. Just go. Just go sit in there with him and watch some TV. Please.\"\nIt's the second down on the Falcon's 60 yard line with 30 yards to cover, and the Lions need one touchdown to equalise. Sara and her Dad are sat in the front room, working their way through a family sized pack of Oreos, when the ad break starts.\nDawn. Red skies over the desert. A Chevrolet truck pulls up next to a large, trailer. Low shot next to the front tire, as a cowboy booted foot drops down from the door, disturbing dust.",
"and lots of hunting and sports channels she doesn't even recognise. It's signed in to her Dad's FB account, and the last thing she wants is to try and log in on hers before he gets back from the john. Yeah. There was no way that would end up with them keeping it civil.\nIn her pocket her phone vibrates, purrs against her skin, reminding her it's there, making sure she's not forgotten where her real friends are, that there's a world outside, beyond Dad and his TV. She takes it out and cradles it in her hands, the dark screen fleetingly reflecting back her face before it jumps awake at her very touch, opening up to bathe her in blue light, in comfort and warmth and the familiar. For the first time since she got home she feels herself relax.",
"\"Not much. Really. I can afford-\" \n\n \"Cabs are expensive. You shouldn't be wasting your money.\" \n\n \"It wasn't expensive. It wasn't a cab, it was a Lyft.\" \n\n \"One of those driverless things?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n Ad break. An elderly couple ride a tandem bicycle through a park, laughing and smiling in Instagram-perfect sunshine, as a calm, relaxing voice lists the potentially lethal side effects of a diabetes drug. \n\n Dad shakes his head. \"I don't know how you can use those things. I don't trust them.\" \n\n \"Dad, they're perfectly safe.\" \n\n \"That's not what I mean. They're stealing people's jobs.\"",
"Cut to: internal shot of the trailer, darkness split by morning light through the opening door. The figure enters, flicks on lights. The room is full of equipment, computers. The figure takes a seat, puts on a headset, thumbs on screens. Rests their hands on two large joysticks on the desk.\nCut to: airfield, the desert. The distinctive silhouette of a Predator drone taxis across the screen, rising heat shimmering the air around it.\nCut to: interior of the trailer. The faceless figure works controls, the joysticks, touch screens.\nVoiceover: They say you need to get up pretty early to get past America's finest. But the truth is we never sleep.\nCut to: a uniformed guard on top of the border wall. He looks up and gives a salute to the drone as it soars above him, out and across the desert.",
"Cut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\n\"Fuck this,\" says Sara, getting up from her seat.",
"Suddenly, one of the party looks up, shouts something in Spanish. They all go to grab their guns.\nBut it's too late.\nFrom three different directions, three different Chevrolet jeeps appear, screeching to a halt, kicking up dust. From them jump Border Patrol agents and Minutemen militia, guns drawn and ready.\nThe gang of men don't even put up a fight. They know they're surrounded, they drop their weapons and pathetically raise their hands.\nAll except one. The guy with the bag full of drugs. He's got nothing to lose. He reaches for his rifle.\nCut to: Border Patrol agents, opening fire.\nText flashes across the screen. ALERT CANCELLED. THREAT NEUTRALISED.\nCut to: the drone, banking and turning, flying away.",
"Divided we stand\nSara lets the Lyft park itself in the drive, lets out a sigh, and tweets\nwish me luck\nplus some emojis before slipping her phone into a hoody pocket. Curtains twitch, and before she can get her bag out of the back Mom is there, right there next to her, their hands touching on the handle as they compete for control. \n\n \"It's OK Mom, I got it.\" \n\n \"You should have let us come pick you up.\" \n\n \"It's fine, there was no need. I didn't want to put any-\" \n\n \"But you shouldn't be wasting money, not with how much rent you pay and-\" \n\n Jesus. Not this already. \"Mom. I can afford a cab ride. I'm not\nthat\nmuch of a failure.\"",
"\"No, it is. It's my fault. I got myself into thinking we can never agree on anything, that we can never see eye to eye. That we've got nothing in common anymore.\" She lifts her head to look up at him. \"But I know that's wrong. That I shouldn't assume things about you. That there's still things that can bring us together.\" \n\n He grins back at her. \"Like Super Bowl ads?\" \n\n She laughs. \"I guess. But you know what I mean, really.\" \n\n \"I know honey. And I'm sorry too. I didn't mean what I said earlier. I know you don't really hate this country.\" He gestures to the couch next to him. \"Why don't you sit down, huh? We can watch the rest of the game together.\" \n\n She straightens herself up, wipes her eyes. Suddenly feels a little self conscious. \"Sure. Let me just go freshen up first.\"",
"He smiles back at her, nods knowingly. \n\n Their first words in nearly a year. Fine. So far. She relaxes. Of course it is. How bad could it be? \n\n \"I thought I was gonna come pick you up from the airport?\" \n\n \"Ah, no. I got a cab. I didn't want to bother you.\" \n\n \"Bother me? You think I'm too old and infirm to pick my own daughter up from the airport?\" \n\n \"No Dad, of course not.\"\nThe war spills out of Fox News, casualty figures scrolling across monochrome drone footage, attack helicopters circling over Caracas apartment blocks, pundits with bronzed skin and immaculate blond hair smiling from four-way split screens.\n\"So you just got a cab?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"How much did that cost?\""
],
[
"A little way away from the main group sits a small child, a girl. Maybe 8 years old. She is drawing shapes in the dust with a stick. She's drawn quite a bit it looks like, but from our angle we can't see what.\nCut to: drone footage. The pilot is watching the group. As he tracks away from the main party to where the girl is sat, the camera reveals what she has drawn.\nA large, child's rendition of the American flag.\nUnderneath it, it childlike handwriting, some words. 'I have a dream'\nText flashes across the screen. ALERT CANCELLED. ALL PATROLS: STAND DOWN\nCut to: the drone, banking and turning, flying away.\nCut to: exterior shot of the trailer. The still anonymous pilot exits, walks back towards his jeep.",
"Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and how we got here.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nSara finds herself in the front room, sobbing.",
"Mom smiles, walks over and kisses her on the forehead. \"It's OK honey. Don't feel bad. Just go. Just go sit in there with him and watch some TV. Please.\"\nIt's the second down on the Falcon's 60 yard line with 30 yards to cover, and the Lions need one touchdown to equalise. Sara and her Dad are sat in the front room, working their way through a family sized pack of Oreos, when the ad break starts.\nDawn. Red skies over the desert. A Chevrolet truck pulls up next to a large, trailer. Low shot next to the front tire, as a cowboy booted foot drops down from the door, disturbing dust.",
"\"No, it is. It's my fault. I got myself into thinking we can never agree on anything, that we can never see eye to eye. That we've got nothing in common anymore.\" She lifts her head to look up at him. \"But I know that's wrong. That I shouldn't assume things about you. That there's still things that can bring us together.\" \n\n He grins back at her. \"Like Super Bowl ads?\" \n\n She laughs. \"I guess. But you know what I mean, really.\" \n\n \"I know honey. And I'm sorry too. I didn't mean what I said earlier. I know you don't really hate this country.\" He gestures to the couch next to him. \"Why don't you sit down, huh? We can watch the rest of the game together.\" \n\n She straightens herself up, wipes her eyes. Suddenly feels a little self conscious. \"Sure. Let me just go freshen up first.\"",
"Mom sighs, shoulders falling, looks at Sara directly. \"I'm sorry honey.\" She looks old, Sara thinks, watching a resigned tiredness flicker across her face in a way she'd not noticed before. Like she's exhausted by conflict, surrendered to it. \"Now, don't I get a hug?\" \n\n Sara smiles. They hold each other for a few long seconds, rubbing and squeezing each other as the Lyft silently backs itself out of the driveway. When they part it's Mom's hand that's on the bag's handle. \n\n Inside she unwraps herself from scarves and layers, the heat in the house almost a shock after the cold air. Michigan in February. Mom is already halfway up the stairs, bag in tow, headed for her room. \n\n \"Mom, just leave that and I'll…\" \n\n \"Your father's in the front room,\" she says, just before she disappears from view. \"Go say hi.\"",
"\"Honey?\" \n\n Dad pauses the TV, looks up at her. It looks like he's been crying too. \"Sara?\" \n\n \"Did you - did you watch it?\" \n\n \"The Chevrolet ad?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"Yeah, we did.\" Embarrassed, he wipes a tear from his cheek. \"It was… it was very moving.\" \n\n She falls on him, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face in his chest. \"I'm sorry Dad. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be so mean-\" \n\n \"It's OK, honey. It really is.\" \n\n \"No, no it's not. We always fight. And I know that's mainly my fault-\" \n\n 'Well, now, c'mon-\"",
"Suddenly, one of the party looks up, shouts something in Spanish. They all go to grab their guns.\nBut it's too late.\nFrom three different directions, three different Chevrolet jeeps appear, screeching to a halt, kicking up dust. From them jump Border Patrol agents and Minutemen militia, guns drawn and ready.\nThe gang of men don't even put up a fight. They know they're surrounded, they drop their weapons and pathetically raise their hands.\nAll except one. The guy with the bag full of drugs. He's got nothing to lose. He reaches for his rifle.\nCut to: Border Patrol agents, opening fire.\nText flashes across the screen. ALERT CANCELLED. THREAT NEUTRALISED.\nCut to: the drone, banking and turning, flying away.",
"Alone, seen only by the TV, Dad smiles to himself. He picks up the remote, but instead of hitting play, he finds himself hitting rewind.\nCut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\nCut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are all men. Dirty, scruffy, furtive. Like they mean business.They carry guns, pistols, and assault riffles. Bad hombres. One of them pulls open a bag, looks inside.\nCut to: close up of the inside of the bag. Inside are packets of white powder.",
"\"Well I'm sure they'll be fine.\" She regrets the sarcasm as soon as she hears it in her own voice, but she still can't stop herself, like it's expected, like it's part of the routine. Part of their schtick. \"They just got to get themselves out there, huh Dad? Pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That's the American way, right?\" \n\n \"I'm glad you think this is funny, I really do. But what you New York types need to realise is-\" \n\n \"Ed!\" Mom had appeared in the doorway. \"Please! Both of you. No fighting today, please.\" \n\n \"Sheryl-\" \n\n \"No. I don't want to hear you two as much as disagreeing about anything today, unless it's about the game. And even then you'd better keep it civil. Otherwise you can both go hungry. Understand?\" \n\n Awkward pause.",
"Hastily she opens her FB TV app, pulls up the game. The ad is just finishing. She hits the 10-second rewind icon a couple of times, then leans the phone on its side against a ketchup bottle.\nCut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\nCut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are revealed to be a Mexican family, maybe two. Men, women, children. They look tired, hungry. They stop to rest, sipping the little water they have left from tattered plastic bottles.",
"Dinner is Mom's meatloaf, with gravy and mashed potatoes. Cornbread and broccoli. Every mouthful tastes like nostalgia, and Sara can feel herself being encompassed by a bubble, this barrier of warm air and long forgotten simplicity enveloping her body, protecting her from the confusion of the world outside.",
"Cut to: internal shot of the trailer, darkness split by morning light through the opening door. The figure enters, flicks on lights. The room is full of equipment, computers. The figure takes a seat, puts on a headset, thumbs on screens. Rests their hands on two large joysticks on the desk.\nCut to: airfield, the desert. The distinctive silhouette of a Predator drone taxis across the screen, rising heat shimmering the air around it.\nCut to: interior of the trailer. The faceless figure works controls, the joysticks, touch screens.\nVoiceover: They say you need to get up pretty early to get past America's finest. But the truth is we never sleep.\nCut to: a uniformed guard on top of the border wall. He looks up and gives a salute to the drone as it soars above him, out and across the desert.",
"Cut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\n\"Fuck this,\" says Sara, getting up from her seat.",
"\"Yeah, well you know your father. Doesn't like to talk about it. Doesn't want to burden other people with his problems. Hates pity.\" She pauses, looks out the window into the yard. When she turns back to Sara her eyes are damp. \"This is why I was so excited about you coming back. Why he was so excited! I thought it'd take his mind of all this. He was so excited to see you. You know he loves watching the game with you, Sara.\" \n\n \"I know. I'm sorry I-\" \n\n \"And the ads! The Super Bowl ads! You know how much he loves watching the new ads with you. It's a stupid thing, sure, but he loves it. Talks about it all the time. It's like a tradition to him. That's why he got so upset over dinner when you got angry at his ads. It's something special he has with you, he doesn't want to lose it.\"",
"He smiles back at her, nods knowingly. \n\n Their first words in nearly a year. Fine. So far. She relaxes. Of course it is. How bad could it be? \n\n \"I thought I was gonna come pick you up from the airport?\" \n\n \"Ah, no. I got a cab. I didn't want to bother you.\" \n\n \"Bother me? You think I'm too old and infirm to pick my own daughter up from the airport?\" \n\n \"No Dad, of course not.\"\nThe war spills out of Fox News, casualty figures scrolling across monochrome drone footage, attack helicopters circling over Caracas apartment blocks, pundits with bronzed skin and immaculate blond hair smiling from four-way split screens.\n\"So you just got a cab?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"How much did that cost?\"",
"\"Of course honey.\" \n\n Mom and Dad watch Sara leave the room, and then look at each other. \n\n \"Well.\" \n\n \"Well indeed.\" \n\n \"What did I tell you? You two just needed to spend some time together. Some quality time.\" \n\n \"I guess so. What did I ever do to deserve a woman as hot and as smart as you, huh Sheryl?\" \n\n Mom stands up and makes to leave the room, leaning down to kiss him as she passes. \"I ask myself that question every day.\"",
"and lots of hunting and sports channels she doesn't even recognise. It's signed in to her Dad's FB account, and the last thing she wants is to try and log in on hers before he gets back from the john. Yeah. There was no way that would end up with them keeping it civil.\nIn her pocket her phone vibrates, purrs against her skin, reminding her it's there, making sure she's not forgotten where her real friends are, that there's a world outside, beyond Dad and his TV. She takes it out and cradles it in her hands, the dark screen fleetingly reflecting back her face before it jumps awake at her very touch, opening up to bathe her in blue light, in comfort and warmth and the familiar. For the first time since she got home she feels herself relax.",
"Cut to: exterior shot of the trailer. The still anonymous pilot exits, walks back towards his jeep.\nVoiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and what keeps us strong.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nDad wipes another team from his eye. \"I think we're going to be OK,\" he says to himself. \"I think we're going to be just fine.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.",
"\"No, just leave her,\" says Dad, gently, his eyes still fixed on the screen. \"Just let her go.\"\nOut in the kitchen Sara sits at the table and wants to scream. She's angry, mainly with herself. She should never have fucking come here. She should have known better. There was never any fucking way anything good was going to come from this. As much as Mom wants to romanticise things, to make them sound cute and adorable, the truth is shit with Dad has never been right since she was a teenager. Too much resentment, too much bad blood, too much control and rebellion. They hadn't agreed on anything - they hadn't managed to have a simple conversation that didn't descend into fighting - in 15 goddamn years, and no amount of eating cookies and watching fucking Super Bowl ads on the TV was going to fix that. \n\n She sighs, wipes a tear from her cheek. On autopilot she takes her phone from her pocket, feels its reassuring warmth in her hand, and swipes open Twitter.",
"\"Fine.\" \n\n \"Sorry Mom.\" \n\n Sara turns back to the TV, to watching the war, to trying to work out which one it is.\nIt had always been this way, ever since she was about thirteen. Up until then it just seemed like constant warmth, as though she didn't have any childhood concept of Dad apart from him getting home from work, then her sitting on his knee, eating cookies and watching football highlights until Mom came in and scolded them both for ruining their appetites before dinner."
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|
[
"Approximately how long was Stinson on the planet before he decided it was home?",
"How old is the Sand God, mentally?",
"What happened to the Sand God's race?",
"Why are the webfoots chasing Stinson and Sybtl?",
"Why do the webfoots only wear skirts?",
"Why does the Sand God keep the webfoots around?",
"Where is Stinson from?",
"Why is the Sand God causing a terrible storm?"
] |
[
[
"12 hours",
"24 hours",
"36 hours",
"48 hours"
],
[
"Six years",
"Fifteen years",
"Twelve years",
"Nine years"
],
[
"The Sand God's race moved to the sixth planet and left him behind.",
"The Sand God burned them all.",
"The webfoots killed the Sand God's race. He left his body to escape death.",
"The Sand God's race learned how to separate the mind from the body. They set a date to leave their bodies together. The Sand God found himself alone after the experience."
],
[
"The webfoots think Stinson took Syblt against her will.",
"Stinson accidentally killed one of the webfoots while disarming him.",
"Stinson murdered the leader of the webfoots.",
"The webfoots think Sybtl did not please the God."
],
[
"Skirts are traditionally worn by prisoners. The webfoots on this planet are all criminals or descendants of criminals.",
"The people from the sixth planet only sent skirts, when it was communicated that the Sand God had burned everything else.",
"The Sand God burned everything, except for the skirts.",
"Skirts are the traditional dress for the webfoots culture."
],
[
"It amuses the Sand God to watch the webfoots evolution.",
"It amuses the Sand God to play with the webfoots.",
"The webfoots worship him like a God even though he is not one.",
"The webfoots fear of the Sand God amuses him."
],
[
"Montana",
"Missouri",
"Mississippi",
"Michigan"
],
[
"He knows he can't control Stinson.",
"He is angry because Stinson figured out he is a child.",
"He is angry Stinson took Sybtl away from the webfoots.",
"He is angry because he doesn't understand Stinson."
]
] |
[
2,
4,
4,
4,
3,
1,
2,
4
] |
[
1,
0,
0,
0,
1,
1,
0,
1
] |
[
[
"Those in the cavern looked at the woman with fear and respect. She\n kissed Stinson's feet. Two of the men came and gave her a brilliant\n new skirt. She smiled at him, and he thought he had never seen a more\n beautiful face.\nThe great, bodiless voice sounded again, but those in the cavern went\n about their activities. They did not hear.\n\n\n \"Who are you?\"\n\n\n Stinson looked at the wind devil, since it could be no one else\n speaking, and pointed to himself. \"Me?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"I am Stinson, of the planet Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I see it in your mind, now. You want to live here, on this\n planet.\"\n\n\n \"Then you must know where I came from, and how.\"",
"He disappeared at once, giving her no chance to object again, and went\n to the desert of sand, where he had first arrived on the planet. He\n wanted to see if the storm were world-wide.\n\n\n Stinson had never been in a sand storm before, even on Earth. He could\n not breathe. He could not see. Bullets of sand stung his skin. Bullets\n of sand shot into his eyes. Clouds of sand howled around him. He fell,\n and the wind rolled him over and over in the sand like a tumbleweed.\n The skirt flew up around his face. He could not get up again.\n\n\n He returned to the cave.",
"He tested the gravity by jumping up and down. Same as Earth gravity.\n The sun—no, not\nthe\nsun. Not Sol. What should he call it, Alpha or\n Centaurus? Well, perhaps neither. He was here and Earth was somewhere\n up there. This was\nthe\nsun of this particular solar system. He was\n right the first time.\n\n\n The sun burned fiercely, although he would have said it was about four\n o'clock in the afternoon, if this had been Earth. Not a tree, nor a\n bush, nor even a wisp of dry grass was in sight. Everywhere was desert.\n\n\n The funnel of sand had moved closer and while he watched it, it seemed\n to drift in the wind—although there was no wind. Stinson backed away.\n It stopped. It was about ten feet tall by three feet in diameter at the\n base. Then Stinson backed away again. It was changing. Now it became a\n blue rectangle, then a red cube, a violet sphere.",
"\"Earthman, wait....\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Stinson shot back. \"You've owned this planet for a million\n years. You have brooded here alone since before my people discovered\n fire, and in all those ages you never learned self-control. I can't\n subject my people to the whims of an entity who throws a planetary fit\n when it pleases him.\"\n\n\n Stinson relaxed. He'd had his say. Sybtl trembled beside him. A small\n mammal, round, furry, hopped by, sniffing inquisitively.\n\n\n Sybtl said, \"Is the Sand God happy?\" She shook her head. \"No, he is not\n happy. He is old, old, old. I can feel it. My people say that when one\n gets too old it is well to die. But Gods never die, do they? I would\n not like to be a God.\"",
"\"I do not know. I alone exist. I have searched all the levels of time\n and matter from the very beginning. My people are gone. Sometimes it\n almost comes to me, why they are gone. And this is contrary to the\n greatest law of all—that an entity, once in existence, can never cease\n to exist.\"\nStinson was silent, thinking of the endless years of searching through\n the great gulf of time. His eyes caught sight of the woman, reclining\n now on the pallet. The men had left her and stood in groups, talking,\n glancing at him, apparently free of their awe and fear already.\n\n\n The woman looked at him, and she was not smiling. \"Please ask the Sand\n God,\" she said, \"to speak to my people again. Their fear of him does\n not last. When He is gone they will probably kill us.\"\n\n\n \"As for the webfoots,\" the wind devil, or Sand God, said, \"I will\n destroy them. You and your people will have the entire planet.\"",
"\"No.\"\nStinson tried to imagine it. At first there must have been a single\n voice crying into a monstrous emptiness, \"Mother, where are you?\nMOTHER!\nWhere is\neveryone\n?\" A frenzied searching of the planet,\n the solar system, the galaxy. Then a returning to the planet. Empty....\n Change. Buildings, roads, bridges weathering slowly. Such a race would\n have built of durable metal. Durable? Centuries, eons passed. Buildings\n crumbled to dust, dust blew away. Bridges eroded, fell, decomposed\n into basic elements. The shape of constellations changed. All trace\n of civilization passed except in the cavern of the heated pool.\n Constellations disappeared, new patterns formed in the night sky. The\n unutterably total void of time—FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS!\n\n\n And a nine-year-old child brooding over an empty world.\n\n\n \"I don't understand why your development stopped,\" Stinson said.",
"The sphere of blue fire screamed away across the frozen wilderness, and\n the thunder of its passing shook the ground and echoed among the lonely\n hills.\nSybtl shivered against his arm. \"The Sand God is angry,\" she said. \"My\n people tell how he was angry once before, when we first came here. He\n killed half of us and burned the ship that brought us. That is how\n Kaatr got the tube-weapon. It was the only thing the Sand God didn't\n burn, that and the skirts. Then, when he had burned the ship, the Sand\n God went to the sixth planet and burned two of the largest cities, as a\n warning that no more of us must come here.\"\n\n\n Well, Stinson said to himself, that does it. We are better off on\n Earth. We can't fight a monster like him.\n\n\n Sybtl touched his arm. \"Why did the Sand God come? He did not speak.\"\n\n\n \"He spoke to me.\"",
"\"I do not understand how. You have a body, a physical body composed\n of atoms. It is impossible to move a physical body from one place to\n another by a mere thought and a tiny instrument, yet you have done so.\n You deserted me out in the desert.\"\n\n\n \"I deserted you?\" Stinson cried angrily, \"You tried to kill me!\"\n\n\n \"I was attempting communication. Why should I kill you?\"\n\n\n He was silent a moment, looking at the people in the cavern. \"Perhaps\n because you feared I would become the God of these people in your\n place.\"\n\n\n Stinson felt a mental shrug. \"It is of no importance. When they arrived\n on this planet I attempted to explain that I was not a God, but the\n primitive is not deeply buried in them. They soon resorted to emotion\n rather than reason. It is of no importance.\"\n\n\n \"I'd hardly call them primitive, with such weapons.\"",
"He wanted to run. He wished Benjamin were here. Ben might have an\n explanation. \"What am I afraid of?\" he said aloud, \"a few grains of\n sand blowing in the wind? A wind devil?\"\n\n\n He turned his back and walked away. When he looked up the wind devil\n was there before him. He looked back. Only one. It had moved. The sun\n shone obliquely, throwing Stinson's shadow upon the sand. The wind\n devil also had a shadow, although the sun shone through it and the\n shadow was faint. But it moved when the funnel moved. This was no\n illusion.\n\n\n Again Stinson felt the urge to run, or to use the cylinder to project\n himself somewhere else, but he said, \"No!\" very firmly to himself. He\n was here to investigate, to determine if this planet was capable of\n supporting life.",
"Life. Intelligence. The planet was inhabited.\n\n\n Should he give up and return to earth? Or was there room here for\n his people? Warming his hands there over the great steaming pool he\n thought of Benjamin, and Straus, and Jamieson—all those to whom he had\n given cylinders, and who were now struggling for life against those who\n desired them.\n\n\n He decided it would not be just, to give up so easily.\n\n\n The wide plaza between the pool and cavern wall was smooth as polished\n glass. Statues lined the wall. He examined them.",
"The cavern was crowded. These creatures were not only humanoid, but\n definitely human, although more slight of build than earth people. The\n only difference he could see at first sight was that they had webbed\n feet. All were dressed from the waist down only, in a shimmering skirt\n that sparkled as they moved. They walked with the grace of ballet\n dancers, moving about the plaza, conversing in a musical language with\n no meaning for Stinson. The men were dark-skinned, the women somewhat\n lighter, with long flowing hair, wide lips and a beauty that was\n utterly sensual.\n\n\n He was in chains! They were small chains, light weight, of a metal that\n looked like aluminum. But all his strength could not break them.\n\n\n They saw him struggling. Two of the men came over and spoke to him in\n the musical language.\n\n\n \"My name is Stinson,\" he said, pointing to himself. \"I'm from the\n planet Earth.\"",
"\"Stinson,\" the Sand God said. \"You said I was adolescent. You are\n correct. Do you remember I told you how my people, the entire race,\n left their bodies at the same time? Do you imagine all of us were\n adults?\"\n\n\n \"I suppose not. Sounds reasonable. How old were you?\"\n\n\n \"Chronologically, by our standards, I was nine years old.\"\n\n\n \"But you continued to develop after....\"",
"This time it kept going. The rain and wind ceased. Lightning stopped.\n Thunder rumbled distantly. Clouds disappeared. Stinson and Sybtl\n emerged from the cave.\n\n\n There was no longer a question of attack from the webfoots, the storm\n had taken care of that. The fierce sun began its work of drying rocks\n and throwing shadows and coaxing life out into the open again. Down in\n the canyon a bird sang, a lonely, cheerful twitter.\n\n\n \"The Sand God is tired,\" Sybtl said. \"He is not angry now. I'm glad.\n Perhaps he will let you stay.\"",
"\"Don't go,\" she said. \"Not yet.\"\n\n\n \"Earthman, hear me.\"\n\n\n \"I hear you.\"\n\n\n \"Why does your mind shrink backward?\"\n\n\n \"I've decided not to bring my people here.\"\n\n\n \"\nYou\ndecided?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly,\" Stinson said boldly. \"Call it rationalization, if you\n wish. You ordered us away; and I have several good reasons for not\n coming here if the door was open.\"\n\n\n \"I've changed my mind. You will be welcomed.\"\n\n\n \"Listen to that, will you?\" Stinson said angrily. \"Just listen! You\n set yourself up as a God for the webfoots. You get them eating out of\n your hand. Then what do you do? You throw a fit. Yes, a fit! Like an\n adolescent. Worse.\"",
"\"No. Even if he allowed it, I couldn't stay. My people could never live\n here with a God who is half devil.\"\nThe cone of sand suddenly appeared. It stood in the canyon, its base\n on a level with the cave. It was quiet. It was dull gray in color. It\n exuded impressions of death, of hopeful words solemnly spoken over\n lowered coffins, of cold earth and cold space, of dank, wet catacombs,\n of creeping, crawling nether things.\n\n\n The bird's twitter stopped abruptly.\n\n\n \"Earthman,\" the Sand God said, as if he were about to make a statement.\n\n\n Stinson ignored him. He glanced down at Sybtl, who sensed that this was\n a time for good-bys. He thought, perhaps I can stay here alone with\n her. The webfoots might find us, or the Sand God might destroy us in\n one of his fits, but it might be worth it.",
"\"I did not hear.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I know now. His voice sounds like thunder in the sky, but it is a\n voice that speaks only in the mind. He said I must leave this planet.\"\n\n\n She glanced at him with suddenly awakened eyes, as if thinking of it\n for the first time. \"Where is your ship?\"\n\n\n \"I have no ship.\"\n\n\n \"Then he will kill you.\" She touched her fingers on his face. \"I am\n sorry. It was all for me.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry. The Sand God travels without a ship, why shouldn't I?\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"As soon as you are safe. Come.\"",
"How was he to decide if this planet was suitable for his people,\n hampered by a woman, slinking through a frozen wilderness like an\n Indian? But the woman's hand was soft. He felt strong knowing she\n depended on him.\n\n\n Anyway, he decided, pursuit was impossible. They left no tracks on the\n ice. They were safe, unless the webfoots possessed talents unknown to\n him.",
"\"Nor do I. But perhaps ... well, I sense that I would continue, if you\n brought your people here. You have already taught me the value of\n life. There is a oneness, a bond that ties each living thing to every\n other living thing. It is a lesson my people never knew. Select any\n portion of this planet that suits you. Take the web-footed woman for\n your wife. Have children. I promise never to harm you in any way.\"\n\n\n \"The webfoots?\"\n\n\n \"You and they shall share the planet.\"\n\n\n The Sand God disappeared. Sybtl said; \"Is the Sand God angry again?\"\n\n\n \"No, he is not angry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm glad. You will leave now?\"\n\n\n \"No. This is my home.\"\n\n\n She laughed softly. \"You are a strange God.\"",
"THE GOD NEXT DOOR\nBy BILL DOEDE\n\n\n Illustrated by IVIE\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine August 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe sand-thing was powerful, lonely and\n \nstrange. No doubt it was a god—but who wasn't?\nStinson lay still in the sand where he fell, gloating over the success\n of his arrival.\n\n\n He touched the pencil-line scar behind his ear where the cylinder was\n buried, marveling at the power stored there, power to fling him from\n earth to this fourth planet of the Centaurian system in an instant.\n It had happened so fast that he could almost feel the warm, humid\n Missouri air, though he was light years from Missouri.",
"A high-pitched keening burst suddenly around them. Stinson knew they\n had heard, or felt the sound for some time, that now its frequency was\n in an audible range.\n\n\n \"The Sand God,\" Sybtl said. \"Sometimes he plays among the clouds. He\n makes it rain in a dry summer, or sometimes warms the whole world\n for days at a time in winter, so the snow melts and the grass begins\n to green. Then he tires and lets winter come back again. He is the\n loneliest God in the universe.\"\n\n\n \"What makes you think he's lonely?\"\n\n\n She shrugged her shoulders. \"I just know. But he's an angry God now.\n See those clouds piling in the East? Soon they will hide the sun. Then\n he will make them churn and boil, like river whirlpools in spring. At\n least he does this when he plays. Who knows what he will do when he's\n angry?\""
],
[
"\"Stinson,\" the Sand God said. \"You said I was adolescent. You are\n correct. Do you remember I told you how my people, the entire race,\n left their bodies at the same time? Do you imagine all of us were\n adults?\"\n\n\n \"I suppose not. Sounds reasonable. How old were you?\"\n\n\n \"Chronologically, by our standards, I was nine years old.\"\n\n\n \"But you continued to develop after....\"",
"\"The Sand God isn't doing this,\" Stinson said. \"It's only a storm.\"\n\n\n She covered his lips with her fingers. \"Don't say that. He may hear you\n and be more angry.\"\n\n\n \"But it is, don't you see? You give him powers he does not possess.\"\n\n\n Sybtl shook her head and stroked his face with her long, slim fingers.\n \"Poor little God-with-fingers-on-his-feet,\" she said. \"You do not\n understand. The Sand God is terrible, even when he plays. See the\n lightning? It is blue. The lightning of a storm that comes by itself is\n not blue. He is running around the world on feet like the rockets of\n space ships, and when he strikes the clouds, blue fire shoots away.\"\nThe clouds continued to build on one another. Soon the blue flashes of\n lightning extended across the sky from horizon to horizon. The earth\n trembled. Sybtl moved closer, trembling also.",
"\"As often as you like. It is good for fifty years. Kaatr—he is the one\n you destroyed—brought it from the ship when we came. Many times he has\n used it unwisely.\"\n\n\n \"When did you come?\"\n\n\n \"Ten years ago. I was a child.\"\n\n\n \"I thought only criminals were brought here.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"Criminals, and their children.\"\n\n\n \"When will your people come again?\"\n\n\n She shook her head. \"Never. They are no longer my people. They have\n disowned us.\"\n\n\n \"And because of me even those in the cavern have disowned you.\"\n\n\n Suddenly she stiffened beside him. There, directly in their path, stood\n the Sand God. It was blood red now. It pulsed violently. The great\n voice burst forth.",
"The Sand God did not reply. The great bodiless, directionless voice was\n silent, and Stinson felt as if he had been taken from some high place\n and set down in a dark canyon. The cone of sand was the color of wood\n ashes. It pulsed erratically, like a great heart missing a beat now and\n then. The web-footed people milled about restlessly. The woman's eyes\n pleaded.\n\n\n When he looked back, the Sand God was gone.\n\n\n Instantly a new note rose in the cavern. The murmur of unmistakable mob\n fury ran over the webfoots. Several of the men approached the woman\n with hatred in their voices. He could not understand the words now.\n\n\n But he understood her. \"They'll kill me!\" she cried.",
"A high-pitched keening burst suddenly around them. Stinson knew they\n had heard, or felt the sound for some time, that now its frequency was\n in an audible range.\n\n\n \"The Sand God,\" Sybtl said. \"Sometimes he plays among the clouds. He\n makes it rain in a dry summer, or sometimes warms the whole world\n for days at a time in winter, so the snow melts and the grass begins\n to green. Then he tires and lets winter come back again. He is the\n loneliest God in the universe.\"\n\n\n \"What makes you think he's lonely?\"\n\n\n She shrugged her shoulders. \"I just know. But he's an angry God now.\n See those clouds piling in the East? Soon they will hide the sun. Then\n he will make them churn and boil, like river whirlpools in spring. At\n least he does this when he plays. Who knows what he will do when he's\n angry?\"",
"\"I do not know. I alone exist. I have searched all the levels of time\n and matter from the very beginning. My people are gone. Sometimes it\n almost comes to me, why they are gone. And this is contrary to the\n greatest law of all—that an entity, once in existence, can never cease\n to exist.\"\nStinson was silent, thinking of the endless years of searching through\n the great gulf of time. His eyes caught sight of the woman, reclining\n now on the pallet. The men had left her and stood in groups, talking,\n glancing at him, apparently free of their awe and fear already.\n\n\n The woman looked at him, and she was not smiling. \"Please ask the Sand\n God,\" she said, \"to speak to my people again. Their fear of him does\n not last. When He is gone they will probably kill us.\"\n\n\n \"As for the webfoots,\" the wind devil, or Sand God, said, \"I will\n destroy them. You and your people will have the entire planet.\"",
"This time it kept going. The rain and wind ceased. Lightning stopped.\n Thunder rumbled distantly. Clouds disappeared. Stinson and Sybtl\n emerged from the cave.\n\n\n There was no longer a question of attack from the webfoots, the storm\n had taken care of that. The fierce sun began its work of drying rocks\n and throwing shadows and coaxing life out into the open again. Down in\n the canyon a bird sang, a lonely, cheerful twitter.\n\n\n \"The Sand God is tired,\" Sybtl said. \"He is not angry now. I'm glad.\n Perhaps he will let you stay.\"",
"\"No. Even if he allowed it, I couldn't stay. My people could never live\n here with a God who is half devil.\"\nThe cone of sand suddenly appeared. It stood in the canyon, its base\n on a level with the cave. It was quiet. It was dull gray in color. It\n exuded impressions of death, of hopeful words solemnly spoken over\n lowered coffins, of cold earth and cold space, of dank, wet catacombs,\n of creeping, crawling nether things.\n\n\n The bird's twitter stopped abruptly.\n\n\n \"Earthman,\" the Sand God said, as if he were about to make a statement.\n\n\n Stinson ignored him. He glanced down at Sybtl, who sensed that this was\n a time for good-bys. He thought, perhaps I can stay here alone with\n her. The webfoots might find us, or the Sand God might destroy us in\n one of his fits, but it might be worth it.",
"\"Earthman, wait....\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Stinson shot back. \"You've owned this planet for a million\n years. You have brooded here alone since before my people discovered\n fire, and in all those ages you never learned self-control. I can't\n subject my people to the whims of an entity who throws a planetary fit\n when it pleases him.\"\n\n\n Stinson relaxed. He'd had his say. Sybtl trembled beside him. A small\n mammal, round, furry, hopped by, sniffing inquisitively.\n\n\n Sybtl said, \"Is the Sand God happy?\" She shook her head. \"No, he is not\n happy. He is old, old, old. I can feel it. My people say that when one\n gets too old it is well to die. But Gods never die, do they? I would\n not like to be a God.\"",
"\"Leave the woman!\" it demanded angrily. \"The webfoots are nearing your\n position.\"\n\n\n \"I cannot leave her. She is helpless against them.\"\n\n\n \"What form of primitive stupidity are you practicing now? Leave, or\n they will kill you.\"\n\n\n Stinson shook his head.\n\n\n The Sand God pulsed more violently than before. Ice melted in a wide\n area around it. Brown, frozen grass burned to ashes.\n\n\n \"You will allow them to kill you, just to defend her life? What\n business is it of yours if she lives or dies? My race discarded such\n primitive logic long before it reached your level of development.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Stinson said, \"and your race no longer exists.\"",
"The Sand God became a sphere of blue flame. A wave of intense heat\n drove them backward. \"Earthman,\" the great voice said, \"go back to your\n Earth. Take your inconsistencies with you. Do not come here again to\n infect my planet with your primitive ideas. The webfoots are not as\n intelligent as you, but they are sane. If you bring your people here, I\n shall destroy you all.\"",
"\"Nor do I. But perhaps ... well, I sense that I would continue, if you\n brought your people here. You have already taught me the value of\n life. There is a oneness, a bond that ties each living thing to every\n other living thing. It is a lesson my people never knew. Select any\n portion of this planet that suits you. Take the web-footed woman for\n your wife. Have children. I promise never to harm you in any way.\"\n\n\n \"The webfoots?\"\n\n\n \"You and they shall share the planet.\"\n\n\n The Sand God disappeared. Sybtl said; \"Is the Sand God angry again?\"\n\n\n \"No, he is not angry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm glad. You will leave now?\"\n\n\n \"No. This is my home.\"\n\n\n She laughed softly. \"You are a strange God.\"",
"\"I did not hear.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I know now. His voice sounds like thunder in the sky, but it is a\n voice that speaks only in the mind. He said I must leave this planet.\"\n\n\n She glanced at him with suddenly awakened eyes, as if thinking of it\n for the first time. \"Where is your ship?\"\n\n\n \"I have no ship.\"\n\n\n \"Then he will kill you.\" She touched her fingers on his face. \"I am\n sorry. It was all for me.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry. The Sand God travels without a ship, why shouldn't I?\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"As soon as you are safe. Come.\"",
"The sphere of blue fire screamed away across the frozen wilderness, and\n the thunder of its passing shook the ground and echoed among the lonely\n hills.\nSybtl shivered against his arm. \"The Sand God is angry,\" she said. \"My\n people tell how he was angry once before, when we first came here. He\n killed half of us and burned the ship that brought us. That is how\n Kaatr got the tube-weapon. It was the only thing the Sand God didn't\n burn, that and the skirts. Then, when he had burned the ship, the Sand\n God went to the sixth planet and burned two of the largest cities, as a\n warning that no more of us must come here.\"\n\n\n Well, Stinson said to himself, that does it. We are better off on\n Earth. We can't fight a monster like him.\n\n\n Sybtl touched his arm. \"Why did the Sand God come? He did not speak.\"\n\n\n \"He spoke to me.\"",
"\"I haven't decided. There are these web-footed people, who were hostile\n until they thought I was a God. They have destructive weapons. Also, I\n don't understand you. I see you as a cone of sand which keeps changing\n color and configuration. Is it your body? Where do you come from? Is\n this planet populated with your kind?\"\n\n\n The wind devil hesitated.\n\n\n \"Where do I originate? It seems I have always been. You see this\n cavern, the heated pool, the statues, the inscriptions. Half a million\n years ago my people were as you. That is, they lived in physical\n bodies. Our technology surpassed any you have seen. The tube these\n webfoots use is a toy by comparison. Our scientists found the ultimate\n nature of physical law. They learned to separate the mind from the\n body. Then my people set a date. Our entire race was determined to free\n itself from the confines of the body. The date came.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\"",
"THE GOD NEXT DOOR\nBy BILL DOEDE\n\n\n Illustrated by IVIE\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine August 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe sand-thing was powerful, lonely and\n \nstrange. No doubt it was a god—but who wasn't?\nStinson lay still in the sand where he fell, gloating over the success\n of his arrival.\n\n\n He touched the pencil-line scar behind his ear where the cylinder was\n buried, marveling at the power stored there, power to fling him from\n earth to this fourth planet of the Centaurian system in an instant.\n It had happened so fast that he could almost feel the warm, humid\n Missouri air, though he was light years from Missouri.",
"It was again going through its paces. Triangle, cube, rectangle,\n sphere. He watched, and when it became a triangle again, he smoothed\n a place in the sand and drew a triangle with his forefinger. When it\n changed to a cube he drew a square, a circle for a sphere, and so on.\n When the symbols were repeated he pointed to each in turn, excitement\n mounting. He became so absorbed in doing this that he failed to notice\n how the wind devil drew closer and closer, but when he inhaled the\n first grains of sand, the realization of what was happening dawned with\n a flash of fear. Instantly he projected himself a thousand miles away.\nNow he was in an area of profuse vegetation. It was twilight. As he\n stood beside a small creek, a chill wind blew from the northwest. He\n wanted to cover himself with the long leaves he found, but they were\n dry and brittle, for here autumn had turned the leaves. Night would be\n cold.",
"\"I do not understand how. You have a body, a physical body composed\n of atoms. It is impossible to move a physical body from one place to\n another by a mere thought and a tiny instrument, yet you have done so.\n You deserted me out in the desert.\"\n\n\n \"I deserted you?\" Stinson cried angrily, \"You tried to kill me!\"\n\n\n \"I was attempting communication. Why should I kill you?\"\n\n\n He was silent a moment, looking at the people in the cavern. \"Perhaps\n because you feared I would become the God of these people in your\n place.\"\n\n\n Stinson felt a mental shrug. \"It is of no importance. When they arrived\n on this planet I attempted to explain that I was not a God, but the\n primitive is not deeply buried in them. They soon resorted to emotion\n rather than reason. It is of no importance.\"\n\n\n \"I'd hardly call them primitive, with such weapons.\"",
"He wanted to run. He wished Benjamin were here. Ben might have an\n explanation. \"What am I afraid of?\" he said aloud, \"a few grains of\n sand blowing in the wind? A wind devil?\"\n\n\n He turned his back and walked away. When he looked up the wind devil\n was there before him. He looked back. Only one. It had moved. The sun\n shone obliquely, throwing Stinson's shadow upon the sand. The wind\n devil also had a shadow, although the sun shone through it and the\n shadow was faint. But it moved when the funnel moved. This was no\n illusion.\n\n\n Again Stinson felt the urge to run, or to use the cylinder to project\n himself somewhere else, but he said, \"No!\" very firmly to himself. He\n was here to investigate, to determine if this planet was capable of\n supporting life.",
"\"Listen,\" he said, \"I am not a God. Get that through your head.\"\n\n\n She drew him into the cave. Her lips were cool and sweet. The cave was\n pleasantly warm."
],
[
"The Sand God did not reply. The great bodiless, directionless voice was\n silent, and Stinson felt as if he had been taken from some high place\n and set down in a dark canyon. The cone of sand was the color of wood\n ashes. It pulsed erratically, like a great heart missing a beat now and\n then. The web-footed people milled about restlessly. The woman's eyes\n pleaded.\n\n\n When he looked back, the Sand God was gone.\n\n\n Instantly a new note rose in the cavern. The murmur of unmistakable mob\n fury ran over the webfoots. Several of the men approached the woman\n with hatred in their voices. He could not understand the words now.\n\n\n But he understood her. \"They'll kill me!\" she cried.",
"\"I do not know. I alone exist. I have searched all the levels of time\n and matter from the very beginning. My people are gone. Sometimes it\n almost comes to me, why they are gone. And this is contrary to the\n greatest law of all—that an entity, once in existence, can never cease\n to exist.\"\nStinson was silent, thinking of the endless years of searching through\n the great gulf of time. His eyes caught sight of the woman, reclining\n now on the pallet. The men had left her and stood in groups, talking,\n glancing at him, apparently free of their awe and fear already.\n\n\n The woman looked at him, and she was not smiling. \"Please ask the Sand\n God,\" she said, \"to speak to my people again. Their fear of him does\n not last. When He is gone they will probably kill us.\"\n\n\n \"As for the webfoots,\" the wind devil, or Sand God, said, \"I will\n destroy them. You and your people will have the entire planet.\"",
"This time it kept going. The rain and wind ceased. Lightning stopped.\n Thunder rumbled distantly. Clouds disappeared. Stinson and Sybtl\n emerged from the cave.\n\n\n There was no longer a question of attack from the webfoots, the storm\n had taken care of that. The fierce sun began its work of drying rocks\n and throwing shadows and coaxing life out into the open again. Down in\n the canyon a bird sang, a lonely, cheerful twitter.\n\n\n \"The Sand God is tired,\" Sybtl said. \"He is not angry now. I'm glad.\n Perhaps he will let you stay.\"",
"\"The Sand God isn't doing this,\" Stinson said. \"It's only a storm.\"\n\n\n She covered his lips with her fingers. \"Don't say that. He may hear you\n and be more angry.\"\n\n\n \"But it is, don't you see? You give him powers he does not possess.\"\n\n\n Sybtl shook her head and stroked his face with her long, slim fingers.\n \"Poor little God-with-fingers-on-his-feet,\" she said. \"You do not\n understand. The Sand God is terrible, even when he plays. See the\n lightning? It is blue. The lightning of a storm that comes by itself is\n not blue. He is running around the world on feet like the rockets of\n space ships, and when he strikes the clouds, blue fire shoots away.\"\nThe clouds continued to build on one another. Soon the blue flashes of\n lightning extended across the sky from horizon to horizon. The earth\n trembled. Sybtl moved closer, trembling also.",
"The Sand God became a sphere of blue flame. A wave of intense heat\n drove them backward. \"Earthman,\" the great voice said, \"go back to your\n Earth. Take your inconsistencies with you. Do not come here again to\n infect my planet with your primitive ideas. The webfoots are not as\n intelligent as you, but they are sane. If you bring your people here, I\n shall destroy you all.\"",
"\"No. Even if he allowed it, I couldn't stay. My people could never live\n here with a God who is half devil.\"\nThe cone of sand suddenly appeared. It stood in the canyon, its base\n on a level with the cave. It was quiet. It was dull gray in color. It\n exuded impressions of death, of hopeful words solemnly spoken over\n lowered coffins, of cold earth and cold space, of dank, wet catacombs,\n of creeping, crawling nether things.\n\n\n The bird's twitter stopped abruptly.\n\n\n \"Earthman,\" the Sand God said, as if he were about to make a statement.\n\n\n Stinson ignored him. He glanced down at Sybtl, who sensed that this was\n a time for good-bys. He thought, perhaps I can stay here alone with\n her. The webfoots might find us, or the Sand God might destroy us in\n one of his fits, but it might be worth it.",
"\"Stinson,\" the Sand God said. \"You said I was adolescent. You are\n correct. Do you remember I told you how my people, the entire race,\n left their bodies at the same time? Do you imagine all of us were\n adults?\"\n\n\n \"I suppose not. Sounds reasonable. How old were you?\"\n\n\n \"Chronologically, by our standards, I was nine years old.\"\n\n\n \"But you continued to develop after....\"",
"\"Leave the woman!\" it demanded angrily. \"The webfoots are nearing your\n position.\"\n\n\n \"I cannot leave her. She is helpless against them.\"\n\n\n \"What form of primitive stupidity are you practicing now? Leave, or\n they will kill you.\"\n\n\n Stinson shook his head.\n\n\n The Sand God pulsed more violently than before. Ice melted in a wide\n area around it. Brown, frozen grass burned to ashes.\n\n\n \"You will allow them to kill you, just to defend her life? What\n business is it of yours if she lives or dies? My race discarded such\n primitive logic long before it reached your level of development.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Stinson said, \"and your race no longer exists.\"",
"\"Nor do I. But perhaps ... well, I sense that I would continue, if you\n brought your people here. You have already taught me the value of\n life. There is a oneness, a bond that ties each living thing to every\n other living thing. It is a lesson my people never knew. Select any\n portion of this planet that suits you. Take the web-footed woman for\n your wife. Have children. I promise never to harm you in any way.\"\n\n\n \"The webfoots?\"\n\n\n \"You and they shall share the planet.\"\n\n\n The Sand God disappeared. Sybtl said; \"Is the Sand God angry again?\"\n\n\n \"No, he is not angry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm glad. You will leave now?\"\n\n\n \"No. This is my home.\"\n\n\n She laughed softly. \"You are a strange God.\"",
"\"As often as you like. It is good for fifty years. Kaatr—he is the one\n you destroyed—brought it from the ship when we came. Many times he has\n used it unwisely.\"\n\n\n \"When did you come?\"\n\n\n \"Ten years ago. I was a child.\"\n\n\n \"I thought only criminals were brought here.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"Criminals, and their children.\"\n\n\n \"When will your people come again?\"\n\n\n She shook her head. \"Never. They are no longer my people. They have\n disowned us.\"\n\n\n \"And because of me even those in the cavern have disowned you.\"\n\n\n Suddenly she stiffened beside him. There, directly in their path, stood\n the Sand God. It was blood red now. It pulsed violently. The great\n voice burst forth.",
"A high-pitched keening burst suddenly around them. Stinson knew they\n had heard, or felt the sound for some time, that now its frequency was\n in an audible range.\n\n\n \"The Sand God,\" Sybtl said. \"Sometimes he plays among the clouds. He\n makes it rain in a dry summer, or sometimes warms the whole world\n for days at a time in winter, so the snow melts and the grass begins\n to green. Then he tires and lets winter come back again. He is the\n loneliest God in the universe.\"\n\n\n \"What makes you think he's lonely?\"\n\n\n She shrugged her shoulders. \"I just know. But he's an angry God now.\n See those clouds piling in the East? Soon they will hide the sun. Then\n he will make them churn and boil, like river whirlpools in spring. At\n least he does this when he plays. Who knows what he will do when he's\n angry?\"",
"The sphere of blue fire screamed away across the frozen wilderness, and\n the thunder of its passing shook the ground and echoed among the lonely\n hills.\nSybtl shivered against his arm. \"The Sand God is angry,\" she said. \"My\n people tell how he was angry once before, when we first came here. He\n killed half of us and burned the ship that brought us. That is how\n Kaatr got the tube-weapon. It was the only thing the Sand God didn't\n burn, that and the skirts. Then, when he had burned the ship, the Sand\n God went to the sixth planet and burned two of the largest cities, as a\n warning that no more of us must come here.\"\n\n\n Well, Stinson said to himself, that does it. We are better off on\n Earth. We can't fight a monster like him.\n\n\n Sybtl touched his arm. \"Why did the Sand God come? He did not speak.\"\n\n\n \"He spoke to me.\"",
"\"I did not hear.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I know now. His voice sounds like thunder in the sky, but it is a\n voice that speaks only in the mind. He said I must leave this planet.\"\n\n\n She glanced at him with suddenly awakened eyes, as if thinking of it\n for the first time. \"Where is your ship?\"\n\n\n \"I have no ship.\"\n\n\n \"Then he will kill you.\" She touched her fingers on his face. \"I am\n sorry. It was all for me.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry. The Sand God travels without a ship, why shouldn't I?\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"As soon as you are safe. Come.\"",
"He disappeared at once, giving her no chance to object again, and went\n to the desert of sand, where he had first arrived on the planet. He\n wanted to see if the storm were world-wide.\n\n\n Stinson had never been in a sand storm before, even on Earth. He could\n not breathe. He could not see. Bullets of sand stung his skin. Bullets\n of sand shot into his eyes. Clouds of sand howled around him. He fell,\n and the wind rolled him over and over in the sand like a tumbleweed.\n The skirt flew up around his face. He could not get up again.\n\n\n He returned to the cave.",
"\"I haven't decided. There are these web-footed people, who were hostile\n until they thought I was a God. They have destructive weapons. Also, I\n don't understand you. I see you as a cone of sand which keeps changing\n color and configuration. Is it your body? Where do you come from? Is\n this planet populated with your kind?\"\n\n\n The wind devil hesitated.\n\n\n \"Where do I originate? It seems I have always been. You see this\n cavern, the heated pool, the statues, the inscriptions. Half a million\n years ago my people were as you. That is, they lived in physical\n bodies. Our technology surpassed any you have seen. The tube these\n webfoots use is a toy by comparison. Our scientists found the ultimate\n nature of physical law. They learned to separate the mind from the\n body. Then my people set a date. Our entire race was determined to free\n itself from the confines of the body. The date came.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\"",
"\"He never did this before,\" she said. \"He never made the earth shake\n before.\"\n\n\n Great boulders crashed down the canyon walls and dropped into the\n creek. They dared not move from the cave, although death seemed certain\n if they stayed.\n\n\n \"I'll leave for a moment,\" he said. \"I'll be back soon.\"\n\n\n \"You're leaving?\" There was panic in her voice.\n\n\n \"Only for a moment.\"\n\n\n \"And you won't come back. You will go to your world.\"\n\n\n \"No. I'll be back.\"\n\n\n \"Promise? No, don't promise. The promises of Gods often are forgotten\n before the sounds die away.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be back.\"",
"Steam rose from the burned area, charred like a rocket launching pit.\n They stepped around it carefully. Stinson felt warm air, but there was\n no time, now, to warm cold feet or dwell on the vagaries of Sand Gods.\n\n\n Together they crossed the narrow valley. Sybtl led him toward a tall\n mound of rock. Here they came to the creek again, which flowed into a\n small canyon. They climbed the canyon wall. Far away, small figures\n moved. The webfoots were on their trail.\n\n\n She drew him into a small cave. It was heated, like the great cavern,\n but held no walled pool nor mysterious lighting. But it was warm, and\n the small entrance made an excellent vantage point for warding off\n attack.\n\n\n \"They will not find us....\"",
"\"Earthman, wait....\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Stinson shot back. \"You've owned this planet for a million\n years. You have brooded here alone since before my people discovered\n fire, and in all those ages you never learned self-control. I can't\n subject my people to the whims of an entity who throws a planetary fit\n when it pleases him.\"\n\n\n Stinson relaxed. He'd had his say. Sybtl trembled beside him. A small\n mammal, round, furry, hopped by, sniffing inquisitively.\n\n\n Sybtl said, \"Is the Sand God happy?\" She shook her head. \"No, he is not\n happy. He is old, old, old. I can feel it. My people say that when one\n gets too old it is well to die. But Gods never die, do they? I would\n not like to be a God.\"",
"It was again going through its paces. Triangle, cube, rectangle,\n sphere. He watched, and when it became a triangle again, he smoothed\n a place in the sand and drew a triangle with his forefinger. When it\n changed to a cube he drew a square, a circle for a sphere, and so on.\n When the symbols were repeated he pointed to each in turn, excitement\n mounting. He became so absorbed in doing this that he failed to notice\n how the wind devil drew closer and closer, but when he inhaled the\n first grains of sand, the realization of what was happening dawned with\n a flash of fear. Instantly he projected himself a thousand miles away.\nNow he was in an area of profuse vegetation. It was twilight. As he\n stood beside a small creek, a chill wind blew from the northwest. He\n wanted to cover himself with the long leaves he found, but they were\n dry and brittle, for here autumn had turned the leaves. Night would be\n cold.",
"He wanted to run. He wished Benjamin were here. Ben might have an\n explanation. \"What am I afraid of?\" he said aloud, \"a few grains of\n sand blowing in the wind? A wind devil?\"\n\n\n He turned his back and walked away. When he looked up the wind devil\n was there before him. He looked back. Only one. It had moved. The sun\n shone obliquely, throwing Stinson's shadow upon the sand. The wind\n devil also had a shadow, although the sun shone through it and the\n shadow was faint. But it moved when the funnel moved. This was no\n illusion.\n\n\n Again Stinson felt the urge to run, or to use the cylinder to project\n himself somewhere else, but he said, \"No!\" very firmly to himself. He\n was here to investigate, to determine if this planet was capable of\n supporting life."
],
[
"So they followed the path leading down from the rocks, along the creek\n with its tumbling water. Frozen, leafless willows clawed at their\n bodies. The sun shone fiercely in a cloudless sky. Already water ran in\n tiny rivulets over the ice. The woman steered him to the right, away\n from the creek.\nStinson's bare feet were numb from walking on ice. Christ, he thought,\n what am I doing here, anyway? He glanced down at Sybtl and remembered\n the webfoots. He stopped, tempted to use his cylinder and move to a\n warmer, less dangerous spot.\n\n\n The woman pulled on his arm. \"We must hurry!\"\n\n\n He clutched the tube-weapon. \"How many shots in this thing?\"\n\n\n \"Shots?\"\n\n\n \"How often can I use it?\"",
"\"Yes. When a man protects a woman from harm, it is a sign to all that\n she is his chosen. Otherwise, why not let her die? You are a strange\n God.\"\n\n\n \"Listen, Sybtl,\" he said desperately, \"I am not a God and you are not\n my wife. Let's get that straight.\"\n\n\n \"But....\"\n\n\n \"No buts. Right now we'd better get out of here.\"\n\n\n He took her hand and they ran, slid, fell, picked themselves up again,\n and ran. He doubted the wisdom of keeping her with him. Alone, the\n webfoots were no match for him. He could travel instantly to any spot\n he chose. But with Sybtl it was another matter; he was no better than\n any other man, perhaps not so good as some because he was forty, and\n never had been an athlete.",
"Steam rose from the burned area, charred like a rocket launching pit.\n They stepped around it carefully. Stinson felt warm air, but there was\n no time, now, to warm cold feet or dwell on the vagaries of Sand Gods.\n\n\n Together they crossed the narrow valley. Sybtl led him toward a tall\n mound of rock. Here they came to the creek again, which flowed into a\n small canyon. They climbed the canyon wall. Far away, small figures\n moved. The webfoots were on their trail.\n\n\n She drew him into a small cave. It was heated, like the great cavern,\n but held no walled pool nor mysterious lighting. But it was warm, and\n the small entrance made an excellent vantage point for warding off\n attack.\n\n\n \"They will not find us....\"",
"He turned to the woman. \"I don't know what I'll do with you, but now\n that we're in trouble together, we may as well introduce ourselves. My\n name is Stinson.\"\n\n\n \"I am Sybtl,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Syb-tl.\" He tried to imitate her musical pronunciation. \"A very nice\n name.\"\n\n\n She smiled, then pointed to the cavern. \"When the ice is gone, they\n will come out and follow us.\"\n\n\n \"We'd better make tracks.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" she said, \"we must run, and make no tracks.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, Sis,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Sis?\"\n\n\n \"That means, sister.\"\n\n\n \"I am not your sister. I am your wife.\"\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"",
"The Sand God did not reply. The great bodiless, directionless voice was\n silent, and Stinson felt as if he had been taken from some high place\n and set down in a dark canyon. The cone of sand was the color of wood\n ashes. It pulsed erratically, like a great heart missing a beat now and\n then. The web-footed people milled about restlessly. The woman's eyes\n pleaded.\n\n\n When he looked back, the Sand God was gone.\n\n\n Instantly a new note rose in the cavern. The murmur of unmistakable mob\n fury ran over the webfoots. Several of the men approached the woman\n with hatred in their voices. He could not understand the words now.\n\n\n But he understood her. \"They'll kill me!\" she cried.",
"This time it kept going. The rain and wind ceased. Lightning stopped.\n Thunder rumbled distantly. Clouds disappeared. Stinson and Sybtl\n emerged from the cave.\n\n\n There was no longer a question of attack from the webfoots, the storm\n had taken care of that. The fierce sun began its work of drying rocks\n and throwing shadows and coaxing life out into the open again. Down in\n the canyon a bird sang, a lonely, cheerful twitter.\n\n\n \"The Sand God is tired,\" Sybtl said. \"He is not angry now. I'm glad.\n Perhaps he will let you stay.\"",
"\"Leave the woman!\" it demanded angrily. \"The webfoots are nearing your\n position.\"\n\n\n \"I cannot leave her. She is helpless against them.\"\n\n\n \"What form of primitive stupidity are you practicing now? Leave, or\n they will kill you.\"\n\n\n Stinson shook his head.\n\n\n The Sand God pulsed more violently than before. Ice melted in a wide\n area around it. Brown, frozen grass burned to ashes.\n\n\n \"You will allow them to kill you, just to defend her life? What\n business is it of yours if she lives or dies? My race discarded such\n primitive logic long before it reached your level of development.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Stinson said, \"and your race no longer exists.\"",
"Together they edged toward the cavern entrance, ran quickly up the\n inclined passageway, and came out into crisp, cold air. The morning sun\n was reflected from a million tiny mirrors on the rocks, the trees and\n grass. A silver thaw during the night had covered the whole area with\n a coating of ice. Stinson shivered. The woman handed him a skirt she\n had thoughtfully brought along from the cavern. He took it, and they\n ran down the slippery path leading away from the entrance. From the\n hiding place behind a large rock they watched, as several web-footed\n men emerged into the sunlight. They blinked, covered their eyes, and\n jabbered musically among themselves. One slipped and fell on the ice.\n They re-entered the cave.",
"\"Nor do I. But perhaps ... well, I sense that I would continue, if you\n brought your people here. You have already taught me the value of\n life. There is a oneness, a bond that ties each living thing to every\n other living thing. It is a lesson my people never knew. Select any\n portion of this planet that suits you. Take the web-footed woman for\n your wife. Have children. I promise never to harm you in any way.\"\n\n\n \"The webfoots?\"\n\n\n \"You and they shall share the planet.\"\n\n\n The Sand God disappeared. Sybtl said; \"Is the Sand God angry again?\"\n\n\n \"No, he is not angry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm glad. You will leave now?\"\n\n\n \"No. This is my home.\"\n\n\n She laughed softly. \"You are a strange God.\"",
"Soon after, while they sat huddled together, watching the chaos of\n tumbling rocks, lightning, and driving rain, the high-pitched keening\n came again. A sphere of blue fire appeared in the east. Its brilliance\n put the lightning to shame. It bore down on the cave swiftly,\n purposefully. Stinson prepared himself to leave. In spite of his desire\n to protect Sybtl, it was useless to get himself killed when he was\n powerless to help her. But at the last moment it veered off.\n\n\n \"Fiend!\" Stinson screamed the word, vaguely marvelling at his own fury.\n\n\n The blue sphere turned and came back.\n\n\n \"Monster!\"\n\n\n Again.\n\n\n \"Murderer!\"\n\n\n \"Adolescent!\"",
"\"I do not know. I alone exist. I have searched all the levels of time\n and matter from the very beginning. My people are gone. Sometimes it\n almost comes to me, why they are gone. And this is contrary to the\n greatest law of all—that an entity, once in existence, can never cease\n to exist.\"\nStinson was silent, thinking of the endless years of searching through\n the great gulf of time. His eyes caught sight of the woman, reclining\n now on the pallet. The men had left her and stood in groups, talking,\n glancing at him, apparently free of their awe and fear already.\n\n\n The woman looked at him, and she was not smiling. \"Please ask the Sand\n God,\" she said, \"to speak to my people again. Their fear of him does\n not last. When He is gone they will probably kill us.\"\n\n\n \"As for the webfoots,\" the wind devil, or Sand God, said, \"I will\n destroy them. You and your people will have the entire planet.\"",
"\"No. Even if he allowed it, I couldn't stay. My people could never live\n here with a God who is half devil.\"\nThe cone of sand suddenly appeared. It stood in the canyon, its base\n on a level with the cave. It was quiet. It was dull gray in color. It\n exuded impressions of death, of hopeful words solemnly spoken over\n lowered coffins, of cold earth and cold space, of dank, wet catacombs,\n of creeping, crawling nether things.\n\n\n The bird's twitter stopped abruptly.\n\n\n \"Earthman,\" the Sand God said, as if he were about to make a statement.\n\n\n Stinson ignored him. He glanced down at Sybtl, who sensed that this was\n a time for good-bys. He thought, perhaps I can stay here alone with\n her. The webfoots might find us, or the Sand God might destroy us in\n one of his fits, but it might be worth it.",
"How was he to decide if this planet was suitable for his people,\n hampered by a woman, slinking through a frozen wilderness like an\n Indian? But the woman's hand was soft. He felt strong knowing she\n depended on him.\n\n\n Anyway, he decided, pursuit was impossible. They left no tracks on the\n ice. They were safe, unless the webfoots possessed talents unknown to\n him.",
"\"The Sand God isn't doing this,\" Stinson said. \"It's only a storm.\"\n\n\n She covered his lips with her fingers. \"Don't say that. He may hear you\n and be more angry.\"\n\n\n \"But it is, don't you see? You give him powers he does not possess.\"\n\n\n Sybtl shook her head and stroked his face with her long, slim fingers.\n \"Poor little God-with-fingers-on-his-feet,\" she said. \"You do not\n understand. The Sand God is terrible, even when he plays. See the\n lightning? It is blue. The lightning of a storm that comes by itself is\n not blue. He is running around the world on feet like the rockets of\n space ships, and when he strikes the clouds, blue fire shoots away.\"\nThe clouds continued to build on one another. Soon the blue flashes of\n lightning extended across the sky from horizon to horizon. The earth\n trembled. Sybtl moved closer, trembling also.",
"He took the tube-weapon in his hands, careful not to touch the button.\n \"Don't be afraid. I didn't mean to kill the man. It was an accident. I\n will protect you.\"\n\n\n She shook her head. \"One day they will find me alone, and they'll kill\n me.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n She shrugged. \"I have not pleased you.\"\n\n\n \"On the contrary, you have. There is a time and place for everything,\n though.\"\n\n\n Suddenly a great voice sounded in the cavern, a voice with no\n direction. It came from the ceiling, the floor, the walls, the steaming\n pool. It was in the language of the web-footed people; it was in his\n own tongue. \"No harm must come to this woman. The God with fingers on\n his feet has decreed this.\"",
"The cavern was crowded. These creatures were not only humanoid, but\n definitely human, although more slight of build than earth people. The\n only difference he could see at first sight was that they had webbed\n feet. All were dressed from the waist down only, in a shimmering skirt\n that sparkled as they moved. They walked with the grace of ballet\n dancers, moving about the plaza, conversing in a musical language with\n no meaning for Stinson. The men were dark-skinned, the women somewhat\n lighter, with long flowing hair, wide lips and a beauty that was\n utterly sensual.\n\n\n He was in chains! They were small chains, light weight, of a metal that\n looked like aluminum. But all his strength could not break them.\n\n\n They saw him struggling. Two of the men came over and spoke to him in\n the musical language.\n\n\n \"My name is Stinson,\" he said, pointing to himself. \"I'm from the\n planet Earth.\"",
"A high-pitched keening burst suddenly around them. Stinson knew they\n had heard, or felt the sound for some time, that now its frequency was\n in an audible range.\n\n\n \"The Sand God,\" Sybtl said. \"Sometimes he plays among the clouds. He\n makes it rain in a dry summer, or sometimes warms the whole world\n for days at a time in winter, so the snow melts and the grass begins\n to green. Then he tires and lets winter come back again. He is the\n loneliest God in the universe.\"\n\n\n \"What makes you think he's lonely?\"\n\n\n She shrugged her shoulders. \"I just know. But he's an angry God now.\n See those clouds piling in the East? Soon they will hide the sun. Then\n he will make them churn and boil, like river whirlpools in spring. At\n least he does this when he plays. Who knows what he will do when he's\n angry?\"",
"The sphere of blue fire screamed away across the frozen wilderness, and\n the thunder of its passing shook the ground and echoed among the lonely\n hills.\nSybtl shivered against his arm. \"The Sand God is angry,\" she said. \"My\n people tell how he was angry once before, when we first came here. He\n killed half of us and burned the ship that brought us. That is how\n Kaatr got the tube-weapon. It was the only thing the Sand God didn't\n burn, that and the skirts. Then, when he had burned the ship, the Sand\n God went to the sixth planet and burned two of the largest cities, as a\n warning that no more of us must come here.\"\n\n\n Well, Stinson said to himself, that does it. We are better off on\n Earth. We can't fight a monster like him.\n\n\n Sybtl touched his arm. \"Why did the Sand God come? He did not speak.\"\n\n\n \"He spoke to me.\"",
"Stinson pointed the disintegrating weapon at them and yelled. They\n dropped back. \"We'll have to get outside,\" he told her. \"This mob will\n soon get out of hand. Then the tube won't stop them. They will rush in.\n I can't kill them all at once, even if I wanted to. And I don't.\"",
"\"Don't go,\" she said. \"Not yet.\"\n\n\n \"Earthman, hear me.\"\n\n\n \"I hear you.\"\n\n\n \"Why does your mind shrink backward?\"\n\n\n \"I've decided not to bring my people here.\"\n\n\n \"\nYou\ndecided?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly,\" Stinson said boldly. \"Call it rationalization, if you\n wish. You ordered us away; and I have several good reasons for not\n coming here if the door was open.\"\n\n\n \"I've changed my mind. You will be welcomed.\"\n\n\n \"Listen to that, will you?\" Stinson said angrily. \"Just listen! You\n set yourself up as a God for the webfoots. You get them eating out of\n your hand. Then what do you do? You throw a fit. Yes, a fit! Like an\n adolescent. Worse.\""
],
[
"Together they edged toward the cavern entrance, ran quickly up the\n inclined passageway, and came out into crisp, cold air. The morning sun\n was reflected from a million tiny mirrors on the rocks, the trees and\n grass. A silver thaw during the night had covered the whole area with\n a coating of ice. Stinson shivered. The woman handed him a skirt she\n had thoughtfully brought along from the cavern. He took it, and they\n ran down the slippery path leading away from the entrance. From the\n hiding place behind a large rock they watched, as several web-footed\n men emerged into the sunlight. They blinked, covered their eyes, and\n jabbered musically among themselves. One slipped and fell on the ice.\n They re-entered the cave.",
"Stinson donned the shimmering skirt, smiling as he did so. The others\n should see him now. Benjamin and Straus and Jamieson. They would\n laugh. And Ben's wife, Lisa, she would give her little-girl laugh, and\n probably help him fasten the skirt. It had a string, like a tobacco\n pouch, which was tied around the waist. It helped keep him warm.",
"\"Yes. When a man protects a woman from harm, it is a sign to all that\n she is his chosen. Otherwise, why not let her die? You are a strange\n God.\"\n\n\n \"Listen, Sybtl,\" he said desperately, \"I am not a God and you are not\n my wife. Let's get that straight.\"\n\n\n \"But....\"\n\n\n \"No buts. Right now we'd better get out of here.\"\n\n\n He took her hand and they ran, slid, fell, picked themselves up again,\n and ran. He doubted the wisdom of keeping her with him. Alone, the\n webfoots were no match for him. He could travel instantly to any spot\n he chose. But with Sybtl it was another matter; he was no better than\n any other man, perhaps not so good as some because he was forty, and\n never had been an athlete.",
"How was he to decide if this planet was suitable for his people,\n hampered by a woman, slinking through a frozen wilderness like an\n Indian? But the woman's hand was soft. He felt strong knowing she\n depended on him.\n\n\n Anyway, he decided, pursuit was impossible. They left no tracks on the\n ice. They were safe, unless the webfoots possessed talents unknown to\n him.",
"He took the tube-weapon in his hands, careful not to touch the button.\n \"Don't be afraid. I didn't mean to kill the man. It was an accident. I\n will protect you.\"\n\n\n She shook her head. \"One day they will find me alone, and they'll kill\n me.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n She shrugged. \"I have not pleased you.\"\n\n\n \"On the contrary, you have. There is a time and place for everything,\n though.\"\n\n\n Suddenly a great voice sounded in the cavern, a voice with no\n direction. It came from the ceiling, the floor, the walls, the steaming\n pool. It was in the language of the web-footed people; it was in his\n own tongue. \"No harm must come to this woman. The God with fingers on\n his feet has decreed this.\"",
"So they followed the path leading down from the rocks, along the creek\n with its tumbling water. Frozen, leafless willows clawed at their\n bodies. The sun shone fiercely in a cloudless sky. Already water ran in\n tiny rivulets over the ice. The woman steered him to the right, away\n from the creek.\nStinson's bare feet were numb from walking on ice. Christ, he thought,\n what am I doing here, anyway? He glanced down at Sybtl and remembered\n the webfoots. He stopped, tempted to use his cylinder and move to a\n warmer, less dangerous spot.\n\n\n The woman pulled on his arm. \"We must hurry!\"\n\n\n He clutched the tube-weapon. \"How many shots in this thing?\"\n\n\n \"Shots?\"\n\n\n \"How often can I use it?\"",
"The Sand God did not reply. The great bodiless, directionless voice was\n silent, and Stinson felt as if he had been taken from some high place\n and set down in a dark canyon. The cone of sand was the color of wood\n ashes. It pulsed erratically, like a great heart missing a beat now and\n then. The web-footed people milled about restlessly. The woman's eyes\n pleaded.\n\n\n When he looked back, the Sand God was gone.\n\n\n Instantly a new note rose in the cavern. The murmur of unmistakable mob\n fury ran over the webfoots. Several of the men approached the woman\n with hatred in their voices. He could not understand the words now.\n\n\n But he understood her. \"They'll kill me!\" she cried.",
"The cavern was crowded. These creatures were not only humanoid, but\n definitely human, although more slight of build than earth people. The\n only difference he could see at first sight was that they had webbed\n feet. All were dressed from the waist down only, in a shimmering skirt\n that sparkled as they moved. They walked with the grace of ballet\n dancers, moving about the plaza, conversing in a musical language with\n no meaning for Stinson. The men were dark-skinned, the women somewhat\n lighter, with long flowing hair, wide lips and a beauty that was\n utterly sensual.\n\n\n He was in chains! They were small chains, light weight, of a metal that\n looked like aluminum. But all his strength could not break them.\n\n\n They saw him struggling. Two of the men came over and spoke to him in\n the musical language.\n\n\n \"My name is Stinson,\" he said, pointing to himself. \"I'm from the\n planet Earth.\"",
"\"Nor do I. But perhaps ... well, I sense that I would continue, if you\n brought your people here. You have already taught me the value of\n life. There is a oneness, a bond that ties each living thing to every\n other living thing. It is a lesson my people never knew. Select any\n portion of this planet that suits you. Take the web-footed woman for\n your wife. Have children. I promise never to harm you in any way.\"\n\n\n \"The webfoots?\"\n\n\n \"You and they shall share the planet.\"\n\n\n The Sand God disappeared. Sybtl said; \"Is the Sand God angry again?\"\n\n\n \"No, he is not angry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm glad. You will leave now?\"\n\n\n \"No. This is my home.\"\n\n\n She laughed softly. \"You are a strange God.\"",
"He disappeared at once, giving her no chance to object again, and went\n to the desert of sand, where he had first arrived on the planet. He\n wanted to see if the storm were world-wide.\n\n\n Stinson had never been in a sand storm before, even on Earth. He could\n not breathe. He could not see. Bullets of sand stung his skin. Bullets\n of sand shot into his eyes. Clouds of sand howled around him. He fell,\n and the wind rolled him over and over in the sand like a tumbleweed.\n The skirt flew up around his face. He could not get up again.\n\n\n He returned to the cave.",
"\"I haven't decided. There are these web-footed people, who were hostile\n until they thought I was a God. They have destructive weapons. Also, I\n don't understand you. I see you as a cone of sand which keeps changing\n color and configuration. Is it your body? Where do you come from? Is\n this planet populated with your kind?\"\n\n\n The wind devil hesitated.\n\n\n \"Where do I originate? It seems I have always been. You see this\n cavern, the heated pool, the statues, the inscriptions. Half a million\n years ago my people were as you. That is, they lived in physical\n bodies. Our technology surpassed any you have seen. The tube these\n webfoots use is a toy by comparison. Our scientists found the ultimate\n nature of physical law. They learned to separate the mind from the\n body. Then my people set a date. Our entire race was determined to free\n itself from the confines of the body. The date came.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\"",
"Steam rose from the burned area, charred like a rocket launching pit.\n They stepped around it carefully. Stinson felt warm air, but there was\n no time, now, to warm cold feet or dwell on the vagaries of Sand Gods.\n\n\n Together they crossed the narrow valley. Sybtl led him toward a tall\n mound of rock. Here they came to the creek again, which flowed into a\n small canyon. They climbed the canyon wall. Far away, small figures\n moved. The webfoots were on their trail.\n\n\n She drew him into a small cave. It was heated, like the great cavern,\n but held no walled pool nor mysterious lighting. But it was warm, and\n the small entrance made an excellent vantage point for warding off\n attack.\n\n\n \"They will not find us....\"",
"\"I do not know. I alone exist. I have searched all the levels of time\n and matter from the very beginning. My people are gone. Sometimes it\n almost comes to me, why they are gone. And this is contrary to the\n greatest law of all—that an entity, once in existence, can never cease\n to exist.\"\nStinson was silent, thinking of the endless years of searching through\n the great gulf of time. His eyes caught sight of the woman, reclining\n now on the pallet. The men had left her and stood in groups, talking,\n glancing at him, apparently free of their awe and fear already.\n\n\n The woman looked at him, and she was not smiling. \"Please ask the Sand\n God,\" she said, \"to speak to my people again. Their fear of him does\n not last. When He is gone they will probably kill us.\"\n\n\n \"As for the webfoots,\" the wind devil, or Sand God, said, \"I will\n destroy them. You and your people will have the entire planet.\"",
"\"Leave the woman!\" it demanded angrily. \"The webfoots are nearing your\n position.\"\n\n\n \"I cannot leave her. She is helpless against them.\"\n\n\n \"What form of primitive stupidity are you practicing now? Leave, or\n they will kill you.\"\n\n\n Stinson shook his head.\n\n\n The Sand God pulsed more violently than before. Ice melted in a wide\n area around it. Brown, frozen grass burned to ashes.\n\n\n \"You will allow them to kill you, just to defend her life? What\n business is it of yours if she lives or dies? My race discarded such\n primitive logic long before it reached your level of development.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Stinson said, \"and your race no longer exists.\"",
"Those in the cavern looked at the woman with fear and respect. She\n kissed Stinson's feet. Two of the men came and gave her a brilliant\n new skirt. She smiled at him, and he thought he had never seen a more\n beautiful face.\nThe great, bodiless voice sounded again, but those in the cavern went\n about their activities. They did not hear.\n\n\n \"Who are you?\"\n\n\n Stinson looked at the wind devil, since it could be no one else\n speaking, and pointed to himself. \"Me?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"I am Stinson, of the planet Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I see it in your mind, now. You want to live here, on this\n planet.\"\n\n\n \"Then you must know where I came from, and how.\"",
"This weapon was completely out of place in a culture such as this.\n Or was it? What did he know of these people? Very little. They were\n humanoid. They had exhibited human emotions of anger, fear and, that\n most human of all characteristics, curiosity. But up to now the tube\n and the chain was the only evidence of an advanced technology, unless\n the ancient inscriptions in the stone wall of the pool, and the statues\n lining the wall were evidences.\nThere was a stirring among the crowd. An object like a pallet was\n brought, carried by four of the women. They laid it at his feet, and\n gestured for him to sit. He touched it cautiously, then sat.\n\n\n Instantly he sprang to his feet. There, at the cavern entrance, the\n wind devil writhed and undulated in a brilliant harmony of colors. It\n remained in one spot, though, and he relaxed somewhat.",
"The Sand God became a sphere of blue flame. A wave of intense heat\n drove them backward. \"Earthman,\" the great voice said, \"go back to your\n Earth. Take your inconsistencies with you. Do not come here again to\n infect my planet with your primitive ideas. The webfoots are not as\n intelligent as you, but they are sane. If you bring your people here, I\n shall destroy you all.\"",
"This time it kept going. The rain and wind ceased. Lightning stopped.\n Thunder rumbled distantly. Clouds disappeared. Stinson and Sybtl\n emerged from the cave.\n\n\n There was no longer a question of attack from the webfoots, the storm\n had taken care of that. The fierce sun began its work of drying rocks\n and throwing shadows and coaxing life out into the open again. Down in\n the canyon a bird sang, a lonely, cheerful twitter.\n\n\n \"The Sand God is tired,\" Sybtl said. \"He is not angry now. I'm glad.\n Perhaps he will let you stay.\"",
"\"No. Even if he allowed it, I couldn't stay. My people could never live\n here with a God who is half devil.\"\nThe cone of sand suddenly appeared. It stood in the canyon, its base\n on a level with the cave. It was quiet. It was dull gray in color. It\n exuded impressions of death, of hopeful words solemnly spoken over\n lowered coffins, of cold earth and cold space, of dank, wet catacombs,\n of creeping, crawling nether things.\n\n\n The bird's twitter stopped abruptly.\n\n\n \"Earthman,\" the Sand God said, as if he were about to make a statement.\n\n\n Stinson ignored him. He glanced down at Sybtl, who sensed that this was\n a time for good-bys. He thought, perhaps I can stay here alone with\n her. The webfoots might find us, or the Sand God might destroy us in\n one of his fits, but it might be worth it.",
"\"The Sand God isn't doing this,\" Stinson said. \"It's only a storm.\"\n\n\n She covered his lips with her fingers. \"Don't say that. He may hear you\n and be more angry.\"\n\n\n \"But it is, don't you see? You give him powers he does not possess.\"\n\n\n Sybtl shook her head and stroked his face with her long, slim fingers.\n \"Poor little God-with-fingers-on-his-feet,\" she said. \"You do not\n understand. The Sand God is terrible, even when he plays. See the\n lightning? It is blue. The lightning of a storm that comes by itself is\n not blue. He is running around the world on feet like the rockets of\n space ships, and when he strikes the clouds, blue fire shoots away.\"\nThe clouds continued to build on one another. Soon the blue flashes of\n lightning extended across the sky from horizon to horizon. The earth\n trembled. Sybtl moved closer, trembling also."
],
[
"The Sand God did not reply. The great bodiless, directionless voice was\n silent, and Stinson felt as if he had been taken from some high place\n and set down in a dark canyon. The cone of sand was the color of wood\n ashes. It pulsed erratically, like a great heart missing a beat now and\n then. The web-footed people milled about restlessly. The woman's eyes\n pleaded.\n\n\n When he looked back, the Sand God was gone.\n\n\n Instantly a new note rose in the cavern. The murmur of unmistakable mob\n fury ran over the webfoots. Several of the men approached the woman\n with hatred in their voices. He could not understand the words now.\n\n\n But he understood her. \"They'll kill me!\" she cried.",
"\"Leave the woman!\" it demanded angrily. \"The webfoots are nearing your\n position.\"\n\n\n \"I cannot leave her. She is helpless against them.\"\n\n\n \"What form of primitive stupidity are you practicing now? Leave, or\n they will kill you.\"\n\n\n Stinson shook his head.\n\n\n The Sand God pulsed more violently than before. Ice melted in a wide\n area around it. Brown, frozen grass burned to ashes.\n\n\n \"You will allow them to kill you, just to defend her life? What\n business is it of yours if she lives or dies? My race discarded such\n primitive logic long before it reached your level of development.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Stinson said, \"and your race no longer exists.\"",
"\"I do not know. I alone exist. I have searched all the levels of time\n and matter from the very beginning. My people are gone. Sometimes it\n almost comes to me, why they are gone. And this is contrary to the\n greatest law of all—that an entity, once in existence, can never cease\n to exist.\"\nStinson was silent, thinking of the endless years of searching through\n the great gulf of time. His eyes caught sight of the woman, reclining\n now on the pallet. The men had left her and stood in groups, talking,\n glancing at him, apparently free of their awe and fear already.\n\n\n The woman looked at him, and she was not smiling. \"Please ask the Sand\n God,\" she said, \"to speak to my people again. Their fear of him does\n not last. When He is gone they will probably kill us.\"\n\n\n \"As for the webfoots,\" the wind devil, or Sand God, said, \"I will\n destroy them. You and your people will have the entire planet.\"",
"\"Nor do I. But perhaps ... well, I sense that I would continue, if you\n brought your people here. You have already taught me the value of\n life. There is a oneness, a bond that ties each living thing to every\n other living thing. It is a lesson my people never knew. Select any\n portion of this planet that suits you. Take the web-footed woman for\n your wife. Have children. I promise never to harm you in any way.\"\n\n\n \"The webfoots?\"\n\n\n \"You and they shall share the planet.\"\n\n\n The Sand God disappeared. Sybtl said; \"Is the Sand God angry again?\"\n\n\n \"No, he is not angry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm glad. You will leave now?\"\n\n\n \"No. This is my home.\"\n\n\n She laughed softly. \"You are a strange God.\"",
"This time it kept going. The rain and wind ceased. Lightning stopped.\n Thunder rumbled distantly. Clouds disappeared. Stinson and Sybtl\n emerged from the cave.\n\n\n There was no longer a question of attack from the webfoots, the storm\n had taken care of that. The fierce sun began its work of drying rocks\n and throwing shadows and coaxing life out into the open again. Down in\n the canyon a bird sang, a lonely, cheerful twitter.\n\n\n \"The Sand God is tired,\" Sybtl said. \"He is not angry now. I'm glad.\n Perhaps he will let you stay.\"",
"\"No. Even if he allowed it, I couldn't stay. My people could never live\n here with a God who is half devil.\"\nThe cone of sand suddenly appeared. It stood in the canyon, its base\n on a level with the cave. It was quiet. It was dull gray in color. It\n exuded impressions of death, of hopeful words solemnly spoken over\n lowered coffins, of cold earth and cold space, of dank, wet catacombs,\n of creeping, crawling nether things.\n\n\n The bird's twitter stopped abruptly.\n\n\n \"Earthman,\" the Sand God said, as if he were about to make a statement.\n\n\n Stinson ignored him. He glanced down at Sybtl, who sensed that this was\n a time for good-bys. He thought, perhaps I can stay here alone with\n her. The webfoots might find us, or the Sand God might destroy us in\n one of his fits, but it might be worth it.",
"\"I haven't decided. There are these web-footed people, who were hostile\n until they thought I was a God. They have destructive weapons. Also, I\n don't understand you. I see you as a cone of sand which keeps changing\n color and configuration. Is it your body? Where do you come from? Is\n this planet populated with your kind?\"\n\n\n The wind devil hesitated.\n\n\n \"Where do I originate? It seems I have always been. You see this\n cavern, the heated pool, the statues, the inscriptions. Half a million\n years ago my people were as you. That is, they lived in physical\n bodies. Our technology surpassed any you have seen. The tube these\n webfoots use is a toy by comparison. Our scientists found the ultimate\n nature of physical law. They learned to separate the mind from the\n body. Then my people set a date. Our entire race was determined to free\n itself from the confines of the body. The date came.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\"",
"The Sand God became a sphere of blue flame. A wave of intense heat\n drove them backward. \"Earthman,\" the great voice said, \"go back to your\n Earth. Take your inconsistencies with you. Do not come here again to\n infect my planet with your primitive ideas. The webfoots are not as\n intelligent as you, but they are sane. If you bring your people here, I\n shall destroy you all.\"",
"Steam rose from the burned area, charred like a rocket launching pit.\n They stepped around it carefully. Stinson felt warm air, but there was\n no time, now, to warm cold feet or dwell on the vagaries of Sand Gods.\n\n\n Together they crossed the narrow valley. Sybtl led him toward a tall\n mound of rock. Here they came to the creek again, which flowed into a\n small canyon. They climbed the canyon wall. Far away, small figures\n moved. The webfoots were on their trail.\n\n\n She drew him into a small cave. It was heated, like the great cavern,\n but held no walled pool nor mysterious lighting. But it was warm, and\n the small entrance made an excellent vantage point for warding off\n attack.\n\n\n \"They will not find us....\"",
"\"Yes. When a man protects a woman from harm, it is a sign to all that\n she is his chosen. Otherwise, why not let her die? You are a strange\n God.\"\n\n\n \"Listen, Sybtl,\" he said desperately, \"I am not a God and you are not\n my wife. Let's get that straight.\"\n\n\n \"But....\"\n\n\n \"No buts. Right now we'd better get out of here.\"\n\n\n He took her hand and they ran, slid, fell, picked themselves up again,\n and ran. He doubted the wisdom of keeping her with him. Alone, the\n webfoots were no match for him. He could travel instantly to any spot\n he chose. But with Sybtl it was another matter; he was no better than\n any other man, perhaps not so good as some because he was forty, and\n never had been an athlete.",
"He took the tube-weapon in his hands, careful not to touch the button.\n \"Don't be afraid. I didn't mean to kill the man. It was an accident. I\n will protect you.\"\n\n\n She shook her head. \"One day they will find me alone, and they'll kill\n me.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n She shrugged. \"I have not pleased you.\"\n\n\n \"On the contrary, you have. There is a time and place for everything,\n though.\"\n\n\n Suddenly a great voice sounded in the cavern, a voice with no\n direction. It came from the ceiling, the floor, the walls, the steaming\n pool. It was in the language of the web-footed people; it was in his\n own tongue. \"No harm must come to this woman. The God with fingers on\n his feet has decreed this.\"",
"\"The Sand God isn't doing this,\" Stinson said. \"It's only a storm.\"\n\n\n She covered his lips with her fingers. \"Don't say that. He may hear you\n and be more angry.\"\n\n\n \"But it is, don't you see? You give him powers he does not possess.\"\n\n\n Sybtl shook her head and stroked his face with her long, slim fingers.\n \"Poor little God-with-fingers-on-his-feet,\" she said. \"You do not\n understand. The Sand God is terrible, even when he plays. See the\n lightning? It is blue. The lightning of a storm that comes by itself is\n not blue. He is running around the world on feet like the rockets of\n space ships, and when he strikes the clouds, blue fire shoots away.\"\nThe clouds continued to build on one another. Soon the blue flashes of\n lightning extended across the sky from horizon to horizon. The earth\n trembled. Sybtl moved closer, trembling also.",
"A high-pitched keening burst suddenly around them. Stinson knew they\n had heard, or felt the sound for some time, that now its frequency was\n in an audible range.\n\n\n \"The Sand God,\" Sybtl said. \"Sometimes he plays among the clouds. He\n makes it rain in a dry summer, or sometimes warms the whole world\n for days at a time in winter, so the snow melts and the grass begins\n to green. Then he tires and lets winter come back again. He is the\n loneliest God in the universe.\"\n\n\n \"What makes you think he's lonely?\"\n\n\n She shrugged her shoulders. \"I just know. But he's an angry God now.\n See those clouds piling in the East? Soon they will hide the sun. Then\n he will make them churn and boil, like river whirlpools in spring. At\n least he does this when he plays. Who knows what he will do when he's\n angry?\"",
"How was he to decide if this planet was suitable for his people,\n hampered by a woman, slinking through a frozen wilderness like an\n Indian? But the woman's hand was soft. He felt strong knowing she\n depended on him.\n\n\n Anyway, he decided, pursuit was impossible. They left no tracks on the\n ice. They were safe, unless the webfoots possessed talents unknown to\n him.",
"So they followed the path leading down from the rocks, along the creek\n with its tumbling water. Frozen, leafless willows clawed at their\n bodies. The sun shone fiercely in a cloudless sky. Already water ran in\n tiny rivulets over the ice. The woman steered him to the right, away\n from the creek.\nStinson's bare feet were numb from walking on ice. Christ, he thought,\n what am I doing here, anyway? He glanced down at Sybtl and remembered\n the webfoots. He stopped, tempted to use his cylinder and move to a\n warmer, less dangerous spot.\n\n\n The woman pulled on his arm. \"We must hurry!\"\n\n\n He clutched the tube-weapon. \"How many shots in this thing?\"\n\n\n \"Shots?\"\n\n\n \"How often can I use it?\"",
"\"As often as you like. It is good for fifty years. Kaatr—he is the one\n you destroyed—brought it from the ship when we came. Many times he has\n used it unwisely.\"\n\n\n \"When did you come?\"\n\n\n \"Ten years ago. I was a child.\"\n\n\n \"I thought only criminals were brought here.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"Criminals, and their children.\"\n\n\n \"When will your people come again?\"\n\n\n She shook her head. \"Never. They are no longer my people. They have\n disowned us.\"\n\n\n \"And because of me even those in the cavern have disowned you.\"\n\n\n Suddenly she stiffened beside him. There, directly in their path, stood\n the Sand God. It was blood red now. It pulsed violently. The great\n voice burst forth.",
"Together they edged toward the cavern entrance, ran quickly up the\n inclined passageway, and came out into crisp, cold air. The morning sun\n was reflected from a million tiny mirrors on the rocks, the trees and\n grass. A silver thaw during the night had covered the whole area with\n a coating of ice. Stinson shivered. The woman handed him a skirt she\n had thoughtfully brought along from the cavern. He took it, and they\n ran down the slippery path leading away from the entrance. From the\n hiding place behind a large rock they watched, as several web-footed\n men emerged into the sunlight. They blinked, covered their eyes, and\n jabbered musically among themselves. One slipped and fell on the ice.\n They re-entered the cave.",
"The sphere of blue fire screamed away across the frozen wilderness, and\n the thunder of its passing shook the ground and echoed among the lonely\n hills.\nSybtl shivered against his arm. \"The Sand God is angry,\" she said. \"My\n people tell how he was angry once before, when we first came here. He\n killed half of us and burned the ship that brought us. That is how\n Kaatr got the tube-weapon. It was the only thing the Sand God didn't\n burn, that and the skirts. Then, when he had burned the ship, the Sand\n God went to the sixth planet and burned two of the largest cities, as a\n warning that no more of us must come here.\"\n\n\n Well, Stinson said to himself, that does it. We are better off on\n Earth. We can't fight a monster like him.\n\n\n Sybtl touched his arm. \"Why did the Sand God come? He did not speak.\"\n\n\n \"He spoke to me.\"",
"He wanted to run. He wished Benjamin were here. Ben might have an\n explanation. \"What am I afraid of?\" he said aloud, \"a few grains of\n sand blowing in the wind? A wind devil?\"\n\n\n He turned his back and walked away. When he looked up the wind devil\n was there before him. He looked back. Only one. It had moved. The sun\n shone obliquely, throwing Stinson's shadow upon the sand. The wind\n devil also had a shadow, although the sun shone through it and the\n shadow was faint. But it moved when the funnel moved. This was no\n illusion.\n\n\n Again Stinson felt the urge to run, or to use the cylinder to project\n himself somewhere else, but he said, \"No!\" very firmly to himself. He\n was here to investigate, to determine if this planet was capable of\n supporting life.",
"\"I did not hear.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I know now. His voice sounds like thunder in the sky, but it is a\n voice that speaks only in the mind. He said I must leave this planet.\"\n\n\n She glanced at him with suddenly awakened eyes, as if thinking of it\n for the first time. \"Where is your ship?\"\n\n\n \"I have no ship.\"\n\n\n \"Then he will kill you.\" She touched her fingers on his face. \"I am\n sorry. It was all for me.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry. The Sand God travels without a ship, why shouldn't I?\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"As soon as you are safe. Come.\""
],
[
"He turned to the woman. \"I don't know what I'll do with you, but now\n that we're in trouble together, we may as well introduce ourselves. My\n name is Stinson.\"\n\n\n \"I am Sybtl,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Syb-tl.\" He tried to imitate her musical pronunciation. \"A very nice\n name.\"\n\n\n She smiled, then pointed to the cavern. \"When the ice is gone, they\n will come out and follow us.\"\n\n\n \"We'd better make tracks.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" she said, \"we must run, and make no tracks.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, Sis,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Sis?\"\n\n\n \"That means, sister.\"\n\n\n \"I am not your sister. I am your wife.\"\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\"",
"Those in the cavern looked at the woman with fear and respect. She\n kissed Stinson's feet. Two of the men came and gave her a brilliant\n new skirt. She smiled at him, and he thought he had never seen a more\n beautiful face.\nThe great, bodiless voice sounded again, but those in the cavern went\n about their activities. They did not hear.\n\n\n \"Who are you?\"\n\n\n Stinson looked at the wind devil, since it could be no one else\n speaking, and pointed to himself. \"Me?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"I am Stinson, of the planet Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I see it in your mind, now. You want to live here, on this\n planet.\"\n\n\n \"Then you must know where I came from, and how.\"",
"\"I do not know. I alone exist. I have searched all the levels of time\n and matter from the very beginning. My people are gone. Sometimes it\n almost comes to me, why they are gone. And this is contrary to the\n greatest law of all—that an entity, once in existence, can never cease\n to exist.\"\nStinson was silent, thinking of the endless years of searching through\n the great gulf of time. His eyes caught sight of the woman, reclining\n now on the pallet. The men had left her and stood in groups, talking,\n glancing at him, apparently free of their awe and fear already.\n\n\n The woman looked at him, and she was not smiling. \"Please ask the Sand\n God,\" she said, \"to speak to my people again. Their fear of him does\n not last. When He is gone they will probably kill us.\"\n\n\n \"As for the webfoots,\" the wind devil, or Sand God, said, \"I will\n destroy them. You and your people will have the entire planet.\"",
"Stinson donned the shimmering skirt, smiling as he did so. The others\n should see him now. Benjamin and Straus and Jamieson. They would\n laugh. And Ben's wife, Lisa, she would give her little-girl laugh, and\n probably help him fasten the skirt. It had a string, like a tobacco\n pouch, which was tied around the waist. It helped keep him warm.",
"The Sand God did not reply. The great bodiless, directionless voice was\n silent, and Stinson felt as if he had been taken from some high place\n and set down in a dark canyon. The cone of sand was the color of wood\n ashes. It pulsed erratically, like a great heart missing a beat now and\n then. The web-footed people milled about restlessly. The woman's eyes\n pleaded.\n\n\n When he looked back, the Sand God was gone.\n\n\n Instantly a new note rose in the cavern. The murmur of unmistakable mob\n fury ran over the webfoots. Several of the men approached the woman\n with hatred in their voices. He could not understand the words now.\n\n\n But he understood her. \"They'll kill me!\" she cried.",
"\"I do not understand how. You have a body, a physical body composed\n of atoms. It is impossible to move a physical body from one place to\n another by a mere thought and a tiny instrument, yet you have done so.\n You deserted me out in the desert.\"\n\n\n \"I deserted you?\" Stinson cried angrily, \"You tried to kill me!\"\n\n\n \"I was attempting communication. Why should I kill you?\"\n\n\n He was silent a moment, looking at the people in the cavern. \"Perhaps\n because you feared I would become the God of these people in your\n place.\"\n\n\n Stinson felt a mental shrug. \"It is of no importance. When they arrived\n on this planet I attempted to explain that I was not a God, but the\n primitive is not deeply buried in them. They soon resorted to emotion\n rather than reason. It is of no importance.\"\n\n\n \"I'd hardly call them primitive, with such weapons.\"",
"A high-pitched keening burst suddenly around them. Stinson knew they\n had heard, or felt the sound for some time, that now its frequency was\n in an audible range.\n\n\n \"The Sand God,\" Sybtl said. \"Sometimes he plays among the clouds. He\n makes it rain in a dry summer, or sometimes warms the whole world\n for days at a time in winter, so the snow melts and the grass begins\n to green. Then he tires and lets winter come back again. He is the\n loneliest God in the universe.\"\n\n\n \"What makes you think he's lonely?\"\n\n\n She shrugged her shoulders. \"I just know. But he's an angry God now.\n See those clouds piling in the East? Soon they will hide the sun. Then\n he will make them churn and boil, like river whirlpools in spring. At\n least he does this when he plays. Who knows what he will do when he's\n angry?\"",
"He disappeared at once, giving her no chance to object again, and went\n to the desert of sand, where he had first arrived on the planet. He\n wanted to see if the storm were world-wide.\n\n\n Stinson had never been in a sand storm before, even on Earth. He could\n not breathe. He could not see. Bullets of sand stung his skin. Bullets\n of sand shot into his eyes. Clouds of sand howled around him. He fell,\n and the wind rolled him over and over in the sand like a tumbleweed.\n The skirt flew up around his face. He could not get up again.\n\n\n He returned to the cave.",
"Soon after, while they sat huddled together, watching the chaos of\n tumbling rocks, lightning, and driving rain, the high-pitched keening\n came again. A sphere of blue fire appeared in the east. Its brilliance\n put the lightning to shame. It bore down on the cave swiftly,\n purposefully. Stinson prepared himself to leave. In spite of his desire\n to protect Sybtl, it was useless to get himself killed when he was\n powerless to help her. But at the last moment it veered off.\n\n\n \"Fiend!\" Stinson screamed the word, vaguely marvelling at his own fury.\n\n\n The blue sphere turned and came back.\n\n\n \"Monster!\"\n\n\n Again.\n\n\n \"Murderer!\"\n\n\n \"Adolescent!\"",
"The cavern was crowded. These creatures were not only humanoid, but\n definitely human, although more slight of build than earth people. The\n only difference he could see at first sight was that they had webbed\n feet. All were dressed from the waist down only, in a shimmering skirt\n that sparkled as they moved. They walked with the grace of ballet\n dancers, moving about the plaza, conversing in a musical language with\n no meaning for Stinson. The men were dark-skinned, the women somewhat\n lighter, with long flowing hair, wide lips and a beauty that was\n utterly sensual.\n\n\n He was in chains! They were small chains, light weight, of a metal that\n looked like aluminum. But all his strength could not break them.\n\n\n They saw him struggling. Two of the men came over and spoke to him in\n the musical language.\n\n\n \"My name is Stinson,\" he said, pointing to himself. \"I'm from the\n planet Earth.\"",
"Together they edged toward the cavern entrance, ran quickly up the\n inclined passageway, and came out into crisp, cold air. The morning sun\n was reflected from a million tiny mirrors on the rocks, the trees and\n grass. A silver thaw during the night had covered the whole area with\n a coating of ice. Stinson shivered. The woman handed him a skirt she\n had thoughtfully brought along from the cavern. He took it, and they\n ran down the slippery path leading away from the entrance. From the\n hiding place behind a large rock they watched, as several web-footed\n men emerged into the sunlight. They blinked, covered their eyes, and\n jabbered musically among themselves. One slipped and fell on the ice.\n They re-entered the cave.",
"This time it kept going. The rain and wind ceased. Lightning stopped.\n Thunder rumbled distantly. Clouds disappeared. Stinson and Sybtl\n emerged from the cave.\n\n\n There was no longer a question of attack from the webfoots, the storm\n had taken care of that. The fierce sun began its work of drying rocks\n and throwing shadows and coaxing life out into the open again. Down in\n the canyon a bird sang, a lonely, cheerful twitter.\n\n\n \"The Sand God is tired,\" Sybtl said. \"He is not angry now. I'm glad.\n Perhaps he will let you stay.\"",
"\"Stinson,\" the Sand God said. \"You said I was adolescent. You are\n correct. Do you remember I told you how my people, the entire race,\n left their bodies at the same time? Do you imagine all of us were\n adults?\"\n\n\n \"I suppose not. Sounds reasonable. How old were you?\"\n\n\n \"Chronologically, by our standards, I was nine years old.\"\n\n\n \"But you continued to develop after....\"",
"\"Leave the woman!\" it demanded angrily. \"The webfoots are nearing your\n position.\"\n\n\n \"I cannot leave her. She is helpless against them.\"\n\n\n \"What form of primitive stupidity are you practicing now? Leave, or\n they will kill you.\"\n\n\n Stinson shook his head.\n\n\n The Sand God pulsed more violently than before. Ice melted in a wide\n area around it. Brown, frozen grass burned to ashes.\n\n\n \"You will allow them to kill you, just to defend her life? What\n business is it of yours if she lives or dies? My race discarded such\n primitive logic long before it reached your level of development.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Stinson said, \"and your race no longer exists.\"",
"Stinson pointed the disintegrating weapon at them and yelled. They\n dropped back. \"We'll have to get outside,\" he told her. \"This mob will\n soon get out of hand. Then the tube won't stop them. They will rush in.\n I can't kill them all at once, even if I wanted to. And I don't.\"",
"The men instantly prostrated themselves before him. The one who had\n poked Stinson with the stick rose, and handed it to him. Still angered,\n Stinson grasped it firmly, with half a notion to break it over his\n head. As he did so, a flash of blue fire sprang from it. The man\n disappeared. A small cloud of dust settled slowly to the floor.\n\n\n Disintegrated!\n\n\n Stinson's face drained pale, and suddenly, unaccountably, he was\n ashamed because he had no clothes.\n\n\n \"I didn't mean to kill him!\" he cried. \"I was angry, and....\"\n\n\n Useless. They could not understand. For all he knew, they might think\n he was threatening them. The object he had thought of as a stick was\n in reality a long metal tube, precisely machined, with a small button\n near one end.",
"\"The Sand God isn't doing this,\" Stinson said. \"It's only a storm.\"\n\n\n She covered his lips with her fingers. \"Don't say that. He may hear you\n and be more angry.\"\n\n\n \"But it is, don't you see? You give him powers he does not possess.\"\n\n\n Sybtl shook her head and stroked his face with her long, slim fingers.\n \"Poor little God-with-fingers-on-his-feet,\" she said. \"You do not\n understand. The Sand God is terrible, even when he plays. See the\n lightning? It is blue. The lightning of a storm that comes by itself is\n not blue. He is running around the world on feet like the rockets of\n space ships, and when he strikes the clouds, blue fire shoots away.\"\nThe clouds continued to build on one another. Soon the blue flashes of\n lightning extended across the sky from horizon to horizon. The earth\n trembled. Sybtl moved closer, trembling also.",
"So they followed the path leading down from the rocks, along the creek\n with its tumbling water. Frozen, leafless willows clawed at their\n bodies. The sun shone fiercely in a cloudless sky. Already water ran in\n tiny rivulets over the ice. The woman steered him to the right, away\n from the creek.\nStinson's bare feet were numb from walking on ice. Christ, he thought,\n what am I doing here, anyway? He glanced down at Sybtl and remembered\n the webfoots. He stopped, tempted to use his cylinder and move to a\n warmer, less dangerous spot.\n\n\n The woman pulled on his arm. \"We must hurry!\"\n\n\n He clutched the tube-weapon. \"How many shots in this thing?\"\n\n\n \"Shots?\"\n\n\n \"How often can I use it?\"",
"\"No.\"\nStinson tried to imagine it. At first there must have been a single\n voice crying into a monstrous emptiness, \"Mother, where are you?\nMOTHER!\nWhere is\neveryone\n?\" A frenzied searching of the planet,\n the solar system, the galaxy. Then a returning to the planet. Empty....\n Change. Buildings, roads, bridges weathering slowly. Such a race would\n have built of durable metal. Durable? Centuries, eons passed. Buildings\n crumbled to dust, dust blew away. Bridges eroded, fell, decomposed\n into basic elements. The shape of constellations changed. All trace\n of civilization passed except in the cavern of the heated pool.\n Constellations disappeared, new patterns formed in the night sky. The\n unutterably total void of time—FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS!\n\n\n And a nine-year-old child brooding over an empty world.\n\n\n \"I don't understand why your development stopped,\" Stinson said.",
"\"Destroy them?\" Stinson asked, incredulously, \"all these people? They\n have a right to live like any one else.\"\n\n\n \"Right? What is it—'right?' They are entities. They exist, therefore\n they always will. My people are the only entities who ever died. To\n kill the body is unimportant.\"\n\n\n \"No. You misunderstand. Listen, you spoke of the greatest law. Your law\n is a scientific hypothesis. It has to do with what comes after physical\n existence, not with existence itself. The greatest law is this, that an\n entity, once existing, must not be harmed in any way. To do so changes\n the most basic structure of nature.\""
],
[
"\"The Sand God isn't doing this,\" Stinson said. \"It's only a storm.\"\n\n\n She covered his lips with her fingers. \"Don't say that. He may hear you\n and be more angry.\"\n\n\n \"But it is, don't you see? You give him powers he does not possess.\"\n\n\n Sybtl shook her head and stroked his face with her long, slim fingers.\n \"Poor little God-with-fingers-on-his-feet,\" she said. \"You do not\n understand. The Sand God is terrible, even when he plays. See the\n lightning? It is blue. The lightning of a storm that comes by itself is\n not blue. He is running around the world on feet like the rockets of\n space ships, and when he strikes the clouds, blue fire shoots away.\"\nThe clouds continued to build on one another. Soon the blue flashes of\n lightning extended across the sky from horizon to horizon. The earth\n trembled. Sybtl moved closer, trembling also.",
"A high-pitched keening burst suddenly around them. Stinson knew they\n had heard, or felt the sound for some time, that now its frequency was\n in an audible range.\n\n\n \"The Sand God,\" Sybtl said. \"Sometimes he plays among the clouds. He\n makes it rain in a dry summer, or sometimes warms the whole world\n for days at a time in winter, so the snow melts and the grass begins\n to green. Then he tires and lets winter come back again. He is the\n loneliest God in the universe.\"\n\n\n \"What makes you think he's lonely?\"\n\n\n She shrugged her shoulders. \"I just know. But he's an angry God now.\n See those clouds piling in the East? Soon they will hide the sun. Then\n he will make them churn and boil, like river whirlpools in spring. At\n least he does this when he plays. Who knows what he will do when he's\n angry?\"",
"This time it kept going. The rain and wind ceased. Lightning stopped.\n Thunder rumbled distantly. Clouds disappeared. Stinson and Sybtl\n emerged from the cave.\n\n\n There was no longer a question of attack from the webfoots, the storm\n had taken care of that. The fierce sun began its work of drying rocks\n and throwing shadows and coaxing life out into the open again. Down in\n the canyon a bird sang, a lonely, cheerful twitter.\n\n\n \"The Sand God is tired,\" Sybtl said. \"He is not angry now. I'm glad.\n Perhaps he will let you stay.\"",
"The Sand God did not reply. The great bodiless, directionless voice was\n silent, and Stinson felt as if he had been taken from some high place\n and set down in a dark canyon. The cone of sand was the color of wood\n ashes. It pulsed erratically, like a great heart missing a beat now and\n then. The web-footed people milled about restlessly. The woman's eyes\n pleaded.\n\n\n When he looked back, the Sand God was gone.\n\n\n Instantly a new note rose in the cavern. The murmur of unmistakable mob\n fury ran over the webfoots. Several of the men approached the woman\n with hatred in their voices. He could not understand the words now.\n\n\n But he understood her. \"They'll kill me!\" she cried.",
"\"As often as you like. It is good for fifty years. Kaatr—he is the one\n you destroyed—brought it from the ship when we came. Many times he has\n used it unwisely.\"\n\n\n \"When did you come?\"\n\n\n \"Ten years ago. I was a child.\"\n\n\n \"I thought only criminals were brought here.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"Criminals, and their children.\"\n\n\n \"When will your people come again?\"\n\n\n She shook her head. \"Never. They are no longer my people. They have\n disowned us.\"\n\n\n \"And because of me even those in the cavern have disowned you.\"\n\n\n Suddenly she stiffened beside him. There, directly in their path, stood\n the Sand God. It was blood red now. It pulsed violently. The great\n voice burst forth.",
"\"I do not know. I alone exist. I have searched all the levels of time\n and matter from the very beginning. My people are gone. Sometimes it\n almost comes to me, why they are gone. And this is contrary to the\n greatest law of all—that an entity, once in existence, can never cease\n to exist.\"\nStinson was silent, thinking of the endless years of searching through\n the great gulf of time. His eyes caught sight of the woman, reclining\n now on the pallet. The men had left her and stood in groups, talking,\n glancing at him, apparently free of their awe and fear already.\n\n\n The woman looked at him, and she was not smiling. \"Please ask the Sand\n God,\" she said, \"to speak to my people again. Their fear of him does\n not last. When He is gone they will probably kill us.\"\n\n\n \"As for the webfoots,\" the wind devil, or Sand God, said, \"I will\n destroy them. You and your people will have the entire planet.\"",
"\"No. Even if he allowed it, I couldn't stay. My people could never live\n here with a God who is half devil.\"\nThe cone of sand suddenly appeared. It stood in the canyon, its base\n on a level with the cave. It was quiet. It was dull gray in color. It\n exuded impressions of death, of hopeful words solemnly spoken over\n lowered coffins, of cold earth and cold space, of dank, wet catacombs,\n of creeping, crawling nether things.\n\n\n The bird's twitter stopped abruptly.\n\n\n \"Earthman,\" the Sand God said, as if he were about to make a statement.\n\n\n Stinson ignored him. He glanced down at Sybtl, who sensed that this was\n a time for good-bys. He thought, perhaps I can stay here alone with\n her. The webfoots might find us, or the Sand God might destroy us in\n one of his fits, but it might be worth it.",
"The Sand God became a sphere of blue flame. A wave of intense heat\n drove them backward. \"Earthman,\" the great voice said, \"go back to your\n Earth. Take your inconsistencies with you. Do not come here again to\n infect my planet with your primitive ideas. The webfoots are not as\n intelligent as you, but they are sane. If you bring your people here, I\n shall destroy you all.\"",
"The sphere of blue fire screamed away across the frozen wilderness, and\n the thunder of its passing shook the ground and echoed among the lonely\n hills.\nSybtl shivered against his arm. \"The Sand God is angry,\" she said. \"My\n people tell how he was angry once before, when we first came here. He\n killed half of us and burned the ship that brought us. That is how\n Kaatr got the tube-weapon. It was the only thing the Sand God didn't\n burn, that and the skirts. Then, when he had burned the ship, the Sand\n God went to the sixth planet and burned two of the largest cities, as a\n warning that no more of us must come here.\"\n\n\n Well, Stinson said to himself, that does it. We are better off on\n Earth. We can't fight a monster like him.\n\n\n Sybtl touched his arm. \"Why did the Sand God come? He did not speak.\"\n\n\n \"He spoke to me.\"",
"\"Leave the woman!\" it demanded angrily. \"The webfoots are nearing your\n position.\"\n\n\n \"I cannot leave her. She is helpless against them.\"\n\n\n \"What form of primitive stupidity are you practicing now? Leave, or\n they will kill you.\"\n\n\n Stinson shook his head.\n\n\n The Sand God pulsed more violently than before. Ice melted in a wide\n area around it. Brown, frozen grass burned to ashes.\n\n\n \"You will allow them to kill you, just to defend her life? What\n business is it of yours if she lives or dies? My race discarded such\n primitive logic long before it reached your level of development.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Stinson said, \"and your race no longer exists.\"",
"\"Earthman, wait....\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Stinson shot back. \"You've owned this planet for a million\n years. You have brooded here alone since before my people discovered\n fire, and in all those ages you never learned self-control. I can't\n subject my people to the whims of an entity who throws a planetary fit\n when it pleases him.\"\n\n\n Stinson relaxed. He'd had his say. Sybtl trembled beside him. A small\n mammal, round, furry, hopped by, sniffing inquisitively.\n\n\n Sybtl said, \"Is the Sand God happy?\" She shook her head. \"No, he is not\n happy. He is old, old, old. I can feel it. My people say that when one\n gets too old it is well to die. But Gods never die, do they? I would\n not like to be a God.\"",
"He wanted to run. He wished Benjamin were here. Ben might have an\n explanation. \"What am I afraid of?\" he said aloud, \"a few grains of\n sand blowing in the wind? A wind devil?\"\n\n\n He turned his back and walked away. When he looked up the wind devil\n was there before him. He looked back. Only one. It had moved. The sun\n shone obliquely, throwing Stinson's shadow upon the sand. The wind\n devil also had a shadow, although the sun shone through it and the\n shadow was faint. But it moved when the funnel moved. This was no\n illusion.\n\n\n Again Stinson felt the urge to run, or to use the cylinder to project\n himself somewhere else, but he said, \"No!\" very firmly to himself. He\n was here to investigate, to determine if this planet was capable of\n supporting life.",
"He disappeared at once, giving her no chance to object again, and went\n to the desert of sand, where he had first arrived on the planet. He\n wanted to see if the storm were world-wide.\n\n\n Stinson had never been in a sand storm before, even on Earth. He could\n not breathe. He could not see. Bullets of sand stung his skin. Bullets\n of sand shot into his eyes. Clouds of sand howled around him. He fell,\n and the wind rolled him over and over in the sand like a tumbleweed.\n The skirt flew up around his face. He could not get up again.\n\n\n He returned to the cave.",
"\"I did not hear.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I know now. His voice sounds like thunder in the sky, but it is a\n voice that speaks only in the mind. He said I must leave this planet.\"\n\n\n She glanced at him with suddenly awakened eyes, as if thinking of it\n for the first time. \"Where is your ship?\"\n\n\n \"I have no ship.\"\n\n\n \"Then he will kill you.\" She touched her fingers on his face. \"I am\n sorry. It was all for me.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry. The Sand God travels without a ship, why shouldn't I?\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"As soon as you are safe. Come.\"",
"\"Nor do I. But perhaps ... well, I sense that I would continue, if you\n brought your people here. You have already taught me the value of\n life. There is a oneness, a bond that ties each living thing to every\n other living thing. It is a lesson my people never knew. Select any\n portion of this planet that suits you. Take the web-footed woman for\n your wife. Have children. I promise never to harm you in any way.\"\n\n\n \"The webfoots?\"\n\n\n \"You and they shall share the planet.\"\n\n\n The Sand God disappeared. Sybtl said; \"Is the Sand God angry again?\"\n\n\n \"No, he is not angry.\"\n\n\n \"I'm glad. You will leave now?\"\n\n\n \"No. This is my home.\"\n\n\n She laughed softly. \"You are a strange God.\"",
"\"I haven't decided. There are these web-footed people, who were hostile\n until they thought I was a God. They have destructive weapons. Also, I\n don't understand you. I see you as a cone of sand which keeps changing\n color and configuration. Is it your body? Where do you come from? Is\n this planet populated with your kind?\"\n\n\n The wind devil hesitated.\n\n\n \"Where do I originate? It seems I have always been. You see this\n cavern, the heated pool, the statues, the inscriptions. Half a million\n years ago my people were as you. That is, they lived in physical\n bodies. Our technology surpassed any you have seen. The tube these\n webfoots use is a toy by comparison. Our scientists found the ultimate\n nature of physical law. They learned to separate the mind from the\n body. Then my people set a date. Our entire race was determined to free\n itself from the confines of the body. The date came.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\"",
"\"He never did this before,\" she said. \"He never made the earth shake\n before.\"\n\n\n Great boulders crashed down the canyon walls and dropped into the\n creek. They dared not move from the cave, although death seemed certain\n if they stayed.\n\n\n \"I'll leave for a moment,\" he said. \"I'll be back soon.\"\n\n\n \"You're leaving?\" There was panic in her voice.\n\n\n \"Only for a moment.\"\n\n\n \"And you won't come back. You will go to your world.\"\n\n\n \"No. I'll be back.\"\n\n\n \"Promise? No, don't promise. The promises of Gods often are forgotten\n before the sounds die away.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be back.\"",
"Soon after, while they sat huddled together, watching the chaos of\n tumbling rocks, lightning, and driving rain, the high-pitched keening\n came again. A sphere of blue fire appeared in the east. Its brilliance\n put the lightning to shame. It bore down on the cave swiftly,\n purposefully. Stinson prepared himself to leave. In spite of his desire\n to protect Sybtl, it was useless to get himself killed when he was\n powerless to help her. But at the last moment it veered off.\n\n\n \"Fiend!\" Stinson screamed the word, vaguely marvelling at his own fury.\n\n\n The blue sphere turned and came back.\n\n\n \"Monster!\"\n\n\n Again.\n\n\n \"Murderer!\"\n\n\n \"Adolescent!\"",
"It was again going through its paces. Triangle, cube, rectangle,\n sphere. He watched, and when it became a triangle again, he smoothed\n a place in the sand and drew a triangle with his forefinger. When it\n changed to a cube he drew a square, a circle for a sphere, and so on.\n When the symbols were repeated he pointed to each in turn, excitement\n mounting. He became so absorbed in doing this that he failed to notice\n how the wind devil drew closer and closer, but when he inhaled the\n first grains of sand, the realization of what was happening dawned with\n a flash of fear. Instantly he projected himself a thousand miles away.\nNow he was in an area of profuse vegetation. It was twilight. As he\n stood beside a small creek, a chill wind blew from the northwest. He\n wanted to cover himself with the long leaves he found, but they were\n dry and brittle, for here autumn had turned the leaves. Night would be\n cold.",
"THE GOD NEXT DOOR\nBy BILL DOEDE\n\n\n Illustrated by IVIE\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine August 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe sand-thing was powerful, lonely and\n \nstrange. No doubt it was a god—but who wasn't?\nStinson lay still in the sand where he fell, gloating over the success\n of his arrival.\n\n\n He touched the pencil-line scar behind his ear where the cylinder was\n buried, marveling at the power stored there, power to fling him from\n earth to this fourth planet of the Centaurian system in an instant.\n It had happened so fast that he could almost feel the warm, humid\n Missouri air, though he was light years from Missouri."
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